#recruitment by kidnapping is legit right

[fujii-draws]

OKAY! Chatot rant in tags below! Read at your own discretion.

[pocketramblr]

How about a gamer au? like an au where shigaraki and Izuku incidentally game on the same server, so for example shenanigans like Izuku kidnapping Shigaraki's pet sheep in Minecraft and holding it hostage until he gives Bakugou back could happen

I asked my brother a minecart question in an attempt to get info to answer this ask, he was confused, and so I showed him for context and apparently "guy holds Minecraft sheep hostage" is legit a thing one of the big smps did which. But also a BABY HOSTAGE???

1- um so Izuku, lonely child he is, turns to the internet to game and socialize. He enjoys Herocraft, which is like Minecraft but with hero product placement and uh you can activate certain quirks in villagers by giving them the right item, which will recruit them for you.

2- Izuku is very careful to not give out identifying information in public streams. Because he's a good kid who listened to the internet safety rules. There's another guy on the server who is just as cautious, though Izuku has no idea that HandHeldConsoul has a very different reason for him to do so.

3- the server in question is kind of set up for large group games, usually two teams against each other in a scavenger hunt, build quest, or more specific modded game. Izuku and HandHeldConsoul are usually on the opposite teams, but once there was a game about randomly drawn partnerships and they were a team who did pretty well for arguing half the time.

4- due to being so cautious, neither suspects each other's identity. Izuku mentioned a school entrance exam but Shigaraki assumed it was for college, thinking Izuku is younger than him but not by as much, and Izuku thinking Shigaraki is like ten, fifteen years older than he actually is to have the time to play when he does. This changes at the mall, when Izuku is trying to explain Stain to Shigaraki and uses a Herocraft metaphor - the same one that had been used in the server a few weeks back. Shigaraki is like "wait are you on that server?" Izuku is like "wait you are too?? WAIT DON'T TELL ME YOU'RE HANDHC" and Shigaraki threatens to kill him there if he doesn't say who he is- wait, no, of course he's SmallMight715. The two leave with a threat of mutually assured Herocraft violence preventing any real life such.

5- Izuku does not dox Shigaraki to the server, and vice versa, though Shigaraki does try to irritate Izuku even more than before now. The others wonder what's up with that but suspect nothing. Izuku just takes it without complaint or firing back, because he's planning something bigger. He didn't expect to have to use it so soon, but when Bakugou gets kidnapped Izuku activates the plan, which is half holding his Herocraft home, goods, and allies hostage and half threat to release info on him. The rest of the server is unaware of what's going on, the admins can't help him, and so Shigaraki angrily sends Bakugou back- an excuse to AfO that "he wasn't going to join anyway, but now the heroes will really distrust him"- and Izuku releases everything for now... Then starts preparing to keep his own things safe from Shigaraki's retribution.

[weregreatatcrime]

I'm sick and rereading Two Halves and I know I leave a lot (A LOT) of stuff in the end notes but there's actually lots of stuff I still never mention or talk about so here's a long sick (started at midnight until i fell asleep to keep going now) ramble about things I didn't get the chance to talk about but wanted to (in somewhat of an order reminded by rereading) or at least just some lines I particularly enjoyed

I have medicine drugging me let's do chapter 6 It's a long one, folks, there's a lot that I wanna scream about

In awe that the Donnie kidnapping arc happened at 6. We're at fucking 15 chapters before Donnie goes home. What the fuck. How did this happen

Karai was getting snacks for Stockman and trying to get him to explain how his heart hadn't exploded from energy drinks. Results were inconclusive

Just the fact that Donnie was the only one knew Karai saw them and all he did was just fucking wave sheepishly

This interaction was entirely unintentional from both sides. Turtles didn't mean to find her and Karai didn't intend to be seen in civies

"If Shredder’s willing to hurt her… I just think maybe she'd be more willing to listen if we tried to avoid hurting her too." Leo, honey, my heart

"And Master Splinter won't be so upset his kids are fighting." <- Mikey nailed it on the head. Splinter’s upset about Karai being hurt, but he IS also upset that she's also willing to hurt his sons too. He's very conflicted and upset about the whole situation, but he'd never tell his boys to not defend themselves at the least, and AGH

Karai yeeted the can over the edge of the roof and intended it to hit someone, but she didn't actually aim it very well because it was a blind throw over the edge of a roof. Hitting Raph on the forehead was pure chaotic luck.

Continued running gag of Karai intentionally or unintentionally blinding Leo, this time on accident as energy drink sprayed right into his poor eyes. You should probably just get goggles at this point Leo

Karai, as much as she hates Shredder, does still look to him as a figure she needs to impress and make proud. She approaches this with as much zeal as any changeling and hates that she has to control herself so much to avoid being suspiciously advanced for her age and training

"Humans were so, so far from perfect. Didn't mean she liked having to be imperfect." <- This chapter just has a lot of lines I like tbh

Despite how it may seem, Karai DOES have a good grasp on wounds and how much they NEED to heal before she can begin to push them without risking further injury. It's just that, well, risking further injury is an acceptable cost for... most things

The happiness Karai feels when he gives her permission to take longer to heal. He's showing he cares!! (Oh honey....)

Karai has no intention of taking longer to heal because now she HAS to impress him now by bouncing back faster

I try very carefully to point out when Karai refers to him as Oroku Saki or as Shredder- she's shrewd enough to spot when he's actually caring and showing his humanity, or when he's purely the madman we all love to hate

"Of course I'll kill Stockman" She is absolutely not going to kill Stockman

Karai’s acting is Good. She flat out lies to Shredder’s face multiple times in this scene

Karai actually begins to think of Stockman as HER minion now, including being possessive and protective of him. Shredder doesn't "deserve" him.

Shredder my man, do you know how many scientists you could recruit just by waving funny alien goo in their faces?? You wouldn't even need to pay most of them jfc

"you should never corner a nerd" PREACH Karai. Scientists aren't all passive geeks and soft nerdy bois. They can fuck you up oh my god. That's how you get shit like Iron Man

Mikey’s intuition strikes again- he KNEW tonight was a bad idea and he felt when the first wave of tranq darts was coming. Too bad he doesn't have the training to be able to recognize this as a legit warning and not just him feeling funny

Mikey not knowing what to do and immediately looking to Leo for instructions, only to realize Leo hasn't said anything in a bit *clutches chest*

Dancing Mikey strikes again. Using his intuition and his own natural talent to just. Dodge and flow through combat without taking a hit. I imagine this actually takes a lot out of him as he's actively channeling that intuition ability whether he knows it or not, and it wears him out pretty fast. Like flexing a muscle he doesn't usually intentionally use

Raph the Protector standing over Leo keeping him safe, and Mikey not even hesitating to turn his back to the fight and let Raph cover him because he knows big brother will keep him safe

Leo's kinda semiconscious in this scene. He's not knocked out, but he's definitely not awake. He'll only vaguely remember the events later. Those darts should've knocked him tf out but a mix of mutant biology and Leo's own stubbornness kept him awake to a degree

Mikey stopping to grab Leo's swords for him 😊😊

Leo's symptoms of tranq overdose are about the same as Donnie’s, if anyone was curious. But Donnie has bigger concerns to worry about plus is kinda unable to DO anything else so is able to sleep them off

Longs legs Mcgee in here got crammed into a tiny cage. rip donnies legs

I love writing Donnie. He's a mix of all the perception and knowledge I need to help set the scene without going too expositiony, but also I can manually cut off his stream of thoughts as him just personally redirecting his own rambling. This is great because I, unfortunately, tend to ramble a LOT lmfao

Donnie hasn't had his mask since this and I feel so bad

Kevin Michael Richardson's voice could kill me and I would thank him. The fact that he voices 2k12 Shredder is unholy. This man's voice gives me shivers. I feel so, so bad for every character who has to be menaced by That Voice. I try to emphasize how scary his voice is to the turtles because holy fuck dude

Shredder is enjoying tormenting poor Donnie

I couldn't remember if the turtles actually knew that Stockman was being held against his will via mutagen collar. If they did know tbh, I think they would've at least kinda tried to help?

The needle thingy is pretty much like a mini harpoon, though custom made to have a bomb installed. It's not supposed to go in torsos. Shredder came very close to actually killing Donnie if he happened to accidentally get it into a major vein

"Of course he was crying, like a child. Because he was really badly injured, and he was 15 years old!" A lot of villains seem to forget, not know, or just not care that they're fighting a bunch of kids. Shredder is a mix of all three

The fact that Donnie was thinking of what his brothers would do in his position, realized Raph would try to spit on him, and Donnie immediately tried to do that (he's probably lucky he was too dry mouther, Shredder would've beaten the crap out of him for it)

I love love love writing evil, unhinged monologues so writing Shredder’s insanity was a fucking delight. Poor Donnie

Yes, Shredder’s intentions aren't super clear with Donnie. Yeah, he definitely wants to torture the poor kid. Yes, he DOES need a scientist for the mutagen. But he also is totes cool with just killing him for the funnies. He hasn't decided yet

(This was in part because those pesky cognitive difficulties kicked in while writing the end of this speech and I got mightily confused myself. Later when editing I went back and realized it actually fit pretty well with Shredder’s decreasing sanity, so I cleaned it up a bit and kept it, rather than trying to make him stick to a singular goal)

The injury likely swells up a bunch, putting strain and pressure on most of Donnie’s torso. His lungs have a bit less room than they'd prefer to breathe- that's part of why he struggles with his breathing and lightheadedness

(Insert my First Aid rambles from the end notes in multiple chapters)

When you have an object Inside Your Body in places that things aren't supposed to go, it feels WEIRD. Even disregarding pain- your body's nervous system is entirely different INSIDE your body versus your skin. Worst thing I've ever felt- steroid injection in the foot, Dr poked the INSIDE OF MY SOLES on accident. It was the most invasive horrific feeling because things *aren't supposed to touch that* and personal note to yall- steroid injections are horrible, don't skimp on your foot health

"I love the dichotomy of Karai enjoying [Shredder’s] compliments and striving for his approval while still ABSOLUTELY hating his guts and planning to literally assassinate him."

Shout out to the one commenter who was having a heart attack over Donnie- glad you're okay 🧡🧡🧡

[star-ocean-peahen]

Excuse me what’s ninjago?? :0

oh!! im so glad you asked!!

Ninjago is a Lego franchise, which sells Lego sets that correspond to the events in a show. The show has been running for eleven years and currently has sixteen seasons, undergoing a reboot at season eleven.

The show began centered around a group of four boys recruited by an old ninja master (Sensei Wu) to stop Wu's evil brother Garmadon. Garmadon was after the Golden Weapons of Spinjitzu, four elemental weapons that were used by Wu and Garmadon's father, the First Spinjitzu Master, to create the world the characters live in, Ninjago. The weapons correspond to four elements: fire, earth, ice, and lightning. The four ninja recruited by Sensei Wu each have an elemental power and a unique personality for the team:

Cole, the master of Earth and the steady, levelheaded de facto leader

Kai, the master of Fire and the hot-tempered reckless heart of of the team

Zane, the master of Ice and chill-but-awkward kickass (psst hes secretly a robot whoa)(he didnt know)

Jay, the master of Lightning and motormouthed inventor

Here's the intro for the first season, it's worth a watch

They are a. Found Family with the capital Fs. It barely takes six episodes for them to start calling each other "brother". They're clumsy and rude and hardheaded sometimes but theyre trying so hard and they love each other so much.

So, season one, we got the team right?? Bunch teenage boys, Kai's sister Nya who is the only reason they're not dead yet, their wise omniscient kickass ninja mentor.......and Garmadon's elementary-aged son. Who unleashed an ancient tribe of vengeful snake people because he wanted to be an evil overlord like his dad.

The kid's way too cute to be evil though, ngl.

His dad's title is Lord Garmadon. His name is Lloyd Garmadon. He painted little skeletal ribs onto his hoodie so he could look like his dad and does this little muahahahahaha. Yes dear you're very scary.

kjashfaskdjf ANYWAY (i may love him a bit too much) being Sensei Wu's nephew, Wu kinda wants him in a place where he can be supervised and not. Yanno. Nearly dying to ancient snakes because he's like nine. So they pick him up and he joins the gang, but then he gets kidnapped BY said snake people and apparently the only thing Wu can do about it is go yank his dad, the evil overlord, out of whatever evil hole he's been brooding in.

Garmadon was legit just going to murder his brother until he heard that his son was in danger and then he instantly dropped it and started hiking to get him back. Ya see, the only thing that can make Garmadon break free from the corruption flowing through his veins is his son.

But whoops! Lloyd is actually the prophesied Green Ninja who is destined to destroy the lord of darkness. He's like nine and he has to kill his dad.

It's rather complicated and I'm not sure if you want to hear all of it, but he does end up defeating and purifying his dad. It's great. Then he has his dad for two more seasons and then loses him again.....

Anyway, that's the basic setup for the show. The team continues to fight evil together, season after season. One of my favorite things about Ninjago is how it utilizes its vast history (sixteen seasons) to construct plotlines that hit just because of how much weight is already behind them. Like, with the aforementioned Lloyd and Garmadon, he saves his dad, gets his dad, has to kill his dad again, has to kill his dad again, gets his dad resurrected as an empty husk and sicced on him, tries to save his dad again but gets disowned, then is forced to watch his father learn empathy for everything but him. Over the course of the sixteen seasons.

Each season is a relatively self-contained narrative, and the show ends up being fun to watch all at once but with cohesive individual stories. It's really dang funny and it has made me cry.

So! Found family, funky animation, and entertaining and hilarious characters. It's been incredibly fun.

[gloriousmonsters]

...goddamn, I’m still thinking about this wen ning-su she swap AU, because the question occurred ‘if you can use demonic cultivation without a core, and awakened fierce corpses seem pretty similar to humans aside from the lack of spiritual energy... could an awakened fierce corpse use demonic cultivation?’

anyway in this ‘verse WWX decided to go on a little sabbatical to the Burial Mounds to meditate or something, and then wound up staying there because the pressure for him to Stop Being Him kept growing and him and Jiang Cheng’s relationship was becoming more strained; this was still meant to be temporary but it gets complicated when rumors spread that he’s starting a sect based on demonic cultivation, and wwx is like ‘lol no I’m not?’ only to poke his head out of the cave he’s been napping in and find out that sms has returned from wherever he went to brood last and has been recruiting people that show up as disciples

screaming arguments happen where sms is like I’M SORRY FOR ATTEMPTING TO GET US MANPOWER WHEN WE’RE ABOUT TO GET ATTACKED ANY DAY NOW and wwx is like STOP TELLING PEOPLE THINGS AND SAYING I SIGNED OFF ON THEM oh wait i’ve packbonded with some of these losers you brought in now. i guess i’m a bit more ok with it

(jgy is currently hiding the whole wen fam in his basement and repeatedly hurrying his assistant, a-ning (who definitely isn’t a wen who thinks he looks like  a wen? don’t be silly) away from jin zixun before things go bad on either side)

I’m seeing wwx’s death in this ‘verse either being a modified Qiongqi Path - there’s no Hundred Holes Curse in this scenario, but look, I REALLY don’t think you need to try hard to make jin zixun want to try and take out wwx; and it would be so easy to play a scenario where wwx and sms argue about him going, causing wwx to slip off to go alone and get caught without backup--or some kind of scenario where the Jin kidnap one of the Yiling Wei’s younger disciples and use them as bait for wwx to come over and get killed. either way, he still dies around the same time, but sms--and the rest of the sorta-sect--still have demonic cultivation on their side, and they successfully defend the Burial Mounds against siege. everyone thinks about their life choices for a bit, someone yells ‘we’ll get ‘em next time, boys!’ and we cut to 13-16 years of very very uneasy peace

(in this scenario you could TOTALLY still have at least jiang yanli, and maybe even jin zixuan, alive if you wanted! just realized that.)

(in the wwx-is-dead interim, wen ning assists jgy in killing nmj quick n’ sweet with some untraceable poison or something. rip nmj. wen ning is also REALLY useful in knocking people out for ‘assassinations’ to be conducted by ‘outside forces’, etc. he also gets along great with all the kids! great guy)

i could see sms as, before wwx’s death, basically trying to pretend he hadn’t died (don’t read into the amount I cover up or the fact I never use qi in public anymore! I still carry a sword AND my robes are wrapped the right way. shut up) but after, leaning ALL the way into the oldstyle Yiling Patriarch, nightmare of the battlefield aesthetic. the Yiling Wei have almost a Ghost Valley rep--are they human? are they demons? we just don’t know, etc; and sms gets ALL the atmospheric mileage he can out of being Actually Legit Dead. god. he’d probably get some kind of White Grim Reaper moniker and encourage the fuck out of it. wwx is going to die of secondhand embarrassment when he comes back to life and sees how edgy everyone’s aesthetic is

(look I don’t know HOW this happens exactly but in this AU i need jin rusong to live also. usually I don’t really care but I just reread what i wrote above and pictured Wen Ning--possibly not able to see his family all that often because jgy got them settled somewhere safe, but rather out of the way, and he has duties in Jinlintai--bonding with jgy’s kid, and my heart is FULL i need this)

also there’s so much delicious tension in the idea of WWX coming back to a world where the Yiling Wei/Burial Mounds are an entity, and are locked in a vicious semi-cold war with Lotus Pier (sms would Absolutely capture and torture jiang disciples as retaliation for losing his demonic cultivators) meanwhile LWJ is. still just trying to do his thing, waiting to see if wwx’s spirit ever shows up, wishing he didn’t really fucking hate everyone else who used to know wwx

[butwhatifidothis]

bless you for this work, honestly. I first was exposed to this game through fanfic and genuinely loved some of the versions of edelgard that writers have developed, and then took on the game starting with the Deer and thought “hmm I’m clearly not seeing her perspective in this timeline though cause I have an outsider view and everyone keeps saying they agree with her in principle,” and then played CF and recruited everyone I could and it was one of the most jarring narrative experiences I’ve ever had, seeing so many characters veer wildly OOC. I was prepared for a villain run or a secretly-good-but-misunderstood or a forced-into-desperate-actions or a bloody-revolutionary route but what I got was just so bizarre that I honestly felt like crap and was just pushing through at the end to get it over with— like the actions I was presented with as a player were super dark but the framing was so happy as to be disorienting (like Ignatz being excited about the fall of the Alliance). thank you for your time and energy laying some of this stuff out! it is very validating and helps me feel less disoriented to have someone acknowledge the disconnects, haha.

Aw, thank you so much! That’s actually very similar to how I first saw Edelgard - I hated her in-game, but reading some fic before playing through/watching through the rest of the routes had me wondering if there was something I was missing to her character that made everyone love her so much. She was very interesting in some fics, and her portrayal in AM softened me up to her some! I thought playing - or watching, in this case - her route would be that final push I needed to like her as much as everyone else did.

But then I watched a cutscene/support movie for CF (those longass ones that are like 7 hours) and saw how just... evil, some of her actions were and most of the characters acted, how weird they were being compared to GD and AM, how angry Rhea was at Byleth’s betrayal, how shocked and dismayed Claude was if you kill him, how distraught Dimitri was at his death scene, combined with everyone’s happy-go-lucky personas, and I was just baffled.

It honestly had me hooked - sat through the whole 7+ hours in one sitting (and as someone who usually can’t sit through a 2 hour long movie that’s sayin’ somethin’ lmao). It was like you said one of the most jarring things I’ve ever seen. When Edelgard lied about Arianrhod I was legit shocked, and when she bold face lied about her assault on Garreg Mach - how she said she gave them time to evacuate when we know as players who’ve played other routes that she was spied on and discovered to have been amassing her men to join together during the two weeks grace period before the assault itself - ngl I straight up yelled WHAT. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing from her, and not for the first time either. 

This is the character that stole the hearts of so many? This character, who compares herself to someone willing to murder his own men - hell, his own son - to get vengeance for someone who’s dead? Who never tried to make up for the fact that she used Demonic Beasts to accomplish her goals, knowing how they’re made? Who helped in Flayn’s kidnapping? Who knew who killed Jeralt and said nothing, ever? Whose response to someone rightfully calling her out on her violent conquest is a childish “no u” (and yes, I’ve seen plenty of translations from the JPN text itself, and from what I’ve seen the ENG ver. just simplifies an already dumb sentiment into the dumb phrasing it deserves)? Who lies to her friends and never comes clean, even when it comes to a mass killing like at Arianrhod? Who calls Nabateans “creatures who can merely masquerade as humans at will,” beasts, an inherent enemy to humanity that must be put down for the good of humans? Who’s blatantly wrong about history, who calls the near end of an entire race a “simple dispute”? This one? If I’m being honest, I don’t see how any player who didn’t play CF first could possibly play her route and come out thinking that she was the good guy at all - CF almost made me go right back to hating her - hell, my sister does hate her, full stop, and she played AM first! The route where she’s the most sympathetic!

Absolutely no problem!! This account was made specifically to rant and rave about the fandom’s shit taste and the game’s inconsistencies (like I love 3H to bits and pieces but oh boy is there a lot to rant about, for me it’s like Bleach - a nice mix of good and bad where I love and write about the good and can vent about the bad for hours lmao), so I’m glad it gave you some validation! (:

[enmy-writes]

Baby Avenger

Summary: (Y/N) is one of the youngest avenger members and some government officials repeatedly let her know of “her position.” So, she lets them know exactly what her position is.

Word Count: 2100

Fandom: MCU Avengers

Pairing: Avengers x Reader

Genre: Fluff, soft, slight angst and sadness, & family love.

Rated: 18+

Content Warnings: profanity, death, abandonment, bullying, this is my first ever post of any fanfiction ever so it’s probably bad

**** This is my first ever imagine that I have ever finished and published. Please give me feedback and let me know what else I should write! I’m very excited and nervous so please let me know if you enjoyed this :) I’m thinking of making this Y/N character into a little “Baby Avenger” one-shot series, so let me know your thoughts ****

 _____________________________________________________________

Baby Avenger.

Baby Avenger.

Baby. Avenger.

 In her head, her stomping can be heard throughout the whole Compound and all of its residents and guests can hear her anger. They know she’s going right to the meeting room; not the team meeting room, but the meeting room they use when they have special guests in for a meeting.

The new government officials who are now “in charge” of the Avengers since The Snap Part 2 were in for the day to go over the general plans that the Avengers have been coming up with. They’re nicer than those in charge of the group from the Accords, but in no way were they nice to majority of the group as a whole.

(Y/N) (L/N) happens to be the second to youngest member on the team coming in at an age of 18, second only to her best friend Peter Parker

(Y/N) is an orphan, the typical origin story of any superhero. Her parents spent their last minutes pushing her out of their burning house in rural Pennsylvania. Actually, it was her father who got her out of the flames and by their fishpond 100 meters from the house. Her mother was inside, trapped under a steal beam in the basement.

(Y/N)’s mother was a scientist who worked in secret in a little band of scientists who tried to accomplish their own small victories in testing the alterations and limits of humans. The goal of these scientists is to stay out of sight of the CIA, FBI, S.H.I.E.L.D., and other government agencies. Most of them are left alone and those who get found are either immediately sent to a high security prison or recruited to continue their experiments for a certain country/agency.

(Y/N)’s mother decided to give herself her treatment she was working on instead of potentially kidnapping someone in the everyone-knows-everything kind of town that they had been living in. Her experiment and life studies were all in trying to find a way to unlock the rest of the human brain so that more than that small percentage is being used at a time. It has been hypothesized that humans could do a lot if their brains just used itself more.

The only problem is when she gave the treatment to herself, she was unknowingly pregnant, and the treatment attached onto that small lifeform instead of her own. She created a super baby.

No one knew the exact answer to what is on the other side of that tunnel of science. No one knew what opening the mind could do, there were only theories to support ideas. Plenty of scientific evidence, but it meant nothing with no legit proof.

Well, turns out that those on the team of “you will gain the ability to read minds and shit unlike any human” were the correct guessers.

(Y/N) can read others’ minds, move things with her mind, slow down time in her mind to be able to successfully breakdown a situation and perform the best possible reaction to anything that comes her way. Oh, and the color spectrum is broader for her, allowing her to see a significantly more amount of colors than a normal human (including seeing the aura’s and heat that people give off. Very useful in the few missions she goes on.).

But her parents are dead.

After setting small (Y/N) down, her father ran back in to save the love of his life. Or, well, that’s what the towns’ people say to romanticize the situation. A brave man trying to save his family.

In the end, her father had shaken his head, laughing at the moment like a mad man with tears running down his face. He pulled (Y/N) in for the tightest hug that he had ever given the girl—which is tight considering how close the two really were. They were just like two peas in a pod, the light of each other’s lives, basically soulmates.

But love makes you do crazy things.

“You listen to me, (Y/N).” He gripped her face in a painful grip, cheeks sure to be bruised later. “I will always love you. Don’t doubt that, baby girl, okay? I love you so so so so much” By this time, tears are pouring off his face, the neon flames coming from the house reflecting off his wet face. “Mommy… mommy just needs me now, baby. I need mommy, too. We love you so much.”

It had confused her, his words. Nothing could prepare her to watch her father run back into the house, leaving her by the pond with nothing but a small bag of little family things like pictures, little stupid gifts, and a notebook she had stolen from her mom’s bookshelf one day.

Her mother’s grandfather had been friends with Howard Stark, both science men having been in the same circle of famous inventors since before WWII. While neither her mother nor father personally knew his son, Tony, he was still listed as the godfather to the child. With no close friends allowed in their secret circle, old bonds and pacts that her grandfather had with the older Stark led to a blind trust in the man.

Tony Stark had agreed to be the godfather during a one-week bender in his 30s, and when he was yelled at about it, he chose to just keep it there because “the chances of this happening is very slim.”

But here we are, Baby Avenger.

The officials who are here now actually were the same people that used to do check-ins and such with them pre-Accords, so they knew the team better than any government official save for the rare union that the team members may have with government officials. (Y/N) randomly has one with the Queen of England (she did a favor for Her Majesty once, and now they have tea every third Thursday of every month).

They knew that Tony suffered from panic attacks, and they knew Steve was going through a never ending loop of an existential crisis, and that Bucky will most likely always be having an identity crisis, and that Sam cries to sleep a lot around a certain time of year that renders him almost useless in his sleep deprived state he puts himself into. They know EVERYTHING vulnerable about the team.

So, that means they know how when she first got to the team and to Tony that she wouldn’t speak to anyone unless absolutely necessary. It took her almost a year to be able to speak more than a sentence to every person she was around. No one was too upset, though, Tony was trying to figure out how to save himself and rebrand his whole legacy and the Avengers weren’t really a family family yet like they are now. (Y/N)’s shyness made it much easier on the adults to figure out their stressful situations.

The officials, though, never got why she wouldn’t speak to them. They actually pushed her progress back more and more with taunts and comments such as “Oh, the baby can’t speak?” or a “Get your phone out! She’s about to say her first words!” every time she did go to say something.

Tony soon got fed up with it and filed a lawsuit against them which threatened their agency enough to pull them out and let a S.H.I.E.L.D. agent be a liaison for them. After their presence was rid of, (Y/N) grew exponentially with her new family. She was still home schooled, but now she had Peter Parker as a friend and world geniuses as her teachers. She was an only child, but now she’s a big sister to Morgan and has plenty of people on the team that are dubbed her siblings (since they don’t act their age majority of the time to be considered aunts and uncles).

While she’s trained to fight, (Y/N) doesn’t go out on the field much unless they need her brain or her extended vision. She likes to remain behind the computer screen and help that way. She’s invented a way to make prosthetics like Bucky’s become more available to the general public and has started a school/home that’s three miles from the Compound for orphaned kids, mutants, super kids, and those who aren’t accepted where they come from.

In conclusion, (Y/N) is 18 and not useless in any way, shape, or form.

So why, why, do these absolute short dick idiots decide that they can come into here, her home, and push her around like she hasn’t contributed more to the Earth and society in the short 18 years than their middle-aged asses?

Eyes narrowed and seeing red, she stomps her way down the last hall, shoving herself into the door of the meeting room and throwing it open.

The team stays unfazed, knowing she’d show up pissed at some point. The officials, though, jump in their seat and turn to look at her.

It wasn’t the biggest meeting, the original Avengers plus Bucky, Sam, and Wanda sit around the table. Though, Rocket and Groot are here sitting along the back wall, looking bored as hell. Thor must have drug them along.

Fists clenched, (Y/N) narrows her eyes more. She’s been here since the first attack. Sure, she didn’t fight since she was like, 8 or so, but she was in charge of her man-behind-the-computer work. She’s been a part of the team since the beginning, and these assholes are too big of pricks to acknowledge that.

That’s what’s pissing the girl off. This could have been a meeting for every one of the fighters of the team, which she wouldn’t go to because that’s not her role. This meeting, though, was scheduled as “Originals plus the newly appointed leaders only.” She’s an original.

SHE IS AN ORIGINAL.

SHE. IS. AN. OG.

AND YET, they remained in telling her she wasn’t invited because “The Baby Avenger doesn’t need to join big kid conversation.”

She locked eyes with her adopted father and her best friend, aka Peter Parker, aka the only reason she knew this meeting was still being held.

Poor, lovely Peter. He grew confused when his best friend wasn’t sitting in between Mr. Stark and him for the meeting, especially when the officials referred to the meeting as they did. He was just there to take notes for Mr. Stark, not that the man wouldn’t remember it all. Pepper thought it’d be a good idea if Tony had written evidence to anything said in these meetings so that he wouldn’t be pouring statements out of his ass without proof, and poor, lovely Peter got elected to take such notes.

When he noticed you weren’t there, he had sent you a text asking where you were and that your drink that he brought you was right next to him.

“(Y/N)! It is so great to see you, my wonderful flower.” Thick arms wrapped around her as a golden man squeezed her tight to him. Thor and (Y/N) had a special relationship. They’re always close and do the most innocent of tasks together like flower crowns, step-by-step painting classes, and making those Tik Tok crocheted blankets made with that big yarn. He even had taken her to Asgard (back when it was a planet) for a royal ball where she was the guest of honor. They’re just soft together.

Though, rage blocked that softness that normally occurs between the two. Pushing off of him, she points her finger at the men in the front. The officials look like they’ve seen the devil and all of Hell and (Y/N) can see the fear pouring off of them.

“Let’s get this clear,” she says as she slowly stalks her way up to them. “I am an Avenger. I am an original Avenger. I know about 3,000 ways to kill you in this room at this very moment with anything. I drink tea with the fucking Queen on Thursdays, and I’ve created a better orphanage/school system in 2 years than this country has in the 250 years it’s been around. Don’t you EVER call me a fucking baby again, you fucking hear me?”

By this point, she’s right up in their faces, her glare unwavering and them sweating. The silence in the room was great and seemed to go on forever. The team held their breaths, some trying not to laugh and some scared of backlash that might be trust upon the girl.

With one last eye narrow (you could blindfold her with toothpicks at this point), she whips around and walks back to Thor, placing herself sideways on his lap and relaxing into his hold. Peter passes her (Drink Order) down the table, and (Y/N) takes it.

Clint, Bucky, and Sam try and hide their laughter when the meeting starts again as they look at their long-time teammate cradled and curled up in Thor’s arms, head on his shoulder and under his chin as she sips her drink with an angry look in her eyes and a pout on her face.

All wrapped up like a baby.

[anestheticrage]

Be me: Japanese honor student🎓, 15, with half a brain and even less of a plan. Hunting bitches by day and witches by night. Livin that dank only child✌️ life while mom n dad yeet all over the globe, leavin me plenty of time to forget not to make 2 lunches for myself #quirky 😜

no time for socialization or basic electronics skills ???📱??? when your best friends are an alien demon rabbit🐰👽 and the inexplicable Hole ™ in your brain. lmao, btw did i mention im ✨M✨A✨G✨I✨C✨A✨L✨

dreamin bout my 2D waifus again when familiar pink haired cancer patient dances through my brain passin out fliers: Kamihama Meguca Dating Service: Sponsored by Cult of the Magius. 250 stones per session 🤔

seems legit, Mr. Moneybags. wasn't spending my unwieldy sack of gemstones on anything else anyway. lets pull 💎💎💎

first up we have Redhead Radagast and her plethora of plants. 🌿☺️🦎

anndd, nearly dies immediately. 

well not off to a great start but i guess shes pretty cute at lea- oh FUCK its her girlfriend, Tsundere Poseidon😒🔱💦, and their exasperated, straight and single Sword Mom 😔🗡️🔥. fml gonna have to save up for the next pull. might as well play a few rounds with what i got tho. 

get in some good girl talk about things like school, color coded hair styles, body count, permanent soul damage, and our personal demon pacts. ya know, the usual 😚 . realize my dark backstory seems to be missing, so the girls take me to Ketchup Queen Sappho 🍅🥧 (wtf?) to molest my glowy egg stone. whatevs, more action than ive had since Kuroe 🖤 got added to the story anyway

the gang agrees it's time to hunt down the cutest rabbit pimp 🕶️🐇💵 in the city. >> say 🎵mukyuuu🎵 one more time and ill hug you so hard my backstory will pop right out, you adorable fluffy bastard. plz be my new best friend 💕

Form brand new friendship pact with Kyubae, and remember that my lil Sis 🐥 was always the best wingman for pickin up magic chicks, and kept her side of the room so spotless i forgot she existed. whoops 乁༼☯‿☯✿༽ㄏ Maybe if I find her i can stop paying these exorbitant pull fees.📵💎

speaking of which: hot damn this week's featured bachelorette is a 19 year old model and magical detective🔎 with massive levels of PTSD and self loathing 🥵💙💦 more likely to stab you or dramatically jump off a rooftoop than utter a single positive comment. wow, maybe i really COULD find true love…

... if i had MORE THAN A 1% FUCKING DRAW CHANCE. 😡 smh

hard to make much progress finding sis or winning the broken heart of a hard boiled detective amidst the never ending lover's quarrel of the Trident Vine Lesbians. 💔 Sword Mom tells them if they don't behave a monster will take them away. LOL classic mom 🤣

>>>HOLY FUCK IT DID

declare all-out war on urban legends, starting with staircases ⚔️ to reunite the dysfunctional trio, and hope that I net a way better lineup with the next 10x pull. at least sad sleuth lady came to help out. they say combat is the best way to bond wi-   and there she goes off the rooftop again 🙄 fml

alright that got way off track, we need a fresh start, away from all the loli drama. how bout a little B&E🔓🔨🤷🏻‍♀️ at the local house of worship to clear my head. ahh nothing like the unanswered prayers of the masses to get you in the mood for another wasted pull, and the 🔥 MIGHTIEST 🔥 headache you could ask for with a side of Double Cooked Pork 🐖🍜 (meh 5/10🧾)

venture forth into the spiritual unknown with your new human flamethrower🔥🌻🧡 and ask your favorite private eye to please, for the love of Eve, trade Meguca accounts with me~~~ Head through the eastern spirit portal to meet up with hologram propaganda sis and detective crush's evil ex, who joined a dating-app cult (#fuck) and also turned into the moon?🌕?(that's rough buddy)

get ambushed by Acid Horse on Wheels 🌈🐴 and vomit up my soul so hard that its time for a crossover episode. T U R F F F   W A R R R *que operatic harmonies* 💛 Blondie with the hair drills and enough attitude and guns to fill up a noble phantasm tries to ban my account permanently, but PI heartthrob denies her admin privileges. aww babe i didn't know you cared. 😭♥️

get kidnapped by my new true love and go back to her place 😏  defs enough empty rooms to house five emotionally traumatized girls and at least two ghosts hehehe👻 XD 💚🃏💜🎸 decide to form the anti-gossip brigade and recruit my blazing sunflower after getting ambushed by the witch living in my fruit loops🥣

❌outvoted 2:1 that cults are bad. mf. fiinneee one last pull to round out the team and then I'll delete the app. cmonnn Karin 🎃~

OH HELL YEAH TWO FOR ONE.

Always wanted a daughter 💜🔨🐄 with a penchant for pissing off the local Martial Arts & Books Club and drinking suspicious liquids offered by total strangers. Well if it's good enough for her AND the sexy mayadere with enough game to seduce a mermaid, might as well get in on that myself. 

#curseddrank 🤢 0/24 would not recommend to a friend, 'cept maybe Ria

win alot of cash 🤑, blow up a fountain, meet the pied piper²🎶🖕, moon cult, monochrome feathers, something about liberation✊🏻; adopt temper tantrum cow girl. aces 💜🥩

Next up!!! skydiving with DJ Hammer! Jump to apparently-not-certain death after suicidal A.I. 💚💾🗼 tells you to rescue her hostage before they run out of Radiohead albums and have to move on to Thom Yorke's solo discography. save the invisible shield kitten 💚👑😿 from happiness and get chased through the internet by the sexiest homicidal Paint Pallette 💚🎨😈 since Caravaggio. (apparently green is the color of the digital apocalypse. i’m deleting Kako from my friend's list)

that’s it, fuck this app. 250 stones 💎 per-life-threatening-experience is more than i’m willing to deal with 😓 don’t wanna mess with the perfect nuclear family anyway. we've already got: 

✔️the two emotionally traumatized moms with memory and commitment issues

✔️the adhd daughter with anger management problems and a giant hammer

✔️the psychologically abused scizophrenic cat

✔️and the eccentric aunt with crippling anxiety

#squadgoals

now that were done hoarding bitches, its time to hunt the witches. and the bitches makin the witches. btw did i mention the witches ARE the bitches! AND WERE ALL GOING TO DIE!? 📽️⁉️💀 wait fuck lets back up a second

This is Nemo📕 and Token🧪 and they have all the answers but prefer if you only ask vague questions in exchange for vague responses so they can fill in the rest by discussing their superior intellect 🧠 at length. not to mention they built that dating app, so of course everyone in my harem decides to be a FUCKING. TRAITOR.🤬

cept waifu prime ofc 🥰💙. [PTSD > brainwashing] 'yOu CaN bE tHe LeAdEr NoW'. i have been from the very beginning you traumatized Hinedere nightmare. maybe if you weren't so caught up collecting surrogate daughters you would've noticed IM👏THE👏ONLY👏 ONE👏PROGRESSING👏THE FUCKING👏PLOT✨

rescue the rest of dysfunctional found-family™ from selves before my adorable firebender burns down Disnihama🎡🔥😱 during her weekly anxiety attack. (love the makeover T B H) 

CHAPTER 8: Magical Girl Massacre🩸🗡️

   - everyone has like, the shittiest day ever

   - the new Pope really needs to be extradited from the church

   - make friends with a really pretty tree 🌺🌲✨

i swear, if i don't finish this god damn story in time to get that free pull im gonna beat the shit out of every mirror i find in that giant mansion that i haven't even had any time to even mention yet. 🖕🏚️ let alone EVERYTHING happening with the prequel [fuck you, I'm the star] girls 💗💜💙💛❤️️ and their multidimensional melodrama. We don't need that many repetitive af episodes to emphasize that Homo-ra is a shitty person. we've all seen Rebellion. 🙄

NO, I DONT CARE IF YOU WANT SAPPHO'S BACKSTORY, I ONLY HAVE 79 STONES LEFT AND IF YACHAN FINDS OUT I HAVEN'T DELETED THE APP YET IM GONNA HAVE TO GO SLEEP IN WITH SANA 😭💎💸😠

uhhhggggg where were we… Topple a cult and burn down Hotel Denoument only to realize that Sis was fused with the dating app servers this entire madokafuckin time (told ya she was the best wingman 😊). 

Dilemma: Sis =🥚, Triumvirate of Trouble want 🐣. What do? vote now:

Help Hatch - IIIIIII

Not Do That - IIIII

What The Actual Fuck Is Going On - IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII

¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Lets just fight everyone until something good happens.

🔥🔫🔥🗡️🔥😱🔥🌆🔥😱🔥🛡️🔥💣🔥

Kill (???) the artist-in-chief of the italian reindeer murder police after teaching her the true meaning of Christmas 🎄 hatch 🐣lil Sis and realize she WAS your wingman all along🐰 MUKYUUUU! we're just gonna ignore how much trouble it would have saved if you'd just mentioned that. "yOu DiDnT aSk..." 

FUCK YOU SPACE BITCH. ONCE AN INCUBATOR ALWAYS AN INCUBATOR 🖕🐇🔪

anywho, somewhere along the lines we of course summoned the Antichrist ⚙️ because why not raise the stakes to max and still not kill off a single character. Madofuckinkami, can we PLEASE wrap this up. 😩💤

feathers (not the culty kind, tfm) rain from the sky, and the power of friendship and not having the Urobutcher 🔪🩸as a lead writer saves our peacefully sectioned off alternate reality 😇

TL:DR fuck cults, real life waifus DO exist, don't sell your soul to space rabbits, or your stones to megacorporations. Enjoy arc 2 on the JP server with your shitty translation patch you filthy fuckin weebs 

Yours Truly, 

- Thirsty Weeb Eroha 💗💎😘 

[luluwquidprocrow]

i know their names, i carry their blood too

originally posted: august 13th, 2018

word count: 19,681 words

rated: teen

beatrice snicket, lemony snicket

family, angst with a happy ending, VFD, assorted original vfd characters, assorted canon characters repeatedly mentioned, one small girl going through a lot of unpleasantness, most of the time by herself, attempted kidnapping (legit vfd recruitment in action), also one small girl trying to avoid a decent amount of trauma and loss

summary: A man has come back to the city. Beatrice Baudelaire, eight years old and miles away, is trying to find him.

opening notes:

this fic relies pretty heavily on the beatrice letters, and there are a few references and one code that will make a lot more sense if you’ve read all the wrong questions and the unauthorized autobiography!

title from the crooked kind by radical face

.

Beatrice learns early on, at seven and with a bare ankle because they said they don’t require the tattoo anymore, that if she turns the doorknob slowly and lifts it up at the same time, her bedroom door doesn’t stick when it opens. At eight, she learns if she stays close to the hallway wall, avoids the places where the floor groans under her feet, especially in the spot in front of the chaperone’s room, then she can make it in absolute silence to the staircase. The stairs are trickier—most of the steps have warped over time—so she wraps her hands tight around the banister and inches along the edge until she stretches out a tentative foot and finds the smooth carpet of the ground floor rug under her socks.

At almost one in the morning, everything, every overstuffed armchair and faded green wall and well-stocked pantry, is smothered in black shadows. Beatrice doesn’t mind. She can still find her way around. She had walked around for a week with her eyes closed to prove a point a few months ago. (The point was that she could tell anyone by their footsteps, which she could. The result was that she could navigate the entirety of headquarters in the middle of the night. She knows every creak in every floorboard and what everyone’s shoes sound like now.)

A proper adult might ask her if she’d like a light on so she can see a little easier at one in the morning. A proper adult would probably think she’d be afraid of the dark, after everything that happened. Then again, a proper adult would probably not have put her in this situation to begin with. She’s not entirely sure. She’s only known a few proper adults in her life, or people older and taller than her to the point she considered them adults. She hopes she’ll know at least one more.

From the report a volunteer smuggled to her during dinner in the mashed potatoes—and from the confirmation from another volunteer during dessert, waving his spoon through the air at her—and from the further confirmation from the chaperones standing in a corner with their heads together and mumbling not very quietly at all—a man was seen. Far away, on the thirteenth floor of one of the nine dreariest buildings in the city. A man they tell stories about, a man no one seems to know for sure, a man who might be a detective, or has had that printed on an office door at one point or another. A man who hasn’t been seen in a long, long time.

“That’s him,” Beatrice had said.

“How do you know?” a volunteer had asked. “You’ve never seen him either.”

Beatrice hasn’t, but she thinks she’s allowed to make an educated guess here. A niece should know her own uncle, even by rumors. And she knows him like she knows the back of her hand, or the floorboard underneath her bed she stashes the picture and the ring under, or the books she’s read in the middle of the night when she was supposed to be asleep, the ones they tried to hide from her so she couldn’t read his name. She knows.

(One of the older chaperones told her—or muttered disparagingly in her direction after Beatrice asked the same question for a whole hour one day, because no one would give her a straight answer—that she has the analytical eyes of her mother and the stubborn streak of her namesake and the brazen attitude of her uncle. Another one told her later, a little more kindly, that she looks like her father when she reads, quiet and studious. So, she knows.)

Her backpack is a heavy weight on her back as she creeps through the downstairs rooms, her shoes gripped in one hand and a letter almost crumpled tight in the other. She’d written it after dinner, tucked away in a corner of a room that no one ever looked in (the bathroom closet, of course), the typewriter across her lap and the news still fresh in her mind. She tapped her fingers against the keys. How should she address the letter? Because she’d have to send a letter. It was only polite, after all. But calling him uncle outright might be a little too much, a little too soon. Dear, she typed, for a start. Dear—physically distant relative? Closest living relative? The person she had to find, because he could help her find the people most important to her? This had to be perfect, and Beatrice knew it would be, but she still had to think—

Dear Sir, she settled on, with a small, pleased smile.

That was when she’d heard the voices from outside in the hall, filtering through the bathroom door.

“This can’t be good news,” said a chaperone Beatrice never liked. “He’s a wanted criminal, isn’t he? And I heard he was responsible for that other fire a few years ago, too. What if he comes here?”

“How can we trust someone like him?” said another one that Beatrice had almost respected until that moment.

“It’s probably not even him,” said a third voice. “There’s been too many people with his initials showing up over the years. With any luck, he’s dead and gone.”

Beatrice frowned, mostly in anger, because that was such an awful, rude thing to say about someone. She knew it was him. There was no way it couldn’t be. But the chaperones had a point about the initials, and it made her think of something else. In case the letter went astray, because the mail could be so unreliable, especially so far from the city, she should preface it with something, shouldn’t she?

I have no way of knowing if this letter will reach you, as the distance between us is so very far and so very troublesome, she’d written, proud at how professional she sounded. And even if this letter does reach you, I am not sure it will reach the right person. Perhaps you are not who I think you are.

But she’d learned one important thing here, and that was that you had to be certain, because you might be wrong. So at the end of the day, it was merely a pretense, a formality. There was nothing she didn’t know for sure, because she was certain.

My name is Beatrice Baudelaire, she typed, with a fierce determination and her head held high. I am searching for my family. Then she’d known that she was going to leave.

Beatrice squints up at the grandfather clock in the corner of the main room, trying to see the time through the shadows. If she cuts it too close she’ll run into the chaperones doing their middle-of-the-night check on the neophytes. She has to be out of the building before it comes to that. The ground floor of headquarters is silent as a grave right now, as dark as one too, and she steps close to the couch where the floor won’t talk back to her as she makes her way to the heavy ivory front door, washed grey in the dark.

She knows from experience—from carefully watching and listening—that the door is locked (silver, outdated, the kind from the old hardware manuals Beatrice has extensively studied in the dead of night) from the outside, the volunteer who locks it then running up the fire escape and back inside through an upstairs window. But the quickest way out is always the easiest way in. She puts on her shoes and takes off her backpack, unzips the latter as slow as she can, and feels around for the thin red ribbon.

She shifts her hair, shoulder-length and blonde with a curl at the very end, away from her face, and ties it back securely with the ribbon.

An older volunteer had given her a lock pick the previous week after Beatrice helped her solve a word game—there’s no way she would’ve been able to get one otherwise. The chaperones almost always seem to know when someone’s doing something they shouldn’t, considering how much else they miss. Beatrice takes it out and gets to work, moving quickly and quietly, listening for the barely audible tick when one of the tumblers releases. One of the chaperones laughs upstairs, a disembodied thing in the darkness, and Beatrice grips the tools harder so she doesn’t jump and drop them.

The lock clicks sharply, the door easing open with a heavy creak. Beatrice freezes in place, straining her ears, her breath still in her throat. She’s sure someone had to hear that.

Something creaks upstairs.

The floorboard outside the chaperone’s door.

Beatrice snatches up her bag, squeezes herself through the gap and outside, and pulls the door shut behind her. She runs down the stone steps two at a time and doesn’t look back.

Ten blocks away, when she’s sure no one is looking, Beatrice drops the folded letter into a public mailbox.

The only train out of town leaves at five in the morning. Beatrice gets to the station with plenty of time to spare, and easily memorizes the route she’ll have to take to get to the city. It’s a long one, so she sits down on one of the benches and counts out her change. She digs the ring out of her bag, the heirloom from the island Sunny had given her that Beatrice had hid from the chaperones, and tries it on different fingers until it stays and doesn’t slide. Then she waits, tracing the low ceiling beams with her eyes, swinging her legs back and forth.

She knows just what he’ll be like. Not too tall, keeps to himself, intelligent. Sensible, maybe a little tentative, a little worried. His books made it sound like he’d been through a lot, after all. But she’s not too concerned about that. He’ll talk to her, because she’s his niece, and she’s read everything he’s written, and they have a good deal in common. They both like big words, long books, and could take or leave the sea.

She has one picture of him, of the side of his back and a corner of his face and one hand, or the side of the back and the corner of a face and the one hand of a man Violet and Klaus didn’t know, but a man Beatrice knew couldn’t be anyone else. There were three other people in the photograph—the uncle she’ll never meet, and the Baudelaire parents.

Beatrice hadn’t meant to take the photograph. It was their photograph, Violet and Klaus and Sunny’s, the last thing they had of their parents. But she thought it might be the only glimpse she’d get of her uncle, especially when she’d only known about Jacques, so she would sneak it out of Klaus’s commonplace book when he wasn’t looking. She’d wonder who the other man was, since that was before she knew. And she’d meant to put it back, but—but there hadn’t been time.

Violet and Klaus told her her mother had blue eyes, and so did Jacques, and she has them too, so she knows she’ll see the same shade of blue in his eyes, another link between the two of them. Excitement flutters around inside of her like a million wonderful butterflies, and she can’t help but smile. Not only is she going to find the family she lost, she’s going to find the family she didn’t even know she still had until a few months before. Beatrice can’t think of anything luckier.

There’s not too many people on the train when it comes into the station, so Beatrice picks a windowseat all to herself, pressing herself close so she can see everything passing by. She doesn’t want to miss a single thing. She swings her legs again, heels kicking the seat, and waits for the train to start moving.

“Aren’t you a little young to be traveling alone?” the woman across the aisle asks. She lowers yesterday’s evening edition newspaper and gives Beatrice a pointed stare behind her thick-framed glasses.

“No,” Beatrice says.

“You seem a little young,” the woman continues.

“I’m short for my age,” Beatrice says.

The woman gives her another look, specifically at her feet, and then looks back up at Beatrice with a raised eyebrow. She ruffles her newspaper imperiously and disappears behind it again.

Beatrice swallows, her shoulders pulling in. She makes a point to stop swinging her legs and sits up straighter. She keeps at it, even when the woman gets off at the next station and she’s by herself on the train.

She doesn’t remember falling asleep, but she jolts awake at a flash of light across her face. It flickers jagged on her hands, lighting up the seat beneath her, bright and blinding white. She looks around frantically, expecting to see rain and bending wood, to hear the roar of crashing waves, before she remembers she’s still on the train. There’s no lightning on a train. It’s just the sun streaming in from the window. She watches with wide eyes as it creates patterns on her arms and her dress, then tears her gaze away and stares hard at the faraway houses outside the window instead, clutching her bag in her lap. Beatrice thinks of big words (pietrisycamollaviadelrechiotemexity surely counts as a word, and she spends ten minutes testing out pronunciations), long books (Anna Karenina is long, and she can probably still read it even though she already knows the central theme), and anything but the sea, until her hands loosen and her shoulders drop and the sun is high enough that she can’t see it.

Beatrice had first found his name buried in old reports, in thirteen files jammed into the back of a drawer, down in the basement at headquarters when someone had asked her to find a flashlight. She found a bat instead, clinging to the rafters, and it blinked at her with big, black eyes. Beatrice blinked back, because she knew all about all kinds of animals, especially the ones the organization trained, and she didn’t mind bats. Then it fluttered down on top of an old filing cabinet in the corner.

Beatrice wandered over and picked out faded letters that spelled Baudelaire on the front. Eager, because no one at headquarters would talk to her about Violet or Klaus or Sunny, or answer her questions about where they might be, she yanked it open and found files and files with a distinct cursive signature ending each one—Lemony Snicket. And her stomach had twisted up tight, because she could hear Klaus like he was standing right behind her, telling her the name Kit Snicket.

Kit Snicket, Beatrice had echoed.

That’s right, Klaus had said, smiling. She was your mother.

Beatrice knew all about her mother. Violet and Klaus and Sunny had told her her mother was a good person, a volunteer, someone who had helped them, and they had helped her. That was how Beatrice was born. And she knew all about Jacques, because they’d said the same thing about him. But they’d never mentioned a Lemony. She knew better than to think he was her father, because she knew her father’s name, too. Dewey Denouement. They’d said his name only once, and she’d repeated it over and over again to herself. Beatrice didn’t know who this was.

She read through them all in the dead of night so no one would bother her, because Beatrice knew they were watching her, closer than they watched the other neophytes. She tried to find the four volumes she’d found hints at in other files, although she never managed to pin them down. But the thirteen files told her enough. They confirmed that Violet and Klaus and Sunny were still out there somewhere, just like she thought. They confirmed their stories, although with other details they hadn’t said or had relayed differently—but Beatrice had never doubted what they’d told her to begin with.

And they confirmed that Lemony Snicket was her uncle, and he was alive.

All of Beatrice’s hopes became real, became fact. There was someone else out there, someone who could help her. Someone who was family. Someone who could help her find Violet and Klaus and Sunny. Someone who knew the whole story too.

So then she just had to wait. She had to wait, and learn, and sit through someone telling her how to make a meringue when she knew full well how to make a meringue, and how to pick a lock and how to define a word and the right way to escape a burning building. She had to keep waiting until the right moment came and she could leave and try to find him, try to find them all. And Beatrice would know when it was. She was Beatrice Baudelaire, after all. She knew everything now.

Beatrice spends three weeks switching trains, eating greasy sandwiches from the vendors hanging around in the old, dingy train stations. Sunny wouldn’t like any of the sandwiches at all, but Beatrice has to make do with what she can. No one talks to her, so she doesn’t get a chance to try out any of the other things she’d thought to say after she spoke to that woman. I’m visiting a relative. I’m in a special program. Didn’t anyone ever tell you not to talk to strangers? She’s a little bummed about that, because she practiced the perfect eyebrow raise in the hand mirror she took from one of the chaperones, but it’s really for the best. She doesn’t need to be sidetracked.

Instead, she listens to how the trains sound smoother and sleeker closer to the city, watches how the stations get more impressive. She takes pamphlets from each station until she has a neat collection detailing train mechanics, local restaurants, and sometimes, if she finds one, the smallest books she’s ever seen. Beatrice sits in the hard station seats and flips through them while she waits for her train to come in. Mostly they’re books she’s read before, but she thinks they’re cute, being so tiny. She’ll show them to Violet and Klaus and Sunny, and her uncle, too. She knows they’ll enjoy them.

A voice mumbles indistinct static over the loudspeaker. Beatrice finishes her sandwich, puts the latest brochure in her bag, and gets on the next train.

The train station in the city is enormous, bigger than headquarters. It certainly looks as old as headquarters, but a little more distinguished, with a solid white floor and an endlessly high ceiling. Beatrice would be able to appreciate it more, she thinks, if there wasn’t so many people, all bustling past in a flurry of suitcases and elbows. None of them spare her a second glance, not even when she climbs up on top of one of the curved benches for a better view of the entire station.

Whenever Violet couldn’t figure out how to fix an invention, or Klaus couldn’t figure out the meaning of a sentence, or Sunny couldn’t figure out how to change a recipe, they would take it apart and look at each individual component before continuing. The same principle works for a city, Beatrice figures. A city is just a collection of streets, one right after the other, and all of them go somewhere. It’s not too hard to find out where, especially when you have the right map.

She finally spots the map display, drops back onto the floor, and goes and grabs every single map available. She squeezes her way through the crowd mobbing around the exit and emerges out on the city street into a sudden deluge of bright lights and noise. Beatrice blinks until it all evens out, all the traffic lights and towering buildings and the people, hundreds and hundreds more of them. She swallows, presses herself against the outside wall, and takes a moment to watch everything.

It’s strange. The ocean was vast, and they rarely ran into anyone out there, and headquarters, tucked away in a small town miles from the sea, had only about twenty neophytes and a handful of teachers and chaperones. But the city is full of jostling bodies and constant sound, like the whole world rushing around her, a storm that doesn’t stop. Beatrice thinks she might be scared, if she wasn’t so systematic about it. You can’t be scared if you know everything. It’s just different, is all it is. She reminds herself to breathe and thinks it’s just different.

Beatrice spreads the maps out in the park across the street, holding the edges down with rocks so they don’t blow away when the breeze kicks up. Everything is marked on the maps, every street and building and corner store, and even the best places to see certain birds. One map includes Nine Dreary Buildings to Avoid on Your Lunch Break, which is absurdly specific but exactly what she needs, and Beatrice hunts them all down with a careful eye and a black pen. All nine buildings are within a few blocks of each other, clustered in the center of the city. She’ll have to go through all of them, just to be sure. Klaus taught her it was good to be thorough. She puts the rest of the maps away and starts looking.

The first two buildings are too short to have a thirteenth floor. The third building looks like it was condemned years ago and no one bothered to do anything with it. The fourth building has so many floors that Beatrice loses track when she stands on the sidewalk and tilts her head back to try and count, and she looks through the directory inside the doors but doesn’t see any mention of her uncle’s name (or a pseudonym, or an anagram, or even just a suspicious blank space).

The walk to the fifth building takes the longest, because Beatrice has to find a path around the construction being done on seventh street, and takes ten minutes to wrestle with the map and figure out which street she’s on when she winds up in a dark alley with a lot of cigarette butts and one very noisy pigeon who tries to steal her map. The sixth building has the suspicious blank space on the directory, but it’s on the fifteenth floor. The seventh and eighth buildings, when she manages to find them, were mislabeled and wind up being two different diners, one of them even across from a completely different train station. Beatrice admits that they’re still pretty dreary-looking and uncomfortable, especially the latter one. She certainly wouldn’t want to eat at a place called The Hemlock Tearoom and Stationary Shop. That’s just tempting fate a little too much.

The ninth building proclaims itself to be the Rhetorical Building in faded but still distinct black print on an otherwise grey building, with a tattered brown awning over the glass double doors. It’s definitely tall enough to have thirteen floors—Beatrice counts twenty rows of windows going up the side. She bites her lip and scans the directory. Her heart leaps when she spots the little card for an office on the thirteenth floor. The name scribbled out, but whoever did it used a faded black pen and didn’t do that good a job, so she can still see the very clear L at the beginning and the S somewhere in the middle. She bites her lip around a smile.

This is it. This is her uncle’s office.

Beatrice pushes the doors open and takes a cursory glance around the lobby, and finds the inside lives up to the dreary reputation too. She wouldn’t have put so much sagging grey furniture and scuffed flooring and wilted potted plants in an office building. She ducks down as she hurries past the front desk so the bored receptionist doesn’t see her, vaguely wondering what it is about the building that her uncle likes so much to have an office here, and heads up the staircase. She can ask him when she sees him. She can ask him everything when she sees him, although everything is just one single question, but it’s everything to her.

The thirteen floors pass in what feels like a matter of moments, and Beatrice breaks into a run when she gets closer to his office, bursting through the doors onto the thirteenth floor. She darts from door to door, looking for the right number, wood creaking under her shoes, and almost barrels right into a panel of old, frosted glass on a door halfway down the hall. The only writing on it says DETECTIVE in peeling letters, which is exactly what she expected. Beatrice grins and knocks a few times, bouncing on the balls of her feet. When there’s no answer right away, she tries the doorknob.

The door is unlocked.

Beatrice tries with everything she has to contain her excitement, but it still comes through in her shaking hands as she turns the doorknob. “Hello?” she calls.

She comes face to face with a cloud of dust. Beatrice coughs into her fist, waving her other hand around to disperse it, and looks up to find a cluttered, but empty office.

Beatrice frowns and walks inside. The blinds are shut tight over the windows, so she eases them open carefully, letting in just enough light to see, and the office still doesn’t have anyone else in it. She checks under the desk, and out on the fire escape, and even under the papers on the walls, but there’s no reasonably tall man with her eyes waiting for her. She huffs out a sigh, her shoulders falling, but then the papers on the wall catch her attention. She looks closer.

They aren’t just papers—there are photographs mixed in, pictures of people she’s never seen before, and pictures of places, cities, hotel rooms, at least one rental car office, an all-you-can-eat buffet, and two separate theaters, and newspaper articles and pages ripped from books, all framing a humongous map of the city and surrounding areas, bigger than any she picked up at the train station. The papers are connected by a thin red string, wound around tacks and marking pins and what looks like an old bottle cap for a soda Beatrice doesn’t think sounds very pleasing. The middle of the map has more recent ones, polaroids dated a few months back of steep, rolling hills, a note paperclipped to one, neat typewriter type proclaiming it could be possible, underlined in a smooth, even blue pen. There’s a path marked beside them, curving through a wide and unlabeled space in the map.

That must be it, she thinks, nodding to herself. He’s not here, and she could be more upset about that, but she can’t be when now she knows exactly where he went. He’s pretty obvious for a detective, which makes her smile around a laugh.

She turns to the desk, which leans a little to one side, papers and a typewriter balanced precariously. A strangely-shaped paperweight sits on top of a stack of papers, and Beatrice mentally runs through every single animal she knows but can’t find a match. It looks like a snake or a worm or an eel, only with too many teeth.

Beatrice clambers up into the chair behind the desk, settles herself, and looks at the typewriter. It’s an old model, but well-cared-for, with shiny keys and a brand new ribbon, almost like it was waiting for her. Beatrice rolls in a sheet of paper, and then runs her fingers over the keys. She’s sure he won’t mind.

Dear Sir, she types. I am writing this on the typewriter in your small, dusty office, on the thirteenth floor of one of the nine dreariest buildings of the city.

I am leaving this city, only hours after seeing it for the first time, to follow your path of yarn and pins. I am heading for the hills…

When she leaves his office and starts hunting through the bus schedules for an idea of how she’s going to get to the hills, she realizes, with an exhilarated jump of her stomach, that it’s now March 1st. She’s been nine years old for a whole day.

On her last birthday on the boat, which Violet had radically modified before leaving the island and on the journey after, Sunny made her a cake. There were no candles, because none of them ever used a candle, at least when Beatrice was looking, and Violet and Klaus read her favorite story, and everyone got icing all over their hands and faces. Beatrice can just barely hear the way they all laughed. There’s a thin fog over the rest of the memory, one that strangles the excitement out of her. She can’t quite recall what the weather was like, or what she wore, or what flavor the cake was or even what the story was and especially how close it was to the day where—

Beatrice clears her throat and looks back at the bus schedules. She doesn’t think I have to find them. She thinks I will find them.

Beatrice takes one look at the sandwich counter in the bus station and resolutely decides she’s too hungry for another sad, uncomfortably greasy sandwich, and she needs a much better option. She takes out her map and backtracks to the Rhetorical Building, because the closest diner is on that street, right across from the office, between a tailor shop and a building shaped almost like a short, squat pen. For a city that on the whole is a lot more dreary than she thought it’d be, the diner looks bright and welcoming, with soft lights in the windows and cheerful blue curtains. Klaus taught her to be aware of her surroundings, so she makes sure she looks at everything when she steps inside.

The diner isn’t very big, but it’s clean and well-kept, with tan booths against either wall, a line of square tables right down the middle, and a counter blocking most of the kitchen from view. The pictures on the walls are all framed and organized in neat rows, and Beatrice’s gaze moves quickly from the few pictures of an ocean and a group of people in front of a boat to the other ones of cityscapes, and then to a completely blank piece of paper with #47! scribbled in the lower right corner. She looks to the other side of the room and finds a tightly-packed bookshelf near the counter. She thinks Klaus would definitely approve.

She climbs up on top of one of the counter stools and smooths out her skirt, and then sees a tall man standing behind the counter, flipping an oozing sandwich on the grill. He looks at her with wide eyes, surprise clear on his face, but then he smiles, so genuine she could’ve just imagined the shock. Beatrice thinks he looks a little like a movie star, with that thick red hair and easy stance.

“What can I get you?” he asks.

“I don’t have much money,” Beatrice says, because Violet always taught her to be honest. Sunny taught her to lie, but she thinks Sunny would like this man too, if she saw that sandwich.

“Not a problem,” the man says. “It’s on the house. What do you like?”

“What are you making?”

“The best grilled cheese you’ll ever eat in your life,” he says, and he slides the sandwich onto a plate and sets it in front of her. Then he puts a napkin and a glass of water beside it and smiles expectantly.

It is the best grilled cheese she’s ever eaten in her life. It puts the millions of sandwiches she ate at all those train stations to shame. When the cheese pulls when she takes a bite out of it, she knows that Sunny would love this sandwich. It seems almost unfair to get it for free. “Are you sure it’s okay?” she asks through a mouthful of toasted bread and mozzarella and a hint of pepper.

“Tell you what,” he says, wiping his hands on his apron. “Have you read anything good lately? My friends and I are always looking for book recommendations.”

She wishes she could get everything in life with a good book recommendation, because that sounds like a great system. The last book she’d read had been back at headquarters, so that she would understand a certain code, but Beatrice liked it a lot anyway. She was told it was a classic too, and she knows lots of adults like it when you read classics. “I read a book about a girl who goes out to dinner with her family,” she says, “and cracks an egg on her forehead. Not at the dinner, in a different chapter.”

He laughs. “A friend of mine liked that one when we were kids,” he says. “She went around trying to crack an egg on her forehead too, made me go through a whole carton of eggs.”

“Did she do it?”

“She sure did. Got egg all over my aunt’s diner in the process, but she looked me right in the eye and told me it was worth it.”

Someone else sits down farther down the counter, and the man walks off in their direction, leaving Beatrice alone with the grilled cheese. But he comes back, a curious look in his eyes. “So what brings you to the city?” he asks.

She thinks this is the question where she shouldn’t be entirely honest. Beatrice sits up straighter in her seat, trying to pull the sandwich apart into smaller, more dignified bites, the cheese oozing. “I’m visiting a relative,” she says.

“A relative?”

“A relative,” she says. “That’s all.”

“Do you need any help?” he asks. “I know this city like the back of my hand, and I’d be happy to—”

“No,” Beatrice says. “I know what I’m doing.” She finishes the last of the grilled cheese and wipes her hand on the napkin. “Thank you very much.”

He frowns a little, like he wants to ask her something else, but then he settles on another smile. “If you’re ever in the area,” he says, “or you need anything, even just some good food, stop on by.”

“What’s your name?” she asks.

“Jake Hix.”

“Beatrice Baudelaire.”

The only thing about the journey into the hills that Beatrice didn’t account for is all the open space.

The bus driver only takes her as far as a convenience store on the outskirts of the city, so Beatrice walks the nearby dirt roads out into the hills, stopping at the first sight of open, empty land. She grips the straps of her backpack, standing at the edge of the misty and faded earth spread out all around her, reaching on and on and on, sloping down at dangerous angles before disappearing completely in a thick haze. She swallows hard and stares even harder.

Beatrice focuses on the color. Even in late winter, it’s green, pale but distinctly green. They’re hills, not the ocean, with a horizon blurred white with fog and clouds. Nothing is a dangerous, roiling blue-black-grey, and the tall crests of the hills don’t move like waves, and nothing rushes through her ears like a scream, except the wind, which is much less thunderous than water. After all that, it’s almost silent, in the hills. It’s silent, and it’s not all that open, is it? There’s at least two scraggly little trees that she can see. Landmarks. Points of reference. She is not alone in the hills.

He’s out there, somewhere.

She starts walking.

Without the train schedules for something to keep track of, Beatrice isn’t sure how long she spends in the hills. Time passes in cool nights and cloudy days and an awful lot of grass with actually very few trees before, in a low valley in the hills, she reaches an encampment of about thirty shepherds. Beyond them, where she expects sheep, is an impressive collection of yaks. They might be the only people she runs into out here, and she’s starting to get worried, not so much that she won’t find her uncle, but that she’ll overlook him completely in all this space. The path on the map in his office was pretty vague. She’s going to have to ask them.

Beatrice approaches one of the shepherds. He looks like he’s the oldest, his wild and white beard tangling in the wind. He holds a thick, dark bell in one hand, his elbow propped against a sturdy walking stick, and watches Beatrice with startlingly cold eyes as she approaches.

“Excuse me,” Beatrice says. “Have you seen a man around here?”

“Depends,” he says. His voice rumbles like deep thunder, and it makes her flinch. “What’s he look like?”

Beatrice thinks about it. “Average height, not bald, fully clothed, answers to the initials L.S.”

“Oh,” the shepherd says, straightening up. “Him! He was here for a while. A strange one. Kept to himself most of the time. Stayed in that cave about two miles away.” He rings the bell, and the sound clunks and thunks against her ears. The yaks in the distance raise their heads and gaze in his direction. The shepherd, meanwhile, looks back at her with a raised eyebrow. “Seemed like he might have been waiting for someone, I thought.”

She feels a twinge of guilt and shifts her weight from one foot to the other. She should’ve gotten here faster. “Can you take me there, please?” she asks.

“I don’t do anything for free,” he says shortly.

“I don’t have much,” she says, frowning, and it’s more true now than it was when she told it to Jake Hix. Between all the train fare and the subpar sandwiches and then the cost of the bus, Beatrice figures she has maybe seventy-five cents.

The shepherd bends down, sweeping a critical eye over Beatrice. When his gaze finds her hands, he points at the little band around one of her fingers. “That,” he says. “That would do.”

“Oh,” Beatrice says. She looks down at the ring, dull in the lack of sunlight. She’s seen it sparkle beautiful gold and red, the carving of the initial in the stone glittering brighter than anything. Something lost, something that was found again after so much time. Beatrice likes wearing it, even though she doesn’t always think about it.

But it’s not like it is a family heirloom, for her mother or her father or for Violet and Klaus and Sunny. It belonged to the Duchess of Winnipeg, and although it found its way through her family anyway, it’s certainly never really been Beatrice’s. She just thought that she’d be able to give it back to the Duchess at some point.

She slides the ring off her finger and holds it up for the shepherd. His beard parts in a smile, revealing awfully shiny teeth, and he snatches the ring up and drops it into his pocket. The yaks are closer now, and he winds his hand into the rope around one of their necks and drags it over. He climbs up onto its back and stares at Beatrice. “It’s a ride. You’d best get on.”

Beatrice pulls herself up behind him. She tracks the sun this time, over the huge shoulders of the shepherd, watching it dip through the sky as they ride.

“Did he say anything?” Beatrice asks at one point. “The man.”

The shepherd scratches at his chin. His elbow swings back as he does, jostling into Beatrice’s ear. “Something about a root beer float,” he says. “I’m in the mood for a root beer float.”

“That seems a lot to ask, in the hills,” Beatrice says, tilting her head to the side to avoid the elbow. “The closest diner is back in the city.”

“No, that’s what he said. I’m in the mood for a root beer float.”

“Oh,” Beatrice says, feeling her face flush.

“Well, there you go,” the shepherd says, some time later when he stops in front of a low but deep cave jutting awkwardly out of the earth. Beatrice thanks him, slides down off the yak, and makes her way inside.

There’s nothing much in the cave—just a few sheets of loose, stained paper, and a whole lot of bats, almost indistinguishable from the shadows. They squeak when Beatrice gets too close, so she leaves them alone in the back and focuses on the rest of the cave. A few sheets of peeling and faded flower-patterned wallpaper cling to the curved walls. A collection of wires sits near the mouth of the cave, and a lone light bulb rolls by her feet. The wind collects in the hollow at the center, making it drafty and uncomfortable. She pulls her sweater tighter around her.

From the shepherd’s words, she knew he wouldn’t be here, but it still stings to get all the way here and then find out he’s gone again, to find out she just missed him. But that just means she has to try again, try harder. That’s not a problem for her. She’s been through worse.

Beatrice rifles through the sheets of paper left behind. She picks out the least ruined one, the only mark a K by a ripped corner. She pulls out a pen and sits down.

Dear Sir, she writes. I have found you at last—but you’re not here.

She finishes her letter and folds it neatly. She didn’t bring a single envelope, and she looks around in her bag to find something else she could possibly trade for the shepherd to send her letter. She doesn’t think he’ll care for a sweater or her lock pick, and she needs them. Beatrice walks out of the cave, staring into the direction of the city. She can’t quite see it, but she’s sure it’s there, just as sure as she is that she’ll find her uncle when she gets back.

She starts to figure out how she’ll get back, because she can worry about the letter when she finds the shepherd. How long it’ll take to get out of the hills, where to catch the right bus, how she can find the diner—when one of the younger shepherds, not much older than her, trots over, tugging a yak behind him.

“The city’s a long ways away,” he says when he stops beside her, panting a little. “I think your best bet is this yak here.”

Beatrice stares at him, and then the yak. The yak yawns at her.

“He’s pretty comfortable,” the boy says, smiling. “And he’s got a good sense of direction. The best yak this side of the hills, I guarantee it.”

“What about the other side?” Beatrice asks.

The boy laughs. “No comparison at all.”

“Don’t you need him?”

He shakes his head. “I can make do without him for a while.”

He tells her he’s heard about a shortcut back to the city, through a mountain rather than the miles of rolling hills. Beatrice has never been on a mountain. When he points it out to her, an enormous shimmering outline through the fog, it’s the most amazing thing she’s ever seen in her life. It looks nothing like the ocean.

The mountain is dangerously uneven, but Beatrice has never been so high up before, and that and the yak make up for all the sudden dips and drops in the path. The yak seems to know where he’s going—she never has to keep him on track or nudge him along, and he always stops around sunset and lets her curl up against his side. Sometimes he stops in front of the occasional bush, and Beatrice makes sure she can identify the berries on them with what Klaus wrote in his commonplace book, and the two of them snack to keep up their strength, Beatrice making sure not to stain the edges of the notebook with juice fingerprints.

Sometimes she flips back, back to when Klaus was a few years older than her, to the page where she’d taken the photograph. She’d replaced when both the objects became hers. She likes reading what he wrote, the little bits of her family’s story, like he’s right beside her on this mountain even as he was trying to get through the Mortmain Mountains. Recipes Sunny put together, things Violet said, pieces of codes and books and memories.

The notebook was the last thing he gave her. He’d thrown it at her during the shipwreck, and she can still see that, plain as anything. The black clouds and the thunder and the lightning, the wood splintering up in a roaring crash under her feet, everything slick with the endless rain and the thick, dark waves, including the edge of wood keeping Beatrice afloat. Then Violet’s voice, shouting we’ll find you, I promise—

Beatrice pages through the notebook, staring at Klaus’s immaculate handwriting. “How much more mountain do you think there is?” she asks the yak.

There’s a lot more mountain, days and days of mountain. Beatrice promises herself that if she ever has to do this again, she’s bringing a calendar.

When she gets to the bottom of the mountain, the ground covered in rocks and patchy grass, still a ways out from the city but definitely closer to it than the spot where the bus had dropped her off, Beatrice isn’t sure what to do with the yak. She climbs down, dusts him off, readjusts her bag, and then watches him. The yak watches her. Then he yawns, turns, and starts meandering back in the direction of the hills. She figures he probably wouldn’t be the best yak this side of the hills if he didn’t know how to get back to the shepherd.

“Bye,” Beatrice calls.

The city is uncomfortably close when she gets back, full of a heavy, simmering summer heat. She wipes the sweat off her face and thinks she could also go for a root beer float right about now. But there's probably a lot more diners than dreary office buildings in the city, ones that will be harder to eliminate than the offices were. She's not even sure if he'll be in his office now either, after he wasn’t where he was supposed to be in the hills. The thought sits in a knot inside her, twisting up the more she thinks. She of all people should know where he is. What sort of person is she, if she doesn't know the whereabouts of her own uncle?

Beatrice winds her way carefully through the masses of people still crowding the sidewalks, as if they never left, like the same people from months ago have been standing around here all this time. She could pull out the maps, but she doesn’t see a place to put them down and look at them again. Beatrice finally comes to a halt in front of a square, stocky building, old pillars framing the tinted glass doors.

Violet and Klaus and Sunny told her about libraries. She doesn’t remember the one on the island, or the island itself, although Violet told her both were massive, and they didn’t have much of one on the boat, just a collection of books Klaus brought from the island. But Beatrice knows that a library is a sanctuary, a calm place, where someone is supposed to feel safe. She knows that her uncle considers a library all of those things too. And even if she doesn’t find anything, at least it’s probably air conditioned.

Beatrice heads inside.

The first thing she notices is that everything is so quiet. But not an unnaturally still quiet, more of a gentle, unobtrusive one, interrupted only by the occasional shuffle of paper. Beatrice understands with a rush what Violet and Klaus and Sunny meant. It’s like stepping into a whole world, one she could spend hours and hours in just reading, among the bookshelves and pale cream carpet and broad windows letting in a sunlight so serene that for the first time it doesn’t make her hands clench in fear.

Beatrice takes her time going through the library, taking it all in. She makes her way through aisle after aisle, down a staircase to the lower level. A short wall separates the little lobby near the staircase and the rest of the floor, and she follows it around where it curves to look at the room.

Her breath catches in her throat. Ten feet ahead, there’s a man standing in front of a glass case, his hands deep in the pockets of his suit jacket. Beatrice walks a little closer, staying against the wall, until she can see the plaque near the case, describing something about poetry and actresses and dedication to the theater. She can see herself in the glass, a distorted short reflection in a pale pink dress, and she smooths her hair on instinct. Beatrice looks up, and up, until she can see the sharp reflection of the man, blue eyes and dark hair and a suitcase beside him that has seen better days but still clearly proclaims the owner to have the initials L.S.

Beatrice ducks back behind the wall in her surprise, her hands gripping each other. What are you doing, she thinks frantically, her heart pounding and pounding. There he is!

But when she pushes herself away from the wall, her mouth open to call out to him, he’s gone. Her heart drops, and she rushes towards the glass case. She skims through the poem for a hint about anything, as he seemed to look at it with a great deal of concentration, but she stops at the line a word which here means “person who trains bats” because who writes a second verse with such an uneven rhythm, and there’s no way baticeer is really a word—then she hears quick footsteps thudding in the hall behind her. She turns and runs towards then.

Beatrice follows him outside, barely keeping up. He runs incredibly fast for a man of his age in this heat, whatever that age is. Beatrice knows it’s certainly much older than she is. She sees the edge of his hat, the corner of his suitcase winging around another street, and she keeps running. It’s him. She’s going to catch up with him.

She follows him to a nearby park, where she finds him yards away of her, almost collapsed on a bench, leaning to the side to examine something on the seat. Beatrice slows up. And then he’s on his feet again, strolling towards the lake. There’s something forced about his casual stance, and she picks up her pace, thinking somewhere inside that this is ridiculous. They’re both looking for each other, they’re both here, and she should just—

He bolts off, this time leaping with an unexpected agility over a patch of shrubbery, which Beatrice dodges around easily when she reaches it, tearing out of the park after him. Moments later, she sees him throwing himself into a bus one street up, disappearing completely when the doors snap shut.

Beatrice lets out a disbelieving groan, staring at the retreating bus. She can’t believe how difficult he’s being, or for what reason, or why he treats the city like a place he’s desperately trying to escape. For as much as he runs, he sure still seems to wind up back here eventually.

But now that she’s seen him, she knows exactly where he’s going. Where else would he go in the city, on this particular bus route? Beatrice has looked over all the maps, and she remembers exactly where to go. She wipes the sweat off her face, takes a breath, and keeps on going.

He still makes it to his office building before her. When Beatrice stops at the corner, clutching the nearby lamppost and gasping, the bus is already far down the street and he’s nowhere in sight. She swallows and heads for the Rhetorical Building.

The lobby is dreadfully cold and still dreadfully dreary, but she barely notices it this time. Beatrice bypasses everything and sprints right for the staircase, not even trying to hide.

It could be because she’s already run so much, but taking the staircase this time seems to take an eternity. She’s so sure she can hear him, wheezing a floor above her, and that pushes her forward when her lungs burn and her legs ache. She makes it to the thirteenth floor, flings the door open, and barrels down the hallway to his office door.

Beatrice tries the doorknob first, but it doesn’t yield. She pounds on the door for five whole minutes, and it rattles and shakes but no one opens it.

One of the doors further down the hallway opens, and a man sticks his head out. “Something I can help you with?” he calls. “I’ve never seen anyone open that door at all. Can I—”

“Thank you,” Beatrice says quickly, hoping she sounds more firm than out of breath, “but I have this under control.” The man shrugs and closes the door. Beatrice continues knocking and knocking.

Maybe you were wrong, a voice in her head whispers. Maybe it’s not him.

I’m not wrong, Beatrice tells herself. I’m not wrong.

She huffs out a sigh, drops her backpack on the floor, and pulls out the lock pick. She doesn’t want to pick the lock, but this is it, she’s not waiting anymore.

The lock springs easily. Beatrice jams the picks back into her bag, grips the doorknob, and hauls the door open.

The office is empty.

Beatrice gapes around at the office, almost incredulous. It looks different than it did before—the papers, notes, and photographs on the wall are new, linked by a thick blue yarn now. The typewriter has a sheet of paper sticking out of it, like someone was just there (and he was, he was just there, she knows he was). There’s a framed picture on the wall of a lighthouse. The curtains are different, stark white and clean and fluttering in the breeze because the window is open.

She runs over to the window, climbing out onto the fire escape. It’s distressingly empty as well. When she grips the railing and leans over to look down the rest of the stairs and into the alley below, she doesn’t find anything at all. She stands there a moment longer, just in case he reappears, her whole body coiled with anticipation. Then another moment, and another, and another after that, until the moments stretch into minutes and her expectations finally die like a doused fire. She pushes herself away from the railing, slides back inside, and slams the window shut. Beatrice glowers at it, then eases it back open. He’ll have to be able to get back in later.

She takes a look at the wall. Before, it was easy to tell where he was going. Now, Beatrice can’t figure out what any of the notes mean. They’re all scattered pictures of beach sand and close-ups of waves and an unsettling collection of curling, spindly things that look like dried seaweed. She catches a few glimpses of his handwriting, mostly just question marks, and some typewritten notes signed M. No matter how hard she tries, her eyes keep finding their way back to the pictures of the ocean, pearly blue and peppered with stark-white foam. Her jaw clenches, and she turns away sharply.

The desk has more papers on it than it did before, but no paperweight. Beatrice flips through them, but she doesn’t find her letters, or letters from anyone else. What she does find are lists of places she’s never heard of, most of them crossed off. The paper in the typewriter is completely blank, but she doesn’t feel like writing anything. She stares around the office, pointedly avoiding the wall, and tries not to feel too angry or too disappointed. It doesn’t work very well.

Beatrice walks back into the hallway and shuts the door behind her, frowning down at the floor. She follows him all this way, and she has him, they’re mere feet from each other, and then he leaves?

Maybe, she thinks, and then she stops, because she’s not wrong. It was him, it was, and despite how the decor has changed, this is the office she was in before. He was here, and then he was gone, and so there has to be a reason he’s gone now, a reason to figure out so she can track him down again. Maybe something came up, business, or an enemy, or maybe he was just hungry, or—or—

sssssssssshh.

Beatrice whirls around and wrenches his office door back open, staring desperately inside. But there’s still no one there. She shuts the door again and looks up and down the hallway. “What was that noise?” she says.

The door down the hallway opens again, and the same man sticks his head out. “Someone say something?” he asks, gazing at Beatrice.

“What was that noise?” she asks.

The man shakes his head. “I didn’t hear a noise.”

“I thought I—”

“It was nothing, probably.” He raises an eyebrow. “You know, shouldn’t you be in school?”

“Shouldn’t you be working?” Beatrice shoots back. It’s uncharacteristic of her, but she’s tired all of a sudden, and she doesn’t like how this bone-deep weariness feels. The man looks affronted, and he shuts his door with a loud bang.

She traipses downstairs, all thirteen floors. Beatrice walks past the old desk and the sad grey furniture and the limp potted plants and makes her way towards the front exit. She’ll just have to wait until he comes back, and she can do that across the street in the diner, where at least she can try to wrangle another sandwich out of Jake Hix. The grilled cheese feels like years ago, after trying to survive on the mountain.

Beatrice hears it again.

It’s a scuffle, or like a slither—the drag of a shoe, a split second brush against furniture.

Beatrice stops in the middle of the lobby, looking around. She only now notices it’s completely empty, the receptionist missing from her desk. A chill ripples down her spine that has nothing to do with the air conditioner. “If it’s nothing,” she says, “then what’s that noise?”

Something curls slowly around her left ankle, something like thin, calloused fingers, and then a hand clamps tight over her mouth. Beatrice gasps, the sound muffled by the hand. Someone heaves her up, jerking her back into a set of arms, wrenching her close to something dark blue and black. She inhales fabric softener and cotton but the color makes her think of salt and brine and she can’t breathe. She can’t breathe.

“When we drive away in secret,” rasps a woman’s voice in her ear, “you’ll be a volunteer. So don’t scream when we take you—”

Beatrice grabs at the woman’s hand with both her own. She drags it away from her mouth and manages to gasp, “The world is quiet here!”

The woman freezes. Beatrice lurches forward, tumbling out of her arms and onto the warped floor with a small shriek and a horrible thud. Beatrice feels horrible, with a red mark around her ankle and her whole body shaking as she stares up at the woman. She doesn’t understand, and that scares her almost as much as the woman. She hadn’t just learned the poem at headquarters, Violet had told her about it, it was something Violet’s parents used to say, but she didn’t—she hadn’t said—Beatrice doesn’t understand.

The woman—tall, in a thin, dark blue sweater, her hair massive and unruly and black—bends down in front of her. Beatrice inches back, trying to catch her breath.

She squints at Beatrice almost suspiciously. “Well, young lady,” she says, “have you been good to your mother?”

My mother is dead, Beatrice thinks in her panic, and then she forces herself to clear her throat and stop it. “The question is,” she pants, “has she been good to me?”

“You’re a volunteer,” the woman says.

No I’m not. “Yes.”

“What’s your name?”

“Beatrice Baudelaire,” Beatrice says.

The woman raises an eyebrow. “Baudelaire?” she repeats, scoffing. “Beatrice Baudelaire?”

Beatrice frowns. “Yes,” she says again.

“Do you really expect me to believe that?”

“I do,” Beatrice says, blinking. “It’s the only name I have.” Which isn’t exactly true, but she’s never felt that Snicket suits her all that much. Beatrice Denouement, even, sounds like someone sophisticated, not a short nine-year-old girl with only a fierce determination to her name. Which is still Beatrice Baudelaire, no matter what this woman says.

The woman straightens up, her face cold, and then she seizes Beatrice’s hand and pulls her roughly to her feet. “You’re coming with me.”

Headquarters in the city is a lot different than the one Beatrice was in out in the country. The main difference is that this one is predominately underground, hidden under a two-story library on the corner of a busy street, and seems, from a cursory glance, like it’s going to be harder to sneak out of. They had to walk through a set of locked double doors in the back of the library labeled Secretarial Department, which lead to a long, tunneling hallway devoid of any typewriters, after all. It’s full of sudden dips and the occasional staircase and one long ladder that leads, when Beatrice climbs down it, to the sewers. She focuses hard on the layout, the curves of the passageways, the way the water drips, on the faded signs she can’t read hanging onto the domed walls, so that she’ll stop thinking about the churning in her stomach.

The path ends in another set of doors, framed in the darkness by flickering torches. Beatrice stumbles to a halt in front of them.

She’s sure that Violet and Klaus and Sunny, while they were on the island and on the boat, had to have used it. There were things Sunny made that could only have been made on top of something hot, even though Sunny always got that fierce, unreadable look on her face when she talked about what she could remember of fires. But Beatrice never saw it. She never saw flames jumping around each other, spitting in the darkness, smoldering orange turning into dangerous white-hot tongues.

Beatrice thinks of lightning and wet, foundering wood under her hands. She feels salt in her mouth again.

The woman shoves her through the doors.

The narrow hallways are bathed in cold, buzzing orange light, an unsettling color against the red brick walls and the hardwood floor. It’s almost claustrophobic, a maze Beatrice can’t parse even when she pays attention. They go up a set of stairs, their footsteps echoing in the silence, and then the woman steers her towards a door around the corner.

She catches a quick glimpse of the plaque on the door and its unnatural shine—vice principal—before the woman pushes her through it as well. Beatrice finds herself in a cramped, shadowy room, illuminated with one single lamp on the desk, where the outline of a tall man sits, hunched over what looks like a stack of papers.

It takes a moment for her eyes to adjust to the thin gloom hovering at the edges of the lamp. The shapes on the shelves along the walls sharpen. They look like tea sets, if tea sets were collections of just small, differently-patterned oblong jars, all topped with fragile lids, a handle on either side.

Beatrice swallows. She never saw what Esmé Squalor was so desperate to find. She wonders if one of the sugar bowls crowding the shelves around her is what she was looking for.

The man looks up and sets down his pen. “Who’s this?” he asks, his voice a low, heavy murmur.

“My name is Beatrice Baudelaire,” Beatrice says, before the woman can say anything.

The man raises an eyebrow at her, like the woman had, and then leans back in his chair. The look he gives her isn’t suspicious—it’s appraising. Beatrice shivers.

“Well,” he says.

They put her in a room down the hall and tell her firmly to stay put. It’s a windowless room with pale walls and only a few other students, all of them her age and sitting behind typewriters, and a particularly flatfooted and wrinkled old instructor, who starts sobbing when Beatrice tells him her name. He motions to a free chair with a long white handkerchief and manages to tell her that they’re writing business letters. He motions to the blackboard and tells her there’s the format. He motions to the typewriter in front of her and tells her, please, write a nice letter, and they’ll all make it through the day.

He shuffles away from her, back to the front of the room. Beatrice watches him go with a confused frown. She doesn’t have time for this—to be stuck here again, or to try and figure out what’s going on, or to try and reason what she’s supposed to say in a business letter. She drops her eyes to the typewriter. It’s not too bad, but certainly not as nice as the one in her uncle’s office. She presses a few of the keys to test them, and they stick and then stab back into the air with loud, fierce snaps, so much that she jolts back in her chair. He’d never give her a typewriter this bad.

Beatrice gets an idea.

She has to get word to him somehow. She has to survive, too, and she’s perfectly capable of doing that anywhere, although she would prefer to do it in a situation where she isn’t at risk of being accosted violently around the ankle at any given moment, among other things. It seems like her best bet to get to him is to stay here, and not wait, this time, but let them lead her to him. It won’t be too hard. This city and this organization are his. He’s here, in this room, and he’s here, in this city, and she knows she will find him if she stays here.

She gives herself a shake and rests her fingers on the keys.

Dear Sir, she types, one eye on the instructor, now leaning against the wall and wiping his face with the handkerchief. I am writing to inquire further on the matter we discussed earlier this year. I’m in my business letter writing class, which is taught by a flat-footed man so sad and unaware that I am certain he will give me an A on this assignment without reading anything but the first sentence of each paragraph. I could say anything here at all. For instance: a “baticeer” is a person who trains bats. I learned that in a poem I watched you read.

The instructor straightens up, still dabbing under his eyes, and wanders around the room, glancing periodically at the typewriters. Beatrice schools her expression into business-like thoughtfulness. When he comes by, he scans the first line of her letter, heaves an enormous sigh, and keeps walking.

After careful consideration, Beatrice continues, biting down a smile, I am pleased to enclose the following information.

The instructors confirm her identity after careful consultation with twenty different people, all of whom Beatrice has never seen before, and a series of photographs and files Beatrice isn’t allowed to see, all of them crowded in an office and staring down at her an hour and a half after Beatrice has finished her business letter.

They tell her it was very irresponsible of her to sneak out like that from the country headquarters. Beatrice does not tell them it was very irresponsible to have a lock so easy to pick and a headquarters so easy to navigate in the dark. She stares back up at them, tries to look appropriately chided, and hopes they’ll think she feels appropriately chided. What she does feel is cornered.

One of the adults standing towards the back, his face in shadows, scoffs under his breath. “Just like her uncle,” he says.

“Which one?” asks another.

“You know,” he says, waving a dismissive hand. “That one.”

“The dead one?”

“Aren’t they both dead?” asks a different voice.

“No, I’m sure at least one of them is alive—didn’t you get that message?”

“You know for a fact I haven’t gotten a single olive jar in three months, since someone broke my refrigerator—”

“For the last time,” someone sighs, “I did not break your refrigerator—”

Beatrice takes the opportunity to slip unnoticed from the room and into the hallway. She takes slow steps, listening to the little click of her shoes on the tile. The adults at the country headquarters had been secretive but easy to predict. The adults here, though—

She stops. She peers down, past the hem of her dress, and lets herself look at her left ankle.

It’s not that she doesn’t like it here, with this organization. They’ve given her a place to stay, and most of the volunteers her age were kind to her at the last headquarters. Most of all, she has vague memories of Violet telling her that people who read that many books can’t be all bad, that most of them were just trying their best, that they’d been noble enough in the end. But she’d said it with a curious look on her face that Beatrice can almost picture, like there was so much more Violet wasn’t sure how to say, like she still hadn’t figured something out, and it hurt to think about it.

That silence had carved out a worry in Beatrice, a hole she feels in her stomach now. She tries to imagine a permanent mark on her ankle, a tie, an anchor, bigger than a promise to be noble enough. She knows what Violet and Klaus and Sunny told her about what happened to them, and she knows what she’s read in the thirteen files, and she knows Klaus wrote in his commonplace book that the organization was their only hope. She knows there are a good many details that maybe they hadn’t left out when they told her their story, but maybe just hadn’t gotten around to telling her at the time. Beatrice knows about the hard choices between what seems right or wrong—and she knows the iron grip that woman had on her ankle. She knows about the circumstances that killed her family, her uncle, her parents.

Because she could be wrong, she has to be certain. Beatrice doesn’t like being wrong. She looks up at the hallway, the old pictures on the walls, the lack of windows, the flickering lights casting shadows around her, and tries to feel certain that her only choice is to stay.

With the considerable amount of volunteers in the city, Beatrice figures she’ll have to share a room with someone, but one of the adults takes her to a single room, off to the side, and tells her, once again, to stay there and not make any trouble.

It’s a simple room, with a bed, a closet, a desk, two lamps, and a bookshelf (already stocked, and she stops perusing it when she finds the book about the girl and the egg and the family dinner, because her hands start to shake). No windows. The walls are all solid stone, but the floors are wood, and Beatrice turns the lights off and stands in almost total darkness—there’s still a sliver of light under the door from the hallway—and tests out the places where the floor squeaks for hours. She memorizes the room, feels with her hands for catches or knobs or secret compartments and doesn’t find a single one.

The light under the door disappears. Beatrice, standing by the bed on the opposite wall, goes completely still. She listens.

After ten seconds, the lock on the door clicks.

After a whole three minutes, the shadow under the door still hasn’t moved. Beatrice swallows and keeps watching. She knows better than to try and pick this lock. They aren’t going to make getting out easy. Finding him might not be as easy as she thought, either.

That doesn’t mean I won’t, Beatrice thinks.

She fully expects to sit through their classes again, to tell the teacher how Sunny taught her to make a meringue, to relearn the same codes she learned from Klaus’s commonplace book, to listen to someone besides Violet explain the scientific principles of the convergence and refraction of light.

She doesn’t. Instead, she finds herself in the vice principal’s office again, early in the morning, although it’s impossible to tell in all the shadows in his office. She takes a moment to wonder where the principal is, but then the vice principal starts talking.

“You strike me as a young woman with a lot on her mind,” he says. “Someone very intent on her goals. And we value that here, you know. Commitment, dedication, loyalty. I think you—and the organization—would benefit the most if we assigned you to a chaperone immediately. There’s a place for you in this world, Miss Baudelaire, and I am most anxious for you to find it.”

Beatrice almost thinks he’s being incredibly nice, if it isn’t for the way his eyes glitter and the way he leans back in his chair, so slowly she barely notices until he’s staring down at her, almost pinning her in place.

Violet did teach her to be polite, but she also taught her to stand her ground. She swallows. “Thank you very much,” she says. “Do I get to pick my chaperone?”

“I’m afraid not,” he says, and he doesn’t sound the least bit apologetic. “We haven’t allowed that for quite some time.” The vice principal smiles. “It lead to some unfortunate events.”

Her chaperone is a woman named Marguerite. Beatrice looks through every record available and can’t find any positive proof that Marguerite has ever had a last name. What she does find out is that Marguerite spent her own apprenticeship working with the remaining volunteer animals.

She gets a letter telling her to meet her at the aquarium on the other side of the city, with just enough for the bus fare. Beatrice checks the letter over and over again the whole way there, but she doesn’t find any other hint about what she’s supposed to do to find her chaperone.

Beatrice wanders the aquarium for a long, uneasy hour before a short woman with chin-length, curly blonde hair catches her eye by the jellyfish tank. The woman gestures at one of the jellyfish. “I always thought they looked like clouds,” she says, in a soft voice. “I like to look at them when summer is dying.”

Beatrice bites her lip. She stares at the jellyfish and tries not to see them, tries to watch the reflections in the glass instead. Summer is dying. She always thought she’d be good at codes if she had to use them, but actually hearing them out loud just makes her uncomfortable. It could just be all the water, though.

“Well,” she says carefully, “summer is over and gone. And you can see clouds any time, you just have to look for them.”

The woman smiles, a surprisingly gentle smile, the lines at the corners of her eyes crinkling. Beatrice thinks she looks too young to have lines like that. “Marguerite,” she says, extending her hand. “You must be Beatrice.”

Beatrice shakes her hand.

“What sort of animals do you like, Beatrice?”

Beatrice looks away from the eerie blue glow of the tanks around them and says the first thing that comes to mind. “I don’t think bats are all that bad.”

As it turns out, the organization’s last collection of trainable bats is in the hills. The whole trek back into the mist, Beatrice can’t help but think her timing could sure use some work.

Beatrice and Marguerite set up camp in the cave, close to the shepherds and obviously very close to the bats. They pull down the remains of the wallpaper, and between the two of them, Violet’s inventing knowledge, and another piece of wire from Marguerite’s pocket, they rig up the light bulb. It casts a dim and hollow yellow light around the cave before it sputters and flickers, drenching them in a momentary darkness before lighting back up.

Beatrice gasps out of shock. The light bulb reminds her of the lamp in the vice principal’s office, something scary and unknown in a place that’s supposed to be safe. Fear grips her chest, and she makes an excuse to Marguerite that she doesn’t even remember and gets out of the cave as quickly as possible. She sits at the mouth of the cave in the darkness with her legs stretched out in front of her, her hands in her lap. Beatrice tells herself that hugging her legs to her chest would not be very mature.

Marguerite comes over and sits down beside her, not too close but not too far away. “Some children are afraid of the dark,” she says.

“I’m not,” Beatrice says, truthfully. Klaus taught her constellations, and Sunny made up her own, and Violet made a telescope so they could see them better. Beatrice knows there are beautiful things in the darkness, and she likes the quiet.

“It’s alright if you are,” Marguerite says gently.

Beatrice knows why Marguerite says that. It’s something a lot of the chaperones think. Some of the adults themselves are probably scared of the dark, even when they haven’t lived through a storm at sea. But she’s not. She’s not scared of the dark. The afternoon was when the storm started, and the dark was when the storm stopped, when everything calmed down. She couldn’t see anything at all, not the broken wood under her fingers or how alone she was, and she could breathe. She could keep floating and imagine Violet and Klaus and Sunny were still right there, telling her she’d make it.

Too much light is what frightens her. Too much light, like a jagged streak through the sky, lightning carving the boat in two, illuminating every fractured piece and the fear on Sunny’s usually calm face. The flashlights of the volunteers who found her, combing the beach for something else, the beams cutting cold white light against the sand.

“Beatrice?”

Beatrice looks up. She uncurls her fingers, which she only now notices had clenched tight into her palms. She swallows. “I’m not afraid.”

Marguerite smiles. She reaches over and squeezes one of Beatrice’s hands, just once.

“We’re going to be training bats to deliver messages,” Marguerite says in the morning. “It’ll be useful, especially all the way out here in the hills.”

Beatrice stares at Marguerite, and she hopes her incredulity isn’t too apparent on her face. She clears her throat and tries to think about how Violet would address this. “Are bats really the best to use?” she asks. “What about telegram wires, or even just pigeons, since they could fly at any time, or—”

“Sometimes we have to send messages at night, and bats come in handy for that.” Marguerite doesn’t interrupt her, just speaks patiently, reasonably, like making a point in a casual debate. “Sometimes the easier way can be more dangerous. People expect that more than something different.”

Beatrice isn’t sure if that makes complete sense. Marguerite definitely notices her confusion, and she smiles. Marguerite smiles a lot, but it’s never condescending. “It can be a little hard to understand,” she says. “I thought it was when I was your age, too. But it’s not a volunteer’s job to question, Beatrice. It’s a volunteer’s job to know, and to trust in what they’re doing.”

Somehow, it sounds right the way Marguerite says it, with her soothing voice. It sounds right, the idea of just knowing, since Beatrice is so certain in it anyway. She has to remind herself that they started this whole conversation about the absurdity of bats being used as a messenger system to counteract that. Beatrice has seen a lot of absurd things, because Violet told her about all her inventions over the years, and Beatrice isn’t quite sure how all of them worked but she knows that they did. But training bats, especially to deliver messages, just seems to take it a little too far.

“It’ll take a bit of time before we can train them that well, though,” Marguerite says. “Have you ever held one before?”

At the very least, training bats gives Beatrice something to think about. You really have to focus, otherwise they squeak too much. It gets easy after a while, once Beatrice knows how to do it. Marguerite is impressed, but Beatrice just tells her that you can do anything as long as you know how to do it.

Marguerite isn’t very talkative, which Beatrice appreciates. What she does say doesn’t always make that much sense, but she never pushes Beatrice or pressures her. She tells Beatrice stories about her own apprenticeship, the last of the volunteer feline detectives and what Marguerite’s own chaperone told her about the eagles. It’s the kindest anyone has ever treated her since Violet and Klaus and Sunny, and that makes Beatrice feel more comfort than she has in some time.

Beatrice is hunched over a notebook while sitting at the mouth of the cave, trying to figure out how to get the bats to follow the patterns of the yaks, because she’s sure that makes at least some sense, when the young shepherd who loaned her the yak last time comes up to her. Beatrice smiles at him, but she stops when she sees how nervous he looks.

“Can I help you?” she asks.

The shepherd bites his lip, looking over his shoulder at Marguerite, who’s examining one of the yaks in the field, and then motions quickly at Beatrice. “You forgot something,” he says.

Beatrice frowns. “What?”

He reaches into one of his pockets and pulls out a small circle. The weak sunlight catches on the slim gold band and the dark diamond set in the center, and Beatrice’s heart leaps when she can see the thin initial in the stone. He puts the ring in Beatrice’s hand and presses her fingers around it.

“I think you might be able to give it back to her, one of these days,” he says.

“Do you know her?” Beatrice asks, clutching the ring with both hands. “Do you know where—”

But the shepherd shakes his head, glances again at Marguerite, goes rigid when he sees the older shepherd approaching her, and then scampers away. Beatrice watches him go, until he’s a shrinking figure among the yaks and she can hear Marguerite calling her name. She lets herself wonder, for a moment, where the Duchess of Winnipeg is now, how much the shepherd knows, why no one can ever give her a clear answer. Then she reminds herself that none of that matters. She has all the answers she needs. She just has to get through this. She just has to get through this, and find her uncle, and then find her family, and she just has to get through this.

She slips the ring in her pocket.

She turns ten while they’re in the hills, which she only knows because she packed a calendar this time. She doesn’t tell Marguerite because Beatrice doesn’t want her to make a big deal out of it, because Marguerite would, and Beatrice spends that night staring up at the stars and trying to make up her own constellations. She connects lines and dots into books, wrenches, a whisk. Then, with her eyes shut tight, she tries to remember that last birthday. It was four or five years ago now, wasn’t it? And there was cake, she knows there was.

Beatrice forces her eyes open. What she remembers is Violet, tying her hair back with a ribbon as she worked on the boat; Klaus, adjusting his glasses as he read to Beatrice from a book; Sunny, talking cheerfully into the radio Violet had built. Everything else is all in pieces, a puzzle she’s losing the parts to.

I have to find them, she thinks, blinking fast. No. I will find them.

The first time Beatrice sends out a bat and it comes back, days later, with a message from one of the shepherds they’d sent out to expect it, she feels a lot more pride than she ever thought she would about training bats to be mail carriers. Marguerite laughs and sweeps Beatrice up into a tight hug, drawing her close, and Beatrice hugs her back.

In late summer, the hills still misty and chilly, they get called back to the city. Marguerite and Beatrice make their way back to the city on foot this time, through all the hills, no mountain. Beatrice sorely wishes she still had the yak.

When they get back to the city, Beatrice actually doesn’t see much of Marguerite. Marguerite tells her only that something is happening, but not exactly what. In the meantime, she tells Beatrice it’s for the best if Beatrice stays at headquarters, where she can write up the reports on training the bats. Beatrice figures someone would’ve had to write the reports at some point, so she doesn’t mind—except that someone seems to be watching her at all times, especially when she uses a typewriter.

Beatrice spends most of her time underground and growing increasingly frustrated, because it’s been months since she’s written to him, months since he’s heard from her, and he must be wondering where she is. He must be. She’s watched mail leave the city headquarters, and they never put a return address on anything. How can he write back to her if he doesn’t know where she is?

But he has to know. He’s been here. He’s in this city, and so is she, and wouldn’t he be able to figure out what happened to her, being a detective and all, or at least a man who has that printed on his door? He went through this too, he knows where she is, why does it have to take so long?

Marguerite comes back, and they go on assignments and scope out pet stores and parks and the occasional fancy restaurant, but Marguerite also lets her look in every single diner window they pass, and lets her linger on the street with the Rhetorical Building, even when the street is wildly out of their way. Then they go on less and less assignments, and she sees less and less of Marguerite, and Beatrice spends her time in so much silence that it starts to dig under her skin, a burrowing restlessness.

At night, she sneaks into the record room again. She isn’t sure what she’s looking for. Maybe the four files she couldn’t find at the country headquarters, or anything about her family, or anything about the organization. Anything at all about anything. And it’s not to find anything new, it can’t be, it’s just—it’s just to reassure her. He’s going to find her. She’s going to find him. They’re going to find her family.

In the back of the room, in a dusty filing cabinet drawer she has to pry open with two pens, she finds a thin, dark brown folder half-stuck under the back of the cabinet. Beatrice wiggles it out, flips it open, and sees the shape of a single piece of paper. She pulls out a flashlight from her pocket, steels herself, and flicks it on, squinting against the light.

It looks like a legal document, almost like a sort of deed, yellowed with age. Beatrice scans through it, and her frown deepens when she finds out it’s for a room in an office building, a room on a fourteenth floor, an office—an office in the Rhetorical Building, right above his. Beatrice grips the edges of the paper and reads further. Her heart stops dead when she sees a bold, imposing signature in red pen across the bottom of the page.

Beatrice Baudelaire.

She’s been in the building, but she’s certainly never tried to get an office there. This must be her, she realizes, reminding herself to inhale. This must be who they named her after.

Beatrice knows about Beatrice Baudelaire. She wasn’t just engaged to Beatrice’s uncle once, she was a person, a mother. She taught Klaus how to fence and how to throw a punch, and she taught Sunny how to scream, and she taught Violet how to stand her ground and be fierce and formidable. She could bake and sing and act, and she ate strawberries in the summer and danced with her husband to old records and took her family to the beach and read long books to them and did different voices for each character. Now, years later, here she is. A whisper in Beatrice’s ear, a gentle kiss on her forehead.

Beatrice Baudelaire sounds like she was a wonderful mother.

Beatrice shakes her head quickly and slips the deed into her pocket. It’s not like she thinks about her own mother a lot. Beatrice knows all about her anyway. Kit Snicket was a good person, a volunteer, someone who helped. So was Dewey Denouement. But sometimes she wonders, just a little, just for a moment, what things would be like if her mother was alive. If her father was alive. If they would’ve liked her. If they would’ve read to her, if they would’ve taught her things, if they would’ve liked strawberries or some other fruit and if they danced and if they baked and if they could act or sing. If she’d still be here, scrambling for the remains of her family. If she’d still see flashes of lightning when she closes her eyes, and the harpoon gun and fungus she’s imagined and the sandy grave at the far edges of her memory and the Baudelaires got their parents, didn’t they, if only for a while, how come she didn’t get hers, how could Violet and Klaus and Sunny do that—

Something creaks upstairs.

Beatrice slips from the records room, shuts the door, and feels her way through the darkness. Her hands find the banister of the stairs, and she creeps up them slowly, waiting for another noise.

The upstairs floor creaks for a second, and then stops. Then another creak, a little further down the hall, like someone’s taking long strides, trying to be light and quick. Beatrice heads up the rest of the stairs and sees the hazy outline of a shape in the darkness, one with short, curly hair.

“Marguerite?”

Marguerite turns, looking over her shoulder, still poised to keep going down the hallway. “Beatrice,” she breathes.

Beatrice hasn’t seen her in what feels like ages, although she knows it’s only been about a week. She walks towards Marguerite, and even in the darkness she can feel a heavy tension in the air. “Where are you going?”

Marguerite turns around all the way and bends down in front of Beatrice. “I’m sorry,” she says softly, “but I have to leave.”

Beatrice hears every word of that sentence perfectly, and somehow she still doesn’t understand it. She blinks. “What do you mean?”

“I was going to leave this with the vice principal for you,” Marguerite says. Beatrice hears a slight rustle, Marguerite digging in a pocket. She takes Beatrice’s hand and places something in it, a curved, spiral wire with a handle at the top. A corkscrew. “Something—something came up, and it’s not safe for me to be in the city anymore. I’m starting back for the hills tonight.”

“I can go with you,” Beatrice says, “I can—”

“No,” Marguerite sighs. “I can’t take you with me. I really am—so, so sorry, Beatrice.” Her voice cracks, and her hand settles on Beatrice’s shoulder. “There was so much I was looking forward to, so many things I wanted to do with you, but sometimes things don’t work out how you want them to. But you’ll be okay, I know you will. You’re brave and resourceful, and you’ll be a wonderful volunteer.”

Beatrice frowns at the slim outline of Marguerite’s face. Her fingers curl around the corkscrew, pushing it hard into her hand. She swallows and finds a lump in her throat, one she tries to breathe around. “But I—”

“Don’t worry,” Marguerite says. Her voice is still so gentle, but it doesn’t make sense with her words. Nothing about any of this makes sense. “You’ll know what to do, Beatrice. We all do. I know you will.”

“I know now,” Beatrice says quickly, “I just—”

“I have to go,” Marguerite whispers. The weight of her hand disappears from Beatrice’s shoulder, and then her face is gone, and Beatrice stands in the hall and listens to Marguerite’s progress downstairs from the distant creak of the floorboards. The sound of footsteps vanishes not long after, and Beatrice is alone. The metal of the corkscrew sits cold against her palm.

Beatrice listens, and listens, and listens, and hears nothing else.

Beatrice hasn’t cried in a long time. She knows she has—everyone does when they’re younger, and she can remember, through that fog, Sunny making faces at her to cheer her up—but it feels such a wrong thing to do now. Hot tears spill down her cheeks, her eyes squeezing shut, her mouth pressed tight so the rising whimper in her throat doesn’t escape.

It’s not as if she didn’t expect Marguerite to leave. All the chaperones do, eventually, and even if she had liked Marguerite she knew somewhere it wouldn’t last. She just didn’t think it would happen like this, so soon, that just like that she’d be gone, swept away from her. All the thoughts Beatrice tries so hard not to think come rushing into her—how much longer will this take, how much longer will she have to do this, how much longer will this feel, because she feels ten years old for the first time and so lost, still adrift in an ocean that could tear her apart as much as it could lead her somewhere safe. She wants to go home, but the only people who were ever home to her feel further away than ever. In a second, the despair and uncertainty she’s been running from overtake her like a crashing wave.

She thinks awful, vicious things. The Baudelaires are dead or they would’ve come for her by now; her uncle hates her and never wants to see her; her mother was a horrible person to die and leave her all alone like this; she’ll grow up like they all did, abandoned.

Beatrice walks back to her room, step by step. She shuts the door, and then sinks down and starts sobbing into her knees.

The vice principal calls her to his office the next morning. Beatrice sits in the chair in front of his desk, her hands in her lap. She’s shoved the memory and the uncertainty and the guilt of last night to the back of her mind, but it still flutters in her lungs, a light panic she tries to smother with each careful breath.

He seems to have acquired even more sugar bowls since the last time she was in here, and they tower above her on those whisper-thin shelves and make the office feel even tighter. A different item sits on the shelf right behind his desk, about the size of a milk bottle, and Beatrice stares at it. It stares back at her with a dark, beady eye, the long face and snout of an impossibly cruel animal, teeth bared and black. Then she notices—it’s only half of a statue, like it’s been cut down the middle, revealing a smooth, solid wood interior.

The vice principal himself looks unbothered, impassive as always. “It seems you’re without a chaperone,” he says.

Her hands tighten together involuntarily. “I’ve been without a chaperone before,” she says, and her voice only trembles a little.

He smiles. It is a thin and humorless smile, smug, and he leans slowly, too casually, back in his chair, his elbows on the armrests and his own hands folded neatly. She wishes he would stop doing that.

“You look like you want to ask me something,” he says.

Where is my family and when will I find them?

But she knows he won’t tell her. “What do you want to ask me?” she says instead.

The vice principal almost laughs. His eyes are dark and fathomless blue. “What did Marguerite leave you?”

Beatrice does not think of the corkscrew up in her room. But she has to say something, she has to show him something. She puts her hand in her pocket and finds the folded-up deed she’d stuck there last night. A deed for an office in the Rhetorical Building. A deed signed with an identical name.

She stares at the vice principal straight on. “An office,” she says. “On the fourteenth floor of the Rhetorical Building.” Beatrice pulls the paper from her pocket, unfolds it, and sets it square on his desk.

He stares at it, and then keeps staring at it, his eyes flicking over the paper as if looking for a loophole. When he doesn’t find any, his mouth thins, his jaw clenching. She’s never seen him with so much emotion on his face before.

“I’ll need a typewriter,” Beatrice says.

The next thing Beatrice does is get business cards. They say Beatrice Baudelaire, so no one will bother her about that, and then Baticeer Extraordinaire, because that’s the closest thing to an occupation she has right now, and then The Rhetorical Building, since that is the name of the building, and finally Fourteenth Floor, which is self-explanatory.

The third thing she does is go to her office. It hasn’t been used in a long time, so it’s empty and dusty and even colder than the lobby, and full of one too many spiders. Beatrice spends an afternoon cleaning the years out of it, and even repairs the radiator, Violet’s ribbon keeping her hair back from her face.

She sets her typewriter carefully on the desk, puts Klaus’s commonplace book in one of the locked drawers, puts the corkscrew in a completely different drawer, and then realizes she has very little else to put in the room. A business card taped to the door, some paper beside the typewriter. The brochures and books she collected from the train stations lined up on the little shelf on the wall. She keeps the Duchess of Winnipeg’s ring on a long chain around her neck so she always has it with her and no one else can see it.

She uses the back entrance so she doesn’t have to go through the lobby.

She stays awake in the office the first few nights, watching the window in the dark in case they try to come back for her, but Beatrice is left alone there.

Beatrice doesn’t know how old the building is exactly, but it must be old, because the wood creaks, and it creaks specifically and consistently in his office, right below hers, muffled but very distinct.

She finishes typing her most recent letter, pulls it out of the typewriter, then takes the corkscrew from her desk and sits down in the middle of the floor.

The wood parts, splitting easily into tiny spiral shavings, and Beatrice keeps twisting and twisting the corkscrew until there’s a reasonable hole in the floor and she can hear the creaking a little more clearly. It’s a small hole, not large enough to see through but large enough to put her letter through if she rolls it into a tiny tube, like she said she would. She throws the corkscrew back on her desk, grabs the letter, and starts to roll it up.

The creaking stops. Then the wood groans low, like he’s leaning on a specific spot, and she leans close and listens.

“Snicket,” says a woman’s voice.

Beatrice startles, jumping back with a slight gasp. She didn’t account for someone else, she didn’t think he knew anyone else, she didn’t think it wouldn’t be him pacing. She doesn’t know who this is.

“Did you always have that hole in your ceiling?” the woman says.

Someone replies. Beatrice can’t hear what he says, but the voice is a low murmur. That’s him, she thinks, biting her lip. That’s him

“You want me to come in here and find you buried under your ceiling one of these days?” the woman continues. “Don’t you think I deal with enough already as your editor?”

He says something else, something Beatrice still can’t hear.

The woman sighs. “If we don’t leave soon, we’re going to be late, and Cleo might just kill you.”

Beatrice waits until she hears the door close, and then sits for a few seconds in the silence, willing her heart to stop rocketing in her chest. She re-rolls the letter, looks down at the hole, and then pushes the letter through it and presses her ear against the floor. Beatrice can just barely hear it bounce off the ceiling fan, uncurl, and land open and waiting on his desk with the tiniest crinkle of the paper.

She sits back on the floor with a long sigh. She hopes she isn’t waiting too long, and Beatrice doesn’t do a very good job of squashing down the worry that she might not know how long it’ll take.

She waits a whole week and still doesn’t get a reply. No one comes to her door, no one tries to get in through the fire escape, no one leaves any secret messages anywhere, and she doesn’t hear anyone pacing in the office below her. She doesn’t hear the woman’s voice, and she doesn’t hear any sign that he’s in there at all. Everything is eerily quiet.

Beatrice goes across the street to the diner, because she figures being miserable but not hungry is better than being miserable and hungry. When she pushes the door open, Jake Hix catches sight of her from behind the counter and grins broadly. “Hey, Beatrice!”

She means to smile, but there are four people sitting at the counter, and all of them turn and look at her with interest. Two men wearing glasses who look like brothers, a sharp-eyed blonde woman in a cloche hat, and then the man in the middle, pale and staring at her with wide eyes. Beatrice looks back at him, suddenly breathless. Not just a mysterious figure she’s never seen, or one she glimpsed in the middle of a chase, but a real, physical person in front of her.

“It’s you!” she exclaims. “You’re here!”

They keep eye contact for a single, almost terrifying second—but then he clears his throat, holds up a hand, and spins around, putting his back to her.

Beatrice stands there, torn between disbelief and irritation. The other two men say something, and the woman rolls her eyes, gets up, pulls them to their feet, and herds them past Beatrice and out of the diner.

“Give him a moment,” the woman whispers to her, winking.

She doesn’t want to, she wants to go over and sit beside him and get right to things, but she picks a corner booth by the window anyway and sits down. She still has a good view of the counter from here. She swallows and tries to quell her anticipation. She wonders how long a moment is, to her uncle.

Jake walks over and gives her a smile. “What can I get you?”

Beatrice looks over his elbow at the counter, at the glass resting in front of her uncle. It occurs to her that she’s actually never had his drink of choice. She looks back up at Jake. “A root beer float.”

Jake smiles.

“And, could you please do me a favor?” she asks, unzipping her bag and digging around inside. “If I give you a message, would you give it to him?”

“Sure thing,” Jake says.

She takes out one of her business cards and turns it over.

Cocktail Time

I am sorry I embarrassed you in front of your friends. I only wanted to talk to you.

The waiter agreed to bring this card with your drink. If you don’t want to meet me, rip it in half when you are done with your root beer float, and I will leave and never try to contact you again.

Ideally, she doesn’t want to say that, to give him an out, now that they’re both here, now that she’s this close, but it’s polite. She figures he’ll appreciate that.

But if you want to meet me, she continues, biting her lip, I’m the ten-year-old girl at the corner table.

B.

Beatrice folds the card in half and hands it to Jake. She watches Jake walk back to the counter, lean in and hand her card to her uncle, watches him open it with shaking fingers. He reads it, but he doesn’t turn around and look at her yet. He takes a sip of his root beer.

Jake brings her her own root beer, and she drinks it and barely tastes it, her eyes still fixed on her uncle. She reminds herself not to swing her legs and settles for jiggling her foot against the smooth tile, a tiny little tap as she waits and waits and waits. She thinks of looking anywhere else, trying to remain sophisticated and calm, because this is it, for real, but she doesn’t want to miss a single thing. She curls her hands together in her lap, forgets about the root beer float. She counts out the seconds in her head, stops when she thinks it’s stupid, starts again when he pushes his glass away and looks at the note again.

Finally, he stands up. He refolds her business card and puts it in his pocket. Then he turns, and he faces Beatrice, coming over and stopping beside her table.

He’s just like how Beatrice imagined him, now that she can finally see him, instead of just across a crowded street or a library wing. Definitely average height, if a little bit taller, in a grey suit and tie, his hair dark, thin at the temples. He looks at her half-finished drink, and then slowly meets her eyes, and they are blue, the same blue as hers, the best color she’s ever seen, brighter than every dark and endless sea. The corners of his mouth turn up a little, although it doesn’t quite reach his eyes. He sits down across from her and extends his hand.

“My name is Lemony Snicket,” he says, his voice deep but soft, just as she expected.

Beatrice smiles, and her face almost hurts with the force of it. She shakes his hand with both of hers. “Beatrice Baudelaire.”

Lemony Snicket takes her to the park a few streets over and buys her ice cream. She points out that they could’ve had ice cream in the diner, but he tells her that he would rather have their conversation away from where a journalist could come back at any second and faithfully record every single moment of it. Beatrice eats her vanilla with sprinkles and figures the journalist had to be the woman, with eyes like that, and then she watches her uncle. Her uncle, real and in person after all this time, after almost two long years of searching, finally beside her.

He matches her pace, which isn’t very brisk, but he looks like he could run at a moment’s notice. He keeps his hat drawn low over his eyes, his gaze lingering on shadowy trees and exits and every single discarded cigarette butt before moving away. He takes quick, economical bites of his ice cream (vanilla, caramel swirl, in a cone).

“Did you like my business card?” Beatrice asks. Her voice comes out a little louder than she intended, which probably explains why Lemony jumps.

He pulls her business card out of his pocket. “It’s very nice,” he says. “Do you like bats?”

“Well,” she says, “I think they’re cute, but that’s all. I’d rather not work with them.”

“Are you saying that you gave me a false business card?”

“You can put anything on a business card,” Beatrice says brightly, looking up at him. “Do you still have those ones that say you’re an admiral in the French navy?”

Lemony looks shocked, then embarrassed, and then takes an incriminating crunch out of his cone. He doesn’t answer.

Beatrice’s throat sticks a little when she swallows her ice cream. She ducks her head, her shoulders bunching up, and scrapes at the bottom of her cup with her spoon. He’s just a quiet person, that’s all, she tells herself, and she’d thought that before. That he doesn’t have anything else to say is just because—just because he doesn’t have anything else to say. That’s fine. They have more important things to talk about than bats and business cards.

She waits until they’ve both finished their ice cream and points out a bench for them to sit down on. She even makes sure it’s out of the way, under a tree, reasonably shady and away from prying eyes, if that’ll make him feel better. Lemony hesitates for a few seconds before he agrees, and they sit down. Beatrice’s legs dangle off the edge, and she holds her hands tight in her lap and reminds herself again not to swing her legs.

“You said you didn’t know where Violet and Klaus and Sunny were,” Beatrice says, leaning towards him, “in your research. That you didn’t know what happened to them after—” Her voice catches. “—after we, we left the island. But that was years and years ago. You have to know now.”

Lemony looks at her, and this close, Beatrice can see the lines around his eyes, etched into his face. They only seem to deepen the longer they look at each other. He folds his hands together, just like hers, and Beatrice bites down on the inside of her lip, her toes wiggling in her shoes.

“No, Beatrice,” he says. “I do not know where the Baudelaires are.”

Some of the air disappears from her lungs, and she gapes at him. “Well—then can you help me find them?”

Lemony sighs. “I have looked,” he says slowly, “but my associates and I have found very little. I do not know if—”

“But you have to know!” Beatrice exclaims. The corners of her eyes start to burn, and she can feel a sharp sting tightening her throat, because he was supposed to know, she was so certain, and he had to be too, so why? “You have to, you’re the only person I’ve got left, and I came all this way to find you, and you—you—” Everything comes tumbling out of her, everything she’s been pushing aside and burying down inside her since the shipwreck, every cruel thought and punch to the gut, every second spent waiting. She’s never talked this much in her whole life, and now she can’t stop, even with Lemony looking at her with wide, broken eyes.

“You left me all alone out there!” Beatrice shouts, her voice cracking. “I followed you for two years, all by myself, and I wrote you letters, and I followed you into the hills, and I stole office space to be close to you, and I did everything I could to find you, and you didn’t do anything!”

She wants to be angry. She wants so much to be angry, to keep yelling, to hurt him, but now she can’t stop crying. “I thought you h-hated me,” she sobs, rubbing at her eyes, tears sticking to her fingers and her cheeks. “I th-thought you never wanted to see me, ever. I thought—I thought—”

Something soft brushes against her wrist, and she lowers her hands and finds Lemony, offering her a handkerchief. “I did not, and I do not hate you,” he murmurs firmly, for a man as heartbroken as he looks. “I could never.”

Beatrice takes the handkerchief and wipes at her eyes. It doesn’t do much in the way of stopping her tears.

“This is an awful thing to say,” Lemony begins quietly, “but the horrible truth is that I did not know if it was you. I did not know if you were—someone else.”

Beatrice swallows thickly, curling her fingers around the handkerchief, clutching it in her lap. She knows what he means and it’s like a dull knife twisting inside her.

“And I know you are not her,” Lemony continues, “or my sister—although you do look remarkably like her—or an old villainess intent on exacting a stiletto-heeled revenge after all these years, or a morally grey woman for whom I still feel a great deal of sadness and guilt. I wondered, though. I think even the most rational mind will wonder in the depths of loss, even when it knows better. It is a wound that does not want to heal, or at least one that I believed could not. When I did know it was you, which I assure you was only within the last year, I—I did not know if I could help you.”

“Why not?” Beatrice asks, sniffling. She chances a look up at him, out of the corner of her eye, and catches a quick, haunted look passing over his face. He stays quiet for a little longer, as if figuring out the right words.

“I was afraid,” he whispers. “It is no excuse for what I did to you, but it is a reason. When I was a little older than you, I made a considerable amount of promises, few of which I managed to keep, and I told myself that fear didn’t matter, which was an admirable if incredibly incorrect stance to take at the time. And since then, very few things have gone right. I lost my family, my friends, the loves of my life, and everything I had, because of that fear. You can have the best of intentions, and still doubt, and still worry, and only realize much later that all you’ve ever done was wrong. I once said that people do difficult things for more or less noble reasons—but it is truly so much harder than that.”

Beatrice lets the words sink in. She thought she knew what it was like to struggle with a decision, to do something villainous to be noble. She thought she understood her uncle and her family—all of it—after everything she’d read, after Klaus saying that it took a severe lack of moral stamina to commit murder, after Sunny suggested it and the fire regardless, after Violet worried about Hal’s keys and disguising her and her siblings and all the other tricky things Beatrice remembers her worrying about.

He looks like Violet, Beatrice realizes suddenly. Not really his facial features, but his expression, just like when Violet told her the volunteers were noble enough. He looks as lost and worried about the consequences as Violet did that day. She feels that hole in her stomach again, that gaping uncertainty—that fear. Beatrice thinks of avoiding the lobby where the woman grabbed her ankle, lying to Marguerite in the hills, covering up her doubts with a vehement optimism. She thinks of every time she read about Lemony’s fear and all the things she didn’t understand until this second, all the things she still doesn’t understand, because there is still so much, so many secrets she could drown in, trying to find them all by herself.

“I put you in a great amount of danger by not stepping in,” Lemony says. He looks at her straight on, his eyes filled with tears. “I did to you the same thing for which I despised so many people, people I too was supposed to trust, because of my cowardice. I cannot apologize to you enough, and you do not have to accept it, Beatrice. I would not blame you if you didn’t.”

Beatrice sniffles again, her mouth wobbling, and watches him for a moment longer. “I don’t know,” she says carefully. She doesn’t like saying it, but it’s true and she has to say it. She takes a breath. “I don’t know.”

They sit in silence on the bench for some time. Lemony wipes his eyes at some point with the back of his hand, and Beatrice holds his handkerchief back up to him, but he shakes his head with a small, trembling smile and tells her to keep it. Beatrice runs her thumb over the handkerchief, each individual stitch along the hem, the afternoon breeze drying her face. She thinks, almost impossibly, that she feels a little less lonely. Not quite not alone, but just not as lonely.

“Although my associates and I have found very little,” Lemony says, “that isn’t to say that there is nothing to find. If you would like, I would like to help you find the Baudelaires.”

Beatrice’s head shoots up, her eyes wide. “Really?”

“Really. We can hope for the best, at least.”

“I’m good at that,” Beatrice says. “I—it can’t be impossible. Everyone thought finding you was impossible. But you’re here.” And he is, isn’t he? Despite his previous absences, here he is. It doesn’t fix everything, not immediately. But it can be enough for right now. Here he is. Here they are.

ending notes: 

i went into this fanfic with a pretty clear idea of where it was going to go, and then realized i’d need to pull out the beatrice letters so i could put them in this, and then did a lot of screaming along the lines of ‘i need to put a yak in this??????????????????????????????’ and ‘good job danhan you shot a hole through my characterization AND my timeline.’ so this vibes with maybe like, 85% of the beatrice letters. i did what i could. (and then this fic gave me so much trouble when i was trying to edit it. like, so much trouble. i only hope this all like, reads okay.)

but once i thought of ‘quiet lil child knows really so little about the world and has been through so much that she adamantly and somewhat optimistically clings to what she does know and that is challenged over time,’ i was reluctant to stop writing that. babybea is definitely her own person but she’s also definitely her mother’s daughter, so that girl is gonna be pretty tightly wound up and trying her best to hide it. i didn’t really buy her constant worry that lemony wasn’t who she wanted him to be while she was writing to him. because she does still have that bright but firm optimism of her father!! and i didn’t want babybea to be as rooted in (or as dependent on) vfd as her predecessors because she has to be the character to break that cycle. she has way more important problems than unattainable worldly nobility….and training bats.

[tsukoyomi-fumikage]

Kidnapped (ShouToko)

Shoji X Tokoyami  (However this is mainly Tokoyami and Dark Shadow centric)

Prompt - What if Tokoyami was taken instead of Bakugou?

Notes - I mainly did this so I could work on my writing of Tokoyami’s personality, and also because at the time I wrote this I legit believed Fumikage had killed Moonfish, when if fact I am a giant doofus and he didn’t. This also includes a few systems of Dark Shadow’s quirk that aren’t actually legit, just stuff I thought worked well. 

.

Tokoyami was free from that dratted prison of a ball, and he yearned to stretch - until he saw Mezo, reaching out with all six tentacles, trying to grasp him. That's when he realized there was a hand wrapped around his thin neck: tight and demanding. Fumikage froze. "See you, Shoto Todoroki." The guy holding him whispered, all the while dragging him backwards. A dark portal caught his line of site - it was like it was swallowing him whole. It was similar too the warp-gate from USJ... His eyes widened in realization.

Looking up, too shocked and exhausted to move, he watched Shoji try and run towards him, along with Todoroki, who both looked like they'd just lost the world. "Don't... Come..." He whispered, just loud enough for them to hear. "You'll... Die..."

Then, the world went black.

He thought maybe he'd passed out at first, until he realized this was just a quirk in action. Dark Shadow was yowling, stuck within this delicate balance of which Tokoyami had never seen before - protectiveness, and fear. The student should have known that his quirk had the ability to feel something as scary as fear, considering the quirk was practically a real person. "Calm, dark shadow." He muttered, voice ghost-like, considerate yet quiet. "Calm."

The beast was ‘pacing’ around inside him - his insides felt like they were being thrown around in frustration. 'What am I supposed to do?' The dark bird-figure whined in confusion. 'Sit here and watch you die?'

Suddenly, light shone itself down at him, making him close his eyes in pain as he tried to swiftly adjust to the colours. Finally, his red-pupiled eyes opened, coming face to face with the man responsible for starting the USJ attack - Shigaraki, if he remembered correctly. Shit.

"This wasn't who I asked for." The multiple-handed man snarled lowly, looking in annoyance at the group as they stepped out of the warp. "Kurogiri, you know I told you to tell them I wanted Bakugou Katsuki, right?"

The large, swirling dark flames sighed, and he shifted into a less terrifying version of himself. "You should have seen this one though." His voice was like the rumbling of an earthquake. "He took out Moonfish with one blow. He is much stronger than Bakugou."

So they were watching that. Tokoyami bit his tongue in frustration. What else could they have been watching? Did they see his interactions with Shoji? Would they use that against him and torture him? So many thoughts ran through his mind, his feathers flattening as fear took over him as well. "Is that true?" Came the croaky voice of the blue-haired man. "Did you kill Moonfish?"

His voice sent shivers down Fumikage's spine. Holding his shudder in, he met the man's hidden eyes with a cold glare. "Yes."

The student obviously couldn't do much in this state, and he would rather keep it that way. Resorting to his edgy, lonely side would be the only way they wouldn't get information out of him. The only way he could help the heroes who were no doubt coming to rescue him. "You look cold-hearted. I like that in a person."

Although Tokoyami couldn't exactly argue with his personality, he still felt a bit offended. His mind thought back to the time he spent with Shoji, being happy - expressing himself. That was nothing apparently: Everyone else besides Shoji saw him the exact way Shigaraki saw him. Gulping to hide his slowly drying throat from the nerves, he narrowed his eyes. "What do you plan to do to me?"

Kurogiri leaned against the bar off to Tokoyami's right, sighing loudly, his hot breath projecting to the bird's face, making him want to gag. These people could kill him in a single blow, yet here they all were, loosely talking to him, showing themselves to be no threat whatsoever. Dark Shadow was crossing his arms, fidgeting. 'It doesn't feel right, Fumi'.' he internally said to him. 'This isn't what it looks like when villains want to hurt you.'

Fumikage sometimes hated how his quirk worked: he couldn't talk back to Dark Shadow without actually making a sound and alerting his captors and allowing them to understand his quirk was actually sentient. It sucked. Dark Shadow seemed to understand his reasoning, however. 'That's alright.' He said lowly, as if the villains could hear his voice as well.

"So..." The girl slowly drawled out the word - what was her name? He swore he knew it. "Are we going to ask him or just stand around? I could just kill him if we're gonna be this boring."

The man with all the sewed on flesh smiled at the girl. It was clear they'd known each other for some time. "Listen here bird-brains." His voice was silky soft, gliding over the words as if he had been preparing to say them all his life. "We scouted you out because you have a lot of potential. We were going for that explosive prick, but he slipped away." Broad shoulders shrugged. "That doesn't matter now anyway."

They wanted... to recruit him? Tokoyami and Dark Shadow went still mentally and physically, in utter shock. His quirk shook his head quickly, narrowing his eyes, 'Don't do it.' , he pleaded. 'I'm sorry I lost control and they saw it - I don't want to be a villain, It's just because Shoji got hurt!'

Fumikage snorted. "You think a member of Class 1-A, one of the best group of upcoming heroes the world has been so far, would just change sides?" he clicked his fingers for effect. "Like that?"

Shigaraki removed the hand covering his face, and the student had to try and not wince at the amount of scars and wrinkles of stress pressed into his enemy's forehead. The hand was let go of, and it crawled itself down his leg and onto the floor, resting by his foot. Tokoyami couldn't help but widen his eyes a little. It was alive? "Not so cool after all, are you?" His smile was hideous, pulling back wrinkle after the wrinkle, scars tightening at they were pulled back harshly. "Don't worry." He assured - though, it was nothing really that comforting. "It won't take long to change your mind."

They had seen him with Shoji, Tokoyami just knew it. They were going to try and get him too, weren’t they? Oh god... "What are you going to do to me?" He tried again, crossing his hands tightly over his chest to quell his shaking, or to at least hide it somewhat.

"Something I've been wanting to do to one of All Might's students for a long time."

...

Midoriya swung his legs over the side of his hospital bed, grimincing as he pressed his feet onto the cold hard floor. "I have to All Might." He ground out, squinting his eyes up at the deflated figure of peace. "Shoji can't take it anymore himself - How do you think Tokoyami must feel right now?"

"I strongly believe in Fumikage's abilities as a U.A student." Toshinori stated, sitting down on the bed next to his successor. "We are planning a rescue and are about ready to go off." He assured the young hero-in-training, reaching a hand out to ruffle his green hair. "But you trying to go yourself could harm both Tokoyami and the heroes involved."

"Don't..." He cut himself off, glaring down at his lap. "Don't talk about the situation as if it were just a simple rescue - as if I weren’t his friend." His fingers twitched as he gripped his clothes. "The league of villains works alongside some of the worlds worst criminals. Tokoyami could die."

All might heard the words Midoriya hadn't spoken: 'You could die'.

"Young Midoriya." Oh gosh, here it comes. "I-I understand your worry - I understand Shoji's worry too. However, there is no need to fear. We will all be just fine."

There was an emphasis on the all, and it made Izuku let out a sigh of relief, knowing he can trust the man's word. "Alright." He said softly. "I won't try and go rescue him."

...

Tokoyami's feathered face rippled with the punch, throwing his small, lithe body onto the ground, his back connected with the stone floor, taking the breath out of him momentarily. Wheezing, he blinked his crimson eyes open, fighting back the dizziness and frustration at the situation - he was going to die here, wasn’t he?

Shigaraki looked at him through wide-eyed crazy red eyes, stamping his leg onto the student's left knee harshly. It must have been around three or four times until a loud pop and a scorching pain ran up his leg. "That's what I was waiting for." He said happily, bending down to feel along his black feathers with two of his fingers, disgusting face almost touching the teens mostly-clean feathered one. "I'm surprised to find them so soft, considering your personality." He chuckled.

Having a hand other than Shoji's six stroking along his feathers felt foreign - It froze him in place, hands unable to move to defend himself as another kick rained down on his body. Tokoyami let his head slam into the stone, hearing the noises of flesh and concrete colliding.

'Get up!' Dark Shadow whined. 'You can do it, Toko'!'

The quirk-user had forbade the shadow from leaving his body in hopes that it would protect the weaknesses and strengths of his quirk from the knowledge of the villains. Even at the cost of his own life. He thought about the future when he'd made that decision - if he ever lived to see the day, he would probably fight these murderers again.

His quirk wasn't happy about it, but gave in, resorting to curling himself up tightly in Tokoyami's chest, trying to cover his ears so he didn't have to hear the sounds of his friend being beaten within an inch of his life. As a quirk, he couldn't feel any pain, but he knew if he came out to defend his family member, it would resort in him being stabbed and attacked at, which Fumikage had made clear over the years that that really fucking hurt him.

Fumikage let out a whimper when a soaring pain ripped through his chest as a blue flame tore near him, burning his cloak away and leaving him only in his casual black clothing he wore underneath. The cloak itself looked more like a cape now. Frigid night air hit him once the flames extinguished themselves and the smoke drifted away, revealing Dabi standing next to Shigaraki, the black haired male taller than the leader, almost towering over him.

"Are you guy's done yet?" Came the whine of that little shit who's supposed to be around the same age as him, maybe a little older. "I want a go!"

Another villain was sitting on a small table nearby - he wore a black and grey suit, covering his whole entire body, and had white masked eye holes. "Calm down Toga!" He laughed, swinging his legs back and forth while staring at both him and the girl. "You'll get your turn!"

A knock at the door stopped them all. Fumikage's eyes flooded with tears when they all looked away. Maybe this was his chance - maybe someone had come for him. 'Stay strong, don't let them see the tears now.' Dark Shadow chanted inside of his mind, and he breathed out a shaky sigh, tightening his face up from the sad mess it had become. "Hello?" Called a voice. "Did someone order a pizza?"

His face fell ever so slightly. No. No it wasn't help at all - he was stuck here.

Suddenly, a rumble startled him - it came from outside of his line of sight, and he closed his eyes nauseously as he tried to look. There has been another villain standing around there, but he was flung over him, landing in a heap on the floor. A loud 'Smashhhhh!' was heard as a person charged through the wall.

'Hey, hey!' Dark Shadow cheered, trying to keep his friend awake by circling the inside of his body excitedly. 'All Might's here!'

Suddenly, he found his limp body being picked up. He dragged his eyes open to find himself in the warp-man's firm grip. "No." He tried struggling, but the darkness surrounded him, blinking him and choking him. "Not again!" He yelled out, squirming as he was dragged into another portal.

...

They arrived in an abandoned warehouse, Fumikage falling out of the villains grip and landing on the ground, jolting at his injuries. He hissed, feathers fluffing up in pain, elbowing his way up to his knees, favoring his right leg over his dislocated one, staring up at the league with a look he hoped didn't scream fearful.

"Awh!" Toga played with some of her loose hair. "He's actually such a cute little birdy! Shigaraki, can we keep him?"

The leader sighed, and Tokoyami dragged himself a little bit backwards while they were all distracted. A ring of fire surrounded him and he freezed, eyes widening. The flames disappeared once more when he sat still, and he inhaled sharply, looking over at the source of the fire - fucking zombie. "That is the plan." The multiple-handed male said simply, yawning in boredom.

Fumikage hadn't realized until now, but there was a presence of someone else in the room - someone who wasn't there before. "This was your chosen one, Shigaraki?" Came a deep voice - cold and calculated, sounding almost dead. Tokoyami had a feeling he knew who it was, and having that voice behind him shook him to his core. Fucking hell he really was in deep shit, huh?

"Yes, master." Shigaraki seemed happy now that this person was there with him, unlike any other time so far. "He will be a great asset to the team if we can 'convince' him to join."

Dark Shadow, being the unique quirk he was, could see out of his 'owners' body, and used that to his ability, twisting around to look outside of Tokoyami's back. 'I-It's...' The Shadow gulped. 'It's the All For One guy, right?.'

"Shit." He muttered under his breath. The man laughed at him, laying a hand on his shoulder, squeezing it tightly.

"It's one of All Might's students." All For One commented out loud, letting go of his shoulder, walking around to face him. "It will definitely come in handy." 

Just looking at his face made shivers run up his spine - did he even have anything under that damn mask? He didn’t think so. 

Tokoyami held in a groan at being called 'it'. Although to be honest, the fear coursing through his veins at All For One being this close to him - his quirk, he knew it too well; it was his name as well... All For One - the stealing quirk. 'If he touches you and takes your quirk away, I'll die.' Dark Shadow sounded calm for once since the beginning of this kidnapping. He probably felt his users fear sparking, and felt like it was his duty to protect him. They had swapped roles so easily, Fumikage couldn't help but smile.

"Leave me alone with him." All nice thoughts were flung out of the window, and the teen couldn't even hear Dark Shadow trying to comfort him over the pounding of his heart. He was doomed now. Shit, shit shit. Where the hell were the pro-heroes? "I would like to see how far he can go."

Tokoyami knew this was going to end badly.

...

His vision was blurry and unfocused when the villain was eventually thrown off of him, allowing him to breathe, before being plucked up and held tightly against a large mans chest. Tokoyami tried struggling against the hands, but a voice hushed him. "Young Tokoyami, do not fear." Came a rather hushed voice for the number one hero. The teen couldn’t help but sigh in relief. Fumikage blinked his red eyes up at the man, and a shining smile rained back down on him.

"I can stand." He grumbled, and the pro-hero placed him down gently. Shakily, he let Dark Shadow loose to keep him steady. The quirk curled around him, keeping to his left side to make up for the lose of movement in said leg. "Well." He mused. "More or less."

His teacher gave him a curt nod. "You should get out of here." He warned, deep blue eyes meeting red tired ones. Tokoyami swore he didn't even think the dude had eyes. The more you know he supposed. "I can take him on myself."

"You can't." He stated simply, and he felt Dark Shadow tense, ready to fight for his owners life for real this time. "And you know that."

The number one hero gave a low chuckle, getting into a fighting stance. "Fine then, young Tokoyami." A thumbs up was sent his way, and the student shuddered, prepared, yet anxious. "I grant you permission to use your quirk."

"I'm already right here you know." Came the cheeky voice of his Shadow; the darkened bird narrowed his eyes despite the humor, almost snarling at All For One. "I'm ready!"

...

Tokoyami was faintly aware of the helicopters and rising crowds as the three of them battled it out on the abandoned construction site. The teen swiftly jumped from bits of rubble to unattended beams, shooting out his quirk and drawing him back in quickly to create a false attack. Fumikage swore the cameras were facing him more than All Might, but in the heat of the situation and pain, he barely noticed his feathers fluff from embarrassment.

"Let me actually attack him." His quirk gave a low growl, reaching out to pretend to paw at the villain, making the man use one of god-knows how many quirks to try and stop him. Dark Shadow just phased through it, smirking before being flung backwards and towards Tokoyami. "He'll understand what's happening soon if we don't take the jump on him."

"I know that." He muttered, dodging a bolder thrown his way, landing awkwardly on his left side, hissing and collapsing in pain. As he fought to right his body, he could hear the agony of the battle behind him, and he grit his teeth. "Fine - Go, Dark Shadow!"

The quirk had never run so fast out of his body, slamming over to the fighting adults, phasing through All Might before projecting a punch right at the villains face. Obviously, from all the fake attacks, All For One hadn't been expecting anything new, so being hit in the face by a shadow probably wasn't what he was quite thinking of. "I didn't even think you could hit." He spoke lowly, reaching out to try and snag the quirk, only to have it phase out on him. "Sneaky."

All Might rounded a punch at the man, following through after he'd recovered from the initial shock of having a fist phase through him, only to hit the man right next to him. Knowing Dark Shadow wouldn't hurt him restored his confidence in the loose attacks Tokoyami had been pulling off until now. It made so much more sense Battle-Wise that he had almost missed it's intentions.  

"Tokoyami." He ground out, throwing a kick at the man's legs, hitting his shins, toppling him over. "I need Dark Shadow to capture." All Might stomped on his opponents chest, hearing a wheeze in return.

Fumikage recalled his quirk, and used it as almost a hover board sort of thing, lifting himself up and carrying him over to the two men. Bringing him down slowly, Dark Shadow then wound himself around All For One, securing him in place. "All done." It chirped happily.

As soon as the teen realized it was over, he noticed the rush of helicopters on the scene, the amount of people cheering for him and the pro-hero, and the small group of heroes who had stood back to watch the epic fight clapping. "You've done well, Tokoyami." All Might said, patting his head. There was blood all over All Might; he looked gravely injured, but then again, so did he probably.

"We both did." He countered quietly.

...

Fumikage Tokoyami wasn't the type to want attention - quite the opposite, in fact. The student had realized this from an early age, tending to not speak out in crowds for the fear of everyone suddenly paying attention to him.

So obviously, this battle was causing some strain.

"What was it like to work with All might?" The nurses would babble on as they took care of his wounds, undressing and redressing them. "He's so strong - that's one hell of an experience!"

The teen would just roll his red eyes at their excitement of knowing what it was like to work with All Might himself rather than asking if anything hurt. It did, of course - he'd taken quite the toll in the torture and then in the battle: an emotional pain and a physical pain, both of which could probably not be clenched by medication. It would take him weeks to heal, he mused quietly.

When one of the woman paused to look at him, he could see that she was actually waiting for an answer this time. "Just like in school." He said softly, voice aching and sore. "He's my teacher at U.A."

She squealed. "You're in the same class as Endeavor's son! That's so cool! Who's your homeroom teacher?"

Now she was diving closer to where Tokoyami drew the line. He may be the silent type by heart, but unlike, for example, Koji, Fumikage still spoke out when he was irritated. "He doesn't like being well known." Simple and to the point. Just his style. The nurse seemed to get the message, muttering a apology before swiftly leaving the room.

When she left the room, he deflated, sighing. As much as he hated all this socialization, he missed Shoji. The school and hospital had come to a decision to hold him there until he could be transferred to the new 'dorms' school were building for Class 1-A. He had to chuckle at the thought of the teachers having to actually consider keeping them on campus after this fiasco.

'It's a good idea though' Dark Shadow murmured, half asleep inside of him. 'Means you're safe now.'

Tokoyami shook his head tiredly. "Well what happens when we leave campus?" He said out loud - the doctors and nurses had been informed of his quirk so they knew he wasn't going insane. "We can't hide from them forever like some cowards."

Dark Shadow's beak poked out from his chest, and the quirk nipped at his shirt. "Can you just shut up and be thankful?" Came the groan from his friend. The shadow of a beak went back into his body. 'I'm trying to rest now.'

"Sure." He lowered himself back onto the white bed-sheets, half closing his eyes from the light protruding through the blinds on the windows. His quirk was quickly asleep, and his breathing, although faint and unreal, lulled Fumikage to a state of calm, then relaxed, then unconscious.

...

All Might had retired - it appears that no matter what Fumikage had done to help, the hero had taken a lot more damage than had been expected. Guilt tore at his insides like when Dark Shadow raged, and he walked shakily next to the now literally deflated man and down the road to the new campus.

"Are you ready to see everyone again?" The teacher asked, voice softer than All Might's had ever been. His stomach tightened with the realization.

"Yeah." He mumbled, dragging the small walking stick along the dirt, pushing himself up and along with it. It was humiliating, but it was life at the minute. Tokoyami clenched his teeth. "It's been too long."

...

Making his way through the door, he was greeted by an extraordinarily clean common room, decorated neatly with balloons and banners, all saying 'Welcome home!' His throat tightened at he saw all of his classmates smiling at him.

"Hey, Fumikage!" Uraraka smiled, looking a tad bit up at him. She was holding out a box as she walked towards him. "A present from us all!"

"I had nothing to do with it!" Bakugou snarled, but his eyes held fierce pride for the feathered-teen. It made the shadow-quirk user smile slightly.

Balancing the cane under his armpit, he took the box shakily, unwrapping it and taking the lid off. There, under the careful and precise wrapping, was a selection of things: a few spiked bracelets, a new red choker, since his one had been burned off by Dabi (He’d learned that shits name after he’d been found), and a small little switchblade. "To go with your costume." Uraraka added when his eyes widened a little at the weapon.

"Thank's guys." Suddenly, his hoodie felt tight around his body, and he felt sweat bead down his neck in embarrassment. "So..." He let his eyes wander away from the group of people. "Can someone show me to my new room? It'd be cool to see it."

Shoji stood forward, reaching out three arms to loop around the teen, taking the box with his other hand. "I'll show you." He said softly, leading him towards the elevator. Tokoyami hobbled along stiffly, wincing at the pain.

"At least there's an elevator."

As they bundled in, Mezo made another handed tentacle to press the level two floor. Tokoyami braced himself half against the metal banister and half against his boyfriend as the doors closed and they began moving upwards. "So, what did I miss?" He asked hoarsely, looking up at him, red eyes meeting black.

"Not much." The elevator stopped, and the white haired male stepped out, hand on the small of Fumikage's back, guiding him to the first room. "We decided on rooms and you got first pick. We chose here so you didn't have to walk much."

The door was made of a nice wood, and Mezo pushed it open, revealing all of his stuff transferred into the room and already set up. "I decided I would set it up like your old room." Shoji had been to his house plenty of times, so he knew what it looked like. "I hope it's alright."

The teen reached out a hand to run it along his desk. He smiled. "Thanks, Shoji." He turned and buried himself into his boyfriend's chest. "Love you." He mumbled against the soft T-Shirt.

"I love you too, Fumi'. I love you so much."

...

It turns out, those helicopters had been filming the fight - and everyone had been watching. That even included his classmates and teachers. Everyone was flowing with pride for his accomplishments, and it made him die a little bit in awkwardness at the looks he received from everyone.

Breakfast was normally a bit frustrating, but with him hobbling in these past three days with a walking stick and hissing in pain every time he sat down, it just got even weirder. Bakugou was quiet ever since he overheard Fumikage mutter to Shoji he had a headache, and so was Kirishima. The two loudest members of their class. Kaminari was acting less irritating and just sort of sat there like a toy, along with Sero and Mina, all three of the students just eyeing him nervously. Hell, even Mineta wasn't being his usual perv-self.

"Alright, guys." He spoke out to them all, and they looked at him, confused. "I get it you're worried I'm damaged, or you want to help me feel better, but." He took a small inhale. "I don't exactly feel comfortable with this obnoxious silence either."

Bakugou sighed, but smirked at the feathered-teen. "Fucking finally, I knew it was a stupid idea."

"It was your idea." Asui pointed out, and the explosive-quirk user, well... exploded, from embarrassment. "I'm glad you're feeling better though, ribbit." She added on, smiling softly at him.

He glanced at her. "I'm pretty much A-okay now. Just waiting for this knee to heal up." He knew his mental scarring would take longer to heal, but they didn't need to know that. "I just wish you guys would stop talking about it though."

"Why?" Midoriya said from across the table. "Tokoyami you were amazing!"

"It was mainly All Might..." His feathers fluffed up a little. "I just assisted."

Bakugou slammed his hands on the table, standing up with pure rage, making everyone jump around him. He stared into Tokoyami's red eyes with his own ruby-colored ones. "Don't downgrade yourself, bird." He growled out, "You were injured. Badly. But you still fought on!"

Blinking owlishly up at the explosive teen, he nodded. "Yeah... Thanks Bakugou."

"You better be." He grumbled fondly, slumping himself down into his chair as if nothing ever happened. Kirishima snickered. "You wanna go, Shitty Hair?" Came the response to his giggling. Red Riot shook his head, coughing off the remains of his chuckles. "Good."

A warm feeling spread over Fumikage's body; it was tingling, and it felt nice. 'That's what it feels like to be loved.' Oh Dark Shadow, his smart, independent and ever nice quirk sometimes knew more than his own host. 'It's nice cause I get to feel it too!'.

"That's enough Bakugou!" Iida practically yelled from a few seats away, dramatically throwing his hand up and down - they'd named it the Iida-gesture, and rightly so: only the speed-quirk user ever did it. It didn’t make it any less intimidating. "Do not make us make you add to the violence jar!"

The feathered-teen glanced at the blue-haired boy. "There's a violence jar?"

"You've missed some... changes." Kaminari laughed, shoving a spoonful of cereal into his mouth. “Goo’ ‘nes.!” He added on in his cereal-muffled voice, spitting it all out when Sero began laughing at him across the table “Hey!” 

...

He had a nightmare that night, dreaming of All For One and death and losing his quirk - Losing Dark Shadow. Tokoyami dreamt of pain and suffering and torture. Being alone. No one came to rescue him - he one cared. Everyone thought he was dead, he'd seen the news show from the TV in the bar as he'd been chained up and beaten - a quirkless first year student against adult villains.

Dark Shadow was whimpering, nudging at his host's shirt with his beak, laying his head on the bird-teens chest, sighing as he watched the boy suffer through another night terror. In any other occasion, Dark Shadow would take control, would force himself to make Fumikage feel protected by physically protecting him, but he knew deep down that having anything holding him tightly would only cause him to panic more.

He had an idea, a small one in the back of his independent mind. 'Could I do that?' He mused softly, watching the student shake and shiver and let out soft whimpers and whines in his sleep. 'Could I make it that far?'

Tokoyami gave a loud sob, and that set the quirk off. The Shadow leapt up, hovering across the room and phasing through the door, flying himself up the stairs to the next floor.

Floating across the different rooms, he finally found Shoji's room.

...

Fumikage threw himself onto the floor as he awoke from his dream, panting harshly as he thudded onto the floor. "Shit." He mumbled when he knee gave a pop and crackle and a searing pain similar to the one a few days ago shot up his leg. "Fuck, fuck, fuck."

Expecting his quirk to tell him to calm down, or to appear next to him fretting worriedly, but he wasn't there. Eyes widening in realization, he looked down at his chest to find that a shadow was protruding from it. His quirk's purple colored body was stretched out, and he followed the trail to find that it had gone under his door. "Aw no, Dark Shadow." He groaned, patting the area next to his bed in search for his walking stick.

Finding the sturdy wooden stick, he hoisted himself up shakily, feeling his knee wobble from where it had re-dislocated itself from his topple. Making his way slowly over to the door, he opened it, eyes following the trail of his quirks body as it led down the hall and up the stairs.

This was going to be a long night.

...

Finally - he groaned out loud again as he made it half way up the stairs, only to be greeted by a worried Dark Shadow and a concerned Shoji Mezo. "Ah, Fumi!" His shadow whined. "You're awake; are you okay?"

"'M fine but.." He looked down at his kneecap. "I think I dislocated my knee again." The feeling rushed back at him, making him feel nauseous. He recalled Dark Shadow into him, the quirk quickly coming back, unease rippling through his body when the whole figure entered him. Shoji quickly came forward and scooped the young boy into his many arms. He nuzzled his head under his boyfriend's chin, sighing.

"Let me check it." They were already heading back to Mezo's room, so it's not like Tokoyami had a choice. "I have a first aid kit." He added when he got a questioned noise from the feathered boy.

When they arrived, he was set gently on the bed, leg stretched out painfully as Mezo looked it over, cold fingers grazing over his skin, making sharp tingles ring up from the injury. "It's not dislocated, luckily. I just think you bruised it a lot, or it did dislocate but relocated itself."

Fumikage snorted. "Only in my body." He mused quietly, taking comfort in the bliss silence that followed. It was so much better than his nightmare of screams and horrors.

"Do.." The white-haired male paused, looking thoughtfully at the smaller student. "Do you want to spend the night here?"

The teen couldn't be happier. Reaching out his arms, he let Shoji pick him up and place him tight against his chest before laying down on the bed. He snuggled into his arms, sighing contently. Everything wasn't going to be the same after this, he thought, feeling a face bury itself into his feathers. He fluffed them up so it was more comfy. "Thanks." Came the muffle from his head. He smiled tiredly, closing his eyes and gripping Mezo’s shirt tightly.

"No problem."

[horseluvr00-ff]

A Place to Call Home | Chapter 36

Masterlist Here

Rating: T+

Fandom: Marvel Cinematic Universe

Genre/Warnings: action/adventure/family | kidnapping, violence, strong language.

Story summary: It’s been a few months since the Battle of New York. Steve Rogers is acclimating to life when he crosses paths with teenager Katelyn Sanders, a SHIELD recruit and highly valued asset with a dark past. Follow Kate’s adventure from SHIELD asset to Avenger to wanted fugitive over the course of her youth and into adulthood with her Avenging family. Follows Infinity Saga and beyond.

Words: 5,967

Disclaimer: Majority of properties within this fanfic are owned by Marvel/Disney. My OC Katelyn Sanders, as well as a few other unaffiliated things within this fanfic are of my own creation.

Author Note: Relogs are welcome and appreciated :) Please no plagiarism or reposts on other platforms. Updates now occur every other Friday, however posts on Tumblr usually occur Saturdays.

Full story available on FFN and A03 here and here

Chapter 36 can be found here on FFN and here on AO3 in full.

Check out a portion of Chapter 36 below:

"I think this will be good. I know you're wary, but if we keep an eye on her I don't think it will be a problem," Clint follows Steve with his eyes as the captain makes his way to the kitchen to refill his coffee mug.

"She made it clear this wasn't about her forming some kind of- reliance on SHIELD, but… That's what I'm worried about." Steve mutters. "She ultimately wants to do what we do." He turns with the filled mug in hand and meets the eyes of his colleagues.

"That's a compliment," Clint raises his mug towards the man with a small smile.

"She's been groomed most of her life to essentially do what we do, Steve." Natasha speaks up, hands gripping her mug of tea. "I think it's a good idea letting her look into this,"

"That's the thing, Nat. I'm not just letting her look into this, I outright told her she could."

"Well you mentioned there would be limitations," Clint adds. "Relax, Cap. This kid is… capable. I think more than you realize. Hell- maybe more than we all realize."

Steve eyes the two of them silently, his expression tense and brow knit. He was regretting it all. What possessed him in that moment to just tell her that she can go back to those people? If he told Fury, Gordon even… They'd find a way to sweep her back under the rug. There's no doubt they'd try. And with Kate wanting to crawl closer to that reality… Did she really understand what she was asking? Who knew if Fury would keep word on those lies he spouted at her. Colleges and proper training. They did have such things, but why would Fury let that happen.

"The colleges are legit, Steve." Clint speaks up.

Steve's eyes snap down to the archer.

How much of that thought train was out loud?

"I've seen them before." Clint tips his mug towards him slightly before chugging down the rest of the liquid.

"You think she'd fit in there?"

"Who knows," Clint shrugs before taking the mug to the sink. "But you told her you'd support her decision, Cap. So there's no backing out there. Kids remember everything," Clint laughs. "She'll never let you live it down if you take it back."

Steve physically shifts his weight at the thought of her holding a grudge against him if he- lied in a sense about that. She looked genuine and completely serious while speaking to him last night. He had to keep his word. Otherwise he jeopardized the trust he was building with her.

"Come sit back down," Natasha uses her foot to push Steve's chair back out at the table as Clint begins returning to his spot next to her.

Steve pushes off the counter and makes his way over. Sitting down across from the two of them, Steve sets his mug down with a quiet sigh.

"They grow up so fast, don't they?" Clint mumbles in amusement.

Steve resists the urge to roll his eyes but shoots Clint a small look while raising an eyebrow.

"You'll need to hash all of this out with Fury." Natasha makes clear, her voice genuine but firm. "For your sake I'd make sure it was just between you and him. This Doctor Gordon that you're not particularly fond of should wait."

Steve nods lightly while staring into his cup.

"There's someone else I'm going to talk to first," Steve speaks up.

He can tell them about Kline. He trusted them to know this man was sort of his… contact regarding Oriah.

"Who?" Natasha's brow knit. She was surprised. That wasn't hard to figure out.

Steve clasps his hands together in his lap momentarily, eyes trailing across the table before he meets Natasha's eyes.

"Someone Tony tracked down for me while I was trying to find information on Kate." Steve begins. "Melvin Kline. He worked with Kate in the early years of the Oriah Program."

"He worked with Oriah," Natasha states, eyeing the man questionably before exchanging a small glance with Clint. "And you trust him?"

"Yeah," Steve nods. "He worked with her before being transferred out of the program, but he's willing to give me guidance regarding her that's been valuable."

"He was transferred, or he did transfer," Her brow was knit and she looked surprised but also confused by Steve's actions. That was out of the ordinary.

"He was transferred," Steve confirms.

"That's irregular for a program as confidential as Oriah. Was he injured?" Natasha questions.

"Yeah…" Here we go. "... Kate stabbed him in the neck with a pen."

The silence that follows is almost loud as Steve waits for responses and finally looks up to see Clint matching expression of concern with Natasha's.

"And you trust this man to discuss Kate's wellbeing," Natasha furthers, brow knitted tightly.

"It's hard to explain, Nat, but yeah. I trust him."

The two agents exchange the smallest glance and Clint gives a shrug.

"He's gotten us this far," The archer puts simply.

"Just be careful who you put your trust in, Rogers." Natasha sighs before getting up from the table, mug in hand. "Especially concerning Kate."

"I'm being careful, Nat." Steve nods gently in response.

The redhead proceeds into the kitchen and Steve leans back into his chair with a small sigh.

Clint watches his colleague quietly before leaning forward, arms crossed over the table.

"If you want either of us to go with you when you make this deal with Fury- I'd recommend it." Clint shrugs lightly.

Steve meets his eyes, brow twitching in response before he sits up straight.

"If you wanna make sure they don't hide anything in the fine print, Nat and I can give you a hand is all I'm saying." Clint nods to the side before giving the man a small smirk.

"Thank you," Steve nods.

These are his friends. Not just his colleagues. Sometimes he had to repeat that to himself from time to time. While he always felt like the outlier on the team, they tried to make him feel as part of life now as possible. It was a feeling Steve despised- being the odd man out. Unfortunately it was a feeling he'd suffered all his life. Whether as a scrawny kid from Brooklyn or a world-famous war hero - he always stuck out in some way or another. It must be nice to be able to just know how to blend into any crowd like Clint or Natasha for a change.

Kate must feel something similar from time to time; being the outlier. Maybe that was part of what she wanted, to have something familiar to others. Training like that which normal agents get. Maybe she just wanted to be treated like a normal agent in training for once.

"I gotta go find Kate," Steve finally sighs, getting to his feet. "Hash some of this out; get more information."

"Good luck," Clint says, giving the captain a small nod as the man begins his journey towards the elevator.

Natasha gives Steve a small smile in acknowledgment as he leaves and Steve reciprocates before heading into the elevator.

Natasha comes back to the table and sits down in Steve's seat across from Clint.

Clint meets her eyes quietly, and a form of silent communication commences for a few seconds before he speaks up.

"What'd you think?"

Natasha nods to the side, eyes picking out the wood grain texture on the tabletop.

"This'll be good for her… Not sure about him though."

Clint chuckles before nodding in agreement.

"Think Fury'll negotiate?"

"She's priceless to SHIELD, so, yes… I think Fury'll be eager to negotiate." Natasha confirms, swallowing quietly while thinking things over; her thoughts begin to wander off. "Be more gentle next time you spar with her."

"Me be more gentle?" Clint laughs, leaning back in his chair. "She would have wiped the floor with me but she held back."

"She got hurt when she came with us on that assignment." Natasha informs him. "Sparring with you tore her sutures."

"What?" Clint's laugh dies and his brow knits, smile falling. "You- when did she-"

"Knife, back of the shoulder," Natasha shrugs lightly. "Don't tell Rogers cause her chances will go right out the window with that reveal."

"Oh," Clint mumbles, thinking over yesterday's events. "She was reluctant to spar now that I think about it. I pushed her."

"Mm hm," Natasha hums in amusement.

Clint rolls his eyes and leans forward in his chair once more, bringing his forearms to the table.

"Injured and she still gave me a black eye… Kid's got potential."

The rest of chapter 36 can be found here on FFN and here on AO3. Take a peak to keep reading!

Stay healthy, stay safe, sending lots of love. <3

Masterlist Here

[aceofstars16]

Girl, why you got a problem with Bendemption? Like he did some crude stuff but like that's Leia's son... They could've made the villain not Leia's son but nooo they had to do it... Of course not that big of a deal when he's a fictitious character, but the heart of the matter is concerning you see - detesting someone's possible redemption is not very tasteful for someone who's needed to be redeemed herself. (I mean that's just all humanity so don't take that personally. :P)

Okay, first off, I don’t detest it. I was actually okay with it before TLJ, and if it was done well, it could maybe still work. But the thing is, someone has to actually like…accept that they have messed up and want to change. Like, repent and make an effort to do what’s right. From everything we have seen, Kylo is nowhere near doing either of those things. He had a chance at redemption and he pretty much spat in it’s face. That’s not saying he couldn’t but something big would have to happen, and even then it might seem a little forced/out of the blue? 

It’s been a while since I watched TLJ or TFA, so I might not remember things the best, but he seems to only want what he wants, and he gets rid of things that get in his way (killing his dad because he had some conflict there, but then that not being shown to have an effect on him like, at all later). And him wanting to recruit Rey was only because he wanted her to help him fulfill his goal. His humanity is pretty far gone from what we’ve seen tbh, and that’s not saying people who have done bad things can’t have a change of heart and redemption, I’m all for that! But just from what we’ve seen, it doesn’t seem like Kylo wants that - he doesn’t seem to have remorse for what he has done, or guilt, he just does it to get what he wants and moves on.

One of the biggest issues I have with it, is that it’s a springboard for a lot of people to ship R*ylo, like if he gets redeemed then they can be together! And that…pisses me off so much because R*ylo is a very toxic, abusive, and manipulative relationship that is not healthy in any regard. It honestly makes me worried about our world that people ship it, especially when Finn is sitting right there. It’s not romantic to kidnap someone, interrogate them, and later manipulate them to get them on your side to help you with your goals. That’s not a healthy relationship. Especially because Rey legit has shown no interest in him. She thinks maybe she can save him, so that’s what she goes and tries to do, but he wants none of that so she’s out of there. Which is good, people shouldn’t stay with toxic people, let alone be in a relationship with them, especially when they have other people who love and support them, not to use them but just because they are genuinely care. 

Anyways, that got long, but long story short. I love redemptions, but from all we have seen in the movies, Kylo’s story really doesn’t seem to be leading up to one. Especially not after TLJ *shrugs*

[msbluebell]

I mentioned this in my reblog on the Byleth Recruits Everyone! AU but thought about more. Beyond how Hubert and Edelgard react I wonder if, with them essentially having private lessons with the non-Byleth professors, someone would possibly notice her malcontent and maybe even her plans to start the war???

That’s actually a really interesting idea and definitely something I could see happening. Idk if you’ve ever worked in large groups or done tutoring, but there’s a HUGE difference between tutoring one or two kids and teaching a whole group at a time.

Now, I default to Blue Lion Route being canon in my metas, because that was my unexpected favorite (I legit thought it was going to be my least favorite when I started the game, but look at me now), so Manuela would be the professor in charge of Edelgard and Hubert in this AU.

I want to set the record straight before I start this one. I played Black Eagles Route first. I thought full stop that Edelgard was the “Main Girl” so to speak and that Black Eagles was most likely the Route written to be the canon route. Don’t think too badly of me guys, I was dumb, Three Houses blew me away faster than I could imagine and exceeded my expectations and is now one of my all time favorite games. Don’t @ me. Why am I telling you all this though? Well…my experience with the game is important for context. I was totally unspoiled when I was playing Edelgard’s Route. I had no idea SHE was going to be the one to start the war. I honestly thought either Those Who Slither caused the issues, or Dimitri, or something. IDK, but not Edelgard. I actually went in knowing nothing because I wanted to be surprised.

I noticed a lot of red flags right away.

Maybe it’s because I intended to romance Edelgard, so I was paying special attention to her, but she had a lot of red flags that I think the Byleth in my playthrough either over looked, or was too busy to put much stock in. But the thing that got me the most were her words before the Mock Battle and her words to you after your father dies (It had been one day Edelgard! Give me time to grieve before you tell me to pick myself back up!). She had a lot of red flags that I thought was me just not liking her, because I totally thought she was supposed to be the “hero” of the game, Chrom/Lucia style, and ignored.

Manuela wouldn’t have that issue.

Manuela, despite how she acts, is a very smart woman. Not only is she a healer, which I suspect requires some high intellect, but she was the first one to put together a solid lead on Flayn’s location after she was kidnapped. She’s a smart cookie, a walking disaster and a messy bitch, but a smart cookie who deserves respect. Not only that, but she’s a people person. As in she knows people very well. She may be willfully blind to a lot of things, especially when self-evaluating, but I think she nails other people in some of her supports.

Not only that, but one of the earliest missions in game shows that the church provides “calming herbs” for students with anxiety and depression, meaning that they have some idea of medication. Who would probably have a thorough knowledge of medications and thus psychological issues? The school nurse, Manuela. Now, this is all just speculation, but it’s speculations I’m considering for this answer.

With private, one on one, tutoring and no other kids to distract her from what’s going on, I think Manuela would notice Edelgard’s and Hubert’s red flags right away. Now, Manuela is a responsible adult, so she would probably share this with the other staff (I assume they have staff meetings because what school doesn’t?), specifically Seteth who seems to work as what is  basically the principle of the school (I’m not giving that to you, Rhea, Seteth does all the fucking work and you know it).

This could go several ways depending on whether or not they have evidence/reasonable suspicion Edelgard will move against the church. Either Rhea, as tight-fisted as she is, would move to arrest Edelgard for treason and jump-start this shit early, or Manuela would make it a priority to curve her psychological issues.

As for Edelgard’s and Hubert’s reaction to all their classmates going over to the Blue Lions (including the Golden Deer students right down to Claude), I think that they would be even colder than in the game. Edelgard now has no personal friends that will stick by her until death as far as she’s concerned, because if they’re so willing to leave to better themselves than they’re hardly loyal vassals to HER cause. Hubert would be along the same line, but with the disgust that they “betrayed” Lady Edelgard despite being mostly nobles or citizens of the Empire. Sure, Petra asked for permission, but that just proves she’s loyal to her own self improvement above Edelgard.

The thing about Edelgard’s plan is that you have to absolutely trust HER and be ready to die for her cause. Them leaving shows they value something other than loyalty to her more. She doesn’t resent that, but it does show that they’re not fit for her plans.

As for the Golden Deer students joining the Blue Lions, that’s even more concerning. It means Faerghus and the Alliance will be more likely to be united, and what’s more, it means that Professor Byleth is one of the biggest threats to her with their charisma and usefulness. 

[henkinsjenkins]

A professor’s Journal

This is a Fallout fanfic, Deacon X male Reader (OC)

Chapter 1: Lets make a deal!

Prologue | We don’t mention him

Story: Sole wasn’t the only one to come from vault 101, there was another. But he had escaped years ago and joined the railroad. Sole, following his fellow vault mate, learns what really happened at the switchboard, and why they don’t mention the Professor.

“-2274, March.13 I met the strangest man trying to break into my room today. His excuse? A man was dying, it was Charley so I knew the shades was lying. Ain’t nothing gonna kill that man. In the end it turns out the burglar was actually an agent from that Railroad. The one Charley kept yapping about. Was gonna decline their offer of course, I’m anything but noble . . . But living as a hack doctor for the rest of my life didn’t feel like it would be fun. Let's hope I’m not wrong.” . . . . . . . . . . . . 

“I heard the railroad is real.” One of the drunks had leaned over to the dark haired man that sat to his right. “I’m thinking about joining. It be like my new poor-pose. Besides drinking my life away.” He chuckled waving his glass. 

Deacon raised his glass at the male, sure the guy was a drunk but despite that he was assured by the boss to take this sort of thing legit for potential recruits or information. After being temporarily expelled from the Railroad, he had no choice but to do recon and spy work. 

‘See what those wastelands have. We can't run the Railroad with only 13 members.’ 

“Oh really? Why would you do that?”

The man babbled on talking about synths, being brave, and about how cruel the world was. Deacon knew it was nothing more than drunken blabber. 

What else was he to do? Boss told him to listen out for any potential, it wasn’t like Deacon had much of a choice. He only could investigate the small trading post until something else came up.

His eyes rolled behind his sunglasses ready to move on. At least until the man said something that caught his attention. 

“There’s a man. He’s sorta the only doctor around that isn’t wandering in a caravan. Nobody knows his real name or where he's originally from. Though I think he knows about this Railroad.”

Deacon edged the drunk to speak more about the man he was speaking about. A possible lead he could check out even if it was just a rumor, Deacon was curious if the doctor knew of their location. To prevent another attack like the last one, he had to check this doctor out no matter what.

“He wears that funky gas mask all of the time so you can't miss him. Nobody really talks to him and he doesn't-” 

Before the drunk man's words could escape his lips the man was vomiting all over the bar. Luckily for Deacon he aim on the other side of the stool. The bartender heard the sound of puking before cursing loudly at the mess his patron made.

“What the hell Charley?!” he walked over throwing his hands up in frustration. 

“Who gave ya another beer?”

‘Oops.’ Deacon thought, remembering he offered the man a beer when they first started talking. 

The said man, Charley only moaned in response before slumping against the bar in a drunken slumber. 

“I'll pay 50 caps to anyone who takes his sorry ass to the Doctor.” A few people got up but being closer Deacon was the first to grab the opportunity. 

“Up on the second floor, to the left past the second room. He's used to taking care of Charley. Alongside others.” 

Deacon nodded lifting the poor man's arm over his shoulder. Deacon did his best lunging the overweight man up the stairs but found it difficult balancing him.

Following the bartender's directions Deacon found, what he hoped was the Doctor's office. The door was locked and still solid enough to the point where he couldn't tell if someone was home. Sighing Deacon set the drunken man off to the side. 

He knocked twice before knocking again.

He waited but there was no answer.

Charley slumped against the hallway wall moaning in discomfort as he shifted. Deacon was glad he didn't hurl while they were coming up the stairs. 

Pulling out a bobby pin Deacon looked around him. Making sure there was nobody else is the shady hallway. Crouching he started to pick the door's lock. Thankfully he was good at this, so it wouldn't be long before he can break in.

Though before the agent could continue a cough from behind stopped his movements. 

“You know from where I come from. This sort of thing would land you in jail.” 

Deacon turned seeing a tall man with a mask. A gas mask nonetheless. 'Ah this must be the doctor' Deacon thought. The man stood there with a bag in hand and the other a small handgun pointed at Deacon's head.

 Slowly he could feel the panic creep on him, Deacon tried focusing on an excuse that would get him out of whatever sticky situation he had gotten into. Otherwise he was gonna have to visit the doc himself. Preferably a different doctor than the one in front of him.

“Well you see this man right here is sick! He needs medical attention asap. Otherwise he might die. So I thought I could narrow some supplies."

The tall man looked down at the snoring drunk. It was obvious the man was just in a drunken slumber, drool leaking from his mouth while he snored like a log.

“He looks like all the other drunks that pass out on the street."

Deacon swallowed before giving a quick save. “Not only that! I think I soaked up a bit too many Rads and could use some Rad-x myself. Of course I was going to-"

“What does that have to do with breaking and entering? Besides you're not even glowing." The masked man interrupted. 

Deacon gave a nervous chuckle. He wondered if it was too late to run at this point.

“It's not like you're the first one to try and break into my room. So I don't have anything worth stealing.” The masked man sighed, putting his gun away he took out a pair of keys.

Deacon moved aside as the man reached the door. He thought about making a quick dash for it and just coming back another day and trying again but with a new identity. Deacon watched as the man turned the doorknob to his room and walked in. 

This was his chance to escape but the masked man turned. 

“Are you coming in or just gonna stand there with your mouth open?”

Deacon thought about it and decided there was no time to waste.

If he was going to find information he had to do it fast. There was no point in staying around when there were other people he needed to talk with. The fact he needed to continue on with his mission and find more members was pressuring. Why bother leaving now? It didn't seem like the man was hostile.

“What about the guy outside?” 

The Doctor waved him off not giving a second look. Deacon wondered what kind of doctor this man was as he stepped into his office. Looking around it was a pretty empty room. A desk, bed and a few chairs. The bag he was carrying was sat down next to a few others, from what Deacon could notice to be duffel bags. 

“I seen that guy drink rat poison and he was good the next morning. This much booze won't do anything. No matter how irradiated it is.”

Deacon only took a seat after the masked man did, sitting across from him he couldn't tell exactly what the doctor was thinking. Should he say something? He thought realizing that they both were just sitting there in silence. 

The doctor had finally spoke, his voice was deep but muffled by the gaskets on his mask. It made Deacon wonder why he was hiding his face in the first place. Considering the drunk from before had said. Maybe he was hiding something. 

 “So, what's your real reason being here? Trying to assassinate me? Or maybe you're one of those Gunner boys trying to kidnap me again. If that's the case I'm gonna have to do something about that.”

Thinking fast Deacon recalled the drunks rambles from earlier. If the doctor knew anything. If the mask man didn't he might throw him an offer. As much as he didn't want to cause any more risk for the organization. They needed agents and having a doctor on board would help with the injured back in HQ.

“Okay...I'll just come out and say it. I heard you might have information on the Railroad that could help me join.”

“You want to join the Railroad?” 

Deacon could swore the man's tone sounded confused. Genuinely or fake he couldn't tell with the sight muffle.

It was obvious the man talking to him had gave in to Charley's bullshit and probably Arden's as well. He wasn’t sure how to exactly confront the sun glass wearing man's idiocy. He was nothing more than a shady doctor, working his best for caps. He sighed realizing his lack of social skills only fueled the craze maniacs of the trading post. All of which, had theories on who he was.

“Look, buddy. All I can tell you is that, a bunch of people started talking about this 'Railroad' awhile back."

 Their whole idea to protect these synths and free them from whatever machine slavery sounded noble but it isn't worth it. Synths were just machines that mimicked human life, why else would they exist? He never cared about whether or not they were human or if they shouldn't be treated differently. He was an ex mercenary doing his best to get by.

“I really don't know what old Charley here has been filling your ears with but I don't know anything about a Railroad. I don't even know what a synth is so you're barking down the wrong tree."

The Doc said re-positioning himself, leaning closer to the man in shades. “I would lay off interrogating drunks for the time being, and focusing on actually finding whatever evidence you're looking for.”

Deacon hummed, he knew well enough that he couldn't tell if the man before him was being honest. But that was the game and he had to only assume.

“Well, that's disappointing. Though I gotta ask, what do you know about them?” he poked further. "If they're the talk around town then there's gotta be something."  

The Doctor sat back rubbing his chin in thought. He didn't know per say if anyone really knew about them or had any valuable information. 

“I hear as much as Charley rambles about. Otherwise I haven't really heard about them.” He didn't have much thought on them or an option for that matter. “I can only guess that they're a voluntary group. I can't see it having a huge caps flow.”

‘So he’s also a Mercenary.’ Deacon hummed rubbing the back of his neck. It made Deacon feel a sense of relief. Not only was this man a doctor but he also had fighting experience. A two in one he thought.

Having a guy like him would definitely help. He got around, he could help with transporting synths, maybe even pick up information about the Institute’s whereabouts. The idea of convincing him to join was the interesting part. How would he convince an ex mercenary to join a practically broken down, no money organization?

“So you work in a caravan?” Deacon asked. He wanted to know a bit more before making his move.

“No, well...Maybe...At least I did at some point.” 

Stopping mid sentence, the doctor had to think about it. It had been some time since he worked his last mercenary job.

“I was a Mercenary and did all sorts of jobs. I'm pretty sure I did at some point. As of now I’m working as a doctor. So if you don't have anything wrong with you, you should leave.”

“But there is! I do need help, but its not...Medical.”

"Then why are you here?"

The doctor sat quietly waiting for Deacon to continue. 

“I have a second lead but I can't go traveling alone. I need a gun. Hearing that you're a mercenary I figured I could hire you.”

He wasn't sure how to respond to Deacon. The thought of getting back into mercenary work did cross his mind. He just wasn't sure he could fight like he used too. Getting older was obviously a set back, despite being only in his thirties. 

Playing doctor had its perks, but there was no real money like he did back in his mercenary days.

“So if I pay you, lets say, 50 caps just to get me there and another 50 to stick around. Would you be interested?” Deacon laid his offer.

“No.”

That was quick...

“Okay...What about...” Deacon pulled out his cap stash, it was noticeable that it was light and the Doc could see it. Much to his displeasure. He chuckled watching as the man struggled to come up with a better offer.

“My price is 200 and a well lit dinner. But for you honey, cause I'm feeling nice. I’ll do it for 100 with dinner in an alley.”

“Deal.” Deacon said throwing his hand out to shake. The Doc took Deacon’s hand and shook it. 

“A deal it is.” 

[jq37]

Ok last one. What's the tea on Prompocalypse?

So...that was something, huh?

This is gonna be quick and dirty (relatively speaking, it’s still too long already as I come back and make this edit) because I have work tomorrow and there are def stuff I want to talk about more and I will (esp if I get asks) but I have work in the morning so let’s just get some words onto the screen aight.

The episode titles have had a pretty consistent naming scheme up until this point so the one word, non alliterative title had me at a 7 on the foreboding scale before we even started.

Everyone was in prom wear! And lol, Siobhan is the only one in a dress. That's almost exactly what I pictured Adaine wearing to prom. That exact shade of blue-green. And Emily looks like a waiter. 

I wonder what Bren's plan was for if they'd thwarted the crowning entirely. Got baller initiative, some nat 20's on crown keepaway and smashing, and killed Penelope/Dayne before the bad guys could finish them. Would he just try to crown someone else or would the curb stompage have stood? Not that Goldenhoard would have been a pushover I imagine but jeez. He couldn't have been as strong as his true form.

Sidenote: One of my favorite little character things is Zac and Siobhan helping each other do math.

Fig dimension dooring Gorgug to the stage and then skateboarding away. Amazing.

"I'm going for her crown vs. his crown."/"In this climate?"

OK, shoutout to Zac fo asking for those bombs because they are OP as hell. 

I love how they just charged in and started trying to kill people, no questions asked, no explaining themselves to the other students, just bombs out immediately. 

My man Riz just couldn't catch a break. I understand the out of story reason the police haven't shown up is that Murph was rolling garbage, but what's taking them so long in story? Where? Is? Sklonda?

"I'm going to jump on the back of the Hangman."/”Presumptuous."

But also, by the end of the fight he's just like, "Do anything any party member tells you to!"

Lou losing it over Riz claiming best friend status. But damn, they kinda are the closest to each other in the party. Wild. 

"You know what baby girl? Why don't you ready an action until I get there," said Siobahn to Ally, hilariously for a number of reasons. 

They keep saying Teen Wolf and I have no idea what part of the movie they're referring to. This is the second ep in a row.

Lou trying to recruit a super sad Ragh.

They started off this fight really strong. Doing double digit damage and rolling over 20s. I was like, "Damn, they've leveled up. They're doing great!" Of course, we were still in the first third of the ep so I didn't know where we were going. But Lou was right. "Wild first turn."

"And then I shoot him."

I'm half convinced Riz jinxed everyone by saying, "Remember the corn fight?"

Kristen cast ONE spell and then said, "I don't have a lot of spells left." THAT'S WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU TRY AND SAVE ADAINE'S WORTHLESS FAMILY. YOU ARE THE HEALER. YOU NEED ALL YOUR SPELLS.

The students running to get food on the way out. Mood.

They messed Dayne *up*. This was the high point of the battle, objective-wise.

Sidenote, why would Dayne have needed to be at the Seacaster Manor raid? It feels dumb to ris him when he was such an important part of things. Was it literally just because he didn't like Fabian? And he disliked him enough to try and kill his parents? Yeesh.

Kirsten @ Ragh flipping out over Dayne: I see what's going on here.

Ragh really made this fight harder than it had to be. If Gorgug hadn't been grappled before Penelope got the crown they might have had a fighting chance.

So Penelope just straight up let what's her face (Sam I think) get palimpsested? Major yikes. Like I know it's a good thing they killed her but I kinda wish they hadn't so we could learn exactly what the insane thought process was there. She comes off as crazier than Biz because Biz was trapping girls he didn't respect, not his actual friends, you know? Like, did Goldenhoard say he was gonna make her an actual queen or something? Because all this isn't worth just being prom queen.

"Sometimes you make a villain and they die in the first two rounds," said Brennan, as if he didn't know what he was about to unleash on the party. Geez, I don't know how long they would have survived if Penelope and Dayne had been in play for a large chunk of the fight.

Murph's idea to blind him was a good one.

I almost was like, "Thank God Gorthalax got kidnapped," because that was the only good explanation for him seemingly ditching Fig.

Ally: Was that his best friend? (Emily: What./Siobahn: NO.)

"I'm like an advertisement for chicken."/"What chicken adverts are you watching?"/"It's like if you went to prom and there was a dangling chicken leg."/"What prom did you go to?"

Fabian full on clocking Penelope in the face like he's playing Punch Out.

"I killed my father today. Yes."

"This is against the rules but I don't care." In hindsight, this feels like foreshadowing.

"Well, that's the risk you take when you go to Aguefort Adventuring Academy."

"Get on the fucking right team!"

Lou (a la Gimli): And *my* D6.

Brennan pulling out that GIANT final form Goldenhoard figure.

For some reason, it didn't occur to me that he'd be just a legit dragon in his true form. I was picturing like the lich from Adventure Time or something.

Also, I was kinda expecting him to "Drop the act," and majorly change in personality but he was basically the same. Just a dick.

Gorgug rolls a 4. Brennan pauses for a second. The entire party: No.

Zac goes all in every time no matter how dumb it is. I love him.

"Father, stop this."/"What?"

"Not clever enough for the library and not brave enough for the world." Oww, I felt that one. Did Brennan have that waiting to use or did he come up with it on the spot because that was brutal.

Goldenhoard goes through the whole party, trying to hit their weakest point and he gets what might have been a great hit on Fig (You're so unloveable your father would rather go to hell than stay with you.) but she just says, "You have got to stop flirting with me," and completely diffuses the moment. As unflappable as Brennan is, he had to take a sec to jump back into the insult parade after that.

"I'm going to eat you."/"OH MY GOD."/"I'm not making it sexual!"

"*The* ball, bitch."

OK, I was wondering what the deal was with Riz's dad. Because giving him that gun implies a chance to kill his dad's killer but I didn't think it could be Goldenhoard directly because of the binding. That's another point towards Riz being the one to finish him off.

Wild that they weren't able to get any of the kids (save Ragh eventually) to help them with the fight. You go to adventuring school! Cowards! You would never make it at Sunnydale and that school was mostly normals!

The one dude still just getting food while Goldenhoard has turned into a full on dragon.

When an 18 wasn't a high enough roll for Fig to make her fear check, that's when I realized my earlier apprehension wasn't misplaced. I mean, maybe it should have been when he turned into a dragon but it is what it is.

But Fig skating away and then going, "Just kidding bitch," because she got it on the very next turn was hilarious.

Kristen still not being 100% on whether Ragh is gay or not.

Who was gonna kick Ragh off the team for being gay? Maybe Daybreak would have but Gorthalax def wouldn't have. Maybe he means he would have been bullied off?

Siobahn to Kristen/Ally: Stop outing students.

I can't believe Gorgug had to kiss Ragh in the middle of this fight to get his head in the game.

Also, I didn't get into it before because I knew this scene was coming but poor Ragh. Like, I could have told him things were gonna go this way and he's a big dummy for thinking otherwise, but poor dude. And then he finally gets it together and he gets wrecked.

"EMILY, I SOMETIMES CAN'T TELL WHEN YOU'RE REALLY FUCKING WITH ME OR NOT."

Siobhan doing the D&D equivalent of reminding the teacher they had homework.

The amount of dice that Brennan rolled for Goldenhoard was truly horrifying. That's permadeath damage.

AND HE GOT THE HEALER DOWN FIRST. This was the next moment I started sensing a TPK.

"HOMOPHOBE!"/"You hit both of the gay ones!"

Kristen taking damage from Goldenhoard's libertarian speech.

I find it such a Fig move to be like, "Can I use charm person to snap Adaine out of it," instead of the spell actually made for that purpose. 

Rolling low perception and getting no information is the worst because then it's like...OK I know something's out there but what dammit?

When Brennan said Fig would have to do opposed athletics against Adaine, that was the first time I was like, "Oh thank God she's so weak."

Murph forgetting to uncanny dodge until midway through the ep was uncharacteristic. Really shows how wild the fight was. 

"This kid likes to get his ass beat to a soundtrack."

Fabian refusing to just use the stairs like a normal person. 

Penelope going, "What's your deal?" like she's not helping an evil dragon who wants to rule the world. 

JAWBONE

JAWBONE JAWBONE JAWBONE

My man Jawbone shot way up on the list of cool adults today.

For real, the scene with Jawbone and Adaine was my second favorite moment of the episode and it would have been my favorite if not for a bit of divine intervention later. 

I already made a post about this but Jawbone notices Adaine flipping the hell out and he asks her if she has panic attacks and if her parents gave her any meds for it. She responds in, like, the smallest, most broken and defeated voice with a tiny head shake, "My parents just left and I don't know where they are." Gah, my heart. She was half crying. I was half awake and being kicked in the face with the full force of human emotion. It was a lot. I felt like I was a kid watching that one scene from Fresh Prince again but British-er. She gets that her parents suck and she hates them but she's 14. Everyone wants their parents to love them. It's like in our DNA.

And then Jawbone launches into the wildest motivational speech ever (including all of Kristen's, which is saying a lot) which starts with him sucking off a border patrol agent. (You understand me?/No!)

Ally, MVP of Terrible Speeches: *That* was the point?

Siobhan trying not to crack up and break character throughout that whole scene was great.

I love that Brennan was clearly trying to not encourage people to mess with their med dosage irl because he was very specific about that but also he was like, "A dragon is about to end the world so please shotgun this bottle of magic Xanax and hop on that bike."

I love that Adaine has all the magic stuff in her inventory and then also Xanax.

Aww, Jawbone offered to let her live with him because her house burned down. (I guess that info was on the news?)

And then Adaine rolls a 20 with the help from her meds (and buffs) right away! It's great when the dice cooperate.

"I came here to FUCK SHIT UP. And help children."

"Jawbone rules. I'm so glad we helped him get his life together."

Jawbone is such a sketch person but such a good counselor.

Siobhan calling Goldenhoard and absolute fucking unit sayed be at 5 in the morning when I watched this.

"I AM A CHILD. YOU ARE ATTACKING A BUNCH OF CHILDREN YOU COWARD."

"Then why is your dick out?" Adaine joining in Fig w/ the taunting Goldenhoard via accusations of flirting. 

"Why are you guys partially singed?"/"Because he's been attacking us Dad! Also Dad, he kind of used to come on to me all the time."

"Play the drums more and we'll have a full band on stage!"/"...Instead."

"You ruined prom!"/"I RUINED PROM?"

At this point I was thinking, "Geez, there's not a lot of episode left and Penelope isn't even dead yet. How could they possibly defeat Goldenhoard AND have time for tying up loose ends?" TPK vibes increase.

Adaine getting a nat 20 on Arcana, "Yeah it is what it is. You're screwed."

Hell yeah for Adaine giving Goldenhoard her low divination roll to ensure her lightning bolt hit. Not that it ended up mattering that much but still. Sick.

"Well you could have told me before this very moment!"/"I was dead!"

I just checked on the stats of an an adult red dragon in 5E and it's got 256 HP. 256! And look at the other stats! They're wild.

"This is the number of dice?"/"Yeah."/"God."

Fig goes down. Their secondary healer. So, not good. Very not good.

Brennan letting Emily burn Goldenhoard's tie as she passes out because Emily refuses to do nothing.

And Riz goes down too! The one with the med kit! At this point I was like, there is no way this can end well.

"How far away is the hospital?" I love it when they try just normal solutions in this magic game like calling their parents and going to the hospital.

It is an hour and 47 minutes into the episode before Adaine remembers she's wearing a magic coat that can make her anything (within reason). Which, to be fair, it took me a little bit too but, in my defense, I'm not staring at her character sheet.

Real talk, I didn't think she was gonna get anything from the jacket from that ask. Something to beat Kalvaxis is such a big ask.

When Brennan started going into the jacket stuff I was like, this is a really weird deus ex machina if that's what this is. But also, the kids have been hilariously chill with just having Adaine walk around in a jacket filled with people.

There was a lot to unpack there and I'll got to it in another post but I can't do another 4k epic this week y'all. I have work in the morning.

Adaine yelling for Basrar to get them their ice cream before they freaking die.

Aww Gorthalax tried to heal Fig instead of attacking.

"Daddy that was a waste of a turn."

Gorgug who has a million hit points went down and all the healers are down. There are less than ten minutes left in the episode. TPK for sure, I'm thinking.

Adaine flipping people off with a vengeance today.

Also the fact that she totally forgot that she could ask for a healing potion which is totally a thing that she almost def would have been able to get is hilarious. I mean it wouldn't have been as funny if the episode ended differently but, as it stands, hilarious.

"Does the Hangman know medicine?"

"What about this student? Is he studying to be a cleric?"

Adaine is down. That's everyone down but Fabian. Three and a half minutes left. And that's when I realize. There's not enough time for a good ending, but there's not enough time for a bad ending either. But there's no S2. This is an anthology series. What's going on here my sleepy 6am brain is saying.

Fig giving her dad bardic inspiration while passed out because Emily is Emily.

Everyone (exceptt Riz) was making their saves. I'm thinking, "Is next season different characters, same setting. Maybe a bunch of years in the future? Legacy characters?" I'm trying to put together the fact that this is the finale with 2 minutes left with the fact that they're playing different characters next season. The pieces aren't fitting. 

And that's because I couldn't have predicted what was about to happen.

Ally, clearly joking says, "Can I roll for a nat 20 and just be alive?"

Brennan, barely thinking, says, "Sure, go for it," as casually as if he was okaying a perception check.

Murph and Lou are cracking up at the absurdity of the ask. 

Ally says, "This is to the corn god," half solem, half smiling.

Siobhan holds her hand over the dice like she's blessing them.

"I know I left for a while," Ally starts as the dice are cast and...

"NAT 20 MOTHERFUCKER!"

Everyone goes WILD.

Ally punches air.

Brennan looks like someone slapped him.

Emily: You have to rip up your comparative world religions book.

BONUS EPISODE UNLOCKED

And what did we learn today? A 5 percent chance is small, but not insignificant. 

OK, there’s one thing I want to address before I tap out for the night (and it’s not spell checking. I’ll do that in the morning).

I saw some people discussing the possibility that they faked the ending. Like, they just edited it like that to give them another chance because they were all about to die. Beyond the fact that I just trust them to not have done that, the other big reason I don’t think that’s likely is because there was a much more seamless way of stacking the deck in their favor. Brennan could have had Adaine pull literally anything out of her jacket. And I truly mean anything because this is a finale. Even if he gave her something game breaking, it wouldn’t have set a precedent because it’s the last ep. And that’s beyond all the NPCs that could plausibly have come in because they know something is up and teleportation is a thing in this world. Nah, I think that was just good, old fashioned, luck of the roll and thank Helio because they needed it.

OK, that’s it for now! Join me at some point between now and next ep to unpack this because it’s a lot and apparently we have another episode to get through. Hoot growl baby!

[purple-moonlights-blog]

STRAY KIDS 10th MEMBER AU

INTRODUCTION

This AU is heavily inspired by @k-llama-llama ! If you don’t know her I highly suggest checking out her blog, she and her writings are really sweet (also some good drama just started in her AU). 🌸

I’m not 100% sure where I’m going with this AU, so please feel free to request and suggest what could happen. I really want to take in ideas from people who are interested in the story. Don’t be shy loves! ♥︎ 

☾☼ 

Btw. I didn’t use her name until the very end because my dumb ass forgot to give her a name.

Also, in this scenario, Stray Kids themselves aren’t very present since it didn’t really fit. However, I promise that next time will be a lot of Stray Kids content! 

▸ Check out the Profile HERE

▸ Request for the AU HERE

▸ MASTERLIST

Words: 2342

Warnings: Swearing?⎮ And weird grammar and spelling mistakes, English is not my native language⎮

I. NEW 〈NOVA〉

(gif not mine)

With her eyebrows knitted together and her upper-lip slightly twisted up, an expression her friend David stated to be her “trying to be polite but can’t help but judge“ look - or in other words, her being a twat visage - she stared at the man, probably in his mid-thirties, in front of her. 

For the past five minutes he spoke very fast and in a very strong Satoori accent, she had difficulties to understand, and thereby wildly gesticulate with his arms. The longer he talked the more he began to sweat and looked noticeably more nervous. She wasn’t intentionally trying to be rude by not saying a word the whole time, even though she was more than once encouraged to respond to his rambling. However, due to her having a hard time progressing what he was saying - her Korean might be quite good, thanks to her mum compelling her and her brothers too Korean lesson since the early beginnings of their childhood, yet she only learned standard Korean - and immediately doubting what he was saying to be true, she kept her mouth shut until she had a clear picture of what was going on. From what she could grasp, the man was responsible to recruit trainees for entertainment companies, which in the end should turn them in successful idols, that bring big profits and put the companies into positive spotlights. 

He explained that he was from JYP and that Park Jinyoung personally placed in order, after allegedly seeing a video of a street performance of her dancing and singing, to track her down and convince her to audition for his company. He further explained that JYP - the company - planned to form an idol group in the upcoming month of October through a survival show and JYP - the person - wanted her in it because she would in his opinion fit perfectly into the concept. 

Bullocks, she instantly thought when he told her that. 

She didn’t believe a word coming from his mouth. Yes, it was true that she appeared in multiple videos of street performances that are posted on YouTube, however, she was neither an outstanding dancer nor a Whitney Huston, at least in her opinion. The more he talked the more it sounded like the plot of a Wattpad fanfiction and as the result of her distinct sense of reality, which often came across as her being pessimistic, she knew stuff like that doesn’t happen in real life. It’s called Fan Fiction after all.  

The whole story sounded like a lie somebody, who kidnaps young girls and boys for human trafficking by exploiting their naivety and their dreams to make it big once, would tell. By that, she suddenly remembered her 14 years old cousin Junsuh conspiracy theory rant about the Korean entertainment industries. Two weeks ago she visited her relatives in Ilsan, where her Junshu, as usually, didn’t stop talking. According to Junsuh, the industry is through and through corrupt - a single stronghold of prostitution rings, human trafficking, child exploitation and even religious cults and a secret origination that controls the whole south of Korea. 

Even though Junsuh tends to get carried away with his theories - she strongly doubted, that one of the big three companies (he refused to tell which one) pays a religious cult to use black magic on the public, so they will only buy the albums of their artists - however, that it wasn’t only glamorous and that pressure and hard work take big role in the idols life, wasn’t a secret. 

Earning her livelihood through music has always been a dream for her. From small on she loved to sing - back then extremely out of tune - and dance around. When in 2008 her cousin Jia (Junsuh’s older sister), while she and her family visited their relatives in Korea, showed her Shinee’s debut MV Replay, she fell in love. Immediately she learned the dances and lyrics to the songs and dreamed of being an idol herself. The combination of vocal, rap and dance fascinated her. 

Yet, after time passes and she got older, her initial spirit disappeared almost completely. More and more she realized that she didn’t fit into the standard female idol category. Beginning with her appearance ending with her personality. She wouldn’t call herself a tomboy since she despite her boyish tendency still liked typical girly stuff. In end, she always thought of separating certain things in a boy and girl category as stupid. 

One day, her aunt took her to the toy store when she was made 5 years old. She asked her aunt if she could have Hot Wheels for her birthday present. The saleswoman, however, who should help her to find something, asked if doesn’t want something that is more fitting for a girl. Her five-year-old self suddenly feeling insecure choose a creepy doll, which the sale woman suggested - she ended up giving the creepy doll to the family dog to play with. 

„Look, you don’t need to say yes right now. But please just come to JYP building tomorrow for the audition. Well, it’s not really an audition, you are basically already in. You just need to say yes.“ The sudden change to a clean Seoul accent made her startle up from her thoughts. The man in front of her got now her full attention. He almost looked desperate. 

It is probably favorable for his career if he gets me to come to the “audition“. South Korea is highly competitive after all, she guessed

„Okay.“

„It doesn’t take long either you….wait, what?“

„I said, okay. When should I be there?“ He looked at her seemingly being genuinely surprised to hear her agree. Sure, she only accepted because she felt bad for him. Also, her class started in 5 minutes and she simply didn’t want to be rude and refuse after his effort. Nonetheless, the fact that he knew her name and where she went to University, still creeped her out. 

„Umm, well 10 a.m. Wait in front of the building, I will escort you in.“

„Good, I will be there.“ She said and then added quickly before she went ahead to run to the other side of the campus to still be on time for her class. „Have a good day.“

————

 At 09:30 a.m. sharp she was in front of the JYP building. She always tended to come over punctual, mainly because she included the time she will need in case anything goes wrong by her taking the bus - a short 25-minute ride - from Seongdong District on the north bank of the Han River to Gangnam District, which lies on the south side of the Han River. 

Traffic jam, traffic collision, plane crashes, nuclear attacks, apocalypse and what so ever. Her constant nagging anxiety back in her head made her throw her common sense out of the window more than once. 

Certainly, she didn’t expect anything, she highly doubted that the apparent JYP staff member was being legit. Either somebody was playing a prank on her or one of Junsuh’s theories will be confirmed and she is going to be sold. 

In a girl group, she would stand out and not in a good way like a pretty flower would. No, she would stand out like a purulent pimple in the middle of one’s forehead. Not like she was particularly ugly or different looking. The fact that she was not special looking was the issue. In general, she was glad about that. She was never big on being the center of attention. However, in the entertainment industry, like it or not, talent is not everything. And her being as interesting as an empty sheet of paper, surley didn’t take a chance. 

After awkwardly standing around for good 25 minutes, somebody came out of the building. She immediately recognized him as the man from yesterday. 

He wasn’t lying about working for JYP then, she thought. 

As he looked to his left and saw her standing there, he sighed with relief and beckoned her over to him. By his reaction, she assumed that he obviously didn’t believe that she will come. But she was not the type to do tell somebody she would be there and then shamelessly not come without giving the other person a notice.    

„You won’t regret this, believe me.“ He said as they walked through the lobby to the elevator. „They really want you in this group.“ Who he meant with they, she wasn’t sure. He chuckled awkwardly since she didn’t respond to anything he said but rather she just nodded and gave him a forced smile. Again, she wasn’t trying to be rude, for sure not, after all in her family having good manners was an essential part. Her very English grandmother would personally fly to Korea and beat her ass if she was being rude. 

In the elevator were already three guys, she guessed them around her age, absorbed in a discussion about, from what she could understand, song lyrics. 

„Listen, I swear it’s good.“ Said the guy, with the darkest hair of the three of them. „You can be Fiona today, I’ll be Shrek. Ugly kind immature swag.“

She snorted and quietly chuckled to herself. The guy closest to her with silver, curly hair her, who heard her laugh, looked over to her. He raised his brow’s at first and then gave her a shy smile, which she returned.

On the fifth floor, they left the elevator and male staff knocked two times on the first door in the hallway, before he opened it and showed with a quick hand gesture that she should follow him. In the room was big glass table where three men already sat. She immediately recognized the man seated in the middle. 

 It’s JYP, It really was not a joke after all.

„Ah, there she is. Please take a seat.“ JYP said and gestured on the chair opposite of him. She bowed and sat down. 

After he asked the staff member to leave he continued: „I’m really glad you are here. When I saw your performance I know you will fit perfectly.“ 

„I was told, if I would accept the offer, I will participate in survival show, right?“ She asked, slowing starting to feel excited. Even though, she gave up on her dream of being an idol a long time ago - better said, she never really tried in the first place. Deep down she still wanted to achieve that and such an opportunity she couldn’t refuse. Even if that meant she had to change herself to fit in. 

„Yes, exactly. I really hope you take this chance. Even though you don’t have a training period as the other trainees participating, I believe you have potential.“

„Okay, I’m in. Where do I have to sign“ she said, full of newly found elan. The three men chuckled surprised about her sudden enthusiasm.

„The formalities we will sort out later.“ JYP answered, „Stray Kids, the name of the group you might debut in, has currently nine male trainees, which your leader Bang Chan handpicked himself.“

„Boys?“ She questioned confused.

„Yes, the management and I decided by making Stray Kids a co-ed group it will be more favorable in the future.“ He continued undeterred. She had to stop herself from making a snarky comment and asking them if they are trying to be edgy be doing that. 

There is no need to act like a twat right now!

„But none of our female trainees fit in Stray Kids. So, I was obviously pleased when I found you. I hope I’m not going to regret this.“ The last part sounded bitter and her previous enthusiasm was slowly suppressed by the anxiety creeping up her throat, making her feel sick.  

She didn’t want to back away now. 

Maybe it’s better to be in a male-dominated group. It’s not like I fit in a girl group either, she tried to calm herself down mentally. 

However, the fact that all other trainees were chosen by Stray Kids leader personally and that she basically was being forced onto them, made her feel like she was going to vomit. 

„They are already informed about your addition to the group. In fact, I want them to get to know you right now. Teamwork is important and the faster you warm up to each the better!“ With that, he stood up, bowed to his colleges and told her to follow him. She bowed to the older men too and left after JYP.

„The kids are probably in the practice room right now. Since they got the chance to debut, they have been prating twice as hard.“ He said, obviously proud about the trainee’s dedication. „I heard they are very excited to meet you.“

Bollocks! I will be extremely out of place. No way any of them are excited for a possible female member. 

Despite, her anxiety she didn’t wanna give up this time. She can’t just run away every time there was a construction put in her way. At last, trying wasn’t going to kill. 

They went down to the second floor. At the end of the hallway, JYP opened the wooden door to the practice room and stepped in. As JYP and she entered, four guys who sat on the floor rushed to stand up and joined five other guys to bow to their CEO. Some looked very young to her. She would have guessed at least two of them fifteen years old at most.

„Please introduce yourself to them,“ JYP told her and encouraged her with a quick hand gesture to step in front. 

All eyes were on her now. Some of them seemed curious, others just stared at her expressionless. And then, there was the guy with the silver hair from the elevator. He looked at her like he wanted to burn her down with his gaze. She honestly couldn’t take offense at that. Like, she understood his seeming dislike of her. 

„My Name is Seol Nova and I hope we can work well together.