Tumgik
#i just read a poem by yeats and i just-
preetee-wid-4-es · 1 year
Text
Idc how good or bad Yeats was as a poet. Ill always remember him as the world's no. 1 loser.
4 notes · View notes
trigunrareshipweek · 7 months
Text
Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media
The prompt lists for the Trigun Rareship Week 2023 are officially out!
For each day of the weak, you can pick a prompt from one of the three lists, or combine two or more prompts from the same day for your contribution.
You can stick to the prompts provided as closely as you'd like, or, alternatively, interpret them in unusual ways! Anything goes!
A transcribed list of the prompts in text form can be found below Read More.
Word Prompts
November 27th
greenery & flowers
November 28th
hurt, comfort & redemption
November 29th
blue skies & celestial bodies
November 30th
past, present & future
December 1st
memory & regret
December 2nd
death & rebirth
December 3rd
sugar & spice
AU Prompts
November 27th
Winged AU
November 28th
Cyberpunk AU
November 29th
Canon Divergent AU
November 30th
Merfolk AU
December 1st
Coffee Shop/Tattoo Artist/Florist AU
December 2nd
Historical AU
December 3rd
Modern AU
Quote Prompts
November 27th
“You are coming down with me - Hand In Unlovable Hand” (No Children, The Mountain Goats)
November 28th
“Don't wake me up - Just leave me there dreaming” (Down By The River, BG3)
November 29th
“I think that I shall never see - A poem lovely as a tree” (Trees, Joyce Kilmer)
November 30th
“My kind companion - softens stone - my gentle giant - painful reminder - don't look in my eyes, I feel a sudden desire” (sudden desire, Hayley Williams)
December 1st
“Tread softly because you tread on my dreams” (Aedh Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven, W.B. Yeats)
December 2nd
“I slithered here from Eden just to sit outside your door” (From Eden, Hozier)
December 3rd
“You pierce my soul. I am half agony, half hope.” (Persuasion, Jane Austen)
67 notes · View notes
jonismitchell · 2 months
Text
Favourite Poems 
Mad Girl’s Love Song by Sylvia Plath
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock by T.S. Eliot
This Be The Verse by Philip Larkin
The Orange by Wendy Cope 
Requiem by Anna Akhmatova 
We Lived Happily During The War by Ilya Kaminsky
Romance by Arthur Rimbaud (note: just read the French if you can, English translations don't capture it)
Poem Read at Joan Mitchell’s by Frank O’Hara
Our Beautiful Life When It’s Filled With Shrieks by Christopher Citro
Having a Coke With You by Frank O’Hara
Tonight I Can Almost Hear the Singing by Silvia Curbelo
Nothing Gold Can Stay by Robert Frost 
Litany in Which Certain Things Are Crossed Out by Richard Siken
The Second Coming by William Butler Yeats 
After the Movie by Marie Howe
Accident Report in the Tall, Tall Weeds by Ada Limon
Stanzas, Sexes, Seductions by Anne Carson
The More Loving One by W.H. Auden
Soliloquy for Cassandra by Wislawa Symborska 
Swans by Hera Lindsay Bird 
Ophelia by Arthur Rimbaud
The Stolen Child by Yeats
The Mermaid by Alfred Lord Tennyson 
somewhere I have never travelled,gladly beyond by e.e. cummings
A Talk with a Tax Collector by Vladimir Mayakovsky
Snow and Dirty Rain by Richard Siren
Mayakovsky by Frank O’Hara
Start Here by Caitlyn Siehl 
Annabel Lee by Edgar Allan Poe
Queer by Frank Bidart
Go to the Limits of Your Longing by Rainer Maria Rilke
On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong
October by Louise Gluck
Portrait of the Illness as Nightmare by Leila Chatti
Life to the Last Drop by Mahmoud Darwish
We Are Hard by Margaret Atwood
The Road Not Taken by Robert Frost
21 notes · View notes
brian-in-finance · 3 months
Text
Video 📹 from 11 May 2020 Harper’s Bazaar
We Want to Be Caitríona Balfe Reading Poetry on the Beach Right Now
The Outlander actress recites W. B. Yeats in a short film by photographer and director James Houston.
In a new video, Caitríona Balfe is spending her day the way we'd like to be spending our time social distancing: on the beach, alone, reading poetry. The footage of the Outlander star was filmed back in February, months before the concept of quarantines and lockdowns had even crossed our minds, but now, the clip of Balfe in solitude is even more relevant.
The short film was shot by photographer and director James Houston—an old friend and frequent collaborator of Balfe's—in L.A. In it, the actress runs barefoot on the sand, laughing with the wind blowing in her hair.
"Shooting Caitríona is always such a wonderful and rewarding experience," Houston tells BAZAAR.com. "She is a dear friend and a true natural beauty. Even though her star has risen over recent years as a respected actress, she has remained the same grounded and humble girl I met years ago. I loved this shoot of her because it showcases her timeless beauty. I chose to take her to the ocean with minimal styling, hair, and makeup to capture an intimate, raw portrait of her."
In the background, Balfe narrates the poem "He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven" by W. B. Yeats, which was a collaborative choice made by both the actress and director. "After I directed this piece for Caitríona, I was thinking about what to put behind the visuals," Houston explains. "I know Caitríona is well read and loves poetry, so rather than just use a music track, I asked her to send me a few of her favorite poems. I chose W. B. Yeats as it just felt right for Caitríona and the visuals. After recording her reading the poem (which only took two takes), we added the sounds of the ocean and birds. I really love the result."
Watch the full video above, and read Balfe's interview on last night's Outlander Season 5 finale, featuring more photographs from Houston below.
Harper’s Bazaar
Tumblr media Tumblr media
Sweater, Ralph Lauren
Tumblr media Tumblr media
Coat, Aritzia; skirt, The Row
Remember… William Butler Yeats, widely considered one of the greatest poets of the English language, received the 1923 Nobel Prize for Literature. His work was greatly influenced by the heritage and politics of Ireland. — poets.org
18 notes · View notes
fragiledewdrop · 6 months
Text
TOLKIEN, MYTH AND THE EARLY 20TH CENTURY
A week ago I wrote a post about my excitement in discovering just how much Tolkien took inspiration from Anglo-Saxon poetry.
I was so lost in my little over-emotional bubble that I was genuinely a little surprised when a few people expressed their disappointment in discovering that "The Lord of The Rings" wasn't wholly original. It makes sense, though, so I thought I'd address it.
These are @fortunes-haven ' s tags:
Tumblr media
@sataidelenn already wrote an interesting reply, but I'd like to approach the question from a different point of view. Why? Because the first thing I thought about when reading this comment was how I myself have grumbled under my breath about having to wade through someone's "personal mythology smoothie", only I wasn't reading Tolkien. I was reading T. S. Eliot.
Now, I want to preface this by making it clear that I am well aware Tolkien is by no means a modernist. He did, however, write LOTR in England in the late 30s. He was part of the same culture, the same society, and above all the same historical context that produced "The Waste Land" and "Ulysses", and I think we should take that into account when we discuss his work.
Because by the time Tolkien published LOTR, Joyce and Eliot and Yeats had already discussed and applied the mythic method. Was Tolkien aware of their debates? Did he read and appreciate their books? I have no clue. It would take some research to find out, research I currently (unfortunately) don’t have time for. But I do not think it a stretch to suggest that Tolkien might have been moved by the same need that drove other writers to look back at myth, although in very different ways.
Why did Joyce and Eliot feel compelled to return to the narrative roots of mankind? Why did Yeats devote so much time to Celtic lore? Why did Tolkien write a new epic and base it on the Saxon world?
The answer is the same: because they lived at the start of a century that posed more questions than ever, but provided no answers; a century when time and the human mind and the very structure of matter had ceased to be solid, defined, a foundation to rely on; a century torn apart by brutal, inhumane, sensless war.
When you can't find answers in the present and the future is so uncertain it's laughable, you look to the past. Because the thing is, we can talk about "personal mythology" all we want, but myths are never personal. They are universal. They are tied to a specific cultural context, certainly, but they exemplify emotions, truths and tragedies that are common (or supposed to be common) to all humankind, beyond space and time. Myths are supposed to be eternal.
They are also a very effective shorthand to communicate rather complex concepts.
I can write five pages telling my girlfriend that she makes me feel safe, that she is something I've longed for and fought to gain, something I've dreamed about but that I'm scared I'll lose. I could, and I probably wouldn’t be able to convey exactly what I mean.
Or I could say "She is my Ithaca" and you would get it, wouldn’t you?
There are whole books that try to explain the symbolism behind "The Green Knight", but Eliot can offhandedly mention a chapel and he has basically evoked the whole original poem plus the centuries of scolarship that followed.
Tolkien could have had his characters recite long monologues about how they feel like their world has been lost. Instead, he has one of them sing a song by the campfire. An 8th century song, about a warrior in exile. He achieves in a couple of lines what could have taken him a whole book to convey, and he does it in a way that goes straight to the heart, even if we don't know exactly why.
And that's the thing: not all of us spend years researching myths and old poetry. Certainly we don't do it when reading LOTR for the first time, especially if that's when we are 13 or 10 or 8 years old. But we get it anyway. We know myths, especially Western myths, one way or another, as if through cultural osmosis. We understand myths from other cultures too- we may need a bit of context, but we do- and often we find that the bones of the stories are similar, across oceans and centuries.
That means that using myths as the building blocks of your story is an amazingly effective way to cut to the quick, to get to the core of what the narrative is aiming at.
I have seen so many people talk about the feeling they get when reading LOTR, or even just thinking about it: that nostalgia? That bittersweet hurt? That longing for something bright and lost, for a star or a jewel or a land beyond the sea? That, right there. That is what Tolkien achieves by telling stories inside stories, by having his words have a meaning and weight that we would associate with a bard or a preacher, not a fantasy writer. And, as I have discovered recently, it's almost exactly the same feeling you get when reading Saxon poetry.
It's almost as if he chose it on purpose, isn’t it?
That's not all, though.
As both people tagged above(and many others, myself included) have already written, Tolkien doesn’t just use myths as building blocks. He alters them.
Yes, Frodo's hero's journey is not typical. Yes, there are a lot of similarities between the last part of LOTR and the Odissey, but they are not quite the same.
That's because Frodo is not, and can't be, Ulysses. He isn’t a warrior crowned with glory and cunning who reconquers his home and that leaves it because a god has promised him peace if he does. He is a mutilated soldier coming home from the trenches, only to find that he no longer belongs in the home he has bled for.
Frodo is a new hero, for a new age (just like Ulysses was a new hero for a new age, which I rather think is one of the reasons Joyce chose him as the model for his novel. The Odissey was already subversive in and of itself. "An odd duck", as @sataidelenn put it.)
We have to understand just how traumatic WWI was. It's a shift, a break so immense that it changed society, politics, culture, family structures, the idea of hero and even of manhood. The Western World was not the same after 1918. Of course art changed too.
Would Tolkien have written LOTR had he not fought in that war? Probably. But it would have been a very, very different book. The way it deals with war, technology, trauma, peace and friendship-all the things we love about it- are direct fruits of that conflict. I think the way myth fits into it is, too.
I can understand being disappointed that not everything in Lotr is wholly new, wholly Tolkien's invention. It didn’t even occur to be to be, though, because I am used of thinking of it in these terms.
All the myths he uses- from Kullervo to Ulysses to Beowolf to medieval fairy tales- are means to tell a new story. They come back to life, and while we perceive how timeless they are, they end up telling us something that is rooted in time. A new English epic, yes, but very clearly an epic of England between two world wars. A 20th century heroic tale which offers a desperate, brave hope for the future. How can we not love it?
And look, I might joke about personal mythology smoothies to myself all the time, but the reason I keep reading and studying Eliot and Joyce and Yeats is that they do have something new to say, something amazing. You can take them or leave them, love them or hate them, but "unoriginal" is not an adjective you can, in good conscience, apply to their work.
I think, in a weird way, Tolkien is the same.
"In manipulating a continuous parallel between contemporaneity and antiquity, Mr. Joyce is pursuing a method which others must pursue after him. They will not be imitators, any more than the scientist who uses the discoveries of an Einstein in pursuing his own, independent, further investigations. It is simply a way of controlling, of ordering, of giving shape and significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history. It is a method already adumbrated by Mr. Yeats, and of the need for which I believe that Mr. Yeats to have been first contemporary to be conscious. Psychology (such as it is, and whether our reaction to it be comic or serious), ethnology, and The Golden Bough have concurred to make possible what was impossible even a few years ago. Instead of narrative method, we may now use the mythic method. It is, I seriously believe, a step toward making the modern world possible for art." –T.S. Eliot, from Ulysses, Order, and Myth (1923)
20 notes · View notes
lulu2992 · 3 months
Text
Decoding the scripts and secret messages in Rebel Moon
Part 2: Solving the riddle of Noble’s Bone Staff
On December 23, 2023, Zack Snyder posted this:
Tumblr media
The idea of uncovering yet another secret got me very excited, so I looked for the Bone Staff in the guide. Here is the image as it appears on the website:
Tumblr media
I slightly cropped it, but yes, it really is this small and you can barely see anything... Still, if you look closely, you will notice a series of little vertical lines all along the handle. Well, they’re not just lines; they’re letters, and they form the “secret inscription” fans were challenged to decode!
Contrary to what the post said, though, it seemed to me this script didn’t look like the New Imperium font. Instead, it reminded me a lot of the symbols I had seen elsewhere in the guide, on the Priests and Scribes’ outfits (more on this later), and on Kora’s gun:
Tumblr media
I learned from AurekFonts, who worked on several typefaces for the film (along with Louie Mantia, Jr.), that this other font was most likely “designed primarily by the Speculative Civilization Advisor, Adam Forman” and called “Old Imperium”. This is the name I’m going to use from now on.
The guide says the message on the Guardian Gun means “My life for hers”, so I now had 10 letters to work with. On the bone staff, I also noticed the “brackets”, which I concluded served as spaces/word separators in Old Imperium, were upside-down compared to the ones on the gun, so I deduced that, to read the message, I first had to rotate the image by 180 degrees.
Tumblr media
But even after doing all that, decoding the inscription remained difficult because of the image’s fairly low resolution... After a lot of squinting, I still managed to count the words and determine how many letters they contained. The message is a 38-word sentence that looks something like this:
---[-------(7th letter is grey)[-----[-----(puntuation mark)---[---[-[----[----[------[---------[--[-----[----(3rd letter is grey)[----[-----[--[---------[--[-[-------[------[---[----[-----[-----[---[----[----[-----[--[----[--------[-------[---------[--[--[----(puntuation mark)
I tried to find the 10 letters I knew... but I was struggling. Then, suddenly, I remembered this:
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold
The poem... it had to be a clue! I looked at “The Second Coming” again, and my eyes were drawn to the last verses:
The darkness drops again; but now I know That twenty centuries of stony sleep Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle, And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
38 words, a punctuation mark between the 4th and 5th words, another one at the end... As for the grey letters on the staff? They correspond to double letters in the poem (“darkneSS” and “slEEp”). Everything works perfectly!
The secret inscription on Atticus Noble’s Bone Staff is the final sentence of the 1919 poem “The Second Coming” by William Butler Yeats.
December 24, 2023, around 7 pm CEST; challenge completed!
And now that I had been introduced to the Old Imperium font, why not try to decode it too?
13 notes · View notes
pirate-poet · 8 months
Text
salt & honey masterpost
JANUARY – 1888
salt & honey is a crossover fic that puts characters from the Master and Commander media into the Sunless Sea/Fallen London universe. The Surprise is a steamship, the sea is the zee, Stephen is imprisoned at the Isle of Cats instead of Mahon...well. Please heed the warnings on this one, it's angst-heavy!
LINK and the fic is COMPLETE!
bonus content below the cut(currently the map, twenty title poems, mentioned music, more to be added including full poem list and calendar)
Tumblr media
(edited sunless sea map)
A note on the poetry: some of these are very topically relevant to the fic to the point that I was yelling to my alpha readers about how perfect they were! Some are very not topically relevant but still good poems. I highly recommend them all! I took great pains to make sure that each poem was written before the time of the fic so the characters could, theoretically, have read them. Also I'm going by Ao3 chapter numbers, not how they would be numbered without the introduction and interlude.
Ch 2 title: Edward Lear's "The Jumblies Ch 3 title: Emily Dickinson's "A little bread - A crust - A crumb" Ch 4 title: Dante Gabriel Rossetti's "Jenny" Ch 5 title: Alfred, Lord Tennyson's "In Memoriam A. H. H. Canto 11" Ch 6 title: Samuel Taylor Coleridge's "The Pains of Sleep" Ch 7 title: William Blake's "The Garden of Love" Ch 8 title: Adam Lindsay Gordon's "The Swimmer" Ch 9 title: William Butler Yeats' "Byzantium" Ch 10 title: Robert Browning's "Prospice" Ch 11 title: Dante Gabriel Rossetti's "Insomnia" Ch 12 title: Alfred, Lord Tennyson's "In Memoriam A. H. H. Canto 24" Ch 13 title: Gerard Manley Hopkins' "I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day" Ch 14 title: Christina Rosetti's "Promises like Pie-crust" Ch 15 title: George Barlow's "The Immortal and The Mortal" Ch 16 title: John Keats' "Ode on Indolence" Ch 17 title: Dante Gabriel Rossetti's "Jenny" Ch 18 title: Alfred, Lord Tennyson's "In Memoriam A. H. H. Canto 3" Ch 19 title: William Blake's "Holy Thursday" Ch 20 title: Alfred, Lord Tennyson's "In Memoriam A. H. H. Canto 4" (for some reason this one is hard to find just as a poem so have a shmoop link) Ch 21 title: John Clare's "A Vision"
Music I mentioned: Surprisingly I didn't mention a lot, which is strange because I am a classical musician(hobbyist). The issue I have with mentioning music, though, is I have NO idea what was popular at the time and finding out is harder than finding out when a poem was published. Oh well, maybe I should be more chill about historical accuracy in the alternate history fiction universe.
Ch 26: Dvorak's Humoresque (i stand by Jack's pun. it's fiddly) Ch 29: Paganini's duet
22 notes · View notes
little-peril-stories · 6 months
Text
The Queen of Lies: Retribution and Regret
Tumblr media
Story Intro | Contents [Warnings] | Mood Board | Vibey Song Lyrics | Ao3
Contents: abusive relationship, gaslighting-adjacent emotional manipulation, trapped in a locked room, lady whump
Thanks @clairelsonao3 for inspiring me to turn to Breanna's literary society book for this chapter following your use of Yeats' "When You Are Old" in GSNBTR. 💕
Of course, I'd also be remiss not to also mention Nathaniel Hawthorne and thank him for the lovely prose in The Scarlet Letter. Thanks, Nate.
Tumblr media
Previous | Masterlist | Next
Word count: 2300 || Approx reading time: 10 mins
Retribution and Regret
Teaser: Baden’s voice, too, haunted her every thought. Her every breath. What were you thinking? Sneaking around like that? For him? For a bastard thief? For one of those Iustitia aecum crooks? Are you trying to humiliate me? Make me the laughingstock of the entire constabulary?
Breanna stared at the ceiling.
Breanna stared at the ceiling and watched nothing happen.
Breanna stared at the ceiling and watched nothing happen, even as the empty, frigid cavern of her bedroom wobbled and spun.
Don’t, Curtis, for the love of god, please don’t let him—
I’m sorry I lied, I really did just want to do something kind—something good—
Please, he’s going to be so angry no matter what, don’t let him kill that boy, he didn’t do anything—
A tear welled in her eye, burning her skin when it grew too heavy and slid down her cheek.
It was my fault, please, I swear—
Rife with hurt and fury, Curt’s voice rang in her head. Do you have any idea what you’ve done?
Baden’s voice, too, haunted her every thought. Her every breath. What were you thinking? Sneaking around like that? Deceiving Lenton? Telling ridiculous lies? For him? For a bastard thief? For one of those Iustitia aecum crooks? Are you trying to humiliate me? Make me the laughingstock of the entire constabulary?
I’m sorry, she’d gasped, again and again and again.
I never expected this from you, Baden had said. Have you taken complete leave of your senses?
I’m sorry.
You’re sorry? You have no idea how sorry you are. But you will.
She had expected what came first, had held her breath and closed her eyes and pushed herself through until it was done.
The soft words of her mother often came to her in such moments—the gentle but fragmented counsel that had helped Cecilia Cooper through her own marriage to Silas Cooper, a bitter man prone to temper and partial to drink. Stay with me, my love, she had whispered so often, and I will keep you safe. A mostly empty promise, untrue but well-meant; Breanna had known even then that her mother had tried her best.
Let’s practice some sums, she would sometimes say, smoothing away her daughter’s tear-damp locks, watching the door with a frantic eye in case the handle began to turn.
Twice two is four. Twice four is eight. Twice eight is sixteen. Twice sixteen…
Or perhaps, Sing me a song. Sometimes, Shall we read together? Or, We’ll play a recitation game. Can you tell me a poem? Quietest one wins.
Some of the poems, Breanna still clung to. O Rose! who dares to name thee? No longer roseate now, nor soft, nor sweet, but pale, and hard, and dry, as stubble-wheat. Kept seven years in a drawer —thy titles shame thee…
She had not expected what came after Baden’s furious tirade—had not expected his rage to be yet unspent, or that he should become a jailer not only to criminals, but to her as well.
You will stay in there, he had said, and she’d been too slow, too stupid to realize what was happening until the bedroom door slammed and the key scraped in the lock. Until you learn your lesson. Until you’ve had some time to remember who you’re married to. Who you belong to.
She had screamed then, hurling herself against the door despite the way her body screeched in pain, despite the rawness of her throat, despite how her weak, pathetic limbs could not budge the heavy wood.
Did you kill him?
She had choked out the words, still sobbing, on the floor now. She’d told herself it was her conscience that wanted to know so desperately.
Silence had answered her question, and she’d tried again. What did you do to him?
More empty air, devoid of sound and of pity.
Please, Baden. He didn’t hurt me. He didn’t.
A long, hissing breath from the other side of the door.
If I ever hear you mention the thief again, Breanna Hatchett—ever again—you will regret it until the end of your days. Do I make myself clear?
It had been her turn to respond with silence, until a fist smashing against the wall made her cry out.
Answer me.
Yes.
Now Breanna stared at the ceiling.
Wishing she had made different choices.
Wishing she had been wise enough to see this coming.
Mrs. Dennison had obviously been instructed not to open the door. Breanna had considered, for a while, setting fire to the room, just to see if the housekeeper would let her out then. To see if she was more loyal to her or to Baden. Fear had stayed her hand in case it was the latter—in case she ended up burning to death on her own self-built pyre.
How many hours had passed since the door had been locked, Breanna could no longer tell. She suspected it felt longer than it truly was, and she reprimanded herself for not paying more attention to how the light had changed. But when she tried to recall the path of the sun across the sky, to ascertain whether one night or two or five had passed, she found she could not remember.
The scrape of a key in the lock woke her from a hazy, dream-filled sleep.
“Breanna.”
He was back.
It was too late to turn around, to turn her back on him now. She was already facing the door. His grey eyes bored into hers, and her courage failed her. She looked away.
Baden closed the door behind him, the key already hidden away in his pocket, and approached.
“You are angry,” he said.
Was she? It was impossible to tell what she was feeling anymore.
“You made a terrible decision and a foolish mistake.” He sat down next to her, his arm scraping against hers.
“I know.”
“You made a complete mockery of me. My position. My authority.”
“I know.”
She kept her eyes downcast, counting specks of dust between the floorboards. He took her chin in his hand and directed her gaze toward him. “You could have been seriously hurt. Killed.”
“I didn’t think—”
“No,” Baden said. “You didn’t. That much is obvious.”
Although Breanna had not wept in hours now, a sob burst out of her again.
“Stop that,” he said. His grip tightened. “Enough tears.”
“I’m sorry,” she whispered.
Was she sorry? Again, it was difficult to discern exactly what she felt. All she knew was that it twisted her insides and filled her mind with fog.
“Perhaps you are,” Baden said. “Perhaps I believe you. But I confess…I cannot even begin to fathom what you thought to accomplish with your folly.”
“I…” His eyes were so cold and so grey, and he was so angry, and he was still holding her chin.
“I ask again. Why were you in there? What in god’s name were you doing?”
So tight. “I thought I’d… I just wanted to…” Too tight. “I don’t know.”
“Hmm.” Finally, Baden let go. He passed a hand over his face, sighing—a motion that might have been boyish were it performed by someone else. “I cannot have a wife who doesn’t think before she acts, Breanna. Who does impetuous things and cannot explain why.”
“I know,” she said. “I’m sorry. It won’t—”
He cut her off, gesturing around the room. “You understand, then, why this is needed. It’s for your own good. You may remain here and reflect on your choices. What you’ve learned. How you will conduct yourself in the future.”
“No,” she said, reaching for his hands. “I—I’m really—Baden, truly, you don’t have to leave me in here, I’ll—”
He took her hands in his, but the grip was like iron. “Do not argue with me, Breanna.”
She slid to the floor when the lock clicked, too exhausted to cry.
Voices floated through the walls. “When will the punishment be ended, Mr. Hatchett?”
Baden’s voice was almost too low to hear. Breanna inched closer to the door, straining. “When I say it is.”
“If it’s not too bold to ask, sir…”
Their footsteps faded, and Breanna curled into herself. How stupid she had been to believe that she could do something new—something good and exciting. Brave and bold. What nonsense—what madness. It had always been this way. It always would.
***
It was a shock when Mrs. Dennison entered.
“I’m not to let you out,” she said quickly. “Before you ask.”
“I know,” Breanna said. She lay on the bed, a dent long carved into her pillow. She could not bring herself to care that she was only half-dressed. So what if the housekeeper saw her wrinkled underclothes, the bare skin of her shoulder, the unkept bird’s nest of her hair? What did it matter?
Mrs. Dennison laid a tray of food next to her. The dull thud of wood against wood seemed far too loud for the gentle action that caused it. Wincing, Breanna closed her eyes tight.
“I asked him.”
Breanna did not raise her head but opened her eyes, directing her gaze upwards. “Asked him what?”
“What happened,” said Mrs. Dennison. “To that man you were help—the man you were visiting.” There was a snick of disapproval to her voice—unspoken and buried, but there. “You wanted to know.”
Breanna sat up. “You did? Why? What—” Her voice splintered. “What did he say?”
“He’s alive,” Mrs. Dennison said. “All the constable would say, though, is that he was punished. For hurting you.”
“He didn’t hurt me,” Breanna whispered. The room blurred before her, turning her housekeeper’s face into naught but watercolour swirls and brushstrokes. “He—he didn’t hurt me.”
No, it was not the thief who had hurt her.
Ice crystallized in Breanna’s veins as this realization sank in fully. That boy had been punished, but he’d done nothing except lash out in confusion and anger, and he had done her no harm, nor had he left a single mark on her skin.
She watched the housekeeper make her way toward the door. “Thank you, Mrs. Dennison.”
“You’re welcome, Mrs. Hatchett. I hope you feel better soon.”
The ice in Breanna’s veins melted and turned to flame.
The solitude of her chamber became a blessing. Breanna, tears dried, made her preparations, trembling and yet fuelled with a fire she had not known could burn inside her so brightly.
Alice’s book was now finished, read beginning to end, many times wept over. Breanna combed through it, placing slices of silk ribbon amongst the pages and marking passages with lightly drawn lines. She could no longer borrow from the future to ease her present grief. Would Alice understand? Perhaps not. In fact, Breanna thought, few would.
But she wrapped it tidily when it was done, the brown-paper corners folded tightly over the beautiful leather binding, the string pulled taut and cut to just the right length, ending in a tight, charming bow.
“Please send this back to Mrs. Wright,” she said when Mrs. Dennison delivered breakfast, holding out the parcel. The housekeeper eyed it nervously. Breanna smiled, relaxed her limbs. “It’s merely the book she lent me. I’ve finished it now.”
Mrs. Dennison nodded, then lifted the book from Breanna’s outstretched hands. “Was it any good?”
“Enthralling,” said Breanna. “Eye-opening. Although I suppose there are some who wouldn’t like it.”
“What’s it about?”
“Sin,” Breanna said. “Hypocrisy. Judgment. Guilt.” She paused. “Such things as no one truly wishes to face.”
Mrs. Dennison’s eyes locked with Breanna’s, fluttering slowly, as if she meant to parse every word, searching for some hidden meaning.
There can be no power to disclose the secrets that may be buried with a human heart.
Breanna smiled wider.
“Perhaps we all could learn a thing or two,” said Mrs. Dennison.
“Oh, yes,” said Breanna. “I know I did.”
The housekeeper cleared her throat. “You’re…well, then? Feeling better?”
She had not known the weight until she felt the freedom.
“It’s been nice to have something to occupy my mind.” Breanna gestured vaguely to the book, hoping Mrs. Dennison wouldn’t look too closely at the pile of sewing behind her.
“You’re looking rather tired, though, if I may say so, Mrs. Hatchett. Haven’t you been sleeping?”
Shrugging her shoulders, Breanna said, “If I wasn’t, would it be a surprise?”
“No,” said Mrs. Dennison. “I suppose it wouldn’t. After what you’ve been through.” She peered around the room again, eyes roving from the book to Breanna’s face to the bed to the hearth. “Would you like me to sit with you awhile? Keep you company?”
Breanna shook her head. “I’m quite fine, Mrs. Dennison. But…” A lump grew in her throat. “Thank you.”
“Not at all, Mrs. Hatchett.” The housekeeper backed away from her, heading toward the door. “I think…”
“Yes?”
Mrs. Dennison cleared her throat again. “I think the constable will release you soon, dear.”
When an uninstructed multitude attempts to see with its eyes, it is exceedingly apt to be deceived.
Letting a forgery of a smile cross her face, Breanna said quietly, “How kind of him.”
When the door was closed and locked, when Mrs. Dennison had gone away, cleaning or conducting the cooking duties that were not usually hers, Breanna allowed herself a few moments of breathless quiet to ponder the choices she had made, and the ones she would make—the life she’d had, and the one she now chose. She suspected, after everything, after the tears she had shed that seemed so infantile now, she would never see a meeting of Mrs. Gage’s literary society. True, she had wanted so desperately to join, but it was a loss she was willing to bear. Did it matter anymore?
Perhaps not—perhaps it never had.
The last of the words she had marked for Alice swirled in her mind, etched in her memory as if they had always waited there for her to read. Scriptures of truth, prophecies of deliverance, and a call to action:
Do anything, save to lie down and die!
Previous | Masterlist | Next
Tumblr media Tumblr media
Taglist (please let me know if you’d like to be added/removed!)
@starlit-hopes-and-dreams
@gala1981
@pleasestaywithmedarling
16 notes · View notes
landwriter · 1 year
Text
Ten Books To Know Me
Rules: 10 (non-ancient) books for people to get to know you better, or that you just really like.
Tagged by @softest-punk, thank you for utterly derailing my afternoon into nostalgia <3 My problem is less not picking ancient books and more not picking exclusively Canadian and English children’s lit published between 1995 and 1999. (Still the first three picks all the same though because it is like, the opus within which my psyche is almost wholly contained.) This got long but I'm going to be very brave and not apologize about that at all. I love talking about books, and these are some of the books I love the most. In chronological order of arrival into my heart.
Some of the Kinder Planets - Tim Wynne-Jones This book has been a part of my life for so long I cannot remember when, exactly, I first read it - only that it was taken from my gran’s shelf; Tim had sent her a copy with a lovely inscription. It’s a short story collection which remains today (and forever) my favourite format. Ted Chiang’s Exhalation, Karin Tidbeck’s Jagannath, Karen Russell’s Orange World, Margaret Atwood’s Stone Mattress are all fabulous examples, stacked before me at my desk, but Some of the Kinder Planets itself lives (alongside my two most precious childhood stuffies) at my mum’s house, the safest place of all. The stories are kids being kids in the way you want to read as a kid yourself: clever and wondering and scared and brave. Special mention also to his Zoom trilogy, beautifully illustrated in black and white by Eric Beddows.
Skellig - David Almond Another book likely pilfered from my granny’s library. There’s a little magic in Some of the Kinder Planets, but here is ALL the magical realism, and it changed me. This book has a sickly bird-or-man-or-angel in a garage being nursed to health by a boy with an ill baby sister in hospital that he can’t help at all; the indelible image of surviving off bluebottles and then getting snuck Chinese takeaway and brown ale; nature and weird kids and William Blake poems. I will weep if I continue thinking about it.
[Not Any Book But Just A Lot Of Books] - Kit Pearson, Diana Wynne-Jones, Kenneth Oppel, Philip Pullman, Madeleine L’Engle, etc. Listen, I know this is an INSANE cop-out but if you know the authors you know more or less exactly what I mean. These are the books that made me more tender than I already was, made me believe in Good, and Kindness, and Love, in a totally immutable way I thankfully do not ever want to change, because I don’t think I could.
Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett My first introduction to Neil Gaiman, Terry Pratchett, and footnotes. Also one of the first books I did not simply pick up because it was Lying Around. I bought it because my older cousin listed it as one of her favourite books on Facebook, and she was (and is) impossibly, horribly cool. I was maybe 13 or 14 and wanted to be cool too. I’ve since read a smattering of Gaiman but I’ve yet to read Terry Pratchett on his own. I’d like to! I know I’d love it.
The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul - Douglas Adams Loaned to me by my best friend before we were best friends. It is, apparently, the second novel in the Dirk Gently series, and I remember nothing of it except a very good bit about a couch getting stuck in a stairwell; nonetheless it’s listed here because this is clearly actually a thinly disguised chronology of sentimentality, and also because Douglas Adams is a wonder and delight to read and I don’t need to fully remember the book to know that in my bones. I’m not sure if it’s fair but I’ll also blame Douglas Adams for my inability to be brief and to resist using semi-colons. Could’ve been someone else. But it was definitely someone English.
Sailing to Byzantium - W.B. Yeats This is not a book, but it was in my English Literature textbook in high school, so it counts. If it wasn’t, I would still count it. Why a sixteen year old girl connected with a poem that begins “That is no country for old men.” is irrelevant, as is every stanza but the third, which contains the fateful, ruinous lines: “Consume my heart away; sick with desire / And fastened to a dying animal / It knows not what it is;” I remember when I read it, and I remember the chill feeling of Yeats’ spectral hand reaching all the way from his grave in County Sligo, across the whole Atlantic and the enormous landmass called Canada, to reach into my chest and cruelly grab my own heart, and I remember thinking How, and Exactly. The first thing I read that named the strangeness I felt inside of me. The Father, Son, and Holy Ghost of all my teenage angst. Written on my bones to this day, if I’m being honest.
Hamlet - Shakespeare We got off on the wrong foot, after I was personally victimized by the line ‘Brevity is the soul of wit’, but I do love Shakespeare. I credit this to having an excellent teacher for it, and reading it aloud in a cohort of tryhards and musicians and theatre kids. A case of familiarity breeds...appreciation, actually. We did a lot of Shakespeare, but we were asked to learn 20 lines of Hamlet specifically, and rewrite them, marked down for every error. Forty lines for bonus marks. There was much grousing and it seemed like a cruel, outdated task of rote memorization, but writing this a decade later, I am belatedly realizing this was a sneaky way to get a bunch of kids to recite a soliloquy so much that they couldn’t help but find the life in it, the rhythm and meter to make it stick in our minds. And now look! I love it! I am writing fanfic in iambic pentameter! Wherefore art my fucking restraint!! I learned my lines so hideously well that when I pulled up the scene just now (2.2, from “Yet I, a dull and muddy-mettled rascal peak”), I a) noticed and b) was offended by, minute differences from the version I memorized, which I then searched out and knew the moment I found. Incredible?!  
Still Life With Woodpecker - Tom Robbins The most recent time I’ve read a work of fiction and been rearranged by it, at the tender age of 21. here I am, I wrote, in my journal, after a very good sob, happier and more rudderless than ever. This man writes with totally unfettered joy and unhinged sincerity, two things I am hopelessly into, but also with a deep distaste for institutions and conformity that I desperately needed back then: lost, returned from a year of magical realism and the sort of adulthood growth spurt that makes you feel dizzy, home and yet horribly missing the home I’d made for myself elsewhere, all my nearly-fulfilled ambitions towards security and prestigious government postings feeling sort of hollow and reeking in my hands. It comforted me that I wasn't wrong as much as it spilled my own guts into my hands, and while I went on for another year seeing things through, it planted a seed that quickly grew proper roots and pushed me right off the ledge of respectability. And it’s a love story, of course.
It’s his prose that sits glowing on the horizon to me when I try to write richly: a distant shore of orgiastic language (from which you can surely hear the wind-carried cries of people fucking day and night), towards which I, still shy and prudish, ever point my prow.
How to Be Happy - Eleanor Davis A comic collection. Sharp and wonderful and alive. Another Best Friend gift (bless those around us with impeccable taste), of which every single panel is MARVELOUS. I meant to share one of my favourites here but apparently it has! Gotten up and left!! I will buy another copy in hopes of coaxing it back out of wherever it’s hiding.
Down to Earth - Monty Don This did not rearrange anything. But it does give me a good hug about it, so to speak. A month-by-month gardening guide which is chock-full of brilliant, sensible advice, and also so cheerfully comforting in a highly specific English way that I actually feel like I’m drinking a cuppa whenever I read a page or two of it. It makes me think of my grandmother. And so we’ve come full circle, eh?
I hope some of you are now nodding thoughtfully and thinking, well, Chrissakes, that explains it. Very sorry, hope this helps, etc. Passing on the tag to @fancy-rock-dove, @chubsthehamster, @broomsticks, @wordsinhaled, @btwimkindagay, @hardly-an-escape, @xx-vergil-xx, @that-banhus, and anyone else who wants to expose themselves on main and chat about their fave books
31 notes · View notes
gretchensinister · 6 months
Text
Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media
I wondered how much the reader was expected to know about the sources of the epigraphs that open Something Wicked This Way Comes.
Text of poem below read more.
Three epigraphs, like tent-poles, shall I say?
To prop and raise the canvas of the tale:
One, Yeats to mark the gnawing jaws of time
Two, Proverbs drawing sharp the ones to fear
Three, Stubb (who dies) claims power in a laugh.
Bright guiding lights! And ones I might not follow.
The line from Yeats a thread, a clue I followed
And found a poem with more than that to say.
The loved yet vanished thing? O gas-rasp laugh:
Laments a world before the War, this tale,
A sweet bright age when some had less to fear.
(The marching scourge was not impartial time.)
And now these words that tease through tongues and time
Excised from those ahead and those that follow—
A practice me and mine have cause to fear—
So with more space, what does the Good Book say?
Ah, still it props this lightning-shiver tale
A father urging wisdom. Ray, go laugh.
To face a whale like Moby with a laugh—
Defiance bold, and still it fails in time
As death for all but one completes that tale
It makes an eerie echo of what follows
The tome belies what tidbit tries to say—
Or not. “Ha”’s not proof ‘gainst cold death, just fear
I doubt the knowing reader you would fear,
Magician playing for magicians. Laugh
When they see how the trick is done, and say
You think you could do one like it next time?
No, you’d dismiss, say my kind could not follow
Even seduced, it’s crystal in your tale.
Still, unset shards shine clearer on the tale
And neither unlearned readers would cause fear
For they would only have your lead to follow.
Stubb who? But strengthens his epigraph laugh.
Words snap sharp, garnered fresh from text and time
To mean no more than what you’d have them say.
Such beacons! I can’t follow what they say.
I’ll break this tale’s frame, make it mine, this time
To hold my different fears, and curious laughs.
10 notes · View notes
freeuselandonorris · 7 months
Note
7, 24, 32 for the writer ask!
writing asks!!!
annoyingly i filled most of this out and then tumblr ate my answers SO take two!
What is your deepest joy about writing?
so this isn’t joy, per se, but i had a conversation with @lost-decade recently where i mentioned that i think a lot of my attraction to writing comes from the fact that i am, at heart, a horrible little control freak (positively unheard of in kink community etc etc) and thus it is very satisfying to me on a deep lizard brain level to put characters in situations and then make those situations conform to my wishes. my writing output always goes up dramatically when i am feeling overwhelmed or uncertain in life and i think this is a big part of it.
but also, i am a person who gets obsessed with things! i am all or nothing! i get obsessed with people (or rather their public personas, fourth wall and all that) and media and scenarios and kinks and tiny little details and big philosophical concepts. writing lets me poke at all those things. picture me like gollum holding a snow globe, shaking it up over and over again to watch how the flakes fall.
24. How much prep work do you put into your stories? What does that look like for you? Do you enjoy this part or do you just want to get on with it?
i’ll talk about fic first as that’s what people on here know me for writing-wise. the answer here is: it depends! for my slutty little one-shots i tend to do very little research; stuff like crosstown traffic or a lot like life are largely unplanned or inspired by one real-life event that sparks an idea (although i guess you could say i researched the njoy plug in a lot like life in the sense that i own one lmao).
with longer fics, particularly RPF, i LOVE fitting my fic timelines into real-life events. this is particularly satisfying with motorsport RPF because the races give the year a very particular and easy-to-research structure. so for longer fics like there was always warmth between us i watched a ton of youtube videos and clips of max and daniel for both timeline inspiration and characterisation (although honestly i read that fic back the other day and my dialogue for them is so generic at times gjrskjfs), plus i wrote it relatively soon after the season itself.
with the toto/christian sequel to all the blood runs hot before it’s cold i’m working on, i wrote myself some notes of what themes i want to explore, plus a timeline of last season so that i could tie those themes into the arc of the season, like so:
Tumblr media
i probably won’t use all those notes in the final piece, but it gives me a structure to work from.
for original writing, again it depends. for short stories and poetry i tend to free write for a bit beforehand until something appears from the ether that i can use as a starting point. for my novel-in-progress, when i wrote the first draft i basically did…maybe a page of planning? this was a bad idea. it was a mess. i resisted planning for ages but eventually i had to admit that for long-form pieces i cannot adequately structure my writing without one. so i went back and wrote a very elaborate plan using the six-arc story structure, which allows for much more freedom than a traditional ‘save the cat’ style beat sheet. highly recommend. i try not to do too much research beforehand (which is hard given i’m writing a novel about AI, something i have very little practical knowledge of!) because i just get bogged down and end up procrastinating.
jeez, that was an essay.
32. What is a line from a poem/novel/fanfic etc that you return to from time and time again? How did you find it? What does it mean to you?
oh lol there are SO MANY. i have a few of them tattooed on me. let me answer all three of those with the first example that comes to mind:
for poem, ‘turning and turning in the widening gyre / the falcon cannot hear the falconer’ from the second coming by wb yeats haunts me. the whole poem haunts me, actually, for reasons that should be obvious upon reading. but those lines utterly terrify me.
for novel, again there’s hundreds but the one that first came to mind was ‘you can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style’ from lolita by vladimir nabokov. lolita is one of the books i’ve re-read the most because it is a complete masterpiece, and this line embodies that to me. it’s clever, it’s funny, it’s defensive, it slides in a fantastically important plot point in the shape of a joke. amazing.
from fic, this is maybe a random example but the first one i thought of was this line from darkest little paradise (F1, pierre/charles) by heroics: 'Charles clutches him for another moment, squeezes the back of Pierre’s neck, resists the urge to drop to his knees right here and let Pierre do whatever he wants with Charles’s soft body.' i don’t know what it is about it, something about ‘soft body’. it’s just a line that has really stuck with me as a beautiful example of a dynamic (both in the relationship sense and, a bit, in the kink sense) described with such restraint.
eta: fuck at risk of making this post even more unnecessarily long i just realised i would be utterly remiss not to mention ‘She wants to know where this moral fortitude was when he had her flat on her back in that dark little cottage. Wonders if he had to fuck her to find it. If she has to always be the one to pay for it.’ from @widespindriftgaze’s astonishing taskmaster RPF masterpiece broke both early and late (part 2 in a series), which i have never managed to read without crying.
thank you for asking! ❤️
from this writing asks post. i love shit like this (as you can see from how fuckin long this got); please feel free to ask more if you're reading this!
7 notes · View notes
osatokun · 4 days
Note
Gotta be The Ragged Wood by William Butler Yeats. I think it's interesting as far as love poems go because, well, it's just an oddly structured weird little poem that's been interpreted a lot of different ways.
This is the first time I actually read Butler's poems! I didn't read the Ragged Wood yet, but I'm going through other ones right now, thanks to you. But I stumped into a problem. The original phrasing is flowy and pleasant, I really do like it a lot! But english does not suit to the roleplaying (that's why I need the poems ofcourse). And the translations are butchering the beautiful flow of the words so much T_T That's really sad discovery :<
2 notes · View notes
Note
Just saw your post about Steve and Oscar Wilde, and I'm headcannoning that Steve was a Wilde fan through and through, and a prolific reader. I'm mainly doing this because a girl can project her own love and hobbies onto her favourite cahracters.
Imagine a queer Irish asthmatic kid who isn't allowed to go out and play with the other children at school because of his weak immune system and the fact that his mother is a TB nurse who he has close contact with. One day he picks up a book to pass the time and is immediately hooked on reading.
Mary Shelley. John Steinbeck. Agatha Christie. Virginia Woolf. You name it, he's either read it or it's on his list.
Until one day he picks up Oscar Wilde, and Steve is reading something written by a man who is queer and Irish like him.
Imagine a queer Irish Brooklynite visiting a dingy, beloved bookstore and pestering the owner if he has any more Oscar Wilde.
Books, plays, or poems, Steve has everything that has Oscar Wilde on the cover of it.
He saves up the money from his art commissions to pay rent, food for himself and Bucky, and of course books.
How do you think Steve reacted when he walked into a modern bookstore and saw all the contemporary classics that he had missed in the ice. Would he cry while reading The Book Thief? Would he like Fahrenheit 451? What about The Kite Runner?
Unlike how the MCU has portrayed him as (a man who is so out of depth with the future and stays that way, not helped by Tony's antics of reminding him of it ever single scene), I believe Steve would love learning and reading about the future.
What's your opinion?
(the post)
I wouldn't say Steve stays that way! He hasn't been out of his depth since 2012, that phase was already over for him by the time of CATWS. His wardrobe was updated, he had a smartphone, a to-watch/listen list, his own sound system, familiarity with the internet, modern cookery, modern medicine, etc. etc. And he was a man ahead of his time already in the 40s; he was passionately antifa, his values were advanced enough to see him ostracised, and he assembled a team more diverse than the Avengers.
He was well prepared for the future, and that was before he got Bucky back! So it's really only Tony's daddy issues/seething inferiority complex running its mouth, and later the dipshits of EG talking a pile of steaming shit about a version of Steve they did not, in fact, portray.
Ahem.
That said: it must be absolutely wild to Steve, to have both the spending power and this number of books available at the same time, in the future?
(Plus, coming from war time, paper rationing, pre-set novels shipped out to the US Army... not able to choose his reading material, etc. What a breath of fresh air!)
.
I have an old headcanon about Steve and his mum having an 'Irish shelf' in their humble apartment, consisting of Irish authors exclusively, including Oscar Wilde! (James Joyce, WB Yeats, George Bernard Shaw, Bram Stoker, Jonathan Swift, Maria Edgeworth.)
But I also have a headcanon that Steve would listen politely to whatever SHIELD thinks he ought to read, nodding attentively...
And then ignore everything they said, get hold of a list of 'Banned Books of the 20th century' and read every damn one, in chronological order, first chance he gets! 😂
(So yeah Fahrenheit 451 would be a good start! Nineteen Eighty Four would be on there, since he'd be interested to see the 'next' take on a Brave New World.
The 'disillusioned soldiers of WWII as authors' would be an interesting demographic to him initially, I think; to hear what other guys like him felt. But it would be difficult because I think books set in the actual war itself would surely be too painful to read, at first. It would take a few years before he could stand it, IMO. So I don't think he could manage, eg. Slaughterhouse 5, The Book Thief, etc.
I headcanon that he'd go decade by decade, learning the history, and then reading the 'big novels' of each period, to get a feel for it.
I think he'd be interested to read the beatnik/silent generations works too (eg. On The Road), out of a suspicion that -- if he had come back from the war -- he would've been one of them, wandering around America, rather than one of the faceless 1950s suburbanites.)
It's mind-boggling to consider how many classics he wouldn't have read or heard of!
But he'd read anything that's being banned from schools, especially -- and he'd make sure to get snapped reading them in public to increase exposure for banned authors. 😇
11 notes · View notes
ruminativerabbi · 2 months
Text
Can the Center Hold?
As we move forward through these strange times, I find myself careening these days back and forth between my native pessimism about the world and the occasional flash of uncharacteristic optimism. On the whole, things are probably no worse than they have been in the course of these last few months. And in some ways, things are actually looking up. (For one thing, I keep hearing rumors about some sort of imminent deal that will bring at least some of the hostages home. So that sounds hopeful.) I know both those things. But another part of me feels that the gyre is widening and that, at least in the end, the center will not hold. I write this week not to scare or depress, but to share my ill ease and to find comfort in inviting you to join me in hoping together for better times to come.
Yeats (that is, William Butler Yeats, 1865—1939) was one of the world’s greatest English-language poets, a Nobel laureate, eventually a senator in the Irish government. He was a strong Irish nationalist and he definitely flirted—and probably even more than just flirted— with the rising fascist movements of the 1930s. Not an anti-Semite in same sense as Ezra Pound or T. S. Eliot, he was nonetheless part of a world that held anti-Judaism and anti-Semitism to be part of a normal, educated person’s worldview. (For a brief but trenchant review of Irish anti-Semitism over the ages that appeared in the Irish Times a few years ago and that specifically mentions Yeats, click here.) There’s a lot of evidence to review, but I don’t wish to sort it all out here. Nor do I want to comment—not now, at any rate—about the set of bizarre reasons that have led Ireland to be the most consistently anti-Israel nation in Europe. (For a recent essay published in the U.K.’s Jewish Chronicle on that precise topic, click here.) Instead, I’d like to use one of Yeats’ most famous poems, “The Second Coming,” to frame my thoughts about the world we are all living in.
Yeats begins his poem with a stunning image:
            Turning and turning in the widening gyre
            The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
A gyre is a gigantic circular oceanic surface current. Before the poet starts to write, he looks out at the sea and finds it calm, placid, and peaceful. And then the churning begins. At first, it is barely perceptible, hardly even noticeable. And then, slowly, the motion picks up speed. What was tranquil and serene just a moment earlier is suddenly unsteady and unfixed in place. And as the speed of the water picks up, the pleasurable expectation of swimming peacefully in calm waters is replaced by the fear of drowning in those same waters. Nothing, suddenly, is as it should be. The tightest personal connections—Yeats uses the intimate relationship of the falcon and the falconer—become attenuated, then ruined entirely by the deafening gyre as it picks up speed and grows louder and stronger. In the world the poet is comparing to the sea, then, things that are normally each other’s natural complement—butter and toast, coffee and cream, pillow and pillowcase, socks and feet—these normal connections too weaken. And, in the end, the center itself around which life revolves—the family, the house, the workplace, the church, the shul, the park, the grocery—the center doesn’t hold and what was once normal, even pedestrian, now seems unpredictable and in a state of permanent, debilitating flux. And then, just like that, nothing at all seems fixed in place. Or safe.
I’ve lost track of the news even though I read obsessively. I subscribe to a dozen daily news bulletins, peruse half a dozen on-line newspapers, have an inbox that is constantly overflowing. My junk file has its own junk file. I am, I think, as up-to-date on the world’s goings-on as anyone who has a day job could possibly be. Mostly, I deal with it all by compartmentalizing the data, thus storing it in manageable chunks for later degustation (which I occasionally even get to). In that way, my center can hold. But just lately the center is not holding. And the gyre feels more than ever as though it is ominously large and ever-widening.
Let’s consider one single week’s worth of news. A man was arrested last Monday in London and charged with having attacked several employees in a kosher supermarket with a knife. In Haifa, a terrorist drove his car into a crowd of civilians just yards from the front entrance to the Haifa Naval Base. A Chabad rabbi in Washington was pushed out of a Lyft cab by the driver, who then violently attacked him. A terror cell about to perpetrate an “October 7-like attack” was identified and neutralized in Jenin. A would-be terrorist was shot and killed as he tried to murder soldiers standing guard at the entrance to Tekoa, a peaceful town in the Gush Etzion bloc that Joan and I visited just last summer. The International Court of Justice considered seriously a charge of attempted genocide made by South Africa against Israel, then rendered its decision almost without reference at all to the October 7 pogrom that took the lives of well over twelve hundred innocent Israeli civilians, some of whom were beheaded and others of whom were raped. The speaker of the French National Assembly commented the other day that the steep resurgence of violent anti-Semitism in France had reached the level at which it poses “a threat to the foundations of [the French] republic.” Federal agents in Massachusetts arrested a man who was making credible threats of mass violence against Jews and Jewish institutions in his state. Undeniable proof was adduced that UNRWA, the branch of the United Nations charged with supplying humanitarian aid to the Palestinians, is so suffused with actual Hamas-affiliated terrorists and sympathizers that it wouldn’t be that unreasonable for UNRWA itself to be considered a terrorist organization. (If you have access to the on-line version of the Wall St. Journal, click here for a truly shocking account of the whole UNRWA scandal.) The top civil rights officer at the U.S. Department of Education, who has spent her entire professional life as a civil rights attorney, declared herself “astounded” at the level of anti-Semitic aggression the characterizes our nation’s college campuses. To offer one single example, students at Stanford University, once a school I would have characterized as one of our nation’s finest, were chased just last week from a campus forum on anti-Semitism by a crowd of haters threatening to hunt them down in their homes and, at least by implication, to murder them there. (Click here for the horrific details. They’d have to pay me to send a kid of mine to Stanford. But I wouldn’t anyway.)
Is the center holding? More or less. So far.
The poet continues with reference to anarchy being “loosed upon the world” and goes on to imagine innocence itself drowning as the “blood-dimmed” tide rises. And the problem is not only the brutal barbarism of the aggressor; it’s also the fecklessness of the aggressed-against: “The best lack all conviction, while the worst / are full of passionate intensity.” Oy. And so ends the first half of the poet’s poem.
Being a Christian, Yeats imagines the salvation of the world in Christian terms. No problem with that for me: in what language should the man speak if not his own? And so the Christian man looks to the horizon for salvation and expects Jesus. But Jesus does not appear at all. The poet is ready for the Second Coming, for the messianic moment, for redemption. But on the horizon he suddenly espies something else entirely:
…somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare…
The savior cometh not and instead cometh the “rough beast, its hour come round at last.” The poet expects to be saved, but his hopes are dashed as his faith turns out to have been misplaced entirely because all the distant horizon can deliver up is a monster. All the promises of modern society—prosperity, human dignity, security—turn out to be hollow,  misshapen fantasies; none will help much. Or at all. The much-awaited Second Coming yields only an ogre, a fiend, a “rough beast.” There is no hope.
And where does that leave us? I too look to the horizon and wait for redemption. I also fear the “rough beasts” of anti-Semitism, anti-Israelism, anti-humanism, and anti-Americanism, the four horsemen (to wander back into Christian terms) of my personal most-feared apocalypse. And yet, despite it all, I don’t find myself entirely drained of hope. I keep perusing the headlines with all the doom they presage for the world and all the terribleness they recount, but somehow find myself able to retain hope in the future. Where that comes from, I have no idea. Maybe it has to do with relativity. Hamas is Amalek, but we’ve faced worse. Our American college campuses are minefields for Jewish students, but things will surely improve as the problem is dragged out into the light and the world can see the haters for what they are and respond accordingly. Israel’s set of tasks in Gaza is beyond daunting, but the tide seems slowly to be turning. I continue to harbor the real hope that the hostages are all still alive and that the rumors of a deal to release them will turn into reality. And even though the streets of our cities seem clogged with villains whose hatred for Israel feels visceral rather than rational, I still have confidence that the American people will never embrace anti-Judaism and that the republic, the indivisible one featuring liberty and justice for all, will never turn on its own citizens. Do I sound Pollyanna-ish or rationally hopeful? Like an ostrich with its head in the sand or a Jew with his head held high? Even I am not sure. But I continue to believe in the future, in our future in this place and in the future of Israel. “You may say I’m a dreamer, but I’m not the only one.”
Tumblr media
2 notes · View notes
theherdofturtles · 9 months
Text
My guesses at the UK brothers' favourite books :
Éire: Mo Scéal Féin by Peadar O Laoghaire. The imagery in Irish !! and manages to be frickin' painful just as it is hopeful- XI, the castle poem and the pigeon in context of Peadar writing in the Irish language ??? THE hhhhh Pain in the soul. But I also imagine Éire's a smug connoisseur of Yeats. In Memory of W. B :
"You were silly like us; your gift survived it all:
The parish of rich women, physical decay,
Yourself. Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry.
Now Ireland has her madness and her weather still"
Alba: Sporan Dhòmhnaill by Donald Macintyre. This is purely self-indulgent. Macintyre writes satire in sort of double-meaning language a lot. His syntax is wacky in the best way? I think this is oddly fitting to Alba. Uibhist Uain' an Eòrna is his favourite part of Sporan Dhòmhnaill. I'm taking no questions. 
England: He says his favourite book is the Odyssey, mainly because no one will argue with him, and everyone expects him to go all ‘Shakespeare’s Judgment Equal to his Genius' on them (Of William, I imagine either King Lear or Henry IV is his favoured). Odyssey is reasonably suited to him, too. Sailing, adventure, morally questionable heroics through manipulation or outsmarting one's foes—Odyssey has all the stuff he likes. HOWEVER on the down low, he's memorised Kipling's Seven Seas. If anyone heard that, there would be red flags. He's aware of that. 
Cymru: This is partly a shot in the dark because I've not actually read Ceiriog, but he has high credentials, is described as being heartfelt in his work, and he seems a fitting author for Cymru? ‘Oriau'r Hwyr’ perhaps? I've heard his diction likened to Coleridge or Wordsworth, both of whom I am fairly familiar with, and if I trust that connection I see it well fit to Cymru. Other than that, I would see him as a fan of Le Morte d’Arthur.
6 notes · View notes
theodoradevlin · 10 months
Text
Quiet Hearts, Hopeful Hollows
SUMMARY: A one shot about how Sebastian, Anne, and Ominis found each other, and then found solace in each other, as life unfurled.
Snippets of time covering the events that occurred leading up to Hogwarts Legacy, mainly the death of the Sallows, and then how Anne became cursed.
Also posted on AO3, but reposting here because i have fondness for this one for some reason.
Tumblr media
"lovely to sit, between comfort & chaos"
The Summer Before Hogwarts
The three children sat playing in the hollow they had found, one curled up with a book reading aloud to the boy who laid next to her, hands resting under his tousled blonde hair, listening so intently at her words…while the third stood in the creek, trousers pulled up, skipping rocks across the water. He had been unable to sit still long enough to listen to his sister’s tales, but was happy to be with them all just the same.
The forrest leaves had provided them a cool respite from a hot summer day as the sun peaked through from above them, making them feel as if this hollow was sheltered from the world, as they were sheltered from the world while within it.
Crickets chirped in the distance, though it was not yet evening, and birds twittered high above their heads. The afternoon had held the sounds of nature, their laughter, and the water tripping clumsily across rocks - none in a rush to go, or to be found.
The three of them had loved wandering around the forrest this summer, despite the fact that Sebastian had no initial intentions of letting his annoying sister tag along.
He had been itching to get out there with his new friend, Ominis, both very anxious to get out in the woods, having heard there might have been a family of bow truckles that had recently taken residency.
Affronted at the lack of invite, the sister demanded she tagged along - and while the two boys were quite apprehensive at first, when Anne had singlehandedly tracked down the bow truckles herself out of stubbornness and led them to it defiantly, they reluctantly welcomed her to their gang.
Before long, Ominis was surprised that Anne was an even faster talker than her brother. Her voice was a constant string of millions of questions always directed to the quiet boy who had been so used to being invisible, and had been surprised to find it was not so bad to be seen by others, even if he could not see himself.
“Can you believe it Omi?” His sister whispered to his friend in an excited squeal. “Levana Dawles was the first auror to single handedly win equal pay for women and men in the field. And how fearsome she is - this tale is just one of many!”
Sebastian rolled his eyes.
“Anne - please. You’re always droning on and on about auror stuff. You know Mum and Dad would much rather us be professors. Especially after Uncle Solomon’s experience.”
She stuck her tongue out at her brother.
“You know Uncle Solomon is a terrible auror - Mum says he doesn’t care about protecting people, just having power over them.”
Anne knew it all too well, the strained tension that existed between their parents and their Uncle. She wouldn’t let it deter her. She would be the type of auror that would protect people. No matter what.
She huffed her chest defiantly.
“I WILL be an auror. YOU go ahead and be a professor Sebastian, your nose is always stuck in those silly poem books anyhow. You can be the professor of Annoying brother studies.”
His cheeks turned slightly pink. He had loved reading ever since he could remember. It fed him so many perspectives on the world - poets like Byron, Yeats, Elliott. But he’d never admit that to his sister.
Maybe one day he’d find someone who appreciated that about him, but in the meantime, Sebastian just stuck his tongue back out at her.
“Mind you - you wouldn’t even have a book about aurors if I hadn’t found that for you. So you’re welcome.”
She just laughed.
“I suppose you’re right. I have you to thank for making me read, and you have ME to thank for always making you better at learning spells. I can’t wait for dueling club next year, it’s the first thing I’m going to sign up for.”
Anne continued excitedly. All three of them were to start Hogwarts in the fall - they had all just gotten their letters, and naturally it had been all they talked about all summer.
The quiet boy continued to listen, which he was always quite content to do around her. He loved hearing the emotion in her voice, it was always so passionate that he didn’t need to see her to imagine the look of pure fascination on her face, even though it was one he longed to see.
Quietly, and almost nervously, he said “You know Anne, I think you would make a fantastic auror.”
Anne gleamed.
“Thank you, Omi. I can always count on you…not like Sebastian.”
Though her words were a jest, a flash of hurt sparked across her brother’s eyes.
“That’s not true Anne- I’ve always looked out for you. I’m your older brother after all.” He reasoned solemnly.
“By eight minutes, I might add..” She huffed in loving jest.
She turned back to Ominis.
“What are you most excited for Omi?” She asked intently.
He paused. Really, he was excited just to have them. He hoped more than anything they would be in the same house…though for him, which house he’d be sorted into wasn’t much of a question. Slytherin would be waiting whether he wanted it to or not.
“I’m…I’m excited to get away from my family for a bit.” He murmured quietly. Unlike the Sallows, who were marvelous parents, always inviting Ominis for supper, teasing their twins, causing a ruckus in Feldcroft with the games they would play in the backyard until well into the night, the Gaunts were….very much the opposite.
Anne simply held his hand in response. She had seen the bruises. The way his eyes were noticeably more cloudy some days, when they hadn’t seem him in a while.
“Mum always says you should just come stay with us.” She said softly.
He squeezed her hand back.
“I think your parents have their hands full already.” He lightly joked, but secretly - he would want nothing more, had he not been such an apparent heir. No matter where he would go, his name would follow. And he didn’t want his name impeding on the little joys in the world the Sallows had carved out for themselves.
“Don’t worry Omi-dearest, like I always offer I have no problem blowing up some gobstones on mommy and daddy dearest for you - should they get out of line again.”
Ominis rolled his eyes, smiling slightly at Sebastian’s constantly reckless offers.
“As great of an offer as it is Seb - so long as we have each other next year, gobstones or no, I think that’s all I need.”
As the fireflies began to emerge, the three of them stayed in the hollow a few moments longer. Wondering in the way that their future had glowed so gently, full of possibilities in that one soft moment.
The Accident
It was a moment that didn’t last long enough.
They had all been at the hollow that night it had all happened. Ominis always found himself thinking back to that night, knowing if the twins had been home ….they all would have been gone in an instant. As terrible as it was, he thanked Merlin he hadn't lost them too.
That night, Sebastian and Anne had walked back, to see neighbors crowding the Sallow home, strange green vapors sifting out through the windows of the home.
“Seb…?” Anne passed a trouble glance to her brother. His brow furrowed. Their parents had said they had just planned on visiting with their Uncle that night.
A sinking feeling started forming in his chest as he looked back at her.
“Let’s hurry, now.”
The brother and sister sprinted to the house, only to be stopped as a figure turned towards them, grabbing them by their shoulders.
He inhaled sharply, at the figure’s face. It wore a strange mask. His eyes darted around him like a trapped animal. Everyone was wearing masks.
“What’s..what’s”
For once, Sebastian could find no words.
“Put this on child - quickly - there’s been an accident it’s not safe!” The figure cautioned.
Anne squeaked.
“Accident-?!”
Sebastian threw the mask to the side, refusing to listen.
“What accident? This is our house. PLEASE. I need to get through. My PARENTS are in there. PLEASE.”
He struggled as more adults came to settle him. Until a looming figure picked him up, taking him further and further away from home. His home.
He screamed, he hit, he fought against it. Against it all.
Finally, the figure let him go, as Anne rushed towards her brother to hold on to him for dear life.
They both stood frozen, watching as their Uncle Solomon removed his own mask, stumbling over his words, “There was…it was a lamp..somehow…"
“You’re not making sense- ” Sebastian choked out.
“They’re dead.” Solomon muttered in finality, cutting Sebastian off. “Your mother. Your father. They’re both dead. I’m…sorry.”
Anne cried out.
“NO - no..no. We just saw them a few hours - they said they would stay up for us…they ..” Anne’s confusion rushed out.
Sebastian vaguely heard Anne’s screams and broken sobs, as his own body became numb.
***
Sebastian had stopped reading books.
That fourth year, the return to Hogwarts had been the first time either of them had felt relief all summer. Ominis had barely seen them since that night, until they showed up to the dorm room that first day. Anne had maintained a sense of cheerfulness at their reunion, while Sebastian now carried a cold glint in his eye. It had not been there before. Before that night.
Ominis ran up to them.
“Anne - I…I wrote you all summer. How..are you? How are you both?”
Ominis’s eyes flooded with concern. He wished so badly he could see for himself what state his friends where in. He wished so badly he knew of some way to help them.
“Oh better now, Omi.” Anne kept her voice cheerful for him so he would know they were okay, hating the desperate worry in his gaze.
“ We’ve ..erm…we’ve been staying at Solomons so it was …hard to get your letters. I’m sorry we didn’t see you much after…after..” She caught herself as Sebastian looked away, she tried again, smiling. “Well - let’s just say I’m happy we’re here now. Sebastian wants to join dueling club this year!”
He certainly had. That year, something in Sebastian had changed… his poetry books collected dust, but his spell casting became legend in a matter of a few weeks.
Anne had been the record holder in the dueling club all their years here, until this one. Whether because of Anne keeping him on his toes, or because of something else - Sebastian became fearsome each time he stepped onto the dueling platform. But... Ominis suspected there must have been some underlying thing that was driving him so hard.
Eventually though, laughter came that year.
It had been a fall afternoon, and Sebastian had excitedly told Ominis to come to the Undercroft to practice a new spell.
He hadn’t told Ominis what exactly “Confringo” did until they had both singed their eyebrows off.
“You - You look about as bald as a Kappa…”
Sebastian wheezed in between laugher as Ominis couldn’t help but join him until they were both rolling on the ground.
Though they laughed themselves silly at the sight of each other, Ominis made a mental note to never do anything Sebastian said without asking questions first. Little did he know - it was going to become a trend for them.
Hecate found them scrambling out of the Undercroft, seeing the soot and burnt hair, she dragged them to detention by their ears, scolding them for learning Confringo when it wasn’t supposed to be learned until the Fifth Year.
Anne had laughed too then, and Ominis found himself thinking more and more, how much lovelier the sound of her laugh had become through each passing year.
Yes…their fourth year had been strange, but they were all glad to find moments of happiness. The weeks passed, and as summer approached, the laughter lessened at the prospect they all faced of going to homes they didn’t want to be in.
“Let’s promise to meet at the Hollow every week.”
Ominis had made the brother and sister promise him. Gladly, they agreed, joining pinkies. After all those summers, it had become their safe place. Their refuge.
One summer night - it had been the agreed upon meeting time at the Hollow. Ominis walked up bubbling with excitement, only to find that no one was there. His stomach sunk. They hadn’t missed a night together yet…so there had to be an explanation for their absence. Something must have happened.
He hurried towards the Sallow home in Feldcroft, his nerves coiling as came upon the house, as a noise crashed into him before he could even reach the gate to the home.
Anger. A voice boomed through the night air, even all the way towards where Ominis was. He didn’t have to see to know exactly who it was.
“You will STOP reading about aurors. You will stop THINKING about aurors. I will be DEAD before I ever allow you to think you can be one. I forbid it!”
Solomon Sallow raised his hand, as Anne’s already tear streaked face looked in frozen horror. Ominis’s heart stopped, he couldn’t see but from her cry he knew something was wrong. He was all too familiar with violence. It had haunted him like an unwanted ghost. He knew Solomon was hurting her.
He sprinted towards them, but the sound of impact never came. Not until Sebastian stepped in front of Anne, using his wand to Expelso Solomon across the room.
“You. Don’t. Touch. Her. Ever. You’ll NEVER touch her!”
All those summers he had the voice of a boy, yet no longer. His fury ground out between his teeth, his fury was that of a man who had grown up quickly.
“We’ll never listen to you!” He screamed. But not before Solomon strode over, the impact finally came, with his fist slamming into the boys face, knocking him out cold.
Ominis’s heart broke as he rushed to his friends, hearing as Anne cried and cried, holding her brother in her arms.
Solomon..pathetic as he was…always seemed surprised at his own actions. The man fled into the night, most likely in the direction of the nearest bar.
As Ominis burst through the door, he gently took Anne in his arms, as Anne cradled Sebastian’s head in her lap. The three of them trembled on the floor, not sure how they had gotten here, but knowing they would get through anything together.
“Omi..Omi..” She whimpered against his shoulder.
“It’s going to be okay Anne, I promise.”
Sebastian slowly came back to consciousness, a bruise already forming on his freckled skin.
Ominis cast a healing charm, despite Sebastian’s protests that he was fine.
“Can we…go to the hollow?” Anne’s quiet voice suggested.
They followed the fireflies there.
It was the only safe place any of them had left.
That night, they cuddled against each other against the trunk of a large oak.
After that day, Ominis no longer wondered why Sebastian had stopped reading books.
The Fall
That summer, finding time at the hollow had become harder. There had been attacks starting to happen all cross the hamlets, due to goblins apparently. It had been slow at first - and then all of a sudden, it had been decreed that there was to be a curfew in place. Times were not safe. And so they could no longer meet at the hollow. It had been awful for Ominis, stuck at home with his parents.
That night, Ominis had been forced to come to dinner with his family. It didn’t happen often, but when it did -he hated it. He sat there, usually being ignored and ignoring everything.
Until an owl arrived.
“My - apparently there’s been another goblin attack in Feldcroft - apparently quite a horrendous one. Just hours ago.” His mother mused in disgust, as Ominis froze.
“Good thing - so many mud bloods living there these days. I do hope those goblins did get rid of a few of them for us.”
Ominis inhaled, not hesitating before he tore away from the table- wand in hand.
“And - where do you think you’re going?!” His father snapped at his movement.
Ominis didn’t care. Didn't care about his father or mother. Didn't care about the curfew.
“My friends are there - I need to go.”
Was all he said.
“You will do no such thing. Sit…before I make you sit.” Cold and commanding.
Ominis sprinted while he could, before he registered the sound of “IMPERIO” slip from his fathers lips, just missing him.
He didn’t care. He didn’t care about anything except getting to Feldcroft. He had to get to Sebastian, to Anne.
He heard her first.
Her pained cries and Sebastian’s hoarse cry ringing out in the distance.
Everything in him started collapsing, but he moved forward faster now.
“Anne! Anne!”
Ominis rushed towards them. Solomon stumbled away,
“I …need to find a healer.” His looming figure faded into the burning town, calling out for help.
Ominis trembled, cursing his blindness, his words rushing out.
“Sebastian - what happened?! Why is he looking for a healer….is Anne..is she….”
Sebastian just looked up at his friend, tears streaking his face.
“There was an attack…the children…she was trying to protect them..Damn her. Always trying to protect everything but herself..” He inhaled sharply.
“But ..I .. I let her down Ominis. I couldn't save her.” Sebastian's voice was hollow as his empty stare gazed into the distance.
Ominis had never cursed his loss of sight as much as he did now, he panicked, he needed to see if she was okay.
He stumbled towards them, blind hands reaching out for her.
When his solid hands met Anne’s body, he let out an exhale at her weak sound of recognition, she was here. She was solid. She was at least alive, even if he knew something was terribly wrong. Anne weakly made an attempt towards his arms, but Sebastian hesitated to let her go.
Ominis struggled, hands trembling on her as he sensed her pain. “Sebastian, please. Let me have her.” He pressed firmly, Sebastian didn’t move.
“Dammit, Sebastian. Let her go.” He pressed again, desperately.
Sebastian let our another broken cry, letting her fall into Ominis’s arms as he crumpled over, body wracked with sobs.
“Omi…it ...curse..” She ground out as she realized who’s arms she had found herself in. Her hands reached up to his face, as if to calm him when he wasn’t the one hurt. He tensed in alarm at her sudden cry of pain.His panic rising in his words.
“Anne..tell me what hurts. Please tell me how to help. I can’t see..I can’t see” His voice broke as he leaned into her hand, “I …I need.. need to know where it hurts..” She could tell him, and he would find a way to fix it. He had to.
“Everything…” She looked up to him as tears fell freely between her groans. He felt the wetness fall on his chest where he held her. “Everything hurts. Everything hurts. I can’t make it stop. It will never stop.”
He pressed a kiss onto her shaking head, never feeling as useless as he did now.
"We'll fix it Anne. We will fix it." He promised, determinedly.
“I’m - I’m sorry Omi. I really wanted to be there this year…” Another sharp inhale from her mouth made him freeze, “..I really wanted to be there to tease those first years again with you….”
He shook his head, his own tears falling.
“You will be Anne, you’re not going anywhere. You will continue to be the menace you always have been.”
He let out a strangled laugh.
“We will tease those first years. We will get through OWLS. I’ll take you to our first ball. We’ll graduate…and and..” His words stumbled out rapidly, “You’ll be an Auror. You’ll be the best damn auror. Because you are the bravest person I know. You are going to do everything you ever wanted Anne. I’ll make sure of it.”
She smiled through the pain. Both of them knowing that nothing was promised. She didn’t know if any of those things were possible anymore - but she knew she wouldn’t take back protecting those who couldn’t protect themselves. Not for one moment.
“I don’t regret it, Omi.”
Her eyes shifted to Sebastian, his unconsolable rage as he tore apart a nearby wagon, throwing the entirety of it’s contents into the field.
“Please Ominis…just look out for my brother….it’s not his fault…”
The fireflies gathered around them, while Anne slipped into sleep in his arms. Ominis held on to her long after he felt her settle in sleep. Long after Sebastian stopped destroying everything. Long after he had stopped wanting to know what would come next for them. And why life had been so fucking unfair to them all.
It Begins
Time went on, as it always did.
Their fifth year began.
Anne was not there.
And in many ways, neither was Sebastian. And in others, neither was Ominis.
They walked along the halls together, just Ominis and Sebastian, and mostly in silence…each day the same.
Until one unsuspecting day, a possiblity stumbled into their Defense against the Dark arts class.
Until one unsuspecting day, Sebastian also found himself stepping foot in the library again.
It is, inevitably, always on unsuspecting days, that everything changes.
The new student had mentioned Ancient magic… It piqued his curiosity. He had never heard of it, but it seemed powerful. Maybe even powerful enough to help Anne.
Vaguely, as he made his way across the school grounds to the library, Sebastian pondered at the fireflies that had started to float through the air as evening settled.
11 notes · View notes