The more I think about it the more I like how unstructured The Boy and the Heron feels. It encapsulates the experiences of dealing with grief and being a child growing up so well.
Something happened that you don't really understand, and now everything's changing, and the world is so much bigger than you thought it was. Sometimes you're forced into engaging with how much more there is to life. Sometimes you choose to step forward, even if you don't know what it means yet. Sometimes you are alone, sometimes you will be by people who annoy you but whom you help anyway, oftentimes there will be people to help you through it. You are much more clever than people would expect, and yet you feel impotent when you can't do anything about the things you care for. What do you even care about? The memory of what you've lost hits you at random moments, making you cry just when you managed to distract yourself; you look back even as you walk forward. You don't understand why you do the things you do. It just felt like the right thing to do. It just felt like it would help, even when it hurt you. Maybe you'll find their meaning eventually. There are so many things that are new and beautiful, and yet the things that matter are familiar, even painfully so. There are people who want you to take on their legacies, shoulder new burdens even when they seem ridiculous to you - and yet you cannot turn the possibility of change away. There is a history that calls to you, but you don't know how to express it. There are chances for you to turn back, but you're never quite done yet. You have to carve your own path. You have to see things for yourself. You remember in your own time and learn, even when some say forgetting would be kinder. One fleeting beauty is exchanged for the contentment you have built. How do you live? You stumble, and discover, and embrace the memories, and bring them with you as you keep moving. You don't know how you live, but somehow you do. There is time. And maybe, someday, leaving and going home will feel the same. Maybe you'll build home again.
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Tell me about God suffering.
Tell me about the God who knew that we would break his heart, yet chose to create us anyway. Who saw Adam, fashioned in his own image, and said “It is very good.”
Tell me about the God who said, “my heart, my bowels, my inner parts weep like a lyre for the suffering of my people.” Who watched his loved ones worship idols and fall into sin, who knew all the blackest desires of their hearts. Who faithfully wounded them, sent them into exile, let them die, and said “How can I give you up, O Ephraim? My heart recoils within me.”
Tell me about a God who fashioned us from dust in the full knowledge that in order to keep us, he would see his son scourged and dying on the cross. Who knew that one day he would turn his face away. About a Jesus who said, “here am I, send me.” Who set his face towards Golgotha even in the halls of eternity.
Tell me about a God who became small and frail. Who endured headaches and hangnails and long nights without sleep. Who was anxious and afraid, embarrassed and misunderstood. Who was tempted. Who saw his friends sad and sick and dying. Who wept with the sound of a horse before battle.
Tell me about Jesus weeping and sweating blood in Gethsemane. Tell me about the cross. Tell me about “my God, my God, why have you forsaken me” and the agony of unanswered prayer.
Tell me about the Father and the Spirit, cut off from the Son for the first time in history. The Son, begotten and abandoned. The Spirit, proceeding from nowhere. Tell me about the death of one you have loved from eternity.
Tell me about the Spirit, who intercedes for us before the Father in groans too deep for words. Who understands our deepest pains that well.
People say that to love at all is to suffer, but that isn’t true. God loved and was loved in perfect Trinity before he created us. To love what is fallen is to suffer.
Tell me about the God who chose suffering.
@citrussunrises
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Boy King AU | Vettonso + Martian | 1.3k
There's something about putting the future emperor of the Holy Realm on his knees like this. About how easily he goes, how willingly, how obediently. What would his adoring public think if they could see him now. If they saw their beloved king pressed down like this, in the cramped space between Fernando's legs. When they realized their little boy king took it like he was a little concubine instead.
Fernando's bitterness is lifted away in moments like these, like taking off a heavy cloak on a winter's day. It was hard to feel humiliated about his own situation when watching Sebastian debase himself like this.
He always gives himself up so easily. When Fernando threaded his fingers through his thick curls. When he pulled them, and then when he pressed his face down further down into the vee of his legs. Sebastian rubbed his cheek into the coarse fabric of Fernando's breeches and blinked up at him. Fernando had to smother an embarrassing sound; he was just like a little cat!
Sebastian quirked his lips up into an odd little smile and slightly rose up on his knees, "What's funny?" Fernando swallowed lightly and schooled his face back into being impassive, "Nothing. As you were." Sebastian simply smirked at him and let himself be pushed back down by the fist clenched in his hair.
Fernando scoffed internally, there was only so much pleasure in putting the other man in his place when he instead acted like this, this degrading action, was his birthright. He took to ruling and indulging in carnal pleasures as if they were of equal gravity. To be privileged to hold such high station and also let himself be taken apart like this…Fernando felt embarrassed for him.
He is dragged away from his musings when Sebastian moved to settle his hands in Fernando's lap, clutching his hips over the fabric and slightly squeezing; Fernando fought against the urge to shiver. Sebastian pushed up the skirt of Fernando's waistcoat and smoothed his hands over the opening flap of his breeches.
His eyes darted up at Fernando again, a daft smile on his face. Fernando scowled at him, "What?" Seb's grin sharpened, "You could stand to be a little more gracious. This is your future emperor, and future husband might I add, kneeling for you on this dirty, depraved, derelict- ah–" Fernando tugged on his hair again and hissed, "Well then, why don't you show me how eager you are to perform your marital duties?"
Seb licked his lips, completely unconcerned by Fernando's annoyance, and unbuttoned one side of the closure to Fernando's breeches and moved to open the other–
The door to the carriage flew open, arrival announcement dying on a wheezing breath as the servant took in the image the two kings made. One splayed across the seat, exuding power, the other kneeled, debauched, between the former's legs.
One would be hard pressed to determine which was higher on the totem of power and titles.
There was something gratifying about this to Fernando, about being caught. He had been humiliated enough throughout the entire courtship, what was one more thing? And, certainly, what was one more thing if he could drag Sebastian down into the dirt with him.
"Oh Mark, don't act so abashed! It's nothing you haven't seen before, in fact, we have been in this very position not even a fortnight ago!"
Oh. Yes. That.
It was hard to be completely pleased when he remembered how Sebastian had already spent years prior to their engagement sampling the palace's ample selection of fellow high-born men. And how all those men seemed to be completely and utterly wrapped around his little finger.
Fernando released his hand from Sebastian's hair as if it had burned him. He did not understand why he felt ashamed with Mark looking in on them like this. Fernando was the one marrying Sebastian, not Mark; Mark was just a lowly courtier who had the esteemed duty of spending practically every waking hour with the brat…something he himself was decidedly not looking forward to.
Sebastian stayed kneeling, staring impassively up at Mark, still fiddling with the clasp on Fernando's breeches. Fernando gritted his teeth and looked up from where he was watching Sebastian's clever little hands; Mark stared back at him placidly.
Mark's indifference made the entire situation worse. Fernando now felt as if he was not doing anything unique, not doing anything particularly new. How many other men had Mark caught Seb with in this exact position? Fernando felt like he was just another plaything of the boy king, soon to be boy emperor, except his position was forever, permanent. He was the "Kept King", the king who only kept his throne due to the whims of a boy who doesn't even understand what power is.
Mark coughed, "Well," he says, "Your Majesty, I do believe you have a meeting to attend." Seb pouted at him and whined, "We were just getting to the main course," but still braced himself on Fernando's thighs and got up off the carriage floor.
Seb pranced down the steps Mark had placed next to the carriage, miming tripping sown the stairs, snickering when his action made Mark reflexively reach out to grab him, and then playfully skipped off the final step.
Fernando couldn't help but stare as Mark made the weirdest grimace in response, and he inexplicably felt all his mortification seep away from him. Huh. Maybe Mark is-
Seb then turned around and frowned at him, seemingly disappointed, but his eyes are deceivingly sharp, "Fernando, I regret to inform you that I have other duties I must attend to, you will simply have to wait." He then grinned up at Mark next to him and giggled as the other man stiffened when Sebastian looped both of his arms through Mark's.
He leaned all his weight on the other man, Mark not so much as shifting his weight, "Oh Mark, won't you carry me back to the palace? I'm so very tired after all the horse riding," Seb looked up at him imploringly.
Fernando observed as Mark rolled his eyes and shrugged off the man, though notably not pulling his arm from Seb's grasp, and he got the distinct feeling that this exact scene had been played out countless times before.
Fernando clenched his jaw as he watched Seb turn and saunter off, Mark trotting alongside him like a loyal dog. Fernando was supposed to be the unaffected one in this partnership, the unflustered one, the unconcerned one. And yet here he stood, in broad daylight, in a foreign kingdom, on the steps of a carriage with his breeches half unbuttoned and his cravat in disarray.
He heard a cough from beside him, jolted and looked to the side. Sebastian's loyal Horse Master stood there, lounging against the side of the carriage. Fernando had forgotten who had even been driving the carriage in the first place. After Seb has let himself be pushed down, his hair still windswept from their ride together, everything else seemed to fade away. His thoughts were reduced only to how he could mess up the younger man's hair further.
Jenson grinned at him wolfishly, and casually crossed his legs, "First time?" he inquired. Fernando glared at him. The other man laughed openly at him, "What? He's a busy man with big prospects. You're not his majesty's only conquest, you know. Now your throne on the other hand…"
Fernando seethed, it was one thing to be humiliated by the future emperor, but to be patronized by the king's horse boy? No. It would simply not do. He closed his eyes in annoyance, pinched the bridge of his nose, exhaled, and prepared a speech about how he was not about to be talked down to by a man who didn't even have a throne to speak of!
But when he opened his eyes again and opened his mouth to begin his tirade, Jenson was already wandering away to tend to the horses. Dios mío, Fernando was not mentally prepared to spend the rest of his life with all of these impertinent morons.
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