heyall~ i hope you're having a good summer, though i'm thinking about everyone in parts of the world who have been getting extreme heat and earthquakes, and hope you're all okay 💕
without jinxing myself by setting a deadline, i figured i'd at least put up a mini research/inspo dump
resting on chairs? what can't sanatoria do
and while i'm not spending a ton of time on these details in the chapter, here are a few underpinnings (source from 1906. close enough)
including sample menus (granted, the source is from the UK, so it was a pudding-heavy diet). the patients who were discharged in a healthy condition often put on upwards of 25 pounds over the course of treatment, while devoutly exercising - in one patient's case, as above, walking 12 miles a day
along the way, i found out about one of the treatments to which Arthur will not be subject, called plombage, the artificial collapsing of the lung using various substances, back when the scientific method included a "see what this button does" stage. the intention was to let the lung “rest,” and as a whole, shockingly, the treatment tended to worsen the patient’s condition. wax, oil, fatty substances were all used at various times. thanks to a friend of mine, I also learned that, for a time, ping pong balls were used (post-1940s anyway). check this shit out. these are ping pong balls in a real live patient’s lung
and while I'm at it, some chapter aesthetic <3 lake avalon mission and its namesake, and a theater, which i am tempted to name the excalibur*, in the nearby town
*no, bad writer, kennel
where alongside the can-can and fire dancing, short vignettes are occasionally dramatized, including greek myths and excerpts from shakespeare, chaucer, song of songs, one thousand and one nights, the cowherd and the weaver girl, you name it
an impending sidesmut is on the way too. little WIP snippet here:
She stirs the brush in the cup, wet and rasping sounds like the bristle of whiskers and tongue stirring, laving creamy circles on the little stone of soap. She concentrates, she glances up, that sheepish smile she gets, and she holds up the brush as if with a warning for him to behave before she paints it on his cheeks and jaw and over his mouth and throat, sets it aside, and opens the razor. Her pause, a question. He takes it from her hold and strops it a few times on the hanging leather of his suspenders, and then presents it on his flat palm, patiently turning his cheek toward her.
“I thought this would be easier.”
“Most of me’ll grow back if you miss.”
She sits up high above him, and testingly wings her elbow out, and he hardly feels the first tug of the blade on his cheek when her skin is this close and she smells so sweet. He contorts his mouth side to side as she goes for his upper lip, his chin, and she thumbs up his nose and makes such cautious work of it all when he would have accomplished it in under a minute, but this heedful attention feels so fine he thinks nothing of the result. Cutting away the old-grown hide. Finding him new underneath. And her ass on his lap, that beautiful round and moving weight.
She studies her angle at his neck, his jutting throat, finally nudging up his jaw with her finger as she aims the blade downward.
“Holdin my life in your hands here.” Chin raised as if he’s being robbed at knifepoint.
“Well hush up then,” she mumbles in concentration and steadies her hand.
The moment she touches the lather with the blade, he jumps with a sharp hiss and she springs back, hands up, eyes wide with genuine concern until she sees him grinning.
She simpers sardonically and holds up the razor in warning, and he presents his throat to her again, reformed and at her mercy.
When she nicks him for real, he doesn’t flinch.
“Shit –”
“Hardly felt it.” He squeezes her hips and feels the trickle of blood crawling down his throat through the soap, but she touches him so intimately, suspending his face between thumb and middle finger. Biting her lip. Her pinky lifted, the bone of her pretty wrist cocked. That blade-thin closeness for the duration of her careful work while he wants nothing more than to be between her breasts and inside her.
As he starts to get hard, that energetic collection at his root, he can do nothing about it, not that he wants to – and there goes his ability to think about much anything else – but as she makes her careful strokes, he wonders when she’ll feel it. Lecherous old man but can’t help but want her to feel it, watching her work and him feeling every pulse and growing tension of a hard-on, heavy and light, that pure contradiction that needs resolution. He keeps still and closes his eyes, swelling, going wooden under her weight. He pushes up without meaning to, into the same small push from her, the willing ellipse of her hips, the secret subtle contraction of her vulva like a swallow around his rigid shaft.