#Cymru apparently has a lot to say

[oumaheroes]

Have a paragraph from a WIP I had hoped to finish this weekend but which is quickly spiralling incredibly out of control:

‘There are so many people.’ On Alba’s shoulders, Cymru grips the wooden posts to keep them both steady. ‘I didn’t know there could even be so many.’ ‘There will be more than this in a few days.’ Mama says. She finishes wrapping Albion to her back and glances up at Cymru and Alba where they stand atop the woodstore, peering over the mound’s defences. In the early morning light, shapes and activity emerge from the retreating shadows. Down the hill, all around the base of the settlement, people are erecting temporary shelters and pitching their animals. Winter solstice is here, with its darkest and coldest of nights, but this year it is apparently a particularly special one.

Cymru doesn’t really understand why. Something about the stars, or the years. Or where the sun hits the ancient stones nearby as it rises and falls- a tradition older than even Mama, passed down from the people before her who stood the circles of stones so tall all over their islands. All Cymru knows is that it is busy, with more people than he has ever seen before going to and fro and glancing his way whenever he goes near them. When Cymru and his family had arrived to stay for the winter a few months ago, this mound had been nothing more than home to one tribe. Now, the mound and the lands around it was home to people from at least seven. Cymru’s eyes pass over all of them, stretched out to the lake on the horizon, his breath clouding in front of him like smoke.

#heroes wips #I both love and hate how long this is becoming #love because I'm having a blast writing it #but hate because I really hoped it'd be done by now and i'm too excited to keep it to myself without sharing something #it is already bigger than the previous two chapters #Cymru apparently has a lot to say

[thisdaynews]

Gareth Bale: Wales forward not distracted by Madrid exit talk

New Post has been published on https://thebiafrastar.com/gareth-bale-wales-forward-not-distracted-by-madrid-exit-talk/

Gareth Bale: Wales forward not distracted by Madrid exit talk

By Michael Pearlman

BBC Sport Wales in Bratislava

Gareth Bale has been a Real Madrid regular in La Liga this season but has been left out of some Champions League games

Uefa Euro 2020 qualifier: Slovakia v Wales Venue: Anton Malatinsky Stadium, TrnavaDate: Thursday, 10 OctoberKick-off: 19:45 BST Coverage: Live on BBC Radio Wales, BBC Radio Cymru & BBC Sport website and BBC Sport app, plus live text commentary.

Gareth Bale says he is not distracted by continuing speculation over his future at club side Real Madrid.

The 30-year-old is “angry” and “fed up” at the Spanish giants and wants to leave the club, according to BBC Radio 5 Live’s Guillem Balague.

Bale says he is focused on Wales amid the latest speculation as he prepares to face Slovakia in Trnava on Thursday.

“I love meeting up with Wales, everyone knows that; I haven’t got anything to clear my mind about,” he said.

“We have a task at hand to try to qualify and this is a massive game. We want to put ourselves right back in the mix.”

Wales without Ramsey against Slovakia

Matondo aims to make Wales proud

How Wales found Moore up front

Bale had been set to join Chinese Super League side Jiangsu Suning on a three-year contract in the summer – earning a reported £1m a week – but Real cancelled the deal because they wanted a transfer fee.

In July, Real manager Zinedine Zidane said “we hope he leaves soon”, a comment to which Bale’s agent Jonathan Barnett replied: “Zidane is a disgrace – he shows no respect for a player that has done so much for Real Madrid.”

Bale has returned to the Real team this season, scoring twice in seven matches as they have moved to the top of La Liga.

The forward downplayed the notion that he is “angry” when asked abut his current situation at Real Madrid.

“I think you play with a lot of emotion and anger comes into it of course, but I am just trying to play football, to enjoy it as much as I can and give my best, whether I am here or in Madrid,” he said.

“Whenever I step onto the pitch I give 100% to help the team and I will continue to do that.”

Gareth Bale will win his 80th cap for Wales in Thursday’s game against Slovakia

Wales boss Ryan Giggs believes Bale’s situation at Madrid has improved and says his impressive club form can be of benefit to the national side.

“I’m not too sure. I think now, looking from the outside, things have improved,” Giggs said.

“The way that he’s playing – which is all that footballers want to do, they want to play, they want to get minutes, they want to do well – I’ve always said he’s at a fantastic club.

“Of course, it would have unsettled him because it was apparently very close for him going.

“But things might have changed. Things do change quite quickly in football and now he’s playing, he’s loved, he’s happy, and I expect him to carry on doing what he’s doing for Real Madrid.

“If Gareth Bale is at your club and he’s training well and he gets the chance to play, he’s always going to keep you interested because he can turn a game on its head, he can score goals and he’s such an asset.

“So I’m not surprised in that respect. I was surprised with what happened in the summer – I think everyone from the outside thought it was a bit strange, but it seems like everything has gone a bit quiet now.

“I think that’s all you ask for – for players to be in good form for their clubs and then take it into the international arena.

“Gareth just scored the winner against Azerbaijan and he’s a huge part [of the team]. He’s our best player and he’s been captain as well recently. He’s a big player, obviously, for us.”

Read More

#distracted #Madrid

[dumbledearme]

chapter two

~~ read The Second Soul here ~~

Johanna spent the months following her grandmother’s death cycling through a purgatory of beige waiting rooms and anonymous offices, analyzed and interviewed, talked about just out of earshot, nodding when spoken to, repeating herself, the object of a thousand pitying glances and knitted brows.

She was plagued by wake-up-screaming nightmares so bad that she had to wear a mouth guard to keep from grinding her teeth into nubs as she slept. She couldn’t close her eyes without seeing it, that tentacle-mouth horror in the woods. Johanna was convinced that it would soon come for her. Sometimes that sick panicky feeling would flood over her like it did that night and she’d be sure that it was waiting, lurking nearby.

The solution was to stop leaving the house. She refused even to venture into the driveway to collect the morning paper. She slept in a tangle of blankets on the laundry room floor, the only part of the house with no windows and also a door that locked from the inside.

She couldn’t help blaming herself for what had happened. If only she’d believed her grandmother... But Johanna hadn’t believed her, and neither had anyone else, and now Johanna knew how she must’ve felt because no one believed her, either.

Even Ricky, who’d been there, didn’t believe her. He swore up and down that he hadn’t seen any creature in the woods that night. He’d heard barking, though. They both had. So it wasn’t a huge surprise when the police concluded that a pack of feral dogs had killed Alice Roseberg.

Johanna tried to convince him giving as much detail as she could, but in the end Ricky just shook his head and muttered something about her needing a brain-shrinker.

“You mean head-shrinker, you loser,” Johanna replied, “and thanks a lot. Nice to know I have your support.”

They were in the living room, Ricky chain-smoking cigarettes with a kind of grim determination. He always seemed vaguely uncomfortable at Johanna’s house because of her parents’ wealth, but this time, she could tell, it wasn’t that making him uneasy, but herself.

“Whatever, I’m just being straight with you,” he said. “Keep talking about monsters and they’re gonna put you away. You’re acting crazy, Jo.”

“Don’t call me that.”

He seemed surprised at how pissed off she sounded. He tried to reach for her, but Johanna slapped his hand away.

“I want you out,” she said.

“Jo-”

“GET OUT!” She shoved him so hard he almost hit his head on the wall behind him. This, apparently, was more than he could take. Johanna yelled at him to leave again, but he was already going.

It was months before she’d see him again.

Eventually, Johanna’s parents did take her to a headshrinker, a quiet, kind woman named Dr. Golan. The calm, affectless way she explained things was almost hypnotizing, and within two sessions she’d convinced Johanna that the creature had been nothing more than the product of her overheated imagination; that the trauma of my grandmother’s death had made her see something that wasn’t really there.

There was even a name for it: acute stress reaction.

But just because Johanna no longer believed the monsters were real didn’t mean she was better. She still suffered from nightmares. She was twitchy and paranoid, bad enough at interacting with other people that her parents hired a tutor so that she only had to go to school on days she felt up to it. They also, finally, let her quit her job.

Dr. Golan’s function seemed mainly to consist of writing prescriptions. The pills were making Johanna fat and stupid, and she was still miserable, getting only three or four hours of sleep a night. So she started lying to Dr. Golan and pretending to be fine.

“So what you’re saying,” Dr. Golan set her pen down, “is that you’re no longer obsessing over your grandmother’s last words? The bird and the loop and the grave?”

Johanna shrugged. “Yes. I’m over it.”

Dr. Golan tented her fingers and pressed them to her chin. “You don’t wish to know what they might mean?”

“I know what they mean. Jack and shit.”

“Johanna. You don’t mean that.”

Truth was: the words had been eating away at Johanna almost as much as the nightmares.

“So that’s it?” Dr. Golan insisted. “Alice’s death was meaningless?”

“Unless you’ve got a better idea,” Johanna said. “Some big theory about what it all means that you’ve haven’t told me. Otherwise…”

“What?”

“Otherwise, this is just a waste of time.”

The doctor sighed. “What your grandmother’s last words meant isn’t my conclusion to draw,” she said. “It’s what you think that matters.”

“That is such psychobabble bullshit,” Johanna spat. “It’s not what I think that matters; it’s what’s true! But I guess we’ll never know, so who cares? Just dope me up and collect the bill.”

She wanted Golan to get mad, to argue, but instead she sat poker faced, drumming the arm of her chair with her pen. “It sounds like you’re giving up,” she said after a moment. “I’m disappointed. You don’t strike me as a quitter.”

“Well, you don’t know me very well.”

Johanna couldn’t have been less in the mood for a party, but she knew her parents wouldn’t let her sweet sixteen pass in a blank. Johanna begged them to skip the party this year because, among other reasons, she couldn’t think of a single person she wanted to invite. Her mother, however, insisted that socializing was therapeutic, although Johanna knew she was only doing it because she loved to show off their house.

So Johanna was “surprised” with balloons, and a motley assortment of aunts, uncles, cousins, anyone her mother could cajole into attending, even Ricky, who looking comically out of place in a studded leather jacket. Johanna was about to go talk to him when her Uncle Bobby grabbed her by the elbow and pulled her into a corner.

“So, your dad tells me you’re really turning the corner with, uh…”

“Acute stress reaction,” she supplied.

“What? Yes. That. It’s good. Real good to hear.” He waved his hand as if putting all that unpleasantness behind them. “So your dad and I were thinking. How’d you like to come up to Tampa this summer, see how the family business works? Crack heads with me at HQ for a while?”

Johanna would’ve rather spent the summer in a Siberian labor camp than live with her uncle and his spoiled kids. She hesitated, trying to think of a graceful way out. “I’m not sure my psychiatrist would think it’s such a great idea right now.”

His bushy eyebrows came together. Nodding vaguely, he said, “Oh, well, sure, of course. We’ll just play it by ear then, how’s that sound?” And then he walked off without waiting for an answer.

When it was time for presents, Johanna decided to start with smallest one. Inside was the key to a luxury sedan. Her first car! Everyone oohed and aahed.

The next present was the digital camera she’d begged her parents for all last summer. “I’m outlining a new bird book," her mom said. “I was thinking maybe you could take the pictures.”

“A new book!” her dad exclaimed. “That’s a phenomenal idea, Franny.”

Aunt Susie stepped forward with a present. “This one is from your grandmother.”

The room went dead quiet, people looking at Aunt Susie as if she’d invoked the name of some evil spirit. Johanna’s dad’s jaw tensed.

Johanna grabbed the present and ripped away the wrapping paper to find an old hardback book, dog-eared and missing its dust jacket. It was The Selected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Johanna stared at it as if trying to read through the cover.

Aunt Susie managed a weak smile and said, “I found it in mom’s desk when we were cleaning out the house. She wrote your name in the front. I think she meant for you to have it, Jo.”

Johanna opened the book. The title page bore an inscription in her grandmother’s shaky handwriting.

To Yehanan and the worlds she has yet to discover.

Johanna stepped back, getting ready to leave, afraid to start crying in front of everyone, and something slipped out from between the pages and fell to the floor. She bent to pick it up. It was a letter.

Emerson. The letter.

She felt the blood drain from her face. Her mother leaned toward her to say something, but Johanna bolted to her room.

The letter was handwritten on fine, unlined paper in looping script so ornate it was almost calligraphy, the black ink varying in tone like that of an old fountain pen. It read:

Dearest Alice, I hope this note finds you safe and in the best of health. It’s been such a long time since we last received word from you! But I write not to admonish, only to let you know that we still think of you often and pray for your well-being. Our brave, beautiful Alice!

Little has change on the island. But quiet and orderly is the way we prefer things! I wonder if we would recognize you after so many years, though I’m certain you’d recognize us -- those few who remain, that is. It would mean a great deal to have a recent picture of you, if you’ve one to send.

Gus misses you terribly. Won’t you write to him?

With respect and admiration, Headmistress Alma LeFay Peregrine.

That had to be what Grandma Alice had meant. A letter, tucked inside Emerson’s book. Johanna studied the envelope for a return address but found only a fading postmark that read Cairnholm Is., Cymru, UK.

Cairnholm Is had to be the island Miss Peregrine had mentioned in her letter. Probably the island where Grandma Alice had lived as a child?

Find the bird, she had said. The headmistress’ name was Peregrine. Could the bird be a person? A woman who’d rescued little Alice, the headmistress of the children’s home?

For the first time, Johanna’s grandmother’s last words began to make a strange kind of sense. She wanted Johanna to go to the island and find this woman. But the envelope’s postmark was fifteen years old. Was it possible she was still alive? If not, there might still be people on Cairnholm who could help, people who had known Grandma Alice as a kid. People who knew her secrets.

We, Miss Peregrine had written. Those few who remain.

Turned out that convincing her parents to let her spend part of her summer on a tiny island off the coast of Wales was a fairly easy task. Her mom learned that Cairnholm Island was a super-important bird habitat, and that half the world’s population of some bird she adored lived there.

And if that wasn’t enough, Dr. Golan shocked them all by encouraging Johanna’s parents to let her go.

“It could be important for her,” she told them. “It’s a place that’s been so mythologized by Alice that visiting could only serve to demystify it. Johanna’ll see that it’s just as normal and unmagical as anyplace else, and, by extension, Alice’s fantasies will lose their power.”

After that, things fell into place with astonishing speed. Plane tickets were bought, schedules scheduled, plans laid. And in less than a week, Johanna and her mom were in Europe.

When the captain announced that they were nearly there, Johanna hoped that the grueling thirty-six hours they’d braved to get this far, three airplanes, two layovers, shift-napping in grubby train stations, and now this interminable gut-churning ferry ride, would pay off. Then she saw a towering mountain of rock emerge from the blank canvas before them.

It was the island. Looming and bleak, folded in mist, guarded by a million screeching birds, it looked like some ancient fortress constructed by giants. Mom ran around like a kid on Christmas, her eyes glued to the birds wheeling above them. “Jo, look at that!” she cried, pointing to a cluster of airborne specks. “Manx Shearwaters!”

As they drew nearer the cliffs, Johanna began to notice odd shapes lurking underwater. A passing crewman caught her leaning over the rail to stare at them and said, “Never seen a shipwreck before, eh? This whole area’s a nautical graveyard. ”

They passed a wreck that was so near the surface, the outline of its greening carcass so clear, that it looked like it was about to rise out of the water.

“See that one?” he said, pointing at it. “Sunk by a U-boat, she was.”

“There were U-boats around here?”

“Loads. Whole Irish Sea was rotten with German subs. Wager you’d have half a navy on your hands if you could unsink all the ships they torpedoed.”

The ferry docked and they humped their bags into the little town. Upon closer inspection Johanna decided it was, like a lot of things, not as pretty up close as it seemed from a distance. They dragged their stuff through town looking for something called the Priest Home, where they had booked a room. They came upon a church which had, however, been converted into a dingy little museum, not a B&B.

“I reckon you’re after the Priest Hole,” said the curator. “It’s got the only rooms to let on the island.” He proceeded to give them directions.

“Where can we find the old children’s home?” Johanna asked.

“The old what?” he said, squinting at her.

“It was a home for refugee kids?” she said. “During the war? A big house?”

The man chewed his lip and regarded her doubtfully, as if deciding whether to help or to wash his hands of the whole thing. “I don’t know about any refugees,” he said, “but I think I know the place you mean. It’s way up the other side of the island, past the bog and through the woods. Though I wouldn’t go mucking about up there alone, if I was you. Stray too far from the path and that’s the last anyone’ll hear of you.”

“That’s good to know,” her mom said, eyeing Johanna. “Promise me you won’t go by yourself.”

“Yes, fine.”

Mom then thanked the man and they left following his directions. They retraced their steps until they came to a grim-looking statue carved from black stone, a memorial called the Waiting Woman dedicated to islanders lost at sea. The Priest Hole was directly across the street.

They squeezed their bags through the doorway and stood blinking in the sudden gloom of a low-ceilinged pub. Hole was a pretty accurate description of the place: tiny leaded windows admitted just enough light to find the beer tap without tripping over tables and chairs on the way. The bar was half-filled, at whatever hour of the morning it was.

“You must be after the room,” said the man behind the bar, coming out to shake their hands. “I’m Kev and these are the fellas. Say hullo, fellas.”

“Hullo,” they muttered, nodding at their drinks.

Johanna and her mom followed Kev up a narrow staircase to a suite. There were two bedrooms, and a room that tripled as a kitchen, dining room, and living room, meaning that it contained one table, one moth-eaten sofa, and one hotplate. The bathroom worked “most of the time,” according to Kev.

“Oh, and you’ll need these,” he said, fetching a pair of oil lamps from a cabinet. “The generators stop running at ten since petrol’s so bloody expensive to ship out, so either you get to bed early or you learn to love candles and kerosene.” He grinned. “Hope it ain’t too medieval for ya!”

They assured him that it would be just fine, and then he led them downstairs for the finale of the tour. “You’re welcome to take your meals here,” he said, “and I expect you will, on account of there’s nowhere else to eat.” And he leaned back and laughed, long and loud.

Other people laughed too, and someone shouted: “To Cairnholm—may she always be our rock of refuge!”

“To Cairnholm!” the others chorused, and raised their glasses together.

#hollowgasts #the second soul #fanfic #dfcrosas #johanna roseberg #sophie lowe #fem jacob portman #genderbend #peculiar children