I’ve seen this post a whole bunch of times but something only just clicked-
Early on during the introduction to Les Amis, Grantaire is described as not understanding exactly what he feels for Enjolras, bar knowing it’s a fascination. Hit by a coup de foudre at the very last second, Grantaire finally realises that what he’s feeling for Enjolras is love.
I was younger than you are now When I was given my first command I led my men straight into a massacre I witnessed their deaths first-hand I made every mistake And felt the shame rise in me And even now I lie awake Knowing history has its eyes on me
Think about this for a moment. Think about how hard it must have been for him to say those words.
‘He’s not your son.’
Like no no no, Molly, this is my Harry. My kid. James and Lily’s son from his appearance right down to the way he writes the alphabet and protects his enemies. I’ve known the kid literally since he was born. I know what James and Lily wanted for him. They’d want him to know what he’s getting into. They’d want him to know that we trust him. And Lily would skin me alive if I let her son face the “chosen one” scenario without knowing what it means. James and Lily Potter gave their lives as a result of this Prophecy and you’re telling me they would want to keep him in the dark? He is my godson, Molly. I would do anything to keep him safe. I’m the one Harry wrote to nearly every day for months and I know what he needs. I know what happened in the damned graveyard. I know what Harry’s been through and I know what his parents would want us to do. HE’S. NOT. YOUR. SON.
‘He’s not your son,’ said Sirius quietly.
Sirius is canonically the sort of person who’d get increasingly louder and angrier over the course of an argument. But no. Molly wants Harry to be a child. Her child. And all he can think of is Lily. Her grit. Her principles. The way she’d have laid the truth out before Harry and then taken him out to a Quidditch game or something.
He never gets to say any of that. There’s Molly’s below-the-belt Azkaban taunt and Sirius just retreats into his guilt about not actually being there for Harry… not being able to protect him last year… not keeping James and Lily safe.
Frogs fall out of my mouth when I talk. Toads, too.
It used to be a problem.
There was an incident when I was young and cross and fed up parental expectations. My sister, who is the Good One, has gold fall from her lips, and since I could not be her, I had to go a different way.
So I got frogs. It happens.
“You’ll grow into it,” the fairy godmother said. “Some curses have cloth-of-gold linings.” She considered this, and her finger drifted to her lower lip, the way it did when she was forgetting things. “Mind you, some curses just grind you down and leave you broken. Some blessings do that too, though. Hmm. What was I saying?”
I spent a lot of time not talking. I got a slate and wrote things down. It was hard at first, but I hated to drop the frogs in the middle of the road. They got hit by cars, or dried out, miles away from their damp little homes.
Toads were easier. Toads are tough. After awhile, I learned to feel when a word was a toad and not a frog. I could roll the word around on my tongue and get the flavor before I spoke it. Toad words were drier. Desiccated is a toad word. So is crisp and crisis and obligation. So are elegant and matchstick.
Frog words were a bit more varied. Murky. Purple. Swinging. Jazz.
I practiced in the field behind the house, speaking words over and over, sending small creatures hopping into the evening. I learned to speak some words as either toads or frogs. It’s all in the delivery.
Love is a frog word, if spoken earnestly, and a toad word if spoken sarcastically. Frogs are not good at sarcasm.
Toads are masters of it.
I learned one day that the amphibians are going extinct all over the world, that some of them are vanishing. You go to ponds that should be full of frogs and find them silent. There are a hundred things responsible—fungus and pesticides and acid rain.
When I heard this, I cried “What!?” so loudly that an adult African bullfrog fell from my lips and I had to catch it. It weighed as much as a small cat. I took it to the pet store and spun them a lie in writing about my cousin going off to college and leaving the frog behind.
I brooded about frogs for weeks after that, and then eventually, I decided to do something about it.
I cannot fix the things that kill them. It would take an army of fairy godmothers, and mine retired long ago. Now she goes on long cruises and spreads her wings out across the deck chairs.
But I can make more.
I had to get a field guide at first. It was a long process. Say a word and catch it, check the field marks. Most words turn to bronze frogs if I am not paying attention.
Poison arrow frogs make my lips go numb. I can only do a few of those a day. I go through a lot of chapstick.
It is a holding action I am fighting, nothing more. I go to vernal pools and whisper sonnets that turn into wood frogs. I say the words squeak and squill and spring peepers skitter away into the trees. They begin singing almost the moment they emerge.
I read long legal documents to a growing audience of Fowler’s toads, who blink their goggling eyes up at me. (I wish I could do salamanders. I would read Clive Barker novels aloud and seed the streams with efts and hellbenders. I would fly to Mexico and read love poems in another language to restore the axolotl. Alas, it’s frogs and toads and nothing more. We make do.)
The woods behind my house are full of singing. The neighbors either learn to love it or move away.
My sister—the one who speaks gold and diamonds—funds my travels. She speaks less than I do, but for me and my amphibian friends, she will vomit rubies and sapphires. I am grateful.
I am practicing reading modernist revolutionary poetry aloud. My accent is atrocious. Still, a day will come when the Panamanian golden frog will tumble from my lips, and I will catch it and hold it, and whatever word I spoke, I’ll say again and again, until I stand at the center of a sea of yellow skins, and make from my curse at last a cloth of gold.
Terri Windling posted recently about the old fairy tale of frogs falling from a girl’s lips, and I started thinking about what I’d do if that happened to me, and…well…
Anonymous asked: So how do you think Rey accepting Kylo's offer to teach her would go down? It seems less like she would accept immediately and more like she would slowly, year by year, conflict by conflict, edge a little closer to saying yes. Well, provided the thought festered in her mind enough.
i. The fifth time, he is on his hands and knees in the mud of Daluuj, rain sluicing over the both of them, turning her into a shaking, drowned thing, hair plastered to the fine line of her skull. He can only imagine what he looks like—panting like a winded bantha and gritting his teeth around the pain, down on his belly in the filth.
There are two lightsabers in her hand (both of them his, one by blood, the other the work of his hands.) He hopes, with a bright bitterness, the cracked crystal chooses that moment to fly apart, and swallow her in light.
It does not. Instead, she steps forward, rests a hand on the wet tangle of his hair, very gently, like he is a wild animal to be quieted. (He wants to twist, bite out the soft skin of her wrist, bury his teeth in the tangled thread of veins and nerves and pull, tear. He wants to eat her whole.)
She says, stop asking me that.
ii. He is always asking from his knees, flat to the earth, down on the ground in the mud and snow and grass (once, still spitting out pond scum, green at the corners of his mouth.) She stands above him ever, a tower, a pillar, a thing unmoved. He could batter himself to death against her, and the rain would wash away the blood and she wouldn’t care. She wouldn’t care.
He thinks about tearing down those ramparts, finding the fear he knew still lingered in her, curled up like a sleeping animal. (It was all he had recognized in her mind; everything else was so bright.)
He never tries to coax her out, to persuade her to open the gates and allow him inside. He’s only ever been the tower, or the lightning that fell on it; anything else would be futility. No one welcomes the lightning in because it spoke a few honeyed words.
Also, it never occurs to him to try.
iii. The twelfth time, it’s Glottal and he is on his back, thinking that he should not have worn his cloak—the humidity is thick enough to choke on, and this fight was particularly vicious. She had wanted to end it quickly, and he had not wanted to let her. He tastes salt and blood, when he licks at his lips.
She crouches down beside him, cocks her head. what would you teach me? she asks.
It’s the first time he’s ever seen her eyes without the refracted red and blue of their lightsabers to fill them. They are dark, which he had not expected. The ways of the Force.
She glances down at his body, which struggles under the great invisible weight that will not let him rise, nor reach for his lightsaber. I already know the ways of the Force. What else?
He bares his teeth. Is this how you used to bargain for scraps on Jakku, scavenger?
Yes. What else?
The lightsaber forms. The ancient ones, developed by Jedi and Sith, not some half-trained moisture farmer.
Again, she glances away, this time at his abandoned lightsaber. I think I can manage. What else?
I’ll give you the coordinates for the Stormtrooper training and conditioning facilities, he says after a moment, because he remembers the way she wept over FN-2187 on Starkiller. The Resistance would never pass up a chance to save innocent children from the clutches of the First Order, he knows. He has to believe—
She is perfectly still, resting on her haunches, studying him with those dark eyes. Two locations now, she says finally, as proof of good faith. Next time we can discuss terms. I was a good scavenger, she says, and there’s something almost like a smile, tugging at the corner of her mouth. I was never swindled or cheated, and I don’t intend to start with you.
You never answered my question, you know, she says as they ready themselves to return to their separate ships, carefully standing two lightsabers’ lengths apart. What could I learn from you, Kylo Ren?
The back of his throat is thick with blood and bile, and he has no answer.
iv. Two major Stormtrooper training and conditioning centers burn. The next time they meet, she is a tower, a pillar—but tired-eyed too, and he imagines he can still smell the acrid smoke in her hair, see the bruises from where a hundred small hands reached up to hers, begging sanctuary, sanctuary.
you need a teacher, he says. The hilt of his lightsaber remains in his hand, unignited.
what for? she laughs hollowly. (She does not even reach for hers.)
For a long moment, they stare at one another, and there is only rushing wind. Finally, he says, you do not have to be this.
(he means: tired and bruised, he means, a tower, he means, a thing unmoved, standing over him always. he means: he does not know what he means. he has never tried to articulate it before, not-having-to-be.)
She recoils as though he has struck her—but he has struck her before, and this is worse, the way her eyes open into wounds he did not mean to inflict. And I suppose you are the one to teach me that lesson? she asks, her voice cold as the Outer Rim. Tell me, Ben—did you have to be this?.
(He eventually gives her coordinates for the other three conditioning facilities, the heat from her lightsaber pushing at the softness of his throat. She generously breaks his nose with her boot, before going.)
v. The twenty-third time, he is lying on the floor of Snoke’s chamber, and most of the blood is not his. (Snoke had bled and bled and bled, and he had kept hacking, screaming through mouthfuls of foul ichor, pushing all his pain and fury and didihavetobethisdidyouhavetomakemethis into every blow, even when Snoke’s lightsaber buried itself in his belly, when the Force reached into him and snapped and crushed, and kept breaking—)
hey, he says, though it comes out slurred, half-choking. He can’t seem to draw breath. scavenger, hey. scavenger—I know what I can teach you now.
He is dimly aware of her hands, thin pressure on his skin as though to hold in blood no longer there. Somewhere above him, Leia Organa is screaming for a medic, and he feels a dull pang of regret for that, if nothing else. (something of the boy who once was, cannot bear to see mother cry.) The rest is right though, is fitting (he is always on his knees, on his back, down in the filth and looking up at the ramparts) and
scavenger, he says. She is looking down at him with wide, dark eyes. There is blood on her cheek; he imagines it is his. scavenger, I can teach you this—I can show you how to die. watch carefully, I’ll only demonstrate it once.
don’t—she says in an uncertain voice.
no, you need a teacher, I’ve been saying so since the beginning. watch. watch. are you watching? say ‘yes m—’
