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ninzied · 3 years

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that which we call a rose

based on the prompt: a hello/goodbye kiss that is given without thinking - where neither person thinks twice about it.

happy valentine’s day, kastle fam!

On the second Thursday of every month, Karen can’t help the extra spring in her step. There’s no point in trying to hide it—she does have an office adjacent to Matt’s, after all—but until she knows what it even is, she’ll let her friends draw their own conclusions.

This month is no exception.

“So…hot date tonight?” asks Foggy, precisely ten minutes after Matt’s said goodbye. Though Foggy’s doing his best to sound nonchalant, he’s clearly been waiting all day to spring the question on her. “You haven’t stopped smiling since you walked in this morning. And that was before we even had coffee. What gives?”

“Not a date,” says Karen lightly. “But a something.”

“Wait.” Foggy looks up from his briefcase, dropping every pretense now. “Yeah? That’s great! I’m so happy for you, Karen.”

She looks a little bemusedly at him. “Thanks, Foggy, but it’s not a big deal. Just takeout and whatever’s on TV tonight, probably.”

“Hey,” says Foggy. “Not gonna lie, but that sounds pretty appealing right now.”

Karen lets out a laugh. “Why? What’s stopping you and Marci?”

“You know how she gets about this kind of thing.” Foggy glances at his watch, and groans. “Shoot. I still have to pick up flowers. I can’t afford to be late—literally. This place had like a five-month wait list for tonight, and I think there’s a surcharge if we hold up one of their tables.” He throws her a rueful smile. “Wish me luck.”

“Good luck,” says Karen, in a tone that she hopes will come across as commiserating rather than slightly confused. Was there some memo about today that she missed?

“And you have a good ‘not a date but a something,’” says Foggy, practically beaming at her. “You can”—he gives a comical wag of his eyebrow—”not tell me all about it tomorrow, sound good?”

“Sure,” says Karen, smiling distractedly. She waits until Foggy has gone, the door closed securely behind him. And then she picks up her tiny desk calendar, which she’d forgotten to flip over to February, and looks down at today’s date.

Oh. God.

…

The signs are everywhere, on her walk home from the subway.

For the life of her, Karen doesn’t know how she could’ve missed them before. Paper hearts plastered on storefront windows. Floral shops spilling out onto the sidewalks. Restaurants boasting their two-for-one specials. And the couples. All the couples, wherever she turns.

By the time she’s at her apartment, Karen is nearing levels of genuine panic.

She hangs up her work clothes as if on autopilot. She pulls on a worn pair of leggings and a soft, oversized sweater before pausing to reconsider, and then she changes out of that too. This isn’t just any second Thursday of the month anymore.

She checks her phone, in case Frank has canceled.

She does have a text from him, but all it says is that he’s running about a half hour late—his latest demolition site is all the way up in the Bronx, and traffic is a bitch right now—but how does she feel about Vietnamese for dinner?

There’s no doubt in her mind that the day has not occurred to him either.

Perfect. I’ll be ready with the wine, she sends back, and immediately wonders what has come over her. Beer would’ve been the more appropriate choice for this very much not-a-date, and besides that, they never drink wine together. Whiskey, sometimes, but they’d finished off her last bottle of Maker’s the last time he was here.

Wine is different. Wine means something. Right?

What was she thinking?

And what on earth is she supposed to wear?

…

Karen answers the door an hour later, back in her sweater and leggings. She breathes a small sigh of relief to find Frank there in his typical attire—jeans, with a faded black henley, and a crooked half-grin as he steps over the threshold into her apartment.

“Hey,” she says.

“Hey,” he says back, like it’s just another day. Like this is just another dinner for them to catch up. He holds up a bag and says, “Hungry?”

“Starving.” She reaches for the food so he can get out of his coat, but he waves her gently off.

“’S’okay, I got it.” He looks at her, his gaze going warm. “Think you said there’d be wine?”

And just like that, the rest of her anxiety melts away. There’s still a light flutter of nerves in her stomach, but that’s something else.

Something that she’s always going to feel whenever she’s around him, whether it’s Valentine’s Day or not.

…

Despite how casually Frank is dressed, there’s always a sense of formality to the way he moves around in her place. Like he’s not quite sure whether he’s intruding or not.

He carefully folds his jacket over the back of her couch before taking the food to her kitchen, unpacking each dish as she pulls out the wine.

She tells him about work—minus Foggy’s theories on how she planned to spend her evening—and Frank doesn’t say much, but she knows that he’s listening, attentive to her as ever.

Somewhere between the first and second glass of wine is when he starts to loosen a little, leaning his elbows onto the counter, swiping the last bite of spring roll from her plate.

He tells her small stories about how work has been going for him, and each time she laughs he ducks his head down, the corners of his eyes crinkling.

They end up eating half the food before realizing they’re still standing in her kitchen.

Frank takes their wine to the couch, and she turns the TV on at low volume, flipping aimlessly through the channels.

They settle on a cooking show, which would’ve surprised her one year ago, before these Thursday night dinners. Before he teased her for the one frying pan that she owned and resigned himself to eating takeout from then on. Before they learned to laugh about things like what Matt said at work that day, or the fact that Frank hasn’t had to kill anyone with a sledgehammer. Not recently, anyway.

“All right,” he says, pointing at the pasta on her TV screen. “Next month, we’re doing this at my place for a change, and I’m making you that.”

She doesn’t know why she does it.

Maybe it’s his casual reference to next times. Maybe it’s how closely they’ve wound up sitting together, with her thigh snug against his, the arm he’s draped warmly over the back of the couch right behind her.

Maybe it’s the way this not-so-random Thursday in February feels as though it could become something like every day, for them.

“Deal.” She puts a hand on his knee without even thinking about it, smiling as she tells him, “All right, I’m going to go to the bathroom real quick.”

“Okay,” says Frank, turning to smile back at her.

It happens so fast, so instinctively that before she knows what she’s doing, she’s leaning in, and pressing her mouth briefly to his as she stands from the couch.

Like this is an everyday kind of thing for them too, kissing each other before one of them’s about to leave the room.

Karen makes it down the hall without any memory of how her legs have carried her there. Oh God. Oh God.

Her cheeks are flaming when she shuts the bathroom door behind her.

…

After splashing water on her face, and dabbing it dry with shaky hands, she looks in the mirror and wills every last part of her being to get a freaking grip. This is Frank, and she can be honest with him. Even if it means being honest with herself.

She knows what this is. She knows what she wants it to be. And she’s done letting either of them think that anything less is going to be enough for her.

Karen takes a deep breath and steps out of the bathroom.

…

She hadn’t been gone long, but apparently it was long enough.

The TV’s shut off, their wine glasses cleared from the coffee table. He’s not on the couch.

He’s not—anywhere in her living room.

But as she moves closer, she sees his coat still folded there, and then she hears the sound of movement in the kitchen. She doesn’t know whether she’s more relieved or apprehensive at the prospect of facing him right now, but she supposes she’s grateful she even has the option to decide between the two.

Frank’s clearing the counter, so she can’t get a good read on his face. He’s quiet, though, brows creased together even more somberly than usual, and the fact that he won’t meet her eye should tell her everything he’s not saying out loud.

Their leftovers are stacked neatly next to the takeout bag. He slides the bag out of her way as she picks up the food containers, storing them in her fridge. There’s a six-pack of beer on one of the lower shelves, the bottles clinking together as she closes the door.

“Frank,” she says, careful not to look over at him, “I think we should talk about what we’re doing here.”

He swallows audibly. And then he says, “Yeah. I know.”

She glances at him, wishing she weren’t as surprised as she feels. She’d expected more resistance from him, if not outright denial. It’s unfair of her, she knows; Frank’s abysmal track record notwithstanding, he’s still here, despite the fact that she’d just snuck a kiss out of him without his permission. That has to mean something.

Right?

God love him, though, but he can’t seem to keep his hands still. He grips the edge of the counter, and then reaches into the takeout bag, a rustle of paper and plastic that echoes overloudly in the silence between them.

Karen presses her lips together, biting back a refrain about how now is probably not the time for dessert.

Instead, Frank pulls out a small bouquet of white roses.

She stares as he sets them down on the counter. When he looks up at her, it’s with an intensity that nearly knocks her off her feet, and she grips the counter edge too in order to steady herself.

His gaze is unwavering on hers. “I’ve been thinking about this day for a while.”

She blinks at him, a part of her still wondering if it’s wrong of her to hope. “You have?”

“More than anything.” He shifts closer, and now she can see the last of the fear in him too, how he’s finally reached past it for something—for more. The edge of her own fear starts to soften, giving way to that fluttering lightness only Frank can make her feel.

Karen steps forward, marveling at the shared heat between them without their bodies actually touching. “And what, exactly, have you been thinking?”

Frank brings his hand up to the back of her neck, and she closes her eyes as he pulls her in.

He kisses her, and it’s everything Karen has wanted, everything she could only pretend that she hadn’t been waiting for all this time. He kisses her, and she knows how long he’s been wanting, and how hard he’s been waiting for this too.

He draws in a hoarse breath when they part. “I wanted to get this right,” he murmurs.

“Well,” says Karen, trying—failing—not to smile, “you want to know what I think?”

He tightens his arms around her. “What?”

“I think this is a good place to start,” she says, and leans in to kiss him again.

#kastle #kastle ff #kastlenetwork

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aminiatureworld · 3 years

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A Sea of Fragments III

Part I here, Part II here

Word Count: 3,519

Warnings: Swearing

Author’s Note: This was originally going to be about twice the length, but then I checked the time and the word count and decided to split it in half. Sorry about the cliffhanger, but hope you enjoy!

The sound of a siren, or perhaps a very badly played instrument, shoved you out of your dreams, groggy and disconnected from the world around you. At first you moved to open a window and tell whoever was playing to fuck off, but the moment your eyes truly opened you were hit with the unfamiliarity of your situation. The tent was still alien, made almost uncanny by the familiar furniture, crammed this way and that, pulling into the sides of the tent, and you felt unease wash over you.

Groaning slightly you stumbled towards the tent opening. Peering out through a crack in the fabric you were met with the sight of what seemed almost like a stampede. Men and women alike, dressed in the same identical light blue shirt and black trousers, jogging this way and that, running into each other haphazardly while cursing those who ran into them in turn. It was a fascinating sort of spectacle, and for a moment you stood there hypnotized.

A woman seemed to notice this trance of yours. Smirking, barely pausing in her mad dash to wherever the hell she was going, she tilted her head slightly. “If you don’t get moving soon you’ll be late for breakfast.” Then she went dashing off, leaving you to try and put together the pieces in your mind.

Turning back around you pulled your clothes out haphazardly. Though you remembered what Scaramouche said about eating with everyone else, you hadn’t really thought the matter through, too distracted by his proximity then. Now your stomach twisted in knots, and you wondered if it would be too much work to sneak out during the day to eat. Immediately you threw away the thought. Even if you could find the time in between, well, whatever you were going to be doing, the idea of fighting with Scaramouche again was exhausting. Even a tenuous truce was better than all out war. With that in mind you drew yourself up to your full height, glancing back at your belongings once before running to join the crush.

The cafeteria was less of a cafeteria and more a complex of various tents, haphazardly pinned together. The noise was almost unbearable after the silence of living on your own, a contrast as well to the low murmurs of the inn. There was no attempt to keep voices low now, and the air was filled with shouts and curses and the sound of too many people shoved into too small a place. You hadn’t noticed how big the camp was before, too wrapped up in the melodrama between you and Scaramouche, too wrapped up in the odd emotions that still swirled around in your mind when you thought of him. Now you wondered how you could’ve possibly ignored something so large and so noisy.

Your hopes that you might be able to sit next to Scaramouche – as awkward as that sounded – were quickly dashed to pieces. Despite the disorder there was still somehow a sense of hierarchy preserved. The Fatui higher ups were seated in a tent at the back, almost completely obscured by the long rows of tables and underlings that sat between them and the place where the food was dished out for the majority of the troops. Though the light was still somewhat dusky, you could still tell that their tent had been cleaned better, as the off-white was still brighter than the rest of the tents, which could generously be described as the color of old egg yolks. Scaramouche sat at the center of the table, already surrounded by officers and other such people; though from his scowl he seemed hardly happier than he had when he was with you. Still the message was as clear as any, and you grimaced at the prospect of trying to find a place to sit now.

When your plate had been filled with food that seemed at least adjacent to edible you wandered aimless for a moment, overwhelmed by the number of the seats and the unseen order of it. Spying a table full of people in ordinary clothes you made your way over to the table slowly, dreading the odd looks and the stilted small talk that would inevitably accompany your arrival. As if on cue the chatter quieted down, as eight pairs of eyes fixated on you. Flashing an awkward smile to no one in particular you sat down, trying to minimize the noise of your chewing. Slowly the conversation trickled back to life, but still your arrival hung in the air. Though you tried to make yourself as small as possible you could still feeling eyes on you every once in a while. The gesture was oppressive, and while you knew that this was par for the course of being new, it didn’t stop the pit in your stomach from hardening, as the act of swallowing became steadily more and more difficult. How you wished you were still at home, at least then you could do something, get up and walk around, instead of being fixed to your spot on the bench.

Setting down your food you looked around you, studying the layout of the tents. Surely there was some way to sneak out, an opening that didn’t fit correctly, an out of the way gap in the fabric. Anything was better than staying here, even going the rest of the day with an empty stomach.

You were jolted out of your thoughts by the call of your name. Looking up you saw an unfamiliar man, one who seemed somehow just as uncomfortable as you were at the moment.

“Yes?” You managed to let out, ignoring the embarrassment that burned your face.

“I’ve been sent with a message.”

“Yes?”

“The Harbinger Scaramouche would like to see you in his tent after breakfast.”

“Is that it?” You asked, feeling like you’d just been told nothing at all. Where else would you go? You hadn’t been around the Fatui for more than an hour and already the impulse to bolt was growing harder and harder to ignore. At least Scaramouche’s berating was familiar, even if it remained unpleasant.

“Yes.” The man nodded awkwardly. Sparing a glance at the table where his message came from he bowed almost imperceptibly, before running off to wherever he’d come from.

The stares had returned, with sounds to accompany them. An “ooh” was audible from the very last person on the bench across from you, as if you were ten years old and had just been called for by your mother. A “good luck” was also heard, though you couldn’t quite tell if it was sincere or not. The rest melded into the rest of the crowd, though you didn’t truly mind that. Sighing you stood up, disposing of your plate and walking out of the tent. If you were going to make your way back to Scaramouche’s tent, then you might as well make a head start.

The camp was more of a maze than you’d initially thought, and by the time you’d managed to spy the familiar dark blue sticking out amid the whites Scaramouche and the rest of his lackeys had already gathered. Murmuring an apology that was ignored you slunk to the back of the room. Though you could see a variety of documents spread across a table in the center of the room, you didn’t really care what was said on them. Why would Scaramouche even call you here when he was dealing with other people? Surely you could have nothing to do with the topic at the moment.

Scaramouche stood with his back facing to you. Though he must’ve heard your entrance, he made no attempt at recognition. Though you were unsurprised by this, you also felt somewhat deflated. If this was how it was going to be then you’d rather just go back to sleep.

“Now that we’ve all arrived, I will explain what the next step is going to be.”

It was odd to hear Scaramouche’s voice so flat, as you normally thought of it as the most emotional part about him. Now however it was completely devoid of emotion, instead set at a monotone, though a hint of disdain still clung to the end of his words.

“As you all know there are two villages in proximity to our camp. The closer one, a trading post for the neighboring village and houses, has recently been discovered to contain no little amount of elemental particles, as well as a distinct elemental footprint. It’s strong enough to imply that there is something of no little magical value hidden away somewhere. Something that will surely be of value to the Tsaritsa and her work. It is our duty, as her trusted army, to aid her in this quest. Thus we will be launching a raid upon the village three weeks from now. It will be a night raid, as to give us the edge, and, if possible, we ought to apprehend this item without the villagers become aware. If we succeed I will send a group to Snezhnaya while the rest of the army remains here as to not arouse suspicion. If you all do as you are told then we will succeed.”

Scaramouche stood back for a moment, arms crossed over his chest. You noticed he hadn’t asked for any questions. Perhaps if he had someone would’ve protested, though you sincerely doubted it. Glancing around at the men and women around you there were a variety of expressions; eagerness, confidence, determination. None of it betrayed the mission they’d been given, to rob a village of something precious, and to care not for the wellbeing of those who resided within those wooden houses. And acidic taste filled the back of your throat, disgust rising. So many men and women, yet not one with any scrap of empathy for those who were not them.

“Scaramouche, Sir.” A voice rose up from amongst the crowd. For a moment your heart lifted, surely there was someone willing to pose any sort of question on the validity of this scheme, even if not outright.

“What.”

“This is a worthy mission, yet I have one question.”

“And what is that?” There was dissatisfaction in Scaramouche’s eyes, and his voice reached a familiar cadence, that of irritation.

“Is there any knowledge as to where this item might be hidden away? Surely it would be easier to deal with discreetly if we were given information on what this item was, or where it’s been hidden.”

“Of course.” There was a sneer on Scaramouche’s face, as if he couldn’t believe the stupidity of those around him. “It would be helpful to know of the item in question. Fortunately for us I have already planned for this.

Turning around Scaramouche’s eyes pierced through the crowd, staring right at your corner in the back. They were brighter than usual, gleaming like a cat. You felt a chill down your spine, up until now you hadn’t truly realized how disarming, how uncomfortable his gaze could be. As if on cue the others turned around to stare.

“This is my plan,” continued Scaramouche, not even bothering to refer to you by name, “they can see the future, or so they say. Using them we will certainly be able to locate such an item, for even if they were of no use in the current view of the future, we would still sniff the item out. This method, however, will require less effort.”

It was as if the air had been stolen from your lungs. Lied, you’d been lied too. He wasn’t disconnecting you from his Fatui work, he was sticking you right in the middle of it! To be a source of intrigue for a Harbinger was embarrassing enough; to be stared at by a whole tent worth of Fatui, each seeing you as no more than a tool, it was mortifying. More than that though was what you knew stood behind their eyes, behind Scaramouche’s words. They genuinely expected you to go along with this plan, to contribute to the suffering of others for no other purpose but greed.

It was all too much. Stumbling sideways, praying that no one was in front of the opening, you let a “no” escape your constricted throat, before whirling around and plunging out of the tent.

Stopping a few steps away from the opening you listened to the chaos behind you. There was a general rustling of voices, a few indignant cries rising over the rest. You listened for the familiar sound of Scaramouche’s voice, but was unable to hear it. Instead you felt an arm on your shoulder. Turning around you were met with the Harbinger, lips pressed together in a line, eyes smoldering beneath his hat. He said nothing, simply disconnecting his hand from your shoulder to meet your wrist. While doing so he dragged you towards the edge of the camp, silence an omen for the fight to come.

-----

“What were you thinking back there!” Scaramouche’s voice had returned to its usual jumping about. “If you’re going to continue your incessant arguing, then at least don’t do it when we are surrounded by others.”

“How could I otherwise!” You let out, voice just as emotional. “You were asking me to do the unspeakable, to participate in the destruction of a village!”

“Are you deaf, or were you just not listening? I made it quite clear what the plan was. A midnight raid for a precious item. You’re acting as if I ordered them to burn the village to the ground.”

“You cannot guarantee that will not happen. If things go wrong, do you really expect me to believe the Fatui will just go running with their tail between their legs? Give me more credit than that Harbinger.”

“And why should we not do everything in our power to retrieve the item? After all it belongs to the Tsaritsa.”

“In what universe does the heirloom of a village belong to a god who can have no use of it other than to grow her own power?”

“It belongs to the Tsaritsa just as your vision does, or my position. The Tsaritsa has aided the creation of this world, the growth of Teyvat. Why should she not demand payment in return?”

“Her payment is her worship. She was given no rights over the belongings of others, others who she does not even know about. What does your precious Tsaritsa know about the every day lives of villagers? She knows as much about that as I do about the movements of the gods.”

“The Tsaritsa has aided in the creation of their villages. Of course she should know more about them than you do of her. She is an archon, you are nothing but a human with a little bit of magic thrown in.”

The words stung, and for a moment you stumbled back, unable to speak. Wrenching your eyes shut you took in a few deep breaths. You’d never given him the satisfaction of seeing you cry. After a moment you glared once more at the Harbinger, whose expression was the same as ever.

“You promised me, you made a deal. You said I wasn’t working for the Fatui, but for you.”

“And I am a Harbinger. What did you expect? You really have no understanding of the world.” Scaramouche’s sneer was all it took to drain the little energy you had remaining.

“You’re heartless. Absolutely heartless. No wonder you love it here. Here no one will notice that you don’t care about anybody, because no one here cares for anything except themselves! And… and to think that I thought there might’ve been some kindness in you.”

Saying nothing more to keep your voice from breaking you turned around. Walking back towards the cluster of tents you ignored the faint, still melodious, call of your name. Everything felt wrong, all wrong.

------

Scaramouche watched you go, anger rising in him as each call of your name dissipated in the air. For a moment he stood there, wanting to storm off, but quickly he realized he really had nowhere to go. His tent was currently infested with lackeys – lackeys who would certainly be wondering what had happened if her returned alone, even if they didn’t dare to say it. Nor could he simply stomp off to the woods, for there was still work to be done, and a useless soldier was a worthless one. Nor could he go wandering around the camp, for it he ran into you there’d certainly be more fighting, and the last thing Scaramouche wanted to do right now was keep fighting.

Still this couldn’t go on. This endless fighting, it was beginning to drive Scaramouche to insanity. Why, why could you not take one simple order? Why was it always fighting with you, always contradictions and refusals and in the end bargains, always bargains, with Scaramouche on the losing end. He wanted to scream, wanted to go up to you and make you understand who he was, that his word was as good as law in this camp, and that you couldn’t be an exception simply because you saw into multiple futures. Hadn’t he made that clear enough already in his actions, in his words? Why then did you continue to talk back to him?

The Harbinger stood there, pondering this question of why. It had occurred to him that you weren’t going to be as easy to pull around as a member of the Fatui, that you had not been trained to simply follow orders. To you a job wasn’t something given on the pain of death, wasn’t something that had a country leaning on it. It was done simply in the hope of getting paid. Yet were you always so surly with your other employers?

Heartless. You had called him heartless. Somehow that grated on him the most. Even if you had yelled, had continued on your insolent way, it would’ve been somehow easier to deal with than your stony accusation. Not that Scaramouche thought much of his abilities to empathize with people; but it wasn’t in his contract to do so. Why did it matter so much to you that he should be heartless? Why should you spit out the accusation as if saying he’d committed the greatest wrong? And why did it sit so low with him, the fact that you had vocalized something he’d already been well aware of?

It gave him a headache to think of all these questions, but then again when was he not in some state of agitation when it came to you. Ever since he’d met you he’d found himself in some sort of state. Even now, when he finally thought you might actually buckle down and start working, even now you resisted. Him breaking your bargain? No, it was you who were unwilling to see this through to the end. All because you could not see what was in front of you, could not see that there were things more important than you. If Scaramouche was heartless, than you were the most self-centered person he’d ever met.

Taking a few breaths Scaramouche reconsidered his last statement. No, no perhaps that wasn’t correct. It wasn’t a consideration for others you lacked, it was rather than you had too much of it. Perhaps that was why you called him heartless, because you cared too much about the hearts of others. It was sound enough, the logic. Yet discontent still floated in the air, and no matter how much Scaramouche told himself that you were the one to blame and that you were behaving illogically something about your words still ate at him. Heartless. Was it so bad then, to be without a heart? Scaramouche felt raw all of a sudden, almost as if you’d somehow reached deep into him and prodded at something, some soft thing he’d not managed to coat over. Heartless. The word echoed in his mind, rattling along with the sudden array of feelings you’d coaxed out.

Why did he care so much anyways what you thought? He’d never cared before. The only opinion that mattered was the Tsaritsa, and you were as different from her as one could possibly be, both in station and in opinion. So why then, why did he care? Scaramouche shook his head, knowing that he must look like a fool, standing there, expression surely revealing the turmoil he was feeling. And yet even as he continued to berate himself the feeling continued.

Looking around Scaramouche sighed, before making his way back into the camp. Somehow he knew that he was looking for you, even if the idea was unwise. But chasing after you had become a bit of a theme, and at this point he didn’t even attempt to hide the fact from himself. Besides, he needed to speak to you. Somehow he knew; if he spoke to you then he might find a way to once more tamper down on the emotions clouding his mind.

Even if he didn’t understand why.

#genshin impact #scaramouche x reader #scaramouche #genshin impact fanfiction #series #my writing

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dramaticviolincrescendo · 3 years

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Okay, what are your thoughts on Ian's relationships? With his family, his boyfriends, and Mandy (since I think that's the only friend he's had)

Oh, no. Ohhhhhhhh, no. Now you’ve done it. You’ve asked about my dear, darling favorite character on the show. My love for one Ian Gallagher runs deep, which means this answer is going to run super long. The good, the bad, and everything in between—Ian Gallagher lives rent free in my brain and always will. I derive so much satisfaction from seeing Ian interact with other people, in whatever capacity that might be. I admire and aspire to the compassion he has shown for others over the years, even and perhaps most especially those who arguably haven’t earned it. He tries so hard to be good to people, and seeing their love for him manifest when he’s reached such lows where he can’t even fathom why the love of his life would want to be with him forever? That’s powerful.

So, yeah. I said I could write essays on these characters, and that’s exactly what you’re about to get: five hours and 6k words’ worth of my thoughts. (I am so sorry. There will be text walls.)

Let’s dive into Ian’s many and multifaceted relationships—his family, his friends, and his romantic pursuits.

Ian and Family

Ian told us where he stood on this in the very first season, and it set the standard for his character for eleven years to come. Faced with a prospect that others in his position could only dream of—not being Frank’s son and having a wealthy father with a functional, prosperous lifestyle mere miles away—Ian refused to buy into it. He refused to do what might have been objectively better for his future by seeking a relationship with Clayton. In that household, he would have had access to a better public school, more financial resources, a tutor to help him where he was struggling, and less urgency for him to work so that he could enjoy being a kid. When he got sick, he would have had access to better healthcare, too. Perhaps he would have had a better shot at West Point from that background than he did at home. But that’s just it: home was with his family, and he was very clear that they didn’t live in that nice house. All he wanted—all he wanted—was to be with his brothers and sisters. He has never referred to them as only half-siblings or half-cousins; he has never even used the words, “you’re not my dad,” on Frank. That’s his family, the people he loves most in the world, and he’s always been at his best when he’s with them and at his worst when he’s not. Let’s look at each of them:

1. Frank: It is so striking to me that Ian doesn’t appear to hold the outright contempt for Frank that Fiona, Lip, and Debbie have exhibited at different points over the years. Aside from the handful of instances where they’ve gotten into physical altercations (which Frank always initiated) and kicking him out of the house on occasion, Ian is simply indifferent to him. But there are these moments, these brief glimmers of mutual attachment and loyalty, if those are the right words. In the scene where Ian famously doesn’t count to three before using the pepper spray on him, Frank starts saying how his New Gallaghers weren’t his real kids—that Ian is his real son, and Frank is his real father. It’s a passing thought uttered while trying to manipulate his way into the house that neither of them think much of, nor does the audience…until you remember that biologically, Frank isn’t his father, and he certainly hasn’t behaved like one either. Ian has more right than anyone to comment on that, but he doesn’t because Frank is his father. He’s the father that Ian idly hoped wouldn’t come to his wedding yet sat joking about with Debbie rather than getting pissed off that he was making out with some lady in front of everyone. He’s the father who sat at the table with them eating breakfast in 11x03 and claimed Mickey was the man in their relationship without Ian saying a word to him about it, and who Ian saw no issue with taking Franny to school when no one else could. In s4, as far removed from his family as he’d been for a while, Ian still went straight to the hospital when he heard that Frank was at death’s door. We focus so much on his attitude towards Monica because of how obvious it was that we frequently miss these tiny moments and their implications. It would take an awful lot of patience, compassion, and love not to write Frank off completely after all he’s done. Not necessarily our standard definition of love between a son and his father, perhaps, but a loving soul.

2. Monica: I have actually written a pretty lengthy post about his relationship with her because while their shared mental illness definitely plays a role in his feelings toward her, that grew complicated far earlier than his diagnosis. The first time we meet her, we see that he has a visceral reaction to news of her presence. He runs. When Ian can’t process strong emotions, that’s what he’s done in the past. I happened upon an interview Cameron did just after the end of s1 where he mentioned something I had already been thinking: Ian’s age when Monica left is extremely important. He was a kid in s1, but one who could roll with the punches, sometimes literally. She left them two years before that. Ian would have been in middle school, roughly as old as Debbie was when she still called Frank “daddy” and forgave him for everything he did. It’s an awkward age that once again set Ian in something of a danger zone—too old to accept an excuse or no explanation at all, but not old enough to process the situation in a healthy way. And then she’s back all of a sudden with no warning. Ian doesn’t cry like Debbie, and he doesn’t typically get explosively angry like Fiona. He can’t deal, so he runs. He hangs back. He only speaks when he has to and compartmentalizes: Monica wants to take Liam, and they need to stop her. It doesn’t have to be about her leaving. They have a goal—he can focus on that. And then she’s back a year later, saying she’s here to stay while Fiona seems to take her at her word and Lip isn’t there to ground everyone. Ian tries so hard to behave like Lip would with his biting sarcasm and attempts to stay emotionally distant in a way that seemed pretty exaggerated for Ian, but he’s also dealing with a fresh wave of guilt over Mickey going to juvie—and Monica gets it. She’s the only person to acknowledge that he’s in pain and actively try to make it better. She’s the only one who really knows at the time, but that hardly matters. This poor kid, whose mother left him when he still needed her, has her standing in front of him and saying she’s sorry and listening when he speaks and taking him dancing—just the two of them. Embarrassing as it was and harmful as it could have been, she tried to facilitate his dreams when no one else wanted him to go into the military. She was there for him when he went AWOL. She came for him when he was arrested and even wanted to make a place for him in her new life, unrealistic as it was. This goes so much deeper than them both being bipolar. Ian’s comment about her parachuting into their lives in s7 wasn’t about Mickey or her role in them breaking up. He trusted her. He wanted her. He needed her. And she’d convinced him that she would be there—until she left. Over and over again. She was there for him and unintentionally took advantage of how desperately he still needed his mother. She made him keep loving her, and that’s both a blessing that has him crying into a voluminous man’s arms when she passes and a curse that wrecked him more than once.

3. Fiona: The trust these two have for each other cannot be understated. Fiona has discussed things with Ian that she never brought up around any of the other kids throughout the entire series. In the pilot episode, she tells him about feeling needed and takes his opinion on the matter to heart. At the end of the season, he’s the one she talks to about the car because she can trust him to give her an answer even without speaking. In s2, she tells Lip that the two of them are her rocks, and we see that time and time again. That’s part of what makes their falling out over the church hit that much harder: it’s Ian and Fiona. The only time they’d been on the outs in any serious manner up to that point was when Ian was adjusting to his new reality and they were trying to find a balance between sister and caretaker. Otherwise, that bond of trust had never been severed—not until Ian literally sold himself only for it to amount to nothing in the end because she had no idea the lengths to which he’d gone to get that building. That damage gets mended, thankfully, but what a powerful period of time when those two were the only ones who’d never really been at each other’s throats. There is a downside to that trust, though. As I mentioned before, Ian was so responsible and put together when he was younger that Fiona didn’t think twice about his situation with Ned or that he ran away. Not even seventeen yet, and she was telling Debbie that she didn’t like his decision to leave but trusted him. That is one of the things I love about this show—even something like trust that we always prop up as an important factor in our relationships can betray us in the most unexpected ways.

4. Lip: I won’t go into it here, but the relationship they share is something that means a lot to me on a personal level. It’s part of how I knew that Ian would become my favorite character pretty early on. The way he simultaneously admires and envies Lip, loves and is annoyed by him, relies on him and is desperate to pave his own path in the world—what a beautiful and accurate depiction of what it means to be a younger sibling. Lip is the first person to discover that he’s gay and openly accept him for it. (I think what he tried with Karen came from a well-meaning place even if it was horribly, horribly misguided.) Lip is the one who tries to get him into West Point, hate it as he does. He helps Ian when Terry is after him, takes care of him in the aftermath of the wedding when he realizes just how deeply Ian feels for Mickey, searches the whole damn city for him when he finds out that Ian is in trouble, gets him a job, leans on him in his own time of need… He’s not perfect. He slips up, just like Ian does. Some things break my heart, like Lip insisting that he’s earned his own space when his little brother is asking him for safe harbor or Ian thanking him for being his brother outside the prison. But they love each other so much, and I just… I can’t possibly put into words how much I love their dynamic.

5. Debbie, Carl, and Liam: I’m grouping these three together because they’re further separated from Ian in age, so we see a lot of the same trends with them as a whole. Ian loves taking care of people. We know this. We also know that Fiona and Lip don’t typically want him taking care of them—they’re the ones who take care of him when he needs it, specifically Lip. With the younger three, however, Ian can be the Big Brother. He can shake his head in utter bafflement at Debbie’s obsession with holding her breath for two minutes, walk Carl through what he needs to go camping, and promise his baby brother postcards when he leaves. The difference here is that his relationship with them is so much less fraught with conflict. We don’t see him fight with Debbie, Carl, or Liam the way he has with Fiona or Lip. While Ian tends to be the voice of reason during conflicts overall, I think it’s also because he relies on his older siblings in a way that he doesn’t with his younger siblings, and the latter don’t tend to rely on him as much as Fiona or Lip as well. There’s a lack of tension in most of their interactions growing up because that pressure isn’t there. Perhaps this is where Ian’s age and standing in the family is a bit more beneficial: young enough to have people he can rely on while too young for anyone to really rely on him for more than his share of the squirrel fund.

Ian and Friends

I’ve seen it mentioned that Ian (and Mickey) not having more friends is bad or lazy writing. I tend to believe that that fails to take something into account that, admittedly, most of us don’t really have to think about: having friends is a luxury. It requires time and effort to cultivate friendships, especially lasting ones. As a kid, Ian spent a lot of his free time working or helping to manage one family crisis after another. Going AWOL, losing his health, struggling to acclimate to his illness, trying to find a new career path, spiraling into the Gay Jesus movement, going to prison, adjusting once again to normal life, getting married, a pandemic… I’m sure he’s had plenty of acquaintances over the years, but having a family to support and constant upheavals would have made it extremely difficult to really forge strong relationships with them. I think that’s part of what makes his relationship with Mandy so special and valuable to him: she’s sort of the same way.

When we met Mandy in s1, she had other friends. We saw her meet up with them and go shopping; she told Ian a story about how one was mad at her for not sharing her make-up. As the trauma in the Milkovich household reached its zenith for her in s2 and she started thinking seriously about getting out of there, we saw those friends fall by the wayside—all except Ian. He saw her and let her see him early on. That’s a level of trust and respect that nobody else in their neighborhood would have displayed, certainly not to her. But then there’s this guy who defended her against their creepy, perverted teacher and treated her like a human being, not an object. It’s no wonder she developed an obvious, unrequited crush and sought physical comfort from him occasionally. It’s no wonder she tried to repay the favor by giving Mickey a hard time in s3 and s4, misguided and rather uninformed as we know it was at the time. (It’s also no wonder that she went for the closest Gallagher to Ian, either, but that’s for another meta.)

And Ian… Ian is loyal to a fault. We have watched Ian cut out his own heart and let the blood drip down his arm to pool on the floor at his feet if it would make a damn bit of difference for the people he loves. Like Fiona and Lip, Mandy immediately accepted him for who he is and suggested an arrangement that would protect him as well as benefit her. That is enormous where they came from. To him, that had to feel like the ultimate sign of friendship: he could trust her with a part of him that he hadn’t even entrusted to most of his family yet. From that point on, she was on the List of People Ian Gallagher Would Do Anything For. Finding out about Terry and what had happened? He held a bake sale, of all things, to fundraise for her. Seeing that his brother—his best friend—was treating her like garbage? He put him in his place. Her boyfriend was beating her? He brought her home and made it his goal to find a safe place for her to stay, even if it ultimately didn’t work. She was going to move away from all of her meager support with that boyfriend? He didn’t just rally his own arguments—he brought in outside help with Lip, who he thought might tip the scales. It’s usually just a saying that true friends will help each other hide a body, but Ian literally tried to do that. Lucky for him, he has a good head on his shoulders and used it.

No, Ian doesn’t seem to have a lot of friends. We’ve seen that he has spheres of influence, if you will, and acquaintances that he can call upon when he needs them. (For example, the guys that helped with the preacher.) However, Ian has always struck me as a “quality over quantity” type of person. Being a soldier or an EMT isn’t lucrative, but they’re meaningful for someone who sees them as vehicles for helping people. Seeing more parts of the world than just Chicago has appealed to him in the past, but he seems perfectly content to carve out a spot for himself right here at home. Having only three best friends—Lip, Mandy, and Mickey—doesn’t seem like much of a hardship for him.

Ian and Romantic Pursuits

I hate to say that there were five, but from Ian’s perspective, there were. So, let’s talk about all five. Even though…there weren’t five. There was only one. We’ll save the best for last.

1. Kash: The first of Ian’s perceived romantic pursuits that really wasn’t. I hope it goes without saying that I hate this man with the passion of a thousand burning suns. I hate him so much. However, their interactions taught me a whole lot about how kind and compassionate Ian really is—and how naïve. Of course, he would believe that Kash loved him. The man was buying him all sorts of expensive gifts, and that’s what we see on all the commercials and in so many movies, isn’t it? Grand gestures of affection through expensive gifts. Poor as they were, Ian still scraped together the money to buy him baseball tickets and CDs, convinced as he was that that was all part of what you did in a relationship. That desire to do things like a “normal” married couple in s11? Yeah, that starts here. Ian has always been a planner, and he’s always bought into certain stereotypes. We can see that here. What we can also see is Ian’s compassionate, kind, loving soul. He cares so deeply for other people, even ones that he doesn’t know very well, especially if they are living in circumstances that mean something to him. (For example, the mentally ill woman they tried to help at work and the shelter kids whose situations were so similar to Mickey’s.) Kash being a closeted gay man living in misery with a wife he didn’t love and two children he never meant to have clearly tugged at Ian’s heartstrings. Even after everything that happens, even though Ian behaves as though they’re awkward exes who just happen to work together, he still covers for Kash. He gives him that head start and takes it upon himself to break the news to Linda that he’s gone. He defends Kash to Lip when the latter finally says exactly what we all know: he was a pedophile who deserved to rot in prison for what he did. As with Fiona’s trust, Ian’s loving soul, compassionate heart, and desire for love outside his siblings are virtues that have done him harm in the past. This is one such instance.

2. Ned: The second of Ian’s perceived romantic pursuits that really wasn’t. To be honest, I don’t believe that Ian would even characterize it that way. He seemed very aware that Ned was a distraction from his problems—from Mickey being in juvie, Monica falling into a depressive episode, the money in the squirrel fund being gone, Lip moving out, losing his shot at West Point, and getting denied for service due to his age. Again, though, Ian has always wanted to feel valued, and this rich dude was letting him stay in a fancy hotel room with anything he wanted readily available. This (disgusting predator) guy was giving him attention and a distraction with no strings attached. Then the complications roll in, and he’s once again faced with being the mistress to a closeted, married man. The difference here is that he’s not comfortable with it. He tries to tell Fiona twice, which is enormous for Ian when he has never been very good at communicating if it means burdening others with or even merely facing his own problems. But he tries to tell her. He rejects the GPS unit and tells Ned that he has a boyfriend, boxing him into a strictly sexual arrangement. (This, unfortunately, makes sense. It aligns with how Fiona viewed things: where Jimmy was concerned about it, she told him that it was “just sex.”) He is also visibly embarrassed to admit to Lip and Fiona what has been going on with Ned. By that point, Ian is a year and a half older and, while still scarred and warped in his views because of Kash, perhaps a bit wiser. Emotionally, he kept Ned at arm’s length most of the time. He used Ned not just as a distraction, but as a way to galvanize Mickey into taking their relationship a step forward. But Ian is still Ian, and Ian is compassionate to a fault. Ned played that card by asking if he could have a little understanding for a man whose life was falling apart. Sure, he can. He’s Ian, the Gallagher too empathetic for his own good at times. We know how that spirals out of control. It just goes to show that even when Ian was trying to maintain some emotional distance, his heart is simply too big and his perceptions too heavily impacted by the grooming he’d experienced with two different people by then, and so he [SPOILER ALERT] still feels enough of a connection to Ned after all these years to be mildly bothered that he passed away.

3. Caleb: The third of Ian’s perceived romantic pursuits that really wasn’t. Ian’s relationship with Caleb strikes me as being similar to what he had with Ned. While more age-appropriate, Ian was very much using Caleb, just as Caleb was using him. That’s why it was so easy for both of them to walk away. Ian was in a difficult spot when they met. He was grateful to the firefighters who saved his life, but he had also just saved someone else at a moment when he was perhaps at his absolute lowest. That’s what he’s always wanted, isn’t it—to be a bit of a hero and help people? So, he’s understandably drawn there, first out of gratitude and then to be surrounded by very attractive gay firemen who helped people, saved his life, and invited him to be part of a function they were holding. But he made himself pretty clear from the start: he was interested in sex with Caleb. That was the draw. He still hasn’t come to terms with being bipolar and losing Mickey, but Ian has never not been with anyone for any extended length of time. That’s just who he is: he’s always sought some level of outward validation—from the army, Kash, Monica, Mickey, and so many others. We’re seeing him struggle with that now as he deals with the opportunities available to him as a mentally ill ex-con felon. So, he pursues Caleb as a distraction just like he did with Ned, only Caleb is a predator in his own right and can smell that his interest is coming from a place of weakness. He immediately (and initially unintentionally) preys on Ian’s desperate need for structure and order by insisting on a traditional date where Ian is very much out of his element and even goes so far as to instruct Ian on how to be intimate. It’s no wonder he mentions Mickey in these moments, as Mickey never wanted him to change, and Ian leans heavily (even slightly hyperbolically) into the fact that Mickey wasn’t a paragon of order and stability like Caleb outwardly appears.

And I think why Ian puts up with it so long—being taught like a child, being used to upset Caleb’s parents, being paraded in front of his friends to make them jealous—is because he was getting something out of it too, just like with Ned. A stable place to live when their home ownership was in flux, a place away from his family when they weren’t providing the support he needed as he adjusted to his disorder, someone who validated his desires to help people regardless of their ulterior motives, and a physical distraction from his own problems. All of these parallel his relationship with Ned very closely. It was never going to last, of course. Ian is a strong person who temporarily forgot how strong he was because he forgot who he was, and Caleb didn’t want to be cared for—he wanted a project, like all of his sculptures. Being a project, being something that others see as needing to be fixed? That’s a hard no for Ian. It always has been. There’s a moment I love later in their relationship where Caleb tells him to turn off the lights when he goes out and lightly reprimands him for leaving one on the day prior. Ian is in a better place at that point, having regained a lot of his sense of self, and stares after him with indignation at being treated like a kid. He’s then lied to and cheated on, but I think that to mention those things to Caleb when they break up is to admit weakness on his own part—that he stuck with Caleb knowing that he was being mistreated, and Ian is not one to be called a victim. So, while we know from his discussions with Lip and Sue that the cheating and distrust bothered him most, he merely focused on Caleb lying about his sexuality, which removed a lot of the emotion from the situation—just like he did with Ned. It ultimately turned out to be a bad move since Caleb, being a skilled predator, made him question even his own sexuality in return, but we’re starting to see that Ian isn’t here to be someone’s toy anymore. Not an older, married man like Ned, but definitely not anyone his age either. I’m glad this pseudo-relationship happened because it showed Ian how strong he really was and that he could be in control of his own life. Sure, it destabilized him a little in the aftermath, but he worked through it. He leaned on his family, specifically Lip, who has always been his rock without the blurred lines that Fiona represented between sister/mother-figure/caretaker. Caleb is a garbage person, but Ian was the one who pulled the treasure from the trash, not him.

4. Trevor: The fourth of Ian’s perceived romantic pursuits that really wasn’t. Trevor is perhaps the first relationship where we don’t see Ian dive in. Whether that’s because of his confusion over Trevor’s gender identity or the fact that he was really beginning to fully mature as an adult by that point (ostensibly finishing his education, getting a career, being fully self-sufficient, etc.), he tried to take his time and not jump right in. They hung out, talked around the neighborhood, and yes, engaged in some casual intimacy at the club. Again, Ian might not be in a full relationship, but he’s never without someone for long. At that point in the series, all he was missing was a relationship when it comes to traditional, “normal” goals for people to have. But Trevor posed a situation he’s never been in before since, while gay himself, Ian has never been very interested in activism or engaging in the LGBT community. It’s just not in his culture or environment, so to be faced with someone he’s interested in that challenges a lot of his views of gender and sexuality is something he takes his time with. Unfortunately, Trevor is younger than him and not quite as mature, not quite as experienced. He tells Ian he has plenty of friends and doesn’t need another, which is an ultimatum that has never really sat very well with me personally because I’m generally of the mind that if a person needs time and you really care for them, you’ll let them have that time. I’m not unsympathetic to Trevor: he’s been burned before and has his own trauma stemming from responses to his identity, so it makes complete sense for him not to be patient in this regard. He shouldn’t have to be—but then, Ian shouldn’t have to rush into anything he’s not 100% certain he wants either. That’s exactly what he does, though, because Ian does for others without thinking of the implications for himself a lot of the time. They make great friends, but they don’t make great partners. Trevor treats Ian similarly to Caleb in that he’s a bit of a project. Trevor educates him on the LGBT community and incorporates him into his ventures for the shelter without ever really showing much interest in Ian’s life or family, which suits Ian just fine because for as interested as he is in helping with the shelter and as attracted to Trevor as he is, he seems to know they’re not compatible. Ian, who has been having sex since he was far too young, takes a step back from it when they run into compatibility issues. (And pushes back on the pressure to bottom with some of his own—neither of them were in the right on that.) He doesn’t ask much about Trevor’s family or try to be part of his personal life. They sort of embody the “friends with benefits” stereotype: they hang out, they have sex, and that’s really all there is to their relationship.

The reason Ian doubles down on trying to make it work isn’t because there was a future for them before Mickey broke out. It’s because he thinks he’s lost Mickey forever, he knows he’s lost Monica forever, and he’s not going to get the support he needs from his family when they couldn’t stand Monica and Fiona told him what he already knew to be true, namely that Mickey being an escaped convict would destroy everything Ian worked so hard for if he got involved. So, he does what Ian does. He needs that distraction—he needs to run from these strong emotions he can’t process, so he bottles them up and unfairly hopes that Trevor will provide some of that comfort after cheating on him with Mickey. (Had Mickey been released, I think they would have broken up. Instead, that was the first match Ian lit, but certainly not the last.) Now, the thing is, Trevor said at the start that he didn’t want to be Ian’s friend. He’s also younger and less mature in a relationship, which means he threw the concept of love out there prematurely, just like Ian thought what he had with Kash was love. The death throes of their relationship were a back and forth where Ian was spiraling and seeking comfort, and Trevor was providing some while keeping their relationship pretty amorphous. (Were they exes? Were they friends? Were they people who shared interests and danced around each other? Were they going to get back together? They never officially broke up—it fizzled and resurged, then fizzled for good.) Ultimately, whatever it was that they had couldn’t survive Mickey, Monica, or Gay Jesus. Trevor wasn’t prepared to deal with a full-blown manic episode, and based on his hands-off approach with involving himself in Ian’s life even before the Mickey-shaped bomb got dropped on them, it doesn’t seem like he really wanted to anyway. He did what he’s always done: prioritized his shelter, which I’m not deriding in the slightest. By that point, Ian was too far gone to care that he disappeared anyway. Had the situation been different and he was getting the support from his family that he needed, it doesn’t seem like he would have cared much there either.

5. Mickey: Finally. Only took over five thousand words to get here. I’ll preface this with something that anyone who knows me from other fandoms is already well aware of, namely that I don’t do romance. Ever. Never been interested. The relationships I’ve always been most passionately interested in are platonic ones, especially “found families” and siblings, which is probably obvious from the other five thousand words here. Ian and Mickey are the first relationship I’ve actively shipped or written for in a fandom. They’re the first I’ve been invested in to this extent. As such, one of the biggest pet peeves I had when I first joined this fandom was the saying, “Ian fell first, Mickey fell harder.” These two wonderful dumbasses face planted on the concrete in front of the Kash and Grab in s1 and never recovered. I could go on forever about these two, but that particular wall of text would probably be too daunting for even the most avid Gallavich stan to traverse, so I’ll keep it fairly brief. As we can see above, Ian has a very strict sense of what he “should” want in a partner. Someone who is moderately successful in their chosen field, makes enough money to at least live comfortably, and typically does something that helps other people (a doctor, a fireman, a youth counselor). These aren’t passionate people. They’re not men who operate on instinct the way most of the people in his life have always had to by virtue of their social standing. They have life goals and opportunities that he envies, and Ian has a great deal of compassion for them when they hit a roadblock or things don’t work out. The amazing dichotomy of Ian Gallagher is that he straddles a line most people can’t between the rough neighborhood that has instilled in him all of his values/behaviors and the middle-class mentality of pulling yourself up by your bootstraps and aspiring to more. Ian has always aimed for what Lip said wasn’t possible for poor people: being successful without having to scam or steal. But as I said way back at the beginning of this manifesto, the South Side is his home. His family is his family. And none of the people he’s been with personify the South Side quite like Mickey—they don’t personify home like Mickey.

And I think that’s where the initial draw for Ian is. (I’m going to focus on Ian’s side since he’s who your question focused on.) The other guys look great on paper, and Ian’s brain says that that’s what he should aim for. We know better, though. We know that Ian has an enormous heart that belongs first and foremost to his family and their home. His heart says that this person—this dirty, rude, mean, violent person—is home. His heart says this person is everything about himself that he denies having, just like Ian was everything about Mickey that the latter declined to openly acknowledge for so long. I don’t like relationships built on “making each other better.” I really don’t. The wonderful thing about this is that it’s never been that way. Ian didn’t change Mickey. He’s exactly who he’s always been, but he’s grown past the fear of his own emotions and Terry’s response to them. He’s still a thief, a con artist, violent, and rude. Mickey didn’t change Ian either. He’s still rigidly conforming to certain stereotypes of what he thinks he should want, seeking structure (to his own detriment at times), and not a great communicator. The point for them is that they complement each other, not that they make the other a better person—not even that they bring something out of each other that wasn’t already there. That’s what Ian’s other relationships did. They made him shave off his edges so that he could fit a square peg into a round hole, and that’s not happiness. It’s simply what he thought he was supposed to do—what “normal” people did.

With Mickey, he doesn’t have to worry so much about what is normal or acceptable. He doesn’t have to worry about whether or not his life is objectively “on track,” not until fairly recently. Mickey is the only person he’s ever been with who has accepted him for who he is, faults and strengths alike, without the underlying insinuation that he should be aiming for something else or pretending to be whatever the other person needs him to be in order to care for them. Kash needed an escape—Ian provided it. Ned needed a very specific brand of toy—Ian played that role. Caleb needed a project to feel fulfilled—Ian went along with it for a bit. Trevor needed someone who accepted him as he was but did things his way—Ian did that. To care for Mickey has only ever meant being himself because all Mickey ever really needed was him. Mickey didn’t need an escape from his home—his relationship with his family is more complicated than that. Mickey didn’t need to be saved from his upbringing—it’s what made him the person Ian fell in love with and who he is happy to be. Mickey didn’t need someone to change who he is on a fundamental level because unless it is going to get him into trouble and separate them, Ian never wanted him to. (Even then, it’s about what he does, not who he is.) And yes, I’m sure that there’s a level of excitement that Ian finds exhilarating where Mickey is concerned, but I tend to believe it goes a lot deeper than that. What he finds exciting about Mickey is what Mickey embodies about the South Side—about home. About his own upbringing, but also Ian’s. About Frank and Monica, his siblings, school, work, ROTC—existing and surviving in an environment where it’s not guaranteed that you’ll have money to keep the heat on this winter or feed your family. They spent the early seasons living in a constant state of fight or flight. They couldn’t afford not to. And there’s excitement in that. Look at how many people say that the first seasons are their favorite! There hasn’t been a huge shift in the quality or direction of the writing, just the trajectory of the characters. They’ve gotten older, and their problems have been different. It’s not about survival so much of the time anymore, but those are the storylines that excite us. For Ian, that exhilaration in the constant battle of survival in their neighborhood is sewn into the fiber of his being just like it is Mickey’s. He saw his home in Mickey before they truly fell in love, and when that followed, Mickey became home.

In Conclusion

Ian has spent his entire life looking for the “right” path only to realize that it was laid before him: his family, his small circle of friends, and Mickey. I love that that is coming full circle this season, where [SPOILER ALERT] marriage has almost made him regress a bit to that place where there must be a right way of doing things going forward, and slowly but surely, we’re seeing him loosen up.

Good morning. It’s Ian Gallagher loving hours.

#shameless #ian gallagher #it's ian gallagher loving hours #shameless meta #well that took six hours #and I didn't get more writing done #but I feel accomplished

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pass-the-bechdel · 6 years

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Supergirl s02e16 ‘Star Crossed (1)’

Does it pass the Bechdel Test?

Yes, twice. Barely.

How many female characters (with names and lines) are there?

Five (41.66% of cast).

How many male characters (with names and lines) are there?

Seven.

Positive Content Rating:

Three? I guess.

General Episode Quality:

Nevermind, they’re back to stupid. So, so stupid.

MORE INFO (and potential spoilers) UNDER THE CUT:

Passing the Bechdel:

Kara passes with Rhea when they meet. They speak again later. There’s a lot of Mon-El involved both times, but they get there eventually.

Female characters:

Kara Danvers.

Alex Danvers.

Lyra.

Rhea.

Maggie Sawyer.

Male characters:

Mon-El.

J’onn J’onzz.

Winn Schott.

Lar.

James Olsen.

Boris.

Mandrax.

OTHER NOTES:

“To make Daxom great again.” Oh, no.

Ok. That flashback. I have mentioned before, how disturbed I am to find that the original confrontation of Kara’s prejudices towards Daxom have since been shown as actual deserved disdain, and how Daxom being actually exactly as bad as she said (to a caricaturish level) undermines Kara’s supposed lesson as well as treating Krypton as holier-than-thou despite all the huge flaws in its culture that have been made so evident, creating this huge us-vs-them divide with a really clear ‘good side’ and ‘bad side’ and absolutely zero nuance, etc. The flashback to Mon-El’s departure from Daxom as it actually happened does no favours to any aspect of the narrative: Mon-El is shown as hesitant and concerned for the safety of others in defiance of the prevailing Daxomite attitude, because the show is too afraid of the audience backlash if they show him being truly callous instead of just passively allowing it, while at the same time the narrative gives no quarter for Daxom and its people as a whole despite their undeserved fates. We are supposed to see Mon-El’s guard and think him awful, but what do we expect any ‘good’ guard to do? Maybe not kill that one guy, but the rest, with the ignoring everyone else in order to focus on rescuing the person he’s pledged to protect? Even killing the Kryptonian makes sense (is not morally ok, but makes sense) in the context of being exactly the kind of targeted violence that happens in the real world when people are ‘othered’. The coding of the behaviour is so transparent it’s disgusting, and coupled with that not-even-veiled MAGA line just before? Daxom’s Republicans to Krypton’s Democrats is a pretty fucking gross parallel to draw. I am very disappointed in the show for all of this garbage.

Remember when I fucking flagged Lyra as using Winn for her own ends the second she stepped on screen? Fucking flagged it.

This is a much better Hamilton joke right here than the one a few episodes ago, but that one a few episodes ago was still too much, and that steps on this, because, really? Two sizeable Hamilton gags with only a couple of episodes between them? You’re trying WAY too hard to be current, show. It’s embarrassing.

Uurrrgghhh, and now we’re doing the ‘oh actually Lyra had a good reason for being terrible!’ thing? This shit is so predictable and empty and I am so over it. Remember one episode ago when this show was momentarily good again?

Is Guardian fighting in a fucking glass factory or what? So many glass panes to be thrown through.

So, we pretending that Lyra’s lie and Mon-El’s lie are the same? Just ‘they lied’ is not a parallel, show. These are not comparable situations.

See, Mon-El says in his apology that ‘I was a spoiled, useless person, but I didn’t know’, and that’s a big part of what is making this whole storyline, all season long, so poor. The total lack of nuance in Daxom. The clear-cut morality of Kryptonians which, also, lacks the nuance of reality. If Mon-El was raised in that life, how much opportunity did he have for seeing the flaws in it and recognising them as such? We have no concept of his level of self-awareness, and refusing to allow people room to grow is not how you achieve progress. At the same time, Mon-El’s process of self-improvement on Earth has been so paint-by-numbers simple, it’s hard to take it seriously. If he’s found changing so easy, how entrenched were those ‘spoiled, useless’ teachings that made up his entire formative existence? Real people take years to overcome such things, not least because when it’s a commonplace feature of how you were raised, it’s hard to recognise that there’s even a problem, let alone dismantle the rationale in your own mind that has allowed you to be unthinkingly complicit. Expecting Mon-El to change like flipping a coin is unfair; blaming him for the circumstances of his birth is unfair; telling this story in the way that they have, with his self-awareness and capacity for immediate total overhaul not just of personality but of ideals apparently uninhibited and detailed with only the slightest of backslides? Utterly unrealistic. What should have been a long, hard journey of self-reflection, questioning, and honestly ugly behaviour has instead been casual comic relief and romantic faux pas, and that’s so insulting. I can’t support Mon-El as a character because I can’t support the ill-constructed narrative that made him; in basic terms, he doesn’t make enough sense. He’s too unrealistic to function.

URGH. This is such a fucking mess I am annoyed at myself for even trying to untangle it. That kinda happens when you’re trying to over-simplify your storytelling to this extent: the break from reality is too intense, and you end up with a heap of confusion that your audience can’t figure out how to engage with on a meaningful level. In university, the single most important word I learned was ‘ethnocentricity’ - the belief that your own culture/background is inherently superior to all others. On the surface level, this is plain ol’ racism - and can be many other ‘isms as well, as cultural background shapes our perceptions of gender, sexuality, religion, etc. Looking deeper, we see ethnocentricity manifest when we assume that our social or moral codes are automatically the correct ones, without pausing to question where we got those codes from, and whether or not, actually, there might be better ways to do things. I actually debated this directly, back in 2016 when two Australian men were executed in Indonesia for drug smuggling, and the debate over the morality of the death penalty was rife throughout the country. I’m not going to get into that debate again here, but as an example of ethnocentricism, it was a case in which a lot of Australians flat refused to acknowledge the possibility that just because another country has different laws which conflict with our way of doing things, doesn’t necessarily mean that the people of that country are corrupt, lesser beings with an under-developed sense of morality which we need to step in and correct. Different ways of doing things can be shocking to our sensibilities at first blush, but we have to think about why they are that way and how the backdrop of that logic informs the constructs we see, before we pass high-and-mighty judgment over others.

Supergirl’s Daxom narrative is a perfect example of ethnocentricism at work, with zero reflection: Kara is right, Mon-El is wrong, this cultural division is all-encompassing and without exception, the end. To be clear: I’m not suggesting that there’s a way to argue for, say, slavery being ok, but what there is is nuance to how people reach such a conclusion, and if we refuse to engage with the nuance we can’t engage with cultural learning, sharing, or understanding, and that’s how you end up with blank hostility instead of working towards more positive futures. Something being ‘obviously morally correct’ is (as evidenced through the entirety of human history) not enough to change systemic issues outright; if it were, the systemic issues wouldn’t have developed in the first place. Supergirl has run into trouble here because it’s trying to be topical, addressing the divisions in current US politics, but it also doesn’t want to actually have a nuanced conversation about the subject, and so instead we get heavy-handed black-and-white morality that only alienates the two sides instead of identifying common ground and building upon it to bridge the gap. Moreover, the show cripples its ability to explore these concepts in a better, more thorough way in the future, because it refuses to commit to the shades of grey in its situation and instead builds a two-camps concept in which any dithering or olive-branching between the two looks like ideological compromise and moral degradation instead of the complicated and painful process of learning that it represents in the real world.

The truth is that as nice as it is to sit on your moral high horse feeling pure and special while everyone else scrabbles on the muddy ground, you can’t understand the people down below and you certainly can’t help them unless you’re willing to hop down and work through the mud as well, and what use is ideological purity if you’re the only one who benefits from it? That doesn’t mean that we should all start behaving in ways that conflict with our moral compass because, hey, some people are bigots, but it does mean recognising that we are all in a process of self-improvement and if you’re not at least open to the possibility that your way of doing things isn’t the best way, you can’t progress yourself, nor does treating others with condescension help bring them to your way of thinking or at least to a middle ground from which you can proceed together. That’s all a much messier and trickier prospect than what this show wants to deal with, and yet it’s exactly the story they’ve blundered into the middle of with the ridiculous notion that they’re gonna be able to clear-cut their way out. Mon-El’s process should involve a lot of questions: not ‘this thing is correct because obviously it is’ or ‘this thing is correct because Kara says so’, but rather ‘I’m being told that my way is wrong: why? Why is it wrong? Why was I taught that it was right? In what ways has my belief in the correctness of this thing influenced my perceptions of other things? Is it possible that this thing I believe actually is right, and Kara is wrong? Why should her perspective be infallible? What are the consequences of either possibility? Does that jive with the rest of my understanding of the world? What else is altered by this change? Are these alterations also correct?’ and so on, and so on, ad nauseum. Exhausting, repetitive, and complicated, yes, but that’s the reality (not least because he’s supposed to be a literal alien from another planet, but, whatever). At first, I thought it was stupid of them to introduce Mon-El without bothering to spend time on his integration into Earth culture outside of a handful of gimmicks; now I see that it’s much worse than that. I don’t expect this whole arc to end well; I only hope that it ends quickly.

#Supergirl #Supergirl season two #Bechdel Test #female representation #Star Crossed (1)

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ampharos-writes · 4 years

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Memoir

Archivist’s Note: The text from the following statement is excerpted from a historical document - an old letter, discovered in the attic of a condemned home and delivered to the Institute for archiving and analysis. The contents of this letter should make it clear WHY it was entrusted into our care. Details regarding the “statement” have been filled in by institute staff.

Statement #9191101 Author’s Name: John Hawthorne Nature of Incident: The nature and circumstances of his death Date and Location: Letter dated November 1st, 1919; recovered from a home in Lexington, Virginia, USA on March 5th, 2020

Statement

Dearest Father,

I write these words to you, of course, knowing full well that there is no way that you will ever be able to read them. Once I was young and idealistic and believed in the great Kingdom of Heaven, but over the course of my life and the events that have transpired within I have become convinced that God and His Kingdom are nothing but the wishful thinking of so many hopeful fools atop this doomed rock, and that all that awaits us at the conclusion of our time upon it is an eternity of cold unfeeling nothingness, a sheer black Void which at the end of our days does consume all that once lived and breathed and grew and flourished and prospered and withered and faded and died.

You must forgive me, as I am getting ahead of myself. No, I am of course aware that you cannot read these words, but in writing them I am perhaps hoping for one last shred of blissful hope myself, one last tiny morsel of catharsis, as I feel my own time drawing near, and I cannot help but dread it down to the deepest part of my soul.

Have you ever died, father? I suppose that’s a foolish question. A better one might be, “Do you know what it feels like to die?”, as I imagine that at this current juncture you’re much incapable of knowing much of anything at all.

I know what it feels like to die. I know it all too well.

I knew it first when Tom and I ran and played by the old creek, when play-fighting turned decidedly more real, when rough hands shoved my lighter frame down into the rushing rapids and a hidden stone lodged itself deep within the back of my skull, when blood rushed out of my head and water rushed into my lungs, when everything went white with pain and then black with nothing, and I was no more.

And then I wasn’t. I woke up the next day, half-blinded by pain, too stiff to move. The poor doctor hovering inches above me blanched as if he’d seen a ghost, and perhaps he had. I remember him shakily asking me to roll over, remember laying on my side for what felt like forever, listening to him hem and haw and poke and prod and examine and ask “does this hurt?” (yes) and “how do you feel?” (bad) and eventually clear his throat and wander off.

Behind a door they thought was thicker than it was, I heard the doctor discussing in hushed tones with mother. He said that I was bleeding much less than I should have been, that the wound looked much cleaner, that I should make a full recovery after copious bedrest. I remember my mother saying that it must have been a miracle, that we had all truly been blessed. I do not believe anything could be further from the truth.

I know that you knew nothing of these events, father, as mother decided that she would rather not worry you, nor did she wish to inspire anger towards Tom, for both she and I knew that what had happened was not his intent, and that his crying at my bedside for the entirety of my confinement was proof enough of that. I must belatedly apologize for this deception, and further admit that while it was the first, it was certainly not the last.

I recall the first time Tom died, too, though I obviously know not what went through his head during the events that transpired. What I DO know is that his recovery from that illness he underwent as a teenager was not nearly as ordinary as we both convinced the hapless physician overseeing him to tell you that it was. In truth, Tom could have, should have, and did in fact pass away from his disease, but the unfeeling end rejected him as it had me, and his condition improved rapidly with no scientific or medical explanation to back it.

Admittedly, as young men this did contribute to our more… reckless endeavors. How could it not have? I know you saw us both as foolhardy braggarts keen to rush into danger for even the slightest chance at glory, but it was all an act, for neither of us relished the thought of fighting an overseer we never knew for a country we barely cared about. No, it was not brashness that drove us to enlist when the minutemen came calling, but a grim sense of duty. We had each died once or twice more by then, enough to know that for whatever reason our lives refused to be cut short, and we felt a moral obligation to harness this towards a purpose that, for whatever reason, people seemed to believe to be righteous and true.

I fell but once in the battles that ensued, to a bayonet wound that grew gangrenous. I hid my discomfort from the others in my regiment, of course; I imagined it would be more tolerable to fight through the pain for the few days I had remaining than it would be to explain away the aftermath of such a wound. Tom claims to have fallen three times, but I was only personally witness to two of them: a musket ball right between his eyes, and a dozen horses briefly reducing him to a tattered facsimile of a human being, before he opened his eyes and quite literally put himself together.

He was always the more brazen of us, Tom was. I was ever-cautious, equal parts humbled by our apparent gift and fearful that it might one day fail us. Tom was under no such compunctions, and after receiving a taste for danger in that great war for freedom he remained something of a frontiersman and a daredevil, constantly venturing out into the wilderness with nothing but his old musket and a canteen.

You knew all of this, of course, just as you knew that I settled down and attempted to put the past behind me, to make something of a normal life. Tom and I stayed in touch, of course, but I have no idea how many times he perished on his expeditions, and that was perfectly fine by me. I had steady employment and a family to look after. The prospect of pushing my luck in a manner such that he had was completely antithetical to my entire nature.

Of course, all the caution in the world is useless against the ravages of our TRUE father. One can evade death as many times as they wish, but their body shall nevertheless weaken and wither with age, their once-bright eyes growing dimmer, their once-proud posture stooping ever lower, their once-unending vigor suddenly draining away with every step they take, until finally they are no more. Ironically enough it was I who father time came for first, as Tom was evidently in better physical condition than I and remained spry well past the age of 80. You and mother were of course long gone by this point, and my sons had both been killed in the second British war, so the only people I had left to comfort me were Elizabeth and Tom.

Both were with me as I lay in bed, too exhausted to move and barely alert enough to speak. Both were with me as my hands dropped from theirs, as the blankets began to feel as if they were enveloping my very soul, as the world began to go dark. Both were with me as faint whispers danced on the edges of my hearing, bearing secrets I could not hear and would not comprehend, as the edges of my mouth crept upwards into a smile, and my eyes finally allowed themselves to close.

Of course, given that I’m here to tell of it, you may correctly assume that this was not the end of my story, and indeed my eyes did not remain shut for long, as the gentle warmth I bore within me suddenly swelled into a searing inferno, sending shooting stabs of agony into every fiber of my being, and my eyes snapped open, and I screamed. It lasted an eternity. It was over in an instant. It matters not. The concept of time itself, I have come to conclude, is as vague and fluid as anything else we like to assume we know about this world.

Whatever the case, what had started did in fact stop at some point, and the first thing I noticed was that I felt… different. Different, but not unfamiliar. It took me a moment to pinpoint what exactly this feeling was: I felt strong. Able. More able than I had in a long time.

I looked at my hands. Gone were the folds and spots of age. Here were the hands of a young man, able to do the powerful work necessary for a young man to succeed in this life. The same was true everywhere I looked, everywhere I examined upon my person. I hadn’t just died. I had been reborn.

My dear sweet Elizabeth had fainted, of course, and poor Tom was too busy gaping at me to help her. We got her into a chair and got her some water, and after confirming that she was still of sound mind and that I wasn’t some demon or malevolent spirit, we explained to her all that had brought us to this point. I didn’t expect her to believe me, but… perhaps there are some miracles in this world.

It was an… odd next few years. Tom had all but moved in with us, waiting for his OWN rebirth, which none of us had any reason to disbelieve would be coming. Elizabeth and I remained madly in love, of course, but there was this strange sort of distance that had cropped up. I would occasionally catch her staring at me with a look that I couldn’t quite place, or shooting glances at Tom that were outright hostile. I of course attempted to make inquiries about the nature of this, but was repeatedly rebuffed, as she insisted that of course everything was fine, and that I was worrying far too much, and should be enjoying my newfound youth. This prospect, frankly speaking, was tempting enough that I tended to agree with her, and spared little thought to my previous concerns.

The darkest day of my life dawned bright and cold. Winter was fast upon us, and Tom had been up before the sun in an attempt to fetch some firewood. Personally, I suspected that he was intentionally trying to wear himself out, in an effort to speed up his own rebirth, but I saw no reason to try to stop him. Elizabeth was already out of bed when I awoke, and I contented myself to simply lay atop the sheets and enjoy the gentle rays creeping in through the window, listening to the love of my life puttering around in the kitchen. In a moment of weakness, I permitted myself to slip into a bit of a flight of fancy, imagining that my lifelong connection with this woman had perhaps extended my curse to her as well, and that she too would be reborn, for us to jointly enjoy a life eternal. It would be… nice.

My daydreaming was interrupted by a terrible, gut-wrenching scream.

I’ll admit to only remembering flashes of the rest of the day. The shock of an event so terrible would do that to anyone, I think. I recall bolting from bed and running through the house. I remember Elizabeth, lying on the ground, her blood pooling atop her chest where a pale and trembling hand still clutched the kitchen knife. I remember the look on her face, equal parts anger and melancholy and regret. I remember she said something as the last of her life slipped away, but I don’t remember if I replied.

I don’t remember Tom returning home, but he must have. I assume he would have found me still standing there, just… looking at her. I don’t remember him guiding me out the door or across town to his own modest lodgings, though I do have vague images of his own rebirth a few short days later. His face was much the same as I recalled it, though tinged with the unmistakable wisdom of age.

To this day, I don’t know why she did it.

The next few years passed in a blur. There wasn’t much I wanted to do except drink and mope, and Tom was of no mind to stop me from doing so. They say that time heals all wounds, but I think that gives time too much credit. I find that wounds deep enough will always leave a scar - enough that you’re not actively bleeding out, but still weaker than the surrounding area, and cementing the memory of the events that created it deep within one’s psyche. So after a few years of my sullen stupor, the wound did indeed began to scar, and I attempted to figure out what I was going to do with what appeared to be my now-unending life.

Of course, at this point Tom and I lapsed into the hedonism one would expect of any two men in their physical primes who believed themselves to have truly and permanently cheated death. We drank, gambled, traveled, hunted, partook in all sorts of activities that sane men would have balked at a hundred times over. Tom fought for the south on a lark, the smug bastard, and you’d be fool to believe that I haven’t lorded our victory over him ever since. We performed odd jobs when we needed money and lived like vagrants when we didn’t. For the first time in my afterlife, I felt like I was truly living.

It was when the Grand Columbian Exposition came to town that we finally learned more of the nature of our situation. Not from the event itself, of course; the nature of our anomalous qualities bears only a tenuous connection to what most people know to be reality, and thus an exposition of such prestige would nary venture to go near exploring it. The prestige and attention that the event brought to Chicago, however, brought with it a fair number of hangers-on hoping to absorb some of the prosperity they figured would be in fair abundance, and it was in the dimly-lit stall of one such vendor that we sought our wisdom.

She claimed to be an oracle from the slopes of Olympus, able to divine the threads of fate and feel out their general trajectory both past and present. Of course, I assumed this was all fairly nonsense - though it was fairly plain that she was at least telling the truth about her Mediterranean origins - but it had been Tom’s idea, and we had nothing better to do. I recall jokingly confiding in Tom that our cover was about to be blown. As it turns out, I was right.

There was no crystal ball, no light show, no smoke and spectacle. She simply sat us down at a small table and stared, hard, at the both of us, fingertips slowly tracing lines we could neither see nor feel. A heavy stillness filled the air, and despite it being a warm summer’s day I suddenly felt very, very cold. When she finally spoke, it was as if she was looking right through me, and I realized with a start that she was very clearly blind.

“Never have I seen the strands of fate so closely intertwined. When one strand is cut, the other patches the gap, until both are so thoroughly entangled that they cannot progress any further. Fate shall not continue Her weaving unless one severs the knot.”

Her voice reverberated through my ears, their meaning clear as day. I shakily slapped a bill down on the table and the two of us fled into the now-too-bright afternoon.

So this is the crux of my tale, father. While Tom lives I cannot die, and the reverse is true as well. We were born together, have lived together, and must die together. Confident as we were at the time, we believed this fate avoidable, and easily so: we would simply have each other’s backs, protecting each other from dangerous circumstances, and we would be fine. Given that this was how we had been living anyways, it seemed almost trivially simple to continue to wind our knot.

But these are curious times, father. The Great War came and went, and out of an abundance of caution neither of us served, but it may spell the end of us anyways. We learned of the Black Plague in the schoolhouse, of course, but this isn’t that. This is something far more insidious. It doesn’t make itself evident with boils and pustules and the overpowering smell of rot and decay. It begins as a common cold, one that simply refuses to go away, that buckles down and ingrains its presence within its host, until it simply saps the life out of them. Dehydration, starvation, breathing problems - no matter the method, the end result is the same. And it’s the one outcome where having each other’s backs may have done more harm than good.

As I write this, Tom lays in the bed next to me, his forehead slick with sweat, his sleep restless, his breathing shallow. My own hand trembles as I write, and were I not writing to a man over a hundred years deceased I would fear for the legibility of it all. I can feel the plague doing its insidious work all throughout my body. Everything hurts, and I know that it will not stop hurting until the end, and that this time it truly will be THE end.

I would say that I lived without regrets, but Tom has always been better at deceiving you than I have. If I am wrong about everything, don’t bother to pass on my regards, as I shall give them myself. If I am right... well, I could do with a rest.

Forever Yours, John

Statement

Historical documents tend to be very, very good at piquing my interest, but this one has been a bit of a dead end. Public record keeping tends to be rather haphazard this far back, and the name Hawthorne is a bit too common in colonial America to truly be of any use. Beyond verifying that the letter truly is as old as it claims to be, there’s little we can do here.

I DID ask Lissa to speak with the man who delivered this, a Mr. Nathan Finch. He read the letter and claimed no knowledge of any family or acquaintances by the name Hawthorne, though he admitted that his mother, one Persephone Theopoulos, had passed away when he was young, and that he knew little to nothing about that side of his family.

It’s worth noting that Mr. Finch discovered the letter through his work with the American Historical Society, and has no personal connection to Lexington, Virginia or the house therein. He himself resides in Chicago, Illinois.

-Amy A. Ampharos, Head Archivist June 1, 2020

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topshelfbitters-blog · 5 years

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This is part of a project that I've been working on for a couple of years. Namely the structure for a Protagonist AU for Saki Konishi. A lot of these are ideas I've borrowed from collaborators while discussing this verse with them, so this wasn't wholly my concept.

April 8th 20xx

Dust motes flutter in front of her eyes, the air smelled stale and all but one of the desks appeared to be locked in a time capsule. Tidy sheaves of paper, notes scribbled on small calendars and rolling chairs pushed in. The room was ready for the onslaught of teachers returning to work next week. Yet for all this meticulous care, Saki Konishi has to sit herself in front of the one workspace that was occupied. A rail-thin man took up a rolling chair, his blue-pinstripe suit the loudest color in the room.

His balding head was bent over an open folder, buckteeth prominent as his expression turned sour. Then again, it wasn't a handsome face to begin with. Saki knew she shouldn't be having such terrible thoughts about one of the few teachers that wanted her to come back to class; she still couldn't get over loathing this man. A part of her said it didn't matter. She had heard worse from her parents and their customers.

She could put up with a teacher looking down on her since he was only in her life a few hours a day. Still, Saki didn't think she'd like to hear what he had to say, so she lingered in the doorway. Apparently she underestimated his awareness. Without looking up, Morooka-sensei gestured with his right hand for her to close the door and then pointed to the chair set in front of his desk.

Gripped with hesitation, Saki wished she could go back in time a few seconds and simply walk off campus and back to the safety of the family store. Too late now. She gingerly gripped the handle, sliding the door closed. Saki took her time unwinding her winter scarf and placing a thick green coat up on the rack. Lacking something to twine around nervous fingers, Saki strode over to the chair, once seated Saki placed hands clasped in her lap.

Unsurprisingly, Morooka-sensei had her school performance folder in front of him. Although Saki knew she had put all of her might into catching up before the new term, a sense of dread still balled itself up in the center of her stomach. What if all that extra work was for nothing? What if she was here because the third year teachers didn't think it was enough? Her fist gradually broke apart, hands resting on the knees of her jeans. Neither student or teacher spoke, letting the tense silence intrude on their meeting.

At last, he broke the quiet with a brisk cough, “Well, your work isn't terrible” was the grumbled admission. Before Saki could breath a sigh of relief though, his voice returned. Sharper and coupled with a narrowed gaze. “You aren't in the clear though. You'll have to come to school every day. On time. No excuses or cutting class anymore.”

Oh. This meeting was about her conduct. Again, Saki was tempted to walk out, though this time out of indignation in place of anxiety. Who cared if she showed up to school every day, as long as the work got done? Would this place really fall apart if one desk was left vacant? All of these questions begged to be asked, yet Saki forced herself to keep her jaw shut and answered him with a brisk nod of her head.

She didn't want a repeat of October. Of sitting in front dozens of teachers, principal and the director of education. She didn't want to force her head down again and apologize. That day still left a bitter taste in her mouth. The shame of being talked about, debated over and eventually granted permission to give up eight hours of her day to learning things she couldn't even apply towards finding a job.

Getting angry wouldn't help her. Shelve the emotion, nod along and comply. She could unpack these feelings later, in the privacy of her room, where no one would look twice if she didn't seem anything short of happy. If she was hoping for an early release though, then the girl grossly underestimated her former homeroom teacher. Sensing discontent, Morooka launched right into what had to be bothering him all along.

“I can't say I'd be disappointed if you didn't show up. Honestly, your parents should be given a medal for putting with such an ungrateful child.”

His words cut, but Saki bit back and bore it. He was building up to a lecture, if she exploded now, days before the opening ceremony, Saki knew she could kiss her chances at a high school diploma goodbye.

His chair creaked in protest as the teacher leaned back, putting on a casual air in response to Saki's stiff posture.

“We shouldn't have let you back into this school. You runaway and take up with some college kid, thinking he's gonna look after you.”

Saki nearly balked. How did he hear about that? Then again, how could such juicy gossip be avoided. This town thrived on making others look bad. Didn't matter who, so long as they came out smelling like a rose...

“Bet it was a rude awakening to find that he was only after one thing, hm? Something he could get anywhere.”

Her throat tightened, bile rising to settle at the back of Saki's tongue. How dare he. He could talk about her lackluster grades and terrible attendance record. He could call her shit. He could even parade around and say her parents should be ashamed for not instilling a work ethic in her.

He shouldn't be allowed to talk about her private life like this. People could whisper behind her back and imply things. She couldn't stop them and acting wounded would only make them talk more, but at least others had the decency to keep their words to themselves, not throw it in her face.

It wasn't right for a teacher to imply that she had put out for free room and board.

Yet he didn't stop there.

“I guess nothing can be done about it though. Girls your age are all the same. They'll attach themselves to a guy they think is gonna be someone. You'll leach off them, rather than putting in the work yourself.”

Saki's hands went back to clench into a fist, fingers digging in tight along the back of her hands. He had no right to say that. She worked hard. She was holding down two jobs just to keep her family happy. She was going to break her back and study just to do what was expected of her.

That wasn't right.

Wasn't fair.

He had no business calling her lazy.

“Just know that sort of behavior won't be tolerated at this school. You're here to learn, not to find your next sugar daddy. Though I have to say, you're not gonna find a lot of prospects to begin with.”

Tears were welling up, despite Saki's efforts to not let his words cut her. It wasn't even about him or his views. Saki had classes with him at the head of the class, spouting this nonsense about how terrible their entire generation was. It shouldn't hurt, so she was wrong for feeling slighted.

She wasn't going to give in and cry though. He might want to see that. See it as a sign of her submitting.

With that in mind, Saki forced herself to remain dry eyed while looking up at him. Enough bowing her head and acting meek.

His lips peeled back, showing those godawful teeth.

“Shit attracts nothing but flies, Konishi-san. Don't forget that.”

She had a remark raring to go. It physically pained her to put it down, to give him a weak smile and bow her head for the last time.

Of course you would know better than anyone what shit attracts. Your mouth is full of nothing but filth

“Of course, sensei. I'll keep that in mind. Look forward to seeing you on Monday.”

- - -

Her breath curled out from behind a tightly wound scarf, hands shoved into the pockets of a coat too big for her body until Saki found her gloves. The outer garment had been cut to fit a man, but the borrowed jacket served a two-fold purpose to Saki. Inaba was unreasonably cold this spring, or so the regulars of her father's store kept telling her.

Saki for one didn't need to be told that it was too cold. She sniffled at the slight chill, gloved hands furiously swiping at the corners of her eyes. It was freezing out, so no one was gonna think twice of her pulling the hood up. Yet, Saki stopped short of doing so because there was a subtle movement caught by the corner of her gaze. Dropping the attempt to shield her face, Saki took a few steps closer to the shop window.

Passing underneath the rotating sign of the gas station, Saki peered at the Help Wanted sign. Strange that. This place seemed to be abandoned most of the time, then again that could be said about a lot of shops down this way. For a moment, she considered it. Maybe her life would be easier if she dropped Junes. At least her father would nag less. Yet, Saki doubted a gas station that saw maybe five cars a day would be able to pay her better than Junes. Besides, her nose wrinkled at the thought of smelling like gasoline every night.

As she was about to turn around and walk on home, Saki moved too abruptly and nearly bowled over into another warm body.

“Whoa there, you okay?”

The voice startled Saki more than the near collision had. That wasn't the raspy voice of the old guy who owned the gas station. Sure enough, a quick glance proved that this was a new face. For her openly staring, the guy smiled then asked.

“What? Is there something on my face?”

“Oh...no, I just wasn't expecting someone to be here.” Probably a bad thing to say about a place looking to hire new employees. Luckily, the guy dismissed her skepticism with a light laugh.

“Yeah, it is kind of dead here. Don't know what the boss was thinking putting that sign up.”

Ah, so he was new. Usually businesses get passed down to relatives, but this guy didn't look like the owner at all. And what unusual hair. Ash gray? It wasn't uncommon to see people with bleached hair, but people mostly go for a shade of blond, not outright gray or silver.

“Speaking of which, saw you looking at the sign” his smile stayed, which made Saki shiver for a second. It didn't make sense though. He didn't sound threatening nor was he discouraging her interest.

“I was considering it, but it'd be impossible for me to juggle three jobs and school.”

Her reply got a low whistle from the gas station attendant, “Two jobs? And you're a student? That must be rough.”

Saki wanted to say, 'Not really', but then decided to let him keep his opinion. It wasn't often that people acknowledged how hard she worked and after that meeting, Saki felt she was owed a confidence boost.

“Well, can't say you're missing out on much. It's pretty boring around here. You do get free drinks out of the soda machine though.”

At this, he had her full attention.

“Ah, I see I've got a taker” his grin looked almost mischievous now.

Saki tried to sound nonchalant, “Well, if you're offering I won't say 'no' to a free soda.”

He responded with a 'tsk', “Nah, sign on the dotted line first and put on a uniform, then we'll talk perks.”

Playing along, Saki sighed heavily as if the decision was so difficult, “I'm afraid I can't decide. A hefty paycheck or free soda.”

At this, he placed a hand to his chest, “W-wait, are you saying our paychecks are inferior?”

“Not intefior, just less than what Junes offers me.”

“...curses, foiled again by a department store.” At that, Saki noticed he suddenly had a soda can in his right hand. Had that always been there? Maybe. She hadn't been paying much attention to him after taking in his unusual hair color, hadn't even looked at his name tag, but it didn't seem important now.

Saki almost didn't want to walk away. Her instincts had been soothed and she enjoyed talking to this guy. Yet, knew she couldn't stay. She had to put a couple hours at the liquor store before changing and going to Junes. Goofing off with a guy would start tongues wagging again.

“I can pay for a 'free soda' though,” she said, not wanting to waste his or her time anymore.

“Nah...” with that the attendant placed a cold melon soda can in her palm. “This one is on me. For breaking up the monotony.”

Saki was within second of thanking him, but some weird sensation struck her. Instead of freezing, the young woman felt flushed with the onset of a sudden fever. Her vision swam, a sudden lurch of her stomach as if it was threatening to make her vomit. A cold sweat broke out along the nape of her neck.

“I...I think I should go home...not feeling well.”

“Oh?” he returned, “You do look pale all of a sudden. Maybe you should come in and sit down.”

Saki barely croaked out, “No, I should go home. Thank you though...”

- -

Somehow, she made it home without incident. Still feeling queasy Saki begged off her covering the afternoon shift, citing a stomach ache. Her mother was understanding, but her father glared and Saki knew she'd probably get the silent treatment from Naoki when he got back from hanging out with his friends, since now it meant he'd have to pull double the work.

The worst though, well aside from feeling like she was suffering from a virus; was having to text Yosuke. Her co-worker sounded 'okay' with taking her shift, but it was so difficult to read people's true feelings over text boxes and emoji's. It sucked. She didn't want to miss out on her shift, but it wouldn't be right to beg off work under the guise of being sick, only to power through for the other place.

Saki could feel a fight brewing, she only hoped her dad could keep a lid on it until she felt well enough to counter.

Her night was hardly restful. While the sudden symptoms did wane eventually, sleep was impossible. Her ears kept ringing and the fever had yet to break. Tossing and turning in bed proving to be useless, Saki groaned and stared at the clock on her phone.

11:57

Thinking she'd feel better after getting some water, Saki forced herself to leave the bed behind. Lightly, she crept down the stairs. Years of sneaking out for a night on the town made her an expert at avoiding complaining steps. However, a different sort of noise reached her ears, which Saki was grateful had simply stopped ringing. It took her a second to place the buzzing noise.

Static

Rather than heading straight to the kitchen for a glass, Saki instead leaned into the entry to the living room. A yellow hue spilled out from the unattended tv, it was the source of the noise. The picture flickered, rolling upwards like an old film about to run off it's spool. Her quest for water forgotten about, Saki vaguely recognized this blind fascination as something familiar. It brought her back to that encounter at the gas station, which only now struck her as something bizarre.

Though like with that attendant's name tag, his face and other features; Saki found that sensation fading from her memory. In it's place was a picture.

A woman in a skirt-suit looked right at her from the screen. Short dark hair, a dimpled smile on her lips while slender hands held out a corded microphone. The picture stuttered. A room drenched in red briefly bleed into the Konishi's living room, changing the mood in the same instance as the lighting.

She could taste iron behind her teeth. Sharp, bitter and it scorched her tongue.

The picture distorted again.

A body hung limply, dimpled smile replaced with a death mask, her hair in disarray and stocking feet dangling above a downed chair.

A ticker went across the bottom of the screen, but Saki couldn't bear to read the headline.

She couldn't bear to look at this anymore. She had to turn it off.

In her haste to reach the dial and power down the television, Saki instead tripped on a corner of the living room rug.

Instead of tuning out of the gruesome program, Saki found her head being pitched right into the production.

Panic gripped the young woman as her eyes took in the red room. Torn posters plastered all over the four walls, the floor and scattered all over the single bed. In her haste to get away, Saki cried out and abruptly pulled away from the tv.

Stumbling back, she didn't find her living room. Instead she was surrounded in chilling fog.

While glad to be out the red room, Saki didn't feel this was an improvement. Looking around, she couldn't find the way back home. Nothing familiar amidst all this cold, thick fog.

Taking in a gulp of air, Saki wondered if she should stay put, hope someone would find her; or move forward to find a way out herself.

The answer came to her in a simple word uttered by someone else.

Come

#Long Post #flexing my writing muscles #after x amount of months lying dormant #Protagonist Saki AU

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