#sticky ficky make it angsty

[snusbandxknifewife]

Sticky Ficky 8

Hello everyone! Since Jurdannet Christmas in July is coming up, I thought I’d celebrate a lil family tradition. In my family, the 23rd of December is Elf Night. Basically, if you’re good, the elves will leave you one gift to occupy your time until Christmas. As it is now July 23rd, that makes this Elf Night in July, and I believe that’s as good an excuse as any for some Sticky Ficky!

So awhile back @slightlyrebelliouswriter23 helped me out with something and I wrote a pillow for hc for her in return and I thought at the time “this has Sticky Ficky potential” so we will now take a break from our scheduled worm chapter to have pillow fort Sticky Ficky! Hope you enjoy!

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Wssssh

THUNK

Jude Duarte Greenbriar, Hugh Queen of Elfhame and wife to Cardan Greenbriar, dove to the side at the very last moment, just barely avoiding the glow-in-the-dark suction cup dart as it flew past her head, sticking comically to the groin of a satyr statue in the office she shared with her husband.

She swerved onto one knee, taking aim directly at Cardan’s pretty black eyes and letting fly a dart of her own, this one pink and with a soft tip. Like most things in her life, she was right on target, her timing impeccable and her aim unfailing.

Why Cardan insisted on doing this when he was so obviously set up to fail always confused her, but she was never one to back away from a surefire victory.

Using the disorientation caused by her near-perfect hit, Jude scrambled to her feet and careened out the office door; headed for their destroyed sitting room. She was out of bullets and needed to restock. Luckily, she knew the sofa fort like the back of her hand, and she had hidden an extra gun in the hollow of the underside of a sofa cushion for just this moment.

But she always underestimated just how fast her husband could move. Cardan was a man well practiced in getting others to forget he could be lethal. Hidden behind the near-constant dullness of intoxication and the ever-present serving of indifference, Cardan always payed attention. He was a dangerously advanced student of the Court of Shadows, and he’d been raised in an insanely cutthroat royal family.

She needed to stop forgetting that.

“Jude, villain and darling,” he purred in her ear as he captured her by the waist, hauling her up over his shoulder and back away from her stash. “Leaving so soon? I was having so much fun.”

“Let go of me!” Jude squealed, going for threatening as she wiggled like a petulant puppy in his arms but unable to hide the mirth in her voice. “I said unhand me!”

Beneath her stomach she felt him chuckle as he ignored her, spinning towards their bedroom and keeping one hand firmly on her ass to make sure she didn’t successfully squirm away.

If their sitting room was a disaster, their bedroom was a war zone. The mattress was completely off the bed frame, angled like a lean-to and hiding a pile of pillows for ample cuddling. The vanity that Cardan used to use as a place to hold his wine was in the middle of the room, hooked to other pieces of furniture by fine silken sheets as they spread across the chamber.

Forts had become a topic of conversation after Jude drunkenly admitted to loving them in childhood. One night, as she and Cardan were deep in their drink and basking in one another’s naked company, she’d gotten to talking about how little Jude had always loved Friday nights.

Friday nights meant no school the next day, no sports and no homework for the following week. Friday nights meant staying up and gorging on microwaved fish sticks with a dessert of cosmic brownies. Friday nights meant reruns of Scooby Doo and pajama parties with her whole family.

Most importantly, Friday nights meant pillow fights and forts in the living room.

Forts in the living room meant family sleepovers in the living room.

Family sleepovers meant she had her parents with her, meant she was safe, that she was nothing more than a child.

A child with no knowledge of real war, of Faerie, of bloodshed and suffering and sacrifice.

Cardan had confessed to her, after she’d described her coveted purple unicorn pajama pants and her favorite mortal soda, that he’d quite like to know what it was like to have a pillow fight and a fort in one’s living room. He hadn’t expected her to follow through. Hell, he hadn’t even expected her to remember. But then, after nearly a week had gone by and he was aching after an infuriating meeting and a ridiculous revel, he’d returned to their chambers to find the sitting room turned over and a pile of sheets by the door.

That night was the first of what would become their weekly ritual. What began as a little fort in the sitting room turned into nerf gun fights and feasting on only the most mediocre of mortal cuisine, sheets hanging from every viable surface in the royal apartments and Homeric descriptions of cartoons from Jude’s childhood, relaxing in one another’s embrace and having a little fun—between, below, and above the sheets.

It seemed like every day they’d find some memento of their Friday nights, a sticky hand that Cardan had used to smack Jude’s ass, a pillow from their bed in their bathtub, or—Cardan’s favorite—Jude’s stash of good wine hidden in the skirts of the dress she was due to wear the following day. Each little thing made them grin and made their hearts go weak with love for their partner.

And that’s what it was, love.

After all this time, after all the teasing in school and the suffering so early in Cardan’s reign, after Madoc and the Undersea and exile, they loved each other. It surprised Jude every day to realize it, but she couldn’t deny it was there. No one who saw the way the king looked at the queen could deny it was there.

Cardan shocked Jude back to reality by none-too-gently throwing her atop a pile of pillow. When she gave him an offended gasp, he turned his nose high and said: “I have no sympathy for prisoners.”

“Am I a prisoner now?” Jude asked, a sly smile overtaking her face as she watched her husband stalk around the room like the cat he just barely wasn’t. Sure, she didn’t have a functional weapon and she was pretty winded from the fall, but she knew she could take him without too much trouble.

He stopped cold, his back turning rigid as he stared at something she couldn’t see. Jude felt her stomach clench and she couldn’t help but wonder if she’d said something wrong. She and Cardan had gotten a lot better at communication over the years, but they still had their moments.

Unable to convince herself to open her mouth to ask what was wrong, she watched in horrified silence as her husband flexed his hands once, twice, three times.

Then, when he turned to face her, something had changed in his eyes.

“Of course you are,” he spit at her with a vitriol he hadn’t used in years. “Isn’t that what you’ve always been? All you’re good at being?”

Her brow furrowed and she felt a furious blush rising to her cheeks, but as her husband fully turned towards her, his boots angled directly at her outstretched legs and his face dark in a way she didn’t like to remember, she couldn’t bring herself to ask him what he was talking about.

Jude was unable to verbally defend herself as he took a step towards her. In fact, she was unable to do anything but scramble awkwardly onto her hands and feet.

“Poor little Duarte, a human child stolen away to Faerie,” he hissed at her, advancing. Jude felt a lump in her throat that she was unable to swallow around and she began to crab-walk backwards as fast as she could. Still, he gained on her.

She successfully dislodged herself from the pile of pillows, the cold stone floor biting into her hands as she continued to move away from her husband. He seemed so angry, so hateful where he’d once been so loving.

“Cardan—“

“Shut your filthy human mouth!” Cardan shouted, so suddenly and so loudly that she couldn’t help but flinch. And then she was against a wall with no way out and he was only fifteen feet from her.

Jude was looking for something, anything to defend herself. She tried to reassure herself that she was the better fighter, that she was protected against geases and that she had the land on her side just as much as he did, but, in the face of that evil look in his eyes, it did nothing to calm her.

“Jude fucking Duarte, the scum of the gentry,” he spit as he tilted his head, inspecting her the same way a troubled child would inspect a beautiful butterfly right before they ripped the poor thing’s wings off. “Did you honestly think you’d ever be anything more than a prisoner?”

She blanched and he was ten feet away.

“Did you think you’d ever stand a chance against a people so undeniably better than you?”

A cold tear dripped down her cheek and he was five feet away.

“Did you think anyone, much less someone like me, could ever love the likes of you?”

He gripped her by the throat and yanked her off her feet, slamming her against the unforgiving stone wall and glaring into her eyes, his nose a hair’s breadth away.

“Jude Duarte, Seneschal to the High King of Elfhame. Jude Duarte, Hugh Queen of Elfhame,” he sneered in a voice so high-pitched that it was obviously making fun of her. “Did you think it ever mattered? Did you honestly believe that those titles made you safe?”

She opened her mouth to try to speak, but she couldn’t force any air out, not with how his long, delicate fingers were so easily crushing her windpipe.

“You were a prisoner to mortality in your childhood,” he leaned forward to whisper in her ear, “and they you were a prisoner of Faerie in your adolescence.”

Her vision blackened around the edges as her mind reached weakly for a memory of when Cardan held her sweetly. She couldn’t quite grasp one.

“You willingly enslaved yourself to my brother and then you went and made yourself into my prisoner when you engineered my rule,” he laughed, pulling away just enough for her to see his cold eyes once more. “Surely you knew that’s all you were? Bound to my word in public and stuck cleaning up all my messes. God, you make a good little servant.”

She tried to kick at him, but her whole body felt week and she wasn’t able to bring her leg up. Panicked, she looked down to where her hands clawed at his and she found that her nails were broken and bloodied, the beds caked with sea salt.

“You were a prisoner beneath the waves.”

Seaweed rose from the floor and wrapped around her ankles, pulling down like it was trying to pull her under the water once more.

“You were a prisoner, bound to the bidding of Balekin.”

She felt the ghost of his lips against hers and she gagged, gasping for air and unable to get any.

“A prisoner to your own desires,” he smirked. “That’s why you stupidly chose my hand over my control.”

She couldn’t get a word in edgewise, couldn’t correct him, couldn’t even really remember why she’d done it. Was he right?

“And now you’re once again locked in the world of the mortals, a prisoner in your little bedroom cell,” he sneered at her. “It’s where you belong, don’t you agree? I’m sure all of Faerie does.”

Memories of exile came flooding back to her. She could see, almost as if she were a fly on the wall, a disturbingly sick Jude. Clothes were falling off her and her normally tanned skin was deathly pale, the only real structure in her life coming from the rat’s nest that has cemented itself in her hair.

“Let me tell you a secret, Jude,” he leans back in, lips ghosting against her ear. “That’s where you’ll stay. In that tiny room in that hellish world, wasting away to nothing and waiting for your inevitable death. You’ll go quietly, without a fight and with no one to remember you. Do you know why, Jude?”

Her mouth formed around his name.

Cardan

But she couldn’t say it.

“I’ll tell you why,” he continued, smirk evident in his icy voice. “It’s because, above all else, you are a prisoner to your own fear. You will always be your own jail cell.”

Tears gushed down her face and she wanted to beg him to stop saying such hurtful things. But she couldn’t, because when Cardan next pulled away, it wasn’t Cardan at all.

One cold, rotted hand gripped her by the throat as she stared in horror at the decaying body of Balekin Greenbriar, fresh blood still oozing from the fatal wound she’d inflicted.

She woke screaming.

Jude Duarte, exiled High Queen of Elfhame, woke screaming.

She didn’t know the day or the time, where she was or why she was there, all she knew is that she could still feel the cold hand of death wrapped around her throat.

Cardan wasn’t there, he’d never been there. They’d never built forts or had pillow fights and they likely never would.

She was blind to the world as she heaved herself out of bed, flying towards the shower to try and wash the stench of death off her skin. She didn’t notice that Vivienne was awake, Oak sitting next to her at the kitchen bar.

The siblings shared a horrified look and Vivi didn’t give herself the time to hesitate. She picked up her phone, dialed, and prayed.

It rang three times.

“Listen, Vivi, I really don’t have the time for th—“

“It’s not about us, Heather,” Vivi rushed to say, taking the sudden silence on the other end as a sign to continue. “It’s Jude. Please, I need your help with Jude.”

More silence, and then:

“I’ll be right over.”

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What? I didn’t say it would be fluffy pillow fort Sticky Ficky,,,,,all aboard the angst train lol

Hope y’all don’t hate me too much I promise I will have more funny/stupid Sticky Ficky but I gotta get this exile angst in!

Tag list: @cardan-greenbriar-tcp @hizqueen4life @slightlyrebelliouswriter23 @thewickedkings @aelin-queen-of-terrasen @cheekycheekycheeks @queen-of-glass @b00kworm @doingmyrainbow @andromeddea @jurdanhell @thesirenwashere @sweetlyvillainous @courtofjurdan @clockworkgraystairs