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awrestlinggirlwholoves80sbands · 4 years

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This isn’t about French homework, is it? ( Sebastian Bach X Rachel Bolan)

A/N: This is for @boraxisme because we deserve more Skid Row fic content! this is a HIGHSCHOOL AU

Summary : Rachel Bolan might have a crush on Sebastian Bach, and maybe Sebastian likes him back, but what happens when Dave and Scotti convince him to help them and Rachel with their French homeworks?

(side Scotti x Dave)

Maybe somebody could say that was not a very good idea, but could you blame Sebastian?

He knew it could have been a prank, but honestly when he saw Rachel Bolan’s friends, aka his crush, inviting him to have lunch with them, he was ready to take the risk

He was still the new kid for most of the school, living in the USA for almost 5 months now, and even if he made friends easily and was far from being a shy guy, the pretty boy with the nose chain always made him feel weird things in his stomach. He shared math class together but he never managed to talk to him, maybe also because Rachel seemed very reserved and intimidating.

“C’mon blond, don’t be shy!” Scotti said, waving his hand. Scotti shared science class with him and he was a very cool guy, they get along pretty well.

While Sebastian was walking towards their table, Rachel tried his best to look interested in the food he was eating. It was frustrating how much that boy made him feel nervous and happy at the same time. He never had a problem with approaching girls, even if he was very reserved, but Sebastian always seemed to take all his coherent thoughts out of his brain.

Sebastian sat right in front of Rachel, as Scotti and another guy named Dave were not-so subtly kicking their friend under the table. The blond guy lift his gaze only for a minute, but as soon as he looked at Rachel’s face a little hidden by his hair, he felt butterflies in his stomach, and he decided that the food was the most interesting thing right now.

Even if his attention was somewhere else, he could still hear very clearly Scotti and Dave whispering very loudly that Rachel’s crush has shown up. And wow, Sebastian had never seen somebody blush so hard as Rachel was doing at that moment. He didn’t know if it was for the embarrassment of somebody thinking he could have a crush on the blond or because he really liked him (but that was not true, right? It was too good to be true!).

“So, Sebastian right? We wanted to ask a favor : Scotti, Rachel, Rob and I need to do a project for French class and well since you’re Canadian we thought you could help us a little with it. Can you do that?” Dave asked, as he kept looking at Scotti for some unknown reasons.

“I’m not the best at French but I guess I can help?” He said unsure, scratching his neck.

Honestly Seb should have been smarter, he should have known that it was very unlikely for those guys to take French class, but c’mon he would have spent time with Rachel! Who was he going to turn that offer down?

“Cool! Let’s see at 5pm at Rob’s house, alright? I’ll write his address down for you.” Scotti added and scribbled down on a napkin something, then handed it to Sebastian.

They still had 10 minutes left, so he ate his food and tried his best to listen to the boys talking about their crazy antics, but his eyes were dropping to Rachel’s face every minute. Sebastian could help but find him very beautiful and also so mysterious.

When Sebastian was not looking, it was Rachel’s turn to, even if still hated how the blond made him feel, he had to admit it was so nice to look at his gorgeous face every other minute.

The brown haired boy was so caught up to not noticed that now Sebastian was looking at him until their eyes met. And oh boy, Rachel felt fireworks in his stomach and warmth all over his chest, but quickly looked away, too embarrassed. Yet again, he enjoyed that feeling, deep down.

Seb was so grateful that the bell rang, because he was pretty sure that he was blushing. He didn’t know how the other boy felt, but he got totally lost into those eyes so warm and sweet, and he felt those familiar butterflies floating in his stomach.

They all split and went to their classes. Sebastian really hoped those hours were about to pass very fast ‘cause he couldn’t wait to spend some time with his new friends and get to know them. Totally it was not because of being close to Rachel.

Absolutely not.

---

At 5pm Sebastian was stalling in front of Rob’s house. His hands were sweaty, and he felt excited and nervous at the same time, so many questions floating in his mind : what if is it a prank? What if I make a fool out of myself by doing something wrong with him?

Ignoring all the questions, he rang the doorbell and soon after Rob appeared, a smile on his face.

“Hey Sebastian, you’re here! Come in, they are all waiting for you!” He said so excited, and led him into the living room.

However, he just found Rachel there, sitting with his legs crossed on the couch. Maybe Sebastian’s heart skipped a bit at the sight, but he would never admit it.

“Are not Scotti and Dave here yet?” He asked, trying his best to sound confident.

“They are upstairs, watching a movie. I’m uhm… they’ve not been 100% honest with you!” Rachel replied, looking down.

“Is all of this a prank?” The blond felt very stupid to have believed them, and also disappointed.

“No no. I mean they said the truth, someone needs your help in French, but it is just me!” The other boy quickly added.

“Then why didn’t you say it right away, at the cafeteria?”

“Because…. I can’t talk with you. I’m usually so okay with talking and making friends, but near you I shut down and freaking blush. And I don’t know why!” Rachel almost sounded angry, but he was just very frustrated.

“Well, I feel the same with you. You’re so badass and intimidating, you look like a freaking rockstar! But I promise you don’t need to feel like that with me, I’m just a big dumbass!” Sebastian said with a laugh.

“And the same goes for me. I think we should start studying, because I get distracted pretty easily.” Rachel smiled. “Especially with you near me” He wanted to add.

The blond really thought that he melted because of that smile, but that was only the beginning. Rachel made a little cute smile every time he pronounced right a very difficult word, and Sebastian tried his best to not look like he was about to melt or squeal.

Despite both of them hating the school, the two boys managed to study for a whole hour, maybe because they both pretended to be focused, while in reality they were looking at the other every five minutes, just to turn around to not get caught.

“Man I think it is enough French for today, do you fancy a beer? Rob managed to hide some in the fridge, so his parents wouldn’t have busted him.”

Sebastian simply nodded and Rachel reappeared soon after with two beers in his hands. He handed him one, and the blond really wished to not be that cliché, but he swore to God, he felt little sparkles in his heart as they touched.

They talked about general things, trying to get to know each other better. Rachel asked him about life in Canada and why he moved in the US, while the other boy asked him about his future and his life there.

“I wanna be a musician, dude. You know, playing bass in a punk band while fans scream at you! That sounds so awesome.” He answered with a huge smile, putting his empty bottle on the ground, and placing his hand on Sebastian’s one.

He was caught off guard, but he decided to intertwined their fingers, he didn’t know if he did it because of the alcohol or because he wanted to be brave. They stopped talking, Sebastian occasionally sipping his beer, and just enjoyed their presence. It felt so nice and good, the blond really wished Rachel couldn’t hear his heart beating fast, on the other hand Rachel hoped Sebastian couldn’t do the same with him.

Their little moment was interrupted by Rob, who bored because his favorite cartoon was over, he started to talk to the two boys. However ,he was too excited and invested in telling the story and eating his ice cream , to notice that his friend were holding hands, so they decided to stay like that.

“Hey, you guys started to drink already, that’s not fair!” Scotti said, coming downstairs.

The two boys quickly disentangled their hands, still Dave looked at the suspiciously.

“What do you have on your neck Scotti? It looks like a bruise.” Rob said innocently, still eating his ice cream.

“Yeah man it almost looks like a hick…”

“Hey, why don’t we play truth and dare?” Dave chimed in, interrupting Rachel.

“There was something going on. So he was not the only one with a huge crush for someone!” Sebastian thought.

Rob was immediately excited at the idea of playing, so he quickly grabbed the other beers, and he told everybody to sit in circle on the floor. Sebastian, Scotti and Rachel looked a bit confused, but they did as they were told.

“Since it is your house, I think we should start from you, Rob. Truth or dare?” Dave said.

“Uhm… dare!”

“Well I dare you to eat a pickle covered in mustard.”

Rob looked horrified, while all the other guys made disgusted faces.

“Ugh that’s gross. You know that I almost puke when I smell or eat mustard!” The boy protested.

“A dare is a dare. You can’t chicken out, you gotta do it.” Rachel said, firmly.

“Do you think he is going to vomit for real?” Sebastian asked the boy next to him, not very fond of the idea of seeing someone puking.

“ Nah, he’s a tough boy. Besides I think you’ve seen worse in your life, Blondie.”

“I bet you also have seen some nasty things, Rachie.” He was actually very surprised by his bravery.

Rachel looked at him and smirked. The tension was high but before he could get any closer to him, Rob came back with a covered in mayo pickle, and quickly put it in his mouth.

Long story short, he coughed and made a disgusted face, but he didn’t puke.

“So Scotti, truth or dare?” Rob questioned.

“Lay me with your best dare, man!” Scotti shoot back, sipping his drink.

“I dare you to do a lap dance on Snake.” Rachel smirked, while Scotti became as pale as a ghost.

Sebastian noticed that Dave he was more excited than scary at the idea.

Scotti awkwardly sat on Snake’s lap, while Rob put a CD on. The room was blasted with “Pour Some Sugar On Me”, and the brown haired man tried his best to dance as smoothly as possible, while Dave kept his gaze anywhere but the other boy.

“Scotti seems too good to be his first time!” The blond said, getting closer to Rachel.

“Well, when you enjoy who you are dancing on, it’s easier! I swear to God they are two idiots in love. But what do you know about lap dance, Sebby?”

He was a very surprised by the nickname Rachel gave him, but he still managed to let slip a little smile on his face, as he cheeks got a little warmer. The other boy noticed that, and kept staring at him intensely.

However before he could have said anything their friends had already finished, looking quite embarrassed but also happy at the same time.

“Wow that was steamy, I didn’t know Scotti had moves like that!” Rachel commented.

“Don’t laugh so much Bolan!” Scotti shoot back, a little embarrassed.

“It’s my turn I guess. I choose truth!” Dave said, as everybody groaned.

“You’re so freaking boring Snake!” Rob said.

“So tell us, do you have a crush on anybody in particular?” Scotti questioned quietly.

The other boy face went pale, as he started to stammer nervously.

“Ehm… no. Yeah, I don’t have any crush and I know this makes me a “virgin” or whatever but yeah. You can laugh as much as you want.”

Rachel looked at Sebastian, shooting him a “that’s bullshit” look, on the other end Scotti seemed quite disappointed.

“C’mon man don’t lie, it’s like saying that Rachel is not a very attractive guy with that piercing!” Sebastian exclaimed and suddenly the brown haired guy was really interested in playing with his nose chain.

“I-I… well I have a crush on someone… he is a guy and… fuck! I like Scotti, okay? I think he is amazing and I’m scared because I’ve never been with a guy before, let alone my best friend, so I don’t want to screw things up.”

Scotti smiled and hugged tighter his friend.

“I like you too, dickhead. But I think you already noticed that, we will have a talk in a more private place, without those idiots!” He linked his hand with Dave.

“Isn’t it beautiful when two lovers her together? Wish someone could do that to me!” Sebastian said dramatically.

“Are you waiting for me, darling?” Rachel said, wrinkling his eyebrows.

“Hey you two lovebirds, it’s Sebastian’s turn. Truth or dare?” Rob asked, still smiling. Rachel instead started blushing.

“Dare! I’m not lame like Snake!” The blond said, after some contemplation.

Dave gave him the middle finger, then he whispered something in Rob’s ear.

“Okay, I dare you to kiss the most attractive boy in this room!”

Sebastian was in absolute panic, at least internally. What was he supposed to do? Kissing Rachel and maybe face rejection and insults, or chicken out and then give the brunette the idea that he was not attracted? He seemed interested in him, but what if he just flirts like that with everybody?

You know what, fuck that! You only live once.

He turned his face to Rachel, gently cupped his face and kissed him in a sweet but also firm way. He was very surprised when the other boy kissed him back, his nose chain tickling Sebastian’s cheek, his lips still had a taste of beer on them.

They could have stayed like that for hours, but the door’s unlocking made me jump apart.

“Fuck! My parents are here. I promise them you would be out when they came back. Oh shit, the beers!” Rob said, quickly putting the bottles in the trash.

All the boys managed to get out of the back door, right before they heard Rob’s parents.

Scotti and Dave, still holding hands, said goodbye and walked down the street. Sebastian and Rachel hesitated for a moment, then they parted ways.

“See you tomorrow, Sebby.”

“You too, Sophia Loren!”

“ Wait really? Sophia Loren?!” Rachel asked confused.

“Rachel is a girl’s name, anyway. So that’s fitting!” The blond replied with a laugh.

---

The next day

Sebastian felt a light tapping on his shoulder. He turned around from his locker, and meet Rachel’s brown eyes.

“Can we talk in private for a minute?” He questioned, trying to sound confident.

The other boy was confused and a bit scared, but nonetheless he led him to the toilets. He just hoped that the previous day’s events were not all a prank.

“Did you really mean it? Our kiss, the most attractive guy thing. Did you mean that?” Sebastian was surprised to see Rachel being somewhat scared.

“I did, I do! I-I guess I’ve always had kinda of a crush on you.” He admitted and Rachel smiled.

A wonderful smile that made the blond’s heart melt and beat fast at the same time.

“Good, because I do too.”

“You still own me a truth or a dare!” Sebastian blurted out, as he remembered of the day before.

“I choose dare.”

“ I dare you to come to a date with me, next Saturday.”

“That’s not even a dare! And I’d love to!” Rachel said with a smirk, linking his hand with Sebastian’s one.

They got out of the bathroom, still holding hand, until they had to slip ways to go to their class. Before he entered the classroom for science class, Rachel gave him a quick peck on the cheek.

As soon as he got in, he spotted Scotti flashing him a big smile, with another weird purple bruise on his other side of his neck.

“Such lovebirds!” He snorted.

“Shut up, I can still see your hickey!” He said with a laugh.

#sebastian bach #rachel bolan #scotti hill #dave sabo #rob affuso #skid row band #fanfic #fanfiction #skid row fanfiction #80srock #80s rock band #highschool au #sebastian x rachel #scotti x dave

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pikapeppa · 5 years

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Cullavellan and Fenhawke pirate AU: Sparring

Chapter 12 of Where The Winds Of Fortune Take Me is up on AO3! It’s another long one (everyone’s POV this week, yay!), so only the first section is here. Read the rest on AO3.

In which there is – you guessed it – sparring. Also a little NSFW. 😏

Divine beautiful soft luscious art by @schoute!!

- PIPER -

“... if we keep running downwind, we should be in view of Kirkwall before sunset,” Dorian was saying. “That will give you ample time to sneak into the city after dark and figure out where things stand. Rather perfect timing, if I do say so myself.” He complacently adjusted one of his many gold rings.

Piper shot him a knowing smirk. “You make it sound as though the favourable winds were your making.”

“My fair captain, you underestimate the power of my dulcet words,” Dorian said loftily. “Who’s to say I didn’t whisper to the Old Gods themselves to blow some wind into your ragged old sails?”

Piper scoffed and shoved him. “Ragged nothing. These sails are perfectly patched.”

“Yes, well.” Dorian shot the lovingly-patched sails a disdainful look. “The point still stands that we should be in Kirkwall by this evening.”

“Excellent,” Piper said. “We’ve made good time. Better than expected, actually.” She leaned her elbows on the railing in front of the helm and watched as the crew sparred on the deck under Fenris’s supervision. Usually the trip from Rialto to Kirkwall took about eight days, but if they arrived tonight as Dorian predicted, the trip will have taken only seven.

In the depths of her selfish heart, Piper was regretting how quickly they’d managed to return.

Dorian leaned back against the railing and folded his arms. “So. What is the plan?”

Piper shot him a funny look. “You know the plan. We sneak into Kirkwall, see what’s happening—”

“I don’t mean that,” Dorian said dismissively. “I mean with our handsome blond guest.” He raised his eyebrows. “Is the fine commander going to be joining our illustrious crew?”

She returned her gaze to the sparring crew, who included both Cullen and Rylen. That’s a good question, Piper thought. The shameful truth was that she didn’t know, because she and Cullen hadn’t spoken again about his joining the Lady Luck.

After that perfect kiss on the beach in Rialto, Piper and Cullen had spent another night in her usual room in the Hanged Man. But this time, very uncharacteristically for Piper, she’d kept on her clothes and hadn’t even tried to proposition him. She knew how Cullen’s mind worked, and she knew that he wouldn’t allow himself to sleep with her unless he decided to stay on the Lady Luck.

It was his sense of honour. Cullen was a serious man, and without even knowing his relationship history, Piper knew he hadn’t slept with that many people. Sex was something he took seriously, and he wouldn’t sleep with someone unless he was invested. Piper, on the other hand, was something of the opposite; it wasn’t that sex didn’t matter to her, but it had always been more about fun and pleasure than an expression of love.

With Cullen, however, she had a terrible suspicion that sex would be different. She didn’t just want to sleep with him because he was handsome. She didn’t just want to sleep with him because it would be fun. She wanted to sleep with him because… well, because he was Cullen, for Mythal’s sake. He was her Golden Boy, the finest man she knew, and… and she…

She stopped herself before she could take that vulnerable thought any further. Regardless, after that first perfect kiss on the beach, they’d lain face-to-face on the bed in the Hanged Man — Piper beneath the covers and Cullen on top — and they’d talked about all sorts of innocuous things: little stories about his childhood, little stories about Piper’s own adventures, and innocent chit-chat about the crew and speculation about how long it would take for Fenris to admit that he liked Rynne. They’d talked late into the night until they’d both fallen asleep, and when they woke the next morning, they’d greeted the new day with another kiss.

Piper hadn’t even really meant to kiss Cullen again. Well, she had, but she’d been going for a kiss on the cheek, the same as she had done when he was asleep in her cabin on the Lady Luck. But just as she was about to place a gentle kiss on his stubbled cheek, he snapped awake.

Piper froze with her face a whisper away from his. Cullen stared at her with wide eyes, and after a tense, breathless moment, he slipped his palm around the back of her neck and pulled her close.

He kissed her softly — so infinitely softly, just a tender press of the lips — and Piper happily accepted his kiss, drifting dreamily in the softness of his lips and the ecstatic pounding of her heart until he leaned away from her with a tiny smile.

And then they’d gotten out of bed and returned to the Lady Luck, and they’d set their course for Cullen’s return to Kirkwall, and neither Cullen nor Piper had brought up the issue of his remaining on the Lady Luck.

That didn’t stop them from continuing the new routine of sleeping face-to-face on her bed, with Piper hidden beneath the blankets and Cullen lying chastely on top. The first night back on the Lady Luck, Cullen had gallantly tried to sleep on her couch, but Piper had teased and cajoled him into sharing her bed. And the next morning, and every morning thereafter, they’d started each morning with a sweet, tender kiss.

But every morning kiss they shared was one day closer to Kirkwall. And now, with Kirkwall practically in sight, it seemed that she and Cullen had shared their last morning kiss.

You don’t know that, she reminded herself. It was still possible that Cullen would join her crew. That was the whole point of not talking about it, after all; as long as they didn’t talk about it, there was still a chance that he would stay, and Piper would shamelessly cling to that chance until Cullen told her in no uncertain terms that he was going to remain in Kirkwall.

“Hello? Captain? Did your wonderful mad brain jump ship?” Dorian drawled.

She shook her head slightly, then smiled casually at Dorian. “I, um, don’t know what Cullen’s plans are. He’ll let me know when we’re back in Kirkwall.”

Dorian raised his eyebrows. “I beg your pardon?”

She shrugged confidently — far more confidently than she felt. “He hasn’t decided yet if he’s staying with us or not.”

Dorian’s eyebrows rose even higher. “Why in Andraste’s sacred bosom would he not stay with us?”

Piper widened her eyes. “I know, right? The Lady Luck is the best ship. Who in their right mind would turn down the chance—”

“That’s not what I mean,” Dorian interrupted. “He’s in love with you. Of course he should stay on your blasted ship.”

Her stomach flip-flopped at Dorian’s words, but she laughed him off. “Ah, we’ll see what happens, won’t we?” She pushed away from the railing and sauntered back to her place behind the helm.

Dorian turned to stare at her with his arms folded. “Do my ears deceive me? Is it possible that Mad Piper is being a coward?”

She bit back a spike of annoyance. Dorian was just trying to be a good friend. “Probably,” she said.

His eyebrows rose in surprise. “Wha–? You’re probably being a coward?”

“No,” Piper said. “Your ears are probably deceiving you. When was the last time you cleaned them? You are looking a little less than tidy, you know.” She gave his fastidiously clean outfit a judgmental once-over.

Dorian tilted his head chidingly. “Ha ha. Laugh all you like, Captain, but you know I’m right.” He stepped closer to her and lowered his voice. “You should press him about it. Tell him what you want. You have to fight for what's in your heart.”

I already have, she thought sadly. That was what made this so hard. Piper had already told Cullen that she wanted him to join her on the ship. It was up to him to decide if it was what he wanted, too… and that was the most painful thought to endure. What if he said no? What if he ultimately decided to remain in Kirkwall?

Her chest felt tight at the very thought. She mustered a smile and rolled her eyes at Dorian. “Yeah, yeah,” she said, and she waved her hand dismissively. “Stop hassling the Captain and get back to work, you gossipy git.”

He snorted, then unfolded his arms and began to saunter away. “And the descent into despotism begins. Don’t make me gather the officers for an intervention,” he called over his shoulder.

“Hah!” Piper retorted. “I’d like to see you try.”

Dorian waved lazily to her as he wandered away. When he was out of earshot, Piper heaved a heavy sigh and rested her arms wearily in the spokes of the steering wheel.

A little while later, Varric joined her at the helm. “Cap,” he said affably. “Ready to change over?”

“Sure am,” she said. She disentangled her arms from the spokes and gave the wheel a loving pat, then stepped away from the helm.

Varric pulled over the sturdy box he stood on while manning the helm. He glanced at Piper as he stepped onto the box. “You all right, Captain?”

“Yep,” she said brightly. She tried to avoid his eye without being obvious about it; Varric was a little too good at sussing out people’s feelings just by looking at them.

“You know the drill,” she said. “Holler for me if the ship starts sinking, that sort of thing.”

He chuckled. “No problem.”

Piper traipsed down the short flight of stairs to the deck and wandered over to join the sparring group. They were standing in a loose circle around Cullen and Rylen, who were were facing off now, and the crew were playfully jeering at their structured navy style.

Piper sidled up to Fenris, who was watching Cullen and Rylen with folded arms. She shamelessly watched Cullen thrusting and parrying for a moment before speaking to Fenris. “Where’s Rynne?” she asked. For the past week, Rynne had been splitting her days between medical training with Anders and combat training with Fenris. She’d started coming to the group sparring sessions for the past couple of afternoons, but she wasn’t here today.

“With Anders, I assume,” Fenris said flatly.

Piper hummed an acknowledgement and glanced at Fenris’s wounded right shoulder. He no longer wore a bandage, and the shallow slice across his shoulder was mostly healed, but the stitches were still in place.

“How’s the arm?” she asked.

He shrugged. His eyes remained on Cullen and Rylen as their blunted practice swords clashed together. “It is fine.”

Piper nodded. “Stitches are still there, though.”

He shot her a brief irritated glance. “And? What of it?”

She shrugged, unbothered by his terse manner. Fenris was notorious for picking out his own stitches rather than allowing Anders to remove them, purely in order to avoid contact with Anders. Piper was certain that the only reason Fenris still had his stitches was that he was waiting for Rynne to remove them, but she decided against asking him about it, not wanting to irritate him further.

He’d been particularly quiet and broody this week whenever he wasn’t with Rynne. When he was with Rynne, however — which was quite a lot of the time — he seemed to fluctuate between being uncharacteristically soft and particularly brusque. Personally, Piper wasn’t sure how Rynne could tolerate the whiplash of Fenris’s obnoxious mood swings, especially since he was obviously only being moody because he liked her.

But it wasn’t Piper’s business to say. She didn’t really want anyone poking at her and Cullen’s business either, after all.

“Just wanting to make sure you’re in tip-top shape in case we need to fight,” she said.

Fenris nodded silently. A moment later, Piper leaned in close to him again. “Listen, Fenris, I know you’re worried about going back to the city, with the WANTED posters and all. But I promise—”

“Stop,” he said quietly. “I stand with you, Piper.” He pursed his lips. “This is a mistake, but I won’t abandon you.”

She smiled. Coming from Fenris, that might as well have been his declaration that Piper was his best friend in all of Thedas.

She gently punched his arm. “Aw, Fen, no need to get sappy on me. I already know I’m your second-favourite person on the ship.” All right, fine, maybe she wasn’t above poking him a little bit about his feelings for Rynne.

He shot her an annoyed look, and she smirked at him before returning her attention to Cullen and Rylen. A minute later, their match ended with the blade of Cullen’s practice sword along Rylen’s throat.

The crew jeered and stamped their feet, and Rylen bowed to Cullen with a smile. “Well fought as always, Commander.”

Cullen smiled and nodded to his lieutenant. Fenris unfolded his arms and frowned at the crew. “Who is next?” he barked.

“Me,” Piper said loudly. She took a step into the circle. “I challenge the Commander to a match.”

The crew broke into a chorus of ooohing and stomping their feet, and Piper grinned at them before turning to Cullen with her hands on her hips. “How about it, Golden Boy?”

Cullen bowed gallantly. “I would be honoured, Captain Lavellan.”

The crew jeered more loudly at his manners, and Piper laughed. “There’s no place for such manners on the Lady Luck, Cullen,” she purred. She sashayed over to the rack of blunted practice weapons and selected a sword that nearly matched Cullen’s sword in length and weight.

“My apologies, Captain,” he said. “I will try to be less mannerly in the future.”

He was smiling, and Piper grinned at him. Now that was a cheeky remark, and one she’d be happy to exploit in a more personal setting, if ever he gave her the chance.

He was standing in a typical navy man’s ready-stance, with his practice sword partly raised and his legs slightly bent. Piper sauntered over to face him and slowly ran her finger along the flat of his blade.

“Such a rude boy,” she said silkily. “I’ll have to think up a special punishment for you.”

His eyes widened slightly, and his cheeks started to redden. The crew laughed raucously, and Piper grinned more widely still. Cullen wanted to make cheeky remarks to her? Well, she was more than happy to be just as cheeky in return.

She stepped away to face him and playfully mimicked his posture, eliciting another ripple of laughter from the assembled crew. Cullen narrowed his eyes and smirked, but he didn’t move.

They watched each other in silence for a moment. Piper kept her attention equally on his face and his feet and the tip of his sword, but he didn’t move.

So Piper took a small step to the left.

Cullen moved smoothly to his left as well, and Piper grinned as they began to circle each other slowly. Sure, he could follow her steps, but he wasn’t going to make the first move. He was too well-trained to move first unless it was necessary.

She cockily twirled her sword just to prove she could, and a chiding smile lit his face. Then Piper rushed at him.

Clang. Their blunted blades clashed with a dull ring of steel, and Piper was pushing forward with a flurry of quick strikes that Cullen swiftly parried. Then Cullen dodged slightly to the left and brought his sword in close to strike at her side.

She just barely dodged his strike and parried it with her sword, and an ooh of interest went up from the crew. Piper skipped out of Cullen’s range and faced him, her eyes darting between his blade and his face, and as she took a second to catch her breath, she admitted the truth: he was the better swordsman.

It was obvious, and it was something she’d known before stepping into this match with him. Cullen had over fifteen years of rigorous navy training, and while Piper had been scrapping since she was nine and fighting with all sorts of blades since the day she set foot on the Lady Luck, her form was nowhere near as perfect as Cullen’s.

But she had two tools that Cullen wouldn’t think to use: improvisation and dirty tricks.

He was in his ready-stance once more, and there was a small, smug smile on his lips. Piper laughed. “Think you’ve won already, have you?” she said.

He shook his head but didn’t break his stance. “I never discount an enemy until they’re flat on the ground,” he replied.

“Is that so?” She twirled her sword once more and flicked her hair over her shoulder. “If you wanted me flat on the ground, Commander, all you had to do was ask.”

The crew hooted in appreciation, and Cullen’s cheeks turned pink once more. Piper took advantage of his embarrassment to rush him again, this time dodging to his left to try and throw him off. He parried her just as easily as the first time, but Piper swiftly dropped to her knees and rolled beneath his arm, then popped to her feet behind him and pinched his bum.

He grunted in surprise, and Piper ducked under his arm and dodged back around to face him. His face was flaming red now, and his eyes were wide. “Did you just… grab my bottom?” he asked in disbelief.

“I did,” she said complacently. “Do you want to return the favour?” She turned to the side slightly and arched her back.

His eyes dropped to her butt for an instant before flicking back up to her face, and she grinned. But still he didn’t move, and his sword hand was steady, and Creators, Piper wanted to throw him off balance.

She sashayed closer to him, then reached out with her practice sword and slowly stroked her blade along the length of his with a faint hiss of metal. “Such a strong and stoic commander,” she teased. “Come on, Cullen, play with me.”

He didn’t move. “I didn’t realize this was a game,” he said.

She raised her eyebrows. “Of course it is,” she said. “And I’m winning.” She lunged at him again.

He parried her instantly and pushed forward at the same time. Piper stumbled back, and suddenly his sword was coming down from above to aim at her head.

Piper brought her sword up just in time. His blade slammed against hers with a ring of blunted steel, and Piper braced her palm on the flat of her blade to hold him back.

Fenedhis, he was fucking strong. Her arms were trembling with the effort of holding him back. Her heart was pounding with exertion and undeniable excitement, and she couldn’t help but stare at his parted lips.

Cullen took another aggressive step toward her, forcing her to lean back to alleviate the pressure of his blade on hers. Focus, Piper, she scolded herself. It was all well and good to find his strength incredibly sexy, but it was another thing to be so riled up that she actually lost a sparring match.

She twisted quickly to the side, escaping the incessant press of his blade, and he stumbled to the side, then smoothly swung his sword back up to defend himself as she lunged at him once more. His eyes widened as she rushed him, and suddenly they were face to face, and – shit, her thigh was brushing between his legs, and only their crossed blades were keeping their bodies apart.

Piper gasped for breath. His gorgeous brown eyes were wide, and his chest was heaving as well, and this was the closest they had stood to each other since that beautiful night on the beach. His cheeks were turning pink, and a giddy rush rolled through her pounding blood at the thought of him remembering the moment too.

Focus, Piper, focus, she thought feverishly. Don’t think about kissing him. Don’t think about your knee between his fucking legs. Focus on this moment. She quickly slid her foot just behind his own, then shoved at his chest with all her strength.

He stumbled back over her foot, but Piper had used this trick on him a few months ago in Kirkwall, and Cullen was too well-trained to be fooled a second time. He brought up his sword while simultaneously finding his balance, and Piper grinned at him.

“Ooh, you’re a quick study, Commander,” she panted.

“I would hope so,” he replied. “Otherwise, I–”

Piper lunged at him again, her sword lashing in a frenzy to keep him occupied as she pushed her way into his space. His eyes widened as he backed away, and a rush of excitement made her light-headed for a moment: she was about to win, she could see it, she could feel it in the desperation of his parries—

She brought the edge of her blade up to his throat, and he froze.

But Piper froze as well. There was a fine and unmistakable line of pressure at the base of her ribs.

Cullen was holding a dagger to her ribs — Piper’s own dagger, which he had taken off of her body at some point during the fight.

The crew was silent for a moment before erupting in a wave of appreciative murmurs and applause, and Piper gaped at Cullen in equal parts disbelief and delight. Cullen had used a dirty trick. He’d stolen her weapon when she wasn’t looking, probably when they were clinched face-to-face. He’d… fuck, he’d used her own tactics against her.

He cleared his throat awkwardly. “You were, er, distracted,” he said. A bashful smile lit his face.

She stared at him, heart pounding with exertion and pride and… fine, yes, she was fucking turned on. Standing this close to him and seeing the sheen of sweat on his chest, and knowing he’d broken the navy rules of engagement to get them both in this position…

She dropped her sword and gripped his shirt in both hands. “Pirate,” she whispered accusingly.

His face turned bright red. He’d dropped his sword as well, and his free hand was curved around her waist, and it was taking every ounce of willpower for her to not kiss him right here and now in front of the entire crew.

Stay with me. The pleading wish rushed through her giddy mind. Cullen looked like a pirate, and he could fight like a pirate when he was pressed, and the innocent nights they’d been spending curled up face-to-face on her bed were better than the finest sex she’d ever had, and… Fen’Harel save her, but she really didn’t want to lose him.

But she couldn’t tell him so. She couldn’t ask again for him to stay. As long as he didn’t say anything, he hadn’t yet said no.

With a huge effort of will, she forced herself to release him and to step away. She turned to Fenris with a grin. “So? What’s your verdict, Fen?”

His arms were folded, and his eyebrows were lifted appreciatively. “That is what I would call a draw,” he said.

The crew exclaimed in agreement, and Piper turned to Cullen. He was smiling at her, but his eyebrows were tilted in that sad way that she was really starting to dread.

She bowed to him with a flourish to escape his sorrowful gaze. “Commander,” she said in a mock-professional manner. “We should do this again sometime.”

He rubbed the back of his neck. “Y-yes, I… I would like that.”

She smiled at him, then turned to the crew. “Keep it up, boys and girls!” she called. “A royal to the crew member who beats Cullen using clean tactics only!”

There was a fresh round of applause and laughter, and Cullen shot her a chiding look. She winked at him playfully, then slipped away from her gathered crew and made her way toward the stern. Her mind was a roil of uncertainty and pride and wistfulness, and her blood was thrumming with nerves and an inconvenient degree of lust, and she desperately wished she could go for a nice bracing swim to clear her head.

Instead, she wandered back up to the helm and sat at the table. Varric briefly glanced at her. “Hey,” he said. “Back already?”

“Yeah,” she said. “I’m going to have a look over the maps.” She kicked her bare feet up on the table and pulled over one of Dorian’s maps.

She and Varric were quiet for a while. Then Varric spoke again. “Sure you don’t want to talk?”

Piper looked up. He was looking over his shoulder at her, and his expression was neutral but kind.

She looked down at the maps again. So much for pretending everything was fine. Damned Varric was too clever for his own good. Still, she wasn’t really in the mood to talk. “Thanks, Varric, but I’m all right,” she said.

“Okay,” he said affably. They fell quiet again, and Piper picked listlessly at the corner of the map for a minute.

“No matter what, you’re going to be fine, you know,” Varric said suddenly.

Piper glanced at him. His tone was matter-of-fact, but his expression was sympathetic.

She smiled and shrugged. She knew what he meant, but she decided to deflect. “Of course I will. We all will. I’ll be leading the charge, and you know how lucky I am.”

He chuckled. “I sure do.” He turned around to face the bow once more.

Piper smiled faintly at his back, then pulled over the captain’s log to start a new entry. She was a firm believer in making her own luck, and it really felt like she’d done everything in her power to draw Cullen into her world.

She could only hope that it was enough.

Read the rest on AO3, picking up from Cullen’s POV!

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theexistentiallyqueer · 5 years

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Sorry to bother, but where do autistic and adhd brains overlap? Because both are neurodivergent (and beautiful, I agree) But how can I find out which behaviour belongs more to me being autistic (got diagnosed this year) and which is adhd? (No Matter What Deadline, after several years in hostile environment (failed university, then call center work) I panic. Hard.) How do I disentangle adhd and autism to find out what strategies to use to function better?

Please don’t feel like you’re being a bother, because you’re not! Honestly the fact that someone is coming to me to ask ADHD questions makes me teary-eyed, because I’ve fought so hard to learn to function with ADHD that people Asking Me Things like I’m a trusted expert just makes my heart grow three sizes, the opposite of the Grinch.

I’m probably not the best person to ask about how ADHD and autism overlap specifically, especially if you’re taking this from an autistic POV. And I’m also not a behavioral expert, which is a very strong preface. But I can (and am very happy to) talk a bit about my experiences with ADHD and how I’ve learned to make things work for my brain.

I’m going to put this under a cut, if that’s okay with you, anon. It got kind of long and I don’t want to overrun anyone’s dash. And you can always, always ask me ADHD questions, and I’ll try my best to answer.

My ADHD tends to manifest specifically in the following ways:

Extreme hyperfixation that has its own varying degrees (e.g., I’m really into Fire Emblem: Three Houses, but I have so lack of interest in Byleth/Claude that my lack of interest feels like an actual void)

An inability to process feelings regarding things other people care strongly about that I don’t. If we’re using the same fandom example: I could rant forever about how Byleth/Edelgard gives me ALL THE FEELS, but if I friend I care about started to talk about Byleth/Claude, I would immediately lose all interest in the conversation and struggle to react in a way that doesn’t present me as a selfish monster who doesn’t care about the person I’m talking to.

I tend to monopolize conversation if I’m given the opportunity because I LOVE getting the chance to talk about my hyperfixations. If someone cuts me off when I’m really into a topic, I get incredibly irritated and have to try to restrain from myself from acting petty in response. The number of times I have smiled my mouth is a knife and said, “ANYWAY, as I WAS SAYING…” is beyond count.

I don’t recognize or remember people until I have something meaningful to associate them with. I also don’t tend to notice things that don’t clock themselves as Important in my brain. I usually describe this as “background furniture.” Even PEOPLE become background furniture. A girl I work with mentioned a person on her team had quit, and I’d literally walked by that person’s desk earlier that day and didn’t notice it was empty, because that person and the entire space they occupied was background scenery.

If something affects or touches me personally, it hits me Very Personally. I had a complete fucking breakdown watching the video of Philando Castille’s shooting, because I heard his daughter crying while she watched him getting shot and went down onto a spiral of personal loss over my own father to gun violence and started to immediately correlate the two. Separating ADHD brainness from my whiteness is complex and hard and (said sarcastically) so, so much fun.

The direct inverse of that are things like: I’m talking to my mom, who’s telling me about a high school friend of hers just got into a horrific vehicle accident and is in the ICU. My mom then goes on to give me regular status updates on this woman I don’t know. I get out of work, and she talks about this woman’s surgery. I get out of work, and she talks about this woman’s family’s attempt to find an adequate rehab center. They find a rehab center, and my mom shows me how her friend decorated her daughter’s room. My mom shows me a video of the girl working with a physical therapist, who gets her to push herself upright with a walker and take her tentative steps. “Awesome!” my brain thinks. “Great!” my brain thinks. All of it spans over several days, weeks, months. I have nothing to do with this constant influx of information. I don’t know how my brain should file it. I don’t know this woman who was injured. I feel for her in theory because no one should ever have to go through that even though so many people do, but I haven’t ACTIVELY PRETEND like I personally am invested in the situation or else my mother gives me Concerned Eyes because I seem to be In A Bad Mood Today.

When it comes to organization, I tend to lean towards hyper-organization rather than hypo-organization. By which I mean I over-organize to combat the fact that ADHD often results in disorganization, and disorganization results in chaos, and chaos gives me COMPLETE PANIC ATTACKS. At work at one point, I had my emails auto-tagging every incoming email based on the email type, on top of tagging for my clients. Every label had a different color, and it all made sense to me, because I’d made it. When my team had cover my stuff on a day I was out, my inbox was such a horror show that it left them feeling drained and distressed.

Let’s talk about socialization! I have a rocky relationship with my childhood best friend. When I discovered social justice in college, I started picking fights with everyone over everything Problematique. The first major fight I had with my best friend at the time was because she felt I was over-aggressive towards a mutual male friend of ours. She was probably right, because I know the kind of bullying behavior I later developed. I thought I learned from it. After the 2016 election, I messaged her on FB, thinking I had a sympathetic ear, to say that seeing her mother post constant messages of support for Trump and sharing stuff dismissing Trump’s sexual assault allegations was particularly hurtful considering I’d told my friend that my mom had been sexually assaulted.. I’m not going to share what she said, but she wasn’t in the wrong. We didn’t talk for several months after that.

Speaking of her! When she started dating the guy she’s now married to, at one point I asked her if they’d had sex yet. I asked it because I thought it was a thing you were Supposed To Talk About as friends, and also because I was, in a way, morbidly curious, because I’m grey-ace and queer. She confirmed that they had, but I still felt so icky and uncomfortable about that for so long afterwards. It was only after I started to understand that I’m not cis and not allo that I really understood why: I was forcing myself to perform what I thought female friendship was based on how it’s portrayed in media, and it’s only once I began to understand that I’m on the ace spectrum and that I’m nonbinary that I really started to understand how forced mainstream conversations of attraction are.

I’m loud! I’m loud! I’m loud! I’m loud all the time! I live with my mom and I socialize with my mom and when we’re in public spaces and I’m talking about something that interests me, she always, always, always feels like she has to shush me. What makes it ironic? If there are other people being loud around me, I can’t function. I can’t process the noise. It’s EVEN WORSE if they’re speaking in another language, because if it’s English I can process the words at least, but if it’s another language, it’s just pure, inescapable sound that I know has meaning but can’t intuit, and if I can’t understand something, that’s as bad as dying.

From what I’ve read about autism, here are ways I THINK my ADHD traits overlap with autistic traits:

I can’t read facial expressions. I think I have a better concept of emotional nuance in facial expressions than someone who’s strictly autistic, but I’ll still panic when I see a smile that isn’t bland enough. RDS (rejection-sensitive dysphoria) will kick in. They hate me, they hate me, they hate me, is the track my brain will play on repeat until I’ve drunk myself into oblivion. Whenever someone smiles, I mistrust it immediately.

Eye contact is incredibly fucking frustrating. I understand that it’s expected, but it’s SO UNCOMFORTABLE. Why do we need to stare into each other’s eyes to understand one another? How can you people write whole treatises on the sanctity of locking gazes and finding an instant intellectual bond without realizing that eye contact that’s not called for is personally invasive?

I can’t understand flirting vs not flirting to the point that I’m absolutely paranoid someone is flirting with me, at which point I usually become hostile if I think they ARE, because DON’T FLIRT WITH ME. TALK to me!

I hate, hate, hate unsolicited physical contact. If I’m in a state of over-expression, I hate it even more. I’m not physically withdrawn, because I love hugs, and cuddles, and human touch. But when I’ve spent the entire day listening to other people talk and I have to walk into a room where people continue to talk, if someone touches me, it’s fucking No-Oh-One.

Someone is interested in a thing I’m interested in. We’ll use Persona 5 as the concept, because this honestly happened recently. I talk with the guy whose desk is across from mine about Persona 5 all the time. He’s also excited about Royal. I started going into my Sophia theory that I’ve really only lobbied at @softspokensansa. I could see, I could viscerally see, the interest drain from his expression. BUT I HAVE AN IDEA SO I WILL TALK ABOUT IT ANYWAY, and then afterwards I felt incredibly resentful that I was being filtered through a cookie-cutter drain.

It’s painful–it’s really painful!–to try to talk about my spiritual ideas with other people. I have a side blog I just started and am preppy myself to share, and I’m absofuckinglutely TERRIFIED everyone is going to write me off without looking at what I have to say. IT’S THE RSD AGAIN! Nothing I ever said has actually mattered before, so why should it now?

I feel, constantly, like I’m halfway between a point of reality and a point of something. What that something is is indefinable, but regardless of it, I exist.

I’d like to direct you to two very positive youtubers I know; I meant to do this earlier, but now feels right in terms of how I’ve written: How To ADHD and Amethyst Schaber.I credit both of them in helping me find a safe place with ADHD before diagnosis. There are stories other than yours that matter.

I wish you the best, anon! If you think you’re autistic and ADHD: given the comorbidity between the two, you probably are! And ADHD is just as beautiful, complicated, and misunderstood as autism is.

If anyone reading this can speak to living as both autistic and ADHD, please respond so I can lift your voice. And to my anon: you’re beautiful completely. I hope my story has helped you in its anyway, and I hope that you find yourself at a place of peace. It’s a struggle to get there, but it’s worth it, every step of the way.

#anonymous #thanks for coming to my teq talk #gaydhd

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adambstingus · 5 years

Text

The diabolical genius of the baby advice industry

The long read: Every baffled new parent goes searching for answers in baby manuals. But what they really offer is the reassuring fantasy that lifes most difficult questions have one right answer

Human beings are born too soon. Within hours of arriving in the world, a baby antelope can clamber up to a wobbly standing position; a day-old zebra foal can run from hyenas; a sea-turtle, newly hatched in the sand, knows how to find its way to the ocean. Newborn humans, on the other hand, can’t hold up their own heads without someone to help them. They can’t even burp without assistance. Place a baby human on its stomach at one day old – or even three months old, the age at which lion cubs may be starting to learn to hunt – and it’s stranded in position until you decide to turn it over, or a sabre-toothed tiger strolls into the cave to claim it. The reason for this ineptitude is well-known: our huge brains, which make us the cleverest mammals on the planet, wouldn’t fit through the birth canal if they developed more fully in the womb. (Recently, cognitive scientists have speculated that babies may actually be getting more useless as evolution proceeds; if natural selection favours ever bigger brains, you’d expect humans to be born with more and more developing left to do.)

This is why humans have “parenting”: there is a uniquely enormous gap between the human infant and the mature animal. That gap must be bridged, and it’s difficult to resist the conclusion that there must be many specific things adults need to get right in order to bridge it. This, in turn, is why there are parenting advice manuals – hundreds and hundreds of them, serving as an index of the changing ways we have worried about how we might mess up our children.

When my son was born, 15 months ago, I was under no illusion that I had any idea what I was doing. But I did think I understood self-help books. For longer than I’d like to admit, I’ve written a weekly column about psychology and the happiness industry, in the course of which I have read stacks and stacks of books on popular psychology. I even wrote one myself, specifically aimed at readers who – like me – distrusted the hyperbolic promises of mainstream self-help. Midway through my partner’s pregnancy, when I first clicked “Bestsellers in Parenting: Early Childhood” on Amazon, I naively assumed it would be easy enough to pick up two or three titles, sift the science-backed wheat from the chaff, apply it where useful, and avoid getting too invested in any one book or parenting guru.

After all, I knew that advice books in other fields often contradicted each other, and indeed themselves, and so should never be taken too seriously. I understood that the search for One Right Answer to life’s biggest questions was futile, even self-exacerbating, leading only to a downward spiral in which attempting the perfect implementation of any one book’s recipe for happiness only generated further anxiety, necessitating the purchase of another book in an effort to allay it. (My own book, The Antidote, argues that trying to think positively reliably leads to more stress and misery.)

I knew all these things – but what I didn’t yet understand was the diabolical genius of the baby-advice industry, which targets people at their most sleep-deprived, at the beginning of what will surely be the weightiest responsibility of their lives, and suggests that maybe, just maybe, between the covers of this book, lies the morsel of information that will make the difference between their baby’s flourishing or floundering. The brilliance of this system is that it works on the most sceptical readers, too, because you don’t need to believe it’s likely such a morsel actually exists. You need only think it likely enough to justify spending another £10.99 on, oh, you know, the entire future happiness of your child, just in case. Assuming you’ve got £10.99 to spare, what kind of monster would refuse?

And so “two or three” books became six, and 10, and eventually 23, all with titles that, even before the sleep deprivation set in, had begun to blur into one other: The Baby Book and Secrets of the Baby Whisperer and The Happiest Baby on the Block and Healthy Sleep Habits, Happy Child and The Contented Little Baby Book. (Their cover designs blurred even more. It’s hard to imagine the jacket art meeting for most baby books lasting more than a few seconds: “How about … a photo of a baby?”) If there is a single secret of good parenting, it is surely to be found on the rickety, self-assembly bookcase in the little back bedroom of our flat.

A tone of overbearingly cheery confidence characterises almost all such books, which makes sense; half the hope in purchasing any one of them is that you might absorb some of the author’s breezy self-assurance. Yet for all this certitude, it rapidly became clear that the modern terrain of infant advice was starkly divided into two opposed camps, each in a permanent state of indignation at the very existence of the other. On one side were the gurus I came to think of as the Baby Trainers, who urged us to get our newborn on to a strict schedule as soon as possible, both because the absence of such structure would leave him existentially insecure, but also so he could be seamlessly integrated into the rhythms of the household, allowing everyone to get some sleep and enabling both parents swiftly to return to work. This is the busy, timetabled world in which we live, the Baby Trainers seemed to be saying; the challenge was to make life with an infant workable within it.

On the other side were the Natural Parents, for whom all schedules – and, often enough, the very notion of mothers having jobs to return to – were further proof that modernity had corrupted the purity of parenthood, which could be recovered only by emulating the earthy practices of indigenous tribes in the developing world and/or prehistoric humans, these two groups being, according to this camp, for all practical purposes the same.

Illustration by Peter Gamlen

A handful of the books I bought resisted classification, but only by maddeningly insisting on the importance of both approaches at once: by the time he was 10 months old, I learned from What to Expect: The First Year, we’d need to be giving our son “¼ to ½ cup of dairy foods per day” and “¼ to ½ cup of protein foods per day”, while also not getting “caught up in measurements”. (There is also a subgenre of books aimed specifically at new fathers, but since they are an almost uninterrupted wasteland of jokes about breasts and beer, this article will give them the attention they deserve, which is none.)

It may be no coincidence that hostilities between camps seem to rage most furiously in those areas where there is the least scientific evidence to favour one or another technique. In online discussion forums, the battles reach their most frenzied over the question of whether letting your baby cry itself to sleep is sensible or tantamount to child abuse. At first glance, the sheer level of emotional investment confused me: why were all these people, presumably very busy looking after their own babies, so obsessed with how other people were caring for other babies they’d never meet?

But such mysteries begin to disperse when you realise that baby advice isn’t only, or perhaps even mainly, about raising children. Rather, it is a vehicle for the yearning – surely not unique to parents – that if we could only track down the correct information and apply the best techniques, it might be possible to bring the terrifying unpredictability of the world under control, and make life go right. It’s too late for us adults, of course. But a brand-new baby makes it possible to believe in the fantasy once more. Baby manuals seem to offer all the promise of self-help books, minus the challenges posed by the frustratingly intransigent obstacle of your existing self.

The essential challenge confronting any would-be parenting guru is this: nobody really knows what a baby is. This is obviously true of the panicked new parents, suddenly ejected from hospital to home, and faced with the responsibility of keeping the thing alive. But it is barely less true of the experts.

To begin with, thanks to the still mysterious phenomenon that Sigmund Freud labelled “infantile amnesia”, nobody can remember what it was like to be a baby. Furthermore, the experiments that could decisively distinguish the best from the worst ways to treat an infant, in terms of future flourishing, would be blatantly unethical; and in the real world, it’s virtually impossible to disentangle the innumerable variables acting upon any individual baby. Does being breastfed really confer lifelong benefits, or do those benefits come from being raised by the kind of mother – older, better educated, better-off – who’s far more likely to breastfeed? (Parenting experts who are childless, such as the “queen of routine” Gina Ford, author of the unavoidable Contented Little Baby series, attract a lot of sharp words for it, but this seems unfair. Where Ford has direct experience of parenting none of the 130 million babies born on Earth each year, most gurus only have direct experience of parenting two or three babies, which isn’t much better as a sample size. The assumption that whatever worked for you will probably work for everyone, which is endemic in the self-help world, reaches an extreme in the pages of baby books.)

“Children are, at once, deeply familiar and profoundly alien,” writes the philosopher and developmental psychologist Alison Gopnik – and babies are most alien of all. For example: are they clever or stupid? Clearly, they’re inept at pretty much everything; yet “science, and indeed common sense, tells us that in those early years they are learning more than they ever will again,” as Gopnik notes, which hardly sounds like ineptitude.

Nothing struck me more forcefully, in my early months as a parent, as the sheer strangeness of the new houseguest. Where had he come from? What was his business here? Sitting in our glider chair, rocking my son back to sleep at 3.30am, I’d often wonder what might be going on in there, but the question led straight to dumbfoundedness. It wasn’t just that I didn’t know what it was like to be him, but that I couldn’t imagine what it could be like, in his pre-linguistic world where every hour brought experiences of utter novelty. Perhaps it’s no wonder that philosophers have tended to deal with the puzzle of babies by ignoring them entirely: one mid-1960s edition of the Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Gopnik points out, contained zero index references to babies, infants, mothers, fathers, parents or families, and only four to children. (There were many more references to angels.)

This explains the unspoken promise detectable between the lines of almost every baby manual: that this book, this guru, might be able to turn the alien in the bassinet into something altogether less daunting and more manageable, reminiscent of all those complicated-but-doable projects you’ve handled at home or the office in the past. Sometimes this is little more than a matter of tone, as in the case of the bestselling parenting advice book in history, What to Expect When You’re Expecting – which has 18.5m copies in print, and has spawned more than 10 spin-off books and a mediocre 2012 romantic comedy starring Cameron Diaz. What to Expect tries to distract from the outlandishness of what’s approaching by means of a relentlessly upbeat tone, characterised by compulsive wordplay that makes you worry for the authors’ mental health: “With just weeks to go before D-Day, have you come to terms with your baby coming to term? Will you be ready when that big moment – and that little bundle – arrives?” It rarely failed to make me – or even my partner, far less perturbable despite being the one who was actually pregnant – more stressed.

Other authors promise to eliminate the uncertainty inherent in the situation by making inexcusably specific claims about how things will unfold. The Wonder Weeks, a popular book by the Dutch husband-and-wife child development experts Frans Plooij and Hetty van de Rijt, insists upon the existence of 10 predictable “magic leaps forward” in your baby’s neurological development, heralded in each case by bouts of fussiness, raising the prospect that you might be able to tick them off like milestones in a home-renovation project. For example: at 46 weeks old, the authors declare, you can expect your baby to start to understand sequences, such as the steps involved in fitting one object into another. (Typically for the genre, The Wonder Weeks tries to reassure readers these stages will unfold naturally, while strongly hinting there are specific things parents must do to make them go well.) But it’s not wholly astonishing to learn, from Dutch press reports, that when one of Plooij’s PhD students sought experimental evidence for these leaps, she found none, and Plooij tried to block the publication of her results, triggering a controversy that saw him dismissed from his university post.

Of course all babies don’t follow an extremely precise 10-stage schedule: the very idea, to anyone who is well-slept and thinking straight, is preposterous. But it is difficult to imagine anything more profoundly reassuring to the first-time parent of a one-week-old than the possibility that they might.

Illustration by Peter Gamlen

This same urge to recast a baby as something fundamentally mundane and familiar suffuses the debate over sleep, where hostilities between the Baby Trainers and the Natural Parents are most acute. From five or six months old, I learned, we could choose to let our baby cry himself to sleep for a few nights, which the Baby Trainers felt was essential if he were ever to learn to “self-soothe”, but which the Natural Parents swore would cause lasting neurological damage. (Besides, they argued, if the baby did stop crying as a result of such sleep training, it would only be because hundreds of thousands of years of evolution had hardwired him to assume that if his parents weren’t responding, they must have been eaten by wild animals, and remaining silent was his only hope of survival.)

Or we could respond within seconds to every cry, sharing our bed with our baby, resigning ourselves to years of multiple nighttime wakings for breastfeeding, all of which the Natural Parents felt was the least a loving mother ought to do, not to mention the instinctive thing all mothers had been hardwired to do – but which the Baby Trainers warned would lead to brain-dead parents unable to properly discharge their duties, plus a maladjusted child incapable of spending five minutes in a different room from them, and probably also divorce. (In reality, there is no persuasive scientific evidence of long-term harm from sleep training; I lost count of the number of times I followed a link or footnote provided by one of the Natural Parents, only to find a study about rats, or babies raised in environments of severe and chronic neglect, such as Romanian orphanages.)

At their worst, the Baby Trainers seemed to suggest that my son was best thought of as an unusually impressive dog, who could be trained, using behavioural tricks, to do what we wanted: if we stopped responding to his night-time cries, he’d learn that he could return to sleep without our assistance and would, as a consequence, stop crying. But the Natural Parents employed an even more outlandish analogy: that he was essentially an adult trapped in the body of a baby, so that letting him cry was equivalent to abandoning a distressed grown-up who’d lost the ability to speak. “Imagine being in an extreme panic attack but your best friend locks you in a room alone while saying ‘Never mind, you’ll be fine’,” as one Natural Parent blogger put it – which sounds awful, until you realise there’s no reason to believe this is what a baby’s experience is like. It was obvious to me that our son was neither a dog nor a miniature adult, yet each analogy had its appeal. If he wasn’t trainable at all, why were we agonising about the right way to do any of this in the first place? And if being inside his head wasn’t at least a little similar to being inside mine, why did the idea of letting him cry trouble me?

Eventually, around six months, after agonising over the question for several weeks, we decided to try sleep training. We re-read the relevant chapters, assembled the alcohol we planned to use to suppress our instinct to intervene during the inevitable hours of screaming that the books foretold – and steeled ourselves to feel like monstrous parents. But more strangeness was in store: the baby cried mildly for about four minutes, slept for 10 hours, and woke in a buoyant mood. I spent much of the night awake, convinced something must be terribly wrong. None of the books had suggested this turn of events; my son appeared to be following an entirely different manual of instructions.

People have been dispensing baby-rearing guidance in written form almost since the beginning of writing, and it is a storehouse of absurd advice, testifying to the truth that babies have always been a source of bafflement. New mothers have been advised to smear their newborns daily in butter or lard, or to ensure that they were always put to sleep facing due north. In one 1920 book by a team of eugenicists, unearthed by the writer Therese O’Neill for an essay in the Atlantic, pregnant women are told to “avoid thinking of ugly people, or those marked by any deformity or disease”. Whiskey and even morphine were frequently recommended as solutions to the pain of teething.

The genre expanded greatly during the 19th century, as urbanisation and industrialisation broke apart the extended families through which advice had previously been communicated, from grandmothers, mothers, and aunts – and as male paediatricians, who were starting to preside over a field traditionally dominated by midwives, sought to burnish their authority with parenting systems bearing the hallmarks of modern science. Today, their advice seems horrifyingly chilly: mothers and fathers alike were standardly exhorted to pick up their babies as infrequently as possible, to resist the urge to play with them, and to refrain from kissing them. Yet with child mortality so high – in 1900, 30% of deaths in the US were under-fives – this advice embodied a bleak wisdom. Less physical contact meant less chance of communicating dangerous diseases, and there was a psychological rationale for not getting too emotionally invested in any one child.

Child mortality began to decline precipitously from the turn of the century, and with it, the life-or-death justification for this kind of advice. But the result was not a new generation of experts urging parents to relax, on the grounds that everything would probably be fine. (Books informed by 20th-century psychoanalysis, such as those by Benjamin Spock and Donald Winnicott, would later advise a far less rigid approach, arguing that a “good enough mother”, who didn’t always follow the rules perfectly, was perhaps even better than one who did, since that helped babies gradually to learn to tolerate frustration. But they were still half a century away.)

Instead, the anxiety that had formerly attached itself to the risk of a child dying took a more modern form: the fear that a baby reared with too much indulgence might grow up “coddled”, unfit for the new era of high technology and increasing economic competition; or even, as at least one American paediatrician warned, ripe for conversion to socialism. “When you are tempted to pet your child,” wrote the psychologist John Watson in 1928, in his book Psychological Care of Infant and Child, which was hardly idiosyncratic for its time, “remember that mother love is a dangerous instrument. An instrument which may inflict a never-healing wound, a wound which may make infancy unhappy, adolescence a nightmare, an instrument which may wreck your adult son or daughter’s vocational future and their chances for marital happiness.”

Thus began the transformation that would culminate in the contemporary baby-advice industry. With every passing year, there was less and less to worry about: in the developed world today, by any meaningful historical yardstick, your baby will almost certainly be fine, and if it isn’t, that will almost certainly be due to factors entirely beyond your control. Yet the anxiety remains – perhaps for no other reason than that becoming a parent is an inherently anxiety-inducing experience; or perhaps because modern life induces so much anxiety for other reasons, which we then project upon our babies. And so baby manuals became more and more fixated on questions that would have struck any 19th-century parent as trivial, such as for precisely how many minutes it’s acceptable to let babies cry; or how the shape of a pacifier might affect the alignment of their teeth; or whether their lifelong health might be damaged by traces of chemicals in the plastics used to make their bowls and spoons.

Perhaps it was inevitable that this process, made possible by the advance of medicine, should end with a crop of parenting philosophies rooted in the passionate conviction that the era of modern science and technology has led us astray. Before the baby arrived, I’d had the luxury of avoiding debates over parenting styles, and no sense of how vicious they could get; but now I felt I had no option but to plunge into the controversy over “attachment parenting”, the most extreme expression of the doctrine of the Natural Parents. After all, what if we ought to be doing it?

Admittedly, the story of its origins inspired little confidence. In the 1950s, I learned, a part-time model from Manhattan named Jean Liedloff met a beguiling European aristocrat who persuaded her to accompany him on a trip to Venezuela in search of diamonds. Instead, Liedloff had become entranced by the Ye’kuana tribespeople of the Venezuelan rainforest. Ye’kuana mothers, she found, carried their babies against their bodies, virtually without interruption, and these babies, she claimed later, were “uniformly well-behaved: never fought, were never punished, [and] always obeyed happily and instantly”. Far from “needing peace and quiet to go to sleep, [they] snoozed blissfully whenever they were tired, while the men, women, or children carrying them danced, walked, shouted, or paddled canoes”. By contrast, she lamented, westerners had learned “to overrule our natural response and follow the going fashion dictated by babycare ‘experts’.”

Not for the last time in the history of the baby advice industry, Liedloff turned her disdain for parenting experts into a successful career as one, publishing a 1975 book, The Continuum Concept, which urged American and European parents to embrace the laid-back ways of the Ye’kuana. It sold healthily, but its greatest effect was undoubtedly in the influence it had on William Sears, a devout Christian paediatrician from Illinois who incorporated its message into his own childcare philosophy, coining the term “attachment parenting” and achieving breakthrough success in 1992 with The Baby Book: Everything You Need to Know about Your Baby from Birth to Age Two, written with his wife, Martha. In it, they urge parents to shun experts and reconnect with their deepest instincts – provided, of course, that these instincts coincide with the Searses’ prescriptions. These include near-constant “baby-wearing”, sharing a bed with your baby, and round-the-clock breastfeeding until age two or beyond. This, they wrote, was “the way that parents for centuries have taken care of babies, until childcare advisers came on the scene and led parents to follow books instead of their babies”. (William and Martha Sears, and their paediatrician sons James, Robert and Peter, have now published more than 30 books between them.)

It isn’t difficult, even when you’ve been up since midnight with a restless four-month-old, to see that there may be some logical flaws in this approach. Why assume that childcare practices that predate modernity are inherently superior? Even if they were, why assume they still would be when transplanted into an environment for which they were not designed? Isn’t there something deeply condescending in the implication that contemporary Venezuelan tribespeople are closer to “human nature” than those of us with better access to cutting-edge medicine – which is, after all, no less a product of our evolved human brains? And isn’t it possible that people dwelling in the rainforest spurn strollers in favour of baby slings just because they lack paved roads?

Illustration by Peter Gamlen

Attachment parenting plays on a theme familiar in self-help: the idea that you should reject outside expertise in favour of your own instincts and inner resources – except in the case of the guru offering this advice, who demands your obedience to his or her expertise. Apart from being disingenuous, this fails to quell anxiety anyway. Attempting to care for an infant in accordance with one’s instincts isn’t automatically more relaxing than trying to make them comply with a schedule, since you’re liable to find yourself constantly questioning whether or not you’re following your instincts faithfully enough.

“As a scholar, I consider this kind of worshipful but patronising attitude toward indigenous peoples a serious error,” the American academic Cynthia Eller has written. And “as a parent, I resent having to measure my civilised, bookish, awkward approach to mothering against the supposedly effortless, natural perfection of ‘simpler’ women the world over … especially when these ‘simpler’ and more ‘natural’ women don’t actually exist.” For every indigenous tribe where babies purportedly never cry, she points out, there is another, such as the Munduruku of the Brazilian rainforest, who also carry their infants everywhere, yet whose children, to quote the anthropologists Yolanda and Robert Murphy, “do not have happy dispositions, and there is a heavy frequency of chronic crying and emotional upsets”.

The Searses, in any case, have another agenda: they have described attachment parenting as “the way God designed us to care for babies”. Many critics have pointed out that strict adherence to their advice is essentially impossible for mothers with jobs – which sends an implicit message that a working mother is not a good one. Advice literature is usually read by people looking to assuage their worries – but it might be better understood as an expression of an author’s anxieties about the ways society is changing.

Insofar as there is any main way in which “parents for centuries have taken care of babies”, the truth seems to be that for most of human history, they were largely ignored, until they were old enough to begin contributing to the survival of household or tribe. The really significant divide in approaches to parenting, according to the anthropologist David Lancy, isn’t between Baby Trainers and Natural Parents, or any similar disagreement about how to pay attention to your infant; it’s about whether to pay much attention at all. For much of history, and in many tribal societies today, he writes, young children have been viewed as “hardy plants that needed little close attention”.

In the cultures Lancy has labelled “pick when ripe”, babies are largely left to entertain themselves; it’s only in those he calls “pick when green”, such as ours, that they’re the centre of attention from day one. This is a relatively recent phenomenon: Lancy dates the emergence of what he wryly calls our “neontocracy” – a society organised around the interests of the youngest – to the emergence of the middle class in 17th-century Holland, which led Europe in urbanisation, the growth of commerce, and the liberalisation of culture, including towards children: “Among the growing [Dutch] middle class, children were no longer viewed merely as chattel but as having inherent value.” You need disposable income, and time, even to have the option of treating small children as valuable not only for the contribution they may one day make, but for what they already are.

“The promise of [the contemporary concept of] parenting is that there is some set of techniques, some particular expertise, that parents could acquire that would help them accomplish the goal of shaping their children’s lives,” writes psychologist Alison Gopnik. That this should be their goal in the first place is itself a recent development; parents in an earlier era would have been unlikely to imagine they had such power over a child’s future personality. But in any case, the problem with this is hiding in plain sight: if there were a secret to raising happy or successful children, children whose parents didn’t know the secret wouldn’t end up happy or successful. Yet almost every human in history has been raised without the insights of almost every book of parenting advice ever published.

The anthropological literature is littered with contemporary examples of baby-rearing practices that would appal both Baby Trainers and Natural Parents: among the Hausa-Fulani of west Africa, for example, there is a taboo against mothers making eye contact with their children; the Swazi of southern Africa sometimes don’t even name a baby until it is several months old. Yet most children raised that way – presumably also like most of those babies smothered with butter or lard – turn out fine. It’s hard not to think of the search for the right techniques as a fuss over nothing – or, more to the point, the cause of added anxiety we’re at risk of transmitting to our children.

Our mistake, Gopnik argues, isn’t one of employing the wrong techniques, but of thinking in terms of techniques at all – in imagining that anything as complex as a relationship between humans could be reduced to a set of consciously manipulable variables. That’s an alluring thought, and one it might be natural to believe given how we’ve succeeded in using science and technology to control so much in our lives. But it’s for good reason that Mary Ainsworth and John Bowlby, the pioneering psychologists who studied the basis of “secure attachment” in children, made barely any mention of specific practices such as breastfeeding, baby-wearing or co-sleeping; secure attachment, they concluded, didn’t result from the use of any such techniques, but from the overall quality of relationship between infants and parents who were “fairly consistently available” to them, attuned to their children’s emotions at least some of the time and – notwithstanding inevitable moments of inattention or irritability – basically loving. (“Attachment parenting” perpetuates a confusion by taking “attachment” to mean physical attachment to one’s baby, when a critical dimension of secure attachment, in Ainsworth and Bowlby’s sense, is the child’s ability to withstand the absence of the parent. There remains no body of scientific evidence to suggest that the specific techniques of attachment parenting make secure attachment more likely.)

“It is very difficult to find any reliable, empirical relation between the small variations in what parents do – the variations that are the focus of parenting [advice] – and the resulting adult traits of their children,” Gopnik writes in her recent book The Gardener and the Carpenter. “There is very little evidence that conscious decisions about co-sleeping or not, letting your children ‘cry it out’ or holding them till they fall asleep, or forcing them to do extra homework or letting them play have reliable and predictable long-term effects on who those children become. From an empirical perspective, parenting is a mug’s game.” Her book’s title refers to the shift in mindset she advocates: we ought to stop thinking of children as construction projects, and instead think of ourselves as gardeners, providing a secure and stable environment in which our children will prove remarkably capable of raising themselves.

Last year, Amy Brown, a health researcher at Swansea University, conducted a study involving 354 new mothers, examining their use of parenting books “that encourage parents to try to put their babies into strict sleeping and feeding routines” – the manuals of the Baby Trainers. The more such books a mother read, Brown found, the more depressive symptoms and the lower self-confidence she reported. This isn’t surprising: rules create expectations from which a baby will almost inevitably diverge, triggering stress. (As the psychotherapist Naomi Stadlen has argued, rule-following also has the effect of making childcare more boring: the more you’re focused on the rules, the less you’re focused on getting to know your specific baby.) But the advice of the Natural Parents is hardly any better: their techniques are still techniques, with the added complication that you don’t even have a yardstick by which to judge if you’re implementing them properly.

But when I think hard about it, I’m not sure it’s truly possible to live according to Gopnik’s technique-free philosophy, either. It may be a matter of fact that I lack the influence I imagine myself to have over my son’s life, but it still feels as if I do. And whether or not they really matter, choices must be made: whether to call the doctor about that rash; when to start looking into pre-school; whether to try to make him read picture-books when he’d rather be playing with dustballs under the sofa. This, I suspect, may be the lasting lesson of the baby advice books that now sit largely unconsulted at the back of our flat. They failed to deliver on their promise to reveal the one right way to do things. Then again, they provided no firm reason to conclude it would be impossible to find the right way. Perhaps what you really learn from baby books is one important aspect of the predicament of parenthood: that while there might indeed be one right way to do things, you will never get to find out what it is.

Illustrations by Peter Gamlen

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from All Of Beer http://allofbeer.com/the-diabolical-genius-of-the-baby-advice-industry/ from All of Beer https://allofbeercom.tumblr.com/post/183699429317

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