Beautiful, dwindling f-list on near-defunct lj, I am in one of those weird restless bored moods. Tell me what to write:



I have other stuff in my WIP folder but ehhhh. You know that feeling when you're just not into ANYTHING you're ~working on? I hate that.

Also feel free to prompt me and stuff, that is more than acceptable. I'm in the mood for sad porny ultimately romantic nonsense. But I am usually in that mood.

Go weird with it. I dig weird. But you don't have to. You do you.

Hello again, my loves –

professional disaster human
Clint. Natasha, Steve, Sam, Bucky, Kate.
2629 words. PG. Gen.
A mix of Hawkeye comics and MCU canon, set post-Cap 2.


Summary: Clint is most definitely out of a job. And he doesn't really know what to do with that. Or with himself.


Note: I'm still getting a feel for writing in this fandom and being very tentative about it and everything, but after blitzing through the Hawkeye comics I couldn't resist trying a Clint fic. He is really fun to write, and I definitely would like to do more of it in the future. His POV is great.









"Okay, okay, okay," Clint slurs, half slumped over the bar, "This looks bad."

He receives little more than a slow blink from Natasha, which is not the tender concern and sympathy he really ought to be getting. Though, he supposes, he probably shouldn't have called Natasha if compassion was what he was after. Then he should've called… Well. The dog can't answer the phone, so that really cuts his options.

"This is your fault," he says viciously, reaching for his beer. "You could have, like, thrown me a text and told me we were working for Nazis."

Natasha shrugs.







Here's the thing with the job – thing.

Clint's got money now, so he can probably coast for a while and maybe the landlord deal will actually prove to have an upside, but it's not like money was the reason he was at SHIELD. There were…moral reasons and stuff, all sorts of things that go out the window once you find out you were kind of working for Nazis.

"Not all of them were Nazis," Natasha says mildly – because she likes to correct him, literally for no other reason than that – as she helps him back to his apartment post-drunken-sorrow-dwelling.

"Enough of them were, Natasha," Clint says meaningfully. He's got an arm slung around her shoulders and she's got one around his waist and it would be kind of nice if everything didn't majorly suck. "Enough of them were."







Being so very suddenly out of a job means Clint has a lot of time on his hands. And he's not really the kind of person who should have a lot of free time. It tends to get him into trouble. What he needs is missions and objectives and –

"Hobbies," Katie says. "Maybe try a hobby."

Once he works his way through Dog Cops (which, awesome) and finally unpacks his boxes and finally labels his arrows and plays all the shoot-the-target games he could ever come up with (which mostly consist of: choose this unfeasible target and make it feasible), he's just kind of bummed out all the time. Which means a lot of pizza and beer and asking Lucky not to judge him for being pathetic. (Lucky usually doesn't, because dogs.)

Stark is trying to rustle up SHIELD-lite or something and Natasha keeps disappearing (business as usual) and Fury is dead but maybe not dead at all. It's hard to keep track. Either way, Clint is most definitely out of a job. And he doesn't really know what to do with that. Or with himself.

Plus it's damn boring.







That is until Captain America of all people shows up on Clint's doorstep.

"I'm sorry to have to do this, Clint," Cap says with that square-jawed, all-American inflection he does so well. "But I…don't know anyone else in Brooklyn."

Saying that seems to physically pain him. He's got a bruise mellowing on one cheekbone and he's rain-drenched, which combined with the earnest puppy dog eyes creates one hell of an endearingly pitiful picture. So Clint steps aside to let him in because, what, is he going to not let Captain America into his apartment?

Well. Captain America, some dude with wings, and a silent assassin with a metal arm. Which is…maybe not an excellent decision, but Clint is Clint, so.







"Where are you planning on putting all of them?" Kate asks but she's hardly even listening for the answer, dazed-looking as her gaze slides from one new houseguest to the next. Clint frowns. He didn't intend this as an influx of eye candy.

'Where to put them' is definitely a question, up there with 'and why are all of them here.' Cap caught him up on the big stuff, like the murderous amnesiac best friend from seventy years ago (gee, thanks again Nat for the total lack of a heads-up on that) but didn't say anything else beyond some vague stuff about getting into a "scrape" and "lying low." Which, whatever: story of Clint's life.

"Hope you guys like the floor," Clint says, then winces a little, considering the floor is still covered in empty pizza boxes and beer bottles from his I–accidentally-worked-for-Nazis binge. He feels kinda bad about that, not to mention all the outdated tech and general tornado-swept-through theme he's got going.

"He'll clean," Kate says. ("I will clean," Clint agrees.)

"I've slept worse places," Cap says with a smile, sweet as apple pie, and honestly Clint isn't really into dudes but he's pretty sure both him and Katie flutter a bit. Captain America, man.

"Place is a palace compared to where we've been crashing," says the guy with the wings, who normally does not have wings and answers to Sam.

The Winter Soldier blinks expressionlessly.

"You're being magnanimous," Kate says, and she seems sort of torn as to which of them to give the eye to. Clint elbows her to get her to quit it, because these are his colleagues– or at least, his ex-colleague, friend-of-colleague, and person-who-once-almost-murdered-colleague. Whatever. They're his people, and they're too old for her.

Kate elbows him back with such force that Clint spills his coffee pretty much everywhere, which is just the cherry on top of the sundae that is his life.







Clint figures the best way to deal with this Winter Soldier thing is pretend to be chill about it while secretly thinking of all the ways he could be silently, untraceably murdered in his own home. So in the morning when the Soldier of Winter comes into the kitchen, Clint just pours a second bowl of cereal and slides it over, continuing to munch his own while he leans heavily on the counter out of sleepiness.

Bucky (or whatever) seems less enamored of his Cocoa Puffs but still eats slow spoonfuls with a restrained kind of hunger.

Clint nods towards the fuck-off metal arm. "Heavy?"

Bucky-or-whoever looks down at it for a moment. "Heavy," he agrees.

It's a little early in the day for metaphors, but hey, it's something.







"Boomerang arrow," Clint is explaining.

Sam is nodding, saying, "It comes back to you in the end."

"Yes," Clint says.

Clint has determined that Sam is pretty great, and not just because he's the only person who is genuinely interested in hearing about all the arrows and what they do. Sam isn't an Avenger, old or new, and he doesn't have powers or serums – sure, his jetpack metal wings sure beat Clint's bow in the coolness department, but still. Sam is a normal guy and it's good to have another one of those around.

Case in point: Clint has brought Sam up to the nightly rooftop barbeque, where he quickly wins over everyone. But Sam was the only one who would come; Cap shifted his weight and gave some excuse about people recognizing him, but Clint was pretty sure he just didn't want to leave Bucky-or-whoever alone. Bucky still didn't say much or even do much, but Lucky had taken a liking to him, so Clint supposes there's hope yet.

"You think you'll go back to D.C.?" Clint asks.

Sam shrugs, sips his beer. "I don't know, man; can't keep skulking around here, you know?"

Clint doesn't want to be an asshole or anything, but, "What d'you think his endgame is?"

"Steve's?" (Clint is a little jealous of Sam's cool, casual use of Cap's name.) "To have his friend back, I guess." Thoughtfully, Sam surveys the scope of the city around them. "I think maybe that's why he wants to hang around here, even if he's not saying it. Trying to go home in some small way."

"Aren't we all, man," Clint says, which is neither true nor as cool-sounding as he wanted it to be. But, well, maybe it is kind of true – home isn't always a place so much as a state of mind. That would be cool to say but before he can vocalize, Sam gives him a little nudge and points over the edge of the building. Clint peers down and sees Cap sitting on the fire escape, the very picture of loneliness.

"Somebody ought to set up a superhero support group," Sam says, faint amusement and concern flavoring his words.

"That might be on you," Clint tells him. "You're the most together guy I've ever met who hangs around with the likes of us."

"That is worrying," Sam laughs.







Later Clint joins Cap on the fire escape, handing him a beer that Cap accepts with a wry smile. "Sorry I'm not…" Cap starts and trails off, looking down at his hands. "We'll be out of your hair in a day or two."

"Don't worry about it," Clint says. What else is he gonna say? Does he need to re-state: this is Captain America.

But maybe that's what's so weird about it – the icon versus the man. Clint never really got the chance to chat Cap up, seeing as they all parted ways pretty quick after the Loki-sponsored alien-monsters ripped New York a new one. Clint had missions to go on (cough cough, Nazi missions, not that he's bitter) and only heard stuff through the Nat grapevine, which was neither reliable nor candid. Once in a while she'd mention trying to set Cap up. Clint thought it was awesome she got to hang out with the big all-American hero of heroes. That was that.

So Clint guesses the weird thing is that Cap isn't the big hero of heroes, or isn't just that: he's a guy named Steve Rogers too. Clint doesn't really know jack schnitzel about Steve Rogers, except he apparently doesn't go to barbeques in favor of being sad on fire escapes.

They've all been there, but it's easy to forget when you're blinded by the red, white, and blue. Clint feels kind of bad about it.

"So where's…?" Clint looks in the window but doesn't catch a glimpse of Cap's murder friend.

"Took the dog for a walk." There's a brief pause and then Cap goes, "You brought Natasha in, didn't you?"

"To SHIELD?" Clint says. "Yeah. I mean, she's probably pissed about that now, considering. But yeah. Yes. That was me."

Cap looks a little lost, like he's curious but doesn't want to push, so Clint takes mercy.

"I was supposed to take her out," he clarifies. "But I, uh, did not do that. Obviously."

Cap worries his lip a moment. "Why not?"

"Honestly?" Clint says. "Sort of instinct. I don't know. Her Natasha thing probably had something to do with it, the whole scary, dangerous, beautiful thing. Thing is –" Clint hesitates, but only because he doesn’t want to come off as more of a doofus than he already has. "I do things like that, make snap decisions; a lot of the time it doesn't work out, but it did with Nat."

Cap nods, gaze straying to the street below. Clint guesses he's thinking of Bucky. Clint wants to say something comforting about that entire situation, but figures we've all been there, pal doesn't really apply.

"He's here," Clint offers. "So that probably means something."

"I would like to think it does," Cap says. "I know he needs more help than I can provide. I know that. But after everything he's been through, I don't even know how to start."

They're quiet again, Clint studying Cap a little but trying not to seem like he is. There are anecdotes Clint could probably share. His own flip from supposed bad guy to supposed good guy. Loki opening up his head and turning his brain to spaghetti. All kinds of things. But there's only one that matters, really, even if it's a sucky one that doesn't help as much as it should.

"Gotta learn to appreciate the small victories," Clint says. "Even the really small ones. Like, tiny. You know, not running out of coffee. That counts." Cap half-smiles, which is reassuring, but Clint finds that he is still talking – without much input from his brain, which is not unusual. "You know I'm like a landlord here? And, uh…I got a guy moving out two floors down, guess he got tired of a crazed man with a bow and arrow patrolling the perimeter all the time… Uh, what I'm saying is…you need somewhere to crash in Brooklyn?"

Cap blinks at him.

"It might be crazy to have two Avengers in one place," Clint continues, "Or it might be awesome. I doubt the tracksuit mafia's gonna futz with the Captain, you know?"

"Tracksuit mafia?" Cap repeats. Then, "Wait, are you offering me a place to live?"

"I'll gut you on the rent," Clint promises, though he hardly collects it from anyone most of the time.

"I'll think about it," Steve says. His gaze falls to the street again and Clint follows his line of sight. This time they're greeted by Bucky shuffling up to the building with Lucky trotting along beside him.

Clint is probably, definitely crazy – but like he told Cap, sometimes he makes rash decisions and sometimes they work out for him. Fifty-fifty. Clint doesn't mind the gamble.







Drunk again, Clint calls Natasha.

"What did I tell you about drunk dialing?" Natasha says, voice even-toned despite the crackling on the line. She must be far. "Do you need me to spell a word?"

"No," Clint says defensively, though the missing-or-not e in judgment has been bugging him lately. He can never remember. Blame the carnie education.

"So what is it?"

Clint reaches down to scratch between Lucky's ears, silent for a minute. Steve took the place two floors down with his murder friend, and Sam went back to D.C. but Clint is ninety-nine percent sure he'll be back. Or he hopes, really. And Clint's place is empty once again, undisturbed outside of Katie, who isn't really a disturbance though Clint likes to pretend she is, for reasons.

"I don't know," he says finally. "Are you gonna do the Stark thing, you know, let him bankroll the whole deal?"

Natasha pauses and then, "Are you still freaking out about SHIELD." She has a way of asking questions so flatly that they all sound rhetorical.

"Not freaking out," Clint mumbles.

Natasha sighs. The line crackles despondently, like it can't believe this shit either.

"I'm not interested in your existential crisis, Clint," she says. On anyone else it might be mean, but he can tell Natasha's moods apart pretty well by now. Probably. It would be pathetic if he couldn't. Her brand of tough love definitely has love in there somewhere. "We're all still doing the things we have to do because we have to do them. Judging by the messes you get into when I'm not watching you, you have no trouble being Hawkeye in your free time, so you should have no trouble being Hawkeye whether you've got a SHIELD paycheck or not."

"Yeah but the difference between weirdo vigilante and trained agent –"

"Is not something we ever worried about before," Natasha says.

Clint is quiet again. "Never had to worry about it before. We had –" Backing. Protection. A clearly spelled out raison d'être. And without all that what is he except a crazy guy running around with a bow and arrow? "I just don't know what this means yet. For me. Or anyone, really."

Natasha is unexpectedly kind on the other side of the phone, far far away. "You'll figure it out." A pause, then, "You have something to offer, Clint. Aside from social awkwardness and extra band-aids."

"I do always have those," he agrees. Lucky looks up at him with that impatient dog curiosity, tail wagging. "Are you ever coming home?"

"What's home?" Natasha says. "I'm sure I'll see you soon."

And she clicks off abruptly like she does. Clint looks down at Lucky. "That's just plain rudeness."

Lucky seems sympathetic.

I've been rereading The Vampire Lestat, as I've surely mentioned before (I'm taking my reread of the series molasses-slow, for reasons) and I'm struck by so many things I want to talk about, so I figured why not make a post? I don't have anywhere else to ramble about the Anne Rice of it all.

I'm not even two hundred pages into the book and there is just so much sort of awesome stuff mixed in with so much totally fucked up nonsense. Mostly in this post I'm going to delve into Gabrielle, radiant badass that she is, and her creepy incestuous relationship with Lestat.

First of all, Gabrielle is even more amazing than I remembered her being. I have not read these books since I was twelve years old and I am now double that, so I'm finding a lot of my reactions to be drastically different (understandably). I don't remember having strong feelings about Gabrielle prior to now, though I suspect I was maybe a little bit unsettled by her. I didn't understand her then, I don't think, just like I didn't understand Claudia then. As a kid, I was mostly blind to everything except The Gay Of It All and my militant feminism had not yet crystallized into its hard exoskeleton. I just saw pretty dudes queering up on each other and got all confused about it. The Vampire Lestat was my favorite book of the series, I loved Lestat absolutely the most, and I wanted him to smooch any number of men, though particularly Louis.

It's funny. Now Lestat is farther down on my list, because though I still like him, I see all the flaws in his creation much too clearly. I'm really not far in the book, but the tonal shift from Interview with the Vampire is apparent immediately. I've talked about that a little bit before, I think. There's a ten year gap in the writing of both books, and it really shows. For all Louis' angst and the relatively boring first half, there are a lot of things I really adored about Interview. Mainly, no one was the hero of that book. There was no hero. Louis was too self-loathing to see himself as such, Claudia was doomed from the start, and Lestat's ugliest faults are all on display. As an adult, I vastly prefer Lestat's characterization in Interview. He was still charming, you know? But he was not – and I hesitate to use the phrase, but here we go – the Mary Sue than he would become. I was laughing my butt off for the first fifty pages of this book because Lestat is so intelligent, Lestat is so handsome, Lestat has so many special vampire abilities, Lestat rides a sexy motorcycle around New Orleans.

The novel is first person and so one could easily argue that Lestat is simply painting himself in a crazy favorable light because that's the kind of person he is: he's vain and self-absorbed and absolutely self-aggrandizing. Lestat absolutely would make himself out to be the prettiest princess in the realm. He is an actor, after all. But my issue that the line between unreliable narrator and author wank fantasy is impossible to define in cases like this, and I think anyone halfway familiar with Anne Rice knows just how very much she wanks over Lestat. She based him on her husband, for crying out loud.

It robs Lestat of some of his complexity IMO. Even Lestat's declining vampire health and decades-long descent into hiding is painted in a less pathetic light. I would enjoy him more if I could have some sense that Anne knew what she was doing, but Anne is terrible, so.

This is not to say I have turned on him. He is still a very charismatic and enjoyable character. There are a lot of things I do like, particularly human!Lestat and his weirdly-written-but-interesting depression in the wake of killing the wolves, etc. But I find as an adult he does not consume me like he did when I was a child and I'm drawn to all the other characters so much more than I was then.

(I kind of want to do a just Lestat post now. These things, they snowball, man.)

But I am here to talk about Gabrielle, for whom I have discovered a new love than I did not possess before. Gabrielle is Lestat's mother. They share a deep connection despite the fact that Gabrielle is relatively cold and distant, keeping herself removed from the rest of the family (I believe Lestat is the seventh son, because he's just so fucking special). They are aristocrats without any money, living in a French village, and all the men in the family besides Lestat are useless and backwards and don't even get names. Gabrielle is originally from Naples and is the only literate person in the family, who she escapes from by diving into her books. Lestat doesn't understand her at all but he loves her anyway because she's sort of odd and not very motherly in a way that appeals to me a lot now – I really love shitty mothers in fiction, women who have children but are entirely unsuited to it, even if they do love their kids. And Gabrielle does love Lestat; in fact he's the only child she seems to pay any amount of attention to. She stands up for Lestat where it counts, doing whatever she can to give him the kind of fulfilling and exciting life she cannot give herself. She is very much consumed with dissatisfaction while she's human.

Her first real impactful moment comes when Lestat has killed a pack of wolves for the villagers and afterwards sinks into a deep depression. They bond over their shared understanding of pain:


      "I know how it is," she said to me. "You hate them. Because of what you've endured and what they don't know. They haven't the
        imagination to know what happened to you out there on the mountain." [...] "It was the same the first time I bore a child. I was in
        agony for twelve hours, and I felt trapped in the pain, knowing the only release was the birth or my own death. When it was over,
        I had your brother Augustin in my arms, but I didn't want anyone else near me. And it wasn't because I blamed them. It was only
        that I'd suffered like that, hour after hour, that I'd gone into the circle of hell and come back out. They hadn't been in the circle of
        hell. And I felt quiet all over. In this common occurrence, this vulgar act of giving birth, I understood the meaning of utter loneliness."


And also their shared desire to murder the rest of the family (no, really):


       "I mean I dream sometimes that I might kill all of them," I said. "I kill my brothers and my father in the dream. I go from room to
         room slaughtering them as I did the wolves. I feel in myself the desire to murder..."

        "So do I, my son," she said. "So do I." And her face was lighted with the strangest smile as she looked at me.


But then Gabrielle gets so fucking awesome I could cry:


       "You know what I imagine," she said, looking towards me again. "Not so much the murdering of them as an abandon which disregards
        them completely. I imagine drinking wine until I'm so drunk I strip off my clothes and bathe in the mountain streams naked." [...]
        "And then I imagine going into the village and up into the inn and taking into my bed any men that come there – crude men, big
        men, old men, boys. Just lying there and taking them one after another, and feeling some magnificent triumph in it, some absolute
        release without a thought of what happens to your father or your brothers, whether they are alive or dead. In that moment I am purely
        myself. I belong to no one."


I LOVE HER SO. Lestat is kind of freaked out by his mom saying sex words (which is funny, considering their relationship later), but he also kind of digs and respects it. He realizes for the first time that his mother is a person and it's actually pretty great. Gabrielle chooses this moment to reveal that she's dying of an unspecific lung-related illness (consumption I guess??), which stuns Lestat totally, but she's just like: dude I know, it's really gross and it sucks, but whatever, what can I do.

Gabrielle's desire for autonomy and independence is what defines her character. And it feeds into what I love so much about female vampires: their vampirism frees them, allows them to take control of their lives and to be as selfish as any man without recrimination or judgement. The scenes following Gabrielle's transformation are what really inspired me to make a post, because her freedom is so beautiful and so just. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

Gabrielle arranges for Lestat and his boyfriend to run away to Paris together, and sort of lives vicariously through Lestat. Then he becomes a vampire, a rich one at that, and tries to provide her with medical care, but her condition is worsening much too rapidly. She comes to Paris to see him before she dies, but Lestat is overcome at her deathbed and decides to turn her into a vampire. It's actually a very beautifully written passage, one of my favorites in the series. Here is when Lestat sees her again for the first time in a while, before he turns her:


       For one eerie moment she looked to me as she had when I was a little boy. So pretty. The symmetry of her face was unchanged
        by time or illness, and so was her hair. And a heartbreaking happiness came over me, a warm delusion that I was mortal again,
        and innocent again, and with her, and everything was all right, really truly all right.

        There was no death and no terror, just she and I in her bedroom, and she would take me in her arms.


I don't know, I just really like it. I like how Lestat is constantly trying to reconcile Gabrielle as his mother and Gabrielle as a person in her own right, because that feels like a very real thing to me. Once they are both vampires, their familial connection begins to break down and they become very incestuous, but Lestat always has this sort of backburner cognitive dissonance about her identity and how it relates to him, and I love that. Have another quote, this time from the turning itself – I think it really sums up what I'm trying to say:


       All the memories of my life with her surrounded us; they wove their shroud around us and closed us off from the world, the soft
        poems and songs of childhood, and the sense of her before words when there had only been the flicker of the light on the ceiling
        above her pillows and the smell of her all around me and her voice silencing my crying, and then the hatred of her and the need
        of her, and the losing of her behind a thousand closed doors, and the cruel answers, and the terror of her and her complexity and
        her indifference and her indefinable strength.

        And jetting up into the current came the thirst, not obliterating but heating every concept of her, until she was flesh and blood and
        mother and lover and all things beneath the cruel pressure of my fingers and my lips, everything I had ever desired. I drove my teeth
        into her, feeling her stiffen and gasp, and I felt my mouth grow wide to catch the hot flood when it came.


Try to ignore the Anne Rice of it all, because there's some good stuff in there and also some hella creepy stuff. This is very obviously the turning point in their relationship. The first paragraph is, I think, so great at expression that conflicting mother/human-person-with-thoughts-and-feelings thing. But then that relationship, the mother-son one, is essentially destroyed, though vestiges of it echo. Rice vampires don't have sex because the blood drinking replaces it, as you can tell from the not at all subtle language there, so basically Lestat and Gabrielle vampire-fuck and are no longer mother and son, but equals, and lovers (ew).

Anne likes her vampires incestuous, it seems. This takes it one step further because they're actually biologically related, but Louis was referred to interchangeably as Claudia's father and lover. Though was that worse because pedophilia? Why is Anne such a creep? I'm so honestly confused, like can someone talk me through why this is such a thing?

Lestat forces himself to call her Gabrielle post-transformation, though he still slips up occasionally. Her change is total and immediate and also beautiful. Gabrielle goes from sickly and powerless to immensely strong and powerful and the way she gets to revel in it is so enjoyable to me. She has been waiting for this kind of freedom her entire life and never expected to receive it and I am just SO HAPPY to see her have it, even if she is now a murderous creature of the night. "She was afraid of nothing," Lestat says. Finally, finally, Gabrielle is able to live a life free of fear. The glorious abandonment of her dreadful life that she fantasized about is her reality now and she doesn't have to face any consequences. Gabrielle the mother is dead and now Gabrielle the woman can thrive.

She and Lestat run around having vampire fun, reveling in her new powers. He realizes quickly that she is much better at being a vampire than he is (I'm not sure if the parallel is intentional, but Claudia was also much better at being a vampire than Louis was. It's kind of presented as a student-surpassing-the-master kind of thing, but I also find it fascinating that the men are flopping about overcome with emotion and the women are much more skilled at being coldblooded killers.) Lestat, upon his turning, had dealt with all kinds of moral issues when it came to killing and eventually came to the decision that he would kill only ~evildoers~ because Lestat is so up his own ass that he thinks HE is the person who can make that kind of moral distinction. But Gabrielle doesn't give a shit who her victims are and doesn't even blink twice over her first kill. She also laughs at the human way Lestat conducts himself by using his wealth to purchase the things he needs when as vampires they can simply steal them. The first thing she steals is a new gown to wear – this is at the beginning of the Night of Vampire Fun. It's important later.


       She didn't even look disheveled so much as she looked impossible, a woman torn out of time and place, clad only in slippers
        and dress, no chains on her, free to soar.


Gabrielle also remarks on the fact that the most dangerous parts of the city are no longer dangerous to them, and it kind of goes over Lestat's head, but it really resonated with me, as a woman. For the first time in her life, Gabrielle does not have to feel fear walking down a dark street. I mean, we all kind of pine for that, don't we? It's a nice touch that I didn't remember at all, because I was a kid and not conscious of those kinds of things.

Killing together brings Lestat and Gabrielle to a new level of intimacy, aka another round of vampire-fucking that changes their relationship again. It's after the joint killing that they become physically very different – as a human Gabrielle had disliked being touched, but as a vampire she is constantly holding Lestat, ~feeling up on him, and they kiss a bunch and it's WEIRD but not as weird as it's gonna get.

Towards the end of their night, they come upon a young man who Gabrielle takes down with immense skill, startling Lestat because they have already fed and he doesn't see the reason to take another victim when it's not necessary for survival. But Gabrielle has killed the young man specifically to steal his outfit, because she is awesome and she is not going to turn down a cute look that is clearly in her exact size over a little quibble like murder.


       It came clear in an instant why she'd done it. She tore off the pink velvet girdle and skirts right there and put on the boy's clothes.
        She'd chosen him for the fit of the clothes.

        And to describe it more truly, as she put on his garments, she became the boy.

        [...] Something in me rebelled against the charm of it, her standing so boldly in these new garments with all her hair still full over her
        shoulders looking more the lion's mane now than the lovely mass of woman's tresses it had been moments before. Then I wanted to
        ravage her. I closed my eyes.


It's fine, Lestat, your dick does not even work.

He has a freakout about her change and also his sexual attraction to her. I feel like it's important to point out that the young male victim reminded Lestat of his boyfriend? I don't know how, but I feel like that factors in here. Lestat is allegedly bisexual though Anne doesn't telegraph that very well; he seems to be primarily interested in men, and his most important relationship with a woman is his mother, who becomes sexual to him as soon as she stops dressing like a woman and, in fact, "becomes" a boy. He tries to play it off like 'you guys don't get it, in those days getting to see a woman's legs was very shocking!!!!!' but I think we all know Lestat digs dudes and I personally think that is responsible for the jump in intensity in his sexual feelings for Gabrielle.

Gender and Gabrielle is another interesting thing. Her feelings about that seem genuinely confused. She refers to Lestat as the male extension of herself. She is resentful of all the "trappings" of being a woman, and once she is free from convention, she chooses to present as male. Lestat is the one who dressed her up in a pink velvet gown, but when Gabrielle makes the choice for herself, she rips off that ladylike pink right in the street and does herself up as a man. She says there's "no real reason" for her to dress as a woman anymore. There is a certain fleeting idea in the text that they are genderless if only because they're now monsters, but I don't know. I don't think it's just that for Gabrielle. She also cuts off all her hair. And, when choosing a sarcophagus in which to retire from the day (there are a few just lying around Lestat's bachelor pad), the narrative makes a point of saying that she does not choose the one with a figure of a woman on it, but the one with a figure of a knight with a sword. And then this:


       She appeared to be dreaming as she ran her hands over the stone.

        "By this hour," she said, "she might have already been laid out, your mother. And the room would be full of evil smells and
        the smoke of hundreds of candles. Think how humiliating it is, death. Strangers would have taken off her clothes, bathed her,
        dressed her – strangers seen her emaciated and defenseless in the final sleep."

        [...]

        She looked wan, cold all over. Sleepily, she drew something out of her pocket.

        It was the golden scissor she'd taken from the lady's table in the faubourg St. Germain. Sparkling in the light of the torch like a bauble.

        "No, Mother," I said. My own voice startled me. [...] The hurt in my heart stunned me.

        Evil sound, the snipping, the shearing. Her hair fell down in great long locks on the floor.


Gabrielle-the-vampire distances herself in every way possible from Gabrielle-the-human. She doesn't say "I would have been dead already" when referring to the human death she would have had if Lestat hadn't intervened. She says, "your mother." Lestat though he was saving his mother, but his mother is effectively dead either way; he saved the person Gabrielle was in deep in her soul, her private self, and every time she reveals that person, it startles him. He calls her mother here for the first time since her death and I think in a lot of ways, this moment is his final realization that his mother is gone.

With her short hair, Lestat notices multiple times how much she looks like a boy. So, of course, he takes that as his cue to have a bloody makeout sesh before they retire for the day.

The next night, Lestat begins to respect her new gender identity in small ways – he chooses masculine jewelry for her to wear, which is kind of sweet. But despite the intimacies of their Night of Vampire Fun, Gabrielle is once again distant from him. She had been sitting still her entire life, trapped in a castle reading, and she wants to explore. She wants to dive into forests. She wants to experience everything previously denied her. And she is so cut off from who she once was that she's constantly puzzled by Lestat's ties to his human life – especially the insistence with which he cares for the people he once loved, like his boyfriend Nicki. Her indifference and lack of understanding terrifies Lestat. And I think once again how strange it is that Anne Rice writes such incredible women, because I sometimes get the feeling she doesn't like women very much. Does anyone else ever get that feeling? Perhaps it's only that Anne is so very worshipful of men that it throws me off. Either way, her female characters are fantastic.


       "I cannot overcome this notion that I've died," she said. "That I am utterly cut off from all living creatures. I can taste, I can see,
        I can feel. I can drink blood. But I am like something that cannot be seen, cannot affect things."


The women are so much better at being coldblooded killers!!!!!!!!!!! There's this entire scene where Lestat tries to explain why he has feelings about things and Gabrielle is so bemused, like she just does not get it at all. It's great. She cannot comprehend his weird human emotions when she has so much vampiring to do.

But then, in a scene that was echoed in the film version of Interview to express something entirely different, Gabrielle realizes that overnight her long hair has grown back and she SCREAMS. This is the most violent outpouring of emotion from her, I think, ever. Her hair growing back freaks her the fuck out in a way that, say, murder does not. She can scale buildings now and read thoughts and do everything short of fly, but her hair royally fucks with her. Now, this happens to Claudia in the movie and she loses it because she realizes so concretely that her body will never, ever change and she will always be a child physically. I think Claudia and Gabrielle are very similar in a lot of ways, and for Gabrielle it is a reminder that she can never be totally free from the woman she was, the Marquise. She tried to shed all of that baggage and then it sprang back on her overnight.


       "Does nothing about it all...ever...frighten you?" she asked. Her voice was guttural and unfamiliar. "Does nothing...ever...stop you?" [...]

        "I don't know," I whispered helplessly. "I don't see the point," I said. But I felt confused now. Again I told her to cut [her hair] each night
        and to burn it. Simple.

        "Yes, burn it," she sighed. "Otherwise it should fill all the rooms of the tower in time, shouldn't it? It would be like Rapunzel's hair in
        the fairy tale. It would be like the gold that the miller's daughter had to spin from straw in the fairy tale of the mean dwarf, Rumplestiltskin."

        "We write our own fairy tales, my love," I said. "The lesson in this is that nothing can destroy what you are now. Every wound will heal.
        You are a goddess."

        "And the goddess thirsts," she said.


I LOVE GABRIELLE SO MUCH.

My one holdup with this series is that I can never tell what is intentional on Anne Rice's part, what is accidental, and what is me seeing what I want to see. It seems too well put together in places to be an accident, but I also know as a writer that sometimes shit like that truly is subconsciously worked out without you realizing it. I have said before that I think Anne Rice is a pretty terrible person. She is definitely racist and has zero idea that she is. I would say she is often guilty of fetishizing queer men. I cannot fully extrapolate why I think she dislikes women, as I said it's just a vibe I get despite her admittedly incredible female characters. And she is a straight up pedo. Has anyone read her porn books? Are THOSE a psychological minefield or what. She sexualizes children and young teens and infantilizes adults in sexual situations, particularly women. She is very cavalier about rape in a way that is tragically commonplace with writers of the 70s and 80s. These are all things that I would love to discuss if anyone even cares. But I'm bringing it all up again because I find it so hard to reconcile all that nonsense with the stuff that is good in these books, and I really cannot tell when she is doing things on purpose. I just can't.

That aside, let us all bask in how amazing Gabrielle is and think about how good she probs looks in her old timey male drag and picture a young Catherine Deneuve as her, because.

I feel like I'm terrible at writing lately. It's like no matter what I do inspiration is not striking? And even if I have ideas I'm having such trouble with execution. I feel like all of it is so clunky and blah. I go through phases of this (pretty much always around June....hm) but I wish I could snap out of it because I want to write! I've been doing all my usual block-breaking stuff, i.e. asking for prompts, jamming to music, reading, movies, just trying to power through it. But it's a no go. I have a whole list of beautiful prompts too and I just......cannot......do things....... I'm so frustrated. Does anyone have writer's block thingies they do?? Idk. I'm hella frustrated. 

Stealing this from the lovely 12_12_12 because I don't know... I always want to do more meta-type-thingies but I'm not really in the habit, and also I don't want my lj to stagnate further if I'm in a fic lull. Basically just wanted to try something different! Though I'm only gonna do ten days because I don't trust my dedication over the course of a month.

SO ASK ME ANYTHING! Comment to this post with questions/topics for one of the following dates and I'll answer them starting on June 21st. You can prompt as many times as you like. :) I will try my best to answer as many and as wide a range of prompts as possible, though I do reserve the right to friends-lock the responses (I doubt I'll end up doing this, but we all know a vague disclaimer is nobody's friend.)


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Hey guys! Sorry I totally blanked on the Ask Me Anything meme; I've been doing renovation for like the past two weeks, so I've been away from the internet and also totally losing track of all time (genuinely thought it was the 19th today) because I am so tuckered out. But I guarantee if you prompted me you will see a response posted here before the end of the month. Eternal Scouts' honor.

lusimeles prompted: what would you say were your most formative books, both as a person and/or writer?


I am almost too excited about this to actually write this post. I'm so afraid I'll forget something! But also I could talk about this at length forever.

I think a lot of my most formative books as a person are books I read as a kid, unsurprisingly. The stuff you read growing up has a way of getting a stronger hold on you than almost anything. The impact is profound. Those books definitely helped shape the person I became and they are immensely important to me even now, at my heavily advanced age. I'm sure it's this way for a lot of people. I definitely measure sections of my life by what I was consuming at that time. And I've come to the hesitant decision that most of the formative-to-me-as-a-person books are the ones I read as a kid, and most of the formative-to-me-as-a-writer books at ones I read as an older teen/young adult. (Adult lol). Even if the early stuff laid the groundwork, it wasn't until I became a more critical consumer of media (and also began actively thinking of myself as a writer) that certain books hit me in a writerly way. And of course these things do intersect!

Sadly all of my books are packed up right now so I won't be able to peruse them for this post. I'll have to try and do everything from memory and just hope I don't fuck anything up.

I have a definite preference for American literature, and I do think there is a stylistic commonality there that appeals to me. And it's what I want most to emulate in my own writing. In general terms, what I try to do most is this: clean, straightforward prose with unexpected bits of beauty or lyricism. Is that so pretentious? Y'all can be the judge of whether I get anywhere close to that ever in my life, but that is generally what I go for and what I'm drawn to. I like a good mix of the nonchalant and the surreal. I also like strong character voices and unreliable narrators, which is honestly probably why I read as many biographies and memoirs as I do. But my number one writing rule is that everyone is the hero of their own story, and I try to keep that in mind; every character is off doing their own shit and worrying about their own issues and I really try and express that in everything I do. Everyone is blinded by their own point of view. It's all too easy to forget that in service of the main character and main story, but it's important.





FORMATIVE FOR ME AS A PERSON

Ella Enchanted, Gail Carson Levine
I've talked at lengthabout this book before. I think it's the first book I ever thought of as a favorite, if that makes sense. I remember getting it out of the school library when I was little and just falling in love. I loved Ella so much. Her strength and her humor and all those awesome gowns... I think she was definitely a hero of mine as a kid even though I didn't think of it in those terms. I just loved the book. I read it so many times it came apart. I used to sleep with it in my bed, lol. I've said many times that I think it's a great book for a little girl in terms of female characters and romance, and it really holds up for me even as an adult.


Aria of the Sea, Dia Calhoun
I must've read this around the same time as Ella Enchanted, but I can't really remember... I haven't looked at this book since I was like nine years old but some of the scenes are still so strong in my memory. You guys, I wrote fanfiction for this book before I knew what fanfiction was. I wrote it in my marble notebooks, next to my hand-drawn art of the Spice Girls. I think they were mostly AUs lol. Does anyone know this book besides me? I hesitated putting this on the list but I mean, baby fanfiction. That seems pretty formative to me. It's about this young girl with the improbable and awesome name Cerinthe Gale who was like a healer of some kind, but then she couldn't save her mother from dying so she decides to follow her other dream of being a dancer. She gets accepted to this ritzy dancing school and has to deal with all kinds of boarding school mean girl stuff, as well as figuring out what her ~true calling~ is. Also I think she has a love interest. Who maybe whittles? Someone whittles. And her main mean girl antagonist is SO GREAT, absolutely foretold my continuing love for horrible and glamorous girls driven by deeply-buried insecurities. I do not remember the girl's name, but she was such a bitch, oh god, I loved her. Obviously she and Cerinthe were the best dancers at the school except Cerinthe was poor so everyone looked down on her. And the BEST PART was when the Mean Girl stole Cerinthe's dance and performed it STARK NAKED and also better, in a mean girl show of superiority. And later she has some horrible accident and her bone is sticking through her leg and Cerinthe has to save her, etc, etc. Man. I should read this again.


Harry Potter, JKR
I mean, what do I even say? I think as a generation we all get the formativeness of HP. Could be a post unto itself tbh.


The Lost Years of Merlin, T.A. Barron
I read this series around the same time as the early HP books, and they really warred for affection in my heart, haha. I was super into Arthurian stuff as a kid, but generally of the Morgan Le Fay variety because, you know, glamorous evil bitches are my thing. But I looooovveeeeddd these books. Does anyone know these??? It's about young Merlin's misadventures on this fantastical island mystical land place. I should re-read these too. It's hard to explain exactly what makes something specifically formative to you, so Idk, it's kind of a feeling. Something that you know lives in your heart.


Remember Me, Christopher Pike
I was SO OBSESSED with this book. I read it so many times. It was probably one of the first teenager books I read when I was still too young to be reading things like that, and I was all scandalized by the sex, etc. I bought it and Witch at the same time but I vastly preferred this book; Shari was a fun narrator, and the story was just more interesting to me, I guess? It's funny the stuff that sticks in your brain from books you read years ago. I remember she died in that orange pants-brown shirt outfit and even as a little one I thought that sounded fucking hideous and obviously something a dude writer would come up with. And when she dies, the stars turning red and dripping like candle wax! And going into all her friends dreams, and how her shady boyfriend like showered with his cousin once??? And of course the unwitting incest of Shari's brother and his girlfriend. Oh 90s, why did you love incest so much?

Also Shari/Peter 4ever.


Someone Like You, Sarah Dessen
I very much loved all of Sarah Dessen's books when I was a teenager. They were formulaic in a certain way: all coming of age stories of teenage girls wherein the main character had to wade through family drama and a (usually) bad boyfriend. But formulaic in a very comforting way, because it was a story I craved and wanted more of, and I knew I wouldn't be disappointed. Later on she started writing more romances that ended happily, but I was super into the earlier novels because the main couple rarely ended up together. And it was because the guy, whatever his virtues, was usually kind of shitty and not good for the girl. And the narrative didn't pretend otherwise! The girl would figure this out and learn and grow and be stronger on her own. I mean, I didn't even get why I liked that back then, but it seems even more important to me now. Realistic, girl-centric stories! Imperfect romances that are not romanticized! The importance of being cool with yourself! Ditching shitty boys! And of them all, Someone Like You was my favorite, possibly because it was the first of her books I read. They made it into a shitty movie with Mandy Moore that smooshed it together with another of the books and totally changed the ending to make her get with the guy, all of which is stupid.


The Vampire Chronicles, Anne Rice
I talk about these books too much, so I will just redirect anyone interested to the tag.


The Realm of Possibility, David Levithan
I kind of cringe at the thought of this book now, if only because I'm not sure I would still care about it, especially in the intense way I did when I was fifteen. I loved David Levithan books (Boy Meets Boy was also delightful) (p.s. one time David Levithan contacted me on MySpace, HOW ABOUT THAT) but my friends and I made a bible of Realm of Possibility. It just...man, it's just such a teenager thing. I haven't looked at it in a while, but I guarantee it is one of those things that you need to be an angsty fifteen year old to read and it is not the same at any other time in your life. But maybe I'm wrong. It's a collection of poetry but also a novel; each poem is from the PoV of a student at this fictional high school and each was told in a different style, befitting the character telling their story. It was cool to see how they intersected and overlapped, and how each character saw the others vs their own personal thoughts and feelings. I mean, it was a cool book. And it really hit home for me at that time in my life. As I said earlier, I have a real thing for every character being the main character of their own lives, and this book was really good for that.


The History Boys, Alan Bennett
DEFINITION OF FORMATIVE. The list could begin and end here. One of the most important pieces of media in my life. THB crept up on me and then just consumed me; I think the play was recommended by a friend, so I read it and liked it but it wasn't until I saw the film and then listened to the radio recording of the play that it really crystallized. I mean, again, I think at least part of it was timing – I was the same age as the characters when I discovered it, so I think it resonated in part because of that. But it's also just incredibly smart and well-written and fascinating. So important. So so so important.


Flowers in the Attic + My Sweet Audrina, V.C. Andrews
I first read Flowers when I was a tween, as every girl should, and I was appropriately horrified but could not look away, as every girl should. But its sequel, Petals on the Wind, proved too much for my young mind and I abandoned the series and any other Andrews books, though I would sometimes peep at them in bookstores like you do with "dirty" books. Then Lifetime announced they were going to do a movie version, and that website The Toast (anyone?) did a V.C. Andrews day chock full of amazing articles (I would link but the site's not working rn so I'll update later) that really inspired me, so I decided to give Flowers in the Attic a re-read (which I've been doing a lot of lately with my tween books and I'm finding it very satisfying). AND NOW EVERYTHING HAS CHANGED. As a kid I enjoyed the vicarious craziness of the books, that car-crash-can't-look-away quality they have, but my trollish love of incredible trash had not formed back then, so I enjoy her books one bajillion times more now. But that's not the only reason why I love them. I think people get distracted and wrapped up in the incestousness and soap opera plots of her books, but that is not their main selling point, IMO. They are horror novels told like fairy tales. They are books exclusively for girls. Seriously. No boys allowed. They access a very specific kind of adolescent girl-rage that is rare in most media. I will take any chance I can to rec this article, because it explains the Andrews appeal better than I could ever hope to. Please do go read it.

My Sweet Audrina is not part of the Dollanganger series; in fact, it is Andrews' only standalone novel. And tbh if you only ever read one V.C. Andrews book, make it My Sweet Audrina. It's probably her best written novel but also the craziest, condensing all of her usual themes in this kaleidoscope of Southern gothic horror. I think it's more of an explicit horror novel than any of her other books, though the horror is not supernatural; her horror is too-familiar, the horror that exists within human beings. And the atmosphere is exceptional.






FORMATIVE AS A WRITER

A Single Man, Christopher Isherwood
Definitely a book I'm mentioned before (especially because of my distaste for the film version, which, understatement). The opening paragraph of this book is one of my favorite passages in all of time, forever, and I basically fell in love instantly. It's a stunning little novel, very gorgeous and very painful. And it's the first book that I can remember reading and feeling jealousy mixed in with my appreciation. You know? I read it and I thought: this is how I want to write.


The Age of Innocence, Edith Wharton
Edith Wharton might be my favorite writer. I could quite literally spend like half an hour just analyzing one paragraph from one of her novels. There's so much there! So much to parse! So much good psychological character-driven stuff written up so prettily! And such a dry, unexpected sense of humor. Plus, this bitch has the best dialogue on the market, I'm telling you. If Edith was born in our modern age, she'd be an A+++ screenwriter.


The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald
For a huge Scottie fan, I am actually tragically underread. Not to get all Angela Chase on you guys, but sometimes his stuff is so beautiful it hurts to look at it! The poetry of Scott's writing is just too too beautiful to me. It's aggressively, painfully beautiful. I can't bear it.


Visions of Gerard, Jack Kerouac
I studied Kerouac in college, and we did it a sort of fun backwards way: we studied his work biographically, i.e. we read it in the order it happened in his life, not the order in which it was written. So the first thing we read was Visions of Gerard, which was one of Jackie's later novels but is about his very early childhood, specifically the brief life of his older brother Gerard. It's very beautiful and achingly nostalgic; there's one passage in particular that I always loved, about the house and his mother's cooking, just beautiful. It's interesting to think of an older Kerouac sort of longing for that time in his life when he was very young, because the death of his brother (who was nine, while Jack was around....four or five, maybe?) obviously had a profound effect on him and his entire family. I loved it because the language was so evocative; I know Jackie's style isn't for everyone, but it highly appeals to me. I would recommend listening to some of his recordings, because the cadence of his voice brings a lot to the material.


The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath
When I first read The Bell Jar in high school, I didn't like it, because I was an asshole. But it had a profound effect on me when I read it again last year. I don't know how to explain this exactly, but it just... It made me highly conscious of characterization in a way I was not before. Obviously it's very personal to Plath which is why it's so raw and honest and true, but it really sort of clicked a light on in my brain when it comes to how to write people.


The Catcher in the Rye, J.D. Salinger
Another book I feel like people tend to throw off these days but I can't help always having a soft spot for it. It's a family favorite, so it was very much in the background of my brain my entire life, even before I read it. I just love Holden's voice and PoV. The beginning is my favorite part; sometimes I just go reread the bits about him tapdancing in the bathroom and saying he's the goddamn governor's son, it's very comforting for me.


The Importance of Being Earnest, Oscar Wilde
So important! Wilde was one of those writers that I was into before I ever read a word, haha, just because I could sense that he was going to be important for me later on. When it comes to that sort of zany wit, etc, etc, he is the lord and master. And Earnest is my favorite, I love those characters to absolute pieces.


The Virgin Suicides, Jeffrey Eugenides
Another novel that inspired jealousy in me. The contrast is what kills me: there's this deep reverence and gorgeous writing about these girls, but then whenever one of the Lisbon sisters opens her mouth to speak, she's saying the most blasé teen nonsense. Because as idealized as they are by the narrators, the text doesn't forget that they are real people living real lives and experiencing real pain.





So I think my taste definitely follows a pattern, especially with the as-a-writer books. Umm this post is already very long and I hope y'all enjoy it even though I got kind of tired and lazy by the end there. Talk to me about books!

ladymercury_10 prompted:how about favorite femslash ships and/or female friendships?


*gifs all stolen from tumblr because I'm too lazy to make my own graphics lately



I didn't ship Johanna/Katniss when I was reading the books, somehow (I have faulty femslash goggles, lol, I often need things spelled out for me) but as soon as I saw the movie I WAS SO HOOKED I WAS A GONER. THEY ARE BOTH SO ANGRY I LOVE IT SO MUCH. Women with intense anger are v. v. v. important to me. All I want is their mean reluctant romance. It would be so mean it would be glorious!!!!



Lol you guys I did not even watch season three of this show. I fully stopped after season two, and then just deeply shipped Sansa and Margaery from a distance because I have no shame at all. They're so pretty and girly and social machinations and flowers!!!



Would you believe it never occurred to me to ship them the entire time I watched this show. I'm so serious. How I missed this, I do not know. BUT EVERYTHING ABOUT IT IS SO PERFECT. THE ANTAGONISM. THE CLUBBING. THE SUPPRESSED HOMOEROTIC FOREHEAD KISSING. Also I have a real thing about their Slayer bond, like, this is such an important thing!!




Idk, I don't seriously ship anything on AHS because I treasure my sanity, but I am obsessed with both Sarah Paulson and Lily Rabe, and I was especially obsessed with Misty Day. My mind is blown that there was an entire season about witches with absolutely zero lesbians. I just liked them both a lot, I wanted them to kiss.




This movie everything to me, it will be so until my dying day, I love Needy and Jennifer so much, the end.





Daria and Jane are probably my favorite tv friendship of all time. They just hit me on a spiritual level, you know? Their friendship was so real and natural, and sometimes I feel that is not the case with female friendships in media. It's just about pizza and judging people.

We don't address the Tom debacle.




Poussey is the new love of my life. I am sure many share the sentiment post-s2. I loved their friendship in s1 as well obviously but getting to see it deepen and grow and fracture and come back together – ugh, so amazing. I loved the heartbreaking tenderness of Poussey being in love with Taystee but I also love that it didn't go any farther, and that their flawless friendship can be enough.



I think.......with Blair and Serena......I was always more into it in theory than I was in practice. I don't know. Looking at these gifs I am suffused with feels but they never quite did it for me on that instinctive level, if that makes sense. I don't know! My Gossip Girl feelings are varied and complex and mostly sad. Plus I find it really hard to write SB for some reason and I think that's part of it, for me. There's something there I can't quite access. But I do love them, it would be ridiculous for me to leave them off this list.



All of the relationships on this show were soooo goooooddddd. I loved both characters so much, and I loved how the bitchiness of their relationship and how it eventually gave way to deep, genuine feeling.



KIDS. LOOK HOW LITTLE. God the relationships on this show were so good too. They don't make 'em like they used to.



Probably the pinnacle of my interest in Tara was her brief little arc as Buffy's friend in s6. I think the show sometimes had a little trouble integrating the later love interests with the rest of the group and Tara was so quiet that it was more difficult for her. Her personality didn't always shine through, but her friendships with Dawn and with Buffy lead to some of my favorite Tara moments, where we really got to see her and appreciate her. I'm sad we didn't get to see more of her relationship with Buffy. Their energy and dynamic was so interesting to me every time it cropped up, and I liked that Buffy didn't really have any other friend like that – someone quiet and supportive and nonjudgmental.



What a weird relationship they have, I love it so much. Joan is so mean! Peggy puts up with it but then figures out how to be passive aggressive! Then they are both like "we are the only halfway sane people in this building full of crazy men, let us hug many times and smoke cigarettes together in our offices." Also remember that time Joan was glad to see Peggy and Peggy was glad to see Joan and they took a long moment to beam at each other with love?????



I loved their friendship so so so so much. I was into pretty much every gen of Skins for different reasons at different points but there's no denying the friendships of s1 were some of the more real and true-feeling ones.



THIS ICONIC CINEMATIC MASTERPIECE. Lady friendship romcoms are the best, it is possibly my favorite genre of romcom ("For a Good Time, Call..." was also good in that respect.) If you have seen it, you understand. If you have not seen it, what on god's earth are you waiting for.

Since I'm in the middle of moving, it seems likely I will not have internet access for a day or two, which will push back the meme answers a bit more. But I am determined to finish them before the month is up! Tho why did I choose these dates I'm not smart.

Thank u and good night. 

Aaaaand back to our regularly scheduled programming, so sorry for the delay.

12_12_12 prompted:what are some of your favorite movie scenes/moments and why?


I AM SO BAD AT LISTS. I seem to hate making ~definitive~ statements about anything. What if I left something out!!!! I think this took so long (aside from the RL stuff) because I was frankly overwhelmed by the possibilities. I could just a favorite scenes post of every genre and every decade tbqh. So for my own sanity let's keep in mind that this is FAR from definitive, just a bunch of things that came to mind. :)

Even now I'm like, how is there no Winona in this post? No Brando? No Pfeiffer? I'm a horrible fan. Ugh.





There are few things I love like watching Natalie lose it spectacularly in this movie. This scene + I HAVEN'T ANY PRIDE are two of my faaaavorite scenes ever (unfortunately I couldn't find videos/gifs of the latter, if you can pls share in the comments). And I really love the lead-up to this scene because it's shot so fucking well, showing Deanie's (Natalie) detachment from her life and how overwhelming her parents are and how little they know how to handle her.

Her entire character arc in this movie is so great. I fucking love me some Kazan, but this is probably my favorite of his, and just. How did he GET IT. How did a bunch of dudes get the purity myth double standard nonsense!! Beatty's character (umm Bud, right? Bud) has got angst in this movie too and I appreciate it and everything, but it doesn't cut like Deanie – how she just cannot reconcile being a "good girl" like everyone tells her she is and wanting so badly to do the things "bad girls" do. So in this scene, after Bud has broken up with her and her mother asks if she's ~spoiled... Man. I will just let the clip speak for itself for the most part.

And then later, the scene I couldn't find but wish I could: Deanie cuts her hair and dresses all sexy in a scandalous red dress and tries to fuck Bud again but he turns her down again by saying something like, "Deanie, where's your pride?" It just SETS HER OFF. She just starts screaming I HAVEN'T ANY PRIDE and then runs off.






Linking instead of embedding for aesthetic reasons.

Okay, so, technically two scenes. BUT THEY ARE IMPORTANTLY LINKED SO IT COUNTS. The interplay of the two scenes is So Important to me: the chaos of Margot's montage with the Clash and the yellow and the kissing against Richie's slow Elliott Smith blue-tinged horror-dream of a suicide attempt. I never tire of this movie or those scenes. Especially Richie. I am very obsessed with characters looking at themselves in mirrors in movies. Usually they're getting ready or putting on makeup, but the opposite also happens a lot, characters deconstructing themselves. Deanie does so in Splendor. And watching Richie pull himself apart in every way is so heartbreaking. He takes down his defenses quite literally: the glasses, the hair, the beard, it all comes down and we get our first real look at who Richie is and his desperate sadness.





Just look at that fuckin' mise-en-scene. Beautiful. I have spoken about this scene before definitely, I love it so much. Brad's acting will always leave much to be desired (I have such mixed feelings about him in this movie) but he pouts and tosses his hair well enough, so. The great thing about Tom as Lestat is you can see how much he relishes the role, and how much he enjoyed playing it. I love that. You can always tell when actors are having a good time with the material. It's just a great scene – narratively speaking, it breaks down the dynamic between Lestat and Louis perfectly, and aesthetics-wise Neil Jordan knows what the fuck he's doing. The sets, the costumes, the framing. It's so beautiful. The actress playing the prostitute is both incredible and gorgeous. It just has great energy. I'm disappointed that the only clip I found is not the full scene; I think it misses something if you don't get to see Lestat flirting with the prostitute first. It's integral to his later cruelty in the scene to see his playfulness first.





Um definitely there are reasons I like this besides boobs. The Venus de Milo scene is the one that gets the most play on the internet but there's a weird thing about the song "La Mer" in this movie that's never really explained or anything, and I love it. It plays overs this scene and also when Theo is on his date, which makes Isabelle lose it for unspecified reasons. Probably just because it is very clearly HER song and he was polluting it by giving it to someone else. Anyway. There's just a freedom to her in this scene that I like a lot. You just felt like it was her favorite song and she was vibing it. You know? There's a weird mix of sexuality and control and freedom and, I don't know, untouchability. I don't mean that in a creepy way. She just seems so in control of her own awesomeness to the point of being more goddess than human. Am I overselling? Possibly.






I love this movie so much I cannot even stand it. I love basically all the scenes between Catherine and Morris so it's really hard to pick one, but I suppose I am partial to their first meeting and also the scene in the rain where they decide to run off. The acting in this movie really gets me because the body language is so incredible – the way Monty leans in and Olivia leans away, the ways he seduces her and sets her at ease. IT'S SO GOOD. WHAT IS ACTING.

Also there's this great line in the rainy scene where Catherine is listing all the stuff she bought for Morris in Paris and he says, "My dear girl, how happy we shall be!" with the true glee of a gold-digger all tied up in the facade of a real lover and it is so so so good. Such a good line reading from my dearest Montgomery.






Um definitely there are reasons I like this besides boobs. This movie is on Netflix so there's really no reason for people with Netflix to do anything except watch it. PAUL NEWMAN STANDS HALF-NAKED OUTSIDE JOANNE WOODWARD'S WINDOW AND SING-SONGS HER NAME WHILE SHE ACTS ALL FLUSTERED AND CUTE. IT'S AMAZING. Other great scenes in this film: they make out and she's annoyed by his hotness, Paul Newman looks rumpled and eats watermelon, Paul Newman wears a suit and eats pie, Joanne Woodward delivers amazing monologue after amazing monologue while serving eyebrow game so strong it burns.






Just too iconic.






I GET SUCH A RUSH FROM THIS MOVIE TO THIS DAY. There's a montage of sorts early on in the movie that sums up Arthur's (Señor Bale) past + his relationship with Brian Slade (Johnny Rhys Meyers) as a fan + the entire glam rock movement. And I just eternally love it. The music, the fun faux-documentary style of it, it's all just so enjoyable. It's like the most fun exposition one could experience. With glitter.






I think the scenes that stick out in your mind do so often because EVERYTHING is working so well together, so seamlessly. Aesthetics, music, acting – it just sparks. And the opening for Secretary sets the movie up perfectly. The score is so distinct. It starts in the middle before going back to the beginning and aside from hooking you as a viewer it also sort of previews where the movie will take you – it cuts immediately from Maggie all sexy and controlled to her looking awkward, frumpy, the exact opposite of what she was before. It's jolting in the best way. You know where she's going to end up and you love watching her get there.





I also wanted to put the scene from Hotel Chevalier but I have discussed that scene more than enough for everyone's liking, I'm sure. There are very many scenes in this movie to love, but I think I particularly adore the scene set to the Stones' "Play with Fire" where the three brothers and their mom try to express themselves without speaking. It's just their faces while the song plays but there's something very deep and wonderful about it. Anjelica Huston is so great in this movie even in her limited capacity; the scene right before this one where the boys are all WHAT ABOUT YOU BEING THERE FOR US and she says something like, "You're talking to her. You're not talking to me," ugh, so amazing. WEIRD BAD MOTHERS IN FICTION, I LIVE FOR THEE.






CHILDREN. I am quite literally haunted by Kate and Jimmy's chemistry. Forever bitter that they never made another film together. I have FOUR glorious Kate and Cary movies to enjoy that are all varied and wonderful in their own ways but ONE Kate/Jimmy movie WHERE THEY DON'T EVEN END UP TOGETHER. Kate's phenomenal dress! Their drunken flirting! Standing so close together! Kate's high pitched laugh that I do in my own life all the time! SUCH CHEMISTRY. One of my favorite things about old movies is just watching amazing actors chew the scenery and spit words at each other. Fucking unparalleled.






This is one of the ABSOLUTE CUTEST romcoms of all time. For those unfamiliar, in short: Jimmy Stewart is a straight-laced science professor who impulsively marries Ginger Rogers, an adorable nightclub singer, and then has to hide it when he brings her home because he fears his family's disapproval. Also he is sorta engaged to another girl. There are many lovely misadventures but the BEST OF WHICH is when Ginger and the other girl engage in FORMALWEAR FISTICUFFS. IT'S SO GREAT. GINGER IS SO SCRAPPY. SHE KEEPS SHUSHING THE OTHER GIRL AND THEN SLAPPING HER ACROSS THE FACE. I have never seen such precious, darling fighting in my entire life.

Second best scene: when Ginger signs up for Jimmy's science class and they flirtatiously look through a microscope together.






I think this is possibly the most convincing and loveliest falling in love montage I have ever had the pleasure of enjoying. Watching them enjoy each other's company is such an unmitigated delight.






Such a flawless movie beginning to end, but I'm a sucker for the incredible acting involved in this scene particularly. I hesitated putting any musical numbers on this list because I could do a whole post about musical numbers but, eh, had to be done. The fantastic animation coupled with the beautiful song coupled with John Cameron Mitchell's face – couldn't resist.





I almost posted this without this scene but then I gasped in horror that I could have missed it. SCREWBALL AT ITS FINEST.

prefectlives prompted:favorite makeup looks in movies

Ah, a topic after my own heart. Unintentionally a lot of these are drag looks. I cannot help it, I am a girl who enjoys a face full of product.

Also I actually got off my lazy butt and made some graphics/reused some graphics for this. Yay me! But the coloring is pretty wonky because we can't have everything, can we.






Bound is so important to me stylistically. Jennifer Tilly's Violet is a femme fatale dressed up like a fifties pinup girl but in a totally neo-goth nineties color scheme. It's hard to tell in stills what exactly is going on with her makeup (it looks much lovelier in motion) but it's this sort of hazy gray-purple smoky eye and brick red lip that is just GORGEOUS.





Lol this movie was stupid. HOWEVER, I really dug this makeup look. It's exceedingly simple, just a wash of deep brown eyeshadow over the lid, and it looked fantastic on her. It's also something I worked into my own repertoire, because it's super easy and quick but still has a lot of payoff in terms of look.





Iconiqueeeee. Love everything about it. The sheer unending amounts of glitter. A RED GLITTER LIP. The harsh, melancholy brows that almost give off a Dietrich or Garbo vibe. The red white and blue! The streak of unblended blush! It is makeup as glamour armor which is my favorite kind, really.





Basically everyone has incredible makeup in this film but I chose Toni for the graphic because this look in particular is so very good. In general the movie embraces the sort of pastel kaleidoscope of seventies makeup that spans everything from the '30s movie star realness you see before you to people dipped literally head to toe in mint green glitter.





The makeup in this movie is incredible. I bow down to the artists responsible. Not only did they do an impeccable job of recreating a lot of Boy George's specific makeup looks, but it's just nice to see this era of makeup on screen, because we don't see much of it. I love the eighties New Romantics look: harsh eyebrows, sunsets of color on the lid, strong lips, and blusher blended straight up to your hairline. It is very full on and very of its time, very pleasing to my eyeballs.





The powder blue eyeshadow that will live in infamy! Honestly I doubt this eyeshadow color exists post-1960s. But it had its MOMENT then, it sure did. And Anna's is the best, especially with that baby pink lipstick. So sixties, I love it.





Kiiiiind of hard to tell in this cap, but Babs spends the whole movie rocking her signature look of the decade, which was a rather elongated cut-crease, very sixties cat eye kind of thing. I love it because it was an oft-repeated look but on her face is utterly unique thanks to the shape of her features. Generally you see that sort of makeup on Cher-types because they have the gigantic eyeballs to pull it off, but Babs really worked it to her own eye shape. God and at one point in this movie she wears this incredible eyeshadow that perfectly matches her gown – I don't even know what to call the color except hydrangea blue, it was so beautiful.





I once saw someone say that the great thing about his look in this movie is that it's very masculine. And I know that is a statement that is kind of cognitive dissonance-y, but I really do agree with it. Yes, he trots around the whole movie in a corset and panties. Yes, he is wearing a very heavy full face of makeup. But it's really not a feminine look. He is not trying to look like a woman. It's heavy, it emphasizes his brows and eyes, it does nothing to soften his features. It's a veeery interesting look.





Marilyn rocked essentially the same look every time, and it's probably burned into our collective cultural retinas by now. It's one of my favorites. Generally, it was a pearlescent white eyeshadow with a heavy lashline and a glossy red lip. Lisa Eldridge over on YT does what I consider the definitive breakdown of the Marilyn look, it's so good. It's interesting how her look didn't vary much film to film, because in a lot of ways her entire career was a character. It was Norma-Jean-playing-Marilyn-playing-whoever.





Sorry for choosing a half-dead cap, Satine! It just showed off the makeup so well. Love love love this look, especially the very long Gibson girl brows and soft, smoky eyeshadow. There's almost a 1940s element to it. A very classic look, and another very simple one.

lusimeles prompted:what is your (fashion) style philosophy?

I've been trying very hard to phrase this in a non-pretentious way, but oh well: I've always been a person very concerned with aesthetics. Though I would say it wasn't until I hit my twenties that I stopped looking like a hot mess most of the time. These things take trial and error! And my style is very much an amalgamation of the media I consume. I'm sure a lot of people would say the same, it's one of those things we can't help – but my clothes always distinctly echoed whatever I was obsessed with at the time. When I was into vampires, I was a goth. When I was Cabaret-obsessed, I had a flapper haircut. And yes, I bought Blair Waldorf red tights and I still have a box of fucking hair accessories that I never wear. It was that way until I became old enough to learn what I really liked and what worked for me, though of course I still give in to it now and then.

I'm a big believer in comfort. I.e., you should style yourself in the way that makes you feel the best and screw anyone else or any made-up fashion "rules," etc., etc. Your way of feeling comfortable might not be my way and that's cool. As long as it makes you happy, you know? As for myself, I prefer a very hyper-feminine look most of the time, and I like to reference a lot of older stuff. I'm not a tried and true vintage girl by any means; I like to work in bits and pieces and reference more than outright go for it (major props to those that do, though). The 90s had a randomly heavy 50s influence in fashion and I aim for that a lot. But really I just love variety too much for my own good. I can't limit myself. Some days I want to rock Betty Draper's casual plaid house pants, some days I want to look like an extra in The Craft. C'est la vie.

What I have in my notes for this post is: 90s!50s pinups mixed with fran fine. joan holloway betty draper fusion. amy blue. marilyn.

So. Take that as you will. I will now throw a bunch of pictures of my current style inspos at you.


* again i stole everything from tumblr, I'm lazy, i will source if asked

prefectlives prompted:favorite music videos

lesoleilluna prompted:some of your favourite headcanons (gg, hp, or skins)

I am honestly so bad at coming up with headcanons when people ask me. I guess I tend to work any extraneous, personally-accepted details into my fics, so I don't really think of them as headcanons? I just think of them as...stuff that I wrote, haha.

One headcanon type thing I always had for Harry Potter was this idea that after the war Harry sort of takes over Grimmauld Place and renovates it and it's very therapeutic for him. I don't know why, but I always liked the idea of Harry just gutting that place, ripping it apart, dismantling the house and everything awful in it. Except Sirius' room, probably. Maybe post-divorce; I also really like the idea of Harry as a divorcé. Not particularly for disliking Harry/Ginny reasons, though it probably started that way. There's just something to the idea of him as a divorced guy with a bunch of kids, a single dad really, that appeals to me a lot.

With GG, I've probably constructed so much alternate canon in my head at this point it's ridiculous. Blair fell first with Dan is a good one; I subscribe to that. And here's some random things I have whipped up in my brain over the years:

Dan got suspended once in middle school for getting into a scuffle with a kid who was giving Jenny a hard time.

Jenny is most definitely a lesbian.

Serena ends up alone, probably with a kid, maybe sometimes with Carter. I have strong feelings about Serena being on her own. I don't see it as a negative thing; quite the contrary.

Blair is a fashion editor (this was mine before the show did or didn't do it).

I like the idea of Dan becoming a professor, very beardy and maybe with glasses. I like the idea of his writing failing or stalling out, or just him getting sick of it.

It's kind of my headcanon that Milo is actually Dan's, and that Georgina was doing some double-triple-agent lying.

Sex headcanons? Serena is super vanilla against all odds. Nate is definitely the dude to send you a dick shot. Dan likes being tied up. Blair could go full fetish if you let her but mostly sex is another way for her to exercise her control issues.

I have a lot of Carter headcanon, actually. Sometimes I forget that he barely existed on the show because I've come up with so much nonsense for him in my head. Things like: his father is a judge and Carter only calls him that, The Judge, and not anything else. His mother is addicted to prescription pills. His sister is younger and her name is Caroline; probably she's a year younger than our main crew, and Carter is like five years older than them. Carter himself is drug addict, sometimes recovering, sometimes not. Mostly cocaine but really anything. He has a little bit of a death wish and it has made him a lot reckless. He's bisexual and fucks pretty much everyone, but thinks of Serena as the only person he really loved. Probably he ends up in some shady career he would hate, like advertising or working as an agent in Hollywood. Uhhh clearly I have another Carter fic waiting in my head, lol.

Ummmm hm is there anything else? I think that's all I've got for now. Sorry for the excessive rambling!

anonymous prompted:your favorite video games and/or graphic novels, and if not favorite tv scenes from any time period of your life

Wowza what a hard choice! I do not play video games, so that one's out; favorite tv scenes is very exciting but so broad I think it would take me forever! And I don't really understand what constitutes a graphic novel but I have been reading a lot of comics lately, so I guess let's do a ramble ramble post about comics? I hope that's cool with you, anon?

(But seriously, can someone explain graphic novels to me? Are they not the same thing as comics? Does a graphic novel have to be a standalone long work? When they compile a bunch of comics into a book, does that make it a graphic novel or is it something else? Is it an anthology? Bueller??)

I always wanted to get into comics but I never really knew how, mostly because the sheer amount of stuff was so overwhelming to me. But this year I got some good recs and started tentatively delving into stuff and it has been very wonderful. I'd dabbled a bit in comic-y stuff before but I guess I never found anything to really latch on to – in high school I read all the Sandman comics and loved them, but I suspect if I looked at them now I would not be into them. Read some pretty gay manga (Fake, anyone?). I also read a lot of BtVS stuff? Those Tales of the Slayer/Vampire ones were decent, but MAN was the season eight stuff rough. I eventually just had to give up on them and that was...five years ago? Ish. And I never tried again with comics until now.

**more stolen art you know how i roll in these posts i'm so sorry




This is actually something I read in my first comic attempt years ago. For a while I just picked up stuff if I liked the art, which is...kind of what I still do. The writing is undeniably important, but I've found with comics I can skate on the writing a little if the art is exceptionally beautiful. And this is so pretty! It had a very lovely, watercolor-y, inky kind of style that suited the subject perfectly (how good are my technical terms right). It's about a mummy who falls in love with the daughter of an egyptologist in the Victorian days. Misadventures ensue, things make a questionable amount of sense but are very pretty and very fun so I would recommend it.




You guys don't even know how much I rep 4 the GG manga. It's like really cute and tacky fanfiction. It's mostly about Blair and Vanessa; later Jenny does stuff too. Nate and Serena are essentially non-characters sorry 2 say. Chuck pops up to be gross but in a limited enough capacity that you can ignore him. Dan is blonde and has glasses which weirds me out. He only really shows up to have the hots for Blair and doesn't do much else (in the first one she fake-dates him to get back at Serena and they have amazingly hilarious conversations, and when he finds out he's so mad he rips off the shirt she bought him and throws it at her. But then he just still has the hots for her after that.). Vanessa kind of has show!Dan's personality to a point. Blair has to live with her after getting cut off financially by her mom, and Vanessa basically teaches her how to be poor. It's so cute! They're such lesbians! Blair turns out to have natural talent as a cook and a maid because she is a perfectionist! She even gets a job as a maid! She does it all with bitchy joie de vivre! It's so cute!





So enjoyable! I really love the art here too, but the characters are what got me. They feel so lovely and real and Kamala is so charming! Just such a thoroughly enjoyable reading experience. And I like all the background/secondary characters too, they all feel like very full characters to me even if they don't appear a lot yet.

Hawkeye has ruined me for other comics. It is my favorite. I am obsessed. It just gives me everything I want! Like aside from the great writing and great art (except YOU, Pulido, except you; he is also the reason I can't get into She-Hulk). I've found what I really like is watching these exceptional people do very normal things and live their day-to-day lives and try to function in the world. I really love that. I do not love action-y things. I JUST DON'T LIKE ACTION-Y COMICS. I don't liiikeeee themmm. That kind of traditional (I guess) comic art is so displeasing to my eyes and I just find it so hard to stay engaged in that sort of thing. Like, recently I tried reading some Avengers Assemble and Young Avengers and I just couldn't deal with how bored I was and how much I didn't like looking at the art and didn't care about all the action bullshit. I mean, there's action in Hawkeye but it's different somehow; more fun, maybe. And I love Clint so much, I love how he stumbles disastrously through his life and is such a failure and all the flawless women in his life have no time for him.




Hey guys rec me more stuff!! I've only really read Marvel, so is there any good DC stuff? Like, do good Superman comics exist? I am invested since childhood in Clark and Lois as characters but the comics seem so blah. I don't really care about Batman and co. Is there good stuff??

anonymous prompted:How about movies you really, really hated? (Or the ones you were excited about, but ended up hating and why?)

Oh dear sweet anon. This is just a selection, I promise there is even more hate lurking in my heart. In no particular order:




A Single Man
I have discussed my hatred of this film before and I don't want to repeat myself too much, but the list would be very incomplete without this on it. This novel is incredibly important to me and the movie had everything going for it in terms of cast, but it was just soulless. It missed the entire POINT of the novel, which, you can loosely adapt works but if you're not going to hit the main thrust/capture the heart of the work, then don't even bother using the same title and character names.



Lost in Translation
I love Sofia Coppola and as of recently I'm come 'round on ScarJo a bit thanks to Natasha, but I just cannot sit through this fucking movie. I've never finished it. I just turn it off because I'm so mind-numbingly bored. ScarJo doesn't even look good in it to distract me from how boring it is. And I don't like Bill Murray, okay. I don't care for him. This is difficult as a Wes Anderson fan, as you could imagine.



Bus Stop
I thought I would like this movie, being a Marilyn fan in general and because whenever I saw pictures from it, the sort of broken down glamor of it REALLY appealed to me. But man alive did I hate this. Marilyn was awful, her voice was SO unbearable – worse than nails on a chalkboard, I do not even get what the fuck she was doing. Plus it was incredibly offensive. I mean, sometimes with old movies you have to brush off some shadiness to allow yourself to enjoy it, but this was BEYOND THE PALE. This guy LITERALLY KIDNAPS MARILYN after she spends the whole movie up to that point avoiding him/turning him down/displaying a complete lack of interest in him. But then blah blah sob stories he learns not to suck supposedly and they end up together? What?



La Belle Persone
Not to be horrible, but this movie was just Too French. It was Too French for me and I love French movies. Everything should be there! Louis Garrel as a sexy languages teacher! How great is that! But instead everything is boring and also terrible! Random suicide for no understandable reason? Louis and Léa Seydoux spend the whole time talking about an affair without ever having one and also without having any chemistry?



My Week With Marilyn
I am quite literally astonished every time I see someone say something positive about Michelle Williams in this role. Now, I like Michelle Williams a lot. I think she is very talented. But she was INCREDIBLY miscast in this movie, insanely horribly nonsensically chosen. Not that that is even the worst thing about this movie! An entire feature film about men in suits talking about Marilyn in rooms. An entire film. As though that wasn't done enough in her life and career, let us also take away her voice in a fucking movie about her. Which is another thing: the movie is from the point of view of some rando dude who likes to have a wank over what a beautiful broken bird Marilyn is? Are you kidding me? As if people didn't fetishize her mental health issues ENOUGH. I would even have been slightly more okay with it if it was about some rando girl and how Marilyn affected her – that would actually be fascinating. But I have literally less than no interest in a bunch of men standing around alternately jerking off to Marilyn (metaphorically speaking) and condemning her for not being what they want. It's boring and frankly embarrassing. Even as a huge Marilyn fan, I would say she is definitely oversaturated in our media, but you'd think just by law of averages at least ONE of those things made about her would do her justice. Honestly, I don't think any of them ever did.

Also the only acceptable actress who could play Marilyn is Christina Hendricks, I will claim this to my dying day.



Midnight in Paris
I hate Woody Allen movies. I always have. Since I was a little kid. Even before discovering the extent to which he is morally reprehensible, couldn't fucking stand his movies. It's something about the cadence of his language that just rubs me the wrong way – Vicky Cristina Barcelona made me want to actually rip my skin off, like I found the dialogue and voiceover that grating. Hoooowever I was drawn into trying this one both out of a real serious crush on Owen Wilson (don't ask) and also the casting of the literary figures seemed pretty cool (the Fitzgeralds were great, I'd watch that movie). But I am clearly allergic to Woody Allen movies because, though my reaction was not as violently hateful as usual, I still came out of the experience with a bad taste in my mouth.



Pierrot Le Fou
I really expected to love this. I love meandering French nonsense! I love roadtrips! I love Anna Karina and Jean Paul Belmondo! But for whatever reason I could not get into it at all and ended up shutting it off before it ended. Blasphemy! But what can you do; I could not emotionally connect.



Beginners
This movie was fine, I guess. I have a long-term love for Ewan, and he was very handsome as usual. The actress whose name escapes me I'm so sorry – she was very lovely too. But it was just TOO hip. You know? It was TOO HIP. It was made in some film major lab in the bowels of NYU to appeal to nineteen year old white children.



The Great Gatsby
Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha

bye



Stoker
Tumblr sure loved this movie, huh.

Look, I'm a huge Matthew Goode fan. And he was good. Nicole was fine if unremarkable. I don't get how Mia Waskfjdsklfri gets work. I think with a different girl in the lead I probably would have liked it more, because in general I am into stylized dark murderous ambiguous morality tales. But she couldn't carry the movie IMO and it suffered for it. Maybe the fault is with India as a character; I don't know. She just felt like such a void to me. Matthew Goode was playing a relatively similar character but he still imbued it with a lot; I didn't get what was even going on with her half the time, and not in an interesting, exciting way either.



Gangs of New York
Though I consider myself a general fan of Scorsese, I still go back and forth on a lot of his movies. It usually takes me a few viewings to enjoy them (except Taxi Driver, which I loved instantly, and with the exception of Goodfellas, which I hated too much to ever give a second shot to). So even though I hated Gangs of New York for being fucking interminable, I decided to give it another shot in the last year or so just to SEE if I still felt the same. AND GUESS WHAT I DID. Daniel Day was phenomenal of course, but Leo was doing that schtick he does now – you know, that "I'm squinting and frowning a lot because I'm a Serious Actor" thing. Also his accent was absurd. And did I mention it was interminable?



When Harry Met Sally
I know this is supposed to be The Romcom, and when it's on, I'll probably watch it and enjoy it well enough, I suppose. But I don't really like it. I don't really get why it's so iconic. Billy Crystal's whole character skeeves me to be quite honest.



The Hunger Games
I've talked about this before, so. Somewhere in the tags is a whole post about it, I'm lazy, I'm sorry.



Almost Famous
Another film which is a Big Deal but I never got. Why do people like this movie? I don't understand. I don't even mean this in an asshole way, I genuinely do not understand. It's such a non-event to me.



Man of Steel
The only movie I have ever walked out of. I have been a huge Superman fan since I was a little girl thanks to both the cartoon and Lois & Clark, though I have yet to ever connect to one of the films. This one INFURIATED me though. IT WAS SO STUPID. I WAS SO MAD. It was untrue to Superman as a character on the basest level. I guess things can't be interesting unless they're ~~~gritty~~*~*~ and all that fucking nonsense. HE IS A SPACE ALIEN WEARING A CAPE, PLEASE HAVE A FUCKING SENSE OF HUMOR. The only cool character was Clark's bio-mom Lara. Bitch births the first child on her planet in CENTURIES, then personally has to send that child into space without knowing what will really happen to him, watches her husband get murdered by their friend, faces down the murderer in his trial, and then stands calmly on her balcony while her entire world shatters around her because she's already lost everything important in her life. WHAT A BADASS. And yet instead of getting any more of her, I had to watch Russell Crowe run around like the Ghost of Hamlet's Father with 'deux ex machina' practically tattooed on his forehead.

ALSO SUPERMAN DOESN'T KILL PEOPLE IT IS NOT A THING HE DOES.

It was also directed SO POORLY. It was like: Clark opens a door. Shot of the door. Shot of Clark's hand. Shot of Clark's hand opening a door. I KNOW HOW OPENING DOORS WORKS, OKAY, I HAVE DONE IT ONCE OR TWICE. Plus I hate Amy Adams and she was miscast in addition to being poorly written (I knew it was over as soon as her first line was a dick joke, because she's a Cool Girl who tells dick jokes, what a fucking revelation). Lizzy Caplan was clearly put on this earth to play Lois Lane and i hope by putting this into the world I somehow will it into being like I did Pfunk and Jeff Buckley.

anonymous prompted:how about books/movies/songs/anything really that you liked, but from genres you usually avoid?


Um hm. This is difficult because I am an asshole and I tend to, you know, hardcore avoid the things I want to avoid. I am a real brat about watching stuff that I do not think will be my kind of thing. However even I can be circumvented on occasion, so I tried to come up with a list of genres that I don't really like and then find a movie that defied that for me in each. These genres would be: war movies, horror movies, masculine movies of the 70s (u know what I mean), space things, westerns, and mob movies. I am not trying to disparage those genres in any way; they're just not what I'm drawn to most of the time.


War movies: Apocalypse Now
MAN what a movie. What an incredible movie. I haven't watched it in years and honestly that's probably because I'm still recovering, but I gotta do it soon. The opening has got to be one of my favorites in cinema. It's a movie where everything works towards one common goal: the visuals, the MUSIC, the acting, everything. Incredible.

Horror movies: Rosemary's Baby
I generally cannot watch scary movies because I am a flat out coward, and I wouldn't really call Rosemary's Baby a scary movie. Horror does not always equal scary (I know that's such a weird thing to say) IMO. It's not a movie I thought I'd like based on the subject matter but I really deeply enjoyed it and then felt gross about it, because fuckin' Polanski. But it is undeniably a great movie, beautifully and awfully tense. And I've been craving horror more and more lately in general.

Masculine movies of the 70s: Taxi Driver
Lol a lot of these are masculine movies from the 70s now that I look at this list. But you know what I mean when I say that, right? It's such a distinct time in cinema and it's not something I'm naturally drawn to, aesthetically-speaking. I really have to force myself, and sometimes I'm into it and sometimes I'm not. I fucking loved this movie, though. I cannot comprehend how it managed to build tension so well without seeming to do so at all; about an hour in, I was just sitting there literally clutching my face because I was so stressed out and I didn't even know how I got to that place. It's such a slow burn of a film, so lowkey that it really sneaks up on you.

Space: Star Trek (the reboot, tho I have yet to see the Benesnit Cumberfloop one)
I saw this film under MUCH DURESS and LOTS of complaining, because I DO NOT LIKE SPACE THINGS but then I was in love in like under five minutes. I was so annoyed about it. I was obsessed for like a summer, but then it faded. And I heard the second one was lame, so.

Westerns:Red River? That's probably the closest I'll get.
I don't actually like Red River outside of Monty Clift devotion. I really can't stand westerns but this one is bearable because of Monty and Joanne Dru and their absolutely GLORIOUS romance. IT WAS SO AMAZING. It was only like fifteen minutes out of the whole movie, but they were a glorious fifteen minutes.

Mob movies:The Godfather I guess
Again, it's probably the closest I'll get. I watched this for the first time recently and I liked it well enough. I mean, I respected it as filmmaking. But I had zero emotional investment.

Did you guys know about how Shawn Hunter has a literary podcast? Well apparently he does, because he likes to read books and stuff. And I've been listening to a couple eps (do you even call them episodes with podcasts? oh well) and generally liking it, but I was rather irritated when it came to their discussion of Flowers in the Attic and Sweet Valley High. There was a kind of automatic dismissal there that really bothered me – I hate people being snide about girl books. Those things are important to me. They are important to many girls, I'm sure. They are incredibly revealing of the culture of girlhood and the lives of girls, even the trashiest ones. And they shape us, because many of us read these books. It really rubbed me the wrong way, especially because when it came time for them to discuss a John Green book I felt there was a clear level of polite respect even amongst the criticisms that was totally missing from the discussion of FitA and SVH. Because a man wrote the Fault in Our Stars, I guess, but girl trash is girl trash.

I actually didn't read any SVH, though I did read Sweet Valley Saga, which were INCREDIBLE. They were family histories – one was the family history of the twins' mother and the other of their father. They were SO GOOD. Generation-spanning! Historical delights! And now that I think of it, incredibly similar to V.C. Andrews in many ways, particularly in the doppleganger effect she loved so much wherein family tragedies, archtypes, and situations repeat over and over across generational lines. Twins obviously were a repeating factor, one ~good and one ~bad. There was a heavily fated aspect: often the two family lines would cross paths romantically only to be tragically ripped apart until finally the twins' parents found each other. There were dark family secrets abounding too, of course.

God I have to reread those.

Perhaps it's silly but there were some specific things in that podcast FitA discussion I felt I had to dispute, even if it was only into the unread internet space of my lj. Plus I think they're fair discussion points in general. I haven't talked about Andrews in depth on my lj and I would like to, so this is as good a reason as any.

Shawnie compared it to Fifty Shades and Twilight, which I get but disagree with. Twilight was boring and unimaginative, two words which could never be applied to the Andrews canon no matter how shitty you think they are. And Fifty Shades is just drivel, so I resent that. But there is also a haze of romanticized abuse in both of those books/series that makes their popularity particularly troubling to me which I would say is not present in Andrews' work exactly – Andrews does not romanticize abuse, though she does revel in it. This is a different thing, arguably just as shitty for different reasons. At no point does Andrews say these horrible things happening are good or normal; quite the opposite. They are unequivocally awful. Yet at the same time there is a definite sense of naughty fantasy about it, getting to experience these bad things in a safe way, appealing to the parts of us that crave salaciousness; being able to enjoy the bad thing while recognizing that it is a bad thing. And though we may want to visit these things in fiction they are not necessarily things we strive for, and Andrews does not represent them as such. People (especially with the new movies) are going to ship Chris and Cathy (the lead siblings of FitA) but IMO the novels do not encourage this, as romantic as their dialogue is sometimes. It is still a bad thing and the books never, ever forget that. It is constantly presented as the result of the extreme abuse they suffered, and something that would not have happened otherwise. They do not have a gentle, romantic first time like in the Lifetime version; Chris rapes Cathy. Now, the rape stuff in these books is...well that's a post for another day, but I doubt Andrews had NO IDEA what she was doing there. Cathy is constantly resisting her attraction to Chris because she is aware that it isn't right and that they are truly fucked up for life because of what was done to all of them. And yeah, they do ~end up together~ but it's after literally every single person they loved has died (often violently) and they have no one left but each other. Just like in the attic.

Also, these are HORROR NOVELS and V.C. Andrews did not like happy endings, so you can bet if a couple ends up together, it's not supposed to be nice.

Shawn Hunter also called Cathy "passive" which I honestly balked at, because Cathy is ANYTHING BUT. Yes, she's physically trapped for the majority of the first book and she takes her sweet time getting to the vengeance part in the second, but Cathy is HARDLY passive. She is filled with rage and fire and passion and she is constantly fighting back. There's this fantastic quote about Cathy in that article I'm always shoving at everyone: "While Cathy has justification for her wrath, she has no moral structure to contain or channel it. At the same time, there’s also something admirable, even enviable, about it. Unlike the 'nice' methods of coping that young women are still routinely implored to use, Cathy never denies her rage or her sexuality (two major challenges for women of any age, let alone teenagers). Cathy is never 'nice' or 'good.' Even her love for her younger siblings is fiercely protective, never 'maternal' or sentimental. A million girl-books, like Sweet Valley High, foreground the good girl, with whom we should identify, and the bad girl, whom we resist while vicariously enjoying her badness. Andrews’s books don’t combine these two girls so much as create an entirely new paradigm: a girl who is 'good' and sympathetic but also very, very angry."

ANGER IN FEMALE CHARACTERS IS VERY IMPORTANT TO ME. And Cathy is real. fucking. angry. She is defined by her rage and it infects every part of her life, especially in the second book. She is a pirouetting rage monster of vengeance and sex. And she has very shiny hair. That is the great thing about Andrews heroines, though: sure, the patriarchy does often win in the end (it always does in life) but on the way there these girls will be fucked up and mad about it. You won't find evolved ideas of forgiveness here.

What is joined in Cathy is split into more familiar (at first glance) opposing types in My Sweet Audrina. We have Audrina, the "good" one, who supposedly has everything come to her very easily and is much beloved and preferred by the father who has also rampantly mentally abused her. Then there is Vera, the "bad" one, who works hard to earn affection but does it in underhanded ways and everyone hates her. Literally everyone. And Vera does do legitimately awful things but it's all due to her own deep anger and desire to lash out at everyone who denies her, but especially at Audrina, who is so good and pure. And Audrina's so-called goodness is actively cultivated by her horrible father to reflect a sort of shitty feminine ideal. He trains her to suppress uncomfortable things, to swallow her feelings, to be quiet, to be kind, to revere him. Audrina becomes imperfect in his eyes when she no longer treats him as a god. Let me just take you through that again: Audrina becomes imperfect to her father when she ceases to worship him. And he spends the rest of her life trying to rework her into his pre-determined mold: a passive, obliging, feminine, demure, modest woman who will always listen to him and never betray him. He makes her into a very specific kind of female fantasy while bulldozing over any reality – and Vera, who is cruel and opinionated and lustful and who, worst of all, tells the truth all the time is of course hated and derided by everyone.

Another thing in that podcast that I thought was strange was everyone remarking on how ~none of this could ever happen!!!!11!! Like. Fucking DUH that is not the point. But also – the abuse of children, the abuse of women, these things do happen. They happen all the time. People HAVE been locked up in rooms for years and years by family members. I've also found the "unrealistic" criticism often lacking because, what? Something is only valid if it could or did happen exactly the same way in the real world? Call me Blanche Dubois but I don't want realism I want magic!

But seriously. It's a faulty criticism though I have used it myself many times; what it really shorthands to is "untrue." It's a way of saying "this felt untrue to me, to my experience on this earth, in some way." And to me, that is valid. Not everything connects to every person. But truth and realism – those are very different things.

One of the ways this was being bandied around was with the character of Christopher in FitA. They (Shawn and some other dude and a lady) found it extremely ~~~unrealistic~~~~ that a young man would allow himself to be trapped in an attic and would not physically overpower his captors. Which to me is a fundamental misunderstanding of the text, Christopher as a character, and the nature of abuse. First things first, Chris is a by-the-books kind of guy who is definitely a rule-follower but, MUCH more importantly, the only person he loves more than his sister is his mother. Chris is devoted to their mother Corrine. Even after learning exactly to what lengths she went to to hurt her children, he still makes excuses for her. At the end of the second book, he is the only Dollanganger child who visits her and remains in contact with her. Chris is a mama's boy. So even when Cathy presses him to dissent (Cathy is a freedom fighter, bless her), he won't out of loyalty to their mother. And ALSO, like all of the children, he has been abused. The grandmother, just to split fucking hairs, is physically very imposing, repeatedly stressed as so. She is an authority figure with absolute power over the children. Chris is a malnourished seventeen year old boy in emotional turmoil who has been living in one room for four years. He is whipped by the grandmother, watches his siblings be whipped and hit, sees the marks from his mother's whipping, and this is just the iceberg of shit heaped upon these kids. There is also a Stockholm element absolutely at work. At one point, Cathy and Chris quite literally break out of their room to go for a nighttime swim and then return to the attic. As a reader, maybe that seems crazy and stupid and it is, but we cannot forget these are kids. Kids who are learning that they cannot depend on anyone, but especially adults. Everyone learns this, but Andrews kids learn it in particularly fucked ways.

What I think a lot of people miss when it comes to Andrews is not only the horror, but the weirdness. I mean, people are aware that they are weird in a hilarious soap opera way, but IMO they gloss over a lot of the nastier, stranger, truly uncomfortable bits. Which are in the fairytale tradition, I think – the real fairytales, the fucked up ones. And this is why the Lifetime adaptations are inherently flawed. You'll get the incest greatest hits and all but you'll miss things like Chris feeding his blood to the twins to nourish them when they're being starved out by the grandmother. You'll miss Cathy's gory possible miscarriage in the middle of an important ballet audition. And I guarantee when they get around to My Sweet Audrina, you'll miss things like Aunt Mercy Marie's Tuesday teatimes, and that time she angrily fucked Arden Lowe on the muddy ground of the First Audrina's grave in the middle of a thunderstorm.

And that's really too bad.

Hey y'all I think I'm gonna post some icons in a few days and seeing as it'll probs be my last icon post for a while (I'm not really in the habit of making them much anymore) I figured I'd see if there were any requests or anything? You can link to a screencap or ask for a specific character or show or w/e.

I'm gonna try and post some fic soon, I know it's been a while. I've been in a kind of weird place yadda yadda but hopefully Stella will be getting her groove back soon.

kill your darlings, kill them dead
Peggy Carter. Natasha Romanoff. Some Bucky guest appearances.
4478 words. PG.
Vampire slayer AU.


Summary: Natasha is a slayer gone rogue, and Peggy is the Watcher tasked with bringing her in.

Note: Wrote this a few months ago for a fest. Finally remembered to post it here.




This is how Natasha looks when they meet:

Strands of red hair stick to the blood on her face, the scrapes on her cheeks. The blood on her split lip is flattering, practically cosmetic. There is a dark bruise on the bridge of her nose that lends shadows to her eyes, which are sharply green, green like grass or springtime. She wears dark, inconspicuous clothing that fits close to her body.

Peggy wears a slim-cut dark brown skirt suit, sensible heels, red lipstick. Her hair is loose around her shoulders but carefully arranged. There is no mistaking her for anyone other than who she is: a person of authority, a woman of position. She studies Natasha with mingled respect and horror.

"What happened to you?" Peggy asks, a hushed murmur.

Natasha says, "That's none of your concern."




***




Natasha has been off the map for god knows how long. There are uncertain reports as to the exact date of death of her last Watcher, who had ceased reporting to the Council some time before his passing. Natasha was hard to find, too good at slipping into the shadows. It is her job, after all. Natasha exists to slide into the shadows and kill what she finds there.

The first thing Peggy does is bring Natasha back to her apartment so she can dress Natasha's wounds.

Natasha's very green eyes travel over the beige walls and clean corners of Peggy's flat. "Nice place," she remarks.

"It'll do alright," Peggy says briskly as she pulls a chair from the small table and pats it lightly to instruct Natasha to sit. The apartment and furniture were provided for her, and are neither are particularly to her taste, not that it matters. Peggy doesn't care much for her surroundings when she has a job to do. "I'll just be a minute."

She goes to retrieve the first aid kit from the bathroom and finds Natasha still wandering when she returns, touching the little decorations on the mantelpiece, picking up a photograph. Natasha taps a nail against the glass, leaving a smear of blood across the face of the man in the photograph. She does not turn round when she speaks. "Who's this?"

"No one," Peggy says, perhaps more sharply than she ought to. "Please do have a seat, Natasha."

Natasha gives Peggy a leveled, if blank, look but drifts over to sit down. She allows Peggy to clean her many wounds, wrap her in bandages. Natasha has quite a lot of scars, probably more beneath her clothes that Peggy cannot see.

With a clucking, reproachful tone that Peggy knows must've come from her mother, she asks, "What were you doing for wound care before this?"

There are so many small, jaggedly healed injuries that clearly went uncared for. Natasha had had nothing on her person except weapons, and she had been living essentially on the street.

"Healing," Natasha says. "I do it fast enough."

She pulls away from Peggy's careful hands soon after, slinging her bag of weaponry up onto her shoulder. She refuses Peggy's invitation to stay the night on the couch.

"But where are you going to go?" Peggy asks.

"Hunting," Natasha answers shortly, and she is already gone.




***




They have not had a slayer so difficult in years.

Peggy thinks perhaps that is why she was assigned to Natasha. It might be unkind to think her colleagues only want to set her up for failure, but unkind does not necessarily mean untrue. The Council is full of men who look at her with doubt in their eyes despite the fact that Peggy has clocked more field time than any of them. So they assigned her to the rogue slayer, ostensibly as a reward for her good work. Peggy knows the truth. They want her to fail at bringing Natasha to heel so they can pat themselves on the back.

There are scant details in Natasha's file; even the year of her birth is in question. She was called much later than most slayers, and has lived longer too. The only compliment that can be paid to Natasha is that she is very good at her job.

But Peggy is too.

Peggy goes out to the cemetery and into the mausoleum where she knows a clutch of vampires sleep. She dispatches two before she allows them to briefly overpower her, and her reward is a telltale toss of red hair as Natasha comes to her rescue.

"That was stupid," Natasha says afterwards. "And an obvious ploy."

"Nevertheless it worked," Peggy says with a half-smile, brushing vampire ash from her skirt. "You know, Ms. Romanoff, it would save us both rather a lot of trouble if you would allow me to help you."

Natasha brushes past her. "Seems to me I help you. I don't get so much out of it."

Peggy knows better than to touch Natasha without permission, so she only quickens her step to catch up. "You need training, information. And on a more basic level, you clearly need physical care that you refuse to provide for yourself."

Natasha turns abruptly to face Peggy; the spark of anger in her eyes is the first clear emotion Peggy has seen her display. "I have taken care of myself my entire life," she says. "The only thing the Watchers' Council has ever given me is a dead friend and a headache."

Peggy watches that inscrutable face closely. "Friend," she repeats. "You mean your Watcher, Fury. You call him a friend?"

Natasha has a way of reacting without reacting: a minute contraction of pupils, a slight intake of breath, the tiniest pursing of lips. Peggy doubts she would notice were she not looking for it. "You don't know as much about me as you seem to think," Natasha says.

Peggy arches an eyebrow. "I could say the very same to you, Ms. Romanoff." There is a beat of tense silence before she adds, "I only want to help."

"I told you," Natasha says, "I don't want your help."




***




Nearly a month later Natasha appears on Peggy's doorstep with a stake through her shoulder. Blood has soaked into her dark clothing. As Peggy gapes for an unattractive minute, one pendulous drop falls and hits the toe of her shoe.

"My goodness," she says, ushering Natasha inside. "You should – I ought to call an ambulance, that looks –"

"It's nothing," Natasha says dismissively but breathlessly as she drops into the same chair she sat in before, all those weeks ago. She yanks the stake free, loosing a fresh torrent of blood. "Looks worse than it is."

"I sincerely doubt that." Peggy hears that motherly disapproval in her voice again and tries to tamp it down. "I don't have the materials to deal with –"

"Got a needle and thread?" Natasha is carefully peeling off her shirt, just barely wincing. "I can sew it up myself."

Peggy rushes to get towels for the wound, vaguely bemoaning that the rug is probably destroyed. "What about nerve damage, Natasha," she scolds. "What about –"

"My body was made to withstand a lot," Natasha says with impatience. "I'm not interested in lectures. You're not my keeper."

"I am, actually," Peggy says. She rolls up her sleeves, sets a basin of warm water on the table, and commences cleaning Natasha's wound – which is not, actually, all that deep, though it is painfully ragged. "I am responsible for you whether either of us likes it."

Natasha watches her with calculating eyes that betray little in the way of pain. She must have experienced quite a lot of it to be so barely fazed. "I suppose your bedside manner isn't too bad."

Peggy smiles just a little. "I'm afraid the only thing I have for the pain is some rather decent red wine," she says. "Would you like it?"

Natasha shakes her head. "I'm fine."

Concern creases Peggy's brow. "Natasha. There is a very good chance some real damage has been caused. You need to see a doctor."

"Peggy," she says, a mocking mirror of Peggy's tone. "I have been in a lot worse trouble than this. Could've killed me, and he didn't. In a week I'll be in working order again."

Peggy sincerely doubts that, but before she can say so, Natasha's words register. Not just her words – her inflection, the way she said he with a kind of familiarity.

"Did you know who – whoever did this?"

Natasha does not make eye contact as she eases a towel away from her shoulder. Perhaps she is kicking herself for giving something away; of course with Natasha it is impossible to tell what transpires in her brain during her silences. Finally she offers, "He knows how to strike to kill. Hitting me clean in the shoulder wasn't a mistake."

There is something in her voice that hints at more, at deeper meanings.

Peggy takes that in and then asks, measured, "What is he?"

Not who but what, because she wouldn't expect an answer to the former and already knows the answer to the latter. Sure enough, after a beat Natasha confirms, "A vampire. With some enhancements."

Peggy's mind is spinning at what that could mean. "A vampire you know."

"His people killed my fr– my Watcher," Natasha says. Together they begin the stitching and dressing of the wound, Peggy wincing a little if only because Natasha doesn't, and won't.

"You've been looking for them," Peggy says gently in realization. Revenge: a simple motive liable to get Natasha killed.

"Biding my time," Natasha corrects. Finally she looks at Peggy, the color of her eyes once again so startlingly clear. "This is not me asking for help."

"Only if we're being absolutely technical," Peggy says. "For the record, this is me offering it anyway."

They hold each other's gaze for a moment, and it strikes Peggy that Natasha is truly exceptionally beautiful and exceptionally intimidating, a woman with power coiled tight inside her waiting for release. She has yet to really see Natasha fight, but she can imagine that it would be impressive and deadly and elegant.

"I am not your enemy," Peggy tells her.

Natasha has been deemed uncontrollable by men who like to hold leashes tight, and Peggy understands something about that.

"We'll see, won't we?" Natasha says.




***




The first attempt at eradication goes badly.

Natasha refuses to wait until she is totally healed, and she is as unforthcoming as anyone Peggy has ever met. She doesn't tell Peggy where they are going or how many vampires to expect, only giving one warning when Peggy asks: be prepared for anything.

They end up in an abandoned building at the edge of town – a large redbrick factory both cavernous and echoing. Natasha is silent and wary as she makes her way across the floor; Peggy tries to do the same with as much skill, but unfortunately has to admit this is one area where she is outclassed.

There are maybe thirty vampires, and none of them are the vampires Natasha is after.

Later, limping dusty and bloodied back to her flat, Peggy categorizes the damage: bruises, blood scrapes, a ruined skirt that she rather liked, three broken fingers, and a black eye. Natasha tore open the wound on her shoulder.

"You are careless," Peggy hisses. "And stubborn. You're going to get both of us killed if you continue in this manner. Don't you value your life at all?"

She expects a sarcastic comment or pointed silence, and gets neither; with a quickness that knocks the breath out of Peggy's lungs, Natasha shoves her against the wall outside her apartment door. "Your people see me as a weapon and little else," Natasha says, voice cold and sharp. "When one slayer gets rusty, they just trot out another. They replace us like it's nothing. They don't value a single girl, not one. They would be glad if I died because the next one might be more malleable. My life is my mission and we both know I am expected to die doing it, so why should I care one way or another?"

It is the most she has ever said to Peggy in one breath. Peggy has training for moments like this, speeches tailor-made for different kinds of girls. She could preach the sanctity of all life, or bemoan that they are all soldiers in an unwinnable war. But Natasha would see through all of it; most of the girls before her probably saw through it all too.

"You were dealt a bad hand," Peggy says finally. "Nothing will make it alright. But it is the hand you were dealt."

Natasha eyes her suspiciously and does not ease up on the pressure keeping Peggy pinned to the wall.

"You obviously care about something if you are so insistent upon your revenge," Peggy continues. "You cared for Fury. You want his loss to mean something. You won't be able to avenge him if you keep going in half-cocked."

"We're doing this my way, or I'm doing it alone," Natasha warns.

"You are impossible," Peggy huffs. "You must learn to trust me a little. I can do more than look good in a suit. Much more."

For the first time, a tiny smile curls the very corner of Natasha's lips. "You do do that very well," she agrees. She steps back.

Peggy straightens, adjusts her clothes with her good hand, and says, "Right. We can start with you giving me all the information you have."




***




The coaxing of information turns out to be the most difficult task yet. Natasha is the very definition of unforthcoming and years of playing her cards close has turned secrecy into an ingrained habit. The story comes out in bits and pieces that Peggy must try to turn into a whole. This is what she knows:

Natasha was not present for Fury's death.

The vampires behind it belong to some kind of organization, or cult.

The vampire who put a stake through her shoulder might be personally responsible for Fury's death.

Natasha is least likely to want to talk about that vampire.

"You're protecting him," Peggy decides. "He might have killed your friend, and yet you're protecting him."

There is a map spread out over Peggy's dining room table and Natasha is leaning over it trying to figure out the vampires' hideout. Natasha does not look up; she viciously crosses out one cemetery. "I protect myself."

Peggy arches an eyebrow, ignoring that. "Need I remind you he is a vampire?"

"I know what he is," Natasha says, perhaps a touch snappishly. Peggy is becoming better at differentiating the emotions in her relatively flat voice.

"You clearly have some kind of feeling about him," Peggy presses. She hopes Natasha doesn't throw something at her head; she prepares to duck if this is the case.

But Natasha doesn't, of course. She only looks at Peggy with those keen eyes. "I feel that if he gets in my way again, he'll be dust."

She probably means it, but somehow it lacks conviction.




***




Before they can come for the vampires, the vampires come for them.

It's only a handful, but they are clearly of great power. Peggy is caught up in combat with a female vampire with long, dark hair and impressive strength, so she cannot keep an eye on Natasha at first. The vampire nearly has her teeth in Peggy's throat before she is dispatched with the stake hidden up Peggy's sleeve. It is through the resultant drifting ash that Peggy sees who Natasha is fighting and finally understands what she'd meant by enhancements.

The vampire Natasha is struggling with is tall, dark-haired, dressed head to toe in black leather – and his arm is made of metal that shines even in the dull light, powerful enough that with one strike he sends Natasha halfway across the street.

But perhaps more shocking than a technologically enhanced vampire is the man's face. Peggy knows that man's face. She hesitates, dangerously frozen in place, and then says, "James?" He turns, blue eyes blank. "James Buchanan Barnes?"

Before he can answer, Natasha has launched herself at him and Peggy has another two to deal with. She kills one; the other is wrenched away and beheaded by a heavily-breathing Natasha. She pulls Peggy to her feet almost angrily, and it is then Peggy realizes they are alone.

"Is that him, was that your vampire?" Peggy asks in a rush, turning round to check that no others are coming. The street is quiet and empty as a ghost town, no sign that moments ago there was a wild struggle.

"Stop talking about him as though he belongs to me," Natasha says. "What was that you called him?"

"James –" Peggy says. But no one really ever called him that, not even her. "Bucky," she amends, "He – he looked like a man I once knew, the friend of my –" She clears her throat suddenly, faltering. "Of a friend of mine."

Natasha wraps her arms around herself, gaze scanning the shadows between houses, between trees. "Before he was…what he is now."

"It couldn't possibly be him," Peggy says. "The man I knew is dead."

"So is that man," Natasha says.

"Yes, I suppose." Pushing has yet to get her anywhere, but Peggy can't help adding, "Your relationship with him is personal."

Natasha glances back over her shoulder once and then begins walking, presumably back to the flat. "I knew him when I was young."

They know nothing about Natasha before she was called. She was twenty years old, or maybe twenty-four depending on which supposed birth year is true, whereas most girls came to them anywhere from fourteen up, and she was already skilled at combat, already deadly, already trouble. They believe she originated in Russia but they found her in Iran and she spoke English with a flat, affectless American accent. She gave no details on her own, of course.

Back in the flat, Peggy picks up the thread of the conversation as though it had never faltered. "Did you love him?"

"Love is for children," Natasha says.

"You said you knew him as a child," Peggy counters, eyebrow arching.

The look Natasha gives her then is almost amused, almost fond. "I was never a child," she says. "Not really."

"You are very melodramatic," Peggy tells her, waiting to see if she will be rewarded with –

The corner of Natasha's mouth lifts upwards. "Comes with the territory." Her gaze flicks away and back, seeming to contemplate something before she offers, "I wasn't a child. I knew him before I was called. I didn't know what he was then."

Peggy wonders if they were lovers, or only friends, or perhaps something else entirely – it's hard to tell without knowing something of Natasha's life before. "When did you find out?"

Natasha seems to sigh. "Too late."




***




"Here is what I know," Natasha says.

She knows Fury discovered something before his death, was consumed by some research he never fully revealed to her. He told her one thing: don't trust anyone, but especially not the Council.

She believes he was not a casualty: somebody hunted him down to try and make his discovery disappear.

"He must've known it wasn't going to end well for him, he left me this before he was killed." Natasha rifles through her bag of weapons for a side pocket and pulls out a folded scrap of paper. She holds it out.

Peggy lays it flat on the table and studies the image sketched out hastily – what looks to be a skull with six curling tentacles beneath it. And one word scrawled, Hydra.

"That's their symbol, the vampires," Natasha says. "But I think it runs deeper than just them." She pauses, studying Peggy. "I think maybe they're working with – for the Council."

Peggy is silent, for once. She has spent her entire life preparing to be a Watcher, like her father before her and his father before him. She cannot have given her entire life to something so corrupt, which purports to eradicate evil while secretly using it for their own selfish purposes. To use vampires as mercenaries, to kill one of their own…

"This is no real evidence," Peggy says firmly, though her head is spinning. "This is just a theory – there's no proof."

"No," Natasha agrees. "But I wouldn't trust them if I were you." And of course Natasha has never trusted them, never trusted a group of men who took away the lives of young girls without consent or sympathy. "They don't really need me or you; if we get on their bad side, we're infinitely replaceable."

"This is mad," Peggy mutters. Her eyes travel over the scrawled symbol, the map where they have spent weeks eliminating potential headquarters. "What if that's true? What then?"

"War," Natasha deadpans, but Peggy doesn't think that's far off.




***




It happens rather quickly after that.

They have narrowed it down to three possible locations: an underground bunker beneath a mausoleum, another empty factory, or an abandoned house on the edge of town. Any way they slice it, they are unmatched: two women versus countless vampires could never end well, even two women like them.

Natasha turns out to have a plan for that. It involves three grenades.

"Even if it doesn't wipe them out, it'll send a message," Natasha says.

"You'll destroy any evidence," Peggy warns.

Dryly, Natasha says, "I doubt they'll have Council stationary lying around."

What Natasha is really after is revenge. On a small scale, first: she wants to do away with Fury's killers. On a large scale, next: she wants to take down the Council even if they aren't affiliated with maniacal cult vampires. She wants revenge for her entire life, for every rotten thing in it.

After their explosive plan is carried out, they sift through the wreckage and debris for anything that will give Peggy a sign that Natasha's little theory is correct. There is nothing, of course. The bunker beneath the mausoleum contains only battered jewels and old treasure. In the abandoned house there are only destroyed coffins and furniture. The factory floor bears Hydra's mark in red like blood beneath the inch-thick dust of blighted vampires, but there is nothing there to prove the Council were the ones operating them.

They also do not find a metal arm amongst the dust, so they know that there is at least one survivor. Peggy tries to determine if Natasha is pleased by this or not, but as usual Natasha reveals very little.

That night, contemplating further plans, they get drunk on a bottle or two of Peggy's relatively decent red wine. Sitting together on Peggy's couch, shoulder to shoulder with glasses in hand, they almost feel like friends.

"Who's the man in the photograph?" Natasha asks. She nods at the framed picture sitting on Peggy's mantle, the one she'd looked at her first night here.

"It doesn't matter," Peggy mutters.

"You love to play twenty questions," Natasha says. "When I'm the one answering things, anyway."

Peggy sighs. "Oh, alright. His name was Steve."

"Steve," Natasha repeats meaningfully, and raises her eyebrows in suggestion. "He's pretty cute, kind of skinny though. Who is he?"

Peggy clears her throat and sips her wine and generally puts off speaking with fidgety nonsense until she says, "Someone I loved."

"You don't anymore?" Natasha asks.

"He is no longer around to be loved," Peggy says, and hopes that clinches it. To further distract, she adds, "You know, your – that vampire. Bucky. Or not. He was a friend of my – of Steve. His best friend."

Natasha is looking down at her glass of wine, full lips pursed thoughtfully. Her hair catches the low, amber light of Peggy's living room, golden orange. "I never knew his real name," she says. "Codename Winter Soldier. That was what I knew."

Peggy's brow creases. "Codename…?"

Natasha glances over. "Codename Black Widow, that was me. KGB." She holds Peggy's gaze like she is daring judgment. "Guess you could say people have been controlling me my whole life."

What Natasha is really after is revenge.

"I'm sorry," Peggy says gently, aware that it isn't nearly enough. She slots this new information about Natasha into the growing picture in her mind – a mere outline that has now begin to take on real color and shape, a portrait of a girl both angry and alone.

"I'm not interested in apologies," Natasha says. "Nothing to do about it but keep going."

"Yes," Peggy agrees in a murmur, "I've found that."

By now they're both slumped back against the cushions, exhausted, wine glasses cradled in hand and heads tilted towards each other. Natasha is pale in the low-light, a worn out and wan kind of pale like she hasn't seen a full night's sleep in years. She probably hasn't. But even tired and faded she's certainly still beautiful, eyes knowing and lips full. And after a moment of studying each other – which is what they've been doing for weeks, cataloguing the other because that's what they were trained to do – it seems only natural that they should shift a little closer and kiss.

Peggy cannot recall the last time she kissed someone. In London, surely, and even then it hadn't been anyone who truly mattered; just someone to touch her, reassure her that she was real. Kissing Natasha feels rather the opposite – like Peggy isn't in her skin at all, only vibrating just outside of it.

When they pull apart, Peggy's deep red lipstick has smeared across Natasha's mouth.

"It's been a long time," Peggy says unthinkingly.

"Since you've been with a woman?" Natasha asks, probably thinking of the framed photo on the mantle.

"No." Peggy finds herself unafraid to touch now, raising gentle fingertips to Natasha's cheek and brushing her hair back. "Since…anyone." Anyone who has mattered.

The smile Natasha gives her then is small and mischievous, but very real. She takes the glasses and sets them on the counter, then slides her hand into Peggy's. "Sounds like you need some practice," she says.




***




In the morning they lay tangled in the pale blue sheets on Peggy's bed, the only thing in the entire place she picked out herself. Natasha is awake first, of course, and it is unlikely she really slept at all. Her skin is milky in the morning light, hair bright. There is a scar on her shoulder, a scar on her stomach, scars crisscrossing faint over her arms and legs. She looks down at just-waking Peggy with another smile, and Peggy is surprised by how easily Natasha smiles at her now.

"I think we should head for London," Natasha says. "Raise hell. What do you think? You up for it?"

"More than," Peggy says, but at the moment she's only interested in curling her fingers in Natasha's hair, tugging her down for a kiss that means something, for once.