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lizzybeth1986 · 4 months

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Hana and Madeleine: When You Reward Your Favourite Bully with One of Her Victims

Series - TRR's Alternative LIs: The "Romances" That Didn't Happen

Previous - Maxwell and Penelope: When You Like the Side Character So Much, You Gift Her A Shiny New LI

A/N1: Apologies, again, for the length of this. There was so much damn retconning to wade through that it felt like a rollercoaster to write. There is also not going to be a lot of Hana in this, as I needed to unravel so many inconsistencies in Madeleine's writing. I also didn't want this to become a repeat of my essay series on Hana (which you can read here).

CW: Descriptions of bullying and intimidation, as well as dismissiveness of the same both in canon and from fandom. A mention of the 'infertility' plotline written for Hana in TRH1. Mentions of parental abuse and neglect.

In every other essay in this series, it's been important for me to analyse the potential of the pairings TRR went for. No matter how badly PB handled them later on, one could find promise in the possibilities of these pairings, and if written well they could result in a sweet, happy ending for the LIs we didn't marry. With a better sense of balance from the writers and less vitriol and double standards (in some cases) from the fandom, they could have worked.

Not so for this pairing.

In the case of Hana and Madeleine,it would have been far far better if this pairing had never happened at all. The problem wasn't just in the development; the roots of such a pairing itself were rotten.

(White) Female Antagonists

Before I delve into the characters involved in this pairing, it's important we take another deep dive into a narrative practice we often see with PB. Their blatant favouring of specifically white female antagonists.

Now, it's not as if white men in antagonistic roles don't get favourable writing from their teams and adulation from sections of the fandom (one has to only look at some of the posts Gaius Augustine of BB, Caleb of Hero, and Kane of TE got - just to name a few). But we also often see fans of such white women decry the (very little compared to their black counterparts) condemnation that their faves get for their actions in comparison to both antagonistic and romanceable white men. Such readers often neglect to acknowledge exactly how much the narrative bends over backwards to accomodate them, in a way that they never have done for even mildly hostile/wary black and brown women. And often this is with ample support and encouragement within the fandom itself.

One cannot even pretend this is a recent development. The early books had their fair share of white-woman-adulation and you can see some of the patterns that would solidify in PB discourse already take shape in their early books.

One excellent example of this is TCaTF. Compare the treatment that white women like Helene Leventis, Hex and Zenobia Nevrakis are given, to what Rowan Thorn - a black woman - gets. Helene is allowed to escape never to return, or join Kenna, despite being the woman who killed her mentor and close friend Gabriel. Hex is well known in the series for her sadistic torture devices and for destroying an extremely prosperous kingdom. Yet, she is captured - alive - and there are two options that allow her a bit more mercy, and only one that recommends the harshest of punishments. Rowan in the meantime only betrays Kenna if the latter is an absolute tyrant to her, and letting her go if she betrays her is touted as a failure. Her loyalty doesn't ensure she will live like Diavolos' does - you can in fact leave her to die if you don't have enough diamonds/prestige points.

The Freshman was an improvement on this: even if Becca Davenport started out as a classic college mean girl, her redemption arc involved her needing to work to regain trust with the group and her best friend Madison, regardless of the MC's fondness of her. Her housemates immediately set her straight when she lashes out at them at the beginning of TS, and Becca has to plan for almost a-book-and-a-half to get her friendship with Madison back to normal again.

Sadly, this is something that rarely ever happened again. Discrepancies in character treatment became more and more obvious as the years passed. Books where black and brown women behaved even mildly unimpressed or catty with the MC, showed them either suffering grievous fates or written out of the narrative (eg. Scarlett not even getting a proper future in the VoS bonus scene) or being mistrusted and misunderstood constantly by the MC and their friends (Aurora). Books where white women could cause grievous harm depicted them being let off without so much as a slap on the wrist (eg. Aunt Mallory of RoE being rewarded with a happy life, a man and reconciliation with the niece she tried to kill and the daughter she emotionally abused).

(Screenshots from SavageLordBarlow's YouTube channel)

Perhaps the worst and most obvious case to date was that of Vanessa Blackwood of MoTY, who called a young child "guttersnipe" within minutes of encountering her, outed a lesbian teacher, encouraged her son's bullying, provided legal counsel to the MC's ex husband just to see the woman suffer, and engineered a plot to frame the MC for theft so she could lose her job. Once Vanessa had crossed her limits, PB ensured they laid on the sympathy narrative thick, having her show sad faces when the MC scolded her in a paywall scene, punishing only her brown lackey (both the white people involved - Vanessa and Guy - are never named when Tallulah is exposed, even though she literally stole jewellery and framed the MC for them). In the series finale, Vanessa was rewarded with a cushy diamond scene where the MC can choose (in what is the understatement of the century) to call her "classist and a little bit racist" - all she is given at the end of the book is an extremely softball form of criticism.

Compare this to Xanthe of ACOR, who had far less power, who was repeatedly slut shamed by the MC and others for doing her job, and whose end was met in a "comical" scene that implied she'd been sold into sexual slavery while two black members of her scholae gloated over her plight (in a manner so uncharacteristic of them that even players who didn't necessarily like Xanthe were shocked. I would highly recommend you read @cassiopeiacorvus' excellent essay on her, "Xanthe: Courtesan, Rival, Pawn").

In an essay I'd written years ago, I'd noted the following:

"Check out who the narrative rewards you for treating well, as opposed to who will be made to support you either way.

You're allowed to show basic decency to a black or brown woman. But you're expected to show kindness, understanding and empathy to a white woman, and richly rewarded if you do. In some cases you will also face consequences if you don't. (Fandom - take note of the difference, and be sure not to forget it)."

Madeleine Amaranath is probably one of the best examples of this - with blatant retcons, unfounded adulation and obvious pandering lasting over five books.

Rules of Engagement

When we look at the full cast of TRR, we find at least six characters who are callbacks to its sister series, Rules of Engagement. Leo, Constantine, Regina, Bastien, Madeleine and Rashad (the last one was an addition from TRR2 onwards). Part of TRR's appeal as a series was its ability to reference the earlier one through these characters, but this time from the PoV of Leo's younger brother instead.

Madeleine appeared in only 2 chapters in RoE. She was Leo's fiancée, in an arranged match that not only their parents but their citizens expected, unfazed by the "commoners" Leo brought to his bed and secure in the knowledge that no matter who he slept with she would eventually become his Queen. Leo dashes these expectations, however, by abdicating his claim to the throne - whether the RoE MC chooses him or not.

At this point - when TRR was barely even a concept - Leo was a clear fan favourite. Players liked the idea of romancing a rogue prince from a fictional European country; it meant they could revel in the luxury of touching royalty, while being away from all the hard, unsavoury parts. The Madeleine angle provided them with a rival to fight off, and at the time that was all that mattered.

Was Leo's behaviour in RoE, towards both the RoE MC and Madeleine, dishonest? Definitely, but not many seemed to care much at the time and it hardly created a dent in his fanbase (most of the criticisms against him and his cheating ways and irresponsibility would emerge later - when the Leo stans became Drake stans, and it was more convenient to badmouth Liam's family).

Jeffrey Herdman, a Junior Game Writer with Pixelberry for over 7 years, was a part of both the RoE and TRR teams, and proudly admitted in the TRR2 pre-release interview, to being the one in charge of writing Madeleine:

Q: Very funny. (Just so we're clear, Jeffrey is joking. Sort of.) Out of curiosity, who's your favorite character to write in The Royal Romance?

Jeffrey: Madeleine. It's fun to write someone who's constantly trying to spin a situation to their benefit, and making power plays along the way. I've actually been writing for Madeleine since her appearance in Rules of Engagement: Book 2, so we're practically besties.

Excerpt from The Royal Romance: Book 2 Interview

(If we were to compare this adulation of the character from Jeffrey, to the person who wrote Hana - head writer Jennifer Young, you'd find a surprising difference. In this very interview Jennifer talks about enjoying the process of writing Hana, but pointed to Drake as her favourite LI - "In my personal game, my love interest is definitely Drake, and I totally make Kara write him just so I can read his scenes and enjoy the romance. =)".

Perhaps if Jennifer had spent less time fawning over Drake, and more time doing Hana's story justice, that LI wouldn't be stuck in a situation where the team constantly erased her experiences and history to benefit their favourites)

When you look at Jeffrey's open admiration of Madeleine, and trace her fairly choppy and largely incoherent narrative journey through the books...a lot of things begin to make sense.

TRR1 - Would a TRR1 Madeleine Have Been A Better Fit for Hana?

When you look at the first book, you can tell that the possibility of any of the other alternative pairings besides Liam and Olivia wasn't really entertained. There is no buildup at all for Maxwell x Penelope, Drake x Kiara - and not even a single direct interaction between fellow competitors Hana and Madeleine. In fact, TRR2 often had to cover up for the lack of interaction in certain cases by making the alternative LI come up with justifications for why they weren't approaching the LI before.

There is maybe one implied interaction between Hana and Madeleine, that I don't think even the writers paid much attention to at the time. In the pie baking scene in Applewood, Hana is assigned to Madeleine's team if the MC doesn't take her along. Whichever group Hana is in, she is in charge of the pie design.

In the diamond scene, she takes the MC's suggestions and gives her advice on the amount of apples required for the filling. Given that she gives credit to the MC (in front of Queen Regina) in this option, and doesn't not do the same for Madeleine, it is likely that she was allowed to decorate for the other team, but not with much input from the captain.

This pie has a rose design, which is beautiful but lacks the intricacy and the challenge of the Cordonian Royal Seal, which the MC can suggest in the diamond scene. It's possible that by default, Madeleine handled the baking herself (since Penelope couldn't even boil water and in fact is so distracted she unwittingly helps sabotage the pie), and Hana was assigned strictly decoration duties. But even these possibilities rely on conjecture and guesswork, with no real dialogue or interaction shown.

There are no other scenes where the two women talk or do anything together. Hana may be present in one or two scenes where Madeleine is speaking (such as the dining scene in Ch 17 where Madeleine tells the court ladies about the upcoming Engagement Tour), but the two never directly engage with each other. It's more likely that (like Maxwell and Penelope, or Drake and Kiara), the writers may have thought of Hana and Madeleine only in the second or third book - more likely the third, but there are possible hints in TRR2 if you squint.

Hana is an interesting anomaly among the cast of TRR. She is both Cordonian and foreigner; the ways of the Cordonian court are, in equal parts, both familiar and confusing to her. This serves as an double-edged advantage to the MC - Hana is both skilled and knowledgeable enough to ease her into the culture, and isolated and vulnerable enough for the MC to step up as a hero on occasion. We also find out in Lythikos (TRR1 Ch 7) that she was so deep in the closet that she couldn't fully articulate her struggle to love the romantic English noble who wanted to marry her, in the presence of the woman she was slowly beginning to love. Within the competition itself, Hana is shown having a hard time finding people who will associate with her, often shown left out of events and her yacht party abandoned during the Regatta. The broken engagement could have a hand in making her appear to be struggling in the competition, but tbh Olivia is the only one who brings it up. Overall, she does well in the competition, but gets little credit for the same.

Madeleine is the polar opposite of this. Even though the ladies of the court initially view her with a mixture of pity and respect (due to her broken engagement with Leo, and her position as a Countess and winner of the previous season), their views on Madeleine once she enters the competition range from anger (Olivia), to speculation (Kiara and Penelope), to indifference and later suspicion (the MC).

Madeleine comes into the social season with several advantages: her pedigree and her years of experience at court. Both Bertrand and the MC note that Madeleine hails from a "powerful family" and "is immersed in the intrigues and maneuverings of courtly life", and therefore the MC is cautioned by Applewood to pay more attention to her than to Olivia. If the MC fails to win court favour, both Penelope and Kiara show allegiance to Madeleine. Where Hana is shown to be vulnerable despite her skills, charm and intelligence, Madeleine is meant to be viewed with respect even by her peers - and expected not to return that respect to others unless they're the king and queen.

I often view the Madeleine of Book 1 (and early TRR2), and the Madeleine of the latter half of Book 2, as two separate people (more on that in the next section). Early Madeleine was depicted as a clear threat. While she does nothing too out-of-pocket during the competition, her threats to the MC once she is (optionally) the favourite frontrunner, her singular focus on only the king and queen (and largely ignoring the Prince), and inability to respectfully lose, ensure that the reader registers her as a figure of danger early on. The first time she (optionally) faces an obvious loss and sees the MC crowned as Apple Queen, Madeleine tells her to "savour these moments. You may never hear the phrase again".

Her very extreme attempts to belatedly win Liam's favour after ignoring him the entire season (we later find out that she barged into his sleeping quarters the previous night and suggested the arrangement that Liam speaks about in TRR2), earns her speculative looks from the MC and wariness from Liam himself. Given that the outcome was so different in TRR2 but the buildup to said outcome was so rushed and chaotic, there is a 70/30 chance that Madeleine's buildup in Book 1 was meant to highlight her as someone with the capability to harm the MC, rather than just as a red herring. At the very most, Book 1 would highlight her as powerful, with the intention that Book 2 would follow through with showing her as a cog in a very vicious machine.

But because Madeleine's actions in TRR1 don't result in any direct harm, it's honestly hard to envision her as dangerous beyond the subtle threats (that people could brush off as basic rivalry) and rank classism.

Would Hana's pairing with the Madeleine of TRR1 have worked? It's equally hard to say. If we take only Book 1 into account, and ignore the very real possibility of a threat that Madeleine represents, there's a sliver of a chance that such a pairing could work...if Madeleine works on herself. At this point she hasn't manifested as a direct threat to Hana in a way that, say, Olivia has - and all the MC has at this point are theories and speculation. You'd have to probably change half of Madeleine's characterization, but it could be workable if the foundation for such a pairing was mutual respect from the start.

Still, when you take into consideration that Madeleine being involved in the plot against the MC was a very legitimate possibility, it's hard to see any opening for this pairing. Even Penelope - whose coddling from the narrative knew no limits - was no longer entertained as a potential alternative romance for an LI the moment her role in the plot was uncovered. If any harm was done to the MC, and Madeleine was found to be behind it, there is no way Hana would even be allowed to entertain the thought of her as an alternative LI at all.

You see - hurting Hana is no big deal. But hurting the MC and still getting an LI to show interest in you? Now that would be beyond the pale!

Madeleine: A Red Herring...Or A Villain Retconned?

As I have mentioned earlier, there is one writer - who has seniority in the company because of his many years there, who has always been in charge of Madeleine's writing, and who has always loved writing her. On close inspection one can say for certain that Jeffrey Herdman had a fair bit of sway in the team itself, especially from the fact that one of his weirdest writing suggestions - the MC's supposed obsession with hats - was retained in the books as a gag for a very, very long time (TRF finale livestream interview). When you take both Jeffrey's sway in the team, and the writing of Madeleine in TRR2 and 3 (and beyond), one can make several educated guesses about what Madeleine was built up to be, and how that changed midway.

Plenty of fan posts written in the gap between TRR1's finale and TRR2's release, took for granted that Madeleine would have some role to play in the plot against the MC. While one may assume this was due to "jealousy" from players or "hate for a bitchy character", there were enough signs in TRR1 and 2 that this was the route the narrative was initially planning to take with her.

The MC does voice suspicions of Madeleine in the first book - mostly after Madeleine herself voices threats to the MC during the Apple Queen ceremony. Madeleine also looks apprehensive at the (optional) public support Liam shows towards the MC at the Beaumont estate, and even shows him a suspiciously huge amount of attention at the Coronation. The MC even confronts Madeleine during the Coronation festivities when she gets a note threatening her to withdraw from the competition, believing it was sent by the latter. But beyond this, Madeleine's own words in TRR1 often sound ominous and laced with subtle threats. Still - going by just TRR1's evidence, Madeleine could still work as a good red herring, since she's not exactly crossed a clear line with anyone yet.

TRR2 seems to go in one direction when it comes to Madeleine's arc, then makes a sharp pivot in the opposite direction post Chs 7 and 8. The first half of the book has both the MC and Liam regard her with doubt and suspicion, especially when the MC learns that Madeleine had come to Liam's rooms the night before the Coronation, and insisted he continue the relationship with the MC on the sly while making her the queen. The book presents several contrasts between Madeleine and the MC, presenting their possible ruling styles and envisioning how each woman would fare as a future queen.

In a diamond scene in TRR2 Ch 4, Liam asks the MC how she would handle a plate of curry chicken falling on someone - an incident that has already occurred in some playthroughs to Madeleine (who got recognizably frustrated and called the whole episode "a disaster"). In contrast, the MC can claim she would either defuse the situation with humour or help clear the mess - both of which establish that unlike Madeleine the MC knows how to adapt to different situations, and prefers to find a solution rather than take her frustrations out on everyone else. Liam points out the differences between the two women as the MC "having perspective... every gaffe isn't a disaster".

Multiple scenes in the story focus on Madeleine's rigidity, her inability to adapt, her hunger for power, her belief that becoming queen gives her a free pass to be a tyrant, her hubris that allows her to outright harm some of her ladies in waiting and believe she will never face consequences, and her overall lack of real impact during her own engagement tour (only if the MC fails miserably does the Italian statesman Francesco even mention Madeleine). A lot of this buildup indicates that she won't be as effective a queen as other characters claim she will be.

Her overall behaviour in the first half of TRR2 seems to highlight overconfidence, and a willingness to overstep every possible boundary in the belief that nothing will now prevent her from getting what she wants ("the best part about being Queen is that I don't have to explain myself to anyone. Including you."). Even though she isn't queen yet, both Madeleine and everyone around her behave as if she has already been crowned! That kind of overconfidence - especially from someone who should know better than anyone that winning the competition doesn't necessarily mean she'll be crowned - makes more sense when she is aware that there are powerful people (like the former king and her aunt, the former queen) to back her.

There is also the fact that Penelope's involvement in the plot never got any proper buildup. There is just one scene, in TRR2 Ch 6, where she speaks about feeling uncomfortable at parties and balls, and how much she hates crowds. The reveal of her being the culprit is in Ch 7; the reveal of her social anxiety is in Ch 8. Before this, you have zero indicators of her being involved in this level of deception - even though her history of "social anxiety" should have ideally made that kind of subterfuge difficult, and she should have been able to leave a few tells, signalling her guilt. It is very clear on rereads that Penelope's involvement in the plot was a last-minute narrative decision.

But perhaps the strongest evidence that TRR2 was originally meant to establish Madeleine as part of the plot against the MC, is a line from the very first scene of the book. When a confused MC asks Bertrand how it's possible for Liam to break his engagement, Bertrand mentions a constitutional provision:

"The king is able to change his selection in specific cases for the good of the nation". The MC being proven as framed and unfairly disgraced achieves very little in this context, because the focus is clearly on the king's final choice. This means that the engagement cannot be voided on the basis of the MC being innocent, but on the basis of Madeleine being unfit for the role.

What happens to this "constitutional clause" once Penelope is declared the culprit among the court ladies rather than Madeleine? It disappears completely. If she was really meant to be a red herring from the start, the team would never have added this line in the first place. Nor would they have left the "buildup" for Penelope's anxiety till Ch 6, just one chapter before her reveal. If Madeleine was really meant to be a mere red herring from the start, there would have been more than just one crumb presented for that trail.

It is highly possible that the team had plans for Madeleine to be involved in the plot, or in something shady enough to justify breaking the engagement. It is just as highly possible that Jeffrey, the writer in charge of her character, allowed his favouritism for that character to dictate his writing of her, and convinced the team to change the trajectory of the story to benefit her.

Hana and Madeleine - The First Half of TRR2

Most of the interactions between Hana and Madeleine in TRR2 are overshadowed by one incident in Ch 7 - the one most popularly known as "the chocolate incident". Madeleine was already not too popular as a character when this scene came out, but her admission that she wanted to break Hana crossed enough of a line that a number of players would bring it up as a reason for why they couldn't ever like her, no matter how often she was retconned in canon.

A common misconception made about the "chocolate incident" from Madeleine lovers and haters alike, is that it's viewed as a singular episode rather than as an escalation in an ongoing pattern of threats that Madeleine was already making to Hana.

Viewing it as an isolated incident is precisely what allowed both Madeleine stans, and the canon narrative itself, to severely downplay what Madeleine did, and what she openly declared she would continue doing to Hana. Therefore, it is essential to look into Hana and Madeleine's interactions before Ch 7, as well as the context behind Hana's return to court and the very real and grave threat that Madeleine represents to Hana specifically.

To do this, we must first look into how Hana's return to court (after her parents forced her to leave post Coronation) is depicted. There are two versions of this story - Madeleine's version...and the truth.

Madeleine's Version: "If it wasn't for me, she'd still be on the other side of the world. I've heard dogs remember those who feed them. I hope you'll keep this in mind and remember that dear Hana is here by my personal invitation". This is a half-truth at best and ironically, this is the version Hana sticks to. She is never allowed to tell us differently.

The truth, as said by Liam to Hana post Coronation: "I am the King of Cordonia. I'm sure Lady Madeleine knows that if she wants to keep our engagement, she'll have to give me something. Perhaps I can convince her to make you part of her court". Hana never gets to tell us this. That honour is given to Drake!

Even after the MC (optionally) gets to know this truth, she never talks to Hana about it, and Hana is never allowed to veer from Madeleine's narrative even in private. In the process, Madeleine gets to use her half-truth as a form of blackmail - threatening Hana at least twice to send her back to China if she paces even one toe out of Madeleine's arbitrary line.

In TRR2 Ch 4, Madeleine is shown antagonizing her entire court (ordering Penelope to get lemonade and comparing her to dogs, telling Kiara to exoticize herself by not speaking in English [which itself has colonial/Orientalist connotations]). But none is more ominous and disturbing than her subtle threat to Hana before introducing her to the two suitors:

Being sent back to her parents is a terrifying prospect for Hana...for two reasons. For one, Hana is committed to being there for the MC, to contributing to her investigation (and she does! Massively. Perhaps more than anyone else in the group). For another, she is just beginning to realize what a damaging environment her parents' house is, and she also knows they are already growing suspicious that she hasn't found another suitor yet. By the end of this conversation, Hana is visibly distraught... to the point of needing moral support (something she rarely asks for herself).

Remember - this is an arbitrary rule Madeleine comes up with, that applies only to Hana. In the same conversation, neither Kiara nor Penelope are placed under this kind of pressure. Though Penelope claims in Ch 6 that her parents won't allow her to come home if she doesn't get a suitor, Madeleine doesn't levy any other threats of this nature on her (she harms Penelope in other ways).

Madeleine is aware that Liam was the one responsible for Hana's return. It is implied that she is also aware that neither Liam nor Hana can say this in public. By this coin, she'd know that she shouldn't be the one who can take a call on sending Hana back - Liam is. Yet she issues this sort of a threat, and worse still...is allowed to get away with it through Hana and the MC's silence, both in private and in public.

Unlike the MC and Olivia, the other three ladies of the court are present in official positions to the future Queen, and are expected to publicly pledge loyalty to her. The narrative of TRR2 alone seems to give the King's fiancèe powers and influences similar to an actual Queen Consort's. And Hana, Kiara and Penelope aren't just random "court members" - they are Madeleine's ladies-in-waiting. They cannot even speak to certain people unless she approves of it (Ch 1), she orders them around with the disrespect that many in that nobility reserve for their servants (Penelope in Ch 4), she publicly humiliates and insults them if they make a single mistake (eg. Penelope not getting a metallic dress in time for the bachelorette), and she can get away with causing them grievous harm (Hana). There is no actual point to any of this behaviour - it achieves nothing and (by the narrative parameters of the third book) is actually foolish, because Madeleine's actions could cost the royal family their relationship with the Great Houses. Neither the MC nor Liam (the actual monarch), would be allowed by the narrative later to abuse their power the way Madeleine can, in a position that isn't even hers yet!

It is easy to view Madeleine's interactions with Hana and Penelope especially, as just some regular mean-girls shit, with all the excuses, justifications and crocodile tears that the fandom can shower on said white/white-passing mean girls. Canon itself encourages this reading when they use the word "hazing" to describe what Madeleine put Hana through. But when we speak of Madeleine's behaviour in her engagement tour that way, we miss a very important aspect of her dynamic with these two women. They are no longer competitors or mere allies. They are not just people she knows in court.

They are not Madeleine's equals. They are her employees. She is directly in a position of immense, unquestioned and unchecked power over them. Publicly, she has the authority to invite them into her court, and to throw them out of their jobs. It is from that lens, that we must view her behaviour, especially in Ch 7.

The "Chocolate Incident" and Its Aftermath

Another reason to believe Jeffrey's favouritism for Madeleine allowed for an actual change in the story, is the way this above scene - and the ones preceding it - were handled immediately in both the immediate and long-term aftermath.

Often dubbed "the chocolate incident", this scene takes place in Italy (the first stop of the engagement tour) during Madeleine's bachelorette. For anyone who has forgotten the incident, Madeleine's ladies-in-waiting are supposed to organize different fun activities for her bachelorette, and the MC uses each event as both a PR exercise and an opportunity to check the credit cards of the ladies.

The final activity is Hana's, an intricately-planned chocolate fondue party complete with chocolate-themed games and treats. If one reads too much between the lines, one could maybe notice the tiniest sliver of a romantic hint in Hana's conversation with the MC over her confusing an actual bachelorette party with the show The Bachelorette (It is just as possible tho - if not more - that this is a comic aside pointing to Hana's lack of exposure to modern media).

However, things take a turn for the worst at this juncture. Madeleine heavily berates Hana for not knowing that she is "allergic to chocolate", accusing her of an attempt to murder and even threatening to remove her from her position in court. This leaves Hana so distraught that she ruins her own dress in the process, and is damn near inconsolable. The MC can - if she chooses - comfort Hana along with their friends. At the end of the night, a heavily drunk Madeleine gleefully admits she lied about the allergy and gloats about wanting to keep hurting Hana till she breaks, because she "wants to have a little fun".

She claims, when asked why, that it's because "everyone wants something, but the nice ones like Hana don't even have the decency to act like it". Which sounds like the sort of sick logic that fandom often happily accepts from their favourite white antagonists, where they can project whatever sob story they want to make such a reasoning palatable. Such attempts ignore the fact that Madeleine is torturing someone for supposed "duplicity" when she is herself well-known for being insincere.

Later, when it was convenient for the fandom to hate on Hana, she would be either blamed for the torture Madeleine put her through (because she was "weak" or "too nice", or that she was "spineless and deserved this treatment". I even saw posts that claimed it "wasn't that bad" (in the case of one particularly memorable instance, a Madeleine stan went so far as to say, agreeing with a post expressing a fondness for Madeleine: "...before anyone mentions the chocolate prank: Did Hana die, tho?"). Some also tried to reason that it was fair for Madeleine to target Hana, either to showcase her "wiles" or because of her sad sad childhood.

As I pointed out earlier, every single one of these takes tend to downplay Madeleine's bullying/abuse so that it sounds more like a schoolyard squabble that happened only once, rather than a person in power consistently placing their employee's job under threat, with the stated intention of harming them mentally and emotionally on a regular basis, until they experienced a breakdown. The center of this conflict isn't about different people with different approaches. Nor is it about court maneuvering or wiles because honestly, nothing worthwhile was achieved through Madeleine's abuse, and she had no purpose for doing those things beyond deriving a sick pleasure from other people's suffering.

It isn't about nice vs tough, nor ambitious vs generous, nor "naive" vs "jaded". It is about a gross power imbalance. An imbalance that results in the exploitation of the more vulnerable party...which is later brushed aside by the one who claims to be the latter's "friend" like it means nothing.

Structure wise, one can see striking similarities between this chapter, and TRR1's Ch 7, where the MC can view Olivia in a new light in the first half of the chapter, but be disturbed by her vindictive nature by the end of it. Here too, the MC comes into the investigation of the credit cards fully expecting to see Madeleine as the culprit. Over the course of the evening she finds Madeleine treating her ladies-in-waiting badly, but also calling out the press for targeting only the MC but staying silent on Tariq's involvement (ironically, Madeleine herself didn't exactly believe the MC if she tells her she was set up). She is also shocked when she realises Madeleine isn't the culprit at the club. Still, the court is given a rude shock when Hana is accused of putting Madeleine's life in danger.

Clearly the aim of such a chapter was to make the MC soften a little towards Madeleine, while still keeping some of the antagonistic tension. However, the more direct impact of Madeleine's huge ego trip on Hana made the harm far more visible than Olivia's jibes towards a woman who was far away...plus the scenes that followed in the former sequence centered Drake, far more than the ones in the latter that involved comforting Hana.

Madeleine's bullying also clashes - quite conveniently - with the reveal of Penelope's betrayal, so that the latter overshadows what Hana went through altogether.

It is important to note at this point that the MC is the only person not directly tied in an alliance to Madeleine (besides Olivia and Maxwell, who are then missing at the fashion show backstage scene in Paris) who knows Madeleine's intentions towards Hana. She is the only person present at the event in Paris, who knows that Madeleine intended to continue harassing her until she broke. Hana herself is never made fully aware of this, and if she is left in a vulnerable, dangerous position while on her mission to support the MC's investigation - then the fault lies to a large extent with the MC for keeping silent, rather than protecting her friend from someone who fully intended to hurt her.

I say this because in France (Ch 8), the MC's exposing of Madeleine is by choice, rather than default (this essay has a full breakdown of said scene). Moreover, the option where the MC can "expose" her will result in Madeleine lying about the act being an "official hazing" she does for all her ladies-in-waiting. Not only does the MC neglect to contest Madeleine's claims (or even tell Hana the full truth in secret), she also parrots Madeleine's lie in a conversation with Adeleide in NY, as if it were the truth (Ch 14).

Remember how I mentioned Jeffrey - the writer who was in charge of Madeleine's scenes and sang her praises in TRR2's pre-release interview? His influence here is obvious in the way the narrative sharply pivots away from Madeleine's characterization so far, to engage in a full-blown pity party.

The abuses of her power (towards Hana and Penelope in particular) stop. The parallels that canon makes between Madeleine and the MC as future Queens, stop. No reference, ever, is made of her actions before Ch 8.

For over seven chapters, Madeleine largely fades into the background - sometimes there will be scenes where she is present, but without any dialogue or actions. Sometimes she may make a catty move like getting the MC to pick up her wedding ring, but from a safe distance. Because she doesn't openly antagonize anyone or show up much in Chs 9-15, the sense of distance could allow some to soften in their memories of her. Especially when the only strong reminders of Madeleine in these chapters come from Adeleide, her mother.

Adeleide is an important cog in the machinery that resulted in the retconning of Madeleine's character in TRR2. Without her, Patriotic!Madeleine wouldn't have become canon. Adeleide sets the stage for this extremely inaccurate reading of her, with complaints on two occasions about how Madeleine is "putting too much pressure on herself" and working too hard. Which contradicts her very real actions in Applewood and Italy, where she regularly antagonized her entire court and where she doesn't get much notable approval from foreign dignitaries (Signor Francesco) unless the MC is that bad.

The narrative, at this point, expects us to view her with sympathy, as someone who could have been "an excellent queen" (Adeleide's words, not mine). The stage is clearly set so that we pity her when Liam calls off the engagement and she loses this position, that we can see her loss as "unfair". It ensures that there is an overflow of sympathy for Madeleine's plight, especially since she had already lost her chance to become Queen once before with Leo. By this point, many readers had actually forgotten the "chocolate incident" altogether, and were more than willing to view Madeleine as a patriot who wasn't given her due. A description that, ironically, more accurately fits Hana.

Is Hana Really Just A Nice Girl who Never Fights Back?

As I mentioned before, Hana's "niceness" and "weakness" were sometimes presented in fandom as justifications/reasons for Madeleine's bullying of her, often in an attempt to shift blame or make it sound like Madeleine's stated "reasons" (in TRR2 Ch 7) to hurt her were legitimate. Almost as if to say that Hana was targeted because she presents herself as an easy target.

To be clear, I don't subscribe to such a train of thought myself. Different people react to bullies and abusers in different ways - and not being able to push back aggressively in tense situations doesn't make anyone a lesser person. In fact, canon itself doesn't mind providing a "weaker" person protection against someone like Madeleine...as long as that person is Penelope. So we cannot even claim that Hana's "weakness" is why Madeleine targets her, or why the MC shouldn't have to protect Hana better.

Canon also doesn't help much in this respect, especially with their preferences for the meaner white women. In fact the narrative doesn't even allow Hana the chance to speak up in private against Madeleine's half-truths about her return, and she is made to easily accept Madeleine's "hazing" excuse. Let's not even get into how she speaks about Madeleine in TRR3. Additionally, no one in Hana's own friend group provides adequate protection or support - they stay silent where it counts.

But is Hana really that incapable of fighting for herself? According to the finale of TRR1, no.

Even though the scene is hidden behind a paywall, Hana's pushback against Olivia's treatment of her during the social season is strong, decisive and done entirely on her own initiative, with no prompting or involvement from the MC. She is honest about the ways in which Olivia has hurt her, but also makes it clear that Olivia's opinions and vitriol no longer matter - effectively reclaiming her own power in the process.

Such a scene is a clear indicator that Hana is capable of pushing back, and isn't afraid to speak truth to power - as early as TRR1. While one could say that as a diamond scene, it is possible that it can't be fully shown as canon - there are ways the writers know how to incorporate such things. Often, they have managed to write in similar scenes or the same information into free scenes later on (eg. the selling of Liam's bachelor party photos, which wasn't even that important to the story of TRR2). Hana could have had a free pushback scene with Olivia if the writers really wanted to give her one.

That aside, it's safe to say that there is a precedent for Hana being able to fight back before TRR2, and canon could have found ways to ensure that she could safely do so with Madeleine too. Or at least have more protection and care from her friend group, if her position as lady-in-waiting prevented her from speaking out. Penelope got to demand protection later on, after all - and she wasn't even our friend.

We must also take into account the positions of power that Madeleine, Olivia and later even the MC hold. Madeleine is a countess in line to become queen in TRR2. Olivia is a duchess, and the MC herself is given this honour in Book 2. Hana - despite her skills, knowledge and charm - never gets lands, nor a title unless she marries the MC. Hana's experience in Cordonia isn't just about "other women" being mean to her with the MC being "not like other girls" - all three of the above women are in positions of power over her, and even the nicest of them uses her more often than she helps.

TRR2 doesn't exactly build Hana and Madeleine as a pair. In hindsight one can read romantic hints into Madeleine's mocking usage of the word "darling" around Hana, Hana's attempt to replicate The Bachelorette for Madeleine's bachelorette party, and read parallels into both their toxic family histories (particularly Hana with her mother and Madeleine with her father). But there is no actual romantic content there that one could find with the other three pairs, which leads me to believe that Hana and Madeleine was only taken seriously as a romantic prospect in TRR3.

How did Madeleine become the final romantic choice for Hana, and no one else? Because the relationship was never made Hana's benefit - it was for Madeleine's. Given all the evidence laid out about TRR1!Madeleine, TRR2!Madeleine and including hints that she may have actually been written as the villain at some point, it's more likely that Madeleine's main writer ensured some changes in the writing of his favourite character midway into the story, resulting in her staying longer in court and several retcons that painted her as a tragic heroine and completely erased any actions that contradicted such a narrative.

This specific narrative also seems to draw upon a narrative trope that is seen sometimes in certain stories featuring queer couples - the Armoured Closted Gay. It is employed often enough, mostly to show the pervasiveness and immense pressure heteronormativity can have on some queer people - that sometimes, they hate themselves for not adhering to the norm and therefore project that self-hatred onto people like them. PB had done a similar kind of story in TF and ILITW - with Zig and an aggressive teammate Manny (but with discussions on sexual harassment and about being closeted) and with Lily Oritz and her crush Britney. Unlike Zig's and Lily's cases though, this sort of narrative hardly centers on Hana.

Hana is hardly treated as a person in her own right in this narrative. She is treated as a "consolation prize" for Madeleine's "good behaviour" and "hard work". Which is still a really, really hard story to sell when one of the characters states outright that they'd abuse their power over the other till she breaks.

So how does PB get back from that kind of cruelty, and convert it into an actual romance?

Madeleine in TRR3 - The Royal Retcon

(In order: MC complimenting Madeleine to Godfrey (Ch 3), response to Madeleine's "send my regards to Hana (Ch 9), Madeleine asking for a dance (Ch 16), Optional response about memories of Madeleine's bachelorette in Hana's Vegas diamond scene (Ch 16))

By gaslighting an entire fandom, of course.

TRR3 requires us at the very start to do two things - to recruit Madeleine into replacing Justin as our press secretary, and to convince her family to join the Unity Tour so that Cordonia knows its nobility stands with the Crown. Until this point, we've only had hints of Madeleine's so-called "patriotism", mostly from Adeleide. TRR3 Ch 3 goes full force on this reading: having Madeleine claim (in the most positive option) that all her efforts to become queen was "for my people...it was always for Cordonia", having Hana claim that Madeleine "would mostly likely take a bullet for Liam... because you'd never leave Cordonia without a King". Coupled with Godfrey and Adeleide's toxic family dynamics, the story is set to push forward a narrative where we are meant to sympathize with her and preferably downplay her behaviour from the previous book.

Throughout Madeleine's tenure as press sec, we are expected to laud her "work" - even though the truth is that she makes our work harder by giving us heavy folders and 100 note cards of materials just minutes before our meetings, and leaving out important information (like Zeke) for us to scramble about and find. Where during her time as future queen, her ladies-in-waiting were expected to have every detail perfect as per her desires otherwise face her wrath - as our employee, we are expected to appreciate efforts alone, and be lenient when she doesn't follow our rules (eg. wearing gold for our bachelorette when she was supposed to wear muted colours, trying to sneak in a white dress to our wedding). Most of our responses to her "work" involve fulsome praise, or at most a very light criticism that still claims she's good at her job (she isn't). And it isn't just the MC - even Justin (who recommended her) and Hana are made to sing her praises.

Having canon claim Madeleine does a good job when she actually doesn't is... frustrating, but not as awful as the retconning they do for her past behaviour. But it is part of a pattern that whitewashes Madeleine altogether so the readers can consider her deserving of the rewards that the narrative so badly wants to give her, whether her actual conduct matches up to these fulsome praises or not.

One clear tactic that is used to achieve this, was to have the person she harmed the most, speak of her in glowing terms. In TRR3 Ch 3, you have at least two instances during the "Cordonia's Most" game where Hana uses the game to compliment Madeleine. Here, she compliments Madeleine on knowing how to "charm a crowd...her confidence and poise", and claims her to be very patriotic. If the MC refuses to coddle Madeleine during their private conversation, the onus to be kind to her rests solely on Hana's shoulders, where she is required to say, "maybe it's time to see if you can catch more flies with honey". Hana is also shown wanting to include Madeleine in group activities (TRR3 Ch 6, before going to the spa), in the same way she tried to include Olivia in TRR2. When we're shown a Hana who is not only willing but enthusiastic to speak to Madeleine, it further encourages the reader to befriend her - almost as if to say, "if Hana doesn't mind being friendly with her, why should you?".

And this wouldn't be possible at all if canon was honest about Madeleine's conduct in TRR2. So much about Madeleine's advice to us in TRR3 directly contradicts her own behaviour as future queen in TRR2 ("having an entourage isn't about vanity...it's about support"). Had canon actually been honest about her conduct, this statement would be viewed as extremely ironic, a huge portion of the blame for Penelope's reluctance to return to court would be (rightly) placed on Madeleine's shoulders and we would be able to call her out specifically on her tyrannical behaviour as future queen, as well as her inability to adjust her work to suit her client now. We would not be placing Madeleine on a pedestal ad nauseum, or paying much attention to her childish complaints that her "efforts" are going unappreciated.

Whenever the early part of the engagement tour is referenced, it is spoken of in the vaguest, most milquetoast terms. The narrative will speak vaguely of "meanness", but never actually specify what Madeleine did. The closest we get to any sort of confirmation of this is in the Costume Gala (Ch 9) if the MC warns Madeleine to stay away from Hana...and even there, the MC just says she did "mean things". Which is the mildest possible way I have seen of someone describing a person who gloated about breaking Hana. Like the word "hazing" from the previous book, all these vague references leave it to the readers' faint memories, or imagination, to figure out what Madeleine did.

But all of these are just hints at best, and most of what we could assume of the writers' intentions came largely from guesswork. There was constantly a sense of something not being right, but many of us at the time couldn't completely articulate it. That is, until Ch 16, and only if we pressed a specific option in the Vegas diamond scene, in just Hana's playthrough:

Unlike the previous scenes - which were mostly attempts to obfuscate the events of the previous book - this scene replaces what actually happened with blatant lies. Not only does it wipe out entirely what Madeleine did, replacing it with a casual comment from Hana about her "fun side", it also smears Kiara for something she didn't do at all during the bachelorette (for clarity, Kiara found out she was a great dancer, and looked quite annoyed if the MC chose a wrong dialogue option as an excuse to see her card. The MC never saw her lashing out at Penelope during this event). Even if the MC and Hana were so drunk that night that they wouldn't remember events clearly (which isn't how they're depicted at all when the "chocolate incident" took place), it wouldn't be replaced with things that never actually happened. The writers were more than ready to throw Kiara under the bus to make Madeleine look better, and have those lies come out of Hana's mouth (and mind you, Hana liked Kiara so much she chose her to be her MoH in Ch 18 of her playthrough, so it can't even have been spite towards Kiara on her part).

In contrast, Penelope is allowed to be open about Madeleine's mistreatment of her. In fact she cites it as the main reason for her reluctance to return to court, and even complains at the MC if the latter asks her if she didn't get the memo on the bachelorette dress code in TRR3 Ch 16 ("oh no, no, it's like Madeleine all over again!"). The group is required to protect her from Madeleine; in Ch 4, when Penelope is upset at the very sight of Madeleine, Drake comes to her rescue and reassures her ("She's with us, Penelope. We won't let her bite."). While Madeleine herself is protected from any consequences for what she did to Penelope (besides an optional tiny jibe in Ch 4), the MC and her group are required to reassure her that they will never allow it to happen again. In a very disgusting contrast, the narrative pushes Hana at the forefront of the diamond scene with Madeleine, without ever considering her comfort or safety around the person who wanted to break her. Not only does the group involve her without ever asking her if she wants to be part of it - Drake and Maxwell safely distance themselves when the time comes for Madeleine to speak personally about her troubles, and the MC can choose not to be sympathetic in certain dialogue options. Which means that the onus to comfort and persuade her is largely on Hana's shoulders. We must also remember that, unlike Penelope, Hana is deprived of the full truth of Madeleine's intentions in the last book too.

Where the writers were ready to at least admit that Madeleine's behaviour affected Penelope deeply, they went to the extent of completely rewriting the narrative of her TRR2 bachelorette to erase what she put Hana through.

The "Romance" in TRR3

(First four screenshots from my playthroughs, next four from the Adventure...Romance...Thrills YouTube Channel, and the final row's screenshots from the Annabelle Lee YouTube channel and the Skylia YouTube channel)

The Hana and Madeleine "romance" is hinted at in 5 scenes (4 in other playthroughs, and just one in Hana's own). As with most of the other romances, Madeleine's feelings are the most prominent. To the more romance-coded overtures, Hana's reaction is usually shock and disbelief, with a small suspicion over whether Madeleine is doing this to trick her into humiliation later. But the narrative gives her very little opportunity to even talk about anything related to Madeleine, especially anything negative. You do have a scene at the finale that is meant to provide closure, but not in a romantic way. This scene is very different from the others, and in some ways puts an end to the possibility of this relationship happening anytime soon.

How did we get from those scenes to this final one in Ch 22? It would be useful to look at the scenes, within the timeline of TRR3's release and with the context of fandom reactions.

1. The "Cordonia's Most" Scene (Ch 3)

This diamond scene is written to give the MC/reader a bit of background on Madeleine's past and family, which will prove useful later when she has to convince the Amaranths to fix their relationship with each other. It is set against the background of a drinking game where an asker can quiz everyone else about who would be the most likely to do a particular action. Hana references Madeleine twice in the game (in a very complimentary manner), and Madeleine references Hana once. It was her comment about Hana being "stupidly sweet and perfect" that caught the attention of some readers and made them wonder if that was the route PB was planning to take with Hana. This dialogue shows up in Hana's route as well.

In later chapters, we see instances of Hana trying to include Madeleine in group activities...such as in Ch 6 where she invites the latter to come with them to the spa after the football match with Jiro and Camellia.

2 and 3. Cross-Referencing Each Other at Costume Gala (Ch 9)

This is a very interesting development, at an equally interesting time. Around the time Ch 9 released (end-April 2018), PB announced that TRR's team would be taking a hiatus, mostly to work on "some exciting stuff" during that break. It also gave them the time to work on certain things the fandom was demanding, and do away with others due to stan vitriol (Kiara's attraction towards Drake being one of them). The next chapter would only appear a month and a half later (mid-June).

Ch 9 sneaked in a scene that hinted at Hana and Madeleine as a romance option, but in a way that made it very hard for players to notice on a casual read. The scene is split in two parts: the MC can choose to speak to either Hana and Olivia, or Maxwell, Justin and Madeleine. Hana and Olivia's scene shows the two commenting on Gala outfits, which kickstarts a conversation about diplomacy vs bluntness. The latter option explores a variety of topics, mostly revolving around an appreciation for Madeleine's "great work".

Both Hana and Madeleine reference each other in their scenes. Hana's dialogue depends on whether the MC is her fiancèe or not; in other playthroughs, she admires Madeleine's costume, the compliment on her good looks very personal. In her own playthrough, she compliments Kiara's outfit but in a more distant fashion ("subtle and clever, just like her...very well-chosen"). In Madeleine's scene (which is the same across playthroughs), the ending involves her telling the MC to "send my regards to Hana", in response to which she can choose a line of questioning (which ranges from "protective towards Hana" to largely indifferent. In all three options, thankfully, the MC can close with "don't let me catch you antagonizing her", but that really is one small mercy in a pile of blatant retconning.

What marks Hana's dialogue about Madeleine as an LI-specific option, is that she says something entirely different if the MC is getting married to her. This is an indication that the dialogue was intended to be read as romantic, and that it couldn't be said by an LI who was already in love and ready to marry the MC. Pretty much in the same way that Olivia in Liam's playthrough cannot hold his hand in Applewood or dance with him in Vegas.

I wrote an essay on this at the time - both on the possibility of the pairing and why it was a bad idea - and the overall response I received at the time was mixed. Those who remembered exactly what went down at Madeleine's bachelorette and weren't her fans hated the prospect, but some weren't as convinced and some refused to believe it would happen. So there was some pushback for it, citing Madeleine's "chocolate incident" (thankfully, since there were players who had forgotten about it), but it was very low-key and didn't gain much traction.

4. An Offer to Dance in Vegas (Ch 16)

The most obvious indication of Hana and Madeleine being a romantic possibility was in the Vegas chapter. It was impossible to miss for people who didn't romance Hana. This scene, again, featured only in playthroughs where Hana wasn't getting married - which meant that many Hana-romancers didn't get to know of this pairing unless they were told by a friend or saw any such posts on their dash (some even found out years later, to their shock and dismay).

The mild pushback from Ch 9 resulted in a scene where the writers could be emboldened to continue writing this pairing, but confirm (in the vaguest possible way) that Madeleine treated Hana badly. Madeleine's non-apology "apology" really reads more like an attempt to get into Hana's pants than actual regret, and is followed by a reaction from Hana that is confusing in its mildness. Hana is surprised at the offer to dance, asking Madeleine whether she's trying to trick her. While the mild suspicion is a slight improvement from Hana's fulsome praise and enthusiastic attempts to involve Madeleine in group stuff in previous chapters, it still downplays what Hana suffered at Madeleine's hands by making her present the weakest, most milquetoast examples of "fooling someone", examples that pale miserably in comparison to what Madeleine actually put Hana through.

With both the "stupidly sweet and perfect" dialogue and this scene, you'll notice that Madeleine is not only the one who initiates the conversation, but is also the only one with an actual voice in these exchanges. Forget having an opinion on whether she wants to have anything to do with Madeleine or not - the narrative doesn't even give poor Hana the opportunity to properly react beyond mere shock.

There was a stronger reaction to this scene than to the Ch 9 one, because it was way more visible (though you could avoid it just by letting Madeleine stay in her hotel) with Madeleine's romantic intentions on full display. Her asking Hana for a dance immediately after the no apology made it pretty obvious. Players who didn't see the Ch 9 scenes or who didn't believe the divergences meant anything, now couldn't deny that this was positioned as an alternative romance. Additionally by this time, those who forgot about the "chocolate incident" did get reminded of the exact scene, so the vagueness with which Madeleine "addressed" her actions in TRR2 felt criminally inadequate for a number of readers.

Most of us, however, didn't know about the retcon in Hana's Vegas scene, until years later. Those who didn't do Hana's playthrough would have had no idea, and those who did more likely chose the more romantic options.

5. "Jealous?" (Ch 20)

This scene is unique in that the option shows up across all playthroughs, but the specific reaction only shows up in two of them. It's understandable that Hana stans would have missed this - the dialogue is an option, the response is very fleeting and you would have to look through the same option in other playthroughs to recognise the variations.

In the cases of both Drake and Maxwell, Madeleine's response to this jibe from the MC is "ugh, please". Dismissive, almost mocking the idea that she would have any interest in them. In Liam's and Hana's cases, she appears shocked for a minute, then composes herself and gives a more neutral response ("I...I refuse to dignify such a ridiculous question with a response"). In Liam's case, one can safely assume that even though she had no romantic interest in him, she was still on the verge of marrying Liam and that alone would make the situation awkward. In Hana's case there is really no other reason for her to feel that awkward besides having lingering feelings that she cannot suppress.

While this version of the scene doesn't feature in playthroughs where she is single at all, it's still a very strong indicator of authorial intent. Even in the face of backlash against the pairing, the writers clearly wanted to continue hinting at the possibility, if they were slipping in hints of Madeleine's feelings for Hana as late as Ch 20 (just two chapters before the finale). The most plausible theory for this inclusion would be that the backlash was a lot more than it was after Ch 9, but not entirely enough to do away without the pairing completely...yet.

6. "I Wanted To Break You" (Ch 22)

No one knows what happened between Chs 20 and 22, and there's little I can think of that would account for such a quick change in such a short span of time. The finale has a scene featuring Hana and Madeleine, that begins by drawing more obvious parallels between the two women and their families (until now, the parallels were not as pronounced. It's not exactly a great parallel to begin with, since Madeleine has at least one supportive parent and doesn't get punished to the extent that Hana has been, if she openly protests against her parents' methods. But in TRR3 the narrative sometimes does use Hana's toxic parental situation as a parallel to garner sympathy for Madeleine's).

However, once the parents are out of the picture, the attention then turns to Hana and Madeleine, setting the stage for either a romantic confession or a full apology. This time, canon opts to go for the latter.

Unlike all the others, this scene is bluntly specific not just about what Madeleine did but what exactly her intentions were. It has her use the word "break"; it has her actually say the word "sorry". It allowed Hana, for the first time, to fully hear the truth about the harm Madeleine planned to wreck on her. And most importantly, it also allowed Hana her own voice in response to Madeleine's revelations, making it very clear to her that her forgiveness needed to be earned, over a period of time.

The dialogues used to talk about Madeleine's bachelorette in the finale are poles apart from the language they'd used earlier ("hazing", "put my ladies through their paces", "mean things", "refuse to coddle", "wronged"). The finale scene was a more accurate return to the original language and purpose of that bachelorette scene. In fact it sounds less like what canon had been attempting to gaslight their readers into believing thus far, and even seemed to borrow verbatim from the language of the readers who closely followed this issue.

One could call it a good closure scene on the surface level...but there are many, many problems with it.

One was the reaction of the MC. Her angry "excuse me?" in response to Madeleine's confession is still a very obvious retcon. It may have been done to preserve the myth that the MC is a good friend/wife to Hana, but reads as extremely dishonest when you remember that canonically, the MC knew the truth about Madeleine's intentions the whole time and just chose to leave Hana in the dark. It's an attempt to make the MC seem protective that ultimately rings false.

Another is the excuse Madeleine gives for why she targeted Hana. "I wanted to push Hana too far, and for her to drop the nice-girl act once and for all! Only, it isn't an act, is it?" My response when I first read this was "if Hana was faking it...so what. So fucking what. Who was she harming". Coming from the reigning queen of duplicity herself, Madeleine is really not in a position to be judging anyone for putting up a front. This also ties into the hollowness of the motives PB tried to belatedly cook up for TRR2 Madeleine's bullying - no matter what canon says to whitewash her actions, her attempts achieved nothing, did no good for Cordonia, and would likely have led to a very fractured court if the Unity Tour was held while she was queen.

Ultimately, the possibility of this pairing becoming canon was laid to rest in the final chapter. One could interpret Madeleine's promise of a starting gesture ("know that if anyone at court gives you trouble, I can make them regret it") as a possible opening to something more, but considering the earlier backlash, that was unlikely.

TRH - Madeleine Gets The Penelope Treatment, Hana Gets Her Entire Childhood History Retconned.

An interesting development that came up when TRH dropped was the departure of Jeffrey Herdman from the team, most likely because he was heavily involved in the writing of its Renaissance-era spin-off The Royal Masquerade. He would return, by TRF (he is part of their finale livestream), but by then his pet favourite character was likely gone.

TRH has a different set of circumstances, and different power dynamics. The MC is settled into marriage and trying for a child, the LIs are working in the council, Olivia is upgraded to cosplaying spymaster and the side characters go on with their lives. The first book of TRH seemed to do a surface-level recognition of some of the complaints certain readers had in previous books, but their favourites and the people who wouldn't get much attention or appreciation, remained the same.

TRH1 was a time when the writers praised Hana and claimed in a livestream that she was the kind of LI they would love to marry, but also where they gave her a condition that (inaccurately) made her unable to safely carry children (just for the MC to be the mother of the heir) and forced her to be immediately okay with that fate. As the sequel series progressed over the course of 4 books, the erasure of all that Hana was in the past was subtle and insidious - the narrative often compared her to Olivia and found her lesser, she was never allowed to even mention her home place China and worst of all - the writing completely retconned the emotional abuse she suffered at home by claiming it emerged from loving protection, from wanting to keep their daughter away from a cult. And even though Hana's discovery of her sexuality was described by Kara as a "journey that she's still on", no attempts were ever made to show her exploring what she likes romantically, or to show her dating. We don't know if she's involved with anyone, we don't know where she lives, we learn very little of her interests beyond what benefits the MC at any given moment, and the narrative never fails to remind us that they like Olivia more than they like her. Hell, they still encourage Olivia to keep insulting and degrading Hana! Hardly the behaviour of writers who love a character so much they would marry them irl, honestly.

On the other hand, Madeleine wasn't very prominent in TRH1, but gained notoriety in the next two books. The first book has her occasionally engage in inappropriate, invasive badgering of the MC to get pregnant quickly, and she continues to pretend that her doing whatever she likes without ever consulting the person in charge is professional behaviour (eg. Setting up the presscon about the MC's pregnancy announcement. She never even considers whether the MC would be comfortable announcing this pregnancy or not at this time). She gets to deliver a small bit of foreshadowing in the second half of the book (an early hint about Queen Eleanor's pregnancy, though Madeleine's awareness of it hardly makes sense when you look at the entire TRH series, and it never comes up as a point again). Her father being exposed as the traitor who poisoned the former queen builds up to a storyline that benefits her the most in the long run.

Hana is given one chapter where she can call Madeleine out on her entitlement (Savannah's bachelorette). She doesn't insult or berate Madeleine in TRH1 Ch 7, but is refreshingly no-nonsense and will not put up with Madeleine's constant whining about an event she had invited herself to. It's a small, cold comfort, since Hana's actions here are tied to making Savannah's bachelorette a success rather than for herself - but it's still gratifying to see Hana in a position where she can call people out without having to worry about the repercussions. Especially when the narrative disrespects Hana in so, so many other ways for the rest of the series.

In the same chapter, the ladies of the court are given an opportunity to talk about their love lives. Of the four, two women can speak about the people they like (Penelope about Ezekiel by default, and Olivia about Liam if you choose), and one only mentions him by name if the MC is married to someone else (Kiara, about Drake, if you choose to ask her over Madeleine). Madeleine doesn't mention anyone at all, insisting that marriage is something she will only consider for the benefit of her country or estate. This was a relief to players who feared that PB might attempt to push the possibility of romance between Madeleine and Hana again.

Though Madeleine doesn't get the romance that PB so desperately wanted to gift her in the last series, and she isn't given any further romances...the narrative clearly wasn't done pandering to her, even though Jeffrey was not officially a part of the team.

Remember how in the previous essay, we explored the levels to which PB encouraged players to coddle Penelope? Entire chapters would be spent just making her feel comfortable and safe, in encouraging her to help us. No actual initiative or enthusiasm from her end, even if her actions caused the problem or there were lives and reputations at stake. No, Penelope's comfort and happiness should be front and center.

Now think of that treatment, but on steroids and lasting for two whole books. That's what Madeleine's story - starting from TRH2 - looks like.

TRH1 ends with the reveal that Madeleine's father, Godfrey, was involved in the assassination of Liam's mother Eleanor. So a certain amount of narrative focus on Madeleine was expected, perhaps. But the second book doesn't stop at just that.

We are not merely asked to be kind to Madeleine. No, kindness towards Madeleine is expected of us. The warning issued in TRH2 Ch 4 promises "consequences", which means we know straight off the bat that we will be punished if we're not nice enough. It insists we take note of her "fragile state", and give her the mercy and compassion she had never given to anyone in her court.

To give Madeleine the smallest of credits, she acknowledges this just two chapters prior to the oath ("in the past, our positions were once reversed and I was...unkind to you. I had no reason to expect any kindness from you..."). However, this admission does sound disingenuous in the face of the narrative's implicit demand that we treat her nicely. Because if she did recognise her own past behaviour in TRR2 esp as hurtful, and herself as not exactly deserving of kindness, then it makes no sense for her to judge people for behaving exactly as she expected. A genuine redemption arc would have been one where she understood no one owed her kindness after what she'd done, and still determinedly forged ahead to do good for her country. After all, the narrative wanted us so badly to believe this woman was patriotic, right? If her "patriotic spirit" was so tied to her ego that you needed to pamper and praise her every five minutes, just for her to not support such an obviously-foolish tyrant as Bartie Sr, then it can't have been as strong as canon so vehemently claimed.

TRH tracks our "treatment" of Madeleine over 2 books and 10 distinct scenes. Of these, 6 scenes allow us to choose between kind responses and unkind ones, 2 others require the player to choose one among multiple options of people, and 2 scenes are check-in dialogues rather than actual choices (which means that the player doesn't choose an option, they just find out through such scenes whether they are winning Madeleine's favour or not). I imagine that the first category is the most important, with the second being options that you don't necessarily need to choose Madeleine for if you want to go for one of the others, as long as you pressed enough "kind" options.

To elaborate, here's the breakdown:

Kind/Unkind Responses

- House Amaranth's pledge (TRH2 Ch 4). Notably, the "most hurtful" one doesn't even accuse her of anything - it just tells her that the family needs to earn back the Crown's trust. Compare that to Madeleine's accusations to Hana that she was trying to kill her and deserved to lose her position in court. You know, the cruel treatment that some Madeleine stans claimed "wasn't that bad".

- Carrying the Heir's train at Anointing Ball or not (Ch 5)

- Deciphering Madeleine's conversation with Godfrey on his boat (ie whether she is betraying or helping the MC) (Ch 6)

- Acknowledging Madeleine's help in capturing Godfrey, at the Gratitude Ball (Ch 7)

- Gently encouraging Madeleine into being Penelope's bridal attendant, rather than mocking her (TRH3 Ch 2). There is no longer any need to acknowledge Penelope's earlier fear of Madeleine - we are expected to forget entirely that she was the main reason why Penelope didn't want to return to court in TRR3.

- Trusting Madeleine to help with investigations at Fydelia (Ch 6)

Choosing Among Multiple People:

- Speaking about loyalty before making a pledge to the Heir. Other ladies of the house are also presented as choices (TRH 2 Ch 14)

- Babysitting the Heir during Fox Hunt. Other choices are Regina and Savannah (TRH3 Ch 10)

Relationship Check-in:

- The way Madeleine greets you at Fydelia (Warm Welcome/Cold Front) (TRH3 Ch 6)

- Whether Madeleine helps you escape with the Heir in Ch 13, or allows the child to get kidnapped by Godfrey in Ch 15 (Desparate Times/What Goes Around)

The ending of TRH3 has Madeleine either thriving and inheriting her mother's estate, or being merely fired from her job in Royal Communications (a better punishment would have been to strip the entire Amaranth family of their lands, but I digress). She is notably absent in TRF, possibly because she wasn't entirely very popular to start with and two whole books of coddling her didn't exactly help matters either. As one of the junior writers in the TRF team said, "some people exiled her so..."

The first few opportunities to win her over, notably emerge from attempts Madeleine makes to assure the Crown/MC of House Amaranth's loyalty, and you will find that even at an early stage she expects to be included in sensitive discussions that call for discretion, and to be constantly praised for her efforts. Let me give a reminder, again, that she hardly ever gave any praise to the women working for her, and in fact punished them just to keep them constantly in fear of her.

I know it sounds like I'm labouring too much on this point, but it's important to understand just how much effort the narrative had put into coddling this one woman. Chapters and chapters of branch coding, writing two routes, title cards, dialogues, rewards and consequences.

This is similar to the way the narrative encouraged kindness and sympathy towards Penelope, but it's now over a lengthier period of time and with more drastic consequences. We were required to coddle Penelope over a chapter each in three specific books, or be deprived of her support/help. We are required to constantly shower Madeleine with praise and sweet words over the course of 31 chapters, or she will help an unscrupulous Regent-Elect kidnap our child. She will even openly accept that the only reason she put a mere child through that, was because we weren't nice to her ("Wouldn't you have done the same to me? You've made it abundantly clear you see me as the enemy").

But if the MC deserved a punishment this cruel for just mocking Madeleine at every turn, then what punishments should Madeleine get for what she put her own ladies-in-waiting through? What should she get for planning to "break" one of her courtiers? A second broken engagement doesn't seem entirely enough by such parameters.

Then again - as I said before, the narrative deliberately shifted the goal posts for what a potential royal could and couldn't get away with, in the time between Madeleine's engagement tour and the MC's marriage, for this very reason. So that Madeleine would never have to face the kind of constant censure the MC and Liam would face regularly. Among characters in canon, or among largely biased stans in the fandom. Speaking of which...

Fandom

Madeleine's popularity has always been a mixed bag, ever since TRR2. By TRR2, there were people who loved her for what they thought were her craftiness and wiles, some who suspected her to be involved in the plot against the MC, and a number of Liam stans had reactions that ranged from stanning, to indifferent (after all, both Liam and Madeleine showed a mutual disinterest towards each other), to slightly jealous (after all, she was still his fiancée).

But it was Madeleine's treatment of Hana in Ch 7 that definitely crossed a line for quite a few. It was so unwarranted, and her justification for this act so inarguably cruel, that it turned several people off her immediately. The way canon dealt with this was to make her feature less in the story until the memory of the "chocolate incident" was faded and almost forgotten, and then encourage fans to sympathize with her.

The gamble definitely worked, with plenty of help from hardcore Madeleine stans who often downplayed what happened to Hana ("a prank", "making Hana cry just once" were some of the terms used to describe it). By TRR3, I recall having to remind some of my mutuals what actually happened in this scene - their own recollections of it were that vague. The Hana and Madeleine ship would have died a far quicker death if more people remembered this incident as it was shown, and not as narrative wanted us to remember it (and also, if more people cared that it was Hana being hurt, rather than their fave white girl/boy).

Madeleine gained some popularity among the wlw crowd - a couple of them did have a soft spot for stoic, aggressive or women often labelled as "bitchy" (I know a few who also showed a similar amount of love for ACOR's Xanthe or BB's Priya, to be fair...but the adulation for the white female antagonists was a lot more), and Madeleine clearly fit that bill.

A point that often came up from Madeleine stans who were wlw (and reiterated with other mean-girl characters) was that grey-shaded and villanous male characters weren't subject to as much censure as their favourites were. While there is truth to such an argument, it fails to take into account the role race often plays in the way some "mean" women are loved and certain others are scorned. Madeleine clearly did not have the scale of hate that a Xanthe or even a Kiara (who isn't even on the same level) got. In fact when it suited them, many in the fandom were more than ready to view Madeleine as a victim when Liam broke his engagement with her.

Madeleine's "patriotism" - as I've now clearly established - was a retcon made to erase the worst aspects of her characterization. Sometimes it was used to make people feel sorry for her losses, other times it was made to cover up her actual behaviour in TRR2. But there were very few readers who didn't consider it an undeniable fact. Even among those who were indifferent towards her. For instance, in an anon ask that compared Madeleine and QB's Poppy, a poster responded that "the difference between the two was that Madeleine had a sense of duty, and Poppy was just petty". In TRH3, players who claimed that "we can all agree Madeleine is fully redeemed" when she worked with the MC to protect the child from Bartie Sr, stayed mysteriously silent when the other consequence (her helping in the child's kidnapping because she didn't like the MC's pettiness) showed up.

And while these responses could be attributed to the way canon gassed Madeleine up in TRR2 and 3, some of these players had no problem nitpicking the political savvy or work of certain other (CoC) characters, esp Liam (often bashing them for "throwing parties every day", even though the general populace was depicted as being happy with their rule and influence. Mind you, no prompting from PB was necessary to bash these characters). So why were these parameters never applied to Madeleine? Why was practically no one asking what the political relevance of her bullying (as future Queen) was, or why we were expected to sing her praises for poor time management or terrible work ethics towards her boss, or ask what work she actually did in canon as Royal Comms Director? (There is a reference or two to the position, but you aren't shown that many instances of her doing much work). For quite a few, the fact that she walked around with a job title in TRH was more than enough (somehow Kiara never got this kind of fandom treatment despite being part of the Diplomatic Liaisons department).

How does this adulation for such a heavily retconned character, affect the way the Hana and Madeleine ship was viewed? For one, it meant that readers bought into the retcons easily enough that Hana's pairing with her was seen as an extension of her "redemption arc" by some.

Take the example of the various posts that argue in favour of this pairing, or fic that features them as a couple - a lot of them center Madeleine: her pain, her history, her reasons, the correctness of giving her a reward. Hana is barely mentioned or given much attention in these arguments - and often when she has any sort of voice, it is only there to humanize Madeleine. Supporters of this pair often took stances that were either ready to throw Hana under the bus, act like she hardly mattered, or treat her like some sort of blank slate to scribble their adulation for Madeleine over.

Hana is often viewed as less worthy of a focus - she is often the benevolent saint who forgives Madeleine because she "worked so hard to be better". Often it never matters to get into detail why Hana thought Madeleine earned her forgiveness, what Hana's perspective was, what journey she went through to get such a point. Because if Hana's journey really mattered in such a ship, the most pressing questions would revolve around why Hana should ever trust a person who wanted to break her in the first place. Why she should feel safe around such a person. Why her own friend group wouldn't want to protect her from such a person.

Some readers would bring up their parallels as daughters brought up in families that didn't value them, but neglect to take into account the nuances of those dynamics (Madeleine's mother at least wanted to be supportive, and no matter how bad things got, Madeleine was never in danger of being disowned. Hana was, repeatedly). Nor is it fully honest about how Madeleine was comfortable being a perpetrator of abuse, in contrast to Hana's own deep discomfort with the idea of controlling her partner.

In certain cases, I can maybe see this attitude in fandom emerging from an acceptance of the narrative's retcons as truth. But I also think there were as many readers who were just inclined to liking the mean white girl, and finding justifications and excuses for her behaviour.

Fandom's attitudes towards Hana herself often played a small role in how Hana's end of this story was ignored too. When TRR3 fucked up her arc phenomenally (by rushing her parents' turnaround from disowning her to supporting her in Ch 15), it became popular to view Hana as a lesser character, and the "meaner" white women as better. People who wanted other options for female LI often took their frustrations out on her, calling her "weak", servile and submissive, dismissing her honest accounts of the treatment she faced even from her own parents as "whining". If that was the way people preferred to view her emotionally abusive childhood...then what can one expect from such a fandom when she was being outright bullied?

Fandom was already comfortable with the idea of erasing Hana in their content, or replacing her with either their fave white girl (or an equally white OC esp in their fanfic - but more on that in a future Hana essay). So neglecting to center her in what would have been her only canonical alternative romance wouldn't be too difficult for some people.

Which merits the question...is there a way to write about (or write fic for) such a pairing, in a way that centers Hana, respects her story, makes it clear that she has the right to never forgive Madeleine no matter what she does to "earn" it - if that was what she wanted? I highly doubt it. You'd have to completely change Madeleine for that to happen, and that would more likely result in a situation where you were too busy working on her as a character, to give Hana the attention and focus she deserved.

And that's a real pity, because there's plenty to explore about Hana if you actually take the effort to look.

Conclusion

In a lot of ways, once the team had decided upon making Madeleine into a more positive character, they tried to draw a little from Olivia's arc to replicate its success. You can see some of these parallels in the way TRR2 structured the bachelorette as a semi-callback to the childhood- reveal-mocking-Savannah sequences in TRR1 Ch 7. Both chapters gave you reasons to start seeing these women in a different light, while still feeling free to dislike them. In both chapters they also targeted LIs - the only difference was that Drake's diamond scene post that confrontation centered him, and Hana's parallel diamond scene a book later...centered everyone else.

That attempt in TRR2 didn't work for several reasons - the timing wasn't right, Madeleine's cruelty had gone too far for some, the retconning hoodwinked quite a few people but not enough.

So when they tried to pair her up with the victim of her bullying, and twisted canon to make it happen - enough readers emerged to call it out, enough people pushed back by Ch 16, and the possibility of this alternative pairing garnered enough dislike that not only did the writers have to backtrack, but they also had to wipe away their past retcons and write in a scene where Madeleine gave Hana the full, unvarnished truth about the "chocolate incident". Hana was, thankfully, given a chance to give Madeleine her most polite "no".

And although that ship would never be brought up again, the team (even without Madeleine's top writer Jeffrey) still attempted to make pampering and uncritically praising her a narrative priority. She gained a bit more popularity during this time period - quite a few were inclined to feel sorry for her (especially considering the way her father's crimes affected her social standing) and saw only what happened if you were consistently nice to her.

But there was also a significant section of people who were tired of the constant coddling, and who didn't like that it was demanded of the player (when there were far more deserving WOC in the same book, who didn't get this level of kindness). It was significant enough that Madeleine wasn't given any scenes in the final book, and the writers cited her lack of popularity as a reason why.

As a Hana fan myself, it was a relief to see Hana not be paired up with her bully. But it was also immensely disheartening for me to see that "ship" get as far as it did, and to see the narrative do so much more work for Madeleine, than they did for Hana even in the follow up series. It was even more disheartening to see so many in fandom follow suit.

By now, we have explored 3 out of the 4 alternative pairings that TRR put forward for the LIs. They all vary in terms of buildup, attention, and payoff. But there are several things that are common about them. They all have either significant histories with the LI, or the narrative thinks they share something in common. The moment an "alternative" option ends up harming the MC, they are no longer suitable as an option because of the LI's loyalty towards her.

But perhaps the most common factor among the three women we have explored so far is how the LI is expected to treat the alternate, no matter how jealous the MC is allowed to get, no matter what the alternate themselves may have done in the past. The alternate is supposed to be treated well. With respect, with kindness, with compassion.

Betrayal doesn't allow an LI to treat their alternate badly. Bad behaviour doesn't allow an LI to treat their alternate badly. Disregarding consent doesn't allow an LI to treat their alternate badly. Classism doesn't allow an LI to treat their alternate badly. Not loving them back doesn't allow it either. Not even extreme levels of bullying...allows an LI to disrespect them.

In the next essay, we will see if any of these rules apply to our last alternative LI - Kiara.

Next: Drake and Kiara.

#essay series: trr's alternative lis #the royal romance #the royal heir #the royal finale #hana lee #madeleine amaranth #trr meta

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mdemontespan1667 · 2 years

Text

STUPID GIRL

BLIND SPOT (3)

PREVIOUS CHAPTERS

THE LONG WALK (1)

JANE DOE (2)

18+ ONLY

SOFT DARK WALTER MARSHALL X READER

SUMMARY: YOU'RE JUST DOING YOUR JOB. TOO BAD SOMEONE DOESN'T AGREE.

(I moved the dates of this to the current year instead of 2018 so hopefully my dates match. I used what character information I could find for Walter and either filled it in with the actor's info or just winged it since no explanation was ever given for his accent. I did my best to research the neighborhoods and streets mentioned. If I made a mistake I apologize.)

SERIES WARNING: NON-CON/DUB-CON/GRAPHIC VIOLENCE/TORTURE/DEATH/DESCRIPTIONS OF DEAD BODIES/VAGINAL SEX/ORAL SEX/ANAL SEX/REFERENCES TO SEXUAL ASSAULT/REFERENCES TO MURDER/STALKING/CHOKING/SLAPPING

“Detective Marshall, Is this the 8th victim of the Hennepin Hatchet?”

“No comment.”

The man bristled at the name, barely concealed disdain in his expression.

You didn’t like the name any better.

Giving murderers cutesy names took the focus off the victims.

But the Press, yourself included, had to call this psycho something.

“Get out of my fucking crime scene”

“I’m not in your fucking crime scene.”

You gestured to the yellow police tape, flapping in the bitter wind, which you were currently behind, barely.

Detective Marshall grunted, clearly annoyed.

“I’m just trying to do my job. The public has a right to know if a serial killer is operating in Minneapolis.”

Crossing his arms, he fixed you with a bored stare.

“What makes you think this is serial? Prostitutes get killed all the time. Hazards of the profession.”

“You’re joking right?”

You rolled your eyes.

“All the victims were last seen in the Hennepin area, all petite blondes, all sexually assaulted, stabbed and mutilated. There’s no way in hell this isn’t the same guy.”

“No comment.”

The dark haired Detective walked away, effectively dismissing you.

“Can you confirm Madison Harper was missing her left breast?”

Turning back he lumbered toward you.

Oh shit.

Detective Marshall was a veritable bear of a man, with a rumored temper to match.

And you?

You’d just poked him, big time.

“Where did you get that information?”

“No comment,” you sassed.

Apparently you had no sense of self-preservation.

“If you don’t get the fuck out of here,” he growled, “I’m gonna have your ass arrested for interfering with a police investigation.”

“C’mon. Give me something, anything.”

You tried your best to bat your eyes.

“Officer Barton,” he shouted to a uniform, “I need you to..”

“Ok, Ok,” you threw up your hands, “I’m going.”

You stomped to your ancient, beige Subaru.

“Fucking prick.”

Driving away, you shivered, convinced the killer was just getting started.

—----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

“I sincerely hope you're hitting submit as we speak.”

“I’m working on it.”

You glowered at your laptop, its blank Google Docs page taunting you.

“Uh, you know deadline’s in 3 hours?”

‘Yeah Brent, I know. I’m..I’m working on it.”

You hit the red dot, ending the call.

Brent was a great colleague, an even better friend.

SInce moving to Minneapolis a year and a half ago he was the only person you had gotten close to.

Even so, the last thing you needed right now was more pressure.

FUCK FUCK FUCK

Milton Turnbaldt, the editor of the Digital Division at the StarTribune, had finally moved you from Special Interest to the Crime Beat.

It was the next step in “THE PLAN” you’d mapped out since graduation.

Imagining yourself a modern day Helen Thomas, visions of Pulitzers had danced in your mind.

Reality had been a bit different.

Two years writing bar reviews for Bar Fly and one disastrous year at Chicago Suburban Family had been followed by a three year stint at the Chicago Sun Times, where the closest you got to reporting anything was letting Maintenance know a lightbulb was out in the Ladies room.

Getting hired at the StarTribune had seemed like a dream come true, even if you’d had to move to Minnesota.

FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK

It was obvious this woman was the 8th victim.

Problem was every other reporter knew it, even if the cops refused to acknowledge the fact.

Your one advantage was your intuition.

The women had to have been comfortable with the killer, therefore, he was most likely good looking, charming and came off as harmless. Every victim had voluntarily left their comfort zone, something sex workers usually refused to do.

The pre- and post-mortem mutilation meant the killer felt confident enough in his surroundings to spend hours with the women, unconcerned about noise or the mess. His secondary location had to be isolated enough for his purpose but close enough to Hennepin Ave that the victims had been willing to take a chance.

Unofficial autopsy reports on each victim listed copious amounts of lube found in the vaginal and anal cavities. It wasn’t unusual for sex workers to use lube but this seemed excessive. The ME had attributed the internal micro-tears and bruising to the sexual assault. That, coupled with the lube, had you leaning in a different direction: The killer was having sex with the dying women.

Too bad you couldn’t prove any of it.

Neither could you publish the information about the missing body part or lube without totally outing your source at the morgue, although that ship had kinda sailed when you showed your hand to the detective.

FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK

Praying for Divine intervention, you started typing.

—-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

“What do you think Claude?”

The overweight Tabby cat yawned.

“Thanks for the support. I’ll remember that next time you want a treat.”

Looking at your reflection in the full length bathroom mirror, you critically assessed your outfit: short, pleated black polyester tennis skirt, metallic silver cowl neck top, dingy, thigh high, white spiked boots, and a cropped, pink fake fur bomber jacket.

Heavy eye makeup, red lips and purposely mussed hair completed the disguise.

This classy ensemble, courtesy of the local thrift shop, had cost you a grand total of $53.98, an amount you really couldn’t afford.

But since the police, one surly detective in particular, weren’t talking you were just gonna have to find someone who would.

—------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Your feet were numb.

Whether it was from the insanely high heels or the -2 degrees (F) windchill you didn’t know.

Or care.

After walking the Hennepin Ave circuit for 3 hours you had a whole lot of nothing.

The sex workers definitely knew something.

Clustered in groups of 3 or 4, they murmured to themselves, cell phone cameras flashing, warning potential customers they were being watched, however, no one was willing to talk to a stranger.

A midnight blue, extended cab pickup pulled up, idling at the curb.

“Come here.”

“Uh, sorry, I’m..uh.. off the clock.”

He wasn’t the first guy who’d tried to engage you.

Maybe your refusal to leave with a client had given you away.

“Come here or I’ll bring you here.”

Tentatively you stepped closer.

“I said I’m not…Are you fucking kidding me Marshall?”

He sat hunched over the steering wheel, eyes blazing at you.

Beyond annoyed, you hissed, “Go away.”

“Get in the truck.”

“No.”

“Get in the goddamn truck now.”

Mimicking his earlier behavior, you crossed your arms.

“You can’t tell me what to….”

The cab of the truck flooded with light as he opened the driver side door.

“Fine!”

In a huff, you climbed in, fastening your seatbelt before throwing him a scowl.

He ignored you, smoothly merging with the heavy Friday night traffic.

“Where’d you park that piece of shit car?”

You refused to answer, making a show of sulking.

“Answer me or..”

“Or what?” you interrupted, “You had no right harassing me, asshole.”

“Excuse me?”

His harsh tone was a clear indicator you’d pissed him off.

“Your car?”

“It’s at my apartment. I took an Uber.”

The Detective sighed.

“Exactly what the hell were you trying to accomplish out there?”

You shrugged your shoulders.

“You’re no help so I…”

“You what? You decided to play fucking dress up? Do you have any idea how dangerous the streets are? Some freak is killing prostitutes and your stupid ass is running around pretending to be one.”

“Are you finished?”

He clenched his jaw, cheek ticking.

“Contrary to your belief I’m not stupid. I can take care of myself.”

You reached in your bag producing a sleek, highly illegal taser.

“Plus I have this. And yes, I know how to use it.”

Taking a sharp left turn he headed South.

“Um, where are we going?”

“I’m taking you home.”

“How do you….”

“Born and raised in the Gold Coast area of Chicago. Only child. Undergrad at University of Chicago, Masters in Communication from Loyola, which your ridiculously rich mother paid for. You worked at two small time local papers then the Chicago Sun where you, what? Got coffee for three years? You took a job at the StarTribune 18 months ago writing online fluff. You live in the East Phillips neighborhood, don’t drink, smoke or do drugs and generally have no social life. I like to know who I’m dealing with.”

Your mouth dropped open in shock, more than a little angry he’d checked you out.

“Pretty good,” you retorted, “My turn.”

“Born in the Channel Islands. Strict Catholic upbringing, four siblings, three boys, one girl. Attended St Michael’s Prep before transferring to Stowe School your Sophomore year, sorry, you call it Year 11. Joined the London Metropolitan Police Force in 2008, the same year you married Angie Stultz. She was interning for Warrener Stewart right?”

You rambled on, not waiting for an answer.

“Your daughter Faye was born the next year. Four years later you were promoted to the Criminal Investigations Department. You started out in Street Crime, then Organized Crime, until landing in Major Crimes in 2015. January of 2017 you and the little family moved to Minneapolis, where your wife was from but you didn’t start with the police department here for another 5 months so I’m assuming you were a house husband until your emigration papers cleared. Apparently you weren’t a very good husband, house or otherwise, cause your wife filed for divorce under “Irreconcilable DIfferences” a little over a year ago. You live alone, don’t smoke or do drugs and are generally recognized as a bully. I like to know who I’m dealing with.”

You flashed a Chesire grin.

Uh, oh.

If looks could kill, you’d be dead, buried 6 feet down, “Here lies a stupid idiot who wouldn’t keep her mouth shut” carved in the marker.

“Um, this is me.”

You pointed to a two story brick building, an empty storefront on the first floor, your studio apartment on the second.

“Why do you live in this shithole? With mommy’s money you could be living in the Carlyle or Legacy.”

“I wanted to prove I can make it on my own. And this neighborhood? It’s not as bad as people think. The Pizzeria over there? The old, Italian couple that own it let anyone who needs to use the free wifi. On the weekends they stay open late and offer a free slice and drink so the kids have a safe place to go.”

You became animated, warming to the topic.

“Mrs Freemantle, in the brownstone next door, invites me over three or four times a month. Her oxtail soup and mac and cheese are freaking amazing. She doesn't get around too well so I run errands for her once or twice a week.”

You peered out the windshield.

“Those two guys on the steps, the ones you gave the stink eye to? Andre and Tony? They fixed my car for a six pack and a pizza the last time it crapped out.”

“Probably with stolen parts,” he mumbled.

“I bought the parts, you judgemental ass.” you spat.

Jerking the handle, you exited the vehicle.

Snow swirled in the open door.

“People here care more about each other than anyone ever did in the swanky condo’s I grew up in. Thanks for the ride.”

You flung the door closed with a thud.

Trekking up the sidewalk, you quickly unlocked the outside door, your mind already on a molten hot shower.

“Honey, I’m home,” you announced to the tiny studio, tossing your bag and coat on the fifth-hand orange and green couch.

You stretched, exhausted, looking forward to…..

It happened so fast.

One second you were contemplating splurging an extra ten minutes in the shower, the next you were slammed against the kitchen wall, Detective Marshall’s forearm across your neck, other hand over your mouth.

You flailed at him, hitting and kicking.

It was like fighting a marble statue.

He leaned in, leg slotted between yours.

“Taser ain’t much help now is it.”

You pushed at his arm.

“How fucking stupid are you? You didn’t even lock your fucking door. Anyone…”

You bit his fingers, drawing blood.

He let go, surprised by your counterattack.

“Get the hell out of…..”

His hand closed around your throat.

Your chest heaved from adrenaline, his booming heartbeat matching yours.

Without warning, his lips crashed to yours.

The kiss was desperate, all consuming, his beard scratching your delicate skin.

His hand slipped under your top and cheap push-up bra, palming your breast, rough fingers pinching the already pebbled nipple.

The kiss deepened to something dark, Marshall taking control.

You rocked your hips against his muscled thigh, your core on fire.

Snaking down your belly, he slid his hand beneath the waistband of you skirt, callused digits gliding through your damp, plumped slit.

He circled your clit, applying light pressure with each pass, thumb randomly sweeping the bundle of nerves.

Lost in a sea of sensation, you mewled, the sound swallowed by his warm, searching mouth.

“Tell me to stop.”

Afraid he wouldn’t stop, even more afraid he would, you remained silent as you unzipped his jeans, freeing his heavy cock.

Gathering the sticky wetness from the tip, you stroked his length.

“Fuck.”

The whispered obscenity went straight to your cunt, fresh slick coating his hand.

He tore your black tights in one motion, leaving you bare.

Marshall lifted your leg, curling it around his waist, his cock poised at you sopping entrance.

“Last chance.”

You draped your arms around his shoulders, balancing yourself.

Taking that as a sign, he pressed into you, you channel stretching painfully.

You cried out, the burn almost too much.

His lips latched to yours, tongues sparing until his cock was fully ensheathed in your heat.

He pulled out, briefly hesitated, before thrusting in again.

Breaking the kiss, you buried your face in his neck, fingers tangling in his dark curls.

He fucked you now, hips pistoning, his fingers digging into your flesh.

Marshall’s feral grunts mingled with your needy moans.

Tendrils of electricity surged along your nerves.

He lifted your leg higher, changing the angle of penetration, his cock hitting the soft, spongy spot repeatedly.

“Please,..please..” you choked out.

“I’ve got you.”

You came with a sob, hips pumping in time with his, cunt clenching, the sheer intensity of your orgasm frightening, wave after wave threatening to drown you.

He drove into you faster, chasing his own release.

All you could do was hold on, tears staining his coarse, coal gray sweater.

You felt him swell, hips stuttering.

His muscles flexed as he came, pushing you against the wall, milky ropes of cum splashing your walls.

Fevered lust dissipating, he rested his cheek on your head.

Untangling limbs, Marshall fastened his jeans.

He didn’t stay, instead turning towards the door.

Hand on the brass knob, he paused.

“I’m sorry. This shouldn’t have happened.”

His words froze the question in your throat.

Door closed, you collapsed to the floor, head bowed, knees to chest.

“What the hell just happened.”

@xoxabs88xox @imanuglywombat @fanfic-fangirl @caffiend-queen @alexakeyloveloki @americasass81 @lokislastlove @sweater-daddiesdumbdork @sweeterthanthis @ironlady1993 @joannaliceevans-fanficblog @joannaliceevans-fanficblog @jennmurawski13 @starynighty @sapphirescrolls @xsapphirescrollsx @sagechanoafterdark @momc95 @jtargaryen18 @demonsandpieohmy @dangertoozmanykids101 @lizzystuffsthings @nildespirandum @shikin83 @sinceimetyou @buckybarnesandmarvel @imdarkinme @inlovewiththefictionalcharacters @titty-teetee @saiyanprincessswanie @littlefreya

#SOFT DARK WALTER MARSHALL X READER #SOFT DARK WALTER MARSHALL AND READER #SOFT DARK WALTER MARSHALL (AU) X READER #SOFT DARK WALTER MARSHALL (AU) AND READER #WALTER MARSHALL X READER #WALTER MARSHALL AND READER #WALTER MARSHALL #SOFT DARK WALTER MASHALL #NIGHT HUNTER AU #NIGHT HUNTER FIC #DARK NIGHT HUNTER FIC #HENRY CAVILL #HENRY CAVILL CHARACTERS

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wickedsrest-rp · 4 months

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Ghost Tours (3D) || Group Thread

TIMING: Current PARTIES: Inge, Nora, Jonas, Archie, and Helene SUMMARY: A fun ghost tour turns ghastly when the guide is revealed to be more than anyone expects. As the tour group is decimated in service of a mysterious entity, survivors are left wondering what they have just seen, and what is to come.

Dirty gray buildings lined what used to be a scenic little cobblestone road. The old maple tree that used to sit proudly at the end of the road was long gone and replaced by cold concrete. It was a shame, Helene decided, that a living relic of the past that could have survived turned into a park bench littered with obnoxiously colored bags. It was a small kindness that her feet made no sound or that she couldn’t really feel the ground at all. She had always loved the sound of the leaves crunching under her boots. There may have been a stray vibrant red leaf still left on the tree this late in the season, but most of them would have turned a shade of rust and fallen to the ground.

She rounded the corner anyway though the path remained largely unfamiliar to Helene. It had been a month now, she believed, and she was so close to having delivered her end of the bargain. She didn’t like to remember Wicked’s Rest this way, as it was now. This wasn’t her home and the wear on the buildings as they approached the part of town called Worm Row indicated that it hadn’t been for quite some time. The path she followed was the only she knew of the abnormality. Someone on one of the tours commented that the drive they were walking down now was private land, but it was long abandoned. The one shed she could make out at the end of shades of slate never showed even a flicker of light or life.

The group chattered absently behind her as they finally reached a small shack of a house labeled ‘historic’ by the town. This was admittedly Helene’s favorite story of the tour, one she got to tell with a wicked glint in her eyes because the Farfoots had gotten what was coming to them. “This was once the home of an author named Madison Farfoot. He was a boisterous man,” she narrated with a smirk playing at her translucent lips, “They call it the roarin’ 20s now and even by his own account, he was a loud man.”

Too loud, she remembered. His main home where he threw all his lavish parties had been taken by the flat some time long after his death, but his death had been here in this shack. Something about that delighted Helene. “His book The Rest Way Home went on to become a bestseller, though that was posthumously, but their land had a rich history.”

The land had been her family’s once, after all, but betrayal had much more dire consequences in a place like Wicked’s Rest. Helene didn’t worry much about that herself. She’d been long dead, long trapped under the black darkness of the abnormality. After tonight, she could feel something besides the earth and rocks one last time before going to live out the rest of her numbered days far away from the town that was as wretched as its name suggested.

Perhaps she was a little wretched, too, leading her last group of patrons closer and closer to the abnormality. They would be taken under it too. Helene had to think they’d understand once they’d lived it. Perhaps died it was more apt.

“The business deal that led to the Farfoot family acquiring the land that once went all the way out toward the mineral abnormality had been questionable to begin with. Handshake deals often are,” Helene recited, “But it was ultimately a squabble over inheritance that led to the end of the family line. Both brothers had very different ideas of what to do with the land. Madison wanted to build a hotel and shopping center, his brother Melvin wanted to farm tobacco believing it would be far more profitable.”

Their precious land belonged to the flat now too.

“The small house here was a den of sorts where Madison did much of his writing. Many today say they can still hear the sound of his typewriter in the darkest hours of the night.” She wondered if any knew or lived the strange anecdotes she would share over the rest of their tour. The small little evidence of phenomena that marred the path to the flat. “Keep close,” she advised with a falsely cautionary smile that gave some air of caring what happened to the living who uglied her town with metal and gray walls, “The hour is approaching twenty two hundred.” She turned back to the crowd, looking up at them from above her brow bone in a way she knew could chill. Scaring them wasn’t actually part of her bargain, that was more for entertainment value. “The hungriest hour of the night.”

—

Wasn’t there something ironic about it, going on a ghost tour when you were undead yourself? Sometimes she almost felt like a ghost herself, or at least those past versions of who she was. Ingeborg de Jong had been a young girl, raised in a country reeling from past war, the middle of five children of whom only four would live to adulthood. That had been a different girl, a different woman, a different wife — and though Inge might pretend she was gone and someone different, she remained.

Like a ghost in the lives of her siblings, of her ex-husband, of her former friends. Not dead, not really, but not there either.

Ingeborg Endeman was hardly a ghost. She was delightfully undead, but as present as any alive being was — and though she might flit from one plane to the other, and though she might haunt like some ghosts did, she thought herself more whole. Still! She felt a pull towards those fellow creatures that existed between the blurred line of alive and dead, and that was maybe why she was here. Enthralled by their tour guide, more keen to listen to her stories than to focus on her surroundings too much.

Worm Row, was, as neighborhoods went, a bad luck charm after all. The indent on her arm, where a piece of flesh was and would forever be missing after her altercation with that zombie. The presence of a Cortez hunter. The sheer threat that hung in the air. That last one didn’t scare her the way it would have scared her former, mortal self, though.

Her eyes moved across the people on the tour with her, a smile spared to the girl who could cast illusions. Was she here for inspiration as well? Inge moved nearer to her, eyes glued to Helene again. “Do you intent to cause some havoc tonight?” It was asked with a level of excitement, because it would be glorious, if the tiny thing was to explode in some kind of ghostly phenomenon and scare all those present.

She listened to the story, too, amused by the way Helene spoke of the late hour, glancing at the small house, “And how did their family line come to an end, exactly?” That was the story Inge was more intrigued by — she was well aware that the night was the time where the monsters came out. It was when she was at her strongest, when she could appear and disappear at will and haunt any person’s dreams and transform herself into something monstrous, stronger and more terrifying than her boring, mortal-seeming form. No, she wanted to hear about a story of what she hoped was fratricide, eyes gleaming as she hungered for a dramatic tale.

—

Were he a being capable of critical thought, maybe Archie would be able to stop and wonder why he hung onto every word of Helene's. Maybe he would be able to notice that in any other circumstances, this would bore him to death. But Archie was never the smart one, never a man of details, and Leon made no appearances here to guide his brother down a realistic (more like deeply pessimistic) path.

However, as much as Archie was stuck in Helene's stories, he retained almost none of the information, flying in one ear and out the other at twice the speed. And yet, he didn't wander off like he would if his will was his own. What truly caught his attention, was Inge's morbidity. Despite having met death, the concept of it feels so far removed from him. It was easy to remove himself from it, after all, he spent every moment he could pretending to be something he wasn't: a beating heart. "Ooo!" He exclaimed, almost cutting off Inge's words. "Yeah, how did they die? Was it like one of those old-timey shoot outs? Did they have guns back then?"

Helene's smile sent a shiver down his spine. Archie isn't sure if he'd felt such a sensation since coming back wrong. He laughed, nervous but with enough energy to attempt to mask it. "When are we gonna see some spooky shit?" He asked, not aware of what he was really asking for. "You know, you should definitely sell booze here. Drunk people are way easier to scare." He chuckled, then he turned to Inge, leaning in close to whisper. "You don't have anything for us on you, do ya?"

—

Jonas had dealt with many ghosts in his time, but having one lead a tour was definitely a first. Normal ghosts did not possess enough power to be projecting themselves in front of a small crowd while talking, what was even more strange was the fact that he wasn’t the only one who could hear her. Or at least that was what he was gathering from the reactions of his tour group members. It was hard to keep track of that many lips, it didn’t help that he was in the back of the group. He fiddled with his cardigan as he tried his best to keep up with the conversations. He should have gotten Lil to come along.

Still his focus was the ghost more than those walking with him. Jonas had come with the intent to help her move on, but he hadn’t wanted to interrupt the tour and make a show in front of everyone as he suddenly made their tour guide disappear. He also thought that perhaps if the ghost got to show off she would be more amicable to his desire to help her move on. Though her level of power was a bit worrying. Normally only poltergeists were so strong.

Jonas wasn’t affected by ghost stories the same where others were. He had been talking to ghosts since he could form words so no fear was held for them only pity. “I hope Madison is not still there trying to type.” He mumbled out. Blue huffed a little at her boy, he couldn’t understand the conversations happening but she could and she was thinking these people were strange and that Jonas was focusing on the wrong thing.

—

There had been a rumbling in the graveyard about ghosts who didn’t know their places. Ghosts who could be seen by the mundane and not just the exceptional. Ghosts who would bring in a new age, destroy the living and put ghosts at their rightful place. At the top. The ghosts in this town were ambitious, Nora would give them that. Nora followed along the party, in the outskirts, hands shoved in her pocket where another ghost was nestled safely. Tied down by a hair tie and paper clip to stop him from making a scene. The group consisted of one woman she did know and then other people she didn’t know. But the woman she did know was a question, because Nora was curious to see if this fellow fear eater was here to help cause panic in any way necessary, going to help the living, or just in the right place at the right time.

“Someone should tell Madison no one wants to hear his typewriter at night.” Nora mumbled, shifting her gaze to look over their tour location. A man was joking with the professor about getting drunk to be easier to scare. For a brief second Nora allowed one of her illusionary monsters to flicker in his sight. In honor of it being a ghost tour, she recreated the man himself, dead and ghostly, approaching the man, arms outstretched before it disappeared into nothingness. Maybe that would be a good indication if he was drunk or not.

Another man seemed interested in the story and was talking about Madison’s typing as well. He didn’t want Maddison to type more. Nora, having never read any of Madison’s work, assumed it was because his stories were the worst ever read and that was how he obtained his posthumous fame. But Helene was talking about the hungriest hour and Nora’s stomach let out a large grumble that reminded her it’d been awhile since her last meal. Her pocket ham had run dried and now she was scraping by on scraps she could find around town. “Yeah, I am hungry.” Nora agreed. “Are you going to feed us?”

—

Much like the town, the people seemed to have taken a turn for the more agitating as well. Helene wondered if that was just the natural progression of time. She wasn’t sure she remembered what that was like, but she was certain her former acquaintances had the decency to retain their manners during a tour. Really, who raised these people? They knew nothing of manners or tact. It was easier that way. She supposed she might feel a thread of guilt if she were to find any of the tour-goers likable. They were a means to an end.

“There is a bar up the road we can stop at if you insist upon refreshments,” Helene relented with a roll of her eyes. The form she had been granted had been given its own allure of sorts, they wouldn’t go too far, but she still couldn’t risk them getting bored of her tour and running off all the same. She couldn’t bear another night trapped in this hellscape of a town she once called home. “I was not under the impression that food and beverage was customary on ghost tours,” she spoke with an air of indignance, “I am certain you will find the offerings at the 9/13 to be more than suitable.”

Not that Helene had tried anything there herself. Even if she was visible to the people of the town, her hands still passed through objects and the drinks they sold would do nothing to cure the sense of yearning she’d lived and died with all these years. The woman’s question made her perk up a bit. At least someone was interested in the spirit of the tour… though the fellow who wanted a drink wasn’t too far off. The scares would be there soon enough and surely there would be regret in having asked for them in the first place.

“Perceptive woman,” Helene turned to Inge with a pleased grin, “Most can’t resist a tale of family betrayals. The whole thing was rather bloody… yes, they had guns at the time, but their fight was far more gruesome.” She turned to the group with a wicked chortle. “Madison was something of a collector and fought his brother with an ax… curious choice of weapon, really though Melvin did have his hunting knives on him. Clearly… Madison was better equipped. The reports at the time said Melvin died with 22 ax marks decorating his corpse.” It sounded like Madison got out scot-free and she shook her head with a bit of delight. “Madison did take some stab wounds from his brother, though nothing quite so deep or fatal. It was infection of the wounds that led to his ‘untimely’ death.”

The only thing untimely about it was it hadn’t happened decades sooner, but Helene tried to tell the tale absent of her own tie to it. “The house is locked this time of day,” she looked at Jonas with a daring glance, “It is open during the day. I suppose you could listen for him then if you’d like.”

—

Archie and Nora prattled on about drink and food as if either of them really needed it to sustain themself. Inge found it amusing, eyes flicking between the two familiar faces and wondering how many of the others here were like them — supernatural. With Nora’s skills, they could create their own ghost story here, after all. She leaned towards Archie, shaking her head, “I don’t, no. Carrying a flask around is a little bit gauche.” He had a point, though: inebriated people were easier to scare. Their dreams were more chaotic, too.

She raised her voice, “It’s fine. We can grab a bite after,” Inge said, glancing at the tiny bugbear with a look of amusement. If she was hungry, she could use her illusions to scare the living daylights out of everyone around them. She’d like to see it. For now, though, she wanted this Helene to answer her questions and explain why this place was allegedly haunted.

And on she went, lifting the veil and speaking of a family betrayal. Gruesome murder, a tale you might hear on a podcast hosted by men with grating voices who threw in a sponsor for beard oil in between speaking about gore-y actions. “Twenty two ax marks …” Inge found it easy enough to imagine what it must have looked like, but had to admit she was on Melvin’s side, here. Anyone who brandished an ax as a weapon was something she considered an annoying individual, if not possible hunter. The memory of Sanne’s beheading was far in her head, nagging. “So a slow but painful death? I suppose that’s what you get for instigating a fight like that, hm?” She looked at the house, then back at Helene. “Can’t you open it to us? Or is it … locked for our own ‘safety’?” She used air quotes around that lsat word.

—

"Maybe our good mate Madison is having a grand ol' time typin' away!" Archie suggested humorously to the faces he didn't recognise. "Who are we to get in the man's way–" The jovial zombie halted all of a sudden. What was once fluid movements and loose shoulders were quickly seized into a tense bundle of muscles. Leon's face appeared, but it wasn't his presence that stitched discomfort into his features. It was the un-Leon-ness of it all.

The ghost reached for him, wordlessly, arms outstretched. "What're you–" Archie mumbled as the ghost drew closer. Perhaps someone else would scream, maybe they'd take off running and wouldn't stop till their lungs were empty and stinging. Archie only moved his head back when those ghostly hands got too close. There was no horror on his face, only confusion when he blinked and Leon's face was gone. Archie looked over his shoulder, no awareness for how strange his movements might look to those who don't see what he saw. He cleared his throat, and the jovial zombie was back.

"I ain't been on a ghost tour before, ain't got the faintest clue what's customary." He dragged out the last word almost mockingly, a far too sophisticated choice of vocabulary for a man who didn't so much as pass secondary school. "Wait, twenty-two? Seriously? Damn. Savage. They really didn't like each other, huh…"

Features softened by laughter morph into confusion as he leaned closer to Inge again. "Did you just say gooch?" Confusion kept his brows furrowed, but Archie began to laugh again. "I feel like you're too much of a lady to say gooch at a ghost tour." He laughed again, the notion of Inge being an upstanding woman in society was plenty amusing.

"C'mon, Helene! You can't tell us it's spooky in there and then refuse to let us in! What, you forget your keys? 'Cause listen, I can get the door open. If none of you tell on me for a bit of light breaking and entering."

—-

Jonas was not one who was very big on going to bars. Normally when he drank it was over heart break and those nights always ended with him at home bent over a bucket. He was a little glad the woman in the front suggested skipping it. He didn't want ot show that side to some strangers, it would be a horrible first impression. Not that he was really here to get on their good sides, he tried to remind himself that he was here for the ghost and what she needed. Though that didn't stop him from going through his many pouches and pulling out a packet of skittles along with a packet of peanuts and offering them to the younger woman in the group. “If you are hungry you are more than welcomed to have these.”

“If it is closed we should leave it till morning.” Jonas was used to a little breaking and entering but that was usually done when a client forgot to give him their keys and normally it as Lil who did the deed. Though he did make a note to come back and help Madison move on. Even if he did something as horrible as killing his sibling he was a danger to people if left alone especially if he carried anger still towards his brother.

It wasn't the first time he heard of siblings doing horrible things to one another, but it was always a little hard for him to understand why. Perhaps it was his closeness to his own siblings that made the thought of someone else killing theirs something he just couldn't wrap his mind around. Sure, sometimes siblings had disagreements but it was never something to get violent over.

—

The scare got a little frightened reaction, but it wasn’t as deep and wonderful as Nora had wanted. However, she was rewarded with a bag of peanuts. Which was a very bad reward, but Nora was a homeless young adult who, now that Emilio’s house was sludged, didn’t have access to a steady kitchen. Nora gobbled down the bag in one giant swallow, shoving the plastic bag into one of her many pockets. She’d tuned out of most of the conversation until the topic of breaking and entering entered the discussion.

“We don’t even have to mess with the locks.” Nora was good at locks, but locks weren’t the only way of getting into buildings. Nora looked down at the ground around them until she found a suitably big garden rock. “Oh no,” Nora dead panned, making direct eye contact with the ghost who told them they were not allowed to enter the house at this time of day. “My hand slipped.” The rock soared out of her hand and shattered the glass to the nearest window. “Looks like we’ll have to go in and clean up.”

—

The moment was approaching. As Helene watched the group banter and make suggestions about entering the house, a mixture of frustration and amusement danced behind her old eyes. She hadn't anticipated this level of eagerness to break in. Something like jealousy flashed through her. Oh, to be able to revel in such chaos like these simpletons. She was long past the point of such earthly emotional pleasures, but her time would come soon. "Breaking and entering was never part of the tour package," she chided, a wry smile on her face. "I'm afraid you'll have to content yourselves with the stories for now. The locks are for your safety as much as for the preservation of this... historical site."

And then came the rock. Helene felt the hour in her insubstantial bones, and she was determined to make this work. So what if they didn’t follow the script. She would flip it in her favor. “You’re right, child. Go in, go clean. In fact, why don’t we all get a long look at the history hidden away inside? You might even become part of it, part of this town forever.” A sudden cold gust of wind swept through the area, rustling the leaves, but sending not a shiver down Helene’s spine. Her form flickered momentarily, transparent figure wavering in the breeze. Now. It had to be now.

A subtle shift in the air signaled the impending change. Could they feel it? Even mortals such as themselves had to be attuned to such great power on some level. It started as a faint shimmer, barely perceptible, then the earth rumbled, a fierce blue glow beaming from the cracks. And out poured the abnormality. It coated the ground, obsidian-like rock and blue crystals circling the group and the old house. The young man happened to be in the epicenter. The abnormality crept, enveloping and hardening around him in seconds, his screaming turning muffled and distant as he was sealed to the ground, to the town.

And Helene, for the first time in so many years, felt a surge of power run through her body, her real body. She floated from the ground, no longer caring to keep up the harmless charade, and the black and blue substance hardened in a lattice pattern around the remaining souls-to-be-trapped.

—

Inge was not immune to being swept up in the excitement and she found the prospect of breaking into an ancient house increasingly exciting. Of course, their host was against it and she huffed, “The stories would be embellished if we could actually properly go on site though, wouldn’t you say?” She wasn’t even sure if her words carried much weight, as they were with plenty and there was enough being said.

Besides, she was quick to forget her words, quiet admiration for Nora spreading through her. She was an aspirational young thing, that one. Much more skilled and clever than Inge had been at that age, decisive in a way that made actual moves. The window shattered and it seemed something else shattered with it. The notion that all this was just a ghost tour — as if there was such a thing in a town like this, where two undead were part of the clientele and a bugbear was causing a havoc. There was something strange about Helene’s words, something strange about the air and she wondered, for a moment, if she should be thrilled or wary.

There it was: the earth seemed to be shattering next, pouring out that goo she’d been avoiding, the crystals she’d up until now managed to not touch. Hasty boots jumped back, tip-tapping until she found a clear spot — but her eyes soon fell on Archie, who had not been so lucky. “No —” Inge was surprised by the exclamation that fell from her lips, her proximity to Archie rather shallow, but still. He was good company and undead like her, and she very much disliked hearing his screams, nay, his cries.

Helene was rising and she supposed it was time to be wary, or even better, time to run. Inge had never been much of a hero and preferred to run from the fights she got into, and that was what she intended to do now. But a strange woman was stumbling, grabbing her arm for balance and she was stuck, unable to reach her darling astral. “Let go of me you –” She busied herself with prying off the terrified hand on her coat, eyes flicking to Nora and the others around her. Despite her wariness, Inge wanted to know what was bound to happen next — call it her incessant need for inspiration, and stared daggers at Helene, “What is this?”

—

Jonas felt his breath hitch in his throat as the rock flew through the window. He frowned, turning to say something to the girl next to him when the ground began to shake as Blue wrapped herself around him. The dog began to growl as the ghostly figure ascended to the sky. Others in the party were panicking and the young man who started the conversation about breaking and entering ended up engulfed by the abnormality. Jonas’ hand went to his mouth and he gasped at the sight. He had avoided the goo rather successfully until now, his only run in was when he went with Lil to see if he could talk to other ghosts about what was happening, that was how he learned of this tour in the first place.

His hands gripped Blue’s fur as he tried to refocus on the now. It wasn’t his first time in a dangerous situation made by a ghost, it wasn’t his first time seeing someone die either which wasn’t a very pleasant thought. He looked up at Helene, if she was a poltergeist, as everything was now suggesting, then there was little Jonas could do. It would be better to focus on getting the other members out of whatever trap Helene had just forced them in. “She may not answer you. It would be best to get away for now.”

—

Pride swelled through Nora at the sound of the shattering glass. Pride that was quickly diminished as their ghost tour guide went wild with it. Nora didn’t understand, it was just a house, and Helene was a ghost, she didn’t need a house anymore. But rock was surrounding them, eating one of their numbers and capturing them. “No.” Nora reached into her deep pockets, pulling out a knife. She was tired of the geological abnormalities in this fucking town. Rocks weren’t supposed to take people away. “Give him back.” Her monotone was shifting into something emotional, something angry.

Knives didn’t work on most ghosts. Most ghosts couldn’t summon hordes of obsidian rocks to eat people. The others, unrecognizable faces, in the tour group were panicking. Sheep to the slaughter, doing nothing except cry and scream. Not a single one of them capable of fighting for their lives, except Inge, Nora knew. Call it the influence Cass was having on her, but Nora wasn’t going to let these people die because she broke a window. “GIVE. HIM. BACK.” Or he would always be the nameless man she’d gotten killed. Another death on her shoulder. A new sin.

Nora propelled herself on the shoulders of strangers, using them as a ladder to scale the slick rock wall. Emerging from the top Nora threw her body at the ghost, knife aimed to strike down through her neck. The knife slid through the ghost like air, quickly followed by Nora, tumbling onto the grass, winded from a rough landing. “Fuck.” It would have been so sick if that had landed.

—

A couple from the group were spirited, Helene would give them that. On another day, she might have enjoyed toying with them a bit, but this was her time, and the minutes spent dealing with these pests were the most valuable ones in her long, long afterlife. She would not let them take it from her. She brushed at her shoulder as if wiping off dirt, but of course, the child who leaped at her had just fallen right through. Helene took pleasure in the rough landing. “He’s gone now. There is no giving him back. He’s not just trapped, like the others. His life has been extinguished.” Helene looked at the older of the two of them. There was an inner strength to this one. Yet she was breaking, and that made pride swell within her ghostly chest. “It’s a ghost tour, dearie. You signed up for it. Didn’t you read the fine print on those waivers? We are not responsible for any harm that may come to you from the ghosts.” She cackled, like the old bat she was. That was enough of that.

The crystals poured up from the earth, mazelike and jagged, growing tall and dividing up the group. They were fish in a barrel now. The two troublemakers split from the cautious little boy and his dog, who were both split from the unruly, confused crowd she intended to lap up. “I will deal with you later,” she said, turning to the two who knew too much. Not that they seemed especially brilliant, but they weren’t terrified and suppliant like most. She found herself smiling at them, wicked and full of more life than any ghost should possess. How long had it been since she’d really felt such glee? If her turning away from them incensed them even more, well, she didn’t mind. They needed to learn their place – which was as nothing more than fodder for the Great One. But first, they needed to see how small and insignificant they really were. With a flick of her wrist, a small window formed within the tall crystal – just enough for the two to peer through and see what was about to become of the others on the tour.

She floated higher. She wouldn’t let that child take another leap at her during such a momentous occasion, and she wished to soar as high as she felt. Helene watched, the smile never leaving her face, as the crystals encircled and closed in on the clamoring crowd. An old woman, a father with his sons, a large family donning tourist shirts, a man who just looked like a lost tagalong. One by one, the goo spiraled around them, climbing up their legs. As the ooze hardened over their faces, their screaming was quick to die. Helene could feel the energy, the life, being siphoned away from them. A meaningful but meager portion was diverted to her, but the rest would be for the Great One. “Quiet at last,” she said, looking back at the two that remained. She didn’t bother checking on that little boy and his dog. They were no threat to her, and she’d had her fill.

But these two, she would relish giving over. “You two are plucky, aren’t you? Did you enjoy seeing all of those people die? It’s the crown jewel of the tour.”

—

There was a genuine look of horror on her face as she tried to process what had just occurred. Inge hadn’t thought the goo a problem for herself and her ilk, had assumed that the undead could not die again and properly by the ooze. She had assumed they’d get trapped, but that the lack of oxygen, water and food would not bother them — but Helene said his life was extinguished. (Maybe she didn’t know, what Archie was, maybe she didn’t know, about undead: but she was a ghost, and she seemed to know everything and Inge figured assuming the worst was wisest in a high stakes situation.)

Nora was angry, was jumping into action whereas Inge remained grounded and silent. It felt like a betrayal to all she knew, that Archie might be gone, truly and fully. She should go, but something tugged at her — and when she and the other were trapped by crystals she felt something dissatisfying: responsibility. She couldn’t leave Nora behind with this woman. Even if it would be so easy to disappear and reappear in the safety of her own home.

So she didn’t jump to the astral, not when the goo started forming around the rest of the tour’s crowd. Humans, all so very human and mortal in their existence — so very different from herself and Nora. Fear-eaters. Was the other getting her fill? Inge tried to search within herself and she wasn’t sure what she felt. It wasn’t horror. It wasn’t her usual intrigue, either. It was a kind of anger. She didn’t like it when the tables were turned on her, she didn’t like it when she was made watcher in stead of instigator. She did not enjoy their screams, because she wasn’t causing it — and though it didn’t quite break her heart, it didn’t sit well with her either. Especially in the case of the children.

There was no point to this. Her nightmares, those had a point and purpose. What she and Siobhan had done to Rhett, that had been for good reason — but this? This was plainly and simply stupid. Never mind what Helene’s motivations might be. Inge found she didn’t much care about the woman’s story: why she was dead to start with, how she managed all this. She cared most about her own back and also, surprisingly, about that of Nora. She was stoic and silent, slow to turn around and glower at the ghost. “It was a sight,” she said, her jaws clenched but her tone mostly controlled. “Seemed rather pointless to me.” Why kill so many? Death had never enticed her. She liked her nightmares and her art; she liked being alive, and those things were part of being alive. Decay and decease were ugly things, best avoided unless it was portrayed in dreams or paintings. She didn’t look at Archie. She couldn’t look at what had once been Archie. “Well. Then. Now that we’ve had the crown jewel, I reckon you’re finished?” Nothing to be done about those kids, those tourists, the little lady any more. Inge figured the next best thing was to run — but not alone. She looked at Nora, inquiring.

—

Knife didn’t work. Knife didn’t work. Knife didn’t work. The words ran through Nora’s head over and over again. A constant and unhelpful barrage. What was the point of all this training? The late nights of work if the knife didn’t work? Knife didn’t work. Stop it. Stop. It. Nora’s fingernails dug into the palm of hands, gripping hard enough to feel the skin break away and small pricks of blood pool under her grimey nails. She would just have to accept that knife didn’t work. Sometimes you can't help everyone. Sometimes you need to stop obsessing and think. Think. But how could she think? People were dying, people who hadn’t done anything. Nora’s breath was hitched in her chest, memories flashing over her, the hunter’s head rolling on the ground, her knife in Debbie’s chest, now this. Knife needed to work.

Inge was next to Nora, as Nora stood up and brushed her clothes off. A useless activity, considering they were already coated in a thick layer of dirt since before the tour. Truly, what were a few more falls in the dirt at this point? “You need a new crown jewel.” Nora snapped back at Helene. Her fingers reached into her jacket, shaking uncontrollably as she fumbled around inside. “Not now, but soon.” Nora mumbled, a response for Inge. Inge was right, they needed to run. Her fingers landed on a warm metal object. She would need to work on her shock reaction, her fingers couldn’t keep trembling like this when there were things to be done. Nora pulled the lighter out of her pocket. One flick. Two flick. Three. It finally lit. “You’re also going to need a new home.” Nora announced to helene before tossing the lit lighter into the home of the ghost tour. “Now I’m ready to run.” Hands still trembling, she took Inge’s in her own. Boots met ground as a burst of speed pushed through her.

In the movies, the house would have exploded behind them. There would have been a fortunate oil spill or gasoline bottle nearby and the house would have been eaten alive by the licking flame. Helene’s body would have been burned inside, sending her to whatever hell she deserved to live in. This wasn’t a movie, and Nora didn’t look back to see if the fire took. Nora hoped it would catch on something, but she was aware that the likelihood was it wouldn’t take and die, just like everyone they’d been touring with. Nora would be back with gasoline.

—

“No!” As she watched the lighter fall, she called out of reflex, more out of surprise than fear. She had lived a long life, an even longer afterlife, and the work was done. Setting the house alight was smart – smarter than trying to charge through a ghost with a knife. Helene watched, fire reflected in her otherwise empty eyes, as the home of her body caught flame. Old floorboards creaked and a beam snapped, causing a section of the roof to cave in as huge plumes of black smoke billowed out. She wasn’t sure what would become of her, though she was ready for anything. She had new power, but she was not alive, and that old lump of bones buried beneath the home was what tethered her to this place. It was possible the lives she had just snuffed out broke her free of that connection, but at the end of the day, she suspected, a ghost was a ghost, and this would be her true end at last.

Helene could feel her toes grow numb, then searing, sensing something for the first time in a great many years (and how awful, yet rapturous, for that something to be pain). She knew now that this was it for her. But she would grant these troublesome lives no satisfaction. They turned to run, and Helene’s voice, though laced with a kind of self-righteous desperation, surrounded them no matter how far they and fast they darted away. “What’s done is done,” she howled, turning into the wind itself, “you have no idea how momentous tonight is, how lucky you are to be witness to such a great power resurfacing. I may be gone, but so are any chances you might have had of getting answers from me. Unprepared as you are, soon you will know.” As the flames ate away at the house, it crumbled and crumbled, and pain spread across Helene’s ghostly body just as it lapped up her remains. She yowled as her ability to speak was stolen from her.

In place of her voice was a low and ominous rumble that made the air tremble with static and vibration – building gradually and swelling into a terrible thunderclap, that seemed in equal parts to come from above and below. Now? Already? Even Helene was shaken, though she didn’t have bones for the sound to pour into and rattle and, soon, she didn’t have any substance at all, even metaphysical. But the sky quaked once more, and the last thing Helene felt, had thought, had known, as she became nothing but ash, was the knowledge that she had served her Great One.

#group writing #ghost tours 3d #season 2

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