#DIZZY YOUTHFUL SELF DESTRUCTION | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

faebriel · 9 months

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and you caused it: chapter 1

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In which Niki has a terrible secret, Puffy just wants to move on, Tommy sneaks into casino parties and Wilbur learns to deal with anger being justified. Or - the one thing they don't warn you of, when dropping nuclear warheads on old friends, is fallout.

in chapter one: wilbur does his very best to be a good friend. niki continues to have issues with making apologies. a casino opening party is attended, and a few well-kept secrets find their way into the light.

wc: 9.8k (this part's the longest! you can tell i start writing out fics from their opening scenes lol)

so before getting into things, i'd like to lay out a few warnings and additional comments.

cws include: implied/referenced suicide, implied/referenced self-destructive behaviour, implied/referenced child abuse, and discussed food restriction. this is very much a fic about trying to deal with the fact that you haven't done great things and having trouble coming to terms with your mistakes and wrongdoings, and not always approaching that in a healthy way. do i still need to clarify all my fics are extremely entrenched in unreliable narrators? the viewpoint(s) of this fic most definitely are.

this fic should be considered canon-divergent from early season 3, as a direct sequel to cause most of us are bitter over someone.

apologies for some of the broken up snippet boxes. did you know tumblr has a character limit per text block? i didn't, until today.

and yes, this fic is also named after youth by daughter. i mean, come on.

with that in mind, onto the story proper.

prologue

The crater is so, so much bigger than she thought it would be. Crumbling rock stretches onward, a chasm fields larger than the pit that once was L’Manberg - easily bigger than L’Manberg ever was. Even now it yawns itself larger, stone crumbling at the edges and tumbling downward, ever downward. The crashing is muffled, the ground under her feet unsteady and yet floating, frozen, caught and crystallised in the stray second that Niki is trapped in. Every stone a diamond, the hulking and twisted mass of metal below glittering in the late afternoon sun. It sinks into her brain, thick and heavy, as she struggles to wrap her mind around what her eyes tell her she sees. This isn’t a burning tree, this isn’t dynamite - this shouldn’t even be possible. And yet somehow, somehow, they failed. She edges closer to the lip of the cliff, letting the sound of tumbling rock fade from her earshot, and stares. Just - stares. What else can she do? Bedrock peers up at her, threaded with smoking silver-grey. The air is clear up here, sky a fading blue, but the longer she looks - her eyes burn, and when she takes a breath she coughs on what tastes like gunpowder, but it burns down the rungs of her throat like it’s somehow been lit behind her tongue. Gunpowder is dry, cold - it doesn’t do that. She would know. The burning feeling raking its way into her lungs pulls her back from her vigil, and somewhere behind her she can hear Tubbo pulling Tommy back from the edge. His voice rambles on about - about radiation. Poison leeching its way into her lungs, her skin, every thread of muscle and sinew holding her together, her brain. (She’s either dizzy, or the height is giving her vertigo. She steels herself, clenches her hands into shaking fists, and tries not to drift.) And they’re all standing in the thick of it, air hot and heavy with poison. Because Tommy’s still here. She tears her eyes away from the wreckage, watches - watches him, still here, still alive, still fire-bright and bold enough to start kicking rocks around. When a cliff crumbles he bounces back, has the audacity to laugh. Jack’s eyes bore holes into the side of her head. Her stomach hurts, pulling itself apart, lining loose - oh, fuck, she’s going to be sick. She can - she can’t feel it, she shouldn’t be able to feel it, but she does. That poison seeping into her bones, settling there like silt. It reaches out with sticky hands, tearing open her stomach and burning everything it touches leaving nothing but the wet and wrong feeling of gristle inside and she takes a deep breath and squeezes her eyes shut and clamps a hand over her mouth because she’s all too aware of every toxic shift in her chest. Takes a shaky breath, feels that burn down her throat too. Her gut is twisting like something’s grabbed it, shot it through with shards of ice, but it’s just her, Jack, Tubbo and Tommy. And the pit that stretches out beneath them. There’s a hand on her shoulder, and Tubbo’s words swim past her ears like she’s been held underwater. We need to go, his voice murmurs quietly. It washes over her like rainwater, like what’s left of the stream that weaves its way into the crater and drips down like rain on the edge of a roof. We need to go, or we’ll die. Isn’t that the point? she wants to ask. It all blurs together when she blinks the water out of her eyes - the shitty canopy over their van, a tree that goes up like firewood, smoke in the back of her throat. Dynamite under her hands, dug deep into a podium. Radiation sinking into her bones. She staggers over - Tubbo is wearing something heavy and yellow, encrusted in shimmering black dust, pressing something similar into Tommy’s hands. She’s wearing - Wilbur’s coat, thin and flapping in the breeze, still smudged with ash. She can feel a draft through the tears in the back. Tommy steps away from the cliff’s edge, and her hands twitch. Hasn’t that always been the point?

☢ ☢ ☢

chapter 1

the first two scenes of this fic are actually written out, so they have been linked in their entirety below:

scene 1 - wilbur and niki, hanging out again - comfortable, reunited - as niki brews potions that she (reluctantly) reveals are to treat radiation sickness from a mishap with one of tubbo's nuclear experiments.

scene 2 - niki walks to snowchester to drop off a few potions, a peace offering. unfortunately, tommy and michael are the only ones home. it's a bit awkward. niki struggles to navigate the historically-turbulent relationship between herself and tommy.

---

after snowchester comes the afternoon syndicate meeting - insert the meeting notes, penned by the deeply-experienced ranboo_beloved.

items of note: technoblade's absence, as he is due to return from his hibernation tomorrow. phil advises ranboo and niki that techno seems to have some big ideas in mind for the syndicate upon his return, but there's no time to speculate - wilbur has advised them that las nevadas is throwing an opening party for its casino in a few nights' time, and the syndicate does not trust like that! ranboo will be representing paradise burgers and phil is pulling the "you've all called me old for too long, and i am now using it as an excuse to get out of this party i don't want to go to" card. niki, you would love to go, wouldn't you?

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well, niki is a bit so-so on las nevadas, but to be honest - a night at a fancy party with a few friends doesn't sound so bad. so niki makes her way to the sparkling city in her glitziest red dress, and wilbur is just a little bit too excited to meet her on its front steps.

The place is bustling, fashioned for pleasure instead of business tonight - strings of lights wrap their way around slender pillars of stone on every corner, each housing sea lanterns that send shifting shades of blue and purple across the obsidian paving. The water flowing from the fountains is bright and blue, the music coming from the casino is booming, and the space needle is lit up like a lighthouse that throws the spotlight onto every partygoer who enters the city. It is sparkling, dazzling, and probably shockingly expensive. In other words, just as tacky as Niki had expected. Although maybe even sparklier. There is something about this place that is stale, artificial. There is a chill to the air despite the sand stuck in her heels, and Niki finds herself shivering as night settles over the desert - and wishing she had a shawl or something. She's wearing the same red dress as she did for the banquet months ago, knife tucked by her back, right in arm’s reach. Though even in her glitziest gown, she feels underdressed. "Wonderful, isn't it?" Wilbur, at least, seems unbothered - he’s still donning his torn trenchcoat and canary-yellow sweater, but moves through the city as if the bright lights and tall buildings fit him like a glove. “Wonderful is one word for it,” Niki murmurs. She’s never visited Las Nevadas, and tonight with its flashing nights and thrumming music seems determined to leave… an impression. A good one, or a bad one, she can’t say - although she’s certainly leaning towards the latter over the former. She thinks she can feel a headache coming on. “Oh, come on, Niki. Try to have a little fun, won’t you?” He grins, a little crooked. “A beautiful night in a beautiful city - a lot of potential, for a night like that..." Wilbur is acting strange. it’s not the locale, because he looks the same as usual and moves through the city in the same way as usual - but he is clearly planning something, and Niki hates to say it but it’s putting her on edge. Bless him, but Wilbur planning things doesn’t end well. Especially when she doesn’t see it coming.

"Alright, get over here," he interrupts her rapidly-derailing train of thought. "Your eyeliner is smudged.” Niki wrinkles her nose as Wilbur licks his thumb, and dodges an attempt to swipe it past her temple. “I’ll decline you rubbing your spit on my face,” she says, taking a step back. Wilbur pouts. “I don’t have anyone to impress here, Wil.” Certainly not. Not in the brightest, most wasteful city in the server. Wilbur presses his lips together, but he doesn’t say anything - just huffs, taking a step back with a roll of his eyes. Niki resists the urge to roll her own. He’s wired, and she’d like to pretend she’s not at least mildly suspicious, but she is. She keeps her mouth shut, though. She trusts Wilbur - despite and because of everything in equal measures. “Don’t blame me later,” is all he says. “This place is so... gaudy. I don't know how much fun you expect me to have,” Niki points out, and reaches out to fix the pins on his collar - glinting gold under the lights, one’s come detached from the point of his collar and dangles helplessly from the chain. He huffs slightly as she winds the pin out from the wool of his sweater, and fiddles with the point of his collar until it stays. “You really are starting to sound like Techno now, you know.” “He’s your brother,” Niki says, flattening out his collar. “i think that should be a compliment.” “Maybe,” Wilbur laughs, and offers her his arm. “Just - try to have fun, yeah? Don’t be stressed. It’s a party.” “It’s a reconnaissance mission.” “It's a reconnaissance mission at a party,” he says flippantly, although there’s something hiding beneath his tone. Niki trusts Wilbur, she reminds herself. “I know you’re putting some plan together again,” she says, despite herself. she just can’t piece together what he’s planning, and that worries her. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he hums. “You clearly do.” Wilbur drops the act a moment - not long enough to fill her in on whatever scheme's caught his eye, but just enough for him to shoot her an encouraging smile. “You'll have a good time, Niki,” he assures her, confident. "Promise."

but oh, the party seems fine. she runs into a few friends - quackity, tubbo, ranboo (they got a babysitter for tonight), actually meets slime. tommy is there too, and they share a bit of awkward conversation, but even they are getting along finely tonight.

Tommy nods out towards the mostly-empty space in the middle of the room, some glitzy imitation of a ballroom - Ranboo and Tubbo, hand in hand, twirl around the space in a clumsy but cheerful attempt at a waltz. As they pass the bar Ranboo spins Tubbo under his outstretched arm, smiling at Quackity - the man grins back, and lets the vodka glug into his glass for a few seconds too long before tossing it back with a grimace.

niki eventually takes a small breather from the party, lingering on the sidelines to catch her breath between all of this talking - this is where wilbur finds her, the most keyed up he's been all night and insisting that niki follow him. it'll be worth her while, of course (he's done something to make things up with her, to make things properly right between them, to do something just for niki). and so niki follows to the faux-ballroom, eyes cast downward to avoid stepping on anyone's feet as wilbur eagerly ushers her through the crowd, until she almost runs into his back as he steps away and finally -

locks eyes with puffy.

who is not happy to see her.

(oh, it would be so kind of wilbur - who has noticed how lonely the niki-who-is-now is compared to the niki-who-once-was, who once had perhaps not a country but friends and a girlfriend who she could rely on. and someone as sweet and good as niki would never do something to cause a horrible, drawn-out, justified breakup.

the point is, wilbur puts niki on a pedestal. he means well. they don't even notice that he does, half the time - he thinks she is good and clever and rational and deserving of the world, and some of the time, she really is those things. she's just also an attempted murderer. and finally, it is coming back to bite both of them in the ass.)

puffy, who has been led to believe that this is some get-her-back scheme orchestrated by niki, is mildly annoyed at best. we broke up for a reason, she insists, and niki knows that.

"I can’t believe you," Puffy scowls, the expression a brash, red rose across her face. "Really, Niki?” “This wasn’t my idea!” she cries. "Guilty as charged," Wilbur mumbles - suitably abashed, he slinks over to Niki's side. She is still too shell-shocked to shoo him away. Puffy is transfixing, like that. A thousand thoughts tumble through her head, chaos - and yet, she can't bring a single other one stammering to her lips. “Well, god knows what you’re telling everyone, then!" Puffy snaps. "I don't know what kind of dumb get back together plan you're trying to pull - I don't care, Niki. I'm sorry. I'm sorry, but - you're a fucking mess." The words land like a blow to the chest - Niki sucks a breath in past her teeth, bracing for the hit, before she thinks better of it. "I told you. I can't fix you, I couldn't - I couldn't just stand around and keep my eyes closed when you hurt people, Niki, I'm done with it. I told you, I'm done."

but niki has been trying. and fuck, trying has been hard. she's not going to beg that puffy takes her back - that ship has sailed - but she's not going to stand there and let herself be slandered, either.

“...I’m getting better," Niki retorts, voice small. Puffy lets go of an angry breath. “Don’t start. Don’t start.” “I have the Syndicate now!" she exclaims. "I have friends - good friends - and I started baking again, I started caring again, I started trying again, and it's - it's none of your business, either way. It's not your business!" “This started being my business when you tried to kill someone under my care - I don't know if you remember that - and then you just, just disappeared off into the wilderness about it! Fuck, have you even apologised to Tommy for all that?” And Niki goes quiet. It's more of an answer than anything she could have said in words. Puffy's glare goes thunderous, voice a loud, rumbling crash in Niki's head. “You haven’t? After exile, after all of that shit - you were in the vault with us, Niki, you heard everything that fucker said, you were there - and you haven't even fucking apologised to him?” A cold rush of - of shame, it sweeps over her, making her painfully aware of the scuffs on her dress and the acne on her chin and the abject, open anger on Puffy’s face. Puffy is no angel but she is righteous, powered by something burning bright and so scathingly good at her core, nigh-divine in her knightly fury - and despite her namesake, Niki is so very far from godhood. “It’s difficult," Niki tries. "It’s - it’s complicated.” “No, it’s fucking not!" Puffy shouts, incredulous. "You tried to kill the kid!” “Niki," Wilbur cuts in, voice quiet. Niki freezes, ice fanning down the length of her spine - she had forgotten, she had somehow forgotten, that the world existed outside of the small bubble encasing herself and Puffy. It all comes rushing back to her now, an assault on the senses - the coloured lights, the fabric of her dress settling across her neck, the uncanny sensation of a person standing at her back, the low sound of Wilbur's voice over her shoulder. "You, did you - you tried to hurt Tommy?” She is experiencing that sense of paralysis again, she dimly notices, silent - voicebox giving up the ghost. Oh, there's nothing she can say to fix this one. So the cords of her throat make no noise at all. “Yeah, go on, brag about it." Puffy waves a half-hearted hand in her direction, dismissive. "You seemed real proud of yourself this time last January.” “She’s - she’s lying, right. What the fuck." She can't see his face. She can't see him, and for some delirious moment her mind parrots if you can't see him then he can't see you, then it's not real then this never happened, he never came back you never tried to kill anyone you never he never - "Niki - Niki, she’s lying, isn’t she?” She turns, strangling the delirium silent. Niki has seen Wilbur heartbroken, desperate, dead - and yet there is another expression in his face that Niki simply cannot recognise, can't put a name to, an expression she has never seen turned onto her. “...I told you," she says weakly. "I said - I said I’d done things I wasn’t proud of - “ "Yeah, what - property damage or something, some shitty fights, I don't - I don't know," he exclaims, voice climbing in volume and incredulity. “You tried to kill him?” “I - I..." “...can you even admit it?” "Let me finish," she snaps, and he falls silent. “I - I did, I did.” Ah, there's the name for that expression. Horrified.

a crowd is forming. and it is listening.

from the crowd bursts tommy and ranboo, both in a state of panic - and as soon as tommy enters the scene, all eyes land on him.

did niki try to kill you, wilbur demands.

and tommy, he backpedals - no, we're over it, we're getting over it - it's none of your fucking business, wilbur, we sorted it out! and the lack of denial amidst it all is damning.

the argument could continue between the four of them for days, but tommy is already frantic - he cuts wilbur off, tells him ranboo is in a state of panic and can barely speak, and was using his few words to beg tommy to take him to wilbur. wilbur's not keen to drop this line of conversation at all, until ranboo babbles out the words casino, and TNT, and wilbur goes white.

you didn't, tommy says. no way you did, no fucking way -

you promised, niki chokes out, and wilbur snaps that now is not the time for her of all people to be rattling on about lies -

and the horrible story forces its way out of ranboo: yes, wilbur asked him to place a bit of TNT in the casino. a small amount! small enough that wilbur had practically forgotten. but ranboo, anxiety-ridden, felt strangely something was out of place - and discovered that somehow, they don't know how, they don't (they do know: it's the same reason excess TNT seems to appear around ranboo and prisons in droves) a few stray pieces of TNT have become an entire network, hundreds of pieces as far as they could see when they checked just now. enough to blow the casino sky-high, and easily kill every player inside.

all hell breaks loose.

tommy is furious with wilbur. wilbur is demanding why tommy didn't tell him about niki. niki is panicking. the crowd has given up on staring for now, instead focused on their escapade stampde. quackity is furious with everyone, barely keeping control of the crowd as they flood outside, as far from the building as they can get.

“Where is Tubbo?” Quackity shouts. “Tommy said he left earlier,” Niki offers quietly, and the man whips around to face her - his gaze settles on Niki, and Niki is not afraid of Quackity by any means (not in Manberg, not now), but the fire in his glare makes her stand a little straighter. “You’d better fucking hope you heard him right, Niki,” he snarls, and turns back to the crowd. “I need - “ And then, the bombs go off. It feels as if someone has taken a sword to the night that falls over Las Nevadas, splitting it open - day spills over them, a bright light that burns its way into her eyes even as she hides her face in the crook of her elbow. The ground shakes…

they make it out, but las nevadas is a wreck. fire falls from the sky, the sands glowing alight with flame, slick with melting glass. niki falls into step with the flood of evacuees, surrounded by whispers, by stares, by a crowd of nosiness and judgement that shifts awkwardly away from her when she walks beside them, pulled into puffy's tumultuous wake.

as the blast settles, the truth dawns on niki - wilbur has heard what she's done. everyone has heard what she's done. puffy has (yet again) rejected her, her peers have rejected her, even wilbur, whose friendship she fought so fucking hard to get back, has rejected her. all her work to heal - all her work, dragging her feet as she just couldn't quite spit out an apology to tommy, not a proper one - has gone up in fire and smoke. it's over.

With her arms wrapped tightly around herself, curled-up and pitiful, Niki walks away from the flaming crater that was once the city of Las Nevadas.

#and you caused it tag #my fics #and the story begins!#i'm even queueing these posts for 4am just like the old days....ah nostalgia #also jsyk reblogging these chapter posts is encouraged/permitted/whatever!! this doesnt feel like enough to post on ao3 #but if people have thoughts in post replies or tags or asks that is so so encouraged. even if i couldnt write this thing out i still love i #my art #<- I ALMOST FORGOT. the chapter art kjfsjfkasj

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whump-town · 3 years

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Aversions

Hotch is less than dealing with the events of Foyet’s attack.

Warnings: alcohol abuse, child abuse, drug abuse, graphic depictions of violence & stabbing, self-destructive behavior, crying, self harm, mentions of suicide, suicidal ideations, violence with guns, and maybe some out of character Hotch and Emily.

Not sure how I feel about this fic... but I guess, we’re going in with both feet so

“You cannot save people, you can only love them.” --Anais Nin

Aaron Hotchner has never been good with words. Not the right ones, anyway.

But actions can speak louder than words.

He’ll spin Garcia around the dance floor when they go out for drinks. Hands placed just where they should be and he’ll laugh softly when she makes a thinly-veiled dirty joke. And she’ll remember those nights for her whole life. The way he smiled at her as the lights shimmered overhead. The way he blushed when she refused to dance with anyone else, stating she needed a real gentleman.

There are nights at Dave’s. Weekends that he gets to keep Jack, uninterrupted by cases, and they go to visit Pop’s; Jack’s third favorite person (mommy and daddy of course being one and two). It’s the sound of Jack’s happy feet running up and down the hall, Hotch’s thundering voice as he he-ho-hums and chases him along. Dave watching the youth bleed into that scrawny, spunky recruit from some twenty years ago. And Jack always runs into Dave’s arms and in one fell-sweep proclaims him the only safety he can get from his daddy. His giggling face turned into Dave’s shoulder as he shouts, “get him Pops, get him!”

Those memories were just weeks ago.

It’s been two weeks since Dave’s house was filled with Jack and Hotch, smiling and happy and… fuck just healthy.

Aaron Hotchner wakes up dizzy and sore. The pain ebbing into the numb, dull ache of whatever’s being steadily fed into the line disappearing into the pale flesh of his hand. For a moment, he just watches the ceiling spin. An all too familiar sinking feeling in the pit of his gut. Anxiety spreading its claws out to take root but he… he can’t seem to remember why.

Realization floods his chilled limbs with a shudder, the memories hitting his sternum. He leans his head back into the pillows, limp and stiff and cold and so fucking hot-- The stiff tug of the stitches in his abdomen force him to come to an altogether too swift descent. There’s a hissing sound that comes before his right-hand aches, something cold and heavy spreading up his arm and into his chest.

“Good to see you awake,” a nurse greets.

He’s too far gone to say anything.

By the time Emily finds him, he’s had one minor run-in with the staff. A doctor stops Emily in the hall, her tone laced with annoyance and apprehension that bleeds into her threat to restrain Hotch if that becomes necessary. Emily leaves with a nod and promises to keep an eye on him but she leaves with this tight bundle of uncertainty forming in her chest.

He wakes as she settles down in the visitor’s chair.

The stitches along his hip are tight, leaving him immobile despite his foggy brain wanting nothing more than to curl onto his side and sleep just a little longer. But the scent of the antiseptics burn his nose and he can still feel Foyet--

The tip of the knife slowly dragging down his chest. There’s no threat of a scratch or blemish out of place. Aaron’s breathing having long ago turned ragged and shallow. “Have you ever read the reports,” Foyet asks, keeping his slow purposeful movement going. “Tell me, Aaron, have you read what David Rossi and Jason Gideon had to say about you? Young Aaron…”

Foyet smirks as he stops, shifting as he presses weight into the stab. It’s slow and agonizing but, Hotch realizes with a shudder, he’s too cold and weak to even really feel it. His body slowly falling away.

“Not so young anymore,” Foyet comments. He takes a moment to watch the knife’s slow pull from Hotch’s body, smiling when Hotch’s chest catches and he falls silent and breathless. Not even the sound of his ragged wheezes filling the air. “I can see how they’re right, you know?” Foyet lays the knife down on the side, pulling himself up and away from Hotch. “I wonder what’s going to get you killed faster, your loyalty, or your stubbornness?”

His eyes peel open slowly. Uncoordinated and sluggish he raises his left hand to scratch at the dried blood on the side of his face. His fingers manage to clumsy hook the canal running his nose and he pulls it crooked on his face.

Her voice quiet, afraid any sudden movement from her or too sudden a loud sound, might startle him, she calls his name. “Hotch,” she rises from the chair. She hates how her voice wavers. The shift that takes place between them. Any semblance of friendship they might have must be cast aside because… he’s a material witness and a victim. One that she can set off. One she might break.

Stepping into his field of vision, she can see his shoulders relax. Just having someone else close. Someone he knows. “You…” she’s stuck between Emily and Prentiss. Between her role as his friend and his coworker and even her role as an agent. But he’s always commended her undercover work. She’s got a spark for thinking on her feet. “I’m going to fix the oxygen canal, okay? It’s going to agitate your skin otherwise.”

Through slow, coordinated, and purposeful movements she keeps her hands where his darting bloodshot eyes can see. She hesitates when he sucks in a panicked breath but something in the back of her mind says pausing is only going to make it worse so she pulls the canal into place. Her fingers just hardly graze his cheek but she can still his body flinch at the contact.

And all she can think is fuck.

“That’s better, huh?” Her eyes dart to the heart monitor, uncertain if she’s convinced herself that it’s beating erratically fast or if it’s just a fragment of her mind. More than anything else, she makes herself aware of her body. The way that she moves so as not to startle him or, as she’s quickly putting together, touch him.

She steps back to the side, fully aware of the way that his eyes don’t break away from her. “Get some sleep, boss.” There’s something familiar and light about the way she calls him that and she can only pray that gets them through.

He suspects that he’s finally gone and done it. A part of him is relieved to find that fourteen-year-old Aaron Hotchner, a boy clutching to life with bloodied hands, was so wrong. The flash of heat and the open sting of his father’s belt against his back isn’t what finally makes him snap. Forces and pries his tight hold from reality. It’s nine, precise stab wounds and an awful cocktail of drugs that he can’t see his way out of. That’s what breaks him. Then again, it’s so much more than that.

Derek Morgan. His dark blue shirt fitted tightly over his back, the edge of the back tucked into his black pants. Tight muscles shifting under his skin as he stands with his back facing Hotch. His tattoos, body art Hotch had never really cared to mind, staring back at him now. Those tattoos are the only sensible thing about the world as his body is pulled back down.

He blinks owlishly at JJ. Her cold, tiny hand squeezing his and trying so valiantly to get him to talk to her. A question, something pressing, something important but he can’t…

Garcia with her tear-stained cheeks and the mascara running down her cheeks in pools. She says his name, he doesn’t hear but he sees her mouth form the word. He thinks that she might sit by his side and read. He’s got the faintest in and outs of The Hunger Games plot stuck in his brain.

There’s a fuzzy, half memory of Reid. Even in the present, he’s not sure it’s actually happening. A hallucination, maybe, but as he’s looking the young genius over he’s not sure why he’d hallucinate Reid. Then again, who else is left? There’s this look in his eyes, it makes Hotch feel guilty. Wrong. He doesn’t dwell on that feeling for very long. One sluggish blink later and he’s gone… maybe he was a hallucination.

Somewhere between hugging Jack and Dave standing in the doorway to his room, Hotch feels a very deep, uncomfortable weight settle across his chest. A realization on the tip of his tongue-- he wishes that Foyet had just killed him.

Waking with only the weak light of the hall outside, he realizes that he has no idea how much time has passed. Days or hours or even time. Just that the room is dark and there’s a light glow from the machines behind him. The morphine’s going to kill him. He needs to be more alert but the edges of the world are blurry and he’s already succumbing to the warm sting spreading over his body.

His hips ache and he makes the mistake of shifting. It’s just a small movement, sleepy and hazed he’s not capable of too much more. Still, his body is on fire.

“Careful,” Emily whispers from the dark.

He can see her, out of the very corner of his eye, rustling as she moves out from under the mountain of a blanket and uncurls her legs. He watches, silent, as those legs seem to go on forever. Reality melting into the heat of his body, the flames licking up him. And her touch is the water he so desperately craves but he’s lost his sense. There is no up or down or reprieve from the heat.

“Easy,” she breathes across him, the flames succumbing to her. To her will. “Just breath.”

He’s sinking back under the haze, mouth full of cotton and jaw slacked open but he can’t find the words. He can’t seem to remember how to speak. “Prentiss,” he rasps, eyes sliding shut but his hand closes around hers. Begging, pleading that she understands.

“I’m right here,” she promises. “Sleep. I’ll be right here when you wake up.”

A week later, she finds him tripping over himself he’s so drunk. Making a mess of himself and everything around him but… that’s all he’s ever been good for anyway. She doesn’t say anything. There isn’t any disappointment in her eyes, despite what he’s expecting.

Haley always hated seeing him drunk. He gets sloppy.

Where Haley had seen only Mr. Hotchner, a broken old bastard, in her husband, Emily just sees a man begging for normalcy. For the pain to numb and for things to return to normal.

Emily just takes the bottle out of his hand. Taking a chug out of the bitter, dark liquid she grunts as she swallows. It burns and she supposed that’s half of the appeal to him. “Come watch the History channel with me,” she says, taking his hand and guiding him to the couch. He goes easily. She knows he likes the History channel and she also knows that he just needs some stability. Something solid. So she leans into his side and holds his hand. Reminds him that he’s not as alone as he thinks that he is.

But even that’s not enough.

“Hotch! Hotch, that’s enough! He’s dead, man,” Morgan falls to his knees, pulling Hotch from Foyet’s body. “He’s dead.”

Emily watches Hotch’s trembling body. The split skin of his knuckles and the way that two of his fingers crookedly bend into his palm. Rough ragged sobs tear through the room, breathless words passing Hotch’s lips. He’s shaking uncontrollably. She watches, his bowed back, snap. His attention, that hawk-like, eerie attention, is moved. It’s changed.

He pulls himself from Morgan’s arms.

Morgan having drawn Hotch to his chest. Bent their bodies to mold them into a folded backward hug. Their heads pressed together. Morgan can’t help his own tears. The abject horror washing over his body at the sight of the mess before him. Great arching sprays of blood and the thick scent of blood looming over them. And George Foyet… a blooded lifeless body before them.

And Hotch…

He stumbles to his feet, pulling his body from where he’d fallen into Morgan. Where he’d allowed himself just a moment's embrace. He takes three, four large steps on shaking legs.

Emily steps forward but Dave catches her elbow. He stops her from moving to Hotch.

He’s not in his right mind. Dave’s only protecting her. Protecting them. Aaron is hardly going to survive today, he doesn’t need to accidentally hurt Emily. He is a live wire and he’ll take them all out in the explosion.

George Foyet arches against his wires and they’re standing right there when his anger boils over and he screams into the nothing. Holding Haley’s body in his arms so delicate and broken. They’re both just broken dolls, their cords cut and the curtain comes tumbling down. One last final blow-- his job really did take everything from.

Jack isn’t enough to save him.

He blows up. It’s not nuclear but it’s unhinged and raw and there’s something about his eyes that makes Emily finally draw the line. He’s hurting but there has to be a line. A place where one of them steps in and says that it’s enough. That he’s got to pull himself together before he sucks them all into the black hole of his chest. And she’s quickly realizing, she’s the only one strong enough to do the job.

She finds him on a bender. He can hardly stand and the light mirth she’d once admired about his quizzical eyebrow raises is gone. The man standing before is a mess and she’s not sure if she hates herself or him more for letting it get this bad. For not finding that line sooner.

“Jesus,” she whispers.

He knows disgust when he sees it. A childhood spent curled into his father’s shoe, cracked ribs, and broken arms, he knows disgust all right. And now, a fully grown man, he just laughs. There’s nothing light about the sound. It’s morbid and twisted in his throat. A hollow sound. She’s disgusted by him.

“You need a shower,” she informs him with a curl of her nose. She steps past him, ignoring the frown she shoots her. She knows that he doesn't want her here but what he wants isn’t really a priority right now. He hasn’t got to tell her. She can see it in his eyes and smell it on his breath. He wants to crawl into a dark hole and die. She’s here to drag his sorry ass out.

Looking around his apartment, the first priority is getting rid of all the bottles. “Where are the trash bags,” she asks, heading to his kitchen. He’s already shaking his head, running his hands through his thick greasy hair. She finds the bags on her own, right where she’d assumed they’d be. Under the sink. “Where’s Jack?”

He falls onto the couch with a huff. “Jessica,” he grunts.

Good, she thinks, for him. Jack doesn’t need to see his father like this. Hell, no one does but… someone has to. At the same time, if Jack were here, Aaron wouldn’t have let himself get this bad.

“He probably misses you,” she says, starting in on tossing his garbage. There’s an astounding lack of food but it’s also not entirely surprising that without one of them hovering over him and forcing him to eat that he hasn’t tried. The word suicidal may not have come out of their mouths but they watch him. They see him. Sometimes you don’t have to speak a truth for it to be true.

And Aaron Hotchner is a coward. They are all. It’s why they haven’t taken his guns and it’s why he hasn’t put one to his mouth.

There are three guns in his home.

Two service weapons that he wouldn’t stain with his own blood. He took a vow and those weapons are not meant for this. It’s a disgrace to the only thing that’s ever made him mean anything.

The third is a gun his father had given him.

He was sixteen.

The words had poured out of his mouth. An aching truth he hadn’t even realized was true until the words were spoken. He did want to kill himself. The abuse was never going to end. He could see no end in sight and his father consumed his every action and thought and even his self-image.

He was tired of his reflection.

His father had grabbed the bottom of his jaw, large fingers digging into his flesh as he’d pulled Hotch’s mouth open. Hotch had shaken, frozen in place, as his father pressed the barrel of his gun to the roof of his mouth. Gunpowder and cold metal.

Sometimes, Hotch can still taste it.

He’d been afraid to die then but now, he longs for it. There is a darkness in his veins, murky and thick, that he needs to spill out. To watch the crimson drip down his flesh so that he can see, so that he can know that beneath this shell he is alive. That there is only a part of his sum that is broken and dead. He is alive.

His ribcage expands with life.

His heart beats with purpose.

But his mind… it has rotted. Desolate and afraid.

His father had beaten him senseless that night but that made it no different than any other night.

And the very gun that had once been pressed between his lips now rests in the safe in his office. Untainted and calling out so wistfully to him. He can hear it now, as Emily calmly collects his empty bottles of alcohol. His throne of glass shattering beneath him. He can always hear it. How simple it would be to get it now. To just end all of this.

“Aaron?”

He looks up suddenly, eyes unfocused and glazed.

“Aaron!”

The bile hits the back of his throat and is thrown out on his hands and knees, expelling the contents of his stomach into the porcelain of the toilet. His head throbs as Emily follows him, turning on the lights. He’s been sitting in the dark for so long, he’d forgotten the sting of the light.

“Just leave me alone,” he grunts, spits falling over his bottom lip as his stomach aches on. Rolling and churning. He’s put nothing in it for the last forty-eight hours other than Scotch, Oxy, and two shitty beers from when he first moved into this shit-stained apartment. He groans as his stomach clenches, leaning his forehead against the cold porcelain.

Emily’s seen enough. She’s tired of this little performance he’s putting on. “No,” she steps to the sink and drenches a rag in the shockingly cold water. Wringing it out only slightly before slapping over the back of his neck. “This bullshit, it ends tonight, do you understand me?”

He grunts as the rag meets his skin, trembling muscles protesting at the temperature difference of his overheated body. Even if he could think of something to say in protest, he’s not sure it would make it past his lips without being accented by more drug-laced regurgitated booze. Besides, he knows she's right. Deep, deep down. Beneath the self-loathing heat and even farther down beneath the frayed parts of him that never survived childhood. He knows. He knows that even if it’s not for him, he has to stop. For the team and his son.

“First,” she whispers kneeling down beside him. “We need to get you sober.” She draws a clean rag over his face, wiping the vomit from his lips. “What have you taken?”

He shakes his head. Can’t meet her eyes. He’s ashamed and he should be.

She reaches out to touch him but he flinches, looking between her hand and her face. As if he’s expecting her to hit him. “Aaron,” she softens her voice. Moving slowly until she’s cupping his cheek. His eyes water, chest hitching as his breathing grows unsteady with the emotions boiling to the surface. “I just want you to get better.”

A tear falls down his cheek and he turns his cheek, trying and failing to hide it from her. He wants to get better.

Tears are falling down his face when he turns his face back to her and pulls in a stuttering breath. He pulls his sleeve up. He shows her the hesitantly made cuts on his forearm. “I-- I don’t…” he pulls away from the hand she reaches out to him with. But when she tries again, he lets her hold his wrist in her hand. Her finger ghosts over the scabs. He hadn’t known what he was doing and he hadn’t liked the blood. He’d just wanted the hurt.

It was too much like Foyet. The knife and the razor and the blood on his white t-shirt.

“I’m sorry,” he whispers.

She shakes her head. No, this is-- this is his fault. These cuts were made by his hand but they never should have let him get so low. They should have done more.

Pulling her eyes from his arm she steadies herself. He isn’t hopeless. He's a fighter and he’s stronger than she is. He’s got more to lose than he realizes.

“I took the oxy,” he admits. “It’s-- It wasn’t enough.” He’s shaking now, coming down from his anger and submitting to the pain. “You need to…” a part of his broken mind screams. It screams to fall silent. That he needs the gun and that he’s just supposed to be distracting her now so that he can follow through with the plan he’s been making for weeks--

The office and the gun. Spinning in the leather-bound chair that Haley had gotten him as a wedding gift and biting the bullet. The letters are written and waiting on his desk. The chamber is full. The gun calls for him.

“There’s a gun,” he whispers. “In my office, you need to-- you have to get it or I’ll…”

She nods her understanding.

He can’t see around the tears pooling in his eyes, “uhm... “ He’s trying to think, what else? What else is left? He couldn’t stomach the thought of slitting his wrist. Never had the nerve to draw a bath and just to sink into warmth… that’s too gentle. He’d needed a bang. A mess and more disgust. More hurt.

And now he can feel the panic of his options being taken away.

“Aaron,” she squeezes his hand. He meets her eyes and feels a fraction of warmth. “Just-- Just--” she wants to tell him to let her in. She wants to tell him that all this is going to pass in time and this awful moment will just be a cruel memory one day. But she’s looking at him and seeing her own reflection. Two people broken by time and unable to trust another human being. She can’t be certain why she does it.

Her mind screams that he’s neither trustworthy nor in the right mind but she wraps her around him and pulls him into a hug. “I love you,” she tells him, hugging him tightly. Feeling his tension and apprehension. Slowly, he lifts his arms and hugs her back. He clings to her. Squeezing her tight but she’s not going anywhere.

He’s vaguely aware of the fabric of her soft cotton shirt getting wet against his face. Her hand comes up and brushes his hair down and he finds that he doesn’t care. He doesn’t care that he’s sobbing in the arms of the very woman who was once hired to end his career. He doesn’t care because he feels the pain and for once, he can breathe.

Emily holds him tighter. Neither is speaking. They just cling together in the storm and Emily hopes that she can drag him out of this mess. That he can come back here, to her arms instead of into the bottle. And she’ll get his gun. She’ll throw out all of the alcohol and call Jessica in three or four days when he’s mopped up and dry and tell her that Hotch needs to see Jack.

And maybe one day they’ll think back to this moment and it won’t hurt as much. But for today, for this moment, they just hold one another.

#tw alcoholism #tw alcohol #tw abuse #tw child abuse #tw guns #tw suicide #tw self destructive behavior #tw self harm #criminal minds #aaron hotchner #emily prentiss #david rossi #george foyet #derek morgan #spencer reid #penelope garcia #jennifer jareau

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heartbreak-of-a-marauder · 4 years

Text

Rogue (3)

Title: The Impossible Girl

Pairing: Loki x fem!reader

Words: 3306

Note: It’s been a long old while but I’ve finally finished my dissertation! University is officially over for me!! It took me a while to work on this part I’m still not super happy with it, I hope you like it. Taglist is open, previous parts are linked below. Let me know what you think!

y/n = you name y/h/c = your hair colour y/f/n = your first name y/l/n = your last name

<- 3 ->

~*~*~*~*~

Age 18

The frigid night air steals the breath from your lungs before you can inhale, wispy white puffs of smoke form as you release another lungful. An invisible band seemingly tightens around your chest making you breathe shallower. Your feet hammer furiously against the mist-covered ground not feeling the stones or twigs that puncture and tear at your skin. The muscles in your legs are beginning to burn, begging for a reprieve; instead, you push harder. A shiver passes over you causing the hairs on the back of your neck to raise, the compulsion of self-preservation increases tenfold.

The thin night shift you wear billows behind you, it provides no protection from the icy temperatures. Your y/h/c hair swishes from side to side past your shoulders, smaller strands that had escaped your plait sneak round to whip at your skin or stick to your face. Roughly, you push the strands away knotting them in the process. You didn’t have time for this. Tears begin to form as you continue to run, blinking you force them out leaving wet trails down your cheeks, yet still, you don’t stop.

Something was out there in the dark, lurking in the mist. You could feel it following you. The adrenaline of the flight reflex descends on every other thought in your brain. ‘Nothing else matters’ it seems to say. What it is, where you were, how you got here. None of it mattered anymore, you simply had to keep going.

But what?

You register a burst of pain in your toes just as the world flips on its side. You crash forward, your knee makes painful contact with the ground first as layers of skin rip against the abrasive stone. Your hands, arms and elbows follow suit when you try to catch yourself. Despite your attempts your head makes contact too, the darkness around you explodes with spots of flashing light as your brain rattles inside your skull.

‘Keep going’ drifts around you, carried along with the delicate curls of mist.

The palms of your hands sting as you push yourself back up onto your feet. Your knee aches in protest at the movement, the skin already beginning to tighten and swell. ‘Go’ a voice from inside commands. You step forward with your injured leg but pain shoots up your leg as your knee gives way. You pant trying to catch your breath, summoning the courage to get up and try again. For some reason you had to, every impulse seemed to be overpowered by the need to keep running.

Warm.

That’s what it felt like.

You risk a look down at the toes on your right foot. A darkness deeper than the night sky had attached itself to you, it was small and unmoving but you could feel its warmth and the way it pulsed. Your hand trembles as you reach out to brush it away. The heat intensifies as soon as your fingers make contact, the blob seems to surge to life crawling up your foot; engulfing you in darkness. You swipe frantically at it trying to get it off, you fingernails scrape your skin but still, it grows.

“Help! Someone Help!” You call into the surrounding quiet.

Panicked whimpers escape you as the darkness ascends your body, the pulsing sensation became more of a throb with every inch it climbed yet still you couldn’t get it off. The darkness was unaffected by your attempts of prising it off, when it rose above your hip you resort to more abrasive methods using the skirt of your shift you rub furiously at your skin.

“Please!” You scream, a strangled sob catches in your throat when it starts on your arms.

“y/n?” a distorted voice drifts from somewhere but you don’t dare look away from the darkness.

You wipe down your arms trying to push the darkness back, trying to slow it down, but the darkness holds no consideration for your feelings. Your breathing comes in short, sharp pants as it reaches your shoulders. Dizziness, heat and the throbbing of power consumed you while tears fall freely from your eyes.

“Mother! Loki! Allfather! Someone help me please!” you call desperately, when it disappears out of sight.

“y/n!” the voice calls again, it sounds closer, more familiar now but you can't concentrate enough to place it.

“No, no, no, no-“ you mutter feeling the heat begin to lick your skin as it weaves its way through your roots.

“Mother!” a final scream rips through you, hurting your throat. “Save me! Save-“

“y/n!” You are jolted awake, your eyes frantically scan your candlelit bed-chamber expecting to see the same eery gloom of the dream. Your eyes finally land on your mother, her features morphed in concern as she grips onto your shoulders.

You waste no time latching onto her in a vice-like hold, burying your face in her chest you breathe in your mother's familiar smell. It keeps you grounded, reminding you it was just a bad dream. It wasn’t real, it couldn’t hurt you, you were safe. Your mother cradles you in return. Peeking your head over your mother's shoulder you wrinkle your nose at the sickly sweet tang in the air, it was stronger again tonight. Your eyes adjust to the dim glow allowing you to see scorch marks and cracks that marred your -. Every day it got worse, spreading further, doing more and you didn’t know what was causing it.

It had all started a few days after your sixteenth birthday. At first, you would just be running endlessly through the gloom, knowing something was stalking you in the mist. It would leave you drenched in a cold sweat, your y/h/c would be tangled and stuck to your neck and forehead. The clothes would stick to your body, the bedsheets wrapped around you, trapping you. When you removed your clothes and cleaned yourself off you would catch the sickly sweet scent for just a second.

By seventeen the nightmares became more frequent, but they had begun to change, you knew what had been chasing you, what had struck so much fear into your heart. As your seventeenth year went on the darkness was starting to win, you had stopped being able to outrun it, and with each dream, it consumed more and more of you. You would wake up terrified, squinting into the darkness, paranoid the horror of the dream had followed you. Eventually, you would manage to go back to sleep. Though it was never peaceful.

You wouldn’t notice the damage until the morning when the sun had risen, casting beams of light through the gap in your curtains. Your bleary eyes would look around the room, the world coming into focus as you rub the last remnants of sleep away. Your eyes widen as you scan the walls of your bedroom, the pictures, the diagrams, the paintings, the edges of every image of childhood memory was singed. Panicked, you tore them all down, stashed them away from sight.

Buried.

Never to be seen again.

You would shiver to wonder what you’re mother would do should she ever find them. It only got worse from there. The destruction became more noticeable, more widespread. Your mother was beginning to notice things going missing, trinkets, ornaments. At times you were afraid to close your eyes, you knew what came with the dark. You would force yourself to stay awake, teetering on the edge of oblivion until exhaustion took over. You began to dread sleep. The destruction was undeniable, you were no longer able to hide it, so you did the only thing you could think to do. Lock it away.

Your mother disapproved greatly of your secrecy but soon gave up trying to convince you otherwise. She accepted it as a phase of your youth hoping you would grow out of it. She would always mutter on about how she was once a young girl going through womanly changes. While it was true, it wasn’t the only thing. The world around you was changing too. During your classroom conversations, your mother had sometimes mentioned that Asgard was being rocked by some unexplained phenomena. The quaking that had once been unnoticeable shudders lasting for less than a second was now more pronounced.

The Allfather had apparently tasked a team of senior advisers to survey all of Asgard to find the source. They were to search high and low; never to stop until the source was found and dealt with. As of yet, that had come up empty-handed.

_ _ _ _ _ _

The recipe for ‘Draught of Sleep’ had become a staple in your knowledge as you grew up. While you felt bad for every time you used it on your mother – praying to whoever may listen for forgiveness – it became a welcomed method of escaping the monotony of your routine in isolation. On a few occasions, you had run into Prince Loki, or rather he had stumbled across you.

He never seemed to change. The tall, raven-haired prince was as handsome as ever, the last time the two of you had met he had outgrown his boyish charm. It had been replaced by something more manly. No doubt a result of the adventures he had been on with his brother Thor and the Warriors Three. However, there were some things about Loki that would never change like the way his eyes glinted with mischief or the way the corners of his mouth would quirk upwards when he grinned. You were always grateful for his friendship but you envied him in a way, the same was a caged bird envied those who were free to soar in the skies.

You sat in a secluded garden, enjoying the late autumn sunshine. It was ideal for you as it was just a stone's throw away from your chambers and hidden well enough that no one would stumble on it by accident. Loki had shown it to you in the spring while he had been bragging about knowing lots of little secrets about Asgard.

The rays of the sun were comforting against your skin, making you feel warm. You scrunch your brow slightly concentrating even more on the sentence you had already read five times previously but it was no us the words weren’t making much sense. You sigh, rubbing the back of your hand against your forehead. After last nights nightmare, you had been too afraid to go back to sleep and exhaustion was setting in. blinking once more you attempt the sentence again, this time feeling your heavy eyelids begin to lull closed. Shifting your position on the stone bench you try to wake yourself up a little more, you didn’t want to fall asleep. You couldn’t fight it anymore.

‘Five minutes won’t be long enough for a nightmare’ you think hopefully as you let your eyes slide closed.

It doesn’t toy with you this time. The chase is shorter, it already knows how terrified you are part of you wonders if it enjoys how frightened you are. When it does catch you, it wastes no time in beginning its journey up your body. In every other nightmare you had had, its ascent was slow and deliberate. This time you barely had enough time to comprehend that it had attached itself to you before it started moving.

You could hear a distant rumble echoing through the bleak mist, but it was overpowered by your screams and pleas for help. Why weren't you waking up? Every other time you had managed to wake up before it had consumed you completely. This time you didn’t, the dream would not surrender you so easily.

“y/n!” a voice shouts, it is muffled but you can hear the panicked edge.

You could feel the earth rattle beneath you like a rag of angry horses were stampeding. In an instant, it grows to something deeper, more ferocious. What had started as a rumble now roared all around you. You hear your name echo around you once more but it is smothered by the noise.

“y/n!” Your eyes fly open to making contact with a set of familiar green. His hands ghost over your body, his eyes follow the movement scanning you. Your eyes focus on his hand as it wraps around your wrist with ease, you frown slightly noticing the coating of grey dust on the sleeve of his normally pristine tunic.

“Loki? What- I don’t... what is happening?” Your body moves on autopilot as Loki pulls you with him, your mind still a few steps behind you. Somewhere around you, you hear the sound of pebbles skipping over the stone and another person's heart-wrenching cries.

“It was another earthquake, it brought down part of the east wing, I thought, I-” Loki jerks you towards him, before wrapping his arms tightly around you. The dust on his clothes makes your nose itch.

“The east wing?” you ask pushing out of his hold. The east wing housed your chambers. Now you were truly awake.

“Was anyone hurt? Was my mother, where- mother, I-is she alright?” you stumble over your words, your mind working faster than you can speak.

Loki’s fingers tighten on the fabric of your dress he can still reach, it keeps you close. He doesn’t answer your question. His normally bright features morph into a look of sadness giving you an answer.

“It's alright, I’ve got you,” Loki soothes pulling you back for another hug. “I will keep you safe,”

_ _ _ _ _ _

You didn’t remember much of what happened next. If someone were to ask you how you had gotten into one of the royal chambers you wouldn’t have been able to tell them. Royal handmaids worked quietly and quickly to clean the dust from your skin and rubble from your hair. None of them spoke to you. None of them looked you in the eye as they gently dabbed away the tears that leaked from your eyes. When they had finished their work, healers escorted you to their work station. They did not speak either. You stared up at the ceiling as they worked, talking in hushed whispers to one another. You didn’t understand what they were looking for, as far as you knew you had not been injured during the quake.

You did not find solace in the quiet if anything it created a vast breeding ground for feelings of guilt and self-loathing. Why did you have to be so selfish? Why did you need to give your mother the ‘Draught of Sleep’ today of all days? Would it have changed things? - would she still be here?

That last thought stuck with you, you let it burrow deep in your heart; scarring it. A constant reminder that your only family in life was gone.

Lost if grief, you didn’t hear the clinking movement of Asgards soldiers. One of them bent over you, his mouth moved but the words sounded like and meant nothing to you. Another seized your arm and pulled you from the examining table. They held a tight formation as they led through the castle, you could only see flashes of your surroundings when their shoulders jostled apart. The once brilliant glittering gold of the palace had dimmed somehow. Sorrow had settled everywhere.

You were presented to the Allfather in the throne room. The show of power had seemed excessive, was this how the King normally expressed his sympathies? Gathering your thoughts together you raise your gaze to Odin. The hairs on the back of your neck stand on end when you meet his stoic, stormy eyes. It didn’t take a genius to work out that something was wrong. You notice a small group of men gathered on either side of the dais, perhaps they were his team of advisers.

Hands clasped. Worried expressions.

Good.

Their king was displeased with them, they had failed to find the cause of the earthquakes at the expense of Asgardian lives. They should fear his ire.

“You are positive?” Odin looks to a man on his left, the rotund old man with rosy cheeks simply nodded in affirmation. “Very well,” Odin replies gravely.

“y/f/n y/l/n, do you know why you have been summoned here today?” The Allfather leans forward on his knees, sounding more like a disappointed parent than a king.

Your y/h/c hair sways past your shoulders as you shake your head in response.

“An independent investigation conducted into the recent geological phenomena plaguing Asgard has found you, and you alone responsible,”

Your eyes bulge in disbelief, you attempt to step closer to the Allfather but the guards flanking your sides grip your shoulders, stopping you.

“Me?” you breathe incredulously. “How could I, w-why would I? My mother is dead and I am the accused?!” the guards now hold you by your arms too, keeping you in place.

“For this crime, you are charged with reckless endangerment to life and accidental manslaughter,” he motions to a nervous-looking gentleman on his right who brings forth two golden bands sitting on a red velvet cloth.

“No!” you argue desperately. “It was not me! I swear on my ancestors, Allfather, please! I was not responsible for this,” you rush, voice rising with every syllable. Your eyes follow the bracelets as they get closer.

“Enough!” Odin bellows, silencing your ranting. “It has been decided to protect the good people of Asgard, you shall be bound forevermore by the bracelets of Sindri,”

The guards flanking you push down on your shoulders when you don’t submit one of them bumps the back of your knee forcing you into a kneeling position. You thrash against them as they hold you still, allowing the sweaty advisor to deposit the bracelets onto your wrists. Still fighting, you watch as the bracelets glow in an ancient language before shrinking down to fit snugly against your skin. The metal that looked hot enough to burn when it glowed is as cold as ice.

“You cannot do this to me Allfather! I did nothing wrong!” Your head whips towards the Allfather again. The bracelets glow once more and you notice Odin’s frown deepen.

“y/f/n y/l/n, through the uncontrolled forces you possess you have opened this peaceful realm and the innocent lives that reside in it, to horror and death.” Frantically you shake your head, the bracelets on your wrists glow brighter.

“You have betrayed those you love, and those who loved you. I have taken from you your power, in the name of my father, and his before,” A mystical wind rushes past you, making you squint to keep your eyes fixed on Odin, as you do colours that remind you of the Bifrost begin to dance behind him, they pick up in speed swirling faster; it's difficult to keep your eyes open.

“I, Odin Allfather, cast you out,”

An unseen force hits you squarely in the chest forcing you backwards, you brace yourself for the impact against the floor, it never comes. Instead, you keep falling, you scream and wonder if anyone will hear you. The feeling of weightlessness making you feel nauseous. Cracking open an eye your senses are assaulted by the bright colours of the Bifrost's transportation.

Just as you feel like you’re going to fall forever, your back collides with solid ground, knocking the air out of your lungs. Rolling to your side you cough and gasp for breath. Your fingers dig into damp soil, an earthy smell invades your nose. Your vision still swims around you, black begins to rim your sight. You head feels like it weighs a ton as you raise it to look out across the expanse of green.

Where had he sent you?

The distant sound of water sloshing was the last thing you remembered before you succumbed to darkness.

TAGLIST: @hellethil @icunee @bloatedandlonly @khadineberry @abrunettefangirlnerd @whothehellsbucky @dark-night-sky-99 @nonsensicalobsessions @batsdothings @crazymclazy @shesakillerkween @nxts-xsf @alwaysincaffeinatedstate

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blackkudos · 4 years

Text

Charles Mingus

Charles Mingus Jr. (April 22, 1922 – January 5, 1979) was an American jazz double bassist, pianist, composer and bandleader. A major proponent of collective improvisation, he is considered to be one of the greatest jazz musicians and composers in history, with a career spanning three decades and collaborations with other jazz legends such as Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Dannie Richmond, and Herbie Hancock.

Mingus' compositions continue to be played by contemporary musicians ranging from the repertory bands Mingus Big Band, Mingus Dynasty, and Mingus Orchestra, to the high school students who play the charts and compete in the Charles Mingus High School Competition. In 1993, the Library of Congress acquired Mingus's collected papers—including scores, sound recordings, correspondence and photos—in what they described as "the most important acquisition of a manuscript collection relating to jazz in the Library's history".

Biography

Early life and career

Charles Mingus was born in Nogales, Arizona. His father, Charles Mingus Sr., was a sergeant in the U.S. Army. Mingus was largely raised in the Watts area of Los Angeles. His maternal grandfather was a Chinese British subject from Hong Kong, and his maternal grandmother was an African-American from the southern United States. Mingus was the third great-grandson of the family's founding patriarch who was, by most accounts, a German immigrant. His ancestors included German American, African American, and Native American.

In Mingus's autobiography Beneath the Underdog his mother was described as "the daughter of an English/Chinese man and a South-American woman", and his father was the son "of a black farm worker and a Swedish woman". Charles Mingus Sr. claims to have been raised by his mother and her husband as a white person until he was fourteen, when his mother revealed to her family that the child's true father was a black slave, after which he had to run away from his family and live on his own. The autobiography doesn't confirm whether Charles Mingus Sr. or Mingus himself believed this story was true, or whether it was merely an embellished version of the Mingus family's lineage.

His mother allowed only church-related music in their home, but Mingus developed an early love for other music, especially Duke Ellington. He studied trombone, and later cello, although he was unable to follow the cello professionally because, at the time, it was nearly impossible for a black musician to make a career of classical music, and the cello was not yet accepted as a jazz instrument. Despite this, Mingus was still attached to the cello; as he studied bass with Red Callender in the late 1930s, Callender even commented that the cello was still Mingus's main instrument. In Beneath the Underdog, Mingus states that he did not actually start learning bass until Buddy Collette accepted him into his swing band under the stipulation that he be the band's bass player.

Due to a poor education, the young Mingus could not read musical notation quickly enough to join the local youth orchestra. This had a serious impact on his early musical experiences, leaving him feeling ostracized from the classical music world. These early experiences, in addition to his lifelong confrontations with racism, were reflected in his music, which often focused on themes of racism, discrimination and (in)justice.

Much of the cello technique he learned was applicable to double bass when he took up the instrument in high school. He studied for five years with Herman Reinshagen, principal bassist of the New York Philharmonic, and compositional techniques with Lloyd Reese. Throughout much of his career, he played a bass made in 1927 by the German maker Ernst Heinrich Roth.

Beginning in his teen years, Mingus was writing quite advanced pieces; many are similar to Third Stream because they incorporate elements of classical music. A number of them were recorded in 1960 with conductor Gunther Schuller, and released as Pre-Bird, referring to Charlie "Bird" Parker; Mingus was one of many musicians whose perspectives on music were altered by Parker into "pre- and post-Bird" eras.

Mingus gained a reputation as a bass prodigy. His first major professional job was playing with former Ellington clarinetist Barney Bigard. He toured with Louis Armstrong in 1943, and by early 1945 was recording in Los Angeles in a band led by Russell Jacquet, which also included Teddy Edwards, Maurice Simon, Bill Davis, and Chico Hamilton, and in May that year, in Hollywood, again with Teddy Edwards, in a band led by Howard McGhee.

He then played with Lionel Hampton's band in the late 1940s; Hampton performed and recorded several of Mingus's pieces. A popular trio of Mingus, Red Norvo and Tal Farlow in 1950 and 1951 received considerable acclaim, but Mingus's race caused problems with club owners and he left the group. Mingus was briefly a member of Ellington's band in 1953, as a substitute for bassist Wendell Marshall. Mingus's notorious temper led to his being one of the few musicians personally fired by Ellington (Bubber Miley and drummer Bobby Durham are among the others), after a back-stage fight between Mingus and Juan Tizol.

Also in the early 1950s, before attaining commercial recognition as a bandleader, Mingus played gigs with Charlie Parker, whose compositions and improvisations greatly inspired and influenced him. Mingus considered Parker the greatest genius and innovator in jazz history, but he had a love-hate relationship with Parker's legacy. Mingus blamed the Parker mythology for a derivative crop of pretenders to Parker's throne. He was also conflicted and sometimes disgusted by Parker's self-destructive habits and the romanticized lure of drug addiction they offered to other jazz musicians. In response to the many sax players who imitated Parker, Mingus titled a song, "If Charlie Parker were a Gunslinger, There'd be a Whole Lot of Dead Copycats" (released on Mingus Dynasty as "Gunslinging Bird").

Mingus was married four times. His wives were Jeanne Gross, Lucille (Celia) Germanis, Judy Starkey, and Susan Graham Ungaro.

Based in New York

In 1961, Mingus spent time staying at the house of his mother's sister (Louise) and her husband, Fess Williams in Jamaica, Queens. Subsequently, Mingus invited Williams to play at the 1962 Town Hall Concert.

In 1952 Mingus co-founded Debut Records with Max Roach so he could conduct his recording career as he saw fit. The name originated from his desire to document unrecorded young musicians. Despite this, the best-known recording the company issued was of the most prominent figures in bebop. On May 15, 1953, Mingus joined Dizzy Gillespie, Parker, Bud Powell, and Roach for a concert at Massey Hall in Toronto, which is the last recorded documentation of Gillespie and Parker playing together. After the event, Mingus chose to overdub his barely audible bass part back in New York; the original version was issued later. The two 10" albums of the Massey Hall concert (one featured the trio of Powell, Mingus and Roach) were among Debut Records' earliest releases. Mingus may have objected to the way the major record companies treated musicians, but Gillespie once commented that he did not receive any royalties "for years and years" for his Massey Hall appearance. The records, however, are often regarded as among the finest live jazz recordings.

One story has it that Mingus was involved in a notorious incident while playing a 1955 club date billed as a "reunion" with Parker, Powell, and Roach. Powell, who suffered from alcoholism and mental illness (possibly exacerbated by a severe police beating and electroshock treatments), had to be helped from the stage, unable to play or speak coherently. As Powell's incapacitation became apparent, Parker stood in one spot at a microphone, chanting "Bud Powell...Bud Powell..." as if beseeching Powell's return. Allegedly, Parker continued this incantation for several minutes after Powell's departure, to his own amusement and Mingus's exasperation. Mingus took another microphone and announced to the crowd, "Ladies and Gentlemen, please don't associate me with any of this. This is not jazz. These are sick people." This was Parker's last public performance; about a week later he died after years of substance abuse.

Mingus often worked with a mid-sized ensemble (around 8–10 members) of rotating musicians known as the Jazz Workshop. Mingus broke new ground, constantly demanding that his musicians be able to explore and develop their perceptions on the spot. Those who joined the Workshop (or Sweatshops as they were colorfully dubbed by the musicians) included Pepper Adams, Jaki Byard, Booker Ervin, John Handy, Jimmy Knepper, Charles McPherson and Horace Parlan. Mingus shaped these musicians into a cohesive improvisational machine that in many ways anticipated free jazz. Some musicians dubbed the workshop a "university" for jazz.

Pithecanthropus Erectus

and other recordings

The decade that followed is generally regarded as Mingus's most productive and fertile period. Over a ten-year period, he made 30 records for a number of labels (Atlantic, Candid, Columbia, Impulse and others), a pace perhaps unmatched by any other musicians except Ellington.

Mingus had already recorded around ten albums as a bandleader, but 1956 was a breakthrough year for him, with the release of Pithecanthropus Erectus, arguably his first major work as both a bandleader and composer. Like Ellington, Mingus wrote songs with specific musicians in mind, and his band for Erectus included adventurous musicians: piano player Mal Waldron, alto saxophonist Jackie McLean and the Sonny Rollins-influenced tenor of J. R. Monterose. The title song is a ten-minute tone poem, depicting the rise of man from his hominid roots (Pithecanthropus erectus) to an eventual downfall. A section of the piece was free improvisation, free of structure or theme.

Another album from this period, The Clown (1957 also on Atlantic Records), the title track of which features narration by humorist Jean Shepherd, was the first to feature drummer Dannie Richmond, who remained his preferred drummer until Mingus's death in 1979. The two men formed one of the most impressive and versatile rhythm sections in jazz. Both were accomplished performers seeking to stretch the boundaries of their music while staying true to its roots. When joined by pianist Jaki Byard, they were dubbed "The Almighty Three".

Mingus Ah Um

and other works

In 1959 Mingus and his jazz workshop musicians recorded one of his best-known albums, Mingus Ah Um. Even in a year of standout masterpieces, including Dave Brubeck's Time Out, Miles Davis's Kind of Blue, John Coltrane's Giant Steps, and Ornette Coleman's prophetic The Shape of Jazz to Come, this was a major achievement, featuring such classic Mingus compositions as "Goodbye Pork Pie Hat" (an elegy to Lester Young) and the vocal-less version of "Fables of Faubus" (a protest against segregationist Arkansas governor Orval Faubus that features double-time sections). Also during 1959, Mingus recorded the album Blues & Roots, which was released the following year. As Mingus explained in his liner notes: "I was born swinging and clapped my hands in church as a little boy, but I've grown up and I like to do things other than just swing. But blues can do more than just swing."

Mingus witnessed Ornette Coleman's legendary—and controversial—1960 appearances at New York City's Five Spot jazz club. He initially expressed rather mixed feelings for Coleman's innovative music: "...if the free-form guys could play the same tune twice, then I would say they were playing something...Most of the time they use their fingers on the saxophone and they don't even know what's going to come out. They're experimenting." That same year, however, Mingus formed a quartet with Richmond, trumpeter Ted Curson and multi-instrumentalist Eric Dolphy. This ensemble featured the same instruments as Coleman's quartet, and is often regarded as Mingus rising to the challenging new standard established by Coleman. The quartet recorded on both Charles Mingus Presents Charles Mingus and Mingus. The former also features the version of "Fables of Faubus" with lyrics, aptly titled "Original Faubus Fables".

Only one misstep occurred in this era: The Town Hall Concert in October 1962, a "live workshop"/recording session. With an ambitious program, the event was plagued with troubles from its inception. Mingus's vision, now known as Epitaph, was finally realized by conductor Gunther Schuller in a concert in 1989, a decade after Mingus died.

The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady

and other Impulse! albums

In 1963, Mingus released The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady, described as "one of the greatest achievements in orchestration by any composer in jazz history." The album was also unique in that Mingus asked his psychotherapist, Dr. Edmund Pollock, to provide notes for the record.

Mingus also released Mingus Plays Piano, an unaccompanied album featuring some fully improvised pieces, in 1963.

In addition, 1963 saw the release of Mingus Mingus Mingus Mingus Mingus, an album praised by critic Nat Hentoff.

In 1964 Mingus put together one of his best-known groups, a sextet including Dannie Richmond, Jaki Byard, Eric Dolphy, trumpeter Johnny Coles, and tenor saxophonist Clifford Jordan. The group was recorded frequently during its short existence; Coles fell ill and left during a European tour. Dolphy stayed in Europe after the tour ended, and died suddenly in Berlin on June 28, 1964. 1964 was also the year that Mingus met his future wife, Sue Graham Ungaro. The couple were married in 1966 by Allen Ginsberg. Facing financial hardship, Mingus was evicted from his New York home in 1966.

Changes

Mingus's pace slowed somewhat in the late 1960s and early 1970s. In 1974, after his 1970 sextet with Charles McPherson, Eddie Preston and Bobby Jones disbanded, he formed a quintet with Richmond, pianist Don Pullen, trumpeter Jack Walrath and saxophonist George Adams. They recorded two well-received albums, Changes One and Changes Two. Mingus also played with Charles McPherson in many of his groups during this time. Cumbia and Jazz Fusion in 1976 sought to blend Colombian music (the "Cumbia" of the title) with more traditional jazz forms. In 1971, Mingus taught for a semester at the University at Buffalo, The State University of New York as the Slee Professor of Music.

Later career and death

By the mid-1970s, Mingus was suffering from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). His once formidable bass technique declined until he could no longer play the instrument. He continued composing, however, and supervised a number of recordings before his death. At the time of his death, he was working with Joni Mitchell on an album eventually titled Mingus, which included lyrics added by Mitchell to his compositions, including "Goodbye Pork Pie Hat". The album featured the talents of Wayne Shorter, Herbie Hancock, and another influential bassist and composer, Jaco Pastorius.

Mingus died, aged 56, in Cuernavaca, Mexico, where he had traveled for treatment and convalescence. His ashes were scattered in the Ganges River.

Musical style

His compositions retained the hot and soulful feel of hard bop, drawing heavily from black gospel music and blues, while sometimes containing elements of Third Stream, free jazz, and classical music. He once cited Duke Ellington and church as his main influences.

Mingus espoused collective improvisation, similar to the old New Orleans jazz parades, paying particular attention to how each band member interacted with the group as a whole. In creating his bands, he looked not only at the skills of the available musicians, but also their personalities. Many musicians passed through his bands and later went on to impressive careers. He recruited talented and sometimes little-known artists, whom he utilized to assemble unconventional instrumental configurations. As a performer, Mingus was a pioneer in double bass technique, widely recognized as one of the instrument's most proficient players.

Because of his brilliant writing for midsize ensembles, and his catering to and emphasizing the strengths of the musicians in his groups, Mingus is often considered the heir of Duke Ellington, for whom he expressed great admiration and collaborated on the record Money Jungle. Indeed, Dizzy Gillespie had once claimed Mingus reminded him "of a young Duke", citing their shared "organizational genius."

Personality and temper

Nearly as well known as his ambitious music was Mingus's often fearsome temperament, which earned him the nickname "The Angry Man of Jazz". His refusal to compromise his musical integrity led to many onstage eruptions, exhortations to musicians, and dismissals. Although respected for his musical talents, Mingus was sometimes feared for his occasionally violent onstage temper, which was at times directed at members of his band and other times aimed at the audience. He was physically large, prone to obesity (especially in his later years), and was by all accounts often intimidating and frightening when expressing anger or displeasure. When confronted with a nightclub audience talking and clinking ice in their glasses while he performed, Mingus stopped his band and loudly chastised the audience, stating: "Isaac Stern doesn't have to put up with this shit." Mingus reportedly destroyed a $20,000 bass in response to audience heckling at the Five Spot in New York City.

Guitarist and singer Jackie Paris was a first-hand witness to Mingus's irascibility. Paris recalls his time in the Jazz Workshop: "He chased everybody off the stand except [drummer] Paul Motian and me... The three of us just wailed on the blues for about an hour and a half before he called the other cats back."

On October 12, 1962, Mingus punched Jimmy Knepper in the mouth while the two men were working together at Mingus' apartment on a score for his upcoming concert at The Town Hall in New York, and Knepper refused to take on more work. Mingus' blow broke off a crowned tooth and its underlying stub. According to Knepper, this ruined his embouchure and resulted in the permanent loss of the top octave of his range on the trombone – a significant handicap for any professional trombonist. This attack temporarily ended their working relationship, and Knepper was unable to perform at the concert. Charged with assault, Mingus appeared in court in January 1963 and was given a suspended sentence. Knepper did again work with Mingus in 1977 and played extensively with the Mingus Dynasty, formed after Mingus' death in 1979.

In addition to bouts of ill temper, Mingus was prone to clinical depression and tended to have brief periods of extreme creative activity intermixed with fairly long stretches of greatly decreased output, such as the five-year period following the death of Eric Dolphy.

In 1966, Mingus was evicted from his apartment at 5 Great Jones Street in New York City for nonpayment of rent, captured in the 1968 documentary film Mingus: Charlie Mingus 1968, directed by Thomas Reichman. The film also features Mingus performing in clubs and in the apartment, firing a .410 shotgun indoors, composing at the piano, playing with and taking care of his young daughter Caroline, and discussing love, art, politics, and the music school he had hoped to create.

Legacy

The Mingus Big Band

Charles Mingus' music is currently being performed and reinterpreted by the Mingus Big Band, which in October 2008 began playing every Monday at Jazz Standard in New York City, and often tours the rest of the U.S. and Europe. The Mingus Big Band, the Mingus Orchestra, and the Mingus Dynasty band are managed by Jazz Workshop, Inc. and run by Mingus' widow Sue Graham Mingus.

Elvis Costello has written lyrics for a few Mingus pieces. He had once sung lyrics for one piece, "Invisible Lady", backed by the Mingus Big Band on the album, Tonight at Noon: Three of Four Shades of Love.

Epitaph

Epitaph is considered one of Charles Mingus' masterpieces. The composition is 4,235 measures long, requires two hours to perform, and is one of the longest jazz pieces ever written. Epitaph was only completely discovered, by musicologist Andrew Homzy, during the cataloging process after Mingus' death. With the help of a grant from the Ford Foundation, the score and instrumental parts were copied, and the piece itself was premiered by a 30-piece orchestra, conducted by Gunther Schuller. This concert was produced by Mingus' widow, Sue Graham Mingus, at Alice Tully Hall on June 3, 1989, 10 years after Mingus' death. It was performed again at several concerts in 2007. The performance at Walt Disney Concert Hall is available on NPR. Hal Leonard published the complete score in 2008.

Autobiography

Mingus wrote the sprawling, exaggerated, quasi-autobiography, Beneath the Underdog: His World as Composed by Mingus, throughout the 1960s, and it was published in 1971. Its "stream of consciousness" style covered several aspects of his life that had previously been off-record. In addition to his musical and intellectual proliferation, Mingus goes into great detail about his perhaps overstated sexual exploits. He claims to have had more than 31 affairs in the course of his life (including 26 prostitutes in one sitting). This does not include any of his five wives (he claims to have been married to two of them simultaneously). In addition, he asserts that he held a brief career as a pimp. This has never been confirmed.

Mingus's autobiography also serves as an insight into his psyche, as well as his attitudes about race and society. It includes accounts of abuse at the hands of his father from an early age, being bullied as a child, his removal from a white musician's union, and grappling with disapproval while married to white women and other examples of the hardship and prejudice.

Scholarly influence

The work of Charles Mingus has also received attention in academia. According to Ashon Crawley, the musicianship of Charles Mingus provides a salient example of the power of music to unsettle the dualistic, categorical distinction of sacred from profane through otherwise epistemologies. Crawley offers a reading of Mingus that examines the deep, imbrication uniting Holiness-Pentecostal aesthetic practices and jazz. Mingus recognized the importance and impact of the midweek gathering of black folks at the Holiness-Pentecostal Church at 79th and Watts in Los Angeles that he'd attend with his stepmother or his friend Britt Woodman. Crawley goes on to argue that these visits were the impetus for the song "Wednesday Prayer Meeting." Emphasis is placed on the ethical demand of the prayer meeting felt and experienced that, according to Crawley, Mingus attempts to capture. In many ways, "Wednesday Night Prayer Meeting" was Mingus's memorial, homage, to black sociality. By exploring Mingus' homage to black Pentecostal aesthetics, Crawley expounds on how Mingus figured out that those Holiness-Pentecostal gatherings were the constant repetition of the ongoing, deep, intense mode of study, a kind of study wherein the aesthetic forms created could not be severed from the intellectual practice because they were one and also, but not, the same." Gunther Schuller has suggested that Mingus should be ranked among the most important American composers, jazz or otherwise. In 1988, a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts made possible the cataloging of Mingus compositions, which were then donated to the Music Division of the New York Public Library for public use. In 1993, The Library of Congress acquired Mingus's collected papers—including scores, sound recordings, correspondence and photos—in what they described as "the most important acquisition of a manuscript collection relating to jazz in the Library's history".

Cover versions

Considering the number of compositions that Charles Mingus wrote, his works have not been recorded as often as comparable jazz composers. The only Mingus tribute albums recorded during his lifetime were baritone saxophonist Pepper Adams's album, Pepper Adams Plays the Compositions of Charlie Mingus, in 1963, and Joni Mitchell's album Mingus, in 1979. Of all his works, his elegant elegy for Lester Young, "Goodbye Pork Pie Hat" (from Mingus Ah Um) has probably had the most recordings. Besides recordings from the expected jazz artists, the song has also been recorded by musicians as disparate as Jeff Beck, Andy Summers, Eugene Chadbourne, and Bert Jansch and John Renbourn with and without Pentangle. Joni Mitchell sang a version with lyrics that she wrote for it.

Elvis Costello has recorded "Hora Decubitus" (from Mingus Mingus Mingus Mingus Mingus) on My Flame Burns Blue(2006). "Better Git It in Your Soul" was covered by Davey Graham on his album "Folk, Blues, and Beyond." Trumpeter Ron Miles performs a version of "Pithecanthropus Erectus" on his CD "Witness." New York Ska Jazz Ensemble has done a cover of Mingus's "Haitian Fight Song", as have the British folk rock group Pentangle and others. Hal Willner's 1992 tribute album Weird Nightmare: Meditations on Mingus (Columbia Records) contains idiosyncratic renditions of Mingus's works involving numerous popular musicians including Chuck D, Keith Richards, Henry Rollins and Dr. John. The Italian band Quintorigo recorded an entire album devoted to Mingus's music, titled Play Mingus.

Gunther Schuller's edition of Mingus's "Epitaph" which premiered at Lincoln Center in 1989 was subsequently released on Columbia/Sony Records.

One of the most elaborate tributes to Mingus came on September 29, 1969, at a festival honoring him. Duke Ellington performed The Clown, with Duke reading Jean Shepherd's narration. It was long believed that no recording of this performance existed; however, one was discovered and premiered on July 11, 2013, by Dry River Jazz host Trevor Hodgkins for NPR member station KRWG-FM with re-airings on July 13, 2013, and July 26, 2014. Mingus's elegy for Duke, "Duke Ellington's Sound Of Love", was recorded by Kevin Mahogany on Double Rainbow (1993) and Anita Wardell on Why Do You Cry? (1995).

Material loss

On June 25, 2019, The New York Times Magazine listed Charles Mingus among hundreds of artists whose material was reportedly destroyed in the 2008 Universal fire.

Awards and honors

1971: Guggenheim Fellowship (Music Composition).

1971: Inducted in the Down Beat Jazz Hall of Fame.

1988: The National Endowment for the Arts provided grants for a Mingus nonprofit called "Let My Children Hear Music" which cataloged all of Mingus's works. The microfilms of these works were given to the Music Division of the New York Public Library where they are currently available for study.

1993: The Library of Congress acquired Mingus's collected papers—including scores, sound recordings, correspondence and photos—in what they described as "the most important acquisition of a manuscript collection relating to jazz in the Library's history".

1995: The United States Postal Service issued a stamp in his honor.

1997: Posthumously awarded the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award.

1999: Album Mingus Dynasty (1959) inducted in the Grammy Hall of Fame.

2005: Inducted in the Jazz at Lincoln Center, Nesuhi Ertegun Jazz Hall of Fame.

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Text

Chapter 3: Wild and Free 2 (Making a Scene)

Wei Wuxian wanted to wash up and see his host’s face, but there was no water in the room, neither for drinking nor for bathing. The only basin-shaped object, he surmised, was used as a toilet, and thus completely unsuitable. He pushed on the door, but it was bolted from the outside, presumably to prevent him from running amok.

Wei Wuxian had finally been reborn, and he wasn’t able to enjoy it one bit!

He might as well sit a while, adapt to his host. He wound up meditating the whole day. When he opened his eyes, sunlight was leaking into the room through the cracks in the door and shutters. Though he could stand up and walk around, he was still dizzy, his condition not much improved. It was strange. “Mo Xuanyu’s spiritual energy is negligible. Why can’t I control his body? What’s causing this?”

Then his stomach rumbled, and he realized it had nothing to do with spiritual energy. This body wasn’t used to fasting. It was hunger, nothing more. If he didn’t find food soon, he might be the first evil spirit to be brought back to life, only to starve to death immediately.

Wei Wuxian had taken a deep breath and raised his foot, prepared to kick the door down, when suddenly the sound of footsteps approached. Someone kicked at the door, impatiently yelling, “Mealtime!”

That didn’t mean the door was going to open. Wei Wuxian looked down and saw that the main door had a smaller door that opened below it. A small bowl had been placed before it.

“Quickly!” the servant outside called. “Quit dawdling, eat up and give the bowl back.”

The door was smaller than a dog flap, large enough for a bowl but too small for a person to pass through. There were two dishes and one serving of strange-looking rice. Wei Wuxian prodded at it with the chopsticks and thought sadly:

When the Yiling Patriarch returned, he was kicked down, chewed out, and given cold leftovers for his first meal. What carnage should result? Not even the chickens and the dogs left alive? The whole family extinguished? Tell anyone who would believe it. He was a tiger in Pingyang nipped at by dogs, a dragon in the shallow waters of Longyou harassed by shrimp. A plucked phoenix is less than a chicken.

This time, when the servants outside the door called, they sounded like they were grinning. “A’ding! Get over here!”

A crisp female voice replied from far away, “A’tong, are you giving the guy in there some food?”

“What else would I be doing in this wretched courtyard?” A’tong spit back.

A’ding’s voice appeared closer, like she was right in front of the door. “You only feed him once a day. When you’re goofing off no one calls you out, yet you say it’s wretched? Look at me. There’s too much to do for me to go out and have fun. ”

“I don’t just have to feed him,” A’tong complained. “Besides, would you dare go out these days? With this many walking dead, what family doesn’t have their doors sealed up tight.”

Wei Wuxian crouched by the door, tossing aside his two different-length chopsticks, and listened as he ate.

It seemed Mo Manor had had little peace of late. The walking dead, as their name implied, were corpses that walked, a relatively minor and common type of corpse transformation. They were generally dead-eyed, slow-moving, and of limited destructive power, but they alarmed the common people, and their stench alone was enough to induce vomiting.

However, to Wei Wuxian, they were the easiest to control, most obedient puppets. He felt a sense of fond familiarity at hearing them discussed.

“If you want to go out, bring me. I’ll protect you,” A’tong flirted.

“You’ll protect me? You talk a big game. You really think you can hold those things off?”

“If I can’t hold them off, no one can,” A’tong retorted.

A’ding laughed. “How do you know? I’m telling you, cultivators have already arrived at Mo Manor. I heard they’re from an illustrious clan! Mo-furen is greeting them in the hall, and everyone crowded in for the occasion. Didn’t you hear the racket? I don’t have time for you, they’ll probably send me on an errand any second.”

Wei Wuxian listened raptly. To the east, a faint clamor of voices could indeed be heard. He thought for a moment, then rose. He kicked the door and the bolt gave with a loud crack.

The two servants, who had been giggling and making eyes at one another, were startled into a screech when the doors flung open to either side of them. Wei Wuxian tossed his dishes aside and made a break for it, eyes burning in the sudden glare of the sunlight. His skin prickled, and he shaded his eyes with his hand, closing his eyes briefly.

A’tong’s screech was sharper than A’ding’s. Composing himself, he saw the headcase everyone bullied and regained his courage. Trying to save face, he jumped over and shouted, “Get back in there! What are you doing out here?” waving like Wei Wuxian was a misbehaving dog.

A beggar or a housefly wouldn’t have been treated worse. Mo Xuanyu had never resisted, giving them free rein. Wei Wuxian kicked A’tong lightly and laughed, “Who do you think you’re talking to?”

Wei Wuxian followed the noise east to a courtyard full of people, with more crammed into the hall. As soon as he set foot in the courtyard, a woman’s voice called out over the din, “One of our clan’s youths was a cultivator...”

That must be Mo-furen, scrambling to build a bridge between herself and the cultivation world. Without waiting for her to finish, Wei Wuxian forced his way through the crowd into the hall, waving enthusiastically and shouting, “I’m coming, I’m coming! Don’t worry, I made it.”

In the hall sat a middle-aged woman, well put-together, in fine clothes: Mo-furen. Her husband was seated before her. Facing them sat a number of white-clad youths with swords strapped across their backs. At the emergence of a disheveled weirdo from the crowd, the hall fell silent. Wei Wuxian pretended not to notice the frozen scene around him and continued, unabashed: “You called? The cultivator you mentioned, that could only be me.”

The powder was too thick, and it cracked when he smiled, fluttering to the ground. One of the youths in white snorted, stifling a laugh. The one next to him, who seemed to be in charge, glared disapprovingly, and he schooled his face back into a neutral expression.

Wei Wuxian surveyed the scene, startled. He thought the visitors had been exaggerated by naive servants, but they really were young cultivators from an “illustrious clan.”

Magic seemed to float from those graceful robes and flowing belts. One only had to glance at that uniform to recognize the Lan clan of Gusu. And these disciples were blood relatives of the Lan family—thin white ribbons circled their foreheads, decorated with wisps of cloud.

The Lan clan’s motto was “Stand Upright.” The ribbons represented self-restraint, and the cloud was the symbol of the Lan family itself. When visiting disciples from other families wore the ribbon, the cloud was not present. Seeing Lans made Wei Wuxian’s teeth ache. In a past life, he had always joked that the uniform looked like funeral garb. He would recognize it anywhere.

Mo-furen hadn’t seen her nephew in some time, and it took a while for her to recover from the shock. Upon recognizing the painted man, her rage mounted. Still in control of herself, she murmured to her husband, “Whoever let him out, put him back again.”

Her husband smiled apologetically, but when the unlucky bastard got up to grab him, Wei Wuxian threw himself down, hugging the floor. He couldn’t be dragged away, and calling in more servants didn’t help, other than to prevent other people from seeing him kick. Watching the look on Mo-furen’s face turn ugly, her husband snapped, “You lunatic! If you don’t get out of here, you wait and see what I’ll do to you.”

Although everyone in Mo Manor knew one of the Mos was a dangerous madman, Mo Xuanyu had been secluded in his dingy room for years, not daring to show his face. When people saw his ghoulish makeup and behavior, whispers sprung up. They were afraid only of missing a good show.

“If you want me to go back,” Wei Wuxian said, extending a finger towards Mo Ziyuan, “tell him to return my stuff he stole.”

Mo Ziyuan, shocked that this lunatic had the nerve first to scold him and then to show up here, turned blotchy and yelled, “Bullshit! When did I steal from you? I don’t need your stuff.”

“Right, right,” Wei Wuxian said. “You didn’t steal from me, you robbed me.”

Mo-furen could see clearly now. Mo Xuanyu wasn’t crazy: he had planned this. He was trying to ruin them. Vitriolically, she said, “You came here to cause trouble, didn’t you?”

“He stole from me, and I came to get my stuff back,” Wei Wuxian said blankly. “You call that causing trouble?”

Mo-furen was silent. Mo Ziyuan was beginning to get nervous, and he wound up to deliver a kick. One of the white-clad disciples twitched a finger, and Mo Ziyuan wobbled, kicking the air, and ended up knocking himself over. Wei Wuxian rolled over as if he really had been kicked, tearing open his lapels to reveal the mark Mo Ziyuan’s shoe had left the day before.

The denizens of Mo Manor, who had been watching eagerly, became excited: it would have been impossible for Mo Xuanyu to leave the footprint himself. The Mo family must be cruel even to their own blood. Mo Xuanyu didn’t return to Mo Manor insane—he was most likely driven to madness. Any excitement was okay with the assembled crowd, and this was even more entertaining than the arrival of the cultivators!

With this many witnesses, Mo-furen could neither strike him nor leave. She was forced to hold her nose and compromise. Faintly, she said, “Theft? Robbery? This accusation is difficult to process—between friends, that’s just borrowing. A’yuan is your little brother, so what if he borrows your things? How can a big brother be so stingy? Acting like a child over such a small matter is foolish. It’s not like he won’t return them.”

Several of the white-clad youths looked at each other in dismay, and one who had just taken a sip of tea nearly choked. Children raised in the Lan clan of Gusu were pure as the fresh-driven snow, and had probably never seen such a farce, or heard such wisdom. This was a learning experience for them. Wei Wuxian, cackling on the inside, held out a hand and asked, “Then you’ll give it back?”

Mo Ziyuan, of course, did not. What was gone was gone, and what was destroyed was destroyed. Even if he could return it, he wouldn’t. Looking pale, he yelled, “A’niang!” His glare said, Are you going to let him humiliate me like this?

Mo-furen glared back, silently ordering him not to cause an even uglier scene. Wei Wuxian interjected, “While we’re at it, not only should he not steal from me, he especially shouldn’t do it in the middle of the night. Everyone knows I like men. Even if he doesn’t have the sense to be ashamed, I know how to stay under the radar.”

Mo-furen took a shocked breath and shouted, “How dare you say this in front of the villagers and your elders? You really are shameless! A’yuan is your cousin!”

Wei Wuxian was an expert at bad behavior. Long ago, he had minded his manners here and there so that no one could accuse him of lacking good breeding. Now he was a madman, with no reputation to lose. He was expected to make a scene, so he could do what he pleased. He ducked his chin and said righteously, “He knows full well he’s my cousin, and yet he still can’t avoid suspicion! Who is shameless here? You won’t admit it, but don’t impugn my innocence! I’m still searching for a good man.”

Mo Ziyuan shouted and swung a chair. Wei Wuxian had finally gotten him to explode. In one motion, he sat up and dodged, and the chair smashed against the ground. The throngs of people milling about the East Hall had originally delighted in seeing the Mo clan lose face big time, but scattered as soon as the chair broke apart, afraid they’d be next if they weren’t careful. Wei Wuxian dodged behind the Lan disciples, who were sitting agape, and said reproachfully, “Did you see that? Did you see? He steals things and hits people, utterly heartless!”

Mo Ziyuan came after him, flailing, but his path was blocked by the head disciple. “This, uh, gongzi has something to say.”

Mo-furen saw that the disciples intended to protect this lunatic. Holding back fear, she forced out a smile. “This is my sister’s boy. Here, it’s complicated. Everyone in Mo Manor knows he’s insane. He says a lot of things you can’t take seriously. Cultivators, you must…” She trailed off, and Wei Wuxian poked his head out from behind the disciples.

“Who says you can’t take me seriously? The next time someone tries to steal from me, I’ll chop their hand off.”

Mo Ziyuan, who had been restrained by his father, broke loose upon hearing this. Wei Wuxian shrieked and leapt like a fish out the door. The disciples rushed to block his re-entrance, and, changing the topic, one earnestly declared, “Then… then tonight we will borrow the West Courtyard. Please bear in mind what I said before. After dusk, close your doors tightly and do not wander, and especially do not go near that courtyard.”

Mo-furen breathed shakily and did not object, just said, “Yes, we won’t, thank you for your help.”

Incredulously, Mo Ziyuan said, “Ma! That madman slandered me in front of everyone, and you let it go? You said, you said he was just a…”

Mo-furen cut him off. “Shut up! What do you have to say that you can’t say later?”

Mo Ziyuan had never experienced this treatment, been embarrassed this way. His mother had never scolded him like this. Full of hatred, he roared, “Tonight, this lunatic is going to die!”

The show over, Wei Wuxian slipped away from Mo Manor. He did a loop around town, taking pleasure in startling passersby and beginning to understand the joys of being a madman. The hanged-ghost makeup was a factor, and he was loathe to wash it off. He couldn’t bathe without water anyway. He fixed his hair and glanced at his wrists. The gashes there were unchanged. Clearly, bringing Mo Xuanyu’s struggles to light was far from adequate retaliation.

Would he really have to exterminate the Mo clan?

...Honestly, that wouldn’t be difficult.

Wei Wuxian pondered this as he wandered back to Mo Manor. When he tiptoed over to the West Courtyard, he saw Lan disciples standing atop the roof and walls, engaged in serious discussion. He retreated quietly—they would definitely notice him.

Although the Gusu Lan clan had headed the siege against him, this generation of cultivators either weren’t born then, or were toddlers. He didn’t need to worry about them. Wei Wuxian stopped and circled back to see what they were doing. As he watched, he suddenly felt strange.

The black flags, planted on the roof and walls and fluttering in the wind—why were they so familiar?

These flags were called “Yin Summoning Flags.” When stuck into the body of a living person, they would attract all manner of beings of Yin energy, like vengeful ghosts, fierce corpses, and evil spirits, which would then only attack the victim. Being stabbed with such a flag would turn a person into a target, so they were also called “Target Flags.” They could also be used on a house, in which case their range would extend to all its living occupants. Because Yin energy would linger wherever the flags were used, swirling around in the form of a black wind, they were also known as “Black Wind Flags.” The disciples had arranged the flags in the West Courtyard and warned bystanders to keep away. They must have planned to draw the walking dead here, catching them all in one net.

As for why they were familiar… how could they not be? Yin-Summoning Flags were invented by the Yiling Patriarch!

Though the cultivation clans raged against him, fought and killed him, it was alright for them to use what he made…

A disciple on the roof spotted him, calling, “Go back, please! You shouldn’t be here.”

Although he was shooing him away, he did it kindly, his tone very different from that of the servants. Taking advantage of his unguardedness, Wei Wuxian leapt up and snatched one of the flags.

The disciple startled. He jumped down from the wall to give chase. “Don’t mess with that! You shouldn’t take this stuff!”

Wei Wuxian shouted as he ran, disheveled and flailing like a real madman, “No, I won’t! I want it! It’s mine!”

The disciple got within two steps of him and grabbed his arm, saying “Will you give it back? If you don’t, I’ll hit you!”

Wei Wuxian held the flag in a deathgrip. The head disciple, who had been arranging the flags, heard the disturbance and leapt lightly down from the roof. “Jingyi, let it go. We’ll get it back nicely. There’s no need to bicker.”

“Sizhui, I didn’t really hit him,” Lan Jingyi said. “Look, he’s made a mess of the flags!”

In this time, Wei Wuxian rapidly finished inspecting the Yin Summoning Flag in his hand. The figures were drawn correctly, the spellwork wasn’t bad, and there were no careless mistakes. It was usable. The flag’s maker was just inexperienced, and the markings would only be able to attract a handful of evil spirits and walking dead. That was good enough.

Lan Sizhui smiled at him and said, “Mo-gongzi, it’s getting dark. The corpses will be drawn here soon. It would be best if you hurried home.”

Wei Wuxian sized up the disciple. He was polite and refined, with an impressive bearing and a small smile at the corner of his mouth. He was a young sapling worthy of praise. He had arranged the flags in perfect order, and his upbringing was clearly acceptable. Wei Wuxian didn’t know who in Gusu, that dreadful, old-fashioned place, could have raised a kid like this.

Lan Sizhui said, “This flag…”

Before he could finish, Wei Wuxian threw the Yin Summoning flag to the ground, hurrumping. “Just a lousy flag! What’s so special about it? I could draw one better than you all!” Then he ran off.

The disciples still on the roof watching the scene heard him boasting, and they laughed so hard they almost fell to the ground. Lan Jingyi huffed a laugh as well, gathering the Yin Summoning Flag and shaking out the dirt. “He really is a lunatic.”

“Don’t say that. Here, come help me,” Lan Sizhui responded.

Wei Wuxian headed off to do a couple more circuits of the manor, not returning to Mo Xuanyu’s little courtyard until nightfall. The bolt was already broken, and no one had tidied up the mess inside. Ignoring this, he looked around, choosing a clear spot on the ground to sit and meditate.

Before dawn broke, a wave of noise from outside pulled him from his meditative state. He could hear footsteps, crying, and panicked yells heading his direction. People were shouting over each other, “Get in there! Drag him out!” “Report him!” “What do you mean, report him? Beat him to death!”

He opened his eyes to see a group of servants had rushed in. The courtyard was ablaze, and someone was shouting, “Drag the crazy murderer to the Main Hall! He’ll pay with his life!”

#mdzs #cql #the untamed #grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation #translation #chapter 3 #wei wuxian #a'ding #a'tong #mo ziyuan #mo furen #lan jingyi #lan sizhui

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the-canary · 5 years

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Don’t Think Twice - S.R (10/10)

Summary: Neither of you thought there were things the other was so afraid of. (Enhanced!Reader/Steve Rogers).

Prompt: Vertigo - sensation of whirling and loss of balance, associated particularly with looking down from a great height; giddiness

A/N: This is for @until-theend-oftheline ‘s beautiful words challenge. i really like when somethings aren’t said just yet, there is a lot left with this chapter but if you have your own thoughts, ideas, and questions -- please consider sharing them, i would love to hear them! i hope you enjoy the last chapter, this series ran longer than i thought it would, but it was a fun ride! <3

Feedback is always welcomed.

Gideon understood that once he uploaded whatever was remaining of his father, that he as a person would be destroyed, but if he really thought about it -- there was so such thing, to begin with. Any version --whether memories or wounds-- was replaceable in the long journey to find what his father wanted, he was just a bigger piece to the puzzle with two objectives in mind -- find his father and reunite with his sister.

But, to see his sister with people that cared for her, saw her as a human being well that just sparked something in him. They hadn’t known each other for very long, but there was a sense of destruction in Gideon that wanted to make his sister remember that she wasn’t anything of the sort -- she was doll meant to be used and thrown away when her time came...when their father was meant to come back and bring home.

Maybe, that’s why Gideon moved with his plans faster than they should have gone. The chemical reaction in his body should have moved so fast, but his anger and impatience made it so the metal and gases in his body expanded further and faster, as his father’s incomplete voice began to swallow up whatever “sense of self” the young man had once.

The youth his sister had met in Sokovia was barely there when she met and headbutted his last remaining body near the Avengers Compound. Her metal limbs and just entire self encompassed him and why he can heat her and father fighting over whatever --ideology or future plans, he isn't quite sure-- but the last part, as the metal expands and encases the blue burning completely lets that little part that is left of Gideon to shine brightest of all

“Wanda was right,” she laughs breathlessly, “Siblings are so annoying.”

There’s a blast that destroys part of the building that is facing it, as Victor tries his hardest not to run over to where he knows you would be. You had rushed out in the last minute, and in your unstable state he really couldn’t stop you. Lawson had tried following you, but the smoke and fumes had been too much for him as well and he needed to help with the evacuation of all the other less-ranked S.H.I.E.L.D agents.

It isn’t until a least an hour later that both Lawson and Shuri come in with two hovering stretchers that a little blue sheen over them. Green eyes widen and Victor moves his body mainly from shock to look at the person laying on one of them -- limbs missing here and there with blotches of dirt and metal covering them all over.

All the rocks and crystals in the center of the chest are broken or cracked in some way, except the center. There is a light crack, but it is still burning a bright and clear blue.

“She’s still alive,” Shuri declares, “But completely comatose.”

Victor can’t help but sigh with a little laugh, “Of course, she would be. Do you think your plan could work now?”

Shuri looks at the doctor before nodding, “If we want to keep her alive, we better start the vibranium transfusion.”

“And the other?” Lawson can’t help but add-in, the silence heavy but Gideon's own heartbeat is just as strong as yours, though he is missing more patches of skin and limbs than you are. There is also heavy scarring over his face and burns on the right side of his body.

“We’ll do what we can,” Shuri declares while moving her fingers over the hologram keyboard, “For the both of them.”

Lawson frowns, but doesn’t say anything as both Victor and Shuri yell and more medical help is brought in.

However, it isn’t that easy as skin needs to be regrown and the vibranium needs to be put into balance with the remaining serum and with anything else that happened when that bright light took ahold of everything.

There are so many questions that need answering, but for now -- everyone’s whose life you touched in such a short amount of time hopes you make it back in one piece --- and like you, most of all.

You are completely unaware that there is a certain man (after he has come back and everything had been explained to him) that tends to stand near your pod every once and a while, though nobody else says anything about it.

You wonder if there was a certain stirring in Audrey Hepburn's character back in Funny Face when she started doing those fashion shoots and opening up herself to the world that had been brought to her by Fred Astaire. You wonder if it was scary at all, or if it was as easy as gliding or flying -- if you forgot to be scared because there was someone with her, even though she was still wary of him when it came to love.

It was one of your first thoughts, as you slow woke up from the dead to have both Shuri and Victor looking at you. You glance around for a second, as the princess asks you how you are feeling.

“I’m…” your voice feels dry from lack of uses over the past couple of months, “...not burning anything?”

Shuri grins and nods, “We’ve stabilized your blood with vibranium and some of your brother’s blood.”

They aren’t sure how to add it might have all be thanks to Captain Rogers, so they leave that part out for now, though it helps that something else is on your mind.

“Gideon?” you faze everything out, remembering your brother’s body but your father’s words (It all deserves to be burned down for what they did to you) being the last things you heard, so you can help but get up just a little in both fear and worry, “Is he still alive?”

“He’s still asleep,” Victor adds in as he motions to a large white pod not too far away from the three of you -- somewhere you had only been a few hours before. At the mention, you just let out of a huff of air before collapsing on the bed once more.

“That’s good,” you let out a light laugh before blacking out completely once more. Shuri and Victor can’t help but look at each other unsure of what just happened, but soon realized that you were alive and well -- and above all else, your powers were being controlled better than they thought they would be.

Slowly but surely you get used to walking in “new skin” as creepy as it may sound because there are patches that have been cleared up and the metal doesn’t sing to you as loud anymore, though it is always there as surely as it seems that Gideon will be sleeping for a while longer -- his healing system completely destroyed and as the Avengers found out, he was the last one of those made. All those others have been destroyed or harmed when the bombings started taking place -- they had all been the sacrifice for bringing your father’s consciousness back once more.

For now, you were sitting underneath the shade of one of the many Avengers building as the sun slowly started to set. The spring heat still made you a bit dizzy here and there, but you had heard that someone was finally coming back from their extended stay in Wakanda.

“Captain Rogers!” you exclaim with a wave, as he runs down the lace for a moment before stopping. Blue eyes stare at you for a good second before you come up to him -- blood starting to warm up just a bit more, but not for its usual reasons.

“Are you alright here?” he can’t help but ask, “Like this?”

You look down at your legging and short sleeve before nodding, “Yes, I’m slowly getting used to the weather.”

Steve smiles before asking if you want to finish the rest of the run with him. You say no, that you still aren’t ready for that sort of thing, though you question if he is willing to watch another movie with you. He agrees right before Lawson ends up calling you for your check-up. You end up heading back inside and wait until your usual hours, as the cold settles in more comfortably than before.

You’re already there, halfway through another Audrey Hepburn movie and munching on popcorn when Steve finally comes in. You welcome him with a pat on the seat and though this is widely different from before, Steve can’t help but wonder what brought about all this change, he ends up -in the silence of it all-- asking right before you start the movie once more.

“It’s crazy,” you breathe out, trying to express what you were feeling in that one moment that you were sure was the end, “I just jumped in the way without a second thought.”

“That was pretty reckless,” Steve remarks as you give him a questioning stare.

“Now, that’s not fair,” you fight back with a grin. The warmth calling you more than it should, as you lean just a bit closer to Steve, “I’ve heard you do it all the time. I’m just following by example.”

Steve laughs and shakes his head as you give him a soft smile, something that he had never seen before -- at least coming from you. And as you settle in to watch the rest of the movie, Steve can’t help but notice that between the chill of the air-conditioned room and feeling of your lukewarm body, there is a sense of dizziness fluttering inside his chest -- Steve was sure he knew what it might be, but for now things could come as slowly as they would -- you still had much to learn and recover from but he knew that he would be there when you need him.

Between fighting and flying against all these emotions, Steve wouldn’t think twice about staying by your side for now.

A little bit further down the road, you might end up admitting the same thing as well. And if someone finds you both asleep on the couch later on, well Shuri will have some pictures to show later on as well.

#mcu beautiful words challenge #Steve Rogers #steve rogers x reader #steve grant rogers x reader #steven grant rogers #steve rogers au #steve rogers fic #steve rogers fanfic #steve rogers fan fic #steve rogers fanfiction #steve rogers fluff #series: think twice #fabiola trying to write

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selvvyn · 5 years

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– brenton thwaites; 23 ; he/his —— is that really marcus selwyn? it’s been so long! did you hear, he is studying to be a quidditch player? from what i remember, he was dynamic and intuitive, but also pretty chaotic and listless, who knows after all this time. word on the street is, they’re with the death eaters, but that doesn’t define them. ( zoe; cst; 21; she/her )

marcus has a stats page, a pinterest, & a playlist!!

marcus was four years old and recently motherless when he decided, for the first time, that he didn’t like rules.

he was raised from a young age to believe in the power of his name, if nothing else. to believe in the cruelty of beauty, if he needed something else to hold onto at night. it was a poor belief system for a child, but he’d say he came out alright. not great; but then he’d long forged a private belief that people weren’t capable of being great. sometimes he wondered if they were even all that capable of being good.

marcus hated rules. but --- names. something small and tangible and stifling, not quite rules but not quite not. he couldn’t escape names.

marcus’ father, sebastian, was not an altogether awful man. he was a politician, as many selwyn’s often were. people loved him because he was a beautiful man who wove beautiful words. he was as known for his corruption as for his re-elections. people came to him for favors, he’d hear them out, pull a few strings; always at a price.

he never asked for more than someone could give --- because he’d learned in his own childhood that there was more to be bargained for than money. trust, faith, loyalty, those were far more powerful. he traded in those even more often than he traded in the tangible.

he saved his cruelties for the closed-door happenings at the ministry, turning a blind eye to subsections in laws that hurt people, or made it easier to hurt them. he championed weaponized neutrality. but he presented a good, if slightly crooked, face for the selwyn name. he tried to make sure his son could do the same. it didn’t take much for people to like selwyns, anyway --- they were a family of beautiful faces going back as long as anyone could remember, and every other truth about them seemed to fall by the wayside.

but the thing was --- marcus didn’t like rules. society and politics were nothing but rules and he was still a child but he was certain he could never do well under their thumb. it was fine. marcus has always been able to tell that his father wasn’t the type of man cut out to be a father. his cruelties seldom bled out onto his son, but marcus was a solitary kid by circumstance if not choice, raised by a string of nannies and house elves until his dad came home for stilted dinner conversations. it took years for sebastian selwyn to note marcus’ shortcomings.

they didn’t talk about marcus’ mother, but that was fine. the two didn’t talk about a lot of things.

sebastian remarried soon after his wife died; another young, pretty pureblood with a dead spouse and miles of history. the two of them had a kid all their own. and while marcus was never his father’s best friend, he never felt like an outsider in their family.

not being beloved didn’t mean much when marcus knew that no matter what, he’d always be his father’s pride and joy. he expected marcus to be a good man --- by a definition of good that meant he being a good selwyn.

marcus didn’t like rules and the prospect of being a good selwyn sure felt like it came with a book full of ‘em. but what could he possibly do about that? it was one thing to break free from the order of the day to go running around outside, to escape his tutors and steal a broom from where his father kept them hidden. it would be another entirely to buck out from under his father’s wishes.

marcus had nothing against his father. nothing tangible. but he’d always wonder if the things wrong in his wiring were to blame on those years of his life with just his father around.

maybe if his father had been the kind of man who could be a father, if marcus would be capable of being a half decent person. his half siblings step siblings and his step mother all seem better at being people than he is; even if none of them are quite as good at being selwyns. for the most part, marcus would guess he’s fine with it. he lets his hands be bloodied, if they’re not good for much else.

( he thinks they’re good for plenty more, of course, but it’s an unspoken rule to keep thoughts like that to himself )

his father was a politician, and politicians have rules. they couldn’t appear too hot-headed, too rash or emotional. every move marcus’ father made felt calculated. even the rote love he gave to marcus felt like a choice he’d come to one day, in the office that marcus was barred from entering. but marcus was a young man. young men could do things that seemed cruel and illogical and if they did them with enough charm, the world would forgive them.

and so, anytime his father has a favor to call in, something harsh he needed done, he had marcus to call upon. isn’t that why purebloods have sons? so they can fall in line and do the work their fathers can’t anymore?

marcus knew his father didn’t think of him as smart. he knew a lot of people didn’t think he of him as smart. he didn’t care enough about school or order to come across like someone who knew to play the game.

( be any way you want, but seem perfect. )

but he noticed things, he’d always noticed them. made note and did nothing with the knowledge but kept it packed up and hidden in the back of his head. he made note when he was fifteen, and it was the first time his father asked him to visit someone he’d helped along, and make a few pointed remarks. marcus worked off the script his father had given him --- after all, the man didn’t think him capable of much improvisation, and marcus didn’t care to challenge that expectation.

he did exactly what his father asked. and then he came home and punched his fist through a wall so hard and he had bruises for so long, he didn’t even notice when they faded.

it was a routine. his father didn’t often ask things of marcus, and when he did, he didn’t so much want marcus as he wanted the selwyn heir. but marcus would do them --- because there were some rules you couldn’t break. and when he was finished he’d come home and find something he could break, and that’d be that.

it was easy to live a life by his father’s careful scripts while cheerfully shattering every other script around him. not caring about other people, about classes, about the future he as a selwyn would one day be forced into ... it was easy. it was necessary. marcus didn’t like rules and life was full of them, unless you knew which ones to follow and which to throw by the wayside. unless you knew how to burn them to the ground.

marcus selwyn knew rules, but sebastian selwyn knew people; he had marcus go and talk for him because he knew that deep down, none of them would begrudge marcus. he was painfully youthful, with a stubborn set to his mouth and eyes that turned wild, and, yes, enough charm to make up for all his shortcomings. marcus’ natural carelessness paired with the careful lines fed to him by his father was the perfect recipe for getting away with highway robbery.

marcus made note of that, too.

if anyone ever decided to ask him a personal, deeply soppy question, he would say: quidditch was, perhaps, the only thing he loved. there was something about the caress of harsh winds on his cheek and the complete insanity of ground obscured by fog and distance. there were rules in quidditch, yes, but rules marcus knew how and when and why to break them. that was the only important thing about rules. and aside from all that -- the stupid love and stupid freedom -- he’s good at it.

he made captain his fifth year at hogwarts and could have crowed with pride.

instead he poured all that brash emotion onto a few sheets of parchment that he soon thew in the fireplace. then he wrote his father a very measured letter detailing the accomplishment in clean words and measured phrases.

writing the things he knew not to say out loud became a routine, then, as much as noticing things had. hell, he wrote the things he noticed, onto the pages of a notebook in dizzy, cramped handwriting. marcus was under no illusions that he was good at writing; but it was necessary. it was a practice he’d started six years ago but he could never keep track of how many journals he’d filled.

every single one, once written up to the last inch of paper, was burned. marcus hated rules, but he’d made this one for himself, for his own good: leave no trace.

marcus’ father didn’t ask too much of him. mostly marcus figured this was because sebastian thought he knew his son’s limits and didn’t want to become disappointed by asking for something those limits couldn’t reach.

this was fine. every few months marcus would somehow be given a location printed on fine parchment in his father’s neat hand with, what to say and what to get out of the interaction laid out in unadorned detail. aside from that, the selwyn patriarch did nothing much to corral his son. and because they were selwyns, this wasn’t seen as a shortcoming on the politician’s end.

marcus would never call his actions self-destructive, because he too knew his own limitations. ( of course, marcus felt he actually knew them, while his father just assumed shortcomings and planned accordingly. not that marcus much cared --- his father used him as a tool. it was hard to expect more of the man after that. ) they were just outlandish and reckless and carried an undercurrent of anger he tried his hardest to only put onto the pitch.

he didn’t think of himself as charismatic, but he knew he knew how to command a room.

he didn’t think of himself as smart, but he knew how to figure things out.

he didn’t think of himself as a liability, but he knew he was a few bad choices away from his father turning to the children he’d had with his second wife.

after school marcus was approached by a recruiter for the montrose magpies and he wanted, more than anything, to jump on the opportunity. quidditch had always been a way for him to channel the energy he didn’t expend on things the world expected him to. but his father balked when marcus told him of this choice.

the selwyns were always in the publc eye, marcus argued. what’s it matter if i’m a politician or a quidditch star?

but it mattered. sebastian selwyn told his son, dismissal clear in his tone, to give it a few years and see if he still believed such a childish profession was the right path.

sebastian selwyn might as well have told his son, dismissal clear in his tone, that he didn’t know enough to be trusted with his own future.

so marcus moved on, resigned himself to more school until he could find the words to sway his father. he figured it would only make marcus a better tool at sebastian’s disposal: when marcus was just the selwyn heir, it was one thing. no one said no to him when sebastian sent him calling. but who would dare touch the selwyn heir who moonlighted as a quidditch star? his father would take time to convince, but marcus had no other choice.

still --- away at university, it was easier than ever to break things once he returned home from appointments his father set him on. it’d been hard at hogwarts and harder at the selwyn home.

but now marcus didn’t live at home. and marcus, as a selwyn, had enough disposable cash with which to buy small, breakable things. he fast learned how to spell away bruised knuckles and scratched palms and return to practice and classes the next day looking like nothing at all had happened the night before.

even if he missed one or two, who would ask about them? people expected guys like marcus to have bruised fists and windswept hair and shining smiles.

his father thought marcus was passable as a selwyn and useful as a son, but the truth was marcus had a talent for seeming exactly as he needed to. the second he felt comfortable joining a professional quidditch team ( the second he convinced his father or made his first choice against his wishes ) he knew he’d be beloved.

it was terrifying. marcus knew no one should ever love him that much.

technically, marcus has never played by the rules. not once in his life. and somehow living that way has given him almost everything he could have dreamed of when he was four and motherless and decided rules were bullshit. he’s mostly got his father’s approval and he’s so close to his dream job. to top it off, he was born a nice smile people like even when he knows they shouldn’t.

but there’s got to be more, right? there’s a war coming up. marcus doesn’t think his father will ask him to fight in it ( marcus has always been his tool, not some causes’ ) but it’s impossible to ignore its presence. there’s probably some sort of wartime protocol even marcus should abide by, but at this point he doesn’t know how.

there’s likely rules for winning and rules for losing and marcus just cannot, will not, bring himself to care about them. come what may, he is determined that nothing in his life will change unless he wants it to.

#( ⁎∴◦ ⊱ ━━ 𝙬𝙝𝙚𝙧𝙚 𝙬𝙚𝙣𝙩 𝙩𝙝𝙖𝙩 𝙗𝙞𝙡𝙡𝙞𝙤𝙣 𝙙𝙤𝙡𝙡𝙖𝙧 𝙨𝙢𝙞𝙡𝙚┊intro. )#resurectiointro

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saintaugustinerp · 5 years

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Congratulations Alexandra! You have been accepted for the OC role of The Crestfallen with the faceclaim Blanca Padilla. Please be sure to check out the accepted applicants checklist! Also be sure send us a link to your blog within the next twenty-four hours. Welcome to St. Augustine!

OUT OF CHARACTER

Name/alias: Alexandra

Age (18+) : 21

Gender/Preferred pronouns: she/her pronouns

Timezone: EST but PST when i’m home for holidays aka Tuesday when I fly home

IN CHARACTER

Character Label: So I really like ‘The Crestfallen’ because of how it ties into Poppy’s sense of hope and then sudden disappointment but since it does have ‘fallen’ in it, I get why it would be weird given her origins with the Fallen Angel, even though they have fairly different meanings, so I’d say maybe ‘The Pariah’? It’s really up to the admins, so whichever you prefer!

Character Name: Poppy Charlotte Northcott

Poppy was the choice of her mother: a Brit, through and through, she’d allowed her husband to choose the name of their first child, but insisted upon naming their second. Her father, naturally, had played up the flower name’s symbolism with regards to soldiers, claiming it was in honour of his daughter’s maternal grandfather, a veteran of the second World War.

Charlotte was in honour of her paternal grandmother, a woman well-known in their community for being a staunch supporter of Connecticut Republicans. She died just after Poppy’s high school graduation, but she’d left a great deal of money to the girl she proclaimed loudly and often to be her favourite granddaughter.

Northcott, of course, was her father’s name, tying her to a family of rather politically-involved, staunchly Catholic Connecticuters, a line which stretched back rather far in the state’s history.

Age (18+): 20

Gender/Pronouns: cis woman, she/her

Desired Faceclaim: Blanca Padilla

Home Town: Greenwich, Connecticut

Three Positive Traits: Kind, faithful, charming

Three Negative Traits: Self-conscious (in the sense that she’s very overly aware of her actions and how she’s perceived, more so than in the sense that she’s not confident), repressed, stubborn

Major: History Major, Art Minor

Year: Second

Quote: “Is she a sinner, or is she a martyr? Some days she cannot remember the difference.”

Character blurb: For the briefest of moments, she is radiant. Clad in a perfectly fitting white sundress, dark hair escaping a bun in the softest tendrils, framing her face as if they’d been styled to do so, she steps off the train and onto the bustling platform. Her footsteps are almost instinctive, with little uncertainty as to their goal, and it is instead her eyes which hold reservations. As she walks, whispers follow her, not overtly, but as she passes, students cluster together, murmuring words you cannot hear — though you’re certain she can. As she draws nearer, making eye contact with what is certainly a familiar face, you can see a spark of hope grow, and then die out, in her expression. Her shoulders sink, almost imperceptibly, and as she draws close enough for you to see the exhaustion on her face, you understand: this is less of a homecoming, more of an ordeal.

Developed Head Canons:

family and youth — Poppy was born to Bridget Alston-Northcott, British socialite turned supportive housewife, and Phillip Northcott, former lawyer, current politician. She was not their first child: Eleanor, born ten years earlier, was a wild-child even at 10, but she adored her little sister, admiring her little fists as they waved in the air. Both girls were raised by their mother, taught to be polite, elegant, and quiet, always subservient to their father, and in the future, their husband. While Poppy, always the softer, gentler of the two sisters, did well in this domain, Eleanor was less of a fan, and it was rather unsurprising when, after a series of expulsions from boarding schools throughout the world, she ran away at age 17, choosing to live with Bridget’s mother, her grandmother, rather than fulfill her parents’ expectations. Poppy grew up with little knowledge of this, having only the vaguest childhood memories of her sister. She was always a perfect child, good at her schoolwork, obedient to her parents, and as her father transitioned from mayor to senator, she was always on display, a doe-eyed, polite little girl who learned how to smile and shake hands, attending church ever Sunday, and winning hearts for herself just as much as they were for her father. She never witnessed any hints of her mother’s frustration, nor any sign of her father’s occasional infidelity, and grew into a young adult that was as much a trophy as she was a daughter. Her parents were firm about their beliefs in theory more so than in action, and so Poppy adopted them, about the sanctity of marriage, about children and the responsibilities of women. From her mother, she learned always to present the perfect image, to stay skinny, to keep her teeth white, to exit cars in ways that prevent wardrobe malfunctions… Her image was everything, and she learned to protect it. Though her views changed a little, particularly in high school, she never questioned her parents openly, reserving physical intimacy for men, and only those she believed she would marry. Though she rebelled against their strict demands in the smallest of ways, attending parties and having fun as any teen would, she was careful to never go too far, never do anything overly wild or illegal, and always showing a smiling face to the world.

(tw: mentions of miscarriage and addiction-shaming in the next two headcanons)

the destruction of her reputation — First was her decision to go to a party in town, not something she ever would have done before she’d witnessed her boyfriend kissing another, but then, perhaps she was owed a little leeway for impulsive decisions, after everything. (It wasn’t like one act of rebellion could have any real lasting consequences…) It surprised her, if she was honest — St. Augustine students had a tendency to look down on the town’s resident youth for their provincialism, but really, they weren’t all bad. Difficult to understand, especially with her rudimentary grasp of Swiss German, and with abysmal taste in alcohol, but what they truly were was different, which was precisely what she needed. No reminders of him, nor of whoever he’d been kissing — god how it shattered her, that he’d cheat on her with someone else — and when she thought of either, the solution was another shot. It’s how she met him, on one of these nights, a scruffy blond, too-tall and awkward as anything, but the way he smiled at her made her feel as though the sun had emerged on a bitter winter day. And the way he touched her, well, it was magical and beautiful, and they both knew it wouldn’t last, but it didn’t matter.

Then was: forgetting to take her birth control a few days in a row, and then losing it in the chaos of a particularly paper-filled week, and then not replacing it — a recipe for disaster, under any circumstances. But that’s when they fell apart, Poppy and this local boy, and so it didn’t matter if she was on the pill or not, because she wasn’t sexually active and so what would be the point? Four months pass, and maybe she gained a little weight, but without her mother there to constantly criticize her body, with studies and internships and her missing classmate and her cheating ex to consider, it was easy to ignore, really, easy to lose herself in the routine of wine and cheese on Sundays and late-night study sessions and everything in between. Maybe she felt ill more than she ever usually did, maybe she had trouble sleeping, developing dark circles under her eyes that never seemed to truly go away, but that was just stress, right?

And lastly, well. It’s May, they have found Frederick’s body, finals are well underway, and so when Poppy began acting oddly during a morning exam, hands shaking and face pale, school gossip acknowledged it, but only just. Trembling, in pain, but incredibly conscious of the room full of her classmates, she finished the exam before going to the infirmary. She’d intended only to find the problem, take some pain medication, and return to her studies, but the nurse, recognizing the pain and bleeding and eager to rule out every possible cause, gave Poppy a pregnancy test, which came out positive. Confused and insistent that she wasn’t pregnant, that she couldn’t be, even in the face of the nurse’s certainty that it was a miscarriage, she simply took the strong pain medication that she was given, and returned to her room. There she lay, curled on her comforter, pale and sweating and terrified, ignoring all of her roommate’s concerns in favour of staring blankly at the ceiling of their room. All too soon it was the evening, and the candlelight vigil for their deceased classmate. Naturally she attended — even ill, with the possibility of something she refused to belief floating around in her mind, there was little question of missing it, and inviting the questions that would draw. In such a small school, Poppy was ever conscious about the way whispers spread, the way any little thing could draw attention, and in these moments she thought of her parents’ teachings on the importance of public appearance.

It would have almost been magical if it hadn’t been so sad, the woods filled with little sparks of light, rows of students illuminated with candles, tears in the eyes of so many, and perhaps flickers of guilt, or shame, in others — though there was little chance of Poppy even noticing any of it. It was as much as she could do to hold a candle, almost swaying, face tight. It was all she could do to keep from passing out, to hold on to consciousness in the face of the dizziness from missing lunch and dinner, and from the medication, and from the stress that threatened to overwhelm her. Chest tight, darkness all around her, and unable to even comprehend any of the words of grief being murmured, someone bumped into her, and that was it. She grabbed the arm of the friend nearest her and explained that she had to leave, that she didn’t give a fuck what it looked like. But her words were far too loud in the moment of silence, voice somehow strong despite the way the world seemed to spin, and when all eyes were drawn to her, Poppy realized she’d made a mistake, and threw up before fainting.

The hospital said, first, allergic reaction to the pain medication, and then, even worse:miscarriage — she’d lost the chance at a child she’d never even known she had, and not even the doctors could tell her why. The alcohol, maybe? The smoking she’d started only to keep from feeling ill in the morning? No matter how many times Poppy pleaded that she hadn’t known, that she hadn’t wanted this to happen, the result was the same: this could have been a child, this could have been… something, and now it wasn’t. Not a soul at Saint Augustine knew, beyond the nurse, and all they’d seen was a dizzy mess of a girl, being sick at a vigil and saying she didn’t give a fuck: it was a catastrophe. And with her stay at the hospital preventing her from returning to school before the end of the year, there was little chance of her preventing the gossip that made its way throughout her classmates. She was branded an addict, a trashy, tragic person who couldn’t even go to a vigil without getting high or being drunk (the rumours varied on substance, but were consistent with their condemnation of her actions). Poppy was pathetic, a joke, and as the hours passed, her reputation as the beautiful, untouchable girl was destroyed. Even her parents heard, kept from the true knowledge of what had truly happened by the privacy she was awarded as an adult, and so rather than return to their home in Connecticut, she was simply shipped off to her grandmother in London, ostensibly to detox before they would do so much as speak to her. Alienated by her family, condemned by her friends, and terrified to even admit to herself that she’d been pregnant, there was little Poppy could do to dispel the gossip, or to defend her actions, and so she, heart-sick and lonely, could do nothing but watch.

the aftermath — Unable to bring herself to tell her parents what had happened: that she’d had sex before marriage, that her wild actions with alcohol and cigarettes had caused her to miscarry a child, that she’d sinned, and sinned to such a horrific extent, she went willingly to London, withdrawn and silent in the face of their fury. Not only had she disgraced herself, she’d damaged their family name; more than one of Saint Augustine’s students had political or media connections, and in-school gossip soon made its way out into the world. Perhaps the seeming addiction of the daughter of a gubernatorial candidate was minimal in the face of a world filled with news, but in their Connecticut community, it was a scandal, and like her sister before her, Poppy was a thing she’d never before been: a disappointment. The implication, though neither of her parents ever explicitly said it, was that if she improved, if she took the summer and made better choices than those she’d made, it was possible for her to return to their family at the next Christmas. If not, well. Her parents would accept the damage done, and she would never see them again, though they’d naturally pay for the remainder of her university. After graduating, her disappearance from their family could be explained away as simply a busy, successful career, and so their image of a perfect family would be repaired, if only a little. There was zero acknowledgement of the possibility of her not returning to Saint Augustine, and distraught as she was, Poppy understood only that if she could not get her addiction under control, she must at least keep it secret: appearance must be everything, as usual.

Her grandmother, a rather severe British woman who disapproved of all of her daughter’s choices, from her parenting to her choice in husband, was also surprisingly more liberal in view than her daughter. She brought in a therapist to talk to Poppy, and though Poppy refused to talk to him, she faced no criticism from her grandmother, only love. She could sense her granddaughter had suffered, though from what (beyond, of course, terrible parental guidance) she was unsure; she knew, though, that Poppy needed love. And so she immediately facilitated a reunion between Poppy and Eleanor, the older sister, thefirst disappointment to the Northcott family. Her older sister was now an openly lesbian artist, her sexuality being the reason for her departure from the intensely Catholic family, and she was rather popular for her sculptures in France. She was also, unsurprisingly, far more accepting of everything Poppy had done. Though she spent the summer with both her grandmother and sister, who were incredibly supportive throughout the ongoing ordeal of gossip and familial expulsion, Poppy still struggled with all that had happened, and it was only towards the end that she admitted she was not an addict, but she was a child-killer. Even this, to her surprise, was met with nothing but love, with both reacting only with tears and hugs. She had done nothing wrong, they told her, only made mistakes that, though they had serious consequences, showed little cruelty or negative character or sin on her part. This, though, Poppy was unable to accept. She had done wrong, and so she was suffering for it.

At the only Saint Augustine’s party she attended during the summer, thrown by a fellow student, for all of the school’s finest who found themselves in the United Kingdom, she was asked about the her addiction, a question to which she responded with a resounding slap, to be documented on video on the private instagram accounts of other attendees, and one which also made the rounds of her classmates, essentially confirming the gossip: that this girl, once so perfect and polite in every action and word, had fallen, and it was undoubtedly a fascinating thing. Though she strove to ignore the gossip, it was difficult, and she dreaded her return to school nonetheless. A letter from her mother, explaining the love she and her father had for Poppy and the way their decision was for the best, only served to confuse her, and make the entire situation even more difficult. Even confession did little to quell her nerves: the priest advised her that she should tell the truth about her sins, and never commit them again, did little but add another conflicting idea to the many in her mind. She was unable to reconcile all these things, unable to decide if the truth, shameful as it was for her and her family, though on occasion, when her hope was the strongest, she wondered if perhaps at school things would go back to normal, if upon seeing her all her friends would return, if her parents would welcome her back to their Connecticut home with open arms. Other nights, she wondered if it would be better to give it all up, to live with her sister, to embrace everything about herself she’d ever denied and hid in order to follow by the rules of her parents. (And with that came the question of her attraction to those who weren’t men: just an added aspect of stress upon everything else, and one that Poppy refused to even consider in light of the already high list of her sins.) Even her return to school brought no reality, and no clarity, and Poppy is still torn between these two variations on a theme, these two potential realities.

her room — When Poppy ‘was ill’, as the school described it, at the end of her sophomore year, she didn’t return to her dorm room and pack up her things for her return home and subsequent move to a single room. An Augustine worker, along with her roommate, more than a little eager to be rid of Poppy’s things, did so instead, sending boxes of clothes with her, but with all room decor packed away for her return. This meant that when she did return, newly friendless and alone, what she found in her new room was boxes of photos. Polaroids, still with blu-tack on their backs, of her with people who now whisper to others when they see her, smirking in amusement. It cuts like a knife, but something in her cannot bear to throw the boxes out. Rather than deal with walls now bare of friends and parents, she has walls covered in art — with prints of Monet’s lilies or abstract tapestries on every wall. One remaining fragment of her life is a pair of photos from the summer, one of her and her sister, as taken by their grandmother, and the other a selfie of the three of them. Her bedding is all soft blues and whites, her bed is stacked high with pillows, and it always smells of vanilla. It truly is her sanctuary, where there is no-one to gossip about her, and there are no expectations but her own.

Plot Ideas:

Specific connection ideas:

a note: I know this sounds a little god-mod-y, but Kayla (Damien’s player) and I are actually friends + we planned this all out, so it’s def okay with them!

Misc:

For her Minor in Art, Poppy is focusing on photography, and while she does prefer still life and landscape photography, she does the occasional portrait. She’s recognizable for having a camera in hand, and this could either lead to a bond with someone else who enjoys photography, or perhaps her photographing someone who very much likes having their picture taken. (I speak from experience when I say it’s difficult at the best of times to get friends to pose for photos, and considering the state of most of Poppy’s friendships, I don’t doubt that she’d take literally anyone’s photo if they were willing to pose for her)

Sure, Poppy is relatively innocent and sweet, but her hopes as they pertained to her first relationship weren’t misplaced. They spent so much time together, and for her to lose her virginity to him, with the thought that they’d get married, wasn’t entirely ridiculous. Still, he did cheat, and it did break her heart, though that was less painful than everything that followed. I’m open to connections here both with her ex or with the person her ex cheated on her with! Poppy doesn’t hate easily, but I do think she’d hate both of them, and it’d be easy on either of their part to just dismiss her, given her overall image. I envision her ex as having been exactly what her parents would have wished for her: the perfect potential husband, in essence, but that doesn’t mean that his image can’t have been a facade of sorts. As for whoever he cheated on her with, I’d be open to really any genders, any personalities, and really any motivations for doing it! They don’t even have to have known that he was in a relationship. Maybe he betrayed them just as much as he betrayed Poppy, who knows!

Poppy is more than a little uncertain about religion right now, and really she could go either way: returning to her Catholic roots with full strength or going full atheist or agnostic. I could definitely see her having interesting late night conversations or debates about religion with someone else with strong beliefs one way or another, and that then influencing her actions.

Writing Sample:

Tendrils of smoke swirled around her hair as she breathed out, the last of the summer sun’s warmth tempered by the cold breeze off the mountain, making her long for a jacket. Taking another drag from her cigarette, Poppy leaned against the bell tower, posture casual, with shadows under her eyes betraying her late night. She’d been unable to sleep, first too restless to lie down properly, and then endlessly disturbed by a few girls in a nearby room. Not that they’d been loud — their voices had been soft, and Poppy was certain they hadn’t bothered anyone else, but their disruption of her had been more related to their companionship than anything else. She missed all of what they had, that close friendship, late night conversations about anything and everything, and that longing had kept her away, contemplating what she’d once had. At the sound of rustling in the long grass at the base of the tower, she crouched, hand outstretched and dark eyes curious. It rustled again, and Poppy, realizing she knew very little about Switzerland’s wildlife, pulled her hand back. A third rustle, and the head of what was very obviously a fluffy tabby emerged, looking just as curious about her as she was about it. “Meow?”It asked her, and she almost laughed aloud at her caution, dropping her cigarette on the ground and grinding it out with her heel.

“Hey, little buddy. You’re not going to nibble on my fingers, are you?” With little care for her clothes, she plopped down on the grass, all else forgotten in this adorable scene. The cat walked up to her, sniffing her hand with an aura of uncertainty before climbing into her lap. “Are you lost? There’s no way you live in the wild, and we’re not allowed pets…” Poppy, stroking it gently, felt for a collar, only to find nothing. It began to purr, and she smiled, kissing it on the head. They sat like that for a while, the girl and the cat, and Poppy found herself lost in a moment of perfection. The cat didn’t care who she was, it only cared that she was warm and kind, and very good at petting it. Cozy and delighted, it rolled onto its back, batting a lazy paw at her long dark hair, and making her giggle. “Why can’t I keep you? I wish I could.” She kissed it once more, and then became aware of an audience: a pair of sophomores she vaguely recognized, looking at her and whispering to each other. In that moment, Poppy felt something within her crumble, and she felt almost like crying. With a deep swallow, she straightened her back, making eye contact with them and raising a perfectly-arched eyebrow. Away they ran, and she sighed. The peaceful moment was officially over. Scooping up the cat — and ignoring its little mew of indignation at the disruption of its lounging — she strode in the vague direction of the cable cars. “You are going in my backpack, and then we’re going to find that animal shelter so you can have a home away from terrible, awful people, okay?” Her voice was soft as she spoke to the cat, but nonetheless there was venom in it, and a little resignation. “At least — at least one of us can have that.”

#accepted

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kiruuuuu · 6 years

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Thank you ♥ AUs are perfectly fine! I have to confess I didn’t include the college setting explicitly because I felt it didn’t fit the scene but I hope you still like it, @thefishychicken :) (Rating G, fluff with feelings?, ~1.2k words)

For a second, he doesn’t know what stings more: the throbbing in his temple, his abused midsection or the fact that the old lady who’s been waiting for the bus immediately got up and left as soon as he plonked himself down on the bench next to her, prompting an offended huff, a judging glance and then a crisp walk to a nondescript point five metres away that she considers a safe distance to the rowdy youths. The question answers itself as a sudden blinding pain shoots through him and makes him gasp, disappears as quickly as it came but he wavers nonetheless.

The Russian kid hurriedly sits down next to him, puts an arm around his shoulders and holds him up. There’s none of the brief hesitation with which Marius’ friends have begun treating him, every touch somehow more deliberate than before he told them, calculated even, careful not to be misunderstood. Nowadays, his brain links everything around him to his… nature, misconstrues derision, disgust, disapproval where there (probably) is none – the old lady can’t have known, it’s not as if it’s tattooed on his forehead yet a small part in him insists that she’s aware and therefore refuses to be anywhere near him. He doubts the Russian would be this supportive if he knew, doubts he’d touch him like this, innocently, ignorantly.

It’s nice, though. He can’t deny it feels nice despite the bittersweet taste that’s in his mouth, in his throat, in his mind. He relaxes a little and winces when another wave of discomfort pulses through him, making him groan. “You alright? Shame none of the girls from my course are around, they always seem have painkillers on them for some reason.”

His accent is cute but his naivety is even more endearing. Marius leans back, rests his head on the glass pane behind him, closes his eyes in the hopes of alleviating the sharp pulsing in his head and smiles slightly. “You don’t know why?”, he asks amusedly and is thankful for the brief distraction. The overall feeling of not belonging, somehow being shameful lessens gradually.

“No.”

“How old are you?”

“Eighteen.”

“Where are you from?”

“Uzbekistan. I came here a few years ago.”

So not a Russian after all. He’s tall, well-built and has a face that’ll break a lot of hearts in his lifetime. Marius blinks and gets a better look at him, his strong muscles relaxed now, his body in a casual sprawl, strikingly at odds with the display he’s put on earlier. “Those guys you just beat up were probably in their mid-twenties”, he says and the kid somehow doesn’t seem surprised, just nods. “You’re insane. There were three, they could’ve easily destroyed you.” Like they did with me, he doesn’t add.

“I’m a good fighter”, comes the cocky reply and the arm is withdrawn. “Also, you’re bleeding like a pig.” He gets up, approaches the elderly woman who seems nothing but scandalised at the audacity but provides him with tissues nonetheless. Calmly, he takes his place next to Marius again, their legs brushing, and dabs at his face gently, the pristine white quickly turning into crimson.

Marius is unable to stop looking at him. His methodical tranquillity is reassuring and for a while, neither of them say anything. “Do you want to know why they beat me up?” Apparently, he’s in a self-destructive mood today – he could’ve accepted the Uzbek’s kindness, allow it to warm his heart and leave it at that but no, his mind decided that he should really rub in the unfairness of it all.

“I’ve seen you a few times, you’re one of the good ones”, comes the enigmatic reply, “so it’s not because you hung around with the wrong people.”

“I’m gay”, Marius tells him and why is it so much easier to admit to a perfect stranger what he didn’t accept for the longest time, what took him nearly forever to confess to his friends?

The kid stills. Draws his brows together, examines him a little more closely. “What does that mean?”, he asks and it’s not that he doesn’t know the word, it’s that he doesn’t understand.

How can he be so pure, Marius doesn’t get it. “You know how you look at attractive girls and want to do things with them? I have that with boys. There’s nothing I can do against it. I can’t change it. It’s always been like that.”

The Uzbek tilts his head in curiosity and even through the pain in his abdomen and skull that muddles his thoughts, Marius can feel the breathtaking relief flooding him, mixed with disbelief and a grim contentment stemming from the fact that being treated like a human being feels like something special to him now. “Have you tried it? With girls?” Marius nods. “How was it?”

“I’ve kissed some. It was nice, I liked them, just not enough. The first time I kissed a boy, it was fire. Just…” He makes a vague gesture; none of the words he knows come close to doing it justice.

“Fire”, the kid repeats, feeling the word on his tongue, “I never had that. I know I should have, but I didn’t, not with girls. I’ve never tried…” He trails off, averts his gaze and leaves Marius staring at him.

“You should”, he says softly. “Just so that you know.”

The bus arrives and the old lady strides past them to the front, side-eyes the two adolescents on the bench and starts an aggressively polite conversation with the driver while she buys her ticket. A few people leave, throw Marius who’s probably still covered in blood regardless of the tissues a quick glance and then pointedly gaze elsewhere as they go about their business. When the bus is gone, Marius is still looking at the Uzbek and the Uzbek is still avoiding looking back. Cars rush by, the leaves of a nearby tree rustle and all he can hear is the nervous scratching of the kid’s fingernails over the seam of his trousers.

“I’m going to find myself a place with a bathroom so I can wash my face.”

This catches his attention and he finally turns back to Marius. “Can you walk on your own?”

A shrug. “I can try.” He senses the indecisiveness, the unwillingness to ask. “Are you hungry though? If you help me, we can find a café and I’ll buy you something to eat for the trouble.”

They both know he’s offering more than just food. Even with how clueless the kid is, there’s no way he doesn’t realise.

“Okay”, he finally agrees, “come on, then.” And he slips one of his arms around Marius’ waist to help him rise, no hesitation, no treating him with kid gloves.

It’s mostly the immediate dizziness, the black spots in front of his eyes and the insistent throbbing that make him hold on to the Uzbek tightly for support as they make their way down the street aimlessly.

Mostly.

#rainbow six siege #fuze #jäger #fuze/jäger #fanfic #oneshot #request #I actually really like fuze's accent

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digitalyogesh · 3 years

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Sepia 200 uses

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Article Contents Show

What is Sepia 200 uses ?

what-is-sepia

Sepia is otherwise called Cuttlefish. It’s anything but an expansive and leveled body. Cuttlefish have a life expectancy of 1-2 years and have numerous hunters.

Cuttlefish have a few cautious components to shield themselves from hunters. One of the instruments is their ink sack.

They obscure the water by showering ink from their ink sack, which can divert and perplex a hunter. Homeopathic organizations arranged Sepia from the dried fluid from this ink sack of Cuttlefish.

The inky juice contains 20 % sulfur, melanin, and different lipids.

Cuttlefish ink has numerous gainful wellbeing impacts like mitigating, hostile to oxidant, against microbial, hostile to malignancy, against retroviral action, hostile to hypertensive.

In prior days, individuals used to utilize ink for composing, drawing, painting, and restorative purposes. The food business likewise utilized it’s anything but a food seasoning specialist and food color.

Sepia Personality: Best Person to Use Sepia

Sepia is dominatingly a solution for females yet not restricted to its use just to them. However, when we talk about homeopathic medication indications, a patient’s physical and mental side effects likewise matter.

So to discover who is the best contender for utilizing Sepia following are some actual attributes where Sepia will work best-

Youthful people of both genders who are apprehensive and sensitive and are arranged to sexual energy or get exhausted by sexual overabundance can likewise utilize Sepia.

Kids who get cold rapidly on climate changes can take profits by Sepia. On the off chance that we talk about the female actual appearance which can be most appropriate for Sepia are those –

Females with yellow appearance, Female having yellow seat across the nose,

A male kind pelvis, Overworked and hauled somewhere around the deficiency of fundamental liquids, overabundance of sexual extravagance.

Those inclined to prolapses and uterine difficulties and brunettes(a white lady or a young lady with dim hair.)

The individuals who get influenced by clothing work, getting wet, injury, over lifting, falls, bubbled milk, inactive life, and guilty pleasure in high greasy food sources, pork, tobacco.

Sepia Mind Symptoms

To know the psychological side effect of a patient is exceptionally vital. Having total information about female mental indications would be not difficult to recommend Sepia.

So how about we see the most conspicuous mental side effects of a lady

A female is all blissful, apprehensive, edgy, warm. Then, at that point she faces certain conditions throughout everyday life, prompting inconvenience, dissatisfaction, and stress.

A condition that significantly influences her is during pregnancy, after conveyance, extreme draining from the uterus, breastfeeding twins, or over-incredible kid, depleting her lacteal liquids. Indeed, even an over-lively spouse is enjoying sexual abundance.

This makes her dull, and gradually her energy begins blurring; she discovers no euphoria in awesome things. A female loses control, delicate, peevish, and get effectively irritated.

A patient gets languid and doesn’t have any desire to do anything, neither physical nor mental work. On the off chance that somebody is amazingly touchy to commotion.

They can’t portray their manifestations without sobbing in view of passionate affectability. A female discussions and does numerous odd things and gets restless about frivolous things.

She realizes she needs to adore her significant other and children, however she can’t settle her adoration in those ways. The female feels heartbreaking without reason.

A state where every one of her warm gestures are altogether still and gets estranged from the nearby or familial relationship. There is a repugnance for the work, family, and become uninterested towards the friends and family.

In outrageous cases, a female can even get self destruction. They get regular assaults of sobbing with absolute loss of expectation. They are inclined to end it all because of this gloom.

Sepia is appropriate for such individuals who can suffer agony or difficulty without showing their sentiments or whining.

Obliviousness, a despondent state, stressing over her future and wellbeing are totally connected with despair.

Sepia Uses

I will take you through all the body parts from toe to head. You can coordinate with the manifestations and when you feel these side effects are coordinated with then you can recommend Sepia –

Head Complaint: Sepia 200 uses for Headaches

A patient (Male or Female) encounters dizziness with the impression of something moving in the head. The agonies in the head are generally on the left side, alongside queasiness and regurgitating.

Head torments improve by lying on the excruciating side and deteriorates on the off chance that you are bound inside at home. A female gets horrible stuns of the wave at the feminine time with low stream and want for intercourse.

Kids with open fontanels who jerk their head in reverse and advances madly or with torment can be assuaged by Sepia. Numerous females notice that their cerebral pains deteriorate subsequent to shopping or after mental work however improve in the wake of eating a supper.

Eyes Complaints

Vision gets darkened because of sexual overabundance, masturbation, and uterus issue.

You may encounter dark spots, blazes, and starts of light before your eyes and afterward breakdown.

Ear Complaints

Sepia is an amazing remedy for herpes, which happens behind the ears, projection of ears, scruff of the neck.

The patient is excessively delicate to commotion, particularly music.

Nose Complaints: Sepia for Nose Bleeding

The patient may encounter draining from the nose.

A female discovers her nose is hindered during periods during pregnancy and might be experiencing heaps.

On the off chance that an individual is delicate to unpleasant scents or even the smell of preparing food.

An earthy colored, yellow stripe across the nose of a female shows the utilization of Sepia.

Face Complaints: Sepia for contagious skin break out

The skin on the face seems old with wrinkles.

Ladies are more inclined to foster earthy colored patches on the face because of hormonal changes during pregnancy or sun openness.

Pimples deteriorate before menses.

So this hormonal choppiness can be amended by the organization of Sepia.

Mouth Complaints

The tongue is messy, yet shockingly, it is spotless during the menses. An individual feels that everything tastes pungent.

Tongue feels consumed. The toothache deteriorates during pregnancy and menses.

Agony in the tooth is generally from 6 pm to 12 PM, and it deteriorates on resting.

A female transcendently has this strange vibe of something plug like in the throat.

She can’t bear the pressing factor of tight garments around the neck.

Respiratory Complaints: Sepia for Cough

The hack is very exhausting and dry, clearly coming from the stomach.

During hack, there’s a spoiled egg taste in the mouth. Hack is more terrible toward the beginning of the day with bountiful noxious, pungent expectoration.

There is additionally shortness of breath, which deteriorates after rest and improves with quick movement.

As earthy colored spots are apparent in the midsection, you can see earthy colored spots on the chest too.

Heart Complaints

Flow of blood is by all accounts stale, which prompts sporadic dissemination.

Palpitations are noticeable and awaken with a savage thumping of the heart.

They improve in the wake of strolling quick and deteriorate lying on the left side.

They may feel shaking or shuddering marginally due to the surge of blood.

Stomach Complaints

A condition of weariness creates in the stomach, which doesn’t improve by eating. They foster queasiness even at the idea or smell of food.

Queasiness deteriorates at the prospect of coition, during pregnancy, in the first part of the day, and furthermore on washing the mouth. They want vinegar, acids, pickles, and desserts.

A patient can not endure bubbled milk. An individual feels huge consuming in the stomach, which increments in the wake of retching.

They are inclined to eructation’s which are spoiled and harsh. Those dependent on tobacco foster extreme heartburn prompts repetitive torment or distress in the upper mid-region.

They foster queasiness toward the beginning of the prior day eating and an inclination to upchuck subsequent to eating.

Midsection Complaints: Sepia for Liver

The Liver turns out to be uncommonly sore and agonizing, and the torment is diminished by lying on the right side and deteriorates on stooping.

One can notice many earthy colored spots on the mid-region. They are inclined to fart with a cerebral pain.

Smoking can cause prolapse of the rectum. Stoppage is serious where they don’t get the inclination for a few days.

Stools become hard and feel like a ball in the butt. This sensation doesn’t improve even in the wake of passing stool.

An individual passes stool solely after delayed stressing followed by a cupful of yellow-white hostile jam like bodily fluid.

Clogging prompts the improvement of heaps that projects and drains while strolling with staying torment.

In the wake of drinking bubbled milk, they foster greenish the runs with quick depletion.

Urinary Complaints: Sepia 200 uses helps in Urine Infection

Ladies foster bladder control misfortune somewhat subsequent to hacking, wheezing, chuckling, hearing abrupt clamor, dread, and during first rest.

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handsforu · 3 years

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Suffering From Alcohol Addiction? Here Is A Rehab Program For You!

Drug abuse is a leading issue among the youth these days, and people don’t even realize that how wrong it is, till the time they get addicted to it. There are many individuals out there who think that drug abuse and addiction are the same things, but it is not true. The fact is that drug abuse leads to addiction, and it can change the brain pattern of individuals. There are various reasons, which can lead to drug abuse, and one of the most common factors is that people tend to use drugs to forget about reality for a while. The substances release a dopamine rush within the body of a consumer; and after a time it becomes difficult for a person to quit a particular drug.

The Alcohol rehabilitation centre in Mumbai is one of the renowned centers, which helps individuals in getting rid of alcohol. Alcohol is one of the easily available drugs in India, and many people don’t even know that it is categorized among drugs, and also one can get addicted to it easily. Alcohol addicts tend to suffer from anxiety as well as depression, and it can cause behavioral changes.

SYMPTOMS OF ALCOHOL DISORDERS

One can suffer from blackouts, dizziness, shakiness, excessive sweating.

Behavioral changes such as aggression, agitation, self-destructive nature are likely to develop.

When we talk about mood, alcohol addiction can lead to anxiety, guilt, loneliness.

Nausea and Vomiting is one of the most common symptoms.

Decreased coordination within the body organs, slurred speech, coordination

If you or anyone you know is suffering from any of the above-stated symptoms, then now you can connect with the Best alcohol rehabilitation centre in Mumbai. It is a place where a person can start their journey of De-addiction. So, what are you waiting for; reach out to them today, to know more about the rehabilitation program.

About Hands For You

Hands For You is one of the renowned names in Mumbai, as the center was established with the motive of providing excellent quality rehabilitation services to everyone. They have a team of skilled psychologists, doctors, and counselors, who always make sure the individual is comfortable, and keep a check on their entire well-being. The infrastructure of the center is highly appreciated because it has all the latest amenities for the addicts. To know more regarding the different rehab programs and therapies, connect with them without any delay!

Source: https://penzu.com/p/25d522c6

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impressivepress · 3 years

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The Matisse we never knew

Henri Matisse, unlike the other greatest modern painter, Pablo Picasso, with whom he sits on a seesaw of esteem, hardly exists as a person in most people’s minds.

One pictures a wary, bearded gent, owlish in glasses—perhaps with a touch of the pasha about him, from images of his last years in Vence, near Nice, in a house full of sumptuous fabrics, plants, freely flying birds, and comely young models. Many know that Matisse had something to do with the invention of Fauvism, and that he once declared, weirdly, that art should be like a good armchair. A few recall that, in 1908, he inspired the coinage of the term “cubism,” in disparagement of a movement that would eclipse his leading influence on the Parisian avant-garde, and that he relaxed by playing the violin. Beyond such bits and pieces, there is the art, whose glory was maintained and renewed in many phases until the artist’s death, in 1954: preternatural color, yielding line, boldness and subtlety, incessant surprise. Anyone who doesn’t love it must have a low opinion of joy. The short answer to the question of Matisse’s stubborn obscurity as a man is that he put everything interesting about himself into his work. The long answer, which is richly instructive, while ending in the same place, is given in Hilary Spurling’s zestful two-volume biography, “A Life of Henri Matisse.” The first volume, “The Unknown Matisse: The Early Years 1869-1908,” was published in 1998. The second, “Matisse the Master: The Conquest of Colour 1909-1954” (Knopf; $40), completes the job of giving us a living individual, as familiar as someone we have long known, who regularly touched the spiritual core of Western modernity with a paintbrush.

Spurling is a veteran English theatre and literary critic and a biographer of Ivy Compton-Burnett. The fact that she is an amateur in art matters proves to be an advantage, given that she is also unfailingly sensitive and thoroughly informed. Matisse’s greatness resides in capacities of the eye and the mind that almost anyone, with willingness, can discern, and no one, with whatever training, can really comprehend. I don’t think it is possible to be more intelligent in any pursuit, or more serious and original, and with such suddenness, than Matisse was when he represented a reaching arm in “Dance I” (1909), or the goldfish that he painted as slivers of redness in a series of still-lifes in 1912. How can intellectual potency be claimed for an artist whose specialty, by his own declared ambition, was easeful visual bliss? It’s a cinch, now that Spurling has cleared away a century’s worth of misapprehensions and canards. Take, for example, the popular notion that Matisse was hedonistic. Hedonists seek pleasure. Matisse served it, as a monk serves God. He was a self-abnegating Northerner who lived only to work, and did so in chronic anguish, recurrent panic, and amid periodic breakdowns. Picasso recompensed himself, as he went along, with gratifications of intellectual and erotic play. Matisse did not. His art reserved nothing for himself. In an age of ideologies, Matisse dodged all ideas except perhaps one: that art is life by other means.

“The Unknown Matisse” told of an awkward youth from a dismal region of northern France—he was born in the cottage of his maternal grandmother, in 1869, and was raised in Bohain, an industrial textile center. He was an unhappy law clerk when, in 1889, he began to study drawing and, while laid up with appendicitis, was given a set of paints by his mother. The effect was seismic. He said later, “From the moment I held the box of colors in my hands, I knew this was my life. I threw myself into it like a beast that plunges towards the thing it loves.” How much did he mean that? He meant it to the extent of warning his fiancée, Amélie Parayre, whom he married in 1898, when he was twenty-eight, “I love you dearly, mademoiselle; but I shall always love painting more.” Amélie assented. She “had spent much of her life searching for a cause in which she could put her faith,” Spurling writes. Her parents were ruined in a spectacular scandal, as the unsuspecting employees of a woman whose financial empire was based on fraud. Spurling attributes to Amélie’s memories of that public disgrace a cocooning “suspicion of the outside world” that would always mark the Matisse family. (If there is any reason to doubt aspects of this book, it’s the unprecedented coöperation that the author coaxed from the congenitally overprotective heirs.) Amélie and, later, Marguerite—a daughter Matisse had fathered with a shopgirl in 1894 and raised with Amélie—were strong-willed confederates of Matisse in his work, and severe critics when his concentration flagged, managing a virtual family firm of which the artist was both the fragile chairman and the slave-driven labor force. According to Spurling, “The family fitted their activities round his breaks and work sessions. Silence was essential.” Even during the years when Matisse lived mostly alone in Nice, an “annual ritual of unpacking, stretching, framing and hanging ended with the whole family settling down to respond to the paintings.” The conference might last several days. Then the dealers were admitted.

Matisse was not taught to paint; he just started doing it. His first two canvases, from 1890, are essentially consummate Old Master-ish still-lifes, the first one pretty good and the second, featuring opulent reds, a knockout. (Of the second painting, Spurling writes, “Digging this picture out of his father’s attic ten years later, Matisse said it came so close to containing everything he had done since then that it hardly seemed worth having gone on painting.” Twenty years later he had the same reaction to it, only stronger.) He had style before he had craft, which he picked up along the way by copying paintings in the Louvre and taking classes with, among others, the arch-academician Adolphe-William Bouguereau and the Symbolist Gustave Moreau. (His one art-schooled technical standby, almost a fetish, was the plumb line. No matter how odd the angles in any Matisse, the verticals are usually dead true.) Most of his early works employ a dark palette and tend to be gloomy, but each strives for an integral vision. Matisse was thirty-one years old when he began showing in Paris—in 1901, a year after Picasso, eleven years younger, arrived in town from Barcelona. (They met in April of 1906, at the salon of Gertrude and Leo Stein.) It was in 1905, in the Mediterranean town of Collioure, that Matisse, in close collaboration with André Derain, combined pointillist color and Cézanne’s way of structuring pictorial space stroke by stroke to develop Fauvism—a way less of seeing the world than of feeling it with one’s eyes.

“Matisse the Master” opens in 1909, with the Matisse family—which now included, in addition to Marguerite, two sons, Jean and Pierre—living in a former convent on the Boulevard des Invalides, in Paris, where the artist conducted a painting school. His immense notoriety, which had been confirmed in 1905-06 by “Le Bonheur de Vivre,” a fractured fantasia that seemed to trash every possible norm of pictorial order and painterly finesse, was regularly exciting near-riots of derision in the public. (“My Arcadia,” Matisse called the picture, which established his career’s dizzying keynote: calm intensity or, perhaps, intense calm.) His huge-hipped, sinuous “Blue Nude,” of 1907, discomfited even Picasso, who complained, “If he wants to make a woman, let him make a woman. If he wants to make a design, let him make a design. This is between the two.” As usual, Picasso (then creating “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon,” his own monumental riposte to “Le Bonheur de Vivre”) was onto something: pattern was a decisive element in Matisse’s kind of picture, which applied a passion for decorated fabrics that began in his childhood. But Picasso was loath to admit that the combined effects of ornamental rhythm and blooming flesh constituted a revolutionary correlative, and not a contradiction.

Picasso and Matisse are poles apart aesthetically. Matisse told his students, “One must always search for the desire of the line, where it wishes to enter, where to die away.” Picasso’s line has no desire; it is sheer will. Form builds in Picasso, flows in Matisse. Picasso uses color. Colors enter the world through Matisse like harmonies through Mozart. Young artists and intellectuals in Paris at that time overwhelmingly favored Picasso’s analytical rigor, to the extent of attacking Matisse in print and snubbing him in public. Gertrude Stein (unlike her sister-in-law Sarah Stein, Matisse’s first major collector) enjoyed ridiculing him, “reporting with satisfaction,” Spurling says, “that her French cook served M. Matisse fried eggs for dinner instead of an omelette because, as a Frenchman, he would understand that it showed less respect.” Matisse’s intimate friends among artists were mostly easygoing minor painters, such as Albert Marquet. His temperamental aloneness made him prey to vertiginous depressions. He later recalled a breakdown that he underwent in Spain, in 1910: “My bed shook, and from my throat came a little high-pitched cry that I could not stop.”

Matisse himself precipitated the most significant and indelible controversy of his career. In 1908, in a famous text, “Notes of a Painter,” he stated as his ideal an art “for every mental worker, for the businessman as well as the man of letters, for example, a soothing, calming influence on the mind, something like a good armchair which provides relaxation from physical fatigue.” At the end of “The Unknown Matisse,” Spurling writes that the metaphor “has done him more harm ever since than any other image he might have chosen.” Straining to defend it, she hazards that “this passage reflects its obverse—Matisse’s intimate acquaintance with violence and destruction, a sense of human misery sharpened by years of humiliation, rejection and exposure—which could be neutralised only by the serene power and stable weight of art.” This tack strikes me as unnecessary, on two counts. First, in general, the principle of Matisse’s armchair seems ever sounder in comparison to more stirring but ultimately vain programs of modern art. If “modernism” had any effective purpose beyond acclimating cultivated people to rapid worldly change, it was a bust. Second, in particular, the tired businessman whom Matisse most likely had in mind was no Babbitt but almost a co-producer of some of the artist’s greatest works, the Russian textile magnate and visionary collector Sergei Ivanovich Shchukin, who wrote to him in 1910, “The public is against you, but the future is yours.” “Dance II” (1910) and “Music” (1910), heraldic mural-size slabs of resonating minor-key red, green, and blue, fulfilled commissions for Shchukin’s house in Moscow, which by 1914 contained thirty-seven Matisses—“He always picked the best,” the artist said—in history’s first dedicated museum of modern art. (Lenin expropriated the collection in person but allowed Shchukin to remain, in servants’ quarters, as caretaker and guide. He died in Paris, in 1936. The collection is now in the Hermitage and Pushkin Museums.)

Among Matisse’s students was Olga Meerson, a Russian Jew who had studied with Wassily Kandinsky in Munich and, already possessed of an elegant style, sought to remake herself under Matisse’s tutelage. Her talent is as apparent as her emulation of him, in a charming 1911 portrait, that shows him reclining on a checkered bedspread, reading a book with amused eyes. Spurling writes, “She personified the pride, courage and resilience that he responded to all his life at the deepest instinctual level in his female models.” She also epitomized a period type of “self-reliant single girl,” an obsessive subject for Matisse in those years, which Spurling locates between the earlier heroines of Henry James and the later solitaries of Jean Rhys. Matisse’s 1911 portrait of Meerson shows a primly dressed and posed, tremblingly sensitive woman slashed with “two fierce black arcs—plunging from neck to thigh, and from armpit to buttock,” which resist any explanation aside from their sheerly formal éclat. Spurling loses me when she hesitates to concede a sexual relationship. The body language in two group photographs from 1911 testifies that Amélie scented the worst. (In one, nearly everyone faces the camera except Meerson, who stares at Amélie, and Amélie, who carefully gazes at nothing.) A combination of Amélie’s jealousy and Meerson’s peremptory neediness caused a severely rattled Matisse to end the connection, with a maximum of bad feeling all around. Meerson moved to Munich, where she married the musician Heinz Pringsheim, a brother-in-law of Thomas Mann. Never having fulfilled her promise as a painter, she committed suicide in Berlin, in 1929.

But the Matisses’ marriage ran afoul not of any romantic rival but of the artist’s growing will to stand, however precariously, on his own. A climax came in 1913, when Amélie sat more than a hundred times for the “Portrait of Madame Matisse,” a thunderous painting, in drenching blues and greens, of a chic and stony woman leaning forward in a chair, with a black-featured gray mask of a face. (“Saturday with Matisse,” a friend’s diary reported at the time. “Crazy! weeping! By night he recites the Lord’s Prayer! By day he quarrels with his wife!”) Spurling says that the portrait, which was the last work to enter Shchukin’s collection, caused Matisse “palpitations, high blood pressure and a constant drumming in his ears.” Such frenzy was not rare when Matisse had difficulty with a painting, but in this case it was compounded by something like exorcism. The portrait expresses no specific feeling but, rather, registers innumerable emotions, not excluding tenderness. The game tilt of Amélie’s small head, sporting a dainty ostrich-feather toque, could break your heart. He referred to the painting years later in a letter to her as “the one that made you cry, but in which you look so pretty.”

One well believes Spurling that life with Matisse could be “close to unendurable,” but enduring it had been Amélie’s vocation, through years of impoverished existence in studio-centered homes. What eroded her role was security, which Shchukin’s patronage provided, along with a big suburban house in Issy-les-Moulineaux, where the family moved in 1909, and from which Matisse was increasingly absent. (In 1930, his travels took him to the United States, where he was thrilled by New York, and to Tahiti, where his melancholic character drew comment from a new friend, the German filmmaker F. W. Murnau: “Shadows are rare here. There’s sunshine everywhere except on you.”) Matisse continued to depend on Amélie, just not enough. Sulkily, she ceded routine leadership of the family to Marguerite. The 1913 portrait was his last painting of her. The couple finally split in 1939, when Amélie tried to dismiss the coolly efficient young Lydia Delectorskaya, an orphan refugee from Siberia who, having been hired as Amélie’s companion, increasingly served the ailing master as model, assistant, and nurse. Delectorskaya reacted to being banished (among other sorrows, which included a thwarted ambition to study medicine) by shooting herself in the chest with a pistol, to remarkably slight effect. Soon the artist and his wife were legally separated and Delectorskaya was back. Phlegmatic in the face of the family’s icy resentment, the Russian said of Matisse, “He knew how to take possession of people and make them feel they were indispensable. That was how it was for me, and that was how it had been for Mme. Matisse.”

Spurling, in her preface to “Matisse the Master,” announces an intention to demolish “two standard assumptions, both false.” The first, which is, indeed, common, concerns “the supposedly exploitative relationship” that Matisse had with the women he painted. The second, which was bruited in 1992 by an American art historian, Michèle C. Cone, in a book on artists in Vichy France, is less often heard, and involves, according to Spurling, “baseless but damaging allegations about Matisse’s behavior in World War II.” In answer to the first charge, Spurling—backed by access to Matisse’s immense correspondence, among other previously withheld archives—contends that the artist, after his marriage, rarely, if ever, had sex with models, despite his keen feelings for many. In this, Spurling is up against a climate of cynical received opinion. I’m one of numerous critics on record as being certain, based on no evidence, that Matisse womanized during his decades in Nice, which started with seasonal sojourns in 1917, when he lived in hotel rooms painting naked or harem-garbed models who, Spurling writes, “were drawn from the tide of human flotsam washed up in Nice between the wars.” Matisse never disavowed, in principle, the libertarian anarchism of most of his avant-garde generation. Nor did he seem to share the wintry belief of Piet Mondrian, quoted by Spurling, that “a drop of sperm spilt is a masterpiece lost.” He would visit brothels, though apparently without enthusiasm. (“Not much fun,” he said.) But I discover ready support for Spurling’s arguments in my own experience of the Nice odalisques, who loll on chairs or chaises amid flowers, fruits, and sumptuous fabrics. Indubitably erotic, the pictures diffuse arousal. Their sensuality never fixates on a breast or a thigh but dilates to every square inch of canvas. Such is the character of Matisse’s formal radicalism, early and late: distributed energy, suspended gesture, deferred climax. Might the tension have been so precious to him, as the engine of what gave his life meaning, that its only end could be exhaustion? It may count that, according to Matisse, he never ate even the fresh food that he used for still-lifes—including oysters, from a restaurant in Nice, that were returned in time for the lunch crowd.

Spurling associates the Vichy charge with a “popular image of the painter indulging himself among the fleshpots of Nice in wartime,” which is absurd on its face. During the war, Matisse was isolated in Nice and Vence. He was old and ill with cardiovascular, renal, and abdominal disorders; he underwent a colostomy in 1941 and, a year later, almost died. Cone bases a speculation that Matisse “sided with the nationalism of the current Vichy regime” on a mild complaint by the artist, back in 1924, that people were mistaking, as French, the cosmopolitan art scene in Paris. (“French painters are not cosmopolites,” he told a Danish interviewer—an observation, largely accurate, about the Parisian avant-garde of the twenties.) Beyond that, Cone primarily cites wartime interviews, in which Matisse chatted amiably about his work, as evidence of irresponsible disengagement. It’s true that he shielded his art from politics under all circumstances—he created the reverberant domestic idyll “The Piano Lesson” (my favorite twentieth-century painting) in the summer of 1916, while death swaggered at Verdun. But there seems to be no gainsaying his at least passive solidarity with the Resistance, which swept up the two most important women in his life—Amélie, who was a typist for the Communist underground, and Marguerite, who served as a courier—as well as his son Jean, who was involved in sabotage operations. (Pierre had by that time become an art dealer in New York.) Amélie was jailed for six months; Marguerite was tortured by the Gestapo but escaped from a cattle car that was stalled on its way to a prison camp in Germany during the war’s chaotic waning months. The artist’s loyalty to the poet and leading Communist Louis Aragon, who, while on the run, spent time with Matisse and wrote passionately about him, also weighs in his favor.

Matisse was so consumed by aesthetic sensibility that his responses to life, when not baffled and distraught, were like unwitting prose poems. Asked to recommend a possible mate for Jean, he sized up one young woman as “tall, well made, limbs a bit long—sprawling movements like a young dog—intelligent, very gifted and very reserved.” His habits were incredibly regular. On a typical day in Nice, in 1917, Spurling tells us, he “rose early and worked all morning with a second work session after lunch, followed by violin practice, a simple supper (vegetable soup, two hard-boiled eggs, salad and a glass of wine) and an early bedtime.” Spurling knows her man so well that you readily tolerate her occasional reading of his mind: “By the seventeenth it was so hot he stayed indoors all day, drawing fruit, reading or dozing on the studio couch, feeling his feet swell and thinking about his ‘Still Life with Green Sideboard.’ ” (As anyone might: that quiet painting, from 1928, is one of the most uncannily ambiguous ever made; you cannot decide if you are looking at or into the surface of a cabinet door.) He had warm but awkward dealings with his sons, realizing late in life that he had burdened them with the sort of hectoring pressures to meet his standards that he had suffered from his own father. Pierre said of the boy in “The Piano Lesson,” “Yes, it was me, and you have no idea how much I detested those piano lessons.” The one person who could command Matisse’s attention was Marguerite. She had married a brilliant man of letters, Georges Duthuit, who was Matisse’s best critic in his lifetime; when Duthuit proved unfaithful to her, the artist forbade him to write about his work. Matisse is never so affecting as in his account of the two weeks that Marguerite spent with him after her escape in 1945: “I saw in reality, materially, the atrocious scenes she described and acted out for me. I couldn’t have said if I still belonged to myself.”

Matisse spoke with self-knowledge both sad and ruthless—on behalf of driven artists in general—when, in a 1941 letter to Pierre, he referred to a harrowing recent painting by his friend Georges Rouault: “A man who makes pictures like the one we were looking at is an unhappy creature, tormented day and night. He relieves himself of his passion in his pictures, but also in spite of himself on the people round him. That is what normal people never understand. They want to enjoy the artists’ products—as one might enjoy cows’ milk—but they can’t put up with the inconvenience, the mud and the flies.”

The last decade and a half of Matisse’s life, spent mostly as an invalid, was a bonus gift of time—“a second life,” he called it—in which, deciding that he had gone as far as he could with oil painting, he invented and developed a new kind of art. His compositions of paper cutouts included the 1947 book “Jazz,” and designs for Catholic vestments to go with his total design of a convent chapel in Vence—an improbable, gruelling commission, including seventeen stained-glass windows and several nearly abstract murals, that was arranged with help from a favorite former model, who had become a nun, and an idealistic young monk who came to remark, “I feel less and less Gothic, and more and more Matisse.” The project horrified not only much of the Catholic hierarchy but also a contemporary art world then largely in thrall to Communism. (Picasso is often said to have recommended that Matisse decorate a brothel instead. Actually, he proposed a fruit-and-vegetable market, to which Matisse “was proud of snapping back that his greens were greener and his oranges more orange than any actual fruit.”) But such was Matisse’s prestige, with the added advantage that the artist largely financed the project himself, that the chapel opened in 1951 in a ceremony led by the Archbishop of Nice. At first bewildered by the chapel, the sisters of the convent came to love its chaste serenity and effulgent color. “From now on,” Spurling writes, “indignant or derisive sightseers demanding to know the meaning of the stations of the cross received a firm response from the nun in charge: ‘It means modern.’ ”

Matisse’s cutouts realized a brilliant conjunction of drawing and color which had always been implicit in his art—often, as if his lines were not the container of his color but the edge produced by its expansion, like the contour of wetness left by a wave on a beach. Formed with scissors, color and shape become effectively one. In his house, luxuriant with simple amenities and living things, he “exercised dominion . . . from his bed,” Spurling writes. “Models and assistants were jealously guarded, cut off from outside contact and more or less confined to the premises.” Picasso, accompanied by his lover, Françoise Gilot, was a frequent and welcome visitor. While still fencing with each other like old duellists, they talked art. (Gilot remembered one occasion when Matisse, producing American catalogues of the work of Pollock and Robert Motherwell, asked Picasso, “What do you think they have incorporated from us? And in a generation or two, who among the painters will still carry a part of us in his heart, as we do Manet and Cézanne?”) Matisse died at the age of eighty-four, on November 3, 1954, with Marguerite and Delectorskaya at his side. Spurling reports that Delectorskaya “left immediately with the suitcase she had kept packed for fifteen years.”

If Spurling fails to make one important element sufficiently clear, it’s the connection between the peculiarities of Matisse’s life and his singularity, which is also his absolute modernity, as an artist. The key fact is his self-invention as a painter, entering art history from essentially nowhere, as if by parachute. Never having had traditional lessons to unlearn (unlike Picasso, with his incessant industry of demolishing and reconstructing the inherited language of painting), Matisse innovated on something like whim—a privilege, without guidelines or guarantees, for which he paid a steep toll in anxiety. There is even a touch of the naïf or the primitive about him, though it is hard to grasp, because his works quickly assumed the status of classics, models of the modern. You can track his inspirations, seeing, for example, that his discovery of Russian icons, during a visit to Shchukin in Moscow in 1911, informed a large confrontational painting of him and Amélie, “The Conversation” (1911). But how does this marital anecdote (the great man in pajamas!) manage to impress as an all-time symbol of creativity? Matisse couldn’t say, and no one else can, either. The circumstances of his life and time, as detailed in this appropriately capacious biography, continually distill into drops of wonder.

~ Peter Schjeldahl · August 22, 2005. Peter Schjeldahl has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1998 and is the magazine’s art critic. His latest book is “Hot, Cold, Heavy, Light: 100 Art Writings, 1988-2018.”

#matisse #artist biography #painting #the new yorker

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kandrsdarkangelsbookblog · 4 years

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ghostproposal · 6 years

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“Kids of the Black Hole” by Marty Cain

Reviewed by Claire Cronin

Kids of the Black Hole comes at readers in one rush. Marty Cain’s debut is a book-length poem that conjures traumatic adolescence as a fever dream. In its specific small-town ecstasies and horrors, the poem at first seems like a straight-forward confessional project, but Cain’s speaker behaves more like the author’s uncanny other than a solid, authentic self.

When we meet the speaker, he is standing with a friend drinking beer by a river, yet the pair also seems to dwell outside of space and time. Past and present selves blur together in these pages, as Cain writes: “this is my black hole where my teenage self resides / & I sit in space locked out of my own house / I watch myself breathe from the outside” (1). Kids of the Black Hole exists in trauma’s realm where memories mix with fantasy, illusion, and the voices of the dead. Although the poem locates itself in the northeastern American town where the author grew up, Cain renames this site “Arcadia,” calling to mind a pastoral utopia that stands in direct contrast to the poem's ruined liquor stores, backwoods, and basements. “Another word for black hole is Arcadia,” Cain tells readers in a digital supplement. This black hole town, the depressed magnetic center into which all parts of the poem drag and spin, is not utopic— it’s demonic. Tenderness, when it’s offered to the speaker, is matched with cruelty. Rage is sorrow’s flip-side. The confession that the book offers us comes only through gothic distortions. In the first few pages, Cain explains: “how I wanted to speak, how I was only waiting for the slap of a hand / or the choke of a lover or a violent god to wake me” (4).

Kids of the Black Hole is certainly a gothic book. Its spectral relation to real places, times, and events (and to the confessional tradition) made sense to me as a technique of the gothic. Cain’s taste for blood transfixes as it wounds us, allowing readers to experience the dizzying afterlife of a traumatic youth. There’s tongue-in-cheek fun mixed with real-world terror: bats, murder, the figure of death eating a burger, sexual violence, a psychotic psychotherapist, and evil jocks all swim inside one nightmare. The speaker’s self-abjection, unending woundedness, and bodily unravelling also perform a suffering that seems part of the book’s gothic aim to transgress bourgeois notions of identity, morality, and meaning. Like other gothic works, Kids of the Black Hole revels in the macabre staginess of its characters and settings. “I rot on the outside & incubate bodies / they call me the spider with the dead-leg twitch,” the speaker brags (3). Alive, undead, and born again, he tells us: “I was baptized in dirt by an iron god / I was born in a grave, I reside there still” (32). Even the speaker’s suicidal ideation is staged at an aesthetic distance through a mix of archaic and colloquial language:

O every blessèd I day I feel a gun to my skull

O every day when I’m against the wall

I want to exhume my voice from the back of my throat

I want to raise it up from the base of the well

& let my corpus rot at the bottom

allow my spirit to bellow loud (39)

There is another quality to Kids of the Black Hole that reads like channelled writing from an unseen source. The author seems cognizant of this. In one section of the book, Cain references Jack Spicer’s poetics of composition via dictated messages from aliens: “for this poem is my one abduction / for I know the transmission cometh from elsewhere / for I know a Martian in my soul” (15). Although there is some of Spicer’s drunken, self-emptying mysticism in Cain’s writing, Kids of the Black Hole overflows with images from a personal ego— not a martian realm. If Cain channels ghostly voices, they comes from old memories and lost friends. Yet there is also something in Cain’s anaphora of “I did” / “I saw” / “I chose” that reads like spiritual revelation. Like John the Baptist’s refrain “I John saw. I testify” in the poet H.D.’s “Tribute to the Angels,” Cain’s speaker also sees and testifies to worldly destruction as if he’s consumed by holy fire. This suggests that the speaker’s quest for self-annihilation comes from an impulse to be transformed and transcend the earthly plane.

Cain’s vision of the negative sublime also fits with my understanding of his book as a gothic work. In it, God and angels are terrifying and the suffering body is one that is temporarily freed from limitations and ordinary language. Cain’s speaker prays in all-caps: “BLESS ALL THE UNHINGED YELLOW HORRORS WITH FEATHERED WINGS / SPROUTING FROM SHOULDERBLADES EVERY BLESSÉD SECOND” (32). A few pages later, he asks for a monstrous rebirth:

O Lord shake me awake from my lifelong nap

make me a newborn steaming in a foggy pasture

make me a split-open nightcrawler foaming over

with the popped-off head & a new one growing (39)

At the level of style, Cain’s lines recall Whitman and Ginsberg, or even more closely, Frank Stanford. What Cain adds to this visionary tradition is a contemporary awareness of the self’s tentative construction, a reluctance to take on the baggage of confessional and narrative poetry, and a vocabulary drawn as much from high literary culture as from punk music and horror films. Kids of the Black Hole shocks and fascinates readers through its dark spectacle, but there’s more going on here than gothic entertainment. Cain has written deep, affecting poetry; this book holds real ghosts.

Claire Cronin is a poet, songwriter, and doctoral student in Athens, GA. She is the author of the chapbook Therese. Her work can be found in Bennington Review, The Volta, BOAAT, Sixth Finch, Cloud Rodeo, Prelude, Yalobusha Review, and other places.

Kids of the Black Hole, by Marty Cain

Trembling Pillow Press, 2017

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