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moonwaif · 4 years

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Upon Reflection

Summary: After nearly a year of pining on his lonesome, Wei Wuxian returns to the Cloud Recesses when a suspicious attempt is made on Lan Wangji's life. While keeping his feelings for Lan Wangji a secret, staying out of trouble (mostly) and trying to be a decent teacher (debatable), it doesn't seem like Wei Wuxian's life could get any more difficult.

Then one morning he wakes up in Lan Wangji's body.

Aka, the post-episode 50 CQL body swap AU you need in your life.

Tags: Body Swap AU, Mutual Pining, WWX has one brain cell, instead of OCs I'm borrowing SVSSS characters, CQL Verse, might mess around and resurrect some people

Rating: T

Excerpt:

“Speaking of Hanguang Jun, what’s his opinion on all of this? Does he even know you two are here?”

Jingyi and Sizhui share another look, and this time it’s guilty. Wei Wuxian chuckles softly, a bitter taste in his mouth. As if Lan Wangji would ever send his disciples out to fetch Wei Wuxian and bring him back to the Cloud Recesses, like some lonely prince in a fairytale romance. If he wanted Wei Wuxian’s help, Lan Wangji would have sought him out himself, instead of letting the months slip past by the handful without so much as a word.

“We left without telling him,” Sizhui admits, “but we had to. You see . . .”

“See what?” Wei Wuxian asks, when it becomes apparent he’s not going to finish. Sizhui glances at Jingyi, who after a few seconds rolls his eyes and nods reluctantly. Sizhui swallows, then speaks.

“Three days ago, Hanguang Jun fainted.”

After parting from Lan Zhan, Wei Wuxian deliberately avoids the Cloud Recesses. He’s too brash, too lascivious, too everything for that place. Going back would only spell trouble. Apparently the Cloud Recesses don’t feel the same way, however, because eventually the Cloud Recesses go looking for him.

He’s in a little town just outside of Yueling when the voice calls out to him: “Master Wei!”

Wei Wuxian turns, smiling as soon as he sees the face it belongs to. “A-yuan! What are you doing here?”

Lan Sizhui beams. Beside him, a typically sour-faced Lan Jingyi crosses his arms.

“What am I, chopped meat?” he grumbles.

“Oh, sorry! It’s good to see you too, Jingyi.”

“Master Wei,” Sizhui exclaims, approaching, “we’ve been looking everywhere for you!”

“Is that so? Then you must be tired. Come on--let’s find a place to sit, and you can tell me about everything you’ve been up to.”

They choose a small restaurant close to the town’s entrance--one of the few public places available in the vicinity. Wei Wuxian manages to dodge most of their questions. What has he been doing over the past year? Oh, traveling here or there with Little Apple, going on the occasional night hunt, enjoying his newfound free and easy life. What about them? Have they heard from Wen Ning? How is everyone at the Cloud Recesses? Zewu Jun and the others, are they doing well?

How about Hanguang Jun?

At this question, Jingyi and Sizhui share an uneasy look. Wei Wuxian's gaze sharpens.

"What?" he asks, glancing between them. "Why are you making that face? What's happened?"

"No reason," Jingyi says quickly, and Wei Wuxian could swear that he feels him kick Sizhui under the table. "He's just busy with a lot of new initiatives."

A spot of warmth blossoms in Wei Wuxian’s chest, replacing the momentary anxiety. “Typical Hanguang Jun. What's he got planned?"

"He is opening the Cloud Recesses back up for lecture," Sizhui answers. "In just eight days, all sects will send their disciples to study cultivation methods.”

“Not all the sects,” Jingyi clarifies, and there it is again--the uneasiness. “But most of them, anyway.”

Wei Wuxian nods thoughtfully. “So the sects are willing to send disciples again, huh? That’s good. Hanguang Jun is wise to bring the clans back together that way.”

“Yes,” Sizhui agrees. “But, um . . .”

Wei Wuxian looks at him expectantly. Sizhui takes a deep breath.

“You see, the thing is, Master Wei . . .”

“We think you’d make a great teacher,” Jingyi finishes.

Wei Wuxian’s jaw drops. “Huh?”

Sizhui seems to sense that they’ve caught him in a moment of weakness, because he launches in full force.

“Your knowledge and innovation in talismans could be a great resource for students. Additionally, your experience and methods in deduction could really help the disciples when they are first learning how to do night hunts.”

“And the younger generation likes you,” Jingyi adds. “If you go, you’ll definitely be popular with the students.”

“Er, guys,” Wei Wuxian says weakly. “I’m flattered, but haven’t you heard the stories about when I was in the Cloud Recesses? I was a terrible student. I really don’t fit in there.”

“Your unconventionality is what will make you unique as an instructor,” Sizhui says, and Wei Wuxian can tell that he must have planned that line with Jingyi during the journey from Gusu.

“Maybe, I guess. I don’t really know anything about teaching.”

Besides, how could he teach cultivation when he didn't even have a golden core?

“You were a great teacher before!” Sizhui insists, and for a split-second Wei Wuxian is almost worried he read his thoughts. “Back when we were working together to escape from the Burial Mounds, you explained everything so well. All of the young people really understood and liked you.”

“Yeah but what about their parents?” Wei Wuxian counters. “If you announce that I’m going to be there--which I won’t be, by the way, because I’m not going--no one will want to send their kids to the Cloud Recesses. They’ll think it’s bad luck, or that I’m going to teach something unorthodox. Even worse, what if I attract unsavory disciples who just want to learn about demonic cultivation? That really won’t look good for the Gusu Lan sect."

“You’ll have the approval of his Excellency, Hanguang Jun,” Jingyi says calmly. “His word will be enough.”

Wei Wuxian's eyes narrow. “Speaking of Hanguang Jun, what’s his opinion on all of this? Does he even know you two are here?”

“We left without telling him,” Sizhui admits, “but we had to. You see . . .”

“See what?” Wei Wuxian asks, when it becomes apparent he’s not going to finish.

Sizhui glances at Jingyi, who after a few seconds rolls his eyes and nods reluctantly. Sizhui swallows, then speaks.

“Three days ago, Hanguang Jun fainted.”

---

They say that time changes everything, so why is it that visiting the Cloud Recesses feels like a journey to the past?

There are some marks of change. The reconstructed buildings, a memorial here and there for those who gave their lives defending the Cloud Recesses from the Wen clan. But it’s the same tranquility, the same warmth and sense of safety, that almost has Wei Wuxian believing that at any moment Jiang Cheng and Nie Huaisang are going to round the corner laughing, ready to pull him off on another misadventure.

Maybe the Cloud Recesses haven’t changed, but Wei Wuxian has.

The heart inside him is certainly different as he gazes at Lan Wangji's silhouette through the screened window, arms moving gracefully as the gentle tones of the guqin drift on the night breeze. Once upon a time, Wei Wuxian was willing to do anything to catch the eye of the Second Jade of Lan. Whether it was playing the clown, showing-off his martial skills or even risking his own safety, he never once felt shy about it. Now, over a decade later, just thinking about talking to Lan Wangji is making his stomach tie up in knots.

It’s been almost a year since he and Lan Wangji officially parted. During that year, they only met once or twice, when Lan Wangji surprised him with a visit. The visits had been brief, but there was a moment when Lan Wangji looked at him, pinned him with a dark, trembling gaze, and in that instant Wei Wuxian truly believed that he was going to invite him back to the Cloud Recesses. But he hadn't. Lan Wangji merely left with the promise to visit again soon, and then never came back.

Wei Wuxian isn’t bitter. It makes sense that Lan Wangji’s path would lead away from him, to a place of glory and light. A place where he probably doesn’t have time for the troublesome, complicated life of Wei Wuxian.

But now, as he watches Lan Wangji through the screen, head bowed, the familiar melody somewhat lonely and melancholy, Wei Wuxian feels like an ass.

He should have been checking up on Lan Wangji.

“Hanguang Jun was injured several months ago,” Sizhui had explained back in the restaurant at Yueling. "Afterwards, he secluded himself and went to cultivate in Cold Pool Cave. When he returned, he seemed to have healed. But as the leader of the four sects, he has many responsibilities. He was working so much, and going on night hunts, and then preparing for the lectures--he never got time to rest. Finally, just a few days ago, he collapsed. Jingyi and I overheard him talking with Zewu Jun. The doctors want him to rest, but with the lectures starting, there’s no time. He’s already committed to taking on the lion’s share of the classes. We’re worried that with all of his obligations, his condition will only get worse.”

Outside of Lan Wangji’s window, Wei Wuxian sighs. 'Lan Zhan,' he thinks. 'You really never change, huh.'

He watches for a few moments longer, then removes Chenqing from his belt. He raises the flute to his lips, waits for the right opening in the song, then softly blows.

The guqin goes silent.

The silhouette doesn't move once as Wei Wuxian plays. It sits, still as a statue, until the song finishes. Wei Wuxian waits until the last notes dissipate in the air, then lowers the flute.

"Lan Zhan, are you ready to tell me the name of that song?"

"Wei Ying."

The words are quiet, but once uttered send a smile spreading across Wei Wuxian's face. It doesn't last long. The shoulders of that silhouette suddenly tense, then spasm in time with deep, guttural coughs.

Wei Wuxian moves quickly. “Lan Zhan,” he calls, opening the door, “I’m coming in!”

The look Lan Wangji shoots him from across the room is bewildered, but he’s too busy coughing into his sleeve to say anything. Wei Wuxian rushes over, crouching beside him, one hand unconsciously settling on the spot between Lan Wangji's shoulder blades.

He’s beautiful as always, Wei Wuxian thinks, in that heavenly, elegant way that could make one believe he stepped out of a poem or a painting. If it wasn’t for the faint circles beneath his eyes, the sheen on his forehead, or the pallor of his cheeks, Wei Wuxian probably wouldn’t even notice anything off. He reaches for Lan Wangji's wrist, feeling his pulse. His brow furrows. He lets go of the wrist and quickly moves his fingers to the acupoints on Lan Wangji's chest.

He doesn't need to be an expert healer to know that something is wrong with the energy circulating in Lan Wangji's body.

"Lan Zhan," he murmurs, face darkening. "What is this?"

Lan Wangji coughs a few more times, then pauses, catching his breath. At last he lowers his sleeve. His eyes meet Wei Wuxian’s.

“Wei Ying, why are you here?”

He actually has the audacity to sound a little bit worried--as if Wei Wuxian has appeared because he’s gotten caught up in another dangerous situation and needs his help. Wei Wuxian leans back, suddenly angry.

“Because of you, that’s why! You shouldn’t make your disciples worry so much!”

Lan Wangji drops his gaze. “It’s fine.”

“It’s not fine! Don't you know Lan Sizhui and Lan Jingyi came all the way to Yueling looking for me? All because of you!"

“They did what ?”

Crap. Wei Wuxian didn’t mean to get them in trouble. He waves it away hurriedly. “Whatever, whatever, never mind that. Anyway, what's going on? How come your energy's so . . . stagnant like this? Is that why you went to cultivate in Cold Pool Cave, to balance things out?"

Lan Wangji’s expression shifts imperceptibly, growing a little sad, a little embarrassed.

"Poison," he says at last.

Understanding creeps over Wei Wuxian like nausea. "You mean that injury you received all those months ago--"

Lan Wangji nods. "Poisoned."

Panic seizes Wei Wuxian like a greedy ghost. “But there’s something we can do, right? What did the doctor say?”

“It’s not lethal,” Lan Wangji replies calmly, and Wei Wuxian’s shoulders relax. “But periodically, the flow of energy is interrupted.”

“Periodically. So like, only sometimes, when you’ve been using a lot of energy, right?”1

“Mhm.”

Wei Wuxian bites his lip thoughtfully. “I see. And the cure?”

"None."1

“Bullshit! There’s gotta be something. Check the Forbidden Library."

“We searched there. So far, nothing.”

“A poison that’s not even in the Forbidden Library? Lan Zhan, no matter how I think about it, this is really just too suspicious. Where were you when it happened?”

“A village, north of Xietang2. Night hunt.”

“Who sent you there?”

“Rumors. A ghost, disappearances on the western bridge. But when we arrived . . .” Lan Wangji looks up. His face is grave. “A demon.”

Every single warning signal in Wei Wuxian’s mind is blaring. A demon in a small village with an extremely rare poison, who Lan Wangji, the newly appointed Chief Cultivator, just happened to encounter?

“How did it poison you?” he asks.

“Its blade.”

Wei Wuxian wants to know more, but Lan Wangji suddenly lets out a stifled, dry cough. The sound shakes Wei Wuxian to the core.

The questions can wait.

“Now that I’m here you should just rest, okay?" he says soothingly. "Focus on getting better. I’ll be here to help out, so don’t worry about anything. Come on, let’s get you into bed.”

The hand on Lan Wangji’s back slips over his shoulder as Wei Wuxian prepares to raise them both up. Lan Wangji, however, remains seated.

“You’re staying?” he asks incredulously.

“Of course I’m staying! You really think I’d let you start that lecture series without me? Someone has to make sure the lessons are at least a little bit interesting, or the Gusu Lan sect will have all of those poor kids bored to death!"

Besides, if there really is someone who has it in for Lan Wangji, Wei Wuxian is going to stick around and make sure they don’t get their way.

Lan Wangji straightens. “Then, a room--”

“Zewu Jun already prepared one for me. He set me up in the Silent Room.” Probably because it’s farther away, Wei Wuxian thinks. He’ll cause less problems out at the Shadow Bamboo Pavilion. Not that Wei Wuxian is complaining. The moments he spent in that room were warm and comforting, even if they took place during one of the most difficult times of his life. It has nothing to do with the fact it used to be Lan Wangji's old room, or anything.

The lines around Lan Wangji’s mouth soften. This time, he allows Wei Wuxian to lead him to the bed. Wei Wuxian waits until he’s settled before speaking.

“Do you need anything?”

“No.”

Wei Wuxian clenches and unclenches his fists awkwardly, then straightens. “All right, then. Sleep well, Lan Zhan. We'll talk later."

He turns and is about to step away, when Lan Wangji’s voice stops him.

“Wei Ying.”

Wei Wuxian's heart trembles behind a tightening smile. He waits for Lan Wangji to continue, to say, 'I missed you.' 'I missed you like you missed me.' 'Stay with me.' 'Come to bed.'

“Thank you," Lan Wanji says.

Wei Wuxian wants to laugh at himself.

“Lan Wangji, you already know words like ‘thank you’ and ‘I’m sorry’ are unnecessary between us."

Something like a smile crosses Lan Wangji’s face, and he looks away. “Mm."

Wei Wuxian watches him for a moment longer, waits until Lan Wangji's eyes slip shut, and leaves. His stomach is heavy with worry and guilt. To think, this whole time he's been feeling sorry for himself because Lan Wangji hasn't come to visit. Meanwhile, Lan Wangji has been cultivating in isolation, struggling to suppress the poison in his body while still managing his duties as leader of the clans. Now that he knows the truth, Wei Wuxian feels like the biggest jerk alive. He sighs as he shuts the door, and swears a solemn vow.

He’s going to make it up to Lan Wangji. This time, he’s going to be the one doing the protecting, the one doing the aiding. And this time, he definitely, most certainly, absolutely will not cause Lan Zhan any problems.

TBC . . .

Footnotes:

1. This is basically just MXTX's "no cure" poison from SVSSS. (The cure will not necessarily be the same)

2. Xietang is a previous name for Xitang, one of the water towns in Jiashan county. (Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xitang)

#wangxian #the untamed #cql #cheng qing ling #mdzs #mo dao zu shi #fanfic #wwx #lwj #my stuff

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tvdas · 4 years

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John Berryman in 1966, two years after the publication of “77 Dream Songs.” The Heartsick Hilarity of John Berryman’s Letters is a book review by Anthony Lane (in The New Yorker) of The Selected Letters of John Berryman. The book is edited by Philip Coleman and Calista McRae and published by the Belknap Press, at Harvard. My acquaintance, the generous Philip Coleman, mailed me a copy of this book at the end of October. Lane writes, “. . . anyone who delights in listening to Berryman, and who can’t help wondering how the singer becomes the songs, will find much to treasure here, in these garrulous and pedantic pages. There is hardly a paragraph in which Berryman—poet, pedagogue, boozehound, and symphonic self-destroyer—may not be heard straining toward the condition of music. ‘I have to make my pleasure out of sound,’ he says. The book is full of noises, heartsick with hilarity, and they await their transmutation into verse.” Here is the book review:

The poet John Berryman was born in 1914, in McAlester, Oklahoma. He was educated at Columbia and then in England, where he studied at Cambridge, met W. H. Auden and Dylan Thomas, and lit a cigarette for W. B. Yeats. All three men left traces in Berryman’s early work. In 1938, he returned to New York and embarked upon a spate of teaching posts in colleges across the land, beginning at Wayne State University and progressing to stints at Harvard, Princeton, Cincinnati, Berkeley, Brown, and other arenas in which he could feel unsettled. The history of his health, physical and mental, was no less fitful and spasmodic, and alcohol, which has a soft spot for poets, found him an easy mark. In a similar vein, his romantic life was lunging, irrepressible, and desperate, so much so that it squandered any lasting claim to romance. Thrice married, he fathered a son and two daughters. He died in 1972, by jumping from the Washington Avenue Bridge in Minneapolis. To the appalled gratification of posterity, his fall was witnessed by somebody named Art Hitman.

Berryman would have laughed at that. In an existence that was littered with loss, the one thing that never failed him, apart from his unwaning and wax-free ear for English verse, was his sense of humor. The first that I heard of Berryman was this:

Life, friends, is boring. We must not say so. After all, the sky flashes, the great sea yearns, we ourselves flash and yearn, and moreover my mother told me as a boy (repeatingly) ‘Ever to confess you’re bored means you have no

Inner Resources.’ I conclude now I have no inner resources, because I am heavy bored. Peoples bore me, literature bores me, especially great literature, Henry bores me, with his plights & gripes as bad as achilles,

who loves people and valiant art, which bores me. And the tranquil hills, & gin, look like a drag and somehow a dog has taken itself & its tail considerably away into mountains or sea or sky, leaving behind: me, wag.

“Wag” meaning a witty fellow, or “wag” meaning that he is of no more use than the back end of a mutt? Who on earth is Henry? Also, whoever’s talking, why does he address us as “friends,” as if he were Mark Antony and we were a Roman mob, and why can’t he even honor Achilles—the hero of the Iliad, a foundation stone of “great literature”—with a capital letter? You have to know such literature pretty well before you earn the right to claim that it tires you out. Few knew it better than Berryman, or shouldered the burdens of serious reading with a more remorseless joy. As he once said, “When it came to a choice between buying a book and a sandwich, as it often did, I always chose the book.”

“Life, friends” is the fourteenth of “The Dream Songs,” the many-splendored enterprise that consumed Berryman’s energies in the latter half of his career, and on which his reputation largely rests. His labors on the Songs began in 1955 and led to “77 Dream Songs,” which was published in 1964 and won him a Pulitzer Prize. In the course of the Songs, which he regarded as one long poem, he is represented, or unreliably impersonated, by a figure named Henry, who undergoes “the whole humiliating Human round” on his behalf. As Berryman explained, “Henry both is and is not me, obviously. We touch at certain points.” In 1968, along came a further three hundred and eight Songs, under the title “His Toy, His Dream, His Rest.” (A haunting phrase, which grabs the seven ages of man, as outlined in “As You Like It,” and squeezes them down to three.) Two days after publication, he was asked, by the Harvard Advocate, about his profession. “Being a poet is a funny kind of jazz. It doesn’t get you anything,” he said. “It’s just something you do.”

There was plenty of all that jazz. Berryman forsook the distillations of Eliot for the profusion of Whitman; the Dream Songs, endlessly rocking and rolling, surge onward in waves. Lay them aside, and you still have the other volumes of Berryman’s poems, including “The Dispossessed” (1948), “Homage to Mistress Bradstreet” (1956), and “Love & Fame” (1970). Bundled together, they fill nearly three hundred pages. If magnitude freaks you out, there are slimmer selections—one from the Library of America, edited by Kevin Young, the poetry editor of this magazine, and another, “The Heart Is Strange,” compiled by Daniel Swift to toast the centenary, in 2014, of the poet’s birth. And don’t forget the authoritative 1982 biography by John Haffenden, who also put together a posthumous collection, “Henry’s Fate and Other Poems,” in 1977, as well as “Berryman’s Shakespeare” (1999), a Falstaffian banquet of his scholarly work on the Bard. Some of Berryman’s critical writings are clustered, invaluably, in “The Freedom of the Poet” (1976). In short, you need space on your shelves, plus a clear head, if you want to join the Berrymaniacs. Proceed with caution; we can be a cranky bunch.

Of late, Berryman’s star has waned. Its glow was never steady in the first place, but it has dimmed appreciably, because of lines like these:

Arrive a time when all coons lose dere grip, but is he come? Le’s do a hoedown, gal.

“The Dream Songs” is a hubbub, and some of it is spoken in blackface—or, to be accurate, in what might be described as blackvoice. It deals in unembarrassed minstrelsy, complete with a caricature of verbal tics, all too pointedly transcribed: “Now there you exaggerate, Sah. We hafta die.” To say that Berryman was airing the prejudices of his era is hardly to exonerate him; in any case, he seems to be evoking, in purposeful anachronism, an all but vanished age of vaudeville. Kevin Young, who is Black, prefaces his choice of Berryman’s poetry by arguing, “Much of the force of The Dream Songs comes from its use of race and blackface to express a (white) self unraveling.” Some readers will share Young’s generously inquiring attitude; others will veer away from Berryman and never go back.

For anyone willing to stick around, there’s a new book on the block. “The Selected Letters of John Berryman” weighs in at more than seven hundred pages. It is edited by Philip Coleman and Calista McRae, and published by the Belknap Press, at Harvard—a selfless undertaking, given that Berryman derides Harvard as “a haven for the boring and the foolish,” wherein “my students display a form of illiterate urbanity which will soon become very depressing.” (Not that other colleges elude his gibes. Berkeley is summed up as “Paradise, with anthrax.”) The earliest letter, dated September, 1925, is from the schoolboy Berryman to his parents, and ends, “I love you too much to talk about.” In a pleasing symmetry, the final letter printed here, from 1971, shows Berryman rejoicing in his own parenthood. He tells a friend, “We had a baby, Sarah Rebecca, in June—a beauty.”

And what lies in between? More or less the polyphony that you’d expect, should you come pre-tuned into Berryman. “Vigour & fatigue, confidence & despair, the elegant & the blunt, the bright & the dry.” Such is the medley, he says, that he finds in the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins, and you can feel Berryman swooping with similar freedom from one tone to the next. “Books I’ve got, copulation I need,” he writes from Cambridge, at the age of twenty-two, thus initiating a lifelong and dangerous refrain. When he reports, two years later, that “I was attacked by an excited loneliness which is still with me and which has so far produced fifteen poems,” is that a grouse or a boast? There are alarming valedictions: “Nurse w. another shot. no more now,” or, “Maybe I better go get a bottle of whisky; maybe I better not.” There are letters to Ezra Pound, one of which, sent with “atlantean respect & affection,” announces, “What we want is a new form of the daring,” a very Poundian demand. And there are smart little swerves into the aphoristic—“Writers should be heard and not seen”; “All modern writers are complicated before they are good”—or into courteous eighteenth-century brusquerie. Pastiche can be useful when you have a grudge to convey: “My dear Sir: You are plainly either a fool or a scoundrel. It is kinder to think you a fool; and so I do.” It’s a letter best taken with a pinch of snuff.

Berryman was a captious and self-heating complainer, slow to cool. Just as the first word of the Iliad means “Wrath,” so the first word of the opening Dream Song is “Huffy.” Seldom can you predict the cause of his looming ire. A concert performance by the Stradivarius Quartet, in the fall of 1941, drives him away: “Beethoven’s op. 130 they took now to be a circus, now to be a sea-chantey, & I fled in the middle to escape their Cavatina.” The following year, an epic letter to his landlord, on Grove Street, in Boston, is almost entirely concerned with a refrigerator, which has “developed a high-pitched scream.” Berryman was not an easy man to live with, or to love, and the likelihood that even household appliances found his company intolerable cannot be dismissed.

Yet the poet was scarcely unique in his vexations; we all have our fridges to bear. Something else, far below the hum of daily pique, resounds through this massive book—a ground bass of doom and dejection. “You may prepare my coffin.” “If this reaches you, you will know I got as far as a letter-box at any rate.” “I write in haste, being back in Hell.” Such are the dirges to which Berryman treats his friends, in the winter of 1939–40, and the odd jauntiness in which he couches his misery somehow makes it worse. It’s one thing to write, “I am fed up with pretending to be alive when in fact I am not,” but quite another to dispatch those words, as Berryman did, to someone whom you are courting; the recipient was Eileen Mulligan, whom he married nine months later, in October, 1942. To the critic Mark Van Doren, who had been his mentor at Columbia, he was more formal in his woe, declaring, “Each year I hope that next year will find me dead, and so far I have been disappointed, but I do not lose that hope, which is almost my only one.” We are close to the borders of Beckett.

There are definite jitters of comedy in so funereal a pose, and detractors of Berryman would say that he keeps trying on his desolation, like a man getting fitted for a dark suit. The trouble is that we know how he died. Even if he is putting on an act, for the horrified benefit of his correspondents, it is still a rehearsal for the main event, and you can’t inspect the long lament that he sends to Eileen in 1953—after they have separated—without glancing ahead, almost twenty years, to the dénouement of his days. The letter leaps, like one of those 3 a.m. frettings which every insomniac will recognize, directly from money to death. “I only have $2.15 to live through the week,” the poet says, before laying out his plans. “My insurance, the only sure way of paying my debts, expires on Thursday. So unless something happens I have to kill myself day after tomorrow evening or earlier.” To be specific, “What I am going to do is drop off the George Washington bridge. I believe one dies on the way down.” If Berryman is playing Cassandra to himself, crying out the details of his own quietus, how did the cry begin?

It is tempting to turn biography into cartography—unrolling the record of somebody’s life, smoothing it flat, and indicating the major fork in the road. Most of us rebut this thesis, as we amble maplessly along. In Berryman’s case, however, there was a fork, so terrible and so palpable that no account of him, and no encounter with his poems, can afford to ignore it. The road didn’t simply split in two; it was cratered, in the summer of 1926, when his father, John Allyn Smith, committed suicide.

The family was living in Clearwater, Florida, at the time, and young John was eleven years old. There was a bizarre prelude to the calamity, when his brother, Robert, was taken out by their father for a swim in the Gulf. What occurred next remains murky, but it seemed, for a while, as if they would not be returning to shore. One of the Dream Songs takes up the tale, mixing memory and denial:

Also I love him: me he’s done no wrong for going on forty years—forgiveness time— I touch now his despair, he felt as bad as Whitman on his tower but he did not swim out with me or my brother as he threatened—

a powerful swimmer, to         take one of us along as company in the defeat sublime, freezing my helpless mother: he only, very early in the morning, rose with his gun and went outdoors by my window and did what was needed.

I cannot read that wretched mind, so strong & so undone. I’ve always tried. I—I’m trying to forgive whose frantic passage, when he could not live an instant longer, in the summer dawn left Henry to live on.

Smith’s death would become the primal wound for his older son. Notice how the tough and Hemingway-tinged curtness of “did what was needed” gives way, all too soon, to the halting stammer of “I—I’m trying.” The wound was suppurating and unhealable, and there is little doubt that it deepened the festering of Berryman’s life. As he writes in one of the final Dream Songs, “I spit upon this dreadful banker’s grave / who shot his heart out in a Florida dawn / O ho alas alas.” Haffenden quotes these lines, raw with recrimination, in his biography; dryly informs us that the poet, in fact, never visited his father’s grave; and supplies us with relevant notes that Berryman made in 1970—two years before he, in turn, found a bridge and did what he thought was needed. He sounds like a patient striving mightily to become his own shrink:

Did I myself feel any guilt perhaps—long-repressed if so & this is mere speculation (defense here) about Daddy’s death? (I certainly pickt up enough of Mother’s self-blame to accuse her once, drunk & raging, of having actually murdered him & staged a suicide.)

Alternatively:

So maybe my long self-pity has been based on an error, and there has been no (hero-) villain (Father) ruling my life, but only an unspeakably powerful possessive adoring mother, whose life at 75 is still centered wholly on me. And my (omnipotent) feeling that I can get away with anything.

For readers who ask themselves, browsing through “Berryman’s Shakespeare,” why the poet bent his attention, again and again, to “Hamlet,” to the plight of the prince, and to the preoccupations—as Berryman boldly construed them—of the man who wrote the play, here is an answer of sorts. And, for anyone wanting more of this unholy psychodrama, consider the list of characters. Berryman’s mother, born Martha Little, married John Allyn Smith. Less than eleven weeks after his death, she married her landlord, John Angus McAlpin Berryman, and thereafter called herself Jill, or Jill Angel. As for the poet, he was baptized with his father’s name, was known as Billy in infancy, and then, in deference to his brand-new stepfather, became John Berryman. This is like Hamlet having to call himself Claudius, Jr., on top of everything else. As Berryman remarks, “Damn Berrymans and their names.”

A book of back-and-forth correspondence with his mother was published in 1988, under the title “We Dream of Honour.” (Having picked up the habit of British spelling, at Cambridge, Berryman never kicked it.) Inexcusably, it’s now out of print, but worth tracking down; and you could swear, as you leaf through it, that you’d stumbled upon a love affair. The son says to the mother, “I hope you’re well, darling, and less worried.” The mother tells the son, “I have loved you too much for wisdom, or it is perhaps nearer truth to say that with love or in anger, I am not wise.” We are offered a facsimile of a letter from 1953, in which Berryman begins, “Mother, I have always failed; but I am not failing now.”

One obvious shortfall in the “Selected Letters” is that “We Dream of Honour” took the cream of the crop. Only eight letters here are addressed to Martha, six of them mailed from school, and, if you’re approaching Berryman as a novice, your take on him will be unavoidably skewed. By way of compensation, we get a wildly misconceived letter of advice from the middle-aged Berryman to his son, Paul, concluding with the maxim “Strong fathers crush sons.” Paul was four at the time. Haffenden has already cited that letter, however, and doubts whether it was ever sent. One item in the new book that I have never read before, and would prefer not to read again, is a letter from the fourteen-year-old Berryman to his stepfather, whom he calls Uncle Jack, and before whom he cringes as if whipped. “I’m a coward, a cheat, a bully, and a thief if I had the guts to steal,” the boy writes. Things get worse: “I have none of the fine qualities or emotions, and all the baser ones. I don’t understand why God permitted me to be born.” He signs himself “John Berryman,” the sender mirroring the recipient, and adds, “P.S. I’m a disgrace to your name.”

To read such words is to marvel that Berryman survived as long as he did. If one virtue emerged from the wreckage of his early years, it was a capacity to console; later, in the midst of his drinking and his lechery, he remained a reliable guide to grief, and to the blast area that surrounds it. In May, 1955, commiserating with Saul Bellow, whose father has just passed away, Berryman writes, “Unfortunately I am in a v g position to feel with you: my father died for me all over again last week.” He unfolds his larger theme: “His father’s death is one of the few main things that happens to a man, I think, and it matters greatly to the life when it happens.” Bellow’s affliction, Berryman reassures him, lofts him into illustrious company: “Shakespeare was probably in the middle of Hamlet and I think his effort increased.” Freud and Luther are then added to the roster of the fruitfully bereaved.

None of this will surprise an admirer of the Dream Songs. Among the loveliest are those in which the poet mourns departed friends, such as Robert Frost, Louis MacNeice, Theodore Roethke, and Delmore Schwartz. Berryman the comic, who can be scabrously funny, not least at his own expense, consorts with Berryman the frightener (“In slack times visit I the violent dead / and pick their awful brains”) and Berryman the elegist, who can summon whole twilights of sorrow. In this, a tribute to Randall Jarrell, he gradually allows the verse to run on, like overflowing water, across the line breaks, with a grace denied to our harshly end-stopped lives:

In the night-reaches dreamed he of better graces, of liberations, and beloved faces, such as now ere dawn he sings. It would not be easy, accustomed to these things, to give up the old world, but he could try; let it all rest, have a good cry.

Let Randall rest, whom your self-torturing cannot restore one instant’s good to, rest: he’s left us now. The panic died and in the panic’s dying so did my old friend. I am headed west also, also, somehow.

In the chambers of the end we’ll meet again I will say Randall, he’ll say Pussycat and all will be as before when as we sought, among the beloved faces, eminence and were dissatisfied with that and needed more.

A photograph of 1941 shows Berryman in a dark coat, a hat, and a bow tie. His jaw is clean-shaven and firm. With his thin-rimmed spectacles and his ready smile, he looks like a spry young stockbroker on his way home from church. Skip ahead to the older Berryman, and you observe a very different beast, with a beard like the mane of a disenchanted lion. Finches could roost in it. The rims of his glasses are now thick and black, and his hands, in many images, refuse to be at rest. They gesticulate and splay, as if he were conducting an orchestra that he alone can hear. A cigarette serves as his baton.

If you seek to understand this metamorphosis, “The Selected Letters of John Berryman” can help. What greets us here, as often as not, is a parody of a poet. Watch him fumble with the mechanisms of the everyday, “ghoulishly inefficient about details and tickets and visas and trains and money and hotels.” Chores are as heavy as millstones, to his hypersensitive neck: “Do this, do that, phone these, phone those, repair this, drown that, poison the other.” We start to sniff a blend—peculiar to Berryman, like a special tobacco—of the humbled and the immodest. It drifts about, in aromatic puns: “my work is growing by creeps & grounds.” Though the outer world of politics and civil strife may occasionally intrude, it proves no match for the smoke-filled rooms inside the poet’s head. When nuclear tests are carried out at Bikini Atoll, in 1954, they register only briefly, in a letter to Bellow. “This thermonuclear business wd tip me up all over again if I were in shape to attend to it,” Berryman writes, before moving on to a harrowing digest of his diarrhea.

Above all, this is a book-riddled book. No one but Berryman, it’s fair to say, would write from a hospital in Minneapolis, having been admitted in a state of alcoholic and nervous prostration, to a bookstore in Oxford, asking, “Can you let me know what Elizabethan Bibles you have in stock?” The recklessness with which he abuses his body is paired with an indefatigable and nurselike care for textual minutiae. (“Very very tentatively I suggest that the comma might come out.”) Only on the page can he trust his powers of control, although even those desert him at a deliciously inappropriate moment. Writing to William Shawn at The New Yorker, in 1951, and proposing “a Profile on William Shakespeare,” Berryman begins, “Dear Mr Shahn.” Of all the editors of all the magazines in all the world, he misspells him.

No such Profile appeared; nor, to one’s infinite regret, did the edition of “King Lear” on which Berryman toiled for years. What we do have is his fine essay of 1953, “Shakespeare at Thirty,” which begins, “Suppose with me a time, a place, a man who was waked, risen, washed, dressed, fed, on a day in latter April long ago—about April 22, say, of 1594, a Monday.” Few scholars would have the bravado, or the imaginative dexterity, for such supposings, and it’s a thrill to see a living poet treat a dead one not as a monument but as a partner in crime. “Oh my god! Shakespeare. That multiform & encyclopedic bastard,” Berryman says in a letter of 1952, as if the two of them had just locked horns in a tavern.

Such plunges into the past, with its promise of adventure and refuge, came naturally to Berryman, nowhere more so than in “Homage to Mistress Bradstreet,” which was published in the Partisan Review in 1953 and, three years later, as a book. This was the poem with which he broke through—discovering not just a receptive audience but a voice that, in its heightened lyrical pressure, sounded like his and nobody else’s. The irony is that he did so by assuming the role of a woman: Anne Bradstreet, herself a poet, who emigrated from England to America, in 1630. It is her tough, pious, and hardscrabble history that Berryman chronicles: “Food endless, people few, all to be done. / As pippins roast, the question of the wolves / turns & turns.” In a celebrated scene, the heroine gives birth. Even if you dispute the male ability (or the right) to articulate such an experience, it’s hard not to be swayed by the fervor of dramatic effort:

I can can no longer and it passes the wretched trap whelming and I am me

drencht & powerful, I did it with my body! One proud tug greens Heaven. Marvellous, unforbidding Majesty. Swell, imperious bells. I fly.

What the poem cost its creator, over more than four years, is made plain in the letters, which ring with an exhausted ecstasy. “I feel like weeping all the time,” he tells one friend. “I regard every word in the poem as either a murderer or a lover.” As for Anne, who perished in 1672, “I certainly at some point fell in love with her.” Berryman adds, as if to prove his devotion, “I used three shirts at a time, in relays. I wish I were dead.”

Is this how we like poetry to be brought forth, even now? Though we may never touch the stuff, reading no verse from one year to the next, do we still expect it to be delivered in romantic agony, with attendant birth pangs? (So much for Wallace Stevens, who composed much of his work while gainfully employed, on a handsome salary, as an insurance executive.) Berryman viewed the notion of his being a confessional poet “with rage and contempt,” and rightly so; the label is an insult to his craftsmanship. Nobody pining for mere self-expression, or craving a therapeutic blurt, could lavish on a paramour, as Berryman did, lines as elaborately wrought as these:

Loves are the summer’s. Summer like a bee Sucks out our best, thigh-brushes, and is gone.

You have to reach back to Donne to find so commanding an exercise in the clever-sensual. It comes from “Berryman’s Sonnets,” a sequence of a hundred and fifteen poems, published in 1967. Most of them had been written long before, in 1947, in heat and haste, during an affair with a woman named Chris Haynes. And, in this huge new hoard of letters, how many are addressed to Haynes? Precisely one. Gossip hunters will slouch off in frustration, and good luck to them; on the other hand, anyone who delights in listening to Berryman, and who can’t help wondering how the singer becomes the songs, will find much to treasure here, in these garrulous and pedantic pages. There is hardly a paragraph in which Berryman—poet, pedagogue, boozehound, and symphonic self-destroyer—may not be heard straining toward the condition of music. “I have to make my pleasure out of sound,” he says. The book is full of noises, heartsick with hilarity, and they await their transmutation into verse.

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ittakesrain · 5 years

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Track Your Shit

I sat on the couch in my psychiatrist’s office with my arms crossed and steam billowing out of my ears.

“Are you on cocaine?” he asked without a hint of sarcasm.

“No,” I shot back, completely bewildered but appropriately defensive.

“Then you’re bipolar.”

Yup. That was how I was diagnosed. And to my memory, that was really the only major piece of information my psychiatrist gave me that day. There was no supplemental information given to me, no sort of enlightenment or introduction into the all-consuming project that would be managing my difficult and sometimes debilitating condition, and I left the office with what felt like a really random label and a higher dose of Abilify. I was nineteen years old, I was a chemistry major in college, I’d kicked the hell out of an eating disorder, and I was bipolar. The facts didn’t matter too much. Right?

Over the next several years, I really didn’t hear the word “bipolar” all too frequently, in or out of my psychiatrist’s office, despite the increasingly, uh, intense fluctuations in my moods and energy as well as steadily growing anxiety and irritability. Weird, am I right? For a diagnosis that impacts pretty much all aspects of a person’s life, in one way or another, to not be mentioned nearly enough times? There are more fitting words, but sure, we’ll go with ‘weird.’

By the time I graduated college, I knew my diagnosis was playing a larger role in my life that I originally assumed it would. I started keeping track of when I took my meds (and with that tried not to miss any doses). I recorded my moods more frequently. I did some cursory research into my disorder. And I finally started noticing patterns in my cycle and knew to watch out for specific warning signs. And mind you, doing all of that was a pretty big accomplishment for someone who was given virtually no guidance. Not to mention a medication regime that was significantly lacking.

The first thing I realized was that my episodes often began with feeling “emotionally itchy,” or “like I want to rip my face off” and “jump out of my skin and out of who I am as a person.” Thanks to the knowledge I have now, I can use different language to describe what actually goes on as I inch ever closer to a major episode. I become incredibly irritable and experience what’s called “dysphoric mania.” I have the racing thoughts and flight of ideas that come with manic episodes, meaning my brain is running at a million miles a minute and I can’t keep myself focused on one idea long enough to think it through, but it’s not what anyone would call a happy feeling (not that mania is to be confused with mere happiness). In my dysphoric state, I have too much energy, so much so that it physically hurts me as it swells from within me and threatens to burst open at any second. I often cut myself in such a state because I need the assumed and metaphorical emotional release as well as the physical release of endorphins in response to injury.

Then I began to see that if I missed my meds for any period of time longer than a day or two, I felt the effects about two weeks later. If I forgot (or “forgot”) to take my Abilify for let’s say a full week, I’d be in the middle of a relentless and torturous depression in about fourteen days. Sidenote, I shouldn’t have missed ANY days of meds, but lo and behold, I wasn’t exactly warned all too well against it. But to see a pattern, to determine the cause of a specific (and dramatic) dip in my moods, was hugely influential in my life. Not to mention, it brought me to google how the medication I was prescribed actually works. And, spoiler, every single human being who is prescribed any medication at all should be aware of what the fucking medication does and how it works and all of that. Seriously. So important. Turns out Abilify is “long acting” and takes about two weeks to leave my system.

Furthermore, Abilify is a type of drug called an “atypical antipsychotic.” Those types of drugs are frequently used as mood stabilizers. They’re the second generation of drugs that you’ve probably seen being used on dramatic medical shows or movies about psychiatric hospitals that knock people who are acting “insane” out. They’re used as tranquilizers. Haldol is an example of one that works fast and Thorazine is an example of one that works somewhat slower. Those are called typical antipsychotics. Atypicals like Abilify have fewer side effects. They work to influence serotonin (the neurotransmitter sometimes called the “happy molecule”) as opposed to blocking signals from dopamine (the “pleasure and reward” neurotransmitter).

Right. So as you see I’ve become fairly well-versed in the goings-on of impending episodes and the key pieces of information surrounding them. Again, this is phenomenally helpful. But my point is that I should have been given this information from the get-go. I should’ve been prepared and taught, should’ve been armed with education given to me by a human being who knew what the fuck was happening to me and how bad it would potentially get if I didn’t have the fucking said information! I got there myself, and I’m damn proud of myself for doing so. And it still brings me peace of mind and a sense of control to research bipolar disorder, and learn new things about treatments and meds and biochemistry, and to work through my recorded moods and symptoms to find existing patterns or warnings. But for fuck’s sake, why wasn’t I told about the importance of recording the fluctuations or about psychoeducation as a tremendously powerful tool?

Alright alright, not going to continue dwelling on the past and how I was royally screwed (at least not in this particular blog post). Because as I look to the future, I know things will at the very least make more sense. I’ll at least be able to understand this bullshit and from there hopefully combat it better.

Which brings me to a few months ago as I began to embark on a new and more um, intense journey of self-discovery and understanding –which, in turn, is allowing me to feel significantly less dread about my eventual (and inevitable?) next episodes. It started when I wound up in the emergency room for the first time in October 2018 when a depressive episode took a terrible turn for the worse. I was 27 years old and at the end of my rope. Exhausted from years of worsening symptoms and my cries for help going unheard, my begging and pleading remaining unnoticed, I collapsed into chaotic despair.

The good that came from that particular visit to rock bottom was that I subsequently found a therapist (no, I hadn’t been in therapy previously and yes, that was really dumb) who is literally the coolest person ever, in addition to being really fucking good at what she does. And a few months after that, my amazing therapist helped me find a better psychiatrist, and from there we all began the arduous task of getting my act together and trying to stabilize the shitshow of my life.

As it turns out, since I was on a medication that didn’t do much for me for such a long time, my bipolar disorder was able to “mature.” To further develop and overall just get worse. Literally look it up. It’s a known thing that bipolar worsens if left untreated, and I absolutely feel that mine at the very least wasn’t being treated properly. Lucky me.

But since beginning to see my therapist in November and my new medication provider in February, I’ve learned like, so so so much. I know to stop and breathe when I start to get worked up, because I know I have gone for long periods of time without inhaling and exhaling like a functioning human. I know that I fidget around and repeat purposeless motions (“display signs of psychomotor agitation”) because it comforts me when I’m anxious. I know I have issues with control, with the desire to feel safe, with things that aren’t fair.

Also. Insomnia is a huge red flag for me and for the majority of bipolars. It’s both a symptom of approaching mania and a trigger for it. Meaning, when you start staying up all night long, you’ve gotta find a way to get some sleep before it gets worse and leads to an episode. It also means that you can’t voluntarily pull all-nighters (if you can help it) because that might land you in the middle of a manic break as well. And as if that wouldn’t suck enough, a despairing depression would most certainly follow the agitated (hypo)mania.

Alcohol is another one. Now, I’m not huge on drinking. I never partook in any of that before I was of legal age anyway (which is perhaps a testament to my nerdy younger self haha), and once I started drinking, I had trouble getting past the gross taste. I still do. But when I drink as an adult (which I haven’t done in a few months, mind you), I drink to get fucked up. So basically, I drink in a way that’s literally terrible for my bipolar. It’s a cycle, too. I’ll have a bad day and come home and take five shots of fireball, and I get shitfaced so I have a terrible day the next day. It’s similar to insomnia in that it perpetuates itself and that I’ve gotta be responsible about it.

[On that note, by the way, I should say that maintaining stability involves quite a few key things (such as sleep hygiene, med compliance, the nutrition you fuel your body with, the way you move your body, being mindful and having the ability to focus on breathing, following pre-set routines, your support system, your coping skills and crisis-management tools, and your healthcare professionals…to name a few). It’s imperative to keep up with each thing to prevent all hell from breaking loose.]

I’ve also come to see that, for whatever reason, my major episodes usually have a definitive end but not a clearcut start. As in, I can identify the specific day my depression ends, but the irritability and frenetic energy and aggressive outbursts start out kind of slowly and increase steadily until my moods surrender into despondent melancholy. At this point, I believe the phenomena has to do with my tendency to ruminate and nearly drown in repetitive thoughts. I really struggle with redirecting my brain away from negatives. It could also be because of my coexisting ADHD, but either way, I can’t knock myself out of a bad mood as easily as most people can. So even something small going wrong has the potential to send me spiraling. I can’t think myself out of it. But I can easily make it worse –by ruminating and letting the negatives repeat like a broken record in my head. The decline, therefore, moves like a ball rolling down a ramp. On the opposite end of a “crazy spell” (as I called them way back in the day before I learned all this enlightening information) we have the ball being yanked back up as if it was attached to a string or something. As in, something good can happen that completely “snaps me out” of a major depression. It’s wild to think about. Like, fuck, why can’t more good things happen? Maybe then I’d spend less time wanting to die. I have, however, come to learn how to put myself in the line of things that have the potential to knock me off the crazy train. File that under “bitchin’ coping skills.”

Thanks to psychoeducation, I’ve also come to understand some of my personality traits. I’ve often called myself “volatile.” I fly off the handle fairly quickly, I accelerate from zero to 100 faster than the Kinga Ka roller coaster at Six Flags. My therapist calls it being reactive, and I prefer that phrasing now. My reactivity is part of my personality, but I understand it more clearly by looking at it through the lens of what I know about bipolar disorder. Similarly, in addition to reacting more, I react bigger. I guess some people might call it being dramatic, but again, I prefer to think of it in terms of how my therapist explained it: I’m wired intensely. I feel things in a bigger way. She once said something along the lines of “you can light up a city with your emotions,” and I don’t think she used the word emotions, but that was the gist. My intensity if a part of who I am. And honestly, as much as it can be super annoying and anxiety-producing, it’s not all bad and I choose to label it as a good thing.

Oh, and I pretty much knew this already, but I like to write/type because in my bipolar brain, the thoughts move more quickly than my mouth can move. It causes me to stutter, or stumble over my words, or lose my train of thought because I didn’t say something the right way and I can’t make my mouth move in a way to correct myself because I have fifteen thousand other thoughts flying through my mind and I can’t focus on any of it now. I exhibit pressured speech. Oh yeah, that’s one of my faves.

Thanks to psychoeducation, I’ve learned why I cling to my routines with a death-grip. Doing so is legitimately helpful to people with bipolar. Which is why going on vacation or starting a new job or a new chapter in life can throw bipolar people off in such grand ways. Circadian rhythms are screwy in us. We need to work hard to keep that shit in check. And the sleep-wake cycle and yes, routines, are part of that.

Okay then. With all of this knowledge being attained and a few more trips to rock bottom (and the emergency room) since October 2018…here I am. Still holding on, and doing better at that holding than I have in a while. A month and a half of normalcy without anything rocking the boat? I feel pretty damn good, thank you very much.

Oddly enough, stability can be just as scary for me as the complete and utter chaos of the rest of it. Like, now I have no excuses for not moving forward. Ugh, I have to move forward. But ya know what, I will. Because I’ve got the bipolar symptoms under control at the moment. There’s really nothing stopping me, so I’m sure as hell not gonna stop me.

Keeping records is absolutely fucking necessary. I’ve got no choice but to record my moods, anxiety, and irritability. I’ve gotta take my meds every fucking day and keep track of if I ever miss a day (which I shouldn’t). I need to write down other factors that play a role, such as my periods and when I have therapy and life stressors and stuff like that.

It’s taken, holy shit, so much work to acquire the awareness I currently have. And moving forward will require consistently working on what I know and actively seeking more information. But dude, I’ve come this far. I’m not gonna stop now.

#bipolar #bipolar disorder #bipolarstrong #bipolar strong #bipolar disorder awareness #mental illness #mental illness recovery #mental health #mental health blogger #moods #mood disorder #mood tracking #mood tracker

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a-gay-bloodmage · 5 years

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About the Character: Kiora Trevelyan

Tagged by: @red-wardens ((and here’s the post!))

Tagging: @thedisc0panda and @zeesqueere and anyone who sees this! Tag me if you do it so I can see!

———–

― your muse’s name:

Kiora Trevelyan

― a favorite picture / faceclaim of your muse:

— More under the cut! —

― two headcanons you have for your muse:

Kiora is the closest thing to a demonologist that Southern Thedas has to offer. Her “profession” isn’t approved by the Chantry, of course, but she’s far more knowledgeable about the inner workings of the Fade than most Circle mages, as she’s not only spent far more time asleep and observing the dream world than most, but she wasn’t shy in approaching spirits. Where most mages try to avoid spirits in the Fade—as they may be demons—Kiora wasn’t scared to introduce herself. She’s been possessed a few times, but not only was she able to distract the more hostile demons long enough to exorcise them, but she was often pleasant enough to convince them to leave before they turned her into an abomination.

She’s well-versed in the world of elfroot. Kiora loves almost nothing more than relaxing with a good elfroot cigar, a cat, and a horror novel. She managed to convince the Templars of the Ostwick Circle to let the mages grow elfroot inside the Tower, lowering the conflict considerably. Mages, when they’re just giggling and sleeping, require a lot less discipline—just more corralling.

― three things that your muse likes doing in their free time:

Smoking: Kiora loves smoking. Loves it. Despite already being a very calm person, she finds elfroot smoking relaxing, and loves the steady rhythm of inhaling and exhaling and feeling the warm smoke curl around her lungs. Smoking was one of the few things in the Circle she could count on to be non-stressful. Having another person to smoke with only makes it better.

Cuddling with her cats: Kiora loves her cats! So much! Socks, Duke, Duchess, Spook, Miss Match, and Patches all hold a special place in her heart. Trevelyan castle had no shortage of fluffy, pampered housecats, and the Ostwick Circle had the cutest little mousers. Her magic is infectious, and if she spends enough time with a cat, she can meet up with their spirits in the Fade, granted that they’re sleeping. Whether it be in the waking world or in the Fade, Kiora is always happy to have a sleepy black cat in her arms.

Reading horror novels: Even if her sweet personality convinces most people that Kiora is simply an innocent girl with an affinity for black and violet, her more Gothic appearance actually does reflect quite a bit of her innermost being. She loves to sit and relax with a good horror novel, enjoying the gory, graphic ones the most. She’s so passive and soft-spoken she just needs to read about a horrific murderer every once in a while...

― seven people your muse loves / likes:

Sera: Kiora is in love with Sera. So much. She could rattle on for ages about how much she loves her hair and her voice and her energy and her smile and her everything. Her and Sera’s relationship is an “opposites-attract” one to most looking on—what with their polar opposite looks, dress, energy levels, etc—but they’re actually quite similar, and agree on the fact that everybody deserves a chance to live free as themselves. And that nobles are annoying.

Anders: Kiora has a love for Anders that most non-mages could never even hope to understand. She was terrified of the idea of being free from the Circle at first, as she had no idea how to survive outside thick stone walls, but as soon as she got her first taste of freedom, she couldn’t have been more grateful. No more long nights consoling abused mages and shooing away all the persistent demons that dwelled in the Tower. She longs to meet him one day, to finally be able to thank the man that made it possible for her to breathe fresh air and fall in love. She knows she’d never be able to express her love and gratitude, but she would love to try.

Cole: Kiora loves Cole and Cole loves Kiora. She all but adopted him as her weird little spirit son the second she saw him, and he immediately grew to like her. She may not be stupid, but her thoughts are quiet and gentle, and he appreciates hearing the memories of a kindhearted stoner than some of the more... intense companions. Her cats love him, and they help ground him to reality when he gets too lost in the loud thoughts of the tavern patrons. Once he becomes more human and starts sleeping, she visits him whenever she can to talk to him in the Fade. Her and Cole are close enough to force Sera to interact with him, and, with enough time, even Sera came around to liking him. Even if he is a little creepy.

The Iron Bull and Blackwall : Kiora adores Bull and Blackwall the same! They’re so sweet to her, and despite the two of them being so different, they both care for her like a kinda simple, sweet little lesbian daughter. Kiora loves cozying up on Bull’s giant lap, and she loves sitting in the stables and watching/listening to Blackwall whittle. Sometimes, she’ll drink and play cards with Bull and the Chargers, and other times, she’ll paint the toys Blackwall makes. She’s got very delicate hands that are quite good at detailed little hobbies.

The Warden (Redren): Kiora, when first hearing about the Warden, was utterly terrified of him. An apostate mage who could rip darkspawn apart with a wave of a staff, known for being aggressive and unfeeling, getting into bloody conflicts with Templars, and who maybe killed the King of Ferelden? The eleven-year-old Kiora was utterly terrified of ever meeting such a man. However, as she got older, and especially once she got shipped to the Circle at fourteen, she came to appreciate the Warden more. How was it possible for a mage to stand up for himself like that? When she became Inquisitor, her respect for the Warden doubled. Leading an organization was stressful, it was a wonder he hadn’t gone mad...!

Dorian: Kiora loves Dorian very much. Of course, learning he was from Tevinter made her nervous—as such a fact makes most in the South nervous—but once she got to know him, she came to really like him. Of course, he can be a little too confrontational for her at times, but for the most part, he’s fun to be around. He’s certainly more flamboyant than her, but they both share a love for eye-catching fashion. As a very empathetic person, she could relate to being a family outcast, and took Dorian in with open and squishy arms.

Vivienne: She and Vivienne may disagree on Circle politics, but Kiora really enjoys the presence of another Circle-raised mage. They were both well-respected in the Circles, and they’re both willing to agree to disagree. They appreciate fine clothing, intricate magic, and a nice glass of red wine. Not to mention, Kiora’s cats love curling around Vivienne’s waist, and no amount of white clothing can keep those cats from cuddling a mage.

― a phobia your muse has:

Kiora’s incredibly terrified of being useless. She’s spent her entire mage-existence being used by others, and she’s been so indoctrinated into the fact the usefulness equals the right to exist, and being tossed aside because nobody needs her is a terrifying concept. Mages that weren’t useful were Tranquil. Kiora helps keep her fears at bay by not only throwing herself into situations where she could be used to help, but by making sure that she’s always taking care of her cats and making herself useful to them. Constant reaffirmation is the best way to keep her from doubting herself, whether that be through thanks, smiles, or happy little purrs.

#thank you so much for the tag!!#dragon age #dragon age inquisition #da inquisitor #kiora trevelyan #original content #i love my sweet mage daughter #so goddamn much

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justaramblingromantic · 5 years

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test drive

Characters/Pairing: Kinokuni Nene and Kuga Terunori/TeruNene

Type: Canon-divergent AU, Post-series, Passive Aggressive-verse, Roommates AU, Fake Dating AU, Freestyle

Word Count: 1856

A/N #01: Wahaha, I wanted to give some love to this rarepair, and so I did~ For additional context for this AU, see here.

“I still cannot believe that you never learned how to drive,” he was muttering in the passenger seat beside her.

“How does that even work in this day and age? Aren’t you the one who learned all the nonsense skills like artistically sticking a bunch of flowers together while stuck in the most physically uncomfortable position possible as well as five hundred and sixty different ways how to poke a man with a sharp pointy stick, but you never learned how to drive?”

She sent him a long, flat stare, irritated by his bitching. This was going to be a long, unbearable session, she could tell already.

“I never asked you to teach me in the first place so if you’re going to be like this, you can get out and I’ll ask someone else to help.”

Terunori crossed his arms before his chest and glowered at the unappreciative woman. She was seriously very uncute; sometimes he wondered why he found her oddly fascinating all the same. She was like that weird, maddening itch he couldn’t quite make go away; it was immensely aggravating at times. Luckily he knew to keep his unflattering opinion to himself, or else he would have been even more peeved to learn that she pretty much found him just as annoying, too.

“Ask someone else? Who? Your kind and considerate ex-husband?”

She continued to stare at him in a rather unimpressed manner. Everything about him was loud and flashy and unnecessarily confrontational. He was also full of swagger, capricious and temperamental; she disliked noisy, hotblooded men like that.

“You’re the cattiest little man I’ve ever met,” she announced in that aggravating, passive tone of hers, and then they were glaring daggers at each other.

“And you’re dating this catty little man so I wonder what that says about you, anesan,” he sniped back. They glared at each other some more, now both utterly cross after this mandatory daily gratuitous mashing of each other’s grumpy buttons.

“So, are we still gonna do this, or what?”

She wanted to glower at him some more, but stoically turned her gaze forward instead, recomposing herself with admirable effort and schooling her features. He was infuriating in the way that he always breached her barriers with his sheer obnoxiousness whether she wanted him to or not. All those years of self-cultivation and learning how to remain calm and tranquil from chado and calligraphy sure were coming in handy now, dealing with this childish brat.

“I’m doing it with or without you.”

“Seeing that it’s my car we’re sitting in, obviously I’m coming along for the ride. Guess that makes me a driving instructor, now.” He gestured vaguely at the dashboard and the various controls of the Maserati. “You know what all these are and what they do, right?”

She shot him a brief side glance, before slowly setting her hands on the steering wheel.

“Yes. I read the orientation booklet.”

He leaned over, reached across her, grabbed her seatbelt and clipped it on for her.

“Then you should know that the first step is to wear your seatbelt, lady.”

She continued to watch him with that uninspired poker face, her expression not changing even when she had been startled by his sudden proximity.

“…I could have done that on my own.”

He looked at her from behind his bangs and smirked a fanged, feline smirk. “And where’s the fun in that? I personally like my learning to be very hands-on.”

She finally reacted to his teasing drawl, and pinched the insides of his wrist before he could start putting his hands elsewhere. He swore and jerked back, hissing like a scalded cat.

“Ow!”

She pointed at him primly. “Keep your hands to yourself.”

He shook out his stinging appendage and scowled disgruntledly at her. This was not the first time she had warded him off like that.

“Oi, what do you think you’re doing to your driving instructor? I demand respect!”

“Perhaps this driving instructor should respectfully stop flirting and start instructing.”

“Who says that I’m flirting with you? I’m just that friendly with everyone I meet, don’t ya know?”

She caught herself almost scoffing, which amused him to no end because that was how he knew he had her.

He lounged back in his seat and put on his own seatbelt as well.

“Let’s start. Is your foot already on the brake pedal? Keep it there when you switch on the engine. Once you’re ready, release the handbrake and put your hand on the gearstick-”

His instructions were clear enough, and between the two of them, they soon managed to get the car moving.

“Hey. Don’t stamp on the accelerator like that. Don’t stomp on the brakes abruptly too, come to think of it. Your passengers, namely me, will not appreciate it.”

“Stop glancing at your feet. It’s an automatic transmission so it’s not like you need to clutch in or anything. Keep your eyes on the road. And you’re too tense. Relax.”

She had expected a lot of snarking and snideness from him, but surprisingly enough, that was not the case. He tapped the back of her hand.

“You’re listing off to one side, lady. Use your spatial awareness to correct yourself.”

She was driving very slowly, easing the vehicle forward around the empty training circuit as she got her bearings. The luxury coupe was an extremely responsive machine, which in turn made it considerably difficult for a beginner like her to control. Her nervousness grew too, having to be responsible for such an expensive car.

“Kuga.”

“Hm?”

“How angry will you be if I damage this car?”

She kept her eyes firmly peeled on the road, but she could sense him turning his head to stare at her, all the same.

“Why? Are you intending to crash us straight into a divider or something?”

“No.”

“Then it depends.”

“On?”

“How willing you’re gonna be to use your body to repay me.”

She jammed on the brakes. Thankfully, she wasn’t driving very fast in the first place and he had his seatbelt on. If not, he might have smushed face first onto the windscreen.

“Oi, what the heck?! I told you not to jump on the brakes like that!”

She glowered at him, righteously offended. “I’m not sleeping with you in exchange for driving lessons.”

He scoffed. “Who’s sleeping with who? I never asked you to do that.” He sounded almost insulted, indignant, even.

As if he needed to stoop to bargaining to trade for sexual favors. Who did she think he was? The number of exes he had was enough to line a city block!

She turned her head mechanically and stared at him. Silently demanding an explanation. She was very good at that, he was quickly realizing. Probably due to all that extreme weirdass formal etiquette training she received as a kid.

He rubbed the back of his neck, exasperated.

“My parents are flying in to spend Christmas, so I need you to do that thing you did the last time my mom came.”

Her brow silently lifted. “That thing I did? You mean, continue to pretend to be your doting girlfriend?”

He shot her an ‘are you shitting me’ look. “Really? That was you being doting back then? I sprained my wrist and you also nearly threw out my back. Please be less doting this time, I don’t think I’ll survive your tenderness, darlin’.”

She frowned at him, doing her level best to ignore his sarcastic endearment.

“You think you’re in any position to make demands?”

“I know I am. Do this for me and I’ll personally guarantee that you earn your driving license, dammit.”

Her gaze grew even sharper, from behind the warning glint of her prudish glasses. Her voice was light, cool, crisp. “What did I say about swearing, Kuga Terunori?”

For fuck’s sake, she was such a schoolmarm. Ever since she became his ad hoc housemate, he found himself involuntarily transforming into an upstanding, model citizen, much to his bewildered horror. No more swearing, no more late-night drinking and raucous partying - it was early to bed and early to rise. The apartment was fastidiously spick and span at any given time of the day, somehow he had also learned to sort the laundry by color for the first time in his life, and even the trash was neatly separated into their various categories by the time garbage collection day rolled around; what even was going on.

Coincidentally, that was also probably why his mom liked her so much.

He leaned towards her again. Bringing his face up to hers. Meeting her crimson gaze with his own catlike cognac gold ones.

“Why? Are you going to pull me out of the car and pin me to the floor again? Tsk, you really are such a violent woman, despite that demure appearance indicating otherwise.”

She was also kind of…interesting, he had to reluctantly admit. She seemed plain and passive at first glance, but there was something about that unyielding, steel backbone, that implacable resolve sitting unwaveringly firm on that elegantly aristocratic, doll-like face that was not like any other women he had met. She had also never tried to be deliberately charming or coquettish or appealing ever, and he didn’t think he had seen her attempt to make herself more palatable in order to please anyone. That quietly defiant side of her was probably her only charm point, as far as he was concerned, anyway. Other than that, she was bossy, forceful, irritating, and always had to be right. It was immensely aggravating, that righteous level of rightness she always insisted to be on.

Nene blinked, slowly. Was he trying to intimidate her?

“My actions are a direct consequence of your incredible insufferableness,” she replied with serene dignity.

She lifted one hand from the steering wheel and calmly met his forehead with her palm, pushing him back onto his seat.

“And stop breathing on me, you buffoon. I’ll agree to do as you asked, on the additional condition that you drive me wherever I need to go for the next one month.”

There was a promising ryokan that had just been listed and looking for a new buyer, but it was a bit out of the way in the mountains and she needed transport. He would be just as good as any, with the additional advantage of being incredibly business savvy and experienced to deal with this sort of transaction.

“Buff-” he spluttered in disbelief. Was that any way for anyone to ask for a favor? “Excuse me; do I look like your personal Uber chauffeur?” he demanded. “Have you any idea how busy I am with the number of restaurants I’m currently managing?”

“You’ve worryingly short legs for a chauffeur,” she retorted blandly, and just like that, his eyes flashed like those of a bull that had just caught sight of a matador’s furiously red cape. He also looked like he was seriously considering reaching over to throttle her, it was strangely amusing.

It was also almost cute, how he quickly puffed up.

“WHO ARE YOU CALLING SHORT-”

A/N #02: Anesan refers to ‘older sister,’ because technically Nene is a good five months older than Terunori, though I doubt she appreciates being addressed as such by him...which is probably why he does it to irritate her, lol. (Anesan is also apparently a common term for the yakuza to address their Boss’s wife...which is fitting considering my hc for Terunori’s family!)

Also, I always wondered why the usually levelheaded and pokerfaced Nene takes such glee in poking at Terunori about his height in canon. I like to think that she finds his reactions amusing...possibly even cute~

#Food Wars: Shokugeki no Souma #Shokugeki no Soma #Kuga Terunori #Kinokuni Nene #TeruNene #TeruNene: Passive Aggressive AU #freestyle #my fics

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happymetalgirl · 5 years

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10 MORE albums I missed in 2017

Okay, so I’m feeling like a real numskull for this one here, not for missing out on talking about these albums in the first place last year, but because I already did a piece about albums I missed last year, and somehow completely forgot to include some of the albums I’m going to talk about here. Some of these I found out about this year and am giving my belated thoughts on because I think they deserve it. But some of these... I was just sterpid, and forgot to talk about them in the post I ALREADY DID about albums I forgot to talk about.

Anyway! Here we go, ten more albums I missed in 2017.

Arckanum - Den Förstfödde

This was one of the albums that made me originally want to make the first installment of posts on albums I missed last year, but in my infinite idiocy, I somehow left it out. And since Arckanum's mastermind, Johan Lahger, has now retired the project this year to focus on his writing career, I definitely wanted to talk about his last album under the Arckanum name. The occult mystique that has overlaid Arckanum's intimidating black metal aura from the start is here on Den Förstfödde as well. And this album ends Arckanum's artistic journey with such ritualistic and meditative tranquility amid the expansive spiritual darkness it conveys, and it does so quite powerfully, with a great, well-versed blend of slow-burning grooves and dark atmospherics to wrap everything great about Arckanum up in one final dark atmosphereic swell of slightly experimental, minimal, black metal. Another addition, a final addition, to the Arckanum legacy, Den Förstfödde is a grand and fitting conclusion to the catalog of one of black metal’s truly unique contributors.

Loss - Horizonless

I had heard a fair amount of hype surrounding this debut album, but I never really got around to checking it out somehow until earlier this year. A bit more of a slow drone-y sort of doom release, Horizonless is an example of something that usually isn't my cup of tea, but ended up being pretty potent and immersive. The band do focus on the more morose and mournful side of the genre, and they show themselves to be quite adept for the most part when it comes to capturing that doom somber. It's a sufficiently long project, but one that doesn't overstay its welcome, a good starting point for the band, but I think they are going to have to do some work on their compositional approach if they're to make a more noticeable mark on doom metal in the coming years. They have the sound narrowed down, and they do show some pretty impressive writing chops on certain tracks on here. I would just love to see this band take this sound to its highest heights with compositions that lend themselves more fully to the tone the band works best with.

Vader - Dark Age

This album came out at the tail end of 2017, and even though I was desperately looking for something better to end my year's worth of discussions on than Asking Alexandria's self-titled disaster, Vader's Dark Age didn't seem like the right kind of release (a compilation album of rerecordings of songs from the band's debut album) to end the year with. Also, it came out four days before the new year, while I was working on my year-in-review lists, hardly enough time to digest the thing and present my thoughts on it. However, as I've come back to this thing a few more times throughout this year, I've found the band's modern approach to their old songs an interesting alternative album experience at least. The steadfast death metal traditionalists make predictably little effort to shake up their sound stylistically, but this album, a rarity of its type, serves as a fascinating exhibit of a close comparison of old and new, showcasing how different they sound on the production fronts, where they differ compositionally, but also how the style of old would fare in today's studios.

Venom Inc. - Avé

I don’t exactly know what kind of Queensrÿche-esque split Venom is undergone, but I can say that this Venom Inc. offshoot has brought a more ambitious and refreshingly modern set of songs to the table than what Venom have been bringing for the past however-many years now. I have seriously not paid Venom much attention since hearing some of the goofy tracks off their previous few albums and giving up most hope of Cronos trying to seriously update his band’s prototypic sound. As vibrant and gruff as Avé is, however, it’s still incredibly drawn out and mostly just a surface-level modernization of the band’s evil thrash metal sound. Still, I appreciate the effort to bring a little bit of the kind of epic bombast akin to the likes of Behemoth to this album, and if this new appendage of Venom really puts its creative head down and focuses on trimming the fat and playing to the strengths of Tony Dolan’s gruff snarls and Jeff Dunn’s knack for groovy rhythms, they can make themselves a name to continue to keep an eye out for.

Godflesh - Post Self

I'm still not sure how exactly I missed a new Godflesh album last year, but it was pretty crazy last year; I remember only hearing of a new Morbid Angel album coming down the pipes about a week or so before it's release, so I guess I'm not super surprised. But either way, it was a pretty unexpected release, somehow. Anyway, Godflesh followed up 2014's fantastic A World Lit Only by Fire with Post Self, an album that leans a little bit more on its portion of atmosheric experimental industrial pieces than its predecessor, but one that is not without its infectious, beat-driven cuts as well. Post Self is mostly the expected continuation of Godflesh’s extraordinarily flawless industrial metal legacy. The ingredients haven’t really changed all that much, but they never really have, and yet something about Godflesh’s consistency remains admirable in a way that hasn’t staled the way the singular motives and predictability of bands like Slayer, Megadeth, or AC/DC have all transformed from selling points to fans’ clamor for something different. Godflesh don’t really deviate, and it’s perhaps because they have such a dominant reign over their musical territory, and Post Self is as solid of a reinforcement of their stronghold as any. All in all though, it's as solid as any album by the mighty and reliable Godflesh, and one I wish I had gotten to sooner before it started distracting me from 2018's metal.

Artificial Brain - Infrared Horizon

The potential for a future, technologically induced apocalypse at the hands of AI seems like the perfect subject matter at the perfect time for a technical death metal project like this, and the sci-fi-minded Artificial Brain seem like just the group to make a statement on the subject. I enjoyed their Labyrinth Constellation album from 2014 for its merits as a solid, virtuosic death metal album, but I was looking for the band to expand their sound a bit more on Infrared Horizon. I don't base my critiques off what I was hoping for from a particular album, and I won't do this album that unusual unfairness here. But man did it feel like a missed opportunity, one the band luckily still has. They could have done so much more than simply spit out more instrumental prowess, which is fine and dandy by its own merits once again. But I was really hoping their expression of the celestial would involve more than the usual sustained dissonant guitar chords and their embodiment of the technological would involve more than robotic technicality. Complex drumming, dissonant guitar atmospherics, tasty slaps of unsubmissive bass, nasty snarls, deep and entirely unintelligible growls: this album has all the ingredients to make your usual techdeath chicken noodle soup. And that's kind of all the album amounts to, a slush of technical wankery. The few times the album ascends beyond techdeath's basic standards, it reveals the band's excellent writing chops and creativity, like the dynamic and bass-heavy "Static Shattering", that I wish popped up more frequently on this album. It's not bad by any techdeath standards, but it seems like this group are punching a bit below their weight, I hope. Definitely still worth the time to digest and appreciate.

Replacire - Do Not Deviate

I heard the hype around Replacire’s Do Not Deviate a little bit late (as in earlier this year), but I have not really connected with that hype. It’s an animated and dynamic progressive death metal release, but the sophomore project still has its kinks to work out, and I didn’t completely see what all the fuss was about. It’s definitely a cut above most of the techdeath crop, but I think there is definitely growth to be done upon the ground laid by this record in the small areas. The band clearly know what they’re doing when it comes to the basics of techdeath (as much of an oxymoron as that might seem to be), it’s just those few quirks to figure out and mold into an identifiably unique sound for the band. The quality playing and presentation of what Replacire are technically and imaginatively capable of does, of course, make a great case for the potential this band has, so I will be looking out for the mastery of the madness strewn about this album on their future releases.

Scour - Red

I didn't really pay Scour much attention when their first EP, Grey, dropped in 2016, mostly because the thought of Phil Anselmo trying his hand at black metal seemed kind of goofy and like something that wouldn't end well. I thought this project would fizzle away not long after this second EP, but that was entirely me judging the book by its cover. One day earlier this year I figured that since they were just EPs I'd check 'em out, why the hell not? And I was pleasantly surprised with both. It's not the most groundbreaking black metal around, but it's hardly the amateurish embarrassment I thought it would be. Even though the black metal vocal style Phil employs on here isn't nearly as technical as his usual melodic gruffness or even other black metal vocal styles, his continued exploration of different techniques at his age continues to impress me. And he still manages to maintain his unique tone and tambre while implementing these new styles. As for how it compares to their first EP, Red is rather stylistically similar and similarly compositionally consistent, but it finds them seemingly more confident on all fronts: Phil with his improved black metal screams, his integration of his lower register growls, and the well-versed band (comprised of members of Pig Destroyer and former Cattle Decapitation bassist, Derek Engeman, who brings that band's guitar style all across the two records as a highlight feature) with their more confident writing and bolder instrumental performances. This EP and the last both possibly benefit from the potential hiding of any major compositional incompetence in the consistently short run times of the twelve tracks between them, but Scour's channeling of the sardonic, nihilistic side of black metal with compelling conviction across these tracks is respectable at the very least. Scour is no novelty side project and far more than just a curious experiment for Phil. The group has the chops to justify their entrance into the readily scornful territory of black metal. Perhaps these short, small releases mark the extent of their creativity, but perhaps not. I'm very curious now as to where this project will go from here and what they might put forth on a full-length.

Amenra - Mass VI

I have stated don't like when bands name albums based on how many albums they have, but I should probably clarify that it doesn't bug me as much when it plays a clear role in their artistic intention as opposed to a lazy showboat of "look how many albums we've made". I don't mind Amenra's numbering of their albums as "masses" because they clearly put effort into embodying a metallic version of that traditional Catholic ritual (even if it's not as true to an integration of those traditional musical elements as Batushka are). Mass VI is perhaps the culmination of the band's work up until this point, with a steady improvement on their sludgy post-metal sound showing signs of crystalizing here on this record. It's not a particularly long album, but it does what it needs to in the time it has, and that is to set and maintain an atmosphere. Amenra do well to capture a sense of liturgical ambiance amid the clashes of sounds they play with across Mass VI, and they do well to expand on them beyond the simple fundamentals of post-metal mood-setting with some truly dynamic shifts between somber, sweetly sung ambiance and soulful crescendos of guitar distortion.

Heresiarch - Death Ordinance

This album is one I found out about this year, completely randomly. I was in a record store and I stumbled upon the band's EP, Hammer of Intransigence. I had never heard it and it was relatively cheap so I just went for it. I then went to find the rest of the band's catalog and found that they had released their first LP last year, Death Ordinance. The lesson from this I suppose is that I'm sure as long as I'm around, I will never find or cover everything I like from a certain year in that year. There will always be stuff I go back and find that I wish I would have known about earlier. As thorough as I am being this year, I'm sure I'll look back and find something I missed, possibly a favorite new artist I didn't even hear of this year. And that to me is wonderful, I'm so glad there is so much metal out there to find and enjoy through this constantly exciting musical journey. Death Ordinance is a meager, but solid enough gruff death metal project that focuses on drawn out sections of low-register guitar groove and bellowing growls to carry its dismal moods. I think the band will need to work on the arrangement of those grooves into more intentional structures on long-form projects like this going forward, but it's a decent enough start.

And that's it for albums I missed in 2017. I'm sure there's still plenty out there that I just have not heard that I am missing that I would love to not be missing, but for now, this is it.

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ofoatd · 6 years

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Spring Playlist 2018

Harry Styles' daily dose of 'Medicine', Panic! At The Disco's every cloud having a 'Silver Lining' and Palaye Royal's an apple a day keeps the 'Mr. Doctor Man' away. Spring has mildly sprung, commencing an new era for Mr Malik with Zayn zoning himself in an epoch separate to his 'Mind Of Mine' moments and One Direction history, signalling the start of something new with the 'Pillowtalk' pioneer posting a powerful, greedy, loyalty yet vengeance film style video ending with a date induced cliffhanger beginning on 04.12.18. With spring shaping up to be a season of sensations coming from Aussie ensemble 5 Seconds of Summer's 'Want You Back' and Brit band Arctic Monkeys 'Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino', as well as some individually curated playlists showcasing a plethora of stellar songs evoked from new releases, attended gigs or simply derived from nostalgic value.

‘Medicine’ – Harry Styles

Styles is feeling super love sick and has therefore been prescribed with a medical medium of music to cure his aggressively hedonistic wants, needs and requirements. Banished in black from his fingers to his toes as Styles shimmered under the stage in Switzerland, a delightful double debut of non-studio songs shone from Harry's low tones yet fitful range as the 'Harry Styles' self titled record rejects 'Anna' and 'Medicine' lavishly launched. Whilst 'Anna' is a sample of moderately melodious riffs compared to the rough and ready specimen of 'Medicine' which explores Styles' sensual side, evoking lyrical content in its wake of a "Tingle running through my bones/The boys and girls are in/I mess around with him/And I'm okay with it" that left fans in a frenzy. With these words demonstrating limitless lyrics and a there's no holding the Styles back approach to his solo songwriting style.

‘Mr. Doctor Man’ – Palaye Royale

Headlining the front cover of Alternative Press magazine, and Payale Royal’s decade long exersion has made them music magnates. From Palaye moulding their personified personalities into true artistic value with meticulously designed merchandise aligning with the bands vivid image and independent appearance, producing products such as the popular Palette Royale as well as their distinct art rock repertoire introducing the triple collective's commencing 2012 single 'Morning Light' to their rated 2015 record 'Boom Boom Room'. 'Mr. Doctor Man' the leading hit that hoisted the Sumerian signed entity into song success upon its release in Spring 16, reveals deathly lyrics, riveting instrumentals and a voice of indisputable distressful tones by potato enthusiast Remington Leith that carries the bands indie glam sound and avant-garde style onto the imminent 'Boom Boom Room' (Side B) anticipated for emancipation next month.

'Silver Lining' - Panic! At The Disco

Struck by a slither of a silver lining and after a rocky road, Panic! At The Disco are finally coming up cherries on top. Revamping Urie's one man band backing with touring musician members Kenneth Harris on the guitar and Dan Pawlovich on the drums, the band hit the big time bagging the instrumentally reputable Nicole Row to fill in the gaping gap of a bassist with upmost pleasantness. Releasing 'Silver Lining' as a single alongside its action packed attached 'Say Amen (Saturday Night' nostalgic religious number and prequel and sequel video its big, bold, brass, marching band style and feel good substance provide a sense of 'Nine In The Afternoon' instrumentals meets 'Death Of A Bachelor' artistic influences to produce a friendship of Beyoncé name dropping, 70's swear word inspired song vocabulary and vocalising his step up as a vocalist, with Brendon Urie's skilful singing by using the analogy of cutting his teeth to end up making a killing with the Panic! At The Disco spiel.

‘Church’ – Fall Out Boy

Whilst not every diehard fan of Fall Out Boy was confessing their love for 'Church', the odd regeneration of rooters were on their knee's worshiping the music work. Despite 'M A N I A' feeling like we were all just sitting in the waiting room for it's delayed Winters date of release, the forth visual instalment to come out of the record brought Montague and Capulet mannered imagery, contexts correlating to religious relations and themes of Gospel sounds, digged up and derived from Island Record's export 'This Ain't A Scene, It's An Arms Race' made a genre resurgence in a current rendition. A choir of voices to vocalise a heavily orotund orientated chorus, overlapping 'Soul Punk' man Stumps prominent singing delivery alongside a verse of tuneful bass hooks and the chiming of brash bells visually represented a kirk's atmosphere and importantly a place of devotion.

‘Nobody Likes The Opening Band’ – I DON’T KNOW HOW BUT THEY FOUND ME

Local community talent shows, circa mid-1983 and uncovered tapes pre 20th century. I DON'T KNOW HOW BUT THEY FOUND ME have built a band brand that brandishes a cleaver curated era of evoking 80's sounds, from the duo's supposed failed attempt at success in synth-pop scenes and art-pop areas during the decade of the Pet Shop Boys. with the ensembles efforts being brushed off and brought to life by the internets influence that the first world is welcoming warmingly being backed by a following of fans in their tens of thousands. Marketed as terminated ex Panic! At The Disco's touring bassist Dallon Weekes once and future project pre and post The Brobecks, with Weekes and Seaman's super small selection of songs from the a-ha affiliated 'Take On Me' attributes in 'Modern Day Cain', grandiloquent sounds of 'Choke' and the candidly newfangled 'Nobody Likes The Opening Band'. Singing of the struggles of being a support act at a show, Dallon's deliberately dull tones depict a sensible tale of negative contexts "Come and see the opening band/Now that you've got your tickets and beverages in hand/They look so tired/Sound uninspired/Guitars are secondhand" prevailing with a positive conundrum "But if you lend an ear and give them just one little chance/You may just like the opening band" makes for a song of sincerity and a soul spilling story.

'Nomad' - In Loving Memory

Death and doom metal meets Panic! At The Disco's artwork of rainbow coloured chemicals from 'Too Weird To Live Too Rare To Die'. 'Introspective' track 'Nomad' is a nostalgic brining together of instrumental and vocal pickings from Bring Me The Horizon's 2008 'Chelsea Smile' and Pierce The Veil's 2012 'King for a Day' under In Loving Memory's own umbrella. 2 EP's in and the New York City capacity have established experimental styles, showcased through a stretch of 'Vans Warped Tour' stints following up a headlining tour titled 'Black Sheep Never Sleep'. Yet song 'Normad' is a backed by a band of solid shredding guitars and wholesome words of warm cordial lyrics, heavily highlighted by the voracious voice of Naveed Stone's fearless tones.

Listen to this Spring Playlist 2018 here:

Spring Playlist 2018

(All photographic content curtesy of Erskine/Columbia/Sumerian Records/Fueled By Ramen/DCD2/Island/DCD2/Fearless/None You Jerk/Bad Moon Man Music

#harry styles #medicine #palaye royale #mr doctor man #panic at the disco #silver lining #fall out boy #church #i dont know how but they found me #nobody likes the opening band #nomad #in loving memory #playlist #music

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neverisalongtime-ja-blog · 6 years

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(Final) Chapter 46: Never is a long time

I have so many things to say in this last post. First of all I want to thank everyone who read the fic and supported it and also followed Anastasia's Instagram. This experience has allowed me to meet so many amazing people around the world and I'll be forever grateful for your friendship during this time. I hope we can all keep in touch. I'm extra proud of myself for finishing this. To be honest with you, there were times when I thought couldn't do it, sometimes I didn't want to, but now I'm happy I did.

It's been a wild year since I started to write this story and my life did a 180° turn since last January when I wrote those first lines after reading another amazing fanfic (Be My Getaway), at that moment I was so alone in life and so depressed that writing this was a light in my dark day to day.

Thank you again, I never expected all the success, even if nobody read it I'm so happy I did this. Life is better now and it's just starting, and I'll keep writing, and I'll continue writing about Anastasia and I hope we can all gather around that story too.

I wanna give special thanks to Adriana for helping me with my grammar, y'all know English is not my first language, to Eva (my new roommate, who would have thought?) for the support and for being JoshAn's number one fan, and to Mai for the love.

And to you for being here with me till the end.

Thank you again, I love you all.

Back in California, Anastasia didn’t have a lot of time to think about Josh’s last unfortunate behavior. The fact that he let her down so many times now was enough for her to stop caring about it, but she couldn’t and she knew it. Now the fact that she still loved Josh as hard as she loved him a year ago didn’t leave her mind. But work was calling and Dead Curse’s new single was all about him, about Josh. “How appropriate”, she though ironically while she was inside a black van on the way to perform on “Jimmy Kimmel Live!”, a popular talk show on US television.

Jimmy knew Barbara for a long time and, of course, he knew Anastasia as well. After a warm and friendly welcome, An and Mandy did a short interview and then it was time to perform.

“Crossfire” was the name of the song and the rhythm was slow. She never planned to make it a single but the rest of the band was very enthusiastic about it and, as a democracy, they voted it to be the third single from Live Action.

There’s still in the street outside your window

You’re keeping secrets on your pillow

Let me inside, no cause for alarm

I promise tonight not to do no harm

I promise you babe, I won’t be no harm

And we’re caught up in the crossfire

Of heaven and hell

And we’re searching for shelter

Lay your body down

Watching you dress as you turn on the light

I forget all about the storm outside

Dark clouds roll their way over town

Heartache and pain came pouring down like chaos in the rain

They’re heading it out

And we’re caught up in the crossfire

Of heaven and hell

And we’re searching for shelter

Lay your body down

Tell the devil that he can go back from where he came

His fiery arrows drew their beat in vein

And when the hardest part is over we’ll be here

And our dreams will break the boundaries of our fears

Lay your body down

Next to mine

Josh’s POV

He was speechless. Josh always had certain envy towards the way Anastasia could put the deepest feelings into such melodic songs and that one, the verses he just heard her sing, were about him. He just knew it. Nobody had to tell him. She loved him and yet he let her down. She even told him she would leave it all for him and positive words couldn’t make their way out of his mouth.

There she was, on that screen, singing about him on national television, wearing a short, loose dark blue dress as the one she wore on their first date in New York, even her lips were red like the. It all brought him back to that night and all the amazing nights that followed. How could he? Josh never watched TV, unless it was sports, but Eric told him that Dead Curse would perform at Jimmy Kimmel and something inside of him pushed him to watch it. He didn’t regret it.

By then Josh was single again. Lauren ended up being tired of him not wanted to do anything “fun” with her, that and maybe the five times he called her “Anastasia” by accident –Two during sex. In the end she left him. He didn’t care about it that much, he just let her go and didn’t even try to reach her out again. It didn’t matter; no other woman mattered at the moment for him but Anastasia. A true treasure he let go, he let her space from his arms too many times. And now it was going to be harder than ever. She was with Richard the last time they were together and she, unexpectedly but magically, told him she would “leave it all” for him. But he shattered any opportunity, choosing fear again. How he loved to hear her say that to him, but enough was enough and he thought this time she wasn’t coming back. Life would go on but without her and it wasn’t going to be even half good.

Josh got up from the sofa and walked to the front door of his house. There he had a small table with some mail he hadn’t checked yet, he went through the envelopes until a very fancy one caught his attention. He opened it to discover the invitation to Mandy’s wedding.

Josh held the card in his hands for minutes and hesitated attending the wedding. On the one hand, Mandy became a great friend and many of his own friends were going to be there, but Anastasia would be an obvious presence and he didn't know if he could face her after what happened at Mark's wedding.

Anastasia’s POV

- I hope you aren't disappointed with your bachelorette party - Anastasia told Mandy while both were flying on a private jet.

- Are you insane? You know how much I wanted to visit Tulum! - Mandy said showing real excitement sitting in front of her blue haired friend.

- Yeah, but it's just us travelling. I thought you wanted a big party with a lot of people.

- An, my wedding will be a big party with a lot of people, this is just what I need right now. It all has been so stressful. I need to relax and you need tranquility too... Have you talked to Richard?

Richard... The topic Anastasia was expecting to surface but didn't want to talk about. Anastasia broke up with Richard a week before. She realized how much she still loved Josh and it wasn't fair for Richard, she was with him but thinking about Josh all the time. Richard was such a great boyfriend, loving and supportive that he didn’t deserve that, what she felt for Richard was more admiration than anything else, it was a platonic love but not a real one. The guy was devastated and Anastasia still felt bad about it.

- He actually thought we would be together forever and I thought so too, but I just couldn’t stop thinking about Josh. I truly love him, Mandy, but he will never be ready - Anastasia said.

- So you’ll just avoid love until Josh is ready? - Mandy asked.

- I'm not avoiding love - Anastasia answered - I'm waiting for it because I know Josh is my true love. - Mandy left her seat to hug Anastasia, sitting on her lap.

- I swear, underneath all that hard shell there is this super romantic, cheesy and ridiculous Anastasia that I love - Mandy said smiling.

- I'm gonna reply to that saying that we need to start with the champagne - Anastasia smiled too while Mandy took her seat again and her blue haired friend went for a bottle of champagne.

Tulum was a beautiful beach location in Mexico. Mandy had wanted to go for the longest time, so Anastasia thought it was the perfect place for a bachelorette party. She didn't have enough time to plan the whole thing ahead so there was just the two of then enjoying a best friend's weekend.

And so they did. They arrived on Saturday morning and had a large breakfast with every fruit they could possibly imagine, then they hit the beach until the afternoon. Tulum was an amazing place to find gorgeous handcraft items and both friends shopped until nighttime.

It was time for dinner. An made reservations in a very exclusive restaurant at the shore, it had a balcony and they could see and hear the waves hitting the sand.

- I don't know if this is my bachelorette party or my honeymoon - Mandy said laughing.

- Maybe this will make you fit more into the bachelorette mood - A waiter approached them with two Margaritas.

- This fits into the Mandy mood - They clinked glasses and cheered but Mandy didn't drink - I can't believe you are actually sending us to Fiji.

- It’s where you wanted to go and I told you I'd take care of the honeymoon.

- Yeah, but you are so good to me!

- Mandy, you are my best friend. You have to deal with me everyday, this is the least I could do for you. I love you. I want you to be happy and this is what best friends do.

- So I have to start planning your honeymoon in Mykonos for when you marry Josh - Anastasia smiled, how well that pink haired girl knew her.

- I'm probably more excited than you about your wedding - Anastasia said changing the subject.

- I'm excited but this is just a step. My relationship with Peyton isn't gonna change because of it.

- Why aren't you drinking your Margarita? - Anastasia asked noticing Mandy hadn't taken a sip of it yet.

- I am - Mandy answered laughing and not touching the glass.

- Of course not, and you didn't drink champagne on the plane either! - Anastasia told her friend with a suspicious look.

- You don't miss a thing, do ya? - Mandy was still laughing.

- Oh my God, Mandy! - Anastasia screamed realizing the whole thing.

- You can't tell anybody. Nobody knows. I'm going to announce it at the wedding. Only Peyton knows about it. - Mandy said with a huge smile on her face.

- You really are pregnant? - Anastasia asked and Mandy just nodded - I'm fainting, for real. I'm gonna be an aunt again! How far along are you?

- Five weeks, kinda - Mandy said - I'm very regular with my periods and I just missed one and I knew it, Peyton went with me to the doctor and the test was positive. He cried, I freaked out.

- I'm freaking out!

- Not even mom knows about it. Neither does Nick. I'm going to announce it at the wedding and it fucking sucks I can't drink on my own wedding - Mandy stopped when she saw tears in Anastasia's face - Are you crying?

- Yes. I love you so much. This is perfect.

Mandy got up from her chair and went to hug her friend.

- This baby is keeping me from drinking but I can still eat so let's eat everything! - Mandy said smiling with Anastasia.

- Isn’t Mexican food too strong for the baby?

- Well, it’ll have to step it up if it wants to come to this world?

- “It”? - Anastasia was laughing.

- We don't know if it's a girl or a boy so we call it "It". It looks like an alien, a penny sized alien. Are you nervous to see Josh at the wedding? - Mandy threw the words without warning.

- Again with the Josh thing? - Anastasia said - I'm always nervous when I’m about to see him. Even after he dumped me after having the best sex of his life. How are you so sure he will be at the wedding?

- Oh, come on! How is he going to miss it?

- Anyway, if he goes I'm sure he is going with Lauren.

- Darling, Lauren is in the past.

- How come?

- Lauren broke up with Josh because he was "too boring" for her.

- God! Poor Josh!

- Nah! Josh was good with it.

- How do you know everything about it?

- Nick likes to gossip - Mandy said with total calm and that made Anastasia burst with laugh - He does! He is the gossipy aunt.

- Shut up! - She was really happy that Josh was single again; it was like a never ending feeling of hope. - I don't know why I'm glad about it.

- Because you want him...

- I can't believe you are pregnant! Cheers to that! - Anastasia said raising her Margarita glass and drinking from it, ignoring the Josh issue and changing the conversation topic.

On Mandy’s wedding day, Anastasia woke up very early at Barbara's place. The first rays of sunlight made their way through the curtains which made her regret drinking so much the night before. It was hard to get out of bed but she did, took a shower, grabbed a pair of jeans and a t-shirt with a pair of sneakers and went downstairs where Barbara was feeding the twins.

- I just had a dejà-vu - She said looking at her big sister.

- Are you going to the venue? - Barbara asked.

- Yes. I'm pretty sure Mandy didn't sleep at all - the blue haired girl answered.

- I will get ready here, wait for the babysitter Anthony is gonna bring and then I’ll leave for the mansion.

- Okay! - An gave Barbara a kiss on the cheek, and one to each twin - See ya later! I love you! - She said walking out the door.

Mandy was going to get married at Malibu. She and Peyton rented a huge and beautiful mansion overlooking a cliff from where you could see all the seashore. They would have the ceremony there, the place also had access to a private beach.

Anastasia drove there to find a huge amount of people setting everything up and decorating. There was pink and blue flowers everywhere, the colors were because their friendship - Peyton didn't really care about it - and shiny, sparkly things all over the place, crystals, glitter, everything.

She walked upstairs to the main bedroom which was set up with a huge makeup and hair station.

- I'm about to throw up - Mandy was lying in a giant bed.

- Don't be so overdramatic - Anastasia jumped next to her - It should be one of the happiest days of your life, relax!

- No, I actually have morning sickness - Mandy said.

- Oh, fuck!

- Richard sent me a huge, beautiful flower arrangement - Mandy said.

- Really? - Anastasia wasn't expecting that but it showed her how good of a gentleman Richard was.

- And a Congratulations card.

- Now I feel bad - Anastasia said- Richard was so good to me. What if he was the one and I let him slip away?

- No, he wasn't. Your one is gonna be here tonight.

- It’s time to go - Anastasia got up from the bed – Is there any food downstairs? I'm starving.

- You’re kidding, right? There's food like for an army! Let's go!

After eating some delicious buns with cheese and garlic the chef was making, the girls started to get ready. Hannah was the other bridesmaid and Mandy's mom was there too to get her hair and makeup done.

When it was time to see Mandy with her wedding dress, nobody could hold back the tears.

- You don't even know why you’re crying! -Mandy laughed.

- Because you look beautiful! - Mandy's mom said.

- I look beautiful all the time and I have never seen you crying about it! - She was still laughing.

Mandy's pink hair had 50’s vibe waves, and her dress was strapless with handmade embroidered appliqué. Makeup was natural. She looked beautiful. The shoes were blue and you could read “Wifey for life” on the soles. The veil was a showstopper, it had more embroidered ornaments, including two blue birds carrying a ribbon from where you could read “And they lived happily ever after”.

Anastasia, on the other hand, wore a pale pink dress with a deep cleavage and embroidered stars all over, her midnight blue hair was up in a messy bun.

The walk to the aisle was the weirdest thing An ever did. She was accompanied by the best man, Peyton's childhood friend from Colorado. All the eyes were on Mandy when it was her turn to make appear on the set of the ceremony. The last light of the day painted the sky and her pink hair was shining. Anastasia saw Peyton's jaw dropping to the floor.

An also gave a look to the assistants; she saw Chad, Flea and Anthony next to Barbara, Nick - her father, who always saw Mandy as another daughter- Mark and Steph. She also saw Eric, Nick and Jonathan. She saw many of their high school friends, some musician friends and then there he was, sitting on the fifth row, behind Anthony. His hair was straightened and he was wearing a tux in his right size. Next to him was his sister Kelly and some guys from The Getaway tour, they made a lot of friends there. Josh’s eyes were completely on Anastasia, he wasn't hiding it. She smiled and waved, he smiled and waved back. And there she was again, looking at the true love of his life.

The ceremony was longer than expected so when the Minister said the phrase “You may kiss the bride” it was a relief for everyone. It was time to party. Anastasia talked to almost everyone in the party. She danced with Mandy and with Nick, announced a huge surprise for the bride: she managed to get the Backstreet Boys to perform, Mandy's favorite childhood band, and then –as in a wedding full of musicians– some guests grabbed instruments and put together an improvised band, Chad and Mark among the members. Of course, they played every cover people requested.

It was so much fun. Anastasia wasn't avoiding Josh but maybe he was because they didn't cross paths in the entire evening. At one moment Mandy decided to pick up the microphone to say some things.

- Hello everyone! - She was so happy - Y'all know how I don't like to be on a stage - she said sarcastically and everyone laughed - and thank God I have one on my own wedding. I wanna thank everyone for being here and celebrating this obvious step of our relationship after eight years together. I couldn't imagine sharing my life with anybody else and I'm so lucky I found true love so early in life and without the hard work that it implies - She looked at Peyton who was next to her- But we are not only celebrating our wedding today - Anastasia smiled wide and looked at Nick because she wanted to see his face, he was going to be so excited to be an uncle - but also the begging of our family and I want to inform all that if I treated you like trash and screamed you during this weeks is because I have a baby in my belly and you are going to have to deal with that for another eight months.

Nick's jaw fell to the floor and Mandy's mom started to cry. Everyone was so happy for them and ran to hug them and congratulate them. Anastasia saw the perfect opportunity to step out and walked downstairs to the private beach the Mansion had. The moonshine reflected on the water and it made it look like glitter. She started to think about everything that just happened and how unlikely it would be to happen to her. Her heart was Josh's and she couldn't carry a child inside her; she started to cry thinking that something was always going to be missing from her life.

She looked at the shore and cried, like she hadn’t cried in a long time. She looked at the sky and back to the horizon, then she felt a pair of arms around her.

- I'm sorry to be crying at your wedding- she said turning herself thinking it was Mandy but no, it was Josh. She was so shocked the tears stopped running.

- Weddings can get a bit emotional, especially when the bride's pregnant - Josh said hugging her. She felt such relieve with those arms around her that she hugged him too. It was always the same, Josh breaks her heart and then appears giving her love and she forgot about the past.

- Yeah. A thing that will not happen to me - She said.

- Being pregnant at your wedding? - Josh said smiling, Anastasia melted watching him doing that - It can happen if you plan it.

- Being pregnant in general.

- How come? - Josh looked at her without breaking the hug and she remembered that she never told Josh she wasn't fertile, now she had to.

- I never told you this, because I don't really talk about it, but my reproductive system doesn’t work well and I'm not fertile, I can't be a mother - surprisingly for her, Josh hugged her tightly and then carry her to sit in the sand.

- You can be a mother, there's some other ways, adoption or even a surrogate.

- Would you like that the woman you marry can't carry your own child inside of her?

- It’s the 21st century, I can live with that. It will be our child no matter what - Those words went straight into Anastasia's heart.

- You need to stop being so damn perfect - Josh smiled.

- I'm not. You are and yet I'm always letting you go - Anastasia just shrugged - I don't want to give you the same speech I'm always giving you, how many times can I be sorry about my behavior towards you? - Anastasia opened her mouth to speak but Josh shut her up - Let me do the talking this time. When I heard about your break up with Richard I told myself that this was the time, it was it, no more fear, no more delays, I want you and I want you now. I love you, Anastasia, and I was always sure of that and part of not being able to be with you was my fear of losing you. But I lost you so many times I decided I'm not going to be afraid of the future, I just want to enjoy the rest of my days with you next to me. I want to wake up and see you, I want to sleep with you in my arms, I want to be with you and adopt a child together. I'm ready, I'm not afraid anymore.

Anastasia was speechless, what could she possibly say? Her dream was finally coming true and Josh was all there for her, she couldn't believe it.

- I know it’s going to be hard for you to believe I'm not gonna run away again - He continued talking - And I can't ask you to believe me, I'm just going to show you. Let me show you.

An kissed him. She couldn't resist it. As much as her dress let her, she jumped over him and kissed him, long and deep kisses. She felt little smiles in his face between kisses and that made her smile too; both started to laugh and stopped the kissing session to look at each other.

- How did you know I was here? - She asked.

- Before the wedding started I took a walk around, I found this access to the beach and thought it was a great place to escape from people for a moment. I was looking for you at the party and couldn't find you so I just knew you were here - They were so alike.

- I love you, Josh. I never stopped loving you and I never will. You are my other half and even if you run away I know you are going to make your way back to my arms and I'll be here, waiting for you because there's no other man I want by my side - she started to cry and Josh wiped the tears from her cheeks with his long fingers, then hugged her again.

- You know? I keep the book you gave me at Christmas on a shelf in my room and I look at it every night before sleep and every morning when I wake up to make sure I never forget you - Anastasia gave him a short kiss this time.

Both got up and Anastasia tried to clean her dress, it was all covered in sand, Josh helped her as both laughed.

- I know you maybe don't want a big wedding or don't want a wedding at all - He knew her so well - But would you accept being with me the rest of our days on Earth?

- I really thought I would never hear those words from your mouth - She said.

- Well, never is a long time - Anastasia smiled at him for quoting his own songs - but it happens in the end.

- I don't know what's going to happen in a year, five or forty, I'm just sure that I want to see your face, and hug your body and kiss your lips until I die.

Josh kissed her again, a deep kiss, a meaningful one, this wasn't a death kiss, it was a forever kiss.

#Josh Klinghoffer #JoshKlinghoffer #Josh Klinghoffer fanfic #Josh Klinghoffer fanfiction #fanfic #fan fic #fanfiction #fan fiction #Klinghoffer #Red Hote Chili Peppers #redhotchilipeppers #rhcp #JoshAn #never is a long time

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thefatfeministwitch · 6 years

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Monday’s Witch is tranquil and white Tuesday’s Witch wields fire and might Wednesday’s Witch is wacky but wise Thursday’s Witch keeps their eye on the prize Friday’s Witch mixes coconut and lime Saturday’s Witch can bend space and time but the Witch who works on Sunna’s day will always bring bright blessings their way

Everyday, as you’re getting ready to leave for work or hit the town with your friends or look for that perfect new job, you take stock of the general vibe of the day so you know how to approach it. You stick your head out the window to check the weather, notice how quick the second hand on your clock is moving, and try to read the dispositions of those you meet on the street. Every day has it’s own energy and when you walk out the door in the morning (or the afternoon, no judgements!) as a good little witch, it’s best to have your magickal arsenal backing you up!

The word “correspondences” doesn’t sound hella interesting or witchy, so don’t think of this as a post about magickal daily correspondences, think of this as your witchy weather report for the days of the week! Much like a daily horoscope (like the ones from Broadly, which I LOVE and check religiously), these daily bits of astrological magick will tell you the kind of spells to focus on, colours to wear and use, witchy tools to wield, or just in general how to be the best witch you can be that day. When you combine this daily witchery with things like moon phases, current astrolgoical phases, and the season you’re in with your own witchy intuition you have a fully fledged magical almanac.

One of my favourite things about daily magick is that it helps break up ruts and monotonous magical slumps. It gets you thinking magickally every day and gives you small things to focus on. Over time this builds into a great daily practice. You don’t have to be an expert, you don’t have to write your own horoscope or even be fully versed in astrology. I’m not! Every day and once a month I read a hororscope from Broadly, I get weekly and monthly astrology reports from Georgia Nicols in my inbox, and I love the Hoodwitch’s weekly witch tips. When we move into astrological seasons I trust other astrologers to give me the highlights, and the same with the astrological signs of the moon. I use that info from those brilliant people, with my own witchy knowledge of daily magick to give myself daily witchy forecasts so I have a head start on the day. I use a magickal day planner to keep it all in and make it look pretty and colourful so I can start the day off right. (OK SO YEAH I’M AN OFFICE SUPPLY NERD, OK??) This week I’ll be posting about the energy of the day every morning so you can start your day off right and maybe do a little magick.

Thursday

Planet: Jupiter

Planetary Symbol: ♃ Jupiter’s thunderbolt, or the letter zeta or Z for Zeus, the Greek god analogous to Jupiter

Element: Earth

Colours: Green, rich purple, brown, gold, royal colours

Stones & Metals: Tin; turquoise, bloodstone, jade, citrine, petrified wood, tree agate, aragonite

Incenses, Herbs & Oils: Clove, Sage, Patchouli, Nutmeg, Cinnamon, Oak

Tarot Cards: Ace, Nine, and Ten of Pentacles

The name Thursday comes from the Norse god Thor (Thor’s Day!) and before that was associated with Jupiter. Gods of thunder both. It’s a strong day of prosperity, wealth, stability, and abundance.

Thursday’s earth energy is best expressed, I think, through deep and earth smells and herbs like sage and patchouli. Patchouli is associated with wealth and luxury, as well as love and lust. It smells a lot like fresh and wet earth (yes, DIRT) and is very deep and full. Sage is grounding and keeps the energy of your home running smoothly and effectively. It also cleanses your space, and invites good spirits in. Clove, Nutmeg and Cinnamon are said to bring wealth and good luck into the home. Finally, the mighty oak tree is the ultimate symbols of stability and the earth element. Carrying acorns is said to bring good fortune, and to ensure a long life. Placing an acorn in a windowsill lets the gods of thunder and lightning know you’re thinking of them, and protects your home from lightning strikes.

My tree agate and aragonite

As an earth day, Thursday is an especially good time to wear or work with the magic of stones. Turquoise is a stone of wealth, luxury, and protection from negativity. That’s what makes it such popular stone for jewellery. It’s also the birth stone for Capricorn, which is the strongest earth sign in the zodiac and is associated with confidence, efficiency and hard work. Bloodstone is a stone of both earth and fire, it attracts wealth and business which also providing a strong foundation on which to grow success. Jade has long been associated with wealth and luck, and is a popular stone in Chinese businesses and jewellery for this reason. Tree agate, like all other agates, is pretty easy to find and a lot of people seem to gloss over it, but it’s an awesomely earthy crystal that I keep on my desk at all time. It’s a quiet and gentle crystal that helps connect you to the earth and keep you balanced and focused. It’s also a good working stone for those involved with activist causes, especially if they are earth and nature related. Finally, it clears energy blockages between you and the earth and invites in abundance and prosperity.

Types of Thursday Magick: attracting money and wealth, grounding, spells for good health and a long life, fertility, anything to do with home and hearth, leadership, spells for success in business or in life, magickal work to help you discover your life’s purpose, helping legal matters,

Tarot of the Zirkus Magi

The World Spirit Tarot

Tarot: No surprise, all the tarot cards associated with Thursday are from the earth suit of pentacles. Pentacles is also the suit of abundance, work and physical things. The Ace of Pentacles is about building a solid foundation for success and stability in life. Meditate on it at the beginning of the day before starting out to work. The Nine of Pentacles reminds you that after you work hard, you deserve to relax and soak it in. It’s easy to get lost in work, use the Nine of Pentacles to remind yourself to be proud of your accomplishments. The Ten is the card of ultimate satisfaction in all things of this earth – home, family, work, wealth, and emotional well-being. Use this card as a focus tool to help you complete your goals.

Dress for magickal success: Today is a day for earth tones and stones that make you feel like you’ve got this. Think of and exemplify luxury – fabrics like silk and accessories that make it look like you’ve already arrived. A professional, tailored look is perfect for Thursdays, and try to include jewellery with a high price tag, or that represents success and wholeness like family heirlooms, class rings, pins that show off accomplishments.

Whenever I teach a class on daily magick I like to start by asking everyone to guess what they think the general vibe of each day is based on what usually goes on in their own lives, and thursday is always a day of money or productivity or getting stuff done and you know why? It’s pay day! It’s also right before the end of the week for a lot of people so there is a mad dash to do their best before the weekend. You may already feel a surge of work ethic, or spend your day paying bills and making sure your finances are where they should be, which is perfect. It’s also a great day to do some magick to attract money, especially if you have the weekend off and have plans or expenses coming. Light a candle, make some green rice or a money mojo bag and get out in the world. I like to go to the bank/credit union (or somewhere else that symbolizes money) and either collect a little dirt or even leave a little something shiny to keep good financial luck flowing.

TOMORROW’S DATE NIGHT, WITCHES!

Some of my favourite sources of daily magick:

Magical Fashionista by Tess Whitehurst

The Book of Witchery by Ellen Dugan

Coloring Book of Shadows Planners by Amy Cesari

The Witch’s Almanac by Weiser Books

Llewellyn’s Witches Companion and Datebooks

Plus the online sources listed above! Where do you get your daily magical advice?

Witchy Weather Report: Thursday’s Witch Monday's Witch is tranquil and white Tuesday's Witch wields fire and might Wednesday's Witch is wacky but wise…

#Abundance #daily correspondences #daily magic #daily magick #magick #Money Magick #Prosperity #thursday #witch aesthetic #Witchcraft #witchcraft 101 #witchy weather report

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theemmataylor · 7 years

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A Frozen Medley || Sebastian, Gaston, Emma, Evelyn, Alaric, and the Mikaelson brothers.

So. I’m only posting part one publicly and will include links here for the other FIFTEEN parts, that way I’m not spamming dashes and so that things can actually be navigable. But this is one of my all time favorite verses written with @familyispower / @bourbonandbrushes / @gastonlefevre / @theveritasi. And I don’t think I will ever get enough of it, honestly.

I | II | III | IV | V | VI | VII | VIII | IX | X | XI | XII | XIII | XIV | XV | XVI

There wasn't much but a bar, a hotel built from trailers, and a road in the tiny little Canadian town that would serve as the crew's jumping off point for their polar bear adventure, so it wasn't hard for the hotel clerk to find the crew enjoying one last night of warmth and leisure in the bar.

"Elijah!" she called out, walking up to the man she assumed was the group's leader. "A radio call just came in for you. Outdoors Magazine is sending a writer after all -- he'll be landing by float in about half an hour."

Elijah blinked, surprised by pleased. "Lovely." He stood. "I'll go and help him with his gear." It was quite a walk from the lake to the tiny strip of houses, shacks, and town, the ground uneven and muddy, and there were no cars to use.

Looking over from his seat at the bar, Gaston raised an eyebrow, then looked at his partner. "Which one of us bet that one of them would go wandering off at twilight without a gun on their first night up here?" he murmured, before standing. "I'll go with you."

"Lovely. Thank you." Elijah nodded at Gaston, glad he'd spoken up before Alaric could -- he was avoiding Alaric's eyes these days. He went and bundled up, waited for Gaston, and then the two of them trudged off on the ten minute walk, then stood by to watch as a large old floatplane, the same one that had brought them in, came trundling down to a messy, long, rough, bumpy landing on the shallow, muddy, half-frozen lake.

Alaric had just been about to speak up to go with Elijah, wishing they could talk again. Wishing they had a moment to get things sorted out. But Gaston spoke up before he had a chance and Ric knew that it was better if he just stayed behind. If any of the Mikaelsons needed him as anything more than the director of this tour, then they could come to him.

Kol waved at his brother and continued to drink. Sebastian had only snorted in regards to the hunter he'd come with, and then the group of them watched the pair leave.

Emma didn't know how she'd gotten herself into this mess. She'd been approached by some friend of Cecelia's and while she'd always dreamed of doing some exciting write up for an adventure like this, it wasn't as if she was really the outdoorsy type.

The plane ride had been loud and rough and the closer they got, the more anxious she got. She saw the list of people who was involved. The nature team. The director. The two... um. Escorts? With guns?

The landing was the worst part, and Emma clutched onto the arms of her seat and closed her eyes and the pilot told her to prepare herself. She whimpered once, grit her teeth, and finally, finally, they had landed and Emma was stepping shakily off the plane. After Emma was brought her pack, she looked around for the men she was supposed to meet.

The pilot pointed to two men standing further on the shore. Emma walked over, pulling her coat tighter around her, and then approached the only slightly less frightening -- though... not necessarily more attractive? -- of the two and extended her hand. "My name is Emma. I'm... your writer? Are you one of the Mikaelson brothers?"

They'd both been expecting a man to come off the plane after the tiny woman, so when she walked up with her pack and addressed them, both looked equally surprised. Elijah blinked and nodded, then offered her his hand.

"Elijah Mikaelson, yes. A pleasure to meet you, Emma. Although -- you're not quite who we were expecting."

Gaston raised an eyebrow, clearly skeptical. "You do realize that we're going after polar bears, don't you?" He sounded amused and he shifted his rifle strap.

Emma shrugged at the first comment, but when the taller man seemed to laugh at her, her gaze narrowed and she crossed her arms over her chest.

"I have been fully briefed on the expedition, sir. And I'm fully prepared. So, if you'd be so kind as to lead the way to wherever it is the party is staying, I would like to warm my hands before we leave out in the morning so that I will be able to keep notes."

Emma shifted her pack on her shoulders and then forcefully brushed past the pair, bumping into the taller one on her way, whispering something that sounded an awful lot like misogynistic prick as she did so.

Elijah gave Gaston a withering look before he moved to catch up with her, but Gaston just laughed his quiet, musical, yet hard-edged laugh as he followed after them. This entire thing felt like a joke -- first, the timing was bad enough, with fall coming in quickly and the hours of usable daylight greatly reduced. He'd heard some sort of argument between Elijah and Alaric about that -- something about their budget, the expiration of a grant, safety -- but it had been so dull, he'd almost immediately tuned it out. Still. There were clearly problems here, and now a woman had been added to the mix?

Wonderful.

"Would you like me to carry your bag?" Elijah asked as they walked along, but then he sighed. "Not -- because I think you cannot carry it, but simply because we came in on an equally crowded float plane," he'd seen all the crates stacked high in hers, "and I remember just how cramped and sore we all were upon crawling out."

Emma looked to the side at Elijah, pursing her lips at the initial offer, and then shrugged and shook her head. "No. I'll tend to my own things, thank you."

She thought many times about how crazy this was, that she was going to be in the middle of this ridiculous expedition with a bunch of men. Men who likely wouldn't believe that she had any place out there. Men who thought she would need to be taken care of and tended to and babied.

But she'd at least thought that it would have taken more than fifteen seconds before the comments about it all started. She had only packed things she thought she would need and had made sure for the two days before she left that she would be able to carry it for long periods at a time. The plane, admittedly, had been overcrowded and uncomfortable. But she was small and could curl up well enough to make herself semi-comfortable.

"So there are six of you? Right? Are they all as pleasant as your friend, here?"

"There's myself, my brother Kol who is actually on screen in the documentaries with me, our brother Niklaus, who handles all photography, still and video alike. Alaric Saltzman is the producer and director, and quite talented with sound. Gaston you've... met. In a manner of speaking. And Sebastian Moran, the other hired gun our insurance company demanded we take."

He glanced down at her, feeling terrible at what a rough bunch she had landed herself with, but just hoped that somehow, she'd come out of this not wanting to murder all of them. "We'll be leaving in the morning on another plane, traveling a significant distance northwest. I believe we're departing at four-thirty... The -- bar is the only place in town for food, and they've closed their kitchen an hour ago, but I'm sure we can manage to find you something…

"Have you ever done anything like this before?"

"You don't need to take care of me, Mr. Mikaelson. I appreciate the gesture, honestly. But I have a couple sources for food in my bag and will manage."

Was it ridiculous that she felt rude just by refusing any help this man extended? But she had told herself that she wasn't going to be a burden. She didn't really feel like she needed to prove herself to him, but the hired gun behind them had already shown here that no leniency would really be given to her.

"I've written for magazines before. And I've done nature pieces. But the conditions have been quite different. I've been in the jungle. In the desert. But not... in the cold, no."

Elijah nodded. "In that case, please, let me ask you to ask if you have questions, to speak up if there's a problem. This is our third time in the arctic, and we did two segments in the Antarctic before... I think -- one of the most important things we learned in our previous trips was that... once away from the last sign of civilization, in such cold, almost empty-feeling landscapes… there's a truly remarkable, tranquil sort of beauty, a peace that -- effortlessly touches the soul. But at the same time, that... the allure of that peace can make it feel even more difficult to handle conflict, odd as it sounds. We were just talking about this yesterday, how -- easy it is to isolate oneself from others, emotionally, even without provocation."

Somehow, some fucking how, he managed not to look back at Gaston when he said it. "So, essentially... Communicate often. Ask when you have questions, speak up when you have problems, try not to just completely isolate yourself emotionally -- because it incredibly easy, especially the... deeper into the white that we get." There was a soft, almost apologetic tone to his voice, rather than any trace of condescension.

"Thank you. I will try to keep that in mind," she said, almost jumping or kind of skipping a little to adjust her bag again better on her shoulders, and then looking over her shoulder at the hired gun. More than anything else about him, it seemed to annoy her that he was handsome. Because of course he was arrogant and condescending.

Of freaking course he held the belief that women belonged at home raising his stupid children, making him dinner, massaging his feet.

At least with the men, they seemed to know one another. The three were brothers, their director knew them well enough. The two hired guns knew one another. Emma knew it would be too easy for her to go silent for the duration of this trip, writing what happened, and not trying to reach out to anybody.

But she could be alone. She was good at being alone.

"Are we heading to the hotel? Or... Sorry. The information I received about this stint of the trip was very minimal. I was given details about the trip, and about the crew. Do I even... have a room?"

Fuck.

Elijah's eyes widened. "You -- do not. Sebastian and Gaston usually share, they're together in one. Kol and Niklaus are together. Alaric has his own, and most of the gear stashed in there... Since we thought there would be no..." And I can't even look at him right now. Gods, how am I supposed to not sabotage this expedition somehow when I can't even look at him? A week ago, he had kissed Alaric. He hadn't said a word, despite having rehearsed statement after statement. He had meant to, but the moment had seemed so right -- just the two of them going through gear, Alaric had moved close to check the serial number on a box…

It was the look of surprise, the moment of complete stillness, that Elijah remembered most clearly about that moment. He had kissed Alaric without meaning to, feeling nothing but the adoration -- the love -- that had steadily been building, and Alaric had said nothing. Granted, that might have been because Niklaus walked in just then, interrupting them (although he hadn't seen them), but all the same, Elijah felt like a monster for it.

He should have asked. He wasn't even sure Alaric knew he had such inclinations before...

That.

"Do you particularly mind sharing with me? I'll be up late reading, but I can assure you I will be quiet and well-behaved. It's not that we can't get you a room, simply that those are all of the rooms."

Emma shook her head and tried to give him a look assuring him it was fine. She considered asking him if he'd be more comfortable sharing the room with the director, and that she could keep the small, equipment filled room to herself. That seemed like the most logical thing, at any rate, but something told her there was a reason they might not be sharing it already? Maybe they didn't particularly like each other.

"I can sleep wherever. In just about any circumstances. So read all you like. Leave the light on as much as you'd like. I... might join you in that activity, even. I didn't bring books, but I have my nook, and had planned to use that while you all were... setting up. Really, my part of the job is observation and note taking. They're expecting me to do a full spread on you guys. So that'll be exciting. But while you're having down time or filming or whatever, I'll mostly just be trying to stay out of your way."

Emma tried to offer a soft smile. She liked this guy. Or what she knew of him thus far. She liked that he was willing to talk to her like a teammate and not so much like she was a woman trying to step foot on a pirate ship -- destined to bring them only bad luck.

"The group... is it... Are they all more like you?" Nice? Accepting? Nonjudgmental? Or like the guy behind us who hasn't even offered to introduce himself to me yet.

"Oh, Alaric and Kol can make anyone fall in love with them in a heartbeat," Elijah assured her with a soft laugh as they got to the hotel, such as it was. Gaston trailed away, back to the bar, and Elijah held the narrow, metal door for Emma. "Sebastian's a bit quieter, but he's charming enough -- inclined to let people be who they are and do whatever they must, he doesn't tend to get involved.

"Niklaus, though, has been in -- a bit of a sour mood recently." The narrow passages through the linked trailers were awkward, but when they made it to Elijah's room, at least there was some space to move.

Some.

The room was tiny. It looked like one of the larger ones -- large enough to have a twin-size bed, not the narrow little barely cot-sized bunks they'd passed coming in -- and was near a bathroom. "I'll let you get settled and head back to the bar -- unless you'd prefer that I wait? There have been a number of wolf sightings in town, and no one, the locals included, goes anywhere alone anymore. So if you intend to come to the bar... It would be best to have two pairs of eyes."

"That's fortunate for them." But I'm not looking to fall in love with anybody. "And, yeah, if you don't mind. I'll just grab my wallet and put my bag down and then be ready to go. After that plane ride, I'm a little restless and I'm not looking to go to sleep any time soon."

And I'm enough of a girl that I'd rather not be left alone.

Her wallet she'd left in the front zipper part of her bag and within moments, Emma breathed a sigh of relief as she set her pack down and stretched, her back and shoulders popping, and then moved to join him again in the doorway.

"You said to not let myself become secluded, right? So... I would like to go to the bar. Please."

"Then by all means." As they headed back, he looked over at her and said, "Thank you, by the way. Thank you for coming. I'm sorry not to have said it sooner." As they walked out, he saw Gaston standing on the porch of the bar, watching the street, his eyes sharp despite his ever amused, derisive expression. He never gets easier to take, no matter how often he and Moran accompany us...

"How much time did they give you to pack and prepare?"

Emma looked at the man on the porch and frowned. She really hoped the rest of them didn't expect her to be as useless as this man clearly did.

"Less than forty-eight hours," she said simply, thankful for the warmth of the bar and the dim lighting. Emma shrugged out of her oversized coat, revealing just how small her frame was, and then awkwardly stuck her hands in her back pockets, shrugging as she did so. She looked at the rest of the men. "Most of that time was ordering a bunch of warm clothing and studying the environment. Trying to figure out how to survive."

She lifted one hand in a sort of wave.

Kol smirked, an almost flirty expression -- something default for him -- and waved back. Sebastian finished his drink, grunted and nodded, and then moved outside to stand with Gaston, and to offer him relief if he wanted it.

"Charmed, I'm sure," she whispered this time.

Klaus had been sitting alone, but he stood and walked over. "So. You're the journalist. Lovely. Expected you to be a bit taller. Come. Sit with my brothers and I. Ignore Alaric, he's being serious."

"Are you drunk, Niklaus?"

"You know, Elijah, it's amazing just how much judgment you can put into the mildest of tones." He put his arm around his brother's shoulders, patted him on the chest, and smiled at Emma. "Really. Come drink with us. Kol was just telling me... something. I confess, I was hardly listening. He does..." Klaus looked at Kol and winked, "tend to go on."

"Taller, sure. To make room for the penis you expected me to have. So I've heard..." She smirked and then moved past the brothers, going to sit near the one who had waved, though she left a couple stools between them.

"Can I have a double tall gin and tonic, please?"

"Have my brothers been rude and or overly stiff in trying to make conversation. Neither of them are the most social of butterflies. Though, Nik, admittedly, is quite the fairy."

"Alaaaaaaric," Nik complained, "Kol's calling me names again." Not that he expected Ric to actually get his face out of whatever work he was doing.

Elijah tensed slightly and fussed over the notebook he'd brought with him, apparently unable to figure out just which page he wanted to read. When Emma's drink was brought over, he didn't so much as look up, because doing so would have him looking towards Alaric.

Nik looked at Elijah, at Alaric, then back at Emma with a smirk. "So, what's your name, love?"

If Elijah would have looked up, he might have seen Alaric looking at him. He might have seen uncertainty and this desperate need to talk about what happened.

But Ric's glance didn't last long, and the moment that Nik looked his direction the first time, his focus went back to his notes on the filming they had to do that first full day of light.

Watching things play out as Niklaus seemed to be doing the same, Emma lifted a brow, met his blue eyes, and then smiled softly. "Emma. Taylor. You, sir, must be Niklaus. The... um... fairy?"

"In the flesh." Nik smirked and sat down on Kol's lap. "Now, what did Outdoors Magazine tell you about the expedition? Did they tell you we leave early in the morning, we're flying out to an Inuit village, where we meet a few dog teams who'll take us the rest of the way?"

"They gave me the logistics of the trip, yes. I read all the notes your former writer had been given on the plane rides. And the thing I probably knew the least about this whole thing was what you boys were like.

"And I didn't really know anything at all about your guard duty. Are they always so pleasant? I don't think either of them were too excited to have a girl on the roster. Were you all just planning some giant orgy?"

"Oh, we usually just have one or the other of them. Moran's the much more charming one. Doesn't seem to like me much..." Nik pursed his lips, shrugged, and ran his fingers through Kol's hair before adjusting his bony little butt so as to hopefully be less uncomfortable on Kol's lap.

"Gaston's quite a talented singer. But when it comes to people skills... Tsk. Bit. Of. An ass. A fine ass. It's.."

"Niklaus, if you do not begin to drink water, or coffee at the very least, I will fetch a syringe from the medical kit and inject you with it myself," Elijah murmured.

"Don't be such a bore, brother," Kol scolded Elijah, wrapping an arm around Nik's waist and helping him adjust before relaxing. "Moran talks when he relaxes a little. Once he's grown more comfortable with your presence. It's like suddenly you're in the middle of a conversation with him, and you don't really remember the exact moment that he started talking."

Emma smiled at the brothers, and then waved over the barkeep and asked him for a cup of coffee, making sure that it was passed to Nik to humor his brother.

"As far as Gaston goes, he made it clear that he believed I'd caught the wrong flight north. Which... is fine. Maybe I'll get to save his stubborn butt from a bear attack or something."

"I hope you don't." Nik huffed, looked at the coffee, then stretched back, pushing himself over Kol's shoulder like a damned slinky before he relaxed into his brother again, one arm around Kol, the other hand reaching for the coffee. "Cheers. No. Don't fight a bear for him, he's bloody paid to protect us. If anyone's getting eaten, make sure it's him, not you."

"You are, as ever, a veritable font of kindness."

"Oooh. Kol, seems I've struck a nerve in our older brother... 'lijah, you told me to lighten up this trip. So. Lightened up? I have." Nik almost never drank this heavily, but at least his tone and energy were playful.

Elijah sighed, rubbed at the bridge of his nose, then stood. "I believe I'll retire."

"Someone has to go with you. I'm sure Alaric would. Won't you accompany my brother back and keep him safe, Alaric? He is the face of Wild Beauty, after all. No offense, Kol, but you saw the poll last week. Sort of a Batman and Robin thing," he added, looking at Emma. "You know, not everyone likes Dick."

"Must you be insuff--" Elijah stopped himself, sighed, and put his notebook back in his coat pocket before quietly and neatly replacing his chair. "Goodnight. Emma, the door will be open, the lights on; please, do not worry about waking me when you return."

"Don't ice-olate yourself, Elijah." Nik thought he was being hilarious and his soft, velvety little chuckle said as much.

Alaric had already started packing up his stuff before Nik had even gotten his coffee. He felt alone in all of this. The desire to talk about things was... a bit overwhelming. And he figured it would be easy to just ask one of the men to walk him back to their hotel.

And then Elijah was packing up.

While Emma laughed at the middle brother, she tried to subtly watch the two.

Ric moved toward Elijah, trying to quietly, silently, request that he be allowed to go with him. But when Sebastian walked in again and Ric looked at the gunman instead of keeping his eyes on Elijah, he felt like he missed his chance and instead moved toward the bar.

"Thank you, Elijah," Emma said softly, nodding in his direction, then looked up at Alaric who seemed to be gripping the edge of the bar as tight as his strength would manage. He glanced at her briefly, then shook his head.

"I'll be in as soon as your brothers are sober enough to walk back with me," she said.

Sebastian watched the entire thing play out with a raised brow, then nodded at Elijah. "You ready to go back?"

Had Alaric looked like he was okay, Elijah would have said yes. But, unfortunately, he looked over at Ric just then, and when he saw the man's hands, Elijah's heart felt like it tightened just as much. He looked back at Sebastian and gave him an apologetic but grateful smile before shaking his head. "Let me just go and see if Alaric is ready to return."

Quietly, he slipped over and stood next to him. Despite his calm exterior, Elijah's heart was pounding as he looked down at Alaric's hands before resting his left over Ric's right, his touch infinitely gentle, caring.

"Alaric," he murmured. "I owe you an apology, I know. I have... been avoiding you for childish reasons. Will you -- are you willing to return to the hotel with me? Perhaps we... ought to talk."

With the touch, Alaric let out a huff of breath and without allowing himself to overthink it too much, he pulled his hand free from under Elijah's and quickly grabbed both sides of his face before pulling him into a kiss. Fast. Hard. His heart thrummed in his chest and his stomach twisted.

Both of Emma's brows raised, her lips parted just slightly as she watched this moment happen so suddenly. Sebastian, too, watched, though his expression remained fairly neutral and relatively unimpressed.

Kol squeezed Nik around his waist and snorted. "I bloody told you," he mused in Nik's ear just as Alaric was pulling away.

"Yes," Alaric whispered, pulling away entirely. Embarrassed. Elijah was a private man. He shouldn't have done that. He shouldn't have made it so public. "Perhaps we should talk."

Elijah looked stunned. He stared at Alaric for a moment before he nodded once, twice, no, a third time, frowned, then went to get his coat. "Mister Moran, if you would prefer to remain here, you're certainly welcome to. Alaric and I will go straight back to the hotel; we'll be fine."

Alaric...

Elijah looked at him, half-convinced that Alaric would somehow already be gone, that he would already have packed all of those feelings in, that he would be pretending nothing had happened -- but the look in Ric's eyes felt like some sort of assurance, an assurance Elijah desperately wanted to understand.

Nik, meanwhile, was laughing quietly, still too drunk to really behave about it. "Took them long enough. You know, Emma, those two have been carefully not eyeing each other for... months. A year, perhaps. No. Two, maybe? Kol, when did it start, the Kalahari?"

"Hush, brother. Watch the show," Kol scolded with a smack to Nik's thigh. Though the smirk on his lips seemed to be infinite and thoroughly pleased with the entire situation. He waited until Alaric had nodded once, avoiding the eyes of everybody except Elijah, it seemed, and then walked with the eldest brother out of the bar.

"About twenty months," he finally said, speaking mostly to Emma. "It's like they've been dancing around the whole possibility of being together. And we couldn't figure out if they were together and just trying to hide it from us. But then we determined they were hiding it from themselves. Their touches were always too careful." He shrugged and continued drinking his bourbon while Nik had to settle for coffee.

"Well... if things work out... Perhaps I should be more careful about going to bed tonight. I..." can just sleep in the hallway floor. "would rather give them their privacy."

Outside, when they were clear of Gaston's range of hearing, Alaric spared a glance in Elijah's direction. "I'm sorry. I... You wanted to talk. And I know you've been avoiding me since you... If you didn't feel anything when you kissed me, if you were afraid of telling me that, afraid that it would split up our company... Elijah, I understand."

Elijah frowned. "I was afraid that you didn't feel -- the same romantic attraction, and that I had grossly overstepped by taking such a liberty with you." He was quiet for the rest of the walk, until they got to the hotel door and he held it open for Alaric. Turning, Elijah nodded to Gaston, who disappeared into the bar now that all of his baby chicks seemed to be settling down for a while.

Stopping in the tiny, drab, sad room that passed for a lounge, Elijah turned to face Alaric. The clerk had already gone home for the night -- she drove a snowmobile with mud skids and carried multiple guns -- and so they had the haunted-feeling place to themselves, for now.

"I greatly admire you, Alaric," he said after an awkward, prolonged silence.

"I was stunned, certainly, when you kissed me, Elijah, but only because after all this time I had managed to convince myself that every look or touch or kind word you had ever given me was out of friendship and nothing more."

He had to smile at the way Elijah confessed his feelings. Only this man could make them sound so proper. But because of the way he'd said them, Alaric felt like anything he said in return would fail to equate.

"I think about you every day," Alaric said softly, reaching hesitantly as if he were going to take Elijah by the hand, but he thought better of it and just brushed the back of Elijah's hand with a singular finger before letting the touch fall away. "I will never be good enough for you, but I do try to be. Because you... You deserve everything good. You deserve every happiness. I guess... what I'm saying, Elijah, is that I think about you every day. I think about... what it would be like to be yours." This is too much too fast. All he said was that he admired me. He could just be talking about my work.

"I'm talking too much. I'm sorry."

Elijah had listened to him with a serious, focused expression. When Alaric reached for his hand and only touched it instead, Elijah glanced down and twitched an eyebrow at the gesture before looking back up to meet Alaric's eyes again. "You need not apologize for expressing your feelings, Alaric. Learning the depths of your -- affectionate interest is a surprise, but not an unwelcome one. Not in the slightest."

He reached out and took the hand Alaric had touched him with, holding it carefully between both of his, never breaking eye contact. "I hope that, in your wonderings, you imagine a time when we might wake up next to each other without both feeling the need to look away. I hope that you imagine knowing, knowing beyond any shadow of a doubt, that you are good enough -- morally, intellectually, aesthetically. Purely. For between us, there can be no.... measure taken that will ever show within you any lack. You move me, Alaric, deeply, in so many ways that I cannot begin to count them, yet will attempt it, if you like." He spoke calmly, his tone measured and soft and yet almost painfully earnest, and then he raised Alaric's hand and kissed his palm.

"Here," his lips still brushed the soft skin, "you hold my heart." He closed Alaric's hand as he straightened, meeting his eyes again -- ready to apologize if any of it had been too much, but stubbornly refusing to offer an apology again without prompting now that he knew the truth they shared.

Carefully, with the hand that Elijah had kissed, Alaric moved it to brush along the side of the other man's face, holding him there, looking at him. He wondered, silently, how he had managed to capture the attentions of someone so incredible.

His lips parted and he inhaled as if he were going to say something else, but instead Alaric leaned forward and pressed a soft, affectionate, this time much gentler kiss to Elijah's lips. He wanted to tell him that he'd convinced himself six months ago that Elijah was just being polite with him, and that if he couldn't get his shit together to control his feelings, he would need to walk away from the company.

Then, when he still hadn't managed to do so, he had decided two weeks ago that this would be his last project with the company. He had the letter all typed up, saved to his drafts, ready to be sent to BBC. Besides, wasn't it time for him to go back where he belonged, anyway?

But now...

"Thank you," he said quietly, his other hand lifting to rest against Elijah's chest. "I will do everything in my power to keep it beating. My own has... been in your hands for some time now. Even without realizing it, you've taken care of it. Thank you, Elijah."

Elijah closed his eyes and let himself sigh away all of the tension he didn't realize he'd been holding. Alaric's hand on his chest felt like home, and Elijah knew, in that moment, he would never feel this peace again if he lost it. He stayed still and quiet for a long time, listening to the wind as it started whistling around the trailers, and then he finally stepped back and opened his eyes again.

"It seems... to me.. that it would be unprofessional and perhaps indecent to take any intimate steps while on a long journey that requires such.. exceedingly close quarters. You and I both have a great deal of work left to do tonight, I know, and perhaps we should part ways to do so... but it would -- if you will consider it -- give me the greatest pleasure to conduct our work out here, together... Side by side, even if we must be silent."

Alaric's arms fell. And so too, it felt, did his heart.

When he was so close to being able to call the man who had consumed every waking moment of Ric's thoughts with hopes of being together and fantasies of what that would make their trips like, Alaric had forgotten to factor in just how professional Elijah was. Always. While his brothers were in the bar holding on to each other and doing something that many people might consider flirting? While the young woman who had just joined them was looking for her place and trying to relax enough with a drink that Alaric had watched her wince against as she took her first drink, as the two hired guns seemed just as likely to kill the crew themselves as protect them from anything, Elijah was professional. Distantly so.

He nodded once and shoved his hands into his pockets.

"I'll go get my things." He offered Elijah a weak smile, and then went to move past him, down the hall and to the back where he held his own room.

Elijah put a hand out against Alaric's abdomen to stop him; as always, despite the firm decision of his movement, something about his actual touch seemed to offer a choice. He would never force anyone to stay beyond their desire to, human or animal, and yet he wished Alaric would.

"May I have one more moment?"

Alaric stopped with the touch. In that brief moment between the kiss and when Elijah had pulled away, he had hoped. And then, in the even shorter span between when Elijah had stepped back and when Ric had moved for his things, he'd understood -- or so he believed -- that this would never actually happen. Because they would always be on some job. They would always be risking the entire company for the sake of a romance.

"Yes, Elijah," he replied, looking down at the hand that touched him so carefully. "As many as you'd like."

"Your... expression changed enough, please forgive me if I've read too much into it, but I cannot help but worry that my words may have been in some way unclear. I have every intention of -- giving you everything," he touched Alaric's chin, trying to get him to look up and meet his eyes, "and on subsequent expeditions, the others will have simply have to accept us, should things go well. But.. for this, for something we're beginning, I would rather it not be... when someone so new is with us, or when we are -- going to be unreasonably, dangerously close to the predators we go in search of. No one has ever done what we're attempting to do -- not without cages, armored observation vehicles, drones.

"I do not want to deny this forever -- only to give ourselves this one last shoot, one of our most dangerous, before we... change everything. Now that we both know, or have an idea, of where the other stands.. and now that I hope you know I -- will never feel home until we are together, as I have been robbed of any sense of the word since we sat together that morning in the desert and the scorpion walked so curiously, so safely, over our hands where they rested side-by-side. I want, desperately want, to be with you, Alaric. And the moment we are back here, the night we spend here waiting for our return flight, I hope you know I intend to...

"Ensure that you are warm. That night, and every night after. Every. Night. If you permit it."

Something in the words, as ridiculous as it sounded, made Alaric certain that one of them would die on this expedition. One of them would unintentionally, unwillingly rob the other of this chance at what could be something... something Ric had always wanted.

Elijah had a family. He had brothers. Parents. But Ric was... alone in this world, save for this crew. Sure, he'd been married once, and he had wanted so much for her to be his family. But looking back on it now, it was so evident that Isobel never wanted him in the same way. She wanted prosperity. She wanted achievement. She wanted everything Ric had, ironically, gone off and gotten for himself after Isobel had left him in the middle of the night with nothing more than a note that said Please don't look for me.

"I can be patient," he said with a weak smile. "I deal with your brothers for months at a time. And then satellite calls from the girl looking to reconnect with the mother who gave her up," who gave me up, "Only to tell her that I still have no information to offer her. I can be patient. But if you are expecting me to be able to continue on as I did yesterday. Careful. Hesitant. Distant... I don't know that I can accomplish that."

#a frozen medley #familyispower #gastonlefevre #bourbonandbrushes #theveritasi #one shot #v nature doc

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dentalrecordsmusic · 5 years

Text

Album Review: Origami Angel - “Somewhere City”

Words by Ari Jindracek

I’m going to be clear: I didn’t find out about Origami Angel until after they were teasing their newest album with an online ARG I’m not bright enough to figure out. Once I did go check out the Somewhere City teaser material, though--sometime shortly after “Doctor Whomst” -- I was pre-hooked on the album. I’m a sucker for music with narratives, and if all those blog posts about aliens were indicative of anything, it was an intriguing narrative. I don’t think I got aliens while listening to Somewhere City necessarily, though. What I heard when I pushed play for the first time was grounded in several realities: in running away and missing people, watching cartoons and going to amusement parks, being bullied and left behind, and wanting to love and be loved. It feels somewhat larger than the two-piece that created it (Pat Doherty on drums and Ryland Heagy on pretty much everything else) in its universality. The city is everywhere, it seems.

The opening moments of Somewhere City, in “Welcome To…” are tranquil, woodsy--soft guitar, gently piercing vocals, and drums that feel somehow cinematic--until the quiet comes to a screeching halt, the metaphorical city limit. “You don’t have to do anything or be anyone, just follow the road / just come with me / you have to see / there’s something in the air out here” makes it eminently clear: this is going to be a concept album. If “this city never lets me down” isn’t about the artists’ hometown, it’s got to be the beginning of something more narrative. You don’t need to know about all the cryptic lead-up; you don’t need to solve Origami Angel’s puzzles. You just need to listen to the way the instrumentals vary between springy, rhythms to bounce on your toes to, and sweeping buildups like the swell of a wave, and think about how much fun it would be to scream the lyrics back to the band. “Welcome To…” stands for itself on its quality, but it can’t stand alone--obviously, obviously, there’s a lot more to follow. “24 Hr Drive-Thru,” the first single off the album, is the immediate follower to the intro sequence, and it has the pop-cultural references I have come to expect from Origami Angel after listening to them for a little bit, even if they’re on the vaguer side, just drive-thrus as a concept, Dr. Pepper filling free water cups, and the reference to a “mobile phone”, which slingshots me back into 2004 when people unironically used that language. “Kenilworth Avenue to 193” is more concrete--I don’t know what it references, really, but it’s very grounded. It’s a song to dance to more than a song to mosh to. The bouncy “Okay! Okay!” section in the middle is my favorite bit, just because the way the tightly-played guitars, the unrelenting drums, and the “bop bop bop” vocals balance each other out perfectly to create a sound of pure fun, which takes an easily-missed but incredibly-complicated guitar riff as an exit ramp. I didn’t have a lot of teenage experiences going out for fast food with friends on summer nights between years of high school, but this song sounds like something that should be playing if I did. The opening of “666 Flags” breakneck-speeds into a song that is both about roller coasters and sounds like a roller coaster. The lyrics almost blur together at some points and climb at others; there is a brief pause when what actually sounds like the wheels of a roller coaster car plays to cap off the metaphor. “It’s a long way from here to where I wanna be” feels like a disembarking from the ride, and here my theme park metaphor breaks down until the very end, when the guitars and drums shred themselves to pieces, replicating the feeling of terror I get when I even look at a steep, two-hundred-foot drop (I am not a roller coaster person). The softer middle section is stunning not as much for the way it catapults you around hairpin turns and into the stratosphere, but for the lyrics and sentiments of hope for the future, which is a theme I can always get behind. “All these microscopic moments make me feel like I’m not helpless / I’m okay” is stunning because it is painfully, ecstatically real. Listeners take that reality into the fantastical final stretch of their wild ride.

The second single, Tumblr-ishly named “Doctor Whomst”, goes on a brief nostalgia tour of pop culture, as the title reference implies, but also on a joyous rooftop-screaming self-esteem bender. I like the juxtaposition of “just how I used to feel / watching Danny Phantom, eating Happy Meals” with “I think I’m starting to like myself.” It puts the youthful innocence and hard-won adult self-love back to back--the same feeling, several long years apart, facing down the interval between. I can relate to the sentiment, while I jam to the blur of drums, the heavy bass, and the bridge’s intriguing whispery backing “vocals” that sound exactly like the noises I make at my cat to get her to look at me. The sample from some movie that I don’t know off the top of my head crawls into the slow introductory verse of “Say Less,” which is just as relatable: “maybe I would be just fine if I could just change everything that’s wrong with me / but it’s not that easy” could be something I said to my therapist. The realization of how hard change can be rockets the listener out of softness into thick bass and thundering, monolithic guitar hits. “Say Less” feels more like a part of the world you’re escaping from when you run away to Somewhere City, not a part of the world that has, so far, been portrayed as, essentially, a birthday party bouncy castle full of fond childhood memories that you can catapult around at will. This song, though, is about being insulted and getting into fights. If that’s what happens in Somewhere City, like it happens in every elementary school, where’s the escapism? Ironically, “Escape Rope” doesn’t get you there, although it’s definitely a getaway for some other, unnamed “you.” The narrator begs someone--a friend heading out of the house, or someone more desperately needed--to stay. The quick, bright guitar feels like a computer error, a glitch in how things are “supposed to be.” As the speaker pleads--“tell me all the things I already know” feels particularly desperate in its tone--you can tell that it’s having no effect. The friend is still leaving, for their parent’s house or college or another city or just anywhere else. It’s not the desired narrative, but it is still the narrative.

The cheekily named “The Title Track” provides the actual escape, the travel brochure to Somewhere City. As a bassist, I am amazed as to how the bass, drums, and guitar can go off so machine-gun fast that there are moments I can hardly parse as anything but a wall of sound. “The secret is it’s in your brain” is stunning in that it actually stunned me the first time it came up. As I type this, I’m still reeling from that a little bit. The image of “how the sun hits the water at six in the morning on every single day” is beautiful too, and it makes me want to see it, but I think, of all the lyrics I could pull meaning out of in the album so far, the concept of the ultimate escape, somewhere where I couldn’t be found but where I wouldn’t be alone or hiding, being within me is true in a way that somehow confuses me. “You won’t be the same” is right! The song as a whole packs quite a bit of musical odyssey into two and a half minutes.

“Skeleton Key” starts off soft, migrating from a blanket of soft, fuzzy guitar, to a heavier, harder wash of sound, to the boppy dance sound I’m coming to expect from Origami Angel. This song is less city-related and more a loving reply to the person from “Escape Rope,” a postcard-back wish-you-were-here song about missing someone beloved. It’s not wish you were here, though, it’s “I wanna be there with you.” The throat-rending desperation of the last “I hope you know” is indicative of how much love lies in the song. Short of being there, though, the speaker can only send their love. “Find Your Throne” is a distortion-charged song filled with a similar love, an awe of someone else, positioned as a genius, “the goddamn king of the universe.” It’s not self-love but love of others. It fits neatly into the escapist narrative, with the idea of a trip to somewhere, the “throne,” where the person will be among others, loved, recognized for their awe-inspiring contributions to the world. This person is absent, missed, however; they are not in the city, and they want the speaker to return. The lyrics sound like an exchange of letters, catching up. I am also struck by the impact that the simple “I love you”s have--I feel as though music usually takes a roundabout way of displaying love rather than just saying it outright. Sometimes, in the world of “show don’t tell,” telling is more effective.

“The Air Up Here”, a final letter, wraps up the narrative with “I’m never gonna come back home”--the escape, started from the first moment city limits were crossed, is complete. Somewhere City is the narrator’s home now; the world they left is gone. The song reprises “Welcome To…,” “Skeleton Key,” and a mash of others I can hardly pry apart due to the tangled mass of drum, guitar, and vocals. It is the full experience of the city rolled into one tight ball, ending with a huge, choral “this city never lets me down.” Why go back to somewhere that does? I’ll admit, having seen narratives like this in the media before--and heard them from relatives who didn’t like me moving far away--I kind of expected the ending to the album to be an encouragement to return home. But Somewhere City has become home, at this point. As the album loops back around, perfectly, to the first song, and I start listening again, I think I can get behind the message, not just because I can relate to the whole “moving to a new city I love” thing, but because Somewhere City isn’t a place as much as a state of mind.

I chopped this review up into a review of each song, but, obviously, the album should be listened to as a complete whole with no breaks. There’s a lot that I missed going song by song to make sure I could wring every drop of meaning out; the transitions between songs are flawless and the way the album paces out the slow and fast sections of songs. It was pieced together masterfully. Somewhere City is much bigger than the sum of its parts, and all of those parts individually are huge. I obviously play favorites--I’m a sucker for reprises and big meaning--but I’d be proud if I’d written even one of these songs. The album stands as a beautiful colossus, glittering in the sun, a paean of love for self and others, and a place you can go to find it, inside or outside of your head.

Listen to Somewhere City on Bandcamp here.

Ari Jindracek is looking up apartment prices in Somewhere City right now. If you find any good listings, you can find Ari on Twitter.

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#origami angel #somewhere city #ari jindracek #album review #washington #emo

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