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aparticularbandit · 2 years ago

Note

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🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹

(I'm being aggressive and I'm only a little sorry)

for every “🌹” received in my inbox i’ll post one random sentence of a random WIP i’m currently writing

oh, fuck you. (affectionate)

READ MORE BECAUSE YOU GET NINETEEN OF THESE. JOKE'S ON YOU. HAH!

...but also a table of contents for anyone else who might want to creep in on these:

Dark!Eve

Agatha Birthday fic

Take A Sad Song and Make It Better Ch. 3

Post-Finding Family Agatha - Stephen Encounter

The Haunting of Westview Manor

What Dreams May Come Ch. ???

Mexican Stud (Epic Superhero Crossover Book 1)

Collateral Damage (Epic Superhero Crossover Book ???)

The House on Ridge Road (Epic Superhero Crossover Book ???)

Dottie as Sin Rostro

Love is Not a Victory March (Roisa Soulmate Timer Book 4)

Clara Ruvelle and the Heir of Slytherin (Roisa HP AU Book 2)

A Christmas Hideaway (Roisa Hallmark Holiday Special Reversal)

Roisa Grinchmas Special (this one’s in rhyme!)

On Myths and Hideouts Ch. ???

On Myths and Hideouts Jess Prequel

Paradise Lost post-canon

Timeless/Noir fusion

The Story of a Girl (Noir fic; Title pending) Ch. 3 - “Shielded by Black Robes”

Dark!Eve:

It’s boring when they don’t struggle.

Dottie’s let her practice on her some, let her bind her hands together, made sure she’s tying her victims down properly, grinned around the gag pressed into her lips, and just stared without making any noise as Eve’s explored. She’s learned – you can’t just rip someone’s fingernail off. That hurts, sure, but you want to extend the pain. Start with something small and then build. You shove splinters and nails under their fingernails first, then you rip them off, if you want, provided there are other nails that you can do the same thing with.

Dismembering usually isn’t necessary. The people they send her after break long before then, which is good, because she’s never actually gotten to try the dismembering thing. She can’t just cut one of Dottie’s toes off. Besides breaking a bone is better than cutting it off because then you can still peel the skin back with a knife later. If you remove stuff, it should be teeth, pried out with pliers. Sure, they can’t grow back, but there’s not really much more you can do with teeth.

The thing about playing with Dottie is that she doesn’t break, which is fine, really, although she’s pretended to break so that Eve gets the idea of what that’s like, but Dottie is intentionally unbreakable so that Eve can deal with her own frustration when torture just doesn’t seem to go the way it’s supposed to go. But also playing with Dottie usually ends up in—

She can’t think about that right now. She needs to focus.

Eve picks at her teeth with the tip of her knife, fitting it carefully beside her canine with a little creak.

Maybe it’s the gag.

Agatha Birthday fic:

It literally goes wrong from the moment Eve wakes up.

Agatha refuses – absolutely refuses – to answer her phone. Which, you know, on a normal day, that’s just fine. Agatha has a life. She has a job. She’s juggling a lot of things all at once, and sometimes it takes a bit before she can call Eve back if she missed her call. Usually, when she knows it’s going to be a while before she can call back, she shoots Eve a text to let her know, to check and see if the conversation is something that can happen over text (most of the time, yes, but not always).

But on her birthday? None of that. No returned phone calls. No texts. No texts back, either, when Eve texts her. Just very clear and complete avoidance.

Now.

Eve likes to consider herself a good girlfriend. She isn’t particularly worried that something has happened to Agatha; she’s too aware of the date for that and figures that Agatha is just hiding. (On a normal day, yes, she would be worried. This is not a normal day.) It isn’t like she didn’t do the same on her worst day ever, when Jane wasn’t available as a distraction (for very good reason), but even she had reached out to Agatha. Eventually. When she’d desperately needed someone there and hadn’t—

Look, Eve understands needing to hole up and mourn, but it is Agatha’s birthday, and Agatha needs her, and Agatha would never admit that she needs her, so she’s going to go pound on Agatha’s door and barge in and make her feel better. As soon as she gets off of work. With the hope that Agatha is actually home.

Take A Sad Song and Make It Better Ch. 3:

The thing about hospitals is that—

Well. There’s a lot of things about hospitals, and we really don’t have quite the time to get into all of that. Andi’s still out, which does give us a fair amount of time, but I highly suspect that you would prefer to get back to the action, back to the fam, back to the search for the envelope to determine whether or not that they might find it.

Give me a moment.

The thing about hospitals is this: If you have an emergency contact listed with them, then when something happens to you, they call your emergency contact. Regardless of whether or not someone else is there with you, your emergency contact is the person who has the right to make decisions about your life when you are unconscious, the way that Andi currently is. It’s just simple protocol.

And here’s the thing about that – up until just recently, Claire was Andi’s emergency contact. Claire knew that. Claire knows that. It hasn’t crossed her mind, however, that when Andi reached the hospital they did not call her. Duke did, but the hospital didn’t.

Because once Claire lied on the stand, Andi took some time to herself. Reconsidered a few things.

And changed her emergency contact.

Post-Finding Family Agatha - Stephen Encounter (because it got prompted):

She told herself she would never actually go in the New York Sanctum again, after that last time, but the problem with telling herself that is knowing that, well. As long as she literally had an apartment right next door. Inevitably.

But honestly, she had a rent controlled apartment in New York City. Sure, sure, she could use magic to override her landlord’s mind and make it completely free (and, sure, she might have already done that once or twice over the past few decades, when whoever inherited the building tried to fuck around with her (How can you be the same resident from over a century ago? That’s not possible! – Dear, you live on a planet of superheroes that gets visited by aliens, and you think you have some normal human being just hanging out in this apartment? That you can boss around? This is why New York gets attacked by every new wannabe villain; it’s not the Worf Effect or a symbol or anything – it’s entitled landlords not remembering that people with powers exist and can punch the ever-loving shit out of them when they get pissed off. Almost as bad as working in customer service. Yeesh)) – but what would be the fun in that? She’s not Wanda, after all. She doesn’t need everything to go her way all of the time.

Admittedly, Wanda is the reason she’s here in the first place. Something about America and Wendy being part of this new Baby Vengeance team or something like that (she knows the real name, but she enjoys seeing the frustration in Wanda’s expression when she refuses to use the right term, loves seeing her pinch the bridge of her nose, delights when, eventually, Wanda says, “I’m not even going to correct you anymore, Agatha; I know you’re doing this on purpose” and still sighing with exasperation anyway); something about how they’ve been gone for far too long this time. That thin tremor under her voice that suggests just how worried she’s trying not to be.

For a witch able to control the very fabric of reality in this universe, Wanda has gotten surprisingly good at not sticking her nose into everybody else’s business.

Why would she need to do that when she has Agatha to do it for her?

(In most cases, Agnes would be better, but they can’t get Agnes without having America open a portal to that universe she and Ash are shacking up in, so she’s the next best thing. Besides. She has centuries of being the New York Sanctum’s nosy neighbor. It’s just a shame that Cian is no longer here to see it.)

The Haunting of Westview Manor (aka THOHH/THOBM and WandaVision infusion):

She’d always had a hard time sleeping in Westview Manor.

Or.

Well.

She’d always had a hard time sleeping starting with Westview Manor.

She remembers, in flickering fragmented memories, moments before her family had moved into the not-yet-decrepit manor, but they’re few and far between. Her time living there had so shaped and shifted everything else that it is hard to reach back to earlier, simpler, happier times. Times when she could sleep and dream of something good – like flying into a sky full of stars and reaching out to each one in turn, hoping to make friends with them. Times that she hadn’t had since—

Well, since Westview Manor.

She’d always had a hard time sleeping in Westview Manor, even before things went bad, and she’d always had a hard time sleeping after Westview Manor, even now when things could almost be called good.

It’s the closest to good she’d had in a long…in a really long time, actually.

But we’re not there yet. We’re still looking at Westview Manor, we’re still looking at her, slumbering, trying to slumber, and shifting beneath her blankets, unable to stay still, turning this way and that, tangling herself in them, hands gripping her throat until she sits up, gasping for air, blankets falling to her waist. Back then, she was only a child, brown hair nearly down to her waist if it was ever let free, although she cut it off a few days later, not liking the way it could so easily catch on anything – everything – around the manor. She always felt like something was reaching out for her, grabbing and tugging on her hair with thin spindly fingers, and it didn’t matter that she would turn and see a statue with a bow or something like that, she still felt like it was someone and not something.

What Dreams May Come Ch. ???:

You are you and you are aware of yourself and you are aware of nothing at all.

Your name is Viola Lloyd, nee Willoughby, or something like it.

Your name is Viola Lloyd. The year is 1680. You are at Bly Manor. Your daughter, Isabel, is five years old. Your husband is gone on one of his business trips. The money is running out.

And your sister wants you dead.

You have lived in this room – in your room, you know this room, you know it well, you know it from the way you have paced it so often, so often since you have taken up space within your host’s body – and yet you do not have a host. You are you and you are yourself and you are nothing at all.

For the past five years, you have been stuck in this room, barely leaving it and being forced back into it when you do by family who are afraid that you will infect them or even more afraid that you will somehow ruin the image your daughter has of you. This angers you – a rage that has been building over the past five years, not just from this alone – a rage that, it appears, has not left you, even in death. Your daughter remembers you as nothing else but this. Why should seeing you at your worst make her hate you? She has only ever seen you like this.

And this?

You know now.

This is not your worst.

Mexican Stud (Epic Superhero Crossover Book 1):

Joan clasps one hand over the hollow where her left eye once was – or she tries to, but it isn’t as hollow as movies and books would lead her to assume. The bulb that was once her eye is splattered, blood covering her face, the sheets, probably the face of the woman who had been lying above her – but none of this matters. The only thing that matters is the nerve she now holds in her hand and the popped vessel at its very tip and the incomparable pain pulsing behind where her eye once was.

She doesn’t scream.

Her throat is torn raw, but she doesn’t scream. She shivers as the pulsing slows down, sparks flying about her fingertips. The rings she’d been wearing – the rings the other woman made to ground her – are smashed, shattered much in the same vein as her eye is, and their metal edges feel shoved into the flesh of her thumbs, her middle fingers. There’s probably blood there, too. She can’t tell.

Joan takes a deep breath and sits up in the bed, still cradling what was once her eye in one hand, trying to clasp it to the hollow where it once lay, and it’s only then that she notices how far the electric jolt has carried Rose. No longer is the redhead on the bed with her; instead, she has been thrown across the room by the force of the blast, and she sits crumpled on the floor beneath a wall that looks cracked by the weight of her. One of her hands cradles her head.

“Was it worth it?” Joan asks, her voice raw, rasping. She can’t keep the venom, the bitterness out of her voice, even as Rose looks up with a blood-spattered face. “Was this what you wanted?”

Rose doesn’t say anything at first, and Joan is certain that’s because there is nothing left to say. With her free hand, Joan tries to prop herself up so that she can move from Rose’s bed, but the hollow where her eye once was throbs. She takes a deep breath, her free hand gripping the edge of the mattress so tight that her knuckles turn a bright white. A tile from the ceiling drops with a loud clang between them, but neither of them jump.

“I can fix this.”

Joan starts to whirl to face Rose, but the movement makes her stomach clench. Her teeth grit together. “What?”

Rose struggles to her feet. “I can fix this.”

Joan stares over the other woman’s naked body with her one remaining good eye, and she chokes back a sound that could either be a laugh or a sob. She intends for it to be the former, but she’s in so much pain that the latter wouldn’t be unimaginable at this point. “You can fix this?” she snarls. “I’m missing an eye!”

Collateral Damage (Epic Superhero Crossover Book ???) (Luisa/Wendy backstory/interlude/etc.):

“Rose?”

It has been three months since the accident. She didn’t like to think about it in public if she didn’t have to, and for those first few days, she had holed herself up in what was their apartment, because no matter where she went it felt like everything playing on every television in every restaurant or train station or anywhere that had a television on playing in the background was that recurring footage and the big white letters on the blue background: SUPERVILLAIN THE GHOST KILLED IN EXPLOSIVE FIGHT WITH—

The rest didn’t matter. It didn’t matter who had killed Rose (it was an accident, the reporters said; there were no witnesses), only that she was destroyed so completely that all that was left of her were her teeth and an imprint of her on a wall otherwise covered with shadow and ash. There hadn’t been any body for her to identify, hadn’t been any call for her to come to the morgue, hadn’t been any funerary arrangements or urns or anything – just POOF! and then the love of her life was gone.

Luisa stared at the redheaded woman standing just in front of her, and her breath catches in her throat because Rose was dead. But, then, maybe that was why Whitney had directed her to this hair salon to get her hair done instead of her normal one. Maybe Whitney knew something she didn’t.

But, no, before the girl could even say anything, Luisa was convinced that this couldn’t be Rose. She was too young. Far too young. (Okay, maybe not that young – she looked the same way, perhaps, that Rose should have when they first met, if Rose hadn’t been changing her appearance to fit how she thought she should look.) Her blue eyes were brighter, calmer than the tempests that had often been in the midst of Rose’s, and the freckles on her face stood out more starkly beneath her make-up. Rose had always tried to change her face enough to cover them up, to not have them at all unless Luisa specifically requested them, but this girl didn’t seem to mind hers at all.

And she was—

“No, I’m Wendy,” the girl said, and her voice made Luisa’s heart ache. “But if you’d like to see someone else, I can arrange for that. You had an appointment, didn’t you? You’re Miss—”

“Alver, yes, I had an appointment, a friend of mine set it up for me, and no, don’t get someone else, I….” Luisa took a deep breath to steady herself and looked up to meet the younger girl’s eyes. “You just look so much like someone I used to know.”

The House on Ridge Road (Epic Superhero Crossover Book ???) (Dottie Backstory):

You run a hand through her hair.

Present tense – run – when it happens, you’re present; when you remember, you’re present – you understand the past and the future as detached concepts, but you are present in them and within them; you remember and you relive.

You run a hand through her hair.

It’s soft, softer than her hair has any right to be after hours, days, years of being pinned up, sprayed into place, not one strand moving unless you – you, yourself, or someone like you, but there is no one like you, only weak men who fail beneath your own prowess – force them to move. Her hair is soft and smells of roses. That’s the bathwater. You scented it, before—

You scent it and run your fingers through the warm water as you sit on the edge of the tub, rippling, rippling, rippling.

There are no candles. She doesn’t like candles. She caught you once playing with the flame – baby lightning in a bottle – sometimes you burn your fingers – Peggy doesn’t like candles or maybe she just doesn’t like it when the skin of your fingers feels raw from playing with them, doesn’t like the way your skin grows back and heals all too easily and the rawness is gone in only moments, doesn’t like the abilities your people stole from vials they were never meant to have.

You’re weaker, in that regard, than the boy she lost years ago. You know his name, but not because she wants you to know it. She tore it at you, screamed—

She tears it at you, screams it, louder than anything – “He’s a better man than you will ever grow to be” – and you let her say it because she means it and because she needs to say it and you brush the dust of broken plaster walls from your dress and wipe a track of blood from just above your right eye and pop your right shoulder back into place and you stare at her, chest heaving, face all rage and hate, and you know it’s just redirected at the nearest person and that person just happens to be you—

You can take it. She needs to get the venom out. All out.

When you look again, her hands are no longer clenched into defensive, aggressive fists; her fingers brush those loose strands of hair back into place; she’ll be sore tomorrow, but she’s not bloodied the way you are. If you were a normal person, you would have a black eye, but you aren’t a normal person, no matter how much they force you to act like one until they need you.

You rotate your shoulder and it hurts but not too terribly. You like the pain.

“Are you done now, Peg? Get it all out?”

Dottie as Sin Rostro:

Time off.

The words are a nuisance for Dottie Underwood, who would far prefer to be sitting in a lair waiting for instructions or set up on location, gathering intelligence or preparing for a hit under yet another alias. Even the name she used now wasn’t the one she was born with, not that it much mattered. Crime lords and their best associates rarely used their real names – Elena di Nola was Mutter and her second-in-command was Sin Rostro, whoever happened to be wearing the name on any given day. Sometimes it was Elena; sometimes it was her son, Derek; sometimes it was her daughter, a woman Dottie had never met; and sometimes, on the rare occurrence that the other two were not available and Elena wanted a proxy, Dottie herself would wear the name.

Names on names on names.

She wasn’t even Dottie anymore now. When the word slowly grew more and more associated with insanity, she’d needed something a little more sane, a little more…consistent.

Not that it mattered during time off.

She’d painted her hair a bright red to match the blood of her nails and her lips, heightening and contrasting her pale skin, her ice blue eyes. Some might use smaller terms to describe her – attractive, pretty, hot – and she hated that last one in comparison with the others she’d grown accustomed to in the earlier years – alluring, magnetic, mesmerizing. Hypnotic. But she wasn’t looking for words when she walked into the bar, as amusing as the murmurs and the collective hush were.

It was the eyes suddenly trained to her that made her blood rise, the heads tilted in her direction and following her every move that started the bubbling giggle clasped in the back of her throat, the turning of bodies open to her every whim that assured her control.

But it’s to the mostly empty bar that she made her way, the crowd parting for her like hot butter for a knife, and it was at the sole occupant that she paused, brightly painted nails tapping on the counter.

“Is this seat taken?” she asked, her voice soft and full of the innocence and wonder she’d been trained to exude. “I wouldn’t want to intrude if you’re waiting for someone.”

Love is Not a Victory March (Roisa Soulmate Timer AU Book 4):

Michael Cordero, Jr. had never had a strong fascination with hotels like the Marbella. He knew they existed, but to him, they had always seemed like tourist traps, destinations for people who didn’t live in Florida, meant for an elite sort of people that he and his family had never and would never be part of. That made it sound as though he had a strong distaste for them, and maybe, to some extent, that was true, but for the most part, he just didn’t think about them.

That was until his timer went off for one of the waitresses who worked there.

At the time, Michael couldn’t have guessed that’s what she was, and in the years since, years he’d spent watching her from afar while he tracked down a crime lord who had grown mysteriously silent until, finally, he’d been connected to the very same hotel where his soulmate worked, he’d found that distaste slowly growing. His soulmate deserved better, and he couldn’t wait to see her grow into whatever that better would be.

Mostly he couldn’t wait to spend his time watching something other than this stupid tourist trap hotel and its absolutely unattractive current manager with his rippling muscles that looked like they could burst out of his shirt at any moment or his leggy blonde wife who seemed to have no sense of propriety and wore bootie shorts everywhere like she wanted to be seen as a piece of meat. Not that he was one of those misogynistic assholes who thought that women couldn’t wear whatever they wanted, because he was not that.

He was just growing very, very tired of watching all of it.

Until Roman Zazo fell from a window on the twelfth floor and landed with the sharp point of an ice Marlin piercing through his chest.

Then everything seemed to suddenly grow a lot more interesting.

Clara Ruvelle and the Heir of Slytherin (Roisa HP AU Book 2):

“Hey!” Clara pushed back against Hermione, shoving her over. “I told you I didn’t want you to sit with me!”

But Hermione stayed where she was, refusing to get up, refusing to move even after Clara shoved her. She just turned and gave her a flat stare. “You’re not supposed to be fighting on the train.”

Clara’s eyes narrowed. “You’re not supposed to set professors on fire either but—”

“Wait, wait, wait.” Ginny held up her hands, palms out, and stared at Clara. “Hermione set a professor on fire?” Her eyes widened, and she looked at Hermione. “You really did that?”

Hermione gave Clara a blank stare and then turned to Ginny. “No. Of course not. Good students don’t set their professors on fire.”

“Yeah, well, you must not be a very good student, then.” Clara crossed her arms and leaned back against the plush back of the train bench. “Since you definitely did that.”

“Clara.” Hermione elbowed her harshly as she whispered through gritted teeth at her. “Stop.”

Ginny just turned to Luisa with wide eyes. “You’re the Hufflepuff!” she exclaimed and grinned. “You’ll tell me the truth, right!”

Luisa just looked from Clara to Hermione and then winced. “I, uh, I—”

“Quit making house assumptions,” Janet interrupted, voice flat. Cat the cat had made his way out of her arms and woven around her neck, his head resting on his paws on the shoulder closest to the window so that he could stare outside with his one remaining eye, his tail on the other end, occasionally flicking against Clara as it moved. “Just because Luisa is in Hufflepuff doesn’t mean that she’s a pushover—”

“Hey!” Luisa interrupted.

“—just because Hermione’s in Gryffindor doesn’t mean she’s brave—”

“Hey!” Hermione echoed Luisa.

“—and just because Clara and I are in Slytherin doesn’t mean we’re going to kill you or try to take over the world.” Janet’s wand tapped against her arm a couple of times. “Although, now that I mention it, taking over the world does sound like fun. We may try and do that anyway.”

“Janet,” Clara hissed, elbowing her. “We’re not going to take over the world. That is way more work than either of us wants to do. And you would have to pretend to get along with people – all that hand shaking and playing nice and everything – and I don’t think you’d like that very much.”

Janet sighed and nodded once. “You’re right. I wouldn’t. Maybe we postpone the taking over the world thing.”

A Christmas Hideaway (Roisa Hallmark Holiday Special Reversal):

“No, Daddy, I won’t be home for Christmas.”

Luisa has perfected the art of lying to her father about mundane things, particularly over the phone. It started years ago when she was in high school, lying about stealing liquor from his cabinet whenever he asked with eyes that had initially shifted to look towards the ground and then eventually grew to facing him directly with a strong jaw, and continued through college, lying about how much time she was spending studying for her classes when really she was spending most of her time out with her friends doing almost anything except studying. At some point, he stopped calling (or she stopped answering). His time was – and still is – much better spent working on his company than inquiring into his children’s life. Not because he doesn’t care. He does. Luisa is certain he does. That just isn’t how he shows it. Mostly he shows it by staying out of her life or by giving her whatever she needs, money-wise, whenever she asks for it.

The not being home for Christmas part isn’t the lie. The next part is.

Roisa Grinchmas Special:

Down at the hotel, far from their harsh glances, lived the other woman, whose drunken dances on tabletops naked with far too much glee were probably not meant for you or for me, especially since she had gone off the drink, tore it from her bar, and poured it down her sink. Yet still in her form she held both style and grace and often used these to make others’ hearts race. Her smile lit the room far better than fire and her heart burned like it would on a pyre for people and family who she held most dear, for whom she would shed far much more than a tear.

On Myths and Hideouts Ch. ???

City Hall feels like a bad marriage between Greco-Roman architecture and modern, streamlined, minimalistic design. The former is a bad habit of all American political buildings; the latter is likely Storybrooke – or Regina – specific. There are columns and a lot of black and white, which Rose hopes is not indicative of Regina’s way of thinking or her morals (she doubts this), and some wallpaper of trees, which should be rustic, but because it’s in black and white, it isn’t. It works a little better than most people would think, but Rose – who spent way too long as Emilio’s interior design decorator for his hotels – doesn’t think it works at all. She likes the black and white better than the Miami beach vibes that the Marbella put out, but only because she’s gotten plain sick of the Marbella after the last several years.

Regina stops at the secretary’s desk before heading into her office, leaning over just enough to give Rose a good view of her ass. This is intentional. At least, if Rose had done it, it would have been intentional, and she suspects that Storybrooke’s mayor runs on the same general wavelength that she does. She can’t say just why she suspects it, but she gets that general vibe.

“Jessica, dear, clear out my meetings for the rest of the day.” Regina glances over her shoulder at Rose as though she hopes to catch her staring. Her expression falters and quickly fixes itself when she realizes that she isn’t. “I have more pressing matters to attend to.”

Regina’s secretary – Jessica, apparently – lifts her head and glances over to Rose. The two of them look quite similar, although Jessica is, for the most part, thinner and more angular than Rose is, with the exception of her chest, which almost seems impossibly big for how small the rest of her is. Her Crayola red hair is pulled back into a high ponytail, and she pushes thin black frames up her nose, brilliantly cerulean eyes peering out at Rose with a lack of interest as she takes her in. “Of course, Ms. Mills,” she murmurs, and her voice is at once both demure and alluring.

Regina Mills might try her hardest to seduce Rose Alver, but she will not get anywhere near as close as this Jessica does within the first five seconds.

Rose swallows once, and her gaze flicks back to Regina. Maybe that ass view wasn’t for her at all. Luisa had thought Regina had something going on with the sheriff, but at this moment, she’s pretty sure that she actually has something much more interesting going on with her secretary.

On Myths and Hideouts Jess Prequel:

Jessica Krupnick sees a lot that she does not mention.

Well. This would mean more if she had someone to mention it to. She has no friends in this little town, although she is certain that she could if she tried. She has never felt that impulse to try. People seem to think of her first as Mayor Mills’s secretary, the woman the mayor chose not as her right hand woman – the closest person in Storybrooke who came to that was Sheriff Humbert, who insisted that everyone refer to him as Graham (or at least, he insisted that to Jessica every time they spoke, and she consistently pretended as though he didn’t) – but as the protector of….

Well, her, if you wanted to think of it that way.

Sheriff Humbert protected the people. He was a physical failsafe. Jessica protected her office. She was a mental failsafe.

And sometimes, Jessica considers as she sees Henry speeding into the office, skidding across the marble floors on his shoes with the biggest grin on his face she has ever seen, she protects her heart.

Paradise Lost post-canon:

Francis tapped the steering wheel of the U-Haul with the pad of her thumb. The air conditioner rattled a little too loudly as she drove, overwhelming the soft tunes crooning through the radio. Davis sat in the middle seat, belt tight across his waist, and Reynolds sat in the passenger seat, elbow resting on the door and staring out the window at the passing landscape.

“It’ll be cooler once the car warms up,” Francis remarks, reaching over and tousling her youngest son’s hair. He’s sticky with sweat; U-Hauls were nothing more than metal boxes, and in the Southern humid heat, it had cooked itself until even touching the seats felt like it would burn through their skin. It was only made worse by the shorts they were all wearing, pushing exposed skin against burning fabric. At least she had convinced the boys to wear t-shirts instead of tank-tops.

Davis was easy enough to convince, but Reynolds….

Reynolds wasn’t wearing a t-shirt the way Francis wanted. Instead, his shirt was stretched so that it hung about him more like a wife-beater than a shirt, and the sleeves were stretched so that they might as well have not been there at all. She was certain if he was wearing a normal shirt, the sleeves would be rolled up to feign a tank within seconds.

This was all just the influence of the football team and his father’s friendship with Dickie. That may have fallen lax in the past few months as the divorce dragged on, but Reynolds had maintained his friendship with Dickie’s son – and no amount of Francis telling him it was a bad idea did anything. In fact, she’d refrained from saying much at all, outside of suggesting that he should choose his friends wisely and hoping that Yates suggested the same.

Considering the fight he’d allowed between the two of them, Francis sincerely doubted he had.

Timeless/Noir fusion:

It happened at the end of her last class of the day. Lucy felt the vibration of her phone – a longer buzz indicative of an email instead of the shorter one for a text – where it rested in the left pocket of her slacks. She stepped outside of the lecture hall, shuffled her students’ papers and folders (it was essay day, and some of them still used folders although she’d said multiple times that she preferred they didn’t), and pulled out her phone.

Emma Whitmore.

Lucy didn’t recognize the name, but it could be from a student wanting into one of her classes or a professor asking for her expertise on one of their projects. This wasn’t too unusual. Probably a student – she knew most of the professors on campus by name; even if she’d never met them, she’d likely heard about them from one of the other students in passing. She’d never heard of a Professor Whitmore, though.

Her eyes scanned the email.

Standard fare for a professor help request – doing a bit of research, wanted to speak with someone more knowledgeable about the subject (mostly time period, maybe some political history), etc. There were a few lines that felt a little off, but Lucy chalked that up to what she expected was likely a new hire who was unnecessarily intimidated by her own pedigree. And while it was odd that Emma hadn’t used her school email, given the more professional setting, it might be that she wanted to keep everything involving her research organized separately from her student emails. Lucy couldn’t fault her for that, either.

She sent a quick reply – yes, along with perhaps meeting for coffee or drinks Friday afternoon – and then promptly forgot about the entire thing as her phone rang, another incessant and immediate buzzing.

“Amy?” Lucy braced the phone between her shoulder and her ear as she moved her pile of essays and folders once more. “Slow down! What happened this time?”

The Story of a Girl (Noir Fic; Title Pending) Ch. 3 - “Shielded by Black Robes”:

The attackers dodged. That was the first thing she noticed, the first of many problems with this scenario. They dodged.

The second problem was when one of them somehow caught the knife she threw at his forehead. He smirked at her and threw it back so fast she barely dodged it herself. These mooks were good.

But Chloe was better.

Whereas before she stood her ground next to the pillar with only the occasional dodge, now she began to race forward, a knife in each hand. The men pulled out their guns, finally finished reloading them, but she was upon them before the first trigger could be pressed.

Below. Sweep the leg. Beneath, behind. Knife to the side, the neck. Catch and hold while shot at – meat shields are the best kind because the shots go both ways.

Throw him away. Dodge. Roll. Bite.

The blonde stepped out from behind the pillar, aiming and shooting and moving, all one fluid motion, she a panther, lithe and strong, and Chloe a cheetah, swift and deadly, spotless. She saw the shot from the gun, aimed toward the blonde, fast, too fast – the blue eyes once so icy now so warm and wide—

No.

Her teeth dripped blood that day.

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