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travllingbunny · 1 year

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So it was quite weird for this person to take that and make it about Misogyny and Incels when that has very little to do with it. plus, in recent years I have seen more female villains receiving this treatment often from female viewers/readers. Characters like Princess Azula, Rei Todoroki, Catra, Harley Quinn, and Heather Chandler receive this in increasingly frequent ways often with the defense that any person who dislikes these characters is a misogynist who hates and opresses women.

(pt 4) It is unfortunately a common thing in many fandoms to do to characters, but lately it often seems that any criticism towards a female character, of groups of women, or even an individual woman. is taken to be misogynistic, born from a hatred and fear of women, and often seems to take the form that every man or even most men are just evil, malicious, people or out to get women, and control and abuse them it's quite frankly ridiculous. and I think its an absurd line of thought that needs to die

Finally to answer parts 3 and 4 of your ask.

Yes, you are right that this is also another phenomenom that's pretty widespread these days. But I don't see how you think that negates what was said about the Draco in Leather Pants trope.

In my first post answeing your asks 1 and 2, I've pointed out why I think this poster was right and that the trope itself is sexist - certainly the way it's described on the TV Tropes page is, and so is, in general, the focus on how silly fangirls are ruining everything by stanning male characters they 'woobify' and find hot - while ignoring the equally widespread idolization / whitewashing of villains like TDK Joker, Walter White, Tywin Lannister etc. by fanboys. And that also the examples on the page show that this trope can also just serve as an excuse for people to rant and complain about the fact that other fans dare like characters they hate.

Fans regardless of gender and sexual orientation (and whether they find the characters attractive or not) tend to whitewash and idealize their favorite characters, but also demonize and oversimplify the characters they hate, too. The main reason for this is people's tendency to want to see every story in black and white terms, as a Heroes vs Villains story, and it gets mixed with today's prevalent idea in pop culture that you can't just like or dislike things, you need to prove that what you like is morally superior, and that the things you dislike are morally bad.

I'm not familiar with the examples you mention, but I've certainly seen it. Sometimes it's worshipping villanous female characters (say, Amy Dunne or Cersei Lannister) who are reimagined by the fandom as girlboss feminists. It feels like the flip side of the phenomenom of fanboys worshipping male villains they admire as badasses, but now with added supposed social justice aspect. It may also be a backlash against the real and blatant misogyny that was very pervasive in fandoms (I remember the time when Sansa, Dany and Catelyn were the most hated characters in the ASOIAF fandom, with people using some... interesting arguments. The one that really got me was how many people in the fandom were hating on a pre-teen girl for not wanting to have sex with a grown man she was forced to marry by her captors who were killing her own famly... because they really liked that male character. )

It might also include the rhetoric based on a certain type of (pseudo-)feminism according to which women are inherently good and perfect and can only be heroes and/or victims, while men are naturally aggressive and abusive etc. This can get hilariously hypocritical: recently a Twitter user went on a rant against fans who like abusive male characters, while being a self-proclaimed stan of Cersei Lannister and Serena Joy.

But it's not like this kind of rhetoric is used just against men (you didn't explicitly say that, but I felt like it was implied in your ask). Women will often throw accusations of misogyny against each other, and women will often show internalized misogyny towards other women in those arguments - and both things will often happen at the same time. This also happens a lot in real life arguments about politics and social issues - especially when people use girlboss feminism to argue that anyone who doesn't support or, god forbid, criticizes their favorite female politician or celebrity, is "misogynistic" and that every criticism of her, no matter how legitimate the reasons are and how little they have to do with gender, are "rooted in misogyny". In the course of that, stans often don't have a problem with mocking, attacking and bullying any number of other (usually less powerful women), and using all sorts of misogynistic insults and assumptions about them.

Now, the tricky thing is that this doesn't mean that hatred or criticism or lack of support for a woman in real life, or a female character, is fully free of misogyny, even if the woman in question is very problematic. It probably always does play a role. Some people - maybe even a lot of people - will really say and do misogynistic things about a woman even when there are perfectly legitimate reasons to criticize her that have nothing to do with gender.

Take a female character like Cersei Lannister as an example. She is a narcissist with internalized misogyny who is abusive towards every woman and girl she had any power over, and is also extremely classist, ableist and racist. While the crimes of the GoT version were downplayed (at least before the season 6 finale), the book version, among other things, is guilty of the murders of many children including a baby, murdered her friend as a child, commits sexual assault, physically and emotionally abused her disabled little brother since his birth (she already abused him as a baby), is guilty of the murder of countless little people (just because she wanted to kill her brother), sends innocent women to be tortured and experimented on, sold a woman into slavery, orders a young boy to be whipped as a way to emotionally abuse her own son.tries to frame her teenage daughter-in-law and get her executed, and the list goes on. But Cersei is also a victim herself, and that's made very clear - of her father using her as a pawn, of her husband King Robert, who used to rape her while drunk and also is physically abusive. She feels generally constrained by her position as a woman. But her takeaways from that are not empathy or support for other women or for any marginalized and oppressed people, but the exact opposite. The complexity about her character is really more about the complexity of our response to her - her horrible behavior and personality makes us hate her, her victimization makes the reader feel pity and empathy, her delusions of grandeur are often hilarious, and there are some times when we may even feel on her side. One of those times is when, after she's done so many horrible things, she doesn't get punished for any of them, but instead gets publicly shamed and humiliated in a really gross and misogynistic way for the 'crime' of having sex outside marriage.

So, is hating Cersei misogynistic? In general, heck no! There are countless excellent reasons to hate her, and anyone who tries to argue that people hating Cersei is by itself misogyny is full of sh1t. But when some people focus not on any of her crimes but call her a wh0re or making fun of the rape and abuse she's suffered or cheer for her husband hitting her - that is misogyny.

It all depends on the type of criticism (or more often hate) - the kind of arguments, or slurs used, or when they are blatantly treated differently than male characters who do similar things. There are also certain things that fandoms are more likely to accuse of or hold female characters than the male characters and vice versa. When fans hate on male characters, you'll typically see them say the character is violent, abuser, rapist, murderer, or, a particularly popular accusation nowadays, "incel" (even if it makes no sense at all). Female characters, on the other hand, will mostly get criticized for their sexual behavior, who they have sex with/whether they have sex (they'll be either slut-shamed, or mocked as frigid women who have never had an orgasm), which male characters they reject, whether they are good mothers (male characters will get far less criticism for being neglectful or straight-up abusive fathers to their own children, while female characters' motherhood will get dissected endlessly), they will be blamed for the actions of men for the way they have supposedly infliuenced / manipulated them (whether or not there's any evidence of that) etc. while, on the other hand, actual violent crimes those or other women may commit might actually get ignored - because a woman committing violence is either unimaginable, funny or girlbossy. and that especially goes for things like rape, sexual abuse or domestic violence (because women are gentle helpless flowers who can never do such things, amirite). Female characters will also get criticized and hated and called a Mary Sue just for basically having the same tropes as male protagonists do all the time: being the Chosen One with some special destiny, being very competent in some area, influencing a lot of people. I've seen pretty much every female protagonst or supporting character who is described as being exceptional in any way as a Mary Sue - while male characters who are all those things to a much higher degree never get that.

So, there's a lot of sexism in fandoms. But there's also a lot of bad fath arguments and blanket accusation of misogyny as a convenient tool in fandom discourse, the same way that you'll inevitably get accused of being homophobic or biphobic jor racist just for not being a stan of certain characters or not shipping certain ships or preferring some ships to others. And again, there is real racism, homophobia, bisephobia, transphobia, misogyny in the fandoms, but fans will also try to use those accusations as a tool to win fandom debates and prove their side of the fandom is the morally right one, and the ones who disagree with them are bad.

I can't help but use the House of the Dragon fandom as an example, because that fandom is a huge toxic mess, with the fandom divided into Team Black and Team Green depending on which faction of the fictional dragonriding royal family fighting a civil war over the throne they like better....and the accusation of misogyny is especially popular. Quite a few of the Team Black stans are taking it to a whole new level by accusing everyone who isn't one of them of misogyny - because if you don't fully and 100% support the side that is trying to put Rhaenyra, a woman, on the throne you must be a misogynist. (Rhaenyra is the protagonist, but the story is very morally grey one without heroes or villains, and if you've read the source material you know just how morally grey it is, and that insisting that people have to root for either side is pretty silly... not to mention that it's all a fictional medieval monrachy, so why would you treat fiction as real life and also why would you then yell at people that they need to supprot hereditary monarchy in general?) The funniest thing is, however, the fact that many of those who are the loudest in those accusations are themselves making extremely misogynistic arguments against female characters on "Team Green", especially Alicent, the other main female character, who's the central charactre on Team Green. Rhaenyra gets some hate that is rooted in misogyny (such as slut-shaming or judging her more harshly than male kings or pretenders to the throne), but there are many more fans who idealize her and ignore or downplay her flaws and mistakes (in the show she's generally portrayed as someone to root for at this point in the story at least, but not as someone who's flawless - but most of the fandom hates nuance!), flattening her as a character in the process. But, since Team Black makes up around 80-90% of the fandom, it's Alicent who gets demonized, so it's much more common to find misogynistic takes about her (downplaying or mocking and making memes of her victimization and every instance of sexual abuse, rape and humiliation she's endured, arguing that she 'seduced' a grown man when she was 14 , trying to reduce her to an 'evil stepmother' trope, hyperfocusing on her as a "bad mother"- while the bad fathers, including her husband, don't get the same treatment, blaming her for the actions of the men around her...). The fandom also bullied both of the actresses who have played her, to the point that one left social media for a while, and the other has publicly spoken about the cyber bullying she was exposed to and how it affected her (and as a result of talking about it, got hated and attacked even more). At the same time, male characters who have done much, much worse and are actually murderers and/or rapists and abusers get whitewashed and adored if they are on the "right" team (even abuse against Rhaenyra gets downplayed if it's committed by a man from Team Black), and even the men on Team Green who have actually commited murder and/or rape are getting less hate than Alicent (and their crimes are often used to reflect on her).

And that's why the HotD fandom is a perfect example showing that many of the people in fandoms who use misogyny (or some other supposedly progressive issue) don't really care about it. It all just comes down to winning a fandom war.

#wow this was long #cersei lannister #alicent hightower #hotd fandom #asoiaf fandom

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trinitynox · 9 months

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Trin Reviews: Barbie

Short answer is, I liked this movie. Long answer, it's a bit more complicated than just it's good or it's bad. There are different interpretations to this movie, critical response has been overwhelmingly positive but there are also some negatives, and no, I'm not talking about Ben Shapiro or people who got their fragile egos hurt by this movie.

For some, this openness to interpretation is what makes it a good story. And that is fair, as a piece of art. But I reckon that the openness detracts a bit from its identity as social commentary.

I think Barbie is not as truly impactful as it could have been or as the marketing surrounding this movie would suggest. It is not generation defining but it is close. A couple revisions to fix those flaws might have helped it achieve that status. Provided that is what the makers of Barbie wanted. A few plot threads got mixed together and I didn't really get the point they were trying to make with it but maybe I will as I write this review.

If you found it more impactful that I did, that's fantastic! Don't let my opinion take that away from you.

Social commentary aside, the movie was quite fun. I loved the random inclusion of high profile actors and actresses as Barbies and Kens. The dance number with Ryan Gosling and Simu Liu's faction of Kens was a great moment of I don't know what's going on but I love it.

From here on, it's going to be spoilers.

*****SPOILERS*****

I don't really know how to start the spoiler review section so I guess I'll just go with whatever thoughts come to mind as I write.

One scene that stuck out for me was when Barbie was having a breakdown and said something along the lines of how she doesn't feel attractive/pretty anymore. It is then lampshaded by the narrator who says that Margot Robbie is the wrong actress to cast to drive that point across. In the moment, I laughed and agreed with that 4th wall break. However, upon reflection, the joke kind of fell flat for me.

Much has been said about how mental health and insecurities can and will affect everyone. And that even physically attractive people have the right to feel ugly. Highlighting Margot Robbie's looks and saying that she's the wrong actress to cast to drive across the point that even Barbie can feel ugly feels...reductive.

The scene was Barbie at her lowest, when her worldview was shattered and she felt like she had lost everything that made her who she was. That joke implies to me that Barbie is just her looks and not anything else, and that her struggles aren't real or her identity crisis isn't significant. Maybe the point was that her looks are too distracting? I don't know.

I watched it with my SO and her thoughts on the movie surprised me a little. She disliked the movie and gave it a 1/10.

When I tried to probe a little to find out why, I found that the message just didn't resonate with her. In fact, she didn't really get the point of the movie. The plot was too confusing, the character actions made no sense to her, there was too much going on, etc etc.

She couldn't pin point why exactly, but she felt that the movie had the opposite effect for her, where she felt less empowered.

I think the reason is this movie is meant to be a satire. It's supposed to take things to the absurd extreme. And the thing about satire is that not everyone gets it. Some might take it too seriously or on face value. Sometimes its message gets lost amidst the absurdity.

There was a pretty great speech in the movie about how difficult society's expectations of women have been so unfair and continues to place undue pressure on women that men don't normally face. I think that speech was the main thesis of the movie, but it was lost in the satirical take on gender norms/roles throughout the movie for some.

Then there was Ken's subplot. This one bothered me a lot, mostly because I absolutely hate everything his subplot is on the surface. Toxic Masculinity. So I guess that's a point to the creative team cuz it probably brought out the emotional reaction they wanted.

But it's also mixed in with Ken's own identity crisis. He doesn't know who he is without Barbie because it's always Barbie and Ken, never just Ken. I'm not sure what to think of this subplot?

Based on the resolution, I think the message is that men shouldn't form their entire lives around finding a partner, and they aren't any less for not having one. A good message to try to steer some away from becoming the internet's stereotypical incel, I suppose. Did it succeed? I don't know.

There's a whole thread about how Margot Robbie's Barbie starts thinking about death even though they can't die in Barbie land. It's a little funny that she starts as Stereotypical Barbie and ends with Death Seeking Barbie (I know, I know...it's not so much she's seeking death but more experiencing what being human has to offer, which includes death. It's a joke.)

Overall, while it was an entertaining movie, I think it failed to be as impactful as it could have due to it being a satire.

6/10

P.S. My favourite joke that I laughed out loud but no one else in the theatre did was: Random Executive: gives a suggestion Will Ferrell: Great idea, executive no. 2!

I died a bit inside when no one else laughed...

#Barbie #barbie 2023 #the barbie movie #greta gerwig #kenergy #movie review #movies #films #cinema #margot robbie #ryan gosling #simu liu #america ferrera

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rhaenyras · 8 months

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different anon, but there's no safe SW. even the ones like the other anon who mentioned making $$$ get threats and often deal with stalking. my friend did it briefly and got a barrage of threats from men saying what they wanted to do to her. she had men saying they wanted to kill and rape her and worse, but people dismissed it cause it was something she got herself into. she was 18 and all she saw were people saying how much money you can make. she was a smaller creator and got off fast, but still dealt with threats and people saying they would find and meet her. getting messages from people against feminism on top of that would have been hell for anyone.

im sure some can speak up and talk about feminism, but even on OF that's risking so much. OF isn't as safe as a lot make it seem, and a lot of the people on it are desperate and don't understand the risks they're taking. even the ones who are better off aren't safe. i don't know enough about it, but just from people pressuring me into getting an OF, seeing what it did to my friend, being in communities where others have done it, there's no safe way to engage in SW and no safe way to speak up against it.

change def needs to happen, but it's not the responsibility of those who would be putting themselves in danger to enact change, and i don't think we can expect that of people and still call ourselves feminists

as i said, i am willing to enact the change even singlehandedly if i have to (but I won't have to, thankfully, because there are many feminists out there who can and do speak up far more coherently than i ever could). the last thing i want is add to a sex worker's burdens by requiring them to further the feminist agenda from a place of need and vulnerability. it's as absurd and as out of touch as expecting this same level of social involvement from women who are illiterate or work in a sweatshop 24/7 or find themselves in abusive relationships/marriages

it's just odd, honestly, because from the turn liberal feminism is taking nowadays, i only see sex work depicted as something empowering for the people involved. speaking against it, even as an outsider, gets you branded as a "radfem" or "swerf", which i am not. similarly, speaking of sex workers in very pitiful victimizing tones, portraying them as people who would rather be doing anything else with their life, also gets you that type of treatment, which is why i never would have dared saying most sex workers hate doing sw on my own. i wouldn't just put that thought out there, because I've never been into it myself. im only opening myself to that discussion now solely because you guys have come forward in my inbox to talk about your own firsthand experiences and they've all been pretty harrowing, so far.

so this begs the question. can a feminist be pro sex workers but anti sex work, do you figure? idk, im anti work in general, as i believe everyone should employ their free time however they see fit without having to constantly worry about rent, and the state should take care of covering your needs by hypertaxing the rich, but in feminist online spaces you can't just say you're anti sex work or you'll be labeled as a swerf. so i just don't. i am pro anything that women choose to do freely. the point is, are women ever free to choose their preferred career path in a sexist world where gender pay gap, sexist double standards, gender roles and female unemployment are a thing? hence why the fight for a more equal society is a fight that benefits us all. and if i may be completely blatantly honest with you right now... yes, i firmly believe that in a system that's not so rotten and broken, in a system where women actually get valued for more than just their bodies, in such a system we wouldn't have as many sex workers as we do now

#ask #anon #anonymous

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bluetomorrows · 2 years

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How Sailor Moon changed my life

Moon Prism Power, Make Up!

So in Grade 11, I had this project in sociology class about homophobia. I wanted to get a somewhat objective example across cultures. Here's how gay people are perceived in one culture vs another. If I just chose 2 random examples there could be arguments made about context and other factors influencing it. I ended up settling on Sailor Moon. Comparing the original Japanese dub to the 90s dubs that removed all references to the gay characters being gay. I think I did a pretty good job on the paper, I explained well how gay people are treated in Japanese media against American media, using the exact same show. I got a good mark. But afterwards, I was still a little interested in the show.

So I thought "Fuck it, I'll watch a little Sailor Moon, even just to check that that paper was completely accurate". I wasn't sure how to feel about it at first. The protagonist was a bumbling idiot, the episodes were formulaic, the plot moved at a snail's pace, and was just generally a little childish and absurd.

But for whatever reason, I kept watching it. At a slow pace mind you, an episode here, 2 episodes there. And now, much much later, I am watching the fourth season of the show and I really love it.

The thing about rain is that eventually, it always ends

I started watching Sailor Moon at a very important time in my life. Something I rarely see when discussing transitioning is the effects being socialized as a boy has on it. When you're a boy, you're essentially trained to hate femininity and women. Well, not necessarily hate women but hate the idea of acting like a woman. You're taught that women are weak irrational creatures. They're selfish and cruel and only pretend to have empathy and compassion. Obviously, when you write it out like this you can see that it's a misogynistic lie, but most men won't write it out. Even if they respect women and try to treat them as equals, a lot of men they're still subconsciously thinking something similar to this, just a little. There is nothing worse to be than someone feminine.

So when you come out as a woman you might have an internal crisis, again, maybe just subconsciously. You know you're a woman but, being a woman is bad right? I don't want to be weak and irrational. The only gauge you have on being a woman is what you feel inside your heart, and what you've been socialized to believe about women. It can be very confusing.

Sailor Moon came to me during this time of crisis. Sailor Moon is not ashamed of its femininity. And it also doesn't think feminity is this one thing some people want to pin it down as. There are a variety of women represented here. More masculine women, more feminine women, queer women, maternal women, non-binary women, a very wide range of women. All of them are distinctly feminine, but not any better or worse than each other because there is no right or wrong way to be a woman.

I love how every Sailor Moon character feels very unique and distinct. It's obviously just a part of good writing but it also helped show me what it's actually like to be around other girls, they aren't a monolith.

There's a trend in a lot of media to make the badass women masculine. You can't be an action hero without also being a tomboy (Not to say there is anything wrong with being a tomboy, just that the idea that you need to be one to be cool or powerful is dumb). The women in Sailor Moon are powerful not in spite of their femininity, but because of it.

Not powerful and women, they're powerful women.

It's a very long intimate exploration of a group of friends. Women who love and support each other through everything, not because of any romantic interest (shipping aside), but just because of their deep connections to each other. As someone who at this point in my life has experienced both male friendships and female friendships, there is definitely a difference. Not to say one is better or worse than another, they just have a different flavour.

I hope it doesn't seem here like I'm implying an inherent difference between men and women. Just because of a lot of cultural and historical factors (that I, someone blogging about Sailor Moon do not have the time to go into) femininity and masculinity are two different things, both associated with gender. Of course, these are social constructs but a lot of people identify with the construct so yeah.

These women can and will kill God

Anyways, their friendship is important to all of them. Our connections are all that we have in this world, but that isn't a bad thing, it's beautiful. It's a beautiful friendship, one that can stay strong with little issues over the course of 5 seasons. Of course, they'll occasionally bump heads, and feel free to tell Usagi when she's making an incredibly dumb impulsive decision, but it's not out of a place of malice or resentment. At the end of the day, they always have each other's backs.

I think Usagi herself is one of my favourite aspects of the show. She's lazy, she's VERY emotional, she eats a lot, and she gets very low marks in school. So over the course of 5 seasons, we slowly get to see Usagi grow out of these aspects and become greater.

Just kidding! Usagi does not change. Well, at least she doesn't change these aspects of herself. That's the thing about her character. She's not ashamed of who she is. You may see this as a fault when she gets in trouble for poor marks at school, but when we see her be the only one in the group to absolutely refuse to give up on Hotaru you realize that's what is so great about her. Usagi may not be able to do algebra or clean her room, but at the end of the day, she's incredibly emotionally intelligent and resilient. And that's okay. You don't need to be perfect, even in the areas where Usagi fails. I see this as a pretty bold decision. Lazy, not traditionally intelligent, are these really the traits you want to give your main character? Especially in a show where they're expected to save the world? But they pulled it off really well. Usagi is perfect just the way she is.

Just a couple besties hanging out

Now I'll be the first to admit that this series is not perfect. Despite all the praise I've given it for how it handles feminine dynamics, I think that's mostly cause of the amazing groundwork set for the mostly male anime staff by the female Sailor Moon creator, Naoko Takeuchi. Because of that male staff, there are a couple sexist moments sprinkled in there. On top of that while I do like how they use filler to expand characters, not all of the many filler episodes are winners. Some are just filler.

But despite all of that I still love Sailor Moon. It occupies a very special place in my heart, and I can truly say that watching it has changed my life

Feels like a curse

Sounds like a dream

Don't know what it means

But it means everything

#sailor moon #anime #trans #transisbeautiful #mtf

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maboroshi-no · 3 years

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Hamefura LN11 Moments: JeffreyxSusanna

While reading Hamefura Light Novel Volume 11, I wrote some summary / quick translations of some moments.

Here is the JeffreyxSusanna moment in the book.

Context:

Sarah has attacked Katarina during the day

Susanna / Larna has used her wind magic against Dewey’s father to stop him from beating his children

Susanna / Larna have made arrangements so that all of Dewey’s siblings could move into the houses for Ministry’s employees

I, Susanna Randall, also called Larna Smith in the Ministry of Magic, after taking care of the formalities for the move of the Percy siblings and making my report to the Ministry of Magic, was finally heading to where my fiancé, associate and supporter, Jeffrey Stuart, was. After knocking on the door and requesting permission to enter,

Jeffrey: "Please come in~~"

He replied with his usual carefree voice.

Susanna: "I am coming in."

When I entered the room, Jeffrey was sitting at his desk, checking some documents. Jeffrey may look happy-go-lucky and unmotivated but his work is quick and accurate. The person himself doesn't seek it at all, but there are voices recommending him to be the next king. He also has the capabilities to make people accept him.

Susanna: "I sent you a notice earlier, but I have come to give you the fully completed report."

As I said this, I handed over the document. Jeffrey casually took it and looked over it, flipping the pages.

Jeffrey: "Hmm... It is mostly what was written in the previous report. Still, Lady Katarina seems to get involved in lots of incidents. Like she is cursed."

Susanna: "Yes, I agree. However the person himself does not seem to feel that way at all."

Whether it is the orphanage incident from before or the kidnapping incident from even before, at the center of the disturbance there always seems to be Katarina who somehow got involved in them. And despite all this, the person himself always leaves unscathed, cheerful and unconcerned. This is just worrisome. I am worried, but the people who hold her dear must be even more so.

Susanna: "For the time being, I gave Lady Katarina a calling magic tool. I also told her to properly use her dark familiar. It is up to her, though."

The dark familiar who lives inside Katarina's shadow can transform into a gigantic wolf. If she used it, it would be an extremely strong ally. However, Katarina considers her dark familiar as a pet so when she is in trouble she forgets to summon it. This is just like her, but if she doesn't summon it when she really is in danger, her strong familiar will be wasted.

Jeffrey: "Let's consider giving her a guard working from the shadows if by any chance we decide that she is really in danger. There is a possibility that Duke Claes already gave her one, so I am confirming this."

After he said this, Jeffrey raised some documents towards me. And then

Jeffrey: "Even so, it seems like you didn't keep your calm this time."

He said this lowering his eyebrows a little.

Susanna: "Yes, I am aware of this."

It was about Dewey Percy's father. I rashly used magic on a civilian outside. I was well aware that this act would cause problems. But I couldn't stop myself at that time.

Susanna: "This man was treating his children horribly, considering them as tools. When I saw it, I felt the blood rushing to my head."

I have been living without paying much attention to things which are not related to magic. But there is this one thing. I can't forgive parents who treat their children as tools. It is because of how I was raised. My father, Marquis Randall, is a man who is not interested in anything but raising his social position. For Marquis Randall, his children are tools he can use to get ahead or get profits. He thinks the same of his wives. To get more and more tools, Marquis Randall married lots of women and had them give him children. As a result, there is no love in our family. My dead mother was Marquis Randall's legal wife. It is because she was a woman with a high social position who could be used. She ceased to be useful when her body broke, so Marquis Randall lost interest in her and kept her away. She left this world without Marquis Randall seeing her. Since I was little, I was smart, I behaved as Marquis Randall wanted and was appointed as the fiancée of a prince. But when my mother died, it became absurd to continue to do as Marquis Randall said and I stopped listening to him completely. Marquis Randall has hated me since then, always saying I am a hindrance he wished he could erase. However, since I am engaged to Jeffrey, he can't do it. He proposed another daughter to Jeffrey, but I can still do as I please even now. It may be because I am greatly fed up with this man, but I just hate parents like that. It makes me want to kill them. Jeffrey, who knows my circumstances, said

Jeffrey: "It can't be helped then."

while shrugging his shoulders.

Susanna: "...I investigated it a little afterwards but they truly were horrible parents."

That mother too was horrible. All she did was give birth to children, and once this was done she would just toss the newborn to her other children and go back to playing around. The father was gambling and drinking, and the mother was greatly enjoying playing around with men. I am fairly sure that the children there were not all the father's.

Susanna: "Even so, these siblings were all living every day helping each other."

Desperately supporting each other, the older brother called Rory was desperately protecting his younger siblings.

Susanna: "...He was so different from me."

I have several siblings coming from different mothers but I lived on without interacting much with them. Because of this, I don't really know them. Even I, who was the child of his legal wife, was treated this way. There was no way my other siblings were treated decently. They were all made to follow Marquis Randall's whims. And now, even though I am aware of it I can't do anything about it. It has been several years now, I have borrowed Jeffrey's strength and built my own but I still can't stop Marquis Randall.

Susanna: "...I am so powerless."

I looked at my hands and let out these words. "I want to live by my own strength". The figure of my half-sister crying out these words appeared in my mind and my feelings sunk. And then he pulled my head towards him.

Jeffrey: "You can't yet but you'll keep getting stronger. This is why we're working so hard, right?"

Jeffrey said this while holding me in his arms. Against his warm and large chest, I was completely enveloped by a familiar scent. My sunken feelings rose up little by little.

Susanna: "...You're right. Thank you."

As I said this, Jeffrey gently stroked my head. And then I borrowed his chest for a short while.

#hamefura #bakarina #my next life as a villainess: all routes leads to doom #susanna randall #larna smith #Jeffrey Stuart

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beeexx · 2 years

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Because all queer men are to you are entertainment. Fuck you, fetishizing bitch.

Wow okay. So let’s begin this lil ask by me actually laughing at the absurdity of this????? Like you whoever you are hiding behind the anonymous icon slid into my dms and made a presumption about me and called me a bitch????? What?? Did that ACTUALLY happen?? 😂😂😂

Second. You know I think fair criticism or just conversations about things you might disagree on is a good thing. We learn from talking respectfully to each other. I’d be happy to have a conversation about fetishisation of mlm ships in fandom (also wlw let’s be honest) because I agree this can be an issue but I also think you have to be mindful that fetishisation, is often done, (but not only) by straight women who hyperfixate on mlm which stems from how women’s bodies as well as their sexuality and desire is policed and have been suppressed by patriarchal social structures for a long time, still is too. It doesn’t make fetishisation okay but it gives you a framework to begin untangling and to begin to understand why it happens. Instead try to have a talk about how women (and non binary and queer people) can be given safe and respectful ways to discover their own sexuality while also acknowledging where this stems from. This is a broader conversation for sure and there are so many aspects to consider but I don’t want to get too bogged down with details so moving on.

Ok my third point. I’m assuming you came at me for this post (https://beeexx.tumblr.com/tagged/if%20it%20doesn’t%20happen%20then%20that’s%20definitely%20not%20true%20to%20their%20characters)

I’m on my phone and it is late and it won’t let me add the link so don’t come at me again for this lol. ANYWAY, I will offer an explanation for this as my original post was so misconstrued apparently. I’m not even a big blog in this fandom, like I am inconsistent so no one pays attention to lil me which is why I never get a lot of notifications. Now, I made this post in a little jokey kind of way I will admit that, though I also think this would fit the characterisation of them as characters and where they are now. Last time in season 2 when they were on call where Carlos says “firefighters you really are a smug bunch” “you love it” they were all flirty and comfortable around each other. The trailer sets up next week’s episode as very serious and parts of it might be though I think the baseball game will be fun and lighthearted with a lot of banter for all the characters, both from the police and the firefighters. Now a potential set up for tarlos is just that they jokingly trash talk each other like the rest of the team only to realise that nah being close and kissing is a much better way to spend our time here. Now this is a couple that has been through a lot recently who are stronger now and finally together after months apart. It would make sense that some of that honeymoon period magic would slip back into their daily lives and going without the other’s touch for so long makes them act a little silly around each other. Who knows? 🤷🏻‍♀️

I’m gonna leave it at this now and just say this, it is incredibly rude to attack people on the internet in this aggressive tone. It’s scary too that people think they have the liberty to call people they don’t know a bitch out of the blue in a way that feels aimed to be disrespectful and just to hurt. I hope you have a life outside of this website, I really do because yikes this is pathetic. Anyway I hope you have a good day anyway and think more carefully next time before jumping into someone’s dms writing hateful messages.

Peace✌🏻

#tarlos #fandom #tk x carlos #911 lone star #personal

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boxlunches · 4 years

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Tiger King was a fucking experience to say the least and I binged it all today, and like everyone else I was darkly, absurdly entertained in my shock. But holy shit I absolutely regret checking social media’s thoughts on it before going to bed. I hadn’t been in on the memes and discussions prior to watching. I gotta vent y’all.

Whiiiile it’s certainly fun to get swept up together in a story that is just so batshit crazy in a surreal time when all of us are gripped by fear, the grand takeaway that so many people got from this documentary is disturbing honestly.

I feel distressed that I have to explain that the conversation surrounding Carole Baskin is dripping with violent misogyny. There’s a way to hate on someone awful without making disgusting remarks about their sex. Carole Baskin is unlikeable, sketchy, and probably terrible - and yeah, QUITE POSSIBLY a murderer. Do not trust her at all myself, especially after hearing from her late husband’s family about her bullshit.

But guys. You just watched a seven hour documentary about a foul-mouthed, racist, predatory, violent man who could not relinquish his murderous obsession to the point that on his frequent internet show he was abusing a blow-up doll and calling it Carole, posting memes about her genitals, and making very colorful public death threats.

And you want to parrot that guy’s words, “that bitch Carole Baskin,” essentially continuing his violent misogynist legacy, because lol the memes you guys the meeeeemes. And he’s gay so it’s fine and she’s a bitch so whatever! Except after the first couple of times it stops being some meta commentary about Joe Exotic’s ridiculous paranoia and instead circles right back around to straight up misogyny, because all people are getting is that she’s “that bitch.”

Which is to say nothing of the people who *genuinely* believe that she was the worst person among all the crime lords on Tiger King. When Joe Exotic wasn’t being a gun-happy prick around his employees and blowing shit up (which I’m sure was a delight to the stressed out and abused animals on his property), he was snatching baby tigers away from their moms seconds after birth, shooting at least five other tigers in the head, and OH, busy preying on young men fresh out of high school and keeping them drugged and confined on his land.

Incoming Tangent: The predatory, grooming, cult shit going on with Joe and his meth-addicted “husbands” is stomach-churning. Travis’s story fucked me up and I’m still reeling over the fact that Netflix showed real security footage of a person reacting to his suicide/or accidental death without any warning. There’s a few major things like that that make me question how responsible this documentary’s handling was. Honestly the creators of the documentary seem a little gross too.

And there’s just so much more, I can’t go over all the fucked up people in this show, it’s a shock a minute lol (although special honorable mention to absolute human shitstain Doc Antle who keeps a harem of young women and coerces them into getting breast implants and fucking him for promotions). BUT THE POINT I’M TRYING TO MAKE IS

Look, I get it. It’s pretty obvious that people are latching on to the Carole thing because it’s easier and safer to riff on some absurd crime we don’t know was technically committed. For a lot of people dunking on Carole is just adopting the absurd costume of Joe Exotic for a minute and having cynical fun while the world spirals out of control. And that’s fine. Make your memes about her slathering her piece of shit first husband in salmon oil and feeding him to a tiger, question her sketch business practices and shitty priorities, fine cool whatever. I know people also target her because of all the villains in a show of villains, she seems to not get any comeuppance at all, and we all want to know what’s happening there. That’s why she was the first name I looked up, after all.

But a bunch of other people? Genuinely they just watched a show overflowing with despicable behavior, and instead of shaking their heads at the whole lot of them, they felt inclined to believe every bit of shit that came out of Joe Exotic’s mouth about Carole and her business. Even after they watched Joe threaten to shoot a tiger between the eyes for acting like a wild animal. Even after they watched Joe prey on a high school graduate and then talk at length about his genitals to his grieving family at his funeral. Even after all else, because our society’s misogyny runs so fucking deep, those viewers felt compelled to take up Joe’s lunatic crusade to put the head of “that bitch Carole Baskin” in a jar.

Instead of giving any kind of shit about tigers.

#tiger king #not trying to ruin anyone’s fun #just fuckin tired like everyone else #what a shitshow eh #keep posting pics like that jet ski guy #that’s the vibe we need

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kuromichad · 3 years

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different subject that’s heavy on my mind rn but since i’m already being harsh let’s get into it. i wish it wasn’t automatically presumed to be some kind of truscum attitude when someone tries to express that different parts of The Trans Community have like, different needs and different risk levels and different experiences and that we have the ability to talk over each other, harm each other, etc... like when i put it that way people generally are like ‘of course that’s true!’ but is it ever really understood in practice? a number of people (not a large enough number, but still) are able to loosely understand ‘you can be trans and transphobic’ when it’s applied to the matter of transmisogyny but when a trans person tries to express distrust of or frustration with afab nb people due to how common it is that that category of person will, despite being trans/nb, espouse bioessentialist, anti-medical-transition, radfem-adjacent if not outright cryptoterf rhetoric, suddenly ‘trans people can be transphobic’ gets applied to... the person with a complaint about transphobia.

because he’s clearly an evil truscum man! regardless of if the person making the complaint is a trans man or trans woman, oops, lol. he’s a bad person who is attacking and invalidating and totally hatecriming the heckin’ valid, equally at-risk transgender identity of “an afab woman who isn’t a woman except when she pointedly categorizes themself as a woman because being afab makes them a woman who is ‘politically aligned’ with women but she’s not an icky unwoke cis woman because they don’t like being forced into womanhood although Really When You Think About It 🤔 all women are dysphoric because obviously the pathologized medical diagnosis of gender dysphoria in transgender people is something that equally applies to cis women just default existing under patriarchy 🤔, and no, equating these things totally does not imply anything reductive about or add a bizarre moral dimension to the idea of being transgender, whaaaaat, this woman who isn’t a woman doesn’t think there’s anything immoral or cowardly or misogynist or delusional about being transgender, they would never say that because THEY’RE transgender, except when she feels it’s important (constantly) to make clear that she’s Still A Woman Deep Down Inherently Despite Not Identifying As One, and none of this ever has any effect on how they treat the concept, socially and politically, of people who actually wholly identify with (and possibly medically transition to) a gender different from the one they were assigned at birth, be it ‘the opposite gender’ or abstaining from binary gender altogether or ‘politically aligning’ with the ‘opposite’ gender from their asab. never ever!”

and like maybe that sounds like a completely absurd and hateful strawman to you! but in that case you’re either like, lucky, or optimistic, or ignorant. i’m literally not looking at random nb people and declaring that in My Truscum Opinion they’re ‘really a woman’ just because they’re not medically transitioning or meeting some arbitrary standard of mine. i am looking at self-identified afab nb people, who most often use she/they because, y’know, words mean things, especially pronouns, so people who are willingly ‘aligned with womanhood’ typically intentionally use she/her (sorry that i guess that’s another truscum take now!!! that pronouns mean things!!! the bigender transmasc who deliberately uses exclusively he/him wants it to invoke a perception he’s comfortable with!), who actively say the things listed above (in a non-sarcastic manner).

like, the line between a person who says “i don’t claim to really not be my asab because i know no one would ever perceive me as anything else” because theyve internalized a defeatist attitude due to societal transphobia, and a person who says that because they... genuinely believe it’s impossible/ridiculous/an imposition to truly be transgender (in the traditional trans sense, beyond a vague nb disidentification with gender) and are actively contributing to the former person’s self loathing... is hard to define from a distance! i think plenty of people who are, in a sense, ‘tentative’ or like ‘playing close to home’ so to speak in their identity are ‘genuinely trans’ (whatever that may mean) and just going through a process. they might arrive at a different identity or might just eventually stop saying/believing defeatist stuff, who knows. but there are enough people saying it for the latter reason, or at least not caring if they sound that way, that it’s like, dangerous. it is actively incredibly harmful to other trans people. and it’s fucking ridiculous that it’s so difficult to criticize because you’ll always get the defense of “umm but i’m literally trans” and/or “well i’m just talking about ME, this doesn’t apply to other trans people” when it’s an attitude that very clearly seeps into their politics and the way they discuss gender.

because it’s just incredibly common for afab nb people (most typically those that go by she/they! since i’m aware that uh, i am also afab nb, but we clearly are extremely different, so that’s the best categorization i’ve got) to discuss gender in moralized terms, with the excuse of patriarchy/misogyny existing, which of course adds another difficult dimension to trying to criticize this because it gets the response of “don’t act like misandry is real” (it’s not, but being a dick still is) and “boohoo, let women complain about their oppressors” (this goes beyond ‘complaining’). a deliberate revocation of empathy/sympathy/compassion from men and projection of inherently malicious/brutish/cruel intent onto men (not solely in the justified generalizations ‘men suck/are dangerous’, but in specific interactions too) underpin a whole fucking lot of popular posts/discussions online, whether they’re political or casual/social, and it absolutely influences how people conceptualize and feel about transness.

because ‘maleness is evil’ is still shitty politics even when you’ve slightly reframed it from the terf ‘trans women are evil because they’re Really Men and can never escape being horrific soulless brutes just as women can never escape being fragile morally superior flowers’ to the tumblr shethey “trans women who are out to me/unclockable are tolerable i guess because they’re women and women are good; anyone i personally presume to be a cis man, though, is still automatically evil, and saying trans men are Just As Bad is progressive of me, and it’s totally unrelated and apolitical that i think we should expand the concept of afab lesbianism so broadly that you can now be basically indistinguishable from trans men on literally every single level except for a declaration of ‘but i would never claim to be a man because i’m secure in the Innate Womanhood of the body i was born into, even as i medically alter that body because it causes me great gendered discomfort.’ none of this at all indicates that i feel there’s an immense moral/political gap between being an afab nb lesbian vs a straight trans man! it says nothing at all about my concept of ‘maleness’ and there’s no way this rhetoric bleeds into my perception of trans women and no way loudly talking about all this could keep trans people around me self-loathing and closeted, because i’m Literally Trans and Not A Terf!”

again, if that sounds like a hateful strawman, sorry but it’s not. i guess i’m supposed to be like ‘all of the many people ive seen saying these shitty things is an evil outlier who Doesn’t Count, and it’s not fair to the broad identity of afab shethey to not believe that every person who doesn’t outright say terfy enough things is a perfectly earnest valid accepting trans person who’s beyond criticism’ but like. this cannot be about broad validation. this can’t be about discarding all the bad apples as not really part of the group. we can’t be walking on eggshells to coddle what are essentially, in the end, Cis Feelings, because in the best cases this kind of rhetoric comes from naive people who are early and uncertain in their gender journey or whatever and are in the process of unraveling internalized transphobia, and in the easily observable worst cases these people are very literally redefining shit so that ‘actually all afab women are trans, spiritually, all afabs have dysphoria, we are all Equally oppressed by Males uh i mean cis men <3’ because, let’s be honest, they know that the moment they call themselves trans they get to say whatever they want about gender no matter how harmful it is to the rest of us. and those ideas spread like wildfire through the afab shethey “woman that’s not a woman” community that frankly greatly outnumbers other types of trans people online, because many of those people just do not have the experiences that lead you to really understand this shit and have to push back against concepts of gender that actively harm you as a trans person.

like that’s all i want to be able to say, is Things Are Different For Different Groups. and a willful ignorance of these differences leads to bad rhetoric controlling the overall discourse which gets people hurt. and even when concepts arise from it that seem positive and helpful and inclusive, in practice or in origin those ideas can still be upholding shit that gets other people hurt. like, i don’t doubt that many people are very straightforwardly happy and comfortable with an identity like ‘afab nb lesbian on testosterone’ and it would be ridiculous and hypocritical for me, ‘afab nb who wants to pass as a guy so he can comfortably wear skirts again,’ to act like that’s something that can’t or shouldn’t exist. it’s not about the identity itself, it’s about the politics that are popular within its community, and how the use of identities as moral labels with like, fucking pokemon type interactions for oppression effectiveness which directly informs the moral correctness of your every opinion and your very existence, is a shitty practice that gets people hurt and leads us to revoke empathy from each other.

like. sorry this is all over the place and long and probably still sounds evil because i haven’t thought through and disclaimered every single statement. but i’m like exhausted from living with this self-conscious guilt that maybe i’ve turned into a horrible evil truscum misogynist etc etc due to feeling upset by this seemingly inescapable approach to gender in lgbt/online circles that like, actively harms me, because when i vent with my friends all the stuff i’ve tried to explain here gets condensed down to referencing ‘she/theys’ as a category and that feels mean and generalizing and i genuinely dislike generalizations but the dread i feel about that category gets proven right way too often. it’s just like. this is not truscum this is not misgendering this is not misogyny. this is not about me decreeing that all transmascs have to be manly enough or dysphoric enough and all nbs have to be neatly agender and androgynous or something, i’m especially not saying that nb gender isn’t real lmao or even that it’s automatically wrong to partially identify with your asab; this is not me saying you can only medically transition for specific traditional reasons or that you don’t get a say on anything if you aren’t medically transitioning for whatever reason, now or ever. i just. want to be allowed to be frank about how... when there’s different experiences in a community we should like. acknowledge those differences and be willing to say that sometimes people don’t know what they’re talking about or that what they’re saying is harmful. without the primary concern being whether people will feel invalidated by being told so. because these are like, real issues, that are more important than politely including everyone, because that method is just getting vulnerable people drowned out constantly.

#source on much of this: existing as a transmasc on tumblr for years and years.#i stopped identifying as any sort of 'woman-aligned' pretty much right before the ridiculous 'all afabs are dysphoric' stuff #but it sure did still make me hate myself and feel like a silly cowardly ugly little girl for wanting to transition!#and back when i WAS a she/they i definitely was falling for 'men are bad maleness is bad always inherently :)' rhetoric #not in the modern form outlined above but in the like. brainlessly parroted from 'baeddel tumblr' form #which was still like 'you can escape being a Bad Person by either becoming or admitting you are a girl :)'#and the only acknowledgment of trans men in this ideology was like. 'well i guess they feel like they have to do that :\'#'too bad for them. im not saying they shouldnt transition but you know. men suck though <3'#it was bad for me it was bad for other people so im saying from experience. Fucking cut it out! the end

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thefudge · 4 years

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Do you have any Romanian (language or just content-wise) media recs? Particularly novels and poetry but really any must-sees/must-reads are welcome!

uuuu!

my brain is too fried right now to do any kind of exhaustive list so i’m gonna rec a few things that i know you could get your hands on/available in translation:

for two thousand years, by mihail sebastian - really heartbreaking yet also lucid, adventurous and darkly humorous memoir of a Jewish writer in his youth at the height of nazism in romania (there’s even a Penguin classic of it)

diary of a short-sighted adolescent by mircea eliade - a funny and bittersweet bildungsroman about a bookish teenager who wants to read everything now and be the cleverest person alive while also struggling with being super lazy and unmotivated because he’s young and restless, it’s very #relatable. but it’s also fascinating to read this in opposition with “for two thousand years” because eliade entertained legionnaire nazi sympathies at one point. (also, you should check out his novellas too, especially the fantastic ones)

anything you can find in translation by gabriela adamesteanu - just lovely, delicate prose about growing up, being an adult, inhabiting your body and your feelings in an oppressive world

the hatchet by mihail sadoveanu (apparently, there is a translation) - a lot of people give this novel flak, mostly because we had to read it in high school, but it’s a great and deceptively simple little novel that says a lot more about people than it cares to admit. the action takes you through several villages in the East-Carpathians, where a peasant woman goes in search of her missing husband. it’s a fascinating mixture of crime and folklore and mythology.

any novella by costache negruzzi, but especially “alexandru lapusneanu”, another classic we had to read in school and which gets a lot of flak. it’s so bonkers and #quality-trash. let’s just say there’s a scene where the power-hungry voievod/prince lapusneanu enacts a red-wedding situation and builds a pyramid of freshly severed heads to impress his lady wife *swoon*

the forest of the hanged by liviu rebreanu - i know people argue this isn’t his best novel, but it’s got the most heart. it’s the story of a soldier/philosopher in WW1 who falls in love with people again. that’s it. he falls in love with people, and the war and everything in between doesn’t matter anymore. or it matters only as it pertains to people, and people alone.

gallants of the old court by mateiu caragiale - a bizarre gem of early 20th century Romanian nightlife, a wonderful, orgiastic fugue, feverish and infuriating. it’s mostly about rich men and social-climbers getting into existential trouble, but also into real trouble. normally, because the action takes place right before WW1, this would signify the end of an era. but we don’t really have a beginning or end. we are part-balkan, part-french imitators, part-whatever-sticks. nothing moves us, and everything does. and that’s why it’s a sort of love/hate letter to romanians

in terms of poetry, some personal faves: nichita stanescu, ana blandiana, monica pillat, marin sorescu, a.e. baconsky, lucian blaga, emil brumaru, nora iuga, marta petreu, nina cassian. and yes, mihai eminescu, our national poet, though i’m often in two minds about him.

poetry in translation is really hit and miss because of the “untranslatable”, so here’s two lines from a poem by nina cassian, because i want to show you what i mean:

De când m-ai părăsit mă fac tot mai frumoasă ca hoitul luminând în întuneric.

this roughly and poetically translates to:

Since you left me I’ve grown more beautiful

like the corpse lighting the dark

and this is sort of lovely on its own, but you’d need to know and hear and taste the word “hoit” in romanian to really feel the abjectness, because “hoit” is a smelly, ugly yet also alluring, already decomposing version of “cadavru” aka cadaver/corpse. also “ mă fac tot mai frumoasă” cannot be accurately summed up in “i’ve grown more beautiful”. a literal translation would be “I make myself more beautiful”. in romanian, this is obviously idiomatic and not literal. and yet, these strange self-reflexive valences make these lines strong and eerie, as if the speaker were authoring her beauty, shaping it out of clay and darkness and “hoit”, like a butterfly cracking the corpse’s shell to get out, but also retaining some of its mesmerizing stench. why did i pause to do a close-reading of romanian poetry??? anyway, you catch my drift

in terms of movies, a recent one i really loved was sierranevada by cristi puiu, which is a neurotic family drama that drains you but also lifts you up

and yeah, the hype is real, 4 months, 3 weeks and 2 days by cristi mungiu really is that good (about two young women trying to get an illegal abortion in communist romania. it won the palme d’or for very legit reasons. it breaks you in small ways. the very last shot of the film you’ll carry with you forever). i also liked graduation by cristi mungiu, where a young overachieving girl is about to graduate high school and go on to study abroad, until a terrible event unmoors both her and her family. the movie turns almost hallucinatory at one point, filled with ambiguity and a kind of sleep-walking quality

tales from the golden age by cristi mungiu (him again!) is also fantastic for anyone who wants to get a taste of communist romania and the sad-funny absurdities of everyday life. this movie is split in 2 parts and the format is that of an anthology, almost like watching several short films at once. and there is one film in the anthology that always turns me inside out, and it’s really silly, it’s this bonnie and clyde type story about this girl and boy who meet at a party and devise an ingenious get-rich scam and just run around a few neighborhoods trying to put it into practice and it’s...the sweetest, most incomplete thing. there is such a strange, lovely connection there that never gets realized, and there is a MOMENT between them where he helps her step down from this ledge and he holds her briefly to him and i remember being in the cinema and thinking THIS, this is THE MOMENT where i felt these people were real. it was such an honest, lovely moment. like the equivalent of this song. ANYWAY, why am i rambling so much??? this ask was supposed to be SHORT.

aferim! by radu jude is also a really neat movie and provides a look into the historical romanian/rroma relationship and why it’s so messed up, yet also so organic

the death of mr. lazarescu by cristi puiu is also a great little film about a man who gets sick and goes to the hospital. and...dies, as you can tell from the title. on the surface, he dies because of institutional ineptness and a broken healthcare system. at a deeper level, he dies because we no longer know how to help people. various hospital staff in the film do try to help him and fail for various stupid or quietly heartbreaking reasons. it’s a movie about being physically unable to care. there’s indifference, sure, but also this great exhaustion of the human spirit. but the movie is also darkly funny. might not be a great pandemic watch, but then again it might be exactly what you need

there are soooo many other classics in terms of books (morometii by marin preda, for instance, about a patriarch in a small village in the South who slowly realizes the world he used to live in doesn’t have room for him anymore, and maybe it never had) but i’m gonna end on a quote from ion creanga, one of the most cryptic classics of romanian lit:

“Şi eu eram vesel ca vremea cea mai bună şi şturlubatic şi copilăros ca vântul în tulburea sa”

my translation: “and I was cheerful like the best weather and frolicsome and childish like the wind in its cloudiness”

and again, the words in romanian and their particular sound and bite (”şturlubatic”, “tulburea”) immediately take me elsewhere. creanga writes about childhood, but it’s never really childhood. he writes as an adult who, in my opinion, was never really a child, but a weird, small god of the land. i mean the word “tulburea” can mean both “turmoil” and “muddiness”. the wind can be anguished, but also just a little cloudy, just a little hazy, shrinking its agony, howling it in the child. it’s eerie and gorgeous. so, that’s what he does: creanga writes about children as if they were wind-like spirits. he writes stories about devils and the peasants who trick them and school books filled with spit and flies, and warm eggs stolen from nests and fairy-tales of a world that is buried somewhere inside us, but not too deep, things hidden under our clothes or nails or even in our hair. and it’s all so physical and convoluted, just like his prose. and i don’t think anyone will ever make sense of him and that’s what makes him so discombobulatingly great.

anyway, this was supposed to be...like, really short! and not gassy! i’m sorry. i love waxing about all this gay stuff. i’m so gay about it.

realistically tho, the nearest thing you’ll find in your local bookshop is probably books by famous ‘theater of the absurd’ playwright, eugen ionesco, or novels in translation by contemporary author mircea cartarescu. both are pretty good, so go for it! (if you want to start small, i’d recommend REM by mircea cartarescu, because it’s so trippy and meta and captures that summer holiday eeriness so well. it goes well with this romanian song sung in english)

okay byeeeee

#romanian lit #recs #romanian literature #reference #my thoughts #romanian cinema #i hope no actual romanians come across this list and eviscerate me haha #im sorry this is such....MUCH

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cchellacat · 4 years

Text

I Will Be Waiting

Darcy Lewis Bingo

Y1: Soulmate AU

Bucky/Darcy

18+ for some smutterfluff

Darcy never wanted to meet her soulmate, fate has other plans.

Thank you @hawksmagnolia for all your support and help and for the absolutely beautiful cover art/mood board!

Darcy had been coming to New York since she was a kid. She loved the hustle and bustle, the people, the sounds, and the vibrance of the city. When Jane had taken up a teaching position at Columbia she’d been excited, with Jane as a guaranteed roommate she could finally afford to live in the city of her dreams.

It took her a month, applying for jobs to find one but she lucked out and got a great foot in the door at Stark Industries. It only took a year before some wise guy sent her up to act as Stark's assistant for the day; no doubt thinking she’d crash and burn or walk out as every other person had for the last ten years. Not Darcy Lewis, no siree, Darcy Lewis was not a quitter and Tony Stark was an overgrown man child, accustomed to pushing people's buttons till they cracked. Darcy didn’t crack. She pushed back. In less than a month she had Stark’s schedule running like clockwork and Pepper had given her the stamp of approval, promising that she’d be canonised as a saint when she died. Darcy had been walking on cloud nine ever since. Her job was a bit of everything, but surprisingly similar to a lot of what she'd done for Jane, everything from paperwork and coffee to experimental engineering. Her salary rivaled most department heads and she had been able to move into an apartment in the Tower. When Jane had visited Darcy she’d crossed paths with Tony and the two had hit it off. Jane’s funding went from meager to unlimited and she was offered science space at the Tower. All in all, life was good.

One of Darcy’s favourite places in New York was in Central Park. There was a small plaza, in a quiet area of the park, perfect for some sun and picnicking at lunchtime. On a plinth at the far end was a statue. The real mystery though was that no one knew where it had come from. The statue of the man was just over six feet, he appeared to be a soldier, in full uniform from around the second World War. He stood, with one arm reaching out, as though waiting for someone to take his hand. There was no record of it being commissioned, no artist had claimed it. Eventually, the city had simply installed the wide plinth with room for the invisible stranger to stand on and constructed the small plaza since it had become somewhat of a tourist attraction. Many people visited just to get a photograph with the handsome soldier.

As with any good urban legend, a fairly ridiculous story built up around the statue. The most prevalent story was that he’d been a real man, frozen in time and only his soulmate could break the curse and bring him back to life. This was completely absurd, but romance sells and so it was in every tourist book and even had its own following on social media.

Touching the soldier was seen as good luck; people said if you did you’d meet your soulmate within a year. It had such cultural belief that many people ended up saying their first words to each other in this very spot. It was rumoured that Pepper Pots had met Tony Stark here ten years ago while she was on her lunch break and the man had spoken to her for the first time when he was passing through on a date with another woman. Darcy doesn't know if that's true, but she's about ninety-nine percent convinced it’s pretty damn accurate. Her boss has a picture of himself and Pepper in front of the soldier on his desk that he often looked at smugly.

The Searching Soldier was deemed as the perfect place for romantic proposals, first dates, and even the occasional wedding. Darcy had seen her fair share of men and women getting on one knee and popping the question in the last two years since she’d made it her regular lunch spot and she couldn’t help but love this place for that alone. The Searching Soldier had become an icon and a symbol of true love and Darcy’s escape from the constant buzz of the building she worked and lived in.

She crumples up her napkin and grabs her coffee cup and ambles over, throwing the waste in the bin before coming to a stop in front of the statue. She’s been inclined more than once to just climb up the steps and touch him, but she’d never been particularly superstitious or even very desperate to meet the man who will give her his first words. In spite of that, every time she stands here, part of her is really tempted to do it anyway. She’s looked at his face every day for two years, trying to figure out the expression. It doesn’t look hopeful or happy. His eyes are slightly wide, his mouth caught mid-smile, or perhaps on the cusp of speaking a name. He looks, Darcy thinks, both resigned and startled. Some days she thinks he’s saying goodbye instead of hello. Her phone beeps, disturbing her a little from her contemplation and she realises she's going to be late back to work if she doesn't hustle. Throwing one last look at the soldier and his out-stretched hand she hurried off.

Stark’s experimental lab was a perfect example of finely organised chaos. Darcy both hated and loved it. There was certainly never a dull moment with Tony as her boss, but the number of clean up requirements every time an experiment went wrong meant overtime as well as exacting and specially vetted clean up crews to ensure no proprietary research left the building.

It’s getting late but Tony is in the final stages of construction of what he says will be a time machine. Darcy doesn’t want to think about the possible ramifications of such a breakthrough and has already discreetly informed Pepper and the Legal department.

“Hey, pass me the sonic wrench will you?”

Darcy glares at the tools in front of her. She’s half-convinced he makes this stuff up just to mess with her. She randomly grabs an oddly shaped tool and passes it over.

When it happens, Darcy is caught off guard. The machine hums to life in almost the same second that the lab doors are forced open. Tony grabs her and hauls her up onto the pad behind him, his watch enveloping his hand as the repulsor glove activates. There is shouting going on and a gun fires. She’s not afraid to admit that at the moment, panic sets in and she’s hardly coherent of anything other than the feel of Tony's hand in hers before he wrenches it free and then slides something onto her wrist. The next thing she knows, the machine whirs to life, there's a sharp noise like metal on glass and then she's falling.

Silence envelopes her as she hits the ground. The bright light of the lab was gone, replaced with almost total darkness and the scent of damp. She groans, pushing herself up and is thankful when Tony’s twin moan of pain reaches her ears through the dark.

“Tony?”

“You ok, Short Stack?”

“I’m fine, what the hell was that?”

“Time travel without a capsule. A little bumpy, but we managed.”

“Are you freakin’ kidding me?”

“No, why would I?”

“Are you insane? We can’t go experimenting on ourselves.”

“Would you rather we stayed where we were and got shot or kidnapped?”

Darcy glares as Tony’s suit deploys and an ethereal glow emanates from the nanotech.

“How are we meant to get back?”

Tony grins.

“I’m glad you asked. I put a recall device on us both before I launched us out of time.”

“The wristband?”

He nods and moves to check her over.

“You seem alright. How are you feeling? Dizzy?, headache?... how many fingers am I holding up?”

“Ugh, you are not a doctor, Tony. I’m fine. Just jittery.”

“Hmmm, shock, probably. Good, that means they work.”

“Means what works?”

“The wristband isn’t just a tracker, it’s like a bubble of real-time from our timeline, one that travels with us and keeps us from what I theorised could be temporal sickness caused by the jump.”

“So what now?”

“We lay low for a few days, in forty-eight to ninety-six hours the tracker engages and we’re pulled back to our own time. Easy.”

“Sure it is, but what are we meant to do while we wait? Do you know when we are? We don’t have any money and I refuse to stay trapped in this mouldy basement for the next two days.”

Tony looks mildly chagrined before shrugging a little and muttering about him figuring it out. Darcy sighs and follows him. She was putting in for danger pay when she got back. This was above and beyond.

They make their way up through some abandoned tunnels, the air turning colder and colder the higher they climb. When they finally make it to the top Darcy realises they are in a railway tunnel and there is a train coming straight at them. Tony manhandles her for the second time that day and pulls her out of the way. Only his suit saved them from a steep snowy drop into the ravine below.

They’re barely back on their feet when an explosion rips through the air and the side of the train car that almost hit them rips open. Even with the speed it’s going, the unmistakable form of a man falling has Darcy crying in horror. Tony doesn’t hesitate. At that moment he forgets where he is, all that matters is saving a life. He takes off, leaving Darcy safely on the embankment, and flies after the man as the train speeds out of sight.

A shaking and cursing soldier drops in front of her as Tony lands and his suit retracts back into its casing. Darcy is barely processing it all as she stares at the stranger, he looks so familiar. He’s tall, dark-haired with the bluest eyes she’s ever seen. He shouts angrily, accusations flying back and forth as Tony explains who they are. Darcy doesn’t blame him, she wouldn’t believe them either. He does tell them the date though, 1945. She has traveled back in time seventy-five years, they are apparently somewhere in Austria. When he finally gives them a name, Tony winces and Darcy’s ears perk up. She knows that name. She knows it because the man in front of her died a hero, falling to his death from a train just before the end of the war. If they weren’t already white with the cold she’s pretty sure Tony would be turning transparent. How the hell do you tell someone they’re dead and have been for seventy-five years? Yeah, it goes down about as well as you’d think. Darcy suddenly sneezes and the sound of her teeth chattering stops both of the men mid-argument. It’s the first time the guy finally looks at her, his eyes seem to widen and then he’s whipped off his coat and swept it around her.

“We can’t stay out here, we have to get off this mountain and back to base.” He addresses Tony. Darcy almost wants to punch him for the rudeness of ignoring her even as she pulls the warm coat around her tightly, savouring the comforting warmth.

“What do you not get about you’re dead? You can’t go back, you can never go back!” Tony punctuates each point with a finger jab at Sergeant Barnes, she grabs his hand to stop him. Barnes looks about one more jab away from knocking Tony out.

“Tony, we still have to get out of here and somewhere sheltered. We don’t know how long we have before we go back and we can’t just leave the Sergeant without any help either. Maybe he can’t go back, but there must be something we can do to help him, right?”

Tony looks at her grudgingly and nods.

“Okay, I’ve got a plan. We get back to the base, I go in alone and talk to Howard. We fly to New York and I’ll make sure Barnes here gets set up with a new identity and a job.”

Darcy smiles as brightly as possible at Barnes.

“See? A whole new start, it’ll be great!”

Barnes's eyes widen for a moment before he bites out the words she had been dreading to hear her whole life.

“I won’t leave Steve!”

To be fair, he looks almost apologetic the second after they came out of his mouth but Darcy closes up and Tony growls.

“What did you just say?”

Barnes raises his hands shaking his head, looking beseechingly at Darcy.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean it like that, I just-”

“Have you got any idea the damage those words have done to her you selfish neanderthal?”

Tony had seen her words once, completely by accident. They’d had to go through decontamination after a spill in the lab, the showers hadn’t left much room for modesty. Her words crawled up the small of her back, just below the rise of her jeans. After that, the older man had been stupidly attentive and protective of her. She’d honestly never expected to encounter her soulmate like this, and especially not with Tony in tow. Tony who knew more of her secrets than anyone other than Jane.

Barnes' face at Tony’s accusation was bitterly remorseful. His eyes flashed to Darcy, boring into her own deeply, seeing the hurt and rejection she’d lived with her whole life. He stepped towards her, his lips parted, she wanted to say something, but any words she could have said were swiftly cut as Tony pushed him back and away from Darcy.

“I said I’m sorry!” his voice is harsh and Darcy thinks she can almost see the threads as he unravels. “But I can’t leave Steve, he needs my help, he’ll get himself killed if I’m not there-”

Tony gabs Barnes and shakes him.

“Rogers lives. You died and Captain America carried on, did just fine without you. You going back, being alive? That could change all of history and just might get your friend killed. Do you want to do that? Risk the future just to butt in where you’re no longer needed?”

Tony’s words were scathing and sharp but no less true for the content.

“Tony! That’s enough….” she turns to Barnes. “Look, I’m sorry this happened, but you were meant to die, it must feel like your life has been turned upside down, I know. But it’s better than actually being dead, right?”

His eyes settle on her and he shakes his head, she suddenly wants to be anywhere but here. He looks lost and afraid and she can’t help but feel this is her fault.

“Better than being dead? I can’t see my best friend ever again and my soul mate is going back to the future. I’m going to be alone for the rest of my life, I’m over the fuckin moon.”

She recoils like a blow has been struck. He’s angry, of course, he is. She is too. This should never have happened. It’s not fair, but if there is one thing she’d learned in life it’s that it is never fair. She’s toe to toe with him, shaking from anger or cold, she’s not sure which.

“How do you think I feel? I’ve been shot at, fell through time, nearly got hit by a train and now my soulmate wants nothing to do with me and even if he did I’m never going to see him again! You’re not the only one with a sucky life Barnes but I’m not having a tantrum over it. Suck it up soldier and deal with it. This is life.”

Twin blue eyes blaze at each other before Tony comes between them again and then she ignores Barnes, letting Tony guide her as they get off the mountainside.

It takes six hours to get back to the base. Tony somehow manages to carry them both, flying low and slow until the dark green tents and the wooden barracks appear. They drop down a few miles out, Tony leaving them both sneak in and find Howard. He doesn’t think it will take much to convince his dad of who he is and tells them to stay safe until he gets back.

Barnes stalkes about the clearing they’re in like an angry bear while Darcy does her best to push away the strange grief she feels welling up in her heart. It doesn’t make much sense, really, it’s not like she knows him or is going to get the chance. The wristbands are their only way home, not equipped to carry an extra passenger. Tony had already put the full stop in her unspoken question about her staying. It was a huge no-no, she didn’t belong in this time, he was almost certain the time-stream would rearrange itself around her if she stayed but that it would most likely try to erase her the longer she stayed. He’d made too good an argument for the universe trying to Final Destination her ass to be comfortable with taking the risk.

“I don't even know your name” She jerks a little at the abrupt statement, suddenly aware of how close he'd come to her.

Bucky feels like his world just ended and nothing is ever going to feel right again. When he’d fallen from the train he was certain he was going to die. It was a long way down and in those few moments where he fell he’d almost made peace with his end. The words inked on his arm the only regret he had. He’d wondered his whole life about the girl that would one day try to reasure him.

See? A whole new start, it’ll be great!

Wondered what he’d say to her, how he’d greet her. Instead of one of the many things he’d hoped he might say he’d pretty much rejected her for someone else. He cringes at the thought that she had spent her life wondering who Steve was to him that he’d refuse her. Now here he was, with the one girl he was made for, who was made for him and he was furious at himself for the cock-up he’d made of it. He runs a shaking hand through his hair, feeling the small ice crystals melt when they come in contact with his hand. It’s freezing out here but he hardly feels the cold. It’s been that way for a while now, not just the immunity to the cold, but the strength and the speed and his senses all sharper and better than they’d ever been. He can see her shivering, even with the long blue coat of his wrapped around her tiny frame.

God, they haven’t even been introduced properly. He feels like a fool.

“I don’t even know your name.”

She looks up at him, seeming surprised at his closeness.

“Darcy Lewis.” she doesn’t give him more than that, a brief snippet of knowledge.

“James Barnes, but my friends call me Bucky.” she raises a brow, “I’m sorry for how I reacted back there, for what I said. You didn’t deserve those words. I was just worried about my friend. You gotta understand, I’ve known him since we were kids, he’s like family to me.”

Darcy sighs. “I get it, I do. Consider it forgiven.” she shivers again and hugs herself tighter.

Bucky feels a twinge of guilt.

“Don’t know how long your friend’s going to be, we could..” he trails off, his hand, held towards her hesitantly, gesturing for something.

Darcy looks at the outstretched hand, it's like a bell in the back of her mind, like deja vu.

“Look, you’re obviously freezing, come here and we can huddle, share warmth. I know it's a little unconventional, but I promise I’m not trying to make a move.”

Darcy snorted.

“Like I couldn’t take you if I needed to.”

The way she side-eyes him and the little twist of her lips as she delivers the words induce a sudden chuckle. It’s been a while since a dame smacked him down so dismissively. Part of him admires her moxie while a deeper part finds a bittersweet understanding of why the universe paired them. He could see it. How they could be. If life had given them a different path.

Darcy throws a half-hearted glare his way.

“What, you don’t think I could?”

“Oh, I’m certain you would if I got fresh, Doll. Come here, you’re freezing, no use refusing just to make a point.”

“And if I said no?”

“You could, '' he nods his head. “ But you won’t, you’re too practical and smart to be the kinda girl that’d cut her own nose off just to spite her face.”

“James Barnes, is that a compliment for little old me?”

Bucky rolls his eyes. Of course, she would be full of sass to match his.

“Tellin’ you you’re beautiful would be a compliment. I’m just calling a spade a spade.”

Darcy presses her lips together, refusing to smile and lets him take her hand, he pulls her in close and wraps his arms around her as she tucks her head into his chest. When she realises he really is like her own personal space heater she unashamedly clings to him like a limpet.

“Getting comfortable, Doll?”

“Digging in, like the spade I am.”

She replies dryly then lets out a tiny giggle and feels an answering rumble of amusement from his chest. His arms tighten around her a little and she sighs, some of the tension bleeding from her shoulders.

“Thanks,” she tells him quietly.

“Least I could do.” He responds equally quiet. A silence lapses between them but it lacks the jagged edges that it had held before. Darcy breathes him in. It would be so easy, she thinks a little sadly, to get used to this.

It’s dawn when Tony gets back to them, Howard in tow. In less time than she’d expected they were in the air and flying over the Atlantic. Tony and Howard are upfront, conspiring away while she’s stuck in the cabin with Bucky. It’s strange watching the man, her soulmate, the little voice in her head whispers, as he sleeps.

Out there in the snow and ice, he’d been all hard edges and furrowed lines. In sleep the angles of his face softened, he looked younger. She’s not blind, the man has the sort of face you’d expect to see in some lookbook for a model agency. Maybe if he’d been born in her time he’d have found himself doing exactly that or perhaps acting on some cable tv show. He was almost pretty but with just enough dangerous charm to describe him as strikingly handsome. More man than boy, despite the big blue eyes and soft lips. If she had to admit to a type, he was exactly hers. Not surprising considering the words curling up her spine. It doesn’t seem to be something she can entirely dismiss, even when she knows there's no future here for them. Her heart sees him and she feels like the breath is knocked out of her. But even the knowledge that he hadn’t been rejecting her is now more of a burden than a relief. A burden because she can’t help but wonder what could have been. It’s like being given water in a desert and then having someone take it away to pour into the sand. In his sleep, he curls an arm around her and pulls her in close. Darcy lets him, selfishly allowing herself to pretend that this isn’t just a temporary stop along the road. She closes her eyes and rests her head against his chest and cuddles in. Deep inside she thinks they really could have been something.

The change in air pressure, subtle though it is, is what wakes him. He finds Darcy wedged into his side, fast asleep. He can feel the plane descending. She’s a soft warm, sweet-smelling refuge of hope amidst the raging storm of his emotions. He’s torn. He thinks he should be pushing her away, this is just prolonging and making matters worse. He doesn’t want to get attached. She's going to leave and he’s never going to see her again. His heart, soul? Whatever they want to call it, this connection the universe gave them is pushing him to keep her close and never let her go. It seems the longer they spend in close proximity the stronger the pull is between them. He has no idea where he’s going to go from here. What sort of future he’s going to have, but the unsettling feeling that there isn’t one without her leaves him numb.

“Hey…”

His eyes flick down to meet hers, gazing up at him, sleep heavy and soft. This is what he was meant to wake up to every morning, he thinks, somewhat bitterly before a fond smile, curls around his lips at the cute scrunch of her nose.

“Morning, sweetheart.”

Darcy huffs and reluctantly pushes away from him.

“Please don’t…” she trails off. The way he was looking at her made her heart swell, she could feel herself softening to him with every second. “This wasn’t what I expected…” she pauses and shakes her head. God that was a stupid thing to say, neither of them could have predicted anything like this.

Bucky purses his lips but keeps quiet. He can see her struggle to put her thoughts in order and his Ma raised him to be polite. He let her gather them, seeing the little wheels turning behind her eyes.

“When I was a kid I used to pretend I didn’t have words. I figured it was easier to say I was blank than admit my soulmate didn’t want me… wouldn’t want me. I told it to myself so much it felt true.” It had felt like that. She had cut herself off from any sort of longing to protect herself from the pain of being rejected. It wasn’t something that happened very often, but it did happen. People refused their soulmate, denied the bond and it would fade into nothing, Meeting your soulmate wasn’t a guarantee of happiness, it was just a chance, an opportunity to find the person best suited to you, but it didn’t guarantee love. “I thought if we ever crossed paths we’d both walk away content with the decision. Me happy to let you have what you wanted, you happy not to have some overly emotional drama queen stalking you.”

He could feel her sadness, her eyes were wet and her voice wavered. He gently cupped her face and caught the tear as it trailed over her pale skin.

“But now…. Now it feels like, -”

“Like we’ve been cheated. Like you were given a chance but the choice has been taken away. It was your choice before, to walk away from me when you thought I wouldn't want you.”

“But I didn’t have all the facts. If we’d met in my time… God, everything would be different, we’d still have a choice, an opportunity to ... I can feel it, you know? You feel it too right?”

His thumb stroked over her lip.

“Yeah, I feel it too, s’like magnets pulling together. Never wanted to know someone the way I want to know you.”

The sincerity in his voice struck a chord deep in her soul. She felt the same echo in her own.

“But we can’t. And this… the way you’re looking at me and touching me… I want it so badly but it’s just going to hurt so much more when I leave... if we keep doing this. I can’t afford to get this comfortable with you, I don’t want to... I’ve been hurting my whole life but now it's real and in front of me and I…” Darcy crumples. Maybe she’d convinced herself she’d never have a great love, but it didn't mean she’d ever really stopped wanting it. She feels like every moment in her life leads here, an inexorable inevitable point, fixed and immovable and she doesn’t want it to end.

He gathers her close, feels her tears soaking into his shirt as she cries. She’s breaking his heart. Every bit of him wants to protect her, comfort her; seeing her like this and knowing there is nothing he can do makes him furious at the world, at whatever god consigned them to this tragedy.

“It’s not fair...it’s not.”

“I know it’s not, princess. But we’re going to hurt either way. Why not make a few memories to hold onto?” The words are out of his mouth before he can stop them, his mind changed. Maybe this wasn't going to be a forever, but he'd be damned if he didn't at least hold onto whatever he could get.

Darcy breathes and considers his idea. Maybe he’s right, isn’t this going to hurt no matter what?

“We might only get hours, a few days at most.” she’s not sure if she's trying to discourage him or begging him to tell her it doesn’t matter, that he’ll take whatever he can get. He doesn’t disappoint her.

“Then we make them count. Enough for the life-time, we could have had.”

Bucky places two fingers under her chin, bringing her gaze to his. Darcy blinks then lets it all go, lets her guard down, and sinks into his eyes. She thinks for a moment she forgets to breathe. His eyes are soft, a warmth in the deep blue. He smiles gently, encouraging an answering smile from her lips.

“Okay.” She finally lets go of the fear, embraces the chance to snatch a few small moments of beauty amid the chaos of their inevitable defeat. How, after all, could you win against time?

“Okay?”

Her smile grows wider at the happiness in his eyes and he hums a little tune. It’s a small thing but it brings a tiny snort of laughter from her, an old song so ironically apt.

“They can’t take that away from me.”

“What?” Her brows rise, was he serenading her?

“The way your smile just beams.” He sang softly, grinning down at her. She giggles.

“The way I sing off-key?” She answers back in kind.

“The way you’ll haunt my dreams… no no they can’t take that away from me.” He presses a kiss to her forehead. “Seventy-five years and people still know that song?”

“I like the Fred and Ginger movies, that one was a favourite.”

“I’d have liked that, taking you to a movie, on a date. Take you dancing somewhere so I could hold you close.”

“You don’t have to dance with me to do that” Darcy wiggles her eyebrows suggestively and Bucky thinks he’s never felt so charmed in his life.

When they finally get off the plane Darcy pulls Tony off to one side.

“I need time,” she tells him.

“Lewis, I swear if I could fix this…” He looks pained, but Darcy just shakes her head.

“No, that's not what I meant. I need time on my own with him, it’s the only chance we’ll ever have and I want to make the most of it, you understand, right?”

Tony sighs. She’s stubborn and fierce and he’s done his best to ignore the way the two had gravitated towards each other once their words were spoken. He knew from his own match that trying to keep them apart would have been pointless so he hadn’t tried, maybe even encouraged it by staying with Howard and letting the man talk his ear off. He gets it, he really does and just once, he can give her this.

“Think you can keep out of trouble till we get pulled back?” at her nod he continues. “Fine. When the recall alert goes off make your way to Central Park. We’ll meet at the little plaza, it should be deserted enough and open enough for our return back. You’ll have about half an hour to get there so don’t stray too far.”

She surprises him with a quick hug and a whispered thanks in his ear and then he watches as she drags Barnes off by the hand.

Forty-three hours later her wrist device beeps. Darcy looks at it mournfully and cuddles into Bucky’s arms. He’s spooning her, her body snugly tucked against his. It all feels so monumentally right, the feel of his skin against her, the rhythm of his heartbeat in time with hers, the way each breath between them works in harmony. His arms are wrapped tightly around, holding her fast, she wishes she could stay here forever, in this one perfect moment, suspended like a dragonfly in amber.

“Bucky, baby, we’ve got to go.” His body tenses and he mutters into her shoulder.

“It’s not fair Darcy… it’s not right.”

“I know. But we’ve had this.”

“S’not enough, doll. It could never be enough.”

He growled, tugging her under him as he rolled on top of her. His mouth met hers swiftly, kissing her till she was breathless and clutching him to her as her body sang for his.

It’s quick and desperate. Two bodies trying to merge deeper than imaginable, both of them attempting to leave their mark on the other. When they peak she cries, even as her body shudders in pleasure. It’s the sweetest torture. To have this and know it will soon be over. She feels his tears on her skin, falling to mingle with her own against her cheeks as he kisses her deeply. She never thought a kiss could feel like this, like hello and goodbye and forever.

They make their way to the park with a few minutes to spare.

When she enters the clearing where the little plaza is usually found, all that's there is a wide grassy space with a few benches and a path. It’s a little jarring to see it like this, without the presence of the Searching Soldier the place felt empty, haunted. Before she can think about it anymore there’s the sound of shouting and the retort of a gun. It’s like the lab all over again, only this time it’s Bucky that grabs her and forces her behind him.

“Put the fucking gun away Howard, it’s not going to help!” That's Tony's voice carrying through the trees.

Tony and Howard burst into the clearing, running, and made a beeline for Darcy and Bucky.

“Three minutes till we get delorean’d back to the future, Lewis and we’ve got a sorcerer on our ass.”

“What? Like Strange?” A blast of golden light cuts through the trees and they’re thrown off their feet.

“More Voldemort than Dumbledore, but sure.”

“What the hell do they want?” Bucky hisses at Tony.

Tony shoots him his patented “Am I the only smart person in the room” expression and Darcy elbows him in the ribs.

“What do you think? They want to know the future!”

“You’re telling me you managed to get Nazi wizards on our asses in less than two days?”

“Like it’s my fault!”

Darcy glares like she could set him on fire.

“Fine, it’s about 12% my fault, the rest is his,” he tells her, nodding at his shamefaced father.

“Oh god, there’s two of you. Now I can tell Pepper where you get it from!”

Tony scowls as they dodge another blast, running and throwing themselves behind a low wall beside the path.

“What are we meant to do?”

“We just need to stay in one piece till we get yanked back.”

“What about Bucky, and Howard?”

A sudden flash of light behind them as a portal opens sends them scrambling, but instead of danger, the serene face of a woman looks down on them as she emerges from the rip in reality. Her head is bald, her porcelain skin seems to shimmer, and about her neck is the faint green glow of the eye. Darcy recognises it as the Time Stone.

“Dr. Stark.” she nods.

“Ancient One.”

Darcy is taken aback at the seriousness of his tone and the respect he gives the woman without question. It’s disconcerting, to say the least.

Four sorcerers follow behind her and scatter quickly, facing off against the enemy as spellfire bathes the clearing in an eerie light.

The Ancient One moves her hands in a complicated pattern, a golden dome engulfs them in a protective bubble.

“You are safe now and there is not much time.” She regards Bucky with a sharp eye and traces some unseen line back to Darcy. Her gaze softens as he takes Darcy’s hand in his, moving protectively in front of her.

“You have nothing to fear for your soulmate, Sergeant Barnes, I mean neither her nor yourself any harm.”

“All due respect Ma'am, but I don’t know you and I don’t trust you.”

She nods to him and returns her gaze to Darcy.

“The timeline of this universe has been irreparably altered. I can see why now and perhaps this way is better.”

“What do you mean?”

“Your Sergeant had another path he should have followed, one that still would have ensured you crossed paths here in your future. That way is now lost, since it cannot be recovered, perhaps there is a way to resolve your current predicament.”

“Can you send Bucky back to the future with us?” she asks her hopefully.

The Ancient One smiles mysteriously.

“In a manner of speaking, yes. But I am afraid your soulmate will have to take the slow path.”

Darcy’s face fell. She had hoped… The watch beeped again, Tony gave her an apologetic look as he held his hand out to her.

“It’s time, Short Stack.”

She doesn’t let Bucky's hand go even as she is reluctantly pulled away by Tony. Bucky seems about to speak, the smallest regretful smile turning his lips and then the Ancient one taps his shoulder just as Darcy's hand leaves his. Bucky freezes, caught in a moment, utterly still as his whole body seemingly turns to stone. Darcy tries to lunge back, a cry of horror ringing out.

“He will be here, waiting, Miss Lewis. And like any good fairy tale, true love's kiss will break the spell.” The Ancient One imparts softly.

Darcy doesn’t have time to react to the words before she feels caught up in a whirlwind of motion and the world jerks sharply to the left.

They come awake together in the lab they left from. Tony tripping over himself to check the machine. The place looks fine, nothing seems out of the ordinary. It’s like the firefight in here never happened.

“Tony?”

He sweeps his desk for his phone and checks the date.

“Just as I thought. The same day we left from, it’s lunchtime. We’ve come back before we left. Come on, we better get out of here before we run into ourselves.”

They take the secret elevator out and Darcy follows Tony without question, still half in shock and trying to wrap her mind around the events she’d just experienced.

Before she knows it, they’re back at Central Park. Tony shepherding her along in a daze.

“It all makes sense now, this is crazy. I mean, you’ve spent every lunchtime here for the last two years... Darcy..., Double D! Snap out of it.”

“He’s been there, all that time?” she finally says, shock and disbelief colouring her tone.

“From the moment we left. He’s been there. Waiting for you.” Tony puts his hands on her shoulders and she doesn’t know whether to sob or laugh.

“I didn’t lose him?”

“Look, “ he tells her, nodding over her shoulder. She turns her head, as though seeing the statue for the first time. It’s him, it’s really, him.

She looks back at Tony, shaking her head.

“What do I do? What if it doesn’t work… what if-”

“Lewis! Breathe.”

Darcy curls her hands into fists and sucks in a deep lungful of New York air. She is a well of mixed emotion, confused and hopeful and terrified. It’s almost too painful to believe this is real. That he’s been here, all this time, trapped in a single moment, waiting for her to free him.

“This is unbelievable.”

“I know.” he agrees soothingly.

“He’s the Searching Soldier”

“Patron Saint of true love and all-around good luck charm. New York may never recover the loss. Pretty sure, lover boy over there accounts for about a quarter of tourist revenue.”

Darcy snorts, a hysterical giggle forcing its way out. Tony only manages to keep a straight face for about a half-second longer than her before they're both howling with laughter. Passers-by stare at them as they walk past. Eventually, breathless and shaking but far calmer, Darcy stops.

An exasperated cough to their right has both turning sharply.

Stephen Strange is dressed casually, a grey jacket with a matching scarf wrapped around his neck, hands stuffed in the pockets.

“I don’t have all day you know.”

“Strange.” Tony gives the wizard a distrustful frown. He dislikes Strange on principle. The man tacks an inordinate amount of pleasure in needling him.

“Stark, Miss Lewis.”

“What are you doing here?”

Strange rolls his eyes, a look eerily similar to Tony’s own” How do I deal with these idiots” sneer crossing his face before he dispels it at the look Darcy throws at him. She is so clearly done with all the shit today.

“Well, we can’t just let the rest of New York know that a man has been trapped in stone for seventy-five years, can we? Besides, the sudden disappearance of a national treasure would be impossible to hide and the economic impact… what, what? Stop laughing, honestly, Stark, can’t you take this seriously for five minutes?”

“So, you’re here to cover it up.”

“Indeed. Miss Lewis will break the spell, I’ll cast an illusion and Wong will bring the duplicate statue through from the Sanctum.”

“How…”

“Did I know? Well, the Ancient One left a reminder on Wong’s phone. Got the alert this morning and crafted a replacement...”

Darcy shakes her head, tuning Strange out, and faces the statue. She’s put it off long enough. She takes off, leaving Strange and Tony bickering behind her, and crosses the plaza. She only pauses for a moment at the bottom of the plinth before determinedly taking the steps and standing beside him.

She knows the answer to the question now. The expression on his face had been both I love you and goodbye. She takes his hand in hers and steps closer before pressing her lips to cold stone. For the tiniest instant, she thinks it didn’t work, but then it’s like the world suddenly found its breath and cold marble becomes warm flesh, unyielding stone transmutes to living motion and she faintly hears a gasp before strong arms crush her close. Bucky’s voice, whispering her name, fills her ears and then he’s kissing her as if he’ll never stop and she revels in every second of it. A Million possibilities open before them. Infinity beckons.

#wintershock #darcy/bucky #dlbingo2020 #dlbingo #my writing

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dillydedalus · 3 years

Text

march reading

kinda forgot about this i guess. anyway feat. uh, magical ships, dubious mental health institutions (plural) & a parisian building with 99 rooms.

the forever sea, joshua phillip johnson (forever sea #1) i firmly believe that more fantasy lit should be set on ships bc ships are inherently a sexy setting & you could have pirates which are extremely sexy. this has ships (and pirates) and also a sea made of grass? a magical plant sea on which ships sail via magical fires, so conceptually i’m very into it all. the plot is fine, but the protagonist kindred has a very bad case of Main Character Syndrome so prepare for mild annoyance throughout. also while i generally enjoy book magic vs wild magic i wish more works would treat them as two ends of a spectrum rather than ~book magic bad and boring, wild magic cool and *~natural*~. but overall i think this series has potential. 3/5

jagannath: stories, karin tidbeck ([partially?] translated from swedish by the author) really cool collection of sff stories by tidbeck, many of which veer into mild horror and some of which are influenced by swedish folklore and especially swedish fey stories. i enjoyed most of these a lot, especially the existential call centre horror story, the ‘god won’t let me die’ one, and a taxonomy of a cryptid that goes a little off the rails. 4/5

annette, ein heldinnenepos, anne weber a novel in verse about anne beaumanoir, a real person who was a résistance member during world war 2 and later supported the algerian national liberation front, for which she was sentenced to 10 years in prison (she escaped to tunisia and later algeria). she’s clearly a very impressive and interesting person & i conceptually enjoyed the idea of writing a modern hero(ine)’s epic, but i feel like the language could have been a bit more stylized to match the form. 3/5

salvage the bones, jesmyn ward (audio) bleak but ultimately hopeful novel about a black family in the days before and during hurricane katrina, although the focus is on the family dynamics, the 14-year-old narrator discovering that she is pregnant, and the kids trying to keep the puppies their dog china just had alive and well. enjoyed this, altho i did it a bit of a disservice but listening to it a lot of short chunks. 3.5/5

regeneration, pat barker (regeneration trilogy #1) set mostly at a military hospital for soldiers with shell shock during world war 1, this novel explores the existential horror of war, psychological treatment (& the horrible absurdity of treating traumatised men just enough so that you can send them straight back to Trauma Town), and the meeting between siegfried sassoon & wilfred owen. i find i don’t really have much to say about it, but it is very, very good. 4/5

how to pronounce knife, souvankham thammavongsa a short story collection mainly about refugees and migrants from laos to canada, many focusing on parent-child relationships and being forced to work in low-paid jobs, often ones that are damaging to their health. the stories are very well-observed and emotionally nuanced and detailed, but with 14 mostly very short stories, the collection as a whole felt a bit samey, which i guess is something i often experience with short story collections. 3/5

faces in the water, janet frame horrifying semi-autobiographical novel about a young woman stuck in new zealand’s mental health system, moving to different hospitals but mostly from ward to (more depressing) ward in the 40s/50s. while there is a shift in attitudes during her stay that sometimes makes the wards more tolerable, mostly the patients are neglected, abused, and the threat of electric shock therapy and lobotomy always hangs over them. 3/5

the upstairs house, julia fine fuck why did i read so many books about mental health conditions this month??? this is another entry in my casual ‘motherhood as horror’ reading project, in which a new mother develops post-partum psychosis & imagines the modernist children’s book writer she’s writing her dissertation on and her poet sometimes-lover haunting her and her child (margaret wise brown & michael strange, who are real people i was utterly unaware of). this does pretty good on the maternal horror front, but i wasn’t entirely sold on the literary haunting. 2/5

1000 serpentinen angst, olivia wenzel a very interesting novel about a woman struggling with grief over her brother’s suicide, an anxiety disorder, the (non)state of a (non)relationship and discrimination/marginalisation based on her identity as a black, east-german, bi woman (while also being, as she notes, financially privileged). much of the novel is written in a dialogue between the narrator and an unnamed (& probably internal) interlocutor, which was p effective for a novel more focused on introspection than much of a plot. 3/5

atlas: the archaeology of an imaginary city, dung kai-cheung (tr. from chinese by the author, anders hansson, bonnie mcdougall) fictitious theory about a slightly-left-of-reality version of hong kong and how maps (re)construct the city, very heavy on the postmodern poststructuralist postcolonial (and some other posts, i’m sure). in many ways my jam. unfortunately my favourite parts of this were the author’s preface and the first part (fictitious theory of mapping alternate hong kong); the rest felt very repetitive and not particularly interesting, altho i’m sure i was also just missing a lot of cultural context. 2.5/5

under the net, iris murdoch .........i liked the other two murdochs i’ve read (the sea, the sea & a severed head) quite a lot so either i was not in the mood for her very peculiar style of constructing novels and characters or, this being her first novel, she just wasn’t in full command of that peculiar style yet but man this was a slooooooooog. don’t stretch out your modern picaresque with an incredibly annoying narrator over more than 300 pages iris!!!! 2/5 bc this probably has some merit & i just wasn’t into it

the impossible revolution: making sense of the syrian tragedy, yassin al-haj saleh (tr. from arabic by i. rida mahmoud) collection of articles and essays saleh (a syrian intellectual & activist who spent 16 years in a syrian prison) wrote from 2011 to 2015, analysing the reasons for, potential and development of the revolution, as well as some background sociological discussion on the assads’ regime. very interesting, very dense, very depressing. wouldn’t necessarily recommend it as a first read on the topic tho. 3/5

angels in america: millenium approaches & perestroika, tony kushner the page to tumblr darling quote ratio in this is insane (”just mangled guts pretending” and so on) and also it just really slaps on every level. also managed to get me from 0 to crying several times. brilliant work of theatre, would love to see it staged (or filmed). 4/5

life: a user’s manual, georges perec (german tr. by eugen helmlé) 99 chapters, each corresponding with a single room in a parisian apartment block; some chapters are basically ‘here’s the room, here’s a long list of objects in the room, that’s it bye :)’, some are short insights into the lives of the people living there, some (the best, mostly) are long, absolutely wild tales that are sometimes only tangentially connected to the room in question. why are the french like this. 61/99 rooms

sisters in hate: american women on the front lines of white nationalism, seyward darby (audio) nonfiction about women’s role in white nationalist hate movements, mainly based on the stories of three women who are or have been involved with various contemporary american alt-right/racist/neonazi hate groups, while also looking at general social trends and the history of white women’s role in white supremacy. interesting and engaging if you’re interested in this kind of thing. if you’re both politically aware and internet poisoned, it’s probably not much that is completely new to you but still worth reading. 3/5

starting in april i will be Gainfully Employed (ugh) & thus probably not read as much or read even more bc i have no energy for anything else

#the books i read #long post

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katedrakeohd · 4 years

Text

What Happens in Paris...(7)

Masterlist

Back at the train, the men and women separate to get ready for the tea party. Down in Max and Drake’s shared room, Drake is sitting on his bed watching Max do his primp and polish in front of the mirror. Impeccably dressed in his black Gucci dress shirt and trousers, Maxwell is running a comb through his neatly trimmed hair and whistling. If he wasn’t his friend, Drake could almost hate him for it. His clothing style rarely changed. His way of taking his day look into a night look usually involved the undoing of a button on his shirt, and the addition of a hair product to keep himself looking sharp when he broke out the moves on the dance floor. Drake knew though, even by day when Maxwell appeared to be calm and collected there was always a three ring circus, complete with peacocks, going on inside his head.

Drake looked down at Maxwell’s shiny black shoes, and then glanced at his own scuffed and worn looking brown ones. As much as Drake didn’t want to dress all fancy for a Royal tea party today, he knew that Kate was expected to be there. Plus he wanted to witness the look of envy on Maddy’s face when Kate walked in all dressed up and stole away attention from the future Queen. Although he usually wouldn’t give a damn how he looked when he skulked his way into events after everyone else important arrived. This time he knew Kate would be under Liam’s lustful eye, and it made his stomach ache at the thought. If he was going to escort Kate into this stupid party, even as her seemingly platonic friend, he had to make an effort to fit in for his own peace of mind. Drake cleared his throat to get Maxwell’s attention. I can’t believe I’m doing this again. Heaven help me.

“Uh, Max? About this party today… I can’t exactly show up looking like some bum off the street. Could you help me pick out something fit to wear?”

Maxwell gasped, dropping the lint roller he was using to remove fluff and hair from his trouser leg. “Really?! You’ll let me dress you up for two events in a row?”

Drake sighs, getting up from the bed and running his hands through his hair. “Well don’t make a big deal out of it.”

“It is a big deal. My grumpy best friend wants to impress a girl!”

Drake grimaced, “Tone it down will ya? Besides, you are not my best friend.”

Maxwell is unfazed by the brush off and just raises his eyebrows, nodding, “Oh right! We’re even better than that now. We’re family!”

Drake opens his mouth to protest and then closes it again. Technically Max was right, as painful as it was for him to admit. He raises his hands and gives Max an impatient head shake, “Alright! Alright! Whatever! Are you gonna help me or not?”

“Of course I will. Show me what you got.”

Drake holds his hands out to the sides to display his current denim disaster.

“No, no silly.” Maxwell drags over Drake’s suitcase and flops it onto the bed. Drake places a protective hand on top, shakes his head.

“No point in looking in there," Drake grumbles.

“Okay then, to the Royal Closet we go.”

Kate sits in front of Hana’s portable makeup mirror, while Hana runs a round brush through her hair, coaxing it into soft waves. “I love your hair Kate, it’s so soft and manageable. What shampoo do you use?”

With a shrug, Kate admires her freshly painted fingernails. “Some kind of fruity scented stuff that I bought at the drugstore. Drake forgot to grab the matching conditioner when we showered, so I hope my hair doesn't get all full of static and frizz.”

Hana meets Kate's gaze in the mirror and they both giggle. “Oh my goodness, Kate. No wonder you two were late for breakfast.”

Trying to hide her blush in the lighted mirror was impossible, “Yeah, well I did interrupt him while he was shaving this morning. And damn he looked sexy in that bathrobe.”

Hana sighed with envy as she parted Kate’s hair and swept it behind her shoulder. Kate hands her the golden, flower embellished comb from the counter. “What’s it like Kate?”

“What?”

“Having a King and his best friend both in love with you?”

"It's not as fun as you might think. They've both staked their claim on me in some way and I hate being the rope in their tug of war. The worst part is that Liam has already lost me and he doesn't know it yet."

“Poor guy, he’s going to be crushed. What does Drake have that Liam doesn't?”

“He doesn't have the weight of the kingdom sitting on his head and shoulders, nor does he have a bunch of noble ladies fighting over him. Plus he’s nobody important to the press or tabloids. I’m not as worried about being seen with him, because I know he’ll protect me.”

“He’s not worried about being pulled into the Tariq scandal with you?” Hana asks, a look of concern on her face.

Kate shrugs, “I know he doesn't regret coming to my rescue, except for maybe the punches Tariq landed on his ribs. He was very much a gentleman about the whole thing, which is a lot more than I can say for Tariq.”

“But speaking of having two guys interested at the same time, what about Neville and Rashad?”

Hana wrinkles up her nose with a frown of disgust, “They're so boring. And neither were very nice to Penelope when we first met them.”

Kate applies a pale pink lip gloss to the center of her bottom lip to enhance her lipstick, pressing her lips together and then checking the results in the mirror, “Well frankly, since finding out she participated in the smear campaign against me, Penelope isn't one of my favorite people either. But I get what you’re saying, especially with Neville. He creeps me out in the same way Tariq does. Rashad seems to be marginally better than his friend as far as character goes, having made his own way as a businessman. He’s not depending on his Father’s money like Neville.”

Hana tilts her head, considering Kate’s thoughts. “I suppose you make a good point. But still, neither are as important, charismatic, charming or handsome as the King.”

Kate smirks, “Liam's definitely a charmer. I wonder sometimes what he sees in an ordinary barmaid like me. Or what Drake does either.” Kate meets Hana's gaze in the mirror. "Am I really worth all this fuss? What's so special about me that loving one man must mean breaking the other's heart?"

"You mean besides your charisma, charm, intelligence and beauty? You're a genuinely nice person Kate, and everyone is drawn to you. The other women in the room envy you when the men all look your way."

Kate turns around to look up at Hana, seeing the admiration in her eyes. "You're all of these things and more, Hana."

Hana looks down at her shoes, shyly, "I wish. My parents have invested so much into my training, refinement and education. But they've rarely praised me for any of my achievements. Sometimes I feel like they'd throw me at any available bachelor if it would raise my status on the social ladder, especially if it got our names in the media back home."

Standing up from her seat, Kate places her hands on Hana's shoulders. "Hey now, don't beat up on yourself. You're more than just some guy's arm candy or potential wife. You need to stand up and grab the future you want for yourself. To Hell with your parents’ expectations. I bet you could excel at anything you put your mind to. You don't need a man to raise your status. Be the strong independent woman I know you can be.”

Hana smiles, “Thanks Kate. I wish I’d met you years ago. You're the type of friend I've been missing all my life.”

Kate smiles back, “You’ve been here for me too, so it's only right that I return the favor.”

Stepping back from Hana, Kate strikes a pose with one hand on her hip, raising the other in a provocative sweep of her hair to highlight her face and bare shoulders. “So what do you think of my finished look?”

Hana smiles broadly, with a clap of approval at her stylish handiwork. “You're going to be hotter than the tea, that’s for sure.”

Kate winks, “Damn straight. We are.”

Drake stands outside of Kate's train compartment, fidgeting. Dressed in a crisp white dress shirt and dark grey trousers, with his hair combed and set with some of Maxwell's styling compound; he felt like a teenager on Prom night. Drying his sweaty hand on his thigh, he's reminded of how thin the fabric feels compared to his usual denim. The way the slim fit of the pant legs hugged his thighs made him feel so exposed, almost naked, and he was starting to regret not opting for his usual jeans. But Maxwell had assured him that he looked good, and that he’d fit in just fine at the party.

He hoped he looked good enough to escort Kate. The sudden absurdity of wanting to dress up for a tea party makes him chuckle and he shakes his head. Damn it Kate, what have you done to me?

Sucking in a deep breath he knocks on Kate’s door and waits.

…

Crouching down to secure the gold strap of her shoe around her ankle, Kate hears the buzzing sound of a text message coming from inside her purse. She glances up, “I bet that’s Drake.”

Hana gets a pinging sound on her phone seconds later, “It's a group text from Liam. The cars arranged to take us to the tea party have arrived. We're to meet in the dining car to coordinate who is traveling with whom.”

Kate breathes a sigh, picking up her clutch. “Ok, off we go then.”

Drake is leaning against the wall looking at his phone when he hears the sound of voices to his right, causing him to look up. Kate and Hana are giggling as they approach hand in hand, and then they stop as Kate sees Drake and gasps. “Oh..my...God! Look at you.”

With a smirk, Drake straightens up blushing. “What..do I look that bad?”

Kate shakes her head, then appraises Drake all over again with a head tilt and a slow look from head to toe and then back up again. “Nah, ah. Hardly. You’re looking like a tasty snack.”

Drake clears his throat, raising his eyebrows. “Heh, look who's talking. If I’m a snack you're definitely dessert.”

Hana grins at them both, rolling her eyes, “Ok lovebirds, quit with the flirty food talk and making eyes at each other we’ve got a party to get to.”

Stepping aside, Drake nods. “But of course, after you Ladies.”

Taking in a deep breath and closing his eyes as Kate passes him in the hall, Drake falls into step a few paces behind them. Damn she smells nice, this party isn’t going to be torture at all.

:::

tagging: @jovialyouthmusic @sirbeepsalot @emceesynonymroll @emichelle @mskaneko @speedyoperarascalparty @dcbbw @drakeandcamilleofvaltoria @drakexwillow @kingliam2019 @kimmiedoo5 @gardeningourmet @drakesensworld @mfackenthal @thequeenchoices @debramcg1106 @fluffy-marshmallow-heart @wickedgypsymoon @griselda1121 @indiacater @texaskitten30 @nikkis1983 @lynne1993 @bobasheebaby @drakesfiance @moonlightgem7 @princessleac1 @janezillow @jlpplays1 @walker7519 @drakesensworld @furiousherringoperatortoad @samihatuli @fromthedeskofpaisleybleakmore @rainbowsinthestorm @burnsoslow @bbrandy2002 @jessiembruno @msjpuddleduck @princess-andromeda-nazario @princess-geek @mom2000aggie @batgirlassociationofgothamcity @masterofbluff

#drake walker #choices #what happens in paris #drake x kate #long post

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whitehotharlots · 4 years

Text

Andrea Long Chu is the sad embodiment of the contemporary left

Andrea Long Chu’s Females was published about a year ago. It was heavily hyped but landed with mostly not-so-great reviews, and while I was going to try and pitch my own review I figured there was no need. Going through my notes from that period, however, I see how much Chu’s work—and its pre-release hype—presaged the sad state of the post-Bernie, post-hope, COVID-era left. I figured they’d be worth expanding upon here, even if I’m not getting paid to do so.

Chu isn’t even 30 years old, and Females is her debut book, and yet critics were already providing her with the sort of charitable soft-handedness typically reserved for literary masters or failed female political candidates. This is striking due to the purported intensity of the book: a love letter to would-be assassin Valerie Solanas, the thesis of which is that all humans are female, and that such is true because female-ness is a sort of terminal disease stemming not from biology but from one’s inevitable subjugation in larger social contexts. Everyone is a woman because everyone suffers. Big brain shit.

But, of course, not everyone is a female. Of course. Females are females only some of the time. But, also, everyone is a female. Femaleness is just a title, see. Which means it can be selectively applied whenever and however the author chooses to apply it. The concept of “female” lies outside the realm of verifiability. Suggesting to subject it to any form of logic or other means of adjudication means you’re missing the point. Femaleness simply exists, but only sometimes, and those sometimes just so happen to be identifiable only to someone possessed with as a large a brain as Ms. Chu. We are past the need for coherence, let alone truth or honesty. And if you don’t agree that’s a sign that you are broken—fragile, illiterate, hateful, humorless.

Chu’s writing—most famously, her breakthrough essay “On Liking Women”—establishes her prose style: long, schizophrenic paragraphs crammed with unsustainable metaphors meant to prove various fuzzy theses simultaneously. Her prose seems kinda sorta provocative but only when read on a sentence-by-sentence level, with the reader disregarding any usual expectations of cohesion or connection.

This emancipation from typical writerly expectations allows Chu to wallow proudly in self-contradiction and meaninglessness. As she notes herself, explicitly, meaning isn’t the point. Meaning doesn’t even exist. It’s just, like, a feeling:

I mean, I don’t like pissing people off per se. Yes, there is a pleasure to that sometimes, sure. I think that my biggest takeaway from graduate school is that people don’t say things or believe things—they say them because it makes them feel a particular way or believing them makes them feel a particular way. I’ve become hyper aware of that, and the sense in which I’m pissing people off is more about bringing that to consciousness for the reader. The reason you’re reacting against this is not because it contradicts what you think is true, it’s because it prevents you from having the feeling that the thing you think is the truth lets you feel.

And so she can get away with saying that of course she doesn’t actually believe that everyone is a female, the same as her idol Valerie Solanas didn’t actually want to kill all men. The writers, Chu and Valerie, are just sketching out a dumb idea as a fun little larf, to see how far they can push a manifestly absurd thought. If they just so happen to shoot a gay man at point blank range and/or make broader left movements so repulsive that decent people get driven away, so be it. And if any snowflakes complain about their tactics, well that’s just proof of how right they are. Provocation is justification—the ends and the means. The fact that this makes for disastrous and harmful politics is beside the point. All that matters is that Chu gets to say what she wants to say.

This blunt rhetorical move—which is difficult to describe without sounding like I’m exaggerating or making stuff up, since it’s so insane—papers over Chu’s revanchist and violent beliefs. Her work is soaked with approving portrayals of Solanas’ eliminationist rhetoric—of course, Chu doesn’t’ actually mean it, even though she does. Men are evil, even as they don’t really fully exist since everyone is a woman, ergo eliminating men improves the world. Chu goes so far as to suggest that being a trans woman makes her a bigger feminist than Solanas or any actual woman could ever be, because the act of her transitioning led to the world containing fewer men. Again: big brain shit.

I’ll leave it to a woman to comment on the imperiousness of a trans woman insisting that she is bestest and realest kind of woman, that biological women are somehow flawed imposters. I will stress, however, that such a claim comes as a means of justifying a politically disastrous assertion that more or less fully justifies the most reactionary gender critical arguments, which regard all trans women as simply mentally ill men (this line of reasoning is so incredibly stupid that even a dullard like Rod Drehar can rebut it with ease). Trans activists have spent years establishing an understanding of transsexualism as a matter of inherent identity—whether or not you agree with that assertion, you have to admit that it has political propriety and has gone a long way in normalizing transness. Chu rejects this out of hand, embracing instead the revanchist belief that transness is attributable to taking sexual joy in finding oneself embarrassed and/or feminized—an understanding of womanhood that is simultaneously essentialist and tokenizing. When asked about the materially negative potential in expressing such a belief, Chu reacts with a usual word salad of smug self-contradiction:

EN: You say in the book that sissy porn was formative of your coming to consciousness as a trans woman. If you hadn’t found sissy porn, do you think it’s possible that you might have just continued to suffer in the not-knowing?

ALC: That’s a really good question. It’s plausible to me that I never would have figured it out, that it would have taken longer.

EN: How does that make you feel? Is that idea scary?

ALC: It isn’t really. Maybe it should be a little bit more, but it isn’t really. One of the things about desire is that you can not want something for the first 30 years of your life and wake up one day and suddenly want it—want it as if you might as well have always wanted it. That’s the tricky thing about how desire works. When you want something, there’s a way in which you engage in a kind of revisionism, the inability to believe that you could have ever wanted anything else.

EN: People often talk about the ubiquity of online porn as a bad thing—I’ve heard from lots of girlfriends that men getting educated about sex by watching porn leads to bad sex—but there seems to me a way in which this ubiquity is helping people to understand themselves, their sexuality and their gender identity.

ALC: While I don’t have the research to back this up, I would certainly anecdotally say that sissy porn has done something in terms of modern trans identity, culture, and awareness. Of course, it’s in the long line of sexual practices like crossdressing in which cross-gender identification becomes a key factor. It’s not that all of the sudden, in 2013, there was this thing and now there are trans people. However, it is undoubted that the Internet has done something in terms of either the sudden existence of more trans people or the sudden revelation that there are more trans people than anyone knew there were. Whether it’s creation or revelation, I think everyone would agree that the internet has had an enormous impact there.

One of the things I find so fascinating about sissy porn is that it’s not just that I can hear about these trans people who live 20 states away from me and that their experiences sound like mine. There is a component of it that’s just sheer mass communication and its transformative effect, but another part of it is that the internet itself can exert a feminizing force. That is the implicit claim of sissy porn, the idea that sissy porn made me trans is also the idea that Tumblr made me trans. So, the question there is whether or not the erotic experience that became possible with the Internet actually could exert an historically unique feminizing force. I like, at least as a speculative claim, to think about how the Internet itself is feminizing.

Politics, like, don’t matter. So, like, okay, nothing I say matters? So it’s okay if I say dumb and harmful shit because, like, they’re just words, man.

Chu can’t fully embrace this sort of gradeschool nihilism, though, because if communication was truly as meaningless as she claims then any old critic could come along and tell her to shut the fuck up. Even as she claims to eschew all previously existing means of adjudicating morality and coherence, she nonetheless relies on the cheapest means of making sure she maintains a platform: validation via accreditation. This is all simple victimhood hierarchy. Anyone who does not defer all of their own perceptions to someone higher up the hierarchy is inherently incorrect, their trepidations serving to validate the beliefs of the oppressed:

I like to joke that, as someone who is always right, the last thing I want is to be agreed with. [Laughs] I think the true narcissist probably wants to be hated in order to know that she’s superior. I absolutely do court disagreement in that sense. But what I like even better are arguments that bring about a shift in terms along an axis that wasn’t previously evident. So it’s not just that other people are wrong; it’s that their wrongness exists within a system of evaluation which itself is irrelevant.

Chu has summoned the most cynical possible interpretation of Walter Ong’s suggestion that “Writing is an act of violence disguised as an act of charity.” Of course, any effective piece of communication requires some degree of persuasion, convincing a reader, listener, viewer, or user to subjugate their perceptions to those of the communicator. Chu creates—not just leans on or benefits from, but actively posits and demands fealty to—the suggestion that her voice is the only one deserving of attention by virtue of it being her own. That’s it. That’s what all her blathering and bluster amount to. Political outcomes do not matter. Honesty does not matter. What matters is her, because she is her.

This is the inevitable result of a discourse that prizes a communicator’s embodied identity markers more than anything those communicators are attempting to communicate, and in which a statement is rendered moral or true based only upon the presence or absence of certain identity markers. Lived experience trumps all else. A large, non-passing trans woman is therefore more correct than pretty much anyone else, no matter how harmful or absurd her statements may be. She is also better than them. And smarter. And gooder.

Designating lived experience and subjective feelings of safety as the only acceptable forms of adjudication has caused the left to prize individualism to a degree that would have made Ronald Reagan blush. And this may explain the lukewarm reception of Chu’s book.

While they heaped praise upon her before the books’ release, critics backed off once they realized that Females is an embarrassingly apt reflection of intersectional leftism—a muddling, incoherent mess, utterly disconnected from any attempt toward persuasion or consensus, the product of a movement that has come to regard neurosis as insight. The deranged mewlings of a grotesque halfwit are only digestable a few pages at a time. Any more than that, and we begin to see within them far too much of the things that define our awful movement and our terrifying moment.

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bottleofspilledink · 4 years

Text

God's Watching, Put on a Show || Chapter III

"All students please gather at the gymnasium for some announcements." Mary's voice rang over the speakers.

As student council president, most of her mornings were spent in the nun's office, going over papers for school events, speaking through the announcement system, and snooping through files to get dirt on people she saw as beneath her.

How did Eve know about all this? Mary herself would tell her and Elizabeth while they did each other's hair, shedding her holier-than-thou exterior whenever they were safely tucked away in her room.

"Let's go?" Elizabeth said, getting up from the bench. The gym was far from the courtyard and if they wanted to make it there in time, they'd have to go now.

"Mmhm." Eve packed her books and they left the courtyard, listening to her friend blab on about the boy she was meeting in secret.

Boyfriends were against the rules. Having one would lead to dire consequences, that included, but we're not limited to: a conference with your parents, a lecture on chastity, a lecture on God's plan for man and woman, a lecture on marriage, and a forced separation of the student that was caught and the boy.

Girlfriends were also against the rules. Though the consequences of having one were much worse than the other. Punishment for that might include, but isn't limited to: a lecture on God's plan for man and woman, a lecture on marriage, becoming a social pariah, being sent to conversion therapy, being disowned by your parents, or death, either by their hand or yours.

"You know, if you're not careful, you could end up pregnant."

The girl only scoffed at the notion. "As if! He always pulls out before finishing, so we'll be fine."

They turned a corner and were nearly separated as others entered alongside them.

"Besides," Elizabeth before she went off to find her section's line, "if he gets me pregnant, then he can't leave!"

Eve found her place in line and wondered if a child would compel him to stay with her or make him hate her for tying him down.

After all, she often heard her mother and her friends complain about the unfaithful husbands they were forced to stay with, complaining about how men hated settling down.

They would warn her not to trust boys, not to date them, while still silently knowing that one day, she would end up just like them, obligated with children they never wanted and unhappily married with men they could never leave lest they anger their God.

But of course, it sounded terrible when you said it like that.

Eve was certain it was better experienced than she thought it to be.

At least, she liked to hope it was.

They would get their just rewards in heaven, or so the women thought, sipping at their wine and laughing at the picture of their husbands and their mistresses burning in hell fire.

Eve knew however, from hushed sobs she would hear, late, late into the nights her father wasn't home that they were all insecure, sad, angry, and so, so, unfulfilled.

They didn't have the youth or beauty of their husband's mistresses.

They wept at the love letters they used to get with promises of eternal love.

They were angry for being treated like they were disposable.

But most of all they felt cheated, robbed of the futures they should have had.

Eve's mother was going to be a realtor agent before she decided to be a housewife instead.

Her friend, Nancy, was supposed to be an English teacher before she got married to her brother's friend.

And her friend, Amy, a nineteen year old fresh out of high school, was supposed to take a degree in arts before she got pregnant near the end of her senior year.

It was all Eve could think about while the set up for what seemed like an abrupt student assembly happened around her.

This was her future.

And she was going to have to grin and bear it if she wanted to keep her precious God's love.

She was usually able to forget about what awaited her after graduation. With years of practice, finding something else to put her mind to wasn't so hard.

But Elizabeth chattering on about her new boyfriend had made the topic unavoidable. And while Eve was able to tune a good deal of it out, her friend had simply teased her, saying she was so distracted because she had a boyfriend of her own to think about.

In reality, she was thinking about Lilith.

What she had heard of her from Mary, from the other gossiping girls, and what she thought she was like from her own experience.

(And, just maybe, her mind still lingered on the sliver of skin that had revealed itself when she stretched. But that stays between us.)

The speeches and announcements went through one ear and exited the next as Eve had yet to pull her head from the clouds, hearing all that was said but not registering a word.

When the people around her stood, she rose a second later, not fully out of her daze. Though the moment they left the gym, she could tell something important had happened.

"I can't believe they're really doing this to us," a girl she passed by lamented, "it's like they think we're first graders or something."

The grumbling came from everyone in the halls but Eve had yet to hear enough to understand it all.

"There you are!" Mary said, pushing through a small crowd to get to her.

"What did you think of the announcement?" She panted, cheeks bright pink and devoid of their usual cover-up. The morning announcements must have given her no time to do her make up.

"I didn't hear it, the girls next to me were too noisy." That was partially true, Eve reasoned to herself, she really hadn't heard anything but not because of the noise.

"Just tell me what I need to know."

"Alright," Mary sighed, though she wasn't sure if it was one of frustration or if she was just out of breath. If the courtyard was far from the gym, more so the nun's office.

"Basically, the nuns have created a sort of buddy system where two girls would be paired together, given the same schedule, and are tasked with watching over each other and reporting any offences they commit." She explained as they strolled leisurely through the cloisters.

"They say it's to keep us from temptation and build a sense of community..." She leaned in closer to whisper. "But between you and me, it's so that they can find out who started the fire."

"What's gonna happen to them?"

"Hmm?"

"The people who started the fire, I mean."

"Going by word of mouth, they're going to be expelled and maybe even sued." Eve could hardly believe the excitement in Mary's voice. A court case would only lead to more papers to peek at for her and endless suffering to the girl who it was for.

"But that's not what I came here to talk about," she said, crowd around them thinning.

"I just wanted to warn you."

"What?"

"You got paired with Lilith Damien, you know, the troublemaker?" She put in her locker combination and yanked her bag out. "She's one of the suspects and even if she wasn't, she's still a bit of a problem student."

"Okay, but why'd you need to warn me? I don't think she's going to hurt me, that would get her suspended."

Mary raised a no longer so perfect eyebrow at her, green eyes narrowing. The look she sent her made Eve feel like was nothing more than a daft cow or a brain dead five year old.

"You don't know that! Look, I'm warning you become she's... well, you know." Mary's tone softened in implication.

"She's what?"

"That she's, you know," She nudged Eve with her elbow, hard bone pressing into her soft sides rather painfully.

"No, Mary, I don't know. Just tell me."

"Alright, alright. The thing is, Lilith's a," she cupped a hand to Eve's ear and leaned in close, her breath hot as her small bust pressed against her friend's arm, "lesbian."

The word was uttered like it was a curse, despicable and dirty. No better than a disease that plagued the weak-willed and the depraved.

And to Mary, it was just that.

Eve visibly paled at the word, going completely stiff as nerves took over her body.

"I know, I'm just as disgusted out as you are."

"H-How did you even know?" Her palms grew damp and her fingers reached for her hair instinctively, twiddling with the ends and wrapping it around her finger so strongly that the tip turned a vivid red.

"Margaret said she saw her and the exchange student making out in the library last year."

"Ah..." Eve didn't know the validity of Margaret's claims, but if she was basing it off of past experience, it wasn't much more than the gum on her shoe.

"So be careful, okay? I don't want you being taken advantage of..."

As mean as Mary could be sometimes, Eve knew she had her best interests at heart and nodded, if only for show.

They may have only met, but she trusted Lilith enough to know that she wouldn't intentionally harm her.

"Good. I'm gonna go, can you head to class on your own?"

"I'll be fine," Eve said, Mary promptly leaving after.

She had arrived just in time for Sister Eunice entered the moment she sat down.

The next few hours were spent in a constant state of questioning, paying little to no mind to what was being taught.

Was she now scared of Lilith because she was rumored to be a.... that? (Not even in the privacy of her mind could she say that word. It was as if evem thinking it would be an admission of some sort. Though one does not need an admission to be a that.) She didn't think herself to be. After all, it was fine to have homosexual thoughts, as long as you didn't act on them.

Though apparently, Lilith had already acted on the thoughts... this didn't quite faze Eve either.

Was that going to pose a problem?

"Probably not," she reasoned to herself.

Mary told Eve to be careful, not scared.

Did that say anything about Eve? For her own sake, she hoped not.

Even in her most absurd thoughts did she think that Lilith could be a that.

She looked nothing like the ones they were taught about. She didn't have short hair, or tattoos, or piercings. She wasn't ugly to the point that she would repulse men. Far from it.

Eve thought she looked gorgeous. Who wouldn't? With her sharp, alluring features mixed with soft skin and fiery, red hair that shone beautifully in the sun, the girl could have anyone.

In fact, she wouldn't be surprised if she found out that Lilith already had a boyfriend.

Just disappointed.

Though, of course, she would never admit this.

Not even to herself.

Similar things flitted in and out of her mind until the lunch bell forced her back to reality.

"Class dismissed, girls." The nun packed her papers and left, other's quickly following suit.

Since it was Wednesday, Eve didn't share her lunch block with Mary or Elizabeth.

For her, this meant either awkwardly asking someone if she could sit at their table, or skipping the humiliation altogether and sneaking her food into the library.

Today, she opted for the second option. She got in line, grabbed two sandwiches and left, all the while stuffing them into her messenger bag.

"Good afternoon, Sister Deborah."

"Welcome back, Eve." The elderly nun by the front desk said to her softly, quite used to her presence here.

The nun's would never let it on, but it was an unspoken truth between them that Eve was a favourite of theirs. All who taught her knew she was an absolute delight. She was smart, well-mannered, pious, and all around a good girl.

The blonde made her way to her usual seat, waving at Sister Anne on the way. She was one of the few nuns here to have taken a vow of silence, thus the usual greetings wouldn't do.

Eve got to her spot, only to find that it had been taken up by what had occupied her mind all day.

"Lilith."

"Something you need, Eve?" She was smirking, leaning deeper into the plush armchair, positioning herself in such a way could almost be considered lounging, a show of relaxation she should covet.

Now, in most situations, Eve could be considered a pacifist. She was rarely assertive, never wanting to cause a fuss. It was considered rude, improper, and it just wasn't what a good Christian would do, disturb others.

There were very few things in the world she would stand up for.

This was one of them.

"That's my spot."

Lilith's eyes widened at that, then a short bark of laughter that echoed through the silent space came from her and she rose.

"And so it is."

She then sank into the armchair beside it, the scratchy one, if Eve remembered correctly, and melted into it, seemingly unaffected by the patchy fabric.

"Thank you." Eve sat down in her rightful place only after smoothing her skirt over, bag plopped onto her lap.

She was about to pull out the food when she was suddenly reminded of Lilith's presence by the all too familiar sound of shifting cloth.

As good an actor she was, the itch would get her soon enough.

"You know, you don't need to sit in an armchair. Just bring a stool over or try a different one." Eve said, trying to be helpful by stating the obvious.

"I could do that, yeah," Lilith shrugged, "but that would mean that of all the things to lose to, I lose to a chair, so I'd rather not."

"Who said everything had to be a competition?"

"Who said that everything wasn't a competition?" Lilith tapped her temple, a smirk once again etching itself onto her features.

Eve decided to play along, crossing her arms in pretend dominance. "I said so."

"And why should I listen to you?"

"Who else would you listen to?" She quipped, sharp but friendly.

The two giggled this and continued their back and forth banter, unaware of the time til Eve's eyes had strayed from Lilith's to the clock on the desk.

"Ah, the sandwiches!" Eve said in a panic, removing her arms that were pressed against her bag, surely squishing the bread.

Too worried about the mayonnaise getting all over her notebooks, she yanked them out of her bag, not bothering to think as to why she had hid them there in the first place.

"My, oh my, someone has brought food into the library," Lilith whispered, a look of mock scandal adorning her face.

"What? N-No, I was just-" Eve glanced around frantically, as if an alibi would appear on the painting of Saint Joan of Arc strung up on the wall.

"Think of something. Say something, you idiot!" Her eyes bounced from wall to wall and she found herself reaching for her hair once more.

At the genuine fear on her face, Lilith's smile dropped. "Hey, it's fine, don't worry about it. I'm kidding, Eve, really."

"I'm sorry. I don't do this often, I swear, it's just embarrassing to eat lunch alone so I thought-"

"Really, it's fine. I'm not gonna tell anybody." Lilith said, voice soft and soothing as she could make it. "Hell, I've done way worse than sneak some sandwiches in. You've got nothing to worry about here."

"Like what?"

Lilith held out her pinky. "Promise not to tell anyone?"

"I promise." Eve nodded, her own pinky reaching for Lilith's.

It sounded horrible, but hearing about how others had done worse would always make her feel better, superior. It would serve as a small reassurance that she'd yet to hit rock bottom.

Though she wasn't exactly certain she hadn't hit it already for the feeling of Lilith's finger intertwined with her was enough to send her spiralling.

"Okay, then." She leaned in close, bright hair brushing Eve's shoulders as the girl's warm fingers rested on her flushed cheek, cupping the small space between her ear and her mouth, hot breath nearly wracking Eve's body with uncontrollable and unexplainable shivers.

It felt so different from when Mary would whisper to her, though if asked to put it into words how, all you'd get was a few false starts and heavy, thought-filled silence.

The overwhelming sensation of it all nearly blocked out Lilith's words, though when they finally settled in, an explosion wouldn't have been able to block it out.

"Oh. That's... worse." It was all she could muster.

How could she possibly reply to that?

The girl laughed, an uneasy and regret filled noise that seemed so strange coming from her.

"I won't tell anyone, as promised." Eve rubbed at her pinky finger. If she wasn't mistaken, Lilith had either applied hand sanitizer just before she showed up or her hands were just so naturally soft.

"We've got about five minutes of lunch left, so if you wanna gobble those up real fast, I can be blind for a good three minutes."

She let out a breathless laugh, unwrapping the bread and offering the other to Lilith.

"What's in it?"

"Just some eggs and mayo."

"Sweet." She sat back down in her chair and they ate in silence, Eve still a bit too shaken to go back to their previous banter.

After, they shoved the mayo stained tinfoil wrapper into their pockets, crinkling with every step, their own inside joke.

The air hung heavy with unvoiced tension, as if the whispered words were a haunting presence just behind them as they walked to class.

At some point, their hips bumped together and much to their surprise, Eve burst into hysterical laughter at the noise that was crushed tinfoil.

With that, the awkwardness dissolved. They were closer now. Bonded by secrets and sandwiches and itchy armchairs.

Eve would rather have a hundred late detentions than have this moment taken from her.

And, as she would later come to know, so would Lilith.

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