#could it be that beatrice is a shadow play put on by these two for their own specific aims? | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

kiatheinsomniac · 3 years ago

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Unwoven Fate X

[MASTERLIST OF CHAPTERS]

@fuckinherondale @nickangel13

(Y/n) began to grow weary as the sun rose in the sky, beams of light breaking through the sparse clouds, the Priest's secret meeting with the Templar intelligence soon to commence. But her target was still throwing the dice and cheering at his victories - she was beginning to wonder if Fortuna had decided to smile upon the man today.

"I'm getting tired of this." The Assassin novice grumbled as the pit from her final peach was tossed aside, wiping the juice on her hidden blade against her trouser leg to clean the weapon off. She would clean it thoroughly that evening anyway. Two quarter slices of the fruit were handed to Beatrice while she kept the other two for herself.

It was rather dark in the tavern, the oil lamps put out to conserve oil and the flames from the wall-mounted candles doing very little. The roof of the building seemed to cast the place in shadow from the leaded windows and she wondered if the place was intentionally designed in such a way to keep people from tracking the time so they would spend more of their money on gamblers' games and drink. Perhaps even to make it easier for thieves to pickpockets and dip into the shadows before their oblivious target could notice.

"I'm beginning to think I should play my own hand just to chase him out. How can such a foul man have such luck anyway?" The courtesan glared over at him before (Y/n) pushed the other slice of the peach across the table, getting up and making her way to La Volpe's office. It was lit up more than the rest of the place, barrels of drink lining two of the walls. A board was propped up upon one of them and he sat at a desk which was mostly covered by a map with chess pieces appointed to certain locations. Likely where he positioned his thieves across the city of Roma.

The windows were covered with dull green drapes that bore a few moth holes and such small details made her begin to wonder about the fight ahead of the Assassins. The Brotherhood was in dire need of more funds but with the Borgia's iron grip around Roma's throat, she knew that getting said funds would be far from easy.

"You should ask before entering. Not everyone is allowed here, you know?" The man spoke.

"Sorry." (Y/n) replied before beginning what she originally wished to say, not being all that sorry at all, truthfully - her impatience was getting the best of her, "Can you not rig the game? I need to get rid of this man so I can go and take out another target. For Ezio." She added for good measure.

"So Ezio has sent you to run the brotherhood's errands to prove your loyalty?" La Volpe raised a brow as he stood from his desk, taking a key from his pocket to unlock a drawer that was tucked between two sets of bookshelves. (Y/n) felt her chest deflate with the weight of betrayal.

"So you think I'm a spy too?" The novice sighed and threw her head back, exhausted at the false rumour already.

"You're Emma's daughter." He began simply, "People had their doubts of her ambiguous past too but she was undoubtedly an Assassin. You will be too, one day soon." She smiled softly, glad to find someone else who believed her.

"Thank you, La Volpe." She spoke sincerely. "Discovering that she, that I, come from a family of Templars... It's a lot to take in, especially so suddenly. I wish that my parents were here now more than ever to guide me." He took out a small purse of coins and gently placed it into her palm, wrapping his gloved hand around hers as he did.

"I see a lot of your parents in you, (Y/n). They were trialled too and with the fall of Monteriggioni, the Assassins must watch our backs now more than ever. But you're strong enough to come this far, you won't be stopped anytime soon." (Y/n) smiled at his thoughtful words and wondered, in another life where her parents hadn't been murdered, if he could have been like an uncle to her. "Give this to the man in the green hat with the scar through his eyebrow. Tell him that I said 'luck has run dry'." A knowing smile teased the corner of her lips.

"Do you often rig the games here, messere?" She raised a brow and he simply spread his hands.

"We are thieves, it's what we do." He replied with a tone of mixed amusedness and smugness. Whatever they needed to fund their faction, she supposed.

(Y/n) did as instructed, the scarred thief's eyes lighting up in delight at the weight of the coins in his palm. Soon enough, the drunk man was raging at his defeats, leaping to his feet and kicking at the betting pieces on the ground.

"I'll be in debt! I owe this money!"

"Then you shouldn't have gambled it away." (Y/n) interrupted, making him whip his head around to face her with an expression of utter fury.

"Fuck off, whore!" He slurred, "I've got nothing to pay you with, in case you hadn't noticed!" His arms flailed about to gesture to where he had been placing his bets, the man in the green hat now happily counting La Volpe Addortmentata's new revenue.

"I'm not a courtesan, actually, but I do have a bone to pick with you about that." The man got to his feet, stumbling to keep his balance and (Y/n) began to wonder if he had been winning at all or if the thieves in the guild had led him to believe so just so that they could watch him lose more money in the end.

"What are you then?" He slurred, stumbling towards her as (Y/n) backed up to the door, subtly beckoning Beatrice over with a jerk of her head. The courtesan made her way just outside of the door as the man followed the assassin recruit. The light strained her eyes once outside and the unrelenting heat of the sun's rays against her eyelids only made her panic more about the time of day.

"I'm a..." (Y/n) thought of a plan to trick the man who was so clearly financially gullible and desperate, on top of intoxicated, "loaner of sorts, yes." She reached into her bag to pull out her purse, "The loan starts with 100 florins. I hang around these areas to find people like you, in need of help." She was awfully surprised at how quickly she was able to come up with the stupidly false and elaborate lie, kicking up dust around her boots as she backed up to the rear end of the thieves' tavern.

"And how do I sign up for this?" He narrowed his eyes, "I don't want any bankers looming around for money next week."

"No, no, nothing like that messere, just follow me." She smirked under her hood and led him behind the tavern where she wasted no time in pushing him to a wall and sinking her blade into his neck, easing him down to the ground so that he was sitting slumped. She fought the urge to not gag at his stench and opted for holding her breath instead. She pushed the tails of her novice robes aside to wipe the blood against her outer thigh, cleaning off the blade and covering the stain with the loose wine-red fabric once more. She did like the traditional red and white of the Assassin robes but when they were presented as available in red, she thought that it would be much more practical for the messier parts of the profession that she was chasing.

She clapped her hands against each other as though she were dusting them off and remembered what she had been taught from the texts she had read on the brotherhood's traditions. "Requiescat in pace."

She made her way back out to the front of the tavern where Beatrice waited beside her stolen horse. The chatter of people going about their day was an odd sound to (Y/n)'s ears; there was a murdered man slumped against the wall less than ten meters away and the rest of the world hadn't noticed.

"Is he...?" She looked around. The Assassin novice nodded her head, thankful for the courtesan's discretion: she knew that the death of this man was no weight on her mind and so she had only skipped around saying anything explicit as to not alert anyone around them.

"Yes. He won't be bothering you ladies anymore, make sure that the other girls hear of it." (Y/n) spoke solemnly, checking the area around her to make sure that she hadn't been seen by anyone who was unaware of Roma's secret underworld.

⚜⚜⚜

When (Y/n) returned Beatrice to the bordello, she was constantly casting nervous glances towards the sun and urging her horse onward, the sound of galloping hooves beating against the ground, kicking up grass in the creature's wake. She couldn't make a single mistake today or else it would be weaponised against her. Everything had to be perfect, there was no room for error.

Her half-gloved hands clenched around the leather of the reins as she thought of what error could mean for her today: potentially exile from the Brotherhood if they found her Templar relations to be of sufficient evidence - she refused to go back to a life of lies where she was to be someone's instead of someone.

By the time she arrived at the ruins, she scampered up an eroded wall onto a ledge where she laid down on her stomach, gravel and stone only slightly digging into her under the light layer of leather armour, chin resting on her wrists to observe the meeting, blanketed in the afternoon shadows of the belting sun.

"They are organising their forces! That Auditore will tear down this city if we don't take him out now! There have even been witness reports of him recruiting rebels across the city! He will pull the rug from our feet if we are not careful. We must work towards shutting down the brothels in the city or buying them for ourselves-"

"Buying brothels? With papal bank accounts? Do you hear how ridiculous you sound?" A man in a deep red cowl replied.

"Then we can put Lucrezia to work and make it seem like her little charity project! The Assassins knew where Caterina Sforza would be due to the intelligence that the whores had brought to them. If we can't shut them down then we must compete and win against them! If we cut off their eyes and ears, they are in the dark in this city and that puts us to an advantage!" The priest exclaimed you almost pitied him in a way: talking with such passion, knowing he was in the right, and being taken for a fool.

"Very well..." The cowled man replied, "I will bring this up with Cesare." (Y/n)'s eyes widened. Did this man have direct contact with Cesare? Should she kill him too? Tail him?

No. She couldn't afford to take such drastic action towards something that she knew so little of. If she couldn't follow or kill him then she could at least use this to provide some intelligence to the brotherhood. Perhaps he would even be here to meet the priest again in three days' time if word of his death didn't spread before then.

Soon enough, the meeting was over and the men went their separate ways. (Y/n) got up from her stomach and crept through the ruins like a wildcat stalking its prey. She was mindful of her shadow and kept her distance, circling around the crumbling pillars to cut off her target's route, crouching down low until she could leap.

Her knees landed upon his shoulders as her blade severed the nape of his neck, laying the man down after using him to break her fall, a hand cradling the back of his bleeding head.

"And I thought I had covered my tracks..." The man sighed out as (Y/n) carefully laid him back.

"You run around threatening those who wish to liberate Roma and her people, you made many enemies, father." She spoke and his eyes seemed to light up knowingly.

"Ah... Antonio's girl." He breathed out and (Y/n) dropped his body at hearing her Uncle's name, scrambling to her feet and getting away from him, looking down at the man who squinted at her with the sunlight behind her head, making him laugh at the mockery of a halo that it presented his killer with.

"What do you know of my uncle?" She pressed him for information.

"He's looking for you... We'll be coming for you soon..." (Y/n) fell back to her knees, clutching the man's black robes as she watched the light fade from his eyes.

"No!" She exclaimed, dropping the body and bringing her hands up to her face, on her feet once more and pacing around the body. She'd just come so close to someone who may well have known why her family kidnapped her and now he was dead. She pushed her hood back and kicked a rock, sending it flying down a set of tiled stairs before realising that she had to hide the body. She could let out her anger at a later time.

Her eyes scanned the ruins for a decent enough place to hide the body, spotting a lower floor of the ruins that were now flooded: evidence enough to make it seem like he fell in, hit his head and drowned - well, by the time they would be able to pull the body out anyway. She crouched over the man again and felt the pain of the lost information that he carried with him.

"Requiescat in pace..." She whispered as her fingers pushed his eyes shut, getting up to take him by the wrists and drag the body over to the opening in the ground, unceremoniously pushing his body into the murky waters below and nodding at her work before going over to the horse once more. She would return to La Rosa in Fiore to inform Claudia of the dead drunk and priest as well as to collect her bow.

She could feel how slumped her body was as she mounted her horse and began making her way back northwest into the city. Her head turned in all sorts of directions as she looked around the city, to all the patrolling groups of Borgia guards, the vendors being turned away from their markets, the closed shops that no one dared purchase. Then her eyes turned to the district's Borgia tower, standing tall like an ever-watching dictator, a fist upon the local people, the same people who kept this city alive. She pulled at the reins until her horse came to a stop and narrowed her eyes, a hand coming up to turn the pearls of her necklace between her fingers as she thought.

There were still many hours left in the day, many hours to undoubtedly prove her loyalty to the brotherhood. It would be risky, very risky, but she needed to get everyone off her back about coming from a Templar family. But she had time and a good disguise.

Getting down from her horse, she left it just outside the border's of the tower's grounds, taking down her hood and pulling more at the tails of the robes, opening them enough to appear more feminine and removing her archer's glove to expose her ringed fingers.

And so, she began pacing circles around the tower, taking mental note of each movement of the soldiers, the paths that they patrolled, the sections they didn't cover. For once, she revelled in how little thought men like this put towards a woman's potential - they practically welcomed her into their territory with open arms.

Eventually, the captain emerged from the tower and she began to plan how she would kill him and then get up the tower. Killing him would cause a great amount of the soldiers to scatter but then she would need to get up the tower quickly to evade those who would remain. The men on the rooftops were her biggest worry: they had more of a view than anyone else and so she made her way onto the ledges to take them out. She pulled her hood back up and prepared herself.

She had been taught to drag them down and either kill them with the fall or her blade on the way down but she did not want to risk being detected before she killed the captain. And so, she opted for severing the Achilles tendon on the archer's feet and pouncing upon them when they fell to the ground in order to kill them and keep their bodies on the roofs. She continued like this until she could crouch upon a platform on the tower, throwing knife clutched in her hands. She had one shot to get this right or else she would be stuck in hand-to-hand combat and severely outnumbered. She took a steady breath as the captain rounded the corner, holding it within her lungs as he looked up towards her, squinting in the light of the descending sun, only seeing the knife once it was milliseconds from his face.

(Y/n) watched as the surrounding guards panicked, seeing their captain crumple to the floor with a knife where his nose should have been, all of those who saw his body beginning to flee from their unseen enemy. Not wasting a single second, she began clambering up the tower, trying to stay with the sun on her back so that the light would make it harder for the guards on the ground to see her.

Upon reaching the top, she smiled widely at the barrels of explosives at the upper level of the tower, picking up a torch and throwing them to the base of the barrels before leaping upon the rail of the post and spreading her arms wide, her leap of faith landing her in a stack of hay as the explosion sent waves of tremors throughout the surrounding area, debris falling and forcing her to her feet, running towards where she had left her horse. She could hear the roar and crackle of the growing fire as she ran, filling her with adrenaline.

(Y/n) leapt upon stacks of crates to the rooftops in order to get past the swarms of people who fled from the explosion and jumped upon her horse's back, smiling widely to herself as she made her way back to the hideout, ditching the horse along the way to blend in with crowds of people once she was far away enough.

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moonsbasileia · 3 years ago

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Root and Bone

Also posted on AO3

Dishonored - Original Characters

Synopsis: Two witches from the Brigmore Coven venture into the Flooded District to look for their missing companion. They have a less than warm welcome from the Whalers occupying the place- despite that, the situation takes a turn, unfolding an unexpected, but positive, outcome.

An exploration of the witches and whalers as individuals. Set in the six months between Jessamine's death and Corvo's escape. Written as practice.

The way them whale fish went for us

It seemed as though t'was planned

For each one had his target boat

They played us man for man

Just knowin' now they think so clear

My heart says let them be

I swear to God them fish can think

As good as you or me

“A Whaler’s Tale” – Ken Graydon

Night fell over the rooftops of the old Financial District, painting the sky in dark orange. With the addition of the smog, pouring out of the factory’s chimneys, the horizon mixed and coiled like a bubbling cauldron. It was impressive, Rowan thought, but suffocating.

She was leaning out of the balcony of one of the many abandoned apartments of the district. Shards of glass lay around her feet, clinking whenever she moved, and the walls had become rotten with humidity.

Despite it all, and the mess of papers, clothes and shattered glass around the room, it seemed like it had been a nice place once, though simple. It had a small single-bed room that had been stripped of everything except for the bedframe, a simple kitchen with a pantry, and a considerably sized living room, still furnished with a red couch, a centre table, and a cabinet resting near the window. Rowan speculated it had belonged to a single accountant, as she’d found a book of finances forgotten on the small wooden table.

“Our time is running out,” a scratchy voice behind her sighed. Rowan shot a look behind her shoulders and saw Beatrice walk out, her face pinched, and holding a bottle in her hand. Despite her young age, her features were hard with unease.

“Is that…?” Rowan pointed at the dark green bottle. It worked; Beatrice’s face softened for a second, and she cocked an eyebrow and cut in:

“Yes, sister, Serkonan wine,” she held the bottle up so Rowan could read the label. Rivera Fig Wine, 1750. “We should drink it after we find our lost sister.”

Rowan hummed in agreement, looking back out to the water below. The stench of stagnated water wafted up, forcing her to avert her face in the direction of the breeze. The balcony next door had been blocked by planks, but the rooftops were low enough that she could see a building with an open terrace entrance.

“I will look over there. She mustn’t have gone too far,” Rowan warned.

“We shouldn’t split up, sister,” Beatrice said. Her green eyes reflected the light of the whale oil lamp that flickered inside the apartment, like a cat. “Who knows what lurks in the shadows of this horrible place.”

Rowan squeezed her shoulder, with her lips curling into a grin. “Nothing as terrible as us,” she assured.

Beatrice smiled, nodding, although she brought up her hand to hold Rowan’s wrist.

“I will check the apartment in the back, then,” she said, “But we shouldn’t take too long.”

Rowan nodded. “If we don’t find anything in twenty minutes, we regroup here.”

“Agreed. Until then, sister.”

The last thing she saw was Bea’s lingering smile while, with a crack, she vanished in a curtain of shadows, leaving behind a small pile of ashes. Rowan looked towards the terrace to the right and felt her body do the same; the rush in her ears of dark energy around her, and weightlessness from plunging into an empty space. A muted crack- and then suddenly spilling out like fish out of a net, into the dusty ground of the terrace.

It was not the first time she’d done that, and wouldn’t be the last. Yet, there was little she loved more than the feeling of surrendering her body to the Void, if for a moment.

Rowan crouched, eyeing her surroundings before going towards the door. Its wood was putrid and soft, and peeling off the bottom. It was ajar. She pushed it open slowly, and it still groaned. Rowan kept still for a moment, listening for any signs of movement inside. Nothing came. She went in.

The corridor was dark, as the only source of light was coming from the moonlight through the door she’d kept open. At the turn towards the stairs, she kept her body close to the wall, leaning sideways to squint at the dark. She saw nothing, but inhaled deeply before unsticking herself from her place to keep going.

There were two doors in this corridor, both blocked by planks. She stopped briefly by them, reaching out with her perception to try to feel Alice’s presence, but to no avail.

Down the stairs, the next floor was equally empty. Rowan crept towards the end of the corridor, where it turned into the next stairwell. The stairs were blocked by debris carried by the water, which she could hear lapping against the other side. However, there was a door, unblocked, directly in front of the stairs. She reached out. Nothing.

Still, Rowan touched the knob, and with a gentle twist of her wrist, tested it. It clicked open. She held her breath, surprised by the noise. When nothing seemed to respond, she pushed it further, and went in.

This apartment opened directly to a narrow corridor that opened to a larger room. Light poured out from it. Rowan followed. There was a doorframe to her left, leading to a bathroom.

She walked further, and the next doorframe belonged to a former bedroom. She searched it briefly. All that was left was the bedframe, a shelf with a few leather-covered books, a safe –that was open and empty- and a cabinet, with a cup still atop it.

Rowan went straight to the bigger room, this time. The light came in from an open window, busted and crooked on the frame. She widened her eyes. Bloodstains clashed with the window’s faded white wash. Rowan touched the hilt of the sword strapped to her waist.

She followed the trail of blood with her eyes. Like the other apartments, this one was scattered with dust, papers and glass shards. However, there were footprints in the dust, although they formed a chaotic pattern, like an abstract painting of dirt and blood. Two roses had been trampled over in the fight, stained and pressed onto the dusty ground. One trail of footprints went out through the window. That was certain.

Rowan walked in slowly. The silence was overwhelming in comparison to the loud beating of her heart, which she felt in her ears. She braced. And she found Alice, lying crookedly near the wall, in a puddle of her own blood.

She knelt next to Alice, cupping her face with her hands and turning it gently. There was a deep tear in her neck, almost all the way through, but not quite. She gasped, and let go quickly. It made her head hang in a strange way, which sent shivers up Rowan’s back.

An arrow had lodged itself right through her sternum. Her eyes, which had become white when she received her magic, had now faded into her natural brown and glazed over. Her jaw was lax, already open. Rowan imagined she might have screamed.

“You gave them a fight,” she said, and barely recognized the cracked voice that came out. She breathed, and said, “You showed them who you are and sent them home bleeding to lick their wounds. You are one with the Void now, sister.”

She didn’t want to leave Alice there to be eaten by rats and flies. But she couldn’t carry her. Her body was stiff and Rowan could barely hold her up, let alone transport her back. So she gently laid her out in the middle of the room with her arms resting on her stomach, and went into the bedroom. She opened the cabinet, and grabbed a few sheets, despite the strong smell of dust and mildew. She covered Alice with the least yellowed one, and took the shards of decorated porcelain bowls and plates from the kitchen to surround her.

She whispered a prayer to the Void, fighting against the nausea that threatened to rise past her throat.

When she was done, Rowan followed the footprints into the window. There was a smudged dirt stain in the lower frame, and nothing else. Either the killer had dropped down into the water or used magic. The prospect made her grimace.

She looked up at the setting sun and startled. Beatrice. More than half an hour had passed, and she had forgotten completely to come back to their meetup point. She summoned the shadows to involve her once more.

With a crack, she was back in the rooftop of the apartment. She walked to the edge, where she could see the balcony downwards. She only needed to drop.

A second, muted snap sounded somewhere behind her.

She turned back. Her fingers twitched towards the hilt of her sword.

Under the full moon’s light, however, the rooftops were well lit, and after scanning them Rowan didn’t see anybody or anything.

“Rowan?”

She barely stifled the jump at the sudden voice. It was Bea, on the balcony, calling up to her. She’d heard it as well, Rowan was certain.

“I’m here,” she said, shooting the rooftops a last glare before bracing with her arm on the edge of the tiles and dropping down onto the balcony. “We need to leave.”

Beatrice nodded, catching onto her unease. “I agree, sister. But- Did you find anything?”

Rowan felt her stomach drop. Beatrice still held onto the wine bottle, and fiddled with the corkscrew’s lid. She held Beatrice’s arms gently, guided her into the apartment, and said, “I did. I’m sorry.”

Bea’s eyes welled up, glinting in the moonlight, but she compressed his lips, as if she was afraid that if she started talking she would break down. She nodded, but the tears escaped, running down her cheeks.

Rowan put her arms around her, pulling her into a hug. Bea rested her head in her shoulder. She let the other stay for a while, pretending she didn’t hear the sniffing and hiccups. When her breath stilled slightly, she pulled away gently.

“We have to go. Take that wine with you, so we drink it in her memory.”

Beatrice wiped her face and nodded. She turned to pick up the bottle in the centre table, where she had left it before they went scouting.

She heard a dry crack behind her.

Rowan spun, her hand already closing around the grip of her sword. A person was perched on the balcony’s rail. Their face was hidden by a mask. Two red-tinted glass panels and a filter cartridge canister over the mouth. They dropped down, and with a blur of movement, something shot out of their wrist. Rowan flinched, expecting it to hit her- a dart, or a crossbow arrow?

Instead, Beatrice let out a thin noise behind her. She looked at her, wide-eyed, swayed, and dropped down.

The person approached Rowan, unsheathing their sword.

Rowan channelled the Void’s energy to her chest, and as she thought of Alice’s broken body, of Beatrice, behind her, she released it all into her shriek. The whaler stumbled back, losing his footing. He quickly balanced himself again, but that was enough to allow Rowan to unsheathe her own blade and slash it at his throat.

He caught it with his own. The metal grinded against each other, until Rowan was pushed back roughly. She stumbled. He slashed at her, but she caught it haphazardly. The assassin didn’t hesitate, and slashed again. This time, it cut a line under her collarbone.

Rowan growled, sneering at him. When he pulled the sword back to pierce through her, the only thing it caught was the smoke and ashes she left behind.

She appeared behind them, with a crack. It alerted the whaler, and he twisted back with the sword ready- until she hurled a vase at their chest.

It shattered, pushing him backwards. This time he did fall over, and Rowan was over in a second, her sword swinging in an arc towards his torso.

The whaler raised his left arm, turning his forearm outward. It didn’t register to Rowan until her sword caught on something, producing a crush. She looked down. It was a gauntlet, a tiny crossbow, notched to the leather vambrace around their wrist.

She tried to back out, but the assassin moved quickly, holding onto the lapel of her coat and hooking his leg around hers. Rowan fell, with the whaler over her, pinning her down. But his sword had been lost somewhere; hers was still on her hand. She tried to slip to the side, gain room to swing the sword again, but the whaler noticed. He trapped her arm between his own torso and left arm.

She struggled against the hold, but there was no give. Panicked, Rowan hit her palm against the mask, shattering the red glass visor and forcing his head back. She felt the meat of her hand split, caught in the metal sockets of the mask, and the warm blood seeping out.

Suddenly, the whaler disappeared, leaving behind a brief image of themselves that shattered onto nothing. Rowan didn’t wait; she disappeared as well, and when the person reappeared near the centre table, picking up their sword, she was already up on the cabinet.

Rowan threw herself at him.

The whaler had heard her, and spun around to deflect her sword, but Rowan’s was angled differently. She felt it pierce through his shoulder, not passing through, but breaking the skin. A sudden, red-hot line of pain traced her ribs, but she used her magic to pull him further into the sword. He kept pushing, trying to get her to release her hold. For a moment, they were stuck in this stalemate.

He broke first, letting go of his sword to close his gloved hands around the tip of hers. Rowan sighed out a small laugh. She pinned him on the wall. Though the whaler were much larger than she was, the sword lodged in his shoulder impeded his from reacting too fast. He tried to move, to throw Rowan off him, but she twisted the sword ever so slightly. Blood gushed out, soaking into the dark uniform.

“Don’t even think about it,” she said, between her teeth. Her knuckles turned white as bone holding the sword’s grip.

“Be done with it, witch.” Despite the metallic rumble the mask gave it, his voice came with a strong accent. Instead of aggressive like she’d expected, the whaler sounded strangely composed. Rowan gritted her teeth.

“Tell me,” she said, “The witch with dark shaved hair, green-skinned. Did you kill her?”

He said nothing. Rowan plunged her knife further into his skin, and he groaned, squirming. “Did you?”

“No,” he said, and hung his head. He looked strangely ashamed when he said, “Not me.”

“Why are you whalers here?”

He hesitated, then said, “…Not for any of you.”

Rowan frowned at the cryptic answer. The man slowly brought his hand up to touch his chest and catch some of the blood that was running out, pooling in his glove.

“Why are you witches here?” he asked.

“I’m asking the questions,” she cut in. “How many of you are there?”

“Many.”

“Not all of you are looking around,” she said. “How many are in patrol?”

“Seven.” His voice was breathy now, tired.

“Where?” Her hand moved slightly, tired of holding up the sword. The man winced, sucking in air through his teeth. She heard the noise through the metallic filter.

“Near the rail tracks,” he said. That was south. They had entered through the buildings near the southwest, and if she kept close enough to the old Hound Pits quarter, maybe she would be able to avoid them entirely. It was her only shot.

She pulled her sword off, but kept it pointed at the same spot. The whaler staggered, propping himself up on the wall. He covered the wound with his hands.

“She’s not dead,” he said.

“What?”

“Your friend,” he indicated with a nod, “It was a sleep dart.”

Rowan didn’t turn to inspect Beatrice and see if he spoke the truth, but she mulled the idea over in her head. He was a whaler, an assassin by profession. He could be buying time. Yet he claimed to have spared a trespassing witch.

“Why would you let her live?” she said, looking at the inscrutable mask’s eyes. She had broken one of the visors, but the inside of the sockets were darkened. He said nothing, but his shoulders were tense.

After a while, he tilted his chin up, and said, “I don’t know.”

His eye showed through the broken visor. It was barely open between his swollen eyelids, red and slick with blood like a weeper’s tears. A piece of glass had lodged itself on the outer corner of his eye socket. He would probably lose that one, if he lived.

Rowan lifted her arm and quickly brought down the pommel of her sword to the side of his head with a crack. The whaler slumped to the floor.

She scrutinized him, still holding onto the sword. When he gave no signs of standing up or moving she sheathed it and ran towards Beatrice.

A small, syringe-like bolt was stuck on her neck. The whaler had called is a “sleep dart”. A quarter of a bright green liquid still sloshed in the syringe when Rowan picked it out carefully, and turned Beatrice over carefully. Alice’s opaque eyes. The wilting flowers on her collarbones. Rowan’s heartbeat echoed on her ribs, hammered on her throat, as she brushed her fingers against Bea’s neck and the budding saplings that grew there. She just started. She’d just started.

Beatrice’s eyes fluttered, and flew open. Rowan’s breath hitched, but as her sister looked over, searching for her, she quickly wiped the tears that had begun to overflow the corner of her eyes.

“Are you alright?” Rowan asked. She offered her hand for Beatrice to hold onto as she propped herself up.

“Yes… I think so,” she said, rubbing her hand on her temple, which had hit the ground as she fell. She looked at the body of the whaler across the room. “Good riddance.”

Rowan kept silent as she helped Beatrice to her feet. The girl stumbled slightly, but held onto her shoulder, taking a moment to regain her balance.

“We need to leave through the Hound Pit’s surroundings,” she explained, “Are you well enough to walk? Can you see properly?”

“Yes, Rowan”.

“Then, be a dear and look out to see if there’s anyone watching. Stay crouched, and don’t leave the balcony.”

Bea nodded, and went out onto the balcony with steady steps, although she still blinked slowly.

Rowan sighed. She dug into the small leather pouch strapped to her belt, pulling out a bit of moss. It was from the deep of the Wrenhaven, and was mixed with enchanted witch hazel oil, giving it a strong herbal smell.

Her heart still beat fast. Everything she’d learned told her it could still be a trick. That liquid might have been poison. Maybe the Whalers had used their magic to concoct a potion that would reveal their lair to them, and they would be made the foolish hares, walking back to their burrow and giving the hunters a better quarry.

She walked over to where the whaler laid, and pressed the moss into his wound, moving his hand to cover it. The blood had seeped out, blooming dark on the front of his uniform.

He had sounded tired, when he’d spoken. That was what convinced her he was being sincere. I don’t know, he’d said, but with a look that carried more than that. He didn’t sound tentative at all. Or maybe, she thought, it was relief that was filling in these logical holes, making up these cues for her.

When it was done, she sighed, frowning. She felt like a fool. The whaler was slumped with his head at an angle, seemingly done for, but his chest lifted and fell rhythmically. Rowan scoffed and turned back, ready to join Bea at the balcony.

“All clear?” she said, walking out with the same half-crouched posture as the other witch.

“All clear.”

“Let’s go home, Bea.”

The two vanished, and reappeared in the rooftops opposite to the apartment.

#dishonored #dishonored fic #dishonored fanfic #I miiiiight continue this bc I wanted to get into Brigmore coven ~cult mentality~#but I'm busy writing my thesis so idk #I just kinda like this it was fun to write #dishonored oc #whalers #brigmore witches

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goonlalagoon · 4 years ago

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We start small || Leagues and Legends

A series rewrite AU for @ink-splotch‘s fantastic Leagues and Legends books.

Spoilers for the whole trilogy below!

Read on Ao3

When George was fifteen, her village left her out for a dragon. The blacksmith slipped a knife up her sleeve as they went, and in the press of bodies she couldn't ask him why. She could only guess at what mercy he was handing her. The villagers would live with shame under their tongues for the rest of their lives, but they would live. The dragon ruled the hillside, great and golden, scales bright against the purple lupins that bloomed there every year, and they pretended it was fear that made them shudder at the sight.

Maybe Jack still survived the bandits who attacked the merchant caravan he was travelling with. Maybe he travelled on with them, bounced from place to place until he found a cause to throw himself into, on some distant shore far from the Forest where he had grown up. Maybe he didn't, one fourteen year old boy with no training and no battlefield experience, just a big heart and a bit of luck on his side.

There was no Dragon Slayer. It would be years before someone earned the old title Giantkiller, and it wouldn't be a red headed forest boy who tried to stand tall under the weight of that history.

Liam Jones powered the towns and villages of the mountains for weeks. The Seeress was almost blind with the burning light that drifted up through the floor, and the afterimage it left behind when it finally winked out was almost worse. There were no tales in the mountains of the Pied Piper.

Beatrice Tanner would never know any of their names.

On the day when in another life she might have opened her door and let a third soul into her shuttered heart, Bea woke as always before the sun to put the bread on to rise, and while the ovens warmed she rolled her dog eared map out over the old wooden table and traced her fingers over hidden paths and scant shelters. She had a network, small but growing, owed petty favours and moments of kindness. She had a list of lives saved, and a list of those she knew were at risk and could possibly be convinced to leave. She had a list of losses, a bitter sting under her tongue and a cold motivator to keep trying.

People still didn't believe her warnings, most of the time. They hushed her for telling children to be careful, to be hidden, and she did it anyway whenever she saw gold glittering in the corner of her eye, when she saw children play with sparks that didn't burn. Maybe they wouldn't believe her, but maybe they'd check over their shoulder anyway. Maybe the children would curl their hands into little fists and ignore the skin of the world pressing in on them, scared by this woman who hissed nightmares at them in the street. She didn't want children to be afraid, but she wanted them to be safe, and when there was a monster on the loose fear was what kept you alive.

She said as much, one day at a market, snapping warnings at children and glaring at the uniformed man who'd asked her what she was scaring children for. She had no patience for coddling, and she had little for the Bureau either. But this one blinked at her, and scratched at his clean shaven chin.

"Stealing mages? Say, d'you mind repeating all this to Sarge? He's the boss of our League, and this sounds like something we should know about." Bea eyed him suspiciously, but the possibility of getting more people to help outweighed her faint distaste for the Leagues.

It was only a few weeks later that May told her that it was really just May, not short for anything despite what the Bureau paperwork said. Bea wasn't quite sure whether this was a sign of trust or of just how much May wanted to get out of her padded armour and into something that didn't chafe quite as much on the healing gash down her side.

Sarge had sent coded reports back to headquarters, and was glaring at the responses. Flash was twisting his fingers, safe with his training and his league, staring sleepless at the ceiling with visions of those who weren’t keeping him awake. They couldn’t give themselves wholly to this cause; the Rangers had a job to do and it was one that badly needed doing - but part of their job was to keep people safe from monsters, so when they left they took some of her gathered information with them, and kept their eyes open.

They sent her news, dropped by the markets they knew she liked to give her the names of people who had helped, people who believed them when they whispered warnings. They sent people to her, frightened or angry or numb, but always desperate, and she sent them on. She didn't ask anyone to be a hero, because heroes were for stories and legends, for Bureau badges and official postings. She just asked people for a little bit of help, and then they offered it again and again.

It was over a year after she met them that they sent her the Giantkiller.

Kay had thick ropes of scarring over his side and arm, the pockmarks of claws pressed deep into his shoulder. He was a child when rocs tried to carry him off, struggling and screaming. He was lucky - the Rangers heard the commotion and brought the beast down, two arrows in its heart, a net of golden fire to catch him as he fell, to pour into gaping wounds and knit flesh back together. When they had to stay camped out for a day while the mage weathered an Elsewhere storm, their Guide showed him how to mix a paste to help the scars heal out of ingredients he could find within an hour’s walk of home.

His father's fury when he said after they left that he wanted to be a Leaguesman too was a burning thing, a bitter thing. He jerked his head down the road the Rangers left by, and listed every time they could have been of use before one lucky day. Kay fiddled with his spoon, because it was true - but that was the point of joining up, wasn't it? To be the person who was there when he was needed. But his father was bitter, furious, so he held his tongue.

When his father was out working in the field and Kay was supposed to be chopping wood, he fenced the air with a stick for a sword the way he'd watched May and Sarge practice in the early morning, as they let Flash sleep late to regain his strength and they kept a wary eye out for any returning rocs. He stumbled over his own feet and knew he was no good.

When he was younger, he'd practiced with his sling until his fingers blistered, and his father smiled over the small game he brought in, the crows he scared away from the crops with a sharp stone to the claws. Kay practiced still, every day, and now he imagined bigger targets.

The rocs came again, as they did every year, and one tried to carry off not a child but the neighbours' sheep. Kay sent it crashing back to the ground. Its neck snapped as it landed and he stood over it, shaking and fierce and frightened. The men arrived at a run from the barn, and Kay's father looked proud and scared and bitter.

"You see?" He said, later, when they’d butchered the carcass and he was watching Kay sort the feathers he'd asked to keep. "Rocs every damn year, and no Leagues here to help."

Kay hummed, non-committal, thinking but I was.

He was too young for the Leagues anyway, he knew. But he wasn't too young to help, so when there were rumours of Things haunting the woods nearby he slipped out his window in the grey dusk and went hunting. He had a handful of mage spelled stones, even if they were spelled for gentle warmth not damage, a gift from Flash to help ease the ache in healing limbs. The Things shrieked like the stones burned, and he was sick behind a bush afterward but the nest was gone, and Things shriek but he'd heard the families who’s homes were closer to the woods than his weeping too, and he knew which he'd choose. His father was pacing when he got home in the soft light of dawn, and he knew without asking where Kay had been. He knew what Kay was making himself into and he was furious and so scared, but Kay couldn't go back to waiting for someone else to save his people.

Kay set out the next morning, when his father was already out in the fields, working off his anger on the weeds. He packed a satchel of food and clothes, his sling and pouches of stones. He slipped the little carved flute his father made for his last birthday into the side of his bag, and set off down the road, refusing to look back.

When he met the Rangers again, it was in the shadow of a giant, the wreckage of a village. They were too late to help bring it down, but they found him digging through the fallen buildings for survivors. Sarge glanced at the sling at his hip first and Kay tensed. They were already whispering about him, the survivors, about the Giantkiller and his sling, and he knew the price of being a vigilante. Sarge said nothing, just gripped the other end of the beam he was trying to lift, hauling it up so Kay could drag the wounded boy underneath into the light.

They had a hushed conference, the Rangers and the Giantkiller, carefully out of sight because they could only shirk this particular duty if no one knew. May shook her head over him but bullied him through a basic staff work drill. Sarge watched, and nodded thoughtfully when Flash muttered "think the Baker could use a field agent?"

His story rolled ahead of him, growing as he went. He cleared a nest of Things in one village and took down another roc in a narrow pass, had a brief run in with bandits that he barely survived. He helped stock a woodpile for a hot meal and repaired a fence for another. There hadn't been a Giantkiller in the memory of anyone younger than his grandmother, and he listened to the old stories that were being dusted off. He hoped no one expected him to live up to all of them.

Bea heard him out, polite but not friendly, and he tried not to shuffle in his seat under her level gaze. She shrugged, eventually, and let him tag along as she smuggled a woman and her sister through the checkpoints in her cart. Kay tucked his sling out of sight and played a sullen teenager for all he was worth so that she could scold him loudly and the guards would shake their heads over the disruption instead of searching through the carefully stacked flour bags.

Someone wrote to her a week later saying they had a wyvern problem - people had long since started writing to the Baker for any help they needed and couldn’t afford from official sources, to see if she knew someone who could help. She sent Kay as a response, and he came back with a burn on his leg and pockets full of scales, scrubbed clean - but he came back. She grew to expect it, became used to keeping his room ready and leaving space at the table for him.

The first time he broke into the Graves' keep, he slipped out of the bakery after she'd gone to bed. They hadn't reached these ones in time, and he'd watched the way her shoulders fell and her lips thinned when he came back too soon, no rescues in his wake and no stories about how he'd helped them escape. He'd looked at her map, and thought but I'm still here.

The keep was easy to break into, because no one else was fool enough to try, and the Seeress was still working her way into her father's toolkit. He'd never held a lock pick but he knew how to remove hinges from a wall so he opened the doors that way, until one of the terrified mages shook off the stupor and started melting through them for him. They fled, and he scrawled the ward diagrams Flash had sent to Bea in the dirt for his rescues to copy with the sparks of power that were left to them. They had suspicions, Bea and the Rangers, dark thoughts about how their foe was finding prey so easily. They had wards that would cloud them from the sight of a seer, briefly, enough to break a trail, and they worked.

Kay led them to the bakery, where Bea fed them and sent them on, and when the house was empty again she wrapped her arms around Kay and hissed don't you dare do that again, don't you dare Kay, you don't disappear on me. He nodded and promised, but they both knew he meant he wouldn't slip away in the night. Kay was young, true, but he wasn't a fool. He could promise not to go without a word, but he couldn't promise he'd come back.

There was no Dragon Slayer, no Piper, a different Giantkiller - but it had never been just about those three friends. They were the ones whose legends were told, but theirs had never been the only hands buried in this war.

In a different village, there was a girl with the Elsewhere pulling gently on her bones. Kay took a warning, because if he and Bea had heard of her then so would the Graves’, and her sister narrowed her eyes at him as she went pale with fear. For all that he was the messenger not the threat, Kay took an instinctive half step back. "If anyone thinks they're taking my sister, they're going to get what's coming to them."

Rosie and Susie had friends, and those friends had already lost people to the machines, vanishing in the night and dropping out of contact. When Kay warned them, told them what he knew, they listened. They planned. When slavers came in the night, Elsewhere cracks tucked in their pockets, they thought this would be easy. The Seeress had seen an orphan girl with magic. If she had seen anything else, it had been shadowy faces with nothing to make them stand out. This is the peril of a Seer; you fall into the habit if thinking that if you don't see something it can't matter.

Slavers came in the night, and never left.

They started calling them Snow White and Rose Red, these sisters with deep roots in the mountain soil who grit their teeth and refused to run, refused to hide. Theirs was a mountain village, no Bureau-sanctioned guard and no walls to defend them, so they built their own. Bea smuggled out every person unwilling to become a civilian soldier, who wanted safety not defiance, and the rest built a fortress.

Kay helped, hands familiar with hammer and nails, the cost of freedom. He made friends, not just with the sisters but with Doc and his sons, the taciturn blacksmith and his two apprentices, the cheerful woman who ran the inn and the cynical one who presided over the fledgling community garden, with a few scattered kids his own age with fire in their veins and fear in their eyes.

(Or was it fear that ran in their blood, twitching at shadows and hearts pounding when they woke at night, and fire in their eyes, a stubborn, worn down fury?)

They named it Challenge, carved it deep over the main gate, a name and a purpose.

Their first siege had been a holding action in the mines, Doc and his sons collapsing tunnels and digging new ones until winter came on and forced the Graves' soldiers back to their own walls. The vigilantes stayed in the mines, huddled together for warmth and comfort, elated and terrified at their own victory. Rosie and Susie roamed the passages, after, speaking to everyone and inviting a selection to a council - Kay was invited too, and sat awkwardly listening to them lay plans for rebuilding, how to build sturdy walls the moment the snows cleared enough. Their second came days after they carved Challenge over the gate, while Kay was still getting all of the sawdust out of his hair.

He went back to the bakery afterward, to pour over maps with Bea and be sent out on missions. They couldn't save everyone. They couldn't save most people, but some was better than none. Kay stared at the ceiling through long, sleepless nights, trying to convince himself that it was okay that he couldn't work miracles. People knew him by sight, now, and some days he didn’t feel he should be looking over his shoulder whenever they called out Giantkiller!

It was a long, slow war, their quiet campaign against the Graves family. Bea’s network grew and grew, despite their heavy losses - mages who escaped and ones who didn’t, the non-magical casualties who weren’t quick enough with a lie or a dodge, or were simply unlucky. Susie and Rosie were a fierce pair, exchanging razor sharp letters with Bea to plan out strategies and contingencies.

(It wasn’t until after his third siege at Challenge that Kay would realise that Bea had never actually met either of the sisters; she had never met Marian, either, but they had never communicated directly so it was easier to recall. The sisters and the Baker sent word back and forth for years, but barely knew anything of each other outside of their shared plans besides what he could pass on - for all that Bea would like to see Challenge, there was bread to bake and travel could be dangerous. Better not to give the Seeress any reason to look again at this sleepy village that she and hers had already gutted for fuel.)

Kay was no natural physician, but he helped to wrap bandages in Doc Frederickson’s infirmary whenever he was in Challenge, between meetings and sentry duty. In the streets and villages people expected him to be a hero; in the infirmary, Doc just expected him to be useful. He cracked bad jokes as distraction, fetched water, and peered over a bewildered man’s shoulder at a neat formula that someone had stumbled through the gates clutching. She didn’t remember where she’d found it, but it had been tucked into the lining of her coat. There was a note on the front in her own handwriting, for all she didn’t recall writing it - My first rabbit was called Snowball, and this is real, not a joke.

Doc’s hand shook so badly that he had to put the unfolded note down before he dropped it. Kay clutched the edge of the desk hard enough to hurt, looking between the message and the woman sat on the edge of an infirmary cot, gold dripping sluggishly from her fingertips to pool on the fabric. It would stain, leaving smudged hand-prints on the sheets and faintly in the mattress below, but they would consider it a miracle not a nuisance. She was sitting, fingertips trembling but no worse this morning than they had been any day of her journey north. She had been dragged from the cells, away from the machines that should have killed her, and rather than dying grateful for a final view of the sky she had found herself weeks to the South, in a town she hadn’t known and a recipe in her pocket in handwriting she didn’t recognise.

It wasn’t a cure, but it was still something no-one had thought to hope for. It was a medicine, true, but it was also a message: somebody, somewhere, was trying to save their mages too. They weren’t the only ones resisting this blight.

This, too: after that first midnight venture of Kay’s they had never been able to rescue anyone from the Graves’ keep. They had fought to prevent people being taken, rescued people from mage warded wagons, hissed warnings to make people hide or flee. They had built a town, walls and watchtowers, a beacon of resistance. But they had never managed to make their way into the keep itself undetected a second time, for all the desperate families who had tried, for all the curses the Seeress and the Mayor hissed when they found the doors open and cells empty. Kay and Bea would exchange long looks over the bakery table, and wonder who on the inside was setting people free and laying the blame at their convenient feet.

(In a lab none of them had never seen, Jillit Chu was saving life after life of people who she knew would never remember her name, secrets written in invisible letters on her skin when she went home at night. Thorne was pouring over reports, Jill’s own records, Jeremiah’s much less successful and yet officially far more vital analyses, the dispatches from his spies in the mountains. He wanted the Graves family dealt with, of course - but he wanted their secrets, too. Thorne was a Bureau man, and while Mayor Graves was always careful not to upset the Bureau, he was no more affiliated with them than the vigilantes that plagued his operations. It had never been the means of production that Thorne objected to, or the Graves’ would have been out of a business years before.

Spider didn’t know this; Andrew Molina had given years of his life to bring the machines down, weaving a web to tear it all down. He was trying to find a gap in his plans to let Sandry slip through; he knew where Sam had gone even if she didn’t, thought if he could get her out too then there would be a life for her away from the wreckage of her father’s dreams. If he had to, he knew he would let her fall with it and take the regrets, but he was an excellent Bureau agent - he liked his odds for achieving both. He wasn’t reaching out to Sam just yet - they were working to weaken the system, but it was slow work. The Baker and her resistance were an irritation, but they weren’t yet causing enough of a disruption to have materially disrupted production, to have strained the system, to be convincing the less dedicated that this was a fight they were going to lose.

Thorne had other agents, he knew, and they heard things the Spider didn’t. Reports that when put together said that this was going to be the work of more cold years - he measured them in people lost, and tried when those the Seeress saw were children to make sure he was spotted on the road, that whispers spread before him, warnings. He couldn’t let everyone slip away, not if he wanted to bring it all down, but he tried to save as many as he could - he felt every mage who burned for other people’s light as a weight on his shoulders. He kept walking, the Seeress’ right hand man, and did not stumble under that burden.)

Robin Hood died on an otherwise unremarkable winter’s day, stumbling back to the treeline with them, held up as much as their rescues. Marian’s hands didn’t shake as she lit the pyre, and Kay wondered if she would stay that cold for the rest of her life. She left with a handful of the Merry Men, the ones who’d been thinking of warmer pastures or those like her couldn’t stand to be beneath the trees without Robin. Kay wasn’t sure if she was angry at him or the world - Marian wasn’t, either. She had fought sieges at his side, before he begged Robin’s help for the last time; she knew his history, this mountain born boy who became a legend. She wouldn’t write to him or the Baker, but Little John would drop mentions into his occasional messages, and some days she was glad for the news.

When Kay had first stumbled into the Woods, an injured mage leaning on his shoulder and pursuit on his heels, it had been Marian who coolly shot down the armed guard and guided them beneath the trees. She had helped bandage up his rescue, and Robin had dropped down next to him at the fire. Kay wasn’t sure he had ever felt as safe as he did that night, curled up beneath the towering trees with their cheerful assurances that he didn’t need to worry about any armed followers tracking him here, dozing off in a borrowed bed roll on the hard ground. The Merry Men weren’t all kind to outsiders, but they loved Robin and respected Marian - if they were told he was a friend, he was a friend. Kay watched the smoke rise, the snow melting around them, and wondered if Robin would still be alive, if Kay hadn’t thought of him as a friend.

The remaining Merry Men stayed out of the fight, after that, nursing wounds physical and metaphorical, but Little John made it clear that the paths through the trees were still open to Kay and his rescues. More than one trembling mage and their shaken family were escorted safely south by the Merry Men after a night or two beneath the trees.

It was a long war, and Kay measured it first in months rather than days, then years rather than months; the Seeress was spreading her gaze further afield as the mountain villages became wary, as anyone with sparks at their fingertips fled before they needed warning. Kay gained scars from vicious brawls with guards, with the long limbed Spider, a bullet wound in the shoulder that would ache in the cold for the rest of his life from Spider’s deputy.

Kay was by no means the only person fighting this war, but he had become one of the lynchpins, the one who most often acted directly against the Graves’ network - his was the face the Seeress saw most in the wake of plans dissolving like smoke. She had a bespoke curse tucked in a pocket, and one vindictive day she set it loose. Bea watched the Giantkiller turn pale, shaky on feet that a moment before had been steady, and crumple. She caught him before he could hit the ground, and carried him gently to his room. She sent out frantic messages through her network, looking for healers, looking for anyone who could help. After three nights of fever, Little John crept into the bakery, cradling a pouch in his large, gentle hands. He was no trained healer, but he knew old stories, knew how to walk into the shadowed trees on a full moon night and ask for help for the deserving. He did not know what he had done, to mix this medicine, but when the sun had risen it had been in his hands.

Kay spent another three nights tossing and turning, but he woke with the sun on the seventh day. It would take weeks until he felt fully rested, and Little John warned him that full moons would make him restless for the rest of his days. He spent his time sorting Bea’s correspondence and helping her in the bakery, until she declared him fit for field work again. Even then they were wary, cautious. They had no doubts who had sent a curse to strike him down, for all they sneered at the hypocrisy - they watched for any sign that the Seeress had known where to strike, but found nothing amiss.

One morning, Kay woke to the sound of shattering crockery in the bakery below; he was wary, fresh bruises on his knuckles and sleeping light, recently home and still listening for ambushes. He crept downstairs, and found Bea pinned to the wall of her own kitchen with strings of golden fire, the butter dish broken on the floor. The slingstone he pitched through the door landed, but its target had moved in time and took a glancing bruise to the arm rather than a blow to the head. She held up calloused palms, but he could see the gun at her hip and the gold holding Bea in place: he wasn’t fool enough to think that she was anything other than ready to take him down if he moved. She smiled, a precise and practiced thing. “Hello. Apologies for breaking in, but I needed to speak to the Baker and the Giantkiller, and I believe this is the right address?” Her smile turned feral, a fierce grin that looked more at home on her lips. “I’m an agent from the Bureau quiet branch, and I thought you might want to know we’re planning to bring the Graves’ down in a few weeks’ time.”

Bea made a scoffing sound, the gold fire glittering off her eyes, and the woman flicked her fingers to twist the fire into nothing again. Kay itched to go to Bea, check that she was alright, but he knew better. There were two of them and one armed intruder - better to keep her looking in two directions, for all that she seemed to think she was on their side, for all that he had no doubt which of them would win, if it came to a fight. Kay had years of experience, true, but you didn’t make it to being a field agent with the quiet branch without a fearsome skillset to your name.

She eyed their distrust with amused, approving resignation, and patiently laid out the bones of the web she and Spider had been steadily weaving, the tipping point that was coming. Kay frowned at the hints, puzzling out tactics, and Bea traced her fingertips over her map - the markers of lives saved, the ones of lives lost. There was an empty room upstairs she still couldn’t bear to use, years later. Kay did not and would never know that sometimes when Bea woke from nightmares these days they had been about waking to find the house cold and the curtains in his cosy room billowing in the night air, for all that he was no more a mage that she was. She eyed their guest with as much professional disregard as the woman had shown her, breaking into a house warded over the years by careful, grateful hands as though it was nothing.

“And why now? Why are you and yours only tearing down the Graves’ now? We know who you are, Agent, and for all I’ve heard of you you’re in the Graves’ pocket, the Spider’s precious protege.” She curled a lip, a mountain woman from a village that couldn’t afford walls, that had begged and begged for Bureau protection and been told to come back with gold in their pockets. “Why have the Bureau decided that now they can deign to get involved? Why are you here, breaking into my home, to tell me you’ve finally decided to care enough to stop it?”

"They killed my brother," snapped Laney, an old, bitter hurt - and the Baker looked back at her coldly, as though that didn't explain anything at all.

"They've killed a lot of people." The sharpshooter stiffened, hand twitching as though she might have gone for a gun if she hadn’t needed them alive. Bea didn't flinch from the movement, expression hard and unforgiving. "How many have you helped them kill? I could tell you, I think, because I hear almost everyone's story about the ones they lost, sooner or later. Do you know what we call you, when we whisper warnings? What legend did you think you were building, in your brother's memory?"

The Ballad of Agent Jones

Laney Jones had stumbled at her brother’s beloved heels for years, until he left the desert in search of new horizons. Years later, she had followed in his footsteps once again, Academy papers in her pocket and a handful of hard-won fire clutched close to keep her warm on the journey. She was planning to find her big brother, one day. She was going to show him what she could do, what she had made of herself, and she was going to see the pride in his eyes once again. It was a warm thought, one she had clung to through cold nights of hidden practice and long days of doubting her worth.

In her second year at the Academy, armed men broke into the fish shop where her study group were having their first meeting. When Thorne took her aside in the days after, to have a private chat with such a promising young woman, he glanced over her skin tone and the name in his file, and paused. He asked, carefully, if she had any connection to a Liam Jones, another powerful mage he had heard of. Laney beamed with familial pride, and a certain quiet joy that she had been put on the same level as Liam. "My brother, sir. He whistles up his magic, though I never had the knack for it."

Thorne called her in again a week later, for another chat, but his face was serious and even the glint of his glasses seemed subdued. There was a thin file on his desk, L. Jones scrawled on the outside. Laney's heart froze, because she knew there was no reason for the Bureau to have files on her, not yet.

"I am sorry, miss Jones, but Liam Jones died almost seven years ago, in the mountains." He pushed the file towards her, sympathy but not pity in his voice. "There are people there who - deal in mages. It seems that there was no one to warn him to hide." He pressed a clean handkerchief into her hand and went to fetch water for the kettle. He could have called for someone to bring them tea, but Thorne understood that people sometimes needed a moment alone with their grief.

The contents of the file had been heavily redacted, because the work of the Bureau quiet branch investigating the trade in mages was an ongoing thing, and a sister's grief didn't give you rights to all of the carefully gathered details. But there were a few stark lines that were intact - a description, a date of capture. A short summary of a doomed escape attempt that made her smile with fierce, pained pride. A date of death.

What had she been doing, that day? Where had she been, when her brother's song vanished from the world?

Thorne made her tea and made no comment on her damp eyelashes, told her she could speak to him at any time if she felt she needed someone who was aware of the situation to listen. He asked for her family's contact details, so that he could write to tell them the terrible news personally. He straightened the papers on his desk and promised to tell her when he sent it, in case she wanted to write as well, but he said that it shouldn't be her job to break it to them unless she wanted it to be.

Laney signed the quiet branch's letter of employment before the week was up.

She would never run the backstreets of Rivertown with Rupert; he would perhaps have trusted Sez, Bart and their secret, steady work to fellow Academy students, if a bit warily, but not to someone with Thorne looking over her shoulder from the beginning. Laney spent her spare hours at the Academy in the library or out on the firing range, and felt trapped, burning in her own skin.

When the battle of Driftwood Island came, when she realised that the monsters of fire were slipping in from the Elsewhere, it was Thorne she went to, to say she could help; she stitched the rift closed while the Rangers held their own in the wreckage above. She didn’t tell Thorne how she’d done it, exactly, but she agreed that they shouldn’t tell anyone it had been her - no point in making her a target, after all.

(Laney wouldn’t remember any of this for years; until then, so far as she could recall she’d spent the whole battle helping to shield sections of lower Rivertown from fire damage. If there was a gap in her recollection - well, it was so easy to lose track in your first real battle, for everything to blur together. The Rangers couldn’t recall exactly who had stitched the rift up while they bought time, and it nagged at them for years, too)

On her first day at the Bureau’s quiet branch as a junior agent, Laney made her way to Thorne's office, shoulders carefully square and chin held level, and asked him what she would need to do to become part of the group working on the mage slave trade case.

Thorne had known her brother's name, his description; not just the dates of his disappearance but those of his escape attempt and death, the clinical numbers documenting how much power had been wrested from his bones. Laney had known, even in the midst of grief - these were not things you could learn without someone on the inside. These were not things you knew, the shadowy quiet branch of the governing powers, unless you had plans to do something with the information.

Laney had her own plans; she had always intended to use the Bureau just as much as Thorne had planned to use her.

When the Seeress saw her, Spider’s newest potential recruit, she smiled slightly in recognition, sinister and small. She asked Laney why she was applying to a role with the Graves' network. Laney had looked her dead in the eye, shoulders relaxed and everything gold around her shining true.

"My brother was a mage, a powerful one. I grew tired a long time ago of being a shadow because I don't have gold dripping from my fingers."

Neither Kay or Bea trusted the Agent and her casually mentioned ally - Spider had been a nightmare in the mountains for longer than Kay had known of this fight, and had never slipped into the Baker’s net to whisper secrets to her deputy. In another life, the Baker’s right hand had been a girl who saw nothing but blood and ash on her palms, who had once let a whole village die, unseen, because she wanted to live; in another life, the Spider had been confident that the Dragon Slayer would understand the price he was paying. He would have offered himself as an informant, trusting in her pragmatism to take his information and keep the source to herself. In another life, Bea had years of listening to George talk haltingly about the place she had once called home, the dragon they had given her a legend for, and would have listened to her, taken the information even if reluctantly.

But the Giantkiller had no such weight on his shoulders, and Spider had spent too long working himself into the Graves’ good graces to risk his position on that kind of gamble.

They didn’t trust Agent Jones or the Spider, let alone the Bureau man with twinkling glasses who slipped into Challenge with a promise of information and a cheerful litany of all of Kay’s illegal activities, but they couldn’t afford not to take their warnings. Challenge prepared for another siege, hunkering down to withstand whatever the Graves’ threw at them, and Kay decided when the Rangers arrived to support the defenders that his life was worth the gamble and followed two shadowy spies into the Keep, a decoy captive.

He’d been here just once before; after that, the Mayor had finally listened to Sandry’s murmurings about weak points in their security, and no-one had broken into the keep since. Spider let them in through a side door, and Kay shuddered as it clicked closed behind him. They burned the machines, Agent Jones lighting the mage blasts, but the engineer wasn’t there, the careful blueprints and plans stored somewhere other than this cold office. Kay turned a corner and ran into the Seeress, the first time he had seen her face to face. They stared at one another, frozen; she was frantically figuring out how the Giantkiller had made it into the keep unnoticed - and he had no idea who he just run into, unsure if he should tell her who he was and hesitating to use force on someone he thought might be an innocent.

Spider stepped up behind him, and the Seeress’ cold mask slipped, fractured as she looked between them, Sandry feeling her steady ground shift beneath her feet. Spider’s hand settled warningly over Kay’s shoulder, yanking him back and cuffing him to a stair-rail to keep the boy in place as the recognition dawned, while he frantically whispered at Sandry - telling her to leave, to slip out of the side door and hide, that she could join her brother and start over. The Seeress snapped out sharp retorts, demanding to know what exactly the Bureau knew of her baby brother, and Kay felt an abrupt, unwelcome fellow feeling - he knew what it was, to fear the extent of the Bureau’s files, to want the names of you and yours kept secret. The Seeress was trembling, torn between drawing herself up and in, hurt and terrified of showing it, and wanting to trust, for just a little longer, that the Spider was on her side.

Mayor Graves turned the corner, calling for the Seeress, his useful little monster, because someone had been in his office, burned his papers to ash. He was clutching a weapon that pulsed gold (in the cells below, there was a trembling body, the magic in their blood ripped free and pushed into a new vessel), concerned but not frantic. He spied Kay, and his face broke into a smirk. Spider stood with a relaxed stance, hand on his holstered gun, face a mask while he weighed options. The Seeress straightened her spine. Her father had told her all her life that mages were selfish, hoarding power, that their work was a sad necessity for the wellbeing of the many. He was holding a gun that took that power and put it in his own two hands - Sandry had made Spider teach her to shoot years ago, on the quiet, because she wanted something she could do, to defend herself and her brother, something to hold onto that would give her power that didn’t rely on words. She knew that this was a power he had made for himself to cling to.

The Giantkiller was a child, still, and almost as young as her brother had been when she pressed a bag into his hands and told him to flee. Her father was pointing a gun at a boy barely older than his son, and everything in him was twisting gleeful with it. She murmured, dispassionate, that the boy might have useful information. That Spider should take him downstairs for questioning, to find out about the gaps in their defences - a security breach such as this must be investigated carefully, for all their sakes. Spider could dispose of the pest, after. Mayor Graves had never been in the habit of listening to his daughter, and she wanted to scream it at him as he dismissed her again without even a word.

The Mayor took an experimental shot at the Giantkiller, burning the ground by Kay’s left leg to cinders, and crumpled to the ground. Agent Jones slipped out of the shadows behind him, ash dusting her fingertips, pistol held steady and familiar in her hand. She glanced down at the body, cold, and wondered if she would regret never getting to tell him exactly why she’d taken aim, a sniper’s precise shot under cover of his own.

Spider stepped casually in front of Sandry, and with a glare Agent Jones holstered her gun before striding briskly by both her mentor and the Seeress to release the bindings holding Kay in place.

“C’mon, Giantkiller. Let’s get you back to your friends at Challenge, and the boss in here to sort out everything else.” She slid her eyes sideways towards Spider. “I’ll be sure to tell him that you have the Seeress in your custody, sir.” Spider gave a resigned sigh, but made no other objection. Kay felt he ought to protest, to argue against leaving the Seeress unchained, to snap that it should have been him who took down the Mayor, but this had never been just his fight, for all his was the name the Seeress had hissed in the wake of foiled plans. He let himself be guided out, Agent Jones brisk and efficient, a polite smile pasted on her face.

Thorne was waiting for them outside, cheerfully confident in his Agents and the Giantkiller. He told Kay that Challenge had withstood the final siege, but couldn’t tell him the cost. Kay, seething, bit his tongue at the man’s oily reminders that in the quiet branch’s service, any messy rumours about illegal activities would be swept under the rug. The Giantkiller jerked his head back at the keep. “The mayor is dead, but the Seeress is still alive in there.” Thorne pursed his lips, nodding. “Good, good. The mayor had to be removed, though alive would have been…preferable. Young Cassandra can take over, however, to maintain consistency - with supervision, of course, before you say anything.” Kay scowled. “She fed mages into his machines for years.” Thorne smiled at him, condescendingly, shaking his head like a kindly grandfather.

“We cannot simply remove every political figure we disagree with. She is young. She will be managed. You should be making your way to Challenge, however. I’m sure your friends will want to hear the good news.” Agent Jones watched the boy stalk away, carefully keeping her face neutral. She was an old hat at manipulating people, after years of practice - she could see that Thorne was trying to collect another recruit. She could also see that he was going about it in entirely the wrong fashion, but she didn’t think it was worth pointing that out.

Thorne glanced at her sideways. “The mayor is dead, Agent Jones?” “Yes sir. An unfortunate necessity to avoid further loss of life.” He heaved a sigh, but didn’t question it. “Very well then. Let us go and debrief Spider, and explain the new order of things to Miss Graves.”

Even with the Mayor gone, the keep was still hostile territory; Agent Jones was on high alert, so when she heard a door click softly closed as they walked through the entry way she waved Mr Thorne on ahead of her, waiting until Dadlus thought it was safe to emerge again. She tackled him to the ground, and had him cuffed and cursing by the time Thorne, Spider and the Seeress made their way back down the stairs. Thorne’s face turned gleeful when he saw her captive. He rubbed his hands together. “Excellent! Good work, Agent Jones.” The Seeress’ head snapped toward him, eyes widening fractionally in surprise before he spoke. “I have a Bureau engineer who desperately needs to pick your brains, particularly as it seems the Giantkiller was able to burn all of the blueprints. You're going to be very valuable to us.”

Spider was staring between Thorne and Dadlus, ice slipping down his spine as he put the pieces together, discovered the game Thorne had been playing all along. He had spent years working in this keep, shoulders weighed down by so many lives he had been unable to save, who he had sacrificed to ensure he could bring it all to an end. He took three long steps forward and slid the knife he always carried up his sleeve between the engineer's ribs. "I didn't let children die for years so the Bureau could turn around and do the same thing all over again." Dadlus slumped to the ground, blood pooling under him. Thorne went for his gun, but Agent Jones was quicker - in a different life, it would have been dragon’s fire that killed Gerald Thorne, but in this one it was handfuls of Elsewhere fire that Laney had been carrying around her wrists for years, hidden even from the Seeress.

Cassandra stared at them both over the cooling body, shaken - she had always seen everything, every secret and every weakness, and here she found both: her lieutenants had been hiding secrets upon secrets, tucked carefully away where she hadn’t found them, and so she was weak where she’d thought her back was guarded. She wondered if it would be a bullet or a blaze that came for her, whether Spider would help or if he would pull her out of the way.

Agent Jones didn’t glance her way: she and Spider were eying each other, weighing up their priorities and potentials. Spider wanted Sandry to go free - she had barely been an adult when he arrived at the keep, for all that it had taken him weeks to discover she wasn’t cold years older. He had realised within those first months of working his way into her network just how young she must have been, when the Mayor told her she was a monster and turned her into a tool.

Laney had always wanted revenge for her brother, justice for the other victims. She had burned the machines with glee and felt no guilt for shooting the Mayor down. She felt no guilt for burning Throne, either - she wanted the machines gone as much as Spider. But she knew who it was who had found her brother, who had sent armed thugs with Elsewhere cracks in their pockets after Liam. She had told herself she would feel no guilt for shooting the Seeress, either, even when she saw the date of birth in the briefing files.

But Laney had spent a year now with Sandry and the Spider; she remembered the squeaky sage in her second year study group, the one she still sometimes met in the University library to chatter over Elsewhere theory. She had heard Sandry talk about Sam, but she had heard Grey talk about Sandry, too. She thought she talked about Liam the same way, sometimes.

“Thorne said we would leave you in charge,” she spoke softly, as though the words were of no importance. “So we will. But you do not re-start operations, and Spider and I will make sure of it.” Agent Jones holstered her gun, turned to the Seeress, and raised an eyebrow. “But the people around here will freeze in winter, without help. Your people, now. So, I’ve a challenge for you - I know you’ve studied how the machines work, how to make them more efficiently. But have you ever tried to figure out how you can wrest this power from thin air and turn it into something useful?”

Laney Jones pressed her hand up to the skin of the world and broke it; in the glow of the Elsewhere she was radiant, and Cassandra would have shielded her eyes if she’d been able to bear looking away. All her life, she had been told that what they did was the only way, only fair.

She stared, eyes stinging, and thought I have never seen a mage burn so bright.

Kay spent the weeks after at Challenge helping to shore up the damage; Bea left the bakery to help, bandaging the wounded and scolding him for taking foolish risks. They knelt side by side in the community garden, repairing damaged trellises and trying to see which of the fragile growths could be coaxed back into health and which needed to be turned to compost. One water break, surveying the rows they’d managed to restore, he idly turned a stone over and said, “What are we going to do now? What’s next?” She didn’t pretend he was talking about the garden, though she didn’t reply until they were carting the next load of dug up plants to the compost heap.

“I don’t know. It’s been so long since I didn’t have -” And he put his arms around her and let her cry into his shoulder; Bea had turned herself to stone in so many ways, over the years, since she woke to a cold house and an empty bedroom, and now her war was won. There would be pieces to pick up, rebuilding that would take years. The Seeress was still in the keep, and for all that Agent Jones assured them she wasn’t going to be a problem it still sat bitter under both their tongues. It would take months for the mountain villagers to feel safe, for a child with sparks flicking between fingertips to inspire joy not terror. It would take years, a lifetime - several lifetimes. There was work for Bea to bury herself in still, but for now there was sun on her shoulders and there would be no mages lost in the night. For now, she could realise they were safe, as safe as you could ever be, and weep for all those who hadn’t been.

Later, shoulder to shoulder in the crowded inn, Kay would rest his head on her shoulder, quiet.

“I think I should go back to the farm, for a bit. See my dad, yeah? Make sure he knows I’m okay.” He nudged her with an elbow, gentle. “I’ll come back, though. But I promised I wouldn’t leave without telling you, so I am. I’m going to head back to the farm and get shouted at, so you aren’t even going to be the only one nagging me about taking risks, then I’m gong to come back to the bakery and chop wood for you.” She laughed softly.

“That’s your life plan?” He grinned, and it was a younger face that looked back at her than she’d seen for years. He was still a child, really, for all that he was growing tall and gangly. He shrugged. "For now. I’d like to go a few weeks with no-one trying to kill me, it’d make a nice change. Later - well. Maybe I’ll go get myself a Badge, I'm almost old enough. Sarge told me plenty of times he reckons I could do it, and I’ve daydreamed about it for years, you know? Be a proper Hero, join the Rangers as an intern. Agent Jones told me Thorne is dead - I didn't ask for details, I thought she might shoot me - and that I didn't need to worry about my name being in any paperwork with the Giantkiller, so long as I say Thorne was tragically killed in the fight with the Mayor. I could do it, if I wanted.” They sat in silence for a while longer, watching the crowd. After a while, Bea ruffled his hair gently. “Maybe you should go to the Academy, get yourself a career lined up. But if you’ll take an old baker’s suggestion - I think you’d make a better Guide, all things considered. You've had enough practice at being a hero.”

In the morning, before he set out for the old farm he hadn’t been back to in years, Kay climbed up the flights of stairs to the uppermost platform of the wall that surrounded Challenge. The wooden posts were riddled with marks, from flung weapons and the sooty streaks left by stolen mage fire, idle carved graffiti left by bored sentries - names and old in jokes, defiant records left when they knew they were all inviting battle to their doorstep. He stood looking out at the surrounding peaks as the sun rose, thinking about the Leauges and Bureau policy, about a roc digging claws into his shoulder and long summer sieges, the machines burning and Mayor Graves crumpling lifeless to his plush carpet, and dug out his pocket knife.

We were here.

#my writing #Jack is a Beanstalk #Beanstalk #Echoes of a Giantkiller #Remember the Dust #this one went way more off canon than usual #I was planning to spend more time with more of the background characters #Sorry Susie and Rosie I'll have to give you more screentime another time #because Kay kind of...took over #L&L fic #the mountain vigilantes never become the mountain vigilantes #other people still step up to the fight #Leagues and legends

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yarn-dragon · 3 years ago

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Some Averno Fanfic Staring Grace, Meg and Beatrice

Photos from the Past

"Miss Beatrice! Look what we found!" Grace followed Meg into the kitchen, where Beatrice was making something.

"Meg, how many times do I have to tell you? It's just Beatrice." She said, looking up from the stove. "What have you got there?"

"We were playing dress up and I found this!" She held up the book. Beatrice smiled sadly.

"Oh this old thing." She took the book from Meg and sat down at the table. The two girls joined her. "Addie and I made this, shortly after she first moved in.' She opened the book to the first page, which had a picture of Beatrice and a dark skinned woman sitting under the willow tree. The woman wore a dark red dress, a dark red hat and a red jacket with a butterfly pin. Something about her face was familiar, but Grace couldn't tell what.

"Who's Addie?" Grace asked.

"My wife. Not legally of course, but that never mattered much." She flipped to another page that had a photo of Beatrice covered in a bright pink liquid, laughing as she tried to hide from the camera. "Oh, that was the first time I tried to use the blender." Beatrice kept flipping through the book, telling the girls the stories behind the pictures. About halfway through the book, something caught Grace's eye. The photo in question was of two girls. One wore a white dress and held a flower bouquet. The other was wearing a sundress, eerily similar to the one Grace had seen her wear countless times. And her eyes, Grace would know those eyes anywhere. It couldn't be, could it?

"Beatrice, who is that?" Grace asked, pointing to the photo. Beatrice looked at it.

"Well that one's Addie and the other is her sister. She told me her name once, it started with a C. Candy, no, Clarissa, no."

"Cassia?" Grace asked, not sure what she wanted the answer to be.

"Yes, that's it. How did you know?"

"I um, met her?" Beatrice gave her a confused look. "At the willow tree. We spent a summer together. She um, she lived in the forest. Had for, I don't know how long. She was my age when I met her, though she said time works weird in the forest."

"She did mention Cassia had run away shortly after her wedding. They never found her, Addie figured she was dead."

"Well she's dead now." Beatrice looked at her again, eyes sad. "Well, dead isn't the right word really. She returned to the forest. She's like a shadow mother now or something. I don't know really." Grace felt tears well up. Meg wrapped her in a hug. "Thanks Meg."

"Maybe Addie and Cassia are together now." Meg suggested. "Swimming and stargazing and doing sister things."

"Maybe Meg." Grace said. "Could I um, have that photo Beatrice?"

"Of course Grace." Beatrice slid the photo out of the clear sleeve and handed it to Grace. She held it to her chest for a moment before putting it in her pocket.

#averno #averno township #grace #meg #Beatrice #grace×cassia #Addieline×Beatrice #photo album #hurt comfort #kinda?#I don't really know what to call it #you can blame the averno tumblr account for this #they gave me that lore drop and I ran with it

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artificialqueens · 4 years ago

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Just Like a Folk Song (Our Love Will Be Passed On), 1/3 (Trixya) - Pinkgrapefruit

A/N -

hi! I’m really excited for this!!! I started it back in the summer of 2020 and it’s been a labour of love for sure. I was initially dead set on waiting for it to reach its end before I posted but I want someone who isn’t me and ortega to enjoy it. I’m so, so proud of it and I really hope you enjoy it so please let me know and maybe I’ll actually finish this one.

Thank you to Jaz, Ortega and Frey who have endlessly supported me, egged me on and corrected the minutia of my grammar. This one is for you xoxo

[chapter 1. pirate wives]

part one. joy

please picture me in the trees i hit my peak at seven feet in the swing over the creek i was too scared to jump in

There is a girl in the trees. She is blonde and messy, and her knees have scratches that Trixie’s mama would never allow. She clambers through the branches in her wellies, light as a feather until she’s straddling the edge of a thick branch, white teeth glistening in the mid-afternoon sun. Trixie is immediately jealous. She’s missing her two front teeth and although her mama straightens her dresses and tells her she’s very pretty - she’s not entirely convinced. The girl jumps down from the tree and hits the debris-littered floor with a soft thud. Her shoes are caked in mud and she runs a dirty hand through her hair in a way that makes Trixie’s skin crawl.

The day is warm, and Trixie’s mama had told her to spend it by the river near their flat. It’s overlooked by a wood, and the last man who pretended to be her daddy built a tire swing, so her and her brother could play down here when the sun makes it unbearable to be indoors.

The girl tilts her head and Trixie mirrors her, unsure. Her eyes are a crystalline green, the same colour as the lazy river, and she blushes as Trixie stares. The girl waves exuberantly.

“I’m Katya!” She introduces, pushing her hand forward for Trixie to shake. She sees her mama greet people like this, but it seems very strange. She cautiously moves her hand to meet it and they shake rather forcefully.

“Katya?” She repeats, almost a question, half-formed on her tongue.

“Yup! K-A-T-” she pauses, eyebrows scrunched as she tries to remember the next letter. The sun filters through the leaves, speckling her face with dots of light. “Y-A! Katya!”

Trixie giggles, cheeks flushing. She grips her pink corduroy dungaree dress, letting the soft fabric soothe her nerves. “My name is Beatrice,” she says, voice tight like a rope pulled taut. She is being polite. She is a good girl. Katya purses her lips, shuffling from one foot to another. “You can call me Trixie, though?”

Katya smiles, nods slightly. “I would like that, Trixie.”

She reaches out for Trixie to take her hand, and Trixie is slightly less hesitant this time. Katya’s smock blows in the slight breeze as she tugs Trixie forward, and the girl in the pink follows willingly.

but i, i was high in the sky with pennsylvania under me are there still beautiful things?

She ends up pulling her towards the tyre-swing and she holds Trixie’s cardigan as she wrestles up onto the tyre. Katya can only manage to push her for a few minutes before she wants her own turn, and Trixie makes her pull the swing as far back as she can, so there’s no chance she’ll end up in the river.

“How old are you?” Trixie asks as she holds the tyre patiently for Katya, who struggles in her wellies, despite being adept at climbing trees in them.

“I’m seven,” she announces proudly as she sits atop the tyre. She grips the rope tightly, so her fingers turn white and her brown smock is tucked under her thighs for grip. “My mama told me I look very old for my age.”

Trixie wouldn’t necessarily disagree. Katya looks bigger and certainly stronger than her. She is louder - more physical - and her hair is pretty. Trixie considers it all for a second.

“Okay,” she replies, pushing the swing gently, so its reflection ripples across the river. “I’m seven too.”

She pushes Katya gently for a few more minutes before Katya pipes up again. She’s more relaxed, fingers only barely hanging onto the rope.

“Do you have a boyfriend, Trixie?” The question makes Trixie squirm almost as much as the fact that Katya is now trying to hang upside-down above the river.

She gulps her anxiety down. “No,” she tells her, “I don’t really want one.”

Katya looks at her from upside down and smiles brightly. “boys are gross, Trixie,” she tells her sternly as if she’s had experience. She is steady in her convictions, and Trixie finds this admirable - she’s not sure if she has convictions.

Katya’s smock comes loose from under her thighs and Trixie looks away in shock as it exposes her almost naked body. Katya just giggles, her stomach expanding with laughter as she tries to grip with her legs and pull herself back up, so she is no longer exposed.

She twists her body slightly and manages to jump off the swing and onto the ground, watching as Trixie winces.

Katya puts her arms in the air. “I’m fine, look,” she tells her reassuringly. Curving her fingertips slightly she smiles. “RAWR!”

She chases Trixie through the horse fields until they end up on a street full of little stone cottages with flower boxes under the windows. Trixie stops when her mary janes hit the concrete and looks quizzically at Katya who’s stopped at a green door. She beckons for her to follow, and Trixie does.

sweet tea in the summer cross your heart, won’t tell no other and though i can’t recall your face i still got love for you

Katya’s sister Anna is sitting in the living room with a jug full of sweet tea and ice that makes Trixie drool just thinking about it. She smiles, offering them plastic cups full of the sugary liquid that Trixie happily gulps down after hours in the woods. She goes to slip her shoes off by the door, but Katya waves her hand. “Keep ‘em on.”

Trixie shrugs and follows the messy blonde up a flight of wooden stairs into a little red room. It has a bed pushed up to the wall and a set of gymnastic rings that come down from the ceiling. Katya places her cup down on the nearest flat surface as Trixie cradles hers in her hands, and launches herself at the rings.

Trixie is astounded that Katya can push herself off the ground, arms locked straight. She jumps down and grabs the shorts off the bed, pulling them on (somewhat awkwardly) over her wellies. Trixie watches in wonderment, fixed in place on the carpet, so she doesn’t spread dirt as Katya swings around, flipping and tumbling, aided by the rings.

When she finally stops, they sit crossed-legged on the floor, sipping sweet tea.

“Will you be my best friend?” Trixie asks Katya sweetly - her tongue coated in tea and her body energised from the most fun she’s ever had. She picks at the lace on the top of her socks while Katya considers her offer.

“I can do that,” she tells her, voice earnest and honest.

“Deal. I think best friends braid each other’s hair.”

“That sounds good.”

your braids like a pattern love you to the moon and to saturn passed down like folk songs the love lasts so long

“You can move now!” Katya announces after a painfully long time. Trixie gently pats the neat rows of hair on her head - it’s tender, and she scrunches her face up in response. She finds herself jealous - Katya is much better at braiding than she is, but she promised to teach her on the hand-me-down styling mannequin she got from her sister Anna.

“You’re better than me,” she effuses, hand splayed on the soft fabric of Katya’s smock.

“Yeah, well you have freckles,” Katya retorts, and Trixie nods because she makes a good point. “You can’t have everything, Beatrice.”

Trixie chews on her lips. She feels freer in Katya’s bedroom, there are no ghosts in the cupboards or angry ladies drying the washing in the sun. “Can you call me Trixie?” She asks. “I liked that better.”

Katya jumps up, pulling Trixie up with her. The sun makes her red walls glow, and they reflect onto her blonde hair.

“Okay, Trixie, do you wanna go on an adventure?”

Trixie nods and they barrel out of the bedroom and down the stairs, which creak pleasantly with every thundering step. Katya tugs her round the bend at the bottom of the stairs so fast that Trixie almost slams into the wall, but eventually they find Katya’s mama, Seraphine, in the kitchen making a salad.

“We’re going on an adventure!” Trixie exclaims, and Seraphine chuckles at them, ruffling Katya’s hair until the blonde scowls.

“Okay girls, stay safe,” she tells them, and they nod earnestly. “Are you staying for dinner?” She asks Trixie, and Trixie shakes her head sadly.

“My mama told me to be home for six.”

Seraphine smiles warmly and moves, so they can exit through the back door. Katya’s house backs onto a horse field and it makes Trixie feel like a butterfly - all warm and free in the sun and she never really wants to go home.

Katya sticks her arms out like she could fly if only she had the lift, and they run around playing aeroplanes for a little while. Trixie’s scuffed mary janes let her socks get wet from the dew in the grass and it makes her feel like she is a part of nature.

Katya takes off her wellies and the ground squishes under her toes.

and i’ve been meaning to tell you i think your house is haunted your dad is always mad and that must be why

Katya walks Trixie home to the grey flats on the edge of the town. They tower high above the little cottages - a relic of a revolution long gone - and cast hazy shadows in the late afternoon sun. In the shadows, Katya’s hair looks dull and Trixie’s dress looks clean, and it makes the hairs on Trixie’s legs stand up as a breeze whistles under her skirt.

“You live here?” Katya asks and she doesn’t mean it to sound mean, but the words still crackle in Trixie’s ears like dying embers. She bristles, standing up tall and proud like she’s always been taught to.

“Yes, I do,” she tells Katya almost haughtily - trying to channel her mama. Her hands firm around the squish of her hips and she purses her lips.

Katya frowns. “I’m sorry,” she voices, chewing the inside of her cheek, fingers clinging together behind her. “It looks like ghosts live here.”

This makes Trixie laugh, it’s soft and ladylike because she’s a lady, which in turn makes Katya laugh - loud and raucous.

“Good-bye, Kat-y-a,” says Trixie, her mouth rounding over the syllables. “Katya.”

“Good-bye, my best friend Trixie,” replies Katya with a wave and a nod before she skips back up the path towards the streetlamps. She steps inside the building and heads up the stairs, knocking three times on the door.

“Why are your shoes scuffed, Beatrice?” Is her first greeting and she turns her toes in an attempt to hide them from her mama.

“The forest, Mama,” Trixie responds, calm and quiet. Her brother is watching from the couch and he sticks his tongue out at her with a kind smile. “I met a girl named Katya.”

Her mama scowls, face tight and eyes sharp. “You let a girl named Katya touch your hair?” She asks, almost mocking as she picks up a braid and lets it fall back onto Trixie’s back. She sighs. “Go get ready for dinner and wash your hands.”

“Yes, Mama,” Trixie tells her dutifully before running off to her bedroom. She places the bobbles Katya used in her hair in her jewellery box.

and i think you should come live with me and we can be pirates then you won’t have to cry or hide in the closet

They play pirates, skipping rocks on the river like cannonballs. Katya is Blackbeard with her macaroni necklace and her stolen clip-on earrings. She smiles sweetly and tells Trixie that she is Grace O'Malley, because she is pretty and male pirates were not pretty. Also because then they could have the best pirate wedding anyone has ever seen and this makes Trixie laugh so hard she accidentally throws her best skipping stone. Katya decides that she’s won, but she will share her treasure and they lay on the grass on the bank of the river.

Seraphine has been reading Katya a book on pirates, so the young girl parrots the information back to Trixie, who revels in the knowledge. She begs her brother Josh to read her that pirates books she’s borrowed from the library and the next day she comes back to the river and tells Katya that they are both women pirates.

“I am Grace O'Malley and you are Mary Reed,” she announces authoritatively. Katya frowns, head tilted so her blonde hair glows white in the sun.

“Can we still have the best pirate wedding though?” She asks, and Trixie squeezes her hand before jumping up.

“Of course!” She tells her like it is obvious. “We will just be pirate wives.”

Katya nods, because this makes perfect sense. “We will be pirate wives,” she consolidates. She pulls a stick out of the belt of her smock and holds it aloft. “TO BATTLE, PIRATE WIFE!” She screams so the horses in the next field are adequately prepared before running down the grassy bank, so her wellies get wet on the rocky shore of the river.

“To battle!” Trixie squeals, running after her with enthusiasm. She stops when the stones start because she doesn’t want to get her socks wet this time, but she watches as Katya jumps in the water.

'Best friend pirate wife,’ she turns over in her head. It sounds good.

and just like a folk song our love will be passed on

part two. discomfort

i want you to know i’m a mirrorball i’ll show you every version of yourself tonight

There’s only one middle school in the village. Its bricks are a rust-brown and rough like they’ve just been dug out of the ground. It used to be a factory town, so everything is covered in a thin layer of dirt and dust anyway, but this building manages to look particularly rugged. Trixie assumes the planters were at one point neat and trimmed, although they don’t seem to be anymore - wiry stems making their way up the walls. It’s not unwelcoming, Trixie just doesn’t really want to be there.

She pushes that down though, pulling her white long-socks back up past her knees and adjusting the way her backpack falls on her shoulders. She spots Katya loitering under the carefully positioned 'no loitering’ sign and smiles - picking up her pace so her mary-janes slip a little on the gravel-covered yard. Katya’s wrists are covered in the friendship bracelets they spent the summer weaving with Seraphine’s embroidery threads. She wears Trixie’s too - her mama threw the first one out with her brother’s holey socks.

They share a homeroom, and Katya makes sure they get two seats next to each other, the plastic chairs sweating in the late August heat. Trixie’s thighs stick to them against her will and she finds herself gently prying her thighs away from the seat every so often as Katya laughs in her loose jeans.

Katya has always been the one who preferred practical fashion. Her brown smocks have turned into tank tops and jeans, and she’s only eleven, but Trixie thinks she dresses a bit like the boys from Grease. They’re older. Maybe, by then, Trixie will look like a Pink Lady. That’s what she wants, anyway.

They write notes on each other’s pencil cases while Mr Thompson gives them a rather hasty personal health lesson. Trixie worries at one point that she’s missing important information about periods or nail varnish, but Katya tells her that Anna can just explain it all to them, so they go back to doodling hearts in the margins of their brand new notepads.

At one point, Trixie chances a look around the room, the walls are sparse and the paint peels, but there’s one poster that makes her tummy feel weird and she almost points it out to Katya, but the other girl is too busy making a paper plane.

The poster tells her homosexuality is a sin.

She wonders if pirate wives are exempt.

i’ll get you out on the floor shimmering beautiful and when i break it’s in a million pieces hush

In Biology, Katya is seated next to a boy named Maxwell. He’s Jewish and sweet enough, and they talk about his babushka’s chak-chak. Katya remembers the sweet, doughy treat from her times visiting her baba back in Russia, and she almost asks why his name doesn’t sound like hers, because he sounds awfully American even though he can pronounce her last name.

Most of the teachers can’t. It’s the third day and they’ve already resorted to Zamo. She’s too used to it to be hurt.

Mrs Dodds comes in through the teacher’s door and drops a textbook on the desk to get everyone’s attention. She’s a mousy sort of woman - light hair cut to a bob that stops at the nape of her neck. Her blazer is tweed and also oversized, and it reminds Katya of the jacket her dad wears to job interviews.

Dodds starts scratching her name onto the board in white chalk and the sound sends shivers down the class’s spines.

“Can anyone explain to me where humans came from?” She asks the room, and the eleven-year-olds cower from the cadence of her voice.

A brave girl called Monique waves her hand, but Dodd’s picks on a boy called Jaremi instead and he quivers under her gaze. “Sex?” He suggests, tone light like he’s walking on eggshells and all of the preteens burst into giggles. The poor boy turns the same shade as summer poppies, and Katya feels terrible. Unfortunately, her face must betray this because a crooked finger is pointed in her direction. She shifts awkwardly.

“Evolution,” she musters with enough confidence that it doesn’t sound like a question, and while the class looks vaguely impressed with her, Mrs Dodds does not. She scoffs.

“A fallacy,” she claims, stalking back to the chalkboard with her sleeves crumpled by her elbows.

The chalk scraped on the board, spelling out a word: God. Katya gulps. She’s pretty sure god didn’t make humans. They came from fish - at least that’s what her encyclopedia told her.

“God created humans,” she announces to them all, smiling faintly, “and it’s people like you, sinner,” she points at Katya again, “who make him regret it.”

when no one is around, my dear you’ll find me on my tallest tiptoes spinning in my highest heels, love shining just for you Hush

They square dance in gym class and even though there aren’t enough boys, the girls aren’t allowed to dance with each other, so Trixie ends up sat on the bench while Katya and Max twirl in circles - blatantly flaunting the teacher’s instruction. Her long black skirt is patterned with white skulls and flares prettily around her ankles, exposing her red Doc Martens.

Katya leads, stepping backwards while Max steps on her toes - his shorter stature making for quite the picture (one that makes Trixie snort into her elbow).

She is not jealous. Jealousy is too strong, what she feels is subtle - like pulling on her ribs, shifting them under her skin until her heart hurts. Her heart does hurt. Maybe she’s not used to Katya having other people, so what - they said they would stick together and they will. She is confident.

When the dance ends, Katya bows - waving her arm so it circles under her and allowing her messy hair to fall over her face before flicking it back dramatically. She smiles at Trixie, and Trixie smiles back for the split second before she is assigned to the tall, lanky boy at the back of the gym. His hands are clammy and damp and strangely cold, and Trixie tries to hold them as lightly as she can, confident that Katya’s would be softer, warmer.

The boy smells strange, his hair falls over his eyes, and he stutters when he talks to her, making a poor effort of leading her and standing on her feet more than she stands on his. The teacher doesn’t seem to care, too busy screaming at the blonde girl who refuses to dance with the boy who has eczema.

They dance in circles rather than squares and Trixie’s mind is running in triangles rather than circles.

i know they said the end is near but i’m still on my tallest tiptoes spinning in my highest heels, love shining just for you

Trixie finds herself giggling with the girls Katya called plastic in her English lesson. She doesn’t share it with Katya and she didn’t want to sit alone, so she positioned herself at the back with Gigi, Pearl, and Courtney, who don’t seem to have an appreciation for Keats, but then again neither does Trixie, unless Katya is reading it to her in the hammock behind the cottage.

Gigi is dating a hippie boy from the next town over. She refers to him as Crystal, and the other girls go along with it, so Trixie doesn’t ask. Pearl wants to smoke weed with the high school boys that hang around the skate park, but she’s promised her brother that she won’t until she’s fourteen. Courtney is from Australia. They seem interesting.

Trixie doesn’t understand why they’re plastic.

But Katya drags her by the arm out of school one day ranting about how they’d called her names like 'dyke’ for not having a boyfriend.

“Boys are dumb,” she’d told them proudly, “I don’t want one.”

“Boys are dumb,” Trixie agrees solemnly, sat on a wall near her flat as Katya paces. She kicks a stone into the road and watches it skitter to a halt before sitting next to Trixie with a huff. “Sometimes girls are dumb too,” Trixie reminds gently, and Katya puts her head on her shoulder.

“You’re not dumb,” Katya tells her, “I don’t understand why they have to be.” She sounds so dejected that Trixie wants to bundle her up in blankets and make hot cocoa until she’s smiling again.

“Welcome to the real world. It sucks. You’re going to love it,” Trixie quips, and it does make Katya chuckle at her best friend’s antics.

“You did not just quote friends at me,” she jokes, pressing a finger into the softness of Trixie’s side. Trixie jumps off the wall in shock as Katya cackles to herself and sticks her tongue out.

“I hate you,” she tells her, smiling widely.

“I hate you too.”

i want you to know i’m a mirrorball i can change everything about me to fit in

They walk the final stretch to Trixie’s flat, hands swinging between them. Katya’s hand is clammy, but it is warm, and it grounds Trixie’s thoughts from where they are spinning. She knows people can be horrid, her brother once told her that 50% of the town is assholes and 50% is assholes you can deal with, but knowing and realising are two different things, and maybe she just hadn’t realised.

She doesn’t mean to be, but she’s more careful from then on. She giggles with boys and she doesn’t really hold Katya’s hand outside of the woods and the fields, where they are free to be whatever they want. And maybe she wants to hold Katya’s hand. Maybe.

There is a boy called Ben who hangs around the library. He seems sweet and small and kind, and she sits at his table while she tries to work out algebra. He plays baseball, but he mostly paints and makes jokes, so everyone seems to like him and Trixie admires that.

She appreciates the non-judgemental silence as she struggles over Pythagoras one evening. Katya is at art club, and Trixie doesn’t feel like having to do the work in the flat where the heating is broken, so she bundles herself up in the library and watches Ben eat a chocolate muffin over the top of his book. He smiles warmly at her and offers a chunk, which she takes gladly - savouring the way it seems to melt in her mouth.

"That’s good,” she mutters appreciatively, mouth full and all too aware of the watchful eye of the librarian.

“I made them!” Ben responds, his cheeks flushing with excitement.

“And they’re not going to poison me?” Trixie asks as he offers her a full one from a Tupperware in his bag. He sticks his tongue out, shaking his head, before ducking down as the librarian looks their way.

you are not like the regulars the masquerade revellers drunk as they watch my shattered edges glisten

“I think Ben has a crush on me,” Trixie postures, approaching it slowly like one approaches a kitten stuck on a road. Katya, in many ways, is comparable to a scared kitten - whether it be her anxious quiver or the mess of her hair - soft, but tangled in a knot on her head.

Katya’s eyebrow quirks, though her mouth stays set. “I thought we said boys are dumb?” She tells Trixie firmly, feet planted in the damp October soil.

Trixie shifts her toes on the crunching leaves and the noise ripples through the forest.

“They are,” she agrees, quietly, “I don’t want one.” She feels like she’s having to defend herself and she doesn’t really know why. Her cheeks prickle red with heat.

Katya scowls, and Trixie’s quivers on instinct before pulling her shoulder back and standing up straight. The clouds rolling overhead seem greyer, but maybe that’s just a trick of the light.

“You can’t control who I’m friends with, Kat,” she advocates, the telltale signs of anger slipping into her tone as the pitch heightens with every word. She pulls the sleeves of her jumper over her palms so she can feel a little sense of security, and Katya’s face softens.

“I know,” Katya sighs. She falls down onto a log, brushing some of the bark off the edges. She shifts as it scrapes her legs through her trousers, but eventually settles, looking mournful. “I just don’t want to lose you.”

Trixie holds her hands in her own, feeling the clammy warmth.

“I promise you won’t.”

hush

part three. comfort

when you are young, they assume you know nothing

Trixie is fourteen, holding hands with Ben as they eat ice creams from the parlour down the street. Ben dots some of his onto her nose, and she flushes pink and flustered as he wipes it off with the pad of his thumb. He’s grown taller, face chiselling ever so slightly, although his cheeks remain doughy and soft. She has to refrain from imprinting her fingertips into the pale flesh just to watch it bounce back. She’s grown into herself, breasts growing until her mama had to take her to the department store, an hour away, to buy training bras in sizes larger than the local shops have in stock.

She blushes and goes back to her ice cream, the strawberry sauce dripping into her knuckles so she has to run her tongue along them, leaving only the faint hint of pink food-colouring trailing across her hand.

He presses his lips to her cheek, tongue skimming the tip of her soft serve on the way, and grins like a Cheshire cat. She relents, placing her lips on his for a peck, and his lips taste like chocolate sauce. It’s sweet.

It took her a few years to finally accept his constant asking her out, but they spent ninth grade canoodling in the library, hand swinging between them and lips pressed to each other’s cheeks. It’s nice.

The girls she changes with for gym class tell her she must be in love, but she’s always thought that love would feel more like fireworks rather than popping candy. It’s pleasant. She doesn’t know if she should want more.

but i knew you dancin’ in your levi’s drunk under a streetlight, i

Ben wanted more. He dumps her for Kelly Mantle, a drama student famed for giving Brian McCook a blowjob behind the smoker shelter.

She cries into Katya’s paint-splattered denim jacket, the blonde’s fingers worming their way around the fullness of her hips until Katya’s holding her.

Trixie sobs in hiccups, and Katya’s sorrow rolls in waves. She’s held the girl so many times in their friendship, but they swore it would never be over a boy. And now Trixie is clinging to her like a liferaft in the ocean and Katya cannot help but pull her ashore.

Katya guides her over to the blanket she’d thrown on the warm grass, and they collapse onto its cushioning. Katya holds her until all her sobs muffle into croaks, and then there is silence.

They eventually roll onto their backs, Katya’s arm resting under the nape of Trixie’s neck, and although she’s losing feeling in her fingers - she wouldn’t move it for the world. The sun is warm, bright and even across their exposed stomachs in crop tops that Anna gave them when her chest grew too large. Katya’s hangs limply, but Trixie’s is stretching to her body and moves gently with each breath. Katya could watch the hypnotic movements until the sunset.

The river at the bottom of the verge babbles softly. There’s a heron in it, tall and proud and searching eagerly for fish. Its beak hooks into the water and it pulls out a flapping anchovy - or so Katya tells her, fingertips painting the words into the skyline.

Sometimes Trixie feels like the heron, but most days, she supposes, she is the anchovy. She is only fourteen, but life is harder than she thought it would be. Heartbreak hurts more. Making daisy chains with a lifelong friend soothes the pain a little.

i knew you hand under my sweatshirt baby, kiss it better, i

The rips in Katya’s Levi’s let the grass brush her calves. She longs to pull Trixie up, drag her around on the grass till they’re dancing, but the sun is starting to burn orange on the horizon line and Trixie’s mam has never been one for letting her off curfew.

She tugs the blonde up, sleepy and satiated - brushes a thumb along the redness of her under-eyes. Trixie adorns her with a flower crown and in the headiness of the sunset, Katya blushes.

The sky goes from naphthol red to quinacridone. Trixie swings their hands together as they take the long road home. Their path is shaded by the trees, and a breeze causes goosebumps to appear all up her arms, so she tugs her sweatshirt on, and Katya carefully pulls her hair out of the back for her. She whispers something, but it is lost to the whistling of the leaves.

Sometimes Katya wishes they could go back to playing pirates. They could be pirate wives and gallivant about the woods, waving their sticks up high and pretending that they could always go home to each other. It would be easier, she muses, easier than enduring school with girls who call her a dyke and a lesbo and tell her not to look at them in gym class, when, really, she gets ready facing the corner. Pirate wives would be fanciful, but lovely nonetheless.

The softness of their footsteps stops as they reach the path to Trixie’s. It’s gravely and it crunches underfoot, but the streetlights cast shadows that make Katya yearn to dance with Trixie once more.

She gives in this time, pulling the younger girl into her arms so they can mock-waltz, imagining the streetlamps as spotlights and maybe their friendship as something more.

Katya’s hand slips onto the fullness of Trixie’s hip again, her skin hot under her cold palm.

“You’re my favourite,” Katya whispers, lips brushing the flyaways from Trixie’s ponytail. She cannot see the blonde blush, but she squirms a little in Katya’s arms and it makes her smirk.

“And you’re mine.”

and when i felt like i was an old cardigan under someone’s bed you put me on and said i was your favorite

They kiss under that streetlight.

It may be the first, but it’s the sweetest and the quickest and the kindest too - lips brushing like a promise. Trixie can’t say what she’s promising, but she’s pretty sure she’d promise her life away just to taste cola off Katya’s tongue again.

a friend to all is a friend to none chase two girls, lose the one when you are young, they assume you know nothing

part four. deception

make sure nobody sees you leave hood over your head, keep your eyes down tell your friends you're out for a run you’ll be flushed when you return

Katya pads quietly along the line - her socks not quite keeping out the 3am chill. She’ll have to wait until she’s out of the door to put her worn converse back on - the squeak of the soles bound to wake the whole flat up. She resists the urge to skid - knowing she’ll hit the front door with a thud that Trixie will struggle to pretend is the wind. It’s a calm night.

She’s left Trixie in bed - the duvet twisted around her recumbent form like a snake. She wishes, for a second, to turn around and snuggle back into the warmth of Trixie’s side. To sling a leg back over the plush of her thigh and rest her head on Trixie’s chest.

Cuddling, she decides, is god’s divine creation. And so is Trixie.

She manages to avoid the creaking floor panel in front of Mama Mattel’s bedroom door, hugging the wall opposite just to make it out unscathed.

She locks the door with the key Trixie gifted to her over summer - pressed at a locksmith two towns over. Mr Lackerty in the village centre would have asked too many questions. Trixie paid for it with her allowance, stealing change from her Mama to take the bus there and back. She’d gifted it to her in a little shoebox stuffed with pulled-apart tissue. Katya has cried.

Slipping on her shoes in the hall outside, she sighs in both relief and sadness. She leaves quickly.

take the road less travelled by tell yourself you can always stop what started in beautiful rooms ends with meetings in parking lots

Trixie shifts on the wooden desks - hoping her skirt won’t be covered in chalk and graphite when she gets up. She’s watching Katya, dark eyes trained on crystalline green, and Katya smiles up at her before focusing back on her canvas. Her tongue pokes out when she does something she deems good, her eyebrows scrunching in concentration.

The art room is empty except for the two of them and by the silence of the corridor outside, lunch isn’t over just yet. They’re safe.

It’s like their own little sanctuary, Katya with her paints and Trixie with her Katya. She gently brushes the girl’s fringe back whenever it looks in danger of getting messy - there’s already a streak of pink across the bridge of her nose, but Trixie doubts she’s noticed.

She starts humming to herself, an old song that she’s heard through the walls of the flat, and Katya looks up at her.

“You should sing more Trix,” she tells her, ever so earnest.

“You think?” Trixie tucks her hair behind her ears, eyes twinkling at the compliment.

“I do,” she muses, turning back to the painting so she can put a final stroke in place before she tugs on the edge of Trixie’s skirt.

Trixie brushes a hand at her, hoping there won’t be painted fingerprints on the corduroy before coming to stand behind Katya. She wraps her hands around her waist and balances her chin on Katya’s shoulder before finally allowing her eyes to fall on the canvas.

It’s the river. Their river.

And they’re on the banks.

Together.

and that’s the thing about illicit affairs and clandestine meetings and longing stares

Trixie turns sixteen in February. Her birthday is celebrated by the world even if they don’t realise it, pink hearts adorning every establishment in town. She spends the day with Courtney, as Pearl is smoking weed with her boyfriend from city college. He’s a forty-minute bus ride away on a good day, but Pearl says the sex is good, and Trixie just blushes softly because she shouldn’t know what Pearl is talking about, but she does.

She’s okay with it, though, spending the day without Pearl. She and Courtney get smoothies from the 'healthy’ diner that Courtney’s been going on about and talk about boys, and Trixie makes up most of her opinions, but that’s okay.

She decides that she’ll be attracted to Mathew because he’s tall and he’s got the same cheekbones, as Katya so she can just talk about that. Courtney’s raving about this guy called Danny that she wants to be friends with (make out with), apparently he’s in a band and he sings, and that makes Courtney positively ravenous for him.

They part ways after Courtney gives her the charm bracelet she and Pearl bought. It’s silver and has a little heart charm on it, but Courtney tells her not to worry, they can buy more.

It jingles, but it’s not as comfortable as the woven friendship bracelets she and Katya made when they were eleven.

Katya meets her by the river and they walk through the woods hand in hand till they reach the clearing where she’s laid out a picnic blanket.

They lay on it together, looking up at the sky and holding hands through their gloves.

“We met here,” Katya ponders, as she allows herself to get lost in the smell of cherries on Trixie’s breath.

“Huh,” Trixie replies, placing a gentle kiss on Katya’s nose, “I guess we did.” A blush spreads across her cheekbones and she feels the heat in her chest as she remembers the past few years.

“You’re my favourite,” Katya tells her, a whisper in the wind.

“And you’re mine.”

it’s born from just one single glance but it dies and it dies and it dies a million little times

They go through a rough patch. They’re only seventeen, it’s their god-given right to, and they’re hiding a secret that’s burning them both, slowly, but surely.

Katya spends more time with Danny and his band, and Trixie spends more time with Courtney and Pearl and Gigi and her boyfriend, who transferred at the end of last year. He’s got a mullet, and it’s confusing, but apparently it’s in fashion, so Trixie doesn’t try to argue.

They drift apart a little bit. It’s the kind of drifting where Trixie stares at Katya across the corridor - watches a boy with eyeliner compliment her rings in front of their lockers. Katya stares at Trixie too - watches her when Courtney and Pearl aren’t around to call her a dyke, and maybe she’s still hurt that Trixie chooses to be their friend.

She wonders what would happen if they knew where Trixie’s proclivities lie.

She slips a note into her locker, telling Trixie to meet her in the art room, 6th period on Thursday. It’s bound to be empty, the rest of the school busy with summer term exams and home study. She tells herself that she’ll wait till then. She can wait.

Trixie looks nervous when they meet, she’s pulling at one of her nails - the glossy pink peeling off.

“You wanted to see me?” She asks, voice low and cautious, and it breaks a little part of Katya that she doesn’t even realise is shattering.

“I’ve missed you,” Katya responds, honest and raw. She’s twisting her fingers together too, subconsciously mirroring Trixie, or whatever Danny was trying to tell her about psychology. Trixie nods slowly.

“I’ve missed you too,” she agrees, gulping air like she’s drowning. The tension is sucking all the air out of the room, but she’s only just noticed it’s ugly form. She manages a smile, and it’s softer than she thought she could muster.

“I love you, you know?”

Katya frowns, and it makes Trixie back into the table she’s been stood in front of.

“I don’t think you do,” Katya says, and suddenly the silence feels like it’s been shattered.

“Wh-” Trixie stutters, feeling like the air has been sucker-punched out of her lungs leaving her winded.

“I don’t think you do,” Katya repeats plainly, her eyes suddenly emptier than Trixie’s ever seen them. She’s gripping the table behind her so hard that her knuckles have gone white - gathering all her resolve because she’s sure she’ll crumble if she lets go for a second.

“Who are you to tell me what I feel?”

“You don’t.”

“Just because you’ve decided you can’t accept it.” Trixie’s indignant now, she wants to scream and shout and yell, but most of all - she just wants to understand.

“You don’t love me,” Katya says again. “You say you do, but you can’t. This hasn’t meant anything to me.” It’s a lie. She watches Trixie crumble and then pick herself back up again all in the space of a few seconds.

“You know what, you can go fuck yourself.” She throws it out there and watches it detonate - the harshest words she’s ever said to Katya.

She turns to leave, inhaling deeply to try and keep the tears in her eyes instead of streaming down her face where they want to be.

“Dyke,” she mutters as the door slams.

She leaves, and Katya finally falls apart.

look at this godforsaken mess that you made me you showed me colours you know i can’t see with anyone else

#rpdr fanfiction #trixya #trixie mattel #katya zamolodchikova #bendelacreme #dela x trixie #miz cracker #coming of age #childhood best friends #fluff #angst #friends to lovers #i swear there is a happy ending #folklore #just like a folk song #pinkgrapefruit #concrit welcome #tw use of dyke

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booksbookssomemoviesandbooks · 4 years ago

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Book Recs

Hello! so for my first post, I'll recommend some books, so y'all can have a closer look at some fandoms I'll post about! enjoy!!

Harry Potter By J.K. Rowling is definitely an interesting, well-written series! there are 7 books however, and the books get bigger as the series progresses. It's sometimes difficult to know the exact order, so I'll list it below:

Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone (Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone)

Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets

Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban

Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

Although the movies are great, they don't include all the amazing details, as with all movies. A short summary:

Harry Potter, a young boy who’s being constantly abused by his uncle Vernon and aunt Petunia, gets a peculiar letter from the magical school of Hogwarts, where he spends most of his time, becoming his home.

Quotes:

“To the well-organized mind, death is but the next great adventure." ― Albus Dumbledore

“You’re just as sane as I am" - Luna Lovegood

“Mischief managed" - Fred and George Weasley

It is Important to know that j*r is a huge transphobe, along with other things, and is currently being erased by the fandom itself.

Percy Jackson and the Olympians, along with the other series by Rick Riordan, is a definite must-read. With each book, you can really notice the character developments and a lot more! There is loads of representation in this one, with lgbtqia+ characters, black characters, Muslim characters and more. It's very action-packed and addicting, sucking you into the magnificent world of Half-Bloods and Demigods within the first page. The first series consists of 5 books, in the following order:

Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief

Percy Jackson and the Sea of Monsters

Percy Jackson and the Titan's Curse

Percy Jackson and the Battle of The Labyrinth

Percy Jackson and the Last Olympian

THE MOVIES ARE TRASH SO I DEFINITELY DO NOT RECOMMEND WATCHING THEM BEFORE READING THE BOOKS!!! There were many changes and the movies aren't nearly as good as the books. A short summary:

Percy Jackson, a 12 year-old who lives with his mother, Sally, and step-father, Gabe, attends the private boarding school Yancy Academy. While on a school trip, his teacher, Mrs. Dodds, turns into a fury and attacks him. This, in turn, triggers a series of other problems and adventures.

Quotes:

“If my life is going to mean anything, I have to live it myself.” - Percy Jackson

“With great power, comes great need to nap. Wake me up later." - Nico Di Angelo

“Even strength has to bow down to wisdom sometimes." - Annabeth Chase

The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins is one of my most recommended series! With everything it deals with, from the Capitol to the districts to the champions, the books are amazing!

Order:

The Hunger Games

Catching Fire

Mockingjay

Starring the movies is the amazing Jennifer Lawrence, but with all books, the movies have slight differences, although I definitely recommend watching them when you're done with the books.

A Short Summary:

In what was once North America, the Capitol of Panem maintains its hold on its 12 districts by forcing them each to select a boy and a girl, called Tributes, to compete in a nationally televised event called the Hunger Games. Every citizen must watch as the youths fight to the death until only one remains. District 12 Tribute Katniss Everdeen has little to rely on, other than her hunting skills and sharp instincts, in an arena where she must weigh survival against love.

(FILM SYNOPSIS)

Quotes:

"May the odds be ever in your favor." - Effie Trinket

"Fire is catching, and if we burn, you burn with us!" - Katniss Everdeen

“Hope is the only thing stronger than fear.” - President Snow

Divergent is another book with a huge fandom, and rightfully so. This book is amazing, and you honestly can't live without having read it!

Order:

Divergent

Insurgent

Allegiant

Surprisingly, I haven't watched the movies yet, but I hear that they aren’t that bad, so you should give them a go!

Summary:

In a world run by fictional classes known as factions, children who reach the age of 16 begin to choose which factions they wish to call home for the rest of their lives. Each faction comes with its own ups and downs, so it's definitely a hard choice, especially for someone as unique as Beatrice.

Quotes:

“Becoming fearless isn't the point. That's impossible. It's learning how to control your fear, and how to be free from it“ - Four

“We believe in ordinary acts of bravery, in the courage that drives one person to stand up for another.” - Dauntless Motto

"We are not the same. But we are, somehow, one." - Tris

You might have heard of this series, and it's really addictive, trust me! The Mortal Instruments is one of the most astonishing books I've ever read, and it's most definitely my go-to when recommending a book series!

Order:

City of Bones

City of Ashes

City of Glass

City of Fallen Angels

City of Lost Souls

City of Heavenly Fire

Again, (I know this is rather disappointing) I haven't watched the movies, but do check them out!

Summary:

Clary Fray's search for her missing mother leads her into an alternate New York called Downworld, filled with mysterious faeries, hard-partying warlocks, not-what-they-seem vampires, an army of werewolves, and the demons who want to destroy it all.

via: https://shadowhunters.com/shadowhunters-novels/the-mortal-instruments/#:~:text=Clary%20Fray's%20search%20for%20her,want%20to%20destroy%20it%20all.

Quotes:

“Heroes aren't always the ones who win. They're the ones who lose, sometimes. But they keep fighting, they keep coming back. They don't give up. That's what makes them heroes.” - Clary Fairchild

“If I cannot move Heaven, I will raise Hell.” - Sebastion Morgenstern

“The descent into Hell is easy.” - Motto of the Nephilim

Gay. What more needs to be said?

SADLY, there isn't a movie yet, but I think they're working on one, or sure though

Summary:

Set in a world in which a female Democrat from Texas wins the presidency in 2016, Red, White & Royal Blue chronicles the illicit romance between the president's son, Georgetown senior Alex Claremont-Diaz (Dad is a Mexican-American senator), and Prince Henry of Wales, his childhood nemesis.

Via: https://www.wsj.com/articles/red-white-royal-blue-book-summer-beach-read-11565285001#:~:text=Set%20in%20a%20world%20in,of%20Wales%2C%20his%20childhood%20nemesis.

Also, classic enemies-friends-lovers arc and honestly it's amazing

Quotes:

“As your mother, I can appreciate that maybe this isn’t your fault, but as the president, all I want is to have the CIA fake your death and ride the dead-kid sympathy into a second term.” - Ellen Claremont

" 'that’s because you can’t hear all the menacing gobbling.' 'Yes, famously the most sinister of all animal sounds, the gobble.' " - Harry and Alex

"History, huh? Bet we could make some." - Alex

I’m sure you've heard at least a little bit about this book. While not nearly as famous as ones mentioned above, it's still just as good, of not better. I'd say this book is one of my favorites, to be honest. It speaks about a lot of topics people usually find disturbing, and it makes me so happy that it's there, it's written, it's amazing. PTSD, coming out issues, abusive relationships and more, this book is truly awesome.

TRIGGER WARNING

Summary:

A young boy named Charlie usually dissociates, and pushes other people away. He’s afraid of beginning high school, until he meets two other students who show him how bizarre and amazing the world is.

Quotes:

“And in that moment, I swear we were infinite” - Charlie

“We accept the love we think we deserve” - Mr. Anderson

“You can't just sit there and put everybody's lives ahead of yours and think that counts as love" - Sam

This book is honestly pro-feminist and I think that's much more than enough

Summary:

Kaur explores the true impact of sexual abuse and harassment, as well as the difficulties of immigrating, being a female, and depression.

It's also a poem

TRIGGER WARNING

Quotes:

“what is stronger

than the human heart

which shatters over and over

and still lives”

“you do not just wake up and become the butterfly

- growth is a process”

“on the last day of love

my heart cracked inside my body"

This book isn't very well-known, which really sucks because I really love how it speaks about the consequences of WWII from the German point of view. And about the Germans who did not believe in Hitler's ways. It's also based on a real story, and it's so cool

Summary:

A nurse working in a nursing home meets a peculiar old lady who decides to tell her her story when she meets the nurse's younger son, Karl, who reminded her of her brother. Lizzie (the old lady) speaks about life in Dresden before the war, and even after it. She also tells them the story about the strange, magnificent elephant in her garden.

Quotes:

“That was the only way of keeping our hopes alive, by looking beyond all we were seeing around us, and the shadow of disaster that hung over us.” -

“I think I have always had a strong sense of justice, of fair play, of what is right and what is wrong.” -

“Our home should be an oasis of peace and harmony for us in a troubled world.” - Lizzie (Quoting Papi)

10.

This book is pro-blm and it's ahead of its time (by like 2 years but still).

Summary:

Sixteen-year-old Starr Carter moves between two worlds: the poor neighborhood where she lives and the fancy suburban prep school she attends. The uneasy balance between these worlds is shattered when Starr witnesses the fatal shooting of her childhood best friend Khalil at the hands of a police officer. via: https://socialjusticebooks.org/the-hate-u-give/#:~:text=Sixteen%2Dyear%2Dold%20Starr%20Carter,hands%20of%20a%20police%20officer.

Quotes:

“Sometimes you can do everything right and things will still go wrong. The key is to never stop doing right.” - Lisa

“Daddy once told me there’s a rage passed down to every black man from his ancestors, born the moment they couldn’t stop the slave masters from hurting their families. Daddy also said there’s nothing more dangerous than when that rage is activated.” - Starr

“Everybody wants to talk about how Khalil died,” I say. “But this isn’t about how Khalil died. It’s about the fact that he lived. His life mattered. Khalil lived!” I look at the cops again. “You hear me? Khalil lived!” - Starr

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pochapal · 9 months ago

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umineko opening live reaction post

due to spoiler avoidance this is now only happening after i'm already like two thirds done with episode one BUT thanks to the magic of trusted followers giving me beautiful spoiler free links (everybody say thank you to @coolstuffiseverywhere) i can now Bear Witness:

immediately noticing from the first three seconds that this is NOT the same opening/song i'm used to skipping. umineko project starts with a shot of i think a record being played?? and then i don't know the rest

this is a very hype-building type song for sure lmao

hi beatrice

the music is very much giving getting turnt at the medieval fiefdom. i'm kind of living for it????

is this what the og version's backgrounds looked like? very dreamlike water painting quality to them

SHE!!!! SQUISHY MARIA!!!!! I HOPE YOU ARE DOING WELL AND ONLY GETTING GOOD THINGS IN THIS WORLD!!!

a shadow falling over maria....how prescient

squishy battler......nobody understands how badly i need to put this boy in a microwave

suuuuper interesting that our first glimpse of george is fogged-glasses Adultsona george before the mask lifts and we see a friendlier face

clock striking twelve + the overlay of the first twilight's sacrificial/freedom magic circle + natsuhi in the corner....much to consider

weird pulsating heartbeat effect over what i think is the ushiromiya eagle? the symbol as the rotten heart pumping the poisoned lifeblood throughout the story perhaps?

failsibling void....mimicking the dining room's seating hierarchy?

them!!!! shannon!!!!! kanon!!!!!!!! of course they're presented as part of the Sus People slideshow but that's okay because neither of them ever committed a single crime ever <3

the failsiblings have Become The Joker

more seriously thinking about the comedy mask presentation here....multiple lies and multiple farces define the ushiromiya siblings so this is extremely apt

kinzo => blood splatter => the epitaph (?) is a Very Leading sequence of images. encouraging certain audience associations from the very start.

the image effect here is really making the mansion's windows look like a stained glass relief. evocative of church imagery. thinking about this in correlation with the floating topic of christianity. of the recurring motif of faith and the demonic. of the gospel house. rokkenjima as a corrupt altar.

it would be false advertising to call you game "when they cry" and not include anyone crying in your opening

uhhhhh that's. that's. blood. on maria's sprite there. a bloody maria besides beatrice. symbolically a representation of maria's use as a pawn in the slaughter or foreshadowing some horrible thing that hasn't happened yet? hope it's the former because Maria Covered In Blood is incredibly something i don't need to think about lol.

a.....bottle? wine bottle on the beach? with. is that paper in there? a message in a bottle? really conspicuous image when compared to the western style ornate envelopes that have otherwise been the defining method of written communication in the story. i can think of a couple of things a message in a bottle could refer to/be used for as fits both the witch narrative and the epitaph puzzle.

seagull sighting!!!! after so very very long the titular umineko reveals itself

so that was the whole opening! first thought is the song is an absolute banger and i WILL be extracting an mp3 file from this video because even listening to it a couple of times is super pumping me up to want to read umineko right now lol.

second thing is that i am very interested in the sequence of images/events portrayed in the latter half the opening. the first part clearly maps onto the failsiblings argument and kinzo's demon's roulette and the clock striking midnight ushering in the killing, feeding then into everyone being upset and arguing. but then we get a bloody maria by the portrait, a message in a bottle on a calm beach and an image of a seagull flying under blue skies. some kind of symbolic representation of how episode 1's gonna end? something Bad goes down with maria and the storm breaks and we get the final word via a message in a bottle and then the seagulls cry?

this is almost certainly something that will make an extreme amount of sense after the fact but mostly right now i'm instilled with a deep anxiety for maria. there were a lot of ominous shots of her in this opening. i worry.

but yeah!! glad to have finally seen this!

#umineko liveblog #more delicious imagery and symbolism to chew on....umineko is the gift that keeps on giving forever

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confessionsofaloudmouth · 4 years ago

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Red Queen by Victoria Aveyard; a blog post by Chelbey Trump

Happy Sunday, everyone! I’m generally going to be posting on Sundays because it gives me all of the weekend to write them. Also, you’ll catch on to the structures of these posts as we go.

This week, I am going to be discussing the novel Red Queen by Victoria Aveyard. Published in 2015v by Simon and Schuster, the novel was on the New York Time’s Bestsellers list. (In the future, I would like to write a blog post about that particular achievement because, let’s face it, almost every book has been on it.)

Characters:

Mare Barrow; A 17 year-old pitpocketer, living in the slummiest part of a country, with a younger sibling who has potential for their life, parents who are loyal to-said country even though they’re given the short end of the stick, and a male best friend who is, undoubtedly, in love with her. Come on down, Katniss Everdeen! Oh, sorry, I meant Beatrice Prior. America Singer? Oh, right this novel is uniquely science-fiction, even though it follows all of the rules of a dystopian-fiction series. Ehem: I hate this character. Her arch, though not necessary to the forward motion of the story, was lost completely by a million different subplots and, even, the main plot. I like the idea that, in the midst of becoming the face of the rebellion, she became less of an individual person and more of a loyal person to her people. That being said, she was incredibly selfish, with her pity-part-for-one attitude simply because she was born into the Stilts. She took for granted her sister’s opportunity to provide for their family by dragging into a scheme which destroyed her life. Did she save her by acting the part of princess? Yes, but, c’mon: It was either marry Maven or be killed. I hope that she loses this attitude within the next couple books because;

Cal Tiberias; What a hunk! Charming, self-less, sensible, and a future-king? Cal was a strong character, although it could be said that he was weak due to his loyalty to his father which was conditioned inside his brain from a young age. He turned his back on the lower part of his people to stay true to the upper, wealthy, ‘better’ half. He deserved better than this, after showing traits that he was, well, better than this! I understand it worked for the plot line, but how juicy would it have been to see Cal stand up to his father? I loved how passionate he was, though. Mare thought he didn’t care about the divide, but he was noble in saying he didn’t want violence to be what closed said-divide. He was willing to put his men on the same level as the Red soldiers, including himself, to fight the war. That’s hot. In the end, when he defended Mare even though she had offended him, I fell more in love with his character. He had stayed true to himself- or who he was meant to be- instead of a stupid girl, but when they turned their backs on him, he was ready to die with honor alongside that dumb female (synonyms!) If Cal was still the general, then I’d say:

Maven Tiberias; If Cal is a hunk, Maven is that nerdy, attractive guy. He was charming from start to finish even though he was, ya know, the ‘bad’ guy. It was hard to believe him even as the bad guy, however, because he only 17 and played Mare like a game of Chess. It’s understandable that he had, like Cal, been conditioned to love his mother and her cause for all of his life, that the king and Cal were enemies, that Mare could never possibly love him. But, Aveyard literally threw us twenty pages from the end of the novel. It felt rushed, uncomfortable and, well, forced. Overall, I still love his character and I’m excited to see him as a king in the next three books.

Queen Elara and King Tiberias; The. Best. Female. Character. What a literal queen! She didn’t care about anyone’s feeling, had powers which made her stronger than pretty much everyone, and waited so long to let her husband’s head roll so she and her son could rule. That’s amazing! I loved her smug attitude which was revolutionary because she was still a lady. She chided Mare for not acting like a said-lady and did so herself while still manipulating everyone and anyone. We dont see enough strong female characters who are still very much feminine, and we deserve to. Now, for the king: Off with his head! I’m so glad he’s dead because I dont think I could have stood another second of his toxic masculinity. That’s all I’ll say about that.

Ruth, Gisa, and Daniel Marrow; I wish we could have a family which is matriarchal. Too many books rely on normal societorial standards fo household and I’m slightly over it. I understand that in a normal kingdom, men, like Daniel, were the war hero’s, honorably discharged, wise, older, and the most-looked up to in the family. But, c’mon, Mare could literally manipulate electricity and her father couldn’t have made dinner? Her mother was too sweet and quiet and her father too quiet and judgmental. It was too basic and boring. However, I feel awful for Gisa: She absolutely deserved so much more than what she was given by Mare’s horrible decisions.

Honorable Mentions; Kilorn was just so annoying, trying to be masculine yet show his affection to Mare. Get over her, bud, she’s fighting a revolution! Evangeline was annoying, yet so, so satisfying to read about. She was exactly like Queen Elara with all the overwhelming traits of King Tiberias. Lucas, I felt, could have been used a lot more sufficiently than he was. Julian, too, was lost in the fast-paced motion of the novel. Overall, the relationships everyone formed with one another were not illustrated well through the novel. I refuse to believe Mare was falling for Maven, or Cal for Mare, or that Julian truly cared about Mare as much as he said he did because I saw no build up of that love.

Settings:

What Aveyard lacks in characters, she makes up for in description. Although sometimes it felt like she was going overboard with her language usage, fo rate majority of the time, I could see exactly what she was discussing. Her most creative ideas for setting were the forest which was able to prevent pollution from Gray Town, the usage of The Capital River running through the entire kingdom, and the bridge separating Archean and the Silver residencies.

Plot Lines:

Reds vs. Silvers; I hate and love the idea of the high-class citizens having silver-flushed skin and literally silver blood. It took the first half of the book for my mind to comprehend the distinction because I was too focused on hating Mare Barrow (just kidding!) I loved the moment when Evangeline dug her nails into Mare’s arm in order to draw red blood so that her identity would be revealed. But, I hated that there was no explanation as to why there was separation between the two classes.

The Love Triangle (Quartet?); How grossed out would you be if your brother was engaged to the girl you just kissed and made-out with her on a regular basis? Well, put yourself into Cal’s shoes and see you feel. I knew from the moment Cal pretended to be a Red citizen that he was the love interest for Mare- not that she didn’t end up having two others. The personification of his body heat connected to the feelings Mare would have for him, and that was interesting to read about. However, Maven had to be thrown into the mix because he was engaged to her for literal marketing reasons. I shipped Maven and Mare so hard, but Maven apparently did not. I wouldn’t call it a love quartet because we all know Evangeline didn’t actually love Cal.

Brother vs. Brother; The idea of Cal and his father vs. Maven and his mother reminded me of Reign and the relationship between Francis, Queen Elizabeth, Henry and Sebastian. As a fan of that show, I loved this power struggle. The idea of Cal being the OG son and Maven his half-brother showed that his blood did run deep with the Tiberias’. It allowed for him to feel disconnected and to want to follow his mother’s lead to power.

Symbolism and Themes; Let’s be honest here: There were none. Besides the fact that the division between the Reds and Silvers could stand for racism in any and all societies, the novel itself lacked depth. You shouldn’t look to this novel for guidance or meaning. Rather, it is a quick, cute read. Mare’s earrings stood fo her brothers, and eventually Kiloran, but that was literally given to us within the first five chapters. Most of the themes lied along the man vs. nature due to the issue of biological desterminism, and man vs. man for the revolution.

Dream Cast:

Jaz Sinclair as Mare Barrow

Charles Melton as Cal Tiberias

Tati Gabrielle as Evangeline

Jaeden Martell as Maven Calore

Melora Hardin as Queen Elara

I know, I know, this is not everyone. But, these are the only characters I truly felt needed to be played by specific people. And, yes, some are highly debatable, such as Melora because of her comedic timing, but I think these actors could play these characters well.

Quote Corner:

“The truth is what I make it. I could set this world on fire and call it rain.”

“Flame and shadow. One cannot exist without the other.”

“Words can lie. See beyond them.”

(Victoria Aveyard is a wordsmith. What she lacks in character and book depth she makes up for in language and description.)

Overall Rating: 3.75/5

I know I bashed the book a lot, but it was a pretty easy and cute read. I am going to read the sequel because I am very invested in Maven as character and would like to see what else Aveyard has in store. She took ideas from dystopian novels which were all familiar with and put her own unique twist on them, and I admire that.

Thank you for reading this week’s blog post. Next Sunday I will be discussing, “The Half of It.” Please like, follow, and reblog my posts to help get me out there. Happy Memorial Day Weekend!

#book and literature #literature #analysis #character analysis #red queen #victoria aveyard #mare barrow #maven calore #king maven #book review #book analysis #science fiction #dystopian #the hunger games #writer #free write #blogger #blog post

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juliandev0rak · 4 years ago

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Green tea, sky, violet, fuchsia, oatmeal and shadow for the wonderful Beatrice?

Thank you for the ask @leechobsessed 🥺

Green tea - Does Tea exist in your world? If so do you like it, and which kind is your favorite?

Beatrice loooves tea. She acquired a taste for it while living with Asra so she finds it really comforting, especially when it’s cold out. It’s also an easy way to get a potion down if you’re having trouble sleeping or have a cold. Her favorite tea is vanilla cinnamon with lots of milk and sugar in it, warm and comforting. She basically only likes sweet drinks but she can stand a bit of bitterness on occasion in a nice green tea.

Sky - What is your favorite time of the day?

Her favorite time of day is twilight, when she can come home from working at the shop and relax at home with Julian. She loves lazy evenings cooking (and probably burning) dinner with him and drinking too much wine for a weeknight.

Violet - What is your ideal date?

As long as it’s time spent with Julian she’ll be happy. She isn’t one for super fancy dates, she’d much rather have a picnic or go see a play at the community theater. Her favorite date she’s had with Julian was when they snuck into the palace library after dark and read snippets of their favorite books to each other like the dramatic nerds they are. They also snuck in dinner and Beatrice might’ve gotten so drunk she set a book on fire...

Fuchsia - Are you a generally playful or goofy person? Who or what makes you feel playful or goofy?

She’s really only goofy under a few conditions:

She’s drunk

She’s had too much coffee

She’s extremely tired

But she can get goofy around anyone she’s close to at times. She and Asra have a ton of inside jokes that make her act like an absolute goof, when she and Portia get drunk together they also act like fools, and of course around Julian she has her guard down and can definitely be goofy

Oatmeal - What is your usual breakfast?

It’s exactly the name of this question lol, she likes oatmeal for every-day breakfasts because its quick (and she’s not a morning person), it’s filling, and it's comforting. As with everything she eats, she likes it sweet so she puts heaps of brown sugar into her oatmeal. She usually has a cup of coffee or two, also with heaps of cream and sugar.

Shadow - What is your biggest regret?

She doesn’t have too many regrets that she can remember, but her biggest regret is her relationship with her older sister Freya. They didn’t have the greatest childhood but they had each other until Freya left home to travel, leaving Beatrice behind. Freya was always jealous that Beatrice could do magic and Beatrice never really recovered from the betrayal of her sister leaving her to fend for herself. They had a chance to fix things at their Aunt’s funeral when they saw each other for the first time in years, but instead tensions rose when Freya learned that their Aunt gave Beatrice the shop in her will. Things got so heated that it came to physical violence and Asra had to literally pull Beatrice away so she wouldn’t accidentally hurt anyone or set something on fire. A few years after, the plague hit and Beatrice lost all of her memories including the knowledge that she had a sister. After the events of the story, Freya unexpectedly shows up at the masquerade and they get another chance to make up (hopefully for good this time!)

#sorry this got so long lol #thank you for the ask!!!!#ask beatrice #asks #apprentice beatrice #my ocs

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aseriesofhyperfixation · 5 years ago

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“Where are you Dragonfly?” Olaf called out, laughing. Beatrice crept slowly up behind him, leaping from where she was crouched on the stair railing and slamming into him hard, the two collapsing to the ground in a pile of giggles, “I’m right here, silly!” “Hey!” Olaf chuckled, spinning around and pinning her to the floor, “Respect your elders!” Shaking her head, Beatrice kicked her legs up and flipped them over, “Stop calling yourself my elder! I’m turning nine in a week and a half.” “And I turned nine three weeks ago, which makes me your elder!” Olaf stood up, extending a hand to her. “Come on Firefly,” Beatrice jumped up beside him, tugging him along behind her, "I’m gonna get in trouble if I don’t get some piano practice in today.” “Aren’t we supposed to be practicing our scene for the play? That’s why we’re here,” He gestured around the theatre. She shrugged, “Well we’re already not practicing that, and you know that we’ll have it all down anyway. We always do. Besides,” She batted her eyelashes at him, “You’re the best piano player I know. Come help me.” “Flattery will get you everywhere,” Olaf followed with a grin, “It’s why we’re best friends.” “Who says we’re best friends?” Beatrice teased, hopping up onto the stair railing and balancing carefully. Olaf stared up at her, wrapping his arms over his stomach, and twisting the little firefly ring that she had made him, “Bea?” “I’m just kidding,” She jumped back down, pulling him close to her, “You know that you’re my best friend.” And as the children made their way to the piano, Olaf wrapped an arm around her and looked at her earnestly, trying to keep his tone light, “Do you think that we’ll be best friends forever?” Beatrice continued to plunk at the piano keys with one hand, but she entangled the other hand with his, squeezing tightly, “I know we will.”

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

“Dragonfly, Dragonfly, come in Dragonfly,” Olaf was speaking into his wrist, using his watch as a pretend spy communicator. “Shh,” Beatrice appeared by his side, whispering to her, and then she lifted her own wrist to use as her own spy communicator, “Here, Firefly, what’s your detail?” He looked around suspiciously and then leaned towards her, “Snake Boy and Gay Baby are near the right position for us to trap them.” Beatrice rolled her eyes, “Those aren’t their code names.” “They are for me,” Olaf chuckled, “Anyway, that’s not the point! Now,do you think you can lead them to the right spot without getting caught?” “Of course I can! Who do you think you’re talking to?” Beatrice scoffed, flipping her hair over her shoulder, “Who’s idea was it to sneak them into the theatre to play spies in the first place? I’m a genius, you know that.” “You’re like twelve.” “I’m fourteen, you bitch!” She smacked him hard on the arm, but laughed and dropped her voice, remembering that she had to be quiet, “You know that we’re the same age.” Olaf shrugged, “We all know that I’m not the smart one,” And then he brushed back the strands of hair that had fallen back into her face, “Actually, fourteen suits you. Seems like a nice age for you to be. But you should try tying your hair up, like B & L do. It must make you half blind.” Beatrice laughed, “Doesn’t really seem like my thing. I only tie it up for shows. But you’re right, I should find a way to keep it out of my face a little better. Maybe I should cut it short.” “But then what can I drag you around with?” Olaf gave her hair a playful tug, “No, actually, I’m sure that would look nice. You always look nice, Bea.” Beatrice smirked, “But not as nice as K, right?” “That doesn’t count,” Olaf tried to ignore the blush that was beginning to spread over his features, “There’s a huge difference between you looking nice and K looking nice.” “Why?” “Because K is a girl! And you’re, uh,” He broke off, shrinking under her glare, “You’re Beatrice! I know you’re a girl, I get it, but you’re not a girl girl like Kit is. You’re my best friend. You shoved my face into a mud pit once because I took a grape without asking. I broke your nose on accident when we were supposed to do a stage kiss because I got too nervous and smacked you. You’re not, I mean, it’s not the-” “I know,” Beatrice laughed, giving him a quick peck on the cheek, “I get it, you’ve got a crush, and I’m not gonna stop teasing you about it, because that’s a best friend’s job. Now, I’m going to lead them to the piano, and you get ready to slam it shut.” Their mission of trapping their friends in the piano actually went fairly well, the two children trying their absolute hardest to win this game of spies. The issue? Beatrice got locked inside the piano along with them. Olaf had slammed the piano shut, locking it, and turned to high five his teammate, “Beatrice? Where are you?” “Goddammit,” A muffled voice complained, “They pulled me in with them!” Cackling, Olaf sunk to the ground, “Are you serious? Oh my god!” “Does this mean we win too?” M asked, his voice also muffled. “No,” B calmly tapped on the piano, wondering if he could play from the inside, “We only have one member of their team, and they’ve got too members of us. And anyway, I don’t think someone really counts as a hostage if they’re stranded along with the people that claim to be their captors.” “Who cares?” Beatrice knocked hard on the lid of the piano, “Let us out, you big Firefly dummy! God, we’re so bad at taking hostages.” “I’ll just have to practice abducting people,” Olaf laughed some more, “I’ll let you out in a minute, but first, I have got to take a picture of this.” “I want a copy!” M called out.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

“Hey Dragonfly,” Olaf appeared, out of the shadows, next to Beatrice, “How are you?” “I’m pretty good,” Beatrice swept her hair back, “But how are you? What’s going on? Is everything okay?” “Everything’s great,” Olaf broke out in a grin, wanting to grab her and hug her as tightly as possible, but instead he pulled the box of darts out from behind his back and handed it to her, “You wanna play?” She beamed, accepting them and looking gleefully into the box, “God, I’ve missed this place, missed this stage. Do you remember how excited we were when they put the dart board backstage? Do you remember how much time we spent playing here?” “I do,” He took one of the darts himself, weighing it in his hands for a moment before throwing it at the board, veering just to the left of a bullseye, “That’s why I wanted to be here, to ask you what I have to ask you.” Beatrice threw one herself, hitting the bullseye easily and smiling at the low and appreciative whistle that Olaf gave her, going quickly to retrieve the darts they’d thrown, “And what, exactly, is it that you have to ask me?”

“Well,” He bounced on the balls of his feet, and then paused, “Actually, I have a gift for you first,” He reached into his back pocket and pulled out a smaller box, handing it to her gently. She examined the box, reading the scrawls of silly things they’d said to each other over the years that he had written on the sides, and she opened it to see the most beautiful dart she had ever laid eyes on. It was small, the end incredibly sharp, but it was also inlaid with gems, and fine wings branches out from either side. “It’s a dragonfly,” She breathed, running her fingers over it carefully. “Check this out,” Olaf took it from her gently and pressed one of the gems that sat in the middle of the wings, and as he pushed it, the wings-which were in an up position-flapped downwards, and the head of the dart withdrew inwards, the nib of a pen coming out in its place, “Isn’t that awesome? It’s supposed to be a play on the saying ‘The pen is mightier than the sword,’ because, y’know, it’s kinda both. I mean I know a dart and a sword aren’t the same thing, but it’s still just-“ “I love it,” Beatrice cut off his rambling, looking up at him with a gleam in her eyes, “I love it so much. Thank you, O. Firefly. Thank you.” Olaf puffed his chest out proudly, “Well, y’know, just doing what has to be done. Now,” He softened again, his face growing anxious once more, “Listen, Beatrice, K and I have been together for a long time, and I just, I really love her, so much more than I thought you could really be in love with a person. So I asked her to marry me.” Beatrice covered her mouth with her hands, feeling herself start to tear up at the thought of two of her favorite people in the world getting married, “That’s so amazing! Oh, I’m so proud of you!” “Thank you,” He shook his head a little, chuckling, “I’m still having trouble believing that we’re really engaged. But that beings me to my question. Beatrice Baudelaire,” He dropped to one knee, holding out the tiny firefly ring that she had given him when he had turned nine, her promise that they’d be friends forever, that he now wore on a necklace chain around his neck as it had grown too small for his fingers, “Will you be my best man?” Almost shrieking, she took the ring from his hand and looped its string around her neck happily, “Of course I will! I can’t believe this, I mean,” She paused to giggle, “I’m not even a man, but somehow I’m still the best one! Why didn’t you ask J?” Olaf shrugged, pulling her into a tight hug, “I love J, you know that, but he’s not my best friend in the world. Not like you. And besides, K already best me to the punch. She asked him to give her away. Pressing the gem on her new dart pen carefully, Beatrice threw the dragonfly and watched as it seemed to fly across the room to the board, “Well, that sucks for him. I’ll be the best best man who ever was.” “God, you’re so good at that,” Olaf muttered as he watched the dart hit squarely on the bullseye, “Anyway, I know you will. And just so you know, you don’t have to wear a suit or anything, just because you’re the best man. I mean, you can if you want, you can wear anything you want. I just want you to know there’s no obligations.” “What If I want to wear dragonfly wings?” Beatrice’s eyes sparkled, “Dragonfly wings that really fly.” “I’d love that,” Olaf turned and examined the poster behind them, “Hey, have you seen this?” “What is it?” He peeled the audition announcement off the wall and handed it to her, “There are auditions for La Forza Del Destino this weekend. You should audition! We never get to see each other anymore, and we haven’t been able to be in this theatre in forever. I would love to come watch you in it.” “You should audition too!” Beatrice showed him the audition slots open, “We could go back to back.” “I’d love to, but that may have to wait for the next play. I need to avoid as much bad luck as I can until after I get married,” He smiled warmly at her, “But I’d be right there, every night, cheering you on. I bet my parents would come too, you know they adore you. You really should audition.” Beatrice wrapped herself into a hug with her best friend, trying to ignore the great sense of sadness and doom that was flooding through her, “You know what? Maybe I will.”

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bee-the-runaway · 4 years ago

Text

Intro Template

HOLD! WHO GOES THERE? WHY, IS THAT [Beatrice “Bea” Stoneward] THE [princess] OF [House Stoneward]? THEY DO LOOK [naive] FOR A [woman] OF [21] YEARS. DON’T THEY CALL [her] THE [kind AND generous]? I’VE HEARD THEY’RE ALSO [anxious AND emotional] THOUGH. DON’T TAKE MY WORD FOR IT BUT THEY DO LOOK AN AWFUL LOT LIKE [Lili Reinhart].

Basic Info

NAME: Beatrice “Bea” Stoneward

PRONUNCIATION: Bee-a-triss Stone-ward

TITLE (IF THEY HAVE ONE, OCCUPATION IF NOT): Dragon Rider of the Dragon’s Order.

AGE: 21

PLACE OF ORIGIN: Glasswater Palace

FAMILY MEMBERS: Josefin Stoneward, Adaline Stoneward, Three other older brothers.

Physical Description

HEIGHT: 5’5”

HAIIR COLOR: Blonde

EYE COLOR: Blueish Green

GENDER: Female

BUILD: Somewhat curvy

DISTINGUISHING FEATURES? (SCARS, TATTOOS, PIERCINGS): pierced earlobes.

ANY HEALTH RELATED ISSUES?: Bea has an intense degree of anxiety which affects her in a variety of ways.

Personality

Beatrice would describe herself as a coward, overly emotional and generally quite weak. She is, fundamentally pretty self loathing which has only really gotten worse since she’d been on her own. She is tormented by her fear and shame, she ran away from home because she was scared to fight in the military, because she saw her death in the lights. Despite having a power that could be used to help her people she ran and kept it hidden, afraid of what kind of responsibility would be levelled on her. Bea gets caught up in the what ifs of any situation and her escape from her home is no exception. The young lady is constantly thinking and worrying about being a runaway, mostly about how she’s made things difficult for people and not nearly enough out how she’s endangered herself.

Bea lives a very solitary life which was hard for her to adjust to, being used to having the comforts of a princess. She still finds life in her little cottage in the woods very difficult but she is committed to making it work. In the Northland forest, she’s faced hard winters and has cried oceans of tears but she’s also laughed and has experienced a calm peace few ever get to. Away from the pressures of the castle her Photokenisis had gotten stronger and her real world application of farming and the natural world has gotten better as well. Truthfully, Bea is a lot stronger than she gives herself credit for and when she decides to help someone who winds up at her home she will not rest until she either fails or succeeds.

Beatrice is dreamy, non confrontational with a great deal of potential. She has much she believes she needs to redeem herself for and is deeply concerned for the wellbeing of others.

Additional Info

I would like to see her status as a missing princess be revealed and/or exploited. She ran away to avoid danger so it seems appropriate that decision land her in heaps of it. Her life being put in jeopardy would be her greatest fear, probably because of the deep reverence she has for all life. As the youngest princess she’s always felt like an extra, someone more unimportant and maybe that plays into her underestimating her importance to others. On the flip side, it would be nice to see her reconnect with people from her past, to see her have to face the selfish harm she’s caused or to be confronted with the fact that people always cared for her and maybe she just was too afraid to see it.

Primarily I would like to see her working hard in her little cottage to save people’s lives. The people she meets might be traders, dragon riders, rebellion members, travellers, really anyone. Maybe people don’t need her help and are just passing through or maybe she’s trading balms and ointments for her own necessities.

As a powerful mage with a great deal of potential, another mage may try and get her to join the mageasterium. Going to school might be a good development for her.

HMU with any old idea really and I’ll probably be game for some version of it.

History

When Beatrice was a very, very young girl she was very happy. Her home was a palace and she was a princess and she felt free and powerful. She made friends, she was silly and a little adventurous. As a four or five year old she snuck off with a friend one day to climb trees. Neither was practiced at the task but they were eager to try. Up and down they both went, getting bolder and bolder until the unthinkable happened. A branch snapped and little Beatrice watched in horror as her friend fell and hit the ground with a snap and a thud. All uncomplicated happy thoughts were sucked from her, along with the air in her lungs with one strangled gasp.

The little princess rushed other friend’s side. The bone was broken and the was a lot of blood. Her stomach turned and flopped and the sun beat down on them with fervour, she sobbed and she sweat and she held her friend close. Her friend was hurt and it had all been her idea. What if her friend never got better? Did she even have the right to call them a friend after all of this? Her parents, their parents would be so angry. “Please please no!” she sobbed. She was pushed to her emotional limit and something within her cracked, like the glass of an aquarium or a tinted window, it cracked and the light spilled forth. She felt warm, calm, without thinking she placed her hands on her friends broken arm, her eyes were closed, when she opened them again, the arm was healed. The two of them sat there for minutes dumbfounded before finally agreeing never to speak of it again.

From that day on, Bea had a secret, something she carried with great reverence. She didn’t want to be sent away from home and she didn’t want to get in trouble for climbing trees. Her parents gathered that something might be wrong but truthfully, it looked more like she was becoming shyer as opposed to more fearful. She spent more time in the library, reading alone or doing things independently of her siblings. She withdrew and built for herself a world of her own because in the world everyone else lived in, she had a power she didn’t understand or want. If she could heal people, even a little, what kind of responsibility did that give her to use or not to use it? The question was too big for a little girl and she was far too afraid to ask.

The fear only grew when she was ten. Bea began to see things in the light, in sunbeams and reflections, they were visions of her in the military, swords plunged into her chest, in another she was riddled with arrows. In all of them she was surrounded by death and destruction and pain, worst of all she was made to cause it. Her military service loomed in her future, a horrible shadow. Could she ask to be exempt? No, that would only shame her siblings and her parents she was sure, despite how little she knew them by that point she was positive that she would only seem mad. She continued to read and escape as the years rolled by but she knew the books weren’t enough, she would have to escape for real.

She planned her escape for nearly a year, she roamed the palace alone, into the cellars to look for secret passage ways and she managed to find one. Beatrice packed a bag and in the middle of the night she spirited herself away. Through the tunnel she went, then it was days in the forest, hiding from her family, hiding from everyone. She was tired, sick and hungry, she wasn’t used to life without comforts and she did not quickly adjust but by some miracle managed to make it to the Northlands where she found an abandoned cottage deep in the woods.

Everything was so…perfect, finding the one room cottage when and where she did, full of dust and the bones of the previous owner. With tears in her eyes she buried those bones and cleaned what would be her new home. She hoped the previous owner had died with happiness and not loneliness as she feared she might. Days became weeks and then months and she received her first visitor, a traveler looking for a place to stay, with a burn on their hand. Bea was able to help them, as well as the next visitor and soon the word spread of the nameless woods witch with a gift for healing.

Five years have passed since she left her home for another and the wight of her past remains heavy. She lived in luxury for years and couldn’t manage the decency to stand for her people. She didn’t believe in war but she could only see her actions as selfish. As the world twists she begins to think more and more that maybe she has to do something about it…

#about #kc:intro

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unfortunate-stranger-losers · 5 years ago

Photo

All Those Things They Couldn’t Say - A Runaway Baudelaires AU

{ao3} {tumblr} {masterlist}

Chapter Thirteen - Violet is ready to snap

“And that is the telephone.” Josephine said, carefully gesturing towards an old phone at the end of the kitchen counter. “I never use it, for fear of electrocution.”

“Phones are fine, Ms Anwhistle.” Violet sighed. “I’ve taken them apart to see how they work before, I can do it again to show you.”

“Oh, no, no.” Josephine shook her head. “That’s alright.”

“I’ve read books about telephones, I could explain them to you.” Klaus said.

“No, I’d rather not.”

“Delmo.” Sunny said, which meant, “If you wish, I will bite the telephone to show you that it’s harmless.”

Josephine narrowed her eyes. “Delmo is not a word. It’s not grammatically correct whatsoever. Violet, Klaus, don’t you find grammar to be one of the most important things in life?”

“Sure.” Violet sighed. She sat at the table and said, “I’m assuming you want an explanation for our existence-”

“I’m a bit afraid to hear it, but I suppose I’ll have to, won’t I?”

“Yes.”

Josephine sighed. “Would you children like soup?”

“Hot soup would be nice, it’s very chilly.” Klaus said, sitting beside Violet and bouncing Sunny on his lap.

“Oh, no, it’s cold.” Josephine said. “I’m afraid to turn on the stove, in case it bursts into flames.”

Sunny gave her the most bewildered look she possibly could, opened and closed her mouth several times to try and find words, and finally managed to mutter, “Fuck?”

“Sunny’s a bit confused.” Klaus translated, as Josephine started pulling bowls out to dish out the soup. “I’m not sure that’s possible for most stoves.”

“Well, you never know.” Josephine’s eyes darted around.

Josephine brought them their bowls and spoons and nervously sat across from them, and Violet said, “Well, Klaus, I did the last explanation. You wanna go?”

“Not especially.”

“Sucks to be you.”

“Oh, please don’t fight…” Josephine said.

“We’re siblings, it’s our job.” Violet said. “It’s also how we cope.”

“Yeah, and we need a lot of coping.” Klaus said. “We did a bit of crying on the way over but now we gotta move the fuck on.”

“So, catch you up to speed, Bertrand and Beatrice are alive, have been on the run for about fourteen, fifteen years.” Violet said.

“Had us.” Klaus added. “And about… a few days ago? Yeah, Count Olaf found us.”

“Olaf?” Josephine jumped.

“Yeah, he’s got our parents held hostage.” Klaus nodded.

“Hideo.” Sunny said.

Violet quickly translated, “They gave us a list of safehouses to go to in case we got separated. We went to Monty but that didn’t…”

She paused, getting choked up, suddenly feeling a pang in her chest. Don’t think about it, just move on. Just move on…

“Olaf found him.” Klaus shook. “Our… our parents told us to go to you next.”

“We don’t think we’ll be found here.” Violet said unconvincingly. “We just need someplace to lay low until our parents break out.”

“Oh dear.” Josephine reached for a handkerchief to wipe her brow. “Oh dear, this is absolutely terrifying. You children must be so frightened.”

“We’re sure our parents will get out.” Violet said. “They’re very resourceful.”

“Nire,” Sunny said, which meant, “And so are we.”

“Again, we just need to lay low somewhere.” Violet paused. “Can you help us? Without calling the police.”

“Oh!” Josephine gave her a nervous smile, and reached over to pat her on the hand. “I would never call the police here.”

“Really?” Klaus looked relieved.

“Of course.” Josephine nodded. “I would have to use the phone to do that.”

The Baudelaires fell into a grimly annoyed silence, and Sunny said, “Pleh,” which meant, “Get her help.”

“But I must admit, children, I am a bit overwhelmed.” Josephine said. “This is a horribly horrifying situation. Are you quite sure you’ll be safe here?”

Violet smiled grimly, glancing around the kitchen, and then she said, “I seriously doubt Olaf will think we’re with you.”

“Well, if you think so…” Josephine paused. “I’m afraid I’m not prepared for guests.”

“We have our own food that should last about a week.” Klaus said. “And we have money to buy more.”

“Well…” Josephine paused. “I believe I do have an empty room you all can sleep in. And it may be nice to have someone in the library to study with.”

Klaus brightened. “You have a library?”

“Yes! It’s full of all the books on grammar it can hold.”

Klaus deflated. “Grammar?”

“Yes! My greatest joy in life, I believe I said? What do you think, don’t you agree?”

“Um.” Klaus gave Violet a look. “Yes.”

“I want to die.” Violet said.

She flopped onto the bed, groaning. There was a guest room with two, and they’d managed to fill a basket with blankets for Sunny to sleep in, though it seemed more likely she’d sleep on Klaus’s pillow.

“This is our safehouse?” Violet said, staring at the ceiling, trying to make sense of it all. “That woman is scared of her own shadow!”

“Well,” Klaus said carefully, “At least she’ll be scared of Olaf when he arrives and she’ll get us out of here.”

“If she doesn’t fend for herself.” Violet rolled onto her stomach, shooting her brother a look. “It’s what we would do.”

“Mother and Father appointed her a safehouse for a reason.” Klaus said, flipping open his commonplace book. “Who knows? Maybe she was braver when her husband was alive.”

“Is her husband dead?”

“Ike doesn’t seem to be here.”

“Could be on a trip.”

“I dunno. I haven’t seen anything that suggests more than one person lives here. Sunny, any thoughts?”

Sunny bit onto the edge of the pillow and shook her head, causing the pillow to fly around a bit, some stuffing flying into the air.

“Well, we can make the best of it.” Klaus said hesitantly. “We just have to hold on until our parents escape.”

“...yeah. Until they escape.” Violet said quietly. She laid down, curling up around her own pillow, and said, “What are the next safehouses again?”

Klaus flipped his commonplace book back to the first page. “After the Anwhistles? The VFD Hideout in Paltryville- remember, that’s the one father says doesn’t have much contact with main headquarters, and the volunteers positioned there would be sympathetic.”

“Yeah, they owe Mother and Father for some shit.” Violet waved her hand. “That it?”

“Prufrock Preparatory School.” Klaus read. “And… that’s it.”

“Well, hopefully they catch up to us here.” Violet said.

Sunny spat out the pillow, crawled onto Klaus’s lap, and then faced Violet. “Vee?” she asked, and Violet sighed.

“Klaus, how do we explain VFD to a toddler?”

“How did Mother and Father explain it to us?”

“I don’t know, I was eight.”

Klaus sighed. “Well, Sunny… sometimes people band together into groups. To learn the same things, or protect each other.”

“Yee.”

“And sometimes those groups can turn… bad. They convince you that if you ever leave the group bad things will happen, and then make you do dangerous things for them, or give up your money and life for them.”

“Vee?”

“Yeah, that’s VFD.” Violet said. “Mother and Father were given to the organization when they were young children, and raised there, so they didn’t know anything but serving VFD. They did… bad things, not knowing how bad they were.”

“And they tried to leave,” Klaus said, “And then people found out about the bad things, and… and Lemony was trying to clear their names…”

“So that we could stop running.” Violet sighed. “But they can’t tell anyone about VFD, because it’s very secret, and good at covering its tracks.”

“Scary.” Sunny said.

“Yeah.” Violet nodded. “But we don’t have to fear. Mother and Father will get us, and we’ll… we’ll find some other way to clear their names.”

“And avoid VFD.” Klaus said.

Sunny quietly nodded, and then nuzzled against Klaus’s chest. “Tired.”

“Go to sleep, Sunny.” he smiled and ran a hand through her hair. “We’ll be right here.”

Violet glanced at the ground, and then nodded. “Always.” She curled up on her bed, and said, “Goodnight, Klaus. Let me know if you want me to come over there.”

“Goodnight, Violet.”

He rolled over, too, cradling Sunny in his arms. Violet laid on her bed, but faced them. She waited until she heard their snores before quietly getting up, sliding her socks against the wood floor to prevent noise. She crept past her siblings, knowing they were, like her, light sleepers, so she’d have to be very quiet.

She moved into the hall, before peering through doors. Searching.

It took a while, but she finally found the library. It was a sprawling room, shaped pretty circular, with most of the walls made up of shelves. She stepped through, and her eyes locked on the far wall- a round, tall panel of glass, behind which was a rather impressive view of the lake. Violet wasn’t one for aesthetics- even if she didn’t live on the run, she didn’t see the point in caring about the appearance of something if it was functional- but even she had to admit, it looked gorgeous. She moved to the window and slid to her knees, putting a soft hand against the glass as she stared at the rushing waves, reflecting the waning moon ahead, and the sprinkle of stars surrounding.

It looked black, the lake beneath her, but she could still make out the waves, to and fro, to and fro. She remembered once, she was sitting on the beach on her father’s lap, playing with some shells she found. She asked, if she threw the shell into the water, would the waves push it back? He’d smiled and said, “Yeah. It might take a while, depending on if it sinks or floats, or how the waves are moving, or if something hits it, but it’ll be back. Could take a few seconds, could take a few years. But everything washes up eventually.”

“Everything comes back.” Violet whispered to herself, once again looking at the waves beneath her.

Then she stood and moved to the shelves, running her hand over the spines of the books, eyes narrowed. She knew what she was looking for- she knew where and how people hid things in libraries. Sure enough, halfway across the wall, there was part of the shelf indented behind the rest. She grabbed the edges and yanked, pushing it back into the wall.

Behind it, above her, was a portrait of a man Violet guessed was probably Ike. Well, added to the “dead” theory. Beneath that was a safe, which piqued her interest much more.

She knelt down, feeling around the fob and fuming a little. There’d be a thousand different combinations to try…

Well, good thing she had Klaus. And, well, if he couldn’t get it open, she could just invent something to break the door off.

She stood up, sliding the shelf back into place. Soon as Josephine was gone, she and Klaus could break into that no problem. She kept moving around the room, looking for something else suspicious. She paced from one wall to the next, scanning titles and trying to see if there was anything she could investigate now. But most of the books seemed to be about grammar, so they were probably just boring.

Then she spotted a book, a bit tilted on the shelf, that didn’t have any writing on the spine. She pulled it out, noticing that it was quite tall, and bound with a ribbon. Perhaps a scrapbook? She slipped off the ribbon and flipped it open- yes, scrapbook.

She knelt on the ground, flicking through pages. Pictures of Josephine and Ike, her fishing, skydiving… shit, wrestling lions. She did used to be cool. The photos weren’t very interesting, but she kept on, until she reached somewhere in the middle of the book, and froze.

There were photos of some of Josephine’s friends- people she didn’t recognize, for the most part. But in the center was a picture taken of three people at a picnic on the beach- maybe sixteen or seventeen years old.

She recognized her mother first, with the shape of her eyes and face, so similar to Klaus, and the waves as her hair fell over her shoulder, tied into a ponytail. Sitting cross-legged on the far left was her father, with his glasses and slight curl in his hair, and the way he smiled that looked so much like Sunny. He was sitting beside his future wife, a book on his lap, looking like he’d only just glanced up at Josephine behind the camera.

She didn’t recognize the third person beside them- a boy about their age, his face a little blurred. But he had an arm around Beatrice, and had a frown on his face, like he was very invested in a conversation that the other two thought was humorous.

It was funny. That was the same frown she got, when Klaus was annoying her. She’d seen that same look, when she glared into a mirror while something was going wrong with her latest invention.

Hmm, she must have picked up that look from one of her parents, who got it from him… that had to be Lemony Snicket, then.

Her parents must miss him a lot.

Slowly, Violet put the photos away, taking a deep breath, and tried not to think about the obvious question: without him, would they be on the run forever?

#asoue #asoue netflix #asoue au #a series of unfortunate events #runaway baudelaires au #all those things they couldn't say #mine #my fanfic #asoue fanfiction

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wokeastroke · 5 years ago

Text

A visit to the cages

He felt alive. More so than normal, yes, very much more. He practically bounced on his toes as he waltzed down the docks, up the stairs, and through the gardens of Stormwind. Any who made eye contact quickly turned away, unable to match the ferocious, fanatical, hungry look in his eyes. It was late, the good folk were making their way to home and to bed.

But he was not a good folk. He was going to the only place a desire and hunger such as his could be satiated. To the dark, wet, cold stockades, worse still in the winter. Soon it would be hot, soon it would be stifling, the only reprieve from the heat of sun and closeness of body being near nudity (or full, for the less embarrassed) for the prisoners. And that meant they would be angry. That meant they would need corralling, cowing, through whip or through baton.

Or through him.

The guards outside of the stockades nodded a greeting to the man. One, a woman with an eye ruined by the wayward punch of a prisoner, could not help but flush as the handsome elf shot a finger gun her way. “Ah, Beatrice, radiant as always. Fuckin’ phenomenal. Come! Show me to the fucker of the week.”

She gave a nod, casting a look to the man she stood watch with. At the jerk of his head, she took up the lead. She was a pretty woman, though the frown lines and scars pockmarking her skin would have any except those who understood the meaning of such scars cringing in disgust. But to Woke? To Woke she was strong. She was beautiful. A woman who would crush a man’s skull, dig out his eyes with her thumbs, and those were few and far between. It helped that she also seemed to view him the same way, if the amount of blood rushing to her face said anything. There was also a few nights of drinking where she found herself in his lap that spoke volumes.

“Perhaps... Beatrice, when are you off next?”

“You know my schedule, Woke. I’m off when I fuckin’ feel like it. Perks of rank.” The Swing of her hips, even in her heavy plating, grew at the same rate of her confidence. This did little to dissuade the catcalls of the jailed men and women, their arms reaching through bars to, maybe, get a squeeze of any flesh that was not their blasted cell mates. One grew too close, too excited, and smeared shit on Woke’s shoulder plate.

The reaction was instant, as if rehearsed. Maybe it was, with how often he visited this place. Woke drew close to the arm, a slender one, likely a woman. Or one of the girly elven boys who often pranced around stormwind. His hand clasped about its dainty wrist, his other arm bracing behind the outside of it’s elbow. With a sharp jerk, Woke broke the arm backwards. Bones jutted through skin, and the pained scream of a woman joined the cacophony of jeering. The knight made no effort to wipe the blood from his armor and face, instead using the limp limb to wipe the excrement from his pauldron.

“Thanks, sweetheart.” He gave the sobbing woman a wink, then left her to the rapidly approaching guard. They did not care that she was injured, but there were rules to uphold. Namely, that inmates did not bleed to death in the Stockades. Beatrice gave a grin, her eyes hidden by the shadow of her helmet as she waited for Woke to catch up. On they continued. To The lord’s cell.

He was not kept within it, but his meals were. And this time, he was to be treated to two. Lucky him. Beatrice stepped within the iron cell, a converted maximum security room with little more than chains and a bucket for nature’s callings. She gestured to a stand for armor.

“Need any help taking that off, big guy? They won’t be here for ten minutes or so.” Woke gave a sharp bark of laughter as he neared the stand and placed his sword against it. “Get the straps in the back, sweetheart.” He answered.

The act of removing his armor was a process within itself. Bracers and gloves were simple, of course, but the larger, heavy playing on his chest required a second pair of hands. Without servants at his manor to aid him, Beatrice would have to do. And did she. After the chestplating was removed, placed ever-so-lovingly on the armor stand, he felt hands roaming the multitude of scars on his back. This was normal, to him. Beatrice would grow brave as could be so long as he didn’t look at her with those hungry eyes.

“Anyone who didn’t know better would say you fight wolves and bears naked. Can’t even tell what this tattoo was meant to be anymore. And these?” Her bare fingers followed the ‘V’ made by claws that ran down his back. He’d bled for days after those were made. He remembered the woman fondly, wondering for a moment where she might be.

“Death knight. Loved her, once. Disappeared long ago. Maybe I still do, in some way.” He made to look over his shoulder, but two of her fingers were placed against his jaw, forcing him to turn back to the wall as she continued her ‘inspection’.

“Wonder if I’d even be able to make some worthwhile lines here. Some of these bitches are scary.” As if to test, her nails ran down his back. Not hard, but a thinly veiled offer. Woke’s smile could be heard in his voice. “You’ve had your chances. But do you ever follow through? Last I remembered, the moment my hands went anywhere worthwhile, you got all embarrassed and stopped me.” He laughed at the resulting irritated noise she made.

“Well. Fuck. I dunno. Maybe some day? not used to it, y’know? Because of the...” she didn’t finish, so he did.

“Because of the eye. I know. And you know I like it. Now go get me my meat before I take it out on you.”

She laughed as she left. “Would that be such a bad thing?”

It was another few minutes before the two were dragged in. Both scruffy, sweaty, unwashed men who’d been stripped to their ratty and torn pants. Both spit and insulted any in sight, even each other, as if any rebellion here would mean a thing. Perfect, Woke thought. The guards left them as soon as they were unchained, barring the door behind them and, as always, turning off their ears. These visits were not official, they couldn’t be, but what the marshal didn’t know, wouldn’t hurt him.

Woke spread his arms wide, welcoming the two to their shared hell with flashing teeth and shining eyes. “Ah, my friends, welcome! Please, take a moment to stretch. Limber up. Would hate for the two of you to pull something during this little meeting.”

A glance was exchanged between the men. The slightly taller and thinner one, a man Woke would refer to as Hooknose later on, spat on the floor. “Ent gonna fight you, knife ears. Know what you do to folk, and it ain’t normal. Figured ya can’t get it if I sit here an’ do jack shit aye?” His partner in crime nodded. He was a much shorter fellow, fat despite the meager gruel served to the inmates. His black beard, coated in grime and dirt, earned him his name.

“Can’t make us loopy if we don’t give ya nothin’ can ya, elf?” Beardy said with a smug tone. Woke gave an almighty sigh, rubbing the stubble on his chin. The light task against his thumb filled the silence for a moment as he looked between them.

“Put me in an odd predicament, boys, you really did. Not used to throwing the firs-“ he didn’t finish, striding across the cell floor in the blink of an eye and slamming his fist into Hooknose’s jaw. The man lifts fully off the ground for a half a second at least, crying out. Beardy echoes the cry, his fists rising instinctually to protect his own jaw. It wasn’t until Woke turned his fists on him that he put any effort in defending himself. A feigned cross brought his guard to his face, conveniently blocking the legs kicking out to sweep him off his feet from his view. Beardy hit the ground with a crack, his skull bouncing against stone, and his teeth snapping together. He realized, for a split moment, that he’d nearly bit his tongue in half.

Hooknose rose up, running up behind the elf to drive a fist into his own jaw, but shrieked as he felt like he had struck metal. Woke spat purple blood from his lips, turning instead on the skinnier of the two like a rabid wolf. He was midway through the fourth of his lightning fast punches before Beardy managed to grab hold of him, trying his damndest to put a man taller than him in a Nelson hold. It worked, to some degree, leaving Woke with little control over his arms as Hooknose pounded fist after sharp, bony fist into his gut.

But, Woke has fought and killed for a century and more. These holds only ever brought more pain to the user, once you knew how to use them. He jerked his head backwards, cracking the back of his skull into Beardy’s nose, splattering the elf’s neck on blood and snot. Before Hooknose could drive fully inward again, Woke kicked up, placing his heels on the an’s shoulders and clamping right on his neck. Then, with an almighty heaven sideways, he slammed all three of them to the ground. Beardy did not rise, his slowly moving chest a testament to his consciousness. Hooknose offered only the barest of of a fight as Woke rose and stalked back towards him. With a hand around his neck, and a fist rising and falling over and over again, Woke began to extract what he came for.

There came a moment in any man’s life when he knew fear. But there was no fear as primal as that of death, the great beyond. Hooknose learned his well, as his thoughts of rebellion, his adrenaline, and his will were sapped with every connection of Woke’s bloodied knuckles to his face. It was all replaced with the striking realization that he would die, in that very moment. And Hooknose wanted very much to not die. It was after the fifteenth punch that Woke could sense it, the welling of terror in the man’s heart, the sweetest of ambrosia...

If Hooknose could see out of his eyes, he would only grow more terrified. From Woke’s eyes and mouth streamed a waterfall of viscous, purple tendrils, seeking his own mouth. Once they alighted on the man’s face, he flinched, but was powerless to stop the invasion of his mind and heart. Is fear increased tenfold as he felt his soul searched and cleaned. Then he began to feel nothing. No pain, no fear, no need for violence. Like a fine toothed comb removing lice from hair, Woke extracted this emotion and fed himself. He glutted on the rawness of it, his mind seething with lust as he dropped Hooknose to the ground.

Beardy had awoken in te middle of the firs feeding. His own horror was delectable. Woke fed well, sucking him dry and leaving his emotionless shell shivering on the ground.

A clapping of hands drew both inmates attention to Woke. “Now that that’s over! Let’s be entirely clear. You’ll be just fine in a day or two. Whether or not you STAY that way depends on your behavior. You might not understand it now, but you’ll remember why you don’t want to come back here, my friends.” He gave both an award winning smile as he turned to his armor and began donning it once more.

Neither inmate truly understood what had happened. Both could not process the occurrence, as neither could understand why they would not want such pain once more. They had no fear, they were merely automatons. Fleshy robots. After a few knocks on the door from the elf, two guards arrived and retrieved the men, laughing at the state of them both.

They returned to their cage, but nether Beardy or Hooknose had much to say. Both eventually found sleep, caring little for much else.

Woke strode out of the Stockades an hour or two later, practically buzzing with life. None were upon the streets however. The good folk had long since gone to bed.

Leaving only the monsters to roam the cobbled roads.

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