ʀᴀɪꜱᴇᴅ ᴡʀᴏɴɢ

[ BANDAGE ] : sender bandages a wound on receiver.

[ GUIDE ] : sender puts a hand on he receiver's back to guide them somewhere.

[ WAVE ]: sender waves down receiver to get their attention.

[ SIGN ]: sender raises their hand to sign to receiver. what follows can be anything the sender desires.

[ LIFT ]: sender lifts receiver's chin to look at them.

[ LIGHT ]: sender lights receiver's cigarette/candle/etc.

[ FIND ] : sender finds receiver beaten and/or bloodied.

[ PIN ]: sender pins receiver against the wall during combat/sparring.

[ GET DOWN ]: sender tackles receiver out of the way of danger.

[ TAKE ]: sender takes a hit meant for receiver.

[ CAUGHT ]: sender finds receiver somewhere they aren't supposed to be.

[ TRAP ]: sender traps the receiver somewhere they don't want to be.

[ DARLING ]: sender touches receiver's cheek.

[ SNATCH ]: sender snatches receiver's wrist as they turn to go.

[ STAB ]: sender stabs receiver.

[ DRAG ]: sender drags receiver from point a to point b.

[ SIT ]: sender sits on receiver's lap.

[ EN GARDE ]: sender and receiver get into some kind of fight.

[ DRUNK ]: sender finds receiver drunk.

[ BLOOD ]: sender walks into receiver's room covered in blood.

[ FLOWER ]: sender offers a flower to receiver.

[ HOLD ]: sender reaches to hold receiver's hand.

[ BRUSH ]: sender brushes a strand of hair out of receiver's face.

[ NOTE: ] sender writes a note for receiver. the contents are whatever the sender decides.

[ EYES ]: sender notices receiver looking at them.

[ STOP ]: sender raises hand to signal the receiver to stop in place.

[ TAP ]: sender taps receiver on the shoulder to get their attention.

[ WAKE ]: sender gently wakes receiver from a nap or otherwise.

[ MORNING AFTER ]: sender and receiver wake up together for the first time after a night of passion.

[ BLANKET ]: sender drapes a blanket over receiver's shoulders.

[ HUDDLE ]: sender and receiver huddle together in an effort to stay warm.

[ TUG ]: sender pulls receiver away from them.

[ PUSH ]: sender pushes receiver away from them.

𝒯he Adelita 𝕯ating Show. 💞

❝ He is very rough around the edges, isn't he? Like cactus coral. Or a werewolf in need of a grooming. ❞ Handsome too-- must she leave this out? Adella taps her unforthcoming mouth; a performative gesture, to be sure, considering that her mind had settled on the answer all too immediately. ❝ That Heathcliff of his has him stuck on a meat hook, I think, and I wouldn't treat him much better. I don't think he would want that. ❞

Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë

Catherine is only now learning to hear the silence, the pauses, what he means in the space where words live that remain unsaid - a language of its own, it seems, born out of the way the wind howls louder than any voice out on the ridges, out of the fire crackling in this house full of its old wrongs and bitterness, out of the loneliness and the altitude and the way sorrow is drowned out softly when there's no one to listen.

It comes unnaturally to her still, quick and sharp-tongued as is her way - but she finds something grounding and steady in it, and in some ways, in her own clumsiness. It would not do, after all, for only one of them to be uncertain.

When she sighs the exhale is softer than the crackle of sparks on log, and her hands twist absently into the corners of an old shawl, "I know very well I have been foolish and cruel and impish- and likely would have been still worse when I first arrived here, had I the means with which to avenge myself." Her heart was not nearly as hard as her old jailer's, however - this she did not say also. Nellie might be well pleased, she thinks with some amusement, to see her young lady has learned to hold her tongue. "Still, I too inflicted what pain I could when I was myself wounded."

It was human. She was unexpectedly given grace -and it seems, learned grace in return.

There had been a time when every syllable from her lips had cut like a lash.  He could remember it well enough – the severity of her wit, the proud lift of her chin, the scorn that had burned hot and searing.  In the beginning, he had scarcely known what to make of her.  A creature too bright and restless for the dark old house, fluttering about its rooms like some wild bird trapped indoors.

Hareton watched the small movement of her hands twisting in the worn shawl.  The gesture was slight, uncertain – so unlike the bold, reckless girl who had once mocked him openly for his ignorance.

Foolish and cruel, she called herself.

He felt a faint tightening in his chest, an awkward sort of protest stirring in him.

It had wounded him then, more deeply than he would have confessed.  The shame of her laughter.  The helpless anger of knowing she spoke truth where his ignorance was concerned.

Another memory stirred – the crack of the fowling gun bursting wrong in his hands, smoke biting sharp at his eyes and the sudden sting along his arm.  Long days by the fireside afterwards, pale and bloodless, set to bursts of Catherine’s song.  Her sudden, earnest request that they should be friends.  The light touch of her lips alighting on his cheek.

That wound had dulled with time, or perhaps something else had come to lie over it.

“Let us not be miserable any longer.”

Hareton lifted his eyes again to find she was smiling faintly. Not with the careless gaiety he had seen in her once long ago.  This smile was smaller, quieter, but no less sincere.

“You and I.”

He felt the words settle somewhere deep inside him, felt the heat climb his weather-beaten cheeks.  His gaze drifted briefly, shyly, to the fire.  Flames licked low around the darkening logs, their light rising and falling along the walls that had known so many bitter voices. Now there were only two. The thought ought to have felt lonely. It did not.

Hareton rubbed the back of his neck again, a gesture of old uncertainty that returned whenever his mind pressed upon matters he could not easily name.

“Aye,” he said at last.  “Aye, I reckon we might be.”

The corner of his mouth twitched – not quite a smile, though the impression of one lingered there a moment.

“It’s been dark here long enough.”

Hareton glanced once more towards the hearth before looking back to her, something thoughtful in his dark eyes.

“We could mend it some,” he said slowly, as though testing the notion even as he spoke it.  “The house, I mean.” His gaze flicked briefly to her hands. Fine, fair. “And the rest besides.”

He drew a breath slowly through his nose.

@handworn asked : “misery made me a fiend.” – for Catherine! - FRANKENSTEIN STARTERS (ACCEPTING)

"Yes," She says directly, voice sharper than she intends with passion that ignites suddenly from the embers of the exhaustion she has been wearing for weeks, something between old anger and emphasis which she cannot presently name, the words catching immediately like flame on dry wood, "As it has made him, as it has made all of us."

Death, she had said, that night with trembling hands and eyes as dark and silent as a still lake. The devil asked her how she felt and she had seen and lived so much death she felt only death - now, it seems, she has seen and lived so much hate she could scarcely feel without it, and that is worse. Her papa would not recognize her now, Catherine thinks. The girl who walked through the threshold and said, chin lifted and defiant, that she shall at least love and no one can take it from her - has burned down altogether.

A fiend.

Heathcliff.

Hareton had never rightly known what the man had been to him. Master, tyrant, gaoler – all fitted easily enough. There had been something else beneath them, however, something harder to name and harder still to cast away. Heathcliff had raised him, after a fashion. Feeding him with one hand while the other lifted to strike. There had been no tenderness in it. No teaching but what came from the rough laughter of men who thought cruelty a sport.

Still, the dead man had been the only father the world had given him.

Beyond the windows the moors stretched black and endless beneath the night, its grasses bent low beneath the wind’s hand. He had belonged to that wildness once. He had belonged to that wildness once, no better than the dogs in the yard. Snapping, snarling, living as they did.

The men who had shaped him had been loud, coarse creatures of appetite and temper. They drank hard, cursed harder, laughed at any gentleness as though it were a sickness. Hareton had grown among them like a weed among stones, never taught to think himself capable of anything finer.

Misery had made him a fiend, aye.

He lifted his gaze at last, though not directly to her eyes at first. Instead he looked at the faint glow of the fire upon her sleeve, the pale curve of her wrist where it caught the light. Catherine seemed slight under the dark weight of the house, yet Hareton knew better than to mistake her for fragile. He had seen too much of what she had endured.

Her father dead.

Her freedom stolen.

Her husband dead too, and little loss in him.

Her days spent beneath the same roof that had twisted him into what he was.

Catherine –

Her name pressed against his teeth, but went unsaid. Biting down around it, he drew breath and rubbed a hand over the back of his neck. Despite the breadth of his shoulders, the gesture was awkward and half-boyish.

“I – ”

His brow furrowed as he wrestled with something stubborn inside himself. Speech never came easy.

“No.”

At last the answer came, low and plain.

“No,” Hareton repeated, more firmly. “I’ve been one, maybe. Near enough.”

His gaze drifted for a moment towards the darkened stairs, as though the house itself might still carry Heathcliff’s shadow along its passages.

“He taught me little else,” Hareton said, the words slow and thoughtful, as if each had to be lifted and set down with care. “But I’ve no mind to stay so.”

Finally, his dark eyes travelled to hers. He should like to be good to her, though he scarcely knew how. He shifted again, uncertain, the old awkwardness returning.

ⁱ  ᶜᵒᵘˡᵈ  ᵍʳᵒʷˡ   /    𝘪  𝘤𝘰𝘶𝘭𝘥  𝘦𝘢𝘵  𝘺𝘰𝘶  𝘸𝘩𝘰𝘭𝘦

› prompts from james baldwin's novel giovanni's room (1956). feel free to tweak as you see fit.

❛ perhaps home is not a place but simply an irrevocable condition. ❜

❛ you don’t have a home until you leave it and then, when you have left it, you never can go back. ❜

❛ if you cannot love me, i will die. ❜

❛ before you came i wanted to die. ❜

❛ it is cruel to have made me want to live only to make my death more bloody. ❜

❛ what is this thing about time? ❜

❛ you are not that young anymore. ❜

❛ i often wonder what i'd do if there weren't any books in the world. ❜

❛ i would have stayed at home. ❜

❛ you never have loved anyone, i am sure you never will! ❜

❛ and you—you are immoral. ❜

❛ you are, by far, the most immoral man i have met in all my life. ❜

❛ look, look what you have done to me. ❜

❛ do you think you could have done this if i did not love you? ❜

❛ is this what you should do to love? ❜

❛ do you think anything else under heaven really matters? ❜

❛ i simply wondered about the dead because their days had ended and i did not know how i would get through mine. ❜

❛ the world is mostly divided between madmen who remember and madmen who forget. ❜

❛ perhaps he is a fool or a coward but almost everybody is one or the other and most people are both. ❜

❛ one day i'll weep for this. one of these days i'll start to cry. ❜

❛ people are too various to be treated so lightly. ❜

❛ i am too various to be trusted. ❜

❛ if i could make you stay, i would. ❜

❛ it takes strength to remember. ❜

❛ it takes another kind of strength to forget. ❜

❛ i really don’t know how you have managed to live so long. ❜

❛ you will go home and then you will find that home is not home anymore. ❜

❛ then you will really be in trouble. ❜

❛ here comes your baby. ❜

❛ what are you doing all the time? ❜

❛ sometimes when you smiled at me i hated you. ❜

❛ what are you always hiding? ❜