#too bad Lewis died before writing his book about her
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Books read in 2023:
The secret life of bees (Jan 6) 4/5 (probably would have enjoyed it more when I was younger. Great overall but still the mammy stereotype. Don’t like it when poc women are portrayed as ~divine creatures~ we are just normal people and we just wanted to treated like normal people. Nothing more, nothing less. Too flowery and cliche at parts but still good overall.)
I’m glad my mom died (Jan 15) 5/5 (funny and thrilling. Reading this would probably help a lot of people with toxic parents think through their own trauma)
Evil Under the Sun (Jan 17) 4/5 (simple and entertaining. Not a masterwork of literature but satisfying nonetheless. A bit slow to get started but great overall)
The hunting party (Feb 4) 4/5 (found hard to get into it/get invested because of unlikeable cast of characters but stil high rating for unexpected ending. I was bored a few times in the beginning and middle parts but it really picked up in the end and made up for it. Would make a great movie)
Sparkling cyanide (audiobook) (Feb 20) 3/5 (good to listen to while doing other work around the house. Probably not worth it to take separate time out to read)
Last bus to Woodstock (Feb 24) 3/5 (hated the main detective and how he went about the investigation eg. relying on instinct and chance discoveries. But the side characters were super interesting and the ending was unexpected. Would have liked it better if inspector Lewis was the main character. No decent female characters. Only wh*res or the "shrill wife." But the crime itself was interesting and I liked the writing style).
And then there were none (audiobook) (Feb 26) 5/5 (Omg. I was in thrall throughout. My favorite Agatha Christie book I’ve read so far. I actually thought there had to be a supernatural explanation lol)
The dark remains (feb 26) 3/5 (not bad. Just boring. Can tell it was written by a dude. Not one interesting character despite being set in the gang world. Very cliche type of noir)
The Falls (Ian Rankin) (March 1) 4/5 (great buildup but disappointing payoff. Loved the concept of the quizmaster. Very likable the main detectives and very interesting plot. Sustains you throughout despite being so long. But yeah. Didn’t quite like the solution to the murder)
Wire in the blood (March 22) 5/5 (excellent. Gory but excellent. What a plot!)
The distant echo (March 30) 5/5 (omg. If someone asks me what’s your favorite crime fiction book I’d say this one! Very suspenseful and unpredictable loved it loved it loved it!!!!)
The Guest List (April 13) 6/5 (this surpasses the distant echo. This actually made me feel things. The amount of gasps I gusped could have powered the state of Texas for a year. Absolutely loved it. )
East of Eden (May 15) 100/5 (what kind of genius do you have to be to write such a book?
In Cold Blood 4/5 (May 30) maybe bc I already knew the story, I kinda had to force myself to finish this
Macbeth 5/5 (June 14) iconic
Northanger Abby by Val Mcdermid 4/5 (June 17) fun modern retelling. Expected a crime and twist but it was faithful to the original. Enjoyed reading.
Gone girl 6/5 (June 24) omg her mind. Will definitely read more by her. Wish I hadn’t seen the movie before so I could have been fully surprised. Liked the ending.
The Pearl (5/5) (July 3) not a page turner but a good depiction of reality. Very sad.
Age of Vice 3/5 (July 7) great beginning but I didn’t like the ending. I think the author tried to put too many stories and perspectives in one. That whole bit of Sunil was unnecessary? It just slowed the story down at such a crusial moment. And Sunny’s backstory with Vicky too. I don’t think it was necessary to have an unbelievably tragic backstory for every character and he already had his deal with his dad. Some things are never clarified like what happened to his mom, his true relationship with Vicky. Why Ajay agreed. Ajay turns out of be such a loser in the end. Maybe it’s “realistic” but lots of things that happen in this book are not realistic so I don’t know why only the ending has to be realistic. I wish I could have followed Ajay’s journey to a good ending.
Milk fed 2/5 (August 12) only read bc of booktok. Good seeds here and there. didn't realy like it.
The club (5/5) (august 19) excellent, gripping. A bit longer than it needed to be though.
The grownup Gillian Flynn (4/5) (October 19) great short story. Great writing. So engaging. Perfect length for getting back into reading
Emma by charlotte Brontë and another lady (5/5) (Nov 2) love. Mr. Ellin needs to be played by Simon Baker in a movie.
A room of one’s own by Virginia Woolf (Nov 11) (1000/5). This has been on my to read list for ages. I see quotes from this everywhere and every time I’m astounded by how she just she gets it and knows exactly what to say to express it perfectly. The essay was everything I imagined it would be. Forever grateful to that Destiel fanfic for introducing me to this.
Villette (4/5) (Dec 29) lovely
Girl, interrupted (5/5) (Dec 31) made me ponder about a lot of things. Her youth was really kind of stolen from her. Made to freeze just like that painting. what is the right thing to do? What is helping and what is hurting? What does “crazy” even mean? I think I tend to be very judgemental about this kind of stuff. But this book made me realize that people are people even if you do not understand why they act a certain way. They feel the same as me.
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Million Dollar Man | chapter two
18+
summary: Spencer's therapist recommended he branch out and meet new people who don't want to talk about his work... she didn't expect him to sign up for a Sugar Daddy website.
Content warnings: sugar daddy!spencer, age gaps (14 years), daddy kink, blow jobs, kissing, drinking mention, lowkey perv!Spencer, cum play, praise, oral (female receiving), grinding, love confessions, arrangements, Spencers anxiety, (more to add)
word count: 3.4K
a/n: updates on Wednesdays and saturdays at 2 pm est
Chapter Two | Masterlist
She sat on the subway with an anxious pit in her stomach and her purse held close to her chest. Her laptop in her bag, she didn’t want to lose it on her way to the most important meeting of her whole life.
Her story was becoming a book, she was almost done the final draft, they were making touch-ups to the cover and picking the type of paper today.
Her dreams were coming true within the next month, soon she’d have a physical copy of her book, her pre-sales were showing that she’d be on the bestseller list, and her name was finally going to be on the cover of this one.
She sighed and reached for her necklace, holding it between her fingers as she took a few deep breaths. She was doing so much better today than she was last year and it was all because of Spencer, he was the best thing to happen to her. To think she complimented his sweater vest and now he’s the only person in her life she can count on.
All she can think about is him for the rest of her journey, through 4 more stops she keeps her eyes closed as she thinks of all his little facts and his cute laugh. She smiles to herself and the anxiety slips away, she loves him and she knows that for sure, but she just doesn’t know how she loves him.
She’s never had a sibling, her best friends are all women, her previous boyfriends were all shit and her other sugar daddies were never this wonderful, and her parents are lesbians… she doesn’t know what her feelings really are for Spencer, mainly because she’s never known any other men to compare him to.
But she does know the exact moment she realized she fell for him.
He booked a hotel room in DC after a local case, asking her to meet him in there at 10 pm. She was waiting in the bathtub when he arrived, bubbles galore, her hair up and arms open, “welcome home, honey.”
He laughs, “you want me to get in there with you?”
She just nods, “let me take care of you, daddy?”
He takes off his blazer, pulls his tie off and starts to unbutton his shirt. She watches patiently as he gets undressed, and it’s not sexual to her. He’s her person, her best friend, the only human being she would ever share a moment like this with and that’s when it hits her.
She doesn’t accept it just yet.
It’s not until he’s lying on her chest, between her legs, cheek resting on her boobs as she runs a sponge over his back while he gives her a little run down on his terrible week. His co-worker almost died, his mom is stressing him out, the only good thing he has left is her and she knows that.
“And then I get to my moms facility and she’s had a really good day, she knows me and she knows all of my childhood again and she’s all right there in front of me and yet she’s so far away. I’m never going to get all the time I want with her and it’s really hard to accept.”
He shares things with her that he doesn’t even tell his therapist. Because his therapist doesn’t hold him like a child against her chest and tell him he’s okay when he get’s upset.
Y/N loves him, so she kisses his forehead, “I’m so sorry, I have 2 moms if you’d like to have one?”
“It’s okay, I would love to meet them sometime though,” he wraps his arms around her waist a little tighter under the water. “Thank you for tonight.”
“Did I mention my leg is 44 inches from hip to toe?” She asks in the middle of the silence, quoting pretty woman, knowing he hasn’t seen that far into the movie yet. “So basically we’re talking about 88 inches of therapy for the bargain price of $800 dollars a week.”
Her legs wrap around him and their naked bodies are closer than they’ve ever been and yet it’s completely platonic, “I’d spend a million dollars on you if it always meant feeling this good after.”
She runs her cheek along his wet hair as he snuggles into her neck, “mmm, I like the sound of that,” she teased. “My million dollar man.”
Her stop rolls around and she pulls herself out of her day dreams to get off the train and head to her meeting. She smiles as she walks through the station, up the stairs and onto the busy downtown streets when she gets a text with Spencers special chime. She opens it when she gets to where she’s going, safely inside and in the waiting room.
It makes her laugh in the waiting room. People look at her but she doesn’t care, he’s so special to her she feels butterflies in her stomach even when he’s not around.
“Y/N!” She hears her name being called by her editor, he’s over ecstatic as he comes running out to get her. “Come, come we have so many choices to make!” He jumps up and down as he holds her arm, like a child in a candy store.
“Andy, chill man,” she laughs at him and plays it cool, “It’s just the cover being finalized.”
“It’s our baby!” He teases back, pushing his glasses up and tugging her behind the glass doors of the office.
She’s surrounded by people and paper and huge versions of her book cover. She has a sharpie as she fixed mistakes and jots down final ideas. “And I wan’t Phil to look more human and less like data from Star Trek?”
“But Dorothy looks okay?” The artist asks, nervously and Y/N can tell.
“She looks beautiful! You really brought her justice,” she smiles, “really she looks the same in my head! It’s just Phil and I’m sure it’s tough getting a drawing to look like a robotic human, let alone human.”
“I have some ideas?” She opens up more, taking her iPad out and sliding it across the table, “I wanted to give him more of a Sophia feel? His face is silicone but his joints and everything are more like an Elon Musk crash dummy.”
“That’s perfect!” She’s shocked, “why didn’t that go in the first draft?”
“I was worried it was too much,” she’s a little older than Y/N, and yet her anxiety is that of a teenage girl. “I’m going to get working on the final, do you want some emailed versions tonight?”
“Yes please,” she smiles.
“So we’re done?” Andy asks, “we’ve made all our final calls?”
“I believe we have,” Y/N closes her laptop and takes her phone out, taking a photo of the final rough sketch of her book cover on the table to send to Spencer before he comes to pick her up. She can’t wait to see him now.
—
They’re sitting side by side in matching spa robes, he’s getting a pedicure while she gets her nails done. Leaning back in her chair with a face mask and cucumbers on her eyes, she’s never felt more relaxed in her life. And just in time too, her back was killing her from writing, her knuckles hurt and she just needed a break.
Spencer did too, he was genuinely not having a good time at work anymore, every case made him spiral and he always looked to Y/N on days like that. They met more than once a week now, she got $800 every Friday and she didn’t even really need it anymore. He was coving for so much of her bills and lively hood that her savings account was growing and growing because of him.
For the first time in her life she thought she would be okay if a man left her. As terrible as it was, as much as her moms tried to raise her differently, she fell down the daddy issues rabbit hole and she’s never going to find her way out— however, luckily for her, Spencer is down here too, and he brought a flashlight.
He understands her, more than anyone else on earth. He knows all her secrets, every crush and bad grade and snide remark she’s ever kept to herself. He didn’t judge her, he could actually listen to her issues and tell her why she had them. He gave better advice than a therapist and he was able to get information for her if he didn’t know the answer to what she was going through.
He’s absolutely everything to her and yet he’s 14 years older than her, he’s still traumatized beyond belief, he’s sad and ashamed and recovering… but he’s the best man in the whole world and she wishes he could see that. If he just looked at himself from her eyes, if he felt how she did in her soul when they were together, he’d love himself.
They’re too relaxed to drive home, and Spencer knew that would happen beforehand, bringing her a change of clothes (lingerie) and that robe me mentioned. He books a hotel above the spa and takes her to it. Arms linked as they enter the suite, she’s amazed to find more than one gift bag on the bed.
“How many gifts is this now?”
“We’re at 5 out of 24.”
She laughs as she wraps her arms around him in a thank you hug, “this is what you consider 4 gifts? Spencer there are like 8 things on the bed, let alone the massage and manicure?”
“If you think this is too much I guess you’re going to get really mad next week,” he teases as she looks up at him with a surprised look on her face.
“Spencer, I am so busy next week, I cannot be galavanting around with my sugar daddy,” she tries to act like she doesn’t want to go on an adventure with him again.
The last trip they took was the best week of her life. They went to all the historical sites in the UK that she and Spencer had talked about. Mainly old churches and castles, strange poets graves, random art and most importantly; stone henge. It was a trip of a lifetime and he took it with her.
“I watched the rest of Pretty Woman the other day,” he smiles, “and I thought I’d pull an Edward Lewis and really surprise you because you deserve it.”
“You know how the movie ends, right?” Her heart beats really fast in her chest and she wants him to love her so bad but it’s also terrifying now that she’s this close.
“He lets her choose,” he whispers.
“He rescues her,” she corrects him.
“And she rescues him right back,” he really did watch the end of the movie.
It makes her heart skip a beat as she swallows sharply, “what does this mean for us?”
“I have a whole plan, a whole sequence of events I want to stick to. I wanted to make you fall in love with me this week and ask you on your birthday, can we still do that?” He pleads with her, he’s so serious. He’s clearly put a lot of effort into this.
“Absolutely,” she smiles, “but if you’re going to make me wait that long for you to ask, you still can’t kiss me till then. No matter how much I already love you.”
“Really?” He’s so soft with her, she knows he’s not reacting to the teasing. He’s never had someone tell him they love him and then stay after.
“I would never lie to you about that, spence. I know what love means to you, I know how scared you are and I’m scared too. But I know there is no one else in the whole world I’d rather be scared with than you,” she holds him tighter and rubs her nose against his, “so what’s in the bags, daddy? Finish your surprise.”
She plays along perfectly, stepping back and hauling him towards the bed. “I got you some outfits and things for the next 2 weeks, we have a few things planned. We’re going on a flight soon, I have new luggage being delivered to your apartment this week and we’re going to see your moms for 3 days.”
“No,” she shakes her head, “there’s no way, Spencer, I haven’t seen them in 5 years, I’m going to cry.”
“I know,” he cups her jaw with his hand. “They’re really excited to see you.”
She hugs him tight, kissing his neck as she holds him. “Thank you, daddy, do you want me to put something on for you now?”
“I’m just going to take it off you, plus, what your wearing is sexy enough, he whispers back. “You’re always so beautiful, baby.”
“I thought you were saving the best for last?” She asks as she pulls back, overly eager and he can tell.
“I want to repay the favour from the other night.”
She doesn’t mean to gasp and yet she does, “please?”
He pulls on the tie of her robe, opening it enough to snake a hand behind her back and draw her in with a hand on her bare back. “Please what?”
“Please, daddy?” She looks up with her best begging eyes, perfect pout and all. “I want you to touch me, I promise I’ll be a good girl.”
He steps away from her to swipe all the bags off the bed before picking her up and laying her back against the pillows. He kisses down her body, hand on her lover back as she arches, he drags his bottom lip from her belly button to her cleavage. Nipping and sucking at the exposed skin on her chest, pulling her breasts out of the bra to suck on her nipples, she moans and it’s louder than she expected.
As she plays with his hair, he marks her, bruising small little love bites all the way down as he makes his way between her legs, “take me, please?”
He’s been dreaming of this for so long, he can’t even give you an accurate number of times his mind has drifted to the thought of how wonderful she would taste, how beautiful she’d sound…
“Tell me how badly you want me?” He asks as he spreads her legs and kisses her left thigh.
“I haven’t had sex in 10 months while waiting for you. Daddy, please you’ve owned me for so long, just take what’s yours already for gods sa- OH!”
With a broad lick, his tongue flattens against her core and it shuts her up. She gets what she wants, holding into his hair as she tosses her head back, taking it all in and enjoying it. He’s been on her mind for months, every time her vibrator was where he is now, she thought of him. he’s been the man of her dreams longer than she’s known him, and he was proving it.
“Right there, daddy,” she speaks through shallow breaths, “do you know how much I’ve thought of this?”
“You know I don’t,” the vibrations of his voice against her skin are glorious, he looks up at her through his lashes as his tongue flicks over her clit and she shakes a bit.
“Fuck,” she gasps, gripping his hair tighter, “better than I thought you’d be, fuck, too bad you— Jesus, don’t have the stash anymore…”
He stops and looks up at her, the smirk on his face glistening with her juices, “the stash?”
She nods, “I’ve thought about calling it the pussy tickler,” she teases, running her hand down his cheek and swiping her thumb across his bottom lip before bringing it up to her mouth to taste, “I want more of you.”
He kisses back up her body and she reaches for his robe the second he’s close enough. “Just grind against me? I know you’re waiting but we can still feel good together?”
He kisses the side of her mouth and she takes that as a yes, wrapping her legs around him so his hard cock is pressed right against her core as they move their hips in synchronicity with each other. His breathing is heavy as he kisses her cheek and jaw, her nails scratch down his back, he feels absolutely amazing against her.
She feels so empty, she wants him so bad she’s clenching around nothing as she squirms against his cock and wishes she was full.
“I wish I could move time,” she whispers. “Fuck, why can’t it be my birthday?”
He laughs against her, grazing his teeth over her neck and drawing another moan from her but then he stops moving his hips, “why are you so impatient?”
“Remember I said I stopped enjoying everything? Well, taking a 10 month break from sex and thinking about you every time I got off has made me desperate,” her hand cups his cheek, “I’d wait forever for you, but a girl needs to be fucked hard every once in a while.”
Only she could find a way to make something both profoundly beautiful and whorish at the same time, he loved her for it and she knew that now. He smiles and leaned in to rub his nose against hers and it takes everything in her not to kiss him. The same way it was taking everything in him not to slip into her as he began to grind against her once more.
She’s so close, the accidental edging has added a whole new level of desperation she’s never felt before. She wants to cum for him so bad, but more importantly she wants him to cum for her.
“Take my bra off,” she whispers, Spencer’s hands travel behind her back to unclasp it and he helps her out of it before tossing it to the floor.
“Cum for me daddy,” she whispers in his head with a hand in his hair, gripping him tightly as he bites at her neck, “cover me with your cum like you’re marking your territory.”
“Shit,” his hips sputter against hers.
“Say it, I know you want to,” she teases, so close to the edge but it’s too good of an opportunity. She loves seeing him fall apart like this and she can’t wait to see it again. “Who’s am I?”
“Daddy’s girl.”
He grinds down on her harder and faster and she’s so close, the bubble in her gut is reaching a fever pitch and with a gasp, she’s cumming and then she feels it. His load covers her stomach as he pants against her neck and grips her hips tighter as he comes down.
She wraps her arms around him and holds him as close as humanly possible, her breathing still heavy as he rises and falls on her chest. He’s heavy but she doesn’t care, she just kisses the top of his head and thanks him.
He brushes his nose against her neck, nuzzling her like a cat, “do you really mean it?”
“What, honey?” He remembers so much, this could be a question about something she said 2 months or 2 minutes ago and she has no clue.
“You’re not just playing along with my kinks right, you genuinely want to be mine?”
For being her million dollar man, his heart sure was broke. This is why he wasn’t ready, he still didn’t understand why she would want to stay without anything in return, he’s gotten so used to paying her for her time now that his anxiety has managed to convince him that she’ll leave when he stops being worth it to her.
“What does my necklace say?” She asks, knowing how close he was to it. “Read it to me, I forget.”
“Daddy’s girl,” he smiles again.
She soothes her hands over his back, “I would do anything with you because I love and trust you, but also because everything you do is sexy… you could read me the dictionary and I’d still want you to pump me full of cum after.”
“It sounds so crude after,” he laughs, “speaking of, we really need to have a shower.”
“I’ll wash your back if you wash mine?” She teases as he gets up.
“Only if you let me wash the front too?”
She smacks his bare ass and races him into the bathroom, turning on the water and getting in with him while still laughing and carrying on. He’s her best friend in the whole world, there’s no one else she would rather do this with… there was no one she has done this with. No one has made her feel this good, before during and after sex.
Spencer Reid was an anomaly, but he was hers.
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#spencer reid#spencer reid smut#spencer reid fanfiction#spencer reid fanfic#spencer reid imagine#spencer reid x reader#spencer reid x y/n#spencer reid x you#spencer reid self insert#spencer reid request#criminal minds smut#criminal minds imagine#sugar daddy spencer#perv!spencer#mdm
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The Structure of Story is now available! Check it out on Amazon, via the link in our bio, or at https://kiingo.co/book
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I often feel that it took me thirty years to write my first book, No Pain, No Game. Not because I was physically writing it for that long, but because finally publishing my first novel felt like the culmination of three decades of bad writing, half-finished novels, random short-stories and a million mundane diary entries. It took that long to experiment with my craft, hone my skills, and master the fear of putting my work out there for all to see.
Exaggerations aside, it actually took me three years to write No Pain, No Game, from typing the first word on an otherwise blank page to having a fully-fledged, ready-to-publish novel. Those three years consisted of mostly undisciplined writing, sitting down to work on the story as and when the urge arose, sometimes not looking at it for weeks on end, and only getting back to it when inspiration hit. Only when I got serious about publishing did I put in the hours consistently, whether or not I was in the mood for it. The whole experience felt like not so much like long distance running, but more like a slow, often sluggish stop-start stroll, with a heart-pumping sprint at the very end.
I came out of having published the book revved up from adrenaline, soaking in the momentum, fretting for more and ready to do it all again. Out came the laptop again, the rush to get the first draft over and done with and the mad rush into editing-land.
It’s a Marathon, Not a Sprint (and not interval running, and not a slow leisurely walk)
The thing with sprinting, however, is that if you do it for too long, you quickly run out of breath and I soon learnt that maintaining that level of effort over time was unsustainable. Somewhere in the middle of editing my first draft, I hit a wall.
A big, fat, hundred feet high brick and mortar monster of a wall. I never saw it coming, and I face-planted right into it. For weeks after that I couldn’t look at my manuscript or social media, and I had to take a proper break from it all to restore.
The break gave me a chance to introspect and take stock of what had happened. It felt to me that, if I wanted to keep on writing more books (which I did) I had to pivot from my disorganised style of writing to a more committed endeavour. There’s nothing wrong with a leisurely walk, or random bouts of interval running, but I realised it wouldn’t give me the kind of results I was truly after. I had to look at writing as a marathon, and build the sort of stamina and endurance I needed to do this many times over without burning out.
From Dilettante to Disciplined Writer
When I think back to writing my first book, I wonder if there’s some truth in the saying that ignorance is bliss. Because I was less focused on the outcome at the time, I was better able to enjoy the ups and downs of the process, especially because I only sat to work at it when I felt like it. I was also mostly unaware of the mountain of logistics that come with writing and publishing a book, so I’d be able to see the distance I’d covered, without worrying about the miles that still stretched ahead of me. Yes, ignorance was, most definitely, a little bit like bliss.
Reminiscing on her own experience, author Shamika Lindsay says that, with her first book, ‘the process felt so different and [she] almost felt the pen gliding across the paper but with [the sequel], it was like pulling teeth’. In fact, she adds, starting to write her second book from scratch felt like ‘such a chore and [she] was just so eager to complete it because [she] felt like it took so much from [her] to write than the first book’.
For R. G. Tully, author of the Ardamin series, who put greater emphasis on the editing stage when working on his second book, the process also took longer and wasn’t always enjoyable. ‘The editing grind was exactly that, a grind’, he confesses.
But you have to do it whether you like it or not, because the only way out is through. There are, fortunately or unfortunately, no shortcuts. Fortunately, because it’s the very act of going through that arduous journey that makes you a better writer in the end. And unfortunately, because there can be times it’s just not all that pleasant.
You’ll be surprised the amount of distractions that manifest themselves when you desperately need a reason not to work on your manuscript — it’s actually quite spooky. Treating writing with discipline, organisation and professionalism is exactly what will prevent you falling off tracks, and what ultimately gets the work done. And that’s the difference between a published book and one that’ll sit indeterminately unfinished somewhere in your archives.
A Tough Act to Follow
Unfortunately, there’s still a little bit more to writing your second book than just great discipline. Even when you’re able to get yourself to follow through and show up for your craft, giving your first book a literary sibling can come with its own challenges, especially because you have something to compare it to.
And it’s not only you, but your readers too, who will be expecting certain standards from your writing, especially if it’s a series. Though it shouldn’t come in the way of writing the book you want to write, the relationship of trust you’ve built with your readership through your first book still needs to be honoured, and this can cause certain amounts of pressure.
‘I felt a little pressure to keep the same feel about the story’, R. G. Tully says, ‘and to include more from my secondary characters, give them a little more depth’.
Stormi Lewis, author of the Sophie Lee trilogy, puts it simply: ‘It was a little hard to decide how to exactly start [with the second book]. At first I was worried and became overwhelmed because so many loved the first one. I didn’t want to let anyone down. I had to step back and come to terms that they loved it for being unique. And the only way I could stay true to the story and give them what they really wanted was to focus on the story and not so much about what I thought they wanted for the second.’
For others, the comparison can be more inward-facing, like author Tara Lake, who admits that writing the second book in her series has been a challenge, because she’s ‘struggled with comparison of the self: past Tara had a lot more time to devote to writing, present Tara has much less time with [her] kids being home full time from school during much of the pandemic’.
For others still, some of that pressure can be self-imposed. When writing her second book, Freya McMillan shares that ‘[she] put a huge amount of pressure on [herself] as [she] wanted it to be meaningful in a particular way to honour [her] dad, who died a few years ago. Once [she] stopped doing that, it was much less challenging to write’.
It Ain’t All Bad.
I do want to pause here and add that not everyone faces such challenges. There are authors out there who launched into writing their second book with more ease than the first.
Sabrina Voerman tells me that ‘[her] second book came a lot easier to [her] than [her] first book. The idea hit [her] so hard and fast that it took [her] aback, and [she] could do nothing but write it’, and the entire novel was written in a matter of weeks, whilst her first book took years to finish.
Same for Trevor Wiltzen, who says that writing the sequel to his first book went smoothly, greatly helped by the fact that ‘[he] wrote the second book immediately after the first, [so he] knew the characters really well’. He admits he ‘found it very freeing and really enjoyed the process’.
Even Stormi Lewis, who struggled at first, adds that ‘once [she] got started, [she] was fine’ and that ‘[she] felt the writing was solid and [her] best book yet, simply because [she] really got to develop more of the characters and the story’.
As with everything, we must then conclude, there will be as many types of experiences as there are writers out there. So how can we best prepare for what’s to come?
A Chance to Grow
Performance coach Tony Robbins says that the quality of our lives is intricately linked to the quality of the questions we ask ourselves on a daily basis. So if we need to face something that’s outside our comfort zone — starting again from scratch on your second book for instance — is it a punishment or is it a gift? Is it a curse or an opportunity?
I’m tempted to think that the level of discomfort that can come with writing your second book is a gift, because it gives us a chance to grow.
It’s a chance to take everything we’ve learnt from doing it the first time around and take our learnings for a spin to see if it makes the process easier. It’s an opportunity to improve, to work at our craft in new and wonderful ways.
It’s both daunting and incredibly exciting to face a brand new story — or a different side to the same story for those writing series — and to dare to plunge into the unknown of where it’s fated to take you. It’ll see you grow and evolve as a writer and, in turn, you’ll get to watch your writing morph into something more mature than it was before.
I say look at your writing like you do the passing of seasons: different times will have different qualities, different characteristics, different feels to them. You live and learn through each of them, and gather a wealth of experiences that eventually inform who you become. Maintaining the discipline to write through every single one of them is what will ultimately give your work all its depth and substance.
All it takes is that first word on the page.
And the second.
And the third.
And all the words beyond that.
#writingtips#screenwriting#creative writing#writers on tumblr#writers#writing#writerblr#writing advice#writing community#writing resources
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Day 6: free prompt. This is from my fanfic on wattpad (account name: mimslovesnewt) called 'finding you again' about Newt losing his memory of Tina.
"I have to go, Theseus. As long as he sees me more, his memory of me may come back sooner"
"Tina, his memories of you are ging to be of you visiting him in hospital, not of the other memories you both had. Not yet anyways."
"What other options do I have?"
Theseus didn't wish to argue with her, especially during this troubling time for both of them, so instead he just sighed and nodded.
-
Tina walks into St Mungo's and asks where Newt's room is. The nurse shows her and she thanks her before she walks into the room. Newt is sitting up in his bed, reading a book.
She walks over to him, trying to seem as casual as she can. When she reaches his bed, she clears her throat. He turns his head and looks up at her, smiling a little and hiding behind his fringe, same old Newt she thought happily.
"Hi" she says to him, timidly.
"Hello" he replies.
"I don't know if you remeber me-"
"Tina, right?"
Tina's smile widens.
"You remember?"
"Of course. You came in with my borther yesterday. You work with him at the Ministry."
oh right we were only introduced yesterday as far as he knows. "Yeah o-of course"
Newt looks behind her. "Where is he?"
"Oh, he's still at the Ministry. But he does say hello. I just came by to see how you are. And to talk to you." Tina had no idea where she was going with this, but mercy lewis she was gonna give it a try.
Newt looks at her confused as she sits down in the chair next to his bed. "What would you like to talk to me about?" Newt asked.
Tina fidgeted a little in the chair and then a lightbulb lit up in her head. "Well, I know you are writing a book about magical creatures, now being an auror from New York I don't have many opportunities to come across any but I would like to learn more about them. If you so wish of course."
Newt smiles as much as a child looking at a bunch of christmas presents.
"That sounds great. But, you're an auror. I've never known aurors would be interested in magical creatures. Unless theres a big case that invovles one."
"A lost friend of mine was very interested in magical creatures and he used to tell me all about thhem. I was always fascinated by them. He even kept some in a-"
Tina realised she has already said too much. He may already suspect that this 'friend' is too much like him' she thought.
Newt was still looking at her, sat up straight on his hospital bed, eyes as big as saucers.
"Where did your friend keep them?" he asked, timidly.
Tina tried to think quickly of an answer. "He..er...well...er...he...erm........he kept them at his....farm" she settled on "yeah, he-he kept them at this farm he inherited from his great aunt who died when he was 18. An old friend from school."
"I'm sorry that you lost your friend, Tina" Newt said. "He sounds like he was a good man"
Tina looked into Newt's eyes, almost pleading that he remembers. "He was" she replies. "I just hope one day he comes back." Tina can feel tears pricking her eyes and quickly looks down, hoping Newt doesn't notice.
He does. He gently places his hand on top of hers. "Would you like to hear more about magical creatures, Tina?"
Tina looks up and smiles softly. Very pretty Newt thought.
"I would like that. Very much" Tina replies.
Day 7: predictions are preposterous
19th August 1928
There's a storm going on outside in London. Tina, Newt, Theseus, Nagini and Jacob are all trapped in Newt's house due to the raging storm outside and the group have a plan to celebrate Tina's birthday, but it's a surpise.
"Its true then. It really does rain in England a lot" Tina said, a teasing sound to her tone.
"Yes, unfortunately. But the weather's not been too bad over this summer" Newt replies.
"I suppose. So, what's everyone doin' today?" Tina, asks. She would never admit this, but she's secretly hoping they have planned something to do for her birthday. Even if they are stuck inside all day.
"Well, Theseus is busy doing paperwork, Jacob is teaching Nagini how to bake and I'm about to feed my creatures. Would you like to join me? Bunty is stuck at home because of the storm and I could really do with an extra pair of hands." Newt explains.
Tina looks down, trying to hide her disappointment. At least I get to spend some time with Newt, she thinks.
"I'd like to" Tina answers, now looking at him.
Newt smiles. "Brilliant, you can go ahead, I just need to fetch something"
Tina walks down into the basement. Newt goes into the kitchen to check how Jacob and Nagini are doing with Tina's birthday cake.
"Everything's goin' swell Newt. Don't worry about it."
"I just need this to be perfect for Tina. Ever since Paris, I've been wanting to do something for her, to cheer her up and this is my chance. She deserves to be happy, especially on her birthday."
"Aww Newt, that's so sweet. You really have a soft spot for her don't you?" Nagini says.
Newt blushes and turns away. He goes into the dining room and finds his older brother setting up the table.
"Everything is nearly ready Newt. Don't worry." Theseus speaks up before his brother even gets a word out.
Newt simply nods and heads down to his basement.
He finds Tina petting the Zouwu in the habitat he created for her. The smile on Tina's face is awwed and fascinated. Newt can't help but smile too.
"Hey, Newt. She seems to be doing well down here. She's much more playful now than she was in Paris."
"That's good."
"Everything okay? You got what you needed?"
"What? Oh, yes I did."
"Good" Tina says, looking at him.
Newt looks at her. Soon they are staring into each other's eyes.
"Newt! Tina! Can you guys come up here for a sec?" Jacob calls to them.
Newt and Tina hurry up the stairs. Newt walks in front of her and turns before he opens the basement door.
"Tina, I need you to close your eyes"
"What?"
"Just please close your eyes. It's good, I promise."
"Sure" Tina says as she slowly closes her eyes.
Ever the auror, suspicious. Newt admires.
Newt opens the door, guides Tina through and closes the basement door, so as not to let loose any of his creatures.
He then guides her into the dining room, where everyone is eagerly waiting for the birthday girl.
"Tina, you can open your eyes now" Newt tells her. She obliges and finds a decorated dining room, with a banner that says; 'happy birthday Tina' on it and the group all smiling widely.
Newt joins them at the other side of the table.
"Happy birthday Tina!"they all shout and clap. Tina tears up at this.
"Aww, look she's crying with happiness" Jacob says.
"Let's eat" Nagini announces and they all oblige, seating themselves around the table that hold a fine feast and a big birthday cake in the middle.
Tina sits at the head of the table. After they all finished eating, Theseus taps his spoon against his glass. Everyone at the table faces him.
"As it's Tina's birthday, we could all say our best moments with her" Everyone agrees. Theseus stands and goes first.
"Well, me and Tina have not known each other very long. She's a great auror, been a great value to the team at the Ministry. But I think our best moment was in fact the time we first met at the french ministry. I was chasing after Tina and Newt as they were running through the french minstry as Newt wasn't supposed to be there due to his travel ban, when Tina here with one flick of her wand, manages to tie me to a chair and send me flying into a meeting room."
Everyone, parituclarly Newt, sniggers.
"Okay, my turn I guess" Nagini contriutes. She stands and faces Tina.
"I haven't known you for very long, either. But from what I've learnt about you, I can honestly say that Tina, you're the closest I've had to a friend or family and I'm truly honoured to know someone as kind and strong as you. To Tina" Nagini says as she raises her glass.
"To Tina" they all chorus, raising their glasses and causing Tina to blush.
"My turn" Jacob says and stands.
"Tina, we have had our ups and downs. But, I can honestly say that you truly are the greatest friend a fella can have. You are kind and loyal and smart. You have taught me so much of your world, like Newt has, and I now see you as my family. Happy birthday Tina."
"Thank you Jacob" Tina says, smiling. Jacob nods and smiles back as he sits down.
"I belive it's Newt's turn now" Jacob suggests.
Newt and Tina blush as Newt stands and looks at Tina through his fringe.
"Well-er- Tina. We have certainly had our ups and downs. How we met is a particular example of that. But, since then I have been able to know how much of an amazing person you truly are. You're kind, smart, an amazing auror, beautiful and I am truly glad to have met you."
Tina tears up again. Trying to contain the smile that's spreading across her face.
"Happy birthday Tina" Newt says and raises his glass. The others do the same.
"Thank you guys. This was a lovely surprise" Tina announces.
"Oh, I almost forgot" Newt says as he gets up from the table and gives Tina a wrapped up rectangle.
"Here's your gift. Sorry it took so long"
Tina opens it and reveals Newt's book.
"It's the first copy"
"Thank you so much Newt"
2 hours later.
Tina is sitting in her and Nagini's room, sitting on her bed and looking down at Newt's book.
"Penny for your thoughts?" Nagini asks.
"What? Oh, hi Nagini. Sorry I was just thinking." Tina replies.
"About?" Nagini prods.
"Something" Tina whispers as she looks down to hide her blush.
"More like someone" Nagini teases.
"What are you talking about?" Tina asks.
"Newt. You've been quiet since he said that speech. What's going between you two?"
"Nothing" Tina says, truthfully.
"But you have feelings for him" Nagini claims.
"What? No. I-" Tina sighs. "Fine yes I admit it. I have feelings for Newt."
"i knew it. And it's obvious he feels the same about you"
"What?" Tina exclaims.
"Newt. He clearly has feelings for you. I mean if it wasn't obvious before, that speech he made about you explains it very well."
"I never knew. What should I do?"
"Talk to him. Tell him how you feel. Maybe he will give you a kiss as a present for your birthday" Nagini teases.
Tina blushes and hurries out of their room and into the basement, where Newt is, trying to convince Pickett to join his brothers and sisters on the wand wood tree.
"Hey Newt"
Newt turns at the sound of her voice, smiling and placing Pickett into his top pocket of his shirt.
"Hello Tina"
"There's something I need to tell you"
Newt walks over to her, hands in his pockets.
"What is it?" he asks.
"The thing is, this past year and couple of months, I have been thinking. A lot. About you and me. And New York" Tina says.
Newt nods, convincing her to carry on.
"And well, the truth is, I- I-- Newt, I love you" Tina blurts out.
Newt's eyes widen as does his smile.
"Really?" he asks.
Tina nods.
"I love you too, Tina"
Tina looks up, surprised. She sees Newt taking a step closer to her and, before she knows it, he kisses her gently on the lips. She kisses him back immediately. They break apart after a few moments of pure bliss.
"Happy Birthday, Tina" Neewt whsipers.
"Thank you, Newt" Tina whispers back.
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Corpse Bride Headcannons, Theories, and Ideas
This is just a list of the theories, headcannons, and ideas I came up with for Tim Burton's Corpse Bride. I might add more later on, so watch out
-Victor and Victoria were born and raised in a small English village close to the Atlantic Ocean called Burtonsville
-Victor’s full name is Victor Ichabod Van Dort
-When he was about four years old, Victor found Scraps as a mixed-breed puppy in an alleyway. Nell and William refused at first, but William saw how his son quickly became attached to the dog, so he let him stay. Sadly, when Victor turned eight, Scraps was brutally mauled and tragically killed while trying to defend his beloved owner from a bigger, nastier dog
-Victor’s favorite toy as a child was a stuffed horse he called Usher. He begged his mother to let him keep Usher until he was fourteen
-Victor learned to play the piano when he was about five years old. He was a fast learner and he picked up on it very quickly, and his tutor was greatly impressed by his skill. His favorite musicians are Mozart and Beethoven
-Victor works as an artist to draw many types of butterflies for the Lepidoptera Community, as well as a professional pianist. Originally, his father wanted him to work as a fish merchant and take over the family business, but Victor politely told him “no thanks” because he wanted to follow his own dreams. William was disappointed, but deep down he wanted his son to be happy. So he usually encouraged him, especially when Nell wasn’t around
-Outside from his butterfly works, Victor does paintings during his free time at home. The color theory that he studied was written by Eugene De La Croix· Victor has been drawing since he was a child. His favorite things to draw are animals, butterflies, and other insects. He also does landscapes and people sometimes. He also likes to write sometimes, mostly a few poems and a couple musical compositions. Nothing he took too seriously, though. He also likes to sing when he thinks he’s alone
-In his childhood, Victor used to have a somewhat regular playmate named Humphrey. They were almost friends, but when William’s business became very successful and Victor’s family became rich when Victor was about eleven, Humphrey stopped coming over and the two boys haven’t seen each other since
-When he was a boy, he learned how to speak French because his mother thought it was “high-class” to be bilingual. Victor was diligent in his studies and thus has a good knowledge of spoken and written French. He may not be perfectly fluent, but he can carry on a decent conversation
-Victor is severely allergic to walnuts and poison oak
-Victor had a cousin named Mary whom he was very fond of, but she passed away when she was seventeen and he was six. She got lost in the woods and was attacked and devoured by a pack of wolves
-Victor doesn’t drink anything more than the occasional glass of champagne or wine. The reason? Mayhew once got him drunk and it turns out Victor is a CHATTY drunk. As in, he’ll tell you his life story at the slightest provocation. Victor was so embarrassed when he sobered up that he nearly swore off all alcohol forever. It’s very unlikely he’ll ever knowingly get wasted again· After he and Victoria were finally married, Victor gained confidence and he stood up against Victoria's parents earning him some respect
-Victor HATES smoking. He was secretly offered a cigarette from Mayhew when he was fourteen and after the first inhale, he was coughing and gagging so much that he nearly threw up
-Victor is the tallest member of the Van Dort family, making him stand out quite a bit during family reunions
-He may not be a sporty person, but Victor enjoys cycling. He also loves a good game of chess
-Victor adores reading. His favorite writers are William Blake, Charles Baudelaire, Lewis Carroll, Edgar Allan Poe, and William Shakespeare
His favorite books are “Les Miserables”, “Dracula”, “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland”, “The Fall of the House of Usher” and other works by E.A. Poe. The play/book that he hates the most is “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” because he strongly dislikes this style of a love triangle in the plot line. He also has a fascination with penny dreadful. Yes, he knows the serial stories are really nothing but lowest common denominator trash, but he loves them anyway. He got hooked on them as a teenager thanks to Mayhew’s nephew, and he used to keep a secret stash under his mattress
-When she still rather young, Victor noticed that his daughter, Emily, became very interested in music, so he taught her how to play the piano as well as the violin
-Victoria was the one who taught her son, Edward, how to read and they bond over books and stories they both enjoy
-The worst day of Victor’s life happened about three weeks after Scraps died. Victor’s parents had some business friends over for tea, and forced a still-grieving Victor to come down and be social. Poor Victor made a bad impression, being quieter and clumsier than normal, culminating in knocking over one man, tripping his wife, and insulting said wife’s coat in apologizing. Nell, humiliated and enraged, turned on her son once the guests were off, screaming at him about what an embarrassment he was while they were still standing on the front steps. Victor was so horrified, embarrassed, and depressed that he came too close to taking his own life. He got his hands on his father’s straight-razor, snuck into the bathroom, and actually had it to his neck when a noise from outside the bathroom spooked him and he dropped the razor and ran back to his room as fast as he could. Fortunately, the distraction gave him time to realize suicide wouldn’t fix anything, and he made a promise to himself never to stoop that low again. His parents also apologized the next day, which helped a lot. Victor avoids telling anyone about it unless he feels he has to, certain they’ll think less of him for it
-Victor was born June 9th, 1867
-Victoria’s full name is Victoria Elizabeth Everglot
-When she was very little, Victoria had always wanted a pet (like a cat or a small dog) but her mother said that having a pet in the house was uncivilized and improper and that all animals were filthy and uncouth creatures
-Victoria’s favorite hobby is sewing and knitting. She often designs most of her husband’s clothes and others in her spare time
-As a child, Victoria tried to be closer to her parents, but often found the family maid Hildegarde as more of a mother figure
-Victoria loves to read in her spare time… even though most people call it scandalous for a woman to do such a thing. Her mother even said reading was too passionate for a young lady. At a young age, Hildegarde, taught Victoria how to read (something her parents never found out about)
-Her favorite books are “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland”, “A Christmas Carol”, and any classic fairy tale. And her favorite writers are Charles Dickens, Lewis Carroll, Charles Perrault, Hans Christian Andersen, and the Brothers Grimm
-Victoria’s favorite toy as a child was a china doll she called Miss Liddie. By the time she was about eleven, she had grown out of it. Even though she knows she’s too old for toys now, she still misses Miss Liddie
-Victoria isn’t allergic to anything, but she does tend to sneeze if dust is in the air
-When she was a little girl, Victoria was nearly trampled by a horse-drawn carriage, which made her develop a slight fear of horses
-Victoria likes to sing whenever she thinks she’s alone. She doesn’t believe it, but she has a surprisingly lovely singing voice
-When she was a little girl, Victoria was entranced by the piano in her house and she immediately wanted to learn how to play but her mother had told her daughter many times that music was improper and too passionate for a young lady. But Victor always tells his wife that music is a wonderful way to express oneself and that he would be more than happy to teach her how to play
-Victoria used to have a regular playmate named Gwyneth in her girlhood. They were good friends, but when Victoria reached her pre-teen years, Gwyneth stopped coming over to play for some reason and she never heard from her since
-Victoria is the most beautiful member of the Everglot family
-When she was in her early teens, Victoria secretly dreamed of becoming a writer someday
-Victoria was born February 3rd, 1868
-Victor and Victoria had two children. Their names are Emily Alice Van Dort (age 15) and Edward Daniel Van Dort (age 10)
-When Victor and Victoria were married, they moved out of their parents houses and bought a beautiful two story house that sat at the edge of a large meadow that was right next to the forest… plus, the house was a good mile or so away from Burtonsville
-The Corpse Bride’s full name is Emily Charlotte Cartwell
-Emily was born into a wealthy family. Her parents, Lord and Lady Cartwell, couldn’t say ‘no’ to their daughter and they practically gave her everything she asked for, so she became incredibly spoiled, selfish, and incredibly naïve· Emily was a hopeless romantic, often spending time reading romance novels and daydreaming about her wedding when she was alive
-When she was alive, Emily was blonde
-When she made it to Heaven, Emily was finally reunited with her mother and father
-When their daughter disappeared, Lord and Lady Cartwell were so sad and depressed that they wasted away and passed away in their sleep
-Before ascending, Emily considered Bonejangles to be one of her best friends. They used to sing and dance together all the time. He even taught her how to play the piano
-When she was alive, Emily knew how to ride horses. She even had a pet white mare she called Aphrodite
-Emily Cartwell died at age eighteen
-Lord Barkis’s full name is Barkis Finbar Campbell Bittern
-Emily met Lord Barkis while she was on an outing with her parents. Her parents had their backs turned while Emily was talking with Barkis. After only a few minutes of talking, she was instantly smitten with him and she accepted his immediate proposal of marriage… and her mother and father were not happy about it at all. Emily and her father had a huge fight and she decided to elope with Barkis… but for her, it didn’t go as planned
-Barkis told her that if they were going to be together, they would need money. Emily wasn’t sure, but in the end, she agreed
-On the night she was running away, Emily stole not only her mother’s wedding dress, veil, gloves, and best shoes, but she also stole the jewels from her mother’s jewelry box and a large bag of gold from her father’s office
-As Emily was waiting for her fiancé that night, Barkis snuck up behind her, stabbed her, knocked her out cold, took all of her money and jewels, and buried her alive. She woke up in a shallow grave and tried to claw her way out before suffocating to death. That's why her hand was sticking out of the ground
-Barkis was married six times in his life. He and his first wife were married out of love until he found her cheating on him and killed her. The second was an elderly widow for her money. The third one got away before he could even hurt her, but she drowned herself in a deep, rushing river. The fourth was a drunken lonely woman who ���accidentally” fell out of a two story window. The fifth being Emily and the sixth being Victoria
-In the Land of The Dead, Barkis was brutally beaten and ripped apart before he was imprisoned in an iron coffin chained seven feet underground with other criminals like him for all eternity
-After he ran away, Barkis studied linguistics in French, Latin, German, and Russian in order to impress others… or use different fake accents to fool them with
-Barkis’s original first name was Bradford and he had a rough upbringing. His father was a violent alcoholic and his mother was a reckless prostitute and they both abused Bradford as a child until he ran away from home at age sixteen and changed his name to Lord Barkis
-Barkis has a twin sister who had a son named Hector. Hector greatly looked up to his uncle and when he heard about what happened to Barkis, he was taken aback, but he also felt he could use that to his advantage. When he turned 30, Hector came to Burtonsville to exact revenge on the Van Dort family… but he also developed a vile infatuation with Emily. Whenever he tries to woo the young girl (which always fails since Emily finds him repulsive and cruel), Victor gladly steps in the way every time and he always sternly tells Hector to stay away from his daughter
-Mrs. Van Dort’s full name is Eleanor Minerva Fitzackley Van Dort
-Nell came from a lower class family. She lived with her father, mother, and three sisters. However, Nell wasn’t happy with her place in society and she wanted to became something more
-Nell and William first met when she was caught in the rain one stormy day and he offered her a ride home in his fish merchant carriage. She declined at first, but quickly gave in when it started to bucket down. As they rode together, they started chatting and soon became very interested in one another
-Nell and William made their way back to the village just in time to witness Emily's soul disappear into the night as a swarm of blue butterflies
-When she learned about Mayhew’s death, Nell quietly wept in her room about it. She might be overbearing, but deep down, she truly does care for the ones closest to her. She also adores her husband and son, even if she does find them a bit irritating. She just has a hard time showing her emotions
-Mr. Van Dort’s full name is William Oscar Van Dort
-William loves talk about fish and his business, he always tries to weasel in the topic whenever possible to his wife and son's annoyance
-William used to take Victor on fishing trips when he was younger, which practically bored Victor to death
-While he tends to be the more passive one in their relationship, William does put his foot down when the situation calls for it
-It may not seem like it, but William adores Victor and he tries to do whatever he can to be there for his son
-When Victor turned sixteen, William gave him a silver pocket watch with a design of a fish on the front and his initials
-Lady Everglot’s full name is Maudeline Hortense Glottberg Everglot
-Maudeline and Finis didn’t plan on having a child in the first place and Victoria came as more of a surprise
-Maudeline had a sister named Marie who loved playing the piano. They didn’t get along in their youth and they drifted apart as they grew up. Maudeline wasn’t even invited to Marie’s wedding to Lord Frederick Cartwell
-When Marie died, she left her piano to her sister, but Maudeline never touched it. She felt it brought back too many memories and forbade Victoria from going near it was well
-Lord Eveglot’s full name is Finis Augustus Everglot
-While he was disappointed in not having a son, Finis deeply cares for his daughter. He just doesn’t know how to show it
-Even though they’re not good at sharing their feelings, Maudeline and Finis do care for each other to some extent
-Hildegarde has lots of grandchildren and she visited their home in the countryside as often as she could before she passed away
-When he was alive, Bonejangles was a freelance jazz musician from America and his original name was Dexter. He was finishing a gig in England when he died in a horrible carriage accident (he was run over), which also caused him to lose his eyeball
-General Bonesapart and General Wellington were actually General Napoleon Bonaparte and English General Wellington, two real historical figures. However, even though they hated each other at first, they became real pals eventually
-Although they don't say it out loud, people in Burtonsville make fun of Maudeline's hair cut, calling her names like "Rump Head" or "Hairmungus"
-Elder Gutknecht is one of the many Afterlife Lords, responsible for managing the dead after they pass. Among them include God, the Devil, King Vince, Hades, Hel, Osiris, Odin, Freya, and, the Hindu God Yama
-The Underworld is actually thousands of miles underground and due to the magic surrounding it. Mortals can't access it unless they die themselves
-After his death, Mayhew kicked the habit of smoking altogether and is very glad he did
-Elder Gutknecht has a fearsome Hellhound by the name of Infernius, his fierce and ever loyal pet. He guards the entrance to the Land of the Dead and can breathe fire that heats up to 900 degrees
-The fellow who was cut cleanly in half was an English gentleman by the name of Herman, who lived in Burtonsville years before. He ended up meeting his death due to an accident involving a rather large guillotine
-Generals Bonesapart and Wellington are the leaders of army of the Land of the Dead, but are only called into combat in times of great peril
-The people of Burtonsville sometimes call Lord Everglot “Everglut” behind his back
-Victoria has a cousin by the name of Dolores. Dolores is something of a freeloading con artist who moved to America when she left home. She considers herself a very attractive woman, but she just wears too much makeup and rather revealing clothes and is actually rather sleazy in reality. She also smokes, which Victoria and the rest of the Everglots are strongly against
-When he was alive, Elder Gutknecht used to be a wise sage that helped people in their time of need. He passed away when he reached the age of 102
-The Everglots were a family of nobles with a significant amount of money, but due to a bit of excessive gambling (by Dolores), they lost almost everything
-Almost every member of the Everglot family is rather ugly due to bad genetics. Victoria considers herself very, VERY lucky to have not inherited such genes (she unknowingly received her natural beauty from her late Aunt Marie)
-Pastor Galswells was raised in a strict environment. He was taught that kindness was weakness and to be stern and firm with everyone. He passed away shortly after the official wedding of Victor and Victoria and a new pastor took his place. His name is Pastor Ivan Blackthorp and he’s much kinder and friendlier than Galswells ever was
-The reason Victor named his dog Scraps was because he only ate table scraps
-The people of Burtonsville have a secret inside joke about the squatty walk Finis Everglot does where they assume that he would jump like a toad and snatch up a fly at any moment
-Burtonsville is well known for its raven population and there's an old legend saying they're messengers to the Land of the Dead
-For some weird reason, William Van Dort is known to mutter the words "Fishy, fishy, fish" in his sleep and it honestly creeps Nell out
-Paul, the decapitated head waiter, was actually a French man who served Marie Antoinette during her reign. Unfortunately, he was unjustly executed by association with the queen when the French Revolution broke out and he was never able to find his body after he died
-Several people have assumed Maudeline's hair is an actual wig and she's bald under it… only to be mistaken, resulting in a whooping
-Lord Barkis was a master of disguise in life and was never caught by the police as a result
-The Underworld has a prison known as the Iron Tomb and it holds some pretty infamous inmates who include Bluebeard, Caligula, Henry VIII, Mary I of England, and many more
-The Town of Burtonsville was actually built on an ancient burial ground, which is possibly why the Land of the Dead is connected to it
-After her death, Emily was made the official guardian angel of the Van Dort family
This is all I've got so far, but feel free to tell me what you think and tell me which one is your favorite
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Random Wanda Vision Thoughts--
Episode 1: I am an emotional bitch crying at Wanda and Vision saying “i do” at the end of episode 1, like can these babies please catch a break? they just want to be happy.
Also Agnes and the 70′s show mom are my favorite wtf.
STARK TOASTERS I SEE YOU.
WHO IS WATCHING THEM WTF
Episode 2:
Dottie should die, she seems like the type who needs gently run over by a bus
WHO IS IN THE RADIO
Elizabeth Olsen is so cute in this, absolutely adorable
IS THAT DAVID SCHWIMMER PLAYING THE PIANO
Vision is drunk from getting gum in his gears, I’m actually cackling right now.
Tiny bit culty with the “for the children” thing, huh? Yikes
BABY BUMP!
Some creepo decides to get in on their world and Wanda literally went “i think the fuck not, let’s try this again and this time in technicolor”
is that the cop who asked out Ant Man on the radio?
The difference in “sitcom” Wanda who is happy in her world and “real life” Wanda when she realizes something isn’t right is honestly astonishing and Grade A Face Acting. See what happens when they let women do more on screen then walk around in tight clothes with full lips parted in a sexy pout?
Episode 3:
Seventies Vision’s hair is ENDING ME, I can’t even deal with that.
IT HAS TO BE DAVID SCHWIMMER except he looks like “russ” from friends instead of “ross”
Poor Vision is not handling impending fatherhood well
COMIC BOOK NAME DROP BILLY AND TOMMY I LOVE IT
Poor pregnancy fritzing Wanda. DID WANDA JUST GLITCH A TIME ERASE AND NOT MEAN TO? Listen, I did not expect to love them as a couple this much. EW HER WATER BROKE OMG
A STORK
Oh Wanda, poor baby she’s so afraid, I write way too much fan fiction about how all these characters are secretly terrified to go through life alone to be okay with this.
Why did I start crying immediately when the babies were born, I’m too emotional for this. She is so beautiful and Vision is so soft meeting his son as himself, oh my gosh. THE TWIN SCREAMS while the other twin comes omg this is Grade A Sitcom bullshit.
The doctor knows something is Up and so do Herb and Agnes. *don’t be suspicious, don’t be suspicious*
...have we actually seen Ralph and I’m just blanking on it? WHY DON’T THEY LIKE GERALDINE? WHO IS SHE?
Oh no i’m crying again over pietro and the sokovian lullaby. Don’t let me watch this while I’m PMSing wtf this is torture. GERALDINE KNOWS ABOUT ULTRON
OH SHIT WANDA IS PISSED LOOK AT THAT DANGEROUS LADY. that head tilt is fucking lethal.
I love agnes oh man. I know because of spoilers she’s something of a bad guy? but I love her
WHAT HAPPENED TO GERALDINE OMG DID WANDA KILL HER
Oh no, not dead. Just kicked tf out of the bubble. I just realized the symbol is for Sword. Is this some sort of experiment to keep Wanda contained post Endgame? I should have read more spoilers, I’m fucking confused.
Episode 4: OH HOLY SHIT IT’S MONICA RAMBEAU AND IT’S POST EG SNAP OH MY GOSH SHE HAS NO IDEA SHES BEEN GONE FOR FIVE YEARS MY HEART IS BREAKING MY HEART IS BREAKING I CAN’T TAKE IT
It IS the cop that hit on Ant Man! WHAT DO THEY MEAN WESTVIEW DOESN’T EXIST
Oh it’s Darcy! Damn straight it’s Dr. Lewis. How very shocking, a woman was the one to show a room full of Ridiculous Men what’s going on?
ZOMBIE VISION OH MY GOD “no we can’t” oh man she is starting to CRACK and Vision knows something is wrong OH NO
At this point I should point out that I am 1000% surprised at the quality of the show and 1000% pleasantly surprised by how much I’m enjoying it. The bar for Wanda’s character development was literally subterranean, but this is has been frankly sort of amazing??
Episode 5
Agnes asking about “taking it from the top” WHAT. I love so much the way the characters “break character” it’s so interesting and well done! WHY IS WANDA LYING TO VISION.
WHERE IS RALPH
oh my god the babies are children now?? why isn’t agnes noticing?? THEY’RE SO CUTE I COULD CRY ALL OVER AGAIN
I do not. trust. hayward. Why is he asking about Wandas nickname? Monica knows whats up-- she knows Wanda is grieving and hurting.
THE VISIONS CORPSE WHAT? WHAT IS WANDA DOING OH MY GOD SHE STOLE VISION. Vision has a living will? Don’t you have to be human for that? Are you telling me the woman that loved Vision would straight up ignore his wish to not be turned into a weapon after his death? I have a hard time with this.
Oh no Vision is starting to worry me. He’s onto Agnes, he’s noticing Wanda getting careless...the boys are adorable though. Good on Agnes for not even flinching.
DAMN RIGHT WANDA COULD HAVE TAKEN OUT THANOS LETS HAVE SOME RESPECT PEOPLE. Also, why is Monica being sketchy about Captain Marvel?
EMAIL ALERT EMAIL ALERT “none of it is real.” oh my god what is happening?!?!
“Is this yours?” OH MY GOD. “This will be your only warning” she is so unafraid and I love her for it. I love her accent coming back when she breaks characters LOOK AT HER TURNING ALL THOSE MEN AROUND I LOVE HER.
“Fix the dead” oh my god the shock on her face. The absolute irony of her trying to tell her boys there’s rules when she’s writing the playbook as she goes. Oh my god. “Can’t I?” Jesus, then the credits start rolling because she wants the episode to be over but Vision won’t let her OH MY GOD. My heart is breaking
WHAT DOES IT MEAN SHE DOESN’T KNOW
SHE RECAST PIETRO
Episode 6
OOOOH look at the classic costumes! Pietro is slaying me. I mean, it’s the wrong pietro but its still very funny. The way Vision calls her out and then plays it off is.... spooky. She is fully aware thats not her brother. “Be good.” holy shit.
Look at me not liking Hayward again. “which one is the sassy best friend” i feel like that’s....racist. “don’t use the last five years as an excuse to be a coward” DRAG HIM SIS
Listen Uncle Pietro being a little shit head is my favorite. I use the OG Pietro in my fics but this one is hilarious.
Vision lied about being on duty? Yikes. The one house where people are stuck in a loop? YIKES. Its crazy how everyone is starting to be super aware of Wanda pulling the strings--MAGIC CHILD OMG.
Whats past ellis avenue? Is that the limit of Wanda’s powers? I don’t super understand how Vision has his powers if he’s technically dead. HE DOESN’T KNOW WHAT THE AVENGERS ARE she really just gave him enough life to exist just barely. Agnes knows he’s dead so she wasn’t snapped??
Agnes’s witchy laugh while dressed like a witch is legit awesome. We call that FOREEEEEEEEESHADOWING! Oh and there’s Ellis Ave. Got it.
Monica’s blood is changed?? Idk how to feel about Black Character willing to die for White Charaxter? I mean I know Wanda should be Jewish but still. Uncomfortably close to icky tropes but maybe I’m reading too far into it.
YIKES where was she hiding the kids till now? How’d she do all this? “I’m not a stranger or your husband” YIKES.
OH MY GOD DEAD PIETRO
OH MY GOD VISION STAY IN THE BUBBLE SOMEONE SAVE HIM SAVE HIM OMG BILLY CAN HEAR HIS DADDY DYING SAVE HIM
“The people need help” oh Vision you are truly Worthy
She literally expanded her world to save him omg
DARCY WHERED YOU GO geez look at power of this girls mind it’s about damn time we got a glimpse at just how intense her powers are
Season 7
Ok is this like a reality show? Oh man she is GLITCHING.
Oh no it’s just Wanda not Wanda vision cos she feels alone? So sad. She really is losing it isn’t she and not in a “lol how awkward” sortnof way but in that truthful hard to watch way that so many of us feel when we’re at the breaking point
“I actually did bite a kid once” I literally ugly laughed right there
I KNEW I COULDNT TRUST HAYWOOD
It’s so nice to see Darcy used in a real way. Her character was totally wasted in Thor
The way Wandas little interviews get more and more sad :(
Uhhh what does that mean Agnes is quiet on the inside? Again with the Ralph thing. I’m starting to think there’s no Ralph at all??
LOOK AT THIS GIRL WITH HER SPACE ROVER . She’s got that same look of determination her mama had. WHAT IS HAPPENING TO HER WHY ARE HER EYES BLUE
“....soooo Wanda killed me?” I’m ugly laughing again and I shouldn’t be but the comedic delivery is excellent. The whole “office” vibe with the cameras is making an otherwise devastating episode fairly funny
LOOK AT THIS GIRL STANDING UP TO WANDA we love a sharp cheekbones beauty
“Maybe I already am” I mean, I would have loved to hear that post Ultron when for some reason everyone blamed Tony for everything?? But hearing it now is just horrifying and I hate it
Oh vision deciding to go get to his wife is beautiful.
WHERE ARE THE BABIES WHERE ARE THE BOYS OH MY GOD IM FREAKING OUT WHAT BASEMENT THATS NEVER GOOD
Uh hey what the fuck is up with Agness creepy basement of horrors??
AGATHA HARKNESS OH MY GOD
This song is a BOP wtf she deserves an Emmy for this shit
Snoopers gonna snoop what?
Episode 8
Of course it’s Salem, where else would a witch story start
“They simply bent to my power” What a queen
lmaoooo THAT ACCENT COMES AND GOES Agatha really said what we’ve all been thinking
Wait so Wandas power drew Agatha in? I thought maybe Agatha trapped her here?? SHE DOESNT KNOW WHAT WANDA IS
THE BABIES
Oh ouch this trip down memory lane is gonna hurt me isn’t it?
Oh no her mama I’m dying inside send help. The TV sitcoms. Oh my god is this her last memory before her parents died. HELP ME I CANT WATCH THIS
Oh my god, she had powers when she was little?? SHES NOT AN EXPERIMENT???
Listen I generally think telling a story retroactively is lazy writing? Just give us a well developed story the first time?? But this is BRUTAL and brutally well done.
SHE SAW HERSELF IN THE MIND STONE???
Would it have been so difficult for them to give us even a PEEK at this version of wanda vision in CACW? Marvel has the worst habit of just popping up like “oh hey these two love each other all the sudden with no real reason for it” but this is wonderful. So much character development.
Oh listen to this woman begging to be able to bury her husband omg. WAIT SO SHE DIDNT BREAK IN AND TAKE HIM?? WHAT ARE THEY DOING TO VISION?? DID HE PUSH HER INTO THIS PSYCHOTIC BREAK?? HE TOTALLY PLAYED HER INTO RECREATING VISION SHE JUST WANTED CLOSURE. He literally showed her visions dismembered corpse and said “say goodbye” I will kill this dude wtf
“I can’t feel you” guys I have to pause this so I can cry for a minute
“I can’t feel you” and then she leaves. Totally alone in the world. My heart is an empty husk.
Why the house though? Why west view?
OH FUCK ME UP ARE YOU KIDDING ME VISION WAS GOING TO BUILD THEM A HOUSE I CANT TAKE THIS ANYMORE
It’s not even real vision? Just the projection of her broken heart? “Welcome home” I am broken. Physically broken.
CHAOS MAGIC
SCARLET WITCH
I CANNOT
OH MY GOD WHITE VISION??? NO NO NO
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Scratch
Here is the Scratch fic. I sincerely love the beginning but the ending makes me want to scream in frustration. However, I simply can not stand to look or think about it any longer so cherish this fic for the first 800 words and pretend the last 400 don’t exist because... it’s just miserable writing and I can’t fix it
There used to be a point in time when Derek Morgan despised some of the additional duties of the Behavioral Analysis Unit. Aaron had been the barrier of that bad news, physically bringing him the sign-up sheet and explaining the general ins and outs of each option. Hotch always does the hostage negotiation class and it’s where he fits best. He was there when Dave, Jason, and Max started the book they teach out of. Being a hot-headed thirty-something Derek wanted to go to bars and hang out with friends in his spare time and he wanted nothing to do with the academy. If anything, he’d like to stay out of that hell-hole as best he can and away from the little savor complex having adrenaline mongers that it holds within its walls. But he’d grown… and more than that he saw things that he can’t forget. Fallacies and stumbles happen when agents aren’t taught by people who know what they’re doing. He’s watched them happen to his family and, suddenly, it didn’t matter all that much if he had to spend his Friday morning with cadets.
While Aaron works in the lecture halls, Derek spends a lot of time teaching the hand-to-hand combat class down in the academy’s basement. Every few months, when the class sizes diminish as the season dies down and the cadets graduate, Derek hassles them all down there to his thrown of rubber gym mats and the stench of sweat. He’s always met with hesitation and outright dismissals but he gets every last one of them down. Reid laughs him off, anxiously trying to provide every reason under the sun as to why he doesn’t need to be down there. “Hotch doesn’t even put me in the field that much!” and “why do I need that? Why can’t you protect me?” They all present him with similar points. Garcia doesn’t actually ever go in the field, the best taste she gets is going to local precincts. Hotch nods and listens but ultimately promises to get some time in someplace else, running maybe. In Derek’s experience, the only running Hotch does is into fires so that’s obviously not helping too much.
Derek has wrangled them all down. JJ goes without complaint, she enjoys rough-housing down there with him. He teaches her to protect her left flank, which she has an awful habit of leaving open. Emily will make her way down and raise hell but she’ll listen when he tells her to drop her shoulder more or to shift her weight a certain way. Derek’s trouble comes in Reid and Garcia and, though it’s both surprising yet not, Hotch. He’ll bait the other two down with snacks and the promise of lunch or a dinner date and they’re satisfied if not just putting up with him. Hotch… well, he has to catch him at the end of a seminar and ask him, in front of the students, to do it otherwise Hotch will just glare at him. Which is what he’ll do when Derek asks him in front of the cadets but Hotch has a dash of anxiety and wedged between Derek Morgan standing in his way stopping him from being able to go lock himself in his office and a hoard of cadets, he always cracks.
He doesn’t do it to torture them (no matter what Reid and Garica think). He does it because...
He remembers the feeling of the cold November breeze drying his sweat to his skin when he heard Hotch’s shout sound through the woods. To find Reid digging his own grave in a dark cemetery hardly able to stand and collapsing right into their arms. The way that Garcia had whimpered and held his hand a little tighter when they walked past the dark stain of her blood sitting right there on her front steps. For the vomit that had crawled up his throat as he ripped the carpet in Hotch’s apartment. Jerking too hard and feeling the blood soaking into his clothes. For the ache of his knees when she cradled Emily on that floor, begging her to stay with him. Her fingers are already cold. For having to listen to JJ’s screams months after she was taken. Finding her in the closed-off rooms sobbing and being reminded all over again what had happened that day and what would have happened if Emily and Hotch hadn’t found her.
He’s just… he’s so tired of seeing them get hurt.
“Hotch’s going there now.”
Derek sits up, eyes darting around the car as he realizes if they’re all here Hotch is entirely alone. “Without back-up?” he asks. “That’s crazy. He can’t go in alone like that.”
Dave shrugs, “well, I’d love to talk him out of it but he’s made his mind up. There’s no stopping him.” Dave meets his eyes through the mirror, face twisted in his own frustration with Aaron’s course of actions, but leaving them unspoken. “We’re right behind him, Morgan. He’ll be fine.”
Derek averts his gaze to the window, clenching his jaw to ride out the tide of anger boiling over within him. Sometimes he finds that he can’t stand working on this unit. Not with Dave and people like Aaron and Emily. All the hiding and the faking, it’s too much. It’s exhausting. Derek loves Emily, he does but he can’t stand the tiptoeing. The way they have to play every new hand dealt like everything is going to be fine. Like Hotch isn’t going to put himself in danger. Like Reid isn’t too young to be doing the things they ask of him. Like being a family somehow saves the day.
“Be careful,” Dave advises. They don’t know what they’re walking into. Their only way to see insides hasn’t answered their calls. Not Garcia’s and not the three Dave tried to get through. “One of ours is in there,” Dave adds as if they can forget. As if the most pressing thing on any of their minds is finding Hotch. Afraid of what they’ll find but the need to find him regardless of what waits on the other side of that door is stronger.
Derek goes in first. Reid presses in close, buzzing with his anxiety. The kid can never really get his mind clear but it’s worse when the danger is as clear as it is now. As they stand outside of the door knowing that whatever waits on the other side is entirely out of their control. And that can mean anything. “Ready?” Derek asks, but he’s not waiting for an answer.
The door opens without him needing to force it in but the house is bathed in darkness. Derek’s eyes dart to the only source of light, to his left a desk lamp, but he’s got to clear what’s in front of him. Leave someone else to assess that. He steps into the hall and throws up an arm as something sharp slices through the flesh of his forearm, his only warning the moan of an old floorboard. There’s a tangle of arms, their sight stolen by the way the walls of the hall consume the meager light from the desk.
Derek’s hand throbs as he punches blindly at ribs, finding no resistance, just bone. The other man puffs, caving in as Derek steals the breath from his lungs. The knife glints in the light, as the man turns his wrist but Derek sees it and he smacks it away with the flat of his palm meeting the man’s wrist hard. It’s over just as soon as it started. Reid gets a clear shot from the mouth of the hallway and Derek shoves the other man off and away from him. Staggering quickly to kick the knife further away.
His arm stings as he leans against the wall, moving his gun to throw the beam of his flashlight at his attacker. Finds the blood attached to the white dress-shirt. To the sharp jaw and the worry lines that he knows all too well. “Oh, God.” Derek falls to his knees, arm suddenly forgotten, as he defends himself from what’s left of Hotch’s fight. Slipping in his blood as Hotch tries to force him away, terrified. “Hotch--” the older man lands a solid blow to Derek’s sternum and all Derek sees is red as his vision dances and he struggles to pull in a breath.
It’s just enough time. Too much.
Pulling himself on rapidly numbing arms, Hotch slips in his blood. His adrenaline is working against him as his arms quake beneath him but there is still a threat and he has to eliminate it. Has to stop it from hurting the team. Peter is going to kill them. He knows. He knows it and he’s the only chance they have. His fingers curl around the knife but he can not force his legs to work. Can’t bend his knees.
“Hotch! Man, it’s me. It’s--”
No. Tears sting his eyes as he thinks about the real Derek Morgan. His friends, his family. About the son, he’s left at home again. Waiting for him to come home. He’s not sure he’s coming back this time but that’s beyond his control. He can save the others. He needs them to live. Crying out as his arm gives out from beneath him, chin hitting the floor hard as his body gives out from beneath him, Hotch knows this is it. He’s got no time left but he won’t let Peter Lewis hurt his team.
The second bullet rips through the air and he feels it lodge itself in his chest.
Peter is right there.
He doesn’t feel the third.
Derek cries out, his shout ripping his throat as he puts himself between everyone else and Hotch. Pulling the knife from Hotch’s cold limp fingers and throwing it down the hall as far as he can. “Hotch,” he cries, shaking the older man. “Hotch, man, look at me.” He grabs Hotch’s jaw, shaking his head. Trying to draw something sort of reaction out of him but only getting choked, strangled breathes. The wet sound of the blood hitting the back of his throat before it pools in his mouth. Gushing past his lips, trailing down his cheeks like a tear.
“Fucking help me!” Derek cries at the officers loitering-- all caught in the web of confusion. They’d just watched the downed man attack the special agent. They watched him go for the knife again, try to end it. It’d been their bullets that stopped him. They stopped him… “Move!” Derek screams at them. “Move! Do something! I-- I need help!”
JJ drops down on Hotch’s other side, her hand swiping through the blood on Hotch’s face quickly. Her thumb cleaning it away as quickly as it appears, her other hand coming to cup the side of his head, shushing him gently as she strokes his temple. “It’s okay,” she soothes, calmly. “You’re okay, Aaron. We got Peter Lewis. We got him. You’re okay.”
He fights against them, struggling but ultimately too weak, to pull away from JJ’s warm palm and the hand Derek uses to keep both his arms down. He can’t go anywhere forced to look at them and he’s torn between the way his eyes deceive him. JJ’s hands are cold, they’re always cold. Peter Lewis wouldn’t know that. He wouldn’t know how softly his name rolls off her tongue, quick to slip in Aaron when he doesn’t even know he needs it. How she says it and he can feel his humanity slip right back into place.
Peter Lewis couldn’t produce that panicked crack in Derek’s voice. The way Derek throws his words like punches.
He’s not sure what’s real.
“No, no, no!” Derek pushes at him, sending bolts of pain along his chest but Hotch can’t do it any longer. Each breath pulls more weight across his chest. The cold spreads down his arms, fingers hardened by its bite. He’s done. The confusion-- his vision fading in and out-- but he knows that when he closes his eyes the hands touching him are Derek and JJ. When he opens them again… he doesn’t know what is real.
“Stay with me,” Derek commands but he’s slipping there’s nothing. His hands are covered in blood and he’s torn between leaning into JJ’s palm and being convinced that maybe the voice in his head is right. This is all a trap. But he’s dying and he’d rather do it here with the fictive parts of them in his mind than with whatever is real.
JJ squeezes his hand, worrying his knuckles with her fingers until he squeezes back. “Just hold my hand,” she encourages. “Just squeeze my hand.” He’s there but he knows his brain will lie if he opens his eyes. She's right there, he tells himself. Right there. “Hotch!” JJ shouts, feeling his hand start to release. She folds her own over his, forcing the grip. “Hotch! Hotch, answer me!”
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and it’s just around the corner
fandom: stardew valley
pairing: sebastian/player (female)
summary: She’s a fool – she tries to tell herself. There’s nothing she can offer Sebastian that would make him stay in this village he so obviously loathes. She’s just dumb enough to have fallen for the man she cannot even bring herself to ask to love her back.
rating: explicit // word count: 25k // AO3
She cannot remember the farm per say, just the proof that she’s been there once: a dusty, yellowed photo of herself, smiling in a pink sundress under the shade of a gigantic oak, 4 years old and beaming. She can vaguely bring back the savour of cranberry jam on her tongue, the authentic, slightly sour taste that only meant home-made. She thinks they had a gray cat, and she can feel the smell of gasoline in her nose, from the long car ride there as a child. That’s all she remembers about her grandparents’ old farm; and anything of that lifestyle is completely lost upon her, or her memories of her grandpa. They haven’t been crazily close either: she was busy pursuing her education too far away to allow proper visits, and the phone signal failed the old man too much to allow even constant communication. When he died, they buried him in the city, next to his wife, and everything about the way he lived his life became hazy and forgotten in the lives of the living.
Which is probably why it is so hard to comprehend what she’s reading now, in her cubicle at work, defeated under her 16th time this month of overwork. Her grandpa was known for being eccentric, which is why she expected to see a card with hey, we all die in the end! or something written on it, and not the dreams of her childhood offered on a plate to her. She stares at the paper, reads and rereads it for 7 times before she’s convinced it’s actually real.
She’s touched at the care in his words, at the oozing affection on that piece of paper. It’s something that she didn’t know she was missing until now. A care sent across generations, to reach her – and when she feels like she needs it most. She doesn’t know if she should scream or cry or laugh.
She looks around: there are only a couple of other workers left in the office at the moment, in the late hours of the night. There’s delivery food all across the others’ empty desks, and a few of the girls switched their shoes, from heels to sneakers. And yet, as she stops, the clanking on the keyboard never ends around her, and the neon light remain buzzing above her, the static noise of her real life nightmare. The sigh coming from a co-worker several seats away is deafening in her ears. As she’s writing her resignation letter, for her boss to find on his desk at the first hour in the morning, she can’t help but notice how her vision shakes, how she can’t quite straighten her back under the pain of hours and hours of being hunched at a desk.
It’s not even the irony of it all, dying in a storm of unfair overworking while those above her wallow in money, that upsets her more. But rather, the way in which she cannot have any satisfaction out of it anymore. As a graduate, she thought she’d find happiness in a corporate job that pays well, but now the comfort of money means nothing when she doesn’t have the time to even spend it, and she can’t even recall what her hobbies are, let alone when’s the last time she did anything else but work, do house chores and sleep.
She cannot recall the last time she met up with some friends, visited new places or ordered online something else but a new pair of heels or a new shirt for work. Gods, now that she hit the brake on her wreck of a life, she can’t stop noticing how pathetic she’s been.
Her hands tremble as she signs the paper, as she tosses her meagre office belongings into her bag, as she pushes the elevator button. She’s already overthinking the decision, but it’s already made and she can only worry about what’s to be done next now. She’s 100% sure she’s not made for this, she has zero knowledge of how to take care of a farm and she still screams when she sees a spider in her apartment. But she’s tired, there’s a tiredness that never seems to let loose, and no matter how much she sleeps on Sundays, she wakes up feeling like she has her hands and feet tied. Even if to only rest for a while, and the whole ordeal would still have been worth it.
Sleep doesn’t come easily to her that night. She reads the letter over and over again, she measures the weight of the keys in her palms, she tries to put puzzle pieces together, from old photos she brings up from hidden boxes. Nothing tells her she made the right decision, though in her old photos, everyone looks so happy while on the farm. Maybe she didn’t even truly get to the end of her patience, just a bad day, maybe she still could have taken it for a while. After all, it’s not like she had that bad of a life. But then, it’s not like it was that good either. And once she started thinking of it, the idea of change became hauntingly tempting. The potential in this new place is infinite, and so, so terrifying.
But a change nonetheless.
She spends the next couple of weeks in a frenzy: selling most of her belongings, keeping only the strictly necessary. She keeps the pictures, of course. A few books, only those that she read during university and she felt like they changed her life, though she hasn’t revisited those stories since. Maybe she’ll finally have the time to, now. She sells or donates all her office clothes, expensive shirts and bags – all gone, because they remind her of some kind of work she never wants to do again in her life.
When she stops to count what’s left, looking at her near-empty apartment, two suitcases and a backpack put aside, she’s overwhelmed at how pointlessly she lived her life up until this point. She has nothing to show for all the efforts she’s made, and she can feel the skin all over her body itch with the realisation, itch for something else to do.
She doesn’t look back, as she’s returning the keys of her rented apartment. She has been paying expensively for the chance to live on her own in the big city, and there’s nothing but bitterness towards that idea anyway. She waits in the bus station with music playing at the highest volume, drowning out an incoming panic attack – as she’s struggling to count up to 10, reassure herself that she’s a grown fucking adult and that she can do something as easy as just moving someplace new.
Still, the scenarios roll in her mind, unperturbed, and she almost throws up thrice before she reaches her destination – and then she almost throws up again, as she’s watching the bus pull away, leaving her alone in the middle of nowhere. The sun is bright, but too bright and her clothes are sticking to her skin, even if it’s barely early spring, and the air is fresh. A fairy-tale start to her new adventure, and yet she feels like crying right then and there, a fain headache booming at her temples from all the anxiety she had to push away.
She’s already exhausted and it’s barely noon. She starts pulling at her suitcases, though the road makes it a tricky and tiring job. Then, just as she’s ready to take her first break, a hand grabs the handle, and she stares up in the face of a kindly looking old man.
Mayor Lewis; she still remembers the face, as he is the kind of person who probably always looked the same. They’ve last seen each other at her grandfather’s funeral, so there’s a bit of awkwardness hanging between the two of them, as she’s allowing him to help her with her luggage.
A redheaded woman is waiting for them in her truck, a bit of a distance away, and she helps them with her stuff. It’s easy to make conversation when friendly people are pushing it forward, and they seem way too enthusiastic about her presence. They don’t even comment about her sneakers, totally unfit for most of the roads in the town, or her outfit, that would rip or get dirty the second she’d encounter a field.
She already has a room prepared at Lewis’ place, there’s no way her old house can offer her proper living conditions just yet. That’s not a jab directed at her, rather at the passing of time and the overgrown state of her courtyard. But there’s nothing mean behind their comments, and they’re even offering all the help they can.
She’s trying to come up with a list of things that she might need, but Robin is already writing one of her own.
“She’s our architect,” Lewis whispers, winking at her in secrecy.
It’s weird and scary and she doesn’t know how to feel about it. Back in the city, she could have crumbled on the sidewalk and nobody would have cared. Here, it seems everyone jumps at the chance to do just that, help and care, and she’s terrified out of her skin. Her thanks are muffled by the weird knot in her throat. When balancing things out in her head, there’s nothing she can give them in equal measures.
The key in her hand feels foreign, but yet it’s that thing that grounds her to the moment, doesn’t let her slip away in that part of her brain that makes her forget things even happened. The house is, of course, a disaster, though someone had the good thinking of covering the furniture. The place is small, and it needs a good dusting, maybe even a new coat of paint. Robin, by her side, is still doing her job.
“Is there anything you want in particular?”
“No, not really. I don’t think so?”
She’s lost and overwhelmed. She’d like to just sit somewhere and start unpacking, maybe go and switch all of her things again actually, because there’s no way she can fit in with these people. But Lewis’ arm is around her shoulder, urging her back the way they came, promising her his special vegetable mix and green tea.
Once finally out of his sight, and comfortably settled in his extra bedroom, she squeezes a pillow close to her chest, hiding her face in it, and starts crying. She sobs – for the grandparents she didn’t properly appreciate while alive, that still left her with so much. For the chance that not many have to switch things around. For the state in which the farm is, and the immense effort she’ll have to put in building it back together. For the pain in her arms, the burn so unfamiliar that it must be only the sign of something new. She’s overwhelmed and scared, and hours pass before she finally falls asleep,
The next morning, she refuses even the breakfast, and immediately heads towards her place, luggage in tow. Mayor Lewis promised he’ll solve the problem of electricity and water running back to the place, so at least she can forget the administrative part.
She greets everyone she passes by, because otherwise the staring just gets too unbearable, and though they’re curious, they also remain polite too. But her courtyard and house are truly disastrous. She’s glad it’s still so early in the year, so the weeds didn’t grow yet on the path towards her door, so at least she can focus on dusting off the room, polishing the floor. She unpacks with nostalgic music blasting from her phone: plates in one drawer, her clothes in the other two. She builds herself a nightstand out of all the books she brought with her, and she washes the curtains by hand, letting them dry out in the sun.
She goes to the town for bedsheets and even more cleaning products, buys a basil plant for the windowsill. The place is small, smaller even than her city apartment, and she has nothing of her own to properly decorate it with, give it a specific charm, so she allows herself to get lost between the small isles of the store, and pick whatever piques her fancy. But this is fine, she thinks. This is, after all, the true definition of a new start.
She watches the sun set from her porch – she thinks she’d like an armchair for the place, it’d make a lovely reading pace if it’s not rainy, and there’s a soft lull from the TV inside, where the weather prognosis for the next day rattles on.
She finds grandpa’s old gardening books, and she starts reading them. She cleans up a small portion of the land, plants some seeds she picked based on Pierre’s recommendations. Gathers wood from the end of the forest that runs almost up to her house, practices splitting it in smaller branches, that she can carry and gather in the small tool shed, for the winter.
During the first night that it rains, she opens her door to a stray, lost dog. She hugs him close to her all through the night, as he whimpers and warms up – and in the morning she names him Max, and buys him dog food and a colourful bowl. She stops feeling so alone, so lost, a purpose forming, even though she can’t quite name it.
When too many days pass with her cooped only at her place, letters and requests for visits start pouring in her mailbox. Sometimes mayor Lewis comes pick her himself, walking around the town with her, stopping to present her to any villager they encounter. She feels like a circus freak being paraded around like this, but she smiles, wonders if Max is getting bored at home or if she could walk through the forest in search of some fruits.
***
Then, when the weather prognosis tells of many sunny days in a row, Robin shows up at her doorsteps, can of paint in one hand, brushes in the other – and her son behind her, to help her out.
She watches him, fiddling on the spot, looking like he certainly doesn’t want to be here and she smiles. Well, that’s at least a feeling that she can relate to, even when in her bed after a tiring day, she still sometimes yearns for everything that this place is not. Max helps. In this case as well, as he runs to the door and immediately jumps on him.
“Max, no!” she chides, though he settles calmly on panting up at the man for pats. Luckily, he hasn’t slammed him to the ground, as he tends to do with her, but that’s still no proper way of greeting strangers. “I’m so sorry…”
“Sebastian,” he says. “There’s no problem, really.” He’s scratching the dog between his ears, absentmindedly looking in through the door, at the small place she now calls home. There’s nothing much in there, but she finds herself growing protective over it anyway, at his gaze.
Max, the traitor, is now cuddled down at his feet. From the side, Robin laughs.
Her and Sebastian move the furniture, as Robin tapes newspaper on the wooden floor. She prepares fresh lemonade for her visitors and helpers before they start painting, and she takes a short break just to water her crops. They do the work in silence, mostly, just her phone turned on to fill up the space – and without mayor Lewis’ fast mouth, she isn’t certain what she could possibly talk about. From time to time, Robin asks Sebastian something – regarding his sister, or some things she asked him about before, which sounds a lot like nagging so she prefers to stay out of it.
She thanks them many, many times before they leave for the day. Especially since it was the weekend, and she’s sure they just threw away a perfectly free day on helping her put together her house. She just feels more and more indebted towards all these people. Even if Sebastian didn’t look her way even once.
***
She starts going to the local library, borrowing books and learning more and more things about the farm. She accepts the quests from the bulletin board, and in exchange she asks for fishing tips or some town history. She starts taking evening walks, with Max, picking up acorns. She gets stronger and better at all the farm work. She places various orders, starting to gather syrup from the trees near her house – and one lazy day, she makes jam, that she then sells.
She starts counting the money, making plans for the farm. She buys two chickens, and the one day when no one in the town sees her, it is because she struggled all the time to build a fence so that they won’t step all over crops and no fox would reach them during the night.
***
Everyone is friendly, showing up at her door with gifts for her new move: a handmade mug from Leah, a beautiful seashell from Elliot, an actual functional first aid kit from Harvey. She suspects the mayor’s doing behind all these kindness acts, and yet it’s with a reverent kind of gestures that she finds a place for all of them in her small house. She starts adding some kind of adjectives to this cast of characters that enter her life.
But with Sebastian, something’s different. She doesn’t know what makes her notice him again; that something that made him stand out from the mass of people she met in the past few weeks. Maybe it’s not even just one single thing, but a mix: like how he is the son of the kindest lady, paler than the farmers or football players, how he doesn’t want to stand out at all, how she has to go out of her way to find him, instead of the other way around.
Most of all, it’s the desperation she can feel off of him. There’s a force in him that cannot make peace with how things are for him at the moment – and it’s the familiarity of it that pulls her in, lets her gaze linger on him for a bit longer, makes her ask about him while smiling in the most innocent way, sipping tea in Robin’s office.
***
They’re not that different; she’s easy to fit in the village life, mostly because she’s so pliable for others, knowing the memory of her grandpa is attached to her as well. She sometimes feels like the older residents of the town look through her, instead of directly at her, and see the ghost of someone else they used to know. And the days pass, things fall together, and yet in her chest, there’s a clock ticking away, counting down the time spent here, because if she was looking for something like belonging, it seems this town buried it away with her grandpa, and things don’t seem that different from how they used to be. She just has dirtier nails now, and some decaying make-up skills.
So she never visits without a purpose, doesn’t get too friendly with most of them. She spends days in a row on her farm, ploughing the land, watering the plants, feeding the animals. Task upon task, she goes through all of them, grateful for how it’s silencing her mind, giving her the time and space to breathe. If she finishes early, she likes to go fishing, the breeze nice against her sun-warmed face, especially as the dusk approaches.
It’s the simplicity of life that lulls her into wanting something more, eventually, tentatively. She visits Robin, as she’s closing the store, so they can share some fresh-picked fruits while watching the sun set. She meets up with the mayor for chess during Sundays, stories of two best friends half a century ago embedded in every sigh, and she wins every time and that’s how she knows he just lets her. When she passes by to drop something for the museum, she spends the remaining afternoon in the library, browsing the collection, reading for the children fresh out of classes that ask her to do so.
But if anyone in Pelican Town would be asked, they wouldn’t be able to tell people that much about their newest villager. In truth, even for those closest to her, there’s an aura of mystery: whatever her life was before, she doesn’t go into details. Whatever and for however long she might remain in their lives, she doesn’t say.
To Sebastian, that’s what makes it easy. He doesn’t expect her to tell him anything, since she’s not pressing her curiosities either. Probably why she opens so willingly, why she creates a routine around his. She always stops at the edge of the river, where she knows she’ll find him in the evenings. They never talk for long, or of important things – but she thinks, the magic is in staring together at the same scenery, feeling much of the same things. After the third time, she asks for a cigarette from him, and she winks at him when he looks just a tiny bit surprised.
This is how it begins. The rest she almost doesn’t even notice.
***
She remembers the Egg festival; she’s sure she took part in one of the hunts back when she was little, though the details are foggy in her mind. She doesn’t remember any of the villagers, but she’s been a very shy child, and not even the promise of bunny chocolates was enough to persuade her back then.
Still, she worked for so long in a corporation, at this point the spirit of competition is embedded into her. She wakes up early, and she wears one of her dresses from before, even if she has to match it with grandpa’s old jeans jacket. She even puts on make-up, manages to water her plants as well before she’s walking towards the town.
She officially meets Maru and Demetrius, as they’ve been so busy during her past visits. Marnie clasps her in-between her arms, exclaims how pretty she is when not trying to imitate her house’s looks, and loudly kisses both her cheeks. Gus waves at her, and keeps presenting various plates to her, and by the time she can excuse herself, she’s glad she hasn’t eaten any breakfast. Jas and Vincent come at her yelling tag! and she spends the next half an hour running around, followed by the sometimes annoyed, sometimes happy smiles of the other villagers.
She buys strawberry seeds, more on a whim, because she was craving for some, and gets herself a cute bunny plush, since she’d had trouble sleeping, and she’s sure Max would appreciate her hugging a non-living thing more. She feels like she fits more, now, that she’s surrounded by everyone else, and she realizes that she knows them all, that they know her back – and there’s no outright hostility.
She greets Sebastian, and meets his friends. She compliments Abigail’s hair, Sam compliments her instead. He’s friendly and outgoing, compared to the other two in his group, but she notices Sebastian’s fleeting smile at the toy in her arms, so she straightens her back even more.
As soon as mayor Lewis starts his announcement, Abigail immediately seems more excited, especially since she is presented as the winner for the past decade. However, by the time the day ends, Pelican Town has a new Egg Hunt winner.
The straw hat doesn’t fit her outfit, and it’s not quite yet a necessary accessory, but she’s beaming at every villager that comes to congratulate her, even if she’s already so old and she shouldn’t be so happy about beating a few 10 year olds. Even Abigail is a good sports and promises she will beat her next year.
Next year – she wonders if she’ll even be around for that long. Her saved-up money is slowly trickling down, as she keeps buying things that she needs, and she has no idea yet how much profit she’ll be able to make at harvest time. She feels better knowing her doubts don’t show to others.
She walks part of her way home with Robin and her family. Maru is happily telling her something about her research, though it goes over her head and she doesn’t understand much of what’s going on. Demetrius and Robin walk several steps ahead, arms linked, and it’s a sweet sight to see, that they can be so close even after so many years.
Then, before she takes her turn to her farm, after everyone else said their goodbyes, Sebastian looks up at her.
“It suits you,” he says, so low she almost misses it, nodding his head at her hat. She blushes under the street lamp, but he’s already turned his back on her and he can’t see, so she can go on her own way and pretend it never happened.
***
She starts going to the mines, even if everyone tells her she better not. But she needs better tools, more resources and something to do on rainy days, so she goes anyway. She comes out late into the night, dirtier than she’s ever been, spider cobwebs stuck in her hair, but her backpack heavy.
The next morning, she struggles packing some presents for Robin and Lewis, for all the help they’ve showered her in ever since she moved. She doesn’t have much to offer, some syrup and a jar of jam, a few eggs. But as she’s going into town, there are three presents that she’s carefully carrying around in her bag.
She stops by Lewis first, sits on his stairs with a steaming mug of coffee between her hands, as he waters his small garden – and they chat about the weather, the fishing days that Lewis has programmed, their favourite Stardrop meal. The days get warmer and warmer, as they’re slowly rolling towards summer, and she’s feeling peaceful, listening to the mayor’s chatter, his grunts as he digs around, his yelling when she offers to help him around.
She drops by Clint to let him examine some of the stuff she found underground, and by the time she reaches Robin’s place, the older woman is taking her lunch break. She’s exclaiming happily at the gift, and invites her to stay for lunch. She helps her with the plates, and while Robin goes to gather the rest of her family, she sends her to get Sebastian.
She has to breathe deep, count to 10, before she has the courage to knock at his door. There’s the sound of something tumbling to the floor, and she winces; more shuffling, and the door finally opens to reveal a somewhat sleepy looking Sebastian. It looks like he hasn’t brushed his hair yet, as it sticks out in odd directions, and in his own space, he’s wearing some old, washed-out t-shirt that is several sizes too large, and sweats. She stares at him, entirely endeared, but also deeply aware that there’s a line she has just crossed by seeing him like this – and she’s not sure she was allowed to.
“Hi,” she says, at the same time he says “Shit”, closing the door on her. She opens and closes her mouth several times, trying to come up with a proper way to reach to this, but her mind coming up blank.
Eventually, she lamely says “Robin said lunch’s ready,” before she leaves for the kitchen again. Demetrius is already seated at the table, looking up at his wife like she hung up the sun on the sky. Maru refuses to show up, as she’s too invested in her research, but there’s the slam of a door from downstairs, and Sebastian eventually shows up, just as his step-father takes his first bite from his plate of spaghetti. Their guest has not yet picked up her fork.
Sebastian is now wearing actual jeans, and his hair looks a bit more tamed. He sits next to her, and the four of them eat in relative silence, though she’s obsessively thinking of her knee, against Sebastian’s, under the table and she wants to fucking swear at herself, for acting like a fucking cowardly high-schooler.
“So, why did you move to Pelican Town?” Demetrius asks her, in the end. She notices him wincing immediately after the dull thud from under the table, and she imagines that was Robin kicking him from asking a question that no one had dared poise to her until now.
She finishes chewing the food in her mouth, swallowing a bit more painful.
“I needed a change,” she says eventually, entirely too vague.
“From? You should tell Sebastian about your city experience, because he’s obsessed with leaving the town.”
There’s a disapproving tone in his voice that makes her wince, but her head snaps up at Sebastian, who looks both entirely annoyed and disappointed. She’d like to press her finger to the frown now so obvious on his forehead.
“Really?” she mumbles lamely instead. Sebastian’s now looking at her, and although across the table his parents are bickering with each other in low whispers, he doesn’t break the eye contact. He just nods at her question, grabs another bite of food – the words won’t make it any better.
She always thought that the people in this town are happy to live here, heck even she’s trying to understand the charm of the place and why her grandpa never left it. She always thought that if there is someone to leave it, that’d be her, in an example of another of her life’s failures. But here’s Sebastian, burning with a yearning for a city just as hers to leave it was.
He takes her back home, assuring her that his lunch break is long enough to allow him to do that. They’re walking side by side in companionable silence. Sebastian, unlike his father, doesn’t ask her anything, so when they reach her property, she hands him her last package.
“Can I?” he asks, a hand already tugging at the ribbon, and she smiles at him. Inside, there’s an assortment of minerals: quartz, obsidians. She’s found them during her time in the mines, and the only thing she somewhat remembers from her dialogue with Maru is that her brother loves this stuff.
“What’s this for?” he says, voice a little chocked, laughing at the end, embarrassed and overwhelmed.
“Thanks for that day,” she says. Then, more unsure… “And good luck for the future?”
“Yeah. Thanks.”
She’s already turned around on her feet, a hand up in the air in goodbye.
The next morning, even if Sebastian never eats breakfast, he makes toast and eats it with strawberry jam, from a jar cutely decorated in stickers, where in cursive, their newest villager wrote for Robin and family <3.
***
She goes to JojaMart to buy an electric kettle; she can’t quite yet afford to get her kitchen built in, so she’s been eating at the Stardrop Saloon or lived on oatmeal and salads. But the mornings are dreadful with instant coffee and cold tap water, so she’s finally investing in something to make her life a bit better. This lifestyle reminds her of being a student in the dorms, and it’s not something she thought she’ll ever return to.
Sam looks around for his managers, and when there’s none around, he stops next to her and they chat by the vegetable stall. She’s frowning at the price, way higher than what they can find in the town and what she sells her own products for.
“Capitalism,” Sam says brightly, tugging at his employee lanyard, and she laughs at him.
“Oh, trust me, I know all about that.”
He wiggles his eyebrows at her, which makes her snort. Shane, his co-worker, turns to stare at them, but he’s not telling them on, so she moves one step closer to him.
“I’ve worked in customer care for Joja Corporation.”
Sam mimics throwing up, turning serious again only when she’s elbowing his side. She’s painfully aware of all the cameras in the store, after all this time away from anything of the sorts.
“But for real, you’re way better in Pelican Town,” he says, even if she’s not yet quite convinced.
But he doesn’t continue pressing the matter. Instead, Sam invites her the next Friday for an evening at the Saloon, where him, Sebastian and Abigail are supposed to play live a few of their songs. She clasps her hands together, and agrees immediately. She used to love this kind of thing: but it’s been so long since she allowed herself to take an evening off, both in her life back in the city, and the life here.
***
She’s already a regular, so Emily nowadays greets her with a hug. Though this time she whistles suggestively at her outfit. Since it’s supposed to be a more special night, she chose a low cut blouse to go with skinny jeans, and she’s no more a formless body buried under work clothes. The only make-up is a very dark lipstick. Her… friends, she supposes, are already on the side, tuning their instruments. Sam grins at her, waving her at the table Gus saved up for them, where he ordered pizza for everyone.
They’re not playing for a long time, maybe half an hour, but by the end, everyone is loudly clapping at their performance. She’s the only one whooping, and Sam is loudly laughing at her embarrassed grin afterwards, runs to fall into her waiting arms and twirls her around in the air, feet not touching the floor.
“Who knew our biggest fan would be you?” he says, helping her pat her hair pack into place.
“I did. I mean, your band has Abigail.”
The girl in questions frowns a bit at her, suspicious that it’s less of a compliment than she tried to make it, turns on her feet as she moves to the music box, tosses a coin in and picks a song. It takes a few seconds for her choice to start loudly booming in the saloon, but as soon as she does, she moves to grab at Sebastian’s arm, dragging him to the dancefloor, though he looks like he’s a lamb taken to sacrifice.
Sam laughs at the two of them, then turns back to his new friend.
“Do you think these two will ever hook up?”
She chokes on the slice of pizza that she’s eating, punching at her chest so she can breathe again. Someone slides in the chair next to her to the table, a hand slapping her hard on the back until she can breathe properly again. Then, frowning, she turns towards the newcomer, because she can’t bear looking at Sebastian and Abigail, together, dancing. She doesn’t think she can look at them without imagining them doing exactly what Sam asked her about, and it’s a shaming thought that she burns down. Shane, the one sitting next to her now, has already picked a slice of his own from their order, and nodded in greetings at Sam.
Sam leaves to talk with Penny, spending enough time as it is in Shane’s company, so Shane moves even closer to her, so he can be heard over the loud music. He’s a bit of an asshole, as he’s looking nowhere else but at her cleavage and the skin she’s showing with her choice of clothes. He’s not even trying to hide it, licking his lips, speaking without even trying to lift his eyes.
“Didn’t know the sunshine and the emo buy are hiding such a beauty between themselves,” he says, snaking an arm around her waist, shoving the second pint of beer he arrived with in her direction. He already smells like the stuff though, which means he’s at least tipsy, if not outright drunk yet. There’s offense in the way he said those nicknames, horrible on their own as well, but she’s sitting between the wall and his body and he’s a man showing interest in her, clearly going out of his way to make it obvious.
She takes several big gulps from her beer, and then turns towards him, smiling. He can’t tell it is strained.
“Well, I’m here now,” she says, and the hand around her squeezes in response. She lets him talk, mostly shit about the town, then shit about himself, and she keeps drinking and drinking, glass after glass of alcohol, because then at least she doesn’t have to reply. In the dark, they must look pretty cosy to the others, because no one else returns to the table – and by the time she remembers she is supposed to have friends around, and looks around for them, her vision is unfocused and she can’t make out the shapes and figures all around.
But she can notice the slightly grown stubble on Shane, how he’s now so, so close to her, his lips brushing against her ear each time he tells her something. She feels like she’s about to suffocate. But he tells her about how beautiful she is, how hard he makes her – and he guides her hand to his pants, where she indeed can feel her effect, and it’s a surge of pleasure and power. She squeezes him through his pants, and he groans in her ear. Her nipples perk up. And then his lips move closer, to her neck, where his tongue is lapping at her skin, sucking against the space. She feels hot all over, in a way that she doesn’t know if she likes or not. His other hand is now fondling with her breasts through her blouse, and she gasps – which only makes him to go at it harder. His mouth finds her, his tongue moving against hers immediately. She’s lost in time, doesn’t know for how long he does it – her body becoming lighter and lighter with each swipe of his saliva against her lips.
Then, a cough from behind Shane. She snaps out of her daze, looks up. Makes eye contact with Sebastian, which feels as effective as a cold shower to her fogged mind. She yanks Shane’s hands off her, but he’s unbothered, turns to look at Sebastian with something like disgust and boredom.
“Can we help you?” Shane says. She hates how the word we sounds from his mouth.
Sebastian doesn’t bother to even look at the drunk guy, instead addressing her only.
“Do you want to go home? The others left already, but it’s getting pretty late…” He stops to stare at Shane, and she wordlessly nods at him. He starts moving instantly, shoving Shane away so he can grab her wrist and help her out of her chair. She needs a few seconds to stabilize herself on her feet, stop the dizzying headache that hit her at the sudden movement.
“Come on, man, what do you think you’re doing?” Shane asks, though he also has troubles standing on his own feet. He makes do with leaning against the table, doing his best to look as menacing as possible.
In his arms, she shudders at the sound of his voice, clutches her fingers around Sebastian’s leather jacket. He doesn’t move away, but he doesn’t want to touch her either, so he just stands still.
“She’s coming with me,” is all he says, and when he starts towards the door, she follows silently. He offers her jacket, which he picked up earlier, before checking on her, and she hangs her head even lower in shame. The cold, outside air is quickly sobering her up, and she really can’t believe she lost herself, just as if she were a college freshman. She burns with embarrassment.
Once out, Sebastian moves a bit away from her, offering her space, though he always extends an arm in her direction when she stumbles on both existent and imaginary obstacles. The silence now is excruciating.
“Say something,” she croaks, her throat hurting from all the alcohol.
“Are you okay?”
His voice is soft, and he stops, looks at her for the first time since the start of all this situation. She knows she probably looks like a mess, lipstick smeared all around her mouth, clothes hanging awkwardly, but his eyes just search hers. She suddenly feels like crying. He must see it too, because he’s moving closer to her.
“Can I-” he tries, sighs, moves a hand through his hair in frustration. “Can I touch you?”
She nods, but he doesn’t move.
“I’ll need verbal confirmation.”
“Yes.”
She’s outright staring at him now, as he makes his way to her, cups her face in between his hands. His fingers are cold against her flushed skin, but it grounds her to the moment. Sebastian’s eyes are moving now, across her face: stop at her jaw, her neck, where Shane sucked painful love bites against her skin, visible even only in the light coming from the street lamps. He hesitates before moving his gaze downwards, where similar marks were left by his fingers against her tits. She feels like used goods, even if there is no judgement from Sebastian.
“Did you want that?” he asks again, sounding deadly serious, so she’s trying to think equally as seriously about his question. It’s hard, her thoughts all jumbled up, a soft kind of edge to everything going on in her head.
“I don’t know,” she answers finally, her head pressing more firmly against his palm. Sebastian’s thumbs are now moving softly against her jaw, and she wants to purr, just like a cat, maybe hang on to him for more of his warmth.
“God,” he says, and it sounds like a swearword. He unglues himself from her, extends an arm that she gracefully takes as they continue on the road to her house. He doesn’t say anything more until they arrive on her porch, though he looks like he’s thinking very hard. She’d like to press her finger to the frown on his forehead.
Max is happily snoring on the warm ground, and she lets go of Sebastian to run the short distance to her dog. She goes on her knees, grabs Max’s head in her hands and coos at him like she would to a baby, talks lovesick nonsense to the dog, pats him all over.
Her voice sounds fucking cute, Sebastian thinks, but instead he fishes something from the pockets of his jacket, bends down so he can press it in her palms. She immediately turns to look at him, eyes big and questioning.
“Take those in the morning, okay? You’ll need them,” is all he says, raising a hand and waving it in a goodbye.
***
Sebastian is right. She wakes two hours later, empties all the contents of her stomach, tears burning at her eyes, and when she wakes again, she thanks all the gods that outside it is raining, because she only gets up to get a glass of water and swallow the pills. Her head is killing her, and her heart aches in embarrassment at the way she acted. She hangs between screaming out in frustration at her own self and complaining about being hangover the whole day, hating herself so, so very much.
She still shoots Sebastian a text, thanking him for taking care of her, in so many ways, the night before. He leaves her on read.
For the next week, she busies herself with work on the farm. She makes another batch of jam jars, which she sends to Lewis for selling. She plants a new tree sapling, harvests strawberries, even builds an ugly-looking scarecrow out of an old broom. She cuts down wood, saves up stacks of it for when she’ll eventually afford Robin’s services. She goes in the mines, once or twice.
Then one of Lewis’ invitations is waiting in her mailbox, for another festival. Spring is coming to an end, already a sweeter, warmer breeze in the air, so the whole town is to celebrate the exact thing.
***
But Pelican Town is a small place, and so it never forgets gossip too easily. On that evening, enough pairs of eyes saw her fumbling in the dark with Shane, and so enough pairs of eyes are now watching her suspiciously as she greets the mayor. She’s wearing some city dress again, though more modest, and ribbons in her hair. She’s forcing herself to smile at everyone she encounters, trying not to seem so affected by the outright cold shoulder.
Sam still greets her, though, grabbing her in his arms.
“Oh, handsome!” she says, and laughs when he’s looking around, to check if anyone else heard her. But he is wearing a suit, his hair is gelled down and he smells like his mother. His eyes are searching hers though, and she thinks Sebastian might have said something to his friend. But thankfully Sam mentions nothing.
She looks behind him, at Sebastian, dressed in a costume as well. Her heart starts beating faster in her chest; his hair is pushed back, and his forehead is now uncovered. He sits relaxed, his hands in his pockets, like he doesn’t really want to be there and she hasn’t seen someone look that heartbreakingly gorgeous.
“You too,” she says. Sebastian raises an eyebrow at her. “Look good, I mean,” she clarifies, and she clears her throat before the awkwardness chokes her.
It’s a big understatement, but it’s the best she can do right now. There’s a small smile that she gets in reply. On the other side of the field, by Robin’s side, Abigail, Penny and Maru look absolutely stunning in their festival dresses, with the flower crowns on top of their heads. They’re laughing at one of Abigail’s stories, and they’re just beautiful and young and entirely enrapturing. She wonders if she didn’t fuck it up so badly earlier, she would have been invited to be one of them.
This time around, there’s not as much mingling with the people as earlier in the season; people are a bit warier, though she supposes she deserves it. She’s busy setting down a mat under a blossoming tree, preparing some kind of picnic and viewing spot at the same time.
“You look beautiful,” she hears from behind her, and she turns around to find Shane. A bit behind him, Marnie is engaged in a conversation with the mayor, and by his side, there’s Jas, who immediately shoves her sandals away so she can step on her mat and sit next to her.
She offers her tea and strawberries, places her own hat on top of the child’s head to protect her from the sun, who squeals in delight that she can show off the winning prize of the egg hunt. Then, she turns back to Shane:
“Is she your daughter?”
“Gods, no. She’s my goddaughter.”
She sighs, relieved a bit. In the morning, Shane looks just scruffy, some kind of sober, but his face is still red and puffy, sign of alcoholism. She knows Jas lives with him and Marnie, and it can’t be a good environment for a child, but she’s heard the rumours that he’s not that much at home anyway. She’s worrying for the young girl, but she also trusts Marnie to handle the subject, not really her place to say anything anyway.
Shane moves closer, his hand grabbing the end of the scarf she’s wearing around her neck, tugging so it comes undone between his fingers. She gasps, palm gluing to the skin there, reaching out for him.
“Give it back,” she all but growls it out, eyes frantically looking around, hoping no one is actually looking their way, since everyone is focused on preparing for the dance.
“I did that, right?” he asks, finally stopping, and she takes back her scarf, hangs her head low, so that her hair can cover her movement, as she ties it back in place.
“Yes, you fucking asshole,” she spits, but doesn’t move away from him.
“I was honest, you know. About you looking beautiful. Then and now too.”
“Thank you,” she says, and stays in place even as Shane gets closer to her. He’s also dressed up, wearing an actual shirt and everything, his jaw freshly shaven. He even looks somewhat attractive, and just like last time, she’s grateful for the attention. Back in Zuzu City, no one bothers with any kind of dating, no one bothers to notice someone else at all – no sweet lies, no prelude, just a dick and a cunt. So this feels new and flattering at the same time.
She sits down on her mat, reluctantly serves Shane too with some of her freshly picked strawberries. Jas moved over to Vincent and Jodi, her hands carefully holding on to the hat that’s still a bit too big for her, so it’s only the two of them in this corner. The music can’t start soon enough, because she can feel stray eyes looking to them.
The dance starts, and she watches, transfixed as the pairs walk towards each other, meeting in the middle in an embrace. Almost immediately the dresses flutter in the air, twirling. There’s an admiring exclamation from somewhere in the crowd, Jas happily clapping along to the rhythm. She looks at Sam, all but drinking up Penny’s laughing face. She looks at Abigail, tightly holding on to Sebastian’s shoulders. She looks at her friends dancing with the girls they have a crush on, and something in her chest rips apart.
“Hey,” Shane says. “Wanna get out of here?”
She nods wordlessly, and he takes her hand. No one looks at them, as they discreetly make their way behind everyone else. Once out the field, Shane breaks into a run through the woods. They stop in a clearing, both breathing hard from their run, and Shane grins at her, before straightening his back, walking purposefully her way and deciding to kiss her. It’s hard and rough, much like he’s been handling her until now too, but she still moans.
His hands are already moving at pulling his belt apart, and he takes her hands and moves them towards his dick.
“Come on, play with it,” he whispers breathlessly, as he’s pulling apart her scarf for a second time today, mouth finding the tender skin, reinforcing the fading marks. She’s feeling needy herself, she’d like him to shove down her panties and eat her out, but she makes do with moving her legs one against the other, seeking some kind of friction, as her hands are moving from his tip towards his balls, slower at the beginning, and faster once he starts grunting in her ear, pumping into her hands.
Then, he grabs at her hair, and she has to bite her tongue to stop from yelping.
“On your knees,” he says, already pushing his weight on her shoulders, and more or less willingly, she gets to the ground. The uneven dirt hurts her skin, and yet she has to ignore it, because Shane is already guiding his dick with his hands towards her lips. She forces herself to open her mouth, hopes he’ll better get down to do the same thing for her.
Her mouth is warm, and she’s fucking good at what she’s doing, sucking hard and taking him all in, like a good bitch, even if tears are forming at the corner of her eyes and her throat is burning. He pulls out, just to slam, hard, back inside her wet, welcoming hole – and in just three shoves, he comes undone, half coming in her mouth, half out just so he can have his fantasy of his cum leaking on her face.
Her dress is stained, and almost all her arousal is out of her. She wipes her mouth with the back of her hand, presses a palm against the painful strain in her jaw. Shane hurries to put his now flailing dick back inside his pants, and he’s not helping her back up.
“Gotta go,” he says, and he’s patting down his pants, where she held onto and left some creasing.
“What?” she asks, suddenly annoyed. “What about me?”
“Solve it yourself, princess.”
He starts walking away. She screams after him.
“Oh, fuck you!”
“My pleasure, next time!” he shouts back, but he doesn’t stop, as he’s making his way back towards the festival.
She shoves the middle finger up in the air, stomping her feet at the same time, shrieking.
“You fucking asshole!”
He chuckles at her tantrum, but he’s spent and satisfied, while she’s there frustrated and fucked over, so he’s not bothering to take her too seriously.
There’s no way she can go back there without everyone else figuring out exactly what she’s been up to. Of course, Shane looks no different than his usual, maybe he’s even surrounded by some post-orgasm glow, but there’s some bleeding from one of her knees, his now dry cum on the front of her dress, and her hair is nothing but a mess. She can’t believe how fucking stupid she can be, and how she fell again in the same old game of “I give you some attention, you give me some sex” that she’s been playing for ages now. It seems like habits don’t change, no matter if she’s in Zuzu City or Pelican Town.
And for what? Just because she felt lonely and jealous, because she felt like no matter how much she’ll try, she’ll never be anything but a passing fancy to these people that know each other inside out?
She makes her way towards her farm stomping her feet, swearing at Shane and mumbling curses all the way. Once back, she draws herself a hot bath and, in the tub, finally somewhere safe, she touches herself, moans out into the air a name she doesn’t dare to even say out loud, and thinks of someone who never even looked at her in any way to indicate she might want her too.
So, she must make do with fucking Shane?
But as she succumbs to her orgasm, moving lower into the water, maybe she can just order a dildo online and leave it at that.
***
On the first summer days, she takes up fishing. She buys a bottle of mead, because she’s heard from mayor Lewis that’s the favourite drink of their local fishermen, and she goes down the beach to beg.
She wants to learn fishing, she says. Just a couple of lessons, whenever he can leave his store and he’s willing to – she really just wants some new hobbies. It’s dreadfully awful to have only three functional TV channels, and only a dozens of books. Even Max is just a dog, and there’s a limitation to what he is capable of. Willy is funny and wise in the way only old men who love the sea can be, but he’s patient in his explanations – and sure enough, very soon, she catches her first fish.
She takes a picture of it on her phone, proud of her achievement. She sends it to Sam, to boast a bit and to annoy him, because he’s currently stuck at his part-time job. Then she goes shell hunting, because she’s too giddy to do any actual work. The villagers recently rebuilt the small bridge on the beach, and it’s lovely to get to take a walk like this. She wants her house to have the same fresh feeling, so she visits Robin for an upgrade.
And she knows she’s paying for the work, but with Robin, she feels like she’s asking for a favour, so she must give something back. And because she feels guilty, for having thought so angrily and jealously about Sebastian and his life, she wants to say sorry in a way, even if he has no way of knowing why she’s doing it in the first place.
Robin’s outside the house, just having come back from an exercise class at Caroline’s. She greets her visitor just a bit more strained than usual, and well – there’s no doubt that if there’s a gossip mill in the town, that’s probably the weekly gathering of middle-aged wives.
The farmer sighs, agrees to wait in the house while Robin takes a shower, before they can discuss about work.
“Is Sebastian home?” she asks, and the older woman makes a dismissive sign with her hand, which means she can go and check for herself.
The door to his room is slightly open, and he actually asks her to come in when she knocks. She greets him from the doorway, suddenly shy when he speaks, suddenly guilty that she’s interrupting him. She sits down on the couch, starts by watching him work, and then eventually she gets distracted by the posters on his walls, and the huge book collection he is showcasing on his shelves. It’s work that she’s familiar with, the stuff she liked to read before, when she used to have time for her hobbies, about worlds that she could escape to only by reading about them in books, featuring magic and dragons and robots.
He doesn’t seem to mind her looking around, as long as she’s quiet. Then, he eventually finishes, and sighs, stretching out his arms.
“Sorry about that, had to finish what I was working on.”
“Ah,” she nods. “And what is that?”
“I do freelance programming,” he answers. “I just want to save up enough to move from here. You know, if I’d gone to college, I’d probably be making six figures right now… but I just don’t want to be part of that corporate rat race, you know?”
“As a rat,” she says, a smile already on her face, “I totally agree with you.”
He looks at her; this is the first hint he gets – of something more about her. He’s heard from Sam, of course, about her actual job in the city, but it’s different to know it from her, to know he has her trust, to hear the defeat behind her voice, even as she tries to hide it with humour.
Then the moment is broken, the ping from his IM breaking the companionable silence between them. Normally, he’d have to explain to people why he is not in the mood to meet up with others, his introversion something out of a freak show with the villagers, but she just nods at him in understanding.
But the next interruption is almost brutal, Robin returning to pass on Abigail’s message, so filled with dismissal at his work, and indifference at his preferences. The easy air about him, as he was talking about a work he clearly loves and his dreams, is now entirely stifled – and instead he, defeated, just accepts all of this, even if he complains. She’d like to press her finger to the frown on his forehead.
This situation makes her blood boil, though: because she’s been in his exact spot. She’s had people look down at her choices for as long as she’s decided to walk her path, out there in the city – and now that she knows what it’s like not to, she can’t take to be the witness to it happening in front of her. Of course, some people will always have something to say, but it should be different with those considered friends – considered family, no?
From the kitchen upstairs, Robin is calling out her name – now, suddenly, she doesn’t really want to go, especially when she knows her presence is soon to be replaced by someone else’s. So, she acts daringly. She touches his arm, as she raises to go:
“You know, I think you’re doing an amazing job, especially considering your conditions. And trust me, it really is better than being a clog in the corporate system, and your work is important, even if it’s important for you only.”
As soon as she came, she’s gone and he loses his chance of asking for more. She left behind another sloppily packed present on his desk, a piece of quartz inside. He gets up, moves to put it up on his shelves – and shit, he wonders if she noticed the other stuff she’s given him, up there.
***
So Robin starts coming around with her carpenter tools, sometimes so early in the morning that she’s welcoming her still in her Disney pyjamas. They drink instant coffee, warm this time – and they discuss recipes that she’d like to try in her new kitchen, or the kind of animals she’ll grow in the barn. She learns that Robin loves goat cheese, and she shares that she absolutely hates peppers. She asks about Sebastian and Maru’s childhoods, she tells of her grandpa’s favourite magic trick.
The sound of Robin’s hammer accompanies her through her motions, as she’s ploughing the land for the summer crops. She didn’t really understand how lonely she has been all these months, just going through what she has to do. It’s nice to have someone to talk to, even if just for a few stolen minutes.
Sebastian drops by during his breaks sometimes, to bring his mother’s lunch, and both women nag at him so much that he ends up eating with them, Max nestled at his feet under the table.
Once, she walks back with him towards the town; she needs to drop by Pierre’s, to order some kitchen utensils – and by Lewis’ house, to leave him a note with info on her next batch of syrup and honey, that she sells for some good prices. He strains himself to walk in a pace that matches hers, even if he just wants to hurry home and take a nap.
She noticed, how tired he looks lately: hair more dishevelled, the slight stubble on his chin, the dark under his eyes. She knows, from Robin, that he spent even more time than usual in his room, refusing to meet even Abigail or Sam. She’d like to press her palm on his forehead, check for any signs of sickness.
“Are you working a lot these days?” she asks, fumbling with the edge of her t-shirt, feeling shy and worried that she might be overstepping.
“Had a tight deadline, but it’s over now.”
He pushes the hair out of his eyes with his hand, pats the pockets of his jeans with the other. He takes out his cigarettes, and then swears.
“Shit, do you have a lighter?”
In fact, she does. Sometimes, when she goes to the mines, her flashlight flickers and dies out, so she started the habit of carrying candles on her expeditions, and always a lighter in her pocket. She offers the fire; she has to stand on her tiptoes and he has to bend down to make it work.
Sebastian looks at her; she’s determinedly staring at the ground. They’re so close that even in the summer heat, she can feel his breathe on her cheek. Once the cigarette is lit, she almost scrambles away, pressing her palms to her cheeks, complaining about the hot weather.
She starts walking faster, afraid of what she might do if Sebastian looks into her face. There’s a small smile on his face that she can’t notice.
***
Pierre’s store is more of a general hangout spot for his daughter, though – Maru is eating her lunch with Abigail in a corner, and she waves at the two of them as she turns towards the counter. Of course, Pierre convinces her to buy several types of flower seeds – and she walks around the town with those in her arms. She thinks she might actually be his best customer. Or easiest, which in his case, it is one and the same thing.
That’s how she meets Evelyn: in the town square, taking care of the flowers. In truth, she never stopped to think about who maintains the town, and now she seems to have her answer. There are many people around; Penny with the kids, playing in the water fountain. Mayor Lewis and Harvey discussing in front of the clinic, Gus sticking a request on the board.
But the old lady spots her shopping, and sits her down on a bench, where she lectures her on the proper way to take care of them.
Then, the tone shifts – and the older woman asks her about the animals she’s growing (they’re well), how she finds Pelican Town (nice) and what’s her favourite flower (hyacinth).
“You know,” she laughs. “I almost married your grandpa.”
She sputters, unsure how to take this wild what-if she’s presented with. Of course, if Evelyn would have ended as his wife, she wouldn’t be here at all. And still, her curiosity gets the best of her.
“What happened?”
“Oh, George – that’s my husband, dear – bought an old farm here in town and moved one day. The next thing you know, everyone was smitten with the new farmer, me included. And by then, your grandpa was already in the army.”
And when he returned from the army, he returned with a wife – that’s a story that she knows. Grandpa met her grandmother at one of the dance evenings organized for young soldiers, and if the story she was told as a child is to be believed, he danced with no one else that night, the next and all the other ones that followed.
“How was he like?”
Sometimes, when it comes to someone you love, it’s hard to consider them from another point of view than the one you were always familiar with. He has always been just her grandfather to her, yet Evelyn here has seen him growing, becoming all those things to all those many people: son, neighbour, husband, father.
“He always worked hard, stirred trouble wherever he went and loved this town like no other,” she says, a faint smile on her face, lost in memories.
That sounds like the old man alright.
“Th-thank you, Evelyn.” Her voice sounds a little chocked. Just a little.
“Psssh, please. Call me Granny.”
The old man takes her hand, squeezes her fingers in hers – and pats her butt when she gets up to go home.
***
“Hey, mom,” she says, pressing the phone closer to her ear. It’s the first phone call she’s making from the landline, and there are jitters all over her skin. She hates that she has to stay still, glued to one spot the length of the phone’s cable. Her brain goes in override.
“Darling!” her mother exclaims from the other side. There’s some shifting, the sound of a door closing, then a sigh. “How are you? How’s Pelican Town?”
She tries not to sniffle outright, tries not to cry that she wants her mother when she’s a fucking grown-up adult, but that really is how she feels. It was all okay, the construction almost to an end, her crops growing beautifully – and then Max gnawed at her only good pair of shoes, and the thing sent her into a spiral of self-pity. She really has no idea what on earth she is doing here.
Instead, she asks: “Did you like living here?”
She is grandpa’s only living child. After her older brother’s death, she simply packed her stuff and moved to a shitty dorm in city, got married in two months and had her almost immediately after. Nowadays, her father is drowning in alcohol and her mother is drowning in work – and she wonders if the first coping mechanism may be more useful than the latter, though her last experience seems to point to a no.
“No,” her mother says. “But depends on what you’re chasing, or what you’re running away from. So, do you like living there?”
She tugs at the phone cord, shifts on spot, looks at Max sleeping a few feet away.
“M-maybe? I don’t know.”
“That’s not a no,” her mother says, ending the call immediately afterwards.
She sits on the same spot, with the tone dead in the background for a very long time, just staring out the window at the setting sun.
***
With the new barn built, she visits Marnie about filling it with the appropriate animals. She’d like a sheep, just because she thinks knitting would be a useful hobby to pick up by winter. Maybe a goat, so she can make cheese and thank Robin properly for all the overtime work she put in finishing her house so early.
Jas is out with Vincent, but before discussing the price of the animal, Marnie hands her the straw hat and her picnic mat. She burns as she takes those from her, not knowing what to say. It’s been two weeks since she ran from the town’s celebration, and even now, she burns with the shame of that day. She starts looking around.
“He’s not-”
“At work, dear,” she says, and finally she starts calculating and writing down something at her desk.
“So you know.”
“Everyone knows,” she says and sounds forcefully cheerful, although she must understand what weight her words have, because the farmer is slouching in a chair, head hanging in her hands.
“There’s nothing going on,” she wails, looking up at Marnie, begging her to believe her – even if she’s just a stranger, asking for a bias against her own blood relative.
“Nothing going on anymore?” Marnie corrects, moves to pat her on the shoulder, signalling at the same time for the young woman to follow her. She nods her head, defeated, and Marnie has to wonder what exactly did this hard-working farmer see in her drunk nephew. She feels relieved to know that she put an end to it. Maybe exactly because she got involved with her good for nothing boy that she feels a bit more forgiving towards her.
She talks her in getting another chicken too, as an apology for having fucked around with her nephew. She doesn’t have the heart to correct this motherly woman that it was, in fact, the other way around. But either way, she’s forgotten.
She knows that because the next day, Penny calls her and asks her to spend the day together with the kids on the beach. She shouldn’t be that surprised to see Sam there too.
***
She asks everyone she gets along with over, after the house expansion is finished. She spent most morning just preparing various recipes, to fit everyone’s taste. Penny arrives first, dropping an apple pie on her kitchen counter and moving around the house to admire Robin’s work. She’s been thinking of doing something about her trailer-living situation for a while.
Abigail and Maru arrive together, with a plate of Robin’s spaghetti. Her and Demetrius decided it’s better to skip the evening, seeing how everyone else there is the same age as their children. She learns that Abigail is supposed to start her second year of university in autumn, and that Maru is going to do her master’s in astrophysics.
She whistles appreciatively, makes fun of her literature degree on the way. The two then huddle together in a corner of the porch, feeding Max stray bits of food and cooing at him when his tail starts wagging.
Sam and Sebastian arrive the last, each carrying a board game in their hands. It’s smart thinking on their side, because she’s not sure what she would have entertained her guests with otherwise. They huddle around the table, filling up plates with at least five different food recipes, passing iced tea and lemonade around. Abigail has this perfect skill of being able to imitate Lewis’ announcement voice perfectly, which in turn makes Sam snort his drink out of his noise. It makes everyone else lose it, and afterwards there’s no awkwardness hanging between them.
Penny helps Sam clean up in the kitchen, and they’re gone for way longer than necessary, though everyone else at the table is polite enough not to comment on it. Abigail and Maru, sitting one across the other, keep looking at each other while the other is not looking, and Abigail might be eating so much chocolate cake that she risks getting sick.
Sebastian sits next to her, smiling softly at a story that Penny is telling, from their time together in high-school. She should, technically, feel left out of the loop, but each time she mentions someone unknown, or a habit they used to have as a teenage group, Sebastian leans over closer to her, and whispers explanations into her ear. His voice, low and smooth, makes her feel like she’s melting down her chair.
Sam and Sebastian go out for a smoke, and she’s following them too, asking for a cigarette from Sebastian, letting her lighter pass around in a circle. The sun has already set, and there’s only the soft buzzing sound of her lamp in the air. The boys are talking about their rehearsal schedule, ask her over sometime, which she happily agrees to.
“Hey,” Sam says, kicking at her leg with his shoe. “Are you single?”
“What the fuck?!”
Sam raises his hands in the air, talking with his cigarette between his teeth. “Don’t shoot the messenger!”
She was ready to punch his elbow, but is now lowering her arm, frowning at him. Behind Sam, Sebastian continue smoking, refusing to get himself involved in this mess.
“Whose messenger?” she asks, though there’s a teasing edge in her voice, clearly proving that she doesn’t believe anything else but his own curiosity brought him to this rudeness.
“Look man – uhm, woman I guess, we’re all friends here, no judgement zone.”
“You just laughed at Maru for liking math two minutes ago!” she points out, this time her kicking his leg.
“You can just not answer the question,” Sam says, pacifying, turning towards Sebastian to offer him his lighter, as he’s already on his second cigarette.
“No, it’s fine.” She feels embarrassed for causing a scene, when it’s not even such a big deal. “I am single.”
She starts walking a bit away, making it seem like she’s inspecting the shrub just next to the stairs.
“So no Shane?” this time it’s Sebastian asking, which is surprising because she did not expect him to care.
“No Shane,” she confirms, her voice a bit weaker than she intended it to be.
Sam punches the air in a victorious movement, grinning at her.
“Thank God, that guy’s a fucking asshole.”
He shivers a bit in the cold night air, wearing only a t-shirt, and with a goodbye thrown over his shoulder, he goes back inside. Sebastian moves his hand in the air a bit, gesturing to his unfinished smoke, but she’s still not making a move to go back.
“But him and Penny… totally a thing, right?”
“Totally,” Sebastian says, and they both burst out laughing.
***
When Abigail phoned to tell her about Luau, she actually mostly whined that summer festivals are the most boring ones, because everyone is so busy tending to crops and making the most out of the long days. The farmer herself was actually taking a break, at the height of the summer heat, with a glass of iced water, but counting down the minutes before she’d be back in the garden, pulling out the weeds and gathering ripened fruits.
She still gets invited to Luau with everyone else; somewhat of a temporary, potentially forever fixture to their group. There’s a gaping hole opening in her stomach when she thinks of this, anxiety bubbling all inside her body making her feel sick. She feels like something terrible surely must happen soon, considering how much joy she gets from all these people.
She has sent some stuff to mayor Lewis, to add to the potluck soup: fresh tomato, some mushrooms, basil. But still, the thing looks completely inedible.
“Are we trying to kill the governor?” she asks, as she’s carefully looking at the bowl in her hands.
Sebastian laughs, turning his upside down in the sand. She’d really like to do the same thing.
“It’s tradition!” Maru explains, frowning at her brother.
“Are we choosing governors based on the quality of their stomach?” she tries again, this time sniffing at the stuff. Its consistency looks absolutely… gluey.
Sam joins the laughter this time, and Sebastian pats Maru’s shoulder in some attempt at an excuse. Abigail is the only one who actually eats the stuff, though her face turns somewhat pale as soon as she is done. The governor looks like he is perfectly fine, and even praises their soup, which makes everyone visibly relax.
***
Maru’s birthday was a solitary thing; just another ordinary working day, celebrated only with chocolate cake in the evening with the entire family. Robin builds her another bookshelf, Demetrius and Sebastian get the money for a new telescope. No other guests are invited, though random gifts still find their way to her mailbox: a stray astrology book, a new case for her glasses.
Sam’s not that different, though they all heard the rumours that immediately after his shift, he visited the museum, and spent a very, very long time there. They meet on Friday night at the Saloon though, so that the band can play and the others can cheer. They’re spectacular, as usual, and when doing something they love, all three of them look younger than she has ever seen them.
Penny is at her side, an arm looped around her waist, and they’re both swaying their bodies on the rhythm of the music. Sam winks in their direction, though the redhead pretends she doesn’t see it.
***
On one of their river discussions, Sebastian mentions frogs to her once; something she’s been terrified of for as long as she remembers. But there’s just such a soft smile on his face, and his voice is so calm: and as such, she thinks to give it a try. Which is exactly why he finds her one day, as he goes to visit Sam, by the river bank, on all fours, staring into the water.
She yelps when he hears him calling out to her, fluttering her arms in the air in a panic. It’s that movement that makes her stumble forward in the water. She doesn’t know how to swim, but the water is low enough to not be a problem, but as she gets up, sitting on her ass in the middle of the river, she scowls at him.
“I hate you,” she says.
He smiles, and with the sun at his back, it’s the most beautiful sight she’s seen. He offers her a hand, which she accepts gratefully, trying to remain as dignified as possible, considering that her clothes are now stuck to her body and there might be some mud on her butt.
“What were you doing?” he asks, and she immediately reddens under his attention.
She mumbles her answer; she’s a terrible liar, so she doesn’t even try. This time, Sebastian actually laughs at her, and she crosses her hands at her chest, both indignant and cold.
“I hate you,” she says again, this time accentuating each of her words. But there’s no fire behind it, so he ignores her remarks. Instead, he unzips his hoodie and, slowly, places it on her shoulders.
“But-” she starts, already moving to remove it, give it back, refuse the help, her natural instinct kicking in. He hasn’t stepped back, and having him so close, she notices the subtle smell of his aftershave, the dark marks under his eyes. She wants to get on her tiptoe and let her fingers run through his hair, so soft from up this close. Then he speaks, the magic breaking, and she moves her eyes down to her shoes, shy all of the sudden.
“Sam’s living real close, so it’s really no problem.”
He’s trying very hard not to move his eyes away from hers, face burning red with embarrassment – and only then does she realize she’s wearing a white shirt, and she’s wet –
“Oh,” she says, lamely, moving her arms through the sleeves and zipping it up. “I… I’ll wash it and bring it back to you.”
“Yeah, don’t worry about it,” he says, before awkwardly saying his goodbyes. Sam will chew him out for being late, and Abigail will frown at him for not letting them know about this ahead of time.
But their new farmer will stand by the river bank for a long time still, looking down at the water, even when Vincent passes her by and laughs at the wet pool that dripped at her feet.
***
She likes taking the mountain path, especially during hot summer days: less people to stop and chat with under the sun, more shade from the trees, chances to see a wild bunny or a squirrel, maybe picking up some wild fruit. She learnt to enjoy these things, that felt like such a chore back in the day, when she was simply a child helping out her relatives. Maybe because, from start to finish, in everything she does for her farm, she leaves a part of herself in there.
She’s as familiar with Robin’s garden as she is with her own, and that’s why it takes her brain a bit to catch up with what she is seeing.
She didn’t even expect to see Sebastian at all, and especially not like… this. Sprawled under his motorcycle, the picture perfect of her dream boy from high-school. It’s then when it dawns on her that she might have some other reasons too, for visiting Robin today, for picking the mountain path, for going to the mines so often, even if she’ll never admit it to anyone else.
For a second, she hates him so much for having been so kind to her, for having taken care of her, for his beautiful smiles and his unending understanding. For having made her like him so much, when this recluse and silent man seems to dislike everything that she is starting to like lately.
She crushes the feeling coming up in her chest; the despair and the need to go and run as far away from him, before they make eye contact, before her beating heart goes into override.
Sebastian heard her approaching footstep though, and as he’s coming up, t-shirt clinging to his chest, she closes her eyes. God help her not to jump this man right here and now.
“Hey you,” he says, the corner of his lips lifting up a bit seeing her.
She waves, taking a deep breath as she approaches him, taking a seat on the outside bench. He picks up the tool that he needed, and goes back to work. She stays put right where she is, watching him.
“You know, it’s fascinating to watch someone do something I know nothing about,” she laughs, thinking of her useless literature degree as well, her dirt stained nails and her dead-end job back in the city, so opposed to his programming skills and the coppery smell of his motorcycle.
“That’s how I feel when you talk about farm upgrades with mom,” he says, and then asking her for another tool – it’s the round one with a yellow handle.
She shifts closer; he gets out from under the metal labyrinth of his bike enough to nod at her in thanks when she hands it to him. But he understands her feeling better than he manages to put it into words, especially since he’s been an outcast in the village for so long; heck he’s not sure anyone else but her even accepts what he’s working, let alone understand it.
But if there’s someone who can get it, it’s certainly the city girl who gave up everything to become a farmer. Much as he wants to drop everything here just for a shot at the big city. It’s the same strangling hope in his voice, that she’s detected the first time they met, when he talks about his short escapades.
He gets up, wiping his hands on a dirty old rag. There’s a dark stain on his cheek that makes him so incredibly cute, and yet the contrast couldn’t be more obvious with his muscles.
“You could come with me next time,” he says, and he purposefully looks at her, digging out her reactions.
She blushes, all red, prettily and opens her mouth to say something, closes it again. Then, with a bit too much eagerness, that makes her seem just a bit too desperate to do the right thing, she says:
“I’d love to.”
“Great,” he says, and this time it’s a full smile that he graces her with.
They move to enter the house now, the sun setting at their back, and he holds the door open for her. She has to squeeze by him, so close that she can feel the smell of oil mingled with his sweat, and the always present soft aroma of soap.
Robin is in the kitchen, preparing hot chocolate for everyone; Abigail is over too, in Maru’s room, the two’s laughter loud enough to be heard from downstairs. Demetrius is in his office, researching something in one of his biology tomes.
She immediately moves to help Robin; now familiar with the layout of her kitchen, with everyone’s favourite mug. His mother yells at Sebastian to go and take a shower before even daring to enter her kitchen, which is exactly the reason why he moves closer to her instead, loudly kissing her cheek.
Robin shrieks, hitting him with the spoon she’s holding in her hand. Their guest watches the scene with a soft smile; she likes it when there’s no bitterness between the two, which is something that comes way easier when no one else in their family is around.
She presents Robin with her first goat cheese; it’s experimental yet, really I have no idea if it’s any good, but she gathers her in her arms anyway, thanking her from the bottom of her heart. She carefully places it in her fridge.
And while Robin goes to Demetrius’ office, forcing a break out of this man as they plan to drink their hot chocolate together, she’s tasked to bringing up the girls’. She knocks, but it still doesn’t feel like sufficient incessant to stop whatever they were doing, because when she opens the door, Maru’s in Abigail arms, having a somewhat lost look on her face. Abigail’s lipstick is all over Maru’s neck, and smeared around her lips, and both their mouths are pulsing red with the pressure of shared kisses.
She blushes under their eyes, hates to have interrupted what she just did. It’s worse than if they were having sex, because the tension in the air is so thick she can choke on it.
“R-Robin said-” she tries, but she’s so embarrassed that she just leaves the tray on the desk, and all but bolts down the stairs.
Shit, she thinks.
“Shit,” she exclaims out loud as well. She’s so wind up she doesn’t hear the footsteps following her, and she almost screams when Abigail’s hand comes down her shoulder.
“Hey, look, let’s be chill about it and keep it a secret, yeah?”
“Of course,” she nods her head. “And I’m really sorry…”
“Our fault for being daring enough not to lock the door. But in our defence, we didn’t think that would happen,” Abigail says, winking at the other woman, before moving upstairs, probably to calm down her lover.
The theme of her life is that she is a big, stupid, idiotic fool. She’s been jealous for months on a relationship that didn’t even exist, and now she feels guilty and embarrassed all over again for what she did when overcome by those emotions. She stands in the middle of the hallway, hating herself so much that she would burst into flames if she had magical powers.
Sebastian finds her eventually, grounds her back to reality with a soft touch against her elbow and a soft call of her name. She startles like she’s been shot, almost jumping out of her skin, before things start refocusing around her. Sebastian, after his shower, smells like pine and mint, and he’s wearing shorts.
“Come on,” he says, slowly guiding her back to the kitchen, where their drink probably went cold already. At the back of his leg, Sebastian has a tattoo: a man lying face down, ten swords hanging above his body.
“That’s cool,” she nods her head at the design, sipping from her hot chocolate.
“Thanks. Sweet sixteen present, teenage rebellion and everything.”
“I ran away from home when I was sixteen,” she says, and Sebastian rises his eyebrows, clearly sceptical.
“For real!” she laughs. “I came here, to gramps.”
“Can’t remember you ever being up here,” he says, but now he’s curious.
“Well, of course, he called my mom the second I entered the house, and next morning she came to pick me up, but still.”
Sebastian snorts at her story, and she’s beaming at him with the largest smile possible, having gotten such a reaction out of him. It seems like it’s so easy for her to rile him up, or to get him involved enough in what she’s doing that he can’t filter his reactions anymore.
He walks her home that evening; she insisted he didn’t need to go through the trouble, since she’s out even later all the time, but Robin pushed, especially since Abigail was to sleep over, so she didn’t need Sebastian to walk her home.
In the end, she had company on the way home.
“Sorry for the trouble,” she says. Sebastian is smoking again, and only shakes his head. They continue their conversation from earlier, about how they used to be as kids and teenagers, periods in time that feels very far-away. Then she tells him of her past job, how she used to want to kill herself every time she entered the building, how there was no more city around her, and just the clutch of overwork and need for money.
She breathes easier here, she says. She hasn’t seen the stars in years, she adds.
She’s looking up at the sky, but Sebastian is looking at her.
She’s seemed lost on that first day, overwhelmed as she looked around at her inherited plot of land, and he’s given her two weeks maximum to survive in there. And here she is, rounding on six months, looking like she’s always belonged.
She hands him his sweater, thanks him again, in that sweet voice that matches her face, but not her personality when she’s swearing. He wishes the road between their houses was longer, longer than to Zuzu City, so long that they could have the entire night at their disposal.
***
“You’re late,” she says, from where she sits on the pier, her feet just a few centimetres above the water surface.
She’s barefoot, and she’s wearing a thin and short dress, and showing so much skin that Sebastian is a bit distracted at first. Technically, they haven’t set a meeting time, but he is indeed the last of the villagers to arrive on the beach for the dance of the moonlight jellies. By now, the others are also grouped together, leaving her alone.
She pats the space next to her. He sits down, yawning.
“Sorry, I was up until 3am reading a new book.”
She lights up then, shoots question after question at him: about his favourite authors and books, hints at the volumes he knows she’s seen on his shelf. They decide to buddy read a book together, and the next day he finds her favourite novel in his mailbox, he sends his instead. His are in pristine condition, while hers are underlined all over, notes scrambled over the margins that he spends a lot of time trying to decipher, corners dog-eared. The first few are a hit and miss, then slowly, as they go through the volumes, writing long texts and handwritten note with their thoughts on it or calling each other late into the night, they start to figure each other’s state, collections growing on each side.
On Penny’s birthday, no one can find the young woman almost the entire day. For that matter, they had the same problem with Sam too.
On Abigail’s birthday, she knocks on the farmer’s door in the middle of the night. The other woman is sleepy, bleary eyed, and she knows that something serious is going on because Abigail doesn’t even make fun of her pyjamas. She opens the door, wordlessly. Makes some tea, as Abigail plops on the rug on the floor, nuzzling Max.
She passes her a steaming cup of tea, sits in front of her in much the same manner.
“What happened?”
It takes Abigail a long time to reply, and when she does, she stumbles over words.
“I-I came out to my parents. Let’s say they didn’t take it too well. Sebastian lives with M-Maru so it didn’t feel like the smartest move, and Sam’s mother already has enough things to worry about. I had no-nowhere else to go.”
She shouldn’t be this surprised when the farmer leans closer, wrapping her arms around her, squeezing her close. Abigail reaches up her hands, tugs at the pyjama top and starts sobbing. There’s a large wet mark on the other woman’s shoulder when she is done, though she doesn’t seem to notice it as she’s running around her house, pulling out a rolled up mattress and building a make-shift bed in the middle of the room. She’s gentle as she moves Abigail to her bedroom, helps her in bed, petting at her hair, and chanting it’ll be okay over and over again.
Abigail’s already asleep when she moves to the kitchen, scrolling through her contacts list. It takes a few seconds before the person at the other end picks up, and Sebastian’s voice sounds muffled. She imagines him for a second, face half-hidden in his pillow, dishevelled hair. Then:
“It’s Abbie.”
The next day, Sam and Sebastian show up on her doorstep at 6am with chocolate cake, and they barely even greet her before moving inside, slamming open the door to the room where Abigail’s sleeping, essentially waking her up. But they also jump on the bed, squeezing themselves in the small space, peppering her face with kisses, even as she screams at them to stop, that they’re gross. But she’s laughing.
Over breakfast (eggs and salad and chocolate cake), they discuss what they should do next. There’s enough space here for two people, and it makes most sense to have Abigail live here for a while, until things calm down a bit.
“Did,” Abigail starts, unsure, playing with a tissue, “Maru tell your parents?”
“Yeah,” Sebastian says, and he feels like he really needs a smoke.
“I guess it went well.”
Abigail ends with a laugh that resounds dry and bitter in the room. Sam’s leaning towards her, holding her hand.
“Your parents will come around,” he says. “They just need to get over the initial shock.”
Except Abigail, everyone else nods. It’s hard to imagine Pierre staying mad at anyone, let alone his own daughter. But Pelican Town is a small enough place that such a thing might take a long time to forgive in the eyes of others. After the guys leave that first day, Abigail spends the entire day in bed. The next one, she joins her host for coffee, asks about the pumpkin patches.
When the Stardew Valley Fair rolls around, she helps the farmer fill Robin’s truck with her products. The older woman hugs Abigail that day like she’s a long-lost daughter, which makes her cry all over again.
***
The Fair itself is nice; the trees around had already started to turn orange, and it gives the place a really cosy atmosphere. Almost everyone in town buys something from her stall, and Marnie even comments that she fits right in. She enters Lewis’ competition with her pumpkins, but she loses to Shane’s chickens, which is a totally deserved win on his side, though she hates to admit.
Abigail makes up with her family that day, because the second she steps in town, her mother drops a crane of jars, swears, and runs up to her baby girl to hug the life out of her, cry and apologize. Pierre is sniffling at his stall, next to her – and she passes him her handkerchief.
Then, because Abigail is Abigail, she kisses Maru in front of everyone. George whistles, loudly and everyone laughs, which ends any discussion on the topic. With this scene, the farmer thinks she has just fallen a bit in love with the man herself.
Shane approaches her, to boast his win.
“Congrats,” she says, though she is pointedly not looking at the bow pinned to his chest. Jas has already been over, stopping everyone and showing it off.
“You’ve been avoiding me,” he says, and she’s glad the stall stands between them, because she knows he would have liked to be much closer than this.
“Glad you took the hint.”
“Is the freak gang that entertaining, little girl?”
There he goes again, with his horrible nicknames and that shit-eating grin. She hopes he’d choke on all the bullshit he’s spewing, some day.
“Yes.”
She sounds firm, serious and soft at the same time. There’s a small smile on her lips as well, and probably it’s that combination that makes Shane realize she’s entirely truthful. So, he laughs. For sure, he must find her stupid and foolish, and yet she only feels relieved as he watches him walk away, shaking his head like he’s disappointed.
As evening approaches, Sebastian stops by her stall. It’s almost empty now, most of her products sold earlier in the day. He sits next to her, smoking, looking at Sam winning the big prize at darts for Penny. She all but swoons.
Sebastian gets up, throwing his cigarette to the ground and stepping on it.
“Do you want to walk around?”
She nods, he helps her up. She asks Pierre to watch over the rest of her stuff, and when they move from stall to stall, her and Sebastian are so close that their shoulder almost touch, though none moves to put more space between them. She keeps stealing glances at him, as he explains to her about his favourite stalls, and how it used to look like back in his childhood.
They eat Gus’ famous burgers, and her heart almost stops beating when he leans closer, pressing a tissue to the corner of her mouth. He starts by looking her in the eye, but then her own eyes drop to the flutter of his eyelids, the curve of his nose, eventually settling on the plumpness of his lips – and his gaze follows suit, tracing the same path on her face. They sit in silence, staring at each other, until Gus’ boisterous laugh makes them both startle.
She mumbles her thanks, looking at her plate, too afraid to look at Sebastian.
They play darts too, though she only manages to hit the target only once, and only on its furthest ring.
“Sam rigged this game, didn’t he?” she asks, which makes him smile.
Sebastian pays for his turn, raises his eyebrows at her when she’s expectantly watching him. He throws the first dart while still looking at her, and it hits bull’s eye. She screams in delight, clapping her hands together.
He moves his hand to the back of his head, embarrassed at her reaction, even if he so desperately wanted it in the first place. He asks her if she wants any of the prizes, but she shakes her head. As cheesy as it might be, for her it’s enough that she can enjoy the fair, and that she can do it alongside him.
***
When she counts her savings the next day, it’s not as much as she would have liked. So she starts going to the mine again, because she can sell well everything that she finds in there, and for a couple of weeks, it works out just fine. Until it doesn’t anymore.
She knows the place is old, but the crack of the stair giving way under her weight was not an expected problem. The lurking animals and the unmapped areas, sure. But not the wooden step of the stairs.
It takes her by surprise, and she doesn’t have fast enough reflexes to find another footing, so she falls all the distance to the ground. She lands on her side, and there’s a terrible crack in the shoulder that makes getting up so, so painful afterwards. She’s bleeding heavily from one of her knees as well, and several bruises are already blooming on her legs and arms.
Her flashlight also went out on impact, so at first she is disoriented, her head booming with the sound of her fall. Then she gets scared, her heartbeat in her throat, and before she can even think more of her wounds, she forces herself to count up to 100, as slowly as she can, bringing her breathing back to normal, forcing her body to refuse the incoming panic attack just yet.
No one knows she’s in the mine right now, so technically even if they were to notice her disappearance, it will take a while until they find her. And it was already dark outside, judging from the last time she looked at her watch, which makes searching for her unsafe until at least tomorrow morning. She can’t just stay here and wait for someone to find her, even if that is all that she truly wants to do.
She winces when she finally raises to her feet. She’s unstable and everything hurts, but she’s most worried about her arm. She tried to pick up her discarded flashlight, but the movement hurt so much she left out an agonized wail.
Tears start biting at her eyes when she bumps into the stairs, after fumbling through the dark for it. She tries not to think of all the steps until the surface, and then her walk back home – and instead tries to take it one step at a time. She can support her weight only on one arm, and her legs hurt each time she raises them, the skin at her knee ripping open a bit more with each move of her leg up. She takes it one at a time, stops often to breathe deeply, give some part of her body some respite. She struggles even more when she finally gets to the broken stair, and she has to cover twice the distance.
When she eventually collapses on the ground at the entrance to the cave, she can smell the fresh night air, and she can hear the rustling of the leaves, and she starts crying. Somewhere down there, where the mine caved in, trapping workers under the stones and dirt and in unending hallways, is the body of her uncle. Of course, she could have easily shared the same fate today, if she would have been a bit higher, if she would have fallen on one of the sharp stones littering the lower floors instead.
She forces herself, again, to just breathe. But even as she makes herself stand up and walk the long way home, her mind is drifting further and further away, the pain now more dulled at the edge.
That’s why she doesn’t catches when someone calls out her name, doesn’t realize she’s not alone anymore until said person catches her arm to make her stop. Unfortunately, it is her hurt arm, and she shrieks, tears pooling at her eyes, as she’s stumbling away.
Sebastian stares at her, mouth agape, looking like he’s just seen a ghost. He moves his eyes over her body, taking in her state, though he’s unsure in some spots, if the stains on her clothes are blood or dirt.
“Shit, you need to see a doctor,” he says, moving closer again, but she flinches upon his approach.
He passes a frustrated hand through his hair. Dumbly, she wonders what he is doing out here, by the river, in the middle of the night.
“Can I touch you?” he asks. He’s still keeping his distance, though he’s looking at her in a strange way, like she’ll fall off her feet at any moment. Although she nods, this time more aware, more in tune with her surrounding, this time around he approaches more slowly, careful with his movements.
She leans onto him, sighing in relief.
“This will hurt,” he says, and before she has time to think about it, he gathers her in his arms, head at the crook of his neck, her good arm around his shoulder, as he starts carrying her. She just whimpers pathetically, at his chest, blushing furiously and trying not to overthink the gesture, or her weight, or the fact that they’re stopping in front of Harvey’s clinic at fuck knows what time.
Harvey answers on the second knock, looks at the state she’s in and simply mumbles I need my coffee, allowing them inside. Sebastian is still carrying her the flights of stairs up, before finally setting her down on a bed. He’s breathing hard by now, but he’s not complaining. In the light, she can see how wild and panicked his eyes are, how deep his frown is as he searches her body for wounds.
Now that they can see, her shoulder is at a weird angle.
“I’ll have to set it back,” Harvey says, sipping loudly from a fresh cup of coffee, sitting on a chair next to her bed. He looks up at Sebastian, checks the time on his wrist watch. “You can go if you want to.”
“I’ll stay,” he replies almost immediately, making her shiver on the bed, a movement that both men catch. “If that’s okay with you.”
She nods, pleading with Harvey to let him stay, to which he agrees. His job is not made any more difficult, since Sebastian looks perfectly healthy, the weird sleep schedule aside. She doesn’t notice when Sebastian moves, shifts so he can sit next to her on the bed, wrapping his fingers around hers.
Harvey descends like a shadow above her, snapping her bones back in place. She squeezes Sebastian’s hand in her good one, so hard that his bones crack, her fingers digging in his skin until they draw blood. But she only inhales sharply, letting out a string of soft curses, teeth grinding together in pain. When she looks at them, she feels only betrayed, because they both clearly knew what was to come, and did their best to make it as fast as possible.
Harvey hands her a glass of water and some painkillers, and only then does she realize she’s still holding onto Sebastian’s hand. She lets go slowly, smiling at him, patting his hand in silent thanks, though Sebastian cannot smile back at her.
“So what happened?” Harvey asks, moving on to cutting open the leg of her pants, cleaning up the cuts, disinfecting her wounds.
She speaks, evenly, though her panic shows through in some parts, and Sebastian rubs calming circles on her back with his palm. She leans into his touch, swaying in place, eyes fluttering closed, opening them again at a slower and slower pace.
“You should sleep here tonight, so I can monitor your condition,” Harvey says, and Sebastian rises, helping her lay down on the bed, covering her with the blanket, as she’s already fallen asleep.
The two men move downstairs in silence. The clock on the wall shows 4 a.m.
***
She wakes to Granny knitting on a chair next to her bed. It’s such an odd image that it takes her a while to recall all the events of the night before. Then, she startles upright.
“Easy, darling, all’s good,” Granny says, though she didn’t even look up at the younger woman.
She learns that Marnie visited her farm earlier, feeding her animals. Abigail took Max to her place, Penny came by with pie. And Sebastian is downstairs, on his 3rd coffee of the day, not having gone home since he first dropped her at the clinic.
Granny smiles to herself when the patient looks longingly at the door, her skin on fire.
***
Harvey keeps her for one more night, though she is feeling alright, and she insists so to everyone coming around to check on her. She thought Robin will pick her up, something that she agreed to after much pestering from the woman, but instead the one waiting for her in front of the clinic, leaning on Robin’s truck, is Sebastian.
“Mom had something come up,” he says, moving to get her backpack, filled with the stuff from the mine and some clothes that Abigail picked for her. He opens the truck’s door for her.
“I could have just walked,” she says, though her leg is still stiff.
He shuts the door on her, and until he joins her in, she has time to mull over what exactly she wants to say.
“Thank you,” she beings. “For everything and I’m sorry.”
She fidgets on the spot, as he starts the engine and begins driving.
“Why are you apologizing?” his voice is soft, the corner of his mouth tilted up just the tiniest bit.
“For all the trouble?”
It sounds more like a question,
“You know I’d gladly be troubled for you.”
She does not know that, in fact. She turns to look out the window, at the stretch of trees on the road to her farm, and she wonders when she became such a person to others.
When they arrive, she invites him in, but he politely refuses. She needs to rest. But he does walk back to the car, fiddling with the gloves compartment, coming back with something in his arms. He presents it to her, carefully wrapped, and watches attentively as she opens it, catching her reaction.
In her hands, she has the first volume of what she knows is Sebastian’s favourite comic.
Abigail will tell her, later on, that before he came to pick her up, he drove all the way to Zuzu City so he could pick a copy for her. So on an autumn rainy day, she makes herself a cup of tea, and curls in her bed, opening the book.
She takes her sweet time, searching every detail in the art, rewriting particular quotes in her journal. Then her thoughts fly without her even wanting to, to a particular someone she’d like to have next to her, to explain her favourite parts. She’d like to have him by her side more than that though, as she wakes and works, a person that makes it so much easier for her to just be.
She’s a fool – she tries to tell herself, hugging the book close to her chest. There’s nothing she can offer Sebastian that would make him stay in this village he so obviously loathes. She’s just dumb enough to have fallen for the man she cannot even bring herself to ask to love her back. But the image is now stuck on a loop in her mind: stray sun rays filtering through the curtain, and Sebastian in the door frame, with her mug of coffee in his hands, offering it to her as she wakes.
She tortures herself with thoughts like this afterwards, whenever she finds a moment of respite in her work, as she hurries to sell the last of her crops, to preserve the mushrooms, fill the sill with grains for the animals and the storage outside with wood.
***
The first time she gets out of her property after the accident is to attend a dinner on Robin’s birthday. In the town here, it’s not a big deal, so she feels particularly honoured to have the older woman invite her.
However, Robin sends Sebastian to pick her up. She’s on the porch, bundled up in her favourite sweater and a shawl, petting Max, when he pulls up in her courtyard on his motorcycle. He’s wearing a leather jacket, and as he moves to get her helmet, she’s only staring at the way his muscles are straining under the material.
He helps her put it on, clasping it under her chin, his fingers lingering on her skin, and they stare in each other’s eyes for a few long seconds. Then, he holds out a hand, helping her get up, and guides her arms around his waist.
She’s basically glued to his back, and she wonders if he can hear how loudly her heart is beating. He tightens his hold against her arms, signalling that she should hold on tighter, and she does, even though she closes her eyes to will the embarrassment away.
Robin welcomes her with an enthusiastic hug, and she’s delighted to see Abigail has been invited as well, and she’s now sitting next to Maru at the table, discussing something with Demetrius. She’s sent her present in the mail earlier this day, more goat cheese and a few quartz pieces, and the redhead thanks her happily.
When she passes Sebastian on the hallway, she stops for a few seconds to thank him for the ride, warmly clasping his hand in hers. Then just as quickly she lets go, joins everyone else in the kitchen.
Most of the conversation is just the parents dotting on the newly formed couple, though there is a passing comment of the pumpkin soup currently served being Sebastian’s favourite food, so she makes a note to ask the recipe from Robin the next day. There’s an anecdote about how Demetrius and Robin first met, though it makes both their children cringe at how young and lovesick they still sound recalling it. Abigail talks about her studies, Maru continues, though their degrees are vastly different.
The farmer turns to look at Sebastian.
“What about your work?”
The conversation stills, a bit awkward. No one ever asks what Sebastian is doing, since freelancing is such a grey area in their mind – though they fail to see that almost everyone in this town is the goddamn owner of their own work.
“Well,” he starts, playing with the food on his plate. “Actually I’ve got a promotion recently and a really big project coming up.”
She clasps her hands together, beaming up at him.
“That’s wonderful, isn’t it?”
Everyone at the table nods politely, Robin even congratulation her son. But he thinks of her question, and lately the answer seems to be no, because each of his successes brings him closer to leaving Pelican Town, and he’s not sure he wants to anymore.
***
By the end of the evening, everyone is more or less tipsy, made soft by the drink and the warmth of the house. Robin insists that she should sleep over, afraid to let her return home this late. She almost puts Sebastian and Maru in one room, but the daughter refuses so vehemently, that Sebastian instead just tells her he’ll take the couch. Their mother stares for a long time after both of her children, as each turns to their guest, and instead decides to retire for the night, together with Demetrius.
That’s how she ends up sitting on Sebastian’s bed, as he’s searching for a towel and some clothes for her.
“Maru is leaving next spring for a research program,” he explains. “That’s why-”
“She wants to make the most out of it,” she continues.
“Yeah.”
He understands the feeling; it’s why he’s more often than not out of his house these days, afraid that one day he’ll have to root himself out of this place, and he will leave many things behind to regret. And many people he will miss.
He throws the clothes in her direction, points her to the direction of the bathroom.
She’s feeling more awake after the shower, and she’s drying her hair with a towel as she enters his room again. She wears one of his hoodies, but on her it looks almost like a dress, coming down halfway to her knees, sleeves rolled several times over. The sweatpants are equally as large.
“I like your socks,” she says, wiggling her toes, an ugly, green gooey face dancing with the movement.
She’s way too freakin cute, Sebastian thinks, though he only smiles at her as he passes her to go and take a shower. When he returns, she’s snuggled in his bed, a comic book in hands, the sequel to the present he’s given her before. She doesn’t hear him come in until he plops on the couch, and then she looks up at him, cheeks immediately flushing.
“Aren’t you cold?”
He’s wearing a tank top, loose enough around the chest area that she can see his collarbones. She knows she’s staring, yet she can’t tear her eyes away from the skin of his arms, or the taut stretch of his top against his chest. When eventually, finally, she moves her gaze up to his face, he’s smirking, clearly having caught her in the act.
“I never get cold,” he replies, shrugging, though he tenses the muscles on his arm, and her gaze immediately snaps back there.
He’s outright laughing right now, which makes her turn her back to him, pulling the blanket over her entire body and mumble an embarrassed good night.
But she has a very, very hard time falling asleep.
***
“I don’t wanna go,” she whines at Sam, pulling at his clothes, dragging him away from the maze.
He just laughs, tugging her harder instead. His little brother scared her as soon as she arrived for Spirit’s Eve, and since then she refused to leave his side, on edge all the time.
The town is decorated in skulls and supersized spiders, and Abigail took to walking around with a witch hat on and a sword in her hands, which everyone agreed was cool but also relatively worrisome.
She swears, loudly, clinging even closer to Sam’s arm, when Sebastian joins them, carrying two glasses of punch. He chuckles, but still passes one of them to her.
“You don’t celebrate Spirit’s Eve in the city?”
“Well,” she says, taking a large gulp of her drink. “There it’s more about getting shit-faced in a club, and less about your heart going for a run when you turn the corner of the street.”
“Amen, sister,” Sam yells, grabbing her glass and downing it all in one go.
“Hey!” She punches his shoulder.
“It made you laugh though!” he says, leaving so he can get her a refill, and well, he’s not wrong, because now she feels way more at ease than before.
Sebastian shifts closer to her, for which she is grateful.
“Is it really that bad?”
“I just hate jump scares,” she whines, again. “And I’m sure the maze is filled with them.”
“You know you don’t have to do it if you don’t want to, right? We can just sit on a bench and watch the skeletons.”
“We?”
He’s pressing his palm to his neck. “Well I’ve cleared the maze every year, so.”
So they sit, together.
***
Back in the city, she can never tell when it will snow anyway – but here in town, the air is crisp and cold for days before. Robin shows up one early winter morning, and helps her isolate the house as much as possible, around the windows and the doors, so that no cold seeps in, so that all the warmth stays. She might need to renovate the house next year, but for now, it will have to be enough.
Robin sips at the coffee she’s been offered, and pretends not to see Sebastian’s books sprawled all around the farmer’s house, on the kitchen counter, on the bed, next to the TV. She also equally doesn’t comment on one of Sebastian’s jackets hanging on the back of the chair that the young girl is currently occupying. Robin takes another sip, and smiles in her cup.
Back in the city, when it snows, it never piles; part car fumes, part all the people walking around doing their business. But here in the town, when she wakes up one morning, all she can see around her house is a wide expanse of whiteness. Max runs past her, jumps into the snow, comes back in so wet but so happy, that she doesn’t mind having to towel him near the fire from the fireplace.
But she’s left with too much time on her hands; she watches Queen of Sauce almost obsessively, following along in her own kitchen, surprised when her food is actually good. She starts knitting, phoning Granny each time she stumbles through a row. She reads, almost obsessively. And she does go to the mines, but for shorter periods now, scared of not repeating her injury, even if the Adventurer’s Guild repaired the broken stairs.
Then Sam calls her over one day and welcomes her to the world of DnD, him and Sebastian more or less forcing everyone else to start a new campaign with them. It’s the happiest she’s seen them both, so she tries to keep up with the characters, stops to ask about plot holes. They explain things in tandem, finishing each other’s sentences, for almost an entire hour, because you see, this race can’t have this magical power. Sam pulls out his guide, passing it around so that everyone can look up the kind of character they want to create.
That first evening together, that’s all they do in fact: filling stat sheets, searching reference pictures on the internet. And they eat Jodi’s delicious snacks, gossip a bit about Marnie and mayor Lewis’ affair, that the whole town knows about but somehow only the two of them missed this detail.
They turn it into a weekly meeting, rotating their meeting place through all their houses, sometimes the Stardrop Saloon in the days when they know it’ll be more empty and calm. They fight imaginary battles, Sam’s voice guiding them through cities and enemies and friends, saving each other’s asses and forging alliances. It’s the best fun she’s had since arriving in the town, though if anyone were to tell her this a year ago, she would have laughed directly into their faces.
They break the tradition only once, when instead they decide to go ice-skating. Each winter, if the temperatures are low enough, the lake freezes, making it a perfect rink. To be fair, it’s her favourite sport – probably only sport that she’s so excited to do, that she jumps on the spot as she waits for her turn to lend a pair of skates.
She’s looking a bit ridiculous, wearing 3 different layers and one of her grandpa’s padded vests, a beanie on top of her head. Sebastian finds her just really cute. She skates around holding one of Maru’s hands, Abigail the other – because she’s the only one who doesn’t really know how to do it.
Then Sam starts a game of tag with Jas. So they start chasing each other around, yelling when they’re caught only to start again. Penny almost trips, but Sam’s catches her hand and stabilizes her, even if he’s it now. Abigail and Maru skate around holding hands, working more like one person than two separate ones, though Abigail lets go only when it’s her turn to chase someone; and she’s fast as a flash, her turn over in under a minute.
She touches the farmer’s back, and she’s left in the middle of the frozen lake, trying to think who to go after. Her intention is to go after Vincent, his voice shrill with happiness when he realizes he has to run away from her, but her skates catch in the ice.
She only has time to gasp out a swearword, preparing to fall flat on her face. But there’s an arm around her waist, though the angle is awkward and her weight too heavy, so both of them fall to the ground.
She blinks, trying to make sense of the new position. She didn’t hit the cold ice, instead Sebastian’s body cushioned her fall. She’s on top of him, hands on either side of his head, and she’s staring into his eyes. She’s so close that she can feel his chest heaving.
“You good?” he asks, a hand moving to settle around her waist.
It snaps her out of it. “Shit, I’m the one who should be asking that.”
She’s trying to get up, though she’s embarrassed and fumbling, and her first movement just positions her ass on Sebastian’s thighs and crotch area. He shudders, inhaling loudly – and she can feel him stir under her.
“Oh,” is all that she can say, eyes blown wide catching his. Though there’s something more there: curiosity, and a growing interest.
“You guys okay?!” Sam’s voice is distant to her ears, though she waves a hand in the air, to both show that they’re okay and ask for a break from their game. Sebastian says nothing, looking up at her like a man found guilty of murder, face flushed, though he hasn’t moved his hand from her waist.
She grinds her hips, pushing harder against Sebastian’s body, watching in fascination as he’s squeezing his eyes shut, a frown on his forehead.
“Stop,” he says, sounding wound up and chocked.
So she does, rolling from on top of him, pulling herself to her feet, smiling when offering him a hand up. Though he’s not smiling back, he takes her hand.
***
“Happy birthday!” she shouts, when Sebastian opens the door to his bedroom, holding up her present to him.
Behind him, music plays loudly, and she can see Sam and Abigail arguing about who gets the last slice of pizza. She’s the last to arrive, but that’s also partially because outside there’s a real blizzard. Penny comes to hug her in greeting, and she high-fives Sam. Most of the time, they just drink and joke around, chatting about random things, his oldest friends telling tales of Sebastian.
After a couple of hours, Sebastian catches her eyes, motions towards the outside. Sam has given up smoking, being more of a social smoker, just like her. But since he got together with Penny, a fact to which they finally admitted after merciless teasing from Abigail, he quit.
They stop in the hallway, putting on their coats – and she hands him the present again, though he hasn’t noticed her coming up with it.
“You might find useful what’s in here.”
So he opens it to find a matching hat and scarf, in a dark navy. They’re clearly handmade, and handmade by her he suspects – and he’s touched by the time and care she had to put in her gift. Nestled between the material, there’s also a frozen tear.
“God, I-I love this. Thank you.”
She beams at him, obviously relieved. He puts the frozen tear carefully in the pocket of his jacket. She helps him with the scarf and the beanie, her hands lingering on his shoulder for a second afterwards, admiring him.
Outside, in the courtyard corner where they’re smoking, there’s a snowman. Sebastian almost feels like kicking it when she mentions in passing that it’s cute.
“I built a snowgoon but Demetrius made me get rid of it, yet Maru’s cute little snowman still stands…”
He didn’t mean to sound this bitter. She shifts, coming in closer, taking his empty hand in hers.
“If I just disappeared, would it even matter?”
He means it like a rhetorical question, just for himself – but she’s strengthening her grip on him, forcing him to look at her. She wants him to understand that she’s entirely serious.
“It would matter to me.”
***
It’s drizzling, a mix of snow and rain, weather suddenly warming up. On the beach, anyway, snow never piles up, and when Sebastian turns around, he finds her standing a few feet away, staring out into the sea. She is drenched, shivering lightly with each gust of wind, and now that her concentration has been snapped by his movement, she’s staring at him instead.
He gestures her closer, and she stops by his side. Now, closer, he can see that she’s shivering more violently than he initially though, and she’s certainly not dressed properly for the weather.
“What are you doing out here?” he asks, softly, pushing some of her hair behind her ear. She closes her eyes, head leaning toward his touch, and he finds himself cupping her cheek without thinking too much about it.
“What are you doing out here?” she counters, blinking up at him.
Maybe it’s the absolutely pathetic state that both of them are into that makes him answer honestly to the question. Or maybe it’s the fact that it’s her.
“Looking out at the bleak horizon… It makes me feel like it’s worthwhile to keep pushing on.”
He shrugs, trying not to look as serious as his statement. Lately, he’s been having more reasons to believe that same thing, but old habits die hard, and there’s a particular calmness in being somewhere where no one else is. Or, he thinks, looking down at her, almost no one.
“I just like the sea,” she says, and any awkwardness that he still felt dissipates with her admission. The water is raging, stirred on by the storm, crashing violently against the pier, and they stand in silence, his hands carefully petting her hair, pulling her closer when she shivers again.
“Fuck, do you want to catch your death?”
He undresses quickly, placing his jacket over her shoulders. It doesn’t make much of a difference, but it’s more waterproof than what she’s wearing, and also carrying his warmth. He pops open the umbrella he’s carrying, and with an arm around her shoulder, pulls her to his chest.
“You know,” he starts, his palm rubbing circles on her back. “I would normally feel anxious doing this with anyone. But somehow, you’re the exception.”
Her head turns, chin resting on his chest so she can look up at him.
“I want to kiss you,” she says, and Sebastian chokes on whatever he wanted to say before. “Can I?”
She’s on her tiptoes now, her lips so close to his that their breathes are mingling, yet she’s giving him the choice of covering the remaining distance. Which he does, hungrily, almost desperate for it, both hands cupping her cheeks as their mouths clash. The umbrella falls into the water, and yet they don’t care enough to notice it.
They stop for a moment, coming up for air, and then they’re back at it, and despite the fire growing at the pit of her stomach, the kiss is languid, exploring, tongue pressing against tongue. Slight movement, a change in their position to deepen the kiss, her fingers now playing in the hair at the nape of his neck, his hands at her waist.
He kisses her like he never kissed somebody else, and went hungry for it all this time. His fingers move under her sweater, and the sudden cold touch makes her break apart. His touch turns comforting, pressing against her skin, and she sighs. Their foreheads meet.
“Fuck, I wanted to do that for so long,” he breathes and she laughs.
“We are two idiots, right?”
“Big idiots,” he nods, and she takes his hand in hers, starts pulling him in the direction of her house.
***
She starts the fire in the house, as he’s slowly undressing layer after layer. In the bathroom, the bathtub is filled with hot water, waiting for him. He’s down to a t-shirt and his boxers when he cups her elbow in his hand.
“Join me?” he asks, voice a bit strained, but firm.
She can only nod, dazed, not trusting that this is not just a dream, afraid that speaking will ruin the moment. He sits down on the edge of the tub, gesturing for her to come closer. She’s standing in front of him, and he’s gentle in guiding her out of her clothes, letting them drop to the floor. He strays from his purpose sometime, to press a kiss against her hip, or at the tip of her fingertips.
When she eventually ends up stark naked, his eyes are hungry, but his touch not, as he guides her inside the hot tub. She sighs in pleasure, closing her eyes. She opens them again when she hears the rustling of clothes, to watch him undress. He’s a bit slow, a bit shy, joining her inside the tub. The water almost spills over. She tries not to think of his cock, the precum leaking. She tries to ignore the uncomfortable heat growing between her legs.
She helps him shampoo his hair, he washes her back. They go off track from time to time, kissing lazingly for a long time, his hands massaging her breasts, her teeth grazing his neck. Until she moans, a loud sound. Until he gasps, her name caught between his lips.
Then, with ease, he helps her out. They share one, large towel, huddling together until they reach her bedroom, giggling like children. They’re almost to the bed when he stops, looks at her.
“We don’t have to do anything.”
He’s a liar, because his cock is pulsing with want and she can feel him against her hip. She pouts.
“But I want you.”
He kisses her pout away, pushes at her shoulder until she falls to the bed with a yelp, hands wrapping against him, taking him down with her. She’s laughing, pleased with having him on top of her, when his mouth moves downwards on her body, kissing against her collarbones, sucking at the skin, biting at the skin, until there’s a dark mark behind. He throws her a pleased grin, moving lower yet again.
Sebastian takes one of her nipples in his mouth, a hand moving up to tease the other. Her hands immediately wrap in his hair and she gasps. He pulls at the sensitive area, with his teeth and his fingers, licking it better immediately afterwards, and she writhes under him. He kisses his path downwards, though his lips kiss at her hips, he bites at her thighs, always circling around where she most wants him.
“Seb,” she whines. “Please.”
He stops his ministrations to look at her, frowning and pouting, hair dishevelled against her pillows, her body flushed all over, his marks so obvious against her skin. He feels himself growing at the sight, though he smirks at her.
“Please what?”
She blushes.
“Please eat me out?”
It sounds like a plead and a question and a prayer and a command all at once, and he’s on her in the blink of an eye, tongue lapping at her folds. Her back arches, but his hands are keeping her in place – and he maintains a constant, slow rhythm.
Until he doesn’t, one of his fingers entering her in full, with ease. Sebastian chuckles.
“You’re so wet, baby.”
Her walls squeeze at the nickname. He adds another finger; watches, transfixed, as it disappears inside with the same ease. He starts pumping them inside her, and the sound of her wet pussy taking it all in is so hot, that he groans.
Buried down in her to the knuckles, he opens his fingers apart. She moans, pushing down, searching for more, more, more. He scissors her, spreading her wide – and his head moves lower yet again, lips kissing against her clit at first.
Then, he adds a third finger. He can feel her stiffen under him, so he pulls her clit in his mouth, rolling his tongue around it, just as he starts pumping his fingers inside her. Now her hands are holding on to her sheets, and she’s mumbling some curses, halfway lost to her pleasure, moans louder and louder as he speeds up.
He raises his head just for a second, to chuckle against her heated pussy.
“Come, baby.”
So she does, and he continue pumping inside of her, letting her ride her orgasm. She still sighs when he pulls out his fingers, immediately missing the feeling of being filled up with him. He moves to pepper her face with kisses, petting at her now sweated forehead.
“You did so well, baby.”
He’s teasing her, knowing how much she likes the nickname. So instead she looks down between their bodies, his cock against his navel, leaking – and looking like the most beautiful dick she has ever seen in her life. It’s not the biggest one she’s seen, but he’s thick and she’s never wanted to taste something more than the cum that’d spill out of it.
Still staring, she moves her hands to grab it, her fingers dancing over it, starting with his leaking tip, spreading his precum all over his length, before stopping with a slight squeeze at its base. Sebastian shivers over her, eyes closed, mouth open in an unspoken prayer, because he’s not sure even god can help him now.
Holding his dick in her hands, she helps him adjust at her entrance. At first, he teases against her cunt, pressing his cock between her folds, rocking his hips back and forth as they both moan in tandem. She’s already dripping over the sheets again.
He grabs at her hand, fingers entwined.
“You ready?”
“For that dick? Born ready,” she says, chuckling, but not moving her eyes away from where he’s starting to push inside her.
“Fuuck,” he says, just as she moans, only the tip in. The stretch is painful, but so fucking delicious and she’s a blabbering mess begging for more, pulling him closer with her free arm. He slams inside her, forcing the rest of his length inside in one go, and she swears. He kisses at her eyebrows, at the tip of her nose, apologizing softly.
“Tell me when to move again,” he says, and true to his words, he seems content to just kiss her, tongue at her neck, words whispered and lost in her hair, but making her shiver nonetheless just because there’s the hot breath so close to her skin. She’s trying to adjust to his entirety of him inside her, not hurtful but not entirely comfortable just yet either, and his mouth now licking at her hypersensitive nipple seems to slowly do the trick.
“Move,” she says, and he does.
He’s slow at first, almost frustratingly so, pulling out almost entirely, before slowly filling her up again. She moans, drawn out sounds, with each movement – and she almost doesn’t notice when the speed picks up, when she starts moving her hips to meet his actions. They’re a mess of grunts and moans, gasps and swears – and he squeezes so hard at her hip when she comes again, the orgasm washing over her with an intensity that it’s almost blinding, that she’s sure he’ll leave bruises.
Sebastian looks like a man in pain, inside her as she’s coming back to herself after the orgasm. She kisses his cheek, hands rubbing against his chest muscles.
“Do you want to cum all over me?”
He almost trips with the haste that he’s pulling out of her. She’s waiting, on her back, tongue lolling out of her mouth. Sebastian rises on his knees – it’s embarrassing that he only needs two more pumps to come. Most of it falls on her tits and neck, though she’s happily licking every bit that she can reach with her tongue, swallowing it all like a good girl.
“Fuck,” Sebastian says, falling next to her on the bed. “You’re so fucking sexy.”
She beams at him, getting closer. They kiss for a while, bored and tired and messy, teeth clanking together, tongue at the corner of the mouth. There’s a string of saliva between their lips when they separate.
She gets up, goes to the toilet, returns all cleaned up, before coming back to the warmth of the bed, dragging the covers over both of them. Sure, the sheets are dirty, but that’s a problem for her future self, because right now, all she wants to do is snuggle at Sebastian’s back, an arm draped over his waist. So that’s what she does.
***
When they wake, they fuck on the kitchen counter, the angle hitting her just right. Truthfully, half of her butt is in the air, her legs wrapped around Sebastian’s torso, as he snaps his hips up in her, deeper and deeper each time. She’s never been so glad she doesn’t have neighbours in her entire life. Maybe because it’s been so long on her part, or because Sebastian is really just that good, she’s loud – and she loves to feel him stirring inside her, with each of her moans and praises.
“So good,” she gasps, fingers digging almost painfully in his back, and he proves his point by ramming into her, ripping a sob of pleasure out of her.
He’s wearing a condom this time around, so there is no mess to clean up, and they drink their coffee afterwards – talking about this and that, not even skimming the topic of what they’re doing, or why.
He kisses her goodbye though.
And on Winter Star, while she’s getting ready for the feast with everyone else, Sebastian comes by. He welcomes him warmly, and he sits on the side of her bed, watching her finish her make-up and doing her hair, and though he doesn’t move, she keeps catching his eyes in the mirror, looking at her every movement hungrily.
“We’re not fucking after all this effort I just put in,” she says, pointedly plucking her lips and applying a bright, red lipstick.
“I want to take you out on a date,” he says, ignoring her childish theatrics, but shaking his head with a soft smile.
“Sure.”
She tries to sound nonchalant, but her heart is beating in her chest. As much as she’d like to have him bend her over the table and take her like a bitch in heat, she’d much prefer him being her boyfriend while he does so.
“Good, let’s go then.”
“Now?” she yelps, when he grabs her hand and walks her towards the entrance.
“Now,” he says. He helps her putting on her beret, she straightens the scarf around his neck. “I’ve already called Sam and told him we won’t make it to the feast.”
“You did? What did he say?”
“To have condoms on me,” Sebastian says, face serious, which is why it makes her snort.
“And?” she’s wiggling her eyebrows at him. “Do you?”
He slaps her butt as she’s getting out instead of a reply. She turns at him, the slightest darkness in her eyes.
They go for a ride, promise not forgotten. They drive for a long time, and when they finally reach their destination, he tells her to keep her eyes closed, keeps his palms against her eyes as he guides her steps.
When he moves his hands away, she gasps. Spread ahead of her, the lights of Zuzu City against the usual darkness of the night. Sebastian moves next to her, grabs her hand in his.
“I come here when I want to get away from everything and just… think.”
He’s been doing this a lot lately, ever since she came to the valley, became his friend. Torn between his dreams of the city and the familiarity of home, he came here often thinking about what he should do.
He’s fumbling with his cigarettes, before eventually lightning one. Leaning against his motorcycle, she’s still looking out at the landscape in front of them.
“It gives such a strange, sad feeling…”
She’s almost saying it to herself. She doesn’t understand why he is showing this to her, and she can only think of how much he wants to be a part of those lights shining in the distance. She knows, if he is to walk that path, there’s nothing she will do to stop him.
Sebastian gets close to her, slings an arm around her shoulder. His gaze is still fixed to the city out in the distance, but when he speaks, it’s all just for her.
“The city used to draw me in… but now I’m finding myself happier at home in the valley.”
Her head snaps up so fast that it almost hurts. She doesn’t trust herself to say anything, afraid she’s overstepping, afraid she actually misunderstands whatever is going on, afraid to hope too much.
He turns to her, knuckles slowly caressing her cheek.
“You’re the only one I ever brought to this place. You know what I’m trying to say, don’t you?”
She shakes her head; wants to hear it. He leans down, pulling her close with his other arm, covering her sound of surprise with his mouth, kissing her. She doesn’t think she’ll ever get used to his kisses; he’s a passionate but patient kisser, drawing out the movements for as long as possible, biting and licking at her lips, smiling smugly and lazily at her when he is done.
“I want us to be together. For real.”
She jumps in his arms, the move making him stumble a bit, but they’re not falling. She looks in his eyes, the gaze as touching and passionate as it’s ever been.
“I love you, Sebastian.”
“Wha-”
But she kisses him.
***
She’s obsessed with saying those three words. Now that she has the right to say it, it blooms out of her at his every gesture. She says it out loud without embarrassment or care as to whoever else can hear it. She says it as good morning and as good bye. She says it when he stays the night, and when he asks her over to play a new game together. She says it in front of Maru and mayor Lewis. She says it when he comes inside of her. She says it when he lets her borrow his sweater. She says it when he calls her in the evening after work.
It makes him dizzy with how wanted she makes him feel.
It’s the middle of the night and they’re waiting, alongside everyone else from the city, for the clock to strike exactly 12, and the fireworks to blast into the sky. She’s holding onto his arm, chatting happily with Sam about a cover song they’re planning. Her weight, next to him, is something new to get used to – but she’s always fitting herself right there with so much ease, that it seems almost natural.
The countdown begins, mayor Lewis’ voice booming across the square. At 8, she joins in. At 3, he does too. The fireworks blast with a loud noise, and she squeezes herself closer to him, her eyes to the colouring sky, her lips to his ear.
“Make a wish, babe.”
She closes her eyes, thinking of everything she wants in the upcoming year. He looks at her.
“So, what did you wish for?” he asks.
She tugs at his jacket, kisses him.
“You.”
#stardew valley#stardew sebastian#sdv sebastian#sebastian x farmer#sdv farmer#sdv fanfic#i think this is the first part and i might do a 2nd one with them being domestic pieces of fluff#i'm so tired i 'm so glad this fic is DONE#hope you enjoy ~#my writing
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Weird headcannon request: what would your favorite villagers do in an apocalypse
Listen listen listen. I fucking love anything to do with the apocalypse, especially when zombies are involved. So I’ll write about that !!
This one took a while, sorry ! I wanted to include at least all of the bachelors, and then bachelorettes in another post maybe if I’m not lazy.
Also I follow someone on my other account and I really liked how they like, used different colors to highlight names, so I think I’m gonna do that ! It’s just cute okay :)
Bachelors in the Apocalypse
Alex
Alex thinks of himself as the most ready for the apocalypse. He’s got what he and his family need to survive for months. Food, weapons (Mostly just old baseball bats), clothes, and the Will to Survive.
The zombies probably come from Zuzu city. City people are dumb and get infected right when the virus hits. Everyone in SDV is safe. For now, at least.
Alex, unlike the other villagers, refuses to interact with anyone but his grandparents. He keeps contact extremely limited with people. The only time he ever interacts is when he goes to drop off cookies at Haley’s house, per Evelyn’s request.
He does miss his best friend, though. He misses everyone. He misses that time where he didn’t hear zombies going around the town, banging on doors and smacking their heads against windows. It sucks!
Alex takes a number of zombies down. He’s easily one of the toughest bachelors, plus he’s super strong. He wants to eventually take out all of them, make the valley a safe haven like it used to be. There’s still a long ways to go, but he’s slowly making progress.
His grandparents, especially Evelyn, help out by cooking for him and others. Alex helps out other villagers by dropping off little care-packages. It’s cute! It’s also his way of keeping in contact with everyone and making sure they’re okay.
Alex is the one in a zombie apocalypse movie to survive until the end. He makes the smartest choices and keeps his family safe. He can’t afford to lose anyone else.
Harvey
As a doctor, Harvey’s first thought when he hears about the zombie apocalypse is that he needs to find a cure.
And so he tries to. For about a week. Maru is in the office with him for a while, going back and forth from her house to the doctor’s office. It’s tough experimenting on zombies and it feels.. wrong.
Even though they’re a zombie, Harvey knows that there’s a person in there. Was a person. So he gives up on the cure and instead focuses on keeping the citizens healthy.
Harvey is a goddamn tank. Were he to be partnered with Alex, the zombies would be gone within two days. However, they have different concerns. Alex keeps the zombies away from the valley, and Harvey keeps them away from houses.
They have a good system. Harvey goes around the houses to do checkups, trying to keep some form of order in the new world. He makes sure the oldies stay healthy, despite being cooped up, and that the people that are out fighting stay un-zombieified.
I think Harvey would almost last to the end, but makes a careless mistake and gets bit. Fortunately, a cure comes around! He still did research on the zombies during the apocalypse, and his notes came in handy.
Elliott
You’d think by now that Elliott would be used to being cooped up in his house. He’s practically a hermit! The only time he used to go out was to sit by the ocean or see Leah at the bar.
Now that he has to stay in, he doesn’t like it. It’s the same as all of us with quarantine. Elliott never went out much before, but now that he can’t, he wants to.
He feels like dying of boredom within a week. Fortunately, the sense of impending doom creates a good writing atmosphere. He finishes at least three books during the span of the apocalypse.
However, Elliott isn’t very smart about his survival. He either forgets to eat the food that Alex drops off, or eats it before the week is up. It’s tough.
Eventually, Elliott decides he can’t survive on his own like this. He feels like he’s going mad. It makes for nice poetry, but for now, he needs to prioritize his health.
So he makes his way to Leah’s! He figures it’s probably a good idea. Nobody ever said that you couldn’t hang out with friends, or stay with them.
While going to Leah’s, he’s not very careful with avoiding any zombies. He’s not attacked, but he is followed. Leah let’s him in of course, and then end up holed up in her house. She’s lucky enough to have the forest near her house, so she can rely on that.
Elliott probably trips up somewhere and ends up dying first, joining the rest of the zombies. He’s not very good at being a zombie, though. Which might be for the best! He doesn’t run around very much and usually just hangs back by himself.
Sam
Sam thinks he’s going to be good at the whole apocalypse thing. He’s like “I’ve played enough first-person shooter zombie games to know how to fight them off.” Then the second he’s put into combat, he falters and doesn’t know what to do.
Lucky for him, Jodi is good at fighting. Kent knows how to defend the house. Vincent knows how to ask dozens of questions about what’s going on.
And Sebastian knows how to sneak into Sam’s window at night when they haven’t seen each other in a while. They still try and keep close, but most of their conversations are over the phone. It gets lonely, sometimes.
Sam isn’t necessarily smart about the apocalypse because he doesn’t need to be. He feels bad about relying on his parents, but you would too if you had his kickass parents.
He knows how to keep Vincent safe! Vincent is taken out at least once a week, mostly to see Jas. He misses her a lot. Sam likes to see Shane, too! He misses working with his buddy, even if his body was a grouchy alcoholic that waved him off whenever Sam got within ten feet of him. Good times.
Sam really wants things to be normal again, so he tries to stick with Alex whenever he sees him out. They’re good at fighting, but Sam is very chatty and often gets distracted by other things.
Other things are usually Abigail waving out of her window and whisper-shouting for Sam. Sometimes she’ll whip out the Samson!!! just to get his attention. It usually works. Alex will take a minute just to tease him.
Sam either survives until the end of the apocalypse, or dies about halfway through while on his many night trips to see Sebastian and Abigail.
Sebastian
Apocalypse? He doesn’t even know her.
Sebastian’s life is literally the exact same. Aside from hearing less people upstairs, nothing has changed about his life. Demetrius is upstairs working on a cure or something (Seb tuned out the second he started talking) and Maru goes off with Harvey sometimes.
He heard Robin say something about building a wall or something to keep the zombies out. He wasn’t planning to help very much, seeing as the others mom and some other villagers wanted to help out. Really, the only place the zombies are coming in is through the tunnel for the bus, so if they block that off, they’ll be fine.
Sebastian is more focused on other things. Like staying in contact with Sam and Abigail to make sure that they’re still kicking. Demetrius doesn’t let anyone outside of the house, so Sebastian sneaks everywhere, whether it’s outside to go smoke or to see his friends.
He’s pretty good at fighting, though. He can defend himself a whole lot better than Sam, who he thoughts would have more experience. They both thought his video game theory was true because they’re both dummies.
Those few times where Seb does get out of the house, he’s like a zombie killing machine. It’s too bad he’s doesn’t do it very often. He’s good at sneaking around, too. Those years of tiptoeing around the house to avoid his stepdad yelling at him are really paying off.
Honestly, the whole apocalypse could end and the zombies could dissapear, and Sebastian would have no idea. He'd still be down in the basement, messaging his friends and working on his coding.
Or, for a worse ending, zombies could storm his house, saving him for last, and he wouldn’t know until it was too late and he was surrounded by a horde.
I think Seb would end up surviving, though. He’s not necessarily good at the apocalypse, he’s just good at avoiding it.
Shane
When Shane thought about sobering up, he never imagined he’d have to do it like this. The apocalypse is pain in the ass for him.
He stays with Marnie and Jas, rarely leaving the property. He doesn’t like being holed up inside for so long because then he’s just alone with his thoughts, so Jas keeps him going most of the time.
As much as he hates to admit it, he misses his old life. He hated being employed at Joja, but it gave him something to do. And yeah, he misses his annoying coworker. Lucky for him, he gets to see him one a week when Sam and Vincent pop in.
Shane can act like he’s annoyed all he wants, but now? It’s he apocalypse. Why should he be so bitter?
I’m not going to say that the apocalypse changes Shane’s attitude, but he definitely has some revelations about himself that he wouldn’t have had under different circumstances.
Shane doesn’t like fighting zombies. Not as much as Alex does, anyways. But he still helps him out if it’s ever necessary. Shane is infinitely better at defending than he is attacking. He makes sure to keep the zombies away from their house, and the town in general.
Sometimes, Marnie will ask him to deliver stuff to Leah’s house, or Sam’s since they’re awfully close. It feels like a job to him, so he actually enjoys it. He’s surprised to see Elliott at Leah’s and immediately assumes they’re banging. He doesn’t ask any questions, though. He doesn’t care.
Shane probably ends up dying after a tiny mistake that could’ve easily been avoided. He doesn’t see it as that bad, since Jas is still safe. That was all that mattered to him, really. He either dies after a few months, or an entire year into the apocalypse. Either way he does not go down easily.
I would like everyone to know that I wrote these thinking that Lewis holes himself up in his house and does not help anyone out, so they kick him out and elect Alex as mayor. It was a silly thought I had, but then I just went with it.
Alex for Mayor 2020.
It’s not necessarily like, an official position, but they all kinda trust Alex to protect them, so he just assumes the position. He’s not the smartest, which is why Penny was elected to be Vice-Mayor (Alex’s words). They do a good job running the place.
Anyways that’s all! Hope you enjoyed! Sorry this took so long, it was a lot to write hah.
#sdv#stardew valley#sdv alex#sdv elliott#sdv sebastian#sdv seb#sdv sam#long post#like really long post#praying for everyone that goes through the entire thing#sdv harvey#i forgot him oops#tagging is such a pain#ion feel like it :/#one again wes is caught writing harveys to be shorter than the rest#big oops#sambastian if you squint#actually it’s pretty obvious#elleah#elleah stans this one is for u#death tw#violence tw#death#violence#i don’t think there’s blood but just in case#blood tw#blood
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Writing Tips: Heating Up
Years ago I heard a story that has stuck with me. Back in West Virginia, a good man stopped going to church. After a couple of years, a preacher stopped by the man’s cabin in the mountains to invite him back, and the man argued that he no longer needed it.
A fire was burning in the hearth and had died down, so that only hot coals shimmered in the fire. The priest took a pair of tongs and pulled a coal from the fire and set it on a stone in front of the hearth. Within a few minutes, the coal began to cool and its fire died.
The priest needed only to raise an eyebrow, and the man got the lesson. Sometimes we can do more together than we can alone.
I got to thinking about this about a year ago. I was talking to my son, who works as a counselor for writers, and he mentioned how very often, when a writer changes one little habit, her entire writing system unravels.
For example, he mentioned one writer who would play a game of solitaire for a few minutes before he wrote. Soon that game consumed whole hours and whole days. The writer’s schedule was unraveled by one bad habit, and my son simply has to tell him, quit playing solitaire. And that reminded me of on international bestseller who once told me, “I lost two years of my life playing Civilization.”
You see, people often go through phases where they write wonderfully. Maybe they’re doing something subconsciously—like reading good books, or writing in the morning when their bio rhythms for writing are at a peak, or they’re writing in a genre they love—and suddenly they change and magic stops flowing. My son once said that in many cases, he identifies that change and then tells the writer simply, “Go back to what works.”
The same, I have seen, may be true with writing groups. I’ve been in several of them, and recently I started the Apex group. I started it because I perceive a need for such a group, one where talented individuals share their passion, their wisdom and triumphs.
Years ago, I read a letter in which Ernest Hemingway had been trying to figure out a title for one of his novels. He had searched in vain for one, and asked some of his friends for help. He went first to one writer, someone who later won a Nobel Prize, and asked some advice that didn’t work. So he asked another writer—who offered up the title “The Sun also Rises,” and that worked. Coincidentally, that author also won a Nobel Prize.
So here were three writers in a writing group, exchanging advice, and all three winning Nobel Prizes.
Similarly, I would have loved to have gone to Oxford eighty years ago and hobnobbed with the likes of C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien about writing fantasy. And the notion has often struck me that in today’s world, we’re free to find our own partners in writing inspiration—our own Hemingways and Tolkiens. I know one fine author who works as a shepherd in New Zealand. He’s a long way from anyone who might heat him up, but in today’s world, he can reach out via the internet.
Yet writing groups so often fail. They don’t always fail due to bruised egos. I belonged to a nice one in college, but after college I moved away and it became too inconvenient. A number of other good writers also moved away, and all of us, like simmering coals removed from the fire, lost some of our heat.
So I’ve been thinking a lot about group dynamics. What is it that you want in a writing group? Here are a few thoughts.
First off, let me explain that any one person might fulfill several roles. In other words, you might be able to fill three or four roles. Just as you can be a loving father, a tough soldier, and a devoted son to your mother, you can fill any of these roles listed below. In fact, to some degree you have to fill all of them. Yet if you are in a group with others who help support you, you may be stronger together than you are apart.
The Motivator:
Some people are engines. They get groups started and keep them moving at a solid pace. These are the people who set goals for themselves and encourage others, then blow past goals without even thinking.
The Idea Generator:
Years ago, I asked some writing students to help come up with ideas for some short films. In a class of 20 students, I got several excellent ones, but soon I noticed that almost all of them came from one person, an author named Dan Wells, who has since become famous. He just has a gift for great story ideas, for seeing interesting situations that others don’t recognize. He recognizes ideas that are stale and finds those that are fresh and exciting.
The Storyteller:
The storyteller is someone who envisions how to instantly transform a good idea into an original story. Not only does this person have deep insights into the human condition and understand character motivations, they understand the possibilities with stories. When a character is confronted with a problem, the storyteller sees a dozens ways that the protagonist could try to resolve that problem, and of course how those attempts could be hilarious, heartbreaking, or revelatory.
The Stylist:
This person has a love for words on a micro level and an ear for poetic diction—for meter and internal rhyme. This is the kind of person who might be moved to tears by metaphors or who quickly recognizes a sentence that is not right for a character’s voice or a word that has the wrong connotations. I’m not sure why, but many great stylists seem to be terrible storytellers—and vice versa.
The Professor:
The professor knows everything. He or she is like Norm on the television show “Cheers.” Want to know a little about Acadian languages? Ask Norm. Want to know the seven types of Chinese unicorns? Ask Norm.
The Accountant:
The accountant is a person who recognizes opportunities to make money with writing, who is always searching for ways to publish in new formats or to win awards or be first to publish in a new magazine. They may be great time managers, too.
I think that I’ll stop here. You may see other interesting character types that you need in a writing group. For example, I think that every writing group needs a bailiff—someone to maintain order and, if necessary, throw out a person who is disruptive or not performing. Maybe every group needs a priest, too, to help settle disputes and heal fragile egos.
The thing is, a group need not be large. You could one of those rare writers who is a solitary genius, but more likely you will find that others are great help. You might be an exceptional stylist, for example, and find that Lucy’s input is still valuable.
In other words, I suspect that nearly all of us would be better off in small, manageable groups. It’s easy for a good group to grow too large, so that writers are critiquing manuscripts instead of creating new ones. In Apex, we have a large group of people from all over their world, but many of our writers are finding, for example that they are doing well in smaller groups that meet for brainstorming sessions or writing sprints or to critique manuscripts. All of those are really worthwhile.
I’d love to hear your thoughts. If you notice a kind of person who fills an interesting role in a writing group, send me an email to [email protected]. Much appreciated!
Our Apex writing group is about to enter its first year and is expanding. I’ve seen tremendous growth in several writers who finally have written books--one person finishing a first novel after twelve years. Another writer finishing and publishing eleven novels this past year. Others have begun to win awards, hit bestseller lists, and receive rave reviews.
If you’re a coal that would like to share some warmth come join us at www.apex-writers.com.
https://mystorydoctor.com/david-farlands-writing-tips-heating-up/
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But seriously, why do I never hear about Irene Iddesleigh around the Internet? It’s practically The Room of late Victorian literature! I have to tell y'all about this book. See here:
Got published because Amanda McKittrick Ros’s (the author’s) doting husband paid for it, but not for the “I want to have more control over publication/don’t need the traditional system” reasons—no, she simply thought her writing was too amazing for that
Mark Twain called it “one of the greatest unintentionally humorous novels of our time”
C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien would deadass have reading parties where whoever could go the longest without laughing won
“Hope is like a shimmering oaken ship on the turbulent seas of discord, fear, and impertinence, cast by the hollow winds of despair. The sun’s rays of goodness and victory tumble down from the heavens, but lo! The clouds of uncertainty beat them back as though"—ALMOST EVERY PARAGRAPH IS LIKE THIS. Metaphors and similes and alliterations and melodrama is the entire book.
a humorist from that era named Barry Pain (lmao) called it the book of the century. At first he found it funny, but then apparently he “shrank before it in tears and terror”
When Ros read what Pain said, she called him a “clay crab of corruption” and then claimed he did it because he was secretly in love with her (my gosh. her mind)
And for all that, it’s not even just the outrageously
🌌 purple prose 🌌
that’s the whole issue here. The plot is basically just
Act I: I’m going to willingly marry a man I hate, and I hate him because he isn’t my secret lover >:(
Act II: I hate him even more each day but we have a kid, oh and I’m having an emotional affair with my secret lover
Act III: husband discovers affair and locked me in a “cursed” room for a year (Charlotte Brontë is literally shaking) but I escape to America with my lover. Huh? I have a child? Never heard of him
Act IV: I somehow legally marry my lover in America and will live there the next fifteen years, but whoops! Suddenly he’s super bad with money and also a drunk and abuser and hits me and then dies by suicide
Act V: I go back to England. Nobody recognizes me even though I’m, like, 35, but they all hate my guts and love my dead husband. My son got the whole story from his dad and hates me the most. I’m sad. I walk to a cottage my lover used to use and literally drop dead. The end
So if you’re looking for something ridiculous to read and be entertained by, I can heartily recommend Irene Iddesleigh. It’s about 100 pages, so it isn’t a slog (somehow)—I read it in an afternoon. You can read it storybook style here or find it over at Project Gutenberg. It’s what Tolkien and Lewis would want.
In case you aren’t convinced yet, though, allow me to show you.
Until now he was inclined to be prejudiced against the snares and allurements of women, but he strongly resolved to try gradually and abandon every unkind thought harboured in his mind against them, fearing lest all his conjured imaginations were both unjust and selfish; and determined to drown them for ever in the clashing gulf of fate, felt a prouder and happier mortal than before.
But time would solve the problem and heal the wound which penetrated so deeply his bosom. Yea, a short time he hoped would bring his creeping fever of endearment under the binding stay of appointed authority, and heal its weakening effects with the sacred salve of truth.
Aka “my long-worn misogyny has just been reversed by a pretty woman”
Great
Chapter IV: When on the eve of glory, whilst brooding over the prospects of a bright and happy future, whilst meditating upon the risky right of justice, there we remain, wanderers on the cloudy surface of mental woe, disappointment and danger, inhabitants of the grim sphere of anticipated imagery, partakers of the poisonous dregs of concocted injustice. Yet such is life.
Chapter VIII: A word of warning tends to great advantage when issued reverently from the lips of the estimable. It serves to allay the danger pending on reticence, and substantiates in a measure the confidence which has hitherto existed between the parties concerned. Again, a judicious advice, extended to the stubborn and self-willed, proves futile, and incurs the further malice and fiery indignation of the regardless, the reckless, and the uncharitable.
Chapter XIII: It is astounding to view the smallest article through a magnifying glass; how large and lustrous an atom of silver appears; how fat and fair the withered finger seems; how monstrously mighty an orange; how immeasurably great the football of youth; but these are as nought when the naked eye beholds the boulder of barred strength—a mountain of mystery.
Every chapter has a paragraph like this. I won’t spoil them for you.
Such is life.
“My dearest and much beloved, I assure you your remarks have astounded me not a little! Your words sting like a wasp, though, I am quite convinced, unintentionally. You are well aware that within a short period I will be marked out publicly as mistress of Dunfern mansion—an honour revered in every respect by me; an honour to which I at one time dare never aspire; an honour coveted by many much more worthy than I, whose parentage is as yet bathed in the ocean of oblivious ostentation, until some future day, when I trust it shall stand out boldly upon the brink of disclosure to dry its saturated form and watery wear with the heat of equality. You are about to place me in a position which cannot fail to wring from jealousy and covetousness their flaming torch of abuse. Yes, Sir John, on me you have not ceased to lavish every available treasure and token of your unbounded love. You have been to me not only a loyal admirer, but a thoroughly upright and estimable example of life’s purest treasures. You have resolved to place me by your side as your equal, whilst wealth in boundless store is thirsting for your touch. You have elevated my unknown position to such a pitch as to defy taunt or jeer, and at any time if I may have, seemingly, ignored your advances, it was purely want of thought, and not through any underhand motive or scheme whatever.
“I assure you your allusion to my verbal answer last night is very pronounced, and may be overlooked on the ground of pure disappointment. Our time of singleness is now short, and begging your forgiveness for my seeming neglect or indifference, I hope the tide, which until now has flown so gently, may not be stayed on the eve of entering the harbour of harmony, peace, and love.”
At the commencement of Irene’s answer of lavishing praises and flimsy apologies, her affianced moved to the opposite corner of the rustic building to scan the features of her he wholly worshipped and reluctantly doubted. Every sentence the able and beautiful girl uttered caused Sir John to shift his apparently uncomfortable person nearer and nearer, watching at the same time minutely the divine picture of innocence, until at last, when her reply was ended, he found himself, altogether unconsciously, clasping her to his bosom, whilst the ruby rims which so recently proclaimed accusations and innocence met with unearthly sweetness, chasing every fault over the hills of doubt, until hidden in the hollow of immediate hate.
Ros is so close to being self-aware at the start of the last paragraph here, but then it’s lost in the same circular language found throughout. Ah, well.
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No, really. Lovecraft Country sucks.
These are spoilers, but I also don’t give a shit because it’s a bad show and I hope you skim enough to fucking skip it. I took a few days to decide if I hated it enough to write this and well, I do.
I will try my best not to say “X is a bad actor,” but instead stick with the characters as they’re intended save for one particular issue.
The Story
It isn’t very Lovecraftian. And don’t take this as me saying Lovecraft was some kind of master of his craft. I think he was an absurd racist that used xenophobia as his guise for what truly horrified the sane mind. That being said, the element of the unknown is definitely the hallmark of his world and that in no way is represented in this show. It could easily be called “Goosebumps: The Black Version” and it’d be just as authentic--if not more so, really.
The story deals with the Bible (?) and magic that comes from uh, knowing the names of things. You speak a made up language and then you do some kind of confusing magic that has no real purpose or point. I sound dismissive of this because I am, to be clear. They could have just as easily had this language be something whites stole from Africans and then perverted into their own means of power (it’d be a pretty easy parralel to any number of imperialist issues left behind in Africa, huh.)
But anyway, it has a tentacle monster. I think we see a big scary octopus at one point. But the monsters are often in your face and it’s probably less scary than Stranger Things S1.
Honestly, the characters repeat “autumnal equinox” so much that I felt I was going to have a fucking breakdown. Just the writing is very empty and no one seems to really care about anyone else on the screen except for in a rare moment between the only two characters that make it far and matter.
Characters
They aren’t very good. There are tropes present, which isn’t bad at all, but the way the characters interact, speak, and in general move us through the story feels stilted, often nonsensical, and entirely reliant on the viewer assuming that the latest sentence spoken is the only one that matters.
Atticus “Tic” Freeman
A war criminal that derives his power from the white blood inside of him. Again, dismissive but true. We see this man struggle to connect pieces to a puzzle and eventually he pays the price for it, but not in the way Lovecraft would have someone pay for endeavoring beyond their realm. Rather, something about fate and a book.
Look, honestly? Who gives a shit. Tic murders a woman in coldblood and it’s never really touched on. There’s a lot that could be said about militaries, oppression, etc, but we often see these characters enact violence and then the story skips merrily beyond it. So yeah, he summarily executes a Korean woman and then is later shown torturing another, but it’s okay because he feels a little bad and fucks the Korean sex demon woman. More on that later.
I felt nothing for him. He didn’t have some deep animus over being a torturing war criminal. He was just kind of moving through scenes and having confusing fights with his girlfriend/baby mama.
Letitia “Leti” Lewis
This is what empowerment shouldn’t look like. It amuses me that the show claimed to subvert some kind of norms when the primary love interest (and ultimate heroine) remains the lightest skinned sister in the room. She is able to maintain the appeal of the ingenue while at the same time having the understood attractiveness of her complexion.
As far as Leti is concerned as a character, she too seems to be a pretty shitty person. We hear that she has “transactional” friendships and she seems pretty much all about self-survival and rarely if ever puts up where others do. She’s a heroine in the sense that the story makes her be heroic, but it never addresses how her flaws are ultimately all self-inflicted and unnecessary. She could just not be a shitty person.
Hippolyta Freeman
Well. Hidden Figures was an excellent film, and I think that’s where Hippolyta came from. In a more serious series, perhaps she and her daughter could have had a very touching arc that would deal with survival and exceptionalism in a world that maligns you for your very being. Unfortunately, in reality she just comes off as a character that’s quirky in a world that’s also quirky and she doesn’t get to harness her power.
There’s an entire episode dedicated to how she discovers who she is and the result is well, her hair turns blue and she makes robots? I think the character TYPE is great, but they misused her here in all ways.
George Freeman
Well, well. If the series had remained about George, Tic, and Leti adventuring through America and encountering sundown towns and monsters both human and otherwise, I think it’d have been okay. The issue is, they wrote this series by the numbers so George is immediately thrown away. He’s a wise and circumspect guy that has his own flaws (he has patrarchical notions built around protecting/babying his genius wife, clearly), but the flaws he has are understandable and well reasoned.
George dies early on. Then he sort of doesn’t, I guess? But the fact he did was really the nail in the coffin for this series. The moment they did that, the rest just became empty strokes. A story where George witnessed the others dying and going back to his wife and daughter would have had so much more heart to it, but well. Uncle George is literally one of the few bright spots.
Ruby Baptise
Much like her sister, Leti, Ruby is a terrible attempt at showing empowerent on the one hand, and a masterwork on the other.�� The bad first: she’s a rapist. I’ve been called a nigger before and while it didn’t feel great, I don’t think I’d have been justified in just sodomizing the person that did it. That entire sequence was weird and they tried to hype it as her reclaiming something, when really it spoke to a disgusting and gratuitous tendency toward Ruby: she’s always too much.
Ruby, IMO, should have been Tic’s love interest. In a sense. First, because Wunmi Mosaku was a very attractive woman with impressive acting chops (she’s where I’ll break my moratirum, sorry), but also because it wouldn’t be what you’d see in every other show now: light-skinned pretty sister, dark-skinned sexual eikon. And that’s the issue with Ruby there: she’s always too much. She’s sexual by existing and that isn’t necessarily to her benefit since Leti, the good one, is an actual virgin before her sudden period sex. So the narrative has already spoken as to how it views sex.
Yet, because they tried to give Ruby these strange strokes, she comes out as an interesting character. She has feelings, aspirations, and dreams that she’s kept from and that’s very real. In a story about the absurd, a sense of realness is a familiar handhold to gather your wits. She’s all that, really. It’s why she has the best relationships in the show, which is AGAIN an issue, but well. I’ll say Ruby was never bad to have on screen though I was disgusted with how often her blackess (and Blackness in general!) became the source of grotesque horror.
Christina Braithewaite
This is where I get annoyed. My issue with Christina is that she should have easily been the most hated character, but they overplayed their hand with not showing how nefarious she was. In fact? Christina and Ruby’s relationship is the only meaningful, real, and understandable one in the entire series. I felt no joy during her downfall, because I didn’t really get to see her doing anything bad?
Just, consider what the show is. It’s about Lovecraft’s lore, ostensibly, which treats all non (specific types of) white men like dogs. So Christina comes at it from the “white” but “woman” perspective and you know, she has moments of duality that you can say is she more white or woman here. But they don’t execute on how sinister she should be. She’s a little rude at times? Yet she is the only person to treat Ruby like she should be treated and she’s the only person that seems to have a goal outside of “the quest.”
It really bothered me that she came out so well done, because either they needed to have her for two seasons and make her far more nefarious after the first, or to just make her less a force for good. She saves the characters more than a few times and pays for it by being killed when she’s at her lowest. Yeah, it’s... a weird take.
Ji-Ah
What can I say? There are depictions of sex in the series, and they’re all negative: most of Ji-Ah’s scenes, Montrose’s angry self-loathing sex with his boyfriend, Ruby’s morphic horror scenes. In the case of most of those, there’s something being said. Ji-Ah is a monster, literally, that could be seen as Lovecraftian in the sense she’s an exotic Asian woman that kills men that sleep with her. So, HBO was like “we’ll blow our tits and ass budget on her,” and she exists for a series of sex scenes and vague, inscrutable... shit, maybe SHE is the most Lovecraft of all the characters!
Anyway at some point she joins the party after confusing drama with Leti because they both fucked Tic. It’s okay though, because Ji-Ah isn’t here for any of that now. She’s the one who had the best friend that had her teeth yanked out by Tic, and also who was there when he shot her other friend in cold blood, but they get over that and she’s now their friendly red panda pal or some shit. It’s fucking trash.
Much like the Freemans (sans Tic), I think she’d have done great in another show. But they rushed her story and it felt less Ghost Nation (Westworld) and more Masturbation (Jordan Peele).
Diana Freeman
Confusing. A stock character (quirky kid that does art, is impetuous, and won’t take no for an answer) that is given a lot of screen time. When she sort of hijacks an episode when two ragamuffin girls chase her down and infest her or something because racist cops. Well, the story veers to her direction. What can I say? If you like 11 from Stranger Things but wanted her to have Mike’s attitude, well. Here you go.
Montrose Freeman
He could have been a good character, I guess. He seemed unnecessary and often was there purely for an x-factor of “uh?” Like, his infamous scene where he slits a two-spirit Native American’s throat after we learn that this indigenous person had just been restored after being raped by bad guys. So there’s that. Also I guess he was self-loathing so he beat his son (that may not be his son???) and also liked fucking dudes, which was I think where we were supposed to care about him.
It’s like someone saw Omar was a gun-wielding desperado of drug theft and decided, “Well what made him okay is he’s gay!” But it didn’t add much. I get he was angsty but other than Tic calling him a “faggot” (one of the few good scenes between them in terms of emotion), it all seemed empty and kind of meandering. At no point does Montrose seem a part of the team. He just half-mumbles, gets angry, cries, and falls apart.
Captain Seamus Lancaster
He’s barely a character, but I need to include him for another point. He’s the “bad guy.” I guess? He uses the bodies of black men to stay alive, which is actually a really smart reference to black bodies fueling the American system, but it comes off as cheesy because it just never comes up. He’s cartoonishly bad in a way that he’s less sinister than a meme. Compare him to say, Ridgeway from Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad. One’s a sinister representation of an oppressive system and the other’s well, a joke.
Racism
How could this not be a theme? The issue, as was shown with Lancaster, is that it isn’t even remotely handled with seriousness. The best scene of racism is in the first episode when Tic, George, and Leti are forced to leave a Sundown county before they’re lynched by the racist sheriff. The anticipation and animosity lead to some serious anxiety and it was a nailbiter.
But after that? White people say “nigger.” Then they get, I don’t know, raped or spit on or who knows. A lot of black people talk back to the cops anyway in the 50′s and that’s cool.
But the real monsters of the series are all black people. Let’s go through it:
Tic brutalized women in the Korean War.
Montrose killed the two-spirit person.
Ruby rapes the shop owner.
Diane crushes Christina’s throat.
Ruby literally sheds her flesh in repeatedly gratuitous acts of the grotesque.
Even Ji-Ah, who’s not black, is a monster in the literal sense. We do see the doctor that experimented on black people, but that’s about 5 minutes at the end of an episode that has a baby’s head on a man’s body so I was too busy laughing at the absurdity to take any real meaning from it.
The truth is, in Lovecraft Country, white people always should do their best to kill or keep black people down. It definitely doesn’t speak at all to any togetherness or what have you. Just, well. Magical negroes doing bad stuff because nothing can stop them.
The show misses the chances to show real horror in race. Hell, the Tulsa Riots are reduced to a backdrop for a confusing book scene. But then again, Emmett Till becomes a kind of empty reference point that we then see a white woman act out... for some reason?
Again, the only characters with any chemistry are Ruby and Christina, which is very unfortunate for any number of reasons. As far as a statement that racism is bad goes, I mean. I barely saw it. If I was a racist I’d be like hell yeah, Lovecraft was right they are dangerous.
Even when people try to indicate the horrors of it like, “Oh, the Korean War scenes are bad because we see how men are forced into the military complex!” We didn’t see a white officer say “Shoot her, boy,” it was just two black guys killing women with no care at all. And no compeuppance, so that’s cool.
The Music
Sucks. Thanks Peaky Blinders for making modern music over gif sets a thing.
Conclusion
I sure as hell would never watch it again. If I can get one other person not to, then maybe it’d be worth it. It’s not a good show. It’s not “smart,” and there’s no secret subversion in it. It’s just... bad.
I won’t post on it anymore. Please, in true Lovecraft fashion, trust me when I say that this show is so bad it cannot be comprehended.
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The Problem with ‘Love Never Dies.’
“Love Never Dies,” 2012 Starring Ben Lewis as The Phantom, Anna O'Byrne as Christine, watched on Youtube, 4/24/2020
SPOILERS.
I would like to note: I enjoyed the set design, costume design, some of the music, and production of this version of Love Never Dies. I also really liked the actor’s performances. They did a good job. I especially loved Ben Lewis’s singing voice. (Derrick Davis ((US Restaged Tour)) is still my favorite.)
The problem with Love Never Dies is its a sequel to Phantom of the Opera, the characterization, and writing.
ALW’s Phantom of the Opera stands alone. It was never meant to have a sequel. It really doesn’t need one. I do feel there is a big disconnect between POTO and LND. I think LND could be rewritten to have nothing to do with the original POTO and would not suffer for it. To me, LND feels like someone’s fixit fanfic that doesn’t actually fix anything. POTO is also insanely iconic. It is hard to follow it up. While LND’s music is pretty good, I don’t think its nearly as memorable nor iconic as POTO’s. I also don’t feel it balanced original POTO music with new material. Honestly, it needs to pick one.
Something ALW does in his musicals is reuses the notes of a song, mixed in a different pattern to make a new one. “The Music of the Night” and “All I Ask of You” are like this (look at sheet music if you don’t believe me.) This is not a complaint. This helps with cohesion of a musical. It also makes refrains, duets with battling music, and sometimes even story, clearer. When its done well, its unnoticeable. In fact, I got to play a POTO compilation in a semi-professional concert orchestra in high school. I never noticed ALW does this until when someone pointed it out to me like a month ago. In LND, I can constantly hear the rifts from the first musical, to the point where I think one of those songs is about to start, or it gets super distracting. I noticed this especially in ‘Why Does She Love Me?’ I’m 80% sure it was based of POTO’s main theme (like the song ‘Phantom of the Opera,’ or the ‘Overture.’) Again, I liked most of the music in LND. But it doesn’t hold a candle to POTO. oh look I made a pun.
Having said that all that: LND feels like a sequel mostly to 2004. In my opinion, 2004 has the most sympathetic version of the Phantom, and the one that could most likely end up with Christine in the end. Especially compared to the US Restaged Tour. In 04, I also feel like the Phantom and Christine (not their actors) feel closer in age than other productions of the musical, other Phantom adaptations, and even the book. (For those who don’t know: Erik is 50-60 in the book, Christine is like, 16.)
LND’s writing is not great. First of all: THE PHANTOM’S NAME IS ERIK. I know they were trying to have a MYSTERY pun. Mister Y does not work for that, especially in a format that ISN’T BEING. READ. I can understand why its left out in POTO, as it lends the Phantom some mystery (though I do not like it.) There is LITERALLY no reason not to have the Phantom called Erik it LND. Granted, this is a complaint I have from POTO too. I kinda feel like the Phantom not having a name dehumanizes him. That is a discussion for another day.
I absolutely HATE that the Phantom runs a circus company. A big part of Erik’s trauma comes from being in a freak show. I don’t believe Erik would be willing to go back to that. I also don’t think it would be his scene. The Phantom of the Opera belongs in an Opera house, or at the very least a music all. I don’t know why he couldn’t have started something like that instead of a freak show. Or perhaps be an eccentric composer. Especially if he is getting help from the Giry’s. I do think its fitting that he’s working with/employing disabled, or deformed people, and other societal outcasts. However, being the owner of the VERY THING that treated him horribly is pretty bad, especially since we don’t know if he treats these people any better than he was treated. Also, every time the music switched to ‘show tunes,’ I felt Erik’s soul dying. On that note, when LND shifts from a musical to addressing the audience directly in its ‘show tunes’ sections, its jarring. It breaks the fourth wall way too much and really pulls the audience out of whats going on.
The way Erik is in POTO, chased away from the world and the light, is why he is like he is. He became fascinated with the night, the macabre and darkness because of his experiences with the world. That’s a pretty big point in POTO. Its one of the things that make him sympathetic. After all “THE WORLD SHOWED NO COMPASSION TO ME!” is the Phantom’s excuse in the final lair. LND tramples over that. Gustave seems to be interested in the same darkness his biological father is, as seen in “The Beauty Beneath.” Erik’s obsession with the dark, night, and macabre is turned into genetics. Which is pretty bad for Gustave if you think too hard about it. Erik is a serial killer. I do believe talent can be passed in genetics. I also think the way we view said talent and how we use it is shaped by personal experiences and preferences. On that note, Gustave could have gotten his musical abilities from his mother, or his grandfather, both of whom are also talented musicians.
Another thing LND suffers from, is making Christine a prize again. Raoul and Erik do not see her as a person. ‘Devil Take the Hindmost’ is literally the boys having a dick measuring contest, with Christine as the prize. That is not okay.
I hated the ending. For several reasons. First of all, the Phantom is still abusive. He is a puppet master. He is still not capable of having a healthy relationship with Christine. Secondly, Christine dies. ALW, if you are gonna write a fixit fic the LEAST you could do is let Erik be happy. Plus, Christine is killed by a cliche ‘I just wanted you to notice me’ subplot. One that wasn’t entirely well set up or thought out. Which is disappointing and frustrating. Last two things I hated: when Christine kisses Erik for the last time, she doesn’t take off his mask. I feel like they missed a good opportunity to show Christine being completely accepting of who Erik is, including what he looks like (again, would be better if Erik wasn’t abusive.) I also NEVER like it when we don’t get to see Erik’s deformity in any version of Phantom. The only other one that doesn’t I’ve seen/read is Dance. (Which I dislike greatly. Its at the bottom of my list.) I’m kinda good either way if Gustave goes with Erik or Raoul (preferably neither, if I get a choice, which I don’t.) Erik and Gustave can connect over music in a way Raoul and Gustave cannot. Erik can teach Gustave about music and the beauty beneath. Raoul did raise Gustave. Raoul might also have a serious heart change after the events of LND that we are not shown. Or we can do that one AU where Raoul and Erik become Gustave’s two dad’s (either gay or not, whatever floats your boat.)
The worst thing about LND is it completely ignores the character growth in its predecessor. Characters completely regress into who they were before the ending of POTO. This is annoying and bad writing.
Lets start with Meg and Madame Giry. I don’t like that Madame Giry is helping Erik. Yes, she helped him escape the freak show in 2004 (and possibly other versions.) BUT, she was also absolutely TERRIFIED of the Phantom in POTO. She helped Raoul find the Phantom’s Lair, with the full knowledge that Raoul intended to put a stop to Erik’s madness. I think it would be more likely that Madame Giry would stay as far away as Erik as she possibly could. Madame Giry also feels like a secondary greedy villain in LND, and that feels WAY off base for her. Maybe Erik being manipulative has rubbed off on her? Again, I don’t think she would be in this position in the first place (nor would Erik be manipulative, because I see him as realizing he DUN HECKED UP at the end of POTO). Meg, I could see wanting to help the Phantom (she even does in some versions.) I see this as her being enthralled by the legend of the Phantom, and less that they actually know each other. As for her loss of innocence, I don’t think it was set up well, nor was it executed well. Also, Meg wanting the Phantom to see her is a cliche. Cliches can be okay, if they are handled well. I don’t think LND wrote it well.
The only person I feel that has consistent characterization from POTO is Raoul (well, a specific version of it.) I have always been of the opinion that Raoul is a jerk. Having him spiral into gambling and drinking after a traumatic event is not surprising. Could be something that was always there, could be PTSD. Who knows, it wasn’t really talked about beyond Raoul feeling sorry for himself, and him being frustrated that he can’t connect to Christine on a musical level.
Christine’s arc in POTO was about taking back her own power and becoming her own person. Of letting go of the past and moving forward. This is thrown out. She is once again caught between two men in a dick measuring contest, both of which are trying to manipulate her to one side or the other, completely powerless. This time, there really wasn’t a way for her to get it back. I feel like she felt obligated to sing for the Phantom, even without Gustave’s life being threatened, and the Phantom’s manipulation is what made Raoul leave (Granted, I think Raoul leaving makes sense in the context of LND.) Christine has no agency in LND.
Finally, the ending of POTO is what redeems Erik. He is the one with the biggest character arc and character growth. He learns the most. I do believe he had a genuine heart change at the end of POTO. What happened wasn’t what he wanted, but it was what he needed to become a better person, and start moving past his trauma. Ignoring that is a big mistake. Yet, in LND, he is back to being an arrogant, abusive, manipulative, puppet master. Sometimes, I can see small pieces of character growth. He seems less bothered by his appearance, and maybe slightly more mature. Though, even these glimpses are often overshadowed or ignored in the next scene.
LND is NOT continuation of the characters we met in POTO. Much of the writing that connects LND with POTO is meh. Honestly, in some ways it feels like less a sequel and more its very own adaption of Phantom. Which is half its problem.
#thank you to fixit fanfic writers who do a good job#I love your work#please continue doing it#also no shade on anyone who likes love never dies#this is opinion#im not looking for a fight#sigh.#text wall#sorry#love never dies#love never dies spoilers#spoilers#phantom of the opera#poto#nocturne#nocturne r&d#nocturne research and development#love never dies 2012#lnd#editing to fix some spelling mistakes#along with making some of the writing clearer#thank you
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The Resurrection of My Chemical Romance: MCR’s Dark Catholicism
Words by Cae Rosch
On October 31, 2019, My Chemical Romance rose from the grave.
Resurrection isn’t a new theme for them, whether it’s in the salvation narrative the band was founded on (“We’re here to save kids’ lives”) or the pervasive undead monsters and heroes throughout their body of lyrics. The Return is another step in their decades-long salvation narrative. And that salvation narrative, one in which death is intimate and impending and necessary, one in which we come alive by shouting out our sorrows and sins like a cathartic confession to rock and roll, is deeply intertwined with a darkly Catholic perspective on the world.
It’s not new to talk about MCR as, on some level, a Catholic band - there’s already great writing about this. But the band took it to a whole new level even just with the concept of The Return, and so we have to take talking about it to a whole new level too.
We know the core members of the band come from Catholic backgrounds (specifically, for the most part, Italian-American Catholic, which is uncontestedly the most melodramatic mode of modern Catholicism). And like most people from Catholic backgrounds, there’s a complex and painful relationship there. As Gerard Way has said, “I was raised Catholic, which turned me off from religion because I had a very bad experience.” Yet in the same response, he remarked that he believed in God, even if it wasn’t in quite a Catholic way.
But that’s the thing: for the sake of this discussion, it doesn’t fucking matter if anyone believes. Regardless of the belief system you grow up to have, Catholicism isn’t something you just shake off, because it’s not simply an ideology - it’s a full-body, five-sense aesthetic world. It never fully departs your subconscious. Something, however small, lingers on your soul. That’s just as true of MCR as it is of your average Catholic or former Catholic on the street. And we can see it throughout their whole body of work.
The imagery is obvious. Song titles reference the Virgin Mary revered as Our Lady of Sorrows, lyrics are addressed to nuns and set in churches and graveyards, entire photoshoots center around Gerard Way as a rock and roll priest. The underlying narrative and its accompanying implied worldview, however, are a lot more subtle.
C.S. Lewis, though not a Catholic, was operating within a Catholic context when he wrote in Mere Christianity, “The Church exists for nothing else but to draw men into Christ, to make them little Christs.” In the salvation narrative that began as soon as the band did, MCR act as little Christs themselves. But they act within one very specific moment in Christ’s own narrative: at the moment Jesus hangs on the cross, the ninth hour, when he cries out, “Ηλει ηλει λεμα σαβαχθανι” - “Eloi, Eloi, lema sabacthani?”
My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?
MCR’s dark Catholicism hurts.
At the very beginning of MCR, Gerard Way thought of it as a “mission from God” despite his own troubled relationship with Catholicism. He writes, “I even firmly believed in creating MCR… The mission involved helping people and battling the forces of evil, by using word and the purifying flames produced by Marshall Halfstack amplification.” This is a saintly mission, a mission of sacrifice. It shows clearly in their early lyrics.
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On their first album, the two most Catholicly obvious songs are also the two most relevant to the band’s salvation narrative. Here, in “Vampires Will Never Hurt You,” the singer embraces the necessity of sacrifice to the point of death to save a beloved from the threat of a very Catholic monster. Vampires have a relationship with Catholicism nearly as fraught as MCR’s - Catholics make excellent monsters in the Protestant culture of early vampire literature, given their literal blood-drinking, yet Catholic iconography is also the most powerful weapon against vampires. Similarly, when Way sings, “And if they get me and the sun goes down into the ground / And if they get me, take this spike to my heart and… / You put the spike in my heart,” he becomes both savior and villain. He dies to himself and becomes a monster, abandoned by God (“Someone burned the church.”)
The only hope for others’ salvation is for him to die. Yet similar to the forsaken Christ, he still desperately cries out for his own salvation when he sings, “And someone save my soul, tonight / Please save my soul.”
“Our Lady of Sorrows,” unsurprisingly, further emphasizes the band’s drive toward sacrifice in its depiction of sainthood (“the patron saint of switchblade fights”) as an act of defiant death for the sake of salvation (“Oh, how wrong we were to think / That immortality meant never dying.”) The violent juxtaposition of that switchblade imagery with the idea of sainthood shows an intense focus on the agony of salvation - fitting, in a song named for Our Lady of Sorrows, who is depicted weeping, with seven swords that represent the seven great agonies of her life piercing her heart.
Salvation is just as painful on Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge. The album and its associated era are extremely heavy on Catholic imagery in general (see the video for “Helena” and that one priest photoshoot, you know the one).
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The album’s “Interlude” is a literal prayer for the intercession of the saints (“Saints protect her now,”) and it’s immediately followed by a song directly addressed to a nun - “Thank You for the Venom.” As in “Vampires Will Never Hurt You,” the singer accepts that his sacrifice will be painful when he sings, “So give me all your poison / And give me all your pills / And give me all your hopeless hearts / And make me ill.” He takes all this onto himself to the point of violent death - “If this is what you want / Then fire at will.”
But just as the figure of Christ, forsaken on the cross, shocks us with the sudden pain of his sacrifice, the singer once again juxtaposes religious and violent imagery to force us to be aware of the complexity of the saving act - sure, his sacrifice is saving people, but it’s fucking excruciating to die. When he sings “I keep a gun in the book you gave me / Hallelujah, lock and load” in the same song as a command to “fire at will,” we can’t see him as simply accepting his sacrifice like the complacent Jesus it would be simpler to remember. Instead, he is a “little Christ” to the Jesus who calls desperately for his father as he suffers and dies. “Give me a reason to believe,” Way cries, and we feel that same desperation.
This dynamic - MCR as the abandoned, agonized martyr violently saving people - builds up through their first two albums. In the 2006 single release of “Welcome to the Black Parade” and “Heaven Help Us,” it explodes.
It’s fitting that these songs are a single and its b-side because they express the two attitudes whose tension drives MCR’s entire narrative of martyrdom and salvation. “Welcome to the Black Parade” embraces the heroic aspect of the savior, victorious through and beyond death. “Heaven Help Us” is its tortured dark side - the savior’s moment of absolute pain, isolation, and loss of faith before that victory can begin.
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“Welcome to the Black Parade” is the most explicit expression of the idea of salvation, beginning almost immediately with the request: “Would you be the savior of the broken / The beaten and the damned?” With this single release, MCR becomes completely upfront about how the thematic martyrdom in their lyrics matches up with the band’s verbalized desire “to save kids’ lives.” MCR know their fan base. Their fans are the bullied kids, the depressed kids, those struggling with trauma and addiction and anxiety - everyone society calls “broken.” It’s clear who’s stepping up to be those kids’ savior.
Though “Welcome to the Black Parade” doesn’t include the kind of explicit Catholic imagery that MCR’s previous records did, lyrics like “Do or die, you’ll never make me / Because the world will never take my heart / Go and try, you’ll never break me” demonstrate a profoundly Catholic attitude toward saving hearts and souls. No matter how much pain (and there’s clearly a lot) happens in this world, the heart persists. This song is about joyous suffering enabled by a heroic savior, about a defiant march past earthly oppression and into eternal victory. That’s pretty Catholic, my friends.
“Heaven Help Us” is about the actual pain that that savior must experience for “Welcome to the Black Parade” to have its victorious end. It’s the darker side of an already dark song.
It’s no accident that “Heaven Help Us,” while just as thematically Catholic as its A-side, is far more obvious about its Catholic imagery. Catholicism knows how to show us pain in a way that’s both beautiful and shocking. When your relationship with the Church itself is alienated and painful, that imagery comes out even more.
“Heaven Help Us” begins with a melody that eerily parallels the classic Christmas carol “O Holy Night.” But it subverts the idea of a hymn, instead almost luxuriating in sprawling religious abandonment. Its imagery is viscerally bloody - “‘Cause mostly I’ve been sprawled on these cathedral steps / While spitting out the blood and screaming / Someone save us.” The lyrics invite sacrifice (“‘Cause I’ll give you all the nails you need / Cover me in gasoline”) but also call out with the desperation of the abandoned (“And the punchline to the joke is asking / Someone save us.”
“Heaven Help Us” is a cry born from fear and resignation to abandonment. “Would you pray for me / Or make a saint of me?” becomes horrifyingly ironic when we remember how fast the path to sainthood is for martyrs - it’s almost automatic once they’re murdered. This singer isn’t the defiant hero of “Welcome to the Black Parade.” This singer is dying, alone, prayers unanswered.
And the thing about Catholicism is that both of those figures are equally Christ.
Seeds of MCR’s dark salvation narrative persist throughout their discography. Even on Danger Days: The True Lives of the Fabulous Killjoys, “Save Yourself, I’ll Hold Them Back” offers salvation through sacrifice right there in the title. The release of “Welcome to the Black Parade” / “Heaven Help Us” harvests what those seeds all grow up to become - the image of Christ, forsaken. It’s the moment where the pain of fraught relationships with Catholicism crystallizes in support of the band’s mission: going forth into the world to save kids’ lives.
But apparently, it wasn’t enough to leave it there.
When MCR formed, the US was a horrific place to live for a whole lot of people. The band started in 2001, and so did the shift of the Bush administration into outright pseudo-fascism. Take it from me, a young teenager of the 2000s - that was not a good time to be a depressed kid, a gay kid, a traumatized kid, any kind of religious or ethnic minority. That was a very specific cultural context, one in which MCR needed to mold themselves into the salvific figure of an alienated rock and roll “little Christ” to save a world of equally alienated kids.
They’re now reemerging in the renewed horror of the Trump administration: the Bush administration on steroids. There’s a whole lot of alienated kids who need saving. And now, at least this one savior is back.
We may not have any new music, but the imagery of MCR’s Return situates them firmly back in their dark Catholic milieu. They announced their return accompanied by a photo of Pasquale Rizzoli’s “Cella Magnani,” a funerary statue in which an angel draws the soul of a dead woman into the celestial blue of its mosaic backdrop. The new logo, in which the letters “MCR” are written in a medieval Protogothic script, situates us back in MCR’s familiar black-and-white color scheme. In combination with “Cella Magnani,” it also places us in the medieval mode of memento mori - an aesthetic practice beginning in medieval Catholicism in which actively remembering your death helps you prepare your soul to die in a state of grace. (Side note: “Welcome to the Black Parade” is included on a popular memento mori-themed playlist curated by a nun.)
A lot of the effectiveness of memento mori comes from the Catholic perspective on the resurrection of the dead - the idea that someday, Christ will rise again and enact ultimate, perfect justice, giving everybody (and every body) exactly what they deserve. So in light of that, MCR’s Return narrative is itself a Catholic salvation narrative. MCR might not literally mean it that way, but in their own small way, this Return lets us hope that someday real justice will come. Someday, someone we trust will come to judge everyone and not even death will stop it.
With their return, MCR’s dark Catholicism helps us remember that this is a band bent on saving lives - our lives. For people like us, MCR has spent 18 years building up the idea of a forsaken-Christ figure that exists specifically to save our lives - and that idea rising from the grave is pretty comforting.
Cae Rosch has been listening to MCR since 2004 and cries about Our Lady of Sorrows (the religious figure and the song) at least 18 times a day. Follow her on Twitter and Instagram.
Follow DRM on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.
Subscribe to the DRM YouTube channel.
#my chemical romance#mcr#my chem#mcrmy#gerard way#frank iero#mikey way#ray toro#catholicism#catholic#feature#cae rosch
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Fic Title: Darcy Lewis and the No Good Very Bad Apocalypse
This is absolutely the The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August AU I'd love to write but probably never will… mainly because I think it would require too much meta, too much research, and a shitload of words.
Darcy is a kalachakra - someone who is born over and over again, living the same life on repeat, ad infinitum.
The kalachakra have a policy of never interfering with the course of history but when the very future of the world and the human race is at stake, they realise that they have to act.
Of course, not all of the kalachakra think the universe should be saved - if it is destined to come to an end, then who are they to change it?
Factions form - those who actively influence the world, trying to find a method to save it, versus those who are trying to maintain the status quo.
When Darcy is born, the struggle has been going for millennia, in both years and lifetimes.
Her first life is normal (see, here I would have to decide, is she born into the MCU as we currently know it, or a less developed one?? Personally, I’m leaning towards one where Loki wins the battle of New York and the Snap doesn’t get undone) but the world still comes to an end.
Second lives are hard for all kalachakra, especially ones that retain all the memories of their previous lives, who - without exception - go mad and die early (do I make Darcy the rare, special one? Probably!)
Her third life is one of ‘well if this is gonna happen, I may as well have fun with it.’ Right up until she dies in an alien-army related incident.
Fourth life, she’s still trying to cope with all the memories and spends a lot of time reading books on reincarnation, philosophy, religion, etc.)
Her fifth life she chooses to live normally, but the temptation to tell someone…anyone…is huge but this is the age of conspiracy theories and constant surveillance and the internet. Darcy isn't stupid, she doesn't want to call attention to herself, because who knows what might happen? She learns how to conceal her presence on the internet, and searches for anything that might explain what's happening to her. (She finds fragments and hints and clues to follow but if she discovers the Cronos Club (like the Freemasons or the Illuminati but for people like her) here how will it affect the plot? Another thing to consider.)
(Oh, and here’s another choice…does Darcy intern with Jane for the first time in her first life? In this life? In a later life? Probably not her first life, because Darcy with Jane is going to be a tipping point in this battle!)
Anyway…
At some stage Darcy interns with Jane, they take Thor in and help him, and he turns out to be telling the truth about being an alien/god. For the first time in Darcy’s many lives, something changes - the addition of Thor to the defenders of New York leads to a victory and the world continues instead of descending into chaos and ruin before the Snap decimates half of life. Well, it was good for a while...
The life after this one is where she discovers the Cronos Club (unless we go for the fifth life option) and learns all about kalachakra, the mission to prevent the Apocalypse, the opposing factions, and all the history of her people. Naturally, older kalachakra noticed the change in the timeline and are frantically trying to discover what caused it. With agents in all the alphabet agencies it's only a matter of time before someone in S.H.I.E.L.D. puts two and two together. It's an (as yet undecided) S.H.I.E.L.D. agent that introduces Darcy to the Cronos Club.
Other things to consider:
Darcy has never died of natural causes
Neither have most of the current kalachakra aged say, fifty and under
how many more lives will it take to stop Thanos before he snaps his fingers?
Are the Asgardians aware of kalachakra? Are they universal or confined to earth-based humanity?
Who else is kalachakra?
And a bunch of other things I haven't thought of yet.
And finally... so many ship opportunities!!!
#darcy lewis#the first fifteen lives of harry august#fusion#the apocalypse#zephrbabe#answered ask#i have so many thoughts about this
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MSA: Take Two (part 11)
Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9, Part 10
Part 12: here
.
Of course, the flash of warmth does eventually fade, replaced with a more neutral impassiveness. It’s not quite the emotional void or intense regret he has grown accustomed to, but Arthur tracks transition with no small amount of melancholy. Before the rare bout of enthusiasm completely fades, Arthur dregs up that courage which has seen him through many an adventure into ‘haunted’ and ‘spooky’ locations. Adventures shared with Lewis and Vivi, and then just Vivi when they had been searching for Lewis.
“You mentioned Lewis? Is he here?” He asks, despite knowing that Lewis is ‘waiting outside’ in the hall with Mystery. Never one to assume anything-for all he knew Lewis didn’t want to see him- Arthur gives Vivi the chance to make an excuse.
“Oh, he’s down the hall,” An energetic gesture towards the door, “We didn’t want to crowd you or anything. Do you want to see him? He really wants to see you.”
“Maybe?” Arthur admits, suddenly unsure. That motivation and courage drains away pretty quick when faced with the immediate possibility of seeing Lewis. It is replaced with fear and nerves. Was he ready to see Lewis? Vivi just makes him feel so comfortable, but that’s natural. Arthur has spent the last few years almost exclusively in Vivi’s company so of course, he’s comfortable around her. All his memories of Lewis are distorted by more recent events, souring his confidence.
“He’s not annoyed or angry is he?” He asks anxiously.
Vivi, a little surprised at the question, responds slowly, “No… Why would he be angry?”
Arthur hesitates. Why would this Lewis be angry?
“Because he’s not,” Vivi fills his silence. A small laugh, “Actually, funny, he asked me to ask you the same question. He’s worried he somehow insulted you because you disappeared, then wouldn’t come out when Mystery called.”
“Oh. No. That’s … That wasn’t his fault.”
If anything it was his own fault. It was his fault…Wasn’t it? Arthur lets off a few flashes of lightning, discomfort growing.
“I didn’t think it was, and trust me, I told him that too,” Vivi comments unflinchingly, and her certainty calms him down again. “But perhaps he would internalise it better if he heard it from you. If you’re up for it that is."
When he spends a second thinking, ‘disappearing mid-conversation’ was a dumb thing to be mad about, for both parties involved. And, it wasn’t like this Lewis had anything else to be mad about in this timeline.
“Okay…” Arthur says with renewed determination, trying to push aside the association between ghost-Lewis and current alive-Lewis, “Sure, I’ll do that.”
He wants to see Lewis if only to double confirm that he is still alive, healthy, and not angry.
“Great,” Vivi hits him with her biggest smile yet, “I’ll go wrangle him.”
She moves to stand and Arthur hastily makes to grab her shirt. He stops before physical contact so the action comes off as an empty grasping motion. Vivi notices and pauses, giving him a questioning glance.
“It’s…been…It has been awhile…since I last saw him. That was why…If I came across as weird last time, that was why.” He quickly attempts to explain, motioning about to fill the space where the rest of the words should be. His mechanical hand lets off a few stronger sparks for emphasis. True to word, Vivi doesn’t push him to elaborate, biting a lip and nodding more solemnly. Vivi is smart. She has probably figured, what with revelations about time travel, that Lewis had died in his timeline, even if she is still unaware of the exact circumstances. He would rather Vivi explain that to Lewis right now so they could just avoid talking about it altogether.
“You know, if you would rather wait, we can always do this some other day. It’s not like we’re on a time crunch,” She comments empathetically.
“No. Now. Now is good.” He reaffirms. Who knows when he would have the courage to do this again. Additionally, he also has this fear that, if he doesn’t cross this hurdle now, the next time someone calls for him he won’t have the will power to manifest. Whether that instinct is true, he is unsure, but the paranoia is there.
“Then, in that case,” Vivi sings, dispersing the solemn atmosphere, “One Lewis introduction coming right up.” She straightens, smoothing her skirt before picking her way around the pillars of books. At the door she leans out, bracing herself on the frame, waving someone forward. Whispered voices drift towards him. Then she gestures a bit more energetically like Lewis is moving to slow. He probably is.
Arthur briefly thinks about retreating further across the room to give himself more room but eventually settles on floating into an upright position over the rug. The sparks are back, not unmanaged, but definitely noticeable, belaying his worry.
There appears to be some disagreement happening at the door because Vivi eventually reaches out to yank Lewis into view by his sleeve. Lewis stumbles into the room and almost trips on the paper Vivi had knocked over earlier.
“Lewis, meet alternate Arthur. Arthur, I present Lewis.”
Lewis rights himself, throwing Vivi an exasperated glance, and gives a small unsure wave. Yeah, okay, seeing Lewis and Vivi play off each other is just as amusing as he remembers. Arthur waves back, momentarily distracted by Mystery who steps into view behind the two. The dog pauses in the door and settles himself down with his head resting on his paws, watching. Arthur shakes off the brief bout of unease, returning his attention to Lewis.
“Hey.” Arthur makes the first move, quashing his anxieties down so they are less distracting. Lewis doesn’t look angry or annoyed. He looks the exact opposite of angry and annoyed: nervous and worried. It’s odd to see Lewis unsure of himself.
“Hi. Again. Good to see you out and about. We were worried.”
“Ah... thanks. It’s been a real trip,” Arthur answers, putting an arm behind his head to run through his hair before remembering he has no hair.
Lewis nodes stiffly, “I see Vivi’s been showing you her notebook?”
“Oh yeah. It’s interesting. There’s a lot I don’t know about this ghost stuff. But, I don’t think I’m dangerous…to you guys anyway.”
He glances to Vivi. If she was right about his ghost lightning being tied to his emotions-and based on the evidence so far, he thinks she is- then they were probably safe. The thought of anything bad happening to them makes him intensely sick and upset. Vivi offers an encouraging ‘thumbs up’ gesture behind Lewis back.
“That’s good to hear,” Lewis has a question to his tone like he’s trying to figure out what to say. After a moment of silence, Arthur realises he has no idea what to say either. The natural rapport from his memories is gone. If anything, they’re acting more like strangers forced to interact at a social function. He’s not sure if that’s better or worse.
Better, he decides.
It’s better. This stiff awkwardness, no matter how uncomfortable, is better than fear or panic or regret. Okay, he still feels a little regret, but that’s directed more towards the realisation that he’s probably not going to have a close friendship with Lewis again. Arthur relaxes, calmer, and Lewis, ever observant, picks up on his renewed comfort and relaxes as well. Later, he’ll have time to mourn everything he’d lost, later. He still needs to make it through this conversation.
.
Note: Oh Arthur, just because things aren't immediately 100% perfect doesn't mean you should write yourself off.
Part 12: here
#MSA#mystery skulls animated#fanfiction#fanfic#arthur kingsmen#Vivi Yukino#Lewis pepper#angst#ghost arthur#arthur and his low self esteem#supportive vivi#awkward lewis
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