#i wanted to capture a mix of grief and resolve

[berrydoodleoo]

i am the emissary and i shall never die

#ffxiv #ff14 #elidibus #themis #venat #emet selch #lahabrea #hermes #i think the parallels between themis and venat are really interesting #their physical similarities and everything else #i really liked the new raids and new i had to make something with themis in this room it's honestly just an amazing space #i tried to capture the moments before the sundering #when the convocation resolved to sacrifice the life on the planet and venat stood up against them #the timeline is a bit mushy of course #especially after the flashback scene in ew #but eh creative liberties i guess #i wanted to capture a mix of grief and resolve #and i tried to make it look painterly #it's something i've been experimenting with but this is the first time i pulled it off in a way i like #click to see the full res version! #ffxiv 6.4 spoilers

[appalamutte]

Hi! I'm hopping to get some check please fic recs from you? If you have any, of if any of your mutuals do? I'll take any classic favs, though in particular I'm dying for a fic that features Bitty's love for Beyonce 😂

hi anon!!

i'd never thought about it until you asked, but i actually don't know of many omgcp fics that feature bitty's love for beyonce? at least not many i can remember haha. but there is one i can think of off the top of my head and another one i found:

Starstuck by boomsherlocka [1.4k words | gen] it's such a sweet little thing where both jack and bitty meet their idols. and honestly, thank you for asking me this anon, i would never had found it if it weren't for you! .

heavy on the sugar by wit (@parvuls) [41.7k words | teen] god, i've reread this one more than any other fic i think. it's just got the perfect amount of coffee shop and feelings and just enough angst to scratch that itch but it's resolved fairly quickly. bitty's love for beyonce is also featured a small bit toward the end! .

and of course, to rec some of my classic favs:

maybe i'm waking up by idrilka (@idrilka) [157.9k words | mature] one of my all time fav omgcp fics, and just one of my fav fics overall. the amount of money i'd give to be able to read this for the first time again. it's the most beautiful blend of mixed media elements, story/plot, original characters, coming out and the fear that brings. .

No Matter How Small by weneedtotalkaboutsherlock (@weneedtotalkaboutfic) [125.4k words | explicit] this is just one big overload of cuteness, but like in the most realistic way. it's a kidfic and a getting back together future fic, and the amount of comfort this fic brings me is incomprehensible. so soft, so warm, so authentic, so overwhelmingly gorgeous. .

Port Out, Starboard Home by onawingandaswear (@whoacanada) [11.6k words | not rated] talk about realism, my god. you ever realize your boyfriend comes from a famous, prominent, totally-different-tax-bracket family? if not, this fic helps you experience what that feels like, and if so, you can relive that experience while reading this. .

live through this and you won't look back by nighimpossible [4.1k words | teen] a fic that perfectly encompasses the continual grief you feel when you think the boy you're in love with is straight. it's painfully good. and it also has a happy ending! .

Better With Time by foryouandbits (@foryouandbits) [118.5k words | mature] now i know this is a high school au, which can be polarizing depending on the person, but frankly i haven't read another fic that better captures bitty's relationship with his father. i mean, i cried more than once when i first read this, both happy tears and i-relate-a-bit-too-hard tears. .

that's just a few of my favorite omgcp fics. i have a ton more bookmarked on my ao3 if you want more recs! also, i highly highly highly recommend all of these author's other fics, as well as other omgcp fic authors: PorcupineGirl (@porcupine-girl), writingonpostcards (@17piesinseptember), RabbitRunnah (@doggernaut), and WrathoftheStag (@wrathofthestag). these authors all have fics i absolutely adore, and if i didn't care about not wanting too long of a post, i'd list them all out individually lol.

also, these are all just for zimbits. if anyone else wants to add onto this post and rec fics for other ships, or just any other fics in general, please do so! and if anyone else knows of any fics that feature bitty's love for beyonce, please add them as well!

hope this helps anon, happy reading!

#ask #omgcp #omgcheckplease #fic rec

[oldestenemy]

the deathless, the undying, and the unwilling divine - part 3

Part 1, Part 2

The first floor poses little issue. Howling Cheney and Sir Blackwater go down without a fuss, Renfield proves to be helpful—though very obviously hypnotized—and directs them towards the upper halls. Which is where the wizard starts to put together why this is where Malistaire had chosen to seclude himself.

The spirits of the Dragon Titan’s army sting—but with the academy rebuild ongoing, much of the wizard’s sourness towards Dragonspyre has eased.

No, it’s the Spirit of Darkmoor herself who throws them into unwanted memory.

Of seeing Sylvia Drake’s wraith.

A spirit unwilling bent to anger.

“You alright?” Penny pulls them to a stop before the fight begins. “You went really off-color just there.”

The wizard grimaces. They don’t like to talk about the wraith. They don’t like to see what grief did to Malistaire—especially after their brief meeting in old Dragonspyre. But this whole mess had come about from lies of omission, they may as well dig up the rest of the pain.

“When I was first in Dragonspyre, Cyrus wanted to try and resolve things without a fight—I went into the Drake family tomb to capture a memory of Sylvia’s spirit—he was hoping her love would bring Malistaire back to reason.” And they had fought the wraith and run. They had spent those sinking moments in a bedroom no longer their own, looking at eyes that were not theirs, shaking flesh and blood that belonged to a stranger. “But her spirit had been twisted into a wraith. Angry and vengeful and—I see why this is where Malistaire chose to come, familiar pain, kindred spirits.”

“He turned her into a wraith?” The mix of horror and disgust on Malorn’s face matches the memory of their own.

“I don’t know if he meant to,” The wizard tells him, “I think he just wanted her back—I think he was trying anything, everything, no matter the cost.”

Duncan is glowering at them, but the anger doesn’t feel like it’s for them specifically.

“I’m sorry.” They say again, it’s coming a lot, they can’t help it. “I know this is hard for all of you—I know you were both close to—”

“Both?” Duncan laughs, “You say that like I wasn’t shoved aside for the only teaching assistant Malistaire ever took—even if he’s better at theory than he’s ever been at real spellwork—”

“Hey!” Malorn barely raises his voice, cutting over Duncan regardless. “I didn’t ask to be his assistant! I didn’t ask to be a professor when he faked his death and blew up our classroom!”

“You didn’t say no though did you.” Duncan spits back.

“How could I? Our professor was dead, our school was gone, the death students needed something and Ambrose barely gave me a choice—”

“Stop stop it—both of you.” Marla slams the end of her staff against the stone floor. “We have more important things to do here.” She looks to the wizard, and then up to the Spirit of Darkmoor where she waits in the next hall. “Let’s keep going.”

The tension doesn’t break.

But it drops back into the well it seems they are all holding at bay.

The spirit falls as quickly as they can manage. Leaving nasty burns and aching limbs in her wake.

Nobody speaks as they enter the library, scanning shelves for the Phylactery that the spirit is so desperate to destroy. The knowledge held in here must be endless, the wizard gives pause at a handful of titles that light on words in their head.

The Great Sky Anchor.

Desserts of Mirage—well, that appeared to just be a cookbook—regardless.

“Little seekers—welcome to my library—behold all the knowledge before you and know that when we are through I shall document your cries for mercy and final words among the tomes.” Lord Von Shane had returned, beckoning them forwards. “And when I do, I will have proven to Malistaire that I am worthy of his boon—to have my love returned to me in eternal live, that we might live in bliss.”

The group share a look, and Penny, an odd little smile on her face asks: “The spirit? She doesn’t seem to fond of you my lord.”

“And Malistaire couldn’t even bring his own love back, let alone yours.” Duncan adds, seeming to enjoy the outlet for a bit of the steam they’re all holding.

“Bah! What do foolish children know—face the might of Von Shane!”

The vampire himself poses more of a challenge, though Penny’s mass feint comes in intensely handy. And once he’s flown himself from the room in a frustrated huff, with a promise of vengeance, they can resume their search.

“That was a little disappointing,” Marla muses as she thumbs through another shelf, “for such an infamous monster he wasn’t exactly, well, hard.”

“He’ll be back.” the wizard tells her, eyes landing on a glass case enclosing an amulet with a carved portrait. One that looks very similar to their bound spirit. “I think I found it.” There is in fact a large amount of magic pouring off the amulet, which has a small song of protection inscribed along the back face. The stone feels quite soft, and without much effort—the wizard crumbles it in their grip.

A soft wind rushes through the room, accompanied by the reappearance of the Spirit of Darkmoor.

“You’ve done it!” In a voice hushed and grateful, the spirit—Tatyana—explains her connection to these halls, how she tried and failed to escape them and was bound even in death to remain.

She guides them through a portal to the Bridge of Neverwhere, and there the group takes a moment to breathe.

“I would offer you a boon for releasing me,” Tatyana tells them, “something that may aid you as you delve further into Malistaire’s nightmare. After spending so much time in death, I am touched by Shadow—let me allow you to use it to your advantage within your chosen schools of magic.” She waves a spectral hand, and a card hovers before each of them.

The wizard smiles a little at the sight of one of Khrysalis’ Colossi. But realizes immediately there will be a problem for their companions.

But now is not the time to turn away a gift, especially not one further arming them for the fight ahead.

“Malistaire the Undying, the self named Exalted Lord of Death, has taken over the Von Shane family crypt. He waits in the mausoleum, where you must go and vanquish him.” Tatyana shows them as far as the graveyard gate. “If you are not successful, there is no telling what he may unleash upon the spiral. I wish you luck seekers, and may your deeds thus far carry you to victory.”

One by one, they offer her quiet thanks.

And pass through the gate.

~*~

It’s in the graveyard that the concern the wizard had is voiced, though not by them.

“We won’t be able to cast these.” Duncan says, inspecting his card. “None of us can use Shadow magic except you.”

The wizard frowns slightly, pulling out their deck and rifling through it for— ah, there it is. The extra time to think before had given them an idea. Though perhaps a foolish one. Only an attempt would tell. “One second—I think—” it’s awkward, spell card now clutched gently between their teeth as they replace their deck and grab for the Shadow Point. They have to be more careful with this, if they tear the spell card oh well they have more—but if they tear it when it’s imbibed with Shadow? That… might not be the best idea.

“What are you—”

There is a flash of violet light as the card in the wizard’s hand shimmers and shifts, the words Donate Power flickering and then settling into Donate Shadow.

“That should work. Probably.”

“How are you still alive?” The expression on Duncan’s face very clearly says he meant more specifically How have you not gotten yourself killed yet?

The wizard doesn’t answer.

Read the whole series here <3

#wizard101 fic #wizard101 fanfic #wizard101 fanfiction #wizard101 #wizard101 fandom #lark is still playing funky wizard game from their childhood #we really in it now boys (gn)

[frogsmulder]

1. “I love you, please don’t go.”

Non te Deseram

a requiem missing-scenes au set before and at the end of the ep; about 1k words; rated t; tagging @today-in-fic Part 1: Fluff

There is a light sprinkling of sunshine trying to make its way through the blind when Scully awakes in the arms of her lover. The spring light is soft and quiet, she imagines it is slightly overcast outside, the sky a mix of blue and grey, sun and rain. Soft and quiet are Mulder’s snores behind her, his breath tickling the back of her neck where his nose is buried in her mussed hair. She sighs. She can’t stay too long, so she takes the moment to enjoy every sensation. The scratchiness Mulder’s morning stubble against her back; the hairs on his legs tickling her thighs where their legs are twined; the weight of his sleep-dead arm across her waist. She is at home. She shuffles deeper into the bed and his body, revelling in his warmth. Scully lets out a short breathy laugh when she bumps into his morning erection: their previous night’s antics clearly not enough to wear him out.

Feeling him rouse behind her, she turns her head back, listening for his predictable morning hum. On cue, Mulder hums and mumbles against her back, something she assumes is supposed to resemble “morning”.

“Morning, to you too,” she teases and laces her fingers through his resting on her stomach. “You want coffee?”

He shakes his head, letting the rough of his stubble scrape against her skin. She shivers, knowing she’s made a mistake when he chuckles and does it again. “Mulderrrr,” she whines, but his lips soothe the scratch with tiny kisses.

Journeying up to her ear, Mulder presses a kiss to her lobe before mumbling, “You’re the only thing I want.” He punctuates his confession with a wiggle of his hips, eliciting a giggle from her. “Is that supposed to be funny?” he jokes.

Quickly, Scully extricates herself from his hold before she succumbs to temptation, escaping his arm that stretches out after her. Engaging the puppy-eyes, Mulder resorts to begging. “I love you, please don’t go.”

She tries to remain stern– “You know we don’t have time. Remember: we have the expense evaluations today–” but her rebuttal is tainted by a smirk.

He pouts, letting his arm flop onto the mattress. “Party pooper.”

“I’ll make some coffee,” she calls after herself as she walks out of the room.

Part 2: Angst

Scully stands in the darkened doorway of Mulder's bedroom, watching him hastily pack for his flight out to Oregon in a few hours. He darts from one draw to another; she admires his single-minded focus, never straining from the people he needs to help. She sees it as he licks his lips; the final items stuffed into an overnight bag; the file they opened placed on top. He picks it up scanning the details again although she knows he already has every account committed to memory. He runs his hand through his hair and an urge befalls her to fix the spikey tufts left behind for him. "I love you," she murmurs from a distance. 

He looks up at her with wide, mossy eyes, flecked golden in the orange light of the lamp. In earnest, his innocent gaze captures her heart in a fist of fiery iron, melting her final resolve. "I love you too," he answers simply, letting the weight of his affection carry his words. 

A panging ache shoots through Scully's heart: a terrible grief she can't comprehend overwhelms her. She sees him the–as she does now before her–but he is standing amongst familiar trees and bathed in an ethereal glow. She shakes her head: no. "I love you, Mulder." Stepping into the light of his room, she follows her heart. "Please don't go." 

He meets her and takes her hands in his own warm, large grasp. "Scully, I have to. There are people that are relying on me–they need me."

She holds his stare and feels his pleading in the wide innocence of his eyes, his furrowed brow. Let him be the hero, fulfilling that hole of crippling guilt his sister left behind. He looks so young when he sets himself missions like this, reminding her of when they first met: determined and stubborn. It’s why she fell in love with him. Yet Scully doesn’t want him to play the hero; doesn’t want to lose him in some grand act of selflessness. "I need you. I– I have a terrible feeling about all of this. I need you here. I need to know you are safe."

He cocks his head, looking so intensely at her she can feel it all the way in the marrow of her bones. Reaching forward, he tucks her hair behind her ear then gently holds her cheek in the palm of his hand. His voice is as soft and sweet as honey, like his touch. There is worry written in his eyes; they flick from side to side. "This isn't like you, Scully–"

"Mulder," she cuts him off: exasperated, exhausted, emotional. Leaning into his hold, she closes her eyes and sighs. "Please. Trust me, just this once… Please."

"Hey," he hushes her, "Always." 

His arms come to wrap around her like the final missing piece of the puzzle and she at last feels safe, able to relax in his embrace. The quiet ticking of the clock in the living room slows. Ear pressed to Mulder’s chest, time is replaced by the thud of his heart and the wave of his breathing, cresting and falling, lulling her. Despite the temporary serenity, Scully can’t shake the feeling of grief like an omen waiting to pass. 

That night she sleeps restlessly, and in the morning, she hears the news from Skinner: people with anomalous brain activity–the very same Mulder experienced a year prior– had been abducted. Rushing to the toilet, she throws up in the basin, gasping for breath when it's over. A comforting hand rests on her shoulder and she looks up to see a concerned Mulder looking down at her. “Scully, I think we should get you to the hospital.” Finally, she agrees. 

When the second piece of news falls in their laps, Mulder cries at her bedside holding her hand. She can’t believe it, needing to see the charts herself, but the evidence is there. She turns to him, confused but elated, and grins.

#txf s7 #fox mulder #dana scully #xf fanfic #happy ending #i couldn't bring myself to stick with cannon #au #fluff #angst #my writing #msr #requiem

[bluerosesburnblue]

The last we talked about Final Fantasy XVI, you'd just seen someone get punched by a certain someone. Are you any further now? Like, have you seen the ending of the game? And if you have... I guess the developers of Final Fantasy XVI have said that this game has so much lore, they could make a sequel with it, which is most definitely true. LOL. Who knows if they'll ever actually do that (if so, it'll be very far off), but if they do, what do you think it'll tell? What would you want it to do?

I have indeed seen the end of it by now! To be honest, I kind of have mixed feelings on the plot of the game as a whole. Love the characters, Clive especially is now one of my favorite Final Fantasy protagonists, but I can't help but feel that the game is a little disjointed in spots. They advertised it as the story of Clive's life spanning three eras, but those three eras don't have equal weight and end up coming across as Prologue #1, Prologue #2, and The Actual Game if that makes sense given that you've actually played the game and I've only seen other people play it. And, honestly, when I think back on it, I kind of liked what Prologue #2 with Clive in his late 20s was putting forward the best out of all three sections

I liked the darker and more personal angle that they were putting down, with a story about a man whose latent powers went berserk and he ended up hurting someone close to him, desperate for revenge without realizing that the one he wants revenge against is himself. But then it feels like they resolve that angle very fast and everything after that is a very classic "god is evil kill god" Final Fantasy plot. It's a well-done version of that plot to be sure, and I can really respect how well they tried to capture the feeling of old-school Final Fantasy games, but given how much of the marketing was about this game being darker and more mature, to me it felt like the themes got almost less mature as it went on, going from personal grief, this desperation to rebuild, the price of revenge, etc. to a more generic "free will good" story

Spoilers from here on out

That said, the developers are correct that there's so much lore, and to me that's the best part of the game. I've always found stories that heavily feature elemental-themed areas a lot of fun, like Avatar: The Last Airbender or One Last God: Kubera, so this game giving each summon a specific element and, for the most part, keeping it one summon/element per faction was really interesting to see brought to light. I think the fact that they touched on different factions viewing their Dominants differently was a good start, I just wanted to see a bit more of it on-screen because again, like I said, they started doing that at the beginning, but then it kind of got completely overwhelmed by the "Ultima wants Clive to have all of the Dominant powers" stuff and then never bothered to really look back at how the people felt about losing their nation's Dominants (also they way that they handled Clive taking the powers was kinda weird? Like, Dion carries on just fine and can still transform but Jill gets benched? What?)

Ahhhhhh I just... I almost wish that Ultima had just been an interesting background element and that the game as a whole had focused more on the infighting between the nations and Dominants and Bearers, rather than the other way around. I just found Ultima so generic and uninteresting, and that the game focused too much on making Clive this Super Awesome Chosen One because of it, when I found he was at his best when he was just a kind, awkward man struggling with this unprecedented power he was stuck with and the trauma it brought him

Because to be honest, at the start of the game I wondered if, maybe, what was happening was that they were gonna pull some classic Final Fantasy Dark World stuff and have it be that every Eikon had a dark counterpart. So Ifrit would be the Dark Eikon of Fire to Phoenix's Light Eikon of Fire and they could have used other classic FF summons as the Dark Eikons, like Garuda vs. Sylph. And the Light Eikons could bless people with their power like how Clive had the blessing of the Phoenix, while the Dark Eikons could steal powers. But, no, it's just Ifrit being Super Special and everything. Also... why... was Joshua the only one who could seemingly bless others with his power? Dion couldn't give Terrence a Blessing of Bahamut or anything and give him some light powers? Jill had to let Clive absorb her Shiva powers rather than blessing him with them becauuuuuuse...? And, man, it could've been so interesting if they had a sideplot on Anabella trying to force all of the Dominants to bless Olivier to match Clive or something. Or maybe not even a sideplot, that sounds like I would've liked it way more than the Ultima stuff because of how much more personal it has the potential to be and the game could've been a race to take the power of each Dominant before Olivier could get their blessings. Olivier was so underutilized

As for the lore, I think they do a really good job fleshing out Bearers, so really if they had more to look into, it would be the unanswered questions. Like, we know that Valisthea is only one continent on this world (Cid isn't originally from there, and IIRC neither was Barnabas's family), so what are the others like? Where is Leviathan? Are the theories that the Medicine Girl was Leviathan's Dominant, just not yet awakened, true? (Also, if Ultima needed Clive to have all of the other Eikon's powers, why were we even allowed to skip Leviathan? Shouldn't we have had to track them down? Why did they end up lost?) If the truth is that Ultima's people descended from another world and created humanity, then where did the idea of the Goddess Greagor come from? And what about the legend surrounding the star, Metia? Is Metia magical or is it just a cute legend thing?

Hmmm. If they ever did more with FFXVI, it would have to be a prequel, wouldn't it? Because I think where it left off was exactly where it should have, with some hope for the future and the world moving on, bittersweet with all of the losses that it took to get there but worth it all the same. (I know that there's a lot of theories about who "Joshua Rosfield" is in the end, and I actually prefer that it's ambiguous. Whether you think Clive succeeded in bringing Joshua back at the cost of his own life, or that Clive took Joshua's name which is the one that I think has the most in-game hints to it, or even if you want to think of a third option like one I've seen where Clive survived, but the "Joshua Rosfield" in question is actually his and Jill's son named in Joshua's honor, sacrifices were made and hope remains)

So I think the route with the most potential might end up being a Cid-centric prequel about what life on other continents is like. And I would never complain about more Cid, especially in regards to how he was chosen by Ramuh and what about how things are on other continents is that made him so averse to how Valisthea does things. I think that Cid is really something special due to his status as an outsider looking in on Storm and Ash and how his different perspective compared to everyone there is such a catalyst for what happens in the plot and it's a real shame that most of what we get of Cid is posthumous. So if FFXVI was to get its own sub-series, that's where I'd take it

#liz answers #oveliagirlhaditright #final fantasy #final fantasy xvi #it's an interesting game to be sure #i like a lot of what it's got to it i just... idk i feel like it didn't match my expectations based on what we were shown pre-release #and it's one of those unfortunate things where what i built up in my head based on that marketing that was hiding spoilers #ended up being more interesting to me than what we got #and again i don't think that ffxvi is bad! it's not! it has a lot of interesting things to it #it just wasn't what i personally was hoping for but i can fully understand how someone else could fall in love with it #i do love clive a lot though #10/10 he's so serious while also being a bit of a dorky sweetheart

[retvenkos]

newfound love | t.l.

Little Women - Laurie Laurence x Reader, slight angst, fluff

tw: mentions of a dead mother

word count: 1.9k

A/N: i’m apparently incapable of writing fluff without first mentioning crushing loss, so that’s fun.

prompt: we’re going out in the cold for a walk, and I know you don’t want to get wet, but I’m trying to convince you to make a snow angel with me

The first thing (Y/n) knew was the cold. From the moment they had been born, they knew the icy touch of frigid air and the bite of snow. Winter babies were often babies who didn’t survive, but it had been their mother that didn’t last the night. Their family had mourning during the most dangerous of seasons, snow falling on their cheeks and melting at their hot tears.

Ever since, (Y/n) knew that winters often brought more problems than they were worth - from the cold, to the lack food, to the bouts of sickness that always seemed to follow, and the tight grasp of melancholy that held their heart hostage. Times were hard enough without the troubles of a changing season, and to have winter come early was simply cruel.

Already the winds had changed, and sometimes, when (Y/n) looked around at the people who surrounded them, they thought they could tell who was already blown away.

Laurie had always been rather good at convincing them that it was just worry, but the feeling never left, just gnawed a little less. 

Now, with the war being what it was, there was more at risk, and more that ate at (Y/n), devouring the very root of their being. It hadn’t taken long for Laurie to notice the strength of (Y/n)’s grief, that year, and he had grown intent on trying to show (Y/n) the beauty of winter, even with it’s hardship and death.

“You can’t just have one,” he had said, sounding much older than he usually did. “Everything is good and bad.”

“Are we?”

And Laurie had laughed unabashedly, as though the thought had never crossed his mind. (Y/n) hadn’t admitted it, then, but they resolved that if naivete was the worst of Laurie’s offenses, they could fall in love with all of him - the good and bad.

In his attempts to demonstrate the enchantment of winter (because Laurie was a true romantic, and he did insist winter was enchanting), he had exhausted every effort he could think of.

He had taken (Y/n) out to ice skate, had taken them to a winter dance, and had even stolen some of his grandfather’s seasonal wines for them to share. Although that last one was largely a success, before they were caught, (Y/n) still couldn’t shake the idea that winters brought nothing but misery. It was an instinct set deep in the fibre of their soul; something created the moment they were born, when the ice and cold had stolen them from the warmth of a mother.

It seemed, even with Laurie’s efforts, that there was one inescapable truth about (Y/n)’s experiences:

Winters were bleak and their frosts were long, lingering well after the snow had melted and the sun dared to peek out once more.

When it neared the end of winter, (Y/n) had assumed that Laurie had let his little project go. It had been a while since he asked them about their opinion of the winter months, and while (Y/n) still caught him staring every once in a while, he made no effort to speak of what he was thinking.

On a day when the cold seemed to be letting up, (Y/n) and Laurie made plans to meet the next day. He had some books he wanted them to see, and (Y/n) was in the throes of  a crisis - finding themself unable to oppose Laurie’s good, if often too forward, nature.

When (Y/n) woke to find that it had snowed sometime between night and early morning, they had sighed, but steeled themself to the reality of it. The day prior they had promised Laurie they would go over, and when Laurie had smiled, they had even promised to be in a better mood. Laurie had said that they needn’t hide their feeling for his sake, but (Y/n) put their hands over his and told them they wanted to.

“It won’t be winter for much longer.”

It wouldn’t have been the first time (Y/n) managed to speak too soon.

Bundled in their warmest clothes, (Y/n) had set out in the cold, intent to walk to Laurie’s house, no matter the weather. The snow crunched beneath their boots, and the rising sun made a blinding glare against the white expanse, but they journeyed forth.

Laurie didn’t live too far away from (Y/n). In the summer months, walking to his house was a welcome distraction and the view of the world in full bloom never ceased to amaze them. (Y/n) looked around at the snow covered world around them and tried to appraise it in Laurie’s eyes - what enchanting beauty could be found, when everything was frozen in time?

Perhaps there was something beautiful in the vastness of it - when covered in snow, the world didn’t seem to end at definite horizon. The clouded sky met the snowy land in a sort of haze - one color mixing with the other and never quite distinguishing itself. And the icicles hanging from trees seemed to shine like diamonds when the sunlight hit them, just right. The ice was sharp and deadly, yes, but it was also delicate and easily broken. 

(Y/n) stopped beneath a tree and when they looked back at the way they came, there was almost something poetic in the way their steps had made a trail - like their existence in the world left a mark, no matter how small.

(Y/n) looked down at their shoes, shaking their head at their own thoughts. If only Laurie saw them now - he might think all of this was his doing.

Perhaps it was.

(Y/n) scuffed the fresh layer of snow with the tip of their shoe, revealing some of the grass beneath - a dark green that reminded (Y/n) of the decorations Laurie had insisted on putting up, claiming that the atmosphere alone would be enough to convince them of the beauty of winter.

(Y/n) was careful to admit it, but all of Laurie’s antic - from the most simple to the elaborate - had made them feel better. Most of the time. Laurie’s presence alone was enough to coax happiness out of them, pushing down that melancholy that stubbornly clung to their being.

“(Y/n)!” A voice brought them out of their thoughts, and it took a moment for (Y/n) to realize they had been smiling.

Laurie, wrapped in a thick coat, was running over to them, his expression a blur and hair flying wild. The sun was rising with him and made it hard to focus on his nearing figure for long, but when he was close enough, Laurie blocked the glare with an amusement that seemed to shine brighter than his heavenly competitor.

“I didn’t think you’d come out for a walk.”

(Y/n) brought a hand up to tame his hair. “Well, I did promise you, didn’t I?”

Laurie nodded his head, dark hair flying once more. “I just thought that with the snow, you might have changed your mind.”

“If it was anyone else, I would have.”

“Do I really mean that much to you?”

(Y/n) felt their cheeks get hot and burrowed their face deeper into their scarf. Laurie hummed in acknowledgement, neither triumphantly nor disappointedly, just markedly.

“You wouldn’t be admiring the weather, would you? I was trying to compose a poem on my way here - something that would capture the essence of a final snow.” (Y/n) scoffed and Laurie’s teasing eyes caught their gaze. “Perhaps you have a line or two to add?”

“Maybe,” (Y/n) conceded, “but only if I can write it somewhere warm - preferably in front of a fireplace, with those books you mentioned.”

The two set off in the way Laurie had come, (Y/n) making it a point to step in his footprints from earlier so that they might avoid getting wet anymore than they already were. Despite having consented to the idea that the winter might be slightly beautiful, in its own, haunting sort of way, (Y/n) was still averse to the cold, and there was nothing worse than the kind of cold that stuck to your skin after getting your clothes wet.

It was when Laurie’s house was in sight, and closer to them than the distant horizon, that snow started to fall from the heavens, sprinkling through Laurie’s dark hair and settling on his scarf. A snowflake fell on (Y/n)’s eyelashes, and they took in a breath, preparing to sigh, but stopped themself short. Laurie looked at them from the corner of his eye, just barely managing to suppress a smile from creeping onto his lips; there was affection in his eyes, though, sweet and pure.

“(Y/n),” Laurie grabbed their hands and the party in question turned to them, snow collecting on their head like the soft down of a duckling. “Do something for me?”

“What?”

Laurie fell back into the snow, letting go of (Y/n)’s hands as he dropped so that he wouldn’t pull them with him. He fell back with an “oof” that seemed to knock the wind out of him, but he quickly recovered started moving his arms and legs, fanning outwards to create a snow angel.

(Y/n) scoffed and shook their head. “Laurie, you’re going to get all wet.”

“And so will you, when you join me.” Laurie’s smile was convincing, making up for his lack of persuasion skills. (Y/n) was able to resist, if only barely.

They opened their mouth to refuse, but no sound came. Laurie seemed to notice the falter in their resolve because he held out a hand, sitting up carefully as to not ruin his angel.

“The house is right there. We’ll be inside before the cold seeps through the layers of your clothes.” 

“Is this another attempt of yours to get me to fall in love with winter?”

Laurie smiled devilishly, despite what he had created just moments before. “You’ve already fallen in love. My schemes are over.”

Laurie was right - (Y/n) had fallen in love - but whether it was with winter or the boy who pointed out it’s beauty, was hard to tell. Maybe a snow angel would help them decide...

“Fine, for you.”

A moment after the words left their lips, Laurie reached for their hand and tugged them downward, pulling (Y/n) with such a force that they stumbled in their fall and landed half on top of him. (Y/n) shrieked and screwed their eyes tight.

They were awfully close, when dared to peek. Lauries cheeks were flushed scarlet, although whether it was from the cold or their position was hard to determine. (Y/n) shuffled away and lay down in the snow, hesitating before putting their hands out. Laurie lay back down, a little breathless, and the two stared at each other for a moment before laughing, not minding the wet snow beneath them.

(Y/n) eventually pushed their arms out and made their frozen angel, their fingers grazing Laurie’s arm. 

When the two stood up, they both looked at their creations with a critical eye.

“We ruined those pretty well, don’t you think?” 

“You were the one who pulled me down!”

“You didn’t give yourself enough space to make wings.”

(Y/n) and Laurie looked at the other challengingly before breaking out in chuckles.

“Let’s get inside. I wouldn’t want your newfound love of winter spoiled by catching a cold.”

(Y/n) nodded, but it wasn’t until they were sitting in front of a fire, books between them and blankets draped over their shoulders, that (Y/n) told Laurie, in just above a whisper, that it wasn’t winter they had discovered their affections for.

#little women #laurie laurence #theodore laurie laurence #laurie x reader #laurie laurence x reader #theodore laurence x reader #reader insert #laurie imagine #laurie laurence imagine #theodore laurence imagine #fluff #slight angst #tw mentions of death #holiday prompts #imagine #one shot #fic #fanfiction #fanfic

[i-cant-believe-i-wrote-this]

What Makes A Memorable Scene: Joy of Life Edition - Chen Ping Ping

Hi! So I'm a giant fan of the Joy of Life (《慶餘年》) webnovel and TV series, and while I was compiling memorable/emotional scenes to talk about on this book I just realised how very skilled the author (Mao Ni) was in crafting this sort of thing. Therefore I decided to write some posts about memorable and emotional scenes in Joy of Life exclusively!

One of my favourite characters was ✨Chen Ping Ping✨, the badass Head of the Overwatch Department! He had this mix of savageness, calmness, kindness and wisdom in him that just made him an extremely intriguing person. Since I read Joy of Life over a year ago, the scenes about him that I remember most was his downfall. And I've got two scenes I'd like to share with you, even though all parts of the novel about him were gold.

Like my last post, I've translated some excerpts because 1) it's so fun and 2) so I can share them with you!

AS USUAL, SPOILERS AHEAD!

1. The Capture of Chen Ping Ping

Volume 7, Chapter 97: 一根手指與監察院的臣服

Chen Ping Ping is arrested for treason and attempted assassination of the Emperor.

But at this time, He Zong Wei who was standing beside him suddenly said softly, “Best to kill them now, so as to shake their resolve.”

“When did it become your turn to speak about what I do?” Yan Bing Yun tossed out a sentence coldly.

Yet his words could silence He Zong Wei but not the officials of the Overwatch Department, they stood up slowly, watching Yan Bing Yun with an indifferent gaze, as if at a corpse; perhaps the next moment they would collectively move, and charge at the stretcher.

The situation was already at an extremely critical state; Yan Bing Yun squinted at his surroundings, knowing clearly that on his own, he still couldn't suppress the officials' love for Chen Ping Ping.

……

……

An aged finger was suddenly extended.

Everyone was silent, every Overwatch official cast their gaze at that aged finger, the finger that extended from beside the stretcher. The finger shifted slightly, motioning a gesture that every Overwatch official had memorised in their heart.

"Hold!" A Second Bureau official’s heart suddenly overflowed with sorrow, wetness lining the eyes; roared with grief and indignation, and knelt down heavily on both knees.

“Hold!”

“Hold!”

That aged finger seemed to have a certain magical power; it only extended and wagged lightly, subsequently, the courtyard sounded with countless voices saying the word hold; hold means silence, hold means waiting, hold means forbearance, hold means to give up against the will.

Hold means stay where you are.

All the Overwatch Department officials stayed where they were, the word hold from their mouths, two streams of tears flowing downwards, no weight of gold on their knees but with the heaviness of a mountain, striking the floor, watching the stretcher slowly pass them.

Before I say anything else can I say...OUCHH

Two main things here: helplessness and love. These two things feed onto each other, making this scene extremely emotional. This excerpt clearly shows the unbreakable bond between Chen Ping Ping and his officials, and their unbeatable loyalty and love for him. And due to that, Chen Ping Ping's order for them to stand down makes it so heartbreaking due to the dilemma in their minds: save him and break his order as a result, or obey him and watch him get captured? They choose to obey, but this makes them helpless and it becomes unbearable for them to watch him suffer. That emotion is shared by the reader due to their liking for Chen Ping Ping and after witnessing the unwavering loyalty of his officials.

Furthermore, the fact that Chen Ping Ping is thinking for his officials - telling them to stand down, so they aren't punished for treason- moves the reader as well, as this shows his care for them. This reciprocated loyalty is simply super emotional because Chen Ping Ping's goodness is revealed.

2. The Death of Chen Ping Ping

Volume 7, Chapter 102: 雨中送陳萍萍

Chen Ping Ping is executed by the brutal method of "death by a thousand cuts".

The old man in his arms was so light, holding him was like holding a cloud of wind, a cloud of wind that could dissipate anytime. Below the slightly disheveled hair, Fan Xian’s pale face twitched slightly, instinctively reaching out to hold Chen Ping Ping’s old and icy hand, holding it tightly and never letting go.

The old man had suffered unspeakable amounts of pain in this life, and was disabled for half of it, so his qi and blood had exhausted long ago; today during the death by a thousand cuts, not a lot of blood other from the pain had burst out as every slice was made, but the torture of so many cuts still caused blood water to accumulate at a location, wetting the black uniform of the Overwatch Department, making it a little sticky, a little hot, a little scalding.

In the autumn rain, Fan Xian held his frail body lightly, afraid to pain him even more; grasped his icy hand tightly, afraid he would leave just like this.

“Who could make you come back if you refused to? Why did you keep me in Dong Yi City?” Fan Xian spoke lowly and hoarsely, parched lips soaked pale by the rain, peeling slightly, pitiful to the eyes. “Who was I toiling and labouring for all these years, wasn’t it all for you elders to leave the Capital City, to enjoy the days, I was always trying hard...”

“You know I know everything.” Fan Xian lowered his head a bit more, resting it against the old man’s wrinkled face, and in the rain his body swayed, as if coaxing the old man in his arms to sleep.

The hand suddenly tightened for a moment; the old man gripped Fan Xian’s hand firmly with his, but all the energy remaining in his life couldn’t even hold a hand firmly now; it was as if he was unwilling to let something go, or fearing something, so he had to hold on to something below this sky of gale and rain, on this ground of blood and water.

🥲🥲 So 🥲🥲

To be honest, I think sorrow and loss are one of the most impactful emotions to ever write about, especially the death of a loved one. Chen Ping Ping was both loved by Fan Xian and the reader, and he was simply a wonderful father figure that everyone is sorry to see him go, especially in a way as torturous and humiliating as "death by a thousand cuts" (literally, usually more than a thousand tbh). This brings us to two more chilling (and by that I mean extremely impactful) emotions - humiliation and powerlessness. Since the reader is literally helpless against the events within the story, they can definitely empathise with the powerlessness of the characters. And humiliation - yeah you get it. It stings.

Mao Ni's (the author) language was also honed very well to portray this scene as emotive as possible. Let me list out what I found:

Its chapter title! In Chinese it's 雨中送陳萍萍, meaning something like "seeing Chen Ping Ping go in the rain" and he doesn't just go, he dies; that's just so sad dude

The emphasis of Chen Ping Ping's physical weakness especially when he's been described as being powerful and badass the entire novel, which creates a giant contrast

"Holding it tightly and never letting go" - the bond between Fan Xian and Chen Ping Ping is so touching, and that's also a main factor of the emotions in the scene

"It was as if he was unwilling to let something go, or fearing something" - even though Chen Ping Ping never defied his arrest, this shows how he actually doesn't want to die at all, making it even more agonising

AND that's all I have for now! I'll be doing a few (?) more posts on Joy of Life because I absolutely adore it, but for now, see you soon!

Bye bye!

#joy of life #cdrama #chinese drama #blog #me #translation #romance #novel #book #webnovel #bookworm #fantasy novel #bookblr #bookaholic #book review

[darkurgediary]

Two Worlds, Two Hearts: Chapter Five

Summary: News of Jareth's disappearance affects Sarah in ways she didn't expect, and brings on a new wave of conflicting emotion.

Warning(s): complicated relationships, creepy nightmare (which is all italicized so it'll be easy for anyone to skip over), and Ludo tears! If I missed anything please let me know!

-------------------

The Labyrinth was crumbling.

Jareth was missing.

And now Ludo was crying with such an intensity the ground started to shake.

Hoggle didn’t know how much more of this he could take. The dwarf wove his way through withered hedges till he came upon Ludo, the great beast brought to his knees, thick tears streamed down his face, and a pitiful cry lurched from his throat. Sir Didymus stood before him with tiny paws rested on Ludo’s forearm. Uncharacteristically quiet in the face of his brother’s pain.

“Sarwah,” Ludo’s lower lip wobbled and he tried desperately to pull a string of snot back up his nose, when such an attempt failed, he instead wiped his face on his left forearm.

Hoggle grumbled to himself but still decided to ask, “whats tha matter with'em?”

Sir Didymus perked his ears, looking to Hoggle with a defeated express, “Sir Ludo claims to have seen young maiden over that way.”

The dwarf glanced in the indicated direction, just as he'd thought, no one was there. Hoggle even approached the area and walked around it. Like he was trying to prove to Ludo that his eyes had played a cruel trick on him. Hoggle understood it though, to a degree. Ludo claiming to see Sarah became a common occurrence over the years. Each time, it was harder and harder to explain to Ludo it wasn't real.

“If she ain't been back already then she ain't never comin' b-”

A whisper carried in the breeze and cut him off, “Ludo...” 

Curved horns raised from the ground as brown eyes widened, and basset-hound shaped ears desperately searched for the sound.

Sir Didymus behaved in a similar manner, his bushy tail swishing side to side in a blonde blur, “My lady!” 

Hoggle whirled around, eyes wide as dinner plates. He stumbled back and fell into the dirt. Gazing up at the translucent image of a woman standing over him. Tall, with long black hair, and pale-green eyes. Hoggle rubbed his eyes but still, the haunting presence lingered like a ghost in a graveyard.

If he’d been by himself he would have discredited it easier. With Ludo and Sir Didymus in his company, not even he could deny the sight of the specter before him.

“S...S'it really you?” desperation clung to his words, along with a loneliness he'd kept buried deep.

The image of Sarah looked around, confused at first, and then she saw him. 

Hoggle tried to swallow the knot in his throat as he extended a shaky hand towards her. The thin image of her flickered, and upon contact, Sarah disappeared again.

-----

“Sarah?”

She didn’t look up from the floor, focused on the arguably-ugly patterned carpet like it offended her. Sarah was at her wits end. First she had a Spriggan to deal with and now a Fiery of all things! She didn't even want to think about Jareth, Toby's claim of him missing affected her in ways she didn't understand.

Her name was called again, “Sarah.”

The tick of a clock brought her senses back one by one, slowly, she raised her head. Tired eyes shifted to the old fashioned clock nestled on the corner of the wooden desk. Sarah set her sights on the coffee table next where a teacup sat in front of her. It's contents long abandoned, the liquid just as cold as the blood in her veins. 

“You drifted off,” a melodic scratch of pencil against paper mixed with the question, “where did you go just then?”

Sarah studied him for a moment, Dr. Zakar looked more like an Oxford Professor than a therapist. His brown suit was freshly pressed and his shoes polished. Red hair slicked back save for the few strands hanging just about his brow. Black, thick framed glasses obscured his eyes so she couldn't look directly into them.

A lie would do little for her, yet Sarah couldn't find it in herself to give him the truth. Not the whole truth anyway. He would call the whole incident a wild hallucination.

“I don’t know,” She admitted. Leaning forward to drop her head in her hands with a sigh, “I’m sorry. I didn’t get much sleep last night.”

He set aside the notepad, giving her his full attention, “Another nightmare?”

“No,” Sarah managed to compose herself. Without realizing it, she started to gnaw on her thumb nail.

“Remember that my job is not to judge you, Sarah. I am here to help encourage you through your struggles. You already have everything you need to conquer them,” Zakar explained calmly, recognizing the anxious habit. “That being said, I cannot give you any guidance if I don’t know the root of the problem.”

He had a point, she couldn’t deny that. As the events of the previous night played in her head like a broken record Sarah wondered where to even begin. It all spiraled out of control in a way she could barely process.

“Last night I found out someone I knew was…” the words trailed off into tense silence. Did she mention the Spriggan and the Fiery or leave it at that? “Missing. He went missing and honestly? I don’t know how I feel.”

“It sounds as though this person left quite an impact on you, I take it you were close?” His inquiry was laced both with concern and caution, showing his condolences but not wanting to further upset her.

“It was complicated, and it was a long time ago. We were different people then. I knew him without really knowing him,” Sarah clenched her hands tight in her lap, “some part of me feels like I should be worried, like I should run through every worst case scenario. What if something bad happened? What if he’s hurt? But...”

Zakar tilted his head, “another part says otherwise?” 

“It’s been fifteen years since we last saw each other. I wouldn’t even know what to say if I saw him again,” Sarah rubbed her temples and groaned, dark brows pulling together.

The clock on his desk chimed twice.

A frown pulled his features, “It seems we’ve reached the end of our session. Though I want you to know, Sarah. You will overcome this grief. Nothing has to be resolved tomorrow, there is a lot to process, and even more to work through. Go home and paint your frustrations, or write them down. Anything to get them out.”

As Sarah left the office she noticed the air felt significantly lighter than it had before she went in, Dr. Zakar’s parting advice stuck with her. She hated how much she thought of Jareth. Even before the news of him missing, the Goblin King often dwelled in a dark corner of her mind. If Jareth wasn’t in the Underground then where else could he possibly be? Sarah started her car and focused on the road ahead.

Upon return to her apartment, the last bits of anxiety washed away as the sound of whimpers and nails against hardwoods echoed behind the door. Sarah didn’t realize how much she missed having a dog till Gwendolyn came into her life. “Hey pretty girl,” Sarah cooed once the door opened Kneeling down to greet her three legged companion. Gwendolyn was a five year old pitbull with a coat the color of caramel and big brown eyes. Sarah’s heart went out to the pup, who came from a hard life on the streets. She felt like she couldn’t leave the shelter without her.

Sarah scratched behind her ears and paused as she set her keys down on the kitchen counter. She stepped towards the half finished painting, the one she’d done the instant she woke from her dream. At first she’d been in the forest with Hoggle, Ludo, and Sir Didymus in her company. Then the forest fell into a sea of white and silver. Sarah shuddered as the details haunted her:

She descended into a broken ballroom. Once pristine chairs and tables were thrown to various parts of the room, scuffed, bent, and broken. Shattered glass and glitter covered the floor, save for a bare circle where Sarah stood in the center of the room. Dawning the white princess dress she’d worn fifteen years ago. Frantic eyes took everything in as her head whipped around. Dancers laid sprawled over one another like puppets with their strings cut. 

Except for him.

His name left her tongue barely above a whisper, “Jareth.”

Rather than address her, the Goblin King stood frozen. The dark mask with twisted horns remained against his face, hiding his eyes from her. In an unusual motion he reached a hand out for her. Though he didn’t move in the same fluid, captivating way he had before. Instead Jareth moved like an old toy being wound up for the first time in forever. A crystal appeared in his hand, and his last words echoed around her.

“I ask for so little.”

He stepped towards her.

“Just fear me,”

Another step.

“Love me,”

Sarah retreated with each advancement, eyes wide, and skin white as a sheet. Whatever defiant remark she had ready to shout at him died on her tongue. Jareth loomed over her now, her back flat against the wall. She had nowhere to run.

Forced to look into vacant eyes as he sounded so defeated.

“Do as I say and I-”

Gwendolyn whimpered beside her, gently butting her head against Sarah’s leg.

Black curtains cascaded down her back as she turned to look at her companion, Sarah gave her a sad smile and smoothed a hand down her neck, “It’s okay. I’m okay.”

Sarah looked back at the expression she’d been so desperate to capture. Why should she be worried about Jareth? Why did her heart absolutely ache at the thought of him cold, alone, and hurt? Her hand started to reach for his half painted cheek but something stopped her. Sarah bit her lip in wonder as the idea of calling him raised to the surface.

With a small shake of the head, Sarah covered it, and tried to bury any other thoughts of him away for the time being. She had other things to focus on. The Spriggan, the Fiery, and Toby’s growing obsession with the Labyrinth. She took one final glance at the painting, “Where are you Jareth?”

———————

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Taglist:

@faeriexqueen​

@tangentasilem​​

@withinthecrystal​​

@purplesigebert​​

#labyrinth #labyrinth fanfiction #labyrinth fic #labyrinth fandom #sarah williams #jareth the goblin king #toby williams #ludo #hoggle #sir didymus #my writing #writers on tumblr #two worlds two hearts

[fuckingfinwions]

I too have so many terrible ideas so I hope it’s ok to share a few of the ones constantly in my brain- @outofangband

1. This is related to my awful idea of Melkor sometimes forcing Maedhros to call him father because of his Fëanor obsession. This very much includes doing it while he rapes him.

I’ve already talked a lot about this (both here and on my blog) so I won’t ramble too much but Maedhros resists at first but his resolve is broken down and sometimes it’s just easier to give into this degrading and horrifying demand if it means there’s a chance he can rest after

Anyways post Angband, Fingolfin is sitting at Maedhros’s bedside when he starts to have a nightmare. Pretty unsurprising given the circumstances. But when he starts to talk in his sleep it sounds to Fingolfin like he’s having a nightmare about Fëanor which does startle him. There are so many different ways this could go depending on Fëanor’s character. Is Fingolfin horrified, knowing that his half brother could be temperamental and even violent but not imagining he’d hurt his sons like that? Is he tempted to ask Maedhros’s brothers about it? (When he asks Maedhros himself, Maedhros looks mortified and says he doesn’t remember what he was dreaming about). What if his brothers get angry at him (either Fingolfin or Maedhros or both) for daring to accuse Fëanor of anything like this.

This in itself isn’t particularly dark by my standards but like there’s so many wonderfully horrible things that can happen between the Fëanorians and the Nolofinwëans now

2. Dark Fingolfin getting off on Maedhros’s testimony about Angband, pressing him for more details that Maedhros doesn’t think seems relevant to the war efforts but he doesn’t really feel he can argue even though he feels so exposed and awful talking about this

But really why does his uncle need to know what Morgoth’s cock looks like let alone feels like

Honestly this could work with dark Maglor too.

(I don’t want to overwhelm so I’ll send more later if ok. I hope your vacation was fun!)

-@outofangband

1. I'm just thinking, what's the worst thing possible for Fingolfin to overhear? Maedhros begging "Feanor" not to hurt him, or Maedhros begging "Feanor" to fuck him? Maybe both.

"No, stop, please Father, I didn't mean it. Please use my hole, I'll be so good for you-" And then Fingolfin wakes Maedhros up, and Maedhros panics and says he doesn't recall his dream/memory.

Maedhros keeps refusing to elaborate. He says that Feanor was a wonderful father, but refuses to go into detail. (Maedhros's grief at Feanor's death and anger at his actions are all mixed up with the sudden burden of kingship and Melkor's messed up games.)

Fingolfin tries gently asking Maedhros's brothers, if they know any reason why Maedhros would be having nightmares about Feanor. He doesn't quote what Maedhros said because it's private and also too horrifying to repeat.

They don't know, and think that this is part of Fingolfin's plan to smear Feanor's reputation, like 'provoking' Feanor to threaten him with a sword. Probably Fingolfin is just making it up that Maedhros referred to Feanor.

(And so what if Maedhros really did? Maedhros has plenty of reason to fear Feanor's opinion of his actions, Losgar and getting captured and giving up the crown. They all have nightmares of various judgements, Maedhros fearing Feanor isn't strange.)

And perhaps Maedhros overhears Fingolfin's question, and says "Of course my brothers don't know, they weren't there, he never made them-" and then realizes he said too much (or far too little) and stops.

(Plus side is that with Feanor dead, Fingolfin will not immediately try rescue Maedhros from his apparent abuse. Fingolfin won't give up without an explanation, but he'll be patient.)

2. Maedhros would answer any questions, no matter how irrelevant they seem. His sense of normal is skewed - he knows what was required in Valinor and than Angband, but not in Beleriand. And of course everyone needs to be sure that Maedhros wasn't suborned, that he's not hiding information in order to help Morgoth.

Plus of course there's the tactical considerations. Maedhros is the best witness they have about the layout of Angband, its hierarchy, the strength and number of troops

Now, of course Maedhros was being tortured at the time, so he might not have noticed all those details. But there's time and paper now to make a precise record. So if Maedhros describes exactly what it was like every time he was raped by a Balrog, Nolofinwe can put together a list of how many different Balrogs there are, and which ones are most interested in elven reactions versus interested in themselves, which will be useful for distracting them on the battefield. Likewise, if Maedhros describes Morogth's cock and hands in detail Nolofinwe can determine that Morgoth really has been locked into one shape, which will be vital when the Noldor breach Angband. (And knowing what it felt like inside Maedhros is important because, uh, Valar's bodies reflect their domains, and it will help them know if the very earth in Angband is toxic.)

"Maedhros, you want to help our people right? You want to have done something useful rather than just lead your soldiers to their deaths? Then repeat the time you were brought to the mines by a group of orcs and gangbanged whenever they had a free moment. I think I've got it connected on the map, though I don't have a good grasp of how long they spent in the mines. I'll keep a tally of how many times each one came in you, we can use that as a clock."

(And my vacation was good, thanks for asking! Lots of hiking to see beautiful lakes and waterfalls and even a small mountain!)

#outofangband #fucking finwion answers

[cordytriestowrite]

Cupcake

Bucky Barnes x Reader

One Shot

Summary: All it takes is time and cupcakes (post-Endgame)

Cupcakes. You had awoken well into the night with the urge to bake cupcakes. This wasn't the first time you had shot up from a dead sleep with a rapid heartbeat and the need to whip up something sweet for the others to rise to. Sam said it was your way of processing everything post snap and as you pulled yourself out of bed and slipped into your slippers you thought about just how ridiculous that sounded.

No one else was awake, though there weren't many of you anymore. Your sleepy shuffle brought you past what had been Wanda's room up until two days ago when she had solemnly packed her bags and bid you farewell. You used to hear her around this time, gut wrenching sobs that would make you rush past her door lest you break down with your own despair. You still hurried to pass her open door and empty room. Your heart still squeezed with her sadness. 

The other doors were closed, as they always were at this time. You didn't know if the people behind them were asleep or awake but you compiled your ingredients as quietly as possible. Mixing bowls and pans you found easily by the light of the open refrigerator. Measuring spoons and cups sat clean in the sink, never put back to their shelf after you had made a bit too much noise bringing them down the first time. 

Eggs, milk, flour, sugar, and then a debate of flavor: strawberry, vanilla, chocolate, pumpkin? This was the part that didn't make sense to you when Sam said you used this time to process grief. Your thoughts never strayed to the five years you missed and if your mind ever even tried to dwell on Tony or Nat or Steve-

Pumpkin, you resolved with a firm nod. Pumpkin was in season and with the distinct lack of seasonal cheer within the house the smell of pumpkin cupcakes in the early dawn could be perfect. 

Cream cheese frosting too. Sprinkles perhaps, if you had any appropriately colored sprinkles. You could feel a bloom of energy open below your breastbone and flutter like wings at the base of your throat tickling you to smile.

You followed no recipe, having done this so many times now the ratios came naturally to you. You dipped a clean finger into the batter, curious to taste the pumpkin flavor and spontaneous pinch of cinnamon. Just as your lips were to close upon your batter covered digit you noticed a glint of metal in the weak light of the still open refrigerator door. Your body involuntarily spasmed with surprise, sending your finger across your cheek instead of into your mouth. Instinct brought your other hand to your hip to grab a weapon that wasn't there. 

The overhead light flicked on and your eyes clenched closed at the onslaught. It felt wrong to have the room so bright at this hour and once you took in the intruder you plunged both of you into darkness once more. 

"Jesus, Bucky, you scared the shit outta me."

Your words came out as a whisper as your eyes darted in the direction of the closed doors, except you couldn't see them in the dimness. 

Bucky was silent, his chin rested heavily in his metal palm. He looked tired, which made sense due to the hour, but it didn't look like he planned to move from the stool he now occupied on the other side of the counter. You shrugged and turned away wiping desperately at your face, then pouring the batter into tins once you were sure your cheek was batter-free. 

The process went all too quickly from there. As you slid the pan into the oven you felt a sudden drop in mood. Eighteen minutes you would have to wait for the runny batter to rise and thicken into a dense, moist cupcake. Eighteen minutes you would sit in silence and watch the clock, counting the seconds in your head as if you and the digital clock on the oven were competing for best capture of each minute. It was either that or falling asleep in the silence of the still hour and subsequently burning down the only home you had. 

You turned around, intending to sit yourself on a stool and begin your competitive time-keeping only to be suddenly reminded there was someone else in the room with you. Bucky had not moved an inch since you had acknowledged him. His bright blue eyes pierced through the darkness with an unsettling alertness and you shivered at the vulnerability he had thrust upon you. The hand that had shot to your chest was resting over a decelerating heartbeat. There was something instinctively you still feared about Bucky due to the lack of time you'd spent with him. It was in his eyes, you thought, or maybe the slight frown his lips came to rest in naturally. Maybe it was all in your head, your mind unable to separate the man before you with the Winter Soldier of HYDRA. 

Time did not stop even if you had your back turned to it. The stare that had you locked in place allowed you passage as Bucky glanced to the clock behind you. Your breath came out long and heavy and your lips tingled in gratitude at the influx of oxygen. Looking at the ground you crossed kitchen and around the counter to the stool beside him. Lips mimed the counting of seconds.

"How long?"

You lost count and the question sounded too loud in your ears. You glanced over to Bucky and quickly turned back to stare ahead, fidgeting in your seat as another sensation of unease rolled down your spine. 

"Seventeen more minutes."

It was too long. Too long to be spending with the man next to you. You swallowed and drummed your fingers against the counter. This minute was lost to you and you would have to wait for the next one to start counting again. The muscles in your neck cried for movement but you didn't dare spare yourself to turn your head in his direction. 

You wondered if Bucky knew you were afraid of him, if he knew how your body filled with adrenaline at his very presence. You wondered how it made him feel, if he cared at all. After so many sleepless nights alone in the kitchen you could not come to any conclusion as to why he was here with you this time. Unless you had made too much noise.

"Sorry if I woke you."

Your voice cracked. In your attempt to keep your voice low you had lost it all together. Despite this Bucky seemed to have caught the essence of your statement. You allowed yourself a quick glance of him. With his head down and eyes averted you felt safe to actually observe him.

His hair was short now making him look more handsome than feral. His strong jaw was on display to you now, clean shaven and marking an appealing path to his cleft chin and pouty lips. Bucky's profile sent a jolt through your system of a different kind, one that warmed you from belly to cheeks. He turned his unreadable eyes to you and that warmth abruptly faded. 

"Spent too long sleepin' anyway."

He might not have meant for the words to sound so ominous but the weight of them brought a cold sweat to your brow. The urge was there to comfort him, to wrap your arms around him and feel something from him other than wave after wave of detachment and disinterest. You stood slowly and like an out of body experience you felt you had no control over your actions. You watched your feet hit the floor between you and bring you ever closer to Bucky Barnes and in a last minute shuffle felt your mind gain back control.

"Want to help me make the frosting?"

Your voice was too loud again, the words said by you but not the way you intended. You were going to say 'I should make the frosting' with no 'we' involved. 

Bucky's eyebrows rose and with it the veil of intimidation. His eyes seemed brighter now that they weren't hidden under furrowed brows and the way his mouth parted in what could only be disbelief let the hard lines around his lips relax. With a single question he seemed younger and, with a sigh of relief on your end, less terrifying. The kitchen had shifted on its axis with both of you trying to right yourselves and adapt to its new position and maybe that's why Bucky decided to shift it all again and throw you both back to the ground.

"Sure."

He's off his stool, standing in the not-enough-space-for-the-two-of-you spot you were already occupying. Your chests were brushing, breaths mingling, eyes glancing then looking away again. You had no control and Bucky's eyes were so different now. So open and blue with a hint of astonishment pushing through anguish and anger. And those eyes, when they landed on you, it's like they were seeing you for the first time. It was all too much, making your breath swell in your chest like a balloon on the verge of bursting and you were afraid the loud pop of it would wake the house. 

"Ten minutes."

Air rushed from your lungs with Bucky's words and suddenly you felt very empty and stretched with exhaustion. You let out an undignified noise of confused to which Bucky reacted in a way so uncharacteristic of him your jaw would have dropped if it wasn't cradled in his hand. 

He was pointing your chin in the direction of the clock set into the stove. Ten minutes until the cupcakes were done. So much had changed in seven minutes making you momentarily suspicious that the clock had stopped. Nine minutes and everything was real again, including the fingers against your skin. You wanted to look at him, to see his expression and let him see yours, wanting him to see the confusion written on your face and receive an answer to how you had gotten to this point in seven minutes. Instead you kept your eyes trained on the clock and counted down another minute.

"We should get started."

You could hear the humor in his voice, a foreign lilt to your ears but a welcome song nonetheless. You smiled and nodded loosening what little grip he had on you. He moved away first and rounded the counter, standing to the side of it and allowing you to walk before him and take the lead. You tactically removed a mixing bowl from the crowded cupboard and grouped your ingredients to the side of it. 

You were used to working in silence and not so much used to giving instructions so you measured and dumped ingredients in without explanation, but Bucky didn't seem to need any. He stirred the contents of the bowl as you added more to it, working in a silent but effective tandem to create the smooth and fluffy frosting. With Bucky left to his mixing you glanced at the clock and excitedly donned the oven mits. You thought you might've heard a soft exhale of air behind you but paid it no mind as you opened the oven door.

The scent of pumpkin wafted in swells of heat and you breathed in deeply as you pricked the top of a few cakes with a toothpick which came out clean each time. With pan in hand you closed the door to the oven and turned it off, then set the pan on the stovetop. Smiling you turned to your unexpected, but not unwelcome, baking companion.

"Those will need to cool before we can- fingers out of the batter mister!"

Too loud, too demanding, too playful. If you could you would catch those words on your fingers and pop them back into your mouth the way Bucky was doing the frosting. His eyes were wide again and hopelessly blue but streaked with deviousness and guilt giving them a dimension you had never seen. His index finger pulled from his lips to give you a knee-weakening smile. 

"Sorry. Couldn't help myself."

He sounded anything but sorry. The smirk on his lips and the way his tongue darted out to gather a bit of frosting smeared across his bottom lip told you it wasn't safe to turn away from him again. You were afraid of him, but not for the reasons you were before. This wasn't the Winter Soldier who stared at you with empty eyes somehow seeing you and seeing through you. This was Bucky, the Bucky your Captain used to talk about, who flirts with all the dames and drags you on vomit inducing rollercoasters and is with you 'til the end of the line. He was there this whole time, under months of grief and mourning he was there, uncovered in only seventeen minutes, and you felt like a fool for not finding him sooner.

You felt it in your throat first. The bulge of a sob against your larynx that traveled up and out of your quivering lips. Too loud. Bucky was in front of your before the tears could spill so when they started to his thumbs were in place to wipe them away. Too loud. You were wailing like a lonely spirit, like you were watching it all over again on the battlefield, like the weight of your loss had finally slammed against your heart and cut it up, leaving it hurt and bleeding and expected to still beat. 

"I'm sorry, Bucky. I'm so sorry I didn't see you before."

He was shushing you, holding you. His heart torn and bleeding with yours. You could feel it in the way his chest convulsed with the sobs he was managing to keep at bay. 

"I miss them so much. I've missed so much."

Bucky guided your head to his shoulder but it was too late.

Too loud. Too bright. You weren't just wrapped in one pair of arms anymore. You couldn't see with your face buried in Bucky's shoulder but you could feel them holding you tight, sniffling, whispering. 

"Let it all out." Sam's voice cut through it all.

"You're finally letting it all out."

There was no clock to tell you how long you all stood together, no room in your brain to count the seconds. It was lighter outside and brighter inside, noises weren't too loud and voices weren't lowered. Your cheek rested against the tear soaked fabric covering Bucky's shoulder; he was the only one who hadn't drawn away from you yet. With tired eyes you watched Bruce pluck the edge of a cupcake liner in his large green forefinger and thumb. With his one good hand he maneuvers the cupcake upside down and proceeds to dip it into the bowl of frosting. You let out an indignant squeal as he raises it back up messy and dripping. A soft chuckle flutters the hair above your ear while a gentle palm stokes the back of your head.

"That's not how the frosting - oh forget it."

Arms squeezing a little tighter around Bucky's waist you rest your chin on his cold, wet shoulder, close your eyes, take a deep breath, and begin to count the seconds that you began to feel okay again. You knew you'd lose count soon enough, especially when you could feel the man wrapped around you extend a hand to dip into the mixing bowl again.

"Bucky, don't you dare!"

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[brooklynislandgirl]

It Gets You Coming and Going: Of all moral dilemmas, what's one that truly stumps you and why? {ginglymostoma cirratum}

Questionable Quotes || Accepting The question is posed in so very Anakin a way that it almost hurts for simply existing. There’s layers built up between the syllables that only someone who knows him well enough can pick out, and only the very rare amongst them that can tell you where they came from. The deepest is the bedrock of his anxiety, that deep down he believes himself so unworthy that it’s compressed down into the core of him and become the basic foundation of the rest of his personality. Closer to the surface is the silt of fear that he’s said the wrong thing and has reached the tether of her seemingly infinite patience with him. That she’s finally going to snap and savage him with tooth and claw, glutting on the softness of his emotional state until all that is left is something that once resembled the bones of his resolve. And she knows she’s mixing metaphors here but that’s how she conceptualises the things about Anakin she can’t pin to a board and press under glass. Not that she would ever do that, she finds it horrifying and cruel, especially when not that proverbially long ago collectors would do that to living specimens, murdering them with chloroform. Ether. She keeps from curling her lip.

And maybe for those few precious seconds when she can feel his gaze sliding off her and back to the edge of the water, so extremely uncomfortable in his own skin, she empathises with him. Finds it easier to make this about wanting to view himself through the prismatic lens he’s made of her, where every fractured splinter can be compared to the raw emptiness that sometimes fills his own mind and pushes everything out of the way. So he can lose himself in his perceptions ~and she can tell, so easily, when he is sinking in the stream of Time, which is almost always~ and escape for just a little while from the weight of everything resting on too fragile shoulders.

It’s entirely possible, too, and dangerously so that she interprets a good many of their conversations this way, focuses the spotlight on Anakin rather than herself because the idea of introspection makes her a little queasy. That she herself hides behind all the preconceived notions that people have of her that she twists and bends herself to fit into because without them she would be as shapeless as the infinite void of the darkness that lingers at the very edge of the Horizon in the deepest umbral reaches.

And of course she would also never admit to maybe spending too much time dwelling on the reasons why the question wounds her as a means of putting emotional distance and actual thought far out of the way ~out of sight, out of mine. Because it is not the easiest thing to answer. In fact she isn’t sure there’s one that would capture intent as much as interpretation.

The problem with morality as it would be defined by most people is that it is an arbitrary system. An socio-artificial construct that puts a distinction between right and wrong, or good and bad behaviour. And much like consensual reality, the guidelines of such behaviour are dictated by people. And all people are fallible. Even the Holy Father, though he’s not supposed to be.

There are other factors to consider as well. Does he mean specifically as the question relates to Sleepers? Does he mean as it relates to the Awakened as they, master and apprentice, are? If they are speaking about the masses, then are there certain cultural borders they’re straying across? What is good for one group of society is clearly not very often understood by others and so what might be wrong or atrocious in belief may have mitigating circumstances if viewed outside of one’s own group. Then of course there’s the difference between an individual's moral dilemmas and ethical ones, which are similar but still vastly different. Not unlike the Traditions versus the Technocratic Union. And this is obviously not what Anakin means because he’s never seen the heated debates that often took a twist at the dinner table between herself and her brothers.

She wants to tell him, that of course, there’s all of these factors to be taken into consideration. Wants to ask him what he means ~specifically~ in regards to whose morals are being questioned and she knows too that by doing so she will somehow manage to trample his self-worth because he’ll judge himself as not having spoken clearly enough, slowly or carefully enough. That he did not adequately set up the scenario and thus given her something incomplete to work with. There will come a stunning display of beautiful if heartbreaking physical manifestations of that internal grief and she might actually expire from the grief of it all. And she isn’t being nasty about it, she isn’t mocking him in that breath of silence as she considers all of this.  It is something that she’s come to experience in the almost year that they have spent bound together by practice and...funnily enough...tradition. And she likes to think she knows Anakin this well by now, that however hard he tries to hide it, she will see.

She reaches into the bucket beside her and takes a hold of another chunk of meat and tosses it out across the murky water. It lands with a specific and yet sad little plop before disappearing below the surface. She watches the way his cigarette smoke rises up to wreathe around his curls a little wild tousled today. It’s a little ironic that she could see him as a dragon, and maybe there’s some Mokolé blood in his family tree, as much as there is shark in hers. But he’s still reserved enough that he doesn’t stick his converse down over the side of the decrepit little dock they’re on. To be fair, his legs are far longer, far too close to the dark, algae choked surface. He’s never had his calf nearly torn right off the bone and probably doesn’t need that experience. Not with his hand in the state it’s in, the way cold and weariness make his bones and joints ache with nothing to compensate for it.

And that’s the point where she realises that now she’s just stalling, letting herself drift along the paths of thought, further and further away from the question asked. So she breathes out a sigh and allows a soft curve settle to her lips that is neither exactly a smile or even a smaller grin. It’s something along the lines of patience made manifest, her natural inclination toward indulging Anakin, and it’s also...tired. The kind of thing that appears when she’s worked herself to the bone and hasn’t slept for days but continues to push herself until she’s at the exact point of inevitable collapse. And how often does she do that more and more these days. Doesn’t even try to make it to her room when he’s just as comfortable as his bed and far warmer even if it’s a slightly unhealthy symptom of his body’s attempt to keep his extremities in life-giving blood. She leans back, wiggling her toes out in front of her, though her legs are still covered by the broom-skirt she’s wearing, arms bracing herself from behind, slick and red, sure to leave prints she’ll have to clean up before they leave.  “I don’ t’ink dis really a fair question, Anakin. I mean... dere’s factors. A precise synt’esis would define culture as a body of ideas; norms, rules, standards, values, an’ beliefs. So dat different cultures would derefore have different moral an’ et’ical impact. An’ mebbe even between one generation an’ anoddah, like dem boomers an’ millennials. I mean, you an’ me are kinda li’dat too, as technically I’m a millennial an’ you’re Gen Z. Between all people dere’s dis enforced, learned social norm dat are symbolically an’ practically reinforced an’ referenced in displays dat signal adherence to any specific system. Now, I know ya no talk story about all kine people, ya specifically aks me ‘bout my own issue an’ I guess...” She trails off trying to regather herself. When she speaks again she does that thing she does when she thinks something is important enough to give him the best chance of understanding her, but that slows her speech, gives it a brittle edge.

“Even as hapa ~being half Hawai’ian~ my mother taught me about kuleana. Loosely translated it means “responsibility”. It’s dis concept of reciprocal relationships between the person who is responsible, an’ the things or persons they are responsible for. As Hawai’ians, we have a kuleana to our ‘aina, our land. To care for it and to respect it, and in return... the land has the kuleana to feed, shelter and clothe us. Through that relationship we maintain balance within society and with the natural environment. But you look at the world and everything is for sale, raped by greed and the need to consume. To conform. This... this is a sign of what my uncle’s people call the Apocalypse, but not like in disaster movies. Maybe tomorrow, I’ll tell you all about that.

“Another concept is...Pono. There’s no real translation for it, it’s a concept that incorporates many things. But many people use it to imply righteousness, but not like the way it’s used in society today. For us, anyway, it’s a very strong cultural and spiritual concept for a state of harmony and balance. So you can see how they relate? By accepting your kuleana and making sure you act on them in the right way, you are living pono. Living pono means to make a conscious decision to do the right thing in terms of self, others, and the environment. And we make no distinction between human and animal or plant, in that way.” She slants that hazel gaze toward him via one eye slitted open to make sure he’s following along.  “And I don’t mean that cutting down a tree is the same as say murder. But in a way, it is. You are killing something that was alive. You are taking its mana. If you do it with proper thanks and reverence, if you ensure that you are doing it sustainably, to feed yourself or build a shelter for your family, then you’re behaving within your kuleana. But clear-cutting an entire rain-forest so you can build a luxury golf-course and resort, displacing thousands and thousands of indigenous wild life and polluting the waters and destroying layers and layers of earth, not to mention the risk of exposing entire tribes of people who have no natural resistance to what are common, immunised illnesses? That is no different than slaughtering those very same lives in a far more expedient way. And I don’t know if you think I’m crazy, or if I am over-simplifying the tragedy that we as an entire world of people are creating and contributing to but you can see...the earth herself is restless. She is angry. And those throes of agony ~the global warming, the spirits crying out, the violence and disease...they are all symptoms of that anger, because people as a whole have lost their way. They trust too much in technology and in coping mechanisms that only breed more trouble...”

She’s momentarily lost in the weeds, but there’s no denying the passion in her voice as it trembles with pure and unbridled rage at society’s ills. And not just the ones that have landed on the Sleepers whom they are, in their own ways, charged with protecting, but the ones amongst their own kind and those of the others. “So I suppose, the dilemma I just cannot begin to understand is...with so much happening, and the world around us vanishing with every breath...why are we unable to reach an understanding. Why do we have to fight this war about whose mana is bigger, is better than someone else’s. And not just the Traditions ourselves. Our infighting is bad but we can typically talk things out. I specifically mean this war with the Technocrats. Their science isn’t doing much to improve lives these days and more and more people are looking for alternatives, for the Old Ways. Why not work with us instead of trying to kill or imprison us? Or why can’t some of us... Verbena and Dreamspeakers... some of you Euthanatos- why can’t we make a pact with the Wolfkin. Or the last of the lizard kings-” She glances askance at him a second time in a very playful and knowing fashion. Which is disturbing considering the nature of the remains in the ice chest she was tossing into the water just moments ago. “It isn’t like some of us hasn’t been busy keeping their kin fed. So I think just like the Traditions coming together, or the Technocrats forming their union, maybe it’s time we put political and spiritual beliefs to the side and just work together for the things we want. We’re all really trying to fight the same enemy, and I promise it isn’t you, and it isn’t me and it isn’t Bil..it isn’t any one person. There is evil out there. Real, terrifying evil. Take this guy. What he did to those kids...He was a disease. And like the healer I am and like...like the man you will some day become, we did what was right, for everyone.” Beth shudders then shakes her head.  “I don’t even know how to answer your question, or if I did. All I can say is...there’s no part of me that has any shame for the way I live my life, and therefore there’s no moral dilemma. But if one comes up, I promise you’ll be the first line of defense for my understanding and sanity.”

#mynameisanakin #Like A Sad Hallucination|Anakin Skywalker #Like a Memory in Motion|Anibeth #The Trunk You Kept Your Life In|Mage the Ascension #Crescent City Blues|Nola #Reborn on the Bayou|Louisiana

[martenvankammen]

A different way of life

Rarely I awaken without finding myself drenched in a cold sweat. Remnants of the past returning to haunt me, following my days within the Imperial Guard. Such horrific memories of war and bloodshed ingrained within my mind that it seems impossible to escape them. I would wager even the most stoic individual would be left with a foul taste upon their tongue at the mere thought of such dreadful sights.

Nothing seems to allow refuge from these dreams with each night a different memory taking hold of my psyche and tormenting me throughout the night. They are so lifelike, that I barely consider them dreams anymore but instead punishment for all I have inflicted upon others. That it simply had become my turn to suffer.

 Yet despite being plagued by memories of my former duties, I am now anything but a soldier. Though I remember little of how that part of my life had ended. All I do know is that it was abrupt and brutal. Beyond that it’s all a blur no matter how hard I try to recall.

Now I have a different vocation to fill my days. Instead of cleansing distant worlds of the Imperium’s foes I now do a cleansing of a different sort. Cleaning floors and workshops within my new place of employ. If you could call it employment at least.

Regardless of the lacklustre nature of this work I am thankful for it. I have learned very early on that within this place there are far worse fates one could be subjected to. One could even say I’m thankful for the position.

 My beloved wife on the other hand had been granted a more prestigious role among the workers. A position at our employers’ side as an assistant of sorts.

Because of this I am often granted the pleasure of seeing her on the odd occasion. Whenever our employer visits one of the workshops.

That brief sight of her always refills my heart with the strength to continue onward with my work. Although I’m sure anyone would feel renewed if they saw my wife’s beautiful smile.

Honestly, I’m not sure how else I would continue. While I’ve grown accustomed to the hours to some degree, we are always short staffed and the burden of shouldering that will always fall to those that remain. Seeing that wonderful smile however allows me to persevere despite it.

But, I suppose its to be expected to have a constant shortage of workers around here. The level of skill expected of the workers here is rather outrageous with little to no reward in return.

Then again what choice do they have? What choice do I have?

Thus, I simply work the days away with a continuous zeal that was expected from me during my days within the Imperial Guard. All in order to make sure I can witness that smile another day.

 Yet today there was no smile to soothe me, as my wife was absent at our employer’s side.

I had considered asking where she was out of curiosity but thankfully stopped myself from doing so.

Anyone that works here quickly learns that it’s better not to bother the higher ups with mundane questions and it would be dreadful to get my beloved into trouble because of a little curiosity.

While I worked my way through the halls however something had caught my eye. Something that wasn’t there before on a particular wall. It was shocking to say the least and I had found my answer to my wife’s absence.

There she was, framed for all eternity with the very smile that was so endearing to me. It would seem the mistress of this place had chosen her to added to this wall filled with the faces of employees.

Before I knew it tears flowed freely across my cheeks. I was overwhelmed with emotion, wondering if I’d ever be added to it myself.

Unfortunately, I could not linger any longer. Idle hands are frowned upon by my employer and it did not take long for someone to call upon me to clean a mess. A particular mess in a workshop I wished they had left for someone else to clean.

 Another day had passed without witnessing my beloved’s smile.

When my employer wandered passed me in the hall, I couldn’t help but expect my wife in tow yet no one followed. It surprised me how much the lack of her presence affected me. To the point where I had caught myself staring blankly into nothingness during my duties. A nasty habit I could ill afford.

Anxiety was taking hold of me merely thinking about the entire situation. Fearing that it would ultimately cost me my position here.

So, in a bid to alleviate the fears that weighted my heart I found myself back at the wall my wife’s visage was placed. Just to get a glimpse of her.

I couldn’t help but ponder on how strange it may have looked to the other workers in passing. But in the end, I cared little anymore. It was the only way to cull the pressure which had taken hold of me. And soon I found myself at that wall every day, looking at the smile of my beloved.

Yet it held nothing compared to the genuine thing. This framed smile felt hollow despite its perfection.

Still, I felt drawn to it. The hollow smile was enough to sustain my resolve and soothed the weight which had been brought on by my wife’s absence.

 Soon days had turned to weeks and without even realizing a month had passed with my wife absent eventually turning my quirky routine into a dependence I could no longer bear without. Today was no different of course. I had slinked away from my duties to meet with my beloved’s eternal smile.

“She is such a lovely addition is she not?” A whisper in my ear from someone I had not noticed until the very first tone reverberated into my ear. My heart skipped a beat and my body felt frozen in time.

That sultry voice was familiar to me. It was a voice I had heard countless times before but never had it struck so much fear into my very being. There was no need see who had uttered those words to me in such a manner because it could only be one individual.

She was the one who had placed my wife’s face upon that wall. But despite her words. Her focus was not on me in the slightest. instead, she was enamoured with her own creation.

“So many wonderful emotions captured for all eternity. Each emotion a perfect representation of what they stand for. Allowing anyone to savour them whenever they wish. Do you agree?” I found myself nodding without even realizing, my body no longer my own. Fear had overtaken it and forced me into submission. Her voice devoid of any malice or threats had already reduced me into such a state. No, her mere presence already accomplished that on its own.

“This is the one you covet so dearly is it not? Tell me, have I captured her smile perfectly?” My stomach churned when she asked that question, knowing she did not care in the slightest for my answer. Her cruel smile left no doubt regarding that facade.

Never had I witnessed such a venomous expression during all my years. My instincts shouted at me over and over, telling me that this Drukhari woman beside me was simply a predator waiting for the signal to devour me. Yet I knew staying silent would grant me a fate far worse.

 “Yes, my mistress. There is nothing quite as beautiful as her smile.” I hadn’t cried since that first time I saw my beloved’s face among the others on that wall. But to confirm the atrocity this wretched woman had inflicted upon her as beautiful, tore my very soul apart.

But I had spoken the truth on the matter. Nothing could compare to the beauty that was my wife and it pained me knowing her very soul was bound in that wall for all eternity. Forcing to smile in the same way she comforted me in this hellish place. This monster had twisted it and perverted that smile and all I could do was to selfishly use it to keep myself sane.

My self-loathing however was interrupted by another question from this serpent disguised as a Drukhari woman.

“Do you hate me for what I did to her Mon’keigh? Despise me for it? Or do you find my work as tantalizing as I do?” Despise? Hate? Those words felt lacking to what I felt for this monster who had done unspeakable things to my beloved. And here she was taunting me about it, expecting something from me. Yet then I came to a realization. Why haven’t I struck her? Killed her? I should be at this woman’s throat yet here I am frozen in fear.

In the corner of my eye however, I found my answer. This monster was gleefully enjoying every moment of my turmoil. As if she was feeding of the suffering that enveloped me in this very moment.

Why can I not attack her? All I want right now is to rip her throat out and take vengeance for the love of my life yet any desire to do so is snuffed out each time!

“You still have not realized have you Mon’keigh?” My eyes widened at the realization of it all. She knew exactly what thoughts were gripping me so tightly beyond her mere presence.

“Why can’t I harm you?” Not the words my mind had conjured yet it was all that could escape my lips

“Because I took it away from you, just like I took this smiling creature before us away from you.” How could I be so foolish to think this nightmarish place couldn’t take anything they wanted. The fool I was.

She had castrated my ability to exact any aggression upon her. Leaving it to fester within my mind for as long as possible. But why? I can’t fathom why one would do such a thing just for the sake of it.

It was a question only she held the answer too.

All I knew she was savouring every moment of it. No, that was an understatement.

The suffering I had endured was a pleasure to be savoured in her eyes.

 Sorrow, anger, confusion and fear mixed into a delicate cocktail for her own consumption. It was in this moment that I knew why she was called an artisan among her people.

When I finally snapped back to reality she was gone and I hadn’t even realized. It felt like hours had gone by leaving me there in a daze once that monster had been sated by my grief.

My beloved was still there eternally smiling upon me even in this pathetic state even though deep down I knew she would be disappointed in me.

No, that would be an insult to her very being. She would have understood and comforted me.

I miss her…

My heart can take only so much yet I fear I cannot even take my own life anymore. Is it even my own life anymore?

I should return to my duties for now. There are far worse fates in store for those who do not work.

#warhammer #drukhari #warhamer 40000 #warhammer 40k #story #short story

[theeverlastingshade]

Favorite Albums of the 2000s

10. In Rainbows- Radiohead

After Radiohead released Hail to the Thief it seemed pretty set in stone that while they may still go on to continue releasing great records, it’s unlikely that they’d ever put out another record that shatters expectations and makes a bid for being among their best work. And then we received In Rainbows, a shocking late-career game changer so assured, dynamic, and brilliant that there are music fans that came of age around its release that still claim it’s the best Radiohead album. It’s not, but it’s exceptional nonetheless; a perfect fusion of the art-rock, electronic rock, and avant-guard impulses that they’d seem to have perfected by the time Kid A dropped, but had never quite navigated so fluidly. It’s a best of both worlds record that’s lean, perfectly paced, and contains some of the strongest songwriting of Thom Yorke’s entire career. It was the first Radiohead record since Kid A to sound like a revelatory statement able to stand on its own, and not simply exist in the shadow of prior records. The pay what you want model that they used to sell the record was a game-changer at the time of its release, but it’s the warm orchestration, frigid beats, and dynamic range that gave this record the staying power that it has. It’s the kind of record that displays an assured effortlessness that belies what exceptional musicians they all are, and reminds you why you fell in love with the band in the first place.

The one-two punch of “15 Step” and “Bodysnatchers” sets the pace for what’s to come; the former a glitchy electronic song that seems to hint at a less claustrophobic approach to Amensiac before the latter, propelled by a motorik rhythm and Yorke’s fractured wail, erupts and shatters that notion. The two of these songs taken together give a fairly apt depiction of the poles that Radiohead where bouncing back and forth from, and the tension arising from that balancing act propels the record forward. Caught between the somber guitar ballad “Nude” and the lumbering, electronic midpoint crescendo “All I Need” is the fidgety, nimble guitar work of “Weird Fishes/Arpeggi” which does a wonderful job of offsetting the dreaminess of the previous track and preparing you for the creeping dread of what immediately follows. “Faust Arp” is a welcome, jangly transition from the heaviness of “All I Need” into the album’s most accessible song, “Reckoner”, and through that song’s warm melody and infectious percussion the downtempo march of “House of Cards” sounds like a perfect transition, with its string drones setting the stage for the record’s best song to arrive. There isn’t a moment wasted throughout the entire record, and it’s a marvel to hear the band cover such vast ground and still end up with something so concise.

Being a Radiohead record it should come as no surprise that In Rainbows tackles themes of existential dread, apocalyptic visions, corruption, and alienation throughout. “Nude” grapples with groupthink, the tendency for societies to not operate in the best interests of its people, and the inherent emptiness that defines the human experience “You paint yourself white/And fill up with noise/But there’ll be something missing”. “Bodysnatchers” explores someone faking their way through life and being unable to live the way they truly are “I have no idea what I’m talking about/I’m trapped in this body and can't get out” while “Faust Arp” finds someone crushed under the weight of monotony, recognizing the issue but seemingly lacking the courage or conviction to change his surroundings “Dead from the neck up, I guess I’m stuck, stuck, stuck/We thought you had it in you/But no, no, no”. “Videotape” ends the record on a perfect thematic note with the narrator making a videotape for the love of his life before he kills himself “No matter what happens now/You shouldn’t be afraid/Because I know today has been/The most perfect day I’ve ever seen”, drawing an unsettling through line from the closer on Kid A. The themes of despair throughout the digital age have become increasingly more realized with each subsequent Radiohead album from OK Computer onward, but they hit a notable new peak on In Rainbows. In Rainbows isn’t their most ambitious, or accomplished album, but it perhaps best distills what their essence best, succinctly showcasing just how peerless they were and remain.

Essentials: “Jigsaw Falling Into Place”, “All I Need”, “Weird Fishes/Arpeggi”

9. The Glow, Pt. 2- The Microphones

Before Phil Elverum recorded two devastating records about the loss of his wife, Genevieve, and the process of having to raise his daughter without her by his side under his current Mount Eerie moniker, he spent several years recording lo-fi psychedelic folk songs as The Microphones. He switched gears in 2003 and continued recording music as a solo act, having swapped the name of The Microphones for Mount Eerie (the name of the final record recorded as The Microphones) feeling that he had taken the former project to its natural conclusion. Before making the switch, Elverum recorded four albums as The Microphones that each rank as among the most accomplished and thoroughly engaging albums that he’s recorded to date. While all are exceptional and worth anyone’s time, The Glow Pt. 2 is the best of the bunch, and still stands as Elverum’s magnum opus. An idiosyncratic LP bursting with personality and color while folding in psychedelic folk, noise, lo-fi, ambient, and indie rock The Glow Pt. 2 is a colossal tour de force through Elverum’s tastes, and it hangs together remarkably well. He would continue to explore various facets of styles explored here on subsequent releases, but no single record of his before or after captures the vivid imagination and breadth of his musicianship quite like The Glow Pt. 2.

Opener “I Want Wind to Blow” sets the stage for what’s to come through gentle acoustic strums, repetition, and a generous use of space while growing increasingly grand in scope until it explodes during its last minute with pummeling percussion and thick slabs of distorted noise. “I Want Wind to Blow” is one of the longest songs here, with most ranging from 1 to 2 minutes, just long enough to begin exploring an idea and then smoothly transitioning to something else before wearing its welcome. There are songs like “(Something)” that drift by quickly with little more than droning strings floating eerily throughout the mix, and others like “Map” that are a treasure trove of eclectic instrumentation that seem to be constantly rising and falling in intensity for several minutes without locking into a steady groove for too long. “Headless Horseman” gets a ton of mileage out of a softly strummed ukulele and Elverum’s tender vocals while the menacing “I Want to be Cold” pits a searing cymbal rhythm against smoldering, distorted guitars with Elverum’s voice barely audible above the noise. The individual songs may run the gamut through a myriad of different genres, but the analog warmth, droning motifs, tape hiss, and punctual silence tie everything together as one vast landscape of thematic and sonic coherence. No matter how far ranging some of the songs here develop with respect to everything else around them, the production renders each song with the same unmistakable warmth and richness.

The Glow Pt. 2 is centered around a breakup that Elverum experienced, and he details his thoughts and feelings throughout the ordeal, consistently blurring the lines between fact and fiction while gradually finding solace in nature. “I Want Wind to Blow” opens the record right after the storm has died down as he begs for a change to sweep away the sense of loss that he’s beginning to endure “My clothes off me, sweep me off my feet/Take me up, don’t bring me back/Oh, where I can see days pass by me/I have no head to hold in grief”. This leads directly into the record’s centerpiece and title track where Elverum comes to terms with the fact that his girlfriend and best friend became romantically involved with one another. Elverum recognizes that life will go on whether or not he wants it to in that moment “I could not get through September without a battle/I faced death, I went in with my arms swinging/But I heard my own breath/And I had to face that I’m still living”, and slowly works his way back towards the resolve to go on. Throughout the rest of the record he tries to erase memories of the relationship (“The Moon”), succumbs to pure apathy (“I Want to be Cold”), comes to terms with how insignificant he is within the scope of the universe (“I Felt My Size”), and eventually comes to terms with what remains of his life as he slowly bleeds out in the forest (“My Warm Blood”). The experience that Elverum draws from throughout The Glow Pt. 2 is universal, but it’s rarely been translated into such a rich, transcendent experience.

Essentials: “I Want Wind to Blow”, “The Glow, Pt. 2″, “Map”

8. Since I Left You- The Avalanches

While the last decade saw the release of many brilliant records, there were very few that were as legitimately inventive as Since I Left You. The debut album by The Avalanches is a plunderphonics record that seamlessly blends disco, r&b, jazz, bossa nova, comedy skits, and pop music into a glorious, kaleidoscopic whole that truly sounds like nothing else. SILY wasn’t the first plunderphonics record, but nothing working entirely within those parameters before or since has achieved something so fresh and singular, creating a colorful, fully-lived in new context for the 900 plus samples that make up its whole. The perfectly natural flow that guides the record is part of its inherent charm, and belies just how intricate and complex the creation of the record actual was. SILY was so painstakingly meticulous to construct that it took The Avalanches 16 years to return with a proper follow-up, and while that follow-up, Wildflower, was a great return to form, it doesn’t quite capture the singular beauty of their inimitable debut.

The eclecticism of SILY is one of the most immediate, and impressive draws. There are recurring samples and motifs that occur multiple times throughout the record, but no two songs sound anything alike. The pacing is sublime, with songs bleeding into one another in a manner that approximates a DJ mix with supreme versatility. Samples are constantly shifting, being pitched in different directions, being sped up, slowed down, or swapped out entirely. There’s never a moment where something isn’t in flux, and the fact that they manage to accomplish this while still constantly giving each song such a defined shape and tone is a marvel. Sampled voices appear periodically, but rather than leading the arrangements, in true plunderphonics fashion they're tucked into the fold alongside everything else, treated as percussion or texture depending on the song. No single moment overstays its welcome, and because of how much texture is being employed at all times it’s easy to constantly discover something new each time that you listen to it. The last song on SILY transitions seamlessly into the first song, which only heightens the potency of its DJ mix structure.

With a record as coherent and consistent as SILY it’s difficult and almost beside the point to zero in on highlights since it’s meant to be consumed all at once as an experience. But there are a few astonishing songs that stand above the already strong pack, and rank as among the strongest plunderphonics songs that I’ve ever heard. “Two Hearts in ¾ Time” unloads a swirling concoction of xylophone, flute, and keys atop breezy scat singing, and the carefree exuberance that radiates from the composition is infectious. “Radio” pits a massive bassline against repetitious chants and distorted bursts of guitars and keys while “Summer Crane” pairs down the sonic density (slightly) as a slurring thermin, strings, and sleigh bells dance in tandem while the recurring string motif flickers throughout. “Frontier Psychiatrist” is as ridiculous and absurd as things get here, and is legitimately one of the funniest moments on any electronic album through its use of vocal samples lifted from the Johnny Wayne and Frank Shuster comedy sketch of the same name “The man with the golden eyeball/And tighten your buttocks, pour juice down your chin/I promised my girlfriend I’d play the violin. And the closer “Extra Kings” unravels in a bouncy psychedelic sprawl with the voice from the first song and title track singing “I’ve tried but I just can’t get you/Every since the day I left you” as noise makers and woodwinds swirl around the vocals in rapturous joy.

The one thing that cannot be overstated is just how much fun it is to listen to this record. Through its many songs and moods, joy, pain, sorrow, regret, and unease are conjured at various moments, but throughout it all there’s a palpable sense that the band are thoroughly enjoying themselves. It remains playful and whimsical even at its most crestfallen, and thrills even at its deepest lulls. A sense of discovery and communal spirit animates this record, and The Avalanches achieve a sense of weightlessness that pervades even the record’s densest moments. It’s the rare record that matches its remarkably accessible, party-friendly nature with an equally groundbreaking execution that completely rewrote the cultural relationship to sample-based music. The Avalanches wisely opted to downplay the inherent brilliance of the music, and they made it as easy as possible to simply get lost in the endless spirals of grooves, texture, and pockets upon pockets of melody. There’s no air of pretension in The Avalanches’ universe, just the pure, unmitigated joy of stumbling upon new sounds in unusual contexts again and again and again.

Essentials: “Extra Kings”, “Frontier Psychiatrist”, “Two Hearts in 3/4 Time”

7. Yankee Hotel Foxtrot- Wilco

Wilco was already a great band before they released Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, but it’s this record that cemented them as one of the most compelling of their era. When their label, Reprise Records, an imprint of AOL Time Warner, heard the record they assumed that it would essentially amount to career suicide and opted to release them from the label with the rights to the album. In order to not significantly delay the release of their record before touring it as well as controlling the quality of the songs that were already being leaked from it Wilco put the entire record on their site and embarked on their most successful tour up to that point. Both Being There and Summerteeth were massive leaps forward for the band, defined equally by Jeff Tweedy’s increasingly accomplished songwriting and the studio wizardry of multi-instrumentalist Jay Bennet, but on YHF these forces hit a peak. The songs on YHF are intensely felt, and earnestly conveyed by a band that was completely in-tune with one another, and were perpetually firing on all cylinders. The tasteful sonic experimentation, warm rock and baroque arrangements, and Tweedy’s wistful, romantic sentiments coalesce into a superbly realized whole. Mature, earnest, empathetic, and adventurous, YHF is a landmark for indie rock, and one of the most beautiful and compulsively listenable albums of the century so far.

The biggest development that took place on YHF was Tweedy’s songwriting fully blossoming into a sincere, singular voice that propelled to the band to unprecedented heights. On opening song “I Am Trying to Break Your Heart” Tweedy’s depiction of someone wandering around Chicago post-breakup “I am an American aquarium drinker/I assassin down the avenue/I’m hiding out in the big city blinking/What was a I thinking when I let go of you?” sets the tone of the album with wistful, poignant urgency. “Jesus, Etc” depicts the desolation and the simple pleasures clung to within urban, contemporary American life “Voices whine/Skycrapers are scraping together/Your voice is smoking/Last cigarettes, are all you can get/Turning your orbit around” while positing love as a balm for the ills of modern existence “Our love is all we have/Our love/Our love is all of God’s money/Everyone is a burning sun”. On the album’s stunning closer “Reservations” Tweedy’s trying to reassure his love that he’s invested in their future “Oh, I’ve got reservations/About so many things/But not about you” while on the album’s centerpiece, “Radio Cure”, Tweedy laments the difficulty of sustaining a long distance relationship despite advancements in technology making it easier to do than ever before “Oh, distance has no way/Of making love understandable”. Tweedy’s writing is concise and direct, cut with an emotional through line that elevates the sentiments beyond what may scan as initially simplistic.

YHF doesn’t provide any overhauls to their approach to the extent that Wilco’s previous two records did. Rather, it’s a case of tightening up what they already did well and improving considerably on all fronts. Jay Bennett continues to showcase how he was the band’s not-so-secret weapon at this phase of their career with a sly touch that embellishes each song here with surprising amount of dimension. Bennett really began to experiment considerably with Wilco’s sound on Summerteeth, but his most compelling contributions are those throughout YHF. Whether its the ambient swirl of chimes that open “Ashes of American Flags”, the spring-loaded percussion on “Pot Kettle Black”, the melancholic string drones that dominate “Poor Places” or the whirring samples that swirl in perfect harmony alongside the infectious concoction of cymbals, xylophone, and acoustic guitars throughout the build of “Radio Cure”, Bennett’s use of texture was subtle, but supremely effective in fleshing each composition into wonderfully distinct shapes. The songs are certainly strong enough to stand on their own in much simpler, stripped down forms, but Bennett’s tinkering perfectly complemented Tweedy’s songwriting, imbuing his romanticism with a welcome surrealist bent.

The suspected allusions to 9/11 in a few of the songs despite the record having been finished months before 9/11 dominated the narrative of the album upon its release, but that supposed prescience overlooks Tweedy’s astute observation of American despair and generally just glosses over the fact that, regardless of possible foresight, YHF is simply a magnificent record. There’s a universality to the sentiments that are beautifully rendered by Tweedy’s aching tone, and the band finally seemed completely comfortable dropping all pretenses of “alt-country” and leaned unabashedly into their intrinsic weirdness without much concern for what the record might initially scan as. What continues to really impress about YHF is that Wilco simultaneously became more experimental and tuneful, with some of the melodies dominating songs like “Radio Cure”, “Jesus, Etc”, “Pot Kettle Black”, and “I’m the Man Who Loves You” ranking as among their strongest to date. There are few albums that I’ve heard that strike such a fine balance between strong melodies and forward-thinking composition, but YHF manages just that, while offering a compelling insight into initial 21st century American malaise.

Essentials: “Radio Cure”, “I Am Trying to Break Your Heart”, “Jesus, Etc”

6. Madvillainy- Madvillain

MF DOOM and Madlib were already renowned figures in underground hip hop with a couple of great records under each of their belts before they linked up to write and record Madvillainy. But in each other they found the perfect collaborator whose sensibilities ran parallel to their own. In the universe that they built together dense internal rhymes float effortlessly over dusty soul loops and thick clouds of pot smoke. There were obvious precedents for what they accomplished on DOOM’s Operation Doomsday and Madlib’s The Unseen, recorded under his Quasimoto alias, but on Madvillainy they helped one another reach a creative breakthrough with them both redefining the form of their respective crafts. Madlib’s beats are relentlessly eclectic, gorgeously textured, and masterfully mixed, while DOOM’s verses are some of the most varied, superbly rapped, and thought-provoking of his entire career. The ease with which their styles complement one another belies the effort that they put into it, and the end result doesn’t sound fussy or labored over, but it did herald a new era of faded west-coast hip hop built on a throne of comic books, jazz records, and a dizzying array of internal rhyme schemes.

The production on Madvillainy was handled entirely by Madlib, with DOOM co-producing the opening track “The Illest Villains”, and it’s the most cohesive collection of beats that Madlib has ever assembled while still packing a considerable amount of variety within its grooves. “Rhinestone Cowboy” is the longest song, clocking in at 4 minutes exactly, but most of the songs are under 2 minutes and concisely introduce their ideas while DOOM unloads brief, but substantial bars over them. The samples span the likes of The Mothers of Invention, Sun Ra, George Clinton, Bill Evans, Diana Ross, Stevie Wonder, James Brown, Street Fighter II, and so much more sometimes within the same songs without once showing the seams. The atmosphere is soulful and jazzy with a hazy tinge that the samples lend the compositions on the whole juxtaposed superbly against the visceral nature of DOOM’s rapping. The music is rendered within a quantized grid so there’s no mistaking it as anything other than hip hop beats, but these beats are arranged more tastefully than the vast majority of instrumental hip-hop that’s come before or since. Whether it's the guitar/sleigh bell stomp of “Shadows of Tomorrow”, or the sluggish bass crawl and metronome sigh of “Meat Grinder”, or the anthemic brass leads that frame “All Caps”, the beats are simply bursting with texture and personality.

Since reemerging as MF DOOM towards the end of the last century Daniel Dumile has completely owned this specific lane of verbose, off-kilter hip-hop defined by his knotty phrasing, complex internal rhyme schemes, and magnetic personality that draws from all ephemeral of pop culture. Madlib brings out the best in DOOM, and his rapping is by turns loose and tight, dense and reference heavy while delivered with a level of precision that transcends pop culture acumen. “Living off borrowed time, the lock ticks faster/That’d be the hour they knock on the slick blaster” are the first lines on “Accordion” that open the record, and things only get more surreal from there. The rhymes are eloquent and guttural, often open to various interpretation, and packed with colorful imagery while never being anything less than thought-provoking. “Meat Grinder” depicts DOOM’s pimping of a stripper named China “Heat niner, pimping, stripping, soft sweet minor/China was a neat signer, trouble with the script” while “America’s Most Blunted” is an absurdist ode to marijuana “Quas, when he really hit star mode/Never will he boost loose Philies with the bar-code”. “Curls” reveals a glimpse of DOOM’s lost innocence after smoking his first spiff at 7 “Spliff made him swore he saw heaven, he was seven/Yup, you know it, growin’ up too fast/Showin’ up to class with Moet in a flask” while on “All Caps” he’s reveling in pure braggadocio “So nasty that it’s probably somewhat of a travesty/Having me, then he told the people “You can call me your majesty””. The complexity and eclecticism that DOOM imbued his lyrics with hit a new peak for hip hop as a whole on Madvillainy.

Although the partnership between MF DOOM and Madlib only resulted in Madvillainy, the influence of that lone masterwork continues to ripple throughout the underground and mainstream alike. Odd Future, Brainfeeder, Black Hippy, Pro Era, Bruiser Brigade and countless other crews, collectives, and labels were informed tremendously by the nerve this record struck. DOOM clones are still rampant, and Madlib’s anything goes crate-digging approach to sample-based composition can be heard in everyone from Kaytranada to JPEGMAFIA. There were very few records that came out this decade that drastically altered the direction for what hip hop can sound like quite like Madvillainy. DOOM and Madlib were such a perfect match for one another that neither of them have made music with anyone else before or since (or solo) that comes close to the brilliance of Madvillainy. Whether or not the two of them ever reunite to create that tantalizing follow-up seems like a coin toss, but truth be told we’re better served with things as they are. The original is still paying enormous dividends 15 years later and it’s only going to continue getting better from here.

Essentials: “All Caps”, “Figaro”, “Curls”

5. Microcastle/Weird Era Cont.- Deerhunter

No other double LP from the last decade delivered so much, or asked so little from the listener, as Deerhunter’s extraordinary Microcastle/Weird Era Cont. Originally just intended as a single LP, Bradford Cox generously recorded all of Weird Era Cont. to reward fans that purchased Microcastle after it leaked months in advance (unfortunately, Weird Era Cont. would be leaked as well). Microcastle finds the band honing their populist impulses with impeccable clarity without completely abandoning their murkier roots, while Weird Era Cont. completely dives into their stranger, more abstract realm of their sound. Each record is exceptional in its own right, but when taken together they form the perfect realization of all the sides of the band, spanning the likes of garage rock, post-punk, shoegaze, ambient, musique concrete, krautrock, and psychedelic pop while managing to make such amalgamations sound like second nature. There’s more range covered on each of these LPs than most bands manage within entire careers. While Cryptograms first showcased the seemingly limitless potential that Deerhunter was capable of, Microcastle/Weird Era Cont. proved that they were one of the defining bands of the century so far.

Microcastle is sequenced in a way that is comparable to Cryptograms, but there are just a few more bright pop moments right out of the gates before the record descends into its shorter ambient middle section. After the obligatory ambient opening interlude, this time in the form of “Cover Me (Slowly)”, Lockett Pundt begins the record proper by taking lead vocals on Cox’s “Agorophobia”. Having Lockett sing the first actual song on the record is a testament to how far their lead guitarist had come as another vocalist (and songwriter, with “Neither of Us, Uncertainly”) in such a short order. With “Agorophobia” Lockett leads one of the gentlest sounding songs that the band had released up to that point, with a disarmingly gorgeous vocal melody superbly juxtaposed against lyrics that describe the sensation of being buried alive for sexual pleasure. The sharp immediacy of “Never Stops” follows suit, and here Cox completely comes into his own a pop frontman, no longer content to wallow innocuously behind the squall of guitar distortion, and he propels the arrangements with a legitimately anthemic melody. Both “Little Kids” and the title track provide two of Cox’s most tender vocal performances up to that point while still making room for Lockett’s spellbinding guitar tones.

“Calvary Scars”, “Activa”, and “Green Jacket” aren’t quite as engaging as any of the ambient songs throughout the stretch from “White Ink” to “Red Ink” on Cryptograms, but they nonetheless draw an effective bridge to the record’s high-point, the colossal “Nothing Ever Happened”. “Nothing Ever Happened” has the band firing on all cylinders and delivering a show stopping performance that blends krautrock, garage rock, and shoegaze for a song far more satisfying and life-affirming than the sum of its parts. After that rollercoaster we’re treated to the bouncy jangle pop of “Saved by Old Times”, and the soothing dream pop of comedowns “Neither of Us, Certainly” and “Twilight at Carbon Lake” before the later erupts into a cacophony of jerky guitar spasms. It’s a welcome ending for a record with such a clear emphasis on melody, and it reinforces the notion that you shouldn’t get too comfortable with any fixed idea of what Deerhunter sound like at any given point in time.

Weird Era Cont. is where things really get interesting. It’s the only album of theirs that includes songs that were recorded and performed by individual members of the band intended for their various solo projects (these being Bradford Cox’s Atlas Sound and Lockett Pundt’s Lotus Plaza). The album as a whole hews closest to the first Atlas Sound LP, Let the Blind Lead Those Who Can See but Cannot Feel, in that both are absolute treasure troves of sonic riches that prioritize pure sound and overall immersion above proper song structure. The fact that Weird Era Cont. is so disparate and yet hangs together so cohesively is as much a testament to Deerhunter’s discipline as it is their sheer intuition with respect to flow and pacing even amongst such inherent disorder. And so here you get the raucous garage rock anthem “Operation” colliding into the noise-pop gem “Dot Gain”, the ambient interlude “Cicada” seeping right into the twisted ethereal waltz “Vox Humana”, and the whirring instrumental collage pop “Moon Witch Cartridge” segueing nicely into the droning noise of “Weird Era”. While Weird Era Cont. is only strengthened when viewed through the lens of it existing as the flip side to Microcastle’s warped pop, it still provides a welcome microcosm of Deerhunter’s incredible range all on its own, and it’s the most adventurous record that Deerhunter ever recorded.

Due to the fact that Microcastle and Weird Era Cont. are both Deerhunter records, the lyrics deal almost entirely with dreams and death. Most of the characters that occupy these songs are trying to escape from their nightmares or literally sacrificing themselves for the sweet ecstasy of oblivion. A version of “Cavalry Scars” appears on both records, the former a brief guitar lullaby and the latter a blistering shoegaze freakout, but the constant thread that ties them together aside from the title is that the narrator is crucifying himself in front of all of his friends. “Saved By Old Times” is more literal, and it depicts the alienation that Cox experienced growing up in his parents house by himself after his parents divorced while trying to cope with his Marfan Syndrome “You are trapped in your basement for a war of 16 years/In a combat for victory/In a combat with ourselves/In combat with these cultural vampires”. Cox’s fixation on death seems to serve as the ultimate salve for his lifelong struggle with simply having to exist, and regardless of whether or not music functions as a temporary solution for his anguish it’s clearly a natural medium for him to exercise his demons. Deerhunter have spent the rest of their career honing in on that release, but Microcastle/Weird Era Cont. is where those fixations first crystallized into something truly singular.

Essentials: “Nothing Ever Happened”, “Never Stops”, “Microcastle”, “Vox Celeste”, “Dot Gain”, “Slow Swords”

4. Strawberry Jam- Animal Collective

Strawberry Jam was the first Animal Collective record to have been released after band member Panda Bear’s exceptional solo breakthrough, Person Pitch, so for the first time in their career there was an obvious precedent in place for where the tight knight crew of David Portner (Avey Tare), Panda Bear (Noah Lennox), Geologist (Brian Weitz), and Josh Dibb (Deakin) might take their sound, but like all their prior records it sounds nothing like anything that came before it. Having completely moved on from the full-band analog approach, SJ is the sound of a band moving fearlessly outside of their comfort zone and harnessing the immense potential of samplers. On the whole, the compositions are more richly textured, melodic, and better paced than the bulk of their past work. The band continued to incorporate field recordings into their music, but given the prevalence of the samples happening at all times it can be difficult to parse who’s doing anything other than percussion and vocals at any given point in time. Avey’s presence dominates SJ to a large degree, with his idiosyncratic approach to melody defining the bulk of the standouts here. But despite Tare’s voice being the focal point on most of the songs on SJ, Panda Bear still holds his own as a songwriter throughout, and his softer melodic tone helped superbly counterbalance Tare’s outbursts. On SJ you can hear the band bending the fabric of pop music to their will in real time, and it remains both a masterclass in warped pop, and a joy to revisit time and time again.

During the tour in support of their incredible 2005 psych-rock LP, Feels, Lennox was mesmerized by the look of a tray of inflight jam, and decided that the production on their next record should sound the way that the jam looked. On SJ the band capture that superbly as they deliver some of their strongest, and sweetest melodies coupled with Avey’s most abrasive, and expressive singing to date. This tug of war between the band’s heightened melodic instincts driving candy-coated, psychedelic arrangements against Tare’s octave leaping shrieks provides an entrancing juxtaposition that loses none of its potency from the frantic opening song “Peacebone”, to the longing closer “Derek”. Songs like “Chores” and the aforementioned “Derek”, both of which are Panda songs, execute sublime, unpredictable transitions midway through that demonstrate both his knack for sample-based composition and the West-African influence on his songwriting that really congealed in earnest on PP. Meanwhile Tare songs, like “Unsolved Mysteries” and “Cuckoo Cuckoo”, still favored conventional chord changes and verse-chorus-verse structures, but they managed to pack the hallmarks of the band’s sound into much more succinct packages that don’t nullify any of the impact. Neo-psychedelic synth textures, tribal drumming, choirboy vocal harmonies, feral shrieks, and a pervasive use of space still reigned supreme throughout SJ, but the band were crafting legitimate pop songs while still in service of their wonderful idiosyncrasies. Nothing on SJ could be mistaken for the work of any other band, but it’s remarkable to hear just how significantly they tightened up their arrangements while still still remaining an island unto themselves.

As soon as opener “Peacebone” kicks into gear with its stomping percussion and dazzling array of arpeggio synth leads setting the foundation for Avey’s full-throttled yelps, it’s clear that this is his record. At the time of its release, “Peacebone” was the most immediate that AC ever sounded, but Tare’s shrieks kept listeners giddily at arm’s length even as they adopt more approachable structures. The midsection breakdown is still thrilling, and a good barometer of whether or not SJ is really your cup of tea or not. “Unsolved Mysteries” follows suit and doubles down on the pervading sense of whimsy from a compositional standpoint, and Tare’s vocals continue to provide a satisfying juxtaposition. The backbone of the album consists of “For Reverend Green” and “Fireworks”, the strongest back to back songs on any of their albums. On “For Reverend Green” Tare provides one of his most thrilling vocal performances to date, gleefully leaping between octaves mid-verse and switching between cathartic wordless croons and feral shrieks on a dime. It’s a stunning display of virtuosity and passion that couldn’t have come from any other musician. “Fireworks” is one of Tare’s most tender vocal performances to date, and it finds him contemplating the cycle of life as well as his place in the world over stuttering percussion, wordless croons, mesmerizing field recordings, and minor key piano. It’s a touching, albeit heavy listen, but the band play with such joy and warmth that it never suffocates under the weight of its ambition, and it’s one of the greatest songs that Tare has ever written.

Despite SJ being an album dominated by Tare’s presence it was still a major showcase for Panda Bear as a songwriter in his own right. “Chores” nails the sort of transitional finesse perfected on PP as it starts from a frantic intro dominated by bass drums and noisemakers before seamlessly shifting into a brief droning mid-section and then ending on a psychedelic, West-African influenced march. The disparate movements sound nothing alike one another, but they’re stitched together in a way that not only flows incredibly well, but sounds completely natural. “#1” is the closest that the band get to one of their signature drone compositions, and although it’s far sparser, and not nearly as developed as most of their prior ones it works on the strength on Panda’s gorgeous vocals alone. The arpeggio synth melody, sleigh bells, and vocal samples provide a refreshing minimal framework on an album otherwise defined by maximalism, and gives Panda’s voice the kind of room necessitated for it to achieve its maximum impact. The finale, “Derek”, also clearly sprang from a PP compositional influence, with an intro full of chirping synths and tranquil organ chords that slowly give way to an explosive, double kick drum wall of sound beneath one of Panda’s most triumphant vocal melodies to date. It’s a massive sound, but his sentiments couldn’t be any more tender “You can count/When you count/Count on me/What do you/See when you/See inside of me”.

On SJ AC grapple with their adulthood, their lives as touring band, and the daily routines they now find themselves entwined in. Panda’s “Chores” is about him getting his chores out of the way so that he can get high in the rain while his closing contribution, “Derek”, finds him pondering the weight of having a living being depend on him for survival. None of Avey’s songs have the the playful energy of “Chores”, and he spends the album delivering a stream of consciousness on the nature of death (“Cucko Cucko), exploring the delusions that we buy into to feel okay about life (“Winter Wonder Land”), and the futility of living in the past (“Peacebone”). In addition to to being compositional standouts, “For Reverend Green” and “Fireworks” also form the emotional backbone of the album. The former explores the jovial existence of childhood against the crippling realities of adulthood “A running child’s bloody with burning knees/A careless child’s money flew in the trees/A camping child’s happy with winter’s freeze/A lucky child don’t know how lucky she is”. It almost plays like a spiritual successor to Tare’s masterful early song “Alvin Row”, and it perfectly exemplifies their ethos as a band. On “Fireworks” Tare contemplates the passage of time, acknowledging how quickly everything moves, and fantasizes about what bliss might look like to him “It’s family beaches that I desire/Sacred night where we watch the fireworks/They frighten the babies and you know/They’ve got two/Flashing eyes and if they’re color blind/They make me feel/That I’m all I see sometimes”. It’s a universal sentiment delivered with their singular charm, and one of their strongest statements to date.

On SJ AC retained their idiosyncratic whims and experimental proclivities, they just learned how to harness these elements into more immediate forms. As with each of their records released throughout the last decade SJ sounds nothing like what preceded it, but it’s too eclectic to be the work of any other band, and despite the shift in sonics it still operates by the dreamy logic that the band imbued it with. Each release following Danse Manatee has found the band creeping closer to full on pop, and although they embraced it unabashedly on SJ it’s still on their own terms entirely. SJ was the latest in a progression of records since Ark that found AC being ahead of the curve of several indie trends, and many of the sample-heavy indie acts throughout the end of the last decade owe their careers to this record. SJ isn’t AC’s most immediate record, nor is it their most challenging, but it is one of the most inspired developments within their progression, and it jump started their sample-based mature phase. MPP remains their most celebrated work, but the crystallization of their sound that took place on that record wouldn’t have been possible without the groundwork laid by SJ. Although SJ was overshadowed by PP the year that they both came out, SJ still stands as the best showcase of the band’s work with samplers, and it remains a landmark of experimental pop music.

Essentials: “For Reverend Green”, “Fireworks”, “Derek”

3. Kid A- Radiohead

Few artists have managed to make such a drastic leap in sound on any of their records the way that Radiohead did with Kid A. Throughout the 90s they developed organically from a run of the mill Brit pop band into one of the most idiosyncratic and forward thinking bands of all time. With their landmark 1998 record Ok Computer they created a blueprint for a form electronic rock equally informed by classical music and the various strains of experimental electronic music that emerged in the 90s courtesy of the likes of Aphex Twin, Boards of Canada, and Autechre. By the time that they were gearing up to record the follow-up to what was then unanimously recognized as their masterpiece they disavowed the form of rock music entirely. On Kid A the guitars are stripped away in favor of icy keyboards and the austere glare of syntheizers, with the stark precision of drum machines deployed to provide the heartbeat for their desolate soundscapes. The risk paid off immensely, resulting in a work that sounds like nothing that’s come before or since. It’s the sound of a band grappling with existentialism, early information overload, and the sweeping saturation of advanced technology and responding with doomsday prophecies that sound more prescient with each passing year. No other record released this century has better set the tone for everything to come quite the way that Kid A has.

As soon as Kid A’s opening song “Everything In It’s Right Place” begins it’s undeniable that a great deal has changed with Radiohead this time around. Despite the chilly exterior that Ok Computer exudes, there are still moments of melodic warmth such as on its opening cut “Airbag”. “Everything In It’s Right Place” presents an uneasy atmosphere at the offset, and things gradually become more foreboding from there. Thom Yorke’s heavily manipulated wail sounds like it’s glitching as it soars over the horizon of digital keys and kick drums. The mix slowly becomes an overwhelming wall of vocals and keys that form a repetitive bludgeoning motif, incorporating their heightened love of krautrock. Along with the classical music and IDM touchstones that informed Ok Computer, krautrock, jazz, and ambient were large influences they drew from as well. The title track follows “Everything In It’s Right Place”, and it’s an ambient lullaby that finds the band prioritizing atmosphere and texture over any semblance of conventional composition. On the following song, “The National Anthem” the band spiral into a propulsive epic that fuses jazz and krautrock into something else entirely. The first three songs sound nothing like one another, and in addition to the late album IDM stomp of “Idioteque”, they set the parameters for the record as a whole.

Despite the variety on display throughout Kid A it still achieves a remarkable cohesiveness through tone and atmosphere. Every song is masterfully paced, and exquisitely produced, and most blow open their sonic parameters further then they’ve ever dared before or since. “Optimistic” is one of the few songs here that hints at the sort of driving guitar compositions they prioritized early on, but when coupled with the forlorn melody and the eerie synth loops it almost sounds like an unsettling throwback that achieves a sense of perpetual weightlessness. “Treefingers” dives headfirst into ambient, and is one of the most gorgeous instrumental compositions that Radiohead have ever written. It also provides a superb bridge from the existential acoustic reverie “How to Disappear Completely” into the moody lurch of “Optimistic”. “Idioteque” is the pounding heart of Kid A’s detached overlook, but despite being the closest the album comes to a single it’s still claustrophobic and uninhabitable. After several songs that aim to instill dread and discomfort at every turn, the album’s last proper song “Motion Picture Soundtrack” ends things with a gorgeous harp arpeggio set against an organ wail as Yorke sings softly about a suicide fantasy. All these years later and Kid A continues to hold together as an astonishing collection of experiments from a band at the height of their powers.

Emerging at the dawn of the current century, Kid A didn’t commit to any pretenses of subtlety whatsoever, particularly with respect to its thematic concerns. On “Everything In It’s Right Place” Yorke lays out his perception of the state of a world laced with depression, anxiety, fear, and disconnection “There are two colours in my head/What was that you tried to say” informed by a breakdown that he experienced while touring Ok Computer. “How to Disappear Completely” takes the form of an out-of-body experience with a narrator thoroughly disillusioned with his life and ready to precede to the next plane of existence “In a little while/I’ll be gone/The moment’s already passed/Yeah, it’s gone”. “In Limbo” traffics in pure abstraction as the narrator wanders aimlessly throughout life unable to escape from his fantasies “I’m lost at sea/Don’t bother me/I’ve lost my way” while “Morning Bell” depicts a lingering spirit that supposedly resided in a house that Yorke used to own “The lights are on but nobody’s home/Nobody wants to be a slave”. The aforementioned “Motion Picture Soundtrack” provides a superb ending to the album rendered in bleak, cutting detail “Red wine and sleeping pills/Help me get back to your arms/Cheap sex and sad films/Help me get where I belong”, and it culmines with the narrator easing into suicide. The songs portray a grim culture of isolation and pacification that we’re much closer to living than we were when the album came out.

A year after Kid A Radiohead returned with their fifth LP, Amnesiac, but it mostly plays like a well-sequenced collection of thoughtfully repurposed leftovers from the Kid A sessions. Several great records followed suit, the latest being their sublime 2016 LP A Moon Shaped Pool, while various members of the band have spun off to focus on solo careers and film scores. Radiohead have never released anything less than a good record, but nothing since Kid A has come close to capturing the consistent brilliance of that record. The paranoia, uncertainty, and disillusionment that was pervasive at the turn of the century is rendered remarkably through their stark arrangements, liberal use of space, and distant temperament. The shift in Radiohead’s trajectory following Kid A was so pronounced that a band releasing their Kid A has become shorthand for the sort of dramatic, swinging for the fences left turn that's all too rare in music these days. While it’s almost certain that Radiohead will never release anything of this magnitude again, Kid A has held up incredibly well, and it continues to loom large as a relic of an already bygone era defined by a sense of wonder slowly being crippled beneath the weight of an encroaching dystopia.

Essentials: “Everything In It’s Right Place”, “The National Anthem”, “Optimistic”

2. Feels- Animal Collective

While Sung Tongs was the true breakout record for Animal Collective, Feels was where the band locked in as a full group to showcase that the remarkable melodic warmth peeking out through their intrinsic weirdness was far from a fluke. Avey Tare, Panda Bear, Geologist, and Deakin had all come together once before for Ark two years prior, but the pop craftsmanship, confidence, consistency, and sheer range displayed on Feels are worlds apart from the unsettling, freak-folk noise collages that define Ark. Psychedelia and drone music are still large facets of their sound, but they hadn’t previously been utilized to reinforce such strong song craft. Having moved beyond their freak-folk and noise roots, Feels was a departure towards presenting themselves as more of a conventional rock band, and it’s still the closest they’ve ever come to releasing any semblance of a traditional “rock” LP, but true to form Feels defies any easy classification. Guitars, drums, piano, and vocals dominate the proceedings to be sure, but so do dense field recordings, and otherworldly drones, particularly on the record’s spellbinding second half. While perhaps not their most adventurous, nor their most unpredictable record, Feels is certainly their most consistent, offering a glimpse of a band still changing dramatically from record to record while offering far more than any of their peers.

Since Feels was only the second album of theirs to feature all four members by that point it’s a far more fleshed out sounding record than the bulk of those that preceded it. Both Avey and Deakin play guitar throughout, and Avey typically played lead while Deakin provided a warm melodic underpinning. Feels was the last record to feature Panda Bear behind the kit until Centipede Hz, and his drumming is some of the best that he’s ever recorded, alternating from frantic tribal percussion on “The Purple Bottle” to serene minimalist rolls on “Loch Raven” and everything in-between. Geologist’s superb use of texture hit a new peak here, particularly throughout the dreamier compositions that made up side B. Tare’s singing is anything but conventional, swinging wildly between octaves mid-measure, and flipping from tender croons to blood-curdling shrieks on a dime. Panda’s vocals continued to play a larger role in their music, and throughout Feels his voice acts most frequently as additional texture that lends their music an ethereal glow. In addition to larger contributions from all of the members besides Tare no other record of theirs features as much from outside collaborators. The piano playing courtesy of Doctress (who was married to Tare at the time) and the violin playing courtesy of Eyvind Kang add quite a bit of unexpected dimension that evens out the record’s more warped leanings. Despite everything that’s going on the instruments all have quite a bit of breathing room thanks to the record’s superb mixing and pacing. No single element ever dominates, and the amount of variation on display is a marvel.

Feels tells you everything that you need to know about its sentiments in the title alone. From the opening track “Did You See the Words” all the way through to the closer “Turn Into Something”, the band chronicle the euphoria of falling in love on the first side, and detail the poignancy of enduring heartbreak on the second side. With the exception of the superb, droning breather “Flesh Canoe”, that bridges the adrenaline burst of “Grass” to the grand, propulsive shuffle of “The Purple Bottle” the first side translates the euphoria of falling in love with infectious giddiness. It’s here where Avey’s delivery is at his most delirious and unpredictable, and he provides two of his greatest vocal performances with “Did You See the Words” and “The Purple Bottle”. “Did You See the Words” establishes the scope of the record as Tare recites the sparks that led to the relationship with keen details “Have you seen them?/The words cut open/Your poor intestines can’t deny/When the inky periods drip from your mailbox and/Blood flies dip and glide reach down inside/There’s something living in these lines” as his voice enthusiastically zig-zags around Panda’s minimalist tribal percussion. “The Purple Bottle” articulates the pure bliss of a relationship in its honeymoon phase, and features what’s quite possibly the most expressive vocal performance of Tare’s to date as he fantasizes about a future with his girlfriend “Well I’d like to spread your perfume around the old apartment/Could we live together and agree on the same wares/A trapeze is a bird cage and even if its empty it definitely fits the room/And we would too”. Naturally, things take a turn for the worse.

Side B is what really elevates Feels to a classic, and it’s the strongest stretch of songs that AC have ever recorded. Even though “Bees” is technically the conclusion of side A, tonally, and especially sonically, it fits far better with the rest of side B. Over chiming autoharp drones and sprinkles of piano, Avey depicts the calm before the storm “They came wide/So wild, the bees/They came crying/They said, “I’d take my time/You take your time/Please take your time”” as Panda’s angelic croon glides across the mix like a mirage. It’s a breathtaking moment of mesmerizing tranquility that emerges just before the clouds begin to take shape. We then transition into “Banshee Beat”, the centerpiece of Feels, and arguably one of the best songs that the band ever recorded. On “Banshee Beat” Avey depicts how his relationship fell apart after he learned that his girlfriend cheated on him, and every second of the sublime, nearly 8-and-a-half-minute song is necessary. “Banshee Beat” opens to wispy trails of droning guitar and brief spurts of piano as Avey solemnly sets the tone “Oh there’ll be time, to get by, to get dry, after the swimming pool/Oh there’ll be time, to just cry, I wonder why, it didn’t work out”. The song then slowly builds up steam as melodic guitar chords cut through the drone set against Panda’s nimble, chugging rhythm. Avey looks back on the memories that he and his ex had together, and despite his sorrow, he comes to the conclusion that he’s far better off without her in his life, and the song reaches a cathartic coda that features wordless harmonies between him and Panda as the song spirals into silence.

After “Banshee Beat” we’re led into “Daffy Duck”, the record’s most surreal, structure-less drone song. The guitar textures that Deakin provides here are some of the most immersive in their discography, and Avey’s at his most abstract “And if I had volcano boots/For swimming in volcanoes/Do you know the origins of laughing ducks?/Oh what’s a matter with those words”. It plays like a dream sequence that emerges right at the tail-end of the glowing resolution from “Banshee Beat” right into “Loch Raven”, one of the record’s other high-points. “Loch Raven” is perhaps the closest that AC have come to writing a straight-up lullaby, and it’s equally haunting and life-affirming thanks to the understated melodic sweep and soft, high-pitched textures that wafts through every corner of the mix. Panda’s honeyed tenor is unbearably tender as he repeatedly sings “I will not give up on you” juxtaposed against Avey referencing lines from Little Red Riding Hood that contextualize his cheating partner as the wolf plotting her deception. It’s truly something that couldn’t have been written by any other band, and it’s the last completely ambient song on the second side before the explosive finale, “Turn Into Something”. “Turn Into Something” is a classic sounding AC song, defined by explosive yelps from Avey alongside droning guitar, sprightly piano, and a bouncy floor-tom beat courtesy of Panda. At the 4-minute mark everything breaks apart and the song transitions into a ambient conclusion with Tare and Bear’s vocals floating through the ether as the droning guitars chime around them. It’s just as effective as a conclusion to Feels as it is an entry point into their work as a whole.

Merriweather Post Pavilion is easily the most successful record that AC have ever released, and most critics will tell you that it’s their best work, but it doesn’t come close to Feels across most conceivable metrics. Feels is the sound of the band firing on all cylinders, having developed exponentially as musicians and songwriters within the span of just five years. It didn’t push their sound forward quite as much as Strawberry Jam, nor did it signal quite as dramatic a leap in song craft as ST, but no other record of theirs succeeds in tackling so much ground with such remarkable consistency across the board. Feels was the last record that AC released before Panda Bear’s landmark solo LP Person Pitch irreversibly changed the entire trajectory of indie music, and influenced them to begin using samplers as the focal point of their compositions over guitars. Like all of their great records from Ark onwards, there are traces of everything that they had done prior on Feels, but listening to this record still leaves the impression that they could truly go anywhere. With almost any other band that’s ever existed, that claim is mostly disingenuous, but up until Centipede Hz the possibilities for AC truly seemed limitless, and that unprecedented unpredictability remains a key component of their appeal to this day. No 2 of their 10 records sound alike, and while they’ll almost certainly never again release anything that comes close to touching the pure bliss of Feels, the magic of this record is still an absolute marvel to revisit every time.

Essentials: “Banshee Beat”, “Loch Raven”, “The Purple Bottle”

1. Person Pitch- Panda Bear

By the time that Panda Bear (aka Noah Lennox) released Person Pitch he had moved from Brooklyn, New York to Lisbon, Portugal, gotten married, and his band Animal Collective were rapidly growing into one of the defining bands of the 21st century, but even knowing all the ground that they covered in such a short span could hardly have prepared anyone for anything as singular as PP. The last solo record that Panda released prior to PP was his gorgeous, yet devastatingly poignant 2004 folk record Young Prayer, a tribute to his late father who passed that same year from brain cancer. On PP the analog instrumentation that defined YP and Panda’s past work with AC was opted out entirely in favor of compositional approach informed by plunderphonics that was spurred by his increasing fondness of producers like Madlib, and his formative musical influences like GAS, The Orb, and Daft Punk. The end result is a remarkably rendered patchwork of disparate sounds that span the scope of recorded music history tied together with Panda’s signature tenor, and his sharp ear for sequencing. While PP isn’t technically a plunderphonics record due to the incorporation of Panda’s vocals recorded fresh for these compositions, it’s still more wide-ranging, and superbly realized than any plunderphonics record released before or since. PP went on to completely shift the trajectory of indie music in the years since its release, and very few artists have managed to release an album that matches the scope of this dazzling breakthrough since.

PP is superbly sequenced into seven songs, two of which broach the 12-minute mark, with well-placed comedowns emerging right after the epics. The songs consist of loops cherry-picked from old records that Panda was exposed to during his time working at the Other Music record store in Brooklyn throughout the early aughts. The music shifts and contorts on a whim, segueing through different motifs with acute finesse while drawing through lines between various eras of music that may have been previously unthinkable, but nonetheless seem to sound like natural evolutions in Panda’s hands. Nothing sounds out of placed or forced because of the careful sequencing, and the precise tweaking of the samples that are being deployed. The opening song “Comfy in Nautica” perfectly sets the tone as a choir of vocals descend upon what sounds like an ascending roller coaster, and samples of racing cars. The construction is simple, but striking, and the tone he achieves is one of pure humility established with his homespun mantras of self-preservation “Coolness is having courage/Courage to do what’s right/Try to remember always/ Just to have a good time”. Whether it’s the dreamlike glide of “I’m Not”, or the cozy, glowing conclusion “Ponytail” the samples that Panda utilizes perfectly achieve the aesthetics of what the songs themselves are striving for. Everything is meticulously placed, and a single shift would disrupt the lean symmetry of the whole.

Nothing on PP underwhelms, but the high points are among the most remarkable achievements throughout the history of sample-based composition. “Take Pills” starts with what sounds like a lumbering stroll along a cobblestone road with percussion cribbed from Scott Walker’s “Always Coming Back to You” as Panda’s sighs guide the caravan forward unassumingly, but after several minutes the song transitions smoothly into jaunty surf rock propelled by a sample courtesy of “The Popeye Twist” by The Tornadoes. The shift is immense, but nothing about it scans as gimmicky or unnatural, and the ease with which the song transitions belies the ingenuity on display. “Bros”, almost certainly the most celebrated song of Panda Bear’s solo career, is a masterful 12 and a half minute tour de force that cycles through various eras of pop music’s history with the sharp precision of DJ set. Beginning with another sample from The Tornadoes (this time in the form of “Red Roses and a Sky of Blue”), “Bros” establishes a merry-go-round framework that never manages to sound stale within the course of its 12 and a half minutes. The acoustic guitar thrust sampled off of Cat Steven’s “I’ve Found a Love” alongside Panda’s harmonies that forever recall those of Brian Wilson propel the second act of “Bros” up until its life-affirming third act that gets a great deal of mileage out of a sampled vocal loop from The Equal’s “Rub a dub dub”. PP’s other epic, “Good Girl / Carrots”, spends its first 3 minutes spiraling through a dub freakout that eventually folds neatly into a rousing, spring-loaded midsection featuring some of the finest melodies that Panda has ever sung. As the song transitions into its carnival-esque, music box final act with a sample from Kraftwerk’s “Ananas Symphonie” Panda caps things off with a rejection of the sort of music nerd hive fandom that helped propel him to such heights in the first place as noisemakers soar along the periphery of the mix. The peaks of “Bros” and “Good Girl / Carrots” are astonishing, and those two songs alone cemented Panda Bear’s status at the vanguard of sample-based composition.

The lyrics throughout PP are heartfelt admissions from someone whose life had undergone massive shifts within the few years leading up to it. The release of AC’s landmark LP Sung Tongs in 2004 allowed him and the rest of AC to begin sustaining a career in music, and that very same year his father died, he decided to move from New York to Portugal after falling in love with a woman while on vacation from tour, and he soon after married her. The warmth seeping out of the music on PP reflects the atmosphere that Panda suddenly found himself immersed in much in the same way that AC’s superb 2003 record Ark was informed by the chaos of their lives in Brooklyn. “Take Pills” grapples with the history of Panda’s family’s reliance on anti-depressants “Take one day at a time/Everything else you can leave behind/Only one thing at a time/Anything more really hurts your mind”. “Bros” is a plea to his brother Matt for space to live his own life in the wake of their father’s passing “I’m not trying to forget you/I just like to be alone/Come and give me the space I need/And you may you may you may you may/You may find that we’re alright” while on “Good Girl / Carrots” Panda’s taking taste makers to task for trying to instill a false sense of superiority over those who aren’t as informed on underground music “Get your head out from those mags and websites who try to shape your style/Take a risk yourself and wade into the deep end of the ocean”. On the album’s closer, “Ponytail”, Panda offers up little more than “When my soul starts knowing/I am as I’d want to be/And I know I never will stop caring”, but it’s a perfectly fitting conclusion to the record, and as sincere a sentiment as anything I’ve heard on any album. The overwhelming sincerity of the music is tempered by a beyond-his-years wisdom that’s well-earned and deeply empathetic.

Panda Bear released three solo LPs following PP, and the approach on this record has gone on to inform all of the AC records that have followed in its wake. The influence of this record simply cannot be overstated. As easy as it is to roll your eyes at chillwave and the “vibe” generation, everyone from Tame Impala to Travis Scott owes an enormous debt to Panda Bear. As the bulk of their peers began to stick to their respective lanes Panda and the rest of AC continued to swing wildly between trends and genres throughout the last decade, leaving their stamp on various forms before pivoting wildly to where their muses led them next. Thankfully, Panda has continued to push his sound forward throughout his solo career as well, and even when returning to sample-based composition for his stellar 2015 fifth solo record, Panda Bear Meets the Grim Reaper, it marked a clear shift towards the influence of hip-hop and house, and away from the minimal techno meets psychedelic guitar pop that PP favored in abundance. No musical artist throughout the 21st century has covered as much ground as consistently or as impressively as Panda Bear, and PP still stands as one of the few truly idiosyncratic statements from any artist throughout the last decade. It’s aged tremendously well in the years since its release, and it still presents a disarmingly well-realized euphoria that couldn’t sound more radical in the moody, deconstructed landscape of music that has defined this current decade.

Essentials: “Bros”, “Good Girl / Carrots”, “Take Pills”

#panda bear #Animal Collective #Radiohead #deerhunter #madvillain #wilco #the avalanches #the microphones

[theonceoverthinker]

"Can You Deny Us the Triumph in Store?" (Rumbelle) (1/?)

Summary: The lifeblood of Belle’s very existence is the opera. Since her mother introduced it to her at five years old, she’s loved it with all her heart. Now, as a grown woman with dreams of writing the Paris Opera House’s next great success and a magnum opus nearing its completion, she’ll need to contend with obstacles almost more dramatic than the work of fiction she pens. Things take a turn when two men take an interest in her work, and suddenly, Belle finds herself on a journey of trust, forgiveness, and perhaps even love. 

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A/N: Hi! This is my first ever Rumbelle fic -- happy to be here with all you lovely folks!

I started this idea from the jumping off point of “Could a Rumbelle ‘Phantom of the Opera’ AU work in a scenario where Rumple was Raoul?” As a longtime Phantom of the Opera fan (All versions), I feel like over the years, I’ve grown to not only like, but really respect and admire the Christine/Raoul pairing and that’s something I wanted to play around with here. And what I came up with ended up feeling pretty true to Rumple and Belle’s characters as well as a fun mix of OUAT, Beauty and the Beast, and of course, The Phantom of the Opera, all alongside a different, more shorthand-based writing style that I’m really excited to try out here. I hope you feel the same way about it too!

Tagging @mrs-stiltskin! If you want to be tagged in future installments as well, please let me know!

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CHAPTER ONE: MELODIE DE PARIS

The year 1890 exists within an age of discoveries, an epoch that sheds light on all manners of beauty. From walks of human life across the world’s surface, possibilities of exactly what people can create with their hands, minds, and hearts are explored in a way they’ve never been before. And of all the lands that this age touches, few places capture the modern ideals of this time better than the city of lights. Paris is experiencing a renaissance of art, music, vibrancy, and knowledge, and the epitome of the city’s progress and lust for life and love is the Paris Opera House. What lays inside the doors of this majestic theatre is a bustling community in itself with all manner of singers, dancers, designers of every kind, stagehands, business people, and others who rush across halls, stages, and balconies as they go about living their lives. 

It is in this palace of music -- where the creative people of Paris come to make magic a reality -- a woman, underestimated in all that she does, but exceptional in what she brings life into spends her days.

Her name is Belle Ébréché.

Belle Ébréché, a woman of twenty-three years, is a dancer at the Paris Opera House. For hours upon hours every day, whether at the behest of an audience or not, she and ten other girls work their feet to the bone as they further strive to perfect their craft. However, her dream is not fulfilled -- not completely in any event. While talented on her feet, definitely enough to earn her keep in the ballet, her ambitions don’t lie with her toes to the floor of a stage. Instead, they reside with a quill that’s as much a part of her body as her lungs to a sheet of parchment...for you see, Belle wishes to write an opera.

Belle’s love of the opera began relatively early, though not through her eventual chosen avenue of expression itself at first. No, the seeds of her love of stories and storytelling were originally planted by her mother, Colette. Night after night starting from her first evening wails, Belle was sent off to the realm of dreams with passages from books that soothed and lulled her to sleep just as well as the very cradle that held her form. And as she grew, Belle’s love of books created an equal love for the imaginations of men and women and their many artistic achievements. Finally, when she was five, as if the heavens themselves arranged it to forever cement that love, Belle was introduced to something that would forever change her life -- The Opera.

While Belle had always loved stories, operas were stories taken to a new level. They were windows to lives she could never dream of that not only painted vivid visions in her mind of stories, characters, and lines, but allowed those visions to exist in a way even her imagination couldn’t accomplish. As Belle took in all the opera had to offer, she was entranced by the sets that took her to foreign lands, the sweeping tales of romance, history, and adventure, and the music that made her heart swell and unlock emotions never before known to her. By the time her first opera, “Béatrice et Bénédict” was through, Belle knew she wanted nothing more in life than to be a part of the experience that opened her world to new possibilities.

However, such happiness, as happiness tends to be, was too good to last. After two years of bi-annual trips to the opera, following the death of the very source of that happiness, they stopped. Collette’s passing left Belle crushed and while grief overtook most of her headspace, her determination to become part of the opera was still as present as ever. Now, it was her deepest wish -- no, more than that. Now, it was her destiny, one Belle knew her mother would want for her.

But Belle found herself quite alone in that mindset. 

As her convictions and desires for a life in the opera grew ever stronger, her father, Maurice’s patience for her passions only weakened. In truth, complications between Maurice and Belle weren’t uncommon even when Colette was still alive, but with a mother and a wife taken from them, a crucial part of their bond went with her.

And part of that waning bond was a disregard for Belle’s passion for the arts, which he deemed as ‘flights of fantasy.’ Maurice was never won over by operas to begin with, but grief turned his indifference into a means to mock his daughter. For years, that misery is how they went about their days, and while Maurice had fully succumbed to feelings of bitterness, Belle fought them off in the name of achieving her life’s purpose.

But even the strongest of resolves could grow weary under the constant duress of those without faith in them. Eventually, after years of enduring such constant belittling, Belle understood that her only hope for peace and a true chance at following her dream was to leave home. So, with only some scant essentials and a few mementos of her mother, Belle took off for where she knew her calling would be: The Paris Opera House. 

The night Belle arrived at the Opera House was cold and damp, the product of a miserable storm. With wet clothes and shoes that plopped against the charcoal-colored rain, she stepped towards the building. It was only than a feeling of unease set in Belle’s heart. Apart from a love of opera, she had no experience in performance -- just a few pages of ideas for operas. 

What would The Paris Opera House of all places want with her?

Had she made a mistake running from home?

Struck by fear, Belle drifted towards a curb by the eastern side of the building, huddling her shoulders close to her for the first time since the rain fell, but for reasons she knew had nothing to do with the trickling water. She sat down on the curb and looked ahead at the dream that was now so close to her, but quite possibly impossible to ask for.

As Belle started shaking in fear, a door opened, glowing Belle and the curb she sat on with a hue of oak. And from out of that door stepped a girl, no older than Belle, holding a bag of what looked to be garbage as she looked towards a disposal bin not far from where Belle sat. The girl wore a rose-colored dress and upon seeing Belle, concern overtook her features. 

She came over to Belle, and offered her hand, introducing herself as Ruby. With a gentleness Belle hadn’t truly felt since she last saw her mother, Ruby asked what she was doing in the rain. Upon hearing Belle’s story, Ruby took Belle’s shoulder into her hand and invited her inside The Opera House, saying that she would take care of her.

And take care of her is exactly what Ruby did. 

Ruby was a young dancer-in-training, and her grandmother Madame Lucas, a dance instructor. And she just happened to know of an opening that needed filling for another new dancer.

It was late at night when Belle met Madame Lucas. While originally grouchy at the prospect of a spontaneous visitor, Madame Lucas quickly came around upon seeing Belle’s fragile and wet form, welcoming her into the room where the ballet dancers slept. The following morning, after Belle had the chance to explain what brought her to the Paris Opera House, Madame Lucas invited her to train alongside Ruby and the other dancers. There, she would live, train, and work under her care. Madame Lucas warned Belle that it would be hard work, but it seemed that even her attempts to appear tough on Belle seemed to only be a facade, she seemed to immediately know that Belle would be up to the challenge. 

And Belle, to this day, makes her living at The Paris Opera House, practicing and performing alongside Ruby and some of Paris’ finest dancers, a population that now includes them. Belle and the others work Madame Lucas’ regimen as if it were second nature. And through years upon years spent perfecting her craft and furthering her studies, she’s grown far more experienced in the ways of The Opera House. She now knows what it’s like to work from dawn to dusk and retire for the evening with barely the ability to speak. She now knows what it’s like to repeat the same moves dozens upon dozens of times and still see Madame Lucas unsatisfied. She now knows what it’s like to wait in anticipation of the latest reviews of the newest operas, understanding that her very way of life could be on the line should things go sour.

But Belle still loves all things having to do with the opera. In fact, she loves it even more than she did when she first heard those opening orchestral notes all those years ago. 

Now though, her dream is more focused. She’s not about to give up her work in the ballet so soon, but Belle knows her destiny is to not dance in operas, but to pen them. 

She’s the only one who thinks so either. Ruby and Madame Lucas know she’s talented, too. Whether intentional or not, Belle’s made it rather easy for them to follow her work. They hear her comment on the stories and compositions of the operas they perform with the intelligence of Paris’ most talented writers. It’s impossible for either of them to not notice Belle stay up well past curfew most every night scribbling and tossing away pages of filled sheets of music and scripts, and ones that are already pretty good at that. The way Belle hums invisible notes only to excuse herself from dinner and rush to write them down in one of her notebooks is predictable to the point of mundanity. 

And she’s only getting better.

Lately, fewer and fewer pieces of paper are being thrown away. Complete lyrics and melodies are being muttered, hummed, and sung under Belle’s breath. Story threads are finally starting to come together and make sense. One night, Madame Lucas sneaks a peek at the notebook Belle’s been frequenting the most lately as an excited Ruby -- who may or may not have told her where it was -- waits just outside for details. 

Yes, Belle’s shaping up to be quite the talented composer -- a stand out creator of her era.

However, nothing’s that simple.

No matter the year nor all the undiscovered wonders of this world that entice those who yearn for them, the brilliant ideas of women are fought every step of the way for their day in the sun, if they’re even listened to at all. Belle’s works, unfortunately, are no exception. She’s regularly brushed off by the managers every time she requests that they so much as look at or listen to one of her songs.

But fuel is only added to the fires of Belle’s difficulties as she’s forced to not only compete for the management’s attention with the operatic composers of the past who haunt her like ghosts with their established renown, but with a modern composer who haunts her present. For all she knows -- nor cares -- he knows not of her existence, but she’s more than familiar of his. His operas have been performed four times in as many years. He oversees each and every one of them, combing over details and punishing anyone he finds to be subpar and vulnerable, like a hawk waiting to snatch up his prey. Those who toil to meet his almost impossible demands consider him a manager in his own right, one to be avoided and feared beyond either of the two actual yielders of the title. But for as utterly charmless as he is to all beneath him, nothing is done to hinder his merciless mission for perfection at any cost. This is because in addition to being the Opera House’s rising star, he’s also its most generous patron.

So despite Belle’s talents with a quill, through no fault of her own, this game of patriarchal superiority and wealth leaves her outmatched to the point of making her naught but an obscurity in the grander scope of the Opera House.

After all, just how can she compete with the likes of Bertrand, the Vicomte de Friper?

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Bertrand de Friper isn’t a people person. 

His personality is often deemed as “testy” at best, his appearance is rather unconventional, and his ancestry leaves a lot to be desired.

It’s a multi-layered problem.

That’s not to say that there exist no advantages to being him. After all, what does a Vicomte have if not money, and all the power, influence, and sometimes freedom that money can grant?

An Opera House isn’t an easy place to spend one’s days when they’re not a people person. However, when one’s chosen to dedicate their life to creating operas, where else could they go?

Composing operas does something for Bertrand that nothing else finds itself able to do -- it gives him something that’s all his own. It gives him something clean of his family’s influence — apart from the money used to finance it — and a chance at a legacy that might not be as tarnished as it would be without it. 

Opera speaks to Bertrand -- its blending of performances, sets, design, and musical numbers allows room for complexity. His works aim for that same complexity, as it’s a complexity he sees in himself, and because of that, he acts as if it’s a mirror of the very person he wishes he could be. And that inspires his every flick of the quill.

He’s more hands on than most other composers. Bertrand knows that to be true. In his own defense though, most other composers are no longer around to see their work come to life. 

So why should he waste his time as nothing more than a silent creator when he can do so much more to make them as majestic as he knows they could be? He’s written and paid for these operas and damnit, he’s going to make sure his vision sees the light of day in the exact way he wants it to! And if that means he’s gonna sit in on every rehearsal and talk the managers’ ears off and nitpick the lighting whenever he finds the slightest flaw, then he’ll do it with all the gusto of a late December’s snowstorm. And he’ll fire anyone who refuses to meet his demands without the backbone to tell him why they can’t be so.

But understandably, it also does no good for Bertrand because that work is the closest thing he’s got to any manner of a real social life, and that cruelty does little to better himself as something even resembling a people person. And his family is of little help in breeding any genetic social charisma, whether through genetics or renown. His parents are rather cutthroat and it’s given them a bit of a reputation that’s followed Bertrand socially. 

Things have never been easy with his family. They’re rich and have a status of nobility, but that status has come from means that were...less than admirable. There are rumors -- some true, some not -- of deals made under the table with much of the city’s criminal underbelly, raises in savings at their bank that line up just too closely with news of a robbery at a bank not two miles down the road, and price gouging at legal firms that the patriarch of the Friper family just happens to own. But money is money. Their titles were granted more out of obligation because of their wealth than any interest in making them part of high society, and it shows to this day. They’re often shunned, but never directly -- kind of in that indirect way that the upper class tend to do. They’ll always be invited to a party, but tables had a way of never having enough space for one of them and invites for other gathering to elude their grasps.

However, Bertrand’s parents liked to show that right back in the most passive aggressive and manipulative ways.

...And maybe he did too.

Okay, he definitely did.

And that’s why, for all his success in business and art, Bertrand de Friper is not a people person.

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The Paris Opera House is often bustling, but never has it been as bustling than the week following the managers’ abruptly announced retirement. 

What kind of long-standing managers only give a week’s notice before retiring?

Well, they’ve never been the greatest communicators -- that’s what Belle’s grasped at least over her tenure here -- and so now, thanks to their rash decision, the entire Opera House drops everything and scrambles to arrange some sort of send off for them. Madame Lucas has them up early every day practicing to put on a dance from one of their favorite operas. The breaks aren’t plentiful and by the end of the day, Belle has to find the strength to eat dinner before she falls asleep. Outside of their space, Belle can hear stringing and tuning of instruments most everywhere she goes and stagehands arguing with each other and gossiping about who's taking over. It’s all quite hectic. 

Everyone’s relieved when the change is finally made and the new managers take up their posts. Those not forced by their positions to socialize with the new management take off for desperately needed breaks and those unfortunate enough to need look like they’re in need of a nap as they push themselves towards their new bosses.

The new managers seem okay. Belle’s not overly optimistic that this management team will be any more receptive to her ideas than the old ones were, but she’ll take a gamble on that in due time. For now, though, it seems like everyone and their mother who holds a higher position than a dancer, a chorus girl, or a stagehand wants to talk to them, so Belle’s content waiting. 

As a matter of fact, Belle’s more than content waiting. In all the business of the past week, she’s had to neglect her opera. But now, there’s time to work on it, and Belle’s not about to waste even a second of her newly recovered free time.

Melodies swim through her mind like guppies in a school. Things have been coming together on one of her final uncompleted pieces so nicely. She almost can’t stand how proud she is of her own work.  

In her excitement, Belle allows a few bars to escape her lips and movements leave her feet as she casually makes her way back to her room.

But all the while as she lightly sings and moves through her trip, Belle, for the briefest of moments, finds herself unaware of the fact that she’s not the only member of her impromptu performance’s audience.

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Bertrand’s not sure what to make of the new managers. They don’t seem too different than the old ones, but appearances are nothing but deceiving -- though if he’s to believe the opinions of most everyone he’s ever known, he’d likely believe that to be a lie.

He tries not to believe it himself.

Not one to give himself an air of brown nosing, Bertrand watches the new managers’ introductions from afar. While in truth, he’d wanted to wait a few days to further acquaint himself with his latest opera’s opening night on the horizon and nagging at him with the force of the sunlight on a hot summer’s day, Betrand knows he doesn’t have the luxury of delaying his introductions. So as soon as the company at large is dismissed for the day, Bertrand moves past stagehands, chorus girls, and ballet dancers alike as he sets out towards his new coworkers. At the very least, he wishes to find a later time when they can talk further, but he imagines that his status as The Opera House’s biggest patron will immediately garner himself the lion’s share of their attention. 

It’s by no means a fun way to spend an afternoon, but Bertrand focuses on how after today, he’ll be able to work to further perfect his opera once more.

And that is what’s going to get him through the day.

As Bertrand passes through the groups of gossiping men and women, something catches his ear -- something that makes him stop dead in his tracks. It’s a lone voice, within yet at the same time somehow distant from the crowd of dancers. Bertrand’s hearing is strong. It has to be for him to do his job as well as he does, but right now, the talent is being used to hone in on strings of notes and lyrics.

The melody he hears from that voice...Bertrand’s utterly captivated by it.

It’s exciting. 

It’s memorable.

But most of all, it’s different from everything he’s ever heard before.

Bertrand knows how rare compliments like that are. While he’s personally been no stranger to them, he’s well aware that so few composers in this age of discoveries have but only longed for words even close to them to be directed their way. 

And Bertrand himself -- by his own admission -- is a man of few compliments to spare on a good day. 

So for him to describe naught but a scant number of bars and lines in such a way, they are bars and lines that are truly something to behold.

He needs to know where the voice that produces such notes is yesterday.

Bertrand follows his ears like a leaf follows an autumn breeze’s path until he’s able to latch onto one woman. Her back is turned, but the fact that it’s her voice making such music is unmistakable by the way her feet move in time with her bursts of singing.

There’s no hesitation in Bertrand -- not an oddity, but also not a regularity by any means -- as he taps on the woman’s shoulder. She practically jumps in her spot, surprised, before turning around to face him.

If Bertrand is to describe his initial impression of the woman who stands before him during those first few seconds before they’ve exchanged a single word, it would be ‘soft.’ She seems surprised, but a residual happiness from her music is as clear as day on her face, creating a soft sense of contentment all around her. Soft dark brown curls cascade just below her soft shoulders deprived of nearly all manner of tension. A dress of a soft pink shade -- one that matches those worn by the other women of the ballet -- covers her form, giving her something of a heavenly air about her. Even as her sky-shaded eyes turn curious and almost dark whilst she takes him in, there’s still an unexplained softness to them.

And just like that, before he’s even talked to this woman, Bertrand de Friper’s absolutely smitten with her.

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If there’s anything that can absolutely ruin Belle’s day, it’s a reminder that Bertrand de Friper exists.

That said, seeing him appear before her, smiling of all things...is strange. 

Belle’s been lucky to have never had direct contact with him thus far in her opera career. Most of his critiques towards the ballet have been made through Madame Lucas. Belle, Ruby, and the rest of the ballet have seen many a heated debate between them over choreography, schedules, and positions. Yes, Madame Lucas may answer to him on some level, but he does not by any means control her and she’s not at all afraid to stand up for herself. Belle admires that.

Bertrand de Friper, however, is someone that she does not admire.

“Can I help you, Monsieur le Vicomte?” she asks, her tone perfectly even as to not show fear, but also to keep any sass on her end at bay. 

Scenarios play in her mind over what brings his attention to her of all people. Was her dancing off during the old manager’s send off performance? Is there an issue with her costume?

There’s an interesting glint in Bertrand’s eyes. He looks almost bewildered by her.

Belle can only hazard a guess at what that could possibly mean.

But if she’s honest, she’s beyond curious to find out.

“That music -- what you were singing and humming to -- what was that from?”

Out of all the questions Belle expects him to ask, that’s just about the last one on this Earth that she can think of.

She’s speechless. There have been times, she’ll admit, where she’s fantasized about what it would be like to be approached about her opera. Usually, they involve the managers, sometimes, it’s a singer, and rarely, it’s a director of another Opera House who then takes her to a far off exotic land where she can spend the rest of the days writing masterpieces with all the creative control she could ever ask for.

Never though have a single one of those fantasies involved Bertrand.

...Well, apart from a bit of gloating at him whilst reveling in her success, that is.

Despite preparing speeches and pitches in her mind right before she’s gone to sleep every night since she was twelve, she’s not sure how to answer now that a similar inquiry’s been thrown at her feet by the very last person she would expect it to come from.

It’s mostly a fear of a response, she reasons. Apart from the family she’s made with the Lucas’, most everyone involved in her life has mocked her dream in some way, shape, or form. She has a hard skin for it these days, but laughter still hurts and with the new managers having just started, it could be detrimental to her hopes of her work ever being heard out. 

But Bertrand has asked her a question and he’s just persnickety enough to bother her to the point of insanity if she lies or tries to dodge it.

Belle takes a sigh and speaks.

“I wrote it,” she says carefully. “It’s part of an opera I’m writing.”

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An opera. 

This woman, a woman whose name he hasn’t even learned, is writing an opera.

It’s as if God above hasn’t already given Bertrand enough of a reason to fall for her.

She truly is a woman after his own heart.

And dammit, she’s succeeding in the endeavor. 

Bertrand feels himself smile. It’s been a while since he’s done that for a reason outside of his own success in quite some time. His face crinkles to reflect his bewilderment.

He’s simply amazed.

She’s written an opera, and by those bits of music he’s been blessed enough to hear, it’s one that may very well have no rival.

“I can’t believe it.” An innocent laughter bubbles under his throat. “Th-” 

The words he’s about to say die on his lips.

Her expression has changed from skeptical to enraged in a single heartbeat.

Crap. 

Bertrand’s never been the most straightforward man when it comes to communicating his approval of others and their works -- a rarity in its own right. 

And unfortunately, the meaning behind his words has been once more betrayed as a result of that.

He rushes to elaborate on his intentions, but he’s not offered the chance.

“Excuse me!” the woman interrupts, a fire in her speech that matches the flames that burn behind her ice-colored eyes as she all but shouts her protest. “How DARE you imply that it’s somehow unbelievable for me to write an opera?” A finger points directly in the direction of Bertrand’s nose, unwavering and menacing. 

Fear isn’t an emotion unfamiliar to Bertrand. He’s afraid of many a thing, but never would he have imagined that a pointed finger of all things would halt a mouth he’s seldom ever bereft of a voice when one has been wanted.

While Bertrand wants nothing more than to stop this rant before it can continue, the words refuse to come out.

And unfortunately for him, the woman’s words are more than happy to compensate for his silence.

“I’ll have you know that I’ve been studying opera since I was five years old! I’ve worked here for over ten years, read dozens of operatic pieces ranging from Shakespearean adaptations to “Ghiselle,” talked with most every person in this Opera House at length about their jobs -- probably to the point where I could do any of them upon request -- and personally tested out every bit of my opera too many times to count.”

“Bu-”

Bertrand’s cut off before more than even one more syllable can escape him, only stopping out of fear that his intrusion will only make things worse. 

“I am MORE than qualified to write an opera and I won’t have yet ANOTHER aristocratic man whose likely worked HALF as hard as me for double the accolades telling me that I can’t out of some chauvinistic mindset! So instead of believing those ideals of the past, start believing that I’ll be the one selling out this theatre instead of you soon enough. I promise you, I won’t be the only person happy to see you overthrown.”

The woman then turns away and starts walking in the opposite direction for him.

Bertrand follows her, keeping at somewhat of a distance to prevent bringing her fury to a head once more.

“Please, wait!” he half cries, though only to prevent a scene. “I didn’t mean it that way. I-I’m sorry! Your work’s good -- better than good, great!”

She doesn’t seem to spare him a thought as she retreats back to the ballet’s quarters. Bertrand stops as she goes beyond where he could respectfully follow. 

In an Opera House full of people -- even those that don’t particularly like him -- never has Bertrand felt so alone.

But right before she escapes his vision, Bertrand sees her hesitate. She almost looks like she’s about to turn back, like she’s accepted his apology and corrections as truth, but she seems to decide against it, walking through and closing the door closest to her.

Bertrand’s about to throw respect to the wind and go after her when suddenly, he hears a scream. It’s blood curdling and sounds like it’s coming from the stage.

Though somewhat reluctant due to the woman now running through his thoughts like a wolf in a forest, Bertrand does go to the stage to investigate. A girl who Bertrand can tell by her costume is part of the chorus lays on the floor. Her foot is crushed underneath and mangled by a sandbag that’s at least twenty-five pounds in weight. According to her cries as two stagehands attempt to remove the obtrusive menace, she heard a snap upon the sandbag’s contact with her foot. The cries are given evidence by an unnatural appearance her ankle presents as it once more meets the lights of the stage. Whispers emerge with the ankle, and there’s an all-to present fear amongst those who’ve responded to her wails that she may never walk wholly again.

A rope suddenly falls from atop the rafters, clearly one that once held up the sandbag. Most present on the stage not helping the chorus girl look up to the apparent scene of the crime for some semblance of a clue as to what happened. There’s no one above there, but light specks of dust fall like snow.

While the ‘why’ of the matter remains unsolved, the ‘who’ is as clear as day, for this is not a crime that’s new to The Paris Opera House.

Over the past few months, things like this have had a tendency to occur. Sandbags untouched for years as evidenced by the dust they’ve accumulated have been falling around and now on unsuspecting workers. Costumes have been mangled with scissors practically starving for fabric. Grand set pieces have been made hazards by artificially faulty support beams.

And just as with any dangerous oddity, they find themselves the subject of rumors, and The Paris Opera House has taken all of these incidents and made a demon of their own. 

This latest of crimes is the work of the culprit that those in The Paris Opera House have dubbed as “The Phantom of the Opera.”

#ouat #rumbelle #belle french #rumple #Rumplestiltskin #once upon a time #Phantom of the Opera #rumbelle au

[dontcallmecarrie]

set after this scene

Ben's scowl had not abated in the time between when they'd boarded the Millennium Falcon, and their arrival. To any outsider, he looked thunderous, probably looked no less intimidating than the man he kept an eye on with the way his very presence oozed menace.

Well, to the one he wanted to intimidate, anyway, for the handful of seconds before he noticed Kylo Ren looked more awestruck than afraid— then, he blanked his face with a disgusted huff, and turned to the others on the ship.

"Looks like he’s awake. Anyone else want to keep an eye on him? Because I can't guarantee he'll be in one piece when when arrive, otherwise."

"I'll do it," Rey answered, clapping a hand on his shoulder as she moved to take his place. Then, at the others' dubious glances, her smile gained an edge. "Oh, I'd like to see him try."

To the side, Finn huffed a laugh as he noticed their confusion, and chipped in. "Rey's the scary one, guys. Be—Calamity, think you can lend a hand?"

"Sure. What do you need?" Ben asked, and pointedly kept his voice as soft as possible because the...other guys' stares burned a hole in the back of his head.

Rey— the other Rey, stars this was confusing— looked like a breeze would knock her over, from her spot in the pilot’s seat. Chewie— Chewbacca, this wasn't the Wookie they knew— had been tense since the start and would probably not relax until this mess was dealt with, and while Finn was doing a good job at healing...his alternate self, it wasn't his specialty and the poor man was still down for the count.

All in all, Ben felt he was doing pretty well, in regards to his composure. So what if he was leaning on their Force bond a bit more than usual? As far as he was concerned, Kylo Ren wasn’t dead, that was enough. 

"I want to move him but I need you to support—"

"Oh, I see what you mean, do you plan to—right."

"You're confusing them again." Rey said aloud, sending a small wave of amusement through the bond but otherwise not looking away from Kylo Ren's makeshift cell.

Finn didn't look away from his work, so Ben didn't either. But, because apparently once a teacher always a teacher, he let his voice fall into a now-familiar cadence as he explained for their audience. 

"We have a Force bond. There's different types, from Master-Padawan to pair bonds, and depending on how strong they are you can feel another's emotions or hear their thoughts. Jedi can do them, Sith have something different, and the less I think about Knights the better off we'll be when we land because mo— the General will probably prefer this waste of space," Ben vaguely gestured to Kylo Ren with his head, "be brought to her alive."

He didn’t hide his disgust, when he said it.

“How long until we get there? And do you guys have Jedi healers available?” Rey asked in a voice that probably sounded casual, to those that didn’t know her.

Chewbacca’s howl sent chills down Ben’s spine, even as it confirmed his fears.

“No Jedi healers. Got it. Finn, looks like you’re taking point for this one.”

Ben didn’t look away from their patient, and did his level best to avoid remembering his nightmares.

Suffice it is to say, he failed.

‘Ben, we can feel your panic,’ Finn murmured quietly, and he mentally apologized and reinforced his shields even further. 

They were all acutely aware of the mess they were in, no need to add to the tension.

Already, he could feel Rey’s protectiveness and Finn’s resolve surging, especially because...

“We’re landing.” The Rey he didn’t know called, and part of Ben twisted when he felt the mix of grief and confusion and exhaustion she projected into the Force, ached to at least try and reach out and support— right. Not his Rey. 

His alternate was the one responsible for it, and for Finn’s distress, and they were now coming in fast to a base teeming with people who would probably shoot on sight.

Oh, sithspit.

.

“Get up.” Rey barked at...Kylo Ren, and when he didn’t move, didn’t hesitate to just levitate him and start moving, exclamations of surprise be damned.

She wasn’t Finn, and while she admired the way he was strong enough to extend a hand in mercy to his fellow man...Ben needed her right now, and she couldn’t be there because of him.

Her younger self was rattled and didn’t have half the support she had, Finn was...otherwise occupied, and the Force itself felt all sorts of wrong, and if Rey kept thinking about it she’d be liable to snap even before Ben and— she took a deep breath, and let it out.

Control, she couldn’t afford to lash out. If Ben could hold it together, then damn it so could she. They needed her to go first, because things’d go to hell in a hand basket if anyone tried to shoot when Ben was helping Finn stabilize...their patient, and focus.

Kylo Ren was still struggling, and she absently tightened her grip to keep him from moving around. Then, feeling another moment of quiet surprise from...her alternate, Rey turned and gave both her and Chewbacca a bright smile that didn’t quite reach her eyes.

“Want to take him down, or would you rather I do it?”

What she wouldn’t give to have a set of Force-binding cuffs, right now. Then her hands wouldn’t be itching for a lightsaber during the inevitable confusion that would arise when they left the ship, and, more importantly, she’d be able to watch her boys’ back for the same.

Well. At least she could ease the way, somehow.

Her alternate self had already commed the base about the situation, after all. Kylo Ren’s capture would help bring at least a measure of goodwill, and from there...they’d figure it out. 

“Rey,” stars it felt weird saying her own name, “I know you’re worried, but...would you mind...” she gestured vaguely to Kylo Ren, and her younger self finally tore herself from hovering by Finn and Ben, concern for her friend written all over her face. [Did she really look that young, back then?]

The entire situation was bizarre. Under other circumstances, Rey might’ve been amused by the sheer amount of stares and double takes she garnered, holding Kylo Ren and walking alongside Chewbacca and her double. 

As it was, however, all Rey felt was a new respect for Ben’s self-control, because every look had her tensing just that much more, acutely aware of their situation. 

It’s not until she saw Leia’s— General Organa, right— ashen face as they continued to disembark, however, that the realization hits home. Because up until that point, Ben had done an admirable job at hiding his emotions from their Force bond, but the glimpse of his mother’s horror and grief as she saw Kylo Ren was enough to break through the same shields that had withstood the worst of the First Order’s torture, and...

“Right, kriff this.” Rey said, voice deceptively level. “Chewbacca? I leave him in your hands.” 

With that, she dropped Kylo Ren where he stood, turned on a heel, and marched right back to the ship.

Force, she missed home.

#The Rise of Darth Calamity #The Man Who Sold the World #in which Darth Calamity meets canon and absolutely no one is happy #behind the scenes #bonus content #My writing #my brain did a thing

[mxadrian779]

Zutarian Except (#2):

           “Mai broke up with me,” said Zuko one day during a healing session.

Katara let the water fall from her hands and looked at him. “Oh,” she said finally, furrowing her brows as she processed his unsolicited statement. “I'm sorry.” She pulled the water back over her hands and continued. She focused her mind on the pulsing water, hovering it over Zuko's chest as it began to glow with healing energy. “Aang and I broke up last week,” Katara offered in response as she moved the water over him.

“How did that go?”

She resisted a shrug as she pressed the healing water onto his wounds. “Okay, I guess.” Katara bent the element against his skin, running the energy through his wounds and letting it loosen his chi. “I mean, what can you say about a relationship that felt like it lasted a lifetime? Somehow you thought you were supposed to be together, it doesn't work out, and you're not sure what to feel.”

Zuko groaned as the water hit a sore spot. “Empty?” he suggested. “Like you're suddenly missing half of yourself?”

“Maybe,” she murmured absently. Katara was silent as she pressed her hands gently against his skin. Zuko sucked in a breath, but relaxed as the soothing energy circulated throughout his body. Katara watched the sapphire glow absorbing into and rejuvenating his skin. She smiled when she saw the last of the bruises finally lift, and Zuko's pained expression loosened. “Is that it?” he asked after a time.

“For now,” she replied, helping him sit upright. “There's still a bit of internal damage. I can feel some blockages.”

“So can I,” said the firebender, grunting on cue and gripping his abdomen. “It's like there's a spiked knot in there whenever I move.”

“Sorry about that. There's nothing else I can do right now,” Katara said with a shrug. “We'll have to wait until the full moon. I'll try to unblock the rest of your chi with bloodbending.”

He eyed her. “Is that going to hurt?”

“Probably,” she responded, stifling a grin.

             Katara watched him as he shifted uncomfortably on the lounge, trying to find a sitting position that didn't give him a bolt of pain. She searched her mind for something to lighten the mood. “You know, Aang actually was convinced that you and I were—”

“An item?” Zuko guessed.

“Yeah.” Katara started to laugh, recalling its absurdity. “Can you believe that?”

The Fire Lord shared her laughter. “Really? Wow.” He smirked as he added, “It took me this long just to get you to stop hating me. Remember when you wanted to kill me?”

Katara gasped emphatically as heat flooded her face. “I never wanted to kill you!” she replied. After a thought, she added sheepishly, “I just wanted to scare you a little bit.”

He chuckled lightheartedly, perhaps taking joy in her embarrassment. “Good times.”

             “Any news on the attackers?” Katara asked, switching the topic.

The jovial look left his scarred face. “No,” Zuko replied, seemingly embarrassed. “My agents couldn't find anything or anyone. It's like the group just vanished into thin air.”

“They'll be back,” the waterbender said darkly.

Zuko stared into the distance. “Tell me about this Hana.”

“Hama,” Katara corrected. “She was a waterbender from the Southern Water Tribe. Many years ago, she and a bunch of other Southern benders were captured and imprisoned.” She paused, watching for Zuko's response. “But she later escaped.”

Surprise flickered across his face. “How? Fire Nation prisons are impenetrable.”

“Bloodbending.” Katara shivered at the thought. “She, uh...she figured out how to bend the liquid—the blood—in the elephant-rats in the prison and manipulate them. Then she used that on the guards.” She swallowed against the lump that was forming in her throat. Her memories of that wicked waterbender were fresh in her mind, even nearly three years later. Katara's heart dropped like a stone as she recalled the destructive devices of her element. She gritted her teeth, detesting Hama for corrupting the art of waterbending. “I learned how to bloodbend from her. I thought it was a great resource at first, but after experiencing it for myself...” Katara paused, suddenly feeling a little nauseous at the memory. How she wished she could erase that part of her history, and wished she'd have never learned that corrupted art. “I swore that I would never use it. Fighting people is one thing, but to actually control them like that, to have that kind of power...”

  ===

             Zuko watched helplessly as Katara grappled with her memories. It was deeply unsettling to see the valiant waterbender in such distress as she recounted the past, and Zuko longed to be able to comfort her. He easily remembered his own near-fatal bloodbending encounter a few weeks back, and remembered watching in horror as Katara bloodbent the murderous Yon Rha some years ago. Katara was a fierce but gentle spirit, and Zuko knew the dark art of bloodbending went against everything she believed. He could see now the trauma it created in her, could see how much she hated and feared having that power, and he desperately wished he knew how to take away that pain.

             “You know,” he said, leaning forward and eyeing the fresh sunlight pouring through the window, “I've been going stir-crazy the last few weeks. Would you want to join me out in the garden?” He looked at her and waited for an answer. Katara met his gaze, but there was a faraway look in her eyes, like her mind was still stuck in her memories. “I think the turtle-ducks are hungry,” said Zuko with a smile.

Katara blinked as she returned to reality. After taking a moment to absorb what Zuko had said, she to smiled. “Yeah, okay. That sounds like a good idea.”

             It was a beautiful early afternoon. Sunlight splashed onto the puffy clouds smudged against the sapphire sky as the colourful blossoms set the garden aglow. Zuko delighted in hearing the breaths that escaped Katara's lips as she took in the scene. “Beautiful, huh?” he prodded.

“It's gorgeous,” the waterbender said in awe.

He staggered to the far side of the garden, towards the private park. The front of the gardens were manicured and were the site of many public dealings, but farther behind the palace was a quieter and more natural setting. It was where the Fire Lords and their sages meditated, and where Zuko used to feed the turtle-ducks with his mother and sister (when she was a little less insane). Zuko seldom liked to visit this place because of its history. He hated thinking of his mother and the fate she suffered at the hands of his own father. He hated being his father's son, growing up in the shadow of a tyrant. Zuko often found himself lost in his moments of self-loathing, especially while recuperating from his most recent injuries.

“Zuko, you're not your father,” Katara would assure him. “Ozai was a treacherous coward, but you are brave and strong and kind. In spite of everything, you found your own path, you helped end the war, and you're rebuilding an entire nation. And you've made a lot of people proud. You've made me proud.”

             Katara followed him to the pond and helped him to the ground. Soon she knelt beside him and waited. Slowly a small family of turtle-ducks paddled out, squawking as they ran right up to Zuko. He withdrew a small pouch from his pocket and opened it to reveal a mix of seeds and specially baked bread rolls. He held them out to Katara and offered the first pick. She took a roll, broke off a piece, and gingerly held it out towards the pond. She clicked her tongue to draw the attention of the turtle-ducks, but they were more attracted to Zuko and his mother lode of bread. He spotted a flicker of disappointment in Katara's face, so he broke off a piece of bread and tossed it in front of her.

“What—?” Her question was cut off as a swarm of ducklings rushed her. She was stunned for a second, then burst into laughter as the little creatures gobbled up the bread Zuko had thrown and begged Katara for more. The waterbender surrendered her bread roll, letting it fall from her hand and watching as the ducklings dashed for it.

Zuko smiled to himself as he watched, savoring the sound of Katara's laugh, and the way her face crinkled when she smiled, and the joyous glimmer in her sapphire eyes...

             Something within him stirred, and in this moment he realised how truly fond of Katara he had become. Of course, Zuko admired her immensely and was grateful for her aid, but there was something much greater at work. He found himself craving her presence, and when she wasn't near he didn't feel quite the same. They'd spent a great amount of time together lately, talking and reconnecting and filling in what their previously strained acquaintanceship forbade. They shared all of their deepest feelings, regrets, fears, and traumas, shared all the darkest things which had never before been unveiled to another. Katara listened patiently and openly as Zuko unraveled his entire history before her, and he in turn heard her difficulties and griefs. Each was quietly in awe of the other's resolve and their ability to overcome their adversity, and each gained a new respect for the other.

             Zuko looked on as Katara played with the turtle-ducks, and he realised how content he was. He had managed to save some good moments from his childhood and thought about them often. But now it occurred to him that he was never as happy, genuinely happy, as he was in this moment. Observing the glee in Katara's face, the delicate way she handled the turtle-ducks, her melodic laughter—

And the way she seemed to glow as the sunlight hit her, highlighting the gloss of her chestnut-coloured hair and illuminating her blue Water Tribe dress against the dark red backdrop of the Fire Nation palace—

It all looked perfectly natural, perfectly in place, almost as if this was where she belonged.

#atla #avatar #Avatar The Last Airbender #avatar: the last airbender #tla #katara #zuko #zutara #otp #fanfic #fanfiction #excerpt from a wip fanfic #wip #excerpt