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And then, at some point, the people who left started coming back.

It was the children first. The March of Dimes and Saint Jude set up programs and my town would do spaghetti fundraisers and raffles and meal trains to support the family and send the child and one parent to a hospital in the city — and the children came home. Their hair grew back. They went back to school. We were all trained to think of them as the angelic lost and they were turning into asshole teens right in front of our eyes. What a miracle, what a gift, how lucky we are that the odds for several children are in our favor!

Adults started leaving for a specific program to treat their specific cancer at a specific hospital or a specific research group. They’d stay in that city for 6-12 months and then they’d come home. We fully expected that they were still dying — or they’d gotten one of the good cancers. What a gift this year is for them, we’d think. How lucky they are to be strong enough to ski and swim and run. And then they didn’t stop — two decades later they haven’t stopped. Not all of them, but most of them.

We bought those extra hours and months and years. We paid for time with our taxes. Scientists found ways for treatment to be less terrible, less poisonous, and a thousand times more effective.

And now, when a friend was diagnosed, the five year survival odds were 95%. My friend is alive, nearly five years later. Those kids who miraculously survived are alive. The adults who beat the odds are still alive. I grew up in a place small enough that you can see the losses. And now, the hospital in my tiny hometown can effectively treat many cancers. Most people don’t have to go away for treatment. They said we could never cure cancer, as it were, but we can cure a lot of cancers. We can diagnose a lot of cancers early enough to treat them with minor interventions. We can prevent a lot of cancers.

We could keep doing that. We could continue to fund research into other heartbreaks — into Long Covid and MCAS and psych meds with fewer side effects and dementia treatments. We could buy months and years, alleviate the suffering of our neighbors. That is what funding health research buys: time and ease.

she rushes to him. fumbles her fingers across his lips. rests her head on his chest. her spot. the place where she sleeps.

and when he comes back to her, she jumps into him. brushes the sweat-drenched blond hair from his forehead like she’s done it a hundred times.

the whole thing just radiates familiarity. this isn’t a discovery. it’s a return.

she knows him. she’s touched him before. rested against him before. let herself feel safe with him before.

by this point in the story, peeta is familiar. peeta is comfortable. peeta is her safe space.

and what’s striking is that katniss never touches gale like that.

the only time she touches his face, it’s hesitant. unsure. like she’s still trying to figure out what it means to be this way with him.

The table:

The artist @dalooch did an amazing job!!

I love me some breenick!!

This can be find on the artists ig (loochleftovers) and Twitter (dalooch_)

WE WON WE WON WE WON SELNICKBREE REAL AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

🚨Beware spoilers 🚨

Just posting some of the thoughts that have been bouncing around in my head because I need to get them out.

My controversial take is that Bree losing her knowledge/memories was necessary for her character growth in Oathbound.

I don’t agree with the mechanism by which she lost her memories (soul theft), but when I recall how much anguish and guilt she felt at the end of Bloodmarked (and the anguish I felt along with her), it felt like like a healing detour.

Bree’s love for people and for her friends was always, always going to have her prioritising their safety above her own, and I think it’s important that a space was created in the story for her to “put on her own oxygen mask.”

She developed control over her power without risking anyone else’s life.

She’s no longer the girl who has to run and hide, whose friends risk their lives to protect her - now she’s the girl who straps a dagger to her thigh and traps a warlock in a magical dome all while looking drop dead gorgeous.

Romance

There’s a lovely post by Annotate with Sara that explains this and more really well, but I thought it poetic that Nick was the one to initiate Bree’s reintroduction to her old self, seeing as he accidentally/unintentionally introduced her to the society that would lead to the discovery of her true identity in the first place.

While I’ve always maintained (mostly in my head) that Nick and Bree’s intelligences cancel each other out and together they tend towards foolishness, I think that the warmth, support and safety he offered is precisely what she needed in what was a very delicate space, particularly when Erebus told her to expect the exact opposite from her friends.

Nick’s first instinct was not to judge, fear, reprimand or even reject Bree:

…Pull the most frightening question up from my depths to breathe it into existence, because Nick makes it safe to do so.

“Do you think I made a mistake?”

He holds my face in both his hands until my eyes open. “No.”

and:

Nick lets me think. Lets me become who I need to be in the circle of his arms.

••••••••••

Looking ahead

“We’ve only just gotten started, Briana Matthews. You still bear my mark. You are a king without a sword. A Pendragon, poisoned. Your own pain and blood await.”

I feel as though the end of Oathbound sort of left us in a similar place as Bloodmarked. This book isn’t a full stop and it’s not a comma, but it’s a necessary parentheses.

At the end, all of Bree’s memories come flooding back when she reclaims the missing piece of her soul.

We aren’t given time to see what this really means for Bree because Sel goes full chaos mode and we end up with That Revelation, but she is going to have to reckon with the emotional fallout of Bloodmarked and also with her decision to choose her soul over Alice’s life.

She’ll have to address the guilt she feels towards Sel after he sacrificed himself and the consequences thereof.

However, unlike at the end of Bloodmarked, Bree is now equipped with the knowledge that she is still loved by those she ‘left behind’ on her quest with the Shadow King. The knowledge that relationships are sometimes messy and hard but that - to quote her dad - “Loving folks is a practice, baby.”