a long way out to reach the sea [1]
History does not happen in the pretty lines that writers eventually wrangle into finer narratives; one very rarely can stand in a moment and know exactly how it will be remembered.
So he writes it for her in his head, so that someone gets it right.
[or: how a prodigy from Sharlayan and a nobody girl abandoned in the desert find common ground — and something more.]
1. under their eyes
He gasps out a breath. Maybe a warning to Izzie. Assurance to Noel and Tataru, who scream for the Heavens’ Ward to stop. He wants to think it’s that. He knows, ultimately, it is merely a shaking breath of fear that says nothing at all.
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Darkness is heavy as a weight in the concessory, the room lit only by pallid yellow globs of light from small oil lanterns. Cold faces sculpted in harsh shadow sneer down at him and Tataru from on high, assuredly as the Church intended, to frighten any lowborn into sniveling and cow any highborn into begging.
Well, Alphinaud is certainly going to do neither.
He breathes in the sticky, still-cold air of this room full of doomsayers and speaks how he was taught. With full enunciation, supported by the diaphragm, loud.
“I, Alphinaud Leveilleur, am innocent of this charge and claim my right to a trial by combat.”
He keeps his fists low to his hips. Izzie mentioned that once. Not that he will be fighting with his fists, not unless this goes terribly sideways in a way he can’t consider. It helps keep the shaking at bay.
He has no choice but to have faith. Of all the ridiculous ironies.
The lalafell girl next to him speaks up in a tremulous voice, but exactly as Haurchefaunt told her to. “I, Tataru Taru, am innocent of this charge...but I am no fighter…so I claim the right to a champion to fight in my stead!”
That’s when the doors slam open.
A furious stripe of red hair half-tumbles into the room, skewing all light in her direction. Like the moon for which the world has named her, Izzie reflects the weak light back upon the faces in the dark, casting everything in a softer glow — even as her mouth twists into a snarl so fearsome it makes Alphinaud’s heart sink down into his gut.
Noel runs in not long after, emerald eyes haunted. Her aether billows out in a fog of possessive fury.
Even Noel seems unwilling to get in the way of whatever has possessed Izzie with such fervor. So for once, the sun hangs back.
The adjudicator attempts to regain control of the warbling voices in the chamber. “Who will—”
“I will!” Izzie declares. The way her mouth curls, Alphinaud can almost taste the cuss she wants to hurl at this man. “Or did my entrance not do it for you?”
She’s a sniper. Would they even allow a bow to be used here? The quarters are far too close.
“Very well,” the adjudicator says, eyebrow twitching.
Alphinaud opens his mouth to protest. And then Izzie pulls knives out of her boots.
Something in him twists sharply to the left. The light glints off the silver of her steel; firelight sings across her teeth. She senses underestimation like a scent on the wind and it makes her reckless and wild.
“And just as I was beginning to doubt in the efficacy of the Ishgardian justice system,” he mutters as she approaches, unable to keep his mouth shut as her copper brightness bears down upon him.
“Are you stupid?” she hisses. He jumps when her arm brushes his shoulder as she slides to his side. She’s taller than him, but not by enough to loom. They are both small in their own ways. “What are you going to fight with, your fucking book?”
“I have very little choice in the matter should I want to prove my innocence, thank you.”
Despite the exchange, familiar as parchment, his eyes track the knights of the Heavens’ Ward. He wants to block their levin-lit gazes. They watch Izzie with nigh lascivious scorn.
They want to tear her apart and see what can be done with the pieces. Alphinaud is just collateral, as he so often is anymore.
His hand clenches. When is survival enough? When can the world stop mocking them for it?
“Just stay behind me,” Izzie says, the hissing suddenly gone from her voice.
He only then realizes her words are streaked through with cracks of panic. She breathes heavily, like she’d run the whole way through the city to get here. He opens his mouth to retort, but nothing comes out.
Because then the inquisitors summon the battlefield up from the bowels of this ancient temple. Injustice snarls through Alphinaud at the too-freshly clean lacquer of its marble floor, at the frighteningly sharp metal bars that line its edges, at how this city could engineer so much and how it dedicates its all to something as barbaric as this.
What would Grandfather think?
His thoughts whirl with such tunneled intensity that the adjudicator’s voice becomes little more than a hallowed droning in the back of his head as he and Izzie descend to the battlefield. The inquisitor lifts his hand in some holy invocation that has Izzie’s shoulders tensing.
“Let’s end this farce,” Alphinaud whispers, unhooking his tome from his belt with more bravado than he deserved.
Izzie’s gaze slides toward him with such intensity it burns his peripheral vision. He glances back.
“No heroics, Leveilleur.” A warning, low and rumbling. “I mean it.”
He has no time to reply — no time to dissect the prickling heat that sweeps through his gut from hearing his name out of her mouth — before she leaps, knives aloft, toward knights in shining armor.
...
History does not happen in the pretty lines that writers eventually wrangle into finer narratives; one very rarely can stand in a moment and know exactly how it will be remembered.
So he writes it for her in his head, so that someone gets it right.
When she leaps, the whole world stops to look. She becomes a cream and copper ribbon of motion, thrown forward by two points of steel. The Heavens’ Ward stand slack jawed in the span of time they could have reacted, suffering all at once the crashing of their hubris.
No one in Ishgard believed a wit about the stories of the Warriors of Light, heralding from greater Eorzea.
Two Viera women had saved the land entire, to hear it told — one as beautiful and glorious as the sun, dancing like the chiaroscuro of shadows beneath magnificent boughs as she cast spells made of miracles. The other is as winking and joyous as the full moon, coquettishly hiding behind gales of bright laughter and a voice that would woo Menphina herself.
How could anyone believe it, looking upon them now?
The Dancing Sun, Noel Kisne, stands watching like a boat’s mast shorn in half, broken and splintered, body motionless. She is an eclipse, cursing them all.
And the Laughing Moon, Izzie Nenelori, is no guileless maiden made of frivolity. Her teeth gnash like a cornered animal, the ferocity of her attack unearthing some deeper darkness for the Ishgardians to examine in horror.
Her strength is preternatural and strange. Her battlecries are more akin to a harpie’s screaming than mellifluous sparrow calls. It is all Alphinaud can do to summon Moonstone to cast a shield over her skin as the knights’ weapons come perilously close to slicing her open.
They don’t.
Her foot whirls around to smash into Ser Grinnaux’s jaw, sending him stumbling to the floor. In the same motion, her knife sings across Ser Paulecrain’s cheek, sending a spit of blood flying. Any advantage they may have had with reach weapons evaporates beneath her fearless charge. Death doesn’t threaten her. The notion of it seems to excite her — like she relishes laughing in death’s face.
She dives beneath the pole of Paulecrain’s halberd and skitters aside when Grinnaux’s axe slams into the marble. She grins, all teeth.
Sweat gathers on Alphinaud’s forehead, watching her. For so long, Izzie and Noel had capitulated to his many demands on their time; he’d never stood close enough to actually watch their battles unfold. Such was not his duty.
Something bizarre unfurls inside his chest where his heart should be, the very organ blooming like an orchid as Izzie pummels the hilt of her knife straight into Paulecrain’s nose. Something itchy and petrifying and warm crawls through Alphinaud’s skin, like he is a monster cracking out of an egg, roaring to consume.
Her hair follows her in a silky curtain of fire even now, crowned by two tall, velvety ears. Her freckles stand out from her pale skin like tiny, dark stars. She shouts in fury, lips red and wide open, skin mottled with orange flushing.
She’s beautiful. She could kill him. The two thoughts are one thought, entwined like vines, and his mouth falls open, helpless.
“Alphinaud, pay attention!” Noel snaps from the stands.
He jumps, hearing her voice — cracked through with disuse.
But he is! He is paying attention, thank you very much! Izzie is doing a fine job entertaining their enmity — but then…
The battle shifts.
They seem to notice Alphinaud is…standing there. Book open, carbuncle hissing furiously. Grinnaux turns on a dime, sollerets screeching, to charge him with his axe held aloft. Alphinaud grits his jaw and squares his feet, hand extended as he performs the arcane geometries to ruin him—
Izzie’s leg swings out in the same moment, tripping the knight to the floor. He clatters to the ground in a kerrang of armor, and in the next moment, she leaps on him, knife’s point going for one of the weaknesses in the far too ceremonial plate.
“Don’t run!” she snarls. “That’s no fun!”
Ser Grinnaux screams in pain.
But Izzie is distracted, giving Paulecrain — face caked with dark blood from his nose — ample time to rise up, halberd intent upon her neck.
No, some part of Alphinaud whispers. You don’t get to do this to her. Not for me. Not again.
Alphinaud half-shouts as a crackling, deep-dark Ruin spell flies toward Paulcrain’s chest from his grimoire. The knight stumbles backward, breathless, only to be further accosted by Moonstone’s chittering fury, leaping to his chest, scratching at his jaw.
Izzie’s fist flies across Grinnaux’s face. His head smacks the stone ground with a sickening thunk, but it only seems to make him angrier.
To be bested so easily by a 19-year-old girl?
Inhuman strength possesses him and he throws her from his body. Her back hits the far wall in a thick crunch. Noel screams. Haurchefaunt calls out the inhumanity of it. Alphinaud’s stomach falls to his feet.
Grinnaux pulls out her knife from his chest with a far too thick squelching sound, blood dripping from the steel before he tosses it to the ground. Then his haunting, bright eyes fixate on Alphinaud.
“Halone smite you!” he bellows.
What happens next is a blur.
Aetheric chains suddenly squeeze Alphinaud about the ribs, crushing him so fully that he forgets how to breathe. His grimoire falls to the ground in his shock; he’s never been accosted like this, never been attacked with the full intent to kill before, not in a way that actually landed, not in a way that will leave bruises if he even survives.
He gasps out a breath. Maybe a warning to Izzie. Assurance to Noel and Tataru, who scream for the Heavens’ Ward to stop. He wants to think it’s that. He knows, ultimately, it is merely a shaking breath of fear that says nothing at all.
Grinnaux stalks toward him, mouth curving in a bloody crescent.
And then a horrifying, guttural scream shakes the very foundations of the church.
In the next moment, a flash of copper is in front of Alphinaud, and the chains break as easily as if Izzie had cut her steel through a fraying rope. Alphinaud collapses to the floor, head spinning, body aching so furiously his eyes prick with tears. Izzie throws that same knife right at Grinnaux’s face—
—only for it to cut a sharp line across the side of his neck. He shouts, gauntleted hands going automatically to the blood flowing from the crack in his skin. Paulecrain bellows in fury, charging her, and Alphinaud cries out, voice choked, scrambling for his tome somewhere upon the floor, because she is utterly weaponless—
But with inhuman strength, she grabs the long shaft of the halberd and uses his own momentum to swing him aside into the same wall that Grinnaux had just thrown her into, like he is a bug at the end of a swatter.
Perhaps Halone is here after all. Perhaps the Heavens’ Ward knows that.
Izzie stalks forward, grabbing her bloodied knife off the ground. She marches soullessly toward Paulecrain, who throws his hands up.
Pleading.
“No!” Paulecrain cries, scrambling back. “We yield! We yield!”
“And so it is decided!” The high adjudicator declares, voice hurried and breathless to stop Izzie before she kills both of the knights. “The accused are deemed innocent beneath the eyes of the Fury! May She keep you in Her hallowed halls!”
The rest of the adjudicator’s cronies wave and shout for healers while Izzie stands there, breathing hard, eyes blown open, hands and knuckles dripping with blood.
“We won!” Tataru shouts, disbelieving.
Alphinaud slowly rises on his shaking legs, wiping tears from his eyes before Izzie can see. It doesn’t feel like a win, watching Izzie return to herself through the mist of his pain. It doesn’t feel like anything good at all.
He is drawn to her side like the very chain she’d broken in her fury. He reaches out a trembling hand to touch her shoulder. Decides not to at the last second.
Her head twists around to stare at him, half-lifeless, half-scalding. His hand lingers in the air between them like a hummingbird.
Her gaze rakes through his face, his body, and then her whole body turns toward him and her palms press into his shoulders.
He is breathless. He has no words, which never happens to him. The spots where her palms touch him tingle as if she held levin crystals to his body.
“Are you okay?” Her words are choked through with sensation. Scratchy from screaming, shaking from adrenaline, sharp with unbalanced determination he can’t quite pin down.
“Yes,” he says, somehow. “Yes.” He remembers himself, bit by bit. “My thanks. Are you?”
She blinks, as if shocked by the question, and then nods slowly. “Yeah. I think so.”
They stare at each other.
For so long, most of their interactions have been defined by acidity. The moment they’d met, she’d called him a prissy nonce who should go home to his mother. And maybe she had been right, he thinks, miserable. Maybe he should have listened to her. Look at this mess they’re in, all because of him.
The Scions are gone because of him.
But he had gotten comfortable in their spiky back and forth. She kept coming back even after she told him off any number of times. She'd even return without Noel sometimes for her next assignment, as if perhaps she could tolerate him if it meant helping other people. He’d decided, long ago, she simply believed in the cause.
Now, he wonders if she had gotten comfortable, too.
This seems too much to hope for, that she cared about him beyond being the boy who pretended to be her commander. This seems like something a different, less cocksure fool would deserve.
“Be more careful, you idiot,” she snaps, furious. “Noel would never forgive herself if anything happened to you. Do you want to make her even more sad?”
He opens his mouth to retort — because he can read between the lines far better than she can and he knows, he knows in a flash of intuition that burns, that she isn’t talking about Noel.
Why doesn’t she just say that? What about it makes it so she can’t? He saw everything. He saw the ferocity of her defense. It was personal.
Is it always like that for her? Does it scare her?
But then they are swept aside in the current of their friends and allies pulling them out from the tribunal to the stained-glass shadows in the vestibule and he decides, wisely, to drop it.
Thinking about it makes his hands shake — and he can’t afford any more weakness.
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Yes, I’m going to admit. The show surprised me.
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(Hopefully by this point you’ve finished Season 1 of ‘Dollface’, the kind of person who isn’t bothered by spoilers, or are just deciding if you still want to keep watching.)
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I had not read anything about the show and just went through the motions (ready to rate it at the most a 4/10) and was surprised how good the jokes were.
Not only that, I was surprised by the actual content. Looks like I’ve found another MA show that I can add to my list!
PS; I’m undecided on what sub-genre to use. It’s basically 70% real...and 30% fantasy. But could the fantasy be happening only in Jules’ mind?
(But in episode 10...Izzy could see Cat Lady!)
PPS: So...are the friends...Older Millenials? Vulture puts them as 30-somethings.
(I was also confused that Goran Visnjic was playing a 45-year-old...in his 50′s...but....then after I checked his IMDB profile...he actually was 47 when Season 1 was released! What!? He was in his 30′s when he finished up ER!?
Yes! It’s actually Maura Tierney who is older! By 7-years!)
PPPS: Now I think I kind of like the reasoning of ‘Girls going to the toilet in groups’ --- there’s a serious safety concern if they don’t.
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HIGHLIGHT:
INT. MKUNDU LAUNCH PARTY - NIGHT
STELLA and JULES are sipping their drinks. MADISON is standing in between them. STELLA puts hers down.
STELLA
I'm gonna run to the bathroom.
MADISON
Of course.
MADISON starts to follow STELLA, but stops after she notices JULES isn't heading to the same direction.
MADISON
What are you doing? We have to go with Stella.
JULES
Oh, I don't have to pee.
MADISON
What does needing to pee have to do with going to the bathroom?
JULES
Is this a riddle?
MADISON
Girls are supposed to go to the bathroom together.
She pauses and stares at her friend. Capiche?
JULES
Well, yeah, but isn't that rule kind of stupid?
MADISON
You're right, Jules. No, it's stupid. And cliques are stupid and loyalty is stupid...and bein there for your friends is stupid. Thank God you're too good for all that.
JULES
Madison, I mean, come on, this---What do you think this whole night was about? This is for you.
MADISON scruitinises her friend.
MADISON
Just forget it.
JULES stands there as her friend walks off and heads to the toilet.
JULES
Madison, wait.
INT. CLUB (HALLWAY TO TOILETS) - NIGHT
JULES arrives just in time to see MADISON rushing out from the women's toilet.
JULES
Hey.
MADISON
She's not in the bathroom.
The reverse shot reveals that IZZY is now standing next to JULES.
JULES
Really?
IZZY
Hey.
MADISON AND JULES
Whoa!
IZZY
If you guys are looking for your friend Stella, I think I saw her get into a van with a weird older guy.
MADISON
Wait, a weird guy with a van?
MADISON throws a look at JULES. Extremely concerned. We know what 'guy in white van' means....right?
IZZY
Yes, but she seemed totally fine. I mean, she wasn't wearing shoes, but...
JULES
Excuse us.
JULES and MADISON head to the exit.
EXT. CLUB (ENTRANCE) - NIGHT
JULES and MADISON arrive just in time to see a white van peel off.
JULES AND MADISON
(shouts)
Stella!
MADISON throws her hands up and turns to JULES.
MADISON
You see what happens when we don't go to the bathroom together?
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My verdict of the episode: 6/10
Timestamp Commentary: None (One to be published only by request)
My Formal review about the show: None (a piece for 'Comedy To Watch’ coming soon!)
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Index:
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