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bookshelf-in-progress · 3 years ago

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Beneath the Surface: A Retelling of “The Frog Prince”

If I’d had any choice, I never would have taken the underground train. I had accompanied Roger to a political summit in the city of Roshen, but spouses leave after the opening speeches, and since I couldn’t leave Roger without the hovercar, I had to use public transportation. The train--built by the natives decades before humanity absorbed Arateph into the Interplanetary Coalition--was a horrible excuse for technology. It rattled me to my destination, jolted me into an underground station, and left me so shaken that I could feel my bones clattering as I climbed up the stairs to the street.

The crowd surged around me as I emerged onto the sidewalk. There were far too many tephans. You know what Arateph’s natives look like—almost like humans, but it’s an unsettling almost. Their eyes just slightly too high on their heads, their ears just slightly too far back, and hands (ugh) split into only three fingers and a thumb. Like a person shaped by a sculptor with a hazy memory of how humans look. I can take them in small doses, but in groups? My skin was crawling. I powered through the crowd as quickly as possible and tried not to let any of them touch me.

I sped several blocks away from the train station before I realized I was nowhere near my hotel. The buildings in this neighborhood were old, made of crumbling stone bricks that had been stacked by physical labor rather than printed by machine. Half the windows were made of colored glass, and half of those were broken. Garbage rustled in the gutters, holes marred the concrete sidewalks, and all the signs were written in an unfamiliar alphabet. I was, somehow, lost in a tephan neighborhood. And not a nice one.

I turned in circles, trying to figure out which way I’d come. Tephans watched me from storefronts and doorsteps and alleyways, and I kept walking to prevent them from figuring out just how lost I was. I was Priscilla Overton, wife of a Coalition finance minister, pillar of this planet’s elite—and human. Some groups violently opposed human rule, and tephan attacks against humans were on the rise. Who knew what these savages would do if they knew how helpless I was?

I rushed through narrow, dark streets until I reached a wider thoroughfare--a residential area with slightly less grimy apartment buildings. Still not a nice neighborhood, but not a place where I suspected otherworldly rats would tear the flesh from my bones or criminals would murder me for my technology.

I pulled my datapad out of my purse to look for directions. Dead.

I unfolded my wristcomm and tried to call for help. No signal.

I put my fist to my mouth to stifle a frustrated scream. Why did these things happen to me?

I stormed further down the street, cursing Roger for ever bringing us to this planet. We’d been happy on Earth. Comfortable. Respected. With no chance of wandering into streets where aliens stared at you with their off-kilter eyes. The rewards we got for helping to civilize this backward planet weren’t nearly enough to make up for this torture.

I turned a corner and found myself in front of a long, low yellow-brick building with dozens of small windows. The window boxes had flowers in them—fist-sized bundles of tiny red and gold petals. Not something you’d find on Earth, but...nice. Nice enough to pull me down from my fury and make me think I could give my wristcomm another try.

I powered down the wristcomm and stood next to a pink metal lamp post (Arateph has strange color trends) while I waited for it to restart. A metal grate was below my feet. These primitives still used storm drains! I shouldn’t have been surprised, since the road clearly wasn’t made of Draincrete, but it was still jarring. Living on Arateph was a strange combination of living on another world and living in the backward past.

My wristcomm buzzed, still powering up. I was ready to explode with anxiety. There were tephans straggling by—not many of them, but too many and too poorly dressed for my taste. To calm myself, I played with my wedding ring—a gold band with a spray of amethysts and pearls. The ring had been in Roger’s family for centuries. Some days, it felt like my last tie to a familiar world.

I kept my life on Arateph as Earth-like as possible, but it could never be the same as living on Earth. Alien things always lingered at the edges. Trees that turned purple in autumn instead of familiar orange. Toothy red-and-purple-feathered birds that rooted through the trash and woke me with their awful screeching. And around every corner, people who looked like grotesque parodies of my own kind. An entire world conspiring to make me constantly aware of how far I was from home.

My sisters were going about their own lives on Earth, and the few times we could afford appointments at synced comms stations, we found little to talk about--we literally came from different worlds. If Roger and I ever had children--doubtful but possible at our age--our families would only know them as data-images.

This was why I hated being alone on this wretched planet. Gave me far too much time to think about these things.

My wristcomm chimed—finally awake. I unfolded the screen and attempted to bring up my list of contact codes. I found Roger’s; he’d be in the middle of a meeting, but I couldn’t help that. I pressed the code and waited.

A discordant note sounded. No signal. I threw down my hand in frustration. My ring flew down with it. The golden band slipped off my finger, tumbled toward the ground, bounced off the edges of the grate, and fell into the drain.

I gasped in horror and fell to my knees. It couldn’t be, not now.

The ring sparkled in the sunlight, caught on a lip where the structure of the drain met the tube of the deeper pipe. I put my purse on the ground and slid my arm through the grate, but my arm got stuck just above the elbow. The ring was still a foot beyond my reach.

I burst into tears. I couldn’t help it. After the day I’d had—lost among tephans, fighting faulty technology, no hope of help from people who looked like me—this was the last straw. This planet had taken me from my home, my family, my friends, everything familiar, and now it was taking my one reminder of it all. Anybody would have cried.

Long before I felt any relief, a harsh voice broke through my sobs. “Are you finished yet?”

I looked up, furious at whoever was rude enough to interrupt my misery.

A tephan girl sat in the stairwell of the long yellow-brick building next to the gutter. I yelped and reeled back, tears still flowing. Have you ever seen a tephan child? They’re ten times worse than the adults; all their slightly-wrong features stretched even further out of shape, their eyes big and bulging in their heads. This girl was gangly. Her skinny limbs dangled out of baggy green clothes, and a wild brown bush of curls frizzed around her face and over her eyes. By human standards, I’d have judged her to be about twelve years old (though I have no idea if these creatures age like humans). By any race’s standards, she looked positively feral.

I couldn’t believe the creature had spoken to me. “Did you say something?” I asked.

She held up a thick book, bound human-style but with blocky tephan letters on the cover. “Can you cry somewhere else? I’m trying to read.”

She spoke Anglese with only a lightly slurring tephan accent. Somehow, this child spoke the Coalition’s language better than most of the tephan diplomats at Roger’s interminable meetings.

In my shock, I blurted, “How do you know Anglese?”

The creature rolled her eyes. “I go to school. With humans and everything.”

Roger hadn’t been in favor of the integration policy, but it apparently had some benefits. Or would have, had I any interest in talking to the child. Before I could decide if I wanted to reply, I glimpsed the ring again and burst into another involuntary round of tears.

The girl closed her book with a sigh. “What are you crying about anyway?”

I couldn’t tell her that I was crying because of her terrible, technologically backward planet and all its inhabitants, but I had to talk to someone and it was so good to hear human words, even from an alien’s throat. I pointed to the drain. “My ring,” I gasped. “It fell...”

She picked up her book, scrambled down the stairs, and peered in the drain. She huffed and rolled her eyes. “You’re making that much noise over that?”

I drew back my shoulders and snapped, “It’s an irreplaceable heirloom! Centuries of human history! You can’t get those stones anywhere but Earth!”

“Then you should have been more careful with it.”

That made me want to scream, but before I could gather enough breath, the child gathered the book to her chest and turned away. “Can you at least try to keep it down?”

As the girl sat on the building’s stone stairs, the wind tore a scrap of paper out of her book and sent it fluttering. She reached up and snatched it out of the air. My gaze fell on the girl’s arms—long, lanky things that were thinner than human arms. With four-fingered hands that could easily slip between the bars of the grate.

“Wait!” I shouted. “Little tephan girl! What’s your name?”

The girl cast me a dark, distrustful expression, but she finally intoned, “Tanza.”

Not bad, as far as tephan names went. I could pronounce this one. “Tanza,” I said, “Do you think you could reach it?”

The girl shifted her hand behind her back, her face becoming a hard mask. “What do you mean?”

I pointed to her, rambling in my excitement. “Your arms are thinner than mine. Just as long. You could probably reach...”

Her brow furrowed. “You want me to dig in a sewer?”

“Not a sewer,” I said. “A storm drain.”

“Still dirty.” She looked at the storm drain with narrowed eyes.“If I get it for you, will you go away?”

I wanted nothing more. “Immediately.”

"What'll you pay me for it?"

I felt like I'd been hit by a train. "What? Who said I'd pay you?"

The child pointed one long finger at the storm drain. “If I get dirty digging in there, it’ll be my tenth laundry demerit and I don’t get supper. I’m not doing it for nothing!”

The building behind her held one of the few signs I’d seen with Anglese translations beneath the tephan words: Alogath Charity Home for Unwanted Children. I could see why this child was unwanted.

“I don’t carry cash,” I told her.

“Do you have a credit stick?”

I put a protective arm over my purse. “It’ll be deactivated the moment you touch it.”

She rolled her eyes. “I don’t need the whole stick. Just buy me something with it.”

A truck—a noisy, clanking tephan thing that actually rolled on the ground—roared past us. The glimmer on the ring shifted closer to the drain pipe. If I didn’t act fast…

“What do you want?” I asked her.

“A lot of things.” Her eyes went blank as she stared at imaginings only she could see. Finally, she declared, “A meal at the High Palace.”

She really said that! As if it were a reasonable request! I don’t know how this urchin even knew about human restaurants, much less the finest of fine dining establishments.

“That’s ridiculous!”

She shrugged one shoulder. “I lose a meal, you buy me a replacement. That’s fair.”

“Do you know how much a High Palace meal costs?”

“A lot less than it’ll cost you to replace that ring.”

I growled in frustration. The child had me backed into a corner and she knew it. I shuddered at the thought of taking this…thing into the sparkling society of a High Palace dining room.

I pointed a fierce finger at the child. “Only if you give me the ring immediately. Understand? There’s not a place on the planet a creature like you could sell it without suspicion.”

“I don’t want your ring. I’ll live up to my end of the bargain. And you’ll live up to yours, or that ring’s staying where it is.”

Of course I couldn’t really take her to the High Palace, but one more street-rattling truck could take the ring forever out of anyone’s reach. I’d have agreed if she’d asked for a hovercar.

“Fine!” I shouted. “I’ll buy you the meal. Just save my ring!”

The child placed her book on a clean patch of sidewalk and returned to the edge of the street. I snatched up my purse and stepped aside while the girl laid face down in the gutter. She slid her arm through the grate, all the way up to the shoulder. I held my breath for an eternal moment and didn’t release it until the girl emerged with a ring of gold and amethyst in her hands.

The ring sparkled merrily at me, grimy but whole. I snatched it from Tanza's hands and tucked it into an inner pocket of my gray blazer. I wouldn’t wear it again without resizing it—and not until I was in a neighborhood where I didn’t have to worry about it being stolen from my finger.

The child picked up her book and looked at me expectantly. Demandingly.

I couldn’t give her what she wanted. She was a complete stranger. I’d made the promise under duress. Not a court in the universe would hold me to it. What right did a tephan child have to make such ridiculous demands of a woman of my stature?

“Thank you,” I said. “You did a very good thing.” Then I sped down the street.

The creature was right at my heels. “The High Palace is the other way.”

I didn’t know if she was telling the truth. It didn’t matter. I walked faster.

She yanked at my arm. “You promised me a meal!”

“Don’t be ridiculous. I couldn’t get you into the High Palace.”

“A human lady dressed like you? You could get me in if you wanted to.”

I yanked my arm away from her. “What a pity I don’t want to.”

She gave a feral yowl. I started sprinting—or as near as I could manage in the heels I was wearing. The girl kept pace with me. I was a foot taller than her; why couldn’t I outrun her? Could I lose her in her own streets when I was lost myself?

Just when I thought I’d never be able to escape, I rounded a corner and saw the green-and-silver uniform of a Coalition policeman. My heart soared as I raced toward him. Help, protection, guidance, all only a few steps away. Something wonderfully human in this alien world.

“Officer!” I shouted to his retreating back. “Please, I need help!”

The officer stopped and raised a hand. A four-fingered hand. When he turned around, his face had the skewed proportions of a tephan face.

I nearly screamed. I’d stumbled into a nightmare.

The officer said, with the crisp diction of a tephan overcompensating for an accent, “Have you a problem, morik—madam?”

I’d heard that a few tephans had been admitted into the police forces, but I’d never thought I’d meet one. This tephan was young. Wiry and blond. Almost insignificant-looking if it weren’t for the uniform and the stolen sense of authority. Would he help a human?

Tephan or not, he had an obligation to assist the public. “Officer,” I gasped. “I need directions to the nearest train station. I’m trying to get home and this child is harassing me.”

The girl stormed up to him and shrieked, “She’s a liar!”

She shouted a stream of gibberish, and it wasn’t until the officer responded with similar sounds that I realized they were speaking the tephan language. Flowing, musical vowels were interrupted by harsh consonants, like rocks in a river. The sounds sent chills down my spine that only grew fiercer as the officer’s expression grew darker.

When the girl finished, the officer looked at me, not like an innocent victim needing help, but like a criminal who needed hauling to one of their barbaric tephan jails. “You have wronged this girl.”

I lifted my chin. “She’s lying! I’ve done nothing to her!”

“She claims she rescued your ring in exchange for a meal at the High Palace, and you are attempting to break your word.”

“I owe her nothing!”

“Did you promise her a meal?”

I threw out my hands in frustration. “It’s not like we had a contract or anything!”

He raised an eyebrow. “Your promise means nothing without a legal document?”

“She had no right to hold me to a promise. I was desperate!”

He put a brotherly hand on the girl’s shoulder. “And she was kind enough to help you.”

I scoffed. “For a heavy price.”

The child shouted, “It’s one meal!”

The officer examined my face carefully. “You are Priscilla Overton, are you not? The wife of the finance minister?”

My jaw dropped. I’m prominent enough in human circles, but I’d never dared to consider that my face was known among tephans. It terrified me, but I knew it could be my ticket out of this. “I am, and when my husband finds out about how I’ve been treated—”

“Your husband is not a popular man. Not among tephans.”

I had never cared about Roger's reputation among the tephans. These primitives didn’t know what was best for their planet. But that wasn’t something I could say when I was alone in a strange neighborhood with two of them.

The officer continued, “It will not help his reputation if his wife is known as a promise-breaker.”

I couldn’t believe it. “Are you threatening me?”

He leaned toward me and said in low tones, “I am helping you.” He gestured to the street around us. “Do you think I’m the only one who heard the girl’s story?”

I shuddered to see a handful of tephans staring at us from among the crumbling buildings.

The officer said, “The Coalition doesn’t care much for tephan opinion, but if there is enough outcry against one man, even a human representative can be released from his job.”

At first, the thought lifted my spirits. Sent home! To Earth! It was what I’d wanted from the moment we’d stepped foot on this planet. But sent home in disgrace? Roger would have no future in government after such a public failure. It would mean everything we suffered here would be for nothing.

I asked the officer, “You really think they’d protest? Just because I didn’t bow to a child’s ridiculous demands?”

“If a person can’t keep a promise made to a child, how can anything they say be trusted?” His tephan gaze raked over me, like he was dissecting my inner thoughts. “Your people may have different ideas, but tephans still value virtue.”

How dare he—this puffed-up primitive in a human position of power—accuse humanity of being inferior?

My opinion didn’t matter. These creatures thought it a matter of morality that I feed this ragged brat finer cuisine than their planet had ever produced, and nothing I could say would change their minds. Now it seems ridiculous to think that those tephans could ruin us, but in that moment, alone in those unfamiliar streets, seeing how these two strange aliens teamed up against me, I could believe their kind capable of anything.

I looked down at the child. Her big eyes. Her frizzy curls. Her long limbs clutching the book to her chest. The grimy, bog-green clothes that fell short of the wrists and ankles. The smug smirk of a spoiled child who knew she was about to get her way. I had never loathed anyone more in my life.

“Do you have a name?” I asked her. “I’ll need a full name for the restaurant register.”

“I told you,” she said, as though she’d expected me to remember. “It’s Tanza.”

“What’s the rest of your name?” Most tephans I’d met had at least three or four names and were obnoxiously eager to explain them.

The girl's face darkened like I’d offended her. “Just Tanza.”

The officer looked at her with new pity, and even I understood why. You know how important names are to tephans. One name was a badge of dishonor--forever marking her as a child who’d never been claimed by any family, who’d never been given anything beyond the minimum necessary label. Tanza would have felt the shame of that, and I wasn’t quite so surprised that she’d turned into such an irritating little brat.

But I had no room for pity. “Do you have anything better to wear?”

She tugged at the cuffs, trying to stretch them over her arms. “Just more green. And all in the wash. Laundry demerits."

The officer said, "It'll do." He knelt in front of the girl, then looked at me and held out a hand. "I'll bet a fine lady like you carries all kinds of cleaning tools."

I sighed and handed him the nanocleanser from my purse. I showed him the power button, then he waved the metal wand over the stains on Tanza’s clothes. After a few seconds, the stains evaporated and the dirt from the gutter fell away as dry sand.

“Good as new,” the officer said, while Tanza gaped at her freshly-cleaned clothes. These primitives were astounded by the simplest things.

The child brushed through her wild curls with her fingers, swept them back over her shoulders, then stood with her hands at her side and feet apart, as if presenting herself for inspection.

I sighed. “I guess it’s as good as we’ll get. Let’s get this over with.”

Tanza tucked her book beneath her arm and her eyes sparkled with victory.

I looked balefully at the tome. “The book’s coming with?”

“Well, I can’t leave it here.”

I considered insisting that she take it back to the home, but I wanted to get this over with as quickly as possible.

“Fine,” I sighed. “Bring the book.”

I was seriously planning on entering the dining room of the High Palace with an alien who thought the proper attire included a set of green work clothes and a giant book. I had gone insane.

The officer stepped aside and gestured for both of us to walk past him. “I’ll escort you there.”

And there went my last hope of escape.

The officer escorted us through winding streets, side alleys and dried up canals until we finally crossed a bridge into a civilized portion of the city with human-designed buildings. One sprawling building of white stone-print bore a black sign with elegant script that proclaimed it The High Palace.

As we approached the building, Tanza suddenly skittered across my path. I almost tripped over her feet.

I glared at her as she fell into step on my right side. “What are you doing?”

She glanced warily to the street corner. “Kids from school.”

I glanced back and saw a pre-teen human boy with short black hair and immaculate clothing. He leaned against the corner of a building while he spoke with a handful of human friends. Well-groomed, friendly, human—why couldn’t that child have rescued my ring? I’d have been glad to take him as a guest to the High Palace.

As I engaged in fruitless wishes, the human children disappeared, and I arrived with my tephan escorts at the entrance doors of the High Palace. Wide glass windows showed a sparkling three-dimensional display of Old Paris in springtime. Tanza studied the images of bakeries and floral shops and fluttering Earth songbirds, as if attempting to dissect the technology. The few people passing by looked askance at the tephan pair with me.

Tanza asked, “Are we going in?”

I looked back at the officer. He just smiled at me and waved us toward the door.

I took a deep breath, put a hand behind the girl’s shoulders and pushed her inside.

The interior was a vision of white and cream: pale artwork on the walls, a glass fountain trickling crystal-clear water, rugs in intricate shades of vanilla, beige and ivory upon white marble floors.

The street sounds disappeared when the door closed behind us. No foot traffic, no rumbling vehicles, no screeching of alien animals. Just the hush of quiet voices, the gentle strings of a European symphony and the trickle of the fountain. It was like we'd stepped into a different world. My world. Except for the alien next to me.

The host standing guard at the dining room entrance stared at Tanza, then looked at me with the horrified compassion of someone trying to tell you there’s a wasp on your shoulder. “Madam, are you aware…?”

The only way to get through this with any dignity was to brazen my way through it. “I’d like a table, please. Two seats. For Priscilla Overton and guest.”

I thought his eyes would pop out of his head. “Your guest? You mean she—?”

“Is my guest. Is that a problem?”

He stared as if incredulous that I didn’t know the problem. I didn’t even blink.

Finally, he put a stylus to his datapad. “Does this guest have a name?”

The girl stood as straight and dignified as I did. “Tanza.”

He poised his stylus over the datapad. “Anythin—”

“Just Tanza.”

After a moment’s hesitation, he set his stylus aside. “Two seats for Priscilla Overton and…Tanza.”

The host led us into a blindingly beautiful dining room. A full wall of windows overlooked a river that glittered in the afternoon sun. The other walls were meshed with holonet that made the room look like a small nook in a formal European garden, with the tables and chairs surrounded by roses, tulips, lilies, and a thousand other flowers whose names I’d forgotten in my years away from Earth. Real potted plants scattered among the tables added to the reality of the image and the string quartet played some of the finest music from Earth's history. The room was a bastion of civilization in this barbaric world. A taste of home. It was more filling than any food could be.

The host led us to windowside tables with an excellent view of the river. My heart lifted. Prime seating—a sign of my place on this planet, which not even a tephan could take away. And it was flanked by two potted gardenia plants that would screen my guest from the handful of other diners.

I took the right-hand seat and motioned for Tanza to take the chair that sat closest to the shrub. Its branches brushed her as she sat down.

The host left us as a waiter handed us our menus. As Tanza sat down, she reached toward the branch above her head, plucked a single white gardenia blossom, shoved it in her mouth, and began to chew.

I froze in terror, then glanced at the waiter. Had he noticed?

If he had, he’d been well trained. He didn’t even stumble in his recitation of the day’s lunch specials.

“Would you like a few minutes to make a selection?” the waiter asked.

“Yes, yes,” I said, waving him away before my guest could decide to take another nibble of the greenery.

He bowed and vanished toward the kitchen.

When he was gone, Tanza spit the flower into a gold-embroidered napkin and wiped her tongue on the far corner. While her mouth contorted in the most disturbing shape, those tephan eyes glared at me. “That’s not a spiceblossom bush.”

“No,” I said, my tone stretched with scorn. “It’s a gardenia. And the blossoms aren’t for eating.”

She wiped her tongue on another corner of the napkin. “Why do they put flowers by the table if you’re not supposed to eat them?”

“For decoration,” I hissed. “And if you can’t behave in a civilized manner, we’ll leave this restaurant, promise or no promise.”

“Well, I’m sorry I don’t know all the fancy human rules of eating.”

Her sarcasm made my blood boil—until I saw her blush. She was prickly, yes, but unless I was very much mistaken, she was embarrassed. Now she was lost in an alien world, and I’d experienced that sensation too recently not to feel a little sorry for her.

But only a little. She had demanded this, after all, at great expense to me. Let her suffer the consequences.

“Rule one,” I said. “Don’t put anything in your mouth unless I tell you to.” I tugged her napkin out of her four-fingered hands before she could run it across her tongue again. “That includes napkins.”

With the napkin gone, Tanza's tongue was on full display in front of her chin as she kept the taste as far out of her mouth as possible. I don’t know if you know this, but tephan tongues can stretch further and thinner than human tongues, and this child made hers come almost to a point. I couldn’t look at that for the entire meal, but I couldn’t have the child destroying all the table linens either.

I waved over a waiter carrying a carafe of water, and I pointed him to our empty glasses. He leaned over our table and filled my glass almost to the brim. Then he turned and saw my guest—her pale skin, green clothes, those big eyes and that long, thin tephan tongue. He yelped, recoiled, dropped the carafe, and knocked over my glass. Water flooded the table and spilled onto my lap.

The child yelped, shouted something in her alien language and scrambled to pull her book out of the path of the water. An old man at the next table dropped his fork and stared at her. Fortunately, the few other diners in the room were too far away to see.

I hushed the child and found myself in the strange position of apologizing to the waiter while I was the one standing drenched. I didn’t know what reznat meant, but I was sure it wasn’t a nice thing for a tephan to say to her waiter.

“Could we...” I asked as I ran the nanocleanser over my clothes, “have another table?”

“C...certainly, madam,” he said, looking at Tanza as if waiting for her to pounce. I half-expected it myself, from the fierce way she curled around that book.

Once my clothes were dry, the waiter brought us to an empty table nearer the center of the room. No window view. No shielding plants. But it was further from the kitchen—where I was certain all the servers would be gossiping about us as soon as this klutz left us.

Once we were settled with new water glasses and dry menus, the server scurried away as if the girl were a poison frog. Tanza muttered alien words while she brushed water from the edges of her book, and gulped water until she got the taste of the flower out of her mouth. Then she glared at me and reverted back to Anglese. “He almost wrecked my book.”

After watching her lug that book around for an hour, my curiosity—and frustration—were mounting. “What’s that book about, anyway? And why are you willing to curse out waiters over it?”

“It’s a biography of Queen Marastel.” She set the book deliberately on the table, and looked around the room as if daring waiters to spill more water on it. “And it’s mine. I finally have a book of my own, and I don’t want it wrecked by an idiot with a water pitcher.”

The book was thick. What I’d seen of the print was small. It was not a children’s history book. I hadn’t expected this grimy alien child to be the biography type. Was there a developmental disorder that gave children irrational attachments to academic texts?

“Who is Queen Marastel?” I asked.

Tanza showed me the book’s cover. It had a picture of a young tephan woman—in her mid-twenties, to my human eyes—with a pale, narrow face, and deep eyes. The woman's dark hair was covered with an elaborate system of veils, and she wore a dress covered in so many white jewels and so much gray and white beadwork that I almost couldn’t see the ivory fabric underneath.

“Her,” Tanza said. “The last queen of Arateph.”

“Arateph had queens?” I asked in surprise. They hadn’t had queens when humanity had found them. It must have been part of their history.

I’d never thought of this planet as having a history. If I’d considered it at all, I suppose I’d assumed that they’d been muddling along the way we’d found them for the last few centuries, waiting for us to show up and drag them into modern civilization.

Tanza said, “The planet was ruled by a monarchy until about forty years before the Coalition showed up.”

“The whole planet?”

Tanza sat straighter and her diction became crisper—she looked like a little lecturer at one of those cultural symposiums that Roger and I always had to make appearances at. “After Kepha joined the other eleven kingdoms, the entire planet was united under the monarchy for three hundred and fifty-eight years.”

Not just a monarchy, but a planet-spanning monarchy. Such a thing hadn’t happened in all of human civilization, and these people had accomplished it when they were still on their home planet, believing themselves alone in the universe. I hadn’t thought such an archaic form of government could rule an entire continent without overextending itself, yet it had ruled their world for centuries. For the first time, I found myself wanting to learn something from the tephan people. How had such a government come about? How had they managed it?

Why did the woman on the cover look so sad?

I didn’t ask any of these questions because just then, a waiter appeared—not the water-spilling one, thank goodness. (I didn’t trust my guest to look at that one without throwing something at him.) This one was older, with crisp lines in his clothes and face. He looked like he could have won a staring contest with a statue—perfect unshakable professionalism.

“Are you ready to order, Madam Overton?” He didn’t even look at my guest.

Tanza’s eyes brightened as she picked up the menu, flipping through the pages to examine the options.

I asked her, “What you want to eat?”

“I don’t know. I’ve never had human food.”

My jaw fell. “You wanted to come here and you didn’t even know what you wanted to eat?”

She gave me a withering stare, as though I was the stupid one. “I wanted to try it.” She closed the menu. “Besides, you said I can only eat what you tell me to eat. So what am I allowed to eat, Priscilla?”

I picked up the menu and realized with horror that I didn’t know the answer. What could tephans eat? Were there foods that were delicacies to us and poison to them?

I asked the waiter, “Do you have any suggestions?” I doubted these people served many tephans, but food was their area of expertise, and we were on Arateph.

The waiter looked at Tanza for the first time. “I’ve heard that people of her...race...are rather fond of the amphibian.” He pointed to an entry on my appetizer list. “The frog legs are popular. And a specialty of the chef.”

I hadn’t eaten frog in years. But if I could choke it down for Roger’s political dinners, I could manage it to satisfy a petulant tephan child. “We’ll have that.”

“Excellent. Is there anything else?”

I didn’t want to give Tanza any more chances to upset the wait staff. “No. Just get us our food as soon as possible.”

As the waiter walked away with our menus, an afternoon crowd filled the dining room; within a few minutes, we went from being nearly alone to being surrounded by other diners. I could tell by the sideways glances that most of them noticed my tephan guest. And I could tell that Tanza noticed them. She sat silently at first, growing more and more tense as we all tried to ignore each other, but when a bald man at the next table stared at her for several long moments, she finally snapped.

“Can you stop it?” she barked at him. “You’re giving me the shivers.” The man, red-faced, studied his menu as if his life depended on it.

Tanza turned back to the table, muttering, “You humans look so creepy when you stare.”

I was too stunned to scold her. I’d never considered that the distaste for the other race’s looks went both ways. If she’d lived her life in a mostly-tephan neighborhood, a human face would look just as slightly wrong to her as a tephan face did to me. It sounds strange, but the idea that she found us ugly made me like her more. It certainly made her more relatable.

But I couldn’t have her making a spectacle. “Please, don’t bother the other diners.”

She seemed ready to protest, but I spoke before she could argue. “That woman in your book. You said she was the last queen of Arateph. What happened?”

Her eyes lit up, rude diners forgotten, as she flipped open the book. “Revolution. The People’s House took over and had her and the king executed.”

I shivered. “So violent. And so young to die.”

Tanza gave me a confused look, then glanced at the cover and understood. “Oh, that’s from her first years as queen. She was almost seventy when she died.”

I pictured the woman on the cover with hair turned gray, but the same dark, sad eyes, facing an angry mob as they led her to the scaffold or the firing squad or however these people killed their leaders. It was brutal, but humanity had often been equally brutal, so I couldn’t dismiss it as their backward alien culture.

Tanza flipped through the pages. “They say she was weak and self-absorbed, but this book gives her more depth.” She looked at a page near the cover. “Verai’s a good scholar. Uses lots of primary sources. Very readable.”

Now that her interest was unleashed, Tanza talked on and on, taking me through an alien history, the tale of a queen beset by tragedy upon tragedy as she helped her husband rule a crumbling planet and struggled to produce an heir. All the scholars at those Coalition events were nowhere near as enthralling as this alien child sharing her favorite book.

As fascinating as the story was, I was even more entranced by the pictures—dozens were embedded through the text. Tanza condescended to turn the book around so I could see. It was grandeur like I’d never seen, buildings in alien colors and shapes and patterns, but bringing to mind the grandest palaces in human history, from Versailles to the Forbidden City to the red spires of the North Martian Emperor's summer home. The people in the pictures wore elaborate, brightly-colored clothes, and feasted upon vast tables full of unfamiliar food—including blossoms from the potted trees next to the tables. No primitive civilization could have created such a culture. No wonder this alien urchin was enthralled, and no wonder she’d seized the chance to attend the closest modern equivalent to such feasts that she knew of.

The return of the stone-faced waiter snapped me back to reality. He planted himself next to the table, passing blank-faced judgement by how thoroughly he didn’t look at the book or the way we bent over it. Face burning, I sat back in my chair and felt ashamed to be caught hanging upon an alien’s story like a dim-witted child.

Tanza swept the book under the table and sat primly as the waiters placed the food in front of us. First a gold charger, then the crystal plates bearing the food—ten frog legs, crisply fried in butter and lemon, dotted with parsley and surrounded by a handful of greens.

Half a dozen nearby heads surreptitiously craned in our direction.

The waiters set a similar platter in front of me, and after I’d arranged my napkin on my lap, I thanked the waiter, picked up the silverware, and began to cut the meat.

Tanza watched me carefully as the waiters left. She picked up her silverware, examined it closely—did tephans even have silverware?—and tried to imitate me, but when she touched the food, the prim little professor became the feral street child again. She still used the silverware, but that was her only concession to decency as she gobbled her foot, downing the frog legs almost whole. The butter sauce ringed her mouth and splattered on her clothing. She made the most inhuman snorting noises as she swallowed.

Now everyone was staring—the red-faced man at the next table, his three dining companions, the ten people sitting at the other nearby tables, the waiters who'd halted on their way to the kitchen. People murmured to their companions. Diners flagged down waiters and asked discreetly if there was something that could be done.

My face burned in embarrassment, but I couldn’t stop the girl. With all these eyes watching me—watching me, Priscilla Overton, entertaining an animal at the finest restaurant in Roshen—I couldn’t even speak. I wanted to sink into the carpet. I wanted to disappear. I wanted to run from the restaurant, flee from this planet, and return to comfortable, civilized Earth. But mortification left me paralyzed. I just sat and did nothing as Tanza devoured her food and licked every last drop of sauce from the plate.

Finally, she dropped her plate back on the charger and leaned back with satisfaction. Her big tephan eyes were bright. “That was amazing.” She licked all eight of her fingers, so lost in the euphoria of her food that she was unaware of the horrified crowd surrounding us. She looked at my plate with confusion. “You’ve barely touched yours.”

I let my fork drop to the tablecloth. “I’m not very hungry.”

Her eyes brightened. “Can I have it?”

“No.”

She gave me a disapproving look. “You can’t waste food. At least try to eat it.”

After that display, I’d never be able to stomach another frog leg. “It doesn’t appeal to me.”

“Then I’ll eat it.” Before I could react, she leaned across the table, speared a frog leg with her fork, and was chewing it before she settled back in her chair.

I wanted to scream. I could have tried to correct her, but I had no idea where to begin, and by now, it was far too late.

The stone-faced waiter leaned over my shoulder. He was pale and his eyes were wide—apparently there were some things that could rattle him. “Madam, if you cannot eat your food here, we can send it home with you.”

He was offering me a doggy bag. The finest restaurant in the city, which usually recoiled in horror from such vulgar practices, was so desperate for me to leave that the staff were sending me home with leftovers. I was, in effect, being kicked out.

I didn’t even care. “Yes, thank you.”

In seconds, another waiter appeared, carrying a green box that had probably held some kind of produce in the kitchen, repurposed into this restaurant’s first take-home container. I sat in silence as they poured the frog legs into the container, then I handed them my credit stick, and when I examined the payment screen of their datapad, I added on a gratuity that cost twice as much as the food did. Perhaps with a tip like that, they’d let me show my face here again. At the moment, I doubted I’d ever want to.

I gathered my purse and stood. That creature gathered her ridiculous book and followed me, smiling, out of the dining room.

When we reached the lobby, I thrust the box into the child's hands. “Take it. I don’t want it.”

The girl's eyebrows rose. “You don’t? Are you sure? It’s really good.”

“I think it appeals more to tephan tastes.”

She thanked me as though I’d given her all the jewels that the queen on her book was wearing, then tucked the box under one arm and the book under the other.

I put a hand behind her shoulders and pushed her out the door. When we emerged onto the sunlit sidewalk, all my frustration exploded.

“There!” I snapped, giving her one last push beyond the awning of the restaurant. “You’ve had your meal. Take your food and go!”

She stumbled forward, then stared at me in bewilderment. “What set you off?”

My laugh was tinged with hysteria. “What set me off? Maybe I’m just a little peeved at being disgraced in front of some of the richest people in the city by a tephan who gobbles her food like an animal.”

She stood with her mouth open, struck speechless. Those big green eyes showed surprisingly human-looking hurt. “Was it that bad? I know I’m not fancy, but...”

“You can’t tell me you didn’t notice all those people staring.”

The creature turned red. She stammered, “I thought it was because I’m tephan. You told me not to bother them.”

I couldn’t bear to have that creature looking up at me with those big, sad eyes. I didn’t want to feel sorry for her. “It doesn’t matter,” I said. “Maybe in a few years they’ll let me dine there again.” I pushed her steadily but firmly away from the restaurant. “I have more than paid you in full. Thank you for saving my ring. Goodbye.”

Still looking baffled, the girl trudged away from the restaurant. I walked in the other direction.

My anger started fading the moment the child was out of my line of sight. Each step away from the restaurant felt like a step back into a normal world. There were humans around me. I could read the signs. I even knew how to find my way to the train station. I’d be back at the hotel within the hour and I could pretend that this whole horrible afternoon had been a bad dream.

Light footsteps skittered behind me. A green-clad tephan child with a book and a box appeared to my left.

I yelped and reeled back. “What are you—?”

Tanza fell into step beside me. “I’m really very sorry for embarrassing you. I need to make it up to you. Let me show you the way to the train station—”

My previous anger felt like a candle flame compared to the volcano that those words set off within me. “Leave me alone!” I towered over her in my fury. “I gave you your meal! I fulfilled the promise! Now leave!” I stormed away, but at the first sound of footsteps behind me, I whirled around. “I swear, if you take another step toward me, I will see you arrested!”

The child’s face hardened into the petulant mask that I recognized from my first sight of her from the gutter. “Sorry for helping.”

“Helping,” I mocked. “Your help comes at too high a price.” I gave a short, cynical laugh. “I see through your plan. You think you can trail after me demanding handouts all day. Well, I have had enough.” I secured my purse over my shoulder like I was holstering a weapon. “Get out of here!”

Face white and lips tight with anger, Tanza bowed her head and turned away. I strode away in triumph.

An old man looked at me sideways, shaking his head. I made it to the end of the block before the guilt hit me. The old man had reason to disapprove. Tanza had made an offer of help, and I’d responded by screaming at her in a public street. Perhaps she had felt remorse. As embarrassing as it had been to be seen with a girl who ate like an animal, how much worse would it feel to be the one who’d done it? I thought of those pictures in that book of hers. Would I have fared any better at a tephan feast?

I turned around. “Tanza, wait—“

“Hey, Tanza!”

The voice, coming from the other end of the block, was louder, harsher, and younger than mine. A crowd of boys stampeded down the sidewalk—all humans, about twelve years old, and led by a boy with slick black hair and gray and white clothes in the latest crisply-cut fashions. The children Tanza had noticed when we’d first arrived at the restaurant.

Tanza—standing near where I’d left her—tried to move away from them, but hesitated when she saw me standing at the other end of the block. In seconds, the boys had her surrounded.

The ringleader prodded her shoulder. “Escaped from your cage, Tanza? What are you doing among civilized people?”

His yellow-haired friend poked at the box of frog legs. “Looks like she’s looting houses.”

Tanza yanked the box away. “I’m not a thief!”

The ringleader tugged at the book under her other arm. “That’s a big book. Still playing at being smart, small-brain?”

Tanza pulled it back. “Don’t touch that!”

One boy pried up her arm while two others slid the book away from her. “Ooh, it’s a small-brain book!” the ringleader said in mock delight. He flipped through the pages with dirt-stained fingers. “It’s even written in their pretend letters.”

Tanza snarled, “Give that back!”

He slammed it shut and pulled it toward his chest. “Why? Scared it’s too complicated for me?”

“It’s mine!”

He looked at it thoughtfully. “Is it, though? I don’t think a charity case like you can afford a big book like this.”

“It’s mine!” she repeated, nearly shrieking now. “Teacher gave it to me!”

“Bet she stole it,” said a voice from the crowd. “She’s just a grubby little nameless charity house thief.”

Tanza, driven past the breaking point as the ringleader held the book just beyond her reach, shrieked in outrage and pounced. She tore at the book while the boys yanked it away from her. The individuals disappeared into a storm of arms and legs and paper. Five against one. I watched in terror for a few moments before thinking to call for help. I had my wristcomm. I could hit the emergency button….

It was over before I could lift my wrist. Tanza was sprawled across the sidewalk, surrounded by the shredded, dirty pages of her book. Her box had been torn open. Fleshy frog legs were scattered on the ground as though the animals had been thrown against the wall.

The boys, barely scuffed, loomed over her, mocking. They lifted the empty binding of the book like a trophy, cheering over it and slapping each other on the back. Then, satisfied with their destruction, they ran off the way they came, leaving their victim on the ground.

Numbly, I shuffled toward her, feeling lost in a different sort of nightmare--one where I was one of the monsters. Those boys had been waiting for her. If she’d had an ulterior motive for coming after me to apologize, she had been hoping for protection, not handouts. And I’d thrown her to the wolves.

Tanza pushed herself onto her knees and pulled the pages toward her, like a mother hen gathering up chicks. She looked more vulnerable than I’d ever seen her, eyes wide and glistening, her face slack with horror. Her emotionless mask was gone. She pressed an armload of shredded pages to her chest, curled into a fetal position, and cried.

Curled up like that, face and hands hidden, she didn’t look like a tephan. Not like the rude negotiator at the gutter. Not like the little professor or even the animal at the table. She was just a friendless little girl, surrounded by the wreckage of her most prized possession.

I thought of the last time I’d seen her lying in the street, arm threaded through a storm drain while she reached for my ring. The ring was in my pocket, safe and whole. How had I thanked her for her service? Tried to duck out of the promise, treated her like a savage, screamed at her in the streets, and left her at the mercy of bullies.

The ring I loved so much was one of dozens that I’d brought from Earth, and my day had been destroyed at the thought of losing it. This book was the only one she owned, and it was gone forever. I couldn’t imagine her distress.

How had I thought her the savage?

My stomach twisted with loathing, and for the first time all day, it was directed toward myself. I could fool myself no longer; I’d done nothing to be proud of today.

But that could change.

Approaching Tanza with soft, careful steps, I crouched next to her. “Tanza?” I brushed a finger across her shoulder.

The girl recoiled from my touch and turned away. She came up on her feet, but stayed scrunched into a ball, protecting her pages and hiding her red eyes.

“Are you all right?” I asked.

Her voice was thick with tears. “Go away.”

I grabbed one of the pages. “I can help—“

She whirled her head toward me and snapped, “I said go away!”

I stumbled back, and for a moment I was ready to do as she wanted. This was not my problem and she didn’t want my help.

Then my good sense returned, and I barked, “Don’t be stupid. I’m not going to leave a child in the street.” I started gathering pages. “Are you hurt anywhere?”

I looked around for help. The crowd had merely started taking a wider berth around us, but after a moment, I saw the green and silver flash of a Coalition policeman’s uniform—on a policeman with tephan hands.

I’d never thought I’d be glad to see that officer again. I waved toward him, shouting, “Officer! Please, can you help?”

My voice startled the officer, and his surprise turned to concern as he neared and saw the devastation. He crouched next to us and asked me, “What did you do to her?”

“Nothing,” I said. The twist in my stomach reminded me that those words weren’t the complete truth, so I amended, “I didn’t destroy the book. There was a group of boys...”

The officer had already turned his attention to Tanza, speaking low-toned words in their tephan language. When they finished, his demeanor toward me was less hostile but more disappointed.

“Now you want to help her?” he asked.

That now was an accusation that cut like a knife. I deserved it, but I met his gaze boldly. “Yes,” I said, daring him to deny me.

He spoke a few more words to Tanza, then told me, “Gather pages.”

He helped Tanza to her feet while I gathered what I could of the paper. Torn edges, smeared alien words, and pictures of long-dead royals who stared at me with accusing eyes. The queen providing food to the poor, shelter to the homeless, clothes to shivering orphans. She’d done all that and wound up executed; looking at Tanza and the tephan officer, I couldn’t help wondering how much worse they thought I deserved.

When I’d gathered all the pages I could into a crinkling, crunching mess, I followed in silence as the officer led us along the route we’d taken, every block seeming as long as a mile. When we reached the familiar yellow building where everything had started, I gave the pages to the officer, and he motioned for Tanza to go toward the stair of the building.

“Is there anything else I can do?” I asked Tanza, almost desperate.

Tanza just turned her head away.

“I think you’ve done enough,” the officer said. The words were soft, but I heard the condemnation in them.

I shouldered my purse more firmly, avoided Tanza’s eyes, then asked the officer, “Can you tell me where to find a train station?”

The officer pointed down the street in the opposite direction from where I’d originally approached the building. “The nearest one is just beyond the Killing Square.”

The words shocked me out of the numbness I’d been feeling. “The what?”

But the officer was already rattling off directions, and I was too busy memorizing the steps—left, then right, past the purple tower, turn two blocks after the bridge—to ask what exactly a Killing Square was. I didn’t think a uniformed police officer would purposely send me to my death, so I assumed something had been lost in the translation.

“Thank you, officer,” I said when he finished. Then I looked at the girl and added, “Thank you, Tanza.”

Tanza's green clothes—now scuffed from battle—hung loosely off her slumped shoulders. After a long moment, she raised her head and looked at me from beneath lowered lids. “Goodbye,” she said.

Her tone meant, “Good riddance.”

My pride flared at that. I thought I'd been rather compassionate--helping her gather the pages, hailing the officer, even trailing her all the way to her home to make sure that she arrived safely. Surely she could show a little gratitude.

But as I walked through the narrow, battered streets, it was my own rudeness that haunted me. Snatching the ring from her fingers as though afraid she'd contaminate it. Fleeing from her rather than fulfilling the promise. Leaving her to fight five against one when a moment's action on my part could have saved her. All day, I'd thought myself better than her because I was human, but my actions had been inhumane.

I tried to put it behind me. There was nothing else I could do. The book was gone, beyond repair. Tanza probably never wanted to see me again. It was best to move on and forget all about the tephan girl and the dark-eyed queen that so fascinated her.

Then I turned the corner and came face to face with Queen Marastel. A picture on the gray stone wall, larger than life, showed the woman whose face I’d seen a hundred times in Tanza’s book. I stopped in my tracks, mesmerized. The image was a photo, more or less, but not like any photo or holo-image I’d ever seen from human technology. The colors were more muted than reality, while a strange vibrant shimmer added depth to the image, so it looked as though I could walk inside the pictured scene with a little effort.

The queen’s hair had gone completely gray, her jewels were gone, and her vividly colored gowns had been replaced by a white fabric sheath. What I noticed most were her eyes—they were striking in most of the book photos, but here, her gaze knocked the breath from me. Surely no human gaze could show that much sorrow.

How was she here? Would this queen haunt me wherever I went on this planet, reminding me of my sins against the child?

I noticed a small plaque next to the picture, with a tiny Anglese translation at the bottom, which explained that the image showed Queen Marastel in front of this very building, moments before she was led to death in the center of the square. “Oh,” I said aloud, turning slowly to examine the streets and buildings around me as understanding struck. “The Killing Square.”

This was the center of the revolution that had ended this planet’s monarchy. It was a hauntingly bland neighborhood; no sign of the violent destruction that Tanza had told me of, not after more than eighty years’ worth of repairs. But pictures and plaques decorated almost every building I saw, telling the story that time had erased. Seven brothers from Kepha stood scarred but proud before a jeering band of executioners. A red-haired older woman tried to cheer up three children as armed rebels escorted them all to prison. The king himself stood tall and white-haired, every line of his face showing his fierce love for his planet even as his people tried to kill him.

I could list examples all day, but I could never make you understand the feeling of being there, gazing at these people in the moments before their deaths. They were young and old, tall and short, had hair and skin in every imaginable shade. They came from regions I hadn’t known existed--desert wastes and mountain ranges and snow-covered tundras. These people had families they’d hated to lose, homes that were as familiar to them as the cottage by the Atlantic had once been to me. They’d made mistakes and suffered for it. They, too, had regrets.

Fear, anger, hatred, love, bravery, cowardice--every possible human emotion filled those alien faces, and it didn’t take long for me to stop seeing them as alien at all. They were people, who’d lived on this planet just as I did, who had loved it the way I’d loved Earth.

I’d never even wanted to know about this world before, but now I was desperate to understand every story these pictures presented. Without Tanza’s book providing context, would I even have paused to look at these pictures? Would I have cared about these people? I doubted I would have. Tanza's childish enthusiasm for a book had upended my world--as I’d upended hers.

With that thought, I found myself back before the picture of the queen. Her sorrowful eyes pinned me in place. It seemed, to my overworked imagination, that she was disappointed in me.

I glared at her. “What else do you want me to do?” I demanded. “What’s done is done. I can’t fix it. I don’t even know what book it was.”

In that hall of death, it seemed a pitiful excuse.

I tore my eyes away from the picture, and my gaze landed upon a door I’d wandered past in my history-induced daze. It was brown and wide, with a sign above proclaiming it the entrance to the Museum of the Alogath Execution Center. I wandered toward it, then froze in my tracks only a few steps away. Next to the entrance was a window—and through the window, I saw books.

This was a museum! Museums—even tephan ones—had gift shops! If there was one place in this world that sold books about Queen Marastel, it was likely the museum that displayed her face on a public street.

I raced into the building, almost giddy, and found the shop just beyond the main entrance. The tiny nook held pamphlets and trinkets, and at the front of the room, a big, silver BookVend machine printed and bound volumes with lightning speed.

I raced through the door. The tephan woman behind the counter dropped her book in surprise as I leaned, panting, against her counter.

The woman asked in smooth Anglese, “Can I help you?”

I stood up and tried to look less like a maniac. “Yes,” I said, in my best politician’s-wife voice. “I need you to help me find a book.”

The door to the charity home loomed large in front of me. I hesitated with my hand before the door. Was I doing something stupid? The freshly-printed book under my arm might not change the fact that the child would want nothing to do with me.

This wasn't about me. I had to try.

My knock was answered by a pale, knobby tephan woman with wisps of blond hair hanging around her face. She stared when she saw my face and clothes. “Madam?”

“Excuse me," I asked, "but does a girl named Tanza live here?”

The woman's eyes glazed over as she struggled to translate my Anglese.

I tried again, speaking more slowly. “Is Tanza here?”

“Tanza…” She trailed off in confusion before her eyes lit with understanding. “Oh!” Gently, she corrected, “It’s pronounced Tanza.”

It sounded exactly the same to me. I was starting to believe those people who said tephans could speak and hear sounds that humans couldn't.

The woman called into the building, and after a storm of voices and footsteps, a slight tephan girl in green clothes came to the door, her curls making a curtain over her still-puffy eyes.

Tanza scowled when she saw me. “What do you want?”

I took a deep breath and stepped forward. “I wanted to apologize,” I said. “For what happened. How I treated you. You saved my ring and I treated you like an animal. That was wrong.”

Tanza crossed her arms. “Glad you noticed.”

This child kept finding ways to irritate me, but I swallowed my words before I snapped back in response.

I pulled a book from under my arm. “I know this doesn’t erase what you went through, but I wanted to undo some of the harm that I’ve done today.” I handed her the book, which had the same cover as the book she’d brought to the restaurant. “This is for you.”

Warily, Tanza examined the queen on the cover. “It looks the same.” She flipped through the pages, and her eyes brightened. “It is the same!”

“I printed a new copy. There’s a BookVend down the street. You rescued my ring; it was only fair that I replace your book.”

"Yes, but I didn't think..." She examined the book in amazement before turning that astonished gaze upon me. "This is really mine? To keep?"

“Yes, of course,” I said.

Tanza clutched the book to her chest and smiled at me, positively radiant. That smile transformed her from a feral orphan into a polite little princess.

I couldn’t keep from smiling back.

“Thank you,” Tanza said. Then she saw the other book under my arm. “What’s that one?” she asked, as though hoping it was for her and not daring to ask.

I pulled it out and showed her the cover. It showed the same image of the queen, but this time above an Anglese title—The Queen of Sorrow. “The Anglese edition,” I explained. “This one’s for me.”

If I’d thought she was happy before, it was nothing compared to her radiance now. “You’re going to read it?”

I shrugged. "I couldn't resist. You made it sound so interesting."

She bounced on the balls of her feet. “Wait until you get to Chapter Five. That’s when she first meets the king, and you would not believe the uproar it causes."

She set down her book, grabbed mine, and started flipping through the pages, desperate to show me the start of the story.

From down the hall, an adult voice barked, “Tanza! Don’t bother the woman. I’m sure she’s busy.”

Embarrassed, Tanza closed the book. She pushed it back into my hands. “Sorry. I don’t get to talk about it much.”

“I don’t mind. You’re an excellent instructor.”

Her eyes brightened with hesitant hope. “I could show you more. If you want.”

“I’d be grateful.”

Tanza called over her shoulder. “Garsa! Can I have a visitor in the study room?”

The tephan woman appeared in the entryway. She blinked, taken aback. “As long as she leaves before supper."

Tanza looked up at me. “Do you want to stay?”

No tephan had ever asked me that question before. In all my time here, I’d been an outsider. An invader. I’d never had the desire to be anything more. But those words, coming from Tanza, felt like a welcome.

I was glad to receive it.

I put a hand on Tanza’s shoulder and smiled. “I’d love to.”

#arateph #fairy tale retelling #sci-fi

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madsdefencesquad · 3 years ago

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The semi-companion piece to Kevin's one and it's all about Mads, of course. Dedicated to Kevison Nation (every single fudging one of you) and to @flythesail and @penny259 (your comments have me weeping haha 😚). Also on ao3.

A little into Madison Pearson by x (with additions) Summer 2026

I first met Madison Pearson a year ago at George Clooney’s 65th birthday celebrations in Perthshire, Scotland in a fashion closer to that of long-travelled friends who haven’t seen each other in years than that of complete strangers who just so happened to enjoy the same foodie indulgence (bacon-wrapped dates, anyone?). Despite the grandeur of the guests present at the lavish affair – politicians, laureates, philanthropists and A-list celebrities (including her own husband actor Kevin Pearson) – Madison Pearson had the kind of invigorating energy that just drew absolutely anyone in.

Perhaps it was the enchanting mix of contained excitement and understated class she exuded that will warm you upon beholding up close, or perhaps it was the charm of a more loquacious woman of California mixed with the rare intelligence of a world-traveller. Either way, despite the taxing social waltz her husband took her throughout the night bumping elbows with the elites, Madison was one of those people who truly left a lasting impression.

Squeezed next to her in the back of a cab, Madison is head-to-toe in Temperley London x Axel Arigato (vintage-inspired nautical jumpsuit and platform suedes) en route to a baking class where her five-year-old twins Nick and Franny are waiting for her to join them along with their father.

“I was supposed to get changed,” she says, lamenting on her attire worn for a meeting with some West Chester development executives that’s perhaps too luxurious for an afternoon of mixing flour and butter and sugar. “But you have to make at least a bit of an impression, right?”

Madison has been the powerhouse head honcho of the Pearson family business, Big Three Homes, since its establishment three years prior. With a solid background in business management and a surefooted ability to navigate the mores of an ever-changing property development landscape, it was no question that Madison would rise up to the challenge of breaking into the market with a business model founded on family, philanthropy and sustainability.

Despite growing up largely independent without people close enough to call family, Madison has also found the means to speak about her experiences in an effort to encourage and give hope to the younger generation of girls and young women who may be going through an ongoing battle between themselves and their self-worth.

“I never felt enough,” she says of the origins of her battle with her eating disorder that began when she was still in middle school. “I look at Franny and she’s so small and carefree and I want to give her everything I never had, but I know that even that won’t be enough unless she herself realises how worthy she is of all the good and all the love that she deserves.”

We pull up outside the baking studio and she brightens at spotting her husband and twins’ silhouettes behind the frosted glass windows. Nick and Franny almost topple over their stools as they rush to overwhelm their mother while their father scrambles to keep his heart rate down—a close call with their foreheads hitting the edge of the marble benches as they got down will just about do it.

Even with her petite frame, Madison carries the twins like she’s just holding a bag of groceries. Unsurprisingly, both Nick and Franny are as enamoured of their mother as she is of them and are on the verge of complaining when put down just as Kevin, grinning ear to ear, envelops Madison in his huge arms—to be fair, he’s always been quite remarkably chiselled but the Tom Ford sweater and those tailored jeans (chosen by his wife “of course” as Kevin credits) is a different level altogether. He leans down to give her a kiss.

Back in Perthshire a year ago at the Clooney extravaganza, I caught up with the married couple the day after the festivities over a traditional Scottish breakfast as we overlooked the highlands of the Gleneagles.

Perhaps unlike the Clooneys, who were still entertaining their guests from all over world, the Pearsons were much more relaxed within their own family bubble. Having just celebrated Kevin’s twin sister’s wedding three days prior with close family and friends, the pair was grateful to spend some quality time with each other and their twins without the need to be anything but present.

From my perch, Kevin and Madison were the kind of couple that were very much “old souls”. They held an affection for each other that is rooted from sincere fondness and adoration for each other—they converse like deep friends and trade wits like secret lovers. And despite the media attention of the adorable moments shared online (often by the social-savvy actor), Madison is uncompromising when it comes to the privacy of their children.

While the twins dipped in and out of the table pilfering scones or taking over their mother’s green juice, neither one of their parents were the least bit bothered by the constant attention they need to provide such a rumbunctious pair.

“They’re so funny,” Kevin said, a careful eye on little Nick who was staring at the whipped cream on his tiny finger like he was contemplating on wiping it on his dad’s face.

I do recall having a good laugh when I accompanied the family on a tour of a nearby 17th century castle and little Franny, a copy-and-paste of her mother, pointed at a wood-cut table decoration of what looked to be intertwined lovers and confidently yelled, “That’s mommy and daddy!”

The fierce mama bear of the Pearson household of four (Madison sometimes calls her husband “kid number three, but don’t tell him that or he’ll get ideas of trying for another!”), remarks that forging her own path away from her husband’s spotlight had been remarkably easy, and she gives much of the credit to the rest of the Pearson clan who all treasure family more than anything.

Even with the notoriety of her brother-in-law, rising political star Randall Pearson, who currently serves in the Philadelphia municipality and is on track for a career in congress, Madison says that quality time to rest and recuperate is a must.

“[My sisters-in-law] and I have a girls weekend every other month when we can where we literally book ourselves a gorgeous Airbnb and just glamp down. I’m talking sleep-ins, endless mimosas, spa sessions… you name it! It’s the kind of getaway that [our husbands] get really jealous for.”

And upon being reminded, Kevin, now sporting Franny’s tiny chef’s hat, shakes his head at his wife conspicuously as if in reprimand that he most definitely should be included in the gals’ next glamping session despite him being, well, not a gal.

While Nick proudly counts five of about a thousand sprinkles that are scattered on his side of the bench, Madison congratulates him with a warmth and pride that is infectious enough to make you think that she’s proud of you too. And despite her husband’s very obvious possessiveness over her—you could count only one occasion where the actor is not at arm’s length from her—when Madison focuses her attention on you, it’s not difficult to believe that this powerhouse woman could truly do absolutely anything.

“She is that and more,” Kevin says about his wife. “Sometimes I can’t believe that this is my life. Our life! Like, she’s mywife, and these two are our kids. It’s just wild! I’m grateful, just grateful.”

Despite the doubts and fear that had been Madison’s constant companions for most of her life and especially going into adulthood, there is a fierce resilience in her that she could only credit her dear grandmother Frances—her own daughter having been named after her.

“She always believed in me,” she recalls, an eye on the twins squatting by the oven watching their creations rise. Despite the deep grief and loss that are quite intimately shared by the married couple, Madison says that it has only made them more resolute in loving their children and each other as best as they possible can every day.

“You just don’t know when it’s your time,” she says. “So, Kev and I make sure that there are no ‘next times’ when it comes to our family.”

When I had asked Madison about Big Three Homes back in Scotland, she squealed at the origin story of its founding, which started with Kevin’s late father Jack Pearson having asked his wife Rebecca to start the business together as partners.

Although Jack’s tragic and unexpected passing put an indefinite hold to this dream, its fulfilment through his son Kevin and through Madison is a testament to the kind of legacy that Jack Pearson had begun through his kids.

“I mean, it started off as more of a passion project for Kev,” Madison says. “But we knew it was always going to be something really special. Especially because his first project was the house that Jack had wanted to build for his mom. And when Kevin had this wonderful idea of bringing the family together to start the business and he asked me to be a part of it, how could I have said no!”

Kevin makes a point to say though that even if the idea of Big Three Homes originally came from his parents, its fulfilment is as much a part of his and Madison’s own story as it is his parents’. And choosing to have Madison work alongside him wasn’t just the best choice (given how much of a boss she is), but it was the only choice he ever wanted or considered.

“I know this is cliché, but I can’t stand not being with her,” Kevin says. “I made a point of this when our twins were born, and I meant it!”

Madison and the family split their time between California and Pennsylvania both for Kevin’s work and for the business, but nowadays, it’s more of an 80-20 split in favour of the east coast.

When asked about a career path carved away from her hometown in California, Madison says fondly, “It surprises a lot of people when I say this but I’m actually an east coast girl.”

This fun fact translates quite well in Madison’s day to day. She could turn any conversation into an erudite discussion, and she will utterly beguile you with her knowledge of books and literature—her constant companions when she can sneak away to her own personal Taj Mahal, a stunning Japanese garden in the backyard of their Pennsylvania home which Kevin built especially for her.

As the Pearsons continue to make a splash in the world of construction, politics, arts and entertainment—a rare mix indeed for a family in the spotlight—Madison is determined to continue writing a story with her husband and her children that she never had growing up.

With the twins happily destroying their creations by the mouthfuls, Madison promises that another visit is a must and perhaps this time, she can show us a collection of Kevin’s baby photos coupled with her own personal commentary to boot.

And who would say no to that.

#kevison #kadison #kevin and madison #still not over that kadison tag but loving it coz yes to more madison yeeeeee #I tried to not let Kevin get away with being gushy but he keeps taking over!!#lezbereal he's in too deep we get it boyy #I need to do a combined one because Uncle Nicky and some of the fam has to feature am I roighttttt #anywhoo hope y'all enjoy this <3 #this is us #tiu #kevison fanfics #kevison fanfic #tiu spoilers #I know most of the deets won't be canon after season 6 but whatever I do what I want #kevin pearson #madison this is us #madison pearson

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reynahermione · 4 years ago

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HI... I love your Apollo x reader so bad I'm crying aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa. Can you make another Apollo X Reader where reader is like going on a quest w Percy and reader got wounded and Apollo who have a crush on reader but pretends that he doesn't have a crush on reader get super worried and like confessed to reader uwu. I'm sorry if it's confusing, anyway LOVE YOU

HI! Thank you so much for reading and requesting this, I really hope you love it!

pairings: Apollo X Reader | Percy Jackson X Reader (platonic)

warnings: near-death experience

You were having a wonderful day. The sky was clear, not a cloud in sight, there was a nice slight breeze flying by, the strawberries were growing nicely, everyone seems to be in a great mood, nothing could ruin your day. Or so you thought. When you arrived at your cabin, you spotted your best friend since middle school, Percy Jackson. You both arrived together at camp all those years ago and have been by each other’s side since. But from the smile on his face, you knew he was about to ask for something.

“Wanna go on a quest?” He smiled as you stopped by the steps of your cabin.

You crossed your arms over your chest, “Wow. Hey Y/n, how are you today? Oh! Hey, Percy! I was having such a great day, thanks for asking.”

He dramatically rolled his eyes, “Hey Y/n, I’m so happy you had a great day. Wanna go on a quest with me?”

“Sure, what are we doing?” You asked going up the steps of your cabin, heading to the door.

“Hermes is down so Demeter wants us to give Persephone something.” He held up a small wrapped package.

That doesn’t sound very hard. This quest could very possibly only be a day or two long.

“Alright. Give me a minute to pack.”

You entered your cabin and went straight to your bunk. Grabbing your bag from the trunk by your bed, you quickly started to shove in your quest essentials: your extra toothbrush, toothpaste, clothes, deodorant, drachmas, money, and your emergency dagger that y/g/p gave to you on your sixteenth birthday. After you close your bag, you put it on just as the door was opened. You turned to see your little sister, Ginger, walking in, with a bright red face and goofy smile.

You smiled at her, “What’s with the smile Ginger?”

She giggled as she rushed over to hug you. You bent down and caught her in your arms, picking her up and tightly hugging her.

“Apollo is outside and he says I look radiate.” She giggled.

Apollo is outside? Well, that’s not really shocking. Ever since his punishment ended he has been visiting Camp more often and hanging out with his children. You would be a liar if you said you hadn’t fallen for the sun god. How could you not? During his time as a mortal, you realized your crush on him. He had unquestionably grown as a person and it made your heart flutter whenever you two would hang out together. Part of you selfishly wanted him to remain mortal so the two of you could be together, but you accept the fact that he probably only saw you as a close friend. Apollo has been hanging around some of the other campers lately and has become a bit distant.

Placing Ginger down, you ruffled her curly brown hair, “He’s a bit too old for you Gin, like a couple of centuries too old. I don’t think y/g/n is gonna approve of that.” She playfully rolled her eyes, unraveling herself from your hold.

“He’s talking to Percy outside. He told me to tell you to hurry up.” She skipped away further into the cabin.

Walking to the door, you stop about a foot away from it and fixed your clothes, and smoothed your hair out with your hands. You hoped that Aphrodite would give you a quick blessing before opening the door and stepping out, seeing Percy and Apollo speaking to each other on the steps of your cabin.

“Morning Apollo!” You smiled as they both turned to look at you.

“Morning Flower! Are you going somewhere?” He asked motioning to your bag.

You nodded, “Yup, I’m going with Percy to giving something to Persephone.”

He gave Percy a look, it almost looked judgemental to you. Why would he give Percy that type of look?

“Did you ask her to go with you?” He questioned Percy, in an off-putting tone.

“Uh-yeah. Persephone likes y/n. I figured bringing y/n along would make Persephone happy.” Percy shrugged.

“Why would you care if he asked me?” You defensively asked, crossing your arms over your chest.

He looked at you again, opening and closing his mouth, trying to formulate an excuse.

“I-I-I didn’t-I didn’t mean it like that!”

“Yeah whatever,” you scoffed, “come on Perc. Let’s get this over with.”

You grabbed Percy by his arm and dragged him away from the bumbling God who was yelling out apologies. How dare he even ask something like that? You helped save Olympus for crying out loud! If saving Olympus wasn’t good enough for him, you were going to show just how well you could handle yourself on a quest. Here you were thinking that he had changed into a better person/god.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The train cart was quiet as it went to its destination, Washington D.C. Why Persephone was there was beyond you, but you couldn’t wait to see your old friend. Percy sat in the seat across from you, staring out the window. He had been quiet since you left the camp. You assumed he was letting you cool down.

“He didn’t mean it that way, ya know.”

You looked at your best friend. He was still staring out of the window, arms loosely folded across his chest.

“But why would he even ask that? Like-I helped save Olympus for crying out loud. Does he not think I can handle doing a quest?”

Percy chuckled as he shook his head, a smile on his face, “You’re so blind.”

You scoffed, “Blind about what? He’s an asshole.”

“Y/n, he has a crush on you.”

You stared at Percy in shock. He what? Apollo has a crush on you?

“Apollo has had a crush on you since his punishment. You never noticed how he would literally agree with everything you would say, laugh a little too hard at your non-funny jokes, and wanted to hang out with you every second of the day?”

You had to think about that. Honestly, you didn’t see it as him wanting to be closer to you because he liked you. It just felt as if he just wanted to be around someone he was familiar with. Him having a crush on you was the last thing you expected.

“Look, he told me to give this to you when you’re in a better mood. Apollo can be an idiot, but I can tell that he wants to make things better with you.”

Percy handed you a folded up piece of paper. You slowly took the piece of paper and looked at it. Your name had been written on the top in elegant cursive writing. Glancing up at Percy, you see him leaned back on his seat, eyes closed, getting comfortable in the seat to take a quick nap. Looking back down at the folded note, you open it up and see many attempts at haikus filling the page. Many of them were crossed out, and some were unfinished with self ridiculing comments written around them. Why would he send you a page filled with unfinished haikus? You turned the page and saw that he had another unfinished haiku written, but this one was different. It had arrows pointing towards it and little hearts and stars surrounding it.

‘Little Flower

My little flower

Blooms under the starry night sky

And that’s all I have…’

Your face felt hot as you reread the title and unfinished haiku. As far as you knew, you were the only person that Apollo called ‘flower’ and he had never called you his little flower. Maybe he did have a crush on you.

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The beginning half of the quest had gone well. It took you a minute to regain yourself from the discovery, but you had to put it aside to focus on the quest. You swore to yourself that you would speak to Apollo as soon as you got to Camp again.

After delivering the package to Persephone, she asked for you both to take her young demigod son Timothy with you to Camp. Taking Timothy with you, both of you heightened your awareness. The most powerful son of Poseidon, the child of y/g/p, and the young son of Persephone was a bright neon sign calling out to monsters to come eat them. That’s how you got into this situation, running away from five echidnas and two harpies who were hot on your trail. You held little Timothy in your arms as you ran through the woods, ducking and jumping over tree branches, heading to Camp. Percy ran beside you, trying his best to block any attacks from hitting you or Timothy. Once you saw the border guards, you began to scream at them for help.

“Help!” The two closest guards jumped at the sound of your panicked voice and immediately ran over to help out.

“You’re mine child of y/g/p!”

Before you could cross the border, a searing pain came from near your left collar bone area and you watch as a spear came out through your body-your blood coating the tip of the spear. Timothy screamed in horror as you fell forward, your eyes rolling to the back of your head as you fell unconscious. His tiny hands clutched your shirt as his screams drew the attention of other guards and campers passing by. One such camper being Will Solace, son of Apollo. Running up the hill, he stops when he sees the scene before him. You laid unresponsive on top of a small child who was screaming for help and a bloody spear stuck out through your body. He felt his blood turn cold as he prayed to every god and fates that you weren’t dead. He bolted to your side and carefully took Timothy out from under you, handing him off to another camper that came to help.

“Stay with me y/n.” He tried his best to put pressure on your wound but it wasn’t much help. He was going to need the big guns. His dad.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Nothing felt different. You slowly woke up without an ounce of pain rushing through your body. Your throat didn’t feel dry, your collar bone area didn’t hurt, and your head didn’t hurt either. Everything felt normal. Well, except for a strange presence laying between your legs. Carefully lifting your head, you look down at your legs and see a little body cuddled in between your legs. It was Timothy. He had a tight grip on the blanket covering you.

“You swore you would keep them safe Percy!”

You slowly turned your head to the loud voice and tried to focus your eyes on the two people standing by the door. It took a moment before your eyes adjusted and you saw Apollo and Percy.

“I tried! We can’t help it that monsters want to kill us Apollo, I let y/n run while I took them on. I thought they were safe.” Percy’s voice cracked as he defended himself.

“Well, they’re clearly not,” Apollo turned to point at you but he froze when he saw you staring right at him. “Y/n!”

He dried his tears and ran to your side, dropping down next to your cot. The god had more tears in his eyes, his once golden skin and breathtaking blue eyes were blotchy and dull. He gently grabbed hold of your hand closest to him while you laid your head back on the pillow.

“Do you like me?”

Of course, that is the first thing you ask after almost dying.

Apollo let out a laugh as he brought your hand up to his lips and placed a gentle kiss on the top of your hand. Tears ran down his blotchy red cheeks as he lovingly stared down at you.

“You’re seriously asking me that?” He asked.

“I need a solid answer-,”

Apollo kissed you. You were momentarily shocked but quickly reacted by kissing him back. You could’ve never dreamt of a kiss like this. Albeit a gentle kiss, you felt all of the passion and love he was putting into it. His kiss had you forgetting about the world around you and made you feel like you were his world, because to Apollo, you were just that. His world. His everything. The person he wanted to change for and give them the world.

When he heard Will’s prayers, he felt as though his entire world crumbled. He rushed down to the infirmary and did everything in his power to heal you. He couldn’t lose another love, especially if he could stop it. Blocking off anyone from going near you (except for Timothy. Apollo could bare to say no to his little puppy dog eyes), he acted as your bodyguard, monitoring you, feeding you nectar, telling you about his day, singing random hymns and jingles. He wasn’t going to lose you. Not before he even had you.

The kiss was short, but it gave you your answer. Apollo was head over heels in love with you and you felt the same way about him. Looking at the god, you saw a new set of fresh tears forming and him smiling down at you. You smiled back at him while reaching over and drying his eyes with the hand he had been holding.

“Can I tell you something?”

He frantically nodded his head while drying his face again with his hands, “You can tell me anything you want my little flower.”

You smiled, “The second line of your haiku had eight syllables.”

For a moment, you both stared at each other before erupting into loud laughter, only stopping when a tiny groan came from the sleeping toddler laying between your legs. You looked at Apollo, admiring him as he did the same to you. His little flower.

“Can I read you the updated version?” He asked, pulling something out of his pocket.

You excitedly nodded. He opened the folded piece and cleared his throat as his eyes scanned the paper,

“My little flower

Blooms under the starry sky

Calling me, her love.”

#percy jackon and the olympians #pjo imagines #pjo/hoo #percy jackson #percy jackson imagine #apollo imagines #apollo imagine #apollo x reader #percy jackdon x reader

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thecagedsong · 3 years ago

Text

Forgotten Light: Chapter 5

A/N: Hi everyone, next chapter here. Back to Seth. You might recognize some bits from a Knox & Seth bonding fic I posted some months ago, but it’s different in the story and I still really like it. Enjoy!

1 / 2 / 3 / 4 / 5 / 6 / 7 / 8 / 9 / 10 / 11

Chapter 5: Agitated

Have to take care of the sanctuary. Have to take care of the sanctuary. Have to take care of the sanctuary.

Seth’s mantra had stopped meaning anything ten minutes ago, but mantras were all about repetition, right? Maybe if he said it enough times, he would actually believe it. Because what he wanted, what he needed to be doing, was going after Kendra. And he was pacing at the top of Seth Tower to keep himself from doing something reckless without a plan. He could feel the elements of a plan buzzing in his head, and his last couple hadn’t turned out too badly. If only he could put them all together. It had been twelveish hours since they lost Kendra, he needed to get it together soon.

They had dealt Celebrant three deliberate blows: claiming their staff (complete with Kendra telling him off and Seth rebuilding the Keep), having the Somber Knight survive striking him in his own castle after taking away his title of caretaker (Wonder how the dragonslayer was doing? Probably suffering), and finally, denying him the Wizenstone. If the dragon king was smart, he’d take some time to lick his wounds.

Which meant Seth wasn’t needed here.

He didn’t have enough proof for his grandparents, but he knew Ronodin was behind Kendra’s kidnapping. It didn’t matter that the Sphinx was likely the one who took the barrel at Fablehaven, only Ronodin knew Kendra had lost her memory. Kendra was more vulnerable than she had ever been, fairykind or not, and Seth couldn’t watch over some butt-hurt dragons when his sister needed him.

If Seth had been the one kidnapped, Kendra would never give up on him. But she wouldn’t abandon her duty as caretaker either. What could he do? What would she do?

A red-maned dragon reared its head over the inside walls of the keep, and Seth’s muscles seized into place.

“I’ve come to alert you about a message from Stormguard,” Marat said. “It is addressed to the Caretaker, and your grandparents are waiting for you to open it.”

He couldn’t be the caretaker, not alone, not if he still seized up like this. It was ridiculous. When he first encountered dragons, he didn’t feel scared, but his mind was mesmerized by the dragon, and he couldn’t think. Kendra cleared up his head, he cleared up her fear, and together they were a single dragon tamer. Since then, even without Kendra, he got to the point where he could keep his thoughts clear, and he wasn’t scared, but it was like his body wasn’t getting the memo.

“You have to get past this Seth,” Marat said, shaking his head.

He couldn’t be caretaker, not without his sister. He was the only caretaker; he couldn’t leave to find his sister.

Seth was the only caretaker.

Celebrant didn’t have a veto anymore. He could give the job to someone else, and go after his sister. Marat started to move away, but he needed to know now. He was one answer away from being able to go after Kendra.

Inside his chest, he felt surge of control spread over his muscles “Marat, wait!” Seth said, and something settled over him, something that made him stand a little taller. Marat turned back, and drew his head closer, curiously. Seth grinned, “I’m the last Caretaker. Celebrant was stripped of his title. The treaty is back to its foundations. Can I turn being caretaker back over to you, and go after Kendra?”

“Well done Seth,” Marat said, then took a moment to think over Seth’s plan. “I do believe that is possible. The provisions of Celebrant’s veto were very specific to the amendment making him co-caretaker. Agad will be arriving soon, we will ask for his advice, but I see nothing wrong with that plan at present.”

Marat shapeshifted back into a human, alighting on the rampart beside him, “A shame that your loyalties take you elsewhere the moment you become a full dragon tamer,” Marat said casually.

“I did it?” Seth asked, “I did!”

“Yes, it seems your sister being in danger was enough for you to push past the final effects, just as the threat of Celebrant to your family was enough for Kendra.”

“Marat,” Seth said, “I know things are a mess, would you be able to keep things under control on your own?”

“Let’s see,” Marat said, holding up a hand, counting off his fingers, “You have already dealt with the Dragon Feast. There will not be another festival night for a quarter year. We have the staff and the amulet. The curse on Stormguard is lifted, and more Fair Folk generally heralds greater opportunities for peace. Celebrant will not be happy, nor will he give up his machinations. However, I do believe I would be able to manage.”

“You can call me back, in case you need any of my specific…expertise,” Seth grinned, and Marat smiled wryly. They both remembered how reluctant literally everyone was to give him the job. With Kendra missing, the risks were really nailed home, but no one could doubt their skill at keeping preserves functioning. First Fablehaven was the only one of the five secret preserves to hold itself together, and now Wrymroost, against the King of Dragons himself, was functioning better than ever.

“I believe I will try to reserve your assistance for true emergencies,” Marat said drily.

“Let’s keep our plan quiet,” Seth said, quietly, “At least until Agad tells us if we can do it and how. I know the staff was safe when we got here, but things have changed pretty quickly.”

Marat nodded, and they entered the interior of the keep. They approached their…War Room? To be honest, he hasn’t spent nearly enough time at his Castle to learn all the stuffy old names for everything. The room with lots of maps and chests. Since he was going to give up caretaking this place, this might be the last chance to name them himself.

Marat opened the door for him, and Seth walked in, shoulders squared.

“All right, I see everyone has gathered in the War Room. What have we got?”

Grandpa and Hendrick held back sniggers, Grandma rolled her eyes, Newel gave him a thumbs up. Grandma held out the letter.

Seth took it, cracked open the old-timey wax seal, and pulled out two pieces of paper. The first one had letters that were so old-timey they were basically illegible. He wasn’t even sure it was English. The second letter was written by Tanu.

Dear Sorenson’s,

We are safe. We have rested and celebrated the restoration of Stormguard Castle, and updated them as much as we could on the current status of the rest of the world. Knox was unfortunately blunt, and they will be holding with their neutrality. They are giving us a ride to Blackwell keep by flying carriage, don’t panic when we arrive. We look forward to understanding what occurred after you were separated from Lomo.

Regards,

Tanu.

Seth let out a sigh of relief. He hadn’t thought his friends were in danger based on Lockland and the Fair Folk’s general determination to stay as far away as possible from anything remotely interesting, but it was good to hear all the same.

“It’s fine. Stormguard is sending a carriage with Tanu and Knox. They already took him out of the quiet box it seems, and the first thing he did was stick his foot in his mouth,” Seth looked around him, “Any possible allies in Quiet Boxes here?”

“Oh, don’t you act like you didn’t mouth off to the Fair Folk about their neutrality the first chance you got,” Grandma said, as Seth handed her the letters. “And we are not sticking Knox in another quiet box. It’s not healthy for a growing child.”

Seth gave a put-upon sigh, “All right, fine. We’ll find somewhere to put him. Isn’t it a little dangerous to go flying around right now?”

Marat shook his head, “One of the benefits of the neutrality you so casually mock is that the carriage of Stormguard has full immunity for diplomatic missions under the treaty. They have as many, if not more, protection on their journey than we do at the castle.”

“Safe transport is a boon that should not be taken lightly,” Grandma Sorensen said, “Knox has already likely ruffled feathers, but they owe Seth and Kendra much for freeing them. Debts hold with Fair Folk like they do everyone else in this world, though their aid is limited in scope. Everyone on their best behavior. The official letter says much of the same”

Seth made a face, but didn’t argue because she was probably right.

An hour later everyone was gathered in the courtyard as the Carriage landed lightly in front of them. It didn’t even kick up dust. Never leaving a mark, just like the people that owned it.

Knox, Tanu, and Lockland exited the carriage.

“Glad to see you guys,” Seth said, giving Tanu a hug and punching Knox on the shoulder.

“I’m afraid we don’t come with good news. While everything is fine at Stormguard, we stopped off at Terrebelle to retrieve Tess and Doren,” Tanu said, “They weren’t there and no one knows where they went. Lord Dagorel’s daughter was missing as well.”

Well, that was rude of them. Who did they think they were? Wandering around a dangerous preserve like Wyrmroost the day after a festival night and in the middle of a dragon war? Now he was going to have to track them down himself and make sure no one gets eaten. How irresponsible — Oh no, Seth was turning into Grandpa.

“They have the cloak of innocence,” Knox assured them, “So they’re safer than us. But we should still find them.”

Seth rubbed his forehead, “Great. Yeah, we’ll get Henrick on it, see if we can track them down. And whatever else we can do. I’m guessing you guys want Eve back at Terrebelle too?”

“Lord Dagorel would appreciate your consideration,” Lockland said with a bow. Well that was a little much, Seth wasn’t going to be the one giving the order to send Eve anywhere. She could do what she wanted, as far as he was concerned, it was Tess that didn’t know anything about this world he didn’t want wandering around. Probably better not to mention that.

Lockland came up from his bow.

“Hey, none of that.” Seth said, giving a tired smile, Lockland was one of the better Fair Folk after all, “Thanks for helping back there. We literally could not have done it without you.”

Lockland shook his head, “Your sister is the heroine, towards the end the only help I could give was that of one mindless puppet not trying to capture her,” he looked around, “Where is she? I’d like to know that she’s alright for myself if that’s okay.”

Seth’s throat grew thick, but no tears came. He’d cried himself out that morning before Grandma passed him one of Tanu’s calming potions, finally allowing him to get some sleep.

“Kendra…lost her memory,” Seth said, looking at the ground, not at the horrified faces in front of him.

“The key of forgetting,” Lockland said. It must have been mentioned in one of the riddles that he heard. “Seth, I’m so sorry —”

“What the heck Seth Breath?” Knox said, “You’re supposed to protect your sister!”

“I have the authority to send you to the dungeons,” Seth threatened back, “I know what I was supposed to do, but she stole the key from me and wouldn’t listen.”

“Can I still see her?” Lockland asked, “I don’t have to talk to her, just make sure that she’s okay. I feel terrible about not being able to do more before you guys came.”

“Sorry,” Seth said tightly, more than ready to shift the blame to the Fair Folk, but Grandma’s warning made him pull back, “But that privilege is reserved for allies and friends, not neutral diplomats. I only told you about her memory because Celebrant already knows what happened and you helped us. You aren’t getting any more information from me until I know you won’t give it up to the dragons for a perfectly neutral reason.”

Lockland flinched back. He had spent the past several hundred years as a human in a competition, it had probably been a while since he’d dealt with the drawbacks of neutrality. If he had ever dealt with it before. After meeting the royal children of Stormguard, Seth wouldn’t be surprised if their parents kept them under lock and key and only taught them untested morality anyway.

“Seth,” Grandma Ruth hissed. She turned to Lockland, “I would like to apologize for the Caretaker’s current temperament. The loss of his sister’s memory, due in part the schemes of Celebrant and Ronodin, is still a fresh blow. Thank you for returning our friends to us.”

Subdued, Lockland nodded, “I also came to inquire about what happened to my brother Tregain. As you are mourning the loss of your sister’s memories, surely you won’t begrudge me knowing the fate of my brother. Enemies though we were, he is family.”

Seth felt a pang then. He wasn’t being fair. It wasn’t like Lockland hadn’t suffered under the curse. And with a memory-less Kendra captured by Ronodin, Seth might be fighting his sibling in the future. Oh God, he might have to fight Kendra.

He shoved those thoughts aside, he needed to get through this, “Tregain died, so did Obregon. There was a final trap for the Wizenstone, anyone who touched it…turned to ash. The only thing I could do was send the stone away with the Rod of Banishment. It was…it was never winnable in the first place.”

Lockland was still and silent, then he nodded. “We were playing a dangerous game with the greatest prize. That those two were the only deaths is…nicer, than what other competitions for magical items are like. The business of the Fair Folk is concluded. Farewell, Caretaker Seth Sorenson.”

Lockland stepped back into the carriage, but before closing the door, turned back to Seth, “I know what we all have to do in war, but believe me when I say I can never thank you and your sister enough for ending the curse. I hope you succeed, and I hope for your safety. If Kendra is willing to give up her place in the war, now that she has no memory of what she is fighting for or how to fight, she will be welcome at Stormguard to wait in neutrality as others take her place in your battle.”

Seth didn’t know what to say. No witty comebacks, no apologies, nothing came to mind.

“Thank you for this extension, we will consider it and offer it to her when we see her next,” Grandpa Sorenson said with a bow, “Please return with the knowledge that Blackwell Keep rejoices in the freedom of you and your people.”

Lockland nodded, acknowledging Grandpa’s words, and closed the door. The carriage took off.

Grandma put a hand to her head. “Seth, I am terrified to know what you said when you and Kendra visited Terrebelle.”

“It wasn’t so bad,” Calvin’s voice piped up from Tanu’s pocket, “Lord Dalgorel’s children were quite accommodating and understanding. Kendra did most of the talking.” Tanu lifted the nipsie out of his pocket and handed Calvin to Seth.

“Calvin, we left you with Patton!” Seth said.

“As soon as dawn hit, I went to test the barriers and found them undone,” Calvin said, “Patton will be making his way back with the flying mounts soon.”

“Forgive me,” Tanu said slowly, “But if Kendra truly has lost her memory, letting her claim sanctuary with the Fair Folk sounds like a good temporary measure. Her abilities are extraordinary, and easy to be misused and misguided.”

“Come inside,” Grandma said, “We have to catch each other up.”

“Hey, I’m sorry for snapping at you about Kendra,” Knox said, walking beside Seth, “I know both of you, and Kendra’s stubborn as a rock. And its not like I did any better protecting Tess from danger.”

“I would say sorry for threatening to put you in the dungeon,” Seth replied, “But I’m not. You’re making me realize just how much Grandma and Grandpa were trying to protect me when I first learned about this stuff, it sucks.”

“I bet Kendra was always trying to protect you too,” Knox said, “How long do you think it will be before she’s back at that? At least she doesn’t have the grounds to nag you when she doesn’t know what’s going on.”

“Shut up,” Seth said, slamming the keep door shut. “I don’t know. I don’t know if she’ll ever talk to us again. I don’t know if the next time she sees me, she’ll try to kill me. Ronodin kidnapped her, and she is somewhere, right now, being convinced that she’s Ronodin’s girlfriend and would do absolutely anything for him.”

“Did I hear right?” Tanu asked, turning back. Grandma sighed.

“Yes, and I think we could all use some tea right about now.”

Seth glared at his teacup while his grandparents caught everyone up. Newel had gotten the task of brewing, snagged on their way back to the War Room, and he was sure Newel slipped a little bit extra in for the adults. Seth knew, because they had caught eyes as he was about to slip something from an unidentified bottle into Knox’s tea, and Seth shook his head.

“Agad will be here in the morning, to follow up on what leads he can,” Grandpa finished.

“I’m telling you, it was Ronodin,” Seth said, “The sleezy jerk was all over Kendra, trying to make her blush and calling her ‘Love’. It’s going to be Gavin all over again.”

“Then perhaps you can take some faith,” Tanu said gently, “Kendra’s heart is good, and her abilities meant to help and heal. Our enemies will have a long ways to go to convince her to do harm. And do not forget who else Ronodin is holding captive.”

Seth blinked, then smiled, “Bracken. If anyone can convince her that she’s better than that jerk, its him.” Seth turned to Knox, remembering that Knox didn’t know who Bracken was, and saw his cousin staring into his cooled cup of tea. Seth nudged him with his shoulder, “Hey, no spacing out in the War Room. Bracken is Kendra’s unicorn boyfriend. They’ve done the prison spree thing before. It only took them five-ish hours, I think. It will probably take a little longer with Kendra’s memory gone, and we’ll have to give them a hand, but that’s good news. As good as it gets anyway.”

“Yeah, uh, I’m a little off, I think I’m going to get some air,” Knox said, putting down his teacup. He left the room, heading inward instead of towards the outside.

“Did something happen at Stormguard after they let him out?” he asked Tanu, frowning after his cousin.

Tanu shook his head, paused then said, “A pretty girl was invited to dine with him. Like most young folk, he couldn’t resist the urge to brag about what appeared to be an unconditional win. Between understanding that it was not the win he thought it was, and likely feeling remaining guilt over the stolen barrel. I believe, given time, he will work through his problems.”

“He likely also thinks that you blame him,” Grandpa Sorensen said, “Please try to keep your temper. You are in charge here, and your attitudes and temperaments affect everyone. The situation with Kendra is bleak, and you must hold together.”

“In better news,” Marat said, “Seth has managed to conquer the last hold of Dragon fear. I found him as a dragon, and he spoke to me clearly.”

Grandma brightened, “Oh, that’s wonderful Seth.”

“It feels kind of an empty victory,” Seth admitted.

Grandpa smiled, “One more dragon tamer in the world is a victory all the same.”

Seth looked around, “When was Henrick supposed to be back?” Maybe the Alcetaur would have something for him to do to whittle the hours until Agad showed up. There wasn’t anything they could do from their end except guard the barrel.

“He’ll be back in the morning,” Grandma said. “I know it’s frustrating, but the wait is short.”

“What if we tried to establish communication through the barrel?” Seth asked, the idea popping into his head.

Everyone blinked at him. “It’s a shared space, right? Coulter showed us how it worked with coins and tin cans,” Seth said, “It doesn’t just move people. If we put in a letter, asking for Ronodin to tell us what he wants in exchange for Kendra, maybe we can work out a trade.”

“Classic,” Newel said, “All the crime shows agree, the first thing you do with a kidnapper is keep them talking. Then you do a little give, a little take, until you’re negotiating for the right stuff. Once they trust you, Bam! Hit them where it hurts.”

Grandma and Grandpa shared a look, “It wouldn’t hurt.” Grandma said. “It will let us track activity with the barrel, if nothing else.”

“I’d feel better waiting until we have Agad’s approval,” Grandpa replied, “But I can’t see any harm, and the longer Kendra is in their grasp, the worse it will be. Could you write the letter?”

Grandma nodded, standing up. “Just to explain that we are open to negotiating for the return of Kendra. Hopefully their reply will contain clues as to where they are, even if they ask for something we can’t give.”

“I have a feeling we will not get peace enough to brew for a while yet,” Tanu said, returning his teacup to the tray, “And my ingredients are most potent fresh. We slept a while before the celebration at Stormguard, I will be brewing in my room, if you need me.”

They both left. “That was a smart idea, Seth,” Grandpa Sorenson said. Seth slumped, “Yeah, but there still isn’t anything I can do.”

“I have the feeling you’ll have the chance to do plenty,” Grandpa said, “Tess and Doren are still at Terrebelle. Agad is coming. If you like, we can do something active. How about a sword-fighting lesson? See if these old bones remember anything.”

He let Grandpa get him into a sword fighting lesson. He didn’t use Tregain’s sword, as the goal was to be seen and fight, and instead practiced as many moves as he could remember Warren and Vanessa teaching him. Grandpa showed him a few as well, from back when he learned.

Grandpa was much more of the “best way to win was never be hit, and you don’t get hit if you’re never there” camp. Instead of Warren and Vanessa’s focus on attacking, counter attacking, and movement economy with broad swords, Grandpa had him dodging in circles, keeping out of striking range by positioning himself on the outer side of the blade.

When Seth complained about not having a good position to attack, Grandpa proceeded to disarm him seven times in a row, attacking from that exact angle when Seth was too slow to move. It was safe to say that ‘the best way to win is to not be there’ was beaten into his arms by dinner.

Knox still hadn’t come back, so Seth took a plate of food and started asking around to find his cousin. Grandpa and Tanu had both suggested giving Knox space, but they didn’t know him. Grandpa wasn’t related to Knox, and Knox was the kind of person that needed someone to show off to in order to be a person at all.

Eventually a dwarf pointed him towards the room at the very top of the central structure. It wasn’t really a room, since it had no walls, just a couple of pillars holding up the roof. A sort of small pavilion.

“I see you’ve found the High Judgement Court,” Seth said, rounding the top of the stairs.

“That what this place is called? It was empty, I figured I wouldn’t bother anyone here, but I suppose it’s a fitting place for me,” Knox said.

“You missed dinner, I brought you some food,” Seth said.

Knox waved it away. “I ate my fill at Stormguard.”

Seth set down the plate of food by him anyway, “You know, we’re taking turns being an absolute wreck about Kendra. I had first go before sunrise, Grandma and Grandpa went while I was sleeping. Thought I should warn you that your turn is almost up.”

“I can’t believe you’re still cracking jokes while Kendra’s kidnapped,” Knox said, clenching his fists. “And with the person whose fault it is.”

“Ronodin’s not here,” Seth said, “He’d be getting a sword to the gut if he was.”

“It’s my fault Kendra was kidnapped!” Knox yelled. “Everyone knows it, they’re all angry and just trying to spare my feelings. It was making me sick. That’s why I am up here. Now leave.”

“Knox, you screwed up,” Seth said, “Everyone does it. No one blames you. We’ve fought tricky enemies before, and we’ve all figured out how to put the blame where it belongs, on the bad guys. You’re the only one who hasn’t yet.”

Knox snorted, “Maybe everyone makes mistakes, but not everyone gets people kidnapped on their first go.”

And it clicked for Seth, in a weird moment of vague empathy. Looking at Knox, he remembered a rushed salt circle, clinging to Kendra, trembling as ghastly noises raged through the house.

Seth regretted not coming sooner.

“No, you’re right, some of us wait until our second mistake to get our family members kidnapped and threaten the whole world,” Seth said. Knox jerked to look at him, but if they were going to have a feeling-ish touchy heart-to-heart, Seth was going to be looking over the preserve.

“You can’t mean —”

“We haven’t had any time between dragon feasts, cursed tournaments, and everything else,” Seth started, “But you’re a couple of important hours late to the magic party. Back when we went to Grandma and Grandpa Larsen’s funeral, all our parents went on a cruise, remember?” Knox nodded. “Kendra and I were sent to stay at Fablehaven for two weeks.”

“That’s when you found out about this stuff? You’ve only known three years?” Knox asked, looking a little perplexed, “I thought you guys had been doing this way longer. How’d you get to be in charge?”

“Longer story,” Seth said ruefully, “We knew things were a little odd, back then. Grandpa kept telling me to stay out of the woods for more and more dangerous reasons, while Kendra played riddle games in the attic of the main house. Grandpa had set up clues for us, to see if we were curious enough to be open to the secrets. Kendra figured out about the milk, she used me as her guinea pig.

“My first mistake? I wanted a pet fairy. A fairy trader had come to visit, and I thought I could catch one too. He was a real adventurer, you know? But I didn’t know the rules, like you didn’t know not to trust the dungeon goblins. I caught a fairy, and kept it in my drawer overnight. Doing that turns the fairy into an imp. Dark, scaly, multiple fangs and eyes, angry. A butterfly into a spider. She had pleaded and begged me from inside the jar not to keep her trapped, but I knew so much better than her, I was going to release her in the morning.”

“Woah,” Knox said, “Tess would hate you forever for that. Could you undo it? With your shadow stuff?”

Seth smiled ruefully, “Me? No, no one can undo that. And the shadow stuff came later. So the fairies got their revenge. You made it to Terrebelle because Tess is like, the most innocent person ever, right? That day was when I lost my innocence protection under most treaties. The fairies came and attacked me. The next part’s a little fuzzy, Kendra said I was some kind of malformed, fleshy walrus. It hurt, my senses were all mixed up, I was breathing through my back, and Grandpa and Kendra fixed me by making a deal with a witch. So yeah, my first mistake didn’t get anyone kidnapped, but it wasn’t a small deal either.”

Knox hesitated, and Seth waited.

“And… and your second mistake?”

“The third floor of the main house is meant for children, and when only children are in it, they have extra protection. You saw how everything went crazy last night?” Seth checked, and Knox nodded, “That’s what happens on the summer solstice at every preserve. Part of the treaty says they can party without boundaries on solstices and equinoxes. The boundaries of the actual buildings at Fablehaven stay secure, but the creatures can party around the yard and all the way up to the window.”

Knox shuddered, “Dude, you’re making this sound like a horror story.”

Seth gave a weak smile. The sun was finally starting to touch the horizon, on the longest day of the year. “Dude, because it was. Over and over they told me not to go near the windows. Don’t look. Phantoms can take any shape, and wraiths were waiting to suck the life out of you. But that just sounded so cool. A little peek wouldn’t hurt anyone. Looking never hurt anyone.

“I peeked. Kendra scolded me the whole time. Fairies were lighting up jack o’lanterns outside the window, keeping the worst of the monsters away so I didn’t see anything good. They saw me though, and the fairies couldn’t ditch me fast enough. They hadn’t forgiven me for turning their sister into an imp. They flew away, Kendra dragged me back. Creatures got right up to the window and started playing out horrible things. It was the wolves eating toddlers that got me, and I opened the window, worried for the kid. That let them in the house. We managed to get the creatures out of the attic, and nothing could get back in with the extra protections. The ones I let in though, they let in all their friends to the rest of the house.”

“No,” Knox said. Seth looked over and saw the appropriate look of horror.

“Yep, I clung to Kendra like a baby the whole night. When it was over in the morning, Dale was a statue, Lena and Grandpa were abducted, Hugo gone. See, it took my second mistake to really mess things up. You were able to do a lot of good before your big screw up. You helped with the scepter, which, no joke, saved Wrymroost. And we wouldn’t have found Lockland, who gave us the glove to go forward, if we didn’t put you in the quiet box.”

“They couldn’t attack me because of the whole innocence thing, right? How did you guys get out of it? How did you fix your mistake back then?”

The memories replayed in his mind.

“Err, I have the feeling you’re not going to believe me if I told you,” Seth said with a small grin.

“Really dude?” Knox protested, “I was turned into gold last night, flew back here in a flying carriage, your sister was kidnapped by a wooden puppet after loosing her memory, and waiting out there are a bunch of dragons ready to kill us. I think I can take whatever you did at Fablehaven to rescue your grandparents.”

Seth stood up, “I’ve pulled you out of your slump. No one blames you, because mistakes happen, and what’s important is working to fix them. Come on, it’s time to turn in.”

“I’m not leaving until I get the rest of the story,” Knox said, “You can’t leave me hanging like that.”

“Fine. Well, first off, Grandma Sorenson hadn’t been captured because she had been turned into a chicken…”

#Forgotten Light #fablehaven #dragonwatch #seth sorenson #Really like this one #Seth feels like Grandpa #Am I using Tess and Knox to grow Kendra and Seth as teachers/mentors #could be

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unmaskedagain · 4 years ago

Text

Not the Devil, but Twice as mean

This is a short story that I wrote. Its dark. It does reference suicide early on. It talks about evil and the supernatural so be warned.

“My mother committed suicide,” Claudia told Dr. Sykes dryly. She kept her face blank, like always. Nothing the therapist could latch on to or exploit. “She did it because she would rather die than raise a daughter like me.”

Claudia had always been Dr. Sykes most… peculiar client. She didn’t come with the usual problems that plagued other schoolgirls her age. There were no body issues, boy troubles, too much pressure to succeed from family, or a desire to improve her popularity at school. Nor did she seem to have any narcissistic tendencies like Sykes thought she would. Claudia was cold, seemingly indifferent to all the troubles that had wreaked havoc on her life but more than willing to discuss them as one talked about the weather.

Dr. Sykes resisted to write the word sociopath on her notepad again. She was a thin, middle-aged blond woman with a big nose and a haircut that reminded people of Tinkerbell. “Why do you think that’s true?”

Her patient raised one of her perfectly sculpted eyebrows at the question. It would be an understatement to say that Claudia Valencia was a pretty girl. She had an otherworldly beauty that would’ve been odd on any woman, let alone a girl of fourteen. Her ink-black hair was a mess of endless curls that framed eyes such a deep brown they were easily mistaken for black. She had high cheeks bones, scarlet lips, and her amber skin was flawless and blemish-free as if the teen hadn’t ever so much as had a pimple.

Which was probably true, Dr. Skyes thought. And when she did, she could swear she saw a flicker of a smile on Claudia’s sweet face.

“I don’t think it’s true. I know it is,” Claudia finally answered.

“Uh-huh,” The older woman said. Dr. Sykes had been Claudia’s therapist for two years. She probably knew more about the younger girl than anyone else. “Why do you know it’s true? And what do you mean: a daughter like you?”

Claudia smiled pleasantly. The answer was the same for both questions. Evil, Claudia thought. She was born evil. She had always known it. Claudia was born with black blood, literally pumping through her veins. The first time she was placed in a crib, Claudia had set fire to the entire room. When Claudia was little, she’d walked the earth with two shadows. One belonged to her. The other did not.

Her mother didn’t mind at first, even when little Claudia had started speaking to it. She wrote it off as a child talking to an imaginary friend. It wasn’t until she finally heard the shadow talk back did she finally have enough. Her mom’s death was the last time Claudia saw her second shadow. Her father’s shadow.

“My mother was a good woman,” Claudia said. “A kind, loving woman. And a fool.” She sighed as she remembered her mother. “She loved fairy tales. She loved books and shows about magic, love, and good, always triumphing over evil. They blinded her of how dangerous such things really are, how dangerous my father was. The reality set in after I was born. I wasn’t the daughter she expected me to be. I could never be the daughter she always wanted. Still, she tried to love me as best she could.”

Dr. Sykes nodded and took more notes. “And do you think she loved you?”

“As best she could,” Claudia repeated.

“And your father?” Dr. Sykes. “Did he want you? In our past sessions, you hardly ever spoke of him. I wish to address him now because, as you have stated, this will be our last session.”

Claudia paused to contemplate what to say, how best to give an answer that wouldn’t end with Sykes accusing her of being the anti-Christ. The situation happened with her last therapist. It was an unpleasant experience. “My father is a cold man, a harsh man. Cruel, even. He demands perfection out of everything and everyone in his life. He despises weakness and stupidity. He firmly believes love isn’t freely given. It’s earned.” It was, Claudia was willing to bet, the kindest words anyone had ever said about her father. “I am exactly the daughter my father always wanted.”

She’d be dead if she wasn’t. I had sisters, Claudia wanted to scream. A dozen, maybe, if she remembered right, give or take one or two. They spanned back centuries. Most of them hadn’t made it past infancy. Too human for Daddy Dearest to even bother with. The rest dead before or by their fifteenth birthday. Too weak, her father had said, to do what was expected of them. However, even though this would be their last meeting, there were some things Claudia couldn’t bring herself to reveal.

“So, he loves you?”

At the question, Claudia’s face turned thoughtful. “My father is capable of many things, but I had always wondered if the ability to love is one of them. He is fond of me.” No daughter of his had ever lived as long as she had. Only sons. And even then, only pure sons. Never a half-breed like her. No daughter of his had ever come so close to completing the Blood Rites, not that her father knew that yet. Countless of her brothers had tried and died in their attempts to complete the Blood Rites. Or had been killed for their attempts. “He is proud of me.”

Dr. Sykes straightened up in his seat, “You’ve had contact. The last time we spoke about your dad, you swore you’d never speak to him again.” This was growth, the woman thought.

“I haven’t seen or spoken to him since I was seven-years-old,” Claudia said. The shadows told her everything she wanted to know. They were how Claudia knew she was running out of time. They could travel to places she dared not tread. It was how she knew her father still looked for her and that he was getting close to finding her.

He had been searching for Claudia for most of her life. It had taken five years, and having a child for her mother to admit that the man she loved was, literally, pure evil. Once she had, her mother had taken her and ran. It was the smartest thing she had ever done.

“He doesn’t know where I am,” Claudia whispered. She always preferred to limit any mention of her father. Speak of the devil and all that. “I don’t want him to know. Not yet, at least.” The very thought of her father finding her before Claudia could finish the rites made her entire body tremble.

Dr. Sykes mistook the emotion for another one entirely. “Do you miss him?”

“Sometimes,” Claudia admitted. She just feared him more. Claudia was terrified of what he would do to the people she loved; her family, her friends. Not could do, not might do; would do. “He was a good dad from what I remember. He always made time to play with me; tea parties, princesses, superheroes.”

“Why don’t you invite him to your birthday?” Dr. Sykes suggested a smile lit up her face. “You’ve talked about it for months. It’s a big day for you. It would be a good time to work out any lingering… issues.”

Claudia sighed. Dr. Sykes still thought she had abandonment issues. She did not have abandonment issues. She had ‘if father finds out I’m doing the Blood Rites in an attempt to declare emancipate myself from his control once and for all, he’ll have everyone I’ve ever known and loved slaughtered in front of me before killing me himself’ issues. “The timing wouldn’t work.”

“It’s a week away,” Dr. Sykes stated. “Is your father overseas?”

“Practically in another world,” Claudia smirked. “Besides, he’s my father. He doesn’t need an invitation. He’s had this birthday marked on his calendar for years.”

Dr. Sykes gave her an understanding look. “My mom was deployed a lot when I was young. Maybe he’ll make it in time.”

“He will,” Claudia said, a coldness went down her spine. “Fifteen is a special age to turn in my family.”

“Yes, a traditional celebration for young Hispanic girls,” Dr. Sykes remembered. “Your Quinceanera.”

Claudia smiled. “My mother used to dream about how’d mine would be. A big puffy dress, going from flats to heels.

“What was your mother’s name?” Dr. Sykes asked. She had finally caved to two years of building curiosity about the young girl’s family. It was her last chance, after all

“Rosemary,” Claudia answered with a soft smile on her face. “My father found it amusing.”

Dr. Sykes leaned forward, hand on her chin. “Why?”

“People call him the devil,” Claudia answered. “He isn’t, of course. My father isn’t old enough, my grandfather maybe. That old man is where Christianity got their idea of what the devil looks like.”

“What?” Dr. Sykes drew back as if bitten.

Claudia carried on as if nothing happened. “It’s absurd, of course.”

Dr. Sykes breathed a sigh of relief and ran a hand through her blond hair. Her sleeve caught her attention. That was when she realized she wasn’t in her regular work clothes, a well-fitted power suit, but her pajamas. “Of course…” She said, blinking in confusion. Why was she wearing her pajamas?

“Lucifer was cast down from the heavens,” Claudia added. Evil, yes. Bringer of darkness, yes. But he is no more of a demon than you. Why in all of time and space would he look like one? Or choose to look like the very incarnation of evil. Even my father doesn’t walk around all black-eyed with his horns showing, and he’s very proud of his heritage. It’s tasteless. Though these days, with all that’s going on in the world, some people might actually welcome the apocalypse. Nevertheless, evil is meant to be tempting. Evil seduces.”

Dr. Sykes barely paid attention to what Claudia had said as too preoccupied with assessing the odd situation she slowly realized she was in. It was like her mind was cloudy, but she was starting to pick out various clues that screamed something was wrong. For starters, she never worked after six, and the view from her window said it was night outside, well after office hours. They were in her bedroom, not her work office, where she only dealt with patients. Her home address was confidential, and she wasn’t listed anywhere. Furthermore, how had Claudia gotten into her house? Why? And why hadn’t she questioned anything until now?

Claudia waited patiently as Dr. Sykes struggled to regain her memory of the last hour. It was the least could do, she knew. Dr. Sykes had been a big help to her in the last couple of years. She was fun, easy to talk to, caring. Odd as it might be, Claudia would miss her.

Panic started to fill the woman. She remembered feeling like she was being watched all night. She remembered red glowing eyes peering down at her from a shadowy corner on her ceiling. Dr. Sykes remembered thinking it was just a dream, her imagination. She remembered getting out of her bed for a drink of water. She had stepped into the darkness of the hallway, and then there had been a pain—blinding pain, and then nothing.

“Ahh, there you go,” Claudia said. “Was that really that hard?”

Dr. Sykes let out a shuddered breath and brought up her terror-filled eyes to meet Claudia’s. “Did you… Am I…” She asked, but the question she wanted to ask didn’t leave her lips. Instead, the doctor asked, “Why is this our last session?”

“Because I killed you,” Claudia sighed. “And spirits can only stay earthbound for so long.”

Dr. Sykes's mouth dropped. “No! You didn’t! I’m not! I can’t be!”

Claudia stood up and brushed off the imaginary dirt of her clothes. She was small, dainty, even, and dressed in a dark blue and green school uniform.

As if she was an innocent little girl, Sykes thought bitterly.

“You’ve been floating above your chair for the last half hour,” Claudia put a manicured hand on her hip. “As smart as you are, as you were, I figured you would’ve realized long before now.”

Condescending little bitch, Dr. Sykes thought viciously. Murdering little demon!

Claudia grinned, red-stained lips spread from ear to ear. “I made it quick, nearly painless. But death is never easy. And I’d watch yourself. Your soul is in this little demon’s hands.” Dr. Sykes’ eyes widened in surprise. “No, I can’t read minds. You’re a ghost, chica—a soul. Souls tell everything. You’ve been talking out loud this entire time.”

It went quiet. Dr. Sykes was too busy coming to terms with her life being over to talk, and Claudia had decided to be generous enough to allow that.

“Are you taking me to hell?” Dr. Sykes finally asked.

Claudia waited to answer. She eyed Dr. Sykes over as she grew more and more afraid of what the answer would be. She loved fear. The feelings of other people’s fears always warmed her right down to her toes. “No, You’ll face your judgment like any other,” Claudia told her. “I only needed your life.”

“Oh? Only my life,” Dr. Sykes said sarcastically. “Well, in that case.”

Claudia laughed, “You always were funny,” She said as she walked to the door, easily stepping over the body in the middle of the room. “I really did like you.”

“Do you kill everyone you like?”

“Some of them,” The girl shrugged. “Usually, just the ones that get in my way. Your death put me just over four dozen. I only killed you because you were born under a full blood moon. That’s harder to find than you think. It was a lucky break that you told me when your birthday during our last session. I already knew the year you were born. After that, it was easy to figure out where you fell on the lunar cycle. I’ll send flowers to your funeral. You liked Madonna lilies, right?”

“I preferred golden rayed lilies,” Dr. Sykes answered drily.

“Oh yeah!” The girl nodded. “I’ll remember that. Goodbye, Dr. Sykes. I hope you make it into heaven. If not, well… I’ll see if I can put a good word for you in hell.” And with that, she was done. Claudia was about to walk out the door when she was called to stop.

“Wait!” Sykes called. “Why do this? Why kill so many people?”

Claudia paused in the doorway and looked over her shoulder. Her face looked far too angelic for all the evil she had done as far as Sykes was concerned. “Because daddy is going to make an uninvited appearance at my Quince. And I have to be ready for him,” She said. “You think you’re afraid of hell. Trying showing up as a demon with a soul.”

#short story #original fiction #original content #evil #supernatural #writing #unmaskedagain

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charlettebffxiv · 3 years ago

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Prompt #5 Persimmon (Extra Credit)

Picking fruit was not exactly tiring work. It’s not hard on the limbs, it does not ask much of your muscles, and it isn’t going to make you run malms upon malms. What it is, though, is time consuming. Little actions, over and over, in the heat of a summer sun for bells on end will wear anyone down. It does not matter how tall, how wide, how thick or how lithe you are. It will wear you down eventually. The grate of bark on your fingers will become cutting, the weight on the straps will pull down harder on your shoulders, the sensation of sweat trickling down your neck, back and between unmentionables will awaken a chafing you couldn’t imagine. This sun Charlette was reminded of that fact and the nostalgic shine of it would reveal itself to be almost completely untarnished by it. Almost.

“Twelve above, I could drown someone in the sweat collecting in my linens. Are persimmons really worth this much toil? Is old Lodden unwittingly guilty of torture and callous mistreatment of the young? Of child labour? You used to pick his crops when you were young, right Charlette?” Maxim’s whining had been noise in the background, another buzzing pair of wings to join the chorus of summer hatchlings finding their nectar. Hearing her name though, brought it roaring back into her ears sadly. “When I was young, Maxim? You are two twelvemoons older than me.” The Wildwood was leaning against the trunk of a particularly bent tree, lounging really, in the crook formed by the winding body of the old growth. He waved a hand at Charlette, swatting away her words like flies. “Yes, yes. You know what I meant. When you were a child! I bet you were a dhalmel back then already. Is that why Lodden took you on? Could you reach all the way to the top even in your tenth season?” Charlette tossed an over-ripe persimmon at him, it missed, hit the tree and squirted its fermented juices far enough to stain a sleeve. Maxim was quick to escape his perch, holding the drenched fabric from his arm and scowling at the stink now stuck to him. “Aww! C’mon! That’s going to stain! Not that it matters, but it smells too! And I was not even wrong, was I!” but Charlette had returned to her picking, not even paying him the slightest bit of attention. Well, not obviously. Fat, heavy, ripe Persimmons were being dropped into the woven baskets that sat at the base of each tree. Baskets that would be hauled back by chocobo cart once they reached this section. The fuller the collection, the more pride Charlette felt. It was simple work, and she felt drenched to the hind quarters, weary with the repetition, but just so simply satisfied with a visible measure of progress. It was so good, beholding the burgeoning baskets, for the moment it was allowed before Maxim whipped his sleeve against Charlette’s cheek. “Ack! Maxim!” “I’m sharing.” “It stinks! Oh- hurrk!” Charlette gagged, a hand shooting up to wipe the sticky leavings away. But nothing will remove that smell from the inside of her nose, nothing but time and retching. “Oh don’t be so dramatic. You’ve smelled worse in the green houses, hells you’ve probably tasted worse too! How does it compare to mite ichor?” The reminder of that only made her turn away, the dirty look she was shooting ruined by the sudden flex of her throat and loud “Guurh!” that escaped her. His reminder of that foul taste, and texture, only made the entire moment that much harder to handle. “Shut up! You deserved that.” “I don’t think so. I think you deserved that. To wear my new scent, ‘Essence of Orchid Garbage’. I think it’ll be big in Ishgard.” He struck a pose, hip cocked out, hand on waist, the other holding his stained sleeve out with a pinky raised. He looked cultured, in a stupid kind of way. She hated that it made her laugh, partly because she gagged in the middle and tasted acid in her mouth. Maxim took a deep sniff of his new cologne, noise raising up in such a lordly manner you’d think he was King of the Gabage Grove, and joined Charlette in her tortured choking. “Woof! Oh dear, huurp! That’s a stench! Hah!” His enjoyment of the process, though, irritated her. She was leaning on fence post and trying to pull in deep breaths of fresh, summer air when a voice called out. “Still can’t handle it, can she?” Charlette had not heard that tone in so long. The comforting pitch, the annoying confidence, the cocksure suggestion that it belonged to someone who just knew her, and knew what had happened to her. “Nope!” Maxim responded with far too much glee, the shit. “But she did ask for it, so don’t feel bad, or try to help. It’s not how penance is supposed to work. Instead, tell me how you’ve been Chloe.” Charlette’s sister was a few ilms shorter in height, white in hair, several shades darker in skin, and inhabited all the self-assured confidence someone needed to both be incredibly likable, and hateable, at the same time. Maxim had already draped his arm around her, Chloe equipped in her best picking overalls, which is to say she wore the same blue, worn, badly-fitting but sturdy kind that Charlette and Maxim did. Borrowed from Lodden, and smelling of one thing: farm. “Penance? Oh good, I’m glad the eldest still gets to spend time doing her favourite thing.” Charlette looked to Chloe, and made a hand-gesture that made Maxim gasp, and Chloe smile. It was very out of character. “I thought you weren’t going to make it this season. Weren’t you in Limsa? Or Doma?” She stepped to them and drew herself to full height, Charlette let the two shorter Elezen look up to her. No need for sharp words when she literally always had the high ground. “Yes! And I made a special effort to come through this season. I’d heard you were back home, and I missed you so very much I just had to come and see you again.” Maxim’s face turned between the two, his mouth drawn tight and remaining shut, a rarity for the man. “Mmhm. Well if you are done lying, we were about to start on the next tree. Come along.” and Charlette turned in a sweep, her nose held high in the air, long and determined steps carrying her away from the two. “She’s happy to see me.” Chloe said as she followed from behind. “That so? Did I just witness a pair of Bellamy’s hugging? Y’know, if I think about it, that makes sense. It’s very polite, cold enough to ice tea, and no one would have any idea it’d happened unless told.” A very fake scoff had left Chloe as she pantomimed offense. In all the years Charlette had known her sister, she knew she was incapable of two things: Shame, and seriousness. “How dare you! What you describe is far more intimate than a hug, to suggest my dear sister and I would embrace in such a way in public is positively scandalous.” Charlette glared back over her shoulder at the pair, but they couldn’t see it. Chloe and Maxim had started up a series of bows to each other. Maxim with one hand behind his back and bending low at the waist as far as he could while they walked. “My deepest apologies Lady Bellamy!” Chloe gripped the baggy edges of her overalls and pulled them out in a shallow curtsey. “Fret not Ser Flowerman, all is forgiven for such a gentleman of culture!” Maxim’s chuckle was loud, hearty, his smooth tone a little bit of a liar in its suggestion that he’s a smooth man. “Ser Flowerman, that’s going on my headstone when I pop off this mortal coil.” “You’re very welcome. It suits you.” They couldn’t reach that next tree soon enough. Charlette picked her harvest in silence while the other two continued to cajole each other into further impressions and comedic takes on, well, just about everything. It was very distracting, Charlette thought. But it was also very nice, as it reminded her of a similar time, out here in this old orchid. The three of them younger, nevermind what Maxim thinks. Only it was not with Maxim. No, back then it was Frederick who was helping distract Chloe and the others. Who was her sister’s companion in gently teasing her, or tossing the fallen, rotted persimmons at the others. He always managed to get poor Alistair on the back of the head, knew just when Brianne had him distracted enough to… “Charlette? Yoohoo, you there?” a charcoal-skinned hand waved in front of Charlette’s face, the sudden silence that had been lost on her came back. Maxim had stepped away, or perhaps been sent away? Why? Charlette looked down at Chloe’s face, which was suddenly serious. What a surprise. “I thought you couldn’t do that.” She asked. “Do what?” Chloe looked confused, perhaps even worried. How dare she. “Nothing. Did you need something?” “I asked if you are okay. You didn’t say anything, you were off with your books again I think. Dreaming of the library?” just a little curl of her lips came out. Hah! See, not a serious bone in Chloe’s body. Charlette looked at her little sister, perhaps staring for a bit too long. Then reached out, pulled her into a gentle hug that Chloe returned as easily as slipping into fresh sheets on a newly made bed. “No. No I’m not okay.” And just then, for the first time since Charlette had been pulled back home, it felt okay to be that way. Goodness, picking fruit was tiring work.

#ffxivwrite2021 #ffxiv #ffxiv writing #ffxiv roleplay #duskwight #elezen

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suddenfossilfightersheadcanons · 4 years ago

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Bullwort and Bandits - Origin and Ending

Bullwort grew up the eldest son amongst five children, forever fighting figuratively and literally to get his way. This propensity for provocation proved dangerous when his father demanded his son study medicine or law, for Bullwort started a fistfight for his right to do art instead. Though he won, his was a Pyrrhic victory, leaving him certain that others couldn’t be trusted, and that exhibiting weakness was nigh-fatal. Thanks to this philosophy, a background noise of aggression and anger haunted him throughout his degree, by the end of which he had collapsed into a solitary, depressed squalor. He exhibited some artworks to apathetic crowds, and lived off dirt and water for a few years. His burgeoning rage manifested in stringent Cubist jawlines and oversaturated backgrounds in his paintings – to most, these seemed ugly and obscene. But to a fellow struggling artist named Lynette June Miles, they were gloriously creative. He adored her paintings in return – but by ’94, it was clear they’d both have to turn to other professions to make a living.

Bullwort retrained as a policeman, granting himself a means of physically expressing his incessant infuriation. But his pleas to Lyn not to throw away her talent proved futile by the end of ’95, when she opened her retirement with a long, long holiday to stay with her boyfriend, Russel Richmond, on Vivosaur Island. Russel was the son of the island’s owner, who was beyond keen on fossil fighting, frequently sending his son to explore the island and discover new dig site ground. However busy he was, Russel was jovial and sweet – the perfect antidote to Lyn (and Bullwort’s) consternation – and he married Lyn on Greenhorn Plains over the spring of ’96, inviting Bullwort as best man.

Whilst on the island, Bullwort met Mr. Richmond, who encouraged him to join their police force. Desperate for job security and a giant salary, he accepted. Lyn, meanwhile, took to exploring with her husband, reapplying her artistic skills as a cartographer. The map of Vivosaur Island visible when travelling in-game is her most famous piece, but the artworks in Bullwort’s office are amongst her best.

However much Richmond’s fervour helped fossil fighting to thrive, it was deleterious to other businesses on the island. (Were it not for Bullwort’s dogged determination, the police would have all but imploded in all but name; meanwhile, almost no non-fighting related trade brings in considerable revenue. It’s quite worrying to consider what would eventuate from a major dino medal provider’s collapse.) Worse than the price paid by the police and people, however, was that paid by Lyn and Russel. Four years after the 1998 birth of their daughter, Rosetta, they were assigned a new mission. Diggins and Richmond had just discovered the Secret Island via radar screening, and were salivating for information. The couple left on Tuesday the 9th of July, and after sending confirmation of their arrival on Wednesday night, sent back nothing. Richmond distracted himself from his accumulating consternation by organising a search party for Monday. Bullwort, insomniac and distracted with deep, deep dread, bullied Diggins into admitting the location of the Secret Island on Saturday night, and left the next morning.

Bullwort quickly found his way to the ruins of the Starship. The entrance had caved in, and beneath the rubble... Two long, limp, rotten objects…

Russel and Lyn dead too soon. He took them back to the mainland and sobbed all the long night and all morning. To honour them, he returned to the island two days later, and cleaned up the collapsed doorway with Amargo’s power scale. When he did, another chunk of land thundered down, striking him in the middle of the back. He returned bitter over both the deaths and the injury.

Richmond was horrified. If he’d been a little less callous, his daughter-in-law and son would still be alive. Now, here they lay, six feet beneath his heels. Grateful to Bullwort, he promoted him to police chief on the 20th. Then, as if the newly declared sergeant regent hadn’t cleaned up the Secret Island, he barred it to all visitors, insisting that the Starship was too sensitive a matter to be known to the public. Bullwort’s ephemeral pride vanished. In its place, loathing sprung up. His promotion, he decided, was for arriving too late to change what mattered most – in other words, for being weak. This wasn’t honour – this was humiliation, and all because of Richmond’s shallow love of dino medals. That man could not be fit to rule. Bullwort could. He maintained a veneer of cordiality with Richmond, but from July 20 onwards, to him, their relationship was well and truly in livor mortis.

Bullwort founded the BB Bandits as the anti-Richmond mafia – everything they did was to disrupt fighters wherever possible. They began as a lucrative fossil black market trader, dealing in rare vivosaurs and miraculous/wondrous fossils. By legal standards, the prices were ugly, but compared to other vendors, they were beyond lucrative. (Saurhead was infamously intercepted mid gold head fossil transaction – but while the press censured him, the public couldn’t help but empathise.) These operations briefly drove Vivosaur Island’s economic growth into the ground. Unfortunately for Bullwort, Diggins responded with two initiatives which have made the Island the richest Fossil Eden worldwide: Establishing fighter levels and level-up battles, and found the Donation Points scheme. The former fuelled tourism while allowing Diggins to bar dangerous and archaeologically vulnerable dig sites to the public. The latter meant that fighters could obtain vivosaurs such as Stego, Spino, and Compso for no price but an annual fee.

The majority of recruitments into the Bandits were black-market based: if one was caught trading one time too many, it’d be easier to join them than to face an absurd jail sentence. The fear of the authorities bred a culture of paranoia and despotism amongst the grunts, meaning that Bullwort could easily ask one of his flightier underlings to carry out some deranged measures. Medal-stealing wasn’t uncommon, but occasionally, grunts turned to attacking fighters with a mind to kill. Beth infamously had her shoulders and her clavicle broken by a BB Bandit intent on murder – ever since that incident, Diggins has pressured Richmond into increasing dig site security. All male BB grunts must shave their heads, and all grunts, regardless of sex, must don the oppressively drab uniforms. It’s meant to prevent police from recognising individuals at a distance, but it’s despised – Snivels was never actually promoted, but gained valence amongst his peers for refusing to obey the dress code.

Most non-black market Bandit operations involve defacing dig sites in degrees ranging from graffiti to arson. Bullwort drew the line at cave-ins – that would be too painful after Lyn and Russel’s deaths. The majority of his most dramatic stunts were executed in Knotwood Forest, where he terrorised the residents and chieftain into directing him to Frigi, vandalised the Digadigamid, and stole numerous artefacts. Whilst the BB Bandits never traded the latter, they did steal particularly beautiful relics from dig sites all around, with Bullwort typically hoarding them.

The Bandits’ market operations, led by Vivian, made Bullwort rich very, very quickly. As he’d never had an awful lot of money prior to this, he quickly became drunk on cash, exchanging his morals for avarice and deluskon. Bullwort had always planned to obtain Frigi to stage his coup in the Guild Area – but after twelve years of Cain-raising, he built up a capacity for spite and pettiness that hadn’t been present initially. Originally, he wanted to covertly control the islands. By 2014, he’d given up on them, and thought he’d be better off as a glorious dictator than a fool attempting to save a hopeless slab of land.

Bullwort’s arrest didn’t collapse the Bandits, but currently, they’re nothing more than an economic nuisance dominating the black market. Sometimes, they engage with the other two B syndicates to spread chaos. But ever since the Caliosteo Cup, Joe’s made it nigh-impossible for the Bandits to access miraculous/wondrous fossils as before, which has driven away most of their clientele who weren’t lost to the DP scheme. Vivian’s considering moving the Bandits into more general illegal trade, such as drug trafficking – however, since Bullwort’s departure, her conscience has inflated, making that difficult to consider. It’s likely that after she leaves, the Bandits will simply pack up and go home to their wives, husbands, mothers, fathers, grandparents, children, sisters, and brothers.

However momentous Bullwort’s arrest was, Vivosaur Island’s citizens paid dearly for it. Thanks to his iron grip on his men, almost all crime on Vivosaur Island other than disruption to fossil was eradicated. Without him, the forces have slid back into incompetency. Bullwort could likely break out if he wanted to, but ever since his wife donated an easel to his cell, he’s been quite content to paint behind bars. As long as they don’t give him carrot sandwiches, there’s no point for him in escaping – for wherever he goes, he’ll face poverty, ignominy, and dissatisfaction.

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Thank you so much to @biblical-mythconceptions for requesting this topic! I’d never really considered the BB Bandits before, so this was huge, huge fun! I hope you all enjoy reading this as much as I did writing it.

And as these asks are so enjoyable to answer, please send some in! I can’t guarantee I’ll respond quickly, but I promise I’ll put in all the effort I can.

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system-of-a-feather · 1 year ago

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(CW: Vent, CSA, grooming, blind trust / faith / following, physical abuse mention)

Honestly, some talk about our oldest sister, but I find it very very fucking satisfying to see how poorly her relationship with the rest of the family tanked the moment I realized the damage she did to us and refused to serve her anymore. Among many other things - much more nefarious and fucked up - she raised us to be her personal attack dog and to blindly defend her regardless and I kid you not, growing up - when she was there, when she WASNT there, when she was miles away and not doing herself any services - I spoke for and adovcated for and kept secrets for her to keep her image in our family clean, to counter the THREE times she had been disowned by our parents, to make sure our parents kept an open door for her. She did nothing to keep in good graces with the family other than sometimes playing nice with them but deadass told me the only reason she came to any of the parties was to be with me.

Which cute, wonderful and all, but the bitch fucking wanted that support from our family and its been like what? Two years or so? Since we cut ties with her? Stopped reporting our life to her every two weeks? Stopped keeping secrets of shit she did and said to keep her image clean? Stopped coming up with reasons and excuses for her behavior?

And what now? Our parents, who are the ever "good parents" tolerate her - barely and disgruntled? My middle sister acknowledges her as a right wing Amazon-working transphobic and possibly homophobic republican when my sister is MORE radical left in a number of areas than we are and what? She's now avoiding me and the family for holidays which makes our middle sister - who has BPD - take that as a massive slight and worsens that relationship? Increases the distance between her and the parents?

Good man. Good, stay away.

You aren't welcome here and I'm so fucking glad shes not coming that I was not even sardonic when my mom told me she actually decided to double back and just not come again.

Honestly, I don't have to wish her ill because honestly, she makes her own life horrible and ruins her relationships without me anyways and its been a never ending sense of schadenfreude to watch her ruin her own shit.

I also will say, I don't think I am over the sheer level of disrespect and realization as to how little respect and value she held to me when after YEARS and YEARS of fighting our family (both physically and verbally) for her, after being a blind loyal fucking dog to her for years, after being OK with all the garbage she exposed us to, handed us off to, and hurt us - she decided that she drew the line at me *checks notes* saying I need space for one holiday because *check notes* her husband who is / was ten years older than me when I was a minor was sending me *checks notes* a shit ton of pornography games when *checks notes* I was already a known grooming / CSA survivor that *checks notes* she at least enable and possibly *checks notes* facilitated.

Apparently, being her ride or die who blindly and faithfully believed anything she told us (even to the point of believing we had 2D vision and had special vision at age 14-16), APPARENTLY she wasn't sure if she would be able to still walk with me if I *checks notes* stated that I needed emotional space because I was processing CSA trauma and her husband - while not the main perpetrator - was enough of a part of that to the point it made me extremely uncomfortable.

I had literally made the decisions that I was aware she played a large role in that and made the decision that I was going to give her the benefit of the doubt, the benefit of my thousands of excuses and contexts that I used to get her out of shit with our parents, and say I would forgive her and that I understood despite her never ONCE apologizing. I was completely overlooking it and letting it fly for her role in it, all I needed was for ONE holiday that her creepy fucking weeb ass husband maybe DIDNT talk to me beyond basic pleasantries. And *that* was too much.

I'm honestly kind of thankful she drew that line (and then proceeded to DARVO and victim blame me) cause I really don't know if I could have ever taken the XIV part of my brain seriously about how much he hated her and how toxic she was because at the time, most of our system saw her as our only ally growing up.

XIV won that, and he was absolutely fucking right about her and well damn man, bless XIV being right.

But anyways, I had mentioned her in terms of Christmas and remembered its like the second anniversary of her completely being a total bitch about shit and TOTALLY dropping the ball on her blindly loyal attack dog and getting the fuck bit out of her.

Fucking angry bless hallelujah a fucking bitch ate shit.

Best thing she ever did was be such an idiot it made me realize she was a fucking toxic parasite that needed me far far far far far more than I need her.

Cause fuck her man. She can fucking sit in her castle of shit and cry about it as if she didn't build it herself.

#alter: fei #<- fused vent #alter: riku #alter: xiv #vent #oldest sister #christmas vent #csa tw #grooming tw #physical abuse tw

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cargopantsman · 4 years ago

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Norse Read-A-Long

Week 2.5

I wanted to do this last week, but… time. And also I’m still parsing out chapter 18…

“Now Thorgrim slew Vestein Vesteinson at the harvest feast in Hawkdale; but the autumn next after, when Thorgrim was five-and- twenty years old, even as his father, Gisli his brother-in-law slew him at the harvest feast at Seastead. Some nights after Thordis his wife brought forth a son, and the lad was called Thorgrim after his father.” (trans. Morris & Magnusson, 1892)

I like how the author of Eyrbyggja just crams Gisli’s Saga into half a paragraph of text. It reinforces my feeling that the sagas were like the comic books of the medieval Icelanders, where a small nod to a whole other story can add in a lot backstory and context in a few words. (It’s just up to us to catch up on the back issues.)

This also nods to how entangled relationships get in these stories.

So we know Thorgrim Thorsteinsson (son of Cod-Biter Thorstein, not Surt) was a powerful goði and pretty well regarded. But who is Vestein Vesteinsson? Since there is hardly enough genealogy in Eyrbyggja Saga, I’ll add in some more.

Thorgrim married Thordis Sursdottir, sister to Gisli and Thorkel Sursson, making Thorgrim Thorsteinsson Gisli’s and Thorkel’s brother-in-law.

Gisli is married to Aud Vesteinsdottir, making Vestein Vesteinsson Gisli’s and Thorkel’s brother-in-law.

So Thorgrim and Vestein have a slight, but not solid family relationship to each other.

Gisli’s Saga frames the four men as getting on rather well, and they apparently get the group nickname of the Haukdel Men at assemblies. But then a spooky wise-man, Gest the Wise, (That oddly enough isn’t made out to be Odin for once) foretells troubled times for the four men in the years to come.

The obvious solution was they would each swear blood-brother oaths to each other. Since Gisli’s Saga also gives some interesting detail to an old rite, I’ll just drop the passage here:

“We shall bind ourselves by more lasting utterances than ever. Let us four take the oath of foster-brothers.”

Well, they all thought that good counsel; and after that they went out of their booth [at the assembly] to the point of the “ere,” and there cut up a sod of turf in such wise that both its ends were still fast to the earth, and propped it up by a spear scored with runes, so tall that a man might lay his hand on the socket of the spear-head. Under this yoke they were all four to pass–Thorgrim, Gisli, Thorkel, and Vestein. Now they breathe each a vein, and let their blood fall together on the mould whence the turf had been cut up, and all touch it; and afterwards they all fall on their knees and were to take hands, and swear to avenge each the other as though he were his brother, and to call all the gods to witness.

But now, just as they were going to take hands, Thorgrim said: “I shall have quite enough on my hands if I do this towards Thorkel and Gisli, my brothers-in-law; but towards Vestein I have no tie to bind me to so great a charge.” As he said this he drew back his hand.

“Then more will do the like,” says Gisli, and drew back his hand. “I will be bound by no tie to the man who will not be bound by the same tie to my brother-in-law Vestein.”

(trans. G. W. DaSent, 1866)

So before we know it the relationship between the four is already unravelling. It eventually becomes that Gisli and Vestein form one side and Thorkel and Thorgrim another.

This gets us to “Now Thorgrim slew Vestein Vesteinson,” though in Gisli’s Saga it’s left a bit more ambiguous as to whether it was Thorgrim or Thorkel that did the murder. Either way, Vestein was a guest at Gisli’s home when he was found to have a spear run through him during his sleep. (FUN FACT: The spear used to kill Vestein was reforged from a magic sword that was in the possession of Gisli and Thorkel’s uncle but ended up getting shattered.) Gisli pulls the spear out of Vestein, which because of cultural reasons left him honor-bound to avenge Vestein’s death. He also recognizes the steel of the spear and knows Thorgrim and Thorkel are behind the murder.

Gisli won’t go against his own brother, but he does eventually repay Thorgrim in kind by sneaking into Thorgrims house in the middle of the night and affixing him to his bed (in which his own sister Thordis is also asleep) with the same spear that killed Vestein, which is a nice message to Thorkel. [A few days later, Snorri Thorgrimsson is born!]

Thordis suspects, and later tells her brand-new husband Bork the Stout, her suspicions that Gisli was behind Thorgrim’s murder. Gisli ends up being outlawed and leads a band of bounty hunters on a years long game of cat-and-mouse with the help of his wife Aud.

This band of bounty hunters is lead by Eyjolf (though Helgi the Spy is the one that holds onto the one collective brain cell of the band), who we may remember Thordis stabbing in the leg with his own sword. (Thordis is an interesting character, never quite sure where her motivations lie.)

And this isn’t the first time Eyjolf has been emasculated by the women of sagas.

Aud and Gisli are a good power-couple. They’re ride-or-die to the literal bitter end.

At a few points during the hunt for Gisli Sursson, Eyjolf stops by the farm that Aud is still running (And at most times, Gisli is still hiding out at. He’s never able to spend too much time away from her.) and offers money for her giving up Gisli. She always refuses. One last time he offers her 300 marks of silver, help in remarriage, and reintroduction into social circles. This time Aud feigns interest in Eyjolf’s offer.

Gisli and Aud’s foster-daughter sees this and panicks, runs off to Gisli to warn him, and he just responds “Aud will never betray me.” [heart emoji, crying face emoji]

Aud, on the other hand, leads Eyjolf on, questioning him that “And this silver, should I take it… I can do whatever I wish with it?” Thinking he has her, and thusly Gisli, Eyjolf assures her that is so. Aud takes the heavy pouch of silver and promptly swings it square into Eyjolf’s face, breaking his nose, and then chastising him for being a coward, a sneak, and being beaten by a woman, all in front of his men.

Eyjolf orders the men with him to cut Aud down in his rage, but one of them, Havard, stays the men saying they won’t commit to such a heinous act.

Eventually though, Gisli is tracked down and slain in one hell of a last stand. During that last stand though, Aud does manage to also break Eyjolf’s arm, so Aud 2 - Eyjolf 0.

This brings us to the scene where Eyjolf and the few survivors of Gisli’s last stand hobble into/march triumphantly into Bork and Thordis’ home, only for Eyjolf to get stabbed by Gisli’s sister.

And next time: Snorri Thorgrimsson the goði!

#norsereadalong #norse readalong #week 2 2020 #week 2.5 #eyrbyggja saga #gisli saga

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tsumtsum-into-omiomi · 4 years ago

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CHAPTER FOUR: THE PINK DIMENSION

warning(s): cursing

word count: 1.8k

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AO3

Located near the centre of Taishi, Inarizaki High is the town's pride for its design and prestige. The school used to house the prefecture's royalties and even though it has gone through multiple renovations over the years, its Japanese castle architectural elements are still apparent all over the school's exterior. Apart from its unique structure, academic practitioners from all over the world also flock the institution for its symposiums, which are held throughout every school term to discuss multiple magical subjects.

The school's main building is its Rectory and it would be the first thing for one to notice even from afar. The elegant white walls are in stark contrast to its black, pointy roof with golden details forged onto it. Other parts of the school have the same colour palette as well. The school would reach its peak of beauty during spring, when the pink flowers of cherry blossom trees planted around the vast fields are in full bloom.

Next to the Rectory, the Potions faculty building appears small compared to it, when in fact, the faculty is the second largest after Pentagrams. Its roof manages to reach only half of the rectory's structure, making it the tallest than the rest of the faculty buildings (the Pentagrams faculty only wins in size, not height). A group of students can be seen exiting the Potions building’s main arch as school session for the day is over, including you and Suna, who are walking together towards the gate.

The sunny afternoon sky is decorated with puffy clouds, which are moving lazily in the wind's direction. Rays of sunshine threaten to dazzle your eyes but the cherry blossom trees lining up the stone walkway shade you from them. Soft breeze blows some petals into your way as you enjoy the scent of spring that wafts in the air. You are glad that there are no signs of rain at all today since that would meddle with your after-school plans.

"Gosh, this school is so big, I swear I feel like all of my cousins come here," Suna complains while faking a smile at a first year girl, who is hanging out under one of the trees with her friends.

"Well, literally everyone in Taishi studies here. What do you expect?" you laugh, attention now directed at him and not the surrounding anymore.

"For them to go study somewhere else, I guess," he retorts, sliding his hands into his pants' pockets. The smile on his face has disappeared.

"At least, your sibling is not here," your eyes catch the twins waiting for you under a tree upfront. They also notice your appearance and wave at you two.

"Oh, shut up. If not for them, you won't have any friends," Suna raises a hand at Atsumu and Osamu.

"Whatever. You sure you don't wanna come?" you ask Suna one last time before parting ways with him.

Suna shakes his head, "yeah, I wanna go home."

"Do you need anything?"

"Oh, right. Can you get me some stocks? Sparrow and jellyfish," he takes his wallet out to pass some money to you.

"Won't they go bad before next week's class?" you accept the notes from him.

"It's already Friday, class is on Monday. I think it would be fine," Suna waves his hand, dismissing your concern.

"Okay, see ya," you swerve towards the twins. Suna echoes a goodbye behind you and keeps walking.

"He's really not coming?" Atsumu asks when you are within hearing distance.

"Yeah, but he asked me to get some stuff for him," you respond before stopping in front of them.

"Lazy ass," Osamu disses. "Anyway, can I teleport?"

"Bitch, no," you and Atsumu say at the same time.

"Your sense of direction is so shitty, it'd take forever to get to Kudo Street," you pull a face.

Atsumu then adds, "a lot of people are using the travel dimension at this hour. You'll surely hit someone although I don't know how is that even possible since it's fucking huge in there."

"But if I don't practise, I won't get better at teleporting??" Osamu argues.

Atsumu lets out an exasperated sigh, "fine, you can teleport us on the way home. Let's go," he starts walking to lead the way. You and Osamu follow him from behind, heading towards the end of the walkway where the teleportation station is located at.

The teleportation station consists of five open top cubic spaces lined together, conjoined on their sides. Each cube fits at least five people and has three transparent glass walls with a white marble floor, where you are supposed to draw your pentagrams on. Two auxiliary police officers are on guard to control the flow of traffic, making sure that the students are queueing up to use the cubicles. At the end of the station, you see a group of younger pupils, whom you assume are waiting for their guardians to pick them up because they're not eligible to travel on their own yet. Teleporting licenses can only be acquired once you are sixteen years old.

You, Atsumu and Osamu get in one of the lines and wait for your turn. Every time a cubicle teleports people, you can hear swooshing noises as they dissipate into coloured light sparks and vanish from sight in a blink of an eye. Before long, the pair of siblings in front of you enter the cubicle you're lining up for and you're now at the front of the line. The elder sister draws the teleportation pentagram, her face scrunched up in concentration, and you watch as she conjures blue sparks on the marble floor.

That's when Atsumu drops the bomb on you.

"You teleport us," he nudges your elbow with his.

You and Osamu look at him wide-eyed, "bitch, what??"

"Why won't you let me teleport, if you're letting her?!" Osamu slaps Atsumu's shoulder with the back of his hand.

"Bitch, I said you will on the way back, didn't I??" Atsumu readjusts his bag's strap that shifted because of Osamu's hit just now.

"Nooooo, Tsumu-nii channnnn!" you whine with a pout, swinging Atsumu's arm in an attempt to change his mind, "I don't want to teleport!"

"And that's why you're getting shitty at it," he shakes you off before pushing you into the now empty cubicle, "go."

"Fuck," you clench your fists but do as you’re told anyway since you don't want to hold the line up with your siblings’ bickering. Plus, Atsumu's right, you haven't been practising ever since you got your license a few months ago.

Once you, Atsumu and Osamu gather in the middle of the cubicle, you inhale a deep breath whilst recollecting the pentagram shape for teleportation. In order to accommodate the number of people teleporting, your pentagram has to be huge and made to fit the whole floor. This will definitely consume a lot of energy. You sigh at the thought.

"She doesn't want to do it," Osamu tries again, "let me!"

"Shut up, Samu. Give her a second. Come on, you're gonna be okay," Atsumu encourages you with a pat on the shoulder.

You click your tongue at him, "I hate you."

Pointing a finger out at the marble underneath, you begin drawing invisible lines from memory that transform into yellow light sparks on the floor. It's a struggle but you manage to complete the shape that now surrounds you and the twins. Due to its size, the pentagram's glow this time is almost blinding and the fizzing noise that it produces is loud in your ears.

"Teleport," you whisper.

The hissing pentagram then floats and spins around the three of you as it nets your bodies tightly. You can feel its particles squeezing to decompose you into molecules. There is stiffness in your muscles and joints that prevents you from moving. The bright light forces you to shut your eyes while the sound is shrieking in your ears. You grit your teeth together and brace yourself for what's to come next.

The sensations become almost unbearable. But before it could get any worse, you find yourself already dissipated into tiny yellow sparks of lights, floating in a different dimension that you're familiar with. The pentagram that you drew has turned into a glowing net, holding your and the twins' dematerialised bodies together. Your mind, still intact even though your body is not, notices other nets of bodies swooshing pass by to get to their destinations through the pink abstract space that you're in.

It's bright here, but not overwhelming. There's no sense of temperature, only the seldom Bernoulli pull by other nets speeding by. You wonder how it smells since you have no nose to take a sniff. Time is not relevant here; you always find yourself arriving at your destination at the same time you left. Often, the only important thing is your sense of direction (of which, Osamu lacks) because the only thing guiding you is a huge ass ancient wooden compass floating in the space above you like a moon (so you feel like it's always following you).

It's a trippy place.

You collect yourself, taking control of the net to carry everyone to Kudo Street- which is situated up north. One push is all it takes for you to zoom through the crowd as the whizzing sound of air friction envelopes you. With awareness of the traffic around, you navigate your way carefully to avoid accidents (it gets super messy when disintegrated bodies collide).

Travelling in the Pink Dimension after school is like walking at a train station during peak hour. Everyone moves at haste in whatever direction they want to. There is not much that can be done to control individuals in a vast space as such. The only rule that applies to travellers is that they have to teleport to and from stations. This is to prevent practitioners from reappearing at a dangerous spot in the physical world when they arrive at their destinations. If you're found to be teleporting from or to an unassigned place, you'll get a ticket for it.

You stay on your path while trying to search for Kudo Street's teleportation station that is supposed to be some floating Greek marble vases. You would say it only took you a few seconds to arrive but time doesn't exist here, so when you see ten vases at your two o'clock, you're pretty sure it doesn't matter anyway.

You choose an Amphora vase that no one was going for and jump into its opening. It becomes dark for a moment before the vase vomits you, Atsumu and Osamu out onto a marble floor, in three pieces. Your brothers stumble a bit before finding their grounds again while you, on the other hand, are bowing down with hands on your knees, panting to catch your breath. You can feel sweat breaking on your forehead and temple.

"Fuck, you two are SO heavy."

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AO3

A/N: where would you teleport to if you could since Ms. Corona is making all airlines bankrupt?

#Miya Atsumu #Miya Osamu #atsumu x reader #osamu x reader #haikyuu x reader

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jamaisjoons · 6 years ago

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golden daddy | jjk

Summary: Jungkook’s tired of you seeing him simply as your best friend’s brother, so he decides to show you exactly who he is. Best friend’s brother AU!

Pairing: Jungkook x Reader

Genre: Smut

Word Count: 6.3k

Warnings: masturbation, use of sex toys, exhibition, dirty talk, mutual masturbation, overstimulation, cumplay, daddy and baby girl kink, penetration, dom!Jungkook, sub!reader, rough sex, cunnilingus, slight degradation (use of slut), spanking, anal play, squirting, creampie

A/N: Hey there demons, it’s me, ya girl, fucking around and updating twice in one day cause im w i l d and have no control. Let me know if you enjoy it, let me know if you hate it too idk i need feedback (and friends ᵘʷᵘ). It’s half 3 in the morning cause i’m a mess™ and so this is barely edited rip

“Well, if you didn’t want me to fuck you tonight why the hell were you wearing that damn dress? I can practically see your tits” Joonho spat out and you were instantly reeling. You picked up your half full glass of red wine and threw the contents at him, spilling the moderately expensive wine all over his preciousVersace suit. Honestly, you were sure he spent the entirety of this train wreck of a date either staring at your tits or talking about the money he had and how much he had splashed out on the damned suit for this date. You had triedputting up with all of it, however you drew the line when he quite boldly asked you to head over to his for a quick tumble in the sheets.

“You prick. My clothing choices don’t mean shit. I could literally stand here naked and that still wouldn’t mean I’d want to fuck you. In fact, we could literally be the last two people on earth and I’d set myself on fire before even thinking of letting you touch me, asshole” You hissed before grabbing your purse and stomping out of the restaurant.

The cold wind hit you like a freight train and you immediately began shivering, cursing yourself for not having the foresight to bring a jacket. Whipping out your phone, you quickly ordered an Uber, wanting to be home, out of the dress and sitting on your sofa with your best friend while the two of you watched horror films that were so bad, you couldn’t help but laugh at them.

“Hey! ____, you bitch. Get back here. I hope you’re going to pay for the dry-cleaning bill. This suit is Versace” Joonho yelled in indignation, stressing ‘Versace’ as he stomped out of the restaurant just as your Uber pulled up.

“Oh, fuck you and your damn Versace suit, you god damn troglodyte” You screamed back, your face twisting into a scowl; you quickly got into the car, flipping him off as you did so.

You sighed once you were safely in the Uber, the driver quickly driving off, leaving Joonho behind, even as the pompous male tried to chase after you. You huffed, wondering when your taste in men had dropped so low. This was the fifth date in the last month alone. Somehow, each and every one of them had turned out to be wrong. The first was far too disinterested, refusing to maintain a conversation the entire night. The second had outright ignored you, preferring to text whoever the hell he was texting. The third had literally broken down into tears, crying about how the love of his life had left him and how he was still not over her. The fourth had ‘forgotten’ his wallet at home and pulled a runner, leaving you to pick up the bill. And finally, the latest and the biggest dick of them all was Joonho.

Eventually, you arrived back at your dorm building; groaning as you noticed the ‘out of order’ sign on the elevator. This was a fantastic end to the night. The elevator to your building had fucking broken down. Simply wonderful. You huffed as you dragged yourself up the ten flights of stairs, in your stupid six-inch heels, wincing as said shoes pinched your toes. You almost yelled out in victory when you finally made it to your flat. You quickly pulled out your keys before throwing the door open and dragging your exhausted body into your home.

You noticed that most doors in the dorm were closed, meaning that most of your house mates were all either asleep or out. It had been weird living with so many people under one roof at the start, especially considering there were seven boys and only four girls. But that made complete sense, as most girls tended to stick to single sex accommodation only. You, yourself, didn’t really care who was under the roof as long as you had somewhere to sleep. Besides, your dorms were one of the nicest dorms to live in, slightly more on the pricier range for a student; but still affordable. You quickly kicked of your heels and shoved them into the shoe rack before walking into the large, spacious common room.

“Wow. I didn’t expect you to be home this early” Your best friend, and one of the girls living in the dorms with you, Sooyun said, looking up from her spot between her two boyfriends, Namjoon and Hoseok. Jungkook, Sooyun’s older twin brother, was spread out on the loveseat, scarfing down his snacks, sending sideways glares to Namjoon and Hoseok whenever he felt they got too ‘handsy’ with his precious babysister. You stressed baby because really, she was only two minutes younger than him.

“Hands where I can see them!” Jungkook suddenly yelled, causing all of you to jump. Hoseok immediately pulled his hands away from under the blanket the three were sharing and off of Sooyun’s thigh. You watched as your best friend let out a frustrated groan.

“Jungkook, whyare you still here? Didn’t you say you had some project you had to work on. Also, if my boyfriendsof a whole fucking year, want to touch me, they’re allowed to! Besides, they do much more than just touch-” Sooyun began only for Jungkook to let out a screech.

“Please stop talking! It’s bad enough that you’re dating not one but twoof my best friends, I don’t need to hear your sordid sex life. I’m still going to pretend that hyungs haven’t defiled you and that you’re waiting till marriage” Jungkook said sending both boys glares as Hoseok snickered at the younger boy, Namjoon simply smirked, pressing a kiss to Sooyun’s shoulder.

“It’s not like we were the first to defileher. Although we’ll definitely be the last” You heard Namjoon mutter against her skin. Jungkook immediately stiffened and you had to roll your eyes. Hoseok and Namjoon loved teasing and riling up their younger friend; and it turned out, Sooyun was a sure-fire way to do that. Sooyun quickly cleared her throat, pushing Namjoon away as she turned her attention back to you.

“Anyway. _____, why are you home so early? How bad was this one?” Sooyun asked and you sighed, throwing your purse onto the table before sinking onto the love seat, next to Jungkook.

“He thought that because I wore this dress, I’d put out. Plus, he spent the entire time speaking about himself and how much money he made and how expensive his stupid Versace suit was” You groaned and Sooyun sent you an apologetic look.

“Well that’s what you get for dating random dickheads” Jungkook muttered and you turned to him in shock, as you spluttered, unable to respond to him. That was completely out of the blue for Jungkook. You had known him three years now, the entirety of your university life, and never once had he commented on your choice in men.

“I said what I said. Anyway, I think its time I actually left, that damn film project isn’t going to edit itself. I’ll see you guys tomorrow” Jungkook said standing up, before looking at Hoseok and Namjoon expectantly, expecting them to leave with him. Namjoon and Hoseok refused to budge, instead the later raising a single eyebrow in response. Jungkook huffed, grumbling under his breath before turning to you, giving you a once over. Your breath caught in the middle of your throat, your skin burning under his heated gaze. His eyes were dark, shining in the dimly lit living room, and he had the slightest smirk on his soft pink lips.

“You look good by the way. See ya” Jungkook said with a wink before crossing the common room and entering his own room, the door slamming shut.

You immediately stiffened, unsure of how to react. Without realising you were doing it, you pinched yourself, unable to believe what had just happened. Had Jungkook just… had he just flirted with you? No. There was no way. He was an entire three years younger than you, not to mention your best friend’s brother. You were just imagining things. You were sure of it. Even if you still had trouble breathing and heat was pooling in the pit of your stomach.

There was no way you were hot for Jeon Jungkook.

A couple hours later, you find yourself lying in bed, staring up at the ceiling, unable to fall asleep. You groaned in frustration; you turned to look at the alarm clock on your bedside table, almost screeching when it read 00:34am. You had work in the morning and ideally, you wanted enough sleep. Especially considering you worked as a baby sitter for a 4-year-old and a 6-year-old. The last thing you wanted to do was spend the day sleep deprived while running after a couple of screaming kids.

A part of you knew exactly why you couldn’t sleep. It had been a good four months since you’d had sex and the pent-up sexual frustration was finally getting to you. You bit your lip before your hands began wandering over your stomach and down to your shorts, before dragging both them and your underwear down your legs. You threw them off the bed, uncaring as to where they landed in your bedroom. Your knees began rising as you slowly spread your legs; almost groaning at the feel of the slight chill of the night air against your heat.

Your hand trailed up your leg before brushing against the inside of your thigh. You dragged a single digit up and down your slight, lowly groaning at the slight stimulation. You spread your lips with your pointer and ring finger before rubbing your clit tightly with your middle finger. Your breathing began deepening as you continuously rolled your clit between your fingers, eyes fluttering at the sensation. Soon however, the stimulation wasn’t enough and you needed more. Your fingers trailed through your dewy hot lips, finger circling your slit before plunging in knuckle deep.

You pumped the finger in and out, feeling your slick walls clench around the digit. You let out a quiet moan, another finger joining the first, whining at the slight stretch. You continued pumping into you, your walls fluttering in pleasure as your juices slowly trailed down your fingers until you were so wet, all you could hear was your fingers thrusting into you and your low breathy moans. Soon, the pleasure began dulling and you groaned, thrusting another finger inside, back arching at the burn of the stretch. It was a sweet pleasurable pain and you began thrusting your fingers in even faster, looking for release desperately.

Ten minutes later and no matter how much you fingered yourself or rubbed at your clit, your orgasm still hadn’t approached. You yanked your fingers out of you and glared at the ceiling as your chest heaved. You felt unbelievable empty and the need for release was entirely too strong. You flipped yourself over, blindly feeling around your bedside table before reaching the draw. You quickly opened it and began rummaging around until you felt the cold, slightly ridged vibrating dildo.

You spread your legs once again, rubbing the head of the dildo against your slit as you wettened it. You rolled the tip against your pussy, mewling at the sensation. Once it was slick enough, your turned it on and slowly began inserting the thick head into your tight pussy, breathing deeply at the stretch. Your eyes rolled back at the sensation of the vibrations deep within you as you continued push the toy into you. When you inserted it in as deep as it could go you pulled it out, before pushing it back all the way in once again.

You began pumping the toy into you, hips swirling slightly as you tried to stimulate yourself further. The vibrations against your walls were helping, and despite being filled, you couldn’t help but feel empty. Sweat covered your entire body and you groaned, bucking into the vibrator harder to try and pull your orgasm closer. However, nothing was working. You let out a small frustrated cry and pulled the silicon toy out of you, turning it off and throwing it beside you before staring at the ceiling in irritation.

“Why” You whined into the night air, writhing slightly on your cotton sheets, fingers digging into the mattress as your clit throbbed for relief, your walls clenching and unclenching uncontrollably. You were so wet your thighs were sticky and you could smell it thick in the air, and it only ceased to incense you further. You knew exactly why you weren’t satisfied with your toys. You needed a cock. A realcock and you’d gone far too long without one.

Your heart was racing and your slit began dripping as you imagined fucking yourself on a big, thick cock. Sliding up and down as it split you open. Your throat died up and your hips thrust against the crisp night air, uselessly humping the air. You continued imagining a nameless figure, one that seemed entirely too familiar, even though you couldn’t place him. His face was blurred but his arms were well defined and he had thick, strong thighs with bulging muscles. You imagined him sliding between your spread legs and into the depths of your heat. You threw your head back and pressed two fingers into your swollen clit as you continued imagining the faceless man fuck into you with his big cock.

“Fuck!” You cried, you could feel your orgasm near you but no matter how hard you tried, you simply couldn’t reach your peak. Although, the faceless man was helping slightly. You plunged two fingers into you, letting out a small hiss as your hands moved as fast as they could, fucking into you.

“Hey ____, you okay? Holy shit” Jungkook enters your room without knocking, catching you with your legs spread and your fingers buried as deep as into your cunt as they could be. You still all of a sudden, sitting up straight, your hand still between your thighs as you stare at him in shock. As soon as your eyes adjust to his figure in the doorway you gulp. The faceless man becomes cleared in your mind.

You were fucking masturbating to Jungkook.

Your best friend’s brother Jungkook.

Three year’s younger than you Jungkook.

You were fucked.

“I’m just gonna go” Jungkook says, beginning to turn around and against your better judgement you call out to him, stopping him in his tracks.

“Wait Jungkook!” You call out and he turned back to you, cocking up his eyebrows. You look at him in embarrassment and begin stuttering, unable to form the words that you want to say. Jungkook immediately draws himself to his full height, a small smirk on his face.

“Is there something you need baby girl?” Jungkook asks, his voice deep and raspy and dripping with satoori. You immediately flush under his gaze, your slit gushing slightly at his voice. You had no idea that Jungkook calling you baby girl would have such an impact on you, especially considering you were definitely older than him.

“I… I need” You stammer and Jungkook’s grin widens. He’s almost like a wolf who’s found his prey. He stalks towards your bed, eyes trained on your figure as you breathe heavily under him.

“Do you need me baby? Do you need daddy?” Jungkook asks and you let out a low groan at his words, nodding furiously.

“No baby, I want you to say it. Tell daddy you need him” Jungkook says, crouching down in front of your bed and levelling his gaze onto yours. Briefly his eyes wander over your body, eyes stopping at the hand covering your pussy. Hot lust courses through your veins and your eyes darken slightly, losing all inhibitions.

“Yes daddy, I need you so much. I need you to fill me up and make me yours” You reply.

“Bring that juicy little cunt to me baby” Jungkook purrs, curling one of his fingers in a come-hither motion. You immediately get onto your knees and crawl towards him. Once your nearer to him, you lay back down, your ass on the edge of your bed and pussy almost face to face with Jungkook. You flushed with the heat of embarrassment once again, however Jungkook ignored you, instead choosing to stare unabashedly at your swollen and dripping pussy.

He runs a hand over you, over your chest, squeezing your breast slightly before he continues trailing down to your legs. He grips your bare thigh in his hand, fingertips pressing hard into the soft skin before pushing it out, watching as your cunt lips spread with your thighs. His ministrations draw out low moans from you and he smirks at your wanton noises, the noise going straight to the pit of your belly.

“Daddy please fuck me” You mewl and he chuckles once more, slapping your thigh harshly and drawing a soft whine out of you.

“My baby girl is being so needy today” Jungkook snorts in amusement and you whine slightly. His hands move to spread your pussy lips for his viewing pleasure, groaning slightly when your slit gushes with your arousal. You’re sure you’re staining your bedsheets by now, but you can’t find it in yourself to care.

"Don’t worry baby, I’ll wreck you tonight. I’ll show you exactly why all those guys you dated before were wrong for you. How I’m the only one who can satisfy this pretty little pussy. But first, show me how you played with yourself before I got here" Jungkook commands, his voice husky and you almost go delirious from his completely erotic words. You blush lightly as you spread your legs wider, one hand trailing down your body and towards the juncture between your thighs.

“That’s it baby, don’t be shy for daddy” Jungkook whispers his own hand moving to palm at his bulge under his tight dark jeans, eyes darkening with lust as he watched you play with your clit, your thighs wet with your arousal.

His cock jerked violently at the sight of you, watching with rapt attention when your fingers slicked with your dripping He quickly stood up and began divesting himself off his clothing, slowly teasing you as he did so. Jungkook began by pulling his shirt up and revealing inch by inch of smooth, delectable tanned skin. Hard abs rippled under his skin, making you groan, your fingers moving slightly faster at his little strip tease. Once it was off his torso, his hands trailed down his body and passed the snail trail of thin wiry brown hairs that led to the waistband of his boxers. He slowly unzipped his dark jeans, slowly slipping them down his thick thighs, muscles bulging and twitching.

Finally, he was down to his boxers. You watched in desperation and lust as his hands trailed around his boxers before slowly sliding them down too, leaving him completely naked. You breathed in deeply, mouth dry at the beautiful male specimen standing in front of you. Your eyes were instantly drawn to his cock, eyes widening slightly. It was impossibly long and even thicker, your mouth watering as you imagined him sliding slowly into you, stretching you out in a way you’ve never been stretched before. His cockhead was red and angry, dripping with precum and making his tip sticky. You longed to wrap your mouth around his cock, suck and worship it until he was fucking it into your throat.

“Continue playing baby” Jungkook ordered, wrapping his hand around his dick, pumping it as he watched you. You ran her fingers up and down your slit before spreading your lips and sliding a finger into your dripping sex. You were so drenched that he was sure you could easily slide in three fingers without an issue. However, he wanted to watch you slowly stretch open your cunt, knowing that you’d need the preparation for his cock. Jungkook began fisting himself more, pumping his dick and imagining that it was you instead; meaning you added a second finger into your depth, Jungkook groaning as he watched you stretch your tiny little hole out.

"Play with your clit" Jungkook commanded, his attention completely on you, watching as you used your other hand to prod and pinch your clit, your fingers moving into you quicker. Jungkook’s hand tightened around his girth, moving his thumb to brush against his angry cockhead. You plunged another finger into you with a cry, curling them to press against your g-spot, your other hand furiously rubbing and teasing your clit. You placed your feet on the edge of the bed before your hips flew off the bed, bucking against the air as you lost yourself in your own pleasure-induced haze.

“That’s it baby, fuck yourself and imagine it’s me instead” Jungkook groaned, his hands sticking with his own precum as his eyes were trained on the way your fingers disappeared in and out of you, watching as your hips bucked into the air.

“Daddy! Please” You whined, pleasing with him as you slowly brought yourself closer and closer to the edge, your own eyes watching as he jerked off in front of you, his precum leaking profusely.

"Cum" Jungkook demanded and your eyes snapped shut; your fingers brought your to a quick end, body shuddering as you screamed his name. Your body writhed on the bed uncontrollably, thighs quivering and womb spasming uncontrollably before you pulled your fingers out, when the stimulation got too much. You breathed harshly, chest heaving and pussy trembling as your cum leaked out onto the bed. You slowly opened your eyes, staring deep into Jungkook’s dark brown ones and drawing up all your courage, you brought your hand up to you lips and licked them clean, sucking your own cum off your fingers.

The sight of you sucking your digits threw him off the edge, Jungkook roared your name as he came, angling his cock against your clit and rubbing it furiously. You let out a small whine and tried to shut your legs from the overstimulation; however, Jungkook’s free hand shot out and held your thigh down, keeping you spread open for him. He continued rubbing his cockhead against your dripping pussy, groaning when you coated it in your cum. His cock erupted, cum shooting out and dousing your clit in his milky sperm. You gasped at the sensation, clit throbbing as the heat of him cum covered your sensitive bundle of nerve.

“Jungkook please” You croaked, pleading with him to stop as overstimulation took over. Jungkook fell over, arms bracing himself above you as his head buried into the valley between your breasts, snuggling and placing soft kisses against your sternum.

“Fuck, you’re so hot baby” Jungkook says before picking himself up and grinning down at you. Your eyes widen when you feel him still hard against your inner thigh, wondering how he still has stamina after cumming so hard. Jungkook looked down, moaning at the sight of your pussy covered in his cum. He kneeled onto the bed, between your thighs and gently began rubbing his cum into your pussy, your eyes rolling into the back of your head as his thumb rubbed against your clit.

“Look at your pussy baby girl, it’s so wet and messy” Jungkook says, voice raspy and your pussy flutters. You know Jungkook’s noticed it too from the way he groans, his eyes staring directly at your slit.

“Please fill me up daddy” You plead and Jungkook growls, he grabs the base of his shaft and rubs at your lips, coating his dick in your arousal before he begins pressing into your entrance.

“It’s gonna be a tight fit baby, look at how small you are compared to me” Jungkook says, voice filled with lust as he rubs the head against your entrance. Finally, he begins pushing into you and you let out a slight shriek, mouth gapping at the way he stretches you out. Your walls are stretched to their limit just from how girthy his head is and you reach up, wrapping your arms around his shoulders. He continues guiding himself into you, inch by agonising inch and you let out a small hiss.

“Fuck daddy, you’re so big” your eyes rolling back in a mix of pain and pleasure. Jungkook chuckles slightly as he continues rolling his hips into yours and you let out a small groan of pain when he finally bottoms out, his tip resting against your cervix. You feel so unbelievably full, your wall muscles rippling around him as you try to adjust to his size.

You moan after a couple moments, rolling your hips against his as you silently beg for him. Jungkook pulls out, straightening his back before pulling out until just his tip is nestled into you before plunging back into you in one smooth stroke, going as deep as he possibly can. You let out a small shriek, not caring whether you wake up the entire dorm, his dick is slightly curved, aiding in rubbing against your g-spot every time he enters into you.

“Fuck baby girl, you take cock so well, look at your tight little pussy being wrecked by my cock. Fuck… fuck you’re so wet you’re drenching me baby girl” Jungkook moans, throwing his head back as your walls flutter around him. He moves one of his hands towards your hips, his grip so tight, you know he’ll leave finger shaped bruises on your hips. He continues bucking his hips into yours, increasing his speed and power until he was jackhammering into you as hard as he could. Your breasts bounce in circles on your chest from the power of his thrusts, your legs shaking continuously from the pleasure he wrought onto your body. He runs one of his hands from your hips, down your thighs until it comes to rest at your knees before pushing it up against your chest, spreading you wider for him. He leans down, his chest braced against your bent leg and giving him for leverage to fuck deeper and harder into you before his hand moves to play with your clit.

“Fuck daddy, I’m going to cum” You moan, lip pulled between your teeth as tears fill your eyes as pleasure fills your every sensation.

“Cum for me. Cum for daddy” Jungkook snarls, his movements become rougher, a feat you thought was entirely impossible. You shudder, your walls clamping tightly around him and drenching his cock in more of your cum as you wail out his name. Jungkook groans at the feel of your wet, hot walls; his thumb pressing harder into your clit. You expect him to slow down and allow you to recover slightly, but he doesn’t.

“Jungkook?” You gasp out as he continues rolling his cock into you.

“I’m not done with you yet baby” Jungkook snarls before roughly flipping you onto your front, pushing you onto your knees as your head is pressed into the mattress. He shifts, spreading your ass cheeks before groaning at the mess he’s made of your pussy. You let out a little moan when he surges forward, pressing small kitten licks against your fold.

“God, you taste like such a slut, so sweet” Jungkook groans against your lips, his tongue moving frantically as you coat his mouth in your juices. You flush as the wet sounds of Jungkook eating you out fill the air, his lips flush against your pussy, mouth slurping and sucking obscenely. One of his hands moves to your clit, fingers playing with it roughly.

“Fuck” You stammer out, pushing your hips further into his face against your better judgement. Jungkook kneels behind you, lifting your hips higher as he drags your over-sensitised cunt over his cock, rubbing his length against your dripping slit until his cock is once again pressing into your entrance. You shudder against him, Jungkook leaning over and pressing a soft kiss against your shoulder blade before thrusting his length back into you. The new position allows him to thrust even deeper inside of you, his hips slightly angled so he was buried to the hilt every time he enters you.

Jungkook continuously impales his dick into you, hands gripping your hips and pulling you back into him every time he thrusts. He watches the way your ass jiggles every time his hips impact with the plush of your ass. He draws one hand back and spanks the flesh with a groan before squeezing it and rolling it in the palm of his hand. He repeats the ministration and before long he’s spanking you so hard, his hand repeatedly meeting your ass, that you’re sure he’s going to bruise you.

“Who’s your daddy?” Jungkook asks, each of his thrusts shaking your body, your knees pressing as hard as they can into the mattress to stabilise your body.

“Jungkook!” You reply with a breathless gasp and you can almost feel the smug smirk from behind you.

“That’s right. I’m your daddy and now this pussy belong to me, you understand? You’re mine _____, which means no more dates, no more giving it up to anyone else. You. Are. Mine” Jungkook grits out; punctuating each of his words with a thrust. His fingers entwine into your hair in a fist before pulling your head up, using it as leverage to pump even harder and faster into you. You can hear the squelching of your pussy every time his dick enters you and the sound of sweaty skin slapping against sweaty skin fills your quiet bedroom.

“Gods, your milking my cock so well baby. Do you want me to fill you up even more?” Jungkook rasps into your ear and you find it in yourself to nod, despite how fucked out you are. His hand grips your ass cheek before spreading it, he moves his hand to where you’re joined and coats his fingers in your wetness before he begins pressing a finger into your tight ass.

“Fuck Jungkook” You whimper; you were sure he was going to be the end of you. The sensation is foreign but not uncomfortable and you quickly begin adjusting to the single digit. His fingers time in with his cock, thrusting in and out of your ass and stretching you for him. Suddenly, you feel him pressing a second finger into you and you let out a soft cry at the burn of the stretch, Jungkook shushing and cooing at you. He lightly begins thrusting them in and out letting you slowly adjust to the bigger stretch and before long you’re bucking back into him.

“Does Daddy’s little slut like being stuffed full?” Jungkook taunts and you blubber your response, barely able to form coherent words at this point. Jungkook uses his free hand to spank you again, causing you to shriek in pain.

“I asked you a question slut, I expect an answer” Jungkook growls with another slap against your tender ass.

“Yes! I love being stuffed full daddy” You squeal back, Jungkook patting your ass in praise.

“Good girl. Oh? What is that” Jungkook praises before spotting your vibrator from the corner of his eyes. You dread what’s about to happen, wondering how much more your body can take before you collapse from exhaustion.

“Were you playing with toys before daddy found you?” Jungkook asks and you nod tiredly, you can hear the mischievous tone in Jungkook’s voice.

“Use it. Turn it on and rub your little clit for me baby” Jungkook orders and you stiffen, unsure of whether you’d be able to stand the added pleasure on top of everything else.

“Fuck- Daddy I don’t know” You reply uncertainly and Jungkook plunges the fingers in your ass deeper, following it with a hard thrust.

“You can and you will baby. I want you to use the vibrator to make yourself cum and then daddy will let you rest, okay?” Jungkook says and you wonder how he can sound so soft yet domineering at the same time. You weakly feel around your bed, your hand coming into contact with the vibrator. You sluggishly turn it on before moving your hand between your thighs, pressing the vibrator against your clit.

“Fuckkkk” You whine, your pussy spasming uncontrollably while your clit throbs at the strong vibrations from the silicon toy.

“Move it down so it’s pressing against my cock too baby” Jungkook orders and you obey, moving the vibrating toy until it’s pressing against both your clit and his cock. Jungkook begins bucking wilding into your cunt, his moans turning into whines. His pulls him fingers out of your ass and grips your hips tightly as he thrusts wildly into you.

“I’m gonna fill you up with my cum so good baby. I’m gonna cum so deep into this tight little pussy, you’ll be dripping for days” Jungkook says and you let out a small whine, your thighs shaking as your orgasm draws nearer.

“Damn, your pussy just clamped so tight. Does my little slut like being filled up? Does my baby want her daddy to cum in her and watch it spill out?” Jungkook asks and you whine your answer, nodding furiously. The idea of Jungkook filling you up has you gushing with wetness once again. Jungkook’s hand moves to play with your clit and all of a sudden cum squirts out of you in a violent rush, splashing against Jungkook’s abs and dripping down to where the two of you are joined. You couldn’t scream, couldn’t moan, all you could do was choke and stutter, your body wracked with tremors as you rode out your orgasm.

“Fuck! You just drenched me baby. Fuck. Fuck I’m cumming. I’m gonna fill up your sweet cunt baby and then I’m going to watch it all pour out of that greedy cunt” Jungkook taunts and you can do nothing but lay limply as he continues pounding into you, exhaustion taking over your body.

“Jungkook please, I can’t” You sob, your pussy on fire from the pain and pleasure of Jungkook’s actions. With a strangled roar, Jungkook cums, his cum splashes out of him powerfully and violently, rope after rope of thick, hot cum being emptied inside your cunt, until you can feel it slowly start to seep out from where the two of you are joined. Jungkook falls forward, biting your shoulder as he rides of the aftershock of his orgasm, his cock twitching in your walls. When he’s finally done, Jungkook pulls out and flips you back onto your back before spreading your legs. His hand reaches out and spread your pussy wide, watching in satisfaction as his cum starts to seep out of you.

“Fuck that’s so hot” Jungkook says, his fingers playing with your mess cunt, pushing his cum back into you before rubbing his cum covered fingers against your slit. You shudder at his actions before pushing him away as hard as you can, closing your thighs. Your pussy throbbed and ached in the best way possible and you were so fucked out that you could barely speak, instead panting and gasping for air as you calm down from your high. Jungkook falls down beside you, pulling you close into his body before placing a soft kiss against your temple.

“Jungkook what happens now?” You finally ask, your voice croaky from screaming out his name.

“I meant what I said ____. You’re mine. I’ve wanted you for the longest time and the past few months, watching you date pricks who don’t deserve you, has been hell. I like you. Have since my sister introduced us. But you’ve only ever seen me as Sooyun’s brother and honestly? It fucking sucked” Jungkook reveals and you bite your lips. You no longer think he’s justSooyun’s sister.

“Jungkook… that was the best fuck of my entire life. And if you honestly want to try and make this work, I’m willing to try too” You say softly. Jungkook’s only answer is to pull you closer into him, his nose nuzzling into your hair.

“Wait! Fuck Jungkook! How are we going to explain this to your sister? She’s my best friend!” You yell and before you can respond, you hear laughter from the room next to yours.

“You don’t have to explain anything! Just next time you fuck my brother, do it where I can’thear you” Sooyun calls from the room across from yours, Namjoon and Hoseok laughing loudly. You flush bright red before stammering out an apology as you bury your face in Jungkook’s neck out of embarrassment.

“I forgot how thin these fucking walls are” You groan and Jungkook chuckles, pressing another kiss onto your head.

“I’ll just think of it as payback for all the nights Sooyun kept me up when she was fucking Namjoon and Hoseok” You say all of a sudden and Jungkook chokes, spluttering out words.

“I didn’t fucking need to know that! I’m going to kill Joon-hyung and Hobi-hyung” Jungkook groans and you chuckle, pressing your body closer into his. Jungkook lightly runs his hand up and down your back, drawing lazy circles into your skin and soon exhaustion begins taking over, Jungkook’s soft caresses slowly lulling you into a deep slumber.

A/N: Yo, peep my other works if you want

Masterlist

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