#He's currently a few quests away from receiving the worst news of his life

[travelling-hydaelyn]

I too would thank y’shtola for teleporting me far away from work and forcing me to live in the wood for a few months

[nanoland]

drowstiel fic in progress

title: Clean Hands

fandom: Supernatural

pairings: Crowley/Castiel, Crowley/Dean Winchester, Castiel/Dean Winchester

blurb: In which Crowley is no one's first choice and he's totally fine with that! :) Really! :) :) :)

warnings: smut, cannibalism, demons getting themselves Extremely murdered

0 

Trumpets sounded. Mortar cracked. The ceiling collapsed, squashing half of Crowley’s court, and holy, horrifying light flooded into every corner.

“We are going,” Castiel growled, storming up to the throne and grabbing him by the scruff, “for a drink.”

Crowley’s tail twitched, wordlessly instructing his bodyguards to stand down. “Um. Fine?”

“Now.”

“Alright, alright. Where?”

“I don’t care.”

So Crowley teleported them to a cosy little nook in Finland, highly ranked among his personal favourites and unknown to any colleagues or enemies. It had a roaring fireplace, generously padded chairs, thick faux fur rugs, and a table by a window through which one could watch snow gently blanketing the city of Rovaniemi.

They ordered Koskenkorva and cider and Salmari and beer – or rather, Crowley did, while Castiel stared broodingly into the fire – and competed to see who could get totally hammered first.  

Castiel won. Castiel always won.

“Coke?” Crowley offered.

Scowling, the angel mumbled, “No. Nnn-o. Dean drinks Coke. Dean bought me a Coke once. Said I should try it. He always wants me to try things. Bacon and Star Wars and cowboy paraphernalia. Human things. Never wants to recipra… recipe… recital… never wants to try my things. Angel things. One-way street. Always.”

“Mmm. I can understand how that might feel invalidating, kitten. However, I was in fact offering you cocaine. Top-quality stuff, of course. Or weed?”

“Oh. Uhh – no. Thank you. Can I sit in your lap?”

With a put-upon sigh, Crowley settled back into his chair.

A woman seated across the room tutted disapprovingly as Castiel clambered onto him, twisting this way and that until he’d made himself comfortable with his legs dangling over the arm rest and his tousled head heavy on Crowley’s shoulder.

Looking her way with a pleasant, if carnivorous smile, Crowley said, “Your husband’s name is Verner. Your sister’s name is Aurelia. They’re currently having sex in your kitchen. Her bare, perky arse is resting on your oven mittens – the nice ones with the canary pattern. If you leave right now, you can catch them at it.”

“You are an abomination,” Castiel murmured into his neck as she bolted.

“You’re an absurdity,” he countered, sniffing his hair. Cheap shampoo. Cheap conditioner. Wood smoke, presumably from the boys’ latest hunt. Traces of blood. Traces of God.

The fire crackled. They drank some more.

“I gave Dean a feather,” Castiel said. “One of mine. It’s what we do to show loyalty. Admiration. When I served Heaven, I received feathers from various admirers every week.”

He sounded smug.

Adorable.

“It wasn’t sexual, mind,” he added, quickly.

“Of course.”

“Nor romantic. We don’t engage in such things. Nonetheless, it was meaningful. Is meaningful.”

“And Dean, I imagine, didn’t realize that.”

“Obviously not. I wasn’t expecting him to. He’s a human; why should he understand our customs? But I thought… I thought he’d at least ask. I was prepared for him to ask. I had an explanation ready to go. And then he didn’t. He took the feather, looked embarrassed, smiled, thanked me, and returned to doing Sam’s laundry.”

“Ouch.”

“I’ve never been so humiliated.”

Crowley gave him a consoling kiss, which he returned hungrily, though not cruelly. In this, Castiel was never cruel. Only demanding. Which was fine; Crowley liked being in demand.

When Castiel withdrew his questing tongue, he looked unsatisfied. (Brattish.) “Why must you always lurk so deep? Come forward. I want to see you.”

Huffing, like it wasn’t something he was asked to do and gladly did every time, Crowley let himself slide from his host’s brain into his eyeballs, turning them crimson; from his chest to his tongue, causing his breath to stink of petrol and graveyard dirt; from his veins to his extremities, prompting his fingernails and toenails to adopt a distinctly claw-like appearance. His expensive black socks would be ruined. “Better, birdy?”

Immediately, Castiel returned to kissing him. (Really, it felt as though he was trying to suck Crowley from his host’s mouth into his own.

Like he wants to eat me.

Crowley shivered happily.)  

Drawing back, Castiel said, “Take us to a hotel room. I want to touch your penis.”

“I live but to serve.”

It had taken Crowley a while to work out what Castiel’s odd sexual ministrations made him feel like; a stim toy. The angel liked nothing more than to fiddle with him. To tug at his chest hair, to pluck at his nipples until they were plump and rosy, and yes, to poke and pat and play with his cock until Crowley whimpered.

“I don’t understand why he’s so reluctant to open up to me,” Castiel sighed, breath-taking on black silk sheets and settled between Crowley’s thighs, twirling grey-streaked pubic hair around his index finger.

“I like opening up to you,” said Crowley, and demonstrated.

Castiel lowered his head and peered appreciatively. “Your vessel is so much furrier than mine. Like you’ve glued a badger’s pelt between your buttocks.”

Some might have found a fuckbuddy who had only two settings – i.e. ‘the worst dirty talk conceivable’ and ‘pining for another man’ – frustrating. Crowley had long since put such petty grievances aside, because he was emotionally mature. Worldly. Smooth. Definitely not because he craved Castiel’s presence all day long and whispered his name to the stars at night.

“Hurry up and stick it in me, you twat.”

As Castiel hoisted Crowley’s legs over his shoulders, he stroked the hair there too. “Mmm. So fluffy. Honestly, with all this to keep you warm, I don’t see why you have to cover yourself in so many layers.”

“You’re one to talk! You’d wear that trench to the scorching outback if you got half the chance.”

“Temperature isn’t a factor for me. Besides, Dean likes me wearing it. It gives him a sense of continuity that he lacks in other areas of his life.”

Castiel couldn’t tell the difference between a groan of pleasure and a groan of exasperation. That was for the best.

Afterwards, Crowley arranged his host such that the majority of his weight rested on Castiel’s chest. So far, it was the only reliable way to ensure he didn’t get dressed and leave the moment they were done.

“Were you busy?” Castiel asked, panting. “When I entered Hell? You probably were. You’re always busy. You work even harder than Raphael used to.”

“Never too busy for you, pet,” he purred, punctuating his assurance with a saucy wiggle.

Castiel’s phone rang.

Castiel actually answered it (rather than his usual reaction to ringing phones – his or Crowley’s – when they were in bed, which was to narrow his eyes at them until their screens cracked and they leaked smoke), which meant it was Dean.

“I am needed,” he announced, rolling Crowley off him.

With a mocking salute, Crowley slithered into the warm spot his body had left. “Godspeed, mighty warrior. Try not to lose any more feathers.”

Fumbling with his tie, Castiel said, “I’m planning to give him one more. A second chance. If he doesn’t react appropriately, I’ll…”

“You’ll what?”

The tie was abandoned, flopping half-knotted against his crisp white shirt. “I’ll be back for more sex. Goodbye.”

With that, he was gone.

Under his stolen skin, Crowley curled into a smoky ball and cursed the whole world. 

0 

‘Never too busy for you,’ he’d told Castiel.

‘My door’s always open,’ he’d promised Dean.

But surely they both understood that if they were going to summon him in the middle of the working day, they would, occasionally, be interrupting something?

“Is that a kidney?” said Dean, staring at the bloody lump in Crowley’s hand.

Flustered, Crowley popped it into his mouth and swallowed it. The thought occurred, a second later, that his instinctive, perfectly normal as per demon etiquette attempt to make the situation less awkward might have been ill-advised.

“I’ll just go, shall I?” he muttered dejectedly.

Dean shook his head, sighing. “Nah. Won’t make me unsee it. But we’re not kissing.”

“Could brush my teeth? Suck on a mint?”

“No. Now get your pants off. I don’t have all day.”

Dear boy. He wasn’t always like this. Often, Crowley appeared in the circle to find him red-eyed, puffy-nosed, and at least slightly drunk, and he’d touch Crowley without saying a word all evening. Other times, he’d be wound tight, buzzing with frustration after a hunt gone wrong or a fight with Castiel or Sam. On such occasions, sex would be more like a wrestling match, Dean’s quick reflexes and pickpocket cunning pitted against Crowley’s ability to lift a car with one hand, and after they’d brutalised one another for a few hours Dean would slide off Crowley’s cock with a bone-deep groan of satisfaction and sleep like the dead. Those times tended to be Crowley’s favourites.

But this was nice, too. Brisk, rude, faux-impatient – today, Dean was in a good mood. And Dean in a good mood meant one thing and one thing only.

“Jesus fu-aaah,” Crowley exhaled, having barely slipped his 100% virgin wool trousers down his thighs before the hunter entered the circle, dropped smoothly to his knees, and latched onto the waiting erection like there was a panel of judges mere metres away and a million dollar cash prize on the line.

Dean Winchester wasn’t nearly as good at sex as he thought he was. But he always, always tried his best, and sometimes that raw enthusiasm was erotic enough all on its own.

“So,” said Dean, pulling back to study his work with that critical mechanic’s eye. “Something weird happened the other day.”

“Really? To you?”

“No, not normal Winchester-brand weird. No new apocalypses brewing, far as I’m aware. Just… y’know. Odd.”

Abruptly, he stood up, wiping his lips, and took Crowley by the arm. Sweeping the edge of his shoe through the circle, he all-but-frogmarched him across the room to the old mattress he’d set up in a corner specifically for these occasions.

(They didn’t always have sex in a grimy abandoned shed three miles from the nearest road. Sometimes they had sex in grimy abandoned cars with wheels buried in knee-deep weeds or, when Dean was feeling unusually romantic, dive bar bathrooms. Crowley didn’t care. He’d fucked Napoleon III in a haystack once.)

Absentmindedly arranging Crowley to his liking, Dean said, “Cas gave me a feather.”

Unnoticed by Dean, every microorganism within a seventy-foot radius – excepting those within his own body – died in a flash of hellfire. “Oh?”

“Yeah. And not, like, a pigeon feather or whatever. One of his. Weird, right?”

“Mm. Very.”

Dean thrust into him, business-like. “You read a lot, yeah? Probably even more than Sammy. Ever found a book that analyses – I dunno – weird angel shit? Or ancient prophecies involving angel feathers?”

Goddamn rotten bloody humiliation kink, he thought moodily, feeling his cock begin to leak. Probably done more to damage my reputation than that time Lilith caught me sneaking into David Cameron’s bedroom wearing a silk chemise and a British Lop. “Not that I can recall, no.”

Giving his arse a friendly smack, Dean said, “C’mon. You gotta know something. Or, if you don’t, you gotta have a theory. I know that nasty li’l brain of yours never stops working. Why would an angel give a human a feather?”

The deranged, beautiful monster hadn’t stopped buggering him.

Even worse, Crowley hadn’t stopped liking it.

“Alright, alright,” he groaned, fingernails surreptitiously sharpening as he dragged them over the mattress. “Stop. Lemme think for a moment. No, no, scratch that. Absolutely do not stop. Oh fuck, fuck, please don’t stop.”

“Crowley,” Dean whined, and while he’d have loved to think that he was whining in passion, he knew better.

“Look, it’s a gift, yeah? He gave you a gift. Use – fuurgh – use your brain, squirrel. Why do people usually give gifts?”

A big, calloused hand wrapped around his cock. “Birthdays. Bribes. To say thank you. To say sorry. Hey, could that be it? Has he… aw, shit, has he done something stupid behind my back? Again? And he doesn’t want to admit it but he’s feeling guilty so he’s giving me weird presents? I bet that’s it.”

Crowley wasn’t certain what language he used to say, “Jesus Christ, you’re both beyond hope,” in the seconds before he came. He was only just mentally present enough to make sure it wasn’t English.

After finishing off with a hearty grunt, Dean belly-flopped onto the mattress next to him. “Fuck yeah, man. That was great. Wonder if I can use it for something? A bona fide angel feather’s gotta have serious mojo, right?”

Facedown and breathing into the pillow, Crowley made a ‘who knows?’ gesture.

“Maybe it could be made into a weapon,” Dean murmured, gently stroking Crowley’s scalp. “There’s precedent. The First Blade was a mule’s jawbone. Or maybe I could write with it – like a quill. Heh, imagine a devil’s trap drawn with an angel’s feather. That would fuck you guys up, right?”

“Sure,” Crowley rasped, lifting his head. “Why not?”

Dean yawned. “So how’s Hell? Been about a month since we last did this, so… what’s that… about a decade down there? Had any problems? Moved the furniture around?”

“No. Hell doesn’t change much these days. Lilith was the innovator. Always installing a new lake of fire here, a new torture chamber there; slaughtering her political opponents en masse; throwing out promotions and demotions and beheadings left and right. Not my style. I prefer stability. Behind my back, they say that I’m the most boring monarch Hell’s ever had. Well, no – they say that wherever they want. When they’re behind my back, they try to stab me.”

He rolled over, wincing at a twinge in his well-used arse.

“Stability’s great and all,” Dean mumbled, sounding half-asleep. “And for real, I think it’s cool that you’ve made Hell so much less… torture-y. But y’ever think about aiming higher?”

“Eh?”

“Making Hell not suck, I mean. You know? Not just stable but actually tolerable for everyone who’s gotta live there. Now and then when I’m ganking some demon dickbag, I start thinking that maybe they wouldn’t always be causing so much trouble on Earth if they liked being in Hell more.”

Crowley laughed. Long and loud. “Where’s this coming from? Is this a Sam idea? It sounds like a Sam idea. Your bleeding-heart centrist of a brother going through another introspective phase, right? Bless.”

Scowling, Dean said, “Wow, someone’s defensive. What’s wrong? Pissed that the Boy King could run the place better than you?”

“Come off it, Dean. You don’t believe that for a second. Sam’s no leader. Much less a leader of demons. And the notion of ‘fixing’ Hell… it’s Hell. It’s not meant to be fixed. It’s not meant to be tolerable, it’s not meant to be endurable. It exists to break people. Horror is its bedrock. Sure, I can tidy up, I can replace the Gitmo vibe with the good ol’ eternal queue, but I can’t make it nice.”

“Huh. Okay, I get it,” said Dean, stretching, slyness in his eyes. “It’s not that you don’t want to – it’s that you don’t think you can. You’re not powerful enough, or smart enough, or whatever. I guess that’s fair. Surprised to hear you admit it, though.”

Like a blowfish, Crowley’s smoke puffed up to thrice its usual size, spilling from his eyes, ears, and lips as he pounced on Dean and pinned him to the mattress.

“Watch your tongue, brat,” he hissed, tail manifesting with its point aimed at Dean’s throat. “I’m not your pet pigeon. Had I the magnanimity of Saint Francis himself I’d not sit here and listen to some cunting mortal question my leadership. What in the name of God’s greasy bollocks do you know about ruling anything? You’ve never so much as managed a fucking corner shop. You’ve never even been employed.”

Dean grinned. “Damn, did I touch a nerve? Sorry, sweetcheeks.”

A canine rumble poured from Crowley’s thick throat. He felt Dean’s wrist bones creak under his grip. “Arrogant little rat.”

They glared at one another, unblinking.

“You ready to go again?” Dean asked.

“Yes.”

“Me too.”

In a violent flurry, they competed to see who could jack the other to completion first. Dean won. Dean always won.

“Same time next month?” Crowley enquired, watching him get dressed afterwards.

“Maybe. It’ll be coming up on Halloween and that’s always the worst time of year for us.”

“Mmm. Same. You’d be amazed how many false alarms we get; idiot teenagers deciding to summon a demon for fun and not actually wanting to make a deal or not letting them out of the trap afterwards. Last year, my secretary found them waiting for her with SuperSoakers full of salted holy water. Still – unless I’m busy – and, obviously, I probably will be busy – I’ll only be a phone call away if you poor lost lambs get yourselves mixed up in something you can’t handle.”

“Cool,” Dean said over his shoulder, already halfway out the door. “Catch you later.”

Crowley waited until his footsteps had faded and his scent had cleared. Then he grabbed the pillow, pressed it to his face, and screamed for forty minutes. 

(to be continued) 

[packsbeforesnacks]

Harmony Hall || Mercy & Winn

TIMING: Thursday, July 9th, 2020, Evening LOCATION: The Western Archives (Mercy’s Loft) PARTIES: @cryxmercy & @packsbeforesnacks SUMMARY: Mercy offers an explanation. Winn faces the truth about his lost years. WARNINGS: None

The lighthouse was intimidating, Winn thought, but no more intimidating than meeting someone for the first time… again, apparently. ‘Cause apparently this ‘Mercy’ woman knew him, said he’d lived in White Crest before he remembered livin’ in White Crest. The possibility had never crossed his mind, that there would be — could be — someone with the answers to the riddle of the years that had been taken from him. Winn would need to buy Rio something nice, if this panned out. Boy deserved, like, a fruit basket, bare minimum. Winn made his way up the staircase, twisted up in the lighthouse like a coiled spring, ready to pop out at any time and remind him why he was actually here.

An explanation. Mercy had promised one and Winn wasn’t about to let his only real chance at fixing all of this slip through his fingers. No one — Rio, Darwin, his dad — had been able to turn up any real leads, and there wasn’t a magic Facebook, where Winn could just post until someone said they’d fix his memories. He’d gotten lucky. He knew it. The chance of him findin’ another person with access to mental magic was too big of an ask. Luckily for him, White Crest kept an eye on wishes.

One of the many problems that came with living as long as Mercy had was that inevitably the past would circle back around at some point, either to bite you in the ass, or simply make life more complicated. She wasn’t quite sure which category the current bit of her past fell into. Winn was a good guy — it was why she’d helped him in the first place all those years back -— so perhaps it fell into neither. Perhaps it was simply the right thing to do. Because Mercy had seen first hand what missing memories could do to a person. How confused and lost they could become. Wondering what had happened to them in a span of time they couldn’t remember. It could drive a person mad.

So Mercy didn’t blame Rio for sending Winn her way. Even if she wasn’t sure what she could tell him, other than what the young wolf had asked of her all those years back, and the events that had followed. Perhaps that would be enough. Even if it didn’t bring the memories back. Because Mercy didn’t know how to do that. So she’d made sure the tower would let Winn pass through, that the roses that grew in the field outside wouldn’t harass him. And when she heard footsteps on the spiral stairs, Mercy looked towards the open door of the small flat at the top of the tower. Her tone was warm and easy as she spoke. “You can come in. I don’t bite.”

Winn passed through the open door with more confidence than he felt. He racked his memory, trying to figure out if he’d known her, some time ago, but there wasn’t even the faintest pulse of recollection. He took a seat, movements a bit stiff, as he considered the woman. There wasn’t much he could tell from just her posture and voice; if he had to pick an age— Well, ‘sides bein’ rude, he couldn’t really do that anymore. Living in a lighthouse wasn’t the most unusual thing about this situation, but it was as good a place as any to break the ice. “Sooooo,” he drawled, “you lived in White Crest long?” He wasn’t sure how to broach the subject of her knowin’ him. “This lighthouse looks old. Beautiful, though, the roses are lovely.”

A compliment, a well-placed smile. She knew Winn. But that didn’t mean she had liked him, in whatever history they shared together. He scanned the room, looking for another point of conversational topic, but his eyes drifted back to the woman’s. It occurred to him that, well, she might know him by his old name. He should clear up any confusion, introduce himself again. “Um, sorry, right. I’m Winn. Winn Woods. Winner Lycus Woods. Said that on the phone.” He gave a small wave, feeling incredibly awkward. What was it about this woman that put him on-edge? Or was it just that she knew more about him, perhaps, than he did? There were no easy answers, and so, he admitted what she’d probably already guessed: “Do I… know you?”

“About six years,” Mercy said, watching Winn as he took a seat. “Going on seven.” He was wondering about her, she knew. Who she was. Probably even what she was. Mercy hadn’t told him much over the phone. But that was deliberate. This was a conversation that needed to happen face to face. “Thank you. I… acquired it some years back.” She smiled at him, small and knowing. “The roses are just a bonus.” And a damn fine security measure. In case anyone who was unwelcome thought they could just waltz up to her tower.

Mercy’s eyes didn’t leave his face as he looked around. The room was small, but cozy. Full of shelves and books and benign things of interest that she’d brought up from down in the archives. There was evidence of Arthur here and there as well. A chess set she’d dug out of one of the rooms for him. New journals and fountain pens stacked neatly on a nearby table, along with a stack of scrolls and manuscripts still covered in dust. There was also a small bed in one corner, a tiny kitchenette, a small bathroom behind a closed door, and a woodburning stove. It was very liveable, even if Mercy usually stayed elsewhere. Winn’s gaze came back to her eventually, and Mercy waited a moment as he introduced himself.

“You did. Once. My name’s Mercy.” She watched him for a short but weighted moment. “I’m the one that took your memories.”  

Well, huh.

Winn wouldn’t pretend there wasn’t a part of him that had been… hoping for this. When Darwin had told him that they weren’t buried, but missing, he had been ready to abandon this entire ‘quest.’ Rio’s message, askin’ to give Winn’s information to one of his allies, had been a Hail Mary, as far as Winn had been concerned. But then, Rio had messaged him back, gave him a number to call. Winn had leapt at the chance.

Once. Maybe… Maybe, even if Winn couldn’t get back his memories, she could tell him about himself. It was another confirmation. When something went missing, there had to be a force behind it. Darwin had given him the information, Mercy had revealed herself as the thief herself. He took a deep breath, in, out, almost like he was preparin’ for Darwin to take another look around his mind. But, really, Winn knew that, if he let himself make assumptions, Winn would be transformed in the middle of this flat. That wouldn’t help anyone, least of all him. So, before he’d climbed the tower, he’d ran through scenarios in his head.

And… Well, this hadn’t been the worst. Could be bleedin’ out. Winn locked eyes with Mercy, and said, strong and far more confident than he felt: “Why?”

Mercy often wondered if her long life — or perhaps her nature — had made her some sort of… beacon… for lost and wayward souls. She seemed to cross paths with them more often than not. If that was the case, it was ironic really, since she had no power whatsoever over the souls of mankind. Unlike the Valkyries of her homelands legends.

What she did have was knowledge. Centuries upon centuries of it. But with great knowledge came great power, as they say. And what good was knowledge if it wasn’t shared? At least when it was for the better. So while Mercy had also prepared for the worst, she didn’t pull any punches in answering Winn’s questions. She wasn’t afraid of the young wolf. Never had been. That said, she was very aware of the damage one could do. To her, and to their surroundings. And Mercy was in no mood to deal with an angry shifter tonight. Or at any point in the near future.

Mercy waited on Winn to process what she’d said. She watched for any signs he was going to lash out or react badly. Any tells that his emotions were going to get the better of him, and the wolf would take over to protect him. Or to get revenge for a perceived wrong. Thankfully, that didn’t happen. And Mercy let out her own internal sigh of relief.

Her tone was soft and even as she didn’t hesitate to answer his follow up question. “Because you asked me to.” There was more, obviously, but Mercy wanted to give him time to process the main parts before overloading him with the rest of the details. Of which there were many.

Winn felt like he’d been smacked with a sledgehammer, like the ‘brain freeze’ he’d felt at Darwin’s probing had been only an appetizer for this main course. The memories weren’t stolen. The memories were given. And his mind scrolled and scrolled through scenarios, trying to figure out what could have happened — what he could have done — that would make him do this.

He put his head in his hands, trying to stave off yet another anxiety attack. Winn had been preparing for an answer, even this one, for nearly a month — two, if he counted that first inkling that there was something inside of him. Finally, scrubbing the fresh tears away from his eyes, he met Mercy’s gaze with tired determination. He had to know.

“Tell me more. Please. I can… I can handle it.” Winn tried to give a weak smile, ended up somewhere in grimace, and settled back down into a flat line.

Mercy watched as Winn started to absorb what she was saying. It wasn’t easy to be told things about your past that you couldn’t remember. This wasn’t the first time Mercy had been in such a situation. She had learned, however, that giving too much all at once could send some people over the edge. Others did better receiving things in one big lump. Mercy wasn’t sure which category Winn fell into just yet. He’d survived the giving away of the memories. But that didn’t mean the opposite would be true. When he got himself together and looked up, tears staining his face, Mercy felt her heart ache for him. He was a good kid. It’s why she’d helped him in the first place.

“We met a few years back when you signed up for my self-defense classes. Didn’t take me long to realize you weren’t human. Took you a bit longer to realize the same was true for me.” Mercy explained how they’d come to be friends, and later, how Mercy had come to be a confidant of sorts for Winn. And how eventually Winn came to confide his personal traumas to Mercy. Who had already encouraged him to stand up to what frightened him. To take back control of his life, by not letting the past control his present, or his future. That effort — thanks to Mercy’s Fury nature — doubled when she found out what the hunters had done to him.

“One day you came to me and asked if I knew how to get rid of unwanted memories.” Mercy sat a book — bound in worn leather wrappings — and an ornately carved wooden box on the table between them. She opened the lid of the box, revealing a pair of ravens — carved from obsidian — nestled inside. Each was small enough to hold in one’s hand, and covered in delicately crafted patterns and runes. “This is the how.” She indicated the book and the stone ravens before looking at him evenly. “Are you absolutely certain you wish to know what memories you wanted gone? And why?”

There was a part of Winn that wanted to laugh at Mercy, to tell her that there was no way that she was right. It was a stubborn, temperamental part of himself that he hardly recognized. But, as she spoke, he realized that… well, that what she was sayin’ made sense. Winn had been in a bad way, after he left the pack. That… That was where the memories got fuzzy, where the train stopped because the track had been cut off. He’d always thought the wolf had finally gotten fed up with him, ran on a Full Moon and stayed transformed that way until Winn could get his shit together.

But none of that was true.

“I… kind of hate that you know more about me than I do,” Winn admitted, honestly. “So, I came to you to erase two whole years? That seems,” Winn grabbed one of the stone ravens to inspect it, “excessive.” His head pulsed, his vision blurred. Shit got weird. And painful.

“I’m used to it,” Mercy said of being hated, her voice holding a hint of something that might’ve been weariness. Or perhaps regret. Maybe both. But her expression turned to a true frown as he told her that— “Wait—” Mercy held up a hand, her tone one of shock. “You’re missing two years? Two entire years?” But Winn never got the chance to answer.

He reached for the raven… and collapsed to the floor.

Mercy was instantly on her feet, both out of concern for Winn, and to be ready in case she ended up with a fully shifted, angry werewolf in her flat.  

“Please…” Winn heard himself begging Mercy and a robed figure behind her. The room was barely lit, but Winn could make out himself, younger, and speaking in broken sobs. It looked like the loft, but… different, in the pieces he could see. “Mercy, I did something I can’t take back. Ever. I want… I want a second chance. I’m not… I don’t want to be this person. I— I wanted my life back, but not like this. I didn’t— He didn’t—” There was a crackle in the air as he looked up, meeting the eyes of the fury. “I want this. No going back.”

The scene cut out, Winn heard three words in a language he didn’t recognize. Then, there was darkness.

In Winn’s memory, Mercy looked on in sympathy at the young wolf’s pain. The air hummed with static. “If this is your wish, if you believe with all your heart, that this is what’s right for you… that your life can only be better for forgetting, then so be it.”

When the spell had been cast, Mercy had merely been an observer, until the caster had come to the final seals. How fortuitous it was that she was there, and capable of speaking the three runes that activated the spell and set it in motion.

When Winn came back to himself, in the present, he was on the floor of the loft, holding his head in pain, tears streaming down his face, claws and fangs extended and digging tiny cuts into his skull and lip. Fuck. Fuck. His ears rang, his heart was racing.

“... What did I do?” Winn asked, finally, when he had just enough energy to pull himself off the floor. He couldn’t look at Mercy, not now. Not until he knew.

In the present, Mercy had moved to place herself between Winn and the door to the stairs, just in case. She knew he was in pain. She could see the partial shift his body had gone through in response to such huge amounts of stress. Mercy waited, relaxing slightly as moving towards him as he came back to himself. And asked the million dollar question.

Mercy sighed, wondering where the hell to start. Perhaps the cut and dry version would be best.

“You started this… one-man ‘protect the wolves’ mission… tracking down and killing the hunters, and others, that were hurting them… You were ruthless. Vicious even. You grew numb to it. Or so you said. Until one day… you killed a hunter in front of his children.” Mercy squatted down so she could be level with the wolf. “That was when you realized all those people, those hunters, were people too. With families. Children. People who loved them.” Mercy knew all hunters weren’t created the same. But that didn’t mean she thought Winn had been in the wrong for what he’d done. How many lives had he saved by taking the ones he had? Though it wasn’t what Mercy thought that mattered, was it? This was about Winn. “It set something off inside you… and you couldn’t live with what you’d done. You wanted it gone.”

She watched him for a long moment. “You’re not a bad person, Winn. I know bad people. You’re a good person that bad things have happened to.”

“Okay,” Winn said finally, curling in on himself on the floor, taking it all in. Numb, Mercy had said. Well, Winn didn’t feel very numb right now. He felt… he felt awful. And part of it was recovering from the stress of touching the raven, but… It was true. There was no denying it. Mercy had no reason to lie to him, and, fuck, was that what Winn had seen at the carnival? Killing a hunter, apparently the last in a string of killings. Winn had found his answer. Or, part of it. And that answer was awful, ripping into him and carving at his heart. He could hear his heart hammering in his chest. Winn sat there, just… thinking.

Until: “Wait, then… Why? Why two years?” Winn said, finally looking up and into Mercy’s eyes. “It doesn’t— Tell me I wasn’t… killing people for two years.” Not that it mattered, he supposed, in the grand scheme of things. Just more bodies to the count. Fuck. Fuck.

Mercy waited patiently while Winn processed everything. She was used to this too, after all. It was the story of her life. Waiting and watching… sometimes for months, even years at a time. But when he asked his next question, the only answer Mercy had was, “I don’t know why the spell took two years away. But no. You weren’t. It was… a few months. Maybe.”

“I’m a coward.” Winn sighed, looking up at the ceiling and away from Mercy’s gaze. He’d run away again. He couldn’t stop running away. “And I’m… I don’t know if I’m a bad person, Mercy, but I… I don’t think I can be a good person, if I did that, if I hurt all of those people — and you said, you said others? So, not all of them were hunters? I mean, that… that makes it worse, right?” Would it be better, if it had only been hunters? No. No, Winn didn’t think so. Even without his memories, without his apparent realization, he knew so many hunters now and he knew they were just… people. Fallible and too, too human.

Mercy’s jaw clenched as he called himself a coward. She remembered a moment very like this one, where she’d told him he should take control of his fears, his doubts, his demons… face them and conquer them. She couldn’t help it as the air in the flat started to hum with static. “A coward wouldn’t be sitting here in my tower, asking to remember things he once thought so terrible that he begged to have them removed from his mind forever.”

“The fact that you feel remorse for any of it…” Mercy shook her head, her expression softening slightly. “Bad people don’t feel remorse, Winn.” What did that say about Mercy, and all the people she’d killed over the centuries that she hadn’t thought twice about? The thought was fleeting, and thankfully didn’t settle in Mercy’s head. So she pressed on. “We can’t judge ourselves for the way we deal with trauma. That’s why it’s called trauma. Because it’s a deeply disturbing experience. Something we can rarely control. The only thing we can do… is learn from it. And try to be better in the end.”

Mercy’s words were as much for herself as for Winn, even if she didn’t realize it. But even then, there was nothing more she could say that hadn’t already been said. So again, she waited. Where they went from here was up to Winn.

And try to be better in the end.

Winn pulled himself off of the floor of the flat, scrubbed at his eyes, and looked at Mercy. She was right, even if he couldn’t believe it right now. Had Winn learned from it? When Winn got the memories back, would time have helped? Or would he just be back to that broken man, cryin’ at his friend to take it all away?

No. No, he refused.

Winn had barely finished saying, “I want them back,” though, when he collapsed, again, to the floor, unconscious and still.

[hedwigstalons]

FabFiveFeb - Alan

For FabFiveFeb set by @gumnut-logic.  This is from the prompts ‘ball’ and ‘”No! You can’t”’

 xoxoxox

 Alan tugged at the stiff collar, feeling constricted by the starchy garment.  When Scott had told him to suit up for advanced training this was not what he had imagined.

 He coughed pathetically into his hand.

 “I’m sure I’m getting sick.  Perhaps I should stay home.”

“Nice try kiddo, but nope.  I know the Cavern Quest expansion has just come out but some things are more important than your game.”

 Rumbled.  He had been looking forward to an all night session exploring the new realms and maintaining his top spot on the leader board but Scott had other ideas.

 Scott too was beginning to have his doubts about taking Alan out but the kid was old enough now to start taking on some of the other duties that came with being a Tracy.  The duties that kept Tracy Industries in the spotlight and the investors sweet.

 “Come on.  Let me fix that tie for you.  This is meant to be a fun night.  The charity auction and ball is an easy event.  Even John can make it to the end of the bidding without imploding so you should have no trouble.  I’ll be right there with you, guiding you through.  Just like Dad did for me the first time I had to attend one of these things.”

 He stepped back and surveyed his youngest brother. The sharp tuxedo was perfectly fitted to his form.  The cummerbund emphasised his narrow waist while the jacket showed off his broad shoulders.  Like all Tracys Alan wore a suit well.  The only difference between Scott and Alan was that Scott looked calm and relaxed while Alan looked tense and miserable.

 “Are you sure I can’t give this a pass?  I’m really not sure I’m ready for this.  I promise I’ll do the next one.”

 “No, you can’t.  Your name is already on the guest list.  Society is expecting Alan Tracy to make his debut.  We’ve all been there.  We all need to take our turn being the public face of the business.”

 Alan personally felt that he would rather deal with a dozen asteroids on a collision course with Earth than sit through the gala event.  It wasn’t that he struggled with social events in the same way John did, it was just that as a teenager this wouldn’t have been his choice for a night out.  He might be a Tracy but he didn’t wear the wealth as easily as his brothers.  The move to the island had happened so early in his life that he had never been exposed to the sort of society events that came with being part of the super-rich. It was an alien world he was about to be launched in to.

 Throughout the flight to the States he fiddled nervously with his outfit.  Each time he reached for the bow tie he received a swift admonishment from Scott. He contented himself with twiddling the expensive cufflinks instead.  A matching pair to the set currently sported by Scott.  The sapphires in them were chosen to perfectly bring out the blue of his eyes, not that Alan cared for such details.

 He tried to take in all the details Scott was giving him.

 “Now remember.  You’re to win one auction lot and then donate it to a charitable cause. John has already picked out some suitable contenders for you.”

 Alan scrolled through the supplied list of lots.  Those deemed both acceptable and suitable for donation had been pre-highlighted along with details of a worthy charity should Alan be the highest bidder.

 “And absolutely no alcohol.”

 “What?  Not even one?”

 “No.  For a start, you’re too young.  And besides, with both of us off island we need to be ready to go if an emergency comes up. I won’t be drinking either.”

 Alan had hoped he would be able to sample the champagne that Gordon had assured him flowed freely at these events but he should have known Scott would have other plans.  He knew Scott was serious about the need to be ready for an emergency. The had travelled in Thunderbird One and their uniforms were stashed aboard.

 As they made their final approach to the venue imparted his final words of advice.

 “Now remember, the cameras are going to be on us from the moment we land.  Just stay a step behind me.  I’ll deal with any reporters.  Once we get inside there will only be a very select few from the press but crossing from our landing spot to the doors we will be running the gauntlet.  Head up, smile, but say nothing.”

 Despite the warning Alan was still dazzled by the flashbulbs as he stepped down from the rocket plane.  Out on a rescue the press normally kept a respectful distance and were thankfully non-existent in space.  Here, at a prestigious event for high society, the popular press were circling like vultures.  Add in a Thunderbird and a pair of elusive Tracy brothers and the charity ball became front page news.

 He tried to smile but was sure it looked more like a grimace.  He was prepped to perfection but he still felt like a prize idiot.  The dress shoes felt stiff and tight compared to his habitual high-tops or uniform boots.  The tailored material of his suit moved in unfamiliar ways.  To top it off he had a wedgie that he most definitely couldn’t be seen to be dealing with on camera.

 Passing through the doorway into the opulent lobby felt like a stepping into a sanctuary.  

 Scott was true to his word and stuck with Alan every step of the way.  Sometimes a little too closely Alan thought as his attempt to swipe a drink was foiled, the champagne flute deftly replaced with a tumbler of juice.  

 As the evening wore on Alan wished more and more to be elsewhere.  The auction part of the night hadn’t been so bad but the ball was tedium itself.  

 Investors and business associates were introduced in a never ending stream.  Scott worked the room like a pro.  Alan envied his brother’s easy charm.  The way he effortlessly joined and exited conversations at polite moments.  At least with Scott taking the lead it diverted some of the attention away from himself.  Scott oozed eligible bachelor.  Men wanted to be him and women wanted to be with him.  Alan trailed awkwardly in his wake.

 “Please Scott, can’t we go home yet?” Alan whined as they drifted across a quiet space between groups.  

 “Sorry Alan, not yet.  Give it half an hour more.  There are a few more contacts we need to talk to.  This event is an important one in the business calendar and we really cannot be seen to snub any of the key Tracy Industries partners.”

 “Can’t I at least undo this stupid bow tie?”

 “No, you can’t.”

 “But he has” Alan protested, pointing out a man lounging at a nearby table.

 Scott looked over at the man indicated by his sibling.

 “I wouldn’t trust his judgement, Al.  That woman he is attempting to chat up is the wife of the CEO of one of the major aeronautics companies.  If I’m not mistaken,” Scott glanced meaningfully as some circling attendants “he is about to be thrown out by security.”

 Sure enough the sloppily attired individual was soon ejected from the venue.  

 Alan had to admit it, Scott certainly knew what he was doing at these events.  He wondered if he would ever be able to get over the awkwardness.  Scott made it look so effortless.  

 Eventually all the essential business associates had been ticked off the list.  Flesh had been pressed.  Duty done.

 It was only when they were safely back within the cocoon of Thunderbird One the Scott’s smooth exterior finally cracked.  He ripped off his own bow tie and cummerbund. Alan quickly followed suit.

 “Urgh, I’m glad that’s over” the elder sibling groaned.

 Alan looked up in surprise.  “I thought you were enjoying it?”

 “Well that’s certainly the impression I was hoping to give. It’s not the worst event but really, if we could get away without doing them, I would.  But it’s good for the share price.  Keeps the cash flow going.”

 “So why did you drag me along?”

 “To lighten the load.  With John practically living up on Five we are one down for the social duty rota.  Now you’re old enough you can start pulling your weight with the business.”

 “Gee, thanks.  Can’t I just do extra cleaning duties instead?”

 “No can do, little bro.  Don’t worry, we won’t make you fly solo yet.  You’ll do a few more events under chaperone before we throw you to the sharks.”

 Alan just grimaced.  He decided that being an International Rescue operative was far easier than being a Tracy.  It was just unfortunate for him that the two went hand in hand.  

[missizzy]

An Account of the Lives of the Weyard Sisters, and Fian Ollivander's Three Most Remarkable Descendants, Chapter 6

(Read entire work on AO3)

Unfortunately, the only real account we have of the confrontation between Dian and Gumboil of Wye is Dian's. Gumboil himself was not a writing man, or one who discussed his more tender feelings with anyone, and it seems when Dian's rejection hurt him enough he therefore did not talk about it, except to heap scorn on her, and tell a few tales that are almost certainly untrue. Dian does not deal with this meeting either in any great length, in the account she wrote of her history with Gumboil, she dedicated only a single paragraph to it:

We didde meet at the time and place at whiche we hadde agreed, and there I tolde him whatte I truly thought of him, giving him a fulle account of alle he had donne to offende. He didde shew himself to be a blinde foolle, for alle he had failed to see. He was taken with a madde fury, and hadde I been weaker with my wande I might have even feared for my swete lyfe. But he had not attemptede to laye hande nor wande on me, when he spoke curses to me insteade, if notte of the kind thate would do me harm, and then turned and lefte me there alone. Ne'er again woulde I lay eyes upon him.

The family might never have seen Gumboil again, but someone else would. Presumably looking to take revenge on Dian, and finding himself willing to do so by going after one of her loved ones, that afternoon he went to the market when Golpalott was known to be there making his daily purchases of potions ingredients, and contrived to "accidentally" fall in with him. An herbalist who recognized them both and witnessed the meeting, wrote about it in a letter to his sister, "All could see he meant it as no accident." According to him, Gumboil invited himself along with Golpalott while he finished up his shopping, and the latter, who of course would have no idea that they were no longer both seeking to marry a pair of sisters, seemed to welcome his company.

The two of them then went off together, and, unfortunately, theirs is another meeting of which there is little record. Golpalott did keep a journal, but he rarely wrote in great detail in it about anything other than his work, and in reference to that meeting, he only spoke of what Gumboil said to him as "enlightening," an adjective he would later retract when he learned that most of what the man said to him that day were lies.

Our only source of knowledge of what those lies were are third-hand, coming from what he told Gaius-Claudius, and what he told Nian much later, and then from what she wrote down about it. The basic gist of it appears to have been that not only had Dian admitted to him that she had led him on from the start without ever having an intention of accepting him, but he had also gotten out of her that apart from Fian, who had, according to Gumboil, only agreed to marry Gecundus to secure the financial support of the Ollivanders for her and her sisters, they had all agreed they would lead on and disappoint someone famous, as this would increase their powers. He accused Cian of doing that with Overdramblus.

He apparently was convincing enough that Golpalott not only believed him, but in his anger he decided to stand Nian up. All the afternoon and well into the evening Nian was left to sit waiting, until finally Gaius-Claudius Ollivander, having heard from Dian a less than honest account of what had happened between her and Gumboil, and determined to benefit from at least one advantageous match, decided to pay the famous potioneer a visit.

Golpalott, who had not believed any ill of the wandmaker, invited him in and informed him of Gumboil's accusations. This made him aware of Dian's deceit, but he was not entirely willing to believe the story that all of the sisters together had formed such a conspiracy, and he told the potioneer so. However, he seemed unwilling to admit to his own behavior in the matter of Overdramblus, and Golpalott seems to have sensed that he was being less than honest. It was likely partly due to this that his attempts to persuade him that Nian was innocent of wrongdoing did not succeed that night.

When he got home that night, he had a meeting with both sisters still living under his roof and their parents, where he informed Dian of the consequences of her actions, which by his own admission he might have exaggerated. All three of him, Nian, and Dian described her great distress upon learning what had happened. She first pleaded with her sister and parents for forgiveness, which they granted, as none of the three of them were ones to deny it when a member of their family had truly not intended the harm she had caused, and was so greatly repentant. Nian did call her a fool, however, something nobody protested. Gaius-Claudius ended the meaning with a promise to Nian to do what he could for her, one certainly sincere on his part.

However, if Dian's feelings of guilt did not go away after the meeting, in the hours afterwards, about which she later wrote, "I slepte not a wink thatte night," as she thought the situation over, she eventually found herself thinking, perhaps rightfully enough, that she was not the main one to blame, but that Nian's unhappiness was in fact because Gumboil had chosen to take his revenge in the way he had. By morning, when it became their unhappy task to visit their two married sisters and break the news to them, she had decided the most appropriate thing for her to do was take revenge herself on her former suitor.

Luckily for him, Gumboil of Wye, probably in reaction to such a great disappointment, chose that day to leave London, and in fact headed south and eventually left Britain all together for the continent, on which he would stay for a number of years. All of Dian's efforts to seek him out, done over the following weeks, would be in vain. However, her quest would bear other kinds of fruit.

She made her first attempt the day after, sneaking out of the Ollivander residence very early the next morning, before anyone else in the household woke up, and would repeat this pattern four more times in the following days. The first three days she lurked around Gumboil's residence, and met with no one more significant than his neighbors, who on her third visit told her they believed he was not currently there. One believed, mistakenly, that he had temporarily taken residence in a concealed place outside London. Her fourth morning out took Dian outside the city walls, trying to determine where that could possibly be. There she first met Tuck and Tarra Potter.

At this point in time, the later famous couple were so poor they did not even have a proper home. They were living out in the open, with only what spells they could cast to shield them from the elements, always on the move except when they had to stop to sleep, owning only what they could carry without too much extra effort. This was a life they took on with the same cheer that they would become known for doing everything with. When they happened upon a young, sad-looking witch, they thought nothing of inviting her to walk and talk with them until she had to go back home for the day.

To Dian, overwhelmed with anger and guilt and uncertainty about what she even wanted in life, the complete lack of these feelings from two people whom she recognized as being much more unfortunate than herself had been unfathomable. Their words and philosophy were ones which under most circumstances she likely would have scorned. But on that day, her mind was in the exact place where she instead listened, and their words had a great impact on her.

She certainly did not change her ways completely. She would even go out several more times in search of her vengeful lover. But each time, she would end the search early to instead spend the afternoon with her two new friends. She was by now becoming persuaded that the neighbor had either told or heard a false story, and with no other leads, it was not too difficult for the Potters to talk her into letting go of her quest.

Instead, the Potters introduced her to another friend of theirs, another potioneer named Sigrid Gurndrune. They probably did not do so with the thought that she might rope her into another quest for revenge, even one that would eventually prove unnecessary. And they certainly had not intended for Dian to goad Sigrid into openly trying to steal customers from Golpalott. Dian insists in her writings, however, that she did not need much encouragement. Apparently she was an ambitious woman.

By this time, several weeks had passed, during which Gaius-Claudius had not sat idle. He had now decided to admit the truth about Overdramblus, only to have two more attempts to talk to Golpalott rebuffed. Finally, he went to Overdramblus, and asked him to go to the potioneer and tell him exactly what had happened with Cian himself.

Overdramblus still was not happy with the wandmaker, and he almost certainly had an even lower opinion of him after that day, with him even afterwards quoted as viewing him as "the worst of grasping merchants." But he retained a strong fondness for all four of the Weyard sisters, as well as a great respect for Cian, and he admitted right away he disliked hearing her name slandered in such a manner. So a few days later, for their sake, he went to talk to Golpalott.

Nor had Nian been willing to give up the man she wanted without a fight. While her guardian had been trying to talk to him in person, she had written letters, lengthy ones, sometimes taking hours over them. She might not have continued had she known he threw out the first two unread, but when he received a third lengthy missive, delivered by what he described as "a likely overtired owl," he finally gave in and read it.

From both their accounts, it was mostly pleas, intermixed with the occasional ramblings about potions she thought he might be interested in reading. After reading it, Golpalott wrote "I can't doubt thatte she likes me very much, both from how much she wrotte and how close she has paid heed to alle I did saye to her, both about my own selfe, and about my work and my field of study." Still he was not entirely satisfied of her innocence. Also, he too was about to leave London for a few months, traveling to meet with a Welsh potioneer he was planning to exchange recipes and brew more experimental potions with. From his writings, it seems he decided not to think further on the matter until his return.

Many years later, Nian would express a wish that she had thought more about the fact that he hadn't sent her at least a brief note. "I woulde have rested far easier thatte month," she said, and she certainly would have. Instead she spent it writing letters that grew desperate, and then angry, and her letters from late in the intervening time period would include a few things that would actually give Golpalott further pause about forgiving her; he described some of her more angry words as far beyond anything he was used to hearing from anyone. Nian would also later wish she'd paid more attention to the obvious signs of his self-importance.

One wonders what would have happened had he at that time learned that her sister had instigated a conspiracy to steal his customers. But while he did note a slight drop in business that month, he apparently didn't think much of it. It wasn't enough to seriously inconvenience him financially, and he would never be all that interested in wealth.

While Dian and Sigrid's campaign to cause Golpalott trouble was not a success in its goals of truly hurting him or getting his attention, his rival's business did enjoy a substantial boost, and her profile rose in London's society. She began forming her own social circle, which of course included Dian, as well as the Potters. Gaius-Claudius also became something of a member of it, especially since he thought any potential husbands he picked out of it would likely be ones Dian would be willing to have.

Dian's sisters, too, also befriended her new friends. Fian and Gecundus grew very close to the Potters, especially since, of course, they would name their eldest two children after them. Gecundus would also set about trying to improve their situation, and they believed it was due to his influence that they shortly afterwards offered the place on the caravan traveling to Wales, where of course they would first develop the set of charms that would become their first claim to fame.

Also in Sigrid's circle was a distant cousin of hers named Brom Constantinis. Although only two years older than Dian, he was already know as an accomplished duelist, and if he had not had the kind of adventures Gumboil had been able to boast to her about, he was still very well-traveled. He seems not to have impressed her much at their initial meeting, and while her opinion of him was generally good, other older, more experienced duelists she was introduced to interested her more, at first.

It was instead Gauis-Claudius who singled him out as a good candidate for her husband. His reasons mostly involved who else he was related to. On his father's side he had two uncles, Rowan and Wiliam Constantinis, who were looking likely to make the Council sooner or later, and his great-grandmother, Margat of Harlowe, was a very famous witch, known for having traveled as far as China. Within days of meeting him, he was already plotting out how to maneuver them into marriage. He knew, of course, that Dian could not know of his hand in it. But Sigrid too had thought of the match, especially since while Brom had not quite caught Dian's eye, she had caught his. He easily persuaded her to work with him to bring it about.

Though Gauis-Claudius does not describe exactly how they managed it, he claims it was due to their machinations that the two youths found themselves spending time together regularly, running errands from their elders or even find each other's company during their free time. It did not take very long for Brom to fall fully in love, at which point he began to openly woo. Dian admits to being thoroughly charmed, and quite ready to be won. Gaius-Claudius must have felt triumphant indeed on the day she burst into his study and announce whom she wished to marry, and he genuinely surprised her when he said he approved of the match. So much so that she made no protest when he then suggested he do proper negotiations with both Brom and his parents.

Later, she would say that perhaps she ought to have suspected then she had not found her husband as independently as she'd believed. Although even then she did suspect Sigrid's hand in events, but her interference she didn't mind. She would, two years later, finally learn the truth, which would leave her quite irked at her former benefactor, but, she wrote, "however he became so, Brom is now mine own heart's love, and I shalle not give him up, merely for what Master Ollivander has donne; for I thinke my husbande hadde no knowledge of that." The evidence does indeed suggest Brom didn't know. It is unlikely either of their elders would have trusted him not to tell her.

Having finally brought about an advantageous match, Gaius-Claudius certainly not willing to risk losing it by giving Dian much time to find the truth out before the wedding. It had to be alarming enough when, a week after the engagement became official, Dian stormed into the house and declared all was over between the two of them, though it was only three hours later that an owl from Brom changed her mind back. Much later, everyone would become used to such behavior between the volatile couple, but at the time, both Gaius-Claudius and Brom's own family were keen to get things done as soon as possible. Within three months of negotiations starting, the young couple had received a settlement consisting largely of his grandmother's money, and they were married almost right after, on May 17, 1043. Initially they too settled in London, though they ultimately would not stay there very long.

By Dian's wedding, Golpalott had returned to town, and then he finally wrote to Nian, saying he would like an interview with both her and her benefactor. Arranging things with the latter took another month or so, during which the Weyards found one reason for joy: Cian was expecting the first of the five children she would ultimately give birth to. Nian expressed a worry for if they would like to have the stresses of children so soon, but generally the young couple and their families were pleased by this new development.

The grandparents-to-be, especially, began talking of trying to stay in London indefinitely. Arthur and Sinead had by now been there so long they had gotten used to the easier life they were able to live there. They were also old enough to start to lose their hardiness. Nian had even expressed a concern for her mother's health if she returned to their homestead. They and their daughters, having now become a reunited family, very much did not want to separate the way they had in the past either.

When Golpalott returned to the Ollivander household, it was considerably emptier than it had been when he'd last visited it. Still, he apparently decided to talk to everyone else in the household before talking to either his would-be bride or her guardian, including her parents. Gauis-Claudius was left to worry what his younger children would say about him. He need not have; Golpalott records them as having said nothing but good of their father. Sinead Weyard apparently rambled at length in response to only a couple of questions from him, and left him uncertain what to make of her words.

From Arthur Weyard, however, he got a clear, thoughtful appraisal of Gaius-Claudius Ollivander, as well as something of the story of what had happened between Dian and Gumboil, which seems to have finally cleared Nian of wrongdoing in Golpalott's mind. It might have even improved his opinion of the wandmaker enough to make him mind the subsequent negotiations with him less.

Finally, he asked to see Nian, and she was summoned downstairs to see him. She apparently had only become aware of his being there an hour previously, which was nonetheless time enough for her to write out and tear up several speeches to him. Her mother would comment to her the following day that she had never in her life seen the eldest of her daughters look uncertain or frightened, until she saw her descend the stairs.

She need have neither worried, nor gone to such lengths to prepare her words. Barely had she began her entreaties before Golpalott assured her they were no longer necessary, and things were quickly settled between them.

Between him and her guardian, however, matters took longer. During the subsequent months, Golpalott even seriously considered breaking negotiations off and marrying Nian without any aid or goodwill from her guardian. He might have even asked her to do it if not for Fian's being married into the man's family; he knew well that nothing was more important to the sisters than each other, and did not want to risk Gauis-Claudius pressuring her not to see them.

In the end, however, he finally got the wandmaker to be generous by offering to take not one, but all three of the final Weyards left in his house off of his hands. Everyone by then had become aware Arthur and Sinead did not want to go home. But Gaius-Claudius did not want to keep a pair of adults in his house for much longer, and Golpalott was quick to guess that.

He quickly hinted that a large settlement on Nian could be used to support her parents as well. Gauis-Claudius made an offer he afterwards declared as big as he'd hoped for, and the two men also made arrangements that would help them both acquire many of the ingredients of their respective trades in the years to come. They also talked about sharing and even collaborating on research, but their plans to do so would never come to fruition.

Nian Weyard was married to Golpalott on January 5, 1044. Dian wrote not long after it, "Nonne coulde look more triumphante on the day they wedde than she." She had reason to be, perhaps. Of the four sisters, she was the one who had truly fought for her choice of husband, and had suffered a true extended ordeal of not knowing if she would ever have him. Which makes it ironic that while her sisters' marriages would all have their ups and downs, Dian's especially, hers would be the one that was ultimately unhappy.

[laughing-with-god]

Pen Pal II

Words; 4.6k

“I love you so much that nothing could matter to me- not even you...only my love- not your answer.  Not even your indifference.”

Reincarnation was an interesting theory, you decided.  

It was a philosophy that held the utmost importance upon karma and charity.  In a way, it made sense. If you did something good in a past life, you should be rewarded in the next one with good fortune.  This mindset explained how some of us seem to have been born under the worst circumstances that was only added on by very odd and horrid luck that appeared in the form of people or situations.  While others have the rare ability to just waltz past life without a single hitch to hinder their enjoyment.

You deduced that you must’ve been a very wicked person in the life prior to this one.  

That could be a grand explanation for the awful series of events that have been striked upon you by an outside force whom is hell-bent on making you pay for crimes you weren’t aware you committed.  ‘Yes’, you thought, ‘I must’ve been a devilish person in my past life.’

You were cursed to forever be terrified of the world, your only sibling meant to guide you through life was murdered in front of you, your mother has gone mad and the one person you found comfort in somehow found a way to be worse than what you already knew him to be- a criminal.    

You bitterly chuckled.  

You wished he was a good-for-nothing criminal.

You would have much preferred that over what he truly is.

A serial killer.  

Tuesdays were the worst.  In your rather short and uneventful life, a pattern had formed concerning the second day of the week.  Your sister was murdered on a cloudy Tuesday afternoon. The day you were labelled with a disorder was on a Tuesday morning, right in your own home.  The day your mother had finally broke and yelled atrocious things at you that you’ve always known she thought but never voiced, was on a Tuesday evening.  And the day you discovered the jarring truth about your ‘pal’ was at 2 am while surfing the web on a Tuesday.

You were naive to be giddy at the latest letter you had received.  

Jungkook had said some rather mean things about your mother, however due to your bruised ego and lingering depression caused by the woman’s harsh put down of you; you couldn’t bring yourself to be upset with his insults toward the woman who gave birth to you.  In fact, your heart felt warmed at his protective slandering. For it meant that he was offended on your behalf, that he cared of what you felt and that anyone who disgraced you was harshly judged by the critical eye of your ‘friend’. He took your side in the matter.  Like a loyal ally that you have always wanted on your side for times like this.

He mentioned that he wanted to utilize the option of calls instead of letters.  You had to admit as an old soul that writing letters to a companion was a very vintage and refreshing practice that you had grown fond of.  Childishly, you would picture yourself in a Fitzgerald novel as a lonesome and willowy woman who eagerly awaited the letters of her dear partner who was far far away.  Or maybe off to war. You supposed that reading all those books had made you a romanticist.

But there was something rather intimate about getting to hear someone’s voice despite the miles in between them.  

You wanted to please Jungkook by surprising him with a call.  And more secretly, you wanted to see if his voice matched his face in the picture he gave you or the voice in your head that would recite his letters whenever you read them.  

You imagined it being very gentle and almost musical, like the light buzz of bees on a Spring day, humming around the blooming flowers.  You hoped (and somehow just knew) you were right in this prediction.

But, you needed to find a way to make this possible.  

That’s when you seeked information in the form of the internet.  Although you loved to picture yourself in a Fitzgerald-esque, roaring twenties type of era, you couldn’t deny the usefulness of the current one that you were living in.  

According to the re-search you had gathered, a telephone account had to be set up in order for Jungkook to talk to anyone.  Also, inmates were allowed to make outgoing calls but incoming ones were not allowed. You frowned, this meant that Jungkook had to call you but you couldn’t call him.  The air of surprise was deflated.

However, you did have a role to fulfill.  Only someone from the outside could set up the calling account.  You would have to pay for the ability for Jungkook to call anyone.  

You then went onto the prison’s website and began to fill out the form for the account.  

Name: (Y/n) (M/n) (L/n)

Age: (Age)

D.o.b: (Date of Birth)

Address: (Address)

Relation to Inmate; Friend.

Card Info: (xxx-xxx-xxx)

Phone Number:  (xxx-xxx-xxx)

Prisoner;

You were stunned at the prisoner section of the form.  It wouldn’t allow you to write Jungkook’s name down, instead you had to enter numbers.  You sighed and realized that you had to get Jungkook’s number in order for the system to match him up with the account.  Luckily for you, the info of prisoners was public knowledge for anyone wishing to seek it. You opened another tab to go the the penitentiary’s website and searched for Jungkook’s name.  

A mugshot of your friend popped up. his boyishly handsome face stared almost disinterestedly at the camera, dark and glassy eyes brooding with raven strands of hair revealing his smooth forehead and framing his sharp face that was marked with intense brows, strong Romanian nose and plush berry lips that sat above his cleft chin that marked the ending point of his angular jaw.  The frosty complexion of his skin made the darkness of his features and orangeness of his jumpsuit stand out. You knew he was very good-looking, and it was a shame that he was locked up. You were sure many ladies would be all over him if it weren’t for the fact that he was stuck in an all male prison for a lengthy amount of time.

The top of his head met the 5’10 mark of the background of the mugshot, making you note the height of Jungkook which was a detail you never really thought about before.  He was tall, but most handsome men were.

Below the image was information about him.  You briefly felt as if you were violating privacy, but you consolidated yourself by reminding yourself that you simply needed his number to further the calling process.  It had to be done. Besides, Jungkook was your friend. You were positive that he wouldn’t mind.

Name: Jeon Jungkook

Height: 5’10

Weight: 154 lb

Date of Arrest; June 6th, 2018

Crime: Serial Killing, Multiple Homicides, First Degree Murder, Crimes Against Humanity

ID Number: 65709-303

Your blood ran cold.  

--

You would have made a decent journalist.  

But to be fair, it wasn’t like his crimes wasn’t that well documented.  

He was practically famous.  

A warm cup of joe is all that you had to company you as you began your plunge into the crimes of Jeon Jungkook.  It had required the use of many old news clips, dramatically written articles and even pictures of the vulgar crimes along with court documents and police reports.  Amidst this crazed quest for knowledge that was fueled by a harsh sting of betrayal, a narrative formed from the foggy woodworks. The jagged puzzle pieces of your beloved ‘Jk’ formed, creating an image that you wished to never have witnessed.  

On March 27th, 2016 an innocent woman was murdered.  Her name was Lee Ji-eun and she was a music teacher at a prestigious private high school.  She was found in her office, throat slit from ear to ear and body laying lifelessly across her desk, school papers stained scarlett red in her blood.  The killing shocked the community, she was adored by her classmates, respected by colleagues and admired in her community. No one had a clue on who could’ve committed such a random act of violence.  

On April 16th, 2017 a man called the police due to his missing wife and daughter.  The daughter, Nayeon was found in a field out in the country, throat blue from having been strangled to death.  Her mother was only a few yards away from her, bullet enlodged in the back of her head from being shot execution style.  Nayeon’s father was desperate for justice, but the police had told him that the killer was just too good.

On April 1st, 2018 another girl named Lalisa was found in her room, dead.  Unlike the other crimes, her murder wasn’t a dramatic or gory one. It had appeared that she was poisoned to death.  Up until then, the police had no leads. It wasn’t until the realized that Lalisa’s boyfriend had been missing as well.  He was caught getting in a suspicious vehicle on surveillance camera, only to never be seen again. A vehicle that was traced to Jungkook.  

Jungkook admitted the murders of all three of these girls, along with Nayeon’s mother and Lalisa’s boyfriend.  Although the boyfriend’s body was never found.

He did all of these crimes on Easter.  

The first murder of Lee Ji-eun just so happened to fall on that day.  

But like other serial killers before him, Jungkook formed a habit.  A ritual. A routine.

You noted with distaste how little the motives were discussed.  

Jungkook never told why he killed his victims.  He was silent. Even in the interrogation process, he just admitted that he was indeed the killer.  Nothing else was uttered from his lips. The trial was semi-famous, due to the fact that such a young and handsome man turned out to be a murderer.  People even called him the new Ted Bundy for his aristocratic fall from grace that was the revelation of his sick minded actions. He came from a rich family, was somewhat quiet as a student but still earned high marks.  Someone no one thought could be capable of taking five innocent lives in such a bloodthirsty fashion.

The Easter Bunny was what some struggling news station tried to nickname him in a frenzied act of getting higher viewership rates.  Turns out, the name stuck.

You shut your laptop and stared off into space.  

The five faces of the victims would forever be burned into your memory.  

You just had one question, why?

Why take away these people’s lives as if it were nothing?  What had they ever done to him? It was just so random and it puzzled you.  Jungkook was a smart man, why did he never tell anyone the reasoning for his snap?  Why did he let the press run with guessing motives and possible reasonings instead of putting the victim’s family at rest by telling them the truth?  Did he plan to take it to his grave?

What could those five people have done to make him murder so ruthlessly?  

You gulped down the last of your coffee that was somewhat chilled due to the long passage of time.  

Remorse slid itself over you body, spreading its’ inky and sticky dread until every part of your body was effected.  

You felt dirty.

You had unknowingly created a friendship with the slayer of five lives.  

A psychopath had somehow became your closest buddy.  You had seeked comfort within his sweet words.

Was this how he lured in his other victims as well?

A shudder came next.  

He lied to you.  If you had known all of this from the beginning, there would be no way that you would have tried to reach out to such person.  You fancied yourself a empathic and understanding woman, but this was just something from hell itself.

You stood and decided to take a shower, hoping that scrubbing the invisible stains of guilt would somehow ease your racing mind.  

--

It was a given that you would stop all communication with Jungkook.

You could never even attempt to play as if things were normal after this.  As much as it pained you, you would have to lose a friend.

It would be rather simple, you will stop sending letters and he would catch onto the silence and move on with his own life.  You were sure that he would have more vital concerns in that concrete jungle that was his home. Although you would miss the communication, you valued your conscious more.  

You attempted to fill your time by distracting yourself with mundane things.  You managed to stay away from your front door, not wanting to catch yourself longingly gazing at your mail slot for Jungkook’s letters.  You began binge-watching one of your favorite shows. And when this wasn’t quite enough to divert your mind and heart, you ordered a new novel online.  Reading always made you emerge yourself into other worlds, you would drown yourself into any plot at the moment. Despite not being able to relate to most characters within those free-spirited stories, you still rather bury your head in a book then spend your time thinking of Jungkook and what he was doing.

This lead to another problem.

The drawings.  

Your assumption of him being an artistic soul was indeed spot on.  He sent you three etchings, all done by pencil and depicting of you.  The first one was just a drawing of your selfie, you could tell by the hair-do, pose and outfit.  The second one was just of you, portrait style with eyes staring ahead at any observer and very detailed.  And the third one was of you tapping a pen against your chin, brows scrunched and staring down at your hands that held a piece of paper.  Right next to this image was a side note of ‘this is what I picture when I think of you writing me letters.’

It was almost unbelieveable how good he was at drawing you.  

It was as if he knew your face for years, he created it so well from just having a picture to go off of.  The cross-hatching, the shadowing, the use of texture, the blending and the perfect imagery of every feature on your face.... It was baffling. It was like looking at the lense of someone else’s perception of you.  He clearly thought you were way prettier than you did. The girl he drew was elevated from what your self-esteem would let you think yourself to be. It was so odd….but you couldn’t help but marvel at his works. It was nice of him to draw you, almost intimate.  You wondered how carefully he dissected your picture to be able to draw you in situations that he’s never seen you in.  You never thought you’d say a boy took the time to draw you, but you were flattered.

Too bad you were unable to tell him how impressed you were with such effort.

Too bad you couldn’t study them any further.

You thought about burning them.  Cutting them into millions of pieces.  Throwing them away. Letting them drift in the wind onto some random street below your apartment.

But when you worked up the nerve to initiate any of the acts of destruction, you just couldn’t.  

You may hate the artist behind the creation.  But not the creation itself.

You stored them under your bed, not wanting to spare any thought to Jungkook but also wanting to preserve the art for a later time when your heart wasn’t wounded and a certain serial killer was in your rear view mirror.  

But you couldn’t ignore the killer for as long as you would’ve liked.  

Your book arrived.  And you had to get it,

While doing so, you were faced with three envelopes addressed to you.  From Jungkook.

Your halted your actions for a split second.  It was almost second nature to feel the bubbling excitement and instinct to reach for them.  

But then those deceased five faces flashed before your eyes.  

In the end, you ignored them in favor of retrieving  your freshly purchased book.

But after you laid yourself on your couch and found yourself re-reading the same first paragraph over and over again, you realized that those letters just couldn’t be ignored.  They stubbornly beckoned your attention, a siren’s call demanding your priority. You huffed and set the book down, fixing your gaze towards the entrance of your humble nest, were the letters innocently laid.

Here you were faced with a dilemma.  

Did you trust yourself enough to read the contents of the letters and not send a response of your own?  

Would it be the right thing to even open them?  

Could you bear not knowing what he had to say to you after you haven’t made contact in a while?  

You bit your lip and contemplated the ethics at play.  

Surely, just to read the letters wouldn’t mean any harm…...right?

You had ended the ties but what was so wrong with glancing over some previous records of the relationship?  Because that’s what Jungkook’s letters would be...evidence of the past friendship you shared with him.

You honestly couldn’t bear the mystery.  

You just had to know what he had to say.  

You grabbed the letters and ripped them open in a rush to put an end to your inner turmoil.

He was worried.

He was confused.

He was hurt.

Jungkook expressed his somberness for not hearing from you.  He also voiced his concern for your well being. He was anything but mad at you, just alarmed.  That alarm was genuine from what you could tell by his growingly frantic penmanship.

This set ablaze a glowing fire inside your chest.  

The audacity of that...that...heathen.

To act so kind and compassionate when he lacked those same emotions towards his victims.  You almost wanted to laugh at his pitying tone, wondering if he had such ability when he put those five bodies six feet under.  How dare he put the blame on you for not responding back? For making you feel guilty? It was him who was at fault.

A sudden urge to inform him that his jig was up suddenly hit you.

You wanted nothing more than to shove his face in the fact that you broke free from his cute manipulative narrative concerning his mother.  In a burst of fury, you quickly grasped for a pen and paper. A rebuttal was all too ready to escape your mind and pierce his soul.

‘Dear Jungkook (or should I say Easter Bunny?)’

--

It had been a week.  

Usually, this is when you would get a response letter.  

But when you went to your mail slot and opened the incoming letter, you were left scratching your head in bewilderment.  

‘My Dearest Y/n,

I see you found out about the nickname the hideous press gave me.  

Well...I think this type of revelation is best talked over in person.

I’ll see you soon.’

It hardly seemed like a proper response to what you had said to him.  

You had exposed his truth and his despicable crimes and the only thing he had to reference was the nickname bit?  Was he avoiding the topic? Why was the letter so fucking short? And how come he mentioned seeing you in person?

A little bit of paranoia was the theme for the rest of your day.  

Logically, you knew that he had no way of seeing you.  He was locked up and the severity of his crimes would surely mean that he was heavily guarded, and even if he did manage to overcome that burden, then how the hell would he find you?  

But still….you didn’t think Jungkook was capable of murder either.  He still did that as well as lied to you to add a ripe cherry on top.  

Perhaps he was just trying to fuck with you?  To play with your head one last time and freak out the mentally ill girl as one last ‘fuck you’.  It wouldn’t be the first time someone used your fears against you. Maybe he wanted to manipulate you once more so you couldn’t help but look over your shoulder even after you two stopped conversing…..

Yes.  Getting into the mind of a killer, you would think this was the most effective way he could cause lasting harm to you from behind bars.  He was most likely snickering in his jail cell, telling his inmates about how he managed to scare his lunatic of a pen pal. He probably delighted in turning your phobia against you.  

This was the only logical explanation.  

But still, you made sure your doors and windows were locked after this letter.  Just for the sake of clarity.

--

Days have passed along with your paranoia for the oddity of Jeon Jungkook.  You were focused on getting your life back to normal. Or normality to you, considering that not much changed.  You just opted out of daydreaming of conversational topics to send to your pal along with the obvious sending of letters.  Sure, you still thought about him from time to time...but you would catch yourself in these moments and force some random chores upon yourself to occupy your brain.  

Today was a rainy day and you made a goal for yourself to finish the novel you had bought only days prior.  

About 30 minutes in, a knock at your door sounded, interrupting your leisurely reading.  

You smiled and checked the time.

Your groceries had arrived.  

You went to answer the door, making sure to grab the delivery boys’ tip on the way.

When you opened the entrance to your home, the usual boy was there, handing over two big brown bags that were overflowing with food.  You grabbed one of the bags and reached for the money to hand over so you could have to tact to grab the other bag without having to struggle to give the boy his tip, when something struck you.  

The boys’ head was ducked downwards, not show casting his face but instead the grocery store’s logo on the hat.  His hair was darker than you remembered….now that you noticed it, he was taller too. And overall just bigger….

The grocery boy you were used to seeing was of a more adolescent type of figure, you knew it would be preposterous for the boy to have such a growth spurt in only a weeks’ time.  Unless he suddenly decided to take up steroids. Confused, you tried to call out his name to get a better look.

“Renjun?”  

A moment of suffocating silence.

An icy shock of terror crashed down upon you and somehow you just knew who was under that hat without him having to look up.  

A flurry of movement commenced, marking the beginning of your doom.  

You tried to keep him out, but your reflexes weren’t fast enough,

In a haste, you dropped the bag and moved to shut the door, pressing your weight against it with all your might to keep him out.  Your body was acting faster than your brain could, not sparing a second to even comprehend how the hell he was here. You had to keep him out, he couldn’t violate your safe haven like this!  Survival instincts were kicking in.

But he was faster, and stronger and arguably more determined.  

He strode in easily, as if your attempts were at a child’s level.  Your found yourself with a large and snowy hand clasped over your mouth, preventing any hollerings for help.  

He ducked closer to you, big glassy eyes staring at your horrified expression with an almost dreamy manner.  

“Why are you shocked?  I told you I was going to see you.”

--

You never gave much thought to what it would be like to be in the presence of a killer.

Somehow, you knew it wasn’t supposed to be like this.  

You sitting on your couch with the killer wrapped around you, large frame practically enveloping your smaller one as you were forced to feel his pulsing muscles up close.  His face in near proximity to yours, big eyes absorbing your profile with an unreadable look upon his graceful face.

You were under close inspection, it had been like this for twenty minutes at least, him staring at you whilst keeping you caged under his far more capable body.  He stared at you with such focus, you found yourself wondering what possibly could have been going through that demented mind of his.

Were you next?  

Were you going to be the sixth notch under his belt?  

Why wasn’t he saying anything?  

The silence was unbearable, for you knew that when it would be broken; something very unpleasant would unfold.  You wanted the silence, but it also petrified you.

Finally, you gathered the courage to pierce the blanket of quiet.  

“A-are you going to kill me?”  

His nose scrunched up at this, transforming his stoic expression into that of confusion from a now somewhat boyish face.  His already big eyes seemed to widened and they peered into yours with a new softness that you wouldn’t expect from a killer.  

“What?  Of course not!  I just wanted to talk to you.”  

His voice was indeed what you pictured it to be, somewhat breathy and puerile but musical in a sense that could not be explained.  You didn’t have time to analyze the person behind the letters, compare him to the mental image you had in your head, when you were too busy trying not to panic and hyperventilate.  You read somewhere that if a person is ever kidnapped it’s best to not outwardly panic because it could cause the attacker to want to get rid of you sooner. With this in mind, you tried to calm your racing heart and breathing.  First, you need to find out what he wanted, convince him to trust you, and make him turn himself back in. Freaking out could get you nowhere, you must use logic as your escape plan.

“What do you want to talk about?”  You wished you sounded as calm as your voice sounded, it completely masked the chaotic state your nervous system was in.  

“My crimes.”  He nuzzled his face into the crook of your neck, inhaling your scent very loudly as if the smell was addicting to his nose.  His behavior was odd, it was as if he was separated from a long lost lover who he finally found once again. He was attached to you, petting you, studying you and even breathing you in.  It was so intimate and you felt like you were being groomed for slaughter….

“Why did you do what you did?”  

Jungkook halted his cuddling for a moment to lean back and stare into your eyes with a more serious feeling.  

“They didn’t love me like I loved them….”  

You were sure you were going to die.  

He was insane.  

The killings were crimes of passion, towards innocent girls who were unfortunate to witness the side of Jungkook that you are seeing now; a love-struck and delusional man with no boundaries or sense of relationships.  

In a last effort to stay alive, you wrestled against his larger form and made a reach for the door.  

To your surprise, nothing prevented you from getting up.  He didn’t stop you.

“What are you going to do Y/n?  Leave?” He called out from behind you in a cynical and delighted tone.  

“Sugarplum, you know damn well you can’t go out there.”

Terrible, terrible realization dawned upon you like a poisonous fog that forced your eyes to water and lungs to clog.  You were only a foot away from your front door, but you knew you couldn’t venture behind it. Your safe haven has become your own prison.

“You’re stuck here with me.”  

[eleanor-writes-stuff]

let the past die (show the way the world could be) - ONE-SHOT

Five years after the rise of the New Empire and the replacement of the Stormtrooper program with a new Peacetrooper program, Beta Rose Tico finds herself being separated from her Omega partner Finn when he’s drafted to serve a year of active duty.

Worried for her partner and fuming at archaic anti-Beta discrimination laws, what’s a woman to do other than go on a galactic road trip to meet the rulers of the empire themselves and push for change? (And maybe, just maybe, learn the truth behind the unexpected fall of the First Order and the rise of the two most powerful Force-users in recent galactic history while she’s at it.)

Gift Fic #2 of my holiday giveaway collection goes out to AO3′s @dagagada, who saw me flailing about this mess of a fic that *Stefon voice* has everything, and decided to claim it anyway. (No but seriously, this fic really does have everything. Check the AO3 version for tags if you need to!)

Also available on AO3. And hey, maybe check out my Twitter or Ko-fi?

“Please rise for Their Imperial Majesties, the Emperor and Empress of the New Empire.”

Rose has always found this part of the holo a bit funny, if only because the actual audience in attendance that day had been entirely comprised of the empire’s staff and soldiers, all of whom had been standing long before the imperial couple had made their appearance.

Today, though, she’s too intent on capturing every single moment of the recording to react with her usual huff of amusement. The speech had lasted for twenty minutes, starting with the usual themes the couple had been fond of at the beginning of their reign five years ago, messages of letting the past die and building something new from the ashes, something better. From there, the emperor had segued into the announcement that the Stormtrooper program was to be discontinued effective immediately, and in its place the empire would implement a Peacetrooper program which would draft every able-bodied young adult citizen of the empire into a year of service, during which they would be stationed at various points throughout the galaxy in order to maintain peace as well as gain new insight into the lives and cultures of their fellow citizens.

The whole thing had sounded good in theory at the time, but then again anything would have seemed better than having children ripped away from their families to be turned into mindless soldiers. It’d worked out decently in practice too, at least for Rose – she’d ended up being called to serve that very first year, and her time with the program had taken her far from her home planet of Hays Minor to see how other systems had suffered from or escaped First Order control, how the New Empire was slowly but surely dismantling the legacy of its predecessor in an attempt to secure a better future for everyone.

The experience hadn’t been the worst of her life, not even close – and then, on her very last assignment in Coruscant before she was due to go home, she’d met Finn.

Finn, a Stormtrooper trainee who’d been released from servitude along with all of his fellow soldiers right before he was supposed to go on his first mission. Finn, a lost boy who hadn’t touched the ground or seen the sky since he was a child and couldn’t for the life of him figure out a new normal once he was released from the life he’d been forced into, the life that had been all he’d ever known. Finn, who’d ended up leaving Coruscant and the empire’s promise of helping former Stormtroopers reintegrate into society in order to go back to Hays Minor with her and rehabilitate her home.

Finn, who’d received notice of being drafted two months ago, just a month after they’d agreed to get married.

Rose shakes off her memories of that dark day and returns her focus to the holo, to her last hope of keeping Finn safe and sound and home with her.

“We understand that this is new, and that change can be confusing and worrying,” the empress had said once her husband was finished explaining the new program, “but above all else we want to reassure everyone that this is meant to bring us together, not tear us apart. A standard year might be short to some of you and long to others, but in any case we do not intend to separate families.”

And here, she’d turned to give her husband a look Rose has never quite been able to decipher, a look that the emperor had, much to the entire galaxy’s shock, returned with a smile softer than anyone had believed the stoic former Darksider Alpha to be capable of.

The imperial couple had shared a moment then, before the empress wrapped up their announcement. “On that note, exemptions and accommodations will be made for mated couples, those with children, and more. A department has been set up within the new Peacetrooper program for the sole purpose of determining and facilitating these exemptions and accommodations, and we urge you to reach out if you have any questions or concerns.”

The thing is, Rose has reached out – multiple times in the past two months, even. And every single time, she’s been met with the same response: the romantic partnership exemption clause is only applicable to mated couples or couples raising toddler-aged children or younger. Beta-mix couples, even if married, have been deemed capable of surviving the separation without significant or long-lasting ill effects due to their unmated status.

The cold and callous response sounds so out of line with what the empress had promised that day on the steps of the newly-erected Coruscant Palace, a bright and welcoming structure that couldn’t be more different from the former Imperial Palace. Rose had had her doubts about the imperial couple when news had first spread about them, just like most of the galaxy, but in the years since she has come to grow relatively fond of them, especially the empress. The orphaned scavenger from nowhere has proven herself to be a fair, emphatic, and trustworthy ruler in the six years since she and the emperor first overthrew the First Order, long before she’d even taken up the mantle of ruler.

So if the empress says that the Peacetrooper program isn’t meant to separate loved ones, then Rose can only trust that she means it. Because someone with eyes that kind, someone with a smile that bright as she and the emperor bid their subjects farewell and disappear into their flagship, marking the end of the announcement and the holo-recording… someone like that gives Rose hope, always has since the day she first stood by her partner’s side and promised to make the galaxy a better place.

That hope had been enough for the galaxy to warily lower their weapons in anticipation of a better future then, and it’s enough for Rose to go on now.

Three days later, she calmly bids Finn goodbye, promises him they’ll be together again soon, and watches him board the transport that’ll take him lightyears away from her.

And then she goes off on a trip of her own, to meet the empress.

👑  👑  👑

Unsurprisingly, securing a meeting with one of the rulers of the New Empire is easier said than done, even for a minor politician and union leader such as herself.

Luckily, Rose isn’t doing this alone.

She starts by turning to her sister Paige, who’d spent two years serving in the Resistance prior to the First Order’s downfall and still keeps in touch with a lot of her friends from that period of time. One friend in particular happens to be her former commanding officer Poe Dameron, who now leads the coalition-controlled Galactic Peace Forces. More importantly, Poe Dameron is still close friends with one Leia Organa, former leader of the Resistance, current senator of Chandrila, mother of the emperor, and mother-in-law of the empress.

Rose’s journey is long and arduous, leading her from Hays Minor to Coruscant to Chandrila with a dozen minor stops in between to make sure she’s on the right path and heading to the right people. Nearly everyone who learns of her quest either laughs her off or suggests she’d have more luck going directly to the emperor, since he’s the one in charge of the Peacetrooper program.

That might well be true, but two things from the holo-recording convince Rose she’s on the right track: one, the emperor might be in charge of everything else, but the empress is most definitely in charge of him, traditional Alpha-Omega dynamics be damned; and two, the look in the empress’ eyes when she announced the exemptions, the emotions in her voice when she spoke of keeping families apart… She’ll understand, Rose knows she will.

Maz Kanata, proprietor of the cantina Rose drops by on her last refueling stop before she heads to Chandrila, is one of the rare few to agree with her.

“Child, have you seen that boy? You know what they used to say, back in my day?” She beckons Rose closer, lowers her voice conspiratorially. “Alphas may rule the galaxy but Omegas, Omegas rule the Alphas,” she says with a knowing wink and a hearty laugh, and Rose would bet a good amount of her credits on Maz speaking from experience.

But it’s rude to ask, and Betas lack the ability to distinguish between Alphas and Omegas by scent alone, so Rose supposes that will have to remain a mystery for now. In any case, it’s nowhere near her list of top priorities; that list reads more like this:

Secure a meeting with Senator Organa and hope she takes Rose’s side.

Hope the senator can arrange for a meeting with the empress.

Try to convince the empress in the hopes that she’ll convince the emperor.

There’s a whole lot of hope involved, but Rose thinks – rather optimistically – that that might endear her to the senator. After all, even though it’s been years since the Resistance demilitarized and transitioned into part of the empire’s new coalition government, Paige still talks about how fond the then-General Organa had been of giving speeches about the importance of hope.

As she finally arrives at Chandrila, Rose can only hope the senator still feels the same way.

It’s midday when Rose surfaces from the Hanna City spaceport, which isn’t too far away from Senator Organa’s office near the Chandrila Senate House. The coalition government is currently based on Naboo, but Senator Organa is known to spend most of her time here in Hanna City. She also makes the occasional trip to her son’s flagship, the next of which Maz had informed Rose is planned for just four days from now.

In other words, Rose has four days – well, less than that – to convince a senator that she’s not a security risk and that she has a valid reason to speak with the empress. It’s a challenge, but not an impossible one, and Rose spends the half-hour ride from the spaceport to the senator’s office rehearsing the speech she’s spent the past week preparing.

Only to find out when she arrives that Senator Organa’s already heard the whole story from at least three other people.

“You poor thing,” Senator Organa says as soon as she opens her door to find Rose on the other side, and quickly ushers her in. “It’s ridiculous that this is still happening, but I guess they’ve been too busy undoing all of the other insane laws and policies out there to notice this one. Anyway, I’m sure Rey will side with you as soon as she finds out what’s happening–”

Rose, who’s barely just settled down into a chair opposite the senator’s, nearly falls out of her seat. “Wait, so you– you’ll bring me to see her?”

Senator Organa blinks as she retakes her seat, and then laughs. “Honey, I didn’t have you come all this way just to tell you no.”

“Stars,” Rose breathes to herself, on the verge of relieved tears. All these exhausting months of worrying, all these long days of travelling and planning and hoping– “Thank you, Senator, thank you so much–”

“Just Leia is fine, dear,” the senator – Leia – says with a smile and a wave of her hand. “And you’re welcome, but I must remind you that nothing is guaranteed yet. I’m sure Rey will side with you, but she’ll still have to discuss this with my son first, and then they’ll have to go through the council and the senate and all that mess…” Leia rolls her eyes at the thought of it, no doubt familiar with (and fed up by) the complications of bureaucracy by now. Rose is, and she’s only served on city council for a term; she can’t even begin to imagine politics on a galactic scale like this.

Still: hope has brought her this far, and she’s determined for it to carry her the rest of the way.

👑  👑  👑

“How much do you know, about my son and Rey and the whole mess?” Leia asks four days later, just as they board the ship set to take them to the Spinebarrel, the imperial couple’s flagship.

Rose peels her eyes away from the viewport and the sight of Chandrila in all of its lush, natural blue-green glory, a far cry from her home planet even after five years of rehabilitation. “Um,” she says as she moves to sit next to the senator. “Just whatever all the holo-documentaries say, I guess. That he found her while he was still serving under Supreme Leader Snoke, and together they grew strong enough in the Force to take him out.” All accounts, whether factual or speculative, tend to be fuzzy about this particular phase of the imperial couple’s rise to power. “After that the emperor became the new Supreme Leader, but behind the scenes he and the empress worked to dismantle the First Order and transform it into something else. And then a year later, the New Empire was announced and the coalition government was formed.”

“I suppose that’s historically accurate enough,” Leia shrugs. “But it leaves out so much about the two of them as people. History tends to do that, doesn’t it?” she murmurs with a faraway look in her eyes, shoulders curling in on themselves for a moment. It’s easy to forget, sometimes, how very small Leia Organa actually is. She’s slightly shorter than Rose, a physical anomaly for an Alpha, but everything else about the senator makes her appear larger than life.

It’s only now, as Leia turns to her with a slightly sad smile, that Rose sees a person underneath everything else, all the layers of princess and senator and general. She supposes Leia Organa, of all people, would know how history and myths and bedtime stories treat their heroes.

“Is there…” Rose hesitates, wonders if maybe she’s prying. But Leia wouldn’t have brought this up unless she wants to talk about it, right? “Is there more to the story?”

Leia reaches out and pats her hand. “There always is. I’ve been watching some of them, you know, those documentaries, especially the newer ones that focus on how he had nowhere to turn, how Snoke manipulated that to prey on a scared, lonely child.” She pauses for a minute, takes a deep breath, and then smiles. “I don’t know if he’s working with them or if these documentarians are finally doing their homework, but I like that bits and pieces of the truth are out there, at least. Even if they don’t paint the best picture of my husband and me as parents.”

The question tumbles past Rose’s lips despite herself, curiosity getting the best of her. “How long had Snoke been targeting him, if… if…” If he was only a child when he became the monster we all had nightmares about?

“Ever since he was born,” Leia says quietly, solemnly. “Possibly even before that. I should’ve known better, should’ve taken my instincts seriously, but I was never one to trust the Force and all that. And in the end, that nearly ended up costing me my son. I was shaken, when I heard that he’d fallen, but when I started hearing about the sightings of him, about reports of his deeds as Kylo Ren… that’s when I nearly gave up hope. Should’ve known that’s exactly what Snoke wanted,” she mutters, “exactly why he made sure to have everything exaggerated and amplified so that I’d believe my son was lost to me even while he was still struggling with the conflict within him.”

This part isn’t exactly news to Rose; there’s been a revisionist movement of sorts surrounding the emperor’s past in recent years, reports of crimes that were never really his and horrors he couldn’t possibly have caused, all falsely attributed to him by order of Supreme Leader Snoke. But even with all of that, there’s no denying that the emperor did stray toward the Dark side, that he did commit some atrocities.

“So then how… how did he… break free?” Rose finally settles on, not quite sure how to put the emperor’s sudden change of heart and direction into words.

Leia merely smiles, the brightest one Rose has seen on her yet. “One day,” she says, her voice warm, “there was an awakening in the Force.”

Of course. “The empress,” Rose breaths, her voice near-reverent without her intending for it to be so. It makes sense now, that of course the emperor must’ve had a reason for his sudden rebellion, that he didn’t dethrone his master for no good reason and then do a complete one-eighty. But none of the stories, be they documentaries or terribly tawdry holo-dramas ‘loosely inspired by true events’, ever speculate about the empress’ role in shaping galactic fate.

Typical, really, that it’s never occurred to anyone that maybe the Omega Empress played just as big a role in these events as the Alpha Emperor.

“The empress,” Leia confirms with a nod and a fondness in her voice. “Though please, just call her Rey when we meet her. She hates all this fuss.”

Somehow, that fits perfectly with the mental image Rose has spent the last five years forming of the empress. She’s never actually seen Rey in person, save for one time from a great distance when the imperial couple made an appearance at the Peacetrooper base to thank them for their service, but a part of her feels like she knows what to expect, feels like they share more in common beyond both being orphans.

“Anyway, we should be arriving soon,” Leia informs her. “She arranged to meet us halfway, so that I can keep her company while my son is away welcoming the newest batch of Peacetroopers.”

Rose frowns in confusion, even as her heart jumps at the reminder of Finn and the induction process he’s probably going through now. “Doesn’t the empress usually go along as well?”

Leia hums. “Traditionally, but… let’s just say things are a little different this year. It’s not my news to share,” she adds vaguely with a secretive little smile.

It doesn’t take long, however, for that news to become apparent.

They arrive at the Spinebarrel not long after, and the door of the senator’s ship opens to reveal the empress waiting for them in the middle of a bustling hangar. A blinding smile lights up her face as soon as her mother-in-law comes into view, and Rose watches in stunned silence as the empress of the galaxy races up the ramp with a squeal and runs straight into Leia’s arms to be enfolded into the kind of warm, motherly hug Rose hasn’t felt in years.

There’s a moment of silence, until Leia backs away with a muffled oh as the empress straightens up into her full height. She’s taller than Rose had assumed, but then again everyone looks tiny next to the emperor, Rose supposes.

Leia looks up at her daughter-in-law with a look that can only be described as awe, and her voice is small and shaky when she asks, “Already?”

The empress smiles and places a hand on her flat stomach, and suddenly everything falls into place. She beams, her smile bright as… well, a proud mother, and curves her hand around her unborn child. “We were definitely a little surprised, but Ben mentioned you could feel him too?”

“Sure,” Leia says, “but not this early, and never this clearly or strongly.”

“Well,” the em– Rey murmurs, her smile turning fond as she looks down at her stomach and gives it a gentle pat. “Clearly we have an overachiever on our hands… just like their father.”

The two women share a conspiratorial little laugh at that, and some part of Rose’s mind registers with no small amount of amusement that they’re laughing at the emperor’s expense. A bigger part of her, however, is too busy dealing with nerves as Rey suddenly turns to her.

“Hello,” she says, eyes open and friendly.

“Oh, right.” Leia shoots Rose an apologetic smile before she gets around to introductions. “Rey, this is Rose Tico, from Hays Minor. Rose, this is my daughter-in-law and, of course, the empress of the New Empire, Rey Solo.”

The formality of the introduction, as well as the mere fact that she’s being introduced to the empress, is enough to make Rose forget Leia’s earlier words and give in to her automatic instinct to dip into her best attempt at a bow as she murmurs, “Your Majesty.”

Two warm hands instantly reach for her elbows, as a laughing empress helps her straighten up. “Please, none of that kriffing stuffy nonsense,” Rey says, her nose the tiniest bit scrunched up in distaste even as her eyes continue to sparkle with laughter.

Out of the corner of her eye, Rose spies Leia giving her what can only be called an I told you so look. “Right. Um. Well, I’m Rose. It’s nice to meet you… Rey.”

Rey’s smile widens. “It’s nice to meet you too, Rose. Now why don’t we get you both settled in, and then you can tell me all about this mess we need to fix, yeah?”

👑  👑  👑

A short hour later finds her and Rey in the latter’s office for a talk before dinner.

“We’ve been living together on Hays Minor ever since,” Rose tells the empress, having covered her initial meeting with Finn and the two weeks they’d spent on Coruscant before he decided to follow her home, “and three months ago we finally decided to get married. But then…”

Rey sighs. She’s been an attentive and emphatic listener this whole time, just as Rose had known she’d be, and now she waits with bated breath for the empress’ insight.

“Every time I think we’re doing okay, every time I think we’ve finally made a dent in the past… we just end up finding more mistakes like this. Rose,” she says, reaching out across the desk to place her hand on Rose’s, “I’m so sorry you – both of you – had to go through this.”

“I just…” Relief and sorrow war within her, at the idea that this nightmare might soon be over but also at the fact that she’d had to go through it at all. “I don’t want him to be alone again. He’s been through so much already, taken from his family and thrown into the Stormtrooper program at such a young age, and now… I know things are different now, I know you’re trying your best, but now he’s been taken away from the only family and home he has again.”

Rey is quiet for a moment, and then she gives Rose a squeeze before pulling her hand back. “I know how you two must feel, trust me. Has Leia told you the story of how Ben and I met?”

Rose shakes her head. “Only that there was an awakening, and that’s how you found each other.”

“Awakening,” Rey scoffs with a hint of amusement. “That’s a nice way to put it, I guess. What really happened was that my… employer, I suppose, had been making these vague comments about how I was so useless it was no wonder even my parents hadn’t wanted me.” She doesn’t pause, doesn’t give Rose the time to consider a reaction. “Big mistake, about as stupid as showing a Teedo something shiny. Once he’d mentioned them, I wouldn’t stop asking – and he wouldn’t stop goading me, the idiot. So I kept pushing, and pushing, and pushing, until one day something inside me said if he won’t give you what you want, then take it. And I did – I used the Force on him without realizing it, reached into his brain without even knowing what I was doing. Turned it into a right scrambled mess, but not before I found what I was looking for, not before I found the truth.”

She stops then, but Rose senses this is not the end of the story. The room is heavy with charged silence as Rey takes a shaky breath and curls one hand around the edge of her desk, digging into it so hard Rose fears she might leave indents.

Finally, Rey speaks again. “I’d known the truth, all along. I’d just buried it because I wasn’t ready for it. And that day, Unkar Plutt paid the price for that – I choked him without even meaning to, pushed my anger and hurt out of me and into the world around me instead. That wave of destruction, of energy… it rippled across the Force, and somehow…” She smiles then, a small, serene curve of her lips as the tension drains from her eyes and her fingers let go of the desk. “Somehow Ben found me.”

“That’s… amazing,” Rose says, “that you two managed to find each other despite everything.”

Rey shrugs. “The Force works in mysterious ways. It wanted us together, two lonely souls trying to find our place in the galaxy. We found it the day he landed on Jakku, the second our eyes met across Niima Outpost.”

Rose has heard stories like this before, of course. Nearly every mated Alpha-Omega couple has that story, the one in which they caught sight or scent of each other from across a crowded room and instantly knew they had been biologically created for each other. But with the imperial couple, there’s another layer to their perfect match, another element to the myth: the Force bond that allows them to live and think and fight as one, that makes them nigh undefeatable if the battle stories she’s heard are true.

“I guess what I mean is… I know how important it is: staying together, once you find each other,” Rey tells her gently. “Ben and I, we had to rewrite the stars and reshape the galaxy to make that possible. But you and Finn–”

“How?” Rose blurts out, and immediately claps a hand over her mouth in horror. That was not supposed to happen, she had not meant to ask–

Rey tilts her head in question. “How did we do it?”

“Maker, I’m so sorry, I didn’t mean to– And of course you don’t have to answer, that’s so invasive and rude and–”

“Rose,” Rey says with a laugh. “It’s okay, calm down, calm down. Really,” she says reassuringly, watching Rose take several deep breaths, “it’s okay. I know everyone wonders, I know they think it’s some kind of epic adventure, but really… really, it was just two desperate people using everything we had at our disposal to stay together. Ben could never hide anything from Snoke, not in the beginning, so naturally that creepy old bastard found out about me as soon as Ben did. But then he authorized Ben to come find me and stay on Jakku for a whole week in the hopes that he’d get a new protégé out of it and that… that was his first mistake. Maybe we could have walked away from each other after the first day, but after a whole week? Nothing but the Force could tear us apart by then – and Snoke’s second mistake was threatening to do exactly that.” This time, Rose spots a hint of teeth in Rey’s sharp smile and for the very first time, she sees in the kind empress a hint of the savage warrior who’d taken down all of those who tried to cut down the empire and keep the galaxy suspended in never-ending bloodshed instead.

“By then, Ben and I had months of training together under our belt. After that first week he’d somehow found the strength to start shielding his thoughts from Snoke, and he’d fed him some lie about me being a member of the Church of the Force, about how it would take time to convince me to join him but that it would be worth it, that I would be worth it. So Snoke didn’t question his regular trips to Jakku, not until a whole year had passed and suddenly he gave Ben an ultimatum: on his next trip, he was to bring me back to the Supremacy with him no matter what – either as a willing new recruit, or as a prisoner awaiting execution. You see, Snoke believed that any Force user this powerful could only stand with him or against him, and that there was nothing in-between.”

Rose furrows her brow, chasing after a memory. “But… there is an in-between, isn’t there? You and… and the emperor speak about it a lot, especially in all those holovids about training a new generation of Force users.”

“You watch those?” Rey looks surprised, as if the entire galaxy doesn’t devour every single shred of information related to their rulers’ relationship with and use of the mythical Force.

“Everyone I know does,” Rose tells her casually, and finds herself mirroring the empress’ smile without even meaning to.

“That’s great! Because yes, there is an in-between – Ben and I discovered and explored it during all those months we spent training out in the desert, and we knew this was the key to the future.”

“So that’s how you defeated Snoke?” Because it’s still shrouded in mystery, the exact events of the day two relatively young and inexperienced Force users had taken down the most powerful living Darksider in the galaxy.

Rey nods. “That was a big part of it, but really… we defeated him together. We did all of that, all of this, together.” She waves her hand across her desk and the precarious-looking stacks of datapads and flimsiplasts, documents that hold the New Empire together and determine its future. “We could never have done it apart – that’s why it matters so much to us, keeping people together.”

Seemingly out of nowhere, Rose is reminded of the look Rey had shared with the emperor in that holo of the Peacetrooper announcement. “That’s why you came up with the exemptions,” she realizes.

“I never wanted to tear people apart, not after what I’d experienced my whole life,” Rey says quietly. “But I guess that’s been happening anyway. Ben and I tried, we tried so hard with the Peacetrooper program, but those were early days for us. There were still so many members of the old guard in place, so many compromises we had to make. I’m sorry we didn’t fight harder then, but I want you to know I’ll fight for you and Finn and all the other people who deserve to stay together now.”

All this talk about fighting only reminds Rose of what Leia had mentioned before, about the council and the senate and all of that. “It will be a fight, won’t it?” she asks reluctantly. “Even with you and the emperor on board, it’s still going to be difficult to convince the galaxy to give us Betas the same rights as everyone else.”

Rey huffs. “A steaming hot load of bantha dung, is what this is,” she rants with a scowl, “how we must always have a target to pick on, how there must always be someone lesser than. First the Omegas, thousands of years ago when they treated us as nothing more than broodmares. Then the Alphas, when our societies started moving past base instincts to learn love and devotion, when Alphas started waiting on their mates hand and foot.”

That had been a relatively recent phase of galactic history, Rose supposes, the so-called Age of the Omegas, when powerful kings and ruthless warlords had been brought to their knees simply by the whims and fancies of their Omega consorts. She thinks of old Maz, of the wink and laugh that had accompanied those knowing words. But it’s been a long few centuries since then, since the Alphas were the laughing stock of the galaxy. Because today–

“And now the Betas,” Rey continues, crossing her arms in obvious displeasure. “Just because you’re slightly different than the rest of us? It’s all so karking ridiculous!”

Rose shrugs; that’s about the nicest, most polite way she’s heard it phrased. Defective is the usual go-to when it comes to describing Betas; lacking something, broken somehow, lesser than, as Rey just said.

Rey stands up from her chair, a sudden move that has Rose wondering if she’s supposed to follow suit. The empress peers down at her, and with a viewport behind her it looks like she’s silhouetted by the light of a hundred stars. “When Ben and I agreed to do this, to try and fix the galaxy, we promised we’d get rid of all past mistakes and start over, finally make things right.”

She dips her head in a determined nod, and holds out a hand to Rose. “I promise you, Rose Tico: we’ll get it right this time.”

And finally, the blind hope in Rose’s heart gives way to anticipation and faith, faith in both Rey and herself to see this through.

👑  👑  👑

At dinner, Rey gives her both good news and bad news.

The bad news is that they’ll have to wait for the emperor to return before any progress can be made.

The good news is that the emperor is expected to arrive in less than twelve standard hours, at the beginning of the ship’s day cycle.

What she forgets to mention, however, is the fact that both the emperor and the empress are suddenly and mysteriously unavailable for the rest of the day as soon as the emperor returns to the Spinebarrel.

“Never quite made it out of their honeymoon phase,” Leia says in the morning as Rose trudges over to join her at the breakfast table, having been informed of the imperial couple’s… scheduling unavailability by a passing droid. “And now with the baby on the way– Maker,” she adds with a groan, before giving Rose a long-suffering look. “Just be glad you can’t feel them through the Force.”

She’s not sure what exactly Leia means, but she finds out later that day when the happy couple finally joins them at dinner, neither of them quite capable of looking Leia in the eye as they mutter apologies.

The emperor seems nice enough when Rey introduces him to Rose, but he’s silent throughout dinner, his attention completely devoted to making sure his wife has everything she desires and more. It’s sweet but odd, seeing the rulers of the galaxy act like any other mated and expecting couple: sitting together so closely they’re practically sharing a chair, constantly making skin-to-skin contact with each other, stopping every so often to cast adoring looks at and place light touches on the barely-there swell of Rey’s stomach.

It’s a far cry from the composed façade they usually present to the galaxy, that’s for sure, especially in the case of the emperor. To her and even his mother he is relatively reserved, but one look at Rey and he lights up like a starved flower drinking in the sun.

He remains that way even after dinner, the three of them making their way to his office after bidding Leia goodnight. Behind closed doors, away from prying eyes (except hers), the emperor drops all pretenses and instantly, unashamedly pulls his wife into his lap rather than letting her sit next to him on the loveseat they occupy, leaving Rose to settle into the armchair opposite them.

Rey falls into his lap with a little shriek of glee, a sound of pure happiness that sends a little pang through Rose’s heart as she’s reminded of all the times Finn has pulled similar stunts with her, all the longing she’s buried deep within herself to focus on the task at hand.

Force-sensitive as she is, it really should come as no surprise that Rey picks up on the sudden spike of pain in the room.

“You really do love each other fiercely, don’t you?” she asks softly, leaning forward to look at Rose.

“As much as any two people can,” Rose tells her without hesitation. “I know what they say about us Betas, I know what people think about mixed couples. But… but I don’t care what they say, I don’t care that everyone thinks Finn is wasting his time with me instead of a powerful Alpha, I don’t care that everyone’s just waiting for the day he finds his ‘true’ mate and abandons me. I know that’s not us, I believe in us, I believe that our love is as strong as any other conventional couple out there.”

“So let’s prove it.”

It takes Rose a moment to realize the quiet, rumbling words came from the emperor himself, silent up until now. Rey turns in his arms to look at him, seemingly as confused as Rose is – until a smile starts to light up her face.

“Love, that’s genius!” she proclaims, reaching up to take the emperor’s face into her hands and kiss him soundly. “When it works they’ll have no choice but to acknowledge–”

The emperor laughs, and pulls away from his wife’s lips by just the slightest bit. “Sweetheart, maybe we should get Rose’s opinion first?”

“Right, right,” Rey says, and then turns back to her. “Okay, so: the big deal with Alpha-Omega couples – or Alpha-Alpha couples, or Omega-Omega couples, you get it – is that we’re capable of mating, right? And that forms this connection that makes us hyperaware of each other, attuned to each other on a whole new level. So what if we can prove that Beta-mix couples are just as connected?”

They are, as far as Rose is concerned, but– “But how would we prove that?”

Surprisingly, the emperor – Ben, Rose reminds herself, Ben – takes over. “Of all the things that get heightened after the mating process, scent sensitivity is probably the main one. If we can prove that Finn is just as attuned and attached to your scent as he would be to an Alpha or Omega partner, we can prove that you need to be around each other just as much.”

The plan, once they lay it out, is so beautifully simple.

Next week, the Spinebarrel is due to host an annual conference of the galactic senate, a three-day event during which participating senators come aboard to update the imperial couple on their planet’s latest developments and raise issues of growing interest. Naturally, with all of these additional guests onboard, a significant number of Peacetroopers will be called in to ensure everything runs smoothly. Finn, by order of the emperor, will be one of them.

At the end of the first day, all guests will be invited to a welcoming gala in the ship’s large ballroom. There, Rose and Finn will be placed on opposite ends of the cavernous room, separated by thousands of other people. Finn will be given five minutes to pick out his partner’s scent from the crowd, after which Rose will be ushered toward one of the many, many exits from the ballroom – with the hope that Finn will have caught her scent by then, allowing him to follow closely behind. From there, Rose will make her winding way toward the hangar, all the way on the other end of the ship.

She will not be allowed to look back to see if Finn is on the right trail, and he will not be allowed to call out for her to check that she is ahead. And to prevent him from catching sight of her, Finn will be blindfolded as soon as he leaves the ballroom.

The process will be challenging but if they prove successful, if an Omega manages to pick out the scent of his Beta partner in a room of thousands and follow it across the titanic imperial flagship, then everything will change. Their success will allow for the repetition of the experiment with other Beta-mix couples, and that in turn will be used as the basis for the imperial couple’s push to make amendments to all existing legislation and policies which regard Beta-mix couples as inferior to Alpha-Omega couples.

At the end of the evening, a nervous but hopeful Rey turns to Rose. “Do you think it’ll work?”

Rose is silent for a moment as she considers the question, and then she asks, “Could you two do it – what you’re asking us to do?” She’s belatedly reminded of the fact that the Alpha-Omega couple in front of her is a special case, and rushes to amend her question. “Could any other Alpha-Omega couple do it?”

Ben nods, even going so far as to offer her a small, reassuring smile. “I see it happen all the time.”

And just like that, Rose knows her answer, knows what the outcome will be. “Then yes,” she tells a beaming Rey. “Yes, it’ll work.”

👑  👑  👑

Finn arrives on the Spinebarrel the day of the gala itself, just two standard hours before things are set to begin. They’re allowed a brief, private reunion as soon as he boards, giving Rose a chance to update him on everything she’s been up to since he left and everything they’ll have to keep in mind tonight.

She worries that maybe Finn isn’t quite paying attention to her careful instructions, though, because his expression had morphed into one of awe at some point during the retelling of her galactic adventure and it’s still stuck that way. “Rose, Rosie, you absolute miracle – you actually did all of this, you came all this way and talked the imperial couple into changing the world. Maker,” he sighs, gently cupping her face before he dips down to kiss her, “you are amazing.”

Rose laughs and pulls him closer, her heart singing with the comforting familiarity of their embrace for the first time in too long. “I told you we’d be together again soon, didn’t I?”

“And I’ll never doubt a single word you say ever again,” Finn vows, just as they’re interrupted by a knock.

“It’s time,” Ben’s unmistakable voice calls from the other end of the door, and for a moment Rose thinks she might panic, thinks they’re not ready–

But then Finn takes her hand, and one look in his eyes is all it takes for her to know that everything is going to be okay.

Brief introductions are made as soon as she opens the door, with Rey surprisingly recognizing Finn as the first friendly face she’d seen upon boarding the Supremacy all those years ago, and then they’re off to the gala, Rose and Finn trailing behind the imperial couple dressed to the nines.

The grand ballroom is absolutely packed, filled with senators and their retinues eating and dancing and socializing after a day of discussions and negotiations. In the midst of all this, the four of them somehow manage to slip in unnoticed even with the striking silhouette Rey and Ben cut in their fancy clothes and regal bearing, and Rey shuffles them off to a quiet corner to run through the plan one last time.

Two people, a human man and woman, appear just as Rey finishes her explanation, more for Finn’s benefit than anything else. “These are Mitaka and Kaydel, two of our most trusted staffers,” Rey tells Rose and Finn. “They’ll be helping you find your places and make sure everything goes according to plan. Now, are you ready?”

Rose smiles at the newcomers, shares a look with Rey and Ben, and then turns to take Finn’s hand in hers once more. “Yeah, yeah we’re ready.”

Rey’s face splits into a warm smile, and she steps forward to take both Rose and Finn’s free hand. “I’d hug you, but I don’t want to throw Finn off with all of these baby hormones.”

That brings their tense little circle a small laugh, at least.

“Good luck, you two. I know you can do this.”

Ben steps forward with a nod. “We’ll be waiting on the other side.”

And with that, the imperial couple disappears into the crowd.

With Kaydel and Mitaka politely standing to the side, Rose takes the opportunity to give Finn one final kiss – for now.

“We can do this,” he says fiercely against her lips.

“Find me,” Rose whispers, and then they go their separate ways for what is hopefully the last time.

👑  👑  👑

High above the ballroom, Rey and Ben settle into a hidden viewing box that’ll allow them to keep tabs on the action within the ballroom. A projector connected to a multitude of cam droids lights up the walls, feeding them live recordings of both Rose and Finn.

The small room is silent as they watch Finn prowl one length of the ballroom, kept in place by a dutiful Mitaka as he strains to distinguish Rose’s scent from the thousands of others in the ballroom.

It’s obvious as soon as he picks it up, the lines of tension on his face and in his shoulders smoothing away immediately. “Remind you of anyone?” Rey turns to ask her husband teasingly, giggling with delight when he simply picks her up from her seat next to his and plops her into his lap in response.

Ben holds her close as they watch the first five minutes tick by, his chin warm on her shoulder as they both cradle their child.

Before long, Kaydel is leading Rose toward an exit and patiently counting down the seconds of Rose’s two-minute head-start before she notifies Mitaka that it’s time to let Finn go. He darts across the ballroom, a strong start, but Rey tenses every time it looks like he might pick the wrong exit.

“Shh,” Ben soothes her after one particularly close call, dropping a hand to her hip to draw calming circles. “Love finds a way, remember?” he whispers in her ear, an echo of the promise they’d made each other in the early days, back when it seemed like the entire galaxy was against them and their relationship.

She and Ben had burned the galaxy down and rebuilt it from ashes in order to be together. Surely Finn and Rose will manage finding each other in a ship, even if said ship is the ridiculously oversized Spinebarrel.

“Love finds a way,” she murmurs, and allows herself to lean back into Ben’s arms and simply watch: watch as Finn finally picks the right exit and Mitaka swoops in to blindfold him, watch as Rose falters once, twice in her steps but determinedly keeps her eyes straight ahead and keeps moving, watch as Finn stops to doubt himself every now and then only to close his eyes, search for Rose, and let his heart guide him.

And then finally, at long last, they watch as Finn bursts into the hangar and blindly runs across the wide, empty space toward Rose, picks her up and swings her around in his embrace before they reunite with a joyful kiss.

Rey turns her eyes away to give them a moment of privacy, and smiles at Ben. “You know what this means.”

“Indeed,” Ben muses with a smile of his own, catching a glimpse of the Beta and Omega clinging to each other for dear life in a desperate embrace that is all too familiar to him. “I suppose it’s the dawn of a new era,” he tells his wife, catching her hand in his.

Rey laces their fingers together. “We’re good at those,” she quips with a confident grin, and settles into Ben’s embrace with a happy sigh just as Rose does the same to Finn on the screens in front of them.

[verdigrisprowl]

Who wants a Halloween Magic Anon event?

More specifically: who wants their muses to have to face down (an illusion of) whatever it is they most fear?

That’s what I thought.

So what’s the event?

On Halloween, a bunch of random Phobia shields will be dropped on a bunch of random Cybertronian-populated areas across a bunch of random universes. Phobia shields were introduced in Spotlight: Hoist as an invention by the Galactic Council to drive off Cybertronians from worlds they haven’t yet invaded.

They function by latching onto a single conscious Cybertronian’s brain, reading it to find their worst fear, and creating a physical manifestation of the fear—think holomatter, although we don’t know if the shield actually uses holomatter or some similar technology. If that Cybertronian passes out, then the Phobia shield latches onto another nearby Cybertronian and starts generating their greatest fear instead. So if your greatest fear is fighting Megatron, suddenly there’s a solid Megatron charging at you with fusion cannon powering up. Make your character face their greatest fear!

When is it happening?

Halloween day! The magic anons will be sent out the day before on the 30th, to be activated on the next day. If you want to activate it as soon as you get it, or save it for a few days before you activate it, you’re free to do so. There’s no overarching plot that depends on everyone doing it at the exact same time.

How can I participate?

We’ll be sending out magic anons to people who are interested on Halloween. Like this post, reblog it, or send a reply, an ask, or a DM to indicate that you want to get the anon. If you find out late about the event and want to get in on it, feel free to copy/paste the magic anon and send it to yourself. You’re also free to send it to any of your buddies you want to haul into terrifying hologram hell with you. 

How long does the event last?

It’s an open-ended event; the magic anons will be sent out on Halloween, but your threads and involvement with the event will last however long it takes you to find and destroy your Phobia shield. If you want to go on a three-month-long epic quest with eight other muns to find and destroy a dozen well-hidden and well-guarded Phobia shields planted at strategic coordinates across Cybertron, you can. If you want to spend two hours goofing around with your muse climbing on a table screaming because their room is filled with a hundred tiny Airachnids and then declare the Phobia shield’s battery burned out and everything is back to normal, you can do that too. There’s no rules here; once you get the magic anon, you get to decide how much or little you want to engage with it.

Under the cut I’ve put more info about fear shields based on what we’ve seen in canon.

Please reblog to signal boost if you’re interested in participating!

What do the shields look like?

We don’t know what Phobia shields look like, so I’ve arbitrarily decided they look like this, stand about shoulder-high to an average carformer, and probably aren’t all that hard to destroy if you find one. The hard part is 1) realizing that you’ve got a Phobia shield latched on to you and aren’t actually getting stalked by a swarm of rusting zombies, and 2) figuring out where it’s located so you can destroy it. The Phobia shield will probably be somewhere within a few miles of the character it’s latched on to.

What kind of things do they generate?

These are the examples we’ve seen of Phobia shield-generated illusions from canon:

- Tarn, complete with working double fusion cannons, courtesy of Sunstreaker’s fears—although the fusion cannon blasts didn’t appear to do a lot of damage. It’s likely that any illusory heavy weaponry generated by a Phobia shield will look just as terrifying as your character can imagine, but not actually be that deadly unless the illusion gets in a lucky shot. - A combiner of Shockwave, Megatron, Overlord, and Sixshot, courtesy of Swerve’s fears, capable of kicking Hoist and knocking him down. - Metroplex, courtesy of Bob’s fears. It was capable of stepping on and crushing a ship. - Hoist’s biggest fear is being alone. The phobia shield obliged by somehow hiding the unconscious Cybertronians around him from his sight.

So, anything that can be physically generated—from objects, to people, to major landscape alterations that conceal the actual landscape/people—is fair game. Weaponfire is also a possibility. None of the illusions are seen talking or making any other sounds, so it’s unlikely that that’s an option, but if it’d work really well for your character’s fears then go for it!

What kind of things can’t they generate?

It’s very likely that, if a thing isn’t an actual physical object, the Phobia shield can’t generate it. It can’t generate a telekinetic bot that’s actually capable of levitating things with their mind. If it generates Glitch, he can’t make objects malfunction just by touching them. If it generates Trailcutter, he probably can’t generate forcefields (although he might be able to generate a solid translucent bubble in the shape and color of a forcefield). If it generates Brainstorm’s briefcase, it won’t actually be capable of time travel. Think of the things it generates as movie props.

How do they work?

When the target of the Phobia shield is knocked out, the illusion visibly fades away to nothing, and then another target is immediately chosen and latched on to. It appears that the shield won’t move on to a new target until its current one passes out.

Ships won’t detect life signs from the illusions; so while the illusions are designed to fool Cybertronian senses (and are solid, so can do real damage), they’re not similarly designed to fool the equipment around Cybertronians.

Considering that the size of the threats consistently escalated (from Tarn, to a four-bot combiner, to Metroplex) before plummeting to nothing (Hoist’s empty void), it’s likely that the Phobia shields can intelligently choose which person’s fears to latch onto in a way that maximizes the amount of fear that can be generated while minimizing the amount of physical matter the shield has to generate, so the fears will get progressively bigger and bigger as it moves through targets, and only at the end resort to “less scary” fears. (But if that doesn’t work with the plot you want to do, feel free to ignore it! It’s theorization, not confirmed canon.)

What if my character has an abstract fear, like failure or abandonment?

Hoist had a pretty abstract fear—loneliness—and the Phobia shield found a way to make a physical representation of that. Get creative! If your character’s greatest fear is being abandoned by their loved ones, maybe the Phobia shield generates illusions of their loved ones that give them the cold shoulder and try to get away from them. If your character’s greatest fear is disease, maybe it makes fake rust appear on their armor. If your character’s greatest fear is damnation, maybe the shield makes a very judgmental-looking Primus that gives them a thumbs down.

Who’s affected by the shields?

The Phobia shields were designed specifically to drive Cybertronians away from planets the Galactic Council wanted to protect. They work on Insecticons too, so presumably any person or creature from Cybertron can be affected by the shields. Since the shields were made to protect aliens from Cybertronians, they probably don’t work on aliens; an alien would still see and could be injured by the shield’s illusions, but the shield wouldn’t latch onto an alien’s brain or generate illusions based on their fears.

I don’t want the shield to affect MY character, but I’ve got some NPCs on my blog that the shield could affect and my character would have to deal with it...

Once you get the magic anon, it’s your shield to do with as you please. It’s all fair game.

One of the rules about how the shield works prevents me from doing something I think would be interesting, can I change it up a little?

Yeah sure, you got a shield that’s malfunctioning and/or custom altered and it operates a little differently from everyone else’s.

Again, the event is on Halloween, the magic anons are sent out October 30, and you can keep going with it as long as you want to keep playing. Like/reblog/reply or send an ask/DM to say you want to receive a magic anon. Please reblog to signal boost if you’re interested!

[arrowheadproductions]

Percabeth arranged marriage au?

This turned out… differently than what I expected… And probably different from what you wanted, but it’s still an arranged marriage. I might make this a bigger piece because I liked this concept so much.

Crossed Unions- Rated T

I met Percy Jackson almost 6 years ago when he was discovered as the sole heir to the Atlantean throne. He, like every other heir to an Olympian throne, received a banquet in his and his father’s name. My mother, Queen of Athens, begrudgingly took my siblings and I to this event out of sheer respect for the virility of the crown. She and the Lord of the Sea never saw eye to eye on much, (outside of a brief project that included the invention of the chariot- but I digress) so it was no question that this was purely out of formality and respect to the High King, Zeus. 

He was a scared little boy no older than 12, like myself, and I didn’t regard him as royalty material. He looked like he’d been taken off of a farm after wrestling with some pigs, hosed off, and wearing clothes that didn’t have holes in them for the first time in his life. His hair was deliberately unruly and dark as the deepest depths of the ocean. He looked absolutely terrified and positively unaware what in the name of the River Styx was going on.

I scoffed. It wasn’t unlike Poseidon to make such a brash decision at claiming this boy as his own. He was better off giving his kingdom to the children of his wife, who at least grew up in that environment and would know how to manage an entire group of people. Instead, like with many of the fine rulers of Olympia, pride got in his way and he was determined to find his singular bastard child.

Mother finds it unlikely that the Sea Lord has just one illegitimate child out there in the realm, but somehow he’d managed to convince his brother, and that was what truly mattered. This was especially scandalous, as the three offspring of the fallen Lord Kronos took a binding oath of loyalty to their wives. 

This led everyone in the kingdom to either hate or love young Percy Jackson, which was a situation he’d never been in before as squalor. He was used to being underestimated and ignored, not plastered on every flyer in town about every movement he made. 

One of the dangers of being claimed as a son of the higher lineage (also known as the “Big 3″) was the idea that he would have to prove himself worthy by fulfilling a prophecy along with 2 companions. He chose a satyr named Grover, despite his father’s insistence he take one of his noble half-siblings, but Percy Jackson was loyal more than anything and Grover was trying to earn his searcher’s license like many other satyrs. To do that, he would need to fulfill a quest alongside a hero.

As for the third companion? Well, he didn’t get much of a choice. His quest was to recover Lord Zeus’ stolen lightning bolt to prevent war amongst the 12 kingdoms. It was a heavy one and I felt it was unfair to bestow this upon a kid so new to this world. He barely knew how to swing a sword. I was the most capable and readily available.

The court was pretty against a girl going, which was super annoying since I’ve kicked all of their sons’ butts in dueling, but Athena sided with me and relented that it was high time I prove myself in her name.

I can’t say I liked him very much upon meeting him, though I will admit to some flickers of jealousy that he was inevitably getting a quest and I haven’t seen the outside of Athens since I was taken in by Lady Athena. 

“So, you’re a daughter of…?” He trailed off as he approached me. I analyzed him carefully and could tell he was obviously nervous. He couldn’t stop alternating between staring a beat too long at me and quickly reverting back to looking at his shoes. They were shiny and all, but not worth gazing at. I would have argued that I wasn’t exactly worth staring at either, but the boy seemed dumbstruck.

“Athena.” I supplied.

He blinked.

“Of Athens.” I said more impatiently. Maybe he was just dumb.

He wrinkled his brow and I could almost see the wires in his seaweed-filled head trying to make out just how that was possible.

“Oh.” He said stupidly and his face reddened. I could tell he was battling between asking me or not. “I thought she was a… Nevermind.”

“I’m adopted.” I sighed, taking pity on him. “We all are, technically.”

“Oh.” He said again. Didn’t he have anything else to say? He was about to embark on a dangerous quest, after all. It would do a lot better to ask someone as trained in the arts of planning and history of our land to converse with me about it. Actually, I had mistakenly believed me was going to do just that at first. 

Nope, instead there we were making weird small talk.

“You drool when you sleep.” I offered, like he needed to know it.

His green eyes widened and it was the first time I’d noticed their impressive likeness to the actual sea. There was no question this was Poseidon’s boy. Though, he could use some training on how to act like a capable person.

“H-How do you-?”

“Who exactly do you think helped nurse you back to health with Chiron after that Minotaur attack, Seaweed Brain?”

“I’m not a Seaweed Brain!”

“Could have fooled me.” I shrugged and slunk away before anyone thought we were getting too comfortable. Had I only known that I’d just met my best friend.

Athena is a virgin leader, so all of her children are actually unrelated to her directly. Those that biologically produce the children are doing so as surrogates and are always the wisest and most intelligent people with whom Athena has built a mental connection with. She is always present at the birth and retrieves her child to Athens. It is as though we are hers through something bigger than blood- fate. 

I am forever grateful to be hers and am rightfully placed, however, I have been waiting for my chance to prove my wit and my strength for the past few years. I am the best swordsman (or woman) in Athens even if I prefer to fight with a knife. No one outside of the great lady herself strategizes like me. I spend all day reading and training, even if mother does not always know it. She is certainly more progressive than some of the other figureheads and wants her daughters to be just as intelligent as her sons, but there is still a standard to be made. She does not think with love like a typical mother might, but in what is strategically best for the good of mankind. 

My mother was unlike many of the other Godly leaders and placed her children with a choice. We were to either marry in the name of strategy and arrangement or to be virgins forever and focus solely on enriching our minds and bettering humanity. At 10, I chose marriage, as it seemed like the best thing for the current climate of our kingdom. Mother had certainly approved of my decision and that was enough for me back then. Hermes had an eldest son a few years my senior named Luke Castellan who was directly in line to obtain his throne. Mother and King Hermes got along well enough and it was always ideal for wisdom to spread beyond the gates of Athens. It was always a goal for the higher up’s to get their children on as many thrones as possible. If I were to marry Luke, I would be in line for Queen of Arcadia. 

This was all good and great back then. I even developed a fixation on Luke Castellan. He was tall, blond and good-looking, not to mention seemed to carry a protectiveness of me that seemed fit in a husband. I was 10 though and more than trying to rationalize the idea that the then 15 year old guy would be my betrothed. I’m sure he didn’t see much in me back then. We were not to marry until we were both of age at 18 and at 10, this seemed like lifetimes away. 

And what does any of this have to do with Percy Jackson? Well, I did my best to dislike him as Mother vehemently dislikes King Poseidon, and at first, I did. I couldn’t stand Percy Jackson. He was ridiculously brash and impulsive, but so thick skulled that I wanted to shake him senseless just about every time he spoke. He wore this stupid smirk that exposed himself with those stupid bright green eyes that told anyone in sight that he was up to no good. I thought he was ridiculous and was glad to be marrying a respectful knight in Luke.

And then, a very dangerous thing happened.

Well, two very dangerous things happened in line with one another. Luke began to betray his father’s realm and planned to overthrow the High King. And, I fell madly, truly, hopelessly in love with the son of the Sea King. It was a slow progression, but it happened and I fear I cannot think my way out of it.

Worst of all? He fell in love with me too.

My engagement to Luke fell through the wayside, due to his own death during his attempted uprising, but our problems in this matter did not end there. I was suddenly supposed to marry the son of King Apollo in an attempt to achieve his throne. Percy was set to be married to a princess from a different country altogether in an attempt to create peace between the Greeks and the Romans. He and Princess Reyna were to be married when they are both 18.

We’re 17 and marriage is no longer lifetimes away, despite how much we pretend it is when we sneak around. When we hold hands and walk together, we pretend we are a normal couple living a content and unplanned life. When we steal dances at galas, we pretend everyone knows about us. When we make love in the protective confines of my room in the high tower, we pretend it’s practice for something bigger than the two of us. There’s a bit of security in knowing I’ll always have Percy as a first everything in my life and likewise. That is something no amount of arrangement can change.

We wear promises that don’t come in the name of rings, but in symbols. I wear a necklace with a coral pendant on it while Percy in an impulsive (it’s become mostly endearing at this point) stunt, permanently branded “AOE” in small letters right over his heart in dark ink. This typically stands for “Of Athenians” and is often accompanied with the owl.

“What if somebody sees this?” I asked one time while we were sweaty and still recovering from being wrapped up in one another. He hovered over me, his muscular chest on full display and I traced patterns into his bare back. 

He smiled that lopsided grin that now made my heart melt and heat grow between my legs if he caught me in the right mood. Sometimes I think he knows what he does to me, but he’s too thick-skulled to see his own beauty and is honestly somewhat surprised every time we arrive in an intimate situation.

He leaned down to kiss a growing mark on my neck. “Who’s going to see it, but you?”

Your future wife.

I didn’t say it, but I don’t think I had to. His smile flickered a bit in his gorgeous eyes and it yanked at my heart strings. Maybe sometimes we pretended a little too well.

Worried I’d ruined the otherwise pleasant mood we’d cultivated in the wee hours of the morning, I leaned forward and kissed the engraving.

“I like it.” I decided. “Now you’re mine forever.”

He leaned in close so our noses were brushing against each other. “As if I ever wasn’t.”

I grow increasingly bitter about the situation as the days go on, even if it could be worse. I am now betrothed to the son of Apollo, who does not lust after me either, but for the son of Hades. For obvious reasons, he does not come out with this claim either. Percy’s bride to be is in love with a lady of the hunt, Thalia Grace, daughter of Zeus. For the same reasons as well as a shared duty to her country, she remains loyal and quiet. 

I toy with the idea that we can time things just right. After all, a baby will be expected from both of our ends. If I were to have Percy Jackson’s baby instead of Will Solace’s, it would not be a problem. Unless, of course, that baby popped out with his beautiful dark locks. That wouldn’t solve Reyna’s predicament either. We get together and vent, occasionally, though all of us return to this binding loyalty we have to our parents. What would we sacrifice in order to protect the greater good? What would we lose? Would we regret it?

It’s hard to think I wouldn’t when Percy’s hands slip so perfectly in mine as we stroll in private by the water.

I no longer side with my 10 year old self, unsurprisingly, though my Mother will hear none of it. Strategically, this makes sense, but I am not thinking that way anymore. My siblings know of my affair and tease me by accusing me of being a child of Aphrodite instead. It isn’t like the Sea King’s son and Wisdom’s daughter as a union would be negative. In fact, it might force the two to actually sit down and get along for a change. It would just be unprecedented. 

We weren’t meant to get along and we certainly weren’t meant to fall in love. 

[dayo488]

fic writer asks

Tagged by @burninghoneyatdusk​ and @bookwormforalways​ ❤

Name(s)?

dayo488 (tumblr, ao3, and twitter - though I don’t use twitter for fandom stuff much, since it’s also connected to my IRL friends too)

Fandom(s)?

I’ve only posted the100 fic so far, but I’ve got a QotS one-shot (like 1500 words) in my folder that I haven’t posted yet.

Where you post? AO3

Most popular one-shot (by kudos)?

I don’t actually have any one-shots posted yet, just multi-chaps, but I do have a Bellarke one-shot that I did randomly a few weeks ago and the above-mentioned QotS one-shot.

Most popular multi-chapter (by kudos)?

Stay Here Tonight E-F-L, slow burn, angst, mutual pining  Clarke goes with her best friend Wells to a wedding of one of his fellow firefighters, Raven. Come to find out when they get there, that the groom is none other than Clarke's boyfriend of a year, Finn. Stuck with having to blow up Raven's wedding day, Clarke has to deal with the guilt of being the other woman, even if she didn't know, and figuring out how to move on.Surprisingly, the worst day of her life, just might lead to more happiness, family, belonging, and love than she's ever known as she makes friends with some unexpected people. But she has a hard time with one person in particular in her new circle. Bellamy happens to be more stubborn, hardheaded, and protective than anyone she's ever come up against, but she might also see a different, kinder side of him that she never thought he would have.

- It was actually my very first fic and I really didn’t expect people to like it as much as they did. I wrote a lot when I was younger, but drifted away from it until I started this idea. It wouldn’t leave me alone and kept developing in my brain so I wrote it down. And now it’s got almost 900 kudos which is completely mind-blowing to me. But it helped me rediscover my love for writing, so I’m eternally grateful for whatever burst of bravery made me post it. Plus, I made some pretty awesome friends by doing so! And it was nominated in the Bellarke Fic Writer Awards, which is incredible!

Favourite story you’ve written so far?

Moved By You

E-F-L, mutual pining, slow burn, angst, canon universe, kidnapping, hurt/comfort, found family

When Clarke finds out that the Ark cannot sustain oxygen past a year, she, along with 3 other experts in their fields, join the prisoners on a mission to Earth, to find out whether it's survivable in the even they can't fix the oxygen systems. However, one of the other adults with her on the mission betrays her and trades her to a Grounder village. Clarke must figure out where she belongs and who she is as she struggles with what her life looks like now. She finds that she enjoys the people of her village, but still feels torn between the people who want nothing to do with her anymore, and the people who she finds she wants to be with, including the village's leader, who is annoying and pushes all her buttons, but also has a depth to him that she hadn't expected.

- Even though SHT holds a special place in my heart, MBY is my favorite. It stretched me in ways that was exhausting, but SO rewarding. I had to research Trig language and survival techniques and fight sequences and other things that I don’t have knowledge in. But it was SO fun and getting to write the found family portion of it was my absolute fave. There’s a few things I’d redo if I could, but I’m really proud overall of how it turned out. 

Fic you were nervous to post?

There’s always a measure of anxiety every time I hit that Post button on all my fics, but actually, my Aladdin four-parter (I Can Show You the World) was probably the one I was most nervous about posting, just because I’d never really done a re-imagining fic before. I had to blend the OC characters and the100 characters and it was a little nerve-wracking. It definitely wasn’t near one of my more popular stories, but that’s okay - it wasn’t really meant to be taken very seriously anyway. I had the idea and wanted to see if I could do it - it was more of writing exercise really. Especially since I didn’t want it to be a musical, but wanted to incorporate the songs anyway. But yeah, I was still really nervous.

How do you choose your titles?

Song lyrics, totally. I have a playlist for each of my fics in my spotify and there’s usually one that I pick specifically that kind of just reminds me of the whole vibe of the fic and I usually pick a favorite line from that.

Do you outline?

Sort of? I have a VERY messy bullet point list for each of my fics of storylines and plot points I want to include, character arcs, character traits, background info, ideas, scenes, even dialogue. But it’s not in any sort of organization lol. I should probably work on that.

Complete works? 3 posted. 2 one-shots not posted

In-progress works? 1 posted. 3 not posted. 

Coming soon/not yet started?

I seriously cannot decide which fic to post next since my inspiration and excitement over the 3 multi-chaps I’ve currently got going shifts every day. Here’s the breakdown so far -

- Treasure Hunt AU, tentative title that I don’t want to say just yet since it may change. This is the one I’m leaning towards posting next. Basically, Bellamy is a treasure hunter/authenticator, with Raven as his partner in crime, and Clarke runs the Palace, an art gallery/school that her father opened when he was alive. Bellarke used to be married - a few years before the fic started they met while Bellamy was on a hunt and needed information from Clarke and she joined them and they fell in love. Then they ended up splitting up and hadn’t spoken in years until Bellamy finds a lead on a BIG find that sends him back in Clarke’s orbit. Very angsty, lots of mutual pining, lots of danger, lots of craziness. (That’s a terrible summary - I’ll clean it up before I post it lol)

- We Were Built to Last - Fantasy AU (this started as a Wonder Woman AU, but morphed into something no longer resembling that at all lol). In this one, Clarke grew up a princess on the Island - a place where the women are trained as warriors because when they turn 21, their “gift” (basically a super power) reveals itself, except Clarke, who is apparently the first woman to not have a gift manifest. The men don’t receive gifts either, but no one knows exactly why (and it’d be a huge spoiler to reveal the reason here 😉). Bellarke grew up best friends and when she’s young and wants to start her training, but her mother forbids it, Bellamy helps her learn anyway, with the help of his mother who is the Head Warrior. Anyway, Clarke discovers that her father didn’t die like everyone thought years ago and instead was kidnapped by Queen Nia, an escapee and outcast of the Island for using her gift for death and destruction. Clarke, Bellamy, Octavia, Raven, and Murphy go on a quest to rescue him. It’s a VERY complicated plot with a LOT of world-building so I’m not sure I’m ready to get this one out yet, even though I’m like 5 chapters in.

- Between the Raindrops - Apocalyptic AU loosely based on the show the Rain, though the plot of the fic is VERY different than the actual show. One day, the rain starts falling and whoever it touches, dies. Bellamy and his sister are the children of a brilliant scientist (Aurora) for the company Eligius, who has access to a bunker that they end up staying in for 6 years. When they finally emerge, they are confronted with a world they no longer recognize. And also a traveling group of survivors - whose leader Bellamy doesn’t understand or like (spoiler - it’s Clarke, and they fall in love 😂). I’m actually the farthest in this one - 6 chapters finished, but I’m kind of at a block with it right now. 

Prompts?

I’ve got one that I haven’t started, still trying to get the ones above finished first before I dive into any others right now. Real life has been crazy the last few months and it’s all I can do to get I Don’t Want to Dream About You finished first! 

Wow that ended up being lengthier than I expected! But it’s very fun to get it all typed out - especially the WIPs I’m super excited about! Thanks for the tags, friends! I love reading your works and being a part of this fandom ❤

I never know who to tag in these, especially since most of you that I would usually tag have already done it (I’m so behind!). You are all an inspiration to me, and I wish all nothing but happiness and inspiration for you in 2021!

[junker-town]

5 NFL preseason trades that would make a lot of sense

Melvin Gordon and Trent Williams want new deals, if not new teams. Here’s where we’d like to see them end up.

The 2019 NFL season is a month away, but that doesn’t mean this year’s opening day rosters are anywhere close to set. Teams will spend the next several weeks analyzing their strengths and weaknesses before coming up with the 53-man combination they hope will be Super Bowl-worthy come February.

While most of the moves that lead up to Week 1 will be relatively minor, a few landscape-changing trades could be on the way. Contract holdouts this summer have turned impact players like Melvin Gordon, Trent Williams, and Jadeveon Clowney into potential August trade bait.

These megadeals don’t happen often, but when they do it can change the outlook of the league. Khalil Mack turned his quest for a record-setting deal in Oakland into a division title with the Bears after being traded last September. Two years ago, the Bills sent Sammy Watkins to LA, where he led the resurgent Rams in touchdown receptions. In 2016, the Vikings gave up a first-round pick for a revitalized Sam Bradford following Teddy Bridgewater’s devastating knee injury.

Sometimes these moves fuel a playoff run. Other times they end up being a relative waste of draft assets. But if we were given omnipotent NFL general manager powers this preseason, here are the moves that would be on the top of our wish lists.

Washington OT Trent Williams to the Browns

General manager John Dorsey pushed his chips to the center of the table this offseason, sacrificing assets and cap space to bring expensive veterans like Odell Beckham Jr., Olivier Vernon, and Sheldon Richardson to northeast Ohio. Adding one more would shore up one of his team’s biggest weaknesses. While Greg Robinson has provided a nice redemption story after washing out with the Rams and Lions, he’s still a shaky option to protect Baker Mayfield’s blindside at left tackle.

Williams would be an immediate upgrade. The seven-time Pro Bowler has consistently been a sunbeam bursting through the never-ending tempest of Washington football. He’s currently looking for a new deal that pays him like one of the league’s top tackles (he is) and is also reportedly untrusting of Washington management and its training staff. He’s ripe to be freed.

There will be several bidders for his services — Houston and Minnesota are also in need of a franchise pocket protector — but another bold move would be right up Dorsey’s alley. Losing Mayfield due to injury would be an especially Browns way to derail their momentum. Dorsey needs to take as many drastic steps as he needs to keep that from happening. — Christian D’Andrea

Cowboys OT La’el Collins to the Texans

This is a trade that could benefit both teams. We all know that the Texans desperately need help along the offensive line — remember, Deshaun Watson got sacked 62 times last year and the Texans used their first-round pick on a project tackle who may end up playing guard.

Collins isn’t an elite offensive lineman, but he could pretty easily be the best one Houston has. Plus, his contract expires after the season and the Texans are projected to have a boatload of cap space in 2020 to extend him.

It could also help the Cowboys in the long-term as well. They’re still working on extensions for Dak Prescott, Amari Cooper, and Ezekiel Elliott. That’s going to create a sticky cap situation to navigate for the next few years, so acquiring more cheap contracts through the draft is something that would be beneficial for them.

Letting go of Collins for the 2019 season would sting for Dallas, but in the grand scheme of things it might make life a little easier for them in the coming years. (Please don’t attack me Cowboys fans I’m just thinking out loud.) — Charles McDonald

Texans Edge Jadeveon Clowney to the Panthers

Houston’s in a tough spot with Clowney. He has the potential and elite athleticism to be one of the game’s most disruptive pass rushers, though he has yet to hit that ceiling. Is that worth a nine-figure contract extension for a team that already features two highly paid cornerstones (J.J. Watt, DeAndre Hopkins) and is slated to give Deshaun Watson a huge new deal in the next two years?

Given Clowney’s steady improvement and recent health, it probably is — but let’s look at the other side of that coin. The versatile defensive end/linebacker would be a boon for a Carolina team with the punishing interior pass-rushing duo of Kawann Short and Gerald McCoy but limited support on the edges of the pocket. The Panthers ranked 25th in the league in sack rate last season and were even worse in blitz downs.

Convincing the Texans to give up a prized part of their potent defense would go a long way toward fixing that. And even though Carolina has less cap space in 2020 than Houston, the potential retirement of Greg Olsen and release of Dontari Poe would free up approximately $25 million in room next spring to retain Clowney via expensive extension. Throwing a Clowney, Mario Addison, Bruce Irvin, and rookie first-rounder Brian Burns defensive end rotation around the middle of a defense led by Short, McCoy, and linebacker Luke Kuechly would made the Panthers an intimidating out against any opponent in 2019.

The Texans have the cap space to keep Clowney around on a market-resetting deal if need be. The question is whether they’ll want to make that move knowing it could eat into the resources needed to reinforce an offensive line with the structural integrity of a bread bowl. If Houston decides Clowney’s not worth a long-term investment, there’s some logic behind trading him while he can still fetch value in return — not a lot of logic, granted, but it’s still a consideration. Should the Texans part ways with the former No. 1 overall pick, the NFC South could be waiting. — Christian D’Andrea

Chargers RB Melvin Gordon to the Bills

For a brief moment in the weird Antonio Brown-Steelers divorce saga, the football world thought the receiver was being traded to Buffalo. There was a lot of pointing and laughing at Brown, who — according to Ian Rapoport — was about to be jettisoned to NFL Siberia in Upstate New York. He was set to play for an offense that was dead last in passing touchdowns. Alas, it didn’t come to be, although one could definitely argue getting traded to the Raiders isn’t much better.

All that to say, Gordon getting traded to Buffalo would probably be received the same way. After requesting a trade from the Chargers, it’d look like a giant middle finger to the running back if he were sent from a contender to the Bills — no matter how bullish you are on the young roster’s upside.

Here’s why Gordon would have reason to be happy about it, though: The Bills could give him the contract he wants.

Buffalo has over $22 million in cap space for the 2019 season and is currently projected to have about $60 million available in 2020. One reason for all that freed up space is that LeSean McCoy — who counts $9.05 million against the cap this year — is set to hit free agency next year.

The Chargers are reportedly holding firm to an offer of $10 million per year for Gordon. That’s a little insulting to the two-time Pro Bowl running back when Todd Gurley, Le’Veon Bell, and David Johnson all have deals that average at least $13 million. The Bills could easily give Gordon a deal that averages about $13 million and still have more room to build.

Buffalo could use the help too. McCoy is 31 now and averaged a career-worst 3.2 yards per carry in 2018. Chris Ivory didn’t fare much better with 3.3 yards per attempt. Maybe Frank Gore and T.J. Yeldon will help in 2019, but neither is the future for the Bills at running back.

Gordon could be that — and give Josh Allen a reliable threat in and out of the backfield for years to come. — Adam Stites

Browns RB Duke Johnson to the Jaguars

Johnson’s status in Cleveland is up in the air. Although the Browns want the versatile tailback on the roster to serve as a valuable receiver out of the backfield, Johnson is unhappy with his spot on the roster after the offseason signing of Kareem Hunt and has requested a trade to search for bigger opportunities elsewhere.

One place he’d be able to shine is Jacksonville. Johnson’s receiving chops would give him the chance to immediately fill the void left behind by T.J. Yeldon, who had 55 catches one year ago but is now in Buffalo. Johnson would almost certainly see more targets in Florida than he did in Ohio, too. The Jags’ wide receiver and tight end depth charts are pretty grim.

New quarterback Nick Foles will spend his debut season in Duval County searching for playmaking targets who can move the chains. Foles hasn’t been prolific when it comes to finding runners on screens or wheel routes — only 18.3 percent of his targets the past two seasons went to running backs, per Pro Football Reference — but that could change in an instant given the lack of talent he’s facing downfield.

Johnson would also have the ability to showcase his skills as a runner on a team that’s still focused on making Leonard Fournette — he of the career 3.7 yards per carry average — happen. If Johnson wants a role beyond just third-down back and third man up on a roster that includes Hunt and Nick Chubb, Jacksonville may be the perfect place for it. — Christian D’Andrea

[thiswaycomessomethingwicked]

Wrack and Ruin

Part I

Part II

Part III

Part IV

Arthur lounges in a chair at the desk in his room. He is attempting to compose a letter to the Cabinet Office as both Master of the Ordnance and Minister of the Occult. He dislikes how the titles and roles are entangling themselves together. He feels there ought to be a distinct delineation between them. He, thus far, has been shot down.

'What are you wearing to dinner?' Napoleon asks as he sticks his head in. Arthur leans his head back so he is viewing the man upside. 'That is a pretty face you're making but not an answer to my question.'

'I was attempting to get some work done.'

'Still not an answer. Oh, I see your man has lain out your uniform.'

'Yes. How involved do you think this dinner will be?'

'Food and drink wise? Very involved. If you want to eat well, always dine with Joseph. In terms of guests? Intimate. He said he was having only one or two people along.'

Arthur screws the lid back on his ink and sets his pen back in its holder. This letter is clearly not going to be completed in the time between present and dinner.

'Very well,' Arthur sighs. 'I will do work after dinner.'

'Think of this as a holiday.'

'I'm here on behalf of the British-'

'Yes, yes. I know.' Leaning over Napoleon adjusts Arthur's collar and cravat. 'Get dressed or we'll be late.'

//

The dinner party is small consisting of Nicholas Biddle and his wife Jane and a Mr. William Bligh and wife Margaret. Arthur had expected there to be the whispered about Annette Savage, unkindly called Madame de la Folie, but she if she is present in Bordentown at this time she is absent from Point Breeze.

'Never seen it myself,' Nicholas is saying as the fish is brought it. 'Of course I've heard all the stories. You can't help it in these parts. It reminds one of some of the beasts that Homer wrote of - creatures of remote Mediterranean islands.'

Napoleon perks up at the mention on Homer. ‘You enjoy the epics?’ He asks with great enthusiasm. 

‘I enjoy all the classics,’ Nicholas pauses as he searches for a title. Finding it difficult with two Bonapartes present, the Duke of Wellington, and an amiable if bland Mr. Bligh, he settles on nothing. ‘I’ve been revisiting Virgil. The Aeneid.’ 

‘An excellent choice.’ With an ironic smile Napoleon quotes, ‘He was to be ruler of Italy, Potential empire, armorer of war; to father men from Teucer's noble blood. And bring the whole world under law's dominion.’ A theatric sigh. ‘But, was not to be for him.’ 

Nicholas spreads his hands as if saying, Such is life. 

Arthur, ‘I beg your pardon, but to return to the beast. The stories you have heard, they only speak of one, correct? Or are there more?’ 

'I've only heard of one,' Nicholas replies. 'Who knows, though. The natives speak of all sorts of strange creatures in the woods. Perhaps there are more.'

'But this one was born of a human?'

'Correct, though our host knows more of the particulars than I.'

Joseph shrugs, he has said all he knows. There is little knowledge left to impart. Perhaps there are still members of Leeds family around? They are the ones who brought this creature forth not quite one hundred years ago.

Napoleon listens with half an ear as Arthur digs into the legend and mildly wonders what sort of letter the War Office is going to receive. Evidently they are concerned about numbers of these strange creatures. Napoleon thinks that a ridiculous approach to it. Folklore creatures do exist in regards to sheer number, that is not their power. It is over the mind that they reign most completely.

Do not go here, do not go there for the Jersey Devil will get you, the giants of Bonafacio will crush up your bones and make pulenta from them like chestnuts, the fairies will lead you astray and down into the dark earth where thirsty roots dig deep. The power of the unknown, the feared other is where true magic of these things lies. He would know, he was the Ogre. The Scourge of Europe. The Bogeyman.

Jane Biddle is a handsome woman and Napoleon, done with thoughts of the unknown for one evening, turns towards her and makes general inquiries about her life. Who was her father? Her mother? Where was she from? Has she and her husband any children? Only two! He asks for their names. Edward and Charles.

'Charles is a good name,' he says.

'I think so,' Jane agrees.

'You should name your next son William or perhaps Harold. Those are names of fame and fortune.'

'If it is a son, sir!'

'Of course it will be a son, you have two already. That is a good sign.'

She teases, 'and if it were to be a daughter?'

'Josephine.'

Jane smiles, 'that is a beautiful name.'

'Of course. Or Pauline, if you absolutely must.'

Nicholas attends to them as he drifts out of a conversation with William Bligh. He catches Napoleon’s eye as the meat course is brought in. ‘Perhaps not as warm a subject as Virgil and Homer but I would like to speak with you on a manner of some import.’ 

'Nicholas, not work.' Jane says this with the tone of one who knows a hopeless situation when it presents itself.

'For only a minute, my dear. What think you of our current situation?'

'Broadly speaking? The general human condition? Hopeful, I would say. Or more particularly?'

'As you may know, I am the director of the federal Bank.'

'Ah! that sort of import. The current economic state. What is your opinion?’  

'It is trying at best, an absolute horror at worst. We'll muddle through it though, I have no doubt. I want to ask you about the Louisiana Purchase repayment process. It has, as you know, exacerbated the current economic crisis and I have been consulting about the best approach.’

'New government in France,' Napoleon holds his hands up. 'I have nothing to do with it. I raise bees and tend my garden in a small village in England now. I am, how do you say in English, a retired gentleman?'

Jane not-so-discreetly nudges Nicholas' foot beneath the table. He smiles warmly at her and says, 'oh fine, we'll talk later. Aside from our current crisis I want a more complete account of the creation of the French bank.'

'Naturally.'

'Your brother Joseph is of little help.'

'Come tomorrow,' Napoleon says. 'We're going on another quest for this devil. Come with us.'

Nicholas at first defers, he would not wish to infringe if this is a specialized practice. He only prepared Lewis and Clarks' report of their western exploration past the Mississippi, he is not a man of nature.

'We are all urban gentlemen,' Napoleon says.

'But you're also all soldiers.'

'Excuse you,' Joseph says primly from down the table. 'Do not cast that aspersion on all of us.'

Nicholas laughs, oh he is sorry. He would not wish to cast any shadow on their host. 'He's a good man,' he says to Napoleon.

'Oh yes, between the two of us Joseph is the more handsome and the kinder.'

//

Arthur approaches the letter and desk with annoyance once dinner has ended and guests dispersed for the evening with plans to reconvene in the morning. He outlines what he wishes to convey then begins. He decides that he will include an edited copy to interested parties in England such as that botanist Buchanan.

Part way through is the expected knock. Napoleon enters without waiting for an invitation and Arthur twists around to face him, points at him with his pen dripping an errant bit of ink to the floor.

'You should wait until you have been invited, Bonaparte.'

'I knew you'd be scribbling away at your letter. You fairly near abandoned me at the end of the evening.'

'You and your brother were reminiscing about family half in Italian. I was clearly not needed.'

Napoleon leans over him and scans the letter. Arthur remains, despite several years of close acquaintance, unaware of exactly how much English the one-time emperor can read. He partially covers the letter with his hand. Napoleon scoffs, ruffles his hair.

'You just wanted to escape Mr. Bligh. Madame Bligh was charming.'

'Yes I saw you steal away with her into the corner of the room for a time.'

'I did not steal away. We were discussing constellations and so we went to a window to look at them which elucidated the conversation.'

'You're hopeless.'

Napoleon grins and flops back onto the bed. He is still half dressed in evening wear and smells of cigars from the other gentlemen.

'Bligh wished to speak to me of the great innovations being made in ship building in Boston,' Arthur says when Napoleon offers no other lead. 'He was being loud.'

'He was rather loud.'

'And brash.'

'His French wasn't good, I didn't get that far.'

'And dull.'

'The worst offence!' Napoleon juts his hand up pointing to the ceiling. 'Off with his head!'

'He was being an American.'

Napoleon props himself up on his shoulders and raises an eyebrow towards Arthur. Arthur does not appreciate the scrutiny and turns back to his letter muttering that some people have work that needs to be completed.

'You tolerated the few socialites we met in Boston.'

Arthur glares over his shoulder, 'they weren't dull. They were charming, educated women with peculiar accents. I am immune to peculiar accents. You have a peculiar accent and I abide it well enough.'

Napoleon flops back down and says that if Arthur is going to be misish he can do it alone. Arthur says he wishes he could be alone. If other people would only let him. Napoleon, 'you don't mean that.' The tone is teasing silk. Without seeing him Arthur knows he is smiling and it is devilish.

Arthur writes on for a time before he hears Napoleon standing and moving about the room. As the door opens Arthur says, 'what your brother wants you to say.'

From across the room Napoleon's voice is low and soft, 'yes?'

'Have you figured it out?'

'Oh yes.'

'Probably for the best.'

'I disagree.'

Arthur shrugs. He continues writing. The door closes with something like an admission.  

[tiaraofsapphires]

my satellite (are you here tonight?)- Chapter 4

Nice and update!

Chapter 4: Calamity

Read on Ao3 here!

It was a relief to now have Jaal by her side, fully aware of everything that was going on. And it was also a relief, of course to a lesser extent, to have Lexi on their team as well.

Their time was spent in a mixed bag of on-the-sly prenatal care and trying to maintain appearances.

They, meaning Sara and Lexi, did an ultrasound, with only the two of them in the room, in the quest of arousing as little suspicion as possible.

Sara was beginning to hate the sneaking around, hated it even more when she was seeing this without Jaal with her.

As soon as the image focused, Sara vowed to bring him with her every time they saw the baby, crew’s suspicions be dammed.

It was a little pulsing lump, almost peanut-shaped. It didn’t look like anything close to human or angara or in-between the two yet

It was beautiful.

“That’s—that’s it,” Sara murmured, pointing a shaky hand at the image.

“There it is. Your little baby,” Lexi confirmed. She was smiling.

She didn’t cry then, but when she showed Jaal the pictures hours later and saw the trembling hope and undisguised awe in his face, she had to bury her face into his shoulder and compose herself.

After the initial excitement, it didn’t take a mind reader to know that Lexi was concerned about the whole human-angara hybrid situation. The scans so far looked promising as they could this early in the pregnancy, but Sara knew that Lexi had her misgivings.

They were going to wait for further development before more rigorous tests. Lexi wasn’t going to push anything that would potentially hurt the child, especially anything that required poking around at it.

This wasn’t a normal pregnancy. Sara had no illusions about that.

Hell, Sara was sure the only reason Lexi wasn’t berating her on the whole ‘you should've practiced safe sex’ thing and the ‘you shouldn’t have had sex with Jaal when he was going through a hormonal event that you didn’t understand’ thing and the ‘this entire situation dangerous both for you and your child, but mostly you’ thing was that Lexi didn’t want to accidentally alienate her patient.

And it was a good thing she kept her mouth shut. Sara already gave those things enough thought, and didn’t want them thrown in her face from a different person.

They already had their spats over SAM and his influence on her physiology. Sara didn’t want to have that conversation that would likely ultimately end in a ‘you shouldn’t go through with this.’

Sara was going to see this through, good or ill, and deal with whatever fallout may come.

It was an unspoken agreement between the two of them that Sara would still do her Pathfinder duties, like nothing had changed, though perhaps not get into firefights with everyone who looks at her funny.

Jaal didn’t like the idea, but when Sara reminded him that pregnant angara still fought against the kett until they couldn’t anymore, he kept his mouth shut.

It was for the best. If things changed suddenly, questions would be asked. So far, the cluster had been quiet enough that most problems didn’t require a Pathfinder’s hand. More and more militia were being defrosted and sent to defend the various outposts, especially after the losses sustained after the battle to take Meridian. And there were three other Pathfinders that could help.

“Tell me you will think about stepping away,” Jaal had asked.

She couldn’t give him a solid answer.

Things were smooth, relatively speaking. She could almost seriously entertain the idea.

Until she received a flurry of emails from Kadara.

Christmas Tate had been doing his best with an outpost surrounded by slowly-healing sulfur springs and every manner of criminals.

Reyes had been as welcoming as he possibly could be to an Initiative outpost after putting a bullet in Sloane Kelly. But Tate was spread thin even with the Initiative militia present and the emails that he sent Sara made it clear that he needed a Pathfinder, specifically Sara, to help.

Allegedly, the general population held some feelings of respect for her, aside from severe Initiative malcontents, any surviving Outcasts, and the Roekaar.

Plenty of people wanted her dead. What else was new?

But there was no choice but for them to dock on Kadara and there was no choice for Sara but to disembark.

Jaal was insistent he go with her, enthusiastic to a point it seemed strange to Vetra, who was scheduled to go planetside to begin with.

Everyone and their mother knew Jaal hated Kadara. There was no reason he’d volunteer to come without good reason.

“Maybe we can raise our child here,” Sara mumbled when it was just the two of them in the armory as the ship started its descent.

Jaal looked utterly insulted, ducking down to hiss in her ear.

“Our child will not live in such a place of squalor and depravity like Kadara.”

Sara grinned and lightly nudged him.

“I know. I’m kidding. We’ll find somewhere.”

Jaal huffed and kissed the top of her head before shuffling out, muttering something about ‘sulfur springs’ and ‘horrible smell’.

Sara’s smile immediately evaporated as she focused on getting her armor on.

She really shouldn’t have turned that stone. It brought about questions that they didn’t have answers to yet.

Where would they raise their child? What would they do after it was born? Neither Jaal nor Sara would put themselves in positions to orphan their child, at least to the best of their ability.

And, right now, Sara was putting herself in a position where their child could die before it even had a chance to live.

Boy, did that make her feel like the worst person ever to live ever.

Still, duty called.

Sara donned the toughest chestplate in the armory and prayed to any gods that would listen that this wouldn’t end in disaster.

Lexi didn’t need to give her a warning before Sara got off the ship.

Don’t take a bath in the sulfur ponds. Don’t get shot.

Easy.

She checked and double-checked her armor, slung two assault rifles on her back, tucked a pistol to her hip, and collected her crew.

“Let’s not pick any fights we can avoid,” she said. “We’ll help Tate, you know, iron stuff out, and leave. Hopefully no one causes us any trouble.”

Vetra tapped fist against her open hand. “If they do, they’re screwed.”

Sara nodded.

“Very. Let’s go.”

Sara strode down the ramp on the back of the Tempest with Jaal and Vetra at her back. There was a confidence she didn’t feel as she walked.

She was Pathfinder. She got in firefights on a near-daily basis for months in

Tate wasn’t there to meet them, but they were quickly approached by a human woman who introduced herself as Yesenia Lopez.

“I’m Tate’s assistant,” she said in a way of explanation. She didn’t seem to like the idea of it, of being sent to do his errands.

Sara didn’t take in personally. It wasn’t like everyone was happy with the positions they were put in after being defrosted. She nodded. “Good to meet you.”

Yesenia gestured with a hand.

“I’ll take you to Tate. He has a laundry list of things he wants you to help him with.”

Sara internally groaned. Of course, just her luck.

Over the private channel, Sara muttered, “SAM, tell me if anything looks suspicious. Like, for real suspicious.”

“I will. There are no current threats around you.”

Alright. A couple minutes into her trip and no threat. So far, so good.

Sara didn’t want to think about the very precious and vulnerable thing that was sitting inside her. Not even a month into the pregnancy and there she was.

To be fair, very few of the habitable worlds were habitable at all. She was more likely to cause damage to herself and her child on Elaaden or Voeld, both of which were still on their way to reaching temperatures close to normal.

Can’t hide from the weather, but can shoot at people who want to shoot at her.

So. There wasn’t much she could do. It’s not like she could only take missions on Aya and Eos, which now had solar radiation levels that could be easily blocked by life support or even sunscreen.

She just had to find a way to boost her life support in her suit for Elaaden and Voeld. And hope that nobody shot at her when she was on Kadara.

Fine. It was all going to be fine.

Yesenia led them through the outpost. People they passed stopped and whispered.

There were always whispers.

Respect, disdain, mistrust, admiration. She didn’t want to be a god or a despot. She signed up to the Initiative to serve.

With that came whispers and titles. Savior of Heleus. The Initiative’s errand girl.

This entire situation was totally not planned, not even close to in-line with what she thought she would face at the end of a 600-year-long nap.

“How are things at the outpost?” Sara asked in way of conversation. Only so much could be gathered from just looking at the superficial.

Yesenia jumped at the question and glanced at her. There were bags under her eyes, a weariness in her posture. But she looked nervous, on-edge. “It could be better. Definitely could be better.”

That didn’t sound good, but Sara couldn’t know for a fact that what she was hearing really was that bad.

“Anything that I can do to help?”

She nodded, mouth curling in what could be mistaken for a grimace. “Definitely. I don’t think Tate would’ve contacted you if he knew you couldn’t do anything.”

They walked and walked to stop in a tiny courtyard-space surrounded by box-like buildings. The outpost had enough resources to pretty-up the place. Native flowers grew in boxes alongside small patches of familiar-looking crops.

Sara looked around, something like irritation heating her face. Tate was nowhere to be seen. They came all this way, and Tate couldn’t be bothered to show up on time?

“Where’s Tate? As much as I love seeing the outpost, you know, I’d like to actually do the stuff I was called here to do.”

She stared at Yesenia, looking for an explanation. The other woman seemed guilty for a second.

“Ah, I already messaged him. He will be here soon.”

Huh.

Neither Vetra nor Jaal said anything. They just shifted where they stood, looking around in idle curiosity.

Really, Sara shouldn’t have felt suspicious. She could chalk it up to prenatal paranoia that something felt wrong.

Still…weird.

She was about to ask SAM if Yesenia had actually used her omni-tool to contact Tate at all while they were walking when he spoke up over the private channel.

“Sara, the turian at your 11-o-clock is a combative position. His hand is going for the weapon on his back. Also, I have Lopez scanned and her heartrate is higher than what is normal.”

Panic like a lance cut through Sara instantly.

She glanced to the left, the action unseen because of the tint in her helmet, to see the turian in raggedy armor. His hand was moving to grab the butt of his shotgun. She glanced to the right to see that sweat glistened in Yesenia’s hairline. Her eyes were cutting towards the turian, almost like she was waiting for him to make a move.

Shit. Shit.

A set-up. They were set-up.

Sara fumbled for her pistol, the quickest thing she could access.

He was going to kill her. He was going to wound her and end up killing her child. She didn’t know. She couldn’t know. Either scenario couldn’t happen.

She had to kill him first.

She aimed just as he brought his shotgun from over his shoulder, pulling the trigger.

His knee buckled a bit right as he shot at her, firing too high, sailing over their heads.

The bullet exchange happened almost simultaneously, an explosion of sound.

People were screaming, Jaal and Vetra tensing behind her, hopping into action.

Sara staggered back, one hand holding her pistol and the other bracing across her abdomen.

She didn’t take him down. It wasn’t enough.

Fear narrowed her vision, closed over her throat.

If this had happened a month earlier, she would have stepped in front of Jaal and Vetra without hesitation.

But now there was something else to focus on: her child. Her little child who had no choice in being her child, no choice in being put in this position.

Jaal made the decision for her. He had her by the scruff of the neck, a handful of her armor, and yanked her behind him, shielding her with his body.

The turian male shouted something that she couldn’t understand and aimed at Jaal.

“No!” Sara yelled, impotent, useless.

While Jaal and Sara moved back, away from the turian, Vetra moved forward.

Vetra was quick and deadly, gunshots ringing out before the male could think to aim at this new target. And he was on the ground, holes smoking in his head.

“Are we clear?” Sara shouted, at SAM, at Jaal and Vetra, at anyone who would give her a straight answer.

“Clear!”

Jaal immediately turned to her.

“Are you okay?” Jaal asked.

His hands skimmed up her sides, brushing over her stomach. Sara shook her head, trying to put a semi-normal amount of space between them.

No, no, don’t treat me differently, not here.

“We’re fine, we’re fine.”

She said that like she knew for sure that was the answer. She didn’t know. She could’ve been shot and shock would’ve made it so she didn’t feel it.

But Jaal wasn’t panicking in a way that would indicate that she was injured and she didn’t feel anything so she could be fine but she didn’t know.

Vetra stared at them with a look of both confusion and suspicion.

Sara stayed impassive on the outside, giving an air of ‘oh, my concerned boyfriend, coddling me’, a lie and a truth meshing perfectly on her face. Just enough for the turian to buy it, maybe.

On the inside, she was frantic on SAM’s private channel, more emotion than words.

SAM already had an answer before she could ask the question, like he had already checked everything possible the moment the attack ceased.

“Sara, I am not detecting any changes with the health of the fetus. Though I would suggest not getting into that kind of situation again, both for your sake and for the sake of your unborn child.”

The words echoed around in her head, like a balm. She nodded at nothing.

Right. Not going to do that again.

A glance to the right and she saw Yesenia’s retreating back. She wasn’t running, but wasn’t walking either. Trying to be as nonchalant and disappear into the crowd while the chaos swirled around the outpost.

Pure rage had Sara’s hand lifting up her pistol.

She felt it, a jolt of energy that radiated from shoulder to fingertip, as she lifted and aimed. With the lightest squeeze, a single bullet left the barrel.

Her aim was true. She didn’t feel a thing.

…

The rest of the stop, fulfilling the various menial jobs and mediating arguments, passed in a numb blur.

Tate had rained apologies for the breach in security, promising that nothing like that would ever happen again.

The turian, Alescus, was a former Outcast with a history of violence. He had paid Yesenia off, a hefty sum, to bring Sara out to the open.

Yesenia was still alive, barely, locked up in the outpost’s little prison.

Sara wished she had killed her.

There were suggestions made that they go back to the Tempest and leave. But some idiot part of her made her bark an order to stay.

She remembered Jaal and Vetra, especially Jaal, looming over her like the fiercest of bodyguards.

It was to make her feel safe. To make sure everyone else around them knew that if there was another attack, there would a hail of bullets to meet the attacker.

Without prompting, SAM knew to fiddle with her physiology, make her hands shake less, make her heart beat a little slower, even giving her prompts as to next steps.

It was a temporary thing, not even fully fixing the panic. It was still there, an ache sitting in the center of her chest. When it was time to fully feel, she would feel it and it would suck. She knew that.

SAM kept her spine straight, kept her composed, until she decided it was time to leave.

She resolved what she could and put tape and bandaids over what couldn’t be fixed in a day.

Tate was grateful for the help, that much was clear. It was some small victory to be had, though she was antsy to get to the privacy of her room on the Tempest.

SAM quietly informed her that he had been collecting names and details of all the errands she did that day and was already writing reports to be sent to the Nexus for filing away. She didn't need to ask how he’d be able to make it sound like her writing in the reports. He had his database on everything Sara Ryder and could probably masquerade as her through words for the foreseeable future.

She was in such a mood that any reports she wrote herself would probably unintelligible.

All she could think about was the light in that turian’s eyes, how he was out to kill her. He could’ve succeeded. He could’ve killed her. He could’ve killed Jaal or her child, which would have been the same as killing her. She knew her heart would've been shattered if she lost either of them.

It was a terrifying thing. The love of her life, and the product of their love for each other. Two things that she found on Heleus that she now couldn't bear to lose.

Her heart hurt in her chest. She wanted to cry and cry because she almost died and she almost lost everything.

It wasn’t fair. It wasn’t fair to so many people.

But she knew she was being selfish. It wasn’t just her and her family that deserved safety and security in Heleus. She was Pathfinder. She was to provide safety and security at the expense of her own. That was how it fucking worked.

Now, it wasn’t as simple.

She had a conversation that she couldn’t remember with Suvi and Kallo about getting underway and going somewhere. Probably towards the Nexus. It was a safe bet that she said something about heading to the Nexus. Or to Meridian. One of the two.

Her fingers shook when she took off her armor. She fumbled over the latches and buckles as one by one, she looked less like a warrior and more like...something else. It felt like she was exposing herself, somehow less safe in the walls of the Tempest.

SAM said her child still lived where it rested inside of her. It was some source of relief. It had to be.

Lexi demanded another check-up, even though it had been two days since she last saw Sara. That was Tomorrow Sara’s problem. Right now was Scared-Out-Of-Her-Mind Sara’s time to try to make sense of what the hell happened.

Jaal followed her out of the armory, similarly freed of his armor and his weapons in their proper places.

The door shut behind Jaal as Sara moved further into her quarters. She sat down on the bed, kept her back to Jaal.

Inhaled and exhaled, shuddering.

Sulfur still clung to the back of her throat and coated her skin. She needed a shower. She wanted to boil herself and get rid of the memory of cruel eyes and a bullet that didn’t meet its mark.

Her hands moved up to rest on her stomach.

Still alive. Not tangible yet. She wished she was further along, that there was a little lump there that she could rub and know was real.

She was going to be a mother. She wanted to experience her child, all that she could.

“You shouldn’t be going out the field anymore, Sara,” Jaal said, shattering the silence.

She immediately bristled, still not looking at him.

“I’m pregnant, Jaal. I’m not an invalid.”

There was a pause. “What happened today could have killed our child, killed you.”

Sara’s irritation turned to anger, near-incoherent.

“That is a risk I have to take!” she yelled. “Living in Heleus isn’t 100% safe even if I wasn’t Pathfinder. But I am Pathfinder.”

Her hands were shaking, hadn’t stopped even since they left Kadara’s atmosphere, when SAM let her feel the panic that was at a simmer under the surface since the first shot.

It had been a close call. If Jaal hadn’t been there, she didn’t know what could have happened.

She barreled on. “I need to keep up appearances. I can’t just hole myself on the Tempest and not do anything. I’m still Pathfinder. I still have a job to do.”

When Jaal touched the top of her head, she jumped as if poked with a sharp object. She didn’t hear him move to stand by her side.

He recoiled.

“I’m sorry,” he muttered.

Sara shook her head.

“It’s fine. I—please touch me.”

His hand immediately returned to the top of her head. She relaxed immediately, whatever could be considered ‘relaxed’ in the middle of a near-panic attack. He fingered the loose strands of hair that had come loose from her ponytail.

Her anchor. Gods, she wanted to cry.

“My dearest, I’m not asking you to give that up.”

She scoffed. Funny, how he was usually the blustery, emotional one and she was usually the one to reason him out of irrational reactions.

He continued in a murmur, “I just—I want you to be safe. And I want our child to be safe.”

She sighed and rubbed her face with her hands. This was where the difficult part came in, a kind of choice where there wasn’t really a clear right-and-wrong.

She didn’t know what to do. There was the safety of her child and there was her duty as Pathfinder. Both could exist at the same time, but it would be difficult. She couldn’t imagine going on raids anymore, killing kett and actively seeking out groups that want her dead.

One wrong move and this would all be for nothing.

But this was her job. She was the fucking human Pathfinder and her father foisted this job on her by fucking dying. She had no choice in this and she didn’t know how to let it go. She was Pathfinder. That and the paths she took in order to keep the cluster safe sunk into her DNA and was the entire reason she was pregnant in the first place.

“I don’t know who I am outside of being Pathfinder.”

She wrung her fingers together.

And that seemed to the root of the problem. Of course, she had her ‘abandonment issues.’ Her distant relationship with her parents, followed by her mother’s death, followed by her father’s death. And then there was the fear of losing anyone else because she cared too much about everyone.

And now there was this, this crippling feeling of inferiority. She couldn’t do everything, but she had to do everything. She had to help everyone, but couldn’t help everyone.

This pregnancy was going to put her on the sidelines at some point. It had to. Once she got big enough, she would have to stop going out in the field. She physically wouldn't be able to fight in the ways she was used to.

Even now, her mind was focusing on protecting her child. Her world’s axis shifted from the safety of billions of lives, to the safety of one. It snuck up on her.

“What am I when I’m not Pathfinder?”

She looked up from where she was focused on her hands when Jaal moved to kneel before her.

“You are the woman I love. You are the hero of Heleus.” He took her hands in his.

“If you can’t be Pathfinder, you still conquered the Remnant and the kett. You brought your people home.”

His hands rubbed on her thighs, massaging the tension out of them.

“My starlight.”

That drew a smile to her lips. Sometimes, the kinds of things he said would almost make her swoon like out of an old-time romance novel.

Jaal’s expression hardened. “My heart stopped the moment that cretin attacked you. I wish I could’ve killed him myself.”

She brought his hands up to her mouth and kissed his knuckles. There was little more she could do.

“I’m sorry for making you worry. I know—I know it was a mistake to go down there. But I don’t know what else to do. People look to me.”

He nodded.

“The burden of leadership. But you are not alone in this. Cora was your father’s second, was she not?”

She chewed the inside of her cheek. She couldn’t say anything.

She worked so hard to prove herself to Cora as usurper of the Pathfinder role. Giving it up to Cora made bitterness churn in her stomach.

Hearing nothing from her, Jaal squeezed her hands. “For our sakes, think about it. I just—I want to keep you safe. You and our child. I couldn’t stand to lose either of you.”

She nodded. At least they were on the same page in that aspect.

“Okay. I’ll—I’ll think about it. Maybe once we talk with Kandros we can get something sorted out with the APEX teams. With Cora, that can come later.”

Twelve more days and the entire damn cluster would know she was pregnant.

Jaal’s hands slipped under her shirt to rest on her stomach.

“Soon, our child will be in our arms. Now, it sleeps, safe. You are keeping it alive. You have the greater burden. I wish I could take some of it from you.”

He was earnest, guilty-sounding. She shrugged, cupped his face in her hands. His eyes narrowed a bit at the touch, kind of like a cat.

“It’s biology,” Sara murmured, trying to assure him that he had no reason to feel guilty. “But, you get to hold back my hair when morning sickness comes and massage my feet when they get swollen.”

She leaned down and kissed him.

“Gladly,” he said with a smile, “Anything for the mother of my child.”

[coin-river-blog]

In an age where governments are trigger happy at censoring or shutting down networks, it is reassuring to know that Bitcoin can operate sans internet. Network censorship, after all, is not some dystopian storyline but a power exercised by many democratic governments across the world. Thankfully, there are solutions that enable people to send and receive bitcoin even in a worst case scenario. For an advanced technology, it turns out that cryptocurrency can get surprisingly low-tech.

Also read: Bitcoin and Weak Frequency Signals: Bypassing Network Censorship With Radio

Send Bitcoin by Radio and Circumvent Network Censorship

Imagine waking up one morning to find that the internet is down. Not because the wifi’s been disconnected: instead, your government has pulled the plug . You’ve no idea when it’ll be back online, and in the meantime, you’re cut off from life as you know it, ranging from contact with loved ones abroad to paying for anything by card. Since society isn’t big on keeping cash these days, and ATMs stock up on only so much paper money at a time, chances are you’ll have to sidestep – or engage in – a few fistfights if you’re to put a meal on the table.

Since bitcoin is, itself, a form of digital currency, it takes a good amount of preplanning to set up a transaction, but in theory, it could still operate even when conventional options are forcefully removed from the equation.

What do –

Greeks Cypriots Venezuelans Argentinians Brazilians Zimbabweans and Ukrainians have in common?

They all woke one day and the banks were shuttered and capital controls were put in place to avoid an economic collapse.

Bitcoin doesn't close 🚀

— Jason A. Williams 🦍 (@JWilliamsFstmed) February 12, 2019

While most of us will hopefully never experience a dystopian world of intermittent internet, the productivity sages remind us that a failure to plan is planning to fail. Knowing how to transact with cryptocurrency in a chaotic world is the sort of knowledge that might just come in handy one day, and in the meantime will make you the most interesting guest at the dinner party.

Depending on the political stability of your geographic location, learning how to send bitcoin without internet could be nothing more than a fun Saturday afternoon science project. Then again, it could provide the way out of a tight spot one day, whether it’s transferring funds to a buddy stuck in the middle of the ocean or bribing a zombie to feast on the coins stored in your brain wallet instead of devouring your brain.

Bitcoin Over Airwaves

2014 saw the earliest mentions of bitcoin being sent via the airwaves. Hamradiocoin was one of the early vanity altcoins, geared at the ham radio industry. While it wasn’t entirely clear why said niche industry needed a dedicated currency, its current $794 market cap – unchanged since May 2017 – adds to crypto’s rich historical arsenal of questionable coins.

But the idea of marrying Marconi and Satoshi was bound to lead to more useful experiments. A step in the right direction saw Finnish company Vertaisvaluutta.fi propose the creation of a P2P half-duplex CB/HAM radio cryptocurrency. Also in Finland, Kryptoradio partnered with a national broadcaster to pilot a cryptocurrency data transmission system that broadcasts bitcoin transactions, blocks, and currency exchange data via national DVB-T television networks in real time. The project failed to launch its commercial phase, with founder Joel Lehtonen explaining:

The project raised huge audience and there has been some serious commercial interest but nothing I am really interested in because they would destroy the original idea of Kryptoradio – distributing the Bitcoin ledger autonomously without internet connectivity.

Come 2018, there was a new experiment in town. Ingredients: Brooklyn-based gotenna, a mobile, long-range, off-grid consumer mesh network, and bitcoin privacy wallet Samourai Wallet. A New Zealand developer transported crypto from a distance of 12.6km away, entirely offline, using only a network-disconnected Android phone and four portable antennas. Though as his Twitter recount acknowledges, it took one heck of a prep, including setting up relay stations.

Over the weekend I sent a bitcoin transaction to a relay 12.6km away with no cell network or internet connection. Here's a tweetstorm about how I used @gotenna and @SamouraiWallet to do it

— ℭoinsure (@Coinsurenz) October 16, 2018

Fast forward to this year, and in perhaps the most simplistic effort yet, Coinkite founder Rodolfo Novak managed to move BTC some 600km away from Toronto, Canada to Openbazaar co-founder Sam Patterson in Michigan, USA. And in that moment, Bitcoin-by-sky went international.

Advocates for Bitcoin by Air

In 2017, computer scientist Nick Szabo and PhD researcher Elaine Ou delved into the topic at Stanford’s Scaling Bitcoin conference, introducing a research project that proposed tethering bitcoin to radio broadcast to secure consensus proofs using weak signal radio propagation. (View their talk, a copy of the presentation, and our coverage of the event for further information.)

With Novak and Patterson’s latest feat, crypto Twitter went wild. Szabo, showing that he’s still a firm proponent of taking bitcoin skyward, chimed in to congratulate the duo for a successful sendoff that not even a snowstorm could stop.

Bitcoin sent over national border without internet or satellite — just nature's ionosphere. https://t.co/IKCAXGs9fW

— Nick Szabo 🔑 (@NickSzabo4) February 12, 2019

How to Send Bitcoin by Radio

As Novak and Patterson have illustrated, you don’t need to overload on gear or make space for satellite storage in your backyard to send bitcoin by air. Accompanying an SDR ham on this quest was nothing more than a 40m 7Mhz antenna and the JS8call application.

While the setup seems simple enough (Google “ham radio for beginners” for a primer), in practice this is probably not something you’ll dive into unless you’re just messing around or, in real life, shit gets real.

Gearing up is as easy as H-A-M

In truth, there are restrictions aplenty when it comes to sending bitcoin by radio.

First off, legalities. To stay on the right side of the law, some countries require you to be a licensed ham operator, and even then you’re unable to send any encrypted messages or use the airwaves for commercial purposes unless so licensed. At this point, it’s not yet clear which governmental task force will join the SEC and co in clamping down on illegal apocalyptic bitcoin-via-radio transactions.

Since legal restriction is the mother of all invention, Novak and Patterson circumvented this by broadcasting their experimental, non-commercial wallet encryption sendoff via public cypher.

Then there’s prepping it all. For this to be a viable – albeit last resort – solution in an actual nail-bite situation, sender and receiver would have to set it all up in advance. Novak and Patterson were able to execute their experiment by communicating and collaborating in lieu of the transfer, using a brain wallet. (The brainwallet, which is simply storing your mnemonic recovery phrase in your brain, is not to be confused with the recent more nefarious version – the deathwallet popularized by CEO Gerald Cotten who took the keys to Quadriga’s crypto kingdom to his grave.)

Thus, if you’re going to use this as a backup plan for when stuff hits the fan, you’d better secure a right-hand wo/man and a fool-proof project management blueprint while things are still web-friendly. If this process seems as though it walked off the pages of a James Bond novel, yes. It’s decidedly more involved than a mere intra-wallet send-off.

However, if you’re gung-ho on testing out alternative bitcoin transports, don’t let the naysayers stop you. Yours might well be the next proof of concept the interweb is waiting for. The blog Better Off Bitcoin, for one, offers a run-through protocol tutorial.

Scalability Is a Big Bottleneck

Clearly, scaling is a non-issue here. For the foreseeable future, sending bitcoin by radio isn’t happening unless it absolutely has to.

According to Australian crypto trader Boss Cole, “As Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are moving into the future, it is an interesting concept to think about what would happen if we instead went into the past. It is possible and easy to transfer Bitcoin without an internet connection, but it is not convenient. There are a number of projects working on this with satellites or their own infrastructure, however at the time of this writing they are not “popular” simply because there is no real demand.” He continues:

In the case of government censorship, the infrastructure would change rapidly. If we were dealing with serious problems, the infrastructure would follow. Because it is possible. If we went into the dark ages, the main way to transfer Bitcoin would be transferring private keys between individuals. This would be simple, but not convenient.

Not even extreme weather conditions can deter the determined from sending bitcoin via radio waves

So while it’s theoretically possible to take to the skies and send crypto wallets around the world and all the way into space, DIY bitcoin ionosphere amateurs won’t be sending satoshis to the dark side of the moon any time soon.

Why Radio Wave Transmission Might Be Necessary

We tend to associate worst-case scenarios in which the main character has nothing but a walkie talkie and an old ham lying around with Hollywood’s portrayal of doomsday.

Yet for unstable regimes like Zimbabwe and Venezuela, internet blackouts were how 2019 got its start. In reality, network censorship is an all-too-common control tool for many governments around the world.

India leads the pack with 288 shutdowns between 2012 and 2019, with 134 instances in 2018 alone. The Middle East and Africa aren’t strangers to forcing citizens into offline mode, either.

Good luck stopping information across borders when all you need is 40 watts of power, a long piece of wire, a radio and a computer.

— Sam Patterson (@SamuelPatt) February 12, 2019

Under the Communications Act 2003 and the Civil Contingencies Act 2004, the U.K. has an internet kill switch, which could be enforced in light of a serious threat such as a significant cyber attack. The U.S. has had, for the past 85 years, the power to kill electronic communications under the Communications Act of 1934. And with talks of Russia considering a test run to decouple from the global internet, we risk taking a rude awakening if we assume the world’s 72,558 Google searches every second to be an unquestionable given.

Bitcoin for Every Situation

It might have taken a mini-library worth of code to get NASA astronauts to the moon, but sending bitcoin there won’t be nearly as hard. All you need is a radio. Okay, that and a moon rocket. But the point is, this new technology can be just as comfortable – or accessible – even when when the tech you’re using is decidely old school.

Peer-to-peer networks built on the internet have a special allure because of the sense of resilience they have without a central point of failure. A bit misleading: they are really built on many computers and the connections between them.

Not true with radios. True peer to peer.

— Sam Patterson (@SamuelPatt) February 16, 2019

Bitcoin might have been invented on the internet for the internet, but it can straddle both the digital and analog worlds. Cryptocurrencies like bitcoin walk the line between money under the mattress and cash in the bank. As these trailblazers show, bitcoin can straddle those worlds not only functionally, but also technically. Thanks to the efforts of the pioneers profiled here, crypto has shown it can survive in even the most challenging environments.

Sending bitcoin by radio isn’t quite carrier pigeon, but in tech terms it might as well be. Which, says crypto developer John Villar, is “probably the most low end you can get before smoke-signaling a brain wallet.”

Can you envision a situation in which you might have to send bitcoin by ham radio? What other ways could you picture cryptocurrency being transferred without the internet? Let us know in the comments below.

Images courtesy of Shutterstock.

Express yourself freely at Bitcoin.com’s user forums. We don’t censor on political grounds. Check forum.Bitcoin.com.

Tags in this story

Bitcoin, Bitcoin Radio Broadcast, brainwallet, BTC, Censorship Resistance, Data Transmission, Elaine Ou, gotenna, HAM radio, N-Technology, network censorship, Nick Szabo, Rodolfo Novak, Sam Patterson, samourai wallet, Scaling Bitcoin 2017, Stanford University, Weak Signal Radio

Nadja Bester

Nadja has been involved in the cryptocurrency industry in numerous capacities, ranging from journalist, writer, marketing and communications specialist, and speaker. She has reported on cryptocurrency since 2017.

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