#Fay Writes Things

[faiell]

Excerpt:

Restraint is a funny thing. Draco can manage it well, as long as it’s wrapped safely in a lie. The easiest way to stave off starvation is by pretending hunger itself isn’t real. Therefore, he doesn’t want Potter. He can’t.

Tags: Comeplay, Breathplay, Infidelity (not between drarry), Journalist Draco Malfoy, Auror Harry Potter, Plot What Plot/Porn Without Plot, Magically Powerful Harry Potter, Invisibility Cloak, Exhibitionism, Cuckolding

Thank you: @kamaela and @kanamycine for the stellar betareading!

Author's note: written for a Kinkuary event for the prompts of Comeplay and Breathplay. thank you to everyone who's read and sent good vibes so far. enjoy freak4freak slutty harry and a draco who gives him exactly what he needs.

AO3 link to The Casual Affair

[lilacs-stars]

wait okay I haven't seen anyone talk about this yet (and I'm really sorry if this has been brought up before, to my knowledge it hasn't, but obviously I haven't seen every single post ever), during "perfect revenge" when they first go into the dead fish layer thing whatever, and around the time where uliana says "find that perfect, perfect revenge"

HADES LITERALLY GRABS ONTO MORGIE'S SHOULDERS AND DOES A LIL JUMP?? AND HE'S SMILING AND HE SEEMS SO HAPPY HE JUST DOES A JUMP LIKE

it's soo cute 😭 honestly in my opinion it feels super out of character for him, idk why it was even included but like maybe it shows a part of hades that's super bubbly, which he tries to mask with his apathetic, uninterested demeanor?

but the way he jumped on morgie's shoulders in particular, makes me wonder more about their dynamic? like is it because morgie's so bubbly that hades is like that around him too? and the way that morgie was quick to agree to hades's "yeah let's burn her to a crisp" makes me wish we got to see more of them. like imagine hades always acting so tough and unconcerned around maleficent, but finally letting loose and being super excited and happy when he hangs out with morgie.

anyways just a thought, I figured it would be nice to point it out and see what you guys think about it. that's all for now! :))

(also now I can't get the idea out of my head where hades is being all chill to maleficent like "yo imma go hang out with morgie" and she's like "okay whatever" and then cut to hades hanging out with morgie where they're both squealing and jumping up and down like a pair of teenage girls while one of them spills the tea 😭 I'm sorry I can't this is too funny 💀 I actually need a fic about this like this is some top-notch villain behavior fr)

[ehlnofay]

Efri knocks on the door, which she doesn’t normally do. It’s so ridiculously loud it feels counterintuitive – she takes a full minute and a fair bit of banging around to shove it open, so he can already hear her, no need for anything else. But this time she knocks.

This time is different. This time is a bit weird, because the Archmage invited her to visit.

Normally, she just barges in when she feels like it, whenever she’s got an hour or so to spare. To look at his magic-grown garden, mostly; it’s a good garden, bright and beautiful and impossible without whatever weird spellcraft set it in place, all kinds of plants with all different needs. Grapes that only grow in the Eastmarch Aalto, mushrooms that only grow in the belly of the earth, flowers that only grow in snow and lichen that only grow in swamps. It shouldn’t be able to all grow together, and yet it does. It’s fascinating. And nice to look at.

So Efri comes to look at it. And sometimes – when the Archmage isn’t being too withdrawn and sulky – he tells her about it, about the care each plant needs, how he has to prune the bushes and pull the fjell’s weave out before it sprawls to take up all the space in the soil. He has gardening gloves, not soft wool like hers but dark leather with dirt streaking the seams. She’s seen him wear them three times.

Sometimes he’s not in the mood, and she looks in silence, and he pretends like she’s not there, and she pretends like he’s doing a good job at that. (He often looks over at her – she can feel his bleeding-red eyes on her back – and sighs, like the weird tired old man he is. She doesn’t acknowledge it.)

But this time he asked for her. Which, unless he’s got a new plant (unlikely) she can’t think of any reason for him to do. It isn’t as though they ever talk about anything else. But Mirabelle found her in the laundry room, pressing soap through Sissel’s favourite blanket because they’d used it for long enough it had started to smell funny, and she told her that Archmage Aren wanted to see her, and she wasn’t going to say no. She was curious. And besides, they’re a sort of friends, she thinks – even if he’s weird and sullen and almost two hundred years old, he still lets her wander into his room when she’s at a loose end, rifling through his things like a careless wind and peering wide-eyed at his garden. He still sits down and talks to her about it, sometimes. So Efri knocks, and waits, uncomfortably, to hear a response.

There’s a faint, “Mirabelle?” through the heavy wooden door. Efri sighs, because she knows he can’t hear her.

“Efri,” she calls back.

A pause. Then, “Ah,” a little louder, and he’s pulling the door open, which is a nice change. That thing is enormous. Hurts her arms to shove at.

Still weird, though.

The Archmage stands, a hand on the door’s fancy-looking knob, wearing his hood again. There’s no rhyme or reason as to when and where he wears that thing, it seems. He took it off on the ramparts, out in Winterhold’s eternal blizzard; he’s put it on now, in his own too-lavish room, where he sits and reads and looks at his plants.

He doesn’t say hello.

“Hi,” Efri says, because she is polite; she ducks under his arm and stands in his little entrance hall, on his nice smooth blue rug. “What did you want?”

“What did I –” the Archmage says; there’s a brief flash of the eyes as he turns, the glow of the mage-lit sconces reflecting off his irises. “Ah. Nothing in particular. Do you mind if I go tend to the garden?”

Efri squints at him. (He’s being strange. In a different way to usual.) Suspiciously, she replies, “All right.”

So he turns and goes. His quarters – spacious and lavish like a jarl’s longhouse – don’t punch the breath out of her like they did the first few times she saw them, but they’re still a lot. The magic lights, the near-glow of the threads of the rugs, the smooth beautiful wood of the furniture. It’s more’n two times the size of Efri’s old house, and that’s before the dragon burnt it down. It’s all full of books and knick-knacks in a way that makes her almost envious. And of course it has the garden; there’s not words for how wonderful the garden is.

The Archmage crosses the floor with neat, steady steps, one hand tugging on the hood of his mantle. His gardening gloves lay creased on a little red-wood desk; he pulls them on and marches over to the garden without so much of a glance.

He shakes, a little, as he crouches down on the edge of the stone steps so he can reach the dirt. Maybe he’s a bit cold – it’s never quite warm in here no matter how the fire burns. Or maybe his knees are aching and weak. Efri understands that old people get that, sometimes.

(She still doesn’t know why he called her here; doesn’t know why he’s not telling her. She doesn’t believe it’s nothing; he’s never done it before, usually seems vaguely put out by her presence, even if it’s in a way she can tell isn’t entirely genuine. If it was something silly, like wanting someone to talk to about a problem with the plants, he’d either wait for her to visit on her own time or just say so.)

(But she often doesn’t understand quite why he does the things he does. So she doesn’t know.)

He stays quiet, and Efri thinks she recognises this quiet – if she talked at all right now, he wouldn’t hear it. Lost inside his own head. She squints at him for a moment, looks around the room; her eyes fall, after a moment, on the polished surface of the desk. It’s cluttered with inkpots and paper and all manner of little mage things; laying open is a book.

Efri takes a step off the rug and onto the stone with a leather-booted foot. She isn’t quiet about it; the Archmage doesn’t notice.

She goes to look at the book.

It’s quite old, she thinks, though not as old as some of the texts in the Arcaeneum; the pages yellowed and wrinkled with time, the leather she can see of the cover soft and supple. The page it’s opened to is covered over with sparse text; handwritten, too, and rather messily. It takes some effort but Efri is able to make out a few words.

Only because they’re familiar, though; only because she’s spent the last few days peering over Sissel’s shoulder as she pores over volumes that might give them the information they need (while still being succinct enough as to be comprehensible). Chapters of histories of the magical institutions of the world with only the vaguest descriptions of the ideas and practices of the Psijic Order; old College record-books that say nothing about an Augur.

On this wrinkled page Efri’s eyes, skimming over the small collections of words in a crisp, crabbed hand, lock onto the familiar shapes of Artaeum – of Psijic – of Winterhold. There are a few other capitalised words that look like names, though none of them mean much of anything to her. Deneth. Antilion.

Efri glances back at the Archmage, who is still crouching on the edge of the garden patch. His arms are limp by his sides, hands spread out on the stone.

She takes the book. (It might be relevant! She’ll give it back later!) She’s got no pockets big enough to put it in, so she hurries back over to the little entrance area and slips it under a dresser. She’ll take it out on her way out – have Sissel help her look through it for anything about the Augur they’re supposed to find or the strange mages they’ve been contacted by – and bring it back, later. No harm done.

The Archmage is still staring at the garden like it’s telling him secrets. She pads over to him on her toes, quiet as a mouse. Even when she’s standing over him, practically looming, her skirt definitely in position to be within the edges of his vision, he doesn’t turn. He’s like this, sometimes. Makes it easier to look through all his stuff without him complaining; makes it harder to talk, if Efri’s in a chatty mood, or to figure out what it is he wants.

Efri waits a few seconds – just to make sure – before she nudges him with her foot.

He startles, whole body twitching under the loose grey cloth of his robe. He looks up.

Efri says, “Are you going to tend the plants?”

The Archmage blinks. “Of course,” he says; his tone is somewhere between curt and bemused. “I was waiting for you to come over here.”

His eyes are fixed on some point on the ceiling, or on the shift of Efri’s mantle. Efri eyes him askance. “Well, I’m here now,” she tells him, like it’s not obvious, and kicks him gently one more time for good measure.

“Don’t,” he says. He doesn’t snap – still talks soft. Efri looks at him even more askance, but he’s already looking away, over his mage-lit bed of plants. They look good, as neat and cared-for as ever, though one of the hardy little bushes is growing more arms than it really needs and the gnarling rock-roots are beginning to drown out the little flowers – the ones that look like goatweed. A garden like this – miraculous, impossible, meddling – takes a lot of maintenance, especially when you’re not a plant-wizard, which, Efri has learned, is a real thing; there’s a surprising amount of plant-based spells, and in Morrowind the wizards actually grow big mushrooms to live in. But neither she nor the Archmage are much good at plant-spells; they have to do it all manual.

Mostly manual. The Archmage raises a hand; Efri watches as ice gathers in the air before his fingers, glittering in the magelight like a sharp-cut diamond (or like the ink-print drawings of them; Efri’s never seen one in real life). With a flick of his wrist he sends it scattering in jewel-bright drops over the patch.

(Efri would have had to get a watering can. Or rig up some complex irrigation scheme. Doing it with magic feels like cheating.)

But it is pretty. “Pretty,” she comments, because if she doesn’t, she is mostly sure the Archmage will forget she’s there.

His fingers curl. “Thank you,” he says. Frost begins creeping over his palm, piling itself on like a gentle drift of snow. After several seconds of him casting in silence and her watching in silence, he speaks again. “That was… a strange incident, the other day. Very strange indeed.”

Ah. The incident.

(The unfamiliar mage that appeared out of nowhere – offering no explanations, would speak to nobody – demanding to see the College’s youngest, newest member. A mage from some important society, no less; magical societies are hardly Efri’s area of expertise, but from the way that both the Archmage and his Advisor were falling over themselves to accommodate his bizarre requests it must be really important. And then they’d messed it all up by insisting that Efri and Kazari go as well as Sissel, even though he only asked for Sissel; and then he stopped time to talk to them and vanished into thin air as soon as he was done. And Kazari said they shouldn’t tell anyone about it.)

(That incident.)

“Mm,” Efri says in vague agreement. (Kazari said she shouldn’t tell anyone about it. And they made fair points. If the not-ghost had wanted the Archmage to know he would have brought him into the fold; Efri and her friends don’t even know what they’re doing, much less who they can trust about it.)

“Very strange,” the Archmage repeats. He curls his hand into a fist and the gathered snow seeps out of it. “And after all these years – he just leaves.” He looks back, the lines of his face stark in the glow of the magelight and the shadow of his hood, his eyes apple-red, and asks, “Do you think we offended him?”

Normally, the Archmage talks kind of blank. Dispassionate. Borderline lofty, borderline lordly, sometimes. This is not that.

(Efri can’t place what it is instead, but it’s not that. She bites the inside of her cheek.)

Affecting a shrug, Efri says, “How should I know? I didn’t talk to him.”

“Hm,” the Archmage replies, and turns back to the garden, a grey silhouette against the colourful shock of the plants.

“He seemed weird,” Efri offers, which is true. (Both versions of events make him seem weird: his cryptic warnings and his cryptic-er silence.)

The Archmage, shoulders slumped, repeats, “Hm.” There is a quiet moment. He says, “Would you like me to show you how to prune the canis root?”

Efri says, “Sure.”

So the Archmage steps into the garden, bare-footed on the sparse patches of free, damp soil. His toes must be very cold. He crouches down, knees clicking as he does – moves to the side of the plant growing sharp and sprawling out of the rock so Efri can see what he’s doing – and unsheathes a wicked little blade that winks in the magelight. He sets a hand on one of the dry, quavering roots (no, Efri notices – the root is still, it’s his hand that trembles) and positions the knife.

A quick, neat slice, right below the bud, to keep the root small and contained, else it might crawl over the rocks and strangle out everything else in the garden. The pruned-off root rests in the Archmage’s palm. He curls his fingers around it; Efri can see the leather of his gloves crease.

“Efri,” he says, sudden. Magelight runs like waterfall rapids down the grey wool of his back, the heavy fold of his hood. “Be careful.”

She’s not the one with the knife. She doesn’t know what he means. But the tremor in his hand is rattling his whole arm up to the shoulder, now, and he still sounds strange. A hundred years younger, maybe. Or much, much older.

“I know you think you’re on the edge of something great,” he goes on, that strange quality to his voice. He sounds like the pruning knife, like ocean storms, like old stone. “You’re curious. You want to know.”

Oh.

“You want to know, too,” Efri says, hand fisting in the pilling warm wool of her skirt. She feels defensive, though she’s not entirely sure of what. “And it’s important. It –”

His shape against the blossoming garden shifts. “Maybe,” he says. “Maybe it is. Maybe you are.”

He turns, then; his face stark blue-grey as the ancient stones, and Efri is suddenly, deeply certain that he has been in the College for aeons. He has never left this room. For a moment, all its luxury feels gossamer-frail; the air is heavy as ash and she is choking on it. She can make out nothing in the lines of the Archmage’s face. “Your great discovery,” he says, and it’s like a recitation. “Think about what it’s worth. Think about what it isn’t.”

In the main hall of the College, far below, the Eye of Magnus rests atop a streaming blue-light font. It spins, and spins, and spins.

“You’re being weird,” Efri tells the Archmage of Winterhold, and his lips flatten.

“Think about it,” he repeats with the distant finality of a bell’s toll, and he slices through another grown-out root, sap sticking bloodily to his blade.

[disorganizedkitten]

Holding murderduo in my hands. They're so messed up. They're so perfect for each other. I have assigned them orbiting atoms. I've written most of their relationship tags. I run the only collection. I traumatize them every day and every hour and I put them in boxes together to sit and bathe in the blood of their enemies.

They are ilk and they are mirrors and they are everything the other is and everything the other is not.

One was raised by a serial killer, a black widow in high society with expectations and rules and sharp words and fingernails in his shoulders. Watching fathers come and go at the whims of his mother with nothing he could do about it.

One was raised by a mortician, with death on his breath and respect in his fingertips, because being dead doesn't stop personhood, with overflowing love and too much information and she is quiet and sweet but she has pieced back together bodies torn apart by the worst of humanity.

They are opposite but they are the same, they are children who grew up around death and know the ways it can hurt but one sees a funeral as an act of respect and the other sees it as a cover up. One will kill because it's the easiest option and one will kill when it's the best option.

They are kids who have seen too much and can't share that because how do you tell your friends that your home is a field of murder and your parent comes to dinner with blood under their nails?

[faynthearted]

okay, I FINALLY finished touching up/rewriting one of the major scenes I wanted to redo in desecration and I’m so much happier with it now

[spellsparkler]

most relaxed girl in the world (who wants to kill you). everyone say hiii elias

[girlvasectomy]

everytime i think about fnaf my autism gets stronger

[faillen]

Every single thing I write for Peaceful Property turns out to be for the exact same fic and I’m annoyed

[nightfayre]

next chapter will be posted a bit later than expected 🫶🏼

[stonerzelda]

MUTUALS TO GIVE YOUR HOME ADDRESS TO MOMENT AAAAAAA GOD @floralfemmes OWE U MY MOTHERFOCKIBGE LIFE‼️‼️‼️🌴🌴🥺🥺✨️✨️✨️✨️💚💙💜🌈💞🖤🤎🤎❤️❤️🤍💛🍑❤️🌈💞💞💞💞💞💞💞💞🎮🎮🎮🎮🎮✨️✨️✨️🌴🌴🌴🌸‼️‼️‼️‼️‼️‼️‼️‼️‼️THANK U SO MCUH FOR THE TALISMAN THAT WILL REMAIN EITH ME UNTIL THE END TIMES we MUST have our crossover episode soon 🙏 🙏 🙏

[disorganizedkitten]

Oh but you should expand on the rarepair things. Whomst is Cecilia? And why is Fay & Harry so low?

Why thank you for asking!

Realistically, Fay and Harry is such a small tag because she's only important in one video game, so all fics are from us writers hunting her down through various wikis or fics and deciding she's cool. I think I first heard of her in A Different Professor by AsphodelWolf15? Which isn't even IN the Fay Dunbar & Harry Potter tag. Tragic, really.

In case you're interested, my fics in the tag are so far Emotional Support Cookies and We'll Take Our World By Storm. She's a main character in Not (Our Parents') Children, though, so that number WILL go up as I write the au. She's also the main character in Dark Magic for Dummies, but that hasn't left my documents yet.

Cecilia! Alright, so, in Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, we meet Voldemort's parents. And in the scene where we meet his dad, Tom Riddle Sr. is riding on horseback with a pretty lady, who he tells to not look at the Gaunts, as they're so disgusting. He calls her "Cecilia, Darling." Now, Voldemort's mom is Merope Gaunt, and canonically we never see Cecilia again. But in the Magpie's Hoard discord, I posited a prompt about 'what if when Tom Riddle went to meet his dad, he met his stepmother too, and she decided to take him in'. That sparked a truly beautiful discussion, of course, and I decided I liked her. She'll appear later on in Hyacinth, but for now I have Judge My Carmine Fingertips (it won't make them clean) and Gentle as Flaking Blood.

Canon rules: nail it or screw it, you know? It's my playground now.

[void-botanist]

Okay I wanna ask you Blorbo wrapped questions back lmao. I'm also curious about who you thought was coolest, who you rotated in your head the most and who was most fun to write. But also, did you have anyone that was kinda driving you up a wall but then something clicked and you really figured out how to write them? If not, who's still driving you up a wall?

Kendrick! I think you saw that I got too excited and answered my own questions over here but who has been driving me up a wall is an excellent question, lol. There are a few who aren't actively driving me up a wall (what's up with Aza huh) but the people who I still haven't got a hold on are Declan, Horatio, and Sid.

I'm almost hesitant to say Declan because I don't think I have a hard time writing him but I also feel like I haven't fully keyed into the fact that he's an autism creature of a man (and also making it clear that the way the rest of the crew does things behind his back is not them infantilizing him because of it but more complicated than that. They do think he's fragile but that's because of how he's handled his grief). Also like. He literally trusts his crew with his life. But he is so so bad at talking to them and I haven't totally figured out how that all works out.

Oops this got long so here's a cut

Horatio got a character lift in this version. He's always been a sweetheart but that evolved out of him having A Sense Of Justice while also being generally pathetic and wet and soft. Now he has the Standing family deviousness that goes along with it and I don't know how to write that. Because also he looks completely different to Sid, who knows him very well and who he's open with, than he does to Avis, who hates him somewhat for the circumstances of his birth (she tries not to because it's not his fault) but extremely much for being sun-coded in the "cheerful" and "unavoidable and intense" ways. So like, what is he plotting (especially about getting Sorian and Avis back together) and how is he plotting it and how does this dovetail with the happy-go-lucky florist which is equally as much who he is?

Sid on the other hand is challenging in the sense that writing him feels fine. He's a real everyman if you will. Except I don't get his character and I think that's a major stumbling block for AOM as a whole. Yeah, on some level he has to be the sad traumatized guy but like. How does he handle his parents trying to run his life once he takes a massive step outside of their frame of reference? How does this work with Avis's story? (Can I successfully shove these two stories into one thing that is a whole? They have so many themes in common help) In his earliest iterations he was the devil-may-care I'm-doing-my-best guy who mildly tormented Horatio Sense Of Justice and I guess they've sort of flipped? Except Sid is always the Doing My Best guy.

Also when it comes to Anni and Zel, Anni is so easy to write with all the technical stuff and much more challenging with the romance stuff and I don't want it to be that way aaaaaaa

As for who did click, I think I'm getting there with Patience (even though I haven't worked on TFA in a while), Rodney worked better when I just let him be soft, working out Fay's whole divorce history helped make her easier to write (she's not pretending to be the good suburban mom. she just is sometimes and other times she sucks), the fact that Wylie hates himself cracked his whole character wide open, and lately I've realized that a critical part of post-divorce Sorian is that he's tired. He's tired of Avis needling him, always being there but never being there for him. He's not even sure he deserves for her to be. But he kinda wishes she would just leave and move on so he can too.

[spellsparkler]

the most fun thing to do when writing bg3 things is making everything terrible that happens to everyone about my terrible guys instead. these assholes are trying to hog all the trauma

[girlvasectomy]

one of these day, if i ever get the power to write, i'd love to work on a stranger things novelization or an it one or a texas chainsaw massacre one or...

[bulletbilltime]

self-callout time

[advitameternal]

less of a question and more open-ended but ! talk about Morgan and her sisters 🥹 what is her relationship with them like, and does it have any influence on her relationship with Arthur once he comes into the picture?

Morgan loves her sisters, she really does. She is the youngest, so I do feel she would have been more sheltered, and protected by her sisters, especially when Uther disrupted their lives.

All her life, I think she was closest to Morgause, because Morgause is the eldest and her model. She admires her strength, her ambition and the way she fights for what she wants and deserves. It also has to be taken into account that their world is dominated by men, especially Arthur, his knights, and their husbands. Morgause and Morgan have a lot in common, they own their power as women, even more as women with magical abilities and political influence. She has immense trust in Morgause, and it's more evident in the verse where Morgan is Mordred's mother and trust her sister to raise him. It makes her love her sister even more. She is closer to Morgause than to Elaine, as she couldn't see herself telling the truth about Mordred's father to Elaine (at the beginning, because after a few years, she doesn't really care anymore.)

If she has to choose between Morgause and Arthur, it will always be Morgause. She's a part of her soul. After the May Day massacre, it's even more obvious. Morgan loses all respect and love she had for Arthur, and if Morgause wants to destroy him? Hell yes, Morgan will help.

As for Elaine, Morgan does care for her, but she isn't as close as she is to Morgause. I see Elaine as being more neutral, not taking a side against Arthur. That's something Morgan sometimes deeply resents. I see Morgan as being an " all or nothing " kind of person, she wants the people around her to be either completely with her, or against her. At the peak of her rage, she sees the world in black and white. It's Arthur, or her, not both. But if something happened to Elaine, Morgan would be there, would support her - and take revenge if necessary. Elaine is the sister who used to braid her hair when she was a little girl, the one who would wrap a fur around her when it was cold and Morgan desperately wanted to go on a walk.

In the end, she's still her sister, and she remembers when it was just the three of them trying to find their place in the world, under Uther's presence.