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yesitsmewhataboutit · 2 years

Text

Poker Face

Mob!Tom Holland x Reader

You get a knock on your door, detectives wanting to use your apartment for a stakeout. Of course you say yes, little do they know you have a secret of your own. Little do they know you know more about their investigation then what they tell you that night

Warnings⚠️: talks of injuries, angst, tbh 1.5k words of sadness (it’s 2.3k total) it’ll be ok tho yall😭

Masterlist

Prologue // Chapter 1

Chapter: 6

It's weird how time seemed to move quickly but also slow. You all knew it would be a slow recovery. After two days, only Harrison had woken up. The doctors are still keeping Sam sedated, and they said they weren't sure when Tom would wake because of the brain injury.

"No," Harry says sternly.

"Harry, come on-"

"No. Y/n. Not happening," Harry says, his voice showing no sign of letting up.

"Haz, tell him," you say, turning your head to the boy in the bed.

Before the warehouse accident, Tom had said when you started getting better: you'd need to practice walking more since you hadn't in a while. You were getting better, and you knew he was right, so Harry would walk with you around the bedroom or living room when it was clear of Tom's men. Today, you and he are pacing the length of the infirmary in front of Sam and Harry's beds.

"I don't know, Y/n. Harry might be right," Harrison says, his voice still slightly weak.

"No. Come on, you guys went up there. It'll be a quick in and out," you urge, looking between Harry and Harrison as you hold on to Harry's arm, still walking back and forth slowly.

You're trying to get Harry's ok on you leaving to go back to your apartment to pick things up. They don't think it's a good idea since there's no way the police don't know what happened to the warehouse. If you go up there, it could be extra suspicious. Especially if they knew about the gala, you showing up, obviously injured, could bring suspicion.

"Y/n, you know Tom wouldn't want you out while he's not able to be around to help," Harry says.

"That's not true! He knows it's safe. He and Haz went there. All I'd do is go, get some clothes, and give a reason to why I'll be gone for a while," you say. "Harrison, tell him to let me go. You're second in command. You're technically in charge now."

"Nope, I'm not doing any of that while I'm still in this bed. You either go to him or Tom, and Tom's still in dreamland, so what Harry says goes."

"Harry!" you whine and look at him.

"Y/n, if you go up there and something goes wrong, Tom will kill me. We don't know if they know about the gala, and they definitely know about the warehouse. It isn't safe for you to show up their injured after you never came home," Harry says, removing his arm from you and taking both your hands, walking backward with his arms stretched out between you, wanting you to balance by yourself.

"What if I bring you? You'll be like my bodyguard, and if anything goes wrong, you'll be able to take those guys," you smirk at him.

"Um, 'those guys' have guns," he laughs and nods.

"So do you!"

"Two guns against one aren't great odds."

"Ok, ok. Harry give her a break. It's not that bad an idea," Harrison pipes in.

"The mafia isn't based on giving things breaks. And if anything goes wrong, I will end up dead, and none of you will know since," he turns his head to Harrison, "you're in a hospital bed," he turns his head to you, "you'd end up in jail, and the sleeping beauty brothers wouldn't help in any way."

You sigh, trying to come up with something as you continue to walk around the room with Harry. "Ok. What if we go, bring as many of Tom's men as we can and tell them if we aren't out within ten minutes to come in and rain havoc," you suggest.

Harry eye's you and then sighs, "Fine. Ok, fine. We'll do it. But when Tom wakes up, you have to tell him and make him promise not to blame anything on me."

"Deal," you smile.

You guys plan to go the next day, and after you get tired and finish your walking with Harry, he helps you back to Tom's room. He helps you up into the high bed and makes his exit, leaving you in the room with your unconscious boyfriend.

Hours later, you wake to a sound in the room. At first, it startles you, making you think someone was in or trying to break into the room. Maybe wanting to get to you or Tom, knowing he can't fight back. But, quickly, you realize that wasn't the case. The sound came from Tom. He woke up.

His hospital bed is on the left side of the bed, farthest from the door, and you had fallen asleep facing him, but in your sleep, turned over to where your back is facing him. When you realized it was a soft groan that sounded through the room, you sat up and looked over at him, the darkness in the room not hiding the way he was squirming.

You reach your hand out, feeling for the room's light switch, the small light from his heart monitor not being enough for you to see clearly. When you find it, you quickly flick it up, light shining into the room. You scoot over to the side of the bed, crossing your legs, and sit next to Tom.

"Tom. It's ok, you're ok," you say gently. You move close to him, reaching out to touch his hand.

He opens his eyes, his head slowly tilting your way. "My head is pounding," he groans.

"Sorry. The nurses said you aren't able to have much more medicine for the pain," you say, rubbing his hand.

It's quiet for a few minutes while Tom continues to get his bearings. He slowly goes through his memories. Then it hits him. "H-haz- and Sam they-"

"They're ok. It's all ok. It was tricky, but Harry was perfect in command and made the right decisions. Without him, you guys might not have survived," you say quietly, watching his face as he turns his head your way and looks at you. "I'll tell you more in the morning. Just get some rest and get stronger." Tom lets out a slow breath, closing his eyes.

You lean over and turn the room light off, laying down, staying close to the edge next to his bed, your hand staying in his as you snuggle under the covers and get comfortable, looking at his figure through the darkroom, watching as he slips into sleep and soon you do the same.

In the morning, you wake up, and Tom is already awake. Your hand is still in his, and he's starring at nothing like he's deep in thought. You sit up, scooting close to him again. "Tommy, hey, how are you feeling?" you ask softly.

"How's Haz? And Sam?" his eyes don't shift, continuing to bore into the wall.

"Harrison is awake. He's fine. Sam's neck and spine were injured, so they're keeping him sedated until it's healed enough cause if its too much movement, Sam could end up paralyzed. When he does wake up, at minimal, he'll only need a little physical therapy," you answer him. Tom doesn't say anything, so you decide to keep going. "And you," that caught his attention, and he looked at you, "um, your ear, your left ear, it was severely damaged. The ear itself is still there, but they said you had blunt force trauma to that side of your head and lost all hearing in that ear."

Tom takes in the information, letting it settle in his mind. He realizes when you speak he can't hear your voice in his left ear, how now it's weird, unbalanced. "What're you thinking about?" you ask, watching his facial expressions.

He looks at you for a moment, weighing his options of how to respond. "Come sit?" You perk up and nod, carefully shifting over to his bed. You put your arm above his head, not touching it but letting it lay there while you lay on your side, your hand in his right one, touching it gently. "When the explosion first happened, and the warehouse came crumbing on us, we were all still awake. There were 5 of us, the other two were somewhere else, but Harrison, Sam, and I ended up in the same area, slowly getting crushed." His voice shakes as he tells the story.

"I remember the pain. It was a lot of pain, and uh, Harrison was a few inches from my left, Sam on my right," he used his free hand to gesture, "it was still early in the morning, so it was very dark, and my vision was blurry, but I saw Harrison in a puddle of his own blood, his face crushed under the rubble." His face doesn't change much, but you feel your eyes wheel with tears, unable to imagine how it all must've felt.

"I've been in a lot of situations, many, bad situations, but that time I saw no way out, no way of survival. I kept looking at Harrison next to me, seeing my best friend as his life was slipping away. Sam had caught my attention, his eyes were wide, and there was blood spilling from his neck. I remember thinking, 'how could so much blood be leaking out, and he's still alive?' He opened his mouth to say something but only coughed blood, so instead, he reached his hand out and grabbed mine, looking at me with pure fear."

Tears are free-flowing from your eyes now, and you can't fathom how Tom isn't crying himself, how his face is staying neutral as he tells the story. Sure, he's the mob boss, he's supposed to be tuff, but this, this was traumatic.

"When I first took over from my dad, my mom had pulled me to the side, and she said, 'You harden your heart, you harden your face, but never turn on your brothers. Sam, Paddy, Harry, and Harrison. They're the most important things you need to worry about, so protect them. If you don't know anything else or how to deal with something, always protect them. Cause, in the end, say you fail, which I know you won't, cause I know my boy will be the best, but if anything goes wrong, you need them by your side. You guys have spent so much time together and made so many memories. Even if the mob fails, you keep them around. At all casts, no matter what.'"

"She told me that, and I kept it with me. Protect them at all costs. When you came around, I kept it even more in mind. I trust you all, so I wasn't going overbored, let you guys be involved, but laying there, seeing Sam pleading to me with his eyes, I failed. He was hurt. Harrison was hurt. Both were life-threatening injuries, and there I was with them, completely helpless."

This' the first time his face changed, his voice wobbled, and he let out a breath. "When, um, when my vision started to go, and I was losing consciousness, I thought about my mum, how heartbroken she'd be when she found out that 'her boy' wasn't the best. I thought about you," he pauses, swallowing as he gets a lump in his throat. "When Sam's eyes closed, it was crazy 'cause we hadn't talked, but at that moment, I figured they could be dead, and I felt alone there, so alone. I laid there, and I thought about quitting the mob. If I made it out alive, just leaving, keeping you, Harry, and Paddy safe. I don't know what the emotions were, but I'd never felt them before, and I wanted it to stop. I wanted to leave. I hated everything about what got me there." He sniffs, tears now falling from his eyes.

"Tom-"

"No. No, let me finish." You close your mouth and nod. "Me and my brothers, even as kids, I'd never seen any of them cry. We were always tuff, and yeah, we played around, but that was only us. I could see the tears rolling down Sam's face, showing how much pain he was in, even while unconscious. But now, now you say he's ok, that we're all ok, and the only thing I can think about is finding out who was behind it and shoving a knife through the person's skull."

His voice spits venom, almost like his cheeks weren't stained with tears. "The only thing I want to do right now, more than sitting here with you and spending time with you, is do everything I can to make whoever did it suffer. To make the person know what it was like, laying under the rubble and thinking, all I could do was wait for death. Momentarily making me hate everything about myself. I want them to pay."

Your tears have stopped, and you're speechless. You stare at Tom, mouth agape and mind blank, not knowing what you could say to make any other this better, not knowing if you even can make any of it better. You want morals to win. You want to tell him it's wrong, that there are other ways to get even, that it could be too dangerous, but that's not what comes out of your mouth.

You think about how the three boys looked when they came in, how terrible it must have been for them, how much pain they'll be in for the next few weeks, how much work it'll be to get themselves back in working condition.

"I agree. Show those bastards what the Holland Mob is made of."

Chapter 7 >>

Masterlist

Ahem: @notyourcupofteax @dreamsarecloserwithyou @tomsirishgirlx @novaresque @b0kutoswaifu @iamasimpingh0e

#tom holland #tom holland x reader #tom holland fanfiction #tom holland fluff #mob!tom x reader #mob tom holland x reader #mob!tom x fem reader #mob!tom #mob!tom imagine #tom holland x fem!reader #tom holland x black!reader #tom holland au #mob!tom holland #mob au #tom holland angst

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jesslockwood · 3 years

Text

Photo Opportunities

Word Count: 2.7k

Pairing(s): Tom Holland x Actress!Reader

Warnings: FLUFF with a slightly (barely) suggestive sentence towards the end

A/n: damn I can't write anything except actress reader? smh but this is for @londonspidey ‘s sit-com Writing challenge (ik I'm early lol) but I was so excited I wrote the whole thing in one go lmao the prompt is bolded!

Calling yourself a fan was an understatement. You were obsessed with anything and everything marvel. And oddly enough, you could after today say you were in the club. It wasn’t a public fact yet, until later that day actually, at the Marvel panel at comic con that you were being announced as the actress for the character, Felica Hardy and no one else knew except for the people who cast you and your best friend who signed an NDA. You were technically still a known actress for your roles on television mainly as Thalia on the PJO Disney + series and a couple of still decently sized films.

You were currently wrapping up signing autographs for fans of yours for today. Your team had planned it out so it wasn’t suspicious that you were at the con with a few of your castmates scattered doing other junkets and press so people wouldn’t guess who they were acting as the cast for new marvel projects.

You had been planning to go meet your best friend, who wasn’t in the industry before getting a text that she bought you both a photo-op with someone and she wouldn’t tell you who. You couldn’t only assume it was a marvel actor that you would indeed, freak out.

Y/b/n: btw I brought you a mask. I get the wig lol.

You: please tell me it doesn’t cover my full face. Also, how are we posing?

Y/b/n: I bought as many photo ops as I could so a lot of different ones, And if I tell you the poses it’ll spoil it.

You: is this with the money I pay you to be my assistant with? Lol fine I’m omw with security

Y/b/n: maybe…

Y/b/n: and they’ll need more backup security for who we’re getting a photo op with than you do for your hellfire.

You roll your eyes before taking your stuff and exiting the booth, before heading out the backways with staff security and your detailed security for the day. You only had security because you wanted to explore the con when you weren’t needed.

Your best friend had also been your assistant for the con weekend, but you didn’t want her to be confined to you the whole three days so when she could, you would let her explore it, at least she could experience it as a fan, right?

When you made it to that part of the building, you wanted to wait in line with her, which your security didn’t agree to so she texted you when there were about five people ahead of her. She was one of the last in line, with you asking her to be kind, so others would get their chance to be first with whomever it was.

When she texted you and your detailed exit, getting a few stares and others taking their phones out to either take photos or tweet, you wave at them before joining your best friend in line.

“Here,” she says before handing you none other than a black cat mask before she puts on a red wig.

You glare at her slightly trying to not make a scene, before putting it on.

“I’m assuming you're Mary Jane?” you laugh figuring out that it had to be someone from Spider-Man.

“How’d you- never mind.” She laughs with you.

She then explains how she’s going to pose for your five photo ops, joking in between how she should “get a raise for this”.

You catch sight of him before sucking in your breath. This was either going to go down amazingly or terribly, there was no in-between with you.

“Excuse Me, are you Y/n Y/l/n?”

You turn around and are met by some fans who were standing in line behind you.

“I am! How’s your con going?” you ask politely to the two of them.

“It's going amazing! We love you as Thalia! Could we maybe get a picture? Only if it’s okay?”

“Of course! Thank you for supporting me!” your best friend grabs their phone to take the photo, before you take off the mask, and stand between the two fans, and your best friend snaps a few photos.

“Thank you so much! And Are you fans of Tom?”

You start slowly walking back to catch up to the line.

“Yeah, I love him as Spiderman, but I also enjoy his other roles. He's very talented, I'd love to work with him one day!”

“Have you seen him in Uncharted? We love Him as Nathan drake!”

“I have, he was amazing per usual! How are you two posing with him?”

They show you their innovative pose. You laugh and tell them it's great before you have to wish them goodbye before heading up for your turn for the photo op.

“How do we want to pose- hang on, I recognize you!”

You freeze slightly before your friend mouths for you to flirt. You look down at the mask in your hand before getting into character and saying “Of course you do Spidey, I'm always causing you trouble.” you put on the mask and wink.

He seems slightly stunned, laughing, feeling like he’s seen you somewhere, not only because he found you extremely gorgeous, while in his peripheral vision he sees his brother/ assistant, Harry waving like a madman on the side.

Your friend directs you both through the poses, first, one both him putting “webs” onto you as she looks over his shoulder, the second one, both of you kissing his cheeks, the third, all jumping in the air in your best superhero poses, the fourth one she gets a photo op alone and the last one she gives to you,

“Seriously, who are you?”

“Your Wildest dreams, baby,” you say, taking off the mask.

Your best friend yells “freestyle” from the sidelines before Tom dips you, gently, with you shocked, holding the mask out with your free arm and the photo captures that moment.

He gently helps you stand back up fully, not before you drop the mask.

“Nice moves Spider-Man.”

“Not so bad yourself, Black Cat.”

You laugh before, taking off with your best friend, well more her dragging you to the printing station leaving the mask behind. Tom picks it up before shoving it in his back pocket to hopefully give back if he could find you.

`You were sitting in the green room, trending on Twitter before you were actually supposed to be trending on Twitter, and god knows where else.

Someone had snuck a video of you and Tom, up till him dipping you, and a video of you interacting with the fans in the line.

Your Y/b/n was currently reading off some tweets out loud

“‘A kind queen we stan.’ I agree, I also agree with ‘Date her if you can't date me tom!!!’.

‘THALIA AND PETER PARKER??? My two fandoms have collided.’ same, same. Oo this one says, ‘if she ain’t playing black cat I will sue marvel.’ I'm dying at the reply ‘She needs to post the photos or I'll sue her!’. This one’s funny, ‘she could squash him like a bug in heels but he liked his queen like that.’.”

She pauses watching you texting.

“Y/n? Y/n?”

“What? Sorry I was only half listening. I was texting my publicist. She said to stay on the DL until tonight.

“Well we should get food, you haven't eaten since this morning.”

“By the way, your show has shot to number one on Disney +. Also, you have like three times the followers you had before, probably cause you're trending on every platform, even Tumblr!”

“Wow you should just become my social media manager now.” you joke trying to ease the joy yet weirded out feeling in your stomach.

“Does that come with a raise? Because after today I've spent way too much of what I'm paid.” she jokes back.

After finishing his photo ops Tom asked Harry who she was and to find out. By the time he finished autographs for the day, Tom and Harry walked to the panel room in the back for announcements, one that included him for the new Avengers movie, while Harry gave him the rundown.

“So she’s an actress, she plays Thalia on Disney plus’ Percy Jackson series, and that's her most known project. The other girl with her is her assistant best friend, and now she's trending everywhere. People dug up some old photos of her being a marvel/Spider-Man fan, so there's that. And she's here at the con for the rest of the weekend. She's doing photo ops tomorrow at one, and yes she's single from what I gather since you were looking at her like this.” he makes a weird face before tom smacks him.

“And plus you have time in your schedule to get a photo op with her, that is if you eat lunch quickly.”

That gave Tom an idea.

“Harry I’m going to need you to book me one, oh and help me find a Spider-Man costume!” He says, before leaving harry to do ‘assistant’ work. entering the green room for the announcements, watching them announce a new movie.

“We are so excited to announce to the Marvel Universe, and spider-verse-” that perked tom’s ears, “-directed by Gina Prince-Bythewood, and today we are announcing our amazing Miss Felicia Hardy, please give a warm welcome to the stage, Your Black Cat!”

You suddenly emerged in an aisle way, dressed in all black with a leather jacket, black ankle boots, and of course black sunglasses indoors.

The music is marvel music until it suddenly changes after a recorded laugh from you into “I can’t be tamed by Miley Cyrus”.

You start owning the music while saying hi and touching fans’ hands. You decide to take off your sunglasses and throwing them to a fan, for them to keep, before getting on stage.

“What a Performance from the one the only Y/n Y/l/n!”

You laugh, being met with the loudest applause you had heard all con before being handed a Mic.

“Thank you but I'm a terrible dancer.” You Joke.

Tom was staring at the screen stunned. You had been the black cat all along. You were in the marvel universe and spidey one, so he'd definitely be seeing more of you. The hard part is that you seemed so genuine when you talked, interacted with fans and was no doubt, stunning.

“Better close your mouth or the flies will get in.” Tom turns around to find the voice of none other than his friend slash bully, Sebastian Stan, along with Anthony Mackie.

“Looks like the kid has a crush!” Anthony laughs, pointing to the screen you were on.

“I-I don’t! I don’t even know her!” Tom tries to come to his own defense, hopelessly.

“She’s got you whipped already don’t even deny it.” Harry comes in, joining the teasing of one, Tom Holland.

“Maybe we can invite her out for drinks tonight, then fanboy over here can meet her, and then probably scare her off!” Anthony mentions.

“You haven’t looked on the internet? They’ve already met.” Seb says, before showing Anthony twitter.

Anthony stands there slightly shocked before bursting into laughter.

“Well, she’s damn well a keeper for Tom since she obviously likes him.”

A staff member peaks their head in the green room to tell Tom he’s up next.

“Well, that’s my cue to leave you two!”

On the other hand, you were on an adrenaline high from being on stage, and seeing all the fans. You knew tomorrow was going to be crazy, as you expected people to book your photo op left and right since the announcement.

You had decided to decline an offer from your fellow marvel universe castmates, Sebastian Stan and Anthony Mackie, which they so graciously told you that whenever you’re free, the offer still stood.

You had gotten to your hotel room seeing your phone blowing up on the social media apps for the second time that day.

You responded to the important stuff, before heading to bed, knowing it was going to be hectic.

You had been right, it was absolutely insane, the number of people who showed up. You had fully booked all your time slots for photo ops. You had seen so many people dressed up in marvel cosplay, ranging from Loki to Ironman, even some people dressed up as your character, which was wildly insane to see.

You had been nearing the end of the line and had enjoyed every moment with the fans, and you couldn’t wait for your autographing session later that day, to truly get a chance to talk to the fans and connect with them and how they felt about you being their beloved Black Cat.

After a few more photos, posing how they wanted, you see a fully dressed, head to toe, mask and all, Spider-Man. You had seen some spider-mans but most took off their masks to snap a picture. The person was the last in line.

“Hey Black Cat.” The southern American accented voice tells you, seeming very familiar.

“Hey, Spider, what poses do you have up your sleeve?” you ask kindly.

“I bought a few, Cat.” they laugh.

“Okay, You can do whatever a spider can right?” you pull out a line out of the comics jokingly.

“I can do flips if that’s what you’re asking.”

“Is that some kind of nerd pick-up line? Because it’s only kind of working.” you laugh.

“I really can, but this is one.”

He gets down on one knee, holding a black cat mask instead of a ring. The photographer captures the shocked expression on your face.

“I- Don’t- What- Spider I-”

“Ow My feelings…” Suddenly their voice changes into a British accent before they pull off the mask to reveal-

“Tom?”

“I guess you don’t have a spidey sense darling?” The photographer captures the moment without warning eating the moment up.

You laugh at that.

“I guess you found out my true identity Spider. And it’s nice to officially meet you, Tom.”

He laughs, just as nervous as you, he notices he has gotten closer to you and a strand of hair loosely is blowing in your face, so naturally, he pushes it behind your ear. Another snap of the camera can be heard.

“NOW KISS!” a voice belonging to your best friend yells from the side, mid-eating a churro.

You both laugh really hard at that.

The both of you calm down, slowly leaning lost in the moment. The camera snaps again. You both look at the photographer weirded out, and they just shrug.

“Wait can you actually do a flip?” you ask, pulling away, not wanting prying eyes aka the photographer, to pry in your business.

“I can, though I’d show you later, maybe in the greenroom?”

“That sounds naughty, but, sure.” you joke around.

He laughs before, you both take off from the area going to grab the photos.

After spending most of the day together when you could, you get Tom’s number, before heading back to your hotel room. He texts you as soon as you get back.

Spider: I had fun today, minus finding our assistants making out.

You: we should ‘snog’ too, it’ll gross them out ;)

You: I had fun too btw. Are you leaving tomorrow?

Spider: lol we should. And yeah an early flight, 6 am to be exact. Hbu?

You: Yeah me too... another day another dollar lol

Spider: ill miss you, Cat.

You: stop talking like we’ll never see each other again lol. As a matter of fact, come to my room, we’re watching a movie!

Spider: alright, I’ll order snacks.

You sigh smiling at your phone. You haven’t felt this giddy in a long time.

Your phone pings with a few Instagram notifications.

Tomholland2013 has started following you.

Tomholland2013 has tagged you in a photo.

You open Instagram to find the photo of him “proposing” to you posted.

“Ow, my leg, my- feelings...Welcome to the Universe, Cat.” the photo is captioned. You decide to post, the photo of him dipping you.

“So what do you say, Spider? Wanna help me pull off the Heist of the Heist of the Century?” you caption it, Before getting comfortable to watch a movie.

What an opportunity ;)

Tags:

@lolooo22 @webmeupspiderdaddy @harryhollandsgirlfriend @spideyspeaches @greenorangevioletgrass @queenofthepouges @sheranatic111 @keithseabrook27

#tom holland #peter parker #marvel #spider-man #tom holland fic #tom holland x reader #tom holland fanfic #tom holland fanfiction #tom holland x y/n #tom holland imagine #tom holland one shot #comic con #ace comic con seattle #ace con #comiccon #Katies4kwc

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adragonhoardingstories · 4 years

Text

Of Blood and Bonds - Chapter 1

@mystery-5-5

@abrx2002 @clumsy-owl-4178 @daminett4life @zalladane

@heaven428 @unmaskedagain

@dawnwave16 @virgil-is-a-cutie

@kris-pines04 @hypnosharkrebeldreamer

@weird-pale-blonde-person

@ravennightingaleandavatempus

@persephonebutkore

@be-happy-every-day-please @blue-peach14 @annabellabrookes

I hope I got everyone in the tag! I know I said this was gonna be fluff but it's also going to be angst. Sorry not sorry.

On that note, this book will contain swearing, mentions of rape and torture. I will try not be explicit but that's really relative. Read at your own risk. There will be warning before if I make a explicit scene so that you can skip it.

Anyways, I hope you enjoy and don't hunt me down for this.

___________________________________

Marinette had punched Bruce Wayne.

Marinette had punched Bruce Wayne, Prince of Gotham, in Wayne Enterprises Tower in Gotham City and she was probably going to get kicked out because of this but it was so worth it.

"Marinette honey," He said cautiously, "I'm sure I deserve it but why?"

She clenched her jaw and took a few deep breaths as she opened and closed her fists. She was trying really hard not to punch him again.

You won't be able to get a second shot in without the boys intervening. She told herself, eying the way the boys - her brothers, she reminded herself stood, ready to pounce on her at any instant.

She had no doubt that the only reason she wasn't being restrained yet was because they were too shocked to react.

"I don't think I asked for much Dad." She practically snarled the words out. "I just asked for a few phone calls and yet-" Her voice was shaking. "Yet, I haven't heard from you in over three years."

"Mari I can expl-"

"No, no, you don't fucking have that right to anymore. I did not come to Gotham to ask an explanation or beg for your attention. This was an unfortunate coincidence. I would have been perfectly happy to never see or hear from you again."

She turned to leave but Bruce grabbed her shoulder. She froze. This was Bruce Wayne, She had to remind herself, This was her father. He would not harm her.

"I needed you Bruce. I needed you and you were not there." She shrugged off his hand from her shoulder and left in the direction of her class.

Dick wordlessly moved out of her way and she tried not to think about the fact that she may have lost her chance to have a relationship with her siblings.

Dick didn't know the whole story. Hell, before today Dick hadn't known that he had another sibling. He hadn't known that Bruce had another biological child.

At least, he guessed that she was his biological child but he couldn't be sure because, once again, Bruce hadn't told them.

He watched the man. As always, he had an incredible poker face but he knew him better, he knew him enough to see the emotions waring among themselves behind his eyes.

"You messed up big time B." He said quietly. "You know that, don't you?"

His father said nothing, instead he pushed past him and Damian to go after Marinette. He and his little brother had only to share a look before they took off after him, if only to stop him from doing something rash that he would regret and and that would probably damage their chance to know their sister better.

Damian, Tim, Jason and he himself already had had the chance to talk to her. They could all collectively agree that they already loved her, even Damian, and they had no doubt the others would too.

Dick saw Marinette head towards the washroom. It was clear that she needed a moment alone, just like it was clear that that Bruce intended to wait for her to come out to be able to talk to her again.

He disagreed.

"B-"

"I need to talk to her."

"I know." He soothed despite wanting nothing more than to yell at the man. Sometimes, Bruce understood less than Damian. "But she won't like it and you've already pissed her off enough. Why don't we go to the cafeteria? The rest of her class is there. We can wait for her there, once she had some time to calm down."

Dick could see that he was about to protest. "Damian will wait for her and accompany her back." He said, sparing a glance at the youngest who gave him a nod back in return. "She'll be fine. Come on."

He tugged Bruce along with him and the fact that he didn't argue and let himself be pulled along was a testament to how much he was upset by this whole thing.

Dick was angry, he wanted nothing more than to scream at Bruce because didn't he know better than to keep secrets like this from them at this point?

Bruce knew he was a coward and definitely not the father one would wish for, but if Marinette really had given up on him, she wouldn't have been so angry.

There was something he was missing.

"-your stupidity aside, she was found bound and gagged with clear signs of having been assaulted. She was tested positive for rape for God's sake. What more do you need to leave her alone?"

There seemed to be an argument going on in the cafeteria. While that was alarming enough, the blond girl's words gave him a very bad feeling.

"Oh, please." A sausage-haired girl rolled her eyes. "She was probably there willingly. No one would get through such traumatic event and be back to normal so soon after. Not even her parents believed her. "

"Normal? Are you serious right now? I was there when they found her. I was there when she screamed at the sight of anyone with blonde hair or green eyes. And you've all seen how after that, she hates being touched."

"She's just over-reacti-" Sausage-hair stopped in the middle of her sentence, staring at something in his direction.

"Oh no, please do continue to speak so openly about the worst month of my life." He couldn't help the flinch when he heard his daughter's voice as she walked past him... because that meant that Marinette, sweet precious Marinette - his sunshine had been kidnapped and assaulted for a month and if the other girl was to be believed neither Tom or Sabine believed in her.

The sausage girl scoffed but backed down. Her reaction meant that she was at least a little guilty. He filed that information for later. She muttered a 'Whatever.' and walked away.

"Marin-" the blonde haired girl who was defending his daughter spoke up but Marinette cut her off.

"I do appreciate you trying to defend me Chloe but I'd appreciate it better if you didn't speak of it at all."

The girl - Chloe, gave a nod in acceptance. "Go on ahead," Marinette said, from beside him. "I'll catch up."

The blonde eyed them for a moment before she walked away.

Bruce looked down to his daughter who was still staring ahead.

He had so much to ask her, like What the hell happened? But she beat him to it, unclenching her fist.

"I'm sorry for punching you, but I was. Angry." She was gritting her teeth. "But I did meant it, you don't need to bother trying to contact me or anything. I'm perfectly happy without you."

She started walking away.

"Marinette-" he called out and she stopped. It reminded him of earlier and he had a sinking feeling that her words would be as heartbreaking as the first time.

She shook her head. "Like I said B, I needed you." For the first time, since she arrived in the cafeteria, she turned to look at him and gave him a small sad smile that broke his heart all over again. "It would have been nice to know that at least one of my parents supported me."

He didn't say anything. What could he say to make this better?

She walked away, and this time, he didn't stop her.

Jason was a little more than pissed.

His day had started out nicely enough, made better when he saw a tiny girl taking out two men probably twice her size.

He was going to help her but she had already taken care of them.

She still thanked him for trying to come to her aid and when he offered to walk her to wherever she was going, the girl took a few moments to assess him - to him it felt like she was looking through his soul.

There was something about her that screamed to him not to underestimate her. She knew what she was doing, that much was clear and when she offered him a sunny smile and told him that she was heading to Wayne Enterprises, he felt something loosen inside of him.

It was bizarre to say the least but he felt at peace near her. Safe.

Later on, he would realise that the haze of the Lazarus pit that he had struggled with everyday since his ressurection had retreated when he was near her.

Jason's mood started to worsen when he found out that she had been left alone by her class. Something like an ugly acidic green snake coiled up inside of him wanting to protect her and extract revenge.

Jason's mood improved again as throughout the day she saw the girl interact with his brothers, clearly winning over them as well.

Though, he was rarely - to the point of never seen at WE usually, he decided to make an exception that day and hang out with the tour group Tim was supposed to be leading.

Damian had also supposedly been bored and had decided to crash the party and Dick wasn't too far behind their youngest to keep him out of trouble.

Everything was going smoothly and honestly, it was after a long time that they found someone the others didn't have a problem with.

Then he had noticed Bruce, and not even a few seconds after, he noticed the bluenette slipping out after him.

Dick and Damian - who had been shadowing her all day, slipped away after her and he was stuck behind babysitting with his replacement.

That class had nothing of worth except Marinette. There was actually even a fool that was stupid enough to claim that she knew the Waynes in front of them, while not knowing that they were the Waynes and instead treating them like mere employees.

He would enjoy putting her in her place.

But before he could, his day started taking a turn for the worst, impossible to brighten again.

The girl, he didn't care enough to know her name, out of the blue stated that Marinette probably just slipped away again to draw attention to her. That escalated in a very…informative battle of words that made him want to take a plane to Paris and drench it's streets in blood.

As if that wasn't enough, he saw Bruce again, now looking like someone slapped him in the face with a fish...

On closer look, he could see that someone had actually punched him. He was so going to hack the Tower's camera.

And then Marinette spoke up and...what?

He was completely lost.

Did she say one of my parents? He hoped for Bruce sake that he misheard because otherwise that meant that this father figure fucked up again...which wasn't that suprising really.

So really, Jason was a little more than pissed and he felt like his choice of words was appropriate.

"What the actual fuck Bruce?"

Tim was tired.

His day had set out to be a tiring one, irrespective of the fact that he had stayed up all night to work on a case.

He had to lead a tour group.

Wayne Enterprises had a habit of keeping an eye on promising students for schools that they funded. For some reason, Bruce had started funding a College François Dupont in Paris. Why? He didn't know but knowing the man, he probably had some ulterior motive.

That had intrigued him and he had taken a look at the students in their last year. There was indeed some very promising young talents - who by the looks of it, already knew which career they wanted to do and were clearly working toward them. Many of them had already been on T.V shows, had their names in newspapers or did small gigs and commissions. It was rather impressive.

There was this one class however which at the beginning was one who seemed to have a lot of potential but he saw in their files that over the years their...efforts dropped collectively around the same time. It was extremely bizarre.

One particular student in that class drew his attention though. It was one Miss Marinette Dupain-Cheng. Her academic records were stellar - always had been and while her grades had dropped a but at one point, she got them back up within the year which was more than impressive since she had skipped two years. She also seemed really talented, had won several awards and supposedly had a website for commissions - her file seemed...rushed and considerably lacking in details compared to her classmates even though Tim felt like she did way more than them.

Call it his detective instincts but he knew that there was something going on in that class, his doubts were further re-inforced when he saw a report about Marinette, it was once again quite vague but what little was in it still chilled him to the core.

But...still...there was something else about her. Something striked him as soon as he saw her picture - she seemed really really familiar but he couldn't put his finger on where exactly had he seen her before.

Well, as CEO he was supposed to be leading the tour groups anyways, so hopefully he'd get to find out then.

The tour group consisted of all the senior class of the college and he prayed against all hope that it wasn't to be a disaster.

Flashforward to the big day...it wasn't actually so bad. His brothers had crashed the party...which was unexpected but they weren't causing any trouble which was for more than he could usually hope for and while some students were absolutely aboherent ((mostly from that one class that had caught his attention)) the rest were genuinely nice. He had managed to talk to a few of them and was pleasantly surprised at their intellect.

The most interesting student there though was, as he had predicted, Mlle. Dupain-Cheng, she was able to keep up with him throughout all of his explanations, whatever department may it have been in even though it was clearly stated in her file that she wanted a career in fashion. But well, he knew better than most that appearances could be receiving. Simply put, she was a genius.

She reminded him of Elle from Legally Blonde for some reason.

There was however also one student who had certainly not impressed him, thoroughly disgusted him actually - Lila Rossi.

See the thing was that no one knew that he was actually the CEO. That had been done intentionally. The aim of the tour after all was for him to be able to see if there was any potential employees for Wayne Enterprises among them.

And boy, was he going to blacklist her.

The girl was a lying machine and the lies weren't even good. She name-dropped at every other sentence and even did the mistake of lying about him and his brothers in a place where any employee who knew them personally could call her out on her bullshit. It was such an amateur mistake.

His opinion of her only soured when she insulted Marinette, he had taken her a liking to her, however brief their conversation had been and even if he hadn't - the fact that Lila bought up her kidnapping and downplayed it would be more than enough.

Thankfully not everyone from that College was total numbskulls. A few people immediately jumped to the defense of the absent girl.

He cataloged them mentally - The Braindead, The Neutrals and The Defenders, while also taking notes of what they were saying.

What he heard out was even more horrifying that what he had read.

That it! He was going to be looking into this girl's case personally.

As of all of this wasn't bad enough, Bruce just had to make everything worse.

Because he could finally out the pieces together and understand why Marinette looked so familiar.

Marinette was his sister.

Marinette was Bruce's daughter and he was going to have to answer to Tim - and but the looks of it, his brother too - about what had happened to their newfound sister.

Damian…

Damian didn't know what to think.

#Maribat #Platonic Daminette #marinette dupain cheng #damian wayne #bruce wayne #dick grayson #jason todd #tim drake #torture #mentions of rape #bamf marinette #Badass Marinette #Bruce is trying #bruce is a good dad #lila salt #adrien salt

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The Great Gatsby .. I think antibucci Summary: Literally just the great Gatsby. Nothing else here. Absolutely no changes. Definitely use this for class, or reference. The Great Gatsby is public domain now after all. Anyways here's the totally unaltered and complete book of the Great Gatsby. I swear nothing was changed, most definitely. Of course credit to F Scott Fitzgerald for writing this commentary on both his life and the world he was in. A lot of this can still relate today, so keep an open mind when reading. Notes: I'd like to preface this by saying... This is really I mean REALLY just the Great Gatsby. I swear. There is nothing going here that is out of the ordinary! Nothing at all! Chapter 1 Chapter Text Then wear the gold hat, if that will move her; If you can bounce high, bounce for her too, Till she cry “Lover, gold-hatted, high-bouncing lover, I must have you!” - Thomas Parke D'Invilliers. In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since. “Whenever you feel like criticizing any one,” he told me, “just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.” He didn’t say any more, but we’ve always been unusually communicative in a reserved way, and I understood that he meant a great deal more than that. In consequence, I’m inclined to reserve all judgments, a habit that has opened up many curious natures to me and also made me the victim of not a few veteran bores. The abnormal mind is quick to detect and attach itself to this quality when it appears in a normal person, and so it came about that in college I was unjustly accused of being a politician, because I was privy to the secret griefs of wild, unknown men. Most of the confidences were unsought — frequently I have feigned sleep, preoccupation, or a hostile levity when I realized by some unmistakable sign that an intimate revelation was quivering on the horizon; for the intimate revelations of young men, or at least the terms in which they express them, are usually plagiaristic and marred by obvious suppressions. Reserving judgments is a matter of infinite hope. I am still a little afraid of missing something if I forget that, as my father snobbishly suggested, and I snobbishly repeat, a sense of the fundamental decencies is parcelled out unequally at birth. And, after boasting this way of my tolerance, I come to the admission that it has a limit. Conduct may be founded on the hard rock or the wet marshes, but after a certain point I don’t care what it’s founded on. When I came back from the East last autumn I felt that I wanted the world to be in uniform and at a sort of moral attention forever; I wanted no more riotous excursions with privileged glimpses into the human heart. Only Gatsby, the man who gives his name to this book, was exempt from my reaction — Gatsby, who represented everything for which I have an unaffected scorn. If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life, as if he were related to one of those intricate machines that register earthquakes ten thousand miles away. This responsiveness had nothing to do with that flabby impressionability which is dignified under the name of the “creative temperament.”— it was an extraordinary gift for hope, a romantic readiness such as I have never found in any other person and which it is not likely I shall ever find again. No — Gatsby turned out all right at the end; it is what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams that temporarily closed out my interest in the abortive sorrows and short-winded elations of men. My family have been prominent, well-to-do people in this Middle Western city for three generations. The Carraways are something of a clan, and we have a tradition that we’re descended from the Dukes of Buccleuch, but the actual founder of my line was my grandfather’s brother, who came here in fifty-one, sent a substitute to the Civil War, and started the

wholesale hardware business that my father carries on to-day. I never saw this great-uncle, but I’m supposed to look like him — with special reference to the rather hard-boiled painting that hangs in father’s office I graduated from New Haven in 1915, just a quarter of a century after my father, and a little later I participated in that delayed Teutonic migration known as the Great War. I enjoyed the counter-raid so thoroughly that I came back restless. Instead of being the warm centre of the world, the Middle West now seemed like the ragged edge of the universe — so I decided to go East and learn the bond business. Everybody I knew was in the bond business, so I supposed it could support one more single man. All my aunts and uncles talked it over as if they were choosing a prep school for me, and finally said, “Why — ye — es,” with very grave, hesitant faces. Father agreed to finance me for a year, and after various delays I came East, permanently, I thought, in the spring of twenty-two. The practical thing was to find rooms in the city, but it was a warm season, and I had just left a country of wide lawns and friendly trees, so when a young man at the office suggested that we take a house together in a commuting town, it sounded like a great idea. He found the house, a weather-beaten cardboard bungalow at eighty a month, but at the last minute the firm ordered him to Washington, and I went out to the country alone. I had a dog — at least I had him for a few days until he ran away — and an old Dodge and a Finnish woman, who made my bed and cooked breakfast and muttered Finnish wisdom to herself over the electric stove. It was lonely for a day or so until one morning some man, more recently arrived than I, stopped me on the road. “How do you get to West Egg village?” he asked helplessly. I told him. And as I walked on I was lonely no longer. I was a guide, a pathfinder, an original settler. He had casually conferred on me the freedom of the neighborhood. And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees—just as things grow in fast movies—I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer. There was so much to read for one thing and so much fine health to be pulled down out of the young breath-giving air. I bought a dozen volumes on banking and credit and investment securities and they stood on my shelf in red and gold like new money from the mint, promising to unfold the shining secrets that only Midas and Morgan and Maecenas knew. And I had the high intention of reading many other books besides. I was rather literary in college—one year I wrote a series of very solemn and obvious editorials for the "Yale News"—and now I was going to bring back all such things into my life and become again that most limited of all specialists, the "well-rounded man." This isn't just an epigram—life is much more successfully looked at from a single window, after all. It was a matter of chance that I should have rented a house in one of the strangest communities in North America. It was on that slender riotous island which extends itself due east of New York and where there are, among other natural curiosities, two unusual formations of land. Twenty miles from the city a pair of enormous eggs, identical in contour and separated only by a courtesy bay, jut out into the most domesticated body of salt water in the Western Hemisphere, the great wet barnyard of Long Island Sound. They are not perfect ovals—like the egg in the Columbus story they are both crushed flat at the contact end—but their physical resemblance must be a source of perpetual confusion to the gulls that fly overhead. To the wingless a more arresting phenomenon is their dissimilarity in every particular except shape and size. I lived at West Egg, the—well, the less fashionable of the two, though this is a most superficial tag to express the bizarre and not a little sinister contrast between them. My house was at the very tip of the egg, only fifty yards from the Sound, and squeezed between two huge places that rented

rented for twelve or fifteen thousand a season. The one on my right was a colossal affair by any standard—it was a factual imitation of some Hôtel de Ville in Normandy, with a tower on one side, spanking new under a thin beard of raw ivy, and a marble swimming pool and more than forty acres of lawn and garden. It was Gatsby's mansion. Or rather, as I didn't know Mr. Gatsby it was a mansion inhabited by a gentleman of that name. My own house was an eye-sore, but it was a small eye-sore, and it had been overlooked, so I had a view of the water, a partial view of my neighbor's lawn, and the consoling proximity of millionaires—all for eighty dollars a month. Across the courtesy bay the white palaces of fashionable East Egg glittered along the water, and the history of the summer really begins on the evening I drove over there to have dinner with the Tom Buchanans. Daisy was my second cousin once removed and I'd known Tom in college. And just after the war I spent two days with them in Chicago. Her husband, among various physical accomplishments, had been one of the most powerful ends that ever played football at New Haven—a national figure in a way, one of those men who reach such an acute limited excellence at twenty-one that everything afterward savors of anti-climax. His family were enormously wealthy—even in college his freedom with money was a matter for reproach—but now he'd left Chicago and come east in a fashion that rather took your breath away: for instance he'd brought down a string of polo ponies from Lake Forest. It was hard to realize that a man in my own generation was wealthy enough to do that. Why they came east I don't know. They had spent a year in France, for no particular reason, and then drifted here and there unrestfully wherever people played polo and were rich together. This was a permanent move, said Daisy over the telephone, but I didn't believe it—I had no sight into Daisy's heart but I felt that Tom would drift on forever seeking a little wistfully for the dramatic turbulence of some irrecoverable football game. And so it happened that on a warm windy evening I drove over to East Egg to see two old friends whom I scarcely knew at all. Their house was even more elaborate than I expected, a cheerful red and white Georgian Colonial mansion overlooking the bay. The lawn started at the beach and ran toward the front door for a quarter of a mile, jumping over sun-dials and brick walks and burning gardens—finally when it reached the house drifting up the side in bright vines as though from the momentum of its run. The front was broken by a line of French windows, glowing now with reflected gold, and wide open to the warm windy afternoon, and Tom Buchanan in riding clothes was standing with his legs apart on the front porch. He had changed since his New Haven years. Now he was a sturdy, straw haired man of thirty with a rather hard mouth and a supercilious manner. Two shining, arrogant eyes had established dominance over his face and gave him the appearance of always leaning aggressively forward. Not even the effeminate swank of his riding clothes could hide the enormous power of that body—he seemed to fill those glistening boots until he strained the top lacing and you could see a great pack of muscle shifting when his shoulder moved under his thin coat. It was a body capable of enormous leverage—a cruel body. His speaking voice, a gruff husky tenor, added to the impression of fractiousness he conveyed. There was a touch of paternal contempt in it, even toward people he liked—and there were men at New Haven who had hated his guts. "Now, don't think my opinion on these matters is final," he seemed to say, "just because I'm stronger and more of a man than you are." We were in the same Senior Society, and while we were never intimate I always had the impression that he approved of me and wanted me to like him with some harsh, defiant wistfulness of his own. We talked for a few minutes on the sunny porch. "I've got a nice place here," he said, his eyes flashing about restlessly. Turning me around by one arm

he moved a broad flat hand along the front vista, including in its sweep a sunken Italian garden, a half acre of deep pungent roses and a snub-nosed motor boat that bumped the tide off shore. "It belonged to Demaine the oil man." He turned me around again, politely and abruptly. "We'll go inside." We walked through a high hallway into a bright rosy-colored space, fragilely bound into the house by French windows at either end. The windows were ajar and gleaming white against the fresh grass outside that seemed to grow a little way into the house. A breeze blew through the room, blew curtains in at one end and out the other like pale flags, twisting them up toward the frosted wedding cake of the ceiling—and then rippled over the wine-colored rug, making a shadow on it as wind does on the sea. The only completely stationary object in the room was an enormous couch on which two young women were buoyed up as though upon an anchored balloon. They were both in white and their dresses were rippling and fluttering as if they had just been blown back in after a short flight around the house. I must have stood for a few moments listening to the whip and snap of the curtains and the groan of a picture on the wall. Then there was a boom as Tom Buchanan shut the rear windows and the caught wind died out about the room and the curtains and the rugs and the two young women ballooned slowly to the floor. The younger of the two was a stranger to me. She was extended full length at her end of the divan, completely motionless and with her chin raised a little as if she were balancing something on it which was quite likely to fall. If she saw me out of the corner of her eyes she gave no hint of it—indeed, I was almost surprised into murmuring an apology for having disturbed her by coming in. The other girl, Daisy, made an attempt to rise—she leaned slightly forward with a conscientious expression—then she laughed, an absurd, charming little laugh, and I laughed too and came forward into the room. "I'm p-paralyzed with happiness." She laughed again, as if she said something very witty, and held my hand for a moment, looking up into my face, promising that there was no one in the world she so much wanted to see. That was a way she had. She hinted in a murmur that the surname of the balancing girl was Baker. (I've heard it said that Daisy's murmur was only to make people lean toward her; an irrelevant criticism that made it no less charming.) At any rate Miss Baker's lips fluttered, she nodded at me almost imperceptibly and then quickly tipped her head back again—the object she was balancing had obviously tottered a little and given her something of a fright. Again a sort of apology arose to my lips. Almost any exhibition of complete self sufficiency draws a stunned tribute from me. I looked back at my cousin who began to ask me questions in her low, thrilling voice. It was the kind of voice that the ear follows up and down as if each speech is an arrangement of notes that will never be played again. Her face was sad and lovely with bright things in it, bright eyes and a bright passionate mouth—but there was an excitement in her voice that men who had cared for her found difficult to forget: a singing compulsion, a whispered "Listen," a promise that she had done gay, exciting things just a while since and that there were gay, exciting things hovering in the next hour. I told her how I had stopped off in Chicago for a day on my way east and how a dozen people had sent their love through me. "Do they miss me?" she cried ecstatically. "The whole town is desolate. All the cars have the left rear wheel painted black as a mourning wreath and there's a persistent wail all night along the North Shore." "How gorgeous! Let's go back, Tom. Tomorrow!" Then she added irrelevantly, "You ought to see the baby." "I'd like to." "She's asleep. She's two years old. Haven't you ever seen her?" "Never." "Well, you ought to see her. She's—" Tom Buchanan who had been hovering restlessly about the room stopped and rested his hand on my shoulder. "What you doing, Nick

?" "I'm a bond man." "Who with?" I told him. "Never heard of them," he remarked decisively. This annoyed me. "You will," I answered shortly. "You will if you stay in the East." "Oh, I'll stay in the East, don't you worry," he said, glancing at Daisy and then back at me, as if he were alert for something more. "I'd be a God Damned fool to live anywhere else." At this point Miss Baker said "Absolutely!" with such suddenness that I started—it was the first word she uttered since I came into the room. Evidently it surprised her as much as it did me, for she yawned and with a series of rapid, deft movements stood up into the room. "I'm stiff," she complained, "I've been lying on that sofa for as long as I can remember." "Don't look at me," Daisy retorted. "I've been trying to get you to New York all afternoon." "No, thanks," said Miss Baker to the four cocktails just in from the pantry, "I'm absolutely in training." Her host looked at her incredulously. "You are!" He took down his drink as if it were a drop in the bottom of a glass. "How you ever get anything done is beyond me." I looked at Miss Baker wondering what it was she "got done." I enjoyed looking at her. She was a slender, small-breasted girl, with an erect carriage which she accentuated by throwing her body backward at the shoulders like a young cadet. Her grey sun-strained eyes looked back at me with polite reciprocal curiosity out of a wan, charming discontented face. It occurred to me now that I had seen her, or a picture of her, somewhere before. "You live in West Egg," she remarked contemptuously. "I know somebody there." "I don't know a single—" "You must know Gatsby." "Gatsby?" demanded Daisy. "What Gatsby?" Before I could reply that he was my neighbor dinner was announced; wedging his tense arm imperatively under mine Tom Buchanan compelled me from the room as though he were moving a checker to another square. Slenderly, languidly, their hands set lightly on their hips the two young women preceded us out onto a rosy-colored porch open toward the sunset where four candles flickered on the table in the diminished wind. "Why candles?" objected Daisy, frowning. She snapped them out with her fingers. "In two weeks it'll be the longest day in the year." She looked at us all radiantly. "Do you always watch for the longest day of the year and then miss it? I always watch for the longest day in the year and then miss it." "We ought to plan something," yawned Miss Baker, sitting down at the table as if she were getting into bed. "All right," said Daisy. "What'll we plan?" She turned to me helplessly. "What do people plan?" Before I could answer her eyes fastened with an awed expression on her little finger. "Look!" she complained. "I hurt it." We all looked—the knuckle was black and blue. "You did it, Tom," she said accusingly. "I know you didn't mean to but you did do it. That's what I get for marrying a brute of a man, a great big hulking physical specimen of a—" "I hate that word hulking," objected Tom crossly, "even in kidding." "Hulking," insisted Daisy. Sometimes she and Miss Baker talked at once, unobtrusively and with a bantering inconsequence that was never quite chatter, that was as cool as their white dresses and their impersonal eyes in the absence of all desire. They were here—and they accepted Tom and me, making only a polite pleasant effort to entertain or to be entertained. They knew that presently dinner would be over and a little later the evening too would be over and casually put away. It was sharply different from the West where an evening was hurried from phase to phase toward its close in a continually disappointed anticipation or else in sheer nervous dread of the moment itself. "You make me feel uncivilized, Daisy," I confessed on my second glass of corky but rather impressive claret. "Can't you talk about crops or something?" I meant nothing in particular by this remark but it was taken up in an unexpected way. "Civilization's going to pieces," broke out Tom violently. "I've gotten to be a terrible pessimist about things. Have you read 'The

Rise of the Coloured Empires' by this man Goddard?" "Why, no," I answered, rather surprised by his tone. "Well, it's a fine book, and everybody ought to read it. The idea is if we don't look out the white race will be—will be utterly submerged. It's all scientific stuff; it's been proved." "Tom's getting very profound," said Daisy with an expression of unthoughtful sadness. "He reads deep books with long words in them. What was that word we—" "Well, these books are all scientific," insisted Tom, glancing at her impatiently. "This fellow has worked out the whole thing. It's up to us who are the dominant race to watch out or these other races will have control of things." "We've got to beat them down," whispered Daisy, winking ferociously toward the fervent sun. "You ought to live in California—" began Miss Baker but Tom interrupted her by shifting heavily in his chair. "This idea is that we're Nordics. I am, and you are and you are and—" After an infinitesimal hesitation he included Daisy with a slight nod and she winked at me again. "—and we've produced all the things that go to make civilization—oh, science and art and all that. Do you see?" There was something pathetic in his concentration as if his complacency, more acute than of old, was not enough to him any more. When, almost immediately, the telephone rang inside and the butler left the porch Daisy seized upon the momentary interruption and leaned toward me. "I'll tell you a family secret," she whispered enthusiastically. "It's about the butler's nose. Do you want to hear about the butler's nose?" "That's why I came over tonight." "Well, he wasn't always a butler; he used to be the silver polisher for some people in New York that had a silver service for two hundred people. He had to polish it from morning till night until finally it began to affect his nose—" "Things went from bad to worse," suggested Miss Baker. "Yes. Things went from bad to worse until finally he had to give up his position." For a moment the last sunshine fell with romantic affection upon her glowing face; her voice compelled me forward breathlessly as I listened—then the glow faded, each light deserting her with lingering regret like children leaving a pleasant street at dusk. The butler came back and murmured something close to Tom's ear whereupon Tom frowned, pushed back his chair and without a word went inside. As if his absence quickened something within her Daisy leaned forward again, her voice glowing and singing. "I love to see you at my table, Nick. You remind me of a—of a rose, an absolute rose. Doesn't he?" She turned to Miss Baker for confirmation. "An absolute rose?" This was untrue. I am not even faintly like a rose. She was only extemporizing but a stirring warmth flowed from her as if her heart was trying to come out to you concealed in one of those breathless, thrilling words. Then suddenly she threw her napkin on the table and excused herself and went into the house. Miss Baker and I exchanged a short glance consciously devoid of meaning. I was about to speak when she sat up alertly and said "Sh!" in a warning voice. A subdued impassioned murmur was audible in the room beyond and Miss Baker leaned forward, unashamed, trying to hear. The murmur trembled on the verge of coherence, sank down, mounted excitedly, and then ceased altogether. "This Mr. Gatsby you spoke of is my neighbor—" I said. "Don't talk. I want to hear what happens." "Is something happening?" I inquired innocently. "You mean to say you don't know?" said Miss Baker, honestly surprised. "I thought everybody knew." "I don't." "Why—" she said hesitantly, "Tom's got some woman in New York." "Got some woman?" I repeated blankly. Miss Baker nodded. "She might have the decency not to telephone him at dinner-time. Don't you think?" Almost before I had grasped her meaning there was the flutter of a dress and the crunch of leather boots and Tom and Daisy were back at the table. "It couldn't be helped!" cried Daisy with tense gayety. She sat down, glanced searchingly at Miss Baker and then at me and continued: "I looked

outdoors for a minute and it's very romantic outdoors. There's a bird on the lawn that I think must be a nightingale come over on the Cunard or White Star Line. He's singing away—" her voice sang "—It's romantic, isn't it, Tom?" "Very romantic," he said, and then miserably to me: "If it's light enough after dinner I want to take you down to the stables." The telephone rang inside, startlingly, and as Daisy shook her head decisively at Tom the subject of the stables, in fact all subjects, vanished into air. Among the broken fragments of the last five minutes at table I remember the candles being lit again, pointlessly, and I was conscious of wanting to look squarely at every one and yet to avoid all eyes. I couldn't guess what Daisy and Tom were thinking but I doubt if even Miss Baker who seemed to have mastered a certain hardy skepticism was able utterly to put this fifth guest's shrill metallic urgency out of mind. To a certain temperament the situation might have seemed intriguing—my own instinct was to telephone immediately for the police. The horses, needless to say, were not mentioned again. Tom and Miss Baker, with several feet of twilight between them strolled back into the library, as if to a vigil beside a perfectly tangible body, while trying to look pleasantly interested and a little deaf I followed Daisy around a chain of connecting verandas to the porch in front. In its deep gloom we sat down side by side on a wicker settee. Daisy took her face in her hands, as if feeling its lovely shape, and her eyes moved gradually out into the velvet dusk. I saw that turbulent emotions possessed her, so I asked what I thought would be some sedative questions about her little girl. "We don't know each other very well, Nick," she said suddenly. "Even if we are cousins. You didn't come to my wedding." "I wasn't back from the war." "That's true." She hesitated. "Well, I've had a very bad time, Nick, and I'm pretty cynical about everything." Evidently she had reason to be. I waited but she didn't say any more, and after a moment I returned rather feebly to the subject of her daughter. "I suppose she talks, and—eats, and everything." "Oh, yes." She looked at me absently. "Listen, Nick; let me tell you what I said when she was born. Would you like to hear?" "Very much." "It'll show you how I've gotten to feel about—things. Well, she was less than an hour old and Tom was God knows where. I woke up out of the ether with an utterly abandoned feeling and asked the nurse right away if it was a boy or a girl. She told me it was a girl, and so I turned my head away and wept. 'All right,' I said, 'I'm glad it's a girl. And I hope she'll be a fool—that's the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool." "You see I think everything's terrible anyhow," she went on in a convinced way. "Everybody thinks so—the most advanced people. And I know. I've been everywhere and seen everything and done everything." Her eyes flashed around her in a defiant way, rather like Tom's, and she laughed with thrilling scorn. "Sophisticated—God, I'm sophisticated!" The instant her voice broke off, ceasing to compel my attention, my belief, I felt the basic insincerity of what she had said. It made me uneasy, as though the whole evening had been a trick of some sort to exact a contributory emotion from me. I waited, and sure enough, in a moment she looked at me with an absolute smirk on her lovely face as if she had asserted her membership in a rather distinguished secret society to which she and Tom belonged. Inside, the crimson room bloomed with light. Tom and Miss Baker sat at either end of the long couch and she read aloud to him from the "Saturday Evening Post"—the words, murmurous and uninflected, running together in a soothing tune. The lamp-light, bright on his boots and dull on the autumn-leaf yellow of her hair, glinted along the paper as she turned a page with a flutter of slender muscles in her arms. When we came in she held us silent for a moment with a lifted hand. "To be continued," she said, tossing the magazine on the table,

"in our very next issue." Her body asserted itself with a restless movement of her knee, and she stood up. "Ten o'clock," she remarked, apparently finding the time on the ceiling. "Time for this good girl to go to bed." "Jordan's going to play in the tournament tomorrow," explained Daisy, "over at Westchester." "Oh,—you're Jordan Baker." I knew now why her face was familiar—its pleasing contemptuous expression had looked out at me from many rotogravure pictures of the sporting life at Asheville and Hot Springs and Palm Beach. I had heard some story of her too, a critical, unpleasant story, but what it was I had forgotten long ago. "Good night," she said softly. "Wake me at eight, won't you." "If you'll get up." "I will. Good night, Mr. Carraway. See you anon." "Of course you will," confirmed Daisy. "In fact I think I'll arrange a marriage. Come over often, Nick, and I'll sort of—oh—fling you together. You know—lock you up accidentally in linen closets and push you out to sea in a boat, and all that sort of thing—" "Good night," called Miss Baker from the stairs. "I haven't heard a word." "She's a nice girl," said Tom after a moment. "They oughtn't to let her run around the country this way." "Who oughtn't to?" inquired Daisy coldly. "Her family." "Her family is one aunt about a thousand years old. Besides, Nick's going to look after her, aren't you, Nick? She's going to spend lots of week-ends out here this summer. I think the home influence will be very good for her." Daisy and Tom looked at each other for a moment in silence. "Is she from New York?" I asked quickly. "From Louisville. Our white girlhood was passed together there. Our beautiful white—" "Did you give Nick a little heart to heart talk on the veranda?" demanded Tom suddenly. "Did I?" She looked at me. "I can't seem to remember, but I think we talked about the Nordic race. Yes, I'm sure we did. It sort of crept up on us and first thing you know—" "Don't believe everything you hear, Nick," he advised me. I said lightly that I had heard nothing at all, and a few minutes later I got up to go home. They came to the door with me and stood side by side in a cheerful square of light. As I started my motor Daisy peremptorily called "Wait! "I forgot to ask you something, and it's important. We heard you were engaged to a girl out West." "That's right," corroborated Tom kindly. "We heard that you were engaged." "It's libel. I'm too poor." "But we heard it," insisted Daisy, surprising me by opening up again in a flower-like way. "We heard it from three people so it must be true." Of course I knew what they were referring to, but I wasn't even vaguely engaged. The fact that gossip had published the banns was one of the reasons I had come east. You can't stop going with an old friend on account of rumors and on the other hand I had no intention of being rumored into marriage. Their interest rather touched me and made them less remotely rich—nevertheless, I was confused and a little disgusted as I drove away. It seemed to me that the thing for Daisy to do was to rush out of the house, child in arms—but apparently there were no such intentions in her head. As for Tom, the fact that he "had some woman in New York" was really less surprising than that he had been depressed by a book. Something was making him nibble at the edge of stale ideas as if his sturdy physical egotism no longer nourished his peremptory heart. Already it was deep summer on roadhouse roofs and in front of wayside garages, where new red gas-pumps sat out in pools of light, and when I reached my estate at West Egg I ran the car under its shed and sat for a while on an abandoned grass roller in the yard. The wind had blown off, leaving a loud bright night with wings beating in the trees and a persistent organ sound as the full bellows of the earth blew the frogs full of life. The silhouette of a moving cat wavered across the moonlight and turning my head to watch it I saw that I was not alone—fifty feet away a figure had emerged from the shadow of my neighbor's mansion and was standing with his hands in

his pockets regarding the silver pepper of the stars. Something in his leisurely movements and the secure position of his feet upon the lawn suggested that it was Mr. Gatsby himself, come out to determine what share was his of our local heavens. I decided to call to him. Miss Baker had mentioned him at dinner, and that would do for an introduction. But I didn't call to him for he gave a sudden intimation that he was content to be alone—he stretched out his arms toward the dark water in a curious way, and far as I was from him I could have sworn he was trembling. Involuntarily I glanced seaward—and distinguished nothing except a single green light, minute and far away, that might have been the end of a dock. When I looked once more for Gatsby he had vanished, and I was alone again in the unquiet darkness. Chapter 2 Summary: Just chapter 2 of the Great Gatsby Notes: (See the end of the chapter for notes.) Chapter Text About half way between West Egg and New York the motor-road hastily joins the railroad and runs beside it for a quarter of a mile, so as to shrink away from a certain desolate area of land. This is a valley of ashes—a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens where ashes take the forms of houses and chimneys and rising smoke and finally, with a transcendent effort, of men who move dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air. Occasionally a line of grey cars crawls along an invisible track, gives out a ghastly creak and comes to rest, and immediately the ash-grey men swarm up with leaden spades and stir up an impenetrable cloud which screens their obscure operations from your sight. But above the grey land and the spasms of bleak dust which drift endlessly over it, you perceive, after a moment, the eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg. The eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg are blue and gigantic—their retinas are one yard high. They look out of no face but, instead, from a pair of enormous yellow spectacles which pass over a nonexistent nose. Evidently some wild wag of an oculist set them there to fatten his practice in the borough of Queens, and then sank down himself into eternal blindness or forgot them and moved away. But his eyes, dimmed a little by many paintless days under sun and rain, brood on over the solemn dumping ground. The valley of ashes is bounded on one side by a small foul river, and when the drawbridge is up to let barges through, the passengers on waiting trains can stare at the dismal scene for as long as half an hour. There is always a halt there of at least a minute and it was because of this that I first met Tom Buchanan's mistress. The fact that he had one was insisted upon wherever he was known. His acquaintances resented the fact that he turned up in popular restaurants with her and, leaving her at a table, sauntered about, chatting with whomsoever he knew. Though I was curious to see her I had no desire to meet her—but I did. I went up to New York with Tom on the train one afternoon and when we stopped by the ashheaps he jumped to his feet and taking hold of my elbow literally forced me from the car. "We're getting off!" he insisted. "I want you to meet my girl." I think he'd tanked up a good deal at luncheon and his determination to have my company bordered on violence. The supercilious assumption was that on Sunday afternoon I had nothing better to do. I followed him over a low white-washed railroad fence and we walked back a hundred yards along the road under Doctor Eckleburg's persistent stare. The only building in sight was a small block of yellow brick sitting on the edge of the waste land, a sort of compact Main Street ministering to it and contiguous to absolutely nothing. One of the three shops it contained was for rent and another was an all-night restaurant approached by a trail of ashes; the third was a garage—Repairs. GEORGE B. WILSON. Cars Bought and Sold—and I followed Tom inside. The interior was unprosperous and bare; the only car visible was the dust-covered wreck of a Ford which crouched in a dim corner. It had occurred

to me that this shadow of a garage must be a blind and that sumptuous and romantic apartments were concealed overhead when the proprietor himself appeared in the door of an office, wiping his hands on a piece of waste. He was a blonde, spiritless man, anaemic, and faintly handsome. When he saw us a damp gleam of hope sprang into his light blue eyes. "Hello, Wilson, old man," said Tom, slapping him jovially on the shoulder. "How's business?" "I can't complain," answered Wilson unconvincingly. "When are you going to sell me that car?" "Next week; I've got my man working on it now." "Works pretty slow, don't he?" "No, he doesn't," said Tom coldly. "And if you feel that way about it, maybe I'd better sell it somewhere else after all." "I don't mean that," explained Wilson quickly. "I just meant—" His voice faded off and Tom glanced impatiently around the garage. Then I heard footsteps on a stairs and in a moment the thickish figure of a woman blocked out the light from the office door. She was in the middle thirties, and faintly stout, but she carried her surplus flesh sensuously as some women can. Her face, above a spotted dress of dark blue crepe-de-chine, contained no facet or gleam of beauty but there was an immediately perceptible vitality about her as if the nerves of her body were continually smouldering. She smiled slowly and walking through her husband as if he were a ghost shook hands with Tom, looking him flush in the eye. Then she wet her lips and without turning around spoke to her husband in a soft, coarse voice: "Get some chairs, why don't you, so somebody can sit down." "Oh, sure," agreed Wilson hurriedly and went toward the little office, mingling immediately with the cement color of the walls. A white ashen dust veiled his dark suit and his pale hair as it veiled everything in the vicinity—except his wife, who moved close to Tom. "I want to see you," said Tom intently. "Get on the next train." "All right." "I'll meet you by the news-stand on the lower level." She nodded and moved away from him just as George Wilson emerged with two chairs from his office door. We waited for her down the road and out of sight. It was a few days before the Fourth of July, and a grey, scrawny Italian child was setting torpedoes in a row along the railroad track. "Terrible place, isn't it," said Tom, exchanging a frown with Doctor Eckleburg. "Awful." "It does her good to get away." "Doesn't her husband object?" "Wilson? He thinks she goes to see her sister in New York. He's so dumb he doesn't know he's alive." So Tom Buchanan and his girl and I went up together to New York—or not quite together, for Mrs. Wilson sat discreetly in another car. Tom deferred that much to the sensibilities of those East Eggers who might be on the train. She had changed her dress to a brown figured muslin which stretched tight over her rather wide hips as Tom helped her to the platform in New York. At the news-stand she bought a copy of "Town Tattle" and a moving-picture magazine and, in the station drug store, some cold cream and a small flask of perfume. Upstairs, in the solemn echoing drive she let four taxi cabs drive away before she selected a new one, lavender-colored with grey upholstery, and in this we slid out from the mass of the station into the glowing sunshine. But immediately she turned sharply from the window and leaning forward tapped on the front glass. "I want to get one of those dogs," she said earnestly. "I want to get one for the apartment. They're nice to have—a dog." We backed up to a grey old man who bore an absurd resemblance to John D. Rockefeller. In a basket, swung from his neck, cowered a dozen very recent puppies of an indeterminate breed. "What kind are they?" asked Mrs. Wilson eagerly as he came to the taxi-window. "All kinds. What kind do you want, lady?" "I'd like to get one of those police dogs; I don't suppose you got that kind?" The man peered doubtfully into the basket, plunged in his hand and drew one up, wriggling, by the back of the neck. "That's no police dog," said Tom. "No, it's not exactly a police dog,"

" said the man with disappointment in his voice. "It's more of an airedale." He passed his hand over the brown wash-rag of a back. "Look at that coat. Some coat. That's a dog that'll never bother you with catching cold." "I think it's cute," said Mrs. Wilson enthusiastically. "How much is it?" "That dog?" He looked at it admiringly. "That dog will cost you ten dollars." The airedale—undoubtedly there was an airedale concerned in it somewhere though its feet were startlingly white—changed hands and settled down into Mrs. Wilson's lap, where she fondled the weather-proof coat with rapture. "Is it a boy or a girl?" she asked delicately. "That dog? That dog's a boy." "It's a bitch," said Tom decisively. "Here's your money. Go and buy ten more dogs with it." We drove over to Fifth Avenue, so warm and soft, almost pastoral, on the summer Sunday afternoon that I wouldn't have been surprised to see a great flock of white sheep turn the corner. "Hold on," I said, "I have to leave you here." "No, you don't," interposed Tom quickly. "Myrtle'll be hurt if you don't come up to the apartment. Won't you, Myrtle?" "Come on," she urged. "I'll telephone my sister Catherine. She's said to be very beautiful by people who ought to know." "Well, I'd like to, but—" We went on, cutting back again over the Park toward the West Hundreds. At 158th Street the cab stopped at one slice in a long white cake of apartment houses. Throwing a regal homecoming glance around the neighborhood, Mrs. Wilson gathered up her dog and her other purchases and went haughtily in. "I'm going to have the McKees come up," she announced as we rose in the elevator. "And of course I got to call up my sister, too." The apartment was on the top floor—a small living room, a small dining room, a small bedroom and a bath. The living room was crowded to the doors with a set of tapestried furniture entirely too large for it so that to move about was to stumble continually over scenes of ladies swinging in the gardens of Versailles. The only picture was an over-enlarged photograph, apparently a hen sitting on a blurred rock. Looked at from a distance however the hen resolved itself into a bonnet and the countenance of a stout old lady beamed down into the room. Several old copies of "Town Tattle" lay on the table together with a copy of "Simon Called Peter" and some of the small scandal magazines of Broadway. Mrs. Wilson was first concerned with the dog. A reluctant elevator boy went for a box full of straw and some milk to which he added on his own initiative a tin of large hard dog biscuits—one of which decomposed apathetically in the saucer of milk all afternoon. Meanwhile Tom brought out a bottle of whiskey from a locked bureau door. I have been drunk just twice in my life and the second time was that afternoon so everything that happened has a dim hazy cast over it although until after eight o'clock the apartment was full of cheerful sun. Sitting on Tom's lap Mrs. Wilson called up several people on the telephone; then there were no cigarettes and I went out to buy some at the drug store on the corner. When I came back they had disappeared so I sat down discreetly in the living room and read a chapter of "Simon Called Peter"—either it was terrible stuff or the whiskey distorted things because it didn't make any sense to me. Just as Tom and Myrtle—after the first drink Mrs. Wilson and I called each other by our first names—reappeared, company commenced to arrive at the apartment door. The sister, Catherine, was a slender, worldly girl of about thirty with a solid sticky bob of red hair and a complexion powdered milky white. Her eyebrows had been plucked and then drawn on again at a more rakish angle but the efforts of nature toward the restoration of the old alignment gave a blurred air to her face. When she moved about there was an incessant clicking as innumerable pottery bracelets jingled up and down upon her arms. She came in with such a proprietary haste and looked around so possessively at the furniture that I wondered if she lived here. But when I asked her she laughed i

Feel free to delete the first one. I would do anything for you if post this. The Great Gatsby in all it’s glory

im aware i was probably supposed to read the whole thing to find out if you changed anything and tnhen find out you hadnt and id wasted an hour of my life but i am way too lazy to do that

#ask #im not gonna post the other one merely because of how bad i feel for my followers #long post

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galaxierowls · 3 years

Note

The Great Gatsby

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Then wear the gold hat, if that will move her;

If you can bounce high, bounce for her too,

Till she cry "Lover, gold-hatted, high-bouncing lover,

I must have you!"

—THOMAS PARKE D'INVILLIERS

Chapter 1

In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since.

"Whenever you feel like criticizing any one," he told me, "just remember that all the people in this world haven't had the advantages that you've had."

He didn't say any more but we've always been unusually communicative in a reserved way, and I understood that he meant a great deal more than that. In consequence I'm inclined to reserve all judgments, a habit that has opened up many curious natures to me and also made me the victim of not a few veteran bores. The abnormal mind is quick to detect and attach itself to this quality when it appears in a normal person, and so it came about that in college I was unjustly accused of being a politician, because I was privy to the secret griefs of wild, unknown men. Most of the confidences were unsought—frequently I have feigned sleep, preoccupation, or a hostile levity when I realized by some unmistakable sign that an intimate revelation was quivering on the horizon—for the intimate revelations of young men or at least the terms in which they express them are usually plagiaristic and marred by obvious suppressions. Reserving judgments is a matter of infinite hope. I am still a little afraid of missing something if I forget that, as my father snobbishly suggested, and I snobbishly repeat, a sense of the fundamental decencies is parcelled out unequally at birth.

And, after boasting this way of my tolerance, I come to the admission that it has a limit. Conduct may be founded on the hard rock or the wet marshes but after a certain point I don't care what it's founded on. When I came back from the East last autumn I felt that I wanted the world to be in uniform and at a sort of moral attention forever; I wanted no more riotous excursions with privileged glimpses into the human heart. Only Gatsby, the man who gives his name to this book, was exempt from my reaction—Gatsby who represented everything for which I have an unaffected scorn. If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life, as if he were related to one of those intricate machines that register earthquakes ten thousand miles away. This responsiveness had nothing to do with that flabby impressionability which is dignified under the name of the "creative temperament"—it was an extraordinary gift for hope, a romantic readiness such as I have never found in any other person and which it is not likely I shall ever find again. No—Gatsby turned out all right at the end; it is what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams that temporarily closed out my interest in the abortive sorrows and short-winded elations of men.

My family have been prominent, well-to-do people in this middle-western city for three generations. The Carraways are something of a clan and we have a tradition that we're descended from the Dukes of Buccleuch, but the actual founder of my line was my grandfather's brother who came here in fifty-one, sent a substitute to the Civil War and started the wholesale hardware business that my father carries on today.

I never saw this great-uncle but I'm supposed to look like him—with special reference to the rather hard-boiled painting that hangs in Father's office. I graduated from New Haven in 1915, just a quarter of a century after my father, and a little later I participated in that delayed Teutonic migration known as the Great War. I enjoyed the counter-raid so thoroughly that I came back restless. Instead of being the warm center of the world the middle-west now seemed like the ragged edge of the universe—so I decided to go east and learn the bond business. Everybody I knew was in the bond business so I supposed it could support one more single man. All my aunts and uncles talked it over as if they were choosing a prep-school for me and finally said, "Why—ye-es" with very grave, hesitant faces. Father agreed to finance me for a year and after various delays I came east, permanently, I thought, in the spring of twenty-two.

The practical thing was to find rooms in the city but it was a warm season and I had just left a country of wide lawns and friendly trees, so when a young man at the office suggested that we take a house together in a commuting town it sounded like a great idea. He found the house, a weather beaten cardboard bungalow at eighty a month, but at the last minute the firm ordered him to Washington and I went out to the country alone. I had a dog, at least I had him for a few days until he ran away, and an old Dodge and a Finnish woman who made my bed and cooked breakfast and muttered Finnish wisdom to herself over the electric stove.

It was lonely for a day or so until one morning some man, more recently arrived than I, stopped me on the road.

"How do you get to West Egg village?" he asked helplessly.

I told him. And as I walked on I was lonely no longer. I was a guide, a pathfinder, an original settler. He had casually conferred on me the freedom of the neighborhood.

And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees—just as things grow in fast movies—I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer.

There was so much to read for one thing and so much fine health to be pulled down out of the young breath-giving air. I bought a dozen volumes on banking and credit and investment securities and they stood on my shelf in red and gold like new money from the mint, promising to unfold the shining secrets that only Midas and Morgan and Maecenas knew. And I had the high intention of reading many other books besides. I was rather literary in college—one year I wrote a series of very solemn and obvious editorials for the "Yale News"—and now I was going to bring back all such things into my life and become again that most limited of all specialists, the "well-rounded man." This isn't just an epigram—life is much more successfully looked at from a single window, after all.

It was a matter of chance that I should have rented a house in one of the strangest communities in North America. It was on that slender riotous island which extends itself due east of New York and where there are, among other natural curiosities, two unusual formations of land. Twenty miles from the city a pair of enormous eggs, identical in contour and separated only by a courtesy bay, jut out into the most domesticated body of salt water in the Western Hemisphere, the great wet barnyard of Long Island Sound. They are not perfect ovals—like the egg in the Columbus story they are both crushed flat at the contact end—but their physical resemblance must be a source of perpetual confusion to the gulls that fly overhead. To the wingless a more arresting phenomenon is their dissimilarity in every particular except shape and size.

I lived at West Egg, the—well, the less fashionable of the two, though this is a most superficial tag to express the bizarre and not a little sinister contrast between them. My house was at the very tip of the egg, only fifty yards from the Sound, and squeezed between two huge places that rented for twelve or fifteen thousand a season. The one on my right was a colossal affair by any standard—it was a factual imitation of some Hôtel de Ville in Normandy, with a tower on one side, spanking new under a thin beard of raw ivy, and a marble swimming pool and more than forty acres of lawn and garden. It was Gatsby's mansion. Or rather, as I didn't know Mr. Gatsby it was a mansion inhabited by a gentleman of that name. My own house was an eye-sore, but it was a small eye-sore, and it had been overlooked, so I had a view of the water, a partial view of my neighbor's lawn, and the consoling proximity of millionaires—all for eighty dollars a month.

Across the courtesy bay the white palaces of fashionable East Egg glittered along the water, and the history of the summer really begins on the evening I drove over there to have dinner with the Tom Buchanans. Daisy was my second cousin once removed and I'd known Tom in college. And just after the war I spent two days with them in Chicago.

Her husband, among various physical accomplishments, had been one of the most powerful ends that ever played football at New Haven—a national figure in a way, one of those men who reach such an acute limited excellence at twenty-one that everything afterward savors of anti-climax. His family were enormously wealthy—even in college his freedom with money was a matter for reproach—but now he'd left Chicago and come east in a fashion that rather took your breath away: for instance he'd brought down a string of polo ponies from Lake Forest. It was hard to realize that a man in my own generation was wealthy enough to do that.

Why they came east I don't know. They had spent a year in France, for no particular reason, and then drifted here and there unrestfully wherever people played polo and were rich together. This was a permanent move, said Daisy over the telephone, but I didn't believe it—I had no sight into Daisy's heart but I felt that Tom would drift on forever seeking a little wistfully for the dramatic turbulence of some irrecoverable football game.

And so it happened that on a warm windy evening I drove over to East Egg to see two old friends whom I scarcely knew at all. Their house was even more elaborate than I expected, a cheerful red and white Georgian Colonial mansion overlooking the bay. The lawn started at the beach and ran toward the front door for a quarter of a mile, jumping over sun-dials and brick walks and burning gardens—finally when it reached the house drifting up the side in bright vines as though from the momentum of its run. The front was broken by a line of French windows, glowing now with reflected gold, and wide open to the warm windy afternoon, and Tom Buchanan in riding clothes was standing with his legs apart on the front porch.

He had changed since his New Haven years. Now he was a sturdy, straw haired man of thirty with a rather hard mouth and a supercilious manner. Two shining, arrogant eyes had established dominance over his face and gave him the appearance of always leaning aggressively forward. Not even the effeminate swank of his riding clothes could hide the enormous power of that body—he seemed to fill those glistening boots until he strained the top lacing and you could see a great pack of muscle shifting when his shoulder moved under his thin coat. It was a body capable of enormous leverage—a cruel body.

His speaking voice, a gruff husky tenor, added to the impression of fractiousness he conveyed. There was a touch of paternal contempt in it, even toward people he liked—and there were men at New Haven who had hated his guts.

"Now, don't think my opinion on these matters is final," he seemed to say, "just because I'm stronger and more of a man than you are." We were in the same Senior Society, and while we were never intimate I always had the impression that he approved of me and wanted me to like him with some harsh, defiant wistfulness of his own.

We talked for a few minutes on the sunny porch.

"I've got a nice place here," he said, his eyes flashing about restlessly.

Turning me around by one arm he moved a broad flat hand along the front vista, including in its sweep a sunken Italian garden, a half acre of deep pungent roses and a snub-nosed motor boat that bumped the tide off shore.

"It belonged to Demaine the oil man." He turned me around again, politely and abruptly. "We'll go inside."

We walked through a high hallway into a bright rosy-colored space, fragilely bound into the house by French windows at either end. The windows were ajar and gleaming white against the fresh grass outside that seemed to grow a little way into the house. A breeze blew through the room, blew curtains in at one end and out the other like pale flags, twisting them up toward the frosted wedding cake of the ceiling—and then rippled over the wine-colored rug, making a shadow on it as wind does on the sea.

The only completely stationary object in the room was an enormous couch on which two young women were buoyed up as though upon an anchored balloon. They were both in white and their dresses were rippling and fluttering as if they had just been blown back in after a short flight around the house. I must have stood for a few moments listening to the whip and snap of the curtains and the groan of a picture on the wall. Then there was a boom as Tom Buchanan shut the rear windows and the caught wind died out about the room and the curtains and the rugs and the two young women ballooned slowly to the floor.

The younger of the two was a stranger to me. She was extended full length at her end of the divan, completely motionless and with her chin raised a little as if she were balancing something on it which was quite likely to fall. If she saw me out of the corner of her eyes she gave no hint of it—indeed, I was almost surprised into murmuring an apology for having disturbed her by coming in.

The other girl, Daisy, made an attempt to rise—she leaned slightly forward with a conscientious expression—then she laughed, an absurd, charming little laugh, and I laughed too and came forward into the room.

"I'm p-paralyzed with happiness."

She laughed again, as if she said something very witty, and held my hand for a moment, looking up into my face, promising that there was no one in the world she so much wanted to see. That was a way she had. She hinted in a murmur that the surname of the balancing girl was Baker. (I've heard it said that Daisy's murmur was only to make people lean toward her; an irrelevant criticism that made it no less charming.)

At any rate Miss Baker's lips fluttered, she nodded at me almost imperceptibly and then quickly tipped her head back again—the object she was balancing had obviously tottered a little and given her something of a fright. Again a sort of apology arose to my lips. Almost any exhibition of complete self sufficiency draws a stunned tribute from me.

I looked back at my cousin who began to ask me questions in her low, thrilling voice. It was the kind of voice that the ear follows up and down as if each speech is an arrangement of notes that will never be played again. Her face was sad and lovely with bright things in it, bright eyes and a bright passionate mouth—but there was an excitement in her voice that men who had cared for her found difficult to forget: a singing compulsion, a whispered "Listen," a promise that she had done gay, exciting things just a while since and that there were gay, exciting things hovering in the next hour.

I told her how I had stopped off in Chicago for a day on my way east and how a dozen people had sent their love through me.

"Do they miss me?" she cried ecstatically.

"The whole town is desolate. All the cars have the left rear wheel painted black as a mourning wreath and there's a persistent wail all night along the North Shore."

"How gorgeous! Let's go back, Tom. Tomorrow!" Then she added irrelevantly, "You ought to see the baby."

"I'd like to."

"She's asleep. She's two years old. Haven't you ever seen her?"

"Never."

"Well, you ought to see her. She's—"

Tom Buchanan who had been hovering restlessly about the room stopped and rested his hand on my shoulder.

"What you doing, Nick?"

"I'm a bond man."

"Who with?"

I told him.

"Never heard of them," he remarked decisively.

This annoyed me.

"You will," I answered shortly. "You will if you stay in the East."

"Oh, I'll stay in the East, don't you worry," he said, glancing at Daisy and then back at me, as if he were alert for something more. "I'd be a God Damned fool to live anywhere else."

At this point Miss Baker said "Absolutely!" with such suddenness that I started—it was the first word she uttered since I came into the room. Evidently it surprised her as much as it did me, for she yawned and with a series of rapid, deft movements stood up into the room.

"I'm stiff," she complained, "I've been lying on that sofa for as long as I can remember."

"Don't look at me," Daisy retorted. "I've been trying to get you to New York all afternoon."

"No, thanks," said Miss Baker to the four cocktails just in from the pantry, "I'm absolutely in training."

Her host looked at her incredulously.

"You are!" He took down his drink as if it were a drop in the bottom of a glass. "How you ever get anything done is beyond me."

I looked at Miss Baker wondering what it was she "got done." I enjoyed looking at her. She was a slender, small-breasted girl, with an erect carriage which she accentuated by throwing her body backward at the shoulders like a young cadet. Her grey sun-strained eyes looked back at me with polite reciprocal curiosity out of a wan, charming discontented face. It occurred to me now that I had seen her, or a picture of her, somewhere before.

"You live in West Egg," she remarked contemptuously. "I know somebody there."

"I don't know a single—"

"You must know Gatsby."

"Gatsby?" demanded Daisy. "What Gatsby?"

Before I could reply that he was my neighbor dinner was announced; wedging his tense arm imperatively under mine Tom Buchanan compelled me from the room as though he were moving a checker to another square.

Slenderly, languidly, their hands set lightly on their hips the two young women preceded us out onto a rosy-colored porch open toward the sunset where four candles flickered on the table in the diminished wind.

"Why candles?" objected Daisy, frowning. She snapped them out with her fingers. "In two weeks it'll be the longest day in the year." She looked at us all radiantly. "Do you always watch for the longest day of the year and then miss it? I always watch for the longest day in the year and then miss it."

"We ought to plan something," yawned Miss Baker, sitting down at the table as if she were getting into bed.

"All right," said Daisy. "What'll we plan?" She turned to me helplessly. "What do people plan?"

Before I could answer her eyes fastened with an awed expression on her little finger.

"Look!" she complained. "I hurt it."

We all looked—the knuckle was black and blue.

"You did it, Tom," she said accusingly. "I know you didn't mean to but you did do it. That's what I get for marrying a brute of a man, a great big hulking physical specimen of a—"

"I hate that word hulking," objected Tom crossly, "even in kidding."

"Hulking," insisted Daisy.

Sometimes she and Miss Baker talked at once, unobtrusively and with a bantering inconsequence that was never quite chatter, that was as cool as their white dresses and their impersonal eyes in the absence of all desire. They were here—and they accepted Tom and me, making only a polite pleasant effort to entertain or to be entertained. They knew that presently dinner would be over and a little later the evening too would be over and casually put away. It was sharply different from the West where an evening was hurried from phase to phase toward its close in a continually disappointed anticipation or else in sheer nervous dread of the moment itself.

"You make me feel uncivilized, Daisy," I confessed on my second glass of corky but rather impressive claret. "Can't you talk about crops or something?"

I meant nothing in particular by this remark but it was taken up in an unexpected way.

"Civilization's going to pieces," broke out Tom violently. "I've gotten to be a terrible pessimist about things. Have you read 'The Rise of the Coloured Empires' by this man Goddard?"

"Why, no," I answered, rather surprised by his tone.

"Well, it's a fine book, and everybody ought to read it. The idea is if we don't look out the white race will be—will be utterly submerged. It's all scientific stuff; it's been proved."

"Tom's getting very profound," said Daisy with an expression of unthoughtful sadness. "He reads deep books with long words in them. What was that word we—"

"Well, these books are all scientific," insisted Tom, glancing at her impatiently. "This fellow has worked out the whole thing. It's up to us who are the dominant race to watch out or these other races will have control of things."

"We've got to beat them down," whispered Daisy, winking ferociously toward the fervent sun.

"You ought to live in California—" began Miss Baker but Tom interrupted her by shifting heavily in his chair.

"This idea is that we're Nordics. I am, and you are and you are and—" After an infinitesimal hesitation he included Daisy with a slight nod and she winked at me again. "—and we've produced all the things that go to make civilization—oh, science and art and all that. Do you see?"

There was something pathetic in his concentration as if his complacency, more acute than of old, was not enough to him any more. When, almost immediately, the telephone rang inside and the butler left the porch Daisy seized upon the momentary interruption and leaned toward me.

"I'll tell you a family secret," she whispered enthusiastically. "It's about the butler's nose. Do you want to hear about the butler's nose?"

"That's why I came over tonight."

"Well, he wasn't always a butler; he used to be the silver polisher for some people in New York that had a silver service for two hundred people. He had to polish it from morning till night until finally it began to affect his nose—"

"Things went from bad to worse," suggested Miss Baker.

"Yes. Things went from bad to worse until finally he had to give up his position."

For a moment the last sunshine fell with romantic affection upon her glowing face; her voice compelled me forward breathlessly as I listened—then the glow faded, each light deserting her with lingering regret like children leaving a pleasant street at dusk.

The butler came back and murmured something close to Tom's ear whereupon Tom frowned, pushed back his chair and without a word went inside. As if his absence quickened something within her Daisy leaned forward again, her voice glowing and singing.

"I love to see you at my table, Nick. You remind me of a—of a rose, an absolute rose. Doesn't he?" She turned to Miss Baker for confirmation. "An absolute rose?"

This was untrue. I am not even faintly like a rose. She was only extemporizing but a stirring warmth flowed from her as if her heart was trying to come out to you concealed in one of those breathless, thrilling words. Then suddenly she threw her napkin on the table and excused herself and went into the house.

Miss Baker and I exchanged a short glance consciously devoid of meaning. I was about to speak when she sat up alertly and said "Sh!" in a warning voice. A subdued impassioned murmur was audible in the room beyond and Miss Baker leaned forward, unashamed, trying to hear. The murmur trembled on the verge of coherence, sank down, mounted excitedly, and then ceased altogether.

"This Mr. Gatsby you spoke of is my neighbor—" I said.

"Don't talk. I want to hear what happens."

"Is something happening?" I inquired innocently.

"You mean to say you don't know?" said Miss Baker, honestly surprised. "I thought everybody knew."

"I don't."

"Why—" she said hesitantly, "Tom's got some woman in New York."

"Got some woman?" I repeated blankly.

Miss Baker nodded.

"She might have the decency not to telephone him at dinner-time. Don't you think?"

Almost before I had grasped her meaning there was the flutter of a dress and the crunch of leather boots and Tom and Daisy were back at the table.

"It couldn't be helped!" cried Daisy with tense gayety.

She sat down, glanced searchingly at Miss Baker and then at me and continued: "I looked outdoors for a minute and it's very romantic outdoors. There's a bird on the lawn that I think must be a nightingale come over on the Cunard or White Star Line. He's singing away—" her voice sang "—It's romantic, isn't it, Tom?"

"Very romantic," he said, and then miserably to me: "If it's light enough after dinner I want to take you down to the stables."

The telephone rang inside, startlingly, and as Daisy shook her head decisively at Tom the subject of the stables, in fact all subjects, vanished into air. Among the broken fragments of the last five minutes at table I remember the candles being lit again, pointlessly, and I was conscious of wanting to look squarely at every one and yet to avoid all eyes. I couldn't guess what Daisy and Tom were thinking but I doubt if even Miss Baker who seemed to have mastered a certain hardy skepticism was able utterly to put this fifth guest's shrill metallic urgency out of mind. To a certain temperament the situation might have seemed intriguing—my own instinct was to telephone immediately for the police.

The horses, needless to say, were not mentioned again. Tom and Miss Baker, with several feet of twilight between them strolled back into the library, as if to a vigil beside a perfectly tangible body, while trying to look pleasantly interested and a little deaf I followed Daisy around a chain of connecting verandas to the porch in front. In its deep gloom we sat down side by side on a wicker settee.

Daisy took her face in her hands, as if feeling its lovely shape, and her eyes moved gradually out into the velvet dusk. I saw that turbulent emotions possessed her, so I asked what I thought would be some sedative questions about her little girl.

"We don't know each other very well, Nick," she said suddenly. "Even if we are cousins. You didn't come to my wedding."

"I wasn't back from the war."

"That's true." She hesitated. "Well, I've had a very bad time, Nick, and I'm pretty cynical about everything."

Evidently she had reason to be. I waited but she didn't say any more, and after a moment I returned rather feebly to the subject of her daughter.

"I suppose she talks, and—eats, and everything."

"Oh, yes." She looked at me absently. "Listen, Nick; let me tell you what I said when she was born. Would you like to hear?"

"Very much."

Thank you.

#she speaks #ria ur so funny

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