#baby Lunette it’s your time to shine!!!

[eliteseven]

What if baby Jen has a twin 👀 Selune blessed them with a black and white haired pair of girls…

Surprise twins?!?

I’m crying imagining them handing baby Jen to Shadowheart for the first time and suddenly: “oop- there’s another one!”

Tav would faint 😅

But omg two of them?? The sun and the moon? Light and dark? Little versions of each of them??? 💕🫠 I die

Shadowheart sleeping with either baby tucked in each of her arms against her and Tav is just like… “we’re going to need another one of everything….” 😮

[selkiechild4998]

Lunette

Here's a quick fic I wrote for the holiday! I got something big cookin' up but it might not be done till the New Year!

Gene- Fluff

Tw-None

Wordcount- 861 Words

AO3 Link Here

A heavy chill hung in the Ministry's air. Winter had arrived the week before, bringing the first snowfall of the year. With that snowfall, it brought a lazy aura to those living within the Abbey. Everyone was affected by it, but none more than the young Emeritus known as Terzo. It was nights filled with freshly falling snow that Terzo adored the most, remaining snug under the heavy blankets of his bed.

It was a night like this that Terzo was fast asleep, his head resting on his precious Omega ghoul's chest, listening to the steady beat of his heart. Terzo could listen to his ghoul's heartbeat for hours, the steady pace acting as a lullaby. A pleasant smile tugged at Terzo's lips, sleeping peacefully until a soft sound made him stir. At first, Terzo didn't think much of it, but the sound came again, a soft chirp breaking the silence of the night.

Groggily, Terzo opened his mismatched green and white eyes and sat up. Omega didn't stir, remaining fast asleep, snoring as Terzo looked around his dark room. Sleep still clouded his mind, so he didn't question seeing a dark bassinet sitting next to his bed, its silky curtains drawn over the crib where those soft sniffling chirps came from. Terzo yawned as he moved to crawl out of bed, slipping his feet into his soft purple slippers and wrapping a throw blanket around himself.

"Sto arrivando," Terzo mumbled at another soft chirp, shuffling to the bassinet and pulling the curtains aside. He then lifted the small figure within the crib into his arms, the soft but warm Victorian-era baby gown overflowing from his arms. "Sono qui Principessa," Terzo smiled as he bounced the infant in his arms, "Papa's here."

With each gentle bounce in his arms, the baby's chirps of protest turned to soft trills and giggles, Terzo smiling as he looked at the infant he held. He had expected a human child, but looking up at him with purple and white eyes was a baby ghoul, specifically a quintessence ghoul. The voidling was tiny, curly black hair with a white stripe framed the kit's face. Black spots were around the infant's softly glowing purple and white eyes, reminding Terzo of the markings the Ministry's Cardinals gave themselves. The voidling giggled, reaching up to Terzo with tiny clawed hands, their fragile bat-like wings stretching clumsily out, the claws on the thumbs of the wings catching at the fabric of Terzo's night clothes.

"She looks just like you," Omega's voice came from behind Terzo, the ghoul appearing to suddenly materialize behind him.

"She does?" Terzo asked, looking back at Omega as his ghoul wrapped his arms around him, as well as his massive wings.

"Of course she does," Omega chuckled before channeling his quintessence into a scattering of small glowing orbs around the room, it looking as if he plucked the stars from the night sky. "Think she'll get your horns?" Omega asked as he nuzzled Terzo's cheek with a deep purr.

"Horns?" Terzo repeated, glancing back at Omega before pausing. With the orbs dimly illuminating the room, he could see his reflection within his vanity. He stared in shock, looking at two sets of smooth, curved horns sprouting from his forehead and temples, curling upwards to create a faint silhouette of a crown. Folded against his back were half-feathered, leathery wings, the feathers around the base of the wings looking slightly iridescent with the shine of dark shades of purple, while behind him rested a spaded tail that matched Omega's.

Terzo stared at the reflection he didn't recognize but knew it was him. When he blinked, he found himself looking up at the canopy of his grand bed. He sat up in record time, running his hands through his black hair. He expected to feel those horns but felt nothing, getting the same results when he felt his back and looked behind him, seeing no wings or tail.

"Terzo?… Are you ok?" Omega's deep, tired voice slurred in the darkness, the ghoul stirring awake with how much Terzo was shifting around.

"I'm…I'm ok," Terzo reassured, glancing around the dark room before laying back down next to his ghoul, "Just had a strange dream, Amore."

"What to talk about it?" Omega asked as he wrapped an arm around Terzo's waist, the human snuggling up to his chest.

"I'll tell you about it in the morning," Terzo mumbled, resting his head on the other's chest, listening to the soft hum from Omega. The ghoul then pressed a sweet kiss to his forehead, settling back into the soft blankets of the bed as Omega let himself slip back into his slumber.

Terzo remained awake, at least for a few more minutes. He listened to the rhythmic beating of Omega's heart, his eyelids slowly getting heavier as his mind lingered on the image of that little voidling from his dream and the ghoulish reflection of himself. After a while, he couldn't keep his eyes open any longer, yawning as he pressed his cheek against Omega's chest, the echoes of that voidling's giggles fading away as the human joined his ghoul in sleep.

[desdemonafictional]

Saltpeter Café

[more original fiction]

[Ko-fi]

About choices; about deals.

Lunette pulls up to the Saltpeter Café in the middle of a miserable summer storm, lashing so hard through the trees that a clump of Spanish moss comes loose overhead even as she is flicking off the headlights. In the carrier, in the passenger seat, the baby keeps wailing.

A cypress tree almost seems to grow out of the side of the café, its huge knees jutting up from the water and the parking lot alike. She fumbles with the carrier, dragging it over the gearshift, and wriggles out into the rain clutching it. The baby hasn’t stopped crying since she left Louisiana, but the howl of the rain keeps the sound deadened. Or maybe it’s just that everything in Lunette’s ears is deadened since the moment she touched the carrier, from the scream of an infant to the swish-thump of the windshield wipers. 

The baby’s rocket-ship printed blanket soaks up rain as she lugs it across the parking lot, arms trembling. Her house-slippers are taking in water just as fast. At the door, just within the cover of the tin roof, she pauses and wipes rain from her stinging eyes. She only hit the highway a few hours ago, but she feels like she hasn’t slept in days. She’s not as young, it seems, as she used to be.

The door swings open with a heavy chime, like a bell opening its mouth with a pop. As soon as her soggy toes touch the tile on the other side of them threshold the baby stops crying. A woman behind the refrigerated case looks up from a book of receipts. Inside it is bright and quiet and green. The kitchen behind the partition is full of golden shadows, what little of it Lunette can see.

“Well hello there,” the woman behind the counter says. She pushes back a curl of bottle blonde hair, her face beautiful and strange with the weathered look of a pageant queen a decade past her prime. “Sit down or carry out?”

Water is pooling around Lunette’s feet. Against all this golden brightness she is the creature from the black lagoon, slorp-slorping across the tile in her ruined slippers. She drops the carrier into a chair under the window and slumps into the one across from it.

The menu that the waitress slides into her hands doesn’t look right. It takes her a few dim seconds to work out why. A drop of water falls from her hair onto the laminated paper.

There’s the usual list of soft drinks and juices, teas, a section for appetizers featuring Famous Fried Green Tomatoes, and then under entrees—she blinks, twice—there are only two items listed.

REMEMBER

FORGET

She looks up. The waitress pulls a pen from behind her ear.

“What can I start you off with?” she says.

“C-coffee,” Lunette says, the word catching in her throat like a burst of static.

“Sugar?” the waitress says. “Cream?”

Lunette double checks the menu to make sure she’s not losing her mind. If she is, it’s at least staying consistent. “Both,” she says. “Please.”

“Coming right up, ma’am,” the waitress says. As she caps her pen, she lingers over the baby. Lunette can just see its little hands coming up, tiny fingers grasping for the woman in the white apron. Fear grips Lunette as the waitress peers down into the sodden cottony bundle. She should have left it in the car, but it didn’t feel right, leaving a baby alone in a car, even if it wasn’t heatstroke weather.

“Takes after his daddy?” the waitress says, glancing up at Lunette. Her mouth is smiling, but all Lunette can see is her pearly, slightly too-sharp teeth. The tongue behind them seems a little too pale.

“No,” Lunette says, hypnotized by those teeth.

The waitress looks back and forth between Lunette and the baby, her smile unchanging. She tucks the pen back behind her ear. “I’ll grab that coffee for you,” she says, and clicks away.

Through the grey curtain of rain outside, something ripples across the surface of the river. A gator, Lunette thinks. But so close to humans?

The coffee cup slides across the table to rest between her elbows. It occurs to her that she didn’t check for prices on the menu—it occurs to her that she does not have unlimited money, that possibly all she has now in this world is the contents of her wallet. As the waitress’s red-tipped fingers retreat, Lunette fumbles for the menu again.

“What’s his name?” the waitress asks.

“Uh,” Lunette says, freezing with her hands full of plastic. She struggles to remember. “He’s—he’s Aldren. Like the astronaut.”

The waitress sets down a little metal canister of cream on the table. The moment Lunette sees the heavy whiteness inside of it, her stomach turns over.

“They call him Buzz,” Lunette says, swallowing thickly. She reaches for the pitch black coffee and burns her lip on the bitter darkness. Her vision is going fuzzy, like a windshield in the rain.

“Mother’s little angel,” the waitress says, letting Buzz catch the scarlet tip of a nail in his grip.

“He’s not mine,” Lunette bursts out. “I don’t know what I’m going—what I’m going to do—”

“Take a look at the menu,” the waitress says, not without sympathy. “Decide what you want.”

Mortified, Lunette picks up the menu again and buries herself in it. She wipes away tears. None of the prices are listed, not even for the coffee. She runs through the list of appetizers, most of them fried—okra sounds really good right now—but she stumbles to a stop again on the entrees.

“Remember,” she says. No price listed. “Forget.”

“Forget is real popular,” the waitress offers. “Not as many people looking to remember. We do big and little here. Mistakes, bad breakups, nasty secrets, you name it. A Big Forget costs a little more, but not too much. You wouldn’t even remember what you lost.”

To forget what she’d seen—god, if only she could. The sound of the screaming in the bedroom, shattering glass, the smell of the stuff she’d found when she went to open the baby’s bottle. She’d only wanted to sooth it, to quiet down the crying. They’d left the door open to the hall. She’d walked right in. The whole stinking wreck had admitted her like an old friend.

The waitress tapped her notebook. “Seems like a woman in your situation might like to forget something big.”

She’d lived down the hall from the Joneses for months, since they moved in with the baby in tow. They seemed alright, none of her business if they were a little brusque with each other, a little snappish. She’d watched the baby a couple times while the mother was out getting her hair done, and then they’d stopped asking her, but the mother kept getting her hair done, and if they found a different sitter then whose business was that? If Lunette could hear crying through the walls for hours on end, in the middle of the day, whose business was that?

She doesn’t know where she’s going. Some city big enough to hide them, some town small enough to be forgotten? She doesn’t know what she’s doing. There’s probably an amber alert out on them by now, if Mrs. Jones stopped yelling long enough to notice the strange silence in her home.

“I could just give him back,” Lunette says. Her nails scrape over her wet scalp. “I could tell them I was—that I was just babysitting, trying to help. Took him to my mother’s for a couple hours. If I turn back now, they might even buy it.”

“Sure,” the waitress says, “you could. And everything will go right back to the way it was.” She gently pries the menu out of Lunette’s hands. “But you’ll still have seen what you’ve seen.”

She can’t forget the smell of the stuff in the bottle, rancid and heavy and slightly alcoholic inside of clear plastic printed with little cartoon bears. She pushes the canister of cream across the table, sloshing fat white droplets onto the vinyl, sick to her stomach.

“What does it… cost?” Lunette says.

“Nothing you couldn’t stand to part with,” the waitress says.

They both look at the baby. It feels like a fist is squeezing Lunette’s throat.

“What will you do with him?” she says.

“Oh,” the waitress says, flashing her vicious teeth, “not anything gruesome. I’ve always wanted little ones of my own.”

There’s no way to know if that’s true, or even what it really means. Lunette holds her coffee with both hands and tries focus. What kind of life will she have if she keeps on this way, past the point of no return? She’ll have to start over in a new city, penniless, unemployed—a fugitive. When she thinks of all the paperwork that it takes just to be a person in the world these days, she almost starts crying again.

The waitress reaches into the carrier and draws the baby up to her chest, against the old white apron. She sways, skirts shifting around her knees, as she runs a nail over the tiny pink cheek. In the river below, something dark and sinuous surfaces again. It takes everything Lunette has to sit still and not rip the baby out of her arms, jump in the car and hit the gas. No, she can’t leave the poor thing here any more than she could leave it in that festering hole of an apartment.

“Something else,” she says, “could I trade you something else?”

The waitress pauses, the baby’s tiny fuzzy head cupped in her palm. “I suppose,” she says. “But what would be the point of that? You’d be no better off than you are now.”

“What if I’m not the one who forgets,” Lunette says.

The Joneses barely noticed their child to start with. It would cost them very little to have his little place in their lives emptied out. They could rise to a bright new morning, full of a thousand new cruelties to subject each other to, and meanwhile Lunette could open the curtains on her own new morning.

The waitress is silent for a moment, and then she shows her shining teeth. “If that’s what you want, honey,” she says, “I can sell you that.”

Lunette takes a steadying drink of her coffee. She is afraid. She doesn’t know what else she can do. “What does it cost? A thing like that?”

The waitress considers the child in her arms for a moment. Light glints off the cake stand behind her, the perfectly glazed circle inside. Thunder cracks above them. This brightly lit tin box sits in the swamp of the world like a candle in a lantern.

“Have him come visit me,” the waitress says. “Once a year. Summer vacation, let’s say. You take this same highway, on the first day of summer, and you bring him to me.”

Lunette chews her lip. She looks at the baby. Buzz, she reminds herself. His name is Buzz.

A life on the run. A life of sucking hatred from a bottle, unwanted and unloved. What, she asks herself for the first time, is the best thing for Buzz?  

She holds out her hand. “Okay,” she says. “That seems fair.”

[maxbegone]

Number 19, but mix it up and make it Vax and Kiki!

OOhhhhhh hohooo stacey! 

I’m giving these kids a happy fucking ending, you cowards.

I will promise you the world, just stay by my side

Vax would have to think back to the time he and his sister were children in order to find a moment that could quite compare to this. Of course, their wedding was one of the best damn days of his life. He was able to promise himself to Keyleth with words bleeding from his heart, a speech that he had worked on for months, but had been thrown away at the last moment. She was fucking magnificent and words that were raw and pure and unrehearsed were exactly what Keyleth deserved.

But now…Well damn. Vax really couldn’t pin a moment quite like this.

The room was silent, save for the low crackling of the coals in the fireplace and Keyleth’s snores. She was passed out on their bed, completely encompassed by mounds of pillows and fresh sheets and her hair splayed all about her. She had one of Vax’s cloaks wound up in her arms, something Keyleth tended to do when she knew Vax wasn’t going to come to bed immediately, or when she was scared.

(“It’s a piece of you,” she said to him once. “When you’re away, or I’m scared or…something, I hold it. I’ll wear it sometimes if I’m cold. Is that weird?” Vax kissed her forehead and told her that he found it adorable.)

So he supposed that right now it was a little bit of both, and that was understandable. After all, what she’d just done was fucking brilliant. She was every bit stronger and more beautiful now to Vax than ever before.

They had a baby. A daughter.

She came out screaming, and it was the sweetest sound he’d ever heard in his life. With dusty red tufts of hair and wrinkly and pink. She was gorgeous. Never in a million years did Vax think he’d be in this position, but he was thankful to every deity out there that was was able to be.

Keyleth was so fucking strong, he really couldn’t believe it. It had been hours, and the rest she was getting was well-deserved and much needed.

So he let her, and Vax stood mesmerized next to their bed in Zephra staring at their girl. His girl. She was peaceful, dressed in gifted clothing from Vex (Who was alerted and was more than likely on her way with Percival now), that almost swallowed her up.

“How did I get to be this lucky…”

The infant stirred, and Vax made a hasty decision to pick her up, being mindful of her head and slow enough not to startle her awake. Keyleth needed sleep.

Vax walked to his side of the bed and lowered himself onto it. He kept himself upright with his daughter on his chest still fast asleep. He called himself lucky, this time around.

“You are so magnificent,” he whispered into her hair. “You’re more brilliant than any kind of magic, and I promise you the world. I promise to keep you safe and I promise to be there for you always.” He kissed her head gently.

“You’re already great with her.”There was a shift to his left, and Keyleth was there awake, and looking up at him with bright eyes. She looked at peace, despite how tired she was, and certainly happy.

“You should be resting.”

“It’s ok…This is better than sleeping.” She brought a hand to the baby’s back and rubbed it slowly.

“Well I’m sorry that I woke you.”

She smiled a little wider. “It’s ok…I can’t believe she’s ours.”

“Yeah,” Vax sniffed. “She’s incredible, isn’t she?”

“She is. She’s also nameless, Vax. She needs a name.”

“I thought we’d call her The Baby? Or Baby Girl.”

Keyleth tucked herself into his side in response, and Vax moved to wrap his arm around her.

“Do you have something in mind,” he asked.

“Yes…But it’s probably not-No, you’re not going to like it.”

“Kiki, just tell me.”

She paused for a minute before mumbling, “Lunette. It means little shining one. I thought it would suit her because even after all we’ve been through, with whatever haunts us even today, she’s our light…and she always will be. And not just to us, but to our family. She’s hope, but she’s also a fire.”

The tender moment quickly changed to Keyleth’s classic rambling. “But, you…We could name her something more traditionally elven, I mean. Oh, oh, Vax! I didn’t even let you say anything, you probably want to name her after your mother and-“

“Kiki.“ Vax took her hand and gave her the most reassuring smile. “I quite literally lost the rights to that name ages ago. Vex’ahlia has always wanted it, and I generously allowed her to name her daughter Elaina, if she is to have one. I didn’t believe I’d ever be this lucky to have a family of my own.” He paused. “But I love the name you’ve chosen for her, and I love why you chose it.

“Stop doubting yourself, Kiki. You’ve got me as your biggest support, and that’s never going to change.”

Keyleth’s eyes were glossed over with tears. “Thank you, Vax.”

“Lunette,” he repeated after a moment. “I suppose it suits a girl like her. She’s rather firey, I mean, those screams. She’s going to be a strong one.”

“That she is.”

“And we’ve got each other for those rough patches, and Lunette to really get us through it all.”

Vax looked back at his daughter. Lunette, yeah. They were going to be very happy.