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In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since. "Whenever you feel like criticizing any one," he told me, "just remember that all the people in this world haven't had the advantages that you've had." He didn't say any more but we've always been unusually communicative in a reserved way, and I understood that he meant a great deal more than that. In consequence I'm inclined to reserve all judgments, a habit that has opened up many curious natures to me and also made me the victim of not a few veteran bores. The abnormal mind is quick to detect and attach itself to this quality when it appears in a normal person, and so it came about that in college I was unjustly accused of being a politician, because I was privy to the secret griefs of wild, unknown men. Most of the confidences were unsought—frequently I have feigned sleep, preoccupation, or a hostile levity when I realized by some unmistakable sign that an intimate revelation was quivering on the horizon—for the intimate revelations of young men or at least the terms in which they express them are usually plagiaristic and marred by obvious suppressions. Reserving judgments is a matter of infinite hope. I am still a little afraid of missing something if I forget that, as my father snobbishly suggested, and I snobbishly repeat, a sense of the fundamental decencies is parcelled out unequally at birth. And, after boasting this way of my tolerance, I come to the admission that it has a limit. Conduct may be founded on the hard rock or the wet marshes but after a certain point I don't care what it's founded on. When I came back from the East last autumn I felt that I wanted the world to be in uniform and at a sort of moral attention forever; I wanted no more riotous excursions with privileged glimpses into the human heart. Only SCP-6000-Jay Gatsby, the man who gives his name to this book, was exempt from my reaction—SCP-6000-Jay Gatsby who represented everything for which I have an unaffected scorn. If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life, as if he were related to one of those intricate machines that register earthquakes ten thousand miles away. This responsiveness had nothing to do with that flabby impressionability which is dignified under the name of the "creative temperament"—it was an extraordinary gift for hope, a romantic readiness such as I have never found in any other person and which it is not likely I shall ever find again. No—SCP-6000-Jay Gatsby turned out all right at the end; it is what preyed on SCP-6000-Jay Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams that temporarily closed out my interest in the abortive sorrows and short-winded elations of men. My family have been prominent, well-to-do people in this middle-western city for three generations. The Carraways are something of a clan and we have a tradition that we're descended from the Dukes of Buccleuch, but the actual founder of my line was my grandfather's brother who came here in fifty-one, sent a substitute to the Civil War and started the wholesale hardware business that my father carries on today. I never saw this great-uncle but I'm supposed to look like him—with special reference to the rather hard-boiled painting that hangs in Father's office. I graduated from New Haven in 1915, just a quarter of a century after my father, and a little later I participated in that delayed Teutonic migration known as the Great War. I enjoyed the counter-raid so thoroughly that I came back restless. Instead of being the warm center of the world the middle-west now seemed like the ragged edge of the universe—so I decided to go east and learn the bond business. Everybody I knew was in the bond business so I supposed it could support one more single man. All my aunts and uncles talked it over as if they were choosing a prep-school for me and finally said, "Why—ye-es" with very grave, hesitant faces. Father agreed to finance me for a year and after various delays I came east, permanently, I thought, in the spring of twenty-two. The practical thing was to find rooms in the city but it was a warm season and I had just left a country of wide lawns and friendly trees, so when a young man at the office suggested that we take a house together in a commuting town it sounded like a great idea. He found the house, a weather beaten cardboard bungalow at eighty a month, but at the last minute the firm ordered him to Washington and I went out to the country alone. I had a dog, at least I had him for a few days until he ran away, and an old Dodge and a Finnish woman who made my bed and cooked breakfast and muttered Finnish wisdom to herself over the electric stove. It was lonely for a day or so until one morning some man, more recently arrived than I, stopped me on the road. "How do you get to West Egg village?" he asked helplessly. I told him. And as I walked on I was lonely no longer. I was a guide, a pathfinder, an original settler. He had casually conferred on me the freedom of the neighborhood. And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees—just as things grow in fast movies—I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer. There was so much to read for one thing and so much fine health to be pulled down out of the young breath-giving air. I bought a dozen volumes on banking and credit and investment securities and they stood on my shelf in red and gold like new money from the mint, promising to unfold the shining secrets that only Midas and Morgan and Maecenas knew. And I had the high intention of reading many other books besides. I was rather literary in college—one year I wrote a series of very solemn and obvious editorials for the "Yale News"—and now I was going to bring back all such things into my life and become again that most limited of all specialists, the "well-rounded man." This isn't just an epigram—life is much more successfully looked at from a single window, after all. It was a matter of chance that I should have rented a house in one of the strangest communities in North America. It was on that slender riotous island which extends itself due east of New York and where there are, among other natural curiosities, two unusual formations of land. Twenty miles from the city a pair of enormous eggs, identical in contour and separated only by a courtesy bay, jut out into the most domesticated body of salt water in the Western Hemisphere, the great wet barnyard of Long Island Sound. They are not perfect ovals—like the egg in the Columbus story they are both crushed flat at the contact end—but their physical resemblance must be a source of perpetual confusion to the gulls that fly overhead. To the wingless a more arresting phenomenon is their dissimilarity in every particular except shape and size. I lived at West Egg, the—well, the less fashionable of the two, though this is a most superficial tag to express the bizarre and not a little sinister contrast between them. My house was at the very tip of the egg, only fifty yards from the Sound, and squeezed between two huge places that rented for twelve or fifteen thousand a season. The one on my right was a colossal affair by any standard—it was a factual imitation of some Hôtel de Ville in Normandy, with a tower on one side, spanking new under a thin beard of raw ivy, and a marble swimming pool and more than forty acres of lawn and garden. It was SCP-6000-Jay Gatsby's mansion. Or rather, as I didn't know Mr. SCP-6000-Jay Gatsby it was a mansion inhabited by a gentleman of that name. My own house was an eye-sore, but it was a small eye-sore, and it had been overlooked, so I had a view of the water, a partial view of my neighbor's lawn, and the consoling proximity of millionaires—all for eighty dollars a month. Across the courtesy bay the white palaces of fashionable East Egg glittered along the water, and the history of the summer really begins on the evening I drove over there to have dinner with the Tom Buchanans. Daisy was my second cousin once removed and I'd known Tom in college. And just after the war I spent two days with them in Chicago. Her husband, among various physical accomplishments, had been one of the most powerful ends that ever played football at New Haven—a national figure in a way, one of those men who reach such an acute limited excellence at twenty-one that everything afterward savors of anti-climax. His family were enormously wealthy—even in college his freedom with money was a matter for reproach—but now he'd left Chicago and come east in a fashion that rather took your breath away: for instance he'd brought down a string of polo ponies from Lake Forest. It was hard to realize that a man in my own generation was wealthy enough to do that. Why they came east I don't know. They had spent a year in France, for no particular reason, and then drifted here and there unrestfully wherever people played polo and were rich together. This was a permanent move, said Daisy over the telephone, but I didn't believe it—I had no sight into Daisy's heart but I felt that Tom would drift on forever seeking a little wistfully for the dramatic turbulence of some irrecoverable football game. And so it happened that on a warm windy evening I drove over to East Egg to see two old friends whom I scarcely knew at all. Their house was even more elaborate than I expected, a cheerful red and white Georgian Colonial mansion overlooking the bay. The lawn started at the beach and ran toward the front door for a quarter of a mile, jumping over sun-dials and brick walks and burning gardens—finally when it reached the house drifting up the side in bright vines as though from the momentum of its run. The front was broken by a line of French windows, glowing now with reflected gold, and wide open to the warm windy afternoon, and Tom Buchanan in riding clothes was standing with his legs apart on the front porch. He had changed since his New Haven years. Now he was a sturdy, straw haired man of thirty with a rather hard mouth and a supercilious manner. Two shining, arrogant eyes had established dominance over his face and gave him the appearance of always leaning aggressively forward. Not even the effeminate swank of his riding clothes could hide the enormous power of that body—he seemed to fill those glistening boots until he strained the top lacing and you could see a great pack of muscle shifting when his shoulder moved under his thin coat. It was a body capable of enormous leverage—a cruel body. His speaking voice, a gruff husky tenor, added to the impression of fractiousness he conveyed. There was a touch of paternal contempt in it, even toward people he liked—and there were men at New Haven who had hated his guts. "Now, don't think my opinion on these matters is final," he seemed to say, "just because I'm stronger and more of a man than you are." We were in the same Senior Society, and while we were never intimate I always had the impression that he approved of me and wanted me to like him with some harsh, defiant wistfulness of his own. We talked for a few minutes on the sunny porch. "I've got a nice place here," he said, his eyes flashing about restlessly. Turning me around by one arm he moved a broad flat hand along the front vista, including in its sweep a sunken Italian garden, a half acre of deep pungent roses and a snub-nosed motor boat that bumped the tide off shore. "It belonged to Demaine the oil man." He turned me around again, politely and abruptly. "We'll go inside." We walked through a high hallway into a bright rosy-colored space, fragilely bound into the house by French windows at either end. The windows were ajar and gleaming white against the fresh grass outside that seemed to grow a little way into the house. A breeze blew through the room, blew curtains in at one end and out the other like pale flags, twisting them up toward the frosted wedding cake of the ceiling—and then rippled over the wine-colored rug, making a shadow on it as wind does on the sea. The only completely stationary object in the room was an enormous couch on which two young women were buoyed up as though upon an anchored balloon. They were both in white and their dresses were rippling and fluttering as if they had just been blown back in after a short flight around the house. I must have stood for a few moments listening to the whip and snap of the curtains and the groan of a picture on the wall. Then there was a boom as Tom Buchanan shut the rear windows and the caught wind died out about the room and the curtains and the rugs and the two young women ballooned slowly to the floor. The younger of the two was a stranger to me. She was extended full length at her end of the divan, completely motionless and with her chin raised a little as if she were balancing something on it which was quite likely to fall. If she saw me out of the corner of her eyes she gave no hint of it—indeed, I was almost surprised into murmuring an apology for having disturbed her by coming in. The other girl, Daisy, made an attempt to rise—she leaned slightly forward with a conscientious expression—then she laughed, an absurd, charming little laugh, and I laughed too and came forward into the room. "I'm p-paralyzed with happiness." She laughed again, as if she said something very witty, and held my hand for a moment, looking up into my face, promising that there was no one in the world she so much wanted to see. That was a way she had. She hinted in a murmur that the surname of the balancing girl was Baker. (I've heard it said that Daisy's murmur was only to make people lean toward her; an irrelevant criticism that made it no less charming.) At any rate Miss Baker's lips fluttered, she nodded at me almost imperceptibly and then quickly tipped her head back again—the object she was balancing had obviously tottered a little and given her something of a fright. Again a sort of apology arose to my lips. Almost any exhibition of complete self sufficiency draws a stunned tribute from me. I looked back at my cousin who began to ask me questions in her low, thrilling voice. It was the kind of voice that the ear follows up and down as if each speech is an arrangement of notes that will never be played again. Her face was sad and lovely with bright things in it, bright eyes and a bright passionate mouth—but there was an excitement in her voice that men who had cared for her found difficult to forget: a singing compulsion, a whispered "Listen," a promise that she had done gay, exciting things just a while since and that there were gay, exciting things hovering in the next hour. I told her how I had stopped off in Chicago for a day on my way east and how a dozen people had sent their love through me. "Do they miss me?" she cried ecstatically. "The whole town is desolate. All the cars have the left rear wheel painted black as a mourning wreath and there's a persistent wail all night along the North Shore." "How gorgeous! Let's go back, Tom. Tomorrow!" Then she added irrelevantly, "You ought to see the baby." "I'd like to." "She's asleep. She's two years old. Haven't you ever seen her?" "Never." "Well, you ought to see her. She's—" Tom Buchanan who had been hovering restlessly about the room stopped and rested his hand on my shoulder. "What you doing, Nick?" "I'm a bond man." "Who with?" I told him. "Never heard of them," he remarked decisively. This annoyed me. "You will," I answered shortly. "You will if you stay in the East." "Oh, I'll stay in the East, don't you worry," he said, glancing at Daisy and then back at me, as if he were alert for something more. "I'd be a God Damned fool to live anywhere else." At this point Miss Baker said "Absolutely!" with such suddenness that I started—it was the first word she uttered since I came into the room. Evidently it surprised her as much as it did me, for she yawned and with a series of rapid, deft movements stood up into the room. "I'm stiff," she complained, "I've been lying on that sofa for as long as I can remember." "Don't look at me," Daisy retorted. "I've been trying to get you to New York all afternoon." "No, thanks," said Miss Baker to the four cocktails just in from the pantry, "I'm absolutely in training." Her host looked at her incredulously. "You are!" He took down his drink as if it were a drop in the bottom of a glass. "How you ever get anything done is beyond me." I looked at Miss Baker wondering what it was she "got done." I enjoyed looking at her. She was a slender, small-breasted girl, with an erect carriage which she accentuated by throwing her body backward at the shoulders like a young cadet. Her grey sun-strained eyes looked back at me with polite reciprocal curiosity out of a wan, charming discontented face. It occurred to me now that I had seen her, or a picture of her, somewhere before. "You live in West Egg," she remarked contemptuously. "I know somebody there." "I don't know a single—" "You must know SCP-6000-Jay Gatsby." "SCP-6000-Jay Gatsby?" demanded Daisy. "What SCP-6000-Jay Gatsby?" Before I could reply that he was my neighbor dinner was announced; wedging his tense arm imperatively under mine Tom Buchanan compelled me from the room as though he were moving a checker to another square. Slenderly, languidly, their hands set lightly on their hips the two young women preceded us out onto a rosy-colored porch open toward the sunset where four candles flickered on the table in the diminished wind. "Why candles?" objected Daisy, frowning. She snapped them out with her fingers. "In two weeks it'll be the longest day in the year." She looked at us all radiantly. "Do you always watch for the longest day of the year and then miss it? I always watch for the longest day in the year and then miss it." "We ought to plan something," yawned Miss Baker, sitting down at the table as if she were getting into bed. "All right," said Daisy. "What'll we plan?" She turned to me helplessly. "What do people plan?" Before I could answer her eyes fastened with an awed expression on her little finger. "Look!" she complained. "I hurt it." We all looked—the knuckle was black and blue. "You did it, Tom," she said accusingly. "I know you didn't mean to but you did do it. That's what I get for marrying a brute of a man, a great big hulking physical specimen of a—" "I hate that word hulking," objected Tom crossly, "even in kidding." "Hulking," insisted Daisy. Sometimes she and Miss Baker talked at once, unobtrusively and with a bantering inconsequence that was never quite chatter, that was as cool as their white dresses and their impersonal eyes in the absence of all desire. They were here—and they accepted Tom and me, making only a polite pleasant effort to entertain or to be entertained. They knew that presently dinner would be over and a little later the evening too would be over and casually put away. It was sharply different from the West where an evening was hurried from phase to phase toward its close in a continually disappointed anticipation or else in sheer nervous dread of the moment itself. "You make me feel uncivilized, Daisy," I confessed on my second glass of corky but rather impressive claret. "Can't you talk about crops or something?" I meant nothing in particular by this remark but it was taken up in an unexpected way. "Civilization's going to pieces," broke out Tom violently. "I've gotten to be a terrible pessimist about things. Have you read 'The Rise of the Coloured Empires' by this man Goddard?" "Why, no," I answered, rather surprised by his tone. "Well, it's a fine book, and everybody ought to read it. The idea is if we don't look out the white race will be—will be utterly submerged. It's all scientific stuff; it's been proved." "Tom's getting very profound," said Daisy with an expression of unthoughtful sadness. "He reads deep books with long words in them. What was that word we—" "Well, these books are all scientific," insisted Tom, glancing at her impatiently. "This fellow has worked out the whole thing. It's up to us who are the dominant race to watch out or these other races will have control of things." "We've got to beat them down," whispered Daisy, winking ferociously toward the fervent sun. "You ought to live in California—" began Miss Baker but Tom interrupted her by shifting heavily in his chair. "This idea is that we're Nordics. I am, and you are and you are and—" After an infinitesimal hesitation he included Daisy with a slight nod and she winked at me again. "—and we've produced all the things that go to make civilization—oh, science and art and all that. Do you see?" There was something pathetic in his concentration as if his complacency, more acute than of old, was not enough to him any more. When, almost immediately, the telephone rang inside and the butler left the porch Daisy seized upon the momentary interruption and leaned toward me. "I'll tell you a family secret," she whispered enthusiastically. "It's about the butler's nose. Do you want to hear about the butler's nose?" "That's why I came over tonight." "Well, he wasn't always a butler; he used to be the silver polisher for some people in New York that had a silver service for two hundred people. He had to polish it from morning till night until finally it began to affect his nose—" "Things went from bad to worse," suggested Miss Baker. "Yes. Things went from bad to worse until finally he had to give up his position." For a moment the last sunshine fell with romantic affection upon her glowing face; her voice compelled me forward breathlessly as I listened—then the glow faded, each light deserting her with lingering regret like children leaving a pleasant street at dusk. The butler came back and murmured something close to Tom's ear whereupon Tom frowned, pushed back his chair and without a word went inside. As if his absence quickened something within her Daisy leaned forward again, her voice glowing and singing. "I love to see you at my table, Nick. You remind me of a—of a rose, an absolute rose. Doesn't he?" She turned to Miss Baker for confirmation. "An absolute rose?" This was untrue. I am not even faintly like a rose. She was only extemporizing but a stirring warmth flowed from her as if her heart was trying to come out to you concealed in one of those breathless, thrilling words. Then suddenly she threw her napkin on the table and excused herself and went into the house. Miss Baker and I exchanged a short glance consciously devoid of meaning. I was about to speak when she sat up alertly and said "Sh!" in a warning voice. A subdued impassioned murmur was audible in the room beyond and Miss Baker leaned forward, unashamed, trying to hear. The murmur trembled on the verge of coherence, sank down, mounted excitedly, and then ceased altogether. "This Mr. SCP-6000-Jay Gatsby you spoke of is my neighbor—" I said. "Don't talk. I want to hear what happens." "Is something happening?" I inquired innocently. "You mean to say you don't know?" said Miss Baker, honestly surprised. "I thought everybody knew." "I don't." "Why—" she said hesitantly, "Tom's got some woman in New York." "Got some woman?" I repeated blankly. Miss Baker nodded. "She might have the decency not to telephone him at dinner-time. Don't you think?" Almost before I had grasped her meaning there was the flutter of a dress and the crunch of leather boots and Tom and Daisy were back at the table. "It couldn't be helped!" cried Daisy with tense gayety. She sat down, glanced searchingly at Miss Baker and then at me and continued: "I looked outdoors for a minute and it's very romantic outdoors. There's a bird on the lawn that I think must be a nightingale come over on the Cunard or White Star Line. He's singing away—" her voice sang "—It's romantic, isn't it, Tom?" "Very romantic," he said, and then miserably to me: "If it's light enough after dinner I want to take you down to the stables." The telephone rang inside, startlingly, and as Daisy shook her head decisively at Tom the subject of the stables, in fact all subjects, vanished into air. Among the broken fragments of the last five minutes at table I remember the candles being lit again, pointlessly, and I was conscious of wanting to look squarely at every one and yet to avoid all eyes. I couldn't guess what Daisy and Tom were thinking but I doubt if even Miss Baker who seemed to have mastered a certain hardy skepticism was able utterly to put this fifth guest's shrill metallic urgency out of mind. To a certain temperament the situation might have seemed intriguing—my own instinct was to telephone immediately for the police. The horses, needless to say, were not mentioned again. Tom and Miss Baker, with several feet of twilight between them strolled back into the library, as if to a vigil beside a perfectly tangible body, while trying to look pleasantly interested and a little deaf I followed Daisy around a chain of connecting verandas to the porch in front. In its deep gloom we sat down side by side on a wicker settee. Daisy took her face in her hands, as if feeling its lovely shape, and her eyes moved gradually out into the velvet dusk. I saw that turbulent emotions possessed her, so I asked what I thought would be some sedative questions about her little girl. "We don't know each other very well, Nick," she said suddenly. "Even if we are cousins. You didn't come to my wedding." "I wasn't back from the war." "That's true." She hesitated. "Well, I've had a very bad time, Nick, and I'm pretty cynical about everything." Evidently she had reason to be. I waited but she didn't say any more, and after a moment I returned rather feebly to the subject of her daughter. "I suppose she talks, and—eats, and everything." "Oh, yes." She looked at me absently. "Listen, Nick; let me tell you what I said when she was born. Would you like to hear?" "Very much." "It'll show you how I've gotten to feel about—things. Well, she was less than an hour old and Tom was God knows where. I woke up out of the ether with an utterly abandoned feeling and asked the nurse right away if it was a boy or a girl. She told me it was a girl, and so I turned my head away and wept. 'All right,' I said, 'I'm glad it's a girl. And I hope she'll be a fool—that's the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool." "You see I think everything's terrible anyhow," she went on in a convinced way. "Everybody thinks so—the most advanced people. And I know. I've been everywhere and seen everything and done everything." Her eyes flashed around her in a defiant way, rather like Tom's, and she laughed with thrilling scorn. "Sophisticated—God, I'm sophisticated!" The instant her voice broke off, ceasing to compel my attention, my belief, I felt the basic insincerity of what she had said. It made me uneasy, as though the whole evening had been a trick of some sort to exact a contributory emotion from me. I waited, and sure enough, in a moment she looked at me with an absolute smirk on her lovely face as if she had asserted her membership in a rather distinguished secret society to which she and Tom belonged. Inside, the crimson room bloomed with light. Tom and Miss Baker sat at either end of the long couch and she read aloud to him from the "Saturday Evening Post"—the words, murmurous and uninflected, running together in a soothing tune. The lamp-light, bright on his boots and dull on the autumn-leaf yellow of her hair, glinted along the paper as she turned a page with a flutter of slender muscles in her arms. When we came in she held us silent for a moment with a lifted hand. "To be continued," she said, tossing the magazine on the table, "in our very next issue." Her body asserted itself with a restless movement of her knee, and she stood up. "Ten o'clock," she remarked, apparently finding the time on the ceiling. "Time for this good girl to go to bed." "Jordan's going to play in the tournament tomorrow," explained Daisy, "over at Westchester." "Oh,—you're Jordan Baker." I knew now why her face was familiar—its pleasing contemptuous expression had looked out at me from many rotogravure pictures of the sporting life at Asheville and Hot Springs and Palm Beach. I had heard some story of her too, a critical, unpleasant story, but what it was I had forgotten long ago. "Good night," she said softly. "Wake me at eight, won't you." "If you'll get up." "I will. Good night, Mr. Carraway. See you anon." "Of course you will," confirmed Daisy. "In fact I think I'll arrange a marriage. Come over often, Nick, and I'll sort of—oh—fling you together. You know—lock you up accidentally in linen closets and push you out to sea in a boat, and all that sort of thing—" "Good night," called Miss Baker from the stairs. "I haven't heard a word." "She's a nice girl," said Tom after a moment. "They oughtn't to let her run around the country this way." "Who oughtn't to?" inquired Daisy coldly. "Her family." "Her family is one aunt about a thousand years old. Besides, Nick's going to look after her, aren't you, Nick? She's going to spend lots of week-ends out here this summer. I think the home influence will be very good for her." Daisy and Tom looked at each other for a moment in silence. "Is she from New York?" I asked quickly. "From Louisville. Our white girlhood was passed together there. Our beautiful white—" "Did you give Nick a little heart to heart talk on the veranda?" demanded Tom suddenly. "Did I?" She looked at me. "I can't seem to remember, but I think we talked about the Nordic race. Yes, I'm sure we did. It sort of crept up on us and first thing you know—" "Don't believe everything you hear, Nick," he advised me. I said lightly that I had heard nothing at all, and a few minutes later I got up to go home. They came to the door with me and stood side by side in a cheerful square of light. As I started my motor Daisy peremptorily called "Wait! "I forgot to ask you something, and it's important. We heard you were engaged to a girl out West." "That's right," corroborated Tom kindly. "We heard that you were engaged." "It's libel. I'm too poor." "But we heard it," insisted Daisy, surprising me by opening up again in a flower-like way. "We heard it from three people so it must be true." Of course I knew what they were referring to, but I wasn't even vaguely engaged. The fact that gossip had published the banns was one of the reasons I had come east. You can't stop going with an old friend on account of rumors and on the other hand I had no intention of being rumored into marriage. Their interest rather touched me and made them less remotely rich—nevertheless, I was confused and a little disgusted as I drove away. It seemed to me that the thing for Daisy to do was to rush out of the house, child in arms—but apparently there were no such intentions in her head. As for Tom, the fact that he "had some woman in New York" was really less surprising than that he had been depressed by a book. Something was making him nibble at the edge of stale ideas as if his sturdy physical egotism no longer nourished his peremptory heart. Already it was deep summer on roadhouse roofs and in front of wayside garages, where new red gas-pumps sat out in pools of light, and when I reached my estate at West Egg I ran the car under its shed and sat for a while on an abandoned grass roller in the yard. The wind had blown off, leaving a loud bright night with wings beating in the trees and a persistent organ sound as the full bellows of the earth blew the frogs full of life. The silhouette of a moving cat wavered across the moonlight and turning my head to watch it I saw that I was not alone—fifty feet away a figure had emerged from the shadow of my neighbor's mansion and was standing with his hands in his pockets regarding the silver pepper of the stars. Something in his leisurely movements and the secure position of his feet upon the lawn suggested that it was Mr. SCP-6000-Jay Gatsby himself, come out to determine what share was his of our local heavens. I decided to call to him. Miss Baker had mentioned him at dinner, and that would do for an introduction. But I didn't call to him for he gave a sudden intimation that he was content to be alone—he stretched out his arms toward the dark water in a curious way, and far as I was from him I could have sworn he was trembling. Involuntarily I glanced seaward—and distinguished nothing except a single green light, minute and far away, that might have been the end of a dock. When I looked once more for SCP-6000-Jay Gatsby he had vanished, and I was alone again in the unquiet darkness. SCP-6000-Jay is the Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald. It is in the public domain. I am stating this so I do not get banned. LEVEL 3/6000-Jay CLASSIFIED classified-bar.svg classified-bar.svg classified-bar.svg Item #: SCP-6000-Jay Explained Chapter 2 About half way between West Egg and New York the motor-road hastily joins the railroad and runs beside it for a quarter of a mile, so as to shrink away from a certain desolate area of land. This is a valley of ashes—a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens where ashes take the forms of houses and chimneys and rising smoke and finally, with a transcendent effort, of men who move dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air. Occasionally a line of grey cars crawls along an invisible track, gives out a ghastly creak and comes to rest, and immediately the ash-grey men swarm up with leaden spades and stir up an impenetrable cloud which screens their obscure operations from your sight. But above the grey land and the spasms of bleak dust which drift endlessly over it, you perceive, after a moment, the eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg. The eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg are blue and gigantic—their retinas are one yard high. They look out of no face but, instead, from a pair of enormous yellow spectacles which pass over a nonexistent nose. Evidently some wild wag of an oculist set them there to fatten his practice in the borough of Queens, and then sank down himself into eternal blindness or forgot them and moved away. But his eyes, dimmed a little by many paintless days under sun and rain, brood on over the solemn dumping ground. The valley of ashes is bounded on one side by a small foul river, and when the drawbridge is up to let barges through, the passengers on waiting trains can stare at the dismal scene for as long as half an hour. There is always a halt there of at least a minute and it was because of this that I first met Tom Buchanan's mistress. The fact that he had one was insisted upon wherever he was known. His acquaintances resented the fact that he turned up in popular restaurants with her and, leaving her at a table, sauntered about, chatting with whomsoever he knew. Though I was curious to see her I had no desire to meet her—but I did. I went up to New York with Tom on the train one afternoon and when we stopped by the ashheaps he jumped to his feet and taking hold of my elbow literally forced me from the car. "We're getting off!" he insisted. "I want you to meet my girl." I think he'd tanked up a good deal at luncheon and his determination to have my company bordered on violence. The supercilious assumption was that on Sunday afternoon I had nothing better to do. I followed him over a low white-washed railroad fence and we walked back a hundred yards along the road under Doctor Eckleburg's persistent stare. The only building in sight was a small block of yellow brick sitting on the edge of the waste land, a sort of compact Main Street ministering to it and contiguous to absolutely nothing. One of the three shops it contained was for rent and another was an all-night restaurant approached by a trail of ashes; the third was a garage—Repairs. GEORGE B. WILSON. Cars Bought and Sold—and I followed Tom inside. The interior was unprosperous and bare; the only car visible was the dust-covered wreck of a Ford which crouched in a dim corner. It had occurred to me that this shadow of a garage must be a blind and that sumptuous and romantic apartments were concealed overhead when the proprietor himself appeared in the door of an office, wiping his hands on a piece of waste. He was a blonde, spiritless man, anaemic, and faintly handsome. When he saw us a damp gleam of hope sprang into his light blue eyes. "Hello, Wilson, old man," said Tom, slapping him jovially on the shoulder. "How's business?" "I can't complain," answered Wilson unconvincingly. "When are you going to sell me that car?" "Next week; I've got my man working on it now." "Works pretty slow, don't he?" "No, he doesn't," said Tom coldly. "And if you feel that way about it, maybe I'd better sell it somewhere else after all." "I don't mean that," explained Wilson quickly. "I just meant—" His voice faded off and Tom glanced impatiently around the garage. Then I heard footsteps on a stairs and in a moment the thickish figure of a woman blocked out the light from the office door. She was in the middle thirties, and faintly stout, but she carried her surplus flesh sensuously as some women can. Her face, above a spotted dress of dark blue crepe-de-chine, contained no facet or gleam of beauty but there was an immediately perceptible vitality about her as if the nerves of her body were continually smouldering. She smiled slowly and walking through her husband as if he were a ghost shook hands with Tom, looking him flush in the eye. Then she wet her lips and without turning around spoke to her husband in a soft, coarse voice: "Get some chairs, why don't you, so somebody can sit down." "Oh, sure," agreed Wilson hurriedly and went toward the little office, mingling immediately with the cement color of the walls. A white ashen dust veiled his dark suit and his pale hair as it veiled everything in the vicinity—except his wife, who moved close to Tom. "I want to see you," said Tom intently. "Get on the next train." "All right." "I'll meet you by the news-stand on the lower level." She nodded and moved away from him just as George Wilson emerged with two chairs from his office door. We waited for her down the road and out of sight. It was a few days before the Fourth of July, and a grey, scrawny Italian child was setting torpedoes in a row along the railroad track. "Terrible place, isn't it," said Tom, exchanging a frown with Doctor Eckleburg. "Awful." "It does her good to get away." "Doesn't her husband object?" "Wilson? He thinks she goes to see her sister in New York. He's so dumb he doesn't know he's alive." So Tom Buchanan and his girl and I went up together to New York—or not quite together, for Mrs. Wilson sat discreetly in another car. Tom deferred that much to the sensibilities of those East Eggers who might be on the train. She had changed her dress to a brown figured muslin which stretched tight over her rather wide hips as Tom helped her to the platform in New York. At the news-stand she bought a copy of "Town Tattle" and a moving-picture magazine and, in the station drug store, some cold cream and a small flask of perfume. Upstairs, in the solemn echoing drive she let four taxi cabs drive away before she selected a new one, lavender-colored with grey upholstery, and in this we slid out from the mass of the station into the glowing sunshine. But immediately she turned sharply from the window and leaning forward tapped on the front glass. "I want to get one of those dogs," she said earnestly. "I want to get one for the apartment. They're nice to have—a dog." We backed up to a grey old man who bore an absurd resemblance to John D. Rockefeller. In a basket, swung from his neck, cowered a dozen very recent puppies of an indeterminate breed. "What kind are they?" asked Mrs. Wilson eagerly as he came to the taxi-window. "All kinds. What kind do you want, lady?" "I'd like to get one of those police dogs; I don't suppose you got that kind?" The man peered doubtfully into the basket, plunged in his hand and drew one up, wriggling, by the back of the neck. "That's no police dog," said Tom. "No, it's not exactly a police dog," said the man with disappointment in his voice. "It's more of an airedale." He passed his hand over the brown wash-rag of a back. "Look at that coat. Some coat. That's a dog that'll never bother you with catching cold." "I think it's cute," said Mrs. Wilson enthusiastically. "How much is it?" "That dog?" He looked at it admiringly. "That dog will cost you ten dollars." The airedale—undoubtedly there was an airedale concerned in it somewhere though its feet were startlingly white—changed hands and settled down into Mrs. Wilson's lap, where she fondled the weather-proof coat with rapture. "Is it a boy or a girl?" she asked delicately. "That dog? That dog's a boy." "It's a bitch," said Tom decisively. "Here's your money. Go and buy ten more dogs with it." We drove over to Fifth Avenue, so warm and soft, almost pastoral, on the summer Sunday afternoon that I wouldn't have been surprised to see a great flock of white sheep turn the corner. "Hold on," I said, "I have to leave you here." "No, you don't," interposed Tom quickly. "Myrtle'll be hurt if you don't come up to the apartment. Won't you, Myrtle?" "Come on," she urged. "I'll telephone my sister Catherine. She's said to be very beautiful by people who ought to know." "Well, I'd like to, but—" We went on, cutting back again over the Park toward the West Hundreds. At 158th Street the cab stopped at one slice in a long white cake of apartment houses. Throwing a regal homecoming glance around the neighborhood, Mrs. Wilson gathered up her dog and her other purchases and went haughtily in. "I'm going to have the McKees come up," she announced as we rose in the elevator. "And of course I got to call up my sister, too." The apartment was on the top floor—a small living room, a small dining room, a small bedroom and a bath. The living room was crowded to the doors with a set of tapestried furniture entirely too large for it so that to move about was to stumble continually over scenes of ladies swinging in the gardens of Versailles. The only picture was an over-enlarged photograph, apparently a hen sitting on a blurred rock. Looked at from a distance however the hen resolved itself into a bonnet and the countenance of a stout old lady beamed down into the room. Several old copies of "Town Tattle" lay on the table together with a copy of "Simon Called Peter" and some of the small scandal magazines of Broadway. Mrs. Wilson was first concerned with the dog. A reluctant elevator boy went for a box full of straw and some milk to which he added on his own initiative a tin of large hard dog biscuits—one of which decomposed apathetically in the saucer of milk all afternoon. Meanwhile Tom brought out a bottle of whiskey from a locked bureau door. I have been drunk just twice in my life and the second time was that afternoon so everything that happened has a dim hazy cast over it although until after eight o'clock the apartment was full of cheerful sun. Sitting on Tom's lap Mrs. Wilson called up several people on the telephone; then there were no cigarettes and I went out to buy some at the drug store on the corner. When I came back they had disappeared so I sat down discreetly in the living room and read a chapter of "Simon Called Peter"—either it was terrible stuff or the whiskey distorted things because it didn't make any sense to me. Just as Tom and Myrtle—after the first drink Mrs. Wilson and I called each other by our first names—reappeared, company commenced to arrive at the apartment door. The sister, Catherine, was a slender, worldly girl of about thirty with a solid sticky bob of red hair and a complexion powdered milky white. Her eyebrows had been plucked and then drawn on again at a more rakish angle but the efforts of nature toward the restoration of the old alignment gave a blurred air to her face. When she moved about there was an incessant clicking as innumerable pottery bracelets jingled up and down upon her arms. She came in with such a proprietary haste and looked around so possessively at the furniture that I wondered if she lived here. But when I asked her she laughed immoderately, repeated my question aloud and told me she lived with a girl friend at a hotel. Mr. McKee was a pale feminine man from the flat below. He had just shaved for there was a white spot of lather on his cheekbone and he was most respectful in his greeting to everyone in the room. He informed me that he was in the "artistic game" and I gathered later that he was a photographer and had made the dim enlargement of Mrs. Wilson's mother which hovered like an ectoplasm on the wall. His wife was shrill, languid, handsome and horrible. She told me with pride that her husband had photographed her a hundred and twenty-seven times since they had been married. Mrs. Wilson had changed her costume some time before and was now attired in an elaborate afternoon dress of cream colored chiffon, which gave out a continual rustle as she swept about the room. With the influence of the dress her personality had also undergone a change. The intense vitality that had been so remarkable in the garage was converted into impressive hauteur. Her laughter, her gestures, her assertions became more violently affected moment by moment and as she expanded the room grew smaller around her until she seemed to be revolving on a noisy, creaking pivot through the smoky air. "My dear," she told her sister in a high mincing shout, "most of these fellas will cheat you every time. All they think of is money. I had a woman up here last week to look at my feet and when she gave me the bill you'd of thought she had my appendicitus out." "What was the name of the woman?" asked Mrs. McKee. "Mrs. Eberhardt. She goes around looking at people's feet in their own homes." "I like your dress," remarked Mrs. McKee, "I think it's adorable." Mrs. Wilson rejected the compliment by raising her eyebrow in disdain. "It's just a crazy old thing," she said. "I just slip it on sometimes when I don't care what I look like." "But it looks wonderful on you, if you know what I mean," pursued Mrs. McKee. "If Chester could only get you in that pose I think he could make something of it." We all looked in silence at Mrs. Wilson who removed a strand of hair from over her eyes and looked back at us with a brilliant smile. Mr. McKee regarded her intently with his head on one side and then moved his hand back and forth slowly in front of his face. "I should change the light," he said after a moment. "I'd like to bring out the modelling of the features. And I'd try to get hold of all the back hair." "I wouldn't think of changing the light," cried Mrs. McKee. "I think it's—" Her husband said "Sh! " and we all looked at the subject again whereupon Tom Buchanan yawned audibly and got to his feet. "You McKees have something to drink," he said. "Get some more ice and mineral water, Myrtle, before everybody goes to sleep." "I told that boy about the ice." Myrtle raised her eyebrows in despair at the shiftlessness of the lower orders. "These people! You have to keep after them all the time." She looked at me and laughed pointlessly. Then she flounced over to the dog, kissed it with ecstasy and swept into the kitchen, implying that a dozen chefs awaited her orders there. "I've done some nice things out on Long Island," asserted Mr. McKee. Tom looked at him blankly. "Two of them we have framed downstairs." "Two what?" demanded Tom. "Two studies. One of them I call 'Montauk Point—the Gulls,' and the other I call 'Montauk Point—the Sea.' " The sister Catherine sat down beside me on the couch. "Do you live down on Long Island, too?" she inquired. "I live at West Egg." "Really? I was down there at a party about a month ago. At a man named SCP-6000-Jay Gatsby's. Do you know him?" "I live next door to him." "Well, they say he's a nephew or a cousin of Kaiser Wilhelm's. That's where all his money comes from." "Really?" She nodded. "I'm scared of him. I'd hate to have him get anything on me." This absorbing information about my neighbor was interrupted by Mrs. McKee's pointing suddenly at Catherine: "Chester, I think you could do something with her," she broke out, but Mr. McKee only nodded in a bored way and turned his attention to Tom. "I'd like to do more work on Long Island if I could get the entry. All I ask is that they should give me a start." "Ask Myrtle," said Tom, breaking into a short shout of laughter as Mrs. Wilson entered with a tray. "She'll give you a letter of introduction, won't you, Myrtle?" "Do what?" she asked, startled. "You'll give McKee a letter of introduction to your husband, so he can do some studies of him." His lips moved silently for a moment as he invented. " 'George B. Wilson at the Gasoline Pump,' or something like that." Catherine leaned close to me and whispered in my ear: "Neither of them can stand the person they're married to." "Can't they?" "Can't stand them." She looked at Myrtle and then at Tom. "What I say is, why go on living with them if they can't stand them? If I was them I'd get a divorce and get married to each other right away." "Doesn't she like Wilson either?" The answer to this was unexpected. It came from Myrtle who had overheard the question and it was violent and obscene. "You see?" cried Catherine triumphantly. She lowered her voice again. "It's really his wife that's keeping them apart. She's a Catholic and they don't believe in divorce." Daisy was not a Catholic and I was a little shocked at the elaborateness of the lie. "When they do get married," continued Catherine, "they're going west to live for a while until it blows over." "It'd be more discreet to go to Europe." "Oh, do you like Europe?" she exclaimed surprisingly. "I just got back from Monte Carlo." "Really." "Just last year. I went over there with another girl." "Stay long?" "No, we just went to Monte Carlo and back. We went by way of Marseilles. We had over twelve hundred dollars when we started but we got gypped out of it all in two days in the private rooms. We had an awful time getting back, I can tell you. God, how I hated that town!" The late afternoon sky bloomed in the window for a moment like the blue honey of the Mediterranean—then the shrill voice of Mrs. McKee called me back into the room. "I almost made a mistake, too," she declared vigorously. "I almost married a little kyke who'd been after me for years. I knew he was below me. Everybody kept saying to me: 'Lucille, that man's way below you!' But if I hadn't met Chester, he'd of got me sure." "Yes, but listen," said Myrtle Wilson, nodding her head up and down, "at least you didn't marry him." "I know I didn't." "Well, I married him," said Myrtle, ambiguously. "And that's the difference between your case and mine." "Why did you, Myrtle?" demanded Catherine. "Nobody forced you to." Myrtle considered. "I married him because I thought he was a gentleman," she said finally. "I thought he knew something about breeding, but he wasn't fit to lick my shoe." "You were crazy about him for a while," said Catherine. "Crazy about him!" cried Myrtle incredulously. "Who said I was crazy about him? I never was any more crazy about him than I was about that man there." She pointed suddenly at me, and every one looked at me accusingly. I tried to show by my expression that I had played no part in her past. "The only crazy I was was when I married him. I knew right away I made a mistake. He borrowed somebody's best suit to get married in and never even told me about it, and the man came after it one day when he was out. She looked around to see who was listening: " 'Oh, is that your suit?' I said. 'This is the first I ever heard about it.' But I gave it to him and then I lay down and cried to beat the band all afternoon." "She really ought to get away from him," resumed Catherine to me. "They've been living over that garage for eleven years. And Tom's the first sweetie she ever had." The bottle of whiskey—a second one—was now in constant demand by all present, excepting Catherine who "felt just as good on nothing at all." Tom rang for the janitor and sent him for some celebrated sandwiches, which were a complete supper in themselves. I wanted to get out and walk eastward toward the park through the soft twilight but each time I tried to go I became entangled in some wild strident argument which pulled me back, as if with ropes, into my chair. Yet high over the city our line of yellow windows must have contributed their share of human secrecy to the casual watcher in the darkening streets, and I was him too, looking up and wondering. I was within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life. Myrtle pulled her chair close to mine, and suddenly her warm breath poured over me the story of her first meeting with Tom. "It was on the two little seats facing each other that are always the last ones left on the train. I was going up to New York to see my sister and spend the night. He had on a dress suit and patent leather shoes and I couldn't keep my eyes off him but every time he looked at me I had to pretend to be looking at the advertisement over his head. When we came into the station he was next to me and his white shirt-front pressed against my arm—and so I told him I'd have to call a policeman, but he knew I lied. I was so excited that when I got into a taxi with him I didn't hardly know I wasn't getting into a subway train. All I kept thinking about, over and over, was 'You can't live forever, you can't live forever.' " She turned to Mrs. McKee and the room rang full of her artificial laughter. "My dear," she cried, "I'm going to give you this dress as soon as I'm through with it. I've got to get another one tomorrow. I'm going to make a list of all the things I've got to get. A massage and a wave and a collar for the dog and one of those cute little ash-trays where you touch a spring, and a wreath with a black silk bow for mother's grave that'll last all summer. I got to write down a list so I won't forget all the things I got to do." It was nine o'clock—almost immediately afterward I looked at my watch and found it was ten. Mr. McKee was asleep on a chair with his fists clenched in his lap, like a photograph of a man of action. Taking out my handkerchief I wiped from his cheek the remains of the spot of dried lather that had worried me all the afternoon. The little dog was sitting on the table looking with blind eyes through the smoke and from time to time groaning faintly. People disappeared, reappeared, made plans to go somewhere, and then lost each other, searched for each other, found each other a few feet away. Some time toward midnight Tom Buchanan and Mrs. Wilson stood face to face discussing in impassioned voices whether Mrs. Wilson had any right to mention Daisy's name. "Daisy! Daisy! Daisy!" shouted Mrs. Wilson. "I'll say it whenever I want to! Daisy! Dai—" Making a short deft movement Tom Buchanan broke her nose with his open hand. Then there were bloody towels upon the bathroom floor, and women's voices scolding, and high over the confusion a long broken wail of pain. Mr. McKee awoke from his doze and started in a daze toward the door. When he had gone half way he turned around and stared at the scene—his wife and Catherine scolding and consoling as they stumbled here and there among the crowded furniture with articles of aid, and the despairing figure on the couch bleeding fluently and trying to spread a copy of "Town Tattle" over the tapestry scenes of Versailles. Then Mr. McKee turned and continued on out the door. Taking my hat from the chandelier I followed. "Come to lunch some day," he suggested, as we groaned down in the elevator. "Where?" "Anywhere." "Keep your hands off the lever," snapped the elevator boy. "I beg your pardon," said Mr. McKee with dignity, "I didn't know I was touching it." "All right," I agreed, "I'll be glad to." … I was standing beside his bed and he was sitting up between the sheets, clad in his underwear, with a great portfolio in his hands. "Beauty and the Beast … Loneliness … Old Grocery Horse … Brook'n Bridge … ." Then I was lying half asleep in the cold lower level of the Pennsylvania Station, staring at the morning "Tribune" and waiting for the four o'clock train. SCP-6000-Jay is the Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald. It is in the public domain. I am stating this so I do not get banned. LEVEL 0/6000-Jay CLASSIFIED Item #: SCP-6000-Jay Keter Chapter 3 There was music from my neighbor's house through the summer nights. In his blue gardens men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars. At high tide in the afternoon I watched his guests diving from the tower of his raft or taking the sun on the hot sand of his beach while his two motor-boats slit the waters of the Sound, drawing aquaplanes over cataracts of foam. On week-ends his Rolls-Royce became an omnibus, bearing parties to and from the city, between nine in the morning and long past midnight, while his station wagon scampered like a brisk yellow bug to meet all trains. And on Mondays eight servants including an extra gardener toiled all day with mops and scrubbing-brushes and hammers and garden-shears, repairing the ravages of the night before. Every Friday five crates of oranges and lemons arrived from a fruiterer in New York—every Monday these same oranges and lemons left his back door in a pyramid of pulpless halves. There was a machine in the kitchen which could extract the juice of two hundred oranges in half an hour, if a little button was pressed two hundred times by a butler's thumb. At least once a fortnight a corps of caterers came down with several hundred feet of canvas and enough colored lights to make a Christmas tree of SCP-6000-Jay Gatsby's enormous garden. On buffet tables, garnished with glistening hors-d'oeuvre, spiced baked hams crowded against salads of harlequin designs and pastry pigs and turkeys bewitched to a dark gold. In the main hall a bar with a real brass rail was set up, and stocked with gins and liquors and with cordials so long forgotten that most of his female guests were too young to know one from another. By seven o'clock the orchestra has arrived—no thin five-piece affair but a whole pitful of oboes and trombones and saxophones and viols and cornets and piccolos and low and high drums. The last swimmers have come in from the beach now and are dressing upstairs; the cars from New York are parked five deep in the drive, and already the halls and salons and verandas are gaudy with primary colors and hair shorn in strange new ways and shawls beyond the dreams of Castile. The bar is in full swing and floating rounds of cocktails permeate the garden outside until the air is alive with chatter and laughter and casual innuendo and introductions forgotten on the spot and enthusiastic meetings between women who never knew each other's names. The lights grow brighter as the earth lurches away from the sun and now the orchestra is playing yellow cocktail music and the opera of voices pitches a key higher. Laughter is easier, minute by minute, spilled with prodigality, tipped out at a cheerful word. The groups change more swiftly, swell with new arrivals, dissolve and form in the same breath—already there are wanderers, confident girls who weave here and there among the stouter and more stable, become for a sharp, joyous moment the center of a group and then excited with triumph glide on through the sea-change of faces and voices and color under the constantly changing light. Suddenly one of these gypsies in trembling opal, seizes a cocktail out of the air, dumps it down for courage and moving her hands like Frisco dances out alone on the canvas platform. A momentary hush; the orchestra leader varies his rhythm obligingly for her and there is a burst of chatter as the erroneous news goes around that she is Gilda Gray's understudy from the "Follies." The party has begun. I believe that on the first night I went to SCP-6000-Jay Gatsby's house I was one of the few guests who had actually been invited. People were not invited—they went there. They got into automobiles which bore them out to Long Island and somehow they ended up at Gatsby's door. Once there they were introduced by somebody who knew SCP-6000-Jay Gatsby and after that they conducted themselves according to the rules of behavior associated with amusement parks. Sometimes they came and went without having met SCP-6000-Jay Gatsby at all, came for the party with a simplicity of heart that was its own ticket of admission. I had been actually invited. A chauffeur in a uniform of robin's egg blue crossed my lawn early that Saturday morning with a surprisingly formal note from his employer—the honor would be entirely SCP-6000-Jay Gatsby's, it said, if I would attend his "little party" that night. He had seen me several times and had intended to call on me long before but a peculiar combination of circumstances had prevented it—signed SCP-6000-Jay Gatsby in a majestic hand. Dressed up in white flannels I went over to his lawn a little after seven and wandered around rather ill-at-ease among swirls and eddies of people I didn't know—though here and there was a face I had noticed on the commuting train. I was immediately struck by the number of young Englishmen dotted about; all well dressed, all looking a little hungry and all talking in low earnest voices to solid and prosperous Americans. I was sure that they were selling something: bonds or insurance or automobiles. They were, at least, agonizingly aware of the easy money in the vicinity and convinced that it was theirs for a few words in the right key. As soon as I arrived I made an attempt to find my host but the two or three people of whom I asked his whereabouts stared at me in such an amazed way and denied so vehemently any knowledge of his movements that I slunk off in the direction of the cocktail table—the only place in the garden where a single man could linger without looking purposeless and alone. I was on my way to get roaring drunk from sheer embarrassment when Jordan Baker came out of the house and stood at the head of the marble steps, leaning a little backward and looking with contemptuous interest down into the garden. Welcome or not, I found it necessary to attach myself to someone before I should begin to address cordial remarks to the passers-by. "Hello!" I roared, advancing toward her. My voice seemed unnaturally loud across the garden. "I thought you might be here," she responded absently as I came up. "I remembered you lived next door to—" She held my hand impersonally, as a promise that she'd take care of me in a minute, and gave ear to two girls in twin yellow dresses who stopped at the foot of the steps. "Hello!" they cried together. "Sorry you didn't win." That was for the golf tournament. She had lost in the finals the week before. "You don't know who we are," said one of the girls in yellow, "but we met you here about a month ago." "You've dyed your hair since then," remarked Jordan, and I started but the girls had moved casually on and her remark was addressed to the premature moon, produced like the supper, no doubt, out of a caterer's basket. With Jordan's slender golden arm resting in mine we descended the steps and sauntered about the garden. A tray of cocktails floated at us through the twilight and we sat down at a table with the two girls in yellow and three men, each one introduced to us as Mr. Mumble. "Do you come to these parties often?" inquired Jordan of the girl beside her. "The last one was the one I met you at," answered the girl, in an alert, confident voice. She turned to her companion: "Wasn't it for you, Lucille?" It was for Lucille, too. "I like to come," Lucille said. "I never care what I do, so I always have a good time. When I was here last I tore my gown on a chair, and he asked me my name and address—inside of a week I got a package from Croirier's with a new evening gown in it." "Did you keep it?" asked Jordan. "Sure I did. I was going to wear it tonight, but it was too big in the bust and had to be altered. It was gas blue with lavender beads. Two hundred and sixty-five dollars." "There's something funny about a fellow that'll do a thing like that," said the other girl eagerly. "He doesn't want any trouble with anybody." "Who doesn't?" I inquired. "SCP-6000-Jay Gatsby. Somebody told me—" The two girls and Jordan leaned together confidentially. "Somebody told me they thought he killed a man once." A thrill passed over all of us. The three Mr. Mumbles bent forward and listened eagerly. "I don't think it's so much that," argued Lucille skeptically; "it's more that he was a German spy during the war." One of the men nodded in confirmation. "I heard that from a man who knew all about him, grew up with him in Germany," he assured us positively. "Oh, no," said the first girl, "it couldn't be that, because he was in the American army during the war." As our credulity switch

[metashard]

Bio (because I have discovered that 1.) I can no longer edit my actual blog bio without deleting it and mama didn't raise no compromiser, and 2.) apparently, this is necessary.)

Meta Shard, he/him, 28, trans, bi, US-Central Time Zone. Hobbyist cosplayer, professional mouse wrangler, former dancer. Any further inquiries about my identity, should they arise for some unfathomable reason, may be directed toward the nearest wall.

[metashard]

a mannequin wearing Djoseras' face works some things out (2450 words). Warning for self harm and unedited writing I suppose

Djoseras folded his polishing cloth into a neat square, tucked it into a crevice in his thigh plating, placed a glass of cool water upon the shrine, and knelt.

It was not Ithakka who was before him. Ithakka was dead millions of years over, his corpse bound in stasis and very much not capable of making its way across the desert from the capital even if it had the inclination to do so. The trek from the capital to Djoseras’ lonely palace in the sands was a taxing one even to a Necron.

But Ithakka was before him nonetheless. He lounged in a regal repose upon his shrine with the glass of water held delicately in his desiccated fingers, and he raised it in greeting to Djoseras as he approached. The kynazh bowed in return, placing his brow upon the (immaculate, freshly-polished) tile floor.

“Rise!”

Djoseras rose to sit upright. His mummified ancestor remained above him, seated as he was on the shrine. It was more of a bench, really, with a small offering table on each side. While the piece itself was exquisite work, if on the minimalist side for a royal, it was a work in progress. Djoseras was still working out precisely what might work best. Feeling his way through such matters was foreign and uneasy for him, and it took time to force himself through it.

“Enough of that.” Ithakka waved his free hand toward Djoseras, filling the air with the clinking of the thin bangles that adorned his corpse. “Are you here solely to make yourself uncomfortable in my presence?”

“No, honored Lawmaker.” Djoseras dipped his head on reflex.

“Ah-ah. Behold me.”

He looked up once again. Ithakka’s eyes were the only part of him that glowed with the vibrancy of life, all wet and flicking around. They peered through holes bored through the rest of his golden deathmask, the one which veiled him in his tomb. The one time Djoseras had been permitted to see his ancestor in person, the mask had been firmly in place, and he had no true idea what lay behind it. Perhaps Ithakka did have the same amber irises as Djoseras now saw him with, the same that he saw in the mirror so often once, nearly the same as those on his father and brother. Perhaps not.

Now, Ithakka looked at him with pity in those eyes, and Djoseras felt a vicious guilt rise within him.

“State why you have come to me, Djoseras.”

“Wise and noble Founder, I -”

“Plainly, boy!” From behind his mask, the corpse snorted a laugh. “Even us dead things do not have all the time in the world, do we? You offer pleasantries as though I must subsist on them.”

He fought the urge to bow his head again. “I am sorry…”

“Ithakka. Or Grandfather, if it comforts you.”

“...I do fear we have far more than one ‘grand’ between us.”

“You all start to look the same after a few generations. There are those that are ‘old’ and those that are ‘young’; one ‘grand’ is enough to get the point across.”

“Grandfather.” Djoseras found that the words he had planned to say would not come, pre-couched as they were in all manner of circumspect niceties. Ithakka let him work, and as he did, he put the glass of water to the carved lips of his mask and took a sip.

“I do not think that I am a good person.”

“And?”

“I wish for your aid in fixing me.”

Ithakka took another long sip, apparently savoring the water’s coldness, before placing the glass on one of the side tables. He then lounged back on the shrine, fingers laced. “Why do you think that you are not a good person?”

“I am cruel. I have harmed others when I should have aided or protected them. I have wasted lives, both in causing deaths and wasting others’ time. Oltyx hates me. Father is entirely apathetic to me. There is no other who has ever claimed to love me - there is something broken within me that makes me unworthy of love. Something repellant. I have stood by and done nothing as my home falls into ruin, and I am afraid that I’ve let it get to the point that there will be no saving it. I have failed, I am despised-” Djoseras’ vocal emitter tumbled over itself into refrenation, and he reset it by force. “You have seen my heart in more clarity than words can provide, haven’t you. Am I beyond repair?”

Ithakka looked at him through the mask, still with that irritating pity in his eyes. “Why do you think that you are broken?”

“Look at other people. They ply the world and each other with such ease. Difficulties, surely, but not so dreadfully incapable that they cannot even tell what they’re missing. I feel as though I am learning the workings of others by looking at the backwards silhouettes of the shadow theater - and at other times, I am nearly overwhelmed with the force of will they expel upon me. It is constantly at either full or nil, with no respite in a balanced middle. I am exhausted trying to sort through it no matter which side of the scale has me.”

“Expelled upon you?”

“In the shifts of their shoulders and a quirk of eyebrows. The way a driver twitches the control orb, how much energy pulses through a glaive’s edge, the twist of one’s torso to make a tile strand clatter just a bit more or less. The telepath’s art is a charlatan’s trick - people will scream at you what they are thinking if you are open to listen.”

“And what are they thinking?”

“Back when I was at court, around others?” A harsh bark of laughter tore from him. “They wanted me dead. Some of them were eager to do it themselves. Others thought it more upright to just wish I would do the job myself and keep their hands clean. Everyone - nobleborn, sandborn - even Pakhet, my old tutors. Always. It has only gotten worse since the forges.”

“Why would they want you dead?”

“I have said it: because I am not a good person. I am cruel and wasteful and ungrateful and all manner of failures. If Unnas were to fall, they do not want this as their king, but it would be too difficult to get rid of me after the fact - so they will it upon me now, before matters entangle themselves.”

Ithakka leaned forward enough to face Djoseras head-on rather than the slight angle he had been lounging in. “It is good to identify the problem, narrow it down. You cannot fix the whole world at once, boy. So let us focus on this; you face a challenge to your primacy as kynazh.”

“Yes, but-”

“How can you fix it? What action can you take?”

“I seek to bring them to not feel such contempt and hatred for me.”

“How might you convince them?”

Djoseras sighed a strangled rush of static and bowed low again. “That is why I come to you, Grandfather. Advice. I do not know what to do. How do I make myself worthy of them?”

“First: do you think that the problem is with you, or is it with them?”

“Am I to believe that everyone else is wrong except me? That seems… dangerously narcissistic.”

“By your heka, may it be true.”

“But that breeds only further hostility. I can change the world, but not turn a heart.”

“Then say the problem is with you. How can you improve yourself to make them love you?”

“I had hoped for training. Philosophy. Art. Music. I have tried and failed. I… my heart has been empty for too long. What little padded it before the forges was carved out and left hollow. I have been told time and again that,” he drew up his fingers in a mockery of quotes, “‘to become worthy of love, you must first learn to love yourself.’ That is-”

“Pandering drivel.”

“-the best I’ve got.”

Ithakka tilted his head and mask to the side. “Well, has it worked?”

“...No.”

“Why not?”

“I tried. I do not think I am worthy enough even for myself to love.”

“Hm.” Ithakka rose from the shrine. His joints creaked like an old wooden ship as they struggled to keep the rickety corpse upright, the sound being almost but nearly covered by the jingling and tinkling of his enormous array of gold and silver funerary jewelry. The cacophony was short-lived, though, as he merely sat back down on the floor at the base of the shrine, level with Djoseras.

“Boy. What do you think love is?”

“I… I am a Necron. I have no soul. I cannot love.”

“But you had one once, and you still have a hole where love is supposed to be. Tell me the shape of that hole, and we will figure out what key might fill it.”

Djoseras dimmed his oculars. “Father loved me. His love was to make sure I was strong enough to succeed him, and to face all he put before me. Oltyx did too, though differently. His was to ask me how my day went sometimes and be worried when I was injured.”

“Those are family. Are there any others?”

“No. Well - it is hard to tell what is obligation and what is love, isn’t it? I don’t believe that anyone who has said they loved me meant it.”

“Well, you cannot make that entire court of simpletons family. I deny my blessing for that one,” Ithakka said with a wink. “But let us try something else: what do you think love is supposed to be like?”

“I think my impression of love has fallen victim to too much fiction in my youth.”

“Surely one of those scribes was trying to tell the truth. So what is it?”

Djoseras thought. “Love is when you want to hear about someone’s day, not simply ask out of politeness. It is being willing to die for them, and also to get out of a warm bed to greet them in the cold. It is thinking about them warmly and unprompted, worrying about them unprompted.”

“You sound as though you’ve contemplated this before.”

“I have.”

“For who?”

“I have stated before; I don’t believe that anyone who has said they loved me meant it.”

“Why not?”

“There is… something repellant within me. Something is rotten. Any time I have attempted to find someone, I become abusive. Needy, pathetic, and the cruelty inherent to me emerges unchecked. It is a constant, exhausting battle to keep that part of myself from showing, and in doing so, the relationship itself becomes exhausting. And for naught, as I always slipped up eventually.” His hands curled around the sides of his throat. “I have never been eager to hurt someone. I am, apparently, simply incapable of not doing so. So I stopped trying. And I am sorry for my failure, for my inability to do this correctly like everyone else in the entire bloody galaxy is apparently capable of. I want to learn how.”

“Practice.”

“On what?”

“Yourself. That is what the advice to love yourself is supposed to teach you.”

Given his current posture, it would have taken Djoseras less than a tenth of a second to reposition, hold out his dominant hand, and draw his hyperphase rapier directly into conjunction with the mummified heart of Ithakka. The heart was the seat of the soul, even after death, and its destruction would mean the dissipation of the Founder’s soul into nothingness and dust. Silence once more.

“And so we come full circle,” he gritted out.

Ithakka shrugged. “If you fail - no, when you fail, you are the only one who will suffer. Train as you would for any skill. Try, fail, learn, try again - and make sure you don’t skip those middle steps. How did you learn to wield a sword?”

“Pakhet taught me.”

Ithakka threw his head back and cackled. “How did she teach you, you obstinate churl?”

“She showed me steps and sequences, then had me mimic. She would prod me into position, and if that failed, struck at the offending limb until it moved properly.”

“And did it work?”

“I am a rather decent swordsman nowadays.”

“Then she has taught you more than Unnas asked of her. If soft redirections do not work, reinforce it. Your mind will eventually reshape to match your teachings.”

“How am I meant to strike the offending part of my processors, lobotomy pick?”

The mummy waved dismissively. “The mind is magnificent; give it pain, and it will redirect the sensation where it needs to go. Associate failure with consequences, and in doing so spur your mind to either learn or suffer.”

Djoseras nodded. This was good. This was familiar, something he knew he could do, a foothold in this uncharted territory. “I will do this.”

“Consistency is key, remember. Do not shirk your duty; if you wish to improve, if you ever wish to make yourself worthy of love, you must be vigilant. Take these flaws that you have listed and make them your first targets: cruelty, wastefulness, ungratefulness, strike them from your mind and actions with all due force. Only thus might you improve.”

“Thank you, Grandfather.”

“And!” Ithakka raised one bony finger with all the vigor of a marshal. “Your body feels pain only when permitted, yes?”

“I had no plans to dodge my duty, honored ancestor.”

“I did not think you would. I worry for rapidity; you must strike immediately, the moment it is warranted. No hesitation. Keep your reception of pain on.”

“At all times?”

“Until you have shown noticeable improvement, at the very least. The tighter the training regimen, the better your chances of fixing yourself.”

“I understand, Grandfather.” Djoseras bowed his head once more.

Ithakka, for his part, seemed to relax, pleased at being able to be of some use. His hands folded against each other with a rustle of old skin like wind through reeds. “Be vigilant in all you do, Djoseras. And when you speak with me again, I wish to hear of your improvement.”

“I shall endeavor to do good things, Grandfather Ithakka.”

“Off to bed again with me, then! And you, to work - I pity you half-dead sort, really. I’m sure you’ll come to have your time of rest soon. Farewell, Djoseras.”

With solemnity, Djoseras bowed his head to the floor, rose, reached forward, polished the shrine and glass clean once more, then bowed again. He remained until the room went silent before taking his phaseblade from its dimensional sheath and getting to work.

[metashard]

oh look more. and worse (2073 words)

“Well?”

Djoseras did not meet the eyes of Ithakka as he approached, nor did he make any acknowledgement at all as his ancestor came to stand beside him. He remained crouching in the hot sand and tried to focus on the scrimshaw epithet he was carving into the hip of one of his Immortals. 

“Have you made any progress?”

The Immortal’s name was Senunet, who had taken the hand of a Krork commander and presented it to Djoseras in an age long past, and it was this deed that he now etched into the ridge of her pelvis. A foul mood was already clouding Djoseras’ vision, and he really, really wasn’t partial to dealing with introspection at the moment. It was fated to only make him more sour.

“You’re avoiding this.”

Quick as a snap of static, Djoseras flicked the carving phaseblade to face himself, pushed it into his thigh, and drew it crosswise. The knife slipped through the necrodermis with the ease only a monomolecular edge could give, and it left a long, thin, perfect line through the plating. As if in belated realization, only once the knife had left him did beads of flux and coolant begin to well out of the wound and run in hesitant rivulets down his bent leg. They mingled as they did so, vibrant green mixing with cool, translucent blue, so that drops of swirling iridescence hit the sand and refracted the desert sun most beautifully.

Djoseras watched them fall. There were warning messages appearing in his processors, hull breaches and flow monitoring errors and combat subroutines detecting damage and baying to be let loose. There was something like pain, too, something shaped like splintered glass burning hot on his thigh. 

“I cannot feel it, Grandfather.” The pain was lazy. Where it should have told him to run, to fight, to solve whatever had caused it, this pain was simply present and asked nothing of him. It demanded that it exist without purpose. Djoseras was disappointed with it. He had been equally disappointed with the wounds that preceded it. "I have not been avoiding my duty. But neither does it have any impact upon me anymore."

Ithakka crossed his arms and harrumphed. “Did I not tell you to keep your sensation of pain on?”

“Yes, Grandfather.”

“At all times?”

“Yes, I have done so, Grandfather.”

He returned to carving the scene of victory into Senunet's hip. Flux continued to seep from him in a languid drip. He ignored it.

Ithakka watched, judging. At some point that Djoseras did not register, he knelt in the sand beside his descendant to get a closer look.

“Are you even trying, boy?”

The phaseblade clicked back into its sheath. “I am not very practiced at it yet, but I can draw the proportions well enough.”

“I mean your improvements. Are you even trying to make yourself loved?”

“...I do not think I am. Or at least, I'm certainly not trying very hard.”

“Why not?”

“I think that, to some degree, I am not worthy of it. That I will never be, that it is impossible for me to become worthy. So why waste the effort.”

“What gives you the idea that you aren't worth loving?”

Djoseras gave a grim smile in his nodes. “I've been basically told as much.”

“And you're a notorious catastrophizer.”

“There's not been much room to misinterpret.”

“Are you talking about Unnas? That boy, I swear-”

“Some of it. There have been others.”

Ithakka sighed, rocked back on his heels, and landed fully on the sand with a little thump and a displeasured groan. “Who? And what exactly was said to make you so distasteful of yourself?”

Djoseras looked at the sand Ithakka had kicked up and backtraced each grain’s trajectory as he spoke with a voice equally dry. “He told me he had been lying to me. That he knew he never loved me, never actually wanted me. But that I looked safe enough for him to try, to see if he really was incapable of feeling such ways. And that I had no right to be angry with him for using me-” His voice choked. “When I couldn't hold my tongue - and I tried. I swear I tried to be civil afterwards. I was abusive, he said. My silence was preferred to any further contact. And my last stroke of unnecessary drama was leaving as desired.”

Ithakka's eyes flicked over him, but he remained silent.

“Another one: I am a distraction from what was important to him. I demanded too much from him - a hug, a kiss, time, energy. Nothing I would ever go through could compare to what he had been through - and he was right. At least Unnas only ever beat when he needed to, and used his words the rest of the time.” A harsh laugh escaped him. “I should have been grateful that I did not face such dire horrors as he did. And I was grateful. I tried to understand for him, but I failed. And so he left.

“The third? Hardly anything, and much of the same. I was his dumping ground for all that plagued him, nothing I had ever experienced would compare, to ask anything of him was emotional abuse, and I was a bastard for curling up when winter came and my heart froze in the cold.”

His hand wavered. Before he could etch a faulty line, he took his hand from Senunet and stabbed the scalpel into the ground hard enough to send a cascade of sand into a plume around himself, the Immortal, and Ithakka. He tried not to think about the grains infiltrating his plates.

“This is… fucking pitiful,” he growled. “I should not need love. It has been nothing but pain every time, and each time I come away even more scarred and empty than before. I am disgusted with myself for wanting such things, terrified that I will be hurt again. And it is terror: I recoil at the very idea of letting myself walk into a stupid pit-trap like that again. I do not want to be baited into trying again.

“And yet I feel as though I am starving. I feel weak and ill and incorporeal at my edges, and this idiotic, greedy nodule in my engrams says that if I were to find someone to share myself with, I would leap from my sickbed in some metaphorical miracle.” He shook his head. “All I have left to share with another now is pain and rot. Were I ever to find someone remotely safe to share myself with, they would be a saint, and therefore deserving of so much better than me.

“So, no. I have not been trying. I have been doing as you asked, promptly and vigorously. But I do not think that, in my core, I even want this to work. And so it will not.”

His hand was still buried in the sands, he discovered, still clenching around the phaseblade’s handle as the crater slowly filled itself back in.

“Necrons are not supposed to feel pain. We left that behind us with the rest of our burdensome flesh. So why, why can I not shed what remains of my heart still and be done with it all? I want to be done with it. I… do not want to want to be loved. I want to not need love. So tell me, honored Lawmaker, how do I achieve that?” Djoseras spat the last of it with a venom he hadn't intended. He hadn't intended to raise his voice nearly as much as he had. No point in trying to suck the words back in now.

He expected to be smacked. That is what Unnas would have done. It would have been by hand before the forges, and with the aid of a gauss-wreathed mace after. He curled inward expectantly.

Instead, he felt a light, gentle arm lean over as much of his shoulder as it could cover. Ithakka embraced him.

And Djoseras froze like prey under his touch.

“Did you ever tell your father about any of this?” Ithakka's voice was unusually soft, moreso than Djoseras had ever heard it before. 

He shook his head, tightly so as to not shake his ancestor off. “He would not have approved.”

“Do you think he wanted you to find someone and be happy at all?”

“No. To both points. He wanted me to be functional, and this would have impaired that.” His helm dropped. “Like the second of them - such fancies were a distraction from what was important in life.”

“You clearly cared enough about them to let their opinions of you matter. Would that not make them important?”

Djoseras tried to meet Ithakka's eyes. “I loved them. I would have given them the world. I would have made them my prince consort and carved a moon with their name, or I would have been happily whisked away to some far-off crownworld to be their toy. I would have run away to live in some backwater swamp among the bugs and muck if they'd asked me, if that meant getting to stay with them forever. And some rancid part of me still wants to love them - but they have rejected me. So I need to quash that voice and let them go, and I can't. I am incapable of controlling myself in this, and I am disgusted by it. I am disgusting for being it. I want to carve out the part of myself that loves them and throw it in an incinerator. And I want to cut deeper than that, to remove any trace of the ability to love from myself and burn it in kind so that I will never again risk feeling this horrid emptiness again. I want to never open myself- to leave such a blatant opening for attack again. Because I keep falling for it. Because I'm a damn fool who can't learn any better. I will continue attracting the vulnerable and never be enough for them. I will hurt them and they will hurt me, and we will all be the worse for it. I just-” His head hit the sand. The air weighed heavy, clung to him like a thick foam or a wet fur or a hundred thousand screaming wasps trying to draw blood from a stone.

“I want it to stop. All of it. I do not want to hurt anyone. I do not think I can take being hurt anymore.”

He remained silent for a time, as did Ithakka. The sand crept into his helm crest.

“There are other types of love; I have been cruel and demanding in them, too. I have tried to bow out before I break the people around me, and that makes them dislike me. I have tried to stay, and eventually I say or do something poor, and this makes them dislike me too. I do not know how to make myself more palatable, at least on a deeper level. I can make myself agreeable enough on an acquaintance level, certainly. But I think that my deeper self is fundamentally incompatible.”

“With whom?”

“Everyone.”

“You get along well enough with me.”

Djoseras pulled away far enough to look Ithakka in the eye and snorted. “You are not real.”

“Pah! What difference does that make?”

“The difference it makes is that you are perhaps the one… entity, I suppose, that cannot use this against me. Myself. And that makes it all the more pathetic.”

“Hmph.” Ithakka withdrew his arm and crossed them both, though not without a wink through that mask of his. “Until you find something better, you will have to make due with me. Is there shame in huddling in a cave through a storm in the absence of a palace?”

“Assuming you lack a tent, or a hut, or any number of things between the statuses of caves and palaces?”

“Yes, assuming that, you dolt.”

“I suppose there isn’t shame in it.”

“Then huddle away.” Ithakka shifted in the sand until he was comfortable. Failing this, he shifted back up to one knee and dusted off as much sand as he could from the pits in his mummified skin. Djoseras looked away and tried not to imagine how unpleasant that might feel. “Have your servants bring forth a palanquin or such for me to rest upon. For as long as you require me, I am not going anywhere.”

“...I will settle at a blanket for now.”

[metashard]

Holding true to the ethos of 0 editing. Hopefully more like raw cookie dough than uncooked rice or such (999 words more)

"I wonder, boy," said Ithakka, then paused to work around a particular toughness in the jerky. "I wonder. If you were ever to find someone willing to love you, what would you do with that?"

Djoseras snorted and did not meet his ancestor's gaze, only continued looking forward as the two made their circuit around the palace grounds. "I ask that you do not taunt me with such impossibilities."

"Ignore the supposed impossibility of it and think in the hypothetical. If someone were to say that they loved you, just one person, how would you respond?"

"With the utmost suspicion."

"Why?"

He shrugged. "There is nothing of worth to be found in me. Thus, such a confession can only be for an ulterior motive: a play at favor from the royal house, perhaps. Perhaps just for access to the coffers. Either way, the story ends with me being suckled upon by a leech, not carried off into some fairytale finale."

"Say that the confession was made by someone of equal standing and greater wealth. What then?"

"Is there such a thing as a person who wants nothing more than what they already have?"

Ithakka waggled the half-chewed meat at him in the manner of a scolding finger. "You are doing your damnedest to avoid engaging with the question. You know what I'm asking; if someone loved you for yourself, what would you do?"

"I find it difficult to imagine such a person being possible."

"Then try harder."

"… Truthfully, I think I would be afraid of them."

"The parameters of the question already ensure they're not going to harm you, fool."

"Yes, but- I will harm them. Inevitably. I will fail at some point to protect them, or make some error that displeases them. If they forgive me for it, then it's only going to get worse, as I err again and again. They will love me until I choke them, or they will learn to hate me soon enough, and I think both would destroy me even more utterly than being left as I have before."

Ithakka sighed. "Why do you think you would be a poor lover?"

"You have seen my heart, Grandfather. I would not hesitate to give all I have for them. Yet, sometimes, too often, I have nothing left to give." A weariness swept in from the east, and Djoseras leaned on a nearby balustrade beside Ithakka. "This is not the time nor place to expound upon it in detail, particularly given how much you have seen already, in the more private chambers - but it suffices to say that in such a state, it strains me enough to see dawn, much less look forward to it, no matter how glorious a face might be graced by its light beside me."

"If you spoke of your peculiarities more often, and without such disgust for them, perhaps you might find them more easily managed. Less intimidating."

"Or I might simply scare you off as well."

"I am you!"

"And I-you am disturbed by you-myself. Was that not the point of all this?"

"You find me disturbing?"

"You are a talking corpse."

Ithakka sniffed, a hollow sound through his radiant deathmask. "One could say the same for yourself."

With the barest flicker of amusement in his nodes, Djoseras turned and leaned over the bannister to look over the sand garden below. "Mutually dead, then. But I do worry about… they say that acknowledging things may speak them into existence. Beyond heka, there is something to be said for reinforcing one's peculiarities through focusing upon them."

"Yet, to refuse to acknowledge the problem makes it impossible to solve."

"Am I vain in hoping that these are the kinds of problems that will go away on their own if ignored dutifully enough?"

"Yes. Extremely."

Djoseras slumped over. "Then how do I tread that narrow line between productive acknowledgement and wanton indulgence?"

"Surely, there's a big enough gap between the two for you to easily pull back."

"When the line is invisible and the only point of reference I have is from within my own mind, it is much more difficult than one might expect."

"So, then, get another set of eyes." The dessicated mummy leaned over the balastrade alongside Djoseras. "Other than mine, if you insist. I know that's where you were going next."

"How wise and prescient of you."

"Start thinking. Who would be a fine choice for second?"

"… I do not think there is anyone I would trust for this other than myself."

"Stop forcing yourself into loops!"

"Would you rather I lied? There is no one I would trust with such information. Either it would be someone who thinks highly of me who would be disappointed, or someone who thinks lowly of me and would use it against me. To share these things openly would be the death of all I have left."

Ithakka stroked the short beard of his mask. "Alright, to backtrack slightly: if someone were to love you, enough to look past these…"

"Call them flaws. Do not hesitate."

"I was going to say 'quirks.'"

Djoseras rolled his eyes. "I can smell Unnas on the wind. He knows you're here, I'm afraid. There's really not much time left for mincing words."

"Then I'll be brief with it: if there was someone who loved you, someone whose vision of you would not be dulled by what you have said in those vaults, who would stay by your side and held your hand as you clawed your way out of it - what would you think of them?"

He looked out to the desert night, and to the storm riling itself into a frenzy in the distance. "I don't think I could help but love them in return. I think I would die for them, and give them all the world and more. And I would think them an utter, dangerous fool for it all." He then turned and swept away, tiles glittering in the cool moonlight.

[metashard]

a chunk written a while ago, oh, very early May or so. I am no longer in the headspace to continue this exact line of thought, but I need to stop chewing and spit it out to make room for the next bite (898 words. mmpalindrome pretty)

"Zultanekh," Djoseras said.

"Prince of the Ogdobekh," Djoseras said.

"Honored kynazh- they don't use that word anymore, do they," Djoseras said.

"Old friend," Djoseras said.

"Would you mind pacing in silence? You're scaring my nap away," Ithakka said and, with a disgruntled harrumph, rolled over on the bench to face his back to Djoseras.

The prince bowed. "I am sorry, Grandfather. You know how it is with diplomacy. Am I to risk flubbing my one chance at reconciliation out of pure laziness?"

"You risk ruining it purely out of overthinking instead, as usual. And diplomacy: was he not your friend in those ancient days?"

"I would say he was, yes."

"Is he now?"

"We have kept in amicable contact."

Ithakka tutted. "A normal, healthy person would call that 'friendship', not 'amicable contact.'"

"Ha. Zultanekh has said the same."

"Then, you fool, that means that he's your friend!" Ithakka rolled himself upright with a grunt, straightened his deathmask, and eyed him queerly. "Hm. You're doing it again. Distancing yourself from all things remotely enjoyable in fear of loving them too much."

"I do not do that. And I do not love Zultanekh."

"He'd probably be heartbroken to hear that."

Djoseras turned his head away. "He is as soulless as the rest of us. He has no heart to break, I'm sure; and if such were not the case, his would certainly be resilient enough to take such a meager blow as discovering that something like this-" he motioned to himself "-does not wish to leech more from him than it already has. No - I cannot hurt Zultanekh, because I am not worth caring for enough to feel my absence."

"You're a persistently miserable little dolt."

A nanosecond flash of an amusement pattern flicked across Djoseras' nodes. "I have had quite enough practice."

"One would think you'd have had enough of it by now, then, and willing to try something different for once in your un-life.

"Oh, but I am oh so good at it." He nearly began another circuit of his throne room, and Ithakka nearly began rolling his beady eyes again. But, mindful now, Djoseras instead took a seat upon a blackstone bench near to the room's apex.

"How can I say this - my presence is an unwanted thing. I do not blame Zultanekh specifically for it, and I know that he would not let such a thing go unsaid if he felt and meant it overtly. Rather, it is something that has become a common theme to my existence. I have been tolerated, sometimes appreciated, but never truly wanted. My participation is something others accept in order to accomplish some task or goal, and then I bow out when I am no longer needed so as to not overstay that summoning."

"Have you considered that people may like you better if they got to know you outside the context of your labor?"

"It has not simply been labor - perhaps I've misspoken. A prince's presence is useful sometimes, diplomatically speaking. Or sometimes I serve as a son, or a brother, or a commander. But, well. Who has ever asked for Djoseras himself?"

"Has Zultanekh not called you 'friend' and asked for you as such?"

"I worry that I have not served as a friend. Not competently enough to make it to the list, at least."

"Competent?!" Ithakka sputtered.

"You're a lot like him, you know."

"Then hear him through me as I say that you're the most creative idiot I've ever met! Competent, competent," the ancient king muttered to himself. The word sounded as though it rolled around his mouth and left a thick, disatasteful film all around it. "What, would you like me to drag your old scribal tutors from eternal slumber too to critique your companionship as though it was some schoolboy's assignment?"

Djoseras bowed his head. "Is it immature of me?"

"Yes, in a way. Stop that, raise your head, and unclog the shame from your ears, boy. Competency is not the purpose of a friendship. The purpose is to find someone else to help make life a little more worth living. You can be a poor friend, certainly; but there is no rubric for success in this, no metrics or rules to live by. This is, I'm sorry to tell you, something that you need to feel your way through. Wing it."

"I am a grown man, Grandfather, I'm fully aware of this!"

"You say a lot of things that you probably do believe but which you fail to embody. You feel that you are not being as good as possible of a friend as can be, yet you outwardly acknowledge that there is no objective goal for what the perfect companion looks like. It is the story of the Mekhiddo Pass; pick a damn path and stick with it! Splitting yourself means dividing yourself into disarray, and even if one path ends up perilous, you will still at least have the strength to push through it if you are united with yourself. You have enough foes already without taking up arms against your own arguments too."

"…I believe the technical term is 'cognitive dissonance.'"

"Did you get that out of one of your fancy library scrolls, boy?"

"A digital copy gifted by a Nihilakh overlord. I suppose yes?"

"Bloody Nihalakh fops and their useless libraries. You'll stew in your hypotheticals until they melt you to sludge and consume you in full. Would you just call him already!"

[metashard]

AHAHAHAHA

No, he did not end up calling Zultanekh first. He called someone else. mistake (2153 words)

There's the fuzzy white scent of shellfish on the wind again.

Djoseras clears his throat, then again. The miasma coils there, roiling its way down his nose and getting caught on itself. He tries to swallow it down too, neither working. His throat's too cold for that now. And so he presses at it with his knuckles to try to force the thickness out of himself, and he hacks in cut-off gasps of static like a choking dog. The metal there feels so tight around him. He presses until he feels flux on his hand, slippery between scrabbling fingers, and so he knows he almost has the thing out. Almost. He presses further.

He's on his back now, wrists pinned heavy to the stone.

"Bloody sea-wretch, are you trying to kill yourself?!" Above him loomed Ithakka. The heaviness in Djoseras must be the Lawmaker's palms and knees upon him.

"I wasn't."

"Could've fooled me. You've worn a hole in your throat. Call the scarabs."

"I've nearly made it."

Ithakka presses his wrists harder into the stone of his own palace floor. It's hardly any use, Djoseras thinks, as he's made no attempt to rise. The sun-gold mask looms above him, the eyes within wide and fiery.

"What devil's gotten into you now?"

Djoseras stared up at him, and past him toward the geometric pin-striping across the ceiling. "I am simply tired."

"Tiredness does not make one tear out their own throat, usually."

"But it is exhaustion at its root. I speak no lies to you, Grandfather."

"Then explain yourself more adequately."

"May I sit up, first?"

Ithakka rose, just enough to hobble himself over to his altar to sit. He heaved a groan as his joints settled into the new position. With mildly more grace, Djoseras pulled himself up to sit cross-legged, not moving far from where he had been driven to the ground by the weight of Ithakka.

"Well?"

Djoseras kept his gaze level with the deathmask of Ithakka but did not speak for a moment. The words felt heavy in the middle of his face, and there was no pressure built up to force them easily. Eventually, though, "I was made to speak with Unnas."

"Ah."

A moment.

"Is that it?" Djoseras kept his voice even. "No question as to why that might lead to all the rest of that?"

Bangles rattled as Ithakka waved a hand. "You don't have a close relationship with him. It was awkward, especially after how long it's been since you last spoke. Is it really that big of an issue?"

The miasma began to coil again, starting in the cavity of his reactor core this time. Djoseras tried to ignore it. "You have never spoken with him. You were born and died millennia before him. You have no clue what he is like."

"He is a passable king."

"But what of a father?"

"Did he need to be a father at the time?"

Djoseras leapt to his feet, froze for a moment, and began pacing. He was making a back-and-forth circuit longways in front of the altar, puffing Ithakka with a small swish of air every time he passed in each direction. "It was about Oltyx. And need I mention that he is my father, too? Yes, I needed him to at least have the thought in mind as he spoke."

"How did he behave, then, that you deem was inappropriate?"

"Was there a single thing he did correctly?"

"I'm asking you!"

Djoseras paused his pacing for just long enough to glare before taking up his path again. "It was about the approaching human offensive. Oltyx's reports, and our local auspices. I need not tell you why it is necessary for a king to be aware of an army approaching his gates, and neither do I think I need to tell you why I was incredibly reluctant to do so."

"Enlighten me, will you?"

"…It isn't as simple as that."

"Why has your relationship with Unnas degraded so far?"

"I cannot explain that."

"Why not?"

"Because- I can't. Do I drag you through every instance that shaped it?" He whirled on Ithakka then, tile strands flaring out with fury his face could no longer show. "Like a sculptor being asked to list every strike he made with his chisel?"

"Just the big events would be enough to get an idea, I would say."

"Then go unenlightened, because there aren't any to give you. I do not get the- I don't know, the luxury of pointing to a single event and saying to him 'yes, this was the exact moment at which I lost my love for you.' No, it would not have been kind nor easy, but it would have made it simple. It would have been something I could say happened."

"Do you mean to say that nothing did happen?" The face tilted to the side. Djoseras was no longer looking at the figure on the altar and noticed nothing more than the gold-and-flesh blur, but he felt the movement.

"No! But- as the mason carves. Ten thousand tiny chips of stone carved away one by one. Some larger, some mere dust, but all subtractive, and with no single strike from which a statue's hand or face suddenly emerges in complete form."

He paced another six circuits before speaking again. "I do not remember when my mother died. Not anymore: that is, perhaps, one of the few mercies biotransferrence has granted me. I was present, though. I was young. How young, I am unsure, but I was still somewhere in scribal tutelage at the time.

'Father did come soon after her passing. I was outside of the room where she lay, and he came to me - he came to me first, as a matter of fact. And he spoke to me of grand ideals. This is an opportunity to remember the importance of family. Mortality is something painful, but I must not shy away because it will be all our fates too. That I needed to get used to this pain."

At the end of the circuit, Djoseras stopped. His palm scraped the necrodermis pillar as he struggled to keep from sliding down it to the floor. All tension threatened to drop from his knees and ankles, the servos and hydraulics there screaming as though they were on the verge of cracking open and letting him collapse to the ground. He locked the joints against themselves and leaned his forehead and arm against the cold metal.

"The way you say it, it sounds rather cruel."

"But that's it; this is a summary. Most of the memory has been muddled by time and, yes, anger."

"So is this misrepresentation?"

His neck tensed, lacking teeth to grind it with. "He said it kindly. As far as he could, and as far as I remember. And he hugged me and told me that he loved me, and he only wished for me to grow from this."

"Then why speak of it when describing what caused this degradation?"

"Because it is the clearest memory I still have of what kind of person he has been to me."

"You remember it fondly, though."

"I hate him!" Djoseras turned on the altar again on stiff legs. "I was a child! I was grieving and scared. I was lost and hurt. I loved my mother, and I had just watched her die. And my father came to me and told me I was wrong for hurting, because this was a good thing. It was a good thing that my mother had died because that meant I would be a more useful heir for him to use. And he told me enough times that this was what love looked like, enough that I believed him. I am nauseatingly afraid that there is a part of me that still believes that that is love - usefulness, grand ideals with no person behind them. I am not supposed to love - I was never supposed to love, it is not the right of kings to love!"

The hall took some time to return to silence. Djoseras had not realized his voice could reach such volumes.

"If you say this with conviction," said the gold-and-flesh figure seated on the altar, "then all is not lost for Ithakas."

It was still blurry, despite Djoseras now facing the figure head-on. His oculars reset but refused to resolve the shape into Ithakka. He began approaching it, slow on his insensate legs.

"It is my right to love."

"Szarekh took that from you. Do not lie to me."

Djoseras shook his head slightly, gaze still locked on the figure as he moved in. "The C'tan stole the ability, if I ever had it. I retain the right."

"I will give you one mark: it is indeed not the right of kings to love. Nor princes, if they are to become kings."

Miasma, thick and clotted as if the sensation were some physical thing, coiled up through his neck, and the weight of dread stopped Djoseras in his place. He reset his oculars again.

Unnas looked upon him. He sat upon the altar squarely, his hands resting upon the offering basins at his sides in the manner of the arms of a throne. The hands there were wheedly, wizened things, even in necrodermis as they were. The rest of his arms, and the legs beside them, were equally reedy, almost flimsy in appearance. Nearly the whole of Unnas was much like this, from neck to ankle. What the rest of him lacked was made up for in his torso. The once barrel chest had warped in its skeletonization to bow outward at the bottom, leaving the flux conduits hanging from them to flare out and swing wild in an unwieldy mockery of a fluid-choked gut. He was, for all his deathless immortality, the very picture of age and decadence compounded upon each other.

He was also draped in something which Djoseras could see only as blurred, dark shadows that swayed lightly as he moved. He did not look closer to resolve them in his processors.

"You know that I have to desire to be a king. Sire."

Slow as stone, Unnas nodded once. “I am aware.”

“And yet you plan to make a king of me regardless.”

“Am I to leave Ithakas headless?”

“You have Oltyx.”

"Oh, Djoseras." The blurry things giving Unnas his modesty swung as the king stood. He was a head shorter, even at Djoseras' own unassuming height, and he stood with his back swayed and toes pointed nearly inward. "I have Oltyx, yes. And I love Oltyx. But I love you too. I want to see you grow into everything you could be. Is that wrong of me?"

Djoseras tried to swallow the weight in his throat. "It is not."

"You are wise, and you will be a just king. You will reach such great heights - I only wish I could be there to see them."

Unnas was crying. Tears were rolling from his face before becoming lost in the shadows that cloaked him. His shoulders heaved as he breathed. The tears left streaks of clean gold in their paths. Djoseras remained rooted in the sand, staring.

"Embrace your father."

Djoseras did.

"I am proud. Of the person you've become, and of everything you will do. I have not said this enough, have I?"

Djoseras remained hugging him. The harsh angles of Unnas' necrodermis combined with the slick warmth of his filthy shroud to make possibly the most unbearable sensation he had ever felt.

"I love you. I will always love you, no matter what. Remember this, please."

His chest felt as though it was going to slough off of him.

"You love me, yes?"

"Yes, father. I love you."

One more slap on the back, then he was free. Unnas swung his arms wide and smiled. It took every ounce of willpower to not leap back from him and cradle himself close.

"My beautiful child! My shining heir. Let the day not come soon, but when it does, I go with the comfort that I've left a worthy person to take my place."

Finally, finally, Unnas turned to leave. He spoke as he walked, seeming to do it purely out of idle thought. "I would enjoy your company at the capital more often, Djoseras. There is no need to warn us of your arrival; I would greet you warmly at the slightest notice. You are my heir, not a stranger. I love you."

Djoseras held himself where Unnas had left him until, through one of the balcony archways, he watched the blackened, creeping speck of his father draw into the distance and over the last dune of the horizon. He then, in silence, called for his necrodermis to heat itself until the air around him seared to plasma and wreathed him at last in a cleansing flame.

[faeffey]

da shrimp

[jerreeeeeee]

not every mutual fits neatly into an archetypal medievalism but there are some mutuals that im like yeah addressing you as “my liege” would come strangely naturally

[jerreeeeeee]

what mutual is prev

my liege lord

my loyal knight

my wise wizard

my evil advisor

my brother in arms

my lady muse

my wild mermaid friend

my fellow alchemist

my dashing rapscallion

my monstrous foe

Remaining time: 2 days 15 hours

[wh40ksummerfest]

WH40K Summer Fest Exchange: Nominations close in 12 hours

Masterpost | Ask | AO3 & Rules | 2026 Tag Set

Nominations for the WH40K Summer Fest Exchange close TODAY, Sunday May 31 at 3:59pm GMT | 5:59pm CEST | 11:59am EDT | 8:59am PDT (countdown).

Now's a good time to check if that popular pairing everyone loves was actually nominated or if everyone just assumed someone else would do it... You know the one! 👀

[cursed-40k-thoughts]

Wettest and driest factions? I’m guessing Drukhari and Necrons, but what does the expert say

This is an excellent question, with multiple answers depending on your personal perspective.

Based on an individual potential level, the wettest and driest faction is the Drukhari. Haemonculi can, obviously, produce extremely and eternally wet individuals via their surgical prowess. At the same time, an unfed Asdrubael Vect is so withered and has a pussy so dry that it actively increases the barometric pressure of the room he's in.

On an overall basis, the wettest faction is that of the Nurglite collective, which is at all times producing, storing and coated with a vast assortment of liquids and substances that renders them delightfully slick, greasy, moist and, indeed, wet at all times. Some of their liquids even beget other liquids. Others exude a wetness across multiple dimensions. Incredible.

Via the same metric, the Necrons are indeed the driest faction overall, with the total percentage of wetness being minimal or even entirely nonexistent depending on the state of a sample group's core flux at any given time.

Necrons must also get a special note with regards to wetness, as their crypteks can transform a person into a quantum wet superfluid that is temporarily the wettest thing in existence. However, given that a person experiencing this stops being a person and starts being a physics, it doesn't really count for the purposes of this examination. It is neat, though.

[alittlereclusive]

Ok, but necrons have fluid in their reactors. Various characters leaking reactor fliud for various reasons is all over The Infinite and The Divine. Necrodermis re-forming is also described with luquid-y adjectives.

I would make mention of the thousand sons as very dry. I also feel like the leagues of votan have big dry potential.

[cursed-40k-thoughts]

Necrons have core flux in their reactors, which is sometimes fluid, and also not a large part of the Necron. Necrodermis is sometimes a liquid, but mostly just a solid. Rubric marines are dry, yes, but Thousand Sons sorcerers are very biological and wet (sometimes due to crying, sometimes due to magic). Biological Votann are actually extra wet so that they can absorb the minerals from ore dust into their pores for sustenance and to maximise the amount of minerals harvested per second.

If you're going to speak up on these matters, do your wetness research.

[cursed-40k-thoughts]

Genuinely shocked it's not apparent that Flayed Ones are famously only temporarily wet, hence their need to find new and exciting people to wear and obvious exclusion from meaningful factional wetness assessment

[suavisoss]

Memory of a Touch

[hangingbottle]

[metashard]

There was one time I was practicing the cello in the orchestra room at school. I want to say it was Elgar's cello concerto, practicing for a solo and ensemble contest. It was about 10-12 years ago, hard to remember, but it was something dramatic. I was getting frustrated and stuck looping phrases.

A french horn player came in and asked if she could practice in here. A pod of trumpets had taken over the band room and were too loud for her to hear herself. I was a lot less assertive then and said yes. I wouldn't be able to hear myself either with a horn in the room, but I wanted a break.

As she set up, she said my playing was beautiful. Pretty, flowy. I told her that I was barely past sightreading this and was making all kinds of mistakes. Wild fingerings, not keeping to tempo, bow on autopilot. My playing sounded like screeching brakes to myself. She said strings always seemed to sound so beautiful and smooth, no matter what. I joked about playing rubato-issimo.

She started to play. I listened. The french horn is my favorite brass, and she played it beautifully. There was such a power to her. Whatever she was playing, it was bright and dance-like, and she moved with it as if she was dancing too. She filled the room with it.

When she took a break, I told her as much. I told her I wish I could get anywhere near that amount of energy in my own playing. She kind of scrunched up her face, and she said it wasn't great. She'd just gotten her orthodontic braces off and was struggling with proper embrochure. Her intonation was wavering, she said, and she had bad control over her dynamics. I told her it was wonderful.

[magistralucis]

I WAS NOT EXPECTING TDK QUOTES AS SOON AS I STARTED THIS GAME 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣

[orphelia4]

You know who else I miss? Prowl.

[transfemheadcanonbracket]

TRANSFEM HEADCANON BRACKET: SECOND ROUNDS

WHICH CHARACTER WOULD YOU BE MORE LIKELY TO HEADCANON AS TRANSFEM?

OLTYX [Warhammer 40,000 - The Twice-Dead King duology]

VYSE [Skies of Arcadia]

Voting ended onMay 28

OLTYX PROPAGANDA

Oltyx is a Necron, an Immortal robot who was once flesh and blood but who was forced to undergo transference to a robotic form against his will. He spends two whole novels wrestling with the "dysphorakh", a dysphoria specific to the Necrons that fixates on the incorrectness of their new forms. "I cannot breathe. Where are my lungs? I claw at my throat, and my fingers do not catch hot skin but instead screech on metal. I cannot open my mouth. Please, damned gods, let me at least scream" -type beat. You know how it is. Without spoilers, he finds peace and community near the end of the second book only once he accepts what he is and acts upon it. Can't help but feel like estrogen could have at least helped. For those who know the books already, you know those tasty little red morsels he indulges in could absolutely mean something else...  =====

VYSE PROPAGANDA

Hi, poll-runner here. I literally cosplayed Vyse in honor of the “Sky Pirate Girlfriends” video that inspired the transfem headcanon of her (specifically her as “Vyrsa”). They also headcanon her as polyamorous in the game, and, I shit you not, this video is the REASON I’m dating these two right now 

[tunaze11x]

[vvurm]

Executioner Phillias intrigues me...

(No legs)

[scramratz]

Its in the best interest for trans people to learn the difference between an actual transphobe, and someone who just isn't up to date with the latest terminology

[the-great-zalmoss]

NEW NECRON FLUFFTOMBER

Waaa~ A new chapter fic from MetaShard! WOWOOWOWOWOWO

An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works

Shamlessly promoting my bumblebee~

[metashard]

awawawawawa

Zahndrekh, Obyron, and Trazyn go hiking, from Zahndrekh's POV. I did some funky formatting with this one! Been thinking of a format screw like this for Zahndrekh's brain for a while. All's not quite well on the mountainsiiiiiide

[smaller-comfort]

hehehehehehehehehe "Said"

What's the last time you wrote the word "said"? Ideally with the line of dialogue it was tied to.

Im gonna cheat a little here, because apparently my most recent dialogue was in present tense (why do I do this to myself? present tense is full of the devil's verbs).

This is the germ of a Chained Echoes story about Glenn (the main character; an earnest young man whose life is a delicious tragedy parfait) and his best friend, Kylian. They're mercenaries, and Kylian is not only technically Glenn's boss (he's second in command of their mercenary company) he's responsible for rescuing Glenn from the prison camp where he grew up.

If you've played Final Fantasy Tactics, Kylian kind of explicitly the Delita to Glenn's Ramza, only make it Worse. I love them, your honor. They are categorically Not Good For Each Other in so, so many ways, most of which are Spoilers.

There aren't really any spoilers here, but there is some questionably consensual drunken groping.

---------

Kylian is warm and heavy, leaning against him as they slowly stumble away from the celebration, towards Kylian's room. He's humming something in Glenn's ear, and Glenn can feel the vibration'of Kylian's voice against the flesh of his neck. It makes him want to shiver and squirm away, but he keeps his arm around Kylian's waist and walks slowly, to keep them both from falling.

"...o'er the beak of the moon," Kylian half-sings, half-hums the next verse of his song. "I can make it back m'self, y'know." He stops, forcing Glenn to stop, too. "Go'on. You should...should go back to th'fun."

"It's okay," Glenn says immediately. "I don't mind. And...I don't think you can manage the stairs without help right now."

"Psh. Stairs. Put me on my ass'n I'll slide down."

The image is enough to make Glenn hide a smile against Kylian's shoulder. "We have to go up the stairs to get to your room."

This seems to dismay Kylian utterly. "Ah, fuck me, then," he says morosely. "Alright. Let's go on." Only he manages to turn the three words into a syllable and a half.

Glenn suppresses a sigh, but it's tempered with something fond; Kylian rarely indulges like this, and their celebrating is hard won. The Band celebrates hardest after their worst losses; the Captain says it's to make sure the souls of their comrades don't get lost between the living world and the Maelstrom. Mourning will come later, when the dead won't be tempted to linger by the sorrows of those they leave behind.

Glenn doesn't know enough about souls or the Maelstrom to have much of an opinion on the matter; priests were never permitted past the gates of Golgota. The closest thing to religion he knows is the pilot's prayer to Luna Orbetnis, begging for mercy if he dares to fly too high.

He doesn't question the Captain's orders for revelry in the wake of their recent victories, though. The Jadarian revolutionaries pay well; he'll have enough coin to upgrade his Sky Armor's RAM after this, and that thought is cheering enough to make him tolerant of everyone's drunkenness.

Kylian keeps up his humming as they slowly ascend the stairs; it's a silly drinking song, something Glenn remembers vaguely from his early days in the Band. Kylian has a pleasant baritone, tuneful despite his inebriation.

"Here we are," he says, a little pointlessly, when they reach Kylian's room. They stumble inside, and the two of them sit down on the edge of the bed, together.

Glenn is about to stand—to leave, and go back down the stairs, past the revelry to the sky armor hangar. He's excited for the chance to be alone with his engineering magazines, each one carefully hoarded from their stops along the coast of Nabrelia. With everyone busy celebrating, Glenn can take his time sounding out each of the words on the pages at his own pace.

He turns to say goodnight to Kylian, because there's no chance of his friend remaining conscious much longer, drunk as he is, and that's when the kiss catches him by surprise. Kylian's mouth is wet and hot, and tastes like beer—which Glenn doesn't like—and his hand is suddenly on Glenn's thigh, warm and firm—which Glenn doesn't hate—

The kiss ends, and Kylian leans his forehead against Glenn's and doesn't pull away. His eyes are closed; Glenn feels a little nauseous, even though he hasn't had more than a sip of wine.

They don't move for a long moment, Kylian's breath hot against his face, his hand hot against Glenn's thigh, and the space around them spinning so violently he thinks he might fall over, even though they're sitting down.

"S'okay," Kylian says at last. He brings his hand up, their faces still pressed together, and strokes Glenn's hair, a little clumsily, but the gesture is so familiar, so safe and comforting, but he doesnt feel safe or comforted by it at all. "It's okay," Kylian repeats, more clearly.

"I'm sorry," Glenn whispers. He doesn't know what for, but he doesn't want Kylian to hate him for this. He can't bear the thought. "I'm- I can-"

"No." Kylian shakes his head and pulls away, shoving Glenn gently back. "M'gonna sleep now," he declares.

"A-at l-l-least l-let me get your b-boots off." He hasn't stuttered like this in years, the clumsiness of his tongue something that hasn't plagued him since they took him from Golgota, and told him he could stay.

Since Kylian took him from Golgota. Glenn can't leave him like this, can he? It isn't right.

Kylian doesn't object when Glenn gets down on his knees and begins unlacing his boots. It's fine; he knows what this looks like, and it's fine. If Kylian wants to kiss him again, or wants- it's fine. He can do this.

"M'too fucking drunk f'r this," Kylian tells him, a little woefully. "You're a good kid."

"I-I-I'm not. N-not. Not a. K-k-kid." Fuck, why can't he get the words out properly anymore? His face burns; his hands are clumsy on the laces of Kylian's boots.

This time, when Kylian pets his hair, it is comforting. He thinks of his mother, and then feels sick again. But he gets the first boot off, and then the second, and the shaky inhale and exhale that hurts his chest helps steady his hands.

Kylian is still looking at him, somberly now. "If I asked you to stay," he begins, over-enunciating in the way of drunk people who very much wish they were not drunk. "Just to sleep."

"On th-the floor?" His voice cracks. So much for not being a kid. The thought is vicious and desolate, heavy with loathing.

Kylian sags forward, bending over his knees and covering his head with his hands. "Fuck, get out of here. Go." His voice is muffled, but it doesn't hide the edge there, and Glenn feels nauseous again.

He goes, and wishes—not for the first time— that he could stand the taste of alcohol.

[metashard]

Cackling that I managed to snag a common word that wasn't actually in there lmao

I didn't know these two going in, never played the game, but I feel like have the shape of them just from your snippet. Poor Glenn, oof.