I wrote a tiny ficlet based on the launch promo for Tum Dena Saath Mera exploring Rakshit's thoughts on why he reached for Aprajita's hand. Also here at Ao3. 237 words/G-rated.
First Touch to Forever
a Rakshit/Aprajita ficlet by @minahbirdie
Later, Rakshit asked himself why he had done it.
He was perfectly capable of picking himself off the ground. And he knew better than to pressure any woman to touch him.Â
She had clearly been in a rush, so it had been rude of him to slow her down.
But somehow, he couldn't resist extending his hand, knowing instinctively that she would pause to help him.Â
There was a spark of goodness about her, despite how stressed she'd been. Some golden glow from her heart maybe, shining through layers of worry and distraction.
Her grip on his arm was firm, the tug she gave strong enough to jerk him to his feet. She looked delicate and soft but that was definitely misleading.Â
When their palms touched, a pulse went through him. A sort of tiny personal earthquake, whispering that his life had just changed forever.Â
But that had to be a mistake, too. The woman in the crimson anarkali had turned away without a second glance, letting go of his hand so fast he had to assume she had felt nothing extraordinary at all.Â
He would surely never see her again.
But he hoped, wherever she was going, she would find the peace she so desperately seemed to need.
And he hoped that even if they never met again, she would remember sharing that fleeting moment with him.Â
Because he already knew he would never forget her.Â
the bridgerton show has this amazing talent of showing me a couple where i am actively rooting for one partner and the other one i'm either neutral on, actively dislike, or am meh about
kanthony? kate, my beloved. anthony, my beloathed
polin? colin my precious angel. penelope, you're on thin ice
benophie? sophie i would die for you. and benedict is. . .there, i guess. unfortunately
philoise? eloise, marry me instead, i'll treat you right. phillip, go home
This is such a mild take to have spurred whatever the heck is happening on Twitter. I am baffled. It's like that "so you hate waffles" meme. I'm not in the ingroup enough to know if there's more to the fury than publicly available so to me it just looks like one person's incomprehension (of the take) became the flapping butterfly wings that resulted in a raging tsunami. Like why bros, why?
Sometimes you love a character and your character loves someone you don't dig. That do be happening.
Who you identify with (or merely care about) in fiction comes down to who you are, what you've experienced, how you see the world. I donât get people who like characters I don't like. But they are allowed to state their opinion??? It doesn't call for a wholesale public repudiation of a person just cause they don't like your fav like come on đ
I might need to pray penance for my past self if I ever did anything like this. I get that when you're ride or die for a character, you're more reactive to any slights (real, inferred, or imagined). I have been that fan. I donât get pathologizing a fellow fan over this kind of difference in opinion.
I debated over posting this because what does it have to do with me and I barely even go here (polintwt or tumblr tbh). But this is fandom and this is tumblr and we are in fact allowed to drop our random musings here without deserving a communal drubbing over it.
Also witnessing this hurt my feelings over the injustice of it all and I'm trying to find ways to metabolize the distress instead of suppressing it đŹ
For the record I am a million times more interested in Penelope than Colin. She is the only character I watch the show for and their book is the only reason I was willing to watch the show at all. I am invested in Penelope to the extent that I sometimes even read other Penelope ships (gasp).
This does not mean I hate Colin. He's just not my particular jam. It is reasonable to expect that the inverse of this could be true for someone else.
Dolly...the first time I came across you was a few years back when some other situation made you resolve to quit Polin altogether. I am so glad you came back after that because you went on to write some of the most searing and satisfying Polin fic that exists. I am relieved that you get how ridiculous this current clamour is and also how deeply it would affect someone less battle-scarred. Idk how you keep going when people be misunderstanding you at scale. Props â€ïž
non-writers will never understand the mental illness of writing an entire conversation in your head while doing dishes and then forgetting every word the second you open a blank doc
"My lord, there is a matter I hesitate to discuss with you, but I believe it will be of great importance to our future felicity."
"By all means." His hand touched lightly at the small of her back, helping her veer around a protruding branch.
She sucked in a deep breath, screwing her nerves to the sticking point. "My lord, it is the matter of your women."
He stopped dead, his hand falling abruptly to his side. "I beg your pardon?"
"Your....that is to say, my lord, I wanted to advise you that I shall have no objection to your keeping lightskirts, as many as you choose, but I would request that you keep me informed. Particularly if it were to be a lady of our circle who I -"
"Miss Arora, I cannot possibly have heard you correctly. You did not just say that you would tolerate infidelity?"
"That is precisely what I said, my lord."
For a moment he simply stared at her in stunned silence. Then a hard look entered his eye and he said curtly, "Then allow me to tell you precisely, ma'am, that I will tolerate nothing of the sort."
She nearly felt her brows jumping into her hairline at the thought. "Well of course not! Nor would you have to, I haven't the least interest in being anyone's lightskirt!"
"Gratifying," he said, not looking the least amused. "If reciprocity is not a consideration, what makes you so magnanimous to the prospect of my...err, keeping lightskirts?"
She wanted to question him on why he thought reciprocity would ever be a consideration, but that seemed tangential to the matter at hand, so she focused on his question. "Well, the truth of the matter is that I have seen and heard of too many marriages broken because the wife could not tolerate the husband straying. It seems to be a fact of life that a man will stray if given the means, and you sir, of course, are blessed not to lack any sort of means. So I would much prefer that we deal frankly about it all, and the only thing I ask is that you not put me in that wretched position of ignorance so many women have to bear with, where they find out about their husband's amours from some malicious third party."
"Ah. And to avoid this, you would like me to - what, my dear, provide you with a constant list of names of chere amies? Entertain you with tales of their talents, perhaps?"
She flushed, but not from the embarrassment he probably meant her to feel. No, she felt a prurient interest in the prospect of such discussions, and blushed from the absurdity of her own thoughts.
"Not perhaps as much as that. But only that you wouldn't need to keep it a secret from me or fear I would be jealous or cut up your peace. I think a man is entitled to his own amusements and it behooves a wife to accommodate as much of her husband's pleasure as she can."
"An interesting choice of words," he commented. The wry twist of his mouth told her he had taken her words in quite another sense than she had meant.
I saw a thing somewhere on here where you link to 5 creative works you worked on in 2022. I'm still living in nothing-is-ever-finished-land so for my version of this, to amuse me in six or sixty months hence, I'm gonna paste 5 sentences eight lines (cause I couldn't stick to 5) I'm glad I wrote in 2022, without links.
"Hmm? Yes, I guess so." There, that sounded like a woman who was definitely not secretly sleeping with her ex-husband.
Pragya blew him a kiss as she headed out of the room. Abhi snatched it from the air and mimed pressing it into his heart.
Seeking soft plant dad to share custody of droopy lemon tree.
âKaun Abhi?â Bulbul frowned, as if she was reviewing a mental catalogue of every man they knew. âWait - Abhi Jeeju?â
Maybe everyoneâs husband had the same coping mechanism, and nobody talked about it.Â
Thoughts recede into something liminal, unknowable. The words tumble out on their own. "Will you be super-dad too?"
"If youâre walking around thinking youâre not hot, interesting, and cool, someone needs to set you straight."
âDo you really think Iâd have been sleeping with you all these months if I didnât think you were hot as fuck?â
Also while I'm at it, honorable mention to me for these whole scenes:
the police baton flashback in Anarkali draft ("I want to beat him bloody, but I donât want to go to jail again.")
the pharmacy scene for Hookup draft ("See you, rockstar." "See you soon, Chashmish.")
the concert scene for Hookup draft
the tea scene in Enough (Is this flirting too?)
this scrap of conversation:
âItâsâŠ.just that simple for you?â
"A lot of life is that simple, if you let it be."
"I fucking hate you sometimes."
It always feels like I didn't write enough, since I'm still. not. finished. my wips. We're entering year 9 now with these unfinished fics, that's freaking insane. But even though I didn't write enough, I did write some bits I like, and that's worth remembering.
Oooh I didn't think to do a 2023 recap. I have forgotten if I finished anything but I did start a Spicy Drabble collection on Wattpad for which I wrote at least 7 new drabbles. They're making me cringe real hard rn but I'm still gonna excerpt three bits I'm particularly happy with:
"they're gonna know"
"Nobody's going to know," Abhi repeated cheerfully. He followed her out of the room, hand in hand. As they headed down the stairs, he whispered into her ear, "But so what if they know?"
"football husband"
When she wasn't too horny to think straight, she was going to figure out who to contact to criminalize this situation. Husbands should simply not be allowed to be this sexy in public.
"debt repayment plan"
"Not fair, Fuggi." Abhi studied her tired face, assessing whether she really couldn't handle any more that night. "A man tries to honorably discharge his debt on an accelerated schedule -"
"Shut up!" she wailed, waving her hand in his face as her eyes shut closed again. "You don't know what it's like, being fucked this hard every night."
I opened a couple random snippets of my writing and god how it made me ache with the wish that I could just somehow live in romcom banter. Mine or anyone else's, it doesn't matter, I just want nothing more ever than to live in that exquisite feeling created by reading impossibly witty dialogue between characters with cracking chemistry and fierce intelligence. Gah.
I also opened a set of notes I forgot, where I mused about ending Hookup on a scene full circle of what hooked me on AbhiGya on the first place - Pragz coming up to Abhi's room when they aren't married, this time to confirm she does want to be engaged to him. I can't even put into words what that does to my heart, the thought of leaving the fandom on the exact same image that brought me into it. I love the idea of coming full circle, I'm absolutely wrecked at the idea of leaving. It's not going to happen like this anyway; doesn't make much sense for the fic and I haven't figured out the problems in it to actually finish it yet. There is hardly even a fandom to leave at this point. And I'm not actually done with AbhiGya, nor do I want to be. So it's kind of a false alarm of verklemptitude, but the cortisol spike that came with it was no joke.
arre i only posted this 2.5 months ago? it's funny now my thought is how could I be wrecked at the idea of leaving a place that is basically an abandoned house at this point? which I guess means my attachment has shrunk a bit in 2.5 months. however lbr my true position now is that I'm never leaving as such. i'm permanently addicted to those characters and they will live in my mind whether i or anyone else is doing anything with them or not.
the thing about âwell-behaved women rarely make history" is that the author, Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, didnât write it about women who would be considered âbadly-behaved;â she wrote it in a book about a midwife, about women who had been largely ignored and erased from history because as a result of their âgood behaviour.â So itâs not a âBAD GIRLS DO IT WELL" kind of quote; itâs a reminder to respect and pay attention to the women who go about quietly living their lives.
I opened a couple random snippets of my writing and god how it made me ache with the wish that I could just somehow live in romcom banter. Mine or anyone else's, it doesn't matter, I just want nothing more ever than to live in that exquisite feeling created by reading impossibly witty dialogue between characters with cracking chemistry and fierce intelligence. Gah.
I also opened a set of notes I forgot, where I mused about ending Hookup on a scene full circle of what hooked me on AbhiGya on the first place - Pragz coming up to Abhi's room when they aren't married, this time to confirm she does want to be engaged to him. I can't even put into words what that does to my heart, the thought of leaving the fandom on the exact same image that brought me into it. I love the idea of coming full circle, I'm absolutely wrecked at the idea of leaving. It's not going to happen like this anyway; doesn't make much sense for the fic and I haven't figured out the problems in it to actually finish it yet. There is hardly even a fandom to leave at this point. And I'm not actually done with AbhiGya, nor do I want to be. So it's kind of a false alarm of verklemptitude, but the cortisol spike that came with it was no joke.
Guess this scene lives in my subconscious cause I wrote it into Enough but forgot I ever watched it lmao. Poor dude doesn't have gloves or wraps tho, yikes.
I saw a thing somewhere on here where you link to 5 creative works you worked on in 2022. I'm still living in nothing-is-ever-finished-land so for my version of this, to amuse me in six or sixty months hence, I'm gonna paste 5 sentences eight lines (cause I couldn't stick to 5) I'm glad I wrote in 2022, without links.
"Hmm? Yes, I guess so." There, that sounded like a woman who was definitely not secretly sleeping with her ex-husband.
Pragya blew him a kiss as she headed out of the room. Abhi snatched it from the air and mimed pressing it into his heart.
Seeking soft plant dad to share custody of droopy lemon tree.
âKaun Abhi?â Bulbul frowned, as if she was reviewing a mental catalogue of every man they knew. âWait - Abhi Jeeju?â
Maybe everyoneâs husband had the same coping mechanism, and nobody talked about it.Â
Thoughts recede into something liminal, unknowable. The words tumble out on their own. "Will you be super-dad too?"
"If youâre walking around thinking youâre not hot, interesting, and cool, someone needs to set you straight."
âDo you really think Iâd have been sleeping with you all these months if I didnât think you were hot as fuck?â
Also while I'm at it, honorable mention to me for these whole scenes:
the police baton flashback in Anarkali draft ("I want to beat him bloody, but I donât want to go to jail again.")
the pharmacy scene for Hookup draft ("See you, rockstar." "See you soon, Chashmish.")
the concert scene for Hookup draft
the tea scene in Enough (Is this flirting too?)
this scrap of conversation:
âItâsâŠ.just that simple for you?â
"A lot of life is that simple, if you let it be."
"I fucking hate you sometimes."
It always feels like I didn't write enough, since I'm still. not. finished. my wips. We're entering year 9 now with these unfinished fics, that's freaking insane. But even though I didn't write enough, I did write some bits I like, and that's worth remembering.
snowghoul
yousharknotpass
discoholicmusic
