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rosethornewrites · 4 years

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Fic: this body yet survives, ch. 1

Relationship: Lán Zhàn | Lán Wàngjī/Wèi Yīng | Wèi Wúxiàn

Characters: Lán Zhàn | Lán Wàngjī, Lán Huàn | Lán Xīchén, Lán Qǐrén, Wèi Yīng | Wèi Wúxiàn, Jiāng Chéng | Jiāng Wǎnyín, Jiāng Yànlí

Additional Tags: No War AU, Recovery, Trauma, Dissociation

Summary: Wei WuXian continues to recover from his traumatic near-death experience, and the cultivation world slowly reacts to the event as well.

Notes: I hesitated to write this because I’m already writing two multichapter fics. But I already started this and I have Plans, so it’s too late. So here we go. Please note that in the coming weeks the new semester will start and so my writing time will be much curtailed. The title of this is taken from another Mei Yaochen poem. His poems are really lovely. My favorites deal with grief and longing. I really need to look into finding translations—a translation I found of 不知夢 was haunting. Alas, this pandemic doesn’t make getting books easy.

Parts 1 & 2

AO3 Link

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“Xiongzhang, shufu, I wish to court Wei Ying.”

WangJi had decided to be forward about his desire. Most would approach such a conversation in a roundabout way, starting with idle conversation, but WangJi preferred to be direct, especially in this.

Truthfully, he would have sought permission before now, but Wei Ying was fragile, even after he had finally broken through to him.

When he had brought him to his siblings after his admission of hunger, Jiang YanLi had cried when he actually ate, kept filling his bowl, and had since made it her personal mission to get him back to a healthy weight. Jiang Cheng’s reaction had been stronger; he had given Wei Ying an almost violent hug and demanded he never worry them like that again.

“I’ll try not to,” Wei Ying had said.

“If you… I was going to kill a-niang if you didn’t get better. She’d deserve it. She does deserve it.”

Jiang Cheng’s voice had been filled with vitriol.

Neither sibling had wanted to part from him, particularly after he admitted to having nightmares, and the four of them had stayed in the jingshi that night, with XiChen as an amused chaperone due to Jiang YanLi’s status as a young maiden. WangJi had not expected to be included in the sleepover, but he had been pleased by it nonetheless.

“I was there, but I wasn’t,” Wei Ying tried to explain, struggling both to find the words and stay awake. “I knew what was going on around me, but I didn’t really feel anything. Interacting was hard, like trying to run underwater.”

He had fallen asleep long before hai shi, after Jiang YanLi had stuffed him full of lotus and pork rib soup, spicy baozi, and osmanthus cakes she had personally prepared in the kitchen. He had sprawled on a blanket in what was normally an anteroom of sorts in the jingshi. Jiang Cheng had covered him with a second blanket with a surprising amount of tenderness.

“How did you get through to him, second master Lan?” Jiang YanLi had asked in the quiet that followed. “We were so worried.”

Answering that question was not easy; he had not then been ready to admit his feelings to anyone but Wei Ying.

“I composed a guqin piece for him,” he finally said.

The smile Jiang YanLi had given him was knowing, and made it clear she was pleased and accepting of his intentions toward Wei Ying, though he knew he would still need to formally request permission of her and Jiang Cheng in the future if he wished to court him.

Jiang Cheng, thankfully, had not seemed to get the implication and just shook his head.

“He always was more musical than anyone else in the family. A-Niang hated that, wouldn’t let him play the dizi. Just another thing she decided to be awful about,” he had muttered angrily.

“‘An angry man is full of poison,’” XiChen had advised softly, quoting Confucius. “Your anger will not change her, only yourself.”

Jiang Cheng nodded, but his lips twisted.

“She wanted me to hate him. Kept pitting us against each other, comparing us. Still, I never thought she would…”

He shook his head, and Jiang YanLi squeezed his shoulder gently.

“Blood or not, a-Xian is our beloved brother,” she had said. “And she hates that. It may be unfilial, but we choose him.”

WangJi had insisted Jiang YanLi take the bed, as was appropriate. He settled in for the night beside Wei Ying, xiongzhang on his other side. Jiang Cheng slept on the other side of Wei Ying, sandwiching him between friendly bodies; if he woke from nightmares, he would not be alone.

But it had been WangJi who woke to hear Wei Ying’s soft whimpers and panting in his sleep, to see his furrowed brow and the fear and pain in his features, even asleep.

“Wei Ying,” he had whispered. “You’re safe.”

Wei Ying hadn’t stirred, but had curled toward his voice, wound up burrowed against his side, and let out a soft sigh, his brow relaxing as he fell deeper into sleep, away from the nightmare that had been plaguing him.

WangJi’s last thought before falling back to sleep had been that Wei Ying fit against his body like it was meant to be.

Shufu’s cup froze halfway to his mouth, but his expression was one of resignation. Xiongzhang simply looked pleased.

“He has been doing better these past weeks,” XiChen commented.

WangJi only nodded.

‘Better’ was the best descriptor. At times Wei Ying still seemed more absent than present, but the mind healers were able to speak with him more than they had before and seemed optimistic. He ate more, though he sometimes needed prompting or reminders of the food if he seemed to fade from reality. He was starting to look healthier.

“Sometimes,” Wei Ying had confessed after one of his fading episodes, “it’s like the world is too bright and loud.”

Even in the serenity of Cloud Recesses. The mind healers, he had said, told him his mind was protecting him when the world was too much for him, as it apparently had been for a full year after his near-death.

Wei Ying had, haltingly, started to play the dizi WangJi had bought him, sometimes losing himself in the music entirely. The battered dizi among his possessions, he explained, had belonged to his father, something he had left behind at Lotus Pier after eloping with his mother. Jiang FengMian had stored it away for his return, but instead Wei ChangZe and CangSe SanRen had died on a night hunt.

The dizi had been given to Wei Ying when he was found and brought to Lotus Pier, the only item he had of his parents’, but he had been banned from playing it by Yu ZiYuan. Instead he had hidden it away in his room.

Playing the dizi also often overwhelmed Wei Ying, leaving him beyond exhausted, the memories associated so fraught. WangJi had seen tears spill down his cheeks as he played more than once. But when WangJi mentioned the idea of attending music classes to learn GusuLan cultivation songs, he had smiled.

WangJi had set up a meeting with the instructor, Lan MingKai. Despite the rule against gossip, all of GusuLan knew what had happened at the Lotus Pier discussion conference. Normally this would be displeasing, but the result was not: Wei Ying was treated with kindness. Not only had the instructor been welcoming, he had even offered individual morning music lessons. Wei Ying was, in fact, attending a lesson while WangJi had tea with his brother and uncle.

Overall, Wei Ying was more present, more expressive—nothing like he had been before, but after so long without seeing him smile at all even the small ones were precious.

“Yes,” WangJi said. “It is gratifying.”

Shufu cleared his throat and took a sip of tea, setting down the cup before speaking.

“Why seek our approval, WangJi? Why not his siblings’?”

“Wei Ying is of GusuLan now,” he reminded softly; it was polite to seek sect approval. “I will seek their approval following yours.”

This explanation seemed to please shufu, who nodded, stroking his beard thoughtfully.

“It has been troubling to see Wei WuXian so… quiet,” he finally said. “I never thought I would say I prefer him more lively, but…”

In conversations over the last year, shufu had expressed concerns. He had seen people severely traumatized in the past, their personalities changed by pain. He had kept up with the mind healers and offered suggestions on activities WangJi could use to try to engage Wei Ying.

“There have been times the mind healers have not been able to help,” he finished after a moment. “I was becoming concerned this might be one of those cases.”

WangJi set down his teacup, afraid he might break it in reaction, his entire body clenching at the idea that Wei Ying could die.

Shufu watched him, something in his face softening.

“He will still need help in his continued recovery, WangJi. And he may never recover fully.”

“I wish to be by his side regardless,” he stated, and his voice came out hoarse.

Xiongzhang placed his hand on his shoulder, squeezing gently as though to soothe.

“You have my blessing, WangJi. You always have.”

WangJi almost smiled at that, remembering how XiChen had pushed him to form a friendship with Wei Ying, how he had resisted. He hadn’t known how to handle his burgeoning emotions, had been afraid of them. Xiongzhang had known long before he himself had.

“You have mine as well,” shufu added. “A marriage would make GusuLan’s acceptance of Wei WuXian more concrete and indisputable.”

XiChen nodded, looking thoughtful.

“After what he has been through, and what I have heard of his childhood from Jiang WanYin, that stability would likely help him heal.”

WangJi resisted his immediate urge to ask after that information, but if Jiang Cheng wanted it known to him, it would be. He refused to violate Wei Ying’s privacy by asking others or even him. If Wei Ying wished him to know, he would tell him.

Shufu interrupted his thoughts.

“WangJi, you need never fear he will face ill treatment here. No physical punishment. No seclusion. He will not be turned out. He has suffered enough.”

Tension WangJi hadn’t known he’d been carrying eased all at once, the fear that Wei Ying would, once healed, face these punishments and, if they were married, be subject to the same treatment his mother had suffered... The last thing he wanted to do was add to the trauma Wei Ying had already been subjected to by making him a prisoner. He had already watched him nearly die and then wither away into almost a ghost once; he refused to do it again.

“Thank you, shufu.”

“He may have a penchant for… antics,” shufu continued. “But none of them have been harmful. They’re simple pranks, nothing worth what he has suffered.”

Silence fell between them, and WangJi did his best not to remember mud-caked pale skin and blue lips, the gurgling gasp of Wei Ying’s desperate breaths under Jiang YanLi’s screams. He feared if he closed his eyes, that would be all he would see, not the gentle whorls of the dark table, the condensation on the teapot, not the steam rising from its spout.

They had been among the first to respond to Jiang YanLi’s screams for help, having happened to be nearby at the time. Shufu, having the best knowledge among them of healing, had not hesitated to dirty his robe in the mud, passing qi to Wei Ying as he lay bleeding from his nose, eyes, ears, coughing up blood and river water, dangerously close to qi deviation after his desperate and dangerous use of his spiritual energy to free himself.

Shufu had ordered xiongzhang to get help, ordered WangJi to help him, clearly knowing WangJi would refuse to leave if asked. Wei Ying had moaned in pain when shufu turned him onto his side, and that was when they saw the tears in the back his clothing that left him almost naked, the blood seeping from lash marks, had noticed the bruising on his face and neck, the bloody fingers that curled in the mud as though seeking something to hold onto.

WangJi had removed the outermost layer of his robe to drape over him, to preserve his dignity in front of the array of faces that were coming to investigate Jiang YanLi’s screams. He had taken his hand then, had watched Wei Ying, eyes wide and terrified, try to focus on him, saw him mouth his name. All he could do was assure him he was there and keep holding his hand when Wen Qing arrived and started snapping orders to everyone.

“It probably helps that he has never gone near your beard,” xiongzhang commented, his tone almost forcibly light, an attempt to dispel the tension.

Shufu seemed to shake himself, as though dispelling the same memories haunting WangJi, or memories of his own.

“CangSe SanRen probably considered her crowning prank the time she shaved my beard while I slept,” shufu said, his voice almost fond. “I rather hope he doesn’t attempt that.”

WangJi hesitated before speaking.

“Wei Ying knows very little about his parents,” he said softly. “He would probably appreciate any stories of his mother you would tell him.”

After a moment of hesitation, shufu nodded.

“She was a very bright person,” he murmured. “Much like Wei WuXian was, before.”

His countenance had a sort of sorrow to it, and WangJi wondered if Lan QiRen, like Jiang FengMian and others of his generation, had also loved CangSe SanRen. Whether she had upended him like Wei Ying had upended WangJi. Or perhaps shufu felt the loss of Wei Ying’s light, and it reminded him of her death.

“Tell him I will speak to him, when he is ready,” shufu said.

WangJi wondered if shufu was ready, but he held his tongue. That his uncle was thinking of Wei Ying’s condition, letting Wei Ying decide if and when he was ready to learn more about his mother, was a kindness. He was still recovering from the damage his adoptive mother, however much she didn’t deserve and had refused the title, had done to him.

“I will let him know.”

They pause to sip at the cooling tea, to enjoy the breeze coming in through the window and the sound of the windchimes gently clinking beyond, the peace of a morning in Cloud Recesses.

“Please also let young master Wei know that he is not required to invent talismans so regularly,” xiongzhang said as he poured more tea. “His recovery comes first. And he need not feel he owes GusuLan for offering sanctuary.”

“Not simply sanctuary,” shufu clarified. “Wei WuXian is a GusuLan disciple, should he wish to be. He need not offer compensation for his care.”

WangJi frowned, considering all that had occurred. Certainly, shufu’s words to Madam Yu had made Wei Ying’s welcome clear, but he didn’t know that Wei Ying had been capable of listening then, so soon after his near death and in the midst of insults and verbal abuse. The announcement of such so publicly at the discussion conference meant that Wei Ying’s status as a GusuLan disciple was known to the cultivation world.

But it didn’t necessarily follow that it was known to Wei Ying.

“Has Wei Ying been informed? Formally invited?”

He watched as his uncle and brother had a silent conversation that left them both looking abashed, and knew this was something that had been lost in the chaos of what had happened, had somehow not been noticed in the last year, an oversight.

“I will speak with him,” xiongzhang insisted. “He already wears GusuLan robes, so we thought…”

“He wears them because they are white,” WangJi reminded him. “He grieves still. I gave him blue robes, and he has not worn them.”

Shufu frowned, his expression almost pinched, close to a wince. XiChen closed his eyes, as he always did when overwhelmed by emotion. WangJi felt the same guilt they did; it had been a year, and none of them had clarified his welcome, too focused on his dissociation with the world, his healing, when this information could have aided in his recovery. None of them had clarified that this was his home.

“I will have a forehead ribbon prepared as well,” shufu said. “We will present it to him, and apologize for the delay.”

“Perhaps you should also make sure his siblings are aware,” WangJi said gently.

Shufu actually winced, which told him the issue had also not been discussed with them, either. WangJi wondered if the Jiang siblings had realized Wei Ying would stay at Cloud Recesses, or if they had planned to follow Wei Ying wherever he went after Gusu.

“I would recommend speaking to them first,” WangJi advised. “Perhaps before I ask about courtship, so they do not assume the two are related.”

“Or dependent,” xiongzhang murmured, as though he had read WangJi’s mind. “We owe them a tremendous apology. After what nearly happened… they’ve feared for his future all this time. It must be one of the reasons they’ve stayed.”

They had many, WangJi knew, and he was certain both XiChen and shufu knew as well. The biggest one was the lady of Lotus Pier, who may have given birth to both of them but could clearly not be trusted.

“We will rectify this,” shufu assured him. “Wei WuXian is of GusuLan.”

“And when he is ready to stop wearing white, that can certainly be accommodated,” xiongzhang added. “He seemed rather fond of black and red, as I recall.”

Shufu twitched but did not protest.

The bell indicating si shi rang, and WangJi rose, bowing properly to his brother and uncle. It was time to collect Wei Ying from his lesson.

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carrietrekkie · 5 years

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Pike/Female OC

I think I´ll try a little experiment and posting my Pike/Female OC Story.

It´s been a while since my last release of a story and it will be my very first in English. I finished only a OC Ask Meme about her in English, so, if someone liked it or want´s to know more about that story, let me know and i will translate the images and stories.

Please let me also know, if there are linguistic mistakes.

So, here it is!

What is your character´s full name?: Cathrin Elizabeth Zimmer (Ranks from Lieutenant to Commander)

When were they born?: 31.10.1986, Germany, Another Dimension.

What are their parent´s names?: Robert Zimmer, Annabell Zimmer

Do they have any brothers or sisters?: An older brother, Markus Zimmer

What kind of eyes do they have: Green eyes with golden sparkles. She has a warm gaze, not afraid of eye contact, even which strangers, this comes from her education and the time she spends with people in her past job.

What kind of hair do they have?: Dark nut brown hair. It falls in soft waves over her armpit but at duty she used to wear it up to a ponytail or a updos with braids.

What is their complexion like? Fair skin, she always used to be very pale, she tans really slowly but that takes time

What body type are they? 5.5, she is average, bit curvy and loves it. By the time she arrives in the 23 century and the events followed by her apparition, she starts to train and learn a lot of Martial Arts to protect her crewmembers and herself if there is need to, so she gets a little more athletic.

What is listening to their voice like? Cathrin has an unexpected deep voice that skip a bit, when she´s getting emotional. She trained that because she made the experience that a deep, warm voice calms patients and people much more than a highly tone. Some of her phrases are old fashioned to the people around her, that’s something Chris loves about her and he started to use them to, long before they get together.

She loves to sing, but thinks she´s not very talented, so she keep it private but sometimes, when she is concentrated, it happens in public. Dr. Culber found it enchanting after it happens in his presence but never mentioned it to her, until she leaves Discovery.

What do they hate most about themselves? Cathrin hate her uncertainty about the 23 century. Almost everything is new to her, despite her memories of the events in the “Star Trek Universe”, it’s a completely different thing to be thrown into this life without advance warning. She had to ask about everything, even the things that totally normal for everyone around her and after all this time she spent in her new life, there is always something new and unexpected that made her feel like a complete idiot. (Just imagine pull out of your time, space and dimension and been thrown over 200 years into the future.)

Do they have a favorite quote?

To see your world in a grain of sand, and a heaven in a wild flower. To hold infinity in the palm of your hand, An eternity in an hour.

Her father used to read her and her brother poems when there where children, this one is the last he told them, on the day he passed away.

_Be bold, be brave, be courageous. _

The words she read to her nephew at his christening. Much later, she said this to Pike and he completed her sentence without hesitation, they started to say goodbye with that, before they go on separate or dangerous missions. He once said this words carried them to the hardest and darkest times of their life, as well as thru the best and brightest.

What sort of music do they enjoy? Cathrin is very into music. She holds the musical data she brought with her like a treasure. She enjoyed a peculiar mixture of music: Pop, Rock, Metal, Country, World Music and Soundtracks from the 1950 till 2019. She also enjoys some stuff from the 23th century, but there she is highly influenced by Chris Favorites.

Once she made a playlist for Chris ( as a thanks for keeping her from drowning, after the first time she was forced to kill, to save Ash Tylers Life), she called it cheesy and terribly old fashioned, he says it´s one of the best gifts he ever received. And with time goes by every song from this list, fits to something that’s happened in their lives.

Have/would they ever cheat(ed) on a partner?: No, she would never do that. When she loves, she does with her full heart, soul and mind. Cathrin is a very romantic person but is uncertain how to show it in the right way or at all.

Have they been cheated on by a partner?: Yes. Back in her old life, her fiancé cheated on her a few weeks before their weeding. And although a year after that, she could forgive him, there both were very young and maybe to naive about their relationship, but she never forget that feeling and swear she would never do such horrible thing to someone she love.

Have they ever lost someone close to them? Cathrin lost everyone she knew and loves when the signal brought her into the 23 century. It took her a while to get to live on with that, but she heeded Chris advice to let them go, since they lived there lives long ago and hers is just to start at a new point.

She is afraid to loss her new friends and crewmembers and, even though she´s used to dead by her job, she still mourn every patient that passed away on her duty.

Her father died, after a long illness, when she and her brother where teenagers.

Are they judgmental of others? No. She treated everyone the same way, unless she get´s a reason for being so rude. She was not a very popular companion when she was at school, sometimes she get bullied, so she decided, she would never be a person like that.

Have they ever been drunk? Yes. The worst drunkenness was at a party after her father´s funeral. Cathrin had a completely blackout on that evening. After that night she nearly tolerated nothing alcoholic and only drinks a glass on very special occasions. The champagne Pike serves her after her admission to Starfleet nearly knocks her out and he still makes his jokes about that. (There was a party after that but she can´t remember anything about that.)

What are they like when they stay up all night? A little bit like a humming-bird, reinforced by the amount of coffee she consumed to get through the night at all. She speaks to much and to fast and gets very jumpy. Usually Cathrin is not a night person, she needs her sleep and she needs to be rested before she takes a step into an OP to lay a life of someone in her hands. But if it´s necessary, and thanks to the training and conditions, she could pull herself together to get through tough times, but she don´t like it, she know it is unhealthy to let it happened to often.

What evokes strong memories for them? A lot of thinks throws her back to things she´s been through, but that are memories she can deal with, like the death of her father, her first heartbreak or the good times, she had with her childhood friends.

Much more harder to process are the flashbacks and buried memories that comes with her knowledge of thinks that probably could happen in the future. For them there are no fixed triggers, so it overcomes her from time to time with unexpected effects and results. Cathrin hates it but can do nothing against it, sometimes it´s like a whisper but otherwise it could knock her completely out and most of this times she ended in sick bay and with a lot of questions she never could answer entirely.

The only memory she could share and prevent form happening, was Pikes fate but she always fear, that with hold up these events, there would be another tragic end for him (she knew, there is some, but she has no access to it) and when she see it clearly, it would be to late.

Anyway she wrote down every fragment she remembers in a notebook and made a note in it, that after her and Chris dead it should go to the Captain and First Officer of the Enterprise.

What do they do on rainy days?: Cathrin used to read on rainy days, doing laundry, watching movies or series.

After rainy days could only happen on personal leave times, she takes these days to do nothing or just things she really likes. Take a long bath, stay in bed till midday, preferred by breakfast also in bed or just listen to music. On top of this list stands spending time with Chris, catch up the things they have to less time on board of Enterprise, even if it´s just sitting side by side by the fireplace, reading a book or dancing to their favorite songs.

**What religion are they? **Cathrin grew up in a little catholic embossed village in Germany. She never get to much into religion but always had faith and believe that there are more tings between earth and sky than science will show her.

She stayed with it, after her arrival in the future and pulled from it, when the days and nights are getting dark and sometimes hopeless. Her spiritual side goes along with her scientific way to live, she never saw a reason why they had to exclude each other.

What do they wear to bed?: Cathrin wears a pyjama shorts with a shirt, sometimes a nightgown, accounting on her daily condition. When she is away from Enterprise for Starfleet Academy, she usually wears some of Chris t-shirts and a long pyjama pants (She had some strange encounters at night in the dorm, so she decided to be as dressed as possible). On vacation she sometimes sleeps in underwear or less.

Do they have any tattoos or piercings?: No tattoos, but she get her ears pierced when she was a little girl.

Cathrin don´t like needles at all, every time she has to take a blood sample from a patient or give an injection in the past, she suffered with him. One reason she thinks Hyposprays are a gift of heaven.

What type of clothing are they most comfortable in?: Cathrin loves the clothes she had with her, when she was brought to Discovery (Jeans, a shirt, a black dress and coat, two pairs of high heels), even the Jeans get ripped, she never thrown it away.

She likes her blue Enterprise uniform more than the dark blue from Discovery. Of duty she likes to wear dresses and skirts, shoes with a heel( gives her the illusion to get nearly the high of Chris) and sometimes the “county girl style” Chris loves so much on her.

What is their favorite food?: Cathrin is addicted to desserts and sweet thinks. Baking was one of her hobbies, but you can´t bake cookies on a space ship.

On personal leave she sometimes cooks. Her all time favorite are Pancakes, done by the recipe of her mother, that’s something she really missed.

Do they have any enemies?: No personal enemies. But if you are in Starfleet, it comes with the duty and some decisions you forced to make. She´s sure there are a few people in the galaxy, who prefer her dead then still alive, but they first have to pass Chris and the crew of the Enterprise.

What does their writing look like?: Cathrin has a very elegant writing but when she´s in hurry, so most of the time, it goes undecipherable. This also caused back to her time as a medical assistant and later as a Paramedic.

What disgusts them? Liars, disloyalty, dishonorable intentions. She has a high loyal compass and goes not well with people who infringe it. Cathrin hates senseless violence and every action that caused damage to the ones she love and who stands under her protection.

#captain pike x reader #christopher pike x reader #pike x reader #star trek discovery #star trek discovery oc #captain pike imagines #captain chris pike

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247reader · 6 years

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Otilia Thing!

So I finally finished the Grand Otilia backstory! (Otilia being my character in our Curse of Strahd 5e game). I now present it below. Rated T-ish for violence.

Background: Haunted One. A terrible guilt consumes me. I hope that I can find redemption through my actions.

[note about the writing process: this was somewhere between fanfic and original writing, which was an interesting balance. Takes heavy inspiration from The Great God Pan, including one nearly-direct quote, but I also threw in a few references to other works and at one point Otilia also quotes Loreena McKennit]

It was the tail end of a glorious Season. For Professor Grayson, most surmised, it had been glorious indeed - two daughters engaged, his youngest to a viscount's heir! For the younger son of a baronet - for such the Professor was, the third of old Sir Henry's boys and uncle to that young Sir Henry who had been the talk of London three years ago - the thought of sitting his little Sarah in Blennox House must have been fine indeed. And yet it was the second proposal that the old man seemed to recieve with greater joy, when Reynard DuPuis, a former student and now a friend of long standing, asked him for Otilia's hand.

Otilia! She made appearances, still, at dances, and her brothers took her across the floor, but what men had been tempted by her bright eyes and blond curls enough to set aside the rumors - not only pertaining to herself, but those that still swirled around her long-dead mother, beautiful Bona Grayson, of questionable origins and questionable demise - soon sheared away from her strange habit of answering a question before one spoke it, of reciting a poem and then stopping off in the middle; from her three flint-eyed brothers; above all, from a disinterest on the lady's part that was rather more insulting than intriguing.

The Professor had married again, after Bona's death, to a woman of fine and respectable blood but no money, and Otilia had never known another mother but Anne. She had doted on her young half-siblings, and her brothers had promised her, when it seemed she was destined to the life of a literary spinster, that she and her poems would always have a place in their homes, Thomas offering his tree fort and Robert - her cheerful Robin - the manor he was certain to acquire when he became an admiral; as he was still a midshipman it seemed she would have to live with Papa and Charles for some years yet.

The thought did not bother Otilia, except for the nagging concern that she had failed them, and she set aside her wild dark poems for a few that she hoped would be publishable. She had set one of her step-mother's thousand Orllewin fairy stories to verse, and was drafting another, when Reynard DuPuis kissed her hand and asked her if she would do the honor of becoming his wife.

She said yes. There seemed nothing else to say, but she was not unhappy. She knew him but little, but he was one of her father's dearest friends, and could be nothing other than a scholarly man of kind character with that to recommend him, for her father was drawn to those most like himself - ever more, they said, since the death of his first wife, the mother she'd never known.

The voices said many things about her mother. But she was a wife now, Mrs. DuPuis, with an estate and servants to oversee, the hostess and not the guest - and perhaps the voices were things of Otilia Grayson, and would plague Mrs. DuPuis no longer.

Sally - Sarah - the future Viscountess Blennox-on-Trivers - Otilia’s Sally, still, twisted roses into her sister's hair and veil, flapping the servants away.

"What luck Mr. DuPuis is an orphan," said Sally, her face sullen. "I fear that Eddie's mother hates me." A rose slipped from her fingers and fell. "She shan't let us marry until I'm nearly twenty!"

Otilia thought of Lord Edward's mother. Of the nightmare she'd had the night after, and then again after that, a small figure in a curtained bed, pain like fire in her belly, a still white shape in the arms of a faceless man, the wait for a baby's cry that never came.

"The Viscountess adores you," said Otilia, which was a statement safe enough. "It's Lord Edward's uncles who you must be wary of."

Sally moved forward until her own dark amber eyes met Otilia's gray ones - it was her eyes, her father's oldest friends would whisper, that most resembled poor Bona. "Wary?"

"They want to see him dead," said Otlia, her eyes clouded and distant, as though she did not realize that she spoke. Not consumption then, the voices had said, taking on a strangely human, too-familiar tone. More's the pity.

"I won't let them. I'll warn Eddie -"

Otilia covered her mouth with her gloved hands, heedless of the smeared powder. Her brothers and sisters believed her, every time. They would be ever so much safer once she was gone, but she would miss them dreadfully.

"Warn him of what, Sally? That your foolish sister had a nightmare?"

Sally gripped Otilia's shoulder with her small plump fingers. "I shall watch them, then. I shan't let them have Eddie!" In the mirror, Otilia could see her sister's face, scowling and red. She reached up a hand, and laid it on Sally’s.

Gilderoy Abbey was a tall, dark house, nestled in the rolling moors. Reynard DuPuis' grandfather had paid off the debts of its former owners, and in exchange had married the daughter of the house. Someone, once, had planned out elegant gardens and a tree-lined drive, but all, now, was overgrown, cedars bowing down under their own weight, the roses gangly and sparse, the boxhedge maze a thicket.

It was beautiful, Otilia thought, in its own way, wild and strange, but her husband, beside her, apologized profusely. He had hired new gardeners, and hoped they would be better than the last, and if some things were beyond repair, perhaps she could assist him in planning new ones?

There was nothing that could have delighted her more. He asked her favorite flowers, whether she like to walk, and what she thought should be done with his father's folly, built to resemble a collapsing Aldor temple but now collapsing in truth.

Planning her first formal dinner as lady of the house was not quite so natural or pleasant as sketching columns, but Otilia, conscious of the debt she owed her husband, threw herself into it with as much fervor as any a general going into battle. The countryside was sparsely inhabited, with inhabitants of quality even sparser, but the local parson and his wife, and a few far-flung squires, could fill up the table with the aid of a few of Reynard's friends from the capital.

The servants of Gilderoy Abbey all seemed to her eyes to be either nearly children or the oldest of old retainers; the cook was of the latter sort. Anne Grayson had taken pride, and taught Otilia to take pride, in the food served in her home, but there was little in the fare of Gilderoy to excite the palate. The best dishes were those of her husband’s mother and his childhood, well-spiced cakes and strange cuts of meat Otilia had never before considered.

She sat proudly in the hostess chair in her best lace gown, a strand of diamonds at her neck, and tried with all her might to ignore that the buttery lumps on her plate had once hopped their owner through the fens.

Mr. Chester, of the West shires, was apparently among her husband’s closest friends, but he had not been one of her father’s. He was a tall man with a mustache that he clearly thought was very fine indeed, and Otilia put on her most vacant smile and murmured assent to half-understood words. This was familiar, if not enjoyable, though she felt high and lonely without Charles or Cathy by her side.

“…But that is what they said, is it not?”

Catching herself, Otilia nodded in agreement. “I suppose it must be, sir.” People said many things. The voices in the dark said things, as well, and she awoke some nights beside her husband surprised to be indoors, covered in blankets instead of vines. It was worse on the nights he didn’t come to her; sometimes then she walked, and sometimes then she didn’t dream at all.

“But Reynard, my man,” Mr. Chester continued, “I still say Wilcox found the sailor’s brother. Poor luck for us that horse, what?”

Otilia smiled distantly. Even the voices had little to say about Mr. Chester. In her mind, this was a firm point in his favor.

“What sailor, then?” One of the men lower down. He had a forkfull of meat halfway to his mouth, and Otilia reflexively scowled.

“From the Crescent, of course.” Mr. Chester gestured with a pale, flapping hand. “The one who saw poor Bona go.”

Otilia’s voice was very still. “I’m sorry?”

She lifted a hand to her mouth. Had she spoken? Had she meant to? Bona, Bona, Bona.

Mr. Chester leant over to her. His breath was too warm on her bare shoulders. “Oh, you’d know, of course, wouldn’t you!” His face bore too many smiles, suddenly, too many eyes and too many mouths. The voices clung to him, and Otlia could not breathe. Bona. “They say he went mad, after – said she walked off the ship – how was it he said? Called to the sea – or sang, something like that – and it rose to meet her.” He was smiling, still, and his chin was very large and very smug.

“Chester! I believe you are upsetting my wife.”

Reynard’s hand was on her shoulder. His voice was a bastion against the world, steep walls against the storm, and she leant into him, desperate and grateful.

The rest of the table was silent. Finally, the waves of conversation rose again, soft and smooth as though the moment of fear had never been. Mr. Chester did not speak again, and neither did Otilia DuPuis.

They did not speak of the incident at supper again. Reynard tried, hesitantly and awkwardly, to apologize, and Otilia lifted her fingers to his mouth. It was a moment better buried. Mr. Chester did not tarry long at Gilderoy, though Mr. Morley and Dr. and Mrs. Ashwood remained for some time. They were gray, quiet people, and Otilia was a gracious hostess if not a glittering one.

Dearest Mama, she wrote to Anne, and Dearest Papa. Sally and Thomas sent her scrawled letters of home, and at the edge of winter there was even a salt-stained envelope from Robin. She kept them in one of the little black wood chests in her room.

There were several of these, and only two would open. Reynard had apologized, as he’d apologized for so much of Gilderoy, the house Otilia had determined to love for all its flaws. The Abbey and its master were hers, after all, and stuck chests and locks with no keys merely inconveniences.

You should have been there, dearest, when my Horace told Papa that we were expecting a ‘sittle langer’! Poor dear, I believe he’s suffering more than I am. You must return to Greenlee in the spring – and tell me, if you can, if it is to be a son or a daughter, and if there is some way I can avoid naming the poor creature for all of Horace’s aunts.

Your most affectionate sister,

Cathy

Otilia clutched the letter to her breast for a moment. Catherine had been the first of her siblings to marry, to a gentleman of good standing – kind, stammering Horace Lee, one of Charles’ schoolfriends. Otilia and Charles had labored long for the only two creatures who seemed to enjoy a ball less than she did, carrying messages and fending off rakes. Otilia had danced with more men in Cathy’s first Season than in her own.

Her sister, a mother! Otilia put the letter down on her desk, straightening out the folds, and then moved to open the letter chest, catching a black splinter of wood to one finger in her distraction. A few drops of blood dripped down the small stack of chests. Otilia sighed, and began to wipe them up with her handkerchief. At the second swipe of the cloth, something moved.

Otilia lowered the handkerchief, and peered at the desk through her reading glasses. The lock on the lower chest had fallen. Rusted through?

She picked it up. It was tarnished, dark metal, the same as it had always been. It was simply open, now, as though someone had finally found the key for the strangely-shaped hole on its front. Otilia slipped it beneath her skirts and into her pocket, then turned back to the letter-chest, hands unsteady in her excitement.

Gilderoy Abbey was old, older than the house she’d grown up in, older even than the rambling half-timbered manor that was her grandfather’s, and now her cousin’s, seat. Otilia would have loved it for that alone, but its mysteries, its hiding holes, intrigued her like one of Sally’s novels. Two weeks ago she’d found a priest-hole behind the east-most stairs, and the smile it had brought to Reynard’s face was nestled, now, in her heart.

They’d spoken of history together, of stories, even Otilia’s poems, and he’d listened and spoke to her just as he would have to her father. Her words were not valuable because of the voices, because of the devotion her brother and sisters had to what Sally and Thomas still called her magic. Her words were valuable because he thought she was intelligent, thought she was interesting, listened to her as he would have listened to a man.

She wanted Gilderoy’s mysteries for herself. But she wanted them, too, to make Reynard look at her that way, and speak to her that way, and kiss her afterwards with a laugh until her heart swelled out of her chest.

She lifted the lid of the box, and it was empty.

The next morning, Otilia awoke in the gardens.

The air around her was the shimmering, foggy silver of the mornings. She could just see the tops of the folly’s broken pillars, and the new wooden scaffolding around them, hazy in the mist. Bare branches rose like islands in the sea that had swallowed the distant hills. The ground was cold, damp against the bare skin of her arms, through the thin cloth of her one remaining stocking.

She allowed herself a moment of despair, to gather her knees to her chest and weep. The walking had not been this bad in years. Servants had found her, twice, in the hallways of Gilderoy Abbey, but they had never ventured questions, simply helped her back to her room. One of the little kitchen maids had brought her warm, spiced cider, and that night she’d slept again, dreamless, and woken with the voices quiet, as they so often were at lovely, silent Gilderoy.

Today there could be no such rescue. She had no dressing gown to cover her nightdress, and as for her feet – one stocking!

Otilia shoved herself to her feet, wincing at the pain. She’d walked though thorns. Through thorns, and they hadn’t waked her.

She’d dreamt of a voice that wasn’t quite her father’s. Bona, it had called. Oh, Bona, Bona, Bona! She had dreamt, and she had followed. Her teeth began to chatter in the cold.

“Otilia!”

She shuddered, slipped, jumped back. It took her a moment to realize she was hearing the voice with her ears.

“Otilia!”

Her husband stood at the edge of the fog, his greatcoat hastily thrown over his shoulders. Heedless of the muddy ground, the thorns, Otilia ran towards him, throwing herself like a child into his arms.

His arms were warm, and real, and he murmured half-understood words into her hair.

“I thought we had lost you.”

Otilia pulled herself back just far enough to look into his eyes. They were a shining, honest blue, and, alone of his features, even Sally would have found them handsome. But every aspect of Reynard DuPuis, in this moment, was beautiful: his coarse sandy hair and old-fashioned sideburns, the sharp points of his cheekbones and nose, the bony strength in his arms as he held her.

“I’m so sorry,” whispered Otilia, and he kissed her hair, and led her back to Gilderoy.

He did not leave her side that morning, though he did not speak even to the servants of where or how he had found her. They lay in her bed, curled together far too closely for daytime or propriety, but when a maid came into the room, Otilia only clutched her husband more tightly. Recognizing the maid, pale and wide-eyed with red hair escaping from her bonnet, Otilia made to ask for hot cider, but Reynard forestalled her before she could speak, and requested mulled wine.

It was a better choice, she allowed, as the warmth filled her. She drank only when it could not be avoided, but, this morning, she welcomed the soft clouds around her mind. At her father’s dinner parties, wine had made the voices louder. Here, with her husband, it stilled them, wrapping them in the fog.

“Cathy is to have a baby,” Otilia said, finally, lowing the empty cup. She tried for a smile, though Reynard’s face was pressed to her neck and he would have some difficulty in seeing it.

“Oh?” She could feel something in him tense where he lay against her back. “And when is the happy occasion?”

“In the spring, she said. Not for some months.”

“I’m glad of that,” he said. “Travelling is hazardous here in winter. It would be a poor thing to lose you in a sled crash so soon after having found you.”

A twinkle of laughter bubbled up in her throat. She reached for his hand, pulled it up against her breast and held it tightly. “Greenlee is beautiful in the spring,” she said. “I cannot wait to bring you there.”

“I’m afraid that Gilderoy on the edge of winter cannot hope to compare.”

Otilia shook her head. “Wait until the snow falls, then, Mr. DuPuis.” The smile came more easily. “The peaks of the roof will look like mountains. The frost will turn it all to diamonds. And you, with snowflakes in your hair…”

“You are a treasure, wife.”

“And perhaps, next winter,” she said, quietly, “there will be three of us to see.”

If he had tensed, before, it was nothing to this. He was suddenly as still behind her as mannequin or a corpse. “…Have you,” and she felt him gulp against the back of her head. His voice was ragged, and she almost felt guilty for teasing him. “Have you had …signs?”

She felt another bubble of laughter leave her throat. “No,” she said. “Not yet.” The red bird made its perch each month, and her belly was flat. But Anne Parr had not even been married to Clarence Grayson for a year before Charles arrived, a fat pink face in the nursery for the young Otilia to dote on. Cathy had followed, right on his heels, and Otilia might have been strange but she had never been lonely. Even the voices were kinder when there was someone for her to care for and protect.

She wanted a child. A child, with her golden hair and Reynard’s bright eyes. A child, with voices whispering around it and a grandmother who had thrown herself into the sea –

It rose up to meet her –

Reynard’s arms tightened around her ribs, pulling her closer still.

“Your child will be glorious,” he whispered.

Winter came to Gilderoy.

Her husband had acquired a new book – or, rather, had pulled down from a little-used shelf a ragged ancient thing, filled with sketches of Tyrrhenian tomb inscriptions made by a nameless scholar. Otilia adored old books, but something about this one seemed disquieting – perhaps simply that she did not know the language and shivered at the thought of all that knowledge next-to-lost. She did not linger long in Reynard’s study; she could be of little help to him in his translations. She missed him, still, in her bed and at her side, but those were the dangers of marrying a scholar.

Determined not to wallow in any more self-pity, Otilia had selected a few other books from the library. Her High Altor was passable, and her Elline not atrocious, to say nothing of her modern tongues, and there was more than enough to busy herself through the long dark evenings.

Worse, though, was to come. Twelfmona had not yet ended before they were besieged by unexpected guests. A few her husband had invited, a few more seemed merely to appear, victims of the weather or distant cousins who assumed they had a standing right to trespass.

One of them was Mr. Chester.

Reynard had apologized for each guest as they arrived; for this one, he sat Otilia down on her bed and held her hands. His eyes were shadowed, his face drawn. He had slept too little, and she told him so.

He shook his head, with a distant smile that faded in an instant. “I must beg your pardon, my darling. I could not have backed out of my obligations towards him without offending his brother as well. I- “

“It’s all right,” she said, and thrusted her chin forwards. “I shan’t have you worrying on my account.”

He squeezed her hands. “If you want him gone, even so, just tell me. I’ll try to find an excuse somewhere – “

“I will be fine, Reynard.” She would not be the cause of the shadows beneath his eyes.

They arranged, even so, that Chester would be told that she was ill; this necessitated avoiding the rest of the guests as well, but Otilia could find little to complain of in that. Her dreams had been monstrous of late, and the fewer strangers, the quieter the voices.

Instead she occupied herself in the favorite pursuit of her youth: her poetry. Her step-mother had told them all beautiful fairy tales, Orllewin and Norrish and otherwise, and she and her siblings had changed them with her, adding songs and new touches and characters based on themselves – she remembered Robin’s offended insistence that Cendrillon be sent to the ball by her fairy step-sister. She wove these, then, into poems.

Her Lay of the Exiled King took form as snows buried the countryside. She expected to have an end to it by Spring, but therein had always lain the difficulty when her step-mother had told the tale: Thomas fighting for a happy ending and Charles sitting the boy on his knee while trying to draw in Cathy’s support for glorious tragedy, Sally flinging her arms about as she explained why Thomas and Robin’s hated sad ending was happy after all.

For his daughter was dead and his son was a fool, and the kingdom he’d left would soon fall, but he had climbed the cloudy mountains to his true love’s keep, and love was still the lord a’ all…

It was a new moon, in the depths of winter. Night came early, and candle smoke teased at her eyes. She had pled her false illness to avoid hosting dinner; she had not liked, the nights past, how the crowd of faceless guests had seemed to stare at her, eyes crawling on her face only to dart away.

She knew it was all in her head. Somehow, this did not make it easier. This was the rest of her life, and she was failing at it already. Perhaps in twenty years Reynard would have to hide her in the attic, locked away like the maiden aunt she should have been. He was kind, and that was the worst of it.

Otilia shook her head, fiercely, curls falling in front of her eyes. Sleep would do her good, she decided. Sleep, and summer.

She was half-dozing at her desk, still fully dressed, when a knock came at the door. Mrs. Sawley, the housekeeper, with two tiny maids at her back like pilot fish. It was unusual; Mrs. Sawley had seen seventy years if she’d seen twenty, and hadn’t been a chambermaid since her husband’s grandmother’s day.

“Poor dear,” she said, shaking her head, and helped a half-protesting Otilia to her feet. “He ought to have seen you to bed, at least.”

Otilia blushed.

She let herself be helped into her best nightgown. Mrs. Sawley tucked her into her pile of coverlets as Anne Parr had, or long-suffering Rose, as perhaps Bona had, once upon a time. She had given up on seeing her husband even before the housekeeper had spoken. He was likely in his study with the book, or cornered by one of the horde who had descended onto their home.

Mrs. Sawley closed her eyes, looking pained, and Otilia immediately tried to relax her scowl. The old woman patted her softly on the hand in response.

“Drink this, child,” she said, quietly.

Otilia took the steaming cup. The taste of the cider seemed muddled, and sickly-sweet. Mrs. Sawley took it back from her softly, Otilia’s eyes fluttering closed. Her bed was a drowning mass of warm clouds, white fading to gray in the darkness. The maids closed the curtains, and Otilia, with a small smile, faded off into sleep.

Bona, Bona, Bona…

It was not her father’s voice, this time. It was a woman’s. Otilia, dreaming, felt herself buoyed up in great arms, music playing at her ears, a choir and an Aldor lullaby.

Anne Grayson sat before her, her eyes redrimmed from tears. Thomas clung to her skirts, white knuckled and shaking. A hand stroked his back. A hand stroked Otilia’s.

“Do you know what is coming, my Lady of Spring?” Her stepmother’s beautiful low voice wavered as she sang. “Off in the distance, the funeral bells ring. And straining to hear them, the –”

Thomas wailed.

“Mama,” whispered Otilia. For a moment, tear-stained eyes locked on her own, but the moment was gone in an instant. Slowly, slowly, Anne and Thomas faded away.

Vita mia… Ah, vita mia…

Blood dripped down around her, staining her skirts, bubbling up between her bare toes. It was sharp and strong and cloying in her nostrils, sticky in her hair. Otilia screamed, and it poured across her face and down her throat.

Otilia woke.

Otilia woke, but it was not true waking. There was a sharp clarity of mind, a taste of blood on the back of her tongue, but she knew she could not be awake, because her body was lying in front of her, and its eyes were closed.

Golden hair, spilled out of its ribbons, fell in curls down the sides of a long wooden table. Otilia stepped forward. She reached out towards her own face, lighting soft hands upon one pale cheek, and shadows began to form.

Figures of irregular height surrounded her, each in a long black robe that winked with green. Their heads were hooded, and their faces masked with rough clay grotesqueries that might have been taken from some Tyrrhenian tomb.

As she stared, the shadows began to recede. As if in a painting, long stroke by long stroke, the marble floor appeared, white pillars stretching up to the gloom of the ceiling, distant high windows dripping down the walls. She knew this place. Around her loomed the old great hall at Gilderoy, now an occasional ballroom and haven for mice and spiders.

Whispers coiled around her ears, fleeing the low, insistent chanting that encircled the scene, rising and falling like a heartbeat. The body before Otilia twitched, slightly, hands rising for a moment before going still. Her breath was warm against Otilia’s fingers.

One of the cloaked men stepped forwards. He was unmasked, but his hood fell forward to shadow his face. He loomed over the waking Otilia and the dreaming both, as tall as her husband. In his hands there was a knife.

It was dark and jagged-edged, an ancient thing, and shined to a perfect mirror. Two pale faces swam reflected in the blade.

“The bride has come,” said the man with the dagger, and Otilia’s hands jerked and fell away, until she was clenching at her own ribs like corsetbone, mouth open in a silent scream.

“The bride has come,” a dozen discordant and dissonant voices, none worse than the first.

“The bride has come!” Reynard DuPuis stood above her.

The dagger gleamed red in the candlelight, dancing like fire. Otilia could not move. She felt the hard wood cold on her back, the ropes on her wrists. She was the woman on the altar, she was the ghostly form who lingered at her head. She was a heart, wrenched and torn, bleeding carmine, bleeding red –

And then the world was still.

Fog rushed in, blurring the hooded figures, the ballroom, even Otilia’s body and Reynard’s knife raised above her, inches away from her breast. Otilia floated above them, the rising mist catching in her hair.

She closed her eyes. Is this what it is to die?

“Oh, no, little one.” It was not a voice, not even one of the bodiless ones that whispered in her ears, and it was not speaking words, not as she knew them. There were raw and ragged edges to each one, each hitting her in a sudden burst of knowledge, until she knew what was being said as though looking at a painting, and recognizing her home. “This is what it is to ascend.”

The clouds rushed up around her. The air smelled of the last snowmelt, full of rot and growing things.

“You hate.”

Otilia gave a raw, short, ragged breath. Her heart was a burning coal within her chest. If she peered through the fog she saw Reynard above her body. If she pulled into her mind, locking every door behind her, she saw worse. She saw a kind man with a sharp smile, she felt his hands on her body and his lips at her ear, and she saw that she loved him.

“You hate,” the voice repeated, and trees of antler began to rise up from the ground, creaking around her. “You want to live. The little ones always want to live. Hers, Ours, Mine, they want to live. They want to live. They want to kill.”

Otilia shook. The winds of autumn rose at her back, the air full of leaf-dust and searing heat.

The knife lowered another inch.

“I can give you power, child.” The antlers cracked and groaned. Leaves rose around her, wheat fields black with blight. “We can give you power, granddaughter.” There might have been two voices, or there might have been a thousand.

The knife touched her collarbone.

You have power, vita mia.

The world twisted and snapped like a coachman’s whip. The air screamed, and tore, and a woman walked out of it, draped in pale cloth and black hair. Her eyes were blank and white, and barnacles clung to her skin.

More power than you know. A cold, dripping hand reached towards her as the clouds convulsed again.

“Bona,” Otilia whispered. Bona, Bona, Bona…

Clammy hands caressed her face. “They sing for you, after all. I had hoped there was enough of him in you that you could live.” Her voice was low and rough. Otilia stared at her, trying to commit this woman’s face to memory, trying to see in it her own. “I am so sorry, my Otilia.”

“I don’t want to die,” Otilia whispered, tears hot in her throat.

“Then live.” Bona pressed an icy kiss to her forehead.

Then live.

The air began to scream. Bona turned away, and was swallowed in the shifting shadows. The drips of seawater shivered into drops of blood, linking together and growing.

Thunder rolled. Lightning singed the air around her, turning it to smoke, and it roiled into a form too close to a woman for comfort. “You want to live? Then come to me, granddaughter!”

Beneath her, the blood had pooled into an ocean, waves rising and crashing.

“No,” said Otilia, less a voice than a ragged breath. Her eyes stung and smarted from the smoke.

Otilia looked down. The antlers rose and tangled, shedding velvet, but beneath them, the waves of blood flooded ever higher, a wild and scarlet sea.

She called to the sea.

And it rose to meet her.

Otilia screamed, and her voice was red. Her voice was red, and her eyes were red. When it faded, there were only broken bodies, slumped and squirming against the walls.

She took a heavy step forwards, and another. Her hands were red. Lightning burned down from her wrists, and it was red. The shapes it made looked almost like blades.

One of the things in robes was trying to stand up. She lumbered towards it, feet sliding in the bloodstains on the floor.

There was a bang, and a short feeling of pressure against her leg. Otilia looked down, her vision strange and triple-shadowed, to see a thin new line of blood against her skin. Pistol, suggested a distant part of her mind, and she turned to see one raised in a shaking hand.

Dr. Ashwood, offered that same distant place. Otilia stepped towards him, and the gun rattled. Her first slash severed his hand. Her second slit his throat. The small, distant place screamed. The rest of Otilia shook into a laugh.

Red, red, red. The world was red.

Something pulled her, again, back to the leftmost wall, back to the creature trying to stand. Red dripped down from his sandy hair into his sideburns, and he stared at her through cold blue eyes.

He was still holding the knife.

“Why?” She barely recognized her own voice. A weak voice, a child’s voice, thin and pale. “Why, Reynard?”

“I found you,” he said. His voice was a raspy whisper, twisted and tortured, and her hands shook, the red whirling around her and filling her lungs. “I found you, in that dusty old man’s house. A child of the Unnamed, and he thought he could turn you human! I found you, and I saved you, and I think, wife,” a harsh, rasping breath, his eyes a feverish flame, “that your life was mine, to use as I saw fit.”

Blood bubbled up between his teeth. Otilia looked down, and saw the great, gaping hole in his chest, saw her own hand. Time twisted and jumped in gashes around her. She watched him slip down, pale and lifeless.

She watched, and she watched.

And she began to scream.

The red splintered away, and she was left with herself. Left with Otilia, pale and shaking. A spectator might have thought her another corpse, leant up against the wall, her eyes pale and empty and her golden curls turned to a twisting thicket of gray.

She had killed a dozen men. She had killed them, and left their broken bodies in the old hall. That they had been in the process of attempting her own murder seemed meaningless now. She had killed them, and the wild whispering place inside of her had spilled out of her mouth in laughter. Around her, Gilderoy was bare and silent. No servants came to investigate the screams, and Otilia did not dare lift the masks from the bodies before her and see just who they had been.

The candles guttered. The silence hung. When she could bear it no longer, she ran.

The corridors were dark. She stumbled more than once on an uneven floor, ripping her nightgown and bloodying her knees. Each time, she scrambled to her feet, and hastened onwards, uncertain of her destination, knowing only the deep and primal need of prey to flee. What predator pursued her, she could not say, only that somewhere past the darkness lurked the thing that had called her granddaughter.

She was a monster. She was a murderer. She would be hanged. Tears spilled from her eyes, bloody and red. She thought of Cathy and her baby, Sally and her Viscount’s son, Robin and his ship. Her father’s face, and her stepmother’s. Her steps slowed, and her tears thickened.

The upper halls were red with candlelight, and the air smelled of burning flesh. Otilia was white mist in the hazy air, some ancient specter, longing for the sunlight to come and burn her all away. At the end of the hall, past the guest rooms where the Ashwoods had slept, she saw for a moment the antler forest, the grain, the sea of blood. Eyes seemed to open beneath her skin. The veil was thin here, she knew.

Live, vita mia.

Otilia saw the light where it tore, the darkness and snow beyond.

She flung herself through.

#writing #my fic #dungeons and dragons #i was torn between 'and caused my bridal flowers to swoon' and 'the rites of bona dea' for titles #so its a good deal i realized i didn't have to give it one

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trinuviel · 6 years

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The Ice and the Fire of the Song (part 3)

What does the Ice and the Fire refer to in GRRM’s epic fantasy series A Song of Ice and Fire? That is the subject of this series of posts. (Part 1, Part 2). In this series, Ice and Fire refer to many different things. That doesn’t mean that one meaning excludes the others but rather that the two concepts have multiple meanings and that these depend on context. In my previous post, I examined Ice and Fire in relation to the cult of R’hllor and its rigid theology of an eternal binary opposition between forces that are ascribed meanings as either Good or Evil.

In this post I’ll use Robert Frost’s poem Fire and Ice as the basis for an exploration of the elements of Ice and Fire in relation human emotions as well as to the history of the world in which the story takes place. Finally, I’ll ponder whether the text offers a possibility to escape the trap that dogmatic binary thinking constitutes. Things aren’t black and white, and sometimes opposing elements can meld together.

DESIRE AND HATE

There are many sources of inspiration for GRRM’s A Song of Ice and Fire but one of them is Robert Frost’s poem Fire and Ice from 1920.

Some say the world will end in fire,

Some say in ice.

From what I’ve tasted of desire

I hold with those who favor fire.

But if I had to perish twice,

I think I know enough of hate

To say that for destruction ice

Is also great

And would suffice.

This an apocalyptic poem where the elemental forces of Ice and Fire are interpreted through the lens of human emotions. Ice is hate and Fire is desire.

“People say that I was influenced by Robert Frost’s poem, and of course I was, I mean… Fire is love, fire is passion, fire is sexual ardor and all these things. Ice is betrayal, ice is revenge, ice is… you know, that cold inhumanity and all that stuff is being played out in the books.” (GRRM)

Here Ice and Fire come to symbolize common human feelings – things that unite and divide us: love and hate, etc. In this context, the Ice and the Fire can be applied to any number of the characters since these feelings are universally human. In order to decipher which feelings GRRM assigns to Ice and Fire, it is important to play close attention to the language of the text.

Cold inhumanity

When it comes to cold inhumanity, the Others immediately spring to mind. They are quite literally cold and inhuman. It is, however, more chilling when men and women act with a cold inhumanity. Tywin Lannister is perhaps the prime example of this. He coldly arranges for horrible events to happen without a twinge of remorse or regret. Tywin Lannister shows no empathy towards the people whose lives he ruins. He coldly weds Sansa Stark to his son Tyrion whilst he plots the murder of her family – and he does not display an ounce of empathy with the poor girl that has already been horribly abused by his grandson. In Tywin’s eyes, Sansa is not a person but a means to an end: She’s the Key to the North.

Tyrion rubbed at the raw stub of his nose. The scar tissue itched abominably sometimes. "His Grace the royal pustule has made Sansa's life a misery since the day her father died, and now that she is finally rid of Joffrey you propose to marry her to me. That seems singularly cruel. Even for you, Father." "Why, do you plan to mistreat her?" His father sounded more curious than concerned. "The girl's happiness is not my purpose, nor should it be yours. Our alliances in the south may be as solid as Casterly Rock, but there remains the north to win, and the key to the north is Sansa Stark."

"She is no more than a child." (ASoS, Tyrion III)

He doesn’t care about her feelings or her well-being. Tywin doesn’t care that a pregnancy could be very dangerous for a 12 year-old girl, he just cares that the Lannisters secure a claim to Winterfell and the North. He treats everyone as tools for his ambitions, even his own children. He doesn’t see them as persons in their own right but simple as vehicles for the legacy he wishes to build for House Lannister.

Hate

When it comes to hate, I find it interesting that the inhuman Others are describes as driven by hate towards humankind.

Old Nan nodded. "In that darkness, the Others came for the first time," she said as her needles went click click click. "They were cold things, dead things, that hated iron and fire and the touch of the sun, and every creature with hot blood in its veins…” (AGoT, Bran IV)

In the prologue of the very first book, the author drops a very significant detail: the Others have a language! One of them speaks when the ranging party from the Night’s Watch encounters them, and the Other says something mocking.

The Other said something in a language that Will did not know; his voice was like the cracking of ice on a winter lake, and the words were mocking. (AGoT, Prologue)

Thus, the text hints that they despise humans. We have yet to find out why but it is a delicious mystery.

Distance/rejection

GRRM also uses imagery of ice with scenes of distancing and rejection. Those can be negative things but it depends on the context and the POV of the scene.

He had always had a yen to see the Titan of Braavos. Perhaps that would please Sansa. Gently, he spoke of Braavos, and met a wall of sullen courtesy as icy and unyielding as the Wall he had walked once in the north. It made him weary. Then and now. They passed the rest of the journey in silence. After a while, Tyrion found himself hoping that Sansa would say something, anything, the merest word, but she never spoke. (ASoS, Tyrion VIII)

Notice how the distant courtesy that Sansa hides behind is described as sullen and icy by Tyrion. He is frustrated by Sansa’s refusal to open up to him. He wants her love and she doesn’t want to givet it to him – with good reason. In Sansa’s chapters her courtesy is described as an armour. For Sansa, it is a defense mechanism – she uses it as a means to avoid angering people and to hide her true thoughts and feelings. For Sansa, her courtesy armour is a positive thing whereas it is a negative thing for Tyrion. Some things are all about perspective.

Love

Whilst GRRM relates fire to love in the interview quoted above, there’s a surprising dearth of direct linkage between fire and love in the text (I am excluding passion here because GRRM generally uses passion specifically in relation to lust and hate). Instead, he uses “warmth” in relation to love in its positive aspects.

He was not a man you'd expect to speak of maids and wedding nights. So far as Jon knew, Qhorin had spent his whole life in the Watch. Did he ever love a maid or have a wedding? He could not ask. Instead he fanned the fire. When the blaze was all acrackle, he peeled off his stiff gloves to warm his hands, and sighed, wondering if ever a kiss had felt as good. The warmth spread through his fingers like melting butter. (ACoK, Jon VIII)

The love that is healthy and positive, is the warmth of the bonfire or of the warmth of the body and soul of the beloved. It is a fire that shelters and gently warms.

Bones, Catelyn thought. This is not Ned, this is not the man I loved, the father of my children. His hands were clasped together over his chest, skeletal fingers curled about the hilt of some longsword, but they were not Ned's hands, so strong and full of life. They had dressed the bones in Ned's surcoat, the fine white velvet with the direwolf badge over the heart, but nothing remained of the warm flesh that had pillowed her head so many nights, the arms that had held her. (ACoK, Catelyn V)

Desire/Passion/Lust

When it comes to desire, passion and lust, the imagery of fire runs rampant in the text. One of the ways in which the text associates desire/passion/lust with fire is through the imagery of “kissing”:

She bit his neck and he nuzzled hers, burying his nose in her thick red hair. Lucky, he thought, she is lucky, fire-kissed. "Isn't that good?" she whispered as she guided him inside her. (ASoS, Jon III)

The wildlings seemed to think Ygritte a great beauty because of her hair; red hair was rare among the free folk, and those who had it were said to be kissed by fire, which was supposed to be lucky. […]Sometimes she sang in a low husky voice that stirred him. And sometimes by the cookfire when she sat hugging her knees with the flames waking echoes in her red hair, and looked at him, just smiling . . . well, that stirred some things as well. (ASoS, Jon II)

She would sooner sit bathed in the ruddy glow of her red lord's blessed flames, her cheeks flushed by the wash of heat as if by a lover's kisses. (ADwD, Melisandre I)

Fire is a perfect metaphor for strong emotions, yet the fires of passion are often framed negatively by the text:

Prince Quentyn was listening intently, at least. That one is his father's son. Short and stocky, plain-faced, he seemed a decent lad, sober, sensible, dutiful … but not the sort to make a young girl's heart beat faster. And Daenerys Targaryen, whatever else she might be, was still a young girl, as she herself would claim when it pleased her to play the innocent. Like all good queens she put her people first—else she would never have wed Hizdahr zo Loraq—but the girl in her still yearned for poetry, passion, and laughter. She wants fire, and Dorne sent her mud. You could make a poultice out of mud to cool a fever. You could plant seeds in mud and grow a crop to feed your children. Mud would nourish you, where fire would only consume you, but fools and children and young girls would choose fire every time. (ADwD, The Discarded Knight)

GRRM assigns hatred to ice but hatred can be passionate, it can burn red-hot - like fire:

He did not love, nor was he loved himself. It was hate that drove him. […] this man Sandor Clegane dreamed of slaying his own brother, a sin so terrible it makes me shudder just to speak of it. Yet that was the bread that nourished him, the fuel that kept his fires burning.” – The Elder Brother to Brienne of Tarth, (AFfC, Brienne VI)

Sex

When it comes to the Targaryens, the connection between sex and fire becomes quite literal. I can’t remember who first pointed it out, but when Daenerys rides Drogon for the first time, the language turns almost orgasmic:

The lash was still in her hand. She flicked it against Drogon's neck and cried, "Higher!" Her other hand clutched at his scales, her fingers scrabbling for purchase. Drogon's wide black wings beat the air. Dany could feel the heat of him between her thighs. Her heart felt as if it were about to burst. Yes, she thought, yes, now, now, do it, do it, take me, take me, FLY! (ADwD, Daenerys IX)

There’s a sexual subtext to the language. Dany mounts her dragon and feel his heat between her thighs – an expression that is often used as a description of sexual desire and Dany herself used the expression of taking someone as an euphemism for sex. She mounts her dragons, feels his heat, asks him to take her (“take me, fly”) and her heart feels as if it is about to burst. This is very much the kind of language used to evoke an orgasm.

When it comes to Dany’s father, the connection between fire and sex is direct and so twisted that I lack the words to properly describe it:

The sight had filled him with disquiet, reminding him of Aerys Targaryen and the way a burning would arouse him. A king has no secrets from his Kingsguard. Relations between Aerys and his queen had been strained during the last years of his reign. They slept apart and did their best to avoid each other during the waking hours. But whenever Aerys gave a man to the flames, Queen Rhaella would have a visitor in the night. (AFfC, Jaime II)

The fact that Aerys II became sexually aroused by burning people alive connects fire to madness in the text.

Madness

The Targaryen dynasty is often described as tainted by madness, which is related to the systematic incest they practiced over many generations. However, their madness is particularly tied to fire:

"Did you know that my brother set the Blackwater Rush afire? Wildfire will burn on water. Aerys would have bathed in it if he'd dared. The Targaryens were all mad for fire." – Jaime Lannister to Brienne of Tarth, (ASoS, Jaime V)

The traitors want my city, I heard him tell Rossart, but I'll give them naught but ashes. Let Robert be king over charred bones and cooked meat. The Targaryens never bury their dead, they burn them. Aerys meant to have the greatest funeral pyre of them all. Though if truth be told, I do not believe he truly expected to die. Like Aerion Brightfire before him, Aerys thought the fire would transform him . . . that he would rise again, reborn as a dragon, and turn all his enemies to ash. – Jaime Lannister to Brienne of Tarth, (ASoS, Jaime V)

Passion, desire and lust aren’t negative things in and of themselves, it is interesting that the text more often than not describes these feelings in a negative manner. An excess of passion is just as dangerous as an excess of fire.

“SOME SAY THE WORLD WILL END IN FIRE, SOME SAY IN ICE”

Revisting Robert Frost’s poem, you can’t help but notice that it is a poem about the end of the world. It is apocalyptic. As the story stands, Westeros faces an icy apocalypse brought along by beings that hails from the far North:

Yet there are other tales—harder to credit and yet more central to the old histories—about creatures known as the Others. According to these tales, they came from the frozen Land of Always Winter, bringing the cold and darkness with them as they sought to extinguish all light and warmth. (tWoIaF)

(The Land of Always Winter. Art by Rene Aigner)

Frost’s poem speaks of an apocalypse of either Ice or Fire, where fire is put before ice. This made me think about whether there has been an apocalypse of fire in the history of Westeros. It just happens that there has: the Doom of Valyria (link), where a catastrophic eruption of a ring of volcanoes, the 14 Flames, brought down an entire civilization in a fiery inferno so hot that even dragons caught fire in the sky.

An apocalypse is a world-ending event but it doesn’t necessarily have to destroy the entire world. The Doom did, however, destroy both the Valyrian peninsula and the Freehold as both a political entity and a sophisticated civilization.

Valyria. It was written that on the day of Doom every hill for five hundred miles had split asunder to fill the air with ash and smoke and fire, blazes so hot and hungry that even the dragons in the sky were engulfed and consumed. Great rents had opened in the earth, swallowing palaces, temples, entire towns. Lakes boiled or turned to acid, mountains burst, fiery fountains spewed molten rock a thousand feet into the air, red clouds rained down dragonglass and the black blood of demons, and to the north the ground splintered and collapsed and fell in on itself and an angry sea came rushing in. The proudest city in all the world was gone in an instant, its fabled empire vanished in a day, the Lands of the Long Summer scorched and drowned and blighted. An empire built on blood and fire. The Valyrians reaped the seed they had sown. (ADwD, Tyrion VIII)

That does sound like a world-ending event but there’s also an element of hubris associated with the Doom of Valyria. It was an empire built on fire and blood and it ended in a cataclysmic fire with a magical fallout that still poisons the Lands of of the Long Summer and the Smoking Sea that was created when the peninsula shattered.

Every man there knew that the Doom still ruled Valyria. The very sea there boiled and smoked, and the land was overrun with demons. (ADwD, The Reaver)

The Doom of Valrya spelled the end of the Dragonlords who subjugated the continent of Essos. The only Dragonlords who survived were House Targaryen and they did so die to the prophetic dreams of Daenys “the Dreamer” Targaryen. It was because of her warning that House Targaryen removed to Dragonstone with all their dragons, servants and slaves. A century later, Aegon Targaryen and his sister-wives Rhaenys and Visenya set out to make a new homeland through the Conquest of Westeros.

As a descendant of the only Dragonlords to survive the fiery apocalypse of Valyria, it seems fitting that the Last Targaryen appears destined to become embroiled in the icy apocalypse of Westeros. Daenerys Targaryen has yet to travel to Westeros in the books but she has a prophetic dream that could foreshadow her fighting the Others with her dragons:

That night she dreamt that she was Rhaegar, riding to the Trident. But she was mounted on a dragon, not a horse. When she saw the Usurper's rebel host across the river they were armored all in ice, but she bathed them in dragonfire and they melted away like dew and turned the Trident into a torrent. Some small part of her knew that she was dreaming, but another part exulted. This is how it was meant to be. (ASoS, Daenerys III)

BURNING ICE AND FROZEN FIRE

My previous posts in this series explored what the Ice and the Fire could refer to in GRRM’s epic fantasy series. They also examined the title of the series, A Song of Ice and Fire - a title that encourages the reader to think in absolute opposing forces, which is the most common way that epic fantasies are structured. However, within the narrative, the cult of R’hllor could very well function as a metatextual discourse on this kind of binary thinking and how it is a trap for the mind.

In this context, it is worth noting that Martin combines the opposites of Ice and Fire several times in the text:

Nothing burns like the cold. (AGoT, Prologue)

The Other halted. Will saw its eyes; blue, deep and bluer than any human eyes, a blue that burned like ice. (AGoT, Prologue)

Ice can be so cold that it feels as though it burns, yet there is no equivalent when it comes to fire. There’s no fire burning cold within the text. Then there’s obsidian, also called dragonglass. The material that can kill the Others is called “frozen fire” in Valyrian and when Sam Tarly kills a White Walker with an obsidian dagger, the language evokes an image of the weapon being simultaneously hot and cold:

Finally only the dragonglass dagger remained, wreathed in steam as if it were alive and sweating. Grenn bent to scoop it up and flung it down again at once. "Mother, that's cold." (ASoS - Samwell I)

What are we to make of this? What does this melding of opposites signify? Jojen Reed knows the answer:

“Why can’t it be both?” Meera reached up to pinch his nose. “Because they are different,” he [Bran] insisted. “Like night and day, or ice and fire.” “If ice can burn”, said Jojen in his solemn voice, “then love and hate can mate. Mountain or marsh, it makes no matter. The land is one.” (ASoS, Bran II)

The land is one!!!

In my previous post, I agreed with @thewesterwoman that purity is dangerous in GRRM’s world. As pure ice and pure fire, the Others and the dragons are equally dangerous. Purity represents an imbalance in the natural state of things. Perhaps this means that it is “impure” things that will play a pivotal part in the endgame. The obsidian is interesting in this context because it can be seen as a product of the marriage between fire and stone, the crystallized product of molten stone (lava).

So the weapon that is extremely effective when it comes to killing White Walkers (they die instantaneously) is made from a melding of different elements into something new. Obsidian is neither pure stone, nor pure fire.

(The Wall. Art by Feliche)

It is also worth remembering that the Wall that keeps out the Others and the undead wights is made of ice. However, the Wall is not made from ice that is “pure”. It is infused with the magic of the Children of the Forest – and their magic was of the living land, and the Land is One!

#asoaif #a song of ice and fire #meta #game of thrones #ice #fire

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onceabluemoonwrites · 6 years

Text

Decay (Of What the Gods Know)

Summary: There’s a man hanging from the chandelier, candle grease dripping onto his dress coat.

Disclaimer: I don’t own Katekyo Hitman Reborn

FF.net | AO3

This was written for a ‘’wish you would write’’ ask by the lovely @metronomeihear ! You can find it here.

You can find my fic master list here.

The lovely poem at the end is by @icarvus and you can find the original here. Thank you so much for giving me permission to quote it!

Tsuna runs his fingers along the line of the (body) doll's cheek. "So pretty," he muses softly. "You would look even better in red I think." (like the blood you wore in battle, splattered along your clothes, woven from pure hatred) He turns away from the table it lay on with a flourish and throws the closet open. Where was that little satin number? The perfect red dress.

He did so love his Kyoya, after all.

It’s time for dinner.

Tsuna’s mama was a witch. A very fine one, indeed. She drew lines of power across his stomach, drew sigils of love around his throat, carved beauty into his bones and breathed life into his stone. A statue come to life.

(Do you want to know about the child who was born to the Amazons? For there were only two, and both were made of clay. The Gods blessed it, gifting them with powers each. Godkillers- the last gods created.

The first was a daughter, all as it should, made of poison and acid, of dripping flowers withering in her leave. They called her Persephone, as she fed off decay, the picture of death in life.

The second was a son, but no man may dwell among the Amazons, not even if he were a god. The Queen took him from his mother’s arms and put him in a boat where the child cried so pitifully the sea reached for him. Love me, love me, the loveliest creature on earth he was.

It was no wonder Nana Tidechild dove after him- she would bear anything for the son she formed from the ground herself. It deserved the chance to take to the sky.).

It is not all his mama gives him. She teaches him how to be polite. How to be terribly rude. How to be a man, how to be a woman, how to be nothing and everything at once.

‘’All you are,’’ she whispered in his ear, ‘’Is what you decide to be, my darling. Ask me not to give you gifts, ask me to teach you how to have gifts, and you will have the world.’’

Tsuna is not a fool, so he listens.

His clay-sister sits across the table. Her pink hair falls across her shoulder- it’s shorter than his, at the time. Ruby red liquid glistens in her glass, crystal teardrops catching the low light. Candles all around them, rich velvet drapes covering the windows. Dolls lined up on the fireplace mantle, the fire long smothered.

‘’How have you been?’’

‘’Excellent. Black suits me.’’ Tsuna smoothes the widow’s veil down over his hair.

‘’Oh, how nice to hear! I like what you did with the place, by the way.’’

Tsuna smiles.

‘’Thank you, Bianchi.’’

There’s a man hanging from the chandelier, candle grease dripping onto his dress coat.

Once upon a time, the Greek goddesses put all the women murdered by men on an island. The amount of them was so large that it looked like a continent, and their Queen, Lavina, was the most peaceful of all.

Her daughter, however, wasn’t. She left.

‘’I believe I have something of yours.’’

Bianchi scoffed. ‘’Please, I prefer heels, darling brother!’’

‘’But winged sandals are so useful when you’re getting creative! Honestly, sister, giving away your uncle’s present, Hermes won’t be pleased!’’

‘’…What did your husband do?’’

Tsuna wrinkled his nose. ‘’He saw my rendezvous with Kyoya in the yard. I wasn’t about to let that go down.’’

‘’Why not just use him as a toothpick?’’

‘’And get that from between Kyoya’s teeth? Please! I know how to take care of my Hound, thank you very much!’’

‘’If you say so, Aphrodite.’’

Tsuna is not a fool, he knows how to accept teachings. Bianchi’s path simple and yet complex. The way of falling- Falling in love, falling from grace, falling into Fall after summer, falling to your death. From an extraordinary height, by preference. It’s her trademark, just like the elegant poisons that boil her partners’ brains out. Petals crushed of flowers in full bloom, rot from roses, snakes’ venom, for snakes venture to warmer pastures, so they always follow Spring.

Persephone is her name, and she is Death to man.

(Tongues lolling, drool dripping, eyes rolling up as the poison makes its way to their hearts. Bloated bodies floating in fountains, heads on pikes on the docks. Sirens singing them down the waves, sailors willingly jumping overboard. There is no escape, not when it comes-

Comes down, down, down to it)

Tsuna wants to try it out, and her little present gives him the perfect opportunity.

‘’Bermuda, sweetheart, won’t you come with me?’’

It’s like taking candy from a baby. Slip on the sandals, grab the man, and soar. Higher and higher, a thousand miles above the city, lights twinkling beneath them, the moon full above. Clouds whirl around them like smoke, wetting his skin, his hair, his everything- even his victim.

Bermuda struggles and Tsuna lets him, gleefully watching as- he slips, friction wavering, falls and falls and falls and-

Splat.

Another doll to add to his collection.

(No more young boys will fall victim to this man)

The siblings like to get creative.

Once upon a time, there were two children. They were the offspring of the murdered, the ones killed in cold blood. The ones that cried and raged, hid away and loved. The Amazons and Gods both. It was all kept contained, until one day, a woman left, for she had committed a sin that could not be forgiven. Birthing a male child.

Bianchi watched her go- the child, the sin, the brother of earth- cradled in the crook of her arms.

There was a time when she wondered whether her mother had been right. Whether that child was a sin because he was a man.

She wondered. She wondered. She wondered and wished to know and went to the world she did not know. The world outside the sphere. The world outside the paradise. The world outside the island especially made for them.

She strode out, Amazon pride. Tall and wide, and proud and bright, so she stalked to Rome. Pounding the earth with her very feet, looking for the creature called Man.

She found it. It was everywhere.

Women were familiar, yet not. Heels were cumbersome inventions. So were dresses so tight it made your knives cut into your skin when you slipped them into the pockets- if they had those, that was. (…Heels crushed fingers easily. The gave height, inspired fear. Corsets pushed breasts so tight together that the vial of acid between them would never be found until it was too late).

Men, she had not known before. The Amazonian island was void of the bearded, the hatred great for them- but they were like women and yet not. Men were sweet, sweet and horrible. Came in all varieties- big and small, wide and thin, double-lidded or single-lid, what did it matter if they spoke so daring? What did it matter if they said something she did not like?

Everything mattered- for Romeo was no Romeo unless death was involved, and Bianchi was no Juliet. Romeo Bovino’s parents had chosen an unfortunate name, and Romeo himself had made unfortunate choices. (Suicide! The people said when they found his body. One more rapist dead whispered the milkmaids. Victory! Crowed Bianchi, high up in the tree).

It tasted like more- so much more, that even Death came to court her. ‘’Marriage is not my thing, Hades. Nor is romance, really. I was made from clay- I leave the fertile, the tongue-tangling, the love-making, to my brother. Give me stone hard. Give me scorching hot. I have been baked, I am clay no more.’’

Hades grinned, souls wailing in his mantle as he spread his arms. ‘’Call me Reborn, Persephone. I think you’ll enjoy the fires of Hell.’’

‘’Sounds like the place to be, my friend.’’

Her arm through his, she meets the furies. Lovely girls, really. Her kind of people.

Before all of this, before the sun rose quite so sadly, right after Bianchi’s first murder, she’d found him. Crouched over a corpse, tears dripping off his face, a snarling Hound bowed over them, as if to protect.

He had raised his head and she knew this was who she had been searching for. Clay-brother, earthen-kin. Sea-born Sky-child. Aphrodite. Tsuna. The only other amazon child ever made.

‘’It was his stepmother. He just- He wanted to belong.’’

Pushing the Hound aside, the man easily going, moving around the boy as if he was the only thing that mattered. Drawing closer, Bianchi gasps.

A child. It’s a child, fingers trampled onto the floor. Stomach ripped open. Small face still scrunched up in pain, silver hair dirtied by the mud.

No- it is earth. He is not dirtied. It is perhaps, trying to clean this boy of all it’s earthly troubles.

It’s a boy.

(Men are not inherently evil. Neither are women. Humankind, in general, is not. All things are good- or have the potential to be, just as they have potential to do evil. There is no such thing as being born a sin- to live is never a sin.

To kill is one.

The boy’s name is Hayato, and he was killed by a woman, and Bianchi cannot reach further than that- it is when the rage overtakes her.

She is Persephone, Spring, the one who blooms on top of the bones of seasons long gone. Who flourishes because of death.

…Mankind is not evil, but Bianchi cannot bring herself to care.

A child was killed)

Dear mother,

Mankind murders. A child called Hayato perished in my brother’s arms.

The letter lies crumpled between Lavina’s sheets as the warhorn calls. Her mortal son (so small in her arms, when she still lived. So small, behind the piano. So small, too small to remember her. Too small to miss a woman who simply came to teach him how to play. Too small- too small, Lavina was, to fight to keep him. Hayato- Hayato- oh, she loved him so.

He’s dead.

His stepmother killed him).

Bianchi wants to fight and Lavina lets her.

‘’Why? Kyoya, please, why do I keep doing this?’’ Staring down at the body before him, caressing the corpses face, fingers gliding over lips as if he can still feel the life slipping through his fingertips. The light leaving red eyes as he looked into them.

Too late to beg.

Too late to ask for forgiveness.

Too late to save Enma from himself.

‘’Because you hate.’’

Staring down at eyes bugging out, compasses dulled. Wild red hair curled around his face at last- Enma’s beauty was in his expressions always. Broad shoulders painted with bruises- the largest of them all on his neck.

Shaped the same as the hands Tsuna hides his face in. ‘’I was asleep, Kyoya.’’ Breath speeding up. Voice high, high, high as the heights he’s let his victims fall from. Knives twisting, skies falling, torn apart like Ouranus was by his own children. Hacked into pieces, like the ones Nana had made him from. Aphrodite is choking on her own habits, love like the legends the sacrifices falling down.

Teacups shattering, faces painted, hearts breaking as prophecied.

Another doll to add to his collection and Tsuna hates himself.

He calls Enma’s doll Enyo, with his wild red hair. A doll, naked, dressed only his wild lust for vengeance, his compass eyes giving away the location of those who needed to be torn down.

(The more Tsuna loved them, the more powerful the doll)

This is the thing about Aphrodite- her marries and marries and marries, and… Kills his husbands and wives. Significant others do not survive once he slips a ring onto their finger- and his one living love forever remains an affair.

Ares, his Hound, the Dog of War. Kyoya, his lovely, painted in blood.

They call him a Black Widow, and isn’t that true? Love is everywhere- marriage is such an entertaining way to kill. Tsuna likes the betrayed faces just before he hangs them. (He hates the ones he did love. He hates the hands he cannot stop from strangling. He hates himself, he hates everything, but he loves it as well. There is beauty carved into his bones, and he knows it is everywhere. The world is too beautiful not to love, and lines of power cannot stop him, but love he can).

He loves War, is entangled with him the way fishes are with water. Starved for him, the same way War always hungers for Love.

From time to time he meets his sister, asks her about her latest trail of bodies, and laughs as she drinks the blood of her enemies in crystalline glasses meant for wine.

Dinner is delicious that night. Nothing tastes better than the crushing defeat of your enemies, after all. From their place on the fireplace mantle, the Dolls of Decay watch War and Love dine. (Blood still fresh, the insects moving in, Gods know everything about decay).

when the gods overthrew the titans it was with the hope of a future they would never see

- instead the gods became what they feared most (l.e.h)

- by @icarvus

#hibari kyoya #Sawada Tsunayoshi #Bianchi #KHR #fic #Reborn #OnceABlueMoonWrites fic #fanfiction #fanfic #my posts #deity au

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blackjacktheboss · 7 years

Text

Maskless

So here is a fic that nobody asked for but I’ve been wanting to write for months on end. Huge thanks to my wife, my love, my whole world aka @ananbeth for being such an awesome beta. Could not have finished this without you, my guy.

All of the section headers are quotes from this poem by Miles Hodges

i. The coolest kid in the room actually doesn’t have any friends

The campfire isn’t as comforting as it once was. Percy watches the flames, focuses on their flicker and the crackle of the wood as the voices of young campers swirl around him. It doesn’t feel like it used to, he thinks. The hum of Camp doesn’t settle over him like a warm blanket anymore, and the sight of familiar faces doesn’t make him feel connected to the life he’s living. Now when he looks around, instead of people he sees shrouds; he thinks of the eulogies that will be given over their funeral pyres. It’s a feeling that has sunk into him over the years, the way a skipped rock finally sinks to the bottom of a lake. That feeling now rests in the pit of his stomach, a hollowness at the very center of him. Some days it feels small, more like a pebble stuck in his shoe than anything. He can carry on normally for the most part but at some point, it makes its presence known. Other days, it is a boulder resting on top of him like the sky rests on Atlas’ shoulders. It consumes his very existence, his muscles burn with the weight and it occupies his every thought. It is a part of him that he wishes he could drown.

Staying disconnected isn’t as hard as he once found it to be. He breaks bread with these kids, shares laughs and a tale or two about his glory days, but nothing ever seems to reach his heart. He feels like a child restricted to the shallow end of the pool as he watches everyone else plunge into deeper waters. Inevitably, his fatal flaw enters his head and Athena’s words echo in his thoughts: “To save a friend, you would sacrifice the world”. But what happens to all that loyalty, he wonders, when there’s no one to give it to.

ii. Cheek safety pinned to the edge by a pile of regrets

Charles. Silena. Michael. Leo. Connor. Travis. Frank. Grover. Clarisse. When Percy awakes in Cabin 3, he recites the names of friends he has lost. At first a prayer, it has now become his penance. Charles. Silena. Michael. Leo. Connor. Travis. Frank. Grover. Clarisse.

Charles, gone too soon.

Silena, a traitor who fought for redemption.

Michael, a war hero.

Leo, a martyr.

Connor, whose feet were not fast enough.

Travis, who sought revenge.

Frank, a fire that burned out too quickly.

Grover, lost to the wild.

And now Clarisse. A warrior until the very end.

As Percy goes down the list in his head, he is acutely aware of the regrets each friend took with them. Regrets of not being fast enough, strong enough, present enough. Enough. Percy laughs darkly. He can’t remember the last time that word meant anything to him. Perhaps it was the last time he let his mother hold him, really hold him, and it had been years since then. It had been a night when his loneliness became too much to bare on his own, so he’d retreated to the only place he could. Sally had held him as sobs wracked his body, running her fingers through his hair. He can still feel her heartbeat against his cheek if he’s still enough. She had never wanted anything from him, never demanded his heroism or expected him to be better than he was. When he was around her, she accepted him for who and what he was. That night when she held him, she let him be a puddle of a boy, who wanted nothing more than to evaporate and disappear. He was always enough for her. No matter what. Enough as a son, as a hero, as a man. She held him solid that night, and he fell asleep feeling whole. He longed for that night.

Or maybe the last time he had felt like enough had been the last time he sat on the porch of the Big House with Grover and Annabeth, reminiscing about their first quest together.

Feeling whole now felt like a false memory to Percy, the type where you’re not sure if you actually remember or you’ve just seen so many pictures and heard so many stories that your brain fills in the gaps for itself.

The list runs through his head again: Charles. Silena. Michael. Leo. Connor. Travis. Frank. Grover. Clarisse. We were just kids, he reflects. But the Gods and the Fates have no time for children, only heroes. Heroes who claw and fight their way to victory, all for the glory of Olympus. But once we stop doing that, we’re all disposable, he contemplates. Hell, we’re disposable either way.

Percy sits at the table for Cabin 3, eating silently as he continues to recite the list in his head. Charles. Silena. Michael. Leo. Connor. Travis. Frank. Grover. Clarisse. Charles. Silena. Michael. Leo. Connor. Travis. Frank. Grover. Clarisse. Charles. Silena. Michael. Leo. Conn-

His list is interrupted by the feeling of a tap on his hand. Percy looks up to see bright grey eyes looking at him and his heart speeds up.

“Good morning, Mr. Jackson.”

“Good morning…?”

“Letha. I took your sword fighting class last summer.”

“Right. Letha. How can I help you?”

“I was wondering if you would give me private sword fighting lessons. I’ve decided that the sword will be my weapon and after taking your class I’m sure you’re the most qualified to teach me. I think two-a-days will be most effective for my learning style, but I promise to be flexible with how we spread those out. Though I do ask you keep in mind that I have other classes I’m taking. I want to be the most well-rounded hero I can be.”

Percy considers the girl in front of him, surely no older than 13. Her hair is a dirtier blonde than children from Cabin 6 usually have, but her eyes are so bright they almost look silver instead of grey. They are clear and innocent, not yet tinted with the burden of being a hero, but have a flare of aggressiveness that will serve her well if she’s trained properly. She is sure of herself, like any child of Athena, and she projects a confidence that takes Percy back to when he was twelve years old. She sits up straight with her shoulders back and looks him directly in the eyes.

Charles. Silena. Michael. Heroes are disposable.

“So, Mr. Jackson-”

Leo. Connor. Travis. A grey funeral shroud.

“-what do you say?”

Frank. Grover. Clarisse. Regret.

Percy takes a deep breath, sitting up straight to match her posture as he reaches a hand across the table towards her. Charles. Silena. Michael. Leo. Connor. Travis. Frank. Grover. Clarisse. In his mind, Percy stares down his pile of regrets.

If he can help one demigod make it, maybe that will be enough.

As Letha takes his hand and shakes it, Percy smiles. “You’ve got a deal.”

iii. I wonder, how do you trust a man whose eyes can go from green to gone in a single night?

Percy stands shirtless in front of his bathroom mirror, watching water trail down the sides of his face and drip off of his chin. He considers himself, a man lost in the curves of his own soul, and wonders what it will take for the real him to return. If it’s even possible at all. If there is even a real him that remains or if it’s simply a figment of his imagination. He is shaken from this reflection by loud banging on the door of Cabin 3. When he opens it, a satyr with panicked eyes rushes forward and grabs his arm.

“We have an incoming party and they’ve got company! We need you!”

Percy quickly turns back into the cabin, grabbing a shirt and pulling it over his head as he begins his jog to Half-Blood Hill.

He stands at the crest of that old, familiar hill with Riptide in pen form twirling between his fingers. Ghosts of a childhood lost run past him, leaving whispers of Annabeth’s laugh and his hope for a happy future. To his left, Peleus sits at attention sniffing at the air while curled protectively around the Golden Fleece. Chiron appears to Percy’s right, with two older campers accompanying him.

“How many monsters?”

Chiron releases a deep sigh riddled with concern, “The last report the satyrs could send out said at least three, maybe more by now.”

“Do we know whose kids we’re dealing with?”

“All suspected but a daughter of Hecate, a son of Hephaestus, and a child of Aphrodite.”

“How the hell did they all end up traveling together?”

“All from affluent families, all ended up at the same boarding school. They tried splitting up but I’m afraid they were… they were herded back together.”

“So this is a hunting party.”

“It would seem that way, yes.”

Percy rolls his eyes, “You know, I’m really sick of the The Fates’ shit.” The sky rumbles and Percy waves it away with his free hand. “Yeah, yeah, yeah.”

One of the campers, a son of Demeter, steps up to Percy. “So what’s our plan?”

“The plan is simple. Monsters on me,” he says, stepping up to the boundary, “While you two make sure those kids and satyrs make it back across this line. Clear?”

The other camper, a daughter of Apollo, looks at Percy skeptically, “How can you be so sure the monsters will go after you when they’ll have five other demigods to choose from?”

Dark shadows appear on the horizon of the trail and Peleus growls from deep in his throat.

Percy looks at the camper, his green eyes shifting into something else entirely as he begins to slowly walk backwards down the hill, his arms stretched out. “What monster wouldn’t want a chance at the son of Poseidon?”

Growing up, Percy never thought of himself as a fighter. It wasn’t something he chose, but something that had always happened to him. Life as a demigod made fighting a necessity; a survival tactic that he happened to master. Now, as he stumbles back across the Camp border bloody and bruised, the feeling of fighting is one he instantly misses.

When he fights, he is not Percy Jackson: ex-boyfriend, terrible son, horrible brother, old friend who doesn’t keep in touch. When he fights, he is simply Percy Jackson, Son of Poseidon. As much as it is a title that burdens him, it is one he knows how to bare. It is his heaven and hell, his penance, his salvation, his legacy. The weight of Riptide in his hand, a monster at his throat, is the only time Percy feels in control of his fate. As he slices, stabs, dodges, and dives, he feels the burn of the ichor that runs through his veins. He becomes someone powerful, a version of himself that the world can’t touch or hurt. As long as he’s fighting, nothing else matters. But as long as he’s fighting... nothing else matters. This duality haunts him, as the thrill of battle is all that he craves but that craving is what keeps him from moving on. At some point, he became a fighter and no one ever bothered to teach him how to stop. But then again, heroes aren’t supposed to stop fighting, he realizes. They’re supposed to die.

In the throes of battle, a hero does not have to think of all the ways he is failing or how many people he has let down. Fighting, when done correctly, consumes a hero and distracts them from everything they are and everything they aren’t. That is the feeling that Percy chases; the place where who he is and who he could be collide to create nothingness. It’s easier, most of the time, to be a hero rather than to be a person.

He lays on the grass staring up at stars that tell stories like his and mentally checks off all the types of monsters he has killed. I’ve got a few more to go, he thinks as a wicked smile spreads across his face. I just gotta chase ‘em down. And fight.

iv. Check his mask, he wears it well

The list of people who recognize the cracks in Percy’s mask has grown small over the years. Distance, both emotional and physical, has robbed Jason of the ability. Piper is annoyingly perceptive, which is why Percy keeps their interactions short. Sally’s voice has become more concerned during their weekly phone calls but she isn’t yet desperate enough to really push him to admit to anything being wrong. Chiron can see through the mask but always makes the conscious decision to let Percy keep it on. Percy doesn’t think either of them could handle what might happen if he loses it.

Most of the time, he is happy to have it. It allows him to be social at times, visiting New Rome for a weekend or meeting his family for a day in Montauk. The mask comforts him, giving him permission to pretend not to be as broken as he feels. He can assume the persona of a Percy who made it through everything unscathed. He can pretend to be a man better than the one he is. When he has his mask on, he can pretend to be in control. He wishes he didn’t so desperately desire to be in control. But he does. He feels stunted and polluted, as if he is undrinkable, toxic, deadly. So every morning, rather than dive into the depths he is sure are filled with nothing but debris, he keeps his head just above the surface. He slips his mask on, and presents the front of a pure and untainted mountain stream. People can look at him like he is something fresh and undiscovered, somehow clean despite the virulent environment that surrounds him.

Then there are days when the mask grates against his skin. It irritates him, makes him feel confined, and it takes everything in him not to scream in frustration. Those are the days he wishes Annabeth were around to rip his mask off of him. She had always had that effect on him, even when they were twelve years old and complete strangers. And she was never shy about it either, not that there was anything Annabeth Chase was ever really shy about. She would tear his mask off and wave it in front of him, but it never seemed like taunting.

No, rather she held it up like a mirror, waiting for him to take in his reflection and see what it was he was hiding behind. For most of his life, his mask had been made up of hope. Hope for his father to come home, for friends, for getting through a school year without attracting any attention, for his best friend to fall in love with him, for a future that went past age 17. This hope is what kept him going for so long. That hope was a reminder of why he was fighting so hard. That hope grounded him in who he was as a hero and as a person.

Thinking on it now as he lies in bed avoiding the start of another day, he’s not sure what his mask is made of. Memories maybe, he muses. Memories glued together by nostalgia….and maybe a little hope. He finally rises, fitting his mask to his face as he opens his cabin door.

“Good morning, Percy! How are you today?” A satyr asks.

Percy adjusts his mask, and considers what kind of hero and person he wants to be today. Smiling warmly, he answers back. “Morning! I’m great, thanks. How are you?”

v. But sometimes he comes home and he’s lonely

The floor creaks beneath his feet as he enters his apartment, chased inside by the rising sun. He peels his jacket off and throws it onto the couch, thinking he should probably just put it up now but it’s fine, he’ll do it later. There are no pictures on the walls of his apartment, no decorations or knick-knacks on the shelves to make it look like a home. The only clue that it is a space in which someone lives is the cereal bowl in the sink and a single seashell magnet that clings to his refrigerator. Percy drags himself down the hallway to the bathroom, where he reaches into the medicine cabinet and pulls out a small bottle of dark green pills. The label is simple, white with a red caduceus on the front. They had been a gift from the Hermes cabin, sleeping pills that block nightmares but only if used sparingly. Take them too often and a demigod could get so backlogged with nightmares that they never really wake up from them. Percy pops two into his mouth and swallows hard before brushing his teeth and heading to his bedroom. He sheds the rest of his clothes and climbs into bed, tired in every way imaginable.

Percy awakens slowly, his eyes taking their time to adjust to the sensation of being open. It is nighttime again and darkness has crept in around him. He turns his head and spots his little blue fish night light, a remnant of his childhood innocence that has stuck with him through the years. Looking at it gives him something to focus on, a happy epicenter to coax his mind out of its sleepy haze. Before long though, the reality of his life encroaches on the happy space that the night light provides and suddenly it’s as if there were no light in his life at all. He turns back to look up at the ceiling, his fingers interlocked across his stomach. They begin to tap nervously as thoughts race through his head until he can’t contain them anymore. Idle hands and all that, he thinks, as he reaches over to his nightstand to pick up his phone. He slides his finger across the screen until he opens a new message.

To: Leave Her Alone

I miss you. Can we grab a drink?

He hits send without a second thought, wanting to allow himself this fleeting moment of reaching out to someone (even if he had promised himself he would stop reaching out to this particular someone). Almost immediately he sees three dots appear, and without realizing it he begins to hold his breath.

The bar near my place in 20.

vi. Sometimes he does things because he knows that tomorrow he will choose to forget them

It is 4 am and he watches Annabeth sleep, softly running his fingers across her bare back as it rises and falls. They’ve been like this for a few years now. Too in love to completely let go, but too broken to really try and make it fit again. Percy wishes he wasn’t such a coward about it, but he doesn’t know what’s worse: this back and forth game they play or trying and losing her for good. Her back rises and falls again, in time with Percy’s own breath. What if she doesn’t understand, he thinks. Or what if she does and it’s still not enough?

So tonight, like every other night their loneliness has chased them back to each other, he will creep through the dark of her apartment to put his clothes back on before leaving without saying goodbye. As he walks home, he will keep Riptide in his hand as he hopes for a monster to challenge him. No monster will show and he will call the Fates cowards under his breath. He will crawl back into his own empty bed, silently praying the smell of her doesn’t fade too quickly from his clothes, before drifting off to a nightmare-filled sleep. When he wakes in the morning, he will delete the text he sent her in an attempt to reclaim the alone that he has so carefully cultivated. He will then make himself breakfast while pretending to read the paper. He will call his mother and decline talking to his sister, but will tell his mom to give her a kiss for him. After taking a shower, he will head back to Camp Half-Blood and spend the day training kids in the hopes that they don’t die too quickly. That night, he will stay late in the training arena, hacking away at air in an attempt to make himself feel alive. He will go to bed after three glasses of whiskey, a bottle of which he keeps stashed in his bunk. The whiskey will help him forget that the night before he was not alone, but rather in the bed of the only woman he has ever loved.

He will choose to forget that it was his decision to leave.

When morning comes, he will choose to forget why he bothered saving the world so many times.

#i attempt to write #percy jackson #pjo au #canonverse #maskless

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odderancyart · 7 years

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His Hatred is as pure as his Love

The title is a quote from a comic by xLadyMalice (18+ blog)

The poem/quote in the fic comes from Steven Moffat

I couldn’t find an owner to Disbelief Papyrus

On AO3

Fandom: Undertale Characters: Papyrus, Frisk, Undyne, Alphys, Mettaton, Asgore Summary: Disbelief Papyrus. On a neutral run, Frisk kills Sans. Papyrus’ hatred is born, and that is something you never want to be the victim of.

Demons run ”You killed… you killed hi… I believed in you. I believed in you and you killed my brother.” Gathering the dusty jacket in his arms Papyrus watched the back of the human disappear into Waterfall. Tears ran down his face. His brother, Sans, was dead. The human had killed him in cold blood. Whilst smiling. They had struck from behind, Sans hadn’t stood a chance despite his ability to dodge. The sobs Papyrus let out started to die, changing into giggles as he stared at the dust at his feet. He put it into a container he had stashed in his inventory, before putting it back, and then he grinned widely. He stared at the path the human had taken. His giggled turned into laughter as he put the jacket on. It was too small. But what did that matter? Papyrus continued to laugh as he stalked after the kid that had dusted his family.

He would make them regret ever coming here.

When a good man goes to war His eye blazed orange as he made his way through Waterfall. It was almost interesting, how most of its inhabitants seemed frightened, talking about how a human had dusted their friends and families, but a few only had nice things to say. Once, Papyrus would have seen those few as proof that the human wasn’t all bad, but now he knew better. They were taunting him. Pointing out that they had spared a few, just like Papyrus had spared them just before they killed Sans. He did stop to help a few monsters who was in need of his aid, but most scuttered out of the vengeful monster’s way. His eye sparked as he heard two Temmies talk. One of them had seen the human dust another Temmie, and one had liked the human. He grinded his teeth, scaring them off. He hated it. He hated the human. And he would get his revenge.

Night will fall and drown the sun Undyne had tried to stop him. The human had spared her as well. For this, he was almost grateful. His best friend lived. But she had tried to stop him from punishing them for what they had done to Sans. Said to leave it to the Guard, to let her take care of the human. She had already failed once. There was simply no way he would risk her messing up again, letting the human go once more. He told her this, with cold voice. She had looked hurt, but still tried to stop him. He had attacked.

Undyne was stronger than him, he knew this. She was the strongest monster Underground, Sans had once said she had a natural well of Determination – something extremely unusual for monsters. But she was still hurt and tired from her encounter with the human, and Papyrus was not going to allow anyone to stop him. He pinned her to a wall and left for Hotland, in his brother’s killer’s tracks.

When a good man goes to war Mettaton was alive. His body was completely, utterly, destroyed, only the SOUL container not in a thousand pieces, but he was alive.

Papyrus knew he should feel something, anything, when hearing these news. MTT was his idol after all, but nothing. It was like all his compassion, all his love, all his hope – everything he was – had disappeared together with Sans. There was not much he cared about anymore, except getting revenge. He had felt something like relief over the fact that Undyne was alive, but otherwise Papyrus was not able to find another positive emotion in his body.

All he knew was this great hatred.

Friendship dies and true love lies ”U-Undyne?” The skittish royal scientist asked the captain of the Royal Guard, who was currently sitting on the floor of her lab. When Papyrus had beaten her up Alphys had immediately sent Mettaton to pick her up before leaving to meet the human, so she could patch her up. ”A-are you o-okay?”

”Okay?” Undyne replied, and let out a light laugh. It sounded forced. ”Of course I’m okay, Alph. I’m always okay. That my best friend just nailed me to a wall in blind rage doesn’t change that. Neither does the fact that there’s a human killing their way through the Underground, and Papyrus is going after them, wants to kill them. Papyrus!”

Alphys could only nod as she watched the person she was sure was the love of her life keep in sobs, grinning a grin that looked slightly unhinged. She was scared.

Night will fall and the dark will rise The Hall of Judgement. The golden room that had been Sans’ primary work place. The Hall of the Royal Judge.

But as the Royal Judge was not there anymore, Papyrus would just have to take his place. He had gotten here before the human, thanks to his ability to ignore and manipulate gravity; much like Sans had been able to manipulate time and space and therefore teleport. He grinned where he stood, leaning at a pillar. It was feral. He had waited, and watched, and his hate had grown with every life the human had taken and spared. Footsteps was heard, coming closer, and Papyrus clutched Sans’ jacket a little closer.

”Don’t worry, brother.” He whispered quietly, darkly. ”I will avenge you.”

When a good man goes to war The human looked surprised to see him there. Apparently, they had thought that since they killed the Judge, they would not have to face judgement, like they had in all earlier RESETs, Papyrus realized. It was almost enough to make him feel slightly giddy.

Then the human shrugged, smiling their weird smile, and kept walking until they reached the middle of the Hall where he stood.

Pushing himself of the pillar he faced the human who had murdered Sans. ”LET’S JUST GET TO THE POINT, SHALL WE?” He asked, back to his normal volume. The black of his eye grew more compact. ”YOU DIRTY BROTHER-KILLER.”

Calling them into a fight he grinned at the way the human almost flinched back at his tone. They did not look worried, though, which Papyrus knew was because they had never had too much trouble with his fight in the past. But he also knew he would make them regret underrestimating him. He called down a shower of bones, letting them rain over the human.

Demons run, but count the cost They were both panting, sweat dripping down their faces. Papyrus couldn’t remember the last time he had been sweating at all, let alone this much. But while the human got slower and slower, he still had a lot of energy left. The training he had gotten since childhood assured that he could fight for days at a time.

He dodged, threw bones, fired Gaster Blasters. He got a twisted joy from seeing their face when he called on the Blasters the first time. He had ten out at all times, more than Sans ever had been able to manage for more than a few moments, so even if they had fought Sans in an earlier RESET there was no preparing for his attacks. They were completely without a pattern; Papyrus was too furious to care about that. He did not know who had taught him to fight without patterns, nor did he care.

He laughed, the sound giving the impression of coming from the edge of madness, and fired on the same time as he let a wall of blue bones rise from the ground. He dodged the human’s attack and turned their SOUL blue.

The fury on their face was great, but the exhaustion in their body even more evident. They were down on 2 HP and he knew their inventory was empty. The battle had been going on for hours. The human screamed as he purposefully only dropped their HP with 1 while still making sure it hurt. Badly.

”FINE!” They yelled, voice filled with a hatred not nearly as pure as the hatred Papyrus felt, but extraordinary nevertheless. ”FINE! I GIVE UP! KILL ME THEN, I GIVE UP!”

The human just stood there, and Papyrus grinned. Finally. He lifted his hand, before bringing it down, firing one of the Blasters.

The human’s body fell to the ground with a final thump, burned almost beyond recognition.

The battle’s won, but the child is lost Papyrus stared at the body lying on the golden tiles. He felt a rush of victory going through his bones. He had avenged his brother’s death. As that thought came into his mind he felt a sob forcing itself up his throat. Sans was avenged, but he was still dead. Papyrus was still alone, without his family.

And who knew when the human would RESET again, and what kind of human they would be?

The orange glow around his eye disappeared as he crumbled to the floor, clutching the jacket tight. He sobbed violently, shaking, as he again called on his magic and had bones impale the dead body again and again and again.

Sans was dead and he was alone. Sans was dead and he was alone. Sans was dead and he was…

”Sans?” A soft voice came from behind, but Papyrus hardly noticed it.

”Oh dear.”

A hand on his shoulder, and he jerked so violently he almost lost his balance. He would have, if the fuzzy paw holding him hadn’t helped him keep it.

”You must be Papyrus.” The voice said. ”Undyne and your brother have told me so much about you.”

Papyrus managed to look up toward the one speaking, through his tears. A goat monster he recognized well was looking down on him, eyes soft and sorrowful. The king. Papyrus couldn’t even bother to care about the fact that the King of All Monsters was in his presence.

Two fuzzy arms wrapped themselves around him, and he cried into the king’s chest, grateful that someone was there to keep him from falling apart. It hurt. It hurt so much. Sans had been the one constant in his life, had been there from the start. Sans had been the most important person in his life. Sans had been the one person he loved more than anything else. His lazy, hot cat-selling, joke-telling, slacking, kind and brave brother.

Once the tears had dried out, he looked at the human body, which was now hovering a few feet above the floor, held up by his bones. His hatred still burned brightly, as strong as ever, not only toward this single human, but toward humanity. He looked up at the king, determination in his face.

”Let me into the Guard.” He simply said, quietly, voice almost void of any emotion except determination. ”I killed the human. The seventh human. You can take their SOUL and break the Barrier. A place in the Royal Guard is the least you owe me. And I will fight when we go to war against those demons.”

While he almost felt bad for forcing his way into the Guard through Asgore instead of waiting for Undyne to allow him in, he would not wait anymore. Then all Papyrus felt was grim and cruel satisfaction as the king, looking pained, nodded.

He would fill the void Sans left behind by making those who killed him regret ever being born.

…

RESET

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pamphletstoinspire · 7 years

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Saint Veronica Giuliani Feast Day - July 9th - Latin Calendar

Last Words of St. Veronica:

" I have found Love, Love has allowed Himself to be seen! This is the cause of my suffering. Tell it to everyone, tell it to everyone!"

Address of Pope Benedict XVI during the general audience Dec. 15, 2010 in Pope Paul VI Hall

Veronica was born on December 27, 1660, in Mercatello, in the valley of Metauro, to Francesco Giuliani and Benedetta Mancini. She was the last of seven sisters, an additional three of whom embraced the monastic life. She was given the name Ursula. She lost her mother at 7, and her father moved to Piacenza as superintendent of customs of the duchy of Parma. In this city, Ursula felt a growing desire to dedicate her life to Christ. The call was ever more pressing, so much so that at 17 she entered the strict cloister of the monastery of the Capuchin Poor Clares of Citta di Castello, where she would remain the whole of her life.

There she received the name Veronica, which means "true image," and, in fact, she would become a true image of Christ Crucified. A year later she made her solemn religious profession. The journey began for her configuration to Christ through much penance, great suffering and certain mystical experiences linked with the Passion of Jesus: the crowning of thorns, the mystical espousal, the wound in her heart and the stigmata. In 1716, at 56, she became abbess of the monastery and was confirmed in this role until her death, which occurred in 1727, after a most painful agony of 33 days that culminated in a profound joy, so much so that her last words were: "I have found Love, Love has allowed Himself to be seen! This is the cause of my suffering. Tell it to everyone, tell it to everyone!" (Summarium Beatificationis, 115-120).

She left her earthly dwelling on July 9 for her encounter with God. She was 67 years old; 50 of those years she spent in the monastery of Citta di Castello. She was proclaimed a saint on May 26, 1893, by Pope Gregory XVI.

Veronica Giuliani wrote much: letters, autobiographical reports, poems. However, the main source to reconstruct her thought is her "Diary," begun in 1693: a good 22,000 handwritten pages, which cover an expanse of 34 years of cloistered life. The writing flows spontaneously and continuously. There are no cancellations or corrections, punctuation marks or distribution of material in chapters or parts according to a pre-established plan. Veronica did not wish to compose a literary work; instead, she was obliged to put her experiences into writing by Father Girolamo Bastianelli, a religious of the Filippini, in agreement with the diocesan bishop Antonio Euctachi.

St. Veronica has a markedly Christ-centered and spousal spirituality: Hers is the experience of being loved by Christ, the faithful and sincere Spouse, and of wanting to correspond with an ever more involved and impassioned love. She interpreted everything in a key of love, and this infuses in her a profound serenity. Everything is lived in union with Christ, for love of Him, and with the joy of being able to demonstrate to Him all the love of which a creature is capable.

The Christ to whom Veronica is profoundly united is the suffering Christ of the passion, death and resurrection; it is Jesus in the act of offering himself to the Father to save us. From this experience derives also the intense and suffering love for the Church, and the twofold way of prayer and offering. The saint lived from this point of view: She prays, suffers, seeks "holy poverty," as "dispossessed," loss of self (cf. ibid., III, 523). Precisely to be like Christ, who gave his whole self.

In every page of her writings Veronica entrusts someone to the Lord, strengthening her prayers of intercession with the offering of herself in every suffering. Her heart dilated to all "the needs of the Holy Church," living with longing the desire of the salvation of "the whole world" (ibid., III-IV, passim). Veronica cried out: "O sinners...come to Jesus' heart; come to the cleansing of his most precious blood...he awaits you with open arms to embrace you" (Ibid., II, 16-17). Animated by an ardent charity, she gave care, understanding and forgiveness to the sisters of the monastery. She offered her prayers and sacrifices for the Pope, her bishop, priests and for all needy persons, including the souls in Purgatory. She summarized her contemplative mission in these words: "We cannot go preaching around the world to convert souls, but we are obliged to pray continually for all those souls who are offending God...particularly with our sufferings, that is with a principle of crucified life" (Ibid., IV, 877). Our saint conceived this mission as a "being in the middle" between men and God, between sinners and Christ Crucified.

Veronica profoundly lived participation in the suffering love of Jesus, certain that "to suffer with joy " is the "key of love" (cf. ibid., I, 299.417; III, 330.303.871;IV, 192). She evidences that Jesus suffers for men’s sins, but also for the sufferings that His faithful servants had to endure in the course of the centuries, in the time of the Church, precisely because of their solid and coherent faith. She wrote: "The Eternal Father made Him see and feel at that point all the sufferings that His elect would have to endure, His dearest souls, that is, those who would know how to benefit from His Blood and from all His sufferings" (ibid., II, 170). As the Apostle Paul says of himself: "Now I rejoice in my sufferings for your sake, and in my flesh I complete what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions for the sake of His Body, that is, the Church" (Colossians 1:24).

Veronica even asks Jesus to be crucified with him. "In an instant," she wrote, "I saw issue from his most holy wounds five shining rays; and all came to my face. And I saw these rays become as little flames. In four of them were the nails; and in one of them was the lance, as of gold, all red hot: and it pierced my heart, from one side to the other...and the nails went through the hands and feet. I felt great pain; but, in the very pain I saw myself, I felt myself all transformed in God" (Diary, I, 897)

The saint was convinced she was participating already in the Kingdom of God, but at the same time she invoked all the saints of the Blessed Homeland to come to her aid on the earthly journey of her self-giving, while awaiting eternal blessedness; this was the constant aspiration of her life (cf. ibid., II, 909; V, 246). In regard to preaching of the time, not rarely centered on "saving one’s soul" in individual terms, Veronica shows a strong "sense of solidarity," a sense of communion with all brothers and sisters on the way to heaven, and she lives, prays and suffers for all. The earthly, penultimate things, instead, although appreciated in the Franciscan sense as gifts of the Creator, were always relative, altogether subordinate to the "taste" of God and under the sign of a radical poverty. In the communion sanctorum, she clarifies her ecclesial donation, as well as the relationship between the pilgrim Church and the heavenly Church. "All the saints," she wrote, "are up there through the merits and the Passion of Jesus; but they cooperated with all that the Lord did, so that their life was all ordered...regulated by (his) very works" (ibid., III, 203)

In Veronica’s writings we find many biblical quotations, at times indirectly, but always precise: She shows familiarity with the sacred text, from which her spiritual experience is nourished. Revealed, moreover, is that the intense moments of Veronica’s mystical experience are never separated from the salvific events celebrated in the liturgy, where the proclamation and hearing of the Word of God has a particular place. Hence , sacred Scripture illumines, purifies and confirms Veronica’s experience, rendering it ecclesial. On the other hand, however, precisely her experience, anchored in sacred Scripture with an uncommon intensity, guides one to a more profound and "spiritual" reading of the text itself, to enter into the hidden profundity of the text. She not only expresses herself with the words of sacred Scripture, but she also really lives from these words, they become life in her.

For example, our saint often quotes the expression of the Apostle Paul: "If God is for us, who is against us?" (Romans 8:31; cf. diary, I, 714; II, 116.1021; III, 48). In her, the assimilation of this Pauline text, her great trust and profound joy, becomes a fait accompli in her very person: "My soul," she wrote, "was connected to the divine will and I was truly established and fixed in the will of God. It seems to me that I could never again be separated from this will of God and turn to myself with these precise words: nothing will be able to separate me from the will of God, not anxieties, or sorrows, or toil, or contempt, or temptations, or creatures, or demons, or darkness, and not even death itself, because, in life and in death, I will everything and in everything, the will of God" (Diary, IV, 272). Thus we have the certainty that death is not the last word, we are fixed in the will of God and so, really, in everlasting life.

In particular, Veronica shows herself to be a courageous witness of the beauty and the power of Divine Love, which draws, pervades and inflames her. It is crucified Love that imprinted itself on her flesh, as in that of St. Francis of Assisi, with the stigmata of Jesus. "My Bride," the crucified Christ whispers to me, "the penances you do for those who are in my disgrace are dear to me...Then, detaching an arm from the cross, he made a sign to me to draw near to his side...and I found myself in the arms of the Crucified. What I experienced at that point I cannot recount: I would have liked to remain always in his most holy side" (ibid.., I,37). This is also an image of her spiritual journey, of her interior life: to be in the embrace of the Crucified and thus to be in Christ’s love for others.

Also with the Virgin Mary, Veronica lived a relationship of profound intimacy, attested by the words she heard Our Lady say one day and which she reports in her Diary: "I will make you rest on my breast, you are united with my soul, and from it you were taken as in flight to God" (IV, 901).

St. Veronica Giuliani invites us to make our Christian life grow, our union with the Lord in being for others, abandoning ourselves to his will with complete and total trust, and to union with the Church, Bride of Christ; she invites us to participate in the suffering love of Jesus Crucified for the salvation of all sinners; she invites us to fix our gaze on Paradise, the goal of our earthly journey, where we will live together with so many brothers and sisters the joy of full communion with God; she invites us to nourish ourselves daily from the Word of God to warm our hearts and give direction to our life. The last words of the saint can be considered the synthesis of her passionate mystical experience: "I have found Love, Love has let himself be seen!"

St. Veronica was a mystic not of the Medieval Age; she was also a Capuchin Poor Clare nun. December 27, 2010 was the 350th anniversary of her birth. Citta di Castello, the place where she lived the longest and where she died, as well as Mercatello — her native country — and the Diocese of Urbino, Italy celebrate this event joyfully.

#st veronica giuliani

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trouvxilles-blog · 7 years

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Character Development : Description

BASICS

Full Name: terrence oberon yoon Nicknames: terry, “t” (lance usually calls him this), dumbass, asshole (both on more than a few occasions) Sex/Gender: male Right or Left: right Age: 21 (international) Height: 5′9 Eye Colour: dark brown Hair Colour: black Distinguishing Marks: a mole on his right cheek; scars across his left wrist; a small diagonal scar on his right temple from getting into a fight; a small, light birthmark on the left side of his chest, and a small, light, heart-shaped birth mark on his right hip bone. Paragraph Of Physical Traits: his skin is fair with golden undertones. his overall body type is slender, but toned from rotc training. he has soft features that people think make him look pretty, and broad shoulders that tells people he’s actually a man which especially helped when he grew his hair out. his arms are toned but still pretty skinny despite doing push-ups and playing basketball; his hair is an uneven dark bob with just as uneven bangs.

FAMILY/RELIGION

Parents: yoon sangchul (father, unemployed asshole alcoholic), alice han (estranged, former file clerk; he doesn’t know what she’s doing now) Siblings: five (5) - titania (tanya), 26, works a desk job her friend got here in the morning and as a bar waitress at night - lance, 23, web developer because he’s basically a genius, got a scholarship in one of the top universities - juliet (julie), 16, 10th grade, takes a lot of babysitting opportunities - tybalt (ty), 14, 8th grade psycho, usually helps julie babysit when their rundown house turns into a daycare every saturday - robin (puck), 7, 1st grade, they love him Marital Status: single Significant Other/s: changes frequently (but who has time for commitment when you barely have time for yourself?) Children: none (unable to think about children when he’s already basically taking of three.) Other Relatives: an aunt who lives in chicago, a grandmother somewhere in northern california, an uncle in incheon (married with kids), grandparents in chuncheon Pets: none (can’t feed a family. obviously can’t feed a pet.) Friends: generally has a lot of friends because he’s way too outgoing and obnoxious for his and everyone’s own good; however, he’s picky when it comes to people he wants to keep a constant figure in his life. - bob kim (a barista from the usual cafe he goes to for coffee runs; he still wonders if that’s his real name; regardless, he still has a crush on bob) - sylvan carter (a barista from the same cafe; bob’s best friend and wingman; in love with terry, but terry doesn’t know nor does he care; terry likes him enough but can never get his name right.) - charlotte ‘charlie’ lee (his baby who he adores so much and will do anything for, including buying charlie cake with what’s left of his money) - aiden kwon (he’s only friends with aiden because aiden is friends with charlie; and also terry knows aiden likes charlie so there’s that.) - kiel sang (a non-blood related twin; both their existence essentially defies any known laws of metaphysics - but their whole relationship is something We Don’t Talk About) Enemies: gets into a lot of petty fist fights, but doesn’t really make lifelong enemies; he probably even fucked one of the people who beat him up at one point. Ethnicity: korean Religion: agnostic (or whatever) Beliefs: he believes in a higher being, but not necessarily a god. he thinks there are probably multiple gods out there making bets and just watching people get fucked over. he still prays sometimes, but he doesn’t tell anyone that. Superstitions: he sticks bills onto every mirror in the house during new year on the off chance that they can earn more money that year. julie and ty have been helping him for the last six years. it doesn’t hurt to try. that’s basically it. Diction/Accent: his southern californian accent is indistinguishable unless he says certain words. he’s also a better english speaker, so he often mispronounces korean words.

SCHOOL/WORK/HOME

Education: public school (primary and secondary); college: verse-dependent, on a cadet scholarship // kookmin university (achieved admission scholarship as a freshman) / santa barbara city college (under financial aid - federal work study) Degree(s): working on his bachelor’s degree in broadcast journalism Occupation: broadcasting student-intern for a tv & radio studio in the morning, mini-mart employee by afternoon night Own or Rent: own; his family owns their own borderline dilapidated house, originally owned by an aunt who moved to chicago. Living Space: cramped; it’s not small in its entirety, but with seven people living together in a two-story, two-bathroom (upstairs has a toilet and a shower, downstairs only has a toilet), four-bedroom house, it’s going to get pretty cramped. terry shares a bedroom with two brothers, lance and tybalt; julie shares a bedroom with their youngest, puck; tanya gets her own room because she damn well deserves it; their dad has his own room, but he’s never around so it’s basically an empty space with a bed. Work Space: the mini-mart isn’t a large place, but it does hold necessary items like basic consumable items and toiletries, which is why they have a lot regulars customers, mostly people who live nearby. the studio is a relatively large media conglomerate. his internship is in the main headquarters which houses multiple enterprises. Main Mode of Transport: walking because it’s free; sometimes the bus or subway if they can’t travel on foot; they steal unattended bikes or skateboards when they have to.

PSYCHOLOGY

Fears: failure, losing control, losing any one of his siblings Secrets: no one from his internship and workplace knows he has bipolar disorder or the fact that he’s gay; they keep illegal drugs at home; his family steals shit to survive. IQ: around 130 - typical for a post-graduate student. (fun fact: his older brother’s is around 160, go figure.) Eating Habits: quick eater because he’s always in a hurry, but not a messy one; sometimes eats on the go - he’ll stuff a piece of bread into his mouth anime style and run out the door to make it in time for class Food Preferences: he’ll basically eat anything aside from pickles (when you have no money, you can’t exactly choose what’s in front of you especially when you know your sister worked her ass off to put food on the table); he loves sweets, especially the hard butterscotch candy the mini-mart owners let him get for free. Sleeping Habits: usually sleeps on his stomach. at the end of most days, he just plops on the bed, exhausted. sometimes he forgets to change out of his jeans. when tanya checks up on them, she has to pull the covers over him. Book Preferences: contemporary classics (the little prince, a clockwork orange, the catcher in the rye, lolita, etc.), can quote shakespeare’s plays but prefers his poems, short stories because they’re quick to read since he doesn’t get much time to himself anymore. Music Preferences: alternative rock, indie rock, indie pop - basically music that pumps him up and keeps him awake. Groups or Alone: groups, mostly because he’s used to it, living with seven people and all. he’s also an extrovert, so he really doesn’t mind being around people. he doesn’t mind being alone every now and then, though. Leader or Follower: both. a follower - when tanya’s in, she’s in charge. he was in rotc, so he’s good with following directions. a leader - when tanya and lance are out, he’s in charge. when he was promoted in rotc, he was praised for being a good leader. Planner or Spontaneous: spontaneous. even his college major was a spontaneous, last-minute decision. he’s especially (dangerously) spontaneous when manic. Journal: used to have one - started multiple ones throughout the years - but never had the time and focus to actually fill one out completely; during junior year, his journal served as a mood diary (as suggested by a therapist). he managed to write on it for three months, and then just forgot about it. Hobbies: reading fiction novels, basketball, soccer, hanging out with his siblings, hanging out with kiel his friends, flirting with bob at the cafe, getting drunk, being an asshole. How Do They Relax: what is relaxation he’ll stay at home and read; he also reads a lot during idle hours at the mini-mart, especially if he takes a night shift. if he’s not too tired, he plays basketball. What Excites Them: seeing kiel almost everything excites him when he’s manic. coffee runs get exciting just because he gets to see bob. What Stresses Them: financial issues (but that’s an issue for their whole family),the possibility of not arriving on time and missing deadlines, not being able to earn enough money. Pet Peeves: slow walkers or people who tend to block the fucking way, especially when you’re in a hurry; people who can’t follow simple directions; people who are habitually late and end up making him late; people who take food from his plate without asking; loud whispering because i can fucking hear you; sudden shift in deadlines; simple grammatical errors. Prejudices: people with mental illness are dangerous and a hindrance (as a collective, despite his only experience being with his bipolar mom and alcoholic dad, hence why he refuses to believe he has the same problem). Attitudes: depends on his mood - manic, stable, depressive. when manic, he has no value for his life (and the law). lance had to force him off the roof once. when depressive, he can barely (or doesn’t) get out of bed. he overdosed once. when stable, his general outlook in life is optimistic - because what else can you do in this situation but hope? Obsessions: keeping things in order, getting enough money to feed the kids for a week, kiel Addictions: caffeine (mostly strong cheap-ass coffee, but they’re also stocked up on soda); alcohol and nicotine (not as bad. he smokes a lot, but he’s trying to keep both under control); does weed sometimes; isn’t really into hard drugs. that’s about it. Ambitions: join the marines (formerly), get into west point (on hold because tanya can’t stand the idea; lance is still trying to talk him out of it); else, he’ll apply for a job at the studio after graduation and work his ass off all the way to the top (from a lowly production assistant to scriptwriter/director/producer; hell, he’ll act if he has to; he’ll take what he can get).

OBJECTS KEPT IN

Purse/Bag: he has a messenger sling bag where he keeps his phone (a black nokia lumia his older brother passed on to him), a worn-out wallet with barely any money in it, a secondhand paperback novel, a pack of cigarettes. Wallet: money (or how much of it he has), an old photo of him and all his siblings (from when the youngest was only two years old), an old family photo tucked behind it, school ID, fake IDs Fridge: two milk jugs, a loaf of bread, cans of sodas, beer (lots of it) - that’s its usual content. Medicine Cabinet: mood stabilizers (lamictal), antipsychotics (abilify, zyprexa which he doesn’t use anymore because he overdosed once), aspirin, some pcp/angel dust that tanya doesn’t know about, and some weed lance hides that everyone knows about anyway Glove Compartment: he doesn’t have his own car but his dad’s glove compartment is filled with receipts, unopened letters (mostly bills), drugs, and money he spends in one go. Junk Drawer: literally junk, except he probably has a gun in there somewhere, and a pack of weed he shares with lance. Backpack: handwritten notes on yellow paper, photocopied pages from required textbooks, photocopied notes, scripts that need proofreading and editing, a secondhand novel that changes on a weekly basis, pens that are pretty much out of ink, a pack of cigarettes. Desk: journal (mood diary; just in case he feels like writing in it again), colored pens, pages from scripts he had to edit and proofread, a pack of cigarettes, the laptop he shares with everyone in the house. Clothes Pockets: loose change, mostly. a pack of cigarettes, a lighter, and a few small bills stuffed into the pockets of his jeans.

OTHER

Halloween Costumes: would be easier if they can actually afford already-made costumes. the siblings used to come together to make costumes for julie, tybalt, and puck with whatever items they can salvage. their close neighbors help them out, too. now that they’re older, they just make one for puck. it’s fun for all of them. it’s something they look forward to yearly. Talents: creative writing, especially comedy writing (he doesn’t think so, but lance does); shooting hoops; shooting a pistol or rifle, and getting perfect aim almost every time; showing up at the last minute; balancing at least ten piping hot coffee cups at the same time; forgetting sylvan’s name; being an overall asshole (he’s the best at this) Politics: a liberal, but mostly neutral. he has other shit to worry about. Flaws: mental instability, addiction, pride, self-destructive tendencies, tactlessness, recklessness, impulsivity, always ready to throw punches, noncommittal (relationships) Strengths: fitness, aim (they were taught to shoot a gun in rotc), intellect (fast learner), wit, determination, creativity, resourcefulness, humor, humility, loyalty, never backs down from a fight. Drugs/Alcohol: a lot of alcohol, frequent drug use (mostly just marijuana; the last time he took pcp, he was manic and almost died from both mania and drug hallucinations), prescription drugs (mood stabilizers and antipsychotics he refuses to take). Passwords: phone: 0603 (it’s not a secret), e-mail: b!tch_y0u_th0ught1004 (tybalt has been trying to get into his e-mail even though he just uses it for work purposes); others: 060395 Prized Possessions: doesn’t really have one except for the photo of his siblings tucked in his wallet. Time and Place: february 22, 2016; 10:00pm; seoul, south korea // february 22, 2016; 5:00am; santa barbara, california. Special Places: the beach. the sound of the waves and the feeling of his toes buried beneath the sand relaxes him. back in santa barbara, his mom used to walk them to the beach every weekend because it was close by. Special Memories: when he got promoted from cadet to officer cadet in rotc. when he had chickenpox, tanya stayed up all night to take care of him. when lance first found out he was gay and confronted him. when he finally told tanya he was gay, and she said i know. during his first mood crash, julie would constantly check on him and bring food up to his room. when tybalt won first place during his first science fair. when puck took his first steps, and all five older siblings were there to witness it.

#[ wow this took forever ]#[ this got super long but fuck it ]#( ` | profile )#( ` | minimalist )#submission #( ` | horribly limited ` hc )

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dfroza · 4 years

Text

Today’s reading in the ancient book of Psalms and Proverbs

for Wednesday, february 19 of 2020 with Psalm 19 and Proverbs 19, accompanied by Psalm 61 for the 61st day of Winter and Psalm 50 for day 50 of the year

beginning with the lines of Psalm 19 that reflects upon the silence of Creation such as that of the night sky:

[Psalm 19]

For the worship leader. A song of David.

The celestial realms announce God’s glory;

the skies testify of His hands’ great work.

Each day pours out more of their sayings;

each night, more to hear and more to learn.

Inaudible words are their manner of speech,

and silence, their means to convey.

Yet from here to the ends of the earth, their voices have gone out;

the whole world can hear what they say.

God stretched out in these heavens a tent for the sun,

And the sun is like a groom

who, after leaving his room, arrives at the wedding in splendor;

He is the strong runner

who, favored to win in his race, is eager to face his challenge.

He rises at one end of the skies

and runs in an arc overhead;

nothing can hide from his heat, from the swelter of his daily tread.

The Eternal’s law is perfect,

turning lives around.

His words are reliable and true,

instilling wisdom to open minds.

The Eternal’s directions are correct,

giving satisfaction to the heart.

God’s commandments are clear,

lending clarity to the eyes.

The awe of the Eternal is clean,

sustaining for all of eternity.

The Eternal’s decisions are sound;

they are right through and through.

They are worth more than gold—

even more than abundant, pure gold.

They are sweeter to the tongue than honey

or the drippings of the honeycomb.

In addition to all that has been said,

Your servant will find, hidden in Your commandments, both a strong warning

and a great reward for keeping them.

Who could possibly know all that he has done wrong?

Forgive my hidden and unknown faults.

As I am Your servant, protect me from my bent toward pride,

and keep sin from ruling my life.

If You do this, I will be without blame,

innocent of the great breach.

May the words that come out of my mouth and the musings of my heart

meet with Your gracious approval,

O Eternal, my Rock,

O Eternal, my Redeemer.

The Book of Psalms, Poem 19 (The Voice)

and the same mirrored in The Passion Translation:

[Psalm 19]

God’s Witnesses

For the Pure and Shining One

A poem of praise by King David, his loving servant

[God’s Story in the Skies]

God’s splendor is a tale that is told;

his testament is written in the stars.

Space itself speaks his story every day

through the marvels of the heavens.

His truth is on tour in the starry vault of the sky,

showing his skill in creation’s craftsmanship.

Each day gushes out its message to the next,

night with night whispering its knowledge to all.

Without a sound, without a word, without a voice being heard,

Yet all the world can see its story.

Everywhere its gospel is clearly read so all may know.

What a heavenly home God has set for the sun,

shining in the superdome of the sky!

See how he leaves his celestial chamber each morning,

radiant as a bridegroom ready for his wedding,

like a day-breaking champion eager to run his course.

He rises on one horizon, completing his circuit on the other,

warming lives and lands with his heat.

[God’s Story in the Scriptures]

God’s Word is perfect in every way;

how it revives our souls!

His laws lead us to truth,

and his ways change the simple into wise.

His teachings make us joyful and radiate his light;

his precepts are so pure!

His commands, how they challenge us to keep close to his heart!

The revelation-light of his word makes my spirit shine radiant.

Every one of the Lord’s commands is right;

following them brings cheer.

Nothing he says ever needs to be changed.

The rarest treasures of life are found in his truth.

That’s why I prize God’s word like others prize the finest gold.

Nothing brings the soul such sweetness

as seeking his living words.

For they warn us, his servants,

and keep us from following the wicked way,

giving a lifetime guarantee:

great success to every obedient soul!

Without this revelation-light,

how would I ever detect the waywardness of my heart?

Lord, forgive my hidden flaws whenever you find them.

Keep cleansing me, God,

and keep me from my secret, selfish sins;

may they never rule over me!

For only then will I be free from fault

and remain innocent of rebellion.

So may the words of my mouth, my meditation-thoughts,

and every movement of my heart be always pure and pleasing,

acceptable before your eyes,

my only Redeemer, my Protector-God.

The Book of Psalms, Poem 19 (The Passion Translation)

and some Scripture takes on the nature of prayer, of which the deepest heart of prayer is the presence of the Spirit within our own, gently and silently guiding us in our thought-lives to follow the path of Love. and it is all about True friendship.

continuing with the ancient writing of the Psalms:

[Psalm 61]

A David Psalm

God, listen to me shout,

bend an ear to my prayer.

When I’m far from anywhere,

down to my last gasp,

I call out, “Guide me

up High Rock Mountain!”

You’ve always given me breathing room,

a place to get away from it all,

A lifetime pass to your safe-house,

an open invitation as your guest.

You’ve always taken me seriously, God,

made me welcome among those who know and love you.

Let the days of the king add up

to years and years of good rule.

Set his throne in the full light of God;

post Steady Love and Good Faith as lookouts,

And I’ll be the poet who sings your glory—

and live what I sing every day.

The Book of Psalms, Poem 61 (The Message)

[Psalm 50]

An Asaph Psalm

The God of gods—it’s God!—speaks out, shouts, “Earth!”

welcomes the sun in the east,

farewells the disappearing sun in the west.

From the dazzle of Zion,

God blazes into view.

Our God makes his entrance,

he’s not shy in his coming.

Starbursts of fireworks precede him.

He summons heaven and earth as a jury,

he’s taking his people to court:

“Round up my saints who swore

on the Bible their loyalty to me.”

The whole cosmos attests to the fairness of this court,

that here God is judge.

“Are you listening, dear people? I’m getting ready to speak;

Israel, I’m about ready to bring you to trial.

This is God, your God,

speaking to you.

I don’t find fault with your acts of worship,

the frequent burnt sacrifices you offer.

But why should I want your blue-ribbon bull,

or more and more goats from your herds?

Every creature in the forest is mine,

the wild animals on all the mountains.

I know every mountain bird by name;

the scampering field mice are my friends.

If I get hungry, do you think I’d tell you?

All creation and its bounty are mine.

Do you think I feast on venison?

or drink draughts of goats’ blood?

Spread for me a banquet of praise,

serve High God a feast of kept promises,

And call for help when you’re in trouble—

I’ll help you, and you’ll honor me.”

Next, God calls up the wicked:

“What are you up to, quoting my laws,

talking like we are good friends?

You never answer the door when I call;

you treat my words like garbage.

If you find a thief, you make him your buddy;

adulterers are your friends of choice.

Your mouth drools filth;

lying is a serious art form with you.

You stab your own brother in the back,

rip off your little sister.

I kept a quiet patience while you did these things;

you thought I went along with your game.

I’m calling you on the carpet, now,

laying your wickedness out in plain sight.

“Time’s up for playing fast and

loose with me.

I’m ready to pass sentence,

and there’s no help in sight!

It’s the praising life that honors me.

As soon as you set your foot on the Way,

I’ll show you my salvation.”

The Book of Psalms, Poem 50 (The Message)

[Proverbs 19]

It’s better to be honest, even if it leads to poverty, than to live as a dishonest fool.

The best way to live is with revelation-knowledge, for without it, you’ll grow impatient and run right into error.

There are some people who ruin their own lives and then blame it all on God.

Being wealthy means having lots of “friends,” but the poor can’t keep the ones they have.

Perjury won’t go unpunished, and liars will get all that they deserve.

Everyone wants to be close to the rich and famous, but a generous person has all the friends he wants!

When a man is poor, even his family has no use for him.

How much more will his “friends” avoid him—for though he begs for help, they won’t respond.

Do yourself a favor and love wisdom. Learn all you can, then watch your life flourish and prosper!

Tell lies and you’re going to get caught, and the habitual liar is doomed.

It doesn’t seem right when you see a fool living in the lap of luxury or a prideful servant ruling over princes.

A wise person demonstrates patience, for mercy means holding your tongue.

When you are insulted, be quick to forgive and forget it, for you are virtuous when you overlook an offense.

The rage of a king is like the roar of a lion, but his sweet favor is like a gentle, refreshing rain.

A rebellious son breaks a father’s heart, and a nagging wife can drive you crazy!

You can inherit houses and land from your parents, but a good wife only comes as a gracious gift from God!

Go ahead—be lazy and passive. But you’ll go hungry if you live that way.

Honor God’s holy instructions and life will go well for you. But if you despise his ways and choose your own plans, you will die.

Every time you give to the poor you make a loan to the Lord. Don’t worry—you’ll be repaid in full for all the good you’ve done.

Don’t be afraid to discipline your children while they’re still young enough to learn. Don’t indulge your children or be swayed by their protests.

A hot-tempered man has to pay the price for his anger. If you bail him out once, you’ll do it a dozen times.

Listen well to wise counsel and be willing to learn from correction so that by the end of your life you’ll be known for your wisdom.

A person may have many ideas concerning God’s plan for his life, but only the designs of his purpose will succeed in the end.

A man is charming when he displays tender mercies to others.

And a lover of God who is poor and promises nothing is better than a rich liar who never keeps his promises.

When you live a life of abandoned love, surrendered before the awe of God, here’s what you’ll experience:

Abundant life. Continual protection. And complete satisfaction!

There are some people who pretend they’re hurt—deadbeats who won’t even work to feed themselves.

If you punish the insolent who don’t know any better, they will learn not to mock. But if you correct a wise man, he will grow even wiser.

Children who mistreat their parents are an embarrassment to their family and a public disgrace. So listen, my child.

Don’t reject correction or you will certainly wander from the ways of truth.

A corrupt witness makes a mockery of justice, for the wicked never play by the rules.

Judgment is waiting for those who mock the truth, and foolish living invites a beating.

The Book of Proverbs, Chapter 19 (The Passion Translation)

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