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rainwaterapothecary · 2 months ago

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For the micro story prompt, #7 :3

7 - Silent Fury

Early 20th Century. Little Italy, America.

Leone S. Candreva was a boy on a mission. Fiorire bounded along beside her counterpart, big adolescent paws hitting the cobblestones as her now-wolf nose lifted into the air to scent their friends between the open windows of the bakery, the bookbinders, and finally the schoolhouse.

“There, Leon!” She called out through their Bond, turning sharply to guide the duo into the playground. If Leon’s soft jaw wasn’t set and his expression thunderous, it surely would have turned so.

Fiorire smelled blood.

She couldn’t smell Panza at all.

Something’s wrong. Something's really wrong.

Her boy’s fists clenched, drawing blood away from his knuckles.

Only the friendship bracelet with her name on it showed any sign of his innocence as he tore into his bullies to save his friend.

“Leon, no!” Little Luis Serra from down the road held out a hand to stay the inevitable beatdown, but Leon came from Sicilian stock and he was silently enraged.

The upperclassmen didn’t see his tiny fist coming.

“Ay Dios mío.” The young boy sighed, holding his dormouse-shaped daemon to his chest. Panza was good to him like that, changing easily to whatever form he needed comfort from the most.

Luis’ mamá’s bombón was a badger, and having a tiny heartbeat nearby calmed him.

Especially when bullies started calling him awful names and pulling at his clothes.

Panza had tried to help but, like his human, there was only so much he could do before turning to the preservation of his boy. Luis and Panza weren’t like their friends, brave and combatative, and they tried to tell themselves that this way okay…

But when the younger boy was fighting three upperclassmen with nothing but Fiorire’s snarls (she’d taken the form of a wolf from Luis’ homeland, he noticed with shock) and Leon’s fists- and kicks, and teeth- just to protect someone else, someone who hung out with him after school when one of their grandparents had to work late, or taught him how to make friendship bracelets in the dusty backyard of a tenement, or gossiped in their Mother tongues just because they could…

Well, it made Luis feel awful.

Panza snuggled into his tiny palms, snuffling at the scrapes his boy had gotten after a bully had tried to tear his shirt and sent him to the ground.

Leon went flying, his small form bouncing as he landed in the sandy playground.

With a sniff, the blond devil picked himself back up and swiped the blood from a cut on his cheek. His steps were solid as he returned to the other kids, each footfall had purpose and his daemon twitched as her teeth sharpened to needles and her form shrunk.

Luis shivered as her ears began to thin and a bright white Glasgow Smile rippled across her chest.

Fiorire the Tasmanian Devil bared her teeth and Leon’s eyes glinted like death.

The shivering youth remembered what the menagerie said about those.

Ferocious. Mean and bloodthirsty just because they could. Would tear apart any enemy, no matter how big.

God, he hoped Fiorire didn’t Settle there.

As a bully’s skull thwacked into the unforgiving metal slide and Leon raised a ripped-up shoe to slam down onto the dazed kid’s head, Luis shook himself out of his horror and his gray eyes set.

"¡Sancho! ¡Basta!”

Enough.

Panza flowed out of his hands and landed in a very familiar shape.

Fiorire’s preferred lion cub form looked back at her with clear eyes and a lips pinched in concern.

She shuddered to a stop, her shock freezing Leon with his foot still poised to stomp his enemy into the metal edge.

Luis was many things: an intellectual, a bookworm, a hit with the girls…

But most of all he was sturdy.

He had held his Abuelo’s hand when his mama had died. He had set his jaw and ripped up one of his favorite shirts just to keep his own chest from betraying him.

He had reached out to the hurting, angry Italian kid when the blond showed up at the schoolhouse two years ago without parents and without anything to hold on to.

So Luis had reached out and he had held on.

"Vete." he mentally snapped to his daemon, the cub pouncing for his heart’s dearest friend where she stood frozen.

Leon felt the hit in his chest.

“L…Luis?”

If he hadn’t known Leon like he did, Luis would think he was betrayed.

Thankfully it was just shock.

Then Luis took the fists his mamá had given him and, with the savagery of her badger soul, he threw a punch.

The boys didn’t win, their enemies were the sons of dockworkers after all, and at least one was using his fists in a mirror to the way that dockworker used his: on smaller boys who couldn’t hope to win.

But they put up a damn good fight.

Panza had taken Fiorire into the trees at the soonest possible moment, utilizing that brain of theirs to remove the daemons from the circling bullies – one or two of whom had already Settled into cruel, muscular forms.

A quetzal from the menagerie led Fiorire’s mourning dove into the leaves where they left the slobbering dog, fox, and panther on the ground, glaring.

Luis’ long hair was pulled nearly to the point of blood and Leon was lucky that the teeth he lost were coming out anyway.

He spat blood into the dust on the side of the road and winced when his skinned knuckles touched his busted lip.

“Nonna is gonna kill us, Lu.”

The bookworm looked over in alarm before seeing the grin on his friend’s face. His shoulders relaxed and he shook his head, stray hairs still slipping loose.

“Not if we told her you were sticking up for me. You know she likes me best.” He knocked shoulders with his friend. Leon nodded to one side like ‘true’.

“’Sides, you’re famigghia. I wasn’t just gonna leave you n’ Panza.”

Luis froze in the middle of the street.

His friend raised an eyebrow and turned back to take him in.

“You okay?”

Luis began patting his pockets, alarm and terror filling his eyes past the point they had even when he had three bigger boys ready to tear him apart.

“I have to go back! Say hi to Nonna for me!”

“Luis-!”

The taller boy turned on his heel and took off back towards the schoolhouse, his hands shaking and a prayer running through the back of his mind.

No, no, no-

Leon’s footfalls followed him, along with the awkward not-yet-silent paws of a baby lioness. Panza circled his human’s neck, the bright reds of a fire salamander flickering as dusk lit his smooth skin.

Luis could handle the cruel names, the violence (Panza usually found a way out before it got too bad), and the stares.

It was when the idiotas touched his stuff that he felt that cold rush of terror shoot up his spine.

The one time he brought his copy of one of the Don Quixote books to school and a mean boy knocked it out of his arms he had frozen.

Panza had nearly turned into the pterosaur from the journals Luis hoarded and taken his tormentor’s hand off before Leon (then too young to be in school full-time) had run over and picked up the book.

Now the bracelet Leon had made him with Panza’s name on it was missing.

It had probably flown off his wrist when one of the big pendejos grabbed his arm and he slipped away, but it wasn’t there and he was panicking.

“Luis?”

He had begun muttering in quiet Spanish at some point as he ran up the road, drowning out the world as his thoughts orbited the small piece of jewelry made of old beads and flaking paint.

Panza’s throat frilled as he cycled through forms on Luis’ shoulders, the boy’s distress open in the rapidly vacillating form of scales, feathers, and fur.

Sometimes Leon wondered if Panza would ever Settle…

(Some part of him hoped not. That his mercurial, fanciful best friend would keep his whimsy and window to his moods on his sleeve for the rest of their lives.)

Panza launched himself off of Luis’ thin shoulders, gliding on the wings of the sharpest-eyed owl they could think of. Luis’ chest rose and fell rapidly, breath coming shorter and shorter.

"There!"

With uncharacteristic gracelessness and lack of care for his clothes, the frantic boy fell to his knees and picked up his friendship bracelet with shaking hands.

It seemed alright, nothing was snapped or broken. He bounced it on its thread once or twice, just in case any of the beads were hiding cracks.

“Luis? Hey…”

Leon could fight. He could swear. He could help his Nonna make meatballs with the best of them. (His hands were the perfect size, she’d said so herself! And you never doubt Nonna).

But he was at a loss when his friend started crying.

What would Nonna do…Fuck, what would Abuelo do?

Wincing as his bruised thigh twinged, Leon knelt on his knees before his friend.

“Luis? You okay?”

The two daemons held one of their silent conversations before the lioness translated into Leon’s head:

Your bracelets are one of his dearest possessions. He’d hate to lose his.

Leon blanked.

His young mind couldn’t fathom how important their afternoon of laughter and craft materials from neighbors must have meant to his friend to have the boy silently weeping.

Suddenly his arms were filled with his friend and he could do nothing but hold on.

Arctic Islands Research Compound

Nearly 19 years later, when one of the faceless scientists slipped an item the test subject had nearly forgotten about into his pale hands at the Dust trials, faded blue eyes snapped into understanding.

“What they’re doing here is wrong, my friend. And I won’t let them take anything else from you or anyone else trapped here.”

The bracelet in his hands matched the tattoo on his wrist, though it said a different name.

The beads were sun-bleached, the paint nearly gone, but as the man tethered to his daemon only through strength of will and the thinnest of threads turned it reverently one direction and then the next…

Laughter, bright and joyous filtered to his ears from between the claustrophobic tenement walls where two boys knelt over beads from a Romani laundress and paint from a German clockmaker.

His fist clenched around the bracelet that was still warm from another person’s skin.

The sewing thread from his Nonna had been replaced somewhere over the years with a thin, leather cord to fit the wrist of an adult.

When now-sharp blue eyes shot up to the retreating back of the scientist in a white coat, the warm eyes of a fire salamander looked right back.

Panza, the bracelet in his fist read.

Panza, the scientist whispered as he slipped into the nearest holding pen.

Fiorire, the salamander called…

And a wolf with dull eyes snapped to clarity and attention.

Panza was still an escape artist.

Leon was still vicious.

Fiorire still loyal.

Luis still whip-smart.

…And he had long stopped being afraid when it came to anything or anyone his still-soft heart held dear.

Besides, his Abuelo’s gun fit his hands, his old volumes of Don Quixote sat secure on a shelf in his safe-house, and his dearest friend held his bracelet.

What did he have to be afraid of?

Leon’s grin was feral as he heard Abuelo Serra’s gun going off in the hallway in front of his cage.

---

A/N Thanks for the prompt!!! This started off as that good good scorched earth Leon and then turned into babbies and then turned into 'I wanna do a Daemon au so I'll add it in' And now I have feelings and Ideas about where this au could go, so we'll see! :3c >:3c

Now with a [part 2]!

#my writings #replies #serennedy #daemon au #Leon uses his mother's last name to keep him safe from the mob but his dad (and Nonna) are Sicilian! Go ahead. Fuck with his best friend.#(He also uses the general italian for grandma bc that's what Leon's mom called her and it was hopelessly endearing)#Yes badgers live in spain yes they are the most savage domestic creatures I know of #if that tells you what his mama was like #:'3c #I'm not tagging one of the things in this fic until after eric reads it so it can be a surprise!#hint: daemons are usually the opposite sex from their humans #serennedy daemon au

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hallothere · 1 year ago

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Not sure if you got this one already but 33?

33. Protector/Sacrifice (oh, you want evil? ...this is sad)

Idhrien is capable. Idhrien is accomplished. She's the best healer in Tornhad if anyone asks you, even if Mandan's staring you straight in the eye. That's a fight you're willing to pick, even if he wouldn't follow it up. You've known Mandan a long time, but you've known your little girl was destined for greatness from the day she was born.

She was worried when you went to Mirkwood, went under orders and secret summons and didn't come back for weeks. You remember that scared look on her face clear when you did come back, albeit a little worse for wear. Mirkwood did that to people, you found. The Necromancer might not have been in residence, but his minions had given you more than enough trouble.

That had all been a feint, you were privy to know. As this may well end up being.

But you stand in the cell and you know that, of the two of you, Aragorn will need your little girl's healing hands more than an old man's sword. Even if she's not so little any more. But you can't help that now. That's how she'll always be, to you.

She's nursing a headache and probably a broken nose. You don't know who did it but you know what you'd do if you ever found out. She's a Ranger, just like you, and that shouldn't matter. But it does. It's hardly worth considering as you plan what to do next.

You wait. They come back regularly enough for fresh blood- more literally than you care to imagine. They're here again and they're looking at the injured, at the weak. At the ones crouched in the backs of the cells nursing broken noses.

So you give it your all. You lock eyes with the biggest, meanest looking one and you try to remember the worst of everything Lothrandir told you not to say. Remarkable similarity to Sindarin, some of these words. But only in pronunciation. What a lovely coincidence, you think, that such a motley collection of nouns makes up a pretty rank curse.

Idhrien knows what you're doing. She's always been quick like that, and you can hear her trying to get up to stop you. This would be the worst part. You hope she doesn't feel guilty, feel responsible about it, but you know she likely will.

You have the guards' complete attention, and you throw in a few creative barbs from one of Braigiar's songs. They get that one too, and now they're furious. The rest of the cell block probably thinks you've finally lost your mind. But not Idhrien.

You turn to her as they unlock the cell.

"I'm sorry," you say, "but I love you so much."

Your brothers cry "Idhrenfair!" as you're taken, and you are all the more glad you don't hear that one voice cry "Dad!" and give away the game.

She's too smart for that. She's going to make it out of this, your little girl.

#writing tag #fic tag #ask games #idhrien #idhrenfair #:'3c

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