#one of these days ill write a snippet centered on someone else...

[carnivalcarriondiscarded]

weee another fantasy au snippet <3 a little shorter than usual cause that's what the scene is <3 shorter <3

~

Something is wrong with Wally. 

It’s not serious, or at least Barnaby doesn’t think it is. If he didn’t pay such close attention to his buddy, he’d never know that anything was amiss at all - Wally has an excellent straight face. But not so excellent that Barnaby can’t read him.

There’s a different curve to his smile these days. It’s sort of pinched, sort of sad. It matches a look in his eyes that puts Barnaby on edge, if only because that deep, dark pensiveness is so wildly out of place on Wally’s soft face. 

It scares him. Something is off.

What is it?

Barnaby taps his claws on his middle as he stares at the tent roof, thin enough that firelight from outside bleeds through. Despite the late hour, his eyelids feel magicked open. The other side of the tent yawns empty, and that is precisely the source of Barnaby’s insomnia. 

Everyone is asleep except for two - and Barnaby is only awake because of one.

With a deep sigh through the nose, Barnaby sits up and clambers out of the tent. He shivers as he stands up and crosses his arms, rubbing at his fur. The night sky is clear, but the breeze cuts him through to the bone. It isn’t even winter yet, sheesh…

The campfire casts a fuzzy outline of red-orange around Wally. He doesn’t turn away from the embers as Barnaby shuffles behind him, and Barnaby doesn’t have to look to know that he’s staring directly into the low flames. He tweaks Wally’s raised hood as he passes, just to make sure Wally knows he isn’t alone anymore. He spaces out, sometimes. 

“Can’t sleep?” Barnaby asks as he takes the log next to Wally’s rock of choice. Wally just hums, and Barnaby frowns.

There’s that look again.

With how Wally is perched, his legs drawn up and arms folded on his knees, his smile is hidden. It’s unsettling. Barnaby scans Wally from the corner of his eye, taking in the tension in his shoulders and the nearly invisible pinch of his nonexistent brows. 

“Yeah, me neither,” Barnaby says. Another breeze, another shudder, and a quick glare at the stars. 

Should he press? The obvious answer is absolutely not, but… Barnaby isn’t sure how much of this - thisness he can take. He has no idea what to call it. A mood? It’s too serious to be considered a mood. All Barnaby knows is that when Wally is like this, something itches under his skin. 

Tonight would be a perfect opportunity to ask. Everyone else is fast asleep. Wally isn’t putting up the fronts he usually does. The knowledge that this Wally, the Wally all covered up and curled in on himself, is as vulnerable as anyone will never see - it makes Barnaby want to reach.

“Hey,” he murmurs, nudging his knee against Wally’s boot, “I’m starting to worry for the fire with how you’re glarin’ at the thing. What, did it emberass ya? Give ya the coal shoulder?”

Wally doesn't laugh, but his gaze softens. Barnaby curses himself.

“Not that there’s anything wrong with glarin' - I’m sure the fire deserves it,” Barnaby is quick to add. “But really… is everything alright, kid?”

“Yes,” Wally says, but it rings like an untruth. It's just something he’s saying because it’s what he always says. Everything is always fine with Wally. 

“You know you don’t gotta pretend with me. There’s somethin’ bothering you, I can tell.” Too far, too much, Barnaby is sure. He shouldn’t be so pushy.

But instead of clamming up, Wally’s eyes flicker down and away, guilty. The bloodhound in Barnaby perks up its ears. It’s all he can do not to point and shout AHA!, because that would assure that Wally would put up the same masks around him that he does with everything else. Vindication wars with his concern, as if he thought he might have been imagining the funks Wally has been slipping into.

Those too-long periods of silence that no one notices because Wally isn’t much of a talker. Moments of utter stillness that no one notices because Wally is always so stationary. The way he doesn’t drink in every new thing with a hunger like he usually does, as if Wally has been starving his whole life.

Those passing glances where his pupils seem too big, the blackness of them infinitely deep as if someone could fall into them. Maybe Wally is. Barnaby doesn’t want him to.

“You don’t gotta say a word,” Barnaby says, wishing the campfire log was just a smidge closer to the rock. “I just want ya to know that I see you, and I’m here. Whatever’s goin’ on in that pretty head ‘a yours, I’ll be right there for whatever you need. I got your back, Walls.”

Wally’s smile peeks over his arms for a moment - he always has liked being called pretty, or handsome, you name it. Barnaby preens over being able to coax him even the slightest bit out of the pit he’s slowly spiraling into. He’s winning big at the whole ‘best friend’ thing, Barnaby thinks - a complete natural.

For a long while, Barnaby doesn’t care to keep track, they sit in companionable silence. The fire cracks and pops when Barnaby adds a chunk of wood to it, coaxing it into a flame that actually takes the bite out of the breeze. Crickets chirp in the forest around them - something howls far away. 

The tension doesn’t leave Wally. In fact the longer they sit, the worse it gets. Barnaby keeps his mouth shut and eyes on the fire, the woods, the stars - anywhere except Wally. It’s the kind of tension that makes him suspect that Wally is gearing up to speak. Sometimes it feels like there’s a sinkhole of silence that opens up whenever Wally has something of his own to say. 

Reviving the fire was either a smart move, or a dumb one. It depends on how quickly Wally thinks of how to share. Without the brisk chill of night keeping Barnaby fresh-faced, sleep is finally starting to sink into him with the fire’s warmth. He briefly considers sneaking into Howdy and Sally’s tent to sneak an energy potion from Howdy’s pack. Pros, he’ll certainly be awake for Wally. Cons, he’ll be awake long past Wally’s spiel, Howdy will have a fit over missing an item, and Sally will have a bigger fit over Barnaby sneaking into her tent when he inevitably comes clean. Also, the potions don’t taste great. Or maybe he should fetch his pipe-

“I think. I don’t…”

For a second, Barnaby misses that Wally spoke at all. He double-takes when the half sentence registers, casting a quick look to Wally. Okay, no, don’t do that. Focus on the fire. Be casual - give him space. Barnaby nonchalantly pokes the coals with the fire stick.

Wally sighs - such a small sound that the crickets almost drown it out. But Barnaby has big ears, and they perk up. When does Wally ever sound frustrated? Curse him, but Barnaby finds it novel. Wally shifts on the rock, curling up impossibly tighter and turning his head away. Barnaby watches the back of his hood. 

“I don’t think I’m a good person,” Wally admits in the smallest, deadest voice Barnaby has ever heard. 

“What?” Barnaby says, or he means to. The air in his throat doesn’t quite form sound. He turns to Wally and clenches his paws on his knees to keep from reaching, floundering for words. 

How could he - why would he - who told him that he - 

“What do you mean?” Barnaby says, a disbelieving chuckle slipping out. “Wally, kid - you’re the best guy I know. You’re my best guy. Out of all the ways I could describe you, a bad person isn’t one of ‘em.”

Wally whips his head around, his eyes flashing - Barnaby tenses his entire body to keep from recoiling, though he can’t keep his eyes from widening.

For a second there he thought… he thought he saw… it must have been the firelight reflecting in Wally’s dark eyes.

Wally’s intense gaze pierces straight into Barnaby’s soul. He feels flayed raw and seen in a way that makes him want to run. But there’s something else. Something scared. Wally is searching for something, and Barnaby doesn’t know what or how to give it to him. His claws splinter bark.

As soon as it appeared, the look fades. Barnaby can take deep breaths again, and he lets go of the log. Wally blinks slowly and lets his sleepy gaze slide back to the fire. “I don’t know… maybe.”

Barnaby carefully lays a paw on Wally’s back. “You’re a good person, Wally. I don’t know who told you otherwise, but don’t listen to ‘em. You’re a fantastic friend, an even better best friend, and I gotta say - you make a pretty bang-up wizard. You’re the most.”

“I’m the most?” Wally murmurs, sounding surprised. He makes a sound that might be a laugh, might be a scoff. “No… you’re the most.”

“Tell ya what- we’re both the most.”

Wally casts him a sideways look, but doesn’t protest further. He hums.

“C’mon, lil’ wizard,” Barnaby says with a pat to his back, “let’s give the fire a break and turn in for the night.”

Just as he was starting to relax, Wally shies away from his touch, curling up like one of those shelled bugs Frank likes so much. “I think I’ll stay up a little longer.”

Barnaby swallows down the hurt and pulls away. “Alrighty. Don’t stay up too late - we got a day tomorrow.” 

“Ha. I know.”

With that, Barnaby stands. He gently squeezes Wally’s nape through the hood as he passes, and breathes a silent sigh of relief at how Wally leans into the touch.

All’s forgiven. Though he isn’t sure what for… whatever Barnaby said or did wrong, he’s just glad Wally doesn't mind.

Barnaby clambers into the tent and another shiver ripples through his fur. All the darn heat leeched out of it... He wraps himself in his thin, too-small blanket and shivers as hard as he can manage to generate some kind of warmth. It’ll heat up soon, he just has to wait. Wally usually casts a little sun spell on cold nights, but Barnaby can do without. Even if the tent gets comfortably warm, Barnaby isn’t sure if he’ll sleep.

Wally didn’t believe him. 

And Barnaby doesn’t know how to make him believe.

How could he think that he isn’t a good person? Barnaby meant what he said - Wally is the best person he knows. Wally is kind, patient, and just - just - him. There isn’t a single bad thing about him. Barnaby is so proud to call him his best friend. 

There has to be something that started this. A moment that made Wally doubt himself. Did someone say something? Not anyone in the Neighborhood, they all love Wally to pieces. He’s their wizard! He’s saved their lives and countless others, and their group simply wouldn’t be complete without him. He rounds them off with an artsy flourish.

So. There’s no reason that Wally should be feeling like this. But that look in his eyes… the guilt… there’s something else going on. Something deeper than just ‘I’m scared I’m a bad person.’ 

Something is wrong. 

Firelight flickers outside the tent, and Barnaby watches it until it goes dark.

#just a lil nighttime conversation... #in my mind wally let the fire die and then Immediately ran off into the forest for home time™️ #this au is so fun bc i really get to have fun with giving wally Extreme Guilt For Existing #and also to play around with him being Unintentionally Sinister on occasion #i hope its obvious that this is pre everyone-knows-about-home era <3 #snippets from the bog #wh fantasy au #one of these days ill write a snippet centered on someone else... #i do have one in mind for frank & julie... #well. Multiple in mind for frank & julie #them <3<3<3<3

[thepenultimateword]

Heroes Don’t Wear Tights

"What do you think you're doing?"

Vigilante froze half-clamber, long legs still dangling in mid-air as his thick arms clung to the fire escape bars. Wide smoky eyes, darker behind the ill-sewn mask and charcoal rubbing, slowly raised to Hero's hovering form.

"Um..." They scrambled the rest of the way and hid the glistening gash in their bicep with one bruised and bleeding hand. "H-hi."

Hero raised her brow. "Hi."

"H-Hero, right?"

"That's me."

"Wow. I just wasn't expecting...you. Here. Do you want..." they glanced absently through their window. "Well, I have juice, milk, water--"

Hero landed gracefully in front of him, so close their noses were almost touching and forcing the civilian back a step. "I want you to stop playing dress-up and stay home."

Vigilante blinked, taking that statement in bit by bit. "Wait, you want me to stop doing hero work?"

"It's not hero work," Hero snapped. "You're not a hero. You're a civilian in tights."

Vigilante rubbed his shoe against the ankle of his black compression leggings, the lighting from his bedroom partially illuminating the blush flooding his cheeks. "Don't heroes--"

"Heroes don't wear tights," Hero said firmly. "Except in movies. You're an amateur waiting to get hurt, and it's time to stop."

"B-but I can help." It was strange how someone so large could suddenly seem so small. Like Hero had deflated all the confidence right out of him.

She sighed. "Look, it's not that I don't appreciate what you're trying to do, but there's a process to these things. Paperwork. Licenses. Random people can't just go around fighting crime. On top of that, you're unpowered."

Vigilante's eyes flashed. "So what?"

Ugh, she wasn't in the mood for an argument on the politics of heroism. The debate on the licensing of unpowered people was still ongoing, but Hero had no idea why. Sure, it all sounded nice on paper, equality, community, whatever, but putting regular people against criminals that could unwind a person with their eyes with was like sending lambs to the slaughter.

"So you think you got out of that warehouse tonight on your own?"

Vigilante blanched. Soot and smoke still clung to the threads of their disguise. He hadn't even tried changing somewhere on his way. He was just lucky Hero was the only one who'd followed him home.

"Yeah," Hero said dryly. "You didn't escape by chance or skill; you escaped because I was there to pick up the mess."

"Please," the civilian said, shrunken once again.

"I'm sorry." She clapped a hand on his shoulder. It was supposed to be comforting, but she didn't think it was coming off that way. She'd never been good with feel-good stuff. "But stick to your day job."

"Ok," Vigilante mumbled, staring at his feet.

He was lying.

But how else could Hero convince him?

"Good," Hero said, feigning obliviousness, and watched him slip over his windowsill and draw the curtains. Hm. Not so impressed with her anymore was he. People rarely were. But what did she care what people thought as long as they stayed alive?

She'd just have to keep an on him. At least until she came up with a more permanent solution.

...

Hmmm, so maybe this snippet was a bit boring, but basically, I just wanted to write a hero x vigilante where the vigilante is just a clumsy civilian too reckless and well-intentioned for their own good. Most hero x vigilante is centered around the dynamic that hero is more morally upright and vigilante is more morally grey, but I wanted to go from a stance of a person who has been given legal permission to fight villains and a person who is taking it upon themself.

Master Taglist:

@moss-tombstone @crazytwentythrees @just-1-lonely-person @the-vagabond-nun @willow-trees-are-beautiful @cocoasprite @insanedreamer7905 @valiantlytransparentwhispers @whovian378 @watercolorfreckles @thebluepolarbear @yulanlavender @kitsunesakii @deflated-bouncingball @lem-hhn @office-plant-in-a-trenchcoat @last-ditch-entry @ghostfacepepper @pigeonwhumps @demonictumble @inkbirdie @vuvulia @bouncyartist @lunatic-moss-studio @breilobrealdi

#hero x villain community #hero x villain #heroes and villains #writing snippet #hero x hero #hero x vigilante #fiction #villain x hero #heroes and villains community #creative writing #hero #superheroes and villains

[sagemoderocklee]

📝

finally getting around to this, sorry for taking longer than i planned to answer but hope you enjoy this snippet from Honor Bound, the sequel to Alliance and part two of The Allied Nations Saga, which has sat in limbo for ages while I languish over editing Alliance. Admittedly this is... really rough and not up to my standards but this has been written for a long time. Once Alliance is where it needs to be I'll be able to focus on fixing up what's written of HB before actually writing the rest of it :p anyways this is from towards the end of chapter 1

---

He woke shaking and in a cold sweat.

It was too dark and it took a moment for his eyes to adjust, but after a moment, Shikamaru could make out the bare walls of his room. The futon at the center of the room was the only thing that showed what the room was; there was nothing else in it save for a pile of clothes in one corner and a few kunai scattered about.

His home had been destroyed during the war and all material possessions he'd had washed away. The Nara clan had worked tirelessly to rebuild its homes, but Shikamaru had barely had the energy for it. He didn't want his things back, he wanted his dad back, he wanted his teammates back. And Temari.

He ran a shaking hand through his hair, pulling the ponytail down. The tension around his temples eased slightly, but it did little to calm him. The nightmares were fading, but the feeling still remained.

Shadows danced across the walls as someone walked past his room, a light swaying as they went. It was most likely one of his cousins, heading to bed after a long day of work.

Shikamaru closed his eyes, turning away from the shadows that danced as the light passed by. He felt himself transported to the forests, back to that fateful moment when he'd found Chouji. Before he knew it, a sob had clawed its way up his throat and he was choking back tears. He stuffed his pillow over his face, trying to quiet his cries. This had been happening since Temari had left. Every night it was nightmares and memories and tears. He had bruises under his eyes to rival the Kazekage's, now. Sometimes he was amazed he was alive at all. There were days when he stayed in his room, lying on the floor, the memories crashing around him, the pain pinning him to the floor of his room, and the only thing that kept him from reaching for a kunai was a promise he'd made to Temari just before she'd left. It was a thin glimmer of hope for a distant future when maybe his heart wouldn't ache quite so badly, when his mind wouldn't see shadows of his dead friends everywhere, when he wouldn't wake in the night sobbing with the guilt and fear of it all.

He swallowed, pulling the pillow from his face and taking in a steadying breath. His heart still beat erratically, but he'd forced himself to calm enough to stop crying so loudly. Heaviness settled around him as the tears rolled silently down his face and he flopped back, staring blankly up at the ceiling, trying desperately not to imagine what might have happened to Ino. “I can't do this anymore,” he muttered to himself. His voice didn't sound right, but then nothing had been right since the end of the war—no, before the end. Only now, the signs were so much harder to miss: his mother always looked sad and his cousins all told him he looked ill, and when the remaining Rookie Nine had tried to drag him out for BBQ he'd had a panic attack before they'd even walked through the door. He'd avoided spending time with anyone since, too afraid or perhaps too ashamed to admit to them what was happening to him. As the hours rolled by, agonizingly slow, Shikamaru drifted. He was not in his body, he was not in Konoha. He didn't want to go back to the forests though. He wanted to go someplace safe, someplace warm. He wanted to go to Suna.

#naruto #shippuden #my fanfiction #ask game answers #nara shikamaru #the allied nations saga

[whump-a-la-mode]

Hi, could you please write a snippet on Hero whumpee, who's being tortured by the Hero league for being so weak, and when they don't show up for a fight, villian goes to find them, and they're completely shocked at hero's battered condition. So they break them out of there and nurse the traumatized hero back to health?

Apologies if it's a lot!

Ah I’m sorry it took so long to get to this one! It’s such a good prompt, Hero whumper and Hero whumpee. I hope I did your idea justice! Sorry that there’s not much in the way of caretaking, here. I was in the mood for some good classic whump.

CW//Injuries, chains, dehumanization, objectification, blood, black eyes, bruises, self-hatred

When Villain’s flashlight beam landed upon the sight, it was all that they could do not to drop their torch to the ground. It was just about as difficult not to lose their lunch.

They hadn’t known what to expect, when they’d taken on this (rather ill-advised) mission. Certainly not this. Certainly not what they saw before them. Really, anything else would have been better.

It wasn’t their business, even! If anything, the villain should have been glad.

They should have been glad when their nemesis disappeared. And, at first, it hadn’t even been a ‘disappearance.’

The last time that they had seen their nemesis had been a particularly climactic, and particularly violent battle. In the end, it was a fight that Villain had won, leaving their enemy limping away. 

Thus, the next time Villain had taken a bank hostage, it wasn’t the greatest surprise that Hero was not among those dispatched to stop them. They were hurt-- the villain had managed to get in some rather nasty blows. They needed their rest, and most doctors agree that fiery battles in bank vaults aren’t conducive to a fast recovery.

But, then, at the next fight, Hero had not shown their face.

Or the next.

Or the next.

Were they the most well-known of heroes? Certainly not. The Heroes’ League had plenty more shining faces, plenty more perfect smiles and dreamboats. But, then again, Villain was not the most well-known of villains. It was only proper that they should have a more obscure nemesis.

So it seemed, however, that obscurity had led to them simply being forgotten. News media never spoke of their disappearance, far more preoccupied with the week’s best paparazzi shots of Superhero and their closest cohorts.

It was as though Hero had simply disappeared into thin air, and only their greatest enemy had noticed at all. Villain would be lying if they said it hadn’t become an obsession. Not that they liked that old jerk, of course. It wasn’t worry that inspired their charge. No, it was merely curiosity.

Curiosity alone is what inspired them to aggressively search every newspaper obituary section, to hound every local hospital and morgue, to devote their supercomputer’s processor to facial recognition, digging through millions of photographs. All in an attempt to find their Hero.

It was merely curiosity. A pastime. That was all there was to it.

But, after weeks, their efforts proved to all have been for naught. It was as though Hero had simply disappeared, been plucked into thin air.

By the time that Villain decided to break into the Heroes’ League Headquarters, nearly a month had passed since their fight. Since their nemesis, their greatest foe had vanished.

And, here they were.

They’d found Hero.

Villain’s flashlight settled first upon the hero’s body, before moving upwards, towards their face. The further up they moved, so it seemed, the most horrifying the sight was. Their jaw had long ago dropped open, and they had not the will nor the desire to close it.

The longer Hero had been gone, the more outlandish Villain’s anxieties had grown. First, they had assumed that their nemesis was simply recovering from their injuries. Then, they thought that perhaps they had become sick. But, the longer that theory stuck with them, the worse their worries became. What kind of sickness kept someone off their feet for a whole month?

But it wasn’t sickness. No, it wasn’t sickness.

It had been no easy feat, getting here. After switching out the night guards’ coffees with a batch laced with sleeping medication, they had only had to wait a few minutes before they made their entrance. That was the easy part, however. Getting in.

Finding Hero? That was a little more difficult. They had searched all the expected places. Their dorm, the med bay, the cafeteria, the lounge. The gym had been a last ditch effort. After all, Hero didn’t exactly seem like the type for some three-in-the-morning exercise, but they had always been full of surprises.

And, that was where they were. But they weren’t exercising. No, they were in no state to be doing any of that.

When Villain had first witnessed their state, they had believed it to be a hallucination. A trick of the light. But, when they rubbed their eyes and blinked, it was still there, clear as day.

Hero. Their despised, hated Hero, with their stupid, noble smile and bright eyes. Here they stood-- or, more so, here they dangled.

Strung up among a row of leather punching bags. That was where they had found their nemesis, hanging from their wrists. A punching bag. A true, literal punching bag.

And it was more than clear the position was taken quite literally by some. They were nearly nude, clothed in only undergarments that had long since been soaked through with dried scarlet. Otherwise, so it seemed, every last inch of their flesh was positively coated with varying splotches of blue, black, and sickly green. Most were centered upon their exposed stomach, to the point that the bruises simply blended together into one big painting.

Their face was swollen almost to the point of being unrecognizable. Varying strikes had twisted their nose and jaw both out of place, and only one of their eyes was able to open in the slightest.

“Hero.” That was all that Villain could do, call out their name breathlessly.

“Don’t call me that.” Their words were so slow, nearly silent. Injuries upon their neck had clearly caused their throat to swell. “Why are you here?”

There was a moment of pause between them.

“To save you, evidently.”

“No.” Hero sounded desperate. “No.”

“N-What are you, crazy? I mean, clearly! But, what, did your doctor up your dose of your kookoo meds? When was the last time you saw yourself in a mirror?!”

“Villain. Leave.” They croaked.

“And leave you like this? Not a chance.”

“I need this.”

Hero had to gasp for air, clearly not getting enough through their swollen throat.

“What?”

“I need this. I- I failed.” Tears beaded and flowed from their closed black eye. “It’s okay, Villain. T- They’re making me stronger.”

Villain stopped.

It had been a terrible loss, the last time Hero had been on the field. Not only had they wound up injured, so had half a dozen civilians, and god only knows how much property.

But this...

“They’re torturing you.”

“My friends are training me.” Their eyes widened, and they were thrown into a coughing fit. At its end, a spot of bloody phlegm was spat up onto the floor.

“They’re torturing you! Have you seen yourself?! You look like you just got hit by a truck!”

“Please. P- Please j-j-just leave.”

“No.” Villain turned off their flashlight, hooking it in their belt loop. They would need both hands free, for this. “No, Hero, we’re going home. And, for the love of everything holy, you’re going straight to the hospital.”

#hero whumpee #hero whumper #whumpblr #whump community #whump #whumpee #whumper #hero x villain #hero villain whump #hero villain trope #villain caretaker

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[centaurianthropology]

The Magnus Archives ‘The Tale of the Field Hospital’ (S02E28) Analysis

A historical tale of disease and horror in a field hospital, and a few interesting new details about the tunnels below the Magnus Institute.  What’s not to love?  Come on in to hear my take on ‘The Tale of the Field Hospital’.

First, holy crap this narrator.  This is one of the best jobs Jonny Sims has done yet of capturing a personality through writing, and I found Joseph Russo equal parts hysterical and irritating.  The only character I can think of who tops him in terms of pure personality bleeding through the narrative is Jane Prentiss, and that’s saying something.

Interesting that he noted that so many statements got leaked in 1999.  While this does explain how other paranormal organizations know about and disdain the Magnus Institute (especially since even Russo admits that most of the leaked statements were lies or drug-induced), I’m more interested in who did it.  It had to have been someone with access to the archives, which immediately puts me in mind of Gertrude or Elias, unless Gertrude had unknown assistants at that time. Of course, this begs the question of why either of them would want to leak some of those statements.  Was there a goal in discrediting the Institute? Perhaps they’d been getting too much attention and needed to seem less credible?  In that case, I nominate Elias for having done the deed.

I also went into this episode expecting a Leitner episode (as per usual when we get an episode about a book), but I really wasn’t expecting the sudden reemergence of John Amhurst.  He’s gone from a creepy unexplained thing last season to a being of great interest this season.  We now know it’s likely he was probably repeatedly dying, coming back, and spreading pestilence at least in 1899 and 1902 (the years of the Second Boer War).

I was also not expecting this to be really the first episode to draw a deliberate parallel between real-world horrors and the horrors of the supernatural.  It was a subtle thing, but the thread between John Amhurst, monstrous being of pestilence and death, and Jeffrey Amherst, the (actual, historical) governor general of Quebec, and one of the earliest known users of biologic warfare was deeply disturbing.  Because while Amhurst spreading his disease amongst the soldiers of the Boer War, and bringing back all the pestilence in the concentration camps to visit upon the field hospital is vicious, it seems more understandable.  Amhurst’s very nature seems centered around disease and decay. But when humans inflict something like smallpox blankets on one another … there’s a horror to that that’s worse than a monster.  Because it’s us doing it to ourselves.  It’s one person looking at another group of people, some of whom are on the opposite side of a war, but most of whom are simply trying to get by, and killing them through confinement and illness.  It’s consigning an entire group of people to death, not based on nature or some ineffable supernatural drive, but the horror of expedience and apathy.  And the connection there between Amhurst and Amherst is one of the creepier ties I’ve seen yet from this show.

Kudos on the show for daring to go there, and for doing it with a lightness of touch that didn’t make any potential message seem preachy or overbearing.  It was a moment when I really had to think about the parallels, and how much more awful the real Amherst seems to me than the fictional Amhurst.

Let’s get back to the story itself.  There’s now some question about how closely tied Amhurst is to the Hive, or if we simply drew the parallel because he and Jane Prentiss seemed so similar.  Of course, there were always differences, but I chalked it up to the Hive needing different vessels for different things. Both were plague-bearers, but Prentiss seemed far more a shambling force of nature, while Amhurst seemed intelligent and deliberate.  Prentiss could barely speak by the end, while Amhurst seemed to have retained a degree of eloquence right up until he got torched in ‘Pest Control’.  So there’s no real answer to whether or not Amhurst is part of the Hive, or something else entirely.  It is well worth consideration, however.  

What we do know now without question is that he is a harbinger of illness.  Each of the soldiers who replaced him on the bed grew septic and died in hours, and one can assume something similar was happening in the nursing home in ‘Taken Ill’.  The fact that the nurse said “We’ve taken ill; we’ve passed away” also seems to echo the fact that Amhurst keeps dying and coming back.  What about the soldiers he infected?  Would they come back as well?  Or is it more like in ‘Squirm’, where Prentiss could infect someone, but they wouldn’t become a Hive so much as burst once the Hive reached a critical mass within them?

And of course, there’s the question of whether or not Amhurst is really dead.  We know that ‘Taken Ill’ happened in 2011, as did Amhurst’s apparent death by lighter in ‘Pest Control’.  Is that the end of Amhurst, as the incinerator apparently was with Prentiss, or will he come back again, being such a restless man?

What’s also interesting here is we have a direct crossover between Leitner (likely) and a major player in the supernatural ecosystem, John Amhurst.  We know that the book itself is infectious, and killed Russo within days of accidentally getting a papercut from it.  So it’s likely to possess at least part of the Hive’s power.  The question I have is how much power, if any, a book like that granted Leitner over the subject?  Would John Amhurst, for instance, have been subjugated in any way by the existence of this book, and its possession by Jurgen Leitner?  I previously speculated that Leitner was the Mommy Fortuna of the TMA universe, using his books to trap and hold supernatural beings, to have a mundane and powerless human granted dominion over beings far higher than him on the food-chain.  All we know of Amhurst in our current timeline, as I mentioned, happened in 2011, well after the apparent burning of the Leitner connected to him in 2003. Was John Amhurst bound to the book, only to be freed upon the burning of his book, or was he never particularly bound, and the book acted more as a mirror than a cage?

I really want to know how Leitner’s library functioned, and how it interacted on a larger scale with the supernatural ecosystem.  I’d also like to know what, or who, eventually got Leitner.

The Supplemental

So that hope that Sims would actually do the sensible thing and take a little field-trip with his assistants?  Yeah, that was obviously a pipe-dream.  I should have known, but I’m still dramatically unimpressed with his decision-making abilities.

What’s interesting is that Not-Sasha came for him, probably deliberately.  How did she know he was in the tunnels?  Was she waiting for him to go down?  If so, why did she follow and rescue him?  And what was it about the tunnels that allowed him to see through her deception for a second?  Is the thing in the tunnels able to work through him somehow to make him see what the Archives can only push him to be paranoid about?  Are they one in the same thing, but somehow the presence is more present in the tunnels?  Is the thing in the tunnels acting like a protector, sort of like the creature in the Alexandrian archive found in ‘Crusader’?  If that’s the case, does that indicate that deep at the bottom of Smirke’s impossible stairwell, someone has secreted a second archive, with all the things that previous archivists squirreled away, beyond even the reach of the Institute, just in case this current larger archive should be burned or otherwise destroyed?

The more we get to know the thing in the tunnels, the more I think it’s deliberately protective of Sims, and yet trying to guide him somewhere.  Things went wrong for him in ‘Too Deep’ only when he decided to take a random side-jog of his own.  And in this episode we see how rapidly Sims got lost, but was he truly lost?  Or was he instead being guided somewhere?

And if he was being guided somewhere, did Not-Sasha want to stop him getting there?

Either way, next time maybe he won’t be a colossal idiot and take Martin with him (Martin being the only one likely to be willing to accompany him down to the tunnels at this point).  We haven’t heard from Martin in a while, and I’m beginning to wonder what’s going on with him.  We have a far better accounting of Tim and even Not-Sasha right now.  Martin is keeping his head down, and I wonder if it’s deliberate.  Is Martin working on something we don’t know about, or is Sims simply not noticing him?

I’d like to see what would happen in the tunnels should Sims bring a friend along with him.  Would the tunnels exert the same effect over him, or would it hold off until he was alone again.  And if it did still exert its effect, would Sims’ bravery be bolstered enough by someone being with him to find whatever it is that the tunnels are hiding?

Conclusions

I always love a good historical story, and this one was particularly skin-crawling (pun intended). Bringing in the atrocities of the Boer War, as well as the atrocities visited on the Native Americans by Jeffrey Amherst, makes for some uncomfortable parallels between the supernatural forces, which we often treat as less malicious and more instinctual, and the human evils of deliberately infecting people with smallpox or other diseases to decimate a population.  It’s a very well done parallel, and only served to highlight to me how much more frightening people are than any monster.

This episode brought up a lot of questions about Amhurst, his connections to the Hive and to Leitner. It also brought up new questions about the tunnels under the Institute.  The more I hear, the more I’m hoping we have a proper multi-cast episode in them.  Even the brief snippet we got this week was properly chilling stuff, hearing Sims panic as he realizes that he’s lost and didn’t prepare for an extended stay (why the hell did you go down without preparing first, you idiot?).  I’d love to get more Tim and Martin down there (though it would be a hell of a thing convincing Tim to return) and their takes on the tunnels and the thing that lurks there.  The more it becomes clear that Sims is a fantastically unreliable narrator, the more I appreciate outside perspectives to either confirm or refute his observations.

#The Magnus Archives #analysis

[ryukoishida]

PARS 2017 | Day 6: Spring Festival | In which Alfreed and Layla become friends at a figure skating competition.

Title: Our Own Rhythmnals   Day/Prompt: Day 6 – Spring Festival Author: ryukoishida Summary: Alfreed and Layla met and became friends at Coupe du Printemps after Layla comforted the heartbroken skater, who was at a very bad place in her life at the time. Three years later, they reunite in the same competition as senior skaters, but Layla is distancing herself, and Alfreed wants to know why. [Figure Skating AU] Rating: T Warning: N/A A/N: Title from Luke Lalonde’s “Grand”. Alfreed’s SP music is Eendo’s “Eshgh e Aasemaani”.  Layla’s SP music is Ólafur Arnalds’ “33:26”. Links to music are embedded into the text of the fic for your convenience. Holy… okay, so this is my first time writing F/F and I hope I did them justice. If you have no idea who Layla is, there’s a bit of information about her here and here. Also, I took the theme a bit liberally; the name of the competition is Spring Cup, so… spring skating festival it is!

L’inverno Series: i. Fire and Ice | AO3 | Arslan/Elam ii. Untitled snippet | Arslan/Elam iii. Our Own Rhythmnals | AO3 | Alfreed/Layla

-

“Alfreed Zottī, with a score of…”

Alfreed doesn’t need to hear the announcement to know that she has one of the lowest scores among the twenty-four junior female skaters present at the Coupe du Printemps.

She squeezes her eyes close, two hands crushing the fabric of her jacket that she hasn’t even bothered to put on after she gets off the ice; her knees still throbbing from the falls as she tries not to let frustrated tears fall. Colours run together and blur into a mirage of shapeless, meaningless images.

A few audience members applaud after the score has been announced, but with the arena only about one-thirds full — not surprising since junior events are never at the center of attention —the half-hearted applause sounds even worst, echoing pathetically and then fading until there’s not a trace of it left as if it was all in her imagination.

She pulls herself up from the bench, and accompanied by her coach, who hasn’t really said anything yet other than a few attempted words of comfort, the red-haired skater stalks down the aisle where staff, other skaters, and coaches are still idling about, and she doesn’t stop until she reaches the safe privacy of the changing room and locks herself inside a washroom stall.

Alfreed knocks her forehead against the metallic door, the cool sensation at least a nice relief for her heated skin after that disaster of a short program, and at the thought of that, her mind of course decides to focus on nothing but the toppled double axel that started the chain of calamity that followed: the triple Loop she stepped out prematurely, the under-rotated jump combo, and the less-than-perfect step sequence when she had lost all momentum and spun out of control.

A teardrop escapes and rolls down her cheek, and before she knows it, she’s sobbing uncontrollably, chest heaving like she can’t catch her breath and fists striking uselessly against the door as tears and snot run down her face in a mess.

She hates herself for being so weak — not just in terms of her physical elements in figure skating, because she’s always believed that she can improve through incessant practice and training, but her emotional state as well, that she had been so easily swayed by a single mistake that it’d led her down into an unending spiral of self-doubt, resulting in such a devastating and disappointing score in an ISU skating competition, even if it was one of the smaller-scale ones.

If only she can be as strong as her brother, she muses, a sense of self-deprecation settles over her like a heavy blanket that’s impossible to shake away. Despite the recent death of their father, Merlane continues to train ceaselessly back at their home rink — perhaps even more so than before, as if he has something to prove.

Alfreed wipes her tear-streaked face furiously — make-up and costume be damned, she can always wash up her face and have the clothes dry-cleaned later — and that’s when she hears the door to the changing room swings open with a squeak, followed by scattered footsteps and snippets of conversations, most likely other skaters who are looking for a refuge for some gossip.

She claps a hand over her mouth and tries to stay as quiet as possible.

“Who do you think will take gold this time?” someone with a nasally arrogant voice asks and adds, “That Kassem girl was really good, but I’ve never even heard of her until this season. Where did she pop out from?”

“I heard she’s just switched coaches; she’s apparently training under Ilterish Turan now.”

Another girl gasps, “No way! The devil incarnate — that Ilterish Turan?”

“Call him what you want, but most of the skaters trained under him ended up sweeping the medals at all the big competitions.”

“Speaking of, how old is she anyway? She looks like she could be in the senior division.”

“I think she’s just freakishly tall for her age,” the first girl replies with an amused snort, and everyone else laughs.

And that is the major reason why Alfreed always finds herself unable to befriend anyone around her own age range in the figure skating field. She isn’t the friendliest person to hang around with in the first place — with her unrefined, loud-mouthed nature that others never expect from a figure skater and a raw, straight-forward kind of honesty that always rubs people the wrong way — but she despises those who talk shit behind people’s backs even more.

Whoever they’re referring to — Alfreed racks her brain trying to remember a skater named Kassem but fails to come up with anything — she wishes she can stomp out of the washroom stall at that very moment and defend the stranger, even if said stranger isn’t around to witness it. That’s not the point, after all, and nobody deserves to be the target of someone’s joke like this, especially when it’s obviously so ill-intended and tasteless.

Her hand is already resting on the lock, ready to kick open the door and reveal her presence, but then someone else is talking again.

‘God, how long are they planning to stay here?’ Alfreed rolls her eyes, but freezes when she hears her own name.

“And from all the things I’ve heard about Alfreed Zottī, I would’ve thought she’d be a more impressive skater, but wow, was her SP a disaster or what? Those jumps and that posture were absolutely awful! How did she even manage to remain at the top twenty?”

“My coach told me that her father just passed away, so maybe we shouldn’t be too hard on her,” another girl mentions in a softer voice, but the first speaker only sniffs indignantly.

“And her father was her coach, if I remember correctly. That would explain why her performances have been so inconsistent lately.”

“All the more reason she shouldn’t slack off, then,” the first girl only says, her tone final, signifying the end of the discussion.

It’s at this point that Alfreed finds herself shuddering in fury, fingers curling into fists and nails digging into the tender skin of her palms as her eyes flare up in a dangerous crimson: it’s fine that they’re talking about all the flaws in her skating, and it’s true that she’d been letting her emotions get the better of her for the past few weeks since her father — a single-parent who brought her and her brother up and trained them since they were young, a harsh and unreasonable man at times, certainly, but everything he said and did was for the benefit of his children — has died from an unfortunate accident. Yet to discredit all the time and effort she’s poured into training in such an offhanded manner when this girl doesn’t even know her is crossing the line, and Alfreed is about to give these clueless girls a piece of her mind.

“Who did you say is slacking off?” a new voice — light and sweet like the first trace of spring — joins in the conversation, and for a few seconds, everyone in the changing room remains uncomfortably quiet, the air stiff and dense and no one dares to make the first move.

“W-what’s it to you?” one of the girls says, a little too loud, like an entrapped prey trying to make itself bigger and more menacing than it truly is.

“Nothing,” the newcomer pauses, and Alfreed presses her ear against the door as if it’d help her hear better, “But maybe you should consider being nicer human beings and stop talking crap behind people’s backs? The way you girls are behaving — it’s rather childish, don’t you think?”

“Just because you’re in first place after the SP doesn’t make you the boss of us, you freak,” one of them, presumably the leader of the trio, snaps.

The newcomer ignores the insult and responds with the kind of nonchalance that Alfreed can only dream to achieve, “Oh? I think the medal speaks otherwise.”  

“There’s still the free skate tomorrow,” the girl reminds her, snide sneering obvious in her taunt, “I wouldn’t be so certain about that gold medal if I were you, Kassem. Come on, girls, let’s get out of here.”

The rushed footsteps fade, and the door swings back to place with the familiar squeak. Alfreed feels herself releasing a breath she hasn’t realized she’s been holding.

The hesitant rapping against the door of her stall comes unexpected, and causes Alfreed to jump back a little, a hand on her chest, her heart still beating a little too fast from the conversation she’s been accidentally eavesdropping.  

“Hey, you okay in there? You’re not stuck in the toilet, are you? Should I get some help?”

It’s the girl who’s kicked the gossipers out of the changing room — ‘Kassem, wasn’t it?’ Alfreed recalls — her heroine, to be honest, though she’ll never admit such an embarrassing thing to a stranger she’s barely met.

“No! I-I’m fine, thanks.”

Without making it too obvious, she tries to wipe off as much of the dried tear marks and straighten up her costume as best as she can, and with a twist of the lock, she pulls the door open and steps out of the cramped stall, murmuring with a hint of blush on her cheeks that she’s hoping the make-up will at least partly cover, “Sorry. I didn’t mean to, but I heard the whole thing… Thanks again for, well…”

She’s aware that she’s rambling a mile a minute, and the more nervous she feels, the worst her running mouth gets. It’s a bad habit Alfreed still hasn’t been able to get rid of.

“You’re Alfreed Zottī, aren’t you?” the sweet voice rings clear and silvery, and it’s filled with pleasant surprise that makes the other skater blink in confusion.

Alfreed finally has the sense to look up, and she internally scolds herself for not remembering the girl standing before her, a bright grin lighting up the soft green of her eyes and short, dark curls braided on one side of her head while stray locks frame her cheeks: Layla Kassem, a young skater with the strength and elegance of a lioness, skills that most skaters her age can only dream of, and a burning passion for the sport that simmers and explodes in her programs and in the way she moves on the ice.

She was in the group before Alfreed’s, but she must have been too busy worrying about her own performance and warm-up to pay attention to the other skaters at the time.

Later that evening, when she’s re-watching that day’s event on the laptop she’s brought along with her, Alfreed will realize that Layla — the thirteen-year-old girl with the bright, fervent eyes and the enthusiasm and skills to match — is one of the few junior female skaters who was crazy enough to attempt the triple Axel, and somehow managed to land it, even if she had to put a hand on the ice to stop herself from completely falling out of the jump.

“How did you know?” Alfreed asks, eyes widening comically.

“Your beautiful red hair is pretty unforgettable,” Layla replies as she glances admiringly at Alfreed with a small but genuine smile, which only makes the other girl blush even harder than before.

“Oh, you mean I didn’t leave enough of an impression when I flunked that double Axel?” Alfreed chuckles, rubbing the back of her neck, abashed at the attention she’s getting from the other skater.

“Come on, we all had our bad days. Your musical interpretation and transitions were nearly flawless, and I’m not just saying that to make you feel better, I promise,” Layla says.

“You really think so?” Alfreed looks up to meet Layla’s steady gaze with hesitant, cerise irises, teeth worrying at her lower lip.

“Don’t judge too harshly of yourself,” she gives the red-headed skater a sympathetic smile — nothing demeaning, just a sincere gesture to express her concern and an invitation to talk more should Alfreed wishes to do so. The dark-haired skater offers her hand with a tilt of her head, “Layla Kassem. Want to be friends?”

“Absolutely!” she clasps Layla’s hand in hers in an enthusiastic handshake, “I’m Alfreed Zottī, but uh… I guess you already knew that.” Her cheeks are tinted pink again, and Alfreed suspects that this is going to become something of a recurrent theme, but Layla merely laughs, the sound gentle and earnest, and they let go of each other’s hand, fingertips tingling with warmth that seeps deeper than skin and into their bones.

“Want to get out of here and grab a coffee?” Layla asks as she turns around and heads to her locker.

Alfreed follows suit.

“Hot cocoa?” Alfreed wrinkles her nose in disgust at the unpleasant bitter drink and suggests instead.

“Sure! Anything to get away from my coach just for a little while,” Layla whispers conspiringly under her breath.

“The rumors are true then? You’re training under the devil incarnate?”

“Is that the nickname Coach Ilterish goes by around here?” Layla can’t help but laugh, though she definitely wouldn’t have dared if the man were actually present. “Sure, he’s tough and strict with his students, and his ballet classes are brutal; plus, I think he’s secretly a robot or something because I’ve never seen that man cracked a smile, ever.”

Layla pauses for a moment as she puts her sweater on and continues after contemplating her next words, “but he’d taught a lot of top skaters for the past decade and I think I can learn a lot more with him guiding me.”

“That’s amazing — you’re amazing, Layla,” Alfreed has already changed out of her costume and into a set of sweatpants and windbreaker with matching orange and white accents; the clothes are half a size too big on her slight frame, so the sleeves are covering most of her hands, revealing only the tips of her fingers. She pokes her head around the corner of a wall of lockers to check and see if Layla is done yet, and finds that the other girl is mostly dressed except for her shoes.

Similar to herself, Layla’s feet are covered in welts and bruises, and healing wounds protected by bandages. The dark-haired skater quickly pulls on her socks and slips on a pair of sneakers, head ducked to hide the faint blush on her cheeks after Alfreed has complimented her out of the blue.

“H-how do you mean?”

“You must be around the same age as me, right?” She plops down beside the other girl and drops her sports bag by her feet. “Fifteen? Sixteen?”

Layla zips her windbreaker all the way up in a weak attempt to hide the heat on her face. “I’m thirteen, actually.” She curls in on herself as if she wants to make herself appear smaller, and Alfreed has to wonder why, though she does find the gesture rather endearing.

“What? Seriously? Wow, you’re two years younger than me and you’ve already got your future all planned out,” Alfreed sighs in awe as she stretches her arms upward and leans back against her hands braced against the bench.

“I mean… I just know that I’ll always want figure skating to be a big part of my life,” Layla replies sheepishly. “Don’t you?”

“That’d be ideal, yeah, but when you get to a certain age, you just realize that there are some things that, no matter how much you want it, no matter how much time and effort you spend trying to attain it, it’s simply… impossible,” Alfreed turns and looks over at her new friend, cerise eyes bright but it’s in the way she shrugs her shoulders a bit helplessly and the crooked grin on her lips that doesn’t quite touch the entirety of her face that make Layla want to shuffle closer to offer some sort of consolation, a hug, maybe.

She isn’t sure how to go about this — isn’t sure if the gesture is perhaps too forward of her — so she remains unmoving.

“Look at you, talking like a grandma already,” Layla playfully punches the other girl’s arm instead, before her tone turns somber once more, “it won’t always be like this — what happened on the ice today.”

“I know,” Alfreed smiles faintly at her friend’s words, her head lowered as she stares at her hands. The gratitude is unspoken, but Layla understands as soon as the red-haired skater nudges her shoulder gently against hers, and the serious topic is dropped for the moment.

The day after the Coupe du Printemps, under the lush, green foliage of the woods that surround the Patinoire de Kockelscheuer, Alfreed and Layla stand side-by-side as they look at the venue one last time before they have to board the bus and leave. In the end, Alfreed managed to climb back up to ninth place after completing a near-perfect rendition of her free skate, and Layla proudly took silver, losing only a mere 0.5 points to the gold medalist.

“This April’s Worlds’ will be my last competition as a junior skater,” Alfreed tells her as she leans heavily against the trunk of an alder tree. The thick layers of leaves provide some cover from the rain for them, but Alfreed pulls her hood tighter around her head as the breeze begins to pick up. It’s rare to see the usually boisterous girl conveying such a grim expression, but as soon as the thought of her senior debut enters her thoughts, it’s difficult for her mind to think of anything else.

“Are you excited about your senior debut next season?” Layla asks, her back touching the same tree, their arms almost touching, and even though it’s already March, the climate of southern Luxembourg is still bitingly cold, especially when the chilling wind brings with it occasional precipitation that’s more like viscous mist than actual rainfall.  

“Not going to lie, but I’m actually really nervous about this whole thing. The ladies’ singles field is pretty deep and there are so many talented skaters from all over the world. I feel overwhelmed just thinking about it,” her voice softens at the next statement, “I don’t know if I’m ready for this.”

“You’ll wait for me, right?” Layla pushes herself off from the trunk with a determined grunt and stands before the other skater. She’s almost a head taller than Alfreed, so when she’s standing this close to her, with one hand braced against the tree a few inches away from Alfreed’s ear, her towering stature seems even more alarming and noticeable.

“W-what?” Alfreed is slightly taken aback by their sudden proximity, but she’s tilting her head to meet Layla’s gaze, albeit a bit bashfully.

“I’ll be keeping in touch, obviously,” and Alfreed really likes how confident and matter-of-fact Layla sounds when she announces this, “but we won’t be competing against each other in the same discipline anymore, so until I debut in the senior division, you have to promise to keep skating your best, and in turn, I’ll promise to train hard over the next two years so that when we’re finally competing in the same field, I’ll be able to stand on the podium with you.”

The pale green of her eyes is blazing, and Layla is focusing on nothing else but the girl standing before her. Her goal has been clear from the moment she’s decided to abandon everything, sacrifice and cut off the frivolous ties that threaten to hold her back, to pursue figure skating as her career: she will go down in history to become one of the most notable female skaters of her era and bring pride to her family and country. Now that she’s befriended Alfreed — an older, more experienced skater who shares some of those insecurities that she has never brought up or admitted to anyone else — Layla wishes nothing more than to have Alfreed be part of this journey, this transformation, her life.

Caught up in her own thoughts, Layla hasn’t even noticed that Alfreed, standing on her tiptoe, is cradling her flushed, wind-chaffed face between her palms, and she says with a teasing grin, “You don’t sound like a thirteen-year-old at all when you talk like that, you know?”

A small, displeased pout begins to form on the younger skater’s chapped lips, but Alfreed interrupts with a pat on Layla’s head as she ruffles her hair, “Hey, I meant that as a compliment. Now stop frowning before you start getting premature wrinkles and sprouting grey hairs.”

Layla’s cheeks are still uncomfortably warm after Alfreed retrieves her hands, and it definitely doesn’t help that a second later, the red-headed skater has taken her hand into hers without a forethought and starts dragging her towards the bus station across from the arena.

“C’mon, we should head back before our coaches decide to ditch us here.”

In the unknowing mist of spring among the green woods in Luxembourg, they make a promise to meet again on the world stage as equals after two years; however, during that period of time, their exchanges over texts and Skype become fewer and farther in between, mostly with Alfreed being the one to initiate conversations, and even then, she’ll only receive the occasional dissatisfying short replies. This awkward, one-sided game of hide-and-seek continues until about a month right before Layla’s supposedly senior debut at the Finlandia Trophy that season, and that’s about the time when Alfreed completely loses track of her friend.

There have been no messages, no calls — no attempt at any kind of contact at all — and Alfreed is worried, her heart becoming heavier as days of silence turn into weeks, except she has no time to worry about a girl who may not be her friend anymore, but she remembers their promise still, intending to keep it in her heart until the end.

-

Nothing much about the Patinoire de Kockelscheuer has changed over the three years since she last skated in the venue, except the crowd in the stands seem more enthusiastic, and she even spots a few supportive banners bearing her name.

“Alfreed, are you listening to me?” her coach is saying, his head ducked down to scan the content of his clipboard, “remember to watch your posture during the triple axel.”

She hums to show that she’s listening, and then asks out of nowhere with a straight face, “So, have you reconsidered my marriage proposal?”

It all started out as a joke when someone back in her home rink discovered Alfreed’s childhood crush had been none other than the current favourite star choreographer for many prodigious skaters, Narsus Shahidi. Since the older skaters wouldn’t stop teasing her about it even after she’d clarified that that childish infatuation had long been forgotten ever since she grew out of that phase, Alfreed has learned to just swim with the tide with a smile instead of fighting against it.

These days, only Narsus himself is still embarrassed about the entire fanfare, and Alfreed enjoys making the older man fluster every once in a while.

Alfreed tucks a stray lock of her red hair behind the curve of her ear, batting her eyelashes in an overly-exaggerated keenness that, if the man hasn’t already known her for a long time, he’d have assumed she’s making a horrid attempt at flirting with him.

“Excuse me?” he cocks a well-shaped eyebrow at his student’s question, though his concentration is still fully focused on the clipboard in his hand, the other one scrawling down notes that Alfreed is unable to make out because she’s standing on the other side of the rink board. Also, because his handwriting — even if she’s not viewing it upside-down — is terrible.

“Remember what I said about marrying you when I win five golds this season?” she continues with a wide grin, unperturbed by the dark glower her coach sends her.

“No,” he snaps.

“’No’ as in you don’t remember, or ‘no’ as in you don’t think I can win gold here?” Alfreed remains in good humor, her lips, shimmering with pink gloss that matches the sea-blue gauze and silver trimming of her costume, tucked in a self-assured smirk.

“’No’ as in I refuse to answer this obviously loaded question.”

“You’ll give the poor man an aneurism, Alfreed,” a tall woman with an elegant posture even when she’s just standing, ink-black hair that cascades down her back, and exquisite jade-green eyes that can either convey heartbreak or downright murder appears beside the blond-haired coach who’s still fuming over Alfreed’s teasing.

“Farangis!” Alfreed chirps excitedly, “What are you doing here? Didn’t you say you were going to stay behind and train for Worlds’?”

“I thought it’d be fun to come cheer you on,” Farangis replies with a soft smile.

“Aghriras is stalking you again, isn’t he?” Narsus turns to her with a knowing glance. “Have you considered getting a restraining order? I heard those things are rather effective against stubborn and shameless men who just don’t know when to give up.”

“That seems a bit extreme, don’t you think?” Farangis sounds remarkably calm, as if having her old pair skating partner following her on every social media platform she’s on and obsessively trying to get back in touch with her despite Farangis’ outright refusal to have any more connection to the man who gave up on their partnership after a few consecutive disappointing results is nothing to be afraid of. It amazes Alfreed how the skater, who’s only three years older than her, can deal with all this with such a mature and composed demeanor.

In most people’s opinion — fellow professional figure skaters and audiences alike — Farangis Avesta is better off skating in the singles discipline anyway; her techniques have always been at the top in the pair skating field and her performances and public persona are popular with the judges and fans. To be rid of the weight of a troublesome partner is a blessing, and Farangis bursts into the ladies’ singles scene burning brighter and more dazzling than ever before.

“You’re too nice,” Alfreed pipes up as she balances her chin on her palm.  

“And you should be out there doing your warm-up before time runs out,” Narsus scolds.

“Alright already,” Alfreed makes a face and skates away to join the other skaters in her flight.

“How’s she doing?” Farangis asks as she watches the red-haired skater speeds past the other young women in the rink, eyes focusing straight ahead and nothing else.

“Everything should be fine if she can concentrate and not let any unnecessary things distract her from her goal,” Narsus answers, a finger tapping against his bottom lip as he finally drops the clipboard down on one of the available chairs nearby.

“I saw her — the girl that Alfreed mentioned before,” Farangis comments, “she’s in the flight after hers, and it looks like Ilterish is keeping quite a tight leash on his prized skater.”

“Yeah? I wish you wouldn’t bring it up to her because Layla Kassem is trouble and is considered to be one of the aforementioned unnecessary things that Alfreed doesn’t need to bother herself with right now,” Narsus replies coolly.

“She probably already knows,” Farangis speaks again after someone announces the end of the warm-up segment, and they move aside to allow the stunningly-dressed skaters go by, a few who recognize Farangis are waving at her and the woman nods her greeting with a pleasant, polite smile. “She must have seen the entries list, at least. And her skating feels different during the last few days, as I’m sure you’ve noticed, too.”

Narsus remains silent but his pursed lips and the unease in those usually confident, violet eyes tell Farangis all she needs to know.

“Wish Alfreed good luck for me,” Farangis turns around, “I’ll be watching from the audience stands.”  

-

Like so many times before, like the moment before that disastrous short program that had led to the most unlikely encounter three years prior, Alfreed is once again standing in the center of the rink where the Coupe du Printemps takes place, her body poised gracefully in her starting position as all eyes dwell on her.

Her mind is blank except for the one name that refuses to be wiped off, and that’s all right because she is the one person Alfreed wants to skate for.

She’s known since the entries list was published on the event’s official website about a month ago; she’s known that Layla will be here, and she will see her at some point over the course of the competition, surely. But somehow, over the past two days during the sanctioned practice times or even at the drawing for the starting order last evening, she couldn’t find a chance to approach her or even wander close enough to garner her attention.

Ilterish is always with her, it appears, as if he’s her personal bodyguard; Alfreed has to admit he’s doing a damn fine job at keeping everyone else at bay from bothering his protégé.

If she can’t talk to her friend, then the only way Alfreed can get through to her is to skate her heart out, lay it bare for all to witness.

Will Layla be watching?  

She doesn’t have time to ponder about that for too long because the staccato notes of the folksy accordion to her short program music have started playing; she unfolds from her frozen pose, the semi-transparent gauze of her sleeves flowing in the air like blue wings spreading out in the wind, and she transforms into a lover lamenting for a kind of heavenly love she’ll never find.

The female singer’s smoky vocals melt seamlessly into the jazzy tang of the melody, and Alfreed lets the harmony of the song and the movements of her body fuse together as one. After the triple flip, which she lands solidly to the applause and cheering from the audience, the music — suffused with playful guitar chords and trombone slides — picks up the pace, and she prepares for the spread-eagle entry, leading to an impressive double axel-triple toe loop jump combination with incredible height and speed.

The colours blur into ribbons and the music drowns out everything else; Alfreed can feel her blood singing, her body soaring in a delirious rush of desperate passion as she seeks the answer she longs for, chases after the shadow of her friend who, like a spirit, continues to slip and escape through her fingers every time she gets too near.  

Slightly out of breath, she topples precariously doing the triple axel in the second half of the program, so deductions are unavoidable in that account, and Alfreed can already imagine Narsus’ unimpressed ‘what were you thinking?’ scowl. She vaguely wonders if Layla has perfected the jump that she’d dared to try three years ago.

The melody is becoming light and sparse once more, and she concludes with a beautiful layback spin that shows off the elegant arch of her back as her skirt flares out in waves from the momentum, skating to a stop in her final pose when the tinkling notes float and dissipate into the roaring ovation from the crowds.

Everything aches: muscles, feet, bones, the raw, clawed out emptiness in her heart, and she’ll have to do it again tomorrow at the free skate event. She pushes the stray locks of her hair back and away from sticking onto her sweaty cheeks as she joins Narsus at the kiss and cry area and awaits her score.

“I would yell at you for that terrible posture during the triple axel…” Narsus murmurs as he smiles brilliantly for the camera pointing at him.

“I know you would,” Alfreed interrupts without a hitch, her eyes trained on the scoreboard.

“But I’m not going to,” he concludes, a little smug.

“Oh? This is new,” Alfreed looks over at him, and then she immediately narrows her eyes with suspicion, “Wait, am I in a different kind of trouble?”

Narsus’ answer is halted by the announcement of Alfreed’s score: her season’s best SP score yet, which lands her in the first place with six more skaters to go.

“You knew she’s here — your… friend,” Narsus only hesitates a little at the end of his statement.

Alfreed has only told him in the briefest manner about her friendship with Layla when they first met, but what she’d said to him three years ago — right after World Championships had ended, and Alfreed had come running to him asking for the choreographer, who has been a decorated figure skater himself at the height of his achievement but has never expressed any desire to take in students, to become her coach — it was enough to convince Narsus.

The resolve in her eyes and the determined set of her mouth when she announced that she wanted to become better so that she could skate as her best friend’s equal, sharing the joy and victory together on the world stage, revealed to Narsus the potential of a young, fervent skater who so desperately wanted to improve her artistry and techniques for the sake of friendship.

He’ll never admit this, but at the time, Narsus thought Alfreed really reminded him of his younger self: awfully reckless and full of the kind of ideals and tenacity to the sport and art of figure skating. It’s a part of him that gradually fizzles out as he grows older and becomes too docile, too complacent.

Alfreed nods without a word as they walk around the side of the ice rink, out through the passageway, and into the hallway beneath the audience stands. She plops down on one of the benches by the wall and begins to unlace her skates with quick, practiced fingers.

“What will you do?” Narsus sits down beside her and gingerly places a pair of sneakers by her skates, which she promptly slips on along with her team jacket.

She pulls herself to her feet and zips her jacket all the way up, the movement echoing a hint of ferocious flare.

“Alfreed?” Narsus picks up his students’ skates and stands up tentatively.

“I’m going to talk to Layla,” she simply says, her tone low and brittle. “I need to know what happened.”

“How? Ilterish follows her like a guard dog.”  

They make for the section of the stands reserved for competitors and staff.

“He can’t possibly follow her everywhere she goes,” she snorts insolently, climbing up the stairs two at a time. Layla is the first to start in her group and she wants to find a good seat.

Glancing over at the red-haired skater and realizing that there’s nothing he can do to dissuade her from doing whatever she’s planning in her head, Narsus can only sigh in defeat.

Her left leg jiggles up and down impatiently as her thumb scrolls on her phone while they’re waiting for the ice to be resurfaced for the last six skaters; she can’t understand a word she’s seeing on the screen, but it doesn’t matter because she isn’t even sure what she’s reading in the first place.

When the six skaters finally step out onto the ice for their warm-up, Alfreed leans her entire torso over the railing and narrows her eyes in search of the familiar figure of her friend. The dark hair and towering frame is easy to spot amongst the slighter-built skaters: donned in an asymmetrical dress with one long sleeve covering her right arm and showing bare, olive-toned skin of her left, the fabric a subdued gradient of black from her neckline to bright red along the edge of her skirt with delicate silver jewels sewn into an intricate pattern, and short hair combed back with a single purple pansy flower hairpin, Layla Kassem stands out with her presence.

It’s difficult to tell from this distance, but Alfreed is sure that Layla has grown quite a lot taller over the years they haven’t seen each other; her limbs develop elegant, powerful lines of lean muscles, and she exudes cool confidence as she perfectly does a triple axel with the ease and grace of a veteran skater.

At last, the announcer is introducing the first skater, and Layla glides one lap on the ice before she locks into her starting position at the left end of the rink.

Alfreed’s attention is solely focused on the lone figure on the ice — the excitement of finally seeing Layla perform live for the first time in three years overwhelms the dawning fear of having to confront her after the event. For now, she just wants to watch her friend skate.

And skate she did: beautifully, perfectly, not a chink in her armour strengthened by the impeccable execution of all the required technical elements.

The program begins with the isolated, winding melody of a violin, the swift contrast from absolute low to rough high notes bringing Layla to stretch out into a graceful layback Ina Bauer, back arched and gliding sideways, that leads into a double axel-double toe-double loop combination.

One element after another, Layla executes each to the praise of the audience, yet it makes no difference for her.

Despite the melancholic nature of the song that seems to paint a character walking alone in the dark — restless and with nowhere to go, no place to belong — nothing on Layla’s facial expressions convey that sentiment. Her eyes, glazed green and too fierce for the piece she’s performing, only depicts hungry, roaring flames; to the skater, there is only one purpose to this program, and that is to flawlessly complete the list of challenging technical elements that will garner her the most amount of points.

With her fingers curled around the railing and her knuckles turning white, Alfreed feels a sense of unease toiling inside her chest. Even though Layla is skating without any mistakes and every movement, every tilt of her head, spread of her arms, is calculated and exact — the Kerrigan spiral that transitions into a triple loop, the various spins — her performance can only be described as cold, distant, and unfeeling.

It’s nothing like the kind of skating Alfreed remembered from when they first met.

As the song progresses, the violin melody becomes more urgent, the notes slashing through the air like caged snarls, the rhythm chaotic and vicious — violent, almost — and her step sequence and final combination spin completely mirror that.

To nobody’s surprise, Layla receives a very high score, a good eight points ahead of the person currently in second place. The other five skaters who perform after Layla don’t even come close to her standards in terms of technical skills, but Alfreed hasn’t remained in her seat long enough to find out until much later because as soon as she observes Layla leaving the kiss and cry area with her coach, she shoots off for the direction of the changing room downstairs.

With her arms crossed in front of her chest and one leg resting before the other while leaning against the stark white wall of the female changing room, Alfreed ignores the confused stares that some of the passerby staff have sent her way and replies to the brief greetings from her fellow competitors when they choose to acknowledge her on their way in or out of the room.

It’s nearly deserted when Alfreed finally spots a tall figure with a head of dark, messy curls. She waits until the last person in the room leaves, and then steadily makes her way to where Layla is sitting on a bench facing the row of lockers. She sits down beside her, with a few inches of space between them; Alfreed can’t find the strength in her to reduce that distance yet, not until she gets the answers she’s wanted for the past year.

“What the hell was that out there?” Alfreed decides to break the silence with the first question that comes to her mind. She could’ve phrased it better, but she thinks they’re beyond polite words and courteous pretense now.

“What do you mean?” Her voice is just as sweet as Alfreed remembers it, yet something is amiss in that tone — that touch of blooming spring that reminds Alfreed of revival, a new beginning, a hopeful future.  

“That style of skating — that was not you at all!” She tries to control the contempt and disappointment in her voice, but it’s leaking into her words like sticky tar, a dark, disgusting coat that clings to every word that comes out of her mouth.

“And how would you know what skating style best defines me?” Layla wraps her jacket tighter around herself as she looks away.

“Maybe if you haven’t suddenly disappeared off of the face of the earth and replied to my messages once in a while, I would’ve known the answer to that and we wouldn’t even be having this ridiculous conversation right now,” Alfreed’s voice simmers between exasperation and helplessness, and it’s tearing her apart.

“Maybe there are circumstances that you don’t understand,” Layla mutters.

“Damn it,” she kicks the door of the closest locker and its slam echoes like a clap of thunder in the room, and then she whirls around to face the other girl, “then make me understand, Layla.”

“I can’t!” She sounds resolute, and she sharply turns to the red-haired skater with an agonized expression, lips pursed and eyes despondent. “I need to do everything I can to achieve my goals, and that includes… this.”

“This?” Alfreed repeats, uncomprehending.

“You,” she tries to put her sentiment into words, but with the way Alfreed is staring at her, confused and pained, it’s becoming difficult to think clearly.

“Me?” Alfreed is feeling foolish for repeating again, but there are issues that need to be clarified, and this one is currently on the top of the list.

“I had to leave you behind,” she says quietly, her fingers fiddling agitatedly in her lap.  

“By ignoring me without a single, logical explanation? The Layla I thought I knew would have at least tried to talk it out first.”

“Coach Ilterish was right…” she murmurs. Everything becomes so much more complicated when Alfreed Zottī is involved, Layla has thought. Coach Ilterish was able to foresee it and was probably just being logical back then, suggesting that the earlier she cut ties with unnecessary baggage that might ruin her future, the faster and smoother her path to the top of the figure skating world would be.

“Ilterish…?” Alfreed spits out the name in distaste, “Since when did you start caring about what he said?”

“Since I started winning at competitions,” Layla’s reply has no wavering hesitation, just absolute belief, “since I started truly understanding his philosophy.”  

“Oh yeah, the philosophy of treating your friends like shit in order to win,” Alfreed sneers, and even as the words slide out of her mouth, viscous and full of venom, some part of her hopes that it will infuriate Layla enough to make her stay just a bit longer.

“You can think whatever you want of me, but I’m done with this conversation,” Layla pulls herself up from the bench and begins to turn away.

“Whatever happened to keeping in touch, huh?” Alfreed has wrapped her fingers tightly around the taller girl’s bicep in a flash to stop her from moving further, and she’s pleading now, wide-eyed and crestfallen. “Whatever happened to waiting for you so we can compete in the same field? Whatever happened to standing on the podium together?”

“We aren’t kids anymore, Alfreed,” she makes no movement to retrieve her arm from the other girl’s grasp, her stance fixed as an ice sculpture, her voice just as stiff and cold, “when all of us compete in the same discipline, there can only be one person standing at the top of the podium, and I will be the one with the gold medal around my neck.”

The trace of warmth in her pale green eyes is lost to the winter frost, and Alfreed feels her friend slipping away from the tip of her fingers again as her arm drops to her side listlessly.

‘Whatever happened to us?’ Alfreed wants to ask Layla, but she’s alone in the room now, and there’s nowhere else for her to go but back to the world constructed of ice.

-

A/N: Err I did mention this piece will not have a happy ending, didn’t I? [sweats nervously]

Some notes about this AU here.

#arslan senki #the heroic legend of arslan #pars2017 #alfreed/layla #alfreed #layla #bowie's crappy writing

[transguykeith]

i wanted to ask u a few of the writer asks but i can't decide which one i want to ask you most, could you answer all the asks? lmao if its too muh of a mission i can just decide on a few

It’s not like I’m doing anything else so yeah, why not. I just won’t ones that might not apply. I’ll put some of this under a read more:

1. Describe your comfort zone—a typical you-fic.

usually some sort of character study of sorts mixed in with scattered events to lead to an ultimate end goal.

2. Is there a trope you’ve yet to try your hand at, but really want to?

im a sucker for a good soulmate au, so maybe one of those eventually

3. Is there a trope you wouldn’t touch with a ten foot pole?

i would never write an abo fic, just no

4. How many fic ideas are you nurturing right now? Care to share one of them?

um, a LOT, like a ton of them my main one is a college au of sorts centering around Yuuri and Phichit as well as Victor, its title is Made of Stars and its gonna be fun to write

5. Share one of your strengths.

i mean, i guess im okay at character studies, but i dunno, im really not super great

6. Share one of your weaknesses.

pretty much everything, im not great at connectivity or writing in a pretty style. like i just kinda write, im not particularly great at it

7. Share a snippet from one of your favorite pieces of prose you’ve written and  explain why you’re proud of it.

This is from chapter 5 of You’re Not Alone:He danced because he skated, and he skated because skating was flying. And somewhere along the way he forgot what had drawn him to it the first place. He supposed that that was what he was searching for some days, that spark that started everything.

That spark that started a fire, a fire that’s flames were the smallest they had ever been. It was almost funny how one small moment could all but extinguish him. A spark started it all, ballet was just kindling, ice skating was logs, and he was a forest ablaze. But it was as if that one moment had sucked the oxygen from the air and the flames died, it suffocated him.

This is a bit flowwier than some of what i write, it’s one of my favorite lines because it encompasses what i have him feeling in that exact moment

8. Share a snippet from one of your favorite dialogue scenes you’ve written and explain why you’re proud of it.

I think this is one of my favorites, it’s from chapter 17 of You’re Not Alone:

“I’m glad too,” Otabek smiled. “It’s how this doing goes though. You dedicate your soul, mind, and body to the ice and you don’t always get to leave without losing something to it. It’s give and take, we’re all just caught in an intricate dance until the fates bottom us out one way or another.”

“When did you go all serious on me?” Yuri teased. He had gotten used to Otabek’s propensity for the occasional dramatic monologue though, they gave a good look into the head of his friend.

“Think about it Yuri,” Otabek clearly wasn’t done. “Here we are, the pinnacle of humanity, literally trying to carve a place for ourselves in history. We have to fight the fundamentals of the universe to do what we do, work against gravity itself all while having a timer above our heads. Who knows when it will expire and the ice will take it all away. We fight everything to be able to do this: the laws of physics, the passing of time, even our own bodies. That’s what makes you a soldier, we all fight this fight but you’re out there with a makeshift helmet and a sharpened stick while the rest of us have full armor and swords. And who is it that we see winning the battle time and time again, you.”

“Did you really drag me out here to give a dramatic monologue on how impressive I am,” Yuri flushed at the barrage of compliments. “You’re such a dork,” he buried his face in his hands.

I just really like how it turned out.

9. Which fic has been the hardest to write?

I guess You’re Not Alone just because of how long it is, but it depends. some of it has been very easy to write and some of it ( ahem my current chapter) has been really hard

10. Which fic has been the easiest to write? 

I’ve written a lot of little drabbles and one shots that i havent posted anywhere but the easiest was probably the little request i did yesterday which is either titled “Pretty Darn Cute” or “The second prettiest boy in the world”

11. Is writing your passion or just a fun hobby?

a little bit of both really

13. What’s the best writing advice you’ve ever come across?

if you have an idea, write it down immediately. it doesnt matter if youre currently engaged in something else, write that shit down or you WILL lose it

14. What’s the worst writing advice you’ve ever come across?

not necessarily advice, but like the idea of only writing it if you think its good

16. If you only could write one pairing for the rest of your life, which pairing would it be?

can I say Yuri Plisetsky and happiness, because yes

17. Do you write your story from start to finish, or do you write the scenes out of order?

I tend to write my chapters in order, but within each chapter i jump around a bit and then connect everything

18. Do you use any tools, like worksheets or outlines?

I have an outline in my head that i sometimes write down, im usually good about following it

19. Stephen King once said that his muse is a man who lives in the basement. Do you have a muse?

my muse is the genderless ghost that haunts me it stares into my cold soul and pokes me until i words

20. Describe your perfect writing conditions.

I prefer it to be kind of dark and i like to be nice and cozy, though sometimes ill be struck with random inspiration and have to write it no matter where i am

21. How many times do you usually revise your fic/chapter before posting?

Ha, revising?! whats that

25. What do you look for in a beta?I have never had a beta, but if i did have one i would like someone to help me idea bounce and keep my writing from sounding choppy

26. Do you beta yourself? If so, what kind of beta are you? 

I haven’t but i would be willing to if anybody wanted me to. I’m pretty good with general editing skills and idea flow

30. Do you accept prompts?

yes! please send me prompts i love them. I cannot exaggerate how much i appreciate being sent prompts

31. Do you take liberties with canon or are you very strict about your fic being canon compliant?

i would say im right in the middle about this, it really depends on what im writing though

32. How do you feel about smut?

ive never really tried my hand at it, i havent written anything that calls for it, but my next fic might

33. How do you feel about crack?

i kind of have written some stuff that could be considered borderline crack, but most of it isnt fanfic and i havent shared that

34. What are your thoughts on non-con and dub-con?

personally, i probably wouldn’t write it, but if its necessary for a backstory then maybe but certainly not in detail

35. Would you ever kill off a canon character?

oh certainly, just depends on the fic im writing

36. Which is your favorite site to post fic?

ao3

37. Talk about your current wips.

my main wip is Youre Not Alone and that one is getting close to its end, i know where it’s going and how it will end i just have to write my way there, but I’ve had some pretty bad writers block in regards to it lately

38. Talk about a review that made your day.

i got this one really long review gushing about how much my story meant to them and how reading it always made their day feel better and that was just such a nice review and it made me really happy. Another one i really liked was somebody complimenting something i did that a lot of other people complained about so i really appreciated that one

39. Do you ever get rude reviews and how do you deal with them?

ive gotten a few upset reviews about something i included in You’re Not Alone, but i cant do much about it. i once got a review about four chapters in asking why yuri had a menstrual cycle and this wasnt rude exactly, but how do you read that far without knowing he’s trans in my fic

#ask #this was long #here you go though #lee you gotta not

[maddiviner]

The World of Grimoires Part III: Grimoire Styles

I’ve talked about choosing your supplies and the physical (or not so physical!) book itself. Now, let’s discuss some of the options you’ve got for structuring, organizing, and keeping your grimoire updated. I’ve experimented with most, but not all, of these styles over the years, and I’ve talked to witches who made each of them work. They all do work, but each requires a different sort of person. Which one is right for you? Only you can answer that! Even if none of these styles sound useful to you, you can always create a new and different way of doing things uniquely tailored to you!

Daily Journal

A daily journal is, of course, just that - a journal that you write in roughly once a day or so. Lots of people keep journals for all kinds of reasons, but here, I’m referring to keeping one centered around your magical practice. Each night, you might reflect on the experiences of the day and write your thoughts, as well as recording any magical work you might have done, spells, rituals, as well as anything important you’ve learned.

Such an exercise of unwinding one’s mental spirals at the end of each day onto paper can be extremely cathartic, and the task of writing daily entries can become a grounding and centering ritual in and of itself. I’ve known witches who kept daily journals and integrated their writing time into other witchcraft-related activities such as ritual bathing and meditation.

This style of grimoire is ideal for those of us who like to have tangible records of our self-development, as well as of our maturation processes and general thoughts. This can be both a blessing and a curse, though - if you keep such a grimoire, be prepared to look back on some of your writing years later and cringe at what you didn’t understand or thought you knew.

Another issue arises simply from the level of discipline and regularity required to keep up with daily journaling activities. If your schedule is very erratic, it may be difficult to find time to write, and also an easily forgotten task. Even for those with a more predictable lifestyle, it does require some discipline and motivation to maintain. I personally don’t consider a daily journal to be incredibly difficult (at least, not compared to some of the other grimoire styles I’ll discuss). 

Still, I can think of many situations in which it would quickly become quite a problem to keep journaling. Health issues like depression or arthritis might make writing daily almost impossible for some people. The bottom line is that everyone is different, and if this style isn’t working for you, or doesn’t feel right, examine why. If it’s purely a lack of discipline, goal-setting can help, but for those of us with health issues or other concerns interfering, this style might not be the best approach.

When I was in my first semester of college, I began my first attempt at a true daily journal of my witchcraft practices. I’ll admit that with class and work, I didn’t always write every single day, but I gave it my best. I would sit and think for a bit, then write down my reflections for the day as a retrospective in the evenings, or whenever I was preparing for bed. It really didn’t differ much from the journals non-witches might keep, except that the subject matter was always at least tangentially related to the Craft and my experience of it.

Not all of my grimoires have survived over the years, but the one mentioned above, did. Looking back at it now, it contains precious little by way of practical information (such as correspondences, etc); the bulk of it describes my journey into college from a magical perspective. The picture below is one of the few entries I made in it that I’m comfortable sharing here - much of what I wrote was intensely personal. 

It was related to magick and witchcraft and certainly aided my development, but was still more to do with me myself than with any studying of magick I’d been doing at the time. I’ve learned a lot rereading what I wrote during this period, and while I left off keeping a daily journal-style grimoire during my second year of college, I’m still glad I kept one at that particular stage in my life.

Magical Diaries

The term “magical diary” was popularized by Aleister Crowley. As part of his work in founding the magical order known as A.’.A.’., he urged his students to keep a regular record of all rituals and magical exercises performed. He even provided examples of the exact format he himself found most advantageous, and you can see such an example in his short text, John St.John, which I’ll quote a brief passage from below.

12.0. Have finished bath and massage, during which I continued steadily but quite gently, “not by a strain laborious and hurtful but with stability void of movement,” willing the Presence of Adonai.

12.5. I ordered a dozen oysters and a beefsteak, and now (12.10) find myself wishing for an apple chewed and swallowed by deglutition, as the Hatha Yogis do.

The distaste for food has already begun.

12.12. Impressions already failing to connect.

I was getting into Asana and thinking “I record this fact,” when I saw a jockey being weighed. {12}

12.12. I thought of recording my own weight which I had not taken.

Good!

12.13. Pranayama [10 seconds to breath in, 20 seconds to

12.24. breathe out, 30 seconds to hold in the breath.] Fairly good; made me sweat again thoroughly. Stopped not from fatigue but from lunch.

[Odd memoranda during lunch.

Insist on pupils writing down their whole day; the play as well as the work. “By this means they will become ashamed, and prate no longer of 'beasts.'”]

I am now well away on the ascetic current, devising all sorts of privations and thoroughly enjoying the idea.

12.55. Having finished a most enjoyable lunch, will drink coffee and smoke, and try and get a little sleep. Thus to break up sleep into two shifts.

2.18. A nice sleep. Woke refreshed.

John St. John is chiefly the diary of a ceremonial magician and student of Thelema, and thus a lot of the words and practices mentioned within it might be unfamiliar to the modern non-ceremonial witch. I quote it, though, to emphasize the level of detail. 

Notice how the author (Crowley himself, in one of his many ritual guises) has recorded almost every activity he performs during this period of time, from eating and smoking to ritual activities. This may seem excessive to a lot of us (it certainly did to me, at first), but even today, many ritual magicians, especially Thelemic aspirants to the A.’.A.’., keep such detailed diaries.

This type of diary is well-suited to practitioners of all sorts (including witches) who both have the fastidious nature to record all this and a reason to do it, such as undergoing a so-called “magical retirement:” spending a few days or weeks free from most obligations and focusing on magick. I realize that for the everyday practitioner, this level of detail may seem nigh impossible, but I myself thought so, too, prior to actually beginning such a record in December 2013.

It was difficult at first, but gradually became second nature. I recorded it all in a binder full of paper, arranged chronologically with tabs for each month, and noted all details of my mental state and activities. Had things not gone bad with my teacher at the time, I probably would have given the magical diary over to him to review, as is traditional and expected in these situations. As I said, though, things went badly between us, and some other people involved, so I ended up not doing that. Thankfully, too - that diary had a lot of private information in it, and who knows what could’ve been done with it!

Keeping this kind of journal is not for everyone, obviously. If you decide to give it a go, more power to you, but I strongly suggest only showing it to those you trust. In a situation where you’re officially studying under someone and they request to see it, you should already be in a position where you trust them. If not, I would recommend working with someone else or going it alone.

Oddly enough, while this format is traditional for Thelemites and other magical practitioners, I also find this method incredibly helpful if you’re going through any sort of mental distress or coping with mental illness. I realize many mental illnesses make keeping a detailed diary difficult, but if you can manage it, just charting your moods with that level of intensity can be very useful, even if you only do it for a week or so. I know that when I was doing it, I noticed patterns that helped me develop coping strategies better, and it made me more aware of how deeply affected I am by sleep interruptions and other similar issues.

Commonplace Books

A “commonplace” book is sort of like a written scrapbook, where the writer records snippets of things they’ve read, thoughts, and general observations in a very loose format. Wikipedia has a good article on the phenomenon, and notes that they were common in Early Modern Europe among the philosophically- minded as a way of compiling information and thoughts in both long and short forms. 

Nowadays, the format is as popular as ever, though not everyone has heard the term. Many seem to erroneously think, as well, that commonplace books only contain quotations, when in reality they can include your personal musings, outlines for writing, or really anything else you want. There’s no real system to it, either - it can be as freeform, or structured, as you want.

This has been one of my favorite methods for recording information for many years. I began my first commonplace book as a young teenager, just prior to becoming involved in magick. My AP English teacher at the time introduced me to the concept, and I’d read about it, oddly enough, in a Lemony Snicket book, as well. If you’ve read A Series of Unfortunate Events, you’ll know that several characters keep them. 

My early commonplace books were almost entirely focused on philosophy, particularly Rationalism and Empiricism, which was my favorite subject at the time. I don’t know why, but the English teacher I mentioned was fairly obsessed with philosophy and had us reading Voltaire instead of Moby Dick or whatever else normally would have been on the slate. As I got more serious about my Tarot studies, and began to delve into magick, notes on that naturally flowed into my commonplace book, and gradually took over until I had a sort of commonplace book of shadows on my hands.

I currently keep a commonplace book in an orange Moleskine journal, and it’s mostly where I go to outline articles I’m writing for my blog, and sections for my book. In fact, as I type this, I’m looking over at the page where I’ve an outline for this very article. Other pages include notes from my reading of Donald Tyson’s books, and notes on the Thelemic Holy Books. I date every entry into this book, small and at the top of the page, so that I’ll know exactly when I was working on a particular outline, article, or reading a certain book. I find this extremely useful as a writer, and I can’t recommend this format more if you’re interested in writing anything.

As to Craft, though (because this article is about grimoires, remember?) if you choose to use a commonplace book as a grimoire, it’s useful to not only include dates in the notebook, but also title each section with a few words on it’s focus. You might write, “1/12/17 Notes on Soul Flight” at the top of the page, just to give you an idea of where you are each day. I also have taken to leaving pages blank at the beginning of the notebook and filling in each section or topic in a table of contents, as well. I really wish I had done this with my older commonplace books, as it can be difficult to find what I’m looking for in those these days.

Spellbooks

Some witches just keep a notebook, either alone or in tandem with another for records, for spells and magical information. By this, I mean that these books dispense with anything resembling a diary format and are instead just organized around topics. A typical spellbook-style grimoire might include a section for prosperity, one for love, one on astroloy, and so on and so forth. These are incredibly hard to organize unless you’re using a binder system where pages are removable, because it’s hard to set up sections and you never know just how big one section will become.

The summer before I went away to college, I set up just such a grimoire, using pages I’d typed and printed, organized, and threw into a three-ring binder. I included some spells and rituals I’d found online, as well as a section devoted to pertinent excerpts from occult texts I found meaningful. It was relatively impersonal, which is probably why I ultimately ended up giving it to a friend. Still, for the period of time when I kept it, I found it rather useful and easy to update, organize, etc. I couldn’t imagine having done it in a traditional notebook, and highly recommend a binder format if you decide to go in this direction.

Nowadays, I do have a small-ish notebook where I exclusively record spells. As you can see below, I illustrate it as lavishly as I personally can, but I only include spells here, not correspondences or other magical information. I have a separate, similar book which details magical information and spells exclusively related to hedgecraft, and I call this, lovingly, my Book of Thorns. Both are useful, but I couldn’t imagine them in the same notebook, so maybe for spellbooks, it’s best to separate them by topic, or use the aforementioned binder technique.

#magick #witchcraft #witch #grimoire #book of shadows #eliza.txt

[pippki-writes]

An Ill-Fitting Name: Snippet 13

NOTES:

Snippet 1; Snippets 2 & 3; Snippet 4; Snippet 5; Snippet 6; Snippet 7; Snippet 8; Snippet 9; Snippet 10; Snippet 11; Snippet 12

Word Count: ~2.9k

Faoust belongs to @thebiggestnerd - she writes him and the healer; Isaiah, Cat, Detective Voros and everyone else here are mine.

%%%%%%%%%%%%%

It has been far, far too many days, with no sign of that damned officer again. Faoust decides he’s going to end things himself, and take out that cop. He’s tired of waiting to see what she’s going to do. Of course she’s somehow never managed to give her name. Not written on anything she left when she was looking for Asmodai. Not even on a name badge on her uniform. Faoust calls the police station.

“Hello,” says the desk officer, “police department.”

“Yeah,” Faoust replies, “I want to make a complaint about an officer but I don't know their name.”

“Uh huh. Well d’you know what unit number it was?”

“She didn't give it to me. But I know a case she was on.”

“Ohhhhkaaaay,” the desk officer drawls, “what’s the case then?”

“Missing person from the hospital.”

The desk officer can’t help but chuckle. As an officer, D. Voros never could keep her mouth shut, and it’s no surprise that getting promoted to detective almost entirely against her will has done little to improve her public relations. “Oh ho ho he he ha hm, not surprising. Alright what’s your name and number?”

“Faoust,” he says, and gives a phone number.

“Mhm mhm and what’s your complaint?”

“She assaulted my friend.”

“Mhm mhm—wait, what?” The desk officer sits up in his chair. “That’s a serious accusation there!”

“Is it? Well she came into his motel room and shot his pet bird. I'd like to talk to her about that.”

“Shot—shot his?! Are you, I’m sorry when and where did this occur?” In the background, the sound of heavy keyboard activity can be heard, fingers clattering the keys.

“Motel outside of town. About a month ago. Could you tell me her name and if she’s working?”

The desk officer makes a series of incredulous noises, thunderous typing still audible. “Are you absolutely sure about this, hmm.”

“Bird only has one wing now.”

“You have proof of this?”

“Just a bird with one wing and my friend's testimony. Look, I don't want to make a big fucking deal out of this. I just want to talk to her.”

The desk officer, at this point, is now talking mostly to himself. “Highly irregular, tricky being a detective and all, might have to call up the watch commander to handle this…”

“Helloooo? Officer name and tell her to come talk to me.”

“You must understand sir we take these allegations very seriously and will investigate them to the utmost.”

“That's fine. Officer name. And tell her to come talk to me.”

“You must, must understand sir that these times being unprecedentedly what they are for safety purposes and in light of these allegations it would not be appropriate for me to disclosinate the nomenclature of the aforementioned accused at this time, but I will relay your concern to the watch commander.”

“Ugh, you're useless. I'm going to have to come down there.”

In the background of the desk officer’s phone you can hear radio chatter, and 6676 keys up “put me out on the corner of Main and Broad with.....with a bunch of geese that won’t get out the road.”

“That’s probably a good idea, we’ll need a statement from you, your friend—“

But Faoust hangs up on hearing the officer he’s looking for key up in the background, and heads to the corner of Main and Broad, looking for her.

Detective Voros is in her patrol car, lights flashing, honking her horn. There are indeed several Canadian geese just sitting and standing in the roadway.

Detective Voros is in the middle of yelling at the birds to get the fuck out of the road when Faoust approaches her car, bangs his hand on the roof and peers down in, looking irritated.

“SHIT,” she exclaims, jerking away from the window, hand going to rest on the butt of the gun at her hip.

“You got a lotta nerve,” says Faoust coolly.

“Jesus fucking shit. What did I do to you?” says Voros, trying to get her heart rate back under the exploding-beats-per-minute range.

“I thought I told you to leave well enough alone.”

“I did.”

“You tried to fucking shoot him.”

Detective Voros looks at Faoust, steely eyed. “Don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Faoust scoffs. “Look, I tried to let you go on your way but you decided to be a problem.”

“No problem, ok? My radio, which was never lost, is where it’s supposed to be. No crimes, no reports.”

“Maybe for you, but in my book? You fucked up.”

“Your book isn��t the law. Now go on about your business.”

“Hm.” Faoust casts a sigil, and deep potholes open up beneath Detective Voros’s patrol car.

Detective Voros is surprisingly nimble for her frame, and voluminously loud in swearing as the car falls in and she, unharmed, pulls herself out of the window and onto the roof of her car, keying up on her radio as she does.

“Shit, shit 6676 I need a fuckin, fire truck or something, my car’s in a deep pothole, do not ask just get me out I’m fine just get me out.” She is glaring up at Faoust now, and though she hasn’t drawn her gun she has her hand ready on it.

“Oh,” says Faoust lightly, “how’d that happen?”

“You. You did it and I know you did it. Get the hell away from me.” She keys up into her radio again. “Yes I said a fucking pothole yes I’m FINE.”

“I have no intentions of going anywhere. You fucked with the wrong people. I warned you and you persisted.” Without further preamble, Faoust launches a fireball at her.

Detective Voros panics—her intention is to dodge, secure position, then shoot, but her foot slips and she doesn’t get out of the way—she is flailing to regain her balance when the fireball is drawn harmlessly into her, like a black hole smoothly drinking down a neighboring sun, and the echo of the action is like a whisper of cold back in the direction of the source of the magic, daring the source to do something else.

Detective Voros is definitely wildly panicking then when she pitches herself forward instead onto a knee, crouching, gun drawn without even thinking about it, and fires two rounds up at Faoust.

“What on—“ Faoust begins before he’s being shot at—he deflects one bullet, but takes the other squarely in the shoulder.

“FUCK!” Faoust screams, and sends another fireball at the detective.

Detective Voros is sort of prepared this time, in that she is prepared to roll in one direction or another, but not prepared for, regardless of the direction she dodges, the fireball to be drawn towards her, slowing as it approaches and once more harmlessly dissolving into her. Another cold whisper travels back towards Faoust as this happens.

Now Detective Voros is shouting. “WHAT THE FUCK YOU HOCUS POCUS MOTHERFUCKER?” She doesn’t know how to explain any of this and smacks the emergency button on her radio, the panicked tone screaming through the dispatch center. “6676 CHANGED MY MIND I AM NOT OK AND THIS MOTHERFUCKER HAS SOME KIND OF…” she struggles to think of something that will make sense, “GODDAMNED FLAMETHROWER!”

Detective Voros has the disadvantage of the terrain but tries to shoot again.

“WHAT ARE YOU?” Faoust roars, and deflects the bullets as he's more prepared this time. He opens a hole underneath Voros. Not too deep, just enough that she can't climb out of it.

A lot of sirens start screaming very loudly at various distances and start getting closer.

“FUCK, I DON’T KNOW!” She tries to act like she’s aiming for his head and fakes toward the direction of a kneecap instead.

Faoust takes another bullet to the knee, screaming and swearing and vanishing from the scene with a loud ear-splitting crack.

Detective Voros is still holding out her gun, breathing heavy. “......fucking.....fuck this....paperwork....” she mumbles to herself.

Faoust’s healer earns herself quite the paycheck this time.

Detective Voros, against her wishes, is nevertheless taken in for mental evaluation. In her favor—a sinkhole, blood on the asphalt. Ultimately also in her favor—very shaky and disjointed body camera footage that seems to show someone doing…something? Impossible to tell. Claims of some kind of flamethrower and a suspect having completely vanished are working against her.

Faoust texts Isaiah, “we can't use magic on her it looks like. Got shot twice for my trouble.”

Isaiah: “I guess it would be a little rude to say I told you, right?”

Faoust: "yeah, yeah fuck you too. And yes I'm alright. We need to come up with a plan that involves getting her gun and stabbing her. A lot"

Isaiah: “well I figured you were fine, otherwise you wouldn’t be texting me”

Isaiah: “but I’m glad you’re alright”

Isaiah sprawls on the recliner, gesticulating into the air as he speaks, saying things like “I told him, I TOLD him,” and “can’t believe he got shot,” to which Cat, who prefers laying on her stomach on the couch, head propped in her hand, notes “she shoots a lot, this officer, doesn’t she?”

After a contemplative pause, Cat wonders, “you worry about him?”

And Isaiah scoffs. “Of course not, he can take care of himself.”

Detective Voros isn’t totally concerned with being put on administrative leave. She was a bit shaky, when help arrived, because no one trains you to really be attacked with a flamethrower (this line she kept repeating, as if repeating it might bring her absolution). She made other repeated disbelieving mumbles, and so it is not surprising that the police department hasn’t figured out who they’re looking for yet. Hell, they haven’t yet corroborated what Detective Voros said. The possibility of concussion, hallucination on her part? That’s still the prevailing theory.

They don’t exactly like it when Detective Voros, determined to be suitably sane enough to be released to her own care, leaves town early in the morning with no indication of where she’s going, but then, the prevailing theory at that point in time was that the pothole ruptured some kind of gas line that had made her see things that weren’t there—they were still having trouble with the bodycam footage—and she gave no one else any choice in the matter because she simply left.

Just a quick little trip to see her grandmother. Her grandmother, the one who always told her not to tell anyone her name, not to leave behind hair strands or nail clippings (exception to this rule: if kidnapped, leave DNA evidence), things like that. Her grandmother who, her intuition tells her, might know something if asked.

It would be rude to wake up an old woman, in the early morning out in rural Virginia, but at an alleged 97 years old, Gramma Lora is already awake before the sun, and sees the little old silver pickup truck sitting in her driveway, Dani asleep inside with her head resting against the window. It would be rude to wake up her sleeping granddaughter, so Lora goes to the kitchen and busies herself with the tasks of the morning.

Detective Voros wakes when the sun starts to shine directly in her eyes, and for a moment tries to convince herself it was just a crazy dream. But she is still in her uniform—without the gun, that had to go with forensics, because in spite of any crazy things she had said, there was the blood and bullets obviously having been fired, and something had happened, even if it was hard for the people in charge to fully agree on what that something was. Detective Voros sits up, and looks at the familiar house, the fields where first tobacco, then corn, then hay were grown, all familiar, and here she is just Dani. She sees movement through the kitchen window, and gets out of her truck to go knock on the carport door.

“Baby you act like you been away so long you can’t just walk in?” Lora calls from the kitchen over the hiss of bacon being dropped fresh in a skillet. Dani opens the unlocked door and walks in hesitantly, past the deep chest freezers in the entryway, past the struggling old desktop computer crammed in a nook next to the washer and dryer, memories of childhood in comforting flashes as she walks—the time the whole extended family almost broke every ankle when all the kids unleashed their collected stores of 25-cent bouncy balls in one dramatic swoop across the kitchen floor; the smells and tastes of so many breakfasts and the anticipation of eating them—and gives her grandmother a hug.

“Gramma,” says Dani, “I’ve seen some sh..some stuff you won’t....well...maybe you will believe. I need to talk to you about it.”

Driving back to her home—because this is all too much to think about, yes she stayed for lunch, no Gramma thank you, I have work to get back to, I think, I can’t stay longer—Dani (more and more Detective Voros, less and less Dani as the miles pass beneath the tires) keeps replaying phrases in her mind.

“You weren’t ever meant to know.”

“I was trying to keep you safe. And then of all things you become the damn police anyway. So much for safe.”

“I don’t know what to call it. I don’t know if they’ve got a word for what I did.”

Magic. Bullshit magic. Real, bullshit magic. Protecting her, and inaccessible to her.

Date night for a couple of murder friends with benefits—dinner at a Korean food truck, trading spicy mandu dumplings back and forth, before heading to the night’s main attraction: a squat, windowless concrete building surrounded by a gravel parking lot. There is a faded wooden sign in the parking lot proclaiming this establishment as the Gray and Blue. The parking lot has a decent handful of trucks with obnoxious bumper stickers. A dingy little white power nest, Isaiah called it.

Faoust sneers, looking around. “I hate it already.”

“Told you!” Isaiah says brightly. “I don’t think we ought to go in, by the way. We kind of look like the sort of people that sort of people like to hit.”

They decide to pick off the patrons as they come and go for a few rounds. Soon after, two men come stumbling out of the door. The first, average along every dimension, wears a shirt that says “my other gun is a gun,” followed by a nasty-faced heavyset man with a white t-shirt with the words “makes right” on it.

Isaiah and Faoust smile and get to work. Violence. Murder. Bloodshed. Guns drawn and impressively useless in the face of two psychotic killer mages. Evidence made to vanish with a snap of their fingers.

Isaiah picks a smaller, champagne colored pickup truck and sets off the alarm, waiting for the owner to appear. Another confrontation, pointless for the victim. Keys stolen, another kill for Faoust. Isaiah kneels by the license plate, tracing sigils on the shapes stamped there until they begin to smooth themselves into other numbers and letters.

They christen the newly stolen truck with a quick consummation in the passenger’s seat, door open, loud as can be, hoping someone else will dare come out and get themselves killed for it. But why wait? Isaiah sets off another truck alarm, the most expensive in the parking lot, and it begins its mournful keening.

It’s not long before the bar door opens, and a voice that sounds like it belongs to the first fraternal order of douchebaggery and natty light says “my truck!” and can be heard jogging across the parking lot. Isaiah uses his magic to yank the unlucky bastard over to them to have the privilege of being killed.

Of course, Faoust and Isaiah both are almost too distracted by being buried one in the other to be bothered to kill him properly. Almost. But they kill him just the same, another lewd and obscene display of violence.

Just the sort of thing Isaiah and Faoust enjoy.

Detective Voros is reinstated without punishment. Due to the inexplicable damage to the footage on her bodycam, it was not conclusive that what she shot was a person. The official report concludes that she shot a potentially rabid deer, which leapt away from the scene. The sinkhole likely ruptured a microscopic intermittent gas line which may account for any strange phenomena reported at the time by Detective Voros. A complaint filed against her that same night was dismissed as unfounded due to the lack of a complainant. Detective Voros is assigned a case in which four missing men were all last seen at the Gray & Blue bar on the same night, and she sighs.

She goes to the gravel lot. No security cameras—these paranoid types, too concerned about government spying to have such a thing. No witnesses, not outside. Three trucks still sitting in the parking lot. One missing. A dent in a truck door, the kind of damage that looks new. Researching the victims—noxious Facebook posts and idiotic retweets of godawful takes. Not a great loss, these men. Cell phone pings bring nothing. No credit card transactions. Her intuition tells her violence, but her fingers type a conclusion woven out of whole cloth, that the four men drove off in the missing truck together to give their lives to the white nationalist cause and headed potentially for Alabama. She puts out a bolo on the tag as potential right-wing terrorists of interest but manages to not conclude any crimes as having taken place, and closes the case.

She does not want to go looking for more trouble.

- NEXT SNIPPET -

#an ill-fitting name #My writing #original story #collaborative fiction #original work #original writing #original fiction #magic fiction #magic murderer #magic murder #Snippets #fictional murderer #fictional incompetent police #Fictional police shooting

[otterthewasted]

[SNIPPET] ACOMAF - Rhysand's Perspective - Part 3

WARNING: If you have not read A Court of Mist and Fury by Sarah J. Maas I strongly suggest you go read it first - it’s undoubtedly better written and what I have written will spoil the book for you.

I am re-writing all of ACOMAF from Rhysand’s perspective, using all of the original characters/scenes/dialogue, and adding in new bits and bobs to flesh his story out more.

This is Chapter 1 of Part 3 - click HERE to read the rest of the chapters in this part.

I hope you all enjoy!

*Disclaimer - I do not take credit for the any of the characters or the world created by Sarah J. Maas.

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I watched her make her way towards her bedroom then, still a little unsteady on her feet but determined and… maybe even a little excited.

Excitement coursed through me in waves and I alternatively felt like I was freezing and burning as my thoughts bounced around in my head. I walked to the balcony around the veranda and stared off at the mountains for several minutes, filling my lungs with the cold mountain air as I tried to center myself.

In many ways everything was about to get a lot more difficult – if being apart from her had been torture, being so close to her day after day was going to be its own form of torment. But at least, if absolutely nothing else, I would know she was safe and cared for – even if she decided she couldn’t stomach working with me, well, that would be fine, but I would know she was eating and sleeping and that she wasn’t alone.

Taking another deep breath, I made my way back around towards the dining table, over to a column, and leaned against it, crossing my arms and waiting.

She took longer than ten minutes. She could have taken ten hours and I would still have waited for her. But I was glad she hadn’t taken too much longer, otherwise I would have felt the need to go and check on her – and I doubted she would have appreciated me knocking down the door.

When she appeared at the top of the stairs, her skin flush from the bath, hair still damp and pulled back into a messy braid, dressed in another set of Night Court clothes that she always looked radiant in, I felt my body nearly tremble with excitement.

She approached me and I couldn’t help but tease her lightly as I extended my hand towards her, “That was fifteen minutes.”

She didn’t scowl at me, in fact she looked completely worn out again – she did need to sleep some more, perhaps once we got there, I could convince her to lay down again.

She lifted a hand, taking mine and stepped towards me as I pulled her into my embrace before I winnowed us through the world, landing us lightly in the foyer of my home.

I lowered my arms as she staggered back slightly, and I held my breath as I watched her take it all in. The early morning sun filtered in through the windows with cheery warmth, pooling over the thick ornate carpet beneath our feet and caressing the warm, wood paneled walls around us. Choice pieces of artwork, all favorites of mine, dotted the walls, and straight behind me was a stair case leading to the second story. On either side of us were door ways, leading to a comfortably appointed sitting room, and on the opposite, a snug dining room, large enough for my family but nothing like the grandeur of the House of Wind. A tiny hallway down the side of the stair case led to the kitchen and the doors leading to the garden.

She drank it all in, her gaze moving steadily across the floors and walls, taking in the art only briefly, then seeming to notice, all at once, how ordinary it all was – the quality was all good, but I had chosen every piece for comfort instead of style. And I drank in the sight of her standing in the middle of it.

And I did not feel quite so empty.

“Welcome to my home,” I said quietly.

I could see the thoughts that crashed through her mind at my words, the sudden uncertainty of her decision to come here and images of the destruction she had seen in the Spring Court flittered through her mind, along with the reactions people had towards her that made her so uncomfortable. My concern for her was abated by the certainty of the knowledge that she would experience neither of those things here.

Looking up at me she asks in nearly a whisper, “What is this place?”

Crossing my arms across my chest I leaned back against the threshold to the sitting room and answered her, “This is my house. Well, I have two homes in the city. One is for more… official business, but this is only for me and my family.”

She looked around again and the thought about servants hovering flashed through her mind.

“Nuala and Cerridwen are here,” I explained, hoping that they would be a comfort to her, a known variable in a world that had gone to pieces for her in such a short amount of time, “but other than that, it will just be the two of us.”

I saw her tense. As though suddenly the thought of being alone with me was frightening – which both saddened me and made me want to laugh, we had been just as alone at the Night Court, only the size of the building had changed. But if sharing this house with me would bother her too much… I would stay elsewhere, for her... for her to feel safe. I opened my mouth to say as much when there was suddenly pounding on the front door.

“Hurry up, you lazy ass,” Cassian drawled from the other side of the door. I ignored him as I noticed Feyre’s eyes growing heavy with exhaustion. Instead I changed direction from what I was going to tell her, “Two things, Feyre darling.”

The pounding continued, soon followed by Azriel’s cooler voice. “If you’re going to pick a fight with him, do it after breakfast.”

“I wasn’t the one who hauled me out of bed just now to fly down here,” Cassian grumbled before adding under his breath, “Busybody.”

A corner of my mouth threatened to curve up, as I never once looked away from Feyre’s tired eyes, “One, no one – no one – but Mor and I are able to winnow directly inside this house. It is warded, shielded, and then warded some more. Only those I wish – and you wish – may enter. You are safe here; and safe anywhere in this city for that matter. Velaris’s walls are well protected and have not been breached in five thousand years. No one with ill intent enters this city unless I allow it. So go where you wish, do what you wish, and see who you wish. Those two in the antechamber,” I explained with a bit of a smirk, “might not be on that list of people you should bother knowing, if they keep banging on the door like children.”

Another bang on the door followed by Cassian calling out, “You know we can hear you, prick.”

“Secondly,” I pushed on, “In regard to the two bastards at my door, it’s up to you whether you want to meet them now, or head upstairs like a wise person, take a nap since you’re still looking a little peaky, and then change into city-appropriate clothing while I beat the hell out of one of them for talking to his High Lord like that.”

Feyre’s eyes looked from me, to the door, and then back, and without her saying a word I knew what she would choose – she looked so very tired, and soul sick.

“Just… come get me when they’re gone.”

There was a brief moment of sadness in me, because I did want her to meet my friends, my family, but it quickly passed in light of everything I knew she had been through. And it was her choice, always her choice.

Right at that moment Amren’s voice joined the other two, scolding them, “You Illyrians are worse than cats yowling to be let in the back door.” The knob turned then, and her scorn quickly shifted to me as she called through the door, “Really, Rhysand? You locked us out?”

I ignored Amren and watched as Feyre turned and began to make her way up the stairs, spotting Nuala and Cerridwen at the top waiting for her. I watched until I couldn’t see her before I finally turned, and with a gesture, unlocked the front door, letting the trio inside with a mock scowl.

Cassian stepped through the door first, dressed in his normal simple city attire, dark pants and a blue sweater, and growled at me, “Welcome home, bastard.” Followed immediately by Azriel, dressed remarkably similar to Cassian in style if not color, tending towards blacks and dark grays, “I sensed you were back. Mor filled me in, but I-“

And then by Amren, who wore a pair of deep red slacks and a silver blouse that nearly matched the color of her eyes, with a cream colored trench coat over the top, who cut him off, “Send your dogs out in the yard to play, Rhysand. You and I have matters to discuss.”

I let out a sigh and reached up to rub a temple as Azriel replied back coldly, “As do I.”

Cassian smirked back at Amren, “We were here first. Wait your turn, Tiny Ancient One.”

Amren snarled at him.

Suddenly I heard Mor walk up behind me, dressed in loose fitting pair of sweats, having obviously spent the night here waiting for me, as she yawned and said sleepily, “Why is everyone here so early? I thought we were meeting tonight at the House.”

Shaking my head, I grumbled at all of them, “Trust me, there’s no party. Only a massacre, if Cassian doesn’t shut his mouth.”

Cassian just raised his arms in mock offense, “We’re hungry,” he complained, “Feed us. Someone told me there’d be breakfast.”

Amren snorted and quipped at all of them, “Pathetic. You idiots are pathetic.”

Mor just grinned at her, “We know that’s true. But is there food?”

I just shook my head at her, “You just came from the kitchen.”

“Oh god,” Cassian laughed, “if she’s cooking then I don’t want it.”

Mor’s eyes shot daggers at him and I couldn’t help myself, I laughed. And it was the first truly free laugh I felt like I had since before I went Under the Mountain.

The all stopped bickering long enough to look at me and smile.

I met their smiles and then gestured into the sitting room, “Let’s get this over with friends, and let’s do it quietly please.”

They nodded and filtered into the sitting room, taking up various seats as Mor gestured at the coffee table and a selection of breakfast items appeared: scrambled eggs, sausage, various fruits and pastry’s, along with a stack of plates, cutlery, napkins and a steaming pot of tea. Everyone except Amren made a selection, then sat back munching in silence for a moment before I finally said, “Amren, I am sure what you need to discuss with me is important, but I would like for it to wait until after dinner tonight – if it is about what I think it is.”

Her silver gaze met mine for a moment, then nodded, “As you wish.”

I turned my gaze to Azriel, “What is the fall out?”

Azriel sat his plate down on the side table beside the couch and wiped his mouth on his napkin before leaning forward. “Tamlin has sealed his borders, no one in or out – has to be some of the finest shield work I have ever seen him do.” I arched a brow at him, and he conceded, “it might not be his shield work.”

I let out a low sigh. Hybern. “Your spies? Are they safe?”

He nodded, “I did not have any full-fledged spies in Spring Court, I worked with some of the more ‘unsavory’ fae that the Spring Court denizens were not fond of. The water-wraiths seem to be particularly fond of Feyre, or at least as fond as they care to be about fae that isn’t their own kind.” That made both of my brows go up in surprise, what in the world had Feyre done to make friends with the water-wraiths? He shrugged at me; he had no idea. “Regardless, they should be safe enough, since they were already ensconced, no one suspects them.”

I nodded and leaned back, thinking, “Summer and Autumn courts? Any troop movement to suggest Tamlin is asking for aid?”

He shook his head again, “No, and we both know it would be a cold day in hell before Tamlin would ask Autumn court for help, not unless he wanted to watch Lucien defect.” He was right about that at least, Cauldron bless Berron, I finally had a good reason to be thankful that old bastard was such an asshole.

“So, if he did ask for aid, it would be from the Summer Court then.” That was not a good thing, not for us and what we needed. Nothing was every easy. “Azriel I need you to keep track of their fleet, I want numbers and I want to know their positions daily.”

He nodded and picked up his plate to eat again as I looked over at Cassian, “I do not expect Tamlin to come for Feyre directly – for all that he is a beast, he is essentially a coward, except at the very end of the battle when someone else has done all the hard work.” I couldn’t help the sneer that leached into my words. “That being said, we need to be ready to call up the Illyrians, because even if Tamlin does not come for Feyre directly there are others who might. It just depends on how quickly he sealed his borders and if the word of her powers has reached any of the other High Lords.”

Or if he would be willing to sell that tid bit – I doubted that however, Tamlin did not want to share her with anyone.

Cassian however nodded and said, “They aren’t ready to launch into a full-fledged war campaign yet, but we can be prepared to defend Velaris if need be. Although, so long as she stays here, she should be safe.” He shrugged, “No one knows where she or Velaris is.”

I nodded, “That’s true, and a blessing, but it’s a possibility I want us to be aware of and prepared for.”

Mor piped up, “How likely do you think it is that if the other High Lords knew she had some of their power, that they would come for her?”

I set my own plate aside and leaned forward, sighing, “I’m not sure. I think most of them would not be happy about it, that’s pretty much a given. Upset enough to go to war with us over keeping her here? Unlikely. But they might try stealth. When we leave the Night Court territory, we will need to be vigilant.”

Amren sniffed, “And you need to train that girl on how to defend herself.”

I smiled vaguely and nodded, “Agreed. Her mental shields are rather impressive already, but she has no control over her other gifts.”

Cassien reached over, picking up and apple and biting into it, chewing, then asked, “Physical fighting?”

I shook my head at him, “Not that I know of, hunting is all. I was hoping I might be able to convince you to take her on – she will learn faster under your tutelage.”

He grabbed his chest and gasped, “A compliment!”

I rolled my eyes at him and Mor smacked his arm.

He chuckled and leaned back against the couch, “Let me take a look at her, if she is tough enough to put up with your bullshit, I’m sure I can teach her something.”

Mor smacked him again and I just grinned. Mor turned back to me and said, “So what is next? Other than teaching her and making sure she is safe, what are we going to do with her?” I could read between those lines easily enough – when are you going to tell her?

I picked up my cup of tea and took a long swallow before I answered, choosing to answer only the question she asked out loud. “I’m going to give her a choice, if she wants to help us or not. If she does, then we’ll figure out the rest from there, if she doesn’t, then I will help her find something she wants to do to stay occupied, and we’ll keep doing what we have been doing.”

Mor sighed at me but nodded in agreement.

“I want us all to have dinner tonight, up at the House, I would like to give her a chance to meet all of you since I’m certain that will be the deciding matter and not the difficulty of the job.” I grinned at them as they all respectively grinned, hissed or rolled their eyes at me.

But then I eyed each of them carefully and said quietly, “No fighting tonight. Feyre is… she is raw right now, I am not asking you all to coddle her – she needs, wants, a purpose and we can give that to her. But I am asking you, not as High Lord, but as a friend, not to shred her to pieces – and for you all not to be the monsters I know you can be to each other.” I managed another grin at them, they all glanced around at each other, silently agreeing, promising to behave and I relaxed slightly.

Trust Cassian to lighten the mood as he suddenly asked with a grumble, “Do I have to dress up?”

I laughed, “No, in fact, wear your Illyrian leathers if you don’t mind… both of you.” I nodded to Azriel who nodded in return, “I want her to see what we really are, who we are and what it is that we do.”

Mor beamed at this then asked brightly, “Can I dress up?”

Cassian snorted.

I chuckled and shrugged, “Whatever makes you happy Mor.”

Her eyes glittered with mischief, “Whatever-“

“Here we go…” Cassian muttered as I cut her off, “In regard to clothing Mor.”

She let out a dramatic sigh. Amren just shook her head at us all with mock disgust.

Smiling I looked around the group again, “Does anyone else have anything pressing? My plan was to stick close to the house today, in case she has any problems.”

They all looked at each other and then shook their heads, “Alright then. Azriel see what the Summer Court fleet looks like, check in with your Summer and Autumn court spies, then get back here for dinner tonight. The rest of you, go do whatever hard work it is I’m sure you do.” I flapped my hands at them in mock dismissal.

Cassian threw me a rude gesture and made his way out, grabbing another biscuit before he left. Azriel simply shifted into shadow, but Amren and Mor stayed in place. Mor glanced at Amren, considered then said, “I’ll go change for the day, I’ll be back down in a minute.” Hint: You two can talk, but you don’t get to escape me that easy, cousin.

She got up and breezed upstairs to the room she sometimes borrowed when she occasionally spent the night. I let out a sigh then turned my attention to Amren who arched a brow at me, “Well this is an interesting turn of events.”

I shrugged a little, “It’s not what I had planned but it is hardly a disaster.”

“Oh hardly,” she said with a touch of sarcasm, “Do you think she will help?” Her swirling silver eyes studied me minutely.

I tilted my head back, looking up at the ceiling as I considered the question. Two months ago, when I first told her about Hybern she had seemed… interested in helping. Protecting her human family mattered to her. I don’t think that had changed; I think Tamlin had just beat her down enough she felt like she didn’t have an option to do anything useful. Given the opportunity, the freedom, and the training… “Yes,” I said and looked back at her, “I do. And I know what you want to discuss, like I said, let’s talk about it after you meet her tonight.”

Amren tilted her head slightly, considering, then nodded again. “Very well.” She stood up and smiled briefly, “Hope looks good on you Rhysand.” Then she turned and walked out.

I stared after her, a little shocked. Hope? Was I hopeful? Perish the thought.

- - - ~*~ - - -

Mor bounced back down the stairs as I was pouring another cup of tea, dressed in dark grey pants and a knitted forest green sweater, she looked like a pine tree, stolid and timeless. She glanced around the room to make sure we were alone, then walked over to sit on the end of the couch closest to me. “Rhys-” she began, and I cut her off.

“Mor, do not start, please. I know what you think, and why you think it, but it is not the right time.” I shook my head at her and took a sip of my tea.

Her eyes turned reproachful, “Rhysand, you are the happiest I have seen you in close to six months and that’s just with her being in this house for less than a day. Do not tell me it is not the right moment to tell her.”

I smiled at her, my lovely cousin, “And that Mor, is exactly why it is the wrong time to tell her.”

She frowned at me, confused.

“Because telling her right now would be for my benefit, and yes, maybe – maybe – it might be good for her as well, or maybe it would be too much for her to handle on top of everything else she has just gone through. Think about it Mor, the love of her life, the man she was going to marry, the man she sacrificed and died for, just broke her trust, if not her heart. He locked her up and abandoned her, and he has been neglecting her for months, and the longer she is here the more she is likely to realize that.” I shook my head, “I will not add to her burden right now. Maybe someday, when she doesn’t look half dead or flinch from the thought of being near strangers, but until then… just leave it be Mor. Let her get healthy, let her get her confidence back, let her taste freedom again.”

Mor stared at me for long moments before she leaned back into the couch. “She has a right to know the truth.”

I nodded, “She does. She also has a right to not be burdened by it.”

Her gaze darkened, “What makes you so sure it would be a burden?”

I looked away from her then and said, “It was for my mother.”

Mor leaned forward again and grabbed my hand, “Rhys - Rhys your parents were different people. Your father was an asshole and you are not him.You would never treat Feyre the way your father treated your mother. You love her Rhys.”

I swallowed once, then said softly, “But she does not love me. And a Mating bond would just complicate matters that are simple right now. And that is what she needs – simple. If she agrees to work with me, with us, I will be sending her into darkness and danger, the very least I can give her is simplicity in matters that have broken her heart.”

Mor let go of my hand and sat back with a huff of disgust, folding her arms across her stomach and staring at me.

“Let’s play a game Rhysand.” She said tartly, “Let’s say you tell her, but she rejects the bond and decides to leave – how is that any different than you not telling her? She could leave any day; she could go back to the Spring Court tomorrow. At least then she would know and make an educated decision. And yes, your heart would break, but your heart will break if she left tomorrow and you hadn’t told her. But let’s say, just for the shits and giggles of it, you tell her, and she picks you. Hell, maybe even loves you, if you gave her a chance to. In one fell swoop you run the risk of mending two broken hearts – are those odds so damn bad?”

I looked away from her, my heart was beating too fast and my thoughts were all jumbled, but I forced myself to focus, forced myself to think through the chaos and say simply, “And if I tell her, and it’s just one blow too many? You saw her yesterday Mor, she imploded. She is just barely functioning today. What if I told her and she couldn’t handle it? What if the guilt of being Mated to me, and not Tamlin ate at her? What if she decided it was a failure on her part? You want to play a game Mor? Prove to me that telling her will guarantee she will be ok on the other side – pick me, don’t pick me, I don’t care about that. Promise me it won’t break her, prove it to me, and I will march up those stairs right now and tell her.” I looked back at her, staring at her with eyes hot with tears that I felt and refused to shed.

Mor was quiet for a moment before she said, “I can’t.”

I nodded with resignation but Mor leaned forward and stopped me with a look, “But I can promise you nothing would ever hurt her more than if she found out and that you had chosen not to tell her.”

My eyes widened and then narrowed, “Mor, you-“

She shot me a look of disgust, “I am not going to tell her, do you think so little of me? But I am not the only one who will ever know. Azriel already suspects, it won’t take Cassian long to catch up and you know how Amren is about things, she will figure it out. That would mean four people who will know when she doesn’t, and you can trust the four of us. What about anyone else? Rhys it shows, spend enough time around you, and now that she is here, it isn’t too damn difficult to put the pieces together. Honestly, I suspect the only reason she hasn’t figured it out yet herself is that she wasn’t born fae and her mind still functions the way her human mind did. All it takes is one person to tell her and for her to think back through everything to figure out that you knew and chose not to tell her and I promise you,” she glared at me, “That will hurt her more than anything else you could possibly do.”

I sat frozen in my seat, staring at her, wavering… and then I heard the bed creak upstairs. The sound of her feet on the floor and of Nuala and Cerridwen climbing the stairs to go tend to her. The entire time Mor held my gaze, she did not flinch away.

Swallowing once I said quietly, “I’ll think about it.”

She let out a low sigh and shook her head, standing up. “You do that Rhys. See you tonight.” Then she turned and headed to the foyer, pulling a knee length black coat out of the closet and slipping it on before she headed out of the house, leaving me alone to my chaotic thoughts while I waited for Feyre.

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