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savebatsfromscratch · 4 years ago

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@dancinglifeboat I wrote the fanfic finally! :D

(Also on Ao3: https://archiveofourown.org/works/32517502 )

A fic about Ghostbur and c!Solidaritygaming stuck together in limbo after their deaths. :) (It's really fluffy compared to what I usually write,.,,.)

(I put triggers for a few things in the tags but here are the ones I put on Ao3:

Death Downing Loss of a loved one Body Horror Getting shot? )

Please don't copy or repost anywhere!!

JIMMY + GHOSTBUR FIC START NOWWW-

“Ah!” he screamed, stabbing pain shooting through his head. The arrow had hit him right in the face, piercing through the skin easily and passing into his brain.

His knees hit the ground heavily, causing sand getting into the wounds that covered his skin. “Scott,” he hissed, blood filling his mouth as an unbearable pain covered all other senses. He fell forwards, the pressure not only pushing the arrow further into his skull, but also chipping his last life away. It was as if he had been torn from his body and thrown back, the ghostly spirit staying floating for a moment before being dragged down, down, down, until he no longer knew which direction was up.

. . .

Darkness filled his vision, the drowned’s glowing blue eyes burning with tears as he spun through the void. His lungs seemed to be filled with water, the drowning constant and inescapable. Occasionally, he would think he would spot a star, but every time it would be swiftly snuffed out before he got a good look at it, so it wasn’t much of a comfort. He would try to scream, in pain or for help it didn’t matter, his mouth would be filled with some inky substance that choked the words away. Ears rang and buzzed as he tried to focus on any sound at all. There was so much but it was all so far away…

He missed his husband. That man would have been able to help him, he would have pulled him out of the darkness and chided him, “Be more careful around the lake Jimmy, you don’t want to drown do you?” and then he would have pulled him into a hug and run his fingers through his hair, gently asking if he was alright. ...and he would be. Everything would be good and he would be fine.

Light would filter through clouds and illuminate the flowers around the lake. The border to their side would have meant nothing, they could just hug and finally be together. Scott could teach him how to build better, slowly helping sculpt his house into slightly less of a mess. He would teach him how to play Chick-Chance and purposely pick eggs to let Scott win. Both of them would pet Daisy, pretending she was still the original. Maybe they could even have won that twisted story. Maybe, in this fantasy, Jimmy wouldn’t have been the first to die.

Dragged back into reality, he let out a pained sob, the inky blackness instantly gagging him, filling his lungs with even more unbearable sludge. It hurt so much. Why couldn’t Scott just be here with him? Why must he suffer alone? Was this what he had experienced on his first “last death”? Was that why he couldn’t remember it or much of what came before? So many questions plagued his mind, but even more pain prevented any of them from being thought about. It was blinding as the stars of night, and as smothering as the smoke from a bad memory. God it was awful.

Until it wasn’t.

He didn’t know when it happened, but at some point, the pain of the void had gone away. He had lost the memory of any cycle of time, and the only memory of “sleep” was too hard to think about. It reminded him of better times, which in turn made him think about why he was here. It was a sort of limbo, and it felt like the end of the world was already here.

But he still told himself it was alright.

-- - - - -

Sometime later something interesting happened. There was a loud sound and a huge puff of smoke. Jimmy had tried to swim away from it at first, but his eyes had caught on what was left in that smoke. A man had been left sitting there, shaking and crying, and trying desperately to leave. He seemed to be stuck on some sort of concrete square, while Jimmy could float and swim as he pleased. (However, he couldn’t really breathe, while the man on the platform seemed to be hyperventilating just fine. He wasn’t sure if he was jealous of this or not.)

Eventually, he had worked up the courage to move towards the man, but, as he did, odd things happened. He would be thrown through the blackness at random intervals, always crashing into a wall he knew was not there. He would feel an awful pain in his chest as if he was stabbed through with a sword. He would imagine odd scenes, TNT blowing up over a nation he did not know, a blue sheep walking softly through a nether portal. It had to mean something... but what? That he did not know. Of course, things he did know were shown to him as well. Memories would work their way to the surface, and as expected, they were always things he wished to forget. Bubbles rising slowly to the surface of a loser’s lagon, a church in flames, fire spreading across a cobblestone floor, a definingly loud explosion, an arrow through his skull. . . There seemed to be a sort of pattern here, but he refused to see it.

Even so, he pushed on.

The distance between the two shrank slower than he had thought possible. He would struggle through the darkness as if it was some sort of sticky slime in need of cleaning, but eventually, his squirming paid off.

His feet touched down on the island of concrete, and instantly he felt gravity fall back onto him. But that wasn’t the only thing that was back. He fell to his knees, coughing and retching, trying to get the sludge out of his lungs. He suddenly felt the need to breathe burning through him, and honestly, the scared voice asking if he was alright was the least of his worries right now. He hacked and choked, until, with a loud and wet splattering sound, a hunk of black-ish purple goo hit the ground in front of him.

He stayed that way for a moment, trembling and relishing the air. Even if it was sort of the opposite of fresh, he hadn’t taken a breath in so long that it could have been a newly discovered continent, it felt so good. However, as he stared into the purple-ish goo that he had expelled from his lungs, he became increasingly aware of eyes on his back. After a few moments of frozen fear, he remembered why he was here in the first place. A man, on the edge of a train station floating in the void. He looked up.

There he stood, cowering slightly, pure white eyes staring into his own muted ones. He had on an oversized sweater stained with something blue, and hands covered with a similar shade. The man was a curious fellow, that’s for sure, but Jimmy had already known that. All that struggling through limbo to get to him had pretty much cemented the image in his mind. (Not to mention all of the other curious fellows he had known in his… life.)

After a minute of staring at each other, the man finally spoke, “Who are you?” he asked, his voice was airy and slightly echoey, which would have been weird if Jimmy wasn’t dead.

He thought for a moment, wondering which of his many names would be the best introduction in this inky world. Not Jimmy, no, that might remind him of Scott. (Just the thought of his husband tore an aching hole in his heart.) And not Timmy either, that brought back memories of Grian…

“I’m Ghostbur by the way,” Jimmy looked up, eyes widening slightly at the abrupt speaking. The man didn’t seem to mind though, “In case you didn’t want to go first,”

Jimmy smiled at this, Ghostbur seemed to be a wonderful man, even if he did find it a little odd that he didn’t seem at all disturbed by his entrance to the room. It had been rather odd.

“I’m Solidarity,” He finally said, his voice sounding stronger compared to Ghostbur’s, despite the slight croak in it from not speaking for so long. (Not to mention the drowning.)

“Solidarity? That’s a nice name,” The man smiled slightly at him, his voice and movements seeming to blur around the edges as he walked to a different tile. How strange. It reminded him of how he had been back on his last server, how, instead of having bloodlust, he had begun to crumble away. It wasn’t a memory he liked to think about.

“Thank you,” Jimmy finally said, pausing for a moment before quickly adding, “I find your name quite nice as well,” He felt awkward in the conversation. It had been so long since he had talked to someone.

“Thank you!” Ghostbur replied, happily spinning around once, a drop of the blue stuff falling off his hand onto the floor as he did, “It’s ‘Wilbur’ bur with ‘Ghost’ instead of ‘Will’,” here he suddenly became serious, though the same airly tone was kept, “But please don’t call me Wilbur, I am not him,”

Solidarity nodded, not quite understanding the request but knowing that it was important to follow such things. Who knows? Maybe this ‘Wilbur’ guy had done some really bad things that Ghostbur had gotten blamed for. It didn’t seem very likely, but who’s to say that it wasn’t true?

They stood there for a moment longer, Ghostbur humming to himself quietly, eyes closed as if he was imagining that he was someplace else. Jimmy cocked his head to the side, trying to get up the courage to ask something. What that ‘something’ was was still a work in progress though. Maybe he could ask about the weird visions he had gotten as he tried to get here, maybe ask about the blue stuff that occasionally dripped onto the floor. Maybe Jimmy could even ask if this man knew where they were, or about the train that had dropped him off. It was worth trying.

But before he got too, Ghostbur spoke again. His voice rang across the concrete floor, almost as if there was a large room that surrounded only him. “You have very nice eyes Mr. Solidarity,” he said, “They are a very pretty blue,”

Jimmy smiled weakly at that, “They used to be more so, but... something happened,” of course, he wasn’t going to share what that something was, drowning wasn’t a very fun topic for small talk.

Luckily for him though, the man didn’t press, “I find them very nice,” he said matter-a-factly, “Much better than all of this red,” he shuddered and shut his eyes, the light from them extinguished like a communicator band being shut off. But that disappearance of the whiteness wasn’t that important, especially when held up to what Ghostbur had just said. Red? What red? Solidarity looked around and saw none. Only the blackness of the void and the flat grey of the tiles beneath their feet.

“But you are here!” Ghostbur suddenly said, looking up very quickly as he did, "And you wear blue clothes, and have blue eyes, and slightly blue skin!” The man laughed softly at his luck. Jimmy however, cringed back, yes his skin was slightly blue now, but that was because of his… deaths. (Drowneds tended to have at least slightly blue skin.)

...But what Ghostbur was saying hadn’t been meant to be rude, so Jimmy just ignored the slight pain in his lungs at the memories and laughed along with the other man. (Who, by the way, seemed delighted to finally be distracted by whatever he saw around them. By now Solidarity had guessed it was much different than his own view. Though what that entailed was entirely up for debate.)

“It’s great to have another person here!” The man’s voice cracked at the end of his sentence, but instead of sounding funny or endearing, it sounded like he was trying to keep Jimmy here. Like a small animal searching for a parent. Something that Jimmy could wholeheartedly relate to, despite how sad it may be.

But he wasn’t longing for a parent or friend, he was crying for Scott, and he had a feeling that this Ghostbur wasn’t looking for a family member either. . . . Though he had never been great at interpreting things so he could be wrong.

“It is great to have another person here. I was floating in that void for so long you wouldn’t believe,” Solidarity grimaced, the thought of it reminding him of the icky slime choking him. Painful and disgusting, two of the things you hoped you wouldn’t run into after death.

“Void?” Ghostbur innocently asked, prompting Solidarity to look up at the other man in confusion. He had guessed that he had been seeing things differently than Ghostbur, but he had been thinking like… a shift in color. Not a whole different place.

He nodded slowly, eyes locked on Ghostbur’s. The glowing white of them was unyielding of any emotion, “Yeah the void,” he turned and gestured vaguely towards the inky blackness behind him, “Where I came from?” he looked back to see that Ghostbur had cocked his head to the side. Confusion now painted on his face.

“Mr. Solidarity, that's a wall,” he said softly, “A wall that opened into a door that you climbed out of,” his voice shook a bit more than it had previously, Jimmy frowned at this, the motion only deepening when Ghostbur continued, “The door is gone now, but you definitely did come out of one,”

Solidarity shook his head slowly, eyes kept on Ghostbur’s the whole time, “Ghostbur I swear that I’m seeing blank blackness out there,” he turned to look at the ‘blank blackness’ and stared into it. Yep, that was definitely not a wall. He looked back at Ghostbur in time for the man to speak.

“I see a concrete wall,” he spoke quietly and uncertainly, as if he was suddenly not so sure of it himself, “A concrete wall with windows filled with red,” his voice broke upon mentioning the color, and Jimmy suddenly realised what the man had meant by the, ‘much better than all this red,’ earlier.

“Ah well, maybe one of us is wrong,” Jimmy quickly said, taking a step forward and attempting to set his hand on Ghostbur’s shoulder, but to his surprise, it went right through him. It wasn’t like there was nothing there really, more like a really warm summer day, one where you could have sworn that you were underwater.

They both stared at each other for a moment, but the slightly shocked silence was broken when Ghostbur continued their conversation. “I hope that I’m wrong,” he whispered, taking a step back and causing another drop of the blue stuff to hit the ground. It landed in the crack between two tiles, and spread out accordingly, but Solidarity saw none of this, only thinking about his hand going right through the man. Ghostbur, that was his name, but could he really be… well, a ghost? Jimmy was dead, so maybe this guy was as well?

Jimmy turned and stared at the void behind him, the blackness causing strange patterns in his vision the more he stared at it. He wondered if that was his eyes being bad again or just a trick of the light, either way, it did nothing to comfort the growing worry in his stomach. If this ghost had pulled into this place, could it be possible to get out? Maybe Jimmy could see Scott again.

He looked back at Ghostbur, not at all surprised to see the man standing right where he had been left, shaking slightly and looking about the platform. His eyes reflected a reddish color that Jimmy could not see coming from anywhere else. This saddened him, maybe the color that seemed to scare him so much was really all around him. It was comparable to his swim through the darkness, the sludge filling his lungs and drowning out both his own sounds and everything else's. (Not to mention drowning him.)

“Hey-” he started, taking a deep breath before continuing, “Ghostbur, why is it that you are… here?” he tried, cringing inwardly at the question he had asked, a feeling only magnified by the ghost’s reaction to it. He looked directly into Jimmy’s eyes, sadness visible in the glowing white things even without an iris or pupil to help them.

“I was… killed by someone,” he sniffled angrily, voice shaking violently the longer the sentence went on, “I thought it was going to be oka-y,” he cried, voice echoing around the area while still sounding as non-threatening as it had from the start.

“It’s alright-” Solidarity started, stepping forwards and just barely stopping himself from putting his hand on the other’s shoulder, “I was, um, murdered as well,” he scratched the back of his head, “... so I understand what your going through,”

Ghostbur nodded and inhaled shakily (yet ever so bravely), “Thank you Mr. Solidarity,” he looked to the ground, glowing eyes half-closed and full of tears, “It means a lot that you are here,” he paused for a moment, as if trying to think of what to say, “Thank you for being my friend,” he finally finished, looking up to look at the drowned man.

Jimmy simply nodded, glad to see that the crying seemed to be over, “Thank you for being my friend too,” He smiled, “It’s been so long since I had someone to talk to,”

Ghostbur nodded back at him, his airy laugh filling the void with a warmth that wouldn’t normally be expected of such a place. It was calming, and Jimmy was truly glad he was here. A ghost and a drowned, an unlikely, but hopefully long-lasting friendship.

-- - - - -

It had been many uncountable days sitting there, oncationaly comforting his new ghost friend (or the other way around), staring into the blackness and discussing what was seen there (a wall apparently), or even sharing past stories. Ghostbur talked fondly of a blue sheep he had known while he was alive, and Jimmy was happily able to discuss fun stories from X-Life. (Because the wounds were less fresh than 3rd Life.) Ghostbur took delight in the tales of Jeremyism and the Coven, and always had something cryptic to add about his own past. It was nice, but it sure wasn’t comfortable, for, whenever you think about happy memories, painful ones pop up.

That was how they had ended up in this position. Ghostbur leaned on Jimmy’s shoulder (Because he couldn’t lean on him) while both of them thought about sad things. Ghostbur would occasionally sniffle and wipe his face with his arms. But the rising steam off his tears didn’t shock Solidarity anymore, it had become normal. He supposed that was what happened when you were dead and didn’t have anything to do.

Jimmy leaned back, shifting a bit more weight to his arms, and sighed. He felt Ghostbur adjust his potion slightly to follow the movement, the Ghost’s arms were wrapped around him and occasionally clipping just a centimeter or two into his sides.

“What is it?” Asked Ghostbur, his friend’s voice was shaky and brave, as if he was struggling to hold back his tears, which, of course, he was.

Jimmy sighed again before speaking, not really caring that the sound was getting repetitive, there were only the two of them here anyway. “I was just thinking about someone that I miss,” He turned to look at Ghostbur, the man’s white eyes blurring around the edges with burning tears, “I’m sure you have people like that,”

For a moment Ghostbur didn’t move and Solidarity regretted his phrasing, but before he could apologize, his friend spoke. “I do miss many people,” he whispered, “Tommy, Ranboo, Friend,” he sighed, the sound a direct contrast to the recent two Jimmy had just made. Instead of being loud and sudden, it seemed to blend in with the nothingness around the two. Though both seemed just as hopeless as the other. (Maybe that’s just what happened when you were stuck in limbo without your loved ones.)

It was a moment before either continued the conversation, instead choosing to rest in each other’s company. Sure they may not have their traditional loved-ones, but at least they had a friend.

“You’ve talked about them right?” Jimmy whispered, staring off into the blank space that surrounded the platform. (Even if he appeared to be staring at a wall from Ghostbur’s perspective.)

“I have,” the man replied simply. He sounded slightly hopeful, but Jimmy really didn’t know why.

“Were they good friends?” he tried

Ghostbur smiled and clipped a little further into his ribs, “Yes they were good friends,” he paused for a moment before finishing off his statement, “For the most part anyway,”

Jimmy nodded and tried his best to not attempt to hug Ghostbur back. You see, the ghost could touch him, but he could not do the same if that makes sense. It was the intent of the movements. If Ghostbur wanted to shake his hand, they could, as long as Jimmy didn’t shake his hand back. (Because if he did his hand would go right through the other’s.) But he did really want to hug Ghostbur sometimes, as a lot of friends do.

“Not all of my friends were always nice to me,” he comforted Ghostbur, hoping that the words would work in place of a hug. As Ghostbur lessened his grip and smiled at him however, Jimmy’s thoughts were plunged into darkness. Memories of two of the nations he had lived in in the past, X Life and 3rd Life, filled his brain. Scott, Tango, Skizz, even Joel. How could any of them have done that stuff? He forgave Scott of course, as the poor man was his husband after all, but all the others? He wasn’t so sure about them.

He was pulled out of his thoughts by Ghostbur speaking, the ghost’s airy voice blowing away the negative emotions he had been feeling a moment before. “You are very kind Mr. Solidarity,” he said, “And, I know I say this a lot, but I am glad to have you,” The words were so genuine that Solidarity couldn’t help but smile.

“That's great to hear man,” he whispered, “I love you too,” and, when Ghostbur looked at him oddly, Jimmy simply laughed. “As a friend! As a friend,” here he looked at the aforementioned friend and paused for a moment, “Do friends ever say where you are from?”

Ghostbur thought about this for a moment, really pondering the fact apparently, because it was a full 10 seconds before he spoke. (Jimmy counted.) “Yes they did, but,” here the ghost blushed a blue that would have calmed him down if he could see it, “Not many people really said it to me,”

Jimmy sighed and wished for the second time that conversation to just be a ghost, and not a drowned, so he could hug the poor man. “You deserve people saying they love you, don’t ever let anyone say otherwise,”

Ghostbur smiled that soft smile of his and laughed, the sound echoing around the train station that Jimmy could not see. “Don’t worry Mr. Solidarity, I don’t think there is anyone else here to tell me that,” and, though it was a joke, the words made the drowned sad, he laughed along with Ghostbur (because it truly was a funny joke) but inside he was worried. Why were they the only ones here? If this was an afterlife, why weren’t the other people on 3rd life here? He knew he was the first to die in that nation, but surely others had died by now . . . right? Suddenly his heart sank, unless everyone had been released from the spell when he had died.

If that was truly the case, why had the rules of the land been worded that way? And, as an even worse thought, if it wasn’t the case, where was everyone? He scanned the void around for any signs of life, hoping the whole time that Ghostbur didn’t notice his worry. The last thing he wanted was for his only friend here to see him upset. (Sure it had happened many times before, but it was so awful every time.) But no, no more chunks of land in the sky were found. Maybe they were still spiraling through it, possibly with the sense of burning or being struck with arrows? How was he to know their deaths, he had gone first.

Unfortunately for him, Ghostbur’s innocent voice interrupted his thinking, “Are you alright?” he asked, sounding very concerned and decently curious. Both good things if you are looking for comfort, but not so good if you want to bury the emotions and never have them be found.

He looked at the other man, eyes taking just a moment to focus on his friend’s face. Friendly void like eyes with grey-ish hair, he couldn’t name a better duo. (Well he could, but thinking about himself and Scott made him sad.)

“Uh yeah, I’m fine,” he said, hoping to Prime, Jeremy, or any other god out there (maybe even Kristen) that Ghostbur couldn’t tell he was lying. However, they must not have heard him, because a moment later his friend shook his head and frowned at him.

“I can tell when you are lying about something,” the friendly ghost chided him, “and after all that cheering up you keep making me do, I want to help you!”

That was a sweet gesture, but oh it came at such a bad time.

“No really! I’m doing good-” Jimmy started, but he was put to a stop by the other man standing up and grabbing his hand. He could have just pulled away, but he was rather curious now.

“Come,” Ghostbur said simply, leading him away from their spot. As he was dragged forwards, Jimmy smiled slightly at the blue stain spreading to his own fingers, that wasn’t going to come out any time soon. It would eventually fade (As the two had discovered by the puddles of blue about the station disappearing.) but it would take a while. It never seemed to fade from Ghostbur though, he wondered why that was…

“Here!” Ghostbur said happily, pushing Jimmy forwards and what he guessed was some sort of wall. (He couldn’t see it though.)

He looked at his friend in confusion, gesturing to the space in front of him and shrugging. When Ghostbur looked at him with the same expression that Jimmy had, the drowned explained. “I can’t see what’s here, it’s all just void to me,”

Ghostbur frowned at this, eyes narrowing in thought as he did. “He must be thinking about how to show whatever it is to me,” Jimmy thought, “It must be really important then,”

After just a moment Ghostbur seemed to come to a conclusion, carefully stepping up to the edge on the platform and standing on his tiptoes. Jimmy bit his lip, even though he knew that Ghostbur saw a wall there (And for him there really was one, Jimmy had seen him climb it before.) he was still worried. He didn’t want his friend to fall into the void.

He looked away as Ghostbur seemed to teeter on the edge, arms reached up as if to grab something. He was too afraid to check what was going on. RIP! Solidarity looked up, suddenly extremely confused what that sound had been. What he saw however, shocked him.

Ghostbur was standing in the same place as before, but in his hands was some sort of poster style advertisement. It was missing the very top corner of it, and Jimmy guessed that that was what had made the ripping noise. However, he had never been so happy to see such a damaged piece of art.

“Do you like it?” Asked Ghostbur expectantly, handing him the poster with his blue-stained hands. All Jimmy could do was nod, taking the picture and holding it close to him. Sure, it was monochromatic red, and stained with blue from the hands of his friend, but it was a picture of someone he loved dearly. Scott.

After a few moments of stunned silence, Jimmy managed to get a word out, hugging the advertisement to his chest as he spoke, he said, “How do you have this?” His voice sounded weak even to him, it was in stark contrast to his normal tone, which opted to sound strong and confident. But, neither was bad.

Ghostbur laughed, hugging his friend in what could only be described as a pounce. “It was on the wall! Along with several other advertisements for other things that I know. El Rapids, the Egg, things like that,” the ghost pulled back out of the hug, giving Jimmy more room to look at his new favorite thing, “MCC fits in right with them,” he finished. He sounded truly proud of himself, though his voice still echoed around the edges, it was a nice change.

“Thank you so much, how can I-?” Jimmy stared, looking up from the photo of his husband and back into his friend’s face as he was shushed.

“You don’t have to do anything! I just wanted to cheer you up,” the ghost grinned, hands still strongly held on Solidarity’s arms. It was a friendly gesture, and since it only slightly hindered his ability to see the paper, he didn’t ask his friend to stop.

After a moment of happy silence, Jimmy spoke, and, though his voice shook as he did, it was purely joyful. “You certainly cheered me up,” he smiled, turning to his friend with eyes full of newfound appreciation.

Ghostbur only laughed.

-- - - - -

Since that last memory, Ghostbur had become more vocal about the train station around them. (Or just him? Jimmy couldn’t really tell.) He explained the staircase that was closed and unclimbable, and was impressed when Jimmy guessed that it was that way because it was off the platform he could see. Ghostbur expressed his distaste for the lights above, apparently, they were a very bright and uncomfortable red. Solidarity expressed his pity for his friend and was sure to try to comfort him. The ghost thanked him profusely and explained that it was starting to hurt less now that they had been here for more than two months. This confused Jimmy, both because he couldn’t believe it had been that long and because he couldn’t believe it hadn’t been longer (not even mentioning how he didn’t have a guess how Ghostbur knew that), but he didn’t say anything.

Or at least, for a while the lights were getting better.

Ghostbur consistently complained about cracks in his vision, in a normal situation, Jimmy would have found this to be nothing to worry about. Sunlight causes vision to wig out, that’s just a known fact, but that didn’t quite explain what was happening with his friend. Probably because, well, there wasn’t really any sun here, and though darkness would also cause sight to mess with itself, Ghostbur wasn’t exactly surrounded by the same void that JImmy was.

“Are you okay?” he finally asked, putting a stop to his friend’s frantic rambling in a way that he hoped wasn’t too harsh. He knew it wasn’t always a good idea to interpret someone while they talked about something important to them. (This was known for many reasons, but a big one for Jimmy was how when, back on Evo of course, Grian was excitedly explaining the best ways to prank people and was rudely interrupted. It wouldn’t normally be a problem to make someone shut up if they were talking about the best way to kill you, but Grian was a different breed. His whole house had been full of traps the next time he had stepped into it. Oh what a time.) But, back in the present, he did know that he deserved to be worried if his only accessible friend was having health problems.

Ghostbur sighed, burying his head in his knees and nodding into them. “I’m fine Mr. Solidarity,” he finally said, “My eyes just hurt a little bit,” (In the last few words his voice escalated in an octave and gained some echo, both of which made Jimmy think that maybe he wasn’t so fine.)

“Are you sure-?” he started, cutting himself off when he accidentally sent his hand through his friend’s shoulder trying to pat him on it.

Ghostbur stifled a laugh and pushed his hand away, “I’ll be fine, things are just feeling a bit bright again,” Jimmy would have accepted that answer had it not been for the slight shaking in the other man’s voice, as it was, the only person he could talk to was this guy, and if he got hurt, well, Jimmy would be plagued with non-ending worry.

He didn’t act on his thoughts though, opting instead to stare into the void with a concerned look in his eyes. It was easier to think if you had the right emotion for the job that was for sure.

But instead of instantly knowing what to do, he was instead plagued with thoughts of all the things that could be going wrong. Was Ghostbur melting away? It seemed unlikely, but he supposed that since he didn’t know how this limbo thing worked, it could work like that. Or maybe Ghostbur was going blind? That wasn’t necessarily a bad option, because he knew that people could still live wonderful fulfilling lives while being blind, but it did take some getting used to. Or- no wait, why was he doing this? Ghostbur could have simply strained his eye for all he knew, he didn’t have access to every emotion he felt. . . .but something in the back of his mind still told him to help.

-and that’s when he got it. The perfect plan.

“What are you doing?” Ghostbur asked, his voice a rather well mixed mash of curiosity, confusion and pain. But Jimmy couldn’t really argue with them, as they all fit the situation perfectly.

“I’m just tearing a bit of fabric off my sleeve,” he answered casually, doing just as he said.

He felt Ghostbur stare at him for a few moments, those pure white eyes boring right through his body the whole time. “But…” He could almost hear Ghostbur blushing as he paused, “Isn't that going to be permanent…? We don’t have a needle or any thread,”

Now it was Jimmy’s turn to flush as his friend’s confused and echoey voice told him things he already knew. “Well I thought that maybe if your eyes hurt it was a good idea to rest them,” he admitted, finishing off the strip of fabric with a satisfying ripping noise as he finished speaking, “So I’m making you an eye mask,”

Ghostbur emited a sound that could have been either one of appreciation or worry. Jimmy hoped it was the earlier option.

“That is very nice of you,” the ghost whispered, and, as Jimmy saw when he looked back at him, closed his eyes and stuffed his head into his sweatshirt. Probably hoping to get some of that ‘rest’ that Jimmy had mentioned earlier.

But he continued to work, checking the fabric for gross looking sections as he went. (Being undead, he had some rotting patches of skin and truth be told, he didn’t really want any of that getting into Ghostbur’s already hurting eyes.) Once that task was done, Solidarity sighed and leaned back on the concrete floor, searching the empty platform for things to make the eye mask look better. Of course he found nothing.

Was the gift done? He wanted to be absolutely sure that this was what his friend deserved. (Which was the best of course.) He didn’t think it was done, but there wasn’t much more he could really do with it. He could probably pull one of the flowers out of his hair to decorate it with, but the two dead men had already figured out that flowers followed in their footsteps when unattached from Jimmy. It was a blessing and a curse really. Having such nice plants right there but not being able to remove them (even to see them) for fear they would be gone forever.

He supposed that the gift must be done if he couldn’t do anything more with it. He looked sadly down at the new torn patch in his sleeve, hopefully Ghostbur would like this eye mask, blindfold thing, because if he didn’t Jimmy would have just torn away part of his sleeve for no reason.

He waited as long as he could, listening to the soft breathing of his sleeping friend the whole time. (Apparently it was effective to sleep with your head shoved into your sweatshirt, who knew.) But after a few minutes of fidgeting, he decided he couldn’t stand it anymore.

“Ghostbur?” he asked, tapping the concrete floor as loudly as he dared, “I think I’m done with the thing,”

Instead of waking up however, Ghostbur simply rolled over, his face slipping out of his sweatshirt and coming to meet the floor instead. His nose came to a rest right over the edge of the border between two tiles. It was almost as if it was made for exactly this situation, that made Jimmy laugh, maybe he should let him rest a bit longer.

He laid back down, though he was unsure of when he had sat back up really, must have happened while he was thinking. The floor was just as uncomfortable and cold as it always was, but as he flattened against it he realised how tired he was, and, closing his eyes, he dipped into sleep.

He dreamed.

He dreamed that he was back in life, but it was a strange sort of life. Many friends he had known were there, and though not all of them made sense to be in that same place (Netty and Lizzy for example,) one stood out past any others. Among all the evolutionists, X lifers, and 3rd lifers there stood one ghost. One ghost among the undead and unknown.

“Hello Mr. Solidarity!” his friend happily called, “I’m so happy to meet all your friends!” Jimmy noticed that his voice was unnaturally strong for him, but he didn’t mind it, instead choosing to indulge in this fantasy of a dream.

“Hey Ghostbur,” he smiled, reaching out to shake hands with his friend, and not questioning when he was able to initiate the touch, “What’s going on over on the Dream SMP?”

Ghostbur pouted and shook his head, “The trains keep pulling into the station,”

If Solidarity had heard such a thing in normal life, he would have questioned why it had been said, however, because this was a dream, he didn’t think twice, instead shaking his head understandingly. “That really stinks man,” he closed his eyes and threw his head back to the sky, “Who’s driving them this time?” It was nonsensical words, but a small bit of logic in the back of his head told him that maybe it was important.

Reacting as if his subconscious was correct, Ghostbur looked from side to side, almost as if he was trying to see if anyone was listening in on their conversation, before he continued. “It’s been Dream most times, but the other day I saw a bunch of blue lambs in the driver's seat instead,”

Jimmy laughed as Ghostbur did, the former serious state of the conversation evaporating as his knowledge of his dreaming state did. Now it was just a fun little brain story, as a lot of things are.

“Say, Ghostbur,” he started, a giddy smile plastered on his face as he spoke, “Have you seen Scott around here?” (If Jimmy was still even a little awake he would have remembered that the dream had placed his husband right beside him, but he was fully asleep by now.)

Ghostbur shook his head, shrugging even as his smile refused to waver, “I have not seen him,” Suddenly, a cold feeling filled the air. Solidarity looked up in fear as Ghostbur put a hand on his chest. “Why don’t you go see him?” The smile twisted as his hand pushed right through him, and pain shot through his body as blankness filled his vision.

Jimmy woke in a cold sweat, sitting up faster than was really necessary as he did. What the heck was that?! A weird dream that’s what. He looked down at his hand, breathing slowing to a more normal pace as he stared at the object there. Ghostbur was absolutely correct, blue could calm a person down. He stared for a moment, evening his breaths and trying to figure out what in the world he had been thinking about a moment before. But, as all dreams do, it was gone in seconds.

He turned to Ghostbur and was happy to see his friend laying half asleep next to him, eyes open halfway and reflecting the red they always did. He looked so tired and Solidarity found it funny, he usually woke up rather fast, but it had already been proven many times that Ghostbur was not like him in that regard. Sure, they may both be dead, but they sure as heck don’t wake up at the same speed.

They stayed that way for a few moments, only stopping when Ghostbur turned to him and yawned, which was so funny that Jimmy simply had to laugh. Ghostbur’s sleepy blinking as he tried to figure out what was so funny acted only as fuel to the fire that was Jimmy’s amusement.

Eventually however, he managed to calm down, taking the chance to hand Ghostbur the piece of fabric and explain what it was for, “This is supposed to be an eye mask,” he started, gesturing at the object now clutched in his friend’s grasp, “You put it over your eyes to block out light. I thought that you might like having something blue to hide all that red,”

It took a moment for Ghostbur to react, but once he did, he was very thankful. Instantly tying the thing around his head and gasping with joy.

“It works!” he yelped, his voice sounding even more echoey than it normally did. (Thanks to his tiredness Jimmy guessed.) “Thank you so much!” He smiled an eyeless smile at his friend, “I am glad that I have this,”

“You’re welcome,” Solidarity grinned, “I’m glad it does,” They sat that way for a moment, Ghostbur happily humming to himself as he stared into the blue fabric. However, Solidarity instantly found it in him to speak again, “But do you want to uh.. See anything?” he gestured around himself before remembering that Ghostbur probably couldn’t tell he was doing it, “There’s the void right over there,”

Ghostbur laughed an echoey laugh and shook his head, “I can’t fall into it remember? Plus, there isn't really that much around to look at,”

He couldn’t argue with that.

-- - - - -

Jimmy had grown to like this new home, and (with the help of his fabric piece) Ghostbur had too. They had figured out how to make it comfortable, however, there was no way to deny that it was still limbo. It had been so long since Jimmy had been in the void that he hardly remembered what it felt like, so sometimes he longed for that feeling again, but every time those sorts of thoughts appeared, the happiness in that empty station brought him back. It was so nice, him and a good friend, two people able to bond over shared experiences despite not knowing each other in life. The causal energy of that sort of thing was nothing less than a breeding ground for laziness, and he was glad for it.

But it was in the moments lazing around the platform (staring at his MCC advertisement and being hugged by Ghostbur that is) that he noticed something. Something… new.

He sat up, causing Ghostbur’s arms to pass right through his chest and his shoes to make an awful squeaking noise against the concrete floor, and stared into the void. What he saw there was nothing short of a shock.

There, nestled against the blanketing blackness of nothingness, sat a place he knew. A welcomingly sunny valley with a beautifully built home and a lake that spilled into nothing. But most importantly, he could see movement. Specifically flowers wavering in the wind and a blurry person making their way across the clearing. Could it be?

“What is it?” Ghostbur asked curiously, standing slowly as he removed the makeshift blindfold to get a better look at whatever it was. But instead of cocking his head to the side and complaining about the walls and red lights, he blinked a few times before gasping.

“Can you see it?” Solidarity asked, breathlessly making his way to the edge of the platform. When no response came, he wondered if his friend had responded with a nod or a shake of his head, and he was tempted to look back, but only for a moment. His eyes were too glued to the island to worry about such a thing. (Not that Ghostbur’s input was unimportant, there were just a few more important things happening. Not even including the speeding beating of his heart and the hope spreading through his soul.)

But as Jimmy stood on his tiptoes on the edge of the station, Ghostbur’s response came. “Is this what you’ve been seeing all this time?” He whispered, “It’s beautiful…”

Jimmy turned to his friend, “I don’t know what you are seeing, but if it’s blackness with no stars, then yes,” (He found that paying attention to the person you have spent nearly three months with was sort of important, you don’t want them to leave do you?)

Ghostbur slowly shook his head, happy looking tears spilling down his face and causing wisps of smoke to float off into nothingness. “No,” he choked, “There's something out there,” he gestured to the void, “Out there in all that darkness, there is something bright and blue,”

Solidarity turned back to what he was talking about, happy to see that it was still there. “Well,” he smiled, “That’s a new addition,”

They stood there for a moment, poster and chunk of fabric forgotten on the floor behind them, there was simply something better now. It was a nice moment, a drowned and his ghost friend standing on the edge of everything they could ever want, but it was so far away, how would they get to it? He started at the thought, was that what he wanted to do? Abandon the life he had found here in favor of chasing what might be a lie? It only took a few moments of thinking for him to determine that if he were to leave this station, he would be bringing Ghostbur with him, like it or not. …but how would he do that?

“What are you thinking about?” Ghostbur asked, his voice still full of disbelief and joy, despite the genuine question he had just asked.

“Home,” Jimmy said breathlessly, despite not turning back around to Ghostbur (He could not tear his eyes away this time.), he could hear his friend respond to the word. He didn’t speak or anything, but only gasped, probably recognising the far away island from the stories he had been told.

They stood there a bit longer, but this time was cut short when a loud sound rocked the station. Instantly, both men looked at each other and then the floor around them. Terror filled Jimmy’s heart as he snatched up his picture of Scott, Ghostbur instantly following in his footsteps and picking up his fabric piece. They had talked about what would happen if bad things happened to their land, but of course, with a loud noise, there were two main options they had thought up. One, a train pulling up to take them out of the station (or someone else in), or, worse really, the land itself crumbling, and well, judging by quickly spreading cracks in the floor, it was the latter.

“Ghostbur!” Jimmy shouted, his heart beating a million miles per hour, “Grab my hand!” His friend quickly reached out and did so. They locked eyes, fear coursing through both of them.

“I really hope this works,” Ghostbur whispered, and, as cracks formed below their feet, Jimmy nodded. He braced himself for just a moment, and only when a bit of the floor fell away did he jump back, back into the suffocating void of nothingness.

They floated in place for a moment, Ghostbur looking relieved when they didn’t instantly fall, but the hopeful expression was quickly gone when he realised that he couldn’t get air in. He looked at Jimmy panic spreading across his face as he clawed at his throat, the bit of blue fabric still clutched in between his fingers. Jimmy simply nodded, himself feeling the effect of the air deprivation, but he was so shocked with the feeling of being there, in true limbo, that he forgot to get them out.

Ghostbur seemed to realise that Jimmy was frozen but after a few moments of struggling against the inky darkness he realised he could not move them. Terror was on his face as the blue stuff began to soak his chest, he clawed at Jimmy, shaking him as best he could in the antigravity, which of course wasn’t that great. ...which didn’t matter all that much, because Solidarity thankfully remembered what was happening and began to struggle against the current of the void.

It was like he was drowning again, burning pain filling his body as he did everything in his power to keep his mouth shut. (Because if he didn’t it would just hurt more.) It had been… so long, since he had been here, that he had nearly forgotten how to maneuver in it, and thanks to Ghostbur’s extra weight, and the poster in his hands, it was even more difficult than it needed to be.

But still he struggled, fought against the weight, kicking his legs and hard as he could, willing himself to move, really anything that would work, and, eventually, they began to move. He hugged Ghostbur to his chest, trying to tell the poor ghost that they would get there soon, just to please, please hold on. They began to really move now, and he was hurtling through space again, the familiar feeling of panic amplified now that he had a friend to worry about, as far as he knew Ghostbur might not be able to survive this.

They moved along, Ghostbur’s body shaking as he lost every last bit of oxygen, trying to hold on just a bit longer-

They were almost there, one kick…

Two kicks.

Three kicks. Ghostbur fell limp.

Four kicks-

Solidarity tumbled to the ground, rolling through the grass and staying there. He inhaled so shakily and violently, one could have thought he was actually dying… erm, again. But after just a few seconds of regaining sensation in his limbs, he forced himself to sit up, turning to Ghostbur’s body lying still in the flowers.

“What-!” he heard a familiar voice from behind him, and then running footsteps, but he couldn’t turn to Scott and tell him how much he missed him yet, no, he had to save his friend.

“Ghostbur!” He yelled, his voice gravely and broken, and he gasped as a bit of the dark sludge dripped out of it, splashing pathetically next to the poor ghost. He shook him, not paying attention to Scott’s fraintic gasp and questions as Solidarity tried to wake his friend up.

“Please just… just be alive!” he inhaled sharply and pressed onto Ghostbur’s chest, hoping that the movement would dislodge some of the ink.

Ghostbur coughed and sat up, narrowly avoiding Jimmy’s forehead on the way. He was shaking violently, shivering and gasping for air as blackness poured from his mouth only resting as it mixed with the blue soaking his body.

“Oh my go-” Scott cut himself off, running forwards and pushing Jimmy out of the way to properly reach the injured ghost. As his husband lay in the grass, Scott began to ask Ghostbur questions. Things like, “How are you here?!”, “What happened to your sweatshirt?”, and most importantly, “Are you okay?”

He wanted to ask Scott why he wasn’t asking him if he was okay, but Jimmy knew this was important, so he stayed right where he was, staring at the sky, which was somehow blue again.

Any worry he had evaporated when Ghostbur spoke, his voice still as echoey as ever, despite the clear lack of a station around them. “I’m okay,” he said shakily, before turning to look at Jimmy, and obviously worried, he asked, “Mr. Solidarity, are you okay?”

Jimmy nodded, feeling tears drip down the sides of his face as he did, “Yeah I’m okay Ghostbur,” he slowly sat up, and, looking at his husband and his friend, he realised he never wanted this moment to end, “I’m just alright,”

-- - - - -

It had been a few weeks since they had arrived here, and Jimmy had no way to explain to himself quite how much he had missed the sun and the real stars. It was really home, beautifully decorated and exactly what they had always wanted it to be, with the uh, small addition of a little ghost friend. Apparently, Scott and WIlbur had known each other (who Wilbur was Jimmy didn’t know) and because of that bond, Scott and Ghostbur got along quite well. And of course Ghostbur and Jimmy had become great friends over the course of their existence at the train station.

Another thing Jimmy hadn’t known he would miss was real water, and the ability to get out of it when it felt icky. The first time he had gone swimming he was hesitant to get in the lake, explaining that he just didn’t trust himself in it, he would find a way to forget where he was and drown he was sure. And so Scott had gone swimming without him. (Ghostbur stating rather plainly that water burned him, and then heading off to go pick some of the flowers that scattered the grass.) But after a bit of watching Scott splash around, still in his full normal outfit, Jimmy decided that it would be fun.

When Ghostbur returned he found the two flower husbands happily sitting in the water and talking to each other. He had waited there for a moment apparently, unseen and listening to his two friends talk about random things, but had soon grown bored and told them he was there. (Which jumpscared Scott so hard he nearly flew out of the pool.) Jimmy and Ghostbur found this very funny, and decided that it was a point in any future prank war that would start.

...and start it did.

In just a month back in his home, Jimmy had decided to initiate a proper prank war, telling Ghostbur before he told Scott of course, they had gotten a lot of ideas back when it was just the two of them. … So of course they had to be a team against Scott. Everyone found it funny, and everyone found it especially funny when Scott managed to win despite being outnumbered by 50% or something.

Of course, like in all things, it was not perfect, (Every relationship, whether it be friendly or something more, argues from time to time.) but it was pretty darn close. Ghostbur had come up with the idea that when someone wanted to apologize, they would go and get the pufferfish of peace and bring it to whoever they had been arguing with. (It was working shockingly well so far, and made a use for an item that would have otherwise brought bad memories.)

Once, Ghostbur fell into the lake, but he was so quickly saved that he promised them it didn’t hurt at all. Of course they still made sure he stayed far away from the water for a long while after that. (Not because they didn’t trust him, but because they were worried for him.) After they became more relaxed on it however, Ghostbur told them, through laughter’s tears, that he had really quite liked the rule because, “Sometimes the side of things are slippery,”

And that was how they were brought to this moment, two months into being out of that awful void, sitting next to each other and watching the sunset, pure blue flower crowns rested upon their heads (Ghostbur made them.) and a pretty roof built over them… (Scott made it.) It was them that Jimmy realized, he was glad to be on the edge of the universe with these two.

#fanfic #my writing #long post if you click keep reading #i mean it #ghostbur #tw: suffocation #tw: shipping #but it's between two canonically married characters #tw: death #smajor #solidarirtygaming #3rd life smp #dsmp #mcyt #actual post #my art #drowned!jimmy

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reversemoon255 · 3 years ago

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Ultraman Trigger Toy Roundup

So I ended up grabbing quite a few things from Trigger/Tiga as the series was airing. I grabbed the GUTS Falcon and Nursedessei because they’re transforming toys that can interact with each other, Trigger because it felt wrong not to have one to accompany his team and go big or go home, and the GUTS Wing set because...I just think they’re neat. And I thought I’d take a second to give my thoughts on each of them.

S.H.Figuarts Ultraman Trigger Multi-Type: I’m not a figure person, and mostly just got the SHF since I didn’t want the Sofubi, but I have handled quite a few figures, and I’d say Trigger is very middle of the road. The sculpt is very good, and easily presents a believable flow to any pose or implied movement. His joints are somewhat finicky, and his feet have a natural arch to them that makes balancing difficult at time, especially with the toe joint. He also only comes with alternate hands and a red chest gem. I would have preferred his often unused sword, but that’s just me.

DX GUTS Falcon: A very simple, but cheap transforming toy. I got it because I immediately noticed the C-clips on the back and was expecting there to be an upgrade or second unit that combines with it, which there never was within Trigger. With Decker, they’ve announced a DX GUTS Hawk, so hopefully that will give me the transforming/combining toy joy that I love.

DX Nursedessei: Another simple transforming toy, like the GUTS Falcon, but much larger and a bit more fun IMO. It has a few sound effects that are easy to not trigger if you don’t like that kind of thing, and a spring-loaded tail clamp. The only thing I wish it had was a joint in the tail so it can wag left and right so it can look a little more dynamic. I like it, but I don’t know if I’d like it as much without the GUTS Falcon.

S.H.Figuarts GUTS Wing 1 & GUTS Wing 2 Set: A tiny set of scale vehicles to go with your Ultramen. They’re decent, well painted, and both transform a little bit, though not as much as the much larger DX’s could, though two out of three configurations each isn’t bad considering the size. Whenever I fold up GUTS Wing 1, I do worry because the wings are small and I feel like they’ll snap, but I haven’t found any damages so far. If you own any Ultraman Sofubi or SHF, I think this is a great companion piece. Biggest thumbs up of the four.

Overall, not the best collection of toys I’ve handled, but not bad either. They’re typically cheaper than most other toy lines I collect, and that certainly raises my opinions a bit. I have the GUTS Hawk and Carmeara on Pre-Order, so I’ll probably talk about those two together in the future. I don’t know if I’ll get SHF Decker or not; depends on if there will be more DX GUTS vehicles than just the Hawk or not, though I do love the asymmetrical design. And I know nothing about Dyna, so I have no expectations for Decker as a show. Hoping it’s good.

#Ultraman #Ultraman Trigger #Ultraman Tiga #Ultraman Decker #S.H. Figuarts #guts #guts falcon #nursedessei #guts wing #review

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hannibard · 4 years ago

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Waiting for You

My @thewitchersecretsanta gift for @ofxwordsxandxletters. I tried my best to incorporate the things you said you liked and I sincerely hope you enjoy. Happy Holidays!!!

Crossposted to AO3

Pairing: Geralt x Jaskier

It was early afternoon when Geralt made it back to the village covered in monster guts. It wasn’t a particularly difficult hunt, but it did take him quite a bit of time to actually find the cockatrice before killing it, so he returned later than he had originally planned.

The villagers quickly stopped chatting with each other when they saw him and made sure to avoid him as he and Roach passed through a dense road on their way to the alderman’s house. He had been on the path for many years and by now he was used to their hateful gazes along with the rotten stench of fear they always seemed to eminate.

He dropped the pouch containing the cockatrice’s head on the alderman’s threshold and accepted his meagre payment from the man, without having to exchange a single word with him, before going straight for the inn he and Jaskier were staying at.

He left Roach at the stable next to the building and made his way inside, expecting to find the bard singing to a bunch of drunkards, having started his set already, but when he entered the common room, he found it empty and with only a hint of Jaskier’s smell, meaning it had been at least a couple of hours since he’d last been there.

The witcher ignored the small pang of worry in his chest and hurried upstairs to their shared room. He threw the door open with a little too much force and looked around. The bard wasn’t inside as he had hoped, despite all his stuff was still being in the same place he had carelessly thrown them when they first arrived the day before. Even his lute, aka his most prized possession and love of his life, was here and he rarely ever went somewhere without it.

Geralt pinched the bridge of his nose and took a few deep breaths, suddenly feeling stupid for caring this much. Jaskier was a grown man after all. He could do whatever he wanted and Geralt had no right to keep him by his side, despite how much he secretly wanted to, but it wasn’t the right time for such thoughts.

Anyhow, Jaskier was probably off with some barmaid or stablehand that had caught his fancy and had decided to skip his usual performance seeing as they had more than enough coin saved up as of late.

Assuming his friend would be back after he’d had his fun, Geralt started on his typical post-hunt routine: placing his swords and pack on a corner, taking off his armor (though this time without the help of a certain someone’s skilled fingers), calling for a bath and a meal to be brought up and after he was both clean and fed, kneeling on the bed and meditating.

By the time he was done with everything, the sun had long set and with his enhanced senses Geralt could hear the rest of the inn’s guests getting ready for bed, but his bard had yet to return.

Feeling as though enough time had passed for his feelings of worry to be reasonable, the witcher went downstairs to the bar. He placed his empty plate and tankard on the counter and as a man got reluctantly closer to take them away, he asked:

“Have you seen the bard that was with me when I arrived anywhere?”

The man was startled to be addressed but he looked back at Geralt.

“I think he went to play gwent at ‘The Rusty Rapier’ with some guys around midday.”

Jaskier’s skills in gwent were notorious to involve quite a bit of cheating, and since it had been so many hours since he went off, Geralt had a bad feeling about this.

“How do I find this tavern?”

He was given directions by the other man and after going back up to the room to take his swords, he went straight to that place hoping nothing bad had happened to his bard, though he doubted that was the case since neither of them was ever that lucky.

.......

Locked inside an abandoned shed, Jaskier was sitting on the ground, hugging his knees and trying to calm himself down while rocking back and forth in a rhythmic motion.

When he was first thrown in here by the men he had tried to scam, after they’d given him a small beating and taken all the coin he had on him (thank Melitele he had left his pouch at the inn) it was still day outside and he could see clearly around him because of some holes on the shed’s wooden ceiling. And Jaskier was mostly fine at that point, just cheerfully singing to pass the time and waiting for his dearest friend Geralt to come rescue him.

Sure, the few wounds and bruises he had (admittedly deservingly) acquired from his gwent-playing buddies stung a bit but it was nothing compared to what some cuckolded husbands had done to him in the past. Plus, ultimately both in this case and all the previous ones where he’d been roughened up by someone he had brought it upon himself, so he couldn’t really complain.

And yeah, singing was always more fun when he had his lute with him but that wasn’t enough to faze him, he could easily make do even without any instrumental accompaniment. He was a professional musician after all.

But as the hours went by, one after the other, the light from outside started dimming, the temperature dropping and his optimism dying, Jaskier grew more and more anxious. He has always hated the dark ever since his childhood and the whole situation was making him recall old memories that he had tried his best to forget.

By this point he had run out of his own songs to sing and had moved on to the ones he had been taught at Oxenfurt, his voice much weaker than before.

He went to rub a hand over his face and noticed that it was slightly trembling, together with the rest of his body and even though it was very cold, he suspected it was only half the reason. He clenched his eyes shut and rested his forehead against his knees, hugging them closer to his torso. He really fucking hated the dark.

Deep breaths Julian, he though as he dug his nails to his upper arms in order to distract himself and sighed. You have no reason to fear. Geralt will probably be here soon and then both of us can leave this godforsaken place behind in the morning.

Except… what if Geralt didn’t come? What if he used this chance to finally get rid of him? After all it was a well-known fact that the older man only barely tolerated his presence.

Sure, Jaskier’s songs had helped lesser the prejudice that existed against Witchers and made it easier for him to find work, but that didn’t mean he needed Jaskier in his life, he’d made that perfectly clear from the start of their acquaintance. Hell, he still refused to even call Jaskier his friend for fucks sake. The bard had thought they’d grown closer over time but maybe that was only wishful thinking.

Jaskier was only a burden and a nuisance to Geralt, and he couldn’t deny that no matter how much it hurt to admit. Still, the bard loved and cared for him anyways. He always had since that fateful day in Posada.

He might have attached himself to the witcher’s side for mostly selfish reasons at first, but he quickly realized how kind and caring he was behind his tough exterior and how low his self-esteem had become from decades of dealing with humans’ contempt and so he had vowed to do everything in his power to create a better world for him.

And although he knew this love wasn’t mutual and that he should have been content by being able to stay with him, even if only as a travel companion, a small traitorous part of him would always crave for more...

Nevertheless, if the witcher was aware of Jaskier’s feelings towards him he probably would have ditched him in some backwater town a long time ago, and so the bard was careful to lock them up inside his chest and never let them show.

But what if he had been careless? What if he let his touch linger while washing Geralt’s hair a little too long? What if he had written a few too many love songs recently with references to ‘luscious silver hair’ and ‘perfectly sculpted biceps’?

Perhaps the reason Geralt hadn’t come yet was because he had left the village without him as his way of letting Jaskier down gently.

Or even worse, what if he’d gotten hurt? Cockatrices (as the witcher suspected the monster he was sent to kill this time was) were fairly easy for Geralt to handle if they were by themselves but accidents could always happen.

What if he was bleeding to death from a fatal wound right this moment when Jaskier had no way to find and help him? If he wasn’t such an idiot and gotten himself in this situation, he might have been able to save him.

All those what ifs were making Jaskier more and more distraught and he could feel tears fill his eyes. He buried his face in his hands and started sobbing quietly, no longer able to continue his singing when suddenly the door was kicked open. The musician looked up abruptly, but he couldn’t make out who was in front of him because of the darkness.

“Jaskier?!” yelled a very familiar gruff voice.

The bard’s eyes widened, and he wiped his tears with the back of his hand. “G-Geralt? Is that you?”

The witcher dropped to his knees beside him. “Yes, it’s me.” He said and started running his hands all over Jaskier’s body, checking for injuries. “You don’t seem badly hurt. Can you stand?”

The bard nodded and got up with his friend’s assistance. It was a bit hard since he felt as if his legs had turned to putty after staying in one position for so long but after leaning on the wall for a moment, he was able to take a few trembling steps. Geralt helped him get outside and onto Roach’s back before climbing to sit behind him. “How do you always manage to get in trouble?” The witcher asked as Roach started galloping towards the village.

Jaskier gave a weak laugh in response. “Must be a talent. How did the hunt go? Are you hurt anywhere?”

Geralt sighed and shook his head. “How you had time to worry about others when you were in that situation evades me.”

“Don’t avoid the question!”

“…The hunt went well and I didn’t get hurt.”

“Promise?” the bard asked, knowing the older man had a habit of hiding his injuries from him.

“Promise.”

Jaskier smiled softly and leaned on his chest, all of a sudden feeling very tired. “Good. How’d you find me?”

“I paid a visit to ‘The Rusty Rapier’ and asked about you. After a bit of threatening, the men you cheated at gwent told me where you were.”

“Heh…Took you long enough.” Jaskier grumbled.

“I thought you were just fucking someone’s wife or something, didn’t expect you to be locked in a shed.” Geralt answered but he sounded somewhat apologetic.

Jaskier chuckled. “I was kidding big buy. Thanks for coming.”

Geralt just hummed in response and the bard could feel the vibrations of it on his back as he dozed off.

.......

When he woke up, he found himself back at the inn’s room. He was laying on the bed in his nightclothes and as he sat up, he noticed that his wounds had been bandaged. The sight brought a small smile to his face. He was about to get up when the door opened and Geralt walked in, carrying a bowl of what seemed to be stew and a tankard of ale. He looked surprised to see Jaskier awake. “You’re up.”

“So it seems.”

The witcher placed the food on the table. “How do you feel?”

Jaskier thought about it. “A bit sore.”

Geralt huffed a laugh. “That’s to be expected. Come.”

Jaskier obeyed and got up, making his way to the table. He sat down and started eating eagerly, only now noticing how hungry he was. When he was done, he pushed the empty bowl away and looked up at the older man. “Thank you.”

“Don’t thank me, thank the innkeeper that had to get up and prepare this in the middle of the night.”

“No, not just that. For everything.” He said nodding towards his bandaged arm. “And… I’m sorry for always causing you trouble.”

The witcher looked a bit taken aback by that but he quickly schooled his expression. “It’s fine.”

Jaskier gave him a lopsided smile and looked down on his hands that were resting on his lap. Geralt waited a bit to see if the bard would say anything and when it was apparent that that wasn’t going to happen, he took hold of the bowl and tankard and went downstairs to leave them somewhere for the innkeeper to find in the morning. He also dropped by the stables to check on Roach.

When he returned, the bard barely noticed his presence. He was still sitting in the same position, not having moved at all, looking dazed and forlorn. Geralt’s brows furrowed in worry and he sat down on the bed.

“Jaskier.”

The musician didn’t turn to look at him, still distracted by his own thoughts. “Hm?”

“What’s wrong?”

Jaskier blinked rapidly a few times and looked up at him. “Nothing’s wrong.”

Geralt sighed and rubbed his face. “You’ve been a bit… out of it. Since I found you.” The witcher had never been good with words, that was Jaskier’s job. But he desperately wanted to help his friend, so he pushed on. “I’ve just never seen you so uh. Quiet. You’ve always been unfazed by any situation, cracking jokes even when that griffin dislocated your shoulder.”

The bard glared at him “Well I though you fucking preferred the quiet.” he snapped and then immediately regretted it, his gaze softening. “Sorry… it’s just-” He cut off himself and sighed. He got up and came to sit next to the witcher. “You might laugh at me when you hear this but… I’m afraid of the dark.”

That definitely wasn’t what Geralt expected. “What? How’s that even possible? We’ve made camp in the woods countless times and you always seemed perfectly fine.”

Jaskier let out a nervous laugh. “That’s because you were there with me. I don’t have an issue when I’m with others but when I’m alone I just kind of lose it. Oh, and there’s also a bit of claustrophobia sprinkled in there.”

“Hm. I never would have guessed.”

The younger man snorted. “Well it’s not like I advertise it.” He scratched his cheek and bit his lower lip. “So that’s why being in that shed affected me this much. Anyhow, I’ll be over it by morning probably.” He bumped the witcher with his shoulder. “Don’t worry, my silly little phobias won’t delay our schedule.”

Geralt immediately felt guilty for making his friend think he would care more about being back on the Path than his mental wellbeing. He frowned and took one of the bard’s hands in his own, giving it a little squeeze. “Jask, if you need more time I wouldn’t mind staying here for a few days longer. I-I just want you to be ok.”

Jaskier’s eyes widened and he looked as if he was about to cry. “Oh Geralt… This means a lot to me. Thank you.”

The witcher smiled at him and gave him a look that seemed full of affection, though Jaskier didn’t dare hope. “Anytime.” He coughed to clear his throat. “So… Do you want to talk about it? Your fear of the dark?”

“Well… There’s not much to say really… It started when I was very young, and my parents decided that to keep me from becoming even more of a disappointment they’d have to find new, stricter ways to punish me for my wrongdoings.” He ran his free hand through his hair. “And one of them was locking me inside a dark storage room for days, without giving me any food until they’d deemed that I had learned my lesson.”

Jaskier was retelling all that casually, as if he was talking about the weather but Geralt was horrified by his words. He always had a hunch that the bard likely didn’t have the best childhood- being a disowned noble and all- but he never guessed that it was actually that bad.

Because how could someone that didn’t receive any love as a child be so full of it as an adult? How could someone that grew up in such a joyless environment be able to spread happiness and laughter wherever he went? How could he wear his heart on his sleeve, letting anyone he met just take it from him and trample it down if he knew better?

“Jaskier that’s fucking horrible, how could you call the fear all that trauma has instilled in you just ‘silly little phobias’?!” His voice raised with each word he spoke, and he was yelling by the end of the sentence.

The bard flinched away from him and avoided his gaze. “Because it’s all in the past Geralt. It’s stupid, to be this affected by it still.”

The witcher was at a loss for words. Jaskier was a pretty talkative guy, always chatting about one thing or the other, but he rarely ever mentioned his family and now the older man could see why, even if he couldn’t completely relate.

Part of him would always resent his mother, Visenna, for abandoning him and thus leading him to the life of a witcher but even still, he had retained many nice memories from their short time together. Instances where she hugged and comforted him or sung him a lullaby to sleep, he treasured all of them dearly.

Because at the end of the day, even though it might not have been as strong in comparison to other mothers, Geralt knew in his heart that Visenna loved him.

And knowing that Jaskier probably couldn’t even be sure about that (because how could a parent that starved their child willingly for days and locked them up have any capacity for love and affection? With that being only one of the punishments) was paining him more than the bard could ever imagine. He wanted nothing more than to envelop him in his arms and protect him from the cruel world they were forced to live in.

He was perfectly aware of what all this meant of course. He might have been bad at dealing with emotions but after the first few years of travelling together, even he couldn’t continue to deny the feelings held towards Jaskier.

It was almost inevitable really. After spending so much time with someone like the bard, with his gorgeous smile and cornflower blue eyes, his easy-going attitude, his beautiful singing voice, someone that had not once been afraid because of him and that had stood up for him when others treated him unfairly, he was bound to fall in love.

“It’s not stupid Jask.” He said after a long exhale. “You’re so strong to have gone through something like that. Most people would have broken under such circumstances.”

Jaskier didn’t look convinced and he smiled wryly while shaking his head. “It’s music that saved me y’know. Whenever I was locked up, I would start singing the melody to whatever few songs I knew, and during those times I could almost forget the hunger and the cold and all the expectations I had failed to meet.” He sniffled and rubbed his eyes. “That’s why I decided to become a bard later on. So that I’d be able to create music too, and maybe help other people when they’re feeling down and give them hope through it.”

When the bard finished speaking, Geralt brought his free hand up and wiped a stray tear that had slid down his cheek. “You’ve done a wonderful job so far. I know I don’t say it much, but I really like all your songs. Yes, even the ones about me.”

Jaskier snickered inelegantly, surprised by his words. “You might regret admitting that darling cause I’m never gonna let you live it down.”

Geralt chuckled. “Hm. True that.” He said and gave the musician a small sad smile. Jaskier rolled his eyes elbowed him in the stomach.

“Oh come on, don’t make that face now! Honestly, if I knew you’d be this affected I wouldn’t have told you.” He said teasingly, trying to make this conversation a bit more lighthearted but the witcher wasn’t having it. He grimaced and maneuvered his body to better face the bard.

“Of course I’m affected Jaskier, how could I possibly not be?! To me you are...” He stopped himself before he could finish that sentence. Nothing good would come if he revealed his feelings to Jaskier. Such a bright person that had their whole life ahead of them would never be interested in a witcher. The bard had helped him see himself in a better light in recent years but that didn’t change the fact that he was a monster, a mutant killing machine that was undeserving of the kind and sweet musician.

Jaskier, unaware of Geralt’s internal monologue, tilted his head the side, looking simultaneously curious and adorable. “…To you I’m what?”

Geralt avoided his gaze. Even in the best-case scenario, the witcher could only hope that the bard would take into consideration their friendship and long history together and not show his disgust too much. Maybe even begin a relationship with him out of pity, but it wouldn’t last long.

Geralt had seen the way Jaskier’s previous flings had gone. He always fell head over heels for some random person that he met during their travels and spent a few weeks, or months at most lavishing them with attention but after that time period passed, he’d fall out of love just as quickly and leave his ex-paramour behind as he rejoined the witcher’s side.

It always secretly pleased Geralt, making him feel superior. Because even if he could never really have Jaskier, not like those other people did, at least he had the knowledge that the younger man would always come back to him. It helped lessen the sting of his jealousy.

And if he ever were to be the recipient of Jaskier’s attentions, no matter how nice it could be at first, he wouldn’t be able to bear it when he became the next person Jaskier left behind, especially after getting a taste of everything he ever wanted. That would only serve to haunt him in his dreams.

But the bard deserved to know. He had just laid down his heart and let Geralt see him at his most vulnerable state. That meant he trusted him enough to do that and the witcher wanted to show him how much he appreciated it by in turn showering him with all the love and affection he held for him. So he took one large breath to brace himself and let the truth out.

“To me you’re everything.”

Jaskier’s eyes widened but he didn’t pull away. “Huh?”

Geralt started tracing circular patterns with his thumb on the other man’s hand. “It’s exactly as I said. When I first met you, I thought you were just a stupid kid looking for adventure and easy coin, and that once you had a taste you’d go back where you came from. But you never did. You stuck next to me through thick and thin, no matter how much I tried to push you away or treated you like shit. You were like an angel, entering my life out of the blue and improving it in every aspect.”

“I hadn’t even realized how lonely I was until you came along. Back then I only focused on my job as a witcher, not really caring if I’d make it out alive whenever I fought a monster. But nowadays I’m extra careful and I try harder just so that I can see you again. You’ve made life worth living again Jask and I… I love you.”

Jaskier just stared at him with his mouth hanging open.

He couldn’t believe what he was hearing. Was it possible that he was still locked in that shed and had begun to hallucinate from the lack of food? Because this whole situation definitely seemed too good to be true.

He pinched himself hard on the arm for good measure.

“Ouch!” Yeah no, it was real. “Are-are you serious?”

Geralt pursed his lips and nodded, looking almost comically grim. He could hear the other’s heartbeat start to pick up.

“And I understand if you feel uncomfortable and want me to be gone by morning, I’m not expecting anything so-hmph!” He was interrupted as Jaskier’s lips crashed onto his. The witcher froze, not able to comprehend what was happening right away but when he did, he wrapped both arms around the other man’s waist and kissed him back with vigor.

When they eventually had to break apart, they were both breathing heavily and Jaskier rested his forehead on Geralt’s, chest heaving, and felt an involuntary shiver run up his spine. “Gods, I’ve wanted to do this for so long.”

The older man brought his hand up and started petting his hair gently, feeling giddy and a little nervous. “Me too.”

This had gone much better than expected and no matter how things turned out in the future, he would never regret this moment.

Jaskier pulled away to look him with the brightest smile on his lips, his eyes crinkling in the corners with the force of it. “I love you too dear heart, I have since the day we met.”

Geralt blinked in shock. “You have? But you never said anything and you’ve been in a thousand relationships since then.”

“That’s because I never expected you to feel the same way! No one else could ever compare to you witcher and now that I have you, I’ll never look at other people ever again.”

Jaskier laced their hands back together and brought them up to his mouth, giving a kiss on the back of the witcher’s palm, letting his lips linger for a few seconds. “I promise.”

With all his worries gone, Geralt grinned at his bard and pulled him to his chest for a tight embrace.

They sat there like that for a long time, just basking in each other’s presence and their close proximity.

“…We’re both pretty stupid aren’t we?”

“Pffft, we sure are.” Jaskier said as he nuzzled his lover’s chest when a thought entered his mind. “By the way, how long has it been since you last slept?”

“Two days give or take.”

The bard looked up at him horrified. “What the hell Geralt! We have to fix that immediately.” He said and blew out the few candles that were still lighting the room, before pushing the witcher to lie down on the bed and joining him. They curled around each other on their sides, torsos facing, and Jaskier buried his face on Geralt’s neck as the older man pulled the blankets over them. When they were settled, he wrapped his arms around the bard and tangled their feet together.

The younger man was about to fall asleep when he heard the witcher’s deep voice calling his name.

“Jaskier?”

“Yeah?”

“There’s something I’ve been meaning to ask you since before this whole thing happened.”

“M’listening.”

“…Do you want to come to Kaer Morhen with me for the winter?”

Geralt held his breath as he waited for a response. It came in the form of Jaskier pulling back slightly, only to give him a long, gentle kiss.

“Of course I’ll come darling.”

The witcher was relieved and felt excited for the months to come. He smiled softly even though he knew the other man couldn’t see it. “Then we’ll have to buy you one of those thick woolen coats you hate sometime soon.”

Jaskier groaned. “Fuck. I guess it’s worth it.” He gave him one last kiss before closing his eyes once more. “Goodnight love.”

“…Goodnight.” Geralt replied and then dozed off to the best sleep he’d had in decades.

#witcher secret santa #2020 #geralt of rivia #jaskier #geraskier #the witcher #gerlion #dandelion #julian alfred pankratz #fanfiction #text #hurt/comort #whump #love confessions #getting together #idiots to lovers #mutual pining #angst with a happy ending

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succulentsunrise · 4 years ago

Text

Where the Fire Lilies Grow

Content: SFW, contains mentions of nightmare and chronic illness.

Hey, it’s my series on Tani and Mereleona, inspired by @thoughtfullyrainynightmare‘s Embers of Sun and Flame! It will tell the tale of Tani meeting and falling in love with Mereleona...but we’ll see if she feels the same 😉

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Chapter 1: Tani, the Verdant Knight

“Love does not begin and end the way we seem to think it does. Love is a battle, love is a war; love is a growing up.” James Baldwin

The morning had begun rather peacefully. There had been no reason to get up early, but Tani was used to waking up before the sun rose. Back at Kikka - her hometown - she had worked hard since the dawn. Now, as a Magic Knight of the Azure Deer, not having to wake up and go at it for the whole day made her feel almost like she was slacking. She had prepared for the day without much of a plan. Still, her planless plans had been ruined by her teammate and friend, Icree. Tani had been calmly treating her small garden of plants, when the red-haired Knight had popped out of nowhere and pushed a new recruit to her shoulders. There they stood now, staring at each other in an uncomfortable silence. The recruit looked young and extremely frail, as if a wind could knock her over. It was a rather direct opposite to Tani’s muscled bearing. The girl’s purple hair was tied into a long ponytail, which could almost reach the end of her long, dark dress. Her eyes were soft and heavy, lending her a youthful and sorrowful appearance.

“I’m Kliodna--Kliodna Sheeban,” the girl said with a hoarse voice. “Pleased to meet you.”

It sounded as if she had smoked all her life, if not more. The smile that she offered was weak at best. Tani nodded uncertainly, recognizing that she belonged to a noble house by her family name.

“My name is Tani Chartreuse,” she answered. “Is your--are you alright?”

“Yes, please, do not worry,” Kliodna quickly rasped. “I was very sick recently, which has left my voice damaged. I will be better soon.”

“Perhaps you shouldn’t talk as much, then.”

“I have a lot of questions.”

Tani narrowed her eyes at the innocent smile the girl flashed at her. Straining one’s voice like that would lead to no good. She brushed parts of her short, brown hair behind her ears.

“I will take care of my garden first,” she commented, turning back to her collection of plants. “Then we’ll get you a quill and some paper.”

“This is yours?”

“Yes. Not everything here, but some of these. That,” Tani pointed at a larger, hanging fern a little further away. “And these here.”

The plants she pointed out last were small, potted succulent plants - her favourites. She took care of them with gentle passion, always making sure they had what they needed.

“You have plant magic, correct?” Kliodna asked, clearing her throat a little.

Tani gave her a surprised glance, stopping for a brief moment to evaluate where she got her knowledge.

“Yes. Did Icree tell you that?”

“Icree?”

“The red-head that dropped you here.”

“Ah! Yes. She said your plant magic was impressive,” the girl answered happily.

Tani eased into a small smile.

“It is still far from what I’d like it to be,” she commented, starting to look for her watering can. “The attack on the capital showed there is still much to do.”

Though it had been a couple of weeks since the terrorist organization Eye of the Midnight Sun had flooded the streets with undead, Tani had not been able to think much else since. She possessed great powers in healing and reinforcing magic, as great as any self-trained commoner could have, but no skill in offensive magic. No matter how she tried, she could not learn a spell to harm. To mend this flaw, she had taught herself how to use a sword. Even now it hung around her waist in its scabbard, attached to her belt. The undead, however, had not cared about a few meager stabs to their already dead flesh. Though Tani had not admitted it to anyone, she still saw occasional nightmares about that flaming street, surrounded by zombies and with no friends nearby to help. The dead citizens laid at her feet - those that she had been unable to defend. It had been sheer luck that Icree and Luka had found her in time back then. With Icree weakening the strange magic’s hold on the bodies and Luka’s sculpted jackals tearing them apart, the remaining citizens - and herself - had been saved. Still, the outcome of the overall attack had not been good. There were hundreds of victims, and a captain of another Magic Knight squad, Fuegoleon Vermillion of the Crimson Lion Kings, had fallen into a deep coma due to his injuries.

Tani looked at the moving lips of Kliodna and realized that she had fallen too deep into her own thoughts. She had not listened properly to the girl’s raspy speech nor had she found her watering can. She concentrated in time to at least hear the question.

“--unable to move. You were present then, protecting the capital?”

“Yes. It’s our duty as Magic Knights. Your duty too, now,” she answered, hoping that Kliodna had not realized that she had not listened.

“I hope to make our squad proud,” the girl said cheerfully.

If Tani had not been caught in distressing thoughts, she might have joined the cheerfulness of the girl. Another member of Azure Deer, Fragil, had told her not to dwell too long in memories of the past. She and Fragil were not very close, but it seemed like the other had sensed her unease. Still, she found it hard to forget how helpless she had felt that day.

“I should introduce you to the other members,” Tani stated a little flatly, the thought of Fragil sparking the idea. “Why did Icree leave you here in the first place?”

“She said she was quite busy - don’t get me wrong, she was very sweet to me! - but that you could show me around.”

Kliodna seemed to have sensed that something was a little off. Her gravelly voice was laced with a little bit more forced cheerfulness. Tani gathered herself mentally. She would have to do better than this.

“That is likely true to an extent,” she commented, pushing a smile on her face. “We are all a bit shaken by the attack. Icree spends her days and nights hunched over books, trying to figure out how to cancel the kind of magic we saw on the battlefield.”

“You--we expect them to return still, then?” Kliodna asked, the forced cheerfulness turning into wariness.

“We don’t know. We need to be prepared,” Tani answered. “However, do not dwell on it now. You have used your voice more than is good for it, so let me use mine. I will show you the place and introduce you to the others.”

The young girl nodded, this time obediently saving her voice. She waited kindly as Tani took care of her plants, and then they left together. The tour was short, but sweet. It took Tani’s mind off of the previous topic of conversation. Though many members of the squad were on missions, she was able to introduce Kliodna to a few of them. The first one they met was a dark-haired and lithe woman in the dining hall, Fragil Tormenta. Tani met her dark blue gaze with slight apprehension, remembering how sharp she was with reading others’ emotions. At least she did not comment anything, but instead welcomed Kliodna warmly to the squad. Fragil was a gentle and caring person by nature, though a little introverted. She and Kliodna got along well, especially after they found out that they were of the same age. Tani made a mental note of being right about Kliodna being young - she was 20 years old, making her six years younger than Tani. Two other members passed them by as they were talking with Fragil, only briefly introducing themselves to the newcomer. Tani had never talked to them much. Francis was a tall, black-haired man with a rather cold air to him. Cesc, instead, was a boyish red-head with a bit of a cocky attitude. They were nice people, but not someone you easily got to know better. The last two members they were able to find that particular day were Tani’s friends: Icree Papillo and Luka Diffidus. Icree they found in her room. What once had been a spacious and clean area was now littered with books and notes, and one tired red-head. Still, her greeting of them was as bubbly as always. Icree was a people’s person. She was a short woman in her 20s, with bright red hair crowning her head. Parts of it she had dyed white for fun. There was always a distinct scent of flowers and fun around her - the latter part being a little exhausting for Tani, who enjoyed calm time spent alone much more than fun time. Nonetheless, Icree was a reliable friend, who adjusted her attitude according to the people she was hanging out with. Later, they found Luka in his small studio. It had once been a normal room, but ever since the green-haired noble had come there, it had turned into his studio. Finished sculptures and designs were neatly put into their respective places, and the floor covered with protective canvas. Luka himself was a rather quiet and shy person, who rarely interacted with others. He was handsomely melancholic, as if a sculpture himself - though the illusion was easily broken if he got embarrassed. He could most often be found right here, in his studio, working tirelessly on details of the most beautiful stone or wood sculptures. He and Kliodna only spoke very briefly. The most that Kliodna could get out of him was Luka explaining what he was working on. He spoke of it with quite the passion - but receded back to his silent self as soon as he realized it.

The tour of the place ended at Kliodna’s new room: a simple, spacious place for resting and her hobbies. Her unopened bag was neatly placed on the floor. Tani concluded that Icree must have snatched her right as she had arrived.

“May I ask something?” Tani asked carefully.

It was something that had bothered her for a while: it was not time for the entrance exam. Yet the girl was noble, so perhaps she was allowed to join a little later. Or perhaps she had been scouted beforehand.

“Of course,” Kliodna said cheerfully, though her gaze was inside her room.

It was likely she was tired from meeting all the new people and seeing all the new things - or at least, Tani would be.

“Why are you joining only now? The entrance exam was a long time ago.”

“Oh. I have been sick for a very long time,” Kliodna answered with a bit of hesitation, her raspy voice breaking a little. “I qualified this year to join, but unfortunately it set me back a little. I’m fine now.”

Tani nodded, uneasily looking to the room as well. Either she had hit an uncomfortable subject, or she was causing the girl to strain her already unstable voice even more. Neither was a good thing.

“Well,” she started cheerfully, searching for comforting words. “We are here for you now. If you feel unwell, come to any of us, and we’ll help you in any way we can.”

Kliodna smiled, and with one hand on her throat, nodded.

“I’ll need to rest now, but thank you for everything,” she said silently. “Thank you.”

“You’re welcome. Do you need anything warm for your throat? I could bring you a cup of tea.”

Tani only got a nod as a reply. She smiled at the young girl and left for the kitchen. She understood perhaps a little now why Icree had brought Kliodna to her. Icree was a person that wanted others to talk, so she could listen to them. With this girl, Icree probably had to worry a lot about where the line between talking and asking questions was. With a small sigh, Tani navigated the corridors to the common kitchen. It was not as if she had done any better job. They’d have to come up with some easier way to communicate. Writing on paper would take a significant time and be a slight waste of resources. It wasn’t the same as talking. Yet Kliodna should not be made feel unwelcome either. Icree would have to be pulled into this. Tani set decidedly three mugs in front of her: one for Kliodna, one for Icree, and one for herself. Icree had worked the whole day, probably. A small pause and a little bit of gossip would do her good. A warm cup of tea would be just the thing. Tani prepared the three mugs of tea and placed them on a wooden serving tray. After a brief consideration, she added the teapot on the tray as well, and made her way back to Kliodna. The new recruit received her tea and the filled teapot with gratitude, having clearly started unpacking her things. Tani did not speak with her long, but instead headed back to Icree’s room. Supporting the serving tray with her left arm and leaning it against her waist, Tani knocked on the door.

Icree’s voice was faint through the door, and clearly tired.

“Come in.”

Tani pushed the door open dexterously. Icree smiled upon seeing her.

“Drinks? Anything hard?” the red-head asked with no small amount of hope in her voice.

“Just tea this time,” Tani laughed. “We’ll get better stuff at the festival.”

“I don’t think there will be a festival, Tani,” Icree responded, beginning to make space on her messy desk for the tray.

“Not true. They are holding it.”

“Really?” Icree sounded very surprised. She gave a slightly distrusting glance to her brunette friend.

“I heard the Captain talk about it earlier,” Tani revealed. “The Star Festival will be held despite the concerns. We’ll get to play festival games and eat well. We are in dire need of it, aren’t we?”

Icree smiled tiredly at her.

“We’ll get to watch the scoreboard tell a sorry tale of the prowess of Azure Deer. I talked recently with my friends in the other squads. The Green Mantis’ have sixty-nine stars for all their efforts. The only one we have hope catching up on are the Purple Orcas, and they have fifty-one. Do you have a way of conjuring two more stars out of nowhere?”

Tani put down the tray onto Icree’s desk. The most popular part of the festival was indeed the ranking of the squads. While their squad, Azure Deer, had never had any hope of catching up with the royal squads, they had managed somewhat to stay in the lower middle of the list. Now it seemed like they’d be second last, if Icree’s information was correct.

“Well, at least we can trust the Black Bulls to be last, right?” she said reassuringly, but it didn’t seem to have the wanted effect.

“Black Bulls have one hundred and one stars,” Icree answered bluntly. “I talked with Vanessa yesterday.”

Tani stared at Icree for a moment in surprise. The Black Bulls were a group of misfits, who completed their missions by the means of destruction. As far as she could remember, they had been near negative amounts in stars. However, Icree’s source was reliable. Vanessa Enoteca was a member of the Black Bulls, and not one to boast without something to back it up.

“So we are likely last?” she asked with a sinking feeling in her stomach.

“Hooray for us,” Icree confirmed, rising her tea mug in a sarcastic celebratory manner.

“Have you told the Captain?”

“Would he care?”

The question hung quietly in the air. They both knew that Rill, their Captain, would likely care, but most often he was rather carefree about running the squad. He was the youngest of the Captains - and younger than both Icree and Tani - and it showed in the way he led. His talent was easy to respect, but his personality was all over the place. Well, that was Tani’s opinion. She would trust him with her life on a battlefield, but on a day-to-day basis of running the squad and making sure everyone had missions? No.

“You know he does,” Tani answered quietly, taking her mug of tea and sitting down on the bed near the desk. “If you don’t tell him, he is going to freak out.”

“He’ll freak out in any case. Better let him enjoy the festival first,” Icree shrugged. “Either way, want to help me with something?”

Tani nodded, having a pretty good guess on what it would entail. Icree always wanted to test out her new theories after a long day of reading and theorizing.

“A new thing you want to try out?” she questioned.

“Yeah. Can you make one of those plants - it can be anything - and just--don’t resist,” Icree requested with a slightly cheered up tone.

It was rather clear she was excited to test out her new theory. Tani closed her fist and concentrated, pushing from between her fingers a pink flower with small petals, large leaves and a long stem: a kalanchoe.

「Molting Larvae」, Icree spoke, creating a striped caterpillar on the plant. Tani had witnessed Icree’s magic many times before: it created butterflies that could hinder and harm enemies. She had never seen her teammate create a caterpillar before. In the most determined manner that she had ever seen a caterpillar eat, this one set out to eat her magical flower. No, it attempted to eat her magic itself. It was a rather slow process, but both Icree and Tani looked at it with wonder.

“I don’t sense you receiving the magic you are taking,” Tani noted after a while.

“As far as I’ve understood my own spell - the caterpillar gets it,” Icree answered, slightly flustered.

“It’s not complete yet. Something is missing. It’s terribly slow and not something I could use in a battle very easily, unless I was able to hide the caterpillar somewhere on the person. Plus, the more magic it eats, the more noticeable it becomes.”

“I could try to reinforce your mana flow?” Tani suggested with uncertainty.

She wasn’t quite sure this was a problem that could be solved with better control of mana, though it was Tani’s specialty. She could help others withstand harder hits and move quicker by reinforcing them and speeding them up, as well as help them regulate the flow of their magic.

“No, it’s not about that,” Icree confirmed her suspicions. “I might just have to keep working with the spell.”

“Well, while the caterpillar feasts - you’ll come with me to the festival? Even if we might be last, we can still enjoy the thing.”

“Of course. I think we’ll all be there, except for Luka. We should drag him out as well.”

“Maybe he’ll find inspiration from the festival,” Tani teased, though neither of them believed in it.

“Maybe he’ll find a muse!” Icree joked a little, her worries melting away for a little while.

They stayed chatting together for a while, leaving behind the worries of attacks and achievements. It was more relaxing to get excited about the Star Festival like everyone else and ponder what to do about Kliodna’s condition.

#Tani Chartreuse #Where the Fire Lilies Grow #black clover #black clover fanfiction

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cappurrccino · 4 years ago

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I decided it would be more fun if they knew (of) each other c:

Zenith would never admit it, but the sound of a portal tearing open behind her head immediately followed by the outraged screeching of a wizard nearly made her drop her sword.

“STOP THAT!”

With a low snarl, Zenith side-eyed the wizard. The aura read as one of Oryx’s brood but higher-rank and deeply powerful in some sort of magic, though she would be significantly weaker in raw force. Zenith hissed in displeasure as she realized she might actually be out-matched and might need to rethink her plan to swat the wizard out of the air. The wizard bristled in response to the aggression and magic glowed ready at the edges of her claws.

With great difficulty, Zenith pushed her aggression down and turned back to her current project..

“Stop what?” she asked, biting irritation deep into the words. The end of the question was mostly lost in the metallic scream of the floor plating as she wrenched her blade free from the new gash she had carved.

“Quit slicing holes in the ship, you imbecile!” The wizard drifted toward the damage in the floor, not quite touching it, and waved a hand over the mess, coaxing the ship to reveal the extent of the damage.

Zenith scowled and made a sharp gesture toward the floor. “The Sunless Cell is below here, busy being useless and empty, and I want a hunting pit.”

The wizard flashed a look at Zenith that would make any lesser Hive flee. Zenith, unfortunately, was no such creature; she leaned an arm on her sword, pushing the tip of the blade back down into the floor. The floor keened quietly and the wizard drew herself up to her full height, bone armor and spines flaring out in a threat.

“Just because you have decided to ignore the remaining tithe lines does not mean you have free reign to go around mindlessly carving your way through the ship. There are important knowledge conduits running through the structure here and I will not have them destroyed by some bored child.”

Between the insult and the insinuation that her carving was anything less than intentional, Zenith forgot her earlier decision to not pick a fight with the wizard, brandishing her sword in her direction. “If the ship doesn’t want traps cut into it, it’s more than welcome to wake up and stop me. Until then--”

She swung the blade back at the floor with all the force she could muster. Whether or not it hit home was debatable as she suddenly became aware of very little other than the deafening howl of ascendant magic and a feeling akin to having her brain turned inside out. A heavy impact caused some plating on her back to buckle and she thought for a moment that gravity might be pointing in the wrong direction before she lurched sideways into something broad and flat.

The first muddy sense to return was an all over ache, rapidly followed by the white-hot needles of irritation from her worm and her own confused surprise at still being alive. It took more than a few moments to sort out up from down and figure out what had happened and she realized she hadn’t been hit but rather hurled across the room. An artfully sculpted support column had caught her mid-flight and cracked her armor, perhaps as its own revenge for the impact shattering off several of the thin, decorative fins.

Zenith hauled herself to her feet, looking around for either her sword or the wizard and finding neither. There were, however, several sets of eyes peering out from shadows on the edges of the room, presumably belonging to some acolytes hoping to see a full-on brawl. Now doubly irritated, she stalked back toward the contentious spot of flooring, seeing first an unsettling haze of magic glowing up from new runes etched into the floor and then her sword laying where it had apparently been flung in a different direction. Skirting the edge of the runes, she snatched up her sword and crouched to get a better look at the magic.

It made absolutely no sense to her.

She also knew she didn’t want to be the first to touch it.

One of the acolytes wasn’t fast enough in hiding again when she swept her gaze toward their hiding place again and she barked an order at it to come closer. It did so, albeit slowly and uncertainly.

“Step on that,” she said, pointing at the circle of faintly glowing runes. The acolyte hesitated and she added, “Step on it, or I’ll eat you.”

That spurred it into action and it dashed forward onto the runes with a quiet yelp.

The glow of the magic flared brighter for a moment...

And nothing happened.

Zenith rumbled in annoyance again and the acolyte scattered from view.

She poked at the runes with her sword. Nothing.

Stepped slowly onto them. Nothing.

Kicked a foot across one of the runes. Still nothing.

She stepped back out of the circle and paused, twirling the giant sword in one hand before coming to a decision and bringing it down in a powerful overhead swing. Before it could reach the scarred floor the blade slammed into a shimmering field of magic that absorbed the force of the blow and cast it back at its attacker.

For the second time that day, Zenith found herself flying through the air.

For the second time that day, she was sent crashing into the floor.

So this was how it was going to be.

#//juri speaks #i wrote a thing #destiny #the hive #oc: zenith #oc: archivist #two doodles in one day! unheard of!#to answer the question of ''why not just delete zenith entirely'': she's still useful #huge and unruly pain in the ass prone to knocking down walls but also very good at keeping the dreadnaught secure

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wicked-game-black-butler · 5 years ago

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I have loved all your headcanon/bullet point posts you’ve done so far! Even the ones for pairings I never had too much interest for... they’re just so good. Would you mind doing one for Sebagni? Canon and/or AU, whatever suits your fancy? No rush. Whenever you have time/the mood strikes.

First of all, thank you for being patient while I worked on getting to this. I was able to muster enough energy to let my two brain cells have some fun being creative so this is what they came up with. I went with a canon premise. 😊 And I also realized after looking over your ask that you didn't really ask for NSFW headcanons, buuuut that's totally where my little gutter rat mind went, lol. 😅 I hope you enjoy!

Sebastian had set his sights on the other butler from the moment they crossed swords. The grace and speed with which the man had moved rivaled his own, mirroring him step for step. To say he was intrigued was an understatement. Very few humans could keep half of his pace, but this man had nearly bested him. He knew Agni would not succumb immediately. Such a devoted, pure hearted servant would not be so easily swayed to such distractions. However, the curious glint he had caught in Agni's silver gaze as he eyed Sebastian when the draw had been called and they had sheathed their swords was enough to assure him that his interest wasn't one sided. Perhaps it wouldn't be as long as he thought before he could sink his fangs into the kansama's deliciously soft, dark skin.

The next couple of weeks passed in a tantalizing game of cat and mouse. Agni was a fascinating study, his duality entrancing to the demon. Upon their return to the manor, the two butlers frequently spent time in each other's passing company, whether that was in the study when the young lord indulged Soma by playing chess or down in the kitchen preparing afternoon refreshments for their masters. Such times were often spent with the kansama entertaining the demon with stories of serving the Prince in India, Sebastian asking a probing question here and there, or in tense silence, the air between them thick with anticipation. What intrigued the demon most was what was spoken between them without words- lingering, heated glances and teasing touches- to the point he couldn't be sure who was seducing and who was being seduced.

The first time they were together, Agni had approached Sebastian in his office. It had been a long, stormy day. The young master had been particularly testy and his foul mood had even managed to sour the unflinchingly cheerful Prince. The conversation had started innocently enough, with Agni uncharacteristically complaining about his master's behavior. They both commiserated how stubborn and vexing their masters could be for some time until Agni stood, Sebastian assuming the kansama intended on taking his leave. Only then did Sebastian suggestively mention how he wished he had a decent way to unwind did the air immediately thicken with tentative eagerness. Sebastian smirked when the other man paused and turned to face him, his stoic face a stark contrast to the molten silver of his gaze as he rounded the demon's desk. He was sure he had Agni exactly where he wanted him, until an hour later he found himself pressed against his own desk, his cock rubbing deliciously against the smooth wood surface as Agni buried himself balls deep into the demon's plump ass.

To Sebastian's pleasant surprise, Agni is a different man in the bedroom. The normally submissive, caring, compassionate kansama is nowhere to be found when sex is the goal. Rather, he is replaced with a ruthlessly dominant persona who isn't afraid to take what he wants from the demon. Though Sebastian isn't disappointed in the least. He would've soon tired of such a pliable quarry, and Agni is anything but that. There's nothing he enjoys more than when the kansama corners him unexpectedly, hunger clear in his expression, before kissing him fervently and bending him over the nearest surface and fucking him until the only thing he can think of is how good Agni's thick cock feels inside him, drilling into him without mercy until Sebastian comes, sweaty and drooling, the kansama's name the only mantra on his lips. Either that, or when Agni forces Sebastian to his knees, eagerly sliding his thick, heavy cock into the demon's waiting mouth where he will not relent in deepthroating him until he comes with a shuddering moan, the demon eagerly swallowing every drop of his release.

Though Agni revels in being so forward with Sebastian, the times he enjoys the most are not necessarily part of the actual sex. Don't misunderstand, he loves the sex...a lot. If he's honest with himself, he's never had better. But he enjoys watching Sebastian the most. He loves stroking himself, the base of his spine tingling with pleasure as his gaze remains trained on the other man as he strips with slow, languid, tantalizing movements. There have been times where he's come off watching him alone, every inch of alabaster skin, of rippling muscle, of promising pleasure too much. Or when Sebastian pleasures himself. How his crimson gaze, piercing and glowing, never leaves Agni's as one hand tightly grips his monstrous cock, pumping it slowly for good show, raven locks splaying on the bed, his back arching while his other hand teases his puckering entrance as he languidly works himself open with one, two, and then three fingers. The groans and sighs that fall from Sebastian's lips are Agni's undoing, even more so than the writhing, undulating movements of his sculpted body (though that is an exquisite sight which boils his blood any time he recalls the sensuous image).

Despite being an aggressive lover, Agni is the master of aftercare. When time and duties allow for it, Sebastian and Agni will spend another hour afterwards soaking in the tub together, talking quietly and sipping wine, before towling off and rubbing each other down with revitalizing scented oils.

I hope these were to your liking. 😊 And also thank you for this ask and your support! ❤️❤️❤️

#kuroshitsuji #black butler #sebastian michaelis #agni black butler #sebagni #thank you so much for your support #thank you for the ask #you're amazing #❤️❤️❤️

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noneatnonedotcom · 5 years ago

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AU where jaune is trained by his dad before coming to beacon

Ruby wasn’t having the best day, she’d gotten into beacon early, same year as her sister which was great! Except her sister had abandoned her the second they got here. Then she’d met a crabby white-haired girl. Then she exploded She literally exploded! who had that much dust? So she could be forgiven if she wanted nothing more than to just lay on the ground and mope. “Do you need some help?” Asked a gentle voice when she looked up there was a prince standing over her with an offered hand. He was tall, like really tall. His hair was gold and his eyes were like sapphires, the way the two colors contrasted only seemed to make them stand out more, she could swear his hair glimmered in the sunlight. When she got down to his chest she saw he had a t-shirt on it was white and it showed off a very broad set of shoulder and a defined chest, the sleeves were tight around a defined pare of arms that went down to a large pair of hands that showed the results of constant training, her eyes went back to his body which leads her to follow the strong core down to his hips where a pair of pants obstructed her wandering eyes. So she brought her eyes back up to his chest, and what a chest it was everywhere she looked there was mussel, lithe but definitely male muscle and so carefully decorated and sculpted was it that she found she couldn’t stop looking. She smiled “oh so I fell asleep, I must be having one of THOSE dreams.” “You dream about me?” came a puzzled voice “I do now I guess. Yang said I'd like stuff like this one day, but dang I didn’t know how much,” she whispered the last part. dream or not she was talking to a very very good looking guy who might as well not be wearing a shirt. “So what’s your name?” she asked taking his offered hand as he pulled her up, wow this felt strangely real. “I am jaune arc, short, sweet, rolls off the tongue, the ladies love it!” he said with a warm smile. she laughed at the corny line as they started walking. The way he moved was weird. It was kinda like how her uncle qrow and her dad moved but more…. Graceful? Like every step was part of some dance. Man, she felt bad for the guys back in the real world she wasn’t sure how they were gonna compete. She noticed something on his belt. Taking a moment to study it she smiled “YOU HAVE A WEAPON! What’s it do!” she said getting excited if this was a dream it must have some cool magic! Maybe it shot fire or lightning! “It’s a sword, infused with dust by a blacksmith way back when. It was my great-great-grandfathers.” “Does it shoot fire?” she asked leaning in He laughed it sounded like what spring felt like “nothing that cool, but it is nigh unbreakable.” “Wouldn’t your aura protect it?” there was a reason why huntsmen trained so much with their weapons the more familiar you got with the weapon the more your aura would protect it because it became an extension of your body. She was pretty sure she was the only one who could use crescent rose without her baby breaking “sure but it never hurts to have a reliable weapon?” he asked tilting his head and looking at her "still the sheath becomes a shield, might not be unbreakable like the sword but it sure is convenient" he smiled down at her "why what would you want it to do?" what no magic? Oh! this was a dream about her saving his kingdom using her awesome hunter powers! Then he’d be so grateful he’d ask to marry her, and they’d live happily ever after and she’d be an awesome hero and never, EVER, not come home. “Don’t worry about it.” she said with a smile “This is my baby!” she said deploying crescent rose “she’s a high impact sniper scythe!” “amazing,” said jaune “where’d you get that?” looking in awe at her awesome weapon “I made it!” she said proudly puffing out her chest jamming her thumb into her heart He looked at her and she didn’t know what he was feeling but whatever it was he was looking at her with FELT GREAT! "you must be an amazing engineer, that's pretty cool" he thought she COOL! “praise me more” she giggled He suddenly looked up “ah seems like we’re here, I should go check if my gear was delivered. It was nice meeting your ruby” he said walking through the doors to the auditorium “come see me again whenever you want” he gave a wave over his shoulders Ah seemed like the dream was over, well that was fine she had to wake up and be a huntress. … … Any second now … Yang walked up to her "hey ruby what's up? you make any friends?" she said with a smile and a raised eyebrow "not now yang I'm trying to wake up from my dream" "your dream?" she asked "yeah I'm dreaming right now, and it's one of THOSE dreams cause there was this really handsome prince and he walked like he was dancing and he laughed like spring and he was great but now I gotta wake up and figure out what to do cause I exploded," she said still closing her eyes then opening them nope nothing yet "Ruby you're not dreaming, but you might have hit your head," she said looking at her eyes "how exactly did you explode?" "Yang, of course, this is a dream, you know what punch me it'll prove it!" Yang punched her in the arm she winced and rubbed her shoulder "YANNNNG" she whined "that hur....." she froze "this isn't a dream is it?" yang shook her head leaning down so she was eye level with ruby "it's not, ruby I need you to be honest with me" she was deadly serious now "did someone make you take or drink something funny? ________________________________________________________________ jaune arc is a hell of a drug fun fact I actually wrote this for something else, if you know where I posted this originally, you’re a nerd.

#lancaster rwby #swanknightAU

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candyshua · 5 years ago

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Until the End {Junhui x Minghao x Reader} (Chapter 1 - The First Life)

Synopsis: You don't know how many lives you have lived. In fact, you don't even believe in past lives. Neither do Junhui and Minghao--yet there you three were, on your umpteenth life, making the same mistakes you always did.

Genre: Angst, Fluff, Potential Smut, Royalty AU, queen!reader, nobleman!junhui, servant!minghao, Forbidden Love AU

Word Count: 2,824

A/N: This story will be a whirlwind of emotions, that's for sure. I don't exactly know how I'm going to format it, so please bear with me. (This chapter doesn't really touch on Junhui and Y/N's love. It's mainly about her and Minghao. However, most of the chapters will be much more love-triangle centric, this one just happens to be a bit different.) (Cross-posted on ao3, my username is vernonie)

The evening of your coronation was the last nail in the coffin.

The grand hall was decorated lavishly. Hues of blue (your favorite color) were splendidly spread throughout the place. Your lovely aqua gown truly made you look like a queen. This was your destiny, your fate. You were born to rule your land and you were to do so with poise and passion.

You kept telling yourself that throughout the entire night. Even when you spared glances at him, even when your heart sunk when you noticed the longing in his eyes, you never stopped convincing yourself that it was your duty.

You remembered the conversation you had with Minghao the previous night. The two of you laid in bed, your bare figures hugging one another closely. You listened to Minghao's steady heartbeat and wondered if it was the last time you would be in such close proximity to him.

"I don't want to be queen." You bluntly murmured, as if you were talking about the weather. You felt Minghao freeze beneath your fingertips. It was the first time one of you had mentioned your inevitable fate in a long time.

Minghao got up and started to dress. The bed suddenly felt cold without his presence. You subconsciously reached out to his then empty side of the bed.

"That is not a choice you were blessed with." Minghao spat, anger coiling up in him. The shock of his tone was like an icy wave of water, and you did not welcome the foreign feeling one bit. You swallowed, your mouth dry.

"I am so, desperately in love with you." You croaked after a thick silence. You were out of breath from your heart's swift rate. You wanted nothing but to run away with Minghao and live with him in solidarity.

"And I love you just the same. But you're going to be Queen, and I'm just a poor boy who works in the castle."

"I cannot be Queen." You uttered shakingly, but Minghao wasn't having any of it.

"You must."

You sighed. The entire event was much too prestigious for you; the grand lights and musicians of the highest talent in your presence. You were going to be crowned Queen quite soon, the golden crown would seal your fate.

You could not breathe. Minghao's glances were suffocating you.

You were going to be Queen and you were going to do it without him. Without the love of your life.

You were about to run outside until a familiar face tapped you on the shoulder. You turned around and were face-to-face with the dashing Wen Junhui. You would smile if it were under any other circumstance.

"Hello, Junhui."

Junhui was your childhood best friend. The Wen family were of high nobility, and they dwelled in the castle. You and Junhui were destined to meet, just like you were destined to become Queen.

"Hello, Your Majesty." He took your hand and kissed it lightly and bowed elegantly. You smiled emptily.

You missed Minghao's burning glare when Junhui's lips reached your skin. You missed the way he almost ran over to the two of you and scooped you away. You missed Minghao's eyes tear up once the searing reality of what was happening had finally reached him.

However, you didn't miss Junhui's dark gaze. You gave him a nervous smile when his staring became a bit intimidating.

"Is there something amiss, Junhui?" You muttered, an odd kind of fear settled deep in your belly.

"Nothing, Your Majesty, you just look absolutely beautiful tonight." You inwardly cringed at the term "your majesty". Of course, Junhui called you by your name when no one else was around, but the ballroom was swarming with people of many different backgrounds.

"Why thank you, Junhui. I best be going, the ceremony will begin quite soon." Your own words were bringing you back to reality. It was going to happen, so you might as well comply for the time being.

Junhui bid you farewell, his long and lanky figure disappearing into the crowd. Your hope of freedom went along with him.

You wore the crown with dignity and pride. You sat on your throne as if you were the ruler of all the lands, and not just your own. You thought you were pretty good at being Queen.

Of course, there was one thing you forgot, much to your detriment. Minghao worked in the castle. Of course, lowly workers like him would come into the presence of the queen once in a blue moon, but that didn't stop it from happening. The two of you were in closed quarters. You went back inside the castle after a light run around it, and you found yourself in the weaponry.

Minghao was in there merely polishing the weapons, but your presence didn't go unknown. The moment you walked in and saw his beautiful, lean face you were done for. His eyes widened once he was soaked in your presence.

"Minghao." You stated longingly. The rush of melancholy you were feeling was incapacitating; you felt as if you could drown in your emotions.

"Your Majesty." Ouch.

"Minghao, there's no one else around, you can call me--"

"I should go, my Queen." He knew he was just rubbing salt in the wound.

You were reminded of the time when you first met Minghao, which was in that very room you were in. You were a fifteen-year-old princess at that point, and you were destined for the crown. You were sure of just about everything in your life.

But then you saw his face. It was as if he was sculpted from the very gods above; his beautiful, small nose resided on his thin, heavenly face. His big brown eyes were innocent at the time, the dark colors of the world had yet to taint his sight. His angled jawline made your knees weak. You were standing next to Junhui, and you were just about to spar. Minghao came in with his master, a well-known artist who lived in the castle.

Your breath was taken away along with your heart. That servant boy had stolen them both.

"Junhui," You began, "I think I shall postpone our spar. I have someone else in mind."

It was in your nature to impress the people you were interested in. You felt a paralyzing desire to impress that beautiful boy, so much so that you wanted to spar with the most talented warrior in that room.

Soon, the two of you were battling with steel swords, the sound of metal against metal clanging in the air. The warrior was skilled, persistent, and confident. However, you were fuelled with the fire of that boy who made you feel things you had never felt before. The warrior was put to shame by a princess. Needless to say, you won.

You noticed the boy had smiled after the warrior was left heaving on the ground. Your heart was beating incredibly fast, to the point where you could feel your pulse in your ears.

Newfound confidence overtook you. Soon, you were taking long strides to Minghao.

"I need help with something, please do help."

He happily obliged. Turning down the princess would only lead to detrimental results, but he didn't feel even a twinge of apprehension. It was safe to say he was absolutely smitten as well as you. You led him to the courtyard, and the two of you just began talking about your lives. He was surprisingly well educated, not even for just a servant.

Soon, the two of you started meeting regularly. Your father did not mind, surprisingly. His reasoning was that he wanted you to have fun and be a kid like the rest.

Yet, your friendship turned into something much more, and that happened faster than the two of you could've imagined. You were enthralled to be in the presence of someone that could keep up with you intellectually and physically. The two of you would often spar, and Minghao had quite the natural gift.

Minghao had a gift for a lot of things--painting, writing, and breaking your heart.

He was just about to walk out of the weaponry, looking anywhere but at you.

"Wait." You ordered. He halted immediately. He turned around, his brown orbs longingly searching for something in yours. Before you could stop yourself, you ran over to the man you loved. Your lips crashed against his, and he surprisingly reciprocated. His muscular arms snaked around your body immediately. Your hands became entangled in his hair. You tried to pull him as close to you as possible, almost as if to say "I'm still yours".

"I love you so much," Minghao whispered in between the kisses you shared. You were taken aback, even if only for just a bit. You knew Minghao had wanted to resist you, because it was the best thing for the both of you. But he just loved you too damn much to stay away.

"I love you too, Xu Minghao."

It was wrong. You were Queen--you had a duty to your land and you knew you were destined to marry some royal man from far away. Yet, you had ceased to care, because being in Minghao's arms and feeling his lips against your skin was something you'd do just about anything for. Maybe talking to him on that fateful day you met was a mistake in the first place, but you couldn't imagine your life without him.

You and Minghao continued to share passionate kisses, and then you snuck away to your room and had a bit more fun. Little did you know that someone with jealousy in his heart was watching from afar...

It was a week since you had reunited with Minghao. The both of you would still secretly meet up just about every day. The entire situation was inherently wrong, but nothing felt more right than being with someone you loved so dearly. You woke up to a knock at your door, and you were grateful for the first time in your life that Minghao wasn't with you.

You forced yourself out of bed, slipping on a pair of dainty shoes. You shuffled to the door to your grand room and tore it open, expecting to be greeted with a servant or Minghao.

It was Junhui.

"Oh, why hello, Junhui, let me get dressed and--"

The sound of the door shutting was heard among your eerily vacant room. Junhui managed to maneuver himself inside, his eyes on fire. Your heart dropped at the furious look on his face.

"Is something the matter? You're being quite scary."

Junhui scoffed, his eyes boring into yours.

"You want to pretend to be oblivious?"

Oh no.

The worst was happening.

"When?" You curtly questioned, your aura of cluelessness dissolving. It was replaced with a cold, burdened mask. Junhui wasted no time in his reply.

"Last week. I saw the two of you in the weaponry, and dear God, Y/N! What are you doing? You are queen, you cannot do this!"

A sigh of anger and fear escaped your lips.

"Junhui, I love him, and--"

"Stop. Let him go this instant, please. I'm begging you, Y/N."

"I'm Queen, Junhui, you cannot order me around." Junhui's face soon turned grim.

"Please do not make me get the ministry involved."

You sucked in a sharp breath through your teeth. Rage was starting to consume your every movement. Betrayal was hot in the air, making you feel stiff and unwell. Junhui's presence was no longer welcome.

You thought he'd support you. He was your best friend, one of the few people in this castle that you could trust. Or so you thought.

"Junhui, get out." You stifled an onslaught of sobs, but you couldn't only fight them for so long. You were not going to let Junhui see you cry.

"If I get the ministry involved, Y/N, you're--"

"Going to die, yes I know! They'll execute me for treason." You were seeing the color red. You wanted nothing else but to run up to Junhui and punch him in his gut, making him feel a sliver of the pain he had just caused you.

"You wouldn't be the only one who dies, Y/N."

The sky of the world you had almost perfectly molded was falling. You swallowed, your throat completely dry. Minghao would die, and it would be of your doing.

"Get out, Junhui, before I kill you."

He didn't speak another word. He got up from the chair he was sitting on and walked out of the room, his jaw tightened. You gave him the most deathly glare as he exited.

And then you broke down. Tears of betrayal, self-hatred, and of inevitability had fallen. This was bound to happen, you should've stopped when you could have. Now you were just left to deal with the aftermath--the consequences of your detrimental actions.

Then, it dawned on you. The great epiphany made your heart drop to your stomach.

You'd rather just die than live without Minghao.

Minghao's face remained stoic the entire time you explained the situation to him. At times, his eyes would flash with a streak of pain briefly, but then they'd go back to their emotionless nature. The two of you had snuck out to the courtyard, hiding in an extremely dark spot at around midnight. You hoped and prayed Junhui didn't see either of you.

"What do we do?" You feebly asked, your voice raw and broken. Tears were already welling up in your eyes.

"We don't let them kill us."

His words made your stomach drop. Your breath was taken away for a bit, and you were left to wonder what the hell the love of your life was saying.

"What?"

"We steal poison berries from the garden, and we eat them." The initial shock of his words was like a blunt punch to your gut. Minghao didn't want to give you up. If the situation were vastly different, you'd probably be flattered.

You wanted to protest. You wanted to run away and live with him until you turned old and decrepit, but you knew that was a mere fantasy. It was impossible.

"Okay." You found yourself saying. You were sealing your fate with that, you were going to die and leave your kingdom behind.

It was quite a selfish decision. However, you grew up a princess. Your entire life was set out for you ever since you took your first breath. This time, the power was in your hands. What a forlorn situation, though; the only thing you have power over is whether you get to kill yourself or not.

You grabbed Minghao's hands and stroke your thumbs over them. You closed your eyes and let yourself relish in the last moment you'd be spending with him. You couldn't help but let tears fall, you didn't want to die, you didn't want to leave your kingdom behind. You were afraid of your brutal end. Your heart was tainted with the black color of hate, something you'd never thought you'd feel towards Wen Junhui. He had betrayed you in the worst of ways, and now he would know your decision. You inwardly scoffed at the audacity of that man. Giving you, the Queen, an ultimatum! You almost wanted to die solely just to spite him.

Minghao removed his hands from your grasp and cupped your face instead, kissing you slowly and longingly.

Much to your dismay, he pulled away and led you to the garden. It took a while to find the poison berries, since they were hidden in the way back, covered by many other plants.

"Minghao, I--"

"Y/N! I know you're out there!" Junhui erupted. You felt your entire figure grow heavy.

"We have to eat them now, Y/N." Minghao's eyes were filled to the brim with tears. You muffled your sobs by pressing your hand against your mouth, your entire body shaking.

"Xu Minghao," You began in a whisper, "I hope we can meet again in another life. I hope we'll know one another as equals, and that we'll love each other freely."

Minghao swallowed thickly. This time, he couldn't contain the tears from falling.

"I hope the same, Y/N. I love you."

"I love you too."

Then all you could taste was the bitter flavor of the berries. The sharpness of your senses was inevitably dulling, and your eyes somehow managed to make out Junhui behind Minghao. It seemed as if realization struck Junhui across the face, due to his shocked and deadly expression.

Everything was going numb. Minghao was fading out of your sight, and your breaths were uneven and unsteady. Soon, you collapsed to the ground. Minghao fell slowly after you, and the last thing you saw was the painful look in your love's eyes as all the life drained from him, and eventually you too

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thelegendofclarke · 5 years ago

Text

still got scars on my back (from your knife)

A Bellarke Knives Out Au in which Kane is probably Benoit Blanc, Clarke might be Ransom Drysdale, Bellamy is definitely Marta Cabrara, Dante was Harlan Thrombey, and like Detective Elliot, Miller is just along for the ride.

Written for @bellarkejanuaryjoy Day 29 and dedicated to @marauders-groupie and @woodswit who were the best sounding boards and cheerleaders and are the reasons this fic exists in any way, shape, or form.

When Bellamy walks into the Mt. Weather police station again, where he has been far too many times in far too few days, he is tired. The kind of tired that starts in your bones and slowly leeches into your soul. He has a migraine that feels like it originated in his prefrontal cortex, and he genuinely can’t remember the last time he felt like he could breathe normally or wasn’t on the verge of puking. He’s led into an interview room in the back and when he enters he stops short. Marcus Kane, the self-proclaimed “last of the gentleman sleuths,” is perched on the corner of the table, posing dramatically as always. And sitting in a chair next to him is Clarke. Despite being arrested over 48 hours ago, she isn’t wearing handcuffs or an orange jumpsuit. Damn it must be nice to be a rich white girl. She’s just wearing a regular button-down shirt and jeans, and that small smirk that always made him want to kiss her. There’s something softer about it now though, and he hates how much that just makes him want to kiss it off her even more. Detective Miller motions for Bellamy to sit down in the chair across from Clarke. He does so without looking at Clarke or saying anything, just glaring down at the table so he doesn’t do something stupid like cry.

“You’re probably wondering why we’ve called you back here…” Miller starts.

“Oh, I’m wondering about a lot of things.” Bellamy shoots back at him.

Miller just snorts and looks over at Kane, “I’ll let you take it from here.”

Kane pulls out the pipe he carries around with him and starts to pack it. Bellamy can feel his scowl deepening, who the fuck even carries a pipe anymore?

Continue reading below or on Ao3...

“First of all, Mr. Blake,” he starts without looking up, “we must begin by giving you our most profuse and sincere apologies.” Kane lights the pipe and brings it to his mouth, then he looks at Bellamy and grins. That dramatic asshole actually smiles, far wider than Clarkes’ smirk, but equally as infuriating. “But you are just far too honest and decent a man to have been let in on all our plans.” He turns to Clarke and nods.

Clarke takes a deep breath and starts talking, but Bellamy can’t bring himself to look at her. He knows if he does all he’ll see is her grabbing his hands when he started having a panic attack, all he’ll feel is her fingers running through his hair, all he’ll hear is her soft but strong voice telling him to look at her, to focus on his breathing, reassuring him “It’ll be okay I promise… We’ll figure this out… Together.”

“You know, I used to be one of the only people that could ever beat my Grandpa Dante at Go. I used to pride myself on that,” she chuckles. “And then you came along and he told me you beat him twice as often as I did.” Bellamy looks up at that and finds Clarke looking right at him, her eyes focused on his. “He said you beat him almost every time. That you had never even played before you met him, but that somehow you would always win. And god that used to drive me fucking crazy,” she laughs again. “I couldn’t figure out how the hell you were beating him. I knew he wasn’t letting you win, he wasn’t that nice. And I knew he wouldn’t lie about it, he was far too arrogant. It was one of the mysteries he could never solve” she shakes her head ruefully at the memory. “How you beat him at that goddamn game night after night.”

“He never figured out that answer to that mystery,” she continues. “But I did. I finally solved it… You win because you don’t just play from the head, you play from the heart.”

“And you won again Bellamy… You won this game not by playing my way or my grandpa’s way, but by playing your way. You won because you are a genuine and honorable and fundamentally good person. You played it honest, you didn’t lie or mislead anyone or try to throw them off your trail. That’s why all the pieces fell perfectly into place: because you made all the right moves. You won by figuring out your strategy and making your decisions the same way you always have: from the heart.”

Bellamy just stares at her for another minute and then looks at Kane. “Look I don’t mean to be rude, but it’s been a really long couple of days and I’m pretty worn out so I’m just going to be really straight with you here and ask: what the actual fuck is going on?”

Miller snorts again, “I asked the same damn question.” He turns to Kane and Clarke and pulls out his little yellow notepad. “Actually, would you mind starting from the top again? Because I’m still not sure I really understand what in the damn hell happened.”

Kane and Clarke look at each other again doing that annoying nonverbal communication thing they seem to be so good at. Bellamy thinks he probably can’t complain about that too much though, since he and Clarke had gotten pretty damn good at it themselves after years of knowing each other, pretending to hate each other, and refusing to admit that they secretly adored each other.… Or so he thought… How the hell did he get her so wrong?

Before this week, Bellamy would have told anyone who asked, with a higher degree of confidence than he possesses about most things, that he could tell you almost everything there is to know about Clarke Griffin…

Namesake: Science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke, who her father had been a massive fanboy of and managed to convince her mother to let him name their newborn daughter after while Abby was still high as a kite on epidural anesthesia. Evidently, he had persuaded her by arguing that it was probably better than Arthurette or Arthurina; when Abby tells the story she always magnanimously says that at the time it seemed to be “the least of the evils.”

Middle Name: Matilda, after Empress Matilda, a member of the British monarchy who was some distant relative of the Wallaces, but that she pretended was after Matilda Wormwood because that Matilda was “infinitely cooler in all ways.”

Notable Likes: Inclusive, intersectional feminism. All forms of alcohol; with the notable exception of tequila which she will not look at, smell, touch, or tolerate in her presence in any way, shape, or form (he’d tried to ask her why once but she’d promptly turned green and puked into the nearest potted plant so he decided not to push the issue). Shark Week. Jane Austen novels. True crime documentaries. The Jonas Brothers (“They’re making a comeback Bell, whether you like it or not! Just save yourself the trouble later and lean into it now!”) Any and all things Harry Potter related (he’s pretty sure she’s on multiple bar trivia teams, including his own, just to answer the Harry Potter questions… And get the free booze.) Netflix. Adult coloring books. Anytime someone climbs a building to tear down a Confederate flag. Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Antique tea sets. Movies that have women wearing armor and/or holding swords. Wearing high heels because they make her feel tall (her diminutive frame is something she endlessly despairs over, but Bellamy maintains she makes up for through presence, spitefulness, and sheer force of will.) Her cousin Roan.

Notable Dislikes: Donald Trump. Tinder, which she has an active profile on (a fact that definitely did not bother him. Much.) Twitter, which she hates even more, and has an even more active profile on. Blavy (“I don’t care what Tom Ford or Marc Jacobs said Bell, it’s a disgrace!”) Humidity. The NRA. The Twilight series (because it was “pushing the suspension of disbelief” that anyone would pick Edward over Jacob, and “downright offensively unrealistic” that Bella wouldn’t just dump them both and run off with “the hot Cullen sister… Either one of them.”) Most forms of organized sports. All forms of organized religion. Camping. When people talk during movies. Having to wear “real pants” for more than a couple of hours on a given day. The American Healthcare System. Toxic masculinity, men yelling, manbuns, manspreading, mansplaining and men having to put the word "man" before everything because their egos were so fragile. Wearing high heels because they are “torture devices of the patriarchy” (Clarke speak for “they make her feet hurt and she’s a wimp.”) Her cousin Ontari.

Favorite Foods: Sushi. Guacamole Doritos (which she had cried genuine tears over being discontinued). Her grandfather’s disgustingly greasy fried egg sandwiches that taste like heartburn. Her mother’s blueberry cheesecake. Avocados (Bellamy never understood what the deal was with white people and avocado; like yeah avocados are great and all, but damn do white people really love avocado.) Movie theater popcorn. Bellamy’s adobo. Octavia’s empanadas. All kinds of Indian food, the spicier the better. Watermelon, especially when it’s filled with vodka. Almost anything that has chocolate in or on it. Potatoes in all their forms, especially the ones that have cheese on them. Kraft Macaroni and Cheese. Cheese Blintzes. Cheese fondue. Cheese in general, honestly. “That one thing we got at that one place that one time, Bell!” which he always knew exactly what she was referring to (Dante had always said that Bellamy, like him, was “fluent in Clarke: a skill coveted by the many, but possessed by the few.”)

Hobbies: Smashing the patriarchy. Art; painting, drawing, sculpting, anything that struck her fancy really (she even went through a sand art phase at one point, which ended up being short lived because while she loves art, she hates sand.) Making fun of Bellamy. Conspiring with Octavia to make fun of Bellamy. Making fun of her grandpa Dante. Conspiring with Bellamy to make fun of her grandpa Dante. Equestrian activities, the only kind of formal, organized “sport” she was actually good at (“All I have to do is sit there and tell the horse what to do, Bell. I’m so good at sitting around and telling people what to do!”). Fighting Twitter trolls. Reading, especially her grandfather’s mystery novels. Krav Maga, which Bellamy will admit surprised him a little (and then surprised him more than a little when he’d asked where she’d learned it and she shrugged and said “Israel” like it was as obvious as the inevitability of death and taxes.) Online shopping. Pretending to hate it when Bellamy calls her Princess. Buying and playing video games she doesn’t really understand with her little sister, Madi (“ I can’t trick her into thinking I’m cool anymore so it’s the only way I can get her to hangout with me. I’m just embracing bribery as a form of bonding!”) Over, and incorrectly, using the word “literally.” Telling Bellamy he is literally a pedantic killjoy.

He knew that she was deathly afraid of heights and irrationally paranoid about catching scurvy and getting cat-fished. He knew that she liked real bananas and blueberries but hated banana and blueberry artificial flavoring. He knew that her first kiss was with her best friend Wells in a closet during a game of 7 minutes in heaven at a classmate’s birthday party in 6th grade, and that her first kiss with a girl was in the exact same closet playing the exact same game at the exact same classmate’s birthday party two years later with a girl named Glass. He knew she lasted exactly one and a half years in med school before telling her mother that she needed to choose between Clarke being a doctor and Clarke being alive, because it was it was killing her slowly and driving her insane. He knew that she always ordered some kind of strange, obscure plant or flower to place on her father’s grave every year on the anniversary of his death because “he was weirdo who liked weird shit” (this past year it was a Venus Fly Trap, the year before that it was a Ghost Orchid because she was “feeling ironic.”)

He knew that she once met the Clinton’s at a charity fundraiser when she was little where she told then President Bill Clinton that he looked better with brown hair and threw up on Hillary Clinton’s shoes. He knew that she’d actually thrown up on several member of the rich and powerful elite; notable examples including Condoleezza Rice’s Hermès Birkin bag, Paul Ryan’s Armani sports coat, and Eric Trmups whole entire arm (which she admitted was definitely not an accident.) He knew that she loved school and learning and once got her English Lit teacher fired for failing her on a paper where she argued that Humbert Humbert was an obsessive, delusional, predatory pedophile who deserved to be medically castrated and the teacher had tried to tell her that Lolita was a “tragic love story” and that she was “simply too narrow minded to appreciate Nabokov’s true message.” He knew that she had unsuccessfully tried to pierce her own belly button in high school and managed to successfully pierce her own nose in college. He knew that she has four tattoos: a small crown on the back of her neck (which only made Bellamy double down on the Princess nickname after he found out about it), a lion on her left foot for her father, a lotus flower on her on her right wrist for her ex-girlfriend Lexa, and the Latin translation of “do no harm, take no shit” running down the left side of her rib cage.

He knew that she pretended to hate Valentine's Day when really, every single year, she handmade super elaborate and incredibly awesome cards for all her friends and family members (well, the ones she liked anyway). He knew that she was planning on naming her first daughter Gertrude after her grandmother, Dante’s deceased wife, even though the kid would probably hate her for it because her grandma was a badass and “metal as fuck.” He knew that otters were her favorite animal and that he favorite type of otters were those terrifying Amazonian river otters that could fight crocodiles (which was typical Clarke, honestly.) He knew that she loved her adopted little sister Madi more than anything or anyone in this world and was as fiercely protective of her as he was of his own little sister. He knew that she loved horror movies and hated Claymation because it freaked her out that that she has seen every single episode of F.R.I.E.N.D.S. at least three times and could sing all the lines of every single song Lana del Ray has ever recorded from memory.

He knew that she started drawing when she was really young and would sit on the floor in her dad’s office and draw on his grid paper while he worked on his designs; he knew that art had helped her through some really hard times like when she started questioning her sexuality and when her father had died and when he girlfriend had been killed and that she hoping to go back to school to become an art therapist. He knew she was stubborn and loyal and empathetic and unafraid to speak her mind. He knew she could be cunning and calculating and ambitious and ruthless and even downright vicious when it came to things going her way or getting what she wanted. Bellamy had just never thought there would come a day where he would be on the receiving end of all that Clarke Griffin Intensity. At least, not like this.

In all the years he’d known her, Clarke had never treated him like one her family’s employees or made him feel like “the help.” She got along (scarily, in Bellamy’s personal opinion) well with his little sister, and took (or sometimes dragged) him out places with her. She asked his opinion on things, and incorporated him into her friend group (while gleefully teasing him about how hot they all thought he was). She went to him for advice, and liked all his friends. She actually read the books and watched the movies and listened to the music he would recommend to her, and made him feel included at Wallace family events and dinners. She always laughed at his dumb jokes (sometimes so hard she would snort, which was his favorite), and would go to his apartment to feed the cat and water the plants when he was out of town. She would text him while she was on a bad date or at a boring event, and listened to all his rants about mythology and colonialism and the Star Wars universe and representation in media and all the historical inaccuracies in every single period drama they ever watched together. She would show him the art pieces she was working on, and remembered shit like his birthday and that he was allergic to tomatoes and the anniversary of his mom’s death and that Nerds were his favorite candy. She treated him like he was someone important to her, someone she cared about even. She made him feel valued and respected. She’d never treated him or made him feel like anything but her equal.

But now, finally looking up at the girl across from him, knowing just how much time and planning and work and effort she’d put into trying to fuck him over and ruin his life, it feels like being in the room with a complete stranger. And it might be one of the worst feelings in the world. Bellamy thought he knew her. Thought he could trust her, that he understood her, that they understood and trusted each other. He had considered her a good friend and, after so many years of knowing her, possibly even a best friend.

He had introduced her to his friends and his sister, and texted her links to stuff she would find funny and when someone said something absurdly ignorant or hilariously dumb on TV. He started keeping those alcoholic ciders she liked better than beer in his fridge, and thought way too hard about what to buy her every year for her birthday. He told her stories about his mom, and his childhood, and his first kiss, and his first girlfriend, and the first time he got punched and the first time he punched someone which were, to Clarke’s endless amusement, two completely different situations.

He told her about how terrified he’d been that he would never see his sister again when they were separated after their mom died, and how for years the only time he felt truly happy was during their weekly visit with their social worker when he got to see her, and how it took the longest time after he was officially able to get custody of her for him to finally relax and not worry that she wasn’t coming back every time she left the apartment, and how fucking proud he was of her for getting into a good college, and all kinds of personal shit he would never just tell to just anyone.

She’d become a fixture in his daily life, a staple in his routine, the first person after O that he wanted to share good news with, and the last person he wanted to say goodbye to before he left the Wallace estate to head home for the day. He let her in.

After years of his mom’s revolving door of terrible boyfriends, and moving around different towns to where ever Aurora could find a job, and constantly having to switch schools, and never really having time to hang out with kids his age because he had a little sister to take care of, and being passed around from foster home to foster home once he was put in the system, Bellamy didn’t just let people in and make friends with them. He has a screening process, a thorough one, what he had thought was an effective one; but somehow, Clarke Griffin had managed to make it through with flying colors in record time.

Bellamy is well aware that, in all likelihood, he should be more concerned about the fact that finding out he didn’t really know Clarke as well as he thought he did feels like his whole world has turned on its head and he doesn’t know which way is up. But between Dante dying and being framed for his murder and having paparazzi actually camped out on his front lawn and being put in charge of an entire estate he has no idea what to do with and bequeathed an amount of money so high he wouldn’t have believed it existed, there’s a lot to be concerned about. He can prioritize. Or at least multitask. Probably.

“Well why don’t we start with who it was that hired me,” Kane begins as he puffs on his pipe.

“We know who hired you,” Bellamy interrupts. “Clarke did. As part of her plan to frame me for Dante’s murder… I really don’t need to hear about it again.” If he has to listen to the whole story in terribly thorough detail again he is definitely going to do something stupid like cry. His voice breaks a little on the last words and out of the corner of his eye her sees Clarke bite her lip and look down at the table. Good, he thinks, she should feel like shit.

“Yes, Clarke did secure my employ,” Kane confirms.

Bellamy almost rolls his eyes. ‘Secure my employ?’ who the actual fuck even talks like that anymore?? While smoking a pipe??? Jesus tap dancing Christ.

“But she did so by proxy,” Kane continues, “under the instruction of her grandfather.”

That stops Bellamy and his internal running commentary on Kane’s outfit (Who the hell wears actual suspenders? And a goddamn deerstalker hat?? Where the hell do you even buy a deerstalker hat anymore?!?) right in their tracks. “Wait… What?”

“Dante Wallace hired me not only to solve his own murder, but to help his granddaughter frame herself while she also pretended to frame you at the same time.”

Bellamy blinks at him.

“You see Dante Wallace knew he was going to be murdered before he committed suicide,” Kane begins what Bellamy suspects is going to be one of the most confusing and ridiculous stories he has ever heard in his life. “And yes, Dante Wallace most definitely did commit suicide.”

This time Bellamy turns to blink at Miller. “Yeah,” he says dryly, “this is about where I started screaming internally too.”

Instead of continuing, Kane uses the pause to pull out that stupid coin he’s always tossing around and flips it in the air, catching it again without even looking but with uncanny precision. Bellamy is sorely tempted to tell him exactly how far he should shove the damn thing up his ass, but he physically restrains himself and waits for Kane to go on.

“Mr. Wallace knew not only that he was dying, but that he was being murdered. Slowly and painfully at that. He knew he was going to die and how, but he didn’t know when it was going to happen or who was doing it. He had a murder and a murder weapon, but no body and no actual death.”

Kane pauses and runs his fingers over his beard. Bellamy is like 99.9% sure this dude grew a beard just so he could stroke it dramatically. “He did have one other thing though,” Kane goes on, “and that was an obvious suspect.” He nods in Bellamy’s direction, “you.”

All three of the room’s other occupants are looking at him in silence. Bellamy’s breath catches and he starts to panic, “But you already cleared me. You said you know it wasn’t me. It wasn’t… I didn’t… I couldn’t… That’s…”

Clarke reaches out and grabs one of his hands. Bellamy can’t help but think that her tiny hand on his huge one shouldn’t be as reassuring as it is. “We know you didn’t do it Bell,” she tells him softly but firmly. She squeezes his hand, “we know you could never.”

He wants to smack her hand away and tell her not to call him that. He wants to tell all three of them to fuck off, he wants to get the hell out of here, he wants to get some weed from Monty the groundskeepers’ stash in the garage, or go down to Polis Pub and have O mix him up of those “kitchen sink” drink thingies she makes that he is pretty sure have what must be an illegal, non FDA approved amount of alcohol in them. He wants to go home and sleep forever, he wants to wake up tomorrow and have this all just be a terrible dream, he wants to travel back in time and never take this fucking job in the first place. He wants to do a lot of things, but he doesn’t. He just stays quiet and waits.

Clarke withdraws her hand and he sees her clench it into a fist on the table in front of her. “Grandpa Dante was being poisoned,” she says matter-of-factly. To anyone else it would seem like she was emotionless; but Bellamy sees the tension in her shoulders, the clench in her jaw, the rapid blinking of her eyes. He has been around the Wallace family long enough to know that they know how to put on masks. The can tamp down their anger, and swallow their sadness, and choke back their tears, and fake out their fear, and affect apathy along with the best of them. But Clarke has her tells, and he knows them. Dante always told him he was observant for his own good; that he was a good judge of character, that he pays attention to detail, that he notices the little things others wouldn’t even know to be looking for. And that one of these days it was going to get him into trouble.

He saw Abby disguise her sorrow and depression and grief after the tragic death of her husband Jake. And a few short years later, saw Clarke as the ice-cold, emotionless mirror image of her mother after her girlfriend Lexa was shot in a drive by. He saw Maya mask her terror the day she got her diagnoses, when she’d found out that she had developed a rare, life threatening blood disorder before she was even able to drive a car, that she would have to go through painful blood transfusions for the foreseeable future just to stay alive, and sees her to the same every time she leaves to go get her treatment. He saw Roan force back his fury every time he sees his mother treat people like dirt and watches his little sister show up to yet another family event high out of her mind. And he constantly saw Dante hide his sense of regret, his feelings of helplessness and hopelessness, when he reflected on what his family had become.

None of them managed to mask their feelings the day Dante’s will was read though, their emotions were written all over their faces: Nia’s fury at being passed over for “the help.” Abby’s shock and confusion at her father’s decision and clear feeling of betrayal and heartbreak that her father trusted Bellamy with his legacy more than he trusted her. Emerson’s horror over not being able to continue to maintain his lifestyle or pay for the treatment his sick stepdaughter needs to survive. Ontari’s hysterics at the easy funding for her pill and powder fixes being cut off. Roan’s indignation when he finally snapped ad yelled at his family members to “chill the fuck out and back the hell off! Bellamy clearly doesn’t know what the fuck is happening even more than we do!” And finally, Cage’s rage over Bellamy daring to take what Cage saw as rightfully his.

Not Clarke though. Clarke remained seated in the arm chair she had unceremoniously plopped down on when she arrived, throwing her legs over one of the arms and pulling up Candy Crush on her phone. Her attention wasn’t focused on her phone anymore though. Unlike the rest of her family, she stayed silent. Also, unlike the rest of her family, her ice blue, all seeing eyes were focused not on him, but on the people gathered around him, yelling and screaming, all hellfire and fury, threats and accusations flying. At first glance she appeared stone faced and detached. But while she studied her family Bellamy looked closer at her and for a brief moment, no more than a second, he saw it: the slight smirk curving at the side of her mouth.

Bellamy couldn’t tell exactly what was running through her mind that day, but he knows what she’s feeling now: grief over Dante’s death, sorrow over losing a family member (one of the only family members) she was close to, anger over her grandpa being murdered, and primarily: pissed as fuck that someone would do this to him. Bellamy still isn’t sure what’s happening or been able to process all the information he’s been given, but he’s starting to strongly suspect that hell hath no fury like Clarke Griffin scorned.

Kane rests a reassuring hand on her shoulder, wordlessly encouraging her to continue. Clarke takes another deep breath seemingly trying to calm herself, like it’s been ages since she felt like she was able to catch it. He knows the feeling. “I figured out he was being poisoned a while back,” she says. “He was just… He was getting sick way too fast.”

“I might not have been in med school for long but I was there long enough to know that his condition shouldn’t have been deteriorating so quickly,” her voice is getting steadier now. “He shouldn’t have been in so much pain, he shouldn’t have been so tired all the time. And nothing was working; some of the treatment should have been working, something should have been working.”

“You must have noticed it,” she half states, half asks. “I mean… He was just so… And nothing was… You had to have noticed it too?”

Yeah, she’s right; he had noticed it. Dante shouldn’t have been so sick so quickly. No matter how much he slept, he always felt tired. He started to lose drastic amounts of weight and his skin started to yellow at a disturbingly rapid pace. His heart rate and blood pressure were all over the place. His bones appeared to have become brittle overnight and he seemed to be in almost perpetual pain, his body shrugging in on itself while he sat, or contorting itself while he slept, just trying to get comfortable. He started getting spells where he was confused, he would have no idea where he was or not remember why he walked into a room or forget something Bellamy had told time only minutes prior. The spells wouldn’t have normally been too alarming in an elderly patient except that this wasn’t any other elderly patient, this was Dante Wallace. He had never been anything but sharp as a tact, quick on his feet, alert and awake and of perfectly sound mind.

She was also right about the treatment. Lung cancer is obviously nothing to scoff about, but the kind Dante was diagnosed with should have at least been manageable, if not treatable or even curable, with the right medication. Medication Bellamy knew he was on because he was the one that administered the drug to Dante every day, which subsequently brought him to the shit storm he was currently caught in without rain boots or an umbrella. Not only did the medication not seem to be doing anything to improve Dante’s condition in any way, they seemed to be making him worse. It was almost like they were causing new symptoms in addition to exacerbating the ones that were already there.

So yeah, he had noticed. Bellamy was no medical professional or trained expert; he was just a caregiver, a companion, he was just “the help,” but even he could tell that something was wrong. Whenever he had tried to express his concerns to members of Dante’s family as well. But whenever he tried to speak with Dante’s children about his health, he was either told off-handedly that it would be checked into, or told in no uncertain terms to mind his own goddamn business or his ass was fired.

“I mean, I’m well aware that me making the illogically, dramatically huge jump straight from ‘my grandpa is super sick’ to ‘MY GRANDPA IS BEING POISONED!’ is a little odd,” Clarke shrugs. “But it turns out that when you’re majoring in pre-med and spend your summers researching insane, off the wall ways to kill someone for your grandfather who writes murder mystery novels, you pick up some things,” she says grimly.

God, he thinks, her whole entire life must just be so weird.

“I remember taking a random medicinal chem class in undergrad,” Clarke starts rambling. “That’s how I think I first figured out what was happening. It took me a while to figure out the specifics, but once the details starting becoming clear it was obvious: Grandpa had anthracycline induced cardiac and pulmonary toxicity that was incorrectly diagnosed as potentially malignant, early stage lung cancer.” She’s talking even more animatedly now and gesturing wildly with her hands like she’s really getting into what she’s saying. Bellamy hates how cute he finds it.

“He was then treated with unnecessary, prolonged, and continuous exposure to radon which not only served to exacerbate his current vascular symptoms, but also caused additional idiopathic neurological, respiratory, skeletal, cardiovascular, and immunological afflictions that caused his condition to deteriorate to the point of inviability,” Clarke explains. Kane is nodding along like this all makes perfect sense to him and that she was explaining something as simple as how two and two makes four.

Bellamy and Miller just stare at her with blank expression of incomprehension on their faces. Miller previously had his pen poised over his notepad like he would have written down every word she said if he knew how to spell half of them. Now he just sighs and tucks his pen behind his ear and shoves the notepad back into his back pocket.

“Uh huh, right, exactly,” he says dryly. “How about you repeat that one more time in Normal Person.”

“He was poisoned with something that made it look like he had lung cancer,” she states matter-of-factly.

Miller shots Bellamy a look that he knows is asking “the fuck couldn’t she have just said that the first time?!” There’s a similar expression on his own face right now, he’s sure.

“Then he started getting chemo and radiation for the Not Lung Cancer which probably ended up giving him the Actual Lung Cancer and definitely gave him a whole bunch of other bad shit. He was slowly but surely dying,” she swallows and looks down at her hands, picking at one of her fingernails. “And the stuff that was supposed to be helping him was really just causing radon poisoning and killing him more quickly and painfully,” the crack in her voice makes him want to fold her up in his arms and tell her everything is going to be okay, the way she had for him so many times over the past week. Until he reminds himself that we don’t comfort people who try to frame us for murder. People who try to frame us for murder are assholes, no matter how pretty they are.

“My first guess was obviously Cage,” she goes on, “mostly because he sucks and I hate him. But still, it's not like I was wrong. It took a while for me to convince grandpa though, he was actually really pissed at me for even suggesting it in the first place.”

Bellamy remembers those few weeks severalmonths back when Clarke had stopped coming around and Dante had gone from his usual “exasperating old man shouts at cloud” to “insufferably cranky asshole.” When Bellamy suggested that maybe they invite Clarke over to cheer him up since she hadn’t been around in a while, Dante had just glared even harder and huffed that he and Clarke had “parted ways” due to “irrevocable creative differences” before flouncing from the room like an egregiously offended prima donna and locking himself in his study for the remainder of the day.

“I finally managed to convince him by figuring out where Cage would have been getting whatever he was poisoning grandpa with: his wife.”

Bellamy didn’t really know Cage’s wife, Dr. Lorelai Tsing Wallace, very well. Nor had he made any effort too. Primarily because she gave him the fucking creeps. She wasn’t the same brand of downright terrifying like Nia, or intimidatingly poised like Abby. She was scary in her very own, unique “don’t stand so close to me,” “makes the hair on the back of your neck stand up,” Stranger Danger kind of way. He would catch her eyeing him with interest sometimes, and he could never quite tell if it was in an “I want to jump you” kind of way or an “I want to kidnap you and harvest your organs” kind of way.

“It seems that the pharmaceutical development company Dr. Tsing works for had been doing a great deal of experimentation with alternative forms of radiation and chemotherapy treatment.” Kane says from where he’s returned to his perch on the table. “Namely, orally administrated, pill forms of radon.”

“We haven’t been able to establish any conclusive evidence that Lorelai Tsing-Wallace was knowingly or willfully involved in her husband’s plot to kill his father,” Miller interrupts, all procedure and formality. All three of them look at him with thoroughly unimpressed faces. “But yeah,” he concedes. “I honestly have no idea how the hell Cage would have gotten his hands on so much radon for so long without her help.”

“So yeah,” Clarke continues. “Once I was able to sit grandpa down and calmly and rationally explain to him what was happening to him and how, he was persuaded to see reason.

It’s another part of the story that Bellamy can’t help but snort at, because looking back, he’s pretty sure he remembers the exact incident she’s talking about. After going weeks without seeing her, Clarke had stormed into the house like a category 5 hurricane (as opposed to her typical level 2 tornado) and stomped up the stairs to Dante’s study. She’d pounded incessantly on the door, demanding he let her in and talk to her. And when he’d continuously and steadfastly refused she’d threatened to “kick in his antique, handcrafted, mahogany door with her heavy-duty riding boots that he knew would fuck that door right up because he bought them for her and knew exactly how expensive they were and exactly how much she was not screwing around.”

Eventually Dante had relented and after that there was a lot of muffled yelling and what definitely sounded like things being thrown and furniture being knocked over, all of which was typical for a Wallace family argument. “You can never say we lack passion,” Dante had always told him. But it was the eerie silence that came after that was concerning. After they were quiet for so long that Bellamy genuinely began to worry that they had somehow managed to kill each other, he relented and made his way up the stairs.

His soft knock was met with an even softer “come in.”

Bellamy had popped his head in and teased “just wanted to make sure everyone was still alive up here.”

God in hindsight that was such a terrible joke, pun absolutely not intended he swears.

“Yes, yes, everything is just fine Bellamy, fine.” Dante had said quietly. Both he and Clarke had been sitting at his desk, red eyed, red faced, and looking horribly sad and defeated.

“Uh ok,” Bellamy had cleared his throat. “Well can I get either of you anything?”

Dante didn’t answer, still staring at his desk, so Clarke said “No I think we’re fine… Everything is… Fine.”

Dante had looked up at that point. “Yes,” he’d said, still sounding odd. “Just fine… You may go for the day.”

Bellamy should have known at that moment that something was up; it was only 11 am and Dante rarely ever even dismissed him an hour early, much less before noon. But he’d just shrugged it off as “family stuff” he didn’t want or need to get involved in, and made his way home, honestly happy to have a day off.

“All that evidence combined with the fact that, starting several months earlier, Cage had apparently started coming around more often wanting to do “guys night” with grandpa and bringing over whatever absurdly exotic, stupidly expensive liquor he could find that week for them to try, was what finally did it.” Clarke continues her story.

Bellamy remembers that, too. Cage had started coming around in the evenings to visit with Dante and they would drink and smoke cigars out on the screened in porch or in the den. Bellamy had been wary of why Cage started coming over so often when he had basically never made an effort to spend any time “getting to know” his father since Bellamy could remember. Dante had, of course, decided to humor him saying “perhaps there’s still time.” Bellamy had never really figured out what there was possibly still “time” for, given that there was no amount of time in the world that could reform Cage into a halfway decent excuse for a human being. But he guessed that was really none of his business.

When he’d asked about it off-handedly, Cage had thrown him some kind of excuse about “who even knew how much longer the old quack was going to survive, so he needed to get in quality time while he could.” Bellamy had just glared and scoffed quietly when Cage turned his back, chalking it up to Cage being an insensitive asshole and generally awful person who was just trying to make sure he would get his cut after his father died. Bellamy just hadn’t realized exactly how far Cage was willing to go to make that happen. At that moment, Bellamy also remembers that after the Hurricane Clarke situation was apparently resolved, that Dante stopped seeing Cage as often. He would make up well and truly absurd excuses like “he volunteered to referee a charity tennis game… at 7 at night… in the middle of January” for Bellamy to give Cage about why he couldn’t come over in the evenings or why Dante wouldn’t be making it to Cage’s house for their usual Thursday night dinners. Eventually Cage got the message and just gave up; not that Bellamy had minded getting to blow Cage off. It had become one of the highlights of his day.

“It was also me who figured out that the person he was probably trying to pin the poisoning on was you,” Clarke says.

“Okay this is one of the parts I’m still a little fuzzy on,” Miller interjects.

“Same,” Bellamy agrees, with feeling.

“I mean it was basically just simple process of elimination,” Clarke says, like figuring this out had been nothing more than a leisurely stroll in the park. And for her it might have been honestly. She’s terrifying.

“Cage was going to have to pin it on someone, he might be a slimy little shit weasel but he’s not completely stupid. And the fact that you gave grandpa his meds, including his radon shots, every day and night, made you the most obvious and ideal candidate.” She’s right of course. “They were going to need some way to explain the inexplicably high levels of radon in Dante’s system. So the most straight forward strategy would be to make it look like you were either knowingly, willfully, and purposefully trying to kill him, or at least make a solid case for elder abuse and negligent homicide.”

“That’s also why we felt we couldn’t go to the police at that point,” she says sadly. “We had no real idea how long Cage had been at this, except that it had been awhile. And we also had no idea just how much evidence he could have fabricated against you, how well he had covered his tracks. He wasn’t just a step ahead of us, he could have hiked the whole Appalachian trail for all we knew.”

“That’s probably also how he came up with the insulin and morphine ol’ switcheroo scheme,” Kane says.

Switcheroo? Bellamy can’t with this guy, he really just can’t.

“And this is where you lose me,” Miller interjects. “How do we jump from Long-term Radiation Poisoning to Lethal Morphine Overdoes to Slit Throat. Not that I don’t think it’s not possible,” he reassures them, "mostly because you are all insane,” he tacks on to the end. “It’s just that I’m gonna have to explain all this to a jury, and with those three potential causes of death, I can barely draw a Venn diagram… And juries love diagrams, so I’m gonna have to come up with something to show them.”

“Have you considered a histogram?” Kane asks, completely unhelpfully. “I know they have developed a somewhat questionable reputation in the chart and graph community, but there is really something to be said for…”

Miller just levels him with a glare that Bellamy is pretty sure could cut through bullet proof glass and Kane raises his hands in apparent surrender. “Just something to consider.”

“Anyway,” Clarke says, bringing them all back to the task at hand. “Like most heartless psychopaths, Cage is nothing if not a determined little creep. It’s why he has several restraining orders again him. I don’t even know how many it is at this point to be honest.” She glances over at Miller, “Could you look that up for me actually? I’ve always wondered and whenever I try to ask him about it he gets all testy.” Miller just looks at her disapprovingly, but when she turns away Bellamy sees Miller write a quick note on his pad and yeah, he’s totally looking that up. They’re all curious about how many it could possibly even be now.

“Since his quality poisoning time with grandpa had been severely limited once we figured out what he was doing, we knew he was going to come up with another plan. He once called 73 ‘Kate Johnstons’ trying to find a girl who had already changed her phone number once because he wouldn’t stop harassing her. His brand of Relentless Creeper Bravado knows no bounds,” she says with a disgusted, despairing look on her face.

“We could never tell exactly when it was going to happen or how it was going to go down,” Clarke said. “But we knew it would be coming eventually. Grandpa knew he would have to help you when the time came, and he also knew that I would need to be there to have your back and cover anything that might look like your tracks in the aftermath. I mean, I had to make it look like I was throwing you under the bus and then hanging you out to dry. But I really was trying to cover your ass. It’s a great ass, I would have hated for anything to happen to it,” Clarke grins a little like the cat that ate the canary and Bellamy can’t catch himself before he starts to grin back. It’s been a long day alright, there’s no way he’s going to be able to keep track of everything that’s happening and control his facial expressions at the same time, sue him.

God he would be a terrible murderer. There is just way too much going on, he would never have been able to keep all this straight.

“We knew we needed to make the plan, including the final cause of death, airtight so that no average cop would ever even consider you as a suspect. No offense,” she says, glancing over at Miller who just shrugs like he wouldn’t have even considered taking offense in the first place.

“So that’s when it was decided that Clarke would be the Moriarty to our Holmes and Watson,” Kane says with a flourish of his pipe.

“I want you to be the Watson to my Holmes on this Mr. Blake,” Kane had said a few days into the investigation. “As one of the last people to see Dante Wallace alive, you have a unique insight into his state of mind and what happened that frightful night… Whaddya say?”

“Sounds like a dream come true, sir.” Bellamy had deadpanned, biting his cheeks to keep from smiling when he heard Clarke inelegantly, and completely ineffectively, attempt to cover her snort of laughter from somewhere in the background.

Kane had just grinned at him. “The game is afoot, eh Watson?” he’d joked in his comically slow, exaggerated southern drawl. That time he was pretty sure Clarke didn’t even try to choke back her snickering.

“Wait…” Clarke says glancing up at Kane. “Would I technically be Moriarty or Irene?”

“Well,” Kane ponders, stroking that goddamn beard again. “You were technically good even thought you were pretending to be bad, so wouldn’t that make you Irene?”

“Yeah… But I was still pretending to be something I wasn’t, so wouldn’t that just make me Moriarty either way?”

“Guys,” Miller interrupts their exchange.

“Right. Sorry,” Clarke says, like she’s just remembering where she is and what’s happening. Kane, on the other hand, looks like he’s still deeply considering the question and will continue to do so for the time being.

“It was actually the slit throat that tipped me off in the first place,” Clarke says with a little shake of her head and a half smile, half grimace. “If grandpa was really going to commit suicide he would never do it by slitting his throat,” she explains.

“He refused to use it as the cause of death in any of his novels because he considered them ‘offensively unimaginative’ and ‘inelegantly pedestrian’,” Clarke says, doing her best Dante impression which, Bellamy must admit, is pretty good. “But it was an effective way to blatantly show that his death was definitely self-induced. So that’s how I knew that something had gone wrong,” Clarke explains. “And when you told me about the accidental morphine overdose I knew it had to be the King of Try Hard’s plan put in motion and that it was Go Time…. No pun intended,” she adds quickly.

Bellamy runs his hand over his face thinking about the Go board, which is probably locked up in evidence right now, covered in Dante’s blood.

“Apparently,” she continues with a look in her eyes that could only be described as ‘murder mode’, “grandpa Dante was taking too long to die for Cage, so he decided to expedite the process. He knew that grandpa would never be able to say no to his birthday cake at the party.”

It was his favorite, German chocolate. Cage special ordered a huge one from Dante’s favorite bakery just for his birthday Bellamy remembers sourly. “I can’t believe you lived through World War II just to keel over and die from a German induced sugar high,” Bellamy had teased him while Dante dug into his second piece.

“Maybe so,” Dante had grinned at him. “But what a way to go eh?” Bellamy had just chuckled and walked away. He remembers reminding himself to make sure Dante got his insulin that night, and to make sure he got the higher dosage.

He can’t smile or laugh about that memory now though. All he can do is remember the horror and heartbreak that came just a few short hours later. He can feel himself starting to panic as he remembered looking down at the tiny glass bottles that held Dante’s insulin and morphine prescriptions. The terror that almost made his heart stop when he realized he’d given Dante more than 200 milligrams of morphine instead of insulin — more than enough to be a fatal dose.

“Hey, hey, Bellamy you gotta breathe,” he hadn’t even registered her moving, but somehow Clarke was kneeling right in front of him. Bellamy sucks in a deep breath through his mouth, but somehow the oxygen still doesn’t reach his lungs and he starts gasping for air.

He remembers the horror that washed over him as he realized: he’d switched the medication vials; the way it grew and started squeezing his lungs and clawing at his throat as he discovered that the emergency Naloxone was missing from his med kit. He remembers the feeling of urgency washing over him while he quickly told Dante what he did and picked up the phone to dial 911. The confusion when Dante pulled the phone cord out of the wall telling Bellamy they needed to “not be too hasty” and “to think this through” all the while Bellamy desperately trying to tell him that he only had ten minutes.

“Ten minutes until what?” he’d asked blandly.

“Ten minutes until you’re dead Dante! Like, stone cold dead. No do overs, no take backs.” Bellamy remembers trying to yell, but what came out was high pitched, hysterical panic. “We need to get you an ambulance NOW!” He’d lunged for the phone again, but Dante stopped him.

“Bellamy, son, listen to me right now,” Dante had said in his most serious I Am Dante Wallace and I Am Not Fucking Around voice. “If it’s only ten minutes, I’m already as good as gone. There is no way an ambulance could ever get here in ten minutes. We are too far from a main road, too far back on the property.”

“Dante, listen… There is no time, you have to listen! We have to get you help!” Bellamy had begged him, not even trying to maintain any of his composure at that point.

“Stop it! Stop this, Bellamy!” Dante had said, his voice even more serious and harsh. “Don’t you understand? If what you said is true, there is no saving me. If you call for help, the authorities will find you and a dead body and you will be in serious trouble for this. Trouble that you may never recover from.”

“I don’t care!” Bellamy had yelled. “I’ll deserve it!” I killed you, he’d wanted to scream. You’ll be dead and it will be all my fault.

“Think Bellamy, think about this. What about your sister? If you are tied up in, or even bankrupted by, lawsuits and legal proceedings and very possibly end up having to serve jail time, who will take care of Octavia? Who will be there for her? Who will protect her?”

Bellamy had glared over at Dante, he knew O is Bellamy’s kryptonite. He’s right though, Bellamy can’t just leave his baby sister alone in the world, not when he’s the only family she has left. Not when she’s relying on him, when he’s putting a roof over her head and making sure she eats and sleeps and does all those things young adults seem to constantly forget to do. Not when he’s paying for her health insurance and car insurance and putting her through college and planning on helping her with grad school. All with the money he made from this job. Fuck. He can’t just abandon her, can’t bring her whole life crashing down around her. He can’t do to her what was done to him when their mother died.

Dante must have noticed the change in Bellamy’s demeanor because he’d placed his hands on Bellamy’s shoulders and said, “We have to get you out of this. If you go down for this, your family will be broken again, but we aren’t going to let that happen are we? You need to listen to me very carefully and do exactly as I tell you… Will you do this Bellamy? This last thing. For me. For your family.”

He remembers trying to calm himself down and snap himself out of the overwhelming, panic-stricken haze that had overtaken his brain as he tried to pay attention to all of Dante’s instructions. He remembers the frenzied anxiety that he felt trying to remember what Dante had told him to do. Was it the drain pipe on the left or the right side of the house? Was he supposed to turn off the road before or after the tiered fountain?? What was the back-gate lock combination again??? Bellamy had known every single lock combination on the estate for years, but in that moment it had taken him at least six guesses. He remembers the frantic need to get as far away from the estate as quickly as he possibly could as he was driving home.

He remembers walking into his apartment and all the adrenaline that must have been keeping him upright completely disappearing. He remembers dragging himself into his room and lying in his bed all night, not sleeping a wink, just staring at his god awful beige colored bedroom ceiling, sobbing silent tears, a nifty little life hack he had picked up during childhood so as not to wake O who was usually sleeping in the room right next to his, if not in the actual bed right next to him. He remembers the freight train of emotions steamrolling over him as he realized that one of his best friends was dead. That he had killed one of the only true friends he’d ever had in this world.

The thing that he remembers most vividly of all though, was turning around to open the door to Dante’s study right after he’d stepped out to say “Fuck it. I’m calling you a goddamn ambulance, I don’t give a shit,” just in time to see Dante slitting his own throat.

“No, no, in through your nose and out through your mouth Bell,” Clarke says a little more urgently, jerking him back into the present moment. She grabs his hands and pushes her thumbs hard into the middle of his palms, trying to ground him. “Close your mouth and breathe through your nose and think about something else, like Kane’s stupid pipe. I know how much you hate that thing.”

Kane’s expression momentarily turns from concerned to offended. When he opens his mouth Bellamy just knows he’s about to launch into a diatribe about how pipes are traditional and sophisticated and all that shit. The thought makes Bellamy snort out a laugh which interrupts his breathing efforts and he starts gasping again.

Then Kane comes to kneel next to Clarke and looks at Bellamy with the first serious, sincere expression he thinks he’s seen from the man since he met him. “Bellamy, son,” he starts in that ridiculous drawl that Bellamy is sure must be greatly exaggerated, if not totally fake, but doesn’t really know enough about Southern dialect to call him out on it.

“Bellamy listen to me,” Kane goes on, making Bellamy meet his eyes and squeezing his shoulder. “You didn’t kill him, son. You did not kill Dante or do anything that led to or resulted in his death. You are an innocent man, Bellamy Blake.”

Bellamy tries to listen to what they are saying to him, but it sounds like they are talking under water and he feels like he’s drowning.

Miller rushes back into the room with a styrofoam cup that he gives to Clarke who then thrusts it into one of his hands while keeping hold of the other. “Here,” she says decisively, like somehow this cup is going to single handedly subdue the sheer panic tsunami that’s still building up inside him. Maybe they just think he needs something to throw up in. When Bellamy looks down at the cup though, he sees that it's full of ice cubes. “Now start crunching and breathe through your goddamn nose.” He does what he’s told and can’t believe she remembers such a small, insignificant detail like that this is his mental breakdown self-medication of choice.

They had been at the Dropship Diner for about an hour or two, and it was during one of the lulls in their anxiety inducing and more than a little depressing conversation about What the Actual Fuck Happened to Dante that he'd noticed her staring at him.

“What?” he’d asked. “Do I have something on my face?”

Clarke had blinked like someone just woken her up from a coma and then shaken her head a little ruefully. “No,” then she’d smiled slyly at him. “Well… At least not anything you can fix.”

He’d snorted. “So just thinking about who you’re going to hire to slowly and painfully kill me to avenge your grandfather’s death then?” He’d only been about half teasing, give or take. Clarke was very much her grandfather’s granddaughter in that she could be downright terrifyingly intimidating when she wanted to be.

She’d cackled at that. “Definitely not,” she’d laughed. “I mean, why outsource a job I could easily do myself?” Bellamy wouldn’t put it past her to be honest, but her grin while she said it had made the would be threat completely ineffective, and he could feel some of his nerves finally begin to settle a bit.

“I’m honestly just wondering how in the world you still have any teeth,” she'd said, shaking her head. “Did you make some kind of dental deal with the devil? Can he do something about my molars? I mean, I know I clench my jaw all the time, but them chipping so often feels a little dramatic.”

He’d barked out a laugh. “What?”

“Well I’ve watched you chew your way through cup after cup of ice water with the hyper focus of some kind of robot beaver on meth, but I don’t think you’ve actually drank a single drop of actual water.”

Bellamy looks around him and sees that yep, there are about eleven half empty water glasses in front of him that he had sucked the ice out of with the tenacity of a Roomba.

He runs a shaky hand through his hair. “Just a weird coping mechanism,” he’d told her. “I started doing it as a kid. We were too poor to get me on any actual anxiety medication or pay for me to do something constructive with all my nervous energy, like ice dance kickboxing or therapeutic underwater basket weaving or whatever it is you rich kids do.” She’d snorted at that but still nodded her head as if to say fair enough. “But between all my mom’s shitty, drug addict boyfriends and being my little sister’s primary caregiver while still trying to get good enough grades to not get kicked out of the charter school I was in, I had a lot of nervous energy. So yeah, ice chomping it was.”

“Wow,” she’d said. “That took a real hard left from cute childhood anecdote to tragic backstory really quickly. Never even saw the plot twist coming.”

“Yeah, I’ve got a few of those,” he'd told her, trying for a joking tone but completely missing it, if the way her expression had softened was any indication.

"I know you do.” She'd said quietly.

“You know you’d make a perfect broody detective with a tragic childhood in one of my grandpa’s books,” she’d said lightly, obviously trying to bring the levity back to the conversation. “You know, the dramatic ho, asshole with a heart of gold type who says shit like ‘they work outside of the law, but on the side of justice’ .”

He’d just shaken his head and smiled ruefully at her before putting his head in his heads, thinking about how much he was going to fucking miss Dante and willing himself not to start crying again. He’d cried more in those past few days than he had in a long time.

“SO!” she’d said loudly all perk and pep, clapping her hands like an annoyingly upbeat cheerleader and jolting him out of his reverie. “What are we gonna do about the whole ‘you potentially being caught propelling down a drain pipe with the stealth of a cat thrown into a swimming pool a few minutes after grandpa’s overdose’ thing? Because even I gotta say… That one is gonna be a toughie.”

Of course she remembers, he muses, she’s Clarke. And even though he’d never admit it, he’s pretty sure he remembers every single small, insignificant detail he’d ever learned about her too. She’s Clarke after all, his Clarke. The thought comes with such startling clarity and certainty that it’s what finally manages to snap him all the way out of the deep, dark panic hole he had been digging.

He opens his eyes and sees that Kane has moved away giving him some space. But Clarke is still there, holding his hand tightly in hers and stroking her thumb gently over his knuckles. She’s looking up at him from her place on the floor; all soft, concerned blue eyes and earnest, encouraging heartbreaker smile and yeah, he thinks, definitely His Clarke.

“Did you hear what Kane said, Bell?” she asks gently. “You’re innocent, you didn’t do it.”

Bellamy opens his mouth to contradict her, but Miller interrupts him before he can say anything, “It’s true Mr. Blake. Dante Wallace’s official cause of death is in fact blood loss from a self-inflicted stab wound.”

Bellamy opens his mouth again to point out that Dante never would have cut his own throat if Bellamy hadn’t fucked up and given him a huge overdose of morphine, but Miller also interrupts him again. “The toxicology screens and blood tests conducted as part of Mr. Wallace's autopsy also showed that there was no morphine in his system at all, just his normal dosage of insulin. In fact, the only abnormality found on Mr. Wallace's tox screens was an irregularly high level of radon in his system. Inexplicably high, even for someone who had been undergoing regular treatments of radiation or chemotherapy for some time. You didn’t give Dante Wallace an overdose of morphine or any other drug.”

Bellamy just sits there, totally speechless and completely dumbfounded.

“Now that Wallace’s deathly has been unequivocally ruled a suicide, neither you, nor anybody else, is under investigation for his murder,” Miller says firmly.

“But,” he goes on and Bellamy feels his gut clench again. There’s always a but. “In anticipation of the potential event that Dante Wallace’s death was not a suicide, we started considering potential motives. With a man like Dante and his considerable fortune and assets, as I’m sure you could imagine, money was obviously the first thing we came up with.”

“Dante’s oldest child, Abigail Caroline Griffin had no financial motive to want him dead that we could find.” Miller said nodding at Clarke. “Nor could we find any financial motive for his other daughter Antonia Elizabeth Kingcade. Like, none. Absolutely. Whatsoever.” And damn, Bellamy knew that was the god’s honest truth.

Not only was Nia still getting alimony and child support for Ontari from her ex-husband, who somehow managed to make more money than she did, he knew that Nia regularly made a killing in her own career. Figuratively that is; although it’s totally possible Nia actually kills people as part of her job, he wouldn’t be that surprised. Bellamy never knew what exactly it was that Nia did honestly; every time he’d try to ask someone, including her own son, they would open their mouths and start to answer him only to say something like “huh” and scratch their heads trying to figure out if they just couldn’t remember or ever even knew in the first place. Eventually they would start to look like they were thinking so hard they might hurt themselves, so Bellamy would just say “never mind” and eventually gave up trying to find out. All he really knew about what Nia did for a living was that she did a lot of it and that she did it very well. Well enough to land herself a spot on the high ends of all those “Fortune 500,” “50 Most Influential Under 50,” “Lifestyles of the Super Rich and Powerful,” "Have Never Paid Their Federal Income Taxes," "We Could Probably End First World Poverty But Just Choose Not To," lists that magazines like Forbes and Time made year after year.

“His oldest son Cage Bradford Wallace however,” Miller says with a pained look on his face like the name is so douchey it offends him to have to say it. Bellamy will hand it to him that it is an offensively douchey name. It's almost like his parents knew he was going to be an offensive douche bag and named him accordingly, “had more motivation than a Richard Simmons workout video. Turns out that Wallace Jr. has been running his ‘investment firm’ less as a business and more as a personal piggy bank. We think he figured out a long time ago that it was going to catch up with him and that he was going to have to somehow magically replace all the money he’d stolen from his investors. But apparently the scheme he came up with the get that money was less magical and more... attempted homicidal.”

“We have a forensics team sweeping his home, his car, and his office right now as well as digging through all his trash,” Miller says. “And I’m not a betting man… At least not during the week anyway… But I am more than willing to bet we are going to find radon residue all over Cage’s entire life from the past year or so.”

The door swings open, interrupting Miller’s monologue, which he looks vaguely put out by. “Not probably, definitely.” It’s Detective Reyes, Miller’s partner and head of the forensics team on the case, and who is the same brand of disconcertingly intelligent and unnervingly observant that Clarke is.

The first time he’d met her, she’d been taking his fingerprints and DNA sample and collecting fingernail scrapings and whatever else it is forensic people collect. He was having a hard time focusing at that point, the panic fog still hanging thick over his brain.

“Okay, you’re all set!” She’d declared when she was finished with whatever it was she was doing. “I’ll let you get back to your cat.”

“My…?” he’d started, staring dumbly at her.

“Your… cat…,” she’d said slowly, like she was trying to explain the rules of Candy Land to a four year-old. “Orange Calico, I’m pretty sure… Might be a Tabby though.”

“How did you…?”

She’d reached over to pluck off a tiny orange hair Sphinx must have left on his jacket that his heavy-duty lint roller didn’t catch. Then she’d just grinned like a wolf and left him with a cheery “have a nice day!” and blown out of the room in a whirlwind as quickly as she came in.

“We also strongly suspect that Carl Emerson Wallace is a co-conspirator in his father’s death,” Kane adds flipping his little coin thingy again. Bellamy decides that he really doesn’t need to work both the pipe and the coin at the same time. One would be enough for him to maintain whatever vibe he’s going for. Bellamy still isn’t completely sure what that vibe is exactly, but at this point he’s a little too afraid, and mostly too tired, to ask.

“Not only did he also have a financial motive,” Reyes says letting a stack of file folders drop loudly onto the table and making everyone in the room jump, “being that he too was broke. But a search of his car turned up a small vial of Naloxone, which he has no business or reasonable explanation for having in the first place. And it will likely prove to be the emergency Naloxone missing from your kit.”

The emergency Naloxone Bellamy needed that night. The Naloxone that would have saved Emerson’s own father’s life. Bellamy can’t help but clench his jaw and tighten his hold on Clarke’s hand. Fucking Emerson, this would be the one time he manages to do something vaguely useful or slightly right.

“Okay. Ow. Bell,” Clarke interrupts his mental tirade by poking his leg. “I know I’m not your favorite person right now, but maybe we can negotiate about which of my appendages you get to rip off? Because I like my fingers, and I just got this manicure.”

Bellamy looks down to see that Clarkes fingers are literally turning white in his grip. “Sorry,” he says sheepishly letting go of her hand. He can’t help but chuckle, both at himself and over the fact that Clarke doesn’t know she’s basically his favorite person in any given room at any given time. Even, evidently, when she’s fake framing him for murder.

She just smiles ruefully at him and gives his hand one more warm, reassuring squeeze before making her way back to where she had been sitting on the other side of the table. He wants to drag her back over to him; to take her hand back in his and fold her under his arm and know she’s on his side again. But he doesn’t, he can maintain some level of chill. He can.

“We knew Cage would fuck up at some point,” Clarke says once she’s settled. “He might be a clever little douche canoe, but he’s not that smart. And his first major fuck up was thinking you would fuck up.”

"He switched are the vials in your med kit," Miller says when Bellamy looks at him questioningly, "or had someone switch them around for him, as the case may be."

Fucking Emerson.

"It was as simple as using the syringes in your kit to switch the liquids in the insulin and morphine medication vials, and then taking the emergency Naloxone as a precaution," Reyes explains. "So simple even an idiot like Emerson could apparently do it."

Bellamy might just end up in jail for murder after all before this is over, because he is going to fucking kill Emerson.

“Apparently, the one thing Cage didn’t count on was that, unlike him, you are actually competent at your job,” Kane says pulling several small vials out of his bag on the floor next to him and setting them on the table in front of Bellamy. "Not just competent; dedicated, skilled, exceptional, unerringly so it turns out. And for that reason, you did not give Dante an overdose, you did not use the incorrect medication. You switcherooed the switcheroo."

Bellamy can't even be annoyed at Kane's word choice, because he is genuinely to stunned to think straight.

“That’s impossible,” he manages to choke out. “I was there… I know what I… I know I gave him an overdose.”

“No, you didn’t,” Kane counters. “Here, I’ll show you… Hand me that vial of morphine.”

Without thinking Bellamy grabs the bottle of morphine from the table and hands it to Kane, who takes it from him grinning. “If you look Mr. Blake, you’ll see that I have taped over the labels of all these medication vials, and the vials themselves are identical… So how did you know this was the morphine?”

“I just knew,” Bellamy says shocked as hell and honestly surprised he can talk.

“Yes, you just knew. You knew because there are the slightest, almost imperceptible difference of tincture and viscosity between all these liquids. You knew because you had administered these exact same medications to Dante Wallace steadfastly and without fail every night for years. You knew because you'd done it hundreds, if not thousands, of times. You gave him the correct medication because you are a good care giver.”

“Then Dante was…?”

“I’m sorry Mr. Blake, but yes,” Kane says sadly. “Mr. Wallace was perfectly fine. His blood was normal. The cause of death was truly, solely suicide, and you are guilty of nothing but some slight property damage in the form of a broken drainpipe and a few amateur, albeit impressive, theatrics. In fact, if he had listened to you and called the ambulance, he would be alive today.”

Bellamy swears his heart actually breaks in that moment. He can feel the sharp, relentless pain starting in his chest and radiating through his entire body as he puts a hand over his mouth and chokes out a strangled sob.

“Yeah,” Clarke says sounding and looking absolutely miserable. “You would think he would have learned at some point to just listen to you,” she tries to tease, but it doesn’t quite land.

“Anyway,” she says curtly, quickly wiping a tear off her cheek like it’s personally offending her. “Once we found out that grandpa had left you literally everything, Cage was even more likely to start getting sloppy and desperate. But what we couldn’t have happen was for us to wait for Cage to dig his own grave and have you go down in the meantime. And I just so happened to be the perfect scapegoat,” a little bit of her grin coming back. “The greedy, self-obsessed granddaughter whose more than willing to hang ‘the help’ out to dry so she can get her perfectly moisturized hands on her share of granddaddy dead and dearest’s dough.”

It’s in that moment that Bellamy actually understands just how immeasurably huge of a gamble Clarke took in risking her ass for this. Sure, it was a calculated risk, with several elaborate fail safes and back up plans, but still. As he begins to truly appreciate what Clarke had done, what she had been willing to do, all for him, to keep him out of trouble. The guilt settles over him like a dark, heavy cloud. He’s spent days hating her. He has said some truly heinous things about her in anger. He had no second thoughts about believing the absolute worst of her. She’s supposed to be his friend. He should have known she would never truly do something like try to frame him for murder she committed. Hell, he should have known that she wasn’t even capable of committing any type of murder at all, much less the one of a person she loved. Clarke could never in any time, dimension, or universe do anything like that. Not his Clarke.

She must notice the heaviness settle over him because when he opens his mouth to start apologizing to her, he’s not above begging really, she puts her hand up and says “I know what you’re gonna say, and don’t… I also know exactly what you’re thinking, and stop.” Honestly he’s sure she really does know, she always knows somehow.

“Yeah sure it was risky,” she says with a shrug, like possibly going down for first degree murder is about as potentially risky as buying a lottery ticket. “But, given the fact that I didn’t actually kill grandpa Dante, they never would have been able to come up with much more than a pretty weak, completely circumstantial case against me… Again, no offense,” she says to Miller who just nods as if to say ‘well, it’s not untrue.’

“And besides, it’s not like I couldn’t afford adequate legal representation who could have totally gotten me out of it. I mean, we might have had to sell one of the summer homes, but it’s like they always say: victory stands on the back of sacrifice,” she says with a completely straight face.

That does startle a bark of a laugh out of him, but the guilt is still there. It’s pinched between his eyebrows and clenched in his fists and sitting heavy in his gut. He knows he won’t be free of it until he really gets to talk to her. Just the two of them. Together. But this clearly isn’t the time or the place to do it. There’s already way too much going on.

“Here’s what I don’t get,” Miller interrupts, startling Bellamy. He had genuinely forgotten Miller was there, or that they were in a police station, and pretty much everything else that was happening. Clarke tends to have that effect on people. Well, mostly him, that he knows of; but he’s sure there are others somewhere. “Why not just tell Bellamy all of this?”

“Kane wasn’t just being figurative or facetious when he said Bellamy was ‘too honest’ to be in on it,” Clarke says. “He is literally incapable of being a convincing enough liar for us to have told him anything about it. He has an unfortunately obvious tell when he tries to lie.”

Ah, so Dante told her about the stutter. Bellamy knows he shouldn’t be surprised really, especially now that he knows Clarke was Dante’s ghost writer. And Clarke was observant as hell, it was totally possible that she just picked up on it herself. He tried not to make it a habit to lie to his employers, but when you are working for the impossibly rich and impossible to please, sometimes it’s necessary. He could usually make it through a quick fib without his voice shaking too much, but he knew it was still noticeable if you were paying attention or looking for it.

“Yeah,” he says with a grimace. “It’s a little nervous habit I picked up during childhood.” He knows that’s putting it very, very lightly. He’s not sure exactly how much Dante would have told Clarke about how Bellamy developed the “stammers when he tries to lie” thing. Probably not much, considering the fact that it’s not a particularly fun or entertaining story to tell.

It had started with one of his mom’s shitty boyfriends, who happened to be O’s dad, which came with the unfortunate side effects of him not just being around for a while, but actually living with them for an extended period of time. While all of Aurora Blake’s boyfriends had been shitty humans in general, this one’s particular brand of shiftiness was a drug induced one. The guy, whose name Bellamy refuses to remember on principle, was a crazy, paranoid tweaker who had decided that 10 year-old Bellamy was somehow the root cause of all his problems and the bane of his entire existence.

When Aurora was at work he would yell and scream and threaten Bellamy for hours on end, sometimes keeping him up until the early hours of the morning when his mom had to work the night shift. He would sit Bellamy down at the kitchen table and pace around the kitchen, using the “bad cop” style of interrogation that Bellamy recognized from those crime shows he definitely didn’t secretly watch while his mom was at work or he was at a friend’s house. He would accuse Bellamy of lying to him, of stealing from him, of spying on him, having him followed, trying to take over his mind, trying to body snatch him. Of being everything from a Ded to a demon haunting the apartment to a rare alien species trying to take over the world and make humans their slaves.

Eventually he started throwing in threats about hurting his Mom and O, who was still just an infant at the time, and Bellamy got so terrified of the dude’s escalating behavior that he just started making things up and telling him what he wanted to hear. Typically, this would appease him and he would calm down for a while until he shot up again and the process started all over. Bellamy would admit to anything, confess anything, say literally anything just to make it stop.

He got so used making things up that he almost couldn’t tell what was the truth and what was lies anymore, except for one thing that kept them apart for him. Bellamy would try to come up with stories so quickly and talk faster than he could think and get so terrified and nervous that whenever he came up with a lie, he would stutter, desperately making things up as he went, just trying to get it out before the yelling and screaming started all over again. It started happening with other people and in normal, everyday conversations too. And before he knew it, he couldn’t even tell a simple fib without breaking out into cold sweats and stammering uncontrollably.

That had gone on for what was probably way too long, until it eventually escalated into the shitty boyfriend demanding Aurora kick Bellamy out because he was actually some kind of government drone sent to spy on them. For what reason the government would give enough of a fuck about this deadbeat, drug head to send a drone to spy on him, Bellamy could never figure out. And it was honestly kind of a moot point anyway because Aurora had ultimately refused, obviously. While she had horrible taste in men and difficulties holding down a job, she made for damn sure that no one fucked with her kids.

It was after that incident that Aurora sat Bellamy down and explained to him that while she counted on him to look after his sister, he also needed to look out for himself. That she wanted to look out for the both of them, so she needed to know when someone treated either of them badly, or he thought someone was treating her badly. That if anyone ever hurt or scared him or his sister, or gave him a bad feeling, he could tell her and they would be gone, no questions asked. And to Bellamy’s surprise she actually kept that promise for the remainder of her life. But unfortunately, “the rest of her life” would only be a few more short years. He lost a lot of things when his mom passed: he lost her, he lost his sister for a while, he lost his home, and he lost any small sense of stability and security he’d had in his life. But the stammer stubbornly refused to take a hike. Now it’s just a part of his everyday life, a quirky personality trait. At best, it’s a fun, if not kind of bizarre, party trick. And at worst, it’s some stubbornly residual PTSD resulting from a depressingly tragic back story that Bellamy probably should have gotten years of therapy for. And hey, now that he’s loaded, he can actually afford it.

Dante had found it absolutely fascinating. He even used an adaptation of it in one of his books. One of the main characters in the novel was a young woman who had a “regurgitative reaction to mistruthing” or, in other words, she blew chunks every time she even thought about telling a lie. Bellamy hadn’t particularly cared for that rather unflattering iteration of his condition. But apparently Dante’s publisher’s thought it was inspired and his readers went absolutely nuts for it, so he just got over himself.

“But grandpa Dante didn’t need to know any of that to be sure that you were the right person to trust to leave in charge of his estate,” Clarke says. “I still can’t believe how genuinely shocked some of them were that he would leave you something… Leave you everything even… I saw it coming honestly.”

“See my grandpa knew you Bellamy Blake. Even when he found out he couldn’t trust his own family, his own children, even we he thought he could no longer trust his own judgment, he knew he could trust you. He knew you wouldn’t sell his stories or his company off to whoever was the highest bidder like Nia wanted to, that you would make sure it went into the hands of someone who would respect his vision. He knew you would never do something as cruel as leave Maya in the lurch with her blood transfusions, but would be able to keep Emerson from seeing ‘one red dime’.”

Bellamy can’t help but smile at Clarke’s use of one of her grandfather’s favorite dramatic epitaphs; but at the same time, he feels his gut clench at the memory of the phone call he got from Maya the other day while he and Clarke were sitting in the Dropship Diner, staring at what had to have been at least their fourth pot of coffee.

“Hey Bellamy,” she had sounded nervous, her voice strained.

“Maya? Are you okay? Did something happen?”

“No… I was just wondering if you had decided what you were going to do yet? With grandpa’s estate? Are going to keep it or…?” she trailed off at the end.

“I don’t know yet Maya,” he’d told her. “I’m still in shock my head is spinning, I can’t even…”

“I think you need to give it back,” she interrupted him in a harsh tone she’d never used with him before. “I mean, it’s the right thing to do Bellamy. This family… We were always good to you. We’ve always been really good to you and your sister… It wouldn’t be right just taking everything from us like that… It was shitty of grandpa to put you in this position and I think you really just need to…”

She’s rambling, her voice is getting even more high pitched, it sounds like she’s panicking. Somethings not right, he can tell. “Maya, slow down okay. Just… Tell me what’s going on.”

He hears her choke back something like a hysterical sob.

“Shitgoddamnitfuck,” she sounds even worse. “I can’t do this. God, I’m sorry Bell! I’m so fucking sorry I’m…”

“It’s fine,” he tries to keep his voice level, nonchalant, reassuring. “Just tell me what’s up.”

“My dad can’t afford my treatment on his own.” Bellamy swears he can feel his balls drop and a cold dread settles over him. “My dad is… He’s broke Bell… He can’t pay for them, grandpa was paying for everything and now he’s not and I don’t know what will happen if I stop being able to get my treatment Bellamy, I don’t even know if I’ll…”

Bellamy knows: she’ll die. Maybe not right away, but eventually, her condition will turn from manageablely life threatening to undoubtedly fatal. Without the ridiculously expensive medication she has to take and her bi-weekly dialysis and transfusions, her blood will start clotting, her immune system will stop being able to fight off infection, her bone marrow will break down, and her body will collapse in on itself. He’s not a doctor or nurse, but he’s been around enough sick people to know what all the big words and scary jargon add up to.

He was there a few years back when the Wallaces called one of their rare Official Family Meetings and were told that Maya’s aplastic anemia had progressed to full blown paroxysmal nocturnal hemoglobinuria. He was there when Dante called in doctor after doctor and flew in experts and specialists from around the world to get 2nd and 3rd and eventually 12th and 13th opinions. He was there when Maya would stay over at the estate for days at a time, not wanting to be home alone while her step-dad went off on one of his “business trips,” (aka his week-long benders in Vegas or Miami or where ever there wasn't currently a warrant out for his arrest for some kind of misdemeanor). He was there when Maya would break down and crack under the depression and the fear of dying. And he was there when Dante would cry on his shoulder over the helplessness he felt that, even with all his fame and fortune and infinite resources, he couldn’t fix this for her.

God, it was just like Emerson to blow through all their money without giving a second thought to his 16 year-old step daughter and her life threatening condition for which she needed continuous care for the foreseeable future. Bellamy never got the chance to know Ada Vie, Maya’s mom, very well; but at least he knew she loved and took care of her daughter. He could never figure out why the fuck Emerson got married in the first place, especially to a woman who already had a kid. He had no interest in being a husband and even less interest in being a dad. Bellamy had always slightly suspected he married Ada for her own family money, and now that he knows Emerson has blown through it all, it’s not even a suspicion anymore. Ada had died suddenly a few years after they got married, and after the dust settled Emerson was left with a step-daughter and dependent whose share of her mother’s estate he controlled and had apparently plowed over like a goddamn 18-wheeler on the interstate.

“Hey listen to me Maya,” she’d been crying in earnest at that point, still apologizing for trying to guilt and manipulate him. “No matter what I decide, nothing bad is going to happen to you. I won’t let it, I would never do that,” he’d promised her. And he’d meant it. Dante was always more of a father figure to Maya than Emerson ever was, and Bellamy knew beyond all shadow of any possible doubt that Dante would have wanted Maya to be taken care of.

He hadn’t been able to figure out why Dante hadn’t left anything to Maya or any instructions about her care in his Will, but now it was clear. Maya was underage and would be for the next two years. Until she turned 18 her legal guardian would have control over the funds left to her as well as if and how they were used. And that legal guardian would have been Emerson. After finding out that Emerson had not only been scamming him, but also using Maya’s inheritance from her mother as his own personal piggy bank, there was no way Dante would have ever trusted his son with this.

“The only one of his kids Dante really worried about cutting out of the will was my mom. But in the end, he knew she would respect his decision like she always did, even when she didn’t understand it. Besides,” Clarke grins, “it’s not like she was left high and dry or anything. My dad left her with a pretty cushy set up when he died.”

Jacob Griffin, also known as Mr. Go-Green; the environmental engineer responsible for most of the prototypes used for the U.S.’s eco-friendly technology. The man who helped spearhead sustainable energy as the world knew it. Yeah, Bellamy could imagine his wife wouldn’t have much to worry about after he died, and his daughter too.

As if Clarke could tell what he’s thinking she adds, “I mean obviously he set me and Madi up nicely too. But honestly, I do pretty well for myself… Who knew that working as a research assistant and ghost writer for one of the most famous crime novelists in history would be so lucrative?!” There’s that smirk of hers again. This time he doesn’t even try to stop himself from smiling back as he feels the last bit of the knot that’s been in his stomach since Dante died finally begin to fade.

“We figured Roan wouldn’t be too much of a problem either since he hates this family’s money on principle and probably wouldn’t have even taken his part of Nia’s inheritance in the first place. Plus,” she goes on, “he would be on the opposite side of his mother and sister purely out of spite. Apparently he’s not hurting for cash either,” she adds. “Did you know that he owns the largest and most lucrative chain of non-medicinal marijuana dispensaries in the North Eastern U.S? Roan, an entrepreneur… Who knew right?!?”

Bellamy actually did know that; Roan told him once while they were commiserating over some of Dante’s good whiskey. What he didn’t know was that Roan was keeping it under wraps or not telling his family though, apparently the combination of top shelf liquor and good weed makes Roan chatty. Or maybe it was just Bellamy that made Roan chatty. Bellamy has that effect on people, as it turns out. Yet another one of his sparkling personality traits that seems to get him in predicaments like the one he is in now.

“I’m kinda jealous of how much he’s winning at life honestly,” Clarke groans. “God… How did the cousin who thought he could practice Santaria and unironically wore dreads and spent multiple summers following Black Sabbath around on their world tours end up being the one with a successful career and functional relationship?”

“According to E!News he’s dating that insanely hot, Icelandic supermodel with no last name. God what is her name?” Clarke starts tapping her head like she’s trying to poke her brain into submission. “Gecko…? Ghetto…? Techno…?”

“Echo.” Miller says in a patronizing tone implying that not only Clarke, but everyone on this planet, in this world should be aware of the information.

“Yes!” Clarke cries out, snapping her fingers at him and making Bellamy jump, “ECHO! Oh my god thank you, that was going to drive me nuts!”

Miller nods at her like he’s willing to let it go this time, but he won’t tolerate such an infraction again.

“Pft you would know that,” Reyes chimes in with a scoff. “I swear, for a dude who is strictly dickly, you are more knowledgeable about supermodels than anyone I’ve ever met. You’re like a walking Hot Chick Encyclopedia.”

“Don’t you have something to be analyzing with some super overpriced high techy-tech thing that we paid way too many hard working, taxpayer dollars for somewhere?” Miller asks her wryly.

“Roger that, chief.” She says with a mock salute.

“So nice to meet you by the way!” she says to Kane on her way out the door. “I’m a huge fan… You’re so much taller in person than I thought you’d be.”

Kane beams radiantly at her and places his hand over his heart like that was the most touchingly gratifying compliment he had ever received. And with that, Reyes breezes out of the room, flicking her perfect pony tail behind her.

“Anyway,” Clarke says, presumably finished with her lamenting and ready to get back to business. “Grandpa knew that those of us he actually wanted to leave money to didn’t actually need it or honestly didn’t give enough of a fuck to try to get our hands on it. My mom and I are set. We both have plenty of savings, we both work, and we’ll have no problem making sure Madi goes to good schools and can take up all the ridiculously expensive and completely useless hobbies she wants.” Bellamy snorts at that and Clarke grins again.

“Roan and his inhumanly hot girlfriend are off conquering the weed market, one pot lollipop at a time, and Maya’s medical care would be taken care of. You were the perfect choice.

“But unfortunately,” Kane says gravely, “that also made you even more of a target for Cage.”

“Idiot kept his cool for about a day and a half after you were released before he tried to hire a hitman,” Miller scoffs.

Bellamy startles at that, “He what?”

“Oh don’t worry,” Miller says waving him off, a scooch too nonchalant about Bellamy's life hanging in the balance for his liking. “We had his phone tapped and got a warrant for his arrest as soon as he made the call.”

“He also just so happened to call an undercover federal agency posing as some kind of hitman concierge service. It’s like he Googled ‘hitmen in my area’ and then just called the first number that showed up. Pleeb,” Miller scoffs again, like the murder for hire business should be easier to figure out than a single serve Kuerig.

“He was brought in about an hour after you were,” Miller says, looking down as gets a message on his phone. “And apparently Emerson is being brought in right now, so I need to go deal with that and you two,” he says pointing at Bellamy and Clarke, “are free to go.”

As Miller is walking out of the room he says over his shoulder, “if you have any questions or concerns, please don’t hesitate to call Detective Reyes... Or Lieutenant Pike… Or Sargeant Byrne… Or even Petty Officer Jordan if you’re feeling desperate... Basically anyone but me to be honest. After this amount of white people nonsense, I’m going on sabbatical.” And with that he’s gone, letting the door slam behind him.

Kane says something about needing to greet his “adoring public” and fixes his bowtie as he starts to strut, all pomp, circumstance, and perfectly coiffed hair, towards the doors at the front of the station, while Bellamy follows Clarke as she heads to more discreet back exit.

Standing in the back parking-lot, she puts on her big floppy hat and hilariously huge sunglasses and Bellamy can’t help but remember the first time he ever encountered Clarke Griffin. It was right after he’d started working for Dante; Clarke had pulled up to the house in her latest model Mercedes Benz looking like she’d traipsed straight out of a Lily Pulitzer catalog, all impeccably dressed, and flawlessly made up, and perfectly curled blonde beautifulness. She’d skipped up the front steps announcing that her spring break trip to Cabo was canceled so she was here to visit her grandfather.

“You’re new,” she’d said, looking at him over the lenses of her ridiculously, unnecessarily large sunglasses that she was still wearing inside.

“I usually go by Bellamy,” he’d responded flatly.

Clarke had grinned at him like she approved, even though he didn’t give a single shit about getting her approval. He swears, he did not.

Then she’d stuck out her hand and said “I’m Clarke Griffin, the prodigal, heathen granddaughter.”

“Heathen?” he’d asked her raising an inquisitive eyebrow and shaking her hand.

“Feminist, agnostic, bisexual, liberal Democrat takes way longer to say,” she’d said, still smiling widely. “Nice to meet you.”

He’d had to put an embarrassing amount of effort into keeping a straight face and not give into her grin. “Uh huh,” he’d said “your grandpa is in his study.”

After that he’d though she was just another dumb, ditzy, blonde, rich princess who had no idea how privileged she was and did things like blow wild amounts of money on fancy cars and trips to Cabo and whatever else it was that princesses spent their money on because she could.

While he’d figured out very quickly that he couldn’t have been more wrong about the dumb, ditzy, and ignorant parts (and about the spoiled princess thing too, admittedly. But he refused to give up the nickname on principle because it got such a rise out of her and riling her up was one of his favorite pastimes. He might have never gotten past the whole “pony tail pulling” stage of flirtation, but he’s working on it. Mostly), he was right about Clarke doing things just because she could.

She definitely did things like blow money on exorbitantly expensive shoes and even more expensive booze; and take last minute trips on jets and yachts to the Hamptons or the Virgin Islands or wherever it is rich people go when they need to “unwind” from their completely stress free lives; and eat caviar on crackers as an “afternoon snack;” and get the same kind diamond infused nail polish manicures that Beyoncé does; and always have the latest models of cars and computers and even a moped that one time. All because she could.

But she also did things like give thousands of dollars and hours of her time to countless charities; and maintain multiple scholarships for low income students interested in STEM and sustainable energy in her dad’s name; and spend her winter vacations working at places like a Sri Lankan elephant orphanage or a battered women’s shelter in El Salvador; and buy staggeringly over the top generous birthday and Christmas gifts for Bellamy and Octavia like all new stainless steel kitchen appliances for their apartment because the ones they had were “tragic,” and those stupidly expensive running shoes O had had her eye on along with a new iPod because “She can’t run without an iPod, Bell. She’s not an animal”, and the annotated first editions of The Iliad and The Odyssey that her book dealer managed to find (because of course she had a book dealer), all of which she apparently got “great deals on” and refused to return because they were all conveniently “final sale;” and pay for everyone’s meals and bar tabs and cover charges and Uber rides and movie tickets and concert seats and amusement park passes and, a few notable times, their hospital bills without even thinking twice or accepting a word of thanks or asking for a penny in return. Just because she could.

He’d asked her once, about the gifts. “Not that I don’t appreciate it,” he’d said quickly. “Obviously I do. A lot. Like, so much. I’m just kind of wondering… ya know… why?“

“Because you deserve them,” she’d answered immediately without looking up from whatever she was viciously typing on her phone in her latest Twitter fight with whichever woefully misguided, conservative, alt right, incel, neck-beard, dude bro had dared to take her on that week.

Then she’d tilted her head up at him with her little smirk he was a completely normal amount of obsessed with. “And because I can.”

Once he’d gotten to know the real Clarke, he still couldn’t help but laugh and heckle her about her over dramatic eye and head wear that made her look like a widow visiting her convict pen pal turned clandestine lover in prison where he was serving time for tax fraud. She is absolutely one of those ridiculously over the top rich people and she absolutely knows it. But her ridiculousness is far surpassed by her kind-hearted, earnest generosity. That was just Clarke.

His Clarke.

“Oh! Before I forget!” Clarke exclaims, reaching into her absurdly large purse, which he must say goes perfectly with her attire. She pulls out a thick manila envelope and hands it to him. “Grandpa Dante wanted me to make sure this got to you. I mean, it’s technically yours anyway since he quite literally left you everything,” she smirks at him again. “But he especially wanted to make sure this made it directly into your hands.”

Their fingers brush as she hands him the envelope and instead of pulling away she twists his fingers into his. “Look Bell,” she starts awkwardly. “I know this was all really fucked up, like beyond fucked up, Kardashian levels of fucked up even… But I just want you to know I am so sorry.”

“More sorry than words can say. For every thing... And I totally get it if you can’t trust me anymore or don’t want to be friends with me,” she starts rambling. “I mean I probably wouldn’t want to be friends with me either after this. Honestly if I could ghost myself right now…”

Bellamy just chuckles and tugs on her hand until she’s close enough for him to press his lips to hers. It’s a totally chaste, 8th grade style kiss. But still, she lets out this little sigh against his lips; and if they weren’t literally standing in the parking lot of a police station right at this moment, the situation definitely would have escalated from tolerable PDA to public indecency.

Instead he just pulls his lips away but keeps his forehead pressing against hers. He opens his eyes and finally feels relaxed for the first time in what feels like an eternity. He’d been wondering where his ability to breath normally had run off to. Figures it had been with her the whole time.

“I’m trying to come up with something really smooth to say right now,” he says, “but I’ve been dealing with a little stress lately so I’m kind of off my game.”

“It’s ok,” Clarke says, eyes still closed, more than a little breathless he thinks proudly. “You’ve never been smooth, I don’t know why you would start now.”

He starts to object that he is the smoothest, but she just pulls his mouth back down to hers and he figures there are much better things his lips can be doing at this current juncture. And when she throws both her arms around his neck to get him closer he finds himself yet again wishing the nearest building weren’t literally full of cops so that he could press her up against the side of it.

When they pull away for air he can’t help but think about how damn smug as shit Dante would be about being instrumental in pushing Bellamy and Clarke together. This probably wasn’t quite how he imagined it going down, but still.

Dante had never outright pressured them, or come out and said they should go on a date, or anything of the sort. No, Dante knew his granddaughter needed to go at her own pace, knew she need time and space to grieve and move on after girlfriends’ death, and, most importantly, knew she would vehemently resist being ordered or pushed into anything. Instead he would find small, yet absurdly unsubtle ways, to nudge them towards each other, to suggested how they would be good together.

Sometimes it was Dante all of the sudden “feeling a tired spell” or “losing his appetite” when he had arranged for his personal chef to make a nice lunch for the three of them, leaving Bellamy and Clarke alone out on the patio, rolling their eyes and chuckling awkwardly into their salmon club sandwiches and sweet iced teas. Other times he would request Bellamy go pick up Clarke when she would work for him during the summer do he wouldn’t have to “wait around for Lincoln or bother him with such a short trip when Bellamy could easily do it,” all while Lincoln, Dante’s own personal chauffeur, sat approximately 20 feet away on the patio where he had been all morning, snorting behind his newspaper. And then there were the times when Dante would have an oddly specific, and usually vaguely ridiculous and completely unnecessary, errand he needed Clarke to run at the exact same time Bellamy would be running his own errands for Dante, and “oh well wasn’t that convenient that they could just go together?!”

Typically, Dante’s antics were met with raised eyebrows, unimpressed expressions, and the occasional snort or sigh from both of them. They had only ever acknowledged it between them once while they were on their way to Saks one summer a few years ago. Dante had decided he needed Clarke to pick out some new swim trunks for him for the pool he literally never used because “she had the best taste in seasonal attire” and needed Bellamy to go with her to make sure the material of whatever she picked out “wasn’t too scratchy.”

“I can’t decide,” she’d said flatly, “if I’m more offended by him thinking he’s actually fooling us with this, or by his clear belief in my total and complete lack of game.”

Bellamy had snorted while desperately trying to come up with something to say about how he thought she had great game, the best game ever, like Shaq level game, without sounding like a total moron when Clarke’s phone had pinged with another text notification.

“He said he also needs flip flops,” she’d said raising an eyebrow. “But the ones without ‘the thingies that go between your toes’.”

“God, what does it say about me that I actually know exactly what he’s talking about?” Bellamy had groaned in response.

She’d looked over at him and they had both burst out laughing. The moment may have been ruined, but he had always been of the opinion that laughing with Clarke Griffin was a moment in and of itself. She didn’t really, truly, genuinely laugh all that often. She would usually cackle or snort, and there was the occasional chuckle, but the only person who seemed to have the innate talent for well and truly cracking Clarke up was her grandfather. Bellamy would hear them both losing it over something or other behind the closed doors of Dante’s study when she would come visit him or do whatever work it was she did for him over the summer. It seemed like someone had taught Clarke at some point in her life that she was only allowed a finite amount of happy and carefree moments, so he always felt a weird sense of accomplishment when he got to witness one; and being the cause of one was even better.

He opens his eyes and sees that right now she’s wearing the biggest, brightest, most beautiful, bonafide Clarke Griffin smile he’s ever witnessed, and he’s more than a little smug that he put it there. They stand there for a minute, just breathing each other in, until she pulls away slightly and beams up at him.

“Well,” she says giving him one last peck on the lips. “You’re about to have to answer an entire metric shit ton of questions from the media who will probably be here in about 3 minutes and 47 seconds, give or take. And while I usually love a good press conference, I haven’t showered in about 3 days and there is no amount of dry shampoo in the world that could tame the epic tragedy that is currently my hair.”

She steps out of his arms and starts digging around in her Mary Poppins bag for her keys. “Wait...” he says incredulously, “you’re leaving me? To face them all alone?! Clarke, how am I supposed to give a press conference?!? You know I can barely even talk on the phone!”

“Oh Bell,” she says patting his shoulder affectionately. “You’re rich now… Rich people can do anything!”

“You’re a dick!” Bellamy calls as she starts walking towards her car.

“You know you love me!” she yells back and yeah, he definitely does. He’s not gonna tell her right this second or anything, but he does.

She blows him an exaggeratedly loud kiss as she hops into the driver’s seat and revs her engine obnoxiously as she speeds away and God he’s totally gonna marry her, he thinks grinning like an idiot, he has no doubt. He’s going to be the shameless, boy toy, arm candy, trophy husband of one of the coolest chicks in the entire world and it’s going to be awesome.

It’s not until hours later when Bellamy gets home that night (gets to his new home holy fucking shit), after Cage and Emerson’s very public arrests, after the press conference clearing Bellamy and Clarke of all wrong doing, after posing with Kane for an endless number of photographs. and after answering what had to be a floppily trillion questions for the media, that Bellamy remembers the envelope. He pulls it out of his bag and slowly opens the seal. Inside is a thick stack of papers with a letter on top in Dante’s messy scrawl.

Dear Bellamy,

Thank you for being a kindred spirit, a loyal friend, a kind heart, and an excellent listener these past few years. And thank you, most recently, for being most inspiring muse yet.  It felt only fair and just for you to be the first to read the completed debut novel of my newest series. I think it has some real potential, but it’s up to you whether or not it will continue.  I trust that you will find someone with the perfect head for it and leave it in the right hands.   

Best,  Dante H. Wallace

Bellamy sets down the letter and looks at what he now realizes is the title page of a manuscript... The Casefiles of Odysseus Private Investigations & Detective Augustus B. Blake  Book 1: The Gold That Killed King Midas.

 On the next page he finds a dedication: for C and B, the head and the heart. Bellamy settles back into his new arm chair in front of his new fireplace in his new study and gets comfortable.  

Prologue: Augustus had a sister, her name was Octavia…