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#it is kind of funny. like there’s a clear pane of glass between my experience and what I think everyone else has going on. but that’s just
loyally-unfaithful · 3 years
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—; it’s beginning to look a lot like christmas.
word count: 3.6k
pairing: razor/gn!reader; razor/traveler
genre: fluff
summary: « i remember… purple mentor say ‘mistletoe’ a big part of weihnachten. »
you looked at the plant in slight bewilderment, not quite sure what to make of this offering. it was cute.
« oh. »
razor stares expectantly at you as you watch him make no further attempt to move. you can’t help the laugh that escapes you, the banality of everything setting into your mind. or maybe you’re getting sleepy. you wonder: « do you know why, razor? »
a/n: secret santa secret santa secret santa anyway, this is my side of the secret santa gift for @absolutely-rational​—i chose to write a thing for razor, but i barely play the game and i haven’t met him or own him* or anything so i apologise if it’s a little ooc ,,,, merry christmas and happy holidays ^^
p.s. as the man who’s good at saying very little in way too many words, the length of this fic just exploded and it’s alot longer than what i wanted it to be dskljfsldkja
heads-up
i write dialogues in what i will call the french/european system? anyway, i see that it's not the dialogue formatting that most english readers are accustomed to so i modified it slightly to be easier to understand basically dialogues will be within guillemets (« »), and words that are within the quotation marks but are italicised are actions and/or dialogue verbs.
hope that clears things out a bit and i hope you give me and my fic a chance :)
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« weih… nachten…? »
he tilts his head slightly, not unlike a dog. what’s that? razor repeats your words slowly, tentatively, enunciating the foreign word with care. he wonders if the words sound strained coming from him. words are hard.
« that’s right! it’s a large festival in teyvat, and even more so in the city! you elaborated, sensing his confusion. here in mondstadt it’s called weihnachten and it’s supposed to be about, you know, spending time with friends and family, passing around gifts and presents to those you care about. »
you soon felt at ease as you continued: this world had its differences, but it had its similarities. it had its own equivalent of christmas. something that you know about. sure, maybe the origin is different, maybe it had different customs and traditions, but it was a comforting familiarity in the midst of everything that’s so staggeringly foreign. then again, you suppose that’s what drew you closer to the silver-haired boy: neither of you truly fit in, nor fully understood the strange world you happen to be in.
though at the very least, razor had his lupical. as bittersweet as it was, it warmed your heart to know that at least he had family to be around with during christmas, and well, around… in general.
« weihnachten. he says, this time with more conviction. how to celebrate? – well for starters, (where do you even begin?) we’d decorate our homes with all sorts of festive trinkets and we’d fill the streets with all sorts of sparkly things. garlands, lights, flowers, ribbons; decorations that’ll spruce up the place and make the city light up. it always made people cheer up and get in the holiday mood, especially at night when the fairy lights twinkle about! »
razor’s mouth moved in a silent gasp. then does that mean that those bright stars he liked so much were not stars, but rather lights? is that why they seemed to be brighter near the end of the year? the people from the city decorated, he considered. is that why the stars’ reflection, bouncing around in the lake, were an array of dazzling colours, from glittering red and shimmering green to captivating shade’s who’s name he doesn’t know?
« is why… sometimes stars explode? he wondered. – yup! though we don’t usually light up fireworks until new year’s. you wondered for a moment. do you like fireworks, razor? the silver-haired boy frowned, lost in thought, before shaking his head. – loud. scary. me and my lupical, we go hide. we don’t like… firework. »
you hummed in understanding. dogs have never been fond of fireworks and firecrackers either.
« fire is bad. why light firework? isn’t it big hassle? »
it reminded razor of the red, burny girl. fun person, friend! but the toys she uses are loud and dangerous, they create explosions and fire, just like fireworks.
« hmm, i guess… you pursed your lips in thought. good question. i guess that at this point we all just do it out of tradition. new year’s brings a lot of excitement, and people let it out by lighting them up. it’s also really pretty. »
the more he thought about it, and the more he learned about it, the less he understood the celebration. why? it’s loud and distracting. bright colours hurt eyes, doesn’t it? it’s time spent with your family, but razor is with his lupical everyday. do humans… not spend time with their lupical regularly? why is this specific day so special from the rest of the year? he doesn’t get all the funny dates and celebrations humans have to keep track of. seems like a big hassle. sounds complicated.
« no such thing as weihnachten in wolvendom, huh? »
he shook his head.
you tucked your finger under your chin, pondering, in slight puzzlement. back in your world, you would’ve been able to take pictures—maybe that would’ve helped him visualise it better—but you couldn’t here in teyvat. a sigh. anyway, it’s not like you had your camera on your person anymore, so you do your best to describe your happiest sensations, experiences, memories of christmas: the smell of hot cocoa on a cool winter morning, the crackle of firewood from the hearth, and the feeling of soft wool on your skin, hugging you from the biting cold. the merry and jovial carols sung by the star singers, the gleeful chattering between friends out on the street, and the boisterous cheering and partying coming from the many bars and restaurants in mondstadt. the comforting arias and prayers echoing from within the cathedral, the mouth-watering aroma and fragrance of treats from the christmas market, and the grand christmas tree placed at the heart of the city decorated with even more opulent and lavish garlands and baubles, the vivid glimmering lights reflected from your eyes.
describe the different little things that made christmas different and more special from the rest of the year.
somehow this time that you took to pay the wolf boy a visit was consumed by you rambling about the merry holiday, drivel that he listened to attentively and with a pure and honest kind of curiosity (even if he doesn’t always understand you) that you found endearing and made your heart flutter, until the sun dipped below the horizon and the stars adorning the city shined out, rivalling those peppering the night sky. until the howls from his family called him away from you, and until you motivated yourself to begin your trek back to mondstadt after sitting in the woods alone.
being with him was always a welcome distraction, you thought.
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december 25th.
paimon was dozing off after stuffing her face full of the dishes from the christmas banquet (good for her!), the cup of tea you had between your hands had gotten cold, and your breath was fogging the frosted window in front of your desk. you mindlessly traced a smiley face on condensation. you can see the ever changing colourful lights blinking through the glass pane. you take another gulp of the unpleasant liquid, unsatisfying as you feel it slowly go down your throat. the calming and comforting scent it brought (it was chamomile) having long dissipated.
sighing, you pulled your fingers off the cold china, deciding it wasn’t worth finishing, and quietly slipped out of your room (which was graciously granted to you by the knights of favonius), taking care to slot the chair back under the desk and gently close the door behind you. you wondered if taking a walk would help you feel better. you tightened your shawl around you and buried your freezing hands into your pockets. head down, you quickened your pace to… wherever your legs were taking you.
another sigh.
you smiled almost bitterly to how much of a grinch you were being. you liked christmas, or rather, you liked what it stood for, and you liked the idea of spending the winter months with your closed ones.
a few hours ago, the knights of favonius had organised a small christmas party at angel’s share, and though they had thoroughly reassured you that you belonged and were included in this celebration, you couldn’t help but keep to yourself and stick to a corner of the bar. you couldn’t bring yourself to join in on the fun, or talk to others. you didn’t feel like it was your place to force yourself into their conversation, into their lives. you were grateful that they thought about you, and you didn’t want to question their kindness, but… you nursed your glass of virgin cocktail, peeling your eyes away from your wonky reflection on the liquid.
you weren’t exactly at home: you looked at jean and barbara, happily exchanging jokes and teases. a relaxed sort of conversation, banter which flowed, almost as if it were rehearsed, in a way that was only possible between sisters. that night, the deaconess wasn’t smiling as if she was holding back tears. the carefree girl was speaking with jean (rather than the acting grand master) who allowed herself some respite from the demanding position.
you look at the uncharacteristic smile on the bartender’s (who happened to be none other than diluc that evening) face, and you doubted that kaeya, sharp-eyed as ever, missed it either. it was subtle. but it was there. you don’t miss the way the cavalry captain held back on his sarcastic remarks or the way diluc wasn’t being “deliberately uncivil” (as kaeya would put it) either; the way the red-head indulges kaeya’s seemingly insatiable thirst for alcohol while the latter makes an effort to maintain a friendly, if curt, chatter.
a particularly loud giggle drew your gaze back at the two sisters: lisa seemed to have joined them. you sipped your beverage, half-hearted. the three seemed to have started a rather animate discussion. you hear them laugh again. it makes you frown, but you shake your head, pushing those angry thoughts out of your mind. just because you’re miserable (even though you shouldn’t be—your friends are with you) doesn’t mean they have to feel down with you.
setting your glass down on the table, you wondered if you would've felt better if you were with someone closer to your age, but amber had gone home early: she dropped by and hung out for a bit before going home to spend time with her family. your glass is empty now. you feel… envious. you wished you could spend this christmas season with your family. it’s not fair. it’s not fair.
your favonian family, and yet you were out of place.
you excused yourself early from the gathering, the other members politely bidding you farewell and a merry christmas (« frohe weichnachten! »), and quickly went up the path leading to the order’s headquarters, wanting to hide away in your room as soon as possible.
now, you stop before the lavish tree: it’s as grand and brilliant as it’s always been. but now it seems much too bright. the colours an eyesore. singing sounds more like knives being dug into your eardrums.
your head hurts.
a humourless chuckle escaped you. you used to take turns with your sibling on who got to slot in the christmas topper.
this year was their turn.
back then, your sibling made a point to hang gingerbread treats on the tree, and you made a point to eat them behind their back come christmas morning.
normally, you’d be sharing gifts with your sibling during this time of the year.
your entire life they’ve always been there by your side, and you by theirs. for better or for worse, you kept each other company. you’ve always spent christmas with them.
this was your first christmas without.
the rest of your thoughts are jumbled, incoherent. something your long term memory didn’t deem worthy of keeping, so they simply fizzled away. everything was a blur as your feet carried you outside the city, away from… it doesn't matter. just away. carried you away. happiest time of the year. but you’re here alone, with no one you know and to call home in a world you don’t recognise. far away from the land you once knew.
panting, you stopped in your tracks when you realised you’ve started sprinting. what were you doing, you chastised yourself. can’t you act a little more mature? finally lifting your gaze, you took in your surroundings; instinctively your feet must’ve taken you to wolvendom. you kicked a stray pebble under your boot. not like that afterthought was going to help much. it’s not like anyone was waiting for you here either, razor was probably with his lupical. hunting or snoozing away.
with little care, you let out an exasperated sigh as you let yourself plop ungracefully to the ground, listless.
you sit there in silence, nothing to accompany you except for the cacophonous ringing of crickets in the forest. you drew your knees closer to you. what were you doing here? it’s cold. you hear thistle crack, and so you defensively draw your sword as you rose to your feet, only to be met with a familiar mop of fluffy silver hair.
« it’s night. dangerous here. »
was his curt greeting. you lowered your sword, shoulders relaxing.
you opened your mouth, ready to apologise, make up some sort of excuse, let him know you’re leaving, when something else caught your eye: « you kept the scarf? »
he blinked. once, twice: « you gave it to me. he said, very matter-of-factly. you are my lupical. it is… treasure… razor paused, correcting himself. treasured, possession. »
having realised that the intruder was not dangerous, the wolf boy came closer and gently pressed his forehead against yours and nuzzled your face. a small laugh escaped you as you returned the affectionate gesture, something you’ve learned was his customary greeting. it was cold out, but his touch was enough to bring feeling back to your cold self and make you warm and fuzzy inside.
still resting your head on his, you asked, timidly: « is it ok if i stay here for a bit? » it came out as a whisper, unsure if you’re any better staying here rather than back in the city. but as he nodded in agreement, your shoulders loosened as you let go of tension you weren’t aware you were building up again. you slumped into him, burying your face into him and held him in a loose hug. razor, as for him, let himself be snuggled to your heart’s content, happy to receive such fondness.
« today is special day, isn’t it? » his blood-red eyes peered inquisitively back at you, arms wrapping around you as he tries to remain as close to you as physically possible.
« mhm. » you mumbled non-commitally into his shoulder, opting to pull yourself closer to him and nuzzle into the crook of his neck.
« not go celebrate in city? » razor asked, perplexed. he thought that you said this was a big celebration to be had around other people? despite his bemusement, he rested his chin on the top of your head. it makes him all warm and soft inside, the thought of you choosing to spend this special day with him of all people. it makes him happy. he hopes you’re happy too. the wold boy gives you a once-over and his brows creased in slight worry: you’re really quiet today. why?
« uh-uh. » you grunted, shaking your head against his shoulder, your hair brushing against his clothes. the chunky scarf you gave him, the one you were convinced he was going to throw out due to its garish colours, tickled your exposed skin. he kept it. you smiled, touched. he kept it. it still smelled faintly of fabric softener, but marked by the smell of pine trees and something sweet, something you associated with brewing thunderstorms. you’ve always found rain and thunder to be comforting.
being with razor comforts you.
he wasn’t much of a talker. you both knew this. silence is ok though. he’s happy to be with you. but razor wonders why you’re so quiet today. concern flashes through his mind and he turns your gaze upwards, making you face him. you can’t possibly imagine what pathetic expression you were pulling and you quickly try to cover your despondence—but it was a fruitless venture.
« you smell sad. he watched you, a worried look on his face. »
you scrambled for some explanation, reassuring him that it’s nothing. that you’re not being a downer. that you’re happy. but he’s decided: « wait here. »
knowing that there was no restraining him once he’s made up his mind, especially when it’s something to do with the ones he considered close to him, you reluctantly let razor peel you off of him. as you watch him scurry away, you find yourself dearly missing his warmth, the comfort and safety of his arms. was staying here a good idea? you wrapped your arms around yourself. maybe you should leave. you’re ruining the mood. you’re disturbing wolvendom’s peace. before you could finish that line of thought, the wolf boy returned, this time carrying a handful of… something with him.
they threatened to tumble out of his grasp, but ultimately stayed put as he returned to his original position and held them out into your general direction, showcasing whatever he had procured. in his hands were multiple plants which bore small scarlet berries and oval, evergreen leaves. a plant you immediately recognised.
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« i remember… purple mentor say ‘mistletoe’ a big part of weihnachten. »
you looked at the plant in slight bewilderment, not quite sure what to make of this offering. it was cute.
« oh. »
razor stares expectantly at you as you watch him make no further attempt to move. you can’t help the laugh that escapes you, the banality of everything setting into your mind. or maybe you’re getting sleepy. you wonder: « do you know why, razor? »
he blinked, clueless, before looking at the mistletoes in his hand with confusion, coming to the realisation that no, he didn’t actually know why it’s so important. it’s not edible. maybe because it’s pretty? the city has many red lights and white lights. some mistletoes are red and others are white?
he continues to stare at the berry, as if it would cave in and reveal its secrets to him if he sustained his efforts. taking his prolonged silence as his answer (though you had expected for him to not actually know—knowing lisa, she would’ve just offhandedly mentioned them. and when razor would’ve asked her about what they meant, she’d just smile without answering him), you filled him in, your voice filled with mirth: « people usually kiss underneath mistletoes. »
he turned his gaze back to you before voicing the conclusion he had come to: « this mean, i have to kiss you? »
you chuckled. « only if you want to. »
he looks at the plant, giving it a long hard look, then back at you.
it wasn’t much, it wasn’t spectacular. hell, it was more of a ghost of a kiss than anything. but you still smiled as his lips brushed on yours. a peck, which lasted too long yet not long enough. awkward, but endearing. your textbook first kiss, including the warm fluttery feeling of butterflies that so often preached about, if only a little more clumsy.
it’s cute.
he’s so genuine, earnest, in his endeavours. it makes your heart soar. he’s sweet. you don’t deserve this kindness but he gives them away without a second thought.
you don’t deserve to be happy during christmas, especially not when your sibling was still out there, alone and potentially afraid. maybe, no, it definitely is selfish for you to enjoy this day. pretend like everything is alright just for this one moment. that you’re not some traveler stuck in a strange and unknown world, that you’re not desperately trying to find your sibling and a way out. act carefree, and get to be you. but goddammit does he make you so so happy that your heart clenches and that you can’t help but smile from ear to ear. you deserve to be miserable today; you feel like shit, really. but you’re also really happy, and glad, and relieved, and maybe a little tired.
it’s all too much, and you feel so much at once that you just don’t know how to handle this anymore. overwhelmed. you smiled and laughed giddily as the waterworks started (despite your best efforts), and you’re a mess, and definitely a bit sleepy, but you’re stupidly happy today. stupidly happy because of him.
this alarmed the boy, watching you laugh between hiccups, sobbing despite wearing a large smile. for humans, tears are sad. smiles are happy. were you ok? he’s confused. did he do something wrong?
« why crying? » he fretted, slightly panicked. he jumped to fuss over you, wipe away your tears, gently cradling your face with a gentleness that you would’ve never thought he was capable of when you first met.
you laughed as you wiped your face. « these are happy tears. » you try to explain.
he’s your home. your lupical. someone you’re at rest with, and safe with. you love him.
your words get caught in your throat, unable to express everything you want to tell him. so instead, you engulf him in a hug. something he was caught off guard from, stiffening, but quickly relaxed and embraced you back. still a little unsure, he comforts and reassures you the only way he knows how: patting your head. when he’s down head pats makes him feel better. he hopes you’ll feel better.
« thank you. » you said softly, shakily, sniffling. thank you for being here. thank you for being you.
you’re not as alone as you thought, you never really were. together, in your own small corner of the world. your home: razor.
as you cuddled together, passing the time by naming and pointing at the celestial canvas above you, you realised: maybe this year, as unfortunate as it had been, didn’t have to end on a bad note. at some point, razor had shared his ridiculously large scarf with you, wrapping it around the both of you. and slowly, your words slowed, your breaths evened out. you pressed more of your weight against him as you felt your eyes droop. you’re safe. you’re with razor. you’ll fall asleep, and when you wake up he’ll be there. as drowsiness takes you over, you think to yourself ‘yeah, i’m happy.’
you’re happy here. in this one time, one place, with razor, you’re happy.
and you hope that wherever they are, your sibling is happy too. and that they’ll forgive you for being selfish, for being happy despite everything.
you hoped that your mirror image had someone to spend christmas with.
somewhere—someone they felt at rest with.
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unmistakablyunknown · 3 years
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Lightning In A Bottle [08]
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Chapter Eight {Superfan}
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Description: A case of obsession-turned-deadly proves to make an interesting experience for the whole team. Teddy has a bad day amidst the case but makes a connection, which helps more than she realises. It’s a messy case and the turning weather doesn’t help, but perhaps it’s what they needed.
Word Count: 6,199
Warnings: mild language, canon-typical violence, descriptions of dead bodies, trauma, psychological profiling, Teddy takes this case hard and struggles with the aftermath, with some extra fluffiness to bulk it out, Teddy encourages Spencer’s infodumping :)
[A/N: this took a while to put together and I’m really sorry about that I just didn’t know how to fill it out. A lot more focus on Spencer and Teddy’s work relationship in this one and it made me so happy to write their interactions it’s unreal. Feedback, as always, is gold! - L]
December's wintery breath is already clouding the pond, frosting the pane, obscuring summer's memory... - John Geddes
The beginning of December always brought a slurry of mixed emotions to Teddy’s doorstep. One the one hand, she knew her birthday was coming up, but on the other, Christmas was already in the air. Teddy wasn’t a Grinch by any means, she could admire the atmosphere and decor of the Christmas season, but as she’d confessed to Rossi, she didn’t have much of a reason to celebrate it any more.
Over the past few nights, she’d found herself contemplating the idea of going to her grandmother’s in Salem for Christmas. It seemed like a nice idea and she knew that her grandmother would appreciate the company.
Presently, Teddy was wrapped up in her burgundy sherpa blanket in the window nook. Inky-black night sky resided on the other side of the glass. She found herself admiring the lights; buildings, cars passing by, streetlamps. The rest of the loft was in complete darkness, save for a lamp she’d left on in her room. Near silence shrouded the space, save for the vague sounds of traffic below.
A glance at the wall clock told her it was close to three in the morning. Teddy knew she should be asleep, getting in as much rest as possible before she got to work. And yet, she couldn’t seem to switch off. Pins and needles in her legs told her it was time to get up and do something, so with a sigh, she slipped down from the nook and loosely folded the blanket. Teddy padded through the archway to her bedroom and she stood in front of the bookshelves.
With little deliberation, her fingers plucked at the spine of her second edition copy of Frankenstein. She threw back the covers on her bed and made herself comfortable amongst the plush covers.
St. Petersburgh, Dec. 11th, 17—.
You will rejoice to hear that no disaster has accompanied the commencement of an enterprise which you have regarded with such evil forebodings. I arrived here yesterday, and my first task is to assure my dear sister of my welfare and increasing confidence in the success of my undertaking.
With every word she read, a sense of comfort and relaxation settled on Teddy. She’d lost count of how many times she’d read the story since one of her professors had gifted her the book when she was a Sophomore in college.
She lost track of the hours, absorbing the words as easily and enthusiastically as she had the first time. Teddy didn’t remember falling asleep, but the shrill ringing of her phone forced her eyes open. Just past 7 am.
“Doctor Theodora Wilson, how can I help?” she rasped as she fumbled to her feet.
“Oh, excuse me, who is this sultry, smokey-voiced vixen I’m speaking to and what have you done to my Sugar Bear?” Teddy smiled sleepily at the sound of Garcia’s voice. She was growing all the more appreciative of the analyst’s ability to bring levity to any situation.
“Funny, Garcia. Not that I don't love hearing your beautiful voice first thing in the morning, but it’s stupid early so I’m hoping there’s a reason for this call?”
“Ah, yeah. Hotch asked me to make the rounds and let you know you’ll be needed an hour earlier.” Teddy let out a disgruntled sigh as she threw open the curtains above her bed, barely any sunlight came in. It was still just a little too early for sunrise.
“Really? Is it too much to ask that murderers and psychopaths take a day off?” She pouted and moved through to the kitchen. Teddy flicked the electric kettle on and waited for it to boil. She rooted around for a clean travel mug and her favourite tea bags.
“Oh, my sweetness, I forget how new you are to working on this team. Say goodbye to weekends and normal holidays.” Teddy could practically see the smirk that was no doubt plastered on the blonde’s face and she shook her head.
“Alright, I’ll leave ASAP and meet you there,” she affirmed before the analyst signed off and left Teddy to get ready.
In a record-breaking 15 minutes, Teddy had eaten, washed, gotten dressed, thrown her work bags and a fresh go-bag by the door, and managed to make herself a mug of tea to-go and remembered to pick up a blanket and book for the plane journey. Thankfully, morning rush hour was yet to happen, so the usual thirty-minute journey was shaved down to twenty minutes in her sleek black Mustang.
“Alright, what have we got?” the breathless brunette questioned as she finished her power-walk from the lift to the Round-Table room. Penelope, Spencer, Hotch and Rossi were already sat down, awaiting the arrival of JJ, Derek and herself.
“Well, we’ll get into it when JJ and Morgan arrive but right now, it’s beginning to look a lot like nine-cats-in-a-bag kind of crazy,” Penelope informed her as she shed her jacket and draped it over the back of her chair. Spencer offered Teddy a sympathetic smile as she stifled a yawn in the crook of her elbow whilst she slid into the seat next to him.
“As opposed to the usual kind of crazy we deal with?” Teddy rebuffed as she flicked open the case file in front of her. The crime scene photos were abysmally disturbing for that time of the morning and Teddy had to take a moment to get used to it.
“I had a unit on Human Anatomy whilst completing my Art degree and there are parts of the human body here that even I don't recognise,” she admitted before closing the manila file again and pushing it away slightly.
“You and me both, Doc,” Rossi mused. All of five minutes passed before the final two pieces of the team arrived. Garcia didn’t hesitate to begin once they were all seated. Under the table, she could feel the motion of Spencer bouncing his leg. And the tapping of his pen on the paperwork didn’t go unnoticed either.
“Alright, my pretties, this is the University of Georgia, Athens, Georgia. Over the last two weeks, three coeds have gone missing and subsequently turned up brutally murdered. The first victim was Perrie Greyson, she disappeared from a party two weeks ago on Saturday. She turned up Monday morning, posed outside the main campus doors.” Everyone grimaced as the photos appeared on the screen.
“Posing suggests remorse, but the staging itself makes it seem more purposeful,” Emily observed and the group agreed. Garcia flicked to the next set of photos. Reid stopped tapping but put the end of the pen cap in his mouth, chewing almost feverishly.
“This is Andy Harding, he went missing after pulling an all-nighter at the library, was found almost four days later by the dumpsters at the back of his dorm building. Evan Price was the most recent victim, disappeared in broad daylight after leaving his first class of the day, found last night, staged to look like a suicide.” Discomfort twisted in Teddy’s stomach and made her uneasy. Something wasn’t sitting right.
“All of these coeds must have something in common. That has to be what got them killed,” Derek theorised and the team made a collective agreement.
“Maybe it’s not a what, but a who, we can’t rule out the possibility that someone’s out for revenge,” Teddy stated as she thumbed through the photographs. All bloody and violent. Serious overkill.
“Yeah and right away, he’s already crossed race and socioeconomic boundaries. None of the victim’s overlap in looks or lifestyle,” JJ interjected with a nod to the screen.
“So, an opportunistic killer?” Rossi suggested but Emily was quick to disagree.
“If they were opportunity kill then why go through the trouble of framing one to look like a suicide? Or posing one in front of the main building?”
“And then disposing the other behind his dorm building like he’s nothing?” Teddy agreed. The M.O and victimology were all over the place and only furthered her discomfort.
“Alright, we’ll establish more on the plane. Wheels up in thirty,” Hotch dismissed them and they dispersed. Teddy still grasped the file in her slightly sweaty hands as she returned to her desk. Spencer, whose desk was directly opposite hers, sat down but seemed restless.
“Everything alright, Spencer?” the brunette questioned as she went through her satchel and removed what she didn’t need; scraps of paper, old receipts and the likes.
“Yeah, everything’s fine, why do you ask?” He turned a pencil between his fingers and Teddy could spot the nervous tics coming through.
“Well, normally, during briefings you spout all these facts and statistics, but you hardly spoke - if at all - back there. Are you sure, you’re okay?” She’d stopped fussing over her bags to look at him for a moment. Hazel eyes were earnest and full of good intentions. His mouth twitched. He swallowed thickly and clear his throat before he sat up and spoke again.
“I… Just - it’s a little complicated to explain and I’d rather move on if that’s alright?” Teddy nodded and resumed digging through her bag and clearing it of debris.
“Totally. But, I’m here, if you ever want - or need - to talk about things.”
“Things?”
“Anything,” she clarified, “Big things, small things, things that give you a headache if you linger on them too long. Things that can only be solved when you share them with someone. Anything.” He seemed to like that and Teddy felt a swell of warmth as he nodded in understanding, his lip quirked in its usual fashion and it was a momentary Band-Aid on the situation.
“Thank you. I’ll keep that in mind,” he assured her as he watched her root through the satchel some more. Teddy couldn’t ignore the way he watched as she gave up with a sigh and upended the leather satchel. Notebooks, pens, forgotten snack wrappers and all other kinds of stuff tumbled out and skittered across her desk. Amongst the spilt contents were a few tangles and fidget toys.
“Are those -?” Teddy let out a sheepish laugh and a nod as she picked one up and ran her fingers over it, twisting and untwisting the plastic “string”.
“Yeah. You wouldn’t believe how easy these things make talking to kids. I’ve met and worked with so many kids that are on the spectrum that having something to mess with and hold helped them talk and concentrate,” Teddy explained and held it out for him to see. Cautiously, his slender fingers reached out and accepted the toy from Teddy’s palm.
“You just carry these around?” Spencer questioned, a little enthused by the notion.
“Yeah, never know when I’m gonna need to talk to or interact with a child that’s on the spectrum in some degree or another. Oh, I also have these glitter timers that I made myself, wanna see them?” Spencer nodded and Teddy was quick to fling open her top drawer. She retrieved a couple of small plastic bottles that were oddly shaped. They were all different colours and when she shook them the glitter burst and swirled into life.
“So, basically, I made them with oil, water and glitter, each one takes a different length of time to settle. Sometimes if a child is getting overwhelmed, I break out one of these bad boys and let them watch the glitter. It’s surprisingly cathartic,” she explained with a bright smile. An unreadable expression flashed across Spencer’s face before he moved to hand the tangle toy back. Teddy shook her head and refused.
“Keep it, I have more than enough spares.”
“But, I -”
“Even if you don't need it, they’re pretty nice to just twist and fidget with. It could help disengage that nonstop brain of yours,” she insisted with a softness. The touch of pink on Spencer’s cheeks didn’t go unnoticed as he tucked it away into his coat pocket.
“Thanks.”
“Don't worry about it. I also have some slightly more hard-standing stress toys in my top drawer if you ever need one,” the brunette Doctor informed him as the rest of the team started making their way to the elevator. Teddy put her debris-free belongings back in her satchel and grabbed her go-bag. She got five steps away from her desk before she realised Spencer wasn’t alongside her.
“Are you coming with us, Doc or are you walking to Athens?” It was light, teasing. He broke into a boyish grin and hurried to grab his things and follow on behind her.
                                                         -/-/-/-
The jet ride to Georgia was smooth and largely uneventful. They’d discussed and debated details of the case to get a better idea of what they were up against and reached a decent point by the time they landed. However, Teddy still couldn’t shake the unsettled feeling that had loomed over her since she stepped foot in the Bullpen.
“Reid, Wilson, visit the M.E. JJ and I will handle the briefing and the press, Morgan and Prentiss take the crime scenes, Rossi, the chief of police has the first victim’s family in, talk to them and see what they know,” Hotch delegated and they all split off. With a little bit of a spring in his step, Spencer followed after her.
In the bitter cold of Georgia, Teddy was a little disappointed at the lack of snowfall, however, she got unhindered viewing of Spencer wrapped up snuggly. She figured he must’ve been wearing his usual long-sleeved shirt, a cardigan or some form of a sweater of the knitted variety, his suit jacket, an overcoat and had a soft purple scarf loosely twisted around his neck.
“So, have you got any plans for the holidays?” Teddy questioned gingerly as she navigated the busy streets of Athens.
“Hm? Oh, I’m flying back to Vegas to spend it with my mom,” he informed her with a small nod as he watched the streets roll by.
“Really? That’s so sweet.” A beat. Spencer cleared his throat and fiddled with one of the buttons on his coat.
“Well, what about you?” The question eventually came and Teddy took in a deep breath, trying to formulate an answer that made sense.
��Oh, I don't know. I might go back to Boston or Salem, spend some time with my Nana and Grandad. Or stay in the loft, watch bad Hallmark holiday movies and eat too much by myself. I’m still undecided.” She tried to make it light and funny, but aloud, her plans sounded catastrophically pathetic and she hated it.
“Are your grandparents by any chance Irish in heritage?” Spencer’s enquiry confused Teddy, uncertain as to why he’d asked.
“Yeah, my Nana was a fourth-generation Irish immigrant from Drumshanbo. She met my Grandad in Salem, the rest is history as they like to say. What made you ask?”
“Well, I made a bit of a leap, based on the fact that you’re from Boston and you mentioned your Nana in Salem. According to a recent census, there are approximately one-point-five million people in Massachusetts that claim Irish heritage. In Boston alone, Irish-Americans make up for about twenty-two-point-eight per cent of the population in the Metropolitan area.”
“That’s amazing. You read that somewhere or did you go looking for that information just because of me?” The brief silence that followed gave it away, but Teddy still waited for an answer of some kind.
“I mean - I just thought it’d be interesting to share. I didn’t know if you already knew that or not, I kind of just assumed that not everybody knows the demographic make-up of their hometown or state,” Spencer rambled from the passenger seat and Teddy couldn’t help but smile. What about this interaction was so endearing that she couldn’t stop the smile from growing bigger and brighter?
“Am I rambling? Do you want me to stop because I can -”
“Reid, it’s fine. Tell me more,” she prompted gently and cast a glance at him with a strange twinkle in her eyes. The bundled-up Doctor seemed surprised at her request but cleared his throat and sat forward slightly.
“Boston is also dramatically more populated by Irish-Americans than Italian-Americans. The latter of which makes up for three per cent of Boston’s population and fifteen per cent claim Italian descent.” The new information had made the car ride all the more entertaining.
When they pulled up outside the Medical Examiner’s office, Teddy killed the engine and took a moment to prepare herself for what they were about to walk into. Together, Teddy and Spencer entered the building in a burst of cold air. Almost immediately, they shed their coats and slung them over their arms. Teddy was thankful that she wasn’t wearing as many layers as Spencer, whose face was flushed pink from the sudden change in temperatures. In particular, the reddish glow seemed to concentrate on his nose and cheeks.
“Can I help you?” a lady behind the front desk questioned as they made their way over. With practised ease between them, the duo flashed their badges as they stopped in front of the desk.
“We’re here to review the victims that were brought in recently from U of G, you should’ve been expecting us?” Teddy explained before a greying woman appeared. If she had to guess, Teddy would’ve put her at no more than fifty-five.
“Ah, I presume you’re from the FBI? Right, this way please.” Wordlessly, the two Doctors followed her through to the main examination room. On their way through, they found some hooks to hang their coats on. Teddy hadn’t been in a Medical Examiner’s office before but she knew already that she didn’t like it.
“Can we see the first victim?” Spencer questioned as the three of them slowed to a stop. The space of the examination room felt too clinical and spaceship-esque. All stainless steel and disinfectant. It was safe to say that Teddy would take loud and vibrant places over this any day. The wily-haired Doctor thrived on colours, sounds and life. This was not within her comfort zone, but she pushed on nonetheless.
“Perrie Grayson, nineteen. She was found with her throat slashed and almost thirty more stab wounds were counted on the torso,” the M.E began and Teddy found it easy enough to follow along. Until the storage unit was opened and a body was pulled out on a rolling tray. When the sheet was pulled back, it really hit home for Teddy to see the cleaned-up remains. The experience was nothing like looking at pictures. The brunette Doctor felt sick to her bones at the sight of the poor girl on the slab in front of her.
“The stab wounds were post-mortem?” Spencer questioned as he pulled on a pair of latex gloves and leaned in to get a closer look. Teddy swallowed thickly before she turned her attention to the copy of the report she’d been handed.
“Yes. Whoever did this slashed her throat and then decided that wasn’t enough.”
“No hesitation marks… The Unsub knew what they were was doing,” the sweater-vest wearing Doctor observed quietly.
“There wasn’t anything unusual in the toxicology report?” Teddy queried after a long minute of skimming the paperwork in her hands.
“Well, there were low-levels of alcohol in her blood, but nothing substantial enough to get an idea of whether or not this led to her death,” the M.E informed them and they both acknowledged the information with a simple nod.
“Makes sense, I suppose. She was last seen at a party off-campus and she was gone for three days.”
“Yeah, moderate to high blood-alcohol levels usually deplete twenty-four to forty-eight hours after the last intake. If Perrie went missing Saturday night and didn’t turn up until Monday morning, the levels on the toxicology report make perfect sense,” Spencer agreed before he straightened up and flicked his head to the side to move an errant wave of hair off his forehead.
“Is there anything else we should be aware of?” Teddy chewed at the inside of her cheek to stop herself from gagging, or worse, in front of Spencer. The M.E nodded gravely and gestured to the side of Perrie’s head.
“In our initial findings, we noted that a chunk of hair had been removed from the scalp.”
“Peri- or postmortem?”
“Hard to say exactly, but our best guess is postmortem.” Teddy and Spencer shared a knowing glance before they turned back to the Medical Examiner.
“Do you have any more of the victims we can review?” Teddy’s stomach rolled and threatened violence at the thought of looking at more mutilated bodies.
“I - I’m just going to… Excuse me,” she fumbled and managed to hand over her copy of the report to Spencer before she made a beeline for the door. On her way out, Teddy just barely managed to pull her coat back over her shoulders before she burst into the frosty streets.
This isn’t your place, she berated herself mentally as she took several lungfuls of crisp winter air.
You don't belong in stainless-steel rooms with sewn-up corpses. You belong in an office, helping kids with their traumas.
You didn’t go to Art school to look at dead bodies.
“Hey, are you alright?” Teddy snapped around to find that Spencer had joined her, sans latex gloves and medical files.
“Oh - I’m good. I’m fine.” It was the worst lie she’d ever told and she wasn’t surprised at the words that came out of his mouth almost immediately afterwards.
“Y’ know, I’ve seen you call out people lying before. All things considered, you do a pretty bad job of telling lies yourself.”
“Thanks, Spencer.”
“Oh, no! I didn’t mean it like that,” he began to backpedal, “I just meant that I noticed you weren’t completely comfortable when the Medical Examiner brought the body out. I didn’t want to question if you were alright in front of her because of the inferences or implications of such a question -”
“I’m sorry for freaking out, but this is as far from my comfort zone as it gets.” He seemed to understand that, at the very least.
“In our brief time of knowing each other, it’s come to my attention that you seem to see the good in things and people alike. For all the horrible things you’ve heard about and the things you’ve seen people inflict on others, you don't let that stop you from doing your job to the best of your ability. I can admire that in a person,” Spencer admittedly gently as a couple of cars rolled by.
                                                     -/-/-/-
Since leaving the M.E’s office, things had been a little weird between Teddy and Spencer, but she wasn’t going to bring it up. Presently, the whole team had been reunited at the police station. With all their boards and paperwork ready to go, it was just a matter of making connections.
From her position at the table, Teddy kept going over the names of the victims.
Perrie Greyson.
Andy Harding.
Evan Price.
It frustrated her, the way that the answer seemed to be staring right back at her, but she couldn’t see it. Not yet at least.
“Garcia, have you got anything new?” Hotch greeted the tech analyst as he set his phone down in the middle of the table for everyone to listen.
“Unfortunately not, my brainiac companions. All three victims were clean. Good students making averages with healthy home and social lives. Nothing suspicious to relay to you.”
“Well, did any of them visit the same counsellor or someone of a similar role?” Teddy suggested as she pulled at her bottom lip.
“Not as far as I can see, and believe me, my sight has quite the reach.”
“What are you thinking, Teddy?”
“It’s a long shot, but there is definitely something that ties these victims together. Something that doesn’t normally stand out when we do this. A counsellor, nurse, a teacher even there has to be something -”
“Okay, so do you want me to run backgrounds on the staff?”
“It’s the only string that makes sense to pull,” the brunette admitted as she returned her attention to the names on the board in front of her. Garcia signed off with some witty comment and the team resumed their previous pace of working.
“Are you doing alright, Doc?” Derek inquired in a low tone as they crossed paths at the coffee machine. Teddy just wanted a cup of hot water for a teabag, but Derek was using the machine.
“Hm? Oh, I’m fine.”
“Are you sure about that?” Teddy sighed and set down the cup she was planning to use.
“If I’m honest with you, it stays between us?” He drew an X shape on his chest with a sincere expression.
“Of course.”
“There’s something about this case that’s just… Bothering me. I have no idea what it is but it’s nagging at me like no tomorrow. I sit at that table with you, Emily, JJ, Rossi, Hotch and Spencer and I feel like I’m two steps behind. Like there’s something that I’m missing but it’s so horrifically obvious -”
“Woah, Woah, okay - take a breath, Teddy,” Derek jumped in before she could get too carried away with her panic-rambling. The flustered brunette did as instructed, hazel eyes not leaving the older agent’s face.
“I don't know who or what put this idea into your head, but you’re a valued member of the team, Teddy. Hell, you’ve taught us things that we’d never consider if you weren’t here. I appreciate this job is far from easy, but you can talk to us - any of us - about things that are bothering you.”
“I know I can - I do! And I know that anthropologically speaking, sharing problems with trusted members of your society helps ease the problem by making it a group obstacle. But I guess there’s still a pretty big part of me that feels like I’m back at college. That I have to somehow prove I belong here. And that sucks, a lot.” Derek put a firm hand on her chunky-sweater-clad shoulder before he pulled her in for a hug. It surprised Teddy, but she wasn’t going to complain. His cologne was noticeable but not overbearing and was pleasing to her senses.
“Don't do that to yourself, Teddy. You belong on this team just as much as the rest of us.” With a shaky breath and a slight sniffle, Teddy pulled out of the hug and looked up at Derek with glassy eyes.
“Thank you.”
“Just being a friend,” he assured her with a smile before he reached out to ruffle her hair and make his way back to the meeting room.
                                                           -/-/-/-
“Something’s missing, I can feel it,” Teddy stated as the team arrived at the UoG main campus. Whilst they disembarked from the vehicles and prepared to canvass some staff and students, Spencer fell in-step with her.
“What do you mean?”
“It’s hard to explain, but earlier, looking at the victim’s names, there was something familiar about them. Well, maybe not familiar, but there’s a connection at least, I know it,” she explained to the taller Doctor as they approached the main office.
“Y’ know, Apophenia is the tendency to perceive meaningful connections between unrelated things. Psychiatrist Klaus Conrad coined the term in his nineteen-fifty-eight publication on the beginning stages of schizophrenia,” Spencer explained and when he realised what he’d said, he frantically tried to correct himself.
“I’m not saying - You probably don't… I’m gonna stop talking,” he finally stated and the two of them shared a quiet laugh as they entered the well-heated building. Garcia had sent them a list of people that ranked high on the list to be questioned, so they’d split into teams.
First on their agenda was a roommate of Andy’s and his girlfriend. As the duo made their way up to the floor they’d been told, an awkward silence settled between them. The only noise to combat it was the humming of the elevator and the sound of Teddy’s boot scuffing against the floor.
“I can talk to the roommate and the girlfriend if you’d rather tackle the victim’s room and belongings,” Teddy eventually cleared her throat to offer and Spencer nodded in acknowledgement.
“I can work with that. Thanks.” The doors slid open with a grating creak and the two Doctors headed towards the victim’s dorm room. Teddy was the one that reached out and knocked against the varnished wood. The ring on her right middle finger grazed against the surface and clicked loudly. Almost immediately, a petite, bouncy redhead opened the door and gave them both a once over. Teddy had never felt so judged in all her years of experience.
“Can I help you?” Simultaneously, the duo revealed their badges for the student to see and she shrunk into herself. The younger girl stepped aside and let them in as a slightly more dishevelled male appeared and sunk into the ratty couch in the middle of the room.
“Who are you?”
“Brody -” the girl began to object, but Teddy didn’t seem to care about the vague hostility in his voice.
“I’m Doctor Theodora Wilson and this is my colleague, Doctor Spencer Reid. We’re here with the FBI’s Behavioural Analysis Unit. We have some questions regarding your roommate, Andy Harding?” Teddy introduced them and both students suddenly seemed a little more alert at the mention of the FBI.
“He’s dead, why do you want to ask questions about him?”
“Because a large portion of our job, Brody, revolves around catching the person - or people - that did this to your friend. Now, Doctor Reid needs to get a look inside Andy’s room so we can get a better understanding of who he was, alright?” Spencer started to make his way towards the room with Andy’s name on it when Brody lept out of his seat.
“You can’t -” he began to protest and he went to grab Spencer to stop him. Teddy made sure that didn’t happen. In a swift intervention, she stepped between them and wrapped her hand around Brody’s wrist. The agitated teen stopped and seemed to be surprised at how calmly she’d intervened.
“I would advise you to choose your next actions wisely, Brody. Doctor Reid is just trying to do his job, as am I. You try and lay a hand on one of us again and I will have you on the floor and booked for obstruction of justice so fast, you won’t see it coming. Understood?”
“Y-yes - Yeah,” he fumbled and Teddy let him go. Spencer shot her a grateful look over his shoulder before entering what was formerly Andy’s room.
When they were done and ready to move on, they thanked the two students and headed out. Whilst waiting for the elevator, Teddy pulled out her notebook - the one she used for work-related notes - and reread the names on the list.
Andy Harding.
Perrie Greyson.
Evan Price.
“Holy shit,” she exclaimed quietly when it became apparent.
“What? What’s wrong?”
“Take a look at these names and tell me what you see,” she instructed as the elevator arrived and they stepped inside.
“Uh… Eleven, thirteen and nine letters?” Teddy shook her head and underlined the first initials of each name.
“A-H? P-G? E-P? Spencer these are the same initials as Hotch, Penelope and Emily.”
“That could just be a coincidence, Teddy. If you factor in every possible combination of initials, the permutations would be in the high thousands,” the curly-haired genius suggested as they reached the ground floor.
“No, I don't think it is. It’s a leap but we’ve found out more from less,” she stated confidently as they left the building. When they were back in the SUV, Teddy opted to call Hotch and the others to alert them to this finding whilst Spencer drove.
“Hotchner,” their Unit Chief answered and Teddy put him on speakerphone.
“Hotch, it’s Teddy and Spencer, we’ve just wrapped up with Harding’s roommate and his girlfriend. I noticed something about the initials of the current three victims,” the brunette Doctor began explaining whilst Spencer focused on navigating them back to the precinct.
“Their initials?” The confusion was understandable.
“Yeah, their initials match to yours, Penelope’s and Emily’s. I think it’s possible that whoever this Unsub might be, knows who we are and what we do.”
“Alright, I’ll update the profile and alert the rest of the team. Good work,” he signed off and hung up. The car was thrown into near-silence, save for the radio playing faintly and the sounds of the road beneath them.
                                                    -/-/-/-
Four days later, they finally caught the Unsub. It was a gritty and gruesome showdown between the BAU, the Athens PD and the man responsible for ruining another two lives in the time since they’d arrived.
Unfortunately, they never found out the true motive for his actions, because he was shot and died within minutes. As Crime Scene techs arrived to help clean up and the other necessary bodies were working to help wrap things up, the team took a moment to collect themselves and regroup.
“It’s been a long few days. We’ll leave first thing in the morning. Everyone needs to get a good night’s sleep.” None of them argued with hotch’s instructions and after removing their vests and earpieces, they all split into the three SUVs they’d arrived in, aching for sleep and a moment to relax.
Teddy wound up in the car being driven by Rossi, with Emily in the front passenger seat. In the back, Spencer was propped up against the window, eyes focused on the almost imperceptible scenery that rolled by outside. It was pitch black, which subsequently meant Teddy could only see flashes of Spencer’s face in the passing headlights of oncoming vehicles.
“Don't take it too hard, Teddy. We can’t save them all,” Emily tried to reassure her from her seat in the front, but her words did little to quell the ache in her stomach and the guilt in her chest.
Things should’ve gone differently.
“I know,” the brunette murmured in reply before she tried to settle back into her seat. There were another thirty minutes to go until they reached their hotel and Teddy had already made a checklist she needed to go through as soon as she walked through the door.
When they did, finally, reach the hotel and descend upon their respective rooms, Teddy was quick to shower and change into her pyjamas. With her hair piled atop her head in a messy entanglement that almost resembled a bun, she went through her nightly routine. Fresh-faced and ready for sleep, she was stopped halfway to her bed by a knock at the door.
“Spencer?” His presence at her door certainly took Teddy by surprise but she wasn’t complaining. He opened his mouth to speak but seemed to forget how. No words left his parted lips.
“Everything alright?” she questioned with a nod to the bags on his shoulder and the rest of his belongings gathered in his arms.
“My - My room has water leaking in from the floor above,” he explained simply and Teddy stepped aside without another word.
“Not that I’m against being in your company, but does no one else want to room with you?” Teddy moved her own bags around and sorted her belongings from the nearest bedside table to let him set some things down.
“Well, Hotch was immediately off the cards, Rossi too. Derek refuses to room with me because of a previous… Incident and both JJ and Emily are rooming together anyway, so…”
“So that leaves me, of course. Put your stuff wherever and make yourself comfortable,” she suggested before going back to the door to make sure it was locked. When Teddy was all but ready to crash, Spencer emerged from the bathroom in his own sleepwear. A pair of loose-fitting sweatpants and a plain white t-shirt. It was then that his blatantly odd socks were brought to her attention whilst she pulled the bedsheets back.
“Nice socks.” The compliment made him blush. She decided that she quite liked the sight of Spencer blushing like that. Made a note to do it more often.
“Thanks,” he beamed before awkwardly shuffling to the opposite side of the bed. It occurred to Teddy that they’d never really seen each other in this capacity before. She’d only ever been around him with a full face of makeup and reasonably smart clothes. Now she was stood across from him wearing her New England Patriots sweatshirt and a pair of flannel bottoms, completely bare-faced.
“You did well today - “
“All things considered,” Teddy agreed and attempted to bury herself under the covers.
“What happened with the last victim, wasn’t your fault, Teddy.” The wily-haired brunette sighed and turned to face the genius who still hadn’t gotten into the bed.
“Well, sure feels like it.” A long pause followed before she sighed and moved to lie down, facing away from the boy wonder, to hide her burning cheeks and watery eyes.
“Goodnight, Spencer,” she forced out quietly before turning her bedside lamp off.
“Goodnight,” he echoed back and Teddy felt the other side of the bed dip under his weight, finally.
-/-/-
@colorlessfl0wers @spencer-reids-trauma @bluepie208 @the-sun-moon-stars @pottersnewt @spenceralvez @hellotamgerine @spacedikut @calliecookie @wooya1224 @bellomi-clarke​ @justanothetfangirl​
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autumnblogs · 3 years
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Day 2: Symphony Impossible to Play
Picking up from yesterday, we just met Rose.
https://homestuck.com/story/220
Right out of the gate, here’s something interesting - another one where a character interacts directly with her medium! I wonder whose eyes she feels on her. Are Rose’s Seer powers allowing her to detect us watching her? Later on, it turns out that Kanaya was watching her all along during her intro. Maybe that’s who she senses? I think it’s possibly both of those, and a third option - Rose is a paranoid girl who doesn’t feel very secure in her own home, or comfortable in her own skin.
More after the break.
https://homestuck.com/story/223
John does a lot of roleplaying, and this is one of the earliest spots in the comic where he does this. Specifically, John performs a lot of his favorite scenes from different movies, and no surprise to anyone, almost all of the times he does, he’s performing either the role of a lover, or of a father. Malo, who I respect a lot, talks a little about John’s appreciation for signifiers here, along with some of their chums. I was going to say something about other points where John’s inner voice comments on the necessity of signifiers to make a thing itself (OR ELSE IT’S A PRETTY PISS POOR EXCUSE FOR THE THING) yesterday, but I didn’t have the thoughts fully formed at the time. Luckily, Malo will call attention to it for me.
This is another one of those weird things about the way that reality works, and it might all retroactively work that way because John expects it to work that way. Homestuck is full to bursting with symbols - everything in Homestuck is extremely abstracted as part of the art style, and also as part of the storytelling, often rendered down to some basic elements that make it recognizable. An example of something Homestuck uses as a symbol would be like, Mustaches - a symbol associated with Grandpa. Swords, symbols associated with Striders. The symbol doesn’t have to have any kind of literal logical association with the thing it represents, but we associate the two things with each other because of cultural context.
https://homestuck.com/story/225
I always liked Rose’s house best out of the group. There’s something deeply romantic to me about the premise of a wooded retreat far away from civilization. I’m pretty sure the Lalonde residence is based on Falling Water but I could be mistaken. As long as I’m thinking about Symbols, by the way, Cats are a Lalonde Symbol. Their presence in the story always evokes Lalondes even when they’re not in the room (which is not very often, as it turns out!) and by association, witches. Both of the Lalondes are witches in the sense of being powerful women who attain to that power by consorting with dubious and transgressive sources.
Rose is up front and melodramatic about her not so great relationship with her Mom, and it’s pretty much literally always on her mind. (Rose’s Mom is an alcoholic, and I should be clear that her relationship has lots of reasons to be not great, but Mom Lalonde deliberately being spiteful to Rose is not one of the reasons). I like to think there are a lot of these misunderstandings between parents and children and if that we were just a little more open with each other, we’d find that we didn’t have as much to be afraid of in each other as we think. But I might never know. Another one of my favorite series that has the inability of Parents and Children to communicate with each other as a central theme is Hideaki Anno’s Neon Genesis Evangelion and if you haven’t watched it, I highly recommend you go do so.
https://homestuck.com/story/231
The presentation of the Guardians is so unsettling that in my first readthrough, I thought they must be some kind of monsters artificially imposed into these characters’ obviously artificial lives to create difficulty for them. Clearly, I thought the story was going in a completely different direction than it actually ended up going.
https://homestuck.com/story/236
Rose does not always think her cunning plans all the way through, something she has in common with her biological father.
https://homestuck.com/story/271
I probably could have mentioned this funny little guy earlier than I did, but Wayward Vagabond is in the story now. I’m not totally clear on whether the Carapacians have any greater meaning, but they sure are charming, and like just about everything that isn’t specifically John and his friends, they exist on a layer of the story that is just a little further away from just the text, and a little closer to the audience - they can enter narrative prompts, much like you or I would have if we were involved in Homestuck’s earliest pages. As a rule in Homestuck, the more influence you personally have over the narratives which change the material conditions of the characters’ lives, the more sinister and ambiguous you become. Luckily, WV turns out to be a pretty benign guy, but if you’re the sort of person to be reading this, you are no doubt aware of the fact that most of Homestuck’s narrators don’t turn out to be nearly so friendly. The Carapacians introduce us to the idea that characters in the story are allowed to be audience members and narrators too. So I guess, really, that’s the greater meaning of the Carapacians.
https://homestuck.com/story/272
Always enjoy Rose’s long, outlandish metaphors. Any chance to read more of them is a good chance to. (Although the main one on this page is a holdover from some of the cringy stuff in MSPA’s early days - some of it slightly racist, some of it slightly homophobic.)
https://homestuck.com/story/287
Andrew’s insistence on having characters like Dave rap at us, the audience, actually reminds me a lot of JRR Tolkien’s tendency to pepper his stuff with songs that he wrote for his in universe stuff. And while both are legitimately talented at their craft, as one of my friends put it, “I’m not a rapper... so stop rappin’ at me!”
https://homestuck.com/story/293
Jade is another character whose first post I forgot to mention, but here she is having a bit more to say than before! I think I remember my initial impression of Jade being pretty favorable, and then gradually declining until she got a bit more exposition. Perky people bother me.
https://homestuck.com/story/307
Another one of Andrew’s cool prose poems. I don’t mind these as much as the rapping, clearly. Rain and Strings are another pair of symbols pretty strongly associated with Rose, although I hardly need to tell you that. This obviously alludes to Rose’s mythological quest. I think it also foreshadows a lot of her worst decisions. Rose overthinks and overthinks and overthinks, and then by the time she should have acted, it’s too late, and she overreacts instead, usually in catastrophic ways.
https://homestuck.com/story/312
Dave’s room isn’t nearly as messy as Rose’s, but his bed isn’t made, same as every other Derse Dreamer. This is also probably the first place that we get hints of Dave’s fascination with death (he collects dead things). He’s specifically fascinated with his own death, and fantasizing about self-sacrifice, something that he ends up doing twice over the course of the comic, is one of the ways that Dave experiences masculinity. Thanks for that, Bro.
https://homestuck.com/story/320
Dave almost immediately fails to uphold his irony schtick within just seconds of our getting to know him. For all that he pretends to the same extreme aloofness as his brother, I don’t think there’s an insincere bone in Dave’s body. Then again, maybe he’s just getting distracted by food, of which there is a significant dearth in his household. Thanks for that, Bro.
https://homestuck.com/story/326
I will never get back the time I spent reading Sweet Bro and Hella Jeff. Was it worth it?
Yeah probably.
https://homestuck.com/story/332
I think this is the very first time I’ve noticed that Dave has a nifty gaming computer with the transparent glass pane and the interior lights and everything. Like, this readthrough, this panel. I’m sure I mentioned somewhere that I get more out of this webcomic every time I read it.
https://homestuck.com/story/333
Dave and Rose are another character relationship I just enjoy tremendously. Their verbal sparring is one of the highlights of the webcomic.
https://homestuck.com/story/344
Bro’s puppet fascination tells us pretty early on that this is a hands-off, manipulative kind of guy. While Bro isn’t in a metanarrative layer the way that the Carapacians are, positioning him as a puppetmaster, controlling things from behind the scenes, still gives him the same kind of sinister ambiguity as one of the comic’s actual narrators.
https://homestuck.com/story/357
Far from being the kind of chill cooldude who kills with a straight face and doesn’t look at explosions, Dave kills a random bird and immediately feels remorseful about it. Poor kid.
https://homestuck.com/story/360
There is almost nothing worse than having someone perform interest in something you enjoy to try and influence you. Unfortunately, that is not what is taking place here. Rose is quick to assume malicious intent as she does a bit earlier when she tucks her journals under her bed because she feels like she’s being watched.
https://homestuck.com/story/369
Mom, sadly, giving your daughter oodles of presents and showering everything she does in ostentatious displays of affection is sadly not a substitute for earnest communication with her and your emotional presence. These two need to learn each other’s love languages. (Note to self. Not everybody enjoys lavish presents as much as I do.)
Roxy is a giver. That’s something that shows up time and again, especially when we meet her in person much later.
https://homestuck.com/story/377
Mom Lalonde performs femininity.
https://homestuck.com/story/382
Jade sees right through Dave.
In other notes, I think most of these kids would be way happier if their Guardians were more emotionally available, and less badass.
I’m going to come back to that and write more on it at some point instead of just alluding to it repeatedly. Maybe after Dave Strifes with his bro.
https://homestuck.com/story/389
Is Mom’s compulsive gift-giving because that’s her love language? Is she performing capitalism by giving her daughter extremely expensive gifts as a show of affection? Is it both things? (Roxy is never exposed to Capitalism except by the awesome powers of Dirk’s cached wikipedia archives, and her gift-giving tends to be significantly less ostentatious than Mom’s.)
https://homestuck.com/story/404
John roleplays some more.
https://homestuck.com/story/414
Here’s where I’ll say one of the things that I think is like a big deal, because I guess now’s as good a time as any. A lot of the roleplaying that John does, and the one-upsmanship that he and Dave do with each other, and Dave and Bro do with each other, and Mom’s ironic housewife routine, and the burial of Jasper in a mausoleum are rituals. Like symbols, they’re cultural touchstones that are ultimately empty when they no longer point to the thing that they signify. Funerals are grieving rituals. When a funeral doesn’t functionally serve the purpose of helping with grief, it becomes an empty signifier. Maybe this is how Mom grieved for Jaspers - I’ll have to check and see what Roxy thinks about it when I get that far, because I forgot.
We do a lot of stupid things in a monkey see monkey do fashion because we’ve just always done them that way, even when they were built for a completely different society, and no longer serve the same function that they used to serve. Big ostentatious funerals are like that, I think. Ideally, they’d give big families an opportunity to come together in mutual support, celebrate the joy brought to them by the deceased, demonstrate compassion to the grieving, and so on and so forth. I’m not prescriptively saying “don’t have a funeral” here, my point is just that funerals are one of those cultural narratives that I mentioned in the first post.
This funeral does not serve the function of helping Rose to grieve. It’s just kind of fucked up.
https://homestuck.com/story/415
Oh hey, Rose has more fish language attached to her - she earlier makes reference to her knitting-needle tech by saying that she thinks she could probably filet a fish with them. Here, she talks about having bigger fish to fry. Rose is associated with Water through her planet, the Land of Light and Rain, and with fish through Cetus. She’s also attached to other deep sea creatures in the form of the horrorterrors.
https://homestuck.com/story/420
I’m going to pause for now and post this since I’ve read through another roughly 200 pages of Homestuck this evening on the fortuitous page of 420. It probably helps that I started earlier than I did yesterday. Nanna’s about to give some exposition, and I already wrote my big brain take for the day so for now;
Cam signing off, alive and not alone.
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St. Vincent Is Telling You Everything
“I told you more than I would tell my own mother.”
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September 10, 2017, 10:34 a.m. By Laura Snapes | BuzzFeed Contributor Reporting From New York, New York Annie Clark was reconfiguring some older material for her upcoming tour when she realized how alien it felt to play it. She could adapt the arrangements to her harsher new sound — the sleazy, acid aesthetic of Masseduction, her upcoming fifth solo record as St. Vincent — but the writing’s proggy complexity was cockblocking the emotion. “In so many ways, I thought I was being completely transparent and brave in every record, only to realize that they are very oblique,” Clark told BuzzFeed News. She cackled and looked delighted. “Who knew! I had no idea.” Clark is much too self-aware for this to be completely true. But the difference between her polite, guarded Texan past and confrontational present is colossal. When I first interviewed Clark in 2009, she nervously pressed her pendant against her lips and face, leaving a red lipstick pox on her insane cheekbones. By 2014’s St. Vincent, Clark’s public persona would be imperious. But these days, she’s a playful freak who revels in showing the tightness of her grip, a disposition aided by long, straight eyebrows that dance like Memphis squiggles. In late July, she appeared in the lobby of New York City’s Marlton Hotel, her temporary home during the making of Masseduction. She had come from pilates — which she likes because it makes her sing better and “come a lot harder” — and disappeared to change out of her leopard-print gym shorts. When I mentioned a recent paparazzi photo of her looking like a sexy detective in another skintight leopard-patterned getup, she asked twice, with predatory delight, whether I’d looked at her camel toe. (No! Okay, maybe!) The only time her control slipped was when the hotel’s stereo started playing “Who,” a knotty song from the album she made with David Byrne, and she shriveled like a salted snail at hearing her own voice. Self-possession like hers is often interpreted as pretentious, or pathological. But over time, the confidence that the younger, anxious Clark had to fake has become bracingly real. You can hear it in Masseduction, a record of pop fluidity and queer possibility. It’s the best thing she’s ever done, and there are no bad St. Vincent records. It’s partly harsh, heady, erotic synth-pop visions steered by her diamond-sharp guitar, and while Clark has written plenty of ballads, there have never been any as brutal and gorgeous as these. Its lurch between apocalypse and ecstasy mirrors how it felt to be kicked in the head by the past couple years. In a way, Clark was right about the obscurity of her past work, filled with archetypes and distanced observations — emotions through a stained-glass window. If not a clear pane, then Masseduction is at least a peep show on heartache, fucking, addiction, destitution, and suicide. And her relatively new life as a very public figure, thanks to relationships with Cara Delevingne and Kristen Stewart, gives it an extra frisson. Tabloids will rush to find the former, the famed British supermodel, on an album littered with wasted bodies, especially on “Young Lover,” where Clark finds someone overdosed in the bathtub. She recounts the night with terror but also arrestingly ugly indignation. “Oh, so what / Your mother did a number / So I get gloves of rubber / To clean up the spill,” she sneers. “Scenario has to rhyme, babe,” is all Clark said about its veracity. She was bemused at being asked to explain the lyrics. To her, this record is butt-naked. “I told you everything,” she stressed. “I told you more than I would tell my own mother. It’s right there.”
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Annie Clark Nedda Afsari Masseduction started out with three tenets: It would feature programmed beats and pedal steel guitar, and examine power and seduction. “What does power look like, who wields it, how do they wield it — emotionally, sexually, financially?” Clark ticked off her fingers. The album was properly born over a creative first-date dinner with Jack Antonoff, the Bleachers frontman who also recently produced and wrote with Lorde and Taylor Swift. Clark was looking for a teammate; they told each other everything that was going wrong in their lives and decided that total oblivion was the only way out of their heads. “It wasn’t, ‘Hey, let’s make a record together, that’ll be fun,’” Antonoff told me. “It was, ‘Let’s absolutely go all the way and find the absolute best thing that exists here,’ which is really the only way to work on things.” That grit is Clark’s MO. Until recently, she claimed to have taken approximately 36 hours off in between returning from touring 2011’s Strange Mercy and starting work on 2014’s St. Vincent. The concerts for the latter were bonkers, starting the run as avant-garde, meticulously choreographed deconstructions of a traditional rock show, and ending it with exorcisms that entailed Clark crumpling down a 10-foot pink plywood pyramid like a drunken horse. She often stole objects from the crowd: a pair of crutches, someone’s dinner. The spectacle of her murdering the thing she’d trained for was addictive.
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St. Vincent during the 2015 Coachella Valley Music & Arts Festival. Frazer Harrison / Getty Images ��Touring became a blood sport for me. I mean, I was born with a whip anyway, and touring became this self-flagellating exercise,” she said, clenching her jaw and lashing each shoulder with an imaginary strap. “And I was seeking that kind of physical exhaustion; I was seeking the pain.” She doesn’t know why, and she’s okay not knowing why, though eventually she did accept that her relationship to touring was a form of delirium. On the new album’s “Sugarboy,” a dystopian, post-Moroder disco banger, she describes herself as a “casualty hanging on from the balcony.” (She literally climbed rafters in some theaters, kicking away security guards.) This hysteria is one of the reasons she considers Masseduction her saddest record. “I lost my mind, I lost people, I gained people, I stopped touring,” Clark said of that period between 2014 and 2017. “It was just a lot of a lot, you know.” After the St. Vincent tour dates ended, Clark had to learn to construct and value life away from the road — she had been on tour since age 16, when she worked as an assistant for her aunt and uncle’s jazz group. “And I still love that,” she said of touring, “but it’s more like a component of my life now rather than…my life.” Back home she indulged in a “period of bacchanalia,” and briefly got into self-medicating, an experience she turned into the lunatic track “Pills”: Imagine the Stepford Wives lost in Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory (Kamasi Washington guests on saxophone; Delevingne sings on the chorus). She’s transfixed by the forces that can swallow us — “You know, drugs, sex, and rock ‘n’ roll,” she winked. “So corny. Kill me! Kill me dead!” Though sometimes she uses those themes to dress up more mundane relationship dynamics. “Savior” explores the unhealthiness of mutual projection through a funny S&M parable involving nurses and nuns and our tediously prosaic concepts of kink: “You put me in a teacher’s little denim skirt,” Clark moans on the song. “Ruler and desk so I can make it hurt / But I keep you on your best behavior / Honey, I can’t be your savior.” The album’s self-destructive dynamic comes out on the title track — “I can’t turn off what turns me on,” she wails over twisted guitar — and her protagonists never stop annihilating each other for their own benefit, whether for carnal kicks, or for the mothers who “milk their young” in the song “Los Ageless.”
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The album cover for Masseduction. Loma Vista Recordings And then there’s the heartbreaking “Happy Birthday Johnny,” which sounds like a snowflake but crushes like an anvil. It calls back to the title track of her 2007 debut Marry Me, about “John” who’s “a rock with a heart like a socket I can plug into at will”; and to “Prince Johnny,” the decadent downtown royal from St. Vincent. She said she feels compassion and hopelessness for his self-destruction, but can’t judge because she’s just like him. Maybe he’s also a cipher for the way humans use each other — Clark flatly refused to talk about him. “One thing I have learned in six records and 10 years is that I’m not obliged to answer any questions — a lesson I more or less only recently learned.” She stared into the bar, fixing a grim expression through her orange aviators. “Next question.” At any rate, the song is a whole story. Once conspirators, her and Johnny’s literal fire-starting days are behind them, and now he lives on the street, calling up Clark at New Year’s for “dough to get something to eat.” She demurs, and he calls her a queenly miser who’s sold out for fame. “But if they only knew the real version of me / Only you know the secrets, the swamp, and the fear,” she pleads. It is deeply tragic, being shamed — perhaps rightly — by the person who once understood your shame. Antonoff theorized that she’s mourning a past on the record. On the forthcoming Fear the Future Tour (named after a new song, and to resemble a Jenny Holzer maxim), Clark said she probably won’t be flinging herself around stages as much because “I think I’m emotionally throwing myself around a lot more.”
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A still from St. Vincent’s “New York” music video. Alex Da Carte In late July, Tiffany & Co. announced Clark as one of the faces of its fall advertising campaign. Diamonds and waspy Americana are a weirdly prim contrast to the freaky propaganda aesthetic that Clark is calling “manic panic” — the Masseduction album cover is a photo of a nice ass in a leopard-print thong bodysuit. But like any savvy propagandist, Clark’s image will be everywhere this year. Having directed a short film, The Birthday Party, as part of the horror anthology XX, she’s now due to direct a feature-length, female-led adaptation of The Picture of Dorian Gray. (“The most rich text I have ever read: transgression, modernity, society, repressed queerness.”) There’s also a multimedia performance as part of October’s Red Bull Music Academy in Los Angeles, and an upcoming art exhibition in New York. A coffee table book. Essays. (She calls art “a fountain of youth” that’s given her everything and everyone in her life, hence her urge to make everything.) And that’s just the exposure she has control over. Celebrities like to pretend that their success is the result of some cosmic fluke, but Clark has said quite openly that the best part of becoming more famous thanks to her love life is “just getting the opportunity to do more work in different fields,” which nobody ever admits! (Though her 2015 Grammy for Best Alternative Album and overwhelming critical acclaim probably helped, too.)
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St. Vincent, Zoe Kravitz, and Zosia Mamet at the Tiffany & Co.-presented Whitney Biennial VIP Opening in March 2017 in New York. Mike Coppola / Getty Images One of Clark’s best-known songs, 2014’s “Digital Witness,” is about social media voyeurism. “I wonder if, in the future, privacy will be something that only the 1 percent can afford,” she told Rolling Stone that year, which now seems beautifully naive. From the second she and Delevingne were spotted together at the 2015 BRIT Awards, the UK’s pervy yet ever-scandalized tabloid media went nuts that their hottest young model was dating a woman, and pursued them so staunchly that the couple once took revenge by firing water pistols at the paparazzi. “She really is so famous!” Clark said of Delevingne, feigning hammy disbelief at the attention they received. “That shouldn’t have been shocking to me, but it was shocking to me in the sense that she’s such a sweet, really, deeply kind, unspoiled person. She has more compassion in her little finger than—” She waved her hand around her torso with a grim laugh. (The pair reportedly split last fall, but Clark would only say they were “never not close.”) Clark’s self-assurance helped her to perceive the tabloid aggression and celebrity weirdness as baffling rather than distorting. She was too classy to run with my suggestion that attending that Taylor Swift 4th of July party must’ve been an interesting anthropological study. “That was, I think, in the midst of a game of Celebrity,” she said of a photo of her wearing the same stars ’n’ stripes onesie as Gigi Hadid, Karlie Kloss, and Ruby Rose. She took a long pause. “I was very bad at it!”
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From left: Cara Delevingne and Annie Clark Schiller Graphics But she was disturbed by dangerous high-speed car chases from paparazzi in pursuit of photos of the couple; she thinks the gossip industrial complex relates to a wider societal disparity. “The biggest problem was that the value system of it is all based on aspiration,” she said with genuine concern. “It’s wealth aspiration, fame aspiration. But if the government, if the world was just generally a more compassionate, empathetic place, people wouldn’t be aspiring to…that. They would be more fulfilled with their own lives if the wealth gap in general wasn’t so insane.” Admittedly, it was hard not to want to look at them, in matching sharp suits and laser-cut Burberry, queering the archetype of the male rock star dating the young supermodel, watching the context around an established artist mutate in front of you. There is the kind of halfway-benign personal invasion where paparazzi follow you and your girlfriend around an airport. But then there is the kind where the never-not-creepy Daily Mail doorsteps your older sister at home in Texas and calls up your well-meaning uncle to sandbag him into revealing that your father went to prison in 2010 for participating in multimillion-dollar stock fraud. Although it is grotesque to treat the paper’s muckraking as a puzzle piece, it did illuminate part of the story behind Strange Mercy, which Clark had — understandably — only ever vaguely attributed to an overwhelming period of loss. “Suitcase of cash in the back of my stick shift,” she sang on “Year of the Tiger.” “I had to be the best of the bourgeoisie / Now my kingdom for a cup of coffee.” (She cowrote the song with her mother, Sharon, who split from Clark’s father when she was three.) “Everybody has their personal tragedies and their crosses to bear,” Clark said in a clipped tone. She calls her father’s 12-year prison sentence “a horrible tragedy. On so many different levels. So absolutely heartbreaking.” She — an adult — could handle it. But her younger half- and stepsiblings on her father’s side are still teenagers. “And I specifically would never talk about that or have ever mentioned that in a myriad of questions about Strange Mercy because it seems like an incredible betrayal of my family. But most specifically, my youngest siblings who are innocent children. They were kiddos.” She described the Daily Mail story as “faux concern,” and reiterated that the paper couldn’t find any dirt on her, no matter how outrageously they tried. “I’m not ashamed of my family,” she said. Then I asked her whether her father going to prison had spun her own moral compass, or made her reconsider any values of right and wrong that he may have instilled in her. She was momentarily confused, and then let rip a massive, absurd, demonstrative laugh. She kept going. “I love my father,” she said eventually, still tickled. “I love my father very much, as any child loves their parent. He’s very intelligent and erudite and a good writer and incredibly well read, and those are all things that I value and I’m glad that he instilled in me.” She paused, and kept on laughing. In the run-up to announcing Masseduction, Clark was Instagramming absurdist junket-styled videos, in which she wears a hot pink skirt and a transparent rubber top the color of ash, and takes questions from an off-screen interviewer. Her answers were scripted by the musician and comedian Carrie Brownstein, who is also her ex-girlfriend. One video poses the question of whether Annie Clark and St. Vincent are the same person. She pauses to consider. “Honestly, you’d have to ask her.” What’s it like being a woman in music? “Good question,” she muses, as the camera zooms to her black and yellow fingernails, which spell out “FUCK OFFF.” These films might factor into her upcoming tour, but the answers were also written for journalists. Earlier in July, in London, Clark found alternative ways to conduct interviews for hours at a time. She invited some female journalists to get massages with her (too weird with men, even though she was face-down on the table the whole time, avoiding eye contact). Other writers were invited into a 10-by-10-foot pink wooden box that was constructed in a North London studio especially for the occasion. Her interrogators had to duck through a low door to enter the blacklit space. “Not full-on crawl, because that’s a little heavy-handed,” she clarified. Inside, she looped a pedal steel recording and lit a Diptyque candle that struggled to mask the paint fumes.
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St. Vincent / Via Instagram If anyone asked her an obvious question — like where the name St. Vincent came from — she planned to play prerecorded answers and “check my email, or stretch, or zone out for a second,” she said, sounding almost disappointed that she didn’t get a chance to enact her schemes. She insisted she wasn’t being antagonistic. But sitting opposite Annie Clark for two hours is often intimidating enough without the added fear that she’s about to make fun of you to your face: It is a gigantic power play! “Oh, deeply so,” she said, affecting a wryly elegant tone. “But then also not at all because I was the insane person stuck in a box for eight hours!” If critics and fans are bored of this sort of thing — see Arcade Fire’s recent album campaign — they are clearly not as tired as the artists who have to smile politely at writers who don’t know how to use Google. Plus, Arcade Fire’s hijinks felt cynical; Clark’s feels like a rejection of the idea that women artists are meant to be relatable, having endured a career’s worth of inane juxtapositions between her pretty face and gnarly shredding like it means anything. The point, she said, was that putting ourselves in a totally different, slightly strange context can produce interesting results. (She and I were meant to do Pilates together — before an oversold class spared me the indignity.) Why not make everything thoughtful and curated? If the stakes are already high, why not aim even higher and put yourself in extreme circumstances to see what happens? If Clark has done two things for the cerebral indie-rock world that she’s long outstripped, it’s teach about sex (thank god), and expose its low-risk complacency for a con.
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Nedda Afsari Of course, in some people’s eyes, this makes her a phony, a manipulator. Earlier this year, legendary cultural critic Greil Marcus wrote an admirably dim-witted column for Pitchfork where he compared Clark to the slippery Father John Misty, aka Josh Tillman, claiming that they “perform as artists of such pretentiousness you couldn’t possibly figure out how to talk to them. … There’s no way to address a saint: To be a saint you have to be dead … Such characters allow themselves to appear as if touched by God, which is what they’re selling, and laugh at you if you’re so square not to know who they really are: to join their club.” If Marcus had read any of the million interviews that Clark is parodying in her high-concept clips, he would know the name is rooted in humiliation and squalor — the hospital where Dylan Thomas died — rather than divine aspiration. “And I have never, nor would I ever, put the kind of trapdoors and booby traps in my music to make the listener feel dumb,” Clark told me in response to Marcus’s theories. “I have enough hubris not to kill myself, but I actually have such a deep respect for the listener that I have never tried to pander. Songs and arrangements were complex and convoluted at times, but they were sincere attempts at connecting.” She hoped there will be no mistaking her intent with her new record, which “is so first-person and sad.” But if anyone does, she knows it’s not her job to correct them.
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A still from the “New York” music video. Alex Da Carte A still from the “New York” music video. If you want to use Masseduction as a treasure map, then this is what it tells us about Annie Clark’s personal life. She experienced a complicated kind of heartbreak. Sometimes that makes her crazy and neurotic: “I won’t cry wolf in the kitchen,” she swears on woozy opener “Hang on Me,” but threatens to jump off her roof “just to punish you” on the vengeful, cracked opera of “Smoking Section,” the last song. Sometimes a mental safety net stretches out when she might otherwise get hurt. “Slip my hand from your hand / Leave you dancing with a ghost,” she sings on “Slow Disco,” the most tender song she’s ever written. “Don’t it beat a slow dance to death?” a forlorn and disembodied voice repeats as it fades out. Her world is changing, and that’s unsettling. “Too few of our old crew left on Astor,” she sings on “New York,” a song about lost heroes. On “Fear the Future,” she belts the title as the song reaches a pyrotechnic cataclysm that sounds like a truckload of fireworks being dumped inside a volcano. But if you respond in kind to Clark’s vulnerability, then these are the more meaningful revelations that we can take from Masseduction into our lives: Relatability is a crock, and sincerity doesn’t take a single form. “I refuse to seem less threatening, if that’s how I’m perceived,” said Clark. “Ultimate freedom is not caring whether you are liked, because you are making something you really love and believe in.” On Masseduction Clark tells us that all the good forms of desire — love, sex, art — are self-destructive. But at their best, they create just that little bit more than they consume, and can eventually alchemize anxiety into total power.
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realcelloguy · 7 years
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Funny Quotes on Music
From cmuse.org. Enjoy!
“A composer is a guy who goes around forcing his will on unsuspecting air molecules, often with the assistance of unsuspecting musicians. — Frank Zappa
“I want to do a musical movie. Like Evita, but with good music.” — Elton John
“Music is moonlight in the gloomy night of life.” — Jean Paul
“Talking about music is like dancing about architecture.” — Steve Martin
“A gentleman is someone who can play the accordion, but doesn’t.” — Tom Waits
“I don’t deserve a Songwriters Hall of Fame Award. But fifteen years ago, I had a brain operation and I didn’t deserve that, either. So I’ll keep it.” — Quincy Jones
“The musician is perhaps the most modest of animals, but he is also the proudest. It is he who invented the sublime art of ruining poetry.” — Erik Satie
“All the good music has already been written by people with wigs and stuff.” — Frank Zappa
“To achieve great things, two things are needed: a plan and not quite enough time.” — Leonard Bernstein
“I’ve been imitated so well I’ve heard people copy my mistakes.” — Jimi Hendrix
“My personal hobbies are reading, listening to music, and silence.” — Edith Sitwell
“I can’t listen to that much Wagner. I start getting the urge to conquer Poland.” — Woody Allen
“Life can’t be all bad when for ten dollars you can buy all the Beethoven sonatas and listen to them for ten years.” — William F. Buckley, Jr.
“Beethoven’s last quartets were written by a deaf man and should only be listened to by a deaf man.” — Thomas Beecham
“The world must be filled with unsuccessful musical careers like mine, and it’s probably a good thing. We don’t need a lot of bad musicians filling the air with unnecessary sounds. Some of the professionals are bad enough.” — Andy Rooney
“Andrew Lloyd Webber’s music is everywhere, but so is AIDS.” — Malcolm Williamson
“All music is folk music. I ain’t never heard a horse sing a song.” — Louis Armstrong
“Money doesn’t talk, it swears.” ― Bob Dylan
“Competitions are for horses, not artists.” — Bela Bartok
“When an instrument fails on stage it mocks you and must be destroyed!” ― Trent Reznor
“I never had much interest in the piano until I realized that every time I played, a girl would appear on the piano bench to my left and another to my right.” — Duke Ellington
“Let me be clear about this: I don’t have a drug problem, I have a police problem.” — Keith Richards
“When I was a little boy, I told my dad, ‘When I grow up, I want to be a musician.’ My dad said: ‘You can’t do both, Son.” — Chet Atkins
“I don’t like country music, but I don’t mean to denigrate those who do. And for the people who like country music, denigrate means ‘put down’.”— Bob Newhart
“Music makes one feel so romantic – at least it always gets on one’s nerves – which is the same thing nowadays.” —Oscar Wilde
“I know [canned music] makes chickens lay more eggs and factory workers produce more. But how much more can they get out of you on an elevator?” — Victor Borge
“It’s easy to play any musical instrument: all you have to do is touch the right key at the right time and the instrument will play itself.” — Johann Sebastian Bach
“Rock ‘n’ roll will never die. There’ll always be some arrogant little brat who wants to make music with a guitar.” — Dave Edmunds
“I stole everything I ever heard, but mostly I stole from the horns.” — Ella Fitzgerald
“Get up from that piano. You hurtin’ its feelings.” — Jelly Roll Morton
“To listen is an effort, and just to hear is no merit. A duck hears also.” — Igor Stravinsky
“To get your playing more forceful, hit the drums harder.” — Keith Moon
“Music expresses that which cannot be put into words.” — Victor Hugo
“Jazz will endure just as long people hear it through their feet instead of their brains.” — John Philip Sousa
“We consider that any man who can fiddle all through one of those Virginia Reels without losing his grip may be depended upon in any kind of musical emergency.” — Mark Twain
“Sometimes we pee on each other before we go on stage.” — Trent Reznor
“Dogs smoke in France. “— Ozzy Osbourne
“Music was my refuge. I could crawl into the space between the notes and curl my back to loneliness.” — Maya Angelou
“Nothing soothes me more after a long and maddening course of pianoforte recitals than to sit and have my teeth drilled.” — George Bernard Shaw
“In order to compose, all you need to do is remember a tune that nobody else has thought of.” — Robert Schumann
“I think John would have liked Free As A Bird. In fact, I hope somebody does this to all my crap demos when I’m dead, making them into hit songs.” — George Harrison
“Nothing separates the generations more than music. By the time a child is eight or nine, he has developed a passion for his own music that is even stronger than his passions for procrastination and weird clothes.” — Bill Cosby
“One good thing about music, when it hits you, you feel no pain.” — Bob Marley
“The piano has been drinking, not me.” — Tom Waits
“Classical music is the kind we keep thinking will turn into a tune.” — Kin Hubbard
“There are some experiences in life which should not be demanded twice from any man, and one of them is listening to the Brahms Requiem.” — George Bernard Shaw
“Wagner’s music is better than it sounds.” — Mark Twain
“In the end we’re all Jerry Springer Show guests, really, we just haven’t been on the show.” — Marilyn Manson
“Rock journalism is people who can’t write interviewing people who can’t talk in order to provide articles for people who can’t read.” — Frank Zappa
“Too many pieces of music finish too long after the end.” — Igor Stravinsky
“There are two golden rules for an orchestra: start together and finish together. The public doesn’t give a damn what goes on in between.” — Thomas Beecham
“Lesser artists borrow, great artists steal.” — Igor Stravinsky
“There’s nothing like the eureka moment of knocking off a song that didn’t exist before – I won’t compare it to sex, but it lasts longer.” — Paul McCartney
“Do I listen to pop music because I’m miserable or am I miserable because listen to pop music?” — John Cusack
“Last night at Carnegie Hall, Jack Benny played Mendelssohn. Mendelssohn lost.” — Harold C. Schonberg
“Beethoven always sounds to me like the upsetting of a bag of nails, with here and there an also dropped hammer.” — John Ruskin
“And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music.” — Friedrich Nietzsche
“I smash guitars because I like them.” — Pete Townshend
“I once sent him a song and asked him to mark a cross wherever he thought it was faulty. Brahms returned it untouched, saying ‘I don’t want to make a cemetery of your compositions.’ ” — Hugo Wolf
“I love Wagner, but the music I prefer is that of a cat hung up by its tail outside a window and trying to stick to the panes of glass with its claws.” — Charles-Pierre Baudelaire
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ckcker · 4 years
Text
Spit-Take’s Last Squirt
I look down at the parking lot of the apartment complex, I briefly think the back of a woman’s head walking away from me is the front of a hot guy walking towards me.  I hear a deadbolt unlock and turn and am invited inside.  Crossing the threshold of Rob’s apartment door sinks a throttled prick through my body akin to stumbling into a rusty and bubble-wrapped metal spike apparently for sale in an antique store.  Even as the top door hinge passes by my temple as a snubbed showbiz air kiss there is a flash in my mind of something, unrelated to the physical apartment and also a thing I will never be able to remove, that asks to keep my focus in two places at once.  Between these two places, the feet and the head spitroast me with their perverse negotiations.  My initial trauma is at this point overused as a topic and let’s agree boring to think about; my mind starts to suggest trauma spinoffs instead.  I am given a glass of water by Rob but then ask for a beer as, without asking, my memory gifts me excruciating yet kinkily edited content of my attempts to recover.  One of the best ways to come back from a nervous breakdown, I decided in the aftermath of that notable moment, is to do it very very quickly, ‘few solutions are as correct as speed-processing a massive landmark shift in the perception of reality,’ I had soothed myself in the aftermath.  I was hoping for something shittier than an IPA, I drink the IPA and turn, I notice the back of what I believe is an old woman’s head and body resting on the couch.  
After my  ˹survivable event˼  it was typical for all of the dying to retire inward. I believed I could bring back my life in the same way that people made jokes about being dead inside to prepare for the end of the world.  Alright, the remodeling of total defeat into pragmatic quarantine.  Enough disaster movies had passed, everyone notices catastrophes have entertainment value, I would walk past and look in the glass reflection of a recently opened Thai street food spot run by white ex-skaters, I evaluated my drilled in face and greyed out options, my de-emphasized terror: maybe even I could be entertaining. My original twist on the concept of recovering was to imagine my strength and ability as limitless. To decide I could pre-understand the well-flung implications of my situation, of a mind unable to cope with learning all of the things that are possible.  I wanted to turbo-ravel a lights out unraveling; the poet who wanted to be a cop.  I turn to Rob and say nothing about the apparently older woman, he also says nothing about her, asks, “what kind of music do you like?” before playing an Ace of Base song and I don’t have to answer.  The woman seems to be activated.  Her limbs slide against her torso and she turns to look around the room, then briefly at us but again at the room, then one certain spot on the wall to the right of where we are standing where she settles and says “hi” in a warble expelled as a foehn.    
I return the hi and am introduced to Gail.  I thought of all my failed solutions.  For instance, attending several satellite Occupy Wall Street protests, where discussions of income inequality and widespread mobilization were annotated with shouts, why is there fluoride in our water and end the fed.  One important takeaway involved a large man yelling along to the song being played on the sound system, “fuck you I won’t do what you tell me,” for two repetitions of the lyric before realizing no one else would join him and vanishing into embarrassed aerosol.  A successful protest fixates on a way for everyone to feel more or less the same emotion at a coordinated moment.  A successful protest is very sharply art directed and does not relish the display of rehearsed outrage.  The foot I thought I’d taken out of my ass and put through the door had somehow ended up in some other ass.  Feel it for the first time again.  Though people will regularly re-watch movies only waiting for their favorite lines to be said, it seems they rarely stop to consider protest tactics they have seen before.  I thought I had the patience, the dedication for such things, I tapped out naturally and in gas form. “She needed a place to stay for a bit,” Rob tells me, Gail says nothing but smiles lightly, looking at us in some awesome combo of salivating for a response and indifferent to the fact of being trapped behind twenty successive panes of stained glass.  Tchah, the experience of watching an ancient demon fail an eight week long beginner’s course on improv. “I see,” I conclude, Gail’s expression remains the same.  “Wow…’Beautiful Life’ is such a good song,” Rob says. The song moves to the front. I say, “Yes, I do love ‘Beautiful Life.’”
I had tried walks and not just sometimes but many walks.  Down the city cul-de-sac at a certain time.  Listening to wordless music, this one some sort of ambient dramatization of Eurydice’s botched escape from the underworld, a repetitive melancholy chunnel.  Then a rotation: it becomes Britney from an era when pop turned us around an axis both blingy and higgedly-piggedly-nigh-fucky-wucky, gently increasing the healing concept with each exacting flail, that there may be a consolation for all problems leading up to and including the end of the world.  The consolation was dancing all night.  Of course the time of my walks was twilight.  Fried mindsets gave the music much power as a narrative soundtrack; as I looked at a single branch of a very tall tree overhead and caught in sunset and streetlight, jiggled evocatively by wind, and heard a sort of coincidental despair-organized belch from the buckled gut of the mp3, I attempted to speed things up by trying to lose my mind all of the way.  This did not work, I had to stay somewhere in between.  
I went on more walks alone but never too far from my amazing bed.  It was crucial to be within 30 walking minutes of somewhere unsurveilled where I could lay down and catalogue mysterious headaches, as mysterious headaches had rightfully been selected as the center of my world.  The speed of losing a mind is incredibly hard to measure.  Gail also listens to ‘Beautiful Life’ and clearly does not know what it is, I don’t feel familiar enough with Rob to confront the question of how they know each other, I try:
“Are you two related?”
“No no no, haha,” Rob’s voice enters an excited tone. Gail emerges a glacial grin that, even as it forms one of the most approachable configurations able to be realized on a face, still seems misdirected from the hook of a comforting social cue, “no, I met Gail at a bar last night.  At Tina’s.  She just needs a place to stay for a little.  She just moved back here.”  “I spent many years in Lawrence, with my family,” Gail says.  
“I see.”  
Context clues point to homeless, I ache to know much more, Rob twirls around with unbridled pizazz.  He puts his two arms straight out towards me, “what would — ohhh!!”  He retracts his arms. “I was going to ask if you wanted something to drink.” Gail rests, “but you already have a beer,” and here he must have felt the panic to entertain away a social gaffe by immediately giving a clear-cut logical explanation, “my mind has been wiped away this week.  So much molly…           Well…   good.”  
“Yes.”  
“Yes INDEED hunny. This past weekend just about mummified me, I’ve been in a sarcophagus all WEEK, did you do anything fun?”
“Umm.”
I remembered then I was trying to stop using umm. I was coaching myself to be quite fearless and brave when entering sentences.  The CEO of a major newspaper-then-media company once said, before filming a segment for an in-house spot on the company’s approach to advertising its newly launched free weekly targeting 23-35 y/o young professionals, ‘I’m not an umm guy.’  This dialogue, delivered to the video director who was reminding the CEO to look straight in the camera and avoid using expressions like “umm” and “uhh” since they communicated unpreparedness, nerves or insecurity, revealed in its choppy severity a set of verbal and body language constraints that likely this man thought of all the time in order to conjure his short and long term goals.  Likely he thought of them almost as much as I thought about mysterious headaches.  I had been hired to help craft services for the shoot and spent much of the time sitting against a wall print of a famous basketball player, staring at the glass-walled office and elevators meant to enhance, via the perspective of ‘more space’ given by such architecture, a tech-oriented workplace for the media-damaged graduates.  See-thru offices offer more natural light, the young people of the era seem to enjoy a certain kind of light.  Another two-day job to float me, and an opportunity to rebuild a stomach for being outside of my incredible room.  “I stayed in on Saturday,” then I pause before continuing, “I watched a movie.  A documentary,” which I had watched for 17 minutes before moving to my window to observe the parking lot for 45 minutes, followed by bed.  
Rob seems uncomfortable with this idea, “you should come out with us this weekend. There’s some stuff going on.  Maybe you can come to this super fun party, it’s a queer party.  In fact it’s a conspiracy theory-themed queer party.”  Gail moves her left forefinger a splanch.  “It’s really funny! And good music, people dress up, it’s called……….Femmetrails” there is a pause of expectation which I do not know how to meet and which is ignored “it’s really funny and lots of dancing. My friend Blake hosts it. But in drag.  And, guess what his drag name is” I try to remember: was it a parking lot I observed, or a man in his early 40s masturbating within a fingerprint-shrouded computer screen “Georgia SORROWS.  Gail’s going to come!”  Gail has stopped grinning and seems to be unreachable for the length of a square breath before a small shift in her sitting style punctures the proto-gargoyle droop. “Yes I am going to come” she confirms.  “Yes and you should too,” it appears Rob is attached to the idea.  I clean out my lower mouth with my tongue, with mouth closed.  “That would be, maybe” this seems to be enough of an answer for everyone.  
Rob sits on the ground, I begin to prepare my body to also sit on the ground.  It had been a meat lover’s pizza approach to self-healing.  Kava tea from the pharmacy chain, sugar abstinence, performative meditation, I slipped into nonsensical jogging regimens, coffee abstinence, I walked gently in frozen empty parking lots, I didn’t touch anyone for a full year, “my balls are lost halls,” short term CBT and do-it-yourself biofeedback, waiting for hyperventilation so I could write about it, and all this supported by typical means: substantial daily hard alcohol acceptances and fearless ibuprofen stuffings.  And to heal oneself completely, one must never enlighten others to the full extent of the problem and the drenched map of half-solutions being applied, regularly, in secret.  Yes, I had as much spiritual discipline as a teen in an Intro to Photo class taking b&w photos of homeless people on the street.  I sit down at least four feet away from Rob and twelve from Gail, who in the meantime it has been discovered does not know the story of Amanda Bynes’ breakdown.  She also does not know who Amanda Bynes is.  Neither Rob nor I have any interest in making that clear.  The super gonorrheic minutiae that line and then bedazzle the mental process of a terrified person do not enter conversations as smoothly as quotes from 23 year old cult TV shows canceled after two seasons.  Not a shock, only a condition that makes the thoughts turn ever more crunched, ever more specific and internally bound, glowing with unpopular culture.
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