#line almost from Every Day you play by Pablo Neruda

[flo-n-flon]

I want to do with you what new spring does with the cherry trees. (x x)

#The wheel of time #siuaraine #siuan sanche #moiraine damodred #wot fanart #show: wheel of time #character: siuan sanche #character: moiraine damodred #can you believe I haven't progressed in my reading because I've been thinking about them again ? #anyway have a little cheeky sketch #pose comes from Rodin's Eternal Idol #line almost from Every Day you play by Pablo Neruda #a very quick something because how I miss them #I am just again overwhelmed by the fact they have loved each other for more than 20 years

[brooklynmuseum]

Closing out National Poetry Month, our Spring Interns paired some of their favorite poems with works from our collection. We hope you enjoy!

— Jeffrey Alexander Lopez, Curatorial Intern, American Art & Arts of the Americas

Image: Suzuki Harunobu (Japanese, 1724-1770). Page From Haru no Nishiki, 1771. Color woodblock print on paper. Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Peter P. Pessutti, 83.190.1

from Citizen: “Some years there exists a wanting to escape...” [Excerpt] By Claudia Rankine 

/

I they he she we you turn only to discover the encounter

to be alien to this place.

Wait.

The patience is in the living. Time opens out to you.

The opening, between you and you, occupied, zoned for an encounter,

given the histories of you and you—

And always, who is this you?

The start of you, each day, a presence already—

Hey you—

/

— Halle Smith, Digital Collections Intern Catherine Green (American, born 1952). [Untitled] (West Indian Day Parade), 1991. Chromogenic photograph, sheet. Brooklyn Museum, Gift of the artist, 1991.58.2. © artist or artist's estate 

Ode to Enchanted Light by Pablo Neruda

Under the trees light has dropped from the top of the sky, light like a green latticework of branches, shining on every leaf, drifting down like clean white sand.

A cicada sends its sawing song high into the empty air.

The world is a glass overflowing with water.

Consuelo Kanaga’s black and white photograph captures a dazzling, yet fleeting moment from everyday life. Three textured glasses cast shadows whose patterns are almost kaleidoscopic in effect. We can imagine Kanaga passing by her kitchen table, as she is brought to a halt to take a closer look at, and ultimately to photograph, the simple beauty generated by the play of light and everyday objects. The close-up scale of this image emulates the singularizing framing techniques deployed by Surrealist photographers, who also took parts of everyday life and blew them up in the photographic frame, thereby encouraging their viewers to look at life around us from a different angle. It is a way of saying: Here, take a closer look. Viewing the world with wonder, along with the joy that this act brings, are encapsulated in Pablo Neruda’s poem Ode to Enchanted Light. The speaker observes the way light passes through trees and creates enchanting patterns. He not only observes, but feels the beauty in the simple details of life, from the way light falls from the sky, to the sheen of leaves, to the buzzing of cicadas. Approaching life through such a hopeful lens evokes a glass-half-full perspective. In fact, the speaker is so hopeful that he believes “The world is/a glass overflowing/with water.” I think Kanaga would have felt the same way. 

— Kirk Testa, Curatorial Intern, Photography Consuelo Kanaga (American, 1894-1978). [Untitled] (Glasses and Reflections). Gelatin silver photograph. Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Wallace B. Putnam from the Estate of Consuelo Kanaga, 82.65.25

Easter Wings By George Herbert

Lord, who createdst man in wealth and store,

      Though foolishly he lost the same,

            Decaying more and more,

                  Till he became

                        Most poore:

                        With thee

                  O let me rise

            As larks, harmoniously,

      And sing this day thy victories:

Then shall the fall further the flight in me.

My tender age in sorrow did beginne

      And still with sicknesses and shame.

            Thou didst so punish sinne,

                  That I became

                        Most thinne.

                        With thee

                  Let me combine,

            And feel thy victorie:

         For, if I imp my wing on thine,

Affliction shall advance the flight in me.

Easter Wings by George Herbet and Martin Bach’s flower vase from the Brooklyn Museum’s Decorative Arts collection reveal the interrelationship between form and function. In Easter Wings, Herbert strategically varies the line length to create an image that enhances the meaning of the poem; when you turn the poem on its side, it resembles the wings of a bird, of which are symbolic of the atonement of Jesus Christ. In doing so, the author is not only telling us his message, but he is showing it visually as well. Similarly, the vase takes the visual form of its function. Its floral design amplifies the meaning of the object, as the vase is meant to hold flowers. In both instances, we see how aesthetic properties of a work echo the meaning and function of the work itself.

— Amy Zavecz Martin Bach (American, 1862-1921). Vase, ca. 1905. Opalescent glass. Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Mrs. Alfred Zoebisch, 59.143.16. Creative Commons-BY 

I am the Earth (Watashi wa chikyu) [Excerpt] by Kiyoko Nagase, Translated by Takako Lento

I am warm, moist soil  I am a single supple stalk  I draw my life  all the way up into corollas of wild berries on the roadside 

I am amazed at  a breast of water welling  to flow into the inlet of a muddy rice paddy  I am amazed at  myself being  hot steam blowing fire and sulfur up  from the bottom of the great ocean, deep indigo.  I am amazed at  the crimson blood flow  covering the earth’s surface in human shape;  I am amazed that it swells as the tides ebb and flow, and gushes out monthly under distant invisible gravity … I am the earth.  I live there, and I am the very same earth. 

In the four billionth year  I have come to know  the eternal cold moon, my other self, my hetero being,  then, for the first time, I am amazed that I am warm mud.

The vivid imagery conjured up by Kiyoko Nagase’s poem is beautifully visualized by Emmi Whitehorse’s painting. The emphasis on deep Earth tones and abstract corporeality in both the poem and the painting really creates an intense metaphysical link between the environment and the self.

— Amanda Raquel Dorval, Archives Intern Emmi Whitehorse (Navajo, born 1957). Fire Weed, 1998. Chalk, graphite, pastel and oil on paper mounted on canvas. Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Hinrich Peiper and Dorothee Peiper-Riegraf in honor of Emmi Whitehorse, 2006.49. © artist or artist's estate

Seventh Circle of Earth by Ocean Vuong

On April 27, 2011, a gay couple, Michael Humphrey and Clayton Capshaw, was murdered by immolation in their home in Dallas, Texas.

Dallas Voice

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2

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                                       4

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As if my finger, / tracing your collarbone / behind closed doors, / was enough / to erase myself. To forget / we built this house knowing / it won’t last. How / does anyone stop / regret / without cutting / off his hands? / Another torch

streams through / the kitchen window, / another errant dove. / It’s funny. I always knew / I’d be warmest beside / my man. / But don’t laugh. Understand me / when I say I burn best / when crowned / with your scent: that earth-sweat / & Old Spice I seek out each night / the days

refuse me. / Our faces blackening / in the photographs along the wall. / Don’t laugh. Just tell me the story / again, / of the sparrows who flew from falling Rome, / their blazed wings. / How ruin nested inside each thimbled throat / & made it sing

until the notes threaded to this / smoke rising / from your nostrils. Speak— / until your voice is nothing / but the crackle / of charred

bones. But don’t laugh / when these walls collapse / & only sparks / not sparrows / fly out. / When they come / to sift through these cinders—& pluck my tongue, / this fisted rose, / charcoaled & choked / from your gone

mouth. / Each black petal / blasted / with what’s left / of our laughter. / Laughter ashed / to air / to honey to baby / darling, / look. Look how happy we are / to be no one / & still

American.

Ocean Vuong’s “Seventh Circle of Earth” has persisted as one of the great, affective moments of poetry in my life since I first heard Pádraig Ó Toama’s gorgeous reading and discussion of it on his podcast, Poetry Unbound. I decided to pair Vuong’s poem with Mary Coble’s Untitled 2 (from Note To Self) because both works are urgently immersive into the violence and experience of LGBTQ people in the U.S., and for how each work uses text and physicality to address presence, pain, and erasure. Vuong’s poem is actually footnoted to a quote from a news article about a gay couple murdered in Texas. The page is thus blank, absent of text. The reader has to sink below the main stage, the accepted space of word and story, to find the voices of this couple and the depth of their story’s tenderness, eroticism, and utter devastation. Coble’s piece foils the structure and effect of Seventh Circle of Earth by taking what was subverted by Vuong—text and the narrative of violence—wholly to the surface. Her photograph captures her own legs tattooed without ink with the names of LGBTQ individuals victimized by hate crimes. I cannot help but think of Franz Kafka’s short story “In the Penal Colony,” in which prisoners’ “sentences'' are inscribed by the needle of a “punishment apparatus” directly onto their bodies. I was struck by how the curator’s note for this photograph describes Coble’s artistic endeavor here as “harrowing.” The needle in Kafka’s short story is indeed called “The Harrow”. The noun harrow is an agricultural tool that combs plowed soil to break up clumps of earth and uproot weeds and clear imperfections. The verb to harrow means to plague, and in the story’s original German the verb for “harrow”, eggen,  is also translated as “to torment”. Kafka and Coble conflate these definitions of “the harrow” in their respective works: they use a needled device, like the true noun definition, as an instrument of torment because of someone else’s idea of punishment and justice. Here, violence is brought to the surface, intimate in as much as we are brought right up to the artist’s skin and into the presence of her and her community’s pain. Together, one can see how each creator physicalizes their respective artistic space to tell the stories of LGBTQ people, of what is tender and harrowing, below the surface and written into the skin. 

— Talia Abrahams, Provenance Intern, IHCPP Mary Coble (American, born 1978). Untitled 2 (from Note to Self), 2005. Inkjet print. Brooklyn Museum, Gift of the artist, 2008.10. © artist or artist's estate 

To my daughter Kakuya   by Assata Shakur  

I have shabby dreams for you   of some vague freedom   I have never known.   Baby   I don't want you hungry or thirsty   or out in the cold.   and I don't want the frost   to kill your fruit   before it ripens.   I can see a sunny place  Life exploding green.   I can see your bright, bronze skin at ease with all the flowers   and the centipedes.   I can hear laughter,   not grown from ridicule   And words not prompted   by ego or greed or jealousy.   I see a world where hatred   has been replaced by love.   and ME replaced by WE   And I can see a world replaced                                       where you,   building and exploring,   strong and fulfilled,   will understand.   And go beyond my little shabby dreams. 

This poem is featured in Assata Shakur’s memoir, Assata: An Autobiography. It details her hope for a better world that  her daughter can grow up in. This poem is positioned in the book when Shakur is facing increasing prosecution as a result of her  activism and affiliations with the Black Panther Party and Black Liberation army. Being written more than 30 years after this picture  was taken, the poem summons me to think about the trauma that many Black women face and how much of that trauma gets passed  down to their children. The black and white photo of a mother and daughter provides a nice visual to the poem. “The image of a Black  mother and child sitting on their luggage reflects the little-discussed history of segregated transportation in the northern United States. Through the 1940s, Penn Station officials assigned Black travelers seats in Jim Crow cars on southbound trains” (Brooklyn Museum). The photograph of train passengers waiting outside of Manhattan’s Pennsylvania Station especially echoes the verse “I don’t want you  hungry or thirsty or out in the cold.” The overall optimistic tone of Shakur’s poem alters our relationship to the image as we imagine  the mother pictured above hoping for the exact same things

— Zaria W, Teen Programs intern Ruth Orkin (American, 1921-1985). Mother and Daughter at Penn Station, NYC, 1948. Gelatin silver photograph, sheet: 13 15/16 × 11 in. (35.4 × 27.9 cm). Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Mary Engel, 2011.22.3. © artist or artist's estate

Crunch.  By Kailyn Gibson 

I retch as a mass of sinew lies between my lips.  The sensation is unbearable.  Fortunately, the jar of flies has gone missing again. 

Slowly, surely, and yet never sure at all,  the quiet of buzzing rings through the in-between. 

It is a symphony wrought from blood and bone. 

Saliva drips from bleeding, hungry gums,  And the crunch of glass echoes the grinding of molars.

If I proffered a sanguine smile, would masticated shards look like teeth?  Would they gleam just as prettily?  

The flies ring,  and the rot calls. 

— Kailyn Gibson Edgar Degas (French, 1834-1917). Portrait of a Man (Portrait d'homme), ca. 1866. Oil on canvas. Brooklyn Museum, Museum Collection Fund, 21.112 

Excerpt from Autobiography of Red A novel in verse by Anne Carson

7. If Helen’s reasons arose out of some remark Stesichoros made either it was a strong remark about Helen’s sexual misconduct (not to say its unsavory aftermath the Fall of Troy) or it was not.

8. If it was a strong remark about Helen’s sexual misconduct (not to say its unsavory aftermath the Fall of Troy) either this remark was a lie or it was not.

9. If it was not a lie either we are now in reverse and by continuing to reason in this way we are likely to arrive back at the beginning of the question of the blinding of Stesichoros or we are not.

10. If we are now in reverse and by continuing to reason in this way are likely to arrive back at the beginning of the question of the blinding of Stesichoros either we will go along without incident or we will meet Stesichoros on our way back.

11. If we meet Stesichoros on our way back either we will keep quiet or we will look him in the eye and ask him what he thinks of Helen.

12. If we look Stesichoros in the eye and ask him what he thinks of Helen either he will tell the truth or he will lie.

13. If Stesichoros lies either we will know at once that he is lying or we will be fooled because now that we are in reverse the whole landscape looks inside out.

This excerpt comes from Appendix C of Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red, a novel in verse. A translator and classicist herself, Carson mixes fact with fiction in her unconventional retelling of the myth of Geryon and Hercules, beginning with a roundabout introduction to the poet Stesichoros. Autobiography presents a captivating example of recent Queer projects that take up Classical material as their basis. A fascination with the Classical past has pervaded our modern conception of sexual identity politics, down to the very etymology of the word “lesbian.” In this fascination, I see the same desire to capture Classical imagery as cultural heritage which has also pervaded American museums, albeit with significantly different aims. The fresco pictured above comes to mind, which passed through many collectors and was even purchased by the museum before anyone pegged it as a modern piece—not an original Roman fresco. John D. Cooney, a 20th century curator of our Egyptian, Classical, and Ancient Near Eastern Art collection, wrote that “the unclad and somewhat winsome charms of the lady [probably] diverted objective glances.” Both in the case of the fresco and Carson’s novel, the “unclad and somewhat winsome charms” of the Classical past shape and reshape our understanding of history.

— Kira Houston, Curatorial Intern, Egyptian, Classical, and Ancient Near Eastern Art Modern, in the style of the Roman Period. Part of a Fresco, early 19th century C.E. Clay, paint. Brooklyn Museum, Ella C. Woodward Memorial Fund, 11.30.

Late Fragment by Raymond Carver From A New Path to the Waterfall, Atlantic Monthly Press, 1989.

And did you get what you wanted from this life, even so? I did. And what did you want? To call myself beloved, to feel myself beloved on the earth.

— Shori Diedrick Brackens (American, born 1989). when no softness came, 2019. Cotton and acrylic yarn. Brooklyn Museum, Purchased with funds given by The LIFEWTR Fund at Frieze New York 2019, 2019.12. © artist or artist's estate

Jaguar By Francisco X. Alarcón

some say                                    dicen que ahora                  I'm now almost                           estoy casi extinto       extinct in this park                      por este parque    but the people                            pero la gente who say this                               que dice esto don't know                                 no sabe that by smelling                          que al oler   the orchids                                 las orquídeas in the trees                                 en los árboles they're sensing                          están percibiendo  the fragrance                             la fragancia of my chops                              de mis fauces  that by hearing                          que al oír the rumblingc                            el retumbo of the waterfalls                        de los saltos  

they're listening                         están escuchando          to my ancestors'                       el gran rugido   great roar                                  de mis ancestros

that by observing                      que al observar     the constellations                      las constelanciones     of the night sky                         del firmamento 

they're gazing                           están mirando at the star spots                       las motas de estrellas    on my fur                                  marcadas en mi piel that I am and                            que yo soy always will be                           y siempre seré the wild                                     el indomable

untamed                                  espíritu silvestre living spirit                               vivo de esta of this jungle                            jungla

While the author of the poem speaks about animals, their words can also speak on behalf of the erasure of indigenous peoples in South America. Much like the jaguar, indigenous traditions and culture are very important to life in South America. Despite their marginalization, Indigenous peoples throughout the Andes used coca leaves to help with the altitude. The use and cultivation of coca are criminalized throughout most of South America despite it being essential to indigenous cultures. This vessel was used to contain lime which would activate the coca leaves.  Much like the jaguar, indigenous traditions are also faced with endangerment despite being woven into the fabric that is Latin America. Through the opposite man and woman figures, the vessel shows the duality that is important to the Quimbaya people which is still relevant to Colombians today.

Aunque el autor del poema habla sobre los animales, sus palabras también comunican el sentimiento común de la supresión de los indígenas en Suramérica. Con la mención del jaguar, se puede entender en el poema que la cultura y las tradiciones de las personas que son indígenas son sumamente importantes para la vida en Sudamérica. A pesar de su marginación, los indígenas en Los Andes utilizan la hoja de coca para ayudar en la altura de las montañas. El uso y el cultivo de la hoja de coca fue criminalizado (penalizado) a través de Sudamérica, aunque su uso para los indígenas era vital y esencial para su cultura. Este recipiente que se utiliza contiene limón lo que activa la hoja de la coca. Similarmente al jaguar, las tradiciones de los indígenas siempre estaban en peligro aunque estuvieran entrelazadas en las telas de lo que sería Latinoamérica. A través del hombre opuesto y las figuras de mujeres, el recipiente muestra la dualidad de lo que es importante para las personas que son Quimbaya, algo que todavía hoy es relevante para los Colombianos.

— Jeffrey Alexander Lopez, Curatorial Intern, American Art & Arts of the Americas Quimbaya. Poporo (Lime Container), 1-600 C.E. Tumbaga. Brooklyn Museum, Alfred W. Jenkins Fund, 35.507. Creative Commons-BY 

#national poetry month #poetry #art #poems #art history #brooklyn museum #bkminterns

[solomonish]

From the Mouths of Fools

Belphegor has a habit of forcing his brothers into trouble, mostly with you. There’s nothing more satisfying than the look of horror on their face when they think they must have dashed their chances with you and that they’re digging the hole deeper. Each time, you reach out a hand and ease their worries, and Belphegor’s stomach twists as you tell them with kind eyes not to worry, that they’re very sweet. Why did you have to be such a spoilsport?

(also posted on ao3 @ treetunkdaddy)

Poems:  A Red, Red Rose by Robert Burns, I Carry Your Heart With Me by E. E. Cummings, I Love You by Ella Wheeler Wilcox, Love Sonnet XI by Pablo Neruda

Leviathan: I love you. Leviathan: I love you more than anyone else in this world. You: Thanks! Leviathan: Happy now? Leviathan: As I thought, this was the right thing to say.

You stared at your phone screen for a moment longer with one eyebrow raised. Something here wasn’t right. Though you weren’t some grand detective, you could tell that the texts didn’t sound like Levi at all Even beyond the sudden boldness, if you pictured Levi texting those messages you could only imagine him with a rain cloud over his head as he hunched over his phone in sorrow. The somber tone didn’t match his usual excitement. Maybe he was trying to get into character for some sort of cosplay…? Biting the inside of your cheek, you tried to figure out if he had mentioned getting into character for something. Still, there was no way he wouldn’t know all the lines of a character he was trying to embody, and it seemed far-fetched that he’d choose something so...overt, let alone practice it with you.

Before you could distract yourself too much from the tasks you were supposed to be working on, a solid oof a few feet away from your door caught your attention. You could just barely hear a half-hearted grumble barely covering the low boyish giggles of a scheming Belphegor as Levi freaked out in a jumble of words that sounded more like a keysmash than an argument. A moment later, you got another slew of texts that seemed much more like the demon you knew.

Leviathan: AAAEWAGVNAFBPEABD Leviathan: WAAAAAIT! Leviathan: I take that back! Leviathan: AARGH, no, that’s not what I meant! Leviathan: I left my D.D.D. on the couch and Belphie ran off with it!

Ah. That made sense. It also explained the nervous energy you could practically feel radiating from where the two demons undoubtedly still lay in a heap. With a devious look on your face, you tapped away at your phone.

You: I took a screenshot of it!

You were right about one of them being outside your door. You could hear Levi’s startled yelp, followed shortly by frantic footsteps running down the hall to his door. The three dots danced on your screen as the sound got quieter, the message reaching you just as the door to Levi’s room slammed shut.

Leviathan: No, you can’t! Delete that ASAP! DELETEIIIITTTTT!

Snickering to yourself, you hefted yourself out of your seat and opened your door to peer out into the hallway. A little ways to your left, Belphie lay sprawled out on the carpet with a half-dazed expression on his face. Taking care to keep your footsteps quiet in case he actually was asleep, you bent over his face to look at his half-lidded eyes. After a moment of shifting into focus, Belphie gave you a lazy smile and patted the floor next to him.

“You should join me,” He offered. “The carpet is surprisingly soft.”

“Yeah, and surprisingly dirty,” You added, gently toeing at his shoulder as if that would spur him to move.

“If you stare at the pattern on the ceiling and let your eyes get unfocused, it’s real easy to fall asleep,” He suggested. You turned your head to look at the ceiling, seeing nothing but a boring, dark texture above you. If you squinted, you could almost make out swirls in the paint. Maybe demons had a better time seeing details in the dark.

Beneath you, Belphie hummed contentedly, folding his hands at his stomach. He almost looked like he was sunbathing in a meadow, surrounded by fragrant flowers - the image made your heart jump the slightest bit. Maybe, if that was the case, you would have joined him. Lying next to him as a gentle breeze danced over your skin and the tall grass kissed your skin...that didn’t seem like a bad way to spend an afternoon.

“Hey,” Belphie asked suddenly, holding you in a serious stare. It was one he didn’t bother to give you often, saving it only for when you trespassed him so greatly he needed to make it known (more often than not when he told you how lame Lucifer was if you mentioned how he’s helped you with some administrative details for the exchange program). “What did you feel when Levi sent you that message?”

“What?” You asked, shaken by the jarring change in his voice. He sounded much more stern, and though it was hard to tell while looking at him upside down, you were pretty sure he was holding you in a glare, albeit a very gentle one.

“Did it make you happy?” He asked. “That he might love you?”

Your face flushed at the personal question and you averted your gaze, missing the way Belphie’s gaze hardened at your reaction. “I-I knew they weren’t from Levi,” You answered, shaking your head and looking back at Belphie. “They sounded way too suave for him. I thought maybe he was playing a character, or something. I didn’t think they meant anything.”

“You thought they didn’t mean anything…” Nodding, Belphie’s mouth twisted in thought as he looked just past your shoulder blankly. Suddenly his arms shot up and he grabbed at the air a few times, shutting off any gateway to questions you might have. “Help me up. I wanna nap somewhere softer than this where I won’t get trampled.”

Rolling your eyes, you turned the idea of leaving him there around once before shifting to his side and pulling him up. He took the chance to stumble into you, jamming his chin into your shoulder as he wrapped his arms around you and nuzzled into your neck. Instead of feeling his breath tickle your skin, however, you felt his hair brush against you as he adjusted, eventually stopping once he was satisfied. You realized for a moment he was listening for your pulse, and your breathing shallowed on instinct, as if you wanted him to hear it. He didn’t tell you what he was listening for, only groaning when you started to ask him to let go so you could resume your day.

“Mmmm….maybe I should nap here? So comfy….” He murmured. Though he made no move to let go, he also didn’t fight you when you finally separated him from your body. Giving him a farewell smile, you turned your back to leave, not seeing his face fall in displeasure.

---

A few days later, there was a book on your bed that you were positive wasn’t there when you left that morning.

Dropping your backpack unceremoniously by your door, you peered at the worn cover to see it was an old collection of romantic poems. There was no suspicious Latin on the cover, now jewels (or missing jewels) to indicate it was a spellbook or otherwise enchanted, so you picked it up. Upon closer inspection, you saw it was a collection of human poems, many of which you read in your early school days. There were a few multicolored tabs stuck in it, no apparent rhyme or reason to their placement. Though it looked to be Satan’s book, you couldn’t imagine him risking getting adhesive on the worn pages. Curious, you flipped to the first marked page and scanned it, face flushing almost immediately.

O my Luve is like a red, red rose That’s newly sprung in June; O my Luve is like the melody That’s sweetly played in tune.

Flipping to the next marked page, your face turned an even deeper red as they scanned the page.

i carry your heart with me(i carry it in my heart)i am never without it(anywhere i go you go,my dear;and whatever is done by only me is your doing,my darling) i fear no fate(for you are my fate,my sweet)i want no world(for beautiful you are my world,my true) and it’s you are whatever a moon has always meant and whatever a sun will always sing is you

Each page you turned to gave you smooth velvet words that someone very clearly wanted to direct at you, each getting more intimate than the last. Every poem you read sent more blush to your face until you were positive another word would have you passing out.

I love your lips when they’re wet with wine And red with a wild desire; I love your eyes when the lovelight lies Lit with a passionate fire. I love your arms when the warm white flesh Touches mine in a fond embrace; I love your hair when the strands enmesh Your kisses against my face.

Honeyed words of Shakespeare and Dickinson forced your heart to pump faster in your chest than you ever thought possible. Though your body really did feel like it might collapse under the affection the poems held, you couldn’t stop yourself from flipping through. Even though it was clear these poems weren’t written for you, the slightest implication that someone could think so highly of you had your head spinning. Before long, you were skimming the last marked page, barely able to catch your breath.

I crave your mouth, your voice, your hair. Silent and starving, I prowl through the streets. Bread does not nourish me, dawn disrupts me, all day I hunt for the liquid measure of your steps.

A loud roar of Belphegor’s name shook you out of your love-stricken trance. Slamming the book shut as if you’d been caught doing something wrong, you listened to the hasty, angry footsteps of Satan right outside your door. The closer he got, you could hear his heavy breathing as he fought to contain his anger. “Where is that book? I know you were the last person in my room!”

Though the thought of being on the receiving end of Satan’s anger was enough to send you running, you slowly cracked open your door and peered out. Satan immediately whipped his head around to look at you, softening just a bit in an effort to let you know that you weren’t what he was after.

In a timid voice, you asked, “Which book would you happen to be looking for?”

“It was a collection of poems. You wouldn’t have happened to see it, would you?”

Taking a deep breath, you opened the door all the way and held the book out to him. Snatching it out of your hands, Satan widened his eyes at the tabs. “Did you-”

“It was like that!” You defended. Satan realized you were jumpy and slowly inhaled, willing himself to calm down before you continued. “It was on my bed when I came home.”

With a gruff hum, Satan nodded at your explanation before flipping through the marked pages. “It’s alright, (Y/n). It’s not your fault. I’m positive Belphie was the one who took it since he was-”

Stopping mid-sentence, Satan flushed a deep red once he read which poems were marked to be read. “O-oh,” He murmured, pulling at his sweater collar and clearing his throat. “This is...these are pretty romantic, huh?”

“Well, it is a love poem collection,” You offered helpfully with a shrug. As if he didn’t believe you, Satan looked at the cover himself.

“I hope you didn’t mistake my intent. I didn’t mean for this book to end up in your care.”

“Ouch,” You hissed through your teeth. “Aren’t you a heartbreaker?”

Satan’s eyes widened before he furrowed his brows and backed a few steps away. “No, that’s not what I- I didn’t mean it like that.” Heaving a sigh, he placed a hand on his chest and shut his eyes as he scowled. “Thank you for returning it to me. Have a good day.”

Satan turned on his heel and walked briskly away, leaving you to chuckle at the empty space before retreating back to your room. On your bed, beneath where the book was, lay a green sticky note you had missed in the excitement. Picking it up, you saw a note scrawled in messy handwriting that made you question just how genuine these advances were.

I’m not the best at expressing myself with words. Maybe if I borrow the words of others, you can finally know how I feel.

---

The pattern continued for a few days, with each brother falling victim to one of Belphie’s tricks. Each time, they managed to fluster themselves to impossible standards, aside from Asmo who insisted he never sent you that love letter and don’t you know how beautiful his handwriting is like the rest of him? Oh, but if a love letter was what you were after, he’d send mountains and mountains until you just couldn’t resist him anymore-

By that time, you had gently shut the door in his face and jogged back to your room, just as red as the rest of the brothers were when it was their time to be the victim. Belphegor even managed to send you an email with a fake account with a name so similar to Lucifer’s you almost didn’t catch the differences. By that time, you saw through his jokes and simply asked:

You: Really? An email? [email protected]: What? He’s such a loser that I wouldn’t put it past him.

Even now, over a week since the last incident, Mammon was shouting in the hall as he kept running circles around himself, demanding Belphie to stop making advances on his human and to stop making him look like a fool. Without fail, Belphie always asked, “Oh? Is it foolish to think highly of the human?” Mammon was sent into a new frenzy every time.

By the time they were finished, you were exhausted just from listening to their incessant bickering. Mammon had scurried off, desperate to hide his embarrassment, while Belphie slumped down on the couch next to you and gave you a lazy grin. This time, you couldn’t bring yourself to return it. The antics had to stop.

“I think you should stop using me as a tool to mess with your brothers,” You said, not yet unpausing the show you were watching before the fighting started. Belphie scrunched his face and looked at you without moving his head.

“No can do. It’s too fun to see how desperately they try to save your honor from themselves. Idiots.”

Cringing at the insult, you continued, “Okay, but can you stop with the love advances? It’s a bit...much.”

Finally moving, Belphie turned his head to give you a scrutinizing look you didn’t understand before relaxing back into the couch. “Sure,” He answered humorlessly, tone dry and brittle with what was, to you, misplaced disgust. “It was losing its charm anyway.”

Now he was sulking, and you had half a mind to press play and just ignore his bitter mood. Still, you didn’t mean to make him pout, even if you had no idea where it came from and therefore weren’t exactly responsible for the shift. Sighing, you turned your back on him and leaned back, moving so your head was resting on his slumped chest. Without sparing you a look, Belphie reached his slim finger up and slowly carded them through your hair, making no effort to comb any tangles and deciding to ruffle it instead.

“I would like to know what’s got you in such a sour mood,” You said bluntly, turning your head to watch Belphegor stare at the ceiling blankly. Other than the occasional slow blink, you would have thought he had fallen asleep with how long it took him to respond. You knew better than to think he was ignoring you - he was either thinking of an answer he was satisfied to give or teasing you, seeing how long you’d wait for him and then pointing out how much you must value what he has to say if you’d wait that long.

“You enjoyed it too much,” He finally said, keeping his gaze from yours.

“I enjoyed it?” You repeated, narrowing your eyes. “I can assure you, I enjoyed none of what happened.”

“The fighting, maybe,” He agreed. “But I heard you tell Levi you thought it’d be sweet if he had texted you. I saw your face when you thought the poems were from Satan.”

“You were there?” Trying to remember the scene with Satan, you ran a hand partially through your hair and rested your palm on your forehead.

“The love letter, the gift basket, everything- you enjoyed it before you realized it was fake.”

“Belphegor, where were you?” You asked, knowing he would ignore your question. How many other times had he been secretly watching you without your knowledge? The thought made you shiver.

Clearly disgruntled, Belphegor growled at your questions before rolling his eyes. “At first I was just messing with you, but I never would have guessed you would sooner take sweet nothings from the mouths of fools before you’d ever take the real deal from me when I offer it out to you.”

Blinking rapidly, you felt your face warm and your heartbeat stutter for the thousandth time this week. “You...you never offered me anything,” you answered dumbly. Displeasure flickered across Belphie’s face before he sighed again and slumped further down, forcing your head down with him.

“Of course I didn’t. The others did, but not me,” He replied in such a way that barely hid the frustration in his tone, but the irony he was lamenting was lost on you. Sitting up, you shifted to sit on your knees and bent over Belphie to look at him.

“What are you talking about?” You asked. Belphie turned his head away, but you grabbed his cheeks and gently pulled them towards you so he could face you directly. “Belphie, tell me what you were trying to do.”

For a moment, Belphie wondered if he could just slump out of your grasp and lock himself back in the attic, clear by the pondering expression he wore on his face. You squished his face a little tighter, just enough to keep him in place and speak up. “I guess...I was hoping you would think the love letters and everything were from them and you’d reject them.” He looked to the side to avoid the pity you couldn’t hide on your face, his gaze unintentionally hardening. “Why didn’t you reject them? You should have rejected them.”

“I knew it wasn’t real! I was just trying to make them feel better,” You defended. Swiping your hand away from him, Belphie lifted himself up so he was sitting straight and crossed his arms, the image of a petulant child. “Is this...is this your version of a confession?”

Though he did his best to maintain his glare, Belphie couldn’t fight the light pink that tinted his cheeks. “So what if it is?”

Thoroughly pleased with yourself, you sat back on your heels and pretended you needed to mull things over. His hair was covering his eye and he kept his head turned away from you, but you could feel Belphie’s pensive gaze on you as you made your decision. Grinning and leaning closer, you asked, “Is this another prank?”

You felt his cold hands on either side of your face before you even saw him move. He glowered at you with no heat, putting on an upset show. If anything, he was more upset that you insisted on teasing him when you were so nice to the others. “If you can look at me and say you think I’m pranking you right now, you really are just a stupid human.”

Your grin widened. “A stupid human you’d have no qualms about kissing, though, right?”

There was no need to answer you with words when showing you was much more enjoyable.

#obey me #obey me shall we date #obey me belphegor #swd belphegor #obey me swd #belphegor #belphegor x reader #belphegor x mc #belphegor fluff #obey me imagines #long post #my fics #belphegor writing #satan writing #mine

[queerenteen]

If you had to choose one from the Girl Next Door story, who would it be? Tell me a little about them?

I'm going to cheat a little here and talk about a relationship instead--Aria Shah and Kaira Bal are the sapphics I needed to see so I wrote about them instead.

They met when they were thirteen and had this academic rivalry that lasted for years before they started getting closer in the last year before senior secondary.

They danced around each other for months before Aria finally snapped when she saw Kaira at the farewell after-party because she had been reduced to 'hopeless lesbian with i kissed a girl and i liked it playing in a loop in her head after she saw her crush in a pretty dress'.

They go to different schools in neighbouring cities because they have very different college plans but it's still very wholesome to have them constantly glued to their phones and randomly giggling and blushing.

Here, have some snippets from the chapters I'd written back then:

"Morning sunshine," said Aria sarcastically, as Kaira rubbed her eyes.

"Stop," said Kaira, pulling down the hem of her pastel green top that said: biologists take cell-fies, complete with a chibi cell holding a selfie stick.

"I will take back this mocha frappe," said Aria, and Kaira made grabby hands for the take-out cup.

She placed the cup on the table, throwing her arms around Aria, the momentum enough to make her lose her balance.

Kaira caught her by the waist, both of them in a poor mimicry of a waltz dip--Aria in her travel clothes, her hand pressed against Kaira's shoulder blades, and Kaira deprived of her caffeine, but they made it work.

"Morning sunshine," said Aria, fondly this time and Kaira's heartbeat off-rhythm in her chest.

"Morning, jingle," said Kaira with a giggle, pulling her back onto her feet, and Aria groaned.

.

The other let out half laughs, half sighs but Kaira's eyes were wider as she pressed her lips together.

Aria sent her a worried glance through the hallway window and Kaira knocked her knuckles against the glass twice.

The tension melted out of Aria's shoulders and she brushed her fingers against the class as she walked, brief enough to be an accident but there were only a few millimetres of glass separating her skin from Kaira's.

Kenna was the only one who noticed, the others too busy to see the edge of Kaira's lips quirk into a smile.

Oh.

She leaned back into her seat, satisfied. So that's what that was all about.

.

sleepless_siren

fine

zayn has a crush on neil

queenofthenight

damn i thought you were going to tell me something i didn't know

sleepless_siren

you knew???

queenofthenight

i'm actually surprised you even figured it out

sleepless_siren

what's that supposed to mean?

queenofthenight

kai, i literally had to almost make out with you in a bathroom

to get you to realise that i liked you

sleepless_siren

fair...

.

From: Aria

To: Kaira

"I want to do with you what

spring does to cherry trees."

(Pablo Neruda)

Kaira

Did you mean to send this to me?

Aria

No, I send poetry to every girl I meet

Kaira

Read it again

Aria

Oh, *fuck*

Fuck.

Kaira

Thought so

.

"I'm so proud of you, Kai," said Aria, and Kaira felt herself melt back into her chair, letting the words wash over her. "You deserve it."

"You're only saying that because you did better than me," said Kaira, but her voice was thick and she was blinking far too much.

There was a shout in the background and Aria sighed. "I'll call you soon," said Aria.

Kaira desperately wanted to talk to her, to do nothing other than listen to her voice and recount their days--even with the hundreds of miles between them.

"Okay," she said instead, soft and hesitant. "Have fun."

"Bye, Kai," said Aria and then the line was cut, leaving Kaira to hug the phone to her chest.

#i never thought these snippets would see the light of day #but i'm glad they are #rey's ocs #the girl next door #mal tag

[baekchelor]

𝕕𝕒𝕪𝕤 𝕠𝕗 𝕕𝕖𝕔𝕖𝕡𝕥𝕚𝕠𝕟

pairings: George Mackay x reader genre: romantic comedy rating: pg13 synopsis: on the set of his new film, golden boy George Mackay learns a basic human truth: that the heart is deceitful above all things.

❝ i  love  you  without  knowing  how,  or  when,  or  from  where.❞                                                                                                                       —pablo  neruda

THREE | HEARTACHE & FAREWELLS ◄ ᴘʀᴇᴠ

Daisy (against Geo's wishes) flies to Mumbai a little over a month into the shoot. Dharma is extending its filming period to six weeks, just as Alma predicted, so although George's left scenes are few, Daisy still gets to see him in action when —without an invitation, she arrives on set.

"I said I'd meet you at the hotel," he says as he greets her once Greta wrapped George’s last take for the day.

It's him and two other actors for this particular scene, in which Edmund reveals amidst the chaos of the Indian rebellion, he's well aware of James' feelings towards his wife.

Y/N is back at The Taj, probably still asleep. It is her free day, and George has come to learn the girl cherishes snooze above all things good. She'd rather stay in her Pj's and dreamland instead of strolling across Mumbai's beaches.

Daisy pecks George on the cheek, and a few of the staff members milling around them exchange curious glances. As far as George knows, no one but Dean and his sister, know about the friends-with-benefits situation with Daisy. And as far as he's concerned, everyone on the crew (except maybe Dev Patel. George suspects he's got a crush on Y/N too) were rooting and gossiping about Geo and Y/N's potential to become an item. So of course, they all seem taken aback with the unknown blonde wrapping her arms around George’s shoulder blades.  

"I wanted to surprise you," Daisy whispers into his ear, standing on her tiptoes.

She's smiling up at him now, a complexion like peaches and cream, and George can make out signals of uncertainty in her expression. Daisy still looks as lovely as he remembers, yet not as beautiful as his lovely one. It hits him just then, how easily Y/N's smile can melt him down —and how, at this moment, Daisy's smile only makes him feel guilty.

"We're okay, aren't we, Georgie?" There it is again: the minimal furrowing of her brow, the vulnerable pull in her mouth. "You've just been busy, haven't you?"

He smiles back as tenderly as he can to reassure her. It seems to work because her features illuminate.

"Yeah," He puts his arm around her, the protectiveness of it a habit. Might this be how Y/N feels with Henry? "Come on. Let's go to The Taj."

Daisy's booked a separate room, of course. She even checked in at a completely different floor. George knows she's here on a mission, and she's going to try to spend at least one night in the same bed as he; but for some reason, it feels wrong to have a girl in the same mattress Y/N has fallen asleep, read books and talk to him about everything and nothing.

"Let's go out to dinner tonight," Daisy is wearing her hair down today, the way George likes it best. "Tell Y/N/N to come too. With a date, if she likes." Her expression slides into something conspiratorial. "She shouldn't have any trouble finding one by seven, right?"

"I don't see why she would," George manages to say, feeling the weight of it sink into his chest.

Things haven't been strange between him and Y/N. Not at all. Not if George ignores the razor-sharp awareness that prickles over his skin every time Y/N sits a little too close, so their thighs touch, or looks at her for a moment too long, so he catches that question Y/N never asked still lingering in her gaze.

Daisy is waiting expectantly, so against his inner-self will, and in an effort to prove God-knows-what to himself, George takes his phone and types out a message:

Two hours later, Y/N replies, and George realises he didn't clarify the fact that the Daisy in the matter isn't his sister but his friend. He doesn't want to let her know he has a physical relationship with a girl via text, so he opts to break the news before they walk into the restaurant.

George wipes off his lips with the corner of a table napkin. He keys in the name of the establishment, the time of their reservation and puts his phone away. Daisy sips her white wine, lashes thick and eyes reserved for him, and the likeness George would generally feel is overpowered by unease.

Much to George's dismay, Dev Patel —the other man in the crew who's also from London and can be referred to as London Boy (yes, George is still investigating if the nickname is reserved for him and if Y/N likes Taylor Swift)— is whom she brings as a date. He's much taller than her, the height difference more pronounced since Y/N is wearing flat sandals. The dress on Daisy is similar to the cobalt mini-dress loosely falling from Y/N's shoulders. Yet Daisy only manages to look almost —almost— as beautiful in George's eyes.

When Dev and Y/N walk into the restaurant together, her hand tucked around his arm, George experiences the tell-tale clench of disappointment. However, his inner self knows better, disappointment might be one of the many symptoms, but the most prominent is jealousy.

<< So there's a new London Boy. >>

"Y/N Y/L/N!" Daisy trills. "I'm so glad to finally meet you."

"Hello... Daisy?" Y/N replies with a discreet smile. She looks over at George, wondering why this Daisy is not the one she expected to encounter, this Daisy doesn't smile in the exact same way George does, and this Daisy is one Y/N hasn't ever heard about. George wants to apologize, entwine their hands and explain the long thread of misconceptions that took place since that one call in George's suite, but he knows this is not the place nor the right time to do it.

"Dev," London Boy #2 greets, extending his palm to shake Daisy's. George is grateful. "Are you George's girlfriend?

George is not grateful anymore.

Dev's eyes shine, he directs to George, "She's gorgeous, man."

"We're not a couple, actually."

"Oh."

"Yeah, we're complicated," Daisy ripostes.

George smiles at him half-heartedly, his gaze drifting immediately to Y/N's face. The studied neutrality on it, which every movie star learns to uphold in front of a press line —only to drop the facade when they're out with friends—, is what makes every trace of that half-smile disappear completely.

"What is it?" Daisy whispers as George pulls out her seat for her. No matter the situation, he is a gentleman.

George bends, so her lips are at the level of his ear. "What is what?"

Y/N catches the movement, and their eyes meet from across the table.

Daisy puts her little hand on George's bicep. "Why do you look so..." Y/N is staring at him, "...so sad?"

George's answer is stolen when charming Dev pulls out Y/N's chair for her. George has shared enough time with Dev on set, howbeit, he didn't realise how...touchy he is when he expresses his attention. The moment he is seated and Y/N smiles next to him, he brushes his fingers over her cheek and the corner of her mouth, with careful attention. Y/N isn't looking at George anymore.

On cue, George tears his eyes away too. "I don't know what you mean," he tells Daisy breezily, pressing his lips to her temple and sliding into his seat in one smooth movement. It's a dick move, he knows, but he has never felt so jealous in his whole life; thus, he cannot get a proper hold of his emotions.

Daisy is smart, intuitive, George is sure she doesn't buy his excuse when her hand cautiously removes itself from his arm and comes to fidget in her lap.

"Georgie..." she tries again, under her breath. Dev taps Y/N on the chin, and she responds with a tiny smirk.

Fuck it. George swallows harshly. There is a bitter taste in his mouth he can't seem to get rid of, not even after his second sip of scotch. "Everything is fine, Daisy."

But Daisy won't stop eyeing him after that. Long, searching looks from behind her menu and wine glass; quick, puzzled glances she tries to play off when Dev draws her into the conversation. When she reaches for it, George permits her to wrap her little hand around him under the table, but he doesn't squeeze back.

Y/N focuses her attention on Dev, letting her feed things to her off his plate with his fork and placing her hand between his shoulder blades when he murmurs a question into her waiting ear. It might be due to the same reason as George allows Daisy to hold his hand, or it might be because she is as angry as George suspects.

Dinner runs long, even though George can't remember anything that was discussed from the arrival of the breadbasket to the departure of the dessert plates. Only the cut of Y/N's lips, the bump of her chest when she breathes, her entire face in perpetual profile.

After picking at her food and swilling way too much chardonnay for her unlined stomach to handle, Daisy gets drunk. You've got to be kidding me, crosses George's mind before he's practically forced to piggyback Daisy out of the restaurant, into Tha Taj's elevator and to his room. She hooks her chin over his shoulder.

"Have fun tomorrow," Y/N susurrates. Dev has his palm at the small of her back, and George wants to slap it away.

"I'm sorry," George starts to say, but drunk Daisy surprises him by biting down gently on the juncture of his neck and shoulder. If he were not a good boy, a good London Boy, George would have dropped Daisy off his back. He wants her gone, now, yet he understands Daisy is at an awkward position, and he hasn't helped at all. George should be honest with her, how come, though? If he hasn't been honest with himself.

As an answer, Y/N shakes her head, dismissing the matter. She forces a smile, George can tell, it's the same expression he writes on his face when he's tired and annoyed and still has to stop to take photos at an Award Show. "Good night, heartbreak prince," Y/N murmurs.

That strikes a chord. George whips his face around, baffled. First London Boy, now Heartbreak Prince. He can't remember it as clear, but his sister repeatedly plays a particular album when she bakes, it is the same record London Boy belongs too, and a certain song, phrase, quote, lyric, contains those two words Y/N just told him: Heartbreak Prince.

Greta gives George the day off. The rumour has spread that a beautiful and clingy visitor surprised him on set yesterday. George hadn't asked for special treatment, but Gerwig insists.

"Show your girl around," the director says over the phone, in the sage tone of a mother. He can't help but correct her, Daisy is not his girl, merely a friend. Greta laughs, maintaining her position, "I'll film the scenes you aren't in. Marina and Edmund (George frowns at it, he doesn't want Michael Fassbender kissing his girl. But at least it is not Dev Patel), falling in love. I had their scenes programmed in two days, I'm just going to advance it. We'll survive without you for a day, prince."

Prince?

And again, he tortures himself with his endless theories about London Boy and Heartbreak Prince. He tells Daisy he's tired, so they reclude on his suite. To show Daisy around feels like betraying Y/N, he visited every landmark on the city with her, and he doesn't want to corrupt the memories by bringing a girl who's not her.

George pours Daisy a cup of coffee. She slept in his bed last night after he'd gently unzipped her dress and slipped one of his sleeping shirts over her head. George fell asleep in a chair by the bed, watching her breathe and feeling like a terrible person. 

"Are you sure you don't want to go out? You shouldn't miss Mumbai's wonders because of me..." George comes to her side, handing her the cup, which she sets down on the nightstand. Then she holds out her arms, so he knows to crawl back into bed with her.

"I came here to be with you," she says, pulling him down until he's half on top of her. Her fingers thread through his hair on cue, but now the gesture lacks the confidence it used to have behind it. George doesn't know what makes him kiss her on the collarbone, almost like he's asking for forgiveness, but he does it once, twice, before resting his cheek against her chest.

They only have sex towards the end of the day, after George has texted his sister concerning a Taylor Swift song —he thinks is— about a Heartbreak Prince. As the other Daisy dips a teaspoon in each of the tarts and cakes available on the in-room dining menu, his sister sends him a youtube link to a song called Ms Americana & The Heartbreak Prince. George doesn't play it, it would be weird if he pulled out his AirPods with Daisy in the room. Instead, he reads the lyrics.

Scrolling through the words, he comes to terms that the nicknames might be nothing but a coincidence. He is indeed from London, and if anybody saw the way Daisy' stared at him at yesterday's dinner, they would have called him Heartbreak Prince as well. But another part of him, really wants it to be premeditated. He wants to be the London Boy, and he wants to be the boy Y/N thinks of when —if— she listens to Taylor Swift sing: you know I adore you, I’m crazier for you.

At dusk, when Daisy slides her hand up the back of his shirt, scratching lightly down his spine, George knows what she wants. She keeps her eyes open like she wants to memorise the expression on his face as he divests her of her underwear and pulls her body against his. Her mouth tastes like strawberries.

Daisy was never very vocal in bed. Whenever they get together, which is often because who's George kidding, that's basically the purpose of a no-strings-attached relationship, she muffles her moans into his shoulder or trades them for delicate gasps. The look of pure, unadulterated pleasure on her face expresses more than any sound could. Tonight, on the contrary, as he moves over her, she cries out uninhibitedly, like she doesn't care if anybody hears. Like she would just keep going even if someone came knocking on the door demanding her to shut the fuck up.

"Daisy," George forces out in the heat of it all, brows furrowed. "Am I hurting you?" And even as he says it, he hopes, so fervently, that Y/N is still out filming, not alone in her room next door, privy to their noise. It makes him sick to his stomach. The fact that he's thinking about someone else —another girl— when Daisy is wet and naked beneath him. "Tell me if I'm hurting you."

"Not like this," Daisy mumbles.

The cryptic nicknames are still running through George's mind when he's led to a chair and simultaneously seen to by hair and makeup. Daisy left this morning, much to George's relief. The feeling doesn't last long. He knows he should expect it by now (They shoot ninety per cent of their scenes together, for god's sake) but that doesn't stop him from jerking in surprise at the sweet sound of Y/N's voice. It sends his stomach into knots, and he swears he can feel something fluttering around.

"Hello," is all she says as she climbs into the makeup chair opposite George's. The stylists enveloped her in a white lace ruffle gown. Her dyed black, long hair has been placed into two victory rolls at either side of her head. It makes her look like a fucking angel and there, right there, is that wretched question in her eyes.

George folds his lips to wet them. "Long time no see, Gorgeous." He ventures, because his research told him it is also a Taylor Swift song, and maybe she'll take the sign that he has discovered her little riddle —if it even exists.  

"It's only been a day," Y/N giggles. "But I know what you mean."The tinge of longing behind it does not go unnoticed. 

"I didn't know about you and Dev," George ventures, because he can't help himself. "I guess it really is off this time with Henry."

"It's been over for a while, Geo." Y/N looks over, and the heat of her innocent gaze sets every single bump on George's spine on fire. "And Dev is just–"

"Are you sleeping with him?" George butts in.

Y/N's eyes darken. She’s clearly mad, and with the right to, what the fuck is wrong with him? "No. I'm not sleeping with him and its none of your business." Her voice is sharp and hollow, and George can only think about how even though he just screwed up, he can still get the girl. That, until Y/N continues, "Only one of us has bedded someone since we got to Mumbai, and it isn't me."

George flushes, swift as a sea swell. "You heard us?"

"I didn't have to," Y/N replies dryly.

Then, just like the first day they'd met, at the read-through in London, she seems to sense that she's said too much, and her mouth —that perfect, kissable mouth, stills over the last word. She shifts in her seat.

"I'm sorry," she mutters. "That was inappropriate of me."

"I'm sorry, too," George offers in return. Everything about the apology is melancholic.

"For what?"

"Thinking you were sleeping with him." After a pause, he continues, “And telling you about it. That was really disrespectful.”

But that's a lie. George is sorry for so many other things. He apologizes because he feels like he's just cheated on someone, and worse, on someone who's not even with him. Call him coward, George doesn't want to ruin what they have. What if she isn't over Henry? What if things don't work between them and they can never go back to this?

He doesn't know how long they sit in silence; it could be three minutes, it could be thirty. The hairstylists and makeup artists have long finished their work and proceeded to the craft service table. The crew is having technical difficulties today, something about the street’s uncooperative lighting. From behind them, George can make out an intense discussion on veganism between two of their co-stars (one plays Marina's maid, and the other plays Clint, a soldier who's close friends with James). Tomorrow, the girl and two other actors who portray Marina's parents will fly back to London, having completed their scenes in Mumbai.

George and Y/N, along with the rest of the actors who interpret Marina's love interests and Clint, will stay on for another six days to complete theirs.

"When I was dating Henry," Y/N says out of the blue, her voice stumpy but clear over the din of production. George smiles at the past tense she employs. "Someone else tried to confess his feelings for me."

"Just one person?" George is not in the teasing mood, so his smirk is lukewarm. He wants to thin the heavy sensation in the air around them. "I find that hard to believe."

"So did I," Y/N continues, "because we were really close friends."

That's not what George had meant, nor what he had been expecting. He wanted her to giggle, laugh even, not to feel like she's speaking to him. Maybe she suspects George fancies her, and this is her way to prevent him from going further.

"Oh." It takes a little time for him to formulate a better response. Y/N waits, or at least, that's what it feels like. "How did it happen?"

She picks at her fingernails, "He told me at a dinner party."

“What's a dinner without a little drama," George says, referring to their dinner with Daisy and Dev, just to fill in the static.

"After dinner, the cast was supposed to head to a bar and him, Booboo, said he wanted to drive with me."

"Booboo…” The name is too singular not to recognize. "Booboo Stewart?"

"Yes," she confirms. Y/N's fingers curl in the lacey fabric of her dress. "We walked to the parking lot together. And just like that, he began to tell me."

A chill treads lightly over George's nape. "What did he say?"

"Nothing," Y/N takes a deep, deep breath and releases it, like something in it has pained her. "I shut him down so fast. " Y/N's mouth sets in a grim line. "I asked him if he enjoyed the dinner, and all in a rush changed the subject to Henry and how good our relationship was at the moment...'"

"And what did he say?" George whispers. His heart is pounding out a hazardous beat.

"He didn't say a word," she tells him. "His face just crumpled, right there in front of me, and I felt so terrible." Y/N tugs at the snug, starched silver necklace she’s wearing as if it's part of the problem. "He was pretty much my best friend among the cast, you know? So I just pretended it never happen. I wanted him to know I still considered him a friend."

George can already see where this is going.

"But after that night, things just turned so weird between us," Y/N says. She's not looking at George, it only adds to his unease. "We couldn't rescue our friendship."

"It ruined it..." George murmurs.

The girl exhales, and it's as pained as it had been earlier. Her eyes have mellow considerably, and finally, she stares right into George's blue eyes. They don't exchange words for a while, their gazes seem to hold enough meaning. George is scared, frightened really, but he still manages to ask what intrigues him.

"Why," his throat works. "Why are you telling me this story?"

"I don't know." Y/N's voice falters, and George waits for the worst. Instead, she says something George didn't expect: "I guess because, recently, I feel like I'm Booboo, trying to say something and getting cut off before I can."

"If you're Booboo," George says, with a twinge, "then who is you?"

The look on Y/N's face is bewildered; soft and yielding too, like overheated butter.

There is a fifty per cent chance —George thinks to himself—, that she won't say what he wants her to say; rather, she will name the London Boy whose hair is black and eyes are brown. That leaves a fifty per cent chance —he continues thinking—, that Y/N will say what George wants her to say. And that is his name.

It is you, George.

"All right!" Greta bellows from the centre of the car park. Y/N snaps to attention, and the spell binding them together is broken. "Lighting issue addressed. We're ready for you!"

Inside, George's organs have turned to quicksand, caving into themselves speck by speck.

"That's us," Y/N says, hopping out of her chair. "Thanks for letting me ramble over my ridiculous stories," she laughs, and it rings with nerves.

George gets up too. "I like your stories," he mutters, suddenly thinking about closure and the different definitions it would hold for him, for Daisy, for Y/N and for, now happy (he hopes), Booboo Stewart.

"Excuse me?"

George didn't realize he wanted to tell someone so severely until Dean called and asked him about his time in Mumbai, his scenes for Dharma, and if he had won the bet. "You did. I liked it. Kissing Y/N."

"Are you telling me?”

"I want her." No filter. "I think I'm infatuated with her."

"Wow." Nothing is masking Dean's shock. "Wow. All this time, I was having a blast teasing you about it, because you're not the kind of man that falls for his co-star, but...wow." He chokes out a laugh. "You won't be a bachelor anymore, huh?"

"Won't I?" George says miserably. "Nothing is going to happen, Dean."

"Have you talked to her about it?"

"No." He and Y/N only talk in riddles. "It doesn't matter, either way, because I won't ruin our friendship."

"I understand," Dean puts in. For the first time in many months, George can tell his friend is being wholly serious. "But can things really go back to the way they were now that you know?"

"Now that I know...what?" A question for a question. It's always been a bad habit of George.

Dean spells it out for him with impatience. George can imagine him rolling his eyes, sick of him, "That you have these feelings for her." He exhales. "I hate to be the one to break this out for you, but if you don't tell her how you feel and she goes back to Henry or dates someone else, do you know how will that make you feel?" Dean barrels on, not bothering to stop for breath. "Ridiculous! Full of regrets! Like you lost her when you had the opportunity to be with her, right there in front of you. Idiot."

George grips his phone a little tighter. "I won't get hurt. And I have Daisy." He's gritting his teeth, molars digging into each other as he speaks. "She's a good girl, and she loves me, might give her a chance."

The silence is back, but only for a moment. "I understand you, Geo." It feels like their stations have been reversed, and Dean is age, and George is beauty. "Daisy is everything good." It's sad the way Dean says it, pitiful, even. "But you can't stay with people just because they're good. You stay with them because they are everything."

George tries to form a rebuttal to that, the leather case of his phone squeaking in his hand from how tightly he's grasping it. But he comes up empty, and he and Dean huff into the receiver at the same time.

The final scene of Marina and James is ironically, filmed on their last day in Mumbai. It is their reunion, where a wounded James comes back from England, unaware that Clint informed Marina about the injuries he suffered while fighting the rebellion, and that at the same fire in which Colonel Edmund lost his life, James lost his sight. Marina loves him and is finally able to be with him, even if Edmund is ashamed of the way his face, and body looks.

They're filming the whole thing at the Gateway of India. George remembers it well from the time they went to Elephanta and Y/N held onto his arm as if her life depended on it. George will remember it for another reason now: the end of a brief, bewitching chapter.

Greta Gerwig pulls his two leading stars into a meeting before she starts rolling. "I want to work with you two again," she says warmly. "I knew this movie was going to be a success when you both signed on."

They smile in turn, murmuring their thanks.

The director gets down to business, looking pleased as punch. "What I need you to do for me in this last scene is making me feel the longing." She squeezes her fists together with gusto. Then she looks at them with a smile painted on her thin lips. "I want it to feel like you're the only two people left in the world. Forget about the extras, and Aakesh looking at the scene. You don't see anybody else —George quite literally—, or hear anybody else, except the person in front of you, and how much you missed them while you were separated." Greta breathes in. "You think you can do that?"

"I'll try my best, Boss," Daniella says in earnest. George nods along, watching her. He wonders if Greta Gerwig, the screenwriter and the vastness of the universe are all conspiring against him.

George repasses his lines on his head, it's supposed to be a sign to the last time James and Marina saw each other —when they made love. The lines are the same, only said different, and George knows every single sentence James will speak to the woman he loves when he hears Greta Gerwig's "Action!"

George can hear the sound of his own breathing crisp in his ears. If he cuts his eyes, just so, to the right, he can make out the rosy swell of Y/N's lip.

"Can you love me like this?" he murmurs, chest heaving. The force of his real-life emotion slams into him like a concrete wall.

"Always" Y/N —no, it's Marina, Marina— thumbs over the still open scar that cuts from his right eye to his chin. Then, so slowly it aches, she kisses him.

There's a celebration party that evening at an Italian Restaurant. It's on the eighth floor of a midrise commercial building. From the window, George observes the rows and columns of flashy lights that crowd the horizon, blinding and unapologetic.

He and Y/N stick close together, preceding conversation for a silence that teems with unsaid things.

As the night winds down, and the people around them begin to file out in a wine-induced haze, George is emboldened enough to ask, "Can I sleep in your room tonight?" He knows how close he is to reveal himself (if George hasn't done it already), how inappropriate it is to ask that to a girl, and he doesn't give a shit. "For old time's sake."

"Uhm…yeah, no problem," Y/N answers. "Whatever you want." It's so simple, yet so loaded, and it makes George curl his toes inside his sneakers.

They take turns in the shower. George's brought his sleeping clothes and his toothbrush, the way he does when he goes over to Daisy's...but George stops the thought right there because he's decided to be selfish this final night. He's not going to think about her at all, neither about Henry or Dev Patel. Not even about the potential, this night has to ruin their friendship.

In the morning, when he flies back to London, everything will go back to normal anyway.

Y/N is already in bed when George emerges from the in-suite bathroom. She props himself up on her elbows when he shuts the bathroom door. Then she smiles, and she pats the space beside her, just like a friend would. It's the same side George had slept on when they'd taken that nap together.

"Did I wake you?" George asks, feeling warm and wistful.

"I wasn’t asleep" is Y/N's reply. "But I should be. Come on."

George feels the dip of the mattress under his backside. The linens guard fragrance of the detergent, and he senses the stillness of the air between his arm and Y/N's, under the covers, where they do not touch.

The girl turns over on her side. "We had a good time, didn't we?" Her breath fans over George's cheeks, toothpaste-fresh.  

"I had a blast." George stares at one of the switched-off ceiling lights. "I had so much fun working with you. And even when we weren't working," he adds in haste. "Every second of it."

Y/N is heavy-lidded, but not in a way that suggests lethargy. "The feeling," she says, "is mutual."

One, two, three, four, breathe. George tries to resist, tries to keep his head above water, but it's as if his body is on autopilot. He turns over on his side too, so he and Y/N can see each other's faces.

He lets the words breach his lips before he can change his mind. "Did Henry ever tell you how beautiful you are?"

It's enough to disrupt the assembly line of Y/N's slow, steady blinks. George loves the way her eyelids flutter, completely surprised. He files it away for the future when he can no longer see it up close.

Y/N's lips part. "Not recently."

"Take it from another man, then," he says with conviction. "You are beautiful."  

"You’re very handsome yourself," his companion mumbles.

George's heart pulses painfully. All right, George, it seems to chide. That's enough. That should be enough to last you.

It's like Y/N has read his mind: "We should get some sleep." She presses her lips together; they're moist at the centre from where she's darted out her tongue. "Early flight tomorrow."

"You're right," the boy agrees. And at that very moment, he feels impossibly reckless.

There's a surge of something potent behind his ribcage, and then he's leaning over and pecking Y/N's bottom lip —so softly, it could almost pass as innocent.

"Good night, Gorgeous," he whispers, bravado slipping a mile and minute. He doesn't look her in the eye. He only turns his body in the opposite direction and switches off the lamp on his nightstand.

The room falls dark.

When Y/N cautiously hooks an arm over his waist and keeps it there, it liquefies George's bones.

"Sweet dreams, Geo," she whispers into his nape. Her voice is defenceless, and it seems to suggest that Y/N isn't holding him to any promises. "Thank you for Mumbai," she tells him, and it breaks George's heart.

ɴᴇxᴛ ►

A/N: The next chapter is the last one, loves. xx 

#George mackay #George mackay x reader #1917 #william schofield #schofield #Thomas blake #blake #dean charles chapman #Henry cavill

[harrystylesandblackgirls]

[PART 2] Hailey Baldwin and Shawn Mendes Timeline - The End

So AFTER  the Met Gala it went to shit (at least for Shawn).

If you’re here after Part 1, you seen the comment Justin Bieber left on Hailey’s picture, this shows that he and Hailey were on good terms again and they started back talking....

(video) *that quote is from an article, I don’t use the word cringe*

May 23, 2018

Hailey tweeted this:

A fan replied:

This GQ Interview was done while he was still with Hailey and before she got back with Justin, so he didn’t get his heartbreak just yet.

Shawn saying he would date Hailey (we all know Hailey was the one that didn’t want to be in a relationship)

(video)

Another press interview

The way he strongly said he’s single was like he’s completely done with whatever he had with Hailey or just being friend zoned in general when he wanted more ... He looked nervous too, and the way he sat up after he said he’s single lol I think he was tired of  being asked about it in interviews

People believe Hailey’s tweet is about Justin and Shawn’s tweet is about himself and Hailey.

June 5, 2018

June 7, 2018 

Shawn performs “Perfectly Wrong” for the first time on James Corden and he was so into it, so emotional, almost look like he wanted to cry? We don’t know who that song is about specifically but some of the lyrics is so relatable  to his situation with Hailey at the time. So sad.

July 2, 2018 Shawn posted this on his Snapchat story. Gee! Can you guess who she is??

July 7, 2018 Hailey and Justin gets engaged in the Bahamas

July 8, 2018 News broke that they are engaged and Shawn found out this day like everyone else through the internet and he texted her congratulations.

July 9, 2018

(the post)

( of course he was hurt/sad but he’s not going to tell the whole world his true feelings over a girl who’s engaged and moved on).

July 13, 2018

Shawn got followed by paparazzi and the guy asked about Hailey and Justin. Shawn looked sad & annoyed and walked away to get away from paparazzi. He was going to cross the street but didn’t want to get asked questions about Hailey so it seems. He must’ve been so hurt.

An article and video was posted on Dailymail the next day about it.

Paparazzi: “What do you think about tha..Hailey and ahh Bieber thing? (meaning engagement)

Shawn: ignores him and immediately right then said to his bodyguard: “Let’s go back” (back inside, he was about to cross the street but I guess getting asked about Hailey made him uncomfortable)

Paparazzi: “What you think about the Bieber ahhh?” (engagement) (Shawn started biting his nails and kept walking off).

Video:

July 15, 2018

On Shawn’s Snapchat story when he was in his feelings over Hailey getting engaged to Justin he turned it up loud on the part  that says “he wasn’t good enough for her” fans were saying it’s obvious it’s about Hailey. (video)

A fan commented: “Did anyone else notice that he frantically turns up the song right when it says “he wasn’t good enough for her” @haileybaldwin”

August 8, 2018 in Variety Magazine Shawn’s says Hailey is, “One of the most beautiful souls I’ve ever met.”

September 12, 2018 Shawn still liking her pictures, still seems like (obviously) he isn’t 100% over her.

September 13, 2018

Hailey and Justin officially got married at a court house.

October 20, 2018

This is a visual played during a festival while Shawn performed “In My Blood” and the actors are portraying Shawn and Hailey. (I don’t know when this visual was created but it was shown during his performance..he was clearly not over Hailey)

November 7, 2018 Someone’s still in their feelings. And all you see in the media is Justin and Hailey traveling here and there.

November 8, 2018 Shawn liked this picture but it seemed to be the last one he liked in a long time. Progress. Moving on, or so we thought.

November 26, 2018 Shawn’s Rolling Stone interview comes out. But the interview took place back in August 2018

He acknowledges they were more than friends, but he’s still reluctant to call it a relationship: “I don’t even wanna put a title on it. I think it was more of a zone of limbo.”

Limbo = Doing things couples do (dates, holding hands, snuggle, have sex..) but still not officially in a relationship it’s like a “friends with benefits” type of thing.

Some on social media painted Mendes as a chump who got played by Baldwin, but he swears he’s not holding a grudge. “I get it, you know,” he tells me. “I texted Hailey, ‘Congratulations,’ and I really am happy for them. She’s still one of the fucking coolest people ever — she’s not just a beautiful person visually, but she’s one of the most beautiful hearts I’ve ever met.” It seems like he might be about to say something more about how it all went down, but he stops himself. “I think I’m an idiot to not, you know. . . . But you can’t control your heart.”

Mendes admits that the attention on his personal life has caused him a lot of stress. “I’d like to say I don’t care about it, but that’s not true,”

I think I’m an idiot to not, you know... = This can be seen in 2 ways. 

1, to not see that she’s still in love with someone else, and that she wasn’t into Shawn as much as Shawn was into her (that’s why she friend zoned Shawn.)

2. to not confess his love for her.

can’t control your heart = Hailey was still in love with Justin so she followed her heart.

November 27, 2018

January 14, 2019

January 27, 2019

On his instagram live he talked about falling in love and getting hurt from it , here’s the quote:

Also on live he recommended this song “still in love” he also recommended it a month before this live (December 2018) so he told us about it again. He said he always listens to it and that it gives him goosebumps every time he listens to it. It’s a great performance but also maybe he relates? it talks about wishing they could get over someone and that he’s still in love with her even though she’s with someone else.

Also here’s a video of his live if you wan’t to watch it

Shawn tries to open up to us but without saying it out loud, that’s why he writes subtle tweets and post lyrics instead of actually saying it, you gotta read between the lines, that’s how I know he loved Hailey he would call her “super special”  “sooooo sweet”, writing tweets about “love love love love” on her birthday after he sent her flowers… (her sister posted about it that’s how everyone knew) there’s soo much stuff on these 2 lol, AND when he said he would date her…yeah this is why it’s obvious “If I can’t have you” is written about her and how he can’t move on..

January 31, 2019

Days after he talks about heartbreak on his instagram live  he posted a lovey dovey poem on his instagram story  called “Your laughter” by Pablo Neruda (but he deleted it.)

February 7, 2019

Shawn liked these pictures of Hailey and Justin from their Vogue Magazine photoshoot.

February 19, 2019

So basically Hailey confirmed what I already knew, SHE WAS STILL IN LOVEEEE WITH JUSTIN WHILE WITH SHAWN! That’s why she didn’t want a relationship with Shawn. She said in an interview:

“It’s definitely scary to be this young and be married,” Hailey told Kendall on Zaza World Radio’s Valentine’s Day Special on Apple Music, according to E! News. “It’s a scary thing, but it’s also the person (Justin Bieber) that I’ve literally been in love with for so many years. So, that’s the best part about it. Like I feel like he’s my best friend. And we just get to do life together forever, now.”

She also called her and Justin’s past relationship what SHAWN CALLED HER AND HIS RELATIONSHIP, but Hailey put her explanation in details:

‘Hailey goes on to talk about her relationship with Justin before getting married.’

“We weren’t really together. It was this weird limbo. We were friends and then it was like more, and then we weren’t (and then we didn’t speak for a very long time).”

February 22, 2019

Hailey liked Shawn’s picture and then unliked it after fans were saying why is she liking her exes picture when she’s married now and she hasn’t like any of his pictures since.

March 6, 2019

Shawn liked a picture of Hailey (that Justin posted)

 Of course it made news every where

And Shawn hasn’t liked a picture of Hailey since.

May 2, 2019

Shawn’s song “If I can’t have you” comes out and after listening to the lyrics it’s 100% about Hailey 😢. You can tell he really liked her. Like he was in LOVE 100%.

Look at this lyric:

“Is it wrong for me to not want half

I want all of you

All the strings attached”

Mutual lyric:

 “But half of you’s not enough for me”

The song Mutual is also about Hailey.

👉LOOK AT THE GIRL IN THE VIDEO!!

The girl in the video has on Hailey’s style. The big hoop earrings she usually wears (even more specifically at Met Gala), the rings on her fingers are her go-to style (also like Met gala)) she even has the same body type and style of clothing she wears (like tomboy style). I mean 😳

He knows we’ll know it’s about Hailey

May 10, 2019

People think she was shading Shawn/ her exes. She posted a picture of her and Justin in the next story.

#shawn mendes #hailey baldwin #hailey bieber #justin bieber #shailey #timeline #shawn and hailey

[featherymalignancy]

                                Tender Jar: An Elriel Experiment          

                    “Like a jar you housed infinite tenderness, and the infinite                                              tenderness shattered you like ajar”

                                          -Pablo Neruda

Synopsis: Six months after the war, Elain is still mourning all that the cauldron took from her, and it’s only Azriel she trusts not to judge her for her brokenness. However, when she has a vision concerning both Lucien and Graysen, she steals her courage and braves first the Spring Court and then the Mortal World, Azriel at her side. When lines are drawn and Elain is pushed to her emotional limit, she must decide whether she will let her past shatter her or give in to the desires of her tender heart.

Warnings: Elriel with brief Elucien. NSFW. Contains some graphic depictions of sex and foul language, and minor violence.

See the Masterlist here

                                      Previously, on Tender Jar…

“I didn’t come here to suffer your abuse, Graysen.”

“Then why have you come?”

“To save your life. Please, won’t you let me help you, this one last time?”

Part VIII

Elain waited with clammy hands and a hammering heart as Graysen considered her proposal. She took refuge in the understanding that if he were going to outright refuse, he would have done it already, and the fact he hadn’t was a good sign.

Still, his sneer was still nearly unendurable, and both her throat and eyes ached from fighting her natural tendency to cry. She’d promised herself after what had happened with Azriel that she wouldn’t be weak in that way. It wasn’t an promise she intended to break, least of all for Graysen.

“Well?” she prompted finally, not sure how much longer she could bear to stand under his cold scrutiny. “What is your answer? Will you come with us?”

“You mean Vanserra is coming as well?”

At this his eyes lit up slightly, though she couldn’t for the life of her understand why. This was the part she’d been dreading to discuss. The jibes he’d already made about Lucien and Azriel had nearly broken what little control she still possessed; she wasn’t sure she was strong enough to weather many more.

“Of course. He’s—“

Graysen expression deadened.

“Your mate. Yes, I know; I hardly need reminding.”

Elain took a steadying breath, knowing that Graysen would gleefully take any ground she gave him on the matter.

“I was going to say Emissary to the Spring Court. It’s likely we’ll have to pass through Spring again, and I doubt we would be welcome there without him present.”

“Is that were you intend to keep me prisoner?”

“You won’t be a prisoner!” Elain bit out, her composure fraying. “You’ll be a guest in my sister’s territory until Azriel can figure out exactly what kind of danger you’re in.”

“The Night Court? That’s hundreds of miles to the North! You expect me to just spend the foreseeable following you and your filthy fae harem though enemy lands?”

“The fae are not your enemies,” Elain said, choosing to ignore the jape about Lucien and Azriel, which had had struck closer to the truth that she was comfortable admitting. “And we aren’t going to make the journey on foot. We’ll winnow to checkpoints.”

Graysen considered.

“What will be the route?”

Elain let out a frustrated whine.

“What does it matter? Either you accept my offer or you don’t. The particulars are irrelevant.”

“Of course they matter,” he snapped, the bite in his voice enough to make her flinch. “Unless I’m satisfied with what you tell me, I’m not going with you.”

“I don't know why!” she countered. “You’ve never even been to Prythian.”

However, when he answered her retort with a dead-eyed stare, she raised her hands in a gesture of defeat.

“We arrived by sea. I assumed we will journey back the same way, then winnow from Spring into Summer.”

“Summer? Why Summer?”

She narrowed her eyes. She couldn’t say exactly why, but his probative questions were churning up an uneasy dread in her gut.

“Because our only choices are Summer and Autumn, and Lucien’s relationship with Beron is—strained. Safer for us to winnow to Tamlin’s palace and cut a diagonal path to the Summer border.”

Graysen considered this, his expression still unpleasantly cool.

“Listen to you, playing at politics and war.”

She rolled her eyes, hoping he couldn’t see she’d done it to keep the frustrated tears at bay. It didn’t matter; when she turned back to look at him, she felt one slide down her cheek.

“Please, Graysen,” she said, swiping furiously at the tear. “Just—let us help you. After that, you never have to see me again if you don’t wish.”

Graysen clenched his jaw, but his gaze softened at what she was sure was her stricken expression.

“Please,” she repeated, not sure she loved or hated seeing the shadow of the man she’d almost married in his blue eyes.

They skated back and forth across her face several times, and for a terrifying second as she watched him raise a hand, she feared he would try and brush the wetness from her cheeks.

However, her apprehension must have showed, because after a moment he let his hand drop, his expression deadening again.

“Fine,” he said. “When do we leave?”

“Before first light, I’d imagine,” she said. If it was fire they were running from, they would have to steal away before Vassa was turned by daybreak.

“Fine,” he said again, turning away from her in obvious dismissal. “I’ll be ready.”

“I’ll come and fetch you when it’s ti—“

“No,” he interrupted, teeth slightly bared. “Send one of the others. I cannot bear to see any more of you this evening.”

She had let her guard slip in the course of their conversation, and Elain felt the cruel jibe as it struck her in the chest, sure as any physical blow. Instinctual tears crawled up her throat, and it was an effort to choke them down.

“Fine,” she echoed, turning towards the door before pausing with her fingers on the handle.

Despite the shards of their broken future still lying between them, some part of Elain had hoped they could have—

She shook her head. Could have what: Mended things? Found a way to be together? It was terrifying to admit, but she realized now that she no longer pined for that future. She’d let that hope go when she’d taken off her engagement ring, and though she knew she would be mourning what she’d lost this trip for some time, for the first time since she turned fae, Graysen would not figure into that sorrow.

She slipped from the room without another word, relaxing when she saw Lucien standing in the hall waiting for her. She felt a sharp spike of disappointment at the realization he was alone, but she willed it not to show in her face or scent.

“And?” he said mildly, offering her an arm to escort her back to her own chambers.

She forced a light laugh.

“As if you couldn’t hear every word we said to each other,” she teased, though she couldn’t quite manage to maintain the levity in her voice as she said it.

It hardly mattered; Lucien’s expression soured at her words, and she felt the muscles in his arms coiling in tense anticipation.

“It took everything in me not to break down the door and throttle him for the way he spoke to you,” he admitted.

“I’m grateful you didn’t. I don’t think his pride could have tolerated any more lessons in humility.”

She’d meant it as a joke, but it did little to brighten Lucien’s expression.

“Azriel had no right to do that,” Lucien said, face grim to the very brink of a sneer.

“Because it was my battle to fight?”

“Because if anyone was going to teach that prick a lesson for disrespecting you, it should have been me.”

She stiffened at this insinuated possession in his tone, and he let out a penitant sigh, squeezing her arm gently.

“Forgive me, I—“ He sighed. “That’s not what I meant. It’s just—I don’t like the liberties he seeks to take with you.”

Elain grappled with the words to assure Lucien that wasn’t why Azriel had done it, but whatever she might had said was drowned by the memory of Azriel’s body moving against hers, and his whispered admission the following day.

You are a very desirable female, and I…I am not blind.

“I can’t control Azriel’s behavior, nor do I wish to. If you want me to censure him for what happened, I will, but—“

“No,” Lucien said quickly, scrubbing a hand down his face as they reached her door. “Forgive me, Elain. Sometimes the bond makes me not quite myself. I never meant to suggest there anything untoward going on. I just—“

He paused, turning to face her fully.

“I know,” she assured him, and he gave a soft smile.

She often failed to appreciate just how beautiful he was, but in the low light, it was impossible to ignore. His full lips parted slightly as he studied her in turn, his throat working in a gesture of obvious restraint.

“Can I,” he began before clearing his throat and beginning again. “Elain, may I kiss you?”

Elain felt that small, inorganic piece of her trill to life at his request, beating under her skin like a second pulse. It thrummed with such intensity that she felt a heady nausea sweep over her. However, after a second of consideration she decided to appease it, just this once; to finally explore what it would be like to give herself wholly to its machinations.

Meekly, she nodded, and Lucien took both her hands in his as he leaned in, pressing her against the door as he pressed his mouth to hers. His lips were soft and warm as he applied slightly more pressure, and she made a soft noise into his mouth. Taking it as invitation, Lucien let his tongue brush hers, his hips pressing slightly closer as he guided one of her small hands over his hammering heart. The other she let slide into his auburn hair.

It was perhaps not the natural thing that kissing Azriel had been, nor did it set her on fire the same way, but their bond seemed to glow at the contact, urging her deeper into a beckoning beyond that, if she entered, she recognized might never release her again.

Hesitant to tip into the temptation of it, she pulled away slightly, her eyes fluttering open and snagging on a patch of particular darkness swirling near the end of the corridor. To anyone else it might have seemed a mere shadow, but Elain knew at once what it was, and she stiffened, the hand in Lucien’s silken hair falling lax to her side.

Lucien studied her face with concern, though he made no further move to touch her, and instead pulled back slightly.

“What is it?” he breathed, eyes still tracing her lips.

“Nothing,” she lied, fighting not to remember how at home she’d been in that very darkness. “It’s just been a long evening, is all.”

He nodded, brushing his knuckles down her cheek. The bond purred contentedly at the contact, even as Elain herself fought not to gently pull his hand away.

“Why don’t you rest?” Lucien suggested. "I will come and fetch you when it’s time.”

She nodded, and he brushed a hand down her hair.

“Were are you going?” she asked, reading the answer in his soft, slightly sad smile before he gave it.

“I want to speak to Vassa before we leave.”

She bit her lip.

“Lucien, you promised—“

“I know,” he said. “But she’s my friend; I just want to make sure she’s alright.”

Elain’s expression must have betrayed her unease, because Lucien let out a sigh.

“I won’t tell her,” he said, brushing a knuckle down her cheek. “You have my word.”

She nodded again, and—surprised—she couldn’t help but stiffen when he bent to kiss her farewell. Her scent must have changed, or Lucien noticed her discomfort, because at the last minute he turned to brush his lips to her cheek instead.

“Goodnight, m’elanned. Rest well.”

She nodded, unable to keep herself from glancing over his shoulder for the tell-tale darkness before retreating into her room and closing the door. To her surprise, neither Nuala nor Cerridwen were there to greet her. Too drained to go through her ablutions alone, Elain simply extinguished the lamp at her bedside and lay down.

Sleep came easily, but it was far from restful. She fell headfirst into a nightmare where she was once again in that camp in Hybern, having been lured there by Graysen’s voice. She sat alone, bound and shivering, as she tormented herself for her foolishness, or her all-consuming desire to win the forgiveness he never intended to give her.

She felt the darkness, the desperation, closing in as she sat and waited for her fate to manifest. Would they torture her? Kill her? Give her to one of the soldiers for entertainment? She’d heard two guards discussing it outside the tent in sickeningly detail, and the thought had her stomach twisting in agonizingly knots.

Even in her dream she felt her heart begin to race as she heard soft footsteps, and she tensed as two figures appeared silhouetted by the fae lamp burning in the small antechamber. She made to scream into her gag, but as she looked again, she noted the outline of great wings, and a second later Feyre and Azriel were there, the latter bending to gently remove the strip of cloth they’d shoved into her mouth.

“Are you hurt?” he murmured, eyes skidding back and forth across her face in concern.

Elain would never forget how gentle he’d been with her that day, or how queer that tenderness had seemed against the cold rage he hadn’t been able to entirely hide.

She could still smell his cool scent as it cascaded over her, as he slung her bound hands around his neck and she knew she was safe.

She twisted in her sleep, and suddenly the memory faded, and she was with Azriel in the sky. Somehow she seemed to sense that they’d shifted into the present. She could see the pain and shame in his eyes, expression haunted and sad the same way it had been when she brushed off his touch earlier.

“Elain,” he began, “I—“

Then he screamed, a sound of shredding agony and fear as a dagger, which had appeared from nowhere, slammed into his chest. He roared again as his wings went slack, and suddenly they were tumbling down, down, down…

Elain bolted up, her cheeks slick with tears as her heart hammered. A vision. That had been a vision, she was sure of it. And Azriel…

She leapt from bed, not stopping to wonder at the mess she must have looked as she scrambled from the room and all but flew to Azriel’s door, banging on it like a fiend possessed by the Dark God.

He answered a moment later, his expression melting from confusion to concern as he took her in.

“Elain, what—“

“You need to go back to Velaris,” she said in greeting, brushing past him into the room as she began to pace, clenching and unclenching her hands to keep herself distracted, keep herself from falling apart. “Right now.”

His brows pulled together in a soft frown as he watched her.

“I know you’re still angry with me, but—“

“Of course I am!” she said, tears in her eyes now. “But that doesn’t mean I don’t still—“

She broke off, not wanting to admit the truth she couldn’t shake, no matter how many times she told herself she hated him.

"Azriel,” she began again, voice a touch pleading now. “You’re in great danger. I’ve seen it. Please, you have to leave.”

His frown deepened, and before she could react, he was before her, gripping her shoulders and staring into her eyes, as if trying to read her fear, to make sense of it.

“Tell me exactly what you saw in the vision.”

She let out a trembling breath, savagely fighting the urge to press into his warmth and assure herself he was truly safe.

“You were stabbed,” she said. “Straight through the chest. You—you fell out of the sky.”

“What makes you so sure it was me you saw?”

“Do you think I would make that something like that up?” she demanded, feeling hurt seeping into her terror and coalescing into something more painful than either.

He tried to tighten his grip on her shoulders in a reassuring gesture, but she snarled and tugged his hands away.

“Why don’t you believe me?”

He paused, and she watched a shadow cross his face. Some part of her knew that he wasn’t questioning her sanity, only doing what he’d been trained to do as a spy: verify the information he was being given. It seemed to pain him that she thought the opposite.

"If you were sure it was a vision,” he said finally. “Of course I believe you. It’s just that your visions are not usually so direct.”

“What are you saying?” Elain said, feeling embarrassed now, too.

She knew exactly what he was saying, and hated herself for it. He paused, as if sensing he had to proceed with care.

“Could it possibly have been a nightmare? A—projection of your subconscious fears?”

“Don’t flatter yourself,” she tried to snap, but it came out a hoarse croak.

His expression didn’t change at the admonishment, but she could tell by the way his wings shifted behind him that her comment had found its mark.

She considered before biting her lip.

“I know what I saw,” she said, the fear sliding back in and turning her blood to cold sludge. “And it was real.”

She bowed her head and her vision blurred, and though she heard his wings moving restlessly again, Azriel remained where he was.

“I believe you.”

She looked up, relieved.

“Then you’ll go back to Velaris?”

She watched the muscles in his jaw work as he studied her expression, seeming to steel himself for her next reaction.

“Elain, I can’t.”

Frantic now to the point of madness, she charged him.

“Why the rutting hell not?”

It wasn’t like her to use such coarse language, but she couldn’t help it, any more than she could help the traitorously weak tears that dampened her cheeks.

“I made a promise to Rhys and your sister that I wouldn’t—“

“Oh hang your promise!” she snarled beating his chest with her fist. “Azriel, you could die if you stay!”

“I know,” he said gently, grabbing her wrists to keep her from hitting him. His eyes were molten amber, veins of emerald running through them like tiger stripes. The kindness in them nearly broke her. “But I will never abandon you so long as you’re in danger. Never.”

Elain thought again of the moment she’d seen him in that tent in Hybern, and the relief at knowing she was not so alone as she’d feared. That she never had been.

She glanced down and back up at him, voice trembling as she said, “And I will never forgive myself if something happened to you because of me.”

He gave a soft, sad smile, brushing a tear away with his knuckle.

“To die for you would not be so terrible a thing.”

She pushed his hand away in pained frustration, but it hovered, still less than a breath from her cheek.

“You do not have my leave to die,” she said, reaching blindly up to tangle her fingers with his outstretched ones. “Do you hear me, Shadowsinger?”

He tensed when she brushed her cheek against the rough back of his hand, but he didn’t pull it away.

“Yes, my lady,” he said quietly, eyes dancing across her face,

“And you will take every precaution tomorrow, even if it slows our progress or frustrates the others.”

“Elain—“

She squeezed his fingers in warning, voice growing hard.

“Promise me, Azriel."

He swallowed before nodding.

“You have my word.”

“I will hold you to it,” she said, finally letting her arm go lax, his hand sliding from where she’d pressed it to her cheek.

Still, she didn’t let go of his hand immediately, allowing herself this one final weakness, this one final moment to pretend they could have been something more.

“Elain,” he breathed, fingers gently detangling from hers. “There is something I have to confess to you. That night in Spring—“

She jerked back, feeling as if she’d been doused in cold water. How could she have forgotten, for even one small moment, what he had done to her?

“No,” she said. “You made yourself perfectly clear on the ship. I have no desire to relive it.”

He should his head.

“You don’t understand. I—“

“No!” she repeated, retreating another step towards the door. “I may not want you to die, but that does not mean I still care for you. I do not.”

It was a lie, and utter lie, and she couldn’t decide if she was relieved or dismayed to see that he believed her. He bowed his head, shadows coming around him as if they might swallow him whole.

“I understand. Forgive me, my lady.”

Something in his tone struck her, and she found herself tempted to hear what he seemed so desperate to say to her. No, she realized after a moment, shaking her head. He would simply offer more excuses, more tepid apologies that only ever seemed to make her feel worse.

Giving a final sad shake of her head, she strode back to her own chambers, slamming the door before collapsing against it and heaving a shuddering sigh. One more day, she told herself, and she would be free from this nightmare for a good, long while.

She’d never asked Rhysand for anything, even in those weeks after she’d been turned, but she would ask him now—beg him, even—to send Azriel far away from the Night Court.

She wouldn’t have to beg though, she realized after a minute. In fact, she wouldn’t even have to ask Rhys; she knew that Azriel would impose a self-exile far harsher than any his friend could ever think to give him.

She wasn’t surprised at the stab of pain this realization caused. Azriel had wronged her, there was no denying it, but there was also no denying that she still hoped they would someday be able to go back to being friends.

Their encounter just now had showed her just how much she still desired him, but that she thought she could possibly abolish with time, perhaps after she and Lucien mated and she was granted a spell to recover. But she knew that she would never stop missing the friend she’d found in Azriel, and now, in the face of her latest vision and whatever awaited them tomorrow, she could admit that it was his friendship more than anything she didn’t want to lose.

A glance out the window told her it was nearly dawn, and she look down at her rumpled gown before calling, “Nuala? Cerridwen? Are you…here?”

There was no reply, nor did the wraiths appear, and she frowned in confusion. It wasn’t so much that she minded dressing herself as it was odd that they wouldn’t come when asked. It wasn’t like either of them, and it prickled against some instinct. Surely if some harm had befallen them sneaking into the realm, Azriel would have interceded. He hadn’t mentioned anything when she’d seen him earlier, nor had he seemed concerned or distracted. Perhaps he’d tasked them with something else.

Hastily, she dressed in a pair of riding pants and a loose tunic, only allowing herself to marvel at the fact that she’d never even worn trousers until she’d been turned fae, and that Graysen would have been scandalized to see her in them if she had. She couldn’t decide if the idea amused or disturbed her as she strode from the room and back again towards Azriel’s.

She knocked and entered to find him in full battle gear, the scales of his armor glittering like the hide of some terrifying beast as he continued to arm himself.

“Where is Lucien?” she asked as she watched him, trying not to grow uneasy. One didn’t wear that much steel on them without cause.

“Fetching Graysen,” Azriel said, glancing at her. However, when he spotted her tense posture, he paused from where he was slipping yet another dagger in his boot. “What is it?” he asked, brows knitting in bemused concern.

“Nuala and Cerridwen,” she said, biting her lip. “Have you heard from them since we’ve arrived?”

Azriel frowned.

“There weren’t in your chamber with you?”

Elain shook her head.

“I could have sworn they slipped in behind us when the guards opened the wards. Perhaps I was mistaken. They had orders to return to Velaris otherwise.”

“So you’re not—“ Elain broke off, worrying her fingers. “Worried?”

Azriel bent a warm, reassuring look on her.

“They are both highly trained. If there were to run into any trouble, it would be the trouble I’d be worried for.”

She smiled, feeling relieved.

“You are thoughtful to worry, fıstığım,” he murmured, then flushed, an indication that it the last word had been a slip.

“Is that Illyrian?” she said, wishing she could find it in her to be affronted instead of pleased at what was clearly some sort of endearment.

She should have reprimanded him for it, especially after what had happened between them earlier, but with danger breathing down their necks, it seemed pointless to pretend.

“Yes,” he said, still flushing a little as he turned away to check a buckle on his belt that was already tightly synched. “Forgive me, I—occasionally it slips out.”

“What does it mean?” she pressed, a touch more serious now.

He considered before answering.

“Little one.”

She must have bristled, because he turned to face her again, expression solemn and penitent.

“A term often used between friends,” he assured her, though he looked away a moment later. “Forgive me, it’s not my place to call you my friend.”

Her heart ached at the tenderness in his voice, and she shook her head.

“Perhaps not,” she admitted. “But given everything we are likely to face today, I will let it slide.”

He gave a genteel nod of his head as the door opened and Lucien and Graysen, both sour from the other’s presence, filed in, the door sliding shut behind them. Lucien made for her at once, and Graysen gave a small noise of disgust and turned away.

“Aren’t you a sight for sore eyes,” Lucien murmured, eyes warm but face unsmiling. “Are you ready, m’elanned?”

Both Azriel and Graysen stiffened at the familiar, the former no doubt given his own slip just minutes before , and the latter because it was a term that was clearly affectionate in nature, and also one that was utterly fae.

“As I’ll ever be,” Elain said, fighting the urge to look at Graysen.

“Let’s go then,” Azriel said. “We need to be far inland by the time the sun rises and the queen is changed back into a firebird.”

“I just assumed we were sailing back,” Elain said, glancing between Azriel and Lucien in mild annoyance. How very male of them to make decisions behind her back.

“There isn’t time,” Azriel said. “We winnow to the coast, then make two cuts up through Spring in to Summer.”

“But,” Elain protested, glancing at a grim-faced Lucien. “That will take us nearly to the Autumn border.”

At this Graysen seemed to perk up, or at least begin listening in earnest.  Good, Elain thought. They didn’t have time for him to drag his feet, and if the threat of Beron Vanserra and his human-hating brood was what it took to get Graysen’s attention, so be it.

“We don’t have a choice,” Lucien told Elain, breaking her reverie. "We’re on a race against the clock, and this is the most direct route.”

“Can’t you just winnow us directly into Summer, or Velaris, even?” Elain asked Azriel, ignoring Lucien as he stiffened slightly beside us.

Azriel cut him a fleeting glance to the younger male before shaking his head.

“Not all four of us,” he explained and suddenly Elain understand Lucien’s agitation.

Even as a high lord’s son, he couldn’t winnow as far at Azriel’s shadows allowed him to, and it was the reason that they had to go in segments.

“We’ll travel in pairs,” Lucien said, touching Elain’s elbow. “You’re with me, little one.”

Elain tried not the stiffen, not at the endearment, but at the urge to look at Azriel. She was used to Lucien calling her sweet pet names, but she realized now by comparison, they inspired nothing of the same warmth as Azriel’s murmured Illyrian had. For a moment, she found herself wondering if ‘little one’ was really all he’d called her, then castigating herself for hoping it had been something a little more—

“Let’s get on with it then,” Graysen growled. “I’d like to reach the North before I perish of old age.” At this he gave Elain a sour look. “Though perhaps I understand why I am the only one of us to share this concern.”

“Save it, Lordling,” Lucien snarled lazily. “We don’t have time for your japes, tepid as they may be.”

Graysen whispered a foul retort under his breath, and Lucien snarled again, this time with a caress of power that was decidedly inhuman. It was clear that despite how softly Graysen had spoken, Lucien’s fae hearing had no trouble picking it up.

“Are you deaf?” he demanded. “Keep your mouth shut, or the Illyrian will shut it for you.” he paused to sneer at Graysen. “Permanently.”

Seemingly despite himself, Graysen cast a wary glance in Azriel’s direction before shrugging and falling into sullen silence.

“Let’s go,” Azriel said, eyes cast out to the pre-dawn light leaking into the sky. “We’re burning daylight.”

At this they slipped out of the castle wrapped in Azriel’s shadows, silent and unseen, before spilling back onto the beach they’d arrived on the previous evening. The sun had crept that much higher in the sky by the time they arrived, and Elain’s trepidation with it.

Lucien gently gripped her by the elbow, preparing to winnow them to the first checkpoint.

“Be on your guard, Vanserra,” Azriel said, gripping a petulant Graysen by the back of the collar. For his part, Graysen had gone pale at watching the shadows wend around him and Azriel like inky serpents. “There are worst things than Vassa in The Greatwood.”

“As if I need reminding,” Lucien said with an acerbic dryness. “Ready, m’elanned?”

“Yes,” she said, stealing a final glance at Azriel, willing him to remember his promise to her. He nodded slightly, and something tight in her chest eased.

“Safe travels then, Shadowsinger,” Lucien said, voice uncharacteristically solemn.

With that, they vanished.

Elain had never winnowed with Lucien before, but she found just as it was with Azriel, that she was cuccooned in his scent, earthen sunlight, some dark spice, and crackling flame. It was not perhaps as soothing as the cool aroma of herbs and dark wood, but it still made her feel safe.

They arrived at the first checkpoint at daybreak, and Azriel had Lucien shield Elain and Graysen as he checked the skies before returning.

“All clear,” he said, grabbing Graysen again. “Let’s go.”

Graysen jerked from his grip.

“Why do I have to go with him?” Graysen demanded, face slightly ashen. “I think those shadows are making me ill.”

“Because Elain can’t winnow yet,” Lucien said, and Graysen stiffened at the insinuation that someday she would likely grown into her power enough that she could.

“And if you and Vanserra travel together,” Azriel added, yanking Graysen back to him and letting the shadows slither over him like so many tentacles. “Then you could very well bring Elain’s vision to pass. Enough winging, boy. Let’s go.”

With that they disappeared, and Elain and Lucien and followed. However, when they arrived to appointed clearing, perilously close to the Autumnal border, it was to find they were alone.

“They should be here,” Lucien said, drawing a slim saber from his hip. “Something is wrong.”

Elain’s pulse spiked sharply.

“What do you—ah!”

Without warning she crumpled, eyes going milky as a vision took over her sight.

It was the same one she’d had all those weeks ago, with a fox and a wolf  tearing away from a blazing inferno. However, this time the vision continued, and Elain watched the wolf arc back towards the flame, protected by a shield of Autumn’s leaves. When it had passed safety through, a crowned figure emerged, his body wreathed in tonguing flame.

When she came to, gasping, Lucien at her side, his face distraught.

“Elain, what—“

“Run,” she croaked, trying to push him away from her. She was too weak to get up, but there was still time for him to escape.

“What the hell are you—“

“Lucien, it’s a trap. Ru—“

It was too late. A wall of fire had indeed erupted around them, ringing the whole clearing and blocking any escape. Lucien yanked Elain to her feet as he threw out a hand to make an archway though the blaze, dragging her behind him. However, in a second a bevy of figures appeared, all with hair as red as Lucien’s own.

Two were behind them before Elain could think to react, tearing Lucien and Elain apart.

“Hello, little brother,” a third called in greeting, strolling through the very arch Lucien had created. It roared shut behind him, and he gave his youngest brother a vulpine smile.

“Consus,” Lucien snarled. “Where’s Eris?”

Consus rolled his eyes.

“Eris has annoyingly chosen now to develop a conscience, and thus had be dealt with. But I know someone else who’s just dying to see you.”

Lucien struggled against his confinement as Graysen appeared from behind yet another of Lucien’s brothers, looking cowed.

Elain gave an agonised snarl at seeing him, eyes blurring with tears.

“I’m sorry, Elain,” he said, voice flat but steady.

“Where is Azriel?”

At this Consus gave a mocking laugh.

“You hear that, little brother? We have you dead to rites, and all your pretty mate cares about is some filthy Illyrian bastard.”

There was a chorus of rough laughter, and Elain grit her teeth and turned back to Graysen.

“Why?” she demanded. “Why would you do this?”

“Because he stole me from you!” Graysen burst, shooting Lucien an ugly glare. “Because you were meant to be my bride, and now you’re his creature.”

Elain let out a frustrated cry.

“I am no one’s! I could have been yours, even after I was turned, but you chose to cast me aside!”

“And what? I was just supposed to shrivel and age as my wife only grew more beautiful? What kind of life is that, Elain!”

Elain choked on a sob.

“It would still have been a life together! I didn’t choose this, but you could have chosen me! This is not Lucien’s fault. In fact, it’s no one’s but your own.”

Graysen gave a snarl.

“He worked his fae sorcery on you, claimed you with his foul magic. How could we ever be together after that?”

“So, what?” Elain said, face wet with tears and arms aching from shruggling against her captor. “You would have him killed for revenge?”

“And for gold,” Consus added, still grinning. “Don’t forgot the mountain of gold my father promised you."

“Shut up,” Lucien snapped. “Where is Father?”

Elain glanced around, suddenly remembering herself with a surge of panic.

“And where is Azriel?"

At this, the flame’s at the far end of the clearing began to spit and hiss, and a second later, Beron Vanserra emerged, dragging a gray-faced Azriel along the ground beside him.

“Azriel!” Elain screamed, her struggling beginning anew. “Az!”

Beron’s lips quirked in amusement as he pulled Azriel to his feet before sliding Truth-teller from it’s sheath at Azriel’s thigh.

Before Elain could scream her next protest,  Beron slammed the knife into Azriel’s ribs in six quick, deadly strokes. Azriel moaned in pain, blood gushing down his side as Beron cast him, face-first, into the mud.

“Yours, I believe” he said to Elain in a bored tone, gesturing to Azriel’s trembling form.

Elain did scream this time, a horrible earth-rending sound that only seemed to amuse Beron further. She felt something in her chest strain and snap off as Azriel gave a soft sound of pain, trying and failing to rise before collapsing back into the squelching earth. She snarled again, her arms nearly popping from their sockets as she fought to get to his side.

Beron—completely unmoved by Elain’s hysterics—stepped over Azriel as if he were no more than a fallen branch, a crimson-soaked Truth-teller still twirling in a hand. “Lucien,” he said instead, studying the younger male with a curious enmity. “It’s been too long.”

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BOOF! Another cliffie, I know! Sorry bout it! Also, happy ACOFAS!! Please let know if you’d like to be tagged!

Tags: @verifiefangirl @katexrenee @dreamingofazriel @urbisie @wolffrising @moonbeammadness @pascale-the-bard @keladrym99fangirl @sky-ocean-underworld-sun-moon @stardustroses @flipthepages @dannylodbrok @manoncrochanblackbeak @imprecisemagic @siderealscion @the-dream-team-of-prythian @lorcanswife @flxwer-petals @adrimir @tswaney17 @mikaylamee @awesomethreedragons @elriel-haline-rowaelin

[logically-asexual]

Me gustas cuando callas

Based off this post

A few things: I wanted to do this relatively fast so I chose the first poem that came to my mind. I hope it’s good enough, its a poem by Pablo Neruda. The translation is at the end of the fic <3 

I don’t write often so any feedback is very appreciated ^-^

It was just another normal day for the sides. Thomas was taking a free day so everyone was relaxing in their own way. Patton was in his room trying to figure out how to use his new computer, with a little help from Virgil. Meanwhile, Logan and Roman were both reading in the living room, each sitting in a different side of the couch. Although Roman had stopped focusing on his fairytale to look at the nerd beside him. The entire room was silent, the only sound coming from each time a page of a book was turned. Roman stared at Logan’s face and at the steady movement of his chest as he breathed. He was sitting still but relaxed, while his eyes moved along the lines in his astronomy book.

Prince was normally uncomfortable in silent situations, but this silence was different. It didn’t fell empty, it was simply calm and cozy. There was so much going through his mind, so much he wanted to tell Logan, but he simply couldn’t find the right words. Until an idea struck him.

As gently as he was capable of, Roman started talking, hoping he still remembered that poem he read once. His voice was almost like a whisper, slow and careful.

“Me gustas cuando callas porque estás como ausente,  y me oyes desde lejos, y mi voz no te toca.”

Logan immediately stopped his reading to turn his head towards Roman, with a confused look on his face, but also with a hint of curiosity in his eyes. Prince knew Logan didn’t understand Spanish, but he was still nervous about continuing.

He took a deep breath and kept reciting the words, not ever breaking eye contact with the other side.

“Parece que los ojos se te hubieran volado  y parece que un beso te cerrara la boca.” 

This time he couldn’t help a small smile tug at his lips, thinking about the words in the poem, and the idea of kissing the man in front of him.

Logan, still looking somewhat confused, opened his mouth to say something, but whatever it was it was stopped by Anxiety bursting inside the room. Oh right! Thomas forgot he was going to the cinema with his friends today! And all of them had to go with him right now, too.

… Oh well, he would finish the poem some other day, it was a promise.

Roman didn’t have to wait long for another opportunity to come, since a few days later Thomas needed him and Logan to work on a new video. They had spent all evening working, but now it was midnight and both were exhausted. Patton had just convinced Thomas to go to sleep and continue the work tomorrow, but neither Roman or Logan wanted to move from their seats.

Another of these comfortable silences. Roman really didn’t know what they meant, or why they made him so happy. They were moments when he could let his imagination wander, without interruption. That also happened when he was alone, but with the logical side next to him, it was even better. And, somehow, at the same time, he felt like he was somehow communicating with Logan through the way they looked at each other. The smiles, the playful teasing, even frustration sometimes. They understood each other, through glances and Logan’s cute expressions.

Logan stared at him again with his curious eyes, as if he was expecting something. Roman met his gaze and stayed in silence for a long moment, observing how Logan’s eyes shined in the darkness. He remembered the promise he made to himself and talked once more.

“Déjame que te hable también con tu silencio  claro como una lámpara, simple como un anillo. 

Eres como la noche, callada y constelada.  Tu silencio es de estrella, tan lejano y sencillo.”

His voice was just as soft as the last time, but he kept some intensity in his eyes, because he meant every word of that he was saying. This time Logan looked at him with less confusion, while a light blush grew in his face and Roman spotted the tiniest hint of a smile. His heart started beating fast and he was again feeling nervous, but reminded himself that Logan still didn’t know what he was confessing.

Without a word, they agreed to go back to sleep before Patton came for them.

Another free day came and the four sides were in the living room watching a movie. Well, Roman was actually the only one still watching it, since the other three were now asleep. Virgil And Patton were lying on the floor and Logan was resting his head on Princey’s shoulder.

Roman was trying to pay attention to the movie in front of him, but he couldn’t stop looking at how peaceful Logic looked. If it weren’t for the slight pink color in his cheeks and his rhythmic breathing, he might as well appear dead. But he wasn’t, he was alive, he was beautiful, he was calm and he was here, accompanying Roman. And, honestly, there was nothing that made Roman happier than that.

“Me gustas cuando callas porque estás como ausente.  Distante y doloroso como si hubieras muerto.”

Logan shifted his position making Roman think he might have woken up. He turned to see Logan suddenly smiling wide, and, with his eyes still closed, Logan spoke.

“Una palabra entonces, una sonrisa bastan.  Y estoy alegre, alegre de que no sea cierto.”

Roman’s gentle expression changed into one of shock as the last verses of the poem were uttered by the other side.

“But… but, I didn’t- how long have you-“ He blurted, until Logic shushed him with a finger on his lips. Then, Logan nodded in the direction where Virgil and Patton were still asleep, as a quiet warning to not wake them up. Roman looked down again at the logical trait, who was about to give in to sleep once again, and decided to worry about what else Logan knew the next day. He reached for the remote and turned off the TV, so he could once more focus in Logan’s breathing against his own chest. And, just when he started feeling tired himself, he heard Logic’s sleepy voice.

“Hey, Princey.”

“Yes?”

“Te amo.”

Roman held his breath for a second, before smiling and reaching a hand up to play with Logan’s hair.

“Y yo a ti.”

Translation (from this website because I am too lazy to do it myself):

I Like You When You Are Quiet I like you when you are quiet because it is as though you are absent,  and you hear me from far away, and my voice does not touch you.  It looks as though your eyes had flown away  and it looks as if a kiss had sealed your mouth. ( ::: )

Let me also speak to you with your silence  Clear like a lamp, simple like a ring.  You are like the night, quiet and constellated. Your silence is of a star, so far away and solitary. I like you when you are quiet because it is as though you are absent.  Distant and painful as if you had died.  A word then, a smile is enough.  And I am happy, happy that it is not true.

Also the ending is “I love you” and “I love you, too”.

#sanders sides #sanders sides fanfiction #fanfic #logince #logan sanders #roman sanders

[reveriesforyou]

The Bookstore

Hey guys! It’s me again, and I sorta wanted to write a Tom meet-cute because I daydream about those 25/8? This is just soft, fluffy and sweet, I hope you like it! Author’s note: Tom is my screensaver and I went to Barnes and Noble today and the girl that was ringing me up was really, really nice and we were talking about Marvel because I was buying a comic, (I finally found Spider-Man Blue, three cheers for me!) and she was literally like, “oh my gosh, you and Tom would be super adorable together! I can just see it now!” And I sort of died? So this is just a story branching off of that? The Bookstore “Is that your boyfriend?” The saleslady asked, referencing the girl’s phone, as a smile that stretched from ear to ear crossed over her features. “He comes in quite often, has mostly good taste in books, although, sometimes his choices are questionable at best. Likes fantasy and adventure, some good, some not.” The girl’s eyes widened and her mouth flopped open and shut like a guppy’s as she attempted to stutter out an appropriate response. Tom Holland was the girl’s screensaver, and no, he most definitely wasn’t her boyfriend because he had no idea that she existed. Even if he had stumbled across her fan account, she’d just be another fan to Tom, maybe she’d even stand out for being an ultimate creep. “He’s a very polite boy, you’re so lucky! My daughters are only interested in self-obsessed assholes.” The lady began to scan her choices, continuing to rant about her daughter’s apparent bad taste in men. The girl was still struggling to comprehend her situation. The saleswoman clearly knew Tom, who apparently came in often, as did she, so she couldn’t really say that he wasn’t her boyfriend without looking like an utter and complete weirdo. Pondering, she bit the inside of her cheek. Their paths had never crosses, so what could be the harm in indulging in a little fantasy? “We’ve been dating since last Spring,” She said, not daring to look into the kind eyes of the saleswoman. “Ah, I see. I bet you two look absolutely adorable together, maybe turn him onto some high quality literature next time he comes in, eh?” The woman smiled from across the counter, waving the girl’s new Philip Roth books in the air before handing them over. Reaching for her five purchases, the girl smiled and nodded, “I’ll do my very best!” She called and waved as she left the store. Over the next few days, Tom wandered back into the bookstore. Navigating his way down the store’s narrow aisles, Tom searched for something that he could read on the plane that he’d inevitably be boarding sometime soon. He paused every so often to pick up a book, glance over the summary on the back, and reshelve it to it’s proper home. After shuffling down another section, he came across the very same saleswoman who had helped the girl moonlighting as his girlfriend. “How come you guys never come in together? She knows some good authors, I’m sure she’d love to help broaden your horizons.” The saleswoman said, maintaining her position, crouched over to straighten and tidy the shelves. Tom looked around, unsure of who the woman was speaking to, because as far as he knew, none of his friends knew about this store. They opted for Barnes and Noble, while he prefered to dig. “Yes, you. I just met your girlfriend and she’s lovely. Great taste in books.” The woman said again. Scratching his head, Tom wasn’t exactly sure what to say, so he played along, not wanting to be rude. Surely she must be confusing him with someone else, because he didn���t have a girlfriend to share books with, as much as he’d like one. “Yeah, we just have different schedules, she’s usually in class when I peruse the bookstore.” Tom said, bending down to help the woman on the floor. “She’s very cute, and very sweet. It’s nice to see young people reading something that isn’t their twitter feed.” The woman said, taking one last glance at the fixed up shelf, before nodding decisively and standing up. Tom stood as well, chuckling, “My Dad’s an author, so reading has always been apart of my life.” “You guys are lovely, let me know if I can be of any help.” The woman began to walk away and Tom shook his head and laughed. “How do you know that my girl is my girl? We never come in at the same time.” Tom asked suddenly, curiosity leaking into his bloodstream. “She comes in more often than you, buys more books than you, and you’re her screensaver. It’s quite cute, actually.” The saleslady called out. There it is, Tom thought, she might be a fan. He couldn’t think of any other reason that he’d be her screensaver. Shoving his hands into his pockets, Tom smirked and picked out not one, but two books. One to leave at the register for her the next time that he came in, and one for him to read while he was on the press tour. “That is so thoughtful! She’ll love it!” The woman said from behind the cash register, clapping her hands together. “I’ll make sure that she gets it, alright? Wanna put a little message in it, promise I won’t peak! I’ve got a pen right here!” She chirped happily. “Yeah, alright, I’ll actually do that. Could I please borrow your pen?” Tom asked. Drawing a heart to conclude the note to his ‘girlfriend’ that he’d never met, he said thank you one to the lady one last time and left the store. The very next morning, the girl pushed her wallet back into her purse at the bookstore’s register, waiting for the same saleswoman to finish ringing her up. “Saw your boyfriend yesterday, left a little something for you.” The saleswoman smiled, turning around to sift through the books on display behind her to find Tom’s choice for the girl. The girl felt the fiery licks of scarlet coloring her skin again. Her hands shook, surely Tom thought that she was a mega, ultra stalker. He’d probably left her a note begging her to kindly fuck off. She wished Mother Earth would swallow her up the same way it did to Sita in ‘The Ramayana.’ “Don’t be embarrassed, silly, it’s endearing.” The woman handed her a book titled, ‘Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair’ by Pablo Neruda. “He’s paid for it, of course, and he left you a little note on the first page. Lent him the pen myself.” “He really shouldn’t have,” the girl stuttered, her hands almost noticeably shaking as she held the book within her palms. Inside, Tom had scribbled out, Seeing as you’re my girlfriend, I thought it was only fitting to leave you at least twenty love poems. Left you a song of despair as well, seeing as we haven’t met yet. Love always, Your devoted boyfriend, Tom

“Could I go back and pick one out for him as well?” The girl asked, feeling a tiny bit braver after reading Tom’s cheeky message for her. “Of course! I love this, I wish more couples did things like this for each other, it’s endearing!” The saleswoman smiled, shutting the register. After picking out an appropriate novel, she left the store, smiling, blushing and practically gliding on air. Later that very afternoon, Tom was chased by the overbearing coldness of the afternoon breeze, and his own excitement over whether or not she’d received his present, back into the bookstore. Not even bothering to look at anything, he came to a halt in front of the saleswoman, who upon seeing him enter, tore through her display to retrieve the novel that she’d left for him. “Did she get it? Did she like it, I haven’t heard from her yet.” Tom asked, beaming at the woman. “She loved it! She loved it so much, in fact, that she’s left one for you as well.” She handed him a novel called ‘One Day.’ “She’s left a love note for you as well!” Tearing the book open, Tom came across her delicate handwriting sprawled in black ink. Here’s to hoping that I meet you one day. With all the love in my heart- Your mystery girlfriend Fighting the urge to hug the book closer to his chest, Tom made a choice. “I’m going to go pick her a book out right now, and I’m going to wait right here until she comes back in. I want to give her this one in person.” Tom turned on his heel to search for the perfect book for to give her, when the saleswoman informed him that she’d already been in today. “Alright then, I’ll be back first thing tomorrow.” Tom blushed, but continued on his way down through the shelves, desperate to find the perfect book for her. Deciding on ‘You,’ by Caroline Kepnes, Tom paid and left the store, planning to return right when the bookstore opened. The very next morning, Tom was perched in a cushy, plush chair, obscured by stacks and shelves housing novels, waiting for her. He’d positioned himself perfectly, ensuring that he could see the register at all times, but that the people at the register wouldn’t be able to spot him, unless they knew where he was hiding. He was completely on edge. Every time the door opened, he’d practically leap to his feet, only to be met with disappointment because mostly everyone who wandered in off the street was either male, or too old to be his mystery girlfriend. Finally, when Tom had all but lost hope, a girl so otherworldly beautiful that Tom truly debated in his mind whether or not the girl was even a girl, he briefly wondered if she was an ethereal fairy of sorts, floated into the room. Her hair reflected light the same way that waves in the sea did, and her voice was so soft and warm that it sounded as he imagined his favorite hot drink would taste. She waved hello to the saleswoman before diving into the poetry section, hidden deep within the store. Jumping to his feet, Tom rushed to finally meet her, rolling the book he planned to give her in between his palms. Checking his hair one more time, Tom came to a stop next to her. “Excuse me miss, I was just wondering if you happen to be my mystery girlfriend, who apparently has better taste in books than me?” Tom’s confidence was evaporating as she turned around to face him. She was even prettier up close and Tom wanted to scratch his own eyes out for beginning the conversation with such a shit line. Thankfully, she smiled, a strawberry jam colored blush widening across her delicate features. “That would be me, but unfortunately, you’ve caught me off guard and now I don’t have anything to give to you.” Her eyes refused to meet his own for more than a few seconds. She could barely believe any of this. First, her celebrity crush and her happened to both shop at the same bookstore. Then, he goes along with the charade of being her boyfriend, and even leaves her gifts, and now, he was standing in front of her. He looked like Prince Charming and her brain was turning to mush. “Lucky for you, I don’t mind. But, I do have a book for you.” Holding the novel, ‘You,’ out to her, he began to sway from foot to foot, nervous that she’d hate it. “Funny enough, that’s one of my favorite books,” She laughed, “But are you planning to kill me?” She referenced the plot of ‘You,’ which was more or less a horror story, hardly the conventional romance. Stuttering, Tom attempted to clear his name. “I just thought it was fitting, seeing as we met in a bookstore, and so did Joe and Beck,” the main characters who become romantically involved in the novel, “And really, I just wanted you to have the line about the mouse in the house.” “Are you going to get a cat to chase me out?” She teased, and Tom laughed. “Absolutely not, you’re just all I’ve been thinking about. I wanna know you, and learn from your apparently epic choices in literature.” Tom said, leaning in closer to her. “Than sit, and I’ll pick you something out?” She questioned, shyly moving to sit on the floor, her arm curled around more than a few options. The pair scooched into one another one the floor, and the saleswoman watched, smiling from her spot at the register. Her two favorite customers were finally together. Her eyes twinkled as she turned the radio onto a station that played only love songs. They read love poems, and love stories together, so it only seemed fair that they listened to only love songs as well.

#tom holland fluff #tom holland imagine #tom holland #tom holland fanfiction #tom holland smut #tom holland oneshot #tom holland x you #tom holland x reader #peter parker fluff #peter parker fanfiction #peter parker imagine #peter parker #peter parker oneshot #peter parker smut #peter parker x you #peter parker x reader #spider man homecoming #spider man #spiderman imagine #spiderman #spiderman fluff

[terminallydepraved]

Sempiternal

I was feeling nostalgic tonight and i decided to do a little something about it. this id dedicated to all of the artists out there who make this fandom worth writing for. @yougei @rainnoir @dwe11s, thank you for your brilliance.

shoutouts to my patrons over on patreon, @intrepidescapist @happyclappyhippydrift @officialpeakspider @razzledazzlerred @illumiknife @mike-the-anime-guy @letstalkhxh!!! thank you for making this possible!

Read on ao3 here

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"The moon lives in the lining of your skin."

—   Pablo Neruda, Twenty Love Poems and Song of Despair

The night was quiet and yet bright, lit by a half-realized moon that stood witness overhead to Chrollo as he traversed the perilous terrain. Stars twinkled and winked, the breeze sighing past his cheek. If Chrollo closed his eyes, he could pretend it was a caress. Cool, gentle, and understanding.

There was no need to pretend, though. Chrollo didn’t need to seek understanding in the wind. He didn’t need to chase gentleness before it passed him by. The touch and care he needed was right before him, hidden within the ruined heights of the long-forgotten church. Decrepit and crumbling, it still held salvation within its fallen walls. Salvation of a different kind, but salvation all the same.

“Hello?” he called out softly, navigating over rough brick and moldering wood, ducking beneath the fallen doorway. The sky overhead still peeked through the gapes in the roof, the moonlight flooding the sacrosanct place with its pale glow. “Are you here?”

A laugh answered him, one that seemed to echo though there were hardly many walls left to allow it. “Of course,” the voice said, a pair of golden eyes appearing in the dim darkness to guide Chrollo inwards. “Did you think I wouldn’t come? I’ll be hurt if you think so little of me, Chrollo, especially when I adore you so.”

Chrollo smiled and let out his own laugh, quiet and soft under the weight of the holy rot around them. He held his coat tighter to his form, moving closer to the man perched upon the altar ahead. “Sometimes I just can’t tell with you,” he admitted, smiling when Hisoka let out an affronted scoff. “Couldn’t you have found somewhere else to sit? That’s hardly polite.”

Hisoka glanced down, tapping at the rotting tabernacle with his nails. It made a dull thud, rhythmic in the low light. “I don’t think God has been in this place for quite some time, so who would I offend?” he answered after a moment of tapping, meeting Chrollo’s eyes with a contemplative smile. “But, on the other hand, perhaps God has returned for tonight. You do carry an air of the divine with you wherever you go. I can’t imagine God not following.”

“As eagerly as you do?” Chrollo posed, pausing in front of the altar to take in his midnight companion. Even in the darkness, Hisoka was clad in the colors of day. His hair caught the moonlight like illuminated blood, his eyes like polished pieces of citrine. Though he sat on the altar, leg propped up under his arm, a foot still remained on the floor almost as if he weren’t fully committed to the act of desecration.

Chrollo cocked his head and smiled softly when Hisoka met his eye, feeling far more content than he should while in the presence of the man the troupe seemed to hate so ardently. “I don’t think even God could boast of pursuing you as eagerly as I do,” Hisoka said, shifting to face Chrollo fully, his hands reaching out to ghost along Chrollo’s sleeves. They settled on his upper arms, as gentle as the wind but with intent enough to cut.

“And yet,” Chrollo said, lifting his hand to cup Hisoka’s thick forearm, “you want to tempt fate by having us meet here. You really are despicable, aren’t you?” He went easily when Hisoka tugged him closer, his knees just brushing the rotten wood of the altar. “Just like the others say.”

The grin that stretched across Hisoka’s lips was patently him in every way, deplorable and lewd and in full acceptance of what he was. “And what does it make you, I wonder,” Hisoka teased, bringing his fingers to the fastened top of Chrollo’s coat, “that you came here so willingly when I offered?”

Cool air brushed Chrollo’s skin, its touch a near physical thing as his chest was bared to Hisoka’s hungry sight. What did it make him? Chrollo didn’t have an answer. He hadn’t really pondered it in any great amount, his curiosity reserved for other things. The zipper went lower and lower, Hisoka’s knuckles now level with Chrollo’s navel. Chrollo’s cheeks began to heat up as Hisoka’s eyes grew wide, his free hand fastening itself to Chrollo’s hip to pull him even closer.

“Oh, Chrollo,” the man crooned, sounding filthy under the light of the moon and the witness of God. “What on earth are you wearing for me?”

Chrollo bit his lip and didn’t protest as Hisoka pulled his coat from his shoulders, leaving him bare and open to the probing, assessing touch of the wind. The man’s hands dipped downwards, dragging along every strap and bit of lace crisscrossing Chrollo’s body. They settled somewhere on his hips, squeezing him firmly as if to make sure that Chrollo really was there, that this wasn’t some beautiful dream. “I thought you would like it,” Chrollo said simply, because there really wasn’t much more of a reason than that. He met Hisoka’s wandering eye easily, smiling and cocking his head once he had caught it. “It’s a little cold like I thought it might be, but I didn’t think that would be a problem for long.”

Hisoka’s fingers hooked around a few of the thin black straps of the body suit, tugging them as if to test their strength. They held firm, but Chrollo knew they wouldn’t for long if Hisoka really wanted them gone. “You’re absolute perfection,” Hisoka breathed, his praise as good as a prayer in the forgotten church. “How long do I have you for?” he asked, dragging Chrollo in to settle against his chest, Hisoka’s lips already marking his favorite spot along Chrollo’s throat. “How long can I have you until the others come running?”

Closing his eyes, Chrollo sighed, tangling his fingers through Hisoka’s thick red hair. Not long enough. Never long enough. “They don’t know I’m gone,” he said aloud, moving easily along with Hisoka as the man tugged him onto his lap, settling them back onto the altar that for all of its rot, for all of its inner flaws, still held steady beneath their combined weight. “A few hours, only. Daybreak at the latest.”

With his mouth against Chrollo’s skin, he was able to feel Hisoka’s disappointment. It chilled his skin just like the wind, Hisoka’s warm tongue lapping at him to erase the proof. “Never long enough,” he sighed, his words an echo of Chrollo’s thoughts. “What I wouldn’t give for an unbroken moment with you.”

“A moment, or an eternity?” Chrollo laughed, pulling gently on Hisoka’s hair, seeking his lips with his own. Hisoka came easily enough, their lips meeting in a soft kiss that quickly became heated. Chrollo tightened his fingers in Hisoka’s hair, letting the man move them. His back met the moldering altar cloth and a warm body rolled against his own, the warmth enough to make Chrollo moan.

Breaking the kiss, Hisoka stared down at him, his handsome features only made perfect by the moonlight streaming down upon them. “An eternity wouldn’t suit us at all,” Hisoka said, voice low and rasped. “I think we’d both grow bored far too soon for it to matter.”

Chrollo set his hands on Hisoka’s chest, coaxing his shirt over his head and tossing it down onto the floor below. Warm skin greeted his hands, mindlessly soft though his muscles were as hard as cut marble. When Chrollo looked at Hisoka, an Adonis looked back, built for centuries but destined for just a moment. “Boredom isn’t what I’m worried about,” Chrollo answered, cupping Hisoka’s cheek in his hand. He stroked over a sharp cheekbone, knowing how easily it could shatter.

Hisoka just laughed, leaning down to capture his lips again in a deep, engulfing kiss. His hands worked at the straps of the outfit, tugging and pulling and then ripping when he failed to find the clasps. Chrollo grunted but didn’t complain. It was bound to happen, he thought, gasping into the kiss as a warm hand wrapped around him and began to stroke. Hisoka wasn’t patient, and Chrollo couldn’t care.

“Did you bring it?” Hisoka asked, freeing himself to the open air, his cock hard when he rolled against Chrollo’s thigh.

Shaking his head, Chrollo hooked a thigh around Hisoka’s hip. “I took care of it,” he said, cheeks burning when Hisoka immediately pressed his fingers to Chrollo’s entrance to check. They slipped inside easily, scissoring and moving just how Hisoka knew Chrollo liked. “J-Just hurry up and go ahead,” Chrollo gasped, closing his eyes to hide from Hisoka’s glee. His fingers dug into the rotten wood above his head, body taut like a bow and honed to Hisoka’s touch.

“Just because we’re pressed for time doesn’t mean you have to do it yourself,” Hisoka teased, lining himself up even as he spoke. “You know how much I love opening you up.”

Chrollo didn’t want to waste a moment of their time. Not on something like that. He cracked open his eyes and stared up at Hisoka, taking in the dips and divots of his strong chest, the way the shadows played across his skin. Though there was no light but for the moon above, Chrollo swore that Hisoka shined like stained glass, his hair a burning pane that illuminated, refracted. He swallowed and bit his lip as Hisoka began to press inside him, eyes falling to half-mast. He couldn’t tear his eyes from Hisoka.

“Chrollo,” Hisoka moaned lowly, the words rolling like amber through the night. “Chrollo, Chrollo, you feel so perfect.” He rolled his hips and set the pace to their usual brand of rough, Chrollo unable to hold back the sounds lingering in his throat. He wrapped his arms around Hisoka’s neck, delivering them to Hisoka’s ear.

“H-Hisoka,” he said brokenly, feeling the altar rock and shift in time to the rhythm. “God, Hisoka. Please.” The harder Hisoka fucked him, the more the straps began to fall away. Soon there would be nothing left between them but air and wind and light. A heady fire began to burn somewhere in the pit of his stomach, every caress of their bodies fanning it higher, higher. Chrollo buried his face in Hisoka’s shoulder, wishing he could become one with the moonlight against his lover’s skin. He wanted to burn cold.

Eternal, if only for the moment.

But there was nothing eternal about them now. Chrollo had done this too many times to think them anything but transient. Hisoka’s thrusts, the sweat on their skin, the breath they shared between them like the intimate secret of their nightly trysts— Every move they made, every single bruise, bite, and kiss was marked by the passage of the moon. They were westward bound, and no amount of begging would slow its steady pace.

“Chrollo,” Hisoka whispered, his voice a song in Chrollo’s ear. “Love. My angel. You’re so beautiful.”

“Hisoka,” he gasped, keening when a hand wrapped around his cock. Not an angel. Not an angel for this. Hisoka kissed him before Chrollo could protest more, a messy, uncoordinated press of teeth and tongue that felt as human as the shaking, splintering altar beneath them.

Chrollo came between a breath and a kiss, Hisoka’s name stamped to his lips and his eyes on the God who wasn’t there. He fisted his hands in Hisoka’s hair and wrapped his thighs around his trim waist, refusing to let Hisoka slow his frantic pace. So close. He felt so close to him, but somehow Chrollo couldn’t close the gap.

Hands like iron wrapped around Chrollo’s wrists, tearing him from Hisoka’s hair to pin them flat against the trembling altar. Golden eyes stared down at him, and Chrollo could only gasp as his nerves began to scream. The pace was desperate now, rougher and meaner than it had been before. Hisoka came inside him with a shudder and a groan, and for a moment, just a moment, Chrollo felt the divide lessen.

“I adore you,” Hisoka whispered in his ear, his breath quick and his eyes filled with undying want. “God, Chrollo. I wish the night would never end.”

Chrollo let out a ragged laugh, thighs numb and eyes wet. “God? You feel like praying now?” The altar had gotten its baptism, so maybe it wasn’t out of place to pray. An endless night, a moment of respite. They were easy enough wishes to grant, weren’t they?

But Hisoka shook his head, holding Chrollo to his body until there was nothing left to see but blood, light, and devotion.

If God were there, Chrollo knew he had already long looked away.

#hisokuro #fic #check ao3 for othe rwarnigns im fuckin tired #religious allusions #chrollos in lingerie

[beckettsthoughts]

Poetry

Poetry: If you have one, name a favourite book or poem.

This is the best question, I love poetry so much and I have some definite favourites. I also have couple of favourite books, or at least books I love with all my heart and will always recommend, so I’ll note those at the end. I apologise for this taking a while, but there’s no way I could go short on this one. No way whatsoever. I really needed a distraction and I felt like this was the kind of ask I could drag out into an essay-length epic of rambling about literature, so I hope you don’t mind that I kind of took this and ran with it.

I read it in your word, and learn it from, by Rainer Maria Rilke

This is my favourite poem from Rilke’s collection Poems from the Book of Hours, a book I bought several years ago from an adorable little shop in Paris. “I read it in your word, and learn it from/ the history of the gestures of your warm/ wise hands,” this poem so perfectly describes a feeling I cannot otherwise put into words. Something like listening to a person and understanding them, learning from them and appreciating them. 

The Yellow Palm, by Robert Minhinnick

I studied this poem for GCSE, which by all rights should mean I hate it. Instead, this poem has become one of my favourites. With rich sensory description and a complex emotional impact, this ballad describes Minhinnick’s experiences walking the streets of Baghdad in the late 1990s. It’s political in a more subtle way than some, but you can truly empathise with both the people the poet describes and the poet himself. It stuck in my head for a long time after I first read it.

Litany in Which Certain Things Are Crossed Out, by Richard Siken

I have not read that much of Siken’s work. I have read this and maybe one or two others, so I cannot claim to know much about Siken. This poem, however, really caught my heart when I discovered it some years ago and it has not released it since. Siken’s writing is captivating, in all honesty, and the structure of the poem is nothing short of genius. It’s an analysis, a musing, a conversation, a letter and a lesson. I could possibly talk about this poem for hours.

The Lost Leader, by Robert Browning

This is another of the poems I studied at school, this one for my A Level course. Again, my reaction to school-sanctioned texts was not so typical, because my teacher’s enthusiasm netted me and Browning is now one of my favourite poets. The Lost Leader is actually not so typical for Browning, definitely the most unique from the collection we studied, and I love it as much for the political and social context as I do for the phrasing and the rhythm. This poem is, in all honesty, Browning grousing about Wordsworth for selling out to the monarchy and betraying the liberal cause. “Just for a handful of silver he left us/ Just for a riband to stick in his coat.” It’s like the Romance poets’ equivalent of a modern day celebrity Twitter feud, complete with name-dropping and petty accusations.

Dulce et Decorum Est, by Wilfred Owen

Okay, I know this is another typical school poem, but I didn’t actually cover this one in any of my English classes. Not even when we had an entire year studying war and conflict poems. No, this poem has entered my consciousness many times over the years and eventually it stuck, as poems seem wont to do. This poem is a scathing criticism of political attitudes to conflict and the glorification of war. The brutal descriptions and imagery are drawn from Owen’s own experiences, and the honesty behind it is one of the reasons this poem is as powerful as it is. The last line refers to a famous phrase, “Dulce et decorum est/ Pro patria mori”, meaning ‘it is sweet and honorable to die for one’s country’, as “the old Lie”; arguing against the perception of war as a noble thing and instead highlighting the cruelty and brutality instead. This poem is revolutionary, and it changed many people’s attitudes towards war, and that is why I love it as much as I do.

The Laboratory, by Robert Browning

And another one from Browning, another one I studied in school. This is one of a group my class dubbed ‘the murder poems’ and for good reason, as this poem details one woman’s plans to poison her ex-lover and his new paramour in the setting of the aristocratic, feudal Ancien Régime of France. It’s written in iambic pentameter, making the rhythm deceptively bouncy and upbeat compared to the subject matter, and the descriptive language is just luscious. The narrator describes the poisons in the laboratory with such fervour, the “gold oozings” and “exquisite blue”, and her wicked excitement about it all is what drives that fast rhythm. It’s hard not to enjoy this poem, honestly.

Angel with a Fiddle, by Bette Wolf Duncan

This is probably the most obscure of the poems I’m talking about, as I have only seen it on one website and even that’s unreachable now. For that reason I considered leaving it off the list, because it’s kind of torturous to describe it without you having any real way of finding it, but I’m going to talk about it anyway. This poem is really what drove my love of folk poetry, not so much because it is a folk poem but instead because the language used is so damn good at evoking the feeling of a folk poem. “Tall n’ lean n’ lanky,/ With a fiddle neath his chin…/ The days weren’t quite so cruel/ When he played his violin.” As a violinist and lover of folk poetry, this just calls to me. It has an air of mystique about it which I love, but it’s just such a sweet little verse. I hope it can find it properly again, some day.

Special shout-outs go to the many poems of Leonard Cohen, all of which I love but could not choose a favourite from; the poems of Pablo Neruda, all of which make my heart ache in the best way, and also to any and all of the comedy poems I grew up hearing and loving. That includes the works of Hillaire Belloc, The Kings Breakfast and other assorted works of A.A. Milne, and T.S. Elliot’s Book of Practical Cats. I really do love poetry. 

Now, onto books:

The Raven Cycle, by Maggie Stiefvater

This is just the perfect fantasy series for me. Every character seems so genuine and so alive, fitting into this epic of magic and wonder and just plain weirdness. It’s hard to believe that every character in an ensemble cast could be quite so endearing, but it’s one of the reasons this book tops my favourite fantasy list and my favourite Y.A. list. There’s humour, there’s magic, there’s mystery and there’s relationships. I love it.

The Ocean at the End of the Lane, by Neil Gaiman

This book is kinda scary. Moreso to adults than children, I think. I first read it the year it was released, in my early teens, and I’ve made it a mission to read it every now and then just to see how differently I interpret it each time. This is one of the few instances I’ve enjoyed a child narrator outside of a childrens’ book. It doesn’t come across as cheesy or dumbed-down, but it’s still appropriately and realistically naive. The magic and surrealist horror elements are very well-handled, and it captures a very genuine feeling of childhood curiosity. This is the kind of book I wish I could write.

Gray, by Pete Wentz (and James Montgomery)

I almost cheated and put this in the poetry section, because the language in this book is so beautifully poetic that it may as well be there. But no, this is a semi-autobiographical novel, a favourite genre of mine, and so I will write about it here. This book is very honest and brutal experience of mental illness and how that impacts your sense of self and relationships with others. It must have made me cry at least twenty times. It hurts, it hurts so hard, but I feel like recommending it anyway because I think it’s a good book for when you want to understand things and understand people. One of the reasons I love it, actually, is that it’s so rare to read something so introspective without it coming across as self-centred, but I came away from this book feeling like I understood Pete Wentz as a person way more than I could from any other media. 

Good Omens, by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett

Lastly, a book I love for having the best humour and characters I can imagine, is Good Omens. Anyone who knows me outside of the internet knows how much I love this book. If anyone mentions anything even tangentially related to Good Omens or any topics or themes within Good Omens, I will talk about it. For a long time. Until I am situationally and circumstantially forced to stop talking about it. I raved about it enough to convince my best friend to read it and now, now he loves it just as much and we can rant about how good it is together. I would recommend this to anyone, regardless of what you usually read or don’t read, because I guarantee that at least 90% of people will love it. 

Anyway, thank you for making it all the way to the end of this, I had a lot of fun writing it and distracting myself from what has otherwise been a downright awful day. Thank you so much for sending me this question, and once again I apologise for going so completely overboard. Thank you

#b replies #rambling again

[jamesdazell]

On FREDERICO LORCA

 Frederico Garcia Lorca. Born, Federico del Sagrado Corazón de Jesús García Lorca, 5 June 1898, in Fuente Vaqueros, a small town a few miles west of Granada, southern Spain. He was a musician, dramatist, artist, and above all, one of the greatest poets of the twentieth century. In the earliest part of his life he was devoted to music, then to poetry, in which he quickly became celebrated, whilst in later stage of his career he was drawn to theatre. Tragically his life was cut short during the Spanish Civil war, under the rise of fascism, where was arrested and executed for his liberal political views. Like most writers, his life was filled with lots of travel, and he lived not only in various parts of Spain but also in Cuba and New York city where he lived in Manhattan in the early 1930s before returning to Spain.   Lorca naturally had a great fascination with Greek tragedy. His own tragic plays were written during his mature years although he says of himself that he had always been so far a novice and was yet to reach his mature period. It has been said that Lorca was a poet of desire, of impossibility, which went unsatisfied. I believe, on the contrary, that he was a poet of possibility in the face of impossibilities. And that his works were not melancholy expressions of unreachable yearnings, but that they are mirages that one can never reach, that disappear once we approach, and when we arrive to where we headed there is yet still much more beyond. His is a poetry of boundless possibilities, that therefore never grasp their yearnings, but always fall in to new mirages, as dreaming in to dreams. His lyricism plays on this, and I admire his lyricism more than any other writer. He uses words which point away from themselves. He uses words together to allow the reader to grasp something beyond them that he means to direct you to, visualised and felt through his combinations of words. They are triggers, and alarm bells, that have meanings outside of themselves, in the effects they inspire in the reader. As such his work is deeply lyrical and not rhetoric. He fills us with sensations and images, but not information. He shows and doesn’t tell. He embosses lyrical pictures into us that only a capacity for imagination can rework into description. His work was consistently influenced by poetry he retrieved that had been forgotten and lost of influence, he always looked backwards to move forward with his work, looking for absent styles in his search for inspiration.   I believe no doubt that he turned to Greek tragedy - and his insistence that Europe rediscover its roots - because it was a poet’s theatre, other than the Naturalism of staging and writing that had developed out of the nineteenth century. He felt closer to these poets, whom poets shared his own artistic talents. The lyricism in his own plays, particularly Yerma and The House of Bernarda Alba, both listed as tragedies, evokes the lyrical quality of his standalone poetry in the mouths of his characters. He seemed to search, not for the poetry in the mundane as the realists had done, but to find the poetry as a means to manifest more marvellous truths. His characters speak unnaturally - and musically - they speak out in poetry. And this allows them to say more than one would in real speech. As if speaking out of the air and music around them. It also allows the play to show more, and to communicate more line by line. It’s a lyricism that doesn’t evoke the tragedies of Lope de Vega of the 16th Century, but more akin to the lyrical plays of Japanese Noh drama. And it’s not unlikely that he would have encountered them, in the growing European fascination with Orientalism, as shorter forms of poetry such as the haiku were being explored in the poetry of his own day in the work of Imagist poets. In Britain, the English poet W H Auden was a huge admirer of Japanese Noh drama, who wrote lectures on the art as well as crafted his own plays through his fascination with them.   I’m unsure how much philosophy Lorca read to shape his particular perspective of tragedy, such as Heraclitus, but I do know he studied philosophy and letters as a student. But in his lecture essay on the duene (meaning to have a soul, a heightened sense of expression, emotion, and authenticity - not far removed from the sense I mean of ecstasy in this zine), he says to have duene one must be fully aware that death is possible. Tragedy features closed horizons. Life’s circumference is clear and inevitable. He says of Spain, “Spain is unique; a country where death is a national spectacle” he is of course speaking of the bull fight, and that “music, dance, song or elegy, the arrival of duende is greeted with vigorous cries of ‘Allah! Allah!’ so close to the ‘Olé!’ of the bullfight, and who knows whether they are not the same?” His ideas parallel the German philosopher Heidegger that only through awareness of death can man envisage his authentic freedom. It is facing the present with full-sight of ability to be in the moment. He argues most art is created out of hindsight or foresight, but duence is made impulsively in the present moment, with full sight of the circumference of life as though it shoots up out of the blood. “All arts are capable of duende, but where it finds the greatest range, naturally, is in music, dance, and spoken poetry, for these arts require a living body to interpret them.”   The duende as Lorca expresses it in his lecture seems to bare resemblance to that ecstasy that the maenad women of Greek myth would experience under the mystic influence of Dionysius. Lorca had read Nietzsche and no doubt had experienced his Birth of Tragedy, discussing the Dionysian aspect of Greek tragedy. That it represented the music, the unculturalising and anti-intellectualism of man, freeing him from the bonds of everyday in to the eternal and nature-returned. Lost in the frenzy of wine, song, dance. All which were combined dualistically with the Appolline of poetry, which constructed character, gave eloquent wisdom, visual action and physical form. Together Nietzsche believed they created an artform which was as much Dionysian as it was Apolline, as much irrational frenzy as it was intelligent beautiful form, as much the abyss and the figure of it, as much the horror of life as the individual which confronts it. Lorca’s duende is the artistic inspiration that rouses artistic creativity. An intoxication, but a spirit of the blood, that is shot in to a chosen art.   His plays were no mere Greek revival but, like his poetry, seem to reach to yearning possibilities. His lyricism of dialogue lifts out of realism in to musical language, drawing the characters not in to the fantastical, but with the exotic truth. Mouthed from a lyrical plane of expression. Lorca described the theatre “as a poetry that rises from the book and becomes human enough to talk and shout, weep and despair.” And described poetic theatre quite simply as any play written by a poet.   The acclaimed Chilean poet Pablo Neruda wrote of Lorca in his memoirs: “What a poet! [of] grace and genius; when did a winged heart and a crystalline waterfall, ever come together in anyone else as they did in him. Federico Garcia Lorca was the extravagant “duende,” his was a magnetic joyfulness that generated a zest for life in his heart and radiated it like a planet.”   Lorca presents his plays like a dream. Stanley Kubrick said of cinema “with film, you don’t photograph the reality, you photograph the photograph of the reality.” I think that’s what Lorca does too. His dialogue is so gifted with poetry that it takes us to a perspective of the world that is the photograph of the photograph of reality, where art is articulating art to tell the truth.   Rider’s Song is one of Lorca’s earliest poems. It narrates the journey of a rider to Cordoba, who believes he has a long way and will never reach his destination. It is the sentiment of ambition, Lorca’s own ambition, that he believes he may never quite reach. An ambition that may have been to restore European poetry to its former height of excellence. It’s a philosopher’s poem, a metaphor for his own journey, and it’s also a poem of a young man. The journey of himself, not to personal maturity, but an artistic maturity. Lorca continuously borrowed from the absent, and it’s no doubt that his ambition included the absent which Lorca consciously sought for by his art.   Lorca writes elegiacally of human existence, and perhaps wrote of the experience of existence more lyrically and vividly in poetry than almost any other poet. By photographing the photograph, he allows us to feel what we already know in the experience of language. I want to end this segment with my favourite poem of his;

Floating Bridges

Every step we take on Earth brings us to a new world. Every foot supported on a floating bridge.

And I know there is no straight road in the world - only a giant labyrinth of intersecting crossroads.

And steadily our feet keep walking & creating --like enormous fans-- these roads in embryo.

Oh garden of white theories! garden of all I am not, all I could & should have been!

#frederico lorca #spanish #poetry #poet #playwright #theatre #literature #books #writer #writers

[shirlleycoyle]

Taylor Swift Super Fans Are Furious About a Good Review

Taylor Swift's new album, Folklore, was released to universal acclaim from fans, non-fans, and music critics alike. But some parts of Swift's fandom are upset that music critics don't like it enough.

Pitchfork has had a long, hard road towards legitimacy as a music criticism website. I am old enough to remember a time when we clowned on them for being too earnest. Their effusive praise for Radiohead's Kid A is still hard to read without cringing, even 20 years after the fact. Over the years, Pitchfork's reputation has swung the other way, in line with its image as a "hipster" website. Artists like pop musician Halsey have bemoaned getting low scores from the outlet (a 6.5 out of 10, which caused the artist to unknowingly call for One World Trade Center to collapse), and the perception is that their taste is pretentious, generally favoring white, male, guitar-based music over everything else.

Despite all of that, Pitchfork senior editor Jillian Mapes gave Folklore a glowing review. Mapes compares Swift to the likes of Jane Eyre, and says that the album highlights her talent for storytelling in songs. 

"You can tell that this is what drives Swift by the way she molds her songs: cramming specific details into curious cadences, bending the lines to her will," Mapes wrote. Even with that praise, Pitchfork and Mapes in particular are now targets of Swift's most ardent stans. You see, she gave the album an 8.0, and fans think that this positive review was not high enough.

Although it's been a few days and the furor has died down, the replies to Pitchfork's tweet about the review are littered with demands that the website either take down the review or re-score it. 

"Folklore deserved a 10. Also personally offended by the suggestion she should have 'pruned' seven & hoax. That speaks volumes about the taste of the person writing this review, yikes," one fan wrote. 

Not every Taylor Swift fan feels this way, and some stan accounts have tried to call in their fellow fans, saying that harassing a critic is out of line. Unfortunately, the angrier fans have not calmed down, and if you search Mapes' name on Twitter, or if you search "Pitchfork Taylor Swift," you'll still find Swifties tweeting about how unfair her review was. Mapes has confirmed that her address and phone number were doxed and she has been receiving calls from upset fans, as well as death threats on Twitter and via email. Mapes locked her Twitter account right as the review went live and at time of writing has not unlocked it.

For Swifties, part of the issue is that Pitchfork's 8.0 rating lowered Folklore's score on the review aggregator website Metacritic, taking the album from a 90 to an 89. The way that Metacritic calculates their scores is an opaque science. In their FAQ, they say that it's a "weighted average" but don't provide much clarity on what that means and how different scores are weighed. The intense scrutiny of this critical consensus is similar to the fan response towards any criticism of the video game The Last of Us Part II, which saw the game's director and one of its voice actors lay into critics who had issues with the game.

Right now, this subset of Taylor Swift's fandom are acting out the worst behaviors we've come to accept as routine in video game fandom, which also has an unhealthy obsession with Metacritic scores. In their case, video game fans know that sometimes bonuses for developers are tied to Metacritic scores. In 2012, a developer from the acclaimed studio Obsidian revealed that because one of its games did not reach an 85 on Metacritic, the developers who worked on it did not receive royalties. Marketing teams at big game publishers obsess over a game's final Metacritic score. They'll invite people to play big budget games before release and "mock review" them in order to estimate a Metacritic score before release, and make final adjustments in order to increase it. 

Taylor Swift's continued success does not rely on a high Metacritic ranking. Swift is already a critically acclaimed, popular artist, and multi-millionaire whose work has dominated the charts every time she releases a new album. She is arguably one of the last standing pop stars in the way we understand the term when it was coined, the last one who can dominate our culture with brand deals and sold out stadium tours in an age where fewer people actually buy music. You don't get to that position on hype alone—Swift is a talented songwriter and singer, and music critics have acknowledged her talent even on albums that don't showcase her best work. Pitchfork gave one of her previous albums a 9.0, writing, "In a counterpoint to the musical wanderlust on display, there’s a newfound patience to Swift’s observations, a knowledge that narratives form out of brokenness and frustrated communication more often than they do out of ease or any emotional clarity." They compare her to Joni Mitchell and Pablo Neruda, describing her work with a deep sense of respect.

The issue with this behavior is less the quality of Taylor's work—which is, again, broadly good—but fans stifling any kind of conversation about art unless it is unbridled praise. We should always condemn harassment and doxing, of course, but even the threat of harassment is enough to make both critics and regular ass people pull their punches instead of being fully honest. One particular criticism of Folklore that fans have taken issue with is Mapes saying that she felt that the songs "hoax" and "seven" were filler. I think "seven" is a great song, but not everyone in the world is going to like every song. Hell, I once went to a party where someone turned off "Ride" by Ciara to put on Arcade Fire, and while I'll never understand that it's not illegal to dislike Ciara.

It's important to remember that fandom is a place of love, a community where people can lift each other up and support each other. It feels good to belong, and tweeting at randoms that Taylor Swift is good, actually, can help melancholy teens find that place of belonging. We also can't pretend that it's only young women who act this way. Toxic sports fans get into physical fights in stadium parking lots over their team, living out fandom rivalries in a violent, dangerous way. It's not hard to understand why people do this, though. Yeah, I do think it was really funny that Dodgers pitcher Joe Kelly said "nice swing, bitch," to an Astros player that he almost hit with a ball. The feeling of allegiance with Kelly, who lost to the Astros twice when they were cheating, is intoxicating. But that's also why it's so dangerous. I mean, Kelly is truly just being an asshole. Why should I cheer that on?

Maybe it's inevitable that fans will get overly invested in their fandoms. The moniker stan comes from Eminem's song "Stan," released in 2000, about his own experiences of being the subject of a toxic fandom. Little has changed in 20 years. That said, we should all be more introspective about what this obsession is serving. All I can see is a stifling of creativity, of placing an artist's popularity and commercial success far above the actual work that they do. 

That the focus is on the numerical score of Mapes' review and not her thoughtful writing is the most disheartening. Even though Mapes clearly loved Folklore, the number is the only thing the fans can see. These numerical scores breed such toxicity, and have become such a distraction from constructive and interesting criticism, many critics are stepping away from them. Here at VICE Games, for example, we don't put numerical scores on game reviews. The same is true for Kotaku, where I previously wrote reviews. Polygon stopped using numerical scores in 2018, explaining that "focusing on criticism and curation, will better serve our readers than the serviceable but ultimately limited reviews rubric that, for decades, has functioned as a load-bearing pillar of most game publications."

The value of Swift's work will only truly be known once time has passed, when people feel more free to take it seriously and discover its nuances, to highlight her strengths, and yes, to recognize her weaknesses. Stopping that conversation from happening is all but a guarantee that she will only ever be seen as a teenage craze, a flash in the pan, a pop artist with no value.

Taylor Swift Super Fans Are Furious About a Good Review syndicated from https://triviaqaweb.wordpress.com/feed/

[ruxnorville-blog]

Days of poetry

(DAY #1) The Eighth Of September - Poem By Pablo Neruda

“this day, today, was it brimming glass. This day, today, was an immense wave.”

I really favor how this one day was described as being a full glass and the huge wave.

When I read this line I can imagine almost being swallowed whole by the ocean. That's how every day feels.

Personal connection this is how I feel when I get anxiety or I feel depressed. The whole day, seems to be filled with water and I could stay home, safe or go out and face the day, the brimming glass, the events wave ready to swallow me whole.

In this poem water is highly used as describing how this one day felt.

I highly agree with the Way Pablo Neruda chose to convey this one day that's too many feels the same as every single day.

“ and drowned, without being Unbound.”

When reading this I think of being with someone and drowning under a current so strong but ,has yet to unbound me and that person.

This line, to me, displays the will of not letting go.

Personal connection- when I was younger I owned dolls. I didn't have anyone to play with or talk too so they were my friends. At one point my mother threw them away and I didn't know how much I truly needs and wanted them until the day I saw them go down the garbage shoot. From that day forward she never threw my next set of dolls away and no one touched them. I stayed bounded to them no matter what. I need them and no matter the strength of others, I stayed with my dolls without being unbounded.

“A strange door opened, between us,

and someone, with no face as yet,

waited for us there.”

To me I took this line completely differently then perhaps how it's written or intended to be. To me I imagined the door opening between them as  a rip in their relationship and by the end, this someone with no face as yet that's waiting for them is the representation of their relationship which is slowly fading away.

When reading this, I get a sense of facelessness.

Personal connection- I used to have nightmares a lot when I was younger and nowadays I only have 1, once in a blue moon. In my nightmares I was always put in scary situations and one thing All my nightmares had in common was, on person. It had no face and somehow it was always there, faceless and dressed in black.

This poem makes me feel, weighed down and scared all at once. It's a very overwhelming poem in my opinion.

Color: throughout the poem it speaks about water more than once. When I read this poem, I get the Colors green and blue. Blue because of the imagery or water and the sky and green because the grass and trees surrounding place of water.

(DAYS#2) “Relentless as the tarantula”- poem by Charles Bukowski

“if you do, somebody's going to drive by and spray your guts with a submachine gun.”

When I read this line, the image of someone sitting down, having coffee and suddenly getting shot, came into my head.

The line before this talks about someone not being able to sit down and enjoy life because if they do their guts will be everywhere and that made me sad to think about how someone can't even enjoy the simpleness of life because of the actions of other.

This one line relates back to what seems to be happening currently in america, with the bombing and the shooting.

“they're not going to let you feel good for very long anywhere.”

This like to be flows perfectly with the idea of the last one and that's that these people won't let this person and the other citizens be free basically.

Personal connections: when you make enemies, it hard to have a good day and especially when you have to see them everyday. I got into an issue once that somewhat has dragged itself into the present. These people, in which I do not associate with, still have a way of ruining my day. My mood will change from happy to straight nothing in seconds. It doesn't matter if I'm home or at school, the feelings follow.

“dead, dropped into some hole”

Though there is no mention of color, while reading this line, I thought of pure darkness. I saw nothing but black because of the description of death and hole.

This part of the poem made me think scary things. The idea of being dead and just tossed into a hole bothers me to an extent of no explanations.

“as long as there are humans about there is never going to be any peace”

This one line has to be the realest thing I've ever read in a poem.

This line speaks truth to the human race.

I agree with this line because humans are the true monsters. We create our own wars etc. And no war means peace and since we create 99% of our problems, if we were no longer apart of earth, peace would live and our planet would be extremely healthy.

“all you can do is maybe grab ten lucky minutes here or maybe an hour

there.”

This line speaks toward the reality standpoint to me. In reality we are not going to have time and so we must make the most of the minutes or hours we get.

Personal connection: I used to have so much time on my hands where I could write on the side, watch netflix, do my cleaning around my house and go to bed without worry. Now I have homework or things I haven't done and it's all stress, stress, stress. For all the extra things I want to do like writing or netflix, I have to fit that into the luck minute of hour I have.

Color: throughout this whole poem, I got images of the poem in black and white. Through they are issues that happen now, my mind associates this with black and white film type styles because both are old. You have the old films and you have the old ways that people still bring into the present and, god forbid, the future

Theme: I'm not one to usually pick up on  themes but this poem had a theme that is relatable to all people and I think that's lack of freedom and how we, humans, are the monsters. The theme lack of freedom shows throughout the majority of the poem when he speaks about how life can not be enjoyed or else your guts are going to be everywhere and humans being the monsters is showed when Neruda says that there will never be peace as long as humans are here on earth.

(Day #3) “Nothing But Death”-poem By: Pablo Neruda

“the heart moving through a tunnel, in it darkness, darkness, darkness”

This line made me feel something within myself. The idea of a heart moving through a tunnel and all there is, is darkness, almost relates to all people during a certain period in their lives.

Personal connection: I liked a guy once and I gave him a love note that was meant to be taken as a joke. He took it seriously and didn't speak to me. I changed lockers and we don't speak anymore. When the whole situation was new, I had trouble finding words to illustrate my exact feelings. Reading this line now, that's how I felt. It's almost a description that described my broken heart within only 1 sentences.

I could imagine a red heart traveling down a long tunnel looking for light and only stumbling into places of darkness which happens to be everywhere.

“death is inside the bones.”

This line reminds me of the saying, we died the day we were born.

Our bones are something that is within us and we can't escape it, same with death.

I agree with the idea of death being everywhere because death lurks and it can strike at anytime.

“like a barking where there are no dogs”

I like the way death was described here.

It is being described as something that can be sensed but not seen. It's like the air. We can't see air but we know it's there because we breath. We can't see death but we know it's inescapable and its present because we all die someday, somehow.  

“Death arrives among all that sound like a shoe with no foot in it, like a suit with no man in it, comes and knocks, using a ring without stone in it, with no finger in it, comes and shouts with no mouth, with no tongue, with no throat.”

I like the way that here, death is something that is there but is empty, but it carries a huge meaning like a shoe with no foot in it  or a suit with no man in it. You can't see the things that are meant to go along with these things, they are empty but, even without the man and the foot, it still carries a greater meaning, like death carries its own.

Color: the river of dark purple, but it seems to me that it's singing has the color of damp violets,  the face of death is green,

and the look death gives is green,

with the penetrating dampness of a violet leaf and the somber color of embittered winter. All these lines within the poem address color.

Theme: the theme to me seems to be death and how it's always around us but won't attack until the time is right. In this poem, I feel as though death is almost portrayed through humans. We kill each other and that invites death in.

Day#4  poem by: Charles Bukowski “The History Of One Tough Motherfucker”

“white cross-eyed tailless cat I took him in and fed him and he stayed grew to trust me until a friend drove up the driveway and ran him over”

I like the detail the writer uses when he speaks of the cat.

I don't really like cats but I find it cute that the person in the story and the cat ended up trust worthy friends.

That last part that speaks of the trust being there until  of the author's friends rubbed him over reminds me that trust can sometimes be broken when you are hurt by someone or in a place you consider safe.