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this is gonna be SO long and rambly sorry anyway i saw a post abt how babel does queer characters and it got me thinking abt why the tropes it uses would usually turn me off other stories but didn’t here

MAJOR BABEL SPOILERS //

i feel like i’d be more mad abt how robinramy ended up in babel if it marketed itself as queer lit at all or if its fans were going “WOW AMAZING QUEER REP” abt it. but no one told me any of that, so finding out they were gay was just a fun little bonus surprise to me. i get why ppl are eh abt robinramy not getting together/technically still being subtext (which i dont think is really true btw like the book literally says “robin was falling in love” but idk i guess if you were stupid you might’ve assumed that it was falling in love with oxford given how romantic some of the other language is (WHICH IS ALSO THE POINT bc i think robin’s friendship with ramy blurring into romance is why he romanticised like all his friendships/experiences in oxford BUT IM GETTING OFF-TOPIC)). i just think robin’s repression abt being gay was intrinsically tied to his attitudes on imperialism (wrt refusing to acknowledge anything that complicated his life until it was too late) and i don’t consider it a cop out or queerbait. like i genuinely don’t think robinramy could ever have gotten together without drastic alterations being made in terms of plot and character. plus i think it’s clear that kuang didn’t want to write a story with any kind of focus on romance at all, because it’s not that kind of book. there’s no successful het romance either, so it grates a lot less. the only reason romance is included at all is to show the ways in which white entitlement manifests. so the tragic way robinramy played out just made sense to me.

and i speak as someone who accidentally spoiled myself on You Know What in the middle of reading and i was like ugghh boooo dreading it the whole time expecting to roll my eyes when it happened but then when it did i was like. wow im actually not that mad LMFAO 😭😭😭 actually thematically the book sets it up so well that i believed that this was unfortunately the only way it could’ve gone. babel is about the loss and tragedy and grief that colonised people experience. it’s about the lengths people will go to to uphold empire and the lengths ppl will go to to tear it down like idk 😭 i guess it is bury your gays but it didnt bother me this time because i thought it fit thematically ❤️ i enjoy tragedy as a genre a lot and i would’ve made it gay anyway you know. thanks rf kuang for doing it for me so i didnt have to.

WHICH IS ALL TO SAY that i guess if you’re going into babel for the queer rep without appreciating that the story is fundamentally a tragedy it would feel like it’s just reusing tired tropes….. but i think the choices kuang made were rly deliberate and not in a way that feels like trauma porn or shock value. the book is fundamentally about the struggles of poc so the layer of queerness that was introduced felt like a subtle extension of the experiences of characters of colour in the book, and i enjoyed and related to it as a queer chinese person who kind of realised they had to prioritise their fight for the liberation of poc over queerness mainly because the idea of western queer liberation cannot be dissociated from imperialism and many aspects of homophobia as we know it was an export of christian european empire into our colonised countries in the first place and FUCK THIS IS A WHOLE OTHER TANGENT ABOUT HOW I THINK RAMY AS A CHARACTER IS EMBLEMATIC OF THE TENSION AND STRUGGLE THAT QUEER POC DIASPORA HAVE BETWEEN OUR IDENTITIES GODDAMNIT OK FORGET IT POST CANCELLED i just rly think babel’s handling of queer characters is fine and makes sense and i like it personally and maybe i will make a coherent analysis about it one day but that day is not today byeeeeeee

#came back to this post and just. everything here is so right #babel rf kuang

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Save me dev patel..

#monkey man

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i hope more people talk about professor chakravarti from babel: an arcane history because he was a witty, intelligent middle aged man who had to deal with all the pain living in england had caused him, and still had to watch his students throw themselves in the face of death. he ended up dying anyway, but imagine his final moments, wondering if robin, victoire and the others had accomplished their goals in what he had once believed was a dharma-yuddha - a righteous war.

also i have the headcannon that he definitely was trained in some form of indian martial arts because my guy knew some moves that even stunned robin.

#the way his little subplot went was so interesting too #it's not a storyline that i'm unused to as a british south asian person with immigrant parents but it is definitely one i don't see in lit #rf kuang sliding that in there just added to the stakes of book 5 it was so OOF #babel rf kuang

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okay hi i just finished babel and ur also bengali. and like. i am toying with the silly concept of a timeloop fic with the premise that কালকে means both tomorrow and yesterday. and since ramy knows very little bengali.... the possibility of the silver failing is very delicious

YESS OH MY GOD

this is such a good idea?? how কালকে ends up being translated, whether it’s ‘yesterday’ or ‘tomorrow’, can determine what day ramy gets stuck in

if we translate it to ‘tomorrow’ in english, then the meaning of ‘yesterday’ is what’s lost in translation, so ramy gets is thrown into the past

and the professors said that you need to say it confidently and clearly for the bar to work, right? what if ramy does say it like that because ramy is nothing if not prideful and doesn’t want to admit he’s lost part of his culture, and the bar gets stuck

the entire day goes by, and once it hits 12am the next day, the day restarts because technically, by 12am, that day is ‘yesterday’

he tries to go back to the present, but when he lets go of the silver bar, he's still in the past. the bar clings onto the confidence of his pronouncation because it’s confused that the knowledge and understanding of bangla aren’t there. the bar wants to work properly, but it can’t, so ramy’s stuck

if you end up writing this concept into a fic i’d love to read it !!! i’d love to know where you’d go with this

#babel rf kuang #ramiz rafi mirza #babel an arcane history #babel or the necessity of violence

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forever thinking about these

#babel rf kuang #babel an arcane history #babel or the necessity of violence #robin swift #ramiz rafi mirza #not the best quality sorry 😔

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at the end of the day, we only know so much abt the magic system in babel that robin knows. what's kept from him, and therefore what's kept from the readers, is entirely intentional for babel to control robin

and even when robin eventually breaks out of babel, he's not given enough time, enough space to actually know the depth of silver-working and its effect on the rest of the world (because he broke out too late and could never go back without risking his life, he exhausted all his chances and his will to pretend)

he was limited by what oxford wanted to tell him and because it was oxford holding his hand through it all, he has no idea where to begin, how to do things by himself. academia can only tell you so much about the world but when at the same time it withholds how you experience it, how much do you really know about the world?

#thoughts :) #babel rf kuang #babel an arcane history #babel or the necessity of violence #robin swift

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self-indulgent robinramy fanfic where i get ramy to talk abt bengali things with robin in 1st year 👀

#babel rf kuang #robin swift #ramiz rafi mirza #babel an arcane history #babel or the necessity of violence #if things go well i'll release it in the summer #and yes there are footnotes 😈

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every day i become more convinced letty fetishised ramy bc tell me why i just found out that the royal pavilion is in brighton which is WHERE LETTY'S FROM

btw the royal pavilion looks like THIS

rf kuang REALLY chose her details right bc letty could've been from anywhere in england but no she was like let me pick brighton where a prominent example of orientalism architecture was built

#im gonna shoot myself in the head /j #ramiz rafi mirza #letitia price #babel rf kuang #generally rf kuang amazes me with how much shit she packs into the little details #and you mean to tell me she isn't a good writer like the classics writers are. LMAO OKAY #also the interior of the royal pavilion are heavily inspired by chinese aesthetics. i could be making a metaphor out of this what am i doin #babel an arcane history #babel or the necessity of violence

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anyway i have Thoughts™ about how ramy is perceived to be just a mouthpiece for rf kuang's anti-colonialist views

at this point i'm genuinely gonna have to reread babel for a 3rd time to see what that means bc. huh?

of course disclaimer preface whatever you are allowed to have your own views you're allowed to feel what you feel you're allowed to not like a book

i just feel like – it's the way a queer character just exists in fiction and in the real world, where they happen to experience prejudice in regards to their identity, but cishets just perceive them to be making "queer" their entire personality

it's the same thing here? when you see a brown character talking about how he feels about britain settling in india (britain, who ends up murdering 100 MILLION indians during this settlement btw!!!) and therefore witness how that naturally results in his strong-willed anti-colonialist views – how is that just his personality? how is that just all that he is? is that all there is to pay attention to whenever ramy opens his mouth?

from what i recall, ramy loves reading and translating, loves cooking even though he's bad at it, loves his religion and okay maybe there is a reading on colonialism in those bits too but when you are literally living in a colonial world, i don't know how you expect none of it to link back. that's how writing works and that's what it means to be a poc in a white man's world

again, just some thoughts lol

#YES YOURE SO RIGHT #babel rf kuang

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anyway i have Thoughts™ about how ramy is perceived to be just a mouthpiece for rf kuang's anti-colonialist views

at this point i'm genuinely gonna have to reread babel for a 3rd time to see what that means bc. huh?

of course disclaimer preface whatever you are allowed to have your own views you're allowed to feel what you feel you're allowed to not like a book

i just feel like – it's the way a queer character just exists in fiction and in the real world, where they happen to experience prejudice in regards to their identity, but cishets just perceive them to be making "queer" their entire personality

it's the same thing here? when you see a brown character talking about how he feels about britain settling in india (britain, who ends up murdering 100 MILLION indians during this settlement btw!!!) and therefore witness how that naturally results in his strong-willed anti-colonialist views – how is that just his personality? how is that just all that he is? is that all there is to pay attention to whenever ramy opens his mouth?

from what i recall, ramy loves reading and translating, loves cooking even though he's bad at it, loves his religion and okay maybe there is a reading on colonialism in those bits too but when you are literally living in a colonial world, i don't know how you expect none of it to link back. that's how writing works and that's what it means to be a poc in a white man's world

again, just some thoughts lol

#i'm not saying rf kuang is the greatest writer ever i don't think anyone really means that when they say it bc it's a hyperbole #but she is intelligent and uses her words carefully! like a good writer should! #and maybe some of the things she does works in babel but turns out to really not work in stuff like yellowface which i haven't read btw #but idk man #brown guy ranting abt how brown characters are perceived what's new #babel rf kuang #babel an arcane history #babel or the necessity of violence #ramiz rafi mirza

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That embarrassing main acc IS THE REASON WE MET SO DONT FORGET YOUR ORIGINS

I CAN SAY MY ORIGINS ARE EMBARRASSING SAPPHO 🙄🙄🙄

#ask tag

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the way this blog was just meant for my ocs and writing and art and i instead made it into a babel fan account oops

#saying this bc i will eventually get back to my ocs #i mean icl i can't talk abt one book forever my autism will let it rest for a bit #(this is also a sideblog to a more embarrassing main acc so if i don't follow back that's why 😔) #psa

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babel ruined my life

robin is my fav character because he is so so relatable i too love being in uk and being delulu whilst simultaneously wishing for it all to burn down

#no bc same #babel rf kuang #also why WAS ramy just staring at robin while he was sleeping wtf was that about 🤨

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to love you is to see the face of God

➵ pairing : robin swift x ramiz rafi mirza

➵ genre : fluffy, friends to lovers

➵ rating : teen

➵ wc : 3k

read on ao3 | feedback + comments much appreciated ^-^

In such a stark quietness, he looks to the one person in the room he is most comfortable with, finding deep, brown eyes staring back at him. One second turning into two, and then forever, and maybe, Robin wonders, this is what the poets wrote about. This is the feeling he can’t quite capture into words, the reason why his love poem translations always seem to be lackluster and dull.

Robin struggles to translate ancient love poems -- there is an indescribable feeling that he can't seem to capture into words.

Ramy helps him see the face of God.

ROBIN SWIFT is familiar to love. He has translated many ancient Chinese love poems before, despite it not being necessary to any grammatica or his own personal research at Babel. Irrelevant as it was, Robin still did such work alone in his room by candlelight, a quill in his hand. To translate to English from Chinese, much less any other language, was to rip something out of a human chest; a beating heart, a breathing lung. He worked on the translations anyways, if not to know what it felt to express himself across languages, but to imitate the cadence of such poems, the intonations a rhythm themselves in Chinese, a taste of what it would feel like to write of desire to another soul. 

Robin knows that his mom loved him. She took care of him as best as she could before the sickness took over, that motherly instinct she performed so well on Robin being turned to her in her final moments. He learned from his mother what it meant for love to look: care, soft hands, a filled belly.

 Robin knows that Professor Lovell does not love him in the way a father should love his son; luckily, that particular patrilial relationship is something foreign to Robin, having grown up and been raised by strong, single women in Canton. He learns from his father that love can also be complicated, resentful, and violent. This love does not feel like love, but control. Robin swears to himself to not love anyone in the way that Professor Lovell loves him.

Robin knows that he loves his cohort and that they love him. On those weary, long nights where the homework seem to be endless, filled-up on wine and yelling in their own respective target languages until they end up a heap on the floor, legs and arms, and foreign tongues. Robin, at the bottom of this pile, thinks of a simple four-letter word: warm. This is something he feels, not only in his bloodshot cheeks but in the swell of his chest, attributing such a sensation easily with that of another special four-letter word.  He is bursting to the brim in these moments with Ramy, Victoire, and Letty. Still, there is that stinging feeling, something he can’t quite describe, an exclamation point becoming a question mark as soon as the laughter dies down. In such a stark quietness, he looks to the one person in the room he is most comfortable with, finding deep, brown eyes staring back at him. One second turning into two, and then forever, and maybe, Robin wonders, this is what the poets wrote about. This is the feeling he can’t quite capture into words, the reason why his love poem translations always seem to be lackluster and dull.

He remembers a time when Victoire was fighting with Letty over a specific translation of a line in an absolute monstrous piece of French literature, one of revolutions and rebels and the unedying nature of love.

“I believe it would be translated to, ‘Remember, the truth that was once spoken; to love another person is to see the face of God!’” Letty yells, eyes filled with tears. Robin is surprised by such a poetic verse, gasping as the words leave Letty’s mouth.  Victoire, who held such romantic conviction with a bit more decorum, combats this translation, instead bringing a much more complicated, extravagant meaning to the table.

“No, no no. You have to also consider what it meant for Marius to meet Cosette in such war-torn circumstances; I translated it as follows,” Victoire gets up on the table, Letty, Robin, and Ramy all standing back to watch a performance in the making, giddy and excitable and carefree. 

“Ahem,” Victoire starts, annunciating for emphasis, “The reduction of the universe to only one being, the dilation of only one being unto god, this is love.”

“Oh, lord!” Letty exclaims, and both Robin and Ramy laught at the theatrics of the two girls, their drunken stupor turning into a battle of spoken word poems. Robin is not even sure how both girls ended up with such different translations, but his head is spinning too fast to question anything complicated.

“Well, whatever does it mean?” Robin asks, perplexed. To see the face of God. It sounded indescribable to him, not just the words that were a collection of letters creating meaning, but the utter emotion behind them, the comparison of such a human, corporeal feeling such as love to the intangible, imperceptible figure of a god.

“It evades meaning, Birdie,” Ramy says, looking at his friend beside him. “It is a love as deep as the layers of Hell, as high as the heavens.” 

Robin, sitting closest to Ramy, watches as the candlelights around the room sparkle in his eyes, those softer, lighter browns swirling into the darker ones. Robin can’t help but think of potions and hypnosis when Ramy speaks, and especially when he’s looking at him, directing his words to him as if he is the only person in the room. 

They stare at each other a second too long, and while Ramy is brave, Robin is wavering, ripping his eyes from his best friend to look back at Victoire and Letty. 

The night continues in such a way, revelry that Robin knows to be a love that he is comfortable with, that he can name and point out even if muddled through the deepest of daisy-chains and match-pairs; this love that is the unbreakable, fated bond threaded around his cohort. Robin knows love is that much. 

When their party ends and the girls head out to return to their dwellings, Ramy and Robin are left in the living area, the air thick with the unsaid and the difficult. Here is where the thread begins to tangle, a braid Robin cannot brush out. He instead avoids it all together. It becomes increasingly suffocating, however, when Ramy leans it just a bit closer, a sweet scent coming from his collar, whispering to Robin how he works through his translations, speaking his native Urdu and Bengali in such a way that was so tender and soft that Robin wonders if this was a Ramy reserved especially for him. 

“Have you been translating anything fun, Birdie?” Ramy asks, eyes half-lidded and deep. Robin finds that he can’t think straight like this, whether it be the wine or the sleep deprivation or just how close Ramy is to him right now, close enough to lean in and touch…

“Yes, well,” Robin stammers, pulling at his collar to fan himself from the heat, “I’ve been trying to translate some Tang Dynasty-era poems into English, but there is obviously so much lost in between the conversion that I worry I’m not capturing the full picture.” 

“What kind of poems are they? Any certain rhyme scheme or pattern?” 

“No, no, it’s not that,” Robin explains, balancing out the words coming out of his mouth with the thoughts racing in his head, “it’s just, I can’t seem to really grasp the meaning of the poems. I know what they are about, but there is just this one dynamic element I keep missing…”

“Can I help in anyway?” Ramy asks, his once loud and witty voice deep, low, and sugar-sweet. Robin feels his cheeks flush, the palms of his hands sweating, and he flickers his eyes towards Ramy and back to his hands multiple times in the span of ten seconds.

“Oh, no, it’s quite embarrassing–”

“Are they love poems, Birdie?”

A few weeks ago, Robin read a few books on traditional Chinese medicine when he stumbled upon a word he hadn’t heard since his childhood. The word was shàng huǒ. This culture-bound illness is caused by an imbalance of temperature in one’s body. Robin thought of a translation for this word and whether the literal meaning of ‘elevated hotness’ would suffice, or maybe even ‘hot air.’ He ended up sloppily translating shàng huǒ into English as “heatiness”, even though this left no room for interpretation, as such a word and it’s definition was innate and culturally significant to those native to Canton. When he was younger, he remembers his mother telling him whenever had had a headache, stomach pains, or even just a craving for something spicy and warm, that he was riddled with shàng huǒ, and forced him to drink a special tea or soup. He would keep inside the house for the remainder of the day, staying cool in order for his body to reach back to it’s regular temperature.

In this moment, with Ramy right next to him, Robin could only describe the feeling in his body as shàng huǒ. He wondered what could work as a remedy, those delicious tea leaves and special ingredients for the childhood soup his mom made him  worlds away from Oxford. Though this shàng huǒ was often described as an illness caused by eating specific foods in surplus, he also found some theories that pointed towards the folkloric, a space that allowed for shàng huǒ to be considered a mythical illness, one caused by a conflict of feelings or emotions. Robin was warm, he could tell, and he could also tell that Ramy was closer to him now than he was five minutes ago. The moment around them became heavy, time slowed down and slurred, Robin taking in every inch of Ramy’s face with quiet recklessness. 

“Yes,” Robin whispers, “I was reading love poems.”

Ramy inhales at hearing this, his eyes scanning over Robin’s eyes, nose, lips. He bridges the gap between them, resting his forehead against Robin’s and closing his eyes as he begins to recite, something deep and red and humble.

“ Heaven did not seem to be my home; and I broke my heart with weeping to come back to earth; and the angels were so angry that they flung me out into the middle of the heath on the top of Wuthering Heights; where I woke sobbing for joy .”

Robin, who’s body thrummed and ached and yearned for the boy in front of him, felt tears well into his eyes. He was stunned, so to speak, filled with a ravenous confusion that he wanted answers to, even if everything he needed to know was right in his hands.

“Acton Bell,” they’d both said at the same time, shock registering in their faces just a moment afterwards, and then laughter filling the air of the dark room.

“How did you manage a copy of Wuthering Heights ?” Robin asked the giggling boy in front of him, Ramy’s laugh one of Robin’s favorite sounds. 

“Me? How did you? Victoire spared me her copy that she received from Anthony, who had smuggled it from a bookseller in London.”

“Victoire!” Robin laughed, at this point maniacally, “Why, she’s also the person I borrowed a copy from!” 

They were insatiable, the inebriation from the wine wearing off but now, drunk on the life of one another, bouncing around the room and their bodies to the point of an excitable, bubbling exhaustion, one that caused them to, if they hadn’t already, make no absolute sense at all. 

They’d resume their closeness to one another, close enough to touch but not one person brave enough to cross any boundaries that were seemingly being stretched and pulled and tested as the night went on. First, it was a touch on Robin’s ankle, Ramy rubbing the small sliver of skin between where Robin’s sock ended and his trousers began. When they laughed, Robin placed a hand on Ramy’s arm, leaning forward and resting his head on his shoulder for just a few seconds. They were, if looking from the outside in, the touches of young lovers; this was Robin and Ramy, however, one half of the illustrious Babel cohort meant to change the world with their collected wealth of knowledge in translation and silver-working. It was normal for them to be inexplicable intertwined, enveloped, overlapping one another; their cohort was the only family they had.

Yet, this feeling Robin had with Ramy felt something different than when he was with Letty and Victoire, all four of them together, the complete puzzle. When it was just Robin and Ramy alone it felt as though the world could split in half entirely, the nerves and jitters making Robin nauseous, causing him to take a seat on a nearby couch to get the blood circulating again. Ramy, who suspected Robin’s nervousness, would make the situation no easier by joining his sickly counterpart on the couch. It was Ramy who, when giddy and in-love, threw himself deep into the panic, relishing the rush of adrenaline and the quick-wit reverie of flirtations. It was fun to tease Robin in these moments, who was often flustered beyond relief, and Ramy made sure that Robin was aware that he knew.

“You like me,” Ramy said finally, one hand placed gently on Robin’s waist. After their last fit of laughter, Ramy’s hand had slyly found it’s way to that part of Robin’s body, ever so softly that the other did not realize until he felt his side being squeezed. He’d suddenly become dizzy, and so Robin did what he knew best and reached out to Ramy as an anchor, placing his own hand on his shoulder, a soft touch that could easily be confused for just a comforting sentiment between friends. Ramy moved closer at that point, moving to feel each other deeper, their arms circling one another. They brought their faces together again, noses touching ever so slightly, and Robin closed his eyes, allowing himself to fall into Ramy’s warmth. He felt and heard a soft peck on his nose soon after, and the boy infront of him began to giggle, which made Robin laugh, too. It was soft, so soft, and was an intimacy with one another that they had never shared before and didn’t even know they were capable of. 

Robin, who could sometimes be considered easily anxious and worried, thought of what it would be like to love Ramy in complete daylight. What if there was no translations, no strict schedules to adhere to, no Babel? And yet, it was this Oxford, the beautiful, smothering town of twirling spires, that allowed him to meet this Ramy, his Ramy. Robin weighed the options with the boy in front of him, papers strewn around the room, workbooks open in front of them and incomplete. The time of night for rational decisions was long gone; no matter when they’d fall asleep tonight, it’d still be too late to get a good night’s rest. They would have to settle for dark bags under their eyes, constant yawning, and the subtle threat of not waking up in time for class. Still, even past midnight, Robin wanted to be nowhere else but in the sun of Ramy. So he stayed right he was and imagined that there was a world in which Babel did not exist, where Ramy and Robin met each other in circumstances that did not force them to constrain or conform, where they could love each other without any flammable fear. 

“Get out of your head,” Ramy tells Robin, “and kiss me.” 

It takes a moment for Robin to register exactly what the boy in front of him has said, his face going from surprise to relief. This is Ramy he is looking at, who would never force Robin to do anything he’d be uncomfortable with. Ramy is aware of how brash he himself can be, impulsive and assertive and to Robin, effervescent. Still, he made sure to always let Robin know that he would follow his lead into the dark and unknown. Ramy was unsure of Robin’s interest at first, but with every lingering look, he had become more confident that Robin would reciprocate his affections.

“And how do you know that’s what I want, Mr. Mirza?” Robin asks, smiling as he closes the gap in between them, leaving just a sliver of their lips from touching, from making that once intangible feeling something real.

“Is it something you want? Because I want to kiss you, Birdie. So very badly.”

It’s written on the walls at this point what happens next. Robin barely moves an inch for his lips to meet Ramy’s, and the world falls away from the both of them. It is tender and good and magnificent, the feeling of Ramy’s mouth against his, the tightened, pent-up energy finally exploding into a burst of tiny stars. They stay just like that for a while, warming themselves up in each other,  trying to find what’s most comfortable and natural.

Ramy rubs his hands up and down Robin’s back, shoulders, and arms.

Robin kisses the corner of Ramy’s mouth, his cupid’s bow, the tip of his nose, his jaw. 

It is a kind of translation that none of them have ever felt before. The translation of touches, of infatuation, of love.

“Is it okay if I kiss you here?” Robin asks, laying his hand gently on Ramy’s neck.

“Yes, please.”

Robin trails lightly from Ramy’s jawline to the base of his throat, kissing the skin just above his collarbone. 

“Shall I unbutton right here? Ramy asks, and Robin nods, kissing all the skin he can reach. He helps with the buttons, their hands together loosening Ramy’s collar. Being able to access more leverage to Ramy’s skin fills Robin with something ravenous, and yet he still takes his time working, kissing a bit more forcefully but allowing the moment to stretch for as long as he can. Ramy begins to hum lightly, small sighs escaping without shame to let Robin know that he is enjoying this moment. Together, their body language is joyful and innocent, a reprieve in their life that is constantly on edge. Robin can’t help but shake off the nerves, the excitement rattling inside of him, and he returns to frantically pushing his lips against Ramy. 

“I think I could cry,” Robin says in-between the quickness, “I could cry tears of joy.”

“I could die happily now,” Ramy responds, pulling Robin in to him so that their bodies are against one another. They don’t go much further than this, just rearranging themselves or a bit more touch of skin, Robin discarding his already loose tie, both boys pulling their button-down shirts out from the tuck in their trousers.

They kiss until they have nothing left in them, jaws and collarbones and lips sore, red, and throbbing. The boys settle on the couch, Ramy draping the both of them in a knitted blanket. Until the lull of sleep takes affect, they slowly whisper to each other, face to face, small kisses in between each exchanged. 

Robin knows that when he wakes up in the morning, he will be drowsy, his homework incomplete, and that he must go back to loving Ramy in the shadows. Despite this, Robin decides that for just this one sweet moment he will suspend time. If he were to never have something so good again and his life, so be it. Right now, intertwined with Ramy, Robin feels something indescribable. He can only compare such a sensation of loving Ramy to a touch of heaven, a taste of ambrosia, the sight of the face of God.

#read this on ao3 and loved it #didn't know op posted it on here too #babel rf kuang

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wait until finals are over bc that robinramy ballroom scene is getting DRAWN by ME in FULL i need ppl to see a visual reference for the cause of my insanity

#babel rf kuang #ramiz rafi mirza #robin swift #“don't you know why?” RAMY #SHAKES YOU

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robin n ramy's dorms were also in number 4 magpie lane – considering both their respective endings 😁😁😁

wondering if rf kuang intentionally wrote four main characters for both tpw and babel because the number four is associated with death in chinese and she likes hurting me

#if i say what this book makes me feel i think ppl will end up calling an ambulance #i'll say im feeling like the joker rn #that's the most sane shit i can say #babel rf kuang

[archiveofrasa]

every time i see a bad take on babel i always have to tell myself to shut the fuck up otherwise it's gonna get so obvious that i'm indirecting people LMAO

#wanting to rip my hair out bc LORD #babel rf kuang #babel or the necessity of violence #babel an arcane history #ive already spoken so much abt this book already but i could go on and on bc it's genuinely so good #it's one of the few books ppl have recommended online that are actually worth the £20 for