#when i said dark skinned people are not privileged like light skinned people across cultures they were like no??? that's impossible 😭 wtf | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

youarejesting · 3 years

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Sea [1/2]

Beta: @lillielil @aroseforyoongi @seokjinssymphony @kpooplifeforever @explosiveranga & my good friend Z (let me know if I left anyone out.) Rating: 17+ Pairing: Idol!Yoongi x Reader Genre: Action, Adventure, Angst, Fluff, Comedy, slow burn, slice of life. Words: 6.8k

Summary: After your plane to Korea takes an unexpected detour, you are stranded with someone you aren’t even sure speaks English. As the race begins to stay alive, emotions run high and tempers short. The unlikely contender in the survival race is love which snuck up on you both.

The thought of a thirteen-hour flight didn't bring you much joy. Why would it? Being trapped in a small box with wings, not to mention being stuck in said box with multiple people breathing recycled farts and eating some sort of wet styrofoam they called food that would most definitely give you food poisoning. Oh yes, what a joy it would be to be in a seat for hours on end, letting your skin slowly dry up.

Arriving at the terminal, you stood waiting for them to start boarding. You would have been sitting if there was a single seat free. Seriously, some asshole had even dared to lay across no less than five and a half seats, his bag resting on the empty chair at the end.

He was wearing all black and looked comfortable in his jeans and hoodie. His black cap pulled down over his eyes and you could see the bleached blonde hair sticking out from underneath. Big chunky headphones on his ears made it possible for this man to drown out the world around him.

You glared at his legs, growing tired, knowing that within a few hours you would be begging for the chance to stand up. If you were to take a mental count, there hadn’t been any nice experiences you could recall in regards to traveling on a plane.

Did that reflect the quality of service or your standard of air travel? No. Obviously, your standards were realistic, not expecting the flight time any shorter or the staff to give a foot massage or anything outrageous.

You really didn't want any extra luxuries other than what was offered in the pamphlet — and yes, that meant you chose first-class — because if you were to suffer, you would do so in the best environment.

Unfortunately, the reality of it was that there was no better or more comfortable way to travel. Checking in, you would be boarding first before the other passengers, not really a privilege. However you got in line anyway behind the young man who had previously been lounging across the airport seats. He was holding up the line having lost his passport and you were getting more and more pissed.

You were simply just having a bad day.

A woman behind you started openly arguing, exclaiming that this man was not allowed to ride first class as he clearly wasn’t fit for it. Bringing up his style of dress and the headphones around his neck. You turned, glaring daggers at the woman until she became silent.

Society taught people to judge based on appearance, that everyone fit into a category, never mind the old adage to ‘never judge a book based on it’s cover’. Stil, you were always respectful and treated others equally, maybe even getting to know a person that you wouldn’t in other circumstances. It always surprised you how much you enjoyed taking a risk and getting to know them.

Once you showed your ticket and passport, you traveled down the long hall towards the plane. You saw the man in front of you talking with another man. He seemed to respect him and was reading him a schedule from his phone. You raised your eyebrows and smiled at the young stewardess who welcomed you on board. Her hair was pristine in a tight bun and her crisp, dark blue outfit was paired with a red scarf.

Stepping over the small gap, you felt the cold of the air conditioning, yet the air still felt thick. There were three places you could go to feel this type of cold: the dentist, an airplane, or the movies. First class was spacious with only a single cubicle on either side of the aisle. You took your seat. It was like personal rooms where you could close a sliding screen for more privacy, even though you were sitting next to someone, you wouldn't be able to see them at all.

The seats were more like arm chairs that one could lay back completely in, made with a brilliant blue leather. The cubicle room was complemented in a similar shade but with red features. You had a tv and a tiny minibar that had a small selection of drinks and snacks.

The flight attendants took all the passengers through the safety instructions. You could practically write them at this point. However they added a few things you had never heard. You had never heard such in-depth instructions going beyond the general life jackets, floatation devices, and first aid kits.

Never before had they told you about the airbags that would be deployed if you crash in the ocean. Apparently the emergency escape slides doubled as floatation devices and could hold up to one hundred and thirty people comfortably. They even explained how they detach these rafts from the fuselage and that they have ropes that allow them to be tied off to each other or the airframe.

Distracted by a tired male sighing beside you, you wondered who would fall asleep during the safety messages. Sure they were boring, but even you pretended to care. When you turned to see the culprit, he was disappearing behind the plastic divider of his cubicle dragged by his long pale fingers.

Well, at least you had some privacy. It was something you were thankful for, you wanted to get comfortable, or as comfortable as you could.

Perhaps these new instructions and information were deemed irrelevant to domestic flights. Or perhaps it was for the very enthusiastic kid they led through the first class discussing more of the plane's anatomy. “What if a wing falls off?”

“The plane is really sturdy, the wing wouldn’t just fall off” She grinned, “Let’s see what the pilot is doing and we can get your mum a picture wearing the captain's hat!”

After the flight attendants thanked everyone for listening, the plane took to the sky. You closed up all sides of your cubicle and requested to be only woken for meals. The stewardess was very diligent and for that you were grateful.

The journey was nearing the six hour mark and all that one could see was clouds and the ocean. The collection of empty water bottles were a poignant reminder to relieve your bladder.

You stood up and waddled determined to go to the bathroom. It was inconvenient to drink so much water but you didn't want to get dehydrated.

Feeling much better, you took a few minutes to look in the mirror and moisturise as your skin was feeling particularly dry already. Startled from your self care routine by a light rapping on the door, you packed up your things and pulled open the door. Unfortunately, at that moment, the plane shook.

It was like something from a romance novel, the way you fell against him and yet, there was nothing elegant or poetic in the way you fell against him.

Your face slammed into his chest and his head hit the wall with a heavy thud. "Sorry, I'm sorry"

"Shibal" he said, his language was something unlike you have ever heard, it was rhythmic and sounded like a song. His voice was so low and rumbly it almost sounded like he was purring.

You weren’t well versed in other languages or cultures, so you didn’t know what he was saying. This was your first time leaving your country. If it wasn’t for the damn holiday raffle at work, you wouldn’t have even left your house. Every other flight you had ever been on was domestic and therefore your suffering was short lived, but this flight was long and you were getting rather bored. It seemed your mind was reeling trying to absorb all that it could and currently that meant the poor man you had body slammed into the wall was under your perusal.

His body was thin unlike yours which was curvaceous. His hair was dark and shaggy making his pale skin almost ghostly. He had sharp cat-like eyes that were quite intimidating as they glared at you and his small downturned lips were yet to speak. He seemed like a man of few words. All this coldness was juxtaposed by his cute round nose. You could tell from his features that he was from Asia, but you couldn't pinpoint where.

Grabbing your shoulders, he started to push you off of him, when the plane shook again and you both fell back into the small bathroom. Your back hit the toilet, and a searing pain bloomed from the impact causing your body to lock up as it radiated through you.

The seat belt light came on. You both scrambled to your feet bumping into the walls, sink and each other from the unstable winds shaking the plane. Struggling back to your seats when the cabin pressure changed. There was a creaking sound and the plane started shaking. You immediately felt a sick sense of dread. The pilot spoke calmly about turbulence and requested everyone return to their seats. But the pair of you couldn't move down the aisle to your seats.

There was a sound like a car backfiring and someone from economy class shouted about the wing being on fire. Your grip on the young man's coat tightened and a terrifying sound like metal groaning filled the cabin. That didn’t sound like regular turbulence, you were sure of that.

Sharing a horrified look with the young man, you got up the courage to try to push off from the wall. Unsuccessful, you were once more pressed against the wall. The plane was plummeting. Out of the corner of your eye, you spotted the emergency box. What was this emergency and what in that box could fix this situation?

"You need to return to your seats,” the stewardess said. The smell of smoke was strong and it filled the inside of the plane quickly. You hadn’t even seen the stewardess trying to climb through the plane. Her grip strained on the walls and seats as she fought against the force pushing her back. “We are making an emergency landing."

The metal sound was louder. Shrieking like nails on a chalkboard, it pierced through the cabin. You watched as the side of the plane ripped completely off with the ease of someone removing the plastic off a new fridge. There was a feeling of being weightless before a drop on a roller coaster, and then it was like your stomach was left behind. The stewardess was sucked out from the cabin behind you.

You and the young Asian man were sliding backwards down the aisle trying to find something to grab onto. The floor in first class was some sort of linoleum and gave you a nasty burn as you slid. It was like fire against your skin. As the pilot fought with the plane, you practically bounced off every seat.

It felt like you were weightless for a brief moment as you were lifted off the ground, your back hit the roof before you smacked the floor again. All the wind had been knocked out of you.

The pilots were fighting against the drop, so in the moment of calm before the plummet, you grabbed the leg of an economy class seat as it was bolted to the ground. You looked at the young man, watching the panic as he realized he was too far away to hold on and dangerously close to the large opening. He began slipping out of the plane, his hands flailing before clamping around your ankle. The two of you were almost hanging outside the plane.

Everyone in economy class was panicking and wearing oxygen masks. No wonder you couldn’t breathe. Gasping for breath, you cursed yourself for liking all those action movies that made this look easy.

“Hold on!” You all but screamed more to yourself than the poor guy holding your leg. He was being completely battered by the wind. You felt his hands slipping and you reached down with one hand to grab his wrist and he grabbed yours. He looked thankful.

“Shibal,” he groaned, his voice straining. Your body was being stretched. The cold metal was unforgiving, and it tore apart the skin on your palm. Your eyes were watering in protest to the wind and smoke that was drying them out.

The drink trolley that the stewardesses had been moving through the aisles had gotten loose and went flying down the plane. It hit an old man in the back of the head. You knew he wouldn’t make it, and speaking of, it was headed straight for you. You watched in fear, like some horrifying game of chicken as the trolley came for you. Thankfully, it bounced on the floor inches from your hand and flew out of the plane.

It was a mix of flinching and the force of the wind that made your hand on the chair slip. You slid further out of the plane, grabbing the exposed shell of the plane with your free hand. Your other hand desperately clutching the young man's hand watching in horror as he smacked into the side of the plane unconscious. “Shit!”

His body was limp and you had to do something. With all the strength you had, you tried to pull his flailing form closer to protect him. Out of the corner of your eye, you saw the ocean quickly advancing. You were going to hit the water.

The breeze pressing against you was fierce. Your eyes were dry, making you think of your eyedrops in your carry-on luggage. You could see the water coming up quicker now; you tried to gauge what would be a survivable height. Knowing you had a higher chance of surviving freediving as opposed to hanging halfway from the plane, where you would both slam head first into the plane. You decided to take the leap.

Screaming in absolute terror as you watched the fast approaching water, you let go just in time. It was equivalent to a few stories on a building from the ground. Wrapping him in your arms, you pointed yourselves down deciding to break the fall. Lifting your free hand above your head like you were doing a high dive, you hit the water. It was such a shock, the liquid was so cold it caused your muscles to lock up.

Your adrenaline was pumping, and one of your arms felt numb and unresponsive. You swam oddly to the surface, gasping when you felt the air on your skin. He was unconscious, and you held his face out of the water.

The plane wasn't too far away and for now was on the surface of the water. The emergency exit inflatable slide, which doubled as a raft, had been deployed but no survivors seemed to climb out.

You swam in a side stroke to keep your damaged arm and the young man's unconscious form out of the water. You hoped he was going to be okay. The only thought in your head was making it to the raft and you were doing everything in your power to get there, even contemplating leaving him behind. But you weren't going to give up, a part of you wanted to prove you could do it.

Reaching the raft felt euphoric. Taking a deep breath you pushed him into the raft. Doing a quick check of his head and body, you noticed he was breathing oddly. You turned him on his side and tried to clear his airway. A little bit of water trickled out before you performed CPR. Your saving grace came when he coughed and spluttered, placing him in the recovery position and hoping he would be okay on his own for a moment. You looked around for any more survivors. There was luggage floating around, and you picked up all you could from the water.

Walking along the inflatable back into the plane, the water was not as high in first class. This was probably due to the hole in the plane in the economy. The right side being the only one of the inflatables that had inflated beside the plane. Keeping the plane precariously afloat balancing on two inflatables which had malfunctioned and inflated under the plane.

Moving quickly and wading through the icy water, you grabbed the emergency kits on the wall. You had passed by deceased passengers and tried not to look. It was eerie and unbelievable even though it had only just happened.

Bags littered the water and you guided them towards the exit and put them on the raft. You could save these people's possessions for their family, or there could be items inside that could be of use and save your life.

You also noticed the flight attendant area and raided the cupboards as quickly as you could. You grabbed the medical kit, some slippers, a range of very thin blankets that were wet and even some snacks carrying everything back to the floatation rafts. As an afterthought you braved a second trip back into the plane to grab your and the other man’s overhead luggage as you knew he would likely appreciate it.

Finding a bunch of cell phones floating around the cabin. You grabbed them all hoping one would be waterproof. You found a few that were still turned on, but only one seemed to have some sort of signal. The plane creaked as you started making the emergency call.

“Come on” you begged the phone to connect. The whole plane creaked again and tilted; it wouldn’t last long. You had desperately searched for survivors but there was no one obviously alive. You tried your best to check their vitals, but time was running out. Hopefully, you wouldn’t be cursed for pronouncing everyone dead.

"Hello, this is an emergency service hotline?" A voice cut through the silence, you looked at the phone about to cry in relief "fire, ambulance or police"

"Hello, we were in a plane crash, my name is y/n, we were on a flight from Los Angeles to Seoul"

"What is your location?" the woman said, confused by your description.

"The ocean" you hissed "we are on a life raft"

"How many people are with you, what are their names?"

"Just one. I don't know his name. He is asian. Um really thin, um, has dark hair and—”

"You seem to be breaking up" the emergency operator said with the voice cutting out. You looked down at the phone in your hand and sighed. Of course, if everything was going wrong, a phone in the middle of the ocean apparently won’t save you. You thought to yourself, ‘it is 2021 so why isn’t service available everywhere?’ Pocketing the phone you began making your way out the plane.

You headed back to the inflatable and made the decision to cut the plane free. Scared that it would bring the raft down with it. Grabbing more luggage from the water, you thought it best not to watch the plane sink. It would only make you feel worse.

The time went by slowly. It took hours for the plane to disappear. Even though you had promised yourself not to look, you had. Taking glances as the plane slowly sank and you drifted further away.

The moment the plane was no longer in sight, you curled up and let the tears fall. The sun began setting and the heat turned into a bitter cold. Your wrist was still quite swollen, and you decided to wrap it as you drifted along. You had been so sure that there would be something or someone to see you drifting, and you would be saved.

However one cold night became two, and then three, only breaking for the scorching heat of the day.

You thanked yourself for watching all those ‘lost on an island’ movies and television shows; you had learned some things along the way. You also had your father to thank for always dragging you along to the volunteer emergency services programs, ones where you learned how to survive in a forest. At the time you thought it was super lame for your friends to go to nice hotels by the beach for their holidays and you were making some sort of mealworm dish while making stick shelters.

Going over the information you had in your head, you knew water was the priority. The instructor had said humans can go three weeks without food, three days without water, three hours without shelter and three minutes without air.

The sun would dehydrate you quickly. You had made a small shelter with luggage and blankets to protect you from the sun.

If you didn’t find land, you were going to have to make some sort of man-made evaporation device to create water. As it was, you were slowly getting the unconscious young man to drink little amounts of bottled water, for he too needed to stay hydrated.

The man you were with had awoken the third day. He seemed a little freaked out about being alone at sea. You explained calmly, not wanting him to do anything drastic and he sat there processing things.

You gave him a bottle of water and something to eat. The two of you continued drifting, not speaking a word to one another. You spent most of the time trying to craft something to float on the ocean and create clean drinking water.

(This evaporation device floats on the ocean and mimics rain by the water droplets sticking to the plastic cover over the whole device when weighted in the middle it then drips back down into a bottle. I can find a reference picture if you need. [Here] [Here] [This one is like what I made in 7th grade camp])

But you couldn’t get the water to land in the bottle and the bottle to stay upright. He was no help, just laying in the shelter out of the sun. The raft was big enough for about one hundred and thirty people. And yet, the two of you sat close by and didn’t say a word.

You were covered in sweat and felt absolutely disgusting. It was time for you to get changed. What a stupid way to die, not from dehydration, or malnourishment, or even sun exposure, but from lack of hygiene. It was decided.

“I am getting changed, don’t look,” you breathed, opening your carry-on bag.

“I don’t want look,” he muttered back in English and turned away. You quickly put on something that covered your shoulders and tried getting some rest. You didn't want to alarm him, but you both had consumed the last of the water and food rations.

It was late that night when you heard a different sound. The raft was moving a lot more. These were big waves and a part of you hoped it was not a tsunami or whale activity.

When the sound got louder, you were reminded of the beach when waves crashed on the sand. Looking up, you saw something big approaching. It was a body of land. Suddenly, your chances of survival greatly increased, now that you had a way to get out of the water. Nervous about putting your hands in the pitch black water, you looked at your companion peacefully sleeping and made the decision to paddle slowly. Anything to increase your chances of getting to safety. You eventually washed up on the beach, arms aching and stepped out to drag the raft onto the sand.

It was late and still dark, but you had to do something. Thinking that perhaps if you found someone, you would both be saved straight away. You waited on the raft until the sky lightened, and then you got to work collecting sticks and starting a small fire. You took the empty water bottles, hoping to find a clean water source or some fresh water that you could boil.

You walked to the highest point in sight, not seeing any signs of large predatory animals was a good sign. When you reached the top, you felt a sense of satisfaction as you had overcome the many trials and tribulations. You made it through a plane crash, survived on the water, and made it to land.

Looking around, you saw something bone-chilling. This was an island and judging by the lack of people, houses or establishments, it was uninhabited. There was no civilization to be seen. You saw the tufts of smoke from your fire and tried not to cry. You were stuck here until someone could rescue you.

Pushing the minor breakdown aside, you thought about water, it was important. Scanning the island, there seemed to be a small waterfall and tiny lagoon at the bottom. Since the rain, the waterfall was running pretty fiercely. You mapped out a path back to the beach which would detour past the waterfall.

By the time you reached the beach, your arms were exhausted with the weight of the now filled water bottles. He was awake and briskly brushing his reddened cheeks with his sleeves, turning his back to you. Sympathising with the man who probably thought you died, fell overboard or abandoned him.

You pulled out the metal pot from the plane and began boiling the water, in an attempt to kill any bacteria in it. The tide was going out. you knew you should be thinking about food as the next priority, but you wanted to sleep. Being primarily awake for a few days was taking its toll.

It took everything in you to get yourself to move and get to work. Taking large rocks, you carried them into the water until you were knee-deep. You were building a V- shaped wall, so when the tide came in, it brought with it fish and when the tide went out, they would be trapped.

Pouring the now cooled water into the bottles, you started thinking about your plan. First, you thought about short-term needs, in case you were rescued soon, and then long-term needs, in the event you weren’t rescued for months or perhaps years. You paused, forcing yourself to think and accept the fact that there was a chance you would never be rescued.

The Asian man had gotten up and looked around hopefully. Handing him a now clean and sterile bottle of water, you frowned looking around with him. "There is no one here." He didn't say a word, staring at you while drinking slowly.

You huffed, trying to figure out how you two could survive on an island. He watched you fuss around trying to make a shelter out of sticks but it collapsed everytime.

“Just no,” he muttered. You tried not to openly sneer at him. Grabbing the raft, you dragged it across the sand. As the raft was built for a large group, it seemed all you were doing was digging your feet into the sand. But little by little it was dragged up the beach thanks to the tide. It took some convincing but you had gotten help from the young man. The two of you madly struggling to lift the inflatable slide to a tilt against a tree. It was still inflated so you hoped you could use it for something else if needed.

Before the tide came in that evening, you ran out to the water. Your hopes were crushed when you found no fish and saw that the wall had broken. Carrying more large rocks into the water and making the V bigger and stronger, things weren't looking great, but you were trying to do your best. Cold from splashing around in the water, you went back to the shelter, but the fire had gone out by this point.

Looking at the young man, you let out an exasperated sigh. Did he not care for his life or yours? Contemplating while gathering more wood, you realized that you had been doing all the work, while he was just lazing around. “We need more wood, come help,” you gestured for the young man to follow, but he sneered at the thought and leaned away from you.

“I just lay uh here and wait to…” he thought over his words, slowly forming an English sentence “die or be rescue,” he mumbled. You were too exhausted to argue. It could wait until tomorrow, and you would both freeze tonight. Maybe then he would understand the importance of working together towards a goal.

You felt absolutely disgusting. hearing the loud patter of rain, you walked down the length of the shelter. On one side was the raft, and on the other was the luggage, built into a wall. You took out some clean clothes and stepped into the rain. Peeling off your seawater and sweat drenched clothes, you stood in the dark and tried washing your body with a tiny travel soap you had found in a bag.

You scrubbed your body of sweat and turned back to the shelter. Grabbing your towel, and wrapping it around your body, you stepped inside. He was laying on the makeshift bed you had prepared. He looked over, and when he saw you just in a towel, he rolled away. It was embarrassing, you who loved privacy and comfort were showering all exposed in the rain and getting changed in the same vicinity as a stranger. That night, he took the only dry blanket, so you laid there with wet hair and damp skin, shivering.

You were thankful for the sun rising, and it took a few minutes for you to thaw enough to move, but when you did, you deemed it time for him to do some work. The two of you gathered sticks and leaves. He barely helped, and when he got back, he laid back down and fell asleep in the shelter.

Building a fire, with the wood, took some time as it had rained the night before. The leaves helped fuel the flames. The fire didn't have to be amazing, you just needed it for warmth. You also hoped some rescue teams might even see the faint smoke.

At the sound of your stomach calling for sustenance you got up and went to check the rock wall you made and found a fish swimming in the shallow water. You grinned, carrying it back making sure to stoke the fire. You were doing your absolute best with the emergency kit knife.

You must have looked pitiful, as your companion took over, filleting the fish with ease, and he even cooked it. The two of you had fish for breakfast and you felt satiated. You took some of the supplies and got ready to set out for food and fresh water. He was dressed and trying to follow you, so you let him carry some of the empty bottles.

Except he wasn't cut out for endurance, he got winded quickly. It reminded you of the time you passed out during a school marathon. Yet you made the best of the situation that you could, walking slowly until you came across some sort of fruit that the birds were eating.

You took a couple of pieces of rotten fruit and then carefully dug up the small plant and began carrying it back. He followed you back. You placed the plant down. Using your hands you tried to shift the dirt until you had a decent hole where you could plant the little fruit tree. Watering it with some of the water you had collected from the lagoon, internally wishing the plant would flourish. It was hard pouring the fresh water on the plant but you had to if you wanted food.

You mapped out an area and put sticks in the ground in a box-shape, in hopes of starting a garden of any edible plants found throughout the island.

You took the old fruit you collected off the ground, put it around the bottom of the tree, and gave a small hopeful sigh. “Hopefully it will break down in the soil and feed the plant. Our fate is in your hands little plant”

You spent another night sleeping in the makeshift shelter and had to decide on what to do, so you sat up and turned to the young man.

"Hey, are you awake?" He sat up, his eyes narrow, "what do we build? Shelter? or a garden for food?"

He blinked before choosing "Shelter?” you giggled at his confusion, not trying to be rude. He knew more English than you knew Korean and that was definitely a feat.

“A home”

“Home, food later" he shrugged

It rained heavier, bringing with it a sense of sadness. There was no one waiting for you, no one looking for you. The tears began falling and you tried to stifle the sounds. He was still and you hoped he didn’t hear the breakdown. You hoped he was sound asleep as this seemed to be his skill. You were sadly mistaken; he wasn’t asleep. He moved and draped a blanket over you. He only drifted off when you exhausted yourself from crying.

Waking up with your back pressed to his back, the two of you had shared a few airplane blankets. Your body was aching, from sleeping on the ground. It was time to build the shelter both of you had been discussing. You needed someplace safe from the elements and a place with some sort of makeshift bed. Sand felt so soft, but was uncomfortable to sleep on.

Standing in the morning breeze, you began thinking: “How does one even build a house?” If people can make houses with only the land, then so could you. You had no excuse.if it didn’t work, you could try again until you figured it out. You knew there should be some sort of foundation. You could build between two trees, or with a big pillar in the middle, or four walls like a traditional home. Whatever you were going to do, you needed the materials, namely wood, but it’s not like you could just rip a tree out of the ground with your bare hands. You needed tools. Unfortunately, this island didn’t have a hardware store. This wasn’t like minecraft; you couldn’t just create perfect tools from nothing. Or, could you?

You got to work trying to make some sort of mock Stone Age axe. It gave you blisters, but you had successfully chopped a single tree down. Getting the hang of chopping the trees with your primitive tool, you had four trees ready on the seventh day. You dug holes in the sand, but it wasn’t holding the trunks at all. They kept toppling over. He told you it wouldn’t work, and you only huffed in response.

You would have to dig, until you found harder ground. This took another week, but you had four tree trunks in the ground in a modest square. You had started feeling dizzy while working, and your head felt clouded. It had been raining ever since you arrived, every night and lightly throughout the day, you didn’t think you had felt warm in a few days.

While making a wall frame out of trees, you started to feel dizzy again. You tied together the thin logs with multiple vines, and you hoped they would stay. The more you worked, the more your hands got torn up.

You were tying the last of the frame, when you felt your body grow heavy. You were so tired. You thought you would die by the hands of the lazy man. With that, all other thoughts left you as the darkness crept in.

The shelter was warm. There was a fire, and the blankets were wrapped around you, keeping you warm. Beside you was a bottle of water and a packet of painkillers. “Fever,” he sighed, “all work makes you uh… quick death?”

“Well, at least I am doing something. I have kept you alive, in the plane, in the water and now. I have done everything and what have you done other than act arrogant and lazy?” You said, “You haven’t even told me your name. We are stranded on an island. Maybe we will be rescued tomorrow, and it will be all in vain but what if it’s not tomorrow? What if it's months or a year from now?”

“What if never safe?” He argued, not looking at you.

“The point is, I don’t want to die in my twenties. I don’t want to die in general. I had dreams, to get married, have a family and be a loving wife. I was working a stupid office job, and I loved it. I won’t give up that dream. I will live with the hope that one day we will be rescued, and I will keep us alive goddamn it.”

“You don’t need to worry about me.” He gave a dry laugh, “I have no care. I was not… supposed be on the plane.”

“I need you alive. I can’t do this on my own. If-” You took a deep breath, “If you die, I might do something stupid. I can’t live an undetermined number of days on my own”

He went quiet.

“Think about someone else for a change, it’s not all about you, Mister Asshole.”

“Yoongi,” he mumbled

“What?” You asked, too tired to be mad.

“My name is Yoongi.” He left the shelter, and you were left sobbing in the dark.

You woke up to Yoongi cooking fish on the fire; you were not expecting it. He hadn’t really done anything to help you. He mostly sat around, but the two of you ate together before you got to work. It was after a few hours you noticed Yoongi was gone again. It disheartened you that he was off doing whatever again, while you were working. You were completely exasperated by the young man, he maddened you, always on your mind. He was hot and mysterious and you hate that you couldn’t stop thinking about him because he acted nice once.

You began opening the suitcases hoping you wouldn’t offend anyone by going through personal belongings of the deceased. Clothes in all different sizes mens and womens, all different styles and one suitcase broke you, filled with tiny onesies and cloth diapers, dummies and ointments and medicines for a tiny baby. A pretty purple rattle with a cute butterfly on the handle.

You slammed the suitcase shut and pushed it across the sand to look at another day but for now you needed to step aside, the wound was too fresh. These were real people who died and yet why did you two survive, the most unlikely pairing with the worst odds and yet you survived when countless innocent lives were lost. It wasn’t fair.

A few days had passed, and you were trying to create something sturdy enough to withstand wind and rain with a roof and walls. You had plenty of resources, but you had to pick the right ones that would last.

You thought about it and decided to use the raft to line the inside of the house in the tarp-like material. It was super long, so you could do the roof and the four walls and still have the whole underside left over. You would weave leaves and sticks together to make them sturdier and layer them on the outside.

Putting your plan to action seemed easy yet tedious. You collected long palm leaves, removed the spines, and weaved the leaves tightly together, and laid them on the floor. The more you weaved, the faster you got. Painstakingly working every day, you rejoiced when all four walls, roof, and floor were finished and stable.

While you were doing all this, Yoongi was nowhere to be seen. He returned at night, as he always did. He looked unbothered by all the work you had accomplished that day. You finished up, and the two of you ate and went to bed, which was just a collection of woven leaf mats covered in some of the leftover tarp from the raft.

You had moved the items from the shelter into the new house area. The two of you sat on the remaining raft fabric. “I made a bed out of leaf mats and covered it in the leftover material.”

Yoongi seemed impressed looking around, “잘 했어.”

“Jal haess-eo?” you repeated the sounds “What does that mean?”

“Uh… good work” He took your hands and pulled out a small succulent leave from his pocket snapping it and squeezing out the liquid inside. Applying it to the cuts and scratches on your hands gently. You noticed his hands were rough too, for he had cuts and blisters littering the his palms as well.

“Where did you find aloe vera?” you asked curiously. What had he been doing?

“Near the…” he made an action with his hand “폭포”

“The what?” You laughed, and he cracked a slight smile.

“Water shaaaa!” he made the sound and gesture of water falling. You laughed hysterically. He was so cute, when you got to know him.

“Waterfall?” you prompted, checking that was what he had meant.

“Ah waterfall!” he nodded, “Near the waterfall”

“What did you call it?” you said. You were genuinely interested. He had been trying his best to communicate with you in your language, so maybe you could learn some of his to ease the burden “Pog-o”

“폭포” he corrected.

“Pogpo” You smiled at him. he seemed a little happy that you were giving his language a try. “How do you say good night?”

“안녕히 주무세요” he said and you blinked shocked, so he grinned,speaking slower in syllables “Ann-yeong-hi ju-mu-se-yo.”

“Annyeonghi,” you repeated. He seemed eager to teach you more, so you stayed up as long as you could, learning Korean phrases until you both fell asleep.

[Part 2/2] coming soon...

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forever-rogue · 4 years

Note

Boba x You: Eavesdropping and, "Cross my heart and hope to die."

Oh my sweet Boba, you know I’m always weak for him…I hope you enjoy. This gets a little…spicy, so 18+ only :)

»»————-　♡　————-««

Boba was a strange man. An enigma most people would argue; at least you surely would. He presented a hard exterior, keeping his true self hidden from view between layers of armor and hardened walls that had been built up through the years. He barely spoke, at least to people in the world outside of his ship or Mandalorian culture, or you.

That’s why the first time you had come across the intimidating bounty hunter, you were sure it would be your undoing. You’d all but expected your inevitable end. He’d come into the cantina you were working at, not by choice, but by servitude rather, looking for a quarry and easily capturing the man that served as your employer. You’d watched everything with wide eyes, scared, nervous, and unsure of what to say or do.

Hiding behind the bar, you hoped that he wouldn’t notice you and opt to leave instead. But the stomp of his heavy footfalls soon met your ears and he stood over you, his shadow falling over you as you looked at him nervously. He seemed to study you for a moment, as if he was trying to contemplate your fate, but quickly crouched down and offered you his gloved hand, “come on.”

“What?” it was a broken whisper that fell past your lips as you gingerly took his hand and let him hoist you up. You thought you’d feel worried…scared even, but a sense of relief washed over you. He offered no more explanations as he strode out with you following closely behind, unsure of what was going on. He offered no more explanations; you asked no more questions.

He’d led you back to his ship, your boss in tow, spewing all lots of expletives at you, claiming you’d set him all up. In reality, you were just as confused as to what was going on as he was; you knew his was a crook, but you’d never known he was that much of a crook; not enough to warrant the wrath of a Mandalorian bounty hunter anyway. The fact that he had forced you to work there for minimal pay for years should have told you everything you needed to know.

Boba had remained silent - stoic - as he stepped foot onboard his ship and quickly froze the man in carbonite. You watched with wide eyes as he added the man to his collection, unsure if you should say something or thank him or…anything. He went about whatever he needed to do, and you sat on a crate, quiet and waiting for further instruction. Eventually, after what seemed like a small eternity he came back over to you, offering you a change of clothes, instead of the near rags you were forced to sport for work.

“Thank you,” you said softly as you took the clothes from him, clutching them tightly to your chest. He lingered for a moment, almost as if he was unsure of what to say.

“There’s nothing to thank me for,” he insisted, his voice, despite being modulated by the helmet, was warm and rich. It was a pleasant change from the normally harsh and cruel voice that was yelling at you, “no one should be treated like a caged animal.”

“I…” your throat seemed to close up with emotion as you listened to his words, surprised by their gentleness. You hadn’t expected a bounty hunter of all people to be like this. He gave you a nod, signaling that he understood what you meant, “I’ll change and be on my way.”

“Where will you go?” he asked without facing you, but helmet tilted slightly in your direction. Where would you go? You had no idea. There really wasn’t anywhere for you to go. All you had was the cantina, and you knew going back wasn’t an option anymore.

“I don’t know,” you admitted with a small shrug, “I’ll find some place.”

“Without any credits?” he had a point and a small pout crossed your lips. While you were thankful for your freedom, you weren’t sure where you would go, or what you would do. He seemed to be able to read your mind, and let a low sigh, “you may stay here.”

“Here?” you repeated quietly as he gave you a slow nod, “with you?”

“Who else?” he quipped, a soft amused tone to his voice. A smile spread across your features at the bounty hunter as he tried to play it cool and calm, “I could use a hand keeping the ship clean and in order.”

“It just so happens that I’m very good at that,” you joked, “and I’m pretty handy with a blaster-”

“We’ll see about that,” you were almost positive that he had an eyebrow raised at you underneath the helmet. Biting your lip, you started to slid off the crate as you held out your hand to him. He hesitated for a moment before taking yours and giving it a firm shake, “I’ll show to the fresher and you can change. Are you hungry?”

“Starving,” you admitted, still taken aback by how warm and kind he appeared to be. It wasn’t that you automatically assumed he would be a gruff person, unkind and proud, but it just wasn’t what you pictured from a Mandalorian, “I…I’m Y/N, by the way.”

“Boba,” he said with the a nod as he turned on the light in the fresher, closing the door behind him as left to give you some privacy. Boba, you repeated softly to yourself. You decided you liked that name. You decided you liked him.

»»————-　♡　————-««

Over the next several months, you worked closely with Boba, getting to know him more and more, tiny piece by tiny piece. He was an interesting man, and if you were being honest, you wouldn’t have thought there was this much to him. But there was - from his origin to the loss of his father, to his career as a bounty hunter and dwindling number of Mandalorians. Everything about him captivated you.

He spoke often you to, after the first few weeks, much more than to anyone else, and he often found himself asking you if he was boring too much. But he wasn’t; he kept you hanging onto his every word. He asked you, often, about yourself as well, and you found yourself at a loss. There wasn’t much to tell in your opinion, especially having spent most of your life as a slave, but he listened with rapt attention to your every word.

It was still sometime after that that you were privileged enough to see him stripped of his armor and helmet, remaining in only his underclothes. You weren’t sure if it had been intentional, or if he’d meant to change, or he really didn’t care, but it still caused a blush to rise up in your cheeks. You’d cleared your throat awkwardly before knocking on the entrance to the cockpit to make sure he had time to tell you to leave or throw the helmet back on if he so desired.

But instead he’d turned to you, a lazy half smile on his lips as he motioned for you to step inside. He was handsome, much more than you had expected, but that didn’t even matter; you’d already well fallen for him, and the man he was, not his looks. But there was something about those dark messy locks, the little bit of stubble covering his face, his honeyed eyes, and the warm, tan skin that set your soul on fire. He was…exquisite to put it simply.

After that first time that he had showed himself to you, fully, as he was, and you didn’t bock at him, he seemed to do it more and more often. At first, it was just in the evenings, once the excitement of the day had died down and you were in for the night. That turned into the mornings as well, before he had to leave for the day, whether it was after a bounty, or whatever else he had to attend to. And even that, after a while, turned into whenever he was on the ship, or around you. Boba seemed to relish in the fact that he could be himself, truly and fully around you, without fear of judgment.

It was some time before it was apparent that the two of harbored…some sort of feelings for each other, but it was never enough for to be completely positive and want to act on those desires. Sometimes it was a light, lingering touch here, or a lasting gaze there, soft spoken promises of something more.

On one particular night, you had gone into the nearby town late to fetch some food and supplies with the crowding of the day time, promising Boba that you’d return soon. He’d seen you off with a smile and waited around for you, but after a while grew impatient. He knew you could handle yourself, he’d made sure to instill some of his Mandalorian training to you, but he still wondered what could be taking so long. Instead, he retired to the small space that served as his bedroom and flopped onto his cot, staring at the metal ceiling. It had been a long week; he was exhausted and tense with stress.

When he’d been stressed in the past, he would easily take care of it himself, often resorting to touching himself and finding sweet relief through an orgasm, but lately…well, it didn’t hold quite the same appeal as it once did. For some reason, knowing you were there with him, only a few feet away really, made him feel wrong and…dirty. That’s not to say that he hadn’t touched himself; no he’d done that plenty of times, in the sanctity of the sanistream where the water could muffle his groans and you were sure not to just walk in. Those were the times that he enjoyed the most, images and thoughts of you occupied his mind as he pictured your mouth around his hard cock, about thrusting into you mercilessly instead of his hand. It was always your name that spilled from his lips as he came.

This particular night, he decided to throw caution to the window, getting up and closing the door to his sanctuary, but not noticing when it remained slightly open. Laying back down on the small cot, he undid his trousers and yanked them down, taking his already hard cock in his hand, and stroking himself to the thoughts of you.

Of course you had chosen exactly that time to return.

Humming softly under your breath, you stashed away the food and supplies you’d acquired from the market, keeping an eye out for Boba. But he was nowhere to be found.

“Boba?” you called down the long hallway softly, looking around for his tall silhouette. When no response met your ears, you decided to check the cockpit, but didn’t find him there either, figuring that mean he must have been in his bedroom. You walked to find him, but stopped dead in your tracks just before his door, when you heard a few soft moans emanating from inside the room. Oh.

You knew you should have walked away, but instead you found yourself peeking inside, your attention captured by the soft sound of your name coming from his lips. You felt warm, hotter than you had in a long time as the sight of him stroking himself and thrusting into his hand met your eyes. Swallowing the lump in your throat, you came to the sudden conclusion that he was touching himself…to you.

Deciding to not intrude on the sanctity of the moment any further you slowly backed away, vowing to yourself that you would pretend that you hadn’t heard or seen anything. For some reason it surprised that he would be so bold, but at the same time, you’d done the exact thing many things yourself, often late at night, long after you’d both retired to bed. It was always his name that escaped your lips as you’d bring yourself to orgasm, despite your best efforts to muffle your soft whimpers. You often wondered what if would be like having his fingers inside you, how his mouth feel between your legs as his stubble scraped against your delicate skin, how he’d fuck you until you were begging him to stop. But no - that was not for right now.

But as your luck would have it (of which you appeared to have very little), you stumbled over a misplaced crate and fell on your bum, a small shriek of surprise leaving your lips. Kriff.

You tried to regain your balance and run away, but you heard some scrambling coming from inside the room, followed by a hasty pair of footsteps. He would know almost immediately what had happened; your face turned a brilliant crimson as you tried to come up with a quick lie on the spot.

“Y/N?’ his own face was flushed as he tried to play it off like he hadn’t just been in such a compromising state, “w-what happened?”

“Boba,” your voice was about an octave higher than normal, causing you to cringe internally, “I, ugh, I just got back..I was coming to find you and I tripped. Y-you know how I am.”

“What…” he stopped himself, treading carefully, “what…did you…are you okay?”

“I didn’t see or hear anything,” you said so quickly it all came out in a rushed whisper as Boba raised an eyebrow at you, “nothing at all…cross my heart and hope to die.”

You groaned internally at yourself, wishing the metal of the floor would open up and swallow you whole. He knew. Of course he knew. You weren’t exactly being subtle. You weren’t sure if you or Boba were more embarrassed.

“Okay…” he said quietly, offering you his as to help you up. You stared at his hand, knowing where it had just been and he seemed to catch himself, switching to the non-dominant one and helped you up.

“I…” you trailed off, unsure of what else to say without making the situation any worse. You were looking anywhere but his face as you got ready to run away hide and pretend this never happened, “I totally didn’t hear anything.”

Boba’s expression faltered slightly as you tried to brush past him, but he reached out and grabbed your wrist. You stopped and swallowed the lump in your throat as tried not to panic directly in front of the bounty hunter.

“You saw,” it was a statement, pointedly not a question, “you…heard.”

Hanging your head, you decided it was better not to lie to him. He’d be able to see right through you anyway. Instead you turned around, catching your bottom lip between your teeth, “I-I’m sorry. I didn’t know, I just got back and was looking for you and I tried to walk away as soon as I realized.”

“No…” he let out a sigh, annoyed that he’d been so careless, “I’m sorry if I made you uncomfortable. I shouldn’t have…”

“No, no you didn’t make me uncomfortable at all,” you weren’t sure if you were doing the right thing, effectively letting him know you didn’t mind because….well, you felt the same, “I…”

Your words caught in your throat as you met his dark, warm eyes, an unsure expression etched on his face. Nervously, you took a step closer to him, raising a trembling hand as you touched his face, running a hand over his cheek. He caught your hand with his, grip tight like a vice as he studied your face.

It happened before you knew it; he pulled you into his arms, crashing his lips onto yours in a feverish, bruising manner as you wrapped your arms around his neck. He smelled of clove and spices, and tasted sweet, just like you had imagined. Why had you waited this long to kiss him?

His hands found your waist and he held you close, his hard on pressing into your center. He drew a soft moan from your lips, and you could feel him smirking against you. Breathless, feeling drunk off of his kisses, you pulled back, and he rested his forehead against yours, an intimate Mandalorian kiss.

“Boba,” your voice was barely above a whisper as you admired his handsome face, “if you need help…finishing what you started, just say the word.”

“Do you have any idea what you do to me?” he took your hand and slowly guided it to his erection, a low guttural sound coming out of his mouth as you palmed him from through his trousers, “do you feel what you do to me? Just the thought of you gets me like this.”

“You should see what you do to me,” you whispered against the shell of his ear, feeling him shudder slightly against you, “how wet I am for you. How often I think about you touching me, making me cum.”

Without warning, his hands went back to your waist and he picked you up. Instinctively, you wrapped your legs around him, going back to feverishly kissing him as he walked towards the cot in his room.

“Boba,” his name feel off of your lips like a prayer as he laid you down, looking over you with hungry eyes; you were prey and he was predator, “please.”

“You want this, right?”

“Yes,” you reassured him, taking his hand and lacing your fingers through his, “I’m yours. Yours and only yours.”

That was all it took before he was on top of you, his mouth finding yours as he murmured sweet, filthy nothings in your ears. His eyes met yours as he gently cradled your face between his large hands, “I am yours.”

“So claim me.”

#boba fett #boba fett x reader #boba fett x you #reader insert #my og mandalorian #star wars #requests

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wonderwafles · 4 years

Text

Secret Hope

My Tolkien Secret Santa gift for @avantegarda! I apologize, as this turned out to be a little bit, um, much longer than I anticipated - I hope that turns out to be a benefit rather than a drawback! I hope you like it!

News of Middle Earth only trickled in slowly, like a river gone dry. It had been that way since the end of the First Age and the War of Wrath, when Elves had come en masse from over the Sea to settle in Aman.

Nerdanel had watched them all, then, although she didn’t make it look like she was. She carved a relief of their return, of ships coming into Alqualondë, on a piece of ivory.

Since then, art historians had debated why there were no visible Elves in the work, only ships. Nerdanel had thought it obvious, and refused to answer any questions about the subject, on the rare occasions when some of them became bold enough to come to her little cottage in the hills.

In any case, the country around Nerdanel's cottage was still more often than not, and when it was disturbed, it was often her father, come to bring supplies and metals she'd requested. She visited Tirion only rarely, to meet with her family and little else.

This suited her. In quietude she did her best work.

Her pieces after the Flight were reserved, more realistic. She took up painting for a short while, but even as she grew to master it she could tell it was not her art.

It took her a while to find her way back to sculpting, though.

On that morning Nerdanel was woken by the sound of something far more annoying than birds - Elves.

Mahtan? she asked herself, because sometimes her father was very loud. Sometimes he would drop something - wood he was bringing, more often than not - and it would be unclear if his shouting or the sound of the log escaping down the hill was louder.

But no. This was far more than that, and far more than one Elf, in any case.

She went to her window and drew it open. As the light poured in, she became aware of the fact that she was not going to be going back to sleep.

The hills were alive, if only sleepily. The Elves walked, pranced, or otherwise migrated in groups no bigger than five. She would catch one or two at a time, sometimes mingling, most times keeping to themselves.

They looked happy. Mostly.

She pulled the curtain over her window and shrugged to herself. The only thing that mattered was that they left her alone.

She lay back down on the bed, despite her previous realization, and filled her head with thoughts of the day. Progress she could make on her sculpture, a letter she could send to Indis about visiting later that month.

None of this materialized as she continued to lay there. The faint sound of laughter carried over the fields and drifted, gently, through her window.

She sat up and rubbed her eyes. "Dammit," she said. She was now curious.

…

Away to the north, before the gentle plains of Valinor gave way to the chill lands of Araman, there was a forest that had become the home of many Avari and Sindar who did not wish to relinquish their old way of life.

Yavanna had tended it since. In the ages since Nerdanel has lived here, the forest has grown from a smear on her horizon to loom over her house like one of the great dark walls of Beleriand's mightiest fortresses.

She traded with the forest Elves, sometimes, but for the most part, they liked to keep to themselves.

Now, though, some of the Elves making their way through the fields where Sindar or even Avari. Sometimes they crossed paths with Noldor or Teleri, and talked like old friends.

Nerdanel had never seen anything like it. The grudges of the old days had long been buried, but she had thought the Elves of Middle Earth and the Elves of Aman would always have a divide between them. Born not of hostility, but merely time and culture and pain.

Perhaps -

She was moving before she realized it. The fields of golden flowers crumpled beneath her feet before springing up again in her wake.

The sound of laughter grew closer. A pair of Elves appeared in her vision, walking, talking, holding hands.

"Greetings," one of them said to her, her voice light. Her hair was golden. Were these Vanyar?

"Greetings," Nerdanel responded. Her tongue felt weird, her words heavy. She hadn't spoken to another soul in almost a month.

"Are you journeying to Alqualondë, too?" The other woman asked her. Her hair was fair to the point of almost being white, and her skin was dark. More Teleri than Vanyar, Nerdanel guessed.

"Journeying?" Nerdanel asked. She narrowed her eyes. "What's happening at Alqualondë?"

The two women looked at one another uncertainly, as if they had happened upon a simpleton. Nerdanel bristled with impatience and prepared to snap at them. But she held her tongue.

"Why," the blonde one said. "You haven't heard? The exiles are coming home."

Nerdanel shook her head. "The exiles came home a long time ago," she said.

"The rest are coming home," the Teler said. She grinned like nothing in the world could make her happier than saying those words. "The power of the Rings in Middle Earth is broken. Sauron has fallen. The Elves return."

The Rings? Nerdanel wondered. She had heard the stories, of course. The resurfacing of Sauron, and his deception of her grandson. Arafinwë and Indis had kept her as updated as possible, when they saw her.

More pain for my family. She shoved the thought out of her mind.

"Our cousins from across the sea," the Teleri said, which is when Nerdanel realized by her accent that she wasn't Teleri. She was a particularly tall Avari - even curiouser. “The rest of the Noldor. They’re coming back.”

Nerdanel wanted to say something, but it felt like she was frozen. Her tongue formed words, but none of them would come out.

“The Noldor?” she managed, nonchalantly, she hoped. “All of them?”

The Vanya nodded. She seemed to squeeze the other woman's hand more tightly. "They say," she said conspiratorially, "that Artanis will be returning with them."

Arafinwë's daughter, she thought dimly. What did that make her? Her niece? Grand-niece?

Still, it was a sign that this woman knew even less than she did. Even Nerdanel knew that Artanis went by Galadriel now - although she was privileged by her acquaintance with Arafinwë, conversations with whom could not go by without news of his daughter in Middle Earth being mentioned at least once.

The Avari brightened. "Would you like to walk with us?" she asked. "For a while, at least."

Nerdanel was just about to ask. She was glad she didn't have to.

…

Their pace was unhurried - they explained that the arrival of the ships was likely at least a month away. It would take a week to reach Alqualondë on foot, if they quickened their pace.

But, they explained, the point was that something of a festival had grown up around the port city, and Elves of all kinds had come to welcome their kindred home.

Nerdanel left a note for Mahtan, although she was sure word would reach him eventually. Besides that, she made no preparations, no ordering of her house. It would be here when she got back. None of it was as important as those ships.

They traveled night and day, making no distinction between when the sun was out and when the stars shone above them. They slept only when they felt like it. The days were warm without being blistering, and the nights were cool and temperate.

Nerdanel thinks she likes the nights best. The Eldar are the people of the stars, after all, and her father told her many stories of the Night in Middle Earth that came before day, when the darkness was fearless.

“Who are you expecting?” Nerdanel felt bold enough to ask one night. The two women - Wiryarë and Kinnlel - were curled around one another, beginning to settle down to sleep.

“I?” Wiryarë asked. “Not many. All of the Noldor I care for returned at the end of the War. Kinnlel, however…”

She nudged her wife. Kinnlel looked at Nerdanel, her expression not entirely comfortable, and Nerdanel began to wonder if she had overstepped.

“Many of my cousins remained on Middle Earth,” she said. “I was one of the few who left, an Age ago.”

When Elves left for Valinor without their family with them, that never boded well for their time on Middle Earth. Now Nerdanel was sure she was probing a wound that was not meant for her.

“Now I hope that they will come,” she said. “They loved the Earth, all of them. But I hope.”

They lapsed into silence. Wiryarë rubbed Kinnlel’s back and Nerdanel looked up at the sky and thought about a pool of water they had passed, that was probably a lake in wetter seasons. It was filled with stars as night fell. She resolved that, if she ever took up painting again, that lake would be first.

“What about you?” Kinnlel asked. “Who do you wait for?”

They had not asked her name. She would have given it if they had. None in Valinor bore her a grudge - besides Feänor, maybe, or more heartbreakingly, her sons.

She feared that far more than the judgment of strangers. But now she hesitated. She didn’t want to disturb the peace of this night.

“My brother,” she lied. Lying came both easy and difficult to her, like coaxing a shape out of stone. The path was obvious, but incredibly easy to fall off of if your hand was not steady. “He settled in Lindon after the War, and then Rivendell, and has not been convinced to leave since. He was happy there, I think.” She paused. The words would not come anymore.

Her companions found that satisfactory. “Sleep well,” Wiryarë told her. “Tomorrow we will be meeting with some friends of ours.”

Her lie was immediately in jeopardy. She couldn’t help but find it funny, and though her new friends asked her what she was laughing at she couldn’t say.

…

“There!” Kinnlel said, pointing at the horizon.

Nerdanel squinted. Her eyesight was marginally worse than many of the other Elves, which her father never tired of attributing to her late nights working on sculpture. As if he were any better.

A figure rose a hand in greeting. The figure separated into two, which began making their way down the ridge.

This far east, Nerdanel could smell the sea. It wasn’t much longer now. She had been gone for nearly two weeks now, but she didn’t mind the delay.

As the figures approached, Nerdanel frowned.

“How do you know them, again?” she asked Kinnlel.

“Kinnlel!” the Man yelled, throwing his arms up. If she didn’t know him better, Nerdanel would have guessed he was angry with the other Elf.

“It’s good to see you again, Tuor,” Kinnlel said, throwing her arms around him. Idril smiled appraisingly at Wiryarë, before stopping on Nerdanel. Her smile deepened, and a new curiosity entered her eyes.

She bowed slightly to Nerdanel, in a style meant for greeting a courtier or one of nobility. She didn’t say anything, however, and nobody seemed the wiser.

“How long has it been?” Tuor demanded of his foster-mother, a one-time comrade of Annael. “Really, I’ve forgotten.”

“That’s because you never visit.”

“I visit!”

“Sure. Once a century or so.” She pinched his cheek like a mother, although the immortal Man looked like he might have been twice her age, by the reckoning of both Men and Elves. When he smiled, though (which he did often), neither the wrinkles nor the beard made him look older than a young man, out on a marvellous adventure.

Nerdanel realized she had been distracted in studying him. It would be interesting to attempt a sculpture of him, she thought. She had tried to do so with Men before, only by the descriptions of the Elves from Beleriand, but had never been satisfied with the results.

“And this is our friend,” Wiryarë said, gesturing towards Nerdanel. She realized she had missed out on a good portion of the conversation. “She joined us not far from Tirion.”

“A pleasure,” Tuor said, and held out his hand in a Mannish greeting. Nerdanel knew enough to grasp it in return. His hand was strong and calloused, still, although he could have let it soften from life in Valinor.

“And this is my wife!” Tuor said, gesturing to Idril.

Idril raised an eyebrow at him. For a moment, Nerdanel had an absurd fear that she was going to break her cover.

“Most Elves know who I am, melmë,” she said. She smiled fondly at him.

“Indeed,” Nerdanel said, finally returning Idril’s bow. “Lady Idril.” Idril stared back at her with barely disguised amusement.

They sat on the grass and ate some of the food Kinnlel and Wiryarë had made. Kinnlel had insisted that Tuor and Idril have some.

Honeyed bread, with brisket made from meat from Oromë’s hunting grounds. It amused Nerdanel considerably to see Kinnlel, an Avari of no notable blood, ply Idril Celebrindal with a second serving to “put meat on her bones”.

As night fell, Wiryarë asked the obvious question. “Will you be going to meet the ships?”

There was no need to explain what she meant. “We will be,” Tuor said. “I hear Elrond will be returning.”

That was a name which took Nerdanel a moment or two to remember. “In the meantime,” Idril continued, “we are heading to Elwing’s tower. We wish to visit her and pass the message on to our son.”

Nerdanel swallowed. She waited a few moments, until she was sure her voice would not betray her. “Will they come to meet the ships?”

“Likely not,” Tuor said. “Elwing may, but I think she would rather her son come to meet her in her tower.”

Idril and Tuor were silent. Nerdanel felt guilty for her few moments of relief at the news.

Still, it was not a topic she knew anything about or could speak of. She glanced away as the silence probed the edge of being awkward.

"So," Kinnlel said. "Are you coming with us, or what?"

"A fine idea!" Tuor boomed, seemingly himself again.

"Is that alright with you, Wiryarë?" Idril asked.

"For Eru's sake, Idril," Wiryarë said. "You're my friends too."

The little group laughed and embraced each other. Nerdanel sat on the grass and felt the wind in her hair and listened to laughter drift over the breeze.

…

Tuor and Idril wished to detour northwards, towards Elwing's tower, before proceeding to Alqualondë.

Nerdanel had no objections to the delay, but a shiver ran down her spine at the idea of seeing Elwing again.

They had met only once, in Tirion, at her and her husband's formal reception in Valinor. Elwing was skinny, suspicious, and standoffish.

When Arafinwë introduced her as the mother of the Sons of Feänor (who had latterly, evidently, been given a capital letter to refer to them by), Nerdanel had not seen the need to feel any kind of shame.

Instead, she was oblivious to Eärendil and Elwing's stiffened features in her haste to speak to the returned ambassadors from Middle Earth. She asked how her sons were.

It was embarrassing, but no one blamed her and she was not going to blame herself. She only wished, in hindsight, that her meeting with them had gone better.

Especially as they drew closer to Elwing's tower now.

"Excuse me, friend," Idril said as they came closer. "May we speak?" She touched Nerdanel's arm.

It was noon. The group had been walking all night. Nerdanel liked that now, especially. The stars comforted her.

"Of course," Nerdanel said.

They wandered away, towards the beach. The sea's crash was especially violent today, Nerdanel thought. Perhaps Ossë was upset, as she was.

They walked in silence for some moments. Idril was a woman of few words at times.

"If you would rather remain behind," Idril said, eventually. "Nobody would blame you."

Nerdanel shook her head. "I have to meet with her eventually," she said. "Frankly I should have done so sooner. But I have been busy."

Idril shrugged. "It's your choice, of course."

"And I am not worried about her breaking my cover, of course," she said, finally throwing Idril a bone.

"I've been meaning to ask about that," Idril said. "Any reason for secrecy?"

Nerdanel knew that Idril already guessed the answer. She did not bother pointing out that she had never lied about who she was, nor did she intend to.

"It would be impossible to say who I am and not have people guess why I am going to the Havens," she said. "Who I am hoping to see."

Idril shook her head. "That was thousands of years ago," she said.

"And yet to many Elves, all too recent," Nerdanel countered quickly.

"Maybe," Idril said. "Maybe to you as well."

"I wish it was too recent when the memory of my sons was fresh and untainted."

Idril sighed, but stayed next to Nerdanel. It was this which made her a good confidante - she did not miss a step when the stubbornness of a friend was an obstacle.

Eventually they came to the middle of the beach. They stopped, by unspoken consensus, and let the waves come and go before them.

Elwing's tower stood in the distance. They had walked further than Nerdanel had thought. She couldn't help but frame its shape in her mind. A template for a future sculpture.

"All I mean to say is, do not think you have to do anything you don't want to," Idril said. "Nor do you need to feel guilt for wanting to meet someone you love at the shore. Almost everyone in Aman feels the same."

When Nerdanel didn't respond, Idril pressed just a little further. "You remember Maeglin," she said.

"Of course." A quiet young quende who had only been released a century ago. He had since nearly vanished to live by himself, near Araman in the north. She knew of his history, of course - everyone did - but it was difficult to see it now.

“Ever since Aredhel was reembodied I have been close to her. I should say, once again close to her. When Maeglin came back… do you think I begrudged her for wanting to see her son again?”

Nerdanel cast her gaze down towards the sand.

“Let it not be said that I forgive him,” Idril said, a small smile on her face. “But I don’t need to. Aredhel is entitled to her love, whatever else may come.”

She placed a hand on Nerdanel’s shoulder, and squeezed it slightly. “Think about it,” Idril said. “In the meantime, we’ll be with Elwing. You don’t have to join us if you don’t want to.”

As she walked away, Nerdanel thought about the first time she had met Idril, when she was just a girl, Nolofinwë's granddaughter. Nerdanel had known that she had grown much for ages now, but it still sometimes surprised her.

In the end, she sat on the beach until the others were done, watching the tower on the cliff. In her mind's eye, she was hewing it from stone, watching it take form before her.

…

In the end, Elwing didn't come. Tuor and Idril were disappointed, but not surprised. As they sat around the fire, Tuor said,

"I only wish I knew what bothered her. Maybe then I could help."

Idril quirked an eyebrow at Nerdanel, and all of a sudden she thought she understood.

"Time will tell," Kinnlel mouthed around a chunk of bread. "And we have time, here."

Tuor nodded, but didn't say anything. Nerdanel wondered if he, of all people, ever forgot that. That he had time, now.

…

They reached Alqualondë about a week after the festival had already begun.

Thor and Idril were greeted as royalty. Metaphorically speaking - Idril had no claim over the city of the Teleri, even had she wanted to exercise it.

Wiryarë, Kinnlel, and Nerdanel were welcomed on a more even footing. Kinnlel was grabbed by a handful of her Teleri cousins and Wiryarë made her excuses to speak to another Vanya who had been living here for some centuries.

Nerdanel was left on her own again, for the first time in weeks. She couldn't help but feel gratified.

She made her way through the streets. The sound of people celebrating, dancing, playing, laughing, didn't quite drown out the sea, lapping against the shore visible from the city limits. Around her, people talked in Telerin, which she was rusty in.

The sea, too, was full. Boats made their way to and from the elaborate, twisting docks, sails full-white and reflecting the brilliance of the sun. Ossë had evidently been tempered, and the sailing looked easy.

Nerdanel had never been tempted by boating before, but the Teleri made it look like pure freedom.

A young elleth came up to her, holding up a crown of flowers in her hands. Nerdanel took it hesitantly.

"Hello," the girl said in Noldorin. "Are you enjoying the festival?"

Nerdanel placed the crown on her head. The girl in front of her reminded her strongly of Tyelkormo when he was young. The gifts of the wilderness, flowers, intricate leaves and so forth, added to the similarity.

“To be honest,” Nerdanel told her, “I find myself wanting for something to do.”

The girl nodded, as though she had heard this before. “Come and talk to Olwë,” she said. “He can give you that.”

The girl romped away, more crowns slung over her shoulder. Nerdanel stood at the docks for a while longer, staring out at the sea. She took the crown out and examined it.

Flowers from the gardens of Valmar. Common in festival crowns, they could only indicate strength and renewal. Strong, hardy flowers that grew by the ocean were woven into them. Some thought they were gifts from Ulmo, although flowers were not his suit, and others that they were brought over from Middle Earth on Tol Eresseä.

Either way, they were commonly associated with survival. Nothing grand or glorious, but the mere act of remaining standing after the storm has passed. Unsurprisingly, they became favored in the years after the Darkening.

She held in her hands a few moments more before turning towards Olwë’s palace, where the king and his sons still lived after the ages passed from the years of the Trees, and where his daughter still spent much of her time.

Eärwen happened not to be here today, and Nerdanel received no indication of where she - and the rest of the surviving Finweans - were. Instead, she was ushered through hallways of pearl and salt, brushed to the finest grain, to the point where she could hardly distinguish between the two.

One of Olwë’s sons did a double take upon seeing her. He greeted her with all the correct courtesy, but still couldn’t chase the surprise from his eyes.

“Um, hello,” he said, once the formalities were over. “It’s good to see you here.”

“It’s always good to see me,” Nerdanel said drily. “What makes here especially good?”

“The lighting, I would imagine,” he replied.

Nerdanel laughed. This one was sharp. It made her feel a little worse about not remembering his name.

Eventually she was placed into a smallish room, lit only by the glow of lamps made of seaglass. It was enough to lend the space a warm feeling. She didn’t mind being left behind as the other Elves went off to do more important tasks than guiding her around the place.

She did not have to wait long. The King’s entrance was something of an anticlimax. He veritably slumped in, looking beleaguered even in the low light, and took his seat as if by custom. A handful of courtiers followed him like gnats.

Still, he brightened when he saw her. “Nerdanel,” Olwë said warmly from his seat. It was a seat, not a throne, although it was still intricately designed, inlaid with patterns and waves that made it look like a swell of water, frozen in time and delicately shaped into something suitable for an Elf to sit on.

She stopped herself from being distracted by it this time. “King Olwë,” she said, and bowed.

“So, you would like to make yourself useful?” Olwë asked.

Nerdanel blinked. “How did you know?”

“Just a guess!” Olwë tilted his head back and laughed. Some of the courtiers around him joined in, although none of it seemed forced. Joy came freely in Alqualondë. “Your reputation precedes you, craftswoman.”

She grinned at him. “Then what would you have me do?”

…

The next few weeks were something of a blessing.

Nerdanel missed the road, sometimes. But she couldn’t deny it was difficult, not having something to work in her hands, making no progress on any of her projects.

Olwë needed her for much. She wondered how they got on without her, truly, but she didn’t really mind.

She was in charge of the aesthetic space of the port - which vendors could be allowed to set up where, where visitors hoping to greet the arrivals could wait, where those pushed out by lack of space would be placed. She did something about the signs and placards that talked of coming home at last, as the Sindar, Silvan, and Avari had understandable qualms with it.

Many more Elves arrived from around the continent. Elves returning home was by now not a new phenomenon, but the fact that this was merely the first wave of all Elves in Middle Earth coming to Valinor brought them en masse. It was an administrative nightmare.

It was something like art. Through all her centuries Nerdanel had somehow never come across urban planning as a hobby, but she thought she liked it. Herding people was not unlike coaxing a shape from stone, when you thought about it.

A shadow remained, however. Something that could not be assuaged by distraction, like razor wire tightening around her heart. The thought of the ships’ arrival only brought it tighter.

After the war ended, she had - not so much contented herself, but at least made herself accept the reality that she might never see her sons again.

Would Mandos release the six of her boys who had died over the sea? Would they languish like Feänor? So far, all she had been able to gather was that all of them were damaged by their time in Beleriand. None of them were ready to come back yet.

At first she had raged at this. She was convinced it was just a fable of Manwë’s, meant to explain why none of these problematic Elves could come back even after the banishment was lifted. She spread her theory to all who would listen, and knocked on the golden halls of Valmar more than once for an audience with Manwë.

This she was granted - through means of a very embarrassed looking Eonwë. The momentary awe of facing the King of Arda was averted, not that it would have deterred her, and she had demanded for her sons’ return.

The Maia met her with kind, but determined resistance, occasionally disappearing from some time and reappearing with new answers. It was not up to his master, he insisted. It was not even really up to Námo. It was up to her sons. And they were not ready.

As time wore on, she didn’t grow any more inclined to believe him. But she did stop asking for their release, and focused on her requests to be allowed to see them. There was more than one way to move a mountain. Patience would do for now.

The point was - if the care of Mandos couldn’t help her sons, then what hope did Makalaurë have, wandering Middle Earth by himself?

Sweet, gentle, musical Makalaurë. Her insides froze solid at the thought of what time had done to him.

The idea that he might not even be on any of the boats nearly stopped her heart. She focused on party planning instead.

…

The day came without much fanfare.

Nobody was quite sure when or how the ships would be coming. As time passed, Maiar would bring some word of how far out the ships were. The day was today, most presumed, although in seafaring nothing was certain.

A blue-robed Maia of Varda, who seemed to have a flair for the dramatic, came in the shape of a bird above the streets of the city. She landed in the midst of the port, making sure all eyes were drawn to her as she shed her old form and took on the aspect of an Elf.

“Ahem,” she said. “The first ships are no more than an hour away from docking.”

Cheers went up. Noldor, Vanyar, and Teleri crowded around her, straining to see the Maia, although all could hear her fine. Nerdanel felt her stomach lurch.

“Patience, friends!” the Maia said, lifting up her arms. “Please remember that the returning Exiles will be disoriented, and especially so for those who have never seen the shores of Aman. Be patient with them! They will need much help!”

Another cheer went up. This responsibility was lost in the midst of all the excitement, although Nerdanel felt it keenly.

The bird flew away, and something like a true festival descended upon Alqualondë. Nerdanel hadn’t seen its like since the days of the Trees, although in fairness, she had not been to many parties.

Elves intoxicated themselves on honey-wine and climbed the low-built homes and buildings of Alqualondë’s shore. They made music and sang shanties slightly too dirty for some of the children present and made each other happy. Lights burned on the shore like stars in the daylight.

What a thing to come home to. Nerdanel felt tears gather at the corners of her eyes, the first in a long time. She truly, truly hoped that her son could be there to see it.

(Moreover, she tries not to think, that he won’t garner a much different reaction when the Teleri see his face in Alqualondë again.)

When the first specks of the ships appear over the horizon, Wiryarë and Kinnlel are at her side again, somehow.

“There you are!” Kinnlel says, half-accusing.

“Here I am,” Nerdanel said, distracted.

Wiryarë followed her gaze. “It’s exciting,” she said. “I told you I have no kin on those ships. But some time here has changed my mind.” She spread her arm around. “Everyone here is my kin. Their loved ones are mine. I’m delighted as if I were their blood.”

“Don’t mind her,” Kinnlel said. “She’s had some mead. And burned something recreational, I think, although she won’t tell me what.”

“It’s still true!” Wiryarë insisted.

Kinnlel nuzzled her and laughed in agreement. Nerdanel smiled faintly at them. They were sweeter than her and Feänor had been, maybe, but she couldn’t help but remember the way they used to be.

Finally, the ships skirted Tol Eresseä and brought themselves to port in Alqualondë (although, Nerdanel understood, they would be spending most of their time on the Island, like many of the Exiles that had already returned.)

The crowd around her vibrated in anticipation. Nerdanel blanked out the stark raving terror in her head and tried to feel excited.

The anchors fell, the ships opened their decks, and time was a bit of a blur to Nerdanel after that.

She was pretty sure Kinnlel’s family were some of the first to come out. It was odd, for an Avarin family, but it was also odd for Elves to be sundered in such a way. Either way, she was happy for her friend.

As Kinnlel introduced them to their daughter-in-law, Noldor emerged. Enough emptied from the ship that Nerdanel could be convinced that this was the last of the Noldor in Middle Earth. They made their way almost sheepishly into the city, perhaps deservedly anxious at their reception.

They needn’t have worried. All grudges had been laid to rest, all the pain between the Elven kindreds. The Teleri clasped them like returning friends.

Nerdanel was hopeful at the sight of it. Maybe -

Next to emerge was Artanis - Galadriel, now, and a queen in her own right.

If she was anything like the Artanis Nerdanel remembered, she would have trouble without a crown in Valinor. She quirked a smile at the thought.

Their eyes met over the crowd. Galadriel’s widened.

“Aunt Nerdanel?” she asked, like she was young again.

Nerdanel made her way up to the ship. She kissed her niece’s cheek in greeting. “The very same,” she said.

“I didn’t think you’d come,” Galadriel said.

“Me neither.”

“I’m glad you’re here now. I have someone I’d like you to meet,” she said. “Though you’ll have to come below deck to do it.”

Nerdanel smiled faintly. “Well, alright,” she said, although her thoughts were already turning to Makalaurë.

Inside the ship there are only a few Elves. The sounds of the party outside drift in only faintly. A lantern burns in the corner, sealed in Elven-glass in a design unfamiliar to her.

“This,” Galadriel said, gesturing towards a figure in the dark, “is Elrond. My son in law, the Half-Elven, they call him.”

The figure stood up straight, as though startled. It turned towards Nerdanel and stepped out into the light, and Nerdanel looked on Elwing and Eärendil’s son. The man her sons had orphaned in all but the most literal way.

The man looked young, never having quite succeeded in getting rid of his baby-face, but with the weight of many years upon him. It pained her to know where some of that weight must have come from. He bowed towards Nerdanel.

“Greetings,” he said. “I have heard much of you.”

“Well I haven’t!” chimed a voice from behind him. Nerdanel barely stopped from laughing aloud at the sight of the little creature that stepped out behind the Elf.

“Bilbo Baggins, at your service,” the little - Man? - said, extending a hand like Tuor.

Nerdanel shook it, allowing herself to giggle. “Nerdanel, at yours,” she said.

“That’s it? No titles, no ‘of the Wooded Glen’ or anything like that?”

“Oh,” Nerdanel said, “I have a title or two I could throw at you. But I fear we would just be wasting time.”

After she was fairly sure she had met everyone in the hold, including a shy, quiet little Hobbit named Frodo, Galadriel’s face turned serious. “I shan’t mince words,” she said, nodding at Elrond. “Aunt Nerdanel, you look upon your grandson.”

Nerdanel looked at Galadriel, then at the Hobbits, as though they could provide some answers. Bilbo just shrugged.

“After the attack on the Havens, all those years ago,” Elrond said, “My brother and I were brought up by Maedhros and Maglor.”

It took her a moment to remember the Sindarin names, the names her boys were known by through history. “Brought… up?” she asked. She had never heard this before. Had nobody told her? Was the news lost in the flood of information from Middle Earth after the return?

Of course she had heard that they had spared the Peredhel boys. But what then?

“I see,” she said, after a few moments.

Elrond shifted his feet. “I will always be the son of Eärendil and Elwing,” he said, although Nerdanel never doubted it. “But one can have more than one father.”

“I think that is wise,” Bilbo said, nodding.

“That is - that is…” Nerdanel stumbled over her own words for a few moments. “That is, good to know. Thank you for telling me. If that is what I can remember of my sons now, then you have given me a great gift.”

Elrond and Galadriel looked at one another. “How well can you keep a secret?” he asked Nerdanel.

“Oh, very well,” Galadriel answered for her.

Elrond was silent for a few, heart-rending moments. Then, he nodded towards the shadows.

As it turns out, she hadn’t quite met everyone on the ship. Another stood, casting off a blanket that had been hanging loosely on him. In another life, long after this, Nerdanel would find his attempts to hide hysterical, but also couldn’t deny that it fooled her.

Makalaurë stepped into the hold of the ship and held his mother’s gaze.

“I must say,” Bilbo was the first to speak, “he’s a nice fellow. I’m not sure what all the secrecy is about, but I like it. One last adventure.”

He coughed. “I should probably be going,” he said, reading the room. “People, places to see, whatnot. Come along, Frodo.”

The Hobbits left the hold, but not without first exchanging a smile with Makalaurë. Her son’s was gentle, hesitant, nervous, and he hardly took his eyes off of his mother.

“I-” He coughed, cutting himself off. “I didn’t expect to see you here.”

“I’ve been getting that a lot,” Nerdanel said, her heart in her throat.

“You, um,” he continued, wringing his hands. They were scarred, rough with burn marks. Nerdanel longed to hold them, rub a salve on them as much good as it would do.

She stepped forward, almost without realizing it. Her son tensed as though she were about to attack him.

She embraced him, held him close, brought his head down into the crook of her neck even though it had been many years since he had been shorter than her.

“You’re home,” she said, overcome with the vastness of those words. “You’re home. You’re home.”

The concerns of his reception in Alqualondë, her worries about his acclimation, even the presence of Elrond and Galadriel in the ship faded to the side. None of it mattered now.

“I’m… home,” he said, testing those words, finding them to be true.

#tss2019 #my writing

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luatemusic-blog · 4 years

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The Diaspora is Mourning: this issue isn’t just American

In the past week or so all the conversations I've been having with black friends and my family have reminded me why the issue of police brutality and the deaths of Black folks in America never feels like an American issue to us. Out here in Brisbane, Australia, I feel the entirety of the diaspora mourning. We're not mourning the loss of a single life but the loss of a little more faith in a future where in our humanity will be fully acknowledged and respected.

I feel my humanity being questioned, every time I'm reminded that these public executions of black folks are happening every day. I was born in Cairo, Egypt and the racism that I experienced and witnessed there varied anywhere from kids teasing you on your walk home from school to being attacked and killed in the streets at night and having your organs harvested; something that is still happening to sub-saharan African refugees in Egypt now. There are new cases every day and these deaths and disappearances are not being investigated.

I was lucky. I didn't experience most of the things that lie in that spectrum of abuse. Beyond this, the lore and history of my family was an important part of my education, that made it so I never felt like my entire identity is inherently attached to or could be reduced down to the colour of my skin. However, at some point every black person realises that even if that isn't how you see yourself, to other people, this is the first thing they see and unwittingly or otherwise, it is the first thing a black person is judged upon.

In my experience, the singular story that exists out there about black folks maintains these 4 codes at the forefront of the image of blackness: that 'dark' equates to 'scary', that black folks are exotic creatures, that they are uneducated, and (to some, yes) that they are inferior. For these reasons black folks find themselves living tentatively, educating youth on how to avoid confrontation with authority or anyone really, at all costs. Ringing home over and over the message that you are not afforded the luxury of a second chance and that to you, the world is unforgiving. And yet, often, even that cautiousness cannot protect folks from the heavy and at times lethal hand of prejudice, unconscious-bias and systematic oppression. Cautiousness doesn't protect folks from the codes people read when they see a black person.

I understand that, to some, what has happened in Minneapolis and what continues to happen all through America is just another upsetting story about 'America's Bad Cops'. As Australians we're afforded the privilege of saying, "Isn't it terrible how America treats its citizens," as we neglect the fact that Australia shares a very similar history of getting away with the murder of black folks, starting with our First Nation citizens. In fact, in our case the systematic oppression is arguably more insidious because as a culture we refuse to acknowledge the history upon which this country is founded.

All this is to say that the problem may feel like it's far away - it isn't. Black people all over the world feel the weight of these deaths. To us these incidents flood light on what little regard our lives have been held in, historically and presently. It reminds us that if nothing is said now out of self-preservation or apathy then we are damned into a future devoid of the simple freedom of feeling safe and we will continue to feel trapped in our own bodies. So for those who are concerned, the following are some steps you can take to help.

For the case in Minneapolis:

Many small businesses (including black owned businesses) were destroyed in the Minneapolis riots. The website https://www.welovelakestreet.com/ has been taking donations to support all those small business get back on their feet.

Here is a gofundme for George Floyd's family, to help them in managing legal support through this trying time https://www.gofundme.com/f/georgefloyd

Also there are petitions all over the internet at the moment that you can sign to make sure that the officers who perpetrated this offence are charged. Here's one: https://www.change.org/p/change-org-the-minneapolis-police-officers-to-be-charged-for-murder-after-killing-innocent-black-man?recruiter=false&recruited_by_id=20f8a0c0-a0f8-11ea-ac37-8bee58d836d7

For the case of Australian Racism and Indigenous deaths in custody:

Since 1991 there have been over 400 deaths of Indigenous folks in police custody around Australia. Here are some links to donate funds for families currently navigating this situation: https://www.gofundme.com/f/day-family-fundraiser, https://www.gofundme.com/f/justice-for-yuendumu-inquiry-on-police-shooting, https://www.gofundme.com/f/d9qkb6-justice-for-david

Get Educated! Anyone who has grown up in Australia knows that school units on Australian History are not nearly as comprehensive as they need to be. To get you started, here is the list of massacres that started the nation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_massacres_of_Indigenous_Australians

Let's start having some vulnerable and honest conversations in our safe spaces about what racism actually means and in what ways we are practicing it. As Reni Eddo-Lodge put it, "If all racism was as easy to spot and denounce as white extremism is, the task of the anti-racist would be simple."

Also, just get out there! Join rallies and elevate voices of Indigenous folks as often as you can.

For the BLM movement:

Once again, get educated on black history, not just African-American history but the history of the colonisation of Africa, Australia, the Pacific and the Caribbean islands. All these stories are the histories of a currently dispossessed people.

There are lists all over the internet of what people can do to be active allies in the fight for racial justice. Here's one: https://medium.com/equality-includes-you/what-white-people-can-do-for-racial-justice-f2d18b0e0234

Remember that all the issues our world faces are intersectional, even if it isn't immediately apparent, this matter affects all of us. So, if you don't know to say, use whatever privilege you have to amplify voices of Black folks and POC on this subject.

Here are some other interesting resources:

Really good read on how Australia views racism - https://humanrights.gov.au/about/news/speeches/institutional-racism

Insight into current institutional oppression of Indigenous Australians: https://redflag.org.au/node/7003

A comprehensive list of resources on American Black history: https://drive.google.com/drive/u/0/folders/0Bz011IF2Pu9TUWIxVWxybGJ1Ync

The BLM website https://blacklivesmatter.com/

Information on BLM protests across Australian in the month of June 2020 https://www.elle.com.au/news/black-lives-matter-protests-australia-23578

If you've indulged me thus far, thanks for listening and I hope you found the sharing of my thoughts, feelings and resources helpful.

#georgefloyd #black lives matter #indigenous activism #racism in australia #essays #open letter #racism

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gangsofolympia · 4 years

Text

The Proposal*

Excerpt from After the Great Storm

"Who are you?" The Bleádh in front of Leilae raised his nose and sniffed, stepping in front of the open doorway.

"I am Leilae, daughter of King Órothan of Caelenya. I wish to speak with Andóloreth Ingíl iedh Unaedhra Caëth."

"Oh, my lady," the elf said, bowing slightly and raising an eyebrow. He gave her a mocking smirk, clearly not convinced. He scanned her up and down, noting her worn shoes and dusty clothes. Her hair had taken on some frizz due to the humidity. "You don't look like any princess I've ever seen."

Leilae tightened her lips, holding her shoulders back in an authoritative stance.

"Perhaps you were expecting a petite, fragile thing in a long, flowing dress, adorned with jewelry of silver and gold and precious stones? Do you have any idea of the world outside this place? It is no place for dainty princesses, and it is especially unwise to travel wearing priceless Aelven jewelry, as doing so would only get me killed." She spat each word clearly with perfect diction, paying attention to the Bleádh's eyes as the words hit his face.

"I simply," she continued. "Have a few questions for Andóloreth Ingíl, and I would appreciate it if you, as his servant - "

The elf scoffed.

"I - I am no servant. Do I look like some dirty hu -- "

"I would appreciate it if you, Aelfe Bleádh, will please inform Andóloreth Ingíl of my presence and of my desire to speak with him." Leilae took a deep breath, satisfied. "If you value your job, that is," she added with a smirk.

"Let her in, Lenwyld," a voice said from inside.

Lenwyld the Aelven servant stepped aside, gesturing toward the doorway.

"You may enter," he said, avoiding her gaze.

Leilae strode inside, not bothering to thank the aelfe.

Andóloreth Ingíl of the Aelven city of Unaedhra Cäéth greeted Leilae with a low bow as she entered a small lounge. A fireplace crackled behind Ingil, making the light flicker in his silver hair.

"What a privilege that a princess of the Aelfe Milern would travel all this way to visit me. Please sit, Ii-Leilae Órothan-ethróu iedh Caelenya." He beckoned her toward a plush chair lined with burgundy velvet.

Leilae settled into the seat, sighing. She hadn't realized how tired she was from her journey and was tempted to kick off her shoes and massage her feet. Of course, that would not be proper, and she, being the representative of Caelenya for the first time in many years, ignored her urge, crossing her legs instead.

The deathlands have turned me into nothing but another dirty ruffian, she thought.

Ingil took the seat across from her, resting his ankle on his knee. His robes draped over the side of the armchair, swathing him in sophistication and elegance. Leilae straightened her back, trying to look as dignified as she could in the dusty rags, lined with sweat and dust, that clung to her skin. She smiled.

"I apologize for my attire, gwa-Ingil," she said. "I had to leave some of my items behind after being attacked by bandits."

"Yes, I have heard it is quite dangerous on the outside. I am amazed that you have come all this way just to speak to an old Dolisië." He smirked.

Leilae found herself wondering if the aelfe before her knew why she had come. Ingil answered her question.

"You've traveled across the deathlands to see a spectacle. To gaze in awe at one of the first ones. Possibly the only one left in the world." He shifted his weight onto his right arm, resting his chin on the back of his hand. "But your objective has changed. I am no longer the spectacle, for you listened instead of simply looking. I applaud you for your wisdom, and I hope you listened well."

"Indeed, I did," Leilae replied. "I listened to you promise the Aelfe Bleádh that they would rise once again, becoming dominant over this world, but I could not help but notice that you did not mention the Milern and the Craoe. What of them? What of my people who hide in the mountains with the dwarves? We have never been at the top as have the Bleádh, and I find myself worrying that we will once again serve them.

"We have restored what glory we had before. We have a king, a beloved one at that, and we have taken back our culture that was so diluted by that of the Bleádh that we had to turn to history texts and ethnographies written by our oppressors to know how we once lived. I am here speaking to you to make sure that does not happen again. If the Bleádh succeed and once again rule over the world, I humbly request that you leave us be. Let the Milern live in their caves and mountain valleys in peace. That is all I ask."

Leilae bowed her head, swallowing involuntarily. Ingil considered her for a moment before speaking.

"I have always believed that the other Aelven races--the Milern, the Craoe and the Elia--are just as good as the Bleádh and should be considered equal. If it is your desire, I will make sure that you and your people are left alone, but I would also like to offer you the opportunity to live in equality with the Bleádh. They are your former oppressors, but no longer will I allow this disgraceful disharmony among the Aelfe. It is shameful how divided our people are. It makes us no better than the humans, from whom we strive to distance ourselves. Suddenly, we find ourselves laboring to highlight the differences between the Aelfe and the Dae Heinya." He took a deep breath, leaning forward. "Ii-Leilae, I would like to help you and your people." His golden eyes locked onto hers, and she nearly gasped. Ingil's irises glowed and swam as though they contained whole worlds--whole universes teeming with life.

"A new age is coming," he said. "Let us start anew. Let us not make the mistakes of the past. This time, the Aelfe will be unified, and we will give the Deinya no mercy. We will sweep over the world and take what is ours."

"What will happen to the Deinya?" Leilae looked searchingly into Ingil's face.

"They will be put in their place. Below the Aelfe. They will serve us, and all will be as it should be."

"They won't go quietly," Lou replied. "Their lives are short, and therefore, they are much more willing to sacrifice their lives."

"This is true," Ingil said with a slight nod. For a moment, Leilae caught Ingil's eyes lingering above her own. He quickly corrected himself, lowering his gaze.

"I am no king," he said. "But I believe I can lead the Aelfe to a better future. A future in which humans will be treated as intelligent beasts. That is all they are. Talking animals."

Leilae shifted in her chair.

"I wouldn't go so far as to-- "

" --Are you not angry?" Ingil interrupted, turning his head upward. He meant to cut in, and he was not sorry. "You have been betrayed by someone you thought was your friend. Many Aelfe have gone through the same situation. There is no need for us to answer to, or even respect, these Deinya. They are fragile, sickly, and ugly." He scoffed. "Who would create such pitiful creatures if not for them to serve the Aelfe? If not to be beaten down and disciplined until they become mindless slaves? You see, when we let them climb onto our shoulders, once they had their grip on the top level, they beat us down, leaving us trapped below them. Then they destroyed all that had been given to us. The very world outside these walls is evidence of their inferiority--their tendency toward destruction. Their inability to become responsible for themselves and the world around them. They kill each other off, and then they kill everything else. We have every reason to take this world back. To heal it and to set things right. Or would you simply have us all die because of the humans' recklessness? Or to their envy combined with their murderous nature, as did the Dolisie?"

Ingil leaned forward, taking Leilae's hands. She felt a jolt travel throughout her body and a wave of pleasure, as though electricity flowed from his skin. She looked down at her hands and watched as Ingil's glow touched them, the light seemingly soaking into her skin. Ingil gave her a smile that caused her heart to flutter.

"Let us end this reign of terror. Let us rise up to bring light to the darkness. Let us heal the earth and restore the pride of our people. Let us--you, Ii-Leilae Órothan-ethróu iedh Caelenya, and I, and the Bleádh, the Milern, the Craoe, and the Elia, all the Aelfe--band together, hand in hand, for a better future."

He let go of Leilae's hands, and she stared at her fingers, mesmerized, as the glow lingered on her skin, emitting a tingly warmth. Soon, the glow faded, and she was back to normal. Ingil watched her in silence, his eyes smiling at Leilae's moment of childish awe.

"I want to share my light with you," Ingil said softly. "I want to share it with you completely. Let us form an alliance, Leilae. Let us wed, ensuring the future for both our clans."

*(This will not be in Gangs of Olympia, but it will happen at some point in the AtGS series)

#gangs of olympia #gangsofolympia #after the great storm #atgs #leilae #ingil #excerpt #writing

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jae-bummer · 5 years

Text

Forever

Request: Could I request a tooth-achingly sweet soulmate!au for Zelo (B.A.P)? Like the kind where they have the tattoo of each other’s names? Also, I’m so so happy you’re back!! 💖💖

Pairing: BAP’s Zelo x Reader

Genre: Fluff

You grumbled to yourself as you scratched at the irritated patch of skin on your forearm. “Maybe I can just get it covered up.”

“Don’t you dare!” your best friend gasped, smacking you lightly on the shoulder. “That’s your destiny!”

“A person is not my destiny,” you argued. “I decide my own destiny.”

“Right, you just don’t decide the person you share your destiny with,” she chuckled, looking over the edge of her glasses.

Shooting her a glare, you looked back down to your coffee, eager to end this conversation and down the cup. “So where are you going on holiday?”

“Spain - what’s your tattoo say?” she asked, setting her own cup down with a smile.

You rolled your eyes before gingerly tucking the skin into your body and away from her. “Zel. He sounds like a Power Rangers villain.”

“I was thinking more Dragon Ball Z,” she nodded, her grin growing more ferocious by the moment. “But calm down, I’m certain it isn’t done yet.”

“Whoever decided one letter would appear at a time didn’t truly know the meaning of cruel and unusual punishment,” you muttered. “And how did you get so lucky?”

Your best friend giggled as she looked down at her tattoo, her soulmate’s name etched in it’s completion. Her attention then diverted to the fat engagement ring balanced on her finger. “Everyone in my family got their tattoos early. I guess it’s an inherited trait.”

Chewing on your lip, you tried to avoid eye contact. Not only were you privileged to live in a society that’s romantic policies seemed to operate based off of systematic genetic mutations, but those mutations also appeared at different times for different people.

Imagine your shock and horror when all of your friends had their soulmates names begin to show up at your twelfth birthday party.

But your skin remained untouched.

It wasn’t until recently that your own black scribble had begun to appear, and in recent days, had been picking up letters with speed.

“Where are you going on holiday?” your friend asked, noticing your silence.

You let out a sigh before giving a small nod. “South Korea.”

“But why does it hurt?” Zelo pouted, draping his arm over Yongguk’s leg.

“Because it’s a tattoo,” his older, former member chuckled, patting his arm in return.

“But it’s not like...a tattoo, tattoo,” he muttered, eying the letters on his arm. “It doesn’t feel the same.”

“You’re right,” Yongguk nodded. “It feels worse.”

“You know, there’s a flaw in the system,” Zelo groaned. “What if someone has the same name? Then what?”

“Then you hope you find the right one,” Yongguk chuckled. “I’ve never heard of that happening though. The universe has it’s ways.”

“It would be just my luck if I found the wrong someone with the right name,” Zelo groaned, glancing down to his tattoo. The words written so plainly in English eluded him. He wasn’t entirely certain of the pronunciation, but knew it was definitely someone who used English as one of their primary languages. That’s how the tattoos normally worked. They would appear as a native tongue, or at least in a language your soulmate spoke. It gave you the opportunity to learn it as well before meeting for the first time and becoming terribly confused.

“Think about it this way,” Yongguk sighed. “It’s not the wrong person, it’s just you taking a little control of the situation.”

“I feel like that was meant to be comforting,” Zelo grumbled. “Can’t you give me better wise words than that?”

“Trust the system,” Yongguk smiled. “That’s the only option we have.”

“Come on!” Zelo gasped. “Don’t you want to give me some speech about disregarding the system and finding your own true soul mate and falling in love your own way?”

“And then what?” Yongguk laughed. “Sure, you find someone you think you’re in love with, but then you bump into the person who is, in all actuality, the person who’s name is written on your arm. Talk about unnecessary complication.”

Zelo furrowed his brows before leaning back into the couch again. “You’ve grown soft in your old age.”

“Nope,” Yongguk hummed. “I’ve just grown more wise. Why create complication and heartache for yourself when you can just follow how things are meant to be?”

“But don’t you ever wonder about the what if?”

“When you meet your soul mate...” Yongguk nodded. “The what if won’t matter.”

You couldn’t tell your best friend that there was a very specific reason for your holiday in Korea. Granted, the food was mouth watering, the history and culture was mesmerizing, and the fashion scene was incredible, but you had another reason to go. Sure, you had mentioned that your tattoo said “Zel,” but that was the only portion of it that you could actually read.

The rest of it was in a very different language.

A very different language that you had determined was Hangul.

You were already in your second day of visiting Seoul when another letter appeared on your arm, an “o” following the “Zel” you were already familiar with.

“Zelo,” you murmured to yourself, shimmying down your shirt sleeve before picking up your coffee from the Starbucks counter. “If that’s his English name...what a strange one to choose.”

Lost in thought as you wandered out of the coffee shop and towards the street, you hardly noticed when a man passed by maybe a little too closely. You felt the pull before your legs could stop you. The uncomfortable feeling of falling took over as your unknowingly untied shoelace was caught under the stranger’s foot.

You let out a noise somewhere between a squawk and a shout, tumbling toward the ground before a pair of strong hands caught you. Spinning your body, and pouring your coffee haphazardly across his white, button down, he grabbed you just as you were about to slam into the concrete.

“Aish,” he groaned, standing you up on your own feet again. He winced as he looked down at you, struggling to find his words. “Are...you okay?”

You winced as you glanced at his shirt, which was very much not okay. “I am, but your shirt.”

“Shirt?” he laughed looking down. “It’s okay...just a shirt.”

You watched as he began to unbutton the fabric around his wrists and roll his shirt sleeves up, his tan skin becoming more and more unclothed by the moment.

You would have missed it if you weren’t watching, but just as you considered thanking him and turning away, a small, black scribble on his arm caught your attention.

“Why...why is my name...why is my name on your arm?” you whispered.

“Sorry,” the tall man said with a small bow. “My English...not so great.”

You took a deep breath and shut your eyes for a moment before opening them again. “H-hello,” you stuttered out in uncertain Korean. “My name is Y/N.”

“Y/N,” he said quietly, letting the words marinate on his lips. His eyes grew wide as he repeated it again, the understanding slowly coating his features. This time, he spoke in quiet, but clear english. “You are...?”

“I think so,” you nodded, your ability to speak his language shaky at best.

With slow fingers, he reached toward his sleeve, and began to fold the fabric further upwards towards his arm. Resting directly below the ditch of his elbow, sat your name in clear, block print. A small smile formed on his lips as he glanced shyly toward you. He was hesitant as he moved, stopping his hand several times before it finally met yours. As if static was waiting behind every touch, his fingertips shocked yours, but not enough to cause either of you to retreat.

You allowed him to move your hands slowly, only stopping once your palm was wrapped around his forearm and your thumb brushed against the moniker you had written for decades now.

“Soul mates...” Zelo said quietly.

You gave him an encouraging nod, noting his English, or at least his English pertaining to this situation, was pretty effective. Taking your hand from his arm, you pulled up your sleeve as well, glancing at it fondly for the first time in your life.

“My name?” he gasped, his eyes lighting up at the words. Without waiting he took your forearm in his grasp. As he eyed the lettering curiously, it gave you the opportunity to examine him more closely. He stood taller than you with short, dark hair, sticking out sharply from his forehead. His eyes were dark as well, so intensely brown that they were nearly black. A small stud sat in his perfect, button nose, adding another interesting facet to a face you could already stare at for hours. Your focus traced down his profile and toward his hand where his pointer finger trailed along your tattoo.

“Zelo,” he nodded. “My stage name. I am rap...I am a rapper. ” He tapped at the word proudly, only moving on once you nodded as well. He moved on to the next letters, written in tight Hangul. “Choi-”

“Junhong,” you finished with a smirk. “Choi Junhong.”

Zelo leaned back, hardly able to contain the happiness in his expression. “I feel...so amazing...right now.”

His hand slid down your arm, allowing himself the chance to let his fingers interlace with yours. “Mine,” he said quietly. “My soulmate.”

“Yours,” you echoed in Korean. “Forever.”

A small smile emerged on his lips before he looked up toward you. “Forever.”

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fandomcolourofmyskin · 5 years

Text

R&R: Race-based Reminders

by @naruhearts || Jan 24 2018

- - - -

Today is a good day to lay down some key points:

1. White/white-identifying individuals must realize that they CANNOT speak for all POC, including their own POC friends. POC may be intersectionally and systematically oppressed and ostracized as a collective in white-constructed Western society, but differing ethnic minority groups possess differing experiences. It is racially inappropriate for white people to tell certain POC what is or isn’t offensive, since each varied POC experience is not painted with broad strokes; they aren’t the same.

What a white individual may perceive as offensive/non-offensive does NOT hold the same meanings and connotations for a POC.

2. Just because something is ‘fact’ doesn’t discount how POC interpret it and consume it. White people might correct POC who point out something in a TV show, take offense to it, and thus discuss it or make jokes about it. White viewers might be argumentative with POC viewers and claim that: “the characters aren’t racist! I’m pointing out the facts! Nothing indicates they’re racist and there’s no substantial basis for your accusations! The writers didn’t mean for it to be racist!”

“The writers didn’t mean for it to be racist” —> tries to push subconscious white supremacy under the rug, exempt white people from race-based responsibility and accountability, and make the POC reality invisible; I will talk about this more in the future, but white writers do not have to have CONSCIOUS AUTHORIAL INTENT in order to write something that is interpreted as potentially racist. White-painted historical narratives influence a white person’s behaviour and by socialized design, they can incorporate racism into ANYTHING they do, subconscious or not (due to internalization of white dominance).

Don’t be defensive. Media consumption by white people is entirely DISTINCT from media consumption by People of Colour.

Again, a white person CANNOT establish an objective view for POC, especially when it comes to societal mediums like media. If they think that TV show characters can be racist or if they think something in the literary narrative(s) potentially comes across as racist, they are 100% entitled to this belief (this is elaborated upon in later points). Refrain from overall defensiveness and LISTEN to POC. After all, POC are oppressed; white people are not.

***Please do NOT tell POC that they are “fake woke” if you aren’t POC yourself, even if you personally disagree with anything they said or did. This is a form of racial bullying.

3. Other POC groups lack the authority to exercise the N-word if they do not belong to the Black community. The N-word exists within the Black sociocultural context and is attached to historically unjust/oppressive narratives, policy development, and legal/institutional action against Black POC. It isn’t the business of other POC groups to contribute opinions about a Black person’s racism jokes or how they choose to perceive racism, just like it isn’t a Black POC’s business to contribute adjacent opinions about racism jokes or perceptions of racism of Chinese POC, Filipino POC etc.

***As a Filipina POC, I will never, for example, disclose or enforce an opinion about c***k jokes being thrown around by Chinese POC. Their respective racial space stays untouched.

4. The dimension of colourism —> very real. Light-skinned privilege is pervasive and underpins white privilege within the sociocultural Western context, where light-skinned individuals are either considered “not POC enough” or “not white enough”. If a dark-skinned POC states that other light-skinned POC are “not POC enough”, it is NOT a white person’s business to defend their light-skinned POC friend(s) without allowing or inviting those friends to speak (this is addressed in the following point).

5. A white person is entitled to their opinion - and yes, they are certainly entitled to defend their POC friend(s) - but their opinion ultimately does NOT matter nor does it hold importance because the racial discussion occurring between POCs excludes them in the first place. White people cannot relate (nor do they belong) within the underprivileged racial context in that POC lack systemic and institutional power/influence when it comes to their opinions, henceforth it’s NOT a priority for the white person’s opinion to be heard; it is more racially appropriate for white people to withhold such opinions and instead let the debate between POCs continue uninterrupted. People of Colour experience enough interruption and talking over by the predominantly White sphere of North American society.

The following excerpt from USA TODAY OPINION is highly applicable to whiteness and race-based discourse:

“Most people think of the Ku Klux Klan when they hear “white supremacy.” But the term just means that whiteness is the supreme value, which in the news media it is. As feminist writer Anushay Hossain noted to me, “Just the fact that Megyn Kelly feels she can have a conversation about race on television with three white people is the definition of white privilege.” Before anything offensive was said, there was already a problem” (Powers, 2018)

6. Do not put in argumentative or defensive interjections if POC/BIPOC (Black/Indigenous POC) attempt to address your racist actions, especially ones that are “invisible” to you and thus “can’t be racist behaviour” (aka white fragility). Trust the word(s) of POC/BIPOC people. We witness racism everyday as ethnic minority-labelled groups and can hence distinguish underlying racist patterns easily, from the obvious to the nuanced. We think of ourselves in racial terms and are able to describe how our lives are shaped by our race within, again, Whiteness-governed society; white people cannot do these things (fail to think of themselves in racial terms as a larger group; fail to describe how their own lives are shaped by their race) since they hold the (unearned) privilege to walk through life unaffected by social, cultural, and political systems that A. benefit white people, and B. disadvantage People of Colour (aka white privilege).

7. Another point: do not tokenize your POC friends. Saying that you cannot be racist “because you have POC friends” reduces your POC friends to nothing but caricatures who elevate your social status and erase your accountability and complicity. Racism does not manifest ONLY through obvious external attitudes, beliefs, and behaviours, but through internal attitudes, beliefs, and behaviours. Racism exists via subconscious systemic forces (i.e. social media) that permeate society in numerous ways.

In other words, racism is a multifaceted subconscious/conscious structure, “not an event” (DiAngelo, 2018).

8. Some common white myths: “a. I don’t see colour” b. “Focusing on race divides us” c. “It’s about class, not race” —> Firstly, saying one doesn’t see colour perpetuates erasure of the POC experience/reality. Secondly, race already divides us. Thirdly, we CANNOT talk about other systemic forces like socioeconomic class without addressing race. Race is inherently interweaved into other structural dimensions. It’s why BIPOC/POC are paid less than white employees/unequally treated in terms of job capability, struggle to find jobs, are unable to afford three-story suburban houses, and can never seem to find favour no matter how hard we work.

Here we go into the issue of legal structures —> Black people in the U.S., for example, were historically barred from purchasing land, investing their money, and seeking permanent lodging. In 1960s Canada, Indigenous POC were plucked from their homes, abused in residential schools, lost their land, and could not gain Canadian rights and citizenship unless they renounced their Aboriginal identity; the Canadian Chinese Immigrant Act of 1885 implemented the Chinese Head Tax to discourage Chinese POC from entering Canada after the Canadian Pacific Railway was created. Overall, POC were confined to financial poverty/kept from flourishing financially. Filipino immigrants in Canada, for example, tend to move into low-wage backdoor jobs involving the transfer of labour from white people to POC people e.g. nannies, factory workers, and foodservice (these include my Filipino relatives in these jobs), while white individuals tend to take up jobs of higher public status e.g. delegation, policy-making (Gibb & Wittman, 2012). In a predominantly white-privileged society, the BIPOC/POC financial reality lags.

***It’s not about “working hard to get to the top” — it’s about “working hard to eliminate racism that hinders us from getting to the top and staying there.” We will always be five steps behind white people today (who, underneath an individualistic ideology, think financial merit can be earned if one works hard enough regardless of race —> again this perpetuates the erasure of POC realities and ignores the POC financial hardship experience + systemic racist forces at play. We do not live in a meritocracy, but in a racial hierarchy). Historical racism is the reason for it.

9. Finally: appropriate language.

Refrain from using derogatory racial terms such as “coloured” and corresponding rhetoric when referring to People of Colour.

If you intend to be a non-BIPOC/non-POC ally, please expand your horizons on appropriate race-based term usage when engaging in racial discourse. Continuous education with POC is key!

#fandom racism #spn + racism #spn + white fragility #white fragility #white privilege #racism #-mod naruhearts #fandomcolourofmyskin #fcs #long post for ts #white narratives #white history #racism in fandom

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namedconquer · 6 years

Text

OF BEAUTY

DIARY ENTRY: 01/08/2017

Beauty is a social construct!

It has been constructed to best serve white supremacist, patriarchal, capitalist systems, with an agenda to deliberately exclude anyone and anything that does not package perfectly for profit – depending on the market. These markets could be different contexts, a few years back it was about being supermodel thin, now we could say it is about being “stripper thick” We could even consider the different markers of beauty in cultures around the world, some value eyes, hips, many value skin tone…The complexity and cruelty of capitalism, with its siblings patriarchy and white supremacy, is that this construction is fluid – it flexes through time and place, morphing and moulding, changing shape, but always serving an evil agenda. Once you understand that beauty is constructed by those in power, you become aware of your own power to construct beauty in a way that best serves you. What I mean is not the clichéd affirmation of, “Beauty Comes from Within,” – because it doesn’t. There is nothing essential about beauty. I’m advocating for the everyday exercise of constructing a definition and standard of beauty that suits and serves you. Deciding that though your edges are not laid today, today’s definition of beauty becomes non-laid edges – and gotdamnit you’re beautiful! These deliberate decisions and definitions are an everyday, maybe even hourly exercise, because whilst you are constructing beauty for yourself, you must simultaneously deconstruct definitions that come against your standard. Theoretically, social constructions are not real, they are made up. They shouldn’t matter, but realistically, they have adverse effects on our being in this world. You get to work, edges not laid – gotdamnit you’re beautiful! And then, your white boss states that your afro is unkempt and unprofessional. You’ve got to churn, do the mental and spiritual work of deconstructing and reconstructing, deconstructing and reconstructing. Whew! If you ask me, being beautiful is exhausting – it’s a task that relies very little on the physical and external appearance, but weighs heavy on the mind and spirit.

It is a task that I have tried in the past year to fulfil, and found some success in the fact that I do not have a deep hatred for my dark skin. I understand that the exclusion of darker skinned people (whatever their race) are white supremacist ideals used to fuel conquest, colonialism and capitalism. I do not want to be complicit, even in the smallest way, of believing there’s something wrong with my skin, and feed into the rhetoric. That’s not to say self-hate doesn’t creep in now and then, between the churning of deconstructing and reconstructing, I may add a lightening filter to my Instagram selfie and then some days I just post. Beauty is an everyday exercise – an hourly exercise.

For me it has become an exercise of life and death. My body has deteriorated – I have lost so much weight. When I took a look at myself in the mirror after two weeks of hospital admission, I hated it. On top of that I had a bloody cold sore on my lips – I deemed myself ugly. Ugly infected with sickness is death. This fear of frailty goes way back, beyond the two-week hospital admission or the week admission last year. It goes back to a school photo of me in Grade 7 that surfaced whilst I was in Grade 8. In this photo, my dark skin looks pale – not light or ashy –but pale, without its glow. I’m smiling – I have a beautiful smile, but my face has lost its filling and firmness, and is struggling to sustain the smile. It seemed as though the smile would fall upon my protruding collar bone and that would be the end of me – shattered, a pile of tiny bones with barely any skin. My mother came across the photo once, hidden in a drawer under stacks of unnecessary things we put in drawers, and she said, “You shouldn’t show people this picture, otherwise they will know.” They will know what? That I was a sickly child, to put it lightly. From then I associated thinness with sickness and death, and at the time the photo was taken, I had heard with my own ears the doctor telling my grandmother, “if this doesn’t work she might not make it”. Lo and Behold I did. I made it to Grade 8, where a fellow pupil came across one of my grade 7 photos and remarked, “you looked so much better when you were thinner”. Sigh – beauty is a social construct.

Sometimes the constructions you form will be in alignment with white supremacist, patriarchal and capitalist standards – I am quite aware of my skinny privilege, I have a smug “never been a dress size over 8 in my life” pride I have to keep in check every so often. To an extent, I understand the reasoning behind why my fellow pupil leaned more towards thin than health. The world is very unjust to bodies above a certain size, and the assumption is that if you weigh above a certain number on the scale, you’re automatically unhealthy, unfit, undeserving of food or adequate seating and freedom of movement. These are all normalized assumptions - it’s not like we have written our BMIs on our foreheads (and even if we did we would still need to question the power behind that measure). In this context, the dilemma for me then becomes anxiety between the thing I see as death. and the big girl that will be socially excluded (and trust that social exclusion has as much intensity as death – do you exist if people deem you invisible?) Hence, another layer to what beauty is and must become, not only must you churn to construct and deconstruct – you must recognize where your definitions of beauty are in alignment with the socially constructed standards – find where that privilege intersects with someone’s oppression and then extend your constructions of beauty to include them. Think on how broaden definitions on beauty will help you grow, think on how inclusive definitions will help others grow.

What is it that is specifically growing? Some call it spirit / soul / self – the only thing I believe to be essential to a human being. Beauty is not from within, nor intelligence, nor any other attribute we’ve been shamed for falling short of, but the spirit / soul / self is – it’s an untainted and fragile part of our being. It needs the body to hold it, it needs thoughts to frame it and it needs emotions to manifest itself, and that is why we must be deliberate about what we construct around us and the world to build it up. Everything but the spirit / soul / self is constructed, learnt, conditioned, socialized. In my very vulnerable state of feeling ugly, I have come to define self-love as the deliberate exercise of activating and amplifying the spirit – that essential part within me. When possible I believe all thoughts, actions, emotions, must serve the growth of the spirit / the soul / the self to fulfil not just your body and mind but any spiritual or physical space you occupy. If you do not take deliberate action in constructing structures and definitions that prop your spirit up, it will be suffocated by all the emissions of capitalism. In the same way that capitalism is eroding the beauty of our Earth, you will find your spirit sinking deep in the waters of a melting ice cap.

Construct. Deconstruct. Churn!

Today, my beauty is health. It’s the fact that I haven’t had difficulty breathing, and that my cold sore is waning to the furthest corner of my lips. Understanding that today’s beauty is about recovery and patience, and less about my desirability in a world that often deliberately excludes me. Which reminds me of a Haitian saying, “Nou led, Nou la” translated “We’re ugly, but we are here.” I’m alive – I’m here! I’m regaining my health and though my edges aint laid…gotdamnit I’m beautiful!

KUNDAI CONQUER

#ART #HIV #BLOG #DIARY #diaryentry

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snarktheater · 6 years

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Carve the Mark Bonus — How (Not) To Write Racial Diversity

So this post's about a year in the making, which I think makes it my biggest act of procrastination on this blog—possibly in my entire life, although there's another strong contender I still need to deal with right now.

But yeah. Remember Carve the Mark? Let's talk about it again while we wait for me to get through my massive pile of work to do so I can get around to reading the sequel. Fun times ahead for everyone.

See, I wasn't the only one to read racial connotations in that text, and Veronica Roth, a woman who every signs points to being pretty well-meaning and progressive, felt the need to address it. And so we're gonna talk about that now.

The main source of what I'm going to be discussing here is this post from her blog, but this isn't really a response to it or a breakdown of it, or even really a rebuttal. I'm not trying to have a conversation with Veronica Roth—I don't think it would be very constructive, and as someone who doesn't think authors should generally argue with their critics, I am not making this post in an attempt to bait her into doing that exact thing. If somehow Ms Roth comes across this post…hopefully she can learn a thing from it. Or not. I don't know. To everyone else reading this: I invite you to read her blog post, for the sake of fairness.

I will state this once again: I do think Veronica Roth means well—based on what I've heard from her before, and on how the blog post opens and is generally phrased. And as a white person working on a fantasy book with a biracial protagonist and a variety of cultures, I feel for her and I certainly don't claim a moral high ground. I'm literally just trying to share my insight into the past few years of trying to figure out how to navigate these pitfalls. Not quite as a peer, since, you know, I'm not published (yet?), but something close to it.

Finally, I'll point out the obvious: I'm not going to speak for all critics of Carve the Mark, obviously. I haven't actually read many people's opinions, because…I don't really have the time and I didn't even dislike Carve the Mark all that much. Like, I felt it was an okay book that botched its execution and landed somewhere in the "mediocre, but interesting" territory. This means some of the point Roth addresses aren't even my own points. But hey, we'll make do with what we've got.

Okay, I think that should be all the disclaimers I need for this.

I will give Roth this: she does seem to have done her research on the sensitive issue of racial representation (and, more generally, of any representation) in sci-fi/fantasy stories. Acknowledging that you can't deflect criticism by claiming it's not the real-world culture, because what matters is how real-world readers read the characters…well, it sounds like the most basic thing to say on this topic, and I'm sure it kind of is.

But it's also a step further than a lot of hardcore fantasy fans and authors are willing to take. Fantasy and science fiction are kind of dominated by straight white men with no intention to check their privilege like that. The bar isn't very high, is what I'm getting at. But credit where credit is due.

With that said…well, the rest of the post is basically a defense and a correction. Like the accusations of racism are all based on just a misunderstanding of the book's text. So that's what we're actually going to talk about. Because yes, Roth makes some good points, but I feel like she misses the forest for the trees by focusing on said corrections.

Okay. So. First and foremost, the race of the characters—specifically how they're portrayed.

The concern that I’ve seen raised more than once about Carve the Mark is that there is one light-skinned, straight-haired race of peaceful people (Thuvhe) warring against a dark-skinned, curly-or-thick-haired race of warriors (Shotet).

Roth's general point here is that Thuvhe and Shotet people are "physically indistinguishable from each another" due to being people of blended origins. Which…okay, I can't speak for her intentions, obviously, but I'm going to say that, purely on the high-concept level, this isn't how the book reads. The Shotet are a diaspora, and Shotet heritage can manifest among literally other culture in the world of Carve the Mark; so yes, the Shotet aren't uniformly "savage" brown people. But that said…I never got the impression that Thuvhe was also such a diverse culture?

Thing is, that's not necessarily a bad thing, but it does feel like Roth is trying to over-specify the criticism aimed at her, so that she can more easily dismiss it. I never really pictured the Shotet as "dark-skinned, curly-or-thick-haired", i.e. what we would call black in our world. Most of the descriptions that came to mind led me to picture them as people of color, but more of North African or Middle Eastern descent. Although, again, it's also pretty clear that they're from a diaspora.

I mean, it's literally a plot point that some of the (Shotet) characters are all blond, and therefore, related. And, conveniently…that's exactly the issue Roth is missing here.

Most of this section of her blog post is devoted to quoting bits from the book that show that Shotet characters have plenty of different hair or skin colors. And it's fine—these quotes include very minor characters, but I won't fault Roth for being thorough. But the problem is that you can't treat all descriptions are equivalent in how the book reads.

First impressions are important—and the first look we actually have at Shotet characters with specific descriptions come from Cyra's chapters, and she's talking mostly about her family, who are either described as having brown skin and dark hair or not described at all. The latter part is important, by the way. Roth uses two quotes to establish that Ryzek is meant to be white. First:

Ryzek: “…his skin was so pale he looked almost like a corpse.” (p60)

The latter is easy to tackle: it's just flat-out a misused word—and a pretty common one among white writers. "Pale" does not mean "white"—"pale", when talking about skin, usually refers to pallor, when your skin grows lighter due to a variety of emotional or physical distress. Pale is also used to describe a lighter, more desaturated version of a color, but either way, pale just does not mean the same thing as white when it comes to skin. People of color can grow pale too, under the exact same circumstances. This specific quote is especially unfortunate, since "he looked almost like a corpse" seems to point at pallor—since pallor actually happens to corpses, among other things.

Reading this book, from an author who by her own admission tries to be sensitive about topics of representation, I (and I assume others) assumed that she knew this, because…well, "don't use pale to mean white" is a pretty common talking points when discussing racial representation. If you want to avoid "white", I've seen people suggest "fair" or "light/lighter skins" as alternatives (the latter especially if your setting doesn't have a concept of whiteness or a "white" ethnicity), but "pale" isn't one.

The second quote is this:

Cyra and Ryzek, compared: “I was tall, too, but that was where my physical similarities with my brother ended. It wasn’t uncommon for Shotet siblings to look dissimilar, given how blended our blood was, but we were more distinct than most.” (p61)

And…well, in the context of this post, it becomes obvious that the intent of the line is it includes Ryzek's skin being white. The problem is: you're not actually saying that. And it turns out, "dissimilar" to brown skin can mean anything, including a darker shade, a different undertone, or a lighter shade of brown that wouldn't register to us as "white".

"Representation should be made explicit" is a pretty common maxim, and one I think Roth knows about, because she mentions several time that Cyra has brown skin. And that's fine. But if you want to establish that her culture is more varied than that, you need to have other characters where you explicitly portray them as white. Note that, of the other quotes Roth uses, all she has is another "pale" character (which, again, not the right word)—the other Shotet characters all either have brown skin or undescribed skin.

Meanwhile, her examples of descriptions for Thuvhesit characters are limited to Akos and his siblings. Akos has fair skin (there's one of the words you should use if you want your character to be read as unambiguously white), and his siblings' skin tones are undescribed, but Eijeh has green eyes, something that's commonly associated to white people.

Roth points out how both Cisi and Eijeh have curly, dark hair, as if that proved they're not white. I guess I have some news for most of my maternal relatives, then? I know that our image of whiteness tends to default to straight blond hair (you might even say…Aryan), but it's not like white people don't have curly or dark hair (or both).

And since these are literally Roth's only examples of Thuvhesit people…you can easily see why a reader would assume Thuvhesits are meant to be read as white. I mean, Roth herself couldn't find an example of a Thuvhesit character who isn't white.

This, I think, is the crux of the issue here: Roth cannot differentiate between what she intends and the book she actually wrote. I actually pointed out a few times that descriptions in Carve the Mark are way too sparse—not just for the characters, but for settings as well. Voa, the city most of the book is set in, is only described to us near the end of the book, for instance. Thinking back to Divergent, I don't think there were a lot of descriptions there either.

And that's most of the problem, really. If all the Thuvhesit characters are white, and all the Shotet characters who get a description is either "brown", "undefined", or "blond, but it's so rare that we can assume those characters are all related", it creates a mental picture. Probably not the one that was intended—I am fully willing to believe Roth on that. But it's still the one that's there.

Don't forget, too, that whiteness is ultimately a very fragile concept. A lot of biracial people will, at best, "pass" as white, because whiteness is basically treated as a recessive trait—either both your parents are white and you are, or one or both of your parents isn't white and you're not either. Biracial people will generally attest that, even if they pass as white, the moment their racial background becomes known they start experiencing racism. [Note that I do say "treated as a recessive trait", not that it is one, because race isn't genetic, but that's a topic for another time. I think I have a post about that on the blog already, so feel free to use the search function.] So by virtue of being a diaspora often described as "mixed", the Shotet will read as majority non-white.

Add to that the fact that the Shotet still do have elements of the "savage foreign culture" in the way they're described to them. Maybe that was unintentional, or maybe Roth was trying to subvert the trope—it kind of sounds like the latter, actually, based on an article she wrote about world building on John Scalzi's blog. Like she wanted Akos to progressively find there's more to the Shotet than that stereotype.

Which Akos…sort of does. To an extent. But it still doesn't change the fact that your culture, which as I've explained reads as primarily people of color, has those tropes associated with it in the first place. And that a lot of the subversion stems from there being more to them than those tropes, not the tropes being wrong in the first place. So it's still a very delicate position to be in.

After talking about the descriptions of the characters (where, to summarize, the issue seems to be "you didn't describe your characters enough, Roth"), she goes on to talk about some aspects of Shotet culture. Specifically, language, religion and the Marks (i.e. scarification/tattoos).

The issue of language is a simple one. Apparently most of the criticism compared the Shotet language to Arabic languages. I personally read it as Hebrew, but since they're all related (specifically they're Semitic languages, part of the Afro-Asiatic language family), I think it's roughly the same idea. Roth's counter is that it's actually based on Hungarian, from her own time living in Romania and meeting the Hungarian community there. She also says that, ironically, she did use Arabic as an influence for the Thuvhesit language, but she also mentions French and as a French speaker I didn't see that, either. Which, she wanted to make something alien and only use the sonorities, so…mission accomplished, maybe?

And…yeah, okay. All I can say to this is "death of the author" and move on to the other points. For now. You'll see what I'm getting at in a moment.

On the religious aspect, people have apparently likened the Scavenge to Hajj, the pilgrimage to Mecca in Islam that all Muslims who can perform should at least once in their life. I hadn't seen it, since I read the Shotet as more Jewish due to the diaspora aspect, but it makes sense to me. But not to Roth, apparently:

But the sojourn is not a religious practice […] The Shotet sojourn may be a pilgrimage, too, but it’s a way of ensuring that they remember their history, when—for a period of time—they didn’t have a permanent home in the galaxy.

This is a really weak argument, and…well, I'm not gonna lie, an argument that only a religious person could make, in my humble atheist opinion. Now, I agree that the religious aspect of Hajj is intrinsic to it. But acting like there's a fundamental difference between a religious ritual and a cultural tradition seems…extremely myopic. Religion, in the end, is a set of traditions and ritual.

But also, in the text of the book, this just flat-out isn't true. The Shotet explicitly worship the current (like, these are words that are said in the book), and the current is what determines where the Sojourn goes. The Sojourn, therefore, is a ritual that at the very least holds a religious significance. So that doesn't even work.

Roth also mentions (in her conclusion rather than in the section about the Sojourn, which…weird) that the Sojourn was mostly inspired by her own husband. Which, cute, but not relevant.

And finally, again, death of the author. I'm getting to that big point, I promise. Before we move on to the last point, I'll point out that Roth describes her background in religious studies and collectively calls the Abrahamic religions as "western religions". It's a little petty to call attention to it, but the use of "western" is already pretty problematic when trying to prove you're not racist, and referring to Judaism and Islam as "western" is flat-out offensive when "Western" culture is built on centuries of antisemitism and Islamophobia.

As for the Marks, she also took those from Eastern Europe, specifically how tattoos were used to mark criminals and political prisoners in Soviet gulags. But…

However, since the book came out I’ve felt like I didn’t fully consider the associations that most people have with scarification, which is primarily with non-white, non-Western, often marginalized cultures. This is definitely an area I feel I should have tread more carefully. I can’t undo what’s already done, but I think it would be best to de-emphasize this Shotet practice in the next book in the series as much as possible, to minimize its potential damage.

First of all: I don't think that de-emphasizing it is really the solution. Especially because, honestly, the Marks are probably the most nuanced aspect of Shotet culture (plus, it's in your title and all), and even if I can see the parallels with real-world cultures, it's a parallel that feels a lot more subtle and empathetic than…say, the duels to the death.

Maybe I'm missing something here, because, again, I'm white myself. But it really strikes me as the wrong thing to accept as your one genuine mistake, and the trying to tone it down in the sequel strikes me as a bad solution to it.

More importantly, this is where we get back to that "death of the author" point. Because, ultimately it seems Veronica Roth understands that major tenet of criticism. Yet she fails to realize that if people can read the Marks as evoking "non-Western" cultures even if she didn't intend it…they can likewise read the Shotet language as similar to Semitic languages even if she didn't intend it, and they can read the Sojourn as similar to the pilgrimage to Mecca even if it was unintended.

They can even read the Shotet as a race of mostly brown people with certain problematic tropes. Because ultimately, your intent doesn't matter. I know it's unfair. As I said, I'm a white person who also hopes to someday publish books, and in those books I want to feature racially diverse characters—and yes, I am scared that that will backfire someday. It sucks, but, you know, that's just part of the risk you take when you try to do something better than a bland white story.

You know what's missing from this blog post as a whole? An apology. She doesn't even give a "sorry you felt that way" non-apology. The closest we get is her conceding she should have been "more careful"…on the specific issue of the Marks, rather than the racial portrayal as a whole.

And that, ultimately, is the biggest problem. The post comes across as extremely defensive. Trying not to justify why she made the mistakes she made, but to dismiss them as mistakes at all as much as possible. And that's…not a good look, regardless of how well-meaning you are. She should have listened, apologized, and tried to see what she can improve, and she did only the latter, and only for one (fairly minor) point rather than for the problems as a whole.

As I said, I don't mean that post as a message to Roth directly. Mostly I hope it can help other people (let's be honest, other white people, I'm not going to whitesplain representation anytime soon) think more critically about racial representation—in their own writing and in other people's. That's all I'm hoping to achieve here. Hopefully I did that.

#carve the mark #veronica roth #race representation #representation #death of the author #Racial diversity #on writing #writing #writing tips #young adult #ya books #books #young adult books #ya #book #st: carve the mark

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coolercolors · 6 years

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Tell us about your greatest childhood insecurity and how you overcame it. Or, if is the case, why you feel as though you can't.

So, I don’t think I’ve talked about this much on here. I think my greatest childhood insecurity was being a child of immigrants and growing up in two worlds that I couldn’t feel I was 100% part of. I was born here in Sweden and my parents are born in South America. We always spoke Spanish in our home and we had a Spanish speaking daycare lady so I actually didn’t speak Swedish until I was like 4 years old. Me and my younger brother actually had to learn speaking Swedish when we started going to a real kindergarten (we did understad it tho).

My dad us pretty dark skinned while my mother is light skinned, among my sibling I am the one with the lightest skin. It was a bit weird being light skinned at home and dark skinned in school. I think it’s a thing that I picked up at a young age even tho I didn’t really understand it. I grew up feeling swedish and wanting to be swedish while feeling like I really couldn’t be because I didn’t look swedish. This also made me distance myself from my family’s heritage. I didn’t like my last name, I didn’t like how I looked, I didn’t like feeling like anything else than swedish. One of the first guys I dated mentioned something about how dark my skin had gotten (I tan SUPER easy), basically he said that I had “bad skin”. It is something that I still think about and that also still affects me.

I think it finally came to a point when I started to question thing and when I finally started to like that side of me. I think it was around the same time that I came out and it was all bundled up in the wave of realizing who I was. It’s difficult to pin point when it was. I’ve been through people saying racist things to be. I’ve been through people fetishizing me for how I look. It’s one of those insecurities that is hard to overcome 100%. I think it will always be with me in the back of my mind sometimes. However, I do think that being aware of it has really helped me. Asking “why do I feel or think this about myself” has greatly helped me accepting and understanding myself and my thoughts about myself. Because that is the thing with this kind of insecurity, it’s not really about how I view other people but how I see myself. I am aware that other people that have darker skin experience think in another way and that my lighter skin puts me in a position of privilege, even if I’m not white. I think it also come across if you know and talk to me since I do tend to point out and question privilege. I also think it comes across in other things like what I post or who I follow (I tend to avoid reblogging images of white model dudes).

Sometimes it’s a insecurity that I feel that I have overcome, sometimes I get reminded about it and I feel shitty. All in all I love myself, my skin and the different cultures that make up the person I am.

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barbecuedphoenix · 7 years

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Hi! I really love your writings! I know it's not a very creative request... But could you please do a post with how Valkyon would react if Gardienne touched his amazing hair?

Ask, and you shall receive.;)

Frankly, I’m surprised thatValkyon is the last guy requested for this hair-raising trilogy. Just look atthose gorgeous platinum locks.

But then again… there aresome strings attached for touching them. You’re talking about a lifelongwarrior, after all.

1.) Not romantically-involved = You crack a rib

Grabbing loose hair is oneof the easiest ways to distract or hamper a warrior on the field, just longenough to connect a mace to their face or run a blade across their throat.Hence why Valkyon ties his up and tucks it under a massive helmet for heavybattles.

So when he feels someonetouching his loose hair during his off-duty hours, battle instinct takes over.

He turns around and punchesyou hard in the gut.

Talk about bad ideas. Youcrumble like a wet sandcastle. Except for his lieutenants and Jamon, no onetakes a full punch from Valkyon and remains standing.

Unmitigated horror entershis eyes when he sees that it’s you on the ground, unarmed and astounded bywhat just happened. Not to mention in terrific pain. Without asking for anexplanation on what you were even doing touching his hair—because gods knowthat if anyone’s in the wrong here, it’s him—Valkyon picks you up as gently ashe can, trained eyes identifying at least a cracked rib from where he punchedyou right below the breastbone.

Saying “I’m sorry” justwon’t fix this. So he shuts up, lips thinning into a grim line, jaw stiffening,and takes you straight to the infirmary, stopping for no one until he reachesEwelein. With you still wheezing in pain against his chest, the hardest thingthat Valkyon can do is admit that…well, he caused this. You caught himoff-guard; he assumed there was someone behind him with a knife. Only the flashof intense shame in his eyes and the vein in his jaw betray the cocktail ofemotions behind the poker face.

Valkyon stands in the cornerof the ward like a living pillar, and about as expressive, while Ewelein bandagesyour chest and doses you with painkillers. Only after she tactfully leaves theroom does he approach your cot.

You greet him with anembarrassed mumble. Though surprised—because heck, the blame is on him–, Valkyon doesn’t question yourreaction. Instead, he asks shortly if you feel any better. When you fail tothink of a good lie, he mechanically reiterates your treatment plan andexpected discharge date, just as Ewelein told you thirty seconds ago.

In the ensuing silence, itfinally occurs to him to ask what you had intended to do that moment on thefield.

His eyes pop when you giveyour reasons. You wanted to give his hair afriendly ruffle? You thought it looked nice?Valkyon is not amused, and he letsyou know by yelling.

What were you thinking sneaking up on him like that?! Ifhe had something in his hand then, he couldhave killed you!

But the moment he sees youshrink, Valkyon forcibly checks himself and takes a deep breath, now doubly-ashamedof himself and astounded at your candor. Approaching emotional overload and fearingthat he’ll only make the situation worse, Valkyon tells you curtly to take careof yourself and avoid physical exertion or heavy eating until the rib sets. Thenhe walks rigidly out of the room as you stare at his back.

It isn’t until much, muchlater, after he has worked out his twin demons of shame and anger, whiletoweling off his hair in the privacy of his room, that an exhausted Valkyonrecalls the second half of your answer. Wait. His hair looks nice?

He spends the next hourstudying himself in the mirror like a zoologist facing an unknown specimen,running his fingers through his hair experimentally and rubbing strands betweenhis callused fingers (causing more split-ends, but he doesn’t care). What doyou mean ‘his hair looks nice’? How do you evaluate the… ‘niceness’ of hair?What’s so interesting about it that other people are tempted to touch it andrisk getting pummeled by him? But having spent all his life treating hishair as a convenient (and sometimes inconvenient) cover for his scalp, Valkyonis immune to whatever charms it has.

At length, he gives up,squinting suspiciously at his own reflection.

Now you made himself-conscious about his looks, on top of everything else. Thank you.

He resolves to ask you againin a few more days, once you can speak without wincing and it becomes less… awkward for him to face you. It’s notout of vanity. Valkyon’s now a bit worried he’ll have crop his hair short orwear a helmet even in the city, if there are other citizens here who have thesame, semi-suicidal urge to touch his hair without asking.

Honestly, he won’t misshaving long hair anyway. Hair is hair.

He just doesn’t get youpeople.

2.) Romantically involved = You taught him some very… uh,important things about himself.

Valkyon has been in very,very few relationships in his life, but he holds them dear. So youautomatically fulfill the role of ‘teacher’ in yours; he is willing to tryalmost anything you suggest at least once if it means improving ‘quality time’.And because of you, he’s learning a lot of new things about himself.

One: Now he understands what you mean by himhaving ‘nice’ hair. You mean to say ‘sexually appealing’, right? Were youreally attracted to him at first because of his hair?

Either way, this knowledge yougave him of his physical attractiveness is new ray of light in his dailyexistence. On the outside, he’s much the same stoic, hardnosed warrior; but inside,his self-esteem just shot up a couple of notches. He’ll avoid cutting his hairfor you.

Two: He likes having hispartner fix his hair.

No matter your skill level,you are now his unofficial hairdresser. He’s more than capable of doing ithimself: one of his best tricks as a bachelor is to pull his hair into a secureknot in two seconds flat in complete darkness. But fixing his hair is now your sole privilege in the morning,because he caught sight of your face in the mirror the first time he let youbrush his hair. The tenderness of your expression, the little glow in youreyes, the almost reverent touch of your fingers slipping through his hair,brushing gently across his temples and ears as you tucked back the loosestrands… that serene moment has been captured and securely locked into his heartfor good.

So how can he deny you thislittle privilege in the morning? Even if he ends up running ten minutes late tothe training grounds, and his hair still comes askew just an hour later?Some days, he’s still surprised with what little about himself can make youhappy. He won’t jinx this.

Three: Hecan’t afford to let you play with his hair in public.

Don’t get the wrong idea: whenyou’re alone, you have full license to do what you want with him. Valkyon has definitely learnt to enjoy the feel ofyour fingers sliding over and deep into the mane of his hair, as much as heenjoys watching your expression when you do this. He has even learnt to teaseyou by shaking out his wet hair over his shoulders after a shower. (Endresult: your hands on him like clockwork. Every. Single. Time.)

It’s just that yourrelationship is still very new to him, so every time you play with his hair inearnest, he gets… distracted.

Specifically, he’ll bereminded of those nights together when your hands roam adventurously, andnone-too-gently, through his hair. The way they would suddenly bunch tight, knucklesgrazing against his scalp. How they would tug hard the moment you start losing yourself…

Really, the first time hegot complacent enough to say yes to you in public was the last. The knot youmade had come undone, and you had volunteered to fix it during your rare lunchbreak together. You had that look inyour eyes again when you made your offer and started gazing at his hair, so Valkyonknew he was hard-pressed to refuse you. So, he’s sexy; who knew?

As your fingers parted hishair, combing out the tangles, spreading the mane across his neck and over hisshoulders, they soon started sliding much deeper into his hair than wasnecessary for an impromptu combing. Down to the roots. Once Valkyon felt yourfingertips massaging teasing circles into his scalp, again, smelled your skin soclose to his, felt the warmth of your breath against the back of his neck thatyou had just brushed naked, and the length of your thigh pressed against his… well, suddenly he remembered he was aman.

He felt his face fill uncontrollably with heat, that cascaded in naturalconsequence down his neck, across the breadth of his back and chest, down hisnavel. And lower still. But he knew that if he moved a muscle, if he said anything, if you so much as sensed the hot tension thrumming through his stiff body like a plucked viol string, you would learn exactly how turned-on he was right there.

Then Nevra chose that momentto walk by.

The damned vampire just had to smirk when he took in Valkyon’sface. And the rest of him. And you too, peeking oh-so-innocently from behind hisbroad shoulder, your hands still tangled in his hair.

To this day, Valkyon stillflushes cherry-red whenever he recalls Nevra’s words from that afternoon:“Don’t let me stop you two”.

So. No more playing with hishair in public. For his sake. Not even if you turn those eyes on him again.

—

Well. I had to make this scenariodifferent from the others.

Apologies to allValkyon fans, but I had so much with this piece. X). Mr. Pure-of-heart Literalis just a magnet for jokes. He can turn a playful little situation into an ERincident or a scene from the red lantern district within seconds. I wasgrinning like a loon the whole time I was writing this.

It’s not all exaggeration,though. When it comes to grabbing hair in battle, I drew inspiration from IronAge Norse culture again. Every sculpture and engraving from the Viking ageshows men with their hair tied back and stuck under a helmet if they’reentering battle. Also, the sagas feature really slapstick ways of their heroesgetting the upper-hand in scuffles. Those crazy Norsemen will try anything to win a fight. It could be thesame in Medieval-ish Eldarya.

And for those of you whoread my Ezarel piece… I don’t think I need to explain the second part. Combingyour s/o’s hair can be very sexy. ;)

In the end, Valkyon isn’tquite as twitchy as Ez, but his level of experience at being touched isn’t muchbetter at all.

#request #scenario #Eldarya #Valkyon

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cherieofthedragons · 7 years

Text

In Which Blackwall Is Not Dalish

A Knight Shop AU fic

I cannot stop playing in this sandbox. Have more Blackwall/Mirevas.

The Knight Shop AU is a modern-ish AU, basically Thedas/modern England, in which there exists a shop where one can hire knights. A knight shop. Hence the name. Typically, knights are hired to do odd jobs, attend social events, act as bodyguards, etc. etc. And many of our favorite Dragon Age characters are knights-for-hire. It’s a giant mishmash world shared by lots of lovely creators and peopled by lots of lovely OCs.

Blackwall is a knight. Mirevas Lavellan is the client he’s besotted with.

Thank you to @aphreal42 for use of her characters Sulevin and Vireth, and for betaing all of this nonsense.

More Blackwall/Mirevas Knight Shop fun:

In Which Blackwall Doesn’t Think Things Through

In Which Blackwall Somehow Manages Not to Kill His Coworkers

Without further ado...the fic!

This was it. Blackwall parked his lovingly-restored 1971 Charger in the gallery parking lot and tugged on the sleeves of his blazer. He hoped he looked all right. On Cassandra’s advice, he’d worn a dark grey blazer, light grey dress slacks, and a cornflower blue shirt with the top button undone. All right, the shirt color had come from Gal’s friend Dorian, but Blackwall never intended to let the man know he’d taken his advice. The whole thing was a little out of Blackwall’s comfort zone -- he tended towards metal t-shirts, jeans, and boots -- but for Mirevas, it was worth it.

And, of course, he’d spent an inordinate amount of time combing out his beard. He always did that, far more than he wanted anyone to find out, but today -- he’d be on Mirevas’s arm. She was the artist; everyone would notice her. He needed to look as presentable as possible.

Maker, he hoped he wouldn’t embarrass her.

He was as ready as he’d ever be. Blackwall pushed open the car door and stepped out into the cool air.

Mirevas was already there. She was facing away from him, standing on the pavement and talking to someone. She may be turned away, but he’d recognize her ebony hair, tawny skin, and petite frame anywhere.

She took his breath away. Her hair was pulled back in her usual pristine bun, which emphasized her long, elegant, pierced ears. Her forest green blouse was backless, held to her slender body by thin laces. An image he recognized as Dalish was tattooed against the smooth bronze skin of her back, a hunting bow with a leafy branch running through it. Tight black slacks were tucked into knee-high leather boots.

She was, beyond a doubt, the most bewitching woman he’d ever seen.

As if sensing his presence, she turned, and her eyes met his. A glorious smile spread across her face. She spoke quickly to her current companion, who nodded and went into the gallery.

Blackwall’s mouth was dry. He wasn’t sure he could speak. Not trusting his voice, he stepped toward her, unable to tear his eyes away.

“Blackwall.” She ducked her head. “It’s good to see you.”

He reached for her hand, and she gave him her own. “It is an immense pleasure to accompany you, my lady.”

In a moment of courage, he bent his head to kiss her delicate fingers. Her skin was warm against his lips.

Mirevas blushed, and his heart beat faster.

“You’re very...chivalrous. Well, you are a knight. I suppose that’s part of the job description.”

“Perhaps.” Blackwall’s chest swelled at the compliment. Most people saw him as rough, unpolished. With Mirevas, though…

It would be a disgrace to treat Mirevas with anything less than the highest respect.

He released her hand, and she drew it back. Suddenly, something behind him caught her eye, and she froze. “Blackwall.”

Her face was so shocked that for a brief moment, Blackwall wondered if she’d seen a spider. “What is it?”

“That--is that your car?”

“Oh.” Blackwall glanced back over his shoulder at his beloved Charger. “It is, yes.”

Mirevas gaped at him. “And you let me drive my beat-up old Rover last time instead of offering me a ride?”

That stopped Blackwall in his tracks. He’d been so distracted by the visage of the Dalish goddess before him that he hadn’t given a thought to transportation at the time. Which was pretty shocking, actually, given his passion for cars. “I--er--”

She folded her arms and narrowed her eyes. “Next time, we are taking that.”

Next time? There would be a next time? He suddenly felt light as a feather -- a very unfamiliar feeling for a man his size.

Mirevas bit her lip and gestured to the door. “Shall we?”

Blackwall offered her his arm. “It is my honor.”

---------

Blackwall wasn’t usually such an idiot. At forty years old, he’d known lots of women over the years. But he couldn’t remember ever being so utterly dumbstruck by a lady as he was by Mirevas.

Which was probably why he didn’t realize exactly what he was walking into until he, well, walked into it.

Blackwall was carefully not staring at Mirevas, which was not easy, given how stunning she looked. He was a knight; he had to be courteous and polite. And he would kill himself if he chased off the most incredible woman he’d ever met. That meant not being pervy, which meant not staring. So instead of watching her, he surveyed the gallery they were standing in.

That was when he realized.

The June Gallery. He hadn’t given much thought to the name of the place, too distracted by the idea of seeing Mirevas again. Now he looked across the room at the few people in attendance, taking in their facial tattoos and intricately embroidered clothing, and a vague memory surfaced, something he’d heard years ago, about a Dalish god called June.

This was a Dalish art gallery. It was right there in the name, and he hadn’t realized it.

Well, that was all right. Mirevas was Dalish. He wanted to know more about her, which meant he wanted to know more about her culture. This was a great opportunity for that.

It was just… well. It had been a matter of seconds since they’d stepped through the door, and he was already receiving strange glances. And the gallery hadn’t even opened yet.

Mirevas’s hand tightened on his arm.

It didn’t matter. He was here for Mirevas. He would serve her in any way he could, and everything else was superfluous.

His eyes swept the gallery again, this time seeking out the artwork on the walls. Mirevas had crafted each piece, and each of them held a promise -- to reveal a glimpse into the heart and mind of their creator. Blackwall had been anticipating this opportunity since the day she’d called to hire him. He focused on the nearest painting, eager to see what her hands had wrought.

It was exquisite. The sharp lines, vibrant colors, and distinct shading marked it clearly as the work of a tattoo artist, which appealed to him immediately. A white halla with intricately entwined silver antlers gazed out of the painting at him, set against a field of blue and framed by waving lines of green reminiscent of elegant vines.

Every time Blackwall thought his admiration for Mirevas couldn’t grow any larger, she proved him wrong. Her physical loveliness had been obvious from the moment he laid eyes on her, but within a few hours of knowing her, she’d shown herself to be both deeply intelligent and incredibly kind. As if that weren’t enough, her talent as an artist was incomparable. Well, he’d known it must be -- people paid her to practice her craft on their own bodies -- but seeing her artwork in person…

It overwhelmed him. Blackwall felt incredibly privileged just to look at it.

Mirevas shifted her weight, drawing his attention back to her. One corner of her mouth quirked up, but her eyes remained fixed on the painting before them. “My uncle raises halla.” She glanced up at him, then quickly away. “You could say he inspired this.”

Blackwall was momentarily jealous of the uncle who inspired this extraordinary creation. He wondered what it would be like to stir that kind of feeling in her, to instill such passion in her that she had to express it, that such beauty would come from her hands all because of--

He couldn’t think like that. She was a client. An exceptionally talented, brilliant, gorgeous...client. An old knight like himself -- there was nothing he could offer her. She’d have no kind of life with him.

“I’ve never seen anything more beautiful,” Blackwall said, and hoped she didn’t know that it wasn’t really the painting he was talking about.

Mirevas looked back up at him in surprise, and a pleased grin spread across her face. “Thank you. I’m glad you like it.”

“Mirevas!” The voice came from across the room, and they both turned to look. An elf with a clipboard was frowning at her, looking distinctly nervous. “Elanas ma halani, sathan?”

Blackwall had no idea what he’d said, but apparently it wasn’t good, because Mirevas sighed and shook her head. “I’m sorry.” She pulled her hand from his arm reluctantly. “The downside of being the guest of honor -- I have to deal with every little wrinkle in the plans. I’ll be right back, I promise.”

Blackwall didn’t really want to be alone here, but of course that was ridiculous. So he smiled. “I’ll take this opportunity to look around before the doors open to the public.”

She grinned shyly. “All right, then.”

The elf across the room spoke in Elvish once again, and Mirevas rolled her eyes. “Yes, yes, I’m coming!”

With one last look at Blackwall, Mirevas turned and hurried off.

----------

Mirevas’s work focused on nature, Blackwall observed. Soaring trees, delicate flowers, stately animals. And yet there was an edge to her art. He couldn’t explain it, but there was something very rock-and-roll in her portrayal, in her style, that set her paintings apart from any other nature scenes he’d ever seen.

Every piece was magnificent. But the most intriguing, the most arresting pictures, the ones that truly fascinated him, were the ones with “Not for Sale” signs posted beneath them. The ones that could only be renderings of Dalish legends and folklore. In these paintings, every brushstroke was so lovingly executed that he knew instinctively she had poured her soul into them. And despite his best intentions, Blackwall felt a surge of dismay. Because--

--well. If the soul she’d poured into her art was so very elven, what could she possibly think of Blackwall? What need could she ever have for a large, lumbering human?

The revelation of just how ill-suited to her he was made him realize -- he’d still been holding out hope. Hope that this incredible goddess might somehow, someway find something in him to...to…

...care about.

He was a bloody fool.

“Blackwall?”

Mirevas’s voice behind him made him start. He turned to see her smiling up at him.

“Problem solved. And Creators willing, I won’t be interrupted again. The artist is supposed to mingle, after all. Can’t be called away to deal with every missing hang tag that turns up. Or rather, doesn’t turn up.” She rolled her eyes and shot him a grin.

“It would indeed be a shame to deprive the people of your presence.”

She chuckled and looked at the floor. “If I’d known knights were so kind and gallant, I’d have started hiring them years ago.”

Her compliment went straight to his heart. Ah, there was that hope again. Would nothing teach him not to wish for the moon?

“I’m really glad you’re here.” Her voice was quiet, and Blackwall realized that no, nothing would.

----------

Well, it was official. Blackwall did not belong here.

He wasn’t the only human. Others wandered in and out, mostly young hipster couples. But Blackwall was the only one who didn’t leave after about ten minutes, and he was at all times the largest person in the room. He almost wished for Gal to be there, just so he wouldn’t be the only giant among elves -- but no, a pair of large men would most certainly be worse.

And this was bad enough. Blackwall couldn’t miss the odd looks he kept receiving, or the way Mirevas seemed to become increasingly uncomfortable as the night went on. With good reason. Having him at her side could only be disagreeable to the throng of Dalish admirers. No doubt she regretted bringing him here. And the fact that she’d actually spent money on it…

He shouldn’t have let her pay for the job; he should have volunteered to come on his own time. But no, he’d already been committed to being on duty this evening, and more importantly, waiving the fee would make this...a date. And he couldn’t impose his affections on her, not when she’d called seeking a professional service.

Perhaps he should have refused the job altogether. But that wasn’t right, either. She’d wanted him to be here, and it would have been wrong to turn her away. He’d had no valid reason to, either, even if he’d known how awkward it would be. Sorry, don’t want to be around a lot of Dalish people. It was an awful, untrue sentiment. He was honored to be allowed to spend time within her culture. He just hated for his presence to reflect poorly on her.

And of course, he could never have risked her thinking that he was rejecting her. The idea was intolerable. No, he’d done the right thing. He just didn’t know what he could do now to improve matters for Mirevas.

At least he didn’t seem to be chasing people away. Mirevas had, unsurprisingly, been receiving a constant string of admirers all evening. None of them had looked at or acknowledged Blackwall in any way. They spoke to Mirevas mostly in Elvish and ignored the large human hovering next to her.

Blackwall did the only thing he could think of -- he refilled her drink as necessary and otherwise stood by her side.

After another trip to the punch bowl, Blackwall came back to find Mirevas hugging a Dalish man with long black hair. She beamed at him fondly, taking his hands in hers. Blackwall couldn’t stifle the sharp jolt of jealousy in his heart.

She’s not yours to be jealous over, he reminded himself sternly.

The mental admonition did nothing to make him feel better.

Mirevas didn’t seem to notice Blackwall standing there. She chattered happily in Elvish to her Dalish friend, and the man laughed in response. Blackwall watched them, holding a cup of punch in each hand and trying not to feel awkward. Was it rude to stand here looking at them? Should he clear his throat or something?

Mirevas saved him the trouble of deciding by noticing him at that moment. “Blackwall!” She sounded genuinely pleased. “Vireth, I want you to meet my--my friend, Blackwall. He’s a knight.”

Vireth’s eyebrows went up, but he held out his hand. “That’s not a profession I’m familiar with. What exactly does a knight do?”

Mirevas reached out quickly to take one of the cups, freeing Blackwall to accept Vireth’s handshake. As he took the elf’s hand, Blackwall analyzed his words, trying to figure out if there was disapproval in them, and then decided that if there was, it didn’t matter. Not everyone could understand his calling, and not everyone needed to. Those who were most important to him understood.

He hoped Mirevas understood.

“These days?” Blackwall shrugged. “Whatever a client finds useful. Protection detail. Gardening. Car repair.” He glanced at Mirevas. “Ridding a flat of spiders.”

Mirevas shuddered. “It was terrible, Vireth. My new flat was full of the things. You should have seen it. I still can’t believe Blackwall went in there. He’s my hero.”

It was the second time she’d called him that, and his chest filled with pride, just as it had the first time. He’d never get tired of those words. To have earned such praise when he hadn’t even been able to finish the job… it overwhelmed him to think of it.

Vireth’s face was unreadable as he looked at Blackwall. “Dirthas Elvehn?”

Er…

“No, he doesn’t speak Elvish.” Mirevas looked uncomfortable again. “I mean -- I’m sorry, I should ask you. Do you speak Elvish, Blackwall?”

Blackwall shook his head. His cheeks grew hot with embarrassment at his inadequacy, and he wished to the Void that he did speak her language, that he could have that to share with Mirevas. Vireth had that to share with Mirevas.

“Ah,” Vireth said. “I wasn’t sure.”

Mirevas looked up at Blackwall (she was going to hurt her neck doing that; she wouldn’t hurt her neck looking at an elven man). “Vireth is my cousin. He’s a very skilled craftsman.”

…cousin?

Blackwall almost laughed in relief. Cousin. Quickly, he pushed the feeling away. It should be nothing to Blackwall if Mirevas had a boyfriend. Blackwall was just…

...he was just…

What was he, exactly? The knight she’d hired for the evening, of course, but why? It couldn’t be more obvious that he was an ill fit for this event. So what had Mirevas been looking for when she signed that contract? What was he?

Whatever he was, he couldn’t just stand there wondering about it while they stared at him. Blackwall addressed Vireth. “A craftsman. What sort of work do you do?”

“I work with wood. Not purchased or planed, found. Every piece is a fragment of a life. I seek to uncover and enhance the beauty inherent in that life, not to alter its structure by imposing my desires upon it. I also strive to advance in traditional arts, crafting items with purpose as the people have always done, but those remain among our own people.”

“A noble trade.” Blackwall meant it. “I’ve done some woodworking. Not comparable to what you do, of course,” he said quickly at Vireth’s frown, “but there’s something very soothing about working with your hands. I admire what you do.”

Vireth’s frown softened. “What sort of woodworking did you do?”

“Children’s toys, mostly. I made a griffon rocking-horse for a friend’s daughter, once. I was rather proud of that one. But I’m afraid I don’t have the skill for creating genuine art.”

Mirevas gazed at him, and Blackwall thought she looked proud. “Do you still do it?”

“Not for years, I’m afraid.” He wished his answer was different -- they might be more impressed with him.

“So you gave it up to become a knight?” Vireth’s tone was polite, but once again, Blackwall thought he detected a note of disapproval at his chosen profession.

“Woodworking was always more of a hobby for me. Something that let me unwind. I usually gave away what I made. Making a profession of it never seemed realistic, not with my limited skill.”

Mirevas spoke again. “Were you always a knight, then?” Blackwall could have been imagining it, but he thought she sounded intensely interested.

“Only the last ten years.”

“What did you do before?”

The conversation was heading into dangerous territory, but Blackwall wouldn’t lie. “Competitive fencing.”

There was no mistaking the awe on Mirevas’s face, and guilt shot through him. There was nothing to admire in what he’d used to be.

Vireth scrutinized him. “Why change?”

It was too much to go into now, not at this time, not in this setting, so Blackwall gave a partial answer. “It’s...complicated. But I couldn’t have done it forever, and I wanted to be honorable. A knight in shining armor. May sound silly, but we help people at the Knight Shop. Each of us has a code to follow and can’t be asked to violate it. I find it a noble calling.”

Mirevas ducked her head, smiling. Vireth squinted at her. In a stoic sort of way.

“Mirevas, Vireth! An’eth’ara!”

Blackwall turned his head to see a Dalish woman resembling Mirevas approach. Mirevas squealed and jumped forward, throwing her arms around the newcomer. “Sulevin!”

The woman laughed and hugged her back, then spoke in Elvish again.

Mirevas pulled back and gestured to Blackwall. “Sulevin, this is Blackwall. Blackwall, my cousin, Sulevin. Sulevin is Vireth’s sister.”

“Andaran atish’an,” Sulevin said to Blackwall. That seemed to be some kind of greeting; he had picked up on that much over the course of the evening, at least.

So he responded in kind, doing his best not to stumble over the words. “Andaran atish’an.”

Mirevas reached for his hand, wrapping her fingers around it. He closed his hand over hers. The expression on her face -- it made Blackwall’s heart skip a beat. Maker, she undid him without even trying.

He’d almost forgotten where he was until Vireth cleared his throat. “Mirevas, lethallan. Nuvan dirtha ma?”

Mirevas blinked and squinted at her cousin. “Sorry, what?”

“Can I speak with you a moment?”

“Yes.” Mirevas bit her lip and turned to Blackwall. “I’ll be right back, okay?”

Blackwall ducked his head in a small bow. “As my lady wishes.”

Vireth gave Blackwall a long look before stepping away with Mirevas on his heels. Blackwall tried not to feel abandoned, but without Mirevas at his side, the feeling that he had no right to be here intensified. He looked at Sulevin to find her watching him carefully, and that did nothing to increase his comfort level.

“Have you had a chance to look around?” she asked him.

Blackwall nodded. “I did. Mirevas...she’s extremely talented.”

“She is. What did you think of the scene with Andruil? The one with the Forgotten Ones, not with Ghilan’nain.”

Erm. Blackwall tried to think of a way to explain that he didn’t know what she was talking about -- without looking like a sodding idiot.

“Did you not see that one? It’s one of my favorites.” Sulevin inclined her head toward a corner of the gallery, and Blackwall followed her over obediently.

The painting was large. He’d seen it already, but the subject matter was a mystery to him. The title was in Elvish, so that was no help, and he hadn’t had time to read the long explanation on the tag. But the painting itself was captivating. In Mirevas’s unmistakeable tattoo style, a beautiful, fierce elvish woman held a spear aloft, wearing an expression so fiery it could melt steel. Menacing shadows with glowing red eyes surrounded her, making Blackwall shiver.

“Andruil is invading the abyss here. Can’t you just feel the fury in her?” Sulevin chuckled. “I almost pity the Forgotten Ones.”

Andruil, abyss, Forgotten Ones. Maker, he wished he had even the slightest idea what that meant. “It’s a very moving piece,” he said simply. “Like there’s a fire in her eyes. I hope I’m never on the receiving end of a look like that.”

Sulevin tilted her head infinitesimally. “Then I’d suggest you never, ever hurt Mirevas.”

Startled, he met her eyes to see them burning dangerously. Not as terrifying as Andruil in Mirevas’s painting, but frightening enough to know that he never wanted to cross Sulevin.

“It’s not like that,” Blackwall murmured. Ah, how he wished it was. “But I give you my word as a knight that I’ll do everything in my power to guard Mirevas from any pain.”

Sulevin nodded slightly, and Blackwall knew she didn’t trust him, but at the same time he thought that perhaps she was...appeased. Somewhat.

Mirevas had been gone for too long. Well. Not that long, but it felt like ages to Blackwall. He glanced across the room, looking for her, and found her standing with her back to him, nodding at Vireth’s words. As if she could sense Blackwall’s eyes on her, she looked back over her shoulder. Their gazes met, Mirevas smiled, and for a moment, he felt that the two of them were sharing an intimate secret.

“I’m not sure this scene is something to applaud.”

Blackwall started. Once again, he’d been so enraptured by Mirevas that he’d lost all sense of his surroundings. A bald elf -- not Dalish, judging by his plain clothing and lack of facial tattoos -- had joined them, and was now examining the beautiful painting critically. It made Blackwall bristle without even knowing what the man meant.

But he wasn’t the only one disturbed by the newcomer’s statement. Sulevin glowered at him, disdain all over her face. “You think you know better than Mirevas how Andruil should be portrayed?”

“It’s a matter of perspective,” the bald elf said smoothly. “This hunt drove Andruil mad, after all.”

“A tragedy. Her passion turned against her.”

The man turned to Blackwall. “Dirthas Elvehn, shemlen? Mar sil?”

Without thinking, Blackwall turned to Sulevin for help. Not that Mirevas’s protective cousin had any reason to come to his aid. But she replied harshly in Elvish, and it felt like a rescue, even if it hadn’t been meant as such. Maker, it made a man feel powerless, being excluded from so much understanding.

But of course, that was his own weakness. The man that Mirevas deserved, the man he wished he could be, would understand her language -- or at least be comfortable enough with her culture not to feel as helpless as Blackwall did right now.

The bald elf shook his head and looked to Blackwall. “The problem with being too close to a legend is that objectivity becomes difficult.” He spoke as if certain that Blackwall would share his opinion, and Blackwall seethed at the man’s rudeness.

“I defer to the lady on this one.” He nodded at Sulevin, who lifted her chin. “I certainly wouldn’t presume to contradict her on her own heritage.”

“I see.” The male elf regarded Blackwall, coldly assessing him. “My name is Solas, if there are to be introductions.”

“Blackwall.”

“Blackwall. What brings you here, shemlen? Are you elf-blooded?”

“I’m afraid not.”

“An academic interest in elven history, then?”

Blackwall glanced away again, looking for Mirevas, and found her approaching, her brow furrowed in concern.

“No.”

“Hmm.” Solas looked unimpressed. “What does bring you here, then?”

“He’s here because I asked him to be, Solas.” Mirevas stepped up next to Blackwall and put a hand on his arm, then looked to Sulevin. “Is everything all right here?”

Sulevin opened her mouth to speak, but Solas answered first. “A difference of opinion, that’s all.”

“Solas eolas banal o isa av,” Sulevin said, then addressed Blackwall. “It was very nice to meet you. Perhaps we’ll speak later.”

“I would like that.” As awkward as Blackwall may feel, he had a great deal of respect for this woman that he’d only just met, and he believed Mirevas was lucky to have such a cousin.

Sulevin nodded. “Dareth shiral.”

That sounded like goodbye, so Blackwall repeated, “Dareth shiral,” and hoped he hadn’t put his foot in his mouth.

He thought, as Sulevin turned away, that she looked just the tiniest bit pleased.

Solas didn’t acknowledge Sulevin’s departure. He was gazing at Mirevas in a way that Blackwall recognized as, well, enamored was the only word for it.

For the briefest of instants, Blackwall imagined himself punching the man.

“It seems your show is a great success,” Solas said. “I expected nothing less.”

“That’s very kind of you to say. Thank you.”

“I speak only the truth. May I get you a drink?”

Yes, Blackwall definitely wanted to hurt this man.

“No, thank you. But I appreciate the offer.” Mirevas tilted her neck to look up at Blackwall again. “We should probably circulate, don’t you think?”

Before he could answer, she was tugging on his arm, pulling him away. “Dareth shiral, Solas!”

Blackwall didn’t bother to say goodbye. He kept his eyes on Mirevas as she led him to the other side of the room, into a corner with a partition that partially hid them from the eyes of the others.

Exhaling, Mirevas turned to look at him. “I’m sorry. We haven’t had a moment to ourselves.”

She wanted to be alone with him?

“I’m flattered you’d spend any time with me. I enjoy talking with you.”

And he truly did. Lunch with her last week had been a wonderful experience. Mirevas was not only exceptionally clever, she’d proven herself to be a kind and considerate woman with a sweet sense of humor. Everything new he discovered about her only made him fall harder.

She fiddled with a bracelet on her wrist. “There’s something I wanted to say to you--”

A voice speaking Elvish made them both turn. Another patron, it seemed. The person gestured to a painting, the lilt of her voice making it clear she was asking a question.

She probably didn’t notice the brief, miniscule grimace that crossed Mirevas’s face, but Blackwall did.

Well. He should probably get her another drink. All that talking had to be thirsty work.

----------

It seemed like ages -- and yet only minutes -- before the doors to the gallery closed, with not a few paintings marked SOLD on their tags. Gallery staff descended on Mirevas immediately, but she spoke in Elvish, giving what could only be a command, and they walked away, albeit somewhat resentfully.

“Step outside with me?” she asked Blackwall.

“As you wish.” He could never refuse an opportunity to be alone with her.

They walked silently to the door. Blackwall held it open for her, and they stepped out into the night air. As soon as the breeze hit them, Mirevas began to shiver.

Immediately, Blackwall removed his blazer and held it out. She allowed him to help her into it, then faced him.

“I’m so sorry,” she said.

Blackwall blinked, her words taking him by complete surprise. “For what, my lady?”

She gestured at the space around them. “For--this. For bringing you here. For the way you were treated. I didn’t think -- Creators, it’s all so Dalish, isn’t it?”

He didn’t follow. “That’s not something to be sorry for. You’re rightfully proud of your heritage.”

“But you--” She shook her head.

He didn’t belong. He was an intrusion. Yes, he knew.

“You should have been welcomed. Included. This -- it’s not just about us. Certainly I never intended it to be. It’s an art show, not some sort of private cultural ceremony. I want to foster understanding, create bridges. The way people ignored you, the way they looked at you -- it’s unacceptable. And I’m sorry. I can’t imagine how that feels. No, that’s wrong, I know exactly how it feels. And I should never have put you in that situation.”

She was apologizing...for him not fitting in. It was utterly incongruous. That any of this could be her fault--

“You’ve done nothing wrong, my lady. Your culture is a part of you, and I’m honored that you chose to share this with me. My only wish is that my shortcomings had not inflicted any unpleasantness on you.”

Mirevas looked astonished -- and appalled. “Shortcomings? What shortcomings?”

“I wasn’t able to respond appropriately. I didn’t understand the intricacies of your culture. You deserve better than an escort so culturally inept.”

She looked no less horrified. “You responded beautifully. And I never prepared you. Honestly, anyone who would judge me for bringing a man who is so obviously trying, who treats our culture with respect despite not fully understanding it -- a person who would judge me for that? I don’t want their approval.”

Blackwall had thought her smile was the most beautiful thing in the world. But the fierce strength that filled her eyes now was almost as overpowering.

“The only regard I care about is yours,” he said softly.

Her anger seemed to melt at his words, and she gazed up at him with intense emotion.

Before he could think, he asked the question that had plagued him all evening. “Why did you want me here, my lady?”

She blinked, startled. “I--”

Maker’s breath. He wished he could take back the words. “Forgive me. That was inappropriate. I should not have asked.”

“No,” she said quickly. “No, I’m glad you did. I--I was so nervous about the show, and you -- well, you were so brave the last time. I felt like--if you were here to support me--I could get through it.”

The admission astounded him. He’d had no idea she was nervous, not with the easy way she’d greeted every admirer. And that she could view him in such a way--that his mere presence could give her strength--

“Besides, I--well, I--” she hesitated “--I just wanted to see you again.”

Her words hit him straight in the heart. She’d wanted to see him. Wanted it enough that she’d risked the censure of her peers to be with him tonight.

She looked away, focusing her gaze out at the parking lot.

Blackwall gathered all his courage.

“May I see you again, my lady?

Mirevas’s head jerked back towards him, her eyes wide. But--not in a good way, he realized. Like a halla caught in headlights.

Fuck. He’d misunderstood. He thought she meant--but she didn’t--

“I’d like that, but--” Maker, she looked uncomfortable “--it’ll be a while before I can afford to hire you again.”

Her smile was nervous, apologetic.

It took him a second to understand what she was saying, and when he did, he was alarmed. Andraste’s arse, could he bugger this any more?

“No,” he said, scrambling for words, “I mean--”

Impulsively, he took her hand, and her lips parted.

“Not as a job. I want to take you out. Dinner. On me.”

She stared at him, mouth agog. Silent.

Maker, his heart was pounding.

“You can ride in my car?” he offered.

Suddenly, Mirevas laughed. “Oh, well, if I get to ride in the car…”

The tension deflated, and Blackwall could breathe again.

“Yes,” she said, smiling that glorious smile. “Even without the car. I’d really, really like to see you again.”

She was so beautiful. He wanted to kiss her. Maker’s breath, he wanted it. But he couldn’t. This was still a job. A professional obligation. And it would not reflect well on the Knight Shop if the knights went around snogging their clients.

Instead, he lifted her hand and kissed her fingers again, never taking his eyes off her lovely face.

The change in her face was unmistakable. Her eyes darkened and her breathing quickened. Blackwall’s pulse sped up in matching desire. He couldn’t kiss her; it wouldn’t be right. But…

...if she kissed him…

Maker, please let her kiss me.

Mirevas withdrew her hand, and her breathing evened out. “Dinner then? Erm--tomorrow?”

She seemed just as impatient as he was to be together again, and a laugh escaped him, not of humour, but of pure joy. “Six o’clock?”

“Perfect.” She beamed. “That’ll be...perfect.”

Perfect, indeed. Blackwall couldn’t agree more.

The Elvish comes from this online translator using the Project Elvhen conlang. Many thanks to the creators of those tools and apologies for any butchering I may have done to their work.

Elanas ma halani, sathan? - Can you help me, please?

Dirthas Elvehn? - Do you speak Elvish?

An’eth’ara! - casual greeting

Andaran atish’an - Welcome to this place of peace, more formal greeting

Mirevas, lethallan. Nuvan dirtha ma? - Mirevas, cousin. May I speak to you?

Dirthas Elvehn, shemlen? Mar sil? - Do you speak Elvish, human? Your thoughts?

Solas eolas banal o isa av - Solas knows nothing about what he speaks of

Dareth shiral - Safe journey

#dragon age #knight shop au #blackwall #mirevas lavellan #dragon age fic #dragon age modern au #inquisitor lavellan #blackwall x lavellan #blackwall x mirevas #cherie writes things #vireth lavellan #sulevin lavellan

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greenchairconvos · 5 years

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“There are levels to this shit”

The internet is an interesting place. You encounter many different viewpoints, and I find that it can be a useful tool for calling out ignorance and privilege. Whether that ignorance is someone else’s or your own, there the ability lies to create a learning experience. Through sharing on social media, our generation has begun to de-stigmatize and de-normalize habits and social norms that have been ingrained in us through our upbringings, external societal customs, and the people we surround ourselves with. One of the ways in which I see Twitter, is a platform of both modern storytelling and opinion pieces. It can be a great device in recognizing how we benefit from systems of oppression, hopefully changing the way we behave and think about these things, and become strong allies to movements we support. That being said, Nick Offerman’s face photoshopped onto every character in the opening credits of Full House is also something you can find on Twitter. It’s a mixed bag.

I recently encountered a tweet where it was being implied that some white people were of the belief that being gay absolved them of their white privilege, and therefore could not be racist because they were being oppressed through some source. As that is clearly a very flawed (and unfortunately, common) understanding of oppression, I responded with an attempt to clarify how interlocking oppression works. For example, being queer myself, I face challenges that a straight person necessarily wouldn’t, but as a white person who is queer, I face less challenges (both in quantity and intensity) than say, a person of colour who is queer, whom is also subjected to racism - both on a systemic and individual level. Of course the concept goes beyond that depth, and there are more layers and variance within those consequent layers. To quote one of my favourite YouTubers, “There are levels to this shit” (I Am Eloho).

This is where I want to bring the discussion towards colorism - a phenomenon that is clouded with intersectional oppressions and discrimination, often plagued within and across all marginalized communities which contain spectrums of skin tone.

The multiple oppressions that all Black people face is undeniable, there is no doubt. In spite of this oppression, there can also be collectives within racialized groups that carry privileges - for example, Black men being of the ‘dominant sex.’ What comes with this privilege is often blindness or ignorance to the additional oppression and discrimination that less privileged people within the community face.

This is not to say however that Black men are the only members of the Black community exhibiting colourist thought towards the women OR that they do not experience colourism themselves. Many people also experience colourism from friends and people in their family due to these same internalizations. My focus lies solely on dissecting the experience of colourism from women in the Black community, their unique perspective, and the complexity of it.

The commentary from Black women on this topic has flooded over social media, especially by dark skinned Black women. Many of my close friends and family have also spoken on the topic. There have been worldwide debates on Twitter that literally pose lighter skinned and dark skinned people from the same race against each other, and also more complex debates about how hair types of black women are an important aspect of the way that they experience colorism.

“It’s hard enough being the lowest on the love pyramid and having to constantly convince the world that I am beautiful but having to convince those who you’d assume should be able to see your beauty already is even harder and perhaps even a worst heart break” (Lauriane M).

What Lauriane talks about as being the ‘lowest on the love pyramid’ is something I wanted to investigate further. Specifically how Black women are seen by the opposite sex and Black men’s role in the colourism of Black women.

“It’s something that people within our own race are still so ignorant about. Men don’t see that they’re prejudice or discriminating against dark skin women. Because of society and culture they don’t want to explicitly say it, using ‘thats my preference’ as a cover up” (Kaiha M).

As Kaiha describes, relying on the notion of preference for partners of certain races can be dangerous, and result in phenomenon like ‘yellow fever’ or ‘jungle fever,’ whether intentional or not.

“Take a beautiful darker skinned woman, compare her to an average lighter skinned woman, share that picture to men, more men will choose the lighter skinned women because they see it as a power grab. They also have that insecurity within themselves. ‘OK I’m getting a white female’ or a mixed female; has the black features but she also has fair skin, looser texture of hair coloured eyes, colonialist version of beauty mixed in with the Black features, so in a way think that they’re winning” (Kaiha M).

The insecurity that some Black men have within themselves that Kaiha references can also be looked at as the internalizing of racism and intergenerational trauma - from colonization, eras of slavery, modern-day police brutality and discrimination. Being of a lighter skin tone was always associated with wealth, success, being of a higher class, and it also often meant safety. We all know that governments and institutions built on white supremacy and colonialism protect and praise fair people. Does that make it okay for Black men to continue to discriminate Black women, or dark skin women, and continue the thought that deems them worth less? Do I really need to answer that?

The problem is, when some Black men are questioned about this, they react kind of similarly to the way the aforementioned gay white people thought they could not be oppressive, because they were being oppressed. The conflict is met with both denial and misunderstanding of how oppression works. It can also be very upsetting to realize you are contributing to a system of oppression that also oppresses you, speaking from experience.

This treatment is not coincidence, but calculated, and damaging to Black women of all shades. It can also make lighter skinned women feel as if they don’t belong to the Black community, creating isolation and tension between sisters – “I wanted to distance myself from Blackness” (Yawa I).

“My hairdresser is Sudanese, and they are often at the end of the spectrum, as in they are the darkest shade of black. Not only was she expressing how hard it is for her to fight against the rest of us black girls but because she’s not as dark (big misconception that all Sudanese people are dark) she gets hate from her own family. She’s not light enough to be part of the world and she’s not dark enough to be identified as being part of her own community” (Lauriane M).

As many women of colour agree that colorism isn’t talked about enough, I wanted to bring light to the topic because it affects my community and women I care about. “It’s a toxic mentality – especially when you’re young and growing up and don’t see a lot of people that look like you” (Yawa I).

Social media can often be looked at as damaging, but it is useful for some things. I think sharing these experiences of voices that are too often marginalized or ignored is an important part of its use – especially with things that are difficult to talk about and address. As Yawa continues, it can also help with representation – “Seeing examples in media or real life where it’s true that your skin is beautiful and there are people that look like you that are doing great things” (Yawa I).

Through the analysis of the theoretical flaws in the real communities around us, making those problems known and denaturalizing them is how change can happen. Most often, analysis within our own trauma cycles and internalizations are also necessary for change.

“Having me reinforcing colourism myself was 10x worse than any Black guy’s ‘racial preference’ – overtime I have been able to accept my skin and realize that lighter skin is not better than darker skin or anything like that, and I try my best not to reinforce those notions” (Yawa I).

To close, I just wanted to thank the lovely women - Lauriane, Kaiha & Yawa - for sharing their valuable perspectives with me.

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tripstations · 5 years

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Could you give up flying? Meet the no-plane pioneers | Travel

It has taken Roger Tyers four days to reach Moscow by train from Kiev. His destination is Beijing: a trip that will take 14 days, with a couple of overnight stops along the way. Tyers, an environmental sociologist at the University of Southampton, is on his way to China to research attitudes to the environment, the climate emergency and personal responsibility. “Given that, I thought it would be somewhat hypocritical of me to fly,” he says over Skype from his hostel room.

It has been months in the planning – he had to convince his bosses to give him a month off to travel to and from China. Has it been a pain? “It definitely has. It’s a matter of getting your train schedule in line with your visa requirements. I didn’t realise I needed a visa to travel through Mongolia, even though I’m not stopping there. There have been moments when I’ve been close to giving up and either cancelling the whole trip or just booking a flight.” But he is glad he has stuck with it, he says. “I have to prove it is possible.”

The no-fly movement is a small but growing community of people who are drastically reducing the number of flights they take, or giving up air travel altogether. Many campaigners say they feel flying is about to receive the same attention as shunning plastic or eating less meat because of its 2% contribution to global carbon emissions, predicted to grow to as much as 16% by 2050. In Sweden, where the movement has taken off, a new term has emerged: flygskam, meaning “flight shame”. Siân Berry, the co-leader of the Green party, has called on people to take no more than one flight a year and suggested a tax should be imposed on further journeys. Berry hasn’t flown since 2005.

The climate activist Greta Thunberg hasn’t flown since 2015; she did her European tour last month by train. In January, she attended the World Economic Forum at Davos in Switzerland, travelling 32 hours each way by rail, while a record number of private jets – about 1,500 – brought the rich and powerful attendees.

‘There is nowhere I want to go that I can’t get to by bike, train or boat’ … Anna Hughes, who run a no-flying campaign in the UK. Photograph: Mat Smith

It is becoming harder to defend alleged hypocrisy, however well-meaning. The actor Emma Thompson was criticised for flying from Los Angeles to support the Extinction Rebellion protest in London, not only by the usual naysayers eager to point out double standards, but also by environmental campaigners. “She could just as easily have paid for a billboard poster in Piccadilly and got her message across there,” said Kevin Anderson, a climate scientist who hasn’t flown since 2004, on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme. The issue has been significant among environmental scientists for years; the Flying Less campaign, aimed at academia, has been running since 2015.

Paul Chatterton, a professor of urban futures at the University of Leeds, also hasn’t flown since 2004. “I think every academic has to justify why they are flying to that particular ‘must-go’ conference. If we have something really important to say, say it in a different way.” He travels to European conferences by train. “One of the privileges of being a middle-income professional – and this is a direct plea to other middle-income professionals – is that you can negotiate with your boss and you have a bit more money to get the train. I’m not talking about people who can’t afford to do that, because I know trains are more expensive.”

As for Chatterton’s no-fly family holidays, the best ones have been taking the ferry from Hull to Rotterdam and cycling around the Netherlands. “You travel light, you make it an adventure with your kids,” he says. “Who wants to sit in a departure lounge? You get the excitement of travelling through places, figuring out what the next journey is. I think we have to get back into the idea that travelling is special; it’s a privilege.”

Most flying is carried out by a small proportion of the population. Aled Jones, the director of the Global Sustainability Institute at Anglia Ruskin University, says we have become used to the low-cost weekend flight abroad in a short space of time. “When I was growing up, and certainly for the generation before, flying on holiday was not something you expected to do,” he says. “By radically cutting down, we’re not going back to the dark ages; we’re going back to when people holidayed in the UK. It will be less of a sacrifice for a lot of people than we expect.” He admits that addressing “love miles” – flying to see family who live abroad – is “a very different challenge”.

Maja Rosén, who lives in Sweden and gave up flying in 2008, had always kept quiet when friends talked about flying abroad on holidays – until last year. “I thought: ‘How is it possible I’m more scared of destroying the mood than climate collapse?’ I decided that my new year resolution last year would be to start asking some inconvenient questions. I realised that most people weren’t aware of the impact from flying and how huge it is.”

‘Your journey becomes part of your holiday’ … Cath Heinemeyer hasn’t flown for 19 years.

She and a friend started a campaign, Flight-free 2019 (now Flight-free 2020), to encourage people to pledge not to fly. By the end of 2018, 15,000 Swedes had signed; by the end of this year, she thinks it will be 100,000. It has changed the conversation around flying in the country: passenger numbers dropped at Swedish airports in 2018, while a record number of people in the country took the train.

“People don’t realise that what they do as an individual is so important because it affects those around them,” says Rosén. “If you keep flying, all your friends will as well. You contribute to the norm. But if you decide to give up flying or take a flight-free year, that makes others reflect. Change can happen fast as soon as enough people start acting. Before, people saw flying as an experience or something you do, it wasn’t in the category of consumption, but I think now people are starting to realise that by taking a flight they are a heavy consumer of fossil fuel.”

There is now a British arm of the campaign, run by the writer Anna Hughes, who last took a flight eight years ago. More than 1,000 people have pledged to have a flight-free year. Hughes likens it to the Veganuary campaign, by which people give up animal products for January to raise awareness of veganism and change behaviour. She has travelled to Ireland, Denmark and other European countries – and seen a lot of the UK. “There is nowhere I can think of that I want to go that I can’t get to by bike, train or boat. If I was going to go further, I would just take a long time to do it.”

The author Nicola Davies is taking long-haul flights for a couple of upcoming commitments, but after that she will radically rethink her flight consumption, she says. There will almost certainly be no more European flights; she has already travelled to the Balearic Islands in Spain by car. “We did the journey down to Barcelona in two days, then the ferry crossing is eight hours,” she says, adding that it requires a bit more planning than travelling by plane. “It’s much more exciting, much closer to the real skin of the planet than the feeling you get from going to an airport, popping into a metal tube and then popping out at some other point on the planet with no real grasp of the distance, habitat, people and cultures you’ve passed over on the way.

If you keep flying, all your friends will. But if you decide to take a flight-free year, that makes others reflect

Maja Rosén

“I think this shift to no, or fewer, flights is an opportunity to redraft what travel truly means, rather than a sort of consumerist ticking of boxes. If we give up the idea of the weekend break in Budapest or the three days in Miami for a stag do, I think that’s probably helpful – for us as human beings, as well as for the planet.”

There are people who are reminding us that it is possible to travel overland with young children. “We’ve gone to Italy by train, Spain, different parts of France,” says Linda Thomas, a fashion designer. For the first couple of years, giving up flying felt like a loss, she says, but the train-travel website seat61.com has enabled them to plan more adventurous journeys. “We’ve had some really incredible wildlife experiences. There would be a feeling of guilt otherwise – that you’re seeing something, but also contributing to its demise at the same time, when you’ve taken a long-haul flight to get somewhere. It doesn’t feel like a loss; it feels like we’ve gained new experiences.”

Wendy and her husband have cut down on flying in recent years and decided to stop altogether at the beginning of 2019. “We couldn’t really justify it any more. Something that was purely for fun didn’t feel enjoyable any more; it didn’t feel right.” They have had fantastic family holidays by train, starting with a trip to Chamonix in the French Alps with their six-month-old daughter, but Wendy says it has been hard not seeing her husband’s family, who live in Malaysia.

Cath Heinemeyer, a researcher and community artist who hasn’t flown for 19 years, says visiting family has been a challenge. “My family live in Northern Ireland, my husband’s family live in Germany and we live in York. We do see them, but we see them less frequently, for a longer time.” She admits they haven’t faced family commitments that would be simplified by flying. “Our parents are in reasonable health. Maybe it will get challenging if we’re suddenly called to support them in their later years. We would have to decide that on a case-by-case basis.”

‘It doesn’t feel like a loss; it feels like we’ve gained new experiences’ … Linda Thomas.

It can be more expensive – “You need to get a bit savvy about booking” – and it requires research, she says. “We have had mishaps, where we’ve had tiny children and missed a train connection and had to find last-minute accommodation in some city.” Heinemeyer felt a twinge of regret at missing her high school reunion in Canada, but otherwise not flying hasn’t felt like a sacrifice, she says. “I like the children to realise how far they’ve travelled and see how the landscape changes. It’s just a thing we’ve always worked around. Your journey becomes part of your holiday.”

Lewis McNeil, a project manager for the charity the Orchard Project, proved the viability of long-haul overland travel after he gave up flying in 2006. There was “a ‘letting go’ period akin to the end of a relationship, but things got exciting when I realised that one can still travel, and travel far, while creating a fraction of the emissions that air travel is responsible for”, he says.

He has gone by coach to many European destinations, finding the train too expensive if booked last-minute, but his most intrepid no-fly holiday was a nine-day cargo-ship journey from France to Trinidad in the Caribbean, booked through a specialist company, then on to Venezuela by boat. “The idea behind this is that you’re piggybacking on emissions that are already going to be emitted – that cargo ship, as unsustainable as it is with our crazy trade system, is going anyway. With flying, flights depend on demand.” The journey was magical. “Watching dolphins and whales, seeing incredible starlit skies in the middle of the Atlantic, swimming in the little plunge pool, swotting up on Spanish, making friends with the Filipino crew and sharing music. It was pretty expensive, at €90 (£79) per person a day, but that included food and a lovely en suite room complete with a porthole and a writing desk.” He returned from Colombia to the Netherlands.

The key to flight-free travel, he says, is “seeing the journey as part of the adventure” – although travel pillows, eye masks, earplugs, snacks, books and a tablet with films downloaded all help.

After Moscow, Tyers will get the Trans-Siberian railway to Irkutsk, then on to Beijing. “Not everybody can do it, I understand that,” he says. “Not everybody has the time, or bosses who are willing to let people take longer to get places. But for those who can – and I think a lot more people can than realise – flying less is good; it’s enriching.” He is pessimistic that people will change voluntarily to the degree needed. “But we’ll see. Often the cultural change comes first, then political change – and I do think there’s something in the air.”

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