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religion-is-a-mental-illness · 2 months

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By: Alta Ifland

Published: Mar 25, 2024

Most of us have had at least once in a lifetime the experience of paradise when a place seems suddenly transfigured and elevated to an otherworldly realm. I experienced paradise in Iceland’s Reykjavik Airport in September 1991, where the plane that took me as a political refugee from Romania to the United States stopped for a couple of hours for a layover. It was the first time I had left my country of birth, and Reykjavik’s airport was my first contact with the West. I remember entering spaces that made me think of Aladdin’s cave of wonders, where under transparent glass lay mesmerizing diamond necklaces, and gorgeous saleswomen with seducing smiles inviting me to try them on; and I remember the impeccable marble-white restrooms like an alien spaceship with curious buttons I had no idea how to maneuver. Everything was clean, as if under the care of a doting fairy, and everybody smiled quietly as if life was a streak of uninterrupted joy.

I went back to Reykjavik for a literary conference twenty years later, but I could no longer find paradise. The diamond necklaces had no sparkle, Aladdin’s cave turned out to be a banal store, the women were like everywhere else, and the toilets nothing to write home about. The gap between the two experiences paralleled my first encounter with JFK Airport in New York, where—having to wait for my connecting flight to Jacksonville, Florida—I wandered for several hours among a hustle and bustle of people, stores, restaurants, buses and taxis, convinced that I was exploring the city itself. I mean, who in their right mind would imagine that they could find all of the above in an airport? It was only years later when I returned to New York that I realized that all I had seen of the city was, in fact, the airport.

These two primal encounters have left me with a lifelong love of airports, although life post-9/11 has considerably altered the experience. But the impression that our existence is made of two irreconcilable universes remained for a long time until, roughly, the advent of social media, which managed to unite the two into one indistinguishable blur and a chorus of mingled, screaming voices. Having spent my life between different worlds, I’m fascinated by the different frameworks people can place around the same events, according to the point of view given to them by their location in time and space.

As newly-arrived immigrants, my then-husband and I naturally gravitated toward other immigrants from Eastern Europe, and since they often went to church—which was, anyhow, the only socializing venue in Jacksonville (a city immortalized by Henry Miller in The Air-Conditioned Nightmare as a soul-killing locale)—we found ourselves for two years in the strange company of puritan evangelicals. After this edifying experience, my admission to an M.A. program at the University of Florida threw me into an environment that seemed completely opposite to the previous one, as if America were made of two separate worlds with two different types of people. Both types were a shock because they didn’t resemble the Americans I had known from the movies I’d seen—neither the neighbors who asked our Romanian friends to cover the non-existent breasts of their five-year-old daughter at the pool, nor my professors from the English department who joyfully professed their Communist and Marxist convictions to a roomful of sympathetic ears.

I cannot forget one professor who praised Mao’s “cultural revolution”—to this day I have no idea whether he was aware that millions had died as a result of this “revolution,” and that many Chinese in rural areas were so starved that they ate their own children.

It was clear to me that these academics knew nothing about the world I came from, which was, again, shocking, given that I knew a lot more about their world even though the country I grew up in was so isolated from the West that we used to refer to it as “outside.” I was the one who grew up in a prison, yet it was American academics who were the ignorant ones.

Growing up in Communist Romania, I read many American classics (the first book I read at eight years old was Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Tom Sawyer) and watched countless American movies. On the other hand, my American counterparts never read any books by Romanians (though I am not arrogant enough to demand that) or by Eastern Europeans generally, and rarely watched any European movies, let alone Eastern European movies. Yet these people who were clearly ignorant about my world were not shy about letting me know that what I experienced was not “real” Communism and that they—who had never set foot in a Communist country—were much better positioned to define Communism. How was that possible?

Let me tell you what nobody teaches Americans about the part of the world I come from.

For years, whenever I drove on one of America’s ten-lane highways, it felt impossible that this world existed in the same historical era as the world of my grandparents. I don’t have any photos of my paternal grandparents because in Communist Romania very few of us owned cameras. But they have remained etched in my mind in a way that makes them immortal, eternally old, as if their dark faces had always been crossed by deep ridges—the kind of faces only Indians (as we called them back then) had in black and white Hollywood movies, their feet always bare and so thick with calluses that when they washed them at night you could see the solidified dirt like mortar between brick-like layers of skin. They never used soap yet they had a drawer full of it, every single piece sent or brought by my father from the city. For them, soap was the equivalent of expensive jewelry, which Grandmother occasionally showed me, opening the drawer with pride: “See? Your father sent them. I keep them all.”

My grandparents lived in a world in which there was no money—I mean, there was no exchange of money, save for the rare occasions when Father gave them a few coins to buy bread. I remember walking with Grandfather unending kilometers through a sea of yellow corn until we reemerged in the world of the living, and Grandfather took out a handkerchief with a complicated knot that he untied to free the coins in exchange for the loaf of bread handed to him by the store clerk at the edge of the cornfield. But this type of exchange happened rarely. Usually, we ate hard polenta, the default everyday meal of Romanian peasants. We ate it either as a substitute for bread, which my grandparents usually couldn’t afford, or else as a meal immersed in a bowl of milk, one bowl for the entire table, inside of which our spoons often met, clanking.

My grandparents lived in the same way their ancestors had for generations in that part of the world: the province of Oltenia in Southern Romania. The only thing that had changed was that they were no longer periodically invaded by the Turks. The stove Grandmother used for cooking was like none other I’d seen except in films about remote indigenous populations—an oval-shaped structure of whitewashed clay set on the ground, with an opening through which one could glimpse the burning twigs, and atop, simmering pots full of aromatic dishes. In front of the stove, wearing her long Gypsy-like dress and stirring the pots, was seated Grandmother on a tiny chair, it too from a different world—about twenty inches high, with only three legs.

My grandparents’ village is where I spent my summers until I finished high school. During the school year, I lived with my parents in a small town in Transylvania in one of the countless intensely ugly Soviet-style flats. The grade school I went to was five minutes away on foot—since first grade, we all went on foot everywhere, unsupervised, and had the apartment key tied on a cord around our neck (apparently, today’s Romanians call us “the generation with the key by the neck”). Needless to say, we came back home on our own, warmed up the food prepared by our mothers, and were responsible for the supervision of our younger siblings until our parents came home from work.

My classmates were mostly children of factory workers and public office clerks; many of these parents had never finished high school and those with university diplomas were rare. Under Communism there was almost no middle class, and for a simple reason: the majority of people who had been part of it (university professors, politicians, economists, sociologists, priests, artists, writers, journalists, etc.) had been imprisoned, tortured and murdered.

Their guilt? They were all “enemies of the people,” the “people” being defined as dirt-poor peasants and what Marx called “the “proletariat.” Neither of my parents had college degrees. My father, whose parents were illiterate, never read a book; my mother, whose father was a chiabur (a farmer who paid for the sin of once owning land by spending a year in prison and having his eldest daughter refused admission to high school), used to read and over the years acquired a small library of Romanian, French, and English classics which I read dozens of times. After I finished reading our library, I began to explore the local libraries. With my best friend, whose parents were construction workers and morbid alcoholics, we took weekly trips to a library where the books were so yellowed and old they fell apart, and returned with a huge travel bag full of books. Without any guidance, we discovered many of the great classics: Sartre, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Cervantes, Gide, Flaubert, Zweig, Twain, Dickens—we read them all, entirely unaware that they were “great writers,” because no one had lectured us on their greatness. In our isolated world, we had a great advantage over children growing up in Western countries: we could discover the world with our own minds and in our own words.

When I say we had an “advantage,” don’t imagine that I'm glorifying the “system” in which we grew up. The world in which we were reading these books had the following characteristics: long lines to buy anything, major food items (sugar, oil, coffee, flour, butter) rationed and hard to find, hygiene products (soap, feminine products, toothpaste) entirely absent, winters without heat spent with our coats on inside our homes, electricity two hours a day, a single TV channel with most of its programs being delirious political propaganda, water cut off for days and sometimes weeks. In order to survive most city dwellers had to use the black market, where you could buy a pair of jeans for the cost of a monthly salary. For reference, my parents’ incomes combined totaled about eighty dollars per month.

In school we studied French. Without anyone’s exhortation and only the help of a dictionary, I soon began to read French classics for my own pleasure: Mérimée, Gide, Zola, Martin du Gard, Dumas, everything I could find. I was the best student in my grade in French, so I decided to major in it. In order to be admitted to college one needed to pass a very difficult exam in one’s specialty, and there were only about twenty positions for French students per university with just a handful of universities in the entire country. The majority of applicants able to pass the exam were either children of university professors or students from preparatory high schools. Given these circumstances, my teachers, neighbors, and parents all insisted that I should study engineering like everybody else and told me I was crazy to even consider French. Yet I persisted and passed the exam with the highest possible grade. While in college, during an internship where I worked as an assistant French teacher in a high school, I attended a class where the lead teacher introduced French food to the students, and after several minutes of hearing descriptions of baguettes, brie, camembert, and the like, one of them fainted. For us, this food was like fiction—not only had we never tasted it, we couldn’t even imagine that we would ever see it outside of a book. We were hungry and cold all the time, yet whenever we’d turn on the TV all we'd hear was that we lived in a “golden era”—the regime’s official language—for which we’d have to thank the Communist Party and its General Secretary, Comrade Nicolae Ceaușescu. All the country’s institutions held regular meetings where everybody, using a language of thought-terminating clichés which we called “wooden language,” had to massage the ego of the “Dear Leader” who made such an era possible. In this language, Ceaușescu was a “skilled helmsman,” a “beloved parent,” and “the exploitation of man by man” had been forever abolished.

During this "golden era” of Communism, when I was barely twenty-one, I got blacklisted as a “person very dangerous for the security of the state” because I had married a dissident. You see, in Communism, the entire family paid for the deeds of any of its members, including those of the dead ones. My husband’s main guilt was that he was the brother of a famous Romanian journalist who worked abroad for one of the Western radio stations that condemned the injustices of Communism. To understand why this was considered a crime, you need to know that the first thing Ceaușescu did every day was read a report on what had been said about him the previous day.

Since his fate was already sealed and he wasn’t even allowed to go to college, my husband and a few friends tried to create a political party that would have been an alternative to the only official one. Needless to say in a country where one in four citizens was an informant, they were quickly apprehended and subjected to harsh interrogations. This happened before my husband and I met; him being too traumatized to talk about it, I found out from his parents how he had been imprisoned and cruelly beaten. After we got married, he signed a petition demanding that the regime stop the demolition of villages and churches, a project Ceaușescu had started because he realized that the traditional rural lifestyle still gave people some independence. Consequently, Ceaușescu put us under 24-hour surveillance, with a car constantly parked in front of our building. We were young and foolish, and so we made fun of the unending series of spies who were struggling to remain inconspicuous every time we went out and they followed us. Sometimes we mocked them overtly, laughing out loud as we hopped on a bus, while they remained outside, but it was a dangerous game: you never knew when an “accident” could happen.

One afternoon, an individual in a black leather jacket got out of the car parked in front of our building while holding an envelope in his hand, entered for a few seconds, then returned with his hand empty. We didn’t keep the letter that my husband had retrieved from our mailbox because it made him so furious he tore it to pieces. The letter warned that “some people” might want to hurt me badly. The police summoned me a few days later to their headquarters for an undisclosed matter, with my husband forced to wait outside. Nothing horrible happened to me that day, save for the fact that I was asked to wait for several hours while my husband remained outside, not knowing when—or if—I was going to come out. When I was finally brought into an office, the officer informed me in a performatively worried tone that “some people” wanted to hurt me, and he wanted to make me aware of this danger.

This is how we lived for about two years until the anti-Communist Revolution from December 1989 swept the dictator and his clique away.

In the first week after the dictator was killed a member of the newly formed Front of the National Salute—the revolutionary organization that replaced the Communist Party and of which my husband was briefly a member—came to our home to uninstall a microphone that the Securitate (the Secret Police) had hidden behind our bed.

It took another quarter of a century until my husband was allowed to see the file the Secret Police had on us. It contained two thousand pages of content produced through the coordinated efforts of dozens of individuals and tens of thousands of dollars spent every month on our surveillance—in a country in which the average income was forty dollars. It also included the names of the “friends" who had informed on us—some of which we’d already guessed, others, a surprise. Our Secret Police file remained open until December 1991, that is, two years after the regime had fallen, and three months after we had left the country for America.

I left the building where my parents lived almost forty years ago, but when I last visited, some of the neighbors I had growing up were still there. Imagine passing by an old man who looks twenty years older than you, and then remembering that you had a crush on him when you were twelve and he was fourteen. The grey Soviet flats have remained unchanged, but in a certain way give you the reassuring feeling that time stands still and there's a continuity between generations—something absent in ever-changing American society.

While the memory of life in the small town of my childhood is ambivalently hazy, when I remember the rural world of my grandparents a wave of nostalgia washes over me. The three-legged wobbling chairs, the haystack above the cow barn where I used to read, even the short-lived doll made of rags that a friend from across the street had taught me how to make, ephemeral as she was, is now bathed in a golden aura of longing for a lost world.

[ Photos of Alta's grandparent's home, taken during a recent visit to Romania. On the left is the cow barn where Alta used to read. ]

I sometimes look at the children of my American friends, with their room full of toys, and I know that their toys don’t make them any happier than my rag doll had made me. And I know that my American female friends, emancipated as they are from the “patriarchy,” aren’t happier than Grandmother. In all traditional societies, labor is organized according to the existence of the two sexes and this has nothing to do with anyone’s “oppression.” Men do some things, women do other things—it's simply a division of labor based on physical differences between the two, and it’s a division that can be observed across cultures and millennia. According to all statistics and their own statements, it’s obvious that many American women are in profound disharmony with themselves and the world in which they live. And this is certainly not because the world in which Grandmother lived was better—although I am wondering more and more whether it was much worse.

The first thing you need to be unhappy is to ask yourself whether you are happy or not—Unlike American women, I am convinced that this is a question Grandmother never asked herself.

Grandmother, just like her mother and her mother’s mother, lived in a way that imitated the lives of previous generations, in an entanglement with “tradition”—the dirty word that American feminists and progressives utter with so much disdain and which they translate as “oppression” and “victimization.” I often try to imagine what Grandmother would have answered had I told her that she was “oppressed” by the patriarchy in particular and society in general. I think she would have had a hard time understanding the concept. You see, it’s hard to feel “oppressed” when you have inner freedom. Aside from this, nobody in the world of my grandparents thought in these terms because in traditional societies it is shameful to be a victim. Only in a world of privilege can victimhood acquire a desirable status. I call this the law of subliminal contradiction, something I discovered by observing how Americans behave. Another example: only in a society of excess can the richest people dress in a way that imitates the homeless. In the society of poverty in which I grew up, it was shameful to wear torn-apart clothes; on the other hand, if you look at the way most well-to-do Americans are dressed today, you’d think they live on the street. Consider high fashion clothing that gives the illusion of poverty and manual labor, like mud-splashes and rips on jeans.

Today I write these lines from France, in my second exile. And many things have changed! My husband is now my ex-husband; he has returned to Romania, and I to Europe. My best friend with whom I used to explore libraries and books, and who grew up in a one-bedroom apartment with two parents, a grandmother, an older sister, and her daughter, and who at ten years old was forced by circumstances to take care of the entire household while her father lay drunk in a ditch and her mother worked on construction sites, is now a doctor and owner of a major medical lab. Unlike my American acquaintances, she never saw herself as a “victim” of anything. When I came to this country as a political refugee over thirty years ago, the thing that most impressed me about Americans was that they were very responsible and resilient. Thirty years later this country has been turned upside-down. But the truth is that the signs and the seeds of this reversal were already present thirty years ago, mostly in one particular space: academia.

The rare Marxists from back then are now the norm (although many traditional Marxists point out that, unlike American academics, Marx was never concerned with “race and gender”). They are the people who call Putin “right-wing,” as if he'd been schooled by the Republican Party rather than the Communist Party, whose Secret Police he represented as an officer of the KGB. The reason Putin is “right-wing” is because he’s a nationalist and anti-LGBT—but if these academics had read any books from my part of the world, they’d know that every single Communist country was ultra-nationalist and homophobic. In Communist Romania you could go to prison for twenty years for being a homosexual. Putin may no longer be a “Communist” because the gifts of the Capital are way too sweet, but his authoritarianism is rooted in Communism nonetheless, and his homophobia has nothing to do with being “right-wing” unless you project a Western value system onto a completely different world in which the categories of Left and Right merge.

After you’ve experienced the clichés of Communist propaganda, you can easily spot the mental structures underlying the impulse to reduce the complexity of the world down to one huge power struggle in which everybody is either an oppressor or a victim. This is why having lived through Communism has become very useful in contemporary America, and it's why the few of us who denounced the insanity of Communism when it could have cost our lives won’t keep our mouths shut now that America is losing its mind. For instance, the concept of “reparations” based on inherited collective guilt is eerily similar to the Communist practice of punishing an entire family for the deeds of any of its members, including the dead. Just like the “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” activists who are being paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to lecture you, the Communists created a privileged class called the “nomenklatura”—Party activists who did nothing but spread ideology and propaganda, making sure that the rest of us conformed to the official dogma. One trait of people who create dogmatic ideologies is that they never feel obligated to obey their own dogma—if they did, they would have to cancel their own privilege.

Because history is always written from one point of view, being an American academic often comes with the privilege of (re)writing history. And in an Americentric world, these academics look at everything through the lens of their own history, which they project onto everybody else. When have you ever heard academics from English departments and Women/Gender/Ethnic Studies—who have been teaching generations of students about the evils of European colonization—denounce the colonization of Eastern Europe by the Russians and by the Turks? It’s as if 500 years of history—the history of the Ottoman Empire—never existed. Or as if Russia started its colonial history with the invasion of Ukraine.

According to these academics, being European is equivalent to having a mysterious essence called “whiteness,” and I should repent for my “white privilege” and Europe’s colonial history, as if my “white” ancestors had colonized anyone and not the other way around, or as if they had enslaved “brown” Muslims and not the other way around.

Let me tell you an anecdote about how I was made to pay for my “white privilege.” You may remember the brouhaha after the poem performed by the young, black author, Amanda Gorman, at Biden’s inauguration, was commissioned to be translated into Dutch not by another black woman, but by a white person. This white person happened to be Marieke Lukas Rijneveld, who identifies as “non-binary” and is a few years older than Gorman. After a complaint that the chosen translator was not black, the translator withdrew from the project and the publisher issued a public apology—never mind that it was Gorman herself who had chosen the translator and that it’s quite likely that there aren’t many black translators who translate into Dutch and have Rijneveld’s literary skills. I know this because I had read Rijneveld’s award-winning book translated into English and recommended it on social media. When the scandal broke, many American translators—some of whom I was personally acquainted with through my work as a translator—commented on the affair online, supporting the decision to replace the white translator with a black translator. In response, I dared to share the comment of a French member of PEN, who believed that skin color should have nothing to do with who translates what. I accompanied this comment with my own: “I think that, this being a forum of translators, we should give a voice to different opinions from other languages.” I was subjected to a pile-on of virulent attacks, summoned to delete my “inflammatory” remarks, and it was made clear to me that my opinion could only be the result of my “white privilege” because I was (I'm not kidding you) a “cultural essentialist.” The cherry on top was that I was also called a “transphobe” because I had “misgendered” Rijneveld—the irony being that I was the only one in that group who had actually read and supported the “non-binary” author. I left these discussions after it was clear that I didn’t have the “revolutionary consciousness” to belong.

The fact is that nothing—and certainly not “white privilege” or any kind of “systemic” anything—is stopping anyone in America from learning languages and translating. When I was a graduate student in French at the University of Florida, my black classmate had spent time in France, just like everybody else in our program. I was the only one who had never been to France. Yet if I could learn French while believing that I would never see France because traveling to Western Europe was, for a Romanian of my station, as impossible as going to Mars, then any American—black, blue, or purple—can do it.

Privilege is a funny thing, especially in a society in which being a victim grants the highest social status. I for one prefer to assume the privilege of having experienced both Communism and life as an immigrant—a privilege America’s social justice warriors will never have—because it has taught me that you can be free under the worst dictatorship and a slave to groupthink in the freest of worlds.

#SmashCapitalism

🤡

#Alta Ifland #We The Black Sheep #communism #capitalism #smash capitalism #Marxism #late stage Marxism #Communist Party #religion is a mental illness

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welcometololaland · 11 days

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Hi Lola!

🧭 and 🤡 for the ask game! And, if three isn’t too many (I don’t wanna steal them all lol) also ♻️ bc that’s something I’m struggling with atm as a beginner’s writer 🙃

Aaand ofc ❤️😌

hi mar! 💜 thank you so much for the ask!

1. An alternative title to one of your WIPs

never too late really could be titled "heath ledger made me do it".

2. How many WIPs are you actively working on?

i just finished all my parts of call me (which is a 911 lone star co-written fic with @rmd-writes). i'm very excited to see that get finished and posted! aside from that, i'm currently working on:

a. the sequel to the ring-in (currently known as 'the ring-in 2.0' but i'm sure it will get a title soon) (911 lone star). i've been waiting to write this for so long and even getting the first chapter down has been a blast.

b. eurotrip (rwrb). i've said it a million times but this fic just scares me. it's so long and i have so much to go and i keep getting imposter syndrome about it.

c. cause of action (tgm). this is just a passion project - i write it when i feel like it and i have no expectations for it. BUT it's a fic about a law firm so it's very cathartic for me to write, plus i've been hitting the hangster fic hard recently so i'm very inspired.

d. never too late (aka the 10 things i hate about you au) (911 lone star). which is not a wip because i've finished it, but i still need to edit it severely before posting so...it's languishing. it's the new alta. someone go save it (it needs to be me but i simply am avoiding).

(i'm currently trying to do one week ls, one week rwrb and squeeze tgm in when i feel like it).

3. A scrapped idea for your current WIP

i can't really think of one for my current wip but in call me, rae and i had written some very vague ideas for the epilogue, but then after i had written my last part we looked at it, discussed what we thought should be written and what we came up with was...way better than what we had originally put down. i think being able to re-read the fic in its totality and having the vibes of the previous parts were important in assessing the kind of stuff we wanted to close the fic out with 💜

wip ask game

#wip ask game #thanks mar!!!#the ring-in #eurotrip #cause of action #never too late #911 lone star #rwrb #tgm #tag games

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quietborderline · 7 months

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There’s always trouble in paradise for the wip ask!

Real talk? I should work on this and say fuck everything else honestly LMAO because this is probably the most fun I have ever had writing anything in my life. My love of fusion fics and my inner dramatic, theatrical bitch just running amok all over the place. It is glorious.

And yet it is not on my current "to focus on" short list, alas.

Soon, perhaps.

Anyway, I know you know most of this already from hearing me talk about it for years now, but it is a fusion of MEA with High Seas (Alta Mar) which is a Spanish murder mystery show and the idea was first spawned because Jon Kortajarena (my Reyes, as you all know by now I'm sure) is one of the main characters, and the other two main characters are siblings. And in my usual fashion, it takes bits of plot and such from both the Netflix series and the ME games, plus some extra fun, and mushes it all together. So basically, long story short, it's a murder mystery/romance story set on the Hyperion/in Andromeda. It may be one giant fic or it might end up a series like everything else because why the fuck not? Learning from mistakes? I don't know her.

I don't really have a snippet I want to share quite yet. But I have slowly but steadily been working on the soundtrack (though it is still very much a WIP and as such it is unfinished and also subject to change randomly), so here if you want a little musical preview, I guess! <3

#thank you for the ask!#<33 #qb writes things

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dano-matchmaker · 2 years

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Hiiiiyaaa!!, hope you’re doing fine<3 (& hopefully this is where I can ask you for a match up with a Paulgod Dano character)

My name is Hannia (pronounced ha-nee-ah.) I’m like 5’2, with dark brown short hair like Lord Farquard, hazel eyes, and pale ivory skin. Every day I use shiny eyeshadows with lip tints. I usually wear colorful clothes. I love to read and listen to music, I do exercise like 3 times per week and I like to cook, (my favorite foods are Thai, Mexican, and burgers)

I don’t know what kind of aesthetic I match;(, I’m Mexican American, so I’m also into Latin things, like this fall I’ll start college, and my major is gonna be Spanish Literature, I want to be a college teacher and writer like Laura Esquivel 🥺. I listen to things like The Smiths, Soda Stereo, Kenia Os, Taylor Swift, Lana Del Rey, and Bad Bunny, but I also love music from the 50’s a lot. My favorite books are The Crucible by Arthur Miller, Hamlet by William Shakespeare, La casa de Bernarda Alba by Federico García Lorca and Malinche by Laura Esquivel. I usually watch Spanish tv series like Velvet, Morocco, and Alta Mar, blah blah blah. I enjoy so much the subjects of Criminal Law and US government, I’m a semi devoted catholic lol bc of my family. My friends make fun of me being straight jsjsjj. Criminal and paranormal cases are so entertaining for me.

I’m better at writing in Spanish rather than English, I’m almost done with high school and I took every advanced Spanish class to get college credit. I’m from San Diego in California, so I love to go to the beach, even though the water is really cold every time;) Besides Paul Dano, I’m mentally married to Peter Pevensie from Narnia and Pedro Pascal (I love Star Wars)

When I was little I used to have pretty bad medical luck. All my life I used to have overweight, but between the fall of 2021 and now I lost like 24 pounds and it’s so shocking for me now. I started to love Paul Dano this last March after going to Rosarito and watching The Batman there 🖤.

Thanks for reading this bible, hopefully, you can match me with someone

I JUST KNOW THAT BRIAN WOULD BE YOUR SOULMATE!!

You two are perfect for each other ik it! He would be obsessed with you, literally just love everything about you. you two would be so cute raaaaa!!!

#fast food na #brian fast food nation #paul dano

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destiniesfic · 3 years

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A little dark!Alina for Tumblr user @darkalinas. Merry Christmas, Maven! I was your Secret “Sankta” for @darklinadaily’s Darklina Secret Santa. 👼 I had a blast writing this and I hope you like it. ♥

Fandom: Grishaverse (post-Ruin and Rising and King of Scars) Pairings: Darklina & Malina Word Count: 5,000 Rating: T+ Summary: Three years after the end of the Ravkan Civil War, the woman once known as Alina Starkov begins to dream.

Or: he can go anywhere he wants (just not home).

Read on AO3 or read below:

It would have been easy to think the mistress of Keramzin, who saw that the orphans straggling through her door were fed and cared for, little more than a girl herself. Boys of twelve seemed tall beside her, and the more daring among them would ask her to stand back to back with them so they could measure the difference in height and come away whooping at how they’d grown. She wore her hair unbraided and walked the halls with bare feet. Sometimes she would lose herself in a daydream and move to tackle a different section of her latest mural with her brush still wet in her hand, trailing little drips of paint like a line of kisses on the floorboards.

But appearances deceived, for the girl was a woman now, and married. She and her husband took their meals sitting among the teachers and staff, not their charges, although either of them could be tugged away from the table with the slightest excuse. Some of the youngest children, confused by her snow white hair, called her Baba like she was a grandmother. Though she was still a young woman, she sometimes moved stiffly, after she had sat too long or hunched her shoulders up to her ears while she painted, like whatever she had done before coming here siphoned some of her youth away.

When the woman slept at night, it was stretched out beside her husband under a warm duvet, safe. Neither of them dreamed often, and when they did they dreamt mainly of sunlight dancing over skin, of the woods’ silent call. But the other times, the few bad times, he was there when the nightmares reached for her with greedy fingers.

“It’s all right,” he would whisper, gathering her into his arms. “You don’t have to carry it all alone. I’m here. I’ve got you.”

Although they were the right words, the things a person should say, her mouth always went dry before she could tell him that she knew.

When one night she arose from their bed in the very early hours, nothing seemed wrong. She had not woken from a nightmare, just suddenly, with no preamble and no cause. Her husband slept on beside her, his brown hair rumpled, one shoulder, sun-kissed from work outdoors, turned toward the ceiling. She thought about kissing it, but she didn’t want to wake him. She left her bed and went to the window, sitting on the bench in front of it and looking out at the pond.

The moon was strong tonight, a silver dish suspended in the sky. Everything she touched—the grass, the sliver of creek—seemed to glow. Her light spilled in through the window, washing the floor and the foot of the bed in desaturated hues, somehow making them both more and less. Where the light did not reach, shadows pooled on the floor like tar.

Most people thought that darkness was the absence of light, its opposite. She knew a different truth. Without light, there could be no shadow. Where one ventured, the other kept close.

And then, out of the corner of her eye, she thought she saw one of the shadows move.

She spun around, but her room was as she always knew it: sleeping husband, solid oakwood furniture, dead fire in the grate. Across the room, a ghost stared back at her, hollow-cheeked and bright-eyed. She startled, but it was only her reflection in the full-length mirror. Then, in her periphery, motion: darkness like smoke, sliding under the closed door and into the hall.

She followed.

The rebuilt Keramzin was completely dark this time of night, orphans and staff alike asleep, lost to their own dreams of tomorrow. Patches of moonlight glimmered at her feet, but the shadows between them seemed to grow darker, deeper, until she thought she might fall into them if she took a step forward. Yawning chasms, or hungry mouths.

This was like no dream she could remember. As far as she could see there was no one beside her, no one behind her. Yet she could feel a presence, she would swear to it. Something winding around her, working its way up her body. Something with a voice.

Alina, it murmured. A name only her husband called her now, when the fire was dying and they were alone, the children tucked safely in their beds.

“Alina is dead,” she said. “No one here has that name.”

A lie—Ravkans began naming their daughters for the Sun Summoner as soon as they learned of her. There were two little Alinas, both under four, in the nursery where the youngest children slept. But she didn’t think this phantom cared for technicalities.

The voice chuckled. Are you really so eager to forget yourself? She felt the brush of lips against her ear, but when she turned her head there was nothing. She was alone in the darkened hall, and she thought he had left, but then a whisper slithered into her other ear. Are you so eager to forget who you are?

“I am the mistress of Keramzin,” she told the voice. “I am the painter of these walls. I am the guardian of these children. I have made my home here, and if you won’t leave it, I will drive you out myself.”

There was silence. Then:

With what power?

“Darling?”

She turned. Her husband stood in the doorway of their room, his hair sticking up endearingly at odd angles, pajamas slung low on his hips. The shadows reverted to their normal shade, strangely innocent, keeping their secrets.

“What is it?” he asked. “I heard you talking.”

She blinked back to herself and reached for a plausible explanation. “I don’t know. Must have been sleepwalking.”

He nodded, distantly, then walked over and wrapped an arm around her shoulder. “Back to bed,” he said, a yawn stretching the last word wide.

“Back to bed,” she agreed, but not without a last glance over her shoulder.

---

“Have you heard from our friend in Os Alta?” the woman asked her husband over breakfast that morning.

That’s what they called the king, that or sometimes their friend in the palace. They had a handful of friends in Os Alta, of course, the lingering remnants of another life entirely. But those friends—the Grisha Triumvirate, the king’s bodyguards, and others—could be mentioned by name occasionally. Davids and Nadias were common enough. Nikolais were, too, but it was better to be cautious with him. Better to leave nothing to chance.

Her husband frowned. “No,” he said. “Were you expecting something?”

She shrugged. They had briefly housed the king’s escort a few weeks back, sans king; the orphans had crowded the windows to gawk at the gilded carriage. When the riders went on their way to the palace, she sent a letter with them. Nothing serious, for there was nothing serious to report from Keramzin, just well-wishes and a request for news from the court. The king was a lively correspondent and usually quick to reply, happy to unburden himself of gossip or fears which he could not, or would not, share with courtiers.

“I wrote to him,” she said, spooning sugar into her tea. “But I haven’t heard back. He’s probably busy.”

“Busy choosing a wife,” her husband replied, with a hint of a snort and a solemn undercurrent that said he did not envy the king one bit.

The woman looked into the glassy surface of her tea. “I forgot,” she murmured, though that news had reached them even in Keramzin and the staff had been buzzing about it for weeks. A royal betrothal was a rare event, and an important one.

Her husband bumped her knee with his, and teased, “Don’t tell me you’re jealous.”

“Hardly,” she scoffed, and smiled at him. That ship had sailed long ago.

Still, it bothered her that she hadn’t heard from her friend. She knew that court obligations must be keeping him occupied, especially with eligible young women swarming the capital, but she wished she had a letter back so she could reply in kind. He was the only person who understood the way darkness had lodged itself between her ribs like a long thorn, reaching to pierce her heart. If she could just slip in a question about his demons, if she could just have reassurance that all was well with him, then maybe she would cease to worry about the impossible.

She took a deep breath, inhaling the earthy scent of her tea. It seemed silly to have those fears here. The air was bright with the chatter of children being herded into their first lessons of the day, with cooking smells, with autumn sun. Half the walls were covered in paintings of fantastical scenes, her own doing, and she wondered if she had been trying to create a ward to keep the darkness out.

“I heard there were earthquakes last night,” her husband said, changing the subject. “Maybe that’s what woke you.”

She frowned. “Earthquakes? Here?”

“All over Ravka. As far south as Dva Stolba.”

Dva Stolba. A shiver ran down her spine. “Why do they think it happened?”

“An act of nature,” said her husband, unbothered. “These things happen, beloved.”

The woman nodded and looked back into her tea. Strange things had been happening all year, it seemed—bridges of bone, statues sprouting flowers, forests falling in the night. It might mean nothing.

And yet when she tried to paint that day, her blues kept running into her blacks, and shadows marred her paintings like bruises. She retired to her room early, dreading her dreams.

---

She did not dream that night, nor the next, nor the one after that, and she breathed a sigh of relief, thinking that her husband was right, that things do happen. That sometimes earthquakes were only earthquakes, and dreams only dreams.

The next time she woke unexpectedly it was to the sound of a bright, sustained note, like ringing in her ears. Someone was playing the piano downstairs. One of the kids must have gotten up and decided to wander around in the night.

Her husband slept on next to her, bracketing her back, and she knew it would fall to her to handle this before the playing woke up the rest of the orphanage. She sighed, pushed her hair back from her face, and slipped out of bed, quietly pulling the door to behind her.

The child fooling around with the piano kept playing and holding the same note, as if not sure where to go from the single key they’d discovered. It was in one of the upper octaves, and although she’d begun to learn how to play the piano alongside some of her more gifted charges, she did not have the knack for knowing which note it was.

But when her feet found the cold tile of the foyer and she hurried to the drawing room where the piano stood, she saw the person sitting at the keys was not a child at all.

The phantom had shape now. He wore a long cloak of all black, with the hood pulled up to cast his face in shadow. She knew what he would look like if he drew it down, and it was that terrible knowledge which rooted her to the spot. He sat on the piano bench like there was real weight to him.

“You’re not here,” she said, as if the words alone were a revocation, a shield.

The phantom pressed the piano key again, and the note held, high and wavering, suspended in the air between them. She looked around, thinking it might wake the staff, or maybe some of the children would stumble bleary-eyed from their rooms, but in her heart she knew no one would come.

“You’re not real,” she insisted.

“Come and sit,” he said. His voice was cool like a poisoned spring at the height of summer, the last drink of the desperate.

She refused to slip into the well of him and stayed where she was, folding her arms over her chest. “You’re in my home.”

“Yes, and such work you’ve done, rebuilding it.” He didn’t need to remind her that he had once burnt Keramzin to the ground, slaughtered all those that had a hand in raising her. She could hear the smile in his voice, picture the way his lips curved under that hood. “Sit with me. I’ll be on my way soon enough.”

“Is that a promise?”

“Would you believe a dead man’s word?”

She shook her head. She wouldn’t have believed him when he was alive. “All you’ve ever done is lie, dead or not.”

“I bent the truth to my will, Alina. I omitted.” There it was again, the name that was hers and wasn’t. She hated the tenderness with which he said it, the same her husband’s voice held when he called her beloved, or my heart.

“A lie of omission is still a lie,” she said.

He made a small, skeptical sound, and then began to play in earnest, coaxing sad, strange music from a piano more accustomed to the clumsy fumblings of students. She had never heard a song like this, composed of discordant notes that didn’t quite fit together and made the hair on her arms stand on end. She found herself moving closer to the piano, watching his bone-white fingers move over the ivory keys, trying to figure out how he was doing it.

He softened his playing, gentled his touch, so that he could speak to her with his head still bowed. “How long has it been since you’ve seen my face at night?”

“Years,” she whispered. Another lie. She couldn’t keep him from entering her thoughts, the man she’d almost loved, the man she killed. She would go weeks at a time without thinking of him, and then he’d glide into her last thoughts before sleep, or she’d feel her husband’s callused hands on her skin and think of the one breathless night he’d gripped her thigh and nearly had her, all of the other evenings that weren’t.

“Would you like to see it again?”

“No.”

He chuckled and stopped playing, then reached up to draw back his hood.

At first she saw only what she expected: his familiar, beautiful face, with its high cheekbones, his thick, dark hair, his cruel mouth curving up at the corner. There were the faint scars that marked his survival of the time she stranded him on the Fold. But that was what she wanted to see. The other half of his face was a rotten mess. Mottled grey skin flaked away from bone, a dark hollow gaped where his eye should be. There were no lips to hide his straight white teeth, and no nose at all. How he would have rotted, if he hadn’t burned.

He smiled.

She screamed.

The cook, emerging from her room to set out breakfast, found her asleep at the keys, her forearm slung in front of the music rack, pillowing her forehead.

---

The woman was led to her bed, skin hot, buried in blankets as soft and heavy as the first snow of winter. A doctor from the nearby town was summoned to diagnose her with influenza, told her husband to see to it that she rested and drank her tea. She had always been prone to sickness when the weather changed–except for the one glorious, blazing year that her ill health could not touch her, when the light she wielded kept it at bay.

She gave that up. She was supposed to have her happily-ever-after.

“I saw him, Mal,” she said, clutching at her husband’s sleeve as he pressed a cool compress to her forehead. “I saw him.”

“Your temperature’s still high,” he replied, cupping her cheek in his work-roughened hand. She closed her eyes. “Fever dreams. He’s gone, love. You saw to that.”

Later, she saw her husband standing in the door, speaking in a low voice to the doctor, asking about paranoia, about delusions, about what it meant that his wife saw ghosts. The doctor shook his head, told him she needed to sweat it out, that after a few days she would be right as rain.

She told no one there was a weight on her chest that had nothing to do with her flu.

But her body won its fight eventually. After a few days her skin cooled, and instead of sipping clear broth from a bowl held carefully by one of the orphanage nurses, she was able to join the rest of Keramzin at dinner, seated at her husband’s side. The staff all greeted her warmly and told her how much better she looked, even though she knew they whispered about the circles under her eyes even when she was well.

Sitting there in the dining room, she was struck suddenly by a sense of profound dissatisfaction with her life. Why should she endure gossip and speculation? Why should she have her counsel so easily disregarded by the physician, by her husband, her words of warning dismissed as flights of fancy? She, who had been a saint. She, who was nearly queen. Why—

But then one of the little girls threw her arms around the woman’s legs and said, “Baba, I’m glad you’re better,” and the world righted itself. She let her hand rest on the back of the girl’s silken head, and breathed.

---

“Keep me awake tonight,” she told her husband later, as they turned down the gas lamps and climbed into bed. “I don’t want to dream.”

“You need your rest,” he replied, smoothing a lock of white hair back from her face.

She twined her arms around his shoulders. “I’m not glass,” she murmured. “I won’t break. Keep me up.”

He tried his best, and so did she, but sleep, ever the creditor, claimed its debts in the end. Although at first she did not realize she was asleep, having sild into it sideways; one moment she watched her husband’s chest rise and fall, and the next she blinked, and the waning moon had moved outside the window. The back of her neck prickled with the creeping certainty that she was being watched. There was someone else in the room with them.

She reached for her sleeping husband to wake him, to tell him, to show him, but her hand passed over his shoulder like rain running down a windowpane. She jerked it back, as if she had burned it. Her husband didn’t stir.

“He won’t wake,” said the soft, cool voice from behind her. “You’re in my domain now.”

The woman closed her eyes and drew a deep breath, steadying herself before speaking. “I thought it was ours,” she said after a moment. “Not yours. I could call to you, too.”

“But you haven’t, have you, Alina?”

“There’s no point calling on a dead man.”

“Am I so dead?”

The more fool her, expecting a nightmare to know he was deceased. The more fool her, for thinking him just a nightmare. She turned over, holding her blankets close to her chest, and found a figure standing at her bedside, nearly human, not a shadow, not half corpse.

She blinked up at him. “You’re whole now.”

“I only wanted to remind you of the damage you did,” he said.

How could she forget? She killed both him and her husband that day, so much heart’s blood gouting warm over her hands. If one had returned to her, it didn’t seem so unlikely that the other would as well, even though she’d watched him burn.

But she wondered if that was it, or if he simply had the strength now to appear as he liked. He had been formless at first, just a whisper in her ear. Now he stood at her bedside, lifelike. His hood was pushed back from his face, and the moonlight glimmered on his sharp, elegant cheekbones, haloed his dark hair. His scars, which had appeared after she stranded him on the Fold, were gone. He looked down at her with his pale grey eyes, and she very much wished she were clothed.

“What do you want?” she asked, smoothing her hand over the blankets.

“A word. A walk.”

“And what if I don’t want to give you those things?”

His mouth curved into a smile, but she read sadness in his eyes. “Then I will come again, Alina. The tracker may think he has you in the day, but your nights are mine.”

She closed her eyes again and imagined him eroding her dreams over and over, until he became the only thought left in her head. She imagined sitting up for days, trying to avoid him. It chilled her blood. If they had thought her paranoid before…

“No tricks,” she told him. “Look away. I need to dress.”

He scoffed, “You act as though we’re strangers.”

“Some things belong to me,” she reminded him. “Look away.”

He pursed his lips, but turned his head away from her. She slipped out of bed, careful not to touch him, and gathered up her discarded nightgown, her underwear, dressing as quickly as she could. She stepped into her slippers, determined to make him wait as long as possible, before asking, “Where are we walking?”

“Around your orphanage, to start.”

“Fine.” She crossed her arms and tucked her hands under her armpits so he couldn’t take them.

The door to their room had a squeaky hinge, one her husband had been meaning to grease for a couple of weeks now. When the phantom opened it, it made no sound. She listened, hard, for his footfalls on the floor.

“Tell me, does this life suit you?” he asked, as they walked side by side through the darkened hall, the only two awake in a house, or perhaps a world, of sleepers. “Do you enjoy being painter and patroness?”

“I do,” she said. It did not taste like a lie.

He hummed. “Do you enjoy being a mere wife, when you might have been a queen?”

“Men wanted to make me their queen,” she reminded him. “That was never something I chose for myself.”

“All the more reason you would have been a good one,” he said. “Power is wasted by those who crave it. It’s twisted, perverted, misused. You would have made an excellent queen.”

“That’s a rare moment of self-awareness from you.”

An amused glint lit his eyes, a candle flame in a darkened window. “I never wanted power for power’s sake, Alina. I loved my country.”

“Did you?” She paused for a moment to consider a painted vine snaking around a bannister, which was already beginning to flake off. She scratched at a leaf with her index finger; green came away under her nail. “Then why couldn’t you stop destroying it?”

“Ah,” he said.

“Well?”

“So young, so wise, so married,” he mused, “and yet you know nothing of love.”

He took the stairs without waiting for her to follow. She did, of course, determined to chase him down and to explain all the ways that he was wrong, then realizing, partway down, that he would only take her arguments as defensiveness. So she reminded herself of what she knew. She loved her life. She loved the children in her care. She loved her husband. Her love would not destroy them. It would not destroy her.

But she had loved power, too, once. And now her power was dead.

He waited for her by the two grand double doors that stood at Keramzin’s main entrance. She tried to follow the lines of his cloak with her eyes, but it bled into the shadows at his feet. He watched her steadily.

“Now what?” she asked.

“Now we walk.” And he held out his hand.

She stared at him.

“You won’t get to where we’re going if you don’t take it.” He spread his fingers out a little, beckoning her. “Alina.”

She held his gaze as she slipped her hand into his. She half-expected to feel the surge of power, familiar and wild, that used to always manifest when she touched him. She didn’t feel that, but she didn’t feel nothing. Some dark thing fluttered just to the side of her heart, a fledgling raven not quite ready to leave the nest.

“Aleksander,” she said.

He pushed open the door.

They stepped together, and for a moment it was as if the shadows had swallowed them whole. She felt like she had stepped back into the nothingness of the Fold, an all-consuming, weightless darkness. But then it resolved itself, and she saw that she was in a grey, windowless room. She blinked and pressed her hand to one of the walls, feeling cool stone under her palm. With a surge of panic, she looked over her shoulder and saw the only door was metal and sealed tight.

“This is a cell,” she said, her heart sinking. Had she stepped into a trap without knowing? Would she be able to leave? “Why would you bring me here?”

“A glimpse of the future,” he said, ever inscrutable.

And then his mouth was hot and hard on hers, and her back collided with the wall. She was so surprised that for a moment she didn’t react, for a moment her lips parted and she let herself be kissed, and then she grabbed his shoulders and pushed him away.

“What are you doing?” she cried, as if someone might hear, someone outside. Someone who could intervene.

“What you want.”

That dark thing fluttered behind her ribcage again. “I have a husband.”

“Your husband,” he said, voice heavy with derision. “The tracker. Have you forgotten? You murdered your husband the day you murdered me.”

“Clearly it didn’t take.” She kept her hands firm on his shoulders. He certainly felt real, firm and strong, all lean muscle.

His laugh was low and dangerous. “Are you so deserving of good things? Are you so deserving of kindness? You put a dagger in both of us, Alina. Tell me why I shouldn’t repay you in kind.”

She felt one of his hands slip up her nightdress, settling on her thigh, a strange echo of the position they’d been in years ago, that very different night. Her blood pulsed hot in her ears, and she knew it was not a dagger he was planning to stick her with. “You’re dead,” she said, trying to keep her voice even. She refused to let him rattle her. “I think that would make it difficult. No blood to spare.”

He gave her a narrow, rueful grin. “If I’m truly dead, does it matter what we do?”

“Yes,” she whispered.

His other hand traced a half-circle over her collarbones, where Morozova’s antlers once sat, before gently tilting her chin up. She could not look away from him. In life, there was always such intensity in his gaze, and the gaze of this nightmare, this dream, was no different. “I’m going to kiss you again,” he said. “Tell me to stop, if that’s what you want.”

She didn’t tell him to stop. He was gentler this time, his lips ghosting over her cheek before finding hers, molding to her instead of forcing his way in. She shut her eyes tight, but her grip on his shoulders turned into something else, a near embrace, another battle in their war. She could even smell him, cool and crisp like the approach of winter. His hand was warm on her thigh.

“You have something of mine,” he murmured against her mouth. “Do you know how to use it?”

“What?” she asked breathily.

She felt him smile. “I’m not so far away, Alina,” he said. “Come and find me.”

---

When she opened her eyes, she found herself standing in the middle of Keramzin’s drive in her nightdress and slippers. Although it was late autumn and a breeze brushed her white hair back from her face like a lover’s fingers, she didn’t feel the cold.

Dawn was just beginning to break in the east, a pink tinge illuminating the dark branches of naked trees. She stood there, watching the morning sun rise, and held her hands up to it, hoping to catch the rays in her palms and hold them for a while. But they glided over her skin, indifferent to what she wanted. She tried not to let her disappointment swallow her. She had felt a tug when he touched her. She had hoped...

But maybe that wasn’t the answer.

“There you are,” said a voice from behind her. She turned and found her husband standing in the door, his feet bare. He had dressed in haste, and his shirt didn’t quite sit right on his shoulders. She saw the nurse peeking out behind him.

“Sleepwalking,” she called from the drive. “Don’t worry.”

“You should come in,” he said. “You’ll make yourself sick again.” She could hear his concern warring with his impulse not to frighten her off. If they could only pretend everything was fine, then everything would be.

“In a minute.” She looked toward the trees bordering the drive, their little patch of forest. “There’s something I want to try.”

“Ali—” he began, then stopped, remembered himself. “Just come in.”

She smiled at him like she couldn’t still feel the ghost of another man’s kiss on her lips. “I’ll see you at breakfast.”

Before he could say another word, she walked off into the trees, where the shadows grew thick like underbrush, even at midday. But it was dawn, with the sun’s light slanting at an angle, and the thick trunks of trees sprouted long, dark shadows that blanketed the leaf-covered ground. She walked until she was sure she could no longer be seen. Eventually, someone would come to bring her in. Better to be quick. Better to be sure.

Alina held out her hands.

The shadows greeted her like an old friend.

#darklina #alarkling #darklinadaily #darklina secret santa #grishaverse #alina starkov #aleksander morozova #the grisha trilogy #shadow and bone #mine: fic #darklinasecretsanta

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mediocrelanguagelearner · 3 years

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Spanish series

Instead of answering in comments, I thought I'd write a post for you instead @seekinglovely .

You asked: “Do you think it helped with your Spanish? I'm looking for interesting series but nothing with super complex vocabulary”

By “it” I think you mean watching tv shows? I think it helped me so much! Learning through tv shows is kind of my thing. I've really enjoyed every Spanish tv show I've seen so far and it helped me immensely. I've learned so many new words, phrases, heard different accents, could shadow pronunciation and I even got to think about subjunctive, which I don't understand at all. But I started noticing it and now I actually use it when I speak? I still don't get it, I probably don't use it when I should and maybe even use it when I shouldn't, but there are just some phrases where I started using it automatically, only because I heard it so much in the series. Once I was just so immersed in the story that I even thought about it while I wasn't watching it. And I was thinking about it in Spanish, pretending to be one character in the series, interacting with the other characters.

Now I don't know what kind of series are interesting for you, but I really enjoy period series and so far I've watched (and loved) these:

Las chicas del cable

El tiempo entre costuras

El gran hotel (my favourite!!)

Alta mar

Velvete (watching currently)

I don't know how complex these are, they for sure do have their weird niche vocab sometimes.

You also asked: “Also, do you have any advice for learning with TV shows? I always get super lazy when watching things in Spanish”

I don't know what you mean by getting lazy while watching things, but for me one of the points in watching series is that I can allow myself to be lazy. I watch them when I'm tired, when I don't feel like studying grammar or reading. My advice would be watch it with Spanish subtitles, if you can. It really helps me understand, it's so helpful to see the word written and hear it too. If I don't know the words, I can just look it up. Otherwise I really don't know if I have any other advice than “just watch and enjoy”. You could turn watching series into a full study session if you wanted to, I've read so many tips about how you should watch an episode multiple times and write out everything, translate everything, watch it once without subtitles then with subtitles...There are tons of tips like this online.

But I watch series because I like them, I watch them so I can enjoy content in my target language and I learn, slowly, along the way.

#spanish #espanol #spanish series #langblr

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maleficarfic · 3 years

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A Battlefield Between Them

Pairing: The Darkling/Alina Starkov

Fandom: Shadow & Bone | The GrishaVerse

Rating: Explicit

Additional Tags: Plot What Plot/Porn Without Plot

Summary: How easy it would be to sink backwards into him, to let a man made of shadows and dreams embrace her.

On AO3: Link

He followed her from the Bone Road to Os Alta, always on the edge of reality. He appeared on the roads, at the end of long hallways, on the edges of a room, a nightmare only she could ese and no one else would believe.

Alina grew used to his haunting presence. He lingered in the war room and her bedroom. She sometimes woke to find him sitting at the end of the bed, and she wondered if she wasn’t losing her mind from the pressure of everything.

Dragging her hand down her face, she rested her hands against the spines of the library books and let her head come to rest against a shelf. Eyes closed, tears burning against her eyelids, she took a shuddering breath.

Hard, this was so hard, and Mal couldn’t—wouldn’t—give her the support she needed.

She felt his presence.

He was silent when he appeared, but he took up so much space, had so much presence, that he was impossible to ignore.

“He doesn’t understand the weight. The burden.”

“A burden you’re putting on me,” she said, unmoving. Maybe if she kept her eyes closed, if she refused to see him, he could become nothing more than a dream.

He made a soft grunting sound, and she couldn’t tell if it was agreement or censure or something else entirely. How had she ever thought she understood this man?

Silence stretched between them. She was so unused to silence even as the loneliness of the Little Palace smothered her.

“It’s not a burden you need shoulder alone.” His words whispered against her ear; she felt him at her back. Warmth from his body reached through the thin fabric of her tunic, sinking beneath her skin.

For a man made of darkness, he felt so much like the sun.

Alina spun about.

His forearms hit the shelves, bracing him mere inches from her face.

Intense, dark eyes met hers. Ravenous eyes. Dark crescents marred his skin, giving him a wan, gaunt appearance. Haggard. But, Saints, he was still so beautiful. The most beautiful man she’d ever seen.

A thrill went through her, a visceral hunger rising inside her to match the greedy interest she saw in him.

She hated that thrill because she didn’t want to feel it. Shouldn’t feel it. He’d lied to her (except that he hadn’t, he’d merely mislead her, and her anger was at her own stupidity, at how she fell to his deceptions) and manipulated her. She shouldn’t want someone who had done those things.

But in the darkness, under the heavy blanket of hot summer nights, she imagined he didn’t just sit at the end of the bed. He came to sit beside her. He stroked his fingers through her hair. He bent down to brush his lips against hers, only once because he was still a gentleman, and that kiss would wake her, rouse her, and they—

“How dare you?” she hissed. “How dare you say that when you hide with your armies, preparing to strike against the country you claim you love.”

An equal fury flashed in his eyes. “I love all of Ravka, not just the parts of it that aren’t Grisha.” The fury faded, and his gaze softened. “He doesn’t understand, does he? Your tracker?”

She bristled. “Leave Mal out of this.”

“He doesn’t listen to you because he can’t understand this. Does he think you’ve abandoned him?”

The question lanced her, tearing open a fragile wound that never quite healed.

Gently, he brought the tips of his fingers to her jaw. He didn’t hold her, didn’t cradle her jaw. He simply stood there, his touch the lightest caress.

She ducked under his arms, striding away from him. He’d never done this before, never lingered or spoken to her at length. The time she’d spent with Nikolai taught her to question people’s changing behaviors, taught her to be much more suspicious.

“Would someone who truly cared about you leave you to suffer the weight of a war on your own?” he asked softly, and the softness of his words cut worse than anything ever had before.

She went still, shoulders hunched, head bowed, hands clenched into fists. She trembled, overwhelmed by too many emotions. Sorrow for whatever she and Mal had that was dying, anger that he couldn’t understand the importance of the war, of the firebird, of any of it. She’d spent her whole life waiting for him, and now that she’d found something to walk toward, now that he had to wait for her to complete a journey, he wielded that waiting like a knife against her heart.

“Can you not talk with him at all?”

“Aleksander,” she whispered. “Stop.”

He fell silent, at her back once more.

She thought he’d vanish like he had all the other times. Thought he’d disappear into the ether and leave her alone.

Instead, he brushed her hair over one shoulder, baring her neck. Just as lightly as he’d touched her face, his brushed his fingers down her arm. Back up. They lingered on the curve of her shoulder.

“Being alone is unbearable.”

She didn’t know if he meant for her or for him—or for them both.

“To stand at the head of an army is to be alone. The only one who understands is the one who stands opposite you.” His lips brushed against the naked line of her throat, and she sucked in a sharp breath.

That thrill inside her became a burn, blotting out her anger toward him, toward Mal.

“There’s comfort in another’s arms. He doesn’t come to you?”

She swallowed hard. “No.”

“Doesn’t let you rest in his arms?”

How easy it would be to sink backwards into him, to let a man made of shadows and dreams embrace her. He was a fantasy, and he offered her the illusion of empathy.

She tensed, and his hands ran down her arms, a comforting a caress.

“What’s wrong?”

“You… Mal and I… we aren’t…”

Now, she felt his surprise in the momentary pause of his hands, in the shifting of his body behind her as if he drew back.

“The boarding house in Novyi Zem?”

She shook her head and stared down the aisle of bookshelves without seeing any of them. “We’ve never more than kissed.”

“Foolish boy.” There was no arrogance in his words, just truth.

Beside a man who had lived for hundreds of years, of course Mal would seem like a child.

Again, his lips brushed against her throat, a soft caress. His hands stayed loose on her arms, and she realized he was making a deliberate choice not to hold her tight. She could step away. He would likely let her go—he’d never needed something as crass as force to convince her to come to him. She’d kissed him first, after all, and she wanted to again.

Even though a battlefield stood between them, he was the only one who saw it the way she did. Who understood it the way she did.

With a shaky breath, Alina let herself sink back. She half expected to pass through him. Instead, she found his form solid at her back. His hands closed around her arms. He still didn’t trap her in place, but now he held her with more strength. With certainty. Not the certainty of a man who’d won some kind of victory, but the certainty of a man who knew he was welcome.

He kissed her neck. His hands stroked down her arms, over her wrists. He laced their fingers together and pressed another kiss to her neck.

Heat kindled to life inside her, a soft simmer low in her belly and between her legs.

Taking a deep breath, she gathered her courage. “Would you—” Catching her lower lip in her teeth, she paused. Reconsidered her words. Felt the tension in him. When she spoke again, her words were so quiet, they were lost in the ocean of print that surrounded them. “Would you do more than kiss me?”

He lifted one of their twined hands. She watched it rise, watched him bring it to her shoulder. He turned their hands, facing her palm and curled fingers toward them both, and he kissed her knuckles. With a gentle tug, he bent her wrist back and kissed the heel of her palm. Let his teeth drag over her skin. Flicked his tongue against the sensitive skin of her wrist.

With three touches, he made her want more than any of Mal’s kisses ever had. With three touches, he made her ache.

“Go to our room, solnishko.”

Their room?

Her room. Except all she did was sleep there. She’d planned to redecorate his room, but she hadn’t.

Their room.

A giddy excitement washed through her. Her lips turned up in a smile, and she felt him press closer in defiance of his gentle command.

“That makes you happy,” he said. “Calling it our room.”

“Maybe. Maybe I just like what you’re implying.”

His fingers squeezed around hers. A sound that might have been a chuckle rumbled against her neck. “Go,” he told her, and he released her.

She turned, but he’d finally vanished.

Nervous anticipation made her grin. Without a second thought, she hurried from the library. Tolya peeled away from the door, but she paid him no mind. Her attention was focused elsewhere, was focused on the next turn, the turn after that, the hallway that led to her room—his room—their room and the promise of what happened behind closed doors.

All the nobles thought she tumbled Mal. Half of them probably thought she was with Nikolai or Vasily when Mal wasn’t there.

So why not embrace those rumors, at least in some small way? Why not take a man to her bed who didn’t hate her for her power or her birth or her command?

At her door, she glanced back at Tolya, but he’d already made his way to the guard quarters adjacent to her room. Their room.

Alina stepped into their room, shutting the door behind her. After a moment’s pause, she locked it.

Aleksander materialized out of the darkness the moment the deadbolt slid into place. He took three steps into her space, drove his fingers into her hair, and kissed her.

He kissed her like a starving man, a dying man, a drowning man in desperate need of air he could get only from her lungs, and she surged against him. He kissed her without hesitation or fear or even artifice; there was nothing hidden in his intentions, just open desire for her, and that delighted her.

Wrapping her arms around him, she clung to him as he drew back, gazed at her mouth with ravenous intent, and then kissed her again.

Her own hunger churned in her belly, a heat that spread through her. Every limb tingled with awareness of all the places they touched—his chest against her breasts, his stomach against hers, their hips pressed together, his fingers in her hair as he turned her head to kiss her again and again.

A delighted laugh bubbled out of her, and he drew back once more, studying her.

Slowly, as if he were fighting the expression, a faint smile curved over his lips. “You smiled like this the night of the party,” he murmured, brushing his thumb against her lower lip.

“I was happy then.” She licked her lips, catching the pad of his thumb with her tongue. The look that shot across his face, a savage need she’d never seen on a man’s face before, made her body arch into his.

“Are you happy now?”

Her fingers caught his wrist as the smoldering embers between her legs grew to a delicious ache. She drew his hand down, her eyes never leaving his.

She’d kissed him first. She’d surprised him then. She wanted to surprise him now. Even though she’d never done more than kissing, she wasn’t a fool. She knew—in theory if not in practice—what people did when no one else was watching.

She pressed his hand low on her belly, his fingertips resting against her pubic bone over her pants.

His dark eyes grew even darker.

“Miss Starkov,” he murmured. The way he said her name made her gasp, made her arch against him. His fingers slipped just a bit lower, and that was a wickeder tease than what she’d given him. “Not many people surprise me.”

“I seem to be rather good at it.”

“You do.” Instead of sliding his hand even lower, he slid his hand to the small of her back and drew her with him as he stepped toward the bed.

Without his mouth on hers, with the reality of what they might do a handful of steps away, anxiety rose like a sudden wave inside her. Her fingers caught on his sleeves, grasping the fabric.

He stopped and bent his mouth to hers again. When they’d kissed before—in her room, at the party, just now—he’d been all hunger and desire. Now, he offered reassurance in the way his mouth moved against hers. And in the space of a breath, he whispered, “At your command, Miss Starkov.”

A shiver wound down her spine. She saw the moment he felt that shiver, saw the comprehension in his gaze and felt compassion in the brush of his thumb along her jaw.

“You like that.”

“Like what?”

The corner of his mouth ticked upward. “Miss Starkov,” he murmured against her lips, and she pressed against him, her kisses demanding instead of comforting.

“Aleksander,” she whispered back, almost in challenge.

He spun them around, pinning her body between his and one of the bed’s thick posts. She gasped, her fingers curling in his hair, and she kissed him again as his hands settled on her waist to hold her tight to his body.

Against her belly, she felt the press of his half-hard cock. Between her legs, she felt the wet heat of her own desire alongside an ache she couldn’t entirely understand. Was this, she wondered, what women meant when they talked about needing a man inside them? If it was, it felt incredible. She wanted to drown in this needy sensation, to bask in the warmth of it until she could no longer breathe.

His hands left her hips. His body bowed and curved around hers, the backs of his hands brushing against her breasts as he pulled at the buttons on his tunic.

Knocking his hands aside, she replaced them with her own. She wanted this; she wouldn’t let him take one moment of the experience from her.

He nipped her lip as her fingers made short work of his tunic, pushing it off his shoulders. “Demanding.”

Maybe, but this was her choice, her moment, her desire.

Before he could take her mouth in another kiss, she did something she’d dreamed of doing for months now. She licked into his mouth, curving one hand behind his head to hold him in place.

The broken, hungry sound he made as his hips rocked hard against hers made her purr with delight.

Her free hand ran down his chest, slipping beneath his undershirt.

At the brush of her fingers against his stomach, he jerked away from her mouth and let out a curse.

“Do you—you like my touch that much?” she asked, feeling strangely powerful. It was so much like that moment before the king that he’d taken her hand and she’d called the sun, but different still.

“I’ve imagined what your hands would feel like on my skin since the party, solnishko.”

Her other hand joined the first. Eyes on his, she slid her palms up his chest, and watched her touch unmake him. He shuddered, his lips parted on a silent gasp, his cock hard against her hip. And she burned, the heat of the sun licking beneath her skin as she realized a new kind of power.

Catching his shirt behind his neck, he yanked it off and tossed it aside. It joined his tunic on the floor, and his hands swept up her sides, trailing fire beneath her skin, as if he called the sunlight inside her with every caress.

“You’re overdressed,” he whispered against her mouth.

His lips ran down her throat, and she arched against him with a soft moan. Between them, his fingers freed the clasps of her own tunic. He drew back only to help her lift the shirt over her head and discard it, leaving her in her stays.

Instead of immediately taking her out of those, he bent his mouth to the swell of her breast and pressed more kisses against her skin.

She shivered beneath his touch, lifting her fingers to his hair to hold his mouth against her as he kissed and licked his way across her skin. Every touch made her burn, made her ache, made the wetness between her legs grow. Her body arched against his, and he pressed against her in turn, fitting his hips between her legs. One of her own legs lifted, wrapping around his hip, and he let out a soft, satisfied noise against her skin.

Dragging his hands down her sides as if he couldn’t get enough of touching her, he caught a bit of skin between his teeth. She sucked in a sharp gasp as he worried her skin, as he slipped his hands beneath her ass and lifted her up with a casual strength that left her reeling in the wake of a wash of heat and desire.

Now, he pinned her against the post with his hips tight against hers, the line of his cock a brand between her legs.

She shifted restlessly against him, but he seemed in no great hurry.

Two of his fingers hooked in front of her stays, pulling to create just enough room that he could urge her breast from the fabric.

Cool air kissed her nipple just before his mouth wrapped around it. A harsh gasp escaped her as wet heat pulled all the air from her lungs. She keened, her nails scratching against his scalp as her eyes fluttered shut.

His teeth dragged against her nipple, worrying it to a hard peak. When he bit down, he applied a pressure that built and built, and just when she thought the pressure might turn to pain, he released her nipple. The tingling pleasure of it made her gasp.

“Again,” she demanded.

Obliging her, he freed her other breast, sucking the hardened peak of her nipple between his lips as his hips flexed against hers.

He bathed her in sensation, holding her against the post with his body as his fingers found the laces of her stays and pulled them free. The fabric fell away from her, and he released her breast, straightening and catching her lips in another kiss.

His hands swept up her sides, and she expected him to fill his palms with her breasts. Instead, he held her tight against him, no space between their bodies as he licked into her mouth and let their tongues tangle together. The crush of his chest against her breasts felt almost as decadent as the line of his cock between her legs, and she moaned into their kiss as her fingers tugged at his hair.

“More?” he asked against her mouth.

“More,” she agreed.

Palming her ass, he smiled. She felt the curve of his lips, delighted that she could make him smile. He pulled her away from the post and, turning, fell onto the bed with her over him.

She followed him down, bending over him to press hungry kisses against his neck as his hands swept over her back.

“Boots, Miss Starkov.”

“Can’t we ignore them?” They could just get their pants out of the way and finish this without taking their shoes off. She knew that.

He slid his fingers into her hair, carding it out of her face as he urged her to look at him.

The expression he wore took her breath away. “I will have you naked in this bed, Alina,” he said, and her body reacted to that with such profound heat that she gasped. The hunger in his eyes sharpened. Saints, he was a predator who was clearly pleased to have caught his prey.

Except she wasn’t prey. She hadn’t been since that moment in the tent when he’d pierced her skin and let out the light, even though she hadn’t known it at the time. As much as he’d manipulated her at first, they were equals now. Their powers existed in a balance, and he could no more consume her completely than she could consume him.

That thrilled her. That excited her.

And his eyes reflected that same feeling.

Bracing her hands on his chest, she pushed herself back. Mindful of his body, she slipped between his legs, going to her knees at the foot of the bed.

He followed her, followed every inch of her progress, pushing himself up. When her knees hit the floor, his shaky exhalation filled the room like a physical thing.

A smile curved her lips. The way he looked at her filled her with more of that new power. With that intense, dark-eyed gaze devouring her, she felt like she could conquer the world.

Her fingers pulled free the laces on his boots, and she tugged them off his feet.

With her hands braced on his knees, she rose over him. Again, he whispered a ragged oath. His eyes raked from her waist up her stomach, over her breasts, up to her face.

“You have enchanted me, solnishko.” His hand cupped her jaw, drawing her close for a lingering kiss. “Take off your shoes.”

She did him one better.

After kicking off her own boots, as she stood at the foot of the bed with his hungry eyes fixed on hers, she smoothed her hands down her breasts. His eyes followed her hands, lingered on her nipples, and then jumped back to her hands as they caught on the fly of her pants.

His breath hitched in his chest.

She tugged the laces open.

He leaned toward her, naked want sharpening his features.

She could do anything, she realized. If he weren’t just a vision—a vision that had substance and weight for her and her alone—she could take this moment to destroy him. The most powerful man in the world was vulnerable in her room. In their room.

She could end the war.

She could kill him.

She could snuff out his power and have all the time in the world to solve the problem of the Shadow Fold without his armies bearing down on hers.

Instead, she swished her hips from one side to the other and let her pants whisper down her legs. She didn’t even hesitate—how could she when the desire in his gaze filled her with confidence and power—to let her small clothes follow.

Naked before him, just as vulnerable as he, she felt more power than she ever had in her life.

“You’re a vision,” Aleksander told her, holding out a hand to her.

She placed her hand in his and climbed onto the bed. When he tugged, she fell into his arms, and he rolled her under him, his hands sweeping down her ribs, her hips, her thighs as he settled beside her.

His lips brushed against her breast. His tongue curled around her nipple. “I want to kiss every inch of you.” He spoke the words against the underside of her breast, his fingers circling around her knee and sliding up the inside of her thigh.

A little gasp from her stopped his hand. He glanced up at her, and she let out a shuddering breath—not of fear or anxiety but of anticipation.

No one had ever touched her like this. She’d fantasized about it, first with Mal between her legs and then with him, with Aleksander. Even as she fled him from Ravka to Novyi Zem, she’d imagined what his hands might feel like on her.

Rough calluses. Warm. Strong.

“Alina?”

Licking her lips, she shifted beneath him, drawing one leg up so that she was open to him.

His breathing sped up, matching hers. His fingers stroked a featherlight caress down the back of her thigh as she caught her lip between her teeth. “Please,” she whispered.

Two of his fingers parted the lips of her cunt and caressed her from entrance to clit—and sunlight shimmered beneath her skin.

He froze. The shadows in the recesses of the room darkened, a gathering gloom that should have been a threat. Instead, desire spiked through her, a wicked snap of electric heat.

“More,” she told him, her eyes on his. “Please.”

“Why did you call the light?”

She took a moment to consider his question even though all her brain wanted was to shut off and let her body enjoy more of his touch. “I didn’t,” she finally said. “You—your touch did.”

He studied her in silence, considering her words. His fingers stayed where they were, resting against warm, wet skin just above her clit. The persistent weight of his touch built anticipation beneath her skin, and she trembled ever so slightly.

Almost experimentally, he circled one finger around her clit.

Light followed his touch, a glimmer of noon in the darkness of their room.

His eyes widened with wonder, with desire, with an avalanche of hunger. He pushed himself up the length of her body, his mouth crashing against hers in a wild kiss.

Wrapping her arms around him, she let herself drown in that kiss as her body twisted toward his.

His fingers moved against her. Long, languorous strokes that matched the drag of his tongue against hers.

He explored every inch of her, his fingers running back and forth between her legs and spreading her slick arousal over her skin. Each caress ended with his fingers flicking against her clit as his tongue flicked against hers.

When she started to moan into his mouth, he drew back. Propped on one arm above her, he watched her. Watched her face as she arched and gasped, rocking her hips into his hands in search of more. But he seemed content to play with her, to make her burn with more of that heat as his touch drew light across her flesh.

His fingers circled her entrance, and she keened for him.

One finger pressed against her, and she raked her nails down his back.

A pleased laugh rumbled out of him, and he eased one finger into her. Now, he gasped. His hips jerked against hers, and that lack of control from him thrilled her. “Tight. You’re so tight.”

He dropped his forehead against hers, and Alina let her eyes meet his. “More,” she demanded.

His finger sank inside her, and the light that he called inside her with his touch glittered beneath her belly, her chest. She felt the warmth of it as it spread through her, felt the warmth of the pleasure created by his finger slowly thrusting into her.

“Should I tell you how I’ve touched myself to the thought of having you like this?” he asked her.

A moan spilled past her lips, and her hips arched. “Yes.”

“I wondered if you’d burn with the heat of the sun.” His lips brushed against her forehead, the length of her nose, her cheek.

A keening whine caught in her throat. One of her hands fisted in the sheets beneath him, the other clutched at his shoulder. She burned—surely he felt how hot she burned.

“I never expected you to glow, too.”

His finger drew out of her, and she made a plaintive little noise. “Don’t stop.”

Two fingers ran over her entrance, and she gasped. His thumb dragged over her clit, and she shook beneath him. Slowly, he pushed those fingers into her, his cheek resting against hers. “You’re the sun itself, light and heat poured into flesh.” His fingers curled inside her, and she keened again for him. “Move with me, solnishko. Rock your hips in time with my fingers.”

His words rumbled against her ear, as much a physical caress as the fingers inside her.

“That’s it.” He drew back, and she forced her eyes open, watching him watch her.

Light shimmered beneath her skin, a prismatic array of silvers and golds that grew brighter as she grew hotter. Beyond the frame of the bed, the shadows grew darker still until she couldn’t see the ceiling, the door. Not that she cared to.

He slipped his hand beneath her head, still braced on that same arm above her, and urged her head to turn toward his. “Close your eyes, Alina.”

After a second of hesitation—she didn’t want to lose his face, the expressions he wore—she let her eyes close.

“Keep moving with me.” His thumb brushed over her clit, and her hips jumped. For a moment, she lost the rhythm of his fingers inside her, but he kept going. Kept stroking her. “You burn me.” His mouth brushed the corner of her lips. “I’d always imagined you would.” His fingers curled inside her, and she let out a strangled moan. “In winter, I’d lay before the fireplace to imagine the heat of you as I stroked my cock.”

She couldn’t quite picture it—not him naked with his cock in his hand, but the rest of it? Oh, yes, she could easily imagine him in front of the fire, that dark-eyed look of desire on his face.

“I’d wrap my hand around my cock and pretend it was yours, that you were beside me, that the heat of the flames was the heat of your body. And when I came, I’d whisper your name and imagine the crackle of the fire was your laughter.”

His fingers curled, and she keened. The fire consumed her, burning her from the inside out. She was lost in the heat except for the weight of his body at her side, the easy warmth of his fingers inside her.

“I’d wonder what your cunt would feel like around my cock.”

Her cunt clenched around his fingers, a sharp contraction that had her gasping. Tension lined her entire body. Her nails dug deeper into his shoulder, her other hand twisting the coverlet beneath them as her body strained against him, chasing a pleasure she craved more than the air in her lungs.

His lips brushed her ear. “I’m going to be inside you tonight, Miss Starkov.”

She came with a broken little cry, her back bowed. Pleasure washed through her in waves of heat. Light burned against her closed eyelids for just a moment before heavy shadow plunged them into darkness.

She was still shaking when his mouth brushed her belly. She hadn’t quite made sense of what he was doing when his tongue laved over her clit and his fingers began moving inside her again.

Her eyes flew open, and she let out a sobbing moan. Her hips arched, her back bowed again, and he laughed against her. The sound was full of pleasure, of dark satisfaction.

Tendrils of shadow whispered down her body. They curled against her breasts and played over her nipples like the bow of a violin as he sucked her clit between his lips and worked his fingers inside her.

When she tried to thrust her fingers into his hair to hold his mouth against her, silky shadows drew her hands above her head.

“Just feel,” he commanded.

The fact that she was helpless to do anything but obey made her tremble with pleasure.

The closer he worked her to orgasm, the brighter the light beneath her skin became. If not for the streaks of darkness between the light, she would have been afraid one of her guards would see the light and come running. But his shadows contained the light, twined around it until sun and night braided together.

She broke for him a second time, whimpering as her legs dragged along his sides, as she rocked against his mouth. He licked her through her orgasm, the stroking of his fingers prolonging the pleasure until she thought she might come a third time.

He worked her to that edge, and then he drew back. His fingers slowed but didn’t leave her, and he leaned over her body.

The shadows holding her arms released her, and now she did drive her fingers into his hair to pull his mouth to hers for a long, needy kiss. The sharp taste of her desire on his lips only served to reignite the desperate fire inside her and remind her of that aching, empty feeling. Even with his fingers inside her, she didn’t feel the way she wanted, needed to feel.

“Please,” she whispered, hating the feel of his pants against her legs.

“Do you need me to fuck you?” he asked, and the rough language drew a ripple of sunlight down her body and sharp heat between her legs. “Do you want me inside you?”

“You promised,” she reminded him, and her fingers dropped from his hair to his back, sweeping down his skin to wiggle beneath his pants. She grasped his ass and yanked him against her.

His groan of pleasure made her shiver with delight. “You’re better than any of my fantasies.” His tongue flicked against her lips. She sucked it into her mouth. “Wicked girl. And they call you a saint.”

Instead of cooling her ardor, that made her burn hotter. “I never wanted to be a saint.”

He drew his fingers from her cunt and caught her chin between his slick index finger and thumb. She had no idea why that made her cunt throb, but it did, and she shifted restlessly against him.

The intense look in his eyes only made her ache more. The fact that he wasn’t between her legs, guiding his cock into her left her frustrated—and desperate.

“Must I beg?” she asked.

Heat flared in his eyes—and that delicious power spread through her.

“Do I need to beg for you to take me, Aleksander?”

He drew back so fast, a cool breeze washed over her skin. She watched him yank his pants open, his eyes dragging down the shimmering length of her body. As he shoved his pants down, her eyes slid over his muscled torso to the arching line of his cock.

Need pulsed inside her. Her mouth felt suddenly dry. She’d seen animals mate, and it wasn’t easy to maintain privacy in the army. None of those things prepared her for him. Or, perhaps, didn’t prepare her for the sight of him when he’d already given her two orgasms. Soft with pleasure and hungry for more, the sight of his cock thrilled her.

He tossed his pants aside and laid himself over her. His hands framed her face as he kissed her, as she shifted beneath him to bring his cock against her slick cunt.

He gasped into their kiss, and she raked her nails down his back as she arched. His cock dragged against her clit, and the pleasure of it left her breathless.

“I want to know what you feel like inside me,” she whispered against his mouth. “And I want you to tell me if I’m as hot as you imagined.”

He swore, rolling to his back and taking her with him. His hands swept down her body with an urgency she’d never seen from him before. Long, fine-boned fingers curved over her hips, and he showed her where to settle over him.

“On your knees for me, solnishko,” he told her, his voice rough.

This was where her knowledge dried up. She’d heard soldiers brag about their conquests, so she understood there were a variety of ways two people could come together, but all that knowledge was theoretical. She followed the guidance of his hands, rising above him.

One of his hands slipped between them, and she understood what he wanted.

As his cock nudged against her, he braced his free hand against her chest, between her breasts. “Sometimes, this hurts the first time.” His voice was ragged. His hand shook. The starved hunger in his eyes made heat roll through her. “I can’t promise—”

She bent forward, her lips against his. “Fuck me, Aleksander,” she said, delighted by her own daring, by the way his eyes widened, by how the tendons in his neck suddenly stood out sharp with tension.

He arched beneath her, and his cock slid into her.

She eased down, and his cock pressed deeper, filling her, stretching her, and her head fell back as pleasure burned through her. Shimmering shafts of light spilled speckling patterns against his skin as his hand settled on her hip and drew her down his length, and the only thing she felt was the exquisite pleasure of it.

Fire. Maddening ecstasy.

“How?” she gasped, her head lolling forward. Her lips found his. “How did you only fantasize about this?”

Ragged laughter warmed her lips. His hands smoothed over her hips, a gentle pressure showing her how to move now that he was seated deep inside her. “No pain?”

Her hips rolled forward, and she moaned. His cock felt so good in her. She felt incredible. Full. Here at last was the feeling she’d been chasing since the first brush of his lips on her neck in the library.

She moved against him again, unable to answer his question when the pleasure consumed all her focus. Her eyes met his, glittering in the darkness, and she let out a soft, stuttering gasp. “Aleksander.”

“Incredible,” he murmured in reply, his hips rolling in a soft counterpoint against hers. When they came together, she felt him slide deep, felt him fill her until there was no space between them, no room for light—no room for darkness. There was only them in the center of a glittering halo of light ensconced in the solid, protective weight of his midnight.

“Again, Alina.” His words were rough, broken by the staccato rhythm of his breathing. “My name—say it again.”

She had a moment of shocking clarity. No one called him by his name. He was General Kirigan or the Darkling, but never Aleksander. Not even Baghra used his name.

Carefully, she lowered herself against him. Her breasts brushed against his chest, and that made his breath stutter. Her arms braced on either side of his head. Her hands cradled his jaw. “Aleksander,” she whispered against his lips. “Tell me how I feel, Aleksander.”

His fingers dug into her hips, but the faint pain only made the pleasure of his cock moving inside her sweeter. “Like summer.”

“Do I burn, Aleksander?”

He thrust deep into her, and pleasure seared her. Light spilled from her skin everywhere they touched, flinging glittering light into the darkness surrounding them. “Like the sun.”

“Am I as good as you imagined, Aleksander?”

The laugh that spilled from his was incredulous, and the disbelief in it flattered her. “You are so much more than hundreds of years of imagining,” he told her. “So much better than any fantasy.”

His words made her ache, made her cunt ripple and clench around him. When he groaned, arching under her to drive deeper, she whispered his name.

One of his hands stayed on her hip. The other dipped between their bodies. His fingers played against her clit as they moved against each other, losing themselves in the hard pounding of their hearts and the harsh panting of their breath.

She tucked her face against his neck as he petted her, as he stroked her, as he helped her come apart around him. The feel of her body clenching around him was indescribable. It sated some itch inside of her she’d never quite understood before; coming from her own hand felt good, but there was a visceral satisfaction in coming with him inside her.

“More?” he asked against her lips.

Her pleasure drunk brain took a long moment to comprehend that little word. “There’s more?”

He wrapped his arms around her and rolled them over. Urging her legs high on his waist, he tangled his fingers in her hair and gripped her waist hard. “Move with me, solnishko.”

When he started fucking her, it was rough and hard and fast. She lost herself in the rhythm, in the punishing pace of his thrusts. Beneath him, she twisted against the bed and arched to get him as deep into her as possible.

Just as good, this was just as good, but for completely different reasons. She dragged her hands over her body, pinching her own nipples to the sound of his hungry growls.

“Touch yourself,” he told her, and she did.

She played with her clit, her eyes fixed on his as he drove into her—at least until the light from her skin grew to be too much. Her back arched, and he surged hard against her, kissing her with a savagery she felt down to her toes.

His tongue slid into her mouth, muffling her sobbing moan of his name as she came again.

He seemed to lose his rhythm, his thrusts coming harder, until he went still against her and the shadows surged around their bodies. For a moment, the darkness was so intense she could see only the glimmer of his eyes.

Slowly, he relaxed against her. The tension eased out of him, and he rolled them both to their sides.

As her breathing steadied and both light and shadow receded, Alina found herself a little uncertain. None of the books—none of the soldiers’ stories—told her what she was supposed to do now.

“How do you feel?” he asked her, his hand settling on the curve of her waist.

She studied him in the dim light, his face mere inches from hers, and realized she didn’t know how to answer that.

“Any pain?”

“No.” That answer came immediately. Her body felt heavy, her limbs leaden. She only now felt how slick with sweat her skin was. “Lethargic, I guess.”

“Then you’ll rest well tonight,” he said, his knuckles brushing against her cheek.

“After you disappear, will we be enemies again?”

Now he looked thoughtful. His gaze fixed over her shoulder for a long moment, and then he turned back to her. His eyes drifted shut and his lips pressed full against hers, not to arouse but to offer something else. Simple intimacy, maybe.

He lifted his lips from hers, his eyes still closed. “We are what you make us.”

#darklina #alina starkov #aleksander morozova #the darkling #shadow and bone #shadowandbone #sab #fanfic

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roxannetywe · 3 years

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An introduction <3

English-

This is my first post, even if i dont have any followers right now, i hope someone can learn something here!

I have been in paganism for almost half a year, so i’m not a professional or a long-time experienced person at all, my only purpose is to share my experiences with all the people who want to read them, and answer as many questions as i can from my knowledge.

For a little know-me-more, i’m spanish and my pronouns are she/her. The deities i work with are from different pantheons:

- Greek: Lord Hades, Lady Athena, Lord Apollo and Lord Ares.

- Nordic: Brother Loki

- Egyptian: Lord Anubis

(the honorary titles i gave them were given by them to me, so, for example, i have the permission for callin Loki “brother”, but he may not allow other people, so please always ask you deities before)

Since i have a very strong relationship with Lady Athena, she asked me to follow the path of priestesshood by her side, but i have not decide it yet, so this is not a place for me to only talk about her (even though i will be posting more about her) or for me to have a higher possition, its not the intention for this place.

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So, now that i have introduced myself and you know a little more about my pagan practice, lets talk about the witch side of me!

I’m not a specific type of witch, since i know mostly the basic and nothing more, but what i can say is that i work most with herbs in spells, some basic crystals (like quartz and amethyst) and different types of water (moon, sea, sun, etc).

On the other side, i do divination with tarot cards (Rider Waite tarot) and pendulums.

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I also have a little disclaimer, probably some people may think that you musn’t work with deities if you have less than x period of experience, but please, i know its them and i have protection and enough experinces to be capable to communicate and work with them, so please be polite with my practise if you dont think the same, thank you <3.

(I also ahve to apologize for my english, im not a native and there may be a lot of spelling mistakes)

______________________________________________________________

Español-

Esta es mi primera publicación, aunque todavía no tenga muchos seguidores, ¡espero que alguien pueda aprender algo gracias a este lugar!

He estado en el paganismo durante casi medio año, por lo que no soy una profesional ni una persona con mucha experiencia en absoluto, mi único propósito es compartir mis experiencias con todas las personas que quieran leerlas y responder a tantas preguntas como pueda desde mi conocimiento.

Para un poco más de info, soy española y me identifico como mujer.

Las deidades con las que trabajo son de diferentes panteones:

- Griego: Lord Hades, Lady Atenea, Lord Apolo y Lord Ares.

- Nórdico: Hermano Loki

- Egipcio: Lord Anubis

(Los títulos honoríficos que les di fueron dados con su previo consentimiento, así que, por ejemplo, tengo permiso para llamar a Loki "hermano", pero es posible que él no lo permita a otras personas, así que por favor siempre pregúntale a tus deidades antes)

Como tengo una relación muy fuerte con Lady Atenea, ella me ofreció la oportunidad de convertirme en su sacerdotisa, pero aún no lo he decidido, así que este no es un lugar para que yo solo hable de ella (aunque lo haré y publicaré más sobre ella por que tengo bastante conocimiento sobre ello) o para que yo tenga una posición más alta, no es la intención de este lugar.

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Entonces, ahora que me he presentado y sabéis un poco más sobre mi práctica pagana, ¡hablemos del lado brujil!

Antes que nada, decir que no soy un tipo específico de bruja, ya que sé principalmente lo básico y nada más, pero lo que puedo decir es que trabajo más con hierbas en hechizos, algunos cristales básicos (como cuarzo y amatista) y diferentes tipos de agua (luna, mar, sol, etc.).

Por otro lado, hago adivinación con cartas del tarot (Tarot Rider Waite) y péndulos.

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También tengo que hacer un pequeño disclaimer: probablemente algunas personas pueden pensar que no debes trabajar con deidades si tienes menos de x período de experiencia, yo no lo rebato en absoluto, pero por favor, sé que son mis deidades y tengo la protección y la experiencia suficiente para ser capaz de comunicarme y trabajar con ellos, así que por favor sé cortés con mi práctica si no piensas lo mismo, gracias <3.

(También pido perdón por mi inglés y si hay alguna falta ortográfica)

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badfauxmance · 3 years

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Some of Your Asks About Her...

So here’s some of your questions and comments about Alejandra.

Anon 1: Hey I'm sorry, I was the anon who asked if Ale was a good actress. But I can't view that video because I don't have any social media. Cuz you pls take pity of me and put the video up here.

I couldn’t quite figure out how to upload videos into a post on here anymore. It’s just very strange why I have this trouble now. I was able to upload the Valentine’s Day video her Agency posted on IG before. Somehow my co-writer figured it out, so hopefully you’ve seen it already.

Anon 2: Funny how sushi fingers hasn’t posted anything today. Not like her not to mooch off Seb’s success.

She doesn’t post everyday, but she doesn’t stay quiet for long. We pretty much expect something from her tomorrow or Monday.

Anon 3: She really isn't the best. I'm not saying that cause she's a terrible person. She is just very bland and doesn't seem to show much emotions. I tried watching Alta Mar and I couldn't get past the second episode. Yes, she is pretty, but you need more than a pretty face to make it in Hollywood.

Demo reels act as examples of your acting ability while also selecting the best clips of you as well. So if she’s kind of okay or bland, then that’s not a very good sign of her actually ability to me at least. I haven’t made myself watch Alta Mar on Netflix yet. Her other credits aren’t available in the US so I can’t judge what evolution she might have had in her acting.

Anon 4: Regarding ale speaking english, celeb as fuck posted a VERY short video of her speaking english a while back (around the mid February mark) probably not long enough to get a true sense but not completely terrible.

Hm... I almost forgot about that. Honestly, we’d need to hear/watch her do a speech or an interview in English to get a real gauge.

#alejandra onieva #wannabes just wanna be famous #we are counting down to when this contract is over #when will this trainwreck stop?

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elegantengineersweets · 4 years

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A canção de amor de J. Alfredo Prufrock, de T.S. Eliot

A canção de amor de J. Alfredo Prufrock

Tradução: Victor Martins Queiroz

Vamos, então, você e eu,

Quando se espalha a noite contra o céu,

Como se, sobre a mesa, um paciente eterizado;

Vamos, então, por entre certas ruas que, demidesertas,

Murmuram, enquanto acobertam

As noites insones em hotéis-de-pouso toscos,

Restaurantes onde a serragem se mistura às ostras:

Ruas que seguem, como um tedioso argumento

De insidioso intento,

Levando-a rumo a uma questão aterradora.

Oh! não pergunte “qual seria?”.

Vamos, então, render nossa visita.

No salão, mulheres vão e vêm, falando

Sobre Miguel Ângelo.

A névoa loura que esfrega as costas nas vidraças,

O fumo louro que esfrega as fuças nas vidraças:

A sua língua fez lamber da noite entre as esquinas;

Languesceu sobre as poças restantes nos ralos;

Deixou pousar nas costas a fuligem dos fumeiros, que fugia;

Escapuliu pelo terraço, escapulou

E, sendo uma noite de Outubro, macia,

Dobrou-se sobre a casa e descansou.

E decerto haverá tempo

Para o louro fumo, que se esgueira pela rua

E esfrega as costas nas vidraças;

Haverá tempo, haverá tempo

De encarar as faces que você encara, uma a uma;

Tempo de cura e de assassinato,

Para o trabalho e os dias de todos os braços

Que erguem e pousam dúvida em seu prato;

Tempo para você e para mim

E tempo ainda para indecisões, centenas!

Para visões e revisões sem fim

Antes do erguer de uma torrada e uma chavena.

No salão, mulheres vão e vêm, falando

Sobre Miguel Ângelo.

E decerto haverá tempo

De indagar “eu ouso? eu ouso?”,

De virar, descer a escada, com um ponto

Calvo bem no meio do meu couro

Cabeludo – (dirão “seus cabelos vão sumindo!”)

Meu fraque, a minha gola alta, subindo

Ao queixo; a gravata, humilde e rica, um broche simples

A firma – (dirão “seus braços, pernas, vão sumindo!”)

Eu ouso

Perturbar o universo?

Há tempo num minuto

Para visões e revisões de que um minuto faça o inverso.

Pois conheci-os todos, já conheci todos;

Conheci as tardes e as manhãs e as noites,

Eu medi-me a vida em colheres de chá;

Conheço a voz que morre com um tombo

Surdo, sob a música de uma sala, atrás.

Mas, então, como presumiria?

E eu já conheci os olhos, já conheci todos;

Olhos que miram-no na frase formulada;

E quando formulado, pregado num pino,

Quando empinado e na parede eu me contorço,

Como, então, dar início

Ao tiroteio de ciladas da mi’a vida e sua estrada?

Como presumiria?

E eu já conheci os braços, já conheci todos –

Com seus braceletes, braços nus e brancos

(Mas que, sob a luz, mostram pêlos castanhos).

É o perfume de um vestido

Que me faz tão digressivo?

Braços que à mesa deitam, ou envoltos num manto.

Como presumiria?

Como, então, dar início?

Deveria dizer “andei, no ocaso, por magras vielas

E vi erguer-se o fumo fora dos cachimbos

De homens em mangas-de-camisa, à beira das janelas?…”

Fora melhor ter sido um par de parcas pinças

Que pelo fundo se arrastassem, do mar mudo.

E a tarde, a noite, dorme tão tranquila!

Acalentam-na longos dedos…

Sono… cansaço… ou fingimento,

Ela se, ao lado de você, de mim, perfila.

Eu deveria, após o chá e o bolo e os gelos

Ter força de impingir a crise a tal momento?

Mas apesar de privação e pranto, prece e pranto,

E apesar de ver minha cabeça (ainda mais calva) ser trazida a mim numa bandeja,

Não sou nenhum profeta – nem assunto sério aqui se enseja;

Vi meu momento de grandeza tiritando,

E o eterno Pagem segurar meu fraque, gargalhando,

E, sem rodeios, tive medo.

E valeria a pena tudo isso, apesar de,

Após as taças, marmeladas, chás,

Por entre as porcelanas, junto a nosso prosear,

Valeria a pena tudo isso,

Mastigar o assunto sob o riso,

O universo espremer numa bola, e fazer

Com que ela role sobre uma questão aterradora,

Dizer: “Sou Lázaro, e estive morto,

Mas retornei para dizer-lhes tudo, eu deverei dizer” –

Se alguém, dela sob a nuca a ajeitar o encosto,

Dissesse: “Não foi isso o que intentei, há nada a ver;

Não há nada, nada a ver.”

E valeria a pena tudo isso, apesar de,

Valeria a pena tudo isso,

Após ocasos, paços, orvalhadas ruas,

Depois das novelas, das chavenas, mesmo após as saias que se arrastam junto ao piso –

E tudo isso e mais que isso? –

É impossível eu dizer só o que intento!

Mas projetassem-se padrões de nervos sobre a tela, num momento:

Valeria a pena tudo isso,

Se alguém, que ajeita um travesseiro ou lança um lenço,

E vira-se à janela, se esse alguém dissesse:

“Não há nada, nada a ver;

Não foi isso o que intentei, há nada a ver.”

Não! Eu não sou Hamlet, e nem deveria sê-lo;

Sou um lorde-na-fila que, em busca

Do sucesso, até faria cena ou duas,

Aconselharia o príncipe; o mão-na-roda,

Distinto, e que se presta ao uso,

Cauto, político, meticuloso;

Cheio de presunção, mas um pouco obtuso;

Por vez, até, alvo de glosa –

Quase, por vez, o Tolo.

Eu envelheço… Eu envelheço…

Devo dobrar a calça atrás dos tornozelos.

Devo partir-me os cabelos? Pêssegos, ouso comê-los?

Vestirei calças brancas de flanela, irei à praia a passeio.

Eu as ouvi cantando, uma sereia a outras sereias.

Não creio para mim hão de cantar.

Vi-as nadando rumo ao mar, por sobre as ondas,

Penteando-lhe os cabelos brancos, quando o vento

Os soprava para trás do aguaçal alvinegro.

Languescemos junto das sereias, nos bolsões do mar,

Com seus lauréis de algas, rubros e castanhos,

‘Té que humanas vozes despertaram-nos, e afogamos.

____________________________

The love song of J. Alfred Prufrock

Let us go then, you and I,

When the evening is spread out against the sky

Like a patient etherized upon a table;

Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,

The muttering retreats

Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels

And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:

Streets that follow like a tedious argument

Of insidious intent

To lead you to an overwhelming question …

Oh, do not ask, “What is it?”

Let us go and make our visit.

In the room the women come and go

Talking of Michelangelo.

The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes,

The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes,

Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening,

Lingered upon the pools that stand in drains,

Let fall upon its back the soot that falls from chimneys,

Slipped by the terrace, made a sudden leap,

And seeing that it was a soft October night,

Curled once about the house, and fell asleep.

And indeed there will be time

For the yellow smoke that slides along the street,

Rubbing its back upon the window-panes;

There will be time, there will be time

To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;

There will be time to murder and create,

And time for all the works and days of hands

That lift and drop a question on your plate;

Time for you and time for me,

And time yet for a hundred indecisions,

And for a hundred visions and revisions,

Before the taking of a toast and tea.

In the room the women come and go

Talking of Michelangelo.

And indeed there will be time

To wonder, “Do I dare?” and, “Do I dare?”

Time to turn back and descend the stair,

With a bald spot in the middle of my hair —

(They will say: “How his hair is growing thin!”)

My morning coat, my collar mounting firmly to the chin,

My necktie rich and modest, but asserted by a simple pin —

(They will say: “But how his arms and legs are thin!”)

Do I dare

Disturb the universe?

In a minute there is time

For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.

For I have known them all already, known them all:

Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,

I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;

I know the voices dying with a dying fall

Beneath the music from a farther room.

So how should I presume?

And I have known the eyes already, known them all—

The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase,

And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin,

When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall,

Then how should I begin

To spit out all the butt-ends of my days and ways?

And how should I presume?

And I have known the arms already, known them all—

Arms that are braceleted and white and bare

(But in the lamplight, downed with light brown hair!)

Is it perfume from a dress

That makes me so digress?

Arms that lie along a table, or wrap about a shawl.

And should I then presume?

And how should I begin?

Shall I say, I have gone at dusk through narrow streets

And watched the smoke that rises from the pipes

Of lonely men in shirt-sleeves, leaning out of windows? …

I should have been a pair of ragged claws

Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.

And the afternoon, the evening, sleeps so peacefully!

Smoothed by long fingers,

Asleep … tired … or it malingers,

Stretched on the floor, here beside you and me.

#t. s. eliot #poem #poema #poesia #poetry #literature

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patron-saints · 1 year

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hi alta mar followers if you’re still here!!!!! happy april 13th!!! as some of you may remember, it’s eva’s birthday! since i missed so many birthdays, and since i’ve had many other special interests in the meantime, i thought for old time’s sake it would be fun to do some questions today. you can ask me about literally anyone from alta mar today, but it IS eva’s day so i wanna make him feel like the special birthday girl a little too haha

happy neil banging out the tunes day too !!

#ask me about alta mar #eva villanueva #alta mar

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greatchildarcade · 4 years

Text

Short Stories that blows your mind.

Story name: TOFFEE

Written by me!

Toffee:

Many incidents happen in human life, but people cannot remember all of it. Some remain in the memory and some are lost in the world of oblivion. I may not remember all the events that have taken place in my short life , but one event that I cannot forget even when I try to forget it again and again but it is like a vague picture of sadness floating in the door of my mind . Maybe I will never forget this memory!! Today I will talk about that memory which is very sad and painful .

Shyamalpur is a small village. The village looks very gallant and decorous with the ceremony of palm and coconut trees. Blue sky over the head with expansive green paddy fields below , the winding paths, shrubs on both sides of the road , songs of cuckoos were heard in morning and evening. In the morning the aroma of the flowers wafts in the cool gentle breeze!! Palash flowers falling spread over the road and turned it red . A small river flows to the north of the village named 'Champa' . On both sides of the river a group of white cranes sit in an alliance in the hope of hunting. Biku, the fisherman with his small boat fishes in the river till late night . His 'Bhatiali' song floats in the air and could be heard from afar! In the evening when the lamps are lit in the houses in both sides of the river , the sky lamp floats in the sky , moonlight plays in the water of the river at night !! On the banks of Champa was 'Chhabi' aunt's small house. Only her two-year-old son was the lifeblood of her life. 'Bhavananda' was Chhabi mashi's spouse worked as a little clerk somewhere in Kolkata. He used to come home once a month with his family expenses and leave for Kolkata on Sunday afternoon. Mashi lived alone with her son in a small mud house but at the touch of her hand the mud house really turned into a picture. The walls of the room and 'Tulsi Mancha' beside the house was beautifully painted with 'alpona' there were some flowers next to the Tulsi mancha, a few Chrysanthemum aparajita flowers bloom every evening and morning . A bamboo fence around the flower trees surrounded in a circular manner. There were two bellflower trees on either side of the fence lots of bell flowers bloomed and the smell filled the whole house. Aunt was a very beautiful woman to look at. Her name Chhabi which means picture, actually approved her beauty! She had curly hair up to her waist, very fair complexion. She used to wear red 'bindi'on forehead and 'alta' on her feet. At times she roamed around wearing anklet and the sweet sound of her anklets kept the house inebriated.

She was not too old, maybe within 24 to 25 years. His son was as good looking as his mother. The baby was 3 years old with fair complexion, curly hair, big dark eyes and his and his Limbs were soft and fluffy his face was like a lotus flower pure and innocent Mashi use to put a big Kajal Bindi on his forehead anyone would love to hug the baby and take him in their arms the innocence in his face fascinated everyone his name was 'Utsav'. Utsav means festival. Mashi affectionately called him by this name. To every mother her son is a source of joy and celebration maybe that was the reason why Mashi named her son so. When Utsav's small feet moved towards her mother's lap the sounds of his anklets tingled my mind. I caressed him everytime I visited their place.

Like every other day I was going to school by the path beside mashi's house , I saw Mashi was teaching the baby to walk.

From a distance I saw Mashi raising her arms and calling the boy to come and Utsav oncestruggling to walk, was falling once with his two legs and again getting up smiling and walking towards his mother's lap. Mashi wrapped Utsav around her arms and affectionately kissed him on the face . Mashi took the milk bowl in front of his face to feed him, Utsav gripped the bowl with his tiny hands so the milk flipped out on his face. Utsav kept smiling at this and her mother cleaned his face with her saree.

Mashi used to love me a lot . Often she asked me to visit their place.

On one Thursday , for some reason it was a school holiday. So I went to Mashi's house . She gave me a slip to sit on . But I did not find Utsav there, so I asked her, "Where is Utsav ?? I cannot see him!!" Mashi pointed her finger at the room. There I saw him with a small nursery rhyme book and he was reciting some poems. As soon as I called him, he ran to me and sat on my lap. He started pulling my hair with his small hands, I felt so good but still I pretended to Mashi and said you see Mashi your son is so naughty!! he is pulling my hair! Mashi said to Utsav , "lokkhishona lokkhi bapon, don't pull her hair, it's hurting ". Then and there Utsav left my hair and got down from my lap and went to her mother.

The baby was trying to go to her mother's lap but since Mar she was busy cooking she said but I am cooking pesh for you it is your favourite Na actually it was Utsav birthday that's why I was invited after completing cooking both the dressed Utsav with the new cotton dress made by maa she herself Utsav was so happy having that dress that he kept on showing his dress to everyone then we we had lunch Utsav enjoyed the Paresh with body fit him while sitting Hona lap on her mother's lap he laughed screamed hopped and again kissed Mashi I had a great time over there on one day on one Tuesday we had half day in school I went back home early in the afternoon while going back I found Mashi a sleep and Utsav was playing with his dolls on the Vishwakarma puja I went to Kolkata and came back home at night probably around 8 or 8:30 p.m. moonlight fell on marshes house and through the window I could see Mashi trying to put Utsav to sleep by singing Ghum parani Mashi pishi so I didn't knock them . After a few days I went back to Kolkata again in the Durga Puja. Before departing I met mashi and Utsav. Utsav asked me , "My toffee??" I assured him that I will definitely bring him good toffees as I come back from Kolkata.

Almost one month later , I returned home from Kolkata. I went to mashi's house but saw no lamps were lit. The house was totally in darkness. I thought they might have been asleep so I started my journey back home. My home was on the other bank of river Champa . As I boarded on the boat to cross the river I heard a weeping sound. I focused on the sound and exactly heard a woman crying, but it suddenly disappeared .

Next morning I went to the river bank while my mother was still asleep. But I found some people standing in a huddle and mourning over someone's death . Moving ahead of the crowd, I find Chaabi Mashi. Her lifeless body was lying in the quagmire! Har clothes were grubby , a bunch of her curly hair lying in the mud was untidy and baffled. She jumped into the water and died .

Mashi was no more !!!

Immediate after realizing this my mind became filled with tears. I wanted to cry but holding back my emotions I asked a man beside, "Where is her son?? Utsav? " The man said, "Her son?? He had died long back" .

Hearing this I couldn't hold back my tears any more. I burst out into tears and screamed , "O my dear Utsav!!" I asked the man, "How did he die ?" The man said, "His mother was cooking when Utsav was playing with his dolls. The toddler came to the river bank and accidentally slipped and fell into the wwater. The demon Champa dragged him away, he sunk in the river forever . From then on the woman was mentally distorted. She came to the river bank, cried every night and left in the morning. Yesterday also we heard her weeping and this morning we find her dead! Maybe out of the sorrow of her son's death she jumped into the river and died!

The toffee I brought for Utsav remained in my hands!!

I will never be able to see Utsav in my entire life this grief will stay with me forever I don't know why I but I couldn't threw away the toffee I was feeling like to hug Utsav, take him into my arms and kiss him and say , " See dear! your didi has brought you the toffee you were waiting for! "

As the usual days I was going to school by the side of mashi's house. The house don't have the beauty and daintiness like before! The house is crumbling. Many flowers have bloomed in the trees a lot of weeds have grown around the house. Bhavananda left his job in Kolkata and came here a few months back but he too died a few days ago due to serious illness .

Today there is no one in that house !

Son and mother's laughter can no longer be heard there ! A few red- blue flowers on the stock of the Chrysanthemum Aparajita tree blooms every morning and evening. Seeing those flowers on the lap of the trees I aggrieved, "O God ! why did you destroy the trees and flowers of that house ?? how beautifully the baby flower had bloomed in the Mother's lap - Utsav giggling in mashi's lap.

After losing them why did you just keep those bell flowers blooming? You drop them too. Having flowers in a house with no mother and son is just a ridicule! "

- by Shreya Paul

#special collections #beauty #nature

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welcometololaland · 11 months

Note

Hi Lola! 3, 5, 10 and 31 for the fic writer ask! sorry if that’s too many, you can just choose which you wanna answer☺️

Side note: I am so excited for ALTA I just know it’s gonna be so good!!

Hope you have a good flight and trip ✈️☺️🌷

Hi Mar! Nice new blog :) Thanks for the ask!

3: Are there any specific themes you enjoy exploring in your fics?

So glad you asked!!!! I love writing about characters coming out of their shells as people - finding themselves by finding someone else they really care for. I love the development of self-love through loving another, flirty banter, enthusiastic consent, characters finding their safe place and their person. Those are my favourite arcs/themes.

31: Do you prefer writing from a single character's perspective or switching between different viewpoints?

This changes over time! I usually prefer single character perspective (TK and Alex for Tarlos and Firstprince respectively), but I've gotten a lot more comfortable writing Carlos and Henry, so now I don't mind a switch!

Thanks for the ask!

Send me a fic ask here.

#fic writer asks #mar tag #eclectic-sassycoweyes #queue do queue #ask #answered

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aeroknot · 5 years

Text

it’s interesting to me that like almost every otp (or otherwise intensely shipped pairing) i have i usually zero in on like one specific kink or passionate action for them that, yeah, i could explore with others, but tend not to or not as much.

like for this new oc pairing it’s neck biting / love bites in general

for lingfan it’s [redacted*], royal baths, and voyeurism

for sesskagu it’s doggy, but make it fashion

for narusaku it’s bondage / femdom and semi-public

for the o’connell’s it’s having mirrors involved for some reason?? wyndolls is post-sparring which is kinda bizarre given how many other pairings i have who are way more likely to spar. clawen is shower sex.

there’s some more but you get the point. it’s just kinda interesting to note. and i’m sure it goes hand in hand with how there’s many ships here who share some core qualities yet ultimately they all have very different contextual dynamics and personality traits from one another.

like, new ocs is a punk with a happy-go-lucky gal who have a fwb relationship that really goes deeper but they (one moreso than the other) don’t like to admit it or think about it. lingfan and ns are both deep working partnerships with tons of devotion but expressed differently, particularly through the presence or lack of power dynamics. they’re both the duo of powerful loveable sunshine clown with task-master protector in the barest sense, but i envision their partnerships behaving very differently from one another— naruto and sakura more boisterous, loud and active together, spurring each other on, but ling and lan fan — while they can be playful and do motivate each other — they carry a lot of each other’s tension and so need to spend more time recharging together, being tender and each other’s refuge rather than a fellow instigator of things. sesskagu still has sexual aspects to me but overall they’re my first foray into exploring a relationship actually higher on an ace/aromantic spectrum, with rare physical intimacy alongside profound unspoken fondness, and both incredibly independent; their feelings are really intangible and yet present and long lasting. sessh is also the first really stern and impassive character in here and kagura is the most fiery fly-off-the-handle-y. claire and owen and wynonna and dolls are the most ‘opposites attract’ in here, while the gender roles are reversed personality-wise: wynonna and owen are the devil may care rural maniacs with wit/grit and an outcast’s chip on their shoulder, while dolls and claire are the professional city slicker with a veneer of stoicism masking deep convictions, sympathies, and untapped affection.

...... ok well that got away from me but in my defense it HAS been a long time since i’ve talked shipping. and i have other ships that i rly enjoy but haven’t even really been interested in the sexy times for them? it’s much more mushy soft romance, like jopper, edling, sethon, zukaang, zuki, msr, jafael, the newest duo nicolas/eva from alta mar... etc...

anyway. Shipping, yay! is the point... i guess? my ships! let me show them to you and analyze them when you never asked

*lol i’ll tell you in dm no problem if you rly wanna know bc i’m very free-speaking about sexuality in one-on-one convos it’s just... a rly weird kink to many and feels too personal to share to my wider audience

#aero talks to herself #fandom #shipping #shipping the rarepair #sexuality #headcanon #headcanons #shipping malarkey #shipping bullshark #my otp #imagine your otp #sex talk

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ua-miruko · 5 years

Text

[8/6]

ua-miruko 2:30 PM

@ua-todoroki @ua-kaibara @ua-mar SUP LITTLE BITCHES you're mine now 🔥 🤪 🔥

ua-todoroki 2:30 PM

Oh.

ua-miruko 2:30 PM

YEP! OH!!

You're rollin' with TEAM MIRUKO NOW

Now we got a few objectives I wanna explain, but the most important one? KICK EVERYONE'S ASS

And when I say everyone, I MEAN

EVERYONE

... But especially Hawks' team

ALSO Endeavor's. I wanna run him into the groooound

ua-todoroki 2:33 PM

I can do that...

ua-miruko 2:36 PM

yeah, you better 😈

ua-todoroki 2:37 PM

:/...

ua-miruko 2:39 PM

oh, c'mon... you don't got more to say than that???

ua-todoroki 2:40 PM

Idk what to say.

It's good to be working with you.

ua-miruko 2:40 PM

good to be workin with you too! you were on of my requests so i'm glad the good ol gov was lookin out for once!! 😤😤

yer rly strong so i'mma be expecting a lot from you 👀

ua-todoroki 2:41 PM

Was I? Huh.

I'll do my best.

ua-miruko 2:43 PM

yeahyeah... didn't want anyone who'd hold me back and you almost won your festival way back when, yeah?

ua-todoroki 2:44 PM

Yeah.

ua-miruko 2:46 PM

yeah...

ua-kaibara 2:46 PM

Right..

ua-miruko 2:46 PM

aha! another one 👀 sup kid

you i don't know shit about lol

ua-kaibara 2:48 PM

Not surprising

ua-miruko 2:50 PM

tell me bout yerself?

what's ya quirk like

ua-kaibara 2:51 PM

I'm Kaibara Sen, one of UA's students but that's.. mostly obvious I think most of this program is UA students. My Quirk is Gyrate. I can basically just.. rotate my body parts like a drill. It's mostly useful for hand-to-hand but I wear metal gloves so I can use my hands as legitimate drills also..

ua-miruko 2:53 PM

🤔 interesting.....so yer a close combat kinda guy, yeah?

ua-kaibara 2:53 PM

Primarily, yeah

ua-miruko 2:53 PM

....you ever get flung through the air?

ua-kaibara 2:53 PM

Yes

ua-miruko 2:53 PM

EXCELLENT

ua-kaibara 2:53 PM

I am kind of scared to ask why

ua-miruko 2:54 PM

cuz im gonna fuckin fling you like a dart, that's why!!

ua-todoroki 2:54 PM

She'll probably do that to you.

Yeah.

ua-miruko 2:54 PM

listen, whatever ya gotta do to add more POWER to yer attacks, i expect ya to do

so, thermo?? you gon be doing a lot of flinging too

ua-todoroki 2:55 PM

I can help transport people with my ice, but it takes a bit of getting used to.

ua-miruko 2:55 PM

expect yall to practice that on your own, then!

ua-todoroki 2:55 PM

Yeah.

ua-miruko 2:56 PM

i do a lot of fighting and we'll be doin a lot of training together but i ain't gonna hold your hands the whole way

ua-kaibara 2:56 PM

I thought we were learning about heroics, not flying

ua-todoroki 2:56 PM

We'll need to be careful about how our quirks interact.

ua-kaibara 2:56 PM

...that's a joke

It didn't come off as one I don't think

ua-miruko 2:56 PM

....work on your humor, kid

ua-kaibara 2:56 PM

It'll be dry as ever by the end of this

ua-miruko 2:57 PM

you got a pretty huge shot, thermo, so our job will be makin sure to dodge yer shit....

nice nice

ua-todoroki 2:57 PM

Yeah.

You could also mess with my ice if you stomped the ground, I think. Shatter it.

ua-miruko 2:58 PM

oh fuck yeah.... 👀

ua-todoroki 2:58 PM

So we'll have to be careful about that.

ua-miruko 2:58 PM

nah i WANT that

that's a fuckin great combo

ua-todoroki 2:58 PM

Oh. Really?

ua-miruko 2:58 PM

stomp on your ice, send a whole STORM of ice shards out to kill EVERYONE

ua-todoroki 2:58 PM

I guess ice is sharp.

Huh.

ua-miruko 2:58 PM

we can call it SHATTER STORM

or somethin

HELL YEAH COMBOS

ua-todoroki 2:59 PM

I've never used it like that...

ua-miruko 2:59 PM

yeah!! you got a pretty basic way of using your quirk, i wanna force ya to do it in new fun ways

ua-todoroki 3:00 PM

Still. If I'm trying to capture a villain and you shatter all of it, we could lose them...

It'll be interesting.

ua-miruko 3:00 PM

yeahyeahyeah, we'll see what happens

ANYWAY

yall, we got a few days before we officially start but if ya got time, i wanna test you out a bit

spar with me 👀

ua-todoroki 3:01 PM

Sure.

When?

ua-miruko 3:01 PM

and everyone else too! expecting to fight you all before the week is done

whenever you're free! my schedules clear the next few days

ua-todoroki 3:01 PM

So is mine.

ua-miruko 3:02 PM

👀 awesome

ua-mar 3:09 PM

Wow! A high ranking hero! To think I finally see you in the flesh! I’m Alta Valentine of 2-B and it’s a pleasure and absolute honor to be here! 😸

Ahaaa, this is the first time a hero has called me such a name.......... BUT I PROMISE I WONT LET YOU DOWN 😤😤💪

ua-miruko 3:12 PM

damn, that's a name....yer a second year! interesting!

tell me yer quirk? ua-mar 3:15 PM

My quirk is called Marble! I can amplify the strength, endurance, and speed on anyone I leave contact on for 5 minutes! I can’t amplify their quirks however. But it’s great for long distances if we’re separated!

ua-miruko 3:16 PM

... No shit???

Holy fuck

ua-mar 3:16 PM

......but once I use it.....I get slower 😅

ua-miruko 3:16 PM

🤔 i see

imma need one of those baby backpacks for you then...

what's it like with multiple peeps?

ua-mar 3:16 PM

......baby backpacks😳?

ua-miruko 3:17 PM

yeah! i can just carry ya quick if ya get too slow!

ua-mar 3:18 PM

Oh.....if you say so 😅

My limit is about 4 people

ua-miruko 3:19 PM

niceeeeee.....

ua-mar 3:20 PM

I hope I can be a great assistance to you all! 💪

ua-miruko 3:22 PM

im thinkin ya will!!!

hold up yall, suddenly we got a newcomer....

@s-inasa GET IN HERE

s-inasa 3:23 PM

IM SORRY MA'AM

IM TERRIBLY SORRY FOR MY TARDINESS

WILL NOT HAPPEN AGAIN

ua-miruko 3:23 PM

BETTER NOT OR I'LL KICK YA ASS

s-inasa 3:24 PM

YES MA'AM!

ua-miruko 3:25 PM

AWESOME

ua-todoroki 3:25 PM

Oh...

ua-miruko 3:29 PM

not rly familiar with you either so!! tell me bout yourself when yer ready!

we were talkin some preliminary quirk combo techniques and also discussing how we're gonna do some sparring before the week is through!

s-inasa 3:34 PM

IM YOARASHI INASA, MA'AM, FROM SHIKETSU HIGH!

MY QUIRK IS BEING ABLE TO CONTROL THE WIND!

ID LOVE TO SPar..

Todoroki...!

ua-miruko 3:35 PM

THE WIND, HUH 👀

... yall know each other?

s-inasa 3:38 PM

We...do.

ua-todoroki 3:38 PM

Yeah.

Hi.

ua-miruko 3:38 PM

....uh? why yall so awkward all of a sudden lol

ua-todoroki 3:38 PM

:/...

ua-miruko 3:38 PM

yall got bad blood or something?

ua-todoroki 3:39 PM

It's kind of complicated.

s-inasa 3:39 PM

...very complicated.

ua-todoroki 3:39 PM

It's ok.

Hopefully this will help.

ua-miruko 3:39 PM

...right

listen, yall can talk it out if you want or leave it at the door but i'm telling yall now, i dont care for anything getting in the way of this lol

s-inasa 3:40 PM

It..wont interfere, ma'am!

ua-miruko 3:40 PM

better not 😌

cuz if it does yall are cleaning toilets instead

s-inasa 3:41 PM

NOTHING WILL GET IN THE WAY MA'AM!!

ua-miruko 3:43 PM

good to hear!!

OH SHIT so if you're a windy boy, that means... you can do a lot of flinging, huh 👀

s-inasa 3:44 PM

I can make anyone fly ma'am! And make tornadoes!

I control currents too!

ua-miruko 3:44 PM

PERFECT

aiight so torpedo, yer gonna be makin powerdrill fly a LOT

you'll be helping me get some air too, i bet 😤 NICE

s-inasa 3:46 PM

Anything you say ma'am!

ua-miruko 3:47 PM

nice........with enough air we can use that shit to break through into any building, heh...

oh FUCK YEAH we gon do some DAMAGE

ua-todoroki 3:49 PM

We can also combine our quirks well.

ua-miruko 3:50 PM

yeah!!!

want as many combos as we can get in here!

make sure each of ya practice with the power up princess too, s'gonna feel weird

suddenly doin your thang with a big ol boost all of a sudden

ua-mar 3:51 PM

Wow! Everyone is so impressive! 😯

ILL TRY MY HARDEST MIRUKO 😤👍

ua-miruko 3:52 PM

💪 😤

ua-mar 4:07 PM

Oh! Miruko Sensei! Forgive me for asking this late, but what kind of training will you put us through?

ua-miruko 4:08 PM

eh...we'll see as we go along but it'll be the general shit... weight training, quirk training... might be a surprise but i do a lot of covert shit

so yall will get a nice lil crash course on that as well

get familiar with all the protocol of doin more public patrols versus shit like stake-outs

....LOTS of beating people up tho

arrests and shit!! it'll be exciting!

if you can keep up, heh

ua-mar 4:13 PM

Oh! I see! I was asking to see the difference in Japanese internships and American internships!! So we’ll cover the whole lot? That is exciting!

ua-miruko 4:13 PM

pretty much lol

ua-mar 4:13 PM

And I may be slow , but it’s too soon to be underestimating 😏

ua-miruko 4:14 PM

😤 good!

ua-miruko 9:16 PM

... OI nearly forgot

when yall stop by, go get yourselves situated with the staff, they'll get you all set up at the agency

give you ID cards and all the shits

those cards will give ya access to my agency whenever ya want!! you'll love it, i got a gym set up and EVERYTHING

so feel free to hang out whenever ya want 👀

ua-todoroki 9:22 PM

Oh... That's cool.

ua-miruko 9:22 PM

yeah!! got a fun lounge too, super fuckin tricked out

s-inasa 9:23 PM

A gym?? Great!

ua-mar 9:24 PM

Tricked out , huh? 😯🤔

ua-miruko 9:24 PM

i expect yall in there a bunch 👀

MHM.....got a TV and a bar and the works!!

.....yall cant go into the bar 😡😡😡

ua-mar 9:28 PM

Ack! Miruko Sensei! You can trust us that we won’t trespass into certain areas and focus on our main objective! 😅

ua-miruko 9:29 PM

yeah you better 😡 😤 listen i like a good party too, but we save partying for AFTER we beat the bad guy

s-inasa 9:29 PM

DOES THE BAR HAVE PROTEIN SHAKES

ua-miruko 9:31 PM

BITCH WHO DO YOU THINK I AM

OF COURSE

ua-mar 9:35 PM

So we can go near the bar, but only for protein drinks?

ua-miruko 9:35 PM

... YEAH!!!

s-inasa 9:35 PM

YEAH!

ua-mar 9:44 PM

Understood then! Protein drink are the only exception! If you don’t mind me asking, is there anything you recommend we work on specifically? Any skills that can be learned from you 🤔 ?

ua-miruko 9:46 PM

good question!! you're real perceptive, i like that 👀

my style is more close-to-middle range... mostly like to brawl but my PUNCH is PACKIN and my KICK can send fuckers 'cross the country!!!!

so if there's ANYTHING SPECIFIC yall are learnin from me, it's how to kick the shit outta someone LOL

imma make the two of yall who are more used to long range attacks focus more on your bodies while the rest of you work on your OWN power... finding ways to make yourself larger, faster, STRONGER!

🤔 what's also important to me tho... is the environment and the advantages or disadvantages you'll be facing

withstanding the heat, the cold.... dealin with heights and the underground... it's all shit i deal with regularly

yall are probably gonna end up everywhere but underwater lol

ua-mar 9:55 PM

Hmmm. Intriguing. You are certainly strong and intense when it comes to an all out brawl. And I’m guessing you’re just as swift and agile making you quite the one not to provoke at all. With you’re ranking, your skills and experience must be incredibly well rounded and fluid 🤔

I trust that you will indeed make us more stronger ☺️!

I only ask that you absolutely don’t hold back and don’t underestimate us! 💪

ua-miruko 10:06 PM

hold back? nahhhhhh...

the goal here is to have yall beggin for mercy... 😈

ua-mar 10:12 PM

Oh goodie!~ Well we hope to learn and apply the same 😇! Only from the best! Once again, it’s an honor that to intern with you Miruko Sensei ☺️!

ua-miruko 10:14 PM

you too, kid!

ua-todoroki 10:18 PM

Good luck with that.

#miruko.log #shouto #kaibara #inasa #valentine

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