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helena-edge · 3 years

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The Great and Powerful Ozpin (RWBY fic)

So, I usually post og content on my page, but in honor of RWBY Volume 8 coming out I thought I’d share a fic I wrote awhile ago. I have to give a shout-out to @tigerstripedmoon. After reading “three small words,” which you can find at https://www.fanfiction.net/s/12372592/1/three-small-words. I had to write a cloqwork fic of my own. Seriously, you guys, it was THAT GOOD. Please check it out. You can find mine at https://www.fanfiction.net/s/13511024/1/The-Great-and-Powerful-Ozpin. I’ll also post the whole thing here. I’m hoping that Oz gets some love in volume 8. That poor old wizard deserves it.

Okay, so here it is, “The Great and Powerful Ozpin” in which Qrow is an alcohol-soaked cinnamon role and Oz is sadder than he lets on...

The Great and Powerful Ozpin

“What kind of headmaster lets a student die on his watch?”

The shout that cut through the amphitheater forced the man on stage to pause mid-sentence.

“I—”

From his place in the balcony seats, Qrow watched Professor Ozpin adjust his spectacles and peer out towards the crowd.

“Pardon me?” Ozpin’s deep, calm voice echoed in the vast room, the gathering place of Beacon Academy. Regular classes had been interrupted for a special ceremony. The screen behind the speech podium was black, the color of mourning.

“You heard me, murderer! You killed my sister!”

Gasps erupted around the room. The sea of students parted aside in the wake of a giant—no, a human, the largest man Qrow had ever seen, making his way, stomp by angry stomp to the stage.

“Hazel.” Ozpin’s soft whisper of recognition sounded loud through the microphone.

“Ozpin!” the man roared in response, a sound that could have come from the mouth of an ursa.

Glynda, Oobleck and Port stood behind Oz, watching Hazel Reinhart approach. Glynda clutched her riding crop tightly, Oobleck nervously sipped coffee from a thermos, and Port gritted his teeth beneath his mustache. Unlike the other teachers, Qrow had chosen to attend the memorial service for Gretchen in the shadows of the balcony. He liked to be up high. It helped him to see better. He clenched the hilt of his sword as he watched Hazel jump onto the stage. He was only a few feet from Ozpin now, who despite, the nearing threat, remained a steadfast presence behind the podium.

“You will pay for what you did!” Hazel bellowed. He raised a beefy arm to point a finger at Ozpin’s chest.

From above, Qrow saw the tightening of Hazel’s body. He knew what he was going to do before anyone else.

None of the students understood how Qrow managed to reach the stage so quickly. There was just a blur of black—one student swore they saw a few feathers—then a clang of something heavy impacting metal. When everyone opened their eyes again, Hazel’s fist was firmly planted in the flat side of Qrow’s blade.

“Not one step closer.”

Qrow heard his own voice pulsing in his ears, low and gravelly—and dangerous. “Make a move, you son of a grim. I dare you.”

A deep, rumbling sound issued from Hazel’s mouth. Qrow couldn’t believe it; the lunatic was actually growling at him.

In response, he turned his blade ever so slightly so that the sharp edge was cutting into Hazel’s knuckles.

“Qrow.” A gentle voice spoke from behind him, and Qrow felt the pressure of a hand upon his shoulder, one with pale, delicate fingers, but with a grip stronger than Qrow had ever known. At that moment there was the sound of a cane being tapped decisively on the ground.

“Why don’t we all calm down,” Ozpin said, his manner congenial as if he, Hazel and Qrow were merely sitting down to a cup of afternoon tea.

Hazel’s eyes looked past Qrow and instantly narrowed. “You,” he hissed. “You killed her; you killed my little sister.”

“Your sister was old enough to make her own decisions.” Ozpin sighed. “Gretchen was brave—braver than most. She would have made an excellent huntress.”

Hazel continued to push harder against Qrow’s blade with his fist. Blood ran down his fingers and dripped onto the stage floor. Qrow stared. Did the man not feel anything?

“I am truly sorry for your loss,” Ozpin continued.

“What do you know about loss?” Hazel cried.

“More than any man, woman or child,” replied Ozpin in a tone that grew heavier with each uttered syllable.

Qrow saw rage grow in Hazel’s eyes. He was certainly not calming down; in fact, Ozpin’s words seemed only to have incensed his rage.

“Oz, stay back,” Qrow warned.

But Ozpin had never been one to take orders from Qrow, or anyone for that matter.

“Hazel,” he said softly, imploringly.

The resistance against his blade intensified. Hazel was strong, too strong. Qrow wouldn’t be able to hold him back for long.

“Drop dead,” Hazel seethed at Ozpin, spittle flying out of his mouth and hitting Qrow in the face.

“Dead,” Ozpin repeated with a wry chuckle. “If only.”

With a single thrust, Qrow felt his sword give way. The barrier that he’d made between Hazel and Ozpin clattered to the floor as Hazel rushed forward, letting loose a yell of savage fury.

“Aaaah!”

“Oz—!” Qrow cried, reaching, weaponless, for the professor.

Before he could take another step, the sight of Ozpin raising his right arm, quick as lightning, caused his shoes to skid upon the ground to a halt. He realized that Hazel couldn’t get closer than a cane-length away from Ozpin. The headmaster held him back with the tip of the walking stick. Hazel was a towering mass of muscle compared to the slim figure of Ozpin, but he couldn’t force the man back an inch.

The student body gaped collectively, spellbound by the scene. The whole amphitheater seemed to be holding its breath, and the teachers themselves were frozen with shock. Glynda, Oobleck and Port had their weapons out, but they appeared to have forgotten that they were authorized to use them. Ozpin’s face remained coolly unaffected; his eyes never broke from Hazel’s fiery gaze.

“Go home Hazel. Your family needs you.”

“My family?” Hazel’s incredulous scream traveled all the way to the ceiling and bounced back again. “You destroyed my family!” He struggled against Ozpin’s cane, but just then the doors to the amphitheater burst open and men and women in uniform came streaming in, guns drawn. Someone with sense (Probably Glynda, Qrow thought) had called the Vale police.

“Hands up!” they shouted at Hazel.

Hazel, finally understanding that he was vastly outmatched by Ozpin and now outmanned, did as he was told, raising his massive arms above his head. With one final hostile glare at Ozpin, he let himself be led away by the police.

After the doors slammed shut behind them, every eye in the amphitheater swiveled back to the stage. His cane lowered, Ozpin walked calmly back to the podium.

“That concludes the service,” he said into the microphone. Then he left the stage without another word.

Glynda took up the mic after he was gone, using her commanding voice to usher some order back into the disoriented crowd.

“You heard the headmaster. Back to class!” she barked at the students.

Qrow picked up his sword, flicking off some of Hazel’s blood before putting it back in its hilt. He was secretly glad that he hadn’t been forced to waste the scythe mechanism on a piece of scum like Hazel. He knew Oz would sympathize with his grief, but Qrow had no patience for people who took their pain out on others.

He pulled a metal flask out of his shirt, hearing it clank against the sideways cross necklace he never took off. He took a large swig and waited for the burn of alcohol to chase away the memory of Hazel, the hatred in his eyes. He would have destroyed anything in his path just to get to Ozpin, all for the sake of his suffering.

He stood alone on the stage as the room emptied out, gazing at his reflection in the flask. He saw dark circles beneath his eyes. The bright red irises matched the tiny veins popping out against the white. All the while he denied the voice in his head that called him a hypocrite.

Self-destruction is still destruction, the voice taunted.

Qrow took another swig. Shut up.

***

“How long has it been since you ate something, Oz?”

The sky was dark outside the circular window of Ozpin’s office. Because the window doubled as giant clock, Qrow was able to watch the minute hand tick up and around the shattered image of the moon, which illuminated the ground below in pearl-white fractals.

“Ate something?” Ozpin said from across the room.

“Yeah.” Qrow turned away from the window to face the headmaster, who was busy shifting books around in his shelves. “You know, food? Hot cocoa doesn’t count by the way.”

A hint of a smile played over Ozpin’s lips. “That’s a shame.”

Qrow couldn’t help but notice that, between reaching up for books, Ozpin was leaning on his cane more than usual. In fact, the slight slump of his shoulders made it seem like the stick was the only thing keeping him upright.

A softer note took hold of Qrow’s voice.

“How long has it been since you last slept?”

“Why do you ask?”

“Because it’s one a.m., and you’ve decided that now would be the best time to rearrange your bookshelves.”

Ozpin paused, running a hand over one leather-bound cover. The History of Remnant. The sound of gears churned rhythmically above them. The gears, along with the cool emerald walls of Ozpin’s office had always had a soothing effect on Qrow. Everything about the room was familiar to him. He used to spend a lot of time here during his student days. Granted, he had been in trouble most of those instances, sent to the headmaster for speaking back in class, starting a fight in the hallway, or sneaking booze into his dormitory. None of the teachers had ever been very fond of Qrow in his younger years, but Ozpin had always gone easy on him. Now as an adult, not much had changed; he continued to rub people the wrong way, but being back with Oz, looking down at the clouds from the tallest part of Beacon Academy, he felt like he was back home again.

“Time is relative,” Ozpin said at last.

“Right,” Qrow replied.

“Why are you here at this hour?” Ozpin turned the question on the huntsman.

“To give my report on the spring maiden,” Qrow lied.

“Young Spring is residing at Haven Academy. Leonardo keeping me updated for the time being…a fact which you are well aware of.” Ozpin raised a silver eyebrow in Qrow’s direction. “Why are you really here?”

Because I saw your face when Hazel called you a murderer, and there’s no way I’m leaving you alone after that.

“To help you organize your books.”

He took a step closer to the shelves. At the same time, a book wobbled and fell, and on its way down, knocked over a figurine of two intertwined dragons that had sat guard there for as long as Qrow could remember.

Ozpin caught the book in one deft swoop. Qrow rushed forward for the figurine but, his reflexes, dulled from drink (he had been outdoing himself this week), were too slow to catch the dragons. They hit the floor, shattering into tiny bits.

“That’s a bit of bad luck.” Ozpin frowned at the mess.

“Sorry,” Qrow grumbled, shoving his hands into his pockets. “You know I can’t always control it.”

“No need to apologize.” Ozpin squinted at the broken dragons, poking a shard with the tip of his cane. “It was a gift. To tell you the truth, I’ve never been fond of it.”

He started to put the fallen book back on the shelf. As he looked up, a daze came over his eyes. He blinked and staggered backwards like someone who was about to faint. Qrow made ready to catch him, watching as the weight of the book carried his arm downwards. Finally, it slipped from his fingers, which appeared to have no strength left in them, and tumbled to floor, joining the shattered dragons.

Ozpin closed his eyes and hunched forward, resting his forehead on his cane, breathing hard. If Qrow hadn’t know any better he would have thought that he just finished fighting off fifty grim. Before him was the shell of the man who had held Hazel back with no effort one week prior.

“Oz,” Qrow said hesitantly, placing a hand on his back. At the touch, Oz straightened up.

“I’m fine; I just became a bit dizzy there for a moment.”

“That’s what happens when you starve yourself for a week,” Qrow muttered under his breath. Then louder. “Are you alright—really?”

Ozpin, either not hearing him or choosing to ignore the question, said nothing. Instead he let his cane guide him towards the center of the room.

“Is there a real reason you came here?” he asked Qrow without looking back at him.

At that moment, anger for the headmaster bubbled up in Qrow. Why couldn’t he be straight with him for once and admit that something was wrong?

“Yeah, there is.” He struggled to keep his voice steady. “I came to ask if you think letting yourself die will bring Gretchen Reinhart back? Well, in case you didn’t already know, professor, Beacon lost a student forever—and you can’t die!”

Oz was silent for a minute before turning slowly around. One look at his face made all the anger in Qrow’s body dissipate into thin air. With his chin lowered into his green turtleneck and golden eyes raised in supplication, Qrow was instantly struck by how vulnerable, how sad he looked.

“Please…I know. You don’t have to remind me,” he said softly.

“I’m sorry,” Qrow immediately apologized again, disgusted with himself. Ozpin pinched the bridge of his nose between his fingers, a betrayal of stress that Qrow had come to recognize over the years.

“I try to eat, but—”

“—you can’t keep it down,” Qrow finished for him. He knew the symptoms of guilt.

Ozpin nodded.

“I try to sleep, but—”

“—let me guess: the nightmares.”

Ozpin nodded once more, pinching his nose harder and furrowing his brows as if a bout of sharp pain had just seized him.

Qrow wasn’t surprised. Ozpin had been suffering the nightmares long before Gretchen’s accident. Another side-effect of a mind steeped in shame. Qrow had heard him cry out in the night before, screaming at someone only he could see.

“The children! Where are the children? What have we done? What have we done?”

He knew that there were parts of Ozpin’s past that he had never shared with him, might never share with him. The man had certainly lived long enough to rack up plenty of secrets.

That doesn’t matter, not now. Qrow told himself. Let him keep his secrets for the time being. What mattered in this moment was getting Oz through the night.

“Even if this body does give out on me, death would be no release. I…I get to carry my guilt through each life,” Ozpin continued.

“Oz, you know Gretchen wasn’t your fault.”

Ozpin lowered his hand and looked Qrow squarely in the eye. Regardless of how old he became, the headmaster’s piercing gaze never failed to make Qrow feel like the scrawny first-year again.

“I’d rather not talk about this right now,” Ozpin said firmly. He moved to turn away but Qrow caught him by the shoulders.

“Then don’t talk, listen. You were right when you said Gretchen was old enough to make her own decisions; she chose her path, she met her fate.”

All of a sudden, an image of Summer came to him. His breath caught in his throat. His team leader had left for the mission that day and never came back, leaving Qrow to somehow make a life without her, to keep Ruby, her infant daughter—his niece, safe. But in the end, he was positive that even if she had known what awaited, she still would have gone.

“That’s right,” he said, swallowing thickly. “Choice. We can’t forget that they made a choice. If we do that, then we insult their—I mean Gretchen’s memory.”

Qrow could feel Ozpin’s body shaking between his hands. He brushed the professor’s silver hair away from his eyes, letting his fingers linger against the side of his face.

“Hey. It’s okay,” he whispered.

The utterance of those three words was all it took to make Ozpin break. He crumpled to the ground, face buried in his hands, his cane clattering beside him.

Qrow dropped to his knees after him. He waited a moment while Ozpin took deep, shuddering breaths. Gently, he removed Ozpin’s hands from his face, his chest tightening when he took in the agonized expression beneath.

Past the black spectacles, past the gleaming gold, Qrow could glimpse a millennium of suffering in his eyes, a man whose life stretched beyond what he couldn’t begin to imagine. A man who had seen a thousand years pass by, life after life. How many mistakes had he, Qrow Branwen, already made in his short lifespan of less than thirty years? He thought of Summer again. Enough to turn to drink to numb the pain. Pain. Once he thought he understood it, but as he gazed down at Ozpin, so small and exposed once the façade of the calm, collected headmaster had come tumbling down, he realized that he only knew pain as an inkling, a small sliver of the suffering that the human soul, that Oz’s soul could and had been made to endure.

“It’s okay,” he said again, hearing how feeble his attempt at comfort was, like trying to staunch a stab wound with a band-aid.

The tears began to stream now, down Ozpin’s cheeks, dripping into tiny puddles on the floor.

“I’m sorry. I’m so sorry,” he gasped.

“Shh, it’s okay,” Qrow repeated, taking off the spectacles to better wipe away the tears. “It’s okay…”

He pulled Ozpin into an embrace, rocking with him as the sobs wracked his body. How long had he been holding them back? It was a while before his breathing steadied.

As Qrow pulled a way, he automatically reached into his shirt for his flask. He contemplated its contents and the weeping man before him. It wasn’t the healthiest coping mechanism, and it certainly wasn’t hot cocoa, but it was the only remedy he could think of.

“Here. This might help you sleep,” he said.

Ozpin, his face pale except for the puffy redness around his eyes, stared at the flask. A split second passed and he seemed to make a quick decision. He took the offered drink, suckling the alcohol from it like a baby with a bottle.

“Hey, hey, slow down.” Qrow took the flask away, making use of his sleeve to dry the left-over drips of liquid on Ozpin’s chin.

“I’m sorry, I—”

“Stop. No more apologizing,” Qrow whispered.

He leaned close, using his lips to kiss away the wetness on his cheeks. Then he moved on to the mouth. Ozpin’s lips were stiff and trembling, but Qrow knew how to work them until they melted into his.

He would stay with him tonight, be there to soothe the nightmares away. With a sigh of exhaustion, Ozpin sank into Qrow’s chest. Qrow’s hand naturally fell to the task of stroking his hair.

Yes, he would be here, always.

“I’ll make you breakfast in the morning.”

Despite everything, Ozpin managed to chuckle through his tears.

“I thought you didn’t want me to starve.”

“Right. I’ll steal some pancakes from the cafeteria then.”

#rwby #rwby fanfiction #cloqwork #rwby ozpin #ozpin x qrow #ozpin appreciation

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wardencommanderrodimiss · 4 years

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Witches, Chapter 29: something of an overdue talk, in a long overdue chapter.

Hey everyone! We’re back at it, hopefully, with a few orders of business.

First things first: I’d like to issue a small warning for a short discussion of past suicidal ideation that pops up during this chapter. Since this series is a retelling, generally most of you do know what’s coming up next and what we’ll run into and to brace ourselves for that. You know about the characters’ past traumas and future choices and know where that pops up, or if it becomes unexpectedly relevant or makes a new parallel, you did at least know in advance that it happened. Phoenix’s occasional oblique allusion to Edgeworth’s “choosing death”, for instance.

As this is not something quite like that and comes up more out of nowhere than usual, I just wanted to make sure that no one is uncomfortably caught off-guard. It felt like something different to me personally as I was writing - whether it’s going to strike any of you as different than other heavier material we’ve had in the past, I can’t say, but I’m erring on the side of caution today. If you’ve got any questions or concerns or anything you want done for content warnings in the future, please do come talk to me and let me know!

On two lighter notes: thank you all for bearing with me through the “oops all Fire Emblem only Fire Emblem” hiatus. It’s been a weird year, obviously. I’m hoping that I can carry on with room in my brain for both.

And finally: Happy UR-1 day! Today is, yes indeed, the exact day that Simon Blackquill is arrested for murder, and in honor of that, have a chapter where I mention him one (1) entire time.

[Seelie of Kurain Chapter Masterlist] [ao3]

[Witches of Los Angeles Chapter Masterlist] [ao3]

----

Golden Saturday-morning sunlight streams in through the blinds, lighting up the dust particles swirling through the air. The office is colder than Apollo expects for the end of October - colder than it was last year this time - and Phoenix is even wearing a sweater, the shining locket that Apollo hasn’t seen in a while hanging around the outside of the tall collar. “Morning,” Phoenix says, without raising his eyes from what appears to be a manila folder full of newspaper clippings he is perusing. “What’s up?”

Straight to business, then. Apollo is fine with that. He grabs the chair from his desk and drags it around, not directly in front of Phoenix’s desk, but near enough that it will be harder for Phoenix to ignore him.

“Is there any way to break a curse?” he asks, shoving his hands deep in the pocket of his hoodie. If it were this cold in a regular office on a Saturday, that would make sense; save money on heating bills when no clients are coming in. This is just - fae bullshit. The beginning of their seasonal tantrums. Winter only properly begins on the solstice, and Apollo really wishes that the fae of Kurain would respect the astronomical seasons. Stave off the snow until the end of December and end it in March. Don’t allow it to span from October to April.

Phoenix sweeps the scraps of paper all back within the folder and ducks down to set it inside a drawer. “If I knew a way,” he says, rising back up with the magatama in hand and setting it down on his desk with a hard clack, “do you think I would go around looking like I do? You don’t think I would’ve gotten this mess cleaned up a long time ago?”

He doesn’t offer Apollo the magatama for a refresher on what that mess looks like. Maybe he was just making a dramatic point with it. “Oh,” Apollo says, scratching the back of his head, faintly embarrassed by how obvious the answer is if he’d given it a modicum of thought from that perspective. “I guess not.”

“Right,” Phoenix says. “As my understanding goes, you can theoretically maybe mitigate a curse, if you layer another opposing blessing on. I am ‘lucky’” - he makes sarcastic quotation marks to ensure that the bitterness dripping from the word doesn’t go unnoticed, as if Apollo could possibly not notice - “to have known enough fae that I’m saddled with both Fortune and Misfortune, and Life and Death. But I’m also not certain that when you drop those on each other they don’t just each take their own separate niches. I’m not dead, but god knows when I try to go somewhere for a vacation or a day off, I still stumble across crime scenes like nothing else. Stunningly lucky in some aspects, and wildly unfortunate in others. You know me. I don’t need to elaborate too much, do I?”

Apollo nods.

“So that’s the theory, but I don’t think that helps anyway for your purposes, which - this is about Prosecutor Gavin?”

Apollo nods again. Phoenix sighs and rubs his eyes. “Shit,” he says, folding his hands together in front of his face and leaning his head against them. “I - believe me, Apollo, I wish I had some - I wish I had any way to help him.”

And Apollo does believe him. Apollo has to believe him, and believe that Phoenix means well, because he’d go crazier if he wasn’t reminding himself that Phoenix’s most frustrating decisions are born out of good intent. That Phoenix thinks he knows what’s best, but there’s still that old saying about good intentions.

“Why didn’t you tell him?” Apollo asks. “You knew before this. You knew before he asked you.”

Phoenix raises his head. “And what does telling him get him? Secure in the knowledge that his brother - who is already in jail by the way, don’t need any more proof of his crimes, he’s already never getting out to be able to hurt anyone ever again - hates him enough to have wished him dead?”

Basically the same reasoning that Klavier had, but Apollo has a counterargument now. “Gives him time to come to terms with it before someone dies!”

“You don’t!” Phoenix slams his palms on the desk. Apollo flinches. Of course everyone is volatile and heated over this topic, but that doesn’t make it easier in the moment that it first gets directed at him from people who are usually frustratingly calm and casual. But Phoenix winces, lifting one of his hands and dragging his fingers through his hair, and sighs. “I’m sorry,” he says, and repeats, much quieter, “You - you don’t. Or I never didn’t. I knew from right when it happened that I was cursed; I had three years between then and when Mia died - it - I could’ve had a decade, or two, and it - it wouldn’t have helped. I wouldn’t have felt any differently. Any more come to terms with it. With the thought that I - helped cause—”

His tongue heavy in his mouth, Apollo nods. “But - but wouldn’t it have been worse to find out right after she died?”

“Of course it would have,” Phoenix says blithely. “Of course that - this - is the worst possible alternative. Of course I would’ve said something if I’d known that this was what would happen instead.”

“But you have to have expected that someone would—”

“No, I didn’t,” Phoenix interrupts. “That’s not how this works. You know Klavier. You know how much he doesn’t say, don’t you? How much I don’t - you know what people like us are like. Who’s going to tell him? Sebastian forgets half the time that he even has the Sight. Kay only acts like she knows things. Prosecutor Blackquill spent until two days ago acting like magic isn’t real even when he knew we knew otherwise. Someone who means ill isn going to keep that information to use it, and not to just plainly say something.” He frowns. “Well, usually not. Unless they’re a clumsy interloper stumbling in somewhere they don’t belong and getting themselves fucked over for it too.”

“So other than Means just walking all over everything” - because he wasn’t immersed in this kind of fae etiquette, didn’t grow up in it, learned just enough to spot what he thought were opportunities and ruined himself by it - “you think every other random stranger is just going to respect all these - these weird little rules about what you don’t say?”

“Rules of engagement, basically,” Phoenix says. “Yeah, I do.”

“Prosecutor Gavin told me that you’re cursed,” Apollo says. “Don’t just tell me that’s - that’s the exception that proves the rule, or whatever.”

Phoenix’s expression, smug and trying to dampen that smugness back into something that respects the seriousness of the conversation, tells Apollo that yes, yes that is absolutely what his retort was going to be. Apollo considers screaming. “I’ve been tangled up in this for far too long,” Phoenix says. “I can promise you, I know the patterns. I know the way these things go.”

“And because you’re so much smarter than the rest of us, that makes it okay?” Apollo demands. “To take a gamble and just hope that it won’t go wildly wrong?”

And he wants to, really wants to add, I guess that’s what you do, just gamble with people’s fates, and he doesn’t, and Phoenix’s face still darkens like he knows, like he can read Apollo’s mind. Because every time Apollo ends up arguing with him, that’s always at the core. This playing card that haunts them both, burnt a bridge barely built, and they keep trying to balance on the ashen skeleton of it. “Just because Prosecutor Gavin is too fucked up about everything else to be mad at you for hiding this—”

“I did,” Phoenix says, voice low, eyes narrowed and dark as an evening’s storm clouds, “what I thought would be best, based on my prior experiences of both how curses don’t get talked about, and knowing exactly what it is like to personally live with knowing that I’m cursed. This is not something I want anyone to have to know how it feels.”

“So you think ignorance is bliss,” Apollo says. Klavier said that. Apollo wants to know how Phoenix takes that statement.

“I wouldn’t call it ignorance,” Phoenix says. “It’s not like he, or you, didn’t know what Kristoph was like until you found this out. You know the crime, the verdict, the sentencing - and everything else that Kristoph tried but failed to do. That Kristoph also wanted Klavier dead is only another small piece in the grand scheme of it all.”

Still the same argument that Klavier made; Apollo can’t imagine they discussed it. What brought them to the same conclusion? That they both have lived this strange specific kind of grief? This common ground that they share that is foreign to Apollo.

“Come to terms with - Klavier’s already got to come to terms with the rest of that,” Phoenix continues. “It was obvious during that trial how much Kristoph despised him. He knew that too. He knows that Kristoph ruined more lives than just the people he murdered - that he tried to kill more people than he actually succeeded at - cursed and tried to kill children because he couldn’t have - didn’t want anyone remaining who - who could - could… say…”

If Phoenix hadn’t faltered like that - fumbling and failing to continue, words petering out as he went back over what he just said, his eyes going wide and welling up with horror - then Apollo would have simply assumed that his thoughts were moving too fast for his mouth and he couldn’t keep them straight. It would have been easy to talk right through it, and Apollo wouldn’t think twice. If Phoenix hadn’t showed his own hand, gave the game away. Something too terrible for even seven years of professional poker to hide.

“Mr Wright?” Apollo asks, and Phoenix turns his head, glancing away away, no longer meeting his eyes when less than a minute ago he was staring him down with a cold confident glare. “What - what are you talking about? Vera, and - not someone else? Who else?”

Phoenix makes a tiny shake of his head, and even that little motion is a bright, distinct liar’s red. It lights up his eyes, too, when they dart down to the floor. “Mr Wright?” Apollo repeats. When would this have been? He casts his mind over everything he learned, just a little over a year ago, Phoenix sitting him down to explain seven years of information collected about Kristoph, what he’d done and how he’d tried to cover it up. He tried to kill Drew Misham to tie up that loose end; he cursed and poisoned Vera, two precautions because he wasn’t confident enough in the former, hoping that if she ever left the house she wouldn’t be able to speak to his identity and the forgery he requested. He killed Zak Gramarye seven years later to hide the same. He wanted to eliminate every link in the chain that connected the diary page to him. Its makers Vera and Drew, and Zak who knew he was the first attorney on the case, and then the page got to Phoenix via—

Via—

“Mr Wright,” Apollo says. His voice shakes. “He didn’t—”

“Promise me something, Apollo,” Phoenix says firmly. His mouth is drawn in a tight line but he doesn’t look stern. He looks more like he’s going to cry and is desperately trying to stop himself. “Promise me.”

“Wh - what? I can’t—”

“Promise me, Apollo.”

Not until you tell me what I’m promising, Apollo thinks, Apollo knows is what he should say. He’s been told this enough times; he’s aware of this on his own. Don’t agree to a deal before all the terms are set. Don’t sign the contract before it’s read thoroughly. Rules for lawyers and fae are the same. Just because Phoenix means well doesn’t mean that Apollo agrees with those decisions he makes; certainly not the one they have been discussing, and likely not whatever Phoenix is asking him to agree to.

“Please.”

The air in the office is so cold. Even the sunlight seems cold now. Apollo shivers, hunches himself up further. What does Mia think? Is this secret-keeping so natural to her, easy as breathing once was, because she’s fae and that’s what they are, liars by trick and by trade?

“Just promise me you won’t tell her until I do.”

His mouth dry, Apollo nods and croaks out, “All right. I won’t.”

He almost regrets pushing the issue,regrets ever asking Phoenix why he faltered. Phoenix sits slumped, his hands in his hair, and when he glances back up at Apollo, he looks so exhausted that it reminds him of Klavier last night. Burnt-out and broken, when it’s so rare for either of their masks to break. Rarer for Phoenix not to be positioning himself as the one with all the cards in hand; for him to fall apart, for Apollo to actually see him upset. “Yeah,” he whispers, soft enough that Apollo sits forward to make sure he can hear him. “Everyone involved in getting the diary page from him to me, Kristoph wanted dead, or to make sure he could silence them. Everyone who knew, even if she was - eleven years old, or eight. The girl who made it, and the girl who gave it to me. He fucking hated the Gramaryes. You think he didn’t jump at the opportunity to try and get rid of all of them that he could? That he wouldn’t cast a curse on each one who ever entered his sight?”

“And she” - Apollo’s voice cracks - “she doesn’t know? You didn’t tell her?”

“Shit, no,” Phoenix says. He sounds close to cracking, too, and when he drops his hands to his desk he starts shaking his head, his eyes scrunched closed. “Being a Gramarye has been goddamn enough of a curse for her. She lost all her family and then found out that her grandfather buried her mother’s soul in the woods because he was a monstrous son-of-a-bitch who deserved worse than getting to go out on his own terms by shooting himself in the fucking head—”

Apollo shudders. Phoenix had never before directly stated his opinion on Magnifi, but Apollo could definitely tell he held only disdain for the man. This, though, is more than disdain. This is positively venomous, and more than a bit frightening. Did he always feel like this, and hid it, or is this hatred something that has only come about since last year Trucy came back to the office with her mother’s soul in her hands?

“—so yeah, on top of that, I’m definitely going to tell her that the same man who killed her father cursed her just because of the accident of who her family is.”

“B-but—” Apollo doesn’t quite know what he’s arguing. He also doesn’t know where all of his prior conviction went. Of course Klavier should have been told - because he found out in the worst way possible - and Trucy - to take a gamble with her too - that’s got to be just as wrong— “Nine-Tails Vale,” he says suddenly. “We went there, and then there was a murder - that - that’s - is that like—”

“Like what happens to me?” Phoenix asks. “What happens with a curse? Yes. That’s how it goes.”

“And you - you’re not going to - to tell her? Ever? In case - in case something happens to her like with Klavier, or—” Too many thoughts are playing in his head, and the next one grabs hold of him and pivots him away from the point he was going to make about maybe why Trucy should know. “The concert,” he says. “When we went to the concert, Trucy and I, and Klavier was there too of course but that’s - Romaine LeTousse was murdered. They’re both cursed and they - wait, was Klavier cursed then? That was before…”

Did Klavier know when it happened? Did he tell Apollo? He’d said that Phoenix had seen him twice since the trial last October. Presume then that Kristoph cursed him then. The last time the brothers saw each other, and that doesn’t make one bit of sense.

“How could Kristoph have cursed him?” Apollo asks, and he doesn’t miss a momentary flash of panic that passes over Phoenix, his eyes popping wide for half a second and a loud, sharp intake of breath. “Klavier always has iron on him. He gave me—” He looks down at his hand, and then back up, to Phoenix’s lifted eyebrows. Apollo sticks his hand back in his pocket. “What’s the point in iron if it doesn’t actually save you from being cursed?”

Phoenix is obviously trying not to move. He knows Apollo is watching him, waiting for a twitch, anything to pounce on and draw an answer out of him. Staring steadily back at Apollo, he barely blinks; he rests his folded arms on his desk and his fingers curl just a little tighter into where he’s gripping his arm. Apollo is right to be asking these questions. He’s getting closer to something that Phoenix is hiding.

“Or it does,” Apollo says. The veins on the back of Phoenix’s hand flex from his grip. Apollo thinks about someone else with a tense hand and secrets. “And he couldn’t have been cursed then, at Vera’s trial, if it does. So then Mr Gavin hated him that much before then.” Phoenix blinks placidly, but he doesn’t adopt his lazy-eyed gaze. Too serious even for that. “And you lied,” Apollo adds. “You lied about when.”

Phoenix flinches. It’s just a tiny one, pulling his head back, the muscles in his jaw and neck tightening, but Apollo can’t miss the light show. Can’t miss that the lie is bleeding out of him.

He finds himself on his feet, not stepping any closer to Phoenix’s desk, just needing the height, just needing to move a little to stop the shaking in his hands and in his chest, a trembling that goes right down to his heart. “He knew already that he’s cursed! Why did you keep lying to him!”

“I didn’t lie to him,” Phoenix says evenly, but very quietly, and Apollo wants to go over and slam his fists on the desk and make him stop with these hollow justifications, make him face what he’s done couched in none of his winding words. “I just didn’t correct his assumption.”

“That’s lying!” Apollo shouts. “That’s still lying! That’s what happened in Mayor Tenma’s trial! Do you remember that? Do you care!”

“Don’t accuse me of not caring.” Phoenix’s voice is low, his eyes dark, staring up at Apollo. “I do care. I—”

“You don’t care about lying! But you do care about - what, about us? Doing this because you care, because you always know what’s best for everyone not to know!” Apollo throws his hands in the air. Phoenix’s brow furrows further, his jaw set tightly. “Never mind that Athena had a breakdown during the trial because Means hit her exactly where you were worried she would be! And you didn’t prepare her! Never mind that Klavier’s having a breakdown now because he found out at the worst possible time! When you could have told him! You know—”

“And if what he knows already hurt him this badly, then what do you think would be happening if he knew Kristoph cursed him years ago?” Phoenix slams his hands on his desk like he’s at the defense’s bench, pushing himself up out of the chair and onto his feet. “That his brother’s wanted him dead for that long? You think that’ll help anything, for him to find that out right now on top of all this? You want him to have that to come to terms with right now, too? I didn’t lie to him! He made an assumption that I didn’t correct because I’m not in the business of salting anyone’s wounds!”

He makes - a point. Apollo sees where he’s coming from. Why he’d do that. An additional piece of truth, yesterday the same as a salting of the wound. “But you don’t think he’s ever wondered if - if Mr Gavin resented him for that long? If he - if you would be setting something to rest, if you told him that. You can’t decide for someone else what they’re capable of handling.”

“Fair point,” Phoenix says. He sinks back down into his chair, and then motions to Apollo’s, suggesting he sit back down. “If he’d asked, I’d have told him. If he ever asks, I’ll tell him. I just wasn’t about to drop that on his head with him unprepared. Or if he asks you - I’m not asking you to swear silence to that. Shit, if you ever think that it’ll help him to know, then tell him - tell him you just found out from me, throw me under the bus and lie to make me look worse, that’s fine.”

Apollo returns to his chair, still not feeling any less like he wants to take a swing and see if he’s gotten any better at punching since last April. “You want me to lie now too?” he asks.

“I want you to use your best judgment about what he might want to know or be able to handle,” Phoenix says. “To not pile on more if he didn’t ask, if you don’t think he’s prepared. Like I said, when it comes to being cursed, I didn’t ever not know, and I know what the knowing is like. Yeah, I took a gamble that if I didn’t tell them then no one else ever would. That they’d never know, I hoped.”

He shakes his head and then leans it back against his chair, his eyes closing. “See, it’s not just grief, not at all. The woman who cursed me was someone I thought I knew. Though I’d known for a while. She had actually wanted me dead since we first met.” His eyes pop back open. “Eventually she tried to poison me, and when that didn’t work she tried to frame me for murder, and when that plan fell apart she just tried to kill me with a curse because she was pissed about it. She was a lot stronger than Kristoph, I’ll tell you that much. But Mia stepped in, and now I’m still alive and other people just drop dead all around me instead.”

He sounds almost like he is making a recitation, like he’s rehearsed it, scripted it. Apollo wonders if he’s ever told anyone else all these details, if anyone else lacking the Sight knows that Phoenix is cursed, and if he used this same script then too. He’s speaking about himself, something so personal, in a way so curt and crisp, so much more detached than he’s been speaking about Klavier, or Trucy.

Apollo nods numbly, unable to force his tongue to ask any of the questions he has.

“I could have come to grips with her hating me that long and that much - I could’ve come to terms with it and moved on. I was - well, I eventually became glad to know what she was. I could’ve been okay with all that. Eventually. If I hadn’t known about the curse. But I did and the - the knowing, the - Mia was murdered. Three years after she saved me. That long, thinking I could accept that I was cursed, and as soon as something really happened - I couldn’t.”

He presses his hands together and rests them against his chin. “And I couldn’t ever even just grieve her, because I had this guilt. That her death was my fault - I know, I know, some other man murdered her. He got to rot in jail for the rest of his life for his crimes, and he would’ve hated her whether or not I was cursed. For the things she did and because of what he was, and I had no part in any of that, but I was still - thinking, if maybe if she hadn’t ever taken me under her wing. If I hadn’t been around, maybe it would’ve been different somehow. Maybe she would have survived.”

The lights flicker gently and return dimmer and softer than they were before. Everything that gets talked about in this office, Mia hears; Apollo wonders if Phoenix doesn’t get sick of it sometimes, just want to say something without her offering input. Even if this is presumably well-meant, some attempt at comfort, the most a dead woman who can’t speak can give. Apollo exhales and can see his breath. He shivers again. “Why are you telling me this?” he finally asks.

“I want you to understand.” Phoenix rubs his hands together, a vacant look in his eyes, like he hasn’t quite realized why he’s so suddenly cold. “What it felt like, and what I’m worried about. If I’d told Klavier, or I tell Trucy - once I say something, I can’t take it back. That’s it, and they know, forever, just like I do. So I want to be sure that this won’t - I want—” He drops his hands and reaches over and picks up the magatama, idly spinning it around between his fingers. Apollo can’t remember ever seeing him this uneasy, this fidgety. “Klavier, especially, reminds me of myself when I was his age, and of a prosecutor I knew then, too. And that - recognition” - he gestures with the magatama clutched in his hand - “is not good, because we were not - okay.”

Apollo wishes he could remember with clarity all that Phoenix said to him about this time a year ago, about Klavier, about Phoenix being concerned for him. He does remember that Phoenix said something about some other prosecutor then, too, that Klavier reminded him of. Or that he was worried Klavier was going to end up like.

Phoenix inhales slowly, and says, “Six months after Mia was murdered - which was three, three and a half years after I was cursed, mind you - I lost someone else. I didn’t realize how badly he was doing - he did a good job at hiding it, and I didn’t know how to reach out. I was wrapped up in my own loneliness and depression, and then he was gone.”

He stops turning the magatama between his fingers, staring down at it for a few seconds, and then he resumes fidgeting with it. “I felt like I’d caused both of those. Couldn’t convince myself otherwise. Every other factor I knew there was, every single thing I couldn’t prevent or control, all these other things that other people did - I still thought that if I wasn’t cursed, then it could have been - just different enough that they would still be here.” He reaches up, brushing his fingertips across his temple. “Wouldn’t have been a fatal wound. Or wouldn’t have—”

He falters, staring past Apollo now, over at the window. This is the same thing he said about Mia earlier, about that sense of guilt, even knowing someone else murdered her. That he held some kind of responsibility, for a curse that seems to manifest itself as coincidence. Just coincidence, a little too often.

“They could’ve been okay, somehow, in the end, I thought,” he continues. “And instead, I was - I was there, I was still around, and they weren’t. And all I could think was that if I didn’t do something, then I would just lose the other few friends I still had - they would be around me, and they would die for it.”

“Didn’t you say that there’s no way you know to break a curse?” Apollo asks. From Phoenix’s solemn expression, he’s not going to suddenly say that there is a method, but Apollo has no idea what he is going to say. What that something he thought to do was.

“Right,” Phoenix says. “So I thought - only way to take the curse out of the equation is by taking myself out of the equation. I thought - as long as I’m not around - if I go and die, then anyone else who I love won’t. The curse will be gone, right, if death finally takes me. But the curse only seemed to hit other people, not me, so if dying was what I needed to do, then I…”

Klavier lying on the stage, wondering why it had to be Courte who died instead of himself. Phoenix’s dark, pained eyes, as he speaks again, finishes the thought in a voice barely above a murmur. “It made - made far too much sense to me, then. Was far too appealing a prospect.”

The question of what Phoenix won’t quite spell out catches sideways in Apollo’s throat, and when he tries to force it he just makes a soft croaking sound. Phoenix presses his lips together and glances away. “It’s a pain I wouldn’t wish on anyone,” he adds softly. “Klavier’s - he’s what, twenty-whatever? I was twenty-five when I—”

When Mia died, Apollo thinks, but that Phoenix doesn’t finish the thought, swallows hard and stares at his desk and says something else, makes Apollo think there was something even worse he could have said, with that implication he didn’t say. “And Trucy - she’s my daughter. I’m supposed to protect her. I took her in because I couldn’t live with the thought of anything else happening to her when I could bring her here, hope that Mia could somehow bless and protect her as much as she did me. But I can’t imagine just - I can’t let that happen to her. To suffer the way I did, to - to spend her life wondering if wherever she goes, someone’s going to die - the concert, Nine-Tails Vale, to ever - to think she can blame herself. Or that everyone she loves is better off without her. Or to—”

He blinks, fiercely, his eyes watering, and Apollo hopes he’ll never have to see Phoenix this close to tears again. Phoenix, cursed and trying - and in the case of Klavier, now failing - to shelter others from that same pain. Klavier, and Trucy, and—

“What about Vera?” he asks. “You explained to me, but did you ever tell her that she’s—” Phoenix stares at him, blinks slowly. Apollo squeezes his own eyes shut. “You didn’t tell her.” He’s unable to muster the same indignation he was before. He can’t really even bring himself to feel manipulated. Phoenix told him exactly that he was saying all this to make Apollo understand. Phoenix sought this reaction. But Phoenix’s chessmaster act has never superceded his desire to keep secrets before; there’s no way that Apollo can convince himself that this emotional vulnerability is all entirely a ploy to get Apollo to shut up. How many times has he refused to explain something and just left Apollo to stay angry about being in the dark? He has never been reluctant to do that. To just sit silent and lock Apollo out. To let Apollo hate him for his secrets.

He wanted Apollo to understand, intimately, whatever it took. So that Apollo would agree keep these secrets. So that Apollo would go along with him. And it might be concern that drives him - he cares, of course he does - but it’s still manifesting in the most infuriating ways possible. In well-meant silence.

“Would you want to know?” Phoenix asks, and that question at this time is an answer and confirmation in itself. “I know the truth is important to you, Apollo - I know it is to all of us.”

For once, Apollo believes he means it. He’d know it’s the truth because he can see when Phoenix is lying, but he’s actually convinced, this time.

“But,” Phoenix continues, “if you already know that the person who cast the curse hates you and is in jail for committing murder - already got to come to terms with that, or grieve that, or for someone else dead - you already know that truth. Would you really, honestly want to live with also knowing that you’re cursed?”

To possibly want to die because of it, like Phoenix did? Apollo opens his mouth. He wants to say yes, yes he would like to know, because that’s the truth of it and he wants to always know the truth, all of its facets no matter how ugly.

Doesn’t he?

He thinks about Nahyuta, about Dhurke, about trying to forget they ever were anyone, because that’s easier than facing the fact that Dhurke abandoned him, and they might both be dead by now. Easier than wondering whether they were human or fae or something else. He doesn’t want to know what they were. He wants to deny the dreams, to convince himself they’re nothing but the weird subconscious mash-up of memory and the fae horrors Clay has spent all these years warning him about. He doesn’t want the truth about his childhood. He doesn’t want to remember his childhood at all.

(Is it well-meant silence when he doesn’t tell Clay, or Trucy, or Klavier, about them? To not worry them about his life and his past? Or is it just cowardice on his part? Blissful ignorance.)

He closes his mouth. Thinks about the smile Trucy forced onto her face as she realized that Apollo was about to reveal to the court that her father Zak Gramarye was murdered six months before then. Thinks about how she couldn’t keep that smile forced when she found out that her dead grandfather took her mother’s soul for his own personal gain. Thinks about Klavier lying on the stage wishing that he had been the corpse there, not Courte. All the pains that truth has caused them. Is that better or worse than that alternative? Does it depend on what truth it is being hidden?

(He thinks about how long it’s been since he’s said Nahyuta’s name out loud. What color were his eyes in real life, and not Apollo’s haunted dreams? He doesn’t remember.)

“I - I don’t really know,” he admits.

The smug, victorious expression he expects never arrives on Phoenix’s face. There’s no satisfaction in winning this argument. “I’m sorry,” he says, closing his hand around the magatama. “I told you about Vera because it mattered directly for that case, but the rest of this - I wanted to shoulder it myself. So the rest of you don’t have to worry about it. I don’t want you to have to keep secrets from anyone. But I don’t know what else to do.” He forces a smile onto his face with visible effort that makes Apollo wince. Nothing masks the exhaustion written into the lines on his face. “Maybe we put our heads and together we figure out some better way to talk about it. If I ever figure that I should tell…”

He trails off, touching a finger to his locket. Tell Trucy. If he ever gains reason to think that he should tell Trucy. Would he actually run it by Apollo first, ask for his advice? The possibility of being in Phoenix’s confidence for something that isn’t a case doesn’t make a damn bit of sense.

“I still don’t think you should try and keep it secret forever,” Apollo says, “but I - I guess I see what you mean. And why you don’t just…”

Why he doesn’t just tell her. More reason that just because Phoenix doesn’t “just tell” anyone anything. For once, he’s not being a cryptic bastard.

“Believe me, Apollo,” Phoenix says darkly, “I’m always thinking ahead and trying to plan for the worst. I’m not naive enough to just hope that anything will stay one way ‘forever’. But I have to be sure I don’t make it worse, either.”

It isn’t the lack of a visual cue that makes Apollo believe him. It’s knowing him that makes Apollo believe him. Phoenix always has his eye on something down the line, playing out the plan a few steps ahead to find the complications. Even - especially - while he wasn’t a lawyer. A gambler’s steady hand holding the cards, chancing on an outcome, because the cost of doing nothing at all is even more unthinkable.

Apollo nods, more times than necessary, lacking anything else to say. Phoenix cocks his head. “Apollo, you all right?” he asks.

What the hell is he supposed to say - how the hell is he supposed to be? Fine? In what world is he possibly fine? At the end of this, he’s learned more than he ever dreamed he would from his sole initial question, but in it all, that first answer has never changed.

This is all there is. A rabbit hole of pain so unfathomably deep and winding, and in its darkest depths, the same as the answer given to him on the surface: there’s no way to break a curse. Their lives aren’t the kind of fairy tale where true love’s kiss can wake a sleeping beauty or transform a beast back to a prince - it’s grimmer than that, colder than that, crueler than that. Curses not so concretely visible but more like haunting coincidence, a ghost whispering at the shoulder with reminders of guilt. How could a man who wasn’t even there when the crime happened blame himself for his mentor’s murder? And yet, even after the killer’s confession, how could he not? How can even the curse’s caster be blamed when someone else wielded the murder weapon? And yet, how could they not share in it?

Apollo would rather someone have been turned into a frog, honestly. Wouldn’t that be easier to grapple with, a simple chain of cause and effect, and no ambiguity in who to blame.

“No,” Apollo finally says. “Not really, no.”

“I guess that was a bit of a stupid question, huh.”

Apollo nods. No kidding. What’s a better question at this point, anyway? Not what he says. “How - how can there really not be any way? For a curse to be broken, I mean.”

Phoenix spins his chair around, resting his head back against it, eyes turned up to the ceiling. Once he slows to a stop, facing the windows, he says, “I mean, maybe it’s possible there was, once, but it was forgotten. There’s a lot of magic that’s gone that way.”

He gives Apollo a moment to digest that, and then continues, “The Court’s heyday was thousands of years ago. They’re living ruins of what they used to be, and a fraction of what they used to know. Maya - you haven’t met her, she’s Pearl’s cousin - Maya’s helping me out with some matters by trying to dig up more about some kinds of magic they’ve forgotten the nuance of. But even that’s something we’ve got a hint that they knew, once. Not like—” He shrugs helplessly. “I’m sorry. Don’t hold your breath waiting for a way to break a curse.”

“Oh,” Apollo says, somewhat surprised, but pleasantly so, that Phoenix said that much. It would be typical of him just to reiterate that no, there just isn’t any way he knows, that’s all, and to skip the explanation for fear of giving Apollo false hope. But thinking about the prospect of false hope is still easier than really, truly considering the meaning of what Phoenix just said - that this, that everything they’ve ever had to deal with in regards to the fae, could have be so much worse. They could do so much worse than all this pain they’ve ever wrought - they were once so much more dangerous than this, and now their Court is only ruins. This is what they are when they are weak.

“If I do find anything out, I’ll—”

Phoenix breaks off, rising up slowly from his chair, staring at something past Apollo, over his shoulder. Apollo twists around to look, not sure what he expects to see, but it certainly isn’t Vongole standing in the doorway, her head held high, her body much more solid than it usually appears, and stiller. The wispy fur at the back of her legs and off of her tail does not stir as though she is made of mist and surrounded by a breeze that affects only her; she could almost, in this moment, be a normal dog, but for her glowing eyes and her ears so bright red as though they were dipped straight in paint.

All the color drains from Phoenix’s face. He snatches up the magatama and springs to his feet, hurrying past Vongole to peer into the other half of the office. Apollo rises to his feet; if Klavier was here - if he heard what Phoenix was hiding - how Apollo promised to keep it a secret—

Vongole stares at Apollo. She doesn’t move. Phoenix reappears in the doorway, curling a hand in his hair, but his face has fallen slack with obvious relief. The claws curled into Apollo’s heart unclenches. “So then what are you doing here?” Phoenix asks the hound, whose ears fold back flat against her head, though her snout does not turn to shift her attention to Phoenix. She stares Apollo down like she will pounce. “Does he send you places or did you just wander here yourself?”

“You don’t know?” Apollo asks.

“You think I’ve ever had the chance to ask either Kristoph or Klavier about the logistics of their spectral hellhound?” Phoenix asks. Apollo tries to remember when he first started seeing Vongole. Whose ownership she would have been under. How soon after Kristoph’s arrest did Klavier come back to Los Angeles?

Despite her weirdly lanky proportions, like a regular dog was put on a rack and stretched out, Vongole always moves with grace, a predator’s prowl and elegance. A monster, but a beautiful one. She circles Apollo like she intends to herd him somewhere, like she is a shark smelling blood waiting for the moment to strike. “What—” Apollo spins too, trying always to keep her in his sight. She moves just slowly enough that he can keep up, but just quickly enough that he becomes slightly dizzy in his efforts. “What do you want?”

She stops. Apollo steps forward, trying to escape her circle, but she swings suddenly to the side, throwing her body up against Apollo’s hip. He expects her to fade through him, as she does walls and doors, but when she hits him he staggers with the force of her weight. And the cold - her body is cold and it reaches straight through his clothes, cold enough to burn, ice on bare skin type of burning, and Apollo doesn’t understand. He’s touched Vongole before, without problem, hasn’t he? Surely he has. What’s wrong with her? Or is something wrong with Klavier?

She trots over to the door, standing on the threshold, staring back at Apollo with her head aloft. He can’t bring himself to move, can’t unfreeze his feet from where they are riveted into the ground. Vongole presses her ears back against her head, lowering it so that her neck is level with her shoulders, prowling again, and she makes another circle of Apollo before again stopping in the doorway.

“I think she wants you to go with her,” Phoenix says.

She wags her tail, much faster than the usual low, wide swishing path that it takes. Apollo wrenches his foot from the floor and takes one step forward. Vongole bounds through the front room of the office, weaving between magic props tossed carelessly on the floor as though she couldn’t pass through them. And she stops and waits at the door, glancing expectantly back at Apollo. He fumbles his phone free from his pocket, finding no messages waiting for him; why would Klavier do something as cryptic as sending his faery dog to collect Apollo, rather than just calling or texting him?

Unless it isn’t Klavier instructing Vongole. Unless she’s acting on her own. Or unless Klavier is in trouble.

“You’d better go,” Phoenix says. “I can lend you the—”

“It’s fine,” Apollo says. He’s pretty sure that Klavier hates the magatama, and he found him fine without it last night. And he didn’t have Vongole guiding him then.

“Let me know that everything’s all right,” Phoenix says quietly. Apollo opens his mouth to ask what Phoenix knows, why he’s so sure that this means something is wrong - remembers what Phoenix said about himself and how Klavier reminds him of himself, long ago. Closes his mouth. Knows why Phoenix worries.

Phoenix always worries. He means well. His road is paved in well-intended worry.

“Yeah,” Apollo says. “I’ll - I’ll let you know.”

Vongole waits for him only to reach the door, diving through it as his hand reaches for the doorknob. He next finds her waiting beside the bike rack, her smoky fur drifting independently of the chill breeze, and as soon as he mounts his bicycle she lopes off down the sidewalk. She never looks back at him but is obviously monitoring him in some way, her pace changing depending on obstacles and traffic so that she always remains in his sight. He follows her through the quieter (relatively, anyway) city of weekend mornings, through his usual stomping grounds, to end up on the stoop of an apartment building that is - quite frankly, not as grandiose as Apollo would expect. He presumes this is where Klavier lives.

(If it’s not, then he’s far too deep into something that it’s also far too late to back out of.)

Vongole noses one of the buttons on the buzzer at the entryway and disappears through the door. Only seconds later, too quickly for her to have physically covered the necessary amount of ground, the door clicks to unlock. Apollo enters the lobby and before he has time to take in his surroundings, she appears in front of him. Literally appears - not bounding up to him out of a wall, but materializing out of the air, white fog swirling in circles around her ankles. She directs him to the elevator, pressing her nose into the button for the fourth floor and then several times in quick succession slamming her nose into the close doors button. “So were you always like that, or did you pick up your impatience from him?” Apollo asks.

She sits down and fixes her eyes on him. He doesn’t know what that means. He’s not sure why he bothered talking to her. She can’t respond - can she understand? Does she have some way to communicate information she hears to Klavier? Surely not - hopefully not, depending how long she was in the office.

She does not move until the elevator halts at their destination, and she springs to her feet and slips through the doors before they have opened wide enough for a fully-corporeal dog of her size to pass through. But when he makes it through, she meets him right at the other side, her impatience not taking her any further down the hall until Apollo can follow right at her tail. The walls are not cracked and peeling as in Apollo’s building, but they are certainly plain - again, very much not the kind of place he would imagine Klavier to live.

Vongole throws herself through the door of Apartment 404, and Apollo waits in front of it. A moment passes, and then another. Right. Even a faery dog doesn’t have opposable thumbs to grip a doorknob. He fails to swallow his apprehension but knocks anyway. There has to be a reason Vongole brought him here. He can’t just run away from it.

The seconds crawl past. Apollo reaches up to knock again, but the door swings suddenly open, and he flinches back.

Klavier’s hair is barely held together in a ponytail, strands falling loose around his face, and he looks even more like he hasn’t slept, going by the shadows under his eyes. And Apollo never thought there would come the day that he sees Klavier in sweatpants, but - he’s still alive. He’s still intact in one mobile piece, and he’s lucid enough to look annoyed. Apollo fumbles for words, any at all, but none arrive on his tongue. He hadn’t thought this far ahead. He starts to raise his arm to point at Vongole, to blame her, and before he can, Klavier sighs, shaking his head, his apparent annoyance sliding into exhaustion, and he steps out of the doorway, pulling the door open wider, and gesturing for Apollo to come in.

[notes on the chapter]

#roddy fanfics #fic: the witches of los angeles

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sebastianshaw · 4 years

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Rando Munday ramblings! For new followers, on Munday sometimes I just post a bunch of personal stuff I normally wouldn’t. Not usually anything intimately personal, more like random thoughts and news that just isn’t relevant to the blog in any way, not related to X-Men or RP or writing in general, etc. ....there’s a lot of Hannibal today, sorry, I’m rewatching it.

- I definitely wanna have a pair of critters named Hannibal and Hasdrubal at some point, maybe if there's a third I'd name him Hamilcar. I know everyone will think I named them after Hannibal Lector but actually these are really common names from Ancient Carthage. Like if you look at Carthagian history and records, everyone is Hannibal, Hasdrubal, or Hamilcar, it's like John, James, and Jim. I'd prefer the pair, though, since Hannibal and Hasdrubal were a pair of brothers and famous historical figures, so it would feel much more like a "set" that way (whereas they did not have a brother called Hamilcar) - Speaking of Hannibal Lector, I knew he was based on a real person, but I did not realize that person was a gay Mexican man. That’s...an interesting example of gay history, for sure. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, Thomas Harris (the writer of the books that the films and later the TV series were based on) based Hannibal on a surgeon he met while interviewing an inmate at prison for another novel. This surgeon was so intelligent and charismatic that Harris implicitly assumed that he was a doctor in the employ of the prison. Nope---the doctor was an inmate himself. Harris was so shaken by the encounter that it inspired him to create Hannibal Lector, who, in contrast to the typical media portrayals of serial killers as uncontrolled lunatic slashers like Michael Myers or Leatherface, is a charming, culture, charismatic intellectual. To protect the man’s identity, Harris called him “Dr. Salazar” in interviews, so that was always how I knew him. I just now learned not only was his real name Alfredo Balli Trevino, but his victim was Jesus Castillo Rangel, his male lover. Harris describes him as a small, lithe man with dark red hair and, unsurprisingly, “a certain elegance about him”. Though Trevino was given the death penalty for his crimes, his sentence was commuted to 20 years and he was released in either 1980 or 1981. He died in in 2009 when he was 81 years old. He reportedly spent the last years of his life helping the poor and elderly, and he expressed deep regret for his “dark past”---which I suppose makes sense, since his crime was that he killed a lover in a fit of rage during an argument, whereas Hannibal simply killed people in cold blood whom he had no attachment to because he liked eating them (something Trevino never did) and to punish them for rudeness. - I’ve decided to stop buying silk, unless it's from a thrift store and thus my money won't go to supporting sericulture. Ahimsa silk isn't an option either, the bugs aren't technically killed but they're not treated well either. I know it might seem weird to eat meat and wear leather and yet not want to purchase something that hurt moths and larva, but...I have to eat meat for medical reasons, and my leather purchases is limited to boots that I then keep for YEARS AND YEARS so it's very sparing. There's really no such thing as a cruelty-free diet or lifestyle, whether that cruelty is suffered by animals or by other humans, but I can still make choices that at least lesson some small aspect of harm. I need to eat meat, I don't need real silk. ...Haven only wears bamboo silk for this reason and when this came up with Shaw, he absolutely thought she was fucking with him, like even SHE can’t be THIS insane, NO ONE ACTUALLY CARES ABOUT BUGS WTF - The books nearest to me right now are “Women Who Run With The Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype ” by Clarissa Pinkola Estes, The Norton Anthology of English Literature: The Romantic Period, “X-Men: The Legacy Quest Trilogy” by Steve Lyons, two horror anthologies, the script for “M. Butterfly” by David Henry Hwang, “The Spanish Riding School of Vienna: Tour of America 2005″ book I got from when I went to see the Lippizanner horses perform, and a big beautiful leatherbound English translation of “The Flowers of Evil” by Charles Baudelaire. This is...this is a summary of my whole personality, sans rodents. Also god I need to clean my room. - Something I've noticed is that many sci-fi horror films that do the whole "science went too far against nature!!!" thing....don't actually have the problem result from the lack of ethics involved or because the scientists did something "unnatural", it happens because they didn't follow basic safety precautions, lab protocol, common sense, etc. "Splice" for instance, is a really good example---the problem isn't that they made a part-human hybrid, that's not why shit goes wrong, shit goes wrong because the two scientists act like idiots, adopt the creation as a child, hide it in their barn instead of a sterile controlled environment, and then one of them HAS SEX WITH IT. Or in "The Fly" the problem isn't that Brundle invented a teleporter, it's that he tested it ON HIMSELF while he was ALL ALONE. Even in "Jurassic Park" the issue is less that dinosaurs are breeding and more the result of a disgruntled worker who was given way too much power over being able to run things, and thus shut them down when he wants to. So many "science gone wrong!" movies end up not really being condemnations of science itself, so much as depicting scientists as utter dumbasses. Which, on the one hand, I do like, because I dislike the notion of condemning scientific progress just because it seems icky or creepy or "goes against nature" (so do vaccines, I still like those!) But on the other hand, the movies don't FRAME it as "this is the result of failure to practice science safely and sensibly" they frame it as "they should never have attempted such an unnatural thing and this disaster is punishment for a moral sin" even though the issue doesn't happen because what the scientists did was "wrong" it happens because they do something DUMB. - Bringing it back to Hannibal, I reached the episode where Margot Verger first appears, and if I have one big disappointment about the Hannibal series, it's Margot. In the books, she's a huge butch lesbian, literally and figuratively. In the TV series, she's a pretty femme fashionista like all the other women, and she fucks Will in order to get pregnant. At the time this came out in 2013, I tried to be all resigned and fair-minded about this. I was like "ok, well, they didn't want to be offensive with a stereotype, and I guess that's fair, I guess not hurting people matters more to me than getting the horseback-riding bulldyke hearthrob of my high school years on-screen at last" but you know what? No. Firstly, butch lesbians deserve representation too. How many have you ever seen onscreen, let alone in a mainstream media production? Sure, it's a stereotype, but it's not an inherently negative one, they just get treated that way in media because society sees it that way. But the way to handle butch lesbians and femme gay men and so on isn't to erase them from the screen, it's to start writing them as human beings and not caricatures or jokes or monsters. Margot is a fleshed-out human being, she's nuanced and twisted and hurt like everyone else in this series, she would be PERFECT for that. She wouldn't be just a butch lesbian, she'd be a CHARACTER who just also happens to be a butch lesbian. I don't really think she was changed to avoid "hurting" lesbians, I think she was changed because the director, gay man or not, clearly has a way he wants the women in his series to look (they're all fashion plates, all have long hair, all very sophisticated, etc) and book Margot didn't fit his aesthetic, his design if you will. Because god forbid we just make her a DAPPER dyke, right? Back to having sex with Will, which most certainly did NOT happen in the books...that's not bad itself in a VACUUM, fucking men to get a baby is something real-life lesbians do, I had a friend in college who was actually conceived that way, but like...no media exists in a vacuum, and there is very little depiction of lesbians in media that doesn't feature them fucking men for SOME reason or another. They want a baby, or they start the story with a boyfriend, or they're actually bisexual, or they're even raped, but there's always SOME reason we have to watch a guy fucking them and it's frankly distressing. Like, remember Irene Adler in BBC's Sherlock? It's a pattern. And I'm not saying lesbians who have had a sexual past with men, or who were the victims of sexual violence by men, don't deserve representation, I would never say that, those are very common experiences, I'm not saying "gold stars only", I'm saying that there is a strong pattern in media where it seems almost obligatory that a lesbian has to have sex with or be attracted to men at some point, while comparatively the opposite case, where a lesbian is depicted as exclusively and only attracted to and "with" other women, is seldom there. And it's just kind of a kick in the nads for me, as I think it was for a lot of other lesbians, butch or not, that a gay director took an opportunity like Margot Verger and turned her into just another attractive lipstick lesbian that is okay with having sex with the male protagonist as a treat tee hee (Spoiler: She does end up with Alana though, which I appreciate)

#out of shirt #munday #mun monday

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under-the-lake · 4 years

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I Suspect Nargles Are Behind It: Luna and Reality - short mind ramblings

I thought that some lighter writing than my usual stuff could be nice during these troubled captivity times. So I wondered and then set my mind on writing about a character, and chose Luna. Why Luna? I just love her. She’s clever but not vain, she’s a proper oddball to whom I can identify, she loves animals and understands the weird. She lives in a strange world of her own, oddly connected with reality, and has values I can share. On a more literature-related point of view, she’s a secondary character but without her the story couldn’t have unfolded as it did. In a very short piece (to my standards at least) I decided to explore Luna’s take on the reality norms the world has built.

Short ID

Name: Luna Lovegood (originally she was called Lily Moon, because it gave Rowling the idea of a dreamy girl - Original Writings for PM, The Original Forty)

Born: 13th February (J.K. Rowling, Twitter, 17th July 2015) and we can suppose it’s 1981 because Luna went to Hogwarts one year after Harry (born on 31st July 1980).

Post-Hogwarts Occupation: Wizarding naturalist (as Rowling called her originally)

Particularities: odd beliefs, and she was able to see Thestrals very soon after her mother’s accidental death, when Luna was nine. Unusually perceptive and creative. Bloody bright.

School: Hogwarts, Ravenclaw

Marital Status: Married to Rolf Scamander (Newt’s grandson)

Children: 2 sons, Lorcan and Lysander

Other Family: Dad Xenophilius Lovegood (Editor of the Quibbler), mum Pandora Lovegood (dead)

Odd Species: Blibbering Humdinger, Nargles, Wrackspurts, Crumple-Horned Snorkack. According to Rowling (Bloomsbury Chat, 30.7.2007), Luna went on discovering and naming many new species, but had to eventually give up on the Snorkack being a real creature.

First Impressions - Hogwarts: from Loony to Luna

She had straggly, waist-length dirty blonde hair, very pale eyebrows and protuberant eyes that gave her a permanently surprised look. [...]The girl gave off an aura of distinct dottiness. Perhaps it was the fact that she had stuck her wand behind her left ear for safekeeping, or that she had chosen to wear a necklace of Butterbeer caps, or that she was reading a magazine upside down.

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, Chapter Ten, Luna Lovegood

That’s how we are introduced to Luna (in the book). Well… dunno what you think, but she is introduced as a weirdo all right. She’s reading a magazine, The Quibbler, upside down, and that she seems to find that perfectly normal (we do learn some pages later that it’s a thing about reading runes but even if there wasn’t any rational explanation I wouldn’t put it past Luna to read something upside down). You cannot deny that Luna is intriguing. There are many reactions one can have on meeting her for the first time, but there will be reactions, either because she’s so far from what the reader holds dear as values, or because she’s so close. One cannot be indifferent to Luna.

Besides, there’s that strange thing that she can see Thestrals, and thinks they are nothing but normal creatures. Who doesn’t remember the ‘You’re just sane as I am’ line? And who wouldn’t doubt their sanity at such a statement? I’m glad they kept the line in the film.

So from the very beginning of our acquaintance with Luna, we know that she’s different, but not yet why, that she is blunt without being rude, that she knows who she is, and that she has some sort of interest in the natural world. We can also imagine from her Butterbeer necklace that she’s not from a wealthy family, her dad running a not-so-mainstream magazine, The Quibbler. We have another bit of evidence for that in the World Cup (see below). The other possibility -which, knowing all the books, sounds at least as true as the first one- is that she’s from a very creative family. However, at that point of the story, we don’t know about Nargles and Crumple-Horned Snorckacks. Yet. As for Luna’s Hogwarts allegiance, Wit Beyond Measure is Man’s Greatest Treasure, and The Circle Has No Beginning, she’s in Ginny’s year, one year below Harry, and she’s a Ravenclaw.

First Mention

Luna is not mentioned by first name until Ginny introduces her in Order of the Phoenix, Chapter Ten. However, Rowling introduces the Lovegoods in Goblet of Fire, Chapter Six. They are just mentioned, en passant, by Amos Diggory, while he and Cedric and the Weasleys, Harry and Hermione are waiting for their Portkey on Stoatshead Hill (seven past five, and old wellington boot) to get them to the Quidditch World Cup. Amos says the Lovegoods aren’t using the Portkey because they’ve been on the World Cup Site for a week since they couldn’t afford it another way. They live near the Weasleys, the Diggorys and the Fawcetts, somewhere near Ottery St Catchpole (Deathly Hallows, Chapter Twenty).

First Meeting

‘There’s only Loony Lovegood in there.’ This statement by Ginny is the first mention of Luna in the whole series. She’s met Neville who is looking for a compartment on the Hogwarts Express and can’t find one because ‘everywhere’s full’. ‘Don’t be silly, she’s all right’, answers Ginny. (OoP, Chapter Ten).

Straight in: ‘Loony’ is ‘all right’. Contradiction, but also completely true. Luna is a loony if you look at her with the eyes of conventional society and the norms it has set. She is all right, which means Ginny has taken trouble to get acquainted and knows she’s no loony, and at least never uses her ‘nickname’ straight in her face (contrary to Hermione’s line in the film…. which I hate, so much not in character. Is that the girl who started SPEW?). Ginny puts things straight from the beginning, yet she’s struggling to repress her fit of the giggles in the compartment, later, when Luna states Ravenclaw’s motto in a sing-song voice. Luna doesn’t seem to care what people think, and she’s pretty straightforward in her statements, though not in a mean way. For instance, when she tells Harry, still in the same scene in the Hogwarts Express compartment, that Parvati didn’t enjoy the Yule Ball with him because he hadn’t cared to dance with her, it’s just a statement, not a judgement. Luna doesn’t do judgement. I must admit that the feelings, at reading this train scene for the first time, are mixed. You perceive that Luna is someone special who is rather unbothered by others’ opinion because she knows herself and is in a way more mature than her fellow classmates. You basically wonder if she’s got some autistic traits. On the other hand, the series of articles in the magazine she’s reading - and obviously taking seriously - show an openness of mind and fantasy that are quite unusual. How Far Would Fudge Go to Gain Gringotts? or Sirius Black - Villain or Victim? Notorious Mass Murderer or Innocent Singing Sensation? are just two of the titles in the issue of The Quibbler that Luna is reading (see picture below).

The first impressions are tested further because once the lot get off the train, there’s the Thestrals. Harry has never been able to see them before, because he had never understood death before seeing Cedric murdered during the Third Task. He’s completely stunned by those skeletal winged horses. Luna isn’t, and simply explains they’ve always been there. Not at all reassured and still thinking he’s having hallucinations, Harry climbs up behind Luna into the carriage, not sure if he wants to disclose this to his best mates.

This is the first meeting with Luna. You cannot deny the impression is strong. Personally I did like her from the start. She then just grew on me.

Reality? Berkeley? Aristotle?

Believing in things that nobody can see… mental, Luna? Or just aware of the world in a way few modern people are able to? Just more open to nature and unusually perceptive or living on another planet? I reckon anything but mental. Luna is a character who questions our perception and definition of reality throughout the three books she appears in.

Traditionally, if we follow Aristotle (On Interpretation), a statement can be true if both the sentence and the reality it aims at describing match. There must be no contradiction and the statement must be in adequation with reality. Like saying, while standing in front of the Hogwarts Express, ‘the steam engine is scarlet’. It’s the, say, rational way. And it is the way it works in the wizarding world, yet the roots are different from the Muggle one. Magic is the scientific framework in which the wizarding world evolves, and in that world magic is a science in the Muggle sense: it can be studied, divided into subjects, tested (Nadal, 2014).

However, on the other end of the spectrum, there’s another way of seeing things that are less black or white, and it was explained by Irish philosopher George Berkeley (1685 - 1753). Berkeley, to put it shortly, states that what one sees is, from the moment it’s apprehended by anything connected with the brain, an interpretation of reality. He says that reality per se doesn’t exist and that the things we see, as a dimension of reality conceived out of the mind, is a mere illusion (Chaillan, 2016; Granger & Bassham, 2016). Seen in that light, Harry’s meeting with Dumbledore at the end of Deathly Hallows is full of sense. So is Luna’s relationship with the world around her. The case of Nargles, Wrackspurts and Crumple-Horned Snorckacks are proof enough. Luna questions our relationship with the norms the world has built around what is considered real and what is not. Can you believe something exists while you’ve never seen it? Well… just ask everyone who believes in any kind of god, magic or whatever. They’ve never seen the source, have they. Still, they do believe it exists. The difference with Luna is that while religion is something built by, and therefore admitted as real, by society (the norm, or one of the possible norms), Nargles and Wrackspurts are not.

If we look at the zoological side of things, the Muggle world has Science (Claim, Evidence, Reasoning), and Cryptozoology. Science proves, tests, confronts, questions. Cryptozoology is the branch of zoology that deals with imaginary species. So there is a society-approved branch of Natural History that deals with what legends and history have given us. Those two sides, in Luna’s world, are, for the ‘official part’, the Ministry Department of Regulation and Control of Magical Creatures, Scamander’s book Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (notice that the title holds the word ‘fantastic’? What irony…) and Hagrid and Grubbly-Plank as Care of Magical Creatures Teachers. Oh and we could add Charlie Weasley as a Dragon Keeper. The other side of this is The Quibbler and Xenophilius Lovegood (and Luna). So while both worlds have two instances to deal with two parts of the natural world, and while the Muggle world has both sides coexisting rather peacefully because society-approved, the wizarding world is in tension because no official body has ever given any credit to The Quibbler or Xenophilius’s weird ideas. I’ll discuss Magical Natural Sciences later in a bit more depth. What I wanted to showcase here is that this comparison about how Natural Sciences and CryptoSciences are dealt with in both worlds further supports the distinction between Aristotelian and Berkeleyan ways of seeing reality, and supports the idea that the Lovegoods are more Berkeleyan, but therefore also the fact that the Wizarding world is even more normative that the Muggle one, and that’s saying something (for instance there’s only one school and one teacher for each subject for the whole of the UK and Ireland; if that is not normative, I don’t know what is).

Luna openly states stuff that is completely bonkers, which makes her sort of -pardon me- unbelievable. Though it fits with Berkeley. I mean who knows if Rufus Scrimgeour is really a vampire or not? Or who knows if Fudge really has an army of Heliopaths? On the other hand, she was raised by An Eccentric if there ever was one. I mean old Xenophilius (incidentally, ‘xenophilius’ means ‘love of the strange’). We first meet him at Bill and Fleur’s wedding, at the start of Deathly Hallows. ‘Slightly cross-eyed, with shoulder-length white hair the texture of candyfloss, he wore a cap whose tassel dangled in front of his nose and robes of an eye-watering shade of egg-yolk yellow. An odd symbol, rather like a triangular eye, glistened from a golden chain around his neck.’ (DH, Chapter Eight) Xenophilius goes one praising the gnome infestation in the Weasleys’ garden, and the wisdom of those creatures. Not exactly your conventional wizard. He looks even stranger than that wizard wearing a lady’s dressing-gown at the Quidditch World Cup. Thing is, the Lovegoods are taking a step back looking at the conventional world they were made to live in. They don’t fit in because their reality is unproven and therefore not believable in an Aristotelian world. However, Luna has her own boundaries of truth. Somehow they meet Dumbledore’s. He believed the Deathly Hallows existed, as did Xenophilius, and finally Harry. For most witches and wizards, including Ron and Hermione until the last moment, the Hallows are only an artefact in a children’s story, The Tale of the Three Brothers.

Luna’s mum died when Luna was nine; a spell Pandora was experimenting on backfired. Luna witnessed that and has since been able to see Thestrals. Luna’s mum was probably the one who was more perceptive and passed that to Luna (reminds me of Fiver in Watership Down passing his own sixth sense on to the next generation). Luna stays as she is, but eventually, according to Rowling, gives up on Snorkacks as her dad’s inventions (Bloomsbury Chat, 30.7.2007).

I reckon Luna would fit more in a Berkeleyan world than in the normative world our ‘civilized’ societies have built, be they magical or Muggle. Of course every society has norms. Thing is, how much constraint they set upon members makes all the difference. Luna is not a Loony (even etymologically, in my opinion, because loony is short for lunatic, which means mentally ill, from the moon - see all the tales and beliefs surrounding full moon for instance, mostly negative in a normative Aristotelian world). Luna is the positive form of Loony, I’d say. She’s seen as a loony by people whose norms are those of the society they grew up in. With a wee bit of openness of mind, Luna is a great character, a philosophical free-lancer, a mirror in which we can question our society and beliefs about reality.

PS: I want to explore friendship and loyalty in Luna briefly too. Soon... confinement helps the writer :P The wizarding community is at risk too! Stay at home!

Sources:

https://www.wizardingworld.com/writing-by-jk-rowling/the-original-forty

https://www.wizardingworld.com/writing-by-jk-rowling/thestrals

http://www.accio-quote.org/articles/2007/0730-bloomsbury-chat.html

https://www.syfy.com/syfywire/the-resiliency-of-luna-lovegood

Aristotle, De Interpretatione (English translation), retrieved from http://www.bocc.ubi.pt/pag/Aristotle-interpretation.pdf

Adams, R. (1972). Watership Down. Penguin.

Chaillan, M. (2016). Harry Potter et Berkeley. In Harry Potter à l’école des philosophes, Philosophie Magazine, Hors série n°31, novembre - décembre 2016. 70-71.

Granger, J. & Bassham, G. (2016). Just in Your Head? J.K. Rowling on Separating Reality from Illusion. In Bassham, G. (2016, Eds.). The Ultimate Harry Potter and Philosophy, Hogwarts for Muggles. Wiley Eds. 185-197

Nadal, C. (2014). Magical Science: Luna Lovegood’s Beliefs, Discoveries and Truth. In Martín Alegre, S., Arms, C., Blasco Solís, L., Calvo Zafra, L., Campos, R., Canals Sánchez, M., ... & García Jordà, L. (2014). Charming and bewitching: considering the Harry Potter series. 148-153.

Rowling, J. K. (2000). Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, Bloomsbury, London.

Rowling, J. K. (2003). Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. Bloomsbury, London.

Rowling, J. K. (2007). Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. Bloomsbury, London.

Rowling, J. K. (2007). The Tales of Beedle the Bard, Bloomsbury, London.

Scamander, N. (1927; 2001; 2018; [J.K. Rowling]). Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them. Bloomsbury, London, in association with Obscurus Books, 18a Diagon Alley, London.

#Louhi #Luna #LunaLovegood #Reality #Philosophy #Harry Potter #Hogwarts #J.K.Rowling #Berkeley #Aristotle #Cryptozoology #Xenophilius #SocietyNorms

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queensdivas · 5 years

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A Damned Soul Chapter 2 (A Gwil Fan Fic)

It’s all coming together! WHOOP WHOOP! If you would like to be tagged please let me know! If you got requests on one of the Bohrap boys or the dads! Please feel free to request! I hope you all enjoy because holy shit this is getting fun to write!

@mexifangorl @leah-halliwell92 @bonafiderocketqueen @i-live-for-queen @its-funny-til-its-not @b-i-g-i-r-l-b-i @teathymewithben @mayofbrian @brianmydear @i-live-for-queen

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He viewed the world as the first cinematograph when he would be walking around this mortal world. The people in constant motion, the quality of viewing, and even trying to add the old piano music along for the ride. It was the only thing that was keeping him sane before walking into a church to drown himself in holy water.

Fixing his black gloves as the coat man took his cloak off the from the hanger. He placed his dark purple hat on top of his head then prepared himself for the walk out to start his day. Breakfast was on his mind Walking out to the cool evening as the world changed into the fast moving of what he saw.

Till his eyes drifted to her..is when the reality of how the world looks would come back to his sight. Hundreds of times he’s witnessed this moment...words still manage to fall short in this instance. It was how she carried herself around the world when he would see her. Always walking with a destination to go..strong footsteps..not light like some kind of fae.

To him..she was an absolute Goddess…

She walked down the street with a basket full of pastries to take home with her which I’m assuming was her little herb shop down the street from my home. Till a bum came running behind her, pushing her down and snatching her basket.

“Thank you for the free pastries! You bitch!” He screamed as I held my cane up to hit him on his leg, collapsing before me and basically rolling all over the sidewalk in pain. Grabbing the basket from the ground as she dusted off her dress then smiling as I handed her basket back to her.

“Ummm..thank you Sir Lee.” Her eyes always looked down when we would first come into contact. But never doing the lifting of the chin so we could meet. It was seeing her standing before me in embarrassment or even humility.

The sunset was causing a little sunburned was beginning form which was time for me to get into the next building. Tipping my hat to her as I moved swiftly past her but her eyes lingering as they always do after we first meet..

“Wait..Sir Lee..if it’s not too much of a burden..may I ask… Oh never mind you look like in a hurry.”

“No please..your want is my command.” She gulped as she hid her face again from me..I don’t mean to frighten her. Just these precious moments seem to fly by so damn quickly.

“I know it’s not far..but will you please walk me home..if it’s out of your way then never mind. Oh never mind you’re too busy!” She scurried off before I could even give her my answer..which will always be yes....

When it comes to the sunlight and vampires. It is your enemy yes..but you won’t burst into a pile ashes with being in it. Eventually they become a little resistant to it so going outside to the world with the sun won't kill them. It’ll hurt a little bit at first so basically it’s like they’re getting a very bad sunburn. Luckily for Gwil. He’d been alive since the 7th century so the sun hadn’t been a major issue to keep himself alive. Still hurts after a little bit.

In his bright red 63’ Corvette Stingray which stuck out like a sore thumb, traveling up along the coast in the strong winds of the night traveling along with him. He was determined that this would be the last time..or would just stay outside on the sunniest day of the year.

Parking at the cottage as the sun was already setting creating a gorgeous orange backdrop of what he would be viewing for when he wakes up from his slumber. The realtor came out of the cottage with her perky smile on her face and a large yellow folder for all the paperwork he has to sign.

“Mr. Lee! It’s truly a pleasure doing business with you!” She shook my hand with her eyes trailing up and down my body. I can’t tell you how many damn times these women just keep staring at me like I’m some sort of eye candy to them. Quite revolting.

“Now you’re more than welcome to walk around to see how the movers got everything put together and ready to go.” This isn’t the first home I’ve had to buy over the millennials. Usually my home has been a castle, some large mansion, and large flat on a square.

Sitting on top of the hill the cottage sat that was a pearl white color but was also a little into the hill so the top would be covered in grass. Keeps a nice natural temperature for the house. My new home was a little smaller than most of the grand places I’ve lived before. As in it’s not a castle, a mansion, or even large flat on the square. It had a living room, a bedroom that is pitch black..for obvious reasons. No kitchen which makes the living room much larger. Then of course a bathroom.

“Now regarding the whole no kitchen. I can always expand the cottage for some room for a tiny little kitc.

“No kitchen needed. I plan on doing most of my cooking outside so to enjoy the view.” Lying to her as she nodded then placed the paperwork I needed to finish signing on the living room table. Scribbling down my signature on the lines so I could get this woman out of my hair. I’ve got things to start working on before tomorrow evening when she should be shopping for the catch of the day.

“Please doing business with you mam and I hope we can do business again.” Practically shoving her out of the cottage then locking the door tightly. Might as well get some rest before I go grab some dinner.

The curtains were shut all over the living room of the cottage as I walked over to the record player. Usually some very light chants get me to fall asleep after a move such as this. Pressing the play button as the house was beginning to fill with beautiful music.

IF it’s one thing I miss about the 13th century was the vast amount of chants that were sung all Sundays. Thought entering a church would practically be a death sentence for myself..walking by them in the early mornings after a night of hunting was always pleasurable.

Entering into the bedroom to see a very large cat sitting in the middle of my bed. His tail softly moving on top of the covers, those very yellow green eyes were staring directly at me..as if he was planning on pouncing at any moment. Cats in this world are very interesting. The whole “cats have nine lives” is very real and to the point some cats have been with me for a very long time...all annoying with their meows and purs.

“Look. As much as I love cats and all the so called happiness you bring to this world. I would prefer not to have you in my home. So c’mon.” Standing at the edge of the bed but he wasn’t moving an inch..stubborn feline!

“Alright then you stubborn feline.” My hands reaching down to him as he began squinting at me.

“Call me a feline again..I dare you ya bloody blood sucker!” Did...did he just talk…? That’s so damn impossible! I must be tired and a little bit of a headache most likely because I’m hungry!

“Shocked to see a feline talking to you?”

“HOLY SHIT!” Falling to the floor as I backed myself to the dresser! Stopping so that he wouldn’t pounce at me to scratch my eyes out!

“How the!?! What the!?”

“Your really going to question why I’m talking? We live in a world with vampires, witches, and other mythical creatures. Is a talking cat really so bizarre that you threw yourself against the dresser?” He had a thick American accent which stung like a viper somehow! Still sitting on top of my bed but closer to the edge so we could have some sort of eye contact.

“If I say yes...I get the feeling you’ll scratch my eyes out.” He sat in the middle of my legs. His ears pointed straight up as I tried to get this entire situation in my head. Like I said..I’ve had cats follow me around..but none of them have ever had some sort of conversation!

“So you’re a talking cat...and you’re bothering me because…?”

“I’ve heard of you before. You’re very famous for your tragic story. To some fellow immortals your story makes even Elvis Presley sad.” Elvis is alive?

“Elvis is alive? I thought he died in 1970 or something…?” Rolling his eyes as he got down from the bed and even appeared bigger than what he was on the bed. His grey fur was very fluffy and his paws were massive for a cat.

“You’re missing the point you idiot! Those of us who have been wandering this world since the beginning have seen heart aches and the destruction. But you..oh boy have you inspired the masses.” For an American cat his vocabulary is better than what I thought it would be.

“So you’re bothering me because I inspired the masses?”

“Nope. I’m here to help your dumbass because after watching this fail countless times..it’s now just utterly depressing.” This cat is making me feel absolutely stupid! A stupid cat is making me feel so god damn stupid!

“You may call me Hyacinth! That’s what my last owner called me and I’ve liked the way it sounds. Now I’ve got to grab some dinner and your stomach growling is flooding my ears. So let’s go find some sort of grub!” Prancing off into the living room as I stayed there in shock. His head poking back into the room with annoyance written all over his face.

Opening the door as he walked out to the front porch, looking around the coast before us. I’m feeling elk. DO you think I go running around eating whatever virgin blood is available? I got tired of human blood around the 14th century...mostly because that nasty plague.

We started walking along the coast in silence..trying to read each other’s thoughts, emotions, and not wanting to attack each other. He doesn’t plan on staying around does he? I need to get on with my life and this cat will get in the way with it!

“So..Hyacinth. I know you said you’re here to help...but why and how do you plan on helping me?” We stopped walking as he entered the water a little then began searching for some sort of fish.

“Like I said. Some of us have had enough of what happens. You think you’re alone in this world..but you’re not the only ones who’ve been completely thrown under the bus. We figured if we start with you..eventually we can all finally have some sort of peace in our lives. A spark has to..” He stopped to dive his head down then pulled out a tiny fish in his mouth.

Their pools of blood crept into my nose with my eyes turning dark red. They’re so close..small animals have been doing the trick..but they’re so..juicy! A white cloudy trail appeared before me that would lead me to those Elk! I could distinctly hear their calm heart beats which was like hearing Beethovens symphony’s for the time! Loud! And so damn desirable!

Squatting on the rock from a short distance to see their blood vessels flowing through each of their bodies. Which one was diseased, weak, pregnant, and the healthiest. My tongue grazing against my lips, my fangs beginning to grow from hunger. It's been so long since I’ve been fully filled..

It’s come down to the point where drinking human blood is just gross. Most humans blood these days are filled with so much damn sugar, diseases, drugs, and even to much damn coffee. But animal blood..no..wild animal blood that live on the richness of nature it was fuels me now. Mostly small animals..since I’ve been living in areas where Elk just don’t come to live in your backyard.

Hyacinth wandered over to where I was drowning myself in my delectable meal. Once finished, he sat down next to me as I sat up. Licking the blood off my lips then beginning to clean myself up.

“As she ever seen your true form?” Catching my breath as he looked up at me.

“Yes..every time. She never cowards away..”

“I think I’m beginning to hatch a scheme for us. Oh yes..it’s all coming together.”

#gwilym lee #gwil #Gwil lee #gwilym x reader #gwilym x oc #vampire fic #vamp gwil #better than twilight #bohrap #it's a bohrap boy #joe mazzello #ben hardy #rami malek #gwil x reader #gwilym lee x reader

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questionsonislam · 4 years

Note

How was the body language and speaking style of the Prophet Muhammad (pbuh)?

The Prophet Muhammad (pbuh) is the last prophet of Allah along with being a human. He had a mission: to convey the religion of Islam to people and to explain it. The skill of the Messenger of Allah, who is the best model in every field, related to communication with people is definitely important.

It is necessary to study thoroughly the personality of the Prophet (pbuh), who influenced tens of thousands of people in a very short period of time and made them obey him related to his cause, which he started to spread alone under the circumstances of fifteen centuries ago, in terms of his communication skills and use of body language.

That the Prophet used the body language, which is a very effective message in communication, as a messenger has become more importance for us today.

His walking style

According to the information given by the resources, the Prophet did not drag his feet as he walked; he would lift his foot firmly when he took a step. He would not swing as he walked; he would lean forward slightly as if walking on rough land. He would not stand upright by puffing his chest while walking. He would not walk very fast as if running but he would cover long distances in a short time as a grace of Allah.

His sitting style

The information that reached us about how the Prophet (pbuh) sat is found in the texts of hadiths as follows:

Sitting in the form of qurfasa: This style of sitting is as follows: his bottom on the ground, his arms round his legs and his knees drawn up. It can also be called supported sitting. There are narrations in the resources that the Prophet sat like this from time to time.

Sitting cross-legged: According to a narration by Abu Dawud, "After leading the morning prayer, the Prophet (pbuh) would sit cross-legged until the sun rose fully."

Crouching: It is seen that this sitting style, which is called “ihtifaz” or “i’qa” was used while eating.

Sitting by letting his legs hang down: There are narrations in hadith texts stating that the Prophet (pbuh) sat on the edge of a well and let his legs hang down.

Kneeling down: Unlike the other styles, there is no separate heading called kneeling down in the narrations in the resources that mention the sitting styles of the Prophet. However, it is possible to find between the lines in the hadith texts mentioning the reasons why the hadiths were uttered and in tabaqat books (biographies). Kneeling down is the usual sitting style of the Prophet. Therefore, if a Companion had said, "I saw the Prophet kneeling down" it would have meant mentioning what is known, which would not be interesting at all.

The other sitting styles that the Companions saw and mentioned are the styles that they sometimes or rarely saw the Messenger of Allah sitting. The Prophet sat in all of the sitting styles listed above in various stages of his life on various occasions; thus, he did not make only one style advisable for his ummah, who wanted to resemble him in all aspects.

The things he leaned on

The Prophet said,

"Three things are nor rejected: cushion, nice scent and milk." (Tabarani, Makarimul-Akhlaq, h. no 152)

When the Messenger of Allah had a religious talk and sat in the same place for a long time, he would place a cushion under his arms and lean on it.

We also know that the Prophet sat on a mattress that was a bit higher than the ground and that was made of date-palm leaves.

There is also information stating that the Prophet sat on a chair with iron or wooden legs.

The Prophet did not oppose to sitting on the things that he was offered if they were customary things and unless they were luxurious. As a matter of fact, when he went somewhere as a guest, he sat on a carpet, cushion made of felt, etc.; he sometimes sat on the wooden floor or ground by avoiding to sit on the cushion that he was offered.

Speaking style

One of the most distinguished characteristics of the Prophet (pbuh) was his beautiful and perfect speech. The Prophet said,

"I was sent with the characteristic of expressing many things with few words." (Bukhari, VIII, 76, 168; an-Nihaya, I, 295)

The environment in which he was brought up played an important role in his fluent speech.

The prophet spoke distinctly, clearly and in a way that everyone could understand. The listeners could count his words one by one. When it was necessary, he would repeat the important sentences three times during his speech.

The Prophet, who acted like a preacher, a mufti, a judge, a teacher, an instructor, a head of a family, a diplomat, a commander, a conqueror, as well as a man of community with a large circle of friends on various occasions, had relationships with all parts of the community whether they were friends or enemies, Muslim or non-Muslim, rich or poor, young or old male or female.

When the Prophet talked, he always acted like a humble brother, a compassionate teacher and a merciful father toward his Companions; and when he wanted to teach them some of the rules of etiquette (good manners), he addressed them with a soft style. He used different speaking styles when he addressed them: a playful style, a heartfelt style, gratifying, promising and encouraging styles, allegorical, metaphorical, stimulating and thought-provoking styles.

The tone and style of the Prophet (pbuh) when he addressed a congregation is also different. Words derived from "khutba" are used in the resources for such speeches. Only “the Farewell Sermon” is very long; the other speeches in the resources are not so long.

When he addressed people, his eyes would become red and his tone of voice would rise. When he made a speech, he would hold a stick (staff) called "mikhsara", which he used to lean on and to point to something.

The Prophet (pbuh) did not like unnecessary extreme deeds, excessive deeds that could harm Islam and the acts that would harm basic principles. When he was informed about such incidences, he would feel sad and angry; he would take a firm stand and try to prevent such incidents by warning people harshly.

The Prophet had an attitude that never changed: He never spoke in an offending, despising, insulting and excessive style, which is not regarded nice even among ordinary people.

His gestures

When the gestures of the Prophet are examined, it will be seen that he used his hands and fingers more.

a. His hands: The Messenger of Allah used his gestures actively and attracted the attention of his listeners in his addresses especially related to education and training. As a matter of fact, he used his staff, which he generally had with him, to make gestures that would make his speech interesting. Once, when he was on the pulpit, he hit the pulpit with his staff and said,

"This is Tayba (Madinah). Listen carefully! I told you that Dajjal (Anti-Christ) would not be able to enter Makkah and Madinah."

The Prophet transformed abstract concepts into concrete forms to enable the listeners to imagine the issue. When he told them that he would be the first person to enter Paradise, he showed how he would knock on the door of Paradise by using gestures. Anas b. Malik, who witnessed it, said,

"When the Prophet said, 'I will be the first person to knock on the door of Paradise', he acted as if he was holding the doorknocker of a door; I can still imagine it."

When the Prophet told his Companions about qadar (destiny), he held his beard. The scholars who explain hadiths say this act indicated surrendering because holding one’s beard meant surrendering among Arabs of that time.

The Prophet used his hands perfectly while teaching. As a matter of fact, Abdullah b. Masud, who was among the notables of the Companions in terms of knowledge, said that the Prophet held his hand when he taught him at-Tahiyyatu. It is stated in another narration that he held his hair, instead of his hand.

The Prophet sometimes pointed to things that he regarded important. For instance, when a person from Ansar said to him, "O Messenger of Allah! I hear some words from you but I cannot memorize them", the Messenger of Allah said to him, "Get help from your right hand." When he said so, he acted as if he was writing.

The following incident reported by the Companion Abdullah b. Amr related to the Prophet’s pointing to something by his hand is a nice example. Abdullah narrates:

I wrote anything I heard from the Messenger of Allah. Some Qurayshis wanted to prevent me from doing it. They said,

"The Messenger of Allah is a human being. He speaks when he is angry and when he is happy. How can you write down anything he says?"

I told the Messenger of Allah about it. He showed his mouth and said,

"Write! I swear by Allah in whose hand my soul is that nothing but truth comes out of this."

Once, the Messenger of Allah was leading the night prayer to the congregation. However, he performed two rak'ahs instead of four rak'ahs and saluted. Then, he stood and leaned on something like a wooden mattress in the mosque. He looked as if he was angry. He put his right hand on his left hand and clasped his fingers together; he placed the back part of his left hand on his right cheek. The people who left the mosque after the prayer was over asked one another, "Was the prayer shortened?" Hz. Abu Bakr and Hz. Umar were among them. However, they avoided talking.

Somebody among the Companions called “Dhulyadayn” due to his long hands went to the Prophet and said, "O Messenger of Allah! Did you forget or was prayer shortened?" The Messenger of Allah said, "Neither did I forget nor was prayer shortened." He said to the people around, "Is what Dhulyadayn says true?" They said, "Yes." He got up completed his prayer and performed sajdah as-sahw (prostration of forgetfulness). Although the Prophet did not say that he was sad and worried, it was understood from his acts, that is, from his body language that he was sad.

b. Fingers: It is known that after delivering his sermon in Arafat to about one hundred thousand people, he asked them, "Have I conveyed it to you?" and that he pointed to the people with his index finger and said, "O Allah! Be witness!"

When he gave advice to Muadh b. Jabal, he held his tongue with his hand and said, "Control this." The Messenger of Allah could have said to Muadh b. Jabal, "Control your tongue" but he used the visual method, which is more effective.

According to what is reported from Abdullah b. Abi Awfa, during a journey, the Prophet said to the person who was serving him, "Give me something to drink, I will break fasting." The man said, "O Messenger of Allah It is still bright. Is it appropriate to break fasting now?" The Prophet asked something to drink again. The man said the same thing. When the Prophet asked something to drink for the third time, the man brought some drink. The Messenger of Allah broke his fasting and pointed to the east with his hand as if drawing a line and said, "Look! When it gets dark in this direction like that, one can break his fasting."

When the Prophet (pbuh) mentioned watching the crescent for Ramadan fasting and the number of the days in lunar months as twenty-nine and thirty, he said, "We are an illiterate community; we do not know how to write and how to calculate. The number of days in a lunar month is like this and that." He showed his both hands with his fingers three times, meaning thirty and by hiding the thumb in the last showing of his hands for the second time, meaning twenty-nine.

When he talked about believers’ helping one another and the relationship and sincerity among them, he said,

"Believers are like a building. They support one another and stand upright."

He clasped his fingers when he said it. With this act, he explained the importance of unity with a perfect style.

His facial gestures

The Messenger of Allah, who was the best man in terms of good manners, was a very gentle and kind person. His vast feelings of compassion and mercy reflected his inner feelings at once; his thoughts were visible on his face.

a. His facial expression: The speech of the Messenger of Allah attained a different value with his facial gestures. His addressees could see the signs of the words that the Messenger of Allah would utter on his face. In the course of time, people started to guess how he would speak before he started to speak. When the Prophet got angry, the blood vessel in the middle of his forehead would swell and his eyes would become red. The Companions understood that the Prophet was angry when they saw him like that. Once, he saw somebody he did not know next to Hz. Aisha and expressed his anger with his facial expression. Hz. Aisha told him that he was her foster brother.

On the other hand, when Ka'b b. Malik narrated the acceptance of his repentance, he said that the Messenger of Allah had welcomed him with a face bright with joy and addressed him as follows:

"Be happy and rejoice for the best day ever since your mother gave birth to you."

b. His gestures of eyebrows and eyes: The Prophet never made signs with his eyebrows and eyes to revile others; he did not allow others to make signs with their eyebrows and eyes either.

Abdullah b. Sa'd b. Abis-Sarh, who had been condemned to death after the conquest of Makkah, entered into the presence of the Prophet, asked for forgiveness and held his hand to pay allegiance to him. The Messenger of Allah did not accept his allegiance but when Abdullah asked for the third time, he accepted it unwillingly. Then, the Prophet said to his Companions,

"Why did you not kill him though you saw my attitude?" The Companions said,

"O Messenger of Allah! If you had made a gesture with your eye, we would have killed him." Thereupon, the Prophet (pbuh) said,

"Treason does not fit the eyes of prophets."

His posture

When the phrase "the body language of the Prophet" is used, the first thing that comes to mind is definitely his posture. Even the silence of the Prophet is meaningful in terms of the religion; the image he forms with his posture is his real and most affective aspect; it also became manifest as his ethics.

His ethics represents the living Quran. Thus, his posture shows us the type of man the Quran envisages.

a. His clothing: The Prophet wore clothes with various colors and patterns. However, we know that he preferred white clothes to the others. He wore the same clothes as the other people in the community wore; he made sure that the clothes he wore were clean and were not torn. He wore wool, linen and cotton clothes, but he did not wear clothes made of silk. The Prophet always smelled nice and cared for his hair and beard.

b. Personal Distance: The prophet was very close to his wives, children and grandchildren; he adjusted his stance according to the degree of relation. That he kissed his daughter Fatima on the forehead, sat on her bed and that he embraced and kissed his grandsons Hasan and Husayn shows his use of physical contact and private relationship with his close relatives.

When he talked to someone, he would look at his face and if he held the hand of the person he was talking to, he would not let hold of his hand unless he withdrew his hand; he would not turn his face away unless his addressee turned his face away. If someone whispered something in the ear of the Messenger of Allah, he would not move his head away unless the man moved his head away.

The Prophet advised the Muslims to smile to each other and he himself always smiled. The Messenger of Allah listened calmly even to his enemies who wronged him, and began to speak when it was his turn to speak.

Once, he was talking to Utba b. Rabia. He said, "O Abul-Walid! Speak! I am listening to you." When Utba finished his speech and stopped, he asked, "O Abul-Walid! Have you finished speaking?" When he said, "Yes", the Prophet started to speak by saying, "Then, listen to me now!"

When the Prophet walked, he would not walk like lazy people; he would walk with firm steps. Those who walked after him could hardly catch up with him. He would walk by bending slightly toward the front; when he was called from behind, he would turn with his whole body; he would not turn his neck only.

It was seen that the Messenger of Allah, who did not speak when it was not necessary, sometimes kept silent for a long time. It is stated that his silence was due to his attribute of lenience, his willingness to make people avoid what they were doing, his consent or contemplation.

c. Body Contact: The Prophet used body contact very well when it was necessary. It is known that he embraced, sometimes kissed and hugged the people whom he loved when they came from distant places and his close relatives. As a matter of fact, when Jafar b. Abi Talib returned to Madinah from Abyssinia, the Prophet (pbuh) had just returned from the conquest of Khaybar. When Jafar entered into the presence of the Prophet after thirteen years, the Prophet embraced Jafar and kissed him between his two eyes; then, he said,

"I do not know for what I became happier, the conquest of Khaybar or the return of Jafar."

As it is also mentioned in the Quran, when the Prophet accepted the “allegiance” of the Muslims, he put his hands on their hands and accepted their allegiance.

The Messenger of Allah strengthened his sincerity by establishing body contact with people.

On the other hand, it is seen that the Prophet acted in a way that children could understand or like in order to communicate with them. He sometimes put them on his camel and gave them a ride; he sometimes gave them advice and caressed their hair; he also joked around with them. Once, he was making wudu and sprayed the water in his mouth on the face of the child next to him. This close contact of the Prophet and his natural acts attracted the attention of children and made it easy for them to love him.

His laughing style

According to what is unanimously written in the resources, the Messenger of Allah had a naturally smiling and cheerful face. He always smiled. Even when he was sad, he would not display his sadness; he did not depress the people around him. When he met the people he loved, he would smile so much that his face would be very bright.

Along with his natural smile, the Prophet sometimes laughed. There are many incidents in which the Prophet (pbuh) laughed in hadith resources. Hz. Aisha narrates how the Prophet (pbuh) laughed as follows:

"I have never seen the Messenger of Allah laugh so much as to show his epiglottis and in a way to lose himself. His laughing was in the form of smiling." (Bukhari, al-Jami'us-Sahih, VII, 94-95; al-Adabul-Mufrad, p. 97, no: 251)

When the Companions of the Prophet mentioned how the Prophet laughed on various occasions, they said, "...He laughed in a way to show his molar teeth." In this style of laughing, the teeth are seen but no sound is heard. That is the laughing style of the Prophet.

His jokes

Anas b. Malik narrates:

"The Messenger of Allah was the person who made jokes the most with children." (Tabarani, al-Mujamus-Saghir, II, 39; Ibnul Athir, an-Nihaya, III, 466)

"The Prophet was the person who made jokes the most with his wives." (Ibnul Athir, an-Nihaya, III, 466; Ghazali, Ihya, III, 129)

The Prophet usually made jokes with children, his wives, the poor and those who expected love and care from the people around them. When he said,

"Do not argue with your friend; do not make jokes with him; when you make a promise to your fried, keep it,"

the people around him said,

"O Messenger of Allah! You also make jokes." He said,

"Yes, I also make jokes but I tell the truth even when I make a joke." (Bukhari, al-Adabul-Mufrad, s.102, no: 265; Tirmidhi, Sunan IV, 357, no: 1990)

Anas b. Malik narrates:

"The Prophet (pbuh) addressed me as 'the one with two ears'." (an-Nihaya, I, 34)

Tirmidhi’s teacher Mahmud b. Ghaylan said his teacher Abu Usama explained this as follows: "That is, the Prophet made a joke with Anas."

Conclusion

The feelings of the Prophet sometimes appeared as tears and sometimes as a blood vessel that swelled on his forehead. When he pointed to something, he would point to it with his whole hand. When he said that it was necessary to control one’s tongue, he showed his tongue by holding it with his hand; when he said the place of taqwa was in the heart, he pointed to his left chest with his hand. When he was surprised at something, he would turn his hand upwards toward the sky. As he spoke, he would put his palms together and hit his right hand on the inner part of his left thumb.

He did not act factitiously; he did not try to show off either; whatever he thought and felt was reflected on his face. When he got angry, he would turn his face away. When he was happy, he would lower his eyes. His laughing was usually in the form of smiling. When he laughed, his teeth looked like hailstones.

He was perfect in all aspects

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alloaroworlds · 5 years

Text

I’ve seen a few posts that conflate aro-ace experiences of aromantic erasure with allo-aro experiences of allosexual-and-aromantic erasure.

I am troubled when this notion of we’re all aros together and we all experience aromantic erasure is sometimes being used to silence allo-aros from talking about our specific experiences. But I believe this line of thought seems reasonable because there’s been no real discussion on what allosexual-and-aromantic erasure in a-spec spaces looks like. When you don’t know what allosexual-aromantic erasure is, it’s not so unreasonable to think that it’s always similar to aromantic erasure.

When allo-aros experience aromantic erasure in general a-spec spaces, we are simultaneously experiencing allosexual erasure alongside it. (This is because we cannot exist in a-spec spaces by virtue of our allosexuality alone.) This makes our experiences of erasure in a-spec spaces different from those of aro-aces, and we need this difference recognised.

(Aro-aces are not privileged for being asexual, but inside a-spec spaces there is a real assumption that folks are asexual, not allosexual.)

It’s also worth noting that these points are interconnected and similar: a lot of these instances of erasure can’t happen without the concurrent existence of others. I’m listing things separately to create this sense of exposure and clarification, because even allo-aros don’t know the breadth of our own erasure. I don’t. It’s taken me a couple of weeks to write this post, and I don’t claim it to be complete.

I’ll also say that erasure does not have to be intentional to be erasure. A lot of this doesn’t happen from malice; some of it happens from good intentions and a lot of it happens from the history of aromantic communities and culture evolving from asexual ones. It still diminishes allo-aro voices, though. It’s still erasure.

So I’m going to start a list post depicting things I’ve experienced and/or recognise as allo-aro erasure, and I’d like any other person who identifies in part or full as allo-aro, or of the allo-aro community, to join in.

(I ask that our a-spec allies--aro-aces, allo-aces, ace-specs who don’t also identify as allo-aro and non-SAM aces--please consider signal-boosting, but if you do so, please don’t add on with depictions or comparisons to your own experiences of erasure.)

Allosexual Aromantic Erasure in A-Spec and Aro-Spec Spaces Is:

Under the keep reading cut: forty-five instances and a few parenthetical explanations.

The assumption that all a-specs are asexual unless otherwise specified

The assumption that all aro-specs are asexual unless otherwise specified

(This is additional to the reality that allo-aros are a tiny sub-section of a small community that developed from the asexual community.)

The assumption that “aro” as a non-SAM identity is only open to aro-aces

The common reference to allo-aros in aromantic informative content being only “not all aromantics are asexual and not all asexuals are aromantic”

The lack of detailed allo-aro content in aromantic informative content

(We’re often just a one-sentence reference or a short paragraph tacked onto the end of more broader aromantic information. General aromantic information rarely provides detail or insight into allo-aro experiences.)

The lack of information on what (allo)sexual attraction feels like when shaped by aromanticism

The lack of information on what aromanticism feels like when shaped by (allo)sexual attraction

The lack of specific spaces for conversations about aromantic shapes of allosexual experiences

The lack of conversation and information about navigating safe sexual relationships specifically targeted at aromantics

The lack of conversation and information about safe sexual practices specifically targeted at aromantics

A culture of avoiding sexual references and sexually explicit content in a-spec and aro-spec spaces when discussing our aromanticism, even when advised for in tags and under read more cuts

(When we don’t feel as though we’re allowed to make sexual references, we lack information. Many allo-aros have absolutely no idea how to navigate sexual life, interactions and relationships centred on our needs as an allo-aro.)

Terminology centred on non-romantic relationships and attractions that acknowledge the potential for sexual relationships as an afterthought

The requirement to centre and applaud the ace-spec community as a-spec language creators, even when their interpretations of some of these terms are harmful to allo-aros

A tendency for informative content available in general a-spec spaces to contain or reference the exclusionary interpretations of these terms

Limited allo-aro involvement in coining most a-spec-community-wide terminology

(The language in common use, especially that originating from asexual, a-spec and aro-ace spaces, was often not made with centering allo-aro needs in mind, and at times it does not best work for us. )

A lack of informative content about aromanticism and allosexual aromanticism that can be found for questioning allo-aros without first accessing the ace-spec and a-spec communities

(We so often don’t know that we exist until we find information about asexuality, usually a brief mention in discussions about aromanticism. I believe there’s many unknowing allo-aros out there, but because finding information on aromanticism requires interacting with asexual and a-spec spaces, it’s exceptionally difficult for allo-aros to recognise our own identity. Especially for cisgender and heterosexual aro-specs.)

The lack of use of “allo aro” and “allosexual aromantic” outside of the aro-spec community

The lack of use of “allo aro” and “allosexual aromantic” inside aromantic informative/educational content in both a-spec and aro-spec spaces

The use of “non-asexual aromantics” instead of “allosexual aromantics” in informative and positivity posts, still labelling and positioning allo-aros in reference to asexuality and the asexual community

(Many formal aromantic informative pieces talk about how not all aromantics are asexual without ever using the term allosexual aromantic.)

The assumption that general aromantic pride without specific allo-aro mentions is fully inclusive of allo-aros

(Without someone specifically saying I am welcome, I truly don’t know that I am. This happens because of the a-spec community’s unspoken assumption that aro-specs are ace-spec and the far smaller numbers of allo-aros in a-spec spaces. All the points of erasure in this post create a feeling that I am not welcome in a-spec spaces, so we require specificity to counteract it.)

The assumption that content that speaks more to aro-ace experiences doesn’t need to be tagged “aro-ace” if it doesn’t too much center on the ace

The assumption that content by an aro-ace is often general aromantic content, applicable to allo-aros

(I am fine with aro-ace content in aromantic spaces, but I need you to tag it as aro-ace. We need your recognition that you are an aro shaped by asexuality, as I am an aro shaped by allosexuality.)

The assumption that in a-spec spaces our aro-spec identities must be the dominant and central part of how we identify ourselves

The assumption that there is always a separation between our aro-spec identities and our allosexual identities

The requirement to push our (allo)sexual experiences and identities to the side in order to fully participate as aro-specs in the aro-spec and a-spec communities

The inability to understand that alloromantic-and-allosexual communities for our allosexual identities are not accommodating of our aromanticism

(Some of us have our allosexual identities and our aromantic identities irrevocably intertwined and don’t wish to separate them, privilege one or deny one to have community for the other.)

The forced relationship to the ace-spec community as the developers of the community events, publications, language, identity mores, relationship terms and behaviours common in a-spec and aro-spec spaces

The comparative lack of allo-aro input in the historical development of community events, publications, language, identity mores, relationship terms and behaviours common in a-spec and aro-spec spaces

The requirement to continually centre and acknowledge the ace-spec community as a-spec and aro-spec community founders

The need for allo-aros to continually engage in activism on these issues in a-spec spaces, meaning that places that are meant to be our home in our own community require us to first educate and explain over finding connection, empathy and support

(When the ace community leads the making of environments that are not equitable for us, it’s well beyond frustrating to be constantly asked to express gratitude for a culture of inequality.)

The inability to scroll through tags like “aromantic” without seeing asexual content dominating, especially asexual content with no reference to aromanticism at all

(This negatively impacts aro-aces as well, but I think you’ll agree that it’s more alienating for allo-aros and some non-SAM aros.)

The dominance of asexual bloggers, blogs and content in a-spec spaces, meaning allo-aros have no ability to escape a relationship with asexuality and asexual content if we wish to be part of the general a-spec community

The reality that the phrase “a-spec community” in practice means something closer to “asexual and a few aros who aren’t ace” and is centred on asexual content, activities and activism

The reality that the general a-spec community evolved from asexual spaces, meaning aromanticism is inherently positioned as an afterthought in need of constant questioning and challenging

This nature of this evolution meaning that asexuals run the better-known a-spec community spaces and events, making it harder for allo-aros to safely interact

The fear that asexuals in a-spec spaces will regard us as predators for experiencing (allo)sexual attraction, something not without historical precedence

The asexual centering in a-spec spaces, meaning that allo-aros are often reliant on aro-aces speaking on aromantic issues in a-spec spaces

The asexual centering in a-spec spaces, meaning that allo-aros are often reliant on aro-aces speaking on allo-aro issues in a-spec spaces

The asexual centering in a-spec spaces, meaning that asexuals are unaccustomed to listening to allo-aro voices on a-spec and aro-spec issues

(Allo-aros have little presence in general a-spec community leadership, activities, information and events. Aromanticism, when it is centered here at all, is voiced first by aro-aces, and asexuals in a-spec spaces are not accustomed to hearing allosexual aromantics talk on a-spec issues with the same granted authority as fellow a-specs.)

The dominance of aro-ace bloggers, blogs and content in aro-spec spaces, meaning allo-aros have no ability to escape a relationship with aro-ace content if we wish to engage with the aro-spec community

The knowledge that we can’t build spaces completely free of asexual content in a-spec and aro-spec spaces, forcing a relationship to and negotiation with a centred identity that isn’t ours

The need for aro-aces to speak for us in so many circumstances, resulting in a well-intended habit of aro-aces speaking over allo-aros even when not necessary

(It’s right that aro-aces have aro-ace content in aromantic spaces. But I do want it acknowledged that allo-aros are required to have, build and center this relationship with an identity that’s more dominant than ours and yet is not ours. Acknowledgement will go a long way in moving this from erasure to something we can renegotiate.)

The inability to discuss our alienation from asexual content without the risk of offending or angering allo-aces, aro-aces and non-SAM aces in the a-spec community

The inability to discuss our alienation from asexual content without the risk of offending or angering aro-aces in the aro-spec community

(We need to be able to talk about this with the understanding that we’re discussing a cultural dynamic, not individual behaviour, that pushes allo-aros to the side in our own spaces. Only when we can discuss it can we renegotiate, again, cultural norms that better fit everyone’s needs.)

The conflating of allo-aro and aro-ace erasure by aro-aces as the same, irrespective of the differences allo does bring to our experiences

Yes, the reason for this post is itself another shape of allo-aro erasure.

It’s not that we don’t have similarities in our erasure. It’s not that some points of our erasure aren’t the same, because they are. It’s that the allo part of allo-aro erasure adds a whole new dimension that isn’t as deeply recognised as it should be. It’s that the allo in allo-aro erasure is erased in favour of the shared aro part.

Please, let’s stop pushing it aside.

#alloaro #alloaro erasure #alloaro erasure in the arospec community #alloaro erasure in the aspec community #the this is getting kinda discoursey tag #discussion post #community and identity discussions #long post #very long post #extremely long post #text #mod chatter

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shadowsof-thenight · 5 years

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Hopeless (A Bucky Barnes one-shot)

Summary:

Takes place right after civil war, slightly altering the events at the end. Written in first person (which I never do, but here we are)

My hopeful nature has always been an asset, and as Steve brings Bucky to our newest hide-out, I thought it would help him. I thought I could help him.

Words: 2633

Ship: Bucky Barnes x Reader, though platonic.

Warning: Sadness, depression, mental health issues/

A/N:This was literally written in such a short amount of time, but I wanted to post it anyway. I might dislike it in a little while, but I've hardly written anything since I finished the long way home...I just wanted to write. And though this'd not work out at all how I had imagined after thinking up those first few lines, I think this suited me better at this moment. I guess I'm not in the right state of mind for lighthearted. Anyway, let me know what you think of this one.

***

It’s a nice feeling, the first time your heart skips. That initial moment that you realise someone has that effect on you. As a teenager it used to make me incredibly nervous, effectively rendering me speechless. I would simply stare at the guy in question and hope he would notice me, eventually speak to me. Always too scared to be the first to speak myself.

I can’t tell you how often that worked against me.

These days it still makes me nervous, but doesn’t leave me speechless. Instead I can manage a sentence, a conversation even. Making getting to know someone a little easier.

What it does not help with though, knowing if the person in question returns the feelings. Those budding ‘ oh that person is cute’ feelings. When you want to know if flirting is the right call.

So when Bucky was first brought into the building by Steve, and my heart skipped a beat, I decided to slow it down. He had been though so much and didn’t need to know that I thought he was gorgeous. In the past I had jumped into these things. However, in those instances the receiver of my budding affection had not been through hell. I could not be sure how he would react to someone complimenting him, flirting with him. I could be sure that it was not what he needed. What he needed was normalcy, time to ground himself. Time to catch his breath. The space to rediscover himself. Perhaps he could even use a friend.

So I squashed my crush. Ignored it. It wasn’t too hard, since I knew nothing about him and it was all very superficial. Instead I was patient, kind and welcoming. Offered him friendship, distraction from his wandering mind and a place he could call home. The entire team worked on that. Our love and respect for Steve was enough to want to act as a warm blanket for his oldest friend.

That first day, as he sat stoic in a chair at the table, anxiously looking around at the faces in the room, everyone tumbled over themselves to tell him he was welcome. Looking back on that now, I realised we might have overwhelmed the poor man.

Bucky was distant, keeping everyone at bay. Wary of any form of attention. Often he stayed in his room throughout the day, not even coming out for food or drink. Steve tried so hard. Tried to help him, give him space, be his friend, but it soon became clear that he was unsure of how to proceed. Bucky was so withdrawn and it was difficult for him to figure out a way to get through to him. Steve had confessed that even when his friend allowed him into his room, there was little conversation. Bucky seemed to have forgotten how to connect. To anything and anyone.

Eventually Steve simply began to leave things in front of his door. Hoping to show instead of telling that he would be by his side. He left food, beverages, mementos of their shared past. It always made its way into the room, though nobody saw Bucky open the door.

It wasn’t until one night after a particular long mission, where I had tried and hopefully succeeded to put the government on a wrong trail, I found myself unable to sleep, and wandered through the farm we called home at the moment. Careful not to make a sound, I walked around on sock covered feet. Midnight snack in hand, music in my ear, I made my way to the balcony that overlooked the surrounding fields. The balcony was on the second floor, right of the attic that we now used as an office. Usually the doors to the balcony remained closed, but you risked the exposure as you unlocked them.

It was a warm night, clear skies offering a beautiful view of the trees, sunflowers and grass illuminated by moonlight. It was my favourite place of all the hide-outs we’ve had so far, especially in the silence of the night. Stepping onto the cold weathered wood, I shivered before sighing deeply, taking in the scene before me and letting the fresh air wash over my aching body. My racing mind instantly seemed to clear up.

Lazily I leaned forward on the railing, staring up at the full moon, when movement below the balcony caught my attention. For a moment I was on high alert, fearing for a hostile break in. Then I recognised the long dark locks of the silent figure, as he sat down on the overgrown lawn. I watched as his fingers absentmindedly moved through the grassy greens, while he stared straight ahead. It took me a moment to realise what he was doing, not until his flesh hand angrily wiped at his face. He was crying. Dumbstruck I stood rooted to the ground, unable to move an inch, simply staring at the lone crying figure.

A few moments passed before I was able to remove myself from the scene. Turning around I silently walked back through the double doors and walked straight to my room. He didn’t need an audience.

After this I began to notice his movements more. As soon as people had gone to bed, he would leave his room. Sometimes to run, crossing the surrounding fields, running until he had exhausted himself so he could hardly move another muscle. Other times he would sit outside on the grass, staring straight ahead. I wondered what went through his head in those times, for he seemed so lost in those moments. Stuck in a state of constant torture. It was clear that he had trouble adjusting to this new life he had been given.

With my room next to his it was easy to hear what went on in his. More than once had I heard him cry, rage and scream. His pain was eating at him, keeping him awake at night and isolating him.

He was struggling and needed help, but I wasn’t sure how to offer any. If he wasn’t accepting it from Steve, why would he accept any help from me?

Still the next sleepless night, I waited for him to leave his room, before following him outside. Hesitation halted my steps as I watched him sit down in his usual spot. Finally I took a deep breath and opened the door to follow him, making sure to made a sound so he wouldn’t spook. At least if he heard me coming, he would be able to take himself out of the situation.

His head perked up, but he remained seated as I moved closer.

“Hi” I said softly, lowering myself down on the grass next to him. His eyes shifted over to me, but he didn’t say a word. His shoulders were tense and I knew I had to say something to make him relax.

“Sorry to invade your space. I just…” for a moment I wasn’t sure what to say next, “I want to help you”

“Help me?” His voice surprised you. It was soft, gruff and uncertain as he looked at me. Emotions seemed to wage a war behind those beautiful blue orbs and it took me by surprise. I’d never seen such devastation in a person before. Finally I could see just how broken he really was. It only made me want to help him more.

“I’ve seen you come here. I’ve seen you struggle. I’m not trying to pry or make you do anything you don’t want too, but I’m told I’m a good listener.” Stopping a moment to look him in the eye before I spoke the next words, “I just want you to know that you don’t have to do this alone.”

He didn’t say a word, but his shoulders slumped and his eyes moved straight ahead again, where he seemed to take in the dark shadows of the sunflower fields that surrounded the farm on three sides.

After what seemed like an eternity he moved again, looking at me, and he opened his mouth. Nothing came out and he closed it again, looking down at his hands. Sensing he wanted to talk, I stayed silent as I watched him struggle to get words out. It took him a while, but finally he seemed to figure out what he wanted to say.

“He gave up everything for me. All of you did” he began, “I just don’t think I’m worth all that”. He sniffed and a single tear rolled down his cheek, effectively breaking my heart. Without thinking, I grabbed his hand in both of mine, holding it close to me. Surprised his looked down at our touching hands and I followed his gaze. I’d grabbed his metal arm. He seemed shocked by that fact. Not letting it go, I looked him in the eye. Hoping he could see my determination, my drive to truly be of help.

“You’ve been through hell and back, you deserve better.”

“I did horrible things” his voice cracked and it took all my willpower, not to hug him. He’d not been around kindness, touch must be difficult. Grabbing his hand had already been a bold move, huddling him could easily push him further away. I didn’t want that to happen at all.

“You weren’t given a choice.” He shrugged at my words, as if that didn’t matter and I realised that in his mind it probably didn’t. He still had to live with the things he had done even if it had not truly been him.

“Bucky listen to me” using one hand to turn his face in my direction, “I know you must feel responsible for all of it, but you are not. Your hands were forced, your mind was erased more times than any of us can even imagine. For years you had no control. You were tortured and forced to live a certain way. That is not on you.”

“Then who?” He asked.

“It doesn’t matter who. Hydra was discovered and they will be dealt with. You need to focus on you now. Realise that you are a good person. Worthy of help. And you are only responsible for the moments where you had a choice.”

He didn’t speak and I allowed the silence to sit between the two of us for a moment. His breath came out ragged and I began to draw circles on his back with the hand that had turned his face in my direction, while my other hand still held his cold metal hand close.

“You’ll have to figure out who you truly are, without the strings hydra has been pulling for so long. I don’t think you can if you pull away from everyone. Let us help you”

Releasing his hand, I impulsively pressed a kiss to his temple and got up off the ground. Without looking back, I walked back inside and went to bed, hoping that my words would have effect.

The next morning as we sat in the attic, discussing our next move, the creaking of a floorboard caught our attention. Silence took the room immediately and Wanda quietly moved towards the stairway, hoping to get a feel of however was moving in our general direction. Soon a soft smile played on her lips as she moved to open the door that as blocking our view of the culprit.

“Come in” her kind smile beaming at the intruder. As soon as she had begun smiling, everyone had instantly relaxed, she was the best judge of character anyone could ask for. And when Bucky hesitantly stepped into the room, a collective sigh passed. Steve moved quickly, enveloping him in a hug. Over Steve’s shoulder, Bucky caught my eye and I smiled at him, grateful that he took a chance.

Over the course of the following two weeks, Bucky made an effort to be around the group an hour or two a day. He still wasn’t comfortable, but he was trying. Steve had been rejuvenated by the progress, walking with a spring in his step. Eager to figure a way out of their dire situation. Steve knew that they could not run forever. Yet there wasn’t a clear path to take. They were still wanted criminals, all of them. But they were human beings who had walked away from all the family they had known. Wanda was missing Vision more and more each day. Sam was going stir crazy, as was Natasha, especially with Clint gone. And the constant moving wasn’t easy on anyone. We were all becoming increasingly tired.

Those first two weeks, I had been convinced that I was helping Bucky. That being amongst the group would help him. I thought he was getting better. That he would start feeling better. Not until I caught him sitting outside of our current hideout in a small European town in the middle of nowhere, tears streaming down his face, that I suddenly realised he wasn’t mending. He was breaking. Seemingly conflicted as he sat there, his emotions clear on his face.

Confronting him he had confirmed as much. He didn’t dare trust himself. He was afraid of his own mind. It was still so easily manipulated, since so little was known about what hydra had done to him. The trigger words that Zumo had used, they were still in there. If anyone else found out about them, he could easily be turned against anyone. He didn’t feel safe. He felt a danger to everyone that was trying to help him. He was afraid of himself and everything, since nothing in the world seemed familiar anymore. He was anxious all the time.

Though I had wished to give him hope, wanted to help him, there was nothing I could say to ease those fears. Those were some well founded fears. And as hard as I tried, this was not something I would ever truly understand. I never had to be afraid of my own mind. It had never betrayed me like his had. Control had never been taken from me in such a massive way.

All I could do was hold him, promising I would try and find a way to help him release those fears.

And there was only one person in the world that I knew could help.

The next morning I suggested we’d move south, to Wakanda. There we could recuperate for a moment. Allow ourselves to finally relax after weeks upon weeks of running. T’Challa had promised us a safe haven and we needed it now more than ever. Though I did not tell them just why.

If I had known the choice Bucky would make over the following days, I’m not sure I would have made the same choices. Seeing Steve’s heart break over his friend, so shortly after thinking things were getting better, was hard. His fallen face and slumped shoulders were fixed in my memory. And as I said my goodbye to Bucky, right before he went back into cryo, my hopeful nature took a huge hit. I thought it had been my greatest asset, but it had been so wrong this time. Seeing the good in Bucky had not been enough. Trying to get him to see the good had not been enough.

And now he was lost to them once more and the fight they had picked over him had suddenly seemed useless.

It was hard telling myself that the fight had not been solely about Bucky, even though rationally I knew the truth of it. Right now it just seemed too difficult.

And as I tried to comfort a crushed Steve, I wondered if I would feel that flutter in my heart again…the one Bucky had caused when I first laid eyes on him.

#Hopeless #Bucky Barnes #bucky barnes x reader #MCU fanfiction #one shot

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mostlymovieswithmax · 5 years

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Classic Doctor Who (S2E1) - Planet Of Giants [spoiler review]

After many months and numerous extended breaks from watching the very first season of Doctor Who (or at least what I was able to watch), originally aired in the latter months of 1963 and through most of ‘64, my impression of the show in its infant stages is that it seemed to want to lean into being quite educational and to show historical events from around the world, while also showing off a bit of space travel as well. With a number of episodes missing from this season, it’s difficult to get the full picture but I’d say I liked it just enough to finish it and begin season 2. The problem I have with these early episodes (or serials) is that each is composed of multiple parts. It’s like in a school test where the teacher tells you there are only 8 questions, meanwhile each question has other sub-questions so for this show the end result winds up being 2-7 sub-episodes for each complete story: a serial. For comparison, each sub-episode is around 24 minutes long so an episode with 6 instalments will roughly take as much time as three modern era Doctor Who episodes, but tell just as much of a story as one of them. Going into season 2 is a similar affair, with its first serial, Planet Of Giants clocking up to only three episodes in total, which I feel is a nice way to ease someone into the show. But is this story any good?

Planet Of Giants deceptively takes place in what I can only assume is the 60’s equivalent of modern day Earth, where companions Ian and Barbara belong. It is not in fact a different planet inhabited by giants, which was a little disappointing, but The Doctor has a cloak now, so it’s all good. The twist however is that the Who crew has been shrunk due to the doors of the TARDIS opening before they’ve fully landed. They explore the land a bit; Ian gets lost; a man dies; all the bugs are being killed from insecticide; everything goes crazy and the gang have to find Ian and also stop the murderer before getting back to the TARDIS and returning to their normal size. This episode is more or less decent in terms of the quality of the show at the time and overall I would say I enjoyed it. Everything in these sets have to be bigger than the main crew composed of The Doctor, Susan, Ian, and Barbara in order to realistically depict how small they all are and it works a treat. Everything looks super cool. These set and prop designers had to make huge match boxes and sink plugs and insects that moved and what have you, for the characters to interact with. I had a lot of fun watching these scenes play out and see the way the environments were utilised. Certain details are set up that seem quite smart, such as the idea that they, as tiny people, wouldn’t be able to talk with regular sized people due to it sounding much in the way a mouse would sound to us. Or that exposure to insecticide would harm them a lot more than it usually would due to their immune system being too small to combat such a relatively high dose. A common issue I’ve noticed with these early Doctor Who episodes is that the writing can often be quite bad. I don’t mind these characters at all but the things they have to say is at times difficult to take seriously. An example of this is an interaction between The Doctor and Ian. Doctor: “Yes, that’s it! We’ll cause trouble! Start a fire, my boy!” Ian: Yes, but can we start a big enough one to do any real damage?” Doctor: “Well we can try anyway, hehe, there’s nothing like a good fire is there!? Hahaha!” Like what the hell? I mean don’t get me wrong, that was hilarious when I heard it but it’s not meant to be. It makes The Doctor sound like a maniac! A recurring detail of this show that I’ve noticed so far is that characters often stumble on their line delivery. They will audibly get mixed up with words or start a sentence, get it wrong, then redo it. In this day and age, it isn’t something I’d tolerate, but here… it’s almost charming. I’m amazed that I don’t mind it. With the film they were using to record the show, I doubt they had the money to stop scenes simply because of a slight line mix up, which would have required a lot more editing and wasted money to account for more film reel, so I can understand why these mistakes are left in. To compare it to, say, Selfie From Hell, the worst movie from 2018 I’ve seen so far, when the woman says “He is really a bad man” in a fake whimpering voice, it served to be ten times worse than any instance of a character in Doctor Who literally messing up a line and saying it again. With Selfie From Hell being filmed on digital, there’s no excuse not to re-record with better acting and writing. So I suppose with older media, I afford some leniency in that sense.

The characters themselves, as I said, I don’t mind. Having watched the newer episode, ‘Twice Upon A Time’ at the end of Capaldi’s run, I expected Hartnell’s Doctor to be infuriating with how misogynistic and out of touch he is in that episode but he is nowhere near as bad as in Twice Upon A Time and I understand now why there was such an influx of people defending him. Don’t get me wrong, there are elements of those traits with Hartnell’s Doctor and sometimes it gets to be rather “eeehh” but mostly he’s played without that being a defining part of his character. If I had to describe the first Doctor, I’d say he was quite playful but strict at times and he definitely loves these adventures but he’s more focused on educating himself from a scientific point of view with each new challenge that comes along, rather than getting stuck into the cultures. Susan, The Doctor’s granddaughter is someone I needed time to adjust to over the first season. As it stands now, I do like her as a character. I think there’s a lot of mystery behind her, what with mentioning her and The Doctor’s home planet a couple of times. At first, she really grated on me because any time anything would go wrong, she would scream. It hurt to listen to. She still does it in Planet Of Giants but I’ve learned to tolerate it. Ian and Barbara are decent. After every outing, they think they’re going to be taken back home and that’s basically the through-line to every episode so far. Every time they open the TARDIS doors, they think they’re going to be back where they belong but each episode is an elaborate way of telling us that The Doctor has no idea how to pilot the TARDIS. Generally, they’re okay with going on these adventures and they do take joy in it but the need to go home always evaporates when they get to a new environment. Unfortunately in more than a few instances, Ian and The Doctor are seen to be more competent than Barbara and Susan which I wish wasn’t the case, but it is more of a symptom of the time it was made and it could have been a lot worse.

As an episode, there’s not a whole lot to say. Planet Of Giants is fun and relatively short. It falls victim to a lot of recurring problems as well as some specific to this episode. There’s not a lot of spatial awareness when it comes to getting characters from one place to the next. The music hits very suddenly when anything that could be considered ‘scary’ happens. Like a stick falling over. I think it succeeds at what it wants to do however. The plot is slightly secondary to the fact that the characters are small now and everything else is big which I don’t mind too much but I’d have liked to have seen a more interesting story being told. As the first episode in the series, it does a good job at letting people know what the show can be about, but as this aired at the end of October in 1964, there wasn’t much of a gap in between seasons, as the last episode of season one aired mid-September during the same year so this feels relatively the same in terms of the overall quality of the episodes. As one of the shorter serials, I’d recommend Planet Of Giants if you fancy having a taste of how the show was back in its early days with the very first Doctor and the very first companions.

#doctor who #classic who #planet of giants #dir: mervyn pinfield #dir: douglas camfield #review #tv #60's

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lefthanded-sans · 6 years

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Heya! You're a linguist, right? Any advice for someone who would love to get into English linguistics with a burning passion, but don't see that as being possible owing to the fact that they're a foreigner/not a native speaker and are afraid they might not get any work because of it other than translation (and I'm guessing the pay isn't that great anyway)? Or just, what's it like being a linguist?

Heyaaaa! Great to chat with you again! Sorry for being so slow responding to you, and I hope this answer helps!

I’ll go through all of these questions, because why not? I want to help as much as I can, and I’m always willing to help and talk more. I’ll also be backtracking and talking some basics of what it means to be a linguist, just so that other people who read this can follow along with the discussion.

What it’s like being a linguist!

Unlike what many people might suspect, linguistics isn’t a field about speaking a ton of languages. While many linguists speak more than one tongue fluently, that’s because we love language, not because that’s the heart of our profession. Linguistics is the scientific study of language, and it covers everything from how we anatomically pronounce words, to the physical acoustic properties of language, to how words and sentences are structured, to how we humans socially respond to language, and more. It means there are a ton of subfields in linguistics, and that linguistics can often get interdisciplinary.

My primary subfield all throughout my undergraduate and graduate work was phonetics, which is the study of language at its smallest sound units. I studied the acoustic properties of sounds, how the vocal tract biologically was made up and moved to create these sounds, the acoustic makeup of all the tiny sound units in a language (often represented as letters in languages) - aka phonemes, how the presence of one sound unit can alter how another is pronounced, things like phrasal tone where your voice pitch varies throughout a sentence, and more.

While I love phonetics, the truth is that the high majority of my career work hasn’t been in phonetics. Almost all of my work has been in the semantic-syntactic interface - where the meaning of sentences interacts with how sentences are structured. In a given day of work, I’ll receive hoards of written sentences online from a computer database. My overseers will tell me how they want me to analyze and organize the data, usually through some sort of annotation scheme where I make notes on top of the sentences. I analyze how meaning is embedded through the structure of the sentences according to that annotation scheme, then send the data back to be processed by computers. That’s because most of my work has to do with machine learning. For computers to get better at understanding sentences, we feed data with annotations to them to help them understand how to parse sentences. Then, they can make future better “comprehension” choices on their own with new sentences they receive. This has a variety of applications, including improving online search functions or making virtual assistants like Siri and Amazon Echo understand you better.

There is a somewhat fair though not unending amount of work to be found in this area, if you know where to look.

Now, I’m going to be transparent about the financial situation and work stability situation of my jobs. That way, you can decide whether or not it’s something you want to gamble yourself. And it is a little gamble because I’m not living a full-time, steady, long-term job. Currently, I work as a contract consultant, annotator, and adjudicator. Sometimes clients will hire me to look at their data for one month, three months, or in the luckiest cases, a year. This means I am constantly looking for new work, I don’t have any health, etc. benefits because I’m part-time (this is of course an issue for my country, not internationally), and I often am doing one to four contracts simulntaneously. There’s also something to be said that, even when I’m hired for a position, data comes in SPURTS - sometimes there are weeks where I’m twiddling my thumbs doing nothing, and other weeks where I am overloaded with tight deadlines and have to work around the clock.

In all of my positions, I’m working temporarily with clients in part-time temporary jobs. It’s remote work where I can choose the hours of the day I work, chill in my pajamas at home, all sorts of great stuff. I communicate with my coworkers or superiors almost entirely through email and online chat, with the RARE Skype call or face-to-face meeting.I tend to get my contracts through a company called Appen or by connecting with old peers from my university days (I still work for my university’s cognitive science research department, in fact). I started doing annotations part-time when I was an undergraduate sophomore in 2012 and was paid about $11 an hour. Now, I make about $18-20 per hour for my contract positions. Specifically, I have slowly bargained up my pay from about $12 to $20 in the last year. So I’m getting increasingly paid higher with each new gig. I don’t know how much higher I can increasingly climb, but it’s not bad pay when I get enough hours (and hours is where it’s hardest to win).

Other linguists will have different types of jobs than me. There is a ton of work - and good stable work! - in the computational linguistics field if you’re interesting in programming and working with the computer side of studying language. That’s the safest gamble. Other linguists will contact indigenous people groups to study endangered languages, and spend their days either out in the field recording speech with tape recorders, or studying the language closely in their office. Others will get their TOEFL certificates and teach English to non-native speakers. Lots of different things that might come up. Again, if you know where to look, and if you’re creative enough to know how to apply your degree to different things.

You’re right that translation is one of the areas you see the most job openings for. Depending on all the languages you know, it’ll be easier or harder to break into. I’ve never looked into translation. I doubt I’d get hired, first of all; I live in a an area which has a high percentage of bilingual Spanish speakers, so everyone’s going to hire the people who speak both Spanish and English fluently and natively (as versus me, who grew up in a monolingual household and started to learn Spanish at thirteen years old). Lots of translation jobs even specify that they want you to be a NATIVE speaker of the language you’re translating, which means that someone like me who came from a monolingual household is 100% out of luck. The other reason why I don’t do translation is because, while there are some translation jobs that pay okay, lots of them don’t, and lots of them in my country/state aren’t full-time. I’ve seen a number of translation positions that pay you by the number of words or pages you translate, and the pay isn’t that pretty when you add it up.

That’s not true for all translation jobs, though, especially if you happen to speak high demand but less commonly spoken languages for your region (in my area, something like Arabic or Bangladeshi could get you a pretty penny). ASL (American Sign Language) translator jobs in my country are always nice gigs. And people who speak English as a second language and something else “uncommon” as their first language have a pretty good shot of being hired for something.

But I know translation isn’t what you’re interested in. Which is fair.

Now, as far as breaking into English linguistics as a non-native speaker, you’re right that you’ll probably run into obstacles, but they’re not imposssssssible to get around. Especially if your verbal speech is anything like the writing you do for English, you’re almost certainly FINE. This following discussion is more specifically for the academic community of linguistics, but what I would do whenever I wanted to study a language I didn’t speak… was get an academic partner who did. And in many types of studies you do, depending on your linguistics subfield, you won’t even need to worry about that. Honestly the biggest challenge isn’t whether English is your first language or not, because linguists get their fingers over any language whenever and wherever they can… the biggest challenge is that English has been very thoroughly studied academically in linguistics compared to many other languages. VERY thoroughly studied. Whereas I had an easier time finding unstudied topics in languages like Khmer, I’d be harder pressed to find easy research areas in languages like Mandarin or Spanish. Buuuuuuuuut there are still many, many Unknowns I have come across in English linguistics - for instance, lots and lots and lots that needs to be done in the sociolinguistic arena. Most of my doctorate peers wrote their second year papers on English. Granted, that was a sample size of five people, but nevertheless. There are still things to be said about the language academically, if you know where and how to look.

Whether or not this’ll be a big hindrance to you depends on more choices than “I want to study English linguistics.” It reaaaaaally depends what subfield you want to get into, whether you go into graduate school, whether you want to enter lingusitics academia or something else, and where you live and how accessible/fluent English is to your overall populace. In some fields more than others, you may find barriers. So be careful, but don’t rule out opportunities completely. I’ll point out I’ve seen native speakers of Arabic, Russian, Spanish, Japanese, Polish, and Mandarin professionally study English… so it’s certainly something that’s not uncommon or impossible!

#linguistics #non-UT #long post #blabbing Haddock #ask #ask me #itsrainingsomewhereelse

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bookinfested · 6 years

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Book Review: Beast by Paul Kingsnorth

Synopsis:

Edward Buckmaster has left his life in society behind in order to search for some sort of understanding out on the English moors. He is looking for God, or at least trying to find some understanding of what God might be, and in doing so purposefully traps himself away in a building far from any sort of society. As time goes on, he becomes injured and overcome with an obsessive need to find an animal he is sure is there in the wilderness.

General Thoughts

Positives:

To this book’s credit, it tries to write in varying degrees of an odd and unique writing fashion that becomes less and less formatted the more frantic, obsessed, and insane the character becomes. Told in the first person, this book follows all of the main character’s thoughts and, in a jarring though fairly realistic way at times, follows as they snap back and forth from hysterical to calculating, desperate to angry, much as any person stranded alone in the middle of nowhere might be.

Negatives:

Speaking of, sweet Judas Priest, I have never seen a book go so much nowhere so fast. This is honestly 163 pages of philosophical and insane babbling by a guy who put himself in his own desperate situation and he doesn’t even learn anything from it. Everything is written from the first-person perspective which means every thought, every emotional high and low (sometimes happening in such quick succession that I got whiplash) is catalogued. Yet so many things in the book are so frustratingly vague that it doesn’t even make sense. In fact, about halfway through the book I found myself wondering if the man was even in the English countryside anymore or if this was supposed to be some pretentious reference to Purgatory or Limbo because the man never seems to know what’s going on and his descriptions of his surroundings are usually so non-specific that I didn’t really have a good sense of many of them until much later in the book.

Also, as the book progresses the writing style slowly starts to lose punctuation and stops abiding by basic grammar and capitalization rules, meaning that by the time I was three-fourths into the book I was reading pages that were just one long run-on sentence. On top of this, the author has a bad habit of having the character doing something, then in the middle of it having him say something like ‘now I’m falling. I tripped over something and I’m falling over a cliff,’ but then it goes right back to him doing whatever he was doing before, so the reader is left scrambling for a few seconds wondering what is going on. The first time this happened, I thought it was a little bit interesting. I thought it was a good way to more or less shake the reader and make them realize this guy was an unreliable narrator as he seemed to be so introspective that he was a little off his rocker. But by the fourth, fifth, sixth time it happens, it’s less of an interesting writing habit and more of a frustrating and confusing one. The fact that it happens combined with the before-mentioned run-on sentences means that the book had pages where it was all one sentence and within it there were moments when the lead would be describing himself in perhaps up to three different scenarios.

There are also a couple of things that keep cropping up and are just more general pet peeves due to their fantastic inconsistency issues. For instance, there is so little real sense for time in this book, which may have worked out alright were it not for the character’s injuries. He seems to heal far more quickly than he should and is able to do physical tasks that he should not be able to do in the state he’s in which makes roughly the second quarter of the book entirely impossible to have happened in the timeframe the book is claiming. I don’t know if this was just an error on the author’s part or if he was trying to make the main character seem more out of it, but either way it was not carried out well. And speaking of the main character, his name is stated once in the entire book. Once. If it were not for the fact that it was written on the back of the book, I would have forgotten it altogether, if I’m being perfectly honest.

Closing thoughts:

I can appreciate an author who tries to write in a unique and experimental way, but it has to be for a reason and it needs to say something. While an interesting idea to study the religious and intellectual philosophies of a lone crazed man in the woods, this book doesn’t execute it well, creating a book that forces the reader to come to the end and breathe “oh thank God.” I had some hopes for this book, but unfortunately the bad far outweighs the good here.

Rating: 1 star

I would recommend this too: anyone who likes pretentious and painful books.

#book review #review #beast #paul kingsnorth #honest book review #beast by paul kingsnorth

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hookforanessay270 · 4 years

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pink-ink-goblin · 7 years

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Darkmark or darkstache: "um... What did two lines mean again?"

((Double sorry mysterious being. One for taking so long to get to this. And two, for making you wait forever for me to essentially tell you no. I don’t do male pregnancy fics. At least, not with the ending you’re probably thinking of. No judgement from me on your proclivities, it’s just not something I like writing. That said, how about a disorganized, light series of probably completely unfunny events instead?))

It had been a quiet day for the most part. No one was fighting, no one had died, and Dark hadn’t found a single squirrel darting around. It was a strange but very welcome sort of peace, so the demon took advantage of it by making himself scarce so he could not only enjoy it, but concentrate on the various more corporate aspects of maintaining a building full of unpredictable, and infinitely frustrating, beings as well. It was more than just watching over them after all. They did not reside there for free and silence was not a cheap item to buy, regardless of how much smooth talking there had been.

But that was honestly the easy part. The rest of the neatly stacked papers, however, were written requests from the more active egos submitted via form because Dark was done dealing with their whining face to face. The one in front of him currently was from their resident game show host, and Bim was requesting permission to expand the studio. He must be at odds with Wilford again if he was beseeching Dark about it.

However, despite enjoying the silence, he couldn’t ignore the strange fact that his main interruption had been absent all day, making the silence take on a more suspicious air, but Dark wasn’t concerned enough to go look for him and ruin his potentially quiet afternoon. Nothing was broken, nothing was flickering in and out of existence, and no one was screaming, so if it didn’t warrant world ending interventions, then he was happy to step back and let be.

True to form, however, his blissful solitude wasn’t meant to last long, and, with the sound of a bubblegum pop, Wilford was in front of his desk, fingers already reaching out to fiddle with his pen stand as he often did when he needed to ask something. It was less a nervous habit and more a plain annoying one, but one that Dark had grown used to so long ago.

“Yes, Wilford?” Dark droned, not even bothering to look up. What were the legal repercussions of letting Host run his own Podcast? As long as it couldn’t be traced, then he could have at it. Approved.

“Um…” Wilford hesitated, seeming to be trying to find the proper words for his question oddly enough, before settling, as he usually did, upon being blunt. “What did two lines mean again?”

Dark’s pen paused in his writing, considering the confusing nature of the words presented to him. He was more than certain Wilford was looking at him expectantly, the sentence of course making sense to the being but not quite registering that they may be puzzlingly vague to someone else. In the small stretch of silence, the pastel-themed being’s deft fingers had left the pen stand and were already reaching for his magnetic container of paperclips, but Dark reached over and snatched it away, still without looking up.

“That’s a very broad question,” The demon finally replied patiently, flipping a paper over and placing it neatly into another pile. “Why not ask Google? He’d be happy to list every single instance of significance that two lines can have in this dimension.”

“Because,” Wilford retorted somewhat petulantly, mostly at being denied optimum stimming material, before tossing something skinny and cream colored onto Dark’s desk that bounced to a stop right on top of his paperwork. “I’m asking you.”

It took longer than the demon would care to admit to recognize not just the stick, but the minimal information Wilford had provided with it, and when it clicked, it made him finally sit up in confusion.

“I can’t remember what the box said,” Wilford admitted, oblivious to Dark’s reaction. The pink ego had a habit of doing the same thing when he cooked, but instead of fishing the box out of the garbage with an air of defeat like a sane being, he would continue on stubbornly and then grumpily whine to Dark when everything went wrong. “Something about one line or two meaning something or other.”

“Wilford,” Dark said slowly, refusing to touch the offending thing with an air of disgust. “This is a pregnancy test.”

“So?” Wilford cocked an eyebrow at him, but Dark could see the man didn’t understand what Dark was implying. He couldn’t possibly actually be this oblivious.

“So you’re a male. Males don’t get pregnant. And, considering you are not a sea horse, I doubt you have anything to worry about. Once again, I implore you to ask Google for clarification. And also get this off my desk.”

“But what do the two lines mean?”

“Two lines usually means-” Positive… Wait, what? “Wilford, did you use this?”

“Yeah.”

“When?”

“A week ago. I forgot about it.” It took an incredible amount of willpower to keep Dark seated after that statement. Had Wilford just been sitting on that information for a week, or had he only just checked it now and thought to ask? Dark supposed it didn’t matter at this point, but it didn’t necessarily stop him from being not only irate, but also deeply concerned.

“And there’s no chance anyone else could have gotten a hold of it?”

“No, it was in my pen cup,” And with that, Dark made note to never touch anything on Wilford’s desk ever again. “Dark, what does it mean?”

Dark sighed heavily, fingers pressing into his temples as he prayed for patience. “… It means we need to have a chat with our good doctor.”

——

It was only natural that their resident doctor’s immediate reaction was to laugh. It was a short bark because the man valued his life, but it was still enough to have Dark only just resisting the urge to throttle him. The demon supposed that if their roles had been reversed, maybe he might have found humor in it as well, but as it stood, he was much too irate to consider it from any side other than his own, and he didn’t even want that perspective either.

They stood now near the door, Dark with his hands behind his back, trying to pretend nothing was wrong with anything he had just said, while the doctor stood across from him, hiding his smile rather poorly as he leaned a hip against the nearest hospital bed with his arms crossed. Wilford, naturally, had become quickly disinterested and wandered off in the moderate space allowed because he was no longer being directly referred to.

“Okay, disregarding Wilford,” The doctor started quietly, the last of the humor finally working its way out of his system. At least for now. “Surely at least you know how this is all physically impossible?”

Dark gave him a flat look. “Why do you think I came to you?”

“Wait, so you don’t know?” Dr. Iplier’s face fell at the prospect of having to give ‘the talk’ to the last two beings he would ever have expected to give it to.

“Of course I know how it all works,” Dark hissed dangerously, something bleeding out into his voice to distort it in his sudden offence, before he took a calming breath and composed himself once more. “That’s the problem. It’s a logical fallacy with a single point of truth.”

Despite the outburst, Dr. Iplier took a rather relieved breath. Thank God. “Well, yeah, it is, but there are too many issues with the theory of ectopic male pregnancy for me to even begin to take that single truth with any modicum of seriousness. It’s just not possible.”

“I understand that,” Dark humored. “Believe me I do, but why then was the test positive?”

The doctor shrugged. “Faulty maybe? They aren’t really an exact science, especially in a commercial setting. Or, you know, there have been cases where males have jokingly used them only to receive a true positive due to having prostate cancer. But I can almost guarantee you that Wilford doesn’t fall under the standard definition of human male even remotely enough for that to be a possibility.” Dr. Iplier paused to sigh before relenting, “Honestly, maybe he is actually pregnant. Who knows what the hell Wilford actually could be.”

“I’ve known him long enough that I can assure you that Wilford is more or less designed like a male human, proclivities included,” Dark vouched, turning to watch distastefully as Wilford raided the doctor’s lolli cup. Dr. Iplier made a subtle face through his own side glance but otherwise let him go at it. This had come to be expected every time the being came in anyway. “That should mean he has no organs to accompany such a thing.”

Dr. Iplier wisely chose to ignore the idea of how Dark could even begin to know that. “And I would be inclined to absolutely agree with you, but with you extra-dimensionals, I’ve seen a lot of weird crap that throws normal right out the window. Have you tried making him take one again?”

“No,” Dark admitted, mood growing more sour by the second. “Because I know for a fact that he’s incapable… Maybe.” Dark rubbed at his face wearily. “Don’t you have a test of your own you could use? Perhaps take some blood?”

“I’ve plenty of cups he can pee in, but not a single machine or any chemical strips to test it with. That’s not my field.”

“You have lab equipment in the back room,” Dark stated, gesturing to the lone door next to the doctor’s corner desk. He even remembered helping Dr. Iplier acquire most of what was in there even if he wasn’t sure what half of it did.

“Yes, for trauma. I treat anything from superficial injuries to life threatening wounds, not deliver babies and happy news.” The doctor replied with equal flatness. “With maybe a minor degree in pathology. Go find an OB-GYN if you’re that insistent.”

Dark was tempted to remind the doctor of his revoked license purely out of spite. “Very well. Could you at least look at the brand and tell me if it’s trustworthy?”

Dr. Iplier shrugged again, looking like he wanted to reiterate what he had just said, but instead settled on a simple, “I can do my best.”

“Wilford, come here,” Dark commanded. Wilford looked up from the mess he had made on Dr. Iplier’s desk - some kind of paper fort built of pens and paperclips that had no business being able to maintain structural integrity given the current physical plane they were on - and wandered over obediently, two suckers in his mouth, three in his shirt pocket, and, when he got close enough, one held out to Dark jovially. Dark plucked it from his fingers and placed it in his own breast pocket to later add to his collection of stolen lollipops in his desk drawer. “Give the Doctor the stick.”

Wilford fished it out of God knew where and handed it over, mouth too preoccupied with the sugary treats to speak. Dr. Iplier took it without the air of disgust Dark had given and, after a good moment of scrutinizing, an inappropriately humorous smile began to spread across his face.

“What?” Dark asked suspiciously.

“This brand’s pretty trustworthy.”

Dark’s eyes went wide with sudden concern, voice almost cracking from the sudden tightness in his throat. “Jesus Christ, you’re joking.”

“Not a bit,” The doctor responded cheerily as he was want to do when delivering bad news. “But, see this?”

“Yes, that’s the second line.” Dark confirmed, unsure what he was getting at. The whole thing was a little faded, given Wilford had left it alone, but… Wait. “Why isn’t it the same color as the first one?”

“Exactly. The color’s off because… it was originally negative. This is what happens when you let them sit out too long after using them. They give a false positive. Also why you should probably follow the directions on the box.” Dr. Iplier quipped in quick tones, turning to toss the stick into a nearby trashcan. “Tough luck. Looks like you’re both doomed to a childless future.”

Dark could feel it on his tongue, the expletive that wanted to explode out of him and eviscerate Wilford where he merrily stood, but he reigned it in with a slow deep breath, swallowing a good portion of his irritation in the process. He should honestly feel relieved, so that’s what he decided to cling to. After all, this was probably the most harmless thing Wilford’s carelessness had ever done, emotional wear aside, and considering past exploits, Dark should be counting his lucky stars that Wilford hadn’t had to have come into the clinic with anyone else.

Maybe the man was sterile. Dark could really only hope. A quiet cough brought Dark back to earth and face to face with the rather mischievous smile of the doctor with something else on his mind.

“What?” Dark humored tonelessly.

“At the risk of being eviscerated,” Dr. Iplier said slowly, taking a few steps back to ensure he was outside of Dark’s immediate reach. “You two make a horrifying and cute couple.”

“… Run. Now,” Dark watched the doctor flee from his clinic, coat flapping behind him while the threat did nothing to remove that smug grin from his face. He’d be back later when he was sure both of them were gone from his clinic. Dark also knew he wouldn’t have to worry about the doctor sharing this either, for if there was one thing the man wasn’t was a gossip, but all the same it still wore on him greatly that someone else knew of this draining experience. What an afternoon.

A hand fell on his shoulder, warm and heavy despite his aura and he looked over his shoulder to see the source of many of his daily irritations smiling at him, having finished the two suckers, but not yet spitting out the sticks. Dark sighed, about ready to ask why Wilford had even thought to buy one of those damn pregnancy tests in the first place, when, mid-turn, his elbow bumped something that made him freeze. Something very round and yellow.

And distinctly attached to Wilford’s abdomen.

Dark jumped back like a scared cat, thrusting himself out of Wilford’s grip and stumbling back in absolute shock and horror. He was about ready to freeze up or bolt when Wilford started laughing. The sudden flip to confusion was enough to ground the demon and make him pause to take a closer look, now realizing he could see something white and cloth-like poking out from between Wilford’s shirt buttons.

“Gotcha,” Wilford chuckled, patting the top of his faux-stomach hard enough to elicit dull, rustling cloth sounding thumps.

“Get that out of your shirt,” Dark demanded sourly, giving Wilford the harshest of looks while the being pulled the bed sheet out and unceremoniously threw the rumpled ball onto the nearest bed. He turned away and started walking out, Wilford trotting to catch up unprompted as Dark always expected him to. “What possessed you to buy one of those damn things anyway? Was this some kind of test?”

“I dunno, did I pass?” Wilford answered cryptically, and when Dark went to give him another beseeching look, he was met with Wilford grinning at him, lolli sticks stuck in his upper lip to look like tusks. Whether the effect was intentional or not, Dark suddenly found his mouth unwittingly pulling at the corners despite it all. A laugh, small and quiet as it was, even managed to sneak its way past his lips.

It was official. The ridiculousness of everything had finally hit him. He couldn’t even be mad anymore, so he just accepted that he would probably never know. Wilford was an enigma, even to himself, so it was always better to just let it go.

Dark reached out and looped his arm into Wilford’s as they made their way to the elevator, the pink ego’s grin turning smug with victory as they locked elbows.

“You know what?” Dark said, pressing the button for the top floor. He looked at the being, tilting his head as his own smile turned amused. “Why not?”

#markiplier fanfiction #markiplier egos #darkiplier #wilford warfstache #prompts #fluff #humor #i had no idea how to end this and basically just gave up #i'm sorry if it's bad

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