#to erase them is to erase part of who i am. so i refuse to be ashamed even tho theyre from my own hands | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

lilac-5ky · 11 months

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Roommates from Hell, pt.2 (Toji x Fem!Reader)

Chapter 2: 2912

Chapter 1 | Chapter 3 | Story Masterlist | Masterlist

A/N: Thanks to everyone who read and enjoyed the first part of the story! I'll do my best to update every 1-2 weeks and to keep things interesting. Feedback and suggestions are always welcome, and if anyone wants to be notified for updates, drop your name in the comments and I'll gladly tag your @.

Warning: Flashback, mentions of violence, blood, and sex toys (odd combo, I know)

2…9…1…2

Deft fingers punched in the numbers on the door’s keypad, a practiced crescendo of beeps and bops granting you access to your flat. Hesitant fingers that dropped to the handle, but refused to push forward, instead anchoring you there. Not yet, you mumbled, your eyes squeezing shut as soon as your forehead hit the frame.

Today has been a long day. So long that you barely had a moment to process the line of rapid escalations as it brought you to this very doorstep, with the ghost of your former scarf dangling from your neck. Some people would rather be glued to the little screens of their little phones than discipline their eight-year-old brats who, for some reason, thought playing tug of war with others’ scarves while they busted their gut to make a leaving to be of utmost entertainment.

Some people ought to keep their genes to themselves, you exasperated, untying the fabric from your neck and then balled it inside your bag, zipping the bunny across the seam.

The bunny…

Toji…

It was becoming a habit of yours to follow up his name with a sigh. Sometimes a sigh that meant “What am I going to do with you?” and others coming from a place of deep longing and frustration, meaning “What am I going to do without you?”

He said he’d be home after “snipping some loose ends,” which in his dictionary either referred to him breaking some poor woman’s heart, or quite literally stabbing some equally unfortunate man’s heart out of his body at his job’s demand. Depending on the plausibility of each scenario, you were given a minimum of four and a maximum of six hours to try and make sense of his actions and devise a plan to make this cohabitation work.

You licked your lips for the millionth time that day, gnawing at the chapped flesh with the edge of your teeth. No lip balm could aspire to salvage their sorry-ass state, aggravated by the low temperatures and honed by your continuous munching on them. You’d become so conscious of their existence, that it seemed as if you were trying hard to erase it before he had the chance to realize his goal of kissing them— even when that was a common goal shared by the both of you.

The taste of metal pooled in the hollow of your mouth, your teeth sinking a tad too deep. There wasn’t much reason to keep contemplating that which never happened and that which, perhaps, would never come. You wiped your shoes on the crooked doormat (was it always crooked?) and walked inside, your legs nearly giving out at the sight of two knees dangling from your beloved couch’s armrest.

“Woah, keep it down, won’t ya?”

None other than the voice of Toji reprimanded you as you screamed at the top of your lungs. His body was spilled across your couch, the expanse of muscles barely fitting upon the three azure-colored pillows. A soda —your soda— nested in his palm, while a bag of empty potato chips —your chips— lay on the kotatsu.

“What the hell are you doing here?!?” A trembling hand reached out to where your heart supposedly was, checking whether it was still in its place.

“Watching some travel show about Chikura,” he answered, unfazed and undisturbed. “You like abalone, right? Why don’t we-”

“I’m asking, how the fuck did you get in here?”

“Oh, that,” Toji smirked, lowering the TV’s volume just when the travel host was about to devour a platter full of steaming hot seafood—mouthwatering enough to divert your attention for a second. “Sayaka let me in.”

“Sa-yaka…?”

“Flat hair, narrow eyes— kinda like Izumi Pinko. Walks around with a cane twice her size. Rings a bell?”

“Talking about Ogawa-san?” you asked, a caricature of your crabby landlady taking shape before your very eyes. “She never lets in anyone without a key, though. Last time I forgot mine, she acted as if she didn’t know me and went right past. Had to phone a locksmith,” you sighed, murmuring under your breath about the extravagant sum of money you were forced to pay. “How did you do it? Convince her to open up?”

“How else ya think?” His chin rotated leisurely atop his knuckles.

“You can’t be serious! Y-you fucked her?” Your eyes went wide like saucers, the notion sounding both feasible and surreal.

His smirk sharpened into a sly grin as he stood up, a slight slouch on his shoulders carrying him to your eye level. You couldn’t exactly look away from this proximity, so you began quietly analyzing him. The tight-fitting black tee and baggy training pants that greatly accentuated his hips and shoulders; his work outfit. The overgrown hair that curtained the dark circles of his eyes; evidence of a sleepless night. The absence of scent, not even of dirt, sweat, or struggle. He must’ve actually been working on a bounty, you deduced, your final thought of rationale as he invaded the last bit of personal space you’d left.

“You really think the worst of me, huh?” His tongue circled his lips, prompting yours to do the same as you sheepishly shook your head, the sultry sound of his voice as hypnotizing as his hooded green eyes were.

“You think I go ‘round spreading the legs of everything that moves?” Toji asked again, his tone growing more condescending by the second. “ ‘fraid that ain’t the case, princess. I’m not into goodwill. Don’t do things without merit, either. She asked who I was, got all perky when I said I’m moving in, and then handed me these,” he paused, throwing a bundle of creased envelopes at your feet.

You kneeled awkwardly, seeking the sender’s origin in each logo seal. Water company. Electricity company. Phone company. Insurance company. Even the bills from that one debit card Hinata issued in your name in case of an emergency.

“Could say I paid my way in,” he scoffed, his eyes searching for an inkling of appreciation that he failed to find in your stubborn squint.

“I could’ve handled these myself.”

“Thought you’d say this, that’s why I saved this one,” he tossed another, smaller yellow-tinted paper onto the pile. “Eviction notice. My, you have it quite hard, don’tcha?”

“I don’t need classes on financial handling from someone whose living conditions are entirely dependent on ‘the bimbo of the week’,” you snapped, rising back to your feet with the bills in hand.

Maybe things were a bit tighter these past few months than you’d accounted for, but you weren’t like him. Sooner or later, you paid all expenses through sheer work and effort— a concept foreign to him, who’d rather be thrown into the streets than save a dime.

You weren’t like Toji. Not one bit. You knew that if he hadn’t run into your landlady, you would have definitely paid all your debts off in a month’s time or two, even if that meant devolving your breakfast’s nutritional value to that of instant ramen. You could take care of yourself, just like you’d done for 14 years now. He had no right to interfere because, come next month, you’d—

But the overdue deadlines at the top of each paper spoke louder than your inner thoughts and bravado did. The next month would never come for you. Not in this house, at least.

Defeated, you unfolded the paper, straightening the creases your fingernails had helped create. You hated feeling this way— indebted. The last thing you wanted was for this to turn into just another transactional relationship with an expiration date dependent on the other’s wage.

“Thank you, and,” you mumbled, your stare hiking up his body and stopping at his chest —right about where the difference in your height manifested— “….sorry, I guess. Just thought that with the way you look, and all that-”

“The way I look…?” A winsome smile tugged at his dimples, his left hand weaving through his hair as if he were oblivious to how effortlessly attractive he appeared in his work clothes, every single crevice of his body visible under the little piece of fabric.

“N-never mind.” You tore your eyes away, cheeks flushing bright red at thoughts a friend shouldn’t be having. “How was work?”

“Pretty dead,” he shrugged, using the same hand to rub some of the tension around the crook of his neck. “Don’t see a real challenge rising until that Gojo kid hatches from his egg. Rest die like flies.”

As a regular person with about an average percentage of cursed energy running through your system, you had little understanding of the mystical world of Jujutsu and its sorcerers, all the information you had acquired being bits and pieces that Toji had shared with you over the years. He never went into too much detail about his job but never hid anything either. He killed sorcerers with the same ease he spread butter on his bread.

You really didn’t understand much, and perhaps the keywords “kills for a living” ought to ring an alarm or two, but an outsider like you who didn’t abide by their rules had no right judging those who broke them. Besides, with the way his family had disposed of him as if he were a chewed piece of gum stuck on the back of their sole, things weren’t as black and white as one would assume.

“Gojo, you say,” the name sounding awfully familiar on your tongue. “Is that one of the three big clans?”

Toji nodded, his arms folding over his chest. “Special grade when he ain’t grown any pubes yet,” he scoffed, voice twisting in an unnatural way that could have tricked you into thinking he was jealous of the young boy.

“Are you gonna kill him?”

His brows knitted together, clearly not expecting such bluntness. “Question is, can I? Answer being, for the right price,” the frown he wore subdued into a crooked smile. “maybe. Kid should fetch one good wad of cash. I’m sure many want the six eyes out of the picture.”

Six eyes?

“Just make sure you save some of it,” you mindlessly said, eyes dancing around the room for the first time since you’d entered the house.

There were no real signs of his presence. The duffel bag seemed to be nowhere in sight either. Only his shoes were left by the door right next to yours, a sign you’d completely missed upon entering.

“What happened to your things, by the way? Don’t see ‘em.”

“Took the liberty of sorting them out,” Toji said. “You had a lot more empty space than you made it sound earlier.”

Somehow that statement terrified you— not because you were some overbearing control freak who didn’t want others interfering with their stuff, but because you feared the misplaced items he might have found casually lying around, providing him with all the excuse he needed to tease you to an excruciatingly slow and shameful death.

You went on a parade through the rooms, Toji following in your steps like a well-trained puppy, letting you freely inspect the new “changes”.

In the living room, you spotted a pair of dumbbells lying by the window, heavy enough that when you tried to pick one of them up, it resulted in one loud, unintentional shriek as your feet were nearly crushed, much to Toji’s vile amusement. Then in the bathroom, you found a second toothbrush that shared the exact same color yours did, along with a black fuzzy towel and a men’s deodorant that was missing its lid. You’d have to get another cup for his toothbrush, you noted, and moved along, eventually making it to your apartment’s sole bedroom.

“Where are your clothes?” you asked, Toji nodding in your closet’s direction.

You opened the first door, finding a series of dark-colored shirts, sweaters, and cardigans hanging from the previously vacant racks. You didn’t wear much color yourself, but when comparing the disparity between his almost exclusively black side of the space and the creamier pastels that predominated yours, the clash in taste was indisputable.

Absentmindedly, you run your fingers through his clothes, stopping at the dark blue parka you’d gotten him for his 21st birthday. He wasn’t the type to keep gifts from women, but seeing he’d preserved yours in mint condition filled you with a strange sense of pride.

“Not bad,” you exclaimed, satisfied with how aptly his clothes were displayed until a new worry surfaced. “What about your underwear?”

He glanced toward the bottom drawer, his instep gently kicking against it. You weren’t too sure if that was necessary, and under different circumstances, you’d rather avoid such overt embarrassment, but this was your house first and foremost. Your closet, your drawer, and—

“The bottom drawer…?” The realization struck like a ton of bricks, your pupils widening and then trembling as a breath hitched up your throat, remaining there.

The bottom drawer is where you kept it, perhaps the only thing in this entire household that you’d rather he didn’t see, at the cost of your own life, even. A rabbit, whose little ears tapped in excitement every time it saw you. A rabbit vastly different from the ones that hopped around happily in fields or the one that was weaved through the zipper of your handbag. A rabbit that had kept you company in his place many nights and knew the sound of his name better than Toji himself did.

Sinking to your knees, you felt his shadow loom over you like the shadow of imminent death. You let go of that breath and yanked the drawer open, eyes squinting at the sight of neatly stacked black boxers, their size big enough to make you arch a brow, yet not big enough to completely conceal 6 inches of hot pink. You were safe.

“Looking for this?” A light buzz rang in your ear, your head tilting to meet Toji’s namesake.

“G-give it back!” You dived forward, gracelessly collapsing at his feet when he pulled it out of reach.

“Come and get it,” Toji retorted, wiggling it before your very eyes.

Piecing a loose strand of hair behind your ear, you pounced at him, fingers locking around the silicone and his hand, while he refused to surrender, his thrilled expression revealing just how much he enjoyed the demand in your tone as you bossed him into handing back the vibrator.

“What will I get in return?”

“Wha— why would you get anything?” You gritted your teeth, stumbling forward as he dragged you to him.

“Tsk, tsk, tsk,” he shook his forefinger playfully. “Finders keepers, losers weepers. If ya really want it, better compensate me first. Oh, look, it has multiple speeds, huh….” he said semi-impressed, revving up the rabbit’s switch to its second and third speeds.

“…What do you want?” You practically begged, seeking a way out of this humiliation.

“Now we talking,” Toji smirked, barely restraining himself from ruffling the hair of the ferocious, albeit cute, beast that attacked him. “2912. What do the numbers mean? Tried your birthday first, but seems like you do have a few brain cells in there,” he tapped at your temple with his free hand, frustration pooling in your eyes. “Then your mom’s death anniversary, your sis’ birthday, that brat’s too— even mine, but no good.

“So, what’s 2912 to you? Indulge me, and I’ll let you have it.”

2912, or more accurately, 29/12. It didn’t surprise you that he didn’t remember. After all, it wasn’t an important date, just another winter’s day from many, many years ago. A day that was all but erased under the thick blanket of snow as it engulfed your tender memories.

A heavy sigh parted your lips, and at that moment, you knew you’d already lost.

“You really wanna know?”

It was the 27th of December.

The 27th morning of a month whose sole notable event was the week-long blizzard that’d condemned the entire nation to a period of absolute and unfaltering inertia. Well, as unfaltering as the in-between downpours let it be, snow washing over the streets in a diluted mixture of ice and mud every two days— streets turning into a dangerous minefield, and hospital beds quickly filling up with broken-boned smarty pants who thought wandering out and about in the heart of winter would be as inconsequential as those dull days were.

You were one of those idiots. Not quite, but you were on your way to join their ranks, every step you took across the frozen pavements of Tokyo threatening to leave you with a bad case of a sprained ankle, or worse, a cracked skull. You regretted wearing those worn-out boots today of all days, but then again, your wardrobe choices were limited to whatever clothing you’d grown out of, and the clothes your mother left behind.

This old suede pair was hers, too. A gift from back when your house was still open to crowds and birthday parties— when it wasn’t just an empty carcass of termite-eaten joists and web-infested corners that could barely welcome, let alone host, the final of its residents: yourself.

Returning to the reason why you’d chosen today as the day to stride across Shibuya —a thermos of soothing Butajiru soup gripped tightly between your mitten-clad palms and a backpack full of advertising fliers for your afternoon job attached to your back— and consequentially, the reason why you sported your mother’s beloved shoes: you had a job interview. Your first non-canceled interview in over two months since your personal inertia began when you were suddenly and unjustifiably laid off.

Those were tough times. The entire country was dipped in despair over the biggest economic recession they’d known. Left and right, people had their jobs snatched from within their grasp in the name of meek excuses such as cost reduction, or merging and buyouts, or even staff redundancy, and who could blame those small enterprise owners, really?

In any case, the cost of running your previous employer’s rathole of a convenience store might have been reduced, but your living expenses weren’t, and the supplementary funds the state provided were running dry. No one wanted to hire an inexperienced, uninsured high schooler. It was too much of a gamble, especially when the contenders were overqualified college graduates desperate enough to work menial jobs for the same breadcrumbs a part-timer would.

You were at your wit’s end. Out of luck and starved for something other than vending machine onigiri. Thirsty for a life you’d probably never be able to obtain. But today wasn’t about wallowing in self-pity. No, today was the day you’d take your first step toward normality and dignity. Today, you marched proudly in your mother’s most prized possession, and today you felt her comforting scent linger in the breeze, giving you the much-needed push to achieve what you’d set out to do.

Live. That was the final request that left her lips, and that was exactly what you were planning to do. You’d live. No matter what, against all odds, you would live.

The headlights at the bustling intersection shone a brilliant green as the herd of sharply dressed businessmen and casually dressed students on their day off pushed forward like a troop of toy soldiers, sweeping you past Shibuya River, where the crystallized waters from below its bridge stilled your grimacing reflection.

It’d been so long since the last time you’d genuinely smiled that your facial muscles barely remembered how to. It looked awkward and forced. Foreign. You’d practiced your introduction days ahead, but that damn smile stood in the way. If only there was a “smiles for dummies” playbook, though you doubted it’d help. Those without a reason to smile could only second-guess the happiness of those who were blessed with it.

As if to further test your theory, today’s misfortune came pedaling right in your direction, a hasty biker knocking the thermos off your hands and onto the water with a faint “sorry” echoing in his stead. You ducked over the handrail, spotting the silver shine a couple of meters away from the river’s brink. You sighed in relief, grateful that the impact hadn’t shattered the ice and that you still had about 45 minutes to catch your interview— more than enough time for you to carry out your flask’s impromptu rescue operation.

You walked over to the bridge’s sideline, where, in place of stairs, an overgrown cherry tree cast its shadow. This was far from sensible, but the cliff wasn’t steep enough to dissuade you. You looped your scarf around a leaning branch and began your descent, the non-existent friction between your tattered soles and the slippery cement sending you to meet your maker as you tumbled down the slope and hit the ground. Shit.

Once you were done lamenting your sheer idiocy, your faulty shoes, the tree branch, the weather forecast, and every Shinto deity’s name you could remember off the top of your head, you pushed yourself onto your knees, carefully rotating each ankle around itself. Not broken. Thank those aforementioned gods you cursed, or else you’d never be able to afford the medical bills.

You shook the snow off your clothes and stood up, stretching both arms over your head, only to realize your blunder had become a lonesome spectator’s object of amusement. The man —assuming that the creature behind you was a man and not some wild beast with the way his jacket fluffed over his skull— was bent in half, knees to his chest, and arms coiled around, the sole distinctive trait that of his sparkling green eyes zeroing in on your plainer orbs.

You could have sworn you heard a chuckle, too, but you weren’t about to start a fight with some unhinged bum at the bottom of a bridge— not when you were one missed bill away from sharing his fate.

Deciding to temporarily forsake his presence, you located the now broken branch and attempted to fish your bottle out, moving as close to the ice as you could. Desperate lunges pushed the thermos further in, your hold on the wood relaxing with each failed attempt until you barely had a grip.

“Excuse me!” you turned at your last resort. “Hi, um… could you please help me out here? I dropped this into the water, and it’s really important I get it back, but my arms can’t reach and the ice is so thin and slippery I just might fall.”

An uncomfortable chuckle failed to appease its tough crowd, with the man remaining lost in his thoughts, his eyes blinking slower than traffic lights during rush hours. It seemed like you’d found the worst person to exercise your communication skills with.

“Hello? Can you hear me?”

“Shut up.”

It was your turn to blink in surprise, your jaw dropping at the man’s barking. You were too shocked to be offended and too offended to question if it was you he addressed, but his next sentence left no real room for misunderstanding.

“I said, shut the fuck up and take it elsewhere. You were the one who dropped it. If it was that important to you, then shoulda taken better care of it instead of avalanching your way down here and disturbing my peace.”

Clapping your hands over your agape mouth, you muttered an apology and faced away from him, coming to your senses a minute later when you realized you weren’t in the wrong. Sure, he could be dealing with some lachrymose life-shattering situation you knew nothing about, but that wasn’t an excuse for him to act like a complete jerk to a fellow stranger in need.

You weren’t sure why you held back from flipping him off. Maybe you’d accepted that dealing with douchebags was going to become part of your new reality as a service worker, or maybe it was because you really didn’t want any trouble with a guy who looked this intimidating even while seated. Either way, you whipped out your trusty branch again and neared the brink, this time using it as a cane to help you tread the frozen waters and snatch your thermos.

You didn’t even get a chance at a victorious cheer when you felt the ice shatter beneath your feet, eager to swallow you into the depths of its bottomless abyss. Or that’s what would have happened if the river didn’t cap at 2 meters, and if a hand didn’t yank you by the scruff of your neck, hurling you back to the shore as if you weighed no more than a snowflake.

“The hell you think you are doing? Got a death wish or something?” the brass voice of your savior accused, belonging to a much more pleasant and youthful face than one would have expected.

The boy was more or less your age, about a head taller with broad shoulders and a toned physique his baggy clothes undermined— much stronger than your average high-schooler, judging by the sheer strength he’d flung your body with. Messy raven black hair rained down to his ears, sloppily chopped into shape by their owner himself. Eyes as green as a thousand springs gone by, and as fiery as the blazing fury scorching them. The only discord in his features was that of a scar on the right side of his lips, begrudgingly moving with each profanity he spat.

Your second apology came as a knee-jerk reaction to his outburst, encouraged by the temporal trance his good looks had subjected you to. You wouldn’t say you had a type, and even if you did, you doubted that a no-good, rude bridge inhabitant was it. However, the only way for you to tear your gaze off of him was to physically force yourself away. The guy murmured something under his breath and moved back to his original spot, arms dangling over his spread thighs.

You were unsure of what to do. The time for your interview was closing in, and no one guaranteed he wouldn’t rip the vocal cords off your throat if you tried to verbally thank him. You had a very bad feeling about this guy, and perhaps you should have listened to your gut rather than nullifying the distance with a peace offering.

“Here,” you prodded a spare cup of soup into the empty space between you.

He arched a brow at your gesture, his irritation gradually melting into curiosity and then acceptance as he brought the cup to his lips and took a hesitant sip.

“Hmm,” he hummed, gulping down some more after he’d made sure you weren’t trying to poison him.

You expected something else to follow, but it seemed like his outburst exhausted his vocabulary. You could always ask what he thought of it, but the thought alone was as scary as going for another suicide dive. So you said nothing, and he did the same. Just two strangers who barely tolerated each other sharing a moment of silence in the snowy landscape.

A short while later, the boy shoved the cup toward you and dug his hand in his jacket’s front pocket, dropping about six crumpled ten-thousand yen bills at your feet.

“For the soup,” he explained as if the notion of spending such an extravagant sum on half a cup of pork loin soup made sense.

“Are you outta your mind?” You pushed the bills back at him, lest your greed take over. “How much do you think this cost to make?”

“Dunno,” he shrugged, no real hurry to reclaim his cash.

Your initial impression was completely false. No bum would ever wave ten-thousand bills around as if they were nothing. No, this guy ought to at least be some troubled conglomerate heir that’d run away from his five-bedroom mansion.

“I’m sure you don’t know how dangerous this neighborhood is,” you said, placing your hand against your heart. “But as a born and raised local, allow me to say that if you keep flaunting wads of cash in people’s faces so recklessly, it won’t be long before you get mugged. It’s your lucky day you ran into me and not some sleazy money grabber, but trust me, not every day’s lucky, and not everyone’s as nice.”

Something about what you said must have resonated with him, considering his frown cracked into a simper.

“I’d like to see them try,” he spoke in a cocky tone that reeked of confidence. “How much for seconds then?”

“Not for sale,” you answered, throwing the thermos inside your backpack.

His weight shifted in your direction, chin balancing against his elbow. “Why not?”

“You see, I’m on my way to a job interview. Figured if I don’t cut it, then the soup will,” quickly adding, “It’s my trump card.”

“What a dumb plan,” he sneered. “If ya wanna bribe someone, better make an offer they can’t refuse. Couple of these work like a charm.”

He waved the money again, successfully drawing your interest when you noticed tiny splotches of red on one of the bills. Blood.

Picking up on the change in your expression, he hurriedly stuffed the cash inside his pocket, his thumbs sticking out in a relaxed grip so as to hide his discomfort. The air grew heavy once more, albeit for a different reason.

Every guess you’d made regarding this guy’s identity clashed with the next one. He was rude, but he’d jumped to your rescue. He looked unkempt yet strikingly handsome. He’d taken refuge under a bridge but was damn loaded. A walking (more like seated) contradiction of a man that intrigued you in more ways than he repulsed you.

“So, what are you doing out here? Did you also fall from up there?” You chuckled nervously while pointing upward.

He smiled.

“That’s a pretty old-school pickup line, if ya ask me.”

“That’s not what I meant!” Your chest pounded against your fleece jacket, hands quick to dispute him. “Did something happen? Why did you end up here?”

He shook his head.

“Did you run away from home?”

He shook his head again.

“Did you get into a fight with someone?”

He thought about shaking his head a third time, but instead, he opted for a groan and hissed about how he should have let you drown.

Your tongue embarrassed you yet again, as you mumbled an apology and cowered in your corner. For some reason, you couldn’t stop apologizing to him, and if that was enough to frustrate you, then it was definitely enough to annoy him. Maybe the time to leave had come. You’d done your part in thanking him, and it was really none of your business to pry into his sad character backstory.

“Well then. It was nice knowing you, and all. Hope you have a Happy New Year’s and a nice life, and let’s never see each other again for as long as we-”

“What if I told you I just killed someone?”

The blood in your veins froze for a reason separate from the cold. You were left staring at him with wide-open eyes and a wide-open mouth that refused to form anything other than a soundless “What?!”

“Thought so,” he scoffed as if he expected the outcome, sorrow lingering in his voice. “Go away if ya don’t wanna end up the same way. I’m still getting the hang of it, and I’m afraid it’d hurt more than drowning.”

But you didn’t leave. Even when that little voice of reason thrashed and begged for you to seize the opportunity and get the fuck away from this place, your legs refused to take another step. Instead, you settled back upon the snowy blanket and stilled your gaze on his face, watching a glimmer of something tune in the green of his eyes.

“W-Who was it?” You feigned calmness.

“Does it matter?” he shrugged.

“Why did you kill him?”

“Does it really matter?” he sighed, reconsidering his answer. “Dunno. Money, I guess. Not as if I had a personal grudge or anything. Didn’t even know the dude up until three days ago. Took him out with a single bullet to his brain. T’was instant since he didn’t move. Painless, too.” He tried to humanize his actions.

You weren’t entirely sold on his story, but on the off chance he was telling the truth, that made him a murderer and you a witness to his crime. Worse, if you didn’t rat on him, it made you an accomplice, and as far as you were concerned, neither was less illegal than the other.

Your hands cupped your mouth completely as you pretended to blow hot air, the reality being that you didn’t want to spew anything too backhanded before thinking things through. Oddly, it all made sense. The reason he sat down there like a puppy kicked by his owners. His devil-may-care attitude and rude comments that meant to throw you off. The blood on the bills and the stain on the hem of his jacket that you’d previously overlooked.

That was all the incriminating evidence one needed to possibly sentence him, and yet you sensed no real danger in his presence. Only a deep sadness that stemmed from his lifeless eyes, making you believe that his so-called victim was none other than himself. He looked as if he hadn’t gotten a wink of sleep in God knows how long, the light in his eyes reduced to a murky shade of jade now that everything was laid bare.

There was so much you didn’t know about this boy, his name included. But you knew that look of despair all too well. If it was because of money, then maybe, just this once, you wouldn’t mind giving him the benefit of the doubt.

“How much did you make?” You lowered your palms.

Your question surprised him more than he thought possible, and his stupefied expression was a telltale sign of that. He flipped both pockets inside out and let the money fall onto the snow, revealing twice the amount he’d held before— a total of 120.000 yen.

“Minus a grand. Felt hungry after,” he admitted.

“Must be nice… With that amount of money, I could have rice to last me until the end of the year.”

“You’d kill for rice…?”

Glancing at his face, you couldn’t help yourself from snorting. You were both too deep inside the twilight zone to be questioning each other’s motives.

“Why act surprised? People like us do all sorts of things to get out of our predicaments, don’t we?” you asked, deciding there were more things you had in common than things that divided you. “Is ‘just money’ a better reason than rice?”

“Nah,” he shook his head. “But if I were you, I’d get myself a pair of boots that ain’t a death trap of its own. Gotta be a special kind of idiot to wear crappy shoes in the snow.”

“These were my mother’s!” you objected, and he smirked. “What about you? Where do you plan on spending all that money?”

“Roppongi probably. Or Kabukicho. Heard the right price fetches you the right type of fun there.”

He couldn’t be serious. Those were two of the most renowned bad districts in the history of bad districts. Drugs, gambling, prostitution— you name it.

“How old are you again?”

“Older than you,” he childishly retorted.

“What’s your name?”

“So you can snitch?” His tongue wet the scar below his bottom lip. “Toji.”

“Last name?”

He contemplated his answer for a bit before proudly stating that he didn’t have one —that he didn’t need one— and then he asked you the same.

“Y/N.” You smiled faintly. “I do have a last name, but doubt the one who gave it wants me to have it. Would’ve asked it back if it had any real value.”

“So we are two fuck-ups,” he— Toji, declared.

“I suppose we are.”

The two of you shared a quiet laugh, the kind that wasn’t heard but felt through the eyes of two kindred spirits entirely content with each other’s presence. Ever since your mother passed, you lived in a sphere separate from other people. Your classmates and those who tried to be your friends could afford the luxury of sharing takoyaki on a school day and going karaoke singing the next. They could attend field trips and leave memories on a string of Polaroid frames.

You didn’t. You couldn’t. There wasn’t a single moment in your life when you hadn’t thought about the cost of milk and the value of one-plus-one deals you convinced yourself you didn’t need. Such were the concerns you had at seventeen. Not boys, no friendships, no university entrance exams, no nothing. You couldn’t afford the price tag of a dream, let alone a tomorrow. You lived for today and for making ends meet, so how could someone like you ever aspire to be understood? How could you ever view yourself as something other than the zeros at the bottom of your meager paycheck?

Your self-exile had no room for others, yet somehow, this foul-mouthed stranger had barged his way in and given you a moment that you couldn’t price. A moment that neither loan sharks nor the bank could ever steal. A moment of your youth.

The thick fingers of a calloused hand came to tap at your knee softly, making you wonder whether you’d missed something during your short period of contemplation.

“When’s the interview?” Toji asked.

“Uhm.” You rolled your sleeve to check your watch. “Ten minutes? There’s still time; the place’s right around the corner.”

“Somethin’ tells me getting your ass over there will take longer than that.” Suddenly, the hand that was on your leg hovered above your head, prompting you to grab it as Toji towered over you. “Let’s go.”

“You coming with?”

“You think I’d rather sit down here like some bridge troll that reels in defenseless damsels in distress?”

You were tempted to answer “yes” to see his reaction, but he resumed talking before you could utter a word. “Won’t say it again. Let’s go.”

And with that, you followed Toji to the other end of the bridge, where the stairs you previously failed to locate mocked you with every little squeak your heels produced, until you stood back at the top of civilization, finding it, unsurprisingly, the same as you’d left it. Thoroughly white and eerily quiet.

Just as you thought your ways would part, Toji took your hand in his rather forcefully and picked up a steady gait that you were made to keep up with, your shoes leaving deep imprints in the snow.

He held your hand all the way to the diner, and although you were truly curious as to why he did that, you didn’t dare ask. You walked side by side in silence, occasional fleeting gazes catching his warm breath clashing with the cold. It was then that you realized how warm his palm felt, despite it being all bare. Warm, strong, and certain. So this is what holding a guy’s hand feels like, you giddily mused.

By the time you reached the front door, you were more reluctant to let go than you’d been to grab his hand, thinking that this was the first and last time the two of you were saying goodbye. Sweat made your fingers slippery. You were anxious. You slid your mittens off your fingers and, on a whim, pressed them tight against his palms, making him the recipient of the first gift you’d ever given. He shot the pink-colored wool a funny look —maybe because the prospect of him accepting such a girly-looking accessory puzzled him— and then lingered for a moment or two before he turned around and waved at you over his shoulder.

“Aren’t you gonna wish me good luck?” You asked when the distance between you began to increase.

“You won’t need it,” you heard him say. “The soup will do.”

And with those final words exchanged, you traded the frigid cold for the diner’s artificial heat and the presence of a prospective friend for that of your boss-to-be.

Just like Toji predicted, you didn’t need luck, and you didn’t need that lukewarm soup either. The man hired you almost as fast as he saw you, sternly announcing that you start come Monday. You thanked him from the bottom of your heart and ran back outside, searching through the various white-painted buildings for that stubborn hint of black you’d not too long ago parted with— which you quickly spotted a couple of alleyways ahead.

“I got the job! You hear me, Toji?” You yelled in utter glee, sensibility alone keeping you from springing upward like a jack-in-the-box. “I’m not a fuck-up anymore; I got it! I got the job!”

You weren’t even sure whether that shadow really belonged to him and whether he’d actually made sense of all your frantic cries, but maybe if you’d hushed a little, then you could have heard a distant voice chiming, “I knew you would.”

It was the 27th of December when we first met, but it was on the 29th that I fell in love with you— the scruffy boy with the snow-laced hair and emptied pockets who ordered the cheapest fries off the menu as my company’s fee.

You had your answer locked and loaded— a trigger waiting to be pulled. A clear shot. One bullet was all it’d take to end it. One word, and the farce you called friendship would fizzle right then and there. A sadistic impulse uncoiled deep within your stomach, hitching up your throat like a vile serpent of temptation spurring your chaste tongue to commit the greatest sin imaginable.

I hate being your friend. I don’t want to do this anymore. Do you have any idea how hard it is?

All synonyms for the same emotion. A gut-wrenching, soul-crushing, and above all, self-destructive unrequited love that made your heart clench at the mere sight of him, pound at the sound of his voice, and hammer at the ghost of his touch. If you could reach deep within your chest and cut that useless thing off the strings that held it in its cavity, you certainly would. You’d hand it over to him and gladly watch him stomp on it with the biggest smile contorting the final expression on your face. You wanted to rid yourself of this pointless emotion, but you knew very well that to destroy yourself meant to destroy him.

The 18-year-old Toji that held your hand on a cold winter’s day as if it were the most precious thing to him. The 20-year-old Toji that came along to meet the sister and nephew you didn’t know you had. The 22-year-old Toji that said he was proud of you when you paid off your parents’ house’s mortgage. The 24-year-old Toji that came to your graduation from state college with blood-stained lilies in his hand, again letting slip how proud he was. The 26-year-old Toji that didn’t hesitate to knock the teeth right out of a handsy prick’s jaw, spending his first and last night in a holding cell. The Toji from the last ten years of your life that never strayed too far away from your sight and always managed to return in time for lunch.

Standing in front of the 28-year-old Toji, you felt more apologetic than ever, wishing that you wouldn’t have let your love for him fester into something so selfish and consuming. Because if Toji left, then you’d still have your sister and her family, but if you left, Toji would have none.

And that was why you could never tell him what that day meant. It was impossible to speak of it with any less fondness than the one depicted in your memories, and as dense as Toji could be at times, he was no idiot. So rather than giving him the answer he thought himself to seek, you retracted your hand and took a step back, forcing the meekest smile your guilty conscience could muster.

“How about an offer you’d never refuse?”

tags: @absoluteindulgence

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jdeclerc · 9 months

Text

a brother's intervention - part two

part one

pairing: eris x reader.

summary: Eris struggles to voice his feelings...can he find a way to do so before he loses the one fae he needs most?

author's note: a longer than anticipated answer to the cliffhanger that is part one...and a little something for the Lucien girlies ;)

warnings: adult content

word count: 4,654

“You can’t love me, not in that way.”

It’s the hurt and following disbelief I see flash across his face that suddenly has anger replacing the tears I had only moments ago.

“And why is that? Is the thought of me feeling this way toward you so nauseating you can’t even entertain the thought?”

His voice returns the anger in mine, his eyes holding nothing but fury as they meet mine.

“Don’t you dare believe you are the problem in this situation, not for a moment.”

“Then what is the problem?! You have given me no other explanation, no other way to interpret your words.”

“Me!” He shouts the words, his voice laced with defeat as he continues. “I am, as I always have been, the problem.”

“Eris...”

“Please, do me the kindness of sparing me from words to try and attempt to dissuade me from seeing myself for what I am.” He throws his hands up in exasperation, gesturing down the length of himself. “To love me is to love a monster, one born and bred to be lethal, undeserving of the love of a fae as extraordinary as yourself.”

“You can’t possibly believe that! Eris, look at what you have accomplished in the last 5 years…you have brought the very thing you say you are undeserving of back to our home.” As I move to close the distance between us, he raises his hand, halting my steps.

“All that I have done is to make up for all that came before. No amount of time or effort can erase the darkness I’ve laid upon our lands.”

“Eris, your father –”

“Whether by own hand or his makes no difference, I had a part in it all the same.”

His anger is once again replaced by defeat. Mine, however, increases ten-fold.

“I have never thought you to be a fool until this moment Eris Vanserra. Are you that self-centered to believe yours is the only opinion that matters in this moment? That I say the words I did with no thought or consideration for who I am saying them to?” He doesn’t stop me this time as I approach him, stunned into silence by the rare occurrence of my wrath being turned on him.

“You forget that every sin you have committed has been done with me by your side. I have taken every step in darkness with you, have walked by your side through it all. Do not believe, for one moment, that all of Prythian does not follow your name with my own when recounting the evil reaped by the Autumn Court over the centuries.” I let out a breath before I continue. “To call yourself a monster is to call me the same.”

I can tell by his expression that he is remembering the same memory I am.

---------

It was a rare moment when my composed exterior gave way to my baser instincts. I distinctly remember the lesser Lord of Autumn cradling the hand I had broken when he dared to think he had claim to any part of my body. He began screaming of the monstrosity he believed me to be, having missed the Lordlings who approached him from behind. Without a word Eris came to stand between myself and the male, Lucien taking a position at my side. As the male cowered in fear, Eris requested that Lucien take me back to my rooms and that he would follow along shortly.

I do not know what transpired in the time it took him to see after my well-being, Eris refusing to tell me even to this day. But what I do know is that he carried the scent of copper, had changed his clothes when he did, and that the next time I saw the lower lord he no longer had a right hand to cradle.

---------

We came out of the memory at the same time, his expression angrier than my own.

“And the reason you were dragged into that life is obvious. There’s a common presence through it all. And that makes it worse, doesn’t it? I wasn’t satisfied being a monster by myself. I was selfish enough to mould you in my image, to create a force just as dangerous and evil as I am.”

“If you think you dragged me into anything Eris, then you don’t know me. You don’t make my decisions for me, you never have, and you never will, no matter what title you carry. Every choice I have made is my own and I live with them every day. But that doesn’t matter to you. No…as long as you’re a monster, pushing everyone away becomes that much easier, doesn’t it?”

The grate to our voices is evenly matched, neither of us conceding to the other.

“Easier?! You think it’s easy to watch the members of my court, my own family, find their happiness? Trust me when I say it has never been easy not being sure enough of myself to find my own. It isn’t easy to have the voice of my father constantly reminding me I will never be worthy of love.”

“Then you’re the coward of the two of us. You’re not your father Eris, you never will be. I’m tired of that man continuing to hold you captive.”

“Y/N, stop.”

“No, I want to know. What is the worst that could happen if you let someone get truly close to you?! What, truly, is there to lose?!”

“Y/N…” Eris’ voice was that of a High Lord, dark and commanding. I matched it with my own, only louder.

“Tell me Eris! What. Is. There. To. Lose?!”

“Everything!” His voice carried the very fire that ran through his veins, I had never heard his anger laced with such desperation. “If I say what I truly wish, I could lose the one thing that means more to me than anything, is that what you want to hear?”

I put the last embers of my anger into my next words.

“No…I want you to say it! Stop being a coward and say it!”

“I LOVE YOU!”

Everything stops in that moment, the forest going deadly quiet. Neither of us making a move toward the other.

Then, all at once, the forest comes to life. Birds are singing, the sun shines past the trees overhead, the leaves begin dancing around us, and his hounds begin letting out excited yips and howls. All in response to what is happening between Eris and me.

It is as though I can see the thread forming and making its way to each of us. Its glow dancing through the air, showing off just how special and beautiful it is. It is with a sharp pain that I feel it reach my chest and snap. Quickly followed by an all-encompassing warmth spreading throughout my entire body.

A sea of emotions flows toward me as I look toward Eris, finding he is already looking at me. As we look at each other for a moment, smiles begin to overtake both of our faces, transforming into laughter.

“Cauldron boil me, what fucking fools we are!” Eris exclaims.

He closes the distance between us, his hands coming to rest of either side of my neck as I look up at him. My own reaching to either side of his waist.

“Forgive me for being fool enough to miss what was right in front of me…my mate.” His words coming out as a whisper, a wave of awe flowing down the bond as his eyes lock on mine.

A look of uncertainty takes over Eris’ expressions, his next words laced with painful meaning.

“I will not force you to accept it, I will not do to you what was done to my mother. Should you choose it, I will step back from you…forever.”

My grip tightens at his waist, my eyes never leaving his.

“Eris Vanserra, hear my words…I love you, for all that you are. I choose you; I am not leaving you…you never have to feel alone again.”

“You must know I have always loved you; every piece of my scarred and broken heart belongs with you.” He leans his forehead against mine, both of us basking in the waves of emotion crashing through the bond.

“Eris…” The desperation in my voice escapes of its own accord, my need for him apparent to us both.

“I have been yours for centuries, say you are mine and I will make it so.” His want is evident in his voice, his eyes darkening as he speaks, as though he is done hiding from me. “Be sure, my love, for I have no intention of letting you go if you say the words.”

I don’t even take a moment to hesitate, having known my answer to such a question for centuries.

“I am yours; now and forever.”

Eris’ gaze searches mine once more, looking for any traces of hesitation or regret…he finds none.

Every ounce of hesitation leaves him as his lips crash into mine.

My arms wrap around his shoulders, bracing myself against the force of his kiss. His encircle my waist, pulling me impossibly closer. Eris kisses me like a male that has been starved for centuries; finally receiving what he needs.

His breaks our kiss for a moment as he commands, “Jump.”

I obey without hesitation, my legs wrapping around his waist and Eris’ hands coming to rest beneath my thighs.

“Good girl.” His voice impossibly deep as his lips find mine once more. Eris begins walking us backward, my back hitting bark. One of his hands comes to the back of my head to prevent it from hitting the tree.

I can’t help but laugh, my words coming out breathless. “Every the gentlefae, Eris Vanserra.”

“What can I say? My mother taught me well.” I raise my brow at that, not being able to resist teasing him for his choice of words. “Don’t you start, we are not doing that, not now.”

“Then what are we doing?” I say as I undo the buttons at the top of his tunic, my hands skimming the exposed skin. I feel Eris tremble beneath the contact, sending a wave of desire down our newly found bond.

“This.” He connects his lips to my neck, finding a particularly sensitive spot just below my ear. A hum of approval coming from him at my responding gasp.

Eris’ hips push into mine to support me against the tree as his hands trace up my sides, thumbs brushing the underside of my breasts. My hips respond with their own push forward at the feeling of his hardness and the brush of his thumbs.

I bring my hands to the back of his neck so I can tilt his head, his groan of protest being replaced by a deep gasp of his own as I begin kissing along his jaw.

I stop only when I reach his ear and brush my lips along it as I whisper, “What else did you have in mind, my High Lord?”

“What else do I have in mind?” Eris lets out a small chuckle at that. He leans back so he can meet my eyes, his expression so intense that I can feel the warmth as it colours my cheeks. His hand comes to rest on the front of my throat, applying just enough pressure to ensure I have to hold his gaze. His voice comes out as a growl and is laced with desire as he says, “Love, I have a centuries-long list of what I plan to do to you. And you using my title isn’t helping the last hold I have on my restraint.”

“I don’t want or need you to restrain yourself, give me everything Eris.” My hips grind into his once more, my words having their desired effect on him. His eyes close of their own accord, and his head tilts back as he releases a shaky exhale.

“As much as we would both enjoy that Y/N, I don’t plan for the first time I fuck the future High Lady of Autumn to be against a tree.” I can’t help the whimper that escapes me at his words, his hand tightening the slightest bit more around my neck at the sound. “No…I plan to take my time with you. Leave you so thoroughly sated that my name leaves your lips like a prayer, and you are unable to rise from our bed on steady footing.”

“Promises, promises…what about the things I’ve dreamed of doing to you?” I begin sliding my hand down his front, painfully slow as I whisper, “Alone…in my room…with nothing but my hand to keep me company?”

He grips my wrist before it can reach where we both desperately want it to be.

“You’ll be showing me exactly what you would do and telling me about every desire your brilliant mind has conjured, of that you can have no doubt.” He brings my hand up to his mouth and brushes his lips over my knuckles. “But I believe it was you said we can’t be late for dinner and if we don’t resume our journey now, the sun’s descent will arrive before we do.”

“Shit.”

Eris makes no move to release me from his hold. He leans in and rests his forehead upon mine. He closes his eyes and takes a deep breath.

“Part of resuming our journey is your letting me down Eris.”

“Allow me the indulgence of savouring what may be the most perfect time of my immortal life for a few more moments…please.” His voice is quiet. It’s almost as though he didn’t mean for the words to pass his lips.

“I suppose we can spare a moment.”

We both chuckle at my words but fall into a comfortable silence shortly after. Time seems to lapse as we breath each other in.

Through the centuries I have seen Eris truly at peace only a handful of times. I refuse to take it from him now, punctuality be damned.

After what is too short a time for my liking Eris leans back, “I’m ready.”

“You’re sure?” My hands come to rest at the back of his neck, rubbing small circles with my thumbs.

“I’m sure…but promise me this: we stay no longer than necessary to be polite. I have waited for and wanted you for centuries, and I intend to have you, in every sense of the word, before this day is done.”

“I swear it.”

Eris leans in and kisses me deeply, nipping at my bottom lip as he pulls away and steps back from the tree. He lowers me so gently that the leaves don’t make a sound as my feet hit the forest floor.

The smokehounds jump up from where they have been resting and race to our sides. They begin jumping and weaving around us, refusing to be left out of such an important day. Eris gently pushes them back, promising the best the cook has to offer when we return home. I can’t help but smile, knowing a piece of his heart is reserved only for them and their 10 siblings. He catches me watching and a smile of his own overtakes his features.

I take his arm as he offers it and rest my free hand against his bicep as we begin walking.

“Lucien is never going to let us live this down, is he?”

“I believe my brother will take great joy in being the one to brings us together. I’m sure there are plenty of “I told you so’s” in store for both of us.”

“Both of us?” I glance at Eris in question. I can see embarrassment start to creep into the tops of his cheeks, his sudden nervousness apparent.

“There may have been a time or two…or fifty…that I made the foolish decision to confide in my brother regarding my falling hopelessly in love with you. The only difference between you and I being that I didn’t resist the urge to punch him when he deigned to call me a coward for my continued silence…on more than one occasion.”

“Hopelessly, huh?” I couldn’t suppress my smile at the colour in Eris’ cheeks.

“Hopelessly, helplessly, every word you can use to describe it…that has always been me when it comes to you. My brother has never let me live it down and I look forward to you doing the same.”

“Never.” I tighten my grip on his arm and pull him to turn toward me. I rest my hand on his chest, over his heart. “I will never weaponize your vulnerability. Not now, not ever. Do not ever be afraid to show it to me, I want to see every part of you.”

He rests his hand over mine, falling quiet for a moment.

“Thank you, truly. That...it means more than you can know.”

He leans in and kisses me, lingering for a moment. As he pulls away the corners of his mouth are upturned in the purest of smiles.

“Let’s hope the Mother allows my brother to do the same.” He offers me his arm once more. “Shall we go find out, my Lady?”

I can’t help but grin as I take his arm, enjoying the glimpse of the carefree, playful side of Eris.

“We shall.”

---------

Eris isn’t sure how long it takes he and Y/N to reach their destination. For all that he valued efficiency and punctuality in his court operations, he couldn’t give one flying fuck if they ever reached Lucien’s home.

A mate is something Eris never let himself dream of having. He had seen firsthand how his father handled their sons being involved with those he deemed unworthy. Beron had taken so much from his brothers, his mother, Eris himself. He refused to even open himself up to the possibility of finding a partner to stand by his side.

What a cruel twist of fate it was to have her by his side for as long as she has been. Eris had denied himself time and time again, knowing that loving Y/N meant opening her up to further abuse from his father than what she already suffered. He had vowed to keep her safe and he was learning that, without him fully realizing it, she had done the same.

Y/N ensured he never walked in darkness alone. She had pulled him from the brink of destruction more times than he could count, and he owed her more thanks than even an immortal fae life could provide.

He keeps sneaking glances down at her as they walk, marveling in the possibilities that lay ahead of them. For the first time, more so than any other point of his life, Eris dares to dream. He begins imaging the foundation they would build for their life together, how it would grow and prosper.

He thinks, perhaps, he does owe his brother thanks. If not for Lucien’s remarkably stupid plan, he may never haver felt what it was like to feel the utter contentment coming from deep within his chest. Felt what it is to have Y/N in his arms, her body responding to his every touch, and the flow of love she had been unable to hold back from the bond. Eris meant it when he said it was the most perfect moment of his life, nothing else had ever come close to what happened in that grove.

They turn the final curve in their path, Lucien’s cottage coming into view. It is not the grandest sight to behold but it is priceless, nonetheless. The cottage was built to house nothing but love and family. Eris had ensured Lucien knew he would always have a place in the Forest House, but his brother wished for his own space. A place in which he could heal from the wounds inflicted by his own mate and a place in which he could fall back in love with his home court.

What the cottage had become for Lucien was more than Eris had ever anticipated.

Lucien waits on the front step, his expression one of smug satisfaction as he takes in the two walking joined to one another.

Eris can hear the happy squeal and pitter patter of small steps before he sees who they are coming from. The source creates a smile on his face like no other can, not even his newfound mate.

“UNKY ERI! UNKY ERI!” The young fae runs by her father with nary a glance in his direction. At a meager two years of age, the youngling is already living up to the fire that runs through her veins. “Up, up, up!”

Y/N has seen this type of greeting enough times to be wise enough to take a step back and Eris shoots her an appreciative smile. He ensures she feels the gratitude he has for the small gesture with a push down the bond.

Eris crouches and opens his arms just in time to scoop his niece from the ground. He swings her in a wide circle, her excitement echoing throughout the forest. They’re both laughing by the time Eris settles her on his hip.

“Hello little flame, did you get into any trouble today?”

“Nooooo…Mama and papa took me into town. We went into all the shops, had cake for lunch, and then papa bought me books from Mama’s store. And then I was waiting for you and Auntie Y/N to get here so I could show you all my books.” The young fae’s hands excitedly wave in the air as she tells her uncle of her day.

“And I would love to see them. I’ll even read one to you before bed if you would like.”

She screams in excitement at the possibility, Eris gives a slight cringe with the sheer volume his niece can reach. She places her small hands on either side of Eris’ face and plants a sloppy kiss on his forehead. Eris can’t help but glance over at Y/N, for the first time allowing himself to imagine having a family of his own. Y/N’s eyes show the first sign of tears as she gives me a loving smile. Both of them knowing they can allow themselves to dream.

“I love you Unky Eri!”

“And I love you, little flame!”

She starts making grabby hands at Y/N and Eris happily passes the youngling to her aunt. Allowing them the opportunity to have their own hello, albeit a much less loud one.

Eris looks up at his brother and feels some of his earlier anger return. Lucien must read this in his expression based upon his next words.

“Jesminda, I think your mother would love to have you help her prepare the table for dinner.”

“Only if Auntie Y/N comes with me.” The girl crosses her arms in a pout.

“It would be my honour.” Y/N sets the girl down but before she can take her hand Eris grabs her wrist and pulls her into him. He leans his head into her, his hand tightening where it sits on her waist.

His lips brush her ear as he whispers, “Only as long as needed to be polite, my love. You won’t like who I become if I’m kept from you longer than is necessary.”

Y/N’s responding look has Eris thinking she would like that very much indeed.

“As you command, my High Lord.”

As she steps aways Eris knows she selected her words specifically to elicit a reaction from him. It is only the need to speak to his brother that keeps Eris from leaving Lucien’s immediately and giving into his need to have Y/N all to himself behind the closed door of their chambers.

Y/N takes Jesminda’s impatiently waiting hand and they begin making their way into the cottage. As Y/N reaches the porch, she gives Lucien’s arm a reassuring squeeze and Eris can tell by the look of surprise that flashes across his face that he smells the mating bond. Lucien waits for a moment after the two have entered his home to begin making his way toward Eris.

“I can’t tell, Brother, whether I should be waiting for your thanks or your ire.” He flashes Eris a smile as he says it.

“Given the situation, I would say it warrants both. Wouldn’t you agree brother?””

After a moment’s stand-off the two move to embrace one another. They agreed long ago to not waste any more of the time they have together, their father having already robbed them of so much of it.

“I knew the two of you belonged with one another, but mates? Now that, I could not have predicted.”

“It would seem as though the Mother herself was waiting for the two of us to get over ourselves and admit how we feel.” Eris falls quiet for a moment and is met with his ever-persistent struggle to communicate his feelings. There is a catch in his voice as he speaks. “I can’t…no words will ever…”

Lucien rests his hand on Eris’ shoulder, understanding his brother’s struggle better than anyone.

“After all that you have done for me Eris, abandoning you in the words with the love of your life is the least I could do.” His humour alleviates the tension that had built, both of them having a much-needed laugh.

“All that I have done is given you back what was stolen.”

“And so much more, you must know this.” Lucien gestures to the cottage in front of them and the future inside that waits for both of them.

Eris regards his younger brother for a moment.

“I’m still learning to.”

Eris lets the last embers of his anger bleed into the grip he puts on the side of Lucien’s neck as he says, “But I swear on this very court brother that if you ever place Y/N in a situation like that again we will have words. And not even my mate’s grace will save you.”

His grip loosens almost as soon as he puts it there but the flash of trepidation across Lucien’s face tells Eris he believes it, nonetheless.

Lucien steps back and puts his hands together in front of himself.

“And on that cheerful note, shall we head inside? You can tell me the story of today and begin the first of many thank yous that you’ll be begging to give me.”

Eris shoves his brother much like they did when they were kids.

“And you can go fuck yourself.”

They both break into laughs as Lucien turns toward the cabin, beginning to make his way inside.

“I love you too Eris, I’m glad to have you by my side…our family is lucky to have you,” Lucien calls as he turns to face Eris for a moment before reaching the porch.

“I’m glad you’re finally admitting it.” If the finger Lucien throws up over his should is any indication, Eris knows his brother hears his words as he crosses the threshold of the cabin.

Eris stops for a moment and tilts his head to the sky. He closes his eyes and breathes in.

What Eris didn’t tell Lucien is that he is the lucky one. That he cherishes every moment he gets to remove the cold mask he dons every day and simply be himself.

“Would you like to come in for dinner or is standing alone in the forest how you would like to spend your evening?”

Eris opens his eyes and meets those of his mate. Y/N is leaning against the doorframes with a look of pure adoration on her face. Eris can’t control the smile that spreads across his face as he makes his way toward her.

He takes her extended hand in his and it’s as though walking into the cabin is walking into their future.

A future that Eris can’t wait to be a part of.

#eris x reader #eris vanserra #lucien vanserra #acotar #acotar x reader #autumn court

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cl0ckworkqueerness · 4 months

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[trigger warning: mention of sexual assault]

the specific breed of queer queerphobia is just as if not more frightening than non-queer queerphobia, specifically in this case as it relates to acespec/arospec people (terms which will hence be combined into "aspec" for the sake of clarity, see the tags for a quick note about this)

if it's not already clear from my posts, i am very supportive of the silenced, erased, and shunned parts of the queer community. i involve myself a great deal in breaking down the walls that queer people have decided to erect in order to determine who does and doesn't get to call themselves "queer". nothing breaks my heart more than seeing other people who experience the world in a way starkly different from perisex, allosexual, alloromantic, cisgender, heterosexual people, get shunned from a family who also experiences the world in such a difference way, simply because it's not different "enough", or not different in the way they want to be different

aspec people will always unquestionably be queer, regardless of anything else that would or wouldn't make them queer. period.

aspec people should not and should never need to "justify" themselves to attend pride, not just "as an ally", but as someone whose relationship with romance and sex (the act) differs from what is expected of a "normal" person. they are inherently different, they are inherently queer. full stop.

aphobia exists, regardless of whether or not you follow your blatant bigotry with "no it doesn't". you cannot erase your shittiness by following up your shittiness with "by the way, I'm not being shitty". and if you know you are being aphobic, and you are proud of such a thing, rethink the way you see queerness as a whole. you are a vile human being, and should unlearn the oppression olympics. you not only are an athlete in it, but you are the obstacles. you are the fucking problem.

aspec people regularly face discrimination and harassment for being aspec. the comments of "why do you refuse to give me grandkids" and "maybe you just haven't found the right person yet" and "you're broken" and "you're going through a phase" have all been said about gay people, about lesbians, and about aspec people. aspec people face violence for being aspec. aspec people face corrective rape for being aspec. aspec people face crocodile tears claws that intend to "help", aspec people face blood and claws that intend to hurt, aspec people face real, visible hatred. and even if they weren't "oppressed enough", WHICH THEY UNDENIABLY ARE, 1) there isn't an oppression goal someone needs to hit to become valid, and 2) queer people should not be defined by the oppression we face, anyway.

"b-b-but what about cishet asexual people!!!" i have never seen a sentence less scary in my life. cishet people can be queer, you know? cishet people can be intersex (if they choose to identify as queer), cis people can be asexual and aromantic, pericishet people can in fact be demisexual and heteroromantic, and guess what? they're still queer. they still differ from what's "normal". they're still allowed to pride, because pride is not meant to gatekeep.

pride is meant to celebrate our differences, to fight against those who try to suppress us, and to unite those who feel crushed by the heel of normality.

so don't fucking do their job for them.

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thefandomlesbian · 3 months

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37 + wilson for the ask game :)

OUCH we're going right for the throat, huh--

This is probably going to be utterly incomprehensible and I am not responsible for any ramifications that arise from answering this question. Allow the word-barf to commence!

#37: What they really think about themselves:

This is such a difficult question to answer because Wilson is a man shrouded in layers upon layers of hiding. This is someone who constantly begs the people around him to be vulnerable with him, to trust him, while simultaneously refusing to ever offer his own vulnerability. And he's good at it. He's good at passing himself off as being close to someone while they never know he has a brother.

House is all walls topped with barbed wire fences and he makes no claims otherwise. Wilson on the other hand is a shimmering oasis. He's fresh water in the desert with shade and fruit. He's nothing but a refreshing illusion. Wilson can be incredibly human while simultaneously more detached than anyone knows. This is aided by the fact that he's a social chameleon, matching whoever he's with, and a natural conscience mirror for the people around him. House calls him out on this multiple times in S5, specifically for being a chameleon who meets the environmental needs of everyone else socially; House asks him, "Who are you at your core?" and then goes on to assert that he thinks Wilson has no core, that his locus of identity has been completely erased in his desperation to meet the needs of others.

Even in S6 when House demands that Wilson choose something to place in their home that he likes... he picks something he knows House likes. "You asked me to tell you who I am, and I am someone who loves you. This is the only answer I know how to give." That's typically the fandom read, but it's important to recognize that this attitude is not unique to House coming from Wilson. He does the same thing with Amber, with Grace (the cancer patient he cares for), with Cuddy during the Rachel adoption arc, with Tucker, with Sam. His existence pivots on his service to other people.

His desperate need to be needed, as House calls it, has a flipside: Wilson can't need anything. From anyone, ever. He can't be vulnerable, which is why he hides himself so effectively. To unveil weaker parts of himself, it would require his loved ones to serve him, to help him, and Wilson cannot cope with the idea of inconveniencing the people in his life. I have written meta in the past on the whole cast's gross mistreatment of Wilson during the Tritter arc. He has no money, no car, living in a hotel that presumably expects weekly payments, no way to buy food or keep himself housed. Everyone attacks him when he finally folds, but none of those people were there to support him, even though his situation was exclusively caused by House lying to and manipulating him. But the thing is... Wilson wouldn't have let them help him. Think of his friendship with Cuddy, how she reveals that she treats him as a confidant (she told him and only him that she slept with her father's best friend) and trusts him not to repeat things to House--but when he arrives to work late from riding the bus, she didn't even know his car was impounded. That sort of friendship is the type you can call to come get you! You don't need to take the bus! Wilson would never dream of reciprocating the relationship she has with him. He's incapable of inconveniencing someone, even to ask for a ride to work or to spot him a five for a sandwich in the cafeteria, even from people he's very close to.

And this all comes to a head in the cancer arc. Wilson is incapable of being needy to the point that he's ready to undergo high dose chemotherapy alone in his own home in a nonsterile environment with no one to monitor him or check on him. In his words: "I am not going to die slowly in a hospital bed under fluorescent lighting with people stopping by to gawk and lie about how I look. Even a small chance of that happening is too big a chance for me." It's funny that later in this episode he says that he wanted a wife and children to care for him, when we know he wouldn't ever allow himself to be so weak in front of his loved ones. House acknowledges this in the same episode.

Wilson's need to serve and his fearful avoidance of being vulnerable all point to an incredibly abysmal sense of self-worth. He says that House doesn't like himself but admires himself, and I don't even think Wilson does that much--as he consistently tries to lie on the sword for everyone around him. RSL says Wilson is the saddest man in New Jersey, and I would agree with that. Wilson has deep-seated issues with his self-esteem. As a wise YA novel once said, we accept the love we think we deserve, and the only love Wilson ever accepts is House's. In S3 after House upends his entire life, it takes one genuine apology to buy him back, because House's love is the only one Wilson knows how to handle. It's the only one he can take without feeling unworthy. All coming to the S8 conclusion: House makes the ultimate sacrifice for Wilson, and Wilson (in spite of having just lambasted House publicly for ostensibly ditching him) argues against it. Wilson says he's not worth the sacrifice. He would rather die alone than have House give up his life for him.

(I could delve into a whole follow-up wrt Wilson's romantic relationships as a gay!Wilson truther, but I've already gone too far and made this unnecessarily long.)

so in short: I wouldn't say Wilson hates himself explicitly, he would consider that vain and self-centered, but he cannot exist outside of serving others. If his utility is gone, he is pointless. I already wrote a long meta on my take on Wilson's suicidality, but that line of thought follows here, too. Wilson thinks his value as a person stems from his ability to care for others and will die sooner than become someone who needs to be cared for.

#house md #james wilson #hilson #meta #spencer speaks

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antianakin · 5 months

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I used to love Ahsoka as a character and I thought she was a really interesting foil/parallel to Anakin but at some point I started to disconnect with her character and be all ‘huh that doesn’t seem right’ and for ages I couldn’t figure out why/what it was specifically that was bothering me that wasn’t just *gestures at post-Wrong Jedi!Ahsoka as a whole*

From airing of tcw s7 onwards and also a little before that in some (but admittedly not all) parts of rebels she just doesn’t act like a Jedi.

Like we’re clearly supposed to think that she does and she uses the Force to do things and she uses lightsabre combat and sometimes she even listens to what the Force is telling her(!) but she doesn’t act the way a Jedi would or should most of the time. She doesn’t use or express their teachings or philosophies or act in any way according to them even when she says she does* or the narrative implicitly claims that’s what she’s doing

(*when she’s around Kanan this gets a bit less notable bc she does act more Jedi-like around him and I can’t figure out whether that’s deliberate or accidental or what it’s supposed to say or mean about them both if it’s intentional)

Before that she was fun and also flawed and I think if they’d kept those roots while either showing how she’d manage to overcome/learn from those flaws or that she hadn’t managed to move past them at all but was still trying her best then she would have stayed interesting! But instead her character gets flattened and her flaws get narratively erased (while still being very much there just not acknowledged in any way and/or presented as though they’re not flaws at all) in favour as propping her up as The Best Jedi TM and making her feel like a caricature of an ideal rather than a real character.

Like I am mid-Ahsoka show right now and she doesn’t even feel like the same character! Everything that made her interesting is just gone and the narrative constantly implies that she’s right even when she very clearly is not???

Writers challenge! Accept that characters have flaws and should have flaws to make them interesting and help drive the plot rather than making them perfect bc they’re your favourite!

Yeah, I don't even mind Ahsoka growing OUT of her earlier flaws (which are primarily the same ones that Anakin was given, like impatience and overconfidence/arrogance) and into different ones that reflect her new experiences and maturity. But it also would've been great to see how those flaws she started with, the impatience/impulsivity and the overconfidence/arrogance sort-of grew WITH her.

Like the way the Wrong Jedi arc shows her refusing to trust the Council LONG before she has any reason to do so and going off on her own to try to prove her own innocence which just makes her look more guilty and pushes the Council into more of a corner while also trusting ONLY the person who ended up framing her in the first place. The way that her more childish impatience and overconfidence has sort-of grown into the more dangerous impulsiveness and arrogance in the Wrong Jedi would've been so so interesting to look at if anyone writing it had been willing to acknowledge that she was in the wrong.

And you could keep going with that in later arcs and have her still be sort-of mistrustful of authority (especially Jedi authority), inclined to believe in her own superiority of opinion, and impulsive in her judgments. That's generally what we see in season 7, especially regarding her behavior towards characters like Mace and Obi-Wan. She believes she's right ALL THE TIME and this would be FINE if the narrative actually supported the idea that she WASN'T. Ahsoka can think she's right, but the audience should understand that she isn't. That's how her flaws got portrayed in earlier seasons of TCW and why I tend to prefer them to later ones. And this would've been a great place to follow up on her comment about not trusting HERSELF. Maybe Ahsoka has sort-of wandered away from mindfulness since she left the Order and so instead of continuing to look at the mistakes she made that caused the Order to mistrust her, she just starts blaming the Jedi for everything. And when she starts making accusations at Obi-Wan, have him point out that not only is she not being fair, but she's not being HONEST, with herself or anyone else. Because truly, it's not the Jedi she doesn't trust. It's not the Council playing politics that she's afraid of. It's her own flawed judgment leading her to her own destruction.

And there's SO MUCH you could do with that moving forward into Rebels, to showcase Ahsoka's continuing struggle with trusting her own judgment and how she's grown since Order 66 and into her place as a rebel where she HAS to trust herself more, but she still doesn't entirely trust herself to be a JEDI. Perhaps her uncertainty over Anakin's fate has a part to play in that. Instead, they just made her a spy despite the fact that a LACK OF SUBTLETY was one of her major personality traits in TCW and never once was she shown doing any kind of real spy work and we don't really see her doing any in Rebels either aside from a few conversations with Hera. We have no idea how she ended up growing into that role or WHY she took on that particular role rather than something that would've fit her existing skillset better. Ahsoka's position within the Rebellion is one of the places I think they really faltered with her because it could've been utilized to genuinely help her character move forward and develop her more as a Jedi survivor. Instead, she's just kinda... there and her entire narrative tends to revolve around Anakin, a problem that persists and actually got worse with the Ahsoka show.

I don't truly mind that Ahsoka is perhaps not acting much like a Jedi, at least not all the time, because that could be a really easy way to give her a journey BACK to being more like a Jedi. Much like the Kenobi show had Obi-Wan acting very out of character and unlike a Jedi in order to have him go on a journey to reclaim that identity and become the wise Master we all know and remember, they could've done something similar with Ahsoka. Let the narrative embrace that she's not acting like a Jedi as an intentional choice so that she can move forward from there and BECOME a Jedi again. This is also an arc that Kanan himself is sort-of going on, so it would've been pretty easy to parallel them a little in Rebels if they'd been willing to represent Ahsoka as anything other than a literal angel come to earth.

The problem with the Ahsoka show is that it DOES give her flaws, but the flaws it chooses to give her are the opposite of what they should be. (This paragraph might get a bit spoilery, so if you're trying to avoid spoilers until you finish the whole show, just skip this paragraph.) Instead of showing Ahsoka as impatient/impulsive and somewhat arrogant, they show Ahsoka being too UNFEELING. Ahsoka's primary flaw in the Ahsoka show is that she's too detached because her feelings regarding Anakin's fall have apparently caused her to pull away from connecting to anybody on a deeper level or something. And they choose to show this by having her literally recite Jedi philosophy of non-attachment and have Sabine push back against it. So now it's not just that Ahsoka is too unfeeling but that she's too much like the Prequels Jedi, the BAD Jedi who FAILED. And only once she lets go of those Jedi philosophies holding her back (and instead explicitly chooses to emulate ANAKIN, the dude who let himself be consumed by selfishness and greed and betrayed everybody and threw an entire galaxy into tyranny) is she able to move forward in her relationships. Instead of recognizing that Sabine is impulsive and arrogant and letting that shine a light on Ahsoka's own flaws so that they can BOTH work on them more, it just chooses to justify Sabine's impulsivity and arrogance instead and Ahsoka needs to accept Sabine as she is and support her completely no matter what horrifically selfish bullshit she does. Moral of the story, never hold your loved ones accountable for anything they do wrong!

Long story short, I think Ahsoka was 100% at her best in her bratty teenager phase in early TCW when the narrative actually was willing to admit she HAD flaws that she had to work through and her character has been completely flattened ever since they decided to pretend she no longer has any flaws and is just always right about everything (except for when she's acting TOO MUCH like the wrong kind of Jedi).

#star wars #the clone wars #tcw #star wars rebels #rebels #ahsoka critical #ahsoka tano critical #anti ahsoka show #ahsoka show negativity

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britany1997 · 1 year

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Fate Yields For No One

Chapter one

Sorry to make y’all wait so long! I hope this chapter is worth it:) (don’t worry y’all, the boys will make an appearance very soon😏) let me know if you want me to add you to this Taglist or to my main Taglist in the comments!

Reblog to support my writing💕

Poly Lost boys x Max’s daughter reader

Prologue

New York, 1986

“what if I told you that I could do more than heal you? What if I could restore your life and then some? Would you want that?”

“I’m not ready to die, I’m so scared. Please don’t let me die, not like this.”

“I am truly sorry that there isn’t enough time to do this the gentle way, I hope you can forgive me.”

Sharp fangs sinking into your neck always jostled you from your reoccurring nightmare. You sighed as you surveyed the sweat covered sheets surrounding you, running a hand through your hair as you fought to banish your fear.

After that awful night in the alley where Max has found you, you’d ran as far as you could, trading the west coast for the east. But no matter how fast you ran, you couldn’t escape your own mind.

Your life as a human was long gone, but the memories populated your nightmares. They reminded you that no matter how different you were now, how strong, you would always be that pitiful girl who’d almost died, alone and unloved.

Whatever you were now could never erase the fact that you used to be nothing to this world.

You slunk out of bed and sauntered to your balcony, taking in the breathtaking sight of New York City when night fell.

Your hands gripped the railing as your eyes scanned the bright lights, the racing cars, and the bustling crowds. You breathed in deeply, taking in your last view from the balcony before you had to flee your apartment and search for a new one, attached to a new sucker for you to use.

As much as you loathed it, your vampirism allowed you to take revenge on the cruel and wealthy in ways you’d never been able to before.

While other vampires went straight in for the kill, you preferred to play with your food. You didn’t just want to feed on random humans, you wanted the ones you chose to suffer.

You preyed on the titans of Wall Street, the trust fund babies, the old money bastards and all the other men who would have stepped over your corpse in the gutter.

You were beautiful and you knew it. It was never a struggle to ensnare them. You hung around at the fanciest restaurants in the upper east side, and the classiest bars in the financial district. Hunting was pointless, the men came to you.

You spent a few weeks stroking their egos, among other things, and they gave you anything you wanted. The money, the power, the influence they had became yours just as much as it was theirs.

They allowed you into their homes and their hearts. When you were sure that they trusted you, that they loved you, you dropped the mask and showed them who you really were, teeth and all.

Maybe you should feel bad for using them and draining them, and some part of you did feel a small pang of guilt every time the life drained from their terrified eyes.

But you had walked with them at night as they ignored the starving people that lined the streets of the city. They refused to offer even a cent of their “hard-earned” money.

When your eyes welled with tears at the downtrodden state of those around you, they wouldn’t dry your tears. Instead, the rich men would tell you that those stranded on street corners had earned their place in life.

“How will they learn?” they’d ask you. “We can’t just give people money,” they’d patronize you, “this is America! Anyone can pull themselves up by their bootstraps nowadays.”

They’d assure you that they helped them more by not sharing a minuscule amount of their vast wealth. The homeless were a plague on the city, they’d insist. Didn’t you want them to help themselves?

So the men you killed, their deaths didn’t bother you much.

You shivered as you replayed their screams over and over again in your head. They called you a murderer, a monster, and maybe you were.

But so were they. You’d killed over and over, but every person on a street-corner they’d all but spit on, every dollar they’d hoarded that could have saved your family all those years ago, they were murderers too, they were more monster then you could ever be.

You were pulled from your thoughts by a firm knocking at your door.

Your blood ran cold. You knew it’d been a risk to feed on those humans that society had deemed to be the elite and important. But you hadn’t realized your actions would catch up with you this quickly.

You didn’t want to slaughter a hoard of police officers, but you’d do what you had to to keep your freedom. You cautiously unlatched the door and pulled it open.

Though you’d expected to be met with the business end of many pistols, the sight before you was much, much worse.

Wrapped in a taupe suit with not a visible wrinkle, glasses perched on his nose, the vision of the man you’d met in the alley all those years ago stood before you, a frown etched onto his face.

You gasped, moving to slam the door on him, but before you could he wedged his foot in, holding the entrance open and pushing past you.

You hadn’t felt so small and weak since you were human. Max had a way of doing that to you.

“Hello daughter,” he uttered nonchalantly as his eyes took in the sight of your stolen apartment.

You clenched and unclenched your fists, struggling to keep your anger at bay. “You’re not my father,” you spit, “not even close. I had a father remember? Because of you I’ll never see him again.”

Max rolled his eyes, “foolish girl,” he stated, “when are you going to realize that this is the only eternity there is.”

He scoffed, “you are too old to be dwelling on fairytales of an afterlife anymore. Your family is gone, it’s been years, get over it.”

You fought back tears as he ridiculed the love for your family you still clung too. Your hand raised to slap him, but he caught it before you could.

“Ungrateful child,” he said through gritted teeth, “you embarrass me and you squander the gift you have been given.”

You snatched your hand from his grasp and rubbed your risk. “I never asked for this,” you reminded him, “you said you’d save my life, but I died in every way that matters, you lied.”

Max rolled his eyes once more, “I tire of your melodrama little girl. I’ve come to bring you home.”

It was your turn to scoff. “Home?” you laughed, humorlessly, “I have no home in California anymore. My home is here now.”

Max smirked, “which home?” he asked, “as I understand it you’ve become the little ‘black widow Robin Hood’ of the upper east side. You’ve had many many homes these past few years, but they’re not really yours, are they?” He raised an eyebrow.

You crossed your arms as your gaze fell. You hated that he was right.

“I’m not going with you,” you whispered.

He hummed, “you seem to be under the mistaken impression you have any choice in this matter.”

He placed his finger on your chin and tilted your head up, “I am your sire. You will obey me.” he commanded.

“I made you what you are, and I can destroy you just as easily.”

You cringed.

“You either come back with me, or you can return to the gutter,” his hand moved from your chin to wrap around your jaw, squeezing tightly, “but if you choose the gutter, I’ll ensure it is your final destination.”

You boiled with rage but you knew Max was right. He was older than you and much stronger. As your sire you were tired to him, and you knew you wouldn’t be able to fight his thrall.

He stole your mortality, your happiness, and he’d come back to steal your freedom too.

Yet you found yourself gathering your things to leave with him. You hated him, but god, you hated yourself too.

Max flicked the light in the apartment before grabbing your arm and leading you out the door.

He sighed, “I know you resent me now, but I’m only doing what’s best for you. I take care of my children, and I hope that in time you can learn to see me as your father.” he spoke in a rare moment of softness.

You took in his words silently, offering no reply, but sure of the fact that you would never see him as anything other than the man who’d doomed you to an eternity of emptiness and pain.

FYFN Taglist❤️:

(Some accounts it wouldn’t let me tag😭 idk what the deal is)

@6lostgirl6 @peachpixiesstuff @ghoulgeousimmaculate @bloodywickedvamp @sidefanficaccounttohidemyshame @paulxbathbomd @anna1306 @its-freaking-bats @dwaynesluscioushair @feardot-com @solobagginses @pixielostboy @ria-coolgirl @vampirefilmlover @flower-crowned-lady @misslavenderlady @lostboys1987girl @warrior-616 @consuming-karma @moonbeam1987 @softchonk @besas-stuff @people-are-strange-87 @simplyreading96 @simpingforthe80s @mad-is-sad @smut-religiously777 @welcome-to-the-hole @vxarak @itsyoboysparkel @billyhargrovedemoness1987 @faefairi3 @jamie-poopoo

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catullus0525 · 2 months

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Repentant Sighs And Voluntary Pains: Oscar Wilde and Robbie Ross 1895-1900

Foreword:

This is the first draft of a chapter in a longer biography of Robert ‘Robbie’ Baldwin Ross (1869-1918) that I am currently working on. I hope to share this with other people who are interested in Victorian queer history and the Wilde circle.

I started this project at the start of February, originally envisioning a short and sharp biography for LGBTQ+ History Month, because imo Robbie deserves to be remembered as a queer hero in his own right. But as I started writing I realised how much there were to his story, and how much emotions often lurked beneath Robbie’s deceptively dispassionate writing style, so the project very quickly ballooned beyond its intended scope. This essay biography will probably end up with 100-120 pages, and I am currently entertaining the idea of turning it into a book.

Part of why the project ballooned so drastically was the fact that Robbie was full of paradoxes.

He was at once incredibly talented and incredibly dismissive of his own talents. Oscar Wilde said he was ‘as cleaver as can be’ and everything he wrote was ‘admirable’; booksellers who had worked with him praised him for his impressive knowledge and inordinate memory; and even Alfred Douglas, who hated Robbie in his later years, conceded that he was ‘a man of brains and ability’. Yet he always thought little of his talents and erased himself from the narrative. He refused to write a biography for Wilde on the ground of his own lack of talent. And even at the 1908 dinner honouring his Herculean effort in reviving the Wilde estate, Robbie declared himself ‘inadequate’ and attributed the revival to others.

Similarly, he was at once unbelievably strong-willed and perplexingly vulnerable. He came out to his family at the age of 19 after being bullied out of Cambridge, and, unlike many of his contemporaries, he never denied his sexuality throughout his life. Moreover, he spoke up against sexism, antisemitism, and militarism, and protected a generation of young queer artists from a hostile world. Yet Oscar Wilde was his Achilles heel: between 1897 and 1900 he was hurt time and again, but he went back to Wilde every time; and in protecting Wilde’s posthumous legacy, he exposed his most vulnerable side to the viciousness of the world, which eventually chased him to his early grave.

I believe the key to unravelling much of the paradoxes is his love for Oscar Wilde. I believe he at once loved Oscar Wilde in the romantic sense and worshipped his art; but his love for the artist compelled him to forsake and denounce his romantic love. This was because, despite so many biographers had claimed that Robbie reconciled his Catholicism and his sexuality without difficulties, I believe he had in fact struggled silently with internalised homophobia against himself throughout his life. He most likely thought of himself as a ‘corrupting influence’ and bore the cross of the guilt for ‘corrupting’ the artist ever since 1895. This chapter tries to unpack the nature of such love, as well as the relationship between Wilde, Ross, and Douglas between 1895 and 1900.

Now, a couple of disclaimers:

This is very much unfinished. I tried to be as accurate factually as possible, but omissions/errors are inevitable at this stage, so pls lmk if you spot any. I am also still working my way through archives and biographies to plug gaps.

I tried my best not to led period-typical homophobia influence my own writing & terminologies, but it has not been easy, so if you find anything problematic in this please help me correct it.

The original manuscript has a million footnotes, and the finished product will be referenced. I decided not to put them in these posts for the sake of brevity, but I am more than happy to share my sources if you are interested.

Some part(s) of it can be a bit rambly, particularly since I found it very hard to control my urge to rebut many claims by Alfred Douglas and his biographers (which were often unsubstantiated, untrue, or maliciously misconstrued)… I really tried to give Douglas sympathetic treatment and benefit of the doubt, but the sheer amount of bile in his biographies and autobiographies made it very hard (I read over 500 pages by himself and three biographies about him with the intention of fathoming the depth of his character and finding every redeeming quality in him, but all of them had substantial revolting passages that made me incredibly uneasy. On top of that, although I am fully aware that he was most likely seriously traumatised, mentally-ill and needed help, I still found his vicious antisemitism and homophobia rather inexcusable)…In my revision I may try to soften some of my criticisms and structure them better. In the meantime apologies in advance if my criticisms of Douglas hurt anyone’s feelings.

Lastly, I sincerely love and admire Oscar Wilde’s writings so much, which makes me a bit apprehensive in writing about him or in analysing his work. De Profundis is my favourite prose work in English and it means a lot to me personally, so I feel personally inadequate in doing literary analysis on it…In other words the bits here about Wilde’s character & writings are very, very imperfect. I will try my best to polish & flesh them out in revisions, but I would sincerely appreciate any advice from fellow Wildeans.

Nothing can ever blot from my memory what you have suffered in defence of your writings […] I shall never forget what enemies your learning, and what envy your glory, raised against you. I shall never forget your reputation, so justly acquired, torn to pieces, and blasted by the inexorable cruelty of half-learned pretenders to science […] since it is decreed that your virtue shall be persecuted till it takes refuge in the grave, and even beyond that, your ashes perhaps, will not be suffered to rest in peace,—let me always meditate on your calamities, let me publish them thro' all the world, if possible, to shame an age that has not known how to value you. I have hated myself that I might love you; I came hither to ruin myself in a perpetual imprisonment, that I might make you live quiet and easy.

—— Heloise to Abelard, Letter II

Later on I think everyone will recognise his achievements; his plays and essays will endure. Of course you may think, with others, that his personality and conversation were far more wonderful than anything he wrote, so that his written works give only a pale reflection of his power. Perhaps that is so, and of course t will be impossible to reproduce what is gone for ever.

—— Robert Ross, around 1900

On 3 June 1918, Alfred Douglas indignantly declared in the Central Criminal Court that Oscar Wilde was ‘the agent of the devil in every possible way’ and ‘the greatest force of evil that has appeared in Europe during the last 350 years’. He was testifying on behalf of Noel Pemberton Billing, a proto-fascist politician sued for libel after spreading a conspiracy which alleged that there had been a circle of 47,000 ‘unpatriotic’ deviant women and clandestine homosexuals in England tied to Robert Ross and the ‘Wilde cult’ undermining the English war effort for the German Kaiser. Douglas’ testimony played right into the homophobia, wartime paranoia, and moralistic fervour of the English public. The jury, in turn, acquitted Billing and condemned Wilde.

Douglas would forswear his statement years later (as he had forsworn many other things in his life), but the harm done was hardly reparable. For Ross, who had fought endless battles to rehabilitate Wilde’s name and literary legacy for the past eighteen years, to see Wilde’s name dragged through the mud in the press again must have been excruciatingly distressing. Days after the acquittal of Billing, Ross wrote to Sir Charles Mathews (then the Director of Public Prosecutions), sardonically congratulating him on ‘the complete rehabilitation of your protégé, Lord Alfred Douglas’ and called him ‘the bastard of a mummer’. Meanwhile, to his friends Cecil Sprigge and Charles Ricketts, Ross lamented that the war-weary English public revelled in ‘kicking Oscar’s corpse’, and that he himself had been ‘used as a piece of mud’ in smearing Wilde’s name. Four months later, Ross died of heart failure, aged only 49.

Ross was a private man who left behind few traces of himself. Unlike Douglas, who wrote endless autobiographies regurgitating his narratives, Ross never told his side of the story. Therefore, we would never know whether behind the official cause of death of ‘gastritis caused by chronic bronchitis’ lied a broken heart. Was he tormented by the thought that his effort for the past eighteen years was rendered naught by the fresh wave of anti-Wilde furore? Might he have worried that Wilde’s name would forever be buried in the mud as a result of Douglas’ vendetta against himself? These we could only speculate. However, we do know that Ross had been seriously depressed, struggled to sleep, and prematurely aged for a long time before his death, due in no small part to Alfred Douglas incessant persecution over the past five years. It would also be reasonable to postulate that the uncharacteristic sarcasm of his letter to Sir Charles Mathews was the tip which belied an iceberg of agony.

Ross left almost everything in his possession to others upon his death. The Oscar Wilde estate was transferred to Cyril (then deceased) and Vyvyan Holland in its entirety. Most drawings in his possession were presented to the British Museum. To himself, he had reserved only a quiet little space in Wilde’s majestic tombstone. Unbeknownst to everyone, he had requested for such a secret little space to be built when commissioning Wilde’s famous Père Lachaise tombstone. In his will, written four years ago during his persecution by Alfred Douglas, Ross had directed that:

[…] my remains shall be cremated at Golders Green Crematorium with the ordinary burial offices of the Catholic and Roman Church. And I direct that my ashes shall be placed in a suitable urn and taken to Paris and buried in the tomb of the said Oscar Fingal O' Flahertie Wills Wilde. If however it should prove impossible to obtain the licence of the necessary authorities for this I direct that my ashes shall be scattered in Père Lachaise.

It was as if Ross was being the Heloise to Wilde’s Abelard. In that famous Medieval love story, much like how the illustrious writer Oscar Wilde was captivated by the 17-year-old Robbie Ross, Abelard, the brightest philosopher of his day, fell for his astute pupil Heloise, 19 years his junior. They were not only intellectual partners but also passionate lovers, yet their love transgressed the strictures of society and religion, thus scandals befell the brilliant Abelard. But Heloise’s love was unwavering even after Abelard’s ruin, not unlike how Ross steadfastly stood by Wilde after his imprisonment till the very end. In the end, much like how Heloise demanded to be buried with Abelard 22 years after his death, 23 years after Wilde’s death, Ross yearned for eternity alongside Wilde, beneath the same hallowed earth that cradled Heloise and Abelard.

Yet, unlike Heloise, whose effigy lay proudly beside Abelard's in Père Lachaise, Ross deliberately left no mark of his own on the final resting place he shares with Wilde. So whilst Heloise receives countless visitors’ songs and tears alongside Abelard, out of the hundreds of kisses imprinted on Wilde’s grave, none was intended for Ross; and most who wander through Père Lachaise remain unaware that Ross's ashes are silently guarding Wilde’s body.

Such self effacement was despite the fact that Ross had given up his eternal life with God for eternal rest with Oscar Wilde. As a devout lifelong Catholic, in directing his body’s cremation, Ross had denied himself resurrection. This is because it was not until 1963 that the Vatican finally conceded that cremation was ‘not opposed to the Christian religion' and ceased to deny Catholics wishing to be cremated their sacraments and funeral rites. Although at the time of Ross’s death, the Catholic Church sometimes acquiesced to cremation in practice as a result of WW1 (as reflected by the ‘the ordinary burial offices of the Catholic and Roman Church’ at Golders Green Crematorium), it was still quite possible that Ross never received the funeral rites which prepare a Catholic’s soul for afterlife. What had prompted such grave sacrifice? Perhaps he wanted to take up as little space as possible, lest his presence eclipse the master’s lustre. Perhaps it was his ultimate penance for his incurable sin of loving Oscar Wilde. Or perhaps he saw incineration as the only way to purify his body and to make himself worthy of eternal rest by the artist he had corrupted, just as Alexander Pope had written of Heloise:

Death, only death, can break the lasting chain; And here, ev'n then, shall my cold dust remain, Here all its frailties, all its flames resign, And wait till 'tis no sin to mix with thine.

Yet, were it not for Ross, us contemporaries might not have known Oscar Wilde at all. Despite Nicholas Frankel’s brilliant effort to re-write Wilde’s final years as a saga of joy, love, and self-acceptance, there is no denying that Wilde died as a ruined bankrupt in 1900. Upon his death, he was a persona non grata in England whose name was synonym to scandal. And due to his bankruptcy, everything he had owned was automatically passed into the hands of the Official Receiver in Bankruptcy. This meant that none of the proceedings from Wilde’s works (if there were any at all) would go to his orphaned children. Furthermore, though Salomé was successful on the German stage and The Soul of Man under Socialism welcomed by the bookshelves of Nizhny Novgorod, Wilde’s works were deemed worthless in England: the complete rights to Lady Windermere’s Fan and The Importance of Being Earnest were sold off for the meagre sum of £100 each. Indeed, the Official Receiver had told Ross in 1901 that Wilde’s works ‘would never command any interest whatever’. But Ross’s labour of love worked miracles. In eight years, Ross had accomplished what none had thought possible: he had repaid all of Wilde’s debts, restored Wilde’s children’s rights over their father’s literary estate, and re-established Oscar Wilde in English literary history. Moreover, we owe much of our knowledge of Wilde and his works today to the 14-volume edition of Wilde’s Collected Works, compiled and published by Ross in 1908. That remarkable undertaking remains one of the most exhaustive collections of Wilde’s writings and had informed much of subsequent Wilde scholarships. Few in history had done so much yet said so little.

II.

In a cruel twist of fate, Oscar Wilde was sentenced to two years of imprisonment with hard labour on Robbie’s 26th birthday. On that very day, a great many homophobes paraded through the streets of London, celebrating the death of the ‘b-gger’. The fateful day of 25 May 1895 was to go down in history as a turning point in so many’s lives. For artists, it spelled the end of the short 1890s, the glorious age of aestheticism and decadence. For activists, it marked the beginning of a vicious conservative backlash towards everything deemed ‘deviant’, from men’s right to not be masculine to women’s right to vote.

For Robbie Ross personally, his 26th birthday spelled the death of ‘Robbie’, that witty, impulsive, kitten-like youth. Most accounts before 1895 described Robbie as an attractive boy looking younger than his age, but every account since described Ross as ‘an old man before his time’ worn down by care. And from the few portraits and photographs we have of Ross, we see that the spark of youthful wit so visible in his 1893 photograph was never again to be seen in any of his pictures since 1895. The change in appearance mirrored the shift in Ross’s literary career: after 1895, he rarely wrote without others demanding him to write. In May 1895, Edmund Gosse encouraged Ross to find solace in ‘the infinite resources of literature’ which Gosse believed was open to Ross ‘more than to most men’. But in his letter to Max Beerbohm five months later, Ross declared with a great deal of resignation that ‘I do not write now’. Indeed, nothing beyond criticism and satire came out of his pen in the next five years. As Bogle said, since that fateful year, it seemed as if Ross had made ‘a deliberate decision against writing what would make him successful’.

Ross was already a worn down man when he received information about Wilde’s sentence. Wilde withdrew his libel action against Queensberry to prevent Alfred Douglas from being called to the witness stand. This, however had led to a witch-hunt for all men with homosexual tendencies in England; as a consequence, Ross was exiled in Europe. The memory of Oscar’s arrest weeks ago was probably still very fresh in his mind. After all, he was with Oscar when he was arrested, and on that apocalyptic day, it was Ross who went to Wilde’s Tite Street home to pack his clothes for him. Ross most likely remembered painfully how he rushed from Tite Street to Bow Street police station carrying Oscar’s Gladstone bag, and fought his way through a homophobic mob ‘shouting indecencies’ at both Wilde and himself. He was hoping to see Oscar for one more time before his inevitable imprisonment, only to be cruelly denied permission to even leave the bag with him. Afterwards, Ross went to his mother’s place and broke down in tears, and according to his former boss W.E. Henley, Ross was heartbroken and fell ill. Despite his illness, however, Ross stayed on for a couple more days after Wilde’s arrest and returned to Wilde’s Tite Street home multiple times to collect incriminating manuscripts.

We do not know exactly why Ross ceased to pursue his own literary career after 1895. Perhaps, as Bogle postulated, he ‘could not help feeling emotionally responsible’ for Wilde’s downfall, and his ‘lack of ambition for himself’ was a ‘subconscious punishment for the disaster he felt that he had brought to Wilde’. Or perhaps, as Borland suggested, Ross had realised that his real talent was in supporting artists. Regardless, because Ross’s life from 1895 onwards irrevocably revolved around Oscar Wilde, we would never know what Ross could have become on his own terms as a literary figure. He would spent the remaining 23 years of his life as Wilde’s personal secretary, part-time lover, and full-time literary executor; and he would burnt his own life to keep the flame of Oscar Wilde’s literary legend.

III.

Love weaves itself into the human experience in myriad forms as a result of our complex nature. Anthropologists have uncovered that at the heart of love lie three primary brain systems shaping our journey toward mating and reproduction. These systems orchestrate the dance of physical attraction, the depths of romantic affection, and the enduring bonds of profound attachment. Yet, these strands of love do not always intertwine seamlessly. It is therefore entirely feasible to find oneself deeply bonded to one, while the flames of romantic desire burn for another, and seek fulfilment of desires elsewhere. Such multiplicity of biological pathways has set the stage for many romantic tragedies through the ages.

The tragedy of Wilde and Ross found its crescendo within the grey walls of Reading Gaol. It was in confinement that Wilde’s affection for Ross reignited with unprecedented depths of passion. Perhaps prison had made Robbie beautiful. Perhaps against the backdrop of 'weeping prison walls' and the dual spectres of ‘lean hunger and green thirst’, memories of Robbie came to be cast in ever more luminous light, as every beautiful moment was relished time and again, and each time made more beautiful by the power of imagination. As evidenced by that famous passage in De Profundis, to the imprisoned, even a trivial gesture could be exquisitely beautiful and inspire extraordinary love:

Where there is Sorrow there is holy ground. Some day you will realise what that means. You will know nothing of life till you do. Robbie, and natures like his, can realise it. When I was brought down from my prison to the Court of Bankruptcy between two policemen, Robbie waited in the long dreary corridor, that before the whole crowd, whom an action so sweet and simple hushed into silence, he might gravely raise his hat to me, as handcuffed and with bowed head I passed him by. Men have gone to heaven for smaller things than that. It was in this spirit, and with this mode of love that the saints knelt down to wash the feet of the poor, or stooped to kiss the leper on the cheek. I have never said one single word to him about what he did. I do not know to the present moment whether he is aware that I was even conscious of his action. It is not a thing for which one can render formal thanks in formal words. I store it in the treasury-house of my heart. I keep it there as a secret debt that I am glad to think I can never possibly repay. It is embalmed and kept sweet by the myrrh and cassia of many tears.

This Robbie, painted by Wilde’s imagination, symbolised everything he had longed for in prison, and everything he had missed from the outside world: Robbie was a safe harbour which promised comfort, security, acceptance, and unconditional love.

Croft-Cooke contended that Wilde ‘dragged in’ Ross’s name in De Profundis because he was ‘naïf enough to suppose that Bosie might feel some envy for Ross’, so he leveraged Ross’s ‘jealous longing to appropriate him’ to make Bosie jealous. And even biographers sympathetic towards Ross, such as Edra Bogle, believed that Wilde had mentioned Robbie only to ‘make Bosie seem even worse by contrast’. This interpretation, I believe, commits the ‘supreme vice’ of shallowness by entirely misjudging the nature of De Profundis. Though much ink had been spilled in debates over the nature of De Profundis, most serious scholars nowadays agree that it was ‘never just a letter’. For one, in 1897 Wilde instructed Ross to have the manuscript copied without telling Alfred Douglas, alluded to potential publication posthumously, and hesitated to send the letter to Alfred Douglas. Moreover, it was one of Wilde’s best proses which contained exquisite passages on aesthetics, theology, and philosophy. To reduce it to a love letter intended to incite jealousy, therefore, not only overlooks much of the historical contexts, but also does much injustice to the beautiful text itself. The piece, as Lee contended, is best read as Wilde’s mourning of the death of ‘Oscar Wilde’ the literary personality, an exercise to exorcise his own demons in order to reclaim and perhaps recreate his sense of self. Thus both ‘Bosie’ and ‘Robbie’ in De Profundis are essentially symbolic characters onto whom Wilde projected himself: ‘Bosie’ mirrored the ‘Oscar Wilde’ in his ‘Neronian hours’, when he was ‘rich, profligate, cynical, materialistic’; ‘Robbie’, in contrast, embodied the simple, tranquil, pensive, and creative future beyond prison which he had envisioned for himself.

Wilde was visibly torn between the two versions of himself after his release. On the one hand, he desired to reinvent himself as an artist by living a healthy and wholesome life. As declared at the end of De Profundis:

I hope to go at once to some little seaside village abroad with Robbie and More Adey […] I hope to be at least a month with my friends, and to gain, in their healthful and affectionate company, peace, and balance, and a less troubles heart, and a sweeter mood. I have a strange longing for the great primeval things, such as the Sea, to me no less of a mother than the Earth […] I feel sure that in elemental forces there is purification, and I want to go back to them and live in their presence.

The longing for rebirth and restoration was reiterated time and again in many of his post-prison letters. In his letter to Selwyn Image on 3 June, for instance, he wrote that he was ‘thoroughly ashamed of having led a life quite unworthy of an artist’, and that ‘if I have good health, and good friends, and can wake the creative instinct in me again, I may do something more in art yet’. Similarly, he told Mrs Stannard that France, the ‘mother of all artists’, had given hm ‘asile’ and enabled him to recover, and that he wished to live thus in ‘solitude and peace’.

However, on the other hand, almost immediately after release, his old luxuriating taste came back to haunt him. On 27 May 1897, for instance, he told Reginald Turner that:

Robbie detected me at Dieppe in the market place of the sellers of perfumes, spending all my money on orris-root and the tears of the narcissus and the dust of red roses. He was very stern and led me away. I have already spent my entire income for two years.

The story was probably as much truth as it was trope. Orris, or the roots of iris flowers, was harvested by the ancient Greeks and Romans for essential oil. The flower carried strong homoerotic connotations: for one, some had argued that in Greek mythology, Apollo had created iris (instead of what we know as Hyacinth today) in remembrance of Hyacinthus, the beautiful youth who died for him; moreover, the flower itself was turned into a symbol for queerness over the 20th century, not least because it had derived its name from the Greek goddess of the rainbow. The ‘tears of the narcissus’, likewise, was a thinly-veiled homoerotic reference: one may recall that Wilde had compared Alfred Douglas with narcissus after their first night together. Thus the flowers were most likely at once flowers of perfumery and flowers of youthful beauty, and the lavishing of the ‘income for two years’ probably referred to not only money but also his spiritual developments over his two years of imprisonment.

It was befitting, then, in the story, it was ‘Robbie’ who sternly led him away from the marketplace of perfume-sellers. He had canonised ‘Robbie’ in Reading Gaol, and he pleaded as ‘St Robert of Phillimore’ for salvation from himself. In such pleadings the ‘Robbie’ in his imagination and the actual person Ross became indistinguishable. In his letter dated 28 May 1897, Wilde wrote that:

For yourself, dear Robbie, I am haunted by the idea that many of those who love you will and do think it selfish of me to allow you and wish you to be with me from time to time. But still they might see the difference between your going about with me in my days of gilded infamy - my Neronian hours, rich, profligate, cynical, materialistic - and your coming to comfort me, a lonely dishonoured man, in disgrace and obscurity and poverty. How lacking in imagination they are! If I were rich again and sought to repeat my former life I don't think you would care very much to be with me--I think you would regret what I was doing: but now, dear Robbie, you come with the heart of Christ; and you help me intellectually as no one else can or ever could do--you are helping me to save my soul alive--not in the theological sense, but in the plain meaning of the words: for my soul was really dead in the slough of coarse pleasures: my life was unworthy of an artist: you can heal me and help me--no other friend have I now in this beautiful world. I want no other. Yet I am distressed to think that I shall be looked on as careless of your own welfare and indifferent to your own good. You are made to help me. I weep with sorrow when I think how much I need help, but I weep with joy when I think I have you to give it to me. I know you love me, but I want to have your respect, your sincere admiration, or rather, for that is a word of ill omen, your sincere appreciation of my effort to recreate my artistic life. But if I have to think that I am harming you, all pleasure in your society will be tainted for me. With you, at any rate, I want to be free of any sense of guilt--the sense of spoiling another's life. Dear Robbie, I couldn't spoil your life by accepting the sweet companionship you offer me from time to time. It is not for nothing that I named you in prison St. Robert of Phillimore. Love can canonise people. The saints are those who have been most loved. I made only one mistake in prison in things that I wrote of you or to you ....My poem should have run: “When I came out of prison you met me with garments, with spices, with wise counsel. You met me with Love." Not others did it, but you. I really laugh when I think how true in detail the lines are.

‘Robbie’ was to be his saviour from despair, and he hope to be reborn as an artist through loving ‘Robbie’. But such love had little regard for Ross the actual person: Wilde wanted ‘Robbie’ to save him from himself, fully aware that he could well harm Ross by demanding salvation from ‘Robbie’. Yet, in the end, instead of trying to bridge the yawning gap between his imaginary ‘Robbie’ and the actual Ross, he merely prayed that ‘St Robert of Phillimore’ may absolve him from ‘any sense of guilt’ for ‘spoiling another’s life’.

Wilde professed much of the similar affections for Ross three days later. However, by then, he had already begun to show signs of yielding to temptations, or rather to his former self. He wrote that:

I feel that Berneval is to be my home. I really do. […] It is also extraordinary that I knew Berneval existed and was arranged for me. […] Dear Robbie, I wish you would be a little more considerate, and not keep me up so late talking to you. It is very flattering to me, and all that, but you should remember that I need rest. Good night. You will find some cigarettes and some flowers by your bed-side. Coffee is served below at eight o'clock. Do you mind? If it is too early for you, I don't at all mind lying in bed an extra hour. I hope you will sleep well. You should, as Lloyd is not on the verandah. I adore this place. The whole country is lovely, and full of forest and deep meadow. It is simple and healthy. If I live in Paris I may be doomed to things I don't desire. I am afraid of big towns…I am frightened of Paris — I want to live here. […] Please send a Chronicle to my wife, just marking it, and if my second letter appears, mark that. Also one to Mrs. Arthur Stannard……I have no one but you, dear Robbie, to do anything……

Here, on the one hand, he was desperately trying to bring himself to love Berneval; on the other hand, however, his pre-1895 self was already rearing its head and luring himself to Paris where temptations filled the streets. This made his declarations of love of Berneval sound all the more like desperate attempts at autohypnosis. Thus, it should be entirely unsurprising that merely two months later, Wilde described Berneval as unbearably ‘black and dreadful’ which made him ‘quite suicidal’. Alongside his rapidly waning love for Berneval’s natural tranquility was probably his increasingly wavering love for ‘Robbie’, which made it all the more necessary for him to keep himself up late to pen contentless love letters to Ross.

Such love was expressed in more explicit terms on 6 July 1897:

I long to see you. When are you coming over? I have a lovely bedroom for More, and a small garret for you, with my heart waiting in it for you.

But at the same time as he told Ross that his heart was waiting in the bedroom for him, Wilde was already making plans of eloping with Alfred Douglas to Naples. By that point, the post-prison persona he had envisioned for himself in Reading Gaol had already been eclipsed by the revival of the Neroian Oscar Wilde.

I largely concur with Laura Lee on the interpretation that Wilde loved Douglas because Douglas seemed to him sin personified; thus he was drawn to ‘Bosie’ ‘not in spite of his flaws but because of them’. He was ‘rapturously horrified’, and he wanted to experience through ‘Bosie’ the ‘heights and depths of life’, and to burn both pleasure and pain with ‘a gemlike flame’. However, for an author so adept in manufacturing symmetries, Lee missed the crucial symmetry between Wilde’s ‘delight in decadence’ with Douglas and his desire for transcendence in his letters to Ross. The oversight is all the more curious because Lee’s referencing of Wilde’s own reflection on his life as ‘a harmony of two extremes’, which considered ‘artistically […] perfect’. I believe this confession offers a profound insight into Wilde's inner conflict: his heart was torn between 'Bosie' and 'Robbie,' the dual muses in his imagination, which inevitably led him to hurt both Douglas and Ross.

IV.

We could not ascertain the level of intimacy Wilde and Ross shared during these months; however, it is nevertheless safe to presume that physical intimacy did accompany the fleeting revival of intense romantic affections For one, Robert Sherard alleged that during Ross’s visit to Berneval in August 1897, he accidentally saw Wilde and Ross in a passionate sexual embrace through undrawn curtains one morning, which had let him to contend years later that ‘there is no doubt — and I am speaking from absolute knowledge — that it was [Ross] who… dragged Oscar back into the delights of homosexuality’. Alfred Douglas likewise wrote in 1932 that ‘it is an absolute fact that it was Ross who at Berneval dragged Oscar back to homosexual practices. Oscar told me this himself… Harris told me at Nice that Ross had told him the same story.’ On top of which, when writing to Leonard Smithers in this period, Wilde said that ‘He [Robbie] can ride everything, except Pegasus’. The thinly-veiled innuendo strongly corroborated the existence of sexual intimacy.

McKenna characterised their relationship as ‘Oscar was in need of comfort, and Robbie obligingly comforted him’. He also claimed that the intimacy between Wilde and Ross was merely ‘sex as consolation’ but was not love and could never ‘scale the same emotional heights as Oscar’s love for Bosie’. But the claim that Ross offered up his own body only to comfort Wilde was not only unsubstantiated but also profoundly degrading: he was not a passive object providing cheap pleasure or consolation but a human subject possessing the agency to love. Moreover, given that Ross very likely harboured a profound sense of guilt for corrupting Wilde and leading him to his downfall by introducing him to homosexual practices, it is highly unlikely that he would casually offer his body as a pastime.

The more plausible conjecture, I believe, was that Ross fell deeply in love with Wilde despite his every effort to prevent a second corrupting of Oscar Wilde by his own love. Ross’s responses at the time to Wilde’s love letters are now largely lost in history, perhaps because Wilde had no habit of keeping letters, or perhaps because Ross (or his family members) had burnt them at some point. However, Ross’s unfinished and unpublished 1918 manuscript, which was supposed to be a preface to a collection of Wilde’s letter to him, gave hints of the depth of his affections. Recalling the day 23 years ago when he welcomed the newly-released Wilde off the shore of Dieppe, Ross wrote:

We met them [Wilde and Adey] at half past four in the morning, a magnificent spring morning such as Wilde anticipated in the closing words of De Profundis. As the steamer glided into the harbour Wilde’s tall figure, dominating the other passengers, was easily recognised from the great crucifix on the jetty where we stood. That striking beacon was full of significance for us. Then we began running to the landing stage and Wilde recognised us and waved his hand and his lips curled into a smile. His face had lost all its coarseness and he looked as he must have looked at Oxford in the early days before I knew him and as he only looked again after death. A good many people, even friends, thought his appearance almost repulsive, but the upper part of his face was extraordinarily fine and intellectual. There was the usual irritating delay and then Wilde with that odd elephantine gait which I have never seen in anyone else stalked off the boat. He was holding his hand a large sealed envelop. ‘This, my dear Bobbie, is the great manuscript about which you know. More has behaved very badly about my luggage and was anxious to deprive me of the blessed bag which Reggie gave me.’ Then he broke into great Rabelaisian sort of laughter. The manuscript was of course De Profundis. […] Wilde talked until nine o’clock when I insisted on going to lie down. We all met at twelve for déjeuner, all of us exhausted except Wilde. In the afternoon we drove to Arques[-la-Bataille] and sat down on the ramparts of the castle. He enjoyed the trees and the grass and country scents and sounds in a way I had never known him do before, just as street-bred child might enjoy them on his first day in the country: but of course there was an adjective for everything — ‘monstrous’, ‘purple’, ‘grotesque’, ‘gorgeous’, ‘curious’, ‘wonderful’. It was natural to Wilde to be artificial as I have often said and that is why he was suspected of insincerity. I mean when he wrote of serious things, of art, ethics or religion, of pain or of pleasure. Wilde in love of the beautiful was perfectly, perhaps too, sincere and not the least of his errors was a suspicion of simple things. Simplicity is one of the objections he urges against prisons. During that day and for many days afterwards he talked of nothing but Reading Prison and it had already become for him a sort of enchanted castle of which Major Nelson was the presiding fairy. The hideous machicolate turrets were already turned into minarets, the very warders into benevolent Mamelukes and we ourselves into Paladins welcoming Coeur de Lion after his captivity.

In stark contrast to his earlier prefaces, which were concise and impersonal, this unfinished piece unfolded with elaborate detail and a deeply heartfelt touch. The first half of the extract reads more like a smitten seventeen year old savouring his love at first sight than a middle-aged man recalling his reunion with a friend from a respectable remove. The vivid depictions of Wilde's tall figure ‘dominating the other passengers’, his ‘odd elephantine gait’, and his ‘great Rabelaisian laughter’ all had a level of raw, animalistic vitality. Subtly, they reveal a deep-seated, almost primal attraction that defied the passage of time, an allure as impossible for Ross to resist in 1918 as it was back in 1897. In weaving his memories, Ross imbued them with such tender details that one can almost imagine a blushing author as he was committing these words to paper. His recounting of Wilde's ‘extraordinarily fine and intellectual’ visage on that ‘magnificent spring morning’ carries the freshness as if but a moment had slid by. Moreover, even after the elapsing of 23 long years, he still remembered with painfully loving precision how Wilde's lips 'curled into a smile’ under the soft, early light of half-past four in the morning, a detail so heartfelt and personal that it defied the yawning chasm of time. It is as though, despite his utmost efforts to restrain and conceal his profound affection and desire, they inevitably seep through his prose and permeated the pages.

The heartfelt affection, however, was heavily tinged with guilt and remorse. Noticeably, Ross described Wilde at his most ‘fine and intellectual’ as how ‘he must have looked at Oxford in the early days before I knew him and as he only looked again after death’. It was as if Ross believed his very presence had cast a shadow over Wilde's luminance, as if Ross saw Wilde as Adam and himself Eve, the snake, and the apple all at once. Thus, as the narrative unfolded, Ross erased himself from the second half of the extract. He affectionately described from the perspective of a silent onlooker how Wilde had ‘enjoyed the trees and the grass and the country scents and sounds in a way I had never known him do before’, the string of ‘and’s hinting at his ‘childish’ curiosity and spontaneity. In that moment, in Ross’s eyes, Wilde was free, untethered by his own corrupting influence; and he himself watched over his return to the Garden before the fall from a distance with almost-maternal affection. Ross reemerged in the narrative not as a participant but as a protector, who removed himself from memory and defended Wilde’s sincere love for beauty to the reader. Perhaps this was Ross’s subconscious hope: to cleanse his influences from Wilde’s life and legacy, to piously marvel at Wilde’s artistic brilliance from a distance, and to walk silently in the shadows as a loyal, protective spirit.

This unfinished manuscript was perhaps Ross’s rawest confession, penned without the chance to polish or pare down his own voice or longing from the narrative. It revealed the tragic conflicts which underpinned Ross’s life: he wanted to erase himself from Wilde’s life at the same time as he wanted Wilde with every fibre of his being; and he believed himself to be the fatal temptation for Wilde but could not help himself from yielding to the temptation of Wilde. In a way, this was the dilemma between his faith and his sexuality he encountered at the dawn of his life reenacted at the dusk: he had internalised the idea that homosexuality was to be a corrupting sin but could not deny his nature, thus he walked with the cross of repentance on his back his entire life.

The most tragic aspect with the second ‘fall’ after Reading was that the final straw before Ross gave in to his own romantic desires was possibly a promise of a life together. After breaking his promises to Ross and abandoning him for Alfred Douglas, Wilde wrote to Ross on 21 September 1897 saying ‘I could have lived all my life with you’. Moreover, in his 2 January 1899 letter rejecting the idea of a second marriage, Wilde suggested that Ross would want him to marry ‘some sensible, practical, plain, middle-aged boy’ —— a description which eerily mirrored Ross himself. Though it might appear as mere coincidence, but reading these words together with his 1897 letter, they seem to hint at profound commitments in the nascent days of their reunion after prison.

But when did the love begin? As argued, I am not quite convinced by the claim that Ross was hopelessly in love with Wilde ever since 1886; rather, from the few textual evidence we have of him, I believe that Ross’s love was most likely rekindled by sorrow and remorse after witnessing the pain of imprisonment taking its toll the man he had admired and once loved. After the prison sentence, in 1895, Ross made multiple trips back to England at great risks to himself. According to Bogle, on 24 September 1895 Ross visited the building ‘where Wilde waited while the Registrar decided to adjourn bankruptcy proceedings for seven weeks’. He then came back again on 12 November 1895, only to wait patiently in the corridors of the Court of Bankruptcy for a glimpse of Wilde, and to silently but solemnly raise his hat to Wilde amidst a jeering crowd. Before the bankruptcy proceedings, Ross had ‘harried and pleaded’ in his attempt to raise £2000 to pay back Wilde’s debt. He went so far as to write to his former Cambridge tutor Oscar Browning for money, but, partly due to Alfred Douglas’ inability of unwillingness to contribute, Ross’s effort fell £400 short, Wilde went bankrupt. Adding insult to injury, the Marquess of Queensberry (Alfred Douglas’ father, the man who sent Wilde to prison) became one of Wilde’s primary creditors upon his bankruptcy.

On that very day, he had a brief interview with Oscar. From which, Ross recorded that:

Physically he [Wilde] was much worse than anyone had led me to believe. Indeed I really should not have known him at all . . . His clothes hung about him in loose folds and his hands are like those of a skeleton.

He further remembered that the only subject on which Oscar had spoken calmly without breaking down was death. His shock and despondence at the ruin of the once great artist was palpable.

He then visited Wilde in prison again in May 1896. His letter to More Adey after the visit repeated many of the same themes. In the letter, Ross wrote that:

Then Oscar appeared. He is much thinner, is now clean shaven so that his emaciated condition is more apparent. His face is dull brick colour. (I fancy from working in the sun in the garden). His eyes were horribly vacant, and I noticed that he had lost a great deal of hair (this when he turned to go and stood in the light). He always had great quantities of thick hair, but there is now a bald patch on the crown. It is also streaked with white and grey. You must allow perhaps for my exaggeration but I try not to do so and I am writing from pencil notes taken down immediately after leaving the prison. I did not break down at all, although this the worst interview I have had with Oscar[…] I did not know he[Sherard] gave way to exhibitions of feeling, though I know he feels things of course, as much perhaps as I do […] He[Oscar] cried the whole time and when we asked him to talk more he said that he had nothing to say and wanted to hear us talk. That as you know is very unlike Oscar.

His attempt to be calm and judicious barely belied his pain. The letter reads like a string of consciousness spilled onto paper, where attempts at detached brevity inevitably give way to detailed and heart-rendering accounts of Wilde’s physical decay. For one, whilst claiming that he ‘did not break down at all’, Ross confessed that the this harrowing encounter had shaken him to the core, and that Sherard’s breakdown was barely on par with his own pain. Moreover, his description of Wilde as a shadow of the man he had once known danced between maintaining a facade of control and the inevitable surrender to grief. It was as if he was desperately trying to reign in his thoughts and tame his emotions.

He further wrote that:

I firmly and honestly believe apart from all prejudice that he is simply wasting and pining away, to use the old cliché he is sinking under a broken heart. […] Each person has his view as to what constitutes a decayed mind, but if I were asked about Oscar before a commission, I should say that 'Confinement apart from all labour or treatment had made him temporarily silly, that is the mildest word that will describe my meaning. If asked whether he was going to die. It seems quite possible within the next few months, even if his constitution remained unimpaired, but for the causes that wives and husbands die shortly after each other, for no particular cause or men who have lost all their money or their '10 o'clock business' and young girls whose engagements have gone wrong. I should be less surprised to hear of dear Oscar's death than of Aubrey Beardsley's and you know what he looks like.

Here, in the shadow of Wilde’s decline, Ross's heartache is again palpable. Wilde’s deterioration was described as a gradual erosion of character evoking his introduction to homosexuality, which Ross most likely believed to be the beginning of his corruption. The phrase "sinking under a broken heart" further deepens the tragedy, evoking the downfall of something majestic now in ruins.

Yet, amidst this despair, Ross clinged to a sliver of hope: he insisted that Oscar’s mental decay was but temporary silliness induced by gaol fever, suggesting the possibility of recovery and restoration. Here, however, this hope was shadowed by the looming spectre of Wilde’s death, making Ross’s optimism appear fragile. It was telling that the analogies Ross drew were all disasters befalling respectable heterosexual families. This resonated with the profound remorse in the apologies he gave Constance before undergoing the life-threatening surgery in 1896: perhaps deep-down, he was repenting over what he saw as his own destructive effects on Oscar’s marriage to Constance.

Ross kept this vow of devotion for the rest of his life. From then on, though fifteen years younger than Wilde, Ross was to be a safe harbour for him amidst every storm. He was to become Wilde’s anchor and confidante, offering unwavering support with almost-maternal tenderness. The only deviation, as argued, was the love and longing which he could not tame or renounce despite his best efforts.

Though Alfred Douglas and his biographers have insisted time and again that Ross had schemed and plotted to replace Douglas ever since Wilde’s imprisonment, historical evidence points to the contrary.

The tussle over Douglas’s dedicating of his first volume of poems to Wilde was a case in point. In May 1896, Douglas decided to dedicate the first volume of his poems to Wilde, either as an inconsiderate display of devotion or a selfish scheme of self-promotion, risking another heavy blow on Wilde’s already-ruined reputation. Upon hearing of this from multiple friends, Wilde went into a fit of rather ugly rage and denounced the dedication as ‘revolting and grotesque’. Moreover, he ordered Ross at once to go to Douglas and retrieve every letter, book, and jewellery piece he had bequeathed Douglas during their affair, for he wished to have ‘nothing to do’ with Douglas. Douglas, however, declined to listen to anything Wilde said in prison and rather melodramatically told Ross that Wilde shall only have the letters back when he was dead.

The odious task of mediating between Wilde and Douglas must have worn Ross down, because a month later, he fell seriously ill and had to undergo a life-threatening surgery to have one of his kidneys removed. Ross never fully recovered from it. According to his brother Alex, Ross lost most of his hair after the kidney operation, and was consistently unwell in the years to follow.

Yet, even during his painful illness, Ross pleaded sympathy for Douglas in front of Wilde by quietly slipping him a piece of paper (to evade the prison censors), with the consequence of drawing rebuke from Wilde upon himself. Moreover, even as Ross was recovering from the surgery, emaciated and barely able to work, he tried to lift Douglas ‘out of his malaise’ and encouraged Douglas creativity. If Ross had truly seen ‘the opportunity to re-stake his claim to Wilde’ as Douglas Murray argued, he would not have gone to such lengths to protect Douglas from Wilde’s wrath: if his aim was to supplant Douglas in Wilde’s affection, he merely had to step aside and let Douglas’ petulance do the job.

If anything, Ross did not need an ulterior motive to dislike Douglas during this period: any friend of Oscar Wilde would have been frustrated by Douglas’s utter inability to see beyond himself. In November 1895, for instance, Douglas complained to More Adey that there was nobody to ‘play his[my] card’ in England, and all of his friends ‘seemed to be his[my] enemies’ despite their effort to console his grief. And in a fit of rather tone-deaf self-pity, Douglas wrote that:

I am not in prison but I think I suffer as much as Oscar, in fact more, just as I am sure he would have suffered more if he had been free and I in prison.

Moreover, when Ross informed Douglas that Wilde did not wish to see him again in 1896, Douglas declared to More Adey that:

[Oscar] warned me that all sorts of influences would be brought to bear upon me to make me change; but I have not changed. From the first to last I have been absolutely consistent and absolutely the same. I shall not change now. I decline to listen to anything he says while he is in prison. But I do not believe that he means what he says, and I regard what he says as non-existent.

And in June 1896, during Ross’s life threatening illness which led to the kidney removal, Douglas told Ross that he would not obey Wilde’s wishes and give up the letters. He declared that:

The possession of those letters and the recollection they may give me even if they can give me no hope, will perhaps prevent me from putting an end to a life which now has no raison-d'etre. If Oscar asks me to kill myself I will do so, and he shall have back my letters when I am dead.

Then, in July, only days after Ross recovered from the ‘very critical state’ post-surgery, when he was still emaciated and barely able to walk,, Douglas wrote Ross a bitter letter blaming him for Wilde’s animosity and bemoaning his own tragedy despite Ross’s effort to plead Douglas’ case in front of Wilde:

It certainly was a surprise to me that you do not think Oscar Wilde and I should ever be together again. If Oscar Wilde only loves me half as much as I love him - if he comes out of prison nothing in the world will keep us apart. All friends and relations, all their plots and all their plans will go to the winds once I am alone with him again and am holding his hand.

Douglas's animosity lasted well into 1897. The fact that he himself had at least some part to play in Wilde’s downfall was entirely lost to Douglas. Indeed, throughout most of his life, the very notions of guilt and responsibility seemed alien to him. Thus he clung onto the fantasy that once Wilde was released all would have been restored to the olden days; and thus he refused to accept Wilde’s evolution in prison. And because he indulged in his own victimhood and refused to bear responsibility for Wilde’s downfall, he could not comprehend the simple fact that the disaster itself sufficed in making Wilde fall out of love with him. So it was psychologically necessary for him to pin the blame on someone, and Ross became his target.

Such oblivion was painfully obvious when it came to relationships with Constance Wilde. In his autobiography, Alfred Douglas claimed that:

I was always on the best of terms with Mrs Wilde. I liked her and she liked me. She told me, about a year after I first met her, that she liked me better than any of Oscar's other friends. […] After the débâcle I never saw her again, and I do not doubt that Ross and others succeeded in poisoning her mind against me, but up to the very last day of our acquaintance we were the best of friends.

The patronising tone is especially jarring: it had not even occurred to him that Constance could have independently come to dislike him after his affair with her husband brought unimaginable calamity onto her life; it simply had to be the malicious influence of ‘Ross and others’, as if she could not have any agency of her own. And if Alfred Douglas could at least claim diminished responsibility due to hereditary mental illness, the fact that his biographers had believed him was truly astonishing. Caspar Wintermans, for instance, contended (without evidence) that it was Ross who ‘blacken[ed] Bosie’ in the eyes of Constance and the Leversons.

Moreover, it was more likely that Wilde himself sowed the first seed of discord between Ross and Douglas by convincing Ross that if he was to recover as an artist, he must first recover from Douglas. In May 1896, Wilde wrote to Ross saying that:

The idea that he is wearing or in possession of anything I gave him is peculiarly repugnant to me. I cannot of course get rid of the revolting memories of the two years I was unlucky enough to have him with me, or of the mode by which he thrust me into the abyss of ruin and disgrace to gratify his hatred of his father and other ignoble passions. But I will not have him in possession of my letters or gifts. Even if I get out of this loathsome place I know that there is nothing before me but a life of a pariah – of disgrace and penury and contempt - but at least I will have nothing to do with him nor allow him to come near me.

After Ross’s attempt to defend Douglas, in his November letter, Wilde further said that:

Do not think that I would blame him for my vices. He had as little to do with them as I had with his.[…] I blame him for not appreciating the man he ruined. An illiterate millionaire would really have suited him better. […] My genius, my life as an artist, my work, and the quiet I needed for it, were nothing to him when matched with his unrestrained and coarse appetites for common profligate life: his greed for money: his incessant and violent scenes: his unimaginative selfishness.

Even if Wilde’s words might have been excessively harsh, Ross was probably convinced of Douglas’s inability to appreciate the genius he had ruined by Douglas’s self-absorption over the past months.

On top of which, Wilde swore time and again that he must get over Alfred Douglas to restore his life. He wrote in his November letter that:

In all tragedies there is a grotesque element. He is the grotesque element in mine. Do not think I do not blame myself. I curse myself night and day for my folly in allowing him to dominate my life. If there was an echo in these walls it would cry ‘Fool’ for ever. I am utterly ashamed of my friendship with him. For by their friendships men can be judged. It is a test of every man. And I feel more poignant abasement of shame for my friendship with Alfred Douglas … fifty thousand times more … than I do, say, for my connection with Charley Parker of which you may read a full account in my trial.

Then, he famously wrote in De Profundis that:

Deliberately and by me uninvited you thrust yourself into my sphere, usurped there a place for which you had neither right nor qualifications, and having by curious persistence, and by the rendering of your very presence a part of each separate day, succeeded in absorbing my entire life, could do no better with that life than break it in pieces. […] Having got hold of my life, you did not know what to do with it. You couldn’t have known. It was too wonderful a thing to be in your grasp. You should have let it slip from your hands and gone back to your own companions at their play. But unfortunately you were wilful, and so you broke it. You did not understand why I wrote beautiful letters to you, any more than you understood why I gave you beautiful presents. You failed to see that the former were not meant to be published, any more than the latter were meant to be pawned. Besides, they belong to a side of life that is long over, to a friendship that somehow you were unable to appreciate at its proper value. You must look back with wonder now to the days when you had my entire life in your hands. I too look back to them with wonder, and with other, with far different, emotions.

After finishing the manuscript, on 1 April 1897, he wrote to Ross instructing him to copy it twice, and said that:

[…] there are in the letter certain passages which deal with my mental development in prison, and the inevitable evolution of character and intellectual attitude towards life that has taken place: and I want you, and others who still stand by me and have affection for me, to know exactly in what mood and manner I hope to face the world. […] Of course I need not remind you how fluid a thing thought is with me – with us all – and of what an evanescent substance are our emotions made. Still, I do see a sort of possible goal towards which, through art, I may progress. It is not unlikely that you may help me. […] My friendship with A.D. brought me first to the dock of the Criminal Court, then to the dock of the Bankruptcy Court, and now to the dock of the Divorce Court. As far as I can make out (not having the shilling primer on the subject) there are no more docks into which he can bring me.

Though Wilde might have wished to revoke some of the harsh words in the early parts of De Profundis, they most likely left an indelible mark upon Ross as he was reading the long manuscript to the typewriters. As someone who adored Wilde’s art more than anything, and who blamed himself deeply for his corrosive influence upon the artist, Wilde’s harsh denunciations gave Ross every reason to want to keep them apart for Wilde’s own good —— and indeed, as argued, for a while, Wilde himself pleaded for ‘St Robert of Phillimore’ to save him from his temptation-prone self.

VI.

Despite all of these, however, it was only after Wilde betrayed him with Douglas that Ross became hostile towards Douglas. Wilde was incredibly contradictory in his letters to Ross and to Douglas between April and August 1897. Ten days after his release, upon Ross’s departure from Berneval, Wilde was resolute in resisting the temptation of returning to Douglas and his former life. In his 28 May 1897 letter, he wrote that:

Bosie's revolting letter was in the room, and foolishly I had read it again and left it by my bedside. My dream was that my mother was speaking to me with some sternness, and that she was in trouble. I quite see that whenever I am in danger she will in some way warn me. I have a real terror now of that unfortunate ungrateful young man with his unimaginative selfishness and his entire lack of all sensitiveness to what in others is good or kind or trying to be so. I feel him as an evil influence, poor fellow. To be with him would be to return to the hell from which I do think I have been released. I hope never to see him again.

On either 29 or 30 May 1897, he reiterated the message to Ross:

I am terrified about Bosie. More writes to me that he has been practically interviewed about me! It is awful. More, desiring to spare me pain, I suppose, did not send me the paper, so I have had a wretched night. Bosie can almost ruin me. I earnestly beg that some entreaty be made to him not to do so a second time. His letters to me are infamous.

And Douglas was not the only source of temptation: a day later, he swore to Ross that:

[…] I was not tempted by either sirens, or mermaidens, or any of the green-haired following of Glaucus- I- really think that this is a remarkable thing. In my pagan days the sea was always full of tritons blowing conchs, and other unpleasant things. Now it is quite different.

In conjunction to his sworn resolution to resist temptation, in these letters Wilde was incredibly affectionate to Ross. The 28 May letter quoted above was extravagant in its proclamation of love for Ross: Ross was to be his ‘St. Robert of Phillimore’, healing him from the wounds the world had inflicted upon him and offering him unconditional love in ‘disgrace and obscurity and poverty’. Moreover, in the letter, Wilde declared that:

I made only one mistake in prison in things that I wrote of you or to you ....My poem should have run: “When I came out of prison you met me with garments, with spices, with wise counsel. You met me with Love." Not others did it, but you. I really laugh when I think how true in detail the lines are.

And on 31 May 1897, he sounded entirely like a pining lover:

Dear Robbie, I wish you would be a little more considerate, and not keep me up so late talking to you. It is very flattering to me, and all that, but you should remember that I need rest. Good night. You will find some cigarettes and some flowers by your bed-side. Coffee is served below at eight o'clock. Do you mind? If it is too early for you, I don't at all mind lying in bed an extra hour. I hope you will sleep well. You should, as Lloyd is not on the verandah.

Yet unbeknownst to Ross, at the same time as Wilde professed love and loyalty to him, he was planning a reunion with Alfred Douglas. On 2 June 1897, Wilde tersely told Ross that ‘Bosie has written, for him nicely on literature and my place’, yet enticed Douglas with talks of art and a meeting at the metaphorical ‘double peak of Parnassus.’ In his next letter two days later, in stark contrast to his assurances to Ross, he showered Douglas with admiration and affection:

Don't think I don't love you. Of course I love you more than anyone else. But our lives are irreparably severed, as far as meeting goes. What is left to us is the knowledge that we love each other, and every day I think of you, and I know you are a poet, and that makes you doubly dear and wonderful.

Then, ten days after he had promised Ross ‘dear boy, there is no one who would stay with me but you’, and after Ross had sent him £250 by check upon his request, on 16 June, Wilde beckoned Douglas to come to Dieppe:

I have asked you to come here on Saturday. I have a bathing costume for you, but you had better get one in Paris. Also bring me a lot of books, and cigarettes. I cannot get good cigarettes here or at Dieppe.

The romantic reconciliation, however, was bound to end in disaster. Lady Queensbury disapproved of any meeting, and Wilde’s weekly allowance from Constance was preconditioned upon him severing all ties with Alfred Douglas according to their divorce settlement. Moreover, any reunion was bound to cause a scandal in the English press, damning what little possibility of a restoration of Wilde’s literary standing. On either 16 or 17 July 1897, Wilde received a resignation letter from his solicitor Arthur Hansell, who informed him that were him and Douglas to meet, Queensbury would descend upon Dieppe and wreck havoc. It is curious that many biographers accused Ross for deliberately tipping off Constance and/or Hansell out of jealousy, for there was really no evidence of either the actus reus or the mens rea. Both could have heard about the plan from many other sources. For one, Wilde himself had written to Lady Queensbury on 7 or 8 June asking for her consent to a meeting with Alfred Douglas, and she duly replied in the negative to More Adey. Moreover, Queensbury had private detectives in France, and Dieppe (next to Berneval) was full of English tourists who could have conversed with Wilde.

But Ross did suspect of something, perhaps a reunion. Like many other friends who wished to see Wilde rehabilitated and financially secure, he was ardently against the meeting. And given that he was most likely in love with Wilde at the time, one could reasonably postulate that Ross also had personal grounds to oppose the meeting. As if reassuring an insecure partner, Wilde tried to dispel Ross’s suspicion by scorning Douglas. On 3 June, he wrote:

The entirely business-like tone of your letter just received makes me nervous that you are a prey of terrible emotions, and that it is merely a form of the calm that hides a storm. Your remark also that my letter is "undated," while as a reproach it wounds me, also seems to denote a change in your friendship towards me. I have now put the date and other facts at the head of my letter. I get no cuttings from Paris, which makes me irritable when I hear of things appearing. Bosie has also written to me to say he is on the eve of a duel! I suppose about this. They said his costume was ridicule.

A day after the meeting in Berneval was called off by Wilde’s solicitor, he told Ross on a postcard that ‘A. D. is not here, nor is he to come.’ Then, two days later, he gave Ross a fuller account of the matter:

I suppose you know that Hansell has resigned his position, and will not act for me any more. He writes a mysterious letter about 'private information'. I suppose he has heard that Bosie wishes to see me. I have now put off Bosie indefinitely. I have been so harassed, and indeed frightened, at the thought of a possible scandal or trouble. The French papers describe me going about at Longchamps with Bosie at horse-races! So that must suffice for evil tongues.

In his version of the story, he was again the hapless prisoner to the whims and wishes of ‘Bosie’, as if he had never written the letters pleading his ‘dear boy’ to visit Berneval.

Douglas blamed More Adey and Ross for the thwarted reunion. Immediately after Wilde called off the meeting, Douglas wrote Adey an ugly letter reeking with antisemitic resentment:

I should like to have some explanation from you as to what your views are and what steps you propose to take to free Oscar (and myself) from the ridiculously transparent Jewish trap which has been laid for him by the admirable George Lewis, and into which you have guided him.

Adey was ill with pneumonia at the time, so Ross replied on his behalf and explained to Douglas why the divorce arrangements between Wilde and Constance forbid the reunion. In his reply, Douglas cursed More and took out his anger on Ross in another revolting letter:

Your letter is rather absurd. The fact of More having a cold does not alter his responsibility for the extreme stupidity of the arrangement that he has made by which Oscar is at the mercy of a Jew solicitor, nor does the fact that you, personally, happen to agree with the Jew solicitor make your own part in the business any more admirable……Nothing short of a very serious operation can atone for More’s part in the sale of Oscar’s freedom to the Jews. A mere feverish cold is no good at all. But operations cover a multitude of sins as you know or ought to. […] As long as Oscar was a captive in prison and I was morally bound hand and foot, you and More could make your own arrangements, but now your interference is simply an impertinence and the fact that your interference between two perfectly free people is conducted by intrigue and backstairs wire-puling only makes it more intolerable. . . . I may point out that I never suggested that you were responsible in any degree for the silly and old-womanish attempt to separate me and Oscar but you have in your letter today deliberately claimed the responsibility and as you seem to be rather proud of it I have no hesitation in giving you the full credit of it.

The remark about ‘operations cover a multitude of sins’ was clearly referring to the kidney removal surgery which nearly claimed Ross’s life the previous year. This begs the question: for what supposed transgressions was Ross being asked to seek atonement, and by Douglas out of all people? The presumptive claim is perplexing. Moreover, perhaps it had never occurred to Douglas that were Ross to be pulling wires behind the scenes, he would not have stepped into the limelight, exposing himself to Douglas’s verbal rotten vegetables. Indeed, if Ross was truly manipulating events to drive a wedge between Wilde and Douglas, as Croft-Cooke, Wintermans, and Murray alleged, he would not have informed Douglas of his own role in negotiating Wilde’s divorce settlement, for it would only work against himself.

At this point, Ross’s patience with Douglas finally frayed. Douglas’ insults of Adey and offensive remarks aimed at himself did not sit well with Ross. Further fuelling Ross's anger was Douglas's apparent disregard for Wilde's precarious financial situation: not only did Douglas seem indifferent to the risk he posed to Wilde's modest annual income of £150 from Constance, he also showed little willingness to alleviate Wilde’s plight by paying £150 out of his own pockets. Thus, Ross’s reply was laced with biting sarcasm:

With your £150 he will have the added pleasure of your perpetual society and your inspiring temper.

In response, Douglas haughtily and patronisingly proclaimed:

You still seem to cling to the idea that Oscar does not want to see me, The wish is the father to the thought. You probably overlook the fact that I am passionately devoted to him, and that my longing to see him simply eats my heart away day and night.

But alas, one could not feed on love alone. As Bogle acutely remarked, Alfred Douglas, the spoiled aristocratic boy whose mother indulged his every whim, struggled to comprehend that there were other things that mattered in this world beside his affections. Perhaps in his head, if he and Oscar had loved each other, nothing else ought to matter, not Constance, not Oscar’s children, not his own mother, not even his father’s threats. To him, anyone who dared to thwart his wishes must either be woefully ignorant or wilfully insidious.

Upon being informed of the row between his two ‘dear boys’, Wilde immediately wrote to console Ross. On 28 June, he wrote that:

Bosie has sent me a long indictment of you and panegyric of himself, to which I will reply to-morrow. You can understand in what tone I shall answer him. But for you, dear friend, I don't know in what black abyss of want I would have been.

Eight days later, he further promised Ross that he had chastised Douglas and that an apology from Douglas was forthcoming:

I have had no time to write lately, but I have written a long letter - of twelve foolscap pages - to Bosie, to point out to him that I owe everything to you and your friends, and that whatever life I have as an artist in the future will be due to you. […] I also wrote to him about his calling himself a grand seigneur in comparison to a dear sweet wonderful friend like you, his superior in all fine things. I told him how grotesque, ridiculous, and vulgar such an attempt was.

In the same letter, he implored Ross to visit Berneval. In a rather saccharine if not somewhat erotic manner, Wilde promised Ross ‘a small garret […] with my heart waiting in it for you’.

A period of silence followed, during which Wilde received no word from Ross, who might well have been nursing his anger or licking his wounds. During this very period, Douglas wrote Ross yet another letter, in which he haughtily flaunted Oscar’s love by stressing how eagerly Wilde implored him to go to France:

[…] You must admit that if he doesn't want to see me, he has a curious way of expressing his disinclination. When a man writes to one and invites one to come and see him, and says that he trembles with ecstasy at the joy of seeing one again it requires a subtle mind like yours to detect symptoms of his unwillingness to see one.’

We do not know whether Ross believed him. After all, Wilde had never confessed to Ross how eagerly he longed to reunite with Douglas; if anything, his letters gave the opposite impression. Thus it may well be that Ross took Douglas’s flaunt as nonsense. But regardless, Ross did not reply to any of Wilde’s letters or postcards till late July. Ross’s delayed response, attributing his silence to ‘domesticity’, might have struck Wilde as a veiled expression of a wounded heart; thus, perhaps to reassure Ross, he once again upbraided Douglas and lavished Ross with kind words in his reply on 20 July:

As regards Bosie, I feel you have been, as usual, forbearing and sweet, and too good-tempered. What he must be made to feel is that his vulgar and ridiculous assumption of social superiority must be retracted and apologised for. I have written to him to tell him that quand on est gentilhomme on est gentilhomme, and that for him to try and pose as your social superior because he is the third son of a Scotch marquis and you the third son of a commoner is offensively stupid. There is no difference between gentlemen. Questions of titles are matters of heraldry - no more. I wish you would be strong on this point; the thing should be thrashed out of him. As for his coarse ingratitude in abusing you, to whom, as I have told him, I owe any possibility I have of a new and artistic career, and indeed of life at all, I have no words in which to express my contempt for his lack of imaginative insight, and his dullness of sensitive nature. It makes me quite furious. So pray write, when next you do so, quite calmly, and say that you will not allow any nonsense of social superiority and that if he cannot understand that gentlemen are gentlemen and no more, you have no desire to hear again from him.

Over the subsequent week, Wilde pestered Ross with a flurry of letters and postcards, each brimmed with a mixture of requests and yearnings. Sometimes, like a lovestruck suitor, he beckoned Ross to visit Berneval and stay for long. Yet, in other letters, he dispatched orders for watches and pictures, treating Ross more as an aide than an equal.

By early August, despite the weight of professional and personal obligations, Ross carved out three weeks for Wilde. During this sojourn, Wilde’s creativity flourished and he began to pen The Ballad of Reading Gaol. It was also there and then that Robert Sherard accidentally spotted Wilde and Ross in a ‘sexual embrace’ through curtains accidentally left open by the pair. This was perhaps a ‘golden holiday’ for Ross, as Borland suggested, with Wilde parted from what he believed to be the ‘corrupting influence’ of Douglas, and with himself healing Wilde’s wounds with the balm of love. Yet, as argued above, it might have also been a period of intense struggle, where he was elated by Wilde’s affections but at the same time anxious about another corruption of his beloved artist by his own love just as his creative genius was about to be revived. We would never know whether Ross was content or conflicted under Wilde’s romantic advancement; but regardless, from what we do know, it was almost certain that Ross was very much smitten if not in deeply in love during that enchanted summer in Berneval.

Yet, again unbeknownst to Ross, despite his promises, Wilde never seriously broke with Douglas. Though few letters from 7 July to 31 August between the two survived, from the ‘loving nature’ of their correspondence which ‘frame this gap’, it is possible that Wilde showered Douglas with ever more ‘exaggerated expressions of affection and devotion’ (as Douglas claimed in his 1929 autobiography) at the same time as he promised Ross that his heart was waiting in the bedroom for him. And given that Douglas was still accusing Ross of pilfering money and exploiting his own absence on 22 July, it was very likely that Wilde never chided Douglas for his offensive conducts towards Ross.

Days after Ross left Berneval for London, on 28 August, Wilde reunited with Douglas in Rouen. He had informed a great many people except for Ross of his plan to escape from Berneval. After their reunion, ‘St Robert of Phillimore’ was replaced by Douglas as his savour from despair and creative impasse. On 31 August, he told Douglas that:

I feel that my only hope of again doing beautiful work in art is being with you. It was not so in old days, but now it is different, and you can really recreate in me that energy and sense of joyous power on which art depends. Everyone is furious with me for going back to you, but they don't understand us. I feel that it is only with you that I can do anything at all. Do remake my ruined life for me, and then our friendship and love will have a different meaning to the world. I wish that when we met at Rouen we had not parted at all. There are such wide abysses now of space and land between us. But we love each other.

Four days later, he finally confessed his real feelings for Douglas to Ross:

Yes: I saw Bosie, and of course I love him as I always did, with a sense of tragedy and ruin. He was on his best behaviour, and very sweet.

Rather incredulously, after confessing that he had lied about breaking with Douglas, in the same letter, he told Ross that he really wanted him and beckoned Ross to join him in Rouen. We could only imagine how Ross responded to the invitation.

Two weeks after Rouen, after he managed to borrow some money from a couple of his friends, on 15 September, Wilde and Douglas eloped to Naples, the city where homosexual men could enjoy ‘freedom from morals’. From Naples, he told Ross that his returning to Douglas was ‘psychologically inevitable’, because he could not ‘live without the atmosphere of Love’, and the fact that Douglas had ‘wrecked [his] life’ only made him love Douglas even more. To Ross, it was nothing less than a ‘metaphorical slap in the face’. But to him, the cruellest part of that letter was perhaps:

I could have lived all my life with you, but you have other claims on you — claims you are too sweet a fellow to disregard — and all you could give me was a week of companionship. […] for the last month at Berneval I was so lonely that I was on the brink of killing myself. The world shuts its gateway against me, and the door of Love lies open. When people speak against me for going back to Bosie, tell them that he offered me love, and that in my loneliness and disgrace I, after three months' struggle against a hideous Philistine world, turned naturally to him.

Relegating Ross to a part of the ‘hideous Philistine world’ which ‘shut its gateway’ after all of his sweet affection and labour of love was so callous that it seemed almost heartless. Moreover, dangling the dream of a life together before Ross’s eyes only to dash it by blaming his own infidelity on Ross’s absence was perhaps as hurtful as he could have been. Ross was understandably devastated and furious. In the following week he sent Wilde multiple angry letters. In response, Wilde wrote:

I have not answered your letters, because they distressed me and angered me — and I did not wish to write to you of all people in the world in an angry mood. You have been such a good friend to me: your love, your generosity, your care of me in prison and out of prison are the most lovely things in my life. Without you what would I have done? As you made my life for me, you have a perfect right to say what you choose to me; but I have no right to say anything to you except to tell you how grateful I am to you, and what a pleasure it is to feel gratitude and love at the same time for the same person. I dare say that what I have done is fatal, but it had to be done. It was necessary that Bosie and I should come together again; I saw no other life for myself. For himself he saw no other: all we want now is to be let alone, but the Neapolitan papers are tedious and wish to interview me, etc. They write nicely of me, but I don't want to be written about. I want peace- that is all. Perhaps I shall find it.

Adding insult to injury, after declaring that he saw ‘no other life for [him]self’ but being with Douglas, he told Ross that they have rented a ‘lovely villa over the sea and a nice piano’ in Naples. But when a heartbroken Ross questioned him whether he wanted his[Ross’s] literary assistance at all, Wilde was quick to take him up on the offer. Because Ross’s letters were lost, we could not tell whether his offer was genuine or angry sarcasm; but regardless, despite the betrayal which ended their romantic affair, Ross stayed on as Wilde’s faithful editor, assistant, and literary executor.

The elopement shocked everyone who had Wilde’s welfare at heart, chief of whom Constance. Mere months before, she was contemplating letting her ex-husband see their children despite the trauma he had inflicted upon the family, as long as he stay away from Alfred Douglas, whom she referred to as ‘that appalling individual’. After the betrayal, there was no way she could stomach paying her ex-husband £3 a week to sustain him and the ‘male equivalent of a mistress […] who had torn her family apart’. Perhaps moved by her agony, More Adey advised Wilde to give up his weekly £3 from Constance ‘in the name of Beauty and Art’, which he refused to do. But regardless, pursuant to the terms of their divorce settlement, Constance promptly terminated his weekly income on 16 November. Under his earnest entreaties over the subsequent weeks, Ross still sent Wilde small sums to keep him financially afloat as much as possible, though he was understandably unwilling to defend Alfred Douglas to Constance.

Over the next two months, Ross wrote to Wilde about nothing but literature and business. He diligently assisted with the writing and editing of The Ballad of Reading Gaol, and Wilde had accepted a great many of his suggestions. However, trouble arose when the poem was about to go to the press in November. As Constance had cut off Wilde’s weekly income, and Lady Queensberry Douglas’s, both men were anxious for immediate profit from the poem. Consequently, Wilde proposed to serialise the Ballad on Reynolds, an English newspaper with a seedy reputation, before having Leonard Smithers publishing it as a book. From a business perspective this was self-destructive, for serialisation would spoil the book sale. Unable to drill such basic commercial awareness into Wilde’s head, Smithers complained that Wilde knew as much about the publishing business ‘as a chrysanthemum’. And despite Wilde’s insistence to Ross that Smithers ‘did not mind a bit’ the poem appearing elsewhere, Smithers had in fact written to Ross on 23 October, threatening that if Wilde was to ‘Reynolds-ise’ him, he shall ‘send back the manuscript of his poem’. Thus Ross was ardently against publishing the Ballad in any newspaper. This, to Alfred Douglas, who probably knew less about business than a chrysanthemum since he had always prided himself on his aristocratic aloofness above the commercial world, seemed like sabotage. In his letter to More Adey, he accused Ross of starving himself and Wilde of money by ‘throwing obstacles in the way of Oscar’s gaining money by his literary work’. The fact that Douglas seemed to have Wilde’s implicit support was the last straw for Ross. On 25 November 1897, Ross wrote to Smithers in resignation of his duty as Wilde’s executor:

I regret to inform you that I have ceased to be on intimate terms with Oscar Wilde or to enjoy his confidence in business or any other matter…Alfred Douglas has written to a common friend that I have tried to prevent any considerable sum being obtained for the poem.

In response, Wilde protested to Smithers that:

Robbie may not wish to be worried any more by my business affairs. He has had endless worry for two years over them but it would be fairer of him to say that it is too much worry to go on, than that he finds he has not my confidence. Such a statement is childish and, if taken seriously by you, would lead you to think that I was at once dense of judgment and coarsely ungrateful in nature.

Wilde seemed painfully oblivious to Ross’s pain. In his correspondence with all of his friends, Ross included, he spilled more ink arguing that Alfred Douglas was not in fact a ‘disreputable person’ than soothing Ross’s hurt after a second betrayal. In a follow-up letter to Smithers, he even complained that Ross was behaving ‘unkindly’ to him, and that Ross had sought to ‘claim the crown of thorns’ of the tragedy ‘on the ground that [his] feelings ha[d] been harrowed’. And although he acquiesced to Ross’s breaking up of their ‘intimate friendship’, he grumbled to Ross that the termination of their business relationship was ‘unjust, unwarranted, and unkind. He went so far as saying to Ross:

I do think you make wonderfully little allowance for a man like myself — now ruined, broken-hearted and thoroughly unhappy. You stab me with a thousand phrases: if one phrase of mine shrills through the air near you, you cry out that you are wounded to death.

The accusation of making insufficient allowance was shockingly inconsiderate. After all, Ross had raised money for him, made time for him, given him his heart and body and provided him with substantial assistance even after the betrayal had left him heartbroken. Perhaps Wilde did not fully grasp the fact that Ross was under no obligation to provide him with comfort or assistance, and that the generosity hitherto had been premised upon love, respect, and mutual trust.

It is difficult to determine why Wilde was so contradictory in his letters to Ross and Douglas, and biographers all had different guesses. Perhaps, as Frankel postulated, his ambition to restore himself in society through the more ‘upstanding and respectable’ Ross by reforming his lifestyle and reconciling with Constance faltered under repeated encounters with vicious homophobia, which reverted him to his old ways and rekindled his infatuation with Douglas. Or perhaps he simply wanted to enjoy the ‘safe, predictable, and consoling homespun of Robbie’s love’ and the ‘dazzling and dangerous love of Bosie Douglas’ at the same time as McKenna contended.Indeed, monogamy was never quite his style. As he confided to John Fothergill:

Two loves have I: The one of comfort; The other of despair. The one has black; The other golden hair.

Or, if one is to be less charitable, he could have been ‘playing off Ross against Douglas’, manipulating Ross’s love to keep him as his free personal assistant, whilst intending to ‘join Douglas as soon as he could without endangering his income’. Douglas himself subscribed to this cynical version of events. In his Autobiography, Douglas rather cruelly boasted that Wilde cared more for ‘my little finger’ than for Ross’s ‘body and soul’ put together. And Rupert Croft-Cooke remembered that Douglas had once told him that Wilde and him kept Ross around as someone ‘useful’ in attending to ‘occasional matters of business’ which they were ‘too indolent’ to attend to themselves. Personally, I see elements of truth in all three interpretations (although to different extents), but I believe Wilde was less socially-minded than in the first version, (somewhat) more genuine in his love than in the second, and more noble a personality than in the third. His will might have faltered, his loyalties were possibly split, and he may have wished to keep Ross as a useful aid, but I believe underlying all of these was the irreconcilable tension between his Apollonian and Dionysian impulses. In Ross, and perhaps in Berneval as well, he saw the possibility of a more orderly, wholesome, and tranquil life, where he could derive artistic inspirations in the embrace of the sun and the sea; whilst Douglas, and perhaps Rouen, Naples, and Paris too, constantly tempted him with the exquisitely decadent pleasures in the shadows of the metropoles. He saw artistic salvation in both men, and therefore he implored both men to ‘remake’ his ruined life for him.

It is even more difficult to scale Ross’s devastation. Most of his letters to Wilde over this period were either lost or destroyed. The few lines which survived read like a heartbroken spouse in a shattered marriage. For one, after discovering Wilde had been lying about his feelings for Douglas, Ross tersely admonished him:

Remember always that you committed the unpardonable and vulgar error of being found out.

The choice of passive voice intriguingly obscures the subject who was doing the ‘f[inding] out’ and leaves much room for imagination. This was probably as much an allusion to Wilde being caught by Queensberry for associating with male renters as to him being ‘found out’ by Ross for associating with Alfred Douglas. The interplay, moreover, was clearly warning Wilde against another disastrous scandal arising out of affair with Douglas. Subsequently, Wilde proposal to dedicate the second edition of The Ballad of Reading Gaol to Ross with the words ‘When I came out of prison some met me with garments / and spices and others with wise counsel / You met me with love’ was sharply dismissed by Ross in his letter to Leonard Smithers, in which he wrote:

I think the dedication with or without initials is ROT and at all events quite unsuitable to a poem of that sort…… I am convinced that dear Oscar meant to tell me and Douglas and two or three other people that each was intended. That only amuses me.

The passage was brimming with the hurt, disillusionment, and passive-aggressiveness of a lover betrayed. It is worth noting that this dedication was first proposed to Ross on 28 May 1897, in that very letter Wilde had canonised Ross as ‘St. Robert of Phillimore’ and promised him that he wanted ‘no other’ in this world. Therefore, Lee was most likely right in postulating that Ross was heartbroken by the fact that ‘the man who had written him words of love a few months before had not trusted him enough tell him the truth’, and had instead ‘lied over and over’ about his feelings for Douglas. He might have also been deeply disillusioned in the character of the man he had loved and admired. As Bogle suggested, because he would ‘do anything he could for Oscar’, he had probably believed in an implicit understanding of mutual support and trust. The relevatin that Wilde might not fully grasp the depth of his devotion, or worse, that a genuine mutual trust had perhaps never existed between them, then, must have been jarring.

But the heartache Ross experienced was not merely a matter of betrayed love, for Wilde’s return to Douglas had torn apart the very fabric of Ross’s aspirations and dreams for Wilde. As a friend, he had wished Wilde a healthy long life after prison, yet his hope was dashed by Wilde’s returning to decadence. Above all, he had worked tirelessly to repair Wilde’s relationship with Constance, hoping to restore his family life if not some semblance of respectability in the eyes of society. Yet, Wilde’s reunion with Douglas had irrevocably cast these hopes adrift, severing the fragile ties that might have reconnected Wilde with his sons. Moreover, as an admirer of Wilde’s artistic genius, Ross must have been pained by the fact that his own effort to rehabilitate ‘the literary Oscar Wilde’ to the European reading public by presenting him as ‘reformed, respectable, and not dangerous to read’ was endlessly sabotaged by Wilde himself —— his cohabitation with Alfred Douglas in Naples had raised endless English eyebrows, for one.

Compared to the ‘branding problem’, however, Ross was probably more devastated by Wilde’s return to the ‘slough of coarse pleasures’ which he had implored Ross to save his soul from merely five months ago. The memory of Wilde begging for salvation from the snare of ‘Bosie’ was still fresh in Ross’s mind, and reading De Profundis word for word multiple times must have further convinced Ross of the exigency of saving Wilde’s art from Douglas’s destructive ‘lack of imagination’. And as mentioned, in his unfinished manuscript 23 years later, Ross fondly recalled Wilde’s post-prison days as a return to the state of nature before corruption: he was enjoying ‘the trees and the grass and the country scents and sounds’ like ‘a saree-bred child might enjoy them on his first day in the country’, and such enjoyment filled him with endless creativity, enabling his imagination to turn Reading Gaol into an ‘enchanted castle’. Thus it was possible that Ross saw Wilde’s disastrous return to Douglas as a result of his own failure to protect Wilde from corrupting influences, and he might have even considered himself partly responsible for failing to suppress his own love and ‘dragging’ Wilde back into ‘homosexual practices’. Therefore, in December 1897, beyond being shattered as a lover and disappointed as a friend, Ross was possibly devastated above all by his sense of guilt for yet again seeing Oscar Wilde expelled from his Garden of Eden.

VII.

After breaking off both his ‘intimate friendship’ and professional relationship with Wilde on 25 November 1897, Ross spent the next couple of months licking his wounds and trying to shut Wilde out of his life. The breakup also made Ross begin to contemplate resuming his own literary career: his best short story, A Case at the Museum, was penned in early 1898 and published in October in Cornhill Magazine. Between November 1897 and January 1898, he did not write to Wilde at all, though he sent him newspaper cuttings to update him on English literary news every once in a while despite his own illness during that harsh winter. When spring finally arrived, Ross was struck by the terrible news of the death of Aubrey Beardsley, another dear artist friend who was only 25 years old. Thus Ross was hardly in a state to cater to Wilde’s needs physically or mentally.

Perhaps realising that he could not do without Ross’s literary and personal assistance, from 25 November to 15 December 1897, Wilde begged for Ross’s forgiveness and return via every channel possible. On 6 December, he wrote Ross a long letter explaining his conduct and expressing his gratitude:

I knew that I was running a fearful risk of losing my income by being with Bosie — I was warned on all sides: my eyes were not blinded. Still l I was a good deal staggered by the blow: one may go to a dentist of one's own free will, but the moment of tooth-extraction is painful, as More's acquiescence in Mr. Hargrove's refusal to pay Mr. Holman wounded me — and I shot poisoned arrows back. […] You have done wonderful things for me; but the Nemesis of circumstances, the Nemesis of character has been too strong for me; and, as I said to More, I think I was a problem for which there was no solution..

On the same day, he reiterated the message of gratitude in his letter to Leonard Smithers:

I am quite broken-hearted about Bobbie's attitude towards me, and the way he has written of me to Alfred Douglas. But nothing can ever spoil the memory of his wonderful devotion to me, or rob me of the pleasure of being deeply grateful to him for the love he showed me.

With the expectation that Smithers would serve as his intermediary in communicating with Ross, he also emphasised that he had parted ways with Alfred Douglas, who was ‘on the way to Paris’. But if Ross was heartbroken by his failure to save Wilde from himself, the apology of ‘the Nemesis of character ha[d] been too strong’ probably only served to rub salt into his wounds. In any case, Ross did not reply to his letters, and Wilde only heard back from Leonard Smithers, who advised him to ‘make it up with Robbie’. In response, on 10 December, he told Smithers:

[…] I would gladly go on my knees from here to Naples if Robbie would be nice to me. I was upset and distressed at everything that had happened, and wrote bitterly - not about anything that was said about me but about what was acquiesced in about someone else. […] I still hope that Robbie may be kind to me again.

But at the same time as he begged for forgiveness and confessed that he was ‘deeply sorry’ for the pain he had inflicted on Ross, Wilde also complained to Smithers about Ross’s reluctance to argue against Constance on the matter of whether Alfred Douglas was indeed a ‘disreputable person’. Moreover, he also grumbled that Ross ‘like most people […] only realises the pain he gets and not the pain he gives.’ In particular, he said:

Robbie's refusal to interest himself in my poem I feel is inartistic of him - my work as a poet is separate from my life as a man - and as for my life, it is one ruined, unhappy, lonely and disgraced. All pity, or the sense of its beauty, seems to me dead in the world.

A day later, perhaps realising that Ross would not take too kindly to his defensiveness when it came to Alfred Douglas, Wilde sent a more suppliant apology to Smithers professing his love for Ross yet again:

As for dear Robbie, if he will kindly send me out a pair of his oldest boots I will blacken them with pleasure, and send them back to him with a sonnet. I have loved Robbie all my life, and have not the smallest intention of giving up loving him. Of all my old friends he is the one who has the most beautiful nature; had my other friends been like him, I would not be the pariah-dog of the nineteenth century. But natures like his are not found twice in a life-time. When dear Robbie heavily bombarded me (an unfair thing, as unfortified places are usually respected in civilised war) I bore it with patriarchal patience. I admit, however, that when he seemed to me slightly casual about someone else, I sent up a rocket of several colours. I am sorry I did so.

And as if worrying that the letters to Smithers were not enough, Wilde also asked More Adey to pass on his love to Robbie in his 15 December letter.

However, Ross could not renounce his love for Oscar Wilde. Despite his every effort to set boundaries and cut the man who had hurt him so terribly out of his life, he could not help but to return to him. When Wilde finally broke with Douglas and beckoned Ross to meet him in Paris in February, Ross gave in; and when they met, it did not take much for Ross to forgive Wilde. And when Constance passed away in April 1898, upon receiving Wilde’s telegraph begging for his presence, Ross at once dropped everything and left for Paris, though he was subsequently very disappointed by how little Wilde was impacted by his ex-wife’s death. Moreover, whilst Alfred Douglas described Wilde as ‘a fat old prostitute’ over his incessant demands for money, Ross continued to dole out money to Wilde to keep him afloat between 1898 and 1899, even when he suspected that Wilde was lavishing money on random boys off the streets of Paris. Notably, once, despite knowing that Wilde was lying to him, despite being strapped for cash himself, and despite the fact that he had not gotten over the hurt, when Wilde asked him for money, Ross sold one of his beloved paintings and asked Leonard Smithers to send £5 to Wilde without stating the source of the money. In return, in February 1899, Ross received a short dedication on a new edition of The Importance of Being Earnest, the brilliant play which Wilde himself never took very seriously.

Over much of 1899, Ross travelled around Europe with his friends and family to recuperate from illness, yet ever so often he gave in to Wilde’s demand for comfort and company. In April 1899, Wilde sent Ross a series of postcards begging him to come to Switzerland because he was desperately unhappy after leaving Harold Mellor. Upon Wilde’s earnest beckoning, Ross headed to Switzerland despite being ill at the time. There, Ross paid off every hotel bill Wilde had racked up out of his own pockets, bought him train tickets, brought him back to Paris, and spent several days with Wilde trying to get him sobered up. In August, Ross fell ill again and spent a couple of weeks in the countryside with More Adey. Then, in October, before joining his mother and niece in Italy, he deliberately stopped at Paris to see Wilde again upon his request.

Wilde decayed rapidly over the two years, and Ross constantly tried to save Wilde from himself. Apart from the old habits of lavishing money on beautiful clothes and beautiful boys, alcoholism was a particular cause for concern. According to his acquaintances, though Wilde had never been ‘exactly sober’, but since 1898 he began drinking excessive quantities of champagne and absinthe, and was often barely able to ‘stagger from the Madeleine to the Opera’. One claimed that he also used cocaine regularly. Moreover, insomnia was increasingly a problem. In March 1898, he asked Ross for money to rent two rooms ‘for insomnia’, and as he sunk deeper into alcoholism, he also began spending every night talking non-stop to everyone who cared to listen, from Ferdinand Esterhazy to poor street girls. This was most likely the consequence of severe depression. or other mental illnesses. Unfortunately, without modern knowledge into mental illness, he was never diagnosed and seldom found understanding. Even Ross, who wanted nothing but the best for Wilde, found it difficult to sympathise with his struggles or to help him at times. For one, Ross advised most friends that if they were to send Wilde anything, it was better to send clothes than money, for money would be squandered in self-destructive ways in no time. Similarly, when he was with Wilde in Switzerland in April 1999, he sternly warned Wilde of the consequences of alcoholism and ordered him to sober up, but was unable to prevent a relapse six months later. Ross blamed himself for not having ‘ordered around’ Wilde enough to keep him sober; however, perhaps Wilde was right in complaining that ‘Robbie is a dear but he does not understand’.

More intriguingly, Ross also tried to steer Wilde’s away from homosexuality despite his own relationships with men, and even as he occasionally engaged in polyamorous affairs with Wilde and his lovers. For one, he objected to Wilde taking unfurnished apartments for fear that he would take endless Parisian street boys to bed if he was accorded such freedom. He also lectured Wilde on associating with ‘gutter perverts’ and even went so far as suggesting another marriage. Yet, this apparent contradiction in Ross's stance was most likely not due to hypocrisy or wariness for societal opinion as some have suggested.: after all, he rarely lectured any other friend on their sexuality, and he opposed several marriages of convenience of his homosexual friends. I believe the key to unravelling this contradiction is in Wilde’s retort to Ross’s admonitions in mid-1898:

It is a curious thing, dear little absurd Robbie, that you now always think that I am in the wrong. […] The only thing that consoles me is that your moral attitude towards yourself is even more severe than your moral attitude towards others. Yours is the pathological tragedy of the hybrid-the Pagan-Catholic. You exemplify the beauty and uselessness of conscience. When I read your often bitter censures of me in your stern lectures, I think of your stern censures of yourself — of your awful curtain lectures — delivered alone — listened to in silence — unanswerable merely because they are unanswered. Judge and prisoner the same person — yourself your own gaoler.

Echoing the subtle subtext in Ross’s unfinished manuscript reflecting on Wilde’s immediate post-prison days, here, again, we see Ross at once defying homophobia and internalising it: he never consciously denied his love for men, yet he could not help but to see it as his sin and corruption. His internalised homophobia, I believe, was not social but religious and psychological in nature: he did not shy away from associating with homosexual men as if it was a social blight, and he never intended to marry some poor girl to win societal acceptance, but his conscience before God was never at ease. Thus, he was his own ‘gaoler’ constantly engaged in self-flagellation. Consequently, he could accept homosexuality in anyone but the man he loved the most: everyone, including himself, could succumb to their base nature, but the artistic genius must be shielded from corruption.

In April 1900, Ross spent his final days of joy with Wilde after recovering from a horrible flu, a period he later described with warmth in a letter to Adela Schuster. In the letter, Ross recalled that during their brief sojourn in Rome, Wilde wanted to be received into the Catholic Church through him, but he[Ross] believed that there was no priest in Rome sufficiently intelligent to debate theology with Wilde. Moreover, he fondly remembered in great detail how Wilde ‘made a good story’ out of the stay with him by playfully telling people that ‘whenever he[Wilde] wanted to be a Catholic I[Ross] stood at the door with a flaming sword which only turned in one direction and prevented him from entering’. But the happiness was tinged with a strong carpe diem flavour. In Rome, Wilde indulged in numerous liaisons with beautiful boys, and before leaving, he mused that:

In the mortal sphere I have fallen in and out of love, and fluttered hawks and doves alike. How evil it is to buy Love, and how evil to sell it! And yet what purple hours one can snatch form that grey slowly-moving thing we call Time! My mouth is twisted with kissing, and I feed on fevers.

The awareness of his own mortality was poignant, for that ‘grey slowly-moving thing’ was to grind to a halt for him in just eight months.

Despite Ross’s every effort, in the end, he could not prevent Wilde’s life from slipping through his fingers. After returning to Paris, he wandered slowly from cafe to cafe looking pale, lonely, and desolate. One of his old friends recalled him saying that he had ‘lived all there was to live’, and that ‘it won’t be long’ before he finally meets the end. In October, the ear infection he had caught in Reading Prison remised. Consequently, he had to undergo a major operation which exteriorised his middle ear and the mastoid cavity in order to prevent the infection from spreading to his brain, this resulted in permanent and complete hearing loss in his left ear. Wilde downplayed the condition’s seriousness to Ross before the operation, but sent him two consecutive telegraphs begging him to come to Paris as soon as possible because he was ‘terribly weak’. Ross immediately set aside everything and headed for Paris, where he stayed with Wilde for a month, taking care of him every day and accompanying him on drives. After being reassured by the doctor that Wilde was recovering, on 13 November, Ross left for the South of France to care for his ailing mother.

However, unbeknownst to all of them, the surgery did not prevent the invisible bacteria’s advancement towards Wilde’s brain. Merely two weeks later, on 26 November, Ross received an urgent letter from Reginald Turner (who had remained in Paris) informing him that Wilde was very unwell. On 27 November, Turner sent Ross two other ominous letters asking Ross what shall happen upon Wilde’s death, followed by another message the next day informing Ross that ‘it’s all over with Oscar’. Ross caught the express train to Paris at once. Upon arriving in Paris on 29 November, he found Wilde emaciated, struggling to breathe, and unable to talk. This at once persuaded Ross that Oscar was, in fact, dying. Remembering his promise in Rome to bring a Catholic priest to Wilde’s deathbed, Ross, though still weary from the 17-hour train journey, immediately went about Paris to search for a priest that would accept Wilde into the Catholic Church as he[Wilde] had wished. It was not until evening that he managed to find Father Cuthbert Dunne to administer last rites for Wilde. After fulfilling his promise to Wilde, Ross wired Harris, Adrian Hope, and Alfred Douglas about Wilde’s urgent condition late at night, before collapsing exhausted himself. That night was restless, with numerous nurse's calls and a final summons to Wilde's side as dawn neared at 5:30 a.m., marking the beginning of the end. The horrible process lasted for nearly ten hours, and Ross was by his deathbed witnessing every bit of the gruesome struggle. He would later recall this horrible day in painfully graphic details to More Adey:

[…] I had never heard anything like it before; it sounded like the horrible turning of a crank, and it never ceased until the end. His eyes did not respond to the light test any longer. Foam and blood came from his mouth, and had to be wiped away by someone standing by him all the time. […] From 1 o’clock we did not leave the room; the painful noise from the throat became louder and louder. […] at 1.45 the time of his breathing altered. I went to the bedside and held his hand, his pulse began to flutter. He heaved a deep sign, the only natural one I had heard since I arrived, the limbs seemed to stretch involuntarily, the breathing came fainter; he passed at 10 minutes to 2 p.m. exactly.

The pain was palpable through the text. We can scarcely fathom his agony when wiping foam and blood from the lips of a beloved for hours, or when sensing the pulse of the man he had cherished so dearly grow ever fainter under his fingertips as he held his hand for the final time. After washing and cleaning Wilde’s body, Ross requested Maurice Gilbert to take a deathbed picture of him, the picture is still preserved in the Robert Ross Memorial Collection at Oxford today.

Douglas would later accuse Ross of misleading him to prevent him from seeing Wilde one last time. With all due respect for the deceased, this is plainly nonsense. Firstly, if Ross actually believed that Wilde was dying in early November, when he telegram Douglas to inform him that Wilde was ill but was recovering, he would not have left on 13 November himself only to return in haste barely 24 hours before Wilde’s death. Secondly, Ross did telegram Douglas on 29 November not long after he arrived in Paris himself. It could hardly have been more urgent. The unfortunately fact was simply that Ross himself had arrived too late. Thirdly, even Laura Lee, who is often prone to giving Alfred Douglas excessive benefit of the doubt, could not help but to point out that Douglas only had his own lusts to blame for the lack of farewells to his former lover. He had countless opportunities to visit Wilde in Paris between August and November —— after all, unlike Ross, he did not have to work and had just inherited a substantial amount of money from his deceased father. But instead, he chose to buy a stable in Chantilly and idle there; moreover, even when he visited Paris in October, he spent all of his time cavorting with cabaret boys instead of visiting Wilde.

Entangled in French bureaucratic red tapes and constrained by financial shortages, Wilde could only be laid to rest in a modest, provisional grave in Bagneux. At his funeral, Alfred Douglas was the chief mourner leading all of Wilde’s friends and former lovers. In Douglas’s shadow, Ross quietly laid on Wilde’s grave a wreath with the simple yet heartfelt inscription ‘From the admirer of his genius, a tribute to his literary achievements’. I believe this proved Maureen Borland right in believing that Ross mourned for the waste of Wilde’s genius, and that in his tormented heart he ‘longed for the Wilde of former years, the man who had dominated London theatre-land, the man who had, before hie his imprisonment, been destined to become one of the greatest dramatists of the century.’ As he laid the wreath, Ross silently vowed that once he acquire sufficient means, he shall secure a more magnificent final abode befitting Oscar Wilde, ideally in Père Lachaise, that famous resting place of Abelard and Heloise.

#history #queer history #victorian #victorian england #oscar wilde #robbie ross #alfred douglas #literature #literary history #The ballad of reading gaol #de profundis #lgbtq+ history

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my-rose-tinted-glasses · 5 months

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Non BL Fan watches Only Friends - Part III (Part I) (Part II)

So Neely finished Only Friends. To say they didn't enjoy it would be a massive understatement. So much so, that I ended up feeling guilty for persuading them to watch it. Which is silly of course, as they kept reminding me, but I can't help it. If anyone manages to read all of this you'll understand. They did enjoy writing about it though, specially in a more casual tone than they're used to. They wrote as soon as they finished so it's kinda raw and personal because of their own personal feelings. i always check with them before I post to make sure they're okay with everything, and they were. There's a freedom about writing from a personal place when you don't know who's gonna read it, that even though this space is anonymous always gives me pause and stopped me from writing about this show. They didn't have such concerns.

Because this is the last one, it's the longest one, so just skip to the conclusion for a broader view on the show as a whole.

Neely's final thoughts on Only Friends

I think it’s worth to preface whatever is coming next here by saying I think I am in general, and specifically at the moment, for personal reasons, particularly sensitive to coupledom and the social pressures to belonging in one. This feels relevant to preface, because it has been the main thing that kept reverting back to me during my time watching the series. It felt almost like it was punishing me as I watched it. This was the thing that, despite not really connecting so deeply with any of the characters, made me shed a tear at the end of the last episode, as everyone celebrated their built Hostel, and the scorned-slut doesn’t even deserve a passing mention. Boston was erased, made completely invisible, he left no mark, he was the rock that fell in the centre of the lake and there were no ripples, because he refused to assimilate.

And, just like him, I didn’t belong either, no part of the moral and main journey of this story was for me. It made it very clear why, and how, they thought I deserved to be excluded. It wasn’t like the world was there but I didn’t quite find my place, wasn’t like I couldn’t connect but I was welcome to try to, it wasn’t awkward in that way; it was more like I was very purposefully being denied access to it. It wasn’t the awkwardness of being in a new place and not quite fitting in, it was a fairly explicit violence of “we do not want you here”. And I know Boston was a horrible character, the villain, there was pretty much nothing he did right over the course of this, and with that, he did deserve some sort of punishment, we could argue he did deserve to be fully left out. But I’m more concerned with who created and wrote him, who also created and wrote the other characters, and why this is where we end up, why it was decided that Boston was the one person that did not deserve to exist and repent in this Universe. He was incurable. The cruelty of the hostel they’ve built together, and the series itself, being called Only Friends, and ending with this really pointed exclusion - it floored me. He’s not a friend, because he’s a slut. It’s such a harsh, morally-superior ending; I felt stepped and spat on. But I have to say, it did not surprise me in the slightest, as this is the world they’ve carefully built throughout the 12 episodes. The cherry on top being that Jennie and her partner have been made part of the group. The slut is cleansed and a new couple enters. Could we be more obvious, writers? And this, not to get all political, is honestly one of the most unqueer messages a show could wrap itself in.

Boston: I will start here since I mentioned him, but I don’t really know what to say. But also just typing this first sentence, I know it’s gonna be the longest section. I think it’s careless, problematic, deeply biased, I wanna even say dangerous, to write a character in this way. To explicitly say: this is the one person in our world that deserves no redemption, that will have no opportunity to repent, that deserves no future.

It wasn’t enough that he went after Top from the start, when that story line was exhausted and culminated, what do we do with him? How could we make him get even worse? How can we punish him even further for his ways? - Oh, make him have sex with a friend’s younger brother.

Why was that storyline even there, aside from just hammering even more into the audience that slut=bad? Brother didn’t even matter beforehand, he was written fully into the show to come and tell us how bad Boston is. Yes, Brother lied, and we get a mild relief that we are not going to go with Boston as a criminal, but to follow fucking your friends Boyfriend with fucking your friends younger brother, consensually or not, is a bad bad move. And the show is telling us: bad bad slut, sluts are bad bad. And the show does this without ever giving us a context for why he is so careless, why he keeps fucking up - because that doesn’t matter in this world.

In this universe, in Boston’s case alone, past trauma or situations don’t matter, his biggest sin is being a slut (which as I said about the 4 past episodes, isn’t even a good word to describe him). Top get’s a more or less fleshed out fire trauma, Ray gets a consistent referring back to dead mother and complicated family; Boston we know is in the closet to his family, and is stressed about protecting his dad’s campaign, but never does the show try to use this to justify his behaviour like it does with the other characters traumas and backgrounds. For the show, it’s enough that Boston is a slut; for that fact alone, he deserves being written as culprit into almost every single horrible act contained in this series. After all of this, and after being completely shunned by his friend group and ending completely alone, he gets 20minutes of being shown to us as a person with feelings, with emotions, with struggles and remorse (BUT ONLY WITHIN A ROMANTIC PAIR, cause this is the sole context in this universe where one can truly exist); but not for long, don’t forget he is a slut - and what are sluts? BAD BAD - of course he will lie to Nick and literally hook up with someone (i refuse to acknowledge that ridiculous characters existence) DURING their date. I just found this disgusting, kinda revolting, and it’s genuinely been a while that I’ve felt so upset at a media portrayal. My hopes for media portrayals of queerness isn’t very high, but Boston - wow. It is heartbreaking to think that even queer creators think of us in this way. There were very faint moments I found endearing in the short stint of his relationship with Nick. Such as their conversation in the bench, after Boston cheats with Boeing (don’t get me started on this lazy-ass-writing-slutty-exboyfriend-deus-exmachina insert…….) it hinted ever so slightly at who Boston is - that he has opened himself to romance but potentially wants an open relationship; and I think Nick’s reaction wasn’t judgemental, but just well practiced boundaries, which the character needed. “it’s cool this is who you are, but this is not who I am”. We could’ve had that earlier, as part of a wider Boston redemption plot, but again.. slut=bad, no redemption possible. But they kinda closed their connection okay, I guess. With the friends, he is not even fully given a shot at apologizing. We get a really crushing goodbye scene where he is allowed in one last time, but where very clearly he is left out socially and emotionally. The single one in the group, whereas the others have found their final destination in coupledom. Their memories as friends don’t matter to shit, their whole lives together until that moment don’t matter to shit. Boston doesn’t belong anymore, he’s been deleted and made invisible already - and the reason he doesn’t isn’t due what he did: Top was given time and space to repent, Chueam has forgiven Boston for the brother situation, Ray has been absolved, even Sand has forgiven Top, everyone that has now paired-up deserves forgiving. But Boston, nope. Boston is not being judged and put aside based on his betrayals and mistakes. As it is reminded to us, by showing Boston messaging Nick, Boston doesn’t belong because he has refused to partner up. Everyone has moved-on, ascended, to their coupled-up states, and Boston, the selfish, egocentric, with no feelings or care for anyone, has refused to: so he has to go. Once again, romance is given all the avenues to repent itself, to reinvent itself, to flourish and last in the face of all mistakes; but friendship is disposable. A whole life of friendship that doesn’t even deserve an honest conversation in an attempt at forgiveness (Boston) VS a few weeks or months of dating that deserved all the space to repent itself (Top).

As I watched this scene, I just kept thinking how, had Boston accepted monogamy with Nick, this whole group dynamic would be different. They would’ve been laughing all together, Boston wouldn’t have been left out awkwardly checking his phone. I am almost sure even that Mew would’ve accepted Boston’s apology, and given him time to re-gain his trust. Because if tamed by a relationship with Nick, Boston could be trusted to not jump on Top. But single, and slutty, he is a danger to be controlled and never trusted. slut=bad, never forget. So, closing on Boston, I just really hope he is happy in NYC, and hope he has managed to escape the totalitarian puritan prison the writers have set this universe in.

Nick: shortly…I wasn’t a fan of him going back to Boston for that period, but I do think generally he had a good character growth. Probably the most meaningful character growth for me, due to ending up alone, and having set such good boundaries with Boston which was his biggest weakness. All the other character growths are very weirdly edged into promises to their loved ones, and they generally feel less honest and less long lasting to me, but Nick felt like he really grew and learned for himself. And I was happy for him. He deserved that. (side-note: what happened to the older boss he was boyfriends with for a moment? It was weird how he just disappeared. I’m happy they gave Nick time to be single and think about his needs and wants as a solo person. I really didn’t expect that from the show, I thought they would clump him into some happy half-arsed relationship with this boss. But this said, Nick did basically take two boyfriends at once, we weren’t given a scene in which he talks to the other guy, so I would like to know what happened, did Nick just ghost this guy after saying they’re together?) AND THE SHOW SHOULD’VE HAD SO MUCH MORE SCENES LIKE NICK AND SAND CAMPING!! Honestly these two were the only friendship shown on screen, they were so endearing, and every small moment we got of them interacting as friends was when the show felt genuine and loving. Of course the show had to interrupt this with the unexpected and unboundaried arrival of RayMANCE.

Sand & Ray: Listen I’ve gotta stan them because otherwise I will just hate everything. I think they are sweet together, they are the only chemistry I could genuinely feel, the way they communicate is amazing, and Sand is the cutest. They’re the couple goals for me in this series.

But I’m not happy with these last 4 episodes, or should I say 8. So much unnecessary back and fourth drama to then end us at a place where they were already close to being at the start of their relationship. Yea, Ray is aware of his drinking and trying to stop, because abracadabra magic of romance or whatever, but so what? I think it’s a disservice to Ray that Mew had to be the one breaking up with him; he deserved to have agency over his own healing from trauma, and his own moving on. And Mew deserved to be rejected, and not having everyone eating from his hand, for once in this series. Even if they had to have this weird awkward bad fling moment, I wish Ray had been the one telling Mew at the hospital that he picked Sand. Sand deserved to be picked, as much as Ray deserved to undo himself of his own insecurity that Mew was so tied into. It weakens the Sand Ray connection for me, that Mew kinda gave the first push to make Ray pick Sand.

But overall, I’m happy with Sandray’s reunion, and I think the ending gave us some good friend moments between Mew and Ray that I was glad to see too, I guess.

I also think Ray’s conclusion is a huge disservice to a story line about addiction, and again borderline dangerous. Tying sobriety and a rehab process to someone else, going sober for someone else, is literally 101 no no rules of AA and most recovery processes. And I know there’s like two lines in Sand and Ray’s convo about this, where Sand mentions he has to do it for himself, but that’s not what happens in any way. To wedge your well being on someone being with you, to put this weight on the relationship itself, and also put your health balanced on it back, it is incredibly precarious, unfair on the other person, and dangerous to you and others.

And it's more than studied that the chances of relapse when people attempt to stop addictions in this way, is much higher than when they are led to a path of loving themselves first, and sobering up for themselves first. So in my head, Ray didn’t repent, heal or grow; I thought he genuinely would with the therapy scene and everything but, I don’t trust it. He will go back to drinking as soon as him and Sand have an argument or disagreement; just like he did when “the-one-i-will-not-mention”, Sand AND Top’s ex, shows up. But again, this show shits on everything that isn’t a couple. This show never cared about Ray or his health or happiness, it cares about SandRay; just like it never cared individually about any other character, it cared about them WITH their "other-halves”.

Not much to say about Sand himself. I love him, he’s my show crush, and he did pull me through the worst moments, and there were many, as I watched this imho badly conceived mess of a show with a depressing message.

He is consistent, he is a good friend, a loving partner, he communicates well, he fucks up but owns up to it, he apologises, he cares. I was too done with the show antics to care about the whole Ray’s dad paying him or not paying him to force Ray into rehab, I thought that was stupid and unnecessary to add to their plot. So many better ways to explore their class dynamics, which they’d already kinda done to varying levels of success throughout the series.

And I feel similarly with Sand’s ex, that I shall not be mentioning. Just weird filler stories that took up screen time when we could’ve tied ends better, shown more general character growth overall, or idk, wild, but giving the designated shameful slut of this series, Boston, some more episode time to really repent and heal. I think there was a nice potential parallel in Sand and Ray’s differing relationships with their dads, that could’ve also been explored sweetly and used to grow their connection and maybe cause drama even, that I was interested in; but it wasn’t really pursued properly or given a closure. But, that’s all. They win, especially Sand, but in the context of this series that’s not something I’d be bragging about if I was them.

Top & Mew:

I feel like you’ll want me to talk about them and contrarily to this show I like my friends and wanna make an effort for you. But genuinely I couldn’t care less about them, which is also what complicated me watching the show as they were very clearly the main characters. I don’t know, they have no chemistry for me as a couple, I could never convince myself into believing they were together, or that they loved each other, or found each other desirable. I don’t think this is about the acting, but just the way they were written, and the specific troupe they represent which I find so common in gay media: the virgin, or the straight-edge, who melts the heart of, and drastically changes, the player.

I think everything about their storyline was textbook. I’m terrible with remembering names of things but so many times I’ve sat through this over and over again, in very very similar ways, and all of them have this air of judgement. I think, as I said before, the virgin insert, the pure insert, the straight-edge insert, is a plot point to allow judgement on queerness, and that’s the role that Mew takes, and consequently, Top too, once he gets assimilated enough to be accepted into being a couple.

Mew is just kinda there for the whole time, being pure and pristine, being naive, young, untouched, virgin, and things happen to him, at the hand of these horrible, vicious, drunk, sex-driven, cock-hungry gays. I felt so consistently like I was being told to go “oh no, poor Mew”; but I just wanted to go “fuck you you entitled little b—-“. There was for me a consistent taint of manipulation and coercion in his interactions with others, this weaponisation of holding, this overt playing the victim, that I just could not take. I think this is seen with Ray for most of their connection, with Top, and with how he gets revenge on Boston.

There is a small moment of acknowledgement with Ray when they decide to be just friends, at the hospital, but still… I guess there’s also a little hint that Mew fucked up when he plots with the one I won’t mention, the toy-airplane gifter, the ex of everyone and their dog, that appeared magically our of nowhere to create plots I did not need. But I don’t think this was enough. The whole thing read too much to me like we should see Mew as a victim, but I couldn’t do that; he annoyed me quite a bit most of the time, and I just kinda was counting down the minutes for him not to be on screen. I think Top didn’t really have a redemption arc, but I can see why in the context of the show it’s understood as that by all the other characters. I guess he showed his love or commitment to Mew alone and that’s all that matters apparently, but I think his main issues are more into his controlling tendencies in relationships, monogamous and committed or not, and none of that was addressed. He continues to be weird and jealous about Ray for lord knows why, he has this weird macho ew reaction to being kissed by Sand during Truth or Dare at the end that also just shows me he is a creep; he does this huge manipulation plot to get Mew to move in with him, by bringing it up several times when Mew wanted to think, and even re-planning the house and making sad pup face and voice when confronted with Mew saying he isn’t sure. And then he wants to be the sugar daddy, or own his coffee shop, insert himself into all aspects of Mew life, but always holding the power side. Their power dynamics are just problematic for me here, and I kept getting the kind of ick feeling about him, and the relationship. To me, Mew still feels more like a trophy to Top, something he wants to own, as this amulet that proves he is not a slut anymore, a player anymore; it doesn’t seem to me like a genuine connection, and definitely not a loving one.

Even the fire scene at the end, which I felt should’ve been this emotional tying together moment, this metaphor that now Top isn’t alone anymore, felt kind of weird and off to me, especially as Top then has to go check on the staff and Mew is left alone, there, waiting, like.. an object left on the shelf? Maybe I’m being harsh, and maybe I forgot core parts of their relationship and storyline because they really did just bore me, I felt nothing, and I zoomed out at times and only in their scenes because I found them bland and I couldn’t take the predictability of their fates.

Chueam: I’m mostly adding this section as a protest and a wish that I’d been given more to say about her. I stand by all I said in what I sent you about the last episodes. I think she plays the classic woman insert in a gay male series, the balance, the good friend and stable partnered, the moral compass, the mother figure of the group. She doesn’t have anything aside from her relationship to the men, or family, or partner we barely hear from. Even the last scene before the men go to watch the fireworks and the women stay at home, it feels so parent-kids coded: the way April and Chueam are at the door, waving their kids goodbye somehow. IDK. it had very strong semiotics of parents waving their kids bye to prom. I wish we had seen more of them, I wish something had happened for them that wasn’t related to the messy gays. She was fun, and attentive, she worked hard, she cared for family and friends consistently, and it seemed like she had a healthy relationship with kinda funny quarrels between them (like her not liking Aprils films is funny to explore no?!). I would’ve loved to be allowed to witness them more. I wanna know what she allowed herself to dream of. She deserved so much more. I’d trade out the unnecessary brother-fucking storyline for something about her. I’d trade out Sand getting offered money to take Ray to rehab for something more about her. I’d trade out Top and Mew still broken up but playing family with Mew’s mums for something more about her. (even tho I liked the older generation lesbian representation. A dinner party between Chueam and them??? I’d fund that spin-off.) I’d trade out the whole ex of the world, deus ex-machina, sudden drama insert for no reason, airplane model named character, every single appearance and storyline for something more about her. I’d honestly probably trade out both Top and Mew as a whole to a focused storyline on Chueam and April. Well… maybe Boston should’ve just never existed if he was gonna be trashed unfairly like he was from this Universe unrepented, and we could’ve just had more Chueam from the start.

(aaaand yes I wasn’t gonna talk about Boeing because I think adding him was just lazy writing and unnecessary and I basically ignored any kinda plot he created because it added nothing to the story in the end aside from being episode filler. I already don’t like when series bring a random ex without motivations just to cause drama, so I really eye-rolled at him being the ex of two character and not only causing drama on both sides, but also coming to stick the last knife on our already tortured scorn-slut lol. But oh well, I enjoyed having him shirtless on my screen though.)

Anyway, I finished and I am done: This show left me angry and terribly sad and feeling a bit like I was being hated on for absolutely no reason. I am not emotional about it aside from my couple of tears at the ending, cause I ultimately have more to do than care about this guy’s opinion on the world and of me I guess, but eye-roll.

In all honesty and without wanting to cancel anyone, I think this is a deeply irresponsible piece of media, queer nonetheless. It comes across queer phobic to me, this type of queer support that is waged on queers assimilating to how heteronormative society has lived and predominantly lives. It discriminates not about who you love or want to have sex with, but how you want to relate to people and how you want to claim agency over your sexuality and life. I just don’t understand why this is what you would choose to put out into the world, but i guess this was made to shock. And maybe that’s the start of the problem. Its the equivalent to the point of view where “it’s okay if you’re gay, as long as you’re seeking a husband” kind of rhetoric. The wide-plethora of queer identities and relationship styles are burned at the fire. And I’m not asking for the almost circus superficial tick-list of representational politics that western media is on the verge of becoming, and I’m really trying to hold on to some sensitivity that cultural context is very different. But I think what they’ve done is shitty and damaging beyond that. I am not saying I needed a liberated slut Boston on a 6 people polycule, or that I needed an open relationship or anything. You could have most people end up in couples and others end up alone but happy, in a way that didn’t need to include the absolute and nearly consecutive and relentless shaming of hook-ups, of any sort of personal desire that doesn’t include 1-1 romantic coupledom, the relentless punishing of every character that dreams a little different, and the consistent disregard and deprioritising of any connection and interaction that isn’t romantic. It’s just a bit lazy and shitty to me.

Chocomilk, the other BL you showed me a while ago, also was intensely focused on romance, as I guess BL is in general, but friendships were there, other non-romantic interactions were there without being judged or outshone. And I think this is true to most media right, the romantic love often takes centre stage. I really think and hope I’m taking this in consideration when complaining about this show - I don’t think its the only show to blame of course, but it felt more intense here, more pointed and much much more judgemental. Maybe because there really was such little care to every other relationship and interaction aside from romance, because every redemption (or lack of), every character improvement was ultimately based on the fact that they were now romantically involved with one significant other; but also of course, Boston’s ending and general storyline, which has been the most direct and relentless attack on a choice of living and relating to others sexually, that I’ve seen on TV in a long long time. This I have to say, I found really shamefully irresponsible. Ultimately I think the writing in this is lazy and shock based, I think they supported themselves on having famous actors and put them in situations that would shock and cause commotion to an audience that already knows and likes those people. It wasn’t about character building or journey cause we got little of that. From my perspective, and my little context, it was about putting famous BL faces doing things that aren’t usually very BL for the simple point of being shocking and different, rather than for good narrative and story purposes.

So we are left with a story that makes little sense, and to me just feels like a messy manifesto against sexual freedom.

The End

Well that's over. If you've made it to the end, thanks for reading.💜

I'll tag some people that left comments last time or reblogged. @doyou000me @summerfullofsnow @o-nao-lugar @lurkingshan @italianpersonwithashippersheart @mygwenchan however don't feel any obligation to read or comment

#rose and neely ramble #only friends the series #only friends meta #thai bl #ofts #only friends

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