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j-morgan-fly · 3 years ago

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The Mockingbird has his way

So, this is a little something I have been working on. It's not full blown nor do I feel it ready to post on AO3, but I wanted to get it out there. I just wanted to write something where the Lords get called out, even if it's by manipulative Baelish, for abandoning and overlooking Sansa's claim and the role she played in ridding the North of the Bolton's.

___

“House Mormont remembers. The North remembers. We know no King, but the king in the North whose name is Stark,” the young Lady Mormont’s words held the power of her loyalty and conviction. She shamed the seasoned and weathered men, old and young, around her. A girl of eleven standing before them, speaking out for herself and her people with far more honor then any of them. It made Sansa smile for Lyanna Mormont reminded her terribly of Arya and she wished her sister were with them, prayed to the Old Gods she was alive somewhere out there and once news reached her about the Starks occupying Winterfell once more she might find her way safely home. She also smiled because she was happy for Jon.

She took his hand under the table, giving it a squeeze. He glanced at her, and her smile grew a little more. She was proud of him and she wanted him to know it. That he deserved these words of ankowledgment from their people. She was happy that despite his reservations in the beginning about taking back their home, he had fought with her, for their family and people and proved himself beyond a shadow of a doubt their fathers son. Bastard or no, Jon was a Stark to her, and now their lords were starting to see him the same way. As they should.

She could feel it in the air, soon, just in a moment they would rise and name him king. She had made sure of. When she realized Petyr’s plans, when he admitted his pretty dream to her under the Heart Tree, she knew what his scheme was and she had to put a stop to it.

She went to as many lords as she could before this great meeting, campaigning for Jon’s claim over her own. She was a woman after all, twice married to enemies of her family and she had seen already what they thought of her when she went to their keeps with Jon. It would not be a difficult thing for any of them to choose Jon over her when given the choice.

“Queen, you mean,” Sansa felt her throat get tight, her smile fell and she as well as the other lords turned to look at Little Finger. He stepped forward from where he stood in a shadow on the wall.

“The queen in the North whose name is Stark. Lady Sansa, who sits beside her bastard brother, is the rightful heir to the Northern Throne and Winterfell.”

The Knights of the Vale gave grunts of agreement and Lady Mormont's already naturally sour expression turned more so, her lips pressing into a thin line and her eyes narrowing on the Mockingbird as he spoke. “I and the Knights of the Vale rode North at the command of Lady Sansa’s cousin, Lord Robert Arryn, to fight and reclaim his cousin's childhood home and her birthright in her name. Not for Jon Snow.”

Sansa swallowed as Jon looked at her, questions in his eyes. She could see the accusation in his dark grey eyes. Was this her plan? Was this why she begged him to fight again? Why she kept him from going somewhere warm and peaceful? To help make her queen?

She shook her head. This wasn’t supposed to happen. This wasn’t what she wanted at all. She had assumed Little Finger would act as a puppeteer, using bribed and convinced Northern Lords to speak up on her behalf, but ultimately they would be outnumbered by those who would see Jon as King. Little Finger was not a man to fight and argue his own battles, so he must feel truly desperate if he was speaking out for her.

“Unless, did King Robb change the laws of succession in the North before his tragic death?” he asked the lords in a whole. “Did King Robb send some document back North, signed by his hand, or is there a witness here to such a letter having ever been made by him before his death removing or displacing Lady Sansa from the succession of Winterfell and putting her claim below that of Jon Snow?”

They murmured to one another, discussing it briefly if any who had fought with her brother, who had managed to come home had seen or heard him plan such a thing in regards to succession should he fall. From there frowns it seemed the answer was no. All of Robb’s closest friends and advisors who might have been witness to such a document being made or at least planned, had died. Murdered with their King at the Twins.

“Not one of you can confirm from your time fighting with your king if he ever planned to disinherit or displace his sister, Lady Sansa, from the line of succession?” Little Finger asked, smirking. “Even after she was forced to marry the Imp?”

Sansa thought for a moment this was perfect, he made a mistake reminding them of her first marriage. It would put her loyalties into question, make the lords unsure of her just like how Lyanna Mormont questioned her when she came with Jon, asking for house Mormont to raise their banners and fight for the Starks once more. It had been humiliating and biting, she hated that her loyalty was in question, that she was seen as anything but the Stark that she was. But she didn’t want to be queen, she just wanted to go home, to free it from the monsters that lurked it’s halls and to feel safe again with her family.

In truth, she had not had detailed plan for the long run when she chose to continue pursuing Winterfell’s reclamation into Stark hands again. What she did know was that she would never bow to the Lannister's or anyone who wasn’t family again, but that did not mean she wished to be queen. She would have seen first what the lords desired and go from there. But she would not marry again. She knew at least Jon would support her in that.

If the Lords wanted freedom, then she would support them. She had lost too much family for their freedom, and she had bled as much as any man in battle since the start of the war. Since they took her fathers head and she would not let the pain and loss be for nothing. If they didn’t succeed in claiming Northern independence for themselves, then what was the point in any of it. Every loss would feel suddenly hollow, without meaning, pointless and she could not go on if that was the case. So she had to hold on to this, to the thing that so many had gave their lives fighting for, the reason she had beaten and sold. If she let go she would fall and never stop. So she would grip on tight, and she would keep fighting the battles to come the only way she knew how.

If the lords cried out for independence like she thought they might, then Jon could rule. He could marry despite the strange way the thought made her stomach clench, legitimize himself and produce heirs for house Stark and she would be a loyal sister, an advisor, helping him maneuver and defeat Cersei and someday Little Finger.

She would help rebuild Winterfell, manage it why he ruled, and one day, maybe she would heal enough to marry, to find a nice, simple man and settle down. Let herself have some peace and happiness. But first their was so much work to be done. And she could get more done as anything but a queen.

“As you say, my Lord, Lady Sansa was wed to the Imp. How can we trust that he did not corrupt her? And it is said she is the one who killed the bastard king at his own wedding.” the young Lord Cerwyn stood again to speak.

“And if she did, would you not commend her and say that she helped avenge her family, her brother and mother, the death of her beloved father, your Lord Eddard that Joffrey beheaded?” Little Finger asked.

“If you are questioning her loyalty to the Lannister’s then I think the example you have given is the answer. If she did murder Joffrey and then framed her Lannister husband than she most certainly is not loyal to them,”

“And what of Ramsay Bolton?” asked Lady Mormont, her scowl turning on Sansa.

She watched as Jon glared at Little Finger, having told him how she had come to be in the Bolton’s possession during her time as a refugee at the wall. The mockingbirds shoulders fell and he looked at Sansa with pained regret.

“That was my doing,” he admitted and the Lords in the room. “I was dear, childhood friend to Lady Sansa’s mother. I wanted to bring Cat’s daughter home. Support her claim as she would have if she had survived the Red Wedding.”

He shook his head and cast an accusing eye over the Northern Lords.

“I had hoped that I might help Sansa with a coup against the Bolton's. They thought I was an ally, but I was simply using them to help place Sansa back in her houses seat of power.” he begin to explain the plan, a plan Sansa had no knowledge of until now. “It was my belief that Northerners were more loyal then the rest of the men of Westeros and would come to Lady Sansa’s aide while I gathered allies in the Vale and Riverland's to take back and hold the North from the Bolton’s and Lannister's.”

He sighed then, the room falling silent, some with suspicion and others with guilt.

“Instead, our brave lady was let down by her own people and had to rescue herself with the help of a turn cloak. If only I had known the disrespectful disregard you would show the daughter of your liege lord I would never have brought Lady Sansa back North,”

No man or women in the room had a very good response, all mostly falling back on the excuse of how they believed Sansa’s loyalties to be with the Lannister’s, and that her marriage to one of their allies was her attempt to save her own neck after killing Joffrey in a jealous rage after being put aside for another woman. It hurt Sansa but she did not show it. She was steal cloaked in ice, her expression one of indifference rather than the pain she felt at her peoples words.

“I have heard enough!” Jon stood from his chair, the legs scraping the stone floor loudly. “How dare all of you question Sansa’s loyalty, while you sat in your castles with full knowledge of what Ramsay was capable of and what he had done to girls before her. Where was your loyalty to house Stark then?”

They grumbled but had no answer to give, heads bowed, some glaring, frustrated to be called out as they were, to be told they were disloyal and dishonorable.

Sansa felt her heart flutter in her chest, growing warm at his defense of her. “My sister was a hostage, a prisoner of the Lannister’s to be used against our brother and the North. I will not let you ignore her and brush her aside as I have seen you do up till now any longer.”

“As much as I am honored by what Lady Lyanna was suggesting, Winterfell belongs to my sister Sansa. She is the one who wanted to fight for Winterfell when I wanted to runaway, go somewhere warm, far from winter and wars. She is a true Northerner and she is Robb’s heir, your queen in the North.”

Sansa wanted to scream. No. No, she didn’t want this.

She looked imploringly at Jon, but he took her expression for something else, smiling at her.

Stop, you fool, you have no idea what your doing. Your playing right into his hands. This is what he wants.

He took her hand and guided her to a stand beside him, his hand slipping to grasp her risk and holding her arm above her head.

“The Queen in the North!” he announced to the whole room and Sansa felt her heart stop when she met Little Fingers eye.

“The Queen in the North,” he repeated, lowering to one knee for her. The lords looked at one another before slowly men rose, unsheathing their swords and raising them in the air, repeating her new title until the whole room was chanting it.

Sansa closed her eyes and a tear slipped down her cheek.

#jonsa #ficlet #sansa stark #qitn #queen Sansa #asoiaf #game of thrones

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dwellordream · 3 years ago

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“...It stands to reason that a society which is ruled by its male senior citizens through the control of younger and less powerful men would instill reverence for the wisdom of advancing age in its male youth. The Romans, we might observe, referred to previous generations as maiores, greater individuals, and employed the adjective magnus, great, in the kinship terms for parents' close male and female ascendants (a practice the English language has adopted with its use of the adjective "great" for kin of earlier generations); such a practice testifies to the Roman equation of seniority with superiority, and to the inclusion of women among its superior seniors.

Thus it should come as no surprise that older women seem to command more respect, inspire more awe, and have (or be perceived as having) greater social and political influence than do younger ones. In addition, Roman women along in years were more likely to have young male relatives who were eager to prove themselves worthy of and to their elders, and who were mindful of the nurturance they had recently received from mothers and older kinswomen; such young men were under special pressure to manifest their respect and awe for their female maiores through publicly visible gestures.

We have already examined the idealization in Tacitus' Dialogus of the moral instruction and intellectual sustenance provided for an eternally indebted Roman male youth committed to a life of public service by his upstanding female relatives; this picture is far from unique in Roman writings. Such a vision of an older Roman matron's function, and of Roman mother-son relations, seems the parodic point of Plautus' Casina. The play, composed immediately before the playwright's death in 184 B.C., was popular enough to be revived in the next generation. In it, the materfamilias Cleostrata intimidates her elderly and socially powerful husband both through proving herself his moral superior and, as her son's ally and abettor, by ingeniously securing for this son the sexual favors of a slave girl his father also covets.

By cleverly rendering her presumably grateful son such services, attracting admiration for her capable handling of this complex affair, but nonetheless setting herself up as a moral example in the process, she evidently travesties the Roman concept of a wise, righteous, and exemplary mother. This same vision, however, is reproduced as part of a serious moral and political exemplum in Livy's narrative on the Bacchanalian scandal, an episode which profoundly shook Roman society shortly before the Casina was first performed. Livy's young male protagonist Aebutius and his reluctantly influential courtesan mistress Hispala Fecinia manage to bring the matter to the consul Postumius' attention, and Postumius proceeds to bring the malefactors to justice, solely through the aid of Aebutia, amita (father's sister), to Aebutius, and Postumius' venerable mother-in-law Sulpicia.

These two older women—depicted as virtuous, beneficent, sagacious, deserving of male reverence and hence, by Livy's implication, truly "maternal"—are contrasted with two, far less admirable, matronly counterparts: Aebutius' own mother Duronia, whose devotion to both her second husband and his interest in depriving Aebutius of his patrimony led her to seek her son's undoing by having him initiated into Bacchic worship; the Campanian priestess Paculla Annia, who began the Bacchic cult's corrupting influence by initiating its first men, her own sons.

Livy's account, at 39.nff., of Postumius' efforts to ascertain, through Sulpicia, the character of Aebutia, warrants special notice since here he treats these two nurturant and publicly influential mother figures in a sympathetic and sentimentalizing fashion: he refers to the former woman as dignified, a gravis (and later a gravissima) femina, to the latter as morally upright and of old-fashioned ways, probam et antiqui moris; he even describes Aebutia as moved to tears by, the dreadful treatment of her brother's son (filius eius fiatris), also morally upright (probus), by those who should have been the last to do so.

Another, doubtlessly romanticized, moralizing tale also attests to both the esteem in which a young Roman male was to hold his elder kinswomen's judgment and moral authority and to the public display and political impact of such esteem, namely the story of Gnaeus Marcius Coriolanus. Set in the mid-fifth century B.C., the story achieved great popularity in the classical period: a lost book by Cicero's closest friend Titus Pomponius Atticus featured Coriolanus prominently; Livy, Valerius Maximus, and Plutarch all treat his tragedy. Coriolanus has recently been called the "Roman archetype" of the "perpetual mama's boy" in a provocative psychoanalytic study of the Roman mother-son relationship, and for good reason: he allegedly valued his widowed mother so highly that he abandoned a traitorous march on Rome at the head of an enemy force only after she demanded that he desist.

There are less dramatic, and probably somewhat more reliable, pieces of ancient Roman testimony to the reverential regard of young Roman men for the older, maternal female members of their families, to their—and others'—experience of these women as significant and influential individuals, and to the frequent exhibition of both this regard and this experience in a larger sociopolitical context. Several laudationes Junebres, orations delivered by aristocratic Roman men (and usually youthful ones) to honor a deceased relative of political distinction, belong in this category.

Cicero reports that the first such speech in commemoration of a woman was given in 102 B.C. by the consul Quintus Lutatius Catulus to honor his mother Popilia; no young woman received this same recognition until over thirty years later, when Julius Caesar's second wife, Cornelia, was buried amid her husband's public praises. That same year, however, Caesar made a more memorable, or at least better remembered, contribution to funeral oratory with his laudation of his father's sister Julia, wife of the military and political leader Marius. Caesar's words first proclaimed the glory of this aunt's, and hence his own father's, maternal ancestry: The maternal lineage of my paternal aunt Julia descended from kings, the paternal is connected with the immortal gods.

For the Marcii Reges go back to Ancus Marcius, Marcia being the name of her mother, and the Julii, to which clan our family belongs, are offspring of Venus. There is, therefore, in her lineage both the holiness of kings, who have the greatest power among humans, and the religious quality of gods, in whose power are the kings themselves. Perhaps not insignificantly, Ancus Marcius, the early king from whom Julia's maternal Marcii traced their lineage, supposedly inherited Rome's throne through his maternal grandfather; so, too, the divinity from whom her (and her nephew's) paternal Julii avowed their descent was Venus, mother of the Trojan hero Aeneas.

A later, and also elderly, Julia, Caesar's sister, was hailed in the funeral laudatio upon her death in 51 B.C. by the twelve-year-old Octavius, whose mother Atia was Julia's daughter; through this maternal grandmother Octavius, later the emperor Augustus, could claim descent by blood, as well as adoption, from Venus and the Julian clan. The laudatio delivered in 42 B.C. to honor the nonagenarian Caecilia by her son Atticus, a man whose attraction to the Coriolanus legend we have already noted, stirred comment as providing proof of Atticus' familial devotion (pietas): said to be sixty-seven at the time, he pointed out that he had never once needed to apologize to his mother, nor quarreled with his sister, who was almost the same age as he.

One might also consider in this context an inscription generally dated to the early empire, the laudatio of a noble matron Murdia. It is dedicated by a son of the woman's first marriage, despite the fact that her second husband seems to have been numbered among her survivors. She is, moreover, identified only with the words Murdiae L(ucii) F(iliae) Matris, "Murdia, Lucius' daughter and my mother"; she is acclaimed by this son as "most precious to me" (carissima mihi), although he says nothing about affection between her and either husband.

Along with citing her modesty (modestia), upright character (probitas, an attribute we have seen noted in Livy's Aebutia and Aebutius), chastity (pudicitia), compliant nature (opsequium), wool-spinning (lanificium), conscientiousness, and trustworthiness (diligentia and fides), he cites her wisdom (.sapientia); what is more, he accords her special praise for treating all of her sons equally in her will. Both mater and amita also figure prominently in another, fairly early and important source for the public reverence awarded and sociopolitical significance clearly and justifiably ascribed to older Roman women of the upper classes by their younger male relatives.

…It may help further to elucidate why other young Roman men of the upper classes regarded their elder female relations, their own and other men's mothers, so seriously, looking upon them as socially and politically powerful figures deserving publicly visible homage. Atticus' sister of sixty-odd, Aemilia, the dowager sister of Lucius Aemilius Paullus, and the matrons who were sisters of Aemilia's son Publius Cornelius Scipio (and hence enjoyed the magnanimity of his adoptive son) obviously rank among older women, whether by age or by relation to their devoted male kin. But the concern publicly evinced for other, younger, women of high birth by their brothers, such as that displayed by Scipio in his munificence to his sisters, indicates that sisters in Roman elite society were also highly, and publicly, esteemed by their brothers.

Evidence from Roman comedy merits special note in this context. A lengthy passage from Plautus' Aulularia generalizes on the feelings and duties of brothers and sisters to one another: it depicts Roman brothers and sisters as partaking of a close relationship, sharing the same concerns, and looking to one another for advice; it depicts one particular sister, moreover, as expecting her advice to be followed. At lines i2off. Eunomia speaks of her sincere commitment to her brother Megadorus' best interests as "befitting a sister of the same parents" While acknowledging that brothers find sisters bothersome, she points out their mutual obligation to counsel and admonish one another, and even demands that Megadorus do what she orders; she justifies these demands on the grounds that she is closest to him and he to her.

More importantly, both Roman legend and Roman historical writing concur in their depiction of this fraternal esteem for sisters, and fraternal compliance with sisters' wishes, as having a substantial public impact among the Roman elite. They suggest that a Roman sister, though likely to be regarded with respect rather than veneration, and subtly complimented rather than eulogized, by her brother, often exerted influence of a political nature both on and through him; they indicate that various sisters publicly reflected in—and often actually benefited from—their brothers' social and political prestige.”

- Judith P. Hallett, “Women of Elite Families and Roman Society.” in Fathers and Daughters in Roman Society: Women and the Elite Family

#judith p. hallett #history #ancient #roman #fathers and daughters in roman society

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alistonjdrake · 4 years ago

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Of Rust and Gold: Season Three

*Or the likely very long intro to my third series of world building and character posts that all have to do with the second to last book in The Saints Song series.

The other ones are here:

Season one: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

Season two: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

Or can be found via OBS’ wip introduction post here:

heyo

Below you’ll find a run down of the prominent cast and a summary of what they’re all about so let’s get to it.

OBS, the third book in the series, showcases the Escana Empire on the verge of crumbling as a murdered king and a divided government threaten to tear the country apart. As some grapple for power and wealth, others decide to jump ship.

Prince Argus: After escaping the war in Codua and his sorta not-friend with whom he cheated on his husband with, Argus returns to Graza only to find his favorite brother dead and everyone else being a dick. In making an alliance to his father’s old enemy Argus hopes to gain a higher position in the council or in the empire overall as a dead king with infant children usually only means one thing. But y’know, he also has hopes to fix his relationship with Leo and to stop being manipulated by all the sharks swimming around him.

Queen Liliana: Problem in Graza #1. The council is almost evenly divided between her authority and Prince Leonides’, pushing them into a bitter rivalry that was toxic way before King Cidro was murdered. She’s reasonably unhappy.

Prince Leonides: Problem in Graza #2 and it was his idea to keep Cidro’s murder hush, hush until they’re in a better position to handle it. Whatever that means. As the appearance of old enemies and the disappearance of his own allies loosens his usual chokehold on the Escana government, for once Leonides finds himself at a disadvantage and there are many (likely a lot on this list alone) waiting to finally push him from his pedestal.

Lord Barraza: Partnered with Argus and ready to take advantage of the bad blood between Leonides and Liliana. His youngest son is missing after being implicated, arrested, and released from the last attempt at King Cidro’s life. Lord Barraza is pretty stern on maintaining his family’s innocence and that all he wants is peace between the Harvers and Barrazas.

Princess Damaris: Has been kicked out of the Order of the Knights (that international police force type beat) and now has blood on her hands but is currently in protection from the law on account of being a princess y’know. She’s really torn up about it.

Princess Zurina: In a bit of a twist she’s now kinda close to Leo due to the whole “Damaris killed someone” debacle. As well as slowly learning to exert her own influence while her siblings and the rest of Graza fight with one another.

Prince Orland: Eleven months older than Zurina and her right hand man. Kinda weird, but so is the whole family tbh.

Chancellor Harver: Bitter as ever. Argus’ involvement in Codua and Damaris’ murder has made Escan’s relationship to the holy capital really strained and has put him in an awkward position. Also, again, technically no longer a prince.

Prince Aayden Ponsonby: Still cleaning up the conflict in Codua and recovering from whatever happened between him and Argus. His anger problems might have momentarily gotten worse and the precarious health of his father and changing attitudes back home has made his own position as Crown Prince of Oskya a bit tense so he’s often too distracted to be mean.

Princess Hadley ek Ponsonby | Niężckna Hajnalka lik Villumsen: (I just like writing her whole name). Aayden’s wife. A bit on the wild side, might find herself in Graza because her husband as a (valid) reason to not want to be around Argus and also to keep her safe and away from what’s happening in Oskya.

Reverend Mother Ulrike: Mother of all Santivian nuns. While she instigated the war in Codua she’s not pleased with some of the outcomes. She has a very anti-Justice Zisa campaign going that she initially was aligned with Chancellor Harver on but then his cousin killed her surrogate son so now things are kinda awkward.

Hartanti Telak: Also currently missing. Still amazing and stunning though. She was last seen criticizing a nobleman for talking to her at a party.

Lady Cordinia ana’Gustavo Carvallo: Now not the only Dowager Queen/Empress in the Escana Empire. In charge of the royal nursery and Queen Liliana’s closest “friend” if she can even be called that.

Lord Enyo an’Tomas Serafin: Last seen throwing wine in Argus’ face. The highlight of his year. Totally not Lord Barraza’s sugar baby now.

Ambassador Ulmer: Probably going to quit soon. The in between for Escana and Oskyan relations. He’s trying to flatter as many people as possible and keep the peace.

Ambassador Oprinchuk: The expert on Ardunese and Oskyan relations. An ally of Justice Zisa’s and a woman feared by many. Hadley admires her.

Maltoq Zamen: Prisoner. Took a vow of silence and hasn’t spoken more than like 4 words a while back.

Leo Dianglo: Has honestly been spiraling since he and Argus had their secret wedding. If he got his way, he and everyone he cares about would be leaving Graza immediately. He overheard some unfortunate things, was arrested for a crime he didn’t commit, and has another kid to take care of. He’s just having a rough time.

Mel: Surprisingly, being forced to join the knights and then kidnapped by pirates trying to use him for purposes he can’t understand did nothing but made him an even more angst-riddled teenager.

Mung: All things considered, unwilling knighthood hasn’t been so bad for him as he’s getting proper medical training and is no longer considered pirate orphan #2. Just don’t ask him how things are between him and Mel.

Officer Gerwin: Commander of the Escana Knights. The one good day he’s had was firing Damaris.

Sir Erasmus: Knight elected to keep watch on Leo and his pirate orphans. Although he hasn’t really been doing that lately. In fact, where has he been?

Catalina: Marcel’s daughter. Leo’s daughter. She’s a kid and she’s around.

Sister Rosalie Pélissier: Kellish nun who ditched the Kallenbachs and the Oskyan war camp to join Duchess Benedetta. But she wants to make friends with Argus. She also seems to know things she shouldn’t.

Lord Gaius Kallenbach: Boy needs a break. He’s almost died like twice and no one seems to care.

Lady Philomené Kallenbach: Gaius’ older sister and was (still is?) Sister Rosalie’s girlfriend. She also ditched the Oskyan war camp to hang out with Duchess Benedetta.

Duchess Benedetta Onesta Cassiopeia de ave Astorino: The warring Duchess has secured a few more victories but might be willing to surrender to the Oskyans and the Escana Empire if they can all come to a beneficial deal. After revealing that she’s not working with her uncle and has her own qualms with the holy capital, she’s made herself a glowing potential ally but still a very dangerous adversary.

Justice Zisa: The ambitions and unlikable leader of the Santivian world. He’s not a huge fan of Escan or Oskya at the moment.

Princess Wiara Mirecka: The girl Leo found marooned on a beach turned out to be a missing princess of Gegra, fleeing her home after her mentor was accused of witchcraft and she’s been causing problems (and plotting kidnappings) since.

Tamune: The living god in the cells deep within Alda.

Captain Mercy Dunham: The island of Ruiz and his fleet are gone but he’s still out there somewhere.

Master Asli: Arrested and in Alda.

Valera de Martí: As Graza and the Escana Empire struggles to stay strong after losing two kings in a so few years, some take the opportunity to reignite old whispers of rebellions and exiled fugitives may come crawling back to take advantage of the weakened government

#long post #my writing #my characters #character intro #tss trilogy #lgbt+ characters #lgbt fantasy #I'm not even gonna make a comment about how large my cast is for these books #it's already a known fact #I know I said these were all 'prominent' but honestly a good chunk stay in the background #their existence is just important for the story #like Justice Zisa hasn't been in a scene since ORG but because he's basically this world's version of a pope he keeps coming up

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tarantula-hawk-wasp · 4 years ago

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Til Death Do Us Part ch 1

This will end up on Ao3 eventually Based on the @maulusque post (Which You Should Read Before Reading This) where Fox and Palpatine end up in a fake relationship and sham marriage because both thinks the other is sincere and that they are manipulating the other but Fox had one hell of a prenup and ends up cleaning house when he divorces Sheev and saves the galaxy

This is not that story. This is a failed version of that story I thought up because my two braincells were like Rey Palpatine? That makes Fox her step-grandpa??? and i wanted them to meet. It also is turning into a Sequels Fix It (disclaimer- I kind of take sequels canon about the sheev clones and mash it with my fist until juice comes out and make lemonade and do whatever i want bc they dont explain enough)

Summary: Fox wakes up from cryo-stasis to a galaxy recovering from the fall of the Empire as the universe’s Bitterest Ex-Husband because he didn’t get to kill Palpatine himself. He’s not going to let some discount clone of sheev ruin things again either, and ends up with a surprise step-granddaughter along the way. 3k words chapter 1/?

Fox should have known better than to attempt out-manipulating the puppetmaster of a galactic war. What really rankled was how close he had come, his fingers had metaphorically brushed the salvation of the Republic before it had been snatched away.

The divorce had been more than halfway processed, and Palpatine had grown more and more panicked. Under the scrutiny of every lawyer on Coruscant, the prenuptial agreement had been airtight, the political powers Fox tried to give himself in it were unlikely to be enforced, but the monetary and titular aspects were to the letter of the law.

Of course the law only applied to citizens and sentients. Palpatine cracked down hard against Clone Rights in those last months. He himself did not publicly utter a biased word in either direction, only ever praising the effectiveness of the troops, but many of Palpatine’s close associates presented strong cases. People that had been at their engagement party, people who had been roped by tradition into dancing with Fox’s brothers at the wedding, people who had looked him in the eye over an oiled banquet table and praised his wit, became the ones proclaiming that Fox and his brothers had no more inborn rights or legal merit than a droid or womprat.

Palpatine drew the court case out in circular debates, and last minute rescheduling. Fox was kept exhausted and worn to the bone between the ramped up tempo of the war, the grueling hours in court, and the new loathing facing him every second he spent at his job in the Coruscant Guard. Palpatine had dropped any acts around Fox, no longer the doting grandfather of the republic, or enthusiastic geriatric spouse, but bitter and jilted and cruel-tongued. Some days Fox feared for his life.

It was that resignation that he would die that saved Fox’s life. He updated his will -clones were at least allowed those for any non-GAR-issue items they had - and made sure copies were held by numerous offices, and even on other planets. He appointed Cody and the Coruscant Guard as the main benefactors, Cody had the authority to divy resources up among the rest of the vode, and the Coruscant Guard were both his closest brothers and deserving of any boon he could grant them. He left a hefty endowment for the cadets and tubies, to find either adoptive families or to raise them without the military training in the event of the War ending. He left his half of the cultural artifacts that Palpatine had collected to the Jedi for them to distribute as they saw fit.

Even if Palpatine managed to pierce holes through every line of the divorce documents, he could not deny Fox’s last will and testament. Palpatine had to keep Fox alive, or else he would lose many of the assets he was trying to keep in his grasp.

Fox had counted on more time to slip information to the GAR and the Jedi, he had counted on less supervision, and he had counted on Dooku and Grievous lasting for a few more months than they did.

He failed to prevent Order 66, and as his brothers lost their free-will, he was abducted from 500 Republica. A drugged dart jabbing through his blacks and unfamiliar hands hauling him onto a ship. He was put into cryo-cycle stasis. That counted enough as keeping him alive that his will could not be enacted, but kept him and his insider knowledge from challenging Palpatine.

Forty years later, a decade after the fledgling New Republic finally closed the buried account that dripped credits into the facility Fox’s stasis pod was in, the power couplings shorted out - whatever droid or employee was in charge of maintenance long departed for salaried work. The pod had emergency protocols to thaw him out with the last of its energy reserves if the power was cut out.

And so out he had staggered, head aching and bile rising. His genetically wired resilience and discipline had carried him through the worst of the stasis sickness.

The computer terminals were easy enough to slice. Palpatine did not change his cybersecurity strategy over the decades, and Fox knew more than he wanted to of that man’s mind. What he found was disturbing, but not surprising. Weapons capable of destroying entire planets, the genocide of the Jedi, the suicidal brothers made into cyborg Dark Troopers, a Galactic Empire. And cloning, an overwhelming amount of information on cloning. Not just familiar Kaminoan files, but resources from other cloning facilities, Strand-Casts, Splices, Stem-cells- every method explored and combined. Palpatine had been seeking immortality.

Fox did not let himself think about what year it was, he did not think about the decades Palpatine had marred for the Galaxy, the vode all marching far away without him, the history ripped apart by waves of propaganda. What he thought instead about was his own failure to sacrifice himself and put a blaster bolt through Palpatine’s wrinkled forehead so many years ago. It rankled quite a bit that Palpatine died while he was in stasis - the bitterness of unfulfilled hatred. But he could find new purpose. He would not let a false Palpatine return and inflict himself upon the healing Galaxy.

After he left the lunar facility orbiting its dead planet in a nearly-corroded relic of an emergency escape ship, the first goal he achieved was programming a medical droid to excise the control chip from his brain. Then he started slicing again. There were still some accounts he had set up during his sham marriage with credits that had decades of interest. His backup plan to that was selling the material assets he knew either he or Palpatine had stored away in scattered locations.

Fox bought a ship, blasters, and assembled piecemeal a set of armor. He bought bounty hunter credentials, keeping his helmet on always to hide any recognition his face might bring. He stacked crates of rations in the empty bunks in his ship - a Skipray Blastboat - a vessel meant for four was a roomy choice to travel alone in, but still nearly invisible in its ubiquity. And he went hunting.

Palpatine’s clones were hard to find, a challenge Fox embraced for its distraction. He found out some of the pseudonyms running the older facilities, the constructed identities for whatever apprentices, droids, or imperial loyalists were actually doing the work. That was a mystery Fox was still investigating.

Sometimes, to find a clone of Palpatine, Fox anonymously set the bounty himself, and then claimed it as well - getting the resources of the minor guild he worked with, as well as a tracking fob.

Sometimes he killed them. Sometimes it was easy, the compulsions and the personality of Palpatine showing through, and that hated face looking back. Sometimes they were worming their way into government positions to undermine the New Republic. Sometimes it was harder, botched strand-casts that held only a passing resemblance to the man, and were without the force or any malignance. Those, Fox judged on a case-by-case basis. Were they in politics? How connected were they to any neo-imperialists? He judged each of them by their own actions, he knew the way a clone could be blamed for the actions of another.

He was not the only one after these clones, someone else was also hunting them - off of any official Bounty Hunting channels. And with the karked up Sith tradition of usurpers, Fox could not assume it was an ally.

Fox’s unknown rival gradually became more than just a nuisance to compete against. There had been a strand-cast clone of Palpatine’s that bore only a partial resemblance and had been actively undermining some of the networks Fox thought might be connected to the cloning facilities. Fox had been trying to track him down, to talk to someone who might be able to link him to the roots of this operation - he was even ready to offer personal protection - but his opponent had reached him first.

The man was dead now. As was the woman he had been traveling with. It was frustratingly suspicious, and Fox was out of other leads to investigate. He spent a few months slicing and scouring for information about the strand-cast. The man had boarded a ship from a large spaceport with a woman and a child, had transferred numerous times, and then, at the last port before his death, had only embarked with the woman. The child had either died prior the the adults’ deaths, or was still alive. And if the child was alive, they might know where their father had come from.

Shipyard security cameras and life/heat sensors could only tell him so much. He looked into crew manifests, ration orders, and fuel receipts. Between fuel logs and hyperspace maps, he created a list of planets between each refueling stop with more fuel purchased and time between than a direct route would necessitate and worked down that, checking for ships matching their vessel’s description docking with false credentials. Planets with smaller populations were quicker to investigate so he looked there first. It was a slow process over weeks.

Jakku had only a few scattered settlements, and while their ship monitoring was lacking, the local population was likely to have seen anyone who arrived or left. He landed outside of one of the larger trade centers.

He disembarked his ship and walked towards the mass of tents and shabby buildings. He was wearing only a minimum of armor, and had left his helmet on the ship. His blaster was still displayed in its holster, a weight he felt pressed against his thigh with every step. He wasn’t here as a bounty hunter, but something closer to undercover instead, and if the kid was here he didn’t want to scare or threaten the child prematurely. He would blend in more as just another spacer.

He was met by a varied group of sun-beaten and skeptical beings. The welcoming committee seemed torn between distrust and hope for trade.

“I’m here for information.” He began, showing a flash of credit chips when he pulled out his holoprojector. “About a year ago a ship of this type would have arrived and left a passenger behind.”

“Lotta ships come in and out…” A thin Caskadag said unhelpfully. But Fox could see poorly concealed recognition among some of the faces. He mentally debated who to bribe or how else to persuade the crowd.

Out of sight, there was a shriek of conversation and then the frantic scuffle of running feet over sand. A girl emerged from a clump of tents and stopped, almost breathless, staring at him. She was young, between six or eight, Fox struggled like most clones with approximating odd numbered years of natural borns, but she was small.

“Did my parents send you!? Are they gonna come get me?” She asked with bright desperation. She was staring at the holoprojected ship in his hands. Fox knew this was the strand-cast’s child.

“I’m here because of your parents.” He said evenly. He looked at the group of now unhappy onlookers, denied their chance to weasel credits out of him. “Is there somewhere less busy we can talk?”

“Mmhmm.” She walked him between tents to a clearing edged with waste heaps. Fox opened his mouth and then stopped again, hesitant.

“Why did my parents send you?” There was sensible caginess warring with hope in her voice. She kept glancing back to the crowd they had just left.

“I’m sorry, Rey,” He hoped that what the other workers had muttered at her had been her name, and dropped down to one knee to be on a level with her. “But your parents are dead. I’m sorry, but they can’t come get you.”

There was a watery vulnerability to her eyes. Fox expected a denial, he hated being the one to deliver this news. It was partially his own failure.

“So… So I’m just… I’m just going to stay here? And - and work for Mister Plutt forever?” She looked wetly at the pitiful tents around them, the sand, the beating sun, the scrap-sorting piles. Fox looked at her, at the scabs and callouses on her tiny hands, at the stained clothing, at the bones of her arms, at the ring of faint green skin around her wrist. Force, he had always been weak for the cadets.

“No, if you want… If you want I can take you with me.” It was an impulsive offer, but it felt right.

“You’re not my dad.” She said sulkily. “I’m only supposed to leave if him or mum comes.”

“No, I’m not.” Fox did some quick thinking about his relationship to Palpatine, his own apparent age, and the fact her father was a clone of Sheev. “But I am your father’s ex-husband.”

He knew that she had no reason to trust him, and frankly if she had any sense to not get abducted, she wouldn’t. Fox was ready to pull up a datapad with the copy of his marriage certificate, proof her father was a clone, and a discussion of family trees. Instead of an argument, she looked intensely at him and he felt a warmth swell around him, like a summer breeze. Of course the kriffing kid was force sensitive.

It was pleasant, as far as being probed by the force ever was. She was bright and gentle and washed over him, so unlike the cloying oil-slick that he had not realized choked his mind for years until he was finally free of Palpatine. He waited, keeping his thoughts on what he had just said, but not so intently as to raise her suspicion that he was hiding something.

Eventually she nodded. “Okay.”

“Okay?”

“I know when people are lying. And-” She hesitated, squirming a little. “And you feel nice.”

Fox smiled. Nice was not the word that Fox would have picked to describe himself currently, considering he had spent a better part of the past year hunting down clones of his ex-husband and killing many of them with extreme prejudice. He wondered unhappily at what relative caliber for niceness she was comparing him to. He stood up and paused.

“So you’ll come with me?” He asked again for clarity’s sake.

“Mmhmm.” She confirmed, and stepped to his side, reaching up to worm her little hand into his.

“Do you have stuff to get? People to say bye to?” He asked uncertainly. He wasn’t sure how this was supposed to go, and right now it felt too easy. She started tugging him towards the array of scrap-sorters.

She went to a spot she had clearly hastily abandoned when he had arrived, and picked up a dingy canvas bag and slung it over her shoulder. She walked back to him and put her hand back in his again.

“Okay. Now we need to tell Mister Plutt.” She nodded towards a permanent structure at the edge of the scrapyard.

“Rey, Rey, Who’s that man?” One of the women who had not been in the group that greeted him, skin toughened by sand and sun, rose up from the heaps of metal and brandished a staff at him. Part of Fox was relieved that at least someone was stopping little girls from getting kidnapped. The other part of him put on his most charming, non-threatening smile.

“I’m her father’s ex-husband. Her parents are dead and I only just found out…”

The woman glared at him but shifted to look at Rey, softening her gaze.

“He tellin’ the truth? Do you know this man?”

“He’s not lying.” Rey said. “And Dad mentioned he had a complix-complexcated past.”

“Her father and I may have split over our differences, but I’m not leaving his kid to grow up a scrapper beholden to quotas when I have the resources to raise her instead.” Fox’s honest determination had the desired effect, the woman lowered her staff and nodded, still suspicious but relenting.

“You’re going to have to pay Unkar for her.”

Fox frowned and gestured towards his blaster on his hip. “Sure, I’ll pay.”

“No. I mean it. You try any funny business and he’ll set the guild on you or worse.” The woman was very serious. “You got enough to pay?”

“If I have to, I will.” Fox said with finality. He did not want to buy another being, but he also wanted Rey off of this planet as smoothly as possible.

The questioning was repeated with Unkar Plutt, who glared with equal distrust to the people outside. He took Rey aside into his office room, and Fox hoped it was to question her about his claims and if she actually wanted to leave with him. Fox was concerned by how easy it was for someone to take a child off of Jakku like this, but also acknowledged that this was incredibly convenient for him.

Plutt and Rey reemerged and Rey walked over and clung to his pant leg. Fox brushed a hand over her hair.

“I’m losing years of good labor.” Unkar said callously. “I expect to be compensated.”

Fox told himself that the credits he handed over were a bribe. Fox swung Rey’s little bag over his shoulder and after a moment of consideration, hoisted Rey up to rest on his hip as well. She was light and clung round his neck, giggling with surprise in his ear.

Fox didn’t need to be force sensitive to know that this decision felt right.

#commander fox #rey #rey skywalker #sheev palpatine #foxpatine #fox/palpatine #my writing #star wars #This turned into a kid fic bc Im Me #foxpatine divorce stasis pod sequels fix it au

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homeformyheart · 4 years ago

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unraveling truth | chapter 1: the tower (rod au)

author’s note: this is a ride or die princess/fantasy AU with inspiration from a bunch of different places, including a tarot card theme per chapter. some dialogue and scenes will reflect or tie back to the original story by pixelberry.

copyright: all characters owned by pixelberry studios. series/pairing: ride or die – colt kaneko x mc (ellie wheeler); minor logan x mc series rating/warnings: 16+ chapter rating/warnings: 13+ word count: 4.2k story summary: eleanor wheeler is a princess and dreading her 18th birthday when she’s expected to select her future husband from her stifling peer group of eligible nobles. however, a not-so-chance encounter with a mysterious stranger she can’t quite place and a reckoning unlike any other finds her on a crazy self-discovery journey and quest to reclaim her throne.

unraveling truth | chapter 1: the tower

a tall, severe looking woman loomed over ellie’s head from behind, casting a shadow on the random flowers and landscapes she had been doodling in the notebook in front of her for the last two hours. she was supposed to be taking notes on all the suitable princes that would be arriving late afternoon to attend her eighteenth birthday ball, which happened to be one of her least favorite annual traditions. even though she would prefer a day out in the town or a quiet day in with those closest to her, as the guest of honor it was her duty to play host to all royals and nobles from the neighboring kingdoms while dodging inappropriate commentary about her beauty and womanly figure from men who were her father’s age and their wives who not-so-subtly insisted on trying to set her up with their sons.

this year, though, the ball was going to take on a slightly different, or rather expanded, purpose. it was also going to serve as her official societal debut as an adult, which meant it was going to be exponentially harder to avoid all the matchmaking conversations. now that she was turning eighteen, she was expected to pick a suitor by the end of the social season. and unfortunately for her, the end was coming up in a fortnight. as much as she hated how long the social season felt, now she wished she could delay it a little longer.

ellie flinched at the sound of her etiquette tutor’s stern voice and pointer slamming down on her parchment, bringing her attention back to the lesson.

“i don’t think drawing horses and flowers has any value in helping you select a proper suitor, your highness. today of all days, you must pay attention.”

ellie straightened up in her seat and feigned the sincerity in her voice as she replied, “i’m so sorry, mrs. clarke. i was paying attention – i know the best economically advantageous ally for us would be with the vandermeer family since we share a border.”

mrs. clark clucked her tongue disapprovingly. “we’ll review again, from the top.”

ellie inwardly groaned as she counted the minutes until her lecture was over. she wasn’t sure why she needed a refresher on the histories and lineage of each of the noble families that would be in attendance, but her father had insisted it was critical to making the right impression on her future in-laws, a term she already resented. she was only turning eighteen and had never been out of the country on her own before. how could she be expected to get married?

as soon as she was dismissed, she ran, or rather, walked as briskly as a princess should, to her chambers, where her best friend and lady-in-waiting, riya was waiting for her with her riding outfit prepared and tarot deck in hand.

“you are the best, riya! after three hours hearing about the same old stories about how noble families are constantly fighting for wealth or defending their titles, i could really use a ride,” ellie grimaced, letting out a loud sigh as riya helped her out of her dress, loosening the tight laces on the corset and helping her get changed.

“mmhm, and spend some time with looogan,” riya teased. ellie gave riya a pointed look as she pulled on her boots.

riya just looked at ellie with a raised eyebrow. “i’ve seen the way you look at him, and more importantly, the way he looks at you.”

ellie blushed. “i know, he’s sweet and he was my first kiss and everything, but at the end of the day, he’s my bodyguard and i have to marry a noble.”

riya wrapped ellie up in a big hug. “i know that sucks but i’m here for you, okay?”

“only when darius isn’t around, right?” ellie giggled at the blush that appeared on riya’s cheeks, earning her a light smack on the arm. “but really, thanks, riya.”

riya handed ellie the tarot deck – it was one of the few remaining possessions of her mother’s and it always made ellie feel a little closer to her mom whenever she communed with the cards – as though it was her mother’s spirit guiding her. ellie unfolded the handsewn and embroidered altar cloth and spread out the cards before her. she could really use some of that guidance today. ellie took a deep breath and concentrated on her intention for the day, although it was something she’d been ruminating over several weeks, which was: what is next for me?

ellie hovered her hand over the cards and moved from left to right with deliberation. she couldn’t describe exactly how the cards called her but it was a feeling, and when she felt the familiar invisible tug, she opened her eyes and flipped over the card.

the tower upright. one of the most dreaded cards in the deck and one that ellie had experienced only once before, when her mother died five years ago. ellie stared at the card until she felt riya’s reassuring hand on her shoulder. “it’s okay,” riya said softly, gently grabbing the card from ellie’s hand and nudging her to stand.

“i know. i can’t dwell on this now. thanks riya,” ellie sighed and made her way over to the door. “i’ll be back in an hour.”

* * * * * the sky was absolutely clear outside with the sun shining brightly overhead. ellie closed her eyes outside the stables and tilted her head upward so she could relish the warmth. feeling the gentle breeze tickle her hair and the sun warm her face immediately lightened her mood.

“hey there, troublemaker.”

ellie opened her eyes to find herself staring into the warm, brown eyes of her one-time adolescent crush. logan was leaning casually against the doorframe, his tousled hair framing his tanned face. ellie let her eyes wander around his face, taking in his firm jaw and high cheekbones and the way the corner of his lips were pulled up into a smirk, before responding.

“as i recall, you were always the one in trouble,” she smirked, walking around him and into the stables.

logan followed behind ellie, stopping to take the reins of midnight, her strong, black stallion and the more tempered chestnut mare he often rode to keep her company so he could lead the horses outside. “by the way, i’m pretty sure you’re the reason i got into trouble, since you seemed to make it your personal mission to ditch your security detail.”

ellie stuck her tongue out at him before climbing into the saddle swiftly. nothing quite compared to the feeling of freedom and control that she felt while riding. it didn’t take long before she was urging midnight to a gallop across the fields toward the woods at the edge of the palace property. she knew without looking that logan was right behind her, albeit a few paces behind given the chestnut mare he was riding was a little older. he was always cognizant of her reputation and kept up the appearances of distance between the two of them. the chestnut mare, which was the typical choice for noble ladies, was one such example of logan’s thoughtfulness toward her reputation. anyone paying attention to the stables would assume he had taken midnight while she rode the mare.

she finally slowed enough for logan to catch up as they approached the woods and she gently guided midnight toward a small path that they both knew by heart. it was a fairly narrow dirt path that seemed to go nowhere but she had discovered as a child that by turning right at a particular gap in the trees, the path opened up to a small clearing and pond in the center. ellie dismounted and made her way over to the pond, taking off her boots so she could dip her feet in the water. logan mirrored her and the two of them sat quietly for a few minutes, enjoying the sounds of birds chirping and leaves rustling with the breeze.

“i can’t believe somehow i’m supposed to decide who i want to marry today,” ellie said with a loud sigh. “i thought i would feel differently about being eighteen, but it’s just another day like all the others, isn’t it? i’m supposed to just keep my head down and do what’s asked of me.” she looked over at logan and felt a longing rise in her chest. the sun trickling through the leaves of the trees above them created dancing shadows on his serene face.

logan finally looked over at her and ellie suddenly felt as though the clearing was too warm and the water encircling her feet was not cold enough and all she wanted to do was reach over and pull logan into a kiss so she could breathe easy again. she didn’t know that much about him since he kept to himself so maybe her feelings were mostly physical in nature, but there was just something about him, especially when he looked at her as tenderly as he was doing now, that made her wish deep-down that she was born of a life where she had the option to choose him.

“no matter what, birthdays are for celebrating with those you love. and there’s a team of people working really hard to make sure that you get to celebrate the right way,” he said, giving her a dazzling smile that seemed to glow with warmth from the sun.

ellie pulled her feet out of the water and began drying off. “are you part of this ‘team of people’?” she asked, letting herself feel excited and repress the dread and longing she felt moments before.

logan smirked at her as she lifted herself onto her horse, following suit on his own. “that’s a secret. now, we better get back quickly before i get sentenced to death for kidnapping the princess.”

* * * * * the rest of the afternoon sped by as ellie was meticulously prepped as though she were both a rag doll and porcelain figurine. she was bathed, combed, and groomed until her skin felt raw and her scalp tingled unpleasantly before being pinched, waxed, and made up with delicate eye makeup and a deure shade of lipstick. finally, ellie put on her custom pale pink a-line gown with a flowing tulle skirt and lace sleeves. the high neckline kept the dress modest, but the cinched waist showed off her svelte figure. gold lace and intricate embroidery detail covered the dress, balancing the sheer softness of the pink against the bold color that would certainly shimmer under the ballroom chandeliers. riya carefully placed a gold braided headband on ellie’s head before securely tying the white mask decorated with pink and gold feathers over ellie’s eyes.

ellie had suggested the masquerade theme by convincing her father that getting to know the suitors while in disguise would help her make a more objective choice since hopefully they wouldn’t realize who she really was until the end of the evening. secretly, ellie also wanted to see if anyone would be interested in her if they didn’t know she was the princess. once riya gave her the thumbs up, ellie took a deep breath and stepped outside her room.

logan straightened up from where he was leaning against the wall opposite the door to ellie’s room. as her personal bodyguard, he was allowed to stay close to her, but he knew he was often pushing the definition of “close.” his eyes widened as he took in ellie’s appearance – she looked both absolutely angelic and mysterious, and he simultaneously forgot and became painfully aware that he was well below her station.

ellie beamed at him and gave a small twirl to show off the full dress. “what do you think?”

“you look absolutely breathtaking, your highness. now let’s go make your secret entrance,” logan said, letting out the breath he didn’t realize he was holding and holding out his arm.

as ellie slid her petite arm through his, logan heard a soft voice whisper, it’s okay to love her. he looked around quickly with his peripheral vision but knew deep-down that the voice came from inside him. whether or not he had any real feelings for ellie didn’t matter, he had a job to do and couldn’t afford any distractions, no matter how beautiful and funny and kind they may be. as he led her down the back stairwell toward a side door he couldn’t help but glance down, trying to memorize the feel of her arm in his and the glow of the lights illuminating her cheeks. as they walked out the door, he took a deep breath and buried that voice as far down as he could, covering it with a metaphorical lid. she wasn’t meant to be his.

ellie extricated her arm from logan’s and gave him a nod. he stepped back and disappeared around the corner, presumably to find a shadow in the ballroom he would use to keep watch. ellie watched as noble after noble, dressed in their most ornate masks and formal wear made their way up the steps and through the palace doors. she clenched her fists at her side to steel herself before lifting her chin with pride and taking a step forward. she could do this.

she stepped inside and was quickly escorted by a servant toward the intimidating ballroom doors. out of the corner of her eye, she saw logan give her a reassuring smile from his “hiding place,” and smiled to herself before squaring her shoulders and walking purposefully into the ballroom, hoping she looked like the epitome of a noble lady. the room was already bustling with conversation and people milling about with drinks, and she flagged down the nearest servant as discreetly as she could so she could grab a flute of the sparkling champagne.

she took a careful sip and crinkled her nose at the carbonated bubbles tickling her nose but then quickly drank half the class once she realized she liked the crisp, dry flavor that hinted of apple. she felt the liquid settle in her stomach and a warm feeling bloom outward until she felt it on her cheeks. she had alcohol before of course, but forgot to take it slow.

ellie didn’t notice a tall nobleman walking toward her from the left and it was too late to pivot once she did. she took a couple steps to the left while looking to her right for a servant to leave her empty glass with when she walked right into a dark-haired man wearing a soft, velvet frock set in black and trimmed in silver lace and black silk gloves. her hand immediately went from where it was holding the skirt of her dress to his abdomen and she looked up to meet the most intense gaze she’d ever encountered. She could feel his gaze piercing through his matching black velvet mask.

“oh, i’m so sorry sir,” she quickly stammered, trying to take an off-balance step back to create space between them.

his arm shot out quickly under hers and held her steady at the waist. ellie felt her cheeks warm at his touch; it was strange, but she felt like his touch was just as intense as his gaze.

“looks like you’re in the wrong place, sweetheart,” he murmured in her ear, grabbing the empty champagne flute out of her right hand and placing it on the tray of a servant walking past them.

ellie felt her temper flare and deliberately took a step back and smoothed out her skirts to keep from telling him off. “who wants to know?” ellie said, through a clenched smile and glare that she hoped conveyed that she thought he had some nerve talking to her like that.

“just wondering who you’re trying to impress, looking like that,” he replied, the corner of his lip tilting up into a very attractive smirk. “that dress seems a bit overkill if you’re tripping over your feet. not very graceful for a lady, are we?”

“i’m meeting someone so i’m afraid i’m going to have to excuse myself,” ellie forced out through a smile that was already hurting her cheeks. she was tempted to dig her heels into his toes and could imagine the satisfaction she’d feel at hearing him cry out in pain, but instead curtsied and turned to walk away.

she took one step forward when she felt a gloved hand grab onto her pinky finger. she whirled around slowly to maintain an air of grace but glared at the masked man who had let go of her finger and now had his hand outstretched toward her.

“dance with me,” he said calmly, but there was an edge to his voice ellie couldn’t quite place. she looked up into his eyes and realized that she didn’t think she had it in her to say no.

as soon as she nodded, he led her to the dance floor where a few other pairs were already dancing along with the live quartet. his arm slid confidently around her waist and ellie placed hers on his shoulder with practiced ease. she was surprised at the way he led her around the floor so gracefully, it felt like she was barely touching the floor.

“i’m surprised at how light you are on your feet. i don’t think i’ve seen you around,” ellie said carefully, tilting her head up to look at him as he twirled her around.

he smirked. “that’s because i haven’t been around.”

now ellie was really curious. “you mean, this social season? i’ve had to dance with a couple dozen nobles all summer but none of them dance quite like you.”

the smirk on his face faded into a thin, pressed line. “no, i haven’t been around for a few years. my father and i didn’t see eye-to-eye and he didn’t want me around.”

“i’m sorry, i didn’t mean to—” he quickly spun her out and back in before she could finish her apology.

when he pulled her back in, he lowered his head by her ear and murmured, “i don’t want your pity, sweetheart. see you around.”

he bowed and she curtsied reflexively before he quickly turned on his heel and disappeared into the crowd. ellie didn’t have time to react before a different nobleman asked her to dance, followed by another, and she found herself going from partner to partner, song to song, making conversation about anything and nothing, leaving her without a chance to catch her breath and make sense of her spinning thoughts.

ellie excused herself from her last partner, grabbing and subsequently draining another glass of champagne from a servant walking by before weaving in and around couples on the dancefloor until she reached the pillar closest to the quartet. she ducked behind the pillar and folded the skirt of her dress behind her so it wouldn’t flare out and took a few slow, deep breaths to calm herself down.

every single person that she danced with clearly had one agenda for tonight. while she was grateful none of them managed to guess who she really was, at least out loud, it was getting tiresome hearing about who they thought had the best chance of marrying her or wondering where she was or wondering if she might be interested in them. only one person didn’t seem to care about that, and she had no idea who he was or where he was from.

maybe she was feeling on edge at the moment with all the adrenaline from the evening pumping through her but she swore she could feel someone approaching her hiding spot. not like the normal self-defense or slightly paranoid feeling of someone coming up behind you, but a real, grounded gut feeling that someone was about to come up to her. ellie quickly pivoted to her right and raised her fists so she wouldn’t be caught off guard but was surprised anyway to see logan.

“whoa, there troublemaker. it’s just me. come on, it’s time for your announcement,” logan said quietly. despite the smirk on his face, ellie couldn’t find the usual playfulness in his eyes.

he led her toward the front where her father was waiting, his arm outstretched toward her. she felt logan leave her side and retreat back to a discreet location a split second before he actually did it, but didn’t get a chance to process that before her father looped her hand through his arm and led her toward the front of the room.

“ready, ellie? your life won’t be the same after this,” her father smiled as he looked down at her the way he had done for as long as she could remember, at least since her mother died. like she was a precious, fragile little flower that needed to be protected from the elements of nature.

before she had a chance to answer, a chorus of silverware clinking against champagne glasses quickly quieted the oblivious conversations still happening and ellie had to physically fight her own body from recoil from all the eyes that were now staring at her. she tried to distract herself from the gnawing in her stomach by scanning the room for any expressions of those she danced with who didn’t realize who she was at the time. it was entertaining to say the least, seeing people suddenly look embarrassed and shocked.

her father cleared his throat and ellie knew that was her cue to smile like the picture-perfect princess if she wasn’t already. she kept scanning the room, and couldn’t help but feel slightly disappointed that the mysterious man she bumped into was nowhere to be found. she sighed inwardly and turned her attention back to her father’s speech since she would have to give hers once he was done.

“i just have one last thing to say to my beloved daughter, eleanor. i am so proud of the young woman you’ve become and i know you’ll do great things. everyone please, raise a glass to celebrate my wonderful daughter’s birthday—” he had raised his glass of champagne but was cut off by a rumbling sound overhead that was quickly followed by a CRACK! and the crunch of concrete crumbling together.

ellie looked up and saw a deep fissure was defacing the beautiful greek-castle architecture design of the ceiling and the crack was expanding as it approached the front of the room, where she currently stood next to her father, frozen in shock. she barely registered logan appearing behind her.

“go! keep her safe,” her father implored, turning only after logan gave him a firm nod.

“no, wait, dad!” ellie watched with horror as her dad disappeared behind the fallen rubble until he was out of sight. logan started half-dragging, half-carrying her until she came to her senses and started running as fast as she could in heels and a long dress, letting him guide her by the hand around screaming people and falling concrete.

they stepped out through a hidden exit that was mostly used by servants to make it easier for them to get to the ballroom from the kitchen. logan expertly led her through the hidden corridor and ellie vaguely registered how abandoned the kitchen looked, with trays of desserts and champagne ready to go; the irony of how wasteful this luxury could be was not lost on her. despite how her toes pinched, she kept her mouth shut and did her best to keep up with logan, who made a beeline for the back door and around the castle until they reached the stables.

midnight and a horse ellie didn’t recognize were already saddled with what looked like fully packed saddle bags.

“why does midnight look like she’s been prepared for an escape and whose horse is that?” ellie was dumbfounded and there was no one else in the stables.

logan pulled her toward midnight and lifted her up so she was forced to grab on to the reins and climb into the saddle as he quickly turned to do the same on his horse. “i’ll explain later, we need to get as far away from here as possible. follow my lead and don’t stop for anyone!”

ellie matched logan’s pace as they left the castle grounds and even though they were galloping full speed under the light of the moon, ellie couldn’t help but look back over her shoulder with a sinking feeling in the pit of her stomach. part of the roof had collapsed, leaving the stone turret closest to her vantage point standing alone among the rubble, its gray stone coat illuminated by the moon.

in that moment, she knew she might never see her home or her father again. the picture of the turret standing tall like a tower was seared in her mind and a sense of dread unlike anything she had felt before settled in her chest. she knew this sudden upheaval of her life, the destruction of her home, and the loss of her innocence was only the beginning of what the cards were trying to tell her.

* * * * * mentions: @kat-tia801; @lovehugsandcandy; permatag: @withbeautyandrage; @agentnolastname; @freckles-spangledvampire

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rockislandadultreads · 4 years ago

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#Bookoween: Thrilling Reading Recommendations

The Red Lotus by Chris Bohjalian

The first time Alexis saw Austin, it was a Saturday night. Not in a bar, but in the emergency room where Alexis sutured a bullet wound in Austin's arm. Six months later, on the brink of falling in love, they travel to Vietnam on a bike tour so that Austin can show her his passion for cycling and he can pay his respects to the place where his father and uncle fought in the war. But as Alexis sips white wine and waits at the hotel for him to return from his solo ride, two men emerge from the tall grass and Austin vanishes into thin air. The only clue he leaves behind is a bright yellow energy gel dropped on the road. As Alexis grapples with this bewildering loss, and deals with the FBI, Austin's prickly family, and her colleagues at the hospital, Alexis uncovers a series of strange lies that force her to wonder: Where did Austin go? Why did he really bring her to Vietnam? And how much danger has he left her in?

Close Up by Amanda Quick

Welcome to Burning Cove, California where 1930s Hollywood glamour conceals a ruthless killer…

Vivian Brazier never thought life as an art photographer would include nightly wake-up calls to snap photos of grisly crime scenes or headshots for aspiring male actors. Although she is set on a career of transforming photography into a new art form, she knows her current work is what’s paying the bills.

After shooting crime scene photos of a famous actress, the latest victim of the murderer the press has dubbed the “Dagger Killer,” Vivian notices eerie similarities to the crime scenes of previous victims—details that only another photographer would have noticed—details that put Vivian at the top of the killer’s target list.

Nick Sundridge has always been able to “see” things that others don’t, coping with disturbing dreams and visions. His talent, or as he puts it—his curse—along with his dark past makes him a recluse, but a brilliant investigator. As the only one with the ability to help, Nick is sent to protect Vivian. Together, they discover the Dagger Killer has ties to the glitz and glamour of Hollywood royalty and high society. It is a cutthroat world of allure and deception that Vivian and Nick must traverse—all in order to uncover the killer who will stop at nothing to add them to their gallery of murders.

The Silent Wife by Karin Slaughter

Investigating the killing of a prisoner during a riot inside a state penitentiary, GBI investigator Will Trent is confronted with disturbing information. One of the inmates claims that he is innocent of a brutal attack for which he has always been the prime suspect. The man insists that he was framed by a corrupt law enforcement team led by Jeffrey Tolliver and that the real culprit is still out there—a serial killer who has systematically been preying on women across the state for years. If Will reopens the investigation and implicates the dead police officer with a hero’s reputation of wrongdoing, the opportunistic convict is willing to provide the information GBI needs about the riot murder. Only days ago, another young woman was viciously murdered in a state park in northern Georgia. Is it a fluke, or could there be a serial killer on the loose? As Will Trent digs into both crimes it becomes clear that he must solve the cold case in order to find the answer. Yet nearly a decade has passed—time for memories to fade, witnesses to vanish, evidence to disappear, and lies to become truth. But Will can’t crack either mystery without the help of the one person he doesn’t want involved: his girlfriend and Jeffrey Tolliver’s widow, medical examiner Sara Linton. When the past and present begin to collide, Will realizes that everything he values is at stake . . .

Confessions on the 7:45 by Lisa Unger

Everyone has a secret… Now she knows yours. Selena Murphy is commuting home from her job in the city when the train stalls out on the tracks. She strikes up a conversation with a beautiful stranger in the next seat, and their connection is fast and easy. The woman introduces herself as Martha and confesses that she’s been stuck in an affair with her boss. Selena, in turn, confesses that she suspects her husband is sleeping with the nanny. When the train arrives at Selena’s station, the two women part ways, presumably never to meet again. But days later, Selena’s nanny disappears. Soon Selena finds her once-perfect life upended. As she is pulled into the mystery of the missing nanny, and as the fractures in her marriage grow deeper, Selena begins to wonder, who was Martha really? But she is hardly prepared for what she’ll discover.

Near Dark by Brad Thor

The world’s largest bounty has just been placed upon America’s top spy. His only hope for survival is to outwit, outrun, and outlast his enemies long enough to get to the truth. But for Scot Harvath to accomplish his most dangerous mission ever—one that has already claimed the lives of the people closest to him, including his new wife—he’s going to need help—a lot of it. Not knowing whom he can trust, Harvath finds an unlikely ally in Norwegian intelligence operative Sølvi Kolstad. Just as smart, just as deadly, and just as determined, she not only has the skills, but also the broken, troubled past to match Harvath’s own.

Invisible Girl by Lisa Jewell

Owen Pick’s life is falling apart. In his thirties, a virgin, and living in his aunt’s spare bedroom, he has just been suspended from his job as a geography teacher after accusations of sexual misconduct, which he strongly denies. Searching for professional advice online, he is inadvertently sucked into the dark world of incel—involuntary celibate—forums, where he meets the charismatic, mysterious, and sinister Bryn. Across the street from Owen lives the Fours family, headed by mom Cate, a physiotherapist, and dad Roan, a child psychologist. But the Fours family have a bad feeling about their neighbor Owen. He’s a bit creepy and their teenaged daughter swears he followed her home from the train station one night. Meanwhile, young Saffyre Maddox spent three years as a patient of Roan Fours. Feeling abandoned when their therapy ends, she searches for other ways to maintain her connection with him, following him in the shadows and learning more than she wanted to know about Roan and his family. Then, on Valentine’s night, Saffyre Maddox disappears—and the last person to see her alive is Owen Pick.

#bookoween #reading recommendations #book recs #Book Recommendations #reading recs #thrillers #fiction #new books #booklr #booklist #library #public library #halloween #reading list

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latristereina · 5 years ago

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UNDERRATED RELATIONSHIP/PARTNERSHIP/FRIENDSHIP MEME 7/?: my pick: Juana Enríquez & Juan II of Aragon

The marriage of Juana Enríquez and don Juan of Aragon and Navarre was a political union, derived from a simple political expedience: the necessity to tight the bond between the adversaries of powerful don Álvaro de Luna (who, in fact, ruled in Castile), since he had gotten back in John II of Castile’s good graces. Don Diego Gómez de Sandoval, count of Castro, acted as a go-between between the admiral of Castile (Fadrique Enríquez) and the king of Navarre (Juan of Aragon). Having arranged the marriage and having obtained the consent of Alfonso V of Aragon (Juan’s older brother whom he would eventually succeed), the future spouses got betrothed – they took each other’s hands – at Torrelobatón, on 1 September 1444, in the presence of the king and queen of Castile and the prince of Asturias (future Henry IV). The bridegroom was 46, the bride 19 years old. The age difference emphasized the political nature of the union. The wedding did not take place until 1447. There were two reasons behind this delay: firstly, Rome had to be approached for the dispensation, for there existed the fourth degree of consanguinity between the betrothed, and then, the disaster of the Battle of Olmedo (1445) happened, forcing don Juan of Aragon and don Fadrique to run off to Navarre. The bride, who was already known as queen consort of Navarre, found herself in the custody of John II of Castile, who had taken over Medina de Rioseco. She recovered her liberty on 1 May 1446, thanks to the intercession of future Henry IV, but on an express condition that the wedding with her betrothed would not be celebrated without the consent of the king of Castile. The fire in the village of Atienza, which was supposed to be a part of doña Juana’s dowry, caused another delay of the admiral's matchmaking plans. Finally, John II of Castile gave the desired permission, and the young Castilian woman could receive the wedding ring from the hands of her mature, Aragonese suitor, on 13 July 1447, at Calatayud. Then, the passionate affection stirred in the heart of the Aragonese infante that he bestowed upon his second wife during their married life. According to her contemporaries, doña Juana was a beautiful, intrepid and intelligent woman. She was "charming", according to her adversary, don Pedro of Portugal, although in the pejorative sense of this word: not a charming woman but a deceitful one. It was enough to win the love of her husband. He also showed her paternal affection, for she well could be his daughter. For don Juan she always was his 'little girl’, in the moments of intimate tenderness and in those of political drama.

- Jaime Vicens Vives, Historia crítica de la vida y reinado de Fernando II de Aragón

Although he relied on his lieutenants—Carles, his wife Juana Enríquez, and later their son Fernando—he was discerning and cautious. A complex and contradictory man who was loathe to share power, Juan was infamous both for his reluctance to work with the Catalan ruling elites and his shabby treatment of his son. Carles and Juan had a deeply problematic relationship owing to the father’s unwillingness to relinquish his claim to Navarre in favor of his son, and then disinheriting him in favor of his daughter Leonor, wife of Gaston de Foix. Tensions between father and son worsened when Juan married Juana in 1444, and many of the later political problems in the Crown of Aragon can be traced to personal problems in the royal family. Juan’s miserly attitude toward the Catalans and his son did not, however, extend to his second wife. He endowed Juana with similar powers to those possessed by Maria of Castile, and in many ways she was truly co-ruler with Juan. Throughout her marriage to Juan she was one of his closest advisers and most valuable allies, traveling with him throughout Navarre and the Aragonese realms. Juan relied on her intelligence and discretion, her prodigious familial, financial, and political connections in Castile, and her tenacious and formidable negotiating skills. In 1451 he appointed her Governor of Navarre with Carles, and the next year she gave birth to Fernando, both of which further deteriorated an already troublesome relationship. In 1458 Juan appointed Carles, then thirty-three years old, as Lieutenant General in Catalunya, where he proved to be enormously popular. Juan imprisoned him on trumped up charges of treason, and when he died of tuberculosis in September 1461, accusations of foul play surfaced, accusing not only Juan but also Juana of plotting against Carles in favor of her son, Fernando (1452-1514, later Fernando II of Aragón). But Juana was nothing if not intrepid and, no newcomer to politics, she shrugged off the personal attacks and succeeded Carles as Lieutenant General. She maintained an extensive court with separate chancery and treasurer, but without the judicial and legislative offices that Maria of Castile possessed in parallel with Alfonso’s Neapolitan court. Amid the turbulence and widespread civil unrest that erupted in the wake of Carles’s death, she suppressed opposition in the towns and countryside and secured support for her husband and Fernando. In June 1461, she negotiated on behalf of the Crown to moderate the anti-royalist Capitulations of Vilafranca del Penedés. Like her sister-in-law before her, Juana sided with the remenees, a position that made her highly unpopular with the city magistrates of Barcelona and the landlords. Unlike the six Aragonese queen-lieutenants who preceded her, Juana is noted for her active involvement in military actions, notably the early campaigns of the ten-year civil war. In June 1462, she and Fernando fled from forces led by the rebellious Count of Pallars and took refuge in a royal castle in Girona only to find themselves besieged for a month. She organized the defense of the castle and held the rebels at bay until Juan and Louis XI of France arrived with military support. Although not personally at the head of an army, she was a tough negotiator who rallied and helped organize and provision an array of forces in defense of the Crown in the Ampurdán, accompanied forces to Barcelona and into Aragón. She was a key negotiator in the treaties of Sauveterre and Bayonne in May 1462 that settled the succession of Navarre and allowed the French to occupy the territories of Rousillon and Cerdanya to France in return for military support. She was virtually prisoner, with her daughter Juana, in the castle of Lárraga in 1463. Hostilities worsened, the French, Castilians, and Portuguese intervened, and periodically the Catalans ‘deposed’ (most notably in 1462) Juan, Fernando (occasionally), and Juana. Her inclusion in this list, although a dubious honor, is a clear indication of her power and importance in the political sphere. After her release from Lárraga and as the civil war intensified, she turned her attentions to governing Crown realms as Lieutenant General from 1464 until her death in 1468. With Fernando at her side, and seeking to pacify the warring factions, she presided over the Cortes of Aragón that met in Zaragoza from 1466 to 1468. During this period, she traveled extensively throughout the realms in the midst of civil war, gathering troops and supplies, negotiating with military leaders while personally attending to the business of governing—collecting taxes, holding courts of justice, dealing with the church, managing Crown lands and her own patrimony. The war outlived her by four years, but it is fitting that her indefatigable work as co-ruler with her husband and as tutor to her son mark her as the last queen-lieutenant of the Crown of Aragon.

- Theresa Earenfight, Queenship and Political Power in Medieval and Early Modern Spain

#UNDERRATED RELATIONSHIP/PARTNERSHIP/FRIENDSHIP MEME #perioddramaedit #historyedit #women in history #men in history #juana enríquez #john ii of aragon #charlize theron #robert pugh

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ignigcna · 4 years ago

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𝑺𝒕𝒂𝒕𝒊𝒔𝒕𝒊𝒄𝒔.

FULL NAME : Daenerys Targaryen APPELLATION(S) : Daeny, Stormborn, Khaleesi, The Unburnt, The Silver Queen AGE : 36 Years Old BIRTHDATE : April 20th, 1984 ZODIAC : Aries

GENDER : Cis Female ETHNICITY : Caucasian RELIGION : Agnostic

ROMANTIC ORIENTATION : Hetero SEXUAL ORIENTATION : Bi-Curious RELATIONSHIP STATUS : Widowed, Involved

MAFIA ALLEGIANCE : Targaryen POSITION : Pakhan DAY JOB : Businesswoman / Entrepreneur ( CEO of Khalasar Conglomerate, The Dragonpit, and various other ventures ) FINANCIAL STATUS : Inherited and Illegal Wealth

𝑷𝒉𝒚𝒔𝒊𝒄𝒂𝒍 𝑨𝒑𝒑𝒆𝒂𝒓𝒂𝒏𝒄𝒆.

FACE CLAIM : Katheryn Winnick HEIGHT : 5′6″ PHYSICAL BUILD : Curvy EYE COLOUR : Vivid Blue HAIR COLOUR : Pale blonde, with golden lowlights

𝑭𝒂𝒎𝒊𝒍𝒚.

FATHER : Aerys Targeryen ( † ) MOTHER : Rhaella Targaryen SIBLINGS : Rhaegar, Shaena ( † ), Daeron ( † ), Aegon ( † ), Jaehaerys ( † ), and Viserys Targaryen EXTENDED RELATIONS :

SISTER-IN-LAW : Elia Martell

NIECE & NEPHEW : Rhaenys and Aegon Targaryen

SIGNIFICANT OTHER(S) :

HUSBAND : Khal Drogo ( † )

LOVER : Daario Naharis

CHILDREN : Rhaego Drogo Targaryen ( † ), Kovarro Drogon Targaryen ( Adopted Son ) HOUSEHOLD PET(S) : A Horse named Silver

𝑭𝒂𝒗𝒐𝒓𝒊𝒕𝒆𝒔.

COLOUR : Crimson, Charcoal, Black WEATHER : Spring FOOD : Stroganoff BEVERAGE : Cabernet Sauvignon, Scotch, TIME OF DAY : Sunrise

𝑷𝒆𝒓𝒔𝒐𝒏𝒂𝒍𝒊𝒕𝒚.

HOBBIES : Reading ( usually epics, classics, and non-fiction ) MBTI TYPE : INTJ ( The Architect ) ENNEAGRAM TYPE : Type 8 ( The Challenger )

𝑩𝒂𝒄𝒌𝒈𝒓𝒐𝒖𝒏𝒅.

tw: passive mention of abuse, death of a child, and murder.

Born in the golden age of the Targaryen rule over King’s Landing, she was the youngest and only surviving daughter of Aerys and Rhaella Targaryen. Her name came with privilege, and the great burden of sin to bare alongside the rest of her family. As a young girl Daeny could hardly stomach the violence and death that was so quintessential to the life of a mobsters daughter, she learned young that there were no good men in their world, and least of all her brutal and abusive father or her brothers. A fact only proven when her father promised her at the age of fifteen to a man whose tales of brutality were famous all the way from Essos a city far from King’s Landing, a city which he solely ruled with his brunt force and mountains of wealth. Her father’s decision meant she would have to live a life away from the only people she found comfort and safety with, all for the promise of power. Little did she know that power would benefit her more than anyone else far in the future.

Rhaegar was the pride of the Targaryens, and he ascended to the metaphorical throne when Daeny was barely old enough to understand the weight of such a responsibility, she remembered her brother being kind to her, but little else considering he was never around, always busy with the family business. She does however bitterly remember her pleading with Rhaegar to speak to their father on her behalf to change his decision in regards to her marriage to Drogo, but his only response being they all must play their part. Her brother had broken her heart that day, she never made another plea to anyone. Three years later she departed for Essos believing that was the last she’d seen of Kings Landing. She heard of her brother’s scandal only a few short months later, and she couldn’t help the bitterness at the thought that he had not done his part. While she knew she should’ve felt sorrow over the dismantling of her families’ rule over the city, she had always seen it as broken, this was only the chink that dealt the final blow.

Khal Drogo was a man that intimidated her from the start, seven years older than her when she was fifteen that age difference had felt too vast to bridge, she couldn’t imagine what a life with him would look like. Though his age was the slightest of factors considering his reputation even at the age of twenty two was that of a ruthless, merciless killer, at least in their world. To everyone else he was an ambitious and trailblazing young man who has just taken over his father’s legacy, Khalasar Conglomerate a company that generated revenue in the billions providing jobs for hundreds of thousands, with a foothold in nearly every continent. Daenerys had expected someone void of emotion and empathy, much like her own father the one person who truly scared her. Though she learned nearly right away after their marriage that yes he was everything she imagined but so much more. The side of him she saw wasn’t the side the rest of the world got, how could they when power and fear mattered so much to them all.

He was kind to her, gentle even, they took their time to get to know one another before they truly began to life as husband and wife. He had no queries with her desire to go to college and work alongside him to expand Khalasar Conglomerate and their reign over Essos. Two years into their marriage when a woman abandoned a young child at their door, his child from an affair many years ago it truly tested their relationship. Though by that point she’d grown to love and trust her husband, she couldn’t be angry with him for someone he’d been with long before he’d even met her. Having Kovarro around took some getting used to but she bonded with him soon enough. Daenerys was happier than she’d ever imagined she could be in her arranged marriage, and two years later she gave birth to Rhaego, and that happiness multiplied tenfold. By this time she’d established herself as a force to be reckoned with in Essos no less capable that her husband, in fact with her at the helm he decided to step away from K.C to focus on expanding the reach of his influence beyond Essos. Together they spoke of plans to reclaim her families lost prestige, though her perfectly crafted world came crashing down two years later when Khal was killed, poisoned anf there was nothing she could do after exhausting every last avenue but watch him suffer and die a slow and painful death. Nothing but end his pain, taking the last of his breathes with her own hands.

In the wake of her husband’s death, there was no room to crumble or to show any hint of weakness not when the vultures circled in hopes of claiming everything Khal had accomplished, everything they had accomplished together from her. Thus, she was given another blow. Returning home one evening to find her home up in flames along with her child. She heeded no warnings when she grabbed one of the firefighters masks right out of his hands and rushed inside to save her baby. She emerged from the flames unburnt with a charred bundle in her hands, the heat of the flames having already dried her tears. No one would see her tears, she would not allow it. They’d sought to set her world on fire so she would crumble alongside the brick and mortar, never to rise again. However they had forgotten that she was Daenerys Stormborn, the Dragon’s Daughter. Within her she had the same spirit of greatness, and capability to wreak the same devastation as the magnificent creatures her family paid patronage to.

Daenerys allowed herself a few year to carefully plot her return to King’s Landing, as well as to settle her affairs in Essos, those loyal to Khal remained loyal to her for which she was grateful. It meant that not only would she have a financial backing but also the added manpower to take back King’s Landing. Daenerys doesn’t just want to return to the tentative peace they’d had before her brother’s fall from grace, no she wants absolute control, to break the mold and shape it to her liking. Since her return she’s been swift to take power, even if it meant snatching it from her own brother’s grasp, allowing him to be her Lieutenant is more or less to appease any further turmoil. Elia on the other hand she has more fate in, at least in her council. Daenerys had always respected her as much as she did her brother, however, she’s never allowed herself to put her complete trust in Elia and by extension her children simply because she can’t be certain that she’d ever be willing to stand against the Martell’s if needed. If there is anyone whom she does trust blindly in is her family of choice, Kovarro whose never disappointed her, who has his father’s spirit and strength having filled the hole in her heart that Rhaego’s death had left.

𝑪𝒐𝒏𝒏𝒆𝒄𝒕𝒊𝒐𝒏𝒔.

JORAH, DAARIO, MISSANDEI : WCs can be found here.

KOVARRO : Sending in the WC soon.

Platonic

A FRIEND FROM THE PAST : Her closest friend growing up they stayed in touch in the beginning of her move to Essos, though with time that changed. However, since her return to King’s Landing they’ve been able to bridge the distance once again. ( 0 / 1 )

POLITICAL FRIENDSHIP : Friends for the sake of mutual benefit. Could just as easily stab one another in the back, or become true allies. ( 0 / ? )

Romantic

WE WERE JUST KIDS WHEN WE FELL IN LOVE : Someone she knew and secretly dated as a teenager, her first love. They lost contact after her move to Essos, and haven’t cross paths since. ( 0 / 1 )

Antagonistic

A BITTER ENEMY FROM THE START : Someone she didn’t like from the moment she met them, that dislike has persisted and grown since. Now they are a clear hurdle in her path to glory. ( 0 / 1 )

#❛ ･ﾟ✖ ( ᴅᴀᴇɴᴇʀʏs ᴛᴀʀɢᴇʀʏᴇɴ )#❛ ･ﾟ✖ ( development › ᴅᴀᴇɴᴇʀʏs )#vixere:intro #vixere:task

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thestraggletag · 5 years ago

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Human Nature, Part One

AN: Happy Birthday to me! Here’s a fic I wrote to commemorate the day. Part two needs editing but will be along shortly. Enjoy!

Also can someone please write a better summary? This is an honest request. It can be my birthday present.

Rating: R

Summary: Warm Bodies AU. After the zombie apocalypse is averted it’s up to Belle French to rehabilitate a mostly-dead Mr Gold, against advice of the experts and the wishes of the entire town. As she struggles to fan the spark of humanity back into Mr Gold she fails to notice something else kindling between them.

It took months to get back to Storybrooke after the beginning of what was known as "the treatment" by which most of who'd been affected by the zombie-like virus slowly regained their humanity. It was slow-going, the process done with an overabundance of caution that nobody begrudged, taking into account what the years before had been like. The outbreak had lasted a little under five years, but it had seemed like months, and so much had changed in that time that life before seemed like a distant memory. The idea of just picking up where everyone left off was an impossible fantasy.

When Brisbane had been hit Belle, who'd been visiting relatives at the time, had been lucky enough to get evacuated to Hamilton Island, where the only undead she'd been close to where relatives of locals, who could not bear to put them down and so kept them locked away in the basement of the local pet shelter. Once word of the treatment reached them most of them had been successfully rehabilitated, and soon after that she'd made her way back to the mainland, to be of help where she could and find out news about her family and friends.

She'd first heard news of Storybrooke from Ruby, when internet access was restored. The town had taken a hit, like most, but efforts were underway to rehabilitate as many people as possible. She cried with her friend when she called her to tell her Granny had called her by her name. Speech was a big step in the treatment, and it was then that they both knew that Mrs Lucas was going to make it.

She had to wait a long time for flights to be restored, and by then things were mostly under control. She'd heard from Ruby and others that Storybrooke was a sort of success story unlike any other, with all services restored, schools open and a rehabilitation rate that defied expectations, and a lot of it was attributed to the iron will of Madam Mayor and the security efforts of the Town Sheriff. Quite the formidable power couple, according to Ruby. She thought their love story surrounding their shared son was very cute, as far as apocalyptic tales went.

And though she had thought at first that Ruby's boundless optimism in the face of Granny's recovery was prompting her to paint a rather misleading picture of how things were back home when she finally made it back to town she had to admit it looked as good as she'd described. There were some signs of destruction, some roadblocks that were still only half-cleared and half the buildings seemed to be in the process of repair but there was an air of orderly normality that she hadn't seen in other places. Ruby had been there to pick her up from the bus stop, squealing and hugging her for the longest time before commenting on her silver-streaked hair, telling her she loved it.

"You can totally get hair dye, the pharmacy is up and running again- no idea how Mayor Mills did it but it's almost completely restocked, she must have made some interesting calls to well-connected people- but I kinda dig the look. Goes with your more angular features."

It was a nice spin on things, as if her thinner body and grey hair were audacious fashion choices and not the product of hunger and stress. The upbeat attitude was decidedly contagious, specially once she saw that her beloved library was mostly undamaged. Boarded up still, and a little worse for wear on the outside, but the inside was just as she had left it. She commented on it to Granny as the woman forced a second helping of pie on her. For someone who had undergone the treatment she didn't really look it, with the exception of a slight stiffness to her movements.

"I'm glad the town council moved so quickly to board it up."

"They had nothing to do with it. It was Gold and his crew, mainly that huge mammoth of a man that worked for him, Dove. Did it by themselves, with the help of Marco."

Though Granny's tone was as gruff and as acid as it always was when she talked of the pawnbroker Belle felt a pleasant warmth bloom in her. She'd always had a soft spot for the Scotsman, something she knew was a bit of an unpopular opinion in Storybrooke. He had always had a smile and a polite comment or two for her whenever she saw her, was a staunch ally of the library in town council meetings and was keen on chatting about a book when he returned it, which he always did in person. Once or twice they’d sat together when Granny’s was too full and his was the only table with spare seats. People had warned her after the first time they’d shared a cup of tea in public that she was better off staying as far away from possible from him, but she had refused to comply, specially when she caught the bias in a lot of the stories, like the one Ashley Boyd spun, about Mr Gold cruelly charging interest for the rent of a meager little flat after having been “a little bit late” on the rent. She was never specific about how late till Belle asked, and she reluctantly admitted it was over two months, even past the grace period contemplated on the rental agreement.

“Still, who threatens to evict a young couple with a newborn baby and nowhere to go?”

Ashley was also always careful not to mention her father-in-law, well-off and with more than enough room in his house to host his only son and his wife for a lengthy period of time. Belle could see how her tale of woe lost a little of the dramatic edge with the addition of those pesky details. So she had carried on being friendly with the pawnbroker, even if it made people look at her funny and sometimes whisper behind her back. Just one of the many things that made her strange in the little town, along with her accent and habit of reading in the strangest of moments and places. She hadn’t cared.

“That was so kind of him. I must go over to his house and thank him.”

She hadn’t seen the Scotsman around since her return, but she’d assumed he was busy either with repairs to his home or perhaps the shop, or even trying to restore order to his many properties. He was a fastidious landlord and considering his nature she imagined he’d be one of those people eager to set the world to rights, to restore order.

“You haven’t told her?”

Granny looked at Ruby reproachfully, though she tried to shrug it off. The old woman sighed, not-quite managing to roll her eyes.

“He was amongst the people infected during a breach a couple of years ago. We’ve been told he’s in treatment, but not responding well. It doesn’t quite work on everyone, as you know.”

It felt impossible, at first. Mr Gold was such a vital part of Storybrooke that it made no sense for the town to be still standing without him. He was also so strong, despite his short stature and his reliance on a cane to walk, that it made no sense to think that even the outbreak could’ve gotten to him. He was the sort of man she would expect to survive the apocalypse, if not thrive in it.

It wasn’t until a couple of days later, when she overheard Katherine Knight talk about “visiting Freddie” that she gave more thought about Mr Gold’s situation. Frederick Knight, Katherine’s husband, was amongst the people still being treated and it had not occurred to her that visits to those infected were not only possible, but desirable. It was human contact, after all, the key to guide those afflicted back to their humanity. Contact and communication with loved ones, with people near and dear, was even better, capable of speeding up the process. And she was sure that, though not close, Mr Gold had considered her a friend. She certainly knew him enough to be of help, and she couldn’t imagine people would much object to her taking him off their hands for a couple of hours a day.

It was with a sinking heart that she learned that, though the treatment of the infected was officially managed by the local hospital, the actual efforts were overseen by Mother Superior and her gaggle of nuns, all of which had survived the apocalyptic events. They had done so mostly because the good Mother had ordered the convent’s doors to be bolted at the first sign of trouble. The sisters had spent the entire apocalypse safe behind the tall walls of the convent, living off the produce from the gardens and closing their ears to the pleas for help from outside.

It was no wonder Mother Superior had decided to offer the services of her little lambs when hands were needed to treat the infected once it was discovered this could be done. It was a way to change the narrative, to erase whatever ill-feelings there remained in town regarding the nuns. It was also a way to position herself in a place of power and relevance, one she relished with little subtlety, it seemed to her. She was practically goading when she turned Belle away, telling her Mr Gold was unfit to receive visits of any kind, and that she could give her no further information.

The rumours she heard were not encouraging. People whispered about Mr Gold lashing out against anybody that dared approach him, about him savagely attacking orderlies and snapping out of restraints with a brute force surprising even in an infected. Too violent to be cured, people said, a beast on the outside as he’d always been on the inside. So thin and haggard, in such a state of rot, that he was practically a boney. The town seemed quite content to do nothing about it, so she decided in the end to take the matter to the mayor. Regina Mills was the closest thing Mr Gold had to family. They’d known each other since she was a baby- there were some unsavoury stories about the pawnbroker and Regina’s mother, but nothing anyone could corroborate- and though they usually bickered they seemed to have a certain respect and fondness for each other, at least from what she’d been able to see.

To her credit Regina did seem to share her concerns regarding Mr Gold- Hell, even Sheriff Swan, not his biggest fan, seemed sympathetic- but didn’t think much could be done about it.

“I wish I could tell you Mother Superior or the orderlies at the hospital were exaggerating, Miss French, but I’ve been to see Mr Gold. Even restrained he was quite violent, and my presence seemed to agitate him more than help him. I believe everything that could be done for him is being done. He’s simply… not responding as he should. I am told it happens.”

She seemed to be honestly contrite, which gave her the opening she needed to convince her to demand the hospital let her visit. It took a while, and some back and forth, but she was finally given permission, though begrudgingly, by Dr Whale and Mother Superior. She was full of cautious optimism that morning, joining Mary Margaret Nolan in the hospital entrance lobby to wait for visiting hours to start, listening intently as the schoolteacher told her that she was hopeful her husband would be released soon, given his progress.

Her enthusiasm waned somewhat when Mary Margaret was ushered along a brightly-lit corridor and she in turn was escorted to a key-coded door that led to the basement, and taken down a flight of stairs into a dark hall, where a clearly-recovering orderly was mopping the floors. She was told to go to the “cell at the end”, a phrase that did away with the rest of her cheerfulness. The air down there was damp and stale, and mold grew on certain areas along the walls and in corners. The floor was solid concrete, with an abundance of thin, spidery cracks, and there were heavy metal doors to her left, with small covered windows slots further down that remained shut, but likely was meant for trays.

She found him when she peered into the third door, though it was difficult to see him at first because the cell was unlit but for the light that shone from a small barred window high above and he was in a shadowy corner, standing still. It was only when her eyes adjusted to the darkness that she began to make out his silhouette, and later more and more details. In many ways it was easy to recognise him: custom suit, slightly-uneven gait, favouring one leg clearly over the other, and shaggy hair a tad too long to be respectable. At the same time, however, the man in the cell looked like a complete stranger: rail-thin, with his trousers torn and his suit jacket in tatters. He wasn’t even wearing a tie, something she’d never seen Mr Gold without. The eyes, however, were the most striking difference: clouded over, almost milky-white, dull and unfocused.

“Oh, Mr Gold…”

The living corpse seemed to shudder, head tilting back to sniff the air. She braced herself for anything, any sudden movement or anything that could remotely be construed as violent, but nothing happened. There was definitely something different, though, an awareness that hadn’t been there before. He could certainly smell her, she knew that, and had likely heard her loud and clear- infected tended to have their sense of smell and hearing heightened, even while their organs and muscles deteriorated. So he knew she was there, but did not attack her, did not seem interesting in doing her harm. The way it seemed there wasn’t anything inherently aggressive or incurable about him, he simply had been left alone to rot.

If no one was gonna do anything about it she would.

She decided the best way to establish any sort of relationship was through something she knew Mr Gold enjoyed. She set aside several afternoons a week to sit down on the hard concrete floor next to Mr Gold’s door and read him, choosing books from his favourite authors and genres. She started with Borges, which he had often checked out, and Irvine Welsh, along with some Cortázar and Verne. She would sneak in, unsure whether Mother Superior wouldn’t try to stop her if she knew what she was trying to do, and spend hours reading and drinking tea. Sometimes Ruby would sneak her something to eat- she had decided early on that she needed at least one person who knew where she was going and what she was doing just in case, specially when it became clear no one went to the basement except her. No nuns, no doctors, no one. People were literally waiting for Mr Gold to turn to dust, too squeamish to outright put a bullet in his brain and be done with it but in no real rush to see him recover either.

Spite became a motivator during those afternoons were things didn’t seem to be progressing and it looked like she was wasting her time. Mr Gold would like that, she thought privately. She felt an odd sort of camaraderie when she thought about sticking it to the nuns, about the expression on Mother Superior’s face if she succeeded. She told him about that, and about the progress being made around town. At some point she started calling him by his first name- Ramsay, a confession he made when she’d playfully teased him about having “R. Gold” as the name on his library card- thinking it might spark something.

She would feed him too, whatever large chunks of raw meat she could get from Granny, who she suspected was well aware of what she was doing but said nothing. She was fully cured, herself, with minimal sequels, but her experience seemed to have made her empathetic to Mr Gold’s plight. She had retained some of the incredible sense of hearing she’d enjoyed while undead. It wasn’t unheard of for people to keep a trait or two from their sickness, though it was rare. In some cases the infection had cause certain irreparable changes to their physiognomy, specially in those further gone.

Fortunately for Belle Mr Gold enjoyed the raw meat, though she never saw him eat it. She’d leave it before heading back to the library and it’d be gone in the morning, tray licked clean but Mr Gold back in his corner. It was a relief, somewhat, to see him lose some of his boney appearance, though he was still rail-thin, little more than skin and bones.

Her first big break happened during an ordinary afternoon, while she sat and read to him something by Horacio Quiroga. Mr Gold rather liked the dark short stories, and though some people might have thought them inappropriate reading material for a recovering zombie Belle disagreed, thinking that anything that might elicit a response from Mr Gold, any response at all, was worth trying.

It was while she was nearing the end of The Feather Pillow that she heard a shuffling and later a thump right on the other side of the door. Tentatively she knocked on the metal door, barely containing a happy laugh when something on the other side knocked back, slow but surely. It was the first time that Mr Gold acknowledged her at all and thought it was a small thing it felt like something monumental. It put a smile on her face so bright Ruby teased her about it for weeks, and prompted her to take a leap of faith one afternoon and open the latch that kept the small window on the door covered. There was no glass to further separate them so she was able to tentatively slip her hand through the opening.

“Come here, Ramsay. Come on, you know me. It’s okay.”

Mr Gold did perk up somewhat, and later dragged himself across the room. She forced herself not to flinch as he leaned forward, his nose almost brushing her skin as he breathed in deeply, hesitantly at first but pressing closer when something about the scent seemed to catch his attention or spark something in him. He never made a move to bite so for the longest time Belle just stood there, on her tippy-toes to be able to pass most of her arm through the opening, fighting the urge to pull back. Her fear gave way to cautionary optimism and later awe at the way Mr Gold practically rubbed his entire face against her hand, as if the notion of skin to skin contact was some sort of miracle. He breathed her deeply now, big lungfuls of her scent, nose pressed tightly against her palm or the underside of her wrist, his expression almost desperate. He made a sort of whining noise when she was forced to pull her arm back, and followed her hand until he physically couldn’t anymore.

She cried later that night, back in the safety of her library, away from prying eyes, part out of sheer relief and part out of anger and sadness at the thought that Mr Gold had been left to rot not because he was beyond help, but rather because it was so convenient. So many people had been given second chances once the rebuilding had started, people who had committed questionable or even downright despicable acts during the apocalypse. Ruby had warned her at the beginning about some, like Keith Nott and Greg Aston, who had taken to the chaos of the past years like ducks to water, had grown unruly and dangerous. She had heard only half-stories, mostly from Ruby, mostly things no one could prove or cared to now that the human race had another chance and the population was in dire need of able-bodied men to rebuild and reproduce. If Storybrooke was ready to embrace lowlifes like those they would have to get used to having Mr Gold back, and she’d call out anyone who dared fight her on that on their hypocrisy.

From then on it became routine to let him smell her. Mr Gold seemed to look forward to it, being sure to stay close to the door and letting out a growly sort of purr when she reached out to him. He was also eager to let himself be stroked and his hair petted, which took a bit of getting used to but to her made sense. Mr Gold had always avoided contact as a rule. Though he sometimes tended to invade people’s personal space as a tactic to put them ill at ease, he usually skirted human touch. She’d had occasion to make a study of it, back before the apocalypse, down to how Mr Gold almost always wore gloves on rent day and avoided passing anything hand to hand. She had noticed that once he got familiar with her he let his guard down a bit and sometimes allowed casual touches, fingers brushing over a book exchanging hands, things of that nature. But he’d always shied away from further contact.

Belle had long ago come to the conclusion that he must have been very touch-starved, given how little actual skin to skin contact he seemed to experience day to day. She had seen him flex his fingers often, his hands and entire body full of nervous energy, of a sort of yearning for what he denied himself. Now, stripped of all human pretenses, without the need to protect himself from others, he was seeking out that which he needed like he hadn’t allowed himself before. She told him over and over that it was alright, that he was allowed to want and seek affection, that she would never use it against him or otherwise harm him with the knowledge. She hoped it would stick on the back of his mind, so he wouldn’t be embarrassed when he was himself again, or wary of her.

She hadn’t expected it to feel so… powerful. So heady, to have someone like Mr Gold, who always seemed larger-than-life, lean on her so trustingly, so eagerly. To have a creature capable of immense feats of strength, of untold violence, purr under her touch like a kitten. She’d always wanted to do it, to reach out and give some sort of comfort to Mr Gold, a little bit of the affection he was sorely missing. It was precisely why she told herself to be cautious and not rush into things, given her impulsive nature. If she botched things now, if she lost her progress or got into a situation she couldn’t handle, Mr Gold might never recover. She was sure any excuse would be enough for people to demand he be “put out of his misery”. She couldn’t afford mistakes or miscalculations.

So she took things slow, and kept things close to the chest. Best no one knew of her progress until she could get Mr Gold talking a little, enough to prove without a shadow of a doubt that he was on the mend, and that killing him would be killing a human being and not some well-dressed boney. So she went about her day as normal as possible, helping set the town to rights, cleaning the library, helping Dove with the community garden that grew on some land belonging to Mr Gold and that was still a vital source of a lot of produce the town consumed, though the normal flow of goods and services was slowly being re established across the estate. Dove was an attentive gardener and the work was strangely soothing. She set her afternoons aside for Mr Gold, though, reluctant to miss a day and cause a potential regression. And it helped her too, helped her deal with what she’d lived through, the peace and companionship she found in the basement of the hospital, with Mr Gold. In the hope that sparked in her every time she caught a glimpse of his eyes and they looked less cloudy and more focused, more alive.

She was so focused on those things, so eager to escape to her afternoon trysts, that she forgot to pay proper attention to her surroundings. It was night when she left the hospital, later than she’d realised, but nothing seemed amiss at first. Even after she heard something she didn’t immediately panic. The Rabbit Hole was close to the hospital, and people were still getting celebratory drunk in honour of the ending of the apocalypse. Sheriff Swan was good about keeping things controlled, all things considered.

It wasn’t until they were almost upon her that she noticed them, staggering around shouting at her, some slurred lewd proposition that made her walk faster, but nothing else. When she chanced a glance back she felt the first true jolt of fear, recognising easily the tall, lanky man as Gregory Aston, which made the other man following her his buddy Keith. Greg had made some advances before the apocalypse, which she hadn’t returned, much to his displeasure. But back then they had both lived in a society with strict rules that limited whatever he might have wanted to do when he was rejected. Now he strutted around Storybrooke getting into fights and using his brute strength to get whatever he wanted, having grown used to the more violent times of the apocalypse, when his fighting ability had given him a position of prominence. Keith, on the other hand, had thrived in the smuggling business, specially of drugs, and was still active. Emma was a competent sheriff but the problems of a town like Storybrooke in the post-apocalypse were many, and the resources of the sheriff’s office were limited.

Being the stupid sort of drug dealer one would’ve expected from Keith he often tested his merchandise and shared it with close pals, which included Greg. Belle could see it the closer they got to her, the tell-tale signs of a person under the influence of more than just alcohol.

“Hey, Belle, wait up, we wanna talk to you!”

She began to seriously consider her options. The library was too far away, and it was too late for Granny’s to be open. The station was close by, but the sheriff was doing rounds so no one would be there. It seemed safer to go back to the hospital, where there was bound to be at least a couple of nurses on their night shift.

“Hey, you frigid bitch, I know you can hear us!”

Running probably was ill-advised, but at some point Belle couldn’t fight her instincts anymore. The relief she felt when she burst through the doors of the hospital was short-lived. The reception area was deserted, and access to the rest of the hospital seemed to be blocked, a precaution typical of the days of the apocalypse that people seemed to still be keeping. Frantically she went to the one door she knew the combination to, but when she tried to close it behind her it was wrenched from her grasp, either by Greg or Keith, she didn’t bother to look. Someone grabbed her arm when she raced down the stairs, but years of surviving in a high-stress environment had given her sharp reflexes that helped her pull herself free.

“There’s nowhere to run, sweetheart. We promise we’ll be nice, we just want to be nice to you, Belle.”

She didn’t know when she made the decision. It was in a split second, more instinctual than anything else. Mr Gold’s cell was bolted from the outside but not locked, she’d noticed that from the beginning. She’d been tempted to open the door so many times, but she’d restrained herself. But now adrenaline was rushing through her and the survival instinct that had kept her alive through hell on Earth moved her to make a quick decision, to seek out safety. Without pausing to second-guess herself she unbolted the door, pushing her way inside and closing it behind her.

“Got ourselves a room, how nice.”

“Hope there’s a bed inside!”

It was dark inside the cell. The only light came from the corridor and was too faint to reach inside. Belle knew she was not alone in the room but she could not hear or see Mr Gold. The infected got very good at being quiet and staying out of sight, like the best of predators, which wasn’t an altogether-reassuring thought. Greg and Keith stumbled inside the room, uncoordinated and sluggish from drink and whatever else they’d consumed, and Belle stepped back, seeking who she knew was there.

“Now, Belle, this doesn’t need to be bad. Ugly. We can… can treat you right. Make it good. We’re nice guys.”

Greg had always said that. Belle was sure that, against all odds, he believed it. Even as he clamped a hand around her arm, with enough force to make her wrist hurt, to make her cry out in pain and fight to wrench herself free. Even as Keith laughed next to him, clumsily pawing at his belt. There was a second of all-consuming fear, the kind that paralysed the muscles and made it difficult to breathe. Then there was a growl and she felt rather than saw an arm wrap around her waist and pull her backwards. Another arm went across her chest, securing her against something solid behind her.

“Holy fuck, what the-?”

“Fuck, fuck, fuck!”

The sheer terror in both men’s eyes was almost amusing, if it weren’t for the fact that Belle felt the same. Mr Gold’s face was next to hers, snarling, teeth bared in a clear warning. She wanted to say something, so that he’d recognise her as a friend, let himself be soothed, perhaps, but nothing came out. Greg and Keith scrambled backwards, fighting to be the first ones out the door, bolting it behind them for good measure before running away, the sound of their footsteps eventually fading into nothing. They weren’t going to look for help, she knew it. Too messy for them, too dangerous. They’d left her alone, perhaps even hoping Mr Gold would take care of her so she wouldn’t go telling tales and for a moment her anger overcame her fear, so thoroughly that she didn’t notice Gold’s head move, his nose coming to press against her neck. He took a deep, audible breath and Belle froze again, part of her bracing herself for a bite. But none came, Mr Gold seemingly content to scent her. Slowly Belle felt fear drain out of her, allowing her to somewhat compose herself.

“It’s just me, Ramsay, Belle. You know me, don’t you?”

He made a purring sound, the one she’d grown so used to, and loosened his hold on her, not a drop of aggression on him. Belle tentatively petted his hair, excited now to be able to look at him so closely, to notice the very slight tint of pink on his cheeks and the slight warmth of his skin, signs of his recovering humanity. He, likewise, seemed curious about her, hands hovering near her, as if asking for permission to touch, to explore. And though he didn’t dare grab her again he had no problems pressing his nose close to whatever part of her he could reach. He spent long minutes scenting her hair, fingers ghosting over it, as if delighted by the feel of it. Fascinated and intrigued she let him proceed, allowing him to sniff at her forehead, down her neck and over her torso. It was strangely endearing, or at least until he pressed firmly against the juncture of her thighs, taking a deep breath in an attempt to scent her through her underwear and cotton shorts.

“No!”

She pushed against his shoulders and he scrambled away, clearly feeling chastised by her tone and actions. He looked confused, as if unaware of whatever he’d done wrong, and whatever offence she might have felt a moment ago went up in smoke. Slowly, so as to not spook him, she sat down in the cot next to him and turned his face so they’d make eye-contact.

“Hey, Ramsey, I’m sorry. You didn’t know. It’s okay, Ramsey, I’m not mad.”

Something sparked in his eyes, and he tilted his head to the side, brow furrowing.

“R-r-r-r…” With a jolt, Belle realised he was trying to speak. It was more of a growl than anything else, but there seemed to be a purpose to it, a desire to shape it into something. “R-r-rum.”

He splayed a hand against his chest and repeated the word. Belle understood at once what he was trying to say.

“Yes, yes, that’s right. You’re Ramsay, that’s your name. Ramsay.”

She said it slowly, over and over again, delighting in the way he focused on her lips as they shaped out the word. He couldn’t quite repeat it, not entirely at least, but he recognised it without a doubt as his name, the first concrete proof that he could not only understand speech but that he had also recovered a sense of self, and at least partial access to his memories. He also seemed to realise it was a momentous occasion, his lips curling up into a shadow of a smile, looking more like Mr Gold than ever.

Knowing that certainly Ruby or Dove would report her missing tomorrow and that this would be an obvious place to check out, seeing as to how Emma and Regina suspected of her near-constant visits, she settled down to wait, lying down on the cot so her face was close to Mr Gold- Rum, now, in her mind- who was still on the floor, looking at her. She talked to him as one of her hands combed through his tangled hair, told him about Dove and how he was taking care of everything for him, about how the Library was ready for re-opening and how things were slowly returning to normal. There was an understanding in his eyes that hadn’t been there before, as if one more of many veiled had been lifted and he could see the world more clear now than before.

She didn’t recall falling asleep, but she must have at some point. When she awoke there was no panic, even when she registered the grey walls of the cell and the thin, hospital-issue mattress beneath her. Rum was next to her, sitting on the floor leaning against the cot and watching her from beneath a curtain of shaggy hair. It was, she was sure, longer than it had been weeks ago, another sign of his blossoming humanity to add to her list.

“Good morning, Rum.”

She pulled herself to a sitting position, looking around her. Now that there was slight coming into the room from the small window in a corner she could see the room properly, and winced at the signs of decay and disrepair. Surely it couldn’t be conductive to his recovery for him to be locked up in a place like that. She would need to try and convince Regina to do something about it, if she could somehow get the woman to the cell so she could see with her own eyes that Rum was on the mend, and certainly not a danger to anyone.

It was while she contemplated how to go about it all that she heard faint sounds, and later the murmur of voices. Someone shouted her name, desperately- Ruby, it sounded like- followed by others. Rum tensed up beside her, scrambling to stand between her and the door. She was about to try and calm him down when she was startled by the cell door being violently yanked open, Sheriff Swan stepping into the room with her revolver up and aimed squarely at the Scotsman’s head. Behind her Belle could see Ruby, David Nolan- who acted sometimes as Deputy Sheriff, and the major herself.

“No, wait!”

Thankfully for her Rum was a short man, so getting in front of him guaranteed Emma would be unable to shoot him in the head. It didn’t make her drop her stance, though, specially when she saw Rum grab her from behind and snarl.

“Belle, what the fuck? Get out of the way!”

“No, you don’t understand. It’s okay. I’m okay. He’s not gonna hurt me. He’s not aggressive.”

She knew how ridiculous she sounded like, with Rum behind her, teeth bared and hands digging into her skin to the point where she had to admit hurt a little, but it was important that they understood.

“He… he’s on the mend. He just thinks you’re threatening me. Just… just stand down. He’ll relax.”

She wasn’t sure he would, but it was worth a try. Emma, to her credit, didn’t dismiss her words, and obviously noticed Rum was making no move to bite or otherwise attack her. She lowered her firearm and relaxed her posture, and little by little Belle felt Rum do the same behind her, though he kept one of his hands curled protectively on her shoulder, as if ready to yank her back at the first sign of trouble. She took advantage of the tentative peace to recount the events of last night, trying to be as detailed as possible. Though she got some sceptic looks she could see that at least Emma and Regina were considering part of what she was saying, particularly regarding Keith and Greg. When it came to Rum, however, the general consensus seemed to be that Belle was likely being a bit too optimistic, and there weren’t enough grounds to challenge the authority of Mother Superior regarding Mr Gold’s situation.

“No, you’re not listening to me. He’s on the mend. He knows who he is, he has memories. Look at him. At the colour of his skin, at his eyes. He’s better. He knows who I am, I’m sure.”

She stared at Emma, hard, as if daring the blonde to contradict her, to pat her on the head and tell her she was mistaken, confused, seeing things that weren’t there. To her surprise she felt Rum’s hand on her shoulder tighten.

“B-B-B-Be-Belle.”

It was more of a croak than anything, but there was no mistaking what he’d just said. Everyone froze in place and things were deadly quiet for a second or two. Belle could have sworn that when she chanced a glance at Rum there was something of the familiar Mr Gold smirk about him, the satisfied, smug look he often got after striking a deal or getting the better of people. Finally, after what felt like forever, Regina spoke.

“I can’t wait to see the look on Mother Superior’s face when I tell her this.”

Rum’s progress seemed to accelerate after that, though his vocabulary remained reduced. But his understanding of speech and his communication skills evolved immensely, and there was a constant awareness now of what was going on around him and a spark of intelligence that hadn’t been there before.. The major, likewise, was determined to make her own progress and before the week was out she managed to arrange a review of Mr Gold’s case with Dr Whale and Dr Hopper, against the express wishes of Mother Superior. Both reports were as positive as Belle could’ve hoped for, with Dr Hopper encouraging Mr Gold be moved to his own house for the remainder of his recovery, which was usually the next step once patients had developed enough understanding of the world around them.

Belle and Dove worked tirelessly to put Mr Gold’s house to rights, or as close to it as possible. Dove had boarded it up after Mr Gold had been infected, so it was quite the job to open it up again and clean it, but the inside was mostly well-preserved. All around Storybrooke news of the imminent release of the pawnbroker spread around fast, and the reception was more than a little chilly. No one dare take it up personally with Belle- apparently the first idiot to even insinuate something like that had had a pickaxe nearly flung at them by Leroy- but people definitely gave her hostile looks and were otherwise very vocal about how much better things would’ve been if Mr Gold had simply… faded away. It was disgusting and she was grateful that those closest to her seemed to be on the same page.

It was nighttime when Rum was officially discharged. He’d been already moved to a regular hospital room a day before in preparation and to administer any final tests and such. Afterwards they left him sitting in the hallway, which was where she found him. He visibly perked when he saw her, lips curling into that adorable half-smile that she remembered from years ago. He lurched forward towards her, which made her notice his limp was more pronounced than before. Infected people gained strength and agility due to the changes in their bodies, which could also strengthen injured bones and muscle. The more Rum’s body returned to its natural state the more his old injury reasserted itself. It was a strange sort of positive sign.

Thankfully the streets were deserted, like she’d hoped when she’d suggested Rum be released at night. They walked slowly, him leaning slightly against her for balance, looking around with unabashed hunger. He breathed in deeply, scenting the air, silently reveling in his freedom. Certain buildings and sights seemed to catch his attention, his eyes lingering on the diner, the library and specially on his pawnshop. When they finally got to the edge of town and he spotted his house he visibly moved faster, tugging her along and paying little attention to his dragging right leg as he all but sprinted towards it. His movements were still very wooden and stiff but the progress was astounding.

The house was dimly lit, electricity still being strictly rationed, but Rum seemed to want to explore everything at once, at least until something seemed to occur to him and he darted awkwardly up the stairs. When she followed him she found him in his ensuite bathroom, shower already on. He was struggling to take his tattered clothes off, which was no easy feat given his current lack of dexterity. Belle helped him take his jacket off, trying not to smile at his slightly abashed look. What was left of his shirt was partly stuck to his undershirt and skin by grime and blood. It took ten minutes and a pair of scissors to peel the fabric off him safely. His torso was littered in half-healing bite marks and scratches and when she gently touched a couple of them he sighed, pressing his forehead against hers.

“I’m-m-m okay.” She didn’t realise until he tried to console her that she was crying. “Ev-v-v-very-thing is o-k-k-ay.”

His brogue was so thick it was difficult to understand him, and his voice was still raspy and harsh form disuse but the gentleness with which he sought to reassure her made his words soft as butter. She helped him out of the rest of his clothing, leaving his boxers on when it became clear he was not keen on the idea of having her remove them. She rummaged his walk-in closet for a pair of pants, fresh underwear and a t-shirt and left him to shower in peace. Afterwards- thankfully, dressing up had been easier for him than stripping down- she sat him down in front of a mirror and trimmed his hair at his request, pleased at the results. Showered and properly groomed Rum was looking more like himself than ever.

When she brought up the idea that she might stay the night- Dove had prepared a room for her just in case- he looked painfully relieved and agreed vigorously, not letting her out of his sight until she slipped into her own room, leaving the door ajar behind her. He shuffled into the room that she’d pointed out was his and laid on the bed, feeling a strange burning in his eyes, and a heaviness that he didn’t recognise at first. Minutes later he was asleep.

#rumbelle #rumbelle fic #Thestraggletag fanfiction #Human Nature

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hunterartemis · 6 years ago

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The Assistant: an addition

This post represents the current members of one of the Richest and Oldest French Pureblood family Valois. It took me two weeks to find the right kind of images and people (most of whom I don’t really know) to represent what was the perfect image of the Valois family

The Image at the very top is the family crest of the Valois, and in real life, it is actually the Crest of Valois, found on the tomb of Charles the Bold, the original founder of the Valois line.

The next one, “Tres haut, tres excellent, tres magnanime et tres puissant” is the official writing on the tapestry of the allied Valois-Bourbon line. It means “most high, most excellent, most magnanimous and most powerful”, it is the praise of the family, and only the High Nobles have.

Hrothgar Bartholomew Valois: I have chose an edited version of Timothy Omundson on this one. Hrothgar has dark eyes, Timothy Omundson had blue. In the panel next to him, is a Crown. The name ‘Hrothgar’ has been taken from the Angle Saxon Epic Beowulf, Where Hrothgar is a Danish King. The exact meaning is not known, but Hrothgar means “Spear”. His middle name “Bartholomew” means “Pirate King”. Pirates don’t care for morality or codes, they just plunder and conquer. I have placed the names of Legitimate and Non-Legitimate Kings side by side to highlight Hrothgar’s diplomatic nature that hold both ruthlessness and shrewdness together.

Marguerite Lucrezia Valois: “Marguerite” is the French version of “Margaret”. This figure, “Marguerite” is inspired from “Marguerite de Valois”, one of the earliest Queen Consort of the Valois dynasty. The Name “Marguerite” means “pearls”, a very sought after object by European nobles, and an important symbol of Virginity and Purity, often worn by Elizabeth I the Virgin Queen of England. “Lucrezia” is an Italian name that means “wealthy”. Marguerite is from the family of Orleans, which in real life assumed the July Monarchy in France. So her name in total means “Wealthy in Pearls” or “Wealthy in Purity”. She is a reddish blond haired woman, with hazel eyes

Menelaus Cepheus Valois: the Eldest Valois son has the name of Mythical King of Troy, Menelaus. Menelaus means “Strength of the People”, the eldest Valois son is also named after a gracious King, like his father and his middle name “Cepheus” is a name of a Constellation, which also means “King”. I have picked Gabriel Aubry for this role. he has a darker blond hair.

Svetlana Arkyadevna Valois: The Elder Daughter-in-law of the Valois hails from the Russian nobility, Gruzinsky. In real life, the Gruzinsky are Georgian Nobility and Subject of Russia. Her name “Svetlana” means “Luminous” or “Light” in Russian, and I have been inspired from the Russian Ballerina ‘Svetlana Zakharova’. Her middle name “Arkyadevna” means “daughter of Arkady”. It is a common tradition in Russia that a person’s middle name suggests whose son or daughter they are. Her middle name was inspired from Tolstoy’s heroine, ‘Anna Arkyadevna Karenina’. “Arkady” usually means “someone from Arcadia”. So the whole of her name means “Arcadian Light”, another Grecian inspired name, coinciding with her husband Menelaus. She has red hair and blue eyes.

Magnus Cetus Valois: The Younger son of the Valois is named after the famous “Whale” constellation. ‘Magnus’ is Latin for “Great”. The literal translation of “Cetus” is Whale. It was coincidental that during both of the son’s birth the Constellations Cephus and Cetus were in the front line, so it was decided that their middle names would be after these stars. Magnus’ name keeps up with the mother. Whale is an oceanic creature and pearl is found in the ocean.

Elena Vittoria Valois: Magus’ wife, Elena Vittoria is from the Italian house of Orsini. In real life, the Orsini family existed in medieval times and Renaissance and produced a number of Popes to give to the Roman Empire. Therefor this Orsini too, is of old origin. ‘Elena’ means “blessed”, a common Italian name, and “Vittoria”, another common Italian name (Italian Version of ‘Victoria’) means “Victory” or the Goddess of Victory herself. Her name therefore means “blessed Victory”. She has platinum blonde hair, gray eyes and neurotic disposition. She is currently with child.

Maxine Adrienne Odessa Valois: The youngest child of Hrothgar Valois who possesses her father’s looks. She has three names, unlike her brothers. “Maxine”, a name that was chosen by her father (all of the sons were named by their mother) that means “Greatest” in Latin; “Adrienne” a name that means “dark”, was given because she was the first child of Hrothgar who was born with the same black hair like his. Her last name ‘Odessa’ was given in a whim, a name that is the female version of “Odysseus”, the famous Greek Traveler. Later in life, she traveled around the world, wandering about, in search of knowledge. I have chosen an edited version of Vittoria Ceretti, an Italian model. she came closest to my idea. I am aware that her hair does not totally match Maxine’s but it is to be remembered, Maxine’s hair is not curly, it is wavy. The roots are straight, but the length is not.

I have chosen to edit them B/W and not in colour or in that fashion of 1920′s to indicate how they are trapped in a mental state of 19th century and aristocratic supremacy. Maxine is in colour to depict how different she is from them.

I have put many quotes here, these are to showcase the values of the family, and to use them as aesthetics. These are the vows of the Valois Family

“bono malum superate, capax infiniti, faciam quodlibet quod necesse est “ : overcome evil with good, holding the infinite, I’ll do whatever it takes.

“Compos mentis, concilio et labore, coniunctis viribus, Resurgam” : in control of the mind, by wisdom and effort, with connected strength, I shall rise.

“Deus et mon droit, et it doit etre pre avec tous les mouyens“: The God and My Right, I will take it by any means.

The last quote is in French, and the part “Deus et Mon droit” is the true motto of the Valois. However, I have put this in French to echo the mindset and realness of Maxine.

Narum Ligno Domum: This is the motto of the Wizarding Pureblood family of the Valois. The quote means “the backbone of the dynasty is made of wood”. It is said that There were not one, but two men that established the Valois family. The Muggle one was established by Charles de Capet, Son of King Philip III and Isabella of Aragon, and his unknown brother Jean-Baptiste de Capet. In the medieval age, when Jean-Baptiste was born with magical blood his Royal parents kept him a secret. When Charles found the Valois house in 1284, Jean-Baptiste, now educated in Magical Arts, threatened to end him. To avoid conflict, bloodshed and exposition, both Charles and Jean-Baptiste signed a treaty that there will not be one, but two Valois branches, one non-wizard another wizard, and both will be bound to each other. The pact consisted-

1. If a non-magic child in born with magical blood, he/she would be the responsibility of the Wizarding Valois family and Vice Versa.

2. The Non-Wizard will protect the secrecy and existence of the Wizarding Valois family.

3. In return, the Wizarding Valois family will protect the Valois-Capet Dynasty with magical means. This condition became null and void when the Muggle Valois family went extinct in 1589.

The motto literally meant that the Muggle Valois Dynasty is and has been protected by the wood (wand) of the Wizarding Valois.

#newt xoc #pureblood family #french nobility #the assistant #newt x reader #Theseus x oc #theseus x reader #harry potter headcanon

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ariesbled · 6 years ago

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CASSIUS FULGORA ( CIS MALE & HE/HIM )? oh, aren’t they the TWENTY-SEVEN year old SHAPESHIFTER who works as a BARTENDER at QUARTER MOON & ( PART-TIME ) PERSONAL TRAINER at PRIMAL FITNESS? word on the streets is that they are DRIVEN & RELIABLE, but they can also be RELENTLESS & ARROGANT. by the way, they look eerily similar to GREY DAMON, don’t they? ( admin karin / 20 / she/fae / aest )

FULL NAME: cassius evander fulgora. ( x. ) AGE: twenty-seven. PRONOUNS / GENDER: he/him / cis male. SPECIES: shapeshifter. HOUSING: rosehill, in an apartment with his girlfriend moon hana. FAMILY: born to claudio and anita fulgora, cassius is their eldest child. however, cassius views his half sister portia’s mother, merce as a mother of his own too. he also has one other sibling born to claudio and anita, five years younger than him.

BACKSTORY

they say that family shapes a person. and in cassius’ case, truer words have never been said. it is impossible to tell his story without telling the story of his family.

it started with a marriage proposal. almost thirty years ago, before his mother anita was pregnant with the boy that would be known to the world as cassius evander fulgora. a business deal had been struck between the fulgoras and the kleins. the eldest fulgora son, claudio was to marry the kleins’ only daughter. but he was in love with another then, a woman named merce. still, a deal was a deal, and claudio fulgora did not turn his back on promises.

and so anita and claudio got married, and a few months later, cassius was born. but it wasn’t until cassius was five, upon returning to fairview after the couple and their child spent a few months in germany, that anita learned claudio had another child. his ex lover came to their home, begging anita and claudio to please not hate her little daughter portia, only a few months older than cassius himself. and anita, despite her disappointment, could not help herself from falling in love with the little girl and feeling a kinship towards this girl’s mother. cassius, however, was a different story. while he was immediately fond of merce, the little girl his father made him call sister earned glares and scowls from him.

claudio and merce were over now. merce got pregnant before claudio married anita, before he fell in love with his wife. but it didn’t change the fact that the lives of these two families would always be intertwined, and in the future, cassius would think of them all as one family.

it was around the same time cassius first met his half-sister that his powers bloomed. something that, as a little boy, he enjoyed showing off to his sister. the only shapeshifters in the family were cassius and his father, and it always made him feel like he was special. it was difficult to control at first, but gradually, over time, his powers became less of a game and something that cassius truly cherished, something that he saw as a part of him rather than an extension of who he was.

at age twelve his father sent him to a boarding school in switzerland. but merce wouldn’t allow portia to get the same education claudio was offering cassius, and in his stubborness, cassius had refused more than a few years at the school, eventually returning to fairview to finish his high school education.

high school was when he met and befriended hana, a striking girl who like him, seemed to know that she was special and above everyone else. it was a gamble, really. they could’ve hated each other or became the best of friends, and somehow, they ended as allies, partners and friends. if there was a person he would call his soulmate, it would be hana.

they remained friends even when cassius left fairview again to go to university further up on the east coast. certainly, there were feelings involved that were a little more than friendship, but neither of them knew how to act on it. when cassius returned to fairview at last, one of the first things he found out that hana was in a relationship with someone else.

but soulmates always came back together. long story short, he and hana found each other again, and in the years to come, they would both become the best versions of each other. cassius, ever the arrogant and stubborn fighter, would eventually find work at the quarter moon ( he says it’s because it has moon in its name, which so happens to be hana’s last name ) where he bartends but more importantly, where he is close to the exclusive fight ring in fairview. it was the perfect mix of elegance and violence alike.

tldr; he has a pretty standard backstory, but it shaped cassius into the person who he is today.

PERSONALITY

there’s no easy way to describe cassius. he’s an arrogant asshole, he’s a person who wants more, who is greedy for power and glory. he’s quick-witted, clever, in the way that he could be a strategist for war. he could be a child of the god of war himself, lord ares. he is driven, passionate and once he has a goal set in mind, he would strive at it until he could grasp it and taste it on his tongue. he is ruled by a strict moral code, although his codes aren’t the ideal or best ones. still, he adheres to his code, knowing full well that he isn’t a good person. on the moral alignment scale, cassius is lawful evil, if you will.

but above all, love drives him. his love for the ones closest to him trumps everything, and despite his greediness and his selfishness, it is all driven by love. he fights, he bleeds for the people that he loves. love makes him selfish because he can’t bear the idea of losing his loved ones, and he would do anything and everything for them.

to sum it up, here is an excerpt from an explanation i had of cassius: “cassius evander fulgora is sensitive but not soft, lawful but not law-abiding, bold and brazen but not brave, and above all, he is a good brother, son, friend, husband and father, but not a good man.”

Does your character have any nicknames? the people closest to cassius are allowed to call him cas. for the most part, only his family does. there’s also evander, his middle name. an old nickname, given by a childhood best friend from the town he came from.

Does your character have any distinguishing features such as tattoos, scars, piercings, etc? curled dragon wings tattooed onto his back, gotten when he was twenty. they’re done in black and white, and take up most of his upper back.

What is your character like in relationships? Are they clingy? Faithful or unfaithful? Do they jump from one relationship to the other? Do they even have an interest in something romantic? cassius has been steadily in a relationship with moon hana for two years now. he doesn’t fall in love easy, but when he does, it’s intense and all consuming. hana is cassius’ world, and he knows that he wants to be hers forever.

What kind of things does your character like? What do they dislike? cassius was born a fighter. if you ask me to define him in one word, it would be that. so it’s no strange thing that he enjoys fighting at the ring down in the quarter moon, but verbal arguments ( so long as they’re not completely pointless ) also give him satisfaction. other things he likes includes but are not limited to: his girlfriend hana, mornings, italian cuisine, the art of war by sun tzu, running/jogging, books ( particularly non fiction ones ), hitting up the gym. one of cassius’ biggest dislikes is smoking and cigarettes, and he does not tolerate with people who smoke near him.

How does your character treat their friends and family? How about strangers? Enemies? the thing about cassius fulgora is that nothing he does is by halves. for him, it’s all or nothing. love, hate — you name it. it’s all the same. he’s intense, passionate and full of fire. when he loves someone, he loves them so fiercely. he is loyal to his family first and foremost ( the list includes friends closest to him and his girlfriend hana ), and he would do anything for them. while he too is loyal to his friends, if they threatened his family, he would drop them in a heartbeat. strangers, he keeps at arm length until they prove themselves. enemies? he would burn the world to burn them. just as he loves, he hates with a passion too.

Where does your character go when they are angry? the ring or the gym sometimes, and other times? home. to hana.

What is your character’s biggest fear? Who have they told this to? Who would they never tell this to? Why? perhaps to some it was a strange fear, but cassius’ biggest fear has always been total blindness. it’s no big secret either, if anyone asks he would tell them about it. but it also isn’t something he advertises, considering that it’s difficult to explain that his fear is stemmed from the fact that that sort of darkness would suffocate him.

Does your character have a secret? If so, what is it? tba, i can’t think of one.

Has your character ever been in love? Have they ever had a broken heart? cassius has had a few crushes here and there, some more intense than others. but the first time his heart felt like it belonged to another was when he fell in love with hana in high school. it was almost too late when he realised it, away from fairview for university and coming back only to see her with another on her arm. it almost broke his heart too, if it wasn’t for the fact that he and hana came back to each other in the end.

Does your character have any flaws? What are they? he likes to act like he’s better than everyone else, but cassius is incredibly flawed. he has a temper, he’s stubborn and he does everything in extremes. too much is what he is. he knows this too, and while he hates how it drives some people away and he fears that it’ll drive his loved ones away one day, he isn’t exactly sure how to stop. he is empty, and the only way he knows to fill himself is to become too much.

What is one strong memory that has stuck with your character from childhood? Why is it so powerful and lasting? there are probably more than one, but the moment his half sister walked into his home changed cassius’ life. they go a long way, but that day was the day that cassius added two more people into his list of family.

WANTED CONNECTIONS / PLOTS

enemies. people he hates, and people who probably hate him back. whether it’s petty hateship, or whether they truly are a dangerous person or perhaps someone he’s made fun of in high school. anything goes for this.

frenemies. he probably has a lot of these, especially werewolves who fight in the ring as he does, or wolves who frequent the gym he sometimes works at. while he has a grudging respect for them, they’re werewolves, and he’s a shapeshifter. they’re meant to be at odds despite being two sides of the same coin.

coworkers. both primal fitness or quarter moon, if your character works there, hit me up.

regular customers. similarly, if your character frequents the gym or the quarter moon, then they would probably be well acquainted with cassius too. a plot i’d also like is someone who has cassius as a personal trainer at the primal fitness.

#sacrilegeintro #WHEEEWWW THIS IS SO LONG #* // : BIOGRAPHY.

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margridarnauds · 6 years ago

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Top five characters from literature (and why, if you're feeling chatty)

I tend to forget about literally everything I’ve ever read when I’m in a position to talk about it, so I’m going to do my best.

(1) Bres mac Elatha - Cath Maige Tuired, Cath Maige Tuired Conga, and a load of other assorted medieval Irish myths.

My boy. My son.

There’s a lot I could say about him, and a lot of it I wasn’t able to fit into my 45 page Capstone. Sometimes, in my (fairly short) life, I’ve been lucky enough to come across something that happened to be exactly what I needed at the time and, for my 14-15 year old self, that happened to be an obscure Irish deity who ends up choking on bog water. As you will.

I didn’t start out liking him; it’s very, very easy to accept a simple version of the text where he’s just a moustache twirling tyrant, and even though it’s not an interpretation I AGREE with, seeing as it’s…boring, as a concept to me, it’s just as valid as anything, given these texts were meant to be interpreted and reinterpreted and transmitted and then rewritten from the ground up to suit the times. Cath Maige Tuired Bres is actually an anomaly; before that, he seems to have been an esteemed member of the Tuatha dé.

Which, I suppose, is part of why I like him. There’s an ambiguity about him, a crossing of lines. Even in CMT where he’s at his most villainous, he’s fairly unique, having many of the traits of a hero and, I would argue, he is as much the protagonist of the text as Lugh is. He has the heroic birth with a missing father, the strange childhood, the trial by combat, etc. And yet, in the world of CMT, with the context of the Viking invasions, he just doesn’t have a chance. He’s a fundamentally doomed character from the beginning, with his own actions damning him in the end.

His very existence in the tribe, the son born out of the most “proper” form of medieval Irish wedlock (seeing as there were nine, I hesitate to apply the term “bastard” to Bres, but the circumstances were NOT the ideal) to an unbetrothed noblewoman of the Tuatha (THE FUCKING SOVEREIGNTY OF IRELAND) and the king of a neighboring tribe, really warps the social structure, and it’s something he kind of carries throughout his life. He isn’t like Cú Chulainn, who is probably the one character who comes closest to him as far as his place in the tribe; he’s not content to serve the maternal side of his family as a champion, doing as he’s commanded. He wants power, and, when he’s removed from power, he takes desperate measures to take it back and, in the process, loses everything.

And, really, that essential liminality extends into his relationship with gender and power structures. While he’s supposed to represent order, as the king, he has no taste for the nobility; he makes them work (!!!!), he doesn’t give a bard due hospitality, he doesn’t give the warriors ale and meat. You get this image of him as this kind of distant, isolated figure in the tribe; not particularly JOYLESS, per se, at least in my interpretation of him (given we don’t see him happy all that often, the interpretation is open), but one who takes joy in things very, very different from the rest of the tribe, or at least from the men. Instead, his closest relationships in the tribe are to the women, who are the ones who elect him. His mother is his most constant ally, being willing to travel with him to see his father, even if it means leaving her own tribe to do it, and she’s the one he goes to IMMEDIATELY for help. And, when his mother addresses her father, it’s notable that SHE’S the one who takes control of the narrative, not Bres. Bres only confirms it when his father asks him. I wouldn’t say that he’s a feminine-coded character, specifically, though I think there are elements of that, but he definitely does not fit the expectations of how a medieval Irish nobleman is to behave with his own sex and with the opposite sex. At the risk of going full-on Pretentious Academic here, it reminds me of what Jeffrey Jerome Cohen wrote in his Seven Monster Theses, where he wrote, “By revealing that difference is arbitrary and potentially free-floating, mutable rather than essential, the monster threatens to destroy not just individual members of a society, but the very cultural apparatus through which individuality is constituted and allowed.”

And, in other texts, I think there’s decent enough subtext to do a queer reading of Bres. Like, in Cath Maige Tuired Conga, which is a sort of prequel to CMT, Bres appears as the champion of the Tuatha dé, a completely normal part of the tribe, and he meets with Sreng mac Sengann, the Fir Bolg champion, and their meeting is…interesting to me, in how intimate it is, as far as two men from opposing sides sent to essentially size up the enemy. There’s a certain…familiarity with one another. They know that if their tribes go to battle, it’s going to be a bloodbath, and there’s really no personal dislike for one another. They even ask each other where they spent the night! (Which, it’s a common enough phrase that I’m not going to tie it to The Wooing of Emer, but…) And then, at the end of their meeting, they each give each other one of their sharp, pointy weapons to bring back to the tribe as a show of what the other tribe can do, and the text says, “They parted in peace after making a compact of friendship with each other.” It’s just…a very unusual scene, in terms of champions meeting up with one another, and it’s one that I think I could spend a lot more time with if I was given the opportunity. And curiously enough, they keep the vow of friendship! Throughout the rest of the fight, you see everyone being paired off against their equal, but Bres and Sreng never go head to head even when Sreng takes the arm off of Bres’ king. Instead, Bres goes for Sreng’s king.

Personally, for me, he only really clicked when I was going over CMT again and I was looking over the scene where Bres meets his father for the first time and he says, “Do you have any advice for me?” and I was like…fuck. This is the first time he’s ever met his father, and the first words that his father’s ever said to him are essentially, “Why aren’t you leading your own people? What have you done wrong?” which is doubly painful when you realize that his father was one of the Fomorian lords who were raiding Ireland earlier. At the risk of going personal here, at the time when I read those lines and had them hit me, I was in the process of divorcing myself from my own father, who, like Bres, I had had a distant relationship with, as he lived across the country and was happier with the idea of having a picture on a mantelplace than a daughter who wanted something as inconvenient as his attention. Reading that, and thinking about my own situation, I was like, “Yeah, I get you” and, from then on, I really read him and the text in a wildly different light, especially when I started to think about the repercussions of, say, Bres having the growth of a 14 year old at the age of 7. Like, if you take this text realistically (which…you can or you can’t, because these texts are over the top by their nature), he never had a childhood. He was just moving from one stage of growth to another, with the tribe probably being all too eager to put a spear in his hand because Well, he has the growth for it now and That’s Just What a Man Does. Which is something that I ALSO understood, deeply, and is something that I wish more adaptations of CMT would take into account besides just forcing Bres into the role of “Entitled Brat.”

Also, if my dissertation up there wasn’t enough: According to some genealogies, he’s The Morrigan’s nephew, given that both Eriu, Bres’ mother, and she are both listed as daughters of Ernmas. Like, if you don’t love him for the batshit insane, Extra antics he finds himself in (like the time the Dagda, his half-brother/father-in-law decides to distract the husband of the woman he’s banging by sending him on a mission to Bres), you’ve got to love him for his batshit insane, extra, goth family.

(2) The Countess - Makt Myrkanna (AKA Weird Ass Swedish Dracula.)

This will hopefully be briefer than my little essay up there, mainly because there’s really not all that much information on her in text and it’s been awhile since I read her scenes (and even then, a lot of that was me rereading it so that I could write the Countess/Lucy smutfic that I am probably never, ever going to let see the light of day. Which. Vampire smutfic. Light of day.)

BUT…why I like her. Makt Myrkanna is a very, very different work than the original Dracula, extending the scenes in the castle while condensing the rest of the novel to a truly dizzying extent, to the point where we have no idea whether Arthur Holmwood’s actually…alive by the end of the book given that the last time he was mentioned, he was stalking Lucy’s grave given that he thought she’d been buried alive. RIP Artie. To me, though, it really, really shows in the figure of the Countess, who is very different from the three women Jonathan meets in the original novel. There, even though there is a lot of subtext about what their relationship to the Count is, some of which might not have been printable in a Victorian novel (at least not one to be sold to the public), the brides really only have the two key scenes: Once when they tempt Jonathan and Dracula intervenes, and then again when they try to get Mina to join them and then Van Helsing goes down and stakes them. They’re probably one of the most memorable parts of the novel and certainly a BIG influence on the portrayal of vampire women in fiction, but they’re not…there all that often.

The Countess, however, is a far more formidable figure. She does not seem nearly as pleased in her current position, seeming to be held in place by Dracula, who it’s heavily, heavily implied might have been her husband (?), though he also shows just as much disdain for the man’s actions towards her in life that it’s kind of hard to tell one way or another. (Like a lot of things in Makt Myrkanna, it’s toyed with and then never picked up again.) No matter what, he definitely wants to bang her and probably has on multiple occasions, given that he describes her, uh, attributes to Thomas while showing him his collection of dirty paintings. (Yes, Dracula has a porn collection in this one.) For the Countess’ part, there seems to be a certain…fear that the Count inspires in her, or at least a sense of caution with her quickly ushering Thomas Harker (inexplicably, Jonathan becomes Thomas in this translation) away. Obviously, she’s on Team Dracula in the end, she very much wants to eat humans, and she’s not a Broken Bird, but you do get the sense that she has some sort of agenda of her own and that, perhaps, there’s a sort of power struggle being waged in Castle Dracula that Thomas is more or less oblivious to (he’s a bit busy dodging human sacrifices).

She also represents far more of a temptation than the original brides, who Jonathan…is interested in, with the reference to “almost wanting them to kiss me” (or something; I don’t have Dracula on hand and, if I spend too long searching, I know I’ll never get this done), but it’s still not…..in depth. Like, Jonathan loves and is faithful to Mina, even though he’s ashamed when he shows her his diaries because of that line. Thomas Harker, his counterpart here, though, reacts…very differently, trying to keep his calm but, “The moment she turned towards me and locked her incomparable eyes with mine, it felt as though an electric current surged throughout my body. I grabbed a nearby chair and held onto its backrest. She looked steadily into my eyes, and it didn’t even occur to me that I should have greeted her, or that my behavior was doltish. But evidently neither did she see a need for salutations. It felt as though we had already known each other for a long time and therefore didn’t need to explain ourselves.” There’s this hypnotic effect that she has on him, and unlike her three counterparts, she is perfectly willing to wait and talk with him for long periods of time.

Also, unlike her other counterparts, we get her backstory detailed to us, with her being described as being just as ruthless and cunning as the Count even as a child, with her being described as, holding, “the hearts of men at [her] fingertips, playing with them as a child plays with grapes before sucking out the liquid.” And in her lifetime, she was powerful, with Dracula saying she, “Held the destinies of whole nations in her hands, though few suspected it. Heads of state, kings, and emperors, lay at her feet–or in her arms.” Ultimately, her only downfall was when her husband ended up locking her and her lover in the bedroom together so she could sex him to death. Literally. He jumps out a window. And then her husband had a funeral service performed but, given she’s walking around the castle, we can presume it didn’t stick.

(3) Asriel/Mrs. Coulter - His Dark Materials

I’m including both of them because it’s not necessarily the two of them I like as individuals; it’s their dynamic. I mean, I do very much like them as individuals, they are each favs in their own right, but their dynamic is essential to that as well. They both complement and bounce off of each other very well, having this kind of spark where, even though they absolutely despise each other for most of the trilogy, they are really the only two who match each other. They’re both incredibly magnetic; like, in his first scene at Jordan College, I was pretty blown away by Asriel’s presentation, in his confidence, his ruthlessness, his intelligence, his pride and his ambition, all of which are also mirrored in Mrs Coulter. They simply happen to have landed on separate sides, with Asriel trying to essentially tear down everything that Coulter stands for and Coulter seizing control in the Church because it’s the only thing she really has as far as options, since she lacks the privileges Asriel has as a man.

They both do horrible things in the pursuit of their goals, including killing children, with Coulter being essentially the embodiment of Stranger Danger, and they both harm Lyra both physically and mentally. Still, when they let their guard down, on the FEW occasions they let their guard down, it is shown that they have some amount of love for Lyra, but they fundamentally don’t know how to be parents when all their lives have been spent in the pursuit of power and knowledge and all the ways those two intertwine.

I’m not sure how much I fully believe in Mrs Coulter’s swerve to motherhood, whether it was the best writing decision, whether it leans into the overall weakening of female characters in the last book or so, with Lyra being another notable victim, but I do think there’s a tragedy in there, as far as her trying but failing. And there is something in the classic femme fatale, generally seen as sexual but cold and unmaternal, dangerous in her embracing of sexuality sans procreation and motherhood (and monogamy!) being allowed to HAVE those kind of feelings and to have a complicated dynamic with the father of her child who she still has obviously holds some feelings for. And for Asriel’s part, he WAS ready to sacrifice Lyra, but he was also HORRIFIED by it, and in the end, he does repeatedly show that he cares, I just think that ultimately he let his own lofty goals get in the way of that until it was almost too late.

I really think that the best showcasing of them as characters tends to be with them together, such as in the third book when she steals the Intention Craft. She comes in there a prisoner, Asriel doesn’t WANT her there because he knows she’ll pull something, but she’s able to trap him in his own words by playing his commanders like a fiddle, and then she takes advantage over his desire to show off his new toy to get her an in, with Asriel then letting her go with one of his spies in the craft with her, knowing fully well what she’s going to do next and then going back to his improved prototype for more scheming. Like, they’re always trying to one up the other; it’s essentially a form of foreplay for them (as much so as you can get in a kid’s series about killing God), and I can only imagine what they were like when they were actually in a relationship, because they must have been terrifying and yet, for whatever reason, they both fell in love with each other to embark on a forbidden affair with each other, when she was married to a highly powerful man, risking everything.

So, I’m going to be curious to see what the new BBC series ends up doing with them, both as individuals and as a pair.

(4) Morgan le Fay - Like, a hundred different Arthurian adaptations

I’ll be honest: Morgan le Fay in The Magic Treehouse was one of my first crushes. I was always strangely drawn to books with her in them, looking at the pictures for a while.

These days, I have broadened my Arthurian knowledge significantly, though not nearly as much as I’d like to, but she’s still my eternal favorite. (Literally any book or film that tries me to root for Arthur over Morgan is going to fail miserably.) She is the embodiment of the Other in a woman, being otherwordly in her name and in her powers, but, like Bres and any other character from a long tradition, she is ambiguous in her presentation. Sometimes, she loves her brother and truly wants to expose the love affair between Lancelot and Guinevere to save his honor. Sometimes, she wants to create destruction for destruction’s sake. Sometimes, she reconciles with her brother and gives up the fight, sometimes she only relents when she sees his dead body there. She is always powerful, but the way that power is applied and, at times, not applied is part of what makes her fascinating and why, I believe, she is still subject to so much study after all these years.

The backstory as far as her mother and Uther gives her VERY strong motivation for why she would be less than pleased with Arthur, though I tend to favor the story of her expulsion from Camelot for having an affair with a kinsman of Guinevere’s for the delicious, delicious irony involved.

She is more of a schemer than her sister Morgause who, despite the oddness of her family, tends to be a loving mother (who just…happens to take a lover many, many years her junior and pays the consequences) in works that don’t take off from sexist Victorian bullshit. (I have many, many feelings over the portrayal of Morgause, and they’re very complicated so I won’t vomit them out.) Like, she successfully steals the sheath of Excalibur, and came very, very close to killing both Arthur AND her husband with the whole Accolon thing.

Also, she literally has a dude come into Camelot dressed in green so she could terrify Guinevere AT CHRISTMAS and then continues to troll her nephew for a year (and a day!) Like, name a greater icon.

(5) Shiloh - Saving Shiloh

A Very Good Boi. Doesn’t die at the end, unlike SOME literary dogs that I could mention whose authors thought that kids needed the slow, creeping inevitability of death forced into them. A+ pupper.

#fey-and-sudden-and-unholy #about me

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alistonjdrake · 5 years ago

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Part Seven: The Stranger Queen

Queen Brandye Zych Mother to: Prince Toli & Prince Calvino Born: Year 1739 after the fall of the Saints Died: Year 1768 after the fall of the Saints

Again, it was not King Frederick’s decision or inclination to marry Brandye. In fact, in 1759, after returning home from a Rhine tour due to the news of the dead Queen Filipa, King Frederick had never heard of the 20-year-old Gegraen princess.

It was King Vadik of Oskya’s idea.

King Vadik married in 1749, the same year of his coronation, to Lukova Georgiy, Grand Duchess of Slovy. Oskya has a long, bitter history with Gegra. The two countries have never truly considered the other enemies, and at times have worked together, but conflict arises due to ownership of the Highlands and Oskyan armies using Gegraen land. Petty things like borrowed money never been paid back, incorrectly drawn or generous maps, whether people born in certain areas are more Gegraen or more Oskyan. The annoyance that is Highlander Geg, which sounds less like Lowlander Geg and more like a mix of Oskyi and Letrossi. Gegraens and Oskyans have always argued and in 1759, things were no different.

While King Frederick was at war in the Rhine, he requested the help of Oskya to supply his army. King Vadik could have moved his troops down through Slovy or Abenland, both nations more or less owned by Oskya, but he chose to have them go down through Gegra. The main reasons for this being Slovy has excruciatingly worse weather than Oskya and the journey would have been harsher, and until the end of 1759, Abenland would still be a republic. Since 1743, the lower class citizens of Abenland revolted against the ruling dukes and ran them out of the country who then took to begging King Vadik to storm the nation and take it back. Until the end of 1759, the Republic of Abenland would be fairly prosperous until inner struggles would make it ripe for Oskya to attack and it would fall into anarchy, but that was currently not of concern.

Marching through Gegra made them angry, and like many things, the problem was solved by marriage. One thing that made Gegra especially mad was being left out of the deals between Escan and Oskya. Escan was quickly growing a reputation and seemingly becoming the richest nation on the continent.

Brandye Zych was the daughter Archduchess Elżbieta Zych, sister to Prince Jakub Zych, who at the time was Gegra’s ovig marska. Gegra has twelve ruling families, and a main governing branch made up of the patriarchs of said families that claim to be equal partners in governing matters. They vote to elect to their ovig marska. But it is noted that out of eleven other possible families, Vadik selected a princess from one closest to the inner circle.

She was raised in the lowlands, in the capital of Jelberok. In her youth, she spoke Geg, Oskyi, and Kellish (as before 1761 and Kellish submission to both Oskya and Escan, the fanciful language was considered posh and impressive to learn). She spent her summers in her mother’s vast vacation home, was no stranger to scandalous courts as Gegra praises its industry of courtesans, she was a strong supporter of the arts, and was known for her good spirits.

Brandye was actually excited about the idea of living the only home she’d ever known, traveling all the way to Escan, and being queen in a country where she did not speak a word of the language. Perhaps to her, it was more exciting than the alternative, as Gegraen nobles usually marry their cousins or are doled out to Oskyan lords who are considerably more culturally and socially restrained. Escan had a reputation.

In truth, King Vadik had been in talk with the Zychs before Queen Filipa’s death, at first in the hopes of introducing Brandye as a possible mistress. With the timing, Brandye ended up arriving shortly after the funeral to the great dislike of the Merlo family but given she arrived with Oskyan troops, very little was said or done.

The only language they shared was Oskyi. So many in Escan had ignored King Frederick’s Oskyan background as the years stretched on. So many had forgotten their king liked to hunt, had spent his early years in the snow-covered mountains, and grew facial hair like their stern allies. His speaking Oskyi with his new wife brought back the loud whispers of how much of an outsider he truly was.

And despite Brandye’s taste for dancing and art, she did not fit in as well as she would have thought. The Escana did not take to her and she did not take to them. In her early days, she suffered from heat strokes often, fainting from long stretches of being out in the open. She did not like the food, was often laughed at for her attempts at learning Escan, sunburned easily, and would be sick often in the beginning. King Frederick liked her enough to get her pregnant before returning to the Rhine. He would say speaking to her reminded him of his childhood and very quickly grew fond of her.

The fondness would not last very long.

Queen Brandye had many factors working for her. When she had Prince Toli, the nation was happy in the way they had been when Prince Cidro was born. Prince Toli was a living symbol of an alliance. He tied Escan and Gegra together in blood. There were festivals and days of celebration. As a Gegraen, the thought of her husband having paramours did not bother it. Adultery is such a huge part of Gegra’s culture, especially among the rich and ruling classes. Most families grow up with their parent’s live-in courtesan being treated as just another family member. Such things were familiar to Brandye, as in reality, she had no “legal” father as her mother had stayed unmarried and had a close relationship with a courtesan instead.

While politics and government were not her strong suits, she relied on Prince Sebastian whenever King Frederick was away. Although the two of them could not talk very well, Prince Sebastian took it upon himself to help his sister-in-law learn Escan. She still liked to dance, and drink, and sing, even if most of the court saw her as strange and unapproachable. Queen Brandye surrounded herself with Gegraen ladies who were just as ostracized by the court.

The trouble started when Prince Toli spoke his first words. In Geg. It continued in 1761 when Queen Brandye was pregnant once more and now with fewer ladies who could speak to her because King Frederick did not want his children unable to understand what he thought should be their native language. But 1761 also marks the year Oskya and Escan divided the Kells between themselves. Escan took the West Kells, and to the rest of the world finally became known as the Escana Empire.

But it also marks the year a Kellish woman would come to Graza to start her career as a palace maid and at the age of 19, would catch the eye of King Frederick.

Queen Brandye was not as close to King Frederick’s paramours as perhaps Queen Trella had been. They did not share a dinner table with them, she did not call out to them in public (for she could not call out to anyone), but she was cordial. On holidays, she would give them minor gifts. She would never complain when King Frederick visited their bedchamber instead of hers, and as she was reaching the height of her pregnancy she understood the pattern where King Frederick momentarily ventured elsewhere.

It is also important to note, in Gegra all courtesans come from families of worth and so did King Frederick’s long term paramours. They were all courtiers who came from wealth and respected families and often when King Frederick broke his relationship with one, he’d take it upon himself to organize marriages and deals for them.

Queen Brandye was in confinement when King Frederick met the Kellish maid Luca Breacher and she probably would have prevented it otherwise. Luca Breacher practiced a unique hold over King Frederick and his judgment. He’d had dalliances with members of the serving class before but it was always something he discarded quickly, but he elevated Luca. Luca’s entry into court life overshadowed Prince Calvino’s birth. She was given her own rooms close to his, expensive jewelry and dresses, he would be seen escorting her around the gardens, servants would gossip that they slept in the same bed.

Queen Brandye was quickly infuriated. On her end, she was infatuated with her husband. She claimed to love him despite his faults and promiscuity. He’d always been kind to her, affectionate at times, but never going to the same grand lengths and gestures he afforded to a girl who months before had been scrubbing the halls. And Luca was known for her temper and bad attitude, going as far as to have (supposedly) slapped King Frederick in the face when he tried to leave her bed one morning to have breakfast with Queen Brandye.

Luca’s jealously was known to the whole court. One by one, King Frederick got rid of his other paramours. Some of which he’d had for years, some of which it was rumored he had children with, some of which had played a hand in government.

There were a few moments where Queen Brandye and Luca interacted. One most notable where Luca wore something similar to the queen and shouted loudly for all to hear that she cared very little for her, mocked her accent, and wished her the worse. At a New Year’s party, Queen Brandye demanded she bow to her, and when Luca refused she called her an “insolent little girl” and had her dragged out by guards only for King Frederick to relent and let her back in after she cried.

To the people of Graza, Luca Breacher would disappear suddenly in 1763 and it would be a relief to many. Especially Queen Brandye. But the changes in King Frederick were evident. He would not take another paramour and if he did sleep around there were instances where he’d have scratch marks on his cheek the next day. When asked by Prince Sebastian where they came from, he once said, “I found a Kellish lioness and I’m afraid she won’t let me go.”

Even with Luca Breacher gone from the public, the damage had been done. Queen Brandye and King Frederick’s marriage never repaired. He would outright yell at her in public when she complained, he fired all of her Gegraen ladies as Prince Toli grew older and spoke more Geg than he did Escan. He would take her authority over the education and care of her children out of her hands completely. Queen Brandye would refuse to be seen with him until he “repented for his whoredom”.

Queen Brandye became recluse and bitter but in truth, she was isolated. Her beginning had been comfortable. She’d been surrounded by friends that traveled with her from Geg, had a husband who was comfortable speaking a language they shared, and although was seen as an oddity, was not so poorly received. But in the second half of her marriage, she could still barely speak Escan and was now surrounded by people who only spoke it and mocked her for her inability. Her husband did not speak to her at all and when he did, it was during their fights. And she was now known as the queen who’d almost gotten into physical altercations with a mistress. And was considered a hypocrite for doing so considering her upbringing and earlier interactions with paramours.

In her own way, Queen Brandye did try to repair the relationship but King Frederick seemed strictly against her. He did not want to be near her and was in secret talks with Prince Sebastian about the possibilities of being granted a divorce.

He would not need one. In 1768, he and Queen Brandye would journey around some towns in Escan to grace the opening of schools he’d built. They would both get sick but while King Frederick would recover, Queen Brandye would not be so lucky. By the time they returned to Graza, she would be near death and choking on her own lungs.

King Frederick would spend the most time he had with her in years when she lay on her deathbed but when she took her last breath, the stories would say he’d be married again within the week to a woman who had never disappeared at all.

#my writing #my characters #tss trilogy #yes #I know this is long #it covers 9 years of marriage tho #And Brandye has a lot of relevant backstory that needs to be told #and also can't ignore the introduction of our girl Luca

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nurseperriestyles-blog · 7 years ago

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More of the Same

A/N: I do not take credit for this picture. But I did have my husband edit her hair and eye color to match Perrie. This is the closest I’ve found online, and it’s pretty close.

This post probably had a lot of typos and issues, as per usual. I was fighting sleep when I wrote it

Template from:

https://theboson.deviantart.com/art/Blank-Character-Sheet-2-1-8-390-Questions-460031650

“I’d much rather save the heroes than be the hero.” --Perrie Styles

General Information

Name: Perrie Styles

Pronunciation: Pear-ee

Name Meaning: Pear tree

Name Origin: French

Other Names: Pear

Gender: Female

Titles: Nurse Styles

Birth Name: Perrie Styles

Birth Date: October 17th

Birth Length: 16 inches

Birth Weight: 6 ½ lbs

Birth Place: Infirmary in Wall Rose

Manner of Birth: Natural

First Word(s): “Uh oh”

Dominant Hand: Right

Astrological Sign: Libra

Catchphrase: “Fuck.” (She says it way too much)

Autograph: Literally just a “P” with illegible scribbles after it

Handwriting: The messiest, most lazy chicken scratch ever. She has very pretty, neat cursive handwriting, though, when she tries.

ID Number/SSN: N/A

License Plate Number: N/A

Appearance

Picture: See above

Height: 5’4

Weight: 110 lbs

Species: Human

Race: Caucasian

Blood Type: A-

Symbol: N/A

Skin Color: White

Birthmarks: N/A

Extra Anatomy: N/A

Hair Color: Pale, icy blonde

Hair Length: Just above her collar bones

Hair Type: Wavy

Hair Style: A long, messy bob

Widow's Peak: None

Eye Color: Dark blue/grey

Eyebrows: Full with a subtle arch

Nose Shape: Small and turns up at the end

Teeth: Straight and white

Face Shape: Heart shaped

Complexion: She has pretty clear skin, but around her hair line tends to get a few small bumps from sweating.

Facial Hair: None

Health and Image

Diet: Perrie doesn’t watch what she eats at all. It’s lucky that she finds time to eat at all.

Exercise: She walks to and from work, and is on her feel all day, but that’ all the exercise she gets

Fitness: That’s one of her least favorite words

Posture: She slouches a lot, but if she’s trying to impress someone, she’ll stand up straight

Dexterity: She isn’t very clumsy, unless she’s really tired

Reflexes: Her reflexes are better than average. She’s pretty good at dodging items thrown by hysterical patients

Abnormalities: None

Handicaps: None

Medication: None

Allergies: Cats

Diseases: None

Illnesses: None

Disorders: PTS from the fall of Wall Maria

Broken Bones: None

Wardrobe: She mostly wears cotton dresses and skirts, her nursing smocks, collared button ups

Accessories: None. She doesn’t wear any jewelry or anything because she loses it or it gets in the way

Equipment: N/A

Musical Instruments: None. She has no musical ability whatsoever

Piercings: None

Hygiene: She’s not a neat/clean freak, but she keeps herself and her hands very clean

Makeup: Nope. Perrie doesn’t have the time or skill to put on makeup

Perfume / Cologne: She keeps a bottle of her mother’s perfume that smells like roses, but she only wears it on special occasions

Scent: She washes in strawberry scented soap and shampoo. She really, really loves strawberries, ya’ll.

Scars: She has a thin, diagonal scar on her left thigh

Tattoos: None

Voice

Voice: She has a sweet, soft voice. When she’s mad or super serious about something, it’s more loud and firm

Pitch: On the higher side, but not obnoxious and squeaky

Laughter: She has a rather loud laugh, and she snorts sometimes

Impediments: None

Psychology

IQ: 148

Vocabulary: Perrie has a very extensive vocabulary, especially medical terms and such. She isn’t pretentious about it, however.

Memory: When she’s learning something, or needing to remember something important, she has an excellent memory. If it’s just everyday things, or when she’s really tired, she can’t remember anything

Temperament: Choleric

Learning Style: She starts by reading and studying something, then moves on to hands on learning

Emotional Stability: She is very emotionally stable. She can, however, become overwhelmed and freak out, but not very often

Mental Health: She’s healthy. She has slight PTS and can freak out in certain situations, but it isn’t debilitating.

Philosophy

Religion: None. She believes firmly in science and thinks religion is ridiculous, but she doesn’t slam it in people’s faces. She never talks about religion with others.

Superstitions: None

Spirit Animal: If she had to pick an animal, it would probably be an owl

Etiquette: Perrie is very polite and kind in social or professional situations, but she can be very vulgar in casual situations, or if she’s bothered

Alignment: Lawful good

Perception: Realist

Philosophy / Motto: “She believed she could, so she did.”

Taboos: Murder. No matter what, Perrie could never bring herself to take another’s life. It is against everything she stands for as a nurse

Vices: Cursing, spite

Virtues: Kindness, open-minded, hard-working

Character

Primary Objective: Become a doctor

Secondary Objectives: Enjoy life with her family and friends

Priorities: Her job and her loved ones

Motivation: Being the best she can be

Self Confidence: Very high

Self Control: High most of the time, but sometimes her temper can get the best of her

Self Esteem: High, though she can be self-conscious about some things

Quirks: Chewing her lip, snorts when laughing, dry hands, always has stained clothes, her hair is always a mess.

Hobbies: Cooking, gardening, reading, sewing

Closet Hobbies: Drawing. She isn’t very good, but she likes to doodle and sketch. She would die if anyone knew

Guilty Pleasures:

Habits: Lip chewing, cursing, hand washing

Desires: Success in her job, safe family and friends

Wishes: Defeat of the Titans, to become a doctor

Traumas: Titan’s invading Wall Maria, being betrayed by close friends...

Worries: Her friends/family being hurt, failing at her job, Titans

Nervous Tics: Lip chewing

Soothers: Quiet places, her garden, cooking, sewing

Soft Spots: Kids, puppies, pretty flowers

Cruel Streaks: Perrie isn’t cruel at all, but she can be a little spiteful. She would never intentionally hurt anyone, though

Accomplishments: Finishing nursing school and becoming a nurse, saving many people, learning how to cook new things

Greatest Achievement: She will always say her greatest achievement is making her dad proud. She’s such a daddy’s girl.

Failures: Not being able to help people when the wall fell, losing patients, she feels like she fails Eren everytime he gets kidnapped. She also felt like a failure when Ty joined the Survey Corps despite her trying to convince him not to, not remembering her mother

Biggest Failure: She feels that Carla Yeager’s death was her fault. She feels that she should have gone and seen if she was okay before fleeing Shiganshina.

Favorite Dream: She dreamt that she had a giant garden beyond the Walls, and there were no Titans. She could hear her father whistling somewhere near by, and she could smell strawberries and tea leaves..

Worst Nightmare: Perrie had a nightmare that her father and Ty were Titans, and she watched them eat Mikasa and her mother. She woke up and felt like crying after it

Earliest Memory: She remembers a woman singing and a vase of roses on the kitchen table

Fondest Memory: There’s so many, but her favorite is her father teaching her how to plant a rose bush

Worst Memory: The day Shiganshina fell

Most Prized Possession: Her mother’s perfume

Most Valuable Possession: A rare cookbook Ty got her for her 19th birthday

Collections: Cookbooks

Embarrassments: She’s embarrassed anytime a guy flirts with her. She gets so flustered

Humor: Sarcastic and silly

Regrets:

Secrets: The fact that she draws, her secret savings stash,

Darkest Secret: She doesn’t really have one

Pet Peeves: Weeds in the garden, when people can’t cook

Phobias: Germs

Greatest Fear: Losing her family/friends

Confidence: 8/10

Creativity: 8/10

Generosity: 10/10

Honesty: 9/10

Loyalty: 10/10

Insecurities: 4/10

Patience: 7/10

Predictability: 6/10

Reliability: 10/10

Responsibility: 10/10

Trustworthiness: 10/10

Common...

Compliments: “Cutie” “Healthy as a horse!” (She’s a damn medical nerd)

Insults: “Asshole”

Expletives: All of them. Every one of them.

Farewells: “See ya later” “Be safe”

Greetings: “Hi” “Hello, I’m Nurse Styles” (at work)

Mood: Tired and friendly

Preferences

Likes: Flowers, books, working, new dresses

Dislikes: Losing things, arguments, not being right

Favorites: Strawberries, pastel colors, spring, naps

Least Favorites: Lettuce, cold weather, Military Police (Even Perrie thinks they’re assholes)

Home, Work, and Education

Sleep Patterns: Sporadic at best

Eating Habits: She eats whenever she remembers

Pets: None

Job Title: Nurse

Experience: 4 years

Work Ethic: She is diligent and hardworking

Transportation: She walks

Criminal Record: None

Dream Job: Doctor

Social

Mother: Moria Styles (deceased)

Father: Desmond Styles

Guardians: She’s of age, so none

Siblings: None

Children: None

Close Relatives: Ty Styles (cousin) Ansel Styles (Uncle) Lise Styles (Aunt)

Distant Relatives: None. She had a very small family. Her grandparents on her mother’s side only had one child, and her father’s parents had Desmond and Ansel. Both sets of grandparents were killed in the culling after the fall

Best Friend: Ty, Hanji, Eren

Close Friends: Mikasa, Armin, Petra, Levi, most of the Survey Corps

Confidantes: Hanji, Levi, Ty

Allies: The Survey Corps

Acquaintances: Her co-workers

Rivals: Hanji, but in a friendly way

Inspirations: Hanji, Levi, Erwin, the doctors she works with

Heroes: Ty, Desmond

Mentors: Grisha Yeager, Hanji

Romance

First Love: Levi

Love Interests: Levi

Marital Status: Single

Orientation: Straight

Flirtiness: She’s too awkward and shy, but she has her moments

Turn ons: Intelligence, dedication, loyalty

Turn offs: Cockiness, selfishness, “assholes” (as quoted by Perrie)

Fetishes: None

Virginity: Perrie hasn’t even been kissed. Poor kid.

Reactions

Angry: When she’s angry, she’ll have a stony expression and not speak unless spoken to. She will say spiteful things, but not very hurtful. She’ll roll her eyes and curse even more than usual.

Anxious: She’ll tear into her lip big time, sometimes she makes it bleed. She will pace a little and talk rapidly and nonstop

Conflicted: She’ll go back and forth between her choices, being very adamant that she’s made her choice, but then the next second she’s switched.

Criticized: She can take criticism very well most of the time, especially when it is from superiors. But if someone is just being overly critical and mean, she’ll bristle and call them out

Depressed: She’ll bury herself in her work, and when she’s home, she’ll hide in her garden or bedroom and avoid people

Embarrassed: She’ll avoid eye contact, blush violently, and stammer a lot

Excited: Perrie’s eyes light up and she’ll smile and jitter around

Frightened: She’ll freeze up for a moment, but then slide her mask on and fight through the fear

Happy: She’ll smile and hum and compliment everyone

Personality

MBTI Personality Type: INFJ-A

#perrie styles #snk fic #aot fic #oc x levi #oc x canon #snk oc #aot oc

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