CS Fic Rec Monday: The Mountains Call Me Home (And I Must Go)
By @seastarved. Summary: Once Upon a Time, there lived a Princess in a kingdom by the sea. She was beautiful, brave and true but cursed to live forever, her heart never beating in her chest, her blood tempestuous, her bones restless. Her very existence a lonely fairytale. Until she meets a man whose eyes remind her of the sea, whose smile echoes with the loneliness of hers. Until she realises that his heart lies still too. ~25K. Rated T. Read it on tumblr or on Ao3
What a perfect candidate for @csficrecmonday! I read this ages ago and recently rediscovered it, and am so glad I did. It’s like nothing else I’ve ever read before, and in the best of ways - the only way I could think to describe this to myself was “star-cursed lovers”. The writing is gorgeous, of course - I’d expect nothing less from @seastarved - but there’s so much else I loved about this that I barely know where to start. The moments with Emma’s family were so bittersweet - I cried over Snow and Charming. The slow-burn is absolutely wonderful, and I really felt like you created a strong foundation before things ever turned romantic. Harold and Maude! God, they were cute. And then exactly the happy ending everyone deserved. I loved it, I loved it, I loved it.
Heathens by @mahstatins, with artwork by @seastarved, is now complete!
Summary: After the events of Renegades, Emma finds herself the reluctant monarch of a struggling Kingdom, her only advisors a mish mash of those who’ve betrayed her in the past, and her only comfort one very uncomfortable pirate.Believing her long lost parents could still be alive, Emma and Killian set out to find them and reunite them with both their daughter and their throne.
Captain Swan AU Challenge between @tehgreeneyes and @museelo
↳ 18th pick: Period drama + School by @museelo
Emma and Killian as two Columbia University students majoring in journalism and photography in the 1940s.
Happy birthday Chinx!!!!! A little bit of weird angsty season 6 canon divergence where the Evil Queen’s mirrorworld actually had consequences based on THIS edit of yours. I love you a billion, pocket friend. Here’s to the years to come!
Thanks to @katie-dub for helping my poor wordless ass pull something out of the bag. You rule.
Rated T. 1.3k.
The thing about mirrors is that they never quite show the truth. The curve of a smile, the trail of a tear, yes, and more besides, but the truth is something beyond the power of glass.
This much, Emma knows.
She knows it in her bones, the way she knows that the heavy wooden door is bolted shut without having to try it, that her dinner will appear when she turns her back, steaming lightly and with magic clinging to the edges of the plate. That the pale cheeks and red-rimmed eyes she sees reflected back at her are both her and not her. True, but somehow not true enough.
That she is alone and always has been.
That she is not, and never was.
It’s at night she sees them, on the whole. Glimpses of other worlds, other faces, a tired looking boy hunched over a book, a grey-faced woman with dark close-cropped hair. She watches them, watches them eat and talk and cry until they rub their hands over their damp faces and she finds herself copying the motion, kneeling before one of the warped planes of glass that line her gilded prison in some strange supplication to these people she cannot touch.
They never look back at her, though, not one, not even the angry man with the jaw like her own and fire in his eyes.
None of them do, except the man with the hook for a hand.
She sees him more than the others. He seems to skip between realms, first salt-soaked and angry on a furious sea, then cowed, bright eyed and desperate, on the edge of some lonely forested shore. She sees him drink, and swear, and fight, and it echoes through her, making her fists clench and her blood pound as though she were the one with rum in her throat and rage in her belly.
At first, she watches him because he’s interesting, more so than the others, his backgrounds as ever changing as his expressions.Later she watches him because he’s beautiful.
Then she watches him because he watches her back.
The very first time she almost misses it, her back to the ornate mirror at the end of her bed, until she hears the faintest tap tap tapping - some half imagined sound, she thinks, at first, the loneliness driving her mad - but when she turns she sees him, beautiful blue eyes blown wide, his jaw hanging open, his knuckles at the glass.
Tap tap tap.
What else can she do?
She throws a sheet over the mirror, and screams.
--
The next night she dares to peek, lifting just the corner of her sheet, just enough to see the pale yellow light of the dark haired woman’s home filtering into the room. She breathes a sigh of relief, reclaiming her bed coverings and returning them to the thin mattress before turning back to the mirror.
She hadn’t expected him to be there, he never had been before, but sure enough there he is, a sharp dark shadow pacing back and forth in front of the table, his hand in his hair, his mouth moving furiously as the sad woman and the man with the fiery eyes watch him warily, their hands entwined, their faces guarded.
At first she steps back, her heart thumping with alarm, but as he paces back and forth and back and forth she finds herself drawing closer. One step, then another, pulled forward as though by some invisible thread, her gaze fixed on the corner of his mouth, on the quick, flickering consonants of his tongue against his teeth. Without realising she finds her toes pressed against the mirror’s frame, her fingertips hovering over the cold glass.
Through the mist her breath leaves behind, she could swear she sees him say;
Emma.
--
She sees more after that, flashes of strangers; a woman with red hair and cold eyes, another whose lips seem permanently curled into a sneer, and once, just once, a man with sharp features and a smile that makes her shudder.
He's not a friend, she tells the boy with the book who stands at his shoulder. He's no one's friend.
But if the boy hears he shows no sign of it, and the man's smile only grows wider, wilder, less human until it's something almost reptilian, and she smothers him as best she can under her comforter.
He never comes back, thank god.
But the hooked man does.
He hovers in the background as all but the man with the snakebite smile come to stare and ponder and prod at the barrier between Emma and themselves. His brow is almost permanently furrowed now, and it upsets her, strangely. Her thumbs itch to smooth the lines away, her fingers tingle when he runs his hand through his hair.
She doesn't remember the last time she touched another person, but somehow she thinks she feels the heat of his skin against her palms. The weight of his breath on her skin.
Perhaps she's mad after all.
(Perhaps she ought to care.)
It's night again the next time she sees him alone. She's tucked up in bed, her chin resting on her knees as she watches the flickerflare of a candle against his profile.
His eyes are averted, downcast, his hand and hook resting on the bare wooden desk before him, and Emma’s heart aches unmercifully and inexplicably to see him so still, so seemingly bereft. That same strange pull sets her crawling over her bed, kneeling at the end and leaning forward until her hands are pressed against the glass. Nervously, she dares to pull one back, her fingernails cutting into her palm as she balls it into a fist, and, taking a deep breath:
Tap tap tap.
He looks up, and she wonders if this is how it feels to fall in love.
--
She can't hear him, not really, not even with her ear pressed against the glass and with his lips so very close, so he writes her notes in swirling script and swears to find her, help her, to bring her home.
This is my home, she tells him, mouth overforming every word as he follows the line of her lips. I don't remember another. Just here.
He shakes his head, tears another piece of parchment, swears another oath.
I love you, he writes. I will never give up.
Alright. Okay.
(She means I love you too, she thinks, but that really would be mad. Wouldn't it?)
--
He's bleeding. A thin red rivulet runs from his temple and into his beard, and his eyes are glazed, unfocused. She doesn't recognise the floor on which he lays, nor the man who holds a sword to his throat, but she knows the words he's muttering, can almost hear them, low and pleading in an accent nothing like her own.
Don't watch, love. Don't watch.
She screams, hammers fists against the mirror's surface until it warps and wobbles, a flash of blinding silver light, and then…
And then nothing. A black void where once he lay. A sword suddenly at her feet, solid and sharp but unsulllied by blood.
She takes hold of it, let's the weight settle into her arm and thinks maybe.
Maybe.
--
This time she searches for him, not daring to wait she trawls the corridors and rooms of her prison. She peers into every surface for a hint of something more than her own reflection, the sword solid still and real at her side.
Other figures come and go in flashes of red and green and startling white, but she doesn’t dwell on them. It's the black she's looking for, the sharp spots of blue, the steel that's starting to feel like home.
She finds him in the forest, caught between the dark gilt vines that wind around the mirror, still and steady and breathing as he waits for her. She can't help the smile that cracks across her face, muscles protesting at the unfamiliar motion as he steps closer, reaches out, his hook shimmering in that nowhere space between mirror and truth.
Take a leap of faith, love.
So she curls her fingers around cold metal, and does.
Caesura /sɪˈzjʊərə/ n. In poetry, a rhythmic pause in a poetic line or a sentence where the reader stops to breathe. England, 1915, the world is having a war to end all wars. But, in the midst of the nightmare that seems to encompass their every hour, two people find one another and learn to how to breathe again. (WW1 War Artist AU)
I have seen it! Can sing most of the songs. It’s one of my mother’s favorites so we watched it a couple times as a kid but I remember it always being too long to really watch so I have seen the beginning a lot more than the last third. When I went to Salzburg I was appalled to learn that somehow little sister had never seen it! So we watched it in the hostel so she could appreciate the visit better!
