Recs and a poem
Two fanfic recs:
Sherlock/Harry Potter:
The case of the unwelcome owl. In which Sherlock gets invited to a wedding and gets outed as the squib of a magical family which explains so much. Best of all, there's a wonderful take on Luna Lovegood.
Doctor Who:
This was just recced at
crack_van, but I am so enthralled I must repeat the rec in case potential readers missed it there:
The Amazon: in which Delgado!Master, post-Frontiers in Space runs into Jo Grant post-The Green Death, the two end up travelling together willing-nilling for a while, and The Deadly Assassin as well as Crispy!Master are prevented by Jo being an irresistable angst-deterrent. Also, the Master meets Four in his pirate outfit, which has predictable results. I still have a wide grin on my face. (If any companion is believable in an almost-friendship type of relationship with the Master, it's Jo because she did end up treating him like an annoying cousin on the show already, and also was the companion who got the Doctor to admit positive feelings for the Master in Classic Who, which is something of a unique position.)
And a poem. I'm in something of an odd mood today, and thinking about the BTVS episode The Body last week has reminded me of a poem that captures the aftermath of death, the shock, numbness, grief and attempt to get on with making it through the next day, and the day after that so very well. It's one of Ted Hughes' Birthday Letters poems, Life after Death. Like most of the BL poems, it's addressed to Sylvia Plath.
Life after Death
What can I tell you that you do not know
Of the life after death?
Your son's eyes, which had unsettled us
With your Slavic Asiatic
Epicanthic fold, but would become
So perfectly your eyes,
Became wet jewels,
The hardest substance of the purest pain
As I fed him in his high white chair.
Great hands of grief were wringing and wringing
His wet cloth of face. They wrung out his tears.
But his mouth betrayed you - it accepted
The spoon in my disembodied hand
That reached through from the life that had survived you.
Day by day his sister grew
Paler with the wound
She could not see or touch or feel, as I dressed it
Each day with her blue Breton jacket.
By night I lay awake in my body
The Hanged Man
My neck-nerve uprooted and the tendon
Which fastened the base of my skull
To my left shoulder
Torn from its shoulder-root and cramped into knots -
I fancied the pain could be explained
If I were hanging in the spirit
From a hook under my neck-muscle.
Dropped from life
We three made a deep silence
In our separate cots.
We were comforted by wolves.
Under that February moon and the moon of March
The Zoo had come close.
And in spite of the city
Wolves consoled us. Two or three times each night
For minutes on end
They sang. They had found where we lay.
And the dingos, and the Brazilian-maned wolves -
All lifted their voices together
With the grey Northern pack.
The wolves lifted us in their long voices.
They wound us and enmeshed us
In their wailing for you, their mourning for us,
They wove us into their voices. We lay in your death,
In the fallen snow, under falling snow,
As my body sank into the folk-tale
Where the wolves are singing in the forest
For two babes, who have turned, in their sleep
Into orphans
Beside the corpse of their mother.
This entry was originally posted at http://selenak.dreamwidth.org/611016.html. Comment there or here, as you wish.
Sherlock/Harry Potter:
The case of the unwelcome owl. In which Sherlock gets invited to a wedding and gets outed as the squib of a magical family which explains so much. Best of all, there's a wonderful take on Luna Lovegood.
Doctor Who:
This was just recced at
crack_van, but I am so enthralled I must repeat the rec in case potential readers missed it there:
The Amazon: in which Delgado!Master, post-Frontiers in Space runs into Jo Grant post-The Green Death, the two end up travelling together willing-nilling for a while, and The Deadly Assassin as well as Crispy!Master are prevented by Jo being an irresistable angst-deterrent. Also, the Master meets Four in his pirate outfit, which has predictable results. I still have a wide grin on my face. (If any companion is believable in an almost-friendship type of relationship with the Master, it's Jo because she did end up treating him like an annoying cousin on the show already, and also was the companion who got the Doctor to admit positive feelings for the Master in Classic Who, which is something of a unique position.)
And a poem. I'm in something of an odd mood today, and thinking about the BTVS episode The Body last week has reminded me of a poem that captures the aftermath of death, the shock, numbness, grief and attempt to get on with making it through the next day, and the day after that so very well. It's one of Ted Hughes' Birthday Letters poems, Life after Death. Like most of the BL poems, it's addressed to Sylvia Plath.
Life after Death
What can I tell you that you do not know
Of the life after death?
Your son's eyes, which had unsettled us
With your Slavic Asiatic
Epicanthic fold, but would become
So perfectly your eyes,
Became wet jewels,
The hardest substance of the purest pain
As I fed him in his high white chair.
Great hands of grief were wringing and wringing
His wet cloth of face. They wrung out his tears.
But his mouth betrayed you - it accepted
The spoon in my disembodied hand
That reached through from the life that had survived you.
Day by day his sister grew
Paler with the wound
She could not see or touch or feel, as I dressed it
Each day with her blue Breton jacket.
By night I lay awake in my body
The Hanged Man
My neck-nerve uprooted and the tendon
Which fastened the base of my skull
To my left shoulder
Torn from its shoulder-root and cramped into knots -
I fancied the pain could be explained
If I were hanging in the spirit
From a hook under my neck-muscle.
Dropped from life
We three made a deep silence
In our separate cots.
We were comforted by wolves.
Under that February moon and the moon of March
The Zoo had come close.
And in spite of the city
Wolves consoled us. Two or three times each night
For minutes on end
They sang. They had found where we lay.
And the dingos, and the Brazilian-maned wolves -
All lifted their voices together
With the grey Northern pack.
The wolves lifted us in their long voices.
They wound us and enmeshed us
In their wailing for you, their mourning for us,
They wove us into their voices. We lay in your death,
In the fallen snow, under falling snow,
As my body sank into the folk-tale
Where the wolves are singing in the forest
For two babes, who have turned, in their sleep
Into orphans
Beside the corpse of their mother.
This entry was originally posted at http://selenak.dreamwidth.org/611016.html. Comment there or here, as you wish.