#I would carve his full legal name I to my skin

[bluejays-boys]

being traumatised is fucking hilarious. I was literally going attempt two nights ago and this fucker calls me and was like 'jj don't do it' and I was just like why lmao and then he starts shaking/crying? he starts fucking saying he loves me? bitch tf? turns out this is what friendship actually is like wtf do u mean you don't actively wish I was dying lmao

#jjsaysshit #fucking love u bro #ur so skrunkly #he aint gone see this [hopefully] #he's literally so silly! #so oingo bingo! #I lovw hen I go into school and he comes and sits with me #I would do anything for hijm #I would kill myself if he told me to #I would carve his full legal name I to my skin #I would murder anyone who even looked badly at him #friendship #best friends #autism #autistic #neurodiversity #neurodivergent #actuallyautistic #death tw #violence tw #murder tw #injury tw #torture tw #cw vent #vent post #tw vent #vent #venting #personal vent #trauma

[romeulusroy]

Mother and Father (Roman Roy Oneshot)

Character/s: Roman

Word Count: 1,588

A/N: I'm at my mums. Idk why I come back. I do and it's a mess and then I go on with my life like nothing happened, like everything is fine when she's constantly choosing him over me. This is stupid and I'm stupid. This not about my dad, but my step-dad. He was a wonderful, patient, smart man and I miss him every single fucking day. The other can go to hell. Feedback is always appreciated 💜💜💜

Succession Masterlist 

He keeps an eye on you. 

The wine is sweet. It stains your insides, pools through your bloodstream, brings a heat to your cheeks that is not unfamiliar. You’re sure if someone cut you open, if they dragged their butter knife across the softness of your stomach, out would pour the wine you’ve been refilling in your glass. It is sweet and red and you make the mistake of thinking it as blood. This house, this party, there is always a sacrifice of some kind. A lamb. A body. A mind. Something to hand out when the guests are full and bored and looking for entertainment. In a pen or cage, something with holes to poke and prod at their own delight. Every time you step through the front door you fear it’ll be you next. An aching, moaning, cerebral feeling in you tells you to run. Run as fast as you can, as far away as you can. Run and never turn back. Save yourself. You don’t listen. You never have. Somewhere along the line that kind of thinking became selfish. It became sinful. Somewhere along the line you were taught to be served on a platter like that is an expression of love. If you loved them you would cut yourself into bite size pieces. If you loved them you would bathe your skin raw. If you loved them you would wear a smile on your face while they sliced through the thickest parts of you. You would relax, untense ever muscle, so they wouldn't have to put force into it. You learned that resistance and self-respect would only land you in a muzzle and they couldn't love something that feral. 

He keeps an eye on you. 

The jokes. They start with the jokes. Always. They have since you were a young teenager. You’re never sure what to do, how to react. They laugh. Your mother laughs. You stand rigid, frozen, wondering over and over if you invited such thoughts. The way their hands move across your body as if it is their own. Holding you a heartbeat too long. Inspecting you, up and down, before landing on what they’ve been staring at for years. The hecatomb. It’s done publicly, the slitting of your throat, the collecting of the blood. Family not by blood nor name, but by her. By so-called-love. Desperation. Alone disguised as loneliness. And yet, he invited friends, onlookers, his own sons to take part. You were fourteen. You are still fourteen. It’s been years, years and years, but when he opens his mouth you are fourteen. You are the same child stunned, disgusted, the same child who cries in secret because their body no longer belongs to them. Others, too. A crowd. You were seventeen and drunk and you forgot. You forgot you could feel unsafe in your own home. His words carved themselves into you. Deep and serrated and looking to scar. Jokes. Your mother laughs and once again you are reminded there are sides to this kind of thing. There are sides and you know you stand alone. You’re older now. Legal. You got out, but you’re always coming back. Following the breadcrumb trail. Foolishly believing it will be different. He will be different. She will, too. They aren’t. He looks, he watches, he makes his comments. You hold back tears. You drink your sweet wine and relive every time before this where she has provided pieces of you to him, his friends, his sons, just to feel loved. You are reminded that she too has been changed by this idea of love. Warped. Mangled. That she too believes as you do: to be loved is to immolate. No exceptions. You pity her. For not getting out, for believing this, for teaching it to you. You’re hurt, too. She taught you. She laughs. Your own mother. 

He keeps an eye on you. 

He keeps an eye on you from the moment you walk in, taking your glass, your sips, kissing everyone hello. Falling into that crowd, your skin visibly crawling, your eyes glossing over, shrinking away into yourself until there is just a shell. An abandoned house. He should be here. With his brothers, his sister and father. He should be here mingling and schmoozing. He should be here listening to your mother go on and on about the man who jokes when he deserves hell. But you shouldn’t. You go out. You left. You fled the sinking ship you were born on. It startles him to see you. You’ve changed so much, so little. That face he remembers better than his own. The shy smile you wear when you’re embarrassed. The laugh you share and the laugh, the real one, that graces too rarely. When he’s lucky. The look of hurt in your eyes when you’re pretending you’re not. Just like now. And yet, he understands deeply. Always coming back for more. One more slap. One more hit. One more jab. It doesn’t matter that they leave you bleeding out across the floor. It doesn’t matter that you want to give up for good. It doesn’t matter that you come back with less bark, less fight, less of you. You always come back. Limping or crawling or crying out when you are unable to move. A caged animal does not trust the wild if their crate was lined with rusty nails. They seek out the sharpest thorns just to feel at home. 

He keeps an eye on you. 

You told him. You told him everything. You’re not sure why, what good it could have done, what good it’s done. You notice how careful his eyes are when they touch you, how cautious they are, how gentle he is.  It just came up, out, dribbling down your chin like vomit. You were crying. Tired. Slamming doors like you used to when you were little. He jumped. You scared him. You didn’t mean to. He was saying those things and she was letting him, encouraging him. About you. Your body. It made you feel dirty. It made you feel vulnerable. He understood. He didn’t say how, he just did. Hiding in a bedroom you can no longer claim as your own, curled into yourself the way you used to. Hiding. Shaking. That sweet wine churning in your gut, at the back of your throat. Sobbing. His voice is so quiet, so unsure, seeping through the door. You’re not sure why you unlock it, only that you do, and he comes in, and it comes pouring out of you. You’re fourteen. You’re thirteen when that boy, that boy with that laugh, decides you are his toy. To play with. To bash against the concrete, the wall. To discard when he gets bored. You’re seven when it starts. All those years. It never really stops, does it? You’re fourteen, and still a child, and he stares at you like he’s hungry. His words starved. Like he knows what they’ve done. Like he knows she is desperate and lonely and he can do whatever he wants to her child if it means she will be loved just a little. You remember and it kills you. You ignore it, you smother it, but it never really goes away. It is always there. He wants to set the house on fire. Burn it to the ground so that there is no place to come back to. So that you can get out for good. He wants to, but he doesn’t. He knows how these things work. They’ll find somewhere else to infest. They’ll call your name and you’ll come running. Limping. Screaming. 

He keeps an eye on you. 

The man with the jokes, the friends, the sons. He keeps an eye on you. He criticizes every emotion that settles into your skin. Every word, every act, every fucking thought. He takes it out on you. On her. Everyone but himself. He keeps an eye on you, and makes his comments, and leans in so that his words tear you apart. He smiles as he watches, his arm around your mother, reminding you this is a game you’ve lost before it’s even started. He keeps an eye on you, too. Roman. Rich, deep, not unlike the soil of the Earth. He steps up, he offers himself to them before they can finish you off. He doesn’t mind. He never has. Not with his own father, not with yours. Let them circle around him. Let them shred what’s left of him. You know better than to stop him. What would you do? What would you say? He does it with a smile. You know how it hurts, a familiar ache in the middle of your chest like your heart is physically breaking. Shattering to sparkly bits. This goes unspoken. Every time. Every time he sees what’s going on, that look of hurt, he intervenes. He can’t get out. Not now, not ever. But you? You did. You left that man behind, you left all those boys all those years ago behind. You need to remember that. Not what they did. Not what he’s doing. Look forward. He doesn’t touch you. He doesn’t try to. But you linger at his side, so little space between you, and he knows what it means. A language only you know, only you speak. A thank you. An I’m sorry. An understanding deeper than anything you’ve ever known. 

He keeps an eye on you, he protects you. He always has. He always will.

#writing #roman roy #roman roy imagine #roman roy x reader #roman roy drabble #roman roy oneshot #succession #succession imagine #succession drabble #succession oneshot #succession x reader

[rayrayor]

So Lily is ready to move in to her dorm and just to get to know her roommate. But Milkovich and Gallagher family members have Gracie and her moms learn more than they bargained for about her family. Papa is in full Mickey form .

Notes:

So AO3 was down today and I could not get into a draft ( lesson back up drafts)

I recently began reading the series by SPNDreamer228 , Lina Milkovich Gallagher and loving it .

I just love the Galladads universe and finding new authors to enjoy.

So while waiting for the AO3 superstars to work their magic , I decided to visit my Galladads and Lily Gazer as I could not get in and read the last work I had left of Lina .

MOVE IN DAY

Gracie and her moms just moved in her bags and she sat in her dorm bed nervous, her roommate and her chatted a few times when rooms were assigned . The bit she had, her roommate was nice. They had not said anything to Gracie but her roommate also seemed very strait laced , had gone to a private girls school started college at 17. Their fear was like always, Gracie would be judged by having two moms.

There were boxes on the other bed but no roommate. Suddenly a petite red head burst through the door with a coffee . She was striking , long red hair with curl, pale skin dotted with freckles and piercing blue eyes Her smile was a big sunbeam .

” omg hi Gracie , I’m Lily . Those are cool glasses, I love vintage things. “

She pulled Gracie into a hug then turned and introduced herself to them.

” Lily did your parents leave?”

” No ma’am I think they are around here..”

” Lily baby your RA said you could have your electric kettle, I think it will be good to have, you drink way too much caffeine, Uncle Carl sent you all that weird tea you both drink.”

Gracie and her moms stared a very tall muscled ginger who matched Lily’s coloring . He was an incredibly handsome man.

After gently dropping a kiss on his daughters head he turned .

” You must be Gracie , I love that lip gloss it’s gorgeous. Oh shit hi sorry . I am Ian, Lily’s dad. “

” I am Angie and this is my wife Sue. First time drop off?”

” No Lily’s older brother Liam went here , by the way Lily he is driving in for dinner . “

“ Cool , Gracie you will like Liam , he was an economics major like you. He is in law school now .. umm do I want to know.. where is papa?”

The redhead broke into a fond but amused look .

” When I left him he was grumbling about the safety logs on the fire extinguishers “

He turned to the ladies “ My husband is a bit overprotective, he can be um …let’s say …passionate when it comes to the kids .”

At husband Gracie and her moms grinned at each other .

” Fuck you, fuck you and especially fuck you “ They heard bellowing down the hall. Lily dropped her head into her hands .

Angie grinned “ Sounds like a party all ready”

Lily looked resigned “ Yeah not really . 5. 4. 3. 2. 1”

” Aye punk waaay too many boys sniffing around here , studies first.“

She teased “ Again what if I am a lesbian like Aunt Debbie and Sandy , lots of girls papa”

” No dyke bars with them until 18 don’t need some drag king making moves”

Ian’s voice showed that these seemed to be regular conversations in the family.

” Mick for the hundredth time , 21. Legal drinking age is 21. “

After being introduced to the tough looking man named Mickey of all things they watched him check out the windows then the lock on the girls door, frowning .

Lily’s papa as she called him was smaller than his husband , stocky but not in a way that was heavy but compact and powerful . His husband was carved and shredded muscle but the brunette a powerhouse. He had electric blue eyes that matched his daughters perfectly . Lily side by side with them looked almost like a 50/50 mix of them both.He turned and addressed both girls now sitting on the bed passing Lily’s coffee back and forth.

” Listen up cupcakes, that lock ain’t for shit , next week I will come back , drill that one out put in ones like at the grow houses. Hmm maybe when I come back , get a steel enforced door…”

” Papa you can’t just yank out a door at university “

” For what we are paying if I want remodel this whole room for you both I will .And by the way can that skirt get any shorter punk ? It looks like one Aunt Mandy would have wore to try and flirt with daddy back in the day.”

Gracie laughed and her moms checked out Lily’s knee length wrap dress with tights, confused.

“ Says the man always trying to low key flirt with sleeveless shirts… oh Ian look at my pale biceps, got ‘em in juvie working out .”

” Douche bag, I married him”

” Ass wipe he was my boyfriend first “

” ohhh a gay boy with his girl beard , whatever Mands”

Ian had stopped making Lily’s bed and was watching , arms folded .

” Daddy are you gonna stop this?”

” Sorry baby it’s been like a long time since they fought over me like this . Last time I think she was pregnant with you ( Gracie’s moms exchanged knowing looks ) and they were fighting over clouds or stars on your nursery ceiling. This is kind of puffing up my ego. Your old man does not pull the same looks like when I was younger.”

” Pulease every time you drag me to boystown it’s like he ain’t Macy’s and you ain’t window shopping “ Mickey snorted.

Gracie was fascinated. She loved her moms but they were both stoic and very PC. Lily’s dads were rough and loud but you could hear not insults . but love.

” Daddy?”

Ian took action , he loped over to Mickey and pulled him in as he sputtered and gave Mandy the finger. Both Gracie and her moms realized then he had knuckle tats which spelled fuck u- up .

” Baby , look Lily and now Lily and Gracie will be fine with the door they have. You spent her teen years threatening to take doors off and now you wanna put one on? “

He pulled up brows furrowed at his husband , bottom lip being chewed on while now that Ian was taming his thug shrew, Lily calmly opened boxes and split a snickers with Gracie.

” Firecrotch ( Sue almost choked on her gum) what if there is a fire?”

” It’s already a fire door Mick”

” tsunami.”

” We are in Illinois. They are on the third floor and if the room is flooding, I prefer they get out easier .”

A deep discontented huff

“ Use your words Mick “

” ok what if a bunch of good time Charlies come rolling down the halls at 3 am?”

” Well it’s not 1943 so those good time Charlie’s would be dead so not a lot of trouble and Lily knows those moves from you when you worked for the cart..in Mexico when you worked in Mexico.”

” Fine fucking ok no new door. Can I put a chain inside like a motel “

” yeah”

He turned to the girls “ oh and getting you both bear spray in case you are going through campus late or early.”

” Mick they can’t carry bear spray “

” You got a better idea Aunt know it all not like she can take a 38 into class.”

” Well Uncle Officer Carl could get them pepper spray “

“ Terrifies me that Carl Gallagher has access to a badge, guns and

chemical warfare”

” UNCLE IGGY “ Lily ran and was scooped up by a blonde man also with knuckle tats . She was put down and slugged him hard.

” Ow Lily “

“ That’s for after all these years getting conned to join uncle Joey in that hair brain scheme and going back!”

” Could have brought her when you guys came out, fuck Mandy why did you hit me”

” also pissed “

Mickey hugged Iggy. “ love you man but told you she was not growing up in prison visiting room like us , you all know you go in she doesn’t come out to Statesville. “

Gracie and her moms both noticed Ian and Lily rubbing the bridge of their noses.

” Well now that you have met the Milkovich’s , any Gallagher’s besides Liam showing up ?”

” You mean us?”

Uncle Lip swung her around then hugged her dads and patted Iggy on the shoulder.Tami gave hugs then settled a death glare on Mandy.

”Mandy so surprised your clients allowed you away .”

” Really you do hair Tami , hey Iggy let’s go check in at the hotel . Lily bean I love you see you at dinner “

Uncle Lip chatted about the new men’s group he started for AA and Tami slid behind Lily to French braid her hair. Lily’s gaze intensified and both her and Mickey were watching Ian fold and refold her clothes mumbling softly about keeping it organized.

Soothing and quiet “ Daddy did you take your pills , you ok , kind of a stressful day?”

” Fourth person who asked and yes I did baby girl , guessing papa even counted them this time “

Mickey pulled Ian into his arms and traced his face with his thumb, the lines in the scowl now gone. His voice was warm but with a hint of almost stern .

“ c’mon tough guy, let’s get these two to the hotel , take a nap before the whole hoard terrorizes the waitstaff for Gallagher Family dinner .”

“ But … Mick I haven’t finished sorting Lily’s stuff “

” Daddy I will finish it , you can check it in the morning.Go nap with papa he looks tired and he is insufferable when cranky.“ She winked at her papa who mouthed “ thank you “

She was pulled in tight and heard a sniffle. Uncle Lip put his hand on his shoulder.

” Ian point out the RA Mickey almost decked “ He walked them out .

” He is gonna crash isn’t he papa, I fucking hate bipolar disease so much “

Two pairs of blue stared at each other . Mickey knelt down and cupped his daughter’s face . It was the tenderness and sadness in both their eyes that made both women choke up.

” I know. Lily I hate it too but Daddy has been living with this since you age. I have been keeping an eye on his sappy ass since I was 19. He hardly gets big episodes because we know what is a support med and what is a med change. The older we get the more this lessens. We know what this is , we know what to do. He is gonna bitch and fuss and I am gonna make him take his pill. We are gonna nap. Then everyone is gonna be loud and crazy and wear him out. He has an appointment Monday . Also punk we talked about this . He goes gown , you do not come home. That will stress him more, got it?”

” But papa..I “

” Nope , no . Lily Gazer we stick to the plans ok .”

He turned to Gracie and family a look of sadness and pride on his face. “ My husband has some mental health challenges with his illness but it’s managed well, big emotions good or bad can set him off level. “

” Pops , hey dad is with Lip looking for you.” In the door was a tall young black man who had very similar features as Ian. Mickey reached out for a hug as the man whispered.

”Hi Pops , hey you get dad, I got Lily “

Mickey patted the young man’s cheek then hugged his daughter , wiping a tear.

As he walked out he looked at Gracie’s moms.

“ Aye we live in Chicago , I know you all from Maine. Lily comes home on long weekends, Gracie comes with. Family watches family .”

Liam smiled at Lily.

” Hey baby sis, dads gonna be ok , pops got him . Hey I am Liam by the way.” He shook hands all around.

” Lily there is the ice cream social on the quad. Gracie wanna join , will spill the tea on the first year Econ professors.”

Sue looked at their daughter

” Take off we have to go pay for meal plan , text us when you are done we can then get our reservations for dinner .”

As they headed out Lily hugged them both “ Thanks for not freaking out, my family can be a lot.”

The women watched as the young adults headed off laughing and pushing each other with ease.

Angie smiled “ Babe is it me or do you feel better the Gallagher’s have Gracie in their sights?”

Her wife grinned “ Yeah 1000% better. They are gonna keep her safe and loved while she is away from us.”

#gallavich #gallavich fanfic #gallavich fic #ian and mickey #mickey x ian #mickey milkovich #shameless fanfiction #galladads #Lily GazerGallagher

[stellocchia]

Anyone remembers my Platonic Soulmates AU?

Well, I decided I wanted to write something in it for Wilbur as well because he's just perfect for angst... (also it's technically the second part of This One, but you don't need to read it for this one)

The Anchor

-

Wilbur had always been what his father liked to call “an artistic soul”. He learned how to play guitar and sing at a young age and he’d been very averse to violence ever since. His father was not one to voice his concern, but Wilbur knew that he had disappointed him when he called out his cruel practices in leading the Antarctic Empire. It was fine though because Wilbur didn’t need him.

He set out to adventure, a guitar on his back and a name proudly displayed on his wrist for everyone to see. He deserved to meet his soulmate and of that, he was certain like of nothing else.

Things don’t always go according to plan however and soon enough he found himself broke and raising the son of a fish he stared at longer than it was strictly appropriate. That was not ideal per se, but he knew he could manage somehow. He was the son of the Angel of Death, after all, giving up wasn’t in his blood.

The next couple of years had been hard, what with the low funds and Fundy growing faster than expected, which meant he needed new clothing more often and more food than other babies. Fundy also absolutely hated Wilbur’s cooking and he never held back from letting him know with shrill cries and incessant pouting. Wilbur wished someone would have told him how exhausting being a parent would be, no wonder Phil avoided it like the plague…

Something good did happen however when one day at a market he met a very young teen named Tommy. The boy successfully stole from him, but, upon seeing him break down when he realized he couldn’t afford a meal for him and his child, he came back with a mortified expression and an apology. Wilbur understood though. They were both leading a miserable life so, instead of calling the guards asthe teen expected, he invited him over for a meal.

It took Tommy one try of Wilbur’s culinary expertise before declaring him a lost cause and inviting himself over for supper as well so that he could make something decent. Wilbur didn’t comment on his inability to taste the food when asked how much better their dinner was, but Fundy was full of praise for the first time in his existence, the little shit…

It took a couple more encounters before Wilbur noticed the name on Tommy’s wrist and they were already brothers by then. It seemed perfect like it was meant to be. And, according to the Universe, it was.

Years passed and they got invited to a moderately new Server apparently owned by Dream, renowned all over the System for his hunting challenges.

The news was the best thing that happened to Wilbur in a while. The desire to prove himself had been buzzing under his skin since forever, almost turning into an unbearable scorching fire in recent times. And that was his opportunity to upheld his father’s legacy, he would not let it go to waste.

Tommy was the first to join, though Wilbur was very reluctant to let him go alone. He was still so young and reckless and so painfully kind. Wilbur’s heart ached knowing him alone where couldn’t be easily reached, but he had to deal with the legal procedures regarding the Server transferal, so he’d have to suck it up this time.

Still, his brother and son were there waiting for him when he joined. Tommy had made friends with another teen and, somehow, had a war with the Server’s Admin. Nothing less than what Wilbur expected.

It was fine though, they were finally getting their life in order.

The first thing Wilbur tried was to get a monopoly on potions, which lead to the impromptu formation of a police force, which then lead to the formation of a country and war.

Before he knew it he was one life down, holding his little brother while his second life bled out of him, choking on his tears while the jubilant screams of his enemies resounded behind him.

It had taken no time for him to lose so much, and Tommy coming back from a meeting with the Admin saying how he’d won them independence was not enough to bring back his sense of safety and control. He was lost. It dawned on him then that he had no idea of what he was doing, only moving forward because he had to. It gave him such a sense of dread that he’d often end up crying alone in his office, the comfort of his soulmate feeling too far with a door between them, yet not far enough to hide his shame.

In a desperate attempt of reigning his life back in he proposed an election. It should have been an easy way to consolidate his power and possibly to give him some peace of mind. He’d planned it perfectly, so of course, nothing could go wrong. Turns out he was mistaken.

His second death was from an arrow piercing his heart while he screamed for Tommy, who was already on his last life, to run for his life. In retrospect, he should have expected things to go wrong as that’s what usually happens.

From then his life just turned into a never-ending spiral. There was no one he could trust, no one who hadn’t betrayed him, aside from his soulmate. And, even then, where he once found comfort in it, Tommy’s presence now felt blinding. Like staring directly at the sun after days spent in a cave. Oh, Tommy was as tainted as him, he knew that much, but the boy was so stubborn in his pathetic desire for peace. He refused to understand how that wasn’t an option anymore. L’Manburg, the country they founded and fought for, was now nothing but a corrupted husk of its former self. It was far beyond saving, destruction being the only remaining option. But Tommy refused to understand and, after a while, Wilbur stopped trying to make him. He’d come around to it eventually…

And then came the grand day, his final act! The stage was set and everything was perfect down to the most minuscule of details. Even Philza showed up for the heartbreaking reunion of the century, where he could pretend he’d been a father to Wilbur while stabbing him through the heart. It was perfect and wonderful and he could finally have peace.

Only death was not what he imagined. It wasn’t nothingness and it wasn’t peaceful. Instead, he was trapped at a station, trains passing but never stopping, and lost souls of those who came before him roaming the platform, unresponsive shadows of their former selves.

And it was such a cruel trick, wasn’t it? Showing him what he was to become while letting him keep the mind of who he was. Of course, he did his best not to succumb to the numbness and fade in that state of non-existence, but he was about to give up when Schlatt fell into an eternal slumber. But then something happened, something wonderful, the veil of death retracted for just a moment and he saw his little brother finally succeeding in defeating Dream once and for all. They talked like they hadn’t in a long time and with the reunion came the constant dull pain of a broken bond interrupted too soon.

It was grounding in a way. There weren’t many sensations in Limbo and of course the one breaking him away from his crushing loneliness would be Tommy once more. His one constant. His one anchor to retain himself.

An even better event was when Tommy himself joined him in Limbo. Wilbur couldn’t be more ecstatic! He mostly ignored his brother’s newfound constant fidgeting and shakey breaths he would take from time to time. They weren’t important, what was important was that Wilbur wasn’t alone and his bond stopped hurting. They were together now and nothing could change that! Well… he thought so, until one day a hand appeared grabbing Tommy’s neck and dragging him away, towards the tracks. Wilbur screamed and tried to take a hold of Tommy’s hand, but it was too late and the boy disappeared with the passing of another train.

After that Wilbur almost faded. He almost gave in. Why holding so desperately onto his mind when he was condemned to an eternity of loneliness? His soulmate too far out of reach once more… this time perhaps forever.

But eventually, a train stopped at his station, with Dream as the conductor. Dream, his hero! Taking him away from that nightmare and gifting him life once more!

He’d been grateful at the time. Truly grateful. Even after receiving Ghostbur’s obviously incomplete memories and having seen some of what the Admin had done to Tommy he still was grateful. And then he noticed something on Tommy’s wrist, a scratched-out name that appeared to have once been carved into the skin, and suddenly the desire to rip Dream apart with his bare hands reappeared stronger than ever.

He’d have to wait of course. Gain allies first, strengthen his bond once more, and play his cards right. He’d have to get the Admin to let his guard down with him and then… well then he would find out what happened when you tried taking Wilbur’s lifeline away from him...

#dream smp au #platonic soulmates au #tommyinnit #wilbur soot #crime boys #my writing/fanfic thingy? #tw suicide #tw unhealthy relationship #wilbur is a bit possessive #but that mostly stems from loneliness in this case

[surveys-at-your-service]

Survey #365

“i’m numb to the pleasure, but still feel the pain”

Are there palm trees where you live? No. Do you own any Hello Kitty stuff? If so, what? No. What’s your favorite flavor of ice pop? Blue raspberry. Do you like animal print? What’s your favorite print? Not really. I think animal "print" only really looks nice on, well, animals. Does your dad have any facial hair? Yes. What do you think of foot tattoos? They're not my favorite, but some look nice. I myself wanna get "11121" (a Silent Hill 4 reference) "carved" onto the top of my feet. Do you like bugs or do they scare you? Some do. I've gotten more into them though as my passion for tarantulas expanded to other inverts, like mantises. Ever seen the movie Chernobyl Diaries? If so, did you like it? If not, do you want to see it? I haven't, but I'd be willing to watch it. I find the whole Chernobyl incident to be extremely fascinating, so I'd probably like it. Did your senior class in high school have a class trip? Where did you go? Bitch I wish. :/ Do you have an instagram account? What’s your username? Yeah, two: brittanymphotography and eldritch_obscura. Do you like Gir from Invader Zim? I think he's cute. Do you or would you ever own a gun? Why or why not? No thanks. If I'm not mistaken, I can't legally obtain one anyway because of my suicidal history. I'm fine with having like, pepper spray and a bat handy by the bed, lol. If it was offered for free by a professional, would you get your hair dyed platinum blonde? For FREE? Fuck yeah I'd try it. What do you normally order at Dunkin Donuts? A chocolate frosted donut, and sometimes a plain/cake one. Do you watch football? Favorite teams? No. What about WWE? Favorite wrestler? That's an even bigger no. Funniest thing you’ve ever heard a teacher say? Okay so this is hard to actually explain and it be funny. I had this amazing, kinda charismatically awkward history teacher in high school, and when talking about some legal stuff I can't remember, she deadass quoted "Without Me" by Eminem ("if the FCC won't let me be...") like so casually and everyone fucking died, just from knowing her and her personality. It was just very unexpected. Do you wear a lot of makeup? What do you think of girls who do? No. Girls can wear however much makeup they please. Do you have a savings account? Are you good at saving money? No. I can't really answer the second question because of me never having a steady flow of money. Would you rather have a relationship or casual flings? Relationship, 100%. I would never have a casual fling. Do you know anyone that’s part Native American? Yes. Who was your favorite Spice Girl? I remember none of them. Have you ever tried to poison someone? Yikes, no. Have you ever saved anyone from a fire? No. Have you ever had a seizure? No. I've had sudden spasms, but never a full-on seizure. Have you ever had an out-of-body experience? No. Have you ever had a black eye? No. Have you ever had a tooth pulled? No. Have you ever had pneumonia? I have not. Have you ever had tubes put in your ears? Yes, as a baby. Have you ever been shot with an arrow or bullet? Thank god no. Have you ever had kidney stones? No. Have you even been bitten by an venomous animal? No. Have you ever thought about being in the military? Fuck no. I wouldn't qualify, anyway. Have you ever been sedated or put under anesthesia? Yeah. Have you ever used shrooms or any other hallucinogen? No. What upcoming event are you most looking forward to? I can barely believe my tat appointment is almost here lakjsd;ajwlej;rwe What was the last song you heard? I'm currently listening to Motionless In White's synthwave edit of "Voices" they just put out. I looooove it. What time did you wake up today? Maybe like, 5:20? Is there a vase in the room you’re in? No. Have you recently been insulted? Yes. Compared to someone else of your age and gender; do you feel that you have a lot to offer someone? N O P E How many days a week do you work? I'm unemployed. Is there ONE person you feel more connected to than others? Yes. What is your worst relationship quality? I obsess over the person probably leaving, so especially at the beginning, I'm paranoid and distrustful. I want to emphasize that I'm not the asshole that snoops through her partner's phone out of distrust, but still, the fear is just there. What was your most recent serious injury? A serious one? Man idk. I've had a lot or negligible and smaller ones, but a big one... *shrug* What were you most recently happy about? I was happy to see "synthwave" in this video title, haha. Are you a fan of cake? Oh yes. What is your favorite insect? Butterflies. Is your town beautiful? Ew, no. Do you prefer the city or the country? THE COUNTRY. Have you ever witnessed an eclipse? Lots of lunar eclipses. Do you wear lipstick often? No. You’re going on a date with someone you like. What would you like to do? Considering the pandemic, probably just like... grab fast food and sit and eat at a park. That'd be cute. You’re hanging out with your best friend. What would you like to do? It'd be nice to get back to Avatar: The Last Airbender while hanging out with Doris (her beardie that I adore), too. Have you ever written or considered writing a play? No. Who is considered the “black sheep” of your family? Why? Ha, me. To begin, I like all the "dark" stuff, I'm the unreligious one, the one with political beliefs unlike most of my family, I'm not doing what I should be... Why is your favorite movie your favorite movie? It's just a masterpiece. I love love love animals, African one especially, and I find it to be an amazing story of courage and dedication to family. Plus I shamelessly love all the songs, haha. What’s an odor you hate? GASOLINE. FUCK. What’s a sound you hate? Fingernails on a chalkboard. Or screech-y noises in general. If money was no issue, what would you like to do right now? I was initially gonna say go to Yellowstone, but fuck that hot weather this time of year. So, this brings us back to Venus' terrarium; I'd want to get a new one and better materials. What’s something you’re so good at that you take pride in your skill? I wouldn't say I'm "so good" at it, but I do take pride in my writing. What’s something you’d never ever dare to ask another person? Hm. Under ANY circumstance, I guess "are you pregnant?" There's almost like... no situation where I'd be comfortable asking somebody that. What’s the worst/best thing you’ve done without your parents knowing? We're not getting into that lmao. Do you know anyone who has a hearing deficit? No. What is one thing stopping you from becoming a veterinarian? I could never stand seeing so many hurt and dying animals and still be okay at the end of the day. Are there any opinions you used to have even a few years ago that you look back on and think, “I can’t believe I ever thought that way”? THERE ARE!!!!!!!!!!! A LOT!!!!!!!!!!!!!! The last time you cried, what was wrong? I fell and skinned my knees when stepping over this barrier Mom made to keep the damn dog out of the hallway and thus my room to fuck with the cat and eat his food. I previously twisted my ankle, fell backwards, and had one other accident with it despite moving stuff, and I didn't cry from pain, just massive frustration. I want this dog GONE. Do you like multi-choice tests or tests you have to write out? Multiple choice. Who last called you ‘beautiful’? Couldn't tell ya, bud. Have you ever caught a firefly? Yeah, I did that lots as a kid. Do you own any camouflage? No. What’s the stinkiest pet you’ve ever had? Uhhh I dunno. Have you ever been on the news? For what? No. Have you ever seen one of your friends get arrested? No. Do you put sprinkles on anything? No, I hate sprinkles. How do you like your steak? Medium well. Long hair on guys: yes or no? Yaaaaaaaas. Is there a basement in your house? If so, what is it used for? No. When was the last time you started a new medication? It's been a while. What is your favourite type of nut? Cashews, I think. Where did you eat the best pizza you’ve ever eaten in your life? I'm so fuckin basic, like my genuine answer is Domino's lmaooo. Did you ever watch The Rugrats when you were a kid? Yeah, I loved that show. I even had the two video games; I was obsessed with the first one in particular. Do you know anyone who was adopted? Yes. Do your parents’ professions match their college degrees? No. Do you write shopping lists on paper or just remember it in your head? I don't do the shopping, so. But I would definitely need to write it down. Have you ever used a lawnmower? No. Have you ever consumed so much alcohol that you vomited? No. Can you tie balloons? No, actually. My hands are just too shaky. When was the last time you were at a pet store? A few weeks ago when we got rats for Venus. Ugh, it is SO overpriced; they come in a box of two, and as I feed her twice a month, it's honestly quite a bit of money. Like if I remember correctly, it's around $16. FOR TWO. SMALL. RATS. I've recommended we just buy them in bulk NOT from an overpriced chain pet store, but the problem with that is then we have *too* many, and the nutritional value of frozen rats apparently does degrade with time, so I don't want to feed my snake poor food. So it's just an annoying thing we have to do. Have you ever taken a pregnancy test? Not like, an at-home one. I've been tested before surgery, but that was just a safety protocol. Does your ex still think about you? "The" ex, probably not. Honestly, who is the last person to tell you that they love you? My mom. What is the last state you were in besides your own? Virginia. Would you go down to see the Titanic if given the chance? Man, that's kinda tempting. Maybe. It'd be super cool. Have you ever seen the Hollywood sign in real life? No. Did you ever see a scorpion in the wild? No, they don't live here. Do you type the proper way? Have you ever typed on a manual typewriter? Yes to both. What was your maternal grandmother’s first name? Cecelia. Name a word that people use locally that outsiders probably can’t pronounce. Conetoe. You said it wrong.

#survey #surveys #questions #lyrics: ''voices'' by motionless in white

[danceworshipper]

Gracie Chiva - HPHM Profile [Redone]

(information is as of sixth year - same universe as Tessa and River)

Identity

Name: Gracie Tessa Chiva

Gender: Female

Age: 16

Birthday: August 17th, 1973 at 3:28 am (leo)

Species: Human/Witch with altered DNA

Blood Status: Pureblood

Sexuality: Bisexual

Alignment: Chaotic Good

Ethnicity: White - German, English

Nationality: British

Residence: Chiva Manor, a heavily warded house in the wizarding part of the English countryside

Personality Type: ISFJ-T (the defender)

The Mage

Wand: 13 3/4 inches of rowan wood encasing a unicorn tail hair core, reasonably supple. The wand is a light color with intricate carvings on the handle and a small peridot sticking out of the front end. This is her only wand, as if her wand breaks she will die immediately. A few different people have put protective spells on it - the peridot is one of them, from Ollivander himself

Animagus: Osprey

Misc. Magical Abilities: Legilimens, very strong. Her Occlumency isn't as strong as it could be, but it's much stronger than Tessa's

Boggart Form: Tessa covered in bloody gashes, gagging and clearly dying

Riddikulus Form: the blood turning into fruit punch while Tessa whines about her shirt being stained

Amortentia (how she smells): Gracie would smell like citrus, poison, and strong wind

Amortentia (what she smells): She smells a mixture of pine trees, spearmint gum, and puffskein fur (Merula)

Patronus: Unicorn

Patronus Memory: the first time she and Tessa were ever allowed to go wandering in the woods on their own. They found a creek and spent the afternoon barefoot, eating berries and splashing each other

Mirror of Erised: Herself, truly happy and looking like she was never cursed

Specialized/Favorite Spells:

- Accio

- Crucio

- Sanguinem Non (stops bleeding, however intense)

- Depulso

- Gelida

Appearance

(picture made using the zepeto app)

Height: 5'6"

Weight: 118lbs

Physique: Skinny, slightly thinner waist than Tessa. Her strength comes more from magical ability than actual muscles

Eye Color: Unnaturally green

Hair Color: Bright white

Skin Tone: Deathly pale, has barely noticeable freckles around her nose

Body Modifications: Two piercings in each earlobe and a cartilage piercing in her left ear

Scarring: Small scars on knees from various childhood injuries, a thin line around her ankle from getting caught in a rope, and a small line on her right middle finger from a cooking incident

Inventory:

- Her wand, either gripped tightly in her hand or tucked in her waistband

- Her pocket knife, hidden in her robes/shorts

- About twenty Galleons

- An icy blue cracked marble to fidget with

Fashion: Gracie likes to look good, but also likes to be comfy. When not in her uniform, she's most likely wearing a thin sweater/shirt depending on the weather, and black skinny jeans or shorts. She frequently wears black fishnet tights, and black heeled ankle boots. Her hair is usually worn down. As for jewelry, she has a necklace with a gold key that unlocks a box full of Vance's childhood memories that he hid for her before he disappeared, mostly of the two of them. She also wears large gold hoops in each of the two piercings, and a gold stud in her cartilage. Makeup-wise she wears dark red lipstick, blush, and heavy dark eyeshadow and mascara. If she hadn't been cursed she might not wear any makeup at all, but as it is, she's insecure about how pale she is and wants to bring some color back to her face

Allegiances

Hogwarts House: Slytherin

Affiliations/Organizations:

- Chiva Family

- Black Family

- R (seventh year)

Professions:

- Current student

- Future Dark Arts Professor at Durmstrang

- Future author

Hogwarts Information

Class Grades:

- Arithmancy: E

- Astronomy: O

- Care of Magical Creatures: O

- Charms: E

- Defense Against the Dark Arts: O

- Flying: O

- Herbology: E

- History of Magic: E

- Potions: O

- Transfiguration: O

Quidditch: Knows how to play, but is not on the team

Extracurriculars:

- Potions Club

- Dueling Club

- Tutor for a few select first year Slytherins, including Aiden

Favorite Professors:

- Professor McGonagall: Despite not being her Head of House, Gracie would much rather turn to McGonagall for advice than Snape. She appreciates McGonagall's teaching style, and her relative lack of prejudice about house/upbringing

- Madam Hooch: When Gracie was first cursed, Madam Hooch was the one to help her calm down and start to accept her changed appearance. Hooch's yellow eyes and whiteish hair are not common either, so the similarities and Hooch's successful life helped Gracie see that she would be okay

Least Favorite Professors:

- Professor Snape: Gracie has never liked her Head of House. Snape is cruel to many of her classmates, grades based on his own opinion of the student, and makes learning in the classroom nearly impossible

- Professor Dumbledore: In the beginning, she didn't mind him, but as the years went on and he proved to be more and more useless during dangerous times, Gracie lost all respect for him. The final straw was when he told her that none of this would have happened if she had left it alone, because she knew that this wasn't her fault and if not for her people would be dead (Redacted's death doesn't happen in my canon)

Relationships

Twin Sister: Tessa Gracie Chiva

- Tessa is younger by eight and a half minutes

- Despite them being the same age, Gracie feels much older and more mature than her sister

- Tessa quit everything to do with the vaults after defeating the second one in third year, so she hasn't seen the horrors that Gracie has

- As such, Gracie feels extremely protective to her sister and tries to always keep her safe, far away from any danger. This is part of why she runs away in seventh year

- Gracie hasn't told Tessa about her crazes and unnatural sadistic urges yet. Tessa finds out a little information shortly before Gracie disappears

- Gracie loves her sister more than anyone else. When they fight, she's always the first one to start crying. She would do anything to protect Tessa, whether it be suffer immense torture, die, anything

- She's also jealous of Tessa's relative innocence

Older Brother: Vance Riley Chiva

- He's five years older than the twins

- As a little girl, Gracie worshipped Vance. He was older and cool, and he spoiled her

- The news of Vance's disappearance shattered her heart, and when she found the key, she spent hours going through all of the memories using her mother's pensieve

- Gracie's main motivation to start looking for the vaults was to find Vance. After finding him and seeing how different he was, she stopped caring about him and only continued to protect Tessa and her friends

- The first spell Gracie learned outside of class was the sticking charm, which she used to stick the clasp of her necklace to the back of her neck. She doesn't undo the spell until the very end of sixth year, when she loses all hope of getting her brother back

- The love she once felt turns to hate fast, but she can't bring herself to throw the key away, so she gives it to Tessa

Younger Cousin: Aiden Carter Darkling

- Aiden is the son of Rachel Chiva, Jason's sister. Rachel and Aiden's father divorced while he was still young, but it was relatively amicable and he comes around for holidays

- Gracie tutors Aiden and a couple of his friends in Potions

- She's always had a liking for the kid. She sees a bit of herself in him, from before she was lost to the vaults

- They aren't the closest, but other than (some of) her immediate family, Aiden is the only family member Gracie doesn't hate

Mother: Clarissa Vanessa Black

- Clarissa passed on her Legilimency to her children

- Gracie's relationship with her mother is strained these days

- They're actually closer than they used to be, with Gracie's favorite parent having been her father as a kid

- Clarissa legally separates from Jason after his arrest, and once she's wiped her hands of him, she and Gracie get closer

- Gracie knows about her mother's girlfriend. Clarissa's upbringing made her too afraid to ever come out, but she's bisexual and began dating her childhood friend Margaret (again) after Jason was arrested

- Gracie also knows that Margaret's husband didn't die of illness, but she never tells anyone that Margaret poisoned him because she had good reason to

- The silent acknowledgement of "I know about you and you know I know but we won't mention it" is the main sense of closeness she and her mother have

- They'll never be as close as they should be, but Gracie does love her mother and her mother does love her

Father: Jason Harvey Chiva

- Similarly to Vance, Gracie loved her father a lot as a kid and looked up to him

- He was an Auror, and a good one. She would beg to visit his office with him and learn about cases

- Despite being pureblood and approving of the Death Eaters, Jason was loving toward his children and never brought up his past

- Jason began acting strangely after she was cursed, but Gracie ignored it

- All the love Gracie felt for her father vanished the day she watched him murder their family friend, a week before she turned thirteen

- After turning him in to his Auror partner, Thomas, they discovered that Jason had killed eleven people in his search to find out who cursed his daughter

- Thus began Gracie's horrible trust issues. Even Vance hadn't ruined her ability to trust completely, but after her father the only two options were trust completely, or not trust at all. Gracie has never trusted another authority figure since (and also has major daddy issues)

- Gracie kills Jason when he escapes from his transfer (she's twenty two). She hates herself for it, but not because it was her father - he deserved it. She's upset that she broke her promise to never kill anyone again after Rakepick (even though both were totally justified - Jason tried to kill Margaret and Rakepick tried to kill most of her friends)

Love Interest: Merula Snyde

- In first year Gracie hated Merula. Merula was mean to Gracie's new friends and was boastful about being the best even though she clearly wasn't, and it was obnoxious having to share a dorm with her

- In second year it gets a bit worse, but then it gets a bit better too. It gets to the point where they don't hate each other and can coexist peacefully, but they still dislike each other

- Then third year starts

- Gracie gets off the train, grabs her stuff, starts heading for the castle, and bumps into Merula

- Merula snaps at her

- Instead of being annoyed, however, Gracie is frozen staring into Merula's eyes with a jolt in her heart

- Well, shit

- Gracie spends that whole year conflicted about if it was actually a crush, or if it was just strange feelings from a strange situation, and eventually lands on being bisexual and indeed having a crush on this girl she used to hate.

- She knows she's bisexual and not a lesbian because she had a small crush on one of the boys in her neighborhood, but that fades pretty quickly after getting back to school

- In fourth year, it starts becoming more apparent that Merula shares her feelings

- Gracie takes a risk and asks her to the Celestial Ball, and Merula says yes

- She and Merula had a lot of fun at the ball, and Gracie's heart nearly exploded during the slow dance

- A week later, Rowan is pissed with the pining and rants about it to Ismelda of all people, who then tells Merula to ask Gracie out before she gets murdered

- Merula does, very hesitantly, and they have their first proper date a few days later. It's awkward and they're scared, but once they open up it's easy to tell everything is mutual

- They have their first kiss that summer while Merula is visiting Gracie

- Fifth year, the night before going into the Portrait Vault, Gracie and Merula are awake, terrified that they'll die the next day

- An impulsive decision leads them to the Room of Requirement (Tessa had found it by accident the year before) and they lose their virginity together

- They don't die, and surviving together brings them closer

- Sixth year problems arise

- Merula is losing her mind, trying to be independent and refusing to be at all affectionate in public, but still clinging to Gracie at night with nightmares

- Gracie also wants Rakepick's head to rot on a stake, but Merula is letting her anger control her and Gracie doesn't know how to help her

- When Gracie runs away in seventh year, Merula will go insane

- When Gracie comes back, Merula will punch her in the face and then hold her close and not let go for over an hour

Best Friend: Rowan Khanna

- Gracie met Rowan in Ollivander's. Rowan walked in just as Ollivander told Gracie her wand wood and Rowan excitedly declared that they had to be best friends

- Being young and relatively sheltered, Gracie said alright because she didn't know how friends really worked

- They did become very close pretty quickly

- They wrote each other letters every day until school started

- Rowan is the only one to know the full extent of Gracie's curse, because she forced it out of her

- Rowan can be pretty scary when she wants to be

- They both know things about the other that no one else does, and they can (and have) talked about everything, even extremely uncomfortable subjects

- Gracie is almost scared by Rowan's level of loyalty, but tries to show her the same

- Gracie mentioned being terrified to be cornered by Rakepick or someone else, so Rowan didn't leave her side at all for a week

- The next time Rowan said something about being afraid, Gracie did the same thing

- Rowan made Gracie teach her the blood healing spell in case Gracie ever can't come back from a craze in time

- The two of them are so close Merula was at one point pretty jealous, but she can recognize that they're just very close friends

Rival: Olivia Green

- The first time Gracie heard of Olivia was when Vance complained about her dating Duncan

- After learning about the vaults and Olivia's involvement with Vance and Duncan, Gracie was determined to find out what happened to her. It takes until seventh year to find out

- (this could all change depending on where Jam City takes the story, but this is where I'm going for now)

- Olivia joined R a year before Duncan died, two years before Vance got trapped in the Portrait. She knew how bad they were, but R was the only place she felt she could grow her power and protect what little she had left, so she faked her own death in order to not be caught by any professors or other authority

- Neither Vance nor Duncan know she's alive

- Over the years Olivia grew cold and ruthless, but she still has a small soft spot for her old friends

- Gracie tries to hate Olivia for everything she's done, but can't help but agree with her reasoning

- Olivia is the one who convinces Gracie to join up with R in seventh year, which is when they end up becoming good friends instead of rivals

School Rival: Diego Caplan

- Gracie hates this boy with everything she has

- He's a flirt with no shame and an ego stretching for miles

- Every time he duels her she makes sure to kick his ass extra hard

- She really doesn't like that he and Tessa are good friends because she thinks he has ulterior motives (he used to, but not anymore)

Enemy: Patricia Rakepick

- Gracie's lack of trust/respect for authority means that Rakepick being brought in for the vaults felt like a direct threat to her. As Rakepick recruited her, Bill, and Merula, Gracie tried to play nice but it's clear she hates the woman

- It's likely that if Bill hadn't knocked her wand out of her hand, Gracie would have killed Rakepick in the Portrait Vault

- It wasn't a craze. She was just furious

- Gracie is as determined as Merula to kill Rakepick (stupid canon mc too weak to murder)

- Joining R will be uncomfortable at first, because Rakepick will taunt her, but they'll learn to work together

- No matter how the game goes, Gracie's adventure with the vaults will end in killing Rakepick

Dormmates:

- Tessa Chiva

- Rowan Khanna

- Merula Snyde

- Ismelda Murk: they could be considered friends, but they aren't as close as they could be

- Liz Tuttle: Liz was close to both of the twins at first, but now is way closer to Tessa

Pets:

- Ruby, the family Crup

- Clara, Vance's toad

- Elaura, an owl

- Lemmy, a moke (he's more Tessa's pet really)

- a bunch of creatures in the Reserve that Tessa and Liz coparent, and Gracie tags along sometimes

Closest Canon Friends:

- Jae Kim: a year of spending hours together everyday will do wonders for a friendship

- Penny Haywood: they've been drifting apart, but they spend a lot of time together in the Potions Club

- Charlie Weasley: they were partnered for a Charms project in year two and kept hanging out all the time after it was done

- Olivia Green (while in R)

Closest Non-Canon Friends:

- Tessa Chiva (technically not canon because mc has no siblings besides the Jacob character)

- Rosalie Sonnenschein: a German model who is one year older and attends Durmstrang. First generation part Veela with a very strong natural allure, which she trains Gracie to resist once it becomes apparent that she's affected

- Justin Freed (while in R): a young man one year older than Olivia. He's mean but he's funny, and he helps Gracie get adjusted to the whole group. He's a bit too egotistical and slightly overprotective over Olivia and Gracie as younger women, even though they're both fully capable (and stronger than him)

(Storyline has to be in a different post because of tumblr's dumb text limit)

Future

Marriage and Children: Before the wedding, Gracie timidly approaches Margaret, who married Clarissa two years prior, and asks if they can take her name since neither Gracie nor Merula want to be associated with their fathers anymore. Margaret tears up and tells her of course they can. Gracie gets married to Merula at age twenty five, becoming Gracie and Merula Miller. They get married on a beach, with ice cream cake instead of traditional wedding cake. Penny calls them up one day with the news that she's been working on a potion to allow a woman to become pregnant from another woman and asks them if they'd like to test it. At age twenty six, Gracie nearly passes out watching Merula give birth to their oldest daughter, Destiny. Three years later their second daughter, Dahlia, is born

Career: Gracie becomes the Dark Arts professor at Durmstrang at age twenty three. She's mocked by the other professors for being young and inexperienced, but after she kicks one of their asses in a duel they back off. She's a talented professor, and her curse actually allows her to be a test dummy of sorts for her students so that they're able to learn both from the book and from experience. After marrying Merula they move to Germany to be near Gracie's family, so she ends up being very talented at Apparation

The Second Wizarding War:

- Gracie is out of the country when the war happens, and only returns when she gets word of Bill's attack, leaving Merula and the kids in Germany to be safe (and avoid risking Merula run into her parents, because Gracie knows that Merula would try and duel them)

- She does not participate in the Battle of Hogwarts because if she did, she knew Tessa would too and couldn't risk her sister getting hurt

- She's horrified to discover that Olivia and Justin were some of the people who escaped Azkaban, but relieved that neither of them were spotted in the battle. Olivia shows up on Gracie's doorstep the day after the battle and begs Gracie to forgive her for everything, including killing Justin when he tried to join the Death Eaters. Gracie forgives her, and uses her Legilimency to figure out the best way to get Olivia out of her jail sentence

- Merula hates Olivia quite a bit when she realizes that this Olivia is the one in R (not because she was in R, but because she and Gracie hooked up a few times while they were there together), but is able to get along with her - especially when Olivia takes a great interest in Rosalie

Old Age and Death:

- Gracie dies at the age of one hundred and seventeen from natural causes. After her death, her wand snaps in half by itself

Personality

- Major introvert

- Craves touch, but won't ask for it unless she's super close with the person she wants it from

- Tries to think logically whenever possible

- Might be a bit of an adrenaline junkie

- When she gets upset, making her laugh is the best option

- Sentimental as all hell, borderlining on being a hoarder

- Prefers animals to humans most of the time

Misc Information

- Gracie is bilingual, fluent in both English and German

- She can play cello. She can also sing, but doesn't like doing it in front of other people

- Gracie's misophonia developed around age nine, but didn't start becoming a real issue until the anxiety and depression joined in at age eleven

- By the time Gracie meets Fleur, she's so good at blocking out Rosalie's allure that she doesn't even notice Fleur's. Speaking of Rosalie, she and Olivia do end up marrying

- Gracie nearly kills Tessa the first time a craze is strong enough to target a family member. Tessa falls off of a small cliff and ends up in a coma the day Gracie joins R

- Gracie doesn't find out about it until the next time she actually sees Tessa months later because the craze was strong enough to disorient her, and oh boy does she hate herself when she finds out

- Gracie never officially broke up with Merula when she joined R, but wrongly assumed she would find someone else. Gracie casually hooked up with a couple people in the meantime, including Olivia

- Olivia gives Gracie an amethyst necklace a few months after she joins R, and Gracie charms that one in place instead of Vance's

- Part of why Olivia was able to convince Gracie to join R was because Gracie had recently failed suicide and was desperate to find a way to get R away from Tessa and her friends. If she couldn't die (and get them to stop targeting her friends to get to her, was the faulty reasoning), she might as well join them and be able to warn her loved ones of upcoming attacks

- Vance jumps in front of Tessa during the last fight with R and dies without saying goodbye, which messes both of the twins up for a while

- Gracie's interest in being a professor stemmed from Rowan's. Rowan became Head Girl :) and lived a long happy life as a professor :))))))))

- Rowan also smacked Gracie when she came back from R, which is fair

- Gracie's favorite muggle thing is orange soda

- Gracie likes pineapple pizza

- She has a sweet tooth, but she really likes sour candy as well

- Her favorite color is blue and she feels like it's a betrayal to her house

- Gracie is forever a dog person because of Ruby. She had previously been a cat person

- She writes a lot of poems as she gets older, and eventually tries out creative writing. She loves it and publishes a few books

- Everyone in her immediate family is left handed besides her father

- Her natural body temperature is a few degrees lower than a normal human's. As such, she sweats more and is always warm to the touch (I don't think it makes sense, but that's how it works for me so...)

- She's obsessed with night. She loves being outside at night, looking at the stars when the air is slightly cooler and feeling alone and insignificant in the universe (it comforts her to know she doesn't matter - it's the depression talking)

- Loves thunderstorms

- Believes in aliens 100%

#hogwarts mystery #gracie chiva #character profile #hphm mc #zepeto

[wardencommanderrodimiss]

the branches and the roots

post-Spirit of Justice. Maya, still in Khura’in, looks in old records hoping to learn a little more about her family.

[on ao3]

----

The heavy wooden door, when it creaks open, dislodges pounds of dust from its frame and its intricately carved face. Maya sneezes into the sleeve of her robe. She lifts her face up out of it, stares into the dark windowless room ahead of her, and sneezes again. 

“Just wait a moment, if you think it is dusty now,” Prosecutor Sahdmadhi says. 

He told her to call him Nahyuta, so there’s a teasing Cuz or Yuty on the tip of her tongue, because family is family however distant, and family she calls things like Sis and Pearly and Nick. But she can’t quite access it. The tip of her tongue hits the back of her teeth and her jaw sticks shut and she’s avoided addressing him as anything. Plus he still calls her Miss Fey so it’s not like he’s figured it out either. 

She covers her face with her sleeve. “Okay,” she says. “I’m ready.”

Prosecutor Sahdmadhi arches one perfect eyebrow. He reminds Maya of what all the hanging scrolls of the former Masters depict; the old portraits are consolidated in the manor, a forest of women whose flaws are brushed away as they are enshrined in traditional inked artistry. He, and his mother, unreal, beautiful, the kind of elegance that Maya was told all her life to emulate and never could. The kind of regal grace that Pearly performed as soon as she was able to walk. 

(Poor perfect Pearl, such a prodigy, but of the branch family, forever damned to be nothing. Morgan was the only one who acted on making Pearl the Master, but Maya knows with the way other elders of the family looked at her when she started spending longer and longer stints down in the city, months at a time with Nick, that they hoped she’d be just like her mother and never come back. That the city would eat her too.)

They step into the darkness, their only light a flashlight that Maya holds, and a lantern Prosecutor Sahdmadhi brought. “I wonder when it was someone last came down here,” he says. His voice is muffled a little by his scarf pulled over his face to shield him from the initial wave of dust. The orange-ish lantern-light turns his skin and his hair and his clothes gold, all gold, and warm and alive, a reminder that this is not a tomb and they are not buried. “I suppose I can get estimate a range…”

He turns to the shelves on the left, closest to the door, and picks up the first scroll-container there. This dusty room in the basement of the palace - Maya kept calling it the dungeons, and Nahyuta didn’t laugh, and she felt a pang of homesickness for the family that laughs at all her stupid jokes, and then she wondered if there are actual dungeons that Ga’ran and Inga used and that’s why he didn’t laugh, and her homesickness turns to sorrow - is an archive, of a sort, but the only information they are keen on recording in here is geneaology. Carefully preserved scrolls sit stacked on shelves around the room’s walls, a number she can’t estimate because she can’t see them all at once swinging the flashlight all around. A solid-looking wooden table stands in the center of the room. Prosecutor Sahdmadhi sets his lantern down there and spreads out the scroll. 

“How did anyone do anything down here before batteries existed?” Maya asks. She shines her flashlight up at the ceiling, almost expecting to find eyes or a face leering down at her, like this is a horror movie and not still part of a very lived-in palace. Much as this room hasn’t been lived-in, or walked in, and certainly not vacuumed or dusted in. 

“There are oil lamp holders on the walls,” Prosecutor Sahdmadhi answers. “And candles.” He doesn’t quite sound disparaging but he’s pretty close to it. 

“And risk setting everything on fire?” Thousands of years of the royal line up in smoke because someone was clumsy. Someone like Maya, who makes movements too quick and too big and takes up space in an unrefined manner. 

Prosecutor Sahdmadhi doesn’t answer and moments later he’s murmuring, almost to himself, “So it’s been at least fifteen years since someone cared to come here and update anything,” he says.

“What do you mean?” Maya lowers her flashlight from examining the lamp holders on the walls so she won’t shine it straight in his eyes and approaches the table, to where he is pointing at something. The names are tricky to decipher, even after two years of extremely immersive study of Khura’inese, but one she knows is Ga’ran’s even without the little crown drawn above it, and the other is very, very long, so that must be Inga. A family tree.

Prosecutor Sahdmadhi taps his fingers between the two names, where a line is drawn between them to signify marriage, but no other line extends from that one, no other name beneath theirs. “They never put Rayfa down as their child, or as existing at all. There were rather more pressing matters when kidnapping your sister’s daughter, and forcing your sister to live as a nursemaid and your double, else you’ll kill them both.”

He says it all so dry, deadpan, because he must have gotten used to living with that over his head, become resigned to the reality of that, the way Nick almost laughs when he’s talking about his poker-playing years even if it’s an obviously bitter laugh, and like with Nick, Maya wants to hug him, but she doesn’t think he’d appreciate that. Certainly she would ask first but he’s already saying something else and the time for asking is passed. “This will have to be redone afresh on a new scroll.”

“Why?” Maya asks. “They didn’t write the princess down at all, so you could just add her under—”

Under your parents, but her eyes follow his fingers brushing across the parchment and all the muscles in his hand tighten when he reaches his mother’s name and the blackened, burned holes next to and beneath her name.

“Another reason candles are so practical for this work of genealogy,” Prosecutor Sahdmadhi says, and this time he isn’t dry or deadpan. His voice is dripping, anger barely contained, not swallowed and barely held in his mouth to stop him from spitting that fury that’s justified if unbecoming of a monk and prince regent. (Unbecoming of a Master, too. Maya’s spent two years in Khura’in trying to learn to be the Master, and she’s a stronger medium than ever but she still only sometimes knows how she’s supposed to act, how to become the Master and not Maya. Maya has too many feelings, Maya has too much righteous indignation to be as calm as the Master is supposed to be, but Her Benevolence Princess Rayfa is also full of fury and still a beloved princess, so maybe that’s okay. To feel things. To be angry.) “Fire right at hand to burn out the sinful heretics.”

“Cut off the branches,” Maya says. Morgan tried to do that literally, with her last plan, pruning the tree violently, and Ga’ran literally used fire to burn the Sahdmadhis out of the royal family. “You were a baby. You didn’t do anything wrong. You were as much the queen’s child as you were Dhurke’s.”

“I’m sure there would have been some contention over my expulsion from the family had I been a girl,” Prosecutor Sahdmadhi says. “You can’t turn a potential medium loose into rebel hands, after all. But I wasn’t, and so the only blood of mine that mattered was that of my allegedly criminal father.”

“How did you ever become a prosecutor like that?” she asks. She asked to come down here searching for something about their family long ago, wanting to find the place where Khura’in and Kurain broke apart forever, but the affairs of a thousand years ago suddenly pale in importance to what happened a month ago. What happened fifteen years ago, and twenty-three years ago. Living family more important than the dead. 

(Especially since she hasn’t ever gotten the chance to speak with Nahyuta one-on-one before. Not even talk with him and Princess Rayfa and Queen Amara together. Prosecutor Prince-Regent Sahdmadhi seems to be everywhere at once, trying to do everything all at once, the way his brother is trying to take up every criminal and civil defense all at once. Maya’s spent more time with Apollo than she expected to, but she’s got more legal experience than Datz and Ahlbi who are also trying to help him run his law office, and they need someone who knows all about it. Putting on the skin of co-counsel and legal assistant is easier than trying to find the skin of Master. And she wants to help her family, and Apollo is family, two different ways. Via Nick, and via her distant Khurainese cousins.)

“When I emerged from the woods claiming to renounce the rebels and wanting to work as a prosecutor to bring an end to them” - Prosecutor Sahdmadhi snorts, his hands curling tight around the edge of the table - “Ga’ran made a great show of being a benevolent queen willing to forgive the child of her sister’s murderer and integrate him into her regime’s legal system. And then she dragged me out of earshot of her guards and snapped a leash around my neck and told me it would be Rayfa’s noose if I ever dared step out of line.”

Maya thinks of Shelley de Killer. A sword hanging overhead to force the desired result. Her mouth is dry. She nods. Prosecutor Sahdmadhi isn’t even looking at her anyway. “Her claims of forgiveness changed the minds of no other prosecutor, and there is a reason I started prosecuting internationally. Not just because there was no fear of facing my father’s friends on the stand and damning them in this farce of justice, but because my colleagues would not be cruel for my name, and because the leash choked me a little less when I did not have Ga’ran’s eyes constantly on me. Do you know, some of the other Khura’inese prosecutors called it favoritism that she had for me. Special treatment, that she often called me to the palace, tasked me with giving the princess a cursory understanding of the legal system or assisting her at crime scenes - it was all a sick game to her. I could spend time with my sister and no one must ever know it. I imagine she enjoyed watching me try to stay detached. Watching me squirm.”

“She’s a monster,” Maya says. 

“Unfortunately not.” Prosecutor Sahdmadhi rolls the scroll back up, his fingers tight around it crumpling it, because this sheet is already tainted, already wrong, and it doesn’t matter if he ruins it. “She’s human, just as the rest of us are.” He sets the scroll aside, near his lantern, rather than put it back. There’s no reason to put it back when it needs to be redone. She wonders if he’ll burn Ga’ran and Inga out of the tree in retaliation. Like Pearly splattering gravy on the hanging scroll of her mother - destroy the records of the family that some other family didn’t want around. She doubts it, somehow, that Prosecutor Sahdmadhi would do that. 

“Now,” he says, curtly, businesslike, like a prosecutor, “this ancestor of ours who founded your channeling school, how long ago did she live?”

-

There is not necessarily a guarantee that Ami Fey will appear anywhere in the genealogy of the Khura’inese royals. It may have been her mother or grandmother who left for Japan, and simply Ami who once there decided to turn their spiritual power again into real power, not as a queen but as a Master. A wise woman with the wisdom of the dead in hand. Or Ami Fey may not have been known as Ami in Khura’in; it may have been a name she took upon leaving. 

Or she may, as they come to realize, have been a branch burned from the tree for leaving and taking their spiritual secrets with her. 

“I suppose this must be her, then,” Prosecutor Sahdmadhi says, “as we have been through everything else and…” He gestures at the shelves on either side of them. They have searched the generations that lie around the era that Ami should have lived, finding no trace of her name or a Khura’inese equivalent. What they have found, what Prosecutor Sahdmadhi concludes is the junction where their families broke apart, is another searing burn, blackened edges of a hole through the parchment, the sole person to have been stricken from the family in half a dozen generations on either side. A daughter; in the scorch marks, when they squint, the light right on the page, both of them hunched over it and struggling to keep their long hair out of the way, they can see that this disavowed disgrace was a daughter. 

“Her,” Prosecutor Sahdmadhi repeats, “or whoever came to bore her, and taught her of the powers of our bloodline. Perhaps she had only some limited knowledge some mothers before her carried out of our homeland, that she came to make her own.”

Our homeland. Does he mean that Khura’in is home to her? It is tradition in the village for the Master to study in Khura’in; did her mother think of it as her homeland? (Did she keep secret her blood’s connection to the royal family? It would have been Amara’s mother on the throne then. How did she rule - did she lay down a hand of fear that would have left Misty cautious to confess her identity, as Maya had been?) What is home - is it Kurain, or Khura’in, or Los Angeles? Is it the village she grew up in, or the city where she found her truest self? She and Apollo share a fond longing for the perks of the city, of one kind of home, and the confusion of not knowing whether to call that place home, or instead consider home the place in the mountains where each of them formed their first memories. 

“They disowned her for leaving, then,” Maya says. “They - they do that too, in my village. If you’re gone for twenty years, you’re considered dead and stripped of your rank and titles and - everything.” That’s what they say, anyway. No one has actually fully disappeared like that to test it. Her mother almost had, and then Maya would have found out whether the elders truly meant to erase Misty from the halls of the manor and the scrolls of the Masters, or simply, finally, pass her title along.

“Spirit channeling is a powerful tool, jealously guarded by individuals who want to hoard that power for themselves,” Prosecutor Sahdmadhi says. “For there to be some outsider who know the secret undermines its exclusivity and its power. It does not surprise me that the act of leaving would so be considered a betrayal, enough to leave one little more than ashes.” He touches his fingertips to the parchment. 

“Or gravy,” Maya says. Prosecutor Sahdmadhi’s eyes dart suspiciously toward her. “Never mind,” she adds hurriedly. “So then, um, we read these right to left, when it comes to ages?”

Prosecutor Sahdmadhi nods. He taps his fingers along all of the other names in a row with the burn mark, the siblings of this persona non grata, and then the row up above, their mother’s siblings. “Yes,” he says. “And our subject here was the youngest daughter of a youngest daughter, and each of them with several sisters. Ami - we will presume, for ease of referring to her, that this was your Ami who has been stricken from the tree - had nothing in her future, no position of prestige or power waiting for her.” He sighs, stepping back, closing his bright eyes and pondering for a moment, as though he may begin a recitation. “Our royal line and our country was founded on a story of two sisters - the elder, a medium so powerful she was revered as a goddess by the people she led, and the younger, who lacked the power to channel spirits but nonetheless stood as the country’s loyal and beloved protector.”

His eyes open. “It should be a position of honor, even to be a younger sister, or even to be one who could not channel. But somewhere that was lost, and being unable to channel or become queen became a source of great shame - as though the only worthy and admirable position there ever is to hold is Queen.” Shaking his head, he continues, “My aunt should have been our people’s great protector, our country’s loyal guardian. Instead she nearly destroyed us, out of jealousy, because our family has come to be such a way that for younger daughters such as Ga’ran and Ami, no future awaits.”

The equating of the two of them - Kurain Village’s revered founder, and the evil queen - makes Maya uncomfortable. Yes, they were both the younger sister, as was Lady Kee’ra, and Lady Kee’ra the younger of two as Ga’ran was, but that is all that Ga’ran shares with either of them. And that is all that Ga’ran shares with—

“I’m the younger daughter,” Maya says. Prosecutor Sahdmadhi looks at her straight on again. Honestly, even Maya has gotten bored sometimes - often - with Kurain Village genealogy and whatever else, even while she’s come to be curious about Khura’in. She wouldn’t blame Prosecutor Sadhmadhi for not wanting to hear it. But he appears genuinely intrigued by what Maya has just said, to be waiting for her to continue telling him about her family tree in Kurain. Something in his eyes urges her to continue, but she can’t get more than one more sentence out through the tightness in her throat. “And so was my mother, the Master of the village before me.”

“What happened?” he asks. She wonders what his guess is. It would be reasonable to assume that they both had older sisters who died - reasonable in any other family, but they are not any other family, the Feys and the royals. If there’s anyone in the world who could make a guess that lands close to the truth of all that Morgan Fey did, it would be Nahyuta. He could know.

And she knows when she tells him, he’ll understand. “Aunt Morgan, my mom’s older sister, wasn’t a very powerful medium. So when the elders convened, they passed her by and gave the title of Master to my mother. And Aunt Morgan had been counting on the power and status that being Master would give, and her husband had too. Her - her first husband.” The implication there tells the rest of that story. It’s exactly what Prosecutor Sahdmadhi can assume it is. “And then my mother was consulted on a murder case, and was disgraced, and she decided that should mean that she should disappear—”

“That was the DL-6 incident of 2001, yes?” Prosecutor Sahdmadhi asks. Maya blinks. “After we witnessed your channeling prowess in your trial, and I returned to Los Angeles, I researched Kurain Village and your family.”

Yes, she was going to tell him about it all - but something about the fact that he already knows it feels like a betrayal of trust. Like she was going to welcome him into her house and then he pushed past her and pulled out a copy of her front door key and used it because he’d stolen it from her a week ago and had a copy made. Except in this analogy her key is a matter of public record. “So you know about all about that ton of murder cases we’ve been caught up in,” she says, and the words still fall out of her mouth bitter. 

“Your aunt tried to frame you for murder,” he replies.

“Guess why.” That sounds bitter as well, but she didn’t mean it to. Morgan’s motive wasn’t part of the actual case as was presented in court, as became part of the transcript. But Nahyuta could know.

“I suppose I may reason that she had, at that point a daughter capable of channeling, whose only path to inheriting the title was through you.” He speaks with confidence, but his expression is puzzled. He wouldn’t know why she has suddenly soured on the conversation. She shouldn’t be mad - it saves her at least ten minutes of explanation if he knows DL-6, and then the incident in Kurain Village, beforehand - but that emotion reared its stupid head anyway. 

“My cousin Pearly,” Maya says, shaking off her frustration. She can’t stay mad at one of the few people who can truly understand. “She’s about as strong as me and ten years younger. A real prodigy. But she was - we call it the branch family, the ones descended from whichever sisters didn’t become Master. And branch family meant, she’d be nothing. She doesn’t care about the titles, but Aunt Morgan sure did.”

“And your aunt was the older daughter,” Prosecutor Sahdmadhi muses. “And passed by despite it. She acted as she did because you were the one to inherit the title - yet you are, as you said, the younger daughter, who should not have had that in her future.” He doesn’t ask a question, but his tone and his eyes make it clear that this is an inquiry.

“You said you researched my family,” Maya says. His family too, at a distance. “If you dredged up every court case with a Fey involved, you know why. You know why this younger daughter gets the title, and it wasn’t anything about who was the stronger medium.”

“I am sure I do,” Prosecutor Sahdmadhi says, “but please, I would like to hear from you - tell me about your sister.”

Maya swallows the lump in her throat and blinks to dispel the burning behind her eyes. “She was amazing,” she says. “She was - she left the village, for me. To try and find our mother, and so she wouldn’t have to compete with me to be Master. So we wouldn’t end up hating each other like our mom and Aunt Morgan did.” Her eyes burn again, after a few seconds’ respite. “I hated her sometimes anyway, for leaving me alone, but that was different than hating her like - like our moms and aunts.”

The plural emerges from her lips without really thinking, but when she does think, she realizes she doesn’t know how her mom felt about Morgan. Did she hate her for all she tried to do? Or did she love her older sister with both pity and anger instead? How did Misty and Morgan feel about each other when they were children? Did Ga’ran love her older sister or spare her only out of the practicality of needing a stand-in to channel spirits? 

“She was a defense attorney,” Maya adds, knowing that Prosecutor Sahdmadhi knows it, but now he can hear it from her, like he asked. “She was Nick’s mentor, and she saved him, and she taught him all of his tricks that he used to beat you.” She grins, despite herself. A faint shadow of a smile crosses Nahyuta’s face. He’s glad he lost. She knows that now. “I wish you could’ve met her.”

The smile fades. “Do you?” he asks. “I put you through hell, and that I did it because I thought it the only way to protect my sister is no excuse, one I cannot imagine her tolerating, not when I am sure that she too must so have loved her own sister.”

Maya runs her hand over the beads of her necklace. Mia wore a magatama until the day she died, and every day she returned after; she kept that connection to a home that she abandoned not because she hated the place, but because she loved who remained there. “I’ve been accused of murder a lot,” Maya says. “Like, a lot, you know.” She glances away from him, doesn’t see if he nods. “And you know, some of the prosecutors who did that, tried so hard to get me convicted of murder because they had perfect win records to maintain?” Tried to act as heartless demons like Nahyuta did, because it’s easier that way, easier to turn cold, to never feel. “We became friends. And are, still.” Edgeworth paid for the flight, after all. “I forgave them. I forgive you. I’m sure Sis would too.”

“You think so?” Nahyuta asks. He sounds honestly concerned that a woman who’s been dead for more than a decade wouldn’t like him. 

“Yeah,” Maya says. “She - I mean, she had experience with the blackmail thing. She spent years on a case like that. Building a case against the horrible man who leaked the news of our mother’s involvement in DL-6 to the press, building up evidence of all of the people he blackmailed to suicide and ruin. She knows you have to strike at the top. And she’d know that you loved your sister. That - that does mean something.” 

They didn’t talk about it, really, but Maya knows that, like she herself did, Mia forgave Godot-Diego for his stupid, prideful plan that ended with him killing their mother. People with good intentions and hurting hearts do ugly, painful things for love. People get trapped and can’t see another way out. She’s forgiven Tahrust Inmee for framing her for murder. People do desperate, mad things for love. Khura’in is a country of mountains and on another mountain on the other side of the sea, years ago, Maya learned a lot that she carries with her.

“Did she ever find your mother?” Nahyuta asks softly. She thinks he must be thinking about his own lost mother who he only just found. She imagines the anguish he felt when she was shot, not knowing if he would ever see her again to catch up on the lost years. She remembers lying on a courthouse couch, her sister with Pearly’s robes smoothing Maya’s hair back from her face and telling her that their mother is dead. Maya remembers not knowing how to mourn a woman she never knew and couldn’t recognize. Nahyuta knew his mother for a time when he was old enough to remember; his situation wasn’t the same, and it didn’t end the same, and Maya is so glad for it.

“No,” Maya says, and Nahyuta’s eyes sadden. “She - she didn’t. Sis thought, I guess, that - 

that if she could find out and expose that blackmailer for everything he’d done, then - then our mother would come out of hiding, I guess. Would come home. And instead, that horrible, horrible man murdered my sister, and tried to frame me, and Nick, for it.” 

There it is again, the pain behind her eyes of sharp tears gathering. “Nick and I took him down but it was too late for Sis. And she was so - she was so young, I keep thinking now, because I’m - I’m older than she was when she died. Does that make me not the younger sister, anymore? I’m older than my older sister. Am I - what am I, then, by birthright? Of course I’m going to be the Master someday, because I’m - I’m the oldest daughter now, aren’t I? Only because I’m the one that lived.”

Nahyuta doesn’t say anything. What is there to say? More than almost anyone else in the entire world - more than anyone but Queen Amara herself - he understands, has lived such a same awful nightmare, and there’s nothing to say. There’s no consolation.

“Sometimes I think I shouldn’t have kids,” Maya adds. “Most of the time I think it. And if Pearly didn’t either we could just - put an end to this. Is it worth it? For the world to have this - us, to channel the dead, is it worth it if it keeps ruining the living?” How many more neglected sons and dead daughters will their bloodline see? Why are they the sacrifice for this power to continue to exist? Why should the dead be prioritized over the living mediums who call them back?

“Maybe I’ll adopt,” she says. “If I ever want kids. Like - Nick adopting a kid worked out really well for them both. Then I could get to have kids without perpetuating this - this cycle.”

“Our shared blood spilled again and again,” Nahyuta says.

“One of my cousins, who can’t even channel, still became a nun because our family is so fucked up,” Maya says. And that’s a bit of a simplification of Iris’ choice and situation, but it’s also exactly what happened, isn’t it? Shut herself away to atone for the crime of loving her sister and also those other crimes - willing to do whatever it took to protect Maya from Morgan’s plot because she knew no other way to atone for the sins of herself and her sister and mother. “I don’t know. Am I overreacting to say that we need to swear a pact, like you and me and Pearly and Her Benevolence, to not have any biological children so that we can end the bloodline? Like is that - is that blaming the wrong thing? The blood and not—”

Not us? 

“Is our family always so damned to turn out this way?” Nahyuta asks, rephrasing her fumbling questions so elegantly. “Do we have a choice in what we become? Or say perhaps we should swear to do better - and perhaps we do, for a generation or two. And then what? The Holy Mother and Lady Kee’ra gave us the best example they could of how to protect Khura’in, how to rule and serve its people while loving each other, and look how that became corrupted. Look how Lady Ami left, and her descendants set out across the sea, and still in your faraway village older and younger sisters go to war with each other.” He gives her a sad smile, his eyes even sadder. “Of course it seems the inevitable fate of our bloodline, given what both your branch and mine have lived through, Cousin.”

“Shit sucks,” Maya says. She needs to ask Datz to teach her some good curses in Khura’inese. All she knows is how to damn people to various hells, and sometimes that just isn’t the vibe she’s going for with her swearing. 

Nahyuta laughs softly. “Indeed it does.”

Maya reaches out and pulls the scroll back closer to her. Ami, the daughter who founded her branch of their ancient family, nothing more than a nameless scorch mark. What else should Maya have expected to find? She knows how her family is, home and here. Why not a thousand years ago, the same? She should have expected it, the fire and the pruned branches. Then and now.

“Does that mean you’re on board with the no-kids pact?” She glances back at Nahyuta. “Or do I just like, really not want kids actually and I’m just trying to find justifiable excuses when ‘I don’t want kids’ can be its own excuse?” She’s babbling. The Master is not supposed to babble. “Have you ever thought about if you want—?”

Something dark and sad crosses his face. “I have no idea what I ‘want’,” he says, making a sarcastic quotation mark in the air with one hand, and Maya almost laughs because that’s some of the most informal expressiveness she’s ever seen from him. “Until a very recent time, all I could hope to ‘want’ for the future was that I would die before I was thirty and be freed of this, for no hell in death I’ve ever heard of could be worse than the one I lived.”

Maya regrets asking. “Oh,” she says. “I’m sorry.”

“I suppose that is some argument in support of your suggestion,” he continues, like the way Nick talks about being disbarred, where he blithely talks past anyone’s sympathy or acknowledgement of how fucked up it was. “Given that it was a hell my own aunt made for me. Is there anything else you wished to examine down here?”

Nick talks past it because he can’t let himself pause to consider how fucked up it was, because he’s treading water and has to keep moving and if he stops to think he’ll drown. Maya knows this because she’s done the same. She kept a smile on her face and kept moving because she had to keep Pearly’s head above water, again and again. Nick has Trucy. Nahyuta has Rayfa and the entire country of Khura’in. “No,” Maya says, rolling up the ancient scroll to return it to its place. “That’s all I was looking for down here.”

Nahyuta nods. He points her to the spot on the shelves, the carefully ordered archive of their family’s burdensome history, the spot where Ami was excised from. They stand there, after, silently, eyeing the shelves in the gloom, as though both reluctant to leave it. “I suppose,” Nahyuta says softly, barely more than a breath, “that it is not quite true to say that I have never given thought to the matter of children. What I want, I do not know. But that I am regent now, I have wondered too, as we said before, what will be next? Holy Mother forbid my sister ever become a tyrant, but what of her potential future daughters? What of - what, perhaps, of mine? How shall we safeguard our country from our own descendants?”

“I hear democracies work okay sometimes,” Maya says. And sometimes there are the Paul Atishons of the world who commit murder in the course of running for a village council position. Sometimes, there are people - greedy, selfish, ambitious people - and everything goes wrong. 

Nahyuta’s mouth twists in a small smirk. She’s certainly hedging her bets with her phrasing, she knows.

“I guess even if you decided to not have kids so they or your grandkids or great-grandkids can’t ruin everything for everyone again,” Maya says, “you and Her Benevolence would still have to restructure the entire government because—”

“Because our entire line of succession is based on spirit channeling, yes,” Nahyuta says. “Thousands of years of tradition and direct descent, and we stand poised to overturn it all.” He shakes his head. “My most immediate concern has been piecing our legal system back together and undoing all the false verdicts that Ga’ran’s rule has wrought, as you and my brother are well aware, but I have had some discussion with my mother and sister about introducing a parliamentary system.” He folds his arms behind his back, shifting his wait like he is about to start moving, and then he doesn’t, and they remain there in the dark. “Even if our family should play out its bloody feuds again, we may at least limit the casualties. Our people should not suffer from a despot’s unilateral decrees just because one sister so envies the other.”

Envy, yes - it was jealousy, and ambition, and selfishness, and people died. It was Morgan expecting that she was owed her birthright and unable to cope when her more talented younger sister overtook her as Master. It was Ga’ran expecting nothing and wanting it all the same, desiring for herself the admiration that Khura’in’s people had for her older sister, the beloved queen, but only able to make herself feared, not loved. People are dead because one sister got what the other wanted.

Kurain Village teaches that channeling is a gift from the gods, but a gift shouldn’t come with a price to pay. 

“What does Her Benevolence think of that?” Maya asks. She respects Rayfa, the princess wo held too much responsibility at such a young age and now has had her world shattered several times over and stepped up from it stronger, and she never should have had to live any of this. She should not have had to learn that her mother was not her mother and was a monster, and her father who was not her father by blood was a monster, and the other father she could have had was already dead. Like Pearly, if such a tragedy ever had to befall her, why did it have to be when she was so young? Everything Princess Rayfa went through, Maya thinks, might make her understand the same facts that Maya and Nahyuta understand. 

“She agrees,” Nahyuta says, as Maya thought she would. “Lady Kee’ra and the Holy Mother were Khura’in’s great protectors. Perhaps this is what protecting our country means now - protecting it too from the worst of ourselves.” He sweeps a strand of hair back behind his ear and the shiny gold earrings there. “And I owe a great many thanks to Phoenix Wright, and you, for first helping Rayfa on the path to understanding these such matters. For teaching her what I could not.”

“I’m glad we could,” Maya says. “I really am glad. I think Khura’in is lucky to have you both now.”

Nahyuta glances away, like he doesn’t really know how he’s supposed to respond to genuine concern and compliment. How long was he under Ga’ran’s thumb? How many years of being unable to have a heart, because it was his heart that Ga’ran used against him - how many years was he in a pit of vipers with no one who was allowed to care about him? If Maya knew she doesn’t quite remember. 

“I will do whatever I can to support Her Benevolence, and to repair all the wrongs that have been done to our country,” Nahyuta says stiffly, forcing the words out. “I owe - for all I stood complicit in, I—” He is still staring at the far wall, and he squeezes his eyes shut and takes a moment to compose himself. “I owe my father so much more, but this much I am able to do. This I may change.” He blinks his eyes shut again and twists his beaded prayer necklace around his fingers. “I cannot make it up to him, but I will try.”

Maya’s stomach sinks. 

Only once has Apollo ever broached the topic of the three days she spent channeling his father, and that was just to know if she had any awareness of what was going on while she was channeling. The answer is no and a noncommittal vague shrug, because her soul vacates her body but spirits leave behind traces of feelings on their departure. When Tahrust left her she felt at peace, a sense of justice imparted and no regret remaining, for about three seconds until she remembered where she was and that she and Nick might be executed depending on what the high priest did or didn’t say. 

After Dhurke left, she was exhausted, mostly, and a bit confused why he was already gone because she didn’t think he had yet accomplished all he meant to - but more than that sense of unfinished business, there was love. Love for all three of his children, love for his wife, love for his rebels and his country. Everything he did was for love, and for once, the choices made for love weren’t stupid and messy. And still they ended with such pain. 

Talking to Apollo then, she remembered how much Dhurke loved his son, enough that for a moment she couldn’t breathe with it. (She wondered if this was how much her mother loved her.) And talking to Nahyuta now—

“You don’t need to make anything up to him,” Maya says. Nahyuta turns his head so that she can’t even see the pained expression on his face, but she can see his hands curled up to his chest, clutching the dragon tattooed on his palm close to his heart. “He loved you. He forgave you from the start. He understood why, and he loved you.”

“Don’t,” Nahyuta whispers. “You can’t say that—”

“I know he - hey!” 

Nahyuta spins on his heel, heading for the door. Maya runs after him, grabbing onto his arm and hanging firm even as he twists in her grasp and slams the heavy doors behind them with a thunderous thud that makes the floor beneath their feet shudder. Nahyuta scowls at her; Maya scowls back, and when he breaks eye contact first, his shoulders slumping a little, Maya risks releasing her cousin’s arm. He studies his boots instead of leaving.

“I’d channel him so he could tell you himself,” Maya says, “but for one thing, I don’t know if that actually - helps. With getting closure.” Nahyuta looks at her from the corner of his eyes. A question. She goes on, her eyes stinging as she does. “Me and Nick with my sister, that whenever I’d channel her, or Pearly would, I wondered like maybe we were just picking at a scab and it’d never heal because she was here again, but she wasn’t here, not enough. She was always just out of reach, even when I got to hug her and tell her I loved her, I - I don’t know.” 

She never considered asking Pearl to channel Misty so that Maya could talk to her mother for the only time ever in her life. Both because she thought that Pearly would find the guilt unbearable, and Pearly feeling in any way responsible for what happened on that mountain is the last thing Maya has ever wanted, and because she doesn’t know what to say or how to get closure with a woman she never really knew. She had never come to terms with her mother’s disappearance, really, but then just the knowing - knowing that she was dead and no longer somewhere just at the tips of Maya’s fingertips if she reached far enough and looked hard enough - was the closure. Not closure enough, never enough, but the best Maya figures she could ever get in that situation. 

“Ask Lady Inmee if she felt the chance to say a final goodbye to her husband made the loss any less painful,” Nahyuta says. “To hear from him one last time that she loved him, when she knew that, and to tell him one last time that she loved him when he knew such.”

“Yeah,” Maya says softly. When Nahyuta resumes walking, it is to set a pace that she can easily keep beside him as he leads her through the maze of halls. She swallows her nerves, shoves aside the little bit of her mind that is convinced she is overstepping bounds, because when has she ever cared about that, and she already did once this conversation so why not finish it off? 

“And for the other thing,” she says, and Nahyuta turns his head sharply, his hair swinging, to look at her, like he’d forgotten that she started talking in a way that signaled that she had more than one point about channelings and closure, “I don’t think it would really change that much about how you feel, for you to hear your father say he’s forgiven you.”

Nahyuta stops, but doesn’t make to flee. He just stops, waiting for her to finish before they ascend to the ground floor of the palace, out of the records of the dead and back to their living family who still need their help. “I think you need to forgive you,” Maya says. 

He doesn’t say anything. He doesn’t say anything as they stride through the palace, passing guards in the lived-in halls, and she expects when they reach the front gates that he will throw her unceremoniously out. But he instead steps with her into the sun, out into the colorful, bustling streets of the capital, where here in the land of the living the people they pass have nods and bows of acknowledgement - for Nahyuta, mostly, of course but Maya too, and it never fails to amaze her. She spent two years here coming to know the people while hiding a part of herself, and now they know, and that and so much more has changed.

Nahyuta stops to chat with a sweet bun vendor, and through the quick conversation Maya gathers that the woman was one of the Dragons. They come away with a pastry for each of them, and it seems like Nahyuta has waited for her to take a bite and be unable to speak for him to finally say, “You make it sound so simple. As though it is easy to - how? How am I to...?”

Joke’s on him; Maya can easily talk through a mouthful of bun, even if it’s not helpful. “Wish I knew.”

Rather than stuff it in his face, Nahyuta breaks off a small piece of the bun and pops it into his mouth. The delicate, refined mannerisms he sometimes shows almost make Maya snort when she thinks about him learning manners while living in a shack in the mountains, that chaotic, feral childhood that Apollo has described a few times. Instead of laughing, she swallows her mouthful and says, “No, really, trust me, I do wish I knew.” How to forgive oneself a guilt of the kind so deep and painful it could drive a person to consider choosing death instead - that would be a power far greater than channeling spirits. Maybe that would be a gift that didn’t come intertwined with pain, but it isn’t the one Maya has. “I wish I was any help at all.”

She waits a moment to see if Nahyuta will reply right away, and when he doesn’t, she takes a large bite of her sweet bun again and raises her eyebrows in the best disdainful look she can muster, in response to Nahyuta watching her shove pastry down her face in the most undignified of ways. He rolls his eyes. She is still chewing when he says, “You were. Thank you, Maya.”

This deserves more dignity than talking with her mouth full can merit. The delay is at least two seconds until she can say, “Oh,” a reply that still surely lacks dignity. “You’re - you’re welcome.”

A warbaa’d roars and they both jump. A dog barks, and then another, another layer of noise over the loud bazaar. Maya closes her eyes to take in the ambience, all the voices chattering, catching up with neighbors and bartering for their groceries. “It feels different here now,” Maya says. 

“What do you mean?” Nahyuta asks. 

“I didn’t notice until it wasn’t, but there was always - this kind of tension, in the air, here. Even when everyone was trying to act normal, we were all - not. We were scared and - and hiding things.” Rebels, rebel-sympathizers, secret police, and Maya the spirit medium from abroad. “It feels like I can breathe now. It feels like - well, it doesn’t feel like home. My village is so damn quiet. Not like—” She waves a hand at all the bustle around them, looking over the shop storefronts, and then she is hastily halted when Nahyuta throws an arm out to stop her from walking into the path of a yak. “But it feels like it could be a home, more than it ever did before.” Even when before had the Inmees’ lovely hospitality. How hard as that is to look back on now, with all that happened since. “The thing I miss most though, besides Pearly and Nick and everyone - I wish I could get a burger. And ramen, but mostly a good burger.”

She watches the yak trundle of sight. Nahyuta looks briefly offended on its behalf until he asks, “Have you ever been to Burger Barn?”

“I can’t,” Maya whines. “The lines. I go in and I’m hungry and I smell everything and I’m so much hungrier but then I have to wait so long, and by the time I’d get to order I’d probably have eaten my own sandals, so no, I’ve never actually had one of their burgers.”

The law office comes into sight down the street; Maya has had trouble remembering where it is, and then Datz redid the outer walls yesterday and she barely recognizes it, but she can find her way now by the dragon he painted on the wall, to go with the office sign. Nahyuta’s eyes widen and he comes to a halt, and Maya realizes that he must not have been down here yet. She gives him a moment to take it in; she’s not going to try to get used to this visage yet, not when Datz is talking about redoing the roof too. “So,” she prompts when Nahyuta tears his eyes away and they resume walking, “you’ve been to Burger Barn?”

“I recommend going before you are hungry,” he says. “Then by the time the wait is over you are not positively famished. But I find it surprising that the wait would prove to you a challenge - it should pale in comparison to activities such as meditation beneath a freezing waterfall. The Burger Barn is only slightly cold from too much air conditioning.”

“I cannot believe you went to Burger Barn before me,” Maya says. “I can’t believe this! Was it as good as they say or is it overrated? I guess you probably haven’t had enough burgers to know—”

“I made it a point to visit several other burger joints in the time while I was in America, intending to make such a comparison,” Nahyuta interrupts, and Maya cackles at the thought, remembering Apollo lamenting his brother’s habit of obsessively over-researching anything that may tangentially cross his path. Like all the trials Maya has been involved in. Like burgers. Nahyuta raises his eyebrows at her outburst but continues, “From the samples that I have experienced” - experience a burger, that would be a great restaurant tagline, and Maya nearly laughs again - “I would rate it as the best.”

“Huh,” Maya says. She’s spent years convincing herself that they have to be overrated. “I guess we’ll have to go. And with Pearly too, it can be like another dimension of our training. I can’t believe I never thought of that trick before! Just treat it like training. I’ve been locked in cold mountain caves before, like oh no, the burger line is difficult somehow.”

“Oh Mystic Master of Kurain, cousin of mine, all your wisdom yet you missed this simple fact.” He says it so deadpan, only the corners of his eyes turning up with amusement.  

Maya sticks her tongue out at him. “Nick’s got a challenger - that is the most sarcastic way of calling me wise that I’ve ever heard. But I’ll—” She stops as something occurs to her. “You - you will come back to LA someday, right?” He isn’t running from an evil queen any longer. He has a home to stay in. 

“Of course,” he says. “I have people there I must ask forgiveness of, and I should like to visit your village someday, as well, to meet our cousin Pearly.”

She’s called her that so much that Nahyuta not knowing her doesn’t know that isn’t quite her name. She smiles. Maybe once she goes back to the village, she can convince Pearl that his name is Yuty and watch what happens when they meet. That would be funny. “And I would like Rayfa to be able to meet her, as well,” Nahyuta continues. “And for her to see more of the world beyond Khura’in.”

Pearl is only four years older than the princess, has had her world upended in much the same way to learn that her mother was not what she seemed, and by following her instructions Pearl was not doing right by the people she cared about. “That’d be good,” Maya says. They stand on the doorstep of the office, stare together up at the hand painted sign above the door. “I bet Pearly would love to meet you and show you around. Go to Burger Barn. Have a fun cousins hang-out. Get to know each other a little better.”

See if together they can find a way to do better than their mothers and aunts. Change the fate of their family. 

Nahyuta smiles. “I would like that.”

#roddy fanfics #ace attorney #maya fey #nahyuta sahdmadhi #the fey family and the khura'inese royals pass down 1. the ability to channel spirits and 2. trauma #and sometimes their descendants don't even get the ability to channel spirits #i've been poking at this on and off since september but wrote the back half in the past two days. the working title was 'younger daughters'

[recurring-polynya]

Hello! I have forgotten my tumblr login, but I am shai from AO3 and I just want to say that the Abhorsen books are very dear to my heart and I am THRILLED at idly wandering tumblr and seeing you're writing a Bleach AU set in that world. (Are the Kuchikis the Abhorsens? Is there a Mogget equivalent and is it Yoruichi? Is Karakura in Ancelstierre? I can't map the two settings together at alllll in my head on first glance but I'm super curious how you will!)

First of all, I am beyond excited that anyone actually cares about this project. I was going to try to explain it, but honestly, it’s not that long and, uh, maybe I should just post it. So, here’s the shorty version, where I cut it off at the Dramatic Drabble Point. I have more, but it starts to meander into an actual plot, where the plot is just the final confrontation at the end of Sabriel. I honestly just wanted to write Renji as part of the Crossing Guard Scouts?? I might expand this (how much? as much as I feel like?) after I re-read Sabriel. My husband has been reading the books to my son, and I catch snatches of it and it’s got me In the Mood, but I found myself forgetting way too much. 

Dear everyone else: I refuse to explain any of this. The Abhorsen books are the shit, just go read them. If you love Rukia as a character, you will love Sabriel. The two of them, along with Susan Sto Helit and Death of the Endless are the fictional pragmatic death girls of my heart, if I *ever* write an actual book, it will almost surely be about a pragmatic death girl.

Anyway, here it is, The Worst Charter Mage in Ancelstierre.

“All that stuff Colonel Zaraki said… about a soldier’s intuition an’ stuff… that was just made up, right? To scare us? Us, uh, new guys, I mean, you never get scared, right Renji?” 

Captain Abarai Renji of the Northern Perimeter Reconnaissance Unit, or the Crossing Point Scouts, as they were often known, stared out into the foggy dusk. His skin itched. His ears strained to hear the unearthly whistling of the wind flutes, which as far as he knew, none of the other scouts could hear. He could usually hear them, but not tonight. “Stop cleaning that damn firearm Yuki,” he grumbled without turning around. “Check your sword fittings instead.”

Lance Corporal Yuki Rikichi, having been stationed on the Perimeter for all of two months, very slowly started reassembling his pistol. “I’m not great with swords,” he admitted.

“Wind’s from the north,” Renji grunted. “Guns ain’t much good.”

“That’s just stories, though, right?”

“Nope,” Renji replied, squinting at a dark shape winging through the sky. It looked a bit like the airplanes he had seen when we went South for officer training, but it was too small, too silent, and besides, shit like that didn’t work past the Wall. He groped for his spyglass. “You think you can do that protection charm I been teaching you?”

“Yeah, I’ve practiced and practiced!” Rikichi bubbled eagerly.

Renji frowned, trying to focus the spyglass. If tonight was going to go as badly as his skin was crawling, that protection charm was going to do about as much good against the Dead as Rikichi hurling his useless gun at them. “Fuck,” he muttered. “That’s a someone.” 

“A what?” Rikichi echoed. 

“We got visitors,” Renji repeated, standing and checking the sword strapped his hip. “You go tell the Colonel, I’ll give ‘em the ol’ Crossing Scout welcome.”

“I can’t leave you alone!” Rikichi yelped. “Look, I’ll just radio him.”

“You’re welcome to try,” Renji shrugged, making his way down the stone staircase of the watchtower, knowing that piece of Ancelstierran junk would give nothing but static until the wind changed.

As Renji watched the strange craft circle down toward the ground, he tried to pull together the Charter Marks for a Major Blessing. It wasn’t a hard spell, and it would protect him from the Lesser Dead, maybe even a weak Free Magic Creature. As usual, the marks weren’t behaving, and he finally gave up. He didn’t know why he had such a hard time casting spells. None of the books he read ever described Charter Marks as elusive or mischievous. Was it like this for all Charter Mages? Maybe if he ever met another one, he could ask them. He was going to have to rely on his sword arm instead. Fortunately, his sword arm was pretty fucking reliable. 

The craft had settled in the tall grass, and two figures were getting out. It looked remarkably like an airplane, except that it appeared to be made of paper, painted in cheerful blue and silver. It was powered by Charter Magic, Renji had heard the pilot whistling Charter Marks as they brought the thing to the ground. Pretty nifty trick, to be honest. Must be from deep in the Old Kingdom, where they still taught the old magic. Renji himself had been born just a few miles from the Wall, lived in that shitty border town until he was sixteen. He’d come south thinking he never wanted to see a Charter Stone again, but somehow, he’d never made it much further south than the Perimeter, not for long anyway. It was fine. He was useful here. 

Renji gripped his sword with one hand. They looked and felt like people, but Free Magic Creatures could be tricksy. “Halt!” he shouted. “Who goes there? This is not a legal crossing point! What is your name? What is your business?”

The taller of the two figures, clad in a red and gold helmet and a red cloak, leaned down and said something to the much smaller figure, the pilot, who was dressed in blue and silver. The pilot elbowed the other in the ribs and then announced in a voice that rang with authority, “I am the Abhorsen and if you don’t help me, this gate is going to fall before dawn!”

Renji drew his sword. “I’ve met the Abhorsen!” he shouted. “You sure don’t look like that tall, pretty bastard to me!”

The pilot, who had been slowly approaching him, froze in her tracks. “That… was my brother-in-law,” she bit off. “How did you know him? He never came this far south.” She was silent for a moment before adding tentatively, “Also, he wasn’t the Abhorsen, although sometimes he let people believe he was.”

Renji’s fingers twitched on his sword grip. No. It couldn’t be. It was impossible. The voice was different, huskier, more mature, but then, it had been twelve years, she wasn’t a girl anymore. Not that she’d grown much. “I am simply returning her to her family,” that pale, flash prat had said, as he pulled her up onto the horse behind him, and rode away with the one person who gave Renji’s life any meaning or purpose. “Not one step further,” he shouted, since he didn’t think he could keep his voice steady any other way. “I don’t care if you’re the bloody Queen of the Old Kingdom herself!”

Something was happening with the taller of two visitors. Dark red energy, nearly black was crackling around his fists, the ozone smell of Free Magic permeating the air. Renji tried again to pull a Mark from the Charter, and this time one came easily, and he felt an invisible barrier thrum into place before him. It was no diamond of protection, but it should be enough to fend of some upstart teen.

“Cool it, you moron!” the pilot yelled at the youth. “The Scouts are good people, they just get hung up on procedure. Also… I… might know this guy.” She reached up and hooked a finger over the scarf wrapped over her face and pulled it down, tucking it under her chin. “Abarai Renji? ‘Zat you?”

“Rukia…” Renji murmured just as there was a clatter of boots on bitumen behind him. 

“WHAT DO WE HAVE HERE?” a familiar voice bellowed. “Abarai, you got your sword out and there ain’t no blood on it, what’s going on?”

“Says she’s the Abhorsen, sir,” Renji reported, adjusting his sword stance but not relaxing. “Don’t look like the Abhorsen I remember.”

Colonel Zaraki strode through the company of men who had accompanied him, towering, helmetless, his hawklike nose catching the setting sun. He surveyed the young woman standing before.

“The wall is going to be attacked, tonight!” she shouted. “A massive army of the Dead, led by a necromancer who is himself one of the Greater Undead!  Are you the commanding officer of this garrison?”

“Abhorsen came through here in ‘87,” Zaraki grunted. “Clever woman. After the fuckers down south stopped letting us move the gate every few months, all the deaths at the crossing point would build up, cause spontaneous risings. She carved us those wind flutes to keep the Dead down.” He surveyed the woman, dressed in a blue and silver tabard over silver chain. Her dark, short-cropped hair, the stunning indigo eyes Renji would never, ever forget. “Looked a lot like you. Your mother?”

“Sister,” Rukia corrected. It was Rukia, Renji was sure of it now. Of course she hadn’t been taken away to be a noble, she’d been taken away to be the fucking Abhorsen. Of course she had.

“If you’re the Abhorsen now, that means–”

“She went into Death four days ago. She’s holding out, but she’s been there too long, she can’t come back. At the full of the moon, the wind flutes will fail.”

“That the new Abhorsen-in-Waiting, then?”

Rukia’s eyes darted to the youth at her side and back again. “Maybe. This is Kurosaki. He is what he is.”

“Yo,” Kurosaki waved, seemingly unconcerned by any of this.

Zaraki jerked his chin at Renji. “Stand down, Captain. You been on the Wall too long to be this twitchy.”

“Don’t trust people who ‘are what they are’,” Renji replied. “Sounds to me like something a Free Magic Construct would say.” He sheathed his sword, but didn’t release the Charter Mark.

“He’s a lot of things, but he’s not a Free Magic Construct,” Rukia rolled her eyes.

“I’m standin’ right here, y’know!” Kurosaki protested.

“What do you need, Abhorsen?” Zaraki asked.

Renji glanced at him, surprised. He’d served under the man for over a decade, and he’d never seen him act this respectfully to anyone, including his own COs.

“I need every Charter Mage you’ve got,” Rukia barked. “Aizen has hidden his body in Ancelstierre, a few miles from here. We need to destroy it, but it’s going to take a ton of power to destroy something that powerful.”

Zaraki scratched his ass thoughtfully. “You may not realize, ma’am, but we don’t get a whole lot of Charter Mages this far south. My boys, though, have got swords like you’ve never seen. Zaraki’s Company can cut through anything, living, Dead, or in-between.”

“That’s very nice,” Rukia bit off, “because they are going to have an awful lot of things to stab in just a few hours. But I need Charter Mages. I don’t care if there aren’t many. Please. Give me what you have.”

Zaraki took a deep, resigned breath through his nose. “Well. You heard the lady, Abarai. Take that fucking apprentice the boys down south sent you, too. You managed to teach him anything yet?”

“Not… much…” Renji admitted, stunned.

“What, what?” Kurosaki exploded. “You’ve only got a single Charter Mage?”

“He’s terrible, also,” Zaraki added. “Worst Charter Mage I’ve ever seen, aside from the apprentice. Good with a sword, though, one of the best in the company to be honest.”

“Thanks for the vote of confidence, sir,” Renji grouched. Suddenly, he realized that Rukia was looking at him, and he felt like he was eleven years old again, meeting her for the first time, being judged by those eyes and, inexplicably, being found worthy. “I’ll go. At your service. Abhorsen.”

#my writing #bleach abhorsen au #bleach fanfiction

[mamawolfblood]

Though he didn't know it yet Chris Mclean was in for a shocking revelation. One of the campers is not exactly just some rando kid. This camper is his kid and she is out to expose it.

Name : Iris  Escalona

Age 16

Eye color green

Caramel skin

Black hair that she keeps in a high ponytail. A Cherokee rose on the left side of the hair tie.

Iris is 5ft 8",135lb

Out fit-White tanktop with the alchemists symbol blue acid washed jean shorts black converses

Iris has a dark sense of humor. She loves horror,pranks,is resourceful. Iris is not above smashing some skulls together. She is not quick to anger but Heather pushes a lot of her buttons.

All her life she just wanted Chris to know she was alive. Her mother never gave the reason why she left. She is the oldest of seven children.

____chapter 5pt2____

Geoff: Whoa… that kinda wrecks the ride.

Bridgette [nervously] : Now what?! We have to send someone out there or we’re going to lose this!

Courtney: Katie and Sadie are covered in barf!

Bridgette: Well then only leaves Tyler, Duncan or Harold. We already know Tyler sucks, what can Duncan do again?

Courtney: Carve a picture of his own skull into a tree? [screaming] What are we going to do?

[stretching]

Courtney: Just, go for it, Harold. What have you got to lose?

Harold: [beatboxes] [groans] [beatboxes] Aawesome. [beatboxes] Uh. [beatboxes] Uh. [beatboxes] Uh. [beatboxes] Uh. [beatboxes][beatboxing intensifies] Gosh! [beatboxes] Awesome.[beatboxes] Wha-what? [beatboxes] Uh, uh-huh! [beatboxes] What-what? [beatboxes] Uh! [beatboxes] Booyah.

[Screaming Gophers cheer]

Bridgette, Courtney, and Geoff cheer

Courtney: That was amazing.

Chris: Wicked beatboxing, dude!

[dinging]

Chris: Check it out. Grand Master Chef has declared its winner. Even though they held the lead, the Screaming Gophers have been trampled by the Killer Bass!

Bridgette: Harold, that was amazing!

Courteney: You did it!

Chris: And as for the Screaming Gophers. Pick your favorite loser, and I’ll see you at the bonfire.

(Confessionals Onn)

Heather: People thought I was mean to Gwen. Whatever. All I needed was four votes against Justin. Lindsay and Beth were easy. Izzy’s just crazy… and Owen? Piece of cake.

Owen [laughs, holding a cake ]: Piece of cake…

(Confessionals Off)

[dramatic sting]

Chris: Kudos to you all for an incredible night of entertainment.[ the fire crackles] Music. Drama. Barfing! There is only one marshmallow left on this plate. Justin. You reminded us all that looks matter a lot. And Heather. You’re full of surprises.[Heather exhales] But reading another chick’s diary out loud, to the whole world… then showing of her birth certificate Man, that is whack. [seriously] No kidding, that’s really messed up, dude. She had the right to tell me on her own.

Heather: Oh please, just give me my marshmallow already.

Chris: Justin, I personally think this is very wrong. I would have booted Heather for being a Bitch. But tonight, hotness just wasn’t enough. The last marshmallow goes to… Heather. Time to catch the Boat of Losers, brah.

Heather: Later, brah.

[Elimination music]

Chris "Iris I need to speak with you later. I'm sure you have some questions and I have some myself.

Who will be going home next how will Heather get by next week. Find out next time on Total Drama Island.

After everyone went to bed Iris and Chris sat by the bonfire in silence. It was awkward for both of them. "I didn't want you to find out like that. I wasn't even sure if I could tell you." She said braking the silence. Chris sighs handing her a letter. "Iris I knew about you for some time now. Your mother just didn't want you to get hurt. I know it sucked seeing other little girls with their dad's and you only had your step. I will make an effort to be in your life. but you understand I have to get a DNA test for legal matters?" He said looking at the fire. "I loved your mother no I still love her. I am happy she found someone to help raise you. I can't tell you how sorry I am Iris. " He was crying Iris placed her hand on his. "Lets not focuse on the past because it can't be changed. We can focus on the now because you are here." She said he pulled her into his arms "that sounds like a good idea." He said the credits started to roll.

#romance #total drama leshawna #total drama island #total drama #duncan #td gwen #td heather #chris mclean #oc #betrayal

[bates--boy]

He set the collection of mice skulls in the tin bowl and stared at them. They looked like tiny, discolored stones carved with holes, more cutesy Halloween decoration than the product of hours of trapping prey in the alley between his flat and the next. And the skinning.

Oh, god, the skinning...

At least his anaconda is set for snacks for the next couple weeks. But there were bits of clarity in his exhaustion and mild panic where he wondered if this would even work with rodent skulls. The only reason he even had them was because he didn't feel right taking ones from the corpses of the primates that passed in the animal center, and he had to save the questionably legally-acquired human ones for later in case this did work.

Because that was what this hesitation came to: the fact that this might not work. The man knew he was being driven by a moment of asphyxiation and an eternity of hallucination, but those souls...their voices...

YOU ARE WRONG

They still crawled over his skin, breathed against the back of his neck, still thundered in his head and made the very little sleep he tried to attain impossible. He still felt that black hole inhaling, trying to swallow his screaming form and those unfortunate, judgemental souls.

What was he wrong about?

He eyed his set-up on the dining room table, checking off the list in his head, and leaned forward to switch on the camera.

"To anyone who may be viewing this: hello. I'm Peter Kirkland, and today, I'm here to answer a question as old as time, itself: what happens after we die?

"As an atheist, my answer was once and always: nothing." He shrugged. "Nothing at all. But, er, there have been some recent developments..."

He thought about the conversation with Matthew, of heads rolling across floors.

He thought about the cycles of regeneration Roderich went through under the unforgiving ocean.

He thought about how he had to carry Roderich back to his hotel room, and wait in a corner until the man came back to life.

He thought about those stories of children claiming memories they were much too young to have, past lives returning to them.

He thought about the black hole, the howling, hungry black hole.

"...that made me wonder if the answer was as simple as emptiness beyond here. Now, don't get me wrong: I'm still an atheist. Truthfully, I don't see how religion would tie into this. Or anything requiring rationality, really. Heh, there goes my angry atheist joke for the day." He tipped an invisible fedora to the camera.

"And now, to make myself absolutely hypocritical, I have here a sort of necromancy equipment." He reached to the camera and turned it at different angles to show the bowl of skulls resting on a trivet, the vials and tubes, the pile of notes, the candles and lighters, and the plasma separator machine.

"But this has less to do with merely communicating with the dead, and more with entering their plane."

He returned the camera back to its place eon the tripod and shrugged. "Now, whether or not that means I may die, I don't know. That does seem like the only outcome of this, doesn't it? 'We all die someday', and hell, today might be my day!" He tried to chuckle, but ended up nibbling on his lip.

He picked up the notes stacked on the corner of the table. "Anyway..."

He gave a brief outline of his theories, some stuff about plasma and energy and stars that sounded more like hopeful sci-fi the longer he spouted it to the camera. After, he wrapped the rubber tourniquet around his upper left arm, struggling to tie it near and tight one handed.

Like the many medical videos he'd watch, he practically doused his inner elbow with rubbing alcohol and pressed his fingers about, looking for that sweet spot. "God damn, it's always so hard to find. Semper Do to my nurses who had to struggle with me." He gave the camera a fleeting, awkward smile.

There. It thumped through his flesh, popping against his fingertips. Okay. Okay. He picked up the needle and flicked off the protective cap. The metal was cool against his skin.

...Okay, he was pushing the syringe in...

...On the count of three, he will push the syringe in... One...two...

...He just needed to take a deep breath, and he'll be able to stick it in.

He inhaled, held it, exhaled. Inhaled, held, exhaled. Inhaled, held, exhaled. Inhaledheldexhaled, inhaledheldexhaled, inhaledexhaled inhaledexhaledinhaledexhaledinhaledexhaledgoddamnitdoitforscienceinhaledexhaledinhaledexhaled

"AAAAAGH!" He squeezed his eyes shut and forced his fist up.

He cracked them open. The needle was stabbed through, with only minor drops of blood bubbling up at the injection site. It'll have to do, so he connected the syringe's tube to the vials' stoppers, one at a time, his body overcome with shakes as he watched his blood run down the sides of his elbow as well as fill the plastic containers.

He gave the vials a shake and set them in the separator machine. While that was at work, Peter bandaged his wound and cleaned up his spills, then downed a half bottle of sports drink, at least whatever he could drink past his quivering lip as he lied down on the couch to recover.

The centrifuging was complete, and Peter returned to the table. He retrieved the tubes and, using the same needle as before, he drew out the plasma from the cells vial by vial, and pushed it out into the bowl. He capped the needle as a precaution and took a moment to lay his hands flat on the table and breathe.

"Next step," he said mostly to himself, reaching for the lighter and a votive candle, "Fire!"

He put the lit candle in its hold under the bowl's trivet, and set the rest of the candles around the vulgar set-up. "Oh, these candles make me feel like I should set some mood music. What music would even be appropriate for this?" He looked off into the distance, grimacing. "Hmm... Death metal? Nah, too cliched."

Still, he was sure that this practice required some silence, so Peter let the joke pass and reviewed his notes one more time, coming to the slips of paper with the procedure he created.

1: Establish a channel.

Wait until the plasma comes to a gentle boil. The steam will be the gas like the ones that make up stars, the candles the fire that make them glow. This will be beacon to you, the skull will be the home for them.

Make sure all distractions are removed; there is no telling what may scare off souls. ("Oh, I guess music was a no-go, anyway," Peter murmured.)

2: Connect

Relax your body to a state of semi-sleep (asphyxiate again?? Give meditation a try)

Place hands as close to the beacon as possible without disturbing it

Mimic the black hole noise

3: Collect information

Invite the sound to take you to their plane

Ask for names and stories

Mingle, I guess

He wished he had thought this through more. Nevertheless, he laid his hands flat between two candles and closed his eyes. He breathed through his nose and out his mouth, gagged at the taste of his own plasma burning in front of him, and tried again. He went back to that place, that void, that place of condemnation and confusion. The bumps returned to his skin as he waded through the screaming of souls, as he faced the ruling entity in his mind, the one that swallowed the dead and existing like smoke from a cigarette.

In the hallucination, when he was right there in front of it, the black hole screeched destruction and vengeance, it howled with an insatiable frenzy, it crackled like the unending fire that it was, making even the frightened cries of the souls it consumed mute and damn near rendered Peter deaf.

But when he recollected that moment of looking the end in its blinding and dark face, when he thought he would lose his voice trying to scream louder than it...

A hum. It was a breathless hum, a droning and tuneless lullaby to soothe the frightened children to sleep.

It had to be wrong. It had to! Nothing so soft could inspire what Peter felt in that place!

Yet Peter leaned back in his chair, and felt the hum reverberate in his chest.

The heat from the candles traveled through his fingertips and up his arms, the warmth crawling up his neck and brushing across his face. The darkness behind his closed kids thickened, almost like time was easing towards night. In the calm, Peter had wished that he used scented candles so the smell of his very essence burning didn't choke him and made him nauseous, but he was slowly getting used to the smell, that the sensation of it clogging up his throat lessened the more he hummed and leaned his head back...

WHOAREWHATDOYOUTHINKYOU'REAREYIUDOINGHERE?!

Peter's head snapped forward, his eyes popping open. He had to stop himself from toppling his chair over as existence flickered around him. He watched as his home, gray with not exactly darkness but still a lightlessness that sucked the life and time out of everything, disappear into that black void. It flickered through the cycle like the flame of a candle, from his flat to the black emptiness to a warping of the two then back to his flat where his bird was so still in his cage but Peter could still hear him go batshit and beating his wings against the bars and above his head in the emptiness was the Black Hole and

He gasped.

Standing before him, phasing in and out of the planes like the planes, themselves, we're switching back and forth, stood the souls. Whether in his flat or in the void, these faceless beings stretched out before him in legions, as far as Peter's watering eyes could see. These beings converged, looming higher, looking down on the heaving young man cowering in his chair. They had no mouths, yet still they screamed

HOWDAREYOUINVADEWHOAREYOUWHERESMYMOMMYDEIDREDEIDREWHEREAREYOUDUMBFUCKRUNBEFORETHEBLACKHOLE

Peter presses his hands to his ears, clawing his nails into the back of his head. Too many...there were too many.

THEBLACKHOLEISHUNGRYRUNWHYAMIHEREWHOAREALLOFISTHISHEAVEN

What were once beads of sweat trickling down his nose and cheeks was now a full layer of sticky sweat plastering his hair to his forehead, drenching the front of his shirt until the collar hung heavy. He swallowed, gasping and blubbering, his lungs searching for fresh, cool air, but only finding the stench of his plasma and heat -- god, the heat of these souls! The candles were pointless! He's being burned alive. These souls drew closer to him and they were nothing but fire and burning energy and they didn't care that this whimpering bastard curled up in his chair was being roasted down to his bones!

THISISWHATIGETFORFIGHTINGINTHEWARYOUAREWRONGYOUAREWRONGDOYOUKNOWMAGNUSYOUAREWRONGYOUAREWRONGYOUAREWRONG

He pressed his hands harder against his face. A droplet ran down the bridge of his nose, and he couldn't tell if it was sweat or a tear.

CANYOUHELPMEFINDMYDADDYTHEVIEWFROMHALFWAYDOWNYIUAEWWROMGYIUAREWRONGYOUAREWRONG

God, make it stop--

Peter?

Peter opened his eyes and lowered his hands. That voice. Through the devastation of these numberless voices that crashed through him like stars and asteroids, he knew that voice. The gentle, loving one, the one that sang him lullabies and told him stories of places afar and promised him a happy home when the war planes stopped flying over his fort. The family he had before he knew what family was.

He whipped his head about, searching these faceless entities. "Marion?!"

Peter!

"Marion!" Peter shot out of his chair, standing on his toes and craning his sweat-soaked neck out as if that would help him seek her out among this cruel, burning mass.

"Marion, I--!"

The flickering worsened, but he found that the flat he lived in stayed longer and time tried to continue. No, no no no, the channel! He had to keep the channel open!

Peter lit more candles, replacing the one under the tin bowl, and grabbed for the needle-- shit, where was it?! He looked for the needle he used-- god damn it, where was it, where was it?! He looked all over the table, under the mess of papers and discarded candles. The souls, the ones he hated and wished was swallowed up by that damn Black Hole flashing in and out of existence above him, started fading. Along with her voice.

"No!" He wailed, his voice hoarse. He looked down at his hands, blinking rapidly to keep the sweat out of his eyes.

And then he bit himself.

His teeth sunk into the tender flesh under his thumb, stabbing deeper until his blood filled his mouth. He spat it into the still heated bowl. The souls' fading stopped, though they still flickered. He bit into the flesh between his thumb and forefinger, sucking until he choked on the blood that he had to spit out into the bowl. The mice skulls turned dark.

Peter, what are you doing?!

He chomped down on the opposite palm, and his wrists, and up his arms, sucking, spitting, choking, crying, screaming through his own skin and meat he had between his teeth. The flickering between planes slowed. Everything slowed, except for hi is rapidly blinking eyes Peter tried to maintain consciousness. Her voice stopped fading.

Peter, please stop!

The darkness of sleep and the darkness of the void were indistinguishable as Peter collapsed into it.

#hetalia #droid noodles ( writing ) #animal abuse tw #self harm tw #death tw #blood tw #uuuuuuh i don't know what ekse to tag this as soo #might be good to just ignore it #long post #since read mores don't work on this godforsaken app #rage against the singularity saga

[prvntcessa]

reckoning;

𝐈𝐓 𝐖𝐀𝐒 𝐘𝐎𝐔𝐑 𝟐𝟏𝐒𝐓 𝐁𝐈𝐑𝐓𝐇𝐃𝐀𝐘.

you were wearing a blush ballgown so big you could hardly fit through the door. pink taffeta and lace everywhere, you felt more like a teacup or a cupcake than a respectable legal adult. you begged папа to let you change into something, anything less ridiculous than this my sweet sixteen monstrosity, but he was as stubborn and argumentative as you, plus he three times as long to polish it. like monopoly, you never won. 

when the picture-taking part rolled around, you sulked and scowled, making funny face after funny face, tongue out, eyes bulging when your father finally said STOP. he grabbed your hand, his eyes pleading. mischaya, please just one picture. i just want one picture where you look pretty. so you sighed, smoothed out your toddlers and tiaras nightmare and smiled. you looked beautiful. 

𝐈𝐓 𝐖𝐀𝐒 𝐓𝐇𝐄 𝐏𝐈𝐂𝐓𝐔𝐑𝐄 𝐓𝐇𝐄𝐘 𝐔𝐒𝐄𝐃 𝐀𝐓 𝐇𝐈𝐒 𝐅𝐔𝐍𝐄𝐑𝐀𝐋.

папа invited the italians, he said that parties and celebrations were a good place to make negotiations because everyone was drunk and happy. leave it to vlad to turn your birthday party into a business meeting. папа had also mentioned in passing that one of the higher ups had brought his son with him, 𝐃𝐀𝐆𝐆𝐄𝐑. there was another one he said, younger, more charismatic, but he couldn’t make it for whatever reason and was the prodigal son anyways. too messy, too u n p r e d i c t a b l e. dagger was calculated and serious, focused and reliable, he would be ‘ a good match ‘.

but you didn’t care about any of that. all you did from the moment you woke up was text 𝑬𝑵𝒁𝑶, your precious little regular guy new york boyfriend. you adored everything about him, the way the world stopped when he smiled, the crinkle in his nose when he was thinking about something important, his irrational fear of the saddle club. you held his hand the whole time.

all you wanted to do was stop the sneaking around, the hiding, the pretending. you just wanted to have him meet the family like all the other girls did with their boyfriends, but it was too dangerous. and besides, the girl that lorenzo liked was 𝐒𝐀𝐒𝐇𝐀 :

a cool, bouncy international business major with a perfect american accent, ceo of messy buns, whiskey spiked pumpkin spice, winning the Finish The Hotter Than Hell Godzilla Ramen In Under 30 Minutes Challenge at Miso Hungry because you could tell enz really wanted that giant gudetama plushie but was full after three bites ( we love u baby a for effort! ) and being a single mom to one fluffy demon cat.

but you were not sasha pierce, named for the iconic beyonce album, you were 𝐌𝐈𝐒𝐂𝐇𝐀 dostoyevsky, named for the unborn son of vladimir dostoyevsky, kingpin of the bratva, the brotherhood of the russian mafia and your adopted father. 

and guys don’t typically like girls with a lot of baggage.

--- now, you always hated the men your father set you up with, but this time it was different, this time it was PERSONAL. 

𝐦𝐚𝐫𝐜𝐡 𝟐𝟕𝐭𝐡.

it had to be special. it had to be perfect. you picked a time you knew enzo would be out, broke in through his apartment window ( ok, it was ONE TIME ), arranged all the bath and bodyworks candles in what you hoped was a Sultry Manner, waited in your very flashy victoria’s secret lingerie for enzo to open the door in t-minus

3.

2.

1.

touchdown! as you practically tackled the poor guy. he made a surprised noise against your mouth as the oranges, the cereal, and everything he had just procured from the store went flying. now, it was time for the big guns. the mortal kombat FINISH HIM. you grabbed the collar of his shirt and ripped it wide open.

game over.

                                                      𝐋

your darling boy, the person you cared about most in the world, had a huge vicious L carved into his chest, the rough, jagged lines digging into the precious, vulnerable space over his heart. the heart that belonged to you. you remained silent. you wouldn’t ask. you never would. but still, you traced it with gentle fingers and gentle kisses, dressed him in your over-sized hot pink sailor moon tee-shirt and carefully tucked him in with the heater blasting and perogi sleeping soundly on his chest, hoping that the shirt and her cat were good enough things to cover up the evil underneath them. 

you bit your lip until it b l e d. scars like that, they weren’t killing scars, they were torture scars, they were scars that were left only by people who truly wanted you to suffer, who wanted you to to wake up in cold sweats and fear and remember over and over and over. the were left by monsters, they were left people who hated you. 

and looking over at lorenzo, finally peaceful after a long, horrible day, a tiny tuft of hair strewn across his tanned forehead, you wondered how anyone could ever hate him. your wonderful, beautiful, boy. you kissed him softly on the temple and left the way you came. 

you wrote i love you on the window, 

but the rain washed it away.

***

you didn’t sleep that night. you googled it. L SCAR ON CHEST. WHY DO PEOPLE GET AN L CARVED INTO THEIR CHEST? WHAT DOES AN L SCAR MEAN? a couple of people on reddit knew the answer. the L was for lucheesi and they used it to brand their victims like cattle. you felt SICK. 

criminals you understood but . . .lorenzo?!  your secret regular college student boyfriend who’s biggest crime was probably forgetting to put the toilet seat down sometimes? an enemy of the lucheesi? why? HOW? no. no, you didn’t care. it didn’t matter. all that mattered was that all those lucheesi bastards were going to die. 

ONE 

BY

ONE. 

you didn’t like that dagger kim. 

not one bit. he was just the type of man that you loathed. sucking on daddy’s thumb and trying to play god on a power trip. eugh. his voice made your skin CRAWL. he oozed slime and skeeze and reeked of a dark, twisted sort of evil that stank through the expensive cologne he doused his tailored suit in. 

“we can make the bratva great, if you comply. we could make an empire. i might even let you be my queen, mischa kim, what say you?” he boasted, full of hot air and toxic masculinity.

you rolled your eyes and laughed boldly in his face. his expression was grim.

 “i would never bend to a man. and even though you are more worm than man, i will NEVER bend to you, you filthy mudak bastard. our army is ten times yours, in men and in heart. the bratva is great, the bratva is GREATER and my name . . .”

 you dragged your nail along the man’s jawline until you reached his chin, harshly propping his head up with your acrylic nail, an angry pink crescent forming where it dug into his skin.

“ --- is 𝐌𝐈𝐒𝐂𝐇𝐀𝐘𝐀 𝐕𝐋𝐀𝐃𝐈𝐌𝐈𝐑𝐎𝐕𝐍𝐀 𝐃𝐎𝐒𝐓𝐎𝐘𝐄𝐕𝐒𝐊𝐘, first of my name, sole heir of rossiyskaya mafiya bratva and i will NOT sign it away. not for you and not for anyone. YOU ARE NOTHING.” leaning into his ear, you bit his earlobe and whispered “re me, cagna.” before dropping your dainty hand and drink all over the first kim son with a soft, girly, woops! 

KING. 

ME. 

BITCH.

dagger kim was not the kind of man you rejected, let alone mocked. 

you would pay for your words, mischaya vladimirovna dostoyevsky,

𝐀𝐍𝐃 𝐘𝐎𝐔 𝐖𝐎𝐔𝐋𝐃 𝐏𝐀𝐘 𝐖𝐈𝐓𝐇 𝐘𝐎𝐔𝐑 𝐋𝐈𝐅𝐄.

#ok this is a lot of backstory #explains her relationship w striker #also just a lot abt mischa #ITS VERY VERY LONG #and i apologize #u dont have to read it i just made it so stuff would make sense also to make hannah cry #mischa like ....makes me so sad #i swear #QUEEN OF THE BROTHERHOOD MISCHAYAAAAAA #FOR ROSSIYA!!!! #sorry abt typos

[pondernce]

Behind Closed Doors

Hi!

So this is the first thing I’ve written in almost 5 years, and the first for Outlander. (be kind to me). I hope you like it, and much love to @julesbeauchamp for her support <3 

Jamie and Claire meet again in less than ideal circumstances...

Chapter 1

He could feel her hands on him, soft, delicate fingers tracing the planes of his back. They danced over scar tissue--the groves hewn into his skin by force--healing the wounds for him. Her mouth dipped to caress his jaw, the feathery brush of lips chased by soft, humid breath. A kiss on his neck. His Adam’s Apple. The juncture where sternocleidomastoid met trapezius. For a moment he let his eyes close, lost in the sensation. She found his mouth then, her legs winding over his hips and guiding him, urging him on.

Immersed in her, the gentle sound of the crashing waves was lost to him. He pressed up onto his hands, wrenching his mouth away because he needed to see her, needed to find those eyes…

Jamie woke up.

His heart raced, his skin was damp with sweat and he was uncomfortable stiff in his pants. As he was every time he remembered. And he always woke before he could see her face again. Aye, he could call her to his mind’s eye and he’d drawn her a dozen dozen times, but nothing so vivid as those dreams. The sketches were never quite right, and he knew that if he could only see her face in those dreams, he’d be able to capture her likeness completely.

With a sigh bordering on a groan, Jamie sat up and glanced at his phone. Five in the morning wasn’t too early, he supposed. At least it gave him time for a workout before he headed to university. A chance to get the nerves out. For some, perhaps, university was an unnerving step into adulthood. Leaving home, moving into a new place, the excitement of newfound independence. But Jamie had already made his move. From Highland Scotland to the Middle East, with the RAF. He couldn’t look forward to seeing what lads and lasses barely out of their A-levels would make of “adulthood” when they had no real responsibilities yet. And what would they make of him?

The streets of London were hardly quiet at this hour, but they were remarkably empty, and that’s what Jamie needed. A place to clear his head- to get her out of his head- before hustling through the crowded halls of King’s College, London. He jogged through the streets of Southwark, dodging the odd dog walker or early commuter. His route to King’s wouldn’t be long, thankfully. His military salary afforded him a nice enough flat close to the school, just across the river. He shared it with another Scot, Rupert, whom he’d served with in Afghanistan. It was a small mercy that Rupert spent almost all his time at his lass’ flat. The bloke was cheerful, but a bit too much sometimes.

Rounding the corner, Jamie checked the time on his FitBit and pushed his pace up, aiming to finish out five kilometers before he made it home. It wouldn’t due to be late for his first course though, even if his schedule for the day of Legal Philosophy and Medical Ethics hardly seemed interesting.

---

Legal philosophy could have been interesting, if the professor hadn’t put half the class to sleep. Jamie wasn’t surprised though, given that the majority couldn’t have been more than 18. High off being in Uni and hardly interested in what the ancient man before them had to say about the foundations of Legalism. The two girls next to him hardly paid attention, too busy giggling. He recognized the blonde from orientation, and she clearly recognized him.

Throughout the lecture he took diligent notes, only to avoid the girl’s eyes. The former soldier nearly bolted when the course ended.

He had nearly two hours before his next course, and plans to meet that bloke from the Rugby team. He’d gone out before orientation, trying to find some way to get involved. Many veterans struggled in university to find community, and he hoped he wouldn’t be another statistic.

“Fraser!”

He turned, smiling over a few startled students to see John Grey speed walking towards him. He was young, but Jamie found he didn’t mind that energy, John seemed a good person.

Smiling, he bumped the shorter man gently on the shoulder. “Good to see ye, I hope yer class wasn’t as boring…”

“Haven’t had class yet, just came early to grab lunch with you. We have practice this afternoon, you know? You’re welcome to come.”

Jamie glanced at his phone and shook his head. “Medical Ethics,” he sighed, “can ye tell I’m keen?” he laughed and shook his head. He wanted to get a background in law before he tried to leap into counter terrorism, and how did medicine relate to that?

“Pity. I hope it’s interesting.”

“I doubt it.”

Jamie didn’t mean to be cynical about university. It was supposed to be an opportunity to make something of himself after his medical discharge. Only, he found it overwhelmingly uncomfortable. And pointless. When he’d been in the war, reviewing briefings and in charge of his men, everything had been urgent. Learning on the fly, under pressure, where attention meant life or death. Here, he had the feeling he’d never need to attend to do well. It was disheartening.

His mind drifted as they ate. His fingers itched for his sketchbook, idle in his book bag. Jamie has taken up the hobby in the barracks, well before he met his muse. But the last two Moleskins had been interspersed with pages devoted to her. It had been a year, he knew he needed to let go. But he couldn’t yet.

“Jamie,” John’s voice cut into his thoughts, jarring the plans for how he’d shade the moonlight dappled on her skin from his thoughts.

“Och, Sorry. What was it ye we’re saying?”

John pursed his lips with that good natured shake of the head Jamie had already come to realize was a habit. “We should get going to class, where’s your head, man?”

The scot blushed, rubbing his hand against the back of his neck with a laugh. “Nothing, sorry. I didn’t sleep well, ye ken?” It wasn’t quite a lie, given he almost never slept well, or the medically recommended amount. With a small nod he grabbed their rubbish, scolding himself internally on the short walk to the bin.

Jamie knew better. He wanted to make something of himself that wasn’t available in the military, and that’s why he was here. He’d done the work, networked with other former soldiers already working for MI5 and in the government, learned what he needed to do if he wanted to work against domestic terrorism. But university should also be for himself, shouldn’t it? A change to live a bit of a normal life, to decompress after so much time at war. He knew he was lucky to even be back in the UK, let alone at a prestigious university. With a sigh and a quick shake of his head, he returned to John.

“I’ll be at practice after my class eh, make it up to you. Ye free for a pint after?” He grabbed his bag and fell into step alongside the shorter man, making a mental note of their plans as John went off about something on the news that morning. His brother was running for Parliament and the whole family had been in politics for centuries. Perhaps someday Jamie would be able to take advantage of such a connection, but presently he just needed the company.

They parted ways at one of the newer campus buildings, all shiny glass and stone. London was like that--an eclectic mix of modern and tradition that had Jamie missing Scotland more than foreign shores ever had. He’d not been home in years, and never truly wanted to go back. At least not yet.

“Excuse me,” he shoulder his way through a gaggle of students in the corridor, looking for the correct room. “104, 106… Christ.” 108 had to be the smallest room in the building, if not on the bloody campus. He’d failed to realize that the modern building connected to one of the oldest buildings, where the rooms became cramped cubicles of stone with sharply pointed windows, more reminiscent of a church than a university. The floor was old oak pitted and polished by centuries of steps, and Jamie could almost trace the path to one of the few available seats left. He was a large bloke--a fact which became abundantly clear as he settled behind the old fashioned desk. His knees knocked against the tabletop when he tried to sit up, forcing him to fold them awkwardly over the side. “Bit cramped, aye?” He joked quietly, meeting the eyes of a petite girl watching him. She flushed violently and nodded, stuttering over her reply.

“It-It’s a small course,” she shrugged finally, milky eyes darting back to her phone.

Jamie hummed, his own phone lost in the bottom of his bag after he got off the tube. After the military he apparently lacked the addiction to smartphones present in the rest of his generation. Or perhaps he was just old. Stretching his legs, he inadvertently cracked his back and sighed in relief, twisting to traction the other side just as another student walked in.

He froze, tracking her steps as she came into the small room. Slightly flustered, curls escaping her high bun and dragging over the material of her lightweight olive jumper, and her arms full of files and textbooks, she was unmistakably the same woman. His muse. Jamie traced every line of her, the smooth curves he knew with his hands and his pencil. He watched the long arc of her graceful neck, so pale and flawless against her dark hair. He couldn’t see her eyes, not yet, and the desire to almost had him squirming in his seat. So distracted was he that he failed to notice she hadn’t taken one of the available seats.

His muse had set down her books at the front of the room, shrugged off her camel overcoat and tossed it carelessly over the podium, carved her name into the ancient chalkboard in neat print, and now stood before them all, introducing the course.

His muse was a professor. His muse was his professor.

The name that had been absent from his syllabus and his memories stared mockingly back at him, stark white on deep green. Dr. Claire Beauchamp.

#my fic #behind closed doors #jamie & claire #prof/student au #if you catch a typo let me know!! #outlander #outlander fanfic #outlander fic

[urdbell18]

A Seed Hidden in the Heart Chapter 16: The One With a Little Hope

AN:I'M BACK!!!!!!!!!!!! And with a brand new chapter for you guys. Was it worth the wait? I don't know but here it is! Enjoy!

Since the summons arrived Zelda entered into a state that was a combination of depression and catatonic. She walked around like a zombie, a shell of her former self that could perform her basic humanly functions. Though not lacking in her duties as a teacher her students noticed that Zelda wasn’t herself and Rosalind and Theo asked if there was anything they could do to help but not even Mary knew how to help Zelda beyond just being there. Mary wouldn’t begin to say she understood what Zelda was feeling, yes she loved Vida like her own but the connection that Zelda and Vida had was something deeper. That connection was why whenever Vida was around Zelda painted on a smile to allude that nothing was wrong, acted like everything was normal when every night after tucking Vida into bed Zelda cried. All Mary could do was hold her and wish that there was something that she could do. It came to her one afternoon on a Saturday in April.

That day had been particularly bad. Zelda wouldn’t stop crying, she couldn’t even muster enough energy to get out of bed. Mary shuffled Vida out, saying Zelda was just a little sick and she was okay. Vida looked at her like she didn’t believe her, and to be honest Mary didn’t even believe herself, but she agreed and headed downstairs. In the kitchen Mary and Hilda shared a quick look and a slight nod. Hilda will take care of Zelda, Mary will handle Vida. Armed with a list of errands Mary and Vida left. After stopping at the pharmacy and the home improvement store for some fertilizer the last thing on Hilda’s list was to fix a clasp on a watch of hers that broke. Mary loathed to go into the shopping district on a weekend but wanting to give Hilda as much time as possible she decided to suck it up and go.

The bell on the jewelry store tinkled when Mary entered shaking off her umbrella as it started to rain lightly. Vida who was decked out in her raincoat with matching boots and hat shook her head when Mary took her hat off, causing red ringlets and little droplets of water to fly everywhere. Mary smiled and fussed over Vida’s hair to make it somewhat neat. A salesperson came over and asked how they could help them. When Mary explained that she needed a watched to be fixed the salesperson led her over to one of the glass cases to have a closer look. At first Vida was next to her, holding onto the side of her leather trench coat but becoming bored at having looked at everything in the case started to wonder. Mary was two seconds away from calling Vida back but stopped. Other than her, Vida, and a few other employees there were only two other customers and Vida was smart enough to not go with anyone or out of the store so Mary turned back to the sales person but kept an ear out for the slight ‘squelch’ that Vida’s boots made on the shops carpet. After several minutes of looking through watches they eventually found something that could match the original fixture the sales clerk went into the back to talk to the person who did the actual hardware work Mary turned to find Vida.

Vida was standing in front of a glass case filled with little charms and pendants for necklaces and bracelets. The charms were all arranged by shape, grouped together by metal type, gold and silver mostly, and gemstone options. Mary quickly recognized the birthstone gems as the pieces were arranged in neat double rows of six. Vida was, of course, fascinated with the little bear pendants. The pendants were about half the size of Mary’s finger tip but the detail was impressive. The 3D bears had little eyes and noses and a tail on its sitting bottom plus soft carving marks to resemble fur. On one foot was a small round gemstone that fit perfectly with the pad of the bears paw.

“What do you have here baby bear?”

“Look at the little bears Mamma they’re so cute.”

“That they are.” The longer Mary stared at the bears wheel started to turn in her head as an idea started to form. The sales clerk that was helping them with the watch came back pulling Mary away from the bear pendants. The watch was fixable and Mary filled the work order so Hilda could pick it up later.

“Is there anything else I can help you with Ma’am?” Mary thought about it for a minute. The bear pendants came back to mind.

“There is one thing.” Mary took the clerk over to the bear pendants and he pulled out the little shelving they rested on out so she could have a closer look. The bears were, as Mary predicted, part of the stores birthstone collection so each bear had a different gemstone. A gold bear with a 36 inch chain was almost $200, a little steep but for Zelda it was worth it.

“What do you think baby bear?” Mary picked up Vida so she could see the bears more clearly. “Should we get one for you Mom?”

“Yes!” Vida then told the sales clerk when her birthday was, May 16th, and he pulled out a pre boxed bear with an emerald gemstone.

“Would you like to get it engraved? It’s $10 and we can do it today in about an hour.” Tempted Mary agred, she and Vida could get lunch and come back to get the necklace. Mary told the clerk what she wanted. When she came back for it the necklace was wrapped up nicely in a little box with a blue ribbon.

After some debate Mary decided not to wait until Mother’s Day to give the necklace to Zelda. That next day she recruited Vida to make their special breakfast, french toast light on the powdered sugar and syrup with some egg whites, a small cup of fruit, a lightly buttered biscuit, and a mug of coffee. Balancing the tray Mary and Vida brought it back upstairs to surprise Zelda. Mary hung back with the try as Vida, after setting down the mug of coffee that she was entrusted with on the nightstand, climbed up onto Zelda’s bed to wake her. It didn’t take much, Zelda hasn’t been sleeping well either and it only took a little prodding to wake her.

“Surprise!” Zelda looked at Vida then at Mary as she placed the breakfast tray.

“What is this?”

“Me and Momma made you our special breakfast. To make you feel better.” Zelda gasped a little in shock, she didn’t know that Vida picked up on her mood, but hid it well.

“Thank you baby.” The bed dipped as Mary joined them on the bed and they shared breakfast. When the tray was empty Mary handed Vida the small box that held the necklace.

“We got you this Mommy.” Zelda took the box, not sure what it could be or why she was receiving this gift. After untying the ribbon the dark blue box opened with a soft crack. Zelda’s eyes widened and she gave a faint gasp. “Do you like it Mommy?” The tiny gold bear looked so much bigger cradled in the soft lining of the box, tiny emerald catching the light. The new addition to the bear, the thing that had Zelda almost in tears, was a tiny engraving on the bears other paw that said ‘V.S.’

“I love it.” Vida smiled and snuggled into her mother’s side. Zelda handed the box to Mary so she could place the necklace on her. Sweeping Zelda’s hair over her shoulder Mary fastened the necklace around Zelda’s slender neck. Though not big the bear stood out against Zelda’s pale skin, the pendant resting lightly on her chest. When the necklace was securely in place Zelda turned back to face Mary and brought her close to share a kiss. Mary returned it, making it just a little deeper and longer.

____________________

After that Zelda was in a better mood. She wasn’t 100%, Mary believed that wouldn’t happen until this whole mess was over, but she stopped crying and could muster real small smiles. She also realized that she couldn’t ignore the inevitable anymore. She needed to hire an attorney. Over the next week or so Zelda contacted several law firms that looked to be in her price range and could help her. None of them, even after a respected waiting time, responded back. Zelda started to panic, she knew that Faustus would have an attorney that would destroy her in a single breath. If she wanted even a snowballs chance in hell to keep her daughter she needed her own representation but with no responses she was starting to go back into her depressed state. Just as it seemed that hope was lost Zelda received a very interesting email on Saturday afternoon.

Dear Ms. Spellman,

I heard from the grapevine that you are looking for an attorney for an upcoming custody case. My name is Daniel Webster, I don’t have a law firm nor work for one but I do have a license to practice law with a decade worth of trial experience. An old friend of mine from one of the law firms that you contacted pointed me in your direction and gave me your email, I hope you don’t mind. I would like to take your case pro bono. To prove that I am not a scammer we can meet in a neutral location on your terms and I have attached some links to a few of the cases that I worked on. Write me back when you can.

Signed, Daniel Webster

Deciding to take a leap of faith Zelda wrote back to Mr. Webster that she would meet him at Hilda’s book shop just after breakfast. Vida was with Mary, Zelda dropped them off at the park with a promise that if they got tired or if the weather turned bad to come to the store. Dr. Cee allowed her to use his back office for the meeting, it was quiet and it plus the tea that Hilda gave her helped her remain calm. At five past ten Hilda let in a middle age man with short white hair and beard and dressed in a nice but not flashy navy blue suit.

“Ms. Spellman.” Mr. Webster held out his hand and they shook hands for a brief moment. Hilda asked Mr. Webster if he would like anything but he said no. With that Hilda closed the door behind her and she and Mr. Webster were alone. Mr. Webster opened his briefcase and took out a legal pad and pen. “So let’s begin. According to court documents a Faustus Blackwood is suing you for full custody of your daughter.”

“Yes.”

“Is he the child’s biological father?”

“Unfortunately.”

“And when did your relationship end?”

“About a month after I found out I was pregnant.” After she gave her answer Mr. Weber straightened up.

“You have had no contact with Mr. Blackwood before now?”

“None whatsoever.”

“Good. We can use that. Do you have the girls birth certificate?” Zelda pulled out a folder from her purse that contained all of the important papers regarding Vida. Each family member had their own folder in a locked drawer in the credenza next to the kitchen. Zelda handed Mr. Weber Vida’s birth certificate. Mr. Webster scanned over the document and his eyes widened. Zelda didn’t know if this was a good thing or a bad.

“Ms. Spellman we have nothing to worry about.” Zelda’s heart stopped in her chest but it was a good stop. A huge wave a relief blew over her and she felt like she could breathe again without this crushing weight against her. She didn’t know why she had so much confidence in Mr. Webster but she did and if he said she didn’t have to worry than she won’t. She really hoped he was right.

With their meeting concluded Zelda went out to the main area. Mary and Vida weren’t there, they still must be at the park. Zelda, after debate decided to walk the short distance to the park. The weather was nice, sunny with just a bit of cloud and a nice breeze that was refreshing but not knee shaking. When she arrived at the park Vida was hanging from the monkey bars with Mary close to her ready to spring into action if Vida needed her. Zelda was impressed as Vida made the last four bars to the landing on the jungle gym set. Though too far away to hear Mary said something that made Vida flush with pride and she ran off to the higher part of the jungle gym. When Zelda reached Mary she took the other woman’s hand, lacing their fingers together.

“Meeting went well?” Zelda nodded and rested her head against Mary’s shoulder. Given hope Zelda could relax enough to enjoy physical contact with Mary. Mary let go of Zelda’s hand to drape her arm over Zelda’s shoulder. They stayed that way until Vida called out to them, she was standing at the opening of a slide. Zelda moved to the end so that when Vida reached it she scooped her up. Vida giggled as Zelda pressed her close and kissed her cheek.

“Ready to go?” Vida nodded and they, after Zelda took Mary’s hand again, walked back to the car to go home.

#Zelda Spellman #Madam Satan #madam spellman

[pettyelves]

becoming an’diel

Wheel of Fortune, the harbor’s gambling house and a pillar of their local economy. But, for all the greed between Kurel and Eilithe-- the four walls that made up the gambling house wasn’t about the money. 

It was a monument to them. Not just the beginning, though the fire had started in several small embers scattered throughout. No, every line crossed, every deal made, every surrender or gain, lust and pain and rage and love, all laid in the stone and wood. 

“Feel free to help yourself, Arbiter.” He said it to her in such a way it made the moment a game. They’d spent the evening recalling all the moments they felt something both now referred to as ‘it’-- but could be more corporeally described as passion. 

She played along with him-- made him wait as she always had over the years. 

"Originally, we buil' our deal with a series of guidelines. Two weeks ago, we both admitted we broke those. You... verbally. Awarded me full ownership of The Wheel of Fortune." Kurel briefly unhooked his fingers to make a gesture with his hands outwards, then returned them. "  I don't think you did i' in soun' mind an' there are no witnesses excep'...." Kurel tapped a ring on his finger.. "I do have proof."

The grin he gave her twisted her up inside, the arrogance was always part of it. He continued.  "I can't run this place alone. Too much other shi' on my agenda. So I'm willin' to come to an arrangemen' of offerin' you a portion. A station... A somethin'. Bu' you've to make i' worth my while."

She had always viewed their exchanges as a trade of moves-- a game were either one of them was equally equipped to back the other into a corner. "If you cannot run this place alone, and we've both very busy schedules, then who should sweeten whose pot? You have something in mind that you want-- so what is it?" Her voice was uniquely sinister when she spoke to him, a rasp which only rumbled when she spoke quite low.

"I wan' to demolish The Wheel of Fortune an' The Empress. Then join them an' rebuil' them both under a single room. As one. I control the games. You control the women. We control the crowds."

The negotiations were just as intense as they always had been--nitpicking, finding loopholes, exploiting them. At the end of it the deal was simple:  The Empress would be reopened as a bathhouse. The Wheel, and all the pain and beginnings would be demolished. A new building, would be erected further inland to draw business to new parts of the city. A new beginning to their empire.

One item was left on Eilithe’s agenda, and it had been bouncing around in her mind for a long while-- then it had left-- then it’d become more gnawing than ever before.  Eilithe An’Diel suited her fancy, it suited the names of her children, it suited them both from the standpoint of presenting as one single, unstoppable force. She had presented it, vaguely as: "And we legally split it all."

"We can figure ou' legal as we go. This place wouldn't be wasted rubble. We level it an' then buil' our new enterprise ontop of where it was." He hadn’t gotten it on the first go. 

"Legality, sooner rather than later. Papers and names. Nothing more." She hid her second attempt in a sea of other details. 

"Fine. Paper an' names. Nothin' more." But he hadn’t really grasped it. As petty, and as sneaky as she could be-- she couldn’t trick him into this. “Do you know what I meant?”  He answered that what she’d meant--   "Is no contingencies. No, 'I ge' Eilonwys' an' 'You forefi' your enter stakes here' stipulations. Jus' names on paper."

"You already forfeit your stakes here-- for new ones, better ones. Stakes that run out deep into these jungles and out onto the sand." A hand on his arm crept along for his hand. "And you've had Eilonwy, I think one day you'll even have Threshad. But you have her, and you have for a long while."

"I'm talking about my name next to yours. Our name."

"Why are you so obsessed with this." His voice was barely above a whisper. His tone somewhat dangerously calm for the subject and he leaned in just close enough to her that the point of his nose softly dragged across her cheek and she could feel his words splash across her skin.  "So prou' to be a Duskbringer. We argued an' compared an' we measured the worth an' the power of our names agains' each other. Why do you wan' i' so badly?" She answered him with a story. One of Endessa Lu’Cerne, who had cast off her name and status because she believed in something. "I will,  in some way, always be a Duskbringer. But I believe in something and that's us. And I believe in someone, and that’s you."

But the desert didn’t marry twice. "Sometimes. Telling you no really does excite me. So listen. Very carefully."  Those last few words were still quiet, but they were hard.  In the familiar way he had in the past prepared her for disappointment.  "Righ' now is not the time.  It would cas' a shadow across the announcemen' of your brother an' your friend. An' when the masses woul' show, they woul' not show for them, bu' for us. An' tha' woul' breed resentmen' an' dissension.

 "So no. You will continue to have to wade in your suffrage as a Duskbringer."

And he was, in part right--which was the purpose for simple names and papers. But had she not been listening very carefully she might’ve missed it. Kurel An’Diel did not give hope when there wasn’t any, and he didn’t say things to make someone feel better. 

It made the ‘no’ easier to swallow, and he was, at least-- apologetic in the ways he touched her after. “Alright,” she answered, just as hard as she ever was. More logistics came after, carried on like nothing had happened. And that-- that was refreshing. 

The night ended with her back pressed against the table across which was a massive map of Dead Sun and the island she was attached to. With torturous kisses placed across her collar, she asked him-- because she knew there was always more.

"Anything else, anything more that you planned?" She did not spare him a glance, for she knew well the grin that was carved into it. 

"Command of the Dead Sun Fleet."

[ @kurel-andiel @deadsunharbor ]

#We Take It All #The Arbiter and the Admiral

[lostredrobin]

Sparrow, Chap 3. Damian x Reader

Part 1 Part 2

YES I CHANGED MY USER NAME. I WAS PREVIOUSLY SEVENTHBUNNY.

I noticed a lot of errors in the past two chapters! I apologize!!!! I’ll try proof reading for now on lol. I should really be studying for my exam, but I get incredibly bored of reading medical terms :D Also google translate says Habibti means my love in Arabic. This is not as long as I wanted it to be, but I wanted to update you guys :) More coming soon!

Tag: @naniky

If you would like to be tagged, just comment! :D

 Alfred deemed in unsafe to move Y/N to the watchtower’s medical bay. She was still in critical condition, moving her can jeopardize her health, much to Hawkgirls dismay. Hawkgirl was very displeased with the whole situation. After a very long talk, it was concluded that Y/N would be returning under the leadership of Hawkgirl and most likely joining the teen titans.

“But that isn’t fair. You’re not even considering Y/N’s feelings in any of this. How could you make that choice for her?” Damian shouted in pure disagreement.

“Robin” Bruce tried to shut him down, but Damian wasn’t having any of it.

“No! None of you know Y/N like I do. She wasn’t even Hawkgirls sidekick for 6-months before deciding to join us in Gotham. Joker took away what made Y/N sparrow! She may not even want to do this whole super hero nonsense anymore.”

“Damian is right.” Jason chimed in.

“I am Y/N legal guardian, Robin. If she so wishes to no longer be part of the Justice League then so be it, however she will not be remaining here.” Hawkgirl stated, “I will be taking my leave now.”

And without another word Hawkgirl was teleported back to the watchtower.

 Damian’s hands were tightly balled up into fists, his anger was evident.  

“How could you stay silent, Father? How could you not defend Y/N?”

“Damian, we can not speak on the behalf of Y/N. By law, we cannot keep her here.”

“Don’t you understand? None of this would have happened if Joker was rotting in the ground. You allow him to torment us, murder not only citizens, but our family (Jason). If you refuse to do what’s best, then I won’t hesitate to do it myself.”

“Do not threaten me, Damian.” Bruce barked. Damian and Bruce obviously ready to gripe at each other’s throats. For only a 16-year-old, Damian’s stature rivaled that of Bruce’s. By an adult, Damian may even surpass Bruce in height and muscle mass.

As much as Jason would have loved to watch them ‘fight to the death,’ he had better things to do. “I doubt all this ‘negative’ energy is going to help Y/N at all” he said making sure to squint his fingers at the words ‘negative energy.’

“Jason’s right. Let’s all rest for the night and discuss everything in the morning” Dick commented while stretching out his arms over his head. His body ache and needed a nice hot shower to sooth his pain.

Without argument, the bat boys (including bruce) went upstairs. Damian was the only exception though. The idea of leaving Y/N at such a vulnerable time made his chest heavy. Alfred had moved her from the examination table to a recovery bed. He had also changed out her destroyed super hero outfit to a loose white hospital gown. Bandages were wrapped completely around her top back and chest. Her skin was sewn together where her wings had previously connected to her body. Her muscles had severe trauma and may never heal correctly. Her face was bruised, cheeks stained in purple as if Joker himself beat her with his own hands. Her skin on her wrists were torn in small straight lines like if she fought furiously against wired/roped restraints.

This was a physical state that Damian could never imagine Y/N in. He failed to protect her and angered him. He was careful to slip his hand in hers.

Being alone with her was the only thing Damian could do, “Beloved, they will pay for what they have done. I will make them suffer as you suffered. I promise”

 When Y/N finally did wake up, she found herself alone in a dimly lit room. Her body felt heavy and numb. She tried to move her head to have a more visual outlook of her situation, but that too felt heavy. As if she just woke up from a massive fever or surgery. She didn’t understand why her body was so exhausted or why she was in the hospital room.

“D-Damian?...” her voiced try to yell out, however it was hoarse and strained. With all her will power she began sitting up. Her back roared in refusal. Even with heavy pain meds, her back still screamed in agony. She hesitated but continued to move her body over to the edge of the bed. As she tried to drape her legs over to the edge, she realized her legs were tangled in the thin hospital blanket. As she tried to kick it off, she lost her balance and fell over the edge to the hard floor. Her used her arms to shield her face upon impact. But that doesn’t mean it didn’t hurt. Her body ached and cried. When she lifted her head up from her arms, she noticed a small puddle of blood below her. The longer she stared at it the more it grew.

“Blood? Is this Damian’s blood?...I don’t understand.” Y/N questioned outload. She tried to stand up, but her legs were still tangled within the blankets. Letting out a frustrated sigh, she began to contract her ‘wings,’ hopefully that would help lift her up. But she did not lift, nor did air circulate like it normally did when she flapped her wings. The only thing that happened was the puddle below her only increased.

And then she realized. She remembered everything. She stared at her blood-stained hands. The bruises across her arms and legs now clear. Joker and Harley tormented her. They beat her with objects and with their own hands. They took a butcher knife and cut out her wings. They cut straight into her. Not caring if she lived or died in the process. But that’s who they were. Sick and twisted monsters.

Y/N’s hands began to tremble as she yelled in frustration and pure agony.

Damian was only gone for 8 minutes, Alfred recommending for him to shower and change. Convincing him that Y/N would not like to see him covered in blood when she first wakes up. He was walking down the bat cave stairs, when he heard her scream. He quickened his pace and ran full speed into the hospital room.

He did not hesitate as he kneeled down beside her, “Beloved! What happened?” He gently laid slipped his arms around her, one behind her back and one under her knees, lifting her back onto the bed. Blood dripped off his arm making Damian realize Y/N ripped open her stitches. “Beloved, please calm down.” His voice was pleading, “ALFRED!!” he screamed out, as he tore the tangled sheets from Y/N’s feet and pressed them against her back.

“Dami, my wings..” Y/N leaned against Damian’s chest, exhaustion overwhelming her.

“Beloved, I know”

“They took them..”

“We will get them back” Damian slipped his hand into her hair, rubbing her temple as he did so.

“But they are soiled. She put them on”

“And I will rip them off of her”

“…they don’t feel like mine anymore..”

“Habibti, I promise you we will get them back”

Y/N could only nod as Alfred arrived and instructed her to lay on her stomach.

It felt like she was in a different world. She could no longer focus on Alfred and Damian’s words or their movements.  Damian caressed her hair as she laid on her stomach and Alfred gave her a numbing shot so he can redo her stitches. Damian spoke to her, hardly caring that Alfred could see his vulnerability.

Damian’s voice sounded muffled, but that didn’t matter. His voice was comforting and warm. Her pain meds and exhaustion were kicking in again. Damian’s face was a blur as her eyes closed and body relaxed. Damian continued rubbing her hair, as she slept.

Soon enough Alfred brought a chair for Damian to sit on. He refused to budge all night, resting his head next to Y/N’s with an arm securely around her form. Imagining her falling off the bed again carved its way in his mind. He refused to allow that to happen again. He got a new blanket for her and made sure it covered her all the way to her shoulders. Y/N was basically naked under her hospital gown with only panties on. He would skin his brothers alive if they ever saw Y/N in such a way.

Alfred stayed closed by to monitor them both, before retreating to his room to rest as well.

In the morning, Dick walked to the hospital room to check up on Y/N. He wasn’t surprised to find Damian in there as well. The blood on the floor was a cause for concern. But it looked like Y/N was stabilized once again. New bandages were wrapped around Y/N’s body to cover her stitches. Damian was again covered in blood once again. Dick could only imagine the scene that may have happened last night while he was asleep.

Dick could only sigh at this and grab a spare blanket from a nearby cabinet and drape it over Damian. His baby bird looked very uncomfortable with his body half on the bed and half on the chair. Dick noted Damian’s protective arm around Y/N. He raised him well.

Tip toeing out of the room, Dick took a seat at the bat computer. He rubbed his tired face and began searching for Joker and Harley.

#batfam imagine #batfam x reader #damian wayne x reader #reader imagine #dc imagine #jason todd x reader #dick grayson x read #dick grayson x reader #batfamily imagine #imagine #tim drake x reader #x reader #batfam #dc #angst imagine #batfam angst

[we-built-the-shadows-here]

it’s Snape’s birthday and I’ve been sitting on this for a bit so here is a new fic to close out my fic recs of 2018, and I’m just gonna throw chapter 1 up here on its own!

LD50 (ao3) (ffn)

January 3 1981: Belladonna

Knockturn Alley is full of furtive movement and mutterings even though it is thirty minutes until the newly-imposed curfew and bitterly cold. It is the first Saturday in 1981, and the street has well-hidden inlets and outlets; the people flow through like a river. No one wants to catch the ire of the Aurors who are, even now, certainly watching. Most of the legal transactions still have the sly movements of the illicit; most of the illicit transactions have the easy grace of a carefree conversation. Everyone’s head is covered in hats, scarves, hoods both to stave off the cold and to disguise identity.

That's how Severus hides: hood pulled high, collar turned up against the chill, stubbled chin and telltale nose hidden behind a lumpy wool scarf. It’s cold enough to warrant it. He’s looking at a fogged window at an assortment of cursed books, watching one drag itself to and fro past the others--the one that shakes, the one bound in human skin, the one whose gently shifting cover pattern could hypnotize if you weren’t careful.

The books are a pretense; his real focus is the reflection in the window of the people as they move up and down the street. He straightens when he sees his target: a bright yellow scarf, catching the dim streetlamps in the snowy gloom, strolling slowly down the alley. He jerks his head as the yellow scarf walks past, tugging his own collar tighter, making sure the tiny brass star pin--his own marker for his partner, nicked from a pawn shop--is exposed. He turns, and they fall in stride, looking straight ahead.

“You’re late,” Severus mutters.

“You’ll wait if you need it,” he drawls. “For your little haemophiliac customer, you said? Sad story.” He sounds as if he’s heard about a dozen of them today and gives credence to none. “It’s five galleons, now. Do you have the money?”

“Yes,” Severus huffs, the word making a puff of mist in the cold air. He had hoped for a discount, with the whole cloth tragedy of a sick child woven in, but clearly struck out. Perhaps the man was raising his prices to charge for the lie, as well.

What they are doing is not precisely illegal , which is why the item is not delivered by one and the payment taken by another to thwart law enforcement. But this transaction is also not entirely above-board. Were a Ministry official to inquire after it, certainly no tax would be paid, and Severus knows for a fact that the brewer would not be certified. There are a number of reasons not to be certified, though; one could be unable to find a Master to apprentice to, or one could be a registered werewolf or vampire or half-breed of some description, or one could simply lack the galleons.

Even galleons themselves are muffled where Severus holds them between his fingers, and the flagon of potion is swaddled in dirty canvas. They pass hand to hand with ease, and Severus takes the vial easily even though nerves have his fingers shaking. He’s bought ingredients from the black market like this, but never a finished potion before, and it feels less like a transaction between fellow professionals and more fully illegal, which means more frightening, with the Aurors permitted to attack with Unforgivables first and interrogate later.

But there’s more he’s supposed to get, more than just the vial. “Your supplier--” he starts.

But his companion has already turned to go into a dimly lit shop door. The shopkeeper greets the man with a thin smile and the door shuts behind them both, and Severus fights the urge to look after, to look around at all. Looking around is worse than walking alone, but his heart is still pounding. He takes a deep breath and lets it out slow, through his teeth, so it doesn’t make a huge puff of steam; it was clumsy to ask like that, clumsy to pry so openly at the supply chain when he’d only just won the dealer’s trust enough to sell. He has to keep his gait even, step by step, soles slipping on the icy cobblestones. Well, half of Dumbledore’s task was to get blood replentisher. He has blood replentisher. The other half--meet with his new contact and begin some kind of work with them in person--will be more painless. It has to be.

Near the end of the alley he slips into a doorway and, spine rigid with the effort it takes to not glance backwards, he disapparates.

The designated place Dumbledore had indicated is not so far as it might be; he makes two stopovers before coming to rest along the foggy, moonlit street. He walks five long blocks, takes two  left turns, and crosses a street to ensure he isn't being followed despite the fact that there is no body in the darkness trailing him, no footsteps in his ear to betray a follower. It helps calm him, and it is perhaps the only spycraft that he'd managed to think of on his own that wasn’t entirely lifted from a pulp novel. His heels are muffled on the sidewalk by snow and charm, and his dark cloak sucks in the light. He feels like a shadow, and is comforted by the thought.

The dingy, dim muggle lane with its dirty shutters and spindly trees comes to an end and there, in the dimmest corner, is the address he was given. One light is on in an upstairs room. Up the stairs to the door, and Severus pauses at the threshold, tugs his hood closer to his cheeks, and knocks.

The door opens of its own accord. Charmed, it must be. Or a trap. He could walk away. It would be safer. Severus thinks of the light upstairs. They must have heard. Might have opened the door using their own wand. It could be an Auror ambush, or a Death Eater ambush, or an Order ambush from those who embraced the more brutal methods Dumbledore claimed to not endorse.

Severus has scrounged in the dirt for as much information as he could for Dumbledore for over a year: it was, all of it, thin, barely sufficient, little of it actionable. Then, on new year’s eve, an owl carrying Dumbledore’s sprawling script: Acquire a blood replentisher potion and meet your new contact, I have an assignment uniquely suited to your skills. This is your opportunity to gain my trust-- and the date, time, and location, this anonymous, run-down home. He had barely managed to find someone who would sell him the blood replentisher in time for the meeting.

Severus decides that he wants Dumbledore’s trust. It’s the only hope he has of surviving this. He strides across the threshold and shuts the door behind him, throwing the bolt.

Warm light is pouring down the stairs in shattered shapes, carved by a banister, but no light is on in the first room, a parlor with an arm-chair and a fireplace. Dimly through a doorway he can make out a kitchen. He waits to hear someone call or speak, but no one does. When no one appears, he whispers, “Hominem revelio.”

His senses expend for a swooping moment and--yes, someone is upstairs in the lit room. He begins slowly moving toward the stair. A floorboard creaks beneath him and he pauses, briefly.

Someone is humming. The tune is half-familiar, half-remembered, something from the Muggle radio from a long time ago.

Two more steps. Only one room is illuminated, the one he saw from the street, half a bookcase and a desk visible behind the banister. No person. Two more steps, and still nothing. Three more, and he’s at the landing. Four more--

A door with no light behind him flies open and there’s a wand stuck in the back of his neck. “Don’t try anything,” a woman’s voice demands. “Were you followed?”

Snape's head turns slowly. Something very odd is happening in his gut. The seller’s voice had been an intentional cipher, but this one, that voice is-- “Do I know you?”

She scoffs, then. “I said, were you followed?”

“I wasn’t followed,” he says. He could shoot a hex over his shoulder, could sweep her legs out from beneath her, could run. But this is about trust. “I have what Dumbledore asked of me.”

“All right.” The pressure comes off the back of his neck. “You can turn around.”

He very nearly doesn’t want to. He stares for a single, flat moment into the opposite room, lit so well, and curses himself for being tricked, for having a secret, for defecting to Dumbledore, for being so damn predictable.

Then he turns.

There she is: red hair, green eyes, anger, and the reason Dumbledore hadn't told him the name of the handler who would meet him. “You,” he says, pushing all the loathing he has for himself into his tone. “Dumbledore didn't say--”

“Dumbledore didn't say because you wouldn't have come,” Lily Potter says. “Frankly I wouldn't have believed it myself if you weren't standing here.”

He had begged--on his fucking knees in front of the old man--for her life, this exact woman’s life, almost a year ago. Dumbledore had taken the defection and assigned it a price: information. He had paid it, over and over again, through a Protean charmed quill and through the Auror Bones and, very rarely, Dumbledore himself. Too much obvious, direct contact was dangerous to Severus himself. Dumbledore cared at least that much for his life.

He had wondered, briefly, if it was meant to be an Auror sting to lock him up. While gray market potioneering could lose his certification if it happened too many times, it wouldn’t put him in Azkaban, it wasn’t really any more illegal than the woman selling homemade pasties by the train station, and Dumbledore had far worse against him.

Far worse that was now standing before him. Severus spits on the floor at her feet.

Lily wrinkles her nose and glared down at the little wet patch on the carpet, then returns to glaring at his face. “Are you done?”

“I'm not working with you,” he says hotly.

“Fine,” Lily says. “I told Dumbledore you we're better suited to Azkaban anyway, when he gave me this assignment. Glad to know I'm right.”

The idea that she didn’t want to work with him-- that she had been assigned when all of this had been to protect her--and her prophecied son and her dreadful husband--that she might be right -- “Is that what you think,” he hisses, stepping closer.  He has grown since the last time they had stood so close together. He has also learned many things, learned to use his voice better than just to shout, learned to imply violence instead of just reach for the blunt tool first when anger flared, learned to be quick and smart and keep a level head in a fight, which maybe this was shaping up to become. He could look down his long nose at her, eyes narrowed in disdain, thinking you’re nothing to me and make it plain on his face without saying a word. He keeps his tone just barely level through sheer force of will. “You know what I am, then. Perhaps you should think twice before threatening me.”

Her wand must be up her sleeve, the way her finger twitches, as if considering bringing it to her hand. “I don’t think you’re going to hurt me,” she says, voice tight but even.

“The Dark Lord has murdered mothers before, witch.”

“I know he has. I don’t think you are going to hurt me.” Her eyes are fixed on his, even, open, brow knitting back together, but not in anger--in frustration, as if he were being particularly dense. She pushes past him, toward the light. “Come on. Let’s sit in the study. Don’t touch anything. This is the house of a Muggle on holiday so I’d ask you not to make me stage a break-in for him.”

He could leave. He could leave, right now, throw the swaddled potion down a sewer grate, disapparate, go home, get blind stinking drunk and go to sleep on the couch. He could do it right now and likely wouldn’t even suffer for it. Dumbledore wasn’t the kind to punish, not the way the Dark Lord is.

He follows her into the study. She takes the seat at the desk. There is a fat floral armchair that Severus would rather set on fire than sit in, so he stays standing.

“Our assignment,” he says, with all the disdain he can muster.

“Yes. Right.” She pulls a piece of thumbed parchment out of her pocket and sets it on the desk.“You’ve got your Mastery and certification, you’re probably brewing, right?” She doesn’t wait for an answer. “There is an artificial shortage in medicinal potions ingredients, Ministry’s throttling imports and increasing hunting down home-herbologists growing ingredients. And there’s an all-time low of potions masters.” Her eyes go narrow and sharp, as if daring him to say anything about why she isn’t one--the marriage, the baby, her blood status and the fact that most potions masters would hesitate even in peacetime to take on a mudblood.

Severus is glaring at the window, at his own reflection and hers. He flicks his fingers at Lily as if he doesn’t care, gesturing in a loop. “Get on with it.”

Her hand on the desk becomes a momentary fist, but then she goes on. “The biggest pinch is blood-replentisher. Even St Mungo's is feeling pinched on that one. The only place that can reliably stock medical potions is the black market and the prices--”

“You owe me five galleons, by the way,” he interrupts.

“Five?” She looks shocked. “Last week the going rate was three.”

“I suppose they aren’t giving me the new customer discount that they offer to Order members,” Severus says bitterly.

“Not to slimy bastards like you, anyway,” she retorts.

He moves to the door. “Tell Dumbledore--”

“Oh, hell, sit down Sev.” She passes a hand across her brow. “I’m sorry, all right. That was uncalled for. You did what we asked.” And then she starts digging in her pocket. “I don’t think I have five. I only brought what I needed. I’ve got a few quid--”

“It’s fine,” he says harshly from the doorway. He can’t exactly afford all five of the galleons but he’s not about to beg for two. There is enough rice in the cupboard, he won’t starve.

She produces three coins and places them in a neat little stack on the desk, as if asking him to come back in. He does. They’re warm to the touch when his hand covers them--the warmth of her body, he realizes uncomfortably. He inspects one. It’s so bright, it must be fresh from the bank, but the mint date is 1716.

Potter gold, then, minted and then put in a bank. That, too, he swallows, and shoves the gold into his pocket. He can feel her watching him and tries not to allow the ugly flush that he knows is creeping up his stubbled neck to reach his cheeks.

“Anyway,” she says, clearing her throat and reverting her gaze to the well-thumbed note. “Fully half the potions the Order managed to source have turned up tampered with or outright poisoned. And they were poisoned really well, even I had trouble when I went through our stores.”

That is interesting. Some Death Eaters had died of tampered black market potions, and they suffered the same difficulties the Order had. Detecting the tampering was a feat in itself, Severus knew firsthand. “And you want me to inspect further? Follow up your work?”

“No,” she says. “Dumbledore wants us to trace the tampering back to their source. Figure out who’s doing it, and why. Maybe even stop them, if we can.”

“I would sooner suggest you stop taking medical potions,” he snaps, rattled by the ambition of the task--and the word us. Himself and her, working together; not the occasional report, but real work.  Low risk spy work compared to the passing of information that he had already done--that would get him killed, this could be played off--but still valuable or he wouldn't be doing it. But then again, he had never been a spy before. His forearm itches, at that thought. He doesn’t reach for it.

“People are dying, Severus,” she says, deadly serious. “We can’t trust anything but charms and you know well as I do that potions are better for the worst of it. People are dying and will keep dying and you and I are the best brewers the Order has. This is our assignment. Do you accept it or do I have to tell Dumbledore that I’m working alone?”

He resents that. It’s not as if he had a choice regardless. “Your first sample, then,” he says stiffly, dropping the cloth-wrapped vial before her on the desk.  “I take it you will require more?”

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