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danaesdesk · 2 years

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Poetry

Poetry (ancient Greek: ποιεω (poieo) = I create) is an art form in which human language is used for its aesthetic qualities in addition to, or instead of, its notional and semantic content. It consists largely of oral or literary works in which language is used in a manner that is felt by its user and audience to differ from ordinary prose.

It may use condensed or compressed form to convey emotion or ideas to the reader's or listener's mind or ear; it may also use devices such as assonance and repetition to achieve musical or incantatory effects. Poems frequently rely for their effect on imagery, word association, and the musical qualities of the language used. The interactive layering of all these effects to generate meaning is what marks poetry.

Because of its nature of emphasising linguistic form rather than using language purely for its content, poetry is notoriously difficult to translate from one language into another: a possible exception to this might be the Hebrew Psalms, where the beauty is found more in the balance of ideas than in specific vocabulary. In most poetry, it is the connotations and the "baggage" that words carry (the weight of words) that are most important. These shades and nuances of meaning can be difficult to interpret and can cause different readers to "hear" a particular piece of poetry differently. While there are reasonable interpretations, there can never be a definitive interpretation.

Nature of poetry

Poetry can be differentiated most of the time from prose, which is language meant to convey meaning in a more expansive and less condensed way, frequently using more complete logical or narrative structures than poetry does. This does not necessarily imply that poetry is illogical, but rather that poetry is often created from the need to escape the logical, as well as expressing feelings and other expressions in a tight, condensed manner. English Romantic poet John Keats termed this escape from logic Negative Capability. A further complication is that prose poetry combines the characteristics of poetry with the superficial appearance of prose, such as in Robert Frost's poem, "Home Burial." Other forms include narrative poetry and dramatic poetry, both of which are used to tell stories and so resemble novels and plays. However, both these forms of poetry use the specific features of verse composition to make these stories more memorable or to enhance them in some way.

What is generally accepted as "great" poetry is debatable in many cases. "Great" poetry usually follows the characteristics listed above, but it is also set apart by its complexity and sophistication. "Great" poetry generally captures images vividly and in an original, refreshing way, while weaving together an intricate combination of elements like theme tension, complex emotion, and profound reflective thought. For examples of what is considered "great" poetry, visit the Pulitzer prize and Nobel prize sections for poetry.

The Greek verb ποιεω [poiéo (= I make or create)], gave rise to three words: ποιητης [poiet?s (= the one who creates)], ποιησις [poíesis (= the act of creation)] and ποιημα [poíema (= the thing created)]. From these we get three English words: poet (the creator), poesy (the creation) and poem (the created). A poet is therefore one who creates and poetry is what the poet creates. The underlying concept of the poet as creator is not uncommon. For example, in Anglo-Saxon a poet is a scop (shaper or maker) and in Scots makar.

Sound in poetry

Perhaps the most vital element of sound in poetry is rhythm. Often the rhythm of each line is arranged in a particular meter. Different types of meter played key roles in Classical, Early European, Eastern and Modern poetry. In the case of free verse, the rhythm of lines is often organized into looser units of cadence.

Poetry in English and other modern European languages often uses rhyme. Rhyme at the end of lines is the basis of a number of common poetic forms, such as ballads, sonnets and rhyming couplets. However, the use of rhyme is not universal. Much modern poetry, for example, avoids traditional rhyme schemes. Furthermore, Classical Greek and Latin poetry did not use rhyme. In fact, rhyme did not enter European poetry at all until the High Middle Ages, when it was adopted from the Arabic language. The Arabs have always used rhymes extensively, most notably in their long, rhyming qasidas. Some classical poetry forms, such as Venpa of the Tamil language, had rigid grammars (to the point that they could be expressed as a context-free grammar), which ensured a rhythm.

Alliteration played a key role in structuring early Germanic and English forms of poetry (called alliterative verse), akin to the role of rhyme in later European poetry. The alliterative patterns of early Germanic poetry and the rhyme schemes of Modern European poetry alike both include meter as a key part of their structure, which determines when the listener expects instances of rhyme or alliteration to occur. In this sense, both alliteration and rhyme, when used in poetic structures, help to emphasise and define a rhythmic pattern. By contrast, the chief device of Biblical poetry in ancient Hebrew was parallelism, a rhetorical structure in which successive lines reflected each other in grammatical structure, sound structure, notional content, or all three; a verse form that lent itself to antiphonal or call- and-response performance.

In addition to the forms of rhyme, alliteration and rhythm that structure much poetry, sound plays a more subtle role in even free verse poetry in creating pleasing, varied patterns and emphasising or sometimes even illustrating semantic elements of the poem. Devices such as alliteration, assonance, consonance, dissonance and internal rhyme are among the ways poets use sound. Euphony refers to the musical, flowing quality of words arranged in an aesthetically pleasing way.

Poetry and form

Compared with prose, poetry depends less on the linguistic units of sentences and paragraphs, and more on units of organisation that are purely poetic. The typical structural elements are the line, couplet, strophe, stanza, and verse paragraph.

Lines may be self-contained units of sense, as in the well-known lines from William Shakespeare's Hamlet:

To be, or not to be: that is the question.

Alternatively a line may end in mid-phrase or sentence:

Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer

this linguistic unit is completed in the next line,

The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.

This technique is called enjambment, and is used to create a sense of expectation in the reader and/or to add a dynamic to the movement of the verse.

In many instances, the effectiveness of a poem derives from the tension between the use of linguistic and formal units. With the advent of printing, poets gained greater control over the visual presentation of their work. As a result, the use of these formal elements, and of the white space they help create, became an important part of the poet's toolbox. Modernist poetry tends to take this to an extreme, with the placement of individual lines or groups of lines on the page forming an integral part of the poem's composition. In its most extreme form, this leads to the writing of concrete poetry.

Poetry and rhetoric

Rhetorical devices such as simile and metaphor are frequently used in poetry. Indeed, Aristotle wrote in his Poetics that "the greatest thing by far is to be a master of metaphor". However, particularly since the rise of Modernism, some poets have opted for reduced use of these devices, preferring rather to attempt the direct presentation of things and experiences. Other 20th-century poets, however, particularly the surrealists, have pushed rhetorical devices to their limits, making frequent use of catachresis.

History of poetry

Poetry as an art form predates literacy. In preliterate societies, poetry was frequently employed as a means of recording oral history, storytelling (epic poetry), genealogy, law and other forms of expression or knowledge that modern societies might expect to be handled in prose. The Ramayana, a Sanskrit epic which includes poetry, was probably written in the 3rd century BCE in a language described by William Jones as "more perfect than Latin, more copious than Greek and more exquisitely refined than either." Poetry is also often closely identified with liturgy in these societies, as the formal nature of poetry makes it easier to remember priestly incantations or prophecies. The greater part of the world's sacred scriptures are made up of poetry rather than prose.

The use of verse to transmit cultural information continues today. Many English speaking–Americans know that "in 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue". An alphabet song teaches the names and order of the letters of the alphabet; another jingle states the lengths and names of the months in the Gregorian calendar. Preliterate societies, lacking the means to write down important cultural information, use similar methods to preserve it.

Some writers believe that poetry has its origins in song. Most of the characteristics that distinguish it from other forms of utterance—rhythm, rhyme, compression, intensity of feeling, the use of refrains—appear to have come about from efforts to fit words to musical forms. However, in the European tradition the earliest surviving poems, the Homeric and Hesiodic epics, identify themselves as poems to be recited or chanted to a musical accompaniment rather than as pure song. Another interpretation, developed from 20th-century studies of living Montenegran epic reciters by Milman Parry and others, is that rhythm, refrains, and kennings are essentially paratactic devices that enable the reciter to reconstruct the poem from memory.

In preliterate societies, all these forms of poetry were composed for, and sometimes during, performance. As such, there was a certain degree of fluidity to the exact wording of poems, given this could change from one performance or performer to another. The introduction of writing tended to fix the content of a poem to the version that happened to be written down and survive. Written composition also meant that poets began to compose not for an audience that was sitting in front of them but for an absent reader. Later, the invention of printing tended to accelerate these trends. Poets were now writing more for the eye than for the ear.

The development of literacy gave rise to more personal, shorter poems intended to be sung. These are called lyrics, which derives from the Greek lura or lyre, the instrument that was used to accompany the performance of Greek lyrics from about the seventh century BCE onward. The Greek's practice of singing hymns in large choruses gave rise in the sixth century BCE to dramatic verse, and to the practice of writing poetic plays for performance in their theatres.

In more recent times, the introduction of electronic media and the rise of the poetry reading have led to a resurgence of performance poetry and have resulted in a situation where poetry for the eye and poetry for the ear coexist, sometimes in the same poem.

#wikipedia #poetry #greek #language #academic writing #writing

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elisaenglish · 2 years

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Loneliness and the Trinity of Creativity: Ada Lovelace, the Poles of the Mind, and the Source of Her Imaginative Powers

Those who have learned to walk on the threshold of the unknown worlds… may then with the fair white wings of Imagination hope to soar further into the unexplored amidst which we live.

What an odd expectation, both hopeful and heedless of logic, that minds capable of reaching far beyond the horizon of the common imagination should be of common constitution and even emotional topography. We can only ever have the faintest map of another’s internal reality. It is hard enough to reconstitute the mental and emotional landscape of another mind across the abyss of otherness, across the barrier of the umwelt even in the present, but it especially hard across the spacetime divide of centuries and cultures. And yet something of the fragments that survive, if handled attentively and compassionately enough, can contour that remote bygone reality and yield a fuller picture of personhood than our flat hero-myths paint.

Ada Lovelace (December 10, 1815–November 27, 1852), whose uncommon mind catalysed the age of the algorithm, could reach soaring heights of the imagination and plummet to the blackest depths of loneliness. She was ill a lot: headaches, cholera, multiple severe attacks of measles. She practised her harp religiously as her mind roamed the most abstract regions of thought. She had moments of elated ideation bordering on the mystical, punctuated by plunges into the inkiest regions of being—syncopations then brushed under the sweeping diagnoses of neurasthenia or hysteria, now most likely identified as bipolar disorder.

Through it all, she understood that creativity was the ability to find “points in common, between subjects having no very apparent connexion, & hence seldom or never brought into juxtaposition”—an understanding that came easily to her, for she herself was a walking juxtaposition.

Two centuries of scholars and admirers have tried to reconstruct this complex person from the fragments she left behind, but none, in my experience, more richly and dimensionally than James Gleick in The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood (public library), which remains one of the finest books ever written about how we got to now.

With an eye to the letter Ada’s delinquent father—the poet Lord Byron—wrote to her forbidding mother—the mathematically gifted baroness Annabella Milbanke—inquiring whether the girl he abandoned was imaginative, Gleick writes:

“Yes, she was imaginative.

She was a prodigy, clever at mathematics, encouraged by tutors, talented in drawing and music, fantastically inventive and profoundly lonely. When she was twelve, she set about inventing a means of flying. “I am going to begin my paper wings tomorrow,” she wrote to her mother. She hoped “to bring the art of flying to very great perfection. I think of writing a book of Flyology illustrated with plates.” For a while she signed her letters “your very affectionate Carrier Pigeon.” She asked her mother to find a book illustrating bird anatomy, because she was reluctant “to dissect even a bird.””

Ada grew up in a cauldron of control, educated at home by her mother, who was determined to eradicate every strain of her father’s dangerous “poetical” inheritance. She handed out paper “tickets” to the girl for excelling at her lessons, then confiscated them when Ada did not meet her expectation. If this system of reward and punishment failed to motivate Ada, she was stuffed into a closet until she vowed to do better.

There was a deeper punishment being administered in her upbringing—not for something Ada did, but for something she was. This intellectual regimen itself closeted a vast and restive part of her, waiting for its powers of expression to be unlatched. She railed at her mother:

“You will not concede me philosophical poetry. Invert the order! Will you give me poetical philosophy, poetical science?”

She rebelled by claiming it for herself, becoming the first person to marry the mathematical capabilities of computational machines with the poetic possibilities of symbolic logic applied with imagination—the world’s first true computer programmer. She also rebelled by developing a romantic infatuation with her tutor, sneaking around the house and garden with him, and making out to the maximum limits of vestigial propriety until their teenage romance was found out and the tutor was promptly banished.

That spring, dressed in white satin and tulle, she met the King and Queen at her official court debut. But the real milestone came a month later, when she met a figure far more important to the history of the future: Charles Babbage—brilliant and bushy-browed, curmudgeonly and charming, described by Harper’s Monthly as “better known to readers of English newspapers as the persistent opponent of street music.” Gleick writes:

“With her mother, she went to see what Lady Byron called his “thinking machine,” the portion of the Difference Engine in his salon. Babbage saw a sparkling, self-possessed young woman with porcelain features and a notorious name, who managed to reveal that she knew more mathematics than most men graduating from university. She saw an imposing forty-one-year-old, authoritative eyebrows anchoring his strong-boned face, who possessed wit and charm and did not wear these qualities lightly. He seemed a kind of visionary—just what she was seeking. She admired the machine, too. An onlooker reported: “While other visitors gazed at the working of this beautiful instrument with the sort of expression, and I dare say the sort of feeling, that some savages are said to have shown on first seeing a looking-glass or hearing a gun, Miss Byron, young as she was, understood its working, and saw the great beauty of the invention.” Her feeling for the beauty and abstractions of mathematics, fed only in morsels from her succession of tutors, was overflowing. It had no outlet. A woman could not attend university in England, nor join a scientific society (with two exceptions: the botanical and horticultural).”

Enraptured by the possibilities that lay hidden in this new generation of machines, Ada was beginning to enjoy her unusual mind in a new way:

“I find that my plans & ideas keep gaining in clearness, & assuming more of the crystalline & less & less of the nebulous form.”

At times, in the positive extremes of her emotional polarity, her confidence crested into grandiosity, both terrible and touching:

“I do not believe that my father was (or ever could have been) such a Poet as I shall be an Analyst; (& Metaphysician); for with me the two go together indissolubly.”

Like Mary Shelley, she had waking dreams in which ideas formed in her mind by their own accord—ideas beyond anything she had been taught, beyond anything teachable. She had the metacognitive awareness that her cognition worked in unusual ways and the precocious intuition to recognise in Babbage a kindred mind on which she could hone her own. With extraordinary self-awareness of both her powers and her limits—which might be the highest achievement of maturity—she beseeched him to take her on as a pupil, not realising she was about to become the magnifying lens through which his own vision would bend past the horizon of possibility he had envisioned for it. She wrote to him:

“Bearing me in mind… I mean my mathematical interests… is the greatest favour any one can do me.—Perhaps, none of us can estimate how great... I am by nature a bit of a philosopher, & a very great speculator,—so that I look on through a very immeasurable vista, and though I see nothing but vague & cloudy uncertainty in the foreground of our being, yet I fancy I discern a very bright light a good way further on, and this makes me care much less about the cloudiness & indistinctness which is near.—Am I too imaginative for you? I think not.”

This question of the imagination—the question of the father she never met but whose portrait she kept under green drapery in her study—both thrilled and troubled her. She felt she had to keep her “metaphysical head in order,” but she also knew there was a different order of reality yet to be discovered. Mathematics was her supreme plaything of the imagination and the closest thing she knew to magic:

“I am often reminded of certain sprites & fairies one reads of, who are at one’s elbows in one shape now, & the next minute in a form most dissimilar; and uncommonly deceptive, troublesome & tantalising are the mathematical sprites & fairies sometimes.”

She longed for the precision of mathematics in the nebula of the imagination. Two centuries before Bob Dylan observed that “we’re all wind and dust anyway [and] we don’t have any proof that we are even sitting here,” she probed the edges of reality:

“We talk much of Imagination. We talk of the Imagination of Poets, the Imagination of Artists &c; I am inclined to think that in general we don’t know very exactly what we are talking about… It is that which penetrates into the unseen worlds around us, the worlds of Science. It is that which feels & discovers what is, the real which we see not, which exists not for our senses. Those who have learned to walk on the threshold of the unknown worlds… may then with the fair white wings of Imagination hope to soar further into the unexplored amidst which we live.”

For her, the imagination was not only a means of escaping from—from the loneliness, the intense dark moods, the limits of her time and place—but an escape toward something greater, something truer than what the eye could see and the common mind could hold. She recognised that she had “a peculiar way of learning“; allowing the cultural luxury of an ahistorical term, she recognised her own neurodivergence. There is a Blakean quality, a Joan of Arc spirit, in the self-declaration she sent to her mother shortly before her twenty-seventh birthday—the closest thing Ada Lovelace ever composed to a personal manifesto:

“Dearest Mama,

I must tell you what my opinion of my own mind and powers is exactly—the result of a most accurate study of myself with a view to my future plans during many months. I believe myself to possess a most singular combination of qualities exactly fitted to make me pre-eminently a discoverer of the hidden realities of nature. You will not mistake this assertion either for a wild enthusiasm or for the result of any disposition to self-exaltation. On the contrary, the belief has been forced upon me, and most slow have I been to admit it even. I will mention the three remarkable faculties in me, which united ought (all in good time) to make me see anything that a being not actually dead can see and know (for it is what we are pleased to call death that will really reveal things to us).

Firstly: owing to some peculiarity in my nervous system, I have perceptions of some things, which no one else has—or at least very few, if any. This faculty may be designated in me as a singular tact, or some might say an intuitive perception of hidden things—that is of things hidden from eyes, ears, and the ordinary senses… This alone would advantage me little, in the discovery line, but there is, secondly, my immense reasoning faculties. Thirdly: my concentrative faculty, by which I mean the power not only of throwing my whole energy and existence into whatever I choose, but also bringing to bear on any one subject or idea a vast apparatus from all sorts of apparently irrelevant and extraneous sources. I can throw rays from every quarter of the universe into one vast focus.

Now these three powers (I cannot resist the wickedness of calling them my discovering or scientific Trinity) are a vast apparatus put into my power by Providence; and it rests with me by a proper course during the next twenty years to make the engine what I please. But haste, or a restless ambition, would quite ruin the whole.

Meantime my course is so clear and obvious that it is delightful to think how straight it is. And yet what a mountain I have to climb! It is enough to frighten anyone who had not all that most insatiable and restless energy, which from my babyhood has been the plague of your life and my own.”

That year, Babbage set out to elaborate on his Difference Engine in the more complex Analytical Engine and their collaboration began in earnest. The rest, as we know, is history.

But in a tragic testament to the uncomfortable fact that even the furthest seers can’t fully bend their gaze past the horizon of their culture’s given, Ada Lovelace was captive to the Cartesian heritage of her epoch—she saw her formidable mind as an entity separate from her ailing body, existing on a plane beyond the atomic reality of her being. And who could fault her—the very notion of entropy, which brought mathematics to mortality, was still a quarter century away.

High on the thrill of solving the problem of generating Bernoulli numbers—the problem at the crux of furnishing the variables that would become the Analytical Engine’s units of information—she wrote to Babbage:

“That brain of mine is something more than merely mortal; as time will show; (if only my breathing & some other et-ceteras do not make too rapid a progress towards instead of from mortality).

Before ten years are over, the Devil’s in it if I have not sucked out some of the life-blood from the mysteries of this universe, in a way that no purely mortal lips or brains could do.

No one knows what almost awful energy & power lie yet undevelopped in that wiry little system of mine.”

With astonishing self-awareness of just how slender the line between genius and madness can be, she added:

“I say awful, because you may imagine what it might be under certain circumstances.”

Two weeks before her thirty-seventh birthday, the entropic brutality of uterine cancer dismantled the matter that made Ada’s mind, leaving behind the world’s first computer programme and the long comet-tail of this blazing prophet of the poetry of computation.

Complement with the story of how the bit was born another century later, also from The Information, then revisit artist Sydney Padua’s perennially impressive graphic novel about Ada’s collaboration with Babbage.

Source: Maria Popova, themarginalian.org (31st August 2022)

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perpetual-stories · 3 years

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22 Essential Literary Devices and How to Use Them In Your Writing

hello, happy Monday. Hope you’re all having a wonderful day!

I will skip the pre-info and dive right into it.

What Is a Literary Device?

is a tool used by writers to hint at larger themes, ideas, and meaning in a story or piece of writing

The List of Literary Devices:

Allegory. Allegory is a literary device used to express large, complex ideas in an approachable manner. Allegory allows writers to create some distance between themselves and the issues they are discussing, especially when those issues are strong critiques of political or societal realities.

Allusion. An allusion is a popular literary device used to develop characters, frame storylines, and help create associations to well-known works. Allusions can reference anything from Victorian fairy tales and popular culture to the Bible and the Bard. Take the popular expression “Bah humbug”—an allusion that references Charles Dickens’ novella A Christmas Carol. The phrase, which is often used to express dissatisfaction, is associated with the tale’s curmudgeonly character, Ebenezer Scrooge.

Anachronism. Imagine reading a story about a caveman who microwaves his dinner, or watching a film adaptation of a Jane Austen novel in which the characters text each other instead of writing letters. These circumstances are examples of anachronisms, or an error in chronology—the kind that makes audiences raise their eyebrows or do a double-take. Sometimes anachronisms are true blunders; other times, they’re used intentionally to add humor or to comment on a specific time period in history.

Cliffhanger. It’s a familiar feeling: You’re on minute 59 of an hour-long television episode, and the protagonist is about to face the villain—and then episode cuts to black. Known as a cliffhanger, this plot device marks the end of a section of a narrative with the express purpose of keeping audiences engaged in the story.

Dramatic Irony. Remember the first time you read or watched Romeo and Juliet? The tragic ending of this iconic story exemplifies dramatic irony: The audience knows that the lovers are each alive, but neither of the lovers knows that the other is still alive. Each drinks their poison without knowing what the audience knows. Dramatic irony is used to great effect in literature, film, and television.

Extended Metaphor. Extended metaphors build evocative images into a piece of writing and make prose more emotionally resonant. Examples of extended metaphor can be found across all forms of poetry and prose. Learning to use extended metaphors in your own work will help you engage your readers and improve your writing.

Foreshadowing. At its core, storytelling has one ambition: to capture and sustain your reader’s attention and keep them reading your story. Foreshadowing, or slyly indicating a future event, is one technique a writer can use to create and build suspense.

Humor. Humor brings people together and has the power to transform how we think about the world. Of course, not everyone is adept at being funny—particularly in their writing. Making people laugh takes some skill and finesse, and, because so much relies on instinct, is harder to teach than other techniques. However, all writers can benefit from learning more about how humor functions in writing.

Imagery. If you’ve practiced or studied creative writing, chances are you’ve encountered the expression “paint a picture with words.” In poetry and literature, this is known as imagery: the use of figurative language to evoke a sensory experience in the reader. When a poet uses descriptive language well, they play to the reader’s senses, providing them with sights, tastes, smells, sounds, internal and external feelings, and even deep emotion. The sensory details in imagery bring works to life.

Irony. Irony is an oft-misunderstood literary device that hinges on opposites: what things are on the surface, and what they end up actually being. Many learn about dramatic irony through works of theater like Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet or Sophocles’s Oedipus Rex. When deployed with skill, irony is a powerful tool that adds depth and substance to a piece of writing.

Metaphor, Simile, and Analogy. Metaphors, similes, and analogies are three techniques used in speech and writing to make comparisons. Each is used in a different way, and differentiating between the three can get a little tricky: For example, a simile is actually a subcategory of metaphor, which means all similes are metaphors, but not all metaphors are similes. Knowing the similarities and differences between metaphor, simile, and analogy can help you identify which is best to use in any scenario and help make your writing stronger.

Motif. A motif is a repeated element that has symbolic significance to a story. Sometimes a motif is a recurring image. Sometimes it’s a repeated word or phrase or topic. A motif can be a recurrent situation or action. It can be a sound or a smell or a temperature or a color. The defining aspect is that a motif repeats, and through this repetition, a motif helps to illuminate the central ideas, themes, and deeper meaning of the story in which it appears.

Motif vs. Symbol. Both motifs and symbols are used across artistic mediums: Painters, sculptors, playwrights, and musicians all use motifs and symbols in their respective art forms. And while they are similar literary terms, “motif” and “symbol” are not synonyms.

Oxymoron. An oxymoron is a figure of speech: a creative approach to language that plays with meaning and the use of words in a non-literal sense. This literary device combines words with contradictory definitions to coin a new word or phrase (think of the idiom “act naturally”—how can you be your natural self if you’re acting?). The incongruity of the resulting statement allows writers to play with language and meaning.

Paradox. “This sentence is a lie.” This self-referential statement is an example of a paradox—a contradiction that questions logic. In literature, paradoxes can elicit humor, illustrate themes, and provoke readers to think critically.

Personification. In writing, figurative language—using words to convey a different meaning outside the literal one—helps writers express themselves in more creative ways. One popular type of figurative language is personification: assigning human attributes to a non-human entity or inanimate object in an effort to express a point or idea in a more colorful, imaginative way.

Satire. Satire is so prevalent in pop culture that most of us are already very familiar with it, even if we don’t always realize it. Satire is an often-humorous way of poking fun at the powers that be. Sometimes, it is created with the goal to drive social change. Satire can be part of any work of culture, art, or entertainment—it has a long history, and it is as relevant today as it was in ancient Rome.

Situational Irony. Irony: it’s clear as mud. Theorists quibble about the margins of what constitutes irony, but situational irony is all around us—from humorous news headlines to the shock twists in a book or TV show. This type of irony is all about the gap between our expectations and reality, and it can make a memorable and powerful impression when we encounter it.

Suspense. No matter what type of story you’re telling, suspense is a valuable tool for keeping a reader’s attention and interest. Building suspense involves withholding information and raising key questions that pique readers’ curiosity. Character development plays a big role in generating suspense; for example, if a character’s desire is not fulfilled by the end of the book, the story will not feel complete for the reader.

Symbolism. An object, concept, or word does not have to be limited to a single meaning. When you see red roses growing in a garden, what comes to mind? Perhaps you think literally about the rose—about its petals, stem, and thorns, or even about its stamen and pistil as a botanist might. But perhaps your mind goes elsewhere and starts thinking about topics like romance, courtship, and Valentine’s Day. Why would you do this? The reason, of course, is that over the course of many generations, a rose’s symbolic meaning has evolved to include amorous concepts.

Verisimilitude. Verisimilitude (pronounced ve-ri-si-mi-li-tude) is a theoretical concept that determines the semblance of truth in an assertion or hypothesis. It is also an essential tenet of fiction writing. Verisimilitude helps to encourage a reader’s willing suspension of disbelief. When using verisimilitude in writing, the goal is to be credible and convincing.

Vignette. A writer’s job is to engage readers through words. Vignettes—poetic slices-of-life—are a literary device that brings us deeper into a story. Vignettes step away from the action momentarily to zoom in for a closer examination of a particular character, concept, or place. Writers use vignettes to shed light on something that wouldn’t be visible in the story’s main plot.

I’ll make a post going into each of them individually in more detail later on!

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slusheeduck · 2 years

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Time and Circumstance

Another malfunction, this one much harder to fix with his waning divinity. The end was coming soon, he knew. What he didn’t know was whether the Mechanical Heart would be ready in time. Rather than fear, a strange sort of amusement came over him at the thought.

It had been so long since Sotha Sil had been uncertain; the feel of it was rather refreshing.

He’d never liked the concept of gods. In his very early childhood, it was in imitation of his sister; how many times had she complained of rules and being told what to do? To him, in the simplicity of a child’s mind, there was no difference in the admonitions of their parents or the Good Daedra. If Nall said they shouldn’t have to listen to adults, then logically, they shouldn’t have to listen to Azura, either.

Later, not much later, it was in fury. If the Good Daedra could stand idly by as Mehrunes Dagon, their kin, laid waste to Ald Sotha for no reason at all, then who were they to dictate the lives of the Chimer…or of anyone at all? Worship, he reasoned that night as he choked on the scent of smoke that clung to him and the screams still echoing in his head, wasn’t only futile; it was an affront to mortality. And if he had his way, he would end it.

“What’s happened to you, Seht?” Almalexia asked him once, a few centuries after their apotheosis. “I hear you’ve hidden yourself away.”

“And who did you hear that from?” he asked. It wasn’t a denial, which made it a confirmation. Golden eyes narrowed at him.

“Vivec, of course,” she said. “He worries, you know. He won’t say so, but he does.”

“He still sees me as a soot-covered child.” The words weren’t scathing, they were simply a statement of fact. Of the three, Vehk had, unsurprisingly, always been the most in-tune with his emotion–the heart to Seht’s mind and Ayem’s will. Warrior-Poet that he was, he was drawn to the weakest moments of others–for those he loathed, to find where he needed to drive the knife; for those he loved, to find what he needed to shield. And, of course, tragedy made the best poetry.

“He worries about your fire,” she corrected, her natural inclination to chide still making him bristle a few lifetimes after his childhood rebellion. Nall, he knew, would have hated her for that. Sil liked to think he could see past it, on his better days. “We both wonder what happened to the impassioned leader unafraid to rebuke the Daedra in the name of his people. Where’s the mer who loved mortality so much he became a god?”

He never replied, and, to her credit, Ayem turned their conversation elsewhere. But he knew the answer well enough: that mer had died centuries ago, when he’d received his first prayer.

"The old gods are cruel and arbitrary, and distant from the hopes and fears of mer. Your age is past. We are the new gods, born of the flesh, and wise and caring of the needs of our people. Spare us your threats and chiding, inconstant spirit. We are bold and fresh, and will not fear you."

Vivec had a habit of embellishing his accounts, shaping words and memory to make events far grander and more poignant than they actually were. But that quote, that one he got right.

Now, Sil could see the words for what they were: a young man drunk on divine power, finally banishing what he considered the greatest imperfections on the planes of mundus. The cold gods of his youth who turned a blind eye to the destruction of his home, and especially the Prince that feigned warmth in the name of vanity, that tugged one of his dearest friends along and did nothing to help him live.

He’d experimented with the tools for this exact purpose, to give the Chimer the gods they deserved: flawed, broken gods, familiar with grief and rage and joy, who knew what it was like to be mortal because they were mortal. Gods that would listen, because they knew what it was like to go unheard.

He never thought beyond that. He was, after all, very young then.

While the power from the Heart might have been instantaneous, as had Azura’s curse, it still took a generation before the Tribunal, respected as they were, truly became gods in the eyes of their people. That suited them just fine at the time. The three of them used their powers to establish the Dunmer, a race not beholden to cruel gods or an exiled past. A race that had all the world to gain and next to nothing left to lose. They were kind, mindful rulers; Seht in particular utterly devoted to the people themselves, in all their misery and joy.

And then, he heard his first prayer.

It was a simple one, a desperate one–utterly mortal in its plea and delivery. A young girl was terribly ill, and her father prayed to him, Sotha Sil specifically, that she would live.

This was what he’d waited for, the mercy he’d craved for himself and was now desperate to give. And he’d healed plenty of others before. He didn’t even need to go see the girl himself; reality warped at his fingertips, and all of Nirn was open to his will. So, with singular focus, he pushed his power outward.

And stopped.

Two paths fell before him in his mind’s eye, each splintering off to hundreds of possibilities. But they all started with one simple choice: the girl lives, or the girl dies.

The choice was obvious, of course. The girl lives. And the moment he decided, a flash of every possibility appeared before him: famine, misery, abandoned homes and skeletons of guars in the fields. A feeling of absolute certainty that all would come to pass settled on him. He should let her die.

But no, that was ridiculous. One small girl couldn’t cause that much change. And even if she did, he would ensure that none of it came to pass. Reality was his to control, and he would wield it in a way that his people deserved.

And so the girl lived.

The girl living meant an extra mouth to feed. As she grew and married, there were now two mouths. Then three, and four, and five. The boost in population took its toll in the fields; there wasn’t enough to go around. But Sil saw this, and he once again stepped in. At his beck and call, the crops flourished, putting out double, triple the amount of their usual produce; animals bearing twins and triplets. The girl’s village prospered.

But even he couldn’t call up something from nothing. The crops flourishing meant the nutrients in the soil depleted. Soon it could grow no more than the ash surrounding it. The animals were weak from the unnatural circumstance of their birth, and their descendants weaker still. Soon, there was nothing left but dead guar and dried up fields, and the villagers that survived the famine had no choice but to leave. One life saved, but so many others lost. All just as he’d expected.

There, he realized, was proof that he wasn’t a god. He was merely a mortal who had gotten lucky, and his pride had been so great that he disregarded his logic. That, he knew, could never happen again. He would never doubt; certainty would be his curse, but it would serve the Dunmer well. And now he knew that failure was a possibility, but could not be an option.

A shrine to him went up, among the ruins of the village, in the years that followed. After all, Sotha Sil had cured a girl there once.

“Are we never to see you again, Seht?” The words were teasing, but in Vivec’s peculiar way, entirely earnest. “I miss your dry remarks, you know, when you disappear for years on end.”

“There’s much to do.” He left it there.

“Such as?” Unlike Almalexia, Vehk wasn’t one to let a conversation go. Sometimes, Sil was grateful for it. Other times, irritated. This time, it was the latter. He didn’t answer, instead focusing on the mechanism he’d been trying to perfect; it’d be easier if his brass hands were steadier, so it’d likely have to wait until he could get them upgraded. But it still served as something to focus on rather than his friend’s two-toned face.

“Is it another barter with the daedra? Or is the great Mainspring Ever-wound still caught up in further perfecting his own perfect world?” A grin split Vivec’s face as Seht finally looked up, a thoroughly unamused expression on his face.

“I hate that name.”

“And yet it fits you so well. Ever-wound, ever-thinking, ever-tinkering.” Vehk rested a cheek in his hand, elbow on his knee as he looked over Seht. He sat the same before the apotheosis, albeit with his crossed legs on the ground rather than floating three feet in the air. “You used to love the messiness of the world, you know.”

“No, I never loved the world. I loved the people,” he corrected, returning to his work.

“Then why not be among them? Ayem and I are present in Dunmeri life. They see us, they know we’re there for them. And in turn, we see them: their triumphs, their failures, their joy and sorrows, their lives.” Vivec’s eyes–one scarlet like his own, one the pale gold he had been born with–traveled over Sil’s face. “You, as I recall, hated the absence of the gods.”

“I did. I still do.” He adjusted a small spring. “But I am not a god. If I’m hated as one, then it only emphasizes the divinity I don’t have.”

“Belief begets divinity.”

“No, hearts of gods and Dwemeri tools beget power that looks like divinity.”

“There’s no poetry in you, Seht.”

“No, there isn’t. I imagine that’s why we have you.”

It’s a fond moment, one that was few and far between lately. As the years dragged on, the Tribunal knew infinitely more about each other than they ever could have before, seen more intimacy with each other than any mortal could hope for, and yet the rift between them always seemed to grow. The longer they were so-called gods, the lonelier it became.

“I still don’t understand why you don’t see the people who love you, who you know love you as a god in spite of what you believe of yourself. Don’t you think that’s denying them a kindness only you can give?” There’s a question within a question; there always was with Vivec. For someone who painted so beautifully with his words, he left so much unsaid. It’d frustrated Sil in his youth; now, it was a language he understood fluently.

Why do you deny me the small kindness of your friendship, Seht?

Sil stayed very quiet; he could feel Vivec’s resignation at not getting an answer–he often didn’t. But this time, he would.

“I do what I must to make the world perfect for them,” he said, voice soft. “Their nature, messy and tragic and destructive as it is, is beautiful, and it’s something that must be protected. The walls of my world must be secure, the defenses must be insurmountable. I cannot rest until it is perfect, and I cannot let anything get in the way of it.”

And you, Vivec, will only get in the way. He spoke Vehk’s language, too.

“And will it ever be as perfect as you dream?”

No, was the correct answer. It would never be, because despite his certainty, despite his power, Sotha Sil was messy and tragic and destructive as well.

“It must be,” is what he said.

The first statue of him was erected a century after the Battle of Red Mountain. Many followed, of course, but the first was the one that haunted him. He hadn’t received prayers yet, but many petitions, and an awe-filled silence followed him as he walked through the streets. He hated it, more than he ever thought he would. It was the first of many times he’d consider hiding away.

The statue was meant to be a surprise. Sweet, in its way–devotion to god-like saviors who had delivered them from the daedra and ushered in a new age, in the only way a mortal could fathom to do so. He knew it was coming, and yet he didn’t–it took another half-century or so before he could really sort the constant stream of information that came to him. So, when the three statues of Almsivi were revealed, his shock was, more or less, very real.

Vivec was delighted, as he was wont to be by any grand displays. Almalexia, ever the graceful queen, thanked those present, like a mother would when given a trinket by her child. And Sotha Sil was silent–it was then, he thought, where he first gained his reputation for being mysterious.

It was a faithful likeness, and the craftsmanship was something to behold.The sculptors knew their subject well…except for the face. The stone countenance was animated, near-wild with joy and possibility. One could practically hear the declaration coming from it.

“We are bold and fresh, and will not fear you."

It was the face of a new god.

One day, not long after, the statues of Vivec and Almalexia still stood tall, but Sotha Sil’s had crumbled into a pile of rubble. Some blamed the daedra; others blamed the craftsman for shoddy work. Many vowed that, should the vandal be one of their own, they would be dealt with swiftly.

The culprit was never found. And, strangely, no statue quite like the first could ever be made again.

He regretted, some centuries later, that he had never been as friendly with the Dwemer as Nerevar had been. He’d admired their work, but always from afar, and always with the intention of improving it. They weren’t allies, despite Neht’s constant attempts to make them so; they were rivals.

And they still seemed to taunt him, even now, having gone somewhere even he couldn’t suss out. He had questions, and no one to answer them.

Well, then. He would make new answers from what was left behind.

Dwarven ruins, as a whole, were very dangerous places. But near-divine powers kept much of the still-active defenses at bay, and Seht enjoyed the solitude he found there. Gears and cogs and springs were simple; they always made sense, so long as you knew how to put them together. So it was fitting that his new world, his perfect world, would be built from them.

Sometimes–not often, but sometimes–he could practically hear Nerevar’s laugh as he tried to piece together his plan. How many times had he praised his cleverness, had he gladly told everyone that his wisest advisor–his teacher, he would even call him in his fondest moments–was this spindly youth from a forgotten house? And alternately, how many times had Neht warned him that his tendency to overthink, his need to fix and fix and fix would be his undoing?

Sil wondered often, as he crafted his prototypes, what his old friend would think of his grand project. Whether he would be disgusted by such a blatant act of hubris, or whether he would find the attempt noble, no matter whether he succeeded or not.

He never could find an answer to that, either. Nor could he ever craft a new one. Nerevar could never be part of this equation, because if he was, this problem would never exist.

Idly, every few centuries or so, Sotha Sil considered ending this charade of his. Never seriously, there was still far too much to do and not enough time to do it. But he couldn’t say the temptation for a bit of peace wasn’t an attractive one.

He wondered, in those same moments, if he even could. Akatosh and Lorkhan both died–in doing so, they gave the world life. What would the suicide of of a creature like him result in?

He came up with different possibilities every time, but one thing was constant: no matter what the result, he was certain that Vehk would be able to make it into quite the poem.

Their pilgrimages to the Heart of Lorkhan didn’t used to be an annual affair. In fact, it took several centuries for them to even realize it was necessary to do so.

In the time between the apotheosis and their first pilgrimage, it had to be said that Ayem wore her divinity well. She, it seemed, was born to be a god; she had always sought to be untouchable, and she had leaned into her natural savagery to do so. Now, by virtue of her very being, she could lay down her arms and play into the fantasy she’d always wanted. Away went the Face-Snaked Queen, the warrior-bride of Nerevar; now here was Mother Morrowind, with infinite children she could guide from birth to death. Her ruthlessness never quite went away, but softened into being the ever-scolding parent, who was only harsh because she wanted the best.

For Vehk, on the other hand, his divinity was a curse, though he would never say so–and, possibly, never even considered it as such. But even as a mortal, Vivec had always wanted to be more than he was, had always been unhappy when reminded that he could be no more than Vivec. Now, with his power to craft his reality as easily as his words, he sought after what he so desperately had wanted. He shaped himself as all in equal parts: male and female, Dunmer and Chimer, god and mortal, warrior and poet. And yet, when all was said and done, he could still be no more than Vivec; arguably, he was more Vivec now than he had been as a mortal. No doubt it was an irony he would appreciate, if it wasn’t so close to his heart.

So, when they first felt their power wan–early enough that they were still bound together, but far enough in to have prayers that needed answering–each of the Tribunal reacted as one would expect: Sotha Sil with grim acceptance, Vivec with profound melancholy, and Almalexia with vicious denial. As Seht drew up simulations and theories of what they would need to do to care for the people, and as Vehk drew up speech and sermon to assure the Dunmer they were still in capable hands, it was Ayem that suggested they return to the Heart, immediately.

Sil and Almalexia had never been particularly close–certainly not as close as Vehk or Neht had been to the both of them–but he had always admired her direct manner of solving problems. She was a mer of action, whether it was charging into battle or milling through crowded streets of worshippers. If it weren’t for her insistence of getting the most straight-forward solution, they may have lost their divinity much, much sooner.

In later years, he wasn’t certain if he should love or hate her for that.

But in that moment, he was grateful, as was Vivec. They bathed in the power of the Heart of Lorkhan, and returned from the mountain as the gods the people expected. Things could stay as they were, for a little bit longer, at least.

But something did change that day, between their descent and ascent. There was a desperate ferocity to Almalexia as they made their way down to the chamber below Red Mountain. She led the way, savage as she had been the last time they’d fought here. But her single-mindedness left her with tunnel-vision, and a particularly reckless slash nearly sent her careening down into the lava below–a mistake that, in their state, would be fatal. But Sil was quick, catching her arm and pulling her back to safety.

He was thanked by Hopesfire’s tip pressed to his throat.

Nothing was said between them, but in the wild gold of her eyes, her thoughts were plain. How dare you touch me? How dare you doubt me? I am a god, the true god, and I should kill you for your impertinence.

Her arm dropped, free hand going to brush a copper curl behind her ear. No apologies or questions from either of them; it was such a quick moment, it was easy enough to pretend it never happened at all.

But along with his rejuvenated powers, Sotha Sil was left with a new certainty: one day, his dear friend Almalexia would kill him.

He was never sure when the Anticipation theory started getting passed around, much less when it became a theological fact in the eyes of the Temple. It was one of the few times he regretted being as absent as he was outside of his city; perhaps he could have talked some sense into whoever had come up with it.

He could understand the correlation between Vivec and Mephala well-enough; carnal proclivities aside, Vehk’s abilities to spin lies came long before they’d come near the heart. He had always twisted others–and himself–into believing his grand fictions; now, he just had the power to make it true.

Boethiah and Almalexia, that went without saying. Disdainful as he was of the Good Daedra, even Seht had seen glimpses of He-Who-Destroys and She-Who-Erases in Ayem on the battlefield. And as for deceit, and treason, and conspiracy…well, it was wise of the Temple to not look too deeply into those aspects.

But for Azura to be his anticipation felt like a cruel joke. There was nothing to compare the two of them. Yes, she loved the Dunmer, but only when it served herself well. Yes, his pride was immense–he knew his faults–but he had reason to be, unlike Twilight and her hollow vanity.

He wondered sometimes, when he had the time to spare for it, if she was equally insulted. Or, perhaps, she was in on the joke. He supposed it depended on what was stronger: her pride, or her hatred of him.

He didn’t ever try to guess at what her answer would be. It’d just prove the Temple right.

Sotha Sil wasn’t given to idle pleasures; he only did what he felt he must. So it took much longer than it ought have for him to finish the Elegiac Replication. When he enjoyed his work there, it felt like folly; when he hated it, it felt like a waste of precious time. But with such potent reactions to it, he realized that it really was something that must be made.

It was meant to be a place for himself–out of the Cogitum Centralis, in the midst of his creation. It was a solitary place, outside of the Brass Fortress, but far from closed off and perfectly open for anyone to come through. Of course, when he was there, he was often left alone regardless. He was never sure if that was a blessing or a curse.

Nall was the first projection he crafted. A childish desire, he supposed, to show his beloved sister all he’d done in the lifetimes upon lifetimes since he’d last seen her. He’d paused in his construction then, for a couple years, content to just have her beside him again.

But his life hadn’t ended with hers, for better or worse, and there was much more to ruminate over than the brief moment of his life in Ald Sotha. He crafted Vehk and Ayem next–considered, for a moment, showing them as they were before the apotheosis. But, in all truthfulness, their divinity was an essential part of who they were–their truest selves. So the projections showed them as they were now: Warrior-Poet and Mother Morrowind. It was a shame that they never came here; perhaps then they’d realize how much he thought of them, even in his isolation.

It took several years before he could craft the final projection. He had countless false starts, only to be stopped by doubt, or guilt, or grief. It was then that he was the most tempted to tear the whole thing apart–his garden, his city, the legacy he’d built for himself. But it must be done.

Even so, he was selfish in his crafting of Nerevar. He didn’t want the cold face of the Ordinators, or the idealized bust of the saint that haunted him across Morrowind. He didn’t want Azura’s Champion or even the Hortator. If he was to remember Neht, it had to be how he had loved him best: as a trusted mentor who trusted him in return, as his friend. And so he pulled from one of his memories, from so very, very long ago, a moment of the two of them conversing.

It was nearly perfect. Nerevar was perfect. But the mer talking with him, with golden skin and a body wholly composed of flesh and blood, with a face that conveyed absolute certainty when, in truth, he didn’t know a godsdamned thing–that wasn’t Sotha Sil. At least, it wasn’t anymore; now, he wondered if it ever was.

The fix was simple enough. A quick tweak, and it was the truest reflection he could hope for: Neht, frozen as he was then, and Seht, frozen as he was now. Later, in one of the times he sat reflecting, he wondered if it was a bit of wishful thinking on his part. Logically, he knew Nerevar would never forgive him for what he’d done if he were to come back. But even knowing so, he would give anything to talk with him once more, to receive friendly counsel not wrapped up in deference or worship or self-imposed divinity.

But, he supposed as he lingered there longer, that was the price of what he had done. The clarity was harsh, but welcome. And it proved that the Elegiac Replication was not a waste of time after all.

Twenty-two minutes. That was all he had left, in the best case scenario.

Millenia of work, all coming to an end in less than half an hour. Vivec would appreciate the drama of it, if he were here. Sil hoped that word would get back to him; he’d trust no one else with his obituary.

Twenty-one minutes. Prospect: Almalexia had come to pass, just as the simulations had shown, just as he’d been certain of beneath Red Mountain. He knew better than to hope he’d be wrong, now. He knew better than to hope at all.

Nineteen minutes. How often had he thought of his death? How often had he considered bringing it upon himself, or hoping against hope that his powers would fail in the midst of a grand battle? He and Ayem had been close, once, hardly even a decade ago; he remembered the terror in her eyes at the prospect of mortality, her utter gratitude–however quickly forgotten–when Vehk had arrived and rescued them from Vor–Shar–Dagoth Ur and his forces. For that moment, even amidst their waning divinity, Vivec seemed like the god he’d always wanted to be.

Fifteen minutes. What would it mean, for him to die? He’d wondered that often, but he’d never been able to come up with a satisfactory answer. Souls existed, and for all that was said of him, he knew he still had one.

Thirteen minutes. Would he go to Oblivion, then? Finally be reunited with the rest of his House?

Twelve minutes. Would he see Nall?

Eleven minutes. Would he see Nerevar?

Ten minutes wasn’t enough time to ponder. Nor was it enough time to truly act. He heard her coming, all the fury of the Chimer’s Warrior Queen once again on display. He needed to get into the control center; it would only take a moment to give his final instruction and seal off the Mechanical Heart, to ensure his one small piece of perfection outlived him for eternity.

Nine minutes. Once he was in, he’d be lost in his dreams. He wouldn’t be able to greet his death, as he probably should. He certainly wouldn’t be able to stop Ayem from killing him. Hopesfire was already dashing his defenses to bits; he was sure she was enjoying it, destroying the creation that he hid inside.

Seven minutes. He must get in the controls. No more time to waste.

It was an eternity and a moment later when she burst in.

“Your time has come, Sotha Sil! All these years you've looked down on me. Have you any last words?”

Oh, so many and so few. But what was the point of last words? A romantic notion, but he had much work to do and so little time to do it. There had never been enough time for him.

"Why are you silent? What are you hiding?! Speak, curse you."

But, of course, he would not. There were more important things to do; the chamber was nearly sealed. And, if his calculations were right, he had just enough time to do it.

“Fine then. Die, old friend.”

He heard nothing else, felt nothing else. His task was done, and his final certainty rewarded with the Mechanical Heart being sealed away.

Time and circumstance had lead to their logical conclusion, as they always did. He’d never been more than a mirror at the best of times, but perhaps every now and again, he had managed to reflect a bit of the divinity he’d always so denied.

Thank you so much for reading! I've sat with inspiration from the Elegiac Replication and this lovely piece of fanart for ages and ages and finally found it in me to write again.

#tes #eso #morrowind #tribunal #sotha sil #seht #vivec #vehk #almalexia #ayem #elder scrolls #almsivi #look i just have a lot of feelings about false gods don't look at me #also hello first fanfic since 2020 #It's been nice

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spacewizardtrek · 3 years

Photo

WARNING: This post will ruin you. Like Medusa; look at your peril.

But here is is. It’s the one you’ve all been waiting for.

Kirk bod appreciation #7: The RIDICULOUSLY BEAUTIFUL FACE. A highly technical and academic review.

This is a rather nebulous one. And not, on the face of it (pardon the pun) very philosophical, as it’s essentially about Kirk being stupidly pretty. This post probably will (it will) descend into just screaming and sobbing, but there will be, I promise, *some* meaningful insight into the meaning of ‘beauty’ and textual analysis of its role herein.

Beauty is subjective. But look at him. It’s not just being aesthetic, but it’s the *way* he’s aesthetic. Here I might repeat myself a bit, but stay with me. I may have mentioned before once hearing him described as ‘beautiful in the way women are often described as beautiful’. He is PRETTY. He is indeed often conveyed in the way the women stereotypically (not necessarily rightly) are on screen: perfect, smooth skin; soft, big eyes; luscious lips (his body is sensually curvaceous and furthermore it’s emphasised). He’s not androgynous though. He’s masculine. And yet I still sense what was meant in describing him as ‘beautiful in the way women are often described as beautiful’. He is a rather uncommon form of gender fuckery. He is a form of stereotype-subversion not commonly acknowledged. He seems to be everything at once, ALL THE GENDER; combines whichever traits he desires from those categories, and yet is undeniably a man and masculine whatever the ingredients. HOW IS THIS POSSIBLE, one might wonder. The fact of the matter is, that it IS. And it teaches us something.

The FUCK. nO. You are not allowed to be that pretty, and you are NOT allowed to look at her like that. We’re trying to have a SENSIBLE DISCUSSION here.

Sorry, that was a non-sequitur / nothing to do with what we learn by Kirk’s embodiment; I was just ambushed by my own gif. Only the control of a Vulcan. ONLY that could possibly withstand this onslaught. And even that won’t hold up forever AS WE WELL KNOW

God.

This is going well, as you can tell.

OK. So, it’s claimed he has Eyes and Stupidly Long Weakness-Inducing Eyelashes. You know, from all that fanfic that goes on about ‘big, sparkling eyes’ and him fanning his ‘long, copper eyelashes’. I mean, yeah right, tropey mc tropeface -

IT’S TRUE. HE IS LITERALLY AN ANIME PRINCESS.

There are some moments where he just BLINKS and, how to describe it...how does a BLINK have that effect. It’s NOT ALLOWED.

...I’m sorry. It IS allowed. All of it. I am not shaming you your beauty. Never change, Jim. Never.

OK. I’m ok. 3 pics down, we can get through this -

Oh you are joking. Stop.

I don’t understand how anyone can be so beautiful. Life is a lie. Reality is fake -

- you did NOT just turn your big anime eyes on Spock. You do know this is why he ran away to PURGE ALL HIS EMOTIONS?

And for that matter, you know when Kirk looks his most beautiful? Literally WHEN HE’S LOOKING AT SPOCK. Spock talks some bollocks and Kirk just sparkles like a fucking angel:

Unbelievable. But utterly undeniable.

Sigh. Moving on.

Oh - someone once suggested I talk about The Lips. Lips are so wonderful aren’t they. So many wonderful things they can do.

And Kirk’s. They’re there in every picture: perfect, rosy, soft and madness-inducing. My advice is just...don’t think about them. But since I’ve been asked to draw attention to them, well, you’ve just sealed your fate. Scroll down at your peril.

I WARNED YOU.

I am pulling NO punches.

I’ve seen this great meme going around:

Excuse me though....CUTE?

That’s the understatement of the 23rd century.

Try impossibly beautiful, mind and body: heart of solid gold, soul deep in love with you. Those eyes and all their passion burned into your memories a thousand times over, along with - maybe, suggestibly, idk I’m extrapolating from all the goddamn tension - even the one unforgettable time he laid between lily-white sheets and gave himself to you; every gift of the mind, body and soul - and your ostensibly-forced Vulcan conditioning, that completely ignored how incompatible one part of you was with it, caused so much dissonance that you thought the only possible course of action for you both to survive was to BREAK UP, tear yourself from this beauty and love and sweetness to PURGE ALL EMOTIONS because nothing, nothing equipped you for this; you were set up specifically to fail, and fail hard in the face of transcendental love and beauty by those who rejected such things and didn’t understand you and could never imagine this for you and who instead of helping your beautiful neurodivergent brain flourish taught you to repress and caused you pain and shame and Gol was so hard and Kirk was so sad, so very sad and depressed and hurt and yet he couldn’t stop loving you with a bond so strong he called to you across the stars and Gol was all for naught yet you still didn’t know how to live like this, it was torture, torture until the mind meld with the living machine flashed your BIOS and you knew, love.exe was suddenly running with no errors and he came after you and held you and you held hands and, and -

*sobbing*

just...give me a moment

YOU WONDER WHAT THE SUBTEXT (FRIKKIN’ MAIN TEXT) OF STAR TREK: THE MOTION PICTURE WAS ALL ABOUT???

The pain?? The angst?? The two logical entities seeking contact, love, THIS SIMPLE FEELING? That fucking moment when spock walks on the bridge and the only way he can control himself is to be SUPER Vulcan, while his love gazes at him with those EYES, fucking huge and glittering and hurt and loving?? Is it so much a mystery what memories these two are carrying, what’s behind the searing tension???????

Love him. Love him Spock. Take him in your arms and love him. He’s for you. All for you. Fucking hell guys. The fuck. This movie.

ok.

ok I can do this

CAN U NOT

those damn eyes I swear

It’s obviously not all just superficial physical beauty. What IS beauty? Narratively we do sometimes find this ‘prettiness’ enhanced and emphasized like the old vaseline lens to set the tone of a scene (he’s vulnerable and delicate, or someone’s indeed in love with him so we see their ‘lens’ on him); but it is somewhat intangible and nebulous and changeable. I don’t think aesthetic beauty, if one deems it so, on its own, would be enough for the likes of Spock (indeed, no woman could charm him thusly); it's about something deeper. It’s about who he is. Who he is inside: the beautiful AND the imperfect. How his good and bad - how his ‘all’ - chimes with Spock’s 'all’. The Enemy Within deals with this, and shows how Spock loves all of Kirk, wants him complete, with both his light and shadow. The beauty of all of us is this totality and variance, not one intangible quality.

I’ll bet Spock’s parents knew immediately. Can you imagine Sarek trying to be a total bitch over Kirk, having heard the rumours and just wanting to have one more thing to reject Spock over, immediately projecting onto Kirk as some blow-up pretty-boy and how Incredibly More Disappointing My Son Is for being Obviously In Love With Stupid Illogical Human Doll Face Bubble Butt Bimbo Captain, and Amanda’s like, stfu, let me remind you Kirk is actually a Fucking Amazing Highly Decorated Starship Captain who Saves Your Life and don’t you DARE resent him just because he’s got tits/ass/tum/lips that won’t quit and is obviously the freakin’ sun Spock orbits. Mr ‘I married a human but that was special because it was logical’ or some bullshit. How is Kirk an illogical choice? I mean literally, Spock is a Science Genius™ on the federation’s FLAGSHIP whose well-matched Genius Captain™ understands him, accepts him, brings the best out of him, helps him fulfil his whole potential and is in love with him in the deepest and purest way and will be his bonded soulmate for ALL OF TIME and that fucking sour-faced bih at the start of that ep, ffs.

Of course Amanda stays in touch with Kirk, adores the fuck out of him, sends him old Vulcan lit on t’hy’la bonds (yes sarek, a T’HY’LA bond, so revered freakin’ poets write about it) etc because frankly her son could do FAR FUCKING WORSE.

FAR. FUCKING. WORSE.

Don’t...just don’t slip the bod into the equation, the face is enough for one post. We’re all in therapy for this already, let’s not relapse.

Oh, what’s the use. I’m gonna die. This is it. This is like the Monty Python joke that is so funny it kills you. This man is lethal. I need to stop this thread and purge all my emotions

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

That’s it. I’m dead. You’re dead. We’re all dead.

I hope, however, seeing this post was worth it. See you at Gol everyone.

The Forbidden Texts, DO NOT READ:

Kirk bod appreciation #6: The Curves. The Front. The...chest. AND THE AMAZING GREEN WRAP

Kirk bod appreciation #5: The Paws

Kirk bod appreciation #4: The Curves. The Back. Poetry in motion.

Kirk bod appreciation #3: Season 3 (Part 1)

Kirk bod appreciation #2b: The Gluteus Maximus

Kirk bod appreciation #2a: The Gluteus Maximus

Kirk bod appreciation #1: The Tum

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sparklycardigan · 3 years

Note

Another ask related to tags you wrote yesterday, haha! You were talking about how both Rory and Jess seem to have limited emotional intelligence (despite their formidable book smarts!) and the way Rory shuts her feelings in metaphorical boxes and Jess just shoves the whole mess onto the top shelf (I LOVE those analogies and they made me laugh so much!), and it's SO true! 😂😭. My poor disaster nerds! But anyway, the purpose of this ask is to note that it's interesting to me how Jess seems much more emotionally mature in Season 6 and the Revival (giving sound advice to both Rory AND Luke and talking Luke through his relationship issues, no less!), and I'm wondering how much of that has to do with his writing. Like maybe he found that writing was a good way to work through a lot of his thoughts and feelings- like when you see it externally in black-and-white, it can be easier to organize and see connections, the way you'd analyze somebody else's literature (which Jess was already used to doing, with all his copious annotating).

And that brings a whole new dimension to his advice that Rory write a book specifically about herself and her mom. Because not only is it a "cool story" and something she feels passionate about, but it forces her to look at her life in a way that Rory is usually all too reluctant to do.

I feel like I should start paying you at this point, your asks are like therapy for me. It took me a bit of time to answer this in a way that I would like because I feel extremely connected to that particular part of both of their personalities which makes the following the only appropriate way to start the expected rambling session: Today On Yet Another Episode Of Me Projecting On Gilmore Girls Characters.

First of all, I'm really glad you find my tags somewhat enjoyable, I have a lot of fun writing them so this feels like a nice addition to that experience. Also, I'm immensely grateful to you for sending this ask because it tackles something that I've been writing about recently. I've been thinking about the way different sorts of media affect me and what is it exactly that I gain from each of those art forms respectively, so I tried to put my thoughts in "metaphorical boxes" if you will, and it's not working that well, but there are a few connections I was able to pick up on, so I'm going to highlight some of them here, in relation to Jess and Rory of course because projecting on them is a personality trait for me apparently. Let's again split this into paragraphs, that's how I function the best:

1. Literati & Books

2. Jess Mariano & Writing A Book Of His Own

1. Reading books unfortunately doesn't automatically amount to possession of greatly desired emotional intelligence despite the basic and logical assumption, even if the person approaches the material with devotion or is shown to be analysing particular characters and their stories in depth. I think that for Jess, books have always been more about escapism (which is something you don't have to be conscious of for it to be true). Something he found comfort in, more like a distraction from his personal reality than a chance to deal with himself and I feel like this is correct for a lot of people ("I live in two worlds. One is a world of books." immediately comes to mind, it definitely goes for Rory too). There's reason why the "Earnest has only lovely things to say about you" scene is shot in a way that it's shot in. It just screams romanticism, I can't help but think of the Thoreau quote used in Dead Poets Society, the "I went to the woods because I wanted to live deliberately" one. That's why Jess and Rory's place is completely cut off from the rest of the town, all natural and wild and free. It's at the same time anywhere and nowhere (there are no traces of either Stars Hollow or New York resembling qualities surrounding them, this is where their worlds collide, this is where they can be themselves). It could be anywhere in the world and it wouldn't make a difference. It's no wonder that's where they are shown to have detailed conversations about books first, books are a form of escapism for both of them, especially when they don't feel like dealing with their own feelings, because what better way to get away from your own problems than to think about the problems of fictional people? (yes, it's messed up and illogical, but it's what people do, speaking in a "running away from things" wider sense now) I'm happy you find the analogy I used fitting, I thought it works for them quite well (+ it's a tiny bit entertaining to think about it in that manner). Rory is somebody who relies heavily on plans and schedules, it makes sense for her to try to divide her emotions and put them in boxes and try to arrange them so they fit her personal preferences. Amy March connection again!!!!!!Quote: "I believe we have some power over who we love, it isn't something that just happens to a person." to which Laurie replies: "I think the poets might disagree." which leads me to Jess. I think he's pretty well aware that he can't control what he's feeling in any way and he absolutely despises it. And that's on him "shoving the emotional annoying madness along with the books he has no intention of rereading way up high on the highest shelf" (I just love it when I quote myself🥰). There's quite a bit of denial involved with Rory, she probably knows deep down that she can't do much about the nature of her emotions. The point is: they are both emotionally unintelligent, just in a different way (which is exactly what makes them clash at times).

*This whole paragraph is just further proof that I need to write that Literati/Amy & Laurie post as soon as I possibly can.

Small addition: the first Literati kiss also happens in a place that cuts them off from the rest of the world AND it's also surrounded by nature. I just think that the romanticism of it all. And of course the Pride and Prejudice of it all (okay, time to write that post).

2. And here we are, post-development Jess at last. I agree with you one hundred percent on this one because the wish to understand myself and my emotions a little better is exactly what got me writing in the first place and now, I'm a s6 Jess myself, fortunately for me (and everyone around me probably). There's this wonderful quality to writing that makes the majority of things much more understandable than they seem to be before they get to meet the everlasting friend that is paper (technology what?) and I think that's exactly what happened to Jess. I also think him to be extremely big on words (internally). It's probably buzzing in that head of his (and let's face it: there's probably a lot of background music added to the mix too), either way it's insanely loud for him most of the time. Offering a bit of that loudness (that's essentially himself) to something visible must have been a tremendous relief for him (and he does look a lot more relaxed in a physical sense s6 forward too, kudos to Milo for that). I love the way you word it: "seeing it externally in black and white", that's exactly it!!!!! Actually seeing it as something existent, not something that he made up or something that he couldn't understand, surely made it easier to think about it objectively. Almost like observing himself as a fictional character? Maybe his mind processed the writing like it would any other book? It would undoubtedly be a familiar route for him. Suppose he didn't even know how much he was letting out when he first started working on it (which seems likely). Maybe he realized later on, after publishing it, closer to the revival timeline, how beneficial the whole thing was for him. The possibilities are endless, that's the beauty of all of this after all.

#literati #jo rambles #gilmore girls #gilmore girls revival #gg meta #rory gilmore #jess mariano #otp: it's just you #otp: you wrote a book #amy x laurie #amy march #YAY i answered one ask today #need to get to the dair one tomorrow #sparkly answers

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ladyfogg · 3 years

Text

Heal My Wounds - Part 2

Heal My Wounds - Part 2 of 3

Fic Summary: After you meet the infamous Kit Walker, you realize that he cannot possibly be guilty of everything they say he is. Determined to treat him with kindness and compassion, you end up falling hard for the handsome man with gorgeous dark eyes. But being in love with a patient is a dangerous game and you must decide just how far you’re willing to go to save the man you love. Part 1, Part 3. AHS Fics Masterpost.

Fic Rating: 18+

Fic Song: War by Poets of the Fall

Pairing: Kit Walker/Female Reader

Warnings: A whole lot of smut in this part, folks! Enjoy!

Kissing Kit leaves you breathless for hours.

Even after he leaves and you go back to your duties, you can remember the feeling of his lips against yours. You dream about it that night and daydream about it throughout the entire next day. Seeing Kit across the room during meds makes your body ache with want. But you’re determined to follow your own rules and keep your distance when you can. You have no idea what’s going on in your mind.

Logically, you know seeing a patient is probably one of the stupidest things you can do. But emotions don’t always follow logic. And you can’t deny the charged chemistry between the two of you. Even from a distance, all you have to do is catch his eye and it’s enough to make your heart pound like it’s trying to break free from your chest.

You’ve never felt this way before.

Outside of work, you carefully follow his case in the newspaper. There are plenty of theories and opinions on Kit but each one is as outlandish as the previous. In the end, you stop reading because each article makes you angry. No one is really interested in helping Kit. They’ve all decided his guilt already and you prefer ignoring them in favor of helping him any way you can.

When you finally have a chance to speak with him at length, it’s days later and you’re both in the Day Room. You’re doing your usual lap around the room, chatting with a few patients when he catches your eye. Immediately you know something isn’t right. He looks pale and you notice a cut on his neck. Remaining calm, you make your way towards him.

“Let me take a look at that,” you say.

He barely reacts as you examine the cut. It’s small, barely an inch long, and looks clean, like it was done with a sharpened blade. The scabbing around the wound lets you know it’s at least a few hours old.

“How did it happen?” you ask.

“Not comfortable saying here,” Kit says, eyes constantly darting around the room.

His behavior is worrisome, but not as much as his pale face and the dark circles under his eyes, none of which were present when you last saw him. There’s a gnawing feeling in the pit of your stomach at his words.

You look around to make sure no one is paying attention before you lean in closer. “Wait a few minutes after I leave and then follow.”

Kit gives a small nod, though cleverly makes it look like he’s just nodding along to that damn record that plays on loop. You finish your rounds, dismiss your assistants, then leave the Day Room yourself.

It’s easy enough for you to find an empty treatment room to wait in. Eventually, when you catch sight of Kit, you motion for him to follow. A quick glance around confirms he hasn’t been followed so you shut the door behind him.

Kit stands there with a blank look on his face. It scares you to death but when you step towards him to offer comfort, he steps back to keep the distance. It’s a stark contrast to the last time you two were left alone.

“Kit, what’s wrong? What happened?”

He studies your face closely, but you’re not sure what he’s looking for. After a moment, he crosses his arms and leans against the wall. “Dr. Arden found something in my neck.”

You frown. “What did he find? And when did you see Dr. Arden?”

“Last night. Sister Jude threw me in solitary for fighting again. He paid me a visit.”

From the tone of his voice, you have a feeling it’s much more than that. “What did he say?”

Kit tells you the story of Dr. Arden’s mysterious examination and his lab, how the doctor strapped him to a table and started waxing poetic about Kit’s “dark mind”. He tells you about the jars of specimens that lined the shelves, the testing that was done on him, and how it made him remember bits and pieces of his abduction. With each detail, your stomach churns and you find yourself growing sicker. Your interactions with the doctor have been minimal unless a patient is brought to you in critical condition. Truth be told, Dr. Arden barely spoke to you unless he had to.

When Kit finishes his story, you are at a loss for words. In fact, you try to speak several times but nothing comes out.

“Did you know?”

Kit’s question is a punch to the gut. “That he was experimenting on patients? Of course not! That’s obscene! That’s disgusting! That’s…that’s evil!” you exclaim.

Angry doesn’t even begin to cover it. You’re furious as hell and have no idea how to proceed or process the information. Once Kit realizes you really didn’t know, his body relaxes and he pushes himself off the wall.

“I’m sorry I doubted you, but I had to ask,” he says. “The niceness, the kiss…”

It dawns on you that Kit must have thought you were snuggling up to him because of the doctor. Nothing can be further from the truth. You can’t find it in yourself to be insulted. After the ordeal he’s been through, you don’t blame him for being suspicious and slow to trust. You reach for him, tilting his chin up so his dark eyes meet yours.

“Hey, listen to me. What I’m feeling for you is real. I’d never do anything to hurt you or anyone under my care. I had no idea that this was going on. If I’m honest, I also have no idea what to do about it. I’m just a nurse. There’s only so much I can do.”

“No! Don’t do anything,” Kit says, taking both your hands in his. “I don’t want you to get hurt. Not on my account. You’re already risking so much just by being here for me.”

“Any risk is worth it when it comes to the people you care about.”

Kit’s eyes soften and you see them flicker to your lips. He cups your cheek and pulls you into the sweet kiss you’ve been waiting for since the moment the door closed. It’s slow and gentle, yet still so passionate that you can’t help the flames of desire that lick through your body. You cling to him desperately, not realizing how much you missed his mouth on yours. When he draws back, it’s only enough so you both can catch your breath.

“I’ve been wanting to do that for days,” he says.

“Me too.” Your brain suddenly remembers something he said. “Wait…why were you fighting?”

“Some jerk said some things and needed to be put in his place.”

“Jerks say things all the time, especially here. You have to let it go or you’re going to get yourself killed.”

“I couldn’t let this one go.”

“Why?”

“Because he was talking about you. Saying some downright lewd things and I was not going to let that slide.”

Your heart warms and you can’t help but smile. “Kit, I’m flattered. But seriously, I’m not worth you being thrown in solitary.”

“You’re worth everything. Even the lashes Sister Jude gave me.”

“Kit! She lashed you? Why didn’t you come see me?!”

Kit shrugs. “It’s no big deal. Besides, I’ve already been to see you so often, I didn’t want people to start asking questions.”

“It’s one thing when you’re making up excuses to see me. This is a legitimate reason. Does it hurt?”

“Haven’t been able to sit down all day.”

With a sigh, you break away from him and shake your head. “Come on, let’s go to the infirmary. I have something that can help.”

You poke your head out into the hall to make sure no one is looking before you signal Kit to follow you out of the treatment room. Back in the infirmary, one of your assistants has already moved on to other duties while another takes care of a couple of patients who require attention. You lead Kit to the bed behind the privacy screen before tossing him a hospital gown.

“Put this on,” you order.

While he undresses, you gather the salve you typically use on lashes. It’s another one of Sister Jude’s punishments that you absolutely hate. Beating and lashing people does nothing, only shows them more pain and suffering. But all you can do is help them afterward. When you return to Kit, you just manage to catch sight of his naked body before he slips on the gown. It’s a beautiful sight, marred by the angry red welts across his deliciously round backside.

You quickly glance at your assistant to make sure she’s busy before you join Kit behind the screen. “Turn around,” you tell him.

He does as you say, turning his back to you so you can take care of his welts. The salve is cool so you rub it between your fingers to warm it before you reach out to gently spread it across his reddened skin. Kit’s body is tense.

“Sorry if this burns a little,” you say, your voice catching in your throat. “It should feel better in a moment.”

Kit doesn’t say anything. He lets you work but his body remains stock-still, muscles clenched from the tension. You hate the fact that he’s in pain and that what you’re doing seems to be causing more harm than good. A thought comes to mind on another way you can help and you almost blush when it conjures all matter of naughty images.

You listen out for your assistant, who is still busy tending to the others. It would be so easy to follow through with your idea. But do you dare? The risk is astronomical.

Biting your lip, you coat your hand in more salve before slipping back into Kit’s gown. After another second of contemplation, your desire to make Kit feel good outweighs your anxiety. You slyly reach around to grasp his cock.

Kit’s hand practically slams against the wall in front of him and you pause, worried you might have overstepped. There is a full ten seconds where neither of you moves. But when he leans his back against your chest, you give him a tentative stroke. His hand reaches back for you, landing on your thigh and giving it an excited squeeze.

Encouraged, you start to stroke him, the salve acting as a lubricant so each movement is slick and fluid. As he swells in your hand, your heart races. The weight of him sends a stab of desire straight to your heart. Your own arousal spikes significantly and it’s all you can do to keep from moaning. You clench your thighs together at the thought of him sliding between them.

You place feather-light kisses across Kit’s neck. He lets out a shaky exhale and his fingers flex excitedly. There’s an added thrill when you remember that only a thin privacy screen separates you two from getting caught. You pick up the pace, falling into a steady rhythm of stroking his cock while kissing the back of his neck, softly so there’s no noise. What you wouldn’t give to hear Kit moan your name, to hear him loudly gasp and grunt with each stroke. Maybe one day. For now, you’re more than happy to bring him some small amount of pleasure in such a cruel place.

His firm hand wraps around yours, forcing you to squeeze harder. He guides your movements, silently showing you exactly how he likes it.

You keep kissing his neck, wishing you could reach his lips but settling for tasting the small bit of skin in front of you. The only reason you know he’s about to come is because his hips suddenly start to jerk forward.

You let your tongue flick over his ear as you whisper, “Come for me, Kit.”

He does. His release comes swiftly, coating your hand in his warm seed as he all but fucks your hand. Finally, the tension leaves his body and he lets your hand go so he can slump forward against the wall.

Before you can do anything else, you hear your assistant call your name, asking for help.

“Be right there,” you say back.

Regretfully, you untangle your hand from Kit’s hospital gown before slipping out from behind the partition. A brief stop at the sink to wash your hands and then you’re good to get back to work.

It takes a few minutes to get a handle on the situation with your assistant. But eventually, she and the other patients are all set and she leaves to escort them to their rooms.

Alone, you hurry back to Kit. The second you step around the partition, you’re grabbed and yanked into a searing kiss. Kit’s mouth is hot and relentless as you both stumble towards the bed.

“I need you,” Kit whispers between kisses, impatiently tugging up your skirt. “Fuck, I need you so bad. Please…please…”

“Yes. God, Kit, yes!”

You find yourself on your back a second later with Kit's hands yanking your panties down. Now that you can see his face, you’re reminded of how god damn beautiful he is. Those dark eyes dance with desire and a gorgeous flush has washed over his cheeks.

Your skirt is shoved up to bunch around your waist before Kit spreads your legs and buries his face between your thighs. Immediately you clamp your hand over your mouth to keep from moaning loudly. The two of you may be alone but anyone can walk in at any time and the last thing you want is to draw attention to yourselves.

Kit doesn’t seem to care. He moans as he tastes you, sucking on your clit with practiced ease. The way he wraps his arms around your thighs to hold you in place reminds you of how strong he is.

And yet, there’s still that gentleness underneath, that sense that he’s being careful with you even now as his lust overcomes him. His tongue is everywhere, licking and tasting your folds, briefly dipping inside you, before returning to your clit. When he slides two fingers into you, your hungry body eagerly accepts them.

You don’t last long. Your orgasm slams into you unexpectedly, causing you to throw your head back as your body locks into place. Even with your own eyes closed you can feel Kit watching you come undone as he coaxes you through your high with love bites to your thigh and a crook of his clever fingers.

He’s on you before you even have a chance to come back to yourself. To your delight, his cock is already hard again. You can feel it when he climbs on top and it makes you wrap your legs around his waist in encouragement.

Kit’s forehead rests against yours and he takes a moment to collect himself. Despite the urgency from before, time now stands still as you both soak in the warmth and intimacy. You kiss him softly and he responds in kind, stroking your cheek.

When he slides into you, he swallows your gasp. It’s a stretch. It’s been too long and he’s thick. Your body is wracked with the shakes, needing and wanting more.

Kit knows time is precious and yet, still seems to savor the moment.

But not for long.

He takes you hard and deep, the infirmary mattress squeaking under your coupling. Your body is on fire. Every thrust and kiss only add fuel to the flames that threaten to consume you.

And you’re so ready to let them.

Kit's mouth doesn’t relent. He kisses you like his life depends on it as he reaches down to grab your thigh for leverage. You come again in a blinding flash of white, causing your walls to clench around his cock. It’s enough to send him over the edge as well and he empties himself into you, still pumping his hips until he’s thoroughly spent.

The silence that washes over the room is almost eerie after such a rush of panting, whispers, and the old mattress.

Kit can’t seem to stop kissing you. Not that you mind. If time allowed, you would lay there all day tasting his sweet lips and curious tongue. His soft cock slips out of you and you’re not expecting the hollow feeling that follows.

“That was wonderful,” you say, running your hand through his hair.

“You’re wonderful.” He kisses you again.

It only lasts a few seconds before you regrettably have to push him away. “I need to clean up before Nancy gets back. And you should probably get back to the Day Room before they come looking for you.”

He sighs, pressing his forehead to yours but nods, rolling off you so you can stand up. Your legs are unsteady as you pull your panties back on and push your skirt back into place.

It doesn’t hit you until later that night when you’re home and in the shower. You’ve officially crossed the line with Kit. After being the one to say you two needed to be careful, you threw your own rules into the wind the moment you could. Part of you is ashamed. Not of being with Kit, never because of that. But because in a rush to sate your lust, you put you both in danger.

It’ll be fine, you say to yourself. It’ll be okay. You just need to be more careful next time.

You’re not naïve enough not to think there will be a next time, because there definitely will. His touch is burned into your memory and when you slide into bed, you allow yourself to fantasize about Kit as you slip your hand under the covers.

Of course, there is a next time, though, it happens by accident really. One moment you’re in one of the linen closets, carefully collecting and cataloging sheets and gowns for the infirmary when the next, Kit appears in the doorway.

“Fancy seeing you here,” he says with a smirk.

You smile at him in return. “Believe it or not, I do occasionally go somewhere other than the infirmary and the Day Room.”

Kit glances around the hallway before casually stepping into the closet with you and kicking the door closed behind him. The moment he does, you’re both going on at it, kissing heatedly. It’s just as powerful and addicting as before. It’s been days since you two first became intimate and they had been the longest days of your life.

When you break to breathe, you’re both panting and clinging to each other. “I’ve missed you,” he says, voice barely above a whisper.

You savor the warmth of his body and the way it molds perfectly along yours. “I’ve missed you too,” you say. “Even though it’s nice not to see you in my infirmary all bloody.”

Kit chuckles, staring deep into your eyes. “I wish I didn’t have to stay away. If I could be in the infirmary with you whenever I want, it would make all of this easier.”

“I know. Trust me, I want that too. And if I can find a way to make it happen, I will.” You pause to listen and make sure there aren’t any footsteps coming your way. “But enough talk. Kiss me.”

Kit doesn’t need to be told twice. He kisses you again, hungrier and needier than before, pushing you up against the shelves in the process. His hands are everywhere, roaming and mapping your body now that he finally has a chance to touch you again. That wonderful liquid heat is coursing through your veins. The want and desire are all-consuming and you’re so ready to drown in it.

His mouth leaves a trail of kisses down your chin and to your neck, causing you to stifle a gasp. He still hears it, still knows that he’s found a sweet spot, and stays there, nipping and sucking on the sensitive flesh. Your skirt is hiked up and suddenly, Kit’s hands are grabbing and kneading the backs of your thighs, urging you to spread them for him.

You readily do.

As you desperately cling to him, Kit grinds himself against you, moaning softly in your ear. “I keep thinking about what it was like being inside you. I want you so bad, it’s driving me crazy.”

“Then take me.”

Those firm, deft hands pull your panties to the side as your own fingers struggle with the clasp of his pants. He’s hot and hard against your palm when you finally get your hand around him, so ready and willing for him to take you. He grabs your thighs again and lifts you up, sliding you down onto his cock in one fluid movement. You gasp in delight, throwing your head back as Kit takes you against the shelves.

He stretches you so deliciously you know you’re going to feel him long after he’s gone, just like last time. With one hand clutching the shelf behind you and the other in Kit’s hair, you cling to him with your body as he fucks himself into your heat. All the while, he can’t stop kissing you. Between pants and grunts, his lips slam against yours, teeth grazing your bottom lip in the process.

“Oh, Kit! Oh fuck!” you moan in his ear, vaguely remembering to keep your voice down.

Kit says your name and the way it spills from him makes it sound so filthy. You love it. “Shit, you feel so good. Can stay in you forever.”

You kiss him, so consumed by lust and desire that all you can think about is more. More of his kisses. More of his voice. More of his cock.

You’ve never been so consumed by another person before. Kit invades your senses until you’re surrounded by him. His voice in your ear, his taste in your mouth, his touch on your thighs…it’s all wonderful in every way. Deep down, you know it’s not just the physical. When you’re with him, it’s like his soul calls out to yours and all you can do is answer.

The pressure against your clit sends you into a toe-curling orgasm. Kit slams his mouth against yours to muffle your moans as he keeps going, chasing his own pleasure now that yours has been reached. A few more deep pumps of his hips and he’s spilling into you again, groaning your name in a broken, lust-addled voice.

You kiss him deeply.

Even as he lowers your legs back onto the ground, he still kisses you. It’s like he can’t get enough which you completely understand because it’s the way you feel about him. When he eventually draws back, you lay your hand on his cheek.

“I hate how we can’t take our time with each other,” you say.

He gives you another sweet kiss. “I know, babe. I know. One day we will.”

“Sounds nice. But for now, we probably shouldn’t linger here too long. The girls will be expecting me back soon.”

Kit buries his face in your shoulder with a whimper. Reluctantly, he adjusts your skirt back into place before kissing you, albeit gentler this time. “Then let me just hold you. Just for a few minutes.”

Who can deny such a request? You certainly can’t, nor do you want to. You’ve never had someone ask to simply hold you before. Kit slides his arms around your waist, holding you close as he presses his forehead to yours. While his eyes are closed, savoring the moment, you can’t help but study him, committing every detail and freckle to memory.

How can anyone possibly think this man is dangerous?

You kiss him, before hugging him tightly. You both relish in the contact and warmth of another person. Another set of footsteps ruins the moment, forcing you two apart. Thankfully, those too dissipate.

“I should go,” Kit says, thumbing your bottom lip before taking a step back. “Until next time.”

“I’ll figure something out. I promise.”

Kit kisses you a final time, long and slow, trying to savor it as much as possible before he forces himself to let you go. After carefully peeking out of the closet, he disappears once it’s safe.

You take a moment to collect yourself, readjusting your underwear back into place and swearing under your breath. You are never prepared for how much it hurts when Kit leaves. It’s like your heart literally breaks in two, only to be mended the next time you see his face. It’s with a start that you realize, you love him. Somehow, already, you’re absolutely devastatingly in love with Kit Walker. A man who is either going to face the electric chair or be locked in Briarcliff for the rest of his life, neither of which he deserves.

When you get back to the infirmary, you pass the clean linens off to one of your assistants before taking a seat at the desk.

You’re there barely a minute when the door opens and Dr. Arden walks in. You hadn’t seen him since Kit told you about his little experiments, so you’re not prepared for the pure hatred that washes over you. It takes every ounce of willpower to stop your hands from shaking with rage. Anger is quickly replaced with fear when he calls your name and approaches your desk. Your stomach drops from nerves.

“Yes? Is everything okay, sir?”

“That remains to be seen. Walk with me. I need to speak to you.” His tone leaves no room for arguing.

Unable to deny the doctors his request, you follow him out of the infirmary. It isn’t unusual for him to ask to speak to you. Yet, you instantly worry that somehow he’s learned about your less-than-professional relationship with Kit.

“You’ve been with us for some time and you can handle yourself,” Dr. Arden says, his hands clasped behind his back. “Which is why I feel I can speak to you candidly.”

“Please do,” you say, trying to keep your voice calm and neutral.

“I understand Kit Walker has been in to see you several times.”

Your mouth goes dry and you try not to trip over your own feet. “Yes, he has.”

“Why?”

“For various injuries.”

“Self-inflicted?”

“Is there a particular reason you’re asking me these questions, sir?” Between what Kit told you and your own instincts, you don’t trust this man in the slightest. Clearly, he has a strange fixation on Kit and before you go saying anything else, you need specifics. Or at the very least, some kind of answer as to why he’s asking you all these questions.

“If there’s one thing I admire about you it is your discretion when it comes to your patients,” Dr. Arden says, his compliment taking you by surprise.

“Thank you, sir.”

“That being said. I am the attending physician in this building and you will answer my questions. Do we have an understanding?”

You bite your tongue, knowing that one wrong word or move could get you into serious trouble. “Yes, sir.”

“Good. Now, were his wounds self-inflicted?”

“No. On two occasions he was involved in a fight with another patient. On another, a guard hit Mr. Walker’s head against a wall.”

Dr. Arden stopped in his tracks, his head whipping around to face you. “Which guard?”

You tell him about the incident with Dixon and, to his credit, Dr. Arden looks angry. “Sister Jude is supposed to keep these guards in check. I should have expected the task to be too much for her,” he says angrily. “Don’t worry about him. He’ll be taken care of. It’s imperative that nothing happen to Mr. Walker.”

“I understand. I mean, the whole city is following the story and has its eyes on us. I imagine if something happens to him in our care, it won’t look good for Briarcliff.”

“Among other things.”

A chill goes down your spine. His phrasing sounds innocent enough but given what you know, his words have a more sinister meaning behind them. Kit’s voice echoes in your mind, reminding you how Dr. Arden was so intent on studying his brain.

“As far as I’m aware, he’s in fine health,” you say, trying not to let your voice waver.

“Good. Let’s keep it that way.”

The way he stares at you leaves no room for doubt: it’s a veiled threat. Dr. Arden wants to make sure nothing happens to his test subject and if it does, it’s on your head.

“I can schedule regular check-ups if you’d like? We’ve had a string of fevers lately and you know how disease passes around this place,” you say.

“Fine, do what you need to. You have my authorization. If you find anything, anything at all, let me know. No one else. Understood?”

You swallow the bile in your throat. “Yes, sir.”

He walks away without another word, leaving you standing in the middle of the hallway. Your head spins and you need a moment to take a few breaths. This all feels wrong. Dr. Arden has never shown any interest in a patient before, at least not that you’ve seen. You wonder if he knows about Kit’s feelings towards you. You don’t know how he would know but it’s still a possibility. If so, is he trying to bait you? Trying to get you two to slip up so he can catch you in the act? Or is he using your relationships to further his own dark deeds?

You’re only there for a moment when the door across from you opens and a man steps out. His dark hair and spectacles let you know that he’s Dr. Thredson. You’ve never really had a full conversation with him and truth be told, he gives you the creeps. There’s something about him that’s not quite right, you just can’t put your finger on it.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to startle you,” he says when you jump a little at his sudden appearance. “Was that Dr. Arden you were just speaking to? About Kit Walker?”

So much for secrecy.

“Yes, Dr. Arden was just sharing some concerns about our newest patient,” you say.

“Interesting man.”

“Who? Mr. Walker or Dr. Arden?”

“Both.” Dr. Thredson takes a cigarette out of his pocket and puts it between his lips. “Although, Mr. Walker has been my focus since his arrival.”

“He has to have sessions with you, right? To see if he’s fit to stand trial.”

“That’s correct.”

“And what do you think?”

“I’m sorry but you know that’s confidential.”

“I’m not asking for specifics. I just meant, in your opinion, is Kit stable?”

Dr. Thredson leans against the doorframe, studying you with those unnerving eyes as he smokes. “In my personal opinion? Kit Walker is a very smart and capable man. If he did kill those women, there could be any number of reasons.”

“If? So you don’t know for sure?”

“We’ve only just begun our sessions. I’m holding off making any assumptions at this time.”

An awkward silence falls between you two. With the way the doctor is eyeing you, you feel like he is trying to glean something but you aren’t sure quite what it could be. Needing to be anywhere but that hallway, you stand up straight.

“If you’ll excuse me, doctor, I must return to the infirmary.”

Dr. Thredson also straightens his stance. “Of course, nurse. Don’t let me keep you from your duties.”

You smile and nod before walking away. Even though you aren’t looking at him anymore, you can feel his eyes watch you the entire time. You’re not sure what the point of his conversation was, though you suspect his appearance has more to do with letting you know that he was listening. All of this feels wrong and poor Kit seems to be caught in the middle. And now, you are too.

Your brain starts to work overtime and your heart aches to protect Kit. You don’t for once buy the psychiatrist’s story that he’s reserving judgment. You’ve never met a person who hasn’t made up their mind about someone the second they meet them. While you can’t get access to Dr. Arden’s lab, you can access the office Dr. Thredson is using.

So, the next morning, bright and early, you arrive for your shift. You know that he won’t be there for several hours and no one expects you in the infirmary yet so, you take the alternate route. Dr. Thredson’s office is locked. You are annoyed since you had hoped that wouldn’t be but after a few tries, you’re able to shake it open. The doors at Briarcliff are old and some of the lesser-used offices don’t take much to break into.

The space is neat. Neater than it has every right to be. If it isn’t for the fact that you saw him there the day before, you wouldn’t even know someone works here. A quick study of the space proves fruitless. Any notes on Kit he must bring with him each time he comes. Dejected, you carefully make sure everything is how you found it before slipping back out of the room and relocking it.

Your mind is still buzzing hours later when Kit comes in.

“Was told you wanted to see me,” he says.

You glance around to make sure you’re alone before closing the infirmary door. “Dr. Arden came to talk to me yesterday.”

Kit immediately reaches for you. “Are you okay? He didn’t hurt you did he?”

“No, no, I’m fine,” you assure him, loving the way his hands run up and down your arms comfortingly. “He wanted to know about your injuries and make sure you weren’t doing them to yourself.”

“Did he ask about anything else? You think he suspects anything?”

“I don’t know. He just told me to make sure you stay healthy. Actually, it sounded more like a threat.”

Kit pulls you into a tight hug and sighs. “I never wanted you to get involved in any of this.”

“I was involved the moment I fell in love with you.”

Kit pulls back, a look of wonderment on his face. “You love me?”

Realizing you didn’t mean to say the words out loud, you feel your face grow hot but there’s no backing out of it now. “Well…yes. I do. And I don’t expect you to reciprocate—”

He cups your cheek, bringing you into a searing kiss that takes your breath away and weakens your knees. All you can do is cling to his shirt for dear life until he pulls away, leaving your head spinning.

“I love you too,” he says softly, his nose brushing yours. “God help me but I do.”

“Why ‘god help you’?”

“Because loving you isn’t safe. You’re the one bright spot in all of this and I don’t want anything to happen to you, especially because of me.”

“We’ve been over this already. I don’t care. You’re worth it.”

Kit kisses you again and this time you’re ready for it, wrapping your arms around his neck to hold him close. He pushes you towards the desk, his hands pulling at your uniform with urgency. You’re too far gone to think of the consequences or getting caught. All you need is Kit.

He takes you on the edge of your desk. It’s quick and dirty, nowhere near as loving as you both want it to be but as rough as you both need. It’s not only about the love you have for each other, but the desire and need to feel something, anything other than loss or pain. You’re sure you make far too much noise but at this point, you’re beyond caring. Because there’s an important conclusion you come to when Kit’s inside you, stretching you with his cock as he rains kisses across your face and down your neck.

You’re going to help Kit, no matter what it takes. If you can prove his innocence, or at the very least plant the seed of doubt that he did what they say he did, then you’re going to do that. And, if worse comes to worst, you’ll help him escape.

Because you love Kit Walker and you can’t stand the thought of losing him.

He comes before you do and it’s a wonderful sight. You live for the way he bites his bottom lip and throws his head back, wishing for the day you can hear him moan your name loud and proud.

Your body trembles, your orgasm hovering just out of reach. It hurts so much you whine. “Kit…”

He kisses you hard, reaching between your bodies to rub his thumb in circles around your clit. He’s still inside you, still half-hard even though he finished and between that fullness and his thumb, you fall completely apart, rocking your hips through the waves and waves of white-hot pleasure.

You’re still kissing when you come back to yourself and Kit slips out of you, pulling your panties back up into place and adjusting your skirt.

“I think I was too loud,” you realize with worry.

Kit smirks, smoothing the wrinkles out of your uniform. “Not loud enough for me.”

Chuckling, you pat him on the chest and gently push him away. “This wasn’t why I wanted to see you but it definitely was a nice perk. You need a physical.”

“I thought that’s what we just did.”

“No, smartass. A real one. I told Dr. Arden I would give you regular check-ups. I hated to, but I figured it’d be safer to play along until we figure out what to do about him. Plus, it’ll give you the perfect excuse to see me every few days. It’s all authorized and above board.”

“Good call. But I don’t want you sticking your neck out for me. Not around him. Alright?” his voice is so serious that you don’t argue.

“Alright. I’ll be careful. As long as you’re careful with that psychiatrist.”

“He’s my one shot at clearing my name. I don’t plan on messing that up.”

“I know but, Kit, there’s something off about him. Something I can’t put my finger on.”

He studies you carefully, sees the worry in your eyes, and leans forward, placing a kiss on your forehead. “Okay. If you can be careful around Dr. Arden, I can be careful around the shrink.”

Relieved, you get off the desk and start to straighten up. “Great. Now, let’s get this physical done before my assistants get back.”

---

Kit’s mind is spinning.

It’s been a whirlwind the last few days. He never ever could suspect that someone as beautiful and caring as you would fall for him, not after what he’s accused of. His heart skips a beat every time he sees you, or the light catches you a certain way. Being inside you was unlike everything he ever felt before and he couldn’t get enough.

He’s also not stupid. He knows how much danger he’s putting you in and what the consequences would be for you if anyone found out. That was why he was determined to keep you safe, no matter what.

Your warning about Dr. Thredson doesn’t fall on deaf ears. If anything, you confirm his own intuition. He has been unable to admit that he also feels uncomfortable around the doc and, at first, he thought it was just the energy of Briarcliff in general. But he trusts your judgment and if you say the doc isn’t quite right, that’s good enough for him.

“Are you alright, Kit?” Dr. Thredson asks. “You’ve hardly said a word since you sat down.”

“Don’t much feel like talking,” Kit says.

“I’m sorry to hear that. I thought we were just establishing a good rapport.”

Kit doesn’t answer, only smokes his cigarette in silence as he and the doc stare at each other. Dr. Thredson waits a moment, before leaning back in his seat.

“Tell me, Kit, how are you handling your incarceration?”

“How do you think I’m handling it?”

“I understand this is a difficult situation, and I am truly trying to help. Have you made any friends?”

“There are no friends in this place,” Kit says, choosing his words carefully. “You’ve seen the others. You know what they’re like.”

“Fine. Then no friends with your peers. What about the staff? Have you found any staff you connect with?”

Alarm bells go off in Kit’s head and a lump forms in his throat. Deep down, he knows the doctor is talking about you. He can feel it in his bones. “Staff is all the same,” he says in a sharp tone. “I mean, some care, but most don’t. They all see me as just another whack job.”

“I’m sure that’s not true. I’m sure there’s a least one person you feel comfortable with.”

“What are you getting at, doc?”

Dr. Thredson closes his notepad as he leans forward, folding his hands in front of him. “I’m very observant, Kit. I tend to see things that most people don’t. Such as the way you stare at a certain nurse when she delivers meds in the Day Room. The same nurse I happen to know you see quite frequently.”

Kit puffs on his cigarette, not breaking eye contact. “Sounds like you’re accusing me of something.”

“I’m not accusing you of anything. I know what it’s like to be deprived of compassion and kindness, and what it’s like to latch onto anyone who provides both. However, considering you’re in here because you’re suspected of slaughtering women, you can imagine my concern.”

“There’s no need to be concerned,” Kit says, extinguishing his smoke in the half-filled ashtray. “I’m not latching onto anyone. I just wanna prove that I’m not crazy and that I didn’t kill those girls.”

Dr. Thredson stares at him for some time. Kit knows when he’s being analyzed and he hates it. But he’s smart and doesn’t react. Doesn’t move or fidget under the scrutiny. Eventually, the doctor sits back.

“We’re done for today, Kit. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

With a nod, Kit gets to his feet. He’s about halfway to the door when Dr. Thredson calls his name. “Oh and, Kit?” Kit stops to look back at him. “Try not to get hurt again. Won’t want you to end up in the infirmary now would we?”

Stomach twisted in knots, Kit leaves without a response.

Fic Taglist: @tatestripedsweater @rebleforkicks @kitwalker02 @ahsk1nk

#kit walker #evan peters #kit walker x reader #kit walker x you #ahs asylum

161 notes · View notes

angelisverba · 3 years

Text

come out, come out wherever you are

in which y/n agrees to do something really stupid, and harry is a bit of a shit

word count: 5k

pairing: vampire!h and y/n (different au from my other vamp!h fics, though)

warnings: drug use, mentions of drinking and alcohol, mentions of blood (duh, he’s a vampire).

author’s note: okay so i know that i put vampire!h in the pairing, but this h is a wierd succubus x demon x vampire mix where he can feed off the emotions he wants to?? i’ll explain it in the story. enjoy your reading :)

She shouldn’t have agreed to play hide and seek in a cornfield.

At night.

During a full moon.

On Halloween.

Y/n’s logic always disappeared when she was… under the influence. Whether that be with alcohol or other sorts of… fun substances. That was not to say that she was an alcoholic, or a drug addict, she just… hated to be a party popper. When her roommate invited her to college parties, she didn’t say no to the red solo cup because she knew that some way or another, she would end up giving in by the end of the night. Or when it was just her and her closest friends passing around a freshly rolled joint, she didn’t say no because she didn’t want to be the odd one out.

Plus, it didn’t hurt that she enjoyed it… most of the time.

This? This was not one of those times.

* * * * * * * * * * *

Josephine, her roommate, had barged into her room with a smile over her lips as the brightness of her phone lit up her face from the bottom up, casting spooky shadows since y/n’s room was dark and she was falling asleep.

“Y/n, look!” She said, turning the phone so beams that felt like they came from hell illuminated y/n’s pinched face, marks from her pillow decorating the place above her lip. She mumbled something, and Josephine kept speaking, “Travis just sent me an invitation to one of the frat’s Halloween parties! Come with me, it’s gonna be so much fun!”

And to get her to leave her room, she agreed. She must have, because the next morning as she was getting ready for her 10 a.m. literature class, she was bombarded with a series of costume ideas and questions about what was considered cheesy or overdone. Josephine had made it clear that it was okay that they didn’t match, especially because of their differences in clothing choices. Jo was more risqué, and y/n liked to dress in what she felt comfortable in.

It didn’t take her a long time to figure out what she was going to go as for Halloween. That same morning, just before she walked into class, y/n stopped to stare at a framed art print in the hallway.

La Belle Dame sans Merci by John Keats was a poem that she knew by heart, and the painting was one that she could get lost in for hours. Stopping to stare at it before walking into class was not an unusual occurrence for her, but that time an idea came to her, almost like it was written in the long locks of her red hair.

Y/n would go as a Victorian princess. The dresses had always fascinated her, with the intricate lace details and elegant rippled of muslin fabric that flounced in a puff around the hips of Countess, or trailed behind the average cottage girl as she frolicked in fields full of daisies. She could picture it in her mind, and it made her giddy to know that there was a possibility she could look as pretty as one of the poet’s muses. She spent the entirety of the class switching from writing notes to browsing the five pages worth of gowns on Amazon, looking for something pretty yet within her price range.

By the end of the period she’d had what she wanted in her cart. A baby-blue wisp of a dress with intricate lace detailing at the neckline that curved like the top-hald of a heart to cup her breasts. The sleeves bunched around her arms mid-bicep, and scrunched again around her wrists, the transparent fabric looking as if her arms were wrapped in the sky. Built in ribbing created a corset that added an extra curve to her waist to make way for the heaps of fabric that exploded from her hips and cascaded down to the floor like the foaming spray of a waterfall.

It fit like a dream. When it arrived a few days before the party she dropped everything she was doing to try it on. The moment Josephine patted her shoulder to tell her that she was finished zipping up the back, y/n twirled around in the limited space of their dorm room to see herself in the narrow mirror at the end of her bed.

Every penny she had spent on it was worth it. Sure, it was snug around the bust and refrained her lungs from expanding the extra millimeter they needed, but it made her feel… nice. Pretty. She liked the way it cinched her waist, how her wrists looked dainty covered in the lacy ends of the sleeves, and the way her breasts looked… accentuated by the frilly detail.

Jo had squealed once she had a full look at her friend, and wouldn’t stop talking about how good they were going to look walking in together. She was going as Cat-Woman, complete with the latex suit, boots, mask, and all. She looked every bit as fantastic as y/n, only on opposite ends of the Halloween costume spectrum.

Building up to the day of the party, the pair talked make-up and hair details, both of which Josephine would be taking care of because she was better at them. At one point, y/n thinks she even dreamt about making a grand-entrance, boys and girls gawking at how amazing she looked, and the most handsome guy stepping forth to profess his undying love for her.

Which wasn't really how it went the night of, but she attained the same satisfaction.

The party was located a little ways away from the city, at a plantation-style frat house in-front of a huge cornfield. Carved pumpkins with candles illuminating them from the inside out lined the pathway up to the front-doors, the trees nearby created crunchy pathways of orange and yellow leaves, and the moon was out; yawning tiredly, but glowing an eerie yellow color over the scene.

It looked like the opening scene of a horror film.

Y/n did receive a lot of stares, though. Most of them were from guys whose beady little eyes pointed straight to her chest, and the ones she got from girls were on the nastier side of envy. She could tell. But, oddly enough, she liked the attention.

Josephine y/n’s hand and led her through the mass of costumed-bodies. There was a variety of ‘sexy’ professions (the usual: nurses, cops, cowgirls, and school girls) and those that come from fandoms (Hogwarts’s students, Eleven from Stranger Things, Mia Wallace from Pulp Fiction, multiple heroes from the Avengers) or those that came for shits and giggles (T-rex blow-up costumes with tiny hands, Joe Exotic, sumo-wrestlers, those things that sway outside car-dealerships, and even a Trojan condom packet). There was a lot to see, and honestly, it was beginning to overwhelm y/n.

Not only was it slightly disorienting to see everyone disguised, the interior itself was something to look at. Chandeliers and velvet sofas, gold lamps and fancy carpets and curtains. The epitome of privilege. She felt trampled, every once a while there was a tug on the ends of her dress.

“How about a shot to start off the night, y/n?” Josephine asked her, hooking a latex coated arm around hers. The music was a rumble on the backs of their heads, shaking them through and through as some nameless rapper sang of drugs, sex, and money. What it always came down to.

She agreed, and took the plastic shot cup. On normal nights, she would’ve usually required some type of coaxing, but not then. Y/n was almost looking for the hangover the next morning. She wanted fun.

Three shots later and her fingers were dragging in front of her face. Her knees were wobbly and cheeks tinged with spirits. Everything was funny and if you asked her what two plus two was she’d tell you five. There was a new swagger in her step, and some might say that was the influenced hand-eye coordination, but to her it was newfound confidence. She felt good, she looked good, and she was having a damn good time. Laughing, making the best conversation she’d ever made, and when Jo suggested they go dance, she danced the best she’d ever had.

And sure, she was drunk out of her mind. A light weight. Everything was under a glamourized rose filter. It only made sense that the crowd parted like the Red Sea at God’s feet.

Y/n’s lungs stopped working the moment her eyes locked with his.

He was her counterpart. Literally.

Dressed in a navy blue Victorian prince’s suit decked in gold trim and gold medals pinned to the breast. The tan pants that hugged his muscular thighs like they were made just for him, and his hair was slicked back. Jaw a sharp, smug line that worked as he popped a piece of pink bubblegum between his molars. A gleam of appreciation sparking in the forest of his eyes as they raked a path on her figure.

It was like the work around them stopped, put on pause by some higher power so they could relish the moment of their discovery. What was that shit called? Divine Intervention? The millisecond before and after and between the time Eve’s teeth sunk into the taught skin of that forbidden red apple, and the snake’s tongue slithered out to see her. He was a stranger to y/n, but it seemed as if the feeling he stirred deep in the core of her being was one she’d always known, one from a past life. Besides her, Jo stopped doing whatever lucrative dance she was doing to see what had caught her friend’s attention. Y/n stood, tongue dry, feet glued to the ground as the handsome stranger approached her, a clear path in front of him.

Then, he takes one step forward and whatever conversation he had been involved with before was no longer of importance. Besides her, Jo stopped doing whatever lucrative dance she was doing to see what had caught her friend’s attention. Y/n stood, tongue dry, feet glued to the ground as the handsome stranger approached her, a clear path in front of him.

“Oh,” Jo huffed in her ear, “he’s hot.”

“I-Is he?...” Y/n’s question died on her tongue.

“Coming right for you, girl. Good luck,” Jo pressed a kiss to her cheek and disappeared in the crowd.

The stranger stops closer than she would have thought him to; a finger away from her nose, and when he spoke, she could feel the vibrations of his speech through her breasts where they nearly grazed his chest.

“I don’t believe we’ve ever met before... princess?” His voice is deep, raspy and filled with grooves like the bark on a tree. He mocks a bow (given their costumes) and their nose touch before he straightens again. Up close, y/n can see the flecks of gold in his eyes, and she hopes her mouth doesn’t stink (it probably does, given the alcohol she’d had). A chilled palm grips her bicep, and the fabric of her sleeve sinks under his touch, “Would you like to get off this shitty dance floor and speak somewhere else?” He asks her.

Her heart is pounding and she wonders if he can hear it because she certainly can, rushing in a taunting, roaring stream past her eardrums. Y/n nodded her agreement; yes, she did want to speak with him. A thrum of warmth comes from where he holds her, and he tugs her so that she’s standing in front of him, her back touching his chest as he pushes her through the crowd.

Her fingers shake as she lifts the fabric of her dress to avoid tripping, and her saliva goes thick. Not because of what might happen, but because the man who ripped her bicep tenderly, like she was made of the most fragile china, was the most good-looking man she had ever seen. Her mind ran images of things to compare him to, and almost all of them were of the Greek statues put up in museums for all to admire.

He leads her past the crowd and the kitchen where everyone was making drinks, past the wrap around stairs on the inside of the house, and even past the calmer sitting areas where couples were making out or groups of friends passed a smoking joint. He leads her right through the open back doors of the house so they faced the seemingly endless cornfield and the barn that was a speck behind it. The deck was less populated than the couches where kids smoked weed, but y/n guessed that it wasn’t to his liking because instead of turning off to the side so they could have a much less strained… conversation, he continued to walk- this time standing beside her instead of behind her.

Grass crunched under their feet as they got closer to the stalks of corn. Confused, y/n spared a glance to what she was leaving, and then to him. He stared straight ahead, but she caught his eyes flickering in her direction, and a smirk quirking cockily on his lips before they returned to the yawning face of the moon.

There was a short wooden fence separating the house from the cornfield that reached her hip, and he stopped there.

“Finally,” he sighed, “Some peace and quiet.” He makes a gesture to the fence, and pops his gum.

Dizzied, the tequila still in her head, she watches his tongue gather the gum back into his mouth, his lips shining with his own spit. Y/n doesn’t register that the movement towards the fence was his way of telling her to take a seat on the wooden bars.

“C’mere,” he murmured. Placing his hands on her waist, he lifted her up so she could sit on the wooden fence, and her hands went to his wrists instinctively, trying to keep herself steady.

Suddenly out of breath, her eyes shot straight up to his. There’s no way he can’t hear my heart right now, she thinks. He’s so close to her, his breath on her face. He smelled like pink bubblegum, cologne, and a liquor much more sophisticated than what she had to drink. His eyes held the same spell that she felt she was under.

“What’s your name?” He asked, his hands still on her waist. He didn’t look like he was in a rush to step away from her, and that was okay because she didn’t want him to.

“Y/n,” she whispered. It was physically impossible to raise her voice any louder. The stupid corset was making it harder for her to breathe, along with the added pressure of being in his presence. “You?”

“Prince Harry, at your service,” he smiled then, and y/n got a glimpse of shockingly sharp canines. They had to be fake. Longer than most in length, and she swore she saw one of those cartoonish-diamond glitter at the knife-like tips of his teeth.

She pointed to his mouth and said, “Are you a vampire prince?”

He looked at her strangely, his brows furrowing and his tongue running along the inside of his cheeks. Then, he laughed. “Something like that.”

“I-” She was gonna say something along the lines of ‘I think you’re a very good looking vampire prince’ until he cut her off.

“How about we play a game?” One of his hands lifted from her waist, and she let go to steady herself by grabbing onto the plant. Y/n hoped that her dress wasn’t getting dirty, but the moment that Harry brushed a stray lock of hair behind her ear it flew out the window.

Her eyes fluttered closed, and she leaned into his touch like a purring kitten. She blamed her blatant carelessness on the alcohol. “A game?”

“Yes, y/n. A game,” he muttered, watching the way her eyes twitched under her eyelids.

“Which game?” Her eyes fluttered open again, and her breasts pushed against the corset as she took a deep breath, “I thought you wanted to talk?”

“Oh,”he glanced down, to her lips and for half a second, to the repressed mounds of her tits, “I promise the conversation is going to be much more interesting after a game of hide and seek.”

“Where would we even play t-that?”

“Right,” he pinched her chin with two fingers so that her lips smushed together, and gently tilted her head towards the field of corn. “There.”

That’s how she found herself, running for her life in the middle of a corn maze, at night, on Halloween.

What had started off as her giggling and running had soon into a panting, scared-shit-less run for no reason. Maybe it was because she just couldn’t get Harry off of her tail, or maybe it was that she was running with no direction into a cornfield she was sure was lost in. Maybe it was a combination of all those things.

Harry yelled, “Come out, come out, wherever you are,” and it only made her want to cry.

It was strange, really. Y/n didn’t know where this fear was coming from, it started out with them actually having fun, the tips of his fingers tugging at the fabric of the skirt before he let her run a bit, calling out how he was going to get her, how he was gonna catch the princess and she was giggling, turning to see him disappear when she turned.

Then he went quiet. The footsteps stopped. And his tone of voice dropped to something much more… sinister.

“Come out, little one,” he said, a clear whisper poured directly into her ear.

Y/n turned, and she felt him getting closer so she tried to run faster. But she was getting so, so tired, and it felt like she couldn’t get any air into her lungs. All she knew then was the moon, with her tired face, and the intimidating, tall stalks of corn.

Harry supposes that he’s doing her a favor. A lot of people wish they could run through a field wearing a dress like the one y/n has on. He was a bit of a shit, sure, setting her up for failure given he had abilities that she did not possess, but, he knew just as he knew the sky is blue- that she liked and wanted to walk into the corn field. Now, it wasn’t because Harry happens to be really good at reading people, no.

As an empath- one of the terms in the fine print of the being he was- he was able to connect into the funnel between her veins, the curved out thrum of what she was feeling. The witches he knew compared it to reading an aura, but it was much more than that. There was no need for interpretation of colors because it was like he was her, feeling what she was feeling. And she liked it.

Up until, of course, he switched up his game.

After a few minutes of running around and playing with her like she was a mouse, Harry decided that he wanted to scare her. He wanted to give her a taste of himself. He wanted her to be scared- to not like him. Because he was something that shouldn’t be liked. It was a sick thing, really, that he happened to be so good looking when he was a literal monster. Harry fucking drank human blood. He wasn’t something that should be thought of as Greek statues.

The part of him that remained human throughout the years felt bad for doing this to her. But, he had to. It made him feel better when he sunk his teeth into a victim’s skin. Almost like… he’d warned them, and it was their fault that they hadn’t taken the signal.

A scarecrow loomed overhead, and her lungs were running out of air, so he decided to go ahead and make his final jump on her.

When y/n broke through the final turn to reach the very small clearing in the center of the field where a scarecrow stood in between a few bales of hay, she felt his breath at the back of her throat, and her knees buckled.

She’d never really been much a screamer during a jump scare. Instead, she sucked her breath in, really loud and sudden, and because she was having such a hard time breathing, that instinctually breath caused black dots to litter her vision and suddenly those weak knees contributed to a faint.

Harry caught her, and picked her up, huffing a small laugh to himself as he laid her across the piles of hay.

She really was a sight to see. Flushed, hair a mess from all her running. Her lips were dewy and her waterline was agitated, he could see the moisture in the place where her eyelashes sprouted.

With a few pats to the cheek, her eyes fluttered open, he was still hovering over her. Harry did not make a move to scoot back.

“You’re awake, princess,” he said, smirking.

Y/n blinked, her eyes wide, and… gasped when Harry pressed a kiss to her cheek. His lips were cool against her heated cheek, and the curved ends of his slicked back hair tickled her chin.

“You chased me,” she gulped, “for a long time.”

“Yes, I did. And you liked it. Didn’t you, little one?” He allowed the tip of his nose to follow the line of her jaw, testing the waters. She liked it, he could feel the shudders it sent to her heart in his bones.

“I did.” Her eyes furrowed at her own admission. Why was she being so carefree? Why was she allowing herself to continue to stay in this cornfield? What was stopping her from questioning further what the fuck was going on? Her attraction, and his implied interest, that’s what.

Harry’s tongue slipped out of his mouth, and licked at her jaw before he placed another kiss to it, “Good. What do you say we have some more fun?” “What kind of fun?” Her head titled, and he was given direct access to what he wanted. Her neck. The column of her throat was pulsing with the beat of her heart, and the veins he could almost taste criss-crossed beneath her skin.

“Fun is fun, pet. But if you must know, the kind of fun I’m talking about involves a lot of mouth to mouth,” He moved so his face was directly in front of hers again, and his palm gripped her waist beneath him. Unconscioslu, her legs parted and Harry had more space to slide both of his thighs between hers, one of his knees resting on the bales of hay she rested on.

Y/n was no longer worried about the state of her dress, but rather, where his mouth would land, and where she would put her hands. Her eyes bounced between his, but they struggled to remain still under his intense hold. “O-okay. I’d like that.”

“The prettiest princess I’ve ever seen,” he mumbled into the hollow underneath her jaw. And it was true. He’d seen a lot of royalty all throughout his wretched life, and none of them had been as pretty as she was. He felt a shiver of arousal go through her at the same time the air came fresh into his lungs, and it felt like he was going to explode from the inside out.

“I think you’re the most handsome prince I’ve ever seen.”

Y/n wanted to slap a hand over her mouth the moment those words left her lips, but Harry only chuckled and the vibrations felt heavenly against her skin.

“You've been seeing other princes’, little one?” Harry teased, his mouth tracing their words against her lips. He pressed forward and kissed her; just a peck, testing. Again, she liked it.

“No, just you,” she shivered. Her words were coming out in pants now. The fabri of her dress was too thick and too abundant to allow for any frisky actions, but his mouth was enough. One of his fingers was running over the tops of her breasts. Her mouth opened, she wanted more. Harry tasted of pink bubble gum. She wondered where it went.

He chuckled and kissed her once more. “Then how do you know you know I’m the most handsome?”

“I just do,” she said, arching into his touch. His finger was hooking into her sleeve, and he let it snap into her skin.

“You do?” He licked her bottom hip, and she whined. This game, whatever it was, she wanted it to be over. It was too much for her to handle.

“Yeah,” y/n said in a dreamy, far-off voice. “I mean, yes. Yes.”

Harry relished in what she felt, and soon enough, his cock twitched in his trousers. He never let himself become… involved in his meals emotions, but it was different with her. She was tender, and sweet. Willing and not a nuisance that he drowned out before biting.

“Am I handsome enough... for you to let me bite you?” And that was another thing.

Harry never asked for permission. Y/n was drunk enough that she’d wake up the next morning and think that he was just some kinky dude who’d left a sick hickey on her throat, as all of his ‘victims’ were, but still. Harry had asked for permission.

“Bite me?” She was confused, head fuzzy with the same feeling that was heating in her groin. The lacy knickers she wore were probably soaked through. The bale on her bum was beginning to hurt.

“Yes, princess. Bite, right,” he licked a stripe right where her pulse was the strongest to accentuate his intentions. “Here.”

“Okay, Harry.”

He was handsome. And she was horny (with a mix of other things), she didn’t see a reason to say no.

“Thank you, pet.”

It was the same as it always was. Harry nuzzled into the spot, sniffing like a dog meeting a new friend, and with no preamble, he bit into her. The tips of his teeth pierced her flesh, and he allowed them to retract once the blood started to flow. When the first drop touched his tongue, he groaned. She was good, one of the best he’d ever had, and the heady flavor was just as sweet as she was. He was so caught up in his own satisfaction that he didn’t notice the moment her hands bunched the fabric of his suit from the late 1700s into fists, or her body going tense before he slowly relaxed, her heartbeat an irregular mix as she decided whether or not she should be panicking.

But, he knew that she continued to enjoy what she was doing.

“H-harry, I-” She went limp in his arms, and the small squeak that left her mouth was the mermaid’s song that enchanted Harry.

He knew this wouldn’t be the last time he’d see her again.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

hi! happy halloween babies! or better yet, happy harryween! i hope you enjoyed this peice, it was for sure out of my comfort zone and something new for me. if you haven’t yet, please check out my fanfic on wattpad in which harry owns a more aesthetic version of playboy mag. you can read it here.

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