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elliesbelle · 5 months

Text

nobody compares to you

chapter 13

pairing: ellie x reader

synopsis: you're in your junior year of college and at a party, you run into the girl who broke your heart: ellie williams. despite the time it took to reset your life, will you risk a broken heart again for her?

content warnings: modern college au, cursing, angst, dealer!ellie, mentions of marijuana and descriptions of its usage, descriptions of anaphylactic shock, brief mention of needles, descriptions of anxiety, mentions of death, descriptions of jealousy, mentions of breakups, several flashback scenes, mentions of LSD and its usage, descriptions of acid tripping, ellie's POV, minors do not interact

word count: 9k

chapters: one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen

series masterlist

my masterlist

i have a ko-if if you like my work so much that you feel compelled to tip me ♡︎

the "nobody compares to you" spotify playlist

songs featured in this chapter (including a surprise audio AND drawing commission in the middle of the fic):

the aaron taylor song “i think i love you again”

the carpenters song “merry christmas darling”

palestine will be free

“Where the fuck even are you?��

“Not home.”

“Well, no shit. I’m literally sitting on your living room couch, dumbass.”

“Get out of my apartment, weirdo.”

“Stop procrastinating, asshole.”

Ellie rolls her eyes as a couple of bright yellow leaves slowly dance down on the pavement from the nearby trees on her path home. One hand holds her phone up in front of her with Dina’s face front and center on the screen through FaceTime.

Having just dropped off a rather large order to a couple of stoner sophomores living on campus, Ellie’d decided to take the longer, more scenic route home instead of the usual way she’d go every day. She had a “date” lined up with Daniela in about an hour or so, a meeting she wasn’t particularly looking forward to being present for. Having no real enthusiasm to actually be on time to meet up with her, Ellie was purposely and leisurely delaying her return home to get ready.

Dina, busy lounging on the couch in Jesse and Ellie’s living room, busies herself by finishing a bland, microwaveable box of mac and cheese she’d found shoved in the back of the duo’s full freezer. She was casually killing time talking to Ellie through video chat while she waited for Jesse to finish getting ready for their movie date night.

Jesse enjoyed dragging Dina along to a movie theater in the neighbouring downtown area that showed old and foreign films. Back home in Jackson throughout their childhood, he and Ellie would make Dina sit through old sci-fi pictures, cult horror films, martial arts movies in a completely different language and with no subtitles. Dina would sit in the middle of the two in complete boredom as she listened to them psychoanalyzing background characters who had two lines and spending hours explaining their personal interpretations of a single camera angle in some inconsequential scene.

When they all began attending university, Jesse was over the moon upon discovering the nearby theater and the kind of films they would show. Dina complained every single time, but she secretly enjoyed these date nights regardless, always arguing with Jesse on the way home with her own analyses of the movie they’d just seen. She was a little less enthusiastic this time, however, upon hearing that the film they were about to go see was an early 2000s Bollywood movie that had a running time of nearly four hours.

Jesse had just gotten home from working out at the gym and was busy showering, and Dina decided to preoccupy herself in the meantime by thoroughly berating Ellie for her disinterest and voluntary tardiness for her “date” later that evening.

“El, I really don’t understand why you’re even bothering with her,” Dina says after a huge, wet slurp of her mac and cheese. “Leave that poor freshman girl alone. You really don’t even seem to like her that much.”

“She’s still got Joel’s jacket and I want it back.” Ellie shrugs nonchalantly.

“Maybe if you didn’t pass that shabby old thing around to every new girl you see for a month…” Dina replies, not bothering to mutter under her breath.

“Oh, leave me the fuck alone, Woodward,” Ellie says, chuckling. “Slutshamer.”

Jesse jaunts into the living room, jet black hair damp from the shower and fully dressed, and spots Ellie’s face on Dina’s tiny screen. He waltzes towards the couch and, without any warning, stealthily snatches Dina’s phone right out of her hand.

“Hey!” Dina protests indignantly, trying to reach for it back.

Jesse ignores her as Ellie laughs.

“Yo, what the fuck, Williams.” Jesse scolds the auburn-haired girl.

“Wassup, Chang.”

“What the hell did you ditch me and the gym for earlier? Today’s our cardio day.”

“Had a huge delivery I needed to make,” Ellie shrugs. “Wanted two 40 bags on top of a few lavender pre-rolls. And they lived on the opposite side of campus.”

“A likely excuse,” Jesse scoffs. “I think you’ve been harbouring a secret, years-long grudge against me and actually hate me for some reason.”

“Oh, it’s not a secret. I do hate you.”

“Dickhead.” Jesse chuckles as Dina heartily laughs behind him with a mouthful of mac and cheese.

Before Jesse can continue to berate his best friend, his own phone rings noisily from the inside of one of his jeans pockets.

“Oh, look. Someone who actually loves and appreciates me.” He says indignantly, handing small-scale Ellie back to Dina.

Ellie playfully rolls her eyes, trying to ignore the fact that Jesse’s phone is currently buzzing and blaring with the personalized ringtone he’d set for your contact years ago shortly after you’d all met for the first time.

Dina, recognizing the familiar sound as well and noticing Ellie’s tight lips and rigid expression, quickly attempts to change the subject.

“So where exactly are you gonna be meeting up with the Daniela girl?” Dina quickly asks Ellie at the same time that Jesse booms, “Good evening once again to my absolute favourite person in the whole world!”

Ellie hesitantly begins to reply to Dina but cuts off almost immediately when she hears Jesse’s tone turn serious and mutter a name she’d come to despise.

“Oh. Hey, Anderson. What’s up?” Jesse says blankly. “Where’s—”

“Oh, shit.” Dina inadvertently murmurs as Ellie’s face immediately goes red with fury.

“Why the fuck is Anderson calling Jesse on her phone?” Ellie demands quietly of Dina.

“I mean… she is on a date with her tonight…” Dina reluctantly admits, knowing that lying to Ellie about your current whereabouts is pointless after figuring Jesse would eventually blab it to her anyway.

“Are you fucking serious?” Ellie seethes.

“I don’t really know why she’d be calling Jesse, though. That doesn’t make any sense...” Dina says, setting down her fork and turning her head back towards her boyfriend as Ellie watches intently him from the corner of Dina’s phone screen.

Both girls stare Jesse down as he intently listens to the other end of the line, the two getting more and more nervous as his face gets stonier as each second passes. When he finally speaks, his voice is grave and urgent.

“Is she breathing?”

“What?” Both Dina and Ellie simultaneously say in distress, which Jesse ignores.

“What did she eat?” He asks Abby.

“What’s going on?” Dina implores of him fearfully, sitting up straighter in her seat and completely abandoning her partially eaten mac and cheese on the coffee table.

Jesse holds up a pointer finger as an indication that he needs to keep listening as Ellie hushes her sternly, fiercely trying to eavesdrop on Jesse’s conversation.

“Okay. What did you eat?” Jesse questions.

The way Jesse’s face falls elicits a sharply drawn breath from Dina and drains all the colour from Ellie’s face.

“Did she have any?” He asks.

While Jesse listens for Abby’s lengthy response, Ellie quickly averts her eyes back to Dina.

“Dina.” She says hastily. “Where did Anderson take her tonight?”

“Orchards. It’s that fancy restaurant that’s like, right by here.”

“I know. They serve a lot of seafood there, right?”

“I don’t know.”

“Do you think Anderson ordered any?”

“El, how am I supposed to know that?”

“Well, does Anderson know that she’s deadly fucking allergic to shellfish? That she can’t even fucking touch that shit?”

Dina’s terrified face suddenly goes completely pale before she responds.

“I-I don’t know...”

“Does she have any pockets or some kind of bag with her?” They hear Jesse say. “See if she has her EpiPen in there.”

“E-El… I don’t think she does.” Dina stammers.” I helped her get dressed tonight and I saw her before she left, and I-I don’t think—”

Ellie nearly drops her phone on the pavement from how clammy her hands have become from complete fear. When she hears Jesse fiercely mutter a furious “fuck,” she immediately breaks into a sprint.

“Dina!” Ellie demands. “Give me back to Jesse! Now!” Dina hastily hands her phone to her petrified boyfriend without question as he quickly asks Abby to stay calm and give him a quick second.

“Jess!” Ellie breathlessly yells, not bothering to keep her voice down and without any concern for the fellow students she was alarming as she ran by. “Go to my room right now and search in the bottom drawer of my desk!!!”

Promptly and silently, Jesse darts in the direction of Ellie’s bedroom with Dina following closely behind him.

“There’s an old EpiPen of hers somewhere in there! I think it’s probably a couple of months expired now, but grab it anyway!”

Jesse and Dina unceremoniously bust into Ellie’s bedroom and follow her instructions precisely. After forcibly yanking open the bottom-most drawer of her computer desk, they begin to desperately rifle through it. After a few seconds of frantic ransacking through its miscellaneous contents, Jesse pulls out a thick, plastic cylindrical object with tiny lettering embellished all over the translucent plastic.

“Look for the little slot on the side of it that shows you some liquid-y shit inside!” Ellie presses him. “Is it still completely clear and clean, or is it all brown and murky?”

“It’s clear.” Jesse replies after quickly inspecting the EpiPen.

“Okay, go!” Ellie orders. “Dina’s gonna call 911 right now! Orchards is right around the corner from our place, so run! Inject the needle on the outside of her thigh! And check her pulse and see if she’s breathing, ‘cause you’ll need to do CPR if she isn’t! Paramedics probably won’t get there for another five minutes or so, so you just gotta keep doing chest compressions until they can get there!”

Jesse nods and immediately sprints out of the room after handing Dina her phone, placing his own back to his ear and quickly informing Abby that he’d be there shortly, firmly asking her to check your pulse.

Dina sets her eyes on Ellie, pure terror engraved on her face.

“Ellie, s-shouldn’t we grab the EpiPen she has now in her apartment? I think I know where it is, probably. Isn’t that safer than—”

“Her apartment is fifteen minutes away from that restaurant and Jesse can get there in two! We can’t waste any more time!” Ellie clarifies quickly. “Now, I need you to hang up right away and call 911 and explain everything that’s just happened! Go!”

Ellie doesn’t bother waiting for Dina to end the call and roughly taps on the red button herself.

She shoves her phone into the pocket of her hoodie and quickens her pace.

Her lungs winded and her heart threatening to beat out of her chest, she couldn't seem to care any less about her own breathing at that very moment. She trusts nothing else but her own feet to get her exactly where she desperately needs to be. She sees nothing and no one else but the pavement directly in front of her, cutting across the university’s campus through the fastest route she can think of in the moment.

Despite never having been a religious person in any way, Ellie begins to plead a desperate prayer in her mind to whatever god or deity that could possibly exist that you were still breathing somehow and that Jesse had found you and gotten there in time.

She takes a moment to pull her phone out and check how long it’s been since she ended the FaceTime call with Dina, seeing that a little less than five minutes had just passed. She considers calling her once more for any updates; but not wanting to risk being a possible distraction in case Dina is needed in the moment, she ultimately decides against doing so and instead wills her feet to move faster.

Unwelcome thoughts begin to involuntarily flood Ellie’s mind as she sprints.

She thinks of the last time you’d seen each other: that night of your heart-to-heart dinner with Jesse at Sterling’s. It felt almost fated for her and Dina to walk into the same restaurant at the same time that the two of you had been meeting. Ellie recalls the identical look of dismay on both of your faces, equally overwhelmed at the sight of one another. She can still feel the angry yet doleful tears that fell down her red cheeks as she stormed away from the diner, threatening to expose endless repressed feelings of remorse and heartache.

She remembers the day she saw your sudden reunion with Abby Anderson, you dressed in that beautiful floral sundress and very obviously flirting with the tall, muscular blonde. Her nails were so angrily digging into her palms at the sight of you two that she can still feel the phantom marks that had nearly drawn blood. She’d nearly frightened Dina, who was lounging on the living room couch with a joint in hand, when she busted into her and Jesse’s apartment with immediate choice words that were aroused by her unbridled anger.

She recalls the last time you’d actually spoken to one other directly after that miserable, unfortunate night of the Sigma Eta party, how taken aback she was at how you were still so undeniably beautiful underneath the pale moonlight. Having been sitting on the hood of her Jeep while she watched in amusement at your futile attempts to keep yourself warm, she thinks of the way your eyes were furiously and desperately trying to avoid her piercing ocean green gaze. The memory of the angry, fleeting look you’d given Daniela when you’d obviously noticed Joel’s old motorcycle jacket resting on her shoulders is one she can never forget; nor could she the air of raw, bitter indignation that radiated off you at the sight of one of your signature lavender joints nestled in between Daniela’s lips.

She can still feel the visceral rage that sparked inside her from Frat Guy Adam’s casual cruelty towards you, followed by feelings of heartbreak at watching the way your face had fallen at his words. The sheer remorse from pathetically having done nothing right when it happened still weighs on her. Ellie can never forget the simultaneous feelings of shame and comfort she’d felt after your heated encounter with her in the bathroom of Sterling’s: shame from being forcibly confronted with a reminder of the deepest regret of her whole life; and comfort at finally being able to see with her own ocean green eyes, after so long, the face of a person she once adored more than she did anyone else in the world.

Maybe even still.

Ellie eventually finds herself at the intersection right where her shared apartment with Jesse is located. Her hasty pursuit is frustratingly impeded when she’s stopped by the angry, glowing red hand at the crosswalk she needs to get past to reach Orchards, cars endlessly coming one after the other. For a few moments, she’s at least able to catch a much-needed, painful breath.

While she bounces up and down on her feet in impatience, very seriously contemplating running across anyway and risking being hit by a speeding car, Ellie thinks of one thing and one thing only: the first moment her eyes met yours all those years ago. The moment when she knew, deep down and instinctively, that everything had changed.

She’s brutally broken out of her brief reverie by the blaring of sirens booming from around the corner. Her head immediately shoots towards the sound and she watches as two ambulances with flashing red and white lights speed down the road and towards what she believes is the direction of the nearest emergency room.

Ellie wastes no time bolting down the crosswalk the millisecond that the orange pedestrian signal finally blinks to white, sprinting down the street of Orchards. She’s somehow able to spot Dina’s figure in the middle of a small crowd of people gathered next to the restaurant and immediately sprints towards her. By the time Ellie is able to reach her, most of the unfamiliar bystanders have dispersed with whispers. Her heart races as she sees Dina’s cheeks wet and dripping endlessly with tears.

“Dina!” Ellie huffs, using the last of her breath and energy to dash to her side.

“Ellie!” Dina sighs in relief upon spotting her friend.

They envelop each other in a tight embrace, Dina hiccuping slightly into Ellie’s shoulder.

“What happened? Did you guys make it in time? Is she okay? Where is she? Where’s Jesse?” Ellie rambles.

“Sh-she’s okay, I think,” Dina stammers. “She was breathing when Jesse got here, but her pulse was really slow. The paramedics got here a few minutes after Jesse did.”

She sloppily wipes her eyes with the back of her hands before continuing.

“They said that the EpiPen probably saved her life, said that she would have had a lot less of a chance if we had just waited for them to arrive. Expired EpiPen was apparently better than nothing, as long as it wasn’t too far off from when it did expire.”

Ellie takes a relieved breath in at hearing this.

“Thank god. Thank fucking god. That’s what I thought, but I-I honestly wasn’t sure. I couldn’t remember clearly in the moment.”

“How did you even know that?” Dina asks her in genuine curiosity.

“I-I… wh-when we were, you know, t-together…” Ellie mutters awkwardly. “I made sure to know, j-just in case.”

“Oh, Ellie…”

Ellie wrings her hands together and clears her throat in embarrassment.

“So where’s Jess? Where’s Anderson?” She asks, changing the subject and voice dripping in disdain at the last word.

“Jesse rode in the ambulance with her and the paramedics, and Abby said that she’d follow behind in her car,” Dina replies. “I stayed behind ‘cause I figured you were on your way and I wanted to be able to tell you what happened in person.”

“Thank you, D, seriously.”

Dina stares at Ellie earnestly for a moment.

“You really do still love her.” Dina says, not as a question but as a statement.

Ellie doesn’t respond to this remark, her lips tight and her ocean green eyes unreadable.

“Come on. Let’s go see her.”

You had been brought to St. Peter’s Hospital, the closest one located to your university. When Ellie and Dina had gotten there, they found Jesse sitting alone in the mostly empty waiting room. He was staring up at the dreary off-white ceiling, his left leg nervously bouncing up and down as one of his hands gripped his right knee. When he spots the two girls enter the room, he immediately jumps out of his seat to meet them. He pulls his girlfriend into a tight embrace and gives her a tender kiss on the forehead, and then he places a firm and reassuring hand on his best friend’s shoulder.

“How is she?” Ellie asks nervously.

“Unconcious still, but she’s alive,” Jesse replies somberly. “The paramedics in the ambulance told me that they were pumping her full of adrenaline; and so now, they’re either still doing that or they’re just trying to get her heart rate back to normal. Apparently, her tongue was so swollen and her throat closed up completely, so they’ve got to reopen her airways ‘cause she’s having a hard time breathing.”

“Oh, god…” Dina chokes out.

“Don’t worry, D.” Jesse consoles. “She’s gonna be fine. She’s strong, and we know that. They’re taking care of her, and she’ll hopefully be awake soon.”

“I know, I know…” Dina sniffles. “It’s really not like me to fall apart like this. But she’s like a sister to me, you know. I mean, she basically is.”

“Me too, babe. Don’t worry. We all love her too. No need to explain.” Jesse says.

Dina gives him a soft smile as he gives her another tender forehead kiss. Watching such a small but affectionate scene between the two makes Ellie feel as if she’s intruding on a private moment she shouldn’t be witnessing. Jealousy in the form of a knife in the stomach twists inside her while her heart aches to feel that kind of intimacy.

“Oh, shit, I should call her uncle,” Dina suddenly realizes, pulling away from Jesse slightly. “I think I still have his number from freshman year. He should know what’s going on.”

“Good idea.” Jesse agrees. “He’s one of her emergency contacts, but I’m not sure if he knows just yet.”

“I’ll call the girls too,” She continues, referring to the other girls who lived in the Wilson Valley building with you and Dina during your freshman year. “I know that they’ll also want to know.”

She pulls her phone out of her pocket before muttering a quick “be right back” and exiting the waiting room.

Jesse and Ellie watch her walk out silently. After a moment or two, Jesse speaks up.

“Are you okay, El?”

“What do you mean?”

“Come on, man. Don’t do that. You know what I mean.”

“I’m fine, Jess.”

“Dude.”

“What?”

Jesse turns his whole body to face Ellie straight on, crossing his arms against his chest and frowning.

“You’re completely red in the face, you look the most stressed out than I’ve ever seen you, and you’re here.”

“So?” Ellie replies stubbornly.

“Williams.” Jesse stresses sternly. “You know Dina and I saw everything you had in that desk drawer.”

Ellie says nothing in reply and Jesse continues.

“You literally still had her old EpiPen from like, two years ago. That entire drawer was full of her shit.”

Ellie clenches her jaw and balls up her fists.

“You still have all those old letters she used to write you all the time, all these mementos and knickknacks from when you two were together. You even have Barbie Bear.” Jesse points out. “Do you know that she’s been chewing Dina out nonstop about her for years because she thinks Dina stole her?”

“Look, she and I just stopped talking to each other all of a sudden before sophomore year. I never had an actual chance to give her all of her shit back—”

“You literally could have given them to me or Dina or even any of the Wilson girls so we could return them.”

“Look—”

“And what about the rest of it? Shit that you didn’t have to actually give back to her? It’s been years. You could have easily thrown it all out.”

“You don’t understa—”

“You didn’t even bother leaving all that shit back home in Jackson. You brought it all here with you to keep in our apartment.”

“I… I—”

“She could have fucking died tonight, El. And you’re still bullshitting me.”

“Jesse.” Ellie croaks out through quivering lips and watery eyes.

“You saved her life. She could have very well been in a worse state right now if it weren’t for you. You told me and Dina what to do. Nobody told you to do any of that. And by the sorry state of you, it looks like you just ran three marathons in a row just to get here and make sure she was okay in person.”

Tears threaten to flow down from Ellie’s ocean green eyes, and it takes every ounce of strength that she has left in her to will them not to fall.

“She means so, so much to me and Dina. And to a whole bunch of other people too. When she gets hurt, we feel that shit too.” Jesse says. “I need you to get your motherfucking shit together, Williams. Now.”

Before Ellie can even form some kind of thought in response to his declaration, Dina suddenly reenters the waiting room.

“Called her uncle and told him everything I know. He’s currently looking up the first flight out and he’ll hopefully be here sometime tomorrow.” Dina informs the pair as she walks over. “Just got off the phone with Astrid too. Most of the girls are either busy or asleep by now, but she said she’ll let them know too as soon as possible. If she’s awake tomorrow, they’ll try to come by to pay her a visit.”

“Okay, good.” Jesse nods in response. “Thanks for doing that, D. I was so focused on what’s been going on, and none of that even crossed my mind.”

“They deserved to know.” Dina smiles sadly before suddenly frowning. “But why did she even go into anaphylactic shock in the first place? They both asked me, but I realized that you never actually told either of us and I didn’t really know what to tell them.”

“She and Anderson were making out, and Anderson had eaten some seafood bouillabaisse for dinner. Apparently, it had a bunch of chopped-up shrimp in it that she couldn’t see.” Jesse says plainly.

Dina inadvertently glances at Ellie in slight sympathy, but Jesse looks at her with zero remorse on his face.

“She didn’t tell Abby that she was really allergic?” Dina asks.

“Anderson apparently had no idea, said that she wouldn’t have ordered it if she knew in the first place.” Jesse clarified.

“Anderson should have fucking double-checked re-fucking-gardless.” Ellie angrily interjects.

“It’s not Abby’s fault, Ellie. There’s no way she could have just known instinctively.” Dina reasons.

“Doesn’t matter. Isn’t she studying to be a fucking doctor? Isn’t that some basic shit that they teach at med school or whatever? She should have known better.” Ellie seethes. “Where the fuck is she, anyway? I thought she came along.”

“She went down to the food court for a breather.” Jesse says.

“Oh, she needs a breather?” Ellie sneers. “Yeah, go ahead and catch your breath when the person you almost killed tonight can’t even fucking breathe—”

“Ellie!” Dina scolds.

“Whatever.” Ellie scoffs.

“El,” Dina suddenly brings up. “Have you talked to Daniela yet?”

“What about her?” Ellie asks.

“Weren’t you supposed to meet up with her…” Dina checks the time on her phone. “... almost an hour ago?”

“So?”

“Ellie.”

Ellie clicks her tongue.

“Fine, let me text her right now that I won’t make it—” She begins to say begrudgingly, but she cuts herself off as someone else enters the waiting room.

Abby Anderson quietly walks through the door, sipping a plain black coffee from a styrofoam cup. She looks up from her drink and gives Jesse an awkward but polite smile which he respectfully returns along with a nod.

Ellie’s entire body goes cold with frigid, icy hatred, exacerbated when her furious ocean green eyes suddenly meet with Abby Anderson’s tired sky blue ones.

“Actually,” Ellie suddenly says. “I’m gonna give her a call and see if she’s still free to meet up tonight. I still want my jacket back.”

Both Dina and Jesse look as if they’re each about to interject with a response, but Ellie is too quick for either of them to say a word.

Ellie storms out of the waiting room, not giving a second look at Abby Anderson.

Ellie throws Joel’s old leather jacket onto her bed, sighing softly. She sheds her sweaty grey hoodie and throws it down next to the jacket before pulling her phone out. She proceeds to call Jesse, but she’s greeted with ten, empty-sounding buzzes before being redirected to his voicemail. She then attempts to call Dina but is greeted with an immediate automated message stating that the call could not be completed.

Groaning in exasperation, Ellie collapses into her desk chair and roughly kicks off her Converse. After a moment or two, she notices the bottom-most drawer of her desk and the way it’s hanging off the frame precariously. Sighing, she crouches down on the floor and begins to rearrange its previous contents.

At first, she shoves items back into the drawer at random, but she immediately pauses once her hand grazes across the fur of a pink stuffed animal.

Barbie Bear.

She picks up the stuffed animal and stares sadly into its plastic eyes. Noticing that the light pink ribbon around its neck has gotten loose, Ellie delicately attempts to retie it back into a bow. After a couple of lopsided tries, she’s eventually satisfied once she’s able to center the ribbon correctly. She carefully places Barbie Bear back into the drawer before returning to restore its contents with more consideration.

After replacing a few pairs of old earrings of yours into a small box, she picks up a stack of old letters that she’d tied together with a piece of brown twine. Ellie resists the urge to go through each of them, but when she notices that one had fallen out of the stack and is now lying on the floor, her willpower dwindles almost instantly.

Ellie picks up the envelope gingerly, almost as if she’s afraid that her touch will cause it to burst into flames. She reads her name on the front written with green ink and flips it over to where the flap of the envelope is torn open. She runs her fingers over the wax seal that had secured the letter inside: the design of Saturn amongst several stars. Nervously, she slips the card out from inside and unfolds it to reveal your handwriting.

Dear Ellie,

It is currently 4:27 A.M. and I can’t sleep, and for some reason, I can’t stop watching that story you posted on Instagram earlier over and over. The one of you singing and playing your electric guitar to that Aaron Taylor song. Not to be gay as fuck, but it is so easy to get lost in the sound of your voice. Also, I really like your lips. And your hands.

I know I said this yesterday already, but you’ve been overworking yourself way too much lately. I’m glad that you’ve been putting a lot of effort into your schoolwork, but have you eaten? When was the last time you had a full meal (microwaveable ramen does not count)? Have you been taking any time for yourself? It’s really sweet that you still make time to come hang out with me most days, but you need some you time too, you know.

Not that I don’t love seeing your goofy face all the time. I don’t know, I think me writing all that out is me casually acknowledging that I have attachment issues and attempting to work on it. Oh, well. I’m pretty attached to you, fucking dork.

Okay, heading to bed now. Hopefully, I’ll actually be able to fall asleep this time. But hopefully I’ll see you tomorrow (I know I just said that you need to take more time for yourself, but shut up). You’re always the best part of my day.

Ellie can’t seem to let herself read the final piece of the letter, the part where you’d signed your name.

She delicately folds the card once more and places it back into its envelope. Turning it over in her hand and tenderly running her fingers over where you’d addressed her name, she wonders if your handwriting is still the same as it was all those years ago.

Reluctantly, Ellie tucks the letter back into the stack before tying them all securely together once more.

Earlier That Evening

Ellie was fifty-two minutes late to her supposed “date” with Daniela. This was Ellie’s third failed attempt at reacquiring Joel’s old motorcycle jacket, and they had previously decided to meet up outside the coffee shop on campus where Daniela recently started working after the end of her shift.

But after Ellie’s unexplained absence from their meeting, Daniela bitterly stormed back home to her dorm. She had half a mind to say no when Ellie called her with a half-assed explanation and asked if she could come over to retrieve her jacket. But after giving in, Ellie arrived at her dorm room within half an hour.

It wasn’t a total shock to Ellie when she was greeted with a look of annoyance when Daniela opened the door for her. Ellie attempted to feign a guilty expression, but all that she could muster was an indifferent grimace. Daniela said nothing as she silently beckoned Ellie to follow her and come in, an AirPod playing music loudly in one ear.

Ellie took a quick glance around the place, never having actually been inside Daniela’s room before. The twin-size beds, old wooden dressers, and scuffed-up desks were an all-too-familiar sight for Ellie, having gone through the same torturous experience herself only a couple of years back in her freshman year. But a few things were different as Daniela and her roommate had attempted to really personalize their living area. Ellie tried not to make a face of repulsion when spotting a few Taylor Swift concert posters above one of the desks.

Daniela plopped onto, what Ellie had assumed was, her bed but made no gesture that welcomed Ellie to do the same. She merely stared at her passively as Ellie tried to avoid looking her directly in the eye.

“You’re an hour late.” Daniela pointed out.

“Only fifty-two minutes late.” Ellie attempted to joke.

Daniela only hummed in response, unsmiling. She picked up a faded brown jacket that was sitting on top of her pillow by the collar and handed it over to Ellie.

“Thanks,” Ellie muttered, tucking the jacket under her arm. “Uh, thanks a lot for looking after it. Needed it back ‘cause it’s really my dad’s old jacket.”

“Oh, sorry. I would have given it back sooner if I knew that.” Daniela replied, not sounding the least bit sorry.

“It’s okay.” Ellie mumbled awkwardly.

There was an uncomfortable moment or two of complete silence where Daniela continued to merely gaze at Ellie, unwavering and unapologetic, while Ellie focused her eyes on her Converse as she wrung her hands together.

“Hey, look…” Ellie eventually spoke up. “I really am sorry about being late. I just had a really important emergency that I had to deal with.”

“It’s fine,” Daniela replied remorselessly. “Tara told me that you suddenly had to deal with some shit.”

“Wait, what?”

“Tara. Tara Maclay. She works with me at Ruston.”

“Oh, right.”

Another awkward moment of silence.

“Your ex-girlfriend, right?” Daniela asks unexpectedly.

“What?”

“Your ex-girlfriend. The shit you had to deal with tonight.”

“Oh, uh…”

“No point in lying, Ellie.” Daniela shrugged. “Tara already told me the gist.”

“Oh. What did she say exactly?”

“Not much. Said that you needed to help deal with something for someone you both know. She didn’t tell me exactly that it was your ex-girlfriend, but it was pretty obvious. I read between the lines.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah.”

“She really shouldn’t have told you all that.”

“She was ranting to another co-worker and I overheard your name and I was curious.” Daniela shrugged again, unabashed.

Another awkward moment of silence.

“So you still into your ex or something, Ellie?” Daniela spoke up again.

“She’s not really my ex-girlfriend.”

“Whatever.”

Another awkward moment of silence.

“Well?” Daniela asked.

“It’s kind of complicated.”

“That’s just the bullshit way of saying yes,” Daniela rolled her eyes. “Doesn’t matter if she’s your ‘ex’ or whatever.”

“Look, Daniela—”

“I know we aren’t serious or whatever, but I don’t really feel like dealing with someone else’s ex drama.”

“There’s no drama. I don’t even speak to her anymore.”

“And yet you ditched me to go and help her out with something earlier.”

“It’s not like that. And it was also an emergency.”

“So you said.”

Ellie wasn’t sure why she felt the need to explain herself to a girl she barely knew. Part of her felt compelled to do so as if she could continue to actively ignore her feelings by saying these things out loud.

Another awkward moment of silence.

“God, you’re such an asshole fuckboy, Ellie.”

“Hey, what the fuck—”

“You know that you can get girls and do, but you just like to fuck around with them and play with their feelings.”

“Alright, first of all, you said yourself that we’re nothing serious. We’ve barely even done anything.” Ellie said defensively. “Second, I literally just said that I don’t even talk to her anymore! Not even tonight!”

Ellie scoffed as Daniela rolled her eyes once more.

“Look,” Ellie continued through gritted teeth. “I’m sorry that I was late tonight. And I get it if your feelings are hurt. But nothing’s happening between me and my ex.”

“You just said that she wasn’t your ex.”

“Sh-she’s— she’s not, she’s—”

“Yeah, yeah,” Daniela muttered as stood up from her bed. “At this point, I’m over it, and I really don’t give a fuck anymore. You’re hot and all, Ellie. But this is not worth it.”

She popped an AirPod in her ear once more and sauntered over to the door.

“Word of advice. Figure out your feelings for this ‘ex’ of yours and decide if you actually wanna be with her or not before getting involved with anyone else. Nobody deserves that hanging over their head, especially when you’re so clearly still in love with her.”

And with that, Daniela opened the door and peered at her expectantly. Ellie took the hint and walked towards her direction and through the doorway. Before Ellie could fully turn around and give any parting words, Daniela shut the door in her face.

Present

Ellie collapses onto her bed next to Joel’s old motorcycle jacket. She pulls her phone out again, contemplating calling Jesse and Dina once more. But realizing they’ll probably call her if they have anything important that they feel she needs to know, she drops the phone down to her side in defeat.

She continues to lay in her bed for a while, stewing in her unresolved feelings with nobody to confide in. Closing her eyes, her mind begins to race against her will with reminders of the path life led her down after you.

First was Marisol. Less than two months into sophomore year of college, Jesse and Dina were completely aghast to see Ellie walking around campus with a girl they’d never seen her with before. She was in Ellie’s Aerospace Engineering class, and Ellie had claimed to have had an eye on her since last year. Jesse and Dina watched helplessly as their friend flaunted her new girlfriend around everywhere for the next couple of months.

Ellie wasn’t initially sure what it was that attracted her to Marisol in the first place. She was naturally beautiful with her long, black hair and slender figure, and she was the textbook definition of a perfect girlfriend. It took two and a half months of overly extravagant dates and bouquets of Marisol’s favourite flowers and late nights spent at her dorm room for Ellie to understand what it was about Marisol that she was drawn to: it was her eyes. Down to the specks in her irises and how her eyelids curved, Marisol’s eyes resembled yours far too well. After coming to this harrowing realization, Ellie quickly broke things off with her tactlessly and with a half-assed, mostly untrue justification.

The next was Luz who she had met during her near-daily workouts at the gym with Jesse. Ellie spent several autumn weeks with them, allowing Luz to whisk her about to different parties with different groups of friends every weekend. But one fateful night when they had dragged Ellie to a party at the same Sigma Eta frat house where you’d both first met, a bad acid trip cemented the end of her time with Luz.

As Ellie’s dilated pupils focused intensely on Luz’s black boots, a pair very similar to your favourites, she felt a sensation begin to roughly tug at something inside her. From her spot on the living room couch, her eyes darted up to a spot by the wall where a small group of partygoers were congregating. She zeroed in on a random girl she’d never seen before whose multi-coloured features, as a result of LSD brain fog, began to morph into those of someone she was desperately trying to forget.

Once the last parts of the stranger’s face had fully formed to impersonate yours, she abruptly stood up from her slouched position on the couch, muttered an excuse to Luz about using the bathroom, and desperately begged Jesse to come pick her up immediately. After Jesse helped her click on her seatbelt in the passenger seat with a tight-lipped expression where he fought the urge to remind her of the significance of this house, Ellie never looked back and swore never to trip on acid again, subsequently ghosting Luz after that night.

A couple of weeks before winter break, she met a sweet and quiet girl named Simi. They met through a dating app during one of Ellie’s crossfaded swiping sprees at 2 in the morning. Ellie’s affair with her was extremely short-lived, ending things with her a day before everyone left campus to head home for the holidays. While spending the day hanging out at Simi’s dorm room as her new girlfriend packed for her trip home, Ellie suddenly and unfairly started a fight with her after Simi had begun to mindlessly sing the song “Merry Christmas Darling” under her breath.

Ellie had unkindly demanded for her to “shut up” immediately, understandably hurting Simi’s feelings. The fight was short and confusing, as Ellie had refused to elaborate on her sudden explosion. As she unceremoniously marched out of the dorm room, Ellie aggressively tried to suppress memories of you singing that same Carpenters song on a loop all of December of the previous year. You’d claimed you couldn’t get it out of your head and needed to sing it out loud at least fifty times a day so you could stop thinking about it. Though Ellie had playfully cussed you out and thrown several pillows at you on multiple occasions, that song now belonged to you forever and nobody else.

After Simi were strings of countless others, some who had used Ellie as their brief college lesbian experience and many whose names Ellie would never be able to recall. She never hooked up with the same person more than twice, never actually took another one out for an actual date until Daniela.

Ellie had found Daniela incredibly pretty when she’d first laid eyes on her on a warm September afternoon earlier in the year. She was lounging on the quad as Dina did her homework and Jesse lazily strummed his guitar when a group of freshmen walked by. Ellie hadn’t spared them a glance until one of the girls approached her, all shy and giggly, and said that one of her friends found Ellie very cute. After pointing Daniela out and asking for her number, Ellie shrugged and relented. She ignored Dina and Jesse’s identical judgmental looks and eye-rolls in her peripheral vision.

Ellie enjoyed the undivided attention of someone completely enamoured by her. Daniela was constantly responsive, did whatever Ellie wanted to do, and was always so eager to please her. Ellie’d bring her to the movies, go on long drives with her in her Jeep, take her to whatever restaurants she’d want to eat at.

To anyone who keenly observed when they were together, it was quite obvious who was far more invested between the two. Despite spending an ample amount of time with her in the past month or so, Ellie continued to keep Daniela at arm’s length. On multiple occasions when Ellie’d convinced Jesse and Dina to allow Daniela to accompany them, the long-time couple would watch how disconnected their friend was from this new girl she’d been seeing.

Dina would constantly give Jesse a raised eyebrow look that silently would ask, “Is she really serious?” to which Jesse would give her a tight-lipped, wordless grimace that replied with “We both know she’s a fucking dumbass.” They both placed bets on when exactly Ellie would eventually ditch this new girlfriend.

Unbeknownst to them, it’s Ellie who was so easily discarded this time around. Feeling so unmoved and unaffected about the split with Daniela, Ellie tries to feel some kind of guilt over her lack of reciprocation. It’s her own actions, after all, that landed her dumped in the first place. She’s never fully seen Daniela as an actual girlfriend, and she knows full well that she shouldn’t have strung her along.

But as she continues to lay in her bed, ocean green eyes shut and a hand woven through her auburn locks, she thinks of only you.

Ellie can’t remember a single moment in her life when she’s felt more in need of another person’s company than she does at this very moment. Unable to trouble Dina to be her listening ear as she always is or bother Jesse to bluntly set her straight as usual, she feels the loneliness of the gloomy, dark room creep into her guilty conscience.

Her fingers begin to mindlessly search her bedsheets as she continues to stare at her decrepit bedroom ceiling, seeking for her silver joint box that had fallen out of her pocket when she’d collapsed on her bed. Instead of the feel of cold metal, her hand comes across something smooth and warm. Pulling the brown leather jacket up to her face, Ellie’s mind murmurs a single word.

Joel.

She pulls her phone out to search for her father’s face within her favourite contacts. She hesitates for a moment but pushes herself to call.

Joel picks up after only two rings.

“Ellie? Jesus, kiddo, what the hell time is it?”

“Hello to you too, old man.” Ellie chuckles.

“Everythin’ alright?” Joel’s voice asks, tired but urgent.

“Y-yeah. Yeah, I guess.”

Ellie can almost hear her father sitting up straight in bed.

“What’s wrong, Ellie?”

“I-I…” She stutters. “Joel…”

With a whimpering tone, she suddenly recounts the night’s events in complete detail. Joel listens attentively, only ever interrupting with sharp intakes of breath and hushed, imperceptible asides. After listening to his daughter’s sorrowful spiel, he finally speaks.

“Oh, baby girl…” Joel utters. “I truly am sorry. It’s been a real rough night for all of y’all.”

“Yeah…”

“That poor kid… I’m glad she had you three lookin’ out for her tonight.”

Ellie says nothing to this, pursing her lips.

“How about you, Ellie?” Joel continues. “How are you feelin’ after everythin’ that’s happened?”

“I-I’m not really sure. I’m not sure I know how to feel.”

“That’s okay. You don’t have to just yet. It just happened and all.”

“All I feel is so much fucking guilt, Joel. It feels like my mind is empty but overflowing all at the same time. I feel so motherfucking powerless and I don’t know what to do.”

There’s a moment of silence before her father speaks again.

“You given any thought to the conversation we had before you left for school, kiddo?”

Last August: Jackson

Ellie’s bedroom was full of boxes and bags packed with everything she planned to bring to college for her junior year. The space was slightly more barren, closet mostly empty and trinkets missing from her shelves. It was only a couple more days before she, Dina, and Jesse would be making their journey back to their university, and she was uncharacteristically ahead of schedule.

Leaning against her desk with a box full of comic books on the floor next to her, she was casually perusing an old graphic novel when Joel appeared in her open doorway.

“Knock, knock.”

“The door’s open, old man. Also, you can literally just walk in, you know.”

“Who raised you to have so much cheek against your elders, kid?”

“You, dude.”

The pair smirked at each other’s smart-mouthed retorts.

“Need any help packin’ up?”

“Nah. It’s pretty much done except for a handful of essentials.”

“Including that book you’re holdin’ right now?”

“Like I said: essentials.”

Joel chuckled.

“Well, the Changs sent over some dinner for us, if you want some. Wisa made K-kaw… Khao Tom Pa… no, Plah…” Joel stuttered, making an effort to pronounce the Thai dish correctly. “Khao Tom Plah, that’s it. She brought some over earlier, thought we might want some. She even made it without the prawns, just the way you like it.”

“Sick. She’s the best. I’ll text Jesse later to thank her.”

“Good.”

Joel lingered as Ellie went back to reading her comic, wistfully looking around his daughter’s nearly vacated bedroom. His eyes fell on a small box sitting at the foot of Ellie’s bed. It was an ordinary, cardboard box just as the others were, except it was heavily sealed with multiple layers of silver duct tape. He frowned.

“Still plannin’ on bringin’ that box?”

“What do you mean?” Ellie asked, knowing exactly what her father was referring to without looking up.

“You know you can just leave it here at home, right? It ain’t like I go through your doohickeys when you ain’t here.”

“So you do go through my shit when I am here?”

“Ellie.”

“What?”

“Why the hell are you doing this to yourself, kid?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“We’ve been having this same conversation for the past year now.”

Ellie finally peeled her eyes away from her graphic novel, tossing it on the desk behind her and crossing her arms.

“You’re the one who keeps bringing it up, Joel.”

“I bring it up because I know that you ain’t been talkin’ about these feelings with anyone. Not me or Jesse or Dina. It’s been a year since you ditched that poor girl, and you’re still sulkin’ over it.”

“She ditched me.”

“Hold your horses; we both know that ain’t true.”

“What do you want from me, old man?”

“I want you to be happy, kiddo.”

“What makes you think I’m not happy?”

“Now, don’t try to bullshit me. You can grumble and deny it ‘til the cows come home, but even after all this time, all you ever do is brood and pine after that girl. Plain as day to anyone. You ain’t been the same since y’all broke up.”

“We weren’t together.”

“Yes, you were.”

Joel ignored his daughter’s subsequent eye-roll before continuing.

“You still have the box, Ellie.”

“I just forgot I even had it.”

“And yet, you’re bringin’ it to school with you, just like you did last year. Why?”

“It was just in my closet stuffed in with all this other shit I don’t touch. Had to take it out while I was packing.”

“That ain’t amount to a hill o’ beans. And you still ain’t answer my question.”

“Sorry, dude.”

“Ellie. You and I would down to Beacon Run all the damn time back when you were growin’ up. You used to beg me to go for dinner whenever you had a hankerin’ to order that cheesy crab dip with all those chips and jalapeños and such.”

Ellie raised her eyebrow, unsure where her father was going with this.

“Then all of a sudden, a few years ago, you seemed to hate the place. You’ll maybe get a plate of fries and nothin’ else. Matter of fact, I can’t, for the life of me, recall the last time I’ve seen you eat a plate of seafood with any kind of shellfish in it.”

Joel’s greying eyes pierced Ellie’s ocean green.

“Two years.” He continued. “It’s been two years. You almost never eat any kind of seafood no more, and even the Changs never cook us anythin’ that has shrimps or scallops or anythin’ of the like.”

Joel watched as his daughter stubbornly struggled to justify herself. He sighed sadly.

“I wish you’d let yourself be happy, Ellie. You could be.”

“That so? How do you figure that?”

“First step is admitting exactly what is clear as day to everyone around you.”

“Oh, yeah? And what is that?”

Present Day

“J-Joel… I-I…” Ellie sobs. “I love her.”

“I know, baby girl.”

Joel helplessly listens to his daughter’s desperate weeping from the other end of the line.

“So,” He eventually asks in between her snivels. “What now?”

“It doesn’t matter.” She sniffs.

“Kiddo, why do you think your feelings don’t matter?”

“Because relationships do not work for me. Love doesn’t work for me.”

“Your relationship with her didn’t work. Past tense. It’s been years. It was a tough situation. You’re a different person now.” Joel clarifies. “And there’s plenty love ‘round you, kiddo. You got a lotta love in your life. I need you t’realize that.”

“Except I-I’m not a different person, Joel. I-I am just an older, slightly more experienced version of myself. I-I…” Ellie stutters. “I’m afraid.”

“Of course you are, kid. It’s only natural.” Joel replies. “But you can’t live your whole life closed off from the rest of the world. You need and deserve love, Ellie.”

“Except I don’t, Joel! I fucking don’t!” She cries. “God, y-you just, you just don’t understand!”

“What don’t I understand?”

“She almost fucking died!” Ellie nearly screams.

A silence falls between the two, only broken by Ellie’s hot and angry tears noisily dropping onto the old leather jacket. She grips it tightly in one hand before continuing.

“I-if… if none of it happened… if I d-didn’t do all that to h-her all those years ago…” She stutters between shaky lips. “M-maybe she wouldn’t be where she is now. She wouldn’t have gone on a date w-with someone who didn’t know about…”

Ellie chokes back a sob.

“I-I… I would have known. I would have t-taken care of her. I would never have—”

“Ellie.”

“She needed me, and I… I let her down. Not just tonight. All those years ago. I couldn’t be what she needed. I fucking failed her.”

“It’s not that simple, kid.”

“Yes, it is! Her cousin fucking died! He was her whole fucking world, and she loved him more than anything, and he fucking died and I… I ran. I abandoned her.”

The blurry memory of your sleeping figure in the passenger seat of Ellie’s Jeep appears in front of her, wrapped up cozily in her flannel as she drives you home from Jackson and naive to what lies ahead.

“I know… I know what I’m capable of, Joel. I loved her so much all those years ago and… I still hurt her. I hurt her so fucking badly.”

Your image transforms to one of you awake and livid, Ellie’s flannel torn off and tears streaming down your face. Anger and betrayal are etched all over your face, just like they were all those years ago. The shame she’d felt back then is incomparable to what she feels now.

“I don’t ever want to do that to her again, ever. I just can’t. I won’t.”

Joel sighs deeply before finally speaking.

“Ellie. That fear is always gonna be there. But you’re young, and we make plenty of mistakes in our youth. God knows how much of my past I used to regret.”

Ellie takes deep breaths as her father continues to speak.

“Everythin’ that happened tonight? None of it was your fault. In fact, I reckon you’re the reason she’s still livin’ and breathin’ right now. I’m proud of you for that.”

“All I did was—”

“All you did was save her life.”

Ellie sniffles but doesn’t respond.

“Look, kiddo,” Joel continues. “As someone who has known you for a very long time, I know how much of a good heart you got. You’re a lovin’ person who deserves love. I wish you could believe that.”

The sound of people entering through the front door echoes all around the empty apartment, but Ellie hears nothing else but the sound of her own agonized sobs.

author’s notes:

belle posting TWO chapters of ncty within less than two weeks of each other??? what is this, may 2023???

saury for not posting this right away like promised yesterday, like i said, going thru some shit rn! but i hope y'all enjoyed regardless ♥︎

i'll give you a kiss on the mouth if you guess the bollywood movie i vaguely reference at the beginning of the chapter :)

the idea of reader being allergic to shellfish and going into anaphylactic shock came to me one day a while back when i was eating something with shrimp and randomly remembered that i am very allergic to shellfish and instead of being like, "i should go take some medicine immediately", i thought, "hmm this would be a wild plot point for ncty" LMFAOOOO

anyway, this is your reminder that if you have an epipen, don't be stupid, bring that shit with you wherever you go sldkfjsdl

the more of jesse that i include in this series, the more i enjoy writing him. he's such a fun character to write hehe

i thought having abby sipping on some hot, black coffee when ellie fucking canonically hates coffee was so hilarious, i pat myself on the fucking back for that one

yes i also pat myself on the back for the line regarding ellie's ocean green eyes and abby's sky blue ones. i fucking love parallels and symbolism. i'm a whore for them, in fact.

btw dina doesn't respond to ellie's phone call bc her phone died (prob from facetiming ellie for that long earlier in the night) and idk, jesse's either not paying attention or being petty LMFAO

the reappearance of barbie bearrrrr, my babyyyy. idk if y'all remember, but yes, barbie bear is a reference to the actual stuffed pink bear i sleep with every night named barbie. i had planned since chapter 4 (which is the chapter barbie bear is first mentioned) for ellie to have had her this whole time because i'm a fucking lunatic LOL

i mentioned in the author's notes section of the last chapter how reader's letterwriting hobby is inspired by me irl cause i do that all the time for friends, but reader's letter in this chapter is actually loosely based on a letter that soulmate ex wrote me, it's not word for word exactly, i altered it a bit to fit the story better, but it's very close because i'm INSANE, anyway

yes "i think i love you again" is on my playlist about my ex-girlfriend and "merry christmas darling" is on his playlist for me, go away

ellie's clear aversion to taylor swift is both a reference to a previous chapter where jesse subtly mentions her dislike for her and also to my personal belief that ellie really would not like her as a person or an artist at all irl lmfao

the names of all of ellie's ex gfs or whatever are inspired by something very specific but that's another heehee secret trivia that nobody else but me will ever know about (let's be real, i'll prob tell star later LOL)

i named jesse's mom after one of my fave co-workers hehe (and the dish she makes for them is thai bc my co-worker is from thailand)

ellie's declaration of love about reader that she makes to joel has also been a long time planned now, idk why i knew it was gonna be chapter 13 when i did it, but i just knew it was. it was always the plan for her to confess it out loud to joel first, above anyone else

the final conversation between ellie and joel is heavily inspired by a scene from one of my fave tv shows, crazy ex-girlfriend. the scene makes me bawl every time i watch it. please watch crazy ex-girlfriend. so good.

we really are thirteen chapters into this series, huh? crazy. anyway, love y'all. <3

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tigris-types · 1 year

Text

Analyzing School Across the Street Lyrics

So the new shadow high song. I love it, I've listened ot it idk how many times, bit I think the lyrics are interesting, especially considering the students singing it.

From a brand perspective, Shadow High is a part of the Rainbow High universe and it makes since that they would start their song with: "Tell me who are those kids in the school across the street". Shadow High is the other school that is cloaked in mystery, so its a good question to ask. Who are the other kids?

But from a character standpoint, I don't think it makes sense as an in universe song. The song starts with "Tell me who are those kids in the school across the street" and then soon says "Everyone so perfect and so neat, from the bougie school across the street".

Now these two lines are very similar and draw a connection between the two schools. And while watching the music video makes it clear the first "school across the street" is Shadow High and the bougie school is implied to be Rainbow High, without the visuals, both "school[s] across the street" could be interpreted as the same school. Sure, they make this distinction clear with the next line of "they all dress so fly but underneath - they want to be like us".

So clearly the singers are not from the "bougie school across the street", but then where are they from? We know that Rainbow High and Shadow High are rival schools, but seeing how the Storm twins had to drive to Rainbow High for pranks, I doubt the schools are literally across the street.

As the song goes on, the kids from the "bougie school" want one of the singers to take them shopping, they admire the singers' style, and are jealous of the singers' style. Then the chorus kicks in again about the "cookie cutter clean" appearance of the "bougie school" students, we get some fa la la's, and the line "they want to be like us".

But who is "us"? Clearly the singers, but what has this song told us about the singers?

According to the song, the singers have a negative opinion if the bougie school and are presenting themselves as having a better grasp on personal style and reality than the bougie school. They aren't "cookie cutter clean". They tell it like it is and they make mistakes, they're messy, but that's what makes them better.

And so then, "Who are the kids from the school across the street?" Well, based on the music and the visuals, this line is referring to the Shadow High students. But it could also be interpreted as asking about the Rainbow High students. And if we were to take that route, what does this song tell us about them?

The students from the bougie school have a "fly" sense of syle. They are jealous of the singers and may even feel resentment because "underneath" their "clean and neat" exterior they want to be like the singers but they can't. Since they "always try to copy", these students are unoriginal and are likely plagiarizers. Finally, because these students are from a "bougie" school we can infer that they likely seeking to appear to be more than they actually are and are probably pretty shallow. They are concerned more with their "perfect" appearance and are chasing an authentic style they can't replicate. "They want to be like [the singers]", but they cant because they aren't.

So when the song asks "Tell me who are those kids from the school across the street", I can answer it with how Shaodw High precives Rainbow High. Which is strange right? I should be able to say who the Shadow High kids are. I can infer that they are the opposite if Rainbow High, but they still don't really tell me anything.

Which is why I think this song doesn't make sense in universe. If the Shadow High students want to separate themselves from Rainbow High, why would they sing a song about the rivalry between the two schools? I understand that their motivation is to raise themselves above Rainbow High, but most of this song is the chorus where they're putting down Rainbow High. They mention the "bougie school" more times then themselves, so if anything, this is just an insult song about Rainbow High. Which tbh does seem like a Shadow High thing to do, but you don't put yourself on a pedestal by kicking others off of it.

So in conclusion, it's a good song. I like it and I've listened to it tons, but I'm not sure it would serve the in-universe goal the Shadow High students would want.

Also, the disorted "fasion" at the end is not music to my ears and I think they could have cut it.

#rainbow high #shadow high

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makeste · 3 years

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BnHA Chapter 318: On Your Left

Previously on BnHA: The Hawksquad+Lurkers were all “well this sucks” and sat around a bit talking about how maybe they should actually come up with a new plan that is actually good, but then in the end they were like “nah.” Deku was all, “THERE’S SOMETHING INSIDE ME THAT PULLS BENEATH THE SURFACE!! CONSUMING, CONFUSING!! THIS LACK OF SELF CONTROL I FEAR IS NEVERENDING. IT’S HAUNTING HOW I CANT SEEM TO FIND MYSELF AGAIN. MY WALLS ARE CLOSING IN.” Just, literally that whole entire song. All Might was all “Deku you should take care of yourself, try eating a thing,” and Deku was all “BYE, ALL MIGHT,” and just LEFT. He left!!! What the fuck!!!

Today on BnHA: Endeavor is all, “maybe if Deku didn’t listen to All Might he’ll listen to me instead.” Deku is all, “[doesn’t listen to Endeavor]” because, well, yeah. The Vestiges are all, “surprisingly, even we are a little concerned -- maybe you should get some rest, kid.” Deku is all, “((Ò ‸ Ó)).” The Vestiges are all, “holy shit.” Deku is all, “[wanders the ruined city streets terrifying the populace on account of him looking like Shelob had a baby with one of the Nazgul].” Some shriveled-up puppeteer villain asshole is all, “HORIKOSHI SAID IT’S MY TURN TO ATTACK DEKU TODAY SO I AM GOING TO SUMMON MY FRIGHTENED HELPLESS ATTACK MOB!!” Kacchan is all “WHADDYA MEAN THEY FOUND THE NERD!!! -- oh wait, that’s me, I found him. I found the nerd, you guys.” And just in time, too. I was about to owe a whole lot of people a whole lot of dollars.

so I have been super good about spoilers this week as always, but let me tell you guys, for the past 36 hours my dash filters have basically been nonstop “manga spoilers” this and “bnha 318” that, and so I’m coming in with a fair amount of hype here. your move, Horikoshi

oh, good! they got Endeavor to call Deku to try to talk him out of it. what a great and wonderful plan

“listen up kid, you haven’t slept since March and you are basically a walking biohazard right now, I’m just telling it like it is. didn’t you get shot like three times?? and there was a whole thing about how you urgently needed medical attention?? and supposedly we gave it to you, but I mean you haven’t even changed your clothes and don’t seem to have any fresh bandages or anything, so did we?? did we, really?? and also we all got blown up yesterday, so yeah.” hmm he’s making some reasonable points here you guys, but you sure do go on and on, Endeavor

oh he says foreign aid is finally on its way! I’m sure they’ll be very helpful. I mean in fairness they can hardly be worse than the home-grown heroes at this point

hey Enji, could you maybe try appealing to Deku the sixteen-year-old human boy, as opposed to Deku The World’s Last Hope? he does have value beyond his quirk. I know that’s always been an incredibly difficult concept for you to grasp, but could you maybe TRY, jesus

and also we’re worried about you as a person?? you’re just a kid and you’re pushing yourself way too hard?? you were going to say that part next, right. why the hell didn’t Hawks make this call instead

“don’t worry about me... I’m completely fine” Deku you do understand that saying it over and over again doesn’t actually make it true

and again with the rush!! all the rush rush rush!! we’re running out of time, we can’t let AFO and Tomura keep getting stronger, I have to end this now, there’s no time to rest, etc. etc. etc. just the constant pressure of this whole big countdown on top of everything else

holy shit, you KNOW it’s bad when even the Vestiges are telling him to chill

these guys are basically the walking talking embodiments of self-sacrifice; if even they’re telling him he needs to take five, then he must seriously be like half a step away from death’s door

OH SHIT LMAO

DIDN’T EVEN LET HIM FINISH HIS SENTENCE BEFORE HE SENT HIM INTO THE FUCKING SHADOW REALM WITH THAT FUCKING LOOK. HOLY FUCK. DIDN’T EVEN KNOW IT WAS POSSIBLE TO DIE TWICE. SHIT

(ETA: so I’m pretty sure this was just Danger Sense activating and so he cut them off to go do more hero stuff, but I’m gonna go ahead and stick to my original interpretation anyway lol.)

anyway so how’s everybody doing. we all good? En, you good? Banjou? Shino? I’m imagining you guys all curled up in a little ball on the floor right now lol. can’t say I blame you though, no shame

lmaoooooooooooo

“SHEESH.” sheesh indeed, lmao. “what in the FUCK was that”

see, this is why y’all need Kacchan. you need someone who’s not going to back down from him no matter what. if it’s a matter of out-stubborning Midoriya fucking Izuku, then there’s only one other person on the planet capable of that, and we all know it. don’t pretend like you don’t. I am not going to shut up about this! we’ve had our hurt so now what about SOME COMFORT, DAMMIT

“I’m afraid that he’s becoming influenced by my conscience” nah are you kidding Nana this is all 100% made-in-Japan pure original Deku right here

see, Banjou gets it. “that kid, he’s totally going on his own.” exactly. this was so inevitable it was basically scientific law

“well I for one don’t see the problem with Deku being so obsessed with saving everyone else that he pushes himself until his body and soul literally fall apart” okay, whose speech bubbles are these?? we’re about to have words

lol of course

well you always did prefer the direct route didn’t you. but even you can’t possibly think this is okay lol

dark AU!Kacchan please tell us more about your badass doomed timeline in which everything went to shit and you apparently had the same character arc that Deku is having right now except it somehow made you sexier instead of turning you into a rabid t-rex. I have so many questions

oh so now you want to help??? well -- good, actually. sorry if that sounded offended just now lol

(ETA: so at first when I got to the end of this chapter I was wondering if Katsuki B. had somehow summoned his alternate-universe counterpart through trippy OFA space telepathy lol. but in the original Japanese there’s no reference to “we”, so this appears to be a mistranslation. this line should probably read more like “if there’s something/someone out there that would be able to complement/complete the current Midoriya Izuku [it would be]…” which, oh hello, is that Horikoshi once again reaffirming that Deku and Bakugou complete each other lol. “guess what guys, the Vestiges ship it too" heck yeah. they know what’s up!)

look how admiring his boyfriends are. HORIKOSHI GIVE US THE REST OF THIS BACKSTORY ALREADY GODDAMMIT

“meanwhile somewhere in the depths of the ruined city, Deku was having a dance-off with the villains”

I like how the villains all have this “AHH WHAT THE FUCK” kind of body language to them lol. I mean if it were me, and an eldritch horror suddenly clawed its way from the shadows with its writhing glowy tentacles and pants-shitting nuclear death stare, I would probably just die on the spot. no need to stick around. only pain awaits

lol for a minute I thought this was Can’t Ya See-kun and I was like “WHAT A FASCINATING CROSSING OF PATHS” but it’s just some random girl

he seems genuinely confused lol

Deku it’s because you look like something that crawled out of a sewer drain, sweetheart

lol they just took his word for it?

so trusting. even though they’re immediately hauling ass anyway just to be safe lmao

“my appearance is frightening to others” no shit Deku it’s because you look like a fucking alien exorcism. you look like a Lich that got caught up in an oil spill my dude

NO NOT THE CHOSEN ONE ANGST AGAIN

I RAN OUT OF ESSAY JUICE FOR THIS ALREADY HORIKOSHI!! I’VE BEEN TALKING ABOUT IT FOR MONTHS NOW WHAT TOOK YOU SO LONG!! BUT ANYWAYS, GOOD!! I MEAN, BAD, THOUGH, OBVIOUSLY. BUT YES

“ENJOY THIS MONTAGE OF DEKU BATTLING A RANDOM KAIJU AND WANDERING THE WOODS LIKE A DERANGED GREEN BABA YAGA” okay yes but sir, exactly how much longer is this going to go on. if it’s a matter of you wanting to make sure we get it, let me assure you that aside from a few stray chuunis who think that Deku embracing the Darkness is the coolest thing he’s ever done, all of us here in fandom fully comprehend that this is Not Good

-- OH SO IT’S LIKE THAT

really. with the flashbacks to his loved ones’ smiling faces and everything. not even gonna try to aim above the belt, huh

AND NO KACCHAN??! NO CLASSMATES?!?! IS HE PURPOSELY NOT THINKING OF THEM??? OR ARE THEY BEING SAVED FOR THE NEXT PAGE??? SO HELP ME, IF THE NEXT PART OF THIS SENTENCE IS “CAN PROTECT THEM”, OR EVEN WORSE, “CAN SEE THEIR SMILING FACES AGAIN”, I...

WHAT DID I JUST SAY

(ETA: my man did Sero and Kaminari fucking dirty lmao. I miss their smiling faces too omg.)

the sheer, unparalleled irony of him saying this while he stands there looking like the gargoyle demon from Fantasia got crossed with an umbrella that got struck by lightning. Deku :(

oi who the fuck is this clown

is he controlling this mob with his evil hair. “what if I made an exhausted, running-on-fumes Deku battle a brainwashed mob at Ground Zero.” Horikoshi do you just have like a checklist of horrible things you want to do to your protagonist

easy there Sasori

well joke’s on you buddy because he’s apparently “completely fine”, so

“here’s to hoping that you know more about AFO’s location than the others” jesus christ Deku you really have hung your mercy out to dry huh

now he’s forcing his mob of terrified prisoners to attack Deku ahhhh. sucks to be them. at least they’re not being controlled by bees

so Deku is saying that Sasori’s control can be broken with “physical trauma.” similar to Shinsou’s quirk I guess. but so does that mean he’s gonna have to hurt them? ( •﹏•)

NO NOT MORE SAD EYES

“DEATH BY EMPATHY!!!” HORIKOSHI NO

fuck. he looks like he’s on the verge of passing out

this is what happens when you nerf a character’s self-preservation stats in favor of spamming their bone-breaking stats instead. NOW ACCEPTING BRAIN CELL DONATIONS FOR A BOY IN NEED!! with your loving generosity we can hopefully help him live to the ripe old age of seventeen

OMGFGGG

YESSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS

[grabs your hands] ლ(*꒪ヮ꒪*)ლ [swings you in a circle] へ(ﾟ◇ﾟへ)

THASSSSSSSS WHATSSSSSSS UPPPPPPPPPP

HORIKOSHI REALLY SAID FUCK THAT MASK (ノ°ο°)ノ YOU FINALLY LEARNED!! IT’S CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT!!!!

JUST FOR YOU KACCHAN, HORIKOSHI LEFT THIS ONE BAD GUY WHO’S STILL WEAK TO FIRE. GOD BLESS

IT’S YOUR COUNTERPART, KATSUKI B!!!! HOW WE DOIN OVER THERE IN THE TRIPPY COSMIC OFA SPACE REALM LOL. DO WE BELIEVE YET, FANDOM???

LIGHTS!!!!

INSTANT RESULTS!!! IT’S SUPER EFFECTIVE!!!

(ETA: imagine what this must look like to Deku though. he’s been caught up in this dark cloud of despair and exhaustion that’s been building up over... I’m gonna go ahead and say “weeks”, because yeah. and now he finds himself here, in the place where All Might’s legacy ended and the torch was passed to him. and the world is in ruins, and he’s surrounded by frightened people who are all trying to hurt him -- because who isn’t trying to hurt him, these days -- and he’s scrambling to figure this all out, but meanwhile the weariness is finally starting to catch up to him, and so he’s basically just standing there in a fog of complete and utter misery.

and then all of a sudden through that haze, he hears the one voice that’s more familiar than any other that he knows. like, I honestly wouldn’t be surprised if he thought he was just imagining it at first. Kacchan showing up to save him right when he’s at his most desperate and feeling the most alone. Kacchan, showing up to save him.

this is the person he always looked up to as a child (to be fair he was quite a strange child lmao). the person who was even closer to him than All Might. the person he always thought was amazing. and bam, here he is now. appearing in the sky out of nowhere to one-shot the bad guy with a single blast (which, btw, that was his armor-piercing attack too lmao dslkjlk take it easy there kiddo). like, that must have felt absolutely surreal to him, especially coming at a time when he’s already half-delirious and barely hanging on to reality. he must have really thought that he was losing it there for a second.

but he’s really there. it really is him. and for this brief moment -- before the rest of the situation catches up to him, and he remembers about all of the fucked-up AFO stuff, and remembers why he was so afraid and why he was pushing everyone away -- for just this one brief moment, he’s too exhausted and stunned to do anything except to just react. just stands there, looking up at him in awe.

and you know, it almost reminds me of...

just. you guys. the character development. the freaking character development. someone who brings reassurance. someone who shows up and makes you think, “oh, it’s all going to be okay now, because [person] is here.” the role reversals. the growth. the payoff!! because who is the one person who always had faith that Kacchan would one day grow up to become an amazing hero like that. WHO IS IT. YOU ALREADY KNOW.

omg. anyways, bless you Horikoshi, my feels which have been on backorder since fucking September have finally arrived lmao. yes, good, thank you. worth the wait. it is always, always worth the wait. fuck yeah.)

“LOWFRIES” SO YOU’RE TELLING ME THE WHOLE GANG IS HERE, AHHHHHHHH (º̩̩́⌣º̩̩̀ )

BEAUTIFUL. WONDERFUL. SENSATIONAL. I DON’T EVEN CARE THAT JUMP IS ON BREAK NEXT WEEK. THIS RIGHT HERE WILL SUSTAIN ME

#bnha 318 #midoriya izuku #BAKUGOU KATSUKI #!!!!#twowy mctwoface #bnha #boku no hero academia #bnha meta #bakudeku #bnha spoilers #mha spoilers #bnha manga spoilers #makeste reads bnha

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mean-scarlet-deceiver · 3 years

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See, whenever anyone teases the interpretation of Ex-Condor as even remotely shippy, I secretly get a bit peeved coz the story is supposed to be about culture clash. If the story was supposed to be shippy, I would have done it an entirely different way! There are so many romance tropes that could work with BoCo and Edward!

To wit...

These 2xD2 ideas are not all meant to be compatible with each other, but they are

Free to a Good Home

BoCo's class was based at Barrow MPD after their refurbishment in '62, right? And the N.W.R. main line definitely had "foreign trains" running about in this era and even sometimes needing to be banked up Gordon's Hill, yeah? Give me pre-Sodor BoCo getting teased affectionately by his friends (and not-so-affectionately by his enemies) coz he always volunteers to take trains "over the bridge." ("Someone's getting steamy for a steamie—" "Here's an idea, mind your own business.")

So if BoCo were the first of the two to internally go all "hello hello hello, what have we here?" well, then he could start doing all those Sodor runs...

Or Edward is the first to internally go all "oh. ohmyGod. HELLO THERE." And then wants to die coz he's had hopeless crushes on bigger engines before and they have never ended with anything but his heart getting shredded and when will he learn and why is he like this and—*BoCo turns out to be friendly and kind*—aaaaahhhhhh oh no this might be worse. WORSE! *thinks Edward, while floating about approximately three inches above the rails for the rest of the day*

It's mutual love at first sight but it takes them three years to do more than exchange glances in passing and pretend they're not.

OR they don't figure it out for AGES and after a couple decades Bill and freakin Ben wind up setting them up.

Alternately: Bill and Ben are oblivious and think everyone is having them on over the years when they imply that Edward and BoCo are making eyes—dating—Literally Married. How silly do the North Western engines think they are??!?!?!?!!! Hrmph.

All right, please, let's forget Bill and Ben a while. I'm begging. Put them aside completely.

Another take: in the early pre-relationship stage, due to some snafus on the line Edward and his train have to hitch a ride on BoCo's just to get a path home. Edward is really resistant to this idea, which his crew writes off as his usual pride—but it's soooo much more about "ahhh nooooooooo don't make me couple up behind my secret crush." Doesn't help that BoCo is strong enough to handle the whole thing quite on his own, and Edward just gets pulled along. At the end of the route the crew thinks Edward is just sulking but actually his "eyes closed, don't talk to me" routine has more to do with drowning in emotions and sensations and needing some space to slowly flutter on back down to earth.

Or, of course, go with Edward bailing out BoCo, who has needed this sort of help so often before, but, ahhhhh, yes, hrmmm, this is—better. Edward doesn't take the opportunity to make BoCo feel like a piece of crap. In fact he's wholeheartedly gentle...

BoCo manages to be so upbeat despite his, well, entire life, in part because he listens to all this new wave of rock 'n' roll every chance he gets. Yeah, that's right. I dragged the Beatles into this. Diesel engines do a lot of humming. BoCo's sounds suspiciously like "Can't Buy Me Love." (Really bad rhythm for a train, honestly.)

Bonus to the above: BoCo: "He'll probably think this is stupid... " Edward: *thinks BoCo is so beautiful and cute when he relaxes into the music that it is all instantly A-OK in his book and now he goes around whistling bars of BoCo's songs as well*

Seriously, one way or another, if you are doing something shippy and you don't make use of what Kips so perfectly called "Edward's iconic blushy face," you are doing it wrong.

In Main Line Engines everyone on the N.W.R. was pretty down on the idea of a diesel, right? Make it so that the crowd BoCo runs with back home all collectively disapprove of him hanging out so much on Sodor, too. Make this some Romeo and Juliet bullshit.

Except, it's only the Montague-and-Capulet tropes. Edward and BoCo are, I readily concede, pretty much the anti-Romeo and Juliet. That's the joke of it. Every time one of their rare allies suggests they do something melodramatic, they just blink. "Oh, that is a pickle. You could... um... you could fake your own death!" "I... I see a few problems with that plan." "You gotta come to the rumble!" "Ah, but, the thing is, I don't think I do..." "Lie to everyone, including the Fat Controller!" "No, in fact I think I might just go and tell the Fat Controller everything. Probably be simpler."

A bunch of diesels from Barrow and the surrounding terrain, who are connected to those who visit the island often, plan some sort of sabotage. It could even center on taking "Old Iron" out of commission. BoCo tries to stop it and winds up basically installing himself as a double-crossing secret agent to make sure things don't get out of hand. (Along The Way, He Finds Love.)

Bonus to the above: *some evil-ish diesel talking about Edward* "Yeah, was built last century, he was, Riddles alone knows why they haven't broken him up yet." "Obviously because he's too beautiful to be broken up..." "What?" "What?" BoCo: Best. Spy. Ever.

Edward requests BoCo's trial. Has to be pretty insistent before FC2 agrees, too. (The "Buzz, Buzz" express takeover was really helpful in FC2 deciding that maybe this wasn't the stupidest thing he ever let himself get talked into.)

Bonus to the above: Edward requests BoCo is the engine trialled on his line the summer of '65 and then feels ashamed at the idea that he pulled strings to get his crush there and cue massive internal conflict that hardly gives him a moment's peace the whole time.

Bonus bonus to the above: BoCo is just enjoying himself enormously.

Still pre-relationship, Edward becomes convinced that BoCo and Gordon are not merely becoming friends but a romantic item and tries to nobly bury his broken (and acidly jealous) heart. After as many stupid wrenching misses as you like, BoCo figures out the misconception and is all like "OMG. KISS ME YOU FOOL—"

Or they don't spit anything out until after Edward returns from his post-Exploit repairs and at that point they just instantly and mutually know.

Give me BoCo five years after he arrives on Sodor suffering crushing grief and survivor's guilt because he wasn't good enough for his trial to convince B.R. to rebuild the rest of his class the new engine and—and—ohhh, screw it, make your own angst! 😢

Give me Edward who has spent so long as the sympathetic listener—with the convenient side effect of keeping a sharp watch on what he himself says and not showing too much to other engines, because even in the "family" of Sodor, whenever you let yourself be vulnerable you got to be prepared for it to be used against you down the line. And then embarrassed that he finds himself "rambling on" to BoCo. But a) usually he's not so much rambling as just sort of... not censoring himself as much and b) even when he does go on BoCo indeed sometimes loses the thread but he doesn't mind because he loves just watching when Edward gets excited or indignant about something.

Right. Bill and Ben. Fine, get back in here, ya little bastards. If you want to lean into the "family" dynamic, then please, read "The Diseasel" with the context of "Edward has had a massive crush on BoCo and has been making sure they take this Indefinable Thing they have thus far slowwwwwly and he just knew BoCo would bounce when he met 'the twins,' he just knew it, but—ah! wait! can it be???? they've done their worse, and BoCo is fine with it! He knows how to just laugh at them! He doesn't appear to be scared off! ALL IS RIGHT WITH THE WORLD."

Sorry, you mean the above wasn't this picture?

#ttte shipping #ttte #ttte edward #ttte boco #*does a lot of digging among various tags*#...#edwardxboco #?#hey quick question how come ship tagging/naming practices gotta change every five years #asking for Science #... i understand completely if this is too incoherent to be understood but i am way over time budget ty for your consideration #thomas the tank engine #zzzZZzzzZZZzz #ttte plot inspiration

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dreamersscape · 3 years

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In Which I Attempt to Wreak Havoc Upon Panharmonium's Heart. Or Something.

Because I am an awesome friend, clearly, and possibly making people sad/verklempt is definitely an excellent way to (belatedly 😔 but I did start before the 15th!) celebrate Kakashi's birthday, right? ;)

I will admit up front that this is nowhere near as deftly structured and compiled as your Kakashi fanmix, @panharmonium, but that is precisely why I'm not even going to try to organize all these songs into individual playlists. Yet. Plus, I have a tendency to over-explain so this way I can better expound on why certain songs remind me of certain characters. Sorry that I sorta went a little... overboard?

Everything--except a few that aren't available on spotify, I'll link to them directly--can be listened to HERE.

What I'm Looking For - Brendan Benson | Kakashi → I may be a little biased with this one because it fits SO many of my favorite characters so well, somehow, but there's just something about the upbeat/tongue-in-cheek musical cues/delivery of lines such as 'I visit hell on a daily basis, and I see the sadness in all your faces' that just feels so Kakashi to me.

Happy Ending - MIKA | Kakashi → This is presumably a breakup song, but I enjoy it so much more in a non-romantic context (and the song itself isn't really boxed in with overtly romantic framing, so I appreciate that!). Anyway, some very important instructions IMO for listening to this with Kakashi in mind: everything before the bridge is about Kakashi up through his ANBU years, but when you get to the 'little bit of love' refrain, picture Kakashi meeting Tenzo, and then becoming Team 7's sensei, opening back up to Gai, adopting all the other leaf genin, assimilating Sai and Yamato into Team 7, and it keeps building with Kakashi gaining more and more loved ones to fill the hole in his heart, and then cry tears of joy with me! Just my personal suggestion. :D

Light - Sleeping At Last | Kakashi & Team 7 (/all his kids)

with every heartbeat I have left I will defend your every breath

→ I've seen this song used for ship vids and I'm all ????? about that because this is clearly a song about the love you have for your child! But I suppose if one of my favorite pastimes is aggressively re-interpreting love songs in non-romantic ways, I can't begrudge the opposite process... too much, lol.

Heroes - MIKA | Team Minato

your blood on me/and my blood on you/but to make you bleed/the only thing I wouldn't do/.../I wish there was a way/to give you a hand to hold/'cause you don't have to die in your glory/die, to never grow old

Long Lost Friends - Transit | Kakashi & Obito

how long/do you have to say that/this is not the person I used to know/you are not the person I used to know/.../because lately, you've been looking at me like you've seen a ghost/and isn't it obvious who's been missing who the most

→ What the heck! What the heck! What the heck! What the heck! What the heck!

Against the Voices - Switchfoot | Kakashi

'cause everybody knows/the hardest war to fight/is the fight to be yourself/when the voices try to turn you into someone else

Out of the Darkness - Matthew and the Atlas | Obito? Yamato? Kakashi? Itachi & Sasuke? Naruto & Kurama? → I'm a bit undecided about this one, or if I should just not worry about choosing one character and just let myself feel all the "inner darkness is not an innate characteristic, Danzo! They're just grieving/in a lot of pain, and they can find their way out of that dark place!" feels.

Save A Place - 1969 | Kakashi & Sasuke

so I'll keep away and save a place for you/and I'll only make the same mistakes as you/.../when all the blood all over your fingers is dried up/the pain will still linger

→ I'm not uber-confident in picking out really fitting Kakashi & Sasuke songs yet, but I hope this hits a lot of the right notes for you. :)

Thrive - Switchfoot | Kakashi

I'm always close, but I'm never enough/I'm always in line, but I'm never in love/I get so down, but I won't give up/I get so down, but I won't give up

→ See, it says right there that he's never in love! Not the crux of the song, and he's not always 'in line' either, but still! :)

Disarm - The Civil Wars | Kakashi & Obito

the years burn, burn, burn

→ I don't know how I keep collecting fictional relationships that work so well for this song, but literally every single line of this song hits so hard for these two?? Will never recover from this. (Also, I usually disregard when 'my love' pops up in the last line of the chorus, as the mood dictates. :) It's pretty incidental as is IMO.)

Renaissance - Paolo Buonvino & Skin | Sakumo & Obito & Kakashi & Naruto

let me show you one last time/let me show you one last sign/you can find it/I can't say that I can change the world/but if you let me, I can make another world for us/let me suffer all for you/make this vision all brand new/we can fight them/I can't say that I can win it all, [but] come with me and I will make my words stand tall

→ Okay, this is a very odd choice given that it's actually the theme song for a different show about the Italian renaissance (if you happen to see this, Mirjam, don't hate me!), but this could be IT! The "those who break the rules are scum, but those who would abandon their friends are worse than scum" anthem that's all about building a better world based on these principles! I really hope our sharing-a-brain talent translates to listening to this song in this way because I am feeling SOME KIND of way about this!

The Lament of Eustace Scrubb - The Oh Hellos | Kakashi → I really liked the song you chose from this album for your fanmix, so now I've feeling a tiny bit too on-the-nose with my choice, but I guess this is just a Kakashi album all around. 😆

Glass Heart Hymn - Paper Route | Kakashi(+ Obito) & Sasuke(+ Itachi)

memories as heavy as a stone/ I am empty, in my end you are my beginning

This Is Home - Switchfoot | Yamato & Kakashi (+ Team 7)

and now, after all my searching/after all my questions/I'm gonna call it home

→ All finding-where-you-belong songs are actually Yamato songs. True story!

Faust, Midas, & Myself - Switchfoot | Obito

you have one life left to leave/you have one life left to lead

→ Could this be any more perfect for Obito? It even has creepy-old-man!Madara!

Pluto - Sleeping At Last | Kakashi

Always Gold - Radical Face | Kakashi & Obito/Sasuke & Itachi/Naruto & Sasuke

all my life, I've never known where you've been/there were holes in you, the kind that I could not mend/and I heard you say, right when you left that day/does everything go away?/yeah, everything goes away/but I'm going to be here till forever/so just call when you're around

→ ...but mostly Kakashi & Obito because 'there were holes in you' 😭😭😭

Lemon Boy - Cavetown | Yamato & Kakashi → You already know the delights of this song of course, but I gots to be comprehensive. :)

Everywhere I Go - Lissie/cover by Sleeping At Last | Kakashi & Team Minato

danger will follow me now everywhere I go/angels will call on me and take me to my home/well, these tired eyes just want to remain closed

→ I chose the Sleeping At Last cover for maximum angst, 'cause sometimes it be like that.

Uneven Odds - Sleeping At Last | Kakashi

maybe your light is a seed, and the darkness the dirt, in spite of the uneven odds, beauty lifts from the earth

→ ...just like an earth style: mud wall :') Okay, okay, bad jokes aside, the seed metaphor of course makes me want to associate it with Tenzo, but this is clearly a Kakashi song!

Twenty-four - Switchfoot | Kakashi & Obito

life is not what I thought it was twenty-four hours ago/and I'm not who I thought I was twenty-four hours ago/still I'm singing spirit, take me up in arms with you/you're raising the dead in me/I wanna see miracles/to see the world change/wrestled the angel for more than a name/for more than a feeling, for more than a cause/I'm singing spirit, take me up in arms with you/and you're raising the dead in me

I'm Still Here (Jim's Theme) - John Rzeznik | Kakashi

and how can they say I never change?/they're the ones that stay the same/.../they can't tell me who to be/'cause I'm not what they see/.../and their words are just whispers/and lies that I'll never believe

→ Yeah, I might've accidentally imprinted on Treasure Planet as a 14 year old, and then someone made sure this song would forever live in my heart by making a fanvid of it with my favorite character from my robin hood show, but! He's still here!

See You Again - Wiz Khalifa (feat. Charlie Puth) | Kakashi & Obito/Team Minato

how can we not talk about family when family's all that we got?/everything I went through, you were standing there by my side/and now you gon' be with me for the last ride

→ I am being very unoriginal here, and there are in fact already fanvids made for these relationships set to this song (along with many others featuring different Naruto relationships), but I don't think I'll be able to rest until I translate the movie playing in my head whenever I hear this song now into an actually watchable format. After all, they have come a long way from where they began, and I intend to make that both as touching and ironically hilarious as possible!

Goodnight, Travel Well - The Killers | Kakashi → Admittedly, I got this idea from a magnificently crafted fanvid done for my robin hood show, but I genuinely think it would be really interesting to make something similar for Kakashi centered around the time he technically died but got better? I don't know how to explain it, but I think it fits quite well.

30 Lives - Imagine Dragons | Kakashi & all the people he's loved and lost → can be listened to here.

A Pound of Flesh - Radical Face | Kakashi

then today I wake up feeling easy/and find I'm on more familiar roads/I got a darkness wrapped inside me/but now it ain't so hard to let it go/so keep a candle burning in the window/I'm almost home

Hold Back The River - James Bay | Kakashi & life getting in the way of him being with his precious people (you may be sensing a pattern here) → @the road of life: Let! Kakashi! And his People! Hold! Each! Other!!! Also, 'tried to square not being there, but think that I should have been' is absolutely about Sasuke's defection and Kakashi adding it to his long list of undeserving self-recriminations.

The Fall - Imagine Dragons | Yamato & Kakashi → 😊😊😊😊😊😊😊

Shadowman - K's Choice | could work equally well for Kakashi or Obito, I think

any time tomorrow a part of me will die/and a new one will be born/any time tomorrow/I'll get sick of asking why/sick of all the darkness I have worn/any time tomorrow/I will try to do what's right/making sense of all I can/any time tomorrow I'll pretend to see the light/I just might/.../and doesn't it make you sad?/to see so much love denied/see nothing but a shadowman inside

Paint - The Paper Kites | Kakashi & Team 7

still there's a wound and I'm moving slow/though it don't show, though it don't show/I've got a hole where nothing grows,/how little you know, how little you know

→ A song for just how much Team 7 doesn't know about their sensei.

Always Find Me Here - Transit | Kakashi → ...most likely at the memorial stone. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ (why am I like this)

Taste - Sleeping At Last | Kakashi

it’s bittersweet, it’s poetry/a careful pruning of my dead leaves/it’s holy ground, a treasure chest/I'm on my knees and only scratch the surface/like fists unraveling, like glass unshattering/we’re breaking all the rules, we’re breaking bread again/we’re swallowing light ’til we’re fixed from the inside

Help - Hurts | Yamato & Kakashi

take my hand and lead the way/out of the darkness and into the light of the day/.../'cause I know what I've been missing/and I know that I should try/but there's hope in this admission/and there's freedom in your eyes/.../I can feel the darkness coming/and I'm afraid of myself/call my name and I'll come running/'cause I just need some help

→ NO ONE TOUCHE ME.

Your Soul - RHODES | A mish-mash of Kakashi & Tenzo and Rin & Obito & Kakashi and Gai & Kakashi vibes? → So like, 'oh you know when you're alone/I'm holding on and on and on and on/to your soul' reminded me of your 'when you're all alone...the only thing you really think about is dying' 'but when there are two of you...the only thing you can think about is surviving.' and now kakashi - who just saved his life - is asking him 'did you want to die' and yamato is saying 'no' there are two of them and yamato wants to SURVIVE. tags as well as Gai's steadfastness as a friend, and 'I just wanna hold your hand' made me think of Rin's "Well then, I'm just going to have to connect the two of you." while holding their hands, and the sunlight/'soul shine'/'your light' motif is just A Lot in this song!!

7 Years - Lukas Graham | Kakashi → Alright, yeah, there are already approximately a gazillion pre-existing Naruto AMVs for this song and even one or two focusing on Kakashi, but they don't capitalize on all the angst possibilities in many of the lyrics or reach the fluff potential of 'will I think the world is cold or will I have a lot of children who can warm me [when I'm old]' and I cannot abide that!

Putting The Dog To Sleep - The Antlers | Kakashi & Sasuke → Okay, on one hand, this song is One Big Oof. But I do like the (potentially odd) way I've conceptualized it for Kakashi & Sasuke? Like, the first half is Kakashi going through all the tragedies in his life and getting lost in ANBU, but then in the second half it transitions to him wanting to prevent Sasuke from having to be as alone as Kakashi once was and they can face life together? It makes me emotional!

Trust Me - The Fray | Kakashi & Obito

I found a friend, or should I say a foe?/said there's a few things you should know/we don't want you to see/we come, and we go/here today, gone tomorrow

→ There are a few lines that call Tenzo & Kakashi to mind, but mostly it's Obito & Kakashi.

The Lightning Strike (What If This Storm Ends?) - Snow Patrol | Kakashi → I had to, right? My mindscape is a little murky/scattered about what specifically I want to think about when I listen to this, but obviously it has to do with Kakashi in one way or another.

Kettering - The Antlers | Team Minato(???) → Honestly not sure if this will make any sense, but yeah, vague team minato vibes?

Swans - Unkle Bob | Kakashi & Obito/Rin/Minato/Kushina/Sakumo → They should be by his side always!!!

Looking Too Closely - Fink | Kakashi → I honestly feel rather ambivalent about this one too, but I can't deny 'truth is like blood underneath your fingernails/and you don't wanna hurt yourself, hurt yourself/looking too closely' always destroys me because... well, you know. I love suffering. :(

Souvenirs - Switchfoot | Kakashi & Obito & Rin

wolves - Switchfoot | Kakashi

snowfall for the battlefield/roses for the father's sons/see them red on the ground:/bleeding/when the revolution came/we were more than hungry men/we were hoping for more:/bleeding/end. begin again./all of my world is collision and spin/hope is a world that has yet to begin/awaken, oh sleeper/awaken, oh sleeper/a new day begins

→ I wanted a wolf-related song too. :)

PRODIGAL SOUL - Switchfoot | Obito, Itachi, & Sasuke; just all them wayward Uchiha boys

Coming Down - Dear Euphoria | kid!Kakashi & his relationships

the shell/that I wore/it wasn't for fun/it wasn't to make you/stick around/it was for survival/it was what I've learnt/it was for the sun/.../our love has grown/our love has flown

→ Another one I'm a little unsure of whether it makes sense outside of my head or not, but I like the vibes?

Ghosts That We Knew - Mumford & Sons | Kakashi & Yamato? → Hmm, can I maybe submit this as a Kakashi-&-Yamato-just-need-to-mske-it-through-this-war-so-they-can-have-a-bright-bright-future song?

All Is Well (It's Only Blood) - Radical Face | Kakashi → ...he said as he's bleeding out or after he's thrown himself in the line of fire protecting someone he thinks is a better person than himself...

Bleeding Out - Imagine Dragons | Kakashi

when the hour is nigh/and hopelessness is sinking in/and the wolves all cry/to fill the night with hollering/when your eyes are red/and emptiness is all you know/with the darkness fed/I will be your scarecrow/you tell me to hold on/oh, you tell me to hold on/but innocence is gone/and what was right is wrong

→ In a similar vein to the previous song. But goodness gracious! Were they NOT straight up describing Kakashi here?

Amaryllis - Shinedown | Yamato & Kakashi → Just tossing this one out there, not sure if it will make sense or if it's a reach... but I like it?

lost 'cause - Switchfoot | Kakashi & Sasuke

are we a lost cause?/or are we just lost 'cause/we won't be the future we refuse to see?/and if I'm your lost cause/it'll be your lost 'cause/you won't see me as I am, the possibility/that I'm not the enemy

→ 214 feels. (And before and after that, but yeah.)

Through the Ghost - Shinedown | Kakashi & Obito

so many silent sorrows/you never hear from again/and now that you've lost tomorrow/is yesterday still a friend?/.../everything that mattered is just/a city of dust/covering both of us/did you hide yourself away?/I can't see you anymore/.../did you hide yourself away?/are you living through the ghost?/did you finally find a place/above the shadows so the world will never know?/the world will never know you like I do ... like I still do

Little Talks - Of Monsters and Men | Kakashi → Just Kakashi having little chats with his ghosts, totally the most heartwarming way to conclude this section. 😅

Sleepyhead - Passion Pit | Kakashi → Just kidding! Here's a slightly less morbid song for the Most Tired Boy Of Them All.™ (Random aside: this was my customary song to listen to on my walks to 8AM organic chemistry classes; I found it strangely soothing! On a different occasion, after a particularly long day for her, one of my roommates didn't have the energy to make it to her bed but nevertheless requested a lullaby from us. So I obliged by playing this song for her, but she didn't seem to gain the same peace of mind from it as I did. 😄 I know it's not my place to propose anything like this, but it does amuse me to imagine bookends!Kakashi in these situations, even though it's not OChem classes he has to go to.)

General/Miscellaneous:

Rise Above It - Switchfoot | Ensemble

don't care what they're telling me/we can be what we want to be/.../just because it's law doesn't mean that it's fair/.../don't believe the system's on your side/.../the curse is spoken/the system's broken; rise above it

→ I mean, how could I not think about Naruto when this song also has the lines 'hear us sing tonight like the last night on earth/we will rise like the tide/like dead men coming back to life/we are rising, rising'? It's fun to be literal sometimes!

Doorways - Radical Face | Allllll the traumatized children → Someone has to put all those tragic childhood flashbacks to good use, after all.

Ghost Towns - Radical Face | take your pick of Itachi, Sasuke, or Post-Kannabi-Bridge!Obito

there's no comin' home/with a name like mine/I still think of you/but everyone knows/yeah everyone knows/if you care, let it go

Blinding Light - Switchfoot | Hey, Hiruzen? You may have coined the phrase, "children are the king" but I don't think you truly understand it... (insert Princess Bride joke here)

hey boy, don't believe them/we're the nation that eats our youth/.../still looking for the blinding light/still looking for the reason why/still looking for the sun to shine/all my life I've been living in the darkest night/still looking for the blinding light/to take me higher and higher

Brother's Blood - Kevin Devine | EVERYONE → ...but certainly so much you could do with Itachi & Sasuke, Obito & Kakashi, Shisui & Itachi, even Hashirama & Madara! Sakumo's teammates turning their backs on him and saying 'I don't know one thing about my brother's blood'?!?! There are SO MANY ideas I have for this song! It gives me chills and makes my brain scream.

We Need Each Other - Sanctus Real | Ensemble → Already mentioned this one to you, but I have to include it here for thoroughness' sake!

Whispering - Alex Clare | the Hidden Leaf's lost/ostracized children/orphans

who will care for the falling?/who will care for the falling leaves?

So this is probably a strange concept to come up with and apply to this song, but the 'whispering, whispering, whispering' parts brought Konaha's virulent gossiping/passing judgement about others and often kids they don't even know problem to mind, too, and yeah?

The World You Want - Switchfoot | Ensemble → If I were to make a fanvid set to this song, I would definitely keep a broad focus, but I can't deny that the lines 'you start to look like what you believe, you float through time like a stream, if the waters of time are made up by you and I, I could change the world for you, you change it for me' FOR SURE has strong Obito & Kakashi/Kakashi & Tenzo vibes.

Red Eyes - Switchfoot | Ensemble, but definitely many dashes of Uchihas 😄 → I would like to thank Masashi Kishimoto for creating a world where red eyes are a Thing of Importance so I can one day make a fanvid using this song in not just the tired or teary bloodshot-red eyes way, but in a very literal sense too.

TAKE MY FIRE - Switchfoot | The Will of Fire → 'Cause I think I'm sooooo clever. 😄

Above The Clouds Of Pompeii - Bear's Den | various parent & child relationships → This obviously derives from the not-caring-about-your-female-characters problem, but it always gets me that all the single parents in the Naruto universe are almost invariably the fathers! I guess sometimes you can safely guess that the mothers are still alive/exist, but either way we hardly ever get to see them. :/ The one exception I can think of right now is Kurenai, but maybe I'm forgetting another conspicuous single mother. Anyway, I don't know if this helps or hinders more a potential Naruto fanvid for this song, but regardless, it still gives me feelings?

Who We Are - Switchfoot | Ensemble → It just makes me inordinately happy that the chorus for this song starts with 'who we are (in the fever of our youth)', you know? :D

Brother - Kodaline | all the friendships we can stuff in here and then some → Quite a well known song I'm pretty sure, but I love how many dynamics one could showcase in a potential fanvid of this. And, not gonna lie, 'oh brother, we go deeper than the ink beneath the skin of our tattoos' deserves to be used in some sort of Tenzo 'n' Kakashi or Team Ro fan creation!

Special Bonus:

Shake It Out - Florence + The Machine | Kakashi & Obito → I'm not sure whether I would have realized how well this works for Kakashi & Obito on my own, funnily enough, but then I found this fanvid of it (containing only scenes you've seen naturally!) and it hit me like a ton of bricks. It's so well done!

youtube

#I do apologize for all the switchfoot/other repeated bands or artists #I wanted this to be really varied but switchfoot just has my number I guess?#I'd like to say I got it all out of my system now since I'll likely have to do a part two at some point #but that's not completely true *rubs back of head sheepishly*#also all the mentions of fanvid creation are just because I've always been a heavily visual learner/how I process stuff #--ironic given my visual disability--#so I suppose when my brain gets attached to something that's in an auditory medium it still has to find a way to add in a visual component?#anyway I hope this 60+ songs behemoth of a playlist is not too overwhelming and that the musical styles are somewhat up your alley!#I swear I'm going to jump back into our Kakashi & Yamato conversations now!#turns out I really suck at multitasking sometimes /0\#kakashi hatake #obito uchiha #team minato #kakashi 'n' obito #kakashi 'n' rin #kakashi 'n' tenzo #gai 'n' kakashi #sakumo hatake #naruto uzumaki #kakashi 'n' sasuke #kakashi 'n' sakumo #kakashi 'n' naruto #kakashi 'n' minato #Itachi 'n' Sasuke #itachi uchiha #itachi 'n' shisui #yamato #tenzo #sasuke uchiha #sakura haruno

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iandeleonwrites · 3 years

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Ian’s Case: A Personal Statement for Grad School Admission

Personal Statement, Ian Deleón

“He felt something strike his chest, and that his body was being thrown swiftly through the air, on and on, immeasurably far and fast, while his limbs were gently relaxed.”

It was more than a decade ago when I first read those words. Written by the American author Willa Cather, Paul’s Case: A Study in Temperament has always felt to me like an intimate account of my own life penned by a woman one hundred years in the past.

That is a feeling which makes me proud; that my personal whims, fears, and desires, could find their echo long ago in a story about a young man and his pursuit of a meaningful life. Because of it, I felt a pleasing sense of historicity at a time when I was struggling so much with my own.

I grew up in Miami Beach. Literally not more than a block away from water for most of my life. My father had emigrated from Cuba with his family in 1980. My mother had come on a work visa from Brazil a few years later. They met on the beach, had an affair, and I came into the world in May of 1987.

My life was marked with in betweenness from the very beginning. My parents’ relationship did not last long, so I grew up traveling between houses. I had two families. I was American, but I was also Cuban and Brazilian. I even have a Brazilian passport. I spoke three languages fluently, but I couldn’t dance salsa or samba. I felt at home with the working class immigrants and people of color in my neighborhoods, but I often had to work hard to prove I wasn’t just some gringo with a knack for foreign tongues.

[A quick note on Paul’s Case––If it happens that the reader is not familiar with the short story, let me briefly summarize it here: A disenchanted youth in turn of the century Pittsburgh feels increasingly alienated from his schoolmates, his teachers and his family. His only comfort is his position as an usher at Carnegie Hall, where he loses himself in the glamour of the art life. Having no drive or desire to become an artist, however, the dandy Paul makes a spur of the moment criminal decision and elopes to New York City. There, he is able to live out his fantasies in a financial masquerade for about a week’s time, until the authorities back home finger him for monetary theft. Learning that his father is en route to the city to collect him, Paul travels to the countryside and flings himself in front of a speeding train, musing about the elegant brevity of winter flowers.]

When I first encountered Cather’s short story I was blown away by the parallels I saw between my own life and Paul’s. In 2005, fresh out of high school, I was living mostly with my father as my mother had relocated to faraway West Palm Beach. I was an usher at the local concert hall, a job I cherished enough to volunteer my time for free. I became entranced by the world of classical music, opera, theater, and spectacle––often showing up for work early and roaming the performance spaces, probing high and low like some kind of millenial phantom.

In school, however, I had no direction, no plan. I had good enough grades, but no real motivation, and worst of all, I thought, no discernible talent. I probably resented my father for not being cultured enough to teach me about music, theater, and the arts. No one in my family had ever even been to a museum, or sat before a chamber orchestra. And it didn’t seem to matter to them either, they could somehow live blissfully without it.

Well I couldn’t. I began to mimic the fervor with which Paul immersed himself in that world, while also exhibiting the same panic at the thought of not being able to sustain my treasured experiences without a marketable contribution to them. But here is where Paul and I take divergent paths.

I was attending the Miami Dade Honors College, breezing my way towards an associate’s degree. I took classes in Oceanography, Sociology, Creative Writing, Acting and African Drumming. I was experimenting and falling in love with everything.

But it was my Creative Writing professor, Michael Hettich, who really encouraged the development of my nascent writing talent. Up until that point my ideas only found their expression through class assignments, particularly book reports and essays on historical events. My sister had always felt I had a way with words, but I just attributed this to growing up in a multicultural environment amongst a diversity of native languages.

As a result of that encouragement I began to write poetry, little songs and treatments for film ideas based on the short stories we were talking about in class. Somehow, thanks to those lines of poetry and a few amateur photographic self portraits, I was admitted to the Massachusetts College of Art & Design for my BFA program.

There, I attended classes in Printmaking, Paper Making, Performance Art, Video Editing, and Glass Blowing. I was immersed in culture, attending lectures and workshops, adding new words to my vocabulary: “New Media” and “gestalt”. I saw my first snowfall. I had the dubious honor of appearing at once not Hispanic and yet different enough. I was overwhelmed. I felt increasingly disenchanted and out of place in New England, yet my work flourished and grew stronger.

It was during this time that I developed a passion for live performance and engagement with an audience. I also worked with multi-channel video and sculptural installations. Always, I commented on my family history, grappling with it, the emigrations and immigrations. I even returned to those early short stories from Miami Dade, one time doing an interpretive movement piece based on The Yellow Wallpaper. Most often I talked about my father. He was even in a few of my projects. He was a good sport, though we still had the occasional heated political disagreement. We never held any grudges, and made up again rather quickly. It would always be that way, intense periods of warming and cooling. A tropical temperament, I suppose.

I continued to take film-related classes in Boston, but my interests gradually became highly abstracted, subtle, and decidedly avant-garde. I had no desire to work in a coherently narrative medium. This would eventually change, but for now, I let my ambitions and aspirations take me where they would.

I returned home to Miami for a spell after graduation. I traveled the world for five months after that. I moved back to Boston for another couple of years, because it was comfortable I suppose, though I was fed up with the weather.

Finally, I wound up in NYC. Classic story: I followed a charming young woman, another performance artist as luck would have it, a writer too, and a bit of an outsider. We were quickly engaged and on the first anniversary of our meet cute we were married on a gorgeous piece of land in upstate new york, owned by an older performance-loving couple from the city. Piece of land doesn’t quite do it justice, we’re talking massive tracts, hidden acres of forest, sudden lakes, fertile fields, and precocious wildlife. As they say in the movies, it really is all about location, location, location.

Nearly all of our significant personal and professional achievements in the subsequent years have centered around this bucolic homestead. After meeting, courting, researching and eventually getting married there, we soon decided we would stage our most ambitious project to date in this magical space––we would shoot...a movie.

We hit upon the curious story of an eighteenth century woman in England called Mary Toft. Dear Mary became famous for a months-long ruse that involved her supposed birthing of rabbits, and sometimes cats. The small town hoax ballooned into a national controversy when it was eventually exposed by some of the king’s physicians. My wife and I were completely enthralled by this story and its contemporary implications. Was Mary wholly complicit in the mischievous acts, or was she herself a sort of duped victim...of systematic abuse at the hands of her family, her husband, her country?

We soon found a way to adapt and give this tale a modern twist that recast Mary as a woman of color alone in the woods navigating a host of creepy men, a miscarriage, and a supernatural rabbit.

Over the course of nine months, our idea gestated and began taking the form of a short film screenplay. This was something neither of us had done or been adequately trained to do before. But we knew we wanted it to be special, it was our passion project. We knew we didn’t want it to look amateurish––we were too old for that. So we took out a loan, hired an amazing camera crew, and in three consecutive days in the summer of 2017 we filmed our story, Velvet Cry. It was the most difficult thing either of us had undertaken...including planning our nuptial ceremony around our difficult families.

It was an incredible experience––intoxicating––also quite maddening and stressful. But it was all worth it. Because of our work schedules, it took us another year to finish post production on the film, but throughout that process, I knew I had found my calling. I would be a writer, and I would be a Director.

Perhaps I had been too afraid to dream the big dream before. Perhaps I had lacked the confidence, or simply, the life experience to tackle the complexity of human emotions, narratives, and interactions––but no longer. This is what I wanted to do and I had to find a way to get better at doing it.

In the intervening months, I have set myself on a course to develop my writing abilities as quickly as I could in anticipation of this application process. I know I have some latent talent, but it has been a long time since I’ve been in an academic setting, and in any case, I have never really attempted to craft drama on this scale before.

I’ve read many books, listened to countless interviews, attended online classes, and most importantly, written my heart out since relocating down the coast to the small college town of Gainesville in Central Florida with my wife in June of 2018. It was through a trip to her alma mater of Hollins University that we learned about the co-ed graduate program in screenwriting a few months ago. After all the debt I accrued in New England, I didn’t think I would ever go back to college, though I greatly enjoyed the experience. But what we learned about the program filled me with confidence and a desire to share in the wonderful legacy of this school that my wife is always gushing about.

Our Skype conversation with Tim Albaugh proved to be the deciding factor. I knew instantly that I wanted to be a part of anything that he was involved with, and I had the feeling that my ideas would truly be nurtured and harnessed into a craft––something tangible I could be proud of and use to propel my career.

I continue to mine my childhood and adolescence in Miami for critical stories and characters, situations that shed light on my own personal experience of life. I’ve found myself coming back to Paul’s Case. No longer caught up in the character’s stagnant, brooding longings for a grander life, I’m now able to revisit the story, appreciating the young man’s anxieties while evaluating how it all went so fatally wrong for Paul. There was no reason to despair, no cause for lost hope. I would take the necessary steps to become the artist I already know myself to be. The screenplay I am submitting as my writing sample is a new adaptation of this story, making Paul my own, and giving him a little bit of that South Florida flavor.

I will close by reiterating how I have visited Hollins, and heard many a positive review from the powerful women I know who have attended college there. As a graduate student, I know Hollins can help me to become a screenwriter, to become a filmmaker. This is the only graduate program to which I am applying––I have a very good feeling about all this.

I want to be a Hollins girl.

#college essay #paul's case #queer writing #hollins university

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weuschoiceheart · 4 years

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Stan OnlyOneOf ya cowards (Long Post - Dance & Song Analysis)

Woah....wow....just WOW

I just watched the 1theK dance mirrored video for OnlyOneOf’s “Savanna” (the one for the dance cover contest, and can I just say, W O W.

I remembered watching this last year (It was the very first video of OnlyOneOf I watched) and I was like, yeah, this song sounds pretty good. But now, after rewatching it, I’m amazed at the amount of imagery they put into the dance. By no means am I a pro dancer or something, but I’ve been dancing to Kpop for a few years now, so I got used to pretty much how the dances are like. Nowadays, most boy group dances are pretty hip-hop / popping / maybe some contemporary dance mixed in for some of the slower parts in songs, so I pretty much know what to expect. There would be some crazy choreo, fast paced tempo you need to follow, etc., etc. Yeah, 4th gen is starting to become some sort of dance competition.

But...THIS. THIS GODDAMN CHOREO SHOOKED ME. I already love how different OnlyOneOf’s songs are from the generic mainstream songs, instead of going for some hardcore rap or edm songs, they always go for mellow tunes and beautiful melodies mixed with entrancing vocals (YES YES YES VOCALS, THERE ARE ACTUALLY V O C A L S IN THEIR SONGS, NOT SOME SORT OF WEIRD NOISE INSTRUMENTAL. I CAN GO ON A WHOLE RANT ABOUT THEIR VOCALS). Anyways, I might make a whole other post for their songs, but right now, let’s focus on their choreography, specifically this one.

It’s strange, in a way. I got into OnlyOneOf because of the dance for “_Sage.” I saw it in a random play dance video, and it was my first time seeing OnlyOneOf in one of these videos, actually. I remembered seeing the dance and got shocked when they yeeted to the ground during Mill’s part in the chorus. Idk the name for the move, but it caught me offguard on how smoothly they did it. After the random play dance ended, I immediately went to watch their dance practice for “_Sage” and decided to learn the move, bc, you know, it looks cool (and I want my awkward self to show a different, cooler side of me on stage). I only wanted to just learn the chorus, but I ended up learning the whole choreo. And it literally started with “i just wanna learn their names so I can tell them apart during the dance” to finally “Ok, I’m gonna stan.”

“_Sage” has a pretty intense choreo, compared to their other songs, but I feel like, with OnlyOneOf’s choreos, you need to properly EXPRESS the song’s meaning. Ofc, it’s always important to convey the meaning of a song, since dance IS a form of art and expression (as a very smart Hwanwoong said, it’s not just about the performance, it’s whether you can convey the emotions well or not).

With OnlyOneOf though, each of their song has a special meaning, all linked to a storyline (I’m probably gonna go on a whole other rant when I piece together the theories), and their songs are so different as well, they don’t talk about the topics that most groups today usually explore with their discography, instead going to a different route and just listening to their songs and watching them dance makes me feel like I’m in a different dimension.They’re just...UNIQUE. I don’t know any other way to say it. Y’all are probably like “how about Group X, they always talk about blah, blah, blah” and I am NOT dragging down other groups, but smth abt OnlyOneOf really stands out to me. I listened to their song “dOra Maar” this morning and got emotional after finding out the meaning behind the song. Even though I finished learning “_Sage” yesterday, I still feel like I need to practice more to make sure the emotions and meaning of the song is properly conveyed through the dance, bc the meaning behind “_Sage” is just so complex. And now, let’s actually go into the semi-analysis I did for “Savanna” so you guys will understand what I’m talking about.

THE ACTUAL ANALYSIS

youtube

Imagery is used by many groups today to give choreography a deeper meaning, or in some cases, like a signature move (SKZ “God’s Menu” uses many cooking references, for example). With “Savanna,” I was amazed by the amount of imagery they use. As I mentioned before, groups these days are more into difficult hiphop dances, so I feel like imagery is being used less and less and choreos are just a bunch of difficult moves strung together to look powerful and difficult and...yeah, 4th gen is really turning into a dance competition. Anyways, i DIGRESS ONCE AGAIN (I can complain for hours about 4th gen music and dancing but let’s save that for some other time).

I will say this again: I am NOT a professional dancer, I only had a few years of ballet + Kpop, and is self-learning popping and hiphop right now. This is only based on what I observe and how I interpret the dance.

Ok, let’s start at the beginning of the choreo. All the members form a ring around one member (KB) and waved their arms to enclose a circle, trapping him, before moving apart. Next, the members seemed to form a path for KB to walk on, with Yoojung and Junji at the end, arms forming a line that KB ducked under and passed through. Right off the bat, we have a beautiful imagery. I think it portrays time travel (since the song seems to hint towards that subject). The four members forming the path that KB walks on, are frozen like statues, like time just froze. KB is the person that wants to break out (he was trapped within a circle in the beginning) and seems to find a loophole through time that he manages to walk through.

Now, onto my favorite imagery for the choreo that really surprised me. At 0:33 in the video, When they formed lines by Nine’s side and opened their arms in sync, creating almost like an illusion. It might be to match the lyrics about “dry, chapped lips,” but that part mesmerized me, and drew me in to continue watching.

The next key point of imagery, is at 0:47, when they formed a line and stood in alternating positions, moving their arms in an alternating pattern as well. It really matches with the lyrics “among the intertwined people, I hide myself again” and creates another illusion that’s JUST. SO. CAPTIVATING. I might be a tad bit overdramatic abt this, but really, I LOVE LOVE LOVE how they put so much imagery and meaning into the choreo.

Another piece of imagery is Love’s and Nine’s solo portion after the chorus, when they mirrored each other with their bodies and made a drinking motion with their hands. Might seem small, but it emphasizes the lyrics “Watchin’ all your silhouette / Drink one more time, Sweepin’ huh.” The lyrics might not make sense, but this part is just so mysterious and mesmerizing.

They did another beautiful imagery for the start of the second prechorus for the same lyrics (”Among the intertwined people, I hide myself again”), but this time, forming a V formation around Nine. They also formed the same ring around Junji when he sang, “I feel like I’m locked in” but with some floorwork this time. I love how they tried variations of the moves, so the image is still there but switched up to keep it engaging.

These are the key details of the dance I’m going to write about here, there are many other parts and some imagery I probably missed, but if I’m going to actually analyze every single move along with the song lyrics, you guys are probably gonna get bored XD. So to wrap this up, I think the important factor about the dance that really draws me in is that, unlike choreos nowadays, the dance is composed of smooth movements and transitions, like contemporary but keeping that Kpop feel, ya know? The song itself is already mellow and vocal-centered, so ofc the dance has to match it, but I wasn’t ready for the imagery (i dare you to count the amount of times I used this word lol) they used. Watching this is like a breath of fresh air, listening to this song is so refreshing. I strongly recommend you guys check it out!

This is the longest post I ever wrote lmao, and if you read all the way to the end, congrats! Anyways, I might learn this after I polish up “_Sage.” Hmm....should I also do vocal covers for the songs too? I was actually thinking of remixing “Savanna” into a diss track because of the misheard lyrics (”i don’t give a shit what they think abt us / you’re like a bitch from Savanna”). Who knows?

Thank you for taking your time to read this!

#long post #onlyoneof #kpop #dance analysis #kpop choreo #kpop dance analysis #onlyoneof dance analysis #dance #choreography #onlyoneof kpop #junjun stuff #savanna #onlyoneof savanna #onlyoneof savanna choreo #onlyoneof savanna dance

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elphenfan · 4 years

Text

Walking in the Air

This is going up literally as I’ve finished writing it. It’s not beta’ed or anything.

For @tlou15 who replied to my request for prompts with: “I would like to see Aziraphale and Crowley going to the country side to have night flying dates”. Took me an embarrassing second to realise it wasn’t anything to do with fruits.

And yes, it’s titled after the song. Do listen to it while reading this, if you like.

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

The car that had pulled up on the other side of the road from the bookshop was quite the familiar sight in the area and so was its owner. So was the owner’s reaction if you touched or even made mention of anything the car did and consequently, no one made a peep of comment about the fact that the car was idling and had been for at least half an hour.

Of course, it should’ve been fine, seeing as the engine had never seen a drop of petrol since it had been bought – the petrol bought in the sixties by its owner had been given to some youth who was protesting something or other, it was hard to keep track of them all at the time.

Somehow, though, despite the fact that it drove purely because its owner expected it to rather than having any combustion happening in its engine, it also put out quite the cloud of exhaust, whether it was idling or not, because its owner expected it to.

Right now, it put out even more than it usually did, and one might wonder if it was in response to said owner and his mood.

The owner who sat inside, in the driver’s seat, a bundle of energy that could only be called nervous.

Why would he be nervous, it might be asked and rightly so, perhaps. After all, he’d walked the earth for actual millennia, seen just about every permutation of evil, and good, that humanity could muster, and been instrumental in causing a few of them, on both sides. He’d been friends with his hereditary enemy for roughly as long and he’d gone up against Heaven and Hell themselves with said enemy in a bid to avert Armageddon.

Which they’d accomplished, too, somehow, though he had a pretty clear idea that without the presence of such a clever, sensible and entirely human Antichrist, all due to a previous cock-up, they would’ve been, well, buggered, screwed, fucked. Take your pick, or they might’ve gone for them all.

The point was that considering all of that, it was very strange that he was nervous about this. Not that he’d been precisely calm through the averted apocalypse, especially not when this very same car had burst into flame and he’d had to struggle to keep it together, both metaphorically and quite literally. But the point remained even so.

When you looked at him, there could be no other words for it, at least if you knew what to look for, knowing better than to confuse the small, suppressed gestures for impatience or annoyance, and especially if you knew the reason he was letting his car idle outside a particular Soho bookshop.

He was going on a date. They were going on a date, Aziraphale and him. Together. The two of them.

Just the two of them. On a date.

They’d been to dinner before, of course. Lunches, too, even a few breakfasts. Gone to the theatre, been to more than a few concerts as well as a few operas.

So what if Crowley happened to like operas?

The point was that they’d done quite a lot of things that could be considered dates already and he’d got through them easily enough.

Relatively easily, at least, but, well…

So, why was he so nervous about this one? It wasn’t even the first time after they’d averted the end of the world and things had changed. All in all, things should just be as they always were.

There was no denying he was nervous, though. Of course, that didn’t mean he was going to admit it out loud or even acknowledge it to himself.

If he did, the culprit might be that he had called it a date, when he’d asked Aziraphale a week or two ago. Not left it open to interpretation as such or alluded more or less obliquely to it that way.

No, he’d come right out and asked, one day after much consideration, at least that was what he called it, and had caused Aziraphale to pause in his work.

“Date?” he’d asked as he’d started up working again, and though he was hardly the one to keep current, to say the least, he had understood it had nothing to do with the fruit mostly eaten around Christmas, for whatever reason, and everything to do with two people going out.

“Yeah. Date. You and me,” Crowley had clarified, just be sure, casual as anything. He’d even leant against a bookshelf as he’d said it. “I was thinking a drive out into the countryside, just take in the scenic route. Maybe have a picnic.”

He’d dropped the reference in there, wondering whether Aziraphale would pick up on it or not. Expecting that he wouldn’t, hoping that he would.

Judging from the way that the angel had almost dropped a book he’d been putting back on the shelf, it seemed likely that he had.

A, a picnic,” he’d echoed. He’d stared into the shelf for a moment that was very long, or felt it, and Crowley had wondered whether he’d outright decline or just ignore that something had been said at all.

Then he’d turned around, a smile on his face that was bright and delighted, with just a hint, the demon had thought, of nervousness in there.

“A picnic sounds utterly delightful, my dear, I would love to,” he’d said and that had been that.

Well, no, not quite that. There’d been the practicalities of when and where and such, of course, as well as convincing Aziraphale that he wouldn’t be in charge of catering.

The angel seemed to have taken that to mean they were buying a hamper from a place somewhere, possibly local, to take out into a field or something similar.

They…weren’t.

Crowley glanced at the hamper stashed underneath the backseat, tucked away so that hopefully, Aziraphale wouldn’t spot it when he entered the car. He’d spent the last week sourcing everything good he could think of to take.

Then he’d spent some time sifting through those to actually make it fit into a hamper. Of course, there were miracles to sort such things out – bigger on the inside, hah, what would you need with bigger when you could have infinite? – and it wasn’t as though he didn’t want to spoil the angel…

But that was just it, wasn’t it? To spoil him properly, and to show that this was a date rather than merely one of their usual meetings, he needed something else. Something more. Something picked among the best of the best.

Something to show the angel just how much he meant to Crowley.

Not that he hadn’t shown him before, of course, in his own way. But now that he wasn’t merely not prevented from doing it but actively allowed to, as much as he liked, almost, he wasn’t going to pass up any opportunity he was given.

Of course, there was something else about this meeting in particular, apart from it being their officially labelled ‘date’, but, well…that was –

His thoughts were interrupted by the sound of the passenger door opening. For a moment, he stiffened, worried about the hamper being discovered. Then his brain kicked in to inform him that what he’d heard was the front passenger door, not the back.

“Hello, dear,” an oh, so familiar and achingly beloved chimed as the car dipped with the weight when he got in.

“Aziraphale,” he acknowledged, his expression not changing an iota.

Then he glanced down, thinking he saw something, and sure enough, there was a small…not exactly hamper but certainly a basket in the other’s lap.

“Thought I said you weren’t in charge of the food,” he said, turning his attention back to face ahead. The car began to move, without him ever doing something as silly as pushing the pedals. He’d never thought he’d need them and therefore, he didn’t.

Oh, this isn’t – this is just a little something extra that I found,” Aziraphale said, somewhat…well, not exactly shiftily but slightly evasively, at least. “Thought it would be perfect for a picnic. I will say, though, that I’ve never had a dinner picnic rather than a lunch one before.”

Something new, then,” Crowley said as he turned out into traffic, metaphorically almost flooring the accelerator.

Aziraphale let out a gasp at that, sharp and high, and shot out a hand to try and grab onto something, anything for a steadying grip. He found it and his knuckles turned just a little whiter.

“Crowley!” he protested, loudly.

“What?” the demon asked, feigning innocence as he took a corner fast enough that he would’ve done a handbrake turn without a handbrake if he hadn’t been in control of the car.

“You don’t have to go this fast!”

“Aw, come on, angel, it’s no fun if you’re only going at the speed limit.” He accelerated just a tad more, to underline the point.

Speeding is one thing, endangering the pedestrians is – Crowley!”

“What?”

“You hit that cyclist!”

“I didn’t. I missed him by three quarters of an inch. That he went tumbling anyway, that’s not my fault, is it?”

It – “Aziraphale looked over to him, then stopped speaking and sighed, heavily. “Oh, it doesn’t matter what I say, does it? Or you might make it worse, just to spite me.”

“Never to spite you. Just…wind you up a little, maybe.”

“Really,” Aziraphale said, and the word really felt orphaned without the disapproving cluck afterwards that should’ve been there. Probably was in the expression, though, if Crowley turned to look.

He didn’t.

They made it out of inner London without any issue and really, in rather record time, to boot. So what if Crowley scared the life out of four cops, a criminal in the process of being arrested, a banker and two telephone salespersons on their way to work.

“You haven’t told me where we’re going,” Aziraphale commented after they’d made it out of the city altogether. He was looking out the window as he spoke, as though trying to guess just by what they passed.

Crowley hadn’t and there was a good reason for that. Well, perhaps not a good one, but a reason, anyway.

“You’ll see,” was all he said out loud about it.

He’d thought that as they left London, his nerves would calm at least a bit and he’d relax back into their normal chat and to be fair, it had. But the moment that the blond had asked, it had spiked right up again.

Was it too much? Too little? It would be too little, wouldn’t it? Or just plain stupid. Definitely plain stupid and Aziraphale would think so. He might even outright refuse to do it.

Not the picnic. The day Aziraphale outright refused food like that…that day Crowley would be sure the world had indeed ended – or someone else was trying to impersonate Aziraphale, and doing a really bad job it, too.

A hand landed gently on his knee. Just on his knee, well within the area that could be considered perfectly acceptable, even respectable.

They still didn’t touch a great deal, at least not by Crowley’s standards – or perhaps those were just fervent wishes – and when they did, it was not uncommon for it to stay at that perfectly respectable stage.

But the important point was that they did touch now, freely if not frequently, and there was a sense that said touching was allowed.

They could if they wanted to and do it as much as they wanted to, as well. The question might then be – why didn’t they?

To be fair to them, it hadn’t been that long since That Saturday, relatively speaking. Half a year, a bit more. Just about the time where the south of England was getting to be fairly warm again, by the standards of old Blighty, anyway, and might reasonably be expected to have a relatively lovely, if not exactly warm, night out like this.

To have gone from not touching at all, even actively avoiding it so as to be sure not to go anywhere they shouldn’t, over six millennia to this rather comfortable touching, infrequent or not, within a span of a little over six months was…quite an achievement, Crowley would say.

Not that he wouldn’t be thrilled with me, and practically melted whenever they ended up in a cuddle session, often because Crowley was an octopus rather than a snake when he was in a bed, sleeping or not, and Aziraphale was sitting, or sometimes even lying, beside him.

That wasn’t to say the angel was an unwilling or passive participant in the sessions, far from it. He just did it in his own way.

Such as touching his hand to a knee.

It helped that he left it there, too. Obviously.

“My dear, it is getting rather late for…well, if we’re to call in somewhere and buy something to eat, they’d be…well, it would be rather rude to expect them to keep their kitchens open for us.”

“As if you haven’t done that several times over the years, angel, and that’s putting it kindly,” Crowley countered, looking over at the other.

Glancing at him out of the corner of his eye didn’t work with the blinkers, for lack of a better term, that he had on his current set of sunglasses, as the most he saw there were disjointed colours through a metal mesh. If he turned his head a little, it seemed to give him the same effect, though, as well as being able to see the other.

“Well, I...” Aziraphale said, not quite spluttering but achieving something to that effect. “I may have, once or twice over the years, but I…that is…well, you’re allowed to mend a bad habit, aren’t you?”

“‘Course. Just find it interesting that the time you decide to mend it is the time when it’s not you who’s in charge of the food, for once.”

Again, he wasn’t looking fully at the other’s face as he spoke, but he still managed to clock the way Aziraphale’s face fell. Not completely but quite a bit, showing that he understood what Crowley was saying and what he was implying as well.

“I didn’t – oh, good grief, I’ve put my foot in it, haven’t I?”

“Just a bit.”

“That wasn’t what I meant, dear, and I apologise.”

He didn’t say anything more but then, what really was there to add? Further words wouldn’t change anything or make it more sincere. The sincerity was more than evident in the angel’s almost always very expressive voice.

Nor was Crowley about to say that it was okay because it wasn’t. It was only a minor thing, that was true, but it still mattered. That said, he wasn’t going to ignore it, either.

“Accepted,” he said instead, quietly, and felt the hand on his knee squeeze slightly in understanding and thankfulness.

He laid his own hand over it, covering it completely. He still thrilled in his heart at being able to do this, and he also had to admit that his nerves had quietened some more.

They sped along into the afternoon that was turning into early evening, and quite a bright one with a clear sky that could be appreciated better without obstructions, if that was your cup of tea, along narrower roads and increasingly more picturesque landscapes, heading for the destination that Crowley had in mind.

It wasn’t Lower Tadfield.

Even though there might certainly be reasons to go to Lower Tadfield, such as the general feel of love that Aziraphale still claimed or the people they’d met that still lived there, it wasn’t his intention to go there.

For what he wanted to do, he needed somewhere a little more…out of the way. Or at least, seeing as the south of England wasn’t exactly sparsely populated, as a rule, he needed somewhere where there was no Antichrist about that might show up to ask what they were doing.

He wanted a bit of privacy. That wasn’t too much to ask, was it?

........................................................................................

It was that special time of evening just before the sun decided it was done for the day. They had only just pulled in somewhere, where the nearest town was a mile or two away all around, there were no nearby farms or obstructing woods. Just pleasant landscape all around the vantage point that Crowley had picked.

Aziraphale, sitting in the passenger seat, looked around him, clearly not finding what he was expecting to see.

“Crowley – “he began, sounding just a little bit…concerned, perhaps, but the demon interrupted him before he could get further.

“I said I’d take care of the food, Aziraphale,” he said as the car shut off, “and I have, so don’t worry about it.”

With that, seeing as it was obviously on his mind and he’d need to bring it, instead of getting out of the car, he reached behind him and down. With a flexibility that ought to have been difficult, at the very least, grabbed hold of the hamper and pulled it around, holding it up at the same time.

If he was a little bit pointed about it, so what?

“Oh.” Aziraphale looked more than a little embarrassed. He looked down at his lap, his fingers twiddling on the handle of the basket he’d brought. “It seems that I might not be able to eat the food, seeing as I keep putting my foot in my mouth.”

It’s fine.”

“It’s not fine, it’s – Crowley!”

Aziraphale called out his name because the demon had got out of the car with his usual speed and dexterity, despite being hampered by a lidded wicker basket.

Come on,” he called just before the door shut behind him, sauntering his way towards a lovely looking spot that would give them quite the perfect view, around and, not unimportantly, up.

He heard the passenger shut and presumed the other was about to join him. While he would’ve liked to walk up there with Aziraphale’s hand in his, he also wanted to find the perfect spot himself, without being interrupted.

That and get his suddenly galloping nerves reined back in a little, of course, if he could.

As he spread the blanket – more of a duvet style of thing, with a few extra things added on, because just because you’d decided to dine outside on the ground didn’t mean you had to be uncomfortable, did it? – out on the ground, he picked up that Aziraphale had stopped moving.

He straightened back up and turned to look, a part of him just a little bit worried about why.

What he found was Aziraphale stopped, basket in hand, looking out over the area which, Crowley had to admit, they had a very good view of from up here. Both of the landscape and the sun setting over it, not a cloud in the sky to obstruct it.

“Strikes you, doesn’t it?” he said as Crowley sauntered up close to him, hands in his pockets. “Even though you’ve seen it unimaginably many times before, it can still be as beautiful as that very first time it happened.”

“Every time since, really,” Crowley commented. “Either none are beautiful, or they all are.”

“True,” Aziraphale agreed, voice and smile soft.

They stood for a few moments, just watching it, taking it in. Enjoying it and each other.

Then the ginger walked back towards the blanket, which now quite mysteriously was packed with just about everything he’d brought. Equally strangely, there was still room for the two of them to sit on it, though not with their legs, despite the spread that could only be described as ‘abundant’.

He sat down, his heart in his throat, hoping he’d got it at least somewhat right.

Which really was stupid. This, at least, he knew he’d got right. Not only had he possibly got every type of picnic-appropriate thing put out on the blanket, and then some, but he knew his angel well at this point and knew that something of quality, food or not, that was made for him was bound to be approved of.

Had he thought about it, he would’ve likely realised that it was almost certainly the nerves from what he had planned for after their ‘light’ dinner that were bleeding over into this.

Aziraphale joined him, sitting himself down opposite, where Crowley had made room for him. Just like they always did. Well, almost always. At least, there was space between them wherever they sat. It had got to be less in the last half a year but well, with everything else, he didn’t want to overdo it.

It was probably, no, unquestionably being overly cautious but at the time, he didn’t see it as such.

Only this time, while the blond did sit where he’d been given a space, it seemed that it was somehow much closer to the ginger than what he’d intended, what he’d made room for, while the spread remained unaltered.

Crowley wasn’t about to complain, he just...he’d thought that with this being so different from what they’d done before, with no concert or play to distract them and not a drop of alcohol drunk between them yet, on an actual date, Aziraphale might find it one thing too many, one step too close to also be sitting as close as they’d done on many occasions now.

Apparently not, though, if not just the fact that he’d sat himself down where he had but the ease with which he’d done it, no hesitation, as well as the smile still on his face.

One might think that the smile was because of the food but as blue eyes were meeting yellow through tinted glasses, it seemed unlikely.

For a long moment, he sat there, immobile. Then he reached across and again placed his hand on top of Crowley’s.

“Thank you,” he said, and there was more packed into that small sentence than the ginger had expected. It felt like he was being thanked for more than just the spread or even the picnic.

“You’re welcome,” he managed to reply, smiling in turn. He was purely smiling, though, not colouring. Not in the slightest. “Go on, then. Eat some. It’s not show food.”

It does look absolutely scrumptious I have to say,” Aziraphale enthused as he looked it over. He put one or two things carefully on the plate beside him, then picked up a jar of something to examine it. “I didn’t know there was anywhere that sold a hamper like this.”

“There isn’t.”

The angel looked up from the jar, realisation dawning.

“My dear…” he said softly, and it really shouldn’t be allowed to pack that much into just two words. Especially not when it wasn’t clear just what exactly was meant.

Oh, the understanding and the gratefulness were both clear enough but as for the rest of it…

The poor demon had to swallow and had to remind himself not to wet his lips.

“Eat,” Crowley said, glad of his glasses that hid his eyes looking just about anywhere else because he couldn’t right now.

He reached out and grabbed something without looking and brought it to his lips. Due to sheer luck, it was something that could be eaten as was and he bit into the scotch egg without relish. Or any other type of condiment, really.

Aziraphale looked at him for an achingly long moment, then smiled and began to fill his plate.

So did Crowley after he’d finished off the scotch egg. Though they as supernatural beings didn’t get hungry and eating was more of Aziraphale’s indulgence than his, he found himself piling more on the plate than he normally would – that he didn’t eat as much as the angel didn’t mean he didn’t eat at all – and what was more, digging into at least most of it.

That seemed to delight Aziraphale for some reason and he placed the occasional morsel from his own plate over on Crowley’s, who in turn made sure to pick up the offered treat as the next thing he ate.

By and by, the food Crowley had brought was eaten, between comments, big and small and completely irrelevant, and discussions, laughter and the occasional touch that was no less meaningful or appreciated for not being constant.

As they ate and talked, they also watched the sun disappear completely beneath the horizon, gradually calling back its tendrils of colour, who darkened as they ran, and the bolder ones even changed colours altogether.

Behind them came night, this time rolling in slowly and majestically rather than jumping and skipping along or racing as if it had got out of bed too late and was in a hurry to reach its destination.

They were even lucky enough to have a few stars come out as night-time came.

As they became visible, Crowley shifted where he sat, feeling a sense of unease creep up on him, but not for the reason that Aziraphale evidently thought, judging by the way he clutched the hand wrapped around his and tried to gently run his thumb back and forth over the patch of skin it touched.

It would be a guess but given what they were looking at, it didn’t seem that big an assumption to make; that Aziraphale was worried he was uneasy being ‘confronted’, as it were, by evidence of his life Before.

Crowley wasn’t going to deny that he did think about it at times or that he wasn’t affected by them, both positively and negatively, much as he didn’t want it to.

At the same time, not only hadn’t he been the sole builder of stars – the paperwork alone on managing all that would’ve caused anyone to Fall, he felt – and consequently weren’t necessarily responsible for what he could see on any given night, he’d watched the night sky so many times over the millennia that…

Well, it hadn’t stopped hurting, but it had dulled, in a way, and become at the very least something he could look at and even contemplate without feeling small and lost, let alone outright pained.

That said, he appreciated both the consideration and the gesture on the angel’s part.

No, the unease, the nerves, were to do with the realisation that they were nearing the end of the meal and therefore also nearing the next step in the plan. The plan which he still wasn’t sure how the other would react to.

Could he just put it off a little bit longer?

Well, yes, of course. He could put it off for eternity, if that’s what he wanted. If he was honest with himself, however, and stripped away the fear and nerves that were doing at least part of the thinking for him, then he knew that he didn’t want to. It hadn’t been a sudden impulse or idea, after all, but something he had wanted for a long, long time.

Putting it off for just a little bit longer wasn’t going to change anything, either. Not the issue and not how he felt about it. If anything, it was in all likelihood only going to exacerbate the matter.

Procrastination was the thief of time, yes, but it didn’t even have the decency to leave a solution or a better feeling about it all behind.

It might be shot down and not happen but if he chickened out like this, it wasn’t going to happen anyway.

With all of that in mind, he took a deep, unnecessary breath and, not entirely intentionally, squeezed the hand in his.

He could do this. More importantly, he was going to do it.

Aziraphale looked at him, puzzled but evidently willing to wait for an explanation, even as he then stood up, keeping hold of the hand in his.

The ginger, after taking another breath, then tugged at the hand in question. Aziraphale followed his request and stood up as well, a little less fluidly than the noodle that was the demon but with a surprising amount of grace, nevertheless.

Once they were both upright, Crowley tugged again and led the other a little way away from the blanket.

The question in blue eyes grew larger still.

Crowley?” he asked, evidently hoping for an explanation.

I…ehm…”

No. No hesitation, no more second guessing. The worst that could happen was that Aziraphale said no and even if he did, he would do it kindly and with understanding rather than judgment.

It was Aziraphale, after all.

For all that he could be a bit of a bastard, Crowley not only loved him the more for it, he was never a bastard around such things.

“I wasn’t only planning to go all the way out here for a picnic,” he said, speaking calmly and at a normal pace, both of which was a bit of a surprise.

He might’ve expected the blond to make a comment but all he got was a patient, yet expectant expression and a small smile.

“I was actually planning, well, hoping that we could…could maybe, if you’re…”

Bless it, when did his tongue become a knot? Or rather, a positive jumble knot. Spit it out already.

“If you don’t mind, I’d like to go flying. Together.”

The angel didn’t seem to react to that and for a split second, Crowley was unsure of whether he’d heard him. But he must’ve done, as he then noticed the blue eyes slowly but surely widening, possibly as realisation dawned.

It was on the tip of the forked tongue to take it back, to somehow annul it. He stopped himself, however. If he was going to do it, then he was going to go the whole way. Even if he ended up being the only one up in the sky.

The possibility that Aziraphale didn’t know what he meant was remote. There really weren’t many, if any, other ways you could interpret those words, were there?

Another deep breath and he made a further decision; he was going to go up there, whether the angel was going to join him or not.

You might not be able to claim that half a year was a long time since they’d last been ‘let out’, not in the context of their lives, but even so, he’d felt an itch in his shoulders ever since that day on the airbase tarmac.

And it would be good, not just to stretch them on the ground but flex the muscles of them, too, let them do they were intended to do for once.

He closed his eyes and let out a long, drawn-out breath of relief as he let go of something inside of him and felt the wings unfurl behind and around him with a silent roar.

It occurred to him, then, somewhat and perhaps unwisely belatedly, that maybe Aziraphale’s reaction had something to do with a fear, residual or not, that they would be spotted. Not by humans, that could be fixed. By upstairs or downstairs.

That conclusion seemed born out by the fact that the blue eyes had somehow only grown wider as they looked at him.

If they were going to strike them down, though, they would’ve done so already, surely? Quite apart from what they had already put them through, what with the trials and everything, they’d had plenty of opportunities in the last half a year.

Going for a flight wasn’t going to piss them off more than the rest of what they’d done so far, or so he’d thought when he’d contemplated it himself.

“Crowley…”

There was quite the evident amount of concern and apprehension in that one syllable, or so the demon would’ve said.

He sighed, heavily. There was convincing and then there was coercion or simply pushing someone into doing something they really didn’t want to do. He had no intention of doing either, not when it came to Aziraphale and their time together, much as it was sending small cracks through his heart.

They would mend, though. It was fine.

It was fine.

He let go of the hand in his, reluctantly but nevertheless, he did it. If he was going to do this on his own, he wasn’t going to drag the other with him, not even a little.

“You don’t have to if you don’t want to, angel, or if you don’t feel safe going up. I can go up myself, it’d probably be safer – “

Before he could get any further, he was interrupted by the angel unfolding his own wings with an equally inaudible clamour.

There were certain benefits to being a demon. One of them was excellent night vision and so he could easily see the angel standing before him, wings spread out on either side before they came to rest, much like his own.

Without the threat of impending doom and obliteration, for the entire planet as well as them, looming over him, over them both, he had the opportunity to take in the shape of his friend and partner, with his wings, and the sight took his breath away.

Oh, to see those wings beat as they brought the angel up into the air properly and then stretch out as he glided across the night sky, occasionally pushing down with force yet still with grace to stay up.

If ever he’d been in doubt that he’d had a fantasy about seeing that, it evaporated at that moment. Not that that meant anything, really, at least in this particular context.

“I don’t believe I ever said I didn’t want to,” Aziraphale said. “Nor imply it, either.”

“Your silence was pretty telling,” Crowley countered, with just the merest hint of sharpness to his voice.

“Perhaps so, but that doesn’t mean it was indicative of the thing you assumed,” Aziraphale returned, with an equal hint of sharpness.

Then he paused, swallowed, and his voice softened when he spoke again.

“With that said, I do see how it wouldn’t necessarily come across as it formed in my brain, and that a silence can leave some very unfortunate implications in its wake that mere words very often, and for that, I honestly do apologise.”

He grabbed hold of the hand that had only just left his, gripping it even firmer than before.

Crowley expected him to say something more. Perhaps explain his reasoning for not feeling like he could go up there. Which wouldn’t gel with him having let his wings out but perhaps his had been itching same as the ginger’s and this had, if nothing else seemed a good opportunity.

What he did not expect was what he got; Aziraphale not saying a word as he took a step backwards, then another while still trying to keep hold of Crowley’s hand.

As the demon didn’t move, however, since he didn’t feel like he ought to, given what the other was trying to do, that proved impossible, even when they both stretched.

Crowley frowned, puzzled but hopeful. Was that – did that mean that –?

When Aziraphale closed his eyes and drew a deep, but quick breath, it seemed more likely and when air slammed into him and flowed around him as the large wings pushed it down with force and the distance wasn’t quite great enough, Crowley could no longer be in any doubt.

He watched, something constricting his throat, as Aziraphale rose into the air, born aloft by his wings that a certain subset of humans would unquestionably point out were entirely impossible; that with their size and construction they shouldn’t be able to carry something the rough shape and weight of a fully grown human.

Impossible included other such small titbits as being immortal and performing actual, honest-to-opposition miracles, whether benign or malignant, too, and they managed both of those well enough, didn’t they?

To be perfectly fair, it was probably at least a little more graceful to Crowley’s biased gaze than reality would record, but that hardly mattered.

What mattered was that it was happening and for that, he could have swayed like a kite that refused to pick up wind as it was run along to make it fly and Crowley would still have found it beautiful.

That wasn’t to say it was inelegant, regardless of the body shape of the angel. Just a, a little rusty, perhaps. Like something that you once excelled at but haven’t touched in long enough that not just your brain, but your body needs a moment or two to tap into what the dickens this was all about again.

Once that seemed to come back to him, he visibly relaxed. How exactly that was visible, given, well, everything, was something best left to someone with demonic night vision and very intimate, though not sexual, knowledge of the body in question.

Then, another thing happened that Crowley hadn’t expected and certainly wasn’t prepared for. Rather than hold his hand out for the ginger to take as he rose himself, Aziraphale instead grabbed the hand he’d been trying to hold onto earlier.

He didn’t pull or anything like it that would make the demon destabilise or otherwise risk staggering and stumbling, though, just held on as he waited, his wings beating a slow but steady rhythm, keeping him afloat in the air.

Crowley should’ve been up there to join him immediately, he knew. He wanted to, too, without a question, and he would’ve done, as well, if not…

If not for the tiny little issue that his body seemed to have shut down for its holidays and the front desk wasn’t taking any calls at the time.

This was not…

He had been so bloody nervous about all of this ever since he had first formulated it in his mind and suggested going on a date; he’d gone from being hopeful and sometimes even confident back to being a nervous wreck to then thinking in entirely defeatist terms about it and then swung back around to hopeful and start it all over again. Sometimes it’d switch up the order, of course, but otherwise, it had stayed.

All of that, over and over in his mind since Aziraphale had said yes to the date, and this was the result?

It wasn’t that he was…no, that wasn’t right. He was complaining, he just didn’t have any right to complain. Not when things had turned out more or less just like he’d hoped for, and he was more than fine with avoiding drama.

Drama when it was someone else could be interesting, might even fuel a tarnishing of a soul somewhere – he was a demon, he’d had a job to do – but drama when he himself was involved? No, thank you. He’d had more than enough of that in his life, he was going to avoid any further instances.

He guessed there was just the slightest sense of…anti-climax to things panning out like this.

Or perhaps anti-climax was the wrong word. Maybe it was more accurate to say that it felt like it was going too well and that it would come crashing down on him, if not right now then in not very long.

Or…oh, he didn’t know. It was too much, all too much to contemplate at once. It wouldn’t change anything, either, but that wasn’t the same as easily being able to push it out of his mind.

The hand that wasn’t already gripping his was extended towards him.

He looked at it, followed the line of the arm all the way until his eyes met those of Aziraphale. The ones that were smiling so softly, so warmly.

So lovingly.

There was no other word for it.

That broke through not just the thoughts thronging in his mind and making the start of an absolute racket, but his momentary stupor.

Right.

Pushing aside the small thought that it ought to have been him who’d asked Aziraphale like this, not the other way around, as petty and irrelevant in the circumstances, he grabbed the proffered hand without further hesitation.

Thankfully, pushing his wings down wasn’t something that required a whole lot of thought. Not none at all, mind, and he ran the risk of wobbling as much or even more than the angel in front of him. But he would gladly take that if it meant that he got to experience this.

He was in the air before he knew it, the hands in his gripping firmly. It certainly wasn’t him that was holding on tightly to the hands of the angel. Most definitely not.

Aziraphale didn’t say anything, not even when Crowley accidentally pulled a little higher than he’d intended in one go.

Only when the demon felt like he had it all under control – and he wasn’t as foolish as to let go before he was sure he had it under his control – did he let go…of one hand.

The whole reason he’d wanted this wasn’t for him to faff about on his own, now was it? One might argue ‘tricks’ but if that was what Crowley was after, he had plenty of things he could show off to his angel – and they were things that only he could do, too.

Hardly a competition, was it?

He changed the grip on the hand in his, just enough that it was much more secure. That and, well, interlacing your fingers always felt very comforting and, well, romantic.

It was a good thing that angels didn’t have excellent night vision as well, because it spared him from having his slightly reddened cheeks exposed. What light might be left from the disappeared sun was not enough to illuminate the demon’s face, thankfully.

His hand was squeezed gently and Aziraphale’s smile only broadened.

Shall we, then?” the angel asked, and Crowley nodded, ignoring the moisture in his eyes.

Despite it being Aziraphale who had got off the ground first, as it were, he let it be Crowley who took the lead on moving forward, beating his wings once, twice as he looked across the expanse of fields, trees and a small smattering of houses that constituted the nearest village, which included both a post office and a pub, and beyond.

All stretched out below them and around them, ready to be seen.

Not because he never had, though it had been a while since he’d last been on any flight, on his own or assisted by machines. That wasn’t the point.

The point was that he was going to see them with Aziraphale.

That made the difference. All the difference in the world, really.

He thought he saw something glow in the far distance and figured that that would be a good thing to start heading for. Not the final destination, of course, just the pointer to head for right now.

Taking a deep breath, he then set off, his grip on Aziraphale’s hand very firm, warm, a little sweaty and just about perfect.

There was the slightest of tugs in their clasped hands at that, but the angel kept pace with him almost immediately and despite the fact that they should’ve crashed right into each other, flying so close and on a line, nothing happened.

For a little while, they just sailed across the sky, floating in the air, in silence that was only theirs.

Crowley closed his eyes without meaning to, unable to help exhilarating in the sheer excitement and utter joy of being up here, letting his wings out to stretch and flex their muscles. The wind in his face, the sting in his lungs, the rushing through his feathers, the power underneath his wings as they rose a little.

Apart from those small noises right beside him, the almost deafening silence of everything around him, the everyday humdrum noises of an evening that hadn’t realised it had become night far too small to be heard up where they were.

All of it coming together to form something that was altogether so much more than the sum of its parts.

Something that was magical.

But it was only so because it was focused through the spectacular, unique prism that was his angel. Without Aziraphale, none of this would’ve meant even a fraction as much, if anything at all.

Speaking of that, he thought that maybe, if he concentrated on the right muscles and such, he could change the angle and maybe just –

Aziraphale, caught up in his own enjoyment, it seemed, must’ve felt the hand in his loosen. But even so, he let out an inaudible but visible gasp as he watched the demon suddenly fly beneath him, keeping perfect pace with him as they sailed on through the gathering night, his wings beating steadily.

Blue eyes slid across the entirety of the body beneath him and Crowley couldn’t help but spread out his arms as well, grinning just a little cockily.

Alright, so perhaps showing off wasn’t purely for when there were serpentine tricks to perform. Sue him.

Actually, that…nah. He’d got better things to do. Especially now.

Such as flying up above the other and circling all the around him, ending up right back where he’d started, but with a bigger grin than he’d had before.

Aziraphale’s mouth clearly said ‘show-off’, judging by the careful, somewhat exaggerated movements of lips, but despite the distance and despite the darkness around them, Crowley had no trouble seeing the warmth shining in the eyes that he knew so well.

He rose again but only so much that he was in front of Aziraphale, hovering high above the ground.

Luckily, the angel must’ve expected something like that to happen, as he slowed immediately before stopping completely, and thereby avoided crashing straight into the other.

Crowley flew in close and grabbed hold of both plump hands. He brought him up a little and then tugged, moving as he did so. The grin that now threatened to take over his face had nothing to do with cockiness and everything to with unadulterated joy and delight.

Aziraphale followed him, a smiling frown on his features as he didn’t quite understand what the ginger was getting at.

That soon became a laugh of delight as he caught on and moved with the demon, faster and faster as they spun round and round, like a celestial round-about, with the added benefit that they weren’t going to fall off and if they became dizzy from it all, it was easily fixable.

They were both laughing like idiots the entire time.

When they finally stopped, Crowley felt just the slightest bit dizzy, but he also felt outright giddy and joyous and the fact that his feelings were reflected on his most beloved face in the whole world. The entire universe, really.

Part of him wondered whether they ought to call it a night. Whether Aziraphale would want to call it a night, after everything.

Did Crowley want to call it a night? No, not at all. Not ever.

…And still have begged for more…

He had no idea where that had come from. No, actually, he did, with music accompanying it and everything. He just didn’t want to acknowledge it, that wasn’t the same thing.

Despite that, he couldn’t deny that he shared the sentiment, even as he tried to bury the wretched song deep where it might never resurface.

He did want it to go on all night, at the very least, if not longer. It wasn’t as though they were exactly hindered by the limits of other creatures with the ability to fly, was it?

On the other hand, though, he did recognise that a large part of the magic lay in it being such a limited time.

To extend it beyond the night would not only mean that they’d have to perform quite hefty miracles not to be spotted by anyone – as it was now, even with the clear sky they were flying in, they would, if they were spotted at all, be seen as weird birds or possible odd hang-gliders…oh, weren’t humans simply wonderful? – it would take away from the night.

From their date.

Which wasn’t what he wanted at all.

So, instead he could make the most of what he had, make it as memorable an experience as possible.

That did not mean that all it could be was showing off for Aziraphale.

He flew a little closer, with the intention of asking whether the angel wanted to make a swooping dive with him.

Before he got the chance to more than open his mouth, however, he was in for a shock that almost sent him crashing out of the sky; Aziraphale closed what distance remained between them and kissed him.

It wasn’t a short kiss nor a chaste one, either of which he would’ve expected from Aziraphale, if he’d expected anything at all. Which he hadn’t, mainly because he hadn’t dared to entertain even the glimmerings of such a thought. To do more was to only set himself up for unneeded disappointment, or so he’d thought.

This now…

This told an entirely different story, though, didn’t it? As well as saying that maybe he’d got it wrong. Possibly not entirely but quite significantly wrong, even so.

Quickly, he pressed back, as enthusiastically as he could without risking the other toppling over. His hands let go of the other’s as their tongues met, but though he’d intended to wrap the hands around the back of Aziraphale’s neck, only one managed that.

The other settled itself under and over the angel’s jaw, cupping it and allowing his thumb to brush across the entirety of the cheek, paying special attention to the cheekbone and the corner of an eye where it seemed as though some moisture had gathered.

It was him that pulled back after a small eternity, his eyes opening slowly…which was entirely lost on the other, seeing as he’d retained his sunglasses for the trip into the air.

“Well, that…”

“Shush,” Aziraphale said, without opening his own eyes. He placed a finger on Crowley’s lips for emphasis, even though they were definitely close enough to hear each other now. “Don’t go ruining it. Not yet.”

The demon let out a sharply indignant noise at that and pulled back a little further.

Ruining it! The bloody nerve of it – as though he would!

Then the angel did open his eyes and there was nothing but warmth and love in them, no anger or annoyance at all.

Well, to say that it was all that was in them was perhaps not quite true…

“You bastard,” Crowley murmured when he cottoned on, the downward pull of his lips transforming into a broad grin in an instant. “You – “

“At your service, my dear, always and ever,” Aziraphale smiled back. After a moment, he asked, “Shall we head back, then?”

Crowley was about to say ‘yes’ – because just because they were headed back didn’t mean they had to take the straight route – when he spotted something flashing through the night.

“Not yet,” he said, his grin a positive beam now. “Come on, I want to try something!”

And what’s that?” Aziraphale asked.

Crowley didn’t answer, just grabbed the other’s hand and headed down.

That was to say, he dove down, in a swoop that was a bit too vertical for any kind of comfort. Nevertheless, Aziraphale followed him, keeping hold of his hand throughout and staying right beside him.

Down they flew, down and down and forward as well, until they were right above what Crowley had spotted; a train, though sadly not a steam train, moving through the night with a speed that was quite seductive and almost lent it a sort of grace as it sped across the rails.

They kept pace with it for a while, just because they could.

Once or twice, Crowley dropped down to look in on the passengers, which rather startled at least a few. There was one who merely waved to him, but as that was a child, with a sibling beside it who just frowned and stared, he had no compunction with waving right back to them before shooting back upwards, with perhaps more speed than he rightly needed.

When he emerged back up above the train, he looked around.

His heart seized when he at first saw absolutely nothing, not even a hint of angel as he looked.

Just as he was about to call out for him, however, strangled and, admittedly, desperate, his eyes caught on a mass of white. A familiar and incredibly welcome mass of white.

He dropped a foot or two out of sheer relief before he flew over to where Aziraphale was. Where he had sat himself down.

On top of the moving train. He was cross-legged but somehow managed to look as prim and proper as he always did when he had something more…chair-like with a seat to perch on instead.

Crowley alighted on the roof himself.

“What the heaven’s possessed you to sit yourself down on top of a moving train?” he asked once he had.

Aziraphale looked entirely innocent. “You were the one who wanted to follow it along like a couple of gulls trailing a ship.”

Gull? Gull? He wasn’t a bleeding gull!

What he said out loud was something else, though. “And you went along with me, which you didn’t have to if you didn’t want to.”

“Of course, I had to, don’t be silly,” the angel said, but his sniffy attitude was rather undermined by the way he reached across to grab Crowley’s hand again. The ginger definitely felt like he could get used to that happening far more often.

“What’s more and much more important, I wanted to,” Aziraphale added, a smile creeping back into his expression. “I just felt that while you flitted about scaring the life out of innocent passengers, I might as well get a bit of rest out of it.”

“As though you get tired – and isn’t it your job to stop me from doing things like that, anyway?”

The flight had lessened some tension between them, which had been more needed than Crowley had been aware of beforehand, and it was nice to just bicker back and forth a little.

That and the kiss had helped significantly in that regard, obviously.

“Scaring passengers is not very nice at all and even a bit juvenile but it hardly counts as evil, my dear, and certainly not something that needs thwarting.” The smile turned just the slightest bit mischievous. “Besides, I thought that we had retired. I believe you were rather adamant on that score.”

“Me? It was your idea.” Crowley wasn’t going to be goaded by something like ‘juvenile’.

“No, I am entirely certain it was yours, dearest, and you won’t persuade me otherwise.”

Crowley opened his mouth to argue, got as far as the first half of a syllable before he gave it up in mild disgust, turning it into a mocking grimace.

It only made the angel smile broader.

They stayed on the train for a few more miles, just taking in the scenery. As the first, faint but distinguishable glow of predawn began to suffuse the darkness around them, they looked to the landscape around them.

Then they looked at each other.

With a deep breath, their wings pushed down in unison as they set off, with surprisingly little issue for either of them, their timing meaning that they only just missed the tunnel the train was about to hurtle through at top speed.

They flew quietly but happily through the countryside, going past a town that might’ve qualified as a city, a few towns, quite a few villages and a whole lot of landscape, none of which looked remotely familiar to Crowley, who excused himself with the fact that it had been dark when they’d set out, completely ignoring the night vision, and besides, didn’t it all look the same?

He wasn’t worried, though. Not in the slightest. After all, he’d left his car in loads of places over the years and he’d always been able to find it.

It had always been in fine condition, too – and if he returned now and found that it wasn’t, for whatever reason, then he would make the little punks who’d so much as thought to damage it or even take it regret the day they had ever been conceived.

And if Aziraphale made any comment, he would ask, innocently, about if someone hurt his books.

He squeezed the hand in his, unable to fight the beaming smile of utter joy on his face as they flew back towards the car, the angel taking the lead this time.

For a first date, it had been almost, definitely entirely perfect. Every other date from now on certainly had a lot to live up.

…Well, then. He liked a challenge.

.............................................................

The car turned out to be fine.

When they finally located it about a mile or two away from where their picnic blanket still lay, undisturbed. Mostly fine, at least.

Aziraphale never asked where Crowley went one afternoon about a week later, which he had spent polishing and pampering his car despite the fact that he could and had fixed it completely with one single glare at the dents and scratches, and the demon never volunteered the information.

It was better and easier for both parties that way, and there was no need to spoil the mood.

Not when they had had such a beautiful trip out of it.

Aziraphale was already planning for another ‘date’, one which he hoped could do the first one proper justice.

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

Hope you like and it even remotely lives up to what you hoped it’d be.

#tlou15 #Ineffable Husbands #post-canon #prompt fill #aziraphale/crowley #date night #nervous crowley #uncertain Crowley #loving aziraphale #loving crowley #good omens fic #elphen fic #ineffable husbands go flying #first kiss #picnic #ineffable husbands picnic

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positivlyfocused · 4 years

Photo

Music is powerful. It can literally shape life experience. So I'm careful about what songs I listen to these days. Here's why.

One day last fall started as usual: in high spirits. The day itself was glorious – clear blue sky, leaves changing with the season and mild but comfortable temperatures. It was a great day to be working outside.

I was happy. Adding to my delight was my music playlist. It's a collection of about two thousand songs gathered over many years. So it's a nice, eclectic mix.

But then it happened. I don't know how, at first. There I was, happy, enjoying my day. So why was I suddenly feeling sorry for myself, cranky and in a bad mood?

I'm almost always positive these days.

But in this moment I felt so negative, I even questioned whether I create my reality!

Srsly? 😕

^^A beautiful fall day was the start of an extraordinary experience (my photo).

My clients have this experience too sometimes. One minute they'll be positively focused. Then, seemingly for no reason, they're sad.

But how could this negative emotion blindside me?

That was the wrong question.

What I should have asked was, how did I miss early stage indicators that I had diverged from my Broader Perspective?

I know I can never completely disconnect from my Broader Perspective. But it is possible to think thoughts inconsistent with what my Broader Perspective knows. When that happens I feel negative emotion. I know that's the only reason negative emotions happen.

Negative emotion tells me I've parted perspectives. I'm no longer seeing life through my Broader Knowing.

When I see life the way my Broader Perspective does, I feel great.

When I feel negative emotion, I'm pretty good at catching it. When I do, I either relax and chill, or change my thoughts.

As I said, I've gotten really good at that. That's why I feel ecstasy or near-ecstasy most of the time. Because of that, happy things happen in my life. I write about these in this blog.

Since I know what emotions are for, I know that if I miss an early indicator, my negative mood will worsen...until life smacks me upside the head with a physical manifestation matching that mood.

I don't like it when things get that far.

So I usually catch bad moods early. Usually very early, like on their first indication.

So how did this negative mood get so far?

Before I go into what what happened next, some non-physical background might be helpful...

The Mechanics of Manifestation

I know this manifestation business is real. I know I create my reality. A ton of evidence has blown away any doubt. I also know manifestations are immediate.

Now I don't blame people who don't believe all this manifestation business. I wouldn't believe it either if I didn't know how to see the evidence.

Thankfully I know how to see the evidence. And, I understand why it seems manifestations take so long or never happen at all. One reason "it doesn't work" or takes a long time has to do with resistance.

Unlike non-physical or Inner Reality, Physical Reality comes with a lot of resistance or friction. It's as real as the nose on my face.

^^My Illustration

Engineers design physical objects with this friction or resistance in mind. That's why high performance cars and airplanes and boats look how they look. That's why tires wear out. It's why rockets look really streamlined...instead of looking like bricks.

Just as cars and airplanes and boats need an initial push to overcome resistance and another force, what physicists call "inertia", it takes persistence and focused attention to change my immediate now, especially a now I may not want, into a preferred now.

Focused attention is just like a push. The more pure the focus, the stronger the push.

But, unlike cars and airplanes and rockets, it doesn't take a lot of focused energy to get reality moving in a different direction. To build momentum a reality creator only needs thoughts with no contradictory energy.

And so, as I started telling new stories about how I felt, I knew my reality started changing at once. It took several deliberate hours for a complete and permanent shift from my negative now to the positive now I wanted. But an early indication that change was on the way was how much better I felt telling the new, improved stories.

Now, you may be saying "several hours? You said it was immediate!"

It is immediate. But full-blown manifestational change must come through physical reality's inherent resistance. Movement from initial signs to full-blown manifestation is therefore gradual.

^^As this graphic illustrates, there's more resistance in physical reality than elsewhere. That's why there's an APPARENT delay in manifestations. If you know how to see the evidence, "apparent delay" disappears leaving you free to witness manifestations manifesting at once. (My Illustration)

Still, compare a few hours to the years or decades a person might invest trying to shake off "negative" emotions such anxiety, depression, chronic fear or even simple pessimism.

These negative states are hard to shake because the person waited too long to turn them around. Know how to see early manifestational evidence of negative situations and any chronic negative trajectory can easily be reversed.

Any reversal must happen before too much momentum gets going. Otherwise it can take a long time. It can take an entire life time. It might never change.

A rocket sits on the launch pad. You "light the fires and kick the tires". If you abort the launch sequence soon enough stopping the rocket is easy.

But if you wait until the rocket has launched and gained altitude and momentum....well, you're not going to stop that rocket easily.

The same is true for any negative manifestation.

^^My Illustration

I caught my "rocket" on the launch pad so that sour mood didn't get any momentum. A few hours was nothing. And it was time well spent. Here's why.

My Past Is Now And Vice Versa

As those hours ticked by, I saw more and more evidence the process was working. That awareness built on itself, creating its own momentum. And as that momentum strengthened, something happened I wasn't expecting.

I felt/got/heard/saw a message from non-physical. It was communication from Broader Perspective. It said a song in my playlist, one that played several hours ago, triggered an old belief constellation. It said I formed that belief constellation in the past in response to an experience I had that I interpreted (way back then) as negative.

Back then, that song was popular. It played on the radio a lot. I liked that song so much I put it in my collection. I played it often. Even during that negative experience. In doing so, I forged an association in my belief constellation between the song and the experience I interpreted as negative.

So the song, playing that day on my route in the present, triggered a belief constellation I formed in that past experience. A constellation I hadn't activated since, until I heard that song!

Beliefs in that constellation are so divergent from how my Broader Perspective interpreted that past experience it caused me to diverge from my Broader Perspective in the present. That's why I felt bad!

When the message ended, I was puzzled. Driving my van, I remembered the song in question. It was vague in my mind, you know? Like when a word is there, but not there in your head, and you say "it's on the tip of my tongue", but you can't say the actual word, even though it's there.

That's how the song was. Right there, but not right there. I couldn't get the title or lyrics in my head. But I knew which song my Broader Perspective meant.

Why do you think I couldn't put my finger on it?

It's because my creation process worked! I shifted my "now" so completely, I couldn't put my finger on it because the frequency of the song and the frequency of my improved mood were too different.

Trippy, right?

And here's the thing: That's evidence!

My increasingly positive frequency was so different from those past stories, only their "ghosts" remained...On the tip of my brain, but inexpressible.

^^Songs are stories. They're stories a talented storyteller tells (My illustration).

Then I realized something amazing. You see, were it not for hearing that song, were it not for listening to that playlist, were it not for the negative emotion triggered by all that, I wouldn't have done what I did in response.

And, I wouldn't have had the awesome experience of tuning into my Broader Consciousness' message. A message that came through all my senses. A message that surprised and delighted me, yes. But also a message confirming the existence of my Broader Perspective!

That's how consistent positive focus creates extraordinary experience. And evidence this manifestation business is real.

While I did not remember the song's title or lyrics, I still felt its "ghosts". That tells me beliefs and experiences associated with that song are still present in me. But they are losing their momentum in light of my now-focus.

Receiving direct, clear, unmistakable communication from the non-physical realm tells me everything I'm doing is real. That it's not mumbo jumbo or New Age bullshit. And this is why personal experience is so convincing.

It's one thing for you to read about this experience in a blog. It's a whole other thing when it happens to you!

Here's something else I learned: Music is powerful. Its repetitiousness builds momentum. When I repeat lyrics to myself, sing-along out loud, or listen to songs over and over, I amplify that song's frequency in my "signal mix".

It behooves me then to pay attention to what types of music I'm listening to, doesn't it? And choose only music supporting positive perspectives.

· · ·

The rest of that day I played with my learning. I listened to my playlist. Every time a song came on, I felt for its frequency. How did I feel when I listened? Did it close the gap between me? Or widen it? If I felt a song triggered even the slightest negative effect, I skipped it.

Songs are stories. They're stories a talented storyteller tells. It's a new perspective for me, seeing songs this way. There are a lot of songs out there telling not-so-positive stories.

Curating my music helps cultivate a high frequency mix. I keep it high by weeding out songs that don't resonate.

So what are you listening to? Is your playlist filed with songs about lost love, broken hearts, angry black men, "Fuck Da Police", "pussy" and "bitches"? Not judging genres. I know, for example, that my frequency response to certain songs depends on my relationship to those songs. Rap, for example, can be uplifting.

It's easy to let others' beliefs and stories shape our mood and therefore our reality. Songs are a powerful way other people's stories do that.

Thanks to my Broader Perspective, I now know my daily life is curated by, among other things, songs I listen to. Going forward I'm choosing my playlist more wisely.

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pupa-cinema · 4 years

Text

Happy Go Lucky Heads - HELL'O' - English Translation

Lyrics: Sekihan Music：324

外出て歩き始めた瞬間　バリバリ雨が降り出す As soon as I stepped outside, rain started pouring down シフト入った日だけ　バリバリ客が湧き出す The day I had to work, was the day the crowd was actually pumped up 動画いいとこなのに　携帯充電もうない Right at the good part of a video, I ran out of phone battery 疲れて寝てる日だけ　隣人めっちゃパーリーナイト The days I go to sleep exhausted, are the same days my neighbors throw a party all night

地獄(HELL！)　地獄(HELL！)地獄(HELL！) この世は地獄 This world is a living hell 地獄(HELL！)　地獄(HELL！)地獄(HELL！) この世は地獄 This world is a living hell

めっちゃ並んだラーメン　眼前で売り切れ御免 I had been waiting in a long line for ramen, until it sold out right before my eyes 昔推したアイドル　いつの間にか脱いどる My old bias idol, throughout the years they’ve stripped to go viral

流れ流されどこまで Going on and on with no end in sight 行けどされども掴めない Where to go, no matter which way, I can’t seem to hold onto- 蜘蛛の糸 The Spider Web’s Thread

歪んじまった　悲しみが　問いかけてる All fucking twisting and turning, the sorrow is intrusive 'HELLO' 育っちまった　想い出の　トゲが胸に The memories I’ve been coddling for some damn reason, theyre like a thorn in my heart 刺さって　動けない Stabbing into me, I can’t move

'何でももうひとりでできるもん！' '本当にお利口さん' ‘I can do it all by myself, hmph!” “You‘re such a prodigy!” 独り上手の果てに　独りぼっちの痛み To work well alone also means to suffer alone

'みんなで幸せになろうよ'だとか “Let’s find happiness together” and shit 'いいことしてれば天国行けるよ'だとか “Good people go to heaven” and shit 'そもそもどうして僕らは生まれてきたのか考えてみて'とか “Take a step back and consider why we were born” and shit うるせぇうるせぇうるせぇうるせぇ Shut up shut up shut up shut up んなもん勝手にほざいとけ It’s none of your fucking business

流れ流されどこまで Going on and on with no end in sight 行けどされども掴めない Where to go, no matter which way, I can’t seem to hold onto- 白い細い　君の手 Your pale slender hand

地獄にひとつ　エン結んで　君を呼んだ I connected with hell and tried to call out for you 'HELLO'

もう2度と　届かない　こんな声なら Alas you can’t fucking hear me anymore 潰れて　無くなれ So get rid of it, I want it gone

痛い　痛いの　翔んでけ Pain, pain, go away 天国まで　今は　さよなら Goodbye, see you again in heaven

here

　Footnotes:

　● ‘The Spider’s Web Thread’ is a short story by Akutagawa Ryunosuke about an act of mercy of Buddha, in which He lowers a thread down into Hell - an escape route - to allow a chance to a sinner with good still in his hearts.... Will he latch on and climb out? It’s a wonderful piece.. A translation is available

　Interviews:

　● Via Gekirock Interviewer: On the flipside of the coin, HELL”O” seems like a song infused with only the darkness of the heart. This type of song was never seen in Omedetai’s roster before.

Sekihan: Up until now we’ve focused on the joys of music, but deep down I actually think this world is a living hell. Omedetai is grounded on the concept of turning negatives into positives, but the fact that we ourselves have negatives inside us just like everyone else was, well, kinda undisclosed before. It’s hard to hit these things into a song or a short performance. The first time I divulged my heart at a long concert MC, everyone kinda went ‘Wow, so he feels like that huh’. People don’t know- and it turns out… people who are extremely depressed or mentally struggling seem to get pissed off when they hear our songs.

Interviewer: The songs are so bright and happy at a glance, huh.

Sekihan: According to some, it feels like it embosses the darkness within them and makes them want to scream “Shut up!”. ‘That’s the perverse effect’ I thought. Giving form and bringing light to those such jittery oozy festering feelings is literally number one on our job agenda. If we can’t even do that, then there’s no reason for us to tell you to have fun. Of course we’re not free of negativity, it’s the very biofuel for our positivity. So I took note of the necessity to shamelessly shamelessly show everyone what it looks like before it’s processed. The opportunity arised along with the full album - we had room for a more negative piece. Thus we came to the decision to do one.

Interviewer: Up until now your writing process involved changing the bad into good. Once you had to write the bare naked bad as is, was there any problems you encountered with?

Sekihan: Actually it feels like we’ve gone all-natural.

324: ‘Cause normally we’re forcing ourselves (laughs).

Mito-juu: Don’t say that!!

mao: Personally when I first saw the lyrics I was sold in an instant.

Sekihan: Seriously? It is true that none of my mates went hard on the editor’s red pen of death this time. Normally they beat the shit out of me with it (laughs). Well now I know that when someone’s truly miserable, it’s best to welcome that misery with open arms. Just saying “You can do it, feel better!” won’t save them. So we have to welcome the misery, soothe it, and only then does our music come it: its turn to give them a boost. I hope this works out well with everyone.

Interviewer: I see.

　● Via Omedetai official + Kansai Pia

Interviewer: One thing that caught my attention was Poniki’s Twitter post reading “Even I feel like everything in life is stupid fucking bullshiiiit, arghhhh!! - But the band’s branding just prevents me from showing it!”

Ponikingdom: This album served to iron out that idea.

Sekihan: We’re supposed to be guys who ruminate the negatives then output them as positives. But after hearing feedback I learned that sometimes we were interpreted differently: people who are leagues deep in depression say that listening to our songs ticks them off, (laugh) it drags them deeper into depression. Our ultimate goal is akin to literally acting as a spokesperson for upset people, so when I heard that we were actually being counterproductive I was shocked.

Of course we feel negative feelings just like everyone else. So enough beating around the bush I said, we gotta express it directly. Hence “This world is a living hell” is the keyword of HELL”O". And once 324-kun saw that, he followed suit and included the lyric “Karmic hell” in ‘Kotoba no Ayaya’. With these songs in their rightful place, they even helped to bring out the brightness in our positive songs, I think listeners will view us more as people now and I hope these songs are acting as a helping hand to pull depressed people out and up to higher heights.

Interviewer: Omedetai always look like they're having a blast, and look like they’re as positive as can be.. So it makes sense that there are people who don’t fit in such a place.

Sekihan: But I don’t want to shrink and turn my back to them. I think I’ve managed to make space for them too. So this is the fruit of my growth.

#omedetai #オメでたい頭でなにより

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kumoriyami-xiuzhen · 5 years

Text

Hakuoki Hana no Shou Yamazaki After Story Translation

My attempt at translating the 「薄桜鬼真改華ノ章」ステラワース早期予約特典　ブロマイド　山崎烝 - Hakuoki Shinkai Hana no Shou Stellaworth Early Reservation Bonus Yamazaki Susumu short story from Chinese to English.

Finally got around to finishing this... and honestly, after Saito, I like Yamazaki the most (for me, hijikata is 3rd for the feels trip, kazama is 4th for the lore and angst while harada is 5th). He’s just so adorable.... and I think his route is very sweet. Also I love how Shimada is when watching Yamazaki and Chizuru lol.

^pic is me wanting to post this for no real reason aside from it being cute.

Anyway here’s my last post of the month so if you can, support me on ko-fi here plz~ https://ko-fi.com/V7V2W0HO also check out my “stuff i’m looking for list” if you own any cds since i am missing audio for a number of dramas i have Chinese translations for....

oh, and happy labour day weekend (well, to those that it applies to). Still really busy rn btw....

enjoy!

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Hakuoki Shinkai Hana no Shou Stellaworth Early Reservation Bonus Yamazaki Susumu After Story

Translation by KumoriYami

Yamazaki Susumu who had served as a member of the Shinsengumi's Watch/been a member of the Watch as part of the Shinsengumi for a long period of time, had been a doctor at the Yukimura clinic for half a year. And during one night——

Yamazaki, who was left alone in the clinic, heard/sensed a door open behind him.

"Susumu-san."

Looking back, standing there was his beloved wife —— Yukimura Chizuru.

"Do you want to take a break? Last night you were also reading late....

Her large eyes were full of anxiety. She looked very worried about Yamazaki.

Although he was very grateful for her taking care of him...

"Now isn't the time to sleep, I still need to remember the basics of LanXue/Western studies as quickly as possible, and I won't feel sleep at night.

[I left the term Lan Xue "蘭學” here since I'm not entirely sure of my interpretation of the phrase and put in "Western studies" since I recall that term from the game... which kinda seems to fit? Anyway, according to Wikipedia that was put through google translate, Lan Xue "refers to the Japanese Edo period by the Dutch incoming general term for Japanese academic, cultural, technological, academic literally Netherlands, the idea could be interpreted as the Western academic (referred to as oceanography ). Lanxue is a kind of learning developed by the Japanese through exchanges with the people of the island. Lanxue allowed the Japanese to understand Western technology and medicine during the period of the Edo Shogunate policy (1641-1853)." This was taken directly from from https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/蘭學.]

Yamazaki knows well that the books/studies he needs for the future will not be about Chinese medicine and acupuncture, but rather Western medicine based on LanXue/Western studies.

That said, it's not easy to understand the literature/words of a foreign country, so it is necessary to decrease [the time spent] resting to learn/study.

Chizuru, she should understand his way of thinking——.

"Please rest today."

Her admonishing tone in her speech left Yamazaki at a loss/ perplexed Yamazaki..

".....What’s going on? You wouldn't normally say that, would you?"

".............."

Her expression sank for a bit. Finally, she spoke....

"I think Susumu-san is as if he were back in the past, and I can't help but feel uneasy."

"In the past... like that?"

"Yes. Not only do you stay awake at night and give me the feeling that you were always fighting for the Shinsengumi... [it] felt that [you] were eager to die."

Hearing such an accusation without warning, Yamazaki could not say a second sentence.

However ——.

(Since I was watching my Chizuru all the time, there shouldn't be anything wrong/things should be okay) [says 我的千鶴 which is my Chizuru]

Looking back at his actions in the past months, Yamazaki deeply reflected on himself/his actions.

“Sorry, I worried you. However I'm definitely not in a hurry to die...."

His words stopped half-way. Chizuru (then) urged/pressed him [to continue] as she tilted her head.

What he said afterwards was really embarrassing, but if he didn't speak, he wouldn't be able to eliminate/dispel her worries/concerns.

"Do you remember the other day when Ibuki's wife brought their child over to play?"

"Yes, I remember it well. That child is very like his mother, truly cute/adorable."

"Seeing that child, I though: I can't allow these children to die before they grow up."

Although not all Western culture was good, he believed that Western medicine at least could help many people suffering from diseases.

"Susumu-san...."

Chizuru's eyes were full of admiration.

Then, she squinted her eyes and smiled.

"I think it's a very good idea. I also want to help my husband Susumu-san."

"Ye, yes...."

She spoke so bluntly, Yamazaki couldn't help but be confused and realized he could not remain calm.

When he heard this sentence (alt: these words) from Chizuru's lips [says mouth but I think it sounds better this way], he thought - it's truly wonderful that I chose her (alt: this might say - it's truly wonderful that she chose him) [this part of the sentence lacks pronouns... so it can be technically can be interpreted 2 ways].

"But today please rest. It's not easy to get used to getting up in the morning and sleeping at night.... and lack of sleep can cause a misdiagnosis.

In actuality, he wanted to read more tonight....

“I know, today I will listen to you. After all, when it comes to Western medicine, you are (my) senpai/predecessor.”

Yamazaki said that as he looked [alt: gestured, though i’m not entirely sure here] over the books.

"No, how can I be your senpai/predecessor...! I have nothing to teach Susumu-san."

"Don't be so humble. I was helped a lot by you when studying/learning Western studies.”

It's the truth, but to Chizuru, it was a very embarrassing compliment.

When he cleaned up his disk, Yamazaki thought of something.

“Speaking of which/by the way, we were just talking about Ibuki's child...”

"Yes. He is a very lovely child."

"Ah, yes.... ah. But, uh...."

Yamazaki was unable to truthfully speak about what he wanted to talk about, thus he hesitated.

Confused by his appearance, Chizuru blinked and asked.

"What's wrong? Is there something that you're worried/concerned about?"

"No, it's not...."

If spoken, would she misunderstand? This doubt kept Yamazaki quiet.

"If you want to say something, please speak. I want to know what you are thinking."

Having been urged by her, Yamazaki made up his mind to speak his thoughts.

"That.... I want/think (that) we should really consider it....."

"Consider, yes —— "

Because there wasn't an immediate indication of understanding what it meant, Chizuru looked/seemed lost for a while, then....

"Well..."

When she understood what Yamazaki wanted to say, her face was flushed. . “Oh, no! I don't mean to force you! Because it's an important time, and it's not too late to think about it before the clinic is developed.....!”

As he explained in a panic, Chizuru spoke up.

".......I will think about it."

Her ears were red. After that, she stood up and left the study.

Only Yamazaki was left in the room.

(She said 【will consider】 does that mean....)

She is willing? Or does that mean she doesn't agree?

After that, no matter how he asked again, he did not get a clear response causing Yamazaki to spend countless nights in anguish. [:3 fufufu lol]

-fini-

————

cyar all next month... still busy rn.... only 3 (harada, souji, heisuke) of these short stories are left from what I have been able to find...

anyvey, i had to go and bawl my eyes out (not really, but i mean it figuratively, lol) since I finally got around to watching the Shitan Kazama-hen musical.... As a result of that, I’m now super motivated to work on my song transpositions from the original one.... as my motivation for doing arrangements was more than dead once i lost my work since timing is seriously my bane when working on any music stuff... so hopefully i’ll be able to finish something within the next month.

再见!

#hakuoki #hakuouki #hakuoki other translation #Hakuoki Short Story Translation #yamazaki susumu #Yukimura Chizuru #hakuoki shinkai

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bookjonsa · 5 years

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Some thoughts on Sansa and Jon, by Tze

Sansa and Jon are, as far as I can tell, the only two Starks we never actually see interact in "present" time, and I don't think that's a coincidence from a literary standpoint. Everything we know of their past interactions comes via someone's reminiscences, so each is present in the other's life, but only in the past, never in the present. If Jon and Sansa meet in the future, it will doubtless come across to readers, in a very real way, as their very first meeting. Given the changes they've both undergone since their last meeting, that type of dynamic makes a certain amount of literary sense.

At the beginning of the series, Jon and Sansa seemed to sit at two opposite ends of the "Stark" children's cultural spectrum: Sansa is viewed by other characters as the most culturally "southern" of the children, (and she did initially seem to value "southern" courtly culture more than Northern culture), while Jon is viewed as the most culturally "Northern" of the Starks because he does not associate with southern-based institutions. Sansa was the Stark child most heavily and explicitly associated with the Faith of the Seven (she was always with her septa and she's the Stark child we see actually worshiping in the sept the most), while Jon was, at the beginning of the series, the most heavily associated with the Old Gods (given that he's the only one of the children who does not keep the Faith at all, not to mention Ghost's physical resemblance to a weirwood tree). Of the boys, Jon looks the most like Ned, while Sansa looks the most (out of the girls) like Catelyn---superficially, readers were encouraged, in the beginning, to associate Sansa and Jon with two different "regions", one with the South and one with the North.

In AGOT, Sansa and Jon occupied two very different, inherently non-overlapping worlds, and each person's understanding of how "the world" worked implicitly contained no real "place" for the other. By that I mean: Jon loved to fight, occupied a world in which fighting was the primary activity, and at the beginning had a great deal of difficulty interacting with people incapable of fighting. Look at his initial attitude toward Tyrion as well as the other Watch recruits, for example. Sansa is the one Stark child inherently incapable of fighting. She loved knitting, dancing, listening to singers, things that Jon had no use for---there was no room for Sansa in Jon's "world".

And Sansa's "world" contained no real "place" for Jon. She believed that knighthood and its accompanying (southern) chivalric code were the celebrated foundations of the world, and interpreted everything she saw through that cultural lens. Sansa knew her "world of chivalry" clearly viewed a bastard like Jon with suspicion, and because of that, I think Sansa probably had difficulty holding what seemed like two contradictory notions in her head: on the one hand, Jon was her brother, raised along with her and someone she never seemed to have any open conflicts with (unlike Arya, for example), and on the other hand, as the occupier of a "place" (bastard) that her social code condemned.

Now, I think it's worth noting that, although bastards have far lesser status in Westerosi society, there are "places" that can be carved out for them nonetheless, especially for paternally-acknowledged highborn bastards like Jon: we're told that bastards have served in the Kingsguard, a bastard (Sam Stone) serves as Master-At-Arms for House Royce of Runestone, a bastard ends up on Cersei's Small Council, at least one bastard served as Hand of the King, bastards freely join the Citadel and the Faith, etc., etc. But the issue with Jon is that Sansa, during AGOT, pretty clearly viewed knighthood as the central aspect of a man's worth. To "properly" occupy an honored place in "Sansa's world", Jon would have to first be a knight---not just a fighter, but an actual anointed knight, with all of the accompanying chivalric duties and responsibilities. (Look at how she thinks about Jory vs. how she thinks of Alyn in AGOT for an illustration of this.) Jon clearly had the fighting ability to attain knighthood, but unlike the other Starks, he has never kept the Seven at all. Knighthood was never a real possibility for him, as it was for Robb/Bran/Rickon, and presumably Sansa recognized that. I think it was difficult for her, especially early on, to really find a positive place for Jon in her understanding of the world, because he obviously couldn't be a septon, he couldn't join the Citadel (she would have recognized Jon wasn't exactly a bookworm), he was not in line for lordship, and he wasn't going to be a knight . . . but deep down she loved him nonetheless. So what was he? Where did he fit? How could she believe that knighthood and chivalry were the cornerstones of her society while simultaneously having a relationship with her non-knight bastard brother? I think this is why Sansa was, in the beginning, so very, very keen on pointing out Jon's exact relationship to her: her half-brother, a bastard. I think deep down Jon really confused her, and this was her way of repeatedly clarifying to herself exactly who Jon was, of seeking a measure of control over a relationship that must have confuzzled her greatly, because its very existence contradicted her understanding of how the world was supposed to work.

Because while Jon and Sansa seemed to have the most "distant" relationship of the Stark children, it's pretty clear that Jon and Sansa did always love each other deep down. At the Wall, Jon mentioned that he missed Sansa. In ADWD, when he thinks of his lost siblings, right before he starts making plans to head to Winterfell, an image of Sansa brushing Lady's coat and singing is included. And even in AGOT, though Sansa rarely thought about Jon, when he did enter her thoughts we saw her seem to subconsciously want Jon to occupy a "positive" position in her understanding of the world order. We know from Jon that Sansa tried to teach him how to talk to girls, and though he mentions that she always called him her "half"-brother, there's no indication she tried to ignore or insult him, as other trueborn children might have done to a bastard. Her love for him was clearly not as "free" as Arya's love for him was---Sansa's world of chivalry and knighthood was a stumbling block to such a relationship, so it's easy for readers to overlook that she did love him. But even in AGOT, look at her reaction to Yoren:

She had always imagined the Night's Watch to be men like Uncle Benjen. In the songs, they were called the black knights of the Wall. But this man had been crookbacked and hideous, and he looked as though he might have lice. If this was what the Night's Watch was truly like, she felt sorry for her bastard half brother, Jon.

It's easy for readers to focus on her calling Jon her "bastard half brother" here, but if we look a little deeper, we notice how she also thinks to herself that the singers called the Watch "the black knights of the Wall". This is important because we know what a huge premium Sansa was putting on the idea of knighthood. Though religion seemingly prevents Jon from attaining knighthood, Sansa seemed to subconsciously look for a loophole there, and found one in the songs: her beloved singers could "grant" Jon a sort of honorary knighthood as a member of the Watch, so that is the route her thoughts took.

(And here we also see that Jon and Sansa, though superficially incredibly divergent, actually did look at the world in somewhat similar ways: each believed in the stories and songs, in honor---just different stories and different methods of honor. Each believed Benjen Stark was the prototypical Watchman. Jon believed all Watchmen were true and honorable, Sansa believed all knights were true and honorable. They each had specific ideas about how a specific place was supposed to be (the Wall and the South), and each of them had those ideas dashed by reality.)

As ASOIAF has progressed, we've seen Jon and Sansa slip into each other's roles, into each other's shoes. Jon becomes a Lord in ASOS, the same book in which Sansa ceases "being" a Lady. Robb disinherited Sansa at the same time (if the will says what many suspect it does) that he declared he wanted Jon to inherit. Becoming Alayne meant Sansa became a bastard, just like Jon, (and Jon could very well have been declared trueborn by Robb's will, which would mean that Sansa "became" a bastard and Jon "became" a trueborn Stark). Sansa began her story by loving singers, and has progressed toward disliking them (Marillion), while Jon initially seemed to have no use for singers . . . until he met the singer Mance Rayder. The Littlefinger/Lysa/Sansa dynamic played out almost as a vicious, over-the-top caricature of the Ned/Catelyn/Jon dynamic, with Sansa forced to literally stand in a (heavily skewed and sensationalized) version of Jon's shoes: Catelyn saw Jon as a living representation of another woman that she feared Ned loved more than her, and Lysa saw Sansa as a living representation of Catelyn, the woman that Lysa (rightly) feared Littlefinger loved more than her. Sansa seemed to have a much closer relationship with her mother than with her father (the exact opposite of Jon), but "Alayne" had a much "closer" relationship with Littlefinger than with Lysa---Sansa takes on with Littlefinger (a much skeevier version of) the relatively close father/child relationship that Jon had with Ned.

In her final chapter of AFFC, Sansa thinks to herself:

She had not thought of Jon in ages.

Or so Sansa tells herself. But I think there's a pretty good chance Sansa had actually been subconsciously thinking about Jon ever since she took on the Alayne Stone identity, because Sansa seems to be subconsciously patterning her "Alayne Stone" persona around Jon Snow. Sansa wants "Alayne" to be 14 years old, because "She had decided that Alayne Stone should be older than Sansa Stark". How old was Jon the last time Sansa saw him? 14 years old. She becomes worried at the prospect of dancing, because she seems to think that, for some unexplained reason, Alayne Stone might not enjoy dancing:

What would she do when the music began to play? It was a vexing question, to which her heart and head gave different answers. Sansa loved to dance, but Alayne...

Dancing is a pretty popular activity among women of all social classes and we know it's an activity very close to Sansa's heart, given that she was able to dance even at her own terrible wedding. But then in ADWD we discover that Jon does not appear to enjoy dancing---he refuses to dance with Alys, and Alys teases him about it when she brings up previous dances they were forced to dance together at Winterfell. If Sansa is subconsciously patterning "Alayne" on Jon Snow, then the fact that she's concerned that Alayne might not enjoy dancing makes quite a bit of sense, given that Jon's apparent dislike of dancing seems like the sort of thing Sansa would have picked up on. (In other words, if "Alayne" is patterned after Jon Snow, then the "real" reason Sansa fears Alayne won't like dancing is because Sansa knows Jon, on whom Alayne is molded, dislikes dancing.) Sansa thinks of Alayne as "bastard-brave", and since she barely knows Mya, what bastard does Sansa want Alayne to be as brave as? The obvious answer is Jon. And we see "Alayne" take on the type of caregiver role with Sweetrobin that the other Stark children (Bran and Arya, especially) seem to have associated with Jon, a role that Sansa herself seemed to take on with people like Beth Cassel and Jeyne Poole in Winterfell, but not with her own younger siblings.

He was only her half brother, but still... with Robb and Bran and Rickon dead, Jon Snow was the only brother that remained to her. I am a bastard too now, just like him. Oh, it would be so sweet, to see him once again.

This is Sansa's thought process once Myranda Royce tells her about Jon's new position as Lord Commander of the Watch. If I'm correct and she's had Jon on the brain throughout AFFC, then this right here actually serves as a breakthrough for her, because Sansa goes from subconsciously longing for Jon to explicitly longing for Jon. And her thought process here is a pretty useful distillation of how far Sansa's come from AGOT, a semi-culmination of her ideological journey thus far: the main issues she once had with Jon---that he was a bastard, that he didn't "fit" the world of knights and chivalry that Sansa loved---have been essentially nullified. She starts out with the "old" Sansa's thought patterns ("He was only her half-brother"), but then she immediately (and pretty substantially) switches gears and starts openly longing to see Jon again, expressly thinking about how she's now a bastard too. The ideological barriers between them are basically gone.

Indeed, Sansa's entire arc had been bringing her closer and closer, ideologically, to the forces (winter, the North, and the Old Gods) represented by Jon. Sansa started out in AGOT preferring the Faith of the Seven, loving knighthood, loving the south, and losing her direwolf. By AFFC, we see her (far) more heavily associated with the Old Gods, favoring a non-knight (the Hound), and in an overall sense, switching gears from the epitomization of a "summer's child" to (IMO) someone on the path to becoming a "winter's child". Jon and Sansa become the Starks who we see most heavily drawing their inner strength from the cold and the snow: Jon mentions on more than one occasion that Ghost loves the snow, we see Jon frequently seeking out the cold (not the heat) at the Wall. We see Sansa literally drawing strength from the snow and the cold at the Eyrie. In the beginning of AGOT, Sansa wanted only to be a queen in the hot south. By AFFC, we see her building a scale model of Winterfell and drawing spiritual strength from the forces of winter.

Given the way Sansa seems to have been sliding more and more "toward" Jon as her arc has progressed---given the way her arc has been bringing her closer to him both ideologically and thematically---I wonder what implications Jon's stabbing (and the potential future that stabbing could bring for him) have for Sansa's future. Because the myth of Persephone looms large over both Jon and Sansa, and given what happened to Jon at the end of ADWD, I'm very, very curious what GRRM has in store for Sansa's arc, especially now that winter has come.

Both Jon and Sansa encounter "the pomegranate": Sansa is offered a literal pomegranate by Littlefinger, while Jon's rulership arc in ADWD was confronted at every turn by the Old Pomegranate, Bowen Marsh. The pomegranate, in Greek mythology, is what causes Persephone to become Queen of the Dead in perpetuity, and it's the reason winter comes in the first place---winter, in Greek mythology, being viewed as Demeter's grief at her separation from her daughter when Persephone descends every year to rule in the Underworld. The pomegrante causes Persephone to undertake two disparate roles, to become a creature of two separate worlds: she is both the Goddess of Spring and the Queen of the Underworld simultaneously (and concurrently), she rules in both the sunlight and the darkness. That idea---of a person moving between two contradictory spheres of existence, of a person gaining strength by a capacity to move between the darkness and the light---is a theme GRRM has played around with in other works, so there's an excellent chance he's exploring it in ASOIAF as well.

Both Jon and Sansa choose to reject "the pomegranate": Jon rejects the Old Pomegranate's demands for the future of the Watch, Sansa rejects Littlefinger's attempt to have her eat an actual pomegranate. But look at what happened to Jon in ADWD: he refused to acquiese to the Old Pomegranate's wishes, but the Old Pomegranate would not quietly accept rejection, choosing to physically attack him: there's been a lot of speculation on these boards that the attack on Jon will lead to some death-based transformation, that he (like Persephone) might find himself transformed (and possibly occupying a new leadership role) because of the Old Pomegranate. GRRM apparently had some Sansa chapters prepared for ADWD, but he pushed them back to TWOW. I'm very curious about what those chapters contained.

Because winter has now come, and in winter, Persephone rules over the dead. Sansa's arc has tracked Persephone in some pretty substantial ways: at the beginning of AGOT, when summer was in swing, she was the Stark most heavily associated with the warmth and frivolity of the South, just as Persephone was the flower-loving Goddess of Spring; Sansa was forced to marry, against her will, a man heavily associated with worldly wealth (in Greek mythology, Hades is associated with wealth because gold, silver, and jewels are drawn from beneath the ground, and Hades of course rules the Underworld). As winter approaches, Sansa loses her childlike innocence and naivete. And winter has now hit Westeros, and will presumably hit with a vengeance during TWOW---so what will Sansa become in the winter? Where winter is a time of imprisonment for Persephone, with spring/summer freeing her to walk the warm world above, it seems that summer was a time of imprisonment for Sansa, and winter might end up freeing her. And the story of Persephone ends with Persephone holding dominion over the dead during the winter. This might be a hint toward our pomegranate-associated characters' future, especially given the heavy associations both Jon and Sansa have with the living dead. (With Jon, those associations are obvious---he's a living man who wears black, his direwolf is named Ghost, he's fighting wights. With Sansa, the associations are less obvious but no less profound: Sansa's direwolf is dead (and since the Starks "are" their direwolves, Sansa is both alive and dead simultaneously because part of her is dead while part of her lives on), Littlefinger associates her with Catelyn reborn (and Catelyn has literally become the walking dead), not to mention the Hound: "The Hound is dead" we are told, and this "dead man" of course hated fire---I doubt it's a coincidence that this description of the Hound, as a walking dead man who hates fire, sounds quite a bit like a wight.)

And then there's this bit from AFFC:

All around was empty air and sky, the ground falling away sharply to either side. There was ice underfoot, and broken stones just waiting to turn an ankle, and the wind was howling fiercely. It sounds like a wolf, thought Sansa. A ghost wolf, big as mountains.

It's easy to forget sometimes that AFFC and ADWD were originally meant to be one super-book. Could Sansa have been "sensing" Jon's "death" here? Is the "ghost wolf" Ghost? Or is there a hint here for Sansa herself? She's become a Stone, and she's been told that a stone is a mountain's daughter. The cold winds are howling, and she thinks the cold winds are becoming a ghost wolf---is Sansa, she of the dead direwolf, en route to her own eventual death and resurrection?

#meta #foreshadowing #tze

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xfcklprtehkrx · 4 years

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Follow the Music

Received this question from @beyondkailani : I'd be interested in your views on the episode titles, especially those released for season 2. I find some of the implications interesting - Sex and Candy being followed immediately by Como la flor for example. Very different in tone!

Okay the episode song titles thing is really fun. For S01 I was familiar with every song, and yay cause even some of my old favorite bands in there. Nirvana, Everclear, Aerosmith, and Counting Crows? Can’t go wrong. Once the episode with Rosa’s CD happened I realized the episode titles were doing the same thing, but I think for most episodes it’s way more literal than others. Since we’ve made it through S01 already I’m gonna mostly focus on S02.

I made a youtube playlist with lyrics for the sake of review: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLu6cxfqCMO9l7f1jJlLLgCzQELAo7W-BZ

2X1 Stay (I Missed You) (Lisa Loeb) Okay this song, the lyrics are 100% about Michael and Alex. Lyrics strangely seem like the inevitable moment of real separation between them because Michael is with someone else. It also smacks a little bit of their reluctance to let go of each other for so long. Now the title could be a direct point to both Rosa and Max seeming to be dead at the end of S01. I mean Rosa was dead for 10 years. She can’t just come back to life, so if she’s going to live, she can’t stay in Roswell. Even if Rosa could stay, what about all her drama with Isobel? Problems. I mean she was Noah at the time, but Rosa doesn’t know that, so they can either tell her or have it be a constant problem. There’s also a chance Rosa already knows and she was going to tell her dad, so she doesn’t exactly scream ‘support the alien conspiracy’ to me.

I don't pay attention To the distance That you're running or to Anyone anywhere

I don't understand if you really care I'm only hearing negative, no no no, bad

So I, I turned the radio on, I turned the radio up And this woman was singing my song Lovers in love and the other's run away Lover is crying 'cause the other won't stay

And you said that I was naive And I thought that I was strong I thought, "hey, I can leave, I can leave" Oh but now I know that I was wrong 'Cause I missed you Yeah, I missed you

You said, "you caught me cause you want me And one day I'll let you go" You try to give away a keeper Or keep me 'cause you know you're just so Scared to lose

2X2 Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating in Space (Spiritualized) This one is all ‘I can’t help falling in love with you’. That speaks to me of Michael and Maria. Could also be a Liz leans on Kyle thing too, assuming Max is still dead. She does always run back to him, which is super unfair to Kyle. Maybe it’s also something good for Isobel. She deserves a new love after everything with Noah, so I’d rather it go that route than either of the other two.

2X3 Good Mother (Jann Arden) This episode will probably revolve around Maria’s mother, and since I predicted before that Michael’s hand and Maria’s desperation to find a cure for her mother could go sideways, I suspect some of that will happen here.

2X4 What If God Was One of Us (Joan Osbourne) As a Malex shipper I admit this is the one that interested me the most since Tyler Blackburn confirmed in this episode Alex gets a new love interest. I can’t see how this would relate to Alex in anyway, so I was disappointed to not get any further insight.

Now the lyrics make me suspect this is when Michael tells Maria he’s an alien. I mean yeah it’s ‘god’ not ‘alien’ but still some similarity there to me.

If God had a face what would it look like? And would you want to see if, seeing meant That you would have to believe in things like heaven And in Jesus and the saints, and all the prophets?

2X5 I'll Stand By You (The Pretenders) I see so many things in this one. -Rosa(assuming she’s still alive)/Liz -Max(if he’s back)/Liz -Max(if he’s back)/Isobel -Michael/Max and/or Isobel. -Kyle always being there for Liz even though he’s sort of a doormat -Kyle and Alex’s rekindled childhood friendship and Kyle being there for Alex -Tragedy strikes so Alex and Maria make up and he’s there for her or vice versa (even though I don’t foresee that lasting)

This could touch so many of the relationships on this show. It’s too generic to me, and we won’t know until we get there. Especially since so much will hinge on how they decide to handle Rosa still being alive and Max being dead.

2X6 Sex and Candy (Macy’s Playground) Now I know the word sex is in the title, but I never interpreted this in a literal way. I always assumed it was about eye sex. His eyes meeting across the room with this fantasy girl and he’s surprised she’s looking back. So maybe something romantic for Isobel or Alex. I assume by this point Maria and Michael will be together so nothing to do with them.

Hangin' round downtown by myself And I had so much time To sit and think about myself And then there she was

I smell sex and candy here Who's that lounging in my chair Who's that casting devious stares In my direction

Mama this surely is a dream Yeah mama this surely is a dream

2X7 Como La Flor (Selena) I don’t speak Spanish so I had to check out a translation for this one, but this one breaks my heart. It’s all about losing the one you love and letting them be happy with someone else. I could almost ugly cry at the implications of this song.

I know you have a new love However I wish you the best If in me, you didn't find happiness Maybe someone else will give it to you

If you saw how it hurts to lose your love With your goodbye, you take my heart I don't know if I can love again Because I gave you all the love I could give

2X8 Say It Ain't So (Wheezer) This song following the last song makes me feel like I am right about the main subject for that episode since it seems to follow the exact same line of thought, but it actually doesn’t. I suspect Jesse Manes will make an appearance here. This song is actually about a boy’s fear of his father’s alcoholism. Then again, if the person who picked it didn’t actually know what the song was really about then yes, it follows the theme of the previous song.

2X9 The Diner So I wasn’t 100% sure which song this was referencing. My mind immediately went to Tom’s Diner by Suzanne Vega, which I won’t lie, I had stuck in my head for like 6 years because I couldn’t figure out what the song was so I never heard it again. When I finally did it was sweet relief. Now there’s a ‘The Diner’ by Kaskade but it’s really just a remix of her song, so I’m going to assume that’s the song.

Now absolutely nothing in this song draws me back to this show. There is a verse at the very end that seems like it might be significant, but it’s not in the ‘the diner’ version. Then again, it could just be that the episode takes place surrounding the Crashdown, and the song title is literal.

Oh, this rain It will continue Through the morning As I'm listening To the bells Of the cathedral I am thinking Of your voice And of the midnight picnic Once upon a time Before the rain began

1X10 American Woman (Lenny Kravitz) This seems way out there, but this song makes me think of an outsider government/military type showing up to investigate and stir the pot.

So beyondkailani had directly commented on the contrast between 2X6 and 2X7. I agree. Different in every way, but I’m not sure it has any meaning beyond trying to find song titles that fit the narrative, but then I think ‘no way’, and I’m sure it must be something more complicated. I’m still digesting how I feel because the songs do bounce all over the place as far as genre.

In S01 I felt like 75% of the song titles it was just the title that related to the episode. I’m sure the lyrics also add to it, but mostly I think they were chosen just for their titles. There are some episodes where it must be the lyrics that had meaning because I can’t see another connection (1X4, 1X10), but for most, it’s just the title.

Per example: -Don’t Speak is a break up song and I suppose you could attach a secondary meaning of the loss of your faith in someone to this song, but that’s a tough sell for me. -Smells like Teen Spirit on the teen revisit episode and I assure you the song is not actually about being a teenager… -I Saw the Sign on the episode where Liz finds a possible motive for why Isobel killed Rosa when this is actually also a break-up song of sorts. -Champagne Supernova on the Gala episode -Creep for the prison and Noah revealing the full extent of his actions (yet the song is actually about wanting someone who you think is amazing to love you but thinking in comparison to them you are nothing). Now that I’m reconsidering this one the lyrics may also have value here. Originally I hadn’t considered that the lyrics might represent Noah’s feelings about Rosa. Rosa not being an active character I didn’t consider her as part of the equation the first time.

I added some of these to the playlist at the top as well. 1X1-Pilot 1X2-So Much for the Afterglow 1X3-Tearin' Up My Heart 1X4-Where Have All the Cowboys Gone? 1X5-Don't Speak 1X6-Smells Like Teen Spirit 1X7-I Saw the Sign 1X8-Barely Breathing 1X9-Songs About Texas 1X10-I Don't Want to Miss a Thing 1X11-Champagne Supernova 1X12-Creep 1X13-Recovering the Satellites

Now all of this could be totally moot since most of the songs in S01 are just about the title and I focused on content to make conjectures. This was really fun for me though.

#episode analysis #ask #roswell nm

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dustedmagazine · 5 years

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Cate Le Bon — Reward (Mexican Summer)

Reward by Cate Le Bon

A decade in to record-making, Cate Le Bon's blend of dada and domesticity has evolved as gradually as a time-lapse, some songs shooting up like a crocuses through the snow, some like small animals decaying into the dirt, all closely observed and uncanny. With Reward, her ever-present introspection comes to the fore, creating an impression of life slowing to a still. Composed on piano rather than guitar, the arrangements are airy and the tempos promenade. Instruments are layered — with frequent bumps of sax, clatters of marimba and guitars tracing over keyboard scales — yet the sound never thickens. Indeed, it often falls away to a tick-tock of percussion with a short melodic phrase on an acoustic instrument looping as strictly as digital. If her earliest music was identifiably rock, it has bloomed into the sort of British art song produced in the adventuring of Robert Wyatt and Lindsay Cooper.

She's pursued other crafts beyond songwriting, most recently furniture carpentry. The looping phrases of Reward are carefully considered and joined with the precision of mortise and tenon. Her songs have always been like small rooms, though they are no longer drafty and rustic. This is a record of tidy natural sounds. They are not immediately inviting, yet spending time in these well-mannered spaces becomes a pleasure.

The route to the heart of this record comes in conundrums like "Mother's Mother's Magazines" and "Sad Nudes.” "Mother's magazines dry by the bedside,” she sings. That chorus is framed by the prickles of something like a harpsichord. The strict funk of a post-punk bass swirls through the verses, as a girl is sent outside to the courtyard. Was Mother angry? How'd the magazines get wet? The image is a vivid fragment, not enough to be a story, but enough to evoke childhood. "Sad Nudes" is slow yet haywire, and the nudes in the room seem like paintings in some lines, and bodies in others. In this lyric, the mother is calling on the phone, and the narrator doesn’t pick up. There's a layer of retreat and heartbreak hanging over Reward. Le Bon reflects, but doesn't quiet share as she takes stock of life.

Oddly, the tracks that are constructed to be more accessible, aren't. "Home to You" is led by puffing brushed snare and a marimba, a chamber music rendering of 1980s synthpop, Thompson Twins in a conservatory recital. The title forms something like a happy chorus while the body is downbeat. A parade of accusations more than a ballad, the song wanders as it wonders why a relationship is faltering. Traditional in structure, it is offish in delivery. It lingers in the head while it pushes the listener away.

But as with all Le Bon's work, Reward is defined by eccentricities, unexpected codas and interruptions. "Magnificent Gestures,” a shade faster than the others with a jogging pace, goes bouncing with the sort of atonal guitar that has been a constant. Ache is addressed from a cautious distance. Singing "I was born no lips, drip drip drip,” and "her heart is a skip, drip drip drip,” the music matches, dribbling and whistling, coiling like a watch spring, only finding release in the title refrain. The construction is frantic by design, but there's a calm to Le Bon's singing that smooths the cut-up measures and shifting point of view. Her tone is a steadying presence to the self-doubt that spurs the words.

The closer "Meet the Man,” a hymn that only turns hopeful in the last bars, manifests the hints of religious longing that pepper the record. The man in the song could be Christ, could be a lost love. The song could describe a desire for the return of either, but also the desire to live without them. She toys with language to keep the multiple meanings concurrent. That could come off as clever wordplay, but Le Bon's presence is too shrewd to merely wow with wit. You don't glint the sacred by being literal. Piano chords fall, reeds purr, and there's a lot of quiet around the notes. Words become secondary to a call into the emptiness. Early in this album, she says "throw away the keys and get to work.” That’s as concise an explanation of her method as she’s ever given. Dislocated from genre and easy interpretation, Reward comes to those who throw away the keys.

Ben Donnelly

#cate le bon #reward #mexican summer #ben donnelly #albumreview #dusted magazine #psych #art song #piano #robert wyatt

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musicmixtapes · 6 years

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October 10, 2018 Mix

Welcome to this week's installation of music! I loved finding tracks that blended well in terms of sound and meaning, as well as playing around with the pace of the pieces so not to cause monotony inside the eardrums. Enjoy and any suggestions/opinions, send my way

Spotify Playlist (Listen in order!) 1. Walls by The Lumineers - First off, can I just say how excited I am to see new music from a group who never seems to disappoint both my ears and my heart. While listening for the first time I thought, "Wow what a great song, but this sounds kind of familiar" so when I showed it to my mom she said "Of course it sounds familiar, it's a cover of one of Tom Petty's songs" and then it made my heart that much fuller knowing that. Petty is known to have the American writing way of describing through metaphor exactly how love and relationships feel at a moment suspended in time. Using that craftsmanship and words that cut to the bone, The Lumineers created a cover that is so folky and vulnerable sounding, I am sure that Petty would not be disappointed in it. 2. I've Just Seen A Face by The Beatles - Continuing with classics that we may find hidden in corners of our mind, that pop out into existence from time to time, is this wonderful treasure from the Help! album, a beloved album to me and most of the world, I'm sure. I specifically chose this track because the title definitely created a supernatural element in my mind that translated to the feeling that love often gives, which is that it transcends regular human volition. It causes this reaction that cannot be expressed through regular conversation and absolutely needed to be sung about, which to me, is fantastic. Also, the really fast and frantic pace of the song adds to the urgency of the message of seeing someone in passing and instantly feeling a surge of love and the need to be with them at the moment. Falling in love is sometimes done in a slow motion type fall, but in this instance, it seems more immediate. 3. Moon Barks At The Dog by Saintseneca - The lyrical value that this song has is endless, and quite honestly, I could spend a long time doing an in depth analysis of this piece line by line, but for now I won't. The main thing I wanted to go in depth with a little bit is this image of the moon barking at the dog, which is just such a strange and abstract concept to grasp. Of course, the typical thing that someone would refer to is the dog barking at the moon, which is apparently a reference to the famous statement (I had no idea this existed): "It is common for the dog to bark at the moon, but if the moon barks back, the dog becomes famous." As a person who loves strange expressions, this has quickly become one of my favorites. There is also an entire verse that nods to Bruce Springsteen and his music not being the singer's cup of tea, which I disagree, but appreciate the reference anyway. 4. Los Ageless (cover) by The Wombats - I would say I'm sorry about including another version of the same song within two months, but I am not sorry at all because it is my firm belief that different versions of the same song can change it entirely and bring fresh perspective and possibly a new interpretation of meaning. Originally a St. Vincent song from her amazing album Masseducation, it was a more techno rock sound for sure, but this alternative group brought it down with a more acoustic sound fleshed out through it. I don't think the sound was altered so much that it changed the composition entirely, but the male voice for sure gave it a perspective which I was not expecting. To have a male singer express the notion "How could anybody have you and lose you and not lose their minds too?" makes me feel a glimmer of hope to diminish toxic masculinity. 5. More Than Romantic Love by St. Lenox - I don't know exactly what to classify this as and to be fair, I'm not sure that putting this artist in a box would be serving him justice in any way. I felt that I was having a conversation with a fellow new yorker while really really cool, eclectic music was playing in the background. And I loved it. Just all of the references to living in a place in time where you are losing someone because you cannot accept the fact that they only want a platonic love, not romantic. This goes deeper though, and examines how to deal with someone who is going through personal struggle and how to reach them emotionally while being sensitive to their needs. St. Lenox has such a soulful conversational tone that speaks freely about mental health, breakup and the nervousness of the city, also shout out to Washington Square. He's an artist on the rise for sure. 6. This Is The Day by The The - This is a classic example of a song with an upbeat, generally happy sounding tune that literally step by step tells about the woes that a person with depression has to go through. It actually really reminded me of a Smiths song, where the mood totally does not match the words, and this is a trope I absolutely love to see in older music. The image of eyes being red and burning when seeing daylight is so profound because insomnia is one of the main traits of depression, so this feeling of always feeling tired in the daytime is so relatable to hear about in song, which I never have before. The synthesized sound and the acordion that are strung throughout the song really emphasize the dichotomy of the sound and feeling, which also add the layer of how you look on the outside doesn't always match how you are on the inside. 7. Greyhound by Calpurnia - Have you ever made future plans with someone you are in a relationship with, thinking that basically you'll be with them forever, and then suddenly, the time for that plan comes around, except you're not together anymore? Yeah? Me too, and apparently the writer of this song was in this exact position because that's essentially what it's about to put it in base question format. But what really satisfied me concerning this song was not the super relatable storyline aspect, but the sarcastic way of telling something pretty sad, which seemed like an epic breakup and heart break. The whole "hats of to you, for you to go" is so sassy and like a middle finger in the center of a song about still having feelings for an ex-love, which was so fun to see. I hope the subject of this song listened to this song. 8. 15 Minutes by The Strokes - Whenever asked my top favorite bands, they are always at the top of the list. I don't know exactly what resonates with me, but I have been trying to pin point the moodiness and exacerbated feelings for awhile that me and this band seems to always share. I think it's the way that Casablancas always mutters some really sad yet humorous things while hard core guitar comes in and really great drum beats and a bass line are right in line with it. This song is no exception because it totally defies the meaning of telling someone how you feel and being comfortable with oneself about it; if I may be so bold, I think it generally classifies how one with lots of anxiety would go about telling feelings from a real perspective, rather insecurely and with the approach of joking about emotions in a very honest way. 9. Think I'm Still In Love With You by Joyce Manor - A new album by an awesome punk, angsty, emo rock band, news I will never be upset to hear about. Specifically, this artist has so many different qualities going past the initial relatable angst you feel when listening to the many, many, many songs they have about not being able to get over something or feeling like a burden in someone else's life constantly. This song has a clear shift in feeling though because the uncertainty is definitely present in terms of wanting to still be in love with someone because of a past emotion, but now things seem a bit hazier and they aren't so sure if the feelings are still quite there. This song comes about midway through the album, a really great placement on their part because it signifies perhaps a shift in weather during a one sided relationship and perhaps things will change thereafter. 10. So Tied Up by Cold War Kids and Bishop Briggs - Oftentimes I speculate from an outsider's look at a song, and piece together the meaning in relation to both the music and my own life. In this instance, I didn't really have to do so because the artist actually shared exactly what his intentions were with the meaning behind this song. He said, "With every new relationship, you either talk about previous relationship stuff (warts and all), or you just pretend like they never existed. Both are kinda terrible. When you go the full disclosure route it’s probably sincere, maybe you’re even praised for your vulnerability. However, you know it’s probably gonna be used against you later, in a fight, in the worst way." So that's that, and in terms of the gospel vibes I received from this alt rock song, I am very happy and get really pumped walking down the street to it. 11. Days On A Wire by Case - This instantly gives me the image of watching a movie scene where one person is lovingly thinking about another and kind of like sitting on a train looking out the window and considering their feelings, all wrapped up in desire. So now that I have shared my mental scene, let me explain that the really awesome acoustic with horns sounds that are produced in this piece add to the love song vibes that is perceived while listening. Also, the singer's voice is super dreamy and light, at some points seeming like barely more than a whisper of phrases, adding to the whimsical elements involved in the song. Actually, the horns in this song kind of act as a guitar usually would in terms of a melodic riff that occurs between verses and choruses, and I love this difference of instruments, a unique sound. 12. In The Morning I'll Be Better by Tennis - Taking some else's pain away is the hardest thing to do, especially when it's something not curable by care and devotion on it's own, but that's precisely what the artist is intending to say in this piece, which is tragically beautiful. So originally, I perceived this to be about someone's mental anguish and a relationship of sorts attempting to remedy this suffering by acceptance and love. In fact, this is not what the artist meant, but it's still a cool interpretation if I do say so myself. It was revealed that the writer's friend was deemed terminally ill and this was their way of processing the emotions that go into realizing that someone is most likely not going to get better. It is a love song that goes beyond love, but more about the wanting to take someone's pain and endure it so they don't have to. 13. Clueless by The Marías - Yes, yes, yes. My exact thoughts when seeing that this group came out with new music, when listening to the first few bars of the song, and then again when hearing the song two full times through (once for sound and another for words and meaning). The palpable tension heard in the song is so real for so many people when having an argument and to match the tension is the dialoguing throughout that basically says they can't handle the ups and downs going through the relationship anymore. I read that this was inspired by a spat between the vocalist and her significant other, drummer-producer Josh Conway. This revelation was incredible because imagine being in a band and a relationship with someone and having to create music while a major fight is going on. Me neither. 14. Running by Nicotine's Famous Honey - If I could title this anything other than what it is, I would title it "The Art of Just Barely Getting By In Our Fucked Up World" but that would not be as aesthetic as this aptly titled name. In the past, I have publicly argued against certain styles of music, simply because I knew less about music and didn't listen to enough genres on a regular basis. I am still trying to broaden my horizons, especially in terms of R&B and the Hip Hop genre in general, but this under emphasized artist is such a beautiful example of taking one genre that is criticized for being cliched and overdone and taking it to a whole different level. I love this combination of dream-pop, low-fi indie and hip hop and R&B all in one piece, and if you haven't looked into them, definitely check out some of their other music, it is so enticing. 15. Weird Honey by Elvis Depressedly - I'm taking the meaning of this song entirely from the artist because I think it can be interpreted a hundred different ways, depending on who you are thinking about while listening to it and what kind of mental state you are in too. Also we love to see an iconic guitar riff thrown in sporadically to a pretty sad low fi rock song, so that's a pretty cool spot in hell. The meaning though: "I lied before. It’s just an homage to Jesus and Mary Chain, and has no direct meaning. This is a love song so it could be seen as a pet name, or even a symbol of a love that is strange and new but full of sweetness. I find it incredibly strange that so many people have interpreted this song to be so negative, or even a break up song, when it’s the opposite. It’s a song about new love." There you have it. 16. Wings In All Black by Gregory Alan Isakov - If you are looking for an acoustic folk artist who puts emphasis on literally every single word and note of a song, look no further, he is right here, and also in my soul forever. Hailing from his brand new album, is this gem which sinks your heart to your stomach almost immediately upon listening. I believe this to be about having to rise up out of a really dark time in your life, despite not wanting to, the fact that instead of feeding the beast of loss, you have to grow wings of your own and fight against the demons you are experiencing. The image of having "wings in black" is a nod to the struggle between staying down in a bad place and having to come out of it no matter how impossible it seems at the time. I am now noticing a lot of these songs have to do with dealing with loss and mental health day by day, which is very important. 17. Should I by Arum Rae - I have to give entire props and credits for this song to my wonderful mother, who is always good for sending me songs to listen to on a weekly basis. Particularly, I first heard this song on my ferry ride home to New Jersey for the first time since leaving for college this year, so it has earned a really special place in my heart for the year. The piano is so present in this song, which as I have mentioned in previous posts, you don't get to see a lot in newer slow songs, which have become taken over by guitar a lot of the times. Also, Rae's voice questioning her every move and overthinking all her choices for the future is so heart felt and honest that you can't help but empathize with these feelings. The message of the song is maybe taking things one step at a time is the healthiest thing you can do when things get overwhelming in life. Yes. 18. How by Daughter - Ok, so finding out that most of the songs I have chosen for this week's mix surround the topics of loss and grieving past versions of self has become super illuminating in terms of my own maturation process. Staying topic though, this group always sheds light on the painful emotions rather than the pleasurable ones, which sometimes creates a dreary mood, but I like to view it as not being afraid to voice some negativity in order to clear it out of one's mind, which many people are apprehensive to do. This song describes pain as being in slow motion and I can't explain why that is true, but it is. The lines "hold me back, hold me back" in reference to wanting to go get someone that they have lost is so crucial to the theme of the song which is moving on from something while still having regrets in regards to the situation, feeling cheated or let down by someone. 19. Killer by Phoebe Bridgers - This playlist began with this song all by it's lonesome, but all along I knew that the rest of the pieces would be built around this, so I guess this has to be the reason why all the songs are so deeply related with one another. You may be thinking, wow I can't believe this song is about one's own death, this is really morose and ominous. Yes, I totally agree and think that it's really sad and death related, but knowing that it goes deeper than that is really vital to appreciating it's beauty. This is about a relationship being buried away and while doing so, dredging up all the past memories of loving a person. There is no remedy for knowing that two people are too much for one another, but this soulful lament is definitely a start. Also, Bridgers has noted that this song is in reference to Ryan Adams, famed songwriter who had a short fling with her when she was pretty young. 20. WALLS by Kings Of Leon - I did this on purpose, I made the first and last song both titled "walls" for a particular reason. I think they both serve very different purposes and perspectives to the metaphorical walls that are being broken down and simultaneously built up within a relationship. In the covered song that the Lumineers did, we see a shift to a more positive message of hearts having walls and climbing them is a struggle, but that it is worth it for the love we get to experience on the other side of it. In contrast, this very low tempo song (especially for Kings of Leon) is about kind of the exact opposite. This is about a man's ego being utterly shattered, exemplifying walls being torn down, in order to love a woman who just took his heart with her when she left. I don't think it's all sad though; I think this experience of walls coming down around someone to experience true loss of a person is so important for personal growth and strength. Thanks for listening and reading into things really deeply with me, catch you next week! Love & Listening,

Julia

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