Remove ads

If Mahan Could See Us Now

Reader mode
[X] I'm sorry. Can we enjoy the rest of the night together?

I liked it a lot, but it made me quite sad.
 
This is a sadness happening. I understand why Sasha wants her secrets and also why her girlfriend wants to know.

Cute but sad :c just want them a happy life
 
This did pull up a lot of feelings. Let me see if I can sort through some of them...

We are currently very at sea. The note about pressure and uncertainty when we first told Sasha what was going on is exactly right- there are at least four groups playing games that involve us a piece, and we walked in knowing of only two. (The count and the secret police.) We were relying on Sasha to ground us.

Now, Sasha has been pulled from us twice (once physically and once, when we were about to be able to relax again finding her, emotionally) and the party has very bad overtones of the cadet ball that ruined our life right after graduation. Stakes are high, we have no one really 'on our side' at the moment, we don't know any of the rules of the game or even half the languages, and we are already miserable from encounters in the main ballroom.

Sasha just found out that there is an LGBT community and she is invited to be part of it, while at the same time trying to deal with NOT being the ghost that's hovering over her constantly here. She has to be in whiplash, going from being excited from validation and the sense that she is facing her fears, to being confronted by a partner who is on edge and seeming like she is feeling better.

I really don't think the party is a good environment now- we won't be able to avoid the tension and pressure as long as we are so lost, and Sasha is going to be torn three ways between managing herself, the audience, and us.

Let's just go.

[X] I'm sorry, my love. Lets go home.
-[x] "I feel as though I've been tossed in a barrel and put through the wringer and I don't even know why, and I can't- I will try, if you wish, to set myself aside so I can be the open and kind Koshka you deserve but I have so little of that left to me that I..." Cry.

I feel like we need this conversation to happen, to happen somewhere that isn't a stress-adding environment, and for Sasha to understand how fragile we are. The truth is, there are two different conversations that need to happen- one about what is stressing us, and one about what is stressing Sasha, because they seem entirely different. I think that trying to do both at the same time is just going to lead to fights- victimization Olympics is a real hard rhetorical move to resist.

So, ideally, leave further stressors. Take tonight to calm us down, take tomorrow to hear Sasha fully, when we are in a place to be kind.
 
Last edited:
[X] I'm sorry, my love. Lets go home.
-[x] "I feel as though I've been tossed in a barrel and put through the wringer and I don't even know why, and I can't- I will try, if you wish, to set myself aside so I can be the open and kind Koshka you deserve but I have so little of that left to me that I..." Cry.

Changing vote.
 
[X] I'm sorry, my love. Lets go home.
-[x] "I feel as though I've been tossed in a barrel and put through the wringer and I don't even know why, and I can't- I will try, if you wish, to set myself aside so I can be the open and kind Koshka you deserve but I have so little of that left to me that I..." Cry.
 
[X] I'm sorry, my love. Lets go home.
-[x] "I feel as though I've been tossed in a barrel and put through the wringer and I don't even know why, and I can't- I will try, if you wish, to set myself aside so I can be the open and kind Koshka you deserve but I have so little of that left to me that I..." Cry.
 
[X] I'm sorry, my love. Lets go home.
-[x] "I feel as though I've been tossed in a barrel and put through the wringer and I don't even know why, and I can't- I will try, if you wish, to set myself aside so I can be the open and kind Koshka you deserve but I have so little of that left to me that I..." Cry.
 
[X] I'm sorry, my love. Lets go home.
-[x] "I feel as though I've been tossed in a barrel and put through the wringer and I don't even know why, and I can't- I will try, if you wish, to set myself aside so I can be the open and kind Koshka you deserve but I have so little of that left to me that I..." Cry.
 
Vote closed
Adhoc vote count started by Arbit on Dec 29, 2018 at 11:57 AM, finished with 18 posts and 14 votes.
  • [X] I'm sorry, my love. Lets go home.
    -[x] "I feel as though I've been tossed in a barrel and put through the wringer and I don't even know why, and I can't- I will try, if you wish, to set myself aside so I can be the open and kind Koshka you deserve but I have so little of that left to me that I..." Cry.
    [x] I'm sorry. Can we enjoy the rest of the night together?
    [X] At this rate, I'm afraid we'll be in Cathay before we escape our pasts. We've both faced demons tonight- let us go home then, to where we can rest.
    [X] I'm sorry. Can we enjoy the rest of the night together?
Click to expand...
 
Remove ads
C4P13: One Still Night
  • Threadmarks
    • "I'm sorry." You say. It's all that you can think to say.

    "I know, my love." She reaches out to touch the line of you jaw, trailing her fingers along it. With a sigh she attempts to smile but the sadness in her eyes puts paid to the idea. "It is not so easy, is it. We have both seen so much pain… it is perhaps more surprising that it took so long for this to happen."

    "Dearest, I… I feel as though I have not paused since we arrived at this party and at no point have I managed to relax. I did not mean to hurt you. I am certainly not myself, I know that much, not after everything this evening. I do not know who I am to these people, even if I know who I am."

    "I know that, Valentina, I know," She says, but you hold a hand up for quiet.

    "I am confused, that much I know. But I will put that aside, if you wish, I will put myself aside so that I can be what you need. You know you have all my kindness and all my patience." You realise you sound almost plaintive, offering everything to her and praying for something back. You realise that in this moment you would tear yourself open for her tenderness, make yourself more vulnerable than you have ever been for anyone if only she would leave her fingers on your skin. Her soft touch is everything. You feel the first sting of tears touch the corner of your eyes and her pained gasp is a fresh tear in your chest.

    Her fingers move from your jaw to your cheek, thumb wiping away the smallest droplet from your eyelashes. A moment later her lips are on yours in a chaste kiss that leaves you breathless nonetheless.

    "I would not ask that much of you." She says, her whisper almost inaudible over the sounds around you.

    You turn to look at the other revellers, now chatting raucously amongst themselves. The woman in the suit, the Grafin, meets your eyes and smiles in a way that you do not like but why you could not say. Perhaps after the night you've had people would not complain for you suspicions, and something inside is telling you that it is not simply a case of paranoia.

    "I would give it though," You turn back to Sasha, "and give it gladly. I will not have you hurting for me or for anyone, if I have my way."

    "I know." She sniffs, fighting her own tears it seems, "I have your kindness and you have my love."

    "And you have mine. My heart is yours." Whether it's the alcohol, the hazy atmosphere or the intensity of the encounter, you are suddenly being more honest with your feelings than you have ever been. You reach up to take her hand, laying it against your chest as the tears continue their slow trickle across your cheeks. It is not sadness that makes you cry; no, you are happy. Happy to hear her words and happy to have her hands on you. "Can we go home, my love?"

    "Of course. Of course."

    You, both of you now united again as a couple, make your excuses and escape into the night. The air is cold on your hot skin as Sasha steals a kiss in the dark shade of a tree, her hands touching in an entirely promiscuous manner as they slide inside your jacket. Your own explore the curves of her before you grab her wrist and race back to the hotel with laughter on your lips and your heart beating faster than it ever has before.

    That night is the first you share together in the most passionate of ways. Before you have been scared to upset her with the wrong touch, the wrong idea. And, you will admit, you have been nervous of your own body. There had been nobody since that snatched night in the toilets of a bar in Polyapavlosk nor before. Not until now, here in a foreign city with a woman you have loved for months.

    Her touch is gentle, her explorations cautious but tender, caring. You, in turn, are almost worshipful as if you kneel before the altar of a certain goddess with whom you wish to commune most intimately.

    Basking in the afterglow, in the darkness, wrapped in sweat-damp sheets, you hold her to your chest and smile even though she cannot see it. Her breathing slows, deepens, as she falls asleep against your breasts with an arm thrown lazily across your naked hips.

    "Oh, Liybimaya." you say to the dark ceiling, to the sleeping woman, to yourself, "We will find a place we can be together, one day. I promise."

    She stirs gently in the silence. Shifts, slightly. Then your eyes close, and you drift into sleep.

    Where will you go?
    [ ] Otrusia
    [ ] Gallia
    [ ] Albia
     
  • Threadmarks
    • [X] Gallia

    Paris and Berlin were the two least LBGT-unfriendly places in historical Europe during the Belle Epoque. Without reason to vote otherwise, well, I'm for it.
     
    [x] Gallia

    Paris is for lovers.

    This was a wonderful update. I didn't see the night ending like that and I am so happy it did. :) <3
     
    I just figured they have, y'know, the Eiffel Tower.

    By the standards of 1910, that WAS a ridiculous thing. And it's just... perfect, in a way that I feel like you'd detract from if you tried to replace it with something different or garish or LOOK HOW BIG THIS IS. It'd feel like overcompensation somehow.

    I suppose you could make it taller and keep the proportions or something, but why?

    Now, what I want to know is what's replaced the Arc de Triomphe, because by retconning Napoleon out of French history you also retcon that.

    [When I portrayed Lutetia in Cavaliere, the Coralie omakes over in Aircraft Design Quest, I basically just used "exactly Paris," with the only change I made being that the Paris Lutetian Commune of the Franco-Prussian Gallic-Dyskisch War ended in a cease-fire negotiated by good old (not old then) Clemenceau. I've found that using lots of real people can add a surprising amount of depth. If people want to overwrite my general approach to portraying Lutetia I understand, but I don't regret doing it that way]
     
    I'd say the most likely difference between Lutetia and Paris would be that Lutetia never really got demolished and rebuilt like Paris did. So it lacks the boulevards that make it so difficult to hold in a revolution.

    At least, that would be my explanation for the Lutetia Commune not getting killed, and it would make sense; the monarchy never returned, so never tried to prevent another revolution.
     
    veteranMortal said:
    I'd say the most likely difference between Lutetia and Paris would be that Lutetia never really got demolished and rebuilt like Paris did. So it lacks the boulevards that make it so difficult to hold in a revolution.

    At least, that would be my explanation for the Lutetia Commune not getting killed, and it would make sense; the monarchy never returned, so never tried to prevent another revolution.
    Click to expand...
    Click to shrink...
    Notably, making it easier to kill rioters wasn't the only, or necessarily even the primary, reason for tearing down medieval neighborhoods and reconstructing large chunks of a major European capital in those days.

    When people say those neighborhoods were unsanitary, they don't just mean "poor people are stereotypically dirty." They can very well mean "there were literal rivers of raw sewage" and "gee it turns out that epidemics spread really fast when you have like one person living in every three square meters of floor space, who knew?"

    Plus, y'know, all those winding alleyways often meant things like "no way for two carts to pass each other." Not good on that front either. A lot of Parisians approved of the major reconstructions of the mid-century, because it meant less disease, more fresh air, and less living in the Victorian version of a favela.

    ...

    Now, in the Gayaverse, Europa had the germ theory of disease much earlier, and that might well trigger an earlier push for public sanitation and public health efforts. But by that same token, that means you'd see a gradual process of urban reconstruction and attempts by both monarchs and republics to build cities that were less overcrowded, more liberally supplied with clean water and ways to get the sewage out of the way, and (ideally) more aesthetically appealing.

    Paris in particular had considerable prior history of people calling for reconstruction, including during the pre-Napoleonic days of the First Republic, too. This really wasn't just about "the Man wants to be able to fire grapeshot down long boulevards to stop rioting mobs from overthrowing him," even if that was in some cases a factor being considered.

    ...

    Now, I actually didn't know at the time that I had "the Commune didn't get drowned in blood" as an outcome that Gallia had been one permanent First Republic throughout the past 125 or so years of its history, but in my opinion that honestly makes it easier to explain a negotiated cease-fire, because there's a relatively secure national government to negotiate with the Commune.

    Like, historically as I remember, Napoleon III surrendered, the government that later evolved into the Third Republic formed to fill the power vacuum, but with Paris besieged in short order a different and more socialist-leaning government emerged to fill that power vacuum.

    If the central government had been, instead, the Republic, an institution that had existed since 1789, and which relocated the capital to a provincial city after the terrifying success of Dyskelandisch arms on the frontiers, it is still credible that working-class radicals and socialist agitators would have overwhelmed the local government of Lutetia and mobilized the populace to repel a siege. But the idea of a cease-fire being negotiated between the Republic and the Commune seems a bit less impossible to me under those circumstances, especially if we slightly butterfly the exact political balances of power that prevailed within the Commune and the Republic.

    And I don't know, I like to add happy-ish-ish endings to things sometimes?
     
    Simon_Jester said:
    Notably, making it easier to kill rioters wasn't the only, or necessarily even the primary, reason for tearing down medieval neighborhoods and reconstructing large chunks of a major European capital in those days.
    Click to expand...
    Click to shrink...

    For most cities, sure. Paris, though? Paris was specifically redesigned to make it easier to kill revolutionaries. The other effects were secondary.
     
    veteranMortal said:
    For most cities, sure. Paris, though? Paris was specifically redesigned to make it easier to kill revolutionaries. The other effects were secondary.
    Click to expand...
    Click to shrink...
    I mean, yes and no. I'm not disputing the truth of the statement as such, in that I'm quite sure the layout was designed with that in mind. At the same time... A lot of this shit is complicated when you dig into it.

    Was the layout of the big boulevards set up with an eye to troop movements, lines of fire, and so on, with the intent of making suppressing an uprising easier? I have no doubt. Were they thinking about it, was it A goal? Surely.

    At the same time, was "let's rebuild the capital so it's harder to have an uprising" the sole motivator? No, no it was not.

    ...

    For starters, it was the product of a relatively new monarch who ascended the throne by election even if he staged a coup later. Napoleon III wasn't exactly unpopular when the bulk of the rebuilding happened. Furthermore the rhetoric surrounding the project included a lot of exactly the same refrains you'd hear anywhere else in Europe, or that you'd been hearing in Paris for about a hundred years. And they were, in point of fact, doing this in parts of the city that we today would look at and say "seriously what an appalling slum."

    A lot of those medieval-vintage neighborhoods that served as hotbeds of revolution also served as hotbeds of cholera, because "defensible tiny twisty alleyways and big crowded tenements full of impoverished workers" is a pretty good way to get both. Because the workers and peasants don't enjoy being forced to sleep six to a room in crowded buildings with no sewer access and drinking water that comes from the Broad Street pump.

    ...

    If Lutetia circa 1910 still has that medieval street layout spread through large parts of the city, without someone, at some time, having done major reconstruction of much of the city, then Lutetia would be a city much as it was in the Middle Ages, with (as Voltaire put it) a few beautiful palaces "hidden behind buildings worthy of the Goths and Vandals." Large parts of the city center would be slums- something like The Shades in Terry Pratchett's Discworld, only with more diseases and a worse stink.

    Given that in a real sense this kind of lightless, miserable, overcrowded and impoverished lifestyle is in large part what the rebels of 1789 were fighting against, I'd expect a fair amount of urban renewal to have happened in the 19th century one way or another.

    It's notable that a lot of reconstruction of historic medieval districts took place in Britain (relatively democratic, minimal fear of public uprisings compared to the Continent), and in cities in the Netherlands. There really were good reasons for this that exist in the absence of "whiff of grapeshot" villainy.

    There aren't a lot of large cities anywhere that have preserved their medieval street layouts, because such layouts simply do not make sense for modern cities that don't have to surround themselves with walls in case of a Viking raid or an attack by Teutonic Knights or something, and that are managed by people who know where things like typhus and cholera come from.
     
    Last edited:
    Simon_Jester said:
    It's notable that a lot of reconstruction of historic medieval districts took place in Britain (relatively democratic, minimal fear of public uprisings compared to the Continent), and in cities in the Netherlands. There really were good reasons for this that exist in the absence of "whiff of grapeshot" villainy.
    Click to expand...
    Click to shrink...

    London did not do what Paris did. I don't believe cities in the Netherlands did. There is a distinction between modernising your cities, including slum clearances, and what was done in Paris, which

    Like, the man who did the work in Paris made explicit reference to his intention being to prevent revolution. I don't know why you're so resistant to this, it's a matter of documented historical fact.
     
    Reader mode
    You must login or register to reply here.
    Remove ads
    Back
    Top