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auspicioustidings · 7 months

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Firewatch Part 3

Summary: You are taken care of and things take a turn for the sinister.

Word Count: 3.1k

CW: Kidnapping, dub-con

You struggled and struggled but Simon, no not Simon, Ghost held your back to his chest in a vice grip. His hand over your mouth muffled your desperate screams, the strength of him so at odds with the syrupy words he was cooing into your ear.

“There baby, I know it’s hard but you’re going to be ok. We’re going to make you ok.”

The high whine of a trapped animal left you, the tendrils of it that could escape his hand barely above audible. You could feel that he was hard at your back, hear the groans coming from him when you struggled against him and gave him friction.

“Fuck sweetheart, need you to stay still.”

Your muscles strained to be free of him as he started rutting against your ass, chasing his own pleasure without realising. It was dark in this closet. You could hear the cops laughing away with the rest of the 141 downstairs, oblivious to the very alive girl being held captive above them. This morning you had found the man behind you sweet, had maybe even felt some sort of giddy crush bubbling away for him. They had seemed so kind and warm and they had all treated you so well these firefighters, right up until you had figured it out.

Ignorance really was bliss.

–

The cabin was breathtaking and the floor was unexpectedly warm beneath your feet when Price finally set you down. It hadn’t been far from the watch tower at all, maybe 10 minutes, but the trees did a good job of making it seem invisible until you were close. It was clear that this was a labour of love with its cute hand burned wooden sign marking it with the numbers 141, the swing seat and rocking chairs out on the porch and the little disorganised but thriving vegetable garden by the side.

The inside was homey if a little rugged, not a lot of touches of femininity to be found but plenty of heart and charm. You spied bits of kit lying around in ways that spoke to the personalities of their owners. One jacket neatly hung on its peg, another haphazardly thrown onto the counter. It felt strangely like a sibling of your own little fairytale cottage you had made, the more wild version. It made you mourn the loss all over again until you heard a long suffering meow and the tears weren’t coming from grief anymore.

“Hi Dosia girl” you cried through an overjoyed smile, crouching so she could come butt her head against your hand.

You were a little embarrassed at your very ugly crying as you scooped her up and cuddled her. She smelled of smoke and ash and you put that thought to the back of your mind. Dosia did not like baths one little bit, so that was certainly going to be a battle and you were going to come out of it with war wounds. Ah, you would need to find a B&B that would be ok with a pet, or maybe you could crash with your aunt for a while. The trip to where she lived would be hours but not like you had many options.

Your reunion was cut short by the fact that you were far more invested in this cuddling than Dosia was. She allowed it for perhaps 15 seconds and then squirmed to be put down, batting at your cheek when you tried to resist.

“Ok, ok!” you laughed, letting her jump down.

It was a bit of a surprise to see her rub against Simon before padding off to curl up by the fireplace. Oh my goodness they had a fireplace. It wasn’t lit which was sensible since they had been out, but you could imagine it made the whole place incredibly cosy. Your thoughts strayed briefly seeing the chopped wood in a basket, imagining the sight of these large men with axes, sweating as they made their firewood.

Grief, relief and horniness were not good bedfellows and you brought your bottom lip forward to blow a puff of air up towards your head. Your mother used to have you do it when you were little to blow the bad thoughts away when you had nightmares and while it didn’t work quite as well with the frankly filthy images it was good enough.

“Come on little bird, shower is this way. I’ll get some clothes for you while you are in there” Price said, his hand on the small of your back to direct you.

He had such an old fashioned way about him that it almost made you feel like you were in another time. His touch against you so firm and gentlemanly that you wanted to swoon a little, but you only smiled and gave a meek thank you before allowing yourself to be led. Price was already imagining the ceremony. He’d have to marry you of course, wouldn’t be proper to fuck a child into you without marrying you first.

He had to give Kyle a stern look over your head as you went into the room. The boy was seconds away from arguing that he also needed to shower and wouldn’t it make sense to save water? He had been the first to taste your lips, it would be unfair if he were also the first to see you naked and trembling beneath the water. Maybe Price was feeling a little mean about it too, a little possessive. Kyle’s clothes would fit you best, but he was more inclined to give you his. You’d look right drowning in his t-shirt. He could imagine the way it would slip off your shoulder, give him access to pepper kisses there and get you all warm and honey sweet for him.

“I really appreciate it” you said, still sniffling a little but trying to convey how thankful you were of their kindness.

You thought as you closed the door and slowly stripped out of your soot covered clothes that maybe it might be nice to ask one of them out for a drink once you had sorted out the Insurance and maybe rented out a little flat until you could plan a rebuild. You had just been very cosy with Kyle, so you knew that he at least found you attractive if nothing else. But then each of them captivated you in a different way, even the masked man who hadn’t spoken one word to you this entire time was giving the temptation of a mystery to be solved.

The water pressure was amazing here and you found yourself relaxing as steam pillowed around you. It’d be nice to keep in touch with these firefighters even if you didn’t ever work up the courage to ask any out on a date. They had saved you after all and if you rebuilt where you had been you could probably visit them pretty easily if you were allowed to be in the watchtower outside of nearly burning to a crisp. You weren’t really sure how it worked, was it open to the public? You could find out after everything was sorted.

You laughed seeing the awful 3 in 1 shampoo, conditioner and soap. It was scented ginger and orange and it was strong as hell. You wondered if they all used it, you hadn’t really smelled it on any of them and given how just opening the bottle made the whole room heady with the scent you would think you would have been able to. Another of life's little mysteries. Maybe this bathroom was so clean and tidy because it was a spare?

You felt bone tired once you were clean, just standing under the warm water and letting your muscles relax.The door opening made you tense up all over again, Price walking in to place a little bundle of clothes on the counter and smiling over at you like you were not currently naked. He wasn’t acting like it was a big deal and you were trying to emulate that while turning yourself to try and cover up as much as you could.

“They’ll be a bit big, but don’t have much in the way of clothing for a lady. I’ll see if we can’t get your clothes clean,” he said, going to take the little bundle of your ashy clothing.

“Oh that’s ok, you really don’t have to-”

“Hush little bird, just you let us take care of everything.”

He left after that and you thought you might die on the spot. Your underwear had been in that pile and it was mortifying to think of them laundering it. It wasn’t like it needed saving, you’d get new things. You weren’t even sure you wanted any of the clothing that such a disaster had happened in. Getting out of the shower, dried and dressed was a hurried affair. Price may not have cared about nudity but you did and you didn’t fancy getting caught again.

The clothes were definitely way too big but you didn’t mind that just now, it felt comforting. He had left sweatpants, a t-shirt and a hoodie. No underwear, but then of course there wouldn’t be. It would be weird to wear theirs. You had a quick look around for a hair brush but found none, instead just trying to comb your towel dried hair as best you could with your fingers. No easy feat considering the product you had just used on it.

Coming out of the little room was a nerve wracking affair. You felt your wits were very much back about you now, your brain reminding you that you were in the woods alone with 4 men, one of which you had been all over a few hours ago. Only the masked man was in the room as you came out. You saw him in the little kitchenette, giving a short gasp when he turned and set a steaming mug of definitely hot chocolate on the counter. You could really use a hot chocolate.

“Come on sweetheart, sit and drink. You need something warm after the day you’ve had.”

It was for you? Oh this mystery of a man was more appealing by the second and you immediately followed instructions, sitting down on one of the stools by the counter and taking a deep inhale of the steam in appreciation.

“Hot chocolate is my absolute favourite, thank you,” you said, happily sipping.

Ghost knew it was your favourite. He had learned so much about you when he had gone into your little cottage while you slept. He knew it would come in handy, knew deep down it was destiny that you’d be here one day. You were already his from the moment he had laid eyes on you from the watchtower, he was just biding his time until you knew that too. And his patience was wearing thin now that you were so close.

“I was wondering who Soap was, is it another firefighter?” you asked, honestly just wanting to make conversation so you could hear his voice again as you ran a finger over the name patch on the jacket over the counter.

“S’Johnny’s call sign. Kyle has Gaz on his jacket, John has Price.”

“Oh, what’s yours?”

You were fascinated by the way his eyes just held yours intensely. They were the only part of his face you could see, the only thing that could give away how he was feeling. While there was something of a smile there, some animal instinct wanted you to run. Some animal instinct saw a predator in his eyes as he answered you.

“Ghost.”

“On account of him being a big spooky bitch” Johnny’s voice floated from the stairs.

You turned to see him and Price coming down, the former looking dishevelled. Johnny had scratches all down his forearms, some looking deep and bleeding. His hair was a mess, clothes damp and sudsy. Price meanwhile looked no worse for wear, holding a purring Dosia wrapped in a fluffy towel. You couldn’t help but laugh, Johnny’s dramatic sigh when you did making you laugh harder.

“Did she kill Kyle?”

“Naw, bastard got out of bath time to go shower like a coward.”

“You’ll have to forgive MacTavish, he’s always been shit with women regardless of if they’re human or not.”

“Awa’ an bile yer heid.”

“English Johnny.”

“Let me translate. Go fuck yerself.”

“Offt, thought it was against the firefighter code to burn things,” you joked, causing Johnny and Price to grin at you.

Price sat himself on one of the armchairs with Dosia still purring away, docile in his arms. Johnny cheekily took your mug to take a sip for himself which you were frankly outraged about, following him to sit on the sofa. Simon spirited himself away to somewhere else in the cabin before coming back shortly with a hairbrush in hand.

You twisted around thinking he would give it to you, but Johnny only smooshed your cheeks and brought your head back around to face front so that Simon could start gently brushing your hair. It was such a sweet gesture that you luxuriated for the moment in the attention. It was probably ok to indulge a little after the day you had, and you closed your eyes and relaxed. You were alive and well and so was Dosia. You could rebuild a cottage.

At some point you dozed off, only waking when Kyle was gently coaxing you to eat some soup. He was sat on the little coffee table feeding you, looking devastatingly handsome all clean and in plaid pyjama bottoms and a hoodie. It felt intimate, way too intimate, but you were happily sleepy and soon happily fed so you let the little alarm bell in the back of your mind be overridden.

–

When you woke up it was morning and you were in a bed. You were in a bed and you were not alone. There was a large body curled around your back, one arm pillowing your head and the other lazily slung over your waist. You tensed and the man noticed, a rumbling coming from his chest that you swore you could feel vibrate against your back.

“S’ok baby, dinnae need to git up yet.”

Johnny, it was Johnny behind you. You squeaked like a damn mouse when you felt his lips press to the back of your neck. Christ he was like a furnace behind you, the heat of him bleeding into you. You knew you were lying to yourself if you said that was the only reason you were suddenly overheating. Maybe he thought you were someone else? You moved a bit, seeing if you couldn’t get out of his hold and wake him up.

He definitely did not think you were someone else, not when he groaned and pulled you back in to squeeze you in a tight hug, your name on his lips.

“Please let me hold ye for a wee bit longer bonnie, nearly lost ye yesterday.”

Your emotions were tangled. Part of you felt that your heart might beat out of your chest from how loving he sounded, that little undercurrent of genuine fear of losing you. The other part had your heart beating out of fear because you had met this man yesterday and he was acting like you were long term partners. The latter won out and you struggled against his hold, relieved when he let you go with a sigh.

You rolled out of bed and looked at him in alarm. Oh he was adorable like this, all sleepy and soft. He didn’t seem so dangerous like this.

“I…” you started, not really knowing where to go from there.

You decided that where to go from there was out of this room, scrambling for the door and spilling out into the hallway without another word. You could see the stairs. Someone must have carried you up last night. You went down them in a rush, not sure what your plan was now. You were flustered, annoyed at yourself for how tempting it had been to stay.

“Good morning luv! Sleep well?”

Christ, Gaz and Price were in the little kitchen area drinking tea. Both were shirtless, Gaz only in PJ bottoms and Price only in his underwear. Fuck these people were models, this could not be a real situation you had actually found yourself in.

“I- uh, yes? Thank you. I need to go.”

Both of them looked concerned, Price walking over to you and blocking your way to the door.

“Do you need me to talk to Soap? I’ve already told the boys they’re not to do anything you don’t want unless it’s for your own good little bird, do I need to remind him?”

He seemed so sincere, so warm and protective and safe. Only now you panicked at it, trying to figure out what on earth constituted something you didn’t want but was for your own good where these strangers were concerned.

“No, we didn’t… thank you for everything, but I need to go now. Need to get paperwork sorted and get some clothes and a place to stay and everything” you babbled, trying to aim for casual. Trying to aim for ‘I am not shit scared or anything, just going to go about my day don’t mind me’. You loved your cat more than anything, but right now you would leave without her and come back for her, that was how on edge this situation was making you.

Kyle was moving now as well, casually leaning against the front door. It wouldn’t matter how subtle he was, you saw it for what it was. They were stopping you from leaving.

“Handled the paperwork yesterday. You can stay here and we’ll get you some clothes, although I think you look beautiful in mine,” Price said, smiling indulgently down at you.

You were going to need to fight. Something was very, very wrong here and you were going to need to fight. There was a knock at the front door, making Kyle jump and whirl around. There was a moment of stillness, Kyle and Price both looking at you and you looking at them, everyone aware things were about to become very bad very quickly.

The scream was a second too late, a hand already clamped around your mouth as you were dragged bodily backwards and up the stairs. You fought like hell, but the body behind you was huge. Simon. It must have been. He had appeared from thin air and the callsign Ghost made sense now.

Johnny passed you being dragged in the hallway, winking and ruffling your hair before heading down the stairs.

It was only once you were dragged into the closet and the door closed that you heard the voices downstairs. It was the police you thought. They were talking about remains from a fire. Oh God, they were talking about your remains.

#cod #cod au #fanfic #mhairiwrites #tf 141 x reader

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thisonesatellite · 2 years

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new to stucky

Hi, hello, yes, i am new to stucky. This is in response to this post by @hellyeahbottombucky -- so, uh, yes, shameless self-recs coming at you. 💕

a handful of dust -- my first stucky fic. Canon divergence after CATWS.

SUMMARY: Steve looks for Bucky for a long time. But the thing is that Bucky doesn't get found, Bucky finds. Bucky always finds Steve.

This takes a hard left after the Potomac and stumbles through the dark a lot after. Take a bit of running, the occasional synaptic misfire, the resurfacing of old memories, a dash or two of PTSD, and (eventually) a nice dose of action, stir, and serve over some unresolved issues. HEA included, of course.

Truth Or Consequences, New Mexico -- my entry for the CAPRBB22, my first bang of any kind. Which was the most amazing experience EVER, thanks to @angelicalslayer and the incredible mods.

SUMMARY: Twelve years after the end of the American Civil War, Marshal Steven Grant Rogers is tasked with finding an assassin who calls himself the Winter Soldier. There are gun fights, fist fights, corruption, intrigue, past trauma, present pain, dumb luck, smart horses, and the difference between right and just, served with a dose of fluff and the kind of Happy Ending where people literally ride into the sunset. .

despite all my rage -- my current WiP, a cage fight dystopia which is also entirely @angelicalslayer's fault. i get enabled in all the wrong places. 🤣

SUMMARY: In an alternate future far from canon, HYDRA's Brave New World is just anarchy with different rules.

Civilization had a bit of a breakdown in the face of the New World Order, but greed still rules all, and far from the madding crowd Bucky tries to work off his debts in a cage fight octagon. Until one day one of the new fighters to get dropped turns out to be a 95-pound bag of bones and attitude and Bucky's world never recovers from the impact.

Not that he wants it to.

This is basically a buffet of connection, courage, bruised knuckles, comic relief, bad guys, badder guys, worse ideas, and best laid plans. Not to mention idiots falling in love and being idiots about it.

Protective idiots. Lovable, wonderful, idiotic idiots.

Completely AU.

Last but not least i've been fortunate enough to meet two absolutely amazing writers and human beings on this journey who are also relatively new to stucky:

@mwritesff (mwritesff on AO3) -- all of her fics are amazing, but happiness will introduce you to sprinklegate, and trust me, you need sprinklegate in your life. Ok? OK.

@crisis-froggo (writerfroggo on AO3) -- who is also amazing in everything, but most especially Strange Bedfellows, which is all you ever wanted in pre-war pining, idiots in love, and bedsharing. With a dose of Jeeves. Like - seriously. Somewhere PG Wodehouse is laughing his ass off.

#new to stucky #new to bucky #thisonesatellite #stucky #stucky fic

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sugar-stories · 1 year

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Happy New Year!

(Pictured above: my homemade osechi ryouri New Year’s meal for 2023! Left box contains kurikinton, kuromame, namasu, kamaboko, shrimp, datemaki, kobumaki. Right box contains nishime.)

Hope 2023 is treating you all well so far! ♥️ I got some unexpected but exciting commissions irl that are taking up a lot of my free time, but here’s how progress (??) is going on fics so far!

Wrote about 7k words of Strange Bedfellows chapter 4…and then edited out about 2k of that, because I realized it was messing with the pacing of the martial arts portion. (Gotta have those wacky martial arts, right???) About half of the scenes I took out will probably be re-edited and shuffled back in later, where they won’t slow down the action.

Reworked some of Here Comes the Bribe’s outline to make the climactic battle slightly more…climactic. 😅

Writing is such a process! It always takes me four times as long to do because I nitpick as I go, and/or spend 38 minutes to write one (1) sentence. I don’t talk about this much, but it’s also a constant uphill battle against my own brain. I’m diagnosed with (and being treated for) ADHD, but even with medication and counseling, it’s sometimes hard for me to get things done in a timely manner, especially the things outside the scope of my day-to-day work. BUT I don’t say this as an excuse, or because I want to be pitied or anything like that. I say it because I’m going to keep chugging through at my own pace despite the hurdles both internal and external, and I hope that it also encourages you to take things one day at a time, do the best you can given your own circumstances, and be patient and forgiving to yourself as you work towards your goals in 2023! Take a moment to appreciate yourself if you’ve read this far, okay?!

#cw food #my fics #text post #strange bedfellows #here comes the bribe

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5judgements · 1 year

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Another Zargabaath drabble ~

Violent waves wash against pristine hulls, rain thundering its pouring attitude over glass panes, and Zargabaath is unable to look away. Settled with his hip against the railings from the command center his attention remains wholly on the sight before them and what a sight it is. There comes a flash of lightning which illuminates for a heartbeat what lies ahead; dozens of mismatched ships trudge against winds and current, fleeing for their lives, an active hunt as Archadia’s navy snaps its jaws at their heels.

He stands to navigate Imperial forces through the storm and see to it that every foreign soul finds an unmarked grave within the maw of a turbulent sea, by order of King Grammis, so decreed that any pirate be unfit for the joy of life. Another streak through the air and his horned helm turns towards a seaman to his left, the Magister’s voice ringing clear through the metal;

“Fire when ready.”

A pause, and he leans forward, gloved hands grasping around the rail to steady himself against the swell. For every love he had to be surrounded by these dark waters, Zargabaath loathes what it means for those around him. This was no ship meant for pleasure, not a vessel harboring good intentions, the Famfrit had been built to sow terror and it did so well. Though the distance between them was far greater he could swear that the horror begot by the crews they seek to silence could be seen on every pale face.

His gaze then slides from the stern of that which has fallen into their effective range of attack, to the soldiers on the deck below him. They move diligently and he should be proud, by every right, to see the well oiled machine that his command had created. He feels nothing short of rotten remorse that their actions here would condemn hundreds of people.

They peer up to meet his emotionless stare, and all he offers is but a gentle nod.

The whole ship rocks from the shockwave of their volley, forward cannons ripping ribbons through metal and wood and every life aboard. He cannot hear their screams but feels them marrow deep, his lips pursed, and Zargabaath looks on. This is the price of war. Death is a strange bedfellow for a man who had fought so valiantly against it. Those lost would marr his very existence, but he doesn’t flinch, not even as another bombardment ensues.

Another follows, more after that, until there is nothing left for them to fire upon.

Morning arrives on a far less chaotic breath. The waves are calm, and a graveyard drifts alongside their convoy.

Stepping onto the top deck and surveying for himself the damage it leaves a hollow pit beneath his ribs. It was us or them, he tells himself, as if the Archadian fleet was anything less than a lethal scar against the horizon. Remaining pensive, his eye catches something in the water he had hoped would not be there to be found.

People were drifting amongst the wreckage, and alive despite the odds.

“We give no quarter,” he states, and despite his tone remaining as clear and even as ever, Zargabaath can’t help the nausea that rises upon watching his orders in effect.

Voices call from the ocean below, and are silenced just the same, by a resounding crack of gunfire in the warm hues of a rising sun.

#(ZARGABAATH) IC #drabble

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xtruss · 2 years

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Analysis: Why America’s Far Right and Far Left Have Aligned Against Helping Ukraine

The discourse surrounding Russia’s war on Ukraine has created strange bedfellows.

— By Jan Dutkiewicz, a policy fellow at the Brooks McCormick Jr. Animal Law and Policy Program at Harvard Law School, and Dominik Stecuła, an assistant professor of political science at Colorado State University | July 04, 2022 | Foreign Policy

Anti-war protesters led by Code Pink demonstrate outside the U.S. Capitol in Washington on March 16. Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images

Since Russia attacked Ukraine, unprovoked, on Feb. 24, the discourse surrounding the war that has emerged in the United States has created strange bedfellows. Although the majority of the American public, led by U.S. President Joe Biden, have thrown their support behind Ukraine, many on the left and right alike have rushed to defend Russian President Vladimir Putin’s regime or, at the very least, have urged the United States not to intervene in Ukraine’s defense.

Tucker Carlson, the face of Fox News and host of the most popular show on cable news in the United States, has been spouting pro-Kremlin talking points for months (and is frequently rebroadcasted on Russian state television). Other right-wing figures regularly spew out anti-Ukrainian disinformation and rail against sending heavy weapons to the country.

Meanwhile, the luminary of the American intellectual left, Noam Chomsky, has invoked former U.S. President Donald Trump as a model of level-headed geopolitical statesmanship for his opposition to arming Ukraine. Left-wing sources—such as Jacobin, New Left Review, and Democracy Now!—have hewed to a party line that blames NATO expansion for Russia’s invasion and opposes military aid to Ukraine.

Online, armies of left- and right-wing accounts find fault with Ukraine’s politics, policies, and president. In Congress, seven of the most fervent conservative Trump supporters voted alongside progressive champions Reps. Ilhan Omar and Cori Bush against banning Russian fossil fuels; even more surprisingly, Omar and Bush are joined by so-called squad members Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Rashida Tlaib as well as the far-right fringe of the Republican Party in opposing the U.S. government seizing Russian oligarchs’ assets.

What we seem to be seeing is a modern-day version of the horseshoe theory of politics, where the far left and far right find themselves in uncanny alignment. Although historically maligned, the theory seems to hold remarkably well when it comes to U.S. opinion on the Russia-Ukraine war. This doesn’t have much to do with ideological symmetry, however, or even Russia or Ukraine, for that matter. Rather, it has everything to do with the fraught state of U.S. politics, where relying on simple notions of “left” and “right” or “conservative” and “progressive” no longer serves a useful heuristic for understanding political developments.

The horseshoe theory of politics was introduced by French philosopher Jean-Pierre Faye, who believed that the political ideological spectrum—traditionally construed as a linear progression from some form of socialism or democratic collectivism through a bourgeois-liberal center and on to some form of totalitarianism or fascism—was not a straight line between ever-more-distant political positions but rather something like a horseshoe, with the extremes bending almost magnetically into conjunction with each other.

Based on his observation of the alignment of fascist and communist parties in early 1930s German domestic politics and then on the Nazi-Soviet alignment in the international sphere, perhaps best embodied by the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, he believed that the political extremes have much more in common than a traditional interpretation of the political spectrum might suggest.

The idea of the political horseshoe has long been criticized both for its lack of intellectual rigor and for its weaponization by centrists to discredit their opponents, mostly by those on the left who could be compared to the conservatives they ostensibly oppose. Critics of the theory tend to point out that any seeming convergence on political positions between the far left and far right—such as critiques of liberal democracy, globalization, and market-based solutions to social problems—is superficial, masking far deeper and divergent ideological and policy preferences. If anything, what unites the far left and far right, critics assert, is opposition to the liberal center, which is why the liberal center so often uses the horseshoe as a cudgel.

One reason for this is that the traditional, one-dimensional left-right spectrum does not account for other axes of political division in U.S. politics, such as those dominated not by any traditionally intellectual notions of progressivism or conservatism but instead by negative attitudes toward “the establishment” and broader forms of populism. As one of us has previously noted, populism in the United States is not constrained to the “Make America Great Again” (MAGA) Trump supporters on the right. Instead, it is distributed across the political spectrum, with populists both on the political left (among Sen. Bernie Sanders supporters, for example) and right (among Trump supporters).

What seem to unite the ends of the horseshoe, if we run with Faye’s metaphor, are not high-brow notions of conservatism or progressivism but instead, opposition to elites, party “establishments,” and traditional gatekeepers in the mainstream press. When it comes to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, not only do we see considerable support for the horseshoe theory but also for something that goes beyond it: the idea that the simple left-right paradigm does not get us particularly far in understanding U.S. politics.

Since Russia invaded Ukraine this year, the vast majority of Americans from both parties have supported the U.S. government’s position: They support providing military and humanitarian aid to Ukraine, and surprisingly, there is even considerable bipartisan support for welcoming Ukrainian refugees to the United States. But Russia has found vocal allies too.

The close ideological and financial relationship between many far-right European parties and the Kremlin is hardly a secret, making their support for Putin’s genocidal campaign par for the course. But considerable elements of the American right, including members of the Republican Party, have openly sided with Russia since the invasion.

The GOP has historically wielded its anti-Soviet (pre-1989) and anti-Russian (post-1989) position to great political effect. This is, after all, the party of “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” In 2012, then-GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney called Russia the United States’ primary geopolitical foe and a country that “always stands up for the world’s worst actors.” Fast forward to 2022, and Republicans—including Trump; his eldest son, Donald Trump Jr.; (soon to be former) Rep. Madison Cawthorn; Ohio Senate candidate J.D. Vance; Fox News personalities, such as Laura Ingraham; and conservative influencers, such as Candace Owens—have all broken from the party line to heap scorn on Ukraine and U.S. efforts to assist it.

A number of tropes that recur in this right-wing critique is the claim that NATO expansion forced Putin’s hand and led to the invasion as well as that money spent on military aid to Ukraine would be better spent on domestic issues, even if those issues include the continued militarization of the U.S.-Mexico border, as suggested by Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley.

Meanwhile, many on the progressive left—including members of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) and the politicians they support, left-wing academics and essayists, and swaths of self-proclaimed online “anti-imperialists”—have tended to side with the aggressor, Russia (or at least not side with the victim, Ukraine) in one of the clearest examples of colonial aggression in recent memory. Their primary arguments mirror those of the right—NATO expansion and Russia’s legitimate security concerns as a trigger for the war as well as the misuse of funds that could be used to solve domestic problems—but they also express opposition to war full stop and, sometimes, espouse outright support for Russia, all wrapped in language of opposition to U.S. intervention abroad, often construed as “U.S. imperialism.”

There has always been a fringe minority of voices on the far left that have been pejoratively labeled “tankies.” Often self-identified as Marxist-Leninists, they have been apologists for the repressive actions of authoritarian communist governments, such as those of the Soviet Union or China. The insult was originally hurled by fellow leftists at the Western communists who cheered as the Soviet Union rolled tanks into Budapest to repress a popular anti-Soviet uprising in Hungary in 1956. Today, the term is mostly tossed around in online circles, referring to supporters of repressive regimes and applying primarily to the opinions held by fringe journalists working for opaquely funded alternative news sources who praise dictators, such as Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

When it comes to Ukraine, many tankies have embraced a pro-Moscow position and parroted Kremlin talking points, perhaps failing to disambiguate between Russia, an authoritarian capitalist-oligarchic state, and its predecessor, the Soviet Union, an authoritarian communist state. These positions include the false claim that Ukraine’s 2014 Euromaidan protest movement was a U.S.-backed coup, which has been shared directly by elected officials like DSA-backed New York City council member Kristin Richardson Jordan in the form of links to online tankie disinformation. But similar claims have also been made by QAnon-boosting GOP Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene and seemingly serious leading scholars, including Chomsky and University of Chicago professor John Mearsheimer.

Indeed, what has pulled the ends of the horseshoe together when it comes to Ukraine is not simply opposition to the conflict or cheerleading for Russia but a ready embrace of ideas from across the political spectrum that suits these positions. In other words, contrary to what critics of horseshoe theory claim, we see not only superficial political similarities on Ukraine but a far deeper, if opportunistic, ideological alignment.

Mearsheimer’s work is instructive here. A highly influential scholar of international relations, Mearsheimer is known as one of the leading proponents of the “offensive realism” school of analysis of world affairs. This school argues that states, especially great powers, will act rationally to maximize their military power in an anarchic world system, meaning that they are likely to react violently to perceived threats to their security.

Mearsheimer’s most influential contribution to the debate about Ukraine—other than his musings that U.S. support for the 2014 Euromaidan protests constituted a coup—is that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was directly caused by NATO’s expansion into Russia’s sphere of influence in Eastern Europe and the Baltics, including its overtures to Ukraine. According to offensive realist analysis, Russia’s attack heads off this U.S.-led expansion. Despite the fact that this theory has been widely challenged since the conflict’s first day, Mearsheimer’s explanation has traveled widely.

He has aired his ideas in a guest column for the Economist and in an interview with the New Yorker, and his work has been mentioned by critics of U.S. policy in Ukraine from think tanks such as the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, whose funding sources include both billionaire George Soros’s Open Society Foundations and the Koch Foundation, and the Koch-funded and Sen. Rand Paul-backed Defense Priorities as well as leftist publications, such as the openly socialist Monthly Review, the tweedy Current Affairs, and the trusty social democratic standby the Nation. Mearsheimer has also been retweeted by the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

Usually, Mearsheimer’s ideas about Ukraine have been discussed separately from his broader theories about offensive realism because these might prove unappetizing to the very people championing Mearsheimer as the éminence grise on Russian strategic logic. To take a historical example, it’s hard to imagine the United States’ progressive elite championing its attempted invasion of Cuba in 1961 because the country was a Soviet staging ground within the U.S. sphere of influence. But this “red in tooth and claw” realism is exactly what offensive realism implies.

A similar citational fate has befallen both Chomsky, a fierce critic of U.S. foreign policy and brutal international interventionism, and former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, the architect of much of that foreign policy and brutal international interventionism. The ends of the horseshoe virtually kiss when these two men’s theories about the end of the conflict in Ukraine overlap. Recently, both men called for the West and Ukraine not to escalate the conflict with Russia and to instead seek “peace.”

And they have both, often in tandem, been used by both the left- and right-wing commentariat to support their claims about Ukraine, including in a recent piece in New York magazine that managed to both claim that the United States does not have the right to intervene in the conflict and has both the power and right to bring Putin and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to the bargaining table.

Of course, there is no reason why people from diverse political leanings shouldn’t draw on the same experts’ political analysis, but the willy-nilly embrace of scholars and statesmen simply because they share one’s predisposition shows a paucity of real political analysis on the far left and far right alike. Both agree on Ukraine, so both draw on the experts (mostly big-name Anglo-Saxon ones and few, if any, Ukrainian ones) that confirm their position.

To see leftists conceding that Kissinger has a point and Republicans handing it to Chomsky has been quite something. But, the argument goes, if Chomsky and Kissinger (and Mearsheimer) agree, then they must be right. But they’re not. Putin said so himself when he recently compared himself to Peter the Great, claiming Russia’s right to expand into its previous colonies and dropping the pretense that Western provocations had much to do with his decision to invade Ukraine. And there went the strongest argument of both ends of the horseshoe: that this was the West’s fault, driven by the United States. In fact, maybe what explains the horseshoe regarding Ukraine is that it has little to do with Ukraine after all.

For all their disparate political goals and motivations, what unites the far left and far right is their relationship to U.S. politics. What unites them is an opposition to what they perceive as the faults of the status quo, a distrust of the establishment, and crude anti-Americanism.

On the political right, the actions of legislators like Greene, Cawthorn, Rep. Paul Gosar, or Rep. Matt Gaetz—all of whom oppose U.S. support for Ukraine against Russia—seem to be driven by a profound dislike of the United States as an ethnically and racially diverse democracy, a country where Obergefell v. Hodges, the 2015 Supreme Court decision legalizing same-sex marriage, is the law of the land (at least, for now).

Many on the far right despise that reality and recognize the ideological proximity of their political goals to what they see as Putin’s accomplishments, including making life extremely difficult for Russia’s LGBTQ community. His general anti-wokeness has been lauded by former Trump advisor and current MAGA influencer Steve Bannon. The Russian propaganda machine has been remarkably well versed in the language of U.S. culture wars, and there is a widespread perception that Putin and Russia are allies to the MAGA wing of the GOP on that culture war front.

The other aspect is the simple fact that in the polarized landscape of U.S. politics, partisanship trumps national interest and lending any support to Biden is simply unacceptable. If Biden and the Democrats take a position (any position), it must simply be wrong and be viciously opposed. That dynamic has been captured by a viral photo from a Trump rally in 2018 that shows two men proudly wearing “I’d rather be a Russian than a Democrat” T-shirts. Unfortunately, as we have highlighted, many MAGA politicians are not just talking the talk; they’re walking the walk on that front.

On the progressive left, the motivation is less any perceived alignment with Putin’s policies and more just plain distrust of U.S. foreign policy. Many Americans in these political circles are very invested in the narrative that the United States is a bad international actor that has caused a lot of pain abroad through various wars (most notably, but not exclusively: Afghanistan, Iraq, and Vietnam). As a result, they reflexively default to the viewpoint that whatever the U.S. policy is toward a foreign conflict, it must be self-interested or even imperialist. This is why many leftists end up repeating the pro-Kremlin framing of NATO expansion as unilateral American imperialism and, even more bizarrely, citing figures like Mearsheimer—and even Kissinger, a traditional enemy of the American left—to support their point.

This framing, of course, misses years of lobbying that countries such as Poland have engaged in to join NATO or the reasons these countries had for pursuing this political course and implicitly deprives these states of any agency in charting their own futures. This is not just cultural chauvinism aimed at the post-Soviet Slavic states that might be explained by a Cold War analytical hangover or plain racism—given that a similar set of arguments is being deployed against Sweden and Finland, which are both on track to join NATO.

If anything, this approach leads (or, one might say, reveals) progressives to be exactly what they profess not to be: U.S.-centered. By treating the United States as the de facto global power, even though it is a great power they oppose, they inadvertently repeat great-power tropes, such as that the United States should (and can) achieve a cease-fire in Ukraine and dictate the terms of that cease-fire to both Russia and Ukraine. This includes the idea that the United States should convince Ukraine to cede territory and the people who live there to Russia.

Reviving a Yalta Conference mindset, but from the left, these ostensible progressives refuse Ukrainians agency, oppose U.S. armed involvement, and yet believe that the United States has the power and right to parcel out Ukrainian land in exchange for peace in Ukraine. In the heart of this perverse leftist anti-imperialism lies the un-imperial impulse to wield imperial power but only, ostensibly, in the name of peace—no matter the will of the locals.

It is not that the U.S. far right and far left share a unified foreign-policy vision, but they do share a vision for Ukraine: naive anti-interventionism. But perhaps rather than simply confirming horseshoe theory, the existence of these strange bedfellows should make us question a simplistic vision of the political spectrum as a unidimensional left-right political space.

After all, there are many on the left—understood as those supporting internationalism, social justice, and redistributive policies—including Sanders, who have thrown their support behind Ukraine for reasons consistent with their broader politics, including opposition to previous U.S. military involvement abroad. So too have many on the right—understood as those who believe in free markets or hold generally conservative sociopolitical positions—supported arming Ukraine, also for reasons consistent with their politics, including a vision of a strong role for the United States in world politics. The center (broadly construed) is also on board—hence the relative consensus on actual policy.

So what accounts for why the ends of the horseshoe are magnetically attracted to each other, pulled away from the rest of the spectrum?

That magnetic force does not come from the political content of the sides of the spectrum. As political scientist Philip Converse demonstrated back in 1964, and as other scholars have subsequently shown, an overwhelming majority of Americans do not hold coherent ideological views. People who do are, in many ways, outliers. The force behind the horseshoe, then, is another dimension of politics without which it is impossible to understand, among other things, why on earth Chomsky and Kissinger would be embraced by people who would never otherwise agree with them both on much of anything. This is the populist, anti-establishment dimension of U.S. politics.

Populism as a term has become something of an empty signifier and, for many, a pejorative. It has been associated with nativist right-wing leaders—such as Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, Polish politician Jaroslaw Kaczynski, and Trump—but also with Sanders’s presidential campaign. If anything, in the United States, populism was historically associated with the egalitarian politics of the Populist Party and the subsequent left-wing progressive movement.

But here, what we mean by populism is simply a worldview that pits average citizens, “the people,” against “the elites,” whom populists view as corrupt. This can mean different things for conservative and progressive populists.

On the right, for example, it manifests in “America First” nationalism, isolationism, and the distrust of experts and the news media. On the left, it manifests in the distrust of the traditional party establishment as well as of business interests and mainstream commentators. That is why populists on both sides of the horseshoe generally distrust the traditional mainstream press and its elite talking heads and frequently seek out information from more ostensibly independent and explicitly ideologically aligned sources. It also pushes people inward, toward an isolationism rooted in the belief that when the United States gets involved abroad, it does so in the interests of the country’s political or business elite.

In both cases, it foments a contrarianism that is perhaps most visible on issues where there is a rare national consensus, such as support for Ukraine. In this case, the contrasting motivations of left and right populists lead both sides to reach the same position: one that “both-sides” the war in Ukraine, denies Ukrainians agency, and plays right into Putin’s hands. And this, despite the fact that there is nothing inherent in either far-right or far-left thought that leads to support for Russia or opposition to the plight of Ukrainians.

So perhaps, horseshoe theory as Faye conceptualized it isn’t entirely correct. It is not that the ends of the political spectrum inherently bend toward each other—in other words, that communists and fascists inherently align. If anything, the ends of the political spectrum tend toward broad heterogeneity in opinions. Rather, it is that the populist, anti-establishment impulse on both ends breaks off slivers of adherents who find themselves brought into agreement despite their ideologies.

It doesn’t, of course, help that the traditional, unidimensional political spectrum is itself a flawed heuristic for understanding the totality of people’s political commitments, especially in a country like the United States, where asking for a modicum of welfare state expansion toward an Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development standard marks one as a leftist and denying the results of democratic elections makes one a fairly mainstream right winger.

Yet the prevalence of a certain populism on both the left and right, which shapes debates online and in the media as well as the political messaging and policy priorities of Democratic and Republican politicians alike show that not just the political landscape but the nature of political discourse is deeply fractured. This is not simply a question of polarization but of something deeper: the increasing nonexistence of a shared understanding of political reality. Ukraine, rather than a protagonist in this trend, is just a bellwether of things to come.

— Jan Dutkiewicz is a policy fellow at the Brooks McCormick Jr. Animal Law and Policy Program at Harvard Law School. Dominik Stecuła is an assistant professor of political science at Colorado State University.

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vomitnest · 4 months

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westywrites · 2 years

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Old Acquaintances

They say this one’s acquainted with the dark, she made memories and nightmares into bedfellows on lonely nights. They say she befriended the dark and lost her heart, replaced its beating with the thrum of the void. They say she doesn’t fear death, they say she’d prefer it over drawing another laboured breath.

But she does. She breathes. Again and again, against all odds and lost in the black, she fights back.

When old acquaintances raise their heads, they say she doesn’t belong in a place of love, they say she doesn’t deserve to stand in the light; they ask why she continues a useless fight.

But through the shadows, she hears something else, a whisper of truth in her own voice. She says to herself look how far we’ve come. She says look at all the work we’ve done.

Taking another step, another breath, she brandishes a smile against the shadows. They’re right, she knows the dark, but it lost its hold on her heart. She left the void for better friends; the night will never own her again.

This rewrite hopefully fixes some of the rhythm oddities from the original. It also takes the rhyming scheme that Almost existed and makes it into an actual thing done on purpose. I quite like the story-telling vibes of this poem, and the ominous “they say” that feels sort of oppressive in its repetition.

(original below the cut)

Acquaintance

They say this one’s acquainted with the dark Nightmares and memories make strange bedfellows in the long nights They say she has seen things Felt them, feared them And still she’s done her part Because she’s befriended the dark and lost her heart And a heart is hard to steal back when it’s been lost to the void so very long ago They say she doesn’t fear death They say sometimes she’d prefer it to drawing another laboured breath

But she does She breathes again and again Against all odds and lost in the black She still fights back She moves forward She moves forward and when old acquaintances raise their heads And they say she doesn’t fit a world of light And they say she doesn’t belong in a place of love

She pauses only for a moment Only to see how far she’s come Only to see her home, her new friends, her future, the wonderful love of her life And she laughs Yes, she knows the dark She will never forget But it does not own her Not anymore

#west's words #writeblr #spilled ink #poetry #poets on tumblr #westywrites 5 year anniversary celebration #this one is a little sad little hopeful #idk what exactly it is honestly #but its a vibe

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crossdreamers · 3 years

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from what i understand LGB is just about sexual attraction and trans people can still be gay so it still includes them?

TERFs are trying to rip the LGBT+ movement apart. Don't let them!

These days the abbreviation LGB is mostly used by transphobic TERFs (trans-exclusionary radical feminists). It is an old tactic: Defeat your opponent by sowing discord and conflict.

Right wing extremists have caught up to this, and they are now actively doing the same thing: They are trying to split the LGBTQAI movement into different fractions by encouraging the exclusion of trans people, weakening the whole movement in the process.

The long term goal of the right wing extremists is to marginalize all queer people, reestablish the strict gender binary and promote traditional gender roles. Strange bedfellows for "feminists", you might say, but that is what irrational prejudices can do to some people.

The good news is that no well established LGBTQAI organization has fallen for this trick, which is why the transphobes have had to make their own anti-trans organizations, like the LGB Alliance in Britain.

As for LGB including lesbian (L), gay (G) and bisexual (B) trans people:

Yes, gay, lesbian and bi trans people are included in the L and the G and the B as far as the leading rainbow organizations go. But they are not included in the LGB of the transphobic fringe.

The anti-trans activists claim that trans women who are attracted to women are perverted straight men and that gay trans men are deluded lesbian women. The arrogance of these people is mind-boggling. They show no respect for the life experience of queer people who do not live up to their own narrow and old fashioned standards.

They are, like their right wing allies, aggressively invalidating the gender identities of trans people, causing a lot of suffering in the process. They are now actively supporting policies that are aimed at harassing transgender kids, forcing them to use the wrong bathrooms, banning them from taking part in sports as themselves, causing these children the kind of trauma gay and lesbian kids have experienced through the ages.

This is a true tragedy: Lesbian TERFs, who themselves have been bullied for their sexual orientation, are now using the exact same tactics to harm trans kids. That is the worst kind of betrayal, and it says a lot about what kind of people we are facing here.

Sexual orientation is not the same as gender identity

Note also that transgender identities cannot be reduced to sexual orientation. A lot of trans people are neither lesbian, gay or bisexual. They are straight. But they are still part of the queer rainbow community, as they face the same kind of invalidation and marginalization as other queer people. This is why the T belongs in the LGBT+. Indeed, trans people have always played an important role in the LGBT+ community.

Here's a photo of leading British TERF Posie Parker together with a Norwegian Nazi leader. Did she know he was a Nazi? I don't know, but they did take part in the same conference, an event promoting anti-trans propaganda, and that tells you a lot about what kind of thinking "gender critical feminism" represents.

See also: Christian Right tips to fight transgender rights: separate the T from the LGB Conservative group hosts anti-transgender panel of feminists 'from the left' LGBTQ+ Community Rallies Against Anti-Trans 'LGB Alliance'

Photo from Kyiv Pride 2019 by Viktor Makhnov

#terf #terfs #gender critical #feminism #transgender #trans #gc #anti-trans #lgbt #lgbtqa #lgbt+#transphobia #lgb #lgb alliance

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trini-trin-trin · 3 years

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Sharing this from a FB group that I am in. I was very moved by the article and felt affinity with the experiences shared. A really sweet read.

Here is the article if you don't want to click on the link (I know it is a little long, but well worth your time to read!):

The letter I received ten years ago was unsigned and bore no return address. Clearly its author did not expect, much less want, a reply. A message in a bottle, from no one to no one, that letter still remains the most bizarre form of communication. It asks nothing but to be read, promises nothing but to share a few facts and feelings, and, seeing that it must have been dashed off on a lined yellow sheet that seemed hastily torn out of a pad of paper, the author would not be surprised if, after skimming through it, the recipient decided to crumple and lob it into the closest dust bin.

The letter is one page long. One page is enough. The handwriting is uneven, perhaps because the author had lost the habit of writing in longhand and preferred the keyboard. But his grammar is perfect. The man knew what he was doing. I assume he was writing the note by hand because he didn’t want traces of it on his laptop, or because he knew he was never going to send it as an email and risk a reply. Now that I think of it, he probably didn’t care if it even reached its recipient, a local Bay Area reporter who had mentioned my novel about two young men who fall in love one summer in Italy in the mid-1980s. The reporter eventually forwarded it to me, minus its envelope with the postmark. It took no time to see that all the author of the letter was looking for was a chance to blurt out the words he couldn’t dare breathe elsewhere.

My book had spoken to him. His letter spoke to me.

So here it is: dated April 16, 2008.

I came upon Mr. Aciman’s book while on a business trip back East. Not the type of book I am normally able to read, so I bought a copy for the flight home. I think I’m glad I did.

You see, I was Elio. I was 18 and my Oliver was 22. Though the time and place were different, the feelings were remarkably the same. From believing that you are the only person who has these feelings, to the whole “he loves me – he loves me not” scenario, Mr. Aciman got it right. I was particularly impressed with the attention he gave to the morning after Elio’s and Oliver’s first encounter. The guilt, the loathing, the fear. I felt it too much. I had to put the book down for a while.

But in the end I was able to finish the book before we landed at SFO. Which was good, because I couldn’t take the book home. Unlike Elio it was I who married and had children. My Oliver died from AIDS in 1995. I’m still living a parallel life. My name is not important. His name was Dwight.

Instead, I kept the letter. I kept it for ten years.

What moved me was not just its sobering matter-of-factness or its hint of downplayed sorrow, but the associations it provoked in my mind. It reminded me of those short, clipped messages to loved ones, written by people about to be shipped off to the death camps who knew they’d never be heard from again. There is a chilling immediacy about their hurriedly scribbled notes that say everything there is to say in the fewest possible words — there wasn’t enough time for more, no smarmy pieties, no hand-wringing, no treacly hugs and kisses before the tragic end. It also made me think of the moving phone messages left by those who finally realized they were not going to make it out alive from the Twin Towers and that only their family’s answering machine was going to take their call.

“My name is not important,” he writes, almost as an apology for remaining anonymous; yet the author drops quite a number of hints about himself — hints he likely knows will stir his reader’s wistful curiosity to know what made him write the letter in the first place, what he hoped to accomplish, and if writing did indeed help. The letter itself allows us to see that he travels for business. We also sense that he probably lives in the Bay Area and that he travels not infrequently to the East Coast, since, as he writes, he is “back” in the East. And we know one thing more: that he simply needed to come out and tell someone that a man called Dwight had been his lover when the two were young. The rest is a cloud. We’ll never know more. Writing has served its purpose. We write, it seems, to reach out to others. Whether we know them or not doesn’t matter. We write to put out into the real world something extremely private within us, to make real what often feels unreal and ever so elusive about ourselves. We write to give a shape to what would otherwise remain amorphous. This is as true about authors as about those who want to correspond with them. Over the years, many have written to me either after reading or seeing Call Me by Your Name. Some tried to meet me; others confided things they’d never told anyone; and some even managed to call me at the office and, on speaking about my novel, would eventually apologize before bursting out crying. Some were in jail; some were barely adolescents, others old enough to look back at loves seven decades past; and some were priests locked in silence and secrecy. Many were closeted, others totally out; some were widows who felt a resurgence of hope if only by reading about the loves of two young men called Elio and Oliver in Italy; some were very young girls eager to meet their long-awaited Oliver; and some recalled former gay lovers whom they’d occasionally bump into years later but who’d never acknowledge what they’d once shared and done together when both were schoolmates and neither was married. All were keenly aware of living a parallel life. In that parallel life things are as they perhaps should be. Elio and Oliver still live together. And no one has secrets there.

Unlike Dwight’s lover, everyone who took the time to write to me did not withhold their names, but all had, at one point or another, withheld something very primal. They withheld it from themselves, from a relative, from a friend, a classmate, or colleague, or from a beloved who would never have guessed what troubled longings seethed below their averted gaze whenever they crossed paths.

Some readers wrote to tell me they felt that my novel had changed them, and given them new insights into themselves; some felt it was urging them finally to turn a new leaf in their lives. But some couldn’t go so far and, despite their perfect command of language, confessed lacking the words to explain why they were so moved by my novel or why they felt an unresolved longing for things they’d never considered or desired before. They were experiencing an upwell of emotions and of ungraspable might-have-beens that were asking to be reckoned with because they seemed more real than life itself, a sense of themselves that beckoned from an opposite bank they’d never known was there and whose potential loss now was a source of inconsolable grief. Hence their tears, their regrets, and the overpowering sense of being lost in their own lives.

And yet, they said, theirs were not tears of sorrow. They were tears of recognition, as though the novel itself were a mirror for readers to watch their own emotions laid bare before them. These responses made me aware that Call Me by Your Name does not call attention to anything readers didn’t already know, nor does it bring new truths or revelations; all it does is shed new light on things that were long familiar but that they never took the time to consider. It would be so tempting to say that they are reminded of their forgotten first loves; the truth is that all loves, even those that occur late in life, are first loves. There is always fear, shame, reluctance, and not a tiny dose of spite. Desire is agony.

Everyone who’s read Call Me by Your Name understands not only the struggle both to speak and hold back their truth but also the shame that comes whenever we want something from someone. Desire is always cagey, always secretive — we’ll tell everyone we know about the person we crave to hold naked in our arms, but the very last one to know this will be the person we crave. Same-sex desire is even more guarded and watchful, especially in those who are just discovering their sexuality. Awkwardness and desire are strange bedfellows at a young age, but shame and inexperience are just as paralyzing as fear when we watch them tussling with the urge to be bold. You’re torn between the raw horniness that makes you dream scenes you hope to forget as soon as you’re up and the scenes you pray you’ll dream again and again — if dreams are all you’ll have. Silence and solitude exact a cost that leaves us emotionally wrecked. At some point we need to speak.

So “is it better to speak or die?” asks Elio, the narrator of Call Me by Your Name, quoting words penned by the sixteenth-century Marguerite de Navarre in her collection of tales known as The Heptameron. Marguerite was the sister of King Francis I and the grandmother of Henry IV, himself the grandfather of Louis XIV, hence she was plenty familiar with court intrigue, gossip, and the risks of opening up to someone who may not welcome what’s in our heart and could easily make us pay for it. Not everyone who has written to me has dared to speak their hearts to those they loved. Some have sought silence — slow, lingering droplets of quiet desperation taken every night before bedtime until they realize they’ve been dead and didn’t even know it. Many have written to me with the feeling of having missed their chance when someone tethered his rowboat to their jetty and simply asked them to jump in. “Some sentence or thought on almost every page,” writes a reader, “triggers tears and knots my throat and chest. Tears well up in my eyes on the subway, at my computer at work, walking down the street. Perhaps I am weeping in part because I know that at my age there is virtually no possibility of experiencing anything remotely comparable to what Elio experiences with Oliver.” Someone else writes, “Reading Call Me by Your Name made me feel a love I never had.” A happily married 50-plus colleague took me aside and said, “I don’t think I’ve ever been this much in love in my whole life.” “I'm 23,” tweeted someone else, “and have never felt such love, until I read Call Me by Your Name. I feel like I lived it.” “Elio and I are essentially the same age,” writes a teenage girl. “I have never really experienced his environment of the Italian summer…My experiences have only taken place halfway between nature and smog, however I have felt the same tension, fear, guilt and overwhelming love that you express perfectly through both Elio and Oliver…Finding myself in Elio was something I never expected and I’m positive that I won’t experience anything quite like it ever again. The first girl I ever loved remains…the only girl I have ever loved and though everything she and I shared…lives now as a secret between two friends.” “I finished reading Call Me by Your Name a couple of days ago,” writes someone else, “and wanted to let you know how much it affected me. It felt like a narration of my thoughts that I had systematically buried long ago.” And finally this from a 72-year-old: “I was fascinated by the idea of parallel lives where would I have been if I had gone with him, where would I be if I traveled alone? Maybe the point is just what do I do with the gift you have given me during the remainder of my life.”

There are at least 500 more such letters and emails.

Some find themselves weeping at the end of the film or the novel, not for what happened long ago or for what did not and might never happen in their own lives but for what has yet to happen, for the terrifying moment when they too will soon have to decide whether to speak or die. This from an 18-year-old: “[Your novel] gives me hope that one day I will meet someone whom I desire so badly that I’ll actually find it in me to make a move, the way Oliver is that someone for Elio. Maybe my Oliver will also turn out to be someone that I realize I love as well as desire.” She was crying for a week, as was this 15-year-old young man: “I stopped reading…because I didn’t want [the book] to end, didn’t want the wounds that you caused me to close, I didn’t want to overcome, for some reason that I have yet to find out. I wanted to stay a wreck, emotionally and mentally fragile….My mother handed me tissues because she had never seen me cry like this. I had finished your book and ‘moved’ is too weak a word to express what your book had done to me. Here a week later and it is literally all I can think about, not my midterms coming up, but…Elio and Oliver and if it is better to speak or die. You answered questions I didn’t even think I had.”

Indeed, the whole novel seems to enable the outing of all manner of feelings, feelings from Elio’s relentless inward journey and obsessive self-examination that readers are invited to identify with. Through Elio’s unfettered introspection they too feel exposed and sliced open like a crustacean without a slough, now forced to look at itself in the mirror. No wonder they are moved. The mask that is torn off their faces is not just the mask that conceals same-sex desires from themselves and from others. Rather, it is the realization, through Elio’s voice, of what they truly feel, who they truly are, what they fear, what bears their signature, and what coy little shenanigans they go through to read others and hope to reach them. Some identified with some effusive sentences in my novel so much that they had them tattooed on their bodies. They even attach photos of these tattoos. People have also tattooed peaches on themselves!

But what moves most people — and this is as true now as it was when the novel first came out — is the father’s speech. Here he not only tells his son to nurse the flame and “don’t snuff it out” after his son’s lover has left Italy, but that he too, the father, envies his son’s relationship with a male lover. This speech tears away the last vestige of a veil between reader and truth and is a moving tribute to the irreducible honesty between father and son.

Most readers have written to me about the scene because the father’s speech rekindles the very difficult moment when they decided to come out to their parents — or, as is often the case with people 60, or 70 or older, it reminds them of the conversation they wished they’d had but never did have with their parents. This is the loss no one forgets and from which no one recovers after seeing Call Me by Your Name. It bears the very essence of that precious and life-defining might-have-been moment that never happened and never will.

Here is the speech:

“Look…[y]ou had a beautiful friendship. Maybe more than a friendship. And I envy you. In my place, most parents would hope the whole thing goes away, or pray that their sons land on their feet soon enough. But I am not such a parent. In your place, if there is pain, nurse it, and if there is a flame, don’t snuff it out, don’t be brutal with it. Withdrawal can be a terrible thing when it keeps us awake at night, and watching others forget us sooner than we’d want to be forgotten is no better. We rip out so much of ourselves to be cured of things faster than we should that we go bankrupt by the age of thirty and have less to offer each time we start with someone new. But to feel nothing so as not to feel anything — what a waste!...

“… {L]et me say one more thing. It will clear the air. I may have come close, but I never had what you had. Something always held me back or stood in the way. How you live your life is your business. But remember, our hearts and our bodies are given to us only once. Most of us can’t help but live as though we’ve got two lives to live, one is the mockup, the other the finished version, and then all those versions in between. But there’s only one, and before you know it, your heart is worn out, and, as for your body, there comes a point when no one looks at it, much less wants to come near it. Right now there’s sorrow. I don’t envy the pain. But I envy you the pain.”

I received the anonymous letter sometime in early May 2008. At the time, I was staying at my parents’, because my father was suffering from throat and mouth cancer and was already in hospice care. He had refused radiation and chemotherapy, so I knew his days were numbered; though morphine was clouding his mind, he was still lucid enough to bandy a few quips about a host of subjects. He had stopped eating and drinking water because swallowing had become very painful. One afternoon while I was stealing a nap, the phone rang. A reporter I’d met in California had just received a letter, which she wanted to share with me. I told her to read it over the phone. After she’d read it I asked if she felt she could mail it to me. I wanted to show it to my father, I said, and explained he was dying. She felt for me. We talked about my father for a while. I told her I was trying to make it up to him these days, and that he too had been exceptionally easy to be with. How was it growing up with him? she asked. Tense, I replied. Always is, she added. Then the conversation ended, and she promised to mail the letter soon.

After hanging up, I got out of bed and went in to see him. Over the past few days, I had made a point of reading to him, which he liked a great deal, especially now that he was having difficulty focusing. But rather than read to him the memoirs of Chateaubriand, one of his favorite authors, and feeling buoyed by the letter I’d been read on the phone, I asked if he’d like me to read from the French translation of Call Me by Your Name, the galleys of which I had just received from Paris that very morning. Why not, since you wrote it, he said. He was proud of me. So I began to read from the very beginning, and soon enough I knew I was opening up a subject neither he nor I had ever broached before. But I knew he knew what I was reading and why I was reading it to him. This made me happy. Perhaps it made him happy as well. I’ll never know.

That evening, after the rest of us had dinner, he asked if I could continue reading from my novel. I was nervous about arriving at the father’s speech because I didn’t know how he’d react to it, though he was the kind of father who would have given that very same speech himself. But the speech was two hundred pages away still, and that would have taken many, many days. Perhaps I should skip some parts, I thought. But no, I wanted to read him the whole book. My father didn��t last long enough to hear the father’s speech. And when the letter finally arrived from California, he was already gone. His name was Henri, he was 93 years old, and he inspired everything I’ve written.

#andre aciman #CMBYK Book #call me by your name #cmbyn #elio x oliver

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kjack89 · 3 years

Text

An Agreement Between Gentlemen (Chapter 9/14)

Continuation of the E/R Bridgerton AU, regency-era fake-marriage fic. I feel confident enough in the remainder of my outline to finally put the end chapter number up top, though of course, it’s subject to change because I’m, you know, me. (Chapter 1 tumblr | AO3, chapter 2 tumblr | AO3, chapter 3 tumblr | AO3, chapter 4 tumblr | AO3, chapter 5 tumblr | AO3, chapter 6 tumblr | AO3, chapter 7 tumblr | AO3, chapter 8 tumblr | AO3)

Rarely has this Author been so inundated with the same piece of news, and so while most readers likely already know this, it must still be reported for those apparently unaware or living under a rock: the Marquess of Enjolras has made his triumphant return to the city.

But those hoping to catch a glimpse of the new Marchioness will find themselves disappointed: the Marchioness has returned to her family home, having apparently fallen ill while on her honeymoon. Still, there is plenty of time left in the season for her to make an appearance, so all hope is not lost.

And while she has not yet taken her place in the Enjolras manor, this Author has learned that her brother has been invited to stay with the Marquess, a move that gives no credence to the rumors that the two have fallen out ahead of the Marquess’s marriage to Mr. Grantaire’s sister. Indeed, if anything, the pair’s unlikely friendship seems only stronger now, which only proves that the marriage mart truly does make strange bedfellows.

Far more important than their living situation, of course, is the annual de Courfeyrac ball this very evening. With the Marquess back in town, he is certain to attend, and this Author is equally certain that even without his new bride to accompany him, all eyes will surely be on the one bachelor who got away…LADY WHISTELDOWN’S SOCIETY PAPERS, 14 MAY 1831

“Stop fidgeting.”

“I’m not fidgeting,” Enjolras grumbled, though he reluctantly stopped playing with the cuff of his shirtsleeves.

Grantaire rolled his eyes as the receiving line at the de Courfeyrac Ball inched forward. “You are so,” he said in an undertone. “And leave your damned cravat alone, it took me near a quarter hour to get it to lay right.”

Enjolras had barely even starting to reach up to adjust his cravat, and his hand fell back to his side as he gave Grantaire a look. “Yes, but only because you were the one who untied it in the first place.”

As Grantaire had indeed been the one who had untied it, in the carriage ride over to the de Courfeyrac manor, mostly to give himself better access to Enjolras’s neck, his self-satisfied grin was somewhat to be expected. “Yes, well, can you really blame me?” he murmured, eyeing Enjolras appreciatively. “I know you hate formal dress, but by God, man, you were made to wear an evening coat.”

Enjolras could not help but preen at that, just a little, even as he warned Grantaire teasingly, “Keep looking at me like that and our cover will be blown sooner than you think.”

Grantaire just laughed lightly. “Please,” he said dismissively. “I’ve been looking at you like this for ten years now with none the wiser.” He paused and considered it. “Or at least, with none willing to comment on it, and I doubt very much that would change now.”

But Enjolras was still focused on the first part of what Grantaire had said. “You’ve really been looking at me like this for a decade?”

Grantaire smirked. “Again, can you blame me?”

Enjolras hesitated, wondering for not the first time what it had been like for Grantaire, to love him as he had for as long as he had, and with Enjolras among those none the wiser. “Does it bother you that I never noticed?”

“I think it would have bothered me more if you had,” Grantaire said, sounding a little surprised by the question. “I wasn’t ready for you to know before.”

“And now?”

Grantaire shrugged, a little helplessly. “Well, that cat’s quite out of the bag regardless, isn’t it?” he asked, before his voice softened, just slightly. “Besides, no matter how prepared I was, it was worth it in the end.”

Enjolras smiled as well. “Keep talking like that and I might be tempted to do something untowards,” he murmured, bending his head toward Grantaire.

“Scandalous,” Grantaire said, with a wicked smirk. “Besides, keep talking like that and I might just let you.”

Enjolras let out a laugh, but his amusement did not last long. As the line barely moved, he could not help but bounce on the balls of his feet, trying to glance over the top of the receiving line. “I wish Courf would just let us go in with having to go through the whole thing,” he muttered.

“Yes, I too wish my friends would allow me to break all social protocol just because I dread having to sit through it,” Grantaire said wryly. “But alas, seeing as how we live in the real world…”

He trailed off as the line started moving again, and finally, with only a few more minutes’ delay, Enjolras and Grantaire were at the front of the receiving line. “Enjolras!” Courfeyrac called, sounding elated, and he grasped Enjolras by both shoulders before leaning in and kissing both his cheeks. “And Grantaire!” To Enjolras’s surprise, he embraced Grantaire in much the same way – and judging by Grantaire’s wide eyes, he was equally surprised.

“Christ, Courfeyrac, have you been borrowing Jehan’s opium?” Grantaire muttered when Courfeyrac finally released him.

Courfeyrac ignored him, just beaming at both of them. “From brothers in arms to brothers in law!” he trilled, clapping his hands together. “What an unexpected twist to this tale. Enjolras, you must find me later and fill me in on the details.”

Enjolras tried to smile, though he was pretty sure it looked more like a wince. “I am certain you would track me down if I didn’t.”

Courfeyrac laughed loudly and waved them through. For as long as he had waited to finally get inside, Enjolras found himself hesitating at the ballroom entrance, dreading what welcome awaited him within in the wake of his ‘scandal’ and marriage.

As if sensing exactly what he was feeling, Grantaire found his hand and covertly squeezed it, his own hand warm and strong in Enjolras’s. “Be easy,” he whispered in Enjolras’s ear, and for the first time all evening, Enjolras relaxed, just slightly.

Of course, he tensed once again when they finally entered the ballroom, and the first person Enjolras saw across the way was Combeferre. He reached out blindly for Grantaire’s arm, gripping his elbow harder than he likely needed to.

This was always going to be the hardest part of their charade, as Enjolras had confided in Grantaire the previous night as they lay together in his bed, neither one tired enough yet to fall asleep. “I don’t know what to tell Combeferre and Courfeyrac,” he had confessed, turning so that he was facing Grantaire.

“What were you planning on telling them before?” Grantaire had asked, curiosity clear in his voice.

“Before what?” Enjolras had asked.

Grantaire had given him a look. “Before, when it was just a straightforward fictional marriage,” he said dryly.

“Oh.” Enjolras flushed slightly. “Frankly, I hadn’t given it much thought. I was certainly going to allude to the arrangement solving certain matters with my mother, and let them draw their own conclusions.”

“And that same answer will no longer suffice?”

Enjolras had drawn Grantaire close to kiss him lightly. “Frankly, I suspect my interactions with you will undermine the credibility of that explanation. Combeferre and Courfeyrac are not stupid, and decidedly more observant than myself.”

Grantaire’s expression softened. “Then we need not interact in front of them,” he had said quietly. “I am overdue in seeing Joly and Bossuet, and it is not as if any of our friends expects me to be at your side all evening. Or at all, frankly.”

While Enjolras had agreed at the time, now, faced with the reality of the situation, he wanted nothing more than Grantaire to stay at his side. But Grantaire was already pulling away, even as the look he gave Enjolras was gentle, and understanding. “They’re your friends,” he reminded Enjolras in an undertone.

“They’re your friends as well,” Enjolras muttered. “And they will likely forgive neither of us for the deception.”

“Forgive? Perhaps not, or at least not immediately. But they will understand.”

“Will they?” Enjolras asked, more rhetorical than anything, and mostly because Grantaire had already abandoned him, making a beeline to where Joly and Bossuet were talking quietly together in the corner.

With no excuse left, Enjolras crossed to where Combeferre waited, feeling more nervous than he frankly expected to be. Combeferre’s expression was completely neutral as he approached, which did not help Enjolras’s nerves. “Hello,” Combeferre said when Enjolras finally reached him. “Long time no see. Anything new with you?”

Enjolras laughed lightly. Combeferre’s dry humor had never before failed to put him at ease, and this was no exception. “Oh, a bit of this, a bit of that,” he said airily before adding, in a more serious tone, “I certainly doubt either you or I were expecting the events of the past few weeks.”

“After the scene your mother made at the Musain?” Combeferre returned with an arched eyebrow. “I expected you married within the fortnight. Grantaire’s sister was a twist I did not see coming.”

Enjolras shrugged, avoiding meeting Combeferre’s eyes. “Yes, well. A twist, but perhaps not as unpleasant a one as some would expect.”

Combeferre nodded slowly, looking at him closely. “Whatever anyone may say, you seem happy,” he remarked.

“Well, I am rid of my mother,” Enjolras said. “Or will be, once I hand over the dowry.”

Combeferre’s expression didn’t change as he took a sip of his drink. “I didn’t say you seemed relieved. I said you seem happy.”

As usual, Combeferre saw right through him, and Enjolras took a moment to compose his answer, opting for as much of the truth as he could give. “I suppose I am happy,” he said. “It’s...freeing, in a way, to know that part of my future is settled.”

“To be free,” Combeferre murmured. “What greater thing is there.”

Enjolras smiled. “Precisely.”

Combeferre nodded slowly. “Well, if you are happy, then I am happy,” he assured Enjolras, before adding, in a slightly disapproving tone, “Of course, Grantaire’s going to be a bit insufferable for awhile, I suppose.”

Enjolras felt his heart stop. Had Combeferre figured them out so quickly? “What do you mean?” he asked, trying to keep his voice calm.

Combeferre raised an eyebrow. “Surely you realize – you’ve rather elevated his status.”

“In what way?”

“By marrying his sister, he is now brother-in-law to a marquess,” Combeferre said slowly, and Enjolras felt immediate relief that he had not figured him out. “Which may very well make him the most eligible bachelor here. A fact I’m certain he’s realized, even if you haven’t.”

He nodded towards the corner that Grantaire had headed to, but where previously he’d been in conversation with Joly and Bossuet, now they seemed surrounded by numerous young women. Enjolras’s initial relief was replaced by a pit in his stomach as he watched one such lady laugh, touching Grantaire’s arm in a way that made Enjolras’s vision go red.

Combeferre, as he always seemed to be, was correct. Before, Grantaire had been notorious as a rake whose sole redeeming quality was association with many powerful peers and gentry. But now, while he may still offer no title, he offered societal status that far too many mothers would crave for their daughters.

And even though Grantaire seemed quite convinced of his affection for Enjolras, there was little doubt that this could change things. After all, while Enjolras would get no enjoyment from marriage to any woman in the entire city, Grantaire very well might.

He was so busy watching Grantaire flirt (or at least, not automatically brush the young women off, which was tantamount to the same thing in Enjolras’s mind) that he barely noticed when Combeferre was pulled into a different conversation entirely, leaving him standing alone. It ended up for the best, though, as he then had no need to make an excuse for crossing the ballroom, making a beeline for Grantaire.

But he was intercepted on his way by Éponine Thenárdier, who blocked his path entirely. “Lord Enjolras,” she said, smiling sweetly at him.

Enjolras jerked a nod. “Miss Thenárdier,” he muttered, trying in vain to sidestep her, but she moved swiftly to again block his path.

“You must allow me to congratulate you on your nuptials,” she told him, her tone saccharine. “I wish you nothing but happiness, no matter how surprising the event was.”

Internally, Enjolras rolled his eyes, knowing damn well that she was trying to goad him into sharing details that would almost invariably make their way into Lady Whistledown the moment he spoke them. Externally, he forced a smile that almost certainly looked more like a grimace. “I’m not certain there’s much of a causal link between surprise and happiness, but thank you nonetheless.”

Éponine laughed lightly. “But where is your lovely bride this evening?”

She almost certainly already knew the answer, having undoubtedly read about it like everyone else had in Lady Whistledown, but Enjolras nonetheless gritted his teeth and told her, “I’m afraid she is ill, and staying at her family home in the country until she recovers.”

“Oh, how dreadful,” she said, though Enjolras noted she didn’t sound particularly upset by the news. “And we were all so eager to meet her.”

“I’m sure you were,” Enjolras muttered, before Grantaire appeared without warning at his side.

“Isn’t it a lovely ball?” he asked, so brightly that Enjolras wondered for a moment if he had been hit in the head – or been hitting the whiskey already. “It is as if someone has unhooked the stars and put them on the table in the guise of candles, don’t you think?”

Éponine’s smile slipped, for just a moment. “Indeed,” she murmured politely, but the look she gave Grantaire was icy as she swept away, clearly put out at having her attempted interrogation so rudely interrupted.

Grantaire smirked as he watched her leave, resting his hand on Enjolras’s back, a little too low to be entirely proper. “The trick,” he murmured in Enjolras’s ear, “is to be so banal that absolutely no one wishes to continue the conversation.”

Despite himself and the jealousy he could still feel, Enjolras was unable to stop his smile. “Is that your secret?” he asked in an undertone.

“My secret is usually to get drunk as quickly as possible and then disappear without saying goodbye,” Grantaire said cheerfully. “But as I am in polite company—” He nodded his head graciously at Enjolras, who rolled his eyes affectionately. “—we must make do together.”

And indeed they did. Enjolras was shocked to find that Grantaire’s trick of not providing any details about his fictional wife and instead speaking of the decor, or the weather, or something equally boring was enough to forestall almost all conversation that followed. It helped, he realized, as he and Grantaire made the rounds together, that far fewer young women and their mothers attempted to monopolize his time or beg him for a dance, almost certainly because they had set their sights on more available targets, and the ones that did want to make conversation were after gossip, like Éponine, and easily thwarted.

But neither was what really made the evening bearable; instead, it was Grantaire who proved the difference in the evening.. Grantaire, always quick with a quip or scathing observation under his breath, who stayed by his side despite the invitations to dance that he received. Grantaire, who knew without Enjolras needing to say a word when they needed to stop for refreshments or be pulled away from the conversation. Grantaire, who was as easy a companion as Enjolras had ever had.

And Grantaire who was, according to Combeferre at least, now the most eligible bachelor in the place.

As much as Grantaire was turning this most dreaded part of his social obligations into, perhaps not the most anticipated, but at least something that could be enjoyed rather than merely endured, Enjolras could not shake what Combeferre had said, or the pit that formed in his stomach when he thought about it.

“Is everything alright?” Grantaire asked an hour or so later, his brow furrowed as he looked at Enjolras.

“Fine,” Enjolras said quickly, giving him a tight smile. “Just a bit warm in here, do you not think?”

Grantaire studied him closely for a moment. “Perhaps we should step out onto the balcony,” he suggested. “Get some air.”

“That sounds like a good—”

“There you are!” Courfeyrac exclaimed with his usual exuberance as he joined them, oblivious to how close Enjolras had been to escaping. “As promised, since you did not come find me later as requested, I have instead hunted you down. And Grantaire is still at your side, how lovely.”

“Not for long,” Grantaire said, ignoring the pleading look Enjolras shot him. “I’m due for a refill. Anything for either of you?”

He did not wait for a reply, leaving Enjolras alone with Courfeyrac, whose smile had sharpened. “Come now, you can afford to look a little less panicked,” he said innocently, looping his arm through Enjolras’s. “After all, people will think you don’t wish to speak to one of your oldest friends.”

“Speak with, or be interrogated by?” Enjolras muttered.

Courfeyrac’s grin widened. “Potato, po-tah-to.” He patted Enjolras’s arm reassuringly. “But truly, more the former than the latter. Too many prying ears, and I’d rather learn the details of your scandal where they can’t be transmitted to the inimitable Lady Whistledown.”

Enjolras snorted. “Yes, that would be a shame,” he said dryly.

But something in his tone made Courfeyrac pause, his eyes narrowing slightly as he looked at Enjolras. “I was hardly anticipating you being the model of wedded bliss, but you seem far too downtrodden for someone who must no longer put up with the marriage mart. What’s wrong?”

“Nothing,” Enjolras said, by instinct alone, and when Courfeyrac just looked at him, he sighed and relented. “Just something Combeferre said.”

He was expecting Courfeyrac to demand details, details that Enjolras would not be able to share without revealing the truth, but to his surprise, Courfeyrac just rolled his eyes and waved a dismissive hand. “Oh, ignore him,” he said. “He’s just jealous.”

Enjolras frowned. “Jealous?” he repeated. “Of what?”.

Courfeyrac looked at him as if the answer was obvious. “He thinks he’s been replaced, you fool,” he said impatiently, and when Enjolras still looked confused, added, “As your best friend. By Grantaire.”

The statement was so absurd that Enjolras barked a laugh before realizing Courfeyrac was entirely serious. “Really?” he asked derisively. “Forgive me, I did not realize we were still in the nursery.”

Courfeyrac just shrugged. “Perhaps not, but you cannot deny that he used to be your partner in crime when it came to your schemes.” He gave Enjolras an appraising look. “And whatever else you may say, you and I, I think, can acknowledge that this is a scheme of some variety, though of which, I could not say.”

Enjolras felt stricken at the realization of how Combeferre had interpreted his involvement with Grantaire, which, of course, couldn’t be further from the truth. “I never thought—”

Courfeyrac patted his arm. “Of course you didn’t.”

Enjolras sighed and tugged his arm out of Courfeyrac’s grip. “Still, I should go apologize.”

“You should do no such thing,” Courfeyrac said firmly, turning to face him head on. “You’ve done nothing wrong, but even if you had, actions speak louder than words. Spend some time planning with him before the next Les Amis gathering, and all will be forgiven.”

“But not forgotten.”

Courfeyrac just looked amused. “My dear fellow, none of us, I think, will be able to forget the moment when you and Grantaire finally stopped trying to kill each other using just your words.” His expression softened. “And believe me, no matter what Combeferre may say, we’re all quite grateful that you have.” His eyebrows raised. “Speaking of Grantaire, I believe he wants a word.”

He nodded over Enjolras’s shoulder, and Enjolras turned to find Grantaire, holding two glasses of champagne and gesturing with his head toward the door that led out to the balcony. Enjolras nodded his understanding, and turned back to Courfeyrac, who had already disappeared into the crowd.

Enjolras crossed to the balcony door as quickly as possible to avoid being waylaid once more, and this time, he was successful. Never had he been so relieved to find himself alone and out of doors, even if the night was unseasonably cold. Grantaire laughed lightly from where he was leaning against the balcony railing. “You look like you need this more than I do,” he said, offering Enjolras one of the glasses of champagne.

Enjolras took it gratefully and drained it in one long gulp. “I did need that,” he told Grantaire, setting the empty glass down on the flat top of the wide marble balustrade. “I suppose I did not fully appreciate how complicated this all was going to be on my return.”

Grantaire eyed him carefully, his expression unreadable. “Curious,” he said lightly. “You normally think through every detail before you take any action.”

Enjolras shrugged. “Desperation apparently made me less thorough,” he said. “And, of course, there were unanticipated complications along the way that I did not account for.”

Grantaire let out a light, humorless laugh. “Am I to assume that I am one of those complications?”

“Yes,” Enjolras said, not seeing any point in sugarcoating the truth. “Though a mostly welcome complication.”

Grantaire nodded slowly. “Who would have thought the word ‘mostly’ could feel like a dagger being driven into me,” he murmured, though he also hastened to add, “I jest, I jest.”

Enjolras traced a finger along the line of the balustrade. “I did not intend to hurt you by saying it,” he said heavily. “Only I think we need to be honest with one another.”

Grantaire searched his expression for a long moment. “I have been entirely honest with you,” he said carefully. “So if there is anyone with something to hide…”

He trailed off, looking at Enjolras expectantly. “Not to hide,” Enjolras hedged. “But one of the complications I did not anticipate has revealed itself this evening, and that is related to your social standing.”

Grantaire blinked. “My— what?”

“Combeferre pointed out that by me marrying your sister, your status has risen to one of the most eligible bachelors,” Enjolras explained. “And that knowledge complicates things.”

“How so?” Grantaire asked, his brow furrowed.

Enjolras shrugged, avoiding Grantaire’s eyes. “You have...options now, I suppose,” he muttered. “Real options, for a real marriage.” He hesitated before adding, “Options that I would not discourage you from exploring.”

Grantaire nodded slowly, turning to stare out at the sprawling grounds that surrounded the manner. After a long moment, he asked softly, “Am I being thrown over, then?”

“What?” Enjolras asked, confused.

“Is this your rather inelegant attempt to be rid of me?” Grantaire asked, his voice brittle. “Trying to soften the blow by intimating that I now have ‘options’?”

Enjolras stared blankly at him. “Of course not,” he spluttered. “That’s not at all what—”

“Then tell me,” Grantaire interrupted, “when I told you, multiple times now, that I love you, did you think I was speaking falsely?”

Enjolras scowled. “Not at all, but you did not know all the facts then!”

“And what facts could possibly matter in this regard?”

“The fact that you have a real chance to make a marriage match that would improve your standing and your family’s standing!” Enjolras snapped, though he wasn’t quite sure why he was angry, and especially at Grantaire. “You could secure a future for your lineage that any man would be envious of. It’s why most men put themselves through these torturous affairs.”

Grantaire just shook his head. “Most men, but not you, and certainly not me,” he said quietly.

Something in his tone caused Enjolras to deflate, but it also allowed him to realize why he was so angry, or more accurately, at whom he was so angry: himself. He had dragged Grantaire down this path, and this was perhaps the last real opportunity that either had to part ways before irreparable damage was done. “Think of what you are saying,” he said, his voice low and urgent. “I cannot offer you anything, not my name, not my title, not even the promise of the future if we are discovered. You deserve so much more than that.”

Grantaire shook his head again, but slower this time, and with a crooked sort of smile. “You can offer me the only thing I have ever wanted: you,” he said simply. “There is no one on Earth who can offer me more than that.” Enjolras shook his head, ready to interrupt, but Grantaire did not let him. “Do not seek to dismiss my words, when I mean every one of them. There is no happiness that I would find now with any other, not now that I know what true happiness is. Not now when I know what true love is.”

The breath caught in Enjolras’s throat, and for a moment, he could not speak. If he had been waiting for the perfect moment to finally tell Grantaire that he loved him, he knew he would never find one better than this. The music from the waltz taking place inside the ballroom swelled, and Enjolras leaned in toward Grantaire, reaching out to lightly cover Grantaire’s hand resting on the railing with his own. “Grantaire,” he started, his voice soft, “I—”

But before he could get the two most important words out, the doors to the balcony banged open, and Enjolras and Grantaire instinctively moved apart as two giggling couples spilled out of the ballroom.

The moment was thoroughly ruined, which perhaps explained the face Grantaire made as he turned back to Enjolras. “Shall we consider this our sign to adjourn for the evening?”

“Yes please,” Enjolras said with a sigh of relief.

His relief was short-lived, however, as a current of tension resonated between them as they made their way back through the ballroom and then waited out front until his carriage pulled around. As soon as they were inside and en route back to his place, Enjolras cleared his throat. “Shall we continue our conversation?”

Grantaire sighed. “I did not realize there was more to say.”

Enjolras gave him a look. “There is always more to say.”

“That should really be your family motto,” Grantaire muttered. “Plus semper est dicere.”

“I don’t think that’s an accurate translation,” Enjolras said mildly. “Though at least it’d probably be more appropriate than my actual family motto, Nox finiet.”

“Perhaps I’ll have Marius figure out the correct translation, then, and we can have it engraved on our stationary.”

Ordinarily, Enjolras probably would have laughed, but now, Grantaire’s attempt at glib just fell flat. “Grantaire—”

Grantaire ignored him. “After all, my family is too new amongst the gentry to have a motto of our own. Of course, if I ever got to pick a family motto, I’d probably choose Fidelitas usque ad mortem.”

His words were pointed, and Enjolras swallowed, hard. “Faithful until death.”

Grantaire met his gaze steadily. “And I aim to be.”

“I do not doubt that you will be,” Enjolras said quietly. “I only wish that you would consider what your loyalty will cost you.”

Grantaire reached out and took his hand. “Even if it costs me everything in this life and the next, it will be more than worth it.” He raised Enjolras’s hand to his mouth and pressed a kiss to his knuckles. “If you will have me, at least.”

Enjolras squeezed his hand, but before he could respond, the carriage jolted to a stop, and he glanced outside. “We’re home already?” he asked, somewhat surprised.

Grantaire just chuckled lightly. “One day we’ll figure out our timing,” he said before stepping out of the carriage and turning to help Enjolras down.

But Enjolras was not so willing to surrender the moment this time. As soon as his driver had left, he grabbed Grantaire’s hand, pulling him away from the lamplight at the door. “Before we go in, there’s something that I wished to say.”

“Something so secret you dare not speak it in earshot of your servants?” Grantaire asked, amused.

“Be serious,” Enjolras said with a frown.

Grantaire just smiled at him, his eyes sparkling even in the dim light. “I am wild.”

“Grantaire…”

“Fine, fine,” Grantaire said, chuckling. “What is it you wished to say?”

Enjolras took a deep breath. “Only that our time together has meant more to me than I ever thought it could. Not just our time up north, when it was just the two of us. But our time tonight as well. “

“Even when we were quarreling?” Grantaire asked.

“Especially when we were quarreling,” Enjolras said firmly. “Because our quarrel came from us wanting the best for each other.” He took both of Grantaire’s hands in his. “I do not know what the future holds, but I know that I want you in it, options be damned. Besides, with you at my side, I’m beginning to think anything is possible.”

Grantaire was quiet for a long moment before he leaned in and kissed Enjolras gently. “I may not share your belief in possibility, but I too have valued our time together,” he said softly. “It is everything I always dreamt it would be, and so much more.”

Enjolras laughed breathily. “You dismiss my belief in possibility, only to speak of dreams?”

Grantaire half-smiled. “Possibility speaks to hope,” he said with a shrug. “I never hoped my dreams would come true, though I am gladder than words can say that they have. That they are.” He squeezed Enjolras’s hands. “And who knows, you may make a believer out of me yet.”

This was Enjolras’s moment, and he took a deep breath, ready to finally say those three words he knew Grantaire wanted to hear more than anything else. “Grantaire, I—”

“Lord Enjolras?”

Enjolras could not stop the groan that escaped from his lips as he let go of Grantaire’s hands at the sound of his butler’s voice. “What is it, Porter?” he asked tiredly, taking a step towards the now-open door.

Porter cleared his throat. “Begging your pardon for the interruption,” he said, “but we’ve received word from the Marchioness.” Enjolras and Grantaire exchanged startled glances, and Porter corrected himself. “Beg pardon, the Dowager Marchioness. Your mother.”

Enjolras felt the blood drain from his face. “Christ,” he muttered. “What does she want?”

“She is planning on visiting tomorrow morning,” Porter said, glancing at Grantaire before looking back at Enjolras. “And I thought you would want to know immediately so that, ah, arrangements can be made.”

Not for the first time, Enjolras wondered how much Porter had surmised of what was going on between himself and Grantaire, and decided quickly that he cared less than making sure his mother knew absolutely nothing. “You were correct, Porter, thank you,” he said, and Porter nodded before closing the door again.

Enjolras sighed and looked back at Grantaire, but before he could say anything, Grantaire cleared his throat. “I should spend the night at mine tonight,” he said, in a tone that brooked no argument. “The last thing you need is to start your conversation with your mother with an explanation for our unusual living arrangement.”

“I know that you’re almost certainly right, but I wish to God you weren’t,” Enjolras said, reaching out to draw Grantaire close. “I need you on my side against her.”

Grantaire just laughed and tilted his head up to kiss Enjolras, a quick, fleeting kiss. “You will be fine,” he said with far more confidence than Enjolras felt. “I promise that I will be back tomorrow morning.”

“Yes, but before or after my mother leaves?” Enjolras muttered mutinously.

Grantaire laughed again and pressed one more kiss to Enjolras’s lips. “I love you,” he murmured before stepping away. “And I will see you in the morning.”

Enjolras watched him go, dreading the next morning and wishing more than anything that he had not waited until Grantaire was out of earshot to finally reply, “I love you, too.”

#exr #enjolras x grantaire #enjoltaire #enjolras #grantaire #with some Les Amis actually making a real appearance!#gasp!#les miserables #fanfiction #bridgerton au #regency au #canon era #fake marriage #developing relationship #chaptered #part 9

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sundance201 · 3 years

Note

Would you take a Sifki prompt that's pretty smutty? Because I loved the prompt from your list “Sometimes you get so close to someone you end up on the other side of them" and it made me recall a smutty scenario where Loki uses his illusions to mimic Sif to get to know her body more intimately. Maybe he thinks he's alone, but Sif walks in and doesn't mind at all – maybe even joins in to help him/her finish.

This was FUN. I've never written anything like this, so at first I wasn't too sure about this prompt, but the more I wrote, the more I was into it. :P Thank you, dear anonymous!

You can read on, or you can read on Ao3. Please be warned that it is absolutely not safe for work.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

As a lover, Loki had never gotten complaints before. He had earned his Silvertongue moniker in more than one way, after all. And it wasn’t as if Sif was shy in her desires – he almost always knew what she was thinking, even when she tried to keep it to herself. Which was why it was so disquieting that she’d seemed distant as of late.

He’d tried to get her to sneak away with him the last few nights and she’d smiled weakly at him and declined, saying that she hadn’t been feeling well or that she was exhausted from training.

And it wasn’t that Loki didn’t have his pick of bedfellows, it was just…Sif was his favorite. So often his partners could stimulate his body, or they could stimulate his mind, but not both. But any sort of physical and verbal sparring with Sif, whether in the training rings, in bed, or lounging in front of the fireplace, was always a good time.

There was also the fact that Loki had been in love with Sif for hundreds of years now.

So there were many reasons why the thought of Sif losing interest in their little clandestine affair sent Loki’s stomach plummeting to the ground. This was hardly a problem that he could go to Thor or his mother about. So instead he chose to do a little research on his own.

Magical research obviously.

Which is how he came to be admiring his figure, which was now Sif’s figure, in the mirror. He’d spent enough time cataloguing her body, he was fairly certain that his magical copy was nearly identical. But he wasn’t sure if the body would react as Sif’s actual body, or if he would be reacting as himself in Sif’s body.

His hands trailed over Sif’s breasts (his breasts?) and down the flat planes of his stomach, shivering as he watched himself in the mirror. He watched as Sif’s familiar fingertips trailed over her thighs and then palmed herself between her legs. He gasped as he felt the wetness there, familiar yet foreign at the same time.

His other hand kneaded his breast and plucked at his nipple, gasping at the action. His nipples were usually quite sensitive, but he knew Sif enjoyed a rougher touch, so he pinched his nipple again and then twisted. He shuddered and let out a soft moan at the touch – definitely rougher than he usually enjoyed, but he seemed to be enjoying the sensation in Sif’s body quite a lot.

Before he could contemplate that further and try to decide if that meant that this would be how Sif’s body would react and then continue on with his little experiment, his door quickly opened and shut. He spun around, mortified and wondering how he would possibly explain this to her. The intruder’s jaw dropped as she took in the sight before her.

“Loki?” Sif whispered, looking bewildered at the sight of her naked body standing in front of the mirror. “What is the meaning of this?”

“Sif, it’s not what you think,” Loki said and both of them found it strange that his illusion only went as far as his body, but not his voice. Loki’s voice coming out of Sif’s body was a strange thing indeed. “It’s not for some trick or cruel prank. I…I just wanted to know if there was something I could be doing better, to please you more…”

Sif’s eyes were still wide, but she took a step forward, towards him. “So you…magicked yourself into my body?”

“Not actually your body, since you’re standing here. Just a facsimile of your body. I wasn’t sure if I’d respond like you or like me and I was just testing-”

Sif stepped forward again, within touching distance now, a strange look in her eyes. She reached out and trailed her fingertips down Loki’s arm, but it looked like her arm. “My skin is that soft?”

Loki swallowed and watched as Sif’s fingers continued to touch his skin. He thought about changing back, but Sif seemed oddly entranced. It wasn’t as if he hadn’t conjured doubles of his own and had a similar reaction, but he hadn’t imagined Sif reacting with the same sort of curiosity. “Yes, Sif. Your skin is that soft.” He stepped back from her touch and did a slow 360 degree turn, his arms out to the side. “Did I do well?”

Sif bit her bottom lip and Loki mimicked her. “You did this for me? Because you thought you weren’t pleasing me?”

“I wanted to know if I could please you better…if there was something I could do…if I knew how it felt…” he trailed off as he looked helplessly at her. Sif smiled, seemingly taking pity on him as she stepped forward again.

“You’re incredible, Loki,” she murmured, cupping his cheek and drawing him forward for a kiss.

It didn’t feel differently to him, not really, other than being the exact same height when he was usually taller, but he could tell she felt strange. Her kisses were gentler than they usually were, more hesitant as she cupped her own cheek and kissed her own lips.

Loki moaned as Sif’s tongue flicked into his mouth and his hands went to her hips, creeping under her tunic to stroke at the skin right above her leggings. They broke apart and Sif smiled wickedly at him. “Do you want to see how I touch myself?”

“Yes,” he whispered, nodding absently as Sif turned him back to the mirror and slipped behind him.

She giggled slightly and pressed a kiss to his shoulder. “This is so strange,” she said, running her hands down his torso, before cupping his breasts and taking his nipples in either hand, pinching harshly. Loki’s breath stuttered and he sighed, opening his eyes to take in the sight before him.

It was strange to see two Sifs in the mirror, with the real Sif standing behind him, her tunic scratching at his back as he leaned against her. Her fingers twisted his nipples again and Loki gasped, the action sending a bolt of lust straight to his core. He could feel his thighs getting sticky with wetness and he tried to catalogue the uncanny sensation.

“I usually am picturing your fingers when I touch myself,” Sif whispered to him, one hand continuing to pinch and grope his breast and the other drifting down his side, over his hip, until her hand was resting between his thighs, much like the position that she had caught him in initially. “I’m sure you can appreciate the irony here, my prince,” she murmured as her fingers teasingly stroked at the wetness between Loki’s thighs, before pressing her fingers in deeper in order to gently circle his clit.

Loki gasped and arched against her. “Do you like your own touch as much as mine?” he asked her.

She hummed contemplatively as she stroked her fingers through his silky wetness, trapping his clit between her pointer and middle finger and rubbing up and down. Loki made a note of how good it felt and resolved to add the move to his arsenal. “I don’t know if I can rank it. I enjoy my own touch because I know my own body so well. But your touch…there are things that your body can do to me that I cannot do to myself.” At that declaration, she slipped two fingers inside him and Loki moaned, his head lolling back against Sif’s shoulder. “My fingers are not nearly as long as yours, for instance,” she whispered teasingly.

“They feel perfectly fine to me,” he replied, his voice weak and breathy. Sif chuckled in his ear and continued to finger him.

“If I make you come like this and then you change back into your own body, do you think your cock will still be hard?” she mused, tweaking his nipple for good measure.

He laughed and shook his head, feeling the long dark hair brush against Sif’s body. “I don’t know, Sif. But you were just extolling the virtues of my fingers, were you not? And you usually can find enjoyment in my tongue as well.”

Sif crooked her fingers just right at that moment and Loki’s knees nearly gave out. Her hand left his breast and wrapped around his middle, helping support him. “I love your fingers, Loki, and your tongue,” she murmured. “But right now I want your cock.” She removed her fingers and then nuzzled against his neck.

“Well the whole point of this exercise was to better please you, my lady,” he said. With one last look in the mirror at the alluring sight of Sif holding her double, he waved his hand and a flash of green wove around his body, returning it to his own body, and no longer the form of the Lady Sif.

Sif grinned at him in the mirror, her hands rubbing at his stomach, before dropping down to his cock. Her hand gripped him and Loki groaned as Sif teasingly stroked him. “Ah yes, something I’ve never managed to quite replicate. Even with the false phalluses I have in my possession, nothing compares to this.”

Loki’s eyes widened and he spun around to look Sif in the eye. “You have false phalluses?”

A wicked grin spread across her face. “I do. Any interest in using them with me, Odinson?”

“You are perfect, my lady,” he murmured feverishly, grabbing her hips and all but tearing off her clothing.

They barely made it to the bed before Loki was inside of her. Sif moaned beneath him, arching her back and hooking her arms behind his neck. “You feel so good, Loki,” she murmured, pulling him down for a kiss.

“You do too, Sif. But you already knew that,” he teased. She laughed, which turned quickly into a gasp as Loki slid his fingers to where they were joined and placed his fingers on either side of her clit, just as she had done to him.

“Mmm, you’re such a quick study,” Sif praised him, as his fingers slid up and down the length of her clit. “I love that about you.” Her eyes popped open at her confession, but Loki was too focused on his movements to see the slight panic in her eyes.

“It helped to have a good teacher,” he said, looking up at her, but she’d managed to soften her expression, so he saw nothing out of the ordinary on her face. “Will you come for me, Sif? I want to feel you clench around me. I want your release.”

She bit her lip and nodded, closing her eyes tightly and throwing her head back as she felt her body clench him in her release. “Loki!” she cried out, knowing that he’d set a sound-silencing charm around her chambers a long time ago. She could call out for him all night long with no one being the wiser and had done so multiple times throughout the past few years.

Loki’s release wasn’t far behind, as he moaned her name desperately to the air, before collapsing on top of her, his face buried in her neck.

Normally he was quick to roll off her, never wanting her to feel trapped, but this time she wrapped her arms around his back, ensuring he’d stay put, and pressed a kiss to his neck. “So I will assume I pleased you?” he panted against her shoulder.

She laughed and he raised his head enough to see her smile at him. “Of course you did. You always do.”

“Then why did you rebuff my past few offers?” he asked. He didn’t want to seem desperate, but after what she’d walked in on, he figured he had little to lose.

Sif was quiet for a moment and then she sighed, pushing at him. He rolled to the side, and then fully onto his back, tucking a hand beneath his head in an affected nonchalance that he hoped was convincing. She turned on her side and propped herself up with one arm, looking down at him seriously. “I can’t hide it anymore. Not from you. That’s why I burst into your room without warning tonight.”

“Can’t hide what, Sif?” he asked softly, afraid of what her answer might be. Her face looked so grave, so stricken, that it must have been something serious.

“My…my feelings for you, Loki. I didn’t think you returned them, but then I catch you turning yourself into me just to see what pleases me…in a strange way it made me hope…” She trailed off and sighed in frustration.

She sat up fully, crossing her arms over her chest defensively. She couldn’t seem to look down at him and Loki felt that old fear creep in again. What could possibly have her so upset?

He reached out to her, brushing his fingers across her bare hip. “Sif, we don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to.”

“I love you,” she blurted out. “I’m in love with you, Loki. And I love what we have, but I want more. I don’t want to just sneak around or just share kisses in dark hallways outside of feasts. I want to hold your hand as we walk in your mother’s gardens; I want to be on your arm when we attend balls. I want to be able to punch Lorelei in her stupid face when she flirts with you.” She blew out a breath and finally glanced down at him. “I want to kiss you where everyone can see us and declare that you are mine, Loki,” she said gravely, as serious as she had been when she’d taken her warrior’s oath.

Loki was completely gobsmacked. All this time he’d thought she was losing interest, but instead she loved him? He pinched the crook of his elbow with his nails letting out a yelp of pain when it hurt. Sif looked at him in confusion and he chuckled as he sat up. “Had to make sure I wasn’t dreaming.”

She smiled softly at his confession and tucked a strand of hair behind her ear. She looked down at her lap, clearly nervous to hear his response.

“Sif, my lovely Sif,” Loki murmured, hooking his fingers under her chin and making her meet his gaze. “I’ve loved you since we were young, Sif. I never imagined that you would actually reciprocate my feelings.”

“Why wouldn’t I?”

“Because I’m not Thor.” Sif scoffed and Loki shook his head, grabbing her hands as he explained. “He’s the first choice for everything. He’s everything a prince of the realm should be and I’m…his opposite in every way.”

“You are my Loki,” Sif whispered. “You are my prince and the one who warms my bed and the one who makes me laugh and the one who I love.”

“Well, I’m glad that we’re on the same page,” he teased, leaning in for a kiss. When they broke apart, Loki couldn’t help but grin at her. “I believe that there is a ball next week to welcome a delegation from Vanaheim. Would you be interested in accompanying me, Sif?”

She grinned brightly and nodded. “I’d be delighted, Loki.”

#sifki #sif x loki #prompt fill #warfrost #let's try actually putting the text in the answer #since the last time i just linked in the answer #the post got zero notes #who knows why #i reset my password for this just so i could post from my laptop #this is dedication people #fanfic #brown chicken brown cow

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hrtiu · 3 years

Text

There’s Only One Bed on Slave I

Thanks to @flybynite19 for the idea!

Fennec had worked for a lot of people over the years, so she was used to dealing with her clients’ idiosyncrasies. Still, she’d never worked with someone quite like Boba Fett before.

She’d heard of him, of course. Anybody who was anybody in the hired gun game knew the Fetts. Ok, maybe some of the young hotshots wouldn’t, but they were all dumbasses whose opinion was of no value to Fennec or anyone else. Boba Fett was bounty hunter royalty, and like any proper monarch, he was a little bit mad.

It took about a month for Fennec to recover from Boba’s life-saving “intestinal enhancements,” as he liked to call them, and Fennec knew that as soon as she was operational, they’d be getting to work. Boba was like a snake, waiting still and silent in the burning sand for the perfect opportunity to strike. And that opportunity had finally arrived.

“Where to?” Fennec asked the first morning Boba declared her fully recovered. She got to her feet and snapped the cover over her cybernetic stomach shut, ready to conquer systems and topple dynasties.

“Wherever my father’s armor is,” Boba said, gathering up supplies from around the small hut he called home with the unhurried confidence of a man who expected others to wait for him.

“And that is…?”

Boba looked up at her, his scarred face serious and unyielding. “My contacts have tracked the man who currently possesses my armor to Corvus. We’ll pick up the trail from there.”

“Fair enough,” Fennec said. “How are we getting off-planet?”

A slow smile crept across Boba’s face. “I’ve got that all figured out.”

They packed their few personal effects and extensive weapons collection, then Fennec followed Boba out of the hut and to the tall sand dunes beyond his residence. He held a small remote up towards the monochromatic dune and clicked it with all the solemnity of a monk performing a sacred rite. Fennec watched on, unimpressed, then a rusted, formidable-looking patrol ship rose from the dune, the sand falling off it in tawny curtains. Her eyebrows rose a half an inch—the most dramatic outwards expression of surprise she’d shown in years.

Boba showed her onboard, not bothering to look back or lock up his hut behind him. The quarters were cramped and timeworn but well-maintained. Boba must have brought it out of the sand periodically for regular upkeep over the years.

They stowed their things away, mostly in the armory as a large percentage of their belongings was made to kill people, then Fennec followed Boba to the cockpit and they took off. Fennec looked down over the desert planet as it slowly receded behind them, feeling strangely reborn at the sight of the planet where she’d died becoming small beneath her feet.

Boba set the coordinates and Fennec leaned back in her seat, her eyes glazing over as she stared into the cerulean sea of hyperspace. Her future was uncertain, in some ways more uncertain than it had ever been, but she was at peace. Working a job, fighting someone else’s fights—that’s where she belonged. That was a life she recognized.

“We’re still several hours from Corvus,” Boba said. “You should get some rest. We might run into the man with my armor as soon as we set foot planetside, and Mandalorians aren’t known to give up beskar without a fight.”

“Fine by me,” Fennec said, getting to her feet. “Where should I bunk?”

“The pilot’s quarters are right up that ladder,” Boba said, pointing behind him without looking.

Fennec’s eyes narrowed as she stared at the ladder, mentally going through the quick tour Boba had given her when they’d first embarked.

“Isn’t that your bunk?” she asked, still making her way back to the ladder.

“Only one bunk on the Slave I.”

Fennec’s hand stopped on the first rung of the ladder, her lips pursing. “I’ll sleep on the passenger deck.”

Eyes still on the console in front of him, Boba Fett sighed. “We’re both old mercs with bad joints. It’s only a few hours to Corvus. It’s a big bunk.”

Fennec’s fingers closed around the rung and her lips pursed tighter. “Fine.” She’d kill him if he tried anything, life debt or no, and she was pretty sure he understood that.

She climbed up into the pilot’s quarters and crawled across the bed, the low space not allowing for much more movement than that. There were fresh sheets, a sturdy blanket, and two cloud-soft pillows already laid out, and Fennec eagerly made herself comfortable. She wondered vaguely at where Boba could have possibly found such nice bed linens on Tatooine, then fell fast asleep.

---

Fennec’s eyes opened on a plain durasteel ceiling less than a foot above her. The lights of the ship had been turned down low and the hum of hyperspace thrummed pleasantly through her body, urging her to close her eyes again and go back to sleep. Conceding defeat, she rolled over onto her side and pulled the blanket tighter around her, fully prepared to once again embrace the oblivion of sleep. Then she saw her bedfellow.

Boba Fett lay flat on his back, eyes closed and hands resting peacefully atop his stomach. The dim light of the cabin cast shadows across his face, the darkness seeping into each crease and crevice of his scars. Fennec reminded herself that she’d known he’d be joining her—that she’d agreed to the arrangement and understood the boundaries. It was still quite the trip to actually witness Boba Fett sharing her bed.

Deciding she wouldn’t get much sleep staring at him, she tried to roll back onto her back, where only the durasteel ceiling would keep her company. The maneuver twinged something in her stomach, and suddenly her gut was burning in pain.

“Agh!”

Boba’s eyes flew open and he surged upwards, banging his head soundly on the low ceiling. “Dank farrik! What is it?” he swore.

“Nothing! I-” Fennec cut off, gasping in pain. “Something went wrong in my stomach.”

“Let me see.”

Boba rolled over towards her as Fennec opened up the panel in her tunic that covered her exposed wiring, the lancing pain overriding any questions of propriety or embarrassment.

“It looks like it’s the motivator,” Boba said, his face hunched low over her torso as he attempted to do repairs in the tiny bunk space.

Fennec bit hard on the inside of her cheeks, her eyes watering from pain and her hands fisting in the blankets. “Just… get it fixed.”

Boba nodded in agreement and practically buried his face in her abdomen, his sharp eyes darting to and fro as he attempted to locate the source of the malfunction. After far too many minutes of agony, Boba’s surprisingly nimble fingers clicked a wire into place and the pain instantly abated. The tension in Fennec’s muscles took time to unwind, and she slowly went through her body one tendon at a time, releasing the built up pressure.

“You alright?” Boba asked, still hovering awkwardly with his nose just inches from her cybernetic stomach.

“Yeah. Much better.”

He started to pull away but Fennec reached out a hand, her vice-like grip on his wrist halting him.

“I’m not useless, you know,” she said, her jaw taught. “I can still fight. I know it.”

“Do you think I would have brought you if you were useless? Do you think I would have bothered to save you at all?” Boba asked, smooth brows furrowed over his honey-dark eyes.

“I can sleep on the deck without a blanket. I can push through the pain if I malfunction. I’m not faulty.”

Boba’s eyes narrowed on her and his mouth twisted more than the scarring already warped it. “Fennec. We’re both faulty. That’s why I picked you. And that’s why we’re both taking the bunk.”

He started to settle back into the sheets, but Fennec didn’t release her hold. She tugged on his wrist, bringing his face close to hers and staring intently into his eyes. She’d heard that the eyes were the windows of the soul, but Boba’s amber eyes revealed nothing. Her gaze drifted to his scars, following the one stabbing right between his brows, then trailing up the one that reached from the end of one eye and up to the very center of his forehead. His red-white-tan-mottled skin didn’t look quite so discolored in the dim light, and she thought he’d actually fared better than most of their peers from her early days of work. Maybe they both had.

Firmly, but with an air of intrepid experimentation, Fennec reached a hand behind Boba’s neck and pulled him to her, pressing her lips to his in a stiff and unyielding kiss. His mouth was softer than she’d expected, and she felt his lips turn up into a smirk before she pulled away.

That smirk convinced her she’d made a mistake, and she started to retreat, her hand slipping away and her eyes avoiding direct contact with his.

Before she could make her escape, Boba cupped her face in his hands, the patronizing smirk on his face morphing into something gentler.

“Oh, I think we can both do better than that,” he said, his nose brushing hers.

He kissed her slowly—almost lazily—but with a control and tension that promised more. It was just enough to remind Fennec how good a touch could feel—the softness, the heat, the breath. She made the beginnings of a response, her mouth opening under his and her fingers testing gingerly at his chest. Then, by mutual agreement, they separated.

Fennec opened her eyes and this time, the smirk on her face matched his. Understanding passed between them, a recognition of kindred spirits in a galaxy of strangers. She couldn’t say where this was headed, and she knew he couldn’t either, but she felt instinctively that they would be on the same page.

Fennec turned onto her back and stared up at the durasteel ceiling again, her eyes closing and her breath slowing.

“Rest up,” Boba Fett said from beside her. “We should only have an hour left before we land.”

“I’ll be ready for it,” she said, resting her hands across her torso. The smirk on her face turned into a full-blown grin.

She didn’t think Boba Fett was going to be like any of her previous employers.

#bobannec #the bobannec plague #star wars #the mandalorian #boba fett #fennec shand #fanfic

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cerastes · 3 years

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Imagine W's ultimate show of trust to the Doc, if she ever decides to bring herself to that point somehow., being inviting them to share a ration with her out in the field. Or sort out some munitions over a chat about the places she's been. Or, as you said, indulging in the peace of just peeling some potatoes. I blame you for infecting me with W enlightenment.

! Yo. That’s some actual 200% Trust stuff right there.

W vaguely, casually inviting Doc out for a walk, telling them that if they decide to come, to give word that he’ll come back later. Doc says they’ve got a lot of work to do. W insists that Kal’tsit won’t give ‘em hell since she’ll explain. Never once has Doc seen Kal’tsit actually reprimand W, or W fail to finesse her way out of a lecture, so sure, why not? W’s reply is simply a smile, one that looks infinitely similar to her usual mocking smirk, but somehow, this time, it reaches her ears, and yet, it feels like it could deflate any time. Doc has seen this emotion before, and while they can’t put a name to it, they know it to be mutually exclusive with joy.

The ensuing chat is meaningless, but not unwelcome. Something about the Penguin Logistics girls being really good in a brawl for mailwomen and tour guides, something about the music room being quite lively, what with Vigna, Courier and Blue Poison habitually going there to play the guitar, with the “kiddos”, as she calls them, looked with admiration, Frostleaf trying to mimic them with her air guitar as Ifrit headbanged, something about how it was funny to see Aak and Warfarin wheel a very unwilling Fang into the infamous Doctor Blood’s lab, right before Dobermann and Kal’tsit caught them red-handed and dole out the appropriate pay docks and, worse still, lectures that seem unending as they are redundant, but ah, see, that’s the thing with Kal’tsit, she may say the same thing for the course of 3 hours, but she somehow keeps using different words, never sounding too redundant, it’s just like that time years ago when Kal’tsit caught raiding the pantry in the wee hours of the morning. How could Doctor not remember that one, it was a classic in Babel! A legendary pursuit that lasted two hours and was followed by four of lectur--

And then W stops.

That’s meaningless.

They don’t remember that funny anecdote.

And if they did? Then she surely wouldn’t be walking down memory lane with the “Doctor”. She surely wouldn’t be here right now.

It’s because they’ve lost all of that, that they have gained this little space, away from the mobile city, in the middle of nowhere, where they can talk.

They sit down across from each other, with the camp’s fire between them, on boxes tastefully labelled “Doctor” and “Me” with black paint. W throws Doctor a potato and a knife. There’s no Gummy or Matterhorn here, buster. You want food? Better get peeling while the water comes to a boil.

So they peel in relative silence. Potatoes. Onions. Dicing some carrots. Uncorking some cheap Kazdel ‘vintage’, if unused sewer lines from long-devastated cities could be considered casks, but hey, it’s got a nice kick and you can pick it right up after wandering back into an old campsite if you leave it fermenting before departing for the next battlefield. Just one of those nomad’s secrets, wink wink. Or do they call them “lifehacks” now? Reunion didn’t exactly have the latest in lingo, W laments.

Throughout all of this, Doctor cannot help but feel a certain tightness in their chest and a hollow pit in their stomach. It’s a feeling Doctor has heard others describe, but they’ve never been able to put a name to it, but they know it to be strange bedfellows with joy. Was this the same pain holding a tight grip on W’s smile before?

“Have we done this before? You know, before.”

But W only chuckles. “Maybe we did. Maybe we sat right here, maybe we had the very same cheap liquor, left to ferment in the same circumstances. Maybe we fixed the very same stew, maybe that knife feels oddly comfortable because that was the one we’d lend you.”

She stresses the plural, and the Doctor, too, stresses. She continues.

“Maybe you earned our trust, maybe you were just the way you are... Superficially, at least. Maybe that’s still something exclusively superficial. Maybe I’m intentionally tripping on the same stone twice, and if that’s the case, this time, it’ll cost me less than before, as it’ll be only one life.”

“As opposed to how many?” the Doctor doesn’t ask, doesn’t dare ask.

“This stew is perfect: Cheap, easy to prepare, nutritious, filling, and the pot is easy to clean afterwards. We make this stew a lot since it reminds us of ourselves as Sarkaz mercenaries... Convenient, gets the job done, and then you can just move on with your life after disposing of it. You used to love this stew.”

W gets real close to the Doctor, face to face, potato and knife gripped still, close enough that her warmth permeates through their mask, breathing audible, blood a frenzied mix of boiling and frigid.

“Do you still love this stew, Doctor?”

W’s explosive charges are less loaded than this question. Agonize, they did, trying to find the right way to diffuse this situation, but she doesn’t give them time to respond, fortunately. A dud, perhaps?

“If you still like the stew, then perhaps we can’t be friends, but... If you don’t find it to your liking, perhaps I can show you other rations and dishes we make out here, ones more nuanced, ones packed with a little more care, you know?”

Instead of sitting on a box across the fire from Doctor, W sits next to them now, finally abandoning the Doctor’s personal space.

“I’ve just been thinking very seriously about this, see? You really... And if I’m wrong about this, heh, shame on me, but you really don’t seem like the kind of person that likes that stew anymore. Just something I’ve learned from watching. Watching you. Watching the new blood. Watching the trust they place in you, the affection, the laugh and cajolery and jocosity of it all. And in the center of it all, what is it that you do? You reciprocate, and it drives me crazy.”

The Sarkaz’ voice raises just for a second.

“Because this could be much simpler, this could be as easy as click click boom, you know? Hit the switch, have a laugh, carry on, but no, you’ve made this far more complicated than it had to be. If you had remembered the anecdote, I could’ve just hit the button half an hour ago, and by now, I would be done picking up whatever was left of you, hiding it in an abandoned sewer line and then sealing it, and I’d be on my way to Columbia right about now. I hear they got some nice new settlement for Infected there now. If only you had remembered.”

But the Doctor did not remember. Not about the time when Kal’tsit lectured W for hours on end, nor about the time they disposed of the leftover stew. Not about a damn thing. The bombs in the box labelled “Doctor” were almost comically redundant, for whatever firepower they could hold, they’d never compare to the edge of Doctor’s conscience, twisting from within.

“...I heard you carried that FrostNova girl’s body. Thanks for that,” carried on W. “And for that, in addition to everything else, I’ve decided that maybe we ought to eat more than crummy stew next time. Which side of you is the real one? I guess I’ll -- we’ll -- find out soon enough.”

After that, no more words were traded. Peel, they did, and eventually, dinner was ready. The stew was somehow bitter and bland. Doctor couldn’t be happier, and was already anticipating what they were going to make next.

Maybe they’ll have anecdotes the both of them remember to fill the silence while peeling potatoes next time. Not that silence is unwelcome. Silence is meaningful, and a surprising amount of times, what unveils the truth behind someone’s heart.

#oh I thought this was shorter #arknights #operator w

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leiainhoth · 3 years

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Work summary: For so long, Din fought the reality of giving the child up, giving him to the jetii and moving on. He had prepared for it, packed a bag and left it all behind, so his son could have the life he deserved. All until he didn't have to. Or the one where Luke rescues Grogu on Tython, and Din rescues Luke in return.

Chapter summary: Luke, Din and the child continue their journey to Mos Espa, and Din makes a startling discovery

...

The pre-dawn light stirs Luke from a dream, and he rises with a grin. It was the sixth morning of their journey, the sixth day of traversing the desert waste of Tatooine with strangers and friends alike, and he was enjoying it. Surely more than one should enjoy journeying across dunes on the back of a bantha. But he was. He was at peace— true peace— perhaps for the first time since he had left Tatooine in the first place all those years ago.

There was peace to be had, even when Luke thought himself incapable of relaxing outside of his morning meditations, this was it. This was what he had been searching for, this feeling, this realization that his endless searching would never be victorious. That perhaps what he needed was to be still, be still and listen.

The force was like the wind, here. It ebbed and flowed, the energy of all living things tangled in a web, connecting each and every thing to another. It swelled around Grogu, the child small in his father's lap, dipping and swaying around the Mandalorian. Luke looked within, pleased and in awe of the feeling of oneness that the force had always given him. There was still so much Luke didn't know. So many secrets and techniques that had been lost, fallen to time. He wanted to learn, wanted to listen, but his world was so noisy, engines and footsteps and clanging metal. There was no use for the force on Chandrila, on Coruscant, on any of the core worlds. Whatever the Jedi order used to be before the war was gone, now. It was up to Luke to decide how it would continue; if it would continue, the future of the Jedi was in his hands.

It was a lot of pressure, Luke thought with a reflective exhale, a pressure that had been placed on him with the expectation that he would fulfill it. But he was older, now. Not necessarily wiser, but perhaps warier. Less anticipatory, more thankful; not often expectant of good things to come his way. It made him feel old, and Leia had teased him about it when he told her. But he was a Jedi master, damn it. What the order looked like, what it felt like, was up to him. And nothing Leia could say would change his mind.

Luke opened his eyes from his musings and looked around, not that there was much to look at. They were still far enough from Mos Espa that the landscape was unfamiliar. And even if he had, as a youth trapped here, he wasn't focused on the sand so much as the sky. Wishing beyond his wildest hopes that one day he'd be able to pilot something better than a landspeeder or a skyhopper, that he'd join the Academy and never have to step foot on Tatooine again.

It was a dream he had garnered for much of his childhood, unaware of his father's prowess as a pilot beyond what Owen and Beru had told him. Unaware, but still hopeful that there was something greater waiting for him out there.

But that was years ago, Luke thought with a pain of nostalgia, almost ten years. He wasn't a youth anymore, and any great hopes he held for his future were quiet ones. Find more force-sensitive younglings, set up a temple on a peaceful planet. Spend time with his sister, and Han and Lando, try and keep his droids running smoothly and his lightsaber in one piece. He wanted a life for himself that was different than that of a rebellion hero, something…predictable, something still. Something with a garden and a familiar bed, and… if he could be selfish, perhaps a companion. Someone to keep him company, someone to love and cherish and grow old with. Luke wanted that life, a quiet life.

He had spent his years in the rebellion being what the alliance needed him to be; a damn good pilot, a leader, an example: the poster boy for hope and peace across the galaxy. But he wasn't that man anymore. He didn't want to be a hero; he wanted peace . Because with heroism came fame, recognition; Luke didn't want people to come up to him and thank him for his service. He didn't want those he didn't know to shake his hand and congratulate him on what he did for the rebellion. He didn't want the insignia of the damn Death Star painted on the starboard wing of his X-wing, a concrete and constant reminder of what he had done in the name of the rebellion.

A million souls had died that day, and there were still nights Luke woke up in a cold sweat imagining their fiery deaths. Still times when he sat down suddenly in great pain, still moments where he was overcome with the overwhelming swells of grief and loss. Leia tried to comfort him, as did the droids in the medbay after he came to that day. It wasn't your fault, they told him, pressing the personal comm code for the rebellion psychologist into his palm. You did what had to be done. More people would've died, whole systems would have been destroyed had we not done it first.

We , they had said, and Luke remembered. Had not we done it first. But there was no we, was there? There were the half dozen pilots behind him, and later Han and Chewie in the Falcon, but it was Luke who made the shot and ended it all. Luke, who would hold those souls with him for the rest of his days.

And all because Luke wanted to be a hero, all because he wanted nothing more than to leave when all that he had ever truly needed was at hand, sitting on a moisture farm in Tatooine.

It was easy to say it was all behind him; the war was over. He was lucky that so many of his friends had survived, that he still had his X-wing and Artoo and Chewie and Han and Leia, but…something was missing. Of course, he had lost friends; he wasn't the only man to be orphaned and alone. But it wasn't just that; it was companionship that Luke craved. A companion who didn't care that he was Luke Skywalker of the rebel alliance, who didn't mind the lightning scars on his arms and belly, someone who didn't care he had a missing hand and debilitating nightmares; someone who wouldn't ask questions he didn't want to answer. Someone to joke with him, to care for him, someone who would hold him tight and not let him go.

Luke remembered crumbling the comm code in his palm, nodding to the droid so they would leave, promising to himself that he'd never call them no matter how bad it got. He couldn't bear the pity in their eyes, the looks of disappointment when they saw him for who he truly was. As if he'd let them down; as if the great impenetrable Luke Skywalker was a fluke, not a hero, just a kid from Tatooine with strange powers and a good trigger finger. He wasn't all that they thought he was.

And so, for five years, he tried to forget.

And frankly speaking, he was more or less successful. He watched with pride and happiness as Leia, and the other generals in the rebellion became the pillars of the New Republic, stood by their side when Han and Leia wed. He had held his twin's hand and congratulated her on her pregnancy, and when Ben Solo was born with early signs of force-sensitivity, promised to teach him the ways of the Jedi. And others did the same; his friends settled down with partners and friends, started families and adopted orphans from every corner of the galaxy. Started a new life, and Luke watched with a feeling close to loneliness as he failed to do the same.

It wasn't that he wasn't interested; there were more than one pilot and hotshot with a blaster he had taken a fancy to over the course of the war. Luke wasn't the only one to sneak a bedfellow into his compartment after dark, but it wasn't what he wanted. He wanted something deeper, something less desperate, something more than a stolen kiss in a cupboard and fumbling hands in the dark. Luke wanted something, someone , he could hold tightly, someone to comfort him, to stand by him; someone who didn't sleep with Luke Skywalker for the rights to goading brags at sabacc tables and crowded cantinas. As if was a pawn, just another ace in an X-wing with no future and no past and no interest in living beyond the moment.

Leia tried to set him up once or twice, but Luke hadn't taken her up on it. He wasn't interested in senators or state officials, less so in their stories about the war. DIdn't they get it? Didn't they understand that all Luke wanted to do was to forget? Move on? He didn't want to be the grand hero for the rest of his days? Why couldn't anyone understand that all Luke wanted was for others to treat him like a person? Not a legend, not a hero, but just as himself?

And then, out of nowhere, he received the distress call from Tython; and everything changed in a moment. His ill-timed philosophical musings of a better life put on hold for a child calling desperately for help.

The cost had been his X-wing and Artoo, who (no doubt) would have words to share with Luke when they returned to rescue him, but it had been worth it.

Because now, he had friends.

Friends who neither knew nor cared that he was Luke Skywalker of the rebel alliance; Luke Skywalker, the man who blew up the Death Star. Luke Skywalker, the Jedi, the last Jedi in the galaxy, and Darth Vader's son. They didn't know, they didn't mind. They treated Luke as one of their own with no questions asked. To them, he was just that, Luke , and who he was to them was who he was inside. The one with an eye for mechanics, a love of flying, a fair knowledge of desert flora and fauna. He was Grogu's teacher, Scoeeri and Laele's friend. He was Varre's companion as Grogu played with her baby, A'vod and Cor's helper into the underground cave network Luke had definitely not known existed. He was the mechanic who helped Cobb Vanth with his modified speeder when it broke down the night before.

But to the Mandalorian, it was strangely unclear. What was Luke to him?

Surely a friend, Luke thought with careful consideration, trying not to be nosy and look behind him to see for himself. He was intelligent, but quiet, kind. Soft and generous with those around him, despite the thick armour about him at all times. They were friends, right? The man trusted Luke to watch his child, to teach him the ways of the Jedi. All Luke had done was meditate with the child, but so far, Grogu's father had accompanied them every morning, exiting the tent he and the child shared fully armoured with the baby in his arms. It became more difficult to focus with the Mandalorian so near (damn, his thoughts were blinding), but Luke tried. But even as he did, even as he taught the child about the bond he was forming between them, he couldn't ignore the primary strand Grogu had. Luke could feel the golden strands connecting Grogu to his father twist and fold together with time, evolving from strings to cords to bolts, impenetrable. And this man was apparently just that, not force-sensitive at all.

There was something amused in Grogu's consciousness when Luke asked the boy about it. Clearly, the baby knew something Din didn't, but he didn't pry. Whatever it was that had brought Grogu and his father together had been formed in and amongst significant loss. Grogu had told Luke about the day his father adopted him, describing the feelings of warmth and oneness he experienced whenever his father held him close. The warmth the baby exuded through the force when he spoke about his buir was blinding, and when the child asked about Luke's buir, his parents, he deflated with a brush of pain at the loss he had experienced. He didn't want to shock the child, but he told him that his parents were gone, passed on; but they had loved Luke very much.

The child sent a wave of understanding and affection, and Luke felt a small hand grip his own. Together, the baby seemed to say, his eyes wide and open. Even if you have no buir of your own, my family is yours to share.

Luke let his eyes drift shut, a smile widening as a tear slipped down his cheek. What would it be, Luke wondered, his mind struggling to face the impossible, what would it be to take what had been offered? What would it be to have a family of his own?

Luke thought of the baby's father, the warmth Luke felt whenever he considered him. He and the child were so happy together, so content to stay close, and it brought a laugh to his throat when Luke remembered when the Mandalorian tossed his child in the air for his amusement when he carved figures out of tough stalks of grass for the children to play with. More so when he and his companion were alone, but Luke didn't quite know what to think about that.

It was easier to talk when the air was still, and the world was dark, Luke decided, trying not to look too much into his and the Mandalorian's time together. He remembered asking, just that morning, in fact, if his companion could teach him the language of the Tuskens. It had been an innocent enough inquiry, stemming from nothing but good intentions. For the whole time he'd known her, Luke had been using the force to read the baseline level of Varre's thoughts and emotions to communicate with her. He still felt uneasy about it and wanted to speak freely when Grogu and her baby played together. But the Mandalorian had stuttered out something unintelligible, gesturing strangely before Luke got the message. Too far. It was just as well, he supposed he could ask Cobb. Even the basics would be better than nothing.

But there was something to be said for having an excuse to spend more time with his companion. Luke enjoyed his company; it was simple, complimentary. The Mandalorian didn't ask prying questions, didn't seem to want anything of him other than his companionship. In the soft evening light when the day's travel was done, they sat together and watched the suns set, Grogu often lulling in his father's arms. It was in these times that Luke spoke, knowing that the Mandalorian wouldn't mind. He talked about his childhood spent not far from here, his family, his sister. Spoke about how proud he was of Grogu's growth in the short time they had been together, joked about the funny expression on Laele's face when he caught Cobb staring at him.

His companion laughed a little at that. Luke felt his chest warming, the deep tones of his laugh raising a blush to Luke's cheeks. Was that all it took to make him laugh? It had been funny, Cobb's expressions were longing and soft, and it was nice to take the piss out of someone else, for a change. For so innocent a recollection, for so simple a reason, his companion had laughed; and Luke wanted nothing more than to hear him do it again.

When they hitched up their bantha's the next morning to begin, Luke couldn't help but feel an itch on the back of his neck and turned without thinking to see the Mandalorian looking right at him. Luke had never found it difficult to understand his companion's expressions even with the helmet but blushed anyway. Even the implication that the Mandalorian had been looking in his direction was enough to bring a stuttering breath to Luke's chest. The suns were bright; perhaps he didn't notice the flush that had settled across Luke's face. Or maybe he had; Luke thought with a strange lurch in his gut; the Mandalorian didn't look away but tilted his head in recognition instead.

Kriff, how was he supposed to turn away?

Luke closed his eyes and tried to steady his breathing, turning his head firmly in front of him, refusing to budge his position no matter how much he might want to.

Luckily or not, their journey across the dunes was much the same as it always was, the steps of his bantha slow and lurching, massaging and opening Luke's sit bones and hip joints in a way they hadn't ever been massaged before. A sand crawler appeared in the far north-east, and Luke jerked at the sound of A'Vor, Cobb and the Mandalorian drawing their rifles.

Luke started at the sound of Grogu protesting in the Mandalorian's saddlebag. He turned, catching his companion's eye with what he hoped to be wordless understanding, halting his bantha in his tracks to let the Mandalorian catch-up.

"Can you," the Mandalorian said softly, not wishing the others to overhear. "Can you convince the Jawas to stay away?"

Luke nodded, "If you want me to. Do you want me to take the child? You'll need both hands to use your rifle,"

"Yes," the Mandalorian said, handing Luke the squirming child. Luke sent a wave of calm to the baby and felt him settle in Luke's lap, unhappy and concerned but willing to remain quiet for the time being. Luke took a deep breath, steadying his mind before reaching out across the sand, feeling inside him a flurry of activity. He had never fully mastered the Jedi mind tricks he had seen Ben perform; they felt so invasive, so personal, to actively work against one's will to achieve his ends. Luke didn't think the Jawas would mind, and at the very least, they owed him from the last time he was on Tatooine. He felt only a twinge of guilt in redirecting them to the southwest, far away from their little caravan.

"They seem to be turning," Cobb said from ahead of them, a pair of binocs in his hands. Luke blinked his eyes open with a smile.

"Imagine that," the Mandalorian said, and Luke smiled, pleased. Cobb lowered his blaster, and the Mandalorian did the same, lowering his heavy pulse rifle to its holster on the side of his bantha.

"Can I keep the child for the morning?" Luke asked, looking down at Grogu, calming down now that his father was still. "He could use a change of scenery."

"If you'd like to," the Mandalorian said but then hesitated, fishing in his saddlebag for something. "He's fine in the satchel, but I have a head covering for him."

That was how Luke found himself fixing a canvas hat to the baby's head, laughing at its floppy brim and too wide chin strap as the baby cooed at this strange thing on his body.

"It's a hat, Grogu," Luke said, adjusting the garment so it didn't fall. "It'll keep you safe in the sun; your dad doesn't want you to get sunburnt,"

Luke understood the hesitancy; he had applied a sunblock patch every day of his life before he left Tatooine and resumed the habit now that he'd returned without a hitch. But Luke recalled the Mandalorian's hesitancy in applying on onto the child, unsure if it would irritate his skin or cause a rash. Luke had watched with affection, helping the Mandalorian drape the baby in his tunics so the beating suns would stay off the child's skin. Grogu didn't seem to mind and was fascinated with this strange fabric in front of his face.

"Keep it on, Grogu, that's it," Luke said with a laugh, settling the baby between himself and the saddle horn. "Look, I have one too!"

Grogu turned and smiled toothily at Luke's sun gear, babbling happily about everything and nothing and all of the things around.

Luke felt the Mandalorian's gaze on him for the entirety of the morning, and when Luke turned with the pretence of showing the baby where his father was, Luke flushed, a hesitant smile on his face.

continued

#dinluke #family bonding #din djarin/luke skywalker #din djarin x luke skywalker #IJADIHIM-xXxVioletSkyxXx

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