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chiropteracupola · 25 days

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"Sleepers in the Peat," 2022.

two years ago I wrote a short story. finally got around to posting it.

The water was bitter here. Beneath thick layers of branching sphagnum moss, it rose from the earth in drips and drenches, pooling in little reed-ringed ponds and lying smooth as glass. A faint curtain of mist drifted across the bogland, obscuring the far-off tree-line and rendering the world somewhat distant from the clear light of the morning.

It was beside one of these little wells of peaty water that she crouched, clipboard and pencil in hand, the raincoat drawn over her broad shoulders a green only a shade less saturated than the moss. Her name, scribed in graphite across the top of her sheet of notes, was Theo-short-for-Theodora, a fact that she had had to explain nearly every time she introduced herself. She had shaped it better to fit herself, although out in the silence of the marshes, there was very little need for such a thing as a name.

Kneeling now, Theo dipped a gloved hand into the water, pressed the acid-tangy water to her lips. She breathed in, and breathed in bitterness. Fibers of moss crept into her nostrils, taking root in her lungs like branching alveoli. This, then, was the culmination of all her work, all her study, the taste of it at last on her tongue.

The faces of the ancient dead had always fascinated her. Their empty eyes, skin smoothed by ice or desert to touch the contours of the skull, lips drawn back from ground-down teeth. It was not the frozen explorers with their eyes still wide and dove-blue that captivated her, nor the ancient kings with their desiccated, dead-lizard hands, nor yet the strange distorted faces of those preserved beneath honey until even their bones took on a sweetness. Theo, young, had traced the crisply-printed pictures set on slick photo-paper in the centers of her books, memorizing the images of those gone down and buried in the peat. She became something of an expert in names that her schoolmates did not recognize, Tollund and Lindow, Windeby and Old-Croghan. They lay still in black-and-white against their backgrounds of sand, so unlike the living people that walked just beyond her windows, and Theo, in her way, preferred that stillness.

Still, she watched the living move all the same. There was a casual grace to them that fascinated Theo, the way in which hips shifted as the feet fell one in front of the other, how hands settled in close at the waist. She herself stood with her hands apart, her thumbs tucked into the loops of a belt.

Just as other children had run in gleeful circles on the blacktop while she stayed inside, book in hand, they kissed and laughed now in dizzy blue-dawn hours. Theo preferred to sleep instead, lazing curled in bed while the world spun by outdoors. Dressed in pajama trousers with torn-out knees and rolled-up hems, she drew layer after layer of blanket over herself, sinking deeper into the quiet dark. In those solitary nights, though, she sought nonetheless, and dreamed of moss beneath her fingers, of the strange faces of the mire-mummified dead. She would see them sure and true one day, Theo knew, and know the taste of the same tannin that so preserved them.

The North, that was where they were to be found, where ancient peat tracked patchily across Europe and left the dead preserved in its wake. Her grandmother had called that place homeland, and Theo had scoffed behind her hand. What connection had she, really, to that place? Without invitation, she could not walk on that soil with the sort of fierce pride that her grandmother held onto so tightly.

“You’ll see one day, Theodora,” her grandmother said, and nudged back the crooked postcards of green, green hills that had slipped slightly from their places on the refrigerator. The words sat sourly around Theo’s shoulders, and with time, refused to rot away.

They clung, sticky and leaden, and Theo would have liked to scream at the feeling of them. What did her grandmother know, she with her good marriage to her good man, her ticking, soap-sweet house, her fine bed in the back bedroom where she slept as contentedly as a cat? Her grandmother’s hair was short in the fashion of old women, cut so that it hid how pale and thin it had become. Theo’s own hair was just as short, cropped by hand in a dim mirror with a sort of ferocity intended to put the viewer in mind of steel-toed boots and hard-wearing canvas. No use putting them back to back and calling them the same. And so, Theo shut her mouth, dragged her hand down the side of her face as if to tie shut her jaw. For all that she railed against those words, the postcards pinned against the refrigerator door were green, green, green.

Try as she might, Theo never slept well in her grandmother’s house. The air was hot and resolutely mint-sweet, the blankets thin against the heaviness of summer. Time was just as heavy there, a clock always ticking away beside the cabinets in the kitchen, machinery humming uselessly within the walls.

Theo crept from the house and settled in the still-warm chair on her grandmother’s far-too-neat lawn. It had been cut to within an inch of its life just that morning, the first of those two precise twice-a-week rounds of mower and rake and clippers that kept the street-facing yard perfect. All the same, in the warm night, Theo’s skin stuck, sweaty, to the plastic slats of the chair, and the heat of it felt far too alive for her liking. She peeled her arms away from it, drew her knees to her chest, sat folded up in herself like an Andean king of old. Behind her eyes, all was green, the green of hollow hills and deep water.

So she thought on it, and so she laid her plans. She did her work with a tired slowness, her motions static and mechanical even as the tasks, somehow, managed to get done. The grinding stasis of daily life dragged forward, every sample of moss and spreadsheet of data creeping closer to the proper work in the field she sought. And then, all in a maze of mist, there she was in the North of the world, the treads of her boots sinking into wet sedge as the fog drew itself in close around her.

There were other sorts of bogs than the sort that made a face into such a bitter ambrotype as those that so fascinated her. Theo had seen the ones where cranberries were grown before, red as all love in the dark water, crisscrossed with boards to serve as footpaths. This was not such a bog, and made no such deceptions about its helpfulness or its safety. This was peat all the way down, heavy and wet and certain. In another thousand thousands of years, pressure would render that peat down to coal, and in another circling of time, perhaps diamond. All carbon, just as she was, and no light. Cool, static, stable, deep, the water still as it filtered slow and soft through the moss. Not so kind, no, but all the same it might hold her gently in the wide green palm of its hand.

So she knelt down into it, uncaring of the stains it would leave on the knees of her trousers, twined her fingers in among the curls of sphagnum. Pulling it away in fraying chunks, as perhaps the ancestors her grandmother had spoken of had done, Theo dug, watching water rise, grey and changeable as the sky, to fill the opening she had made in the peat. Down below, she knew she would find what she had searched for for so long. And oh — her hand met slick solidity, not peat at all.

The girl in the bog was unchangeable, frozen in amber. She was no body behind museum-glass, lying in state as if to be awoken by a kiss, but sleeping fast in untouchable earth. Her face, leathery and smooth, was unwrinkled despite the years. She could have been born the very same day as Theo, for all that the centuries showed upon her skin. Her hair, falling wispy about her face, had been reddened by hundreds of years of tannins. The sun caught upon it and turned it to the gold of autumn-dried acorns, sharp as straw. There would be grit in her mouth, dust from the rough millstone that had ground down grain, hardly noticeable behind the rich green smell of the bog.

Gloved hands scraped away wet threads of moss, smoothing over skin with as light a touch as Theo could manage. Under her fingers, the girl shifted, drawing up her shoulders as she yawned. Her eyes stayed closed, but all the same, Theo felt that she was seen.

The girl raised herself up languidly on one elbow, water sloughing off in trickles and streams from every seam and crevice of her body. Her ribs stood out in perfect parallel, still wrapped tightly by the skin of her sides.

“Hello,” said Theo, not knowing what else to say. The girl in the bog smiled at her with crooked, blackened teeth, and reached out to her. Her hands were small, round, doll-like, but still soft as burnished leather, the fingernails as neatly trimmed as if she had cut them the day before the peat closed over her.

She stroked the buzzed-short ends of the hair at the back of Theo’s neck as she leant closer, drifts of wet soil sloughing from her skin, and frowned.

“Why did they cut your hair?”

“I cut it myself. I liked it better that way — it felt right to do it before I came here.” Then, pausing, seeing the wind flick at her rust-red, blunt-hacked locks, “Did you—“

“They cut it before they sent me here. But it fits, doesn’t it? It was you that made yourself ready for me.”

“I suppose it was,” said Theo, and meant it. There was a rightness to it, a reason that she had not put words to before.

“Come down with me,” she said, and Theo could not help but follow. Half-laughing, she thought of the promises of the red-haired rusalki she’d read of in her books of tales. To walk down into the sweet water and meet a maiden there, and hear her speak words just as sweet of eternal youth in her kingdom down beneath the riverbed, was an old story, and one that she might find herself believing now. But the water of a peat bog is bitter, as are all things that keep memories safe, and it wasn’t youth, but eternity only, that the girl in the bog had promised her.

To be preserved, young arms entwined with ones that centuries ago were young, was all that she’d receive. But what more had she desired to begin with? The choice had been made long before she had ever set foot there. Theo extended a hand, stripped off its pale blue latex glove like a snake shedding its skin. Placing it atop her clipboard, she set aside the plastic barrier as if laying out an altar’s worth of grave-goods. She shucked the green raincoat and heavy backpack from her shoulders — she’d have another coat of that same verdant color where she was going, once the moss had closed over the both of them. Then, lowering herself feet-first into the open space amid the moss, Theo leaned down and met the girl’s mouth with her own.

The kiss was thick with pollen, and Theo inhaled it without any of the fear she had previously associated with such things. There was a sweetness to it, a choking flavor of juniper and sap as it poured like sand into her throat. Theo wondered, a little, that she could breathe through it, but it was no longer a time for wondering. Instead, her eyes slid softly shut, and the cool, deep darkness was all that remained. It was not the iron-red dark of closed eyes in sunlight, but a bitter and at the same time refreshing green-dark, a soft sort of shadow that spoke of nothing at all but the faintest edges of dreams.

Drawing the peat back over them, the girl curled herself fast around Theo’s back, cradling her in earth as if in the palm of a hand. Twining together beneath the moss, the water crept up over them both one more. As Theo sank, her eyelids slipped closed, and her head drifted downwards all the while. It twisted sideways on Theo’s neck, slipping bonelessly forwards, and down with it she went into dreamless sleep, bog water growing ever sweeter in her mouth.

#em writes stuff #oc time again hehe #bogstory #there are some things that I would do differently if I was writing this now. however this one is going to be what it is.#look! they are posting an original ghost story on a day Other than halloween! what a rare occurrence!

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sstar-ggirl · 3 months

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The Lights shine brighter when you’re there.

Pairing: Alex Turner x AFAB!reader (but u can read as wtv u want)

Word count:1081 (this ain’t a blurb ts a fic atp😭💀)

Summary: filming for TBHC, 2018 era, super cute fluff shit

Mars rambles abt things: AIGHT SO I NEED THIS MAN TERRIBLY BAD. ESPECIALLY TBHC ALEX😭. Anyways I wrote a cute little fluff fic for the first time in forever bc I had time(FINALLY) anyways I’ll try to write as much as I can.

The set was abuzz with anticipation as Alex Turner prepared to film the music video for his latest album. Surrounded by a team of producers and filming crew, he couldn't help but feel a surge of excitement for this particular project. The album was a supposed to be “a playful tune, super smooth but makes you feel expensive”he said when you asked about it. It carried a personal touch that resonated deeply with him – and he had the perfect person to share the screen with, his girlfriend, you. His most prized possession, something he wants to show off forever.

As the cameras started rolling, the set was transformed into a mesmerizing, eye catching jazz bar. The director, recognizing the unique connection between Alex and you, aimed to capture not just the essence of the song but also the genuine emotion shared between you two. The first scene unfolded in a dimly lit but well decorated jazz bar, the air heavy with the lingering notes of the melody.

Alex, dressed in his signature 70s style, met you in the center of the set, dressed in a tight black dress with a long slit in the side, black heels with gold accessories. There was an unspoken understanding between you two, a silent agreement to let the music guide the movements. As the haunting notes filled the room, you two moved with a fluidity that spoke of a deep, unspoken connection. It was more than just a regular dance; it was a dance of the heart.

The director, observing from behind the monitors, couldn't help but marvel at the chemistry on display. The raw emotion conveyed through his and your expressions painted a vivid picture of love and longing. The first scene wrapped, leaving everyone on set with a sense of anticipation for what was to come.

During a break, Alex and you found a quiet corner to steal a moment away from the commotion. You two shared a deep hug and kiss, acknowledging the magic that was created by you two. As you two broke from the kiss, Alex couldn't help but express his gratitude for having you by his side.

"(Y/N), you brought something special to this video, in fact this whole album – something only you could inspire. It's like the songs, the lyrics, the melodies come to life when you're here, or at home or sitting in the studio waiting for me to wrap up. You are truly the muse for my art." he confessed, his eyes reflecting sincerity.

You grinned and blushed, "Well, I happen to think your music brings out the best in me too, Alex. This is a great masterpiece in every sense."

As the day progressed, the scenes became more diverse, each one telling a different chapter of the song's story. From a rooftop overlooking the casino to a dimly lit jazz bar to the pool setting, the couple seamlessly transitioned from one setting to another, their connection intensifying with each passing frame.

The highlight of the video was a sequence where Alex and you found yourselves dancing under a canopy of fairy lights. The soft glow accentuated the tenderness in your movements, creating a visual poetry that mirrored the song's emotional depth. The crew watched in awe as the couple moved through the enchanting scene, your silhouettes etched against the twinkling lights.

As the day drew to a close, the final scene approached. The director wanted to capture an intimate moment between Alex and you that would serve as the emotional climax of the video. The setting was a quiet, candlelit room – a metaphorical space where their love could unfold without any distractions. A safe haven that hides all troubles and shows your true self to eachother.

The room was adorned with vintage furniture and flickering candles, casting a warm glow on as you two stood face to face. The soft strains of the song echoed in the background, creating a cocoon of intimacy around you. The director, satisfied with the day's work, whispered instructions to the cinematographer, signaling the start of the final scene.

With a subtle nod, the cameras began to roll, capturing the delicate nuances of the couple's expressions. Alex gently reached for your hand, his touch conveying a silent reassurance. His eyes locked, and in that moment, the world outside the set ceased to exist. It was just the two of them, immersed in the emotions the song evoked.

As the lyrics unfolded, Alex sang with a soul-stirring resonance, his voice intertwining with yours in a beautiful harmony. The vulnerability in your eyes told a story of love, heartbreak, and the unspoken promise of togetherness. The director, realizing the magic happening before him, chose to let the scene unfold organically, without interrupting the flow.

The room seemed to disappear, replaced by a realm where only your emotions mattered. Alex's thumb traced gentle circles on your hand, a silent gesture of comfort. Your closeness spoke volumes, transcending the scripted nature of the scene. It was a genuine moment, an unfiltered expression of the love they shared.

As the last notes of the song lingered in the air, the director called for a cut. The crew erupted into applause, acknowledging the authenticity and beauty captured in that final scene. Alex momentarily pulled out of that intimate bubble, shared a knowing smile, proud of the art you two had created together. You couldn’t stop staring at him falling deep in love within each second.

With the filming wrapped, the couple found themselves outside the studio, bathed in the soft glow of the evening. The air was crisp, and the city lights twinkled in the distance. They walked hand in hand, reflecting on the day's journey.

"I can't believe we did it," you exclaimed, your eyes sparkling with a mix of joy and exhaustion. Alex grinned, "It was magical, wasn't it? Having you by my side made it even more special. You’re really a present full of surprises aren’t you"

Later on, after leaving set, you two continued to stroll through the quiet streets, savoring the post-production bliss. The city seemed to have slowed down just for them, allowing them to relish the shared triumph. The music video, a testament to their love and collaboration, was destined to become a visual masterpiece.

Days later, as the video premiered to the world, fans and critics alike were captivated by the palpable chemistry between Alex Turner and you, (Y/N) (L/N). The comments flooded in, praising not only the song but also the genuine connection that elevated the video to a realm beyond ordinary music visuals.

In interviews, Alex and you shared snippets of their experience, emphasizing the organic nature of the collaboration. The music video, now a symbol of their artistic minds, resonated with audiences on a profound level, leaving an indelible mark on the hearts of those who watched it.

As the applause echoed and the views skyrocketed, Alex couldn't help but feel a sense of fulfillment. His journey- no Your journey together, from the studio to the screen, had not only produced a beautiful piece of art but had also strengthened the bond between eachother. The music video became a cherished chapter in your love story, a visual representation of the magic that happens when two hearts beat in perfect harmony.

#alex turner x reader #alex turner #tranquility base hotel and casino #arctic monkeys #i love him #I ADORE HIM #i had so much fun writing this #but writers block was fucking kicking my ass so hard I had to get my get back #IM UP THO #mars writing?!(rare occurrence)#LET MARS COOK 👩‍🍳

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