@julianacapulet / julianacapulet.tumblr.com
Arthur Golden, Memoirs of a Geisha (via hrrrrrystyles)
Wonderland by Stacey D'Erasmo (via pairedaeza)
B, I woulda died too I'da liked to
Clarice Lispector, from Complete Stories; “The Waters of the World” (via luthienne)
Dolce sbocciata dalle anche ilari, Il vero amore è una quiete accesa,
Sweet blossomed from blithe hips, The true love is a burning stillness,
— Giuseppe Ungaretti, from Silenzio in Liguria (tr. Andrew Frisardi)
Katherine Mansfield, from a letter to Dorothy Brett written c. July 1927 (via violentwavesofemotion)
Jen Rouse, from “Acid and Tender,” Acid and Tender (via lifeinpoetry)
Hanif Willis-Abdurraqib, from Vintage Sadness (via lifeinpoetry)
does priam love juliana
Yes, yes he does. It was platonic at first, but it has grown to be romantic.
Priam would like to plead the fifth on this, of course. To say or show he loves anyone feels like a weakness someone will use against him, having seen it happen too many times before, and using other peoples’ similar relationships to his own advantage. Plus it feels like a vulnerability he’s handing to the very person he loves. How many times did he tell his parents that he loved them, only for them to turn their back on him and cast him out? It was a scarring event for him, and he’s often in denial about his real feelings until it’s too late to tell the person (see: Rafaella and Maeve.)
With Juliana, he would like to learn from his mistakes, but he’s still scared to admit it, to himself or to her, even after spending all night in her hospital room, or knowing he would rather help her rise than overthrow her. While he’s always thought attachments like this couldn’t happen because of his ambition, it certainly hasn’t stopped him from forming them.
So even if Priam is still struggling with what to do or think on this, I can tell you that, yes, he loves Juliana.
you will be okay / m.h. (via huntersmaya)
Deathless, Catherynne M. Valente (via deckle-edge-books)
“Flowers.” There is a stillness in the word. Placid and hollowed out. “Do me a favor, principessa.” His gaze trails down to Maeve’s headstone. To the pastel and white petaled blooms frothing from the stone base to the grass.
“Don’t.”
He disregards her self-righteous expectations of monogamy. Her aversion to sex. Allows her to willfully keep her head in that sugar spun cloud of propriety. But, ah–did she not know?
Orion holds both hands up. “I’ve never tried to hide it. The price tag of my loyalty. Cosimo was the highest bidder for so long.”
He’s never pretended that he couldn’t be bought. Never. Not once.
And Orion doesn’t fault her for her deluded expectation of his loyalty. Let her play at a holy war. Let her expect fair rules and an honest battlefield. So endearing–how she vindicates herself on that pedestal, even if there was something decidedly more poisonous about her targeting, inviting, luring him out into the cage based on their old affections.
However–
“I was unaware of the poison. But, wait. Is that the reasoning you use to make yourself feel better? He did it first.” Orion clicks his tongue. “Does that vindicate you? Allow you to stand here and accuse? Tell me. With Rafaella and Maeve’s bodies still warm, who agreed to an alliance with the Spades? And who stepped in line with the rest of the Capulets behind Cosimo’s choice?”
You stood by and did nothing as well.
“Will you come up with more excuses? I was unwilling. I didn’t have a choice.” Orion held a finger up. ”Everyone has a choice. And there is no honor among thieves and murderers. But you.” Softer. “You. Were different, love. And that made you brighter than the rest of them. But tell me.”
“Have you proven yourself wicked enough now? That they’ll prop the Capulet crown on your head?”
What was his intention exactly? To be needlessly hurtful? To put on a show of disdain, an attempt to tip the scales of power towards his side instead of the equal standing that she viewed them to be on? Or was it - as Juliana liked to believe was the motivation for most of the times that he spoke - something said to merely say something? “Your being dead and stiff cold under the ground hardly puts you in the position to be asking for favors, Signor Massetti,” there’s a playful lilt to her voice that was hoping to annoy more than to inspire innocence, a naive batting of her eyelashes as she spoke that hoped to counter such a surprise show of callousness from the Capulet. She didn’t like this, any of it, but damn if she was going to keep being the only fool prancing about in this (battle)field. It was high time she came to shed that image and embrace what she truly has been all along: a wolf, masquerading as sheep, biding time until her fangs grew that she could start biting at the necks of those who sought to do the same to her.
“And here I am, openly showing my contempt for it... and I know you shall hate me for this, mio amico, but I do so pity that you just said that with so much pride. As if you are above us all for jumping off the boat when you’re the only one who sees the looming threat up ahead. As if any of the friends you make along the way have any real sense of loyalty to you. Or have you also made it plainly aware to them that should someone far more noble and enchanting than Faron come your way, you will drop them too at a moment’s notice? I’m sure all your friends must absolutely love that side you.”
She knew because she had loved it too, loved when she had been the object of his affections at one point or another, until slowly it had soured till they stood here now, perhaps only a minute away from tearing at each other’s necks. Juliana was more than aware of what he was capable of, he had showed her the underhandedness of his moves, the swiftness of his turns, and if he were to attempt to make her wholly a part of the cemetery they stood on, likely she would surrender to the light out of exhaustion. But had it really come to this? Had they really come down to simply this?
“Me? You really, truly want to condescend to me right now, talk as if I have been thinking with the mind of a child in what was undoubtedly one of the hardest things I have ever had to do in my life? No reasoning in the world can make me feel better for what I did, but if I had to do it all again, then I won’t lie to you like you are lying to my face right now: I will. Because this conversation has made it clear to me that you have severed all ties between us; even before the kidnapping, you have maintained your distance and if you had the decency to shed your masks even just for a minute to tell me what we both know to be true, we can keep on with our day.”
“Sometimes I think 'Orion cannot honestly be as selfish as he acts' but this here, this conversation, this encounter, is enough proof that all the benefit of the doubt in the world cannot vindicate you. You're standing before me, honestly saying that the reason you chose to side with them is because of my father's actions? Because he thought he could defeat the enemy from within? A short-sighted thought, yes, I won’t begrudge you or the many people who think like you because I know you're not the only one who lost faith in him, but for you to imply that you loved Rafaella more than my father, that he spat on her memory by doing what he felt he had to to keep the rest of us alive... If I wasn't standing before Maeve right now, I would slap you for your goddamn audacity,” And indeed she could feel her arm shaking next to her, fingers stiff and palm icy and pale. Her eyes practically dared his to wilt with the way that they stared, refusing to budge or blink for even a split second lest she miss any reaction that her words might elicit. And boy did she have a lot to say, his bringing up Rafaella had triggered far more emotions than she had previously thought herself to have about the topic. There never was a proper mourning period allotted her after all that had transpired, she never truly stopped to feel all the things that must be felt over such a grand and sudden loss, and now it seemed that in lieu of sadness, her cousin’s death must be met with anger.
“Just a second ago you were flaunting that your loyalty has always been for sale and then you say this, all this, is for Rafaella? Where the fuck do you get off on bandying her name around as if you don’t have your tea parties and your play dates with the people responsible for her death? For Maeve’s death? My cousin was a Capulet through and through, she loved the Capulets and died for us, and if this little vendetta of yours really was for her, you would know that the last thing she would have wanted was a traitor to her people.”
Don’t forget to breathe, Juliana. Inhale. Exhale. It’s not worth dying out of loss of air because you chose to speak your mind to a man who surely would try to find a way to worm himself out of them.
“It must be so easy for you, for everyone else, to say what my father should or should not have done, since you’ve never had to lead, since you never were and never will be in his shoes, but my father loved every single one of his people, he gave all of us a chance, and I, daughter or no, will never fault him for doing what he thought was right at that moment. He may have surrendered on the outside, but he never fully gave in to Faron, no matter what you saw or thought. My father was going to die either way, alliance or no, and the Capulets were never going to win a war that you wish that he had started if the people standing among our ranks have their loyalties on sale to the highest bidder.”
That made you brighter than the rest of them. As if one person could keep being the only source of light in a town that constantly sought to envelop itself in the black. As if time and time again she had not held on to that brilliance with all of her might, only to have everyone surrounding her, everything inflicted upon her, working towards making her whatever monster he saw before her now. There was no point in trying to tell him that she still believed, she still had hope, deep, deep within her; it did not matter anymore, not to him, not when he had cemented his idea of her as someone who was fallen from grace. What was the point in trying to change his mind when she was nothing to him now?
"You only ask people to be different when it suits your needs, Orion. Or did you forget that you were one of the first to jump at the opportunity to teach me when to hold a knife to someone's throat and when to plunge the blade in, knowing that it would curry favor for you? You can't teach me to attack from below and then call on me for honor. If you believe me wicked, then so be it, but when I say that I did what I had to do for my family, for my people, at the very least it doesn't ring after the heels of deceit. I should hope the next person in line to buy whatever false affections you're selling don't end up doing to you what you've become so adept at, maybe then you'll genuinely grow a heart and I'll still be around to gaze upon it from a distance and be happy for you. If you think this is still about stupid crowns and heiress titles and me proving myself a worthy leader for the Capulets, then clearly you know nothing at all about the kind of person that I am and the kind of person that I have become.”
Charles Baudelaire, The Flowers of Evil (via larmoyante)
Hea would not provide Juliana with a wide berth. Since their legs, with their blood loss, did not allow them to go elsewhere, that was an addition to the original reasoning: which was, in fact, that they simply did not want to. Indeed, they were quite surprised when she approached them of her own accord, when she greeted them and broke into the silence with all the delicacy of a hand holding a serrated knife. But they would accept such a jarring revelation, if it meant that she was still unafraid of them – if it meant that she could forgive them.
The hand upon their elbow belied such a forgiveness. Their gaze landed upon it, and then their own hand, fingers light beneath her own before interlacing. Her knuckles did not feel frail, even if the brittleness of her resolve had been constantly tested. No matter how many blows she had been dealt, still she stood tall and withstood each tempest as it came across her. She was one of the few remaining lighthouses that still spoke out, that still guided ships from damage. And it might be said that Hea was such a vessel. A vessel who needed it.
If it was a warm-light of affection that Juliana wished to give them – there would be no blatant dismissal of it from them. They shifted their head back better to look at her. “Perhaps I was not lying,” they amended. “That is, until you came into the room with me.” As delicate of a blushing comment as the touch upon their elbow. “But I fear that I am the one who should be offering such apologies to you. For my own blindness. For not –”
For not being enough, perhaps, when I have thought I am too much.
“Even in your darkest places, you still have the light of a thousand precious gems, and are all the more precious for it. There is nothing you should or should not speak of except that which you wish to say. The gods only know that you’ve been forced into enough.” And the hand that held hers came to reach for her cheek, although the thumb which brushed her jaw was barely there. As if to reassure themselves that something was still right.
“I suppose we shall rise,” they remark. But then, they confide: “But can we?”
How easy it would have been to blame everything and everyone else in the world for a loss that was now so acutely hers and hers alone, but Juliana had made her peace long before the final blow had fallen, taken her father’s cold and still hand between her own two, lifted it to her lips and bade him go: if you want to be with them, papino, I completely understand. The three of you can be a family there, with mother and il nostra piccola angela. Maybe you held on for this long because you don’t want me to be alone, but I won’t be, I never will be (not with Priam and Hea, with Catherine and Tiberius, she counted in between the voiceless thoughts, tears streaming silently down her face), you don’t have to stay.
And he didn’t. Faron may have thought himself Satan manifest for his little stunt, it was an empty gesture that hit her hard for a moment then passed the next; her father was dead that very night he fell, red streaking down his face, and what happened next was nothing more than the door closing itself with finality. The witches, as much as she respected them and maintained belief that they were invulnerable, still the prodigious of Verona, did not hold the ability to predict the future or change fate, there was no fault to be cast at their feet and Juliana could only hope that Hea knew that clearly and fully by her gestures now. If they were to cut away now, hold their distance because of a failure that they had all been complicit in... oh, how she would mourn and be irreparably crush. Losing another so quickly after her father was a notion she could not even indulge in, especially one so near and dear to her heart as this that stood before her.
Instinctively squeezing their hand as if to will what little strength she carried be shared between the two of them, the Capulet could not have stopped the bright rouge blossoming over her cheeks at their words, corner of her lips twitched into a shy, sweet smile that she quickly moved to cover up with a slight bow of her head and pulling behind the curtains of her hair; she was so used to the hollow compliments thrown her way by those that had wanted to curry her favor in order to gain her father’s, but now, with only the two of them and nothing much for her to offer, genuine was really all it could be and she already knew that by the character of the person alone, it was merely a bonus to be so reassured. “Oh, hush, I should dare to say that it would be an insult if you were to do that, mia cara. We all were blinded... by hope, of all things. For one shining occasion, you and your siblings managed to bring Capulet and Montague together, a feat that I have softly hoped for way back when but never thought possible. Is that not something to be proud of still? Far be it for me to try and find the silver lining in such a disastrous occasion,” for herself most, perhaps nobody would argue that she was the one who had truly suffered for that night. “But you mustn’t-...”
To be held with such delicacy by such divinity... Juliana’s facade faltered in that split second that she lifted her eyes to look into theirs, to feel what she felt, to see what she still saw, the image of her father in the mirror and the reality bear manifest by his tears of blood, broken by the way that she shut her own, leaning slightly all the while into their touch. When Hea told her that light still shone within her, it took some coaxing to get herself to believe it, not when she saw herself a black hole that brought demise to all that came in close proximity. Hope had taken their plans and thrown them back at their faces, and still hope was the one that kept her back straight, legs steady, tears dry, standing still when her enemies fought so hard to break her. “If that’s what you want, then do let me thank you. I wanted to reserve it for when I visit you and your siblings together, but I’d be lying if I said that I wasn’t hoping to have a private moment with you. To thank you, personally. From the very start, my dear Hea, you believed in me when everyone else doubted me, you told me that I will come to be ready to lead the Capulets when the opportunity comes... now, I believe, it’s my time to repay you and dispel what seem to be burgeoning worries in you. Yes, mia cara, we will rise. You and I, together, even if I have to lift you up myself, you will rise.”
d: May 14th t: 2:30 p.m. l: guido massetti’s gravestone status: closed to @julianacapulet
All the men and women of note in Verona were buried here. Bones of ancient Romans knocking against politicians, actors, artists. Watched by stone angels on bent knee, heads bowed, faces mottled by time and Orion stepped out of the black Mercedes, a whiskey in one hand and a glass in the other as he moved off the concrete and up to the grass.
Guido Massetti was buried by an olive tree, the breeze scattering leaves that caught in Orion’s hair, settled on his shoulders. And he placed a crystal glass by his father’s headstone.
Lilies for your mother. For me? Cognac.
Orion took a knee and poured the Black Pearl Louis XIII into the glass, sloshing the stones, rattling them against the crystal as the amber liquor rose to the brim. “Salute.” He took a sip from the bottle, the alcohol smooth down his throat. Four years to the day since his father passed, and Orion never missed the opportunity to share a bottle of Guido’s favorite drink.
Movement to his left. And Orion startled–recognizing the young woman paying her respects at a gravestone several paces away.
“Juliana.” He called, raising his voice. And he set the bottle next to his father’s glass and approached, pace measured and slow, hands slipping into the pockets of his slacks as he stopped, several graves from where she stood.
“Are you disappointed, my love? After that spectacular kidnapping, I’m certain you expected me to be cleanly disposed of.” Orion tipped his chin up. The curve of his mouth was crooked, and he clapped his hands together. “I must commend you. Despite the shift of allegiance, I never would have been capable of it. Caging you. With weapons bidded on.”
“But alas. The sentiment wasn’t shared. They’ve made an excellent Capulet of you yet.“
Though it spoke against every instinct in her body, all the effort in the world could not have stopped the sigh that passed through Juliana’s lips, audible and exasperated and begging that he take the hint (though knowing full well that his arrogance would have him plow on all the same). Had he not seen her, the way that their paths had paralleled when they both entered the cemetery but she, taking a page out of the silence that had enveloped what relationship they still had, had bitten back her tongue and taken back her step, making sure that he was some ways ahead of her before continuing on? Did she not don the garb of a woman seeking solitude, willing herself be buried among the stillness of the dead if it gave her reprieve from the chaos of the much smaller world that she now moved in?
Yesterday’s hours had been spent in the sanctity of the Capulet mausoleum, contradictory in its simplicity and sanctity with that of the people that now forever resided in it: her mother, Rafaella, all the Capulets that came before her that had forged the name into renown, most having been cheated out of lives that should have been full and long. What remained of her father had to come to the visit with her, urn cradled in her arms like the childhood toy he had gifted her shortly after her mother’s diagnosis, pressed to her heart and filled with fondness. Today she chose to visit Maeve, surround her with flowers as she knew the other would have wanted, smile sweetly, laugh softly as she recalled memories of their time together to carry her when a wave of depression threatened to drop her to her knees.
And then he showed up.
“If you had died and were buried where you’d been standing, I would pass by you today and leave you flowers still,” Juliana did not have the energy nor the desire to meet what brazenness he was giving her; if he had approached her expecting an apology, all that was left for her to do was turn her back and walk away. “Believe it or not, Orion, I barely give you any thought, much less have expectations of you. You’ve made it clear from the very start that you’re not someone who can only share one person’s bed, so why should it surprise me that you will be one of the people to fuck us over?” The audacity. Would that it should shock her if not for the person who spoke, who dared be so false to her face. “Oh, please, at least have the decency to be honest in the company of the dead. If the tables had been turned, it’s clear that you would not have hesitated… just as you did not hesitate betraying me, my father, Rafaella… working with them. At the very least, the kidnapping required some courage, unlike your little poisoning party.” I’m sorry you have to witness this, Maeve, my love. But the world does not take kindly to a kind heart anymore and neither do I. “Are you disappointed, my love? I’m certain you expected me to be cleanly disposed of… just like my father.”
