Pinned
Don’t I deserve the right to aim a saber of fire at your heart in return?
Laura Benson (US-American, 1997) - Headless (2026)
the crazy thing about this place called “grocery store” is that you always need to go there. especially if you like, just went.
every big city needs an infinite park in its heart
malini is. so hungry actually. like she is not yearning or pining softly for priya in the slightest she is twisting everything she knows about her inside her head trying to figure her out.
she’s hallucinating and suffering from abrupt withdrawal and yet still out here trying to wrap her head around why priya likes her even now despite her intentions and manipulations being very out in the clear. she is so hungry to understand priya, her hidden faces, priya who doesn’t fit cleanly to either purpose of maid or a weapon.
priya who is caring and kind in ways that malini has picked up on but also dangerous, powerful, the echo of the temple daughter she was raised to be that still lives in her bones and there is so much malini doesn’t know and wants to understand. priya who refuses to have herself toyed with further and malini is glad deep down that she isn’t currently strong enough to even attempt to make a pawn of her.
how deeply important that act of trust is when malini goes from weaponizing her vulnerability to genuinely being unable to utilize it effectively to her purpose and having to put off her scheming and just trust priya and part of her knows too that at even a shred of her full power she would still have found another way and there's just something deeply terrifying yet solidifying in that act of trust and letting herself be helped without actively trying to extract it to serve her.
just her as she is to offer, the woman who lied and schemed to survive. the face that has worn a million more faces and right now, does not have the strength to reach for even one.
but there is priya who is too dangerous to lie to and malini who is so. fascinated by her. attracted to her. threatened by what it means for her that she doesn’t WANT to break a promise she made to a powerful woman whose full capabilities she isn’t even aware of to much extent. down sickeningly bad I fear. priya fell first but malini fell hard.
double exposure of the full moon on 35mm film
ngl reading this part actually makes me sick. but also this memory is so interesting to me because it says so much about all three of the siblings. starting with chandra who grew up in aditya’s shadow, with aditya being well-liked and considered the ideal person to rule, something that lead to deep resentment and rage which chandra deals out in the form of punishment, like the kind inflicted on malini and in his treatment of aditya’s friends as ‘lesser’ because of his fixation with his idea of righteousness and control.
his idea of loving malini even later on is rooted in control and expecting sacrificial transformation from her, a possessive kind of need for her willful compliance that she fails to meet even when she ‘flee from him in bitter disobedience’ on him punishing her for ‘ill-bred’ behaviour. his idea of love and care manifest through possession and correction which is so fucked up. destroying the parts of malini he dislikes is his expression of care and she becomes the perfect target for these impulses because she embodies everything that cannot be neatly ordered, a direct deviation from his ideal of womanhood, a direct threat to his virtues.
and this memory and similar instances were also formative to shaping malini into someone who had to learn to use her emotions to get the desired results: if she was meek/cried, he would stop hurting her. so despite the shame and humiliation, keeping up a timid demeanour to survive her own brother wore her down until even tears weren’t signs of grief at all but a tool. malini operates in tools but underneath that is rage for what chandra did to her. she wields herself. she is her own weapon. she forged herself into one to survive and then to conquer.
and aditya doesn’t really intervene much when chandra is doing this to malini, like he tells him to stop and and then reassures malini that no one else thinks like chandra later but when malini questions his protection (who will protect me from my brothers?) all he does is assures her chandra would never do her real harm. after she has already felt emotionally harmed and physically had a form of autonomy taken away. his attempt to keep the peace and smooth things over comes across an awful lot like passivity i.e. on some level he denies her experience of reality in order to appease the situation as a whole and instead she ends up internalising this sense of feeling unsafe and learns to manipulate her emotions instead.
aditya’s perspective rationalizes chandra’s actions by assuming there is ultimately good in him or at the very least that he isn’t capable of the kind of evil that would be a threat to their sister. malini doesn’t believe him because of what she experiences in the situation. and I wonder how much of that drives a subconscious wedge in their relationship?
nice pair of characters who trust each other more than anyone else in the whole entire world it would sure be a shame if one of them betrayed that trust for the sake of trying to keep the other alive. it would sure be a shame to love someone so much you destroy them
“i need you to live even if it means you never forgive me for this” is an emotion
"Hate me. Hate me and live"
i get that we don't have chapters from jeevan's pov because a) he mostly follows orders, b) what he thinks is clear anyway from bhumika's chapters and c) straight men in this series have rarely more than one chapter unless they're the villain
but! it would be so entertaining having some snippets and seeing just how much he's simping for her... like, malini and priya cannot even look at each other in the eyes because their feelings would be too obvious to everyone else (you are like ink, malini thought helplessly. ink, and all i want is to make poetry of you) and i just know jeevan matches that level of yearning and devotion, sure he's stoic and hardworking but i bet half of the time he's thinking only about how his lady is the strongest cleverest beautifulest woman he's ever known
