#tumblr stop fucking with my paragraphs order challenge
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Okay, the promised is debt.let"s talk about Gintaka moments!!!
I said a long time ago I was gonna do a compilation of Gintaka/Takagin moments. And I will deliver right now! (op skimmed the jp twitter and is excited/can’t wait to see the movie )
Ok, no, this will be mostly my disorganized headcanons, moments where I can see the ship with my shipper googles on, some paralels? Haha, honestly just to show the ship some love!!!
It’s also my perspective on why I love this ship!!
Of course, I'm going to talk about all the series and go back and fort, so there’s going to be spoilers all around, so if you have not seen the manga end, best skip it.
The rest is under the cut, let’s go!!!!!
So, I started shipping Gintaka/Takagin after the Shougun Assasination arc, best strangled friends story I have ever seen. I like a lot of Gintoki ships, but it became my favourite really fast. Then, looking back, I noticed these haha:
the first meeting in the show (ep 17). I know it was threatening, but watching it again the fireworks exploded over their heads as they met.Isn’t that a romantic troupe? (and also in this scene makes Takasugi face scarier, haha). And also how Gintoki stopped Takasugi blade, so obvious for point one that they knew each other.(the interactions here are so painful in retrospective 'When his father saw his son's head, imagine the rage he felt?😭')
(and then there’s also , in the extra episode where the yoroyuza go to China, they help a poor dude with his first date with a girl, and Gintoki comments how the first date should have fireworks, haha, at the time there were some images on pixiv of child Gintoki and child Takasugi seeing the fireworks together, it was so lovely, good headcanon!)
There's the Senbonsakura arc, and Takasugi appearing at the reunion scene looking at the moon, woah (there's also them crossing paths, but that's more dramatic of the ideologies maybe, still this a shipping post so ' them crossing paths there, the athmosphere of fated (rivals) people!!!')
( ‘They both had sad eyes’)
I like how even as they are different their core is the same, even if not these character are so raw together in their feelings
Let's talk about the movies for a moment: in the movie version of the Benizakura arc, Gintoki dreams with Takasugi, and IDK, but for how haunting it is, it also feels intimate, and that makes it hurt most.
About the second movie when we saw it we didn't know what the hell happened to Takasugi, but looking back he's dead by that time....maybe. (why didn't you give us a clear answer at the end sorachi).Okay but for practical purposes of what the cast knows he's dead (maybe...ahhh let's says it's like that) and well, haha, gintoki of the future dying looking at the sunset haha don't think of him daydreaming things.(When I saw the movie I had the impression that takasugi was dead, for both katsura clothes that are not called as a joke, and future gintoki 'the only one that can kill me is me', if takasugi was alive, he wouldn't let gintoki claim that so hypotrically, that's what I believed.)
There's the mini arc of the underseas dragon palace, (I remembered this one because of takasugi 'monster' form) I'm just gonna said that even if I read too much into ot there are some interesting paralels maaaaaybe, this one is a strech.
Talking about far fetched things, you people remember the Love Chorris arc? The one with the virtual girlfriends game? I think I am not the first person to point this out, but if you analyze Gintoki girl:
Gintoki selects her and (accidentally)kills her son.After that, she is bend of killing him in return in revenge. With his son corpse at her back to haunt him too.
She later confesses to him that she knew he wasn't at fault for her sons death, and that she focused on blaming him to be able to handle the pain, that she's grateful of Gintoki for understanding this.
The spirit of her son aproves their relashionship.
Now tell me this doesn't remain you of someone in particular and his relashionship with gintoki. And this is gintoki mind perspective and hopes, and fears.
(Well it probably isn't that deep, its the chorris arc, but still)
The way you can see Sakamoto’ jokes as a friend teasing because he knows they like each other. The fight when they to a red district gaining another lining.
The rajuko arc, when they exchanged blades to save the other newfound friends/family. The fucking red string of blood that they form together.
In the manga there was the famous saying attributted to takasugi historical counterpart :
'I want to kill all crows in the three thousand world, and sleep in with my heart's master'
This if I remember correctly because crows caw mark the morning, and in a brothel you have to leave.
So the meaning is ' I want to kill all crows in three thousand worlds(so that morning never comes) and sleep/stay in (forever) with my heart' master'
(Of course this could refer to shouyo, but it could be about gintoki, they go directly to meet the other)
It's a famous saying used in songs, I believe.
The part when he doesn’t want to see more rain, its of course because seeing gintoki's crying was imprinted in his mind for so long and influenced how he thinks. He is so important to him!!
And of course the final arc, where they are more open to each other,(the strangled friends are so happy to be together again) both Takasugi who finally let go of that 'burn the world down' and of Gintoki that walks besides him. The way Gintoki looks at Takasugi with a soft expression on his eyes. Matako ' I have never seen before Shinsuke sama with those eyes, I couldn't stop them'
The Glorious Days ending, that's when one (me) realises, 'oh ... this two care about each other and want to save the other' and while it isnt surprising for Gin, it was for Takasugi at the time.Rewatch the openings and endings in general, and see Takasugi place in them. IDK, he is usually the last alone waiting under the moon. And it gets me...cant really explain that.
The radio call, how we couldn’t see gintoki's initial reaction as Takasugi talked to him, gintoki even pretending not knowing (painfully bad) he didn’t know the other voice.
And of course the myriad moments in the final arc, Gintoki promply saying he is the one he wants to protect, the death sequence 'maybe we were just born under that kind of (tragic) star'
Gintoki teading takasugi that his parents would cry if they see the delincuent he is bringing home 🤣🤣.
Fuck, in the spin off Takasugi as a student novel, when he and Gintoki meet they can't keep the skit up, they talk directly to each other.
Also about the special episode, there's another...uh this is more of a paralel, and purely a headcanon, but here it goes: the yorozuya meet with kamui while trying to help a woman about her mother setting her up in blind dates, and in one moment she starts mothering both kamui and kagura and they get, well their eyes are animated different in that moment, and then they start listening to her. They were probably remainded of their own mother. And then I realised that I have seen Kamui make those eyes before (I will look for a pic, it's a very distintive shift), when talking to Takasugi. Is in one op too.
Of course the childhood friends dynamic. Regardless of nature, nobdy can deny the deep connection these two have.
(Here's the image from the op, is less obvios in the ep I think...or I'm overthinking, that's more possible)
Here’s Kamui and Kagura’s eyes when tehy get scold by the mother:
(I’m not crazy, they are similar XD Maybe XD)
I remember thinking to myself at the time 'woah, Kamui shows a admiring expression with takasugi somentimes' and now I fully believe is a childlike more like expression because takasugi reminds him of his mother(subconsiously). I can see the resemblance, especially towards the end of the series. As Gintoki and Umibozuo paralel too(both of them act like Kagura's dads) I just....haha parallel things.
There's a hundred things more, I'm sure I'm forgetting some (may add in a reblog after). All their fucking dialogue with each other is so intense. I I just love this ship sooo much
Totally up to talk about this ship if someone wants to!!
#gintama#gintaka#takagin#gintama spoilers#the movie is close so just to be sure anime watchers arent spoiled#gintoki sakata#takasugi shinsuke#somentines I play a little game called 'which gintama end lyrics fit takagin better XD'#grammar mistakes probably#will edit later...probably#add more pictures since it's difficult on phone#also this post is really a continent away fron serious analysis XD#tumblr stop fucking with my paragraphs order challenge#Edit: there were some sentences out of order still#I added one or two more pictures#thanks for liking my rambles
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Fanfic 2020 in Review
I got tagged by @kasienda @noirshitsuji and @marvelousmsmol and I am tagging whoever wants to play!
1) List of fics completed this year in the order they were finished:
*filters own works to complete and updated in 2020*
1 - 20 of 57 Works by AlexSeanchai
nope. *adds filter to include only works of at least 1000 words*
unless otherwise indicated, these are all Miraculous Ladybug:
“don’t bake it lying down”, post-reveal Marichat vs Felix Graham de Vanily
“veracity”, canon divergence from “Ladybug” featuring Mister Bug and Verity Queen (so also Marichat, I guess)
“(no request is too extreme, if) your heart is in your dream”, in which Hawkmoth wins, for the thirty seconds or so before Emilie saves Ladybug and Chat Noir’s lives
“tell me you love me and make me believe it”, in which trans girl Chatonne Noire ropes Ladybug into helping plan her civilian self’s escape slash social transition
“kingmaker, oathbreaker”, in which Hawkmoth wins and Emilie watches her son remove himself from the family
“stay and let me watch you break it down” (Twelve Dancing Princesses), a modern setting
“set a course for winds of fortune”, in which trans girl Chatonne Noire has already escaped and Gabriel and Nathalie are trying to bring Gabriel’s son home
“we ground love in a hopeless place”, in which post-reveal Marinette’s attempt to remain resolutely not in love with her partner dissolves like sugar in coffee when they start a pun war
“ring the bells that still can ring”, in which Alya is deeply confused about why Adrien and Marinette are planning a wedding when last night both were single
“burning wishes at both ends (the cold wind and long loud wail remix)”, in which Gabriel made a monkey’s paw wish and Emilie makes another
“words cannot espresso”, in which Marinette’s OC roommate is justifiably worried for Marinette’s safety, and meanwhile Adrien takes care of Marinette
“the compromise of truth” (the chronologically second-earliest part posted to date of nine lives, snake’s eyes), in which Adrien tells his friends how he won some freedom and respect from his father
“At The Present Time”, the Ladrien/Ladynoir marriage proposal follow-up to @art-deco-shrimp‘s “Your Presents Required”
“j'ai rêvé (so I don't have to dream alone)”, in which the events of canon must just have been a series of dream sequences, Marinette and Adrien both think, until they both arrive at Chloe’s Halloween masquerade dressed as themselves from the dreams
2) Number of words written:
ahahaha no. I am not counting all my scattered fic drafts and trying to figure out what I did and didn’t write in 2020. I refuse.
AO3 says I posted 162K in 2020. it is counting all of keeps you guessing (like any real love), which (a) I started posting in 2019 (b) is co-written by @galahadwilder; it is counting all of my meta snippets collection, much of which was written in 2019; it is counting the Vimeo passwords for my vids. but I probably cleared 150K by a safe margin.
3) Your most popular fic:
“veracity” has a four-digit kudos count, wow, when’d that happen? this is also the 2020 work with the most hits and the most bookmarks, but “tell me you love me” has four-thirds as many comments as its nearest competitor.
4) Your personal fav:
“cannot break us, not with a thousand swords”, no question about it. this is the one in which Ladybug proposes marriage to Chat Noir via Princess Bride meme on Tumblr. (if you intend to download the work or otherwise to consume it with creator style off, you want the accessible version instead of the primary version.)
5) Your fav scene:
aaaaaaaaa
—okay so this is cheating and I know it, since Uncertain Humors (the one where Marinette/Adrien is both Orpheus/Eurydice and Theseus/Ariadne) is nowhere near finished, never mind posted (maybe I'll get “Sanguine” done to post on my birthday?)
but it is still my favorite of the year. as you might guess from that description of the story, this scene has content notes for character death:
Hell is a maze. Marinette walks.
This acrid passage has little to see but damp stone, seeming blood-stained in the dim carmine light. At about the height of her heart, the faintly glowing thread cuts through the not-clammy air; it ought to be pulsing at the same rate as the heart it's bound to. She might be able to see her own reflection if she looked down at the open sewage pipe, or at one of the puddles that now and again she splashes through, dampening the canvas of her shoes. She might see reflected what's behind her.
She remembers Mme. Mendeleiev lecturing on human physiology. In healthy humans old enough to have learned how, urination is a voluntary action: one may not know which muscles one tenses and relaxes in order to do so, and probably isn't paying attention to those details when one is doing, but one has conscious control over whether one does. Usually. Stress and anxiety mean some people are unable to relax the relevant sphincter muscle and others are unable to stop themselves. It's voluntary for cats, too: it's one way they mark their territories. Cat-boys have other ways.
There is a moment in every human life when all one's muscles relax at once. Some Parisians have had several such moments.
The thread is braided with itself around her left fourth finger, rows of tiny red half-hitch knots, and falls loosely over the back of her hand to loop twice around her wrist. She holds it wrapped between the fingers of her right hand to keep it at a constant tension, as though knitting with this insubstantial thread, so fragile for something two (two dozen, two million) lives hang from—too thin to sew with, no thicker than one strand of his hair. As she walks, she winds it around and around and around her wrist.
Between her ring finger and her right hand, it loops twice.
Marinette's shoe lands in a puddle she didn't see. The rainwater splashes soundlessly onto her bare ankle and on the stone.
(With cat-like tread, upon our prey we steal— It's a very loud song.)
She walks on.
6) A fic or scene that challenged you:
where the firelight fades, no contest. this is the second story I’ve ever been able to stick with more than a couple hundred words past the 20K mark, but it’s easily the twentieth novel-length I’ve begun. (though also, you know that kedreeva post? well, 90K later, I’m less than 15K from completing this 10K fic! I think.) and I have been learning so much about long-form fiction.
there has also been a lot of weeping and tearing my hair. case in point: I just trashed the chapter 15 draft because I figured out the reason it wasn’t going anywhere! I can probably keep the first few hundred words of that draft without any editing, and another few hundred with some revision...
7) A line of writing you’re proud of:
from “j'ai rêvé (so I don't have to dream alone)”:
Everything about their partnership is fragments of sentences in the dream diary Adrien writes in ultraviolet pen. Disjointed flickers of thought even when examined under the black light he hides in the snack cabinet under packets of Super Yoyo sandwich cookies and bags of cheesy Monster Munch potato chips and boxes of petit écolier butter cookies (chocolat noir)—none of which explains the gym-socks smell. All fleeting incoherent flashes, invisible between the mundane lines of La Modification shelved at his bedside between Leroux and Dumas. None of it is solid. Adrien has more proof his room's haunted.
okay let me break this down for you!
* Adrien started a dream diary to make sense of the memories
* in invisible ink, in a book that (according to Wikipedia) is thematically appropriate and won’t (if Gabriel sees it) look like anything other than Adrien developing an interest in French literature
* shelved between Phantom of the Opera and The Three Musketeers
* look I didn’t come up with the name “black light”
* or “chocolat noir” for what English speakers call “dark chocolate”, or “petit écolier” (that is, “little schoolboy”) for that sort of butter cookie
* also not my fault that “chocolat noir” sounds remarkably like “Chat Noir”, which, attentive readers may have noticed, is not a name that appears in the story after the header and before Miraculous Cure
* I found the website of a store in Boston, Massachusetts that caters to French expats, and the yo-yo cookies and the monster chips were right there in the photos, y’all
* the snack stash and the black light live in the cabinet where, in canon, the Camembert lives; yes, that cheese smells in the real world like gym socks
* this story’s akuma was not able to affect anything but squishy human memory: nobody affected remembers anything about Ladybug or Chat Noir or Hawkmoth, not in any solid way, not even when they read news articles about the subject, and this includes Marinette and Adrien not being able to see or hear or remember their own kwamis—but you know what Adrien’s Insta post about his poltergeist and Adrien’s Insta post with the floating sock don’t show and don’t explicitly refer to?
* I love this paragraph so much (my housemates may have been lovingly mocking me over it)
8) A comment that touched you:
there are people (y’all know who you are) who said y’all are studying my style. I ded of blush.
9) Something that inspired your writing:
by volume of fic drafts that can be blamed on any particular person, the winner is probably @norakwami
10) Your proudest accomplishment (that one scene; finally finishing that one fic; posting your first fic; etc):
so that longest-story-ever-written record I set in 2007 with the 89.5K story that, till where the firelight fades, was the only story I’d gotten much past 20K?
I broke that fucking record!
and then I deleted the draft of firelight chapter 15 😭
11) Do you have any writing goals for the next year?
I’m starting work on a fantasy novel, a Sleeping Beauty retelling in which I explore (among other things) the economic consequences of the king’s ordering all the spinning wheels burned, and I want to make significant progress on that. and I want to not make my hands any worse; I kind of need those!
(breaking news alert: bodies fucking suck. so does giving yourself repetitive stress injuries in doing one and a half to two people’s worth of work for an organization that was never ever going to pay you more than one person’s worth of pay.)
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As previously warned, I have a huge number of questions for the fanfic author ask thing. So, here we go: 4, 5, 6, 12, 13, 14, 15, 17, 20, 21, 24, 25, 26, 27, 29, 30, 31, 33, 36, 37 and then, if that wasn’t already enough, and there is anything you want to answer that I haven’t already asked, then pick one of your choosing to answer as well! 💕
Holy crap you weren’t kidding! lol this is gonna be so much fun!
4: What made you start writing fanfiction?
My 3rd grade teacher, Mr. Gula, gave me a challenge to write out my own ending to my favorite movie or TV show. As I was never really one to back down from a challenge, I went home and wrote out my own story about the first Transformers movie and another one about what I would do if I had been in HIgh School Musical. Yeah... needless to say, I was the Hermione of my grade.
5: Favorite pairing?
I know I don’t write for them, but my top is probably either Dee Dee and Frankie from the Beach Blanket Bingo, Bikini Beach, and Muscle Beach type movies or Seaweed and Penn from Hairspray. Something about those types of romance are sort of sweet to me. Guess I’m just an old soul. I also adore Cory and Topanga form Boy Meets World, but I’m mostly here for the older romances.
6: Least favorite pairing?
I’ll probably get flack for all of my answer, but I’m a little bit opinionated about this lol. The way Ginny and Harry’s relationship in the films was, was just confusing and so not what I had expected from them. The books gave them so much more than the movies ever did. The books were way better. Another case I don’t like was Bella and Edward/Renesmee and Jacob from Twilight. I think the other relationships in Twilight were better (Jasper and Alice are so sweet!) and Stephanie Meyer just kinda tossed Bella and Edward and Renesmee and Jacob together in the hope it would work and it just didn’t.
12: What’s the weirdest fic you’ve ever written?
I can’t believe I’m admitting to this.... I used to write full stories about One Direction. I had a full Niall x OC story I posted on a 1D Imagines group on Facebook that got almost 2,000 likes. It was silly, but, my word, it was almost as long as Broken Record. It spanned over the month of October 2014 and I can’t believe it ot the attention it did. It wasn’t all that good, but I guess it was good enough for people to like it, so that’s alright by me lol
13: Weirdest fic you’ve ever read?
I don’t believe it’s on fanfiction anymore, but I remember the basic info on it. It was Make a Wish by FireBladePrime. It was pretty much a girl made a wish on a shooting star and it made her favorite toys come to life as full size humans. I believe she ended up falling in love with one, but I’m pretty sure it just ended up being something that she came up with in her head when she was in a coma due to a car accident. Definitely a weird one, but it was pretty well written as far as memory serves.
14: Do the people in your life know you write fic? How do they feel about it?
Well, quite a bit of my family knows, actually. It started with just my parents, but my dad was always wanting to show off whatever his baby princess did (I was his only biological child, my older siblings were from my mom’s ex-husband). Dad shared with his siblings, mom shared with her siblings and my grandfather. My nieces and nephews know as well, but I believe that’s it. As far as I know, they are all very supportive and have no problem with it. My neice, Lorali, and nephews, Erek and Drake, have read all of my Teen Beach fics and quote things from them daily just to see if I’ll react, but they mostly just like reading them or having me read to them. They’re very loving and supportive of my writing.
15: Favorite fandom to write for?
I don’t know if I could pick one! I love Teen Beach so much, but I also have a certain affinity for writing small oneshots or “x Reader” style stories for Avengers and Harry Potter which can be found here and here. I do share the Harry Potter page with my sister, but she handles reblogging things to our page. Anyway, those would probably be my top fandoms!
17: What is the harshest criticism you’ve ever gotten on a fic?
Holy crap. Okay, I may or may not have repressed this for a long time, but I have more than one that I can’t decide between. The other one was from a girl in my class who stole my writing notebook and read my writing. Fuck you, Ashley She gave it back to me later that day with marker scribbles all over my writing. She said that I was horrible. The next day, I stole the makeup bag she had brought from her mother’s bathroom and buried it on the playground.
I was a good child that believed in getting even. Nobody found out about that btw.
Anyway, the first real criticism I had on a fic was someone who said, “You have no talent and you shouldn’t be writing. It all sucks and you’ll never go anywhere as an author.” I had actually written this down and, when I felt it no longer mattered to me, I burned it. It took me a couple of years to come to the realization that their opinion didn’t matter to me.
20: What’s your biggest struggle when it comes to writing fic?
Having time to sit down and write, probably. I usually have great ideas, but, in order to write them out and have them come out alright, I would need to sit down and feel it all come together while I write. I need time that I just don’t have most of the time.
21: Your biggest strength?
When I sit down to write, it all just flies out of me. Once i start, I don’t stop until my idea is all out into either m notebook or my computer. I can have a simple idea that somehow spirals into an eight page chunk that I never thought was possible. I like to think of that as my biggest writing strength.
24: What’s your process?
Write out the “backbone plot” (The stuff that has to happen, no matter what)
Decide on characters. Figure out appearance, personality and basic traits. (Sorta like a sim, I guess)
Bounce ideas with whoever will listen/listen to music (Gain ideas and write them in a small notebook)
Wait for inspiration and time to line up accordingly.
Write as much as I can.
Go back into that later on and edit what needs to be there and delete what isn’t necessary.
Publish!
I hope that’s what this means, at least.
25: Of all the fics you’ve written, which is your favorite?
Most definitely Broken Record and Creating a Rift. It was one of my first published stories and I just adore them.
26: Which of your fics is your least favorite?
I don’t even know how to find it anymore, but it was called Life’s a Rollercoaster. It was a Transformers fic that I had written when I was 11. Never finished it bc I lost the login stuff and it, now that I remember it, sucked hard.
27: What’s your most popular fic? Do you think the popularity is warranted, or is there another fic that you think deserves it more?
Any of them really! I love that Broken Record has had almost 10,000 reads, but I don’t believe it. As I go back over it, I wonder how on earth it gained popularity in the first place, but I couldn’t be happier that it did!
29: Which of your fics was the hardest to write?
My book. Probably the Christmas one, tbh. I only feel the pull to write it around the holidays and that kinda sucks lol
30: Favorite fic writers?
You better know you’re number one, girlie! For those who don’t know, Eleanor here is one of my closest internet friends and she’s practically family to me at this point!
As for other authors, I love Ulurnaga’s Primary Mechanisms story (Transformers). I know she hasn’t updated it since 2014, but it was so good that she could’ve left it at multiple parts and it would’ve been fine. I think it has abot 118 chapters to it. I have a few favorites from AutobotGuy710 who does a lot of Transformers stories basing around adoption (helps for my references and also a better understanding of what goes on a bit in adoptions/foster care). On Tumblr, I have a few faves, but not a ton. I like imagine-and-marvel and potterlyimagines fics a lot, but that’s about it at the moment as I haven’t sat down to read fics in a little while.
31: Do you write just for fun, or would you ever consider pursuing writing?
A bit of both, actually. I mostly enjoy writing my fics as a bit of an escape from reality. I enjoy being able to place myself in a world that doesn’t exist and sort of play around a bit. However, I do actually write as a job. I was working for my county newspaper for a while and that spiraled into me writing my first book, Feather Picked. I am currently writing one of the sequels to Feather Picked which takes the focus from my original main character, Melody, and moves it to her best friend, Roxy. I am planning on publishing a total of at least 5 books, the first four being the chronological 4 that take place over the course of a full year, each taking one season. The last one will be a look into the future, hopefully.
My first book can be found here!
33: Fanfiction pet peeves?
Goodness gracious. As someone who loves English classes, when people don’t place paragraphs correctly or spell simple words correctly, it reeeeeeally grinds my nerves. I will still sit through a story if it’s a well plotted story, but, come on people, at least do proper paragraphing!!!
Also, when people spell “definitely” as “defiantly”...... uuuuuuuuggggghhhhhhhhh
36: Which charachter(s) would you never write for?
For this one, I don’t really have much to say.
Probably characters from shows like soap operas or shows that never seem to end. If I can’t grasp the character’s backstory or personality after watching it because it never stops changing whenever it benefits the story or what the writers have planned, I refuse to write for them.
Mary Sue types like Bella Swan who are merely the damsel in distress and are only there to play out the author’s wish to be put in some type of scenario where everyone fawns over them constantly (can be applied to male characters as well).
37: Which character is your favorite to write for?
Out of already made characters: Butchy, Lela, Cheech, Evie, Ben, Harry Hook, Bucky Barnes, Draco Malfoy, Luna Lovegood.
Out of my OCs: Mick, Malina, Roxy Madden, Candi DiMaggio
Since you said I could pick one if I wanted, I’m going to pick #40.
40: Imagine yourself 10 years in the future; do you think you’ll still be writing fic?
I think I will be, yes. I don’t think my ideas for movies and books will ever stop. Especially knowing what I have planned after Creating A Rift is done. But... that’s a story for another time, lol
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Writer’s Interview
thanks for the take @a-shakespearean-in-paris!! <3
Q: What is your coffee order?
Usually just a cappuccino? I don’t usually like sweet things in my coffee, except for at Christmastime when I order exclusively peppermint mochas lol.
Q: What is the coolest thing you’ve ever done?
Tbh the coolest thing I’ve ever done is probably be a fake socialite for like a portion of my late twenties and early thirties. My husband’s great uncle, who passed away last year, was quite wealthy and a huge, well-respected philanthropist for the LGBT community and gay rights. He lived in Palm Springs, and any time he had a gala or a fabulous event to go to, he would invite my husband and I to be in his entourage. We got to go to the GLAAD Awards about five times, including VIP events and cocktail parties with like, Leonardo DiCaprio, the Getty family, and Michael Jackson’s daughter. It was decadent and ridiculous but a fun role to play for a little while in my life.
Q: Who has been your biggest mentor?
My biggest mentors have been my professors from graduate school, both of whom are fantastic writers that taught me how to respect the work, stay grounded, and focus on making writing an important, central part of my life, no matter what comes. They taught me and my colleagues a very “purist” approach, which I appreciate to this day, revolving around the concept of inevitability: writing for love, writing for vision, writing in secrecy, ignoring the world as I grew and developed, and viewing The Industry as but a secondary factor that, when focused on with too much intensity too early in a writer’s career, can and will spoil their outlook and creative struggle forever.
Q: What has been your most memorable writing project?
I have several? My MFA thesis is memorable, because it was weird, and I was doing things back then in this very raw way that I can see and feel coming back to me now, eight years later, as a more mature writer and person. My Solavellan longfic The Dead Season also stands out as hugely memorable, as it took two years of my writing life to complete, and I believe it single-handedly improved my writing skills in ways I am only just now beginning to appreciate.
Q: What does your writing path look like, from the earliest days until now?
I have no idea lol. I have been writing since I could read. I started when I was very young, filling notebooks with horror stories and christmas stories and bad poetry and world building ideas. It was literally just notebook after notebook after notebook. I started typing my writing on a computer probably in fifth or sixth grade, and using it more consistently when I was in eighth or ninth grade. I wrote some fanfiction for boybands when I was in middle school, but that was short-lived. I continued to invent worlds and write shitty poetry all through high school lol, and then my senior year I started writing short stories. I went to college, majored in English with an emphasis in Creative Writing. Taking workshops honed my short story writing and gave me lots of practice, and then I won a little prize money out of it which helped me pay for my graduate school applications. All I ever really wanted to do was be a writer. I took a year off after college and worked as a bank teller back home in Wisconsin, and then I got real lucky and got into a very good MFA program which moved me out to California when I was about 23. I wrote and wrote and wrote. I met my husband, who was one of my colleagues at the workshop table. We moved in together. I finished my thesis, he finished his. Then we went to Montana for a little while, and we got engaged. I published some stories, mostly in small places, a couple big ones, too. Then we got married, had a baby, and I came to fandom out of boredom and frustration with the mainstream, and I’ve been toiling away here every since.
Q: What is your favorite part about writing?
I agree with @a-shakespearean-in-paris that for me, the best thing about writing is discovery. Discovery of language, ideas, characters I love.
Q: What does a typical day look like for you?
Uh, wake up. Feed child. Snuggle with child. Derp around on tumblr. Drink coffee. My husband and I switch off mornings and teach on opposite days of the week. If I have to teach that day, I’ll lesson plan, go teach, maybe have office hours for my students, come home, hang out with my fam, put the child to bed, and then I get my nights. Mondays and Fridays the kid is in preschool and I don’t teach, so on those days I try to be as productive as possible with my own writing and also art (if I don’t have to comment on too many student papers lol). I write when I can. I don’t have a set schedule. My grown-up life has taught me the importance of speed and the kill instinct as a writer. Like when you have the chance to write, fucking just do it. Don’t hem and haw. And when you feel the need to finish something, don’t stop.
Q: What does your writing process look like?
Lol. Who knows. I consider music to be a big part of my writing process. I always use playlists that I keep on repeat whenever I’m not writing. I also do a lot of my drafting in the notes on my phone, a lot of the time in bed at night, right before I fall asleep. When I sit down to write, I usually have something in mind. I know what I need to do. At this point, once I start, I can go for a long time and write a lot of words in a very short timespan. It’s just getting to that point where I’m sitting down. But once I’m there, I can kind of just go.
Q: What’s the best advice you’ve gotten?
Stay in the room. I got this advice from one of my professors in graduate school. It literally just means: Once you’ve made the decision to write, don’t leave the room. Stay in the room. Because if you leave the room, you’ll lose your momentum. He always said the biggest challenge for any writer is staying in the room, ie: forcing yourself to do the work. Thinking of writing as work and as something that is not always pleasant but must be done anyway was very important to me. It taught me not to be so precious about my work and to just do the thing and let drafts be drafts. I also learned from him that the best thing you can do when finishing your writing day is to write one more paragraph. So when you think you’re done, write one more paragraph. It’s usually there that the best discoveries are made.
Q: What’s the biggest lesson you’ve learned?
Don’t focus on publishing. Writing is not a well-paying gig. Even those who get grand book deals are rarely living large. Unless you’re Stephen King or equivalent, you’re still having to teach and apply for grants and do other shit to get by. I’ve learned that the only true satisfaction that comes from writing is pleasing others, pleasing readers. Having readers at all. You can toil away on a story for months, publish it in a lit journal, and never hear about it again. It’s pure vanity. I’ve learned from fandom writing that there is nothing more gratifying than the response from and interaction with readers. Actually touching peoples’ lives with my characters, inspiring and affecting them in some way. That’s what writing is all about. It’s an exploration of the self, but it is not self-serving. It can bring real joy to people, and that’s the thing I want.
Q: What advice would you give someone who wants to start writing?
Just write. There’s no reason not to. In fandom, there is a lot of concern over not being good enough, I think, because of this culture of constantly sharing everything we make, and notes, and kudos, etc. But if you want to write, you have to just write. You can’t say, “Oh, well, I’ll never be as good as so and so, so what’s the point?” Writing is a journey of many choices. The first choice has to be: I will now write. Don’t compare yourself to others. Find a niche that works for you. If you like to work alone and avoid showing your work, that’s okay. That’s how most writers start out. You don’t need a “beta” or a workshop team, particularly not when you’re just beginning. Share your work when you feel comfortable. It’s not important to always be sharing. It’s important to always be writing. And try not to get ahead of yourself. You must write for your own reasons and not to impress others. That is a toxic mindset that will only bring you down. And write. And write. Skip the over-planning. Skip the worksheets and the organizational worldbuilding software. Just write. It’s the only way to find out what you actually have to say.
tags for @thevikingwoman @bearly-tolerable @idrelle-miocovani @pikapeppa @littleblue-eyedbird @ocean-in-my-rebel-soul @buttsonthebeach @ellstersmash and anyone else who’d like to do this!! <3
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Morning Pages No. 62
Tuesday 25th August - 10:26pm
Yeah, I know these are just becoming later and later, and I know I’m going to have to do this whole thing again in around ten to twelve hours, but I honestly just needed to take a whole day today. I feel like that’s genuinely something I needed to do. And a lot has happened today! I don’t know if I want to talk about all of it, but I suppose I do feel full and happy enough to talk about...some. I spoke to Malith? I called him when I was on my walk with Lonzo after realising that I was feeling a bit lonely. And Malith was #1 on my list of 50 people who’ve helped shape me into the person that I am today. Out of all the people I could’ve thought of first, I thought of him. And that was in my head all day today, so around 4pm I decided to finally call him. And I expressed that the reason I hadn’t been able to call him before that was because I was getting too in my own head about allocating time to call Malith. I mean we usually speak on the phone for hours at a time, with three or so hour phone calls being a totally normal and regular occurrence when we were younger, and by younger I mean like two or so years ago? It’s perfectly natural for us to waste away hours on the phone, and for our phone calls to include multiple toilet trips. Phone in hand. I felt like if I was always multitasking, then I’d have no time for a phone call. But on my walk today, I realised that I’d rather speak to him for twenty minutes a day rather than not speak to him at all for months just because I never had four spare hours at a time. Which reminds me, I also told the boy that I’d actually read ‘Fleabag’, so I have to do that right after finishing these pages. Yowza. I kind of fucked myself over here, didn’t I? The amount of crap I need to do is seemingly large almost always usually because I allow myself to have days like this, where I get absolutely nothing done. Well, actually it’s not entirely my fault. I had uni this morning, and so that meant a 9am start AT THE LATEST. I actually woke up at around 7am, closer to 7:30am but not close enough that it was an alarm that had woken me up. The sun woke me up, because it comes out earlier now. And I love that. Summer’s on its way in, but I still have a gross winter body and it’s still weirdly raining a lot, so I want to rectify the gross winter body, but it’s a little difficult in this abhorrent torrential August rain.
I’ve just realised I haven’t had a single paragraph break for this whole page, so I’ve decided to put one right here. We learnt about ‘chunking’ in Writing & Editing for Digital Media this week, and the inverted pyramid model that’s used for writing content meant for digital platforms. I felt pretty confident in my ability to ‘chunk’ effectively, that is to construct my content in defined and digestible chunks so that it’s not just one wall of text, and our audience is more likely to both find the information they came for, and also better engage with our content in general. I’m really enjoying this class, and I’m also really enjoying ONLY TAKING ONE CLASS! After this class, I’ll only have one more left, and then the internship. Which is exciting. If I’ll ever be able to actually do an internship. COVID-19 has screwed up my hopes of finding full-time employment by February 2021, and calling my 24th year on this earth the first official year of my professional career. It seems as though there’ll still be some time before I properly enter my industry. But I am enjoying doing whatever I can with whatever is available to me right now. I mean maybe I could go on to get my PhD at unimelb. Maybe not at unimelb? But honestly where else would I go? I have no other connections to any other institutes, but one could also say that I have no connections at unimelb either. I just owe them a lot of money. And also $282, or I believe that is the amount. I don’t want to think about that bullshit right now though.
Evan just coughed in the other room. I’m not sure what he’s doing, but I love him. I don’t know why, I just wanted to write that.
Sarah posted in the 21 Days group that today’s challenge was to call up one person from our list of 50 people and just touch base with them. Funnily enough, when I read the challenge I was already on the phone to Malith. I called him after realising that if he was the first person on my list, that would mean that I’ve been thinking about him quite a bit, and took that as a sign that I should definitely call him. It felt pretty nice to have preemptively completed the challenge, without even knowing that I was PREEMPTIVELY completing the challenge?! ‘Preemptive’ is such a weird word. I misspelt it when I was typing it out in caps. The ‘p’ being between the ‘m’ and the ‘t’ threw me off completely. It just felt wrong to type those letters in that order.
Anyway, Sarah also spoke about her friend Joshua in the post, and I didn’t know how to express my condolences. I just sent her a message. I feel my mind straying from these pages. I don’t think I want to deal with anything too complicated right now, which is why I’m skirting the issue. Sometimes, I worry that if I don’t speak about my friends and what’s going on in their lives, I’ll just repeat the same basic stuff that I seem to concern myself with for the majority of my time, or over the bulk of my day. I don’t know. I need to read ‘Fleabag’, and I’m worrying that I’m not making sense. I doubt that these pages will provide me with any insight today. I honestly just feel like I’m ticking boxes at this point, and I’m a little bit annoyed about that feeling, but I’m also accepting it as part of the pages. Oh what zen. I am a revolutionary mindful practitioner, a beautiful and empty-headed queen of calm. I don’t fucking know. It’s 10:56pm, it seems ludicrous to still refer to this as a morning pages entry. LOOK. I consider it to be a colossal win that I’m writing anything at all today.
I texted Julie and organised to visit her again next Wednesday so we can spend a bit more time looking at all the stuff I’ve done on Squarespace so far. It’s not bad, what I’ve done so far. Like it’s really not bad. I’m proud of where the site’s at, with perhaps a small exception to the colour scheme and the fonts. I have to sort that out. I’m not entirely sure how to add our own font packs to Squarespace’s site builder. I hope they allow for that? Because the font pack that they do have is INCREDIBLY limited. I’ve stopped using italics in these pages because I’ve realised that when I copy/paste the text from this morning pages doc into tumblr, tumblr gets rid of all my italicised text and just turns them into normal letters again. Lonzo just had a dream where he was running and his legs were moving, but he’s lying behind me under the blanket and so his little scratchy paws were moving up and down on my butt and it felt like the largest, weirdest, most inefficient spider bite I was ever receiving.
There are now TWO spiders on the window sill above the kitchen sink now, and the newer one is smaller but still BIG for a house spider, and it’s suspended in the centre of a web that’s been prominently constructed right above the kitchen sink and in the centre of the bottom section of the window. So basically this spider is like eye-level with me when I go to do the dishes. But the problem is, is that this smaller spider looks eerily like a crab, its legs are at weird angles, and I legitimately think it’s dead? AH. I hate this so much. I’m trying not to think about it, but goddamn it’s on my mind and now I’ve described it in great detail. That horrid spider will be in these morning pages for the rest of eternity, and someday future Rue is going to read this description and hate past Rue for it...present Rue? Rue that is Rue right now, sitting here typing against her will but also for her own good.
I’m weirdly enjoying it that whenever I answer the phone at work and an older man is the one who’s calling, they say ‘like a French street’ when I tell them my name. Haha! Sometimes I’ve responded with ‘or like searing regret’ or something along those lines. And if they appreciate wit, they tend to laugh. This one time, I told a middle-aged couple about my idea for a useless superhero (‘Superfluous’), and the dad (because he was a dad and she was a mum and they were in the shop buying a phone for their daughter, if I remember correctly) CACKLED. I have a love-hate relationship with brackets. I think they’re lazy and I would never use them in anything I write and put my name to, but I’ve always used them avidly in journal entries and personal stuff like these pages. I figure nobody’s going to judge me for having horrid grammar and some shoddy structure in something that they shouldn’t be reading anyway.
I do enjoy writing though. Always have. No surprises there. But sometimes it is hard. It feels like a part of me that I feel I need to disconnect from myself in order to survive, and yet at the same time, it is my life. I don’t want to do anything else but this, I say that a lot. But then sometimes I am SO fearful that I’ve forgotten or I’m on the way to forgetting how to do this. It’s been literal years since I last wrote long-form fiction, and I feel like all the stuff I’ve written recently isn’t even that good. But was my stuff as a teenager any good too? Mr. D.B. Kuruppu said that it was. And I owe it to him to try harder. But I owe it to myself too. I have good ideas, or at least teenage Rue had good ideas, and those ideas deserve to be fleshed out and done justice.
Nicky’s just crawled into my lap. He almost crawled all over my keyboard but I stopped him. He almost did it again. Now he’s licking his back leg but actually I can hear and feel his scratchy tongue trying to lick up my yellow ‘KINDNESS ONLY’ hoodie. I love this hoodie. I never thought I’d ever spend so much money on a HOODIE, but I am glad that I did. Wearing this makes me feel happy, and I know that it makes other people feel happy too, which is everything that matters. Positivity. The colour ‘yellow’ is one of the most beautiful colours in the world, but the best thing about it by far is the fact that it reminds me of my mum. That’s a beautiful sentence. I miss my family. I want to see Sandy at LEAST. Maybe I should call her tomorrow and see if she’d be keen to take the dogs out. I also have to do a bit more work on the website tomorrow, but for now I suppose I should just read ‘Fleabag’ and maybe a bit of ‘Dominicana’ if I can stomach it. And by ‘stomach it’, I mean if I can physically deal with lying on my stomach after my very modest dinner of hummus and crackers.
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Flick kidnaps 3 people
Just some quick worldbuilding that I once again got tired of. I figure Flick isn’t just an asthmatic, he has a whole handful of other fucked up issues (think I imply he has ehlers-danlos) to make him suck more. Florence is technically good but imo she’s a proto-Silas because it’s weird that like all of her people are....18-19 in the very beginning. I made an attempt at alluding to the different areas in the North including the fucked up blood magic corruption place that is cool in my head.
Also all of these men are extremely not heterosexual and I hate their society. At least Flick is self-aware of his desires and apparently does honeypot operations w dudes to get his spy info...Anatole is very ‘straight’ and Jules is completely naive. Oh yeah and poor Dog :(
Also why can’t I fucking format paragraphs/spacing on tumblr I hate this website.
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The witches would come out of the seclusion of the Hinterlands forests every few months, to sell their wares and buy the things they needed. They always went to the towns of the Valley. Somehow, they knew, that if they went into the larger cities of the Capitol or of Kemenka, they would not fare well due to the civil war. It affected everyone.
“The old woman isn’t with them,” said Flick, as he watched his targets. As usual he was dressed in civilian clothes, all black and easy to move in. His weapons were concealed, but then, he never had to worry about hiding a sword or a gun. He leaned against a wall of a housing complex as he observed the witches barter with a shopkeeper. “Why isn’t she with them?”
His companion was less curious. Anatole Surkhov was not happy about being unarmed, not happy about wearing civilian clothes, and even less happy about having to deal with unnatural forces which frightened him. He looked uncomfortable in jeans and a long wool jacket instead of his uniform. He hunched over beside Flick with his arms crossed, a grim look upon his handsome tan face. “The General is not going to like this,” he said. “She wants the old woman, not some girls and a child.”
“She’ll have to deal with the disappointment,” said Flick. He stayed perfectly still, comfortable in his knowledge that nobody would notice him. It was easy for him to blend into an environment, to feel at ease. And the small towns of the Valley were his home.
His companion stuck out like a sore thumb. He stood like a soldier; every muscle ready to spring into action at a moment’s notice. Flick elbowed him, trying to get him to relax. There was a war going on, after all.
The witches finished their transaction in the booth across the street. They also did not fit into what the average farmers and bakers of the area looked like. They dressed in layers of shapeless dark wool. One of the girls was around Flick’s age, 18 or 19, and was thin and pinched. The other was in her early 20’s, softly heavyset with flushed cheeks. There was a child with them as well and even from a distance it was clear there was something wrong with him.
Florence wanted to get her hands on them. Even Flick was not sure why. She knew the old woman, the witch who was in charge, from the time she was a teenager and was just married. This was likely the reason he never had any brothers and sisters, which he didn’t mind so much. But Florence claimed she needed the witches for the good of the Rebellion. She needed their magic, even if she had to force them to use it.
That didn’t make sense. That was not how you won a civil war.
But Flick never argued with the woman who had once been his mother.
The witches walked down the street, unaware of the men who watched them. They talked quietly between themselves. Each of them carried a few things: rope, a basket, some tools. As they passed, the child made fleeting eye-contact with Flick. He gave the kid a smile and a little friendly wave. Most children-- and this child was around 5 or 6-- would have smiled back, but the witch’s boy remained expressionless and did not look at him for long. The chunky child hurried after his mother.
Anatole made the sign against evil with his left hand, thumb pressed to the middle two fingers.
“So superstitious,” Flick commented. The witches entered a tavern and he stopped slouching against the wall once there was no chance of them seeing him. He turned to his companion. Comparatively, the two of them were like day and night and sometimes being around Anatole reminded him exactly how weak and defective he was. He wheezed when he breathed and his joints were prone to popping and overextending themselves. There would never come a time where he would prove his bravery on the battlefield. Relegated to the sidelines, the shadows. But in this, at least, he knew he was superior. “I didn’t know you would be so scared of a couple of women, or I would have asked somebody else to help me grab them. Reed, maybe, or Beatrice.”
The allegation of cowardice made Anatole’s beautiful mouth twist up. “If you were smart, you’d be afraid of them too. You haven’t seen the kind of destruction blood magic has brought to my people. Not just the poisoned wells. The pits. it’s like an infection.”
Not that he would ever tell this stupid boy, but Flick had traveled east to Kemenka, like he had traveled all over the Northern Territories. He had not stayed there long; as curious as he had been about the changes that had been made to the landscape, it was not safe for him. Blood magic had ruined a good third of the land there in retribution. Florence warned him not to drink the water. He remembered one of the pits. Instead of dirt, it was lined with slimy flesh that pulsated as if it was alive. The wrinkled, flabby material spread out of the pit and to the rocks and trees around it. Sweaty, fungal body-odor wafted out of it. Warm. Why had it been so warm and wet? He nearly had an asthma attack.
It was beyond him and it had frightened him, so he had left. There were things in this world that he did not want to understand and blood magic was one of them. Even now when he saw raw meat, he would think about it...
That infection was the reason Florence had half her army, though. The King refused to help, of course. Even the proudest people can only go through so much, and Anatole’s people were not loyal to the Monarchy: they were loyal to the son of the Butcher, Mikhail Surkhov.
Even so, he rolled his eyes at the other boy. “These witches don’t use blood magic, they’re entirely different. No, I haven’t been to Kemenka, but I’ve heard of what the (COME UP WITH TERM FOR CULTISTS) did to it out of revenge for the time nearly all of them were slaughtered, on your father’s orders. What do you call that? Genocide?”
“I would challenge you for that if you weren’t a cripple,” said Anatole nastily.
“I guess it’s a good thing I’m a cripple. Come on, let’s go inside, buy our lovely ladies a couple of drinks. Flirt with them, pretend we’re a couple of friends interested in their company. That will make it far easier to drag them back to HQ without a problem.”
Anatole’s face was still twisted but he could not be ugly if he tried. He straightened his heavy black coat and pushed his hair out of his eyes. The lazy brown curls fell to his ears and normally he wore it back in a short ponytail. His right hand drifted to his left hip, but found it bare.
Was he useless without a weapon? Maybe. But that was not the reason Flick had asked him to help carry out Florence’s kidnapping orders. Anatole’s use in this particular situation was his beauty, his tall muscular frame, and his charm; he was irresistible to any woman. As for Flick’s charms? He knew he had some, and was well able to utilize them when he needed to gather information. But it was rarely women who were attracted to him.
His companion whistled sharply. Flick sighed. Apart from his arrogant stupidity, Anatole had one other significant weakness.
“That whistling shit makes me sick,” he told him.
Anatole’s terrible shadow made his way over to them. Flick had protested his presence for personal reasons as well as practical ones. He had forced him to sit 20 feet away from the two of them at all times, so as not to call attention to them. After all, the boy known as Dog was freakishly large at nearly 7 feet tall and broader than any grown man in the Blue Army. It was not his size that made him so frightening though; he could grab, rend, and tear things with his mind as if he had dozens of hands of great length and size under his control. This enormous strength and power was offset by his intellectual and emotional incapacities.
One night, Florence told him all she knew about Dog. It turned out that Beatrice was his sister, but even she did not know what happened to him after they were separated as young children. She did not want to know why he acted like, well, a dog. Why he could barely speak. It turned out that he had been kept in a kennel for 6 years, only taken out when he was being forced to kill.
In the end, he’d torn the man who did that to him to pieces.
That was not the confusing part. The real enigma was why Anatole allowed Dog to live when he was the sort to challenge someone if they even called his father “The Butcher”.
Dog loomed over them. Over the year Flick had known him, his behaviors had improved exponentially, but remained just disconcerting enough to provoke disgust. The enormous young man wore the same dark heavy wool that Anatole did. His eyes were trusting, and he always cocked his head to one side when someone talked to him. The cold did not bother him, although it was well below freezing; his size protected him while everyone else shivered.
“You are not coming in with us,” said Flick. “We’re trying to not be suspicious, Surkhov, and bringing a giant into a tavern is a sure way to get noticed, to scare the ladies away. We want to get them drunk and pliable. That isn’t going to happen with your man lurking around behind us as we try to charm them.”
“I’m sure they would be charmed to hear you speaking about them like that,” sneered Anatole. He put a hand on Dog’s arm, and the large boy flinched but quickly remembered himself. “Stay outside. If one of the witches comes through the door, grab her.”
It turned out that even simpletons could carry superstitions. Dog looked down at his boots. “But Tolya…” he whined, in the canine sense.
Upon hearing the childish diminutive, Anatole raised his right hand to strike him. It was not his fault, he had been raised in violence and he had been raised watching others be mistreated or killed for the slightest offenses. As fast as he was, Flick was able to catch him by the wrist before he landed a blow. He squeezed and anticipated getting cuffed himself.
If this operation ended with all of them squabbling in the street, Florence would...well, she wouldn’t do anything, but she would blame Flick for screwing it all up which was worse.
Anatole regained his composure. He wrenched his arm away with such force that Flick’s shoulder popped. “Don’t grab me like that.”
“Let’s keep our minds on the objective, gentlemen,” said Flick, smiling. His shoulder hurt and he rotated it gingerly. The mystery of what was wrong with him had not been solved after 19 years, and he knew that he would never know. It was some kind of connective tissue disorder that messed up his joints and made him bruise easily. On the plus side, his body was excessively flexible and mobile. Unfortunately it also left him with chronic pain and prone to dislocations and sprains. On more than one occasion he had to stay in bed all day to recover. “Get that scowl off your face, you’re playing a common merchant, not a soldier.”
The snow fell lightly above them. Flakes of it landed in their hair, melted on their cheeks. It made Dog shake himself. Flick simply brushed the snow off with the back of one hand so that it didn’t lower his already body temperature any more.
Anatole let the snow hang in his curls. His face untwisted from its scowl and he was handsome again. He straightened his coat, the perpetual discomfort of not being in uniform, of not being armed evident upon him. “Fine,” he said, and he pushed past Flick to walk to the tavern. “I call the skinny one.”
Flick rolled his eyes and followed. His legs were shorter than his companion’s and his boots broke through the icy crust on the street, sinking down into the mud up to his ankles.
The towns in the Valley did not have the infrastructure that the Capitol had, or even that Kemenka had. Most of the roads were unpaved, and electricity had to be rationed. They had more natural resources than the other Territories, but none of the wealth. The King expropriated more than 70% of what was grown there, in the temperate fertile fields. He would have done the same to what was grown in Kemenka, had that Territory not been vile muskeg bogland corrupted by blood magic. The best resource there was the fierce people; the men who had not revolted and joined the Blue Army were forcibly conscripted into the Imperial Guard. Compared to the majority of the population in the Capitol, they were all treated like laborers to exploit.
That’s what they were fighting for.
The Valley and Kemenka shared next to nothing culturally, but in this civil war they shared a common enemy.
These dark perspectives were banished from Flick’s mind as he entered the tavern. It was exactly like every other unnamed tavern in the small towns of this region: wooden, warm, lit by a coal-burning hearth in one corner. The building itself was small and rectangular, with a second story which was the space in which the proprietors lived. A small bar was located near the door, and behind it an equally small kitchen could be glimpsed. It was barely past one in the afternoon so there were few people inside-- the witches and their child, a bartender, and four merchants who were taking their break. A single television was mounted on the wall above the bar, its picture blurry.
Either the owners were long-term supporters of the rebellion, or they were only now just brave enough to show it. Next to the television hung a flag with Florence’s symbol on it: a green rowan branch with red berries, over a white background. And beside it, a photograph of her husband on the day of his execution a decade ago, standing tall and unafraid on the scaffold.
He had been made a martyr that day in the eyes of many people. Flick looked away. He remembered the type of man his father had been, despite his noble cause and deeds.
The witches sat at the bar, talking quietly amongst themselves. The skinny younger one had pushed back her fur-lined hood. She seemed to be the one in charge, the one who kept a wallet with money in it; she counted her money anxiously. Her limp black hair fell to her shoulders. The other one, the obvious mother of the child due to the flat, heavy face which they shared, was more dull. She chimed in every now and then, but kept her dark eyes on her folded hands. The little boy sat on the floor and busied himself with pulling off his mittens and scarves.
They did not look dangerous. Flick and Anatole shared a glance before they advanced.
“ Ladies,” said Anatole, approaching the bar and taking a seat on a stool next to the skinny one. All of his mannerisms changed now that he was dealing with women. If he was still afraid, he did not show it. He pushed his curls out of his eyes with one hand, and leaned on his elbow. Somehow he came across as charming, in a knightly way rather than a scoundrel-y one. “Keeping out of the cold?”
The witches looked up, wary as wild animals. The child hunkered down on the floor and went perfectly still.
Flick sat down beside Anatole. He also had an easy smile, but could not pull off that kind of charm. His skill in seduction went hand in hand with espionage, he could not flirt for the sake of flirting. It was easier to just get somebody into bed and then gather the information he needed through pillow-talk, after their minds were nice and relaxed with the release of oxytocin.
“It isn’t that cold,” said the skinny witch in a low lilting voice. She was no beauty. Her face was too sharp and the olive skin on her cheeks and across her nose was damaged by the cold. Her lips parted to reveal a noticeable overbite. “The hills here keep the wind from biting too badly. We’ve seen much worse.” The layers of her clothing made her shapeless. In the warmth of the tavern, she took off her gloves which were sewn from rabbit skin with the fur on the inside. She unwrapped her cowl-like scarf and draped it on the back of her chair.
It took all of two minutes for Flick to realize that this witch was actually a boy. Like everyone else in the North, he did not exactly have a complex understanding of gender, but due to the nature of some of his work he was better than most. The clothes both witches were wearing were, after all, shapeless and genderless. He did not know much about witches and up until that point, had believed them all to be women. Why was that? They were always women in the stories, but he saw no reason a man could be a witch if it was indeed something genetic like blood magic or Dog and Beatrice’s Ability.
It did not change anything.
“I’m Anatole,” said his idiot companion. His IQ had to be around 20, and in his backwards Territory, any issues surrounding gender boiled down to ‘men fight and women cook’. “Can I buy you a drink?”
Flick wondered if he should step in. If this boy, this man really, believed that Anatole was flirting with him, a fight might break out. Most people were so touchy over things like that. He remembered how his comrade had once been and it was doubtful that he had changed at 19.
“Jules,” said the witch boy. For a second his black eyes narrowed into slits, but then he smiled nervously. His cheeks colored beneath the dark spots. “You can buy me a drink, if you buy food for my family as well. Ivy, Mary, do you want something to eat?”
From the floor, the little boy --Mary?-- made a noise that mimicked the yip of a fox. His heavy, dull-expression mother only nodded, her gaze fixed on the TV. She appeared removed from reality and her attention was elsewhere; eyes completely glazed over. Flick amended his plan in his mind as he did not believe this woman would be able to put up much of a fight.
It was clear that Anatole was flirting. It showed in the way he smiled at Jules, and everyone knew that when men are interested, they offer to buy drinks. But Jules smiled right back, unabashed and in a public establishment. It was true that the Valley did not prosecute homosexuality in the same severe ways they did in the other Territories, but that did not mean people went about their business in the open. There were always consequences. Jules was either the boldest person Flick had ever come across, or he was a foolish gay boy who had been isolated in the Hinterlands woods his whole life and did not truly grasp the consequences of what would happen to him if he acted freely. Perhaps he did not yet understand that who he was was...wrong.
Reflecting on such an idyllic existence made Flick feel jealous. He had always known that there was something wrong with him because he was a cripple. Then when he was 12, he found out that there was something else wrong with him when another boy beat him to a pulp after he clumsily made a pass in the same way he did with girls. If Jules was 18 or 19 and had not yet learned this lesson, he was very lucky.
Well, he would learn that lesson very soon. Again, Flick wondered if he should step in so that Anatole didn’t go into some kind of rage and kill the little witch.
Anatole waved the bartender over. She was a busty middle aged blonde with a terrible scar on her face, most likely a parting gift from the Imperial Guard’s rampage 10 years ago. “Bring us whatever you have that’s hot,” he told her, and he put his wallet on the bar to indicate that he had money. “And-- what do you drink, Jules?”
“Gin,” said the witch. He was still smiling but looked increasingly nervous, the way people look when they get hit on for the first time. There were bracelets made out of bone and shell on his skinny wrists and he played with them. “Just gin.”
“Interesting,” said Anatole, and nodded at the bartender. “Gin. Most girls I meet drink cider, especially here where the orchards are so plentiful.”
“Huh?” said Jules, stupid and young and naive after a lifetime of loneliness.
Flick sighed. If he sat back and let Anatole kill this guy, Florence would be angry with him. He slid off the barstool. The child was sitting on the floor pulling on his shoelaces, and he hated to see that as well. He took his communication device -- an old model, from the industry-rich Capitol-- out of one of his jacket pockets and handed it to the kid. That was how his mother always kept him quiet and entertained when she was doing important things. Mary didn’t make eye-contact with him, but took the device regardless and began to examine it with his chunky hands.
“We’re merchants,” Flick said loudly, changing the subject. He inserted himself between Jules and Ivy’s stools and put a hand on Jule’s bony shoulder to forcibly establish a connection. His proximity to Ivy made her look away from the television and stare at him confusedly. “We noticed you selling your wares. What do you bring, all the way from the Hinterlands forests? It’s possible we could be interested.”
Jules’s troubled expression did not leave his narrow face. His thin black eyebrows furrowed. Up close he was even more effeminate, no wonder Anatole was confused. He wore jewelry in his earlobes like women did, except instead of gold or stones his earrings were made of bone. Protective charms? Parts of some ritual? Or were they just a stylistic choice? “Medicine. Mixtures of herbs, some rare, some less so. We make boxes of tea in bulk, but when we can get glass bottles tinctures sell twice as well. We’re herbalists.”
“What’s popular?”
“Oh, tinctures of valerian for sure. It helps you sleep. I mix chamomile into it for more strength.”
“Tansy and pennyroyal tea too,” said Ivy, still dully looking at the television.
For the first time, fear flashed across Jules’s countenance. Selling or using abortifacients was a crime worse than sodomy, since the King believed that it went hand in hand with infanticide. It was punishable by death. Flick pretended he did not know what those herbs were for, and was confident that Anatole did not know either. He didn’t care about all that, but then, he didn’t care about much of anything.
“ R-right,” said Jules. He fiddled with his bracelets, tucked a necklace made of shell back under some folds of clothing.
The bartender brought out a bottle of gin and several shot glasses. Jules poured the first drink, to calm himself after Ivy nearly outed the two of them. He knocked it back and then poured another. For all his bravado, he was not a seasoned drinker; he grimaced at the strong taste of liquor.
Anatole smiled and now the scoundrel showed through him. He took off his heavy black coat and hung it behind him. Underneath he wore a simple blue shirt with buttons that went down halfway. He undid the top 3 buttons as if he was overheated. Jules stared at the hollow of his throat. “You have a useful skill,” he said. “Did someone teach you or did you learn by yourself?”
“I’m an apprentice.” Jules poured himself a third shot. Now Flick felt bad for him. He was so nervous, he was acting like one of those poor girls Anatole set his sights on. “We’re both apprentices. I have a lot to learn.” Between the alcohol and the fire in the hearth, he was actually overheating. With some difficulty, he removed one of his outer layers. Beneath it he was even thinner; was the old woman even feeding him? “What do you do?”
“We just told you that we’re merchants,” said Flick, a little crossly. He looked at Anatole, attempting to indicate that he wanted to grab the witches now. He did not want this to escalate.
“Oh.”
From the floor came a series of beeps and buzzes. Mary was fixated on playing with the communication device as if he had never seen one before. Up until that point he had been blank faced and serious, but he began to smile slightly. He was a cute child. When Florence was done doing whatever-it-was she wanted to do with the witches, maybe she could find somebody good to raise him. Somebody who wouldn’t screw him up.
Suddenly, bright lights flashed from the device’s screen. Mary had found some kind of video with excessively coruscating images and sound. He froze, stiff as a board for several seconds. The child began to shake and twitch all over, his eyelids fluttering. He made a noise like a kitten getting the air pressed out of it, then fell over onto his face, his limbs making tiny jerking movements.
Jules jumped up unsteadily and almost tripped over his own feet. He crouched over the child and secured him on his side, jabbering in a strange language that was not English, French, nor Russian. The mother only watched with dull, cow-like indifference.
“The time!” slurred Jules, urgently. “I need to know the time.”
Flick and Anatole looked at each other once again. Flick raised his eyebrows. Anatole shrugged. It was as good a time as ever; their target distracted and half-intoxicated while a child had a seizure. Sure, it was not necessarily ethical or moral, but what was in a time such as this?
“The time!” insisted Jules. “I need to know how long it lasts!”
It was the wrong moment to try and be funny, but Flick could not help it. He pulled the knife from inside of his jacket, where he had been secreting it all day. When Anatole saw it, he grew annoyed: after all, he had been told to leave his beloved sword behind. As fast as anything, Flick had the blade at Ivy’s soft throat. She barely reacted, so he did not press it down. He would not need to if the witch boy did what he told him to do.
“It’s time for you to come with us,” he told him. “The kid will be fine. Get him under control. You witches are hereby wards of Florence Gauthier and the Blue Army. Don’t try to resist or I’ll gut her; we only need one of you. Be smart, Jules.”
The words that left Jules’s tongue sounded like English being spoken backwards.
And then his hands glowed white.
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