#sorry for the onslaught of tags 😭 | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

chaotic-orphan · 10 months ago

Note

Hiiii !!!!

May I please request where you write a story where a villain whumps a hero into loving and obeying them but then it backfires and the hero is a toxic lover and whumps villain outta possessive and obsessiveness ?

Thanks if you do !!! Your writing is literally SOOOO fire girlie 😭🔥🔥🔥🔥 I’ve literallyy been eating up the febuwhump prompts

Twisted Love

TW: lady Whump, lady Whumpee, male Whumper, yandere Whumper, intimate Whumper, creepy Whumper, hero Whumpee, villain Whumper, Whump love, but not consensual at all, kidnapped hero,

Please lmk if I missed any tags! 🙏

@xxgalgurlxx what a fun prompt! Thank you so much! It’s a series, I’m sorry, I can’t fit it all into one snippet!

*~*~*~*~*

Hero had just gotten back to her feet when her eyes trained on Villain raising his arm in front of him, fingers splayed. Hero didn’t have time to react as she was slammed backwards into the brickwork at the end of the alley. She let out an involuntary gasp, her back and ribs aching from the force of the impact.

Her mind was like sludge, moving too slow to react to Villain’s easy onslaught of attack after attack. Not to mention his stupid telekinesis that made everything he did effortless. Every fight easily won.

Villain didn’t even let Hero fall to the ground, instead she was held against the wall, feet dangling a few inches above the ground, arms flailing uselessly to attack Villain’s hold. She might as well have been fighting air, but Villain’s bone crushing grip didn’t feel like air. It felt like Hero was being squashed from every side, like Villain was squeezing a grape between his fingers.

“Give up yet?” Villain asked politely, advancing on Hero after Hero seized struggling, but it was all false. Everything about Villain was false. The politeness was just another layer of smug that Hero hated.

“Yeah, keep talking. You just know you couldn’t win in a real fight.”

The hand holding Hero squeezed tighter until Hero gasped out in pain, curling in on herself.

“I could just watch you all day,” Villain hummed appreciatively. He stopped two feet away from Hero, a passive smile on his face but his eyes… Villain’s eyes looked hungry and full of something that Hero couldn’t quite discern.

Hero threw her arm forward. Glinting metal turned over metal in the moonlight and stopped mid air, just in front of Villain’s cheek.

Villain smiled and tsked, grabbing the knife by the handle and turning it between his fingers with a dramatic sigh.

“That wasn’t very nice Hero,” Villain said, gently scolding her. His smirking eyes dancing with dark promise as be said, “someone should really teach you some manners.”

Another invisible hand grabbed both of Hero’s and pinned them against the wall. Hero jerked forward, trying to free herself but she had no grip on anything! She couldn’t even gain purchase on the ground because her feet were hovering above it.

Hero let out a frustrated groan as she kicked out, trying to dislodge herself in anyway. Villain’s eyes lit up at Hero’s renewed struggles.

“So feisty. So persistent,” Villain whispered. He was standing in front of Hero now and Hero blinked back her surprise, stifling a gasp. When had that happened? Villain grazed the tip of her knife from the center of Hero’s palm up her wrist and arm. Hero’s breath hitched when the cool blade touched her skin. “I bet I could make you grovel.”

That sent a shiver down Hero’s spine that she tried her damnedest to suppress. Wait, Villain was so close. Hero kicked out at Villain, but again, just before her feet made contact something caught Hero round the ankles and yanked them down.

Hero slid down the wall with a surprised yelp, eyes wide as her feet touched the ground and grew stuck there, her entire body immobile against the dusty brickwork behind her. Villain was taller than her, Hero realised as she swallowed, staring at Villain’s chest.

Villain brought Hero’s own knife up her shoulder and then throat, before pressing the flat of the blade up under Hero’s chin. The tip biting into her neck as he tilted Hero’s chin up to stare into Villain’s eyes, which sent a rush of ice through Hero’s veins.

Something primal in the back of her mind told her to run, to flee, to get out of there. That Villain was dangerous and a threat to her continued survival.

“God, look at you,” Villain hummed. With his free hand he reached up to cup Hero’s cheek, thumb stroking over Hero’s cheekbone. Hero did shiver at that, and jerk her arms back trying to escape the unrelenting invisible hold. “You are magnificent. That little spark of defiance in your pretty little eyes, the fear…”

“Get off of me, you creep!” Hero spat, trying to turn her head away from Villain, mostly to just stop looking at that dangerous glint in his smirking eyes. Villain didn’t let her turn an inch. The moment Hero’s head twitched to move, Villain brought the flat of her blade up to Hero’s other cheek, stopping her from moving.

“You know what Hero?” Villain said, leaning his face in close to Hero’s. Hero pressed her head against the wall, trying to get away from him, but Villain kept leaning in nonetheless until his lips were inches from Hero’s. Hero let out a quiet, powerless whine in the back of her throat, her heart thundering against her chest. Villain smiled, bone chilling and cold. “I think I’ll take you home with me.”

Hero’s stomach bottomed out. “No!”

Villain leaned in closer and for a breath-stealing moment, Hero thought Villain was going to kiss her. Instead Villain pressed his lips against Hero’s ear. Delighting in the shiver she couldn’t fight.

“Yes, little Hero. You’ll be my greatest prize. I’ll keep you suspended like this, like a trophy. Maybe in the entrance hall.”

“No,” Hero whispered, trembling against the telekinetic hold. The only thing that stood between Hero and her freedom. She flinched when she felt tears fall onto her cheeks. “Let me go, please,” Hero sniffed.

Villain pulled back, a grin on his face. “Now why would I do that, Hero?”

Villain stepped back, leaving a little distance between them, not as much as Hero would like, but enough. She couldn’t stop shaking, and she hated herself for it. Adrenaline was rushing through her veins like bolts of electricity, trying to feed Hero’s muscles and give her strength to flee, to fight, to escape.

It all just sat useless below the surface.

Villain let Hero’s knife swing down from her cheek and reached his hands forward. Hero slammed her eyes shut and looked away waiting for the blow to come.

Instead, a deep, rumbling chuckle sounded in front of her. Hero risked opening her eyes to see Villain sliding Hero’s knife back into its sheath on her thigh. His fingers lingering on Hero’s thigh. It made bile climb up Hero’s throat.

“Please, don’t touch me,” Hero pleaded, her voice so broken. So light. So terrified. Bargaining with a Villain!

Villain’s fingers drew up to Hero’s waist and lingered there. “Hero. Look at me.”

Hero refused. She kept her gaze stubbornly on the wall of the alley. Until that invisible hand was on her cheek and turning her head, against her will, to face Villain.

She swallowed and mustered up all her hatred into her glare when she met his dark eyes. Villain let out a breath, that same sickening smile on his face.

The snap of her cuffs being unclipped from her belt drew her attention down, but the invisible hand pushed her head back up to look at Villain. She let out a frustrated groan to his laughter.

“Come on, Hero. I can’t have you fighting me on the way home.”

“Go to hell!” Hero spat.

Villain grinned a lazy grin. “Only if you come with me, sweetheart.”

Villain reached his hand up to Hero’s wrist pinned to the wall, taking his sweet time in opening the cuffs. Hero knew what she was going to do before Villain even touched her. The moment he let the hold slip she was going to bolt for it. Slap him, push him, distract him, something. If she could reach her knife—

Villain put a hand on her wrist and she felt the telekinetic hold loosen. She shoved forward with all her strength. Villain’s eyes went wide, gaze cutting into her face but she just needed that moment of surprise. She felt the hold drop completely and she ducked under his arms, grabbing her dagger from it’s sheath and cutting Villain’s knee as she surged forwards.

Villain cried out behind her but Hero didn’t care. She didn’t have time to care. She had to make it to the mouth of the alley before he got his bearings. She felt the adrenaline surge in her calves, her lungs taking in more air, her heart beating more blood.

A hand caught her ankle. Hero was thrown forward by her own momentum, hands out to brace her fall. Her palms grazed against the stone, but she was already twisting her body, turning, expecting Villain to still be at the end of the alley. She could throw her dagger again and catch him.

It all went so well in her head.

She gasped when she saw those brown eyes up close. He was above her, knees on either side of her waist that pinned her beneath his body.

He didn’t look angry, just sickly entertained. He didn’t use his telekinesis. He used his own hands to pin her wrists to the ground above her head. She cried out when he slammed her dagger wielding hand against the pavement, once, twice, three times— again and again until finally she dropped it with a clatter.

“No!” She cried, struggling beneath him but he didn’t take his time this time. He snapped the cuffs open and the weight settled cold against her wrist. She could feel her powers draining, muting under the power dampeners. “No! Get off me! HELP! Somebo—”

Villain clamped his hand over her mouth, leaning his weight down onto it. She cried out, her free hand going to his, trying to dislodge it.

“A hero crying for help?” He asked with a smirk. “How ironic.”

Escape be damned. For one second she wanted to wipe that smugness off his stupid face.

She stopped fumbling with his wrist and instead slammed her hand up, palm first and aimed for his throat, his stupid adam’s apple.

Her hand stopped an inch away. Eyes widening as she watched it tremble. Villain pressed a kiss to her palm, then her wrist while Hero was powerless to push up or pull back. She let out a frustrated moan in the back of her throat as he laced his fingers through hers.

“Oh you are going to be so much fun,” Villain said, his eyes half lidded, smirk still on his face as he gazed down at Hero. “Now, are you going to promise not to scream or are you going to force me to knock you out?”

Hero huffed a breath out through her nose and Villain removed his hand.

“I won’t scream.”

Villain tilted his head. “Now why don’t I trust you?”

“Probably because you’re currently kidnapping me, you bastard!”

“Kidnapping makes it sound so romantic doesn’t it?”

Hero bucked her hips under him, revelling in the slight widening of his eyes at her sudden movement. Hero clicked her fingers and her knife summoned back into her palm. Hero had only a second to enjoy the familiar feeling before Villain was off her and yanked Hero to her feet.

Villain slammed the knife out of her palm, but she didn’t even have time to mourn the loss of it when Villain yanked her back, spinning her so her back was to his front.

Villain grabbed her free hand and wrestled it back into the other cuff, as if she wasn’t struggling at all. The sound of the cuff clicking closed was like the final nail in her coffin.

She froze for a moment, not being able to feel her knives around her. The weight of them on her body was a small mercy. It was such an uncomfortable feeling. As if her arm had just been severed, a limb taken from her.

It took a breath for her to acclimatise. Then she cried out in anger and slammed her head back. It connected with Villain’s chest, not even relishing the surprised breath she stole from his lungs she hook her leg around the back of his and slammed her head back again so they went to the ground. She rolled the minute his back hit the ground and got to her feet with a little difficulty.

She didn’t even have time to think of running before she felt that giant invisible hand grab her and pick her up, leaving her dangling useless in the air.

Villain was on the ground, turned on his side, elbow bent, propping his head up on his palm. That stupid smirk in his stupid eyes.

“Honestly, it would be wise of me to knock you out, but you struggle so beautifully that it would be a crime to not watch you try and stop me on the way home.”

“I’m going to kill you,” Hero promised.

Villain flashed her a grin. “I look forward to it.”

Villain was on his feet in a second, Hero’s knife in one hand. He gestured his hand down and Hero sunk to the ground in front of him.

“Now, open wide.”

Hero frowned at him. Villain grinned and pointed at his cheeks. “Say aah!”

Hero didn’t know what he wanted her to do, but she damn sure wasn’t going to do it if he wanted her to.

He placed his thumb over her lips and pulled down. “Come on now, Hero. Play nice.”

Hero opened her mouth to bite him but instead Villain pushed the hilt of her dagger into her mouth. Before she could spit it out she felt his real hand and his invisible one slam her chin up, forcing her to bite down on the handle.

“Hold that for me, will you?”

“Oohk—” she began but coughed as her tongue got caught around the hilt.

“Oh, be careful, Hero. Wouldn’t want you to choke now, would we?”

Hero wanted to scream, she wanted to fight. She wanted to be able to move her body and open her mouth, but she didn’t get any of that, not with Villain in front of her.

Villain put a hand on her arm, sliding down to rest on her wrist and steered her forward towards the mouth of the alley. “You are going to simply adore the boot of my car.”

81 notes · View notes

desognthinking · 10 months ago

Text

WIP... Wednesday

Tagged by @willowedhepatica (thanks!) I'm so sorry that this comes so late 😭 life got in the way. Not sure who i can tag who has things in the works they can share, but please Please know if anyone has any snippets or sneak peaks I would love to see them and yell about them with you pleaseee

Not strictly a WIP but here’s just under 3.5k of an oldish experimental AU inspired by this post :’) in this one they’re… *checks notes*, ah, hmm. Chimerical tomb guardians carved from stone.

-----

It’s a wickedly stormy day when a procession scores up the hill through beating rain and blowing dust, but there’s no time to waste. The wedding will not wait, and on its occasion, as a symbol of the new ties between the families of the bride and the groom, there is a terrible, beautiful new guardian grotesque to be received by the Silva tombhouse from the Salviuses.

It is surely mounted on the property sometime during the silver-black onslaught of sky upon earth, but Beatrice cannot clearly see it through the rain and the maze of trees that still separates the Silvas from their neighbors. The families on this hill are not quite rich enough to expand at the pace of the wealthiest among them, who slice and raze to add to their already broad campuses of tombs. Instead, in this part of town, modest, often unmatching clusters dwell amongst the wildflowers and long-lived trees sprayed across the land.

Beatrice likes the nature. Her perch is kept cool by the damp and dewy mornings, birdsong flickering from above and around. In the filtered haze of heat and light there is some measure of peace too – here, there is less to fight over, and fewer lines of tension between the families. Hidden by farther slopes, there are fewer threats from beyond. And, overshadowed by the lower circuit of large gated tombhouses, there are far milder spoils for aspiring robbers.

It’s from one of these large inner-city tombhouses that the new stone protector is said to arrive. The Salviuses have money spilling out their hands and down their wrists. It’s said, it’s said, it’s said – it’s whispered in the wind that carries the falling leaves from vine to vane, so easy for Beatrice to stretch up and put an ear to. The pollen clouds dispersed over grass in shapes spelling disruption and newcomer. It’s gossiped over pages in the library, first with smug nods and just you wait and see, dear, we’re never wrong from the grandfathers and grandmothers as Beatrice pores through the volumes in the upper shelves, precious books pressed so high and so far back that they’re backed into both wall and ceiling.

Then, inevitably, it carries through the air in the giggles and hushed gasps of the living members of this family, hands curling over yarn and needle as the youngest children breathlessly run and hide behind the walls and in the shadowy pockets of the tombhouse. The Great-great-great Grandmother who had been the first to break the news is mollified by the confirmation, and generously refuses to gloat.

A Silva girl is marrying a Salvius boy, and the Salviuses are pledging a guardian – the spirits know they have too many anyway, but still, a Salvius guardian – to this hill.

“You’ve got to go over and see what’s going on,” Beatrice is instructed one morning, in no uncertain terms. They’re going over integration by partial fractions on the little platform at the back that looks down over the mills: her, Great-Grandfather, and Lilith, who’s slunk over yet again from the Villaumbrosias’ for some ‘peace and quiet’, and also because Beatrice’s family likes her for some mysterious reason. They pretend it’s because they need the extra pair – or, well, pairs, in Lilith’s case – of eyes. The massive, foreboding, Villaumbrosia affair the next hill over already boasts so many fearsome hands on deck, and they only have one Beatrice.

Great-grandfather is gentle and teasing about it; Beatrice (and Lilith, although she will never admit it) is his favorite captive audience.

Of course, it’s easy to treat her as one of their own on mornings like this — quiet summer days when she’s stripped of silica and scale, descended from her weatherworn perch. Devoid of the coarse matter of rock and metal twisted into hungry, flame-spitting fangs, and instead merely a soft-spoken spirit in a youthful skin. When the great grandfathers and mothers and their grandfathers and grandmothers look at her and see dark, almost-human eyes and loosely-bound hair in a bun above her shoulders.

And when Beatrice walks Lilith out and across the rocky way that leads home, it’s easy for them to wave the two of them off. After all, Lilith is just a young woman with black waves she tucks carefully behind her ears and a handsome, slanting jaw that could almost pass as being real; as being pressed and molded with muscle and mandible and a fragile, mycelial network of vasculature and nerves. Not another delicate illusion that would slip and shatter at the first sign of danger, revealing in a flash the grotesque ugliness within.

There hasn’t been an attack in a while. When there hasn’t been an attack in a while Beatrice thinks the family tends to forget where exactly they hold court.

(Here, cradled close enough within these hills to walk back to where home once was. Children’s handprints on the threshold, coal scribbles on the floor. Walls still perfused with the fragrance and vapor of hot homemade stew.)

This is a graveyard. This is a necropolis, a city of the dead. It slithers amongst the roots of the living but does not make a home of it. In its palm lies the fragile in-between, the sickly sweet intersection where the living and the after-dead mingle like the meeting of two clouds. Within its grounds the family is wont to forget the ruthlessness that’s sometimes needed to keep it in balance.

Once they depart, Beatrice and Lilith’s guises fall away. Invisible to a still-beating heart, two terrible chimeras gouge skid-marks through the dirt to get to the Villaumbrosia citadel before its guests arrive at ten-thirty. Miraculously, only twice during the entire trip does Lilith half-heartedly threaten to snap Beatrice’s tail off.

They make it there just in time. Beatrice watches as Lilith sweeps her way up the manicured moss columns and melds, in a quick thrash, with the magnificent dark-gray creature of stone that lunges out from the south turret. Frozen like this: mouth curled in a snarl and sharp wings flung out – in mockery, in bombast, in warning; Lilith at her most vindictive and most frightening, the elaborate Villaumbrosia insignia branded hot and painful down her side.

Beatrice knows it hurts, of course. Perhaps less so like this but certainly in the flesh, where it is always red and raw like the day it was carved down Lilith’s ribs in the workshop. Preserved unchanging in the meat as it is preserved forever in the rock. Lilith winces, when she thinks the others aren’t looking, but Beatrice knows. Camila might say something – probably does say something, but Beatrice doesn’t. She understands too well, and after all, what can they do?

After all, this is their work. This is life: whatever is asked of them. For Lilith today, it is to be a showpiece for guests at a bloated, overwrought tea ceremony. Broadly, it is watchman, and protector, and advocate. And at times like these, when there is a stir in the tangled ecosystem of bloodlines and their guardian-creatures, Beatrice is called upon to be an ambassador.

So, the day after the storm, Beatrice leaves her perch to seek out the Silvas. She glides down from the still-slippery stone, and lands softly on the wet earth, scale meeting fur meeting soil and humid air.

In her hands – her metaphorical hands – she clasps fistfuls of string that stretch, infinitely thin, to every corner of her tombhouse. She flexes each one and puts it between her teeth as she steps over the threshold and into the trees, testing their elasticity and tensile strength. If there is to be a twang, however minute, she must feel it. There is only one of her at home.

As she approaches the Silva tombhouse the air around her shifts and seems to solidify into a medium both probing and warning. Beatrice stills, allowing the woods to see her and course through her calmness. They know her, of course, and she waits for them to pass on the message to the newest guardian, still incredibly sensitive to the prickle of unfamiliar movement and sound.

Presently, physically, the world exhales.

Beatrice cautiously continues forward, until the treeline peels away to reveal the Silva tombhouse.

Tombhouse, as it goes, is a misnomer – a tombhouse is a complex rather than a single shell. It is no single cell for a coffin, but a collection of connected mausoleums and courtyards and passageways and corners and gates, lifted high and tunneled low. And as befitting a clan of esteemed craftsmen, the Silva tombhouse is a harmonious set spiraling outwards in organic whorls. Its walls are scraped clean and brushed beige, curled and leafed and folded in at the edges. Delicate and pretty in its strength in a way Beatrice’s own plain, stoic little set of residences could never be.

At the top of the central mausoleum, bounded by a parapet, rests a flat platform. On that ledge sits the new grotesque.

Ink-black stone peeks curiously down at Beatrice.

Immediately it is clear that she is like nothing Beatrice has ever seen before. Yes, as is tradition she is joined and jawed together piecemeal from various symbolic beasts, but this composition and style is unique.

She’s simultaneously entirely unlike both the typical statues produced by-the-dozen in the workshops, and the specially commissioned sculptures like Beatrice herself. This guardian is a patchwork of shapes and textures Beatrice has only ever seen in the watercolor sketches of her tombhouse’s own library as belonging to exotic creatures from faraway places. Still other elements escape her recognition and description, and everything meshes deftly at smooth, near-invisible seams.

Perhaps this isn’t surprising in a Salvius guardian – Jillian’s own commission too, it’s rumored. No less should be expected from someone the alchemists and scientists alike shy away from. Jillian Salvius considers herself a traveler, and a collector, and a dabbler, and Beatrice hears that the spokes of her gates are gnarled and carved in strange patterns from foreign lands.

The guardian shifts and cocks her head curiously, and Beatrice pulls herself together sharply.

“Hi,” the creature says. “You must be the neighbor from the east.”

Beatrice snaps back into polite, exceedingly proper posture. She nods, dipping forward in a movement resembling a bow. It makes the high-perched creature giggle, gauzy like air.

“Good morning,” she replies. “My name is Beatrice, and you’re right. How did you know?”

The guardian doesn’t answer. She separates from her stone in a miasma of color, swoops down noisily, and lands, a little clumsily, on a lower ledge. “Two heads, huh?” she says, thoughtfully. “Kinda perfect for the scholars.”

It’s not said judgmentally; more so with a further curious slant of her head, observational and light. Beatrice feels strange and semisolid all over.

She doesn’t correct the new guardian; tell her that no, she hadn’t actually been crafted or blessed for this bloodline, only gifted to them just one generation ago. And gifted rather carelessly, at that; an obligatory token presented upon the death of the benefactor’s tutor.

Before that her two heads were designed not as a tribute to wisdom or a paean to collaboration, but in order to stare proudly over an excessive estate, stretching out in opposite directions over land too vast for merely one head to behold. An arrogant symbol of not just physical, but political reach. She was a status symbol for powerful people – two-faced might be a better descriptor.

Beatrice has always considered this with some bitterness, but today, she oddly feels no urge to self-flagellate. She feels, suspiciously, nothing at all; a fuzzy blank.

Instead, in response to the guardian, Beatrice blinks. Both of her heads do. They crane and incline together, like long-necked birds bending to convene. She feels sharp ears on each one twitch and flutter.

The creature laughs again. She descends further to the porch, then approaches Beatrice slowly. “I’m Ava,” she introduces herself, finally. Shyly. “It’s nice to meet you.”

“Ava,” Beatrice repeats, careful and hushed. She parses it over and traces it as though threading a needle – how the strange, simple symmetry of the word, the hypnotic up-down-up of A-V-A, doesn't begin to encompass the entity approaching her. On cue, Ava does a funny, shuddery motion that cascades down her whole form.

Beatrice, leaning her heads over old tomes like water jugs tipped over a parched tongue, dreams of fantastical things, from places that often sound even more surreal. And yet before her now stands the most peculiar thing alive yet, that defies everything she’s known and seen.

Yes, clearer now before her eyes, Ava is a patchwork of impossible parts.

Up close Beatrice can see she’s also a riverbed of illusory things. Small divots seem to scoop themselves out, sink deep, and then ripple back up into the surface of her body. Bubbling, and collapsing, and reforming, like springs of molten mother-of-pearl. Each little cavity shimmers like roughened gemstones: a gasping, dark blue, like well water under the sun; or a moody green like the light-starved undershade in a storm; or a thawing amber that Beatrice cannot even describe except that it looks like the smell of hot bread with a sweet cream core, tempting and steaming.

“Beatrice,” Ava echoes, her eyes gleaming and dark. They bubble expressively and endlessly deep. Gazing at Beatrice, straight, still and pondering. Searching.

Silence stretches until it doesn’t.

Something snaps – a bird on a twig above – and Ava shakes herself awake. “Where’s my manners!” she exclaims suddenly. “Come on,” she swishes around gamely. Beatrice, bewildered, sneezes.

She’s learning quickly that when Ava laughs, the dense tassel-like feathers on the back rise in delighted reflex and splay apart.

The two of them slip between trees into a little glade, buoyed by her relentless charm and a thrumming current of something else, in the undertow.

Once upon a time, this was a courtyard, although now that the Silva tombhouse has unfurled in the opposite direction it’s been allowed to tastefully overgrow into its former self, mossy and scruffy. Old pieces of wall and pillars still cordon off one side; Beatrice resists the temptation to bound about and explore, and instead parks herself primly at a corner, not fidgeting.

Ava has no such compunctions. She wriggles herself into a comfortable position on a large boulder. Her weapon of a tail dangles down and bats at the ground idly, uprooting chunks of grass.

“How are you finding it here?” Beatrice asks, trying very hard to be normal.

“Honestly? I don’t know yet,” Ava grins, “and you’re the first one of us I’ve met here.”

She pauses, cocks her head to one side so strikingly. The gesture almost looks human. “You know, my new folks think very highly of you,” She looks appraisingly over Beatrice with an indecipherable expression.

Beatrice feels quite hot. “Mine are curious about you.”

There is a shift in the air as Ava straightens abruptly. Her tail stills. “What will you tell them?”

Beatrice bites her tongues, undecided. She’d meant to think of it later, to phrase and rephrase and turn the words over and over in her mouth on the way back to get them right. It takes a while, usually, to distill her thoughts precisely into words that balance both insinuation and tone, and half the time it ends up all too stilted and formal anyway. How people seem to be able to do that, off the cuff – it’s confusing. Far easier, Beatrice thinks, to sit quietly beside and let such people do the talking.

Especially now that this seems, somehow, to be important to Ava. And especially now that she finds she doesn’t quite have any of the words.

If Beatrice had hands she would wring them. She thinks, distantly, of what someone else wiser than her might say. “They’ll agree with me that you’re certainly unique,” she starts, and it’s like Shannon’s talking through her, stately and gentle. Bold, like Mary.

She adds, in an abrupt impulse that’s, alarmingly, all Beatrice, “I do think you’ll fit in well here.”

“Oh,” Ava seems surprised. Her tail, heretofore curled tightly on the boulder, relaxes and turns a loose arc in the air, hacking at the grass. “Thanks,” she looks at Beatrice, and inhales sharply, although not unkindly.

Pauses. Sheepishly, she adds, “I’ve heard some people, uh, calling me devilish and other things, you see. But you know, it’s fine. Whatever.”

Beatrice grimaces involuntarily, then schools her expression back into an empathetic nod. It’s not unexpected. There’s bound to be a procession of curious gawkers and onlookers filing through to try and catch a glimpse of something hailing from the elusive Salviuses. Beartice knows the type: traditional, gossipy and busybodies.

They’ll take one look up the roof and gasp in disbelief or disgust, probably. Sneer up at the twisted, unnatural proportions, if they’re brave. Ava runs too close to the precipice of their diluted tolerance.

“The Silvas are good people. They’ll stand by you.” Beatrice isn’t sure if it helps, but it’s true. The households here are the little silver lining of this part of town, otherwise ragged and out of the way and a little discordant in its hues.

Ava exhales gently. Beatrice thinks there’s a small smile there. “I know.”

“It doesn’t make it easier.”

“Yeah. I know,” repeats Ava, her eyes shining, and it’s almost like she really does.

Beatrice understands. They did it to her, too, after all.

The people who commissioned her had made a puppet of her. They had demanded a departure from classical references and therefore affixed to her frame things like startling, swiveling joints and odd angles. Two heads, of course, among other modifications – all in an arrogant, ambitious drive to defy tradition and create a visionary symbol of fear and envy. Instead, the lay beholder glanced upon the warped anatomy and thought it blasphemy. And so, Beatrice rapidly became that to her own family too: acrid to the eyes, rotted in the soul, a disembowelment. Failure. An embarrassment.

The whispers billowed large like cotton sheets drying in the fields, caught and blown out in the wind.

It was a matter of time. Beatrice imagines the tiny family offspring being taught their true oral history in a sugary sick little chant, clapping their chubby hands cheerfully and squealing every grim word,

Then the old teacher died / and it was a great relief / The family rushed to ready / a token of public grief

Her, of course. Her, and not any of the cruder, more sedate, stone guardians that studded the estate. The small ones who, on a good day, sat patiently and circulated air and respired noisily, and who were not capable of thought or pain. The family had a lot of them lining their walls, not much more than large decorative lumps of dough programmed to trap, waylay, or bite at intruders.

Instead, they parted ways with the looming, ghastly and elaborate figure that guarded one of their main wings, and painted it as a great outpouring of sadness. Beatrice knew better.

The whole event was swift; almost planned in advance. She’d barely had time to send an urgent warning to Lilith before she was gone – a failed experiment in pomposity that took an unforeseen and regrettable turn into the profane.

In a matter of days she was transplanted from lush green gardens into dry hills bathed in reedy, half-obscured sunsets. The kind of neighborhood her old family would call avant-garde or ‘forward-thinking’, although with a scoff that betrayed what they really thought.

And at night, looking down to sleeping homes, Beatrice would hear in the nothingness the same whispers splashing down the stone like rain, all over again.

Mindlessly, now, she has the sudden urge to reach out and feel. Fluttering cells or hardened stone, it doesn’t matter. She wants to transmute a hand of tender human pulp and skin, and run fragile fingers softly over the strangest braided foldery and flattening of membrane, bumps and spindles until they catch, pierce and bleed.

And she so badly wants to tell Ava: I think you’re nightmarish and very beautiful. You would hold an army off this humble hill. like holding out a pathetic little bundle of flowers– but she doesn’t. It’s too long and too much; I’m here. is too short, and both are too naked. She’s not that kind of creature. She’s carved from solid rock and even when she sheds it it still feels like its weight chains her to the earth.

Her voices remain even and steady, somehow.

“I –This isn’t the customary welcome and introductory visit,” Beatrice confesses, in lieu of it all.

“Oh. It’s not?”

Beatrice shakes her heads. “There’ll need to be a more official one.”

The overlapping layers of spines along Ava’s limbs rise and then flatten, quickly. “So I’ll get to see you again soon?”

Feeling warm, or moist, or something like a pillar of pressurized foam, Beatrice clears her throats. “I suppose so. Yes.”

#“Ard wtf is this AU” 😭 listen. it was a strange and fun little thing/experiment to play around with #YEAH imagine a large town/small city that spills out over the hills in a labyrinthine necropolis of familial mausoleums / tomb complexes #pragmatic bulwarks of defence and important centers of social/intellectual/cultural life and death and the rich after-death #beatrice is the super serious guardian of a respectable but modest bloodline of teachers and scholars #when she's not staring moodily out into the distance she spends like all her free time in the library/underground heirloom chamber #and getting tutorials from fond but vaguely concerned ancestors #They love her unconditionally btw she’s just sometimes in her head too much to see it #the Silvas are renowned artisans! Jillian is jillian lol #If some of the words sound like they don’t exist it’s because they straight up don’t. I’ve no idea what old me was thinking.#hashtag avatrice hashtag meetcute hashtag wrarior nun hashtag mutually obsessed at first sight etc.

37 notes · View notes