✒⸻ July

• Biosimilar, by peachygreen (Pathologic fanfic, Burakhovsky)

╰┈• "Darkness curled her childish mirth like decay curled a flower."

• Piranesi by Susanna Clarke (spoilers to the ending)

╰┈• People were walking up and down on the path. An old man passed me. He looked sad and tired. He had broken veins on his cheeks and a bristly white beard. As he screwed up his eyes against the falling snow, I realised I knew him. He is depicted on the northern wall of the forty-eighth western hall. He is shown as a king with a little model of a walled city in one hand while the other hand he raises in blessing. I wanted to seize hold of him and say to him: In another world you are a king, noble and good! I have seen it! But I hesitated a moment too long and he disappeared into the crowd.

A woman passed me with two children. One of the children had a wooden recorder in his hands. I knew them too. They are depicted in the twenty-seventh southern hall: a statue of two children laughing, one of them holding a flute.

I came out of the park. The city streets rose up around me. There was a hotel with a courtyard with metal tables and chairs for people to sit in more clement weather. Today they were snow-strewn and forlorn. A lattice of wire was strung across the courtyard. Paper lanterns were hanging from the wires, spheres of vivid orange that blew and trembled in the snow and the thin wind; the sea-grey clouds raced across the sky and the orange lanterns shivered against them.

The Beauty of the House is immeasurable; its Kindness infinite.

• Running on Air by eleventy7 (Harry Potter fanfic, Drarry)

╰┈• Both of them have had something struck from their voices since the war, Harry thinks. That polite deference that seems heavy as silence, blank as white walls, like one person in an empty room.

╰┈• "And look how you've changed," he says. "Is it just me, or did you just pause to actually think about what you were about to say?"

╰┈• "Coming home is hard. Going away is easy,"

╰┈• Harry parks the car and pauses for a moment. It's in the heart of winter, and he's in the middle of nowhere at two a.m, listening for the sound of a wave breaking, listening for the sound of another human voice. Listening to the wind blow southerly, southerly, from the edge of mainland Britain, listening to it whistle through the cracks in the rocks and the secret hollows and coves along the coast.

╰┈• Are we getting closer, or just getting lost? It doesn't matter, Harry thinks.

╰┈• Harry watches the world roll past, and it reminds him of his memories: scenery constructed around him, only to vanish again a moment later. Rebuild, dissolve. The scenes collapse and fade like waves breaking on the shore.

╰┈• "and Harry's reminded of how the ocean sometimes feels like an echo of his pulse."

╰┈• Harry knows the journey by heart. It's like drawing breath, it's like speaking his own name, it's like stepping into the night and tilting his head back to stare at the stars.

• the measure of the year by BeautifulSoup (Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell fanfic, Johnsquared)

╰┈• There was a curious song that was sung in the North near Christmas.

Segundus had first heard it that first winter he had spent in York, bright and alert with the possibility of it all – the magic of the North spread out before him, the air cold and invigorating against his skin.

One night in mid-December he had been walking home past the cathedral, craning his neck up in an attempt to see where the dizzying towers met the black of the starless night and found himself unable to. Just as he looked back to earth with a sigh, he heard the rustle of a great group of people, then a long mournful note sung by a single man. That note had stopped Segundus in his tracks, despite his previous hurry to get home as the cold seeped closer to his bones through his thin coat. The hair at the back of his neck had shivered and risen as more voices joined that first, as the bleak harmony dissolved into words he could not quite make out, but he had stood still, arrested, staring wide-eyed at the group of wassailers standing outside the minster doors. The song had ended, the spell had broken, and he had dropped the few small coins in his purse into the hat before them before hastening home.

In the years since – more than ten, now, he could hardly believe – he had heard the song many times, had tracked down the lyrics and the title (although both seemed to change depending on who he spoke to, or the area of the North he was visiting). It was always sung in the dark, and, despite being sung outside churches in the season of Christ’s birth, seemed to have very little to do with Him or the Church at all.

After that first time, he had thought it would be a song like any other – it had, surely, been an accident of timing and a wild romantic moment on his own part that had given him such a visceral reaction to it.

The second time he heard it he had hardly been aware of it, drifting as it had through his window in Lady-Peckitt’s Yard from the street below. He had felt his skin prickle as he sat at his notes, and had risen to shut the window before realising it already was shut, and instead he had opened it and heard the voices, low and longing as a memory, had listened to it with the cold wind on his face and his eyes closed.

The third time, he heard it formally. It was by then his second winter in York, and he had been invited by Mr Honeyfoot to dinner. Segundus – although he had no memory now of how they had got onto the subject – had mentioned the curious song, and the oddities of it.

“Oh,” Mr Honeyfoot had said, “I suppose it is rather strange, when one comes to think on it.” And he had asked his daughter to give them the pleasure of performing for them.

It was a different beast when sung in the sweet high voice of Jane Honeyfoot in the tasteful drawing room, tamer – his skin did not itch in the same way – but it allowed him a closer inspection of the lyrics. He found that by the end of the young lady’s recital he was sitting forward to listen, his elbows on his knees, and Miss Honeyfoot’s cheeks were quite pink under his scrutiny. It had been an admirable performance, although Segundus found that he missed the rawness, the wildness of hearing it out of doors, pulling in the darkness. He had thanked Miss Honeyfoot and said goodnight to his friends, and now armed with the title of the song set himself to studying it.

He found record of it in old books and broadsides, found his way to doors and inns and took note of how it changed between the Ridings, caught hold of the solid, unchanging core of it and dug in his nails. He felt the shadow of it rise on the walls behind him, his guts twisting in a way he found hard to give up. It felt a little like falling in love.

His favourite version – they were all very similar, changing only in the odd word or two from parish to parish, perhaps a little variation in the tune – had come from an old woman who lived on the outskirts of Newcastle. She had been ancient even then, in the winter of 1809: thin white hair escaping her cap like wisps of smoke, face as lined and cracked as the limestone pavements of the moors, back and hands all bent in echoes of each other as she sat before the fire waiting for the kettle to boil. Her voice had been deep and dark, hoarse with the rough use of the years. When she had sung for him, he had sat entranced, the hairs on his arms and his neck lifting just as they had at the cathedral. She was not a talented singer, did not have a partner to achieve that melancholy harmony of the wassailers, but she sang as if by doing so she was tearing the song out of her very soul. He had visited with the aim of transcribing the song to take away and study alongside his other variations, but he had been so transfixed by this old, old woman – her eyes closed tight as she rocked herself with the almost primitive rhythm of it, lit only by the glow of the fire in the early December dark – that he had to ask her to take him through it another three times before he was sure he had it.

When written, it looked almost like a spell. The strange words and thick, flat vowels of the North made it sound foreign, indecipherable to Segundus’ southern ears and unsuited to the sharp sounds of his southern tongue when he tried to speak it aloud.

The song had become a reason to look forward to the winter: its re-emergence holding off the brunt of the sudden dark nights and the thick snow blowing in from the North Sea, although it was far from warm itself. It did not so much keep the dark out as invite it in, but it was an invitation that made the dark keep its teeth beneath its lips.

╰┈• Segundus had thought he had heard all the variations possible on the song. He had heard it sung by children on street corners, hats held out for coins. He had heard it sung by groups of men and women framed by the great arching doors of the cathedral. He had heard it sung in alehouses, in posting inns, by firesides in remote two-room cottages by men and women as ancient as the hills.

Hearing it in Childermass’ rough, low voice was like hearing it for the first time.

His skin shivered with the sound of it, goose-skin rippling up his arms even in the heat of the crowded room. His guts turned to liquid, swirled like molten gold and flowed into his veins. He heard the words clearly – dark and sinister, the description of a world he had thought was in the past. Now that they were being sung to him (and Childermass was singing to him now, for him, not really for any of the others assembled on this dark winter night) they were almost a promise.

The hall was silent as Childermass sang. The low buzz of conversation that had been present throughout the evening had vanished, soaked up by the captivating sound of Childermass’ voice. The only sound came on the second refrain, when an old man from the village stepped forward to join in – not with the words, just providing a quiet, keening note to layer with Childermass’ voice, pushing it into relief and making Segundus shiver and close his eyes.

It had been haunting enough in the centre of York – bright with fires and candles shining through a hundred windows; at Starecross it crept into his bones and seeped from the very stones of the house, crawled in from the moor.

He could see it behind his eyelids, the layers of the song: the King making a bargain with the snow, with the holly, with the robin redbreast and the encroaching dark. I will give to you this season, the closest to my heart, the King said in Childermass’ voice, caressing the darkness with his hand and his words, and how like the darkness Childermass sounded, how deep and lingering, how scented with woodsmoke and stories and magic.

• The Echoes Resound by BeautifulSoup (Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell fanfic, Johnsquared)

╰┈• full of the knowledge that he would trust this man with his life. He had already trusted him with his magic – seen him cup it in his hands like a fledgling bird, something delicate and wonderful – and the two were more or less the same thing in Segundus’ mind. It was a weight, an expectation, taken off of him to feel as known as Childermass made him feel, like any mistake he might make had already been predicted and forgiven.

╰┈• The breath vanished from his lungs as he stumbled a little over the uneven rocks down to the shore, watched the waves froth as they tumbled over and over one another, advancing and retreating again and again. The shape of it, Segundus thought, almost looked like writing: white froth on dark stone full of fissures and cracks, the call of the birds and the shape of them in the sky a different paragraph in the same book.

╰┈• There was so much swarming inside him, memories and details not just of the past, but of this present life long forgotten, disturbed like silt on a riverbed during a flood: a new course being drawn by overabundance.

╰┈• Childermass slid into the seat beside Segundus with a mug of tea, and pushed a plate of pastries in front of him. Segundus wasn’t sure where he had found these. Perhaps in that strange no-man’s land between lives yesterday, that moment between closing his eyes for the final time and opening them to the bright dawn, he had uncovered a spell for the procurement of pâtisserie.

╰┈• of how he felt he might now spend the rest of his days feeling as though he was trapped between two sets of memories like a flower pressed between pages of a book,

╰┈• He felt so old here, where had only ever been young.

╰┈• He kissed Childermass, full and deep until his chest ached for breath, not because it was empty but because it was overfull.

• i forgot the difference between seduction and arson by gyzym (Pacific Rim fanfic, Newmann)

╰┈• In their haphazardly joined skull-space Newt draws a breath and Hermann excises it, pushing it out with a violence that Newt tracks carefully; the precision converts him, however briefly, into a spirometer. You and me and the squalling infant makes three, the barely-born with thoughts that glisten like viscera but stab like shatter-shards -- glass, shrapnel, who cares. Newt feels more or less Frankenstein's monster, the seams of this latest connection stitched with reckless abandon into the holes the last try left, and every nerve ending he's got is sobbing a fucking exhausting song. Somebody's childhood is screaming his name. Somebody's future is writing his obituary. You are not a spirometer, somebody's thinking, and it's almost definitely not the kaiju baby; about that, at least, Newt is pretty fucking sure.

It's weird, drifting, The Drift with its capital letters, the brain with all its hairpin turns. After, Newt'll remember pieces of lives that were never his, will tremble himself awake and asleep riding the crest of borrowed doubts, losses. With five, god, with fucking ten seconds to process, this whole thing'll be a different story, and he won't remember this piece of it, this part that's happening right now. He's three people -- he's two people and one not-person -- he's tracking the way he keeps pulling in air and Hermann keeps shoving it out again, keeps batting it away, because everything else is so goddamn loud.

I'm not going to fucking hold my breath for you, Newt wants to say, and the funny thing is that he's been wanting to say that for years but he's never meant it literally before, never meant, Would you stop fucking doing that, stop shutting it out, we need that, dude, we need it to live.

Except that he has meant that, and he's meant it every time. Somebody's stomach is turning against them. Somebody's glands are learning to secrete their momma's poisons.