Rumi accidentally injures Celine during their confrontation under the tree but she doesn’t notice as she’s not in the best headspace and Celine no sells it. Doesn’t realize Celine is hurt till she finally decides to reconnect again and Celine won’t tell her how she got injured.
[And you might ask, hey aren't you busy writing that "short fic"? And I would say, yes. Don't worry about it. I definitely know how to allocate my time properly between all my projects. Everything is fine.]
//
In all honesty, Rumi didn't remember much of her argument with Celine.
Between the heartbreak of having everyone she trusted -- and yes, she had to admit to herself that she did trust Jinu, even if it had been a mistake -- turn on her and the despair-panic of facing against Gwi-ma himself, her talk with Celine had blended into a gray haze in the back of her mind. To be brought to the forefront of her mind when she was trying to relax; a memory of where she personally humiliated herself in front of her Celine that she couldn't talk to her girls about because, well, how else was anyone supoosed to take, "do what you were supoosed to."
Apparently, she had also completely forgotten that her Celine had gotten injured at some point as she watched Celine hiss under her breath after Rumi touched her arm; the corners of her eyes going tight with pain.
"Kang-nim?" One of the younger business executives asked. Because of course this had to happen out in public and Rumi had to pretend she couldn't tell exactly how much pain Celine was in. "Are you alright?"
Celine waved off his concern with a self-deprecating smile and a, "Slept wrong. Make sure you enjoy your youth, Park-nim."
"Of course, Kang-nim," the man said before he bowed and left the conference room.
The doors had barely swung shut before Rumi rounded on Celine, hands pressed against her hips.
"When did you get hurt?" Rumi demanded. "How did you get hurt? You've been at the office since --"
The realization choked off her voice and froze the air in her lungs.
She'd thought Celine's movements had been a little strange in recent weeks but she'd been too preoccupied with her own issues -- Mira and Zoey were fighting over who was more responsible for the Idol Awards; they were both mad at her and Celine for lying to them for so long -- that she hadn't thought much of it. The moments she'd put in the back of her mind flooded her now.
The stiffness of her arm, how Celine avoided using it when at all possible. The way her blazer sleeve folded strangely and how Rumi had noticed a stain once, before Celine started wearing exclusively black jackets.
"Rumi, I'm fine," Celine said. She stared out the window, avoiding Rumi's gaze entirely.
"No, you're not!" Rumi yelled. She raked her fingers through her hair, cut short for the first time since she was a child.
"Keep your voice down." Celine glanced towards the conference room doors. When no one barged in to check on the commotion, she continued. "And don't pull on your hair like that, it's bad for the follicles."
An angry, distressed whine escaped from Rumi's lips as she pressed them tightly together. She paced the length of the conference table before she stopped to face Celine again.
"That's great, Celine," Rumi said. "Let's worry about my hair while you've been injuried for weeks. God, have you -- has anyone even looked at it? What if you got some weird demon disease!?"
Celine sighed. "Rumi, I have been fighting demons longer than you've been alive. If there were weird demon diseases, I would have gotten them years ago."
"That -- that isn't the point!"
Rumi started to pace again.
"You don't tell us these things," Rumi said, finally. "You still think you have to be perfect in front of everyone all the time. And maybe in front of the board, sure. But us -- me? Do you really think that we'd think less of you just because you needed help stitching an injury?"
"Rumi, I am your guardian --"
"You're my mother and I worry about you!" Rumi yelled.
Rumi watched Celine's face tighten. Her hand brushed over her injuried bicep; her fingers tugged at the fabric of her jacket.
"All the more reason to not tell you," Celine said. There was a tighteness to her voice, though only someone as familiar with her as Rumi could hear it.
Rumi hated that -- the way Celine was so perfectly controlled; the way Celine pretended to be flawless as though Rumi hadn't seen her collapse at the foot of the tree, the same as her, a few weeks ago.
She was weak and fragile and human just like Rumi was. She just refused to let anyone else help.
"I don't have to tell Mira and Zoey you got hurt. They can keep thinking you're this untouchable hunter if you want," Rumi said. That they had been disillusioned of that fact years ago was something Celine didn't need to know. "No one but us needs to know that some random demon got the drop on you."
The stillness in Celine's body after she said demon made Rumi's stomach grow cold.
"It wasn't a demon, was it?" Rumi asked, quietly.
Celine's eyes wavered and she glanced away from Rumi.
Rumi felt the cold in her stomach spread. Vines of ice crawled up her spine, rippled across her shoulders. Down into the tips of her fingers.
"Celine, what -- who --"
"Rumi don't --" Celine shook her head. "It wasn't your fault. I know it was an accident."
The loud thud of Rumi's own heartbeat muffled the last of Celine's words. Your fault echoed in her head. Your fault.
The sharp scent of pine burned in her nostrils. Was that the new air fresheners the building was using? Rumi couldn't tell. But it mixed with smell of moist soil and thick, honey-sweet evening blooms.
Stomach acid nipped at the back of her throat.
"I need to see," Rumi said.
Celine shook her head.
Why was Celine shaking her head? She couldn't fix this if Celine refused to show her. Rumi -- Rumi needed to fix this.
"This isn't going to make you feel better," Celine warned.
As if she had any idea of what would make Rumi feel better. As if not knowing was some kind of mercy. As if Rumi wouldn't feel her mind collapse in on itself, conjuring images of white bone jutting out from a mass of red meat or separating wounds, green and yellow and black, leaking pus.
"Celine --" Rumi hated begging. She wanted to say, can you just take off your damn jacket and let me see, but what came out was a quiet, child-like, "Please."
The hard corners of Celine's eyes softened.
"It's not as bad as you're thinking," Celine said.
She shrugged off her blazer. Underneath, she wore a white, sleeveless blouse. Her left bicep was wrapped in a layer of gauze. A dark yellow-green stain had seeped through the covering.
Celine frowned. "Suppose it's time to change the dressing anyway."
She said this with the same tone as she might have said, the rabbits are invading my vegetable gardens again.
It did not settle Rumi's stomach.
Hunters lived dangerous lives and they were all painfully aware of how long wound healing should take. Celine should have healed enough to not need gauze by now. If it were being taken care of properly.
Celine had been staying late at the office for weeks. And Rumi suspected that she had slept at her desk more times than anyone knew.
"Can I --" Her fingers trembled as Rumi brought them up to the bandage.
"You don't have to --"
Rumi clenched her jaw. "I want to, Celine."
A quiet sigh left Celine and Rumi began to unwind the mostly white fabric before Celine could protest further.
As the gauze fell away, Rumi could see four lines, puckered and red and crusted with yellow, where Celine's flesh had separated cleanly. Like a fish fileted with a sharpened knife.
The skin was held together now by stitches -- neat and orderly in the front and which grew increasingly messy until they were replaced by butterfly bandages.
She could see too clearly Celine slide needle and thread into her own skin, her hands shaking the further along she got until finally, in too much pain to stitch herself together, she slapped butterfly bandages over the rest before resting her head against the cold porcelain sink.
If Rumi touched them, the tips of her fingers would cover the start of each stitch perfectly.
Her stomach started to churn again and Rumi gripped the side of the conference table to steady herself.
She had done that.
It had been her. Her claws, her anger had torn Celine's flesh and forced her to mend herself stitch by bloody stitch. Alone. And she didn't even remember doing it.
And she'd forced Celine to show her. Cornered Celine into this empty conference room and demanded -- as if she had any right! Celine should hate her. Celine should be scared of her. Hadn't she left Celine that night trembling on her knees?
God.
She was an awful child.
"I -- I'm sorry," Rumi mumbled.
She couldn't -- she shouldn't be here. Celine shouldn't have to be alone with her.
"You should -- you really should have someone help with that it looks infected," Rumi said. She stepped backwards, hand fumbling for the door. "I'm sorry, Celine. I -- I'm sorry."
Strange racists and homophobes on the internet seem to have access to an alternate way cooler version of TV than me. "every white character on TV is in an interracial relationship" "every show has a gay couple in it" "main characters keep having to secretly be bisexual and nonbinary" "every show has gratuitous full frontal nudity" like damn promise?? What channel???
for real though, those DO NOT WATCH OR YOU'LL CORRUPT YOUR CHILDREN lists put out by conservative christian family groups is where I find all the stellar tv shows. Like, shit I didn't know half of those existed, thanks for finding them for me, gonna go watch 30 hours of gay tv now!
For personal context, before I went to the '98 Burning Man festival, one of the things I'd read from a couple different journalists was that "everybody" runs around naked. Which, fine by me, I'd already spent a lot of time in clothing-optional spaces, I'm not fanatic about it but it's nice.
So I got there early and set up a public shade structure on one of Black Rock City's main roads and spent most of each afternoon just watching the crowds go by. I don't remember seeing more than one actually naked person the whole week. I think a topless woman passed by my intersection maybe every half an hour, sometimes once an hour. So why in the hell were people, normally pretty smart and observant writers, coming away with the impression that everybody was naked?
Then I remembered an unrelated passage from Joel Garreau's great book about the history of the outer-ring suburbs, Edge City. Mall developers told him flat-out that they tried to keep the crowds in their malls less than 5% black. Not because they themselves were racist, but because they had determined, experimentally, that if more than 5% of the people in the mall are black, the median white shopper will wrongly describe the mall as at least half black, as mostly black. And not a few of them would describe it, at 6% black, as a mall where "only black people go." Why?
Because, emotionally, they were still upset over the last one when the next one came into view.
Same as the journalists describing Black Rock City as all naked. Same as the right-wing religious culture warriors describing television as entirely mixed-race and gender non-conforming. Not because it's even vaguely true, we know that, but because they haven't gotten over their discomfort over the last one by the time the next one comes along. The anger, not the stimulus, is the part that's continuous, so their mind lies to them that it's "all" the thing they can't get over.
Similar effect for the presence/proportion of women in things, by the way: https://health.howstuffworks.com/mental-health/human-nature/perception/how-17-equals-496-the-amazing-multiplying-women.htm
"If there's no solution, should we just make things even queerer and more diverse?"
Unironically, yes. Edge City was written in 1991 - do you think 5% is still the threshold for the "median white shopper" to describe the mall as half black, 35 years later? I'd be very surprised if so.
Except for a small minority of extremely hateful people, things like outrage and discomfort can't be sustained. They fade with time and exposure. This is the same idea with the Overton Window, it's what we mean when we say "normalization".
For some people, and in some ways, that idea of "normalcy" is locked where it was in your childhood, but most people are more pliable than we like to think. Marketing and propaganda are massive industries for a reason - what we see affects how we act and how we see the world, often without us realizing and in ways that aren't comfortable to admit.
So yeah, making things more queer and more diverse isn't giving up on a solution, it IS the solution.
Writing advice #?: Have your characters wash the dishes while they talk.
This is one of my favorite tricks, picked up from E.M. Forester and filtered through my own domestic-homebody lens. Forester says that you should never ever tell us how a character feels; instead, show us what those emotions are doing to a character’s posture and tone and expression. This makes “I felt sadness” into “my shoulders hunched and I sighed heavily, staring at the ground as my eyes filled with tears.” Those emotions-as-motions are called objective correlatives. Honestly, fic writers have gotten the memo on objective correlatives, but sometimes struggle with how to use them.
Objective correlatives can quickly become a) repetitive or b) melodramatic. On the repetitive end, long scenes of dialogue can quickly turn into “he sighed” and “she nodded” so many times that he starts to feel like a window fan and she like a bobblehead. On the melodramatic end, a debate about where to eat dinner can start to feel like an episode of Jerry Springer because “he shrieked” while “she clenched her fists” and they both “ground their teeth.” If you leave the objective correlatives out entirely, then you have what’s known as “floating” dialogue — we get the words themselves but no idea how they’re being said, and feel completely disconnected from the scene. If you try to get meaning across by telling us the characters’ thoughts instead, this quickly drifts into purple prose.
Instead, have them wash the dishes while they talk.
To be clear: it doesn’t have to be dishes. They could be folding laundry or sweeping the floor or cooking a meal or making a bed or changing a lightbulb. The point is to engage your characters in some meaningless, everyday household task that does not directly relate to the subject of the conversation.
This trick gives you a whole wealth of objective correlatives. If your character is angry, then the way they scrub a bowl will be very different from how they’ll be scrubbing while happy. If your character is taking a moment to think, then they might splash suds around for a few seconds. A character who is not that invested in the conversation will be looking at the sink not paying much attention. A character moderately invested will be looking at the speaker while continuing to scrub a pot. If the character is suddenly very invested in the conversation, you can convey this by having them set the pot down entirely and give their full attention to the speaker.
A demonstration:
1
“I’m leaving,” Anastasia said.
“What?” Drizella continued dropping forks into the dishwasher.
2
“I’m leaving,” Anastasia said.
Drizella paused midway through slotting a fork into the dishwasher. “What?”
3
“I’m leaving,” Anastasia said.
Drizella laughed, not looking up from where she was arranging forks in the dishwasher. “What?”
4
“I’m leaving,” Anastasia said.
The forks slipped out of Drizella’s hand and clattered onto the floor of the dishwasher. “What?”
5
“I’m leaving,” Anastasia said.
“What?” Drizella shoved several forks into the dishwasher with unnecessary force, not seeming to notice when several bounced back out of the silverware rack.
See how cheaply and easily we can get across Drizella’s five different emotions about Anastasia leaving, all by telling the reader how she’s doing the dishes? And all the while no heads were nodded, no teeth were clenched.
The reason I recommend having it be one of these boring domestic chores instead of, say, scaling a building or picking a lock, is that chores add a sense of realism and are low-stakes enough not to be distracting. If you add a concurrent task that’s high-stakes, then potentially your readers are going to be so focused on the question of whether your characters will pick the lock in time that they don’t catch the dialogue. But no one’s going to be on the edge of their seat wondering whether Drizella’s going to have enough clean forks for tomorrow.
And chores are a cheap-n-easy way to add a lot of realism to your story. So much of the appeal of contemporary superhero stories comes from Spider-Man having to wash his costume in a Queens laundromat or Green Arrow cheating at darts, because those details are fun and interesting and make a story feel “real.” Actually ask the question of what dishes or clothing or furniture your character owns and how often that stuff gets washed. That’s how you avoid reality-breaking continuity errors like stating in Chapter 3 that all of your character’s worldly possessions fit in a single backpack and in Chapter 7 having your character find a pair of pants he forgot he owns. You don’t have to tell the reader what dishes your character owns (please don’t; it’s already bad enough when Tolkien does it) but you should ideally know for yourself.
Anyway: objective correlatives are your friends. They get emotion across, but for low-energy scenes can become repetitive and for high-energy scenes can become melodramatic. The solution is to give your characters something relatively mundane to do while the conversation is going on, and domestic chores are not a bad starting place.
I actually first learned this lesson when doing improv. Always have your character doing something, but don’t make the scene about what your character is doing. Come in and start putting groceries away and confront your roommate about sleeping with your boyfriend while you’re putting the groceries away. Be working in a clothes store folding shirts and be reunited with your long-lost cousin while working. Etc etc.
And then much later (partially bc I started writing regularly years after I started doing improv but even then it took me way too long to figure it out) I realized this can be applied to writing, and it’s great. Anytime there’s a long dialogue scene and it feels flat, rewriting it so they’re doing something else - something that on the surface is totally unrelated to the conversation - is a sure-fire way to make it more dynamic and open up whole new avenues for conveying thoughts and feelings to the reader.
We learned this in my comic mfa program as well. Comics are a showing over telling medium but sometimes you have to do a “talking heads” section where it is just characters talking at length and having your characters doing an activity makes the panels you draw more engaging. It gives you more options for framing things as well.
"But it's not FOR them!!!" The biggest military power in the world belongs to a christofascist nation overseen by a felon found guilty of 34 federal crimes and has greenlit a gestapo with more direct funding than the entire military of Canada for the purpose of ethnic cleansing. Let Hetero Jessica throw some biodegradable glitter at a municipal parade
At this point if anyone is trying to exclude anyone benignly pro-queer from a pro-queer space I'm just going to assume you're a fed or something idk like something something destabilize the movement from within or whatever
On Our Backs portrayed lesbian sex and sexuality, with real lesbians.
Created by, for, and about lesbians, On Our Backs came about in the tumult of the “feminist sex wars,” a deeply polarizing internal debate in the feminist movement regarding sex, sexuality, pornography, erotica, and BDSM. Divided into sex-positive and anti-porn camps, the sex wars saw rabid disagreement on what the nature of things like pornography were doing for lesbians and for society as a whole. Many feminists argued that pornography and erotica were inherently objectifying and abusive. Writer and theorist Andrea Dworkin argued that not just pornography but heterosexual sex as a whole was a “means of physiologically making a woman inferior,” and claimed that anyone aroused by porn that depicted sexualized violence (whether real or scripted) “was evidence of a mind that’s absorbed the propaganda of the patriarchy and eroticized the subjugation of women.” On the flipside, sex-positive feminists argued that pornography itself was not an inherent evil, but rather its morality was dependent upon the creators and participants. Rubin, one of the founders of the lesbian feminist BDSM group Samois, believed sexual liberation was a key component of the feminist movement and that public expressions of female sexuality were crucial in asserting women’s existence as fully realized beings.
"Follow Your Bliss" @nerd-spikey - Tumblr Blog | Tumgag
snowghoul
discoholicmusic
jacobvanloon
pixelskylines
kaledo-art
romaincrisis
blakekathryn
prguitarman
