For reasons unknown, an immortal beast has been dropping off random trinkets at your ancestral home for generations. They're all kept in storage; nobody dares throw them away. Today instead of a trinket, the beast leaves a note with instructions on it.
Tweak this one as you see fit. Maybe Octavia? Dunno. Do what sparks your imagination!
Taken from here if the link works...
Ooooh I've actually got a neat idea for this one....
Thank you!!
____
Years Ahead
Word Count: 2.7k
Content Warnings: none? mentions major character death but not in a violent way
____
The boy peered at the doorstep. He didn't spot the trinket for a long time. He was looking for something bright, something shiny, like so many of the other trinkets were shiny, and this... wasn't.
Finally he spotted it, a folded piece of old paper half-tucked under one of the flowerpots on the front stoop. Carefully, he tilted the pot enough to snag the paper underneath, and gingerly unfolded it.
It was a photo: in color, glossy, but faded with time. It looked like the photos the boy had seen on the walls of his grandmother's house - they still stuck to paper, instead of the screens and projections he had in his own house.
The photo showed a cluster of figures, dirty and bloodied but grinning at the camera. Some of the figures were... odd, not quite human, and it made the boy wonder where this picture had come from.
He folded it back up and took it inside. His mother had warned him, repeatedly, not to get too involved with the trinkets. Nobody in his family knew who sent them, only that they'd been arriving on the doorstep almost daily for close to a century. There was a heavy oak trunk in the attic, big enough that the boy and his father could both curl up inside and take a nap, full to the brim of these little trinkets.
The boy tossed the photo onto the pile with the rest, looking at the odd assortment of trinkets in the box. It didn't make sense: Roman coins next to animal-bone jewelry, rolls of camera film stacked on top of shark teeth and bullet casings. It was like their mystery gift-giver had raided a museum. Half the items looked like trash to him, useless, but his mother forbade him from throwing anything out.
"Did you check the stoop?" his mother called out, from somewhere below him.
"Yeah!" the boy shouted back, "It was a photo! I put it with the rest!"
He thundered back down the stairs and raced to catch the bus, and that was the end of that.
____
The next day, there was a shiny silver medal on the stoop. The boy picked it up and carried it upstairs, like all the rest, but something made him curious. He snagged the previous day's photo and turned over, poring over the figures in the shot.
There. The tall man in the center of the picture- he had the same medal clipped to his chest. And a gun slung over his shoulder. Military. The boy didn't know what it meant, but it felt like some sort of clue.
He spent the rest of the day rooting through the chest of trinkets, separating any items that caught his eye. He didn't find any more clues there, though he nearly cut himself on a small, slender blade at the bottom of the trunk. He nearly gave up there. It was a fluke, these two items in a row, or their mystery gift-giver just happened to steal from this military man and give out what they found there. The boy had wondered repeatedly if they were a thief. It was the only way to explain how they got all the trinkets.
His mother called him down to supper. He was nearly to the stairs when he remembered the stack of photos.
"Just a minute!" he shouted back down to his mother, rifling through the photos as quickly as he could.
Sure enough, the same man popped up in almost all of them. A few of the others did too, here and there, but none with as much frequency.
Well, almost none.
The man had his arm around them in almost every single one of the photos. Smaller, shorter, sharp-eyed but smiling, and always with a weapon in their hand. And as the boy flipped through the pictures, one right after another, he noticed something else.
They didn't age.
The man next to them did, little by little. His hair, already on the pale side, went thin and gray. Lines appeared on his forehead and cheeks, crinkled around his eyes when he smiled. The boy had no idea the scope of the photos, how many years were represented, but he could see that quite a lot of time must have passed between them.
And the person standing next to him did not change. If the boy looked closely, he could see a few new scars on their skin, or shifts in their expression over time, but they didn't age like the man next to them.
Immortal. Or close to it.
He knew who was leaving the trinkets.
The boy ran downstairs and tried to explain this all to his family, but they didn't believe him. No, not quite - they might have believed him, but they insisted he not push this any further. He didn't need to know who was leaving the trinkets, they said, and trying to investigate might just make them angry. If this really was some sort of god, the last thing they wanted was to displease it.
He said he understood. He said he wouldn't search for any more clues. He said he would let the immortal leave their gifts, and he would put them in the trunk upstairs, and that would be it.
He lied.
____
That night, once his parents had gone to bed, he snuck out of his room and crept down to the front stoop. He intended to stay there all night, armed with a two-liter of caffeinated soda he'd stolen from the kitchen and his fluffiest blanket wrapped around himself to ward off the nighttime chill. He was determined to stay awake, and catch this mystery gift-giver in the act. He held the photo and medal clutched tight in his hands.
Hours stretched on, and even the soda couldn't help him hold off his tiredness. It just made him have to pee. He was glad his mother didn't catch him doing it in the bushes. She'd be furious.
There was no sign of the gift-giver, nor anyone else. The night was dark and silent around him.
He must have dozed off, because the next thing he noticed was sunlight spearing into his eyes. His head hurt, probably from all the soda and lack of good sleep. And he hadn't even caught a glimpse of the person he was looking for.
But his blanket had been tucked around him a little more soundly, and in his hands, alongside the medal and photo, was a note.
Stop looking for me.
There was no signature. The words were written in dark ink, simple and blocky handwriting. He was half-convinced his parents had written it for him, the same way they'd masqueraded as Santa Clause and the Tooth Fairy for so much of his life.
The boy had to hustle back inside before his parents could realize he'd spent the night on the stoop. He got dressed, brushed his teeth, ran off to catch the school bus like it was any other morning. The note burned a hole in his pocket the whole way.
He didn't show the note to his parents. When they asked about the morning's trinket, he grabbed a random object from the trunk upstairs and presented it to them. They couldn't tell the difference.
That night, he tucked a few of the photos - all showing the military man in the center of the shot - under the flowerpot, alongside a note of his own.
Who is he?
The boy didn't expect a response. But the next morning, he found another old medal from the US Army on the front stoop, alongside a small scrap of paper.
You remind me of him. Stubborn. Stop looking for me.
That was the only explanation he got. It confirmed something in his mind, though - the immortal from the picture, the one the soldier always held close to his side, was the same one who'd been leaving his family these little trinkets for decades.
He left them another note.
Why do you leave my family these things?
That one was accompanied by a handful of items from the trunk upstairs. He picked them at random. In the morning, they were gone.
Would you rather I take them back? Stop asking questions.
He thought about that one for a long time. On the one hand, he didn't want them to take back what they'd given - mostly because it sounded like a threat, and he didn't want his family or their home to get hurt because of it. Maybe he was getting too curious for his own good.
But on the other hand, they'd responded to every note he left. They could have been silent, kept leaving wordless trinkets or no trinkets at all, let him think they didn't understand English or didn't care or weren't human at all. But they responded. So maybe they did care. Just a little.
That night, he decided to voice his thoughts.
Why would I stop asking questions when you keep answering them?
Answering was more than a little generous. He still didn't know anything new. If anything, he had more questions than he started with. But why would they respond at all if they didn't want him to ask more questions? He had the strangest feeling that, whoever this person was, they liked the back-and-forth of it.
But maybe he'd pushed things a little too far with that last note. They were silent for a whole week after that. No more notes, no more trinkets. Even his parents started to get suspicious.
Just as he was ready to give up, when he debating not checking the stoop at all after so much silence, there was another note under the flowerpot.
You built a fort in the woods when you were ten. Meet me there. Next Sunday at midnight.
He'd definitely pushed things too far. This was how kids got abducted. He was a smart boy, but even a stupid boy would know not to walk into the forest at midnight and meet somebody they'd never met. He didn't even know this person's name, or if they were who they said they were. The only proof that they were the immortal in the pictures was that they'd been leaving trinkets for a hundred years, and no normal human would be able to do that.
But he wanted his questions answered. He wanted to see who it was.
He thought about telling his parents. This was starting to get scary. But if he told them now, they'd shut this whole thing down. And if this was the immortal person in the pictures, if they did know who that military man was, this might be his only chance to find out.
He didn't tell them just yet. He just left another note.
How do I know I can trust you?
The response was on the front stoop the morning after, alongside a carved statuette the size of his thumb. It looked like a lion, carved of some rough off-white material that might have been bone.
You don't. I'm a very dangerous person. Your family has always known this. There's nothing I can say that would reassure you otherwise.
But if you want to see me face to face, that is where I'll be.
He debated it for days. Logic told him not to go. Instinct told him he would be fine. He wasn't sure which one he trusted more.
____
The next Sunday, the boy found himself walking through the woods. He still remembered the path to his fort, though the darkness made every tree look alike. Once or twice, he thought he saw the gleam of animal eyes reflected in the light of his flashlight. Every so often, a stick cracked from somewhere off to his left. He felt like he was being followed.
He wasn't unarmed. He had a knife clutched in his hand, the same small blade he'd found in the trunk weeks before. In his pockets were a collection of firecrackers he'd found in the garage - hopefully they would prove some distraction if this really did turn out to be dangerous. He'd clipped the medals to the front of his shirt, just because. They made him feel a little braver.
He approached the fort, silhouetted in the darkness. His eyes strained for light, looking for any figure or flash of movement. So far, he saw nobody.
"You have my knife."
The voice came from his left, and he chucked the blade as hard as he could in the direction of the voice.
It struck their shoulder, hard enough to make them stagger back a step. Calmly, as if they were in no pain at all, they pulled the blade from their shoulder and turned it over in their hands. The wound sealed over in moments, leaving behind only a rip in their shirt and a wash of blood down their arm.
"Not bad, kid."
"You're the one from the picture." he blurted, the first thing that popped into his head. Because they were - the same sharp eyes, the same freckled-spotted skin, the same dark curly hair. Now they had no weapon, and most of their scars were covered by their long-sleeved shirt, but their face was familiar. He'd been looking at it for weeks.
The boy rustled in his pockets, pulling out the picture they'd left before - the group photo, where they all looked young and healthy, with the soldier and the immortal and the human shark and all the rest. Now it was obvious they were the same. They hadn't changed at all, though he wondered what had happened to the others in the photo.
"This one." he said, holding it out to them. The person took a step forward, and the boy unconsciously matched it with a shuffle back. He didn't want them close enough to grab him. He still had that much sense. The other person stopped where they stood, tilting their head at him.
"Yes." they said, "That one."
"You're... you're a god?" he guessed, his other hand fiddling with the firecrackers in his pocket. He had a feeling they would do very little, if this person wanted a fight. Maybe it was a bad idea to come here. Maybe he shouldn't have investigated.
"Not exactly." they responded, "I've just lived a very long time. You've heard of my kind before. Metahumans. Amazons."
"Like Wonder Woman."
That made them grimace, just a little. If he hadn't been watching them so intently, looking for any flicker of motion, he would have missed it.
"Yes." they decided, "Like Wonder Woman."
"Why do you keep leaving things on the doorstep? My grandpa says you've been doing it since before he was born." the boy asked. Little by little, he could feel his fear starting to trickle away. He still was wary, he still didn't let himself relax, but he was becoming convinced that this person wasn't here to hurt him. They still hadn't moved from their spot, and their hands hung loose at their sides. One still held that little knife, but it was a casual grip, like they'd forgotten it was there.
They were silent for a long time. The boy shifted on his feet.
"I made a promise, a very long time ago," they finally answered, dark eyes still frozen on the photo in his hand. They looked sad. They looked like they'd been sad for a long time. "I promised that I would protect your family for as long as I could. I promised that I would keep you safe. The trinkets are a sign that I'm still here to watch over you."
"Did he make you promise?" he asked, pointing to the man in the center of the photo. Another low wash of grief passed over the person's face.
"Yes," they said, voice choked, "Yes, he did."
"Who are you?" the boy couldn't help but continue, glancing between them and the photo in his hand, "Who is he?"
"My name is Eris." the person responded, looking at the picture with dark, sad eyes, "The man you see is your great-great-grandfather. He was... he was the only man I ever loved."
9 notes
·
View notes
The Unreadable Heart
Chapter 14: Something Happens
(47854 words) by Thornbushrose
Chapters: 14/?
Fandom: Daredevil (TV)
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Matt Murdock/OC
Characters: Matt Murdock, OC - Character, Sister Maggie, Father Lantom, Franklin "Foggy" Nelson, Karen Page, Maybe Jessica Jones?
Additional Tags: Slow Burn, metahuman OC, Canon Typical Violence, No Smut, Please don't be mad, if I tried to write smut you'd still be mad, talking bird, Implied Drug Use, Depression, Suicidal Ideation, Angst, Hurt/Comfort, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Mind Control, Implied/Referenced Domestic Violence
Summary:
Birdie Garrett lives a deliberately peaceful life as a social worker at St Agnes Home for Boys, until a mysterious patient in the infirmary starts to challenge the rules she uses to keep the peace.
=======================================
This is it. The chapter you've been waiting for. I expect lots of comments.
=======================================
Summary:
The living room was dark and silent. Empty. Safe. Birdie didn’t feel safe. She retreated to her bedroom and closed the blinds there, too, but she still didn’t feel safe. She sat in the narrow space between her bed and the wall, but the open air above her felt oppressive. Poisonous. She went into her closet, shoved her neatly paired shoes out of the way, closed the door and sat in the dark, hugging her knees.
Even while her heart pounded in her ears she knew, in her mind, that there was nothing immediate to be afraid of. She was having a panic attack or something. But even though she knew she was acting crazy, she couldn’t move. The terrified mouse had control of her brain, and she couldn’t do anything about it. She tried to make herself tiny. Silent. Invisible. Tried to make even her mind disappear.
She felt like she sat there for days, but later she understood it had only been an hour or so. Then, without warning, the closet door flew open.
=====================================
@mattmurdocks6thscaleapartment, @shouldbestudying41, @ebathory997, @marytheweefrenchie, @ofmusesandsecrets, @stilldreaming666 @avgvstlover @audreypie29 @cometenthusiast @shiorimakibawrites @ceterisparibus116 @bellaxgiornata @hithertoundreamtof23, @amberlynnmurdock
7 notes
·
View notes