#discussion of neglect in prison | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

sundrop-writes · 2 months ago

Text

I'm Not Angry (Anymore)

George Weasley x Slytherin!Fem!Reader

I’m not angry… anymore. (Well, sometimes I am.)

I don’t think badly of you. Well - sometimes I do.

It depends on the day, the extent of all my worthless rage…

I'm Not Angry (Anymore).

Part One: The Lion and The Serpent

Summary:

You and George have never been friends.

You have known him for a long time, and even if your schoolyard hatred toward him turned into hesitant co-operation during the War (still paired with mild annoyance), the two of you never became friends.

You working at Weasleys' Wizard Wheezes is simply out of convenience for the both of you. And even if you can't bring yourself to leave the awful job, it's certainly not because of the weird attachment you have formed with one of your bosses.

You and George Weasley are definitely not friends.

George Weasley x Slytherin!Fem!Reader. Enemies to Lovers. Pre-Smut, Heavy Plot Build-Up, Romance. Set Post War.

Word Count: 29,900

Harry Potter Masterlist | AO3 Link | Series Masterlist

Full warnings list and author's notes below the cut.

Warnings: the reader character goes by she/her pronouns and has a vagina (though as with most of my fics, most of the pronouns used throughout are you/yours); this fic does use Y/N and L/N (as in Last Name); there are no descriptions of the reader’s race, weight, hair colour, eye colour, or general looks other than a few statements about George being taller than the reader (and even then, it does not say how much taller he is than her and it does not state that she is ‘tiny’ or petite) - this is based off the idea that Oliver Phelps is 6 foot 2 and most people would be shorter than that by comparison; there is descriptions of the reader wearing very hyper feminine clothing, including skirts, dresses, and high heels (and it is stated that she wears high heels on a regular basis), and it's stated that she regularly wears makeup (I had a very specific clothing aesthetic in mind for this character, I couldn't help it); the reader is a Slytherin, and this fic explores the ‘evil Slytherin’ trope because the reader used to be somewhat of a bully but she joined Dumbledore’s Army during her time at Hogwarts and joined the Order of the Phoenix when she turned 17; the reader is the same age as Fred and George and was in their year (so DA took place during her seventh year and the Battle of Hogwarts took place when she was 19 or 20); the reader is a Pureblood and comes from a family that upholds typical Pureblood values - while she used to believe in those things (or was taught to) she broke away from her family and is not a Pureblood supremacist; the reader has a father and other unnamed family members who are Death Eaters, and clearly expected her to follow in their steps; this takes place three years after the Battle of Hogwarts (so the reader character is 23 or 24 in this fic, but you can imagine her to be whatever age you want her to be) - there is some discussion/explanation of the fallout from the War; even though Fred is not the love interest character, this is a ‘Fred Lives AU’ (I can’t put George through all that); this might be slightly OOC Fred - but I do think this is genuinely how Fred would react if one of his siblings had a crush on a Slytherin (the Weasleys can be petty); mentions of canon deaths (Cedric Diggory); there is some ACAB themes - the reader is wrongfully arrested (but George helps to keep her out of prison); George has some trauma over Fred almost being killed; general themes of trauma and PTSD (because both the reader and George fought in and experienced a war); the reader has trauma because she comes from an emotionally abusive and neglectful household (though there are no mentions of her ever being physically abused at home); alcohol and drinking - in this part, only the reader character gets drunk (in a flashback), and she gets drunk with the purpose of drowning out emotional pain, but this is only a one-time thing and she does not have a drinking problem; mentions of vomiting due to drunkenness (does not happen during the fic) (also general mentions of vomit because they sell Puking Pastilles at the shop - but it doesn’t happen during the fic and there’s no detailed descriptions of it); mentions of the reader being raised with House Elves and having a specific beloved House Elf; mentions of a snake being used to scare the reader (if you have a fear of snakes, this might trigger you, but it does turn out to be a rubber toy snake and not a real one); mention of the reader having to experience Umbridge’s canon torture (writing with the blood quill to the point where it slices her hand badly); there is mentions of the reader being right handed (her right hand is her wand hand and the hand she uses to write), so if you’re left-handed, sorry; something that could be considered forcible confinement - George handcuffs himself to the reader as a joke and loses the key, leaving them stuck together; I believe that is all for this section. The next part will have smut (a lot of it) - so don’t get attached to reading this story if you don’t like smut.

A/N: I know that I said this was going to be late, and I genuinely thought it was. But I was feeling a bit better today (even though I am still mostly feeling crappy) and I wanted to get it done so that I can take a break to rest before I start work on editing the next part. And I am really excited to see what people think of this so far, so please enjoy. I am obsessed with their dynamic, and I hope you love it just as much as I do!!!

...

“Um, excuse me, Miss?”

You were distracted away from your work when someone called for your attention - you had been opening and unpacking a new box of Screaming Yo-Yos, but you put that aside for now. You looked up and put on your best (rather fake) customer service smile, the shelf in front of you still half empty, only halfway done as you abandoned it to help the customer.

You rose up from your back-aching kneeling position on the floor and wiped your hands on your apron - an ugly, obnoxiously bright orange one with the Weasley W on the chest, your uniform. You were allowed to wear whatever clothes you wanted with it, but the colour easily ruined whatever outfit you tried to put together. A bit of public embarrassment to go along with the forced nicety that you had to participate in while doing the job. You straightened yourself to better speak to the person - a woman in her forties who most definitely wasn’t the regular clientele for the shop.

“Yes?” You said, your voice bright in a very forced way, your fake smile continuing to beam toward her as she responded with a grin.

“My son absolutely loves this kind of stuff, and I was wondering if this would be a good gift for his birthday?” She asked, gesturing toward a large fireworks display behind her.

Your eyes wandered toward the obligatory ‘must be at least sixteen years old to purchase’ sign that the twins had put on the fireworks display. One that Professor Hermione Granger had been down their throats about adding (‘in a large, legible font’ she had specified). She had been very adamant about it after multiple of her First and Second Year students had nearly taken fingers off from lighting the fireworks and then holding onto them as they exploded, despite the clear instructions on the packaging.

“How old is your son?” You asked, trying to sound politely curious rather than cautious.

You knew better than to scare away a potential customer. You didn’t need Fred down your throat again about how your ‘sour attitude’ was driving away business.

“He’s ten. About to turn eleven. I wanted to get him something for his big day.” She said, clearly beaming with pride.

“Those are a bit, uh… advanced.” You said, choosing your words very carefully. “I think I know something much better for someone his age.”

You put a gentle hand on her shoulder and guided her over to a section of products that the twins had recently come out with - animal themed masks with animated, moving features that made genuine, loud animal sounds when the wearer put them on. The eyes also blinked in time with your own eyes, and the mouth moved in time with your own speech behind the mask.

They were a big hit with younger kids, especially for sneaking up behind people and scaring them with a loud sound. Even if you found the display to be loud and annoying, you did have to admit that it was adorable to see smaller kids put the masks on and get so excited to become their favourite animal.

“Morph-O-Masks.” You said, motioning toward the display with an outstretched, showy arm that felt far too familiar of your red-haired bosses. They were rubbing off on you in a painfully obvious way. “They make genuine animal sounds, have moving tongues, eyes, and ears, and we just released a Hungarian Horntail-”

“Oh my little Gareth would love this one,”

The woman said, clearly excited, as she picked up the classic lion mask. It had a large, furry mane and the toothy mouth that opened wide to let out a loud, realistic roar.

“He’s been hoping to get into Gryffindor, just like his father. I didn’t go to Hogwarts myself. I’m American, you see, so I went to Salem. But I moved here when my Walter proposed. And we had sweet little Gareth a few months later. Fat little baby, he was-”

“That is our best seller,” You commented with a nod, trying to gently cut off the woman’s irrelevant rambling.

“Thank you so much, dear.” The woman thanked you, and much to your internal annoyance - she then pulled you in for a tight hug.

You rolled your eyes sharply over her shoulder, your fake smile dropping into a harsh scowl where she couldn’t see. As your annoyance toiled on, you were simply thankful when the hug lasted no more than a three count (because you were most definitely counting in your head). When she pulled away, you directed her to the cash register where Fred was waiting to check out the purchase and then you got back to stocking the yo-yos.

Your thankfulness ended the moment you turned around and found the other twin waiting for you. George was lingering behind you, a shit-eating grin plastered across his face.

“‘That’s our best seller’,” He repeated your words, mocking you in a girlish tone that did not at all sound like you.

“Shut up,” You griped, rolling your eyes again, shoving your hands sharply into the pockets of your apron in order to resist the urge to hit him.

You had to force yourself to remember that it wasn’t your school days anymore, and you couldn’t afford to lose your job as much as you could afford to lose a few house points back in the day. You had to control the petty nature of your temper much more now.

“No, really, that was great.” He continued on, still grinning with an intense aura of satisfaction.

It made you want to slap him. Not because you didn’t like to see him smiling, but because it felt like he was mocking you. You hated the way his smile curled humiliation into your gut, and you wanted that feeling gone.

“You’re finally settling into the job now, eh?” He added on gleefully.

“It’s work,” You shrugged, eager to end the conversation.

You attempted to move around him to get back to unpacking the yo-yos - but with the isles cramped so tightly together and with his body so stupidly broad, he easily blocked your way, giving you a very punchable smirk as he purposefully stood in your way. Before you could squeeze around the other way, he leaned in closer, forcing you to take a step back as he moved to grab something off the Morph-O-Mask display.

You hated that you caught a whiff of his cologne along the way, during the moment that you were a bit too close to him as he moved toward the display and you couldn’t move away fast enough. The scent was far too strong - a cedarwood and lavender combination that you hated, and even so, his hard day’s work was causing the slightest bit of sweat to seep through. It was truly awful.

(That’s what you told yourself, anyway.)

“I see you still haven’t sold any of the serpents yet.” He chimed, holding up a scaly bright green serpent mask from the display. “If this was a house tournament, I would say that Gryffindor is winning,”

You knew that it was no coincidence that the original line of masks had consisted of a golden yellow lion, a green serpent, a bronze eagle, and a black and white badger. The badger let out a very terrifying snarl and had rather creepy beady red eyes - which had to be the reason you hadn’t sold many of those, not due to any lack of loyalty from Hufflepuffs.

It wasn’t your fault that kids were more attracted to the ones that came in the secondary release than they were to a simple round-headed serpent with a flicking tongue and a very dull hissing sound. They loved the different types of dragons, a spider with snapping fangs and dozens of eyes, even the black cat that purred and flicked its ears sold out more often than the serpent.

Typically, you wouldn’t engage in such a stupid, childish conversation with George, but something had been on your mind considering the original four for a while. Especially when you thought about how many times you had to restock the lion mask in the few short weeks that the Morph-O-Mask line had been out.

“Did you consider the inherent bias?” You posed, tilting your head at him. “This is a shop owned by two Gryffindors, therefore you are bound to have more Gryffindor customers - especially due to the time you two spent performing grassroots marketing back at Hogwarts, which primarily took place within Gryffindor Tower,”

George’s face knit with intense thought as you explained this, and you were glad that for once, he was pensive and actually taking in your words, rather than cutting you off with some kind of joke.

“And even if done unconsciously, you put more care and thought into the design of the lion mask, so it did turn out to be the best one.” You hated to admit it, but it was true.

Between the quality of the fur and the intense daring beauty of the eyes - the way it raised its mouth and let out the deep intimidating roar - it was beautiful. The serpent - which was supposed to be a fellow predator - looked dull in comparison.

“And it’s the one you’ve used primarily for marketing,”

You pointed to the front window, where the lion mask was on a stand advertising the new product. The one in the window was charmed to open its mouth and roar every minute or so, putting on a show to bring people in and check it out.

“It’s like you set up the serpent to fail.” You spoke with finality. “And then you blame it on a poor stock girl for not shilling it hard enough,”

You ground intense sarcasm into your final words, taking the green mask from his hands and tossing it back onto the shelf with the large pile of its unsold brothers, finally skirting around him as he stood there shocked into silence. He was genuinely impressed by the amount of thought you had put into it. He finally snapped out of his shock by the time you had knelt back down beside the box of yo-yos, continuing to neatly stock the shelf with them.

Of course, George wouldn’t leave the topic well enough alone. He turned around to bother you once again, coming to hover over you like a shadow while you worked.

“Well, perhaps next time we should consult a Slytherin for further research and development,” He said, giving you a grin. “Especially one as thoughtful and intelligent as you.”

“Let me know when you find one who’s willing to donate her time.” You replied, brisk and cool and entirely dismissive, grabbing the finally empty cardboard box from the yo-yos and shuffling back to the storage room. You were thankful to have an excuse to finally flee away from George, escaping the conversation.

You were behind the thick wood of the storage room door by the time that George wandered over to the front counter, visibly sulking in front of Fred.

“That was smooth.” Fred told him, entirely sarcastic.

“Oi, that was the longest we’ve ever gone without her insulting me. I am making progress.” George replied, determination ultimately distinct in his voice.

“Yeah, at this point, you’ll be going on your first date in your fifties and be married by the time I have grandchildren,” Fred joked, sounding proud of himself, even standing a bit taller to compliment his words.

“You don’t even know if Angelina wants kids,” George argued easily, eager to navigate around the subject of his pathetic crush.

“Yeah, but at least I know she wants me.” Fred nagged, putting emphasis on the word in a way that made George roll his eyes. “At least I’m not hung up on some stone cold Slytherin bit-”

“Hey!”

George chastised, knowing that he was somewhat hypocritical now because he would have easily hurled that kind of language at you during your school days. He was understanding when Fred heaved a sigh and shook his head in return.

“Maybe I like cold.” George added on dully, still trying to justify himself to his brother.

“Then go stick your cock in the freezer.” Fred sighed. “Maybe it’ll help you get over this nonsense so you can start seeing someone who’s actually good for you.”

George didn’t say anything further, not wanting to waste his energy and words on trying to explain it to a brother who just couldn’t understand. There was no one else for him, no one else who lived in his heart - no one else but you.

Even if you refused to look his way - he couldn’t look at anybody else but you.

…

Weasleys’ Wizard Wheezes.

Part of you - well, most of you - had to wonder how the hell you ended up here.

It had been three years since The Battle of Hogwarts. Three seemingly winding and endless but so very short years since the great Harry Potter had delivered the final blow to the dark side, killing Voldemort and for the most part, killing all the festering ideas that he represented.

And not surprisingly, the entire Wizarding World was still very much in the process of healing, even years later.

Many of Voldemort’s followers had fled Hogwarts in the wake of his defeat, and they had quickly gone into hiding or fled the country altogether, fleeing like cockroaches from the light rather than taking a stand without him there to lead them. Some of them were still being hunted down and persecuted for their crimes; internal investigations were still ongoing at the Ministry, looking into who was responsible for such a dark wizard even having a foothold to so easily take control of the government and even Hogwarts.

Hogwarts had been reconstructed and normal classes had resumed, but it was clear that the effects of the War were still lingering on the place that had once been a battleground. Many veteran professors had retired in the wake of what had happened, leaving positions vacant and desperate to be filled. This caused a strange kind of immaturity as freshly graduated wizards and witches stumbled along, teaching new students in subjects that they had barely mastered for themselves.

And you - your life had turned into one big joke. Literally. You were working at a fucking joke shop, when just a few short years ago, you would have absolutely scoffed at the idea and completely dismissed it as impossible. A past version of yourself would have endlessly mocked the version of your future self who wore that embarrassing orange apron, publicly branded as a slave to two annoying pranksters that you absolutely detested during your school days.

And one of the worst parts?

You couldn’t even truthfully say, not even in the private of your own mind, that you hated those two annoying redheads now as much as you had in the past. Because you truly didn’t hate them as much. You weren’t even sure if you did hate them now.

The War had softened you. You still weren’t sure if it was for the better or if it had weakened you greatly - if it had made you tired and complacent. But the whole experience had definitely softened your opinion of the Weasleys and how much you paid attention to things as petty as house rivalries.

Yes, you were a Slytherin. Yes, you were a Pureblood.

Yes, you had been raised in a world much different than the one you currently lived in. But it was the changes along the way that had made you the person you truly were.

You had been raised in rich nobility, constantly catered to by House Elves, never knowing love or affection from a constantly cold father who only showed you disappointment and disdain. You had been raised to believe that you were inherently better than others because of your surname, because of your blood status, because of your family’s generations old wealth and magic. You had been trained from a very young age to think that nothing was more important than upholding the reputation of that name because of all the wealth and generational magic behind it.

Your mother had been married to your father via a marriage contract - something not uncommon in Pureblood society, something you believed would be your fate. Though your mother had died when you were young and you had very few memories of her - one of those memories being her telling you that you shouldn’t marry young, you should go out and explore the world and ‘find your own path’, you still had been raised to believe that the ways of your family were the right ones.

You had been raised to believe that your father’s word was as good as Merlin’s Law. For a long time, you believed that you would go to Hogwarts - not to get an education, but to carry on the tradition of Slytherin nobility, getting good grades to show off your magical prowess, and make others aware of your family’s ongoing perfect Pureblood reputation. And then, when you turned seventeen, you would be sold off in a marriage contract similar to the one that had bonded your mother to your father. And it didn’t matter if you were happy or not. That part never mattered.

Your life never revolved around something as frivolous as joy, laughter, and pranks.

Perhaps that was why you developed a natural contention for the Weasleys - particularly Fred and George. Because they spent so much of their lives smiling. They were always so happy, seemingly for no reason. They came from a magical family, they had Pureblood lineage, but their family didn’t represent or value the same things that yours did. They didn’t care about reputation or blood purity or upholding traditional values. They cared about happiness and love and friendship.

You spent a lot of your days trying to believe that they were stupid and you were truly better off than they were. You spent a lot of time telling yourself that you would be better off in the long run because you studied more than they did, and you had a parent who cared about your future - someone who was setting you up for a good life. You spent a lot of your time pushing down feelings of loneliness - or telling yourself that those truly superior to their peers always end up lonely.

While the twins spent their days surrounded by friends, smiling and joyful, you spent your days walking the halls of Hogwarts alone, swept up in your own thoughts, constantly worried about your future. To you, it seemed like they didn’t think farther than a few days ahead with the way they acted. And it bothered you. They bothered you. They were a nuisance.

The twins spent so much time laughing - boisterously, loudly, uncaring of who heard them or who they annoyed in the process. Even when they spoke of paranoia for authority figures, even when they voiced a passing worry about their mother’s iron fist - truly, you knew that they didn’t worry about getting in trouble. Because if they did, they wouldn’t actually carry out half the things that they ended up doing.

Meanwhile, your days were riddled with worry - cautious of everything from your posture to your hairstyle to the length of your skirt, knowing that if you made even the slightest poor impression, it would become a rumor that got back to your father. And it made you stressed - and that stress made you sour. And it was something that you easily took out on the Weasleys, especially the loud, annoying Fred and George.

…

Any time you so much as crossed paths with Fred and George while at Hogwarts, your day was instantly ruined. All it took was a simple sighting of the two heads of bright red hair for any calm to immediately leave you. As soon as they were near, your blood pressure skyrocketed and bitter words came flying out of your mouth.

You hated the fact that the castle was so sprawling and large and yet somehow, you kept seeing them so damn often. Part of you couldn’t think that it was simply a coincidence when you saw them. When they kept appearing in the corridors that they knew you took to class, lingering in the dungeons even when they didn’t belong there, lurking near the Slytherin table at meal times. Part of you had to believe that they kept doing these kinds of things on purpose simply to annoy the hell out of you.

“Ugh, you two haven’t been expelled yet?” You sneered the words in their direction as you walked by, your shiny black heels clacking on the stone floor as you made your way towards Potions class. “I would say that this place has gone to the dogs, but I’ve actually had pitbulls more well behaved and more easily trained than you two idiots.”

They were huddling close to each other, standing off to the side of the large corridor, and you were instantly suspicious of them and slightly upset that there was nothing you could immediately accuse them of. You could sense that they were up to no good, as always, and you knew that the evidence of that fact wouldn’t come to you cleanly.

“Oh, Y/N, it’s you.” Fred gave you a feigned, sarcastic smile, and the part of you that thrived off conflict paused your stride and allowed him to keep speaking rather than passing on by. “I thought I heard all the innocent wildlife fleeing in terror.” He put a dramatic hand up to his ear, as though actually listening for this. ��Careful, brother, you’ll want to avoid the large cracks when the ground opens up to swallow her back into the dark pit from which she came.”

It was the typical kind of words he hurled at you. He believed that you were ‘pure evil’ in human form, and he prided himself on coming up with increasingly creative ways of stating that fact.

“I’m surprised that you can hear anything with all the gunpowder and confetti in your ears.” You jested back. “How many IQ points did you lose after that last explosion? Do they have to let the two of you tag-team your exams now? I mean, if you think about it, the both of your brains added up might make it to Troll level.”

“We do just fine. Better than most, actually. Especially if the scores were adjusted for academic favouritism from a certain greasy-haired creep.” Fred sighed harshly in return, crossing his arms firmly.

It was something he had talked about for years, both to your face and behind your back - the idea that you were only considered to be academically gifted because teachers favoured you, especially Snape. And when asked how you achieved such good grades with professors who weren’t your Head of House, he posed another, even more ridiculous sounding theory. He genuinely believed that your father paid them off - that because you were so ‘stinking rich’, you could afford to buy your good grades.

Notwithstanding that his older brothers certainly didn’t have the coin to buy their grades and two of them had made Head Boy in their time. And when you pointed that out to him, he only stopped off steaming mad without admitting that this fact blew huge holes in his theory. No - he would much rather go around spewing massive lies about you (that many of the other Gryffindors believed simply due to Fred’s charisma and popularity) rather than accepting the truth that you truly worked hard and studied. Rather than accepting the fact that you were genuinely smart, while he on the other hand was a lazy, dumb oaf.

You were about to open your mouth to argue passionately against the point when George jumped into the conversation.

“Is that a new perfume?” He added on, dramatically sniffing the air to further punctuate his point. “Or just the scent of ravaged innocent souls coming off you? It is rather lovely, I must admit.”

Your stomach twisted in an odd way as you weren’t sure whether to interpret this as a compliment or a joking insult. He was clearly playing off his brother’s words, dancing around with the implication that you were evil - but he said that you smelled nice when Fred often said that you ‘stank of the burnt cinders off hell from miles away’. The odd feeling became even more jarring when Fred let out a bright, jeering laugh at the words and high fived his brother in response.

As terrible confusion rusted through you, you couldn’t conjure a clever response. Your next instinct was to flee. But of course, you couldn’t let them know that you were running away - you couldn’t show anything resembling panic or fear. You couldn’t bare your neck to a pack of hungry lions.

“Well, as delightfully immature as this is, I am afraid I don’t have the time to stand around here and compete in this stunning battle of wits,” You announced, truly grinding sarcasm into your words to drive home your point as you began to walk away. “Perhaps next time you can come a bit more prepared and actually challenge me. I have to get to Potions.”

“Aww, how disappointing for us.” George replied, faking a whine in his voice that made you clench your jaw with annoyance. “Another time, then?” He tacked on, waving at you and giving you an oddly sincere smile as his eyes gleamed with something you couldn’t perceive as hope.

“Say hello to Snape’s back mole for us!” Fred added on, shouting at your back.

Even as you walked away, you knew that the twins were lingering in the corridor for a reason. Some terrible reason. They stayed in that same spot for far too long, paying far too much attention to you, their eyes glued to your every move as you crossed over the courtyard.

By now, you knew them well enough to know that something was up, and it made you highly suspicious of everything around you - so that when something snagged your toes, you instantly paused, rather than continuing on with your usual steps. When you looked down, you let out a small huff. Of course. Your eyes followed a very thin, near-invisible tripwire to a bucket that was strung up in a tree above your head.

You could only imagine what kind of sickening mixture was in the bucket. So you made a point of dramatically stepping over the tripwire, and you smiled to yourself when you heard the twins swearing and sighing with disappointment from their spot far off behind you. And before you finally left for class, you turned around, spotting them in a poorly concealed hiding place in one of the window-like openings around the edge of the courtyard.

And then, just to prove a point, you blew them a kiss off the tip of your extended middle finger, wanting to show them that they truly hadn’t bested you. Your stomach made that strange twist again when George made a distinct motion of catching the kiss before he winked at you while Fred chose to flip you off in return, clearly mouthing the words ‘horrid bitch’ at you.

You couldn’t linger too much on it, though. You had to get to class.

…

Back then, you thought of the Weasleys as nothing more than daily annoyances. You certainly didn’t think that they would be your future employers. You didn’t think that they would be people that you would be fighting a war alongside.

You thought your life was perfectly planned out ahead of you. You thought that treating others poorly and being generally mean was just a reputation that naturally preceded you - something that you lived up to very well. Everything in your life was finite and decided, and you were just playing the role that had already been drawn out for you.

Until Voldemort made his return.

For you, it was a clear line in the sand.

After years of walking around blind, sleeping through life - all it took was seeing Cedric Diggory’s limp, dead body in the grass to awaken you.

You had lived your life talking about your perceived superiority over others, listening to your father talk about it near constantly. But the longer your life went on, the less you actually believed it to be true. The longer you spent away from home while at Hogwarts, the more it all felt like an act to you; one as fake as the smile you put on at the shop for the customers.

So when it came time to take the next step - when your father urged you to scorch your arm with a Mark in loyalty to a man risen up from the dead and start killing others who were supposedly ‘lesser’ than you, and therefore undeserving of life - you just couldn’t do it. You didn’t have the true pride to back up beliefs that were never your own.

So you turned away from your father, and you did the one thing that you could remember your mother telling you to do. You found your own path.

You had been the only Slytherin to join Dumbledore’s Army, to much hatred and suspicion from the others at first. And even though they had attempted to exile you, it felt like the correct, obvious choice. You knew that you weren’t accustomed to such things, but it felt like the right thing to do.

While it was the first (quiet) rebellion you made against your father’s choices for your life, it was also the most time you had spent around the twins outside of the classes that you had with them. They kept making jokes about you secretly being Umbridge’s mole within the group - which Hermione had assured them and everyone else couldn’t possibly be true, only for you to find out in the most spectacular and horrific way exactly how she had been so assured. And eventually, the twins soon became more adjusted to the idea that you truly didn’t have any ulterior motives.

But that didn’t mean you were opposed to kicking their asses in dueling practice.

(Or any other time.)

…

You had grown used to the stares and ugly looks that you received whenever you walked into a DA meeting. As much as Hermione vouched for you and assured everyone that you were not intent on betraying them to Umbridge, people had a very difficult time getting used to your presence there. They simply couldn’t adjust to the idea that a Slytherin, especially one who had a Death Eater for a father, genuinely wanted to oppose Voldemort, and was actively training to do so.

But you weren’t going to spend your time making noble rallying speeches in order to justify yourself to them. You had your own personal reasons, and that was more than enough for you. You were sick of your father’s ways. You knew that you weren’t any better than someone like Hermione Granger simply because of the name you had been born with. And you wouldn’t stand by and watch people like her be murdered or be forced into performing the killing yourself because your father thought you didn’t have a backbone.

You were sick of a world where you were nothing more than an ornament to him - something quiet and beautiful to help maintain his reputation until you would be married off to someone else to continue doing the same for them. Being sold into a future where you would be forced to produce babies who would be fated to carry on the terrible cycle.

Even if you would be killed for it, you needed to stand up and fight back.

You knew that you were likely the only one in the room, other than Harry Potter himself, who was actively thinking about the worldly consequences of these meetings. You were likely the only other person thinking about the possibility of your own untimely death. Everyone else was just showing up for their own personal satisfaction, and the fact of not falling behind in their DADA efforts while Umbridge was actively restricting their education.

On this day when you walked into the Room of Requirement as the other DA members trickled in, you attracted only enough attention to receive a few solitary sour looks. You had to guess that people were getting a bit more accustomed to you attending the meetings by now. But you picked up on a particularly harsh conversation from a group of huddled boys. You easily recognized the twins, and you thought you knew the others as Dean and Seamus… something. You didn’t know their last names.

“And have you seen who’s in The Inquisitorial Squad? It’s all Slytherins, it’s just a matter of time until-” Seamus whined.

“Until that stuck up bitch, L/N, rats on us. Yeah. It was a complete mistake letting her join.” Fred easily cut him off, entirely unafraid to call you harsh names, whether you were listening or not.

“When have you ever met a Slytherin with good intentions?” Dean posed to the small group.

“Guys, listen, I think you might be overreacting-” Surprisingly, George tried to oppose them, but his words were swiftly cut off.

“Seriously, who’s ever heard of a good Slytherin?” Seamus sneered.

“Well just because I joined this group doesn’t mean I’m ‘good’.” You said, stepping between the twins and forcing yourself into the conversation.

This caused the boys to either shamefully stare at the ground or divert their eyes off to the side as they clearly weren’t expecting to be overheard by you. George was the only one who dared to look at you, his expression clearly confused at your choice of words.

You decided to explain yourself.

“Just because I oppose my father’s traditional hatred of Muggleborns and I don’t believe in mass murder doesn’t mean I’m not still a heinous bitch. It doesn’t mean that I’ve stopped - what was it that you said, Fred? That I strike fear into the hearts of children and rot plantlife with my every breath?”

“Yeah.” Fred grumbled quietly. “I may have said that.”

“My point still stands.” Seamus griped bitterly. “There is no such thing as a good Slytherin.”

“Then it’s irritably clear that you’ve never picked up a book in your short, useless life.” You spat back at him.

As more confused looks were thrown your way, you dove into a stash of mental research that you had reserved for exactly this occasion, and began spouting off facts.

“Kory Anderson, during The Great Fire of 1916 that nearly wiped out the entirety of Hogsmeade, she rescued six children from homes within the village and then cast barrier charms to contain the fire until it naturally blazed out. She was a Slytherin.” You announced confidently.

“Yeah, but-” Dean began to speak up, and you drove right over whatever he had to say.

“Isaac Lahesen - he invented the first wide use Pain Relief Tonic in 1756. The original recipe is still widely followed and commonly used today. He was a Slytherin. Gally Poulter - died from Ancromantula venom poisoning due to his experiments with the venom that later lead to the invention of the common Anti-Bruise Tonic. His efforts also helped to conserve the Ancromantula as a species and brought them back from the brink of extinction-”

“Alright, jeez, we get it.” Fred sighed, finally cutting you off.

“I could go on.” You replied plainly, trying not to sound too smug. “It pays to take your head out of your arse every now and then and insert it into a library book.”

You turned to stomp away then, and you were entirely surprised when you felt someone catch your elbow. You whipped back around to glare at the person automatically, and had to forcibly crane your neck upward to meet George’s surprisingly soft gaze. You knew it was him in an instant.

Mostly because Fred always looked at you like you carried hellfire in your shoes wherever you went, and George most definitely did not.

But you could also easily spot the difference between the twins because George had broken his nose during a Quidditch game against Slytherin during your third year. A game that you had been sitting in the stands for - forever banned from participating in ‘something so brutish’ by your father. It had been a nasty move from one of the Slytherin players who had swung their Bludger’s bat at his face in a fit of anger when they realized that Harry had caught the snitch and they had lost.

The bone growth around the break gave his nose bridge a distinct bump near the top that Fred did not have. It was something you found quietly endearing, along with his soft eyes. Something you had only recently admitted to yourself in the quietest, darkest recesses of your mind.

“What?” You snapped at him, wondering why he had stopped you and why he was touching you.

He recoiled from the touch quickly, as if only then realizing just how long he had been holding onto your arm.

“Sorry.” He muttered quietly. “And I’m sorry about them, too.”

He added on, jabbing a thumb over his shoulder to point toward the spot where Fred, Dean, and Seamus were still standing - where Fred was now showing the two boys something inside a large box. Likely some of their disgusting, horrible ‘products’ - but it made the boys laugh and smile. You almost envied their care-free nature. But you definitely didn’t envy their ignorance.

“They’re being knobheads.” George declared confidently. “I know it probably doesn’t mean much, but I never thought that you were here to spy on us. You’re actually really good. With the spells, and whatnot, I mean. You’re really talented.”

You felt a sickly fullness - almost like an ache in your chest coming from deep within your stomach - as you looked over his expression and knew for certain that he was being sincere. As it truly hit you that this wasn’t some dumb prank where he would laugh in your face after you accepted the compliment. Still, nonetheless, as your insides squirmed, your outer shell became prickly once again in a well practiced defense mechanism.

“Why would I care what you think?” You spat back harshly. “You can barely cast a protection charm and you waste most of your talents coming up with stupid, useless joke products anyway. I don’t need you to tell me that I’m talented in order to know my worth, Weasley.”

It was only a moment later when the words had already left your mouth that you realized you had inadvertently complimented him in return. You became overwhelmed with a desire to smack him when he began smirking at you. That desire became almost crippling when he leaned into you, crowding tightly into your personal space before he whispered something in a low baritone that stuck to your ear terribly well as he reached into his pocket.

“Perhaps sometime I could get you alone and show you how well I waste my other talents,” He said, forcing his hand into yours and giving you something.

Between the strange psychological mind game of his words and the way he quickly retreated, you thought for sure whatever he had given you would be a trick - that it would blow up or poison you or something. Your eyes flickered, panicked, from the back of his head as he resumed his spot beside Fred to what he had placed in your hand, and you were eerily surprised to find a seemingly perfectly normal sweet.

One of your favourite sweets, actually.

It was something you would have purchased from Honeydukes for yourself - a kind of hard candy that came in many different flavours, wrapped individually in plastic. They turned your hair and eventually your skin the same colour as the candy the longer that you sucked on them - but for you, that was never the appeal. You simply enjoyed the taste. Your personal favourite was the sour green apple ones, and you almost always left Hogsmeade with a large bag of them in hand and ended up with green streaks in your hair from sucking on them throughout the days.

It was almost as if George had known that your personal stash had just run out.

You stashed it in your pocket, still suspicious of it, wondering if he had tampered with it somehow. He was likely waiting to laugh as your skin broke out in boils or you vomited viciously and had to beg him for the cure. And it was only when you were back in the security of your dorm that night when you found it in your pocket once again that you decided it would be safe to open it. If he had tampered with it, he wouldn’t get the satisfaction of watching you suffer from the results of his prank.

But there wasn’t one. It had simply been a random thoughtful gift.

When George saw you the next day with a small lingering streak of green in your hair, he smiled to himself.

…

The practice that you got from DA was invaluable when you fought during the Battle of Hogwarts - much to your father’s undisguised hatred, on the side of The Order of the Phoenix, as an official member. As much as he absolutely hated your new affiliations, he definitely found a way to get back at you for ‘dessamating years of carefully crafted heritage’ - as he had put it when he confronted you on that day.

When the battle ended and everyone on the losing side began to flee, you weren’t at all surprised to find out that your father had escaped, rather than being among the dead or the few who the Order managed to capture on site. You couldn’t have been so lucky.

Perhaps it was the karma of your younger years coming back on you - the fact that you had so harshly, thoughtlessly bullied others, tossed words around so carelessly, at one time truly believing that you were better than others simply because of the family that you came from. Now it was all coming back to you, life turning around to spit in your face, showing you what a truly rotten person you were.

Your father went to Gringotts and cleaned out your personal vault (as well as his own), taking every single bit of gold that your mother had left you when she had died. And it soon became obvious to you that he used the money to flee the country - not because he needed it. A small sack’s worth of the gold would have supplied him on his fugitive’s journey. But he took all of it simply because he thought that you were no longer worthy of it.

You were denying your ancestral ways, and now, you were no longer worthy of your ancestral riches.

It was a cruel slap in the face, and it left you abandoning any plans you had to apprentice as a future Potioneer in Ireland - or even the plans you had to take a break and vacation in the Maldives for a while and recover from The War.

Instead, fate had you dawning that stupid orange apron in London to earn a living for once in your life - taking up the first paying job that you were offered, especially after you heard what the hourly wage was. Perhaps the Weasleys were a bit stupid with money after not having much of it for most of their lives, but they were paying far above the average rate that most other jobs in the Alley did, so you had to jump at the opportunity.

All of it was so damn ironic.

The products that you had degraded and openly hated since the moment you had heard about them were now something that you had to proudly promote to customers. The pranksters you had called annoying with every opportune breath were now your bosses, and dictated your life every single day. Even if it felt backwards, you started to establish a new, quiet life. The twins let you live in the flat above the shop, and while you hated being constantly surrounded by everything Weasley - eventually, you got used to it.

But even that gentle peace was disrupted.

Only a few short months after The War, you were blindsided. Members of the newly formed Department For Internal Investigation for The Ministry of Magic, along with pre-existing Aurors, showed up at the shop with a warrant for your arrest. The grounds of said warrant? Your blood relation to a known Death Eater. You were being accused of helping your father and others flee the country, along with conspiracy against The Ministry. You were being accused of feeding them information from the inside to aid in their evasion of current law enforcement.

It was DA all over again. Only this time, it was on a scale that could end up with you in prison for the rest of your life.

…

George found himself thankful for finally having a slow day at the shop.

Now that school age kids were returning to Hogwarts, the summer rush was finally over and the hectic chaos of those three months was finally behind them. It did only leave a small breath of relaxation before the turbulence of Halloween and then eventually Christmas, very busy gift buying seasons for the Wizarding community, but at least they had the quiet of September to hold onto while they still could.

George could have never pictured him and his brother being this successful when they were just tossing around ideas, writing things down and drawing crude diagrams on scraps of parchment while huddled together on their bedroom floor back at the Burrow. And he knew that he should never be rueful of having ‘too many customers’ - but it was nice to have a breather every once and a while, especially when the shop got as intensely busy as it did sometimes.

Perhaps he was just getting too old, but he found himself getting sick of the chaos every now and then. His sixteen year old self likely would have beat him over the head to know that even so much as thought those words, but it was true.

They were taking this as an opportunity to rearrange the shop, shifting around some product displays to make things look nicer and flow easier, as well as refilling inventory that had gotten wiped out during the height of busy season in Diagon Alley - those last few days that people had been scrambling to get school supplies before September First. Inevitably, hordes of young people had ended up inside the shop, getting things to bring to Hogwarts that definitely were not on their list.

George actually felt a swell of pride to know that there had been an official amendment to the Hogwarts Code of Conduct, one that specifically banned the possession and use of Weasleys’ Wizard Wheezes products by any student (or professor, for that matter). It was something that had stuck around a lot longer than the ‘educational decree’ that Umbridge had made back in the day concerning the twins’ earlier products.

McGonagall had even sent the twins a letter about it personally, kindly asking them not to sell products to any students. They had sent her back a personalized Jack-In-The-Box that featured a tattered Umbridge as the ‘Jack’, jumping out and screaming once it reached the end of its song, running away from a terrible beast that chased her from within the box, along with a note that bluntly said ‘not a chance, Professor’. And though the amendment stayed written in the Code of Conduct, it was silently agreed that they would disagree on the matter.

It had practically tripled their sales since then, because students followed in their mischievous footsteps and loved to do something simply on the basis of being told not to do it. Banned items are the most sought after, of course.

(Fred and George had even started putting together something that they called ‘The Hogwarts Special’ - a box full of their most popular items bundled together at a discount price, all in disguised brown paper packaging rather than the bright colorful packages that they had become known for, better to sneak into a school trunk without being caught.)

As George heaved another large package of Skiving Snack Boxes into the middle of the floor, his eyes landed on you.

You were working on a display for the center of the store - a combination of new products and their most popular classics, your face knit in concentration as you arranged the products in a way that you thought was most appealing on the display stand. Somehow, even wearing your slightly stained work apron with your hair in a messy but practical style and your makeup mostly smudged off from the hard day’s work, you were a truly gorgeous vision. You would always be gorgeous in his eyes. But there was something truly goddess-like about you as the midday sun poured in through the front window to brush across your skin.

George’s eyes lingered on you for a few moments longer, trying to work up the nerve to say something. He always struggled with what to say to you. And the longer he stood there behind his large stack of boxes, the more the voice in his head screamed: she hates you.

Well he knew that hate was a strong word. As much as he knew that’s how you might have described it, he knew that it was likely not the right word for how you truly felt. If you had been crassly annoyed with him when the two of you first met due to his pranks and the stupid house rivalry, those feelings had never developed into hate. Especially not after your time in DA together - not after fighting on the same side of a war.

Some foolish part of him liked to think that after working side by side for so long, the two of you could actually be considered friends. But he wasn’t sure that’s how you saw it.

When your fingers fumbled and you dropped a Screaming Yo-Yo, causing it to fall to the floor and roll away (the charmed mechanism inside of it letting out little yelps as it rolled across the floor), George bent forward and caught it as you rushed to chase it before it rolled underneath one of the shelves. His breath caught in his chest when the two of you brushed hands around the small object.

“Oh, here.”

“Thanks.”

Both of your quiet voices merged in the air as he handed you the toy and you rushed back to a standing position, holding the object awkwardly and staring at it as you fiddled with the string, avoiding eye contact with him.

“Stupid little-” You muttered out angrily, and then sighed. “I would say that it jumped out of my hands, but it’s not nearly as bad as those display fireworks,”

You said, pointing toward a display model of one of the fireworks tubes, which was designed to constantly burn and sputter on the back end, causing it to flip around and fly on a string without ever burning out. Wrangling it onto that string in order to tie it to the display - that had been a particularly challenging time.

“Sorry about that,” George said quietly, giving a nervous chuckle. “The magic behind it was actually quite tricky, you see-”

His train of thought was cut off by the sound of the bell ringing above the door - he was surprised that they had customers at this time when this early in September was usually such a dry time for them. When he looked up to greet whoever it was, a frown cut into his face when he instantly realized that these weren’t clients.

There were about five people, all dressed in formal black robes, topped off with varying kinds of very businessy headwear and stiff expressions, instantly recognizable as Ministry officials. It was quite clear that they weren’t coming into the shop looking for Puking Pastilles or fireworks - they were here for something else.

Whatever that something was instantly worried him - George’s stomach jolted with anxiety as he wondered if all their business permits were in order (that was Fred’s job, and ordering stock was his). But surely, if it was a simple matter of paperwork, they wouldn’t send this many officials out to take care of it.

No - this had to be something much worse. This was something big and terrible and that worried him much more.

“Good afternoon.” George greeted them with a smile (hopefully not looking too nervous) as he forced his spine tall and proud, feigning confidence in front of people who would judge him for his appearance and his mannerisms. “How can I help you fine people today?”

Fred craned his head up over the shelves to get a look at who it was, instantly picking up on the nervous tone in his brother’s voice where few others would. He had been deeper inside the store at the counter near the cash register, going over the inventory numbers that the three of you had counted up the night before, looking to confirm them with his superior math skills. (Of course, now he was very much distracted from that task.)

The one leading the pack of stiff looking officials - a particularly stiff man with many wrinkles, who was wearing a black bowler hat to cover a seemingly bald head, someone that George had never seen before and did not recognize - answered George by reaching into the pocket of his robes and pulling something out, extending a piece of parchment out to show him.

“I have a warrant here for the arrest of one Ms. Y/N L/N.” He said plainly, his tone entirely dull and official. “I was informed that she is employed here.”

“Warrant?!” You cried out, having been staring at the parade of strangeness from beside George - in a moment your face and body went from the dull tired that came with a long day to stiff with anxiety, clearly shocked. “That can’t be right, that’s bullshit-!”

You moved to charge toward the man, and George put a protective arm in front of you. He wasn’t quite sure if his instinct was to protect you from the group with their eyes now locked on you, hands moving to their wands, or if he was intent on protecting them from a wrath that he knew you could easily rain down upon them. (Either way, he was protecting you from your own temper, protecting you from flipping out mindlessly on law enforcement and racking up additional very real charges to add to the ones that they had on your warrant now that were - like you said - bullshit.)

You did fall silent and hovered behind George, letting out a grunt of frustration - but still, he didn’t move his arm, clinging onto your hip beside your apron and causing you to grip his wrist in return while you scowled at the officials past him.

“Look, we don’t know anything about this.” Fred told them - by now, he had woven his way through the shelves to stand at George’s shoulder. “She’s worked for us for a while but we don’t know anything about-”

It appeared that he was about to claim your innocence - or at the very least, claim that he and George never knew of any criminal activities that you had partaken in.

“What are the charges?” George gaped. “Obviously you’ve gotten this all wrong.”

“Yes, obviously.” You added on with a hiss, tense behind George, clearly eager to fight them once again.

“You may take a look.” The man said, prodding the paper toward George once again. “But I can assure you that I am not wrong.”

George let out a grunt of dissatisfaction and snatched the warrant from the man, and his eyes began flickering over the words at lightning speed. You crouched in closer as you read along with him - he saw something about ‘conspiracy to commit heinous acts’ and ‘conspiracy against the Ministry of Magic’, but none of it was blatantly clear to him - nothing read as a clear, specific crime. And he knew that you hadn’t done anything wrong.

“This is bullshit!” You cried out again. “Conspiracy? I’ve been here playing with fireworks and stupid puke sweets for the past few months and you think I’ve had time to commit conspiracy?!”

“Can you please confirm your identity, Miss?” The man asked, his voice still deadpan and lacking any emotion. “Are you in fact Miss Y/N-?”

“I don’t have to tell you shit.” You said, slowly backing up.

George’s stomach sank when two of the Ministry lackeys rushed to you, more of them taking different routes to get to you as your hand went to your apron for your wand. He ached to fight them off for you, but he knew it wouldn’t end well.

“Look, Y/N, just go with them!” Fred shouted, his tone deeply frustrated.

You refused to listen.

Instead, you ran toward the door, clearly looking to get to the Apparition point outside before they could catch you.

But they were well-trained Aurors, and they were faster. One of them struck you down with a wordless curse, making you limply fall into one of the fresh displays, knocking down a spray of colourful boxes along the way. Fred heaved out a groan and smacked a hand across his face, clearly upset about the mess. George instinctively ran to your aid, only to be yanked back by Fred, a harsh grip digging into his arm that barely held him back, every single cell in his body screaming at him to help you. But he was forced to watch on in horror while they put some kind of binding curse on your wrists and took your wand out of your apron pocket, confiscating it.

“On what grounds?!” George shouted - his body coursing with intense rage, on the verge of tears.

He finally shook himself out of Fred’s grip, but only because his brother knew him too well, and knew that he was still in shock now and would do nothing more than witness the horrible things unfolding in front of him. He could do nothing more than watch as they lifted your limp, barely conscious body from the floor, holding you up by your shoulders.

“What grounds do you have for this arrest?!” He screamed, clutching the warrant so hard that he began to tear holes in it with his fingernails.

The leader nodded toward the two people who were holding you, and George couldn’t race across the shop quickly enough to catch them as they stepped out into the street and then Disapparated with you in a blur. His feet felt numb on the floor as he practically tripped over the mess, and he was left with a shaking hand on the doorknob and tears swelling in his eyes, left staring out the glass panes at the empty spot that you had left.

Now he had nothing more than a harsh pain in his chest that made him want to scream.

They were taking you away. They were stealing you from him. After all the work he had done to make sure that you would stay with him, that you would be safe. They were taking you away.

“Sir, I am sorry that you hired someone of such credence without knowing it. Typically their forms of deception are-” The bowler hat man began to speak again, and George flared with anger.

“What are the charges?” George asked again, whipping around to face the man.

George eyed Fred, who was strangely quiet, staring him down for once in all their years, with what was an unreadable look. He had to wonder why Fred wasn’t as upset about this demonstration of injustice as he was, even if he didn’t like you that much.

“I have already given you the warrant, Sir, which is my only necessary duty under Rule 36, Section B-”

“This is a piece of rubbish!” George yelled, cutting off the man’s rambling. “It’s so unreadable - it - it doesn’t mean anything,” He added harshly, throwing the now crumpled warrant at the man’s feet.

The man sighed and kicked it aside.

“I have copies.” He said under his breath, seemingly more so to himself. “The charges are Conspiracy to Commit Fraud, Conspiracy Against the Ministry of Magic, Aiding and-”

“What does that even mean? What evidence do you have?” George pressed. “I’ve known Y/N for years, she hasn’t done anything wrong. You’ve got this all wrong, you’re mistaken.”

The man paused, hanging a deadly silence over their heads as George stared him down and Fred stared George down, all very tense. George was seemingly the only person in the room who had absolutely no idea what was going on. He was the only one who thought it was entirely shocking that you had been arrested.

“Is Miss L/N not related to a known Death Eater? Several, actually, if I’m not mistaken?” The man posed.

George’s throat tightened harshly.

They were arresting you because of what your father had done?

That was so unfair. So grossly unfair. That was plainly unjust. It was horrible and unethical and - just stupid. It was bullshit.

“Yes, but-”

“Well I’m terribly sorry to break the news to you, Mr. Weasley, but typically those regrettable values are passed on in families. Nobody has seen or heard from Mr. L/N since The Battle of Hogwarts, and we have a feeling that his daughter will know exactly where to find him.”

“She won’t.” George spat back. “She hasn’t spoken to her father in years, I know that for a fact.”

George hated to lie, but he knew that if he did tell the truth, they wouldn’t believe him. They would never believe the fact that the last time you had seen your father, it had almost ended with you dead for your ‘betrayal’ of the Pureblood line.

“Well Mr. Weasley, I’m afraid that the Ministry can’t simply take your word for it. We must use our own tactics and gather the information for ourselves.”

His stomach grew sickly at the implication of what ‘tactics’ they would use, thinking that you would come back to him as a hollow shell of your former self after being tortured by Dementors for hours, destined to never give them the answers they wanted to hear. And that was only what he knew about the things they did. Merlin knows what other things he couldn’t even imagine that they might do to you.

Before George could further argue - before he could defend you and explain that you hadn’t spoken to your father, that you hated him, that you had no idea where he was - the man left the shop and Disapparated himself as well, leaving George hurt and speechless.

But only for a moment.

Then, everything within George was telling him to spring into action. You hadn’t done anything wrong, and there was nothing they could truly charge you with. If they were extorting you for information about your father, they weren’t going to get it. So they needed to leave you the hell alone.

George was going to free you.

He stormed past Fred to the store room, grabbing his coat off the hook he had hung it on in order to lug around the boxes, and he put it on and started straightening up his appearance a bit. If he was going to the Ministry (or to Hogwarts to seek back-up first, he wasn’t quite sure yet) then he would need to look nice to ensure that he would be taken seriously.

“What are you doing?” Fred asked, slowly trailing behind him into the storage room, entirely curious about his shift from shock and anger to determined urgency.

“Going to get help.” George announced, as it was the only thing he was sure about.

Help from where or who, he wasn’t quite sure. Perhaps he should go to Hogwarts and find Hermione - he could grab the crumbled warrant off the floor along the way and have her read it. She would know how to decipher the bullshit wording and find some kind of loophole within it.

“Are you going to close up and come along or are you staying back to watch the shop?” George asked, his mind still busy with planning his next move.

Fred gaped at George, his expression somewhere between disgust and shock. Again, George felt a strange uneasiness in the fact that he genuinely didn’t know what his brother was thinking. Perhaps he was intimidated by the idea of taking on the Ministry, or perhaps he was just hesitant to leave the shop when they had so much work to do. But George knew what had to be done when such harsh injustice had just been done right in front of his eyes.

“You can’t be serious.” Fred breathed out quietly, almost timidly, the words leaving him like air seeping out of a balloon.

“I am.” George easily confirmed, firm and confident now. “Maybe we can go to Dad, or-”

“Dad’s department would have absolutely nothing to do with this.” Fred fired back, edging on rude.

“Then I’ll go to Hermione. She’s read books about this sort of stuff - hell, she’s probably read through the laws that they are currently breaking by holding Y/N without cause, and-”

George moved to walk around Fred, going to get the warrant so that Hermione could look it over. Much to his shock, Fred stopped him by raising a hand to the middle of his chest.

“Georgie, slow down.” He said, using the nickname in an attempt to ground his brother from what he believed to be a small fit of insanity. “Look, I know you had a very strange, misguided, schoolboy crush on this girl once, but-”

“That’s not what this is about.” George ground out through his teeth.

Yes, George had confided in Fred that he fancied you - only to have Fred mock him relentlessly for it. But even if he had absolutely no romantic inclination toward you, seeing someone be arrested without cause would still truly bother him. It just wasn’t right. If it had happened to you or anyone, it wasn’t right.

“Then what is it?” Fred pressed. George chose not to dignify this with an answer, hoping that his brother was having a momentary brain aneurysm that would soon end and that they would be back on the same page again. “As far as I’m concerned, dear brother, they just took care of our problem for us. We should be thanking them.”

George clenched his jaw angrily. This was the first time in nearly ten years that he had genuinely wanted to hit his brother.

“You can’t be serious.” George hurled Fred’s words back at him, harsher than Fred had originally said them, causing him to roll his eyes.

George stepped around him and walked back out into the shop to find the crumpled up paper that he needed.

“Come on, what’s so great about Y/N anyway?” Fred whined. “Any sense of good looks she has is easily wiped out by her horrible personality-”

“She’s not nearly as horrible as she was.”

George argued gently, reaching down to pluck the paper off the floor.

“Besides, this isn’t about great or not great - this isn’t about stupid personality conflicts. This is about right and wrong. And you know it.” George told his brother firmly. “She shouldn’t go to Azkaban simply on the basis of being related to a Death Eater when she hasn’t done anything wrong. She’s shown that she’s nothing like her father, so she doesn’t deserve to be arrested for his crimes just because they’re too bloody stupid to find him.”

George stared Fred down, and Fred looked swollen with thought for a moment, taking a heavy breath and clenching his jaw as he clearly hesitated to speak. Obviously, he wanted to argue - but he knew that George was right.

“And might I remind you that she saved your life. And you would not even be standing here with breath in your lungs to whine and complain without that ‘horrible’ witch that you claim to hate so much.” George added on smugly, unable to resist.

Naturally, this caused both of them to think back to The Battle of Hogwarts, when you had indeed saved Fred’s life. A Death Eater had fired off a curse that caused a ceiling to collapse above Fred’s head, and if not for your quick thinking to hurl a non-lethal stunning curse at Fred that threw his body out of the way of the debris, he would have been crushed under hundreds of pounds of falling stone and killed.

Of course, he whined at you for days after he woke up from the minor head injury that you caused by knocking him into one of the few still-standing walls. And to this day, he had never once thanked you for saving his life. And you never brought it up, because whenever you did, all he did was whine about the scar he now had - one that was well disguised in his hairline and barely noticeable. He always said that you had ‘deliberately maimed’ him to get back at him for the years of name calling.

The two of you couldn’t get along over anything.

“You’re gonna keep lording that over my head, aren’t you?” Fred mumbled quietly, rolling his eyes.

After a few moments of Fred’s mind churning hard, the thoughts clearly simmering behind his eyes, he took his wand out of his pocket and flicked it toward the front of the shop. In a few smooth movements, he closed the blinds, locked the door, and switched the sign from ‘Welcome’ to ‘Closed - Please Come Again Later’.

“Fine.” He huffed out, clearly defeated. “I guess you’re right. But I don’t have to like it.”

George beamed a smile at this brother.

“We’ll go and find Hermione, then?”

“Strangely, I think we’ll have better luck calling in a favour from our big brother.” Fred noted. “The stick up Percy’s arse might actually be useful for once.”

George hadn’t even thought of that. But that was why he and Fred made a very great team.

“And for the record, I still don’t like Y/N.” Fred hastily added on as they walked upstairs to leave via The Floo Network. “But I do hope that this finally gets you laid.”

George sharply rolled his eyes at this, and chose not to reply - mostly because he knew that coming from Fred, it wasn’t entirely intended as a joke.

…

You were surprised by how passionately the twins defended you. They stood up as character witnesses for you in court - and had even called upon others to do the same.

Perhaps that was why you were still ‘settling into’ a job that you continuously claimed to yourself was only temporary.

As much as you were annoyed by the constant sounds and bright colours and the steady stream of customers, you found a certain sense of comfort in the shop. You were annoyed by the twins, but when it mattered most, they had backed you up. They had saved you. And you knew that people needed laughter now more than ever, even if you weren’t in on the joke.

…

You were pleased that even if your life didn’t necessarily make you happy, you had established a sense of routine that made your life relatively stress-free.

You would wake up, make yourself a cup of tea, get dressed and put on some make-up (even though the obnoxious orange apron ruined whatever ‘look’ you typically tried to go for, you still did pride yourself in your appearance). And after eating something easy for breakfast, you would make your way downstairs to help George open the shop.

Sometimes he would bring you a pastry as a thanks for being awake so early, which you found strange because it was quite literally part of your job. But you still found yourself accepting whatever danish or croissant he brought you - and taking his copy of the Prophet to read on your lunch time break when Fred finally stumbled out of bed to come into work.

George was much more of a morning person, so he and Fred had an agreement that if George opened, Fred would be the one to stay later to close up when needed.

They balanced each other out in a lot of ways.

Fred was better with numbers, so he attended to the books. George was better with the artistic aspects, so he designed the packaging for new products. Fred was much more outgoing and easily charmed new people - so he spoke to people about getting WWW products into shops in other places around the world. And he even made business deals to get them rare and new ingredients for products that they wanted to make. And George was a better Potioneer, so he often made test batches of those new products with the new ingredients that Fred acquired.

During your time at school, you had been one of the people who had made the mistake of believing that the twins were simply two halves of the same person. You had thought that they were truly identical, inside and out. You lumped them together in your mind so often, thinking that there weren’t any differences between them.

But the more time you spent around them, especially while working at the shop, the more you realized that they were truly, utterly different. They worked together not because they couldn’t be separated or because they naturally came as a pair - but because they had established a friendship and a working relationship that genuinely worked well for them. They balanced each other out with their unique talents, they didn’t just have the same skill set twice over.

In a lot of ways, you admired it.

Even if that strong partnership had caused you to be covered in slime or paint or to be tripped and trapped in a broom closet during your days at Hogwarts far too many times. You admired them much more now that you worked with them, and not against them.

It was seemingly just another random Monday when George took a break from whatever he had been doing and came to find you in the upstairs store room. You were going through a new batch of products and taking inventory of everything before you stocked them out on the floor.

“How’s it going?” George asked, using his height to his advantage to peek over the pile of boxes at you. You were sitting on the floor with one of them open in front of you, counting and sorting a batch of products for their newly improved Skiving Snack Boxes.

“Fine, I guess.” You answered dully, using your quill to jot down a number on your parchment before you forgot it. “Wasn’t Fred supposed to do this last night? Where is he, anyway?”

“Oh, he’s gone on a trip.” George told you, leaning his folded arms on the box in front of him. “He’s visiting Angelina during her week off from Harpies’ training.”

Angelina Johnson, Fred’s girlfriend of a few months, had been recruited for the professional Quidditch team The Holyhead Harpies. A few weeks prior, she had left to go to Berlin, where the team’s prestigious coach resided and they had a training camp set up for the team. Since then, you had overheard Fred complaining to George near constantly about how she wasn’t allowed to leave training to come and visit him and how he almost never got letters from her because she was too busy and too tired to write to him.

You hoped that him getting laid for a week straight would mean that he came back in a better mood. Even if it meant a whole week of you having to pick up the slack and do more work while he was gone.

“And he’s meeting with some potential investors while he’s there.” George added on, casual and conversational. “Apparently he was in communication with someone who has a line of Prank Quills that we might want to buy off them for the shop,”

“I thought you two always made your own products?” You questioned, raising a brow at him.

“So far that has been the case, yes.” George confirmed, obviously proud. “But it never hurts to expand our horizons and see what other mischievous minds have come up with,”

You shrugged. It wasn’t your business to worry about.

“I just wish that I would have been warned that I would be stuck in this dusty, spider-invested hole doing inventory.” You lamented, staring down at yourself in disgust.

You had worn a dress that day, and a pair of rather nice black lace tights along with your usual heels. And now you were sitting on the dusty floor, with your shoes and tights getting disgustingly filthy.

“I would have worn crappier clothes…” You mumbled the last part to yourself, heaving a small sigh as you lightly kicked one of the boxes, needing to get out some of the frustration.

“I thought Fred mentioned this to you?” George posed, confused. “He should have warned you that you might have to pick up a few extra shifts-”

You let out a harsh scoff, cutting off George’s words.

“This might have escaped your attention, George, but Fred doesn’t talk to me unless it’s absolutely necessary.” You pointed out. “Beyond talking about the products, he doesn’t even say ‘hello’ to me when he comes in. I think if the building was on fire, he would ask you to tell me to evacuate.”

George sighed, mentally conceding to your point.

“Yeah, I think Mum got on him about that whole… ‘if you don’t have anything nice to say’, bit.”

You rolled your eyes at this.

You thought back to a time when Mrs. Weasley had come into the shop to bring the twins some food she had made for them, complaining about how they likely weren’t eating properly.

But she had accidentally stumbled upon Fred calling you stupid and useless, accusing you of losing some of his inventory sheets, though the conflict was far from one-sided. You had called him blind and dumb and said that he would never be able to find a hole in his own arse even with a mirror, arguing that he had obviously lost them himself.

But naturally, Molly had only heard the incriminating words coming from him, which quickly put a fury in her. She had put her casserole dishes on the front counter, marched around it, grabbed him by the ear, yanking him harshly toward her - she berated him for calling you such names without shame and threatened to yank his ear right off so that he and George would match.

(She had put on a sweet voice and apologized profusely to you on his behalf before making him grunt apologies through the pain, and then she had invited you to a nice helping of cottage pie - so the day turned out wonderful for you.)

Obviously, since then, he had been terrified to say a cross word to you, lest it somehow get back to his mother.

“Well I understand.” You replied. “He’s never had anything nice to say to me, so he’s just stopped talking to me completely. It makes sense now.”

“Yeah, Fred is…” George trailed off, trying to find words for it.

To this day, George didn’t entirely understand why Fred was so petty and aggravated with you. Sure, the two of you had exchanged plenty of mean words to each other during your days at Hogwarts, but you weren’t even as quick to anger these days as he was. He was usually the one to start it.

“I’m sorry about him.” George landed on those words, deciding that even if he didn’t understand the cause behind Fred’s petty anger toward you, he could apologize for it. “He can be a bit of a stupid git sometimes.”

“‘Can be’ - that’s a funny way to put it.” You replied, nodding, your face breaking into a slight smile.

George smiled. Again, he was pleased to have a conversation with you where you didn’t seem so deeply annoyed with him and didn’t try to insult him. Thus far, you didn’t even seem so eager to get away and end the conversation.

He would even dare to say that you seemed content. That you were enjoying his presence.

Typically, this would be the part of the conversation where he would say something like ‘I should let you get back to work now’, and then he would leave the room and leave you alone, knowing that your patience with him was thin and he shouldn’t wear it out. But this time, he decided to push things just a bit farther. He was trying to make progress with you, after all. (He knew that Fred had been joking, but he wanted to go on a real date with you before the end of the decade.)

“Well, at least we can enjoy this week without him.”

You were intensely curious about his use of the word ‘we’ in that sentence, but another word tripped you up far more.

“Enjoy?” You questioned.

You knew that sometimes Fred and George bickered with each other - running a business together could be stressful, and they didn’t constantly agree about everything. But as far as you knew, they enjoyed spending time together and they were practically inseparable. You didn’t think that George would be relieved to have time without Fred.

You wondered why he seemed so happy not to have Fred around.

“Yeah,” He nodded.

George grinned at you, and you found a pang shooting through your gut. It was an odd kind of delight that you could barely acknowledge igniting inside of you as you realized that he was smiling at you, genuinely smiling at you. There was no indoor swamp or parade of water balloons to be found. You weren’t the butt of a joke in order for that smile to happen. It ignited an instinctive panic within you, but you found yourself really liking his smile.

“We should have dinner together or something.” He chuckled brightly. “We could finally spend some time together outside of work. Have a discussion that doesn’t involve sales numbers or product displays.”

That small spark of panic flamed into a full-blown raging fire when you realized what he had meant. That the ‘we’ had been the truly important part of the sentence - ‘we can enjoy this week’ - he had meant that he wanted to spend time with you. He wanted to enjoy some time with you.

He wanted to spend time with you outside of work?

He wanted to be alone with you?

He was asking you out on a date.

No, he wasn’t - a voice inside of your brain instantly demanded. There was no way he was asking you out on a date. He didn’t like you, he never thought of you that way. There was no way he thought of you romantically.

He was only trying to be nice because he was a decent human being. He had been raised much differently than you had. This was just his instinct toward common courtesy acting up again - the same one that had caused him to extend the job offer toward you in the first place. He thought you were pathetic and lonely and he likely knew that you spent all of your time outside of work by yourself. He was extending this offer to you due to pity.

Absolutely alarmed with that internal panic, you forced yourself to break the horrible moment of ongoing silence by asking:

“Is that… necessary?” You choked out, knowing that you sounded like an animal caught in a trap, hating how intimidated and unsure your voice was.

“What?” George gaped in return, his face pressing tight with confusion. “What do you mean?”

“Are you ordering me to have dinner with you?” You asked, doing the cowardly thing and doubling down instead of clarifying what you truly meant - asking him if he had intended it romantically, as a date. “Are you asking me as my boss or can I do what I please in my own free time?”

George’s face shifted from bright and hopeful to downtrodden, and seeing this instantly caused something inside of you to ache. It was the first time since unnerving grief of The Battle of Hogwarts that you had felt anything other than stress and tired boredom toward life.

“I’m asking you as a friend.” He quickly clarified, a sharp sourness popping up in his voice, barely covering up the lulling sadness that tightened his throat. “And I thought that you would be pleased to spend your free time with me, but I guess I thought wrong.”

Friend.

For some reason that hurt you more than any insult could have. The strange reality of a date you could have dealt with. Even if he had come in and demanded that he was taking you out on a date - your mind would have eventually adjusted to the pure bizarreness of it.

But him calling you a friend? It hurt and it was too strange, all at once.

You weren’t friendly. You weren’t anybody’s friend.

Perhaps it was because something inside of you screamed that you didn’t deserve the title, but you hated it. Instantly, it caused you to seethe with anger. So as he finally turned and walked away in defeat, you had to open your mouth and deliver the final blow. You pushed yourself up off the floor, barely able to see over the stack of boxes to shout your next words at him.

“We aren’t friends!” You spat out bitterly. “I’m not your friend.”

When he turned back to you, he had the most utterly hurt expression that you had ever seen - his gentle eyes swimming with pain and his mouth drooping into a pathetic frown, his cheeks that were usually full with laughter sagging in a horrible way that didn’t suit him at all.

Though it made you feel sickly to see him like this - in the typical fashion that you were taught, you killed any kindness that had been shown to you. You stepped out from behind the boxes, and continued firing blows as he tried to speak. You had to make sure that this notion of ‘friends’ was truly dead.

“Y/N-”

“No.” You rasped, your throat slightly tight with tears that you were holding back, hating yourself for being like this. “Just because we ended up on the same side, doesn’t mean we have to like each other. Fred doesn’t like me, so why should you?”

George’s expression grew even more painful at this, but he didn’t have anything left to say.

“I’m your employee, that’s it.” You said, firm and finite. “We can be courteous to each other, but we don’t need to have fucking tea parties and hold hands and-”

“I get the point.” George sighed, cutting you off. “I get it. I won’t try to be nice to you anymore.”

With that, he stormed out, not sticking around long enough to see the bitter, angry tears that you released as you moved to get back to your work.

After he rang up a few off-season customers in the shop and then saw them off, his mind began churning and he formed a terrible, brilliant plan. Even without Fred around, he could still make plenty of trouble on his own.

And as George plotted his clever, mischievous little plans to get back at you, he also thought about how you came to be employed at the shop in the first place. He thought back to the whole reason that he believed the two of you were friends at all. A night that he considered two parts luck and one part clever scamming on his part - as most of his life beforehand had been.

…

Three days.

It had been just three days since The Great Harry Potter, The Chosen One had defeated Lord Voldemort once and for all, truly killing the darkest wizard of all time, even leaving behind a corpse to prove it. A corpse that had been burned in the courtyard of Hogwarts to many rousing cheers from the tired crowd of onlookers. It had been three tender days since the battle had ended, leaving everyone tired, battered, bruised, and cautiously optimistic for the future.

It had been three days filled with roaring celebrations for the Dark Lord’s defeat, and those rousing parties were finally starting to die down, leaving a breath of space in the wake of the disaster, time for funerals to bury the dead and mourn the people everyone had loved. And finally leaving mindfulness for the discovery of gruesome things that Voldemort’s followers and people within the Ministry were trying their best to cover up. Many people who had ended up on the wrong side were fleeing the country, trying not to be apprehended for their crimes.

George had been awake for days straight, setting up some extra spells to protect the shop from looting as Diagon Alley descended into chaos with so many celebratory parties having broken out. With Fred still in the Hogwarts Hospital Wing due to the injury he had sustained during the Battle, taking the time he needed to recover, George was on his own to make sure that Fred still had a shop to come home to. He had to make sure that everything they had worked so hard for wasn’t ruined in just a few short days. As happy as he was that Voldemort had been defeated, he was glad that all the revelry seemed to be dying down now.

Though he was bone-tired and exhausted, as he locked up the shop, he chose not to go back to the apartment - vacant of Fred and far too lonely. And he couldn’t see himself going to the Burrow either, where Mum was likely cooking a feast to over-feed everyone and fussing over injuries. (He didn’t need his head wound cleaned until it was sore and he was feeling a bit too sickly to eat.)

He couldn’t lay down and go to sleep, because every time he closed his eyes, all he could think about was the image of Fred, his head bloody with a large cut across his forehead from where you had flung him into a wall, to save his life from tons of falling debris. But still, the sight of his limp, unconscious body on the floor as he grew more pale, unable to woken up no matter how much George shook him and called his name - it was a frightening one that shook his soul at the time.

George had only been able to breathe again once he received the news from Madame Pomfrey that Fred was going to be okay. He would just be unconscious for a few days while the wound healed and the swelling in his head went down.

So, like many other people on this day, whether it was for celebration or mourning or just to dull the pain, George wanted to get drunk. He was not surprised when he found The Leaky Cauldron packed, and he had to force his way in, using his height to his advantage to elbow his way up to the bar in an attempt to place his order. But before he could actually get the barmaid’s attention, any thought about drinking flew from his mind when he spotted you.

You were leaning against the end of the bar, propped up with your face in the palm of your hand, your elbow pressed against the bartop - you looked as though the filthy, unpolished wood of the bar was the only thing supporting your entire system at the moment.

Your dark eye make-up was smeared, and you were sitting on a long dark trench coat that you had draped over the barstool, your blouse was partially unbuttoned, revealing the dark, lacy bra that you had on underneath. Your dark stockings were torn in some places, beginning to turn into runs up your whole leg, your skirt riding up to a short length that he knew you would have deemed far too inappropriate and yanked down if you had been paying attention at all, one of your heels having fallen off to the floor.

You were a drunken mess, that much was immediately obvious. As he shoved past more people and got closer to you, he could smell the scotch practically seeping out of your pores.

George had to wonder how long you had been camping on that barstool, drinking away your sorrows. He wondered which loved one you were mourning - who had died that was close to you in order for you to need so much booze to drown the feelings out. He immediately felt an instinct flare up to care for you, and he knew that he wouldn’t be having his drink, and he wouldn’t be leaving the bar without you. Especially not when you were in this state.

“Y/N.” George gently called your name as he came to stand at your side, still towering over you as you sat on the tall barstool.

Instinctively, he put a hand on your back, feeling the need to protect you from the bustling crowd, suddenly conscious of how many men were in the bar and how vulnerable you were. He felt intensely lucky that he was the one to find you, and not some other foul git with worse things on his mind.

Finally, after a long, delayed moment, you turned your head in response to him calling your name. Your eyes were terribly slowed by how much alcohol was in your system, and you moved in slow motion as your gaze wandered from the wall in front of you over toward him, seeming entirely surprised to find that the warm hand on your back was attached to him.

“Weasley.” You said quietly, and then let out a small hiccup. “George. George Weasley. You’re the tall one.”

“Yes.” George responded.

He knew that with the bandage wrapped around his head, still supporting his very visible ear injury, (or rather, the random hole in the side of his head where his ear used to be) he was much more easily discernible from Fred. But he was still glad that you knew who he was.

“How much have you had to drink?” He knew that it was likely a stupid question, but still, he felt the need to ask it.

“How much have you had t-to drink?” You countered, slurring, scowling harshly at him.

As much as he would like to pull up a stool beside yours and follow you into stupid levels of drunkenness, he knew that he had to be the responsible one. Stupid Gryffindor nobility. And he owed you, because you had saved Fred’s life just a few days ago. He would owe you for that for a long time. So it was time to start paying you back - even if getting you into a warm bed and making sure that you didn’t drown in your own vomit was small compared to saving someone’s life, it would still be a start.

“Come on,” George insisted, wrestling your coat out from underneath you and trying to get you into it.

Of course, you immediately started fighting him like a cranky drunk toddler as he moved to put your arm into the sleeve.

“No!” You shouted at him, beginning to push him away, causing a few pairs of eyes in the pub to look over. “I am gonna keep drinking! B-because getting drunk is the thing to do. Drinking is the thing. It’s all that there is.”

“Why?” George countered, pausing with your arm awkwardly halfway into your sleeve.

You gave a long, lazy blink up at him. He thought that perhaps if you could vent your sadness to him, then you would be less inclined to drink, and you wouldn’t fight him off so that he could take you home to rest.

Your face broke into a smile - not one of actual happiness, but a twisted one that said your mind was truly breaking under the weight of what had upset you. And then, you began laughing. A broken, harsh laugh that pierced right through George as your scotch-soaked breath puffed across his face.

“I - I have nothing!” You cried out, sounding utterly mad. “I have no prospects, no family, no job! No future! Nothing!”

So that’s what was upsetting you so much. The end of the war had reminded you that you and your ‘family’ had ended up on two very different sides. And the entire battle against Voldemort had disrupted your education and the Potioneer training that you had wanted to do after Hogwarts, so you weren’t sure what you wanted to do with your life now.

It was all a very crappy situation to end up in. While George had the shop to go back to, and a very loving family to fall back on for support (his mother’s love so smothering that sometimes he dared to complain about it) - you didn’t have anything. A pang of guilt throbbed inside of him as he watched your face become distant and haunted, and even more terrible words came drifting from your drunken lips.

“He even took Pixie.” You sniffled quietly, picking up the cup in front of you and finishing the last of your drink. “The bastard took everything… and he just had to - fuck. I can’t believe he killed Pixie.”

“Who’s Pixie?” George wondered quietly, hating the depth of the mourning in your voice.

He had to guess that the ‘he’ you were referring to was your father. It didn’t surprise him that he had killed someone dear to you, and that was one of the reasons you were in the bar, trying to drink yourself into unconsciousness. George wondered if Pixie was a pet of yours or something along those lines - it would be a bit of a strange name for a person. But if it was a person, he would report the murder so that your father would pay for the crime when they caught him.

“She - she was my House Elf.” You told him with another drunken stutter.

Oh.

George had never been around House Elves much in his life. He knew that it was something often linked to Pureblood culture, and his parents had never liked the idea of having one around. They were much more into ‘the value of hard work’ and ‘getting stuck in’, and they had always taught the Weasley children from a young age that if you want something, you need to do it for yourself. It was likely why Fred and George had worked so hard to get the shop - making the products from scratch, getting their seed money by taking bets, filling out all the paperwork to get the lease in Diagon Alley. Even if it wasn’t exactly what their parents had envisioned for them, they had worked hard for it.

George’s experience with House Elves was very minimal. Other than the few times he and Fred had ducked into the Hogwarts’ kitchens to hide out from a professor after a particularly epic prank, only to have dozens of beady eyes staring at them; or hearing Harry speak of Dobby as a good friend; or the few months the Weasleys had stayed at Grimmauld Place and he had tried his best to avoid Kreacher and his ramblings about ‘Blood Traitors’ - he wasn’t really sure what having a House Elf was even like.

So he simply sat there and listened as you spoke about Pixie, your heart clearly aching for your lost beloved Elf.

“She was m-more of a mother to me than… well my mother was dead. She took care of me more than my father did, honestly. She did everything for me. It was her job, but - it felt like family.” You choked on these words, clearly most mournful when thinking of this. “She used to wake me up, and cook for me, and do the little buttons on my jumpers. And she used to tell me ‘don’t frown, girlie, because you never know who could be falling in love with your smile’. And I know it’s stupid, but I loved her. And I was - I was gonna take her with me. I - I had no clue where I was gonna go, but I was gonna take her with me.”

George’s insides ached as the undistilled sadness came through your voice, and he could do little more than to listen as you continued on. He knew that it was important for you to feel heard when you were at your weakest.

“I went home. I wasn’t planning on staying, I just… he ruined everything.” You huffed, your words touched with anger even though grief was the prominent emotion. “He had burned all the pictures of my mother… and there was this jewelry box that she had given me that belonged to her grandmother. And he had smashed it. He just wants me to suffer. He’s such a bastard.”

You looked up at George then, your eyes shining with tears, and his throat was throttled by his own unshed tears.

“He is.” George easily confirmed. Unsure what else to do, he tried once again to get you out of the bar. “Come on, love. Come on, let’s get you cleaned up, and we can get you some water-”

He moved onto trying to care for you, knowing that he couldn’t take away your pain. He could only try to ease it - he could only be there for you now to make sure that you didn’t make a terrible mess of yourself. He was trying to make sure that you had a safe place to land.

“I don’t even have a reputation.” You whispered this quieter, pulling George closer by the front of his shirt to say it, as though it were a fantastic secret. “That used to be all I could think about - my reputation. I used to spend every day thinking of what other people thought of me… I mean now I know what everyone thinks of me!”

Much to George’s alarm, you back shouting, turning to stare at everyone else in the pub as you intentionally attracted their attention.

“They all think I was part of it! They all think I’m one of them!” You hissed out, your voice struggling to slither out of your heavy, drunken lips, not sounding nearly as intimidating as you likely wanted it to while you glared at the crowd of on-lookers. “But look! Look, everyone!”

George had no idea why, and then suddenly, you ripped your arm out of your jacket once again, and you began waving both your arms frantically, showing off your bare arms to everyone who continued to stare.

“Look, everyone! No Marks! I am not the person you think I am!”

Oh.

You were desperate to prove that you hadn’t been fighting on the wrong side.

“Just because my father is a self-righteous arseh-”

“Love, calm down.” George told you, gently bringing your arms back down, knowing that you would regret making a fool of yourself later.

You let out a sputtering laugh in his direction.

“Good idea!” You gasped, and then waved toward the barmaid. “I’ll have another-”

“No, she’s cut off.” George said sharply, looking at the barmaid rather than trying to tell you.

George then went back to trying to dress you, squatting down and forcing your shoe on, which wasn’t too difficult. When he came back up and kept trying to wrestle you into your coat, he found the barmaid waving a piece of parchment in his face.

“She hasn’t paid her tab.” She said gruffly.

By the look of the amount, you had been there all night.

“Send it up to Weasleys’ Wizard Wheezes.” George said, shoving the paper back across the bar.

“Fine.” The woman huffed. “But I didn’t know that a couple of good boys like you associated with Death Eaters-”

“She’s not a Death Eater.” George spat back. “She saved my brother’s life a few days ago. So you should check your facts before someone in a worse mood hears you spouting that shit,” He added on, giving a thinly veiled warning.

George finally got you into the coat, and he kept an arm tight around your shoulders as he steered you through the crowd and out of the bar. Walking you down the cobblestone street, keeping you from tripping over yourself while you were wearing those bloody heels was certainly interesting. After a journey that felt too long, he finally got you through the shop and upstairs to the apartment above it.

He and Fred still had a few boxes left there (more for storage purposes than anything else), and he would have to find something to make up the bed with, but it was better than nothing. Definitely better than trying to Apparate with you in this condition.

He sat you down on the couch that they had left behind, and you sank into the soft furniture, quickly kicking off your irritating shoes as you relaxed back and closed your eyes. George went to the kitchen and got you a glass and filled it with water, bringing it over to you, knowing that something other than liquor would do you some good.

You took it from him without a fight, and began gulping it down, finishing almost the entire thing as he smiled at you. He was glad to be taking care of you right now. Not only did it occupy his mind, but he was thankful for the company. Unlike what most people thought, you were easy to get along with.

As you took a breath from the water, he moved toward the boxes, looking for something to make up the bed with. You gave him a curious look.

“Is someone moving?” You slurred out, your words still weighed down by drunkenness.

You would definitely need to sleep it off.

“Yeah.” He answered. “Fred and I have already moved. We used to live here. But we got a better place outside of London.”

“Oh.” You replied, giving another hiccup. “T-too bad. This place is kind of cozy.”

He was surprised that someone like you - someone who came from riches and grew up with the ‘finer things in life’ didn’t make a comment about the apartment being small and cramped. But he supposed that you weren’t a snob like Malfoy, after all.

“It’s nice that it’s empty. It means that nobody will care that I’m putting you up here for the night.” He told you.

“What?” You gaped in return, seeming confused by his words.

“You’re not Apparating while drunk.” He told you. “So you’re staying here.”

There was a moment of comfortable silence, and then you surprised George when you spoke up again.

“George?”

When he turned around to face you, you were looking at him with that intense sadness in your eyes again, and it truly struck through his gut. He hated that he felt so utterly helpless. He hated that he couldn’t take your pain away.

“What is it, love?” He asked, wondering what was on your mind now.

“Do - do you think I’m a bad person?” You asked, your voice terribly pitiful and small.

Just like the image of Fred bloody and unconscious, this punched a hole right through George’s chest.

“What? No. Of course not.” George itched with the urge to reach out and sweep you into a hug, but he feared that this would make you uncomfortable. So he squeezed his hands at his sides and eventually crossed his arms over his chest as he spoke again. “You’re so far from being a bad person. You fought alongside us. You saved Fred. You’ve always been good.”

“Not always.” You huffed quietly.

“Well you’re certainly no Death Eater.”

George declared, turning back and grabbing a quilt that his mother had made from one of the boxes and bringing it into the naked mattress that was still stacked on the twin frame in the bedroom. (When the shop first started, the twins had been so busy that they used to take shifts sleeping, and only needed one single bed between the two of them, so it was all the apartment had.)

By the time he had made up the bed to be somewhat comfortable, he came back out to discover that you had fallen asleep on the couch. So he decided not to risk waking you up by levitating you, and instead he very gently lifted your feet up to join the rest of your body, tucked a small throw pillow under your head, and covered you up with the quilt.

While he stood there, admiring how peaceful you looked in your sleep, he did have to use the deepest form of self restraint to keep himself from laying a small kiss on your forehead. He couldn’t let himself give in to that urge because that wasn’t the nature of your relationship. No - he just left you a note telling you to meet him downstairs in his office when you woke up.

…

When you found George in his office the next day, if you had any signs of a hangover, you certainly didn’t show them. You were carrying yourself very well - you had rubbed off your smudged make-up, tidied up your hair, straightened out your clothes, and even taken off (and presumably thrown away) your ruined stockings, giving him a rare glimpse of your bare legs.

However, as you stared him down after knocking on the open door, he was surprised to see such a deep scowl on your face. He thought that the two of you had made progress the night before and that you would be… softer toward him. Especially after opening up to him so much.

“Y/N-” He greeted you warmly.

“Look, Weasley, I’m really sorry about last night. Whatever happened-” You began speaking vaguely, and he cut you off, immediately curious of something.

“How much of it do you remember?” He asked.

He would be mildly devastated if you didn’t remember the night before - the tender emotions of it, the way you had opened up to him. But he knew that you had certainly been drunk enough to cause memory problems, and that was likely the only reason you had opened up to him so much. He definitely wouldn’t hold it against you in the long run.

“Excuse me?” You gaped, seeming almost insulted by the question.

“How much of last night do you even remember?” He prodded, repeating the question. “Do you even know what you’re apologizing for?”

You let out a huff, your whole body tense. And then, deflating like a balloon, your posture slumped for the first time in all the years he had known you, and you finally let your guard down in front of him for the first time while sober.

“No.” You admitted hesitantly. “Go ahead, start laughing.”

You were on the verge of tears, and George hated that you thought he might make fun of some of your most vulnerable moments.

“I don’t think people being upset is very funny.” He told you honestly. “People freaking out because they’re covered in muck or because something jumped out at them? Yes, that’s funny. Genuine upset - that’s not funny.”

“Thank you for the clarification.” You said, deadpan coming into your voice as you were unsure how to proceed.

You moved to leave, and George’s next words stopped you.

“Last night, you were complaining because you said that you have no prospects.” He told you. “Nothing planned for your future.”

You froze up, not yet turning around - absolutely hating the vulnerability you had disclosed to him.

“Fred is gonna be in the hospital for a while, as you know. And I’m gonna need some help around the shop while he’s gone. We’re probably gonna help around here after that anyway. We’ve been getting busier and busier.” George continued on.

You slowly swung around, heart pounding in your chest as you processed his words.

“I know it’s probably not glamorous - it’s gonna be a lot of hard work and some of the products can be tricky-”

“Are you offering me a job?” You asked, trying to get clarity on the situation.

“Yes.” George nodded. “It’s fifty Galleons a day, flat rate, no commissions. Plus, if you want, the flat above the shop is vacant. And it’s furnished.”

“What would the rent be?” You asked, thinking that there was a catch.

George shrugged. “It comes with the position. But you don’t have to take it if you don’t want to.”

He remembered what you had said about going ‘home’ but not planning to stay there - you said that you had no clue where you planned to go, and he wanted to help you out with that. He truly wanted to be your soft spot to land.

He knew that you were likely used to living in some fancy mansion, and the flat above the shop was small and shabby in comparison - but you had called it cozy. You liked it. Hopefully you would consider it a nice place to live, especially in the wake of the war that had just taken place.

“And you want me to take the job? You want me around here? In your shop? Every day?” You questioned, motioning toward yourself.

“I can think of nobody better qualified for the job.” George grinned at you.

You let out a sigh. “Okay. I - I guess you have yourself a new employee, then.”

George extended out a hand to signify that it was a done deal, and out of ingrained social queues, you took it and sealed the verbal agreement with a handshake.

That was how you came to be employed at Weasleys’ Wizard Wheezes.

…

That had been over three years ago.

You had truly believed that the whole thing would be temporary. And you found more and more that as the days went on, you didn’t mind working at the shop or living in the small apartment above it.

You found that more and more - you were getting used to it. And you were even enjoying this quiet life.

…

You were dreading coming in after having that harsh conversation with George. Immediately after it happened, you regretted so boldly telling him that you weren’t his friend instead of simply taking him up on his offer. But it had been done, and you couldn’t simply go back and change your actions now.

When you came into the shop that morning, you didn’t find any trace of George. Luckily, there was a set of internal stairs that led from your apartment directly into the shop, so you didn’t have to worry about needing a key for the front door in order to be let in.

You wouldn’t be surprised if George was making you open by yourself due to his new policy about no longer being ‘nice’ to you, so you set about performing the opening duties all on your own. You swept the floor, faced the shelves, opened the curtains and made sure all the products in the display windows were working how they should be. It was lonely. You found yourself missing his usual quips about ‘barely having his eyes open’ and how he was surprised that you managed to look so awake and put together so early.

But you had done this to yourself. So you had to accept it. When you were about to open the cash register and make sure that you had the correct amount of change to start the day, you noticed a small box sitting on the counter. A box with a label on it that signified it was from one of the nearby pastry shops in the Muggle part of London.

It was a place that George ventured often to get baked goods, and he had brought you back pastries from there before. You eyed the box suspiciously. It was large enough to fit quite a few items, and with Fred not around, you had to assume that George had left the box on the counter, intending to share whatever he had brought back with you. He was revoking his promise awfully quickly, but you didn’t entirely mind.

You were glad to forget about the previous day’s conversation and simply go back to the quiet, pleasant dynamic that the two of you had established. He harassed you with his niceties and you grew increasingly annoyed by it until he got the hint and left. It was simple, but it worked.

You moved toward the box and lifted the lid, interested to see if he had picked up any of the chocolate croissants this time -

“Fucking hell!”

You let out a harsh scream when something jumped out of the box at you as soon as you opened the lid - a blur of green, a pair of glowing eyes and a forked tongue that leapt toward you. Instinctively, you jumped back and ended up with one of your high heels wedged between the floorboards (in a strangely large gap that you constantly whined at the twins to get fixed). This caused your entire foot to get stuck, which made you trip over yourself and fall into the display of Extendable Ear boxes that was set up behind the counter.

You let out another undignified scream as you felt yourself falling, and you frantically looked around for whatever it was that had come out of the box, soon spotting the long, lanky body of the snake on the floor at your feet. You squirmed and screamed again, literally wiggling out of your own still-stuck shoe in order to escape it, frantically tripping over the downed boxes trying to get farther away.

Your fright quickly turned to fury when you heard laughter.

Laughter that was all too familiar to you. Except, it wasn’t echoed by a secondary voice that sounded like a pair to the first. It was entirely solo this time.

You looked for the source of the laughter, craning your neck upward toward the voice. Soon you saw George descending from the second floor balcony that overlooked the main floor of the store, his face split with a wide grin as the sounds died off into a dull chuckle. You glared at him the entire time. You began to grind your teeth out of pure fury while he raised his hands and slowly began to clap.

“My, my, that was magnificent.” He announced loudly, congratulating himself. “You dream, and you hope, but you never think it’s gonna be so satisfying.”

“Satisfying?” You parroted back, the word coming out as an infuriated hiss. “You put a live snake in a pastry box to scare me and you-”

“Live snake?” George quickly cut you off. “Seriously, do you think I’m that reckless?”

He walked over to the area behind the counter, and you felt truly stupid when he picked up a very obviously rubber toy snake from beside your now empty shoe. He turned around and presented it to you with a wide, satisfied smirk - one that would have looked far more fitting on Fred.

“It’s charmed.” He announced proudly. “Though I am flattered that you consider my work so realistic. But I suppose I had to step up my game after you critiqued my Serpent Morph-O-Mask to hell and back.”

“Shut up.” You huffed at him, limping over with your uneven, one-heeled walk, going to retrieve your shoe. You hoped to put it back on and make up some excuse about something else that you had to do, and hopefully you would be able to avoid him for the rest of the day.

“And you know, this wouldn’t have happened if you simply wouldn’t have assumed that anything in this box was for you.” George pointed out, motioning to the still open box of pastries on the counter, which you now noticed had a few very delicious looking croissants in it. The chocolate ones that he knew you liked. “You could have just asked me-”

“So then I would have gotten scared by a fake snake after I asked you nicely for a pastry?” You fired back sarcastically, leaning down grabbing a hold of your shoe.

You were soon disappointed to find that the heel was firmly wedged into the gap, and you yanking on it once, twice, did nothing to free it. You stood up and moved to grab your wand from your apron, but by then, George had knelt down and had a hand on it. He used a burly arm to pull it free with a grunt in one single motion - a show of strength that you would never admit had impressed you.

“I don’t think you’ll ever find out what happens when you ask for things nicely, because you never do.” George told you, holding out your shoe for you as he continued to kneel, implying that he would slide it onto your foot for you. “Now, come on Cinderella.”

His words confused you, but you stepped forward anyway, feeling exceedingly awkward about it. Especially with how unexpectedly intimate it felt to have him put a warm hand on your calf and guide you into the shoe, shoving it snugly onto your foot with his other hand.

“What the hell is Cinderella?” You asked him quietly as you pulled your foot back, now with your shoe securely on it.

“Oh, it’s some Muggle story that Hermione made Ron read. He was telling us about it-” He explained as he stood to his full height. “Some woman loses her shoe, and this prince-” He cut himself off abruptly. “Some ladies cut their toes off, and there’s mice. It sounds interesting, I guess.”

You almost wanted to ask him to further explain it, mostly out of bored curiosity. But before you could, he changed the subject entirely.

“Clean this up,” He told you, gesturing to the many boxes you had knocked over in your haste to escape the joke snake. “And then go sweep upstairs. Last night I had a mishap with some of the Instant Peruvian Darkness Powder on my way out.” He added on, speaking to you curtly like a boss typically would.

He then took one of the croissants and closed the box before he promptly left to go open the shop’s front door for the day.

You looked at the pile of boxes now scattered across the floor and heaved out a sigh.

This was a horrible change of pace. Any time that the twins had pranked you in the past, they had always been the ones who had been forced to clean up afterwards. But you definitely weren’t at school anymore. They weren’t going to be forced to scrub cauldrons for detention if they did something to you.

It was going to be a very long day.

…

With Fred gone, it turned out to be a grossly long week.

Without his brother there, George was bored or something, and he turned to bothering you for entertainment. Which meant that his childish pranks only continued and grew worse as the week went on.

The next day he brought you a cup of tea, seemingly as a peace offering to apologize because you had been so upset about the (fake) snake. You accepted it without thinking anything of it, taking a small break in between stocking shelves and sweeping the floor to drink it.

Unknowingly, for the rest of the day, you walked around with large, bright blue feathers growing out of your head where your eyebrows were supposed to be.

Customers gawked at you and children pointed and laughed, which you thought was run of the mill for a joke shop. You forced yourself to assume that they were enthusiastic about the products around you - not that they were laughing at you. You only thought to duck into a bathroom and check to see what was wrong after you spoke to George about a new product line and it was clear that he could barely contain his laughter through the whole conversation. That was around late afternoon. And when you finally saw what he had done to you, then you stormed upstairs, boiling angry, absolutely fuming at George for embarrassing you like that.

Not wanting to start firing off spells so close to your face, you did the only thing that you could think to do - you trimmed the feathers down with a pair of scissors and ended up shaving your eyebrows cleanly, completely off, when you saw that there was still traces of the bright blue growing out of your roots. You ended up having to draw them back on with an eyeliner pencil, and by the time you returned, George scolded you for taking ‘such a long break’ and made you sweep cobwebs out of one of the store rooms as a punishment.

Later that night, after consulting an article in Wonder Witch Magazine about overplucking one’s brows, you mixed up and applied the slightest dab of hair tonic to the area and managed to grow them back to the way they were, but you were still fuming angry with George.

The rest of the week went like that. He disrupted your usual routine with childish pranks, making you angrier and angrier. Glitter bombs disguised in a package of Extendable Ears that you had to unpack, making frog sounds go off whenever you were talking to customers to disrupt you, and then escalating to releasing live frogs into the store to scare you and making you run around to catch them before they ruined the merchandise.

Toward the end of the week, after a hard day of living in paranoia of every move he made, trying to dodge his childish antics, you went upstairs and collapsed onto your bed. You were utterly exhausted, and you couldn’t help but to think about a time when he had been kinder to you. You truly thought that without Fred around, George was a lot less lethal when it came to this ‘mischief for no good reason’ stuff.

At least, that’s what your time at Hogwarts had led you to believe.

…

Umbridge was one of the worst things to ever happen to Hogwarts.

You had seen far too many awful, unqualified professors in your time - and you could officially say that the man who turned out to secretly be a Death Eater was a better teacher than her.

But even as you sat in a lonely, secluded, cold corridor after a long, late night detention with her - even as you clutched your bloody hand, she wasn’t the main person occupying your mind. She wasn’t the reason you were quietly sobbing to yourself while you clutched your hand to your chest, for once, not caring if you got your pristine uniform stained with your own blood.

Being in detention with her had gotten you thinking about everything in your life. Your father, your blood status, everything that had led up to this point. And as you had written those hundreds of lines with her terrible quill, somehow scrawling in your own blood, you kept thinking about the last DA meeting that you had been to. A meeting where Harry had been teaching everyone The Patronus Charm, and you hadn’t even attempted it.

Why not?

Because you couldn’t come up with a single strong happy memory to focus on while casting the spell. And you were far too embarrassed to admit to anyone in the room, especially Harry. And the more you racked your brain, trying to come up with a memory that you believed could help you pull off the spell, the more you came up with: your father screaming at you, telling you that you weren’t good enough, casually tossing discontent toward you, telling you that you were stupid and emotionally immature when you were only a child.

Your only friends being House Elves - who were nice to you, but forced to be there in order to care for you. You thought of lonely days at Hogwarts where others stared at you and whispered about your past, where the few attempts you made at friendship during your early days of school were met with children fleeing from you because they believed the rumors about your family and how ‘evil’ you must have been because of them.

You thought of how embarrassing it would be to not be able to perform the spell in front of everyone at DA. How they would all know that you were a fraud. And the more you thought about how pathetic your life was and how embarrassing the next meeting would be, the more upset you became.

So you wept.

Little did you know, someone had stumbled upon you and was listening to your cries.

Umbridge had come up with the horrifying but clever strategy of separating Fred and George for their detentions. On this night, while Fred was scrubbing cauldrons for Professor Snape while George had just finished shining the floor in the Defense Against The Dark Arts Classroom. On his way back to the Gryffindor common room, he was more than surprised when the sound of weeping in a corridor led him to you.

At first he was terrified to approach - terrified that acknowledging you crying would get him on the wrong end of a hex. But as he lingered near the end of the secluded corridor, eventually, you looked up and spotted him on your own.

“Oh great.” You sighed heavily, sounding entirely bothered by his presence.

“I'm unarmed.” He said, putting up both his hands in surrender, showing you that he held no prank products and genuinely meant no harm.

You hastily wiped your tears, an instinct to hide your vulnerability; though you knew there was no way that he hadn’t seen you crying. You were hoping naively that he would simply let the subject pass in silence - and he might have, until he spotted something on the back of your hand. A set of red welts that were bleeding freely that signified that you had just been freed from a detention with Umbridge yourself.

“What were you in for?” George asked, gesturing to your hand, cautious not to get close enough to touch it, not wanting to unintentionally graze against the open wounds and hurt you.

“Oh.” You sighed, glancing down at it, having been so caught up in your upsetting thoughts that you had almost forgotten about the smarting of your hand. “I must not tell lies.” You said, reciting the line now engraved into your hand that was illegible past the blood.

You realized that you couldn’t tell him the truth - ironically, completely ignoring the directive that Umbridge had been trying so hard to drill into your head. So you quickly made up a lie about the reason you had been put into detention in the first place.

“The awful old cunt was convinced that I was lying to her when I said I have no clue what you and Fred are planning next.”

In actuality, she had called you in for ‘questioning’, and grown increasingly angry when you refused to drink the tea she offered you. Veritaserum was colourless, tasteless, and odorless, but because of your true talent for potions, you immediately recognized the amber tinted bottle on her desk that clearly contained it. Knowing that the stuff couldn’t be stored with any chance of light getting at it and tainting, so it had to be kept in tinted glass, you pushed the tea cup away and she immediately gave herself up with her petty reaction.

She questioned you about what kind of ‘activities’ you got up to outside of class, only to receive boring, dead-pan answers from you about studying and sleeping, and then she moved on to asking you about why you were spending increasing amounts of time with ‘the Weasleys’, and Granger and Potter. When you went silent, she not-so-subtly threatened to Owl your father and tell him about ‘the kind of company that you were keeping, and you couldn’t help it - you grabbed a quill off her desk and slapped it down in front of her, daring her to do it.

Which only ended with you writing lines for her. It meant that you had silently won that round. You guessed that she was actually slightly afraid of your father - or afraid of the fact that you didn’t seem all too scared of him. Not anymore.

But you couldn’t possibly spill all of this to George now. Just because you worked on practicing spells with the DA members didn’t mean that George or any of the others cared about your personal gossip.

Despite what Umbridge believed, it was just easier to make up a lie.

“I don’t even know what Fred and I are planning next.” George replied honestly, light laughter on his lips. “We just use a mixture of improvisation and our knack for causing mischief.”

“Exactly.” You said.

“You know, I have a healing cream that works pretty well to prevent scars.” He said, reaching his hand out to show you his, where the once deep indent of ‘I shall not talk back’ was now barely visible. “Fred and I had to come up with something good after testing the early versions of our products on ourselves started to go awry.”

You never would have guessed that they actually tested those awful products on themselves, but you had to silently admire them for being willing to do it.

“Oh, um, thanks but - it’s not that big of a deal.” You said. “I’ll be fine.”

Truly, the physical pain was not the thing bothering you the most.

You moved to walk away, and George surprised himself when he dared to speak up again, shouting down the hallway after you.

“Then why were you crying?” He asked.

You turned back around, startled into facing him again. You hated that he had asked the one question you hoped he would avoid.

You heaved a terrible sigh, fidgeting with the end of your skirt as you mulled in the silence, wondering if you should tell him the truth or not. He shoved his hands in his pockets and took the few steps toward you again, closing the gap because you weren’t eager to run away.

“I -” You choked on a breath, and George waited patiently for you to speak.

You hated to be vulnerable, but the darkness and the late night made it too easy. The fact that he was alone instead of being bracketed by Fred staring you down with his hyper critical eyes made it too easy. George - sweet George - and his damn soft eyes and his expression full of nurturing rather than judgement. He made it too easy.

He made it all feel so safe.

“I couldn’t stop thinking about the stupid Patronus thing from DA, okay?” You admitted hesitantly, rushing to get the words out, bracing yourself for the laughter you felt was inevitably after he heard the words.

This confused George slightly.

During the last DA meeting, Harry had been teaching everyone how to produce a Patronus Charm - something that was difficult, but incredibly useful against dark creatures like Dementors. Even George himself hadn't been able to produce a fully corporeal Patronus, only a shield version, which Harry still congratulated him for being able to do. George had noticed you standing back to watch everyone else, pacing around the room with your wand grasped in your hand tightly, held down by your side, and he overheard something about you ‘taking time to think’ when Harry asked you if you needed help.

He knew that it was a very difficult spell and upon leaving the meeting, he hadn’t faulted you when he hadn’t seen you cast one.

“What about it?” He asked, confused.

“I wasn’t able to do it.” You said, clearly embarrassed.

George shrugged, letting off a nervous laugh.

“It’s a really hard spell.” He said. “I can’t conjure a full Patronus myself. Not yet. That’s the point of DA - to practice. And-”

“No.” You heaved, the word so heavy on your breath. “That’s not what I meant.”

Pure tragedy overtook your features, and George’s heart ached for you as he waited for you to finally speak the words.

“I - ugh.” You sighed, scuffing your heeled shoe harshly against the stone floor, unable to look at him as you said it. “I couldn’t even try. Because I couldn’t think of a happy memory…”

You trailed off the last words very quietly, and if George hadn’t been straining his ears to listen, he wouldn’t have actually known what you said.

Oh.

Oh fuck.

George was struck with the horrible realization that not everyone’s life had been like his. He had always known that the two of you were very different, but… he had never thought about it like this.

On that day in DA, he had struggled to begin because he had too many happy memories to choose from, and Harry theorized that he wasn’t concentrating hard enough on just one. He had memories of childhood birthday celebrations, family dinners, years at Hogwarts with friends, playing pranks with Fred, the Quidditch World Cup - all those among many memories that made him intensely happy. His life was so joyful.

Finally, George landed on a particularly intense memory of when Bill had gifted him his first broom. It wasn’t brand new, but Bill had spent one of his first paychecks post-Hogwarts on two secondhand refurbished brooms for him and Fred on their birthday so that they could stop using the absolutely crap ones from the Hogwarts storage shed for their practices. That was the year they had both made Beater for the first time. Flying on that broom had felt like the most perfect, joyous freedom that George ever could have tasted. Especially knowing that his brother had gifted it to him.

“It’s not like my life is terrible.” You quickly rushed to assure George. “But it’s all just - a blur. My father isn’t some vessel of affection. And I don’t remember much of my mother. And Hogwarts-”

You quickly cut yourself off, sucking in a sharp breath as you held back more tears.

Oh hell. What had Hogwarts been like for you? Fred and George tormenting you with pranks over some stupid house rivalry? Making your life more difficult for no reason?

Did you even have any good friends?

George never remembered seeing you around with anyone. At least, not with friends like he had.

You always walked the halls alone, you always ate alone. But he thought that was how you preferred to spend your time. He always thought before this that you were simply snobbish and you never thought anybody else was good enough to be in your company. But more and more these days, he was realizing that fact simply wasn’t the case. (He supposed that Slytherins weren’t the easiest to make friends with, and Slytherins didn’t have much luck making friends outside of their house, especially not when their father was a known Death Eater.)

Silently vowing to become your good friend from then on, George moved on to a more important matter first - helping you cast a Patronus Charm.

“What do you remember about your mother?” He asked.

“What?” You gaped, confused.

“Your mother - do you have any happy memories of her?” He asked.

You stirred in quiet thought for a moment. You hated where this was going, but with his gentle eyes still giving you that terrible sense of safety, you found yourself opening up to him once again.

“I don’t remember much of her.” You told him quietly. “She died when I was really young - when I was only four. My father always talks about her like she was some horrid bitch. He never paints a kind picture of her, and I often wonder if I’m misremembering her because I was so young.”

“You should disregard anything your father says as a general rule.” George told you, entirely confident in his own words as he always was.

This was the first time that you considered, beyond his beliefs about ‘Mudbloods’ and your family’s ‘natural superiority’, that your father might have been wrong when he spoke about you. Before you could dwell on that thought, however, George spoke up again.

“What do you remember?” He asked, stressing the word to put meaning on your own personal experiences, not the weight of someone else’s.

He genuinely valued your opinion for once. It felt strange that someone did.

“She was kind.” You said quietly, still reserved. “She smelled wonderful - like rising bread dough and fresh flowers. She was always smiling. She-”

You cut yourself off, growing tearful. It had been a long time since you had allowed yourself to remember.

“Keep going.” George encouraged you. “It's okay. You should hold onto these things.”

The soft rumble of his voice - so much gentler than usual - made the words feel true. You tried to let yourself fall into the memories. Far off in your mind, you ran into your mother’s embrace.

“She used to give me these little square sweets after every meal.” You said, making the small shape with your fingers as the memory truly sank in. “Different chocolates filled with things - mint and nougat and strawberry. She said that you should always have something sweet after every meal. And I would bite them in half and guess the flavour, and then I would give the other half to her and kiss her on the cheek.”

It was something you hadn’t thought about in so long, and though it was tender, it did bring you joy.

“Good.” George whispered, terrified to break your concentration on the memory. “Hold onto that.”

He took his wand from his pocket, not even thinking about the fact that you casting the charm with his wand might not be as successful, if successful at all. He was simply too eager to try it out. He stepped behind you and you felt odd with the sudden closeness, wanting to run from the contact as he crowded up tight to your back and grabbed your wand arm, placing the wand in it.

“Come on, you can do it-”

“George, no-”

“Just try.” He insisted, gently whispering in your ear in a way that was strangely intimate. “Just once. For me.”

You had no clue why you went along with it, but you did.

“What was your favourite flavour?”

“What?”

“What was your favourite flavour of the sweets that your mother gave you?” He asked.

“Peanut butter.” You replied. “If it was a peanut butter one, she would let me finish the whole thing by myself. And she always laughed when I licked my fingers. Not in a mean way - she wasn’t laughing at me… but she was laughing because she was happy. Happy because she knew I was enjoying it.”

“Now say the words.” He whispered, guiding your hand to raise the wand up into the sky.

Strangely, you trusted him.

“Expecto Patronum.”

Engulfed by the safety of George at your back and feeling the intensity of your mother’s love inside of you, the overwhelming magic flowed through you. In a moment, you were amazed as a bright white light came flowing out of the wand - George’s wand - not just blasting into a shield but forming into a beautiful array of moving, living beings that filled the whole corridor within seconds. The previously dark space was soon lit up by dozens of tiny bright little lights that danced so beautifully for the two of you.

At first you thought they might be butterflies, but when you got a closer look at their wings and their size, you realized that they were moths - not as beautiful or well liked by people. How fitting. You couldn’t help but to reach out and try to catch one - and that dreamy little beam of light, that magical little white moth landed on your extended finger before it dissipated off into nothingness as the magic dissolved and the corridor darkened once again.

“I told you you could do it.” George said cheerfully.

You turned to George, and likely for the first time ever, you smiled at him.

“Thank you, Weasley. I mean it.”

When the Owl Post came the next morning, a random Tawny owl that you did not recognize dropped a poorly wrapped package into your lap and then screeched away. When you peeled it open, you were surprised to find a random jar of some cream, along with a package of peanut butter fudge. It came with a scrawled note that said ‘it would be a shame for that beautiful hand to be scarred forever’.

You peered across to the Gryffindor table and found a certain tall redhead grinning at you, and he gave you a wink. The cream smelled vaguely of green tea, and was very soothing to apply. The marks on your hand faded within a week of use, and it never left a scar. The fudge tasted amazing, and thankfully, did not give you a fever. It reminded you of your mother - and for the first time in a long time, you actually let yourself indulge in those memories.

You had to wonder where he had gotten the sweets on such short notice. But you supposed that was just another ‘Weasley trick’ you weren’t allowed to know about.

That day had shown you a kinder side of George that you had never truly expected even existed.

…

Despite what you believed, George could be just as much trouble by himself, even when Fred wasn’t around for him to conspire with.

The entire week culminated in an incident that you never could have predicted - one that had you mentally begging for Fred’s return.

That afternoon, just after closing, you were tallying up the register as a part of your end-of-day duties, and George walked up to you, seeming far too ‘innocent’ for your liking. His presence now filled you with a slight sense of dread, wondering what he would do next, but you said nothing about it. You didn’t even look up at him - you continued your work, counting the money and writing down your tally while he lingered off near the edge of the counter. You hoped that if you didn’t acknowledge him, whatever prank he had planned next simply wouldn’t play out. You were far too tired for his antics now.

“Y/N,” He called your name gently, and you still didn’t look up.

Instead, you hummed gently in response to acknowledge him, pretending that you were far too busy to look up from your work. He let out a deep sigh, walking around the counter toward you.

“Look, I do have to say that I’m sorry for everything. This week, I pulled a lot of immature pranks on you and it was a step backward between us,” He announced, his tone sounding oddly… insincere.

You finally looked up from the ledger book to face him, and you found that his expression was… smug? His mouth was tight, clearly holding back a smile, and his eyes were glinting with an ardent joy that you knew had to be ill-conceived mischief.

Your stomach churned as you wondered what he was up to, and you immediately knew that the apology was a false, a cover for whatever he was attempting. You didn’t trust him - not one bit.

But you knew that you couldn’t call him out for it right away, otherwise he would simply try again later. And he would come back with a better set up, or simply try to catch you off guard next time. You had to figure out what he was doing first, and put a stop to it.

So for now, you pretended to believe him.

“Yes, it was.” You replied quietly.

You glanced around, trying to see if he had set up any trip-wires, any hanging buckets. You looked down at the drawers in the front counter to see if any of them had moved during the quick break you had taken for a cup of tea (one that you had definitely made for yourself this time). You had to wonder if he had hidden anything inside of them that would jump out at you when you opened them.

“Thank you for apologizing.” Your tone was dead, your mind too busy focusing on trying to figure out his next move.

“I got you something!” He added on excitedly.

When he reached into his pocket, you instinctively took a step back, your eyes glued to his hand as he took a few sweets out and laid them on the counter. The green sour apple candies that you loved. You were instantly suspicious of them, just like you had been the first time he had gifted you some (in the same manner of apology). But you had to guess that he wouldn’t stoop to tampering with them.

You gave him a harsh glance, and he gave you a smile. And then, you reached your hand out to grab one.

But that was your greatest mistake.

The minute your arm was extended, he reached out with his arm - the one that was closest to you, his left, and before you could blink, he wrapped something cold and metal around your right wrist and tightened it. A sharp ‘click’ sounded through the air as he secured the metal around your arm, trapping you.

He started cackling loudly - as both the hilarity and the victory of it truly overcame him, and your brain began to process what had just happened. You lifted your arm up, tugging on the metal, realizing that it was a wrist cuff attached to a chain no more than four inches long, and on the end of that chain was George Weasley.

He had handcuffed himself to you.

What. The. Fuck.

He had cuffed himself into the other side and hidden it under his jacket sleeve before walking up to you, holding the cuff in his hand down by his side to hide it from you. He had planned this out.

But what-? Why had he done this?

Why the fuck had he chained the two of you together?

You yanked on it again, causing his hand to flail along with yours, a sharp bite grinding against your skin as the metal tugged on your own wrist, very secure in place. The realization that the two of you were now solidly attached was truly, fully settling into your brain.

“What the fuck?!” You yelled, shocked and slowly becoming angry as he continued to laugh and beamed a smile at you. “What the fuck is this, George?”

“Oh come on, it’s a joke!” He replied, still grinning. “We both know that you and I could use some extra time together.”

“I said-” You were about to remind him of your previous protests to this exact idea, but he cut you off.

“You said that you didn’t want to spend time together because we’re not friends.” He reminded you. “And the only way for us to become friends is to spend more time together. Ironically.”

He always had a way of making you regret your own words.

You glared at him intensely, now absolutely fuming with annoyance and a growing rage.

“I - I don’t care, you idiot!” You screamed in return, beginning to panic. “Get rid of it! Unlock it!”

You continued to flail in panic, making your own wrist continue to hurt more as the short chain caused his arm to act like a dead weight against your own, preventing you from moving too far away from him. It made you feel so terribly trapped, and you hated it.

Sure, of all the people to be trapped with, he wasn’t the worst by far. But you had already spent so much of your life feeling trapped; you had spent so long being defined by your father’s choices for you, in fear that all eyes in the world were judging you based on his reputation (which mostly turned out to be true). And just as you were barely becoming free from those chains, George had come and slapped another literal one onto your wrist.

It caused a terrible anxiety through you, turning your muscles to putrid stone within seconds and tightening your throat as your body threatened tears. And you refused to let yourself cry in front of him, so of course, it only manifested as harsh anger toward him while your brain put up shields and tried to protect you.

“Calm down, will you?” George replied, his face still vibrant with laughter, obviously not taking you seriously. “It’s just a joke.”

Of course. His singular excuse for everything in life.

“A joke!” You screamed back so harshly that your voice easily broke. “A joke?!”

“Y/N-”

You didn’t let him speak.

“Everything in your life is a joke!”

You shouted, getting closer to his face to magnify your words since you quite literally couldn’t get away.

“You had absolutely no work ethic in school and wasted any brains you had on torturing fellow students for a few cheap laughs and now you wonder why you can’t get a girlfriend because you push away any woman in your life with immature antics and you refuse to actually reflect on anything more serious than what you ate for lunch!”

Your throat became worn out from screaming so many words with so little breath, getting louder as you went along, but it felt nice to get some of the anger out.

George just rolled his eyes and then smirked at you, and you became even more irritated by the fact that he didn’t seem at all phased by your words.

“Are you done, lover?” He asked as you took a breath, still shaking with rage. “You are starting to hurt my one good ear. And it is rather precious to me, as you could understand.” He added on, using his free hand to gesture to that side of his head.

‘Lover’?

This pet name, and the casual nature with which he spoke it, just left odd confusion mixing in with your anger.

“Weasley, I swear to Merlin, if you don’t take this off me within the next minute-!” You began to threaten him, grabbing your wand out of your apron pocket to point it squarely at his chest. “I will singe all the hair off your body and turn your cock into something so shriveled and unrecognizable-!”

“So you do think about my cock, eh?” He said, cutting you off, his smirk growing even more intense now.

You let out a deep growl of frustration and pressed your wand into his throat, and then, as a warning, you began to count.

“Ten, nine, eight, seven-”

You weren’t sure if you were counting down to when you would start firing non-lethal curses at him, or if you were counting down to try and make your rage less potent, but you were glad when it worked.

“Alright, alright, calm down.” George sighed in surrender, and batted your wand down from his throat with his free hand. You weren’t so easily convinced and continued to hold the weapon in his direction, glaring at him. “I’ve got the key right here. It was just a little joke, a wind up, ya know?”

He started searching the pockets of his jacket, finally ready to give up the key and unlock you. You did feel a twinge of relief, even if you refused to show it, keeping your appearance firm and stony - a way that you hadn’t looked at him in a long time.

However, that bit of relief was incredibly short-lived as his hand went into more of his pockets and came up empty-handed again and again, and he seemed to grow increasingly more frantic. You grew more panicked too as you noticed him doubling back and checking his pockets over again, even checking his pants, and dumping things out onto the floor - causing random sweets and crumpled pieces of parchment to fall by your feet…

But still, no key.

“George.” You ground out between your teeth, pressing your wand tightly against his cheek.

“I have it here somewhere,” He mumbled hastily, giving you a nervous grin.

“You lost the key?!” You shouted, lowering your wand now, knowing that another flash of accidental anger would end up with him on the wrong end of a jinx, and (as pissed off as you were) you didn’t want to hurt him by mistake.

George continued frantically fingering his pockets, but his expression grew more honestly worried now. Whether it was because he was terrified of what you might do to him, or because he actually didn’t like the results of his own prank and truly didn’t want to be chained to you, you weren’t sure. You had to guess that it was the latter - being chained to you for a period of time longer than five minutes would be incredibly unpleasant for anyone.

“It - it was an honest mistake, really.” He stuttered out nervously, still frantically looking for the key.

However, you knew that it was just your luck that the key had gone missing - likely fallen out of his pocket somewhere and truly gone. You didn’t count on him finding it anytime soon. Still, you continued to internally panic - you weren’t prepared to spend much longer like this.

George flinched when you waved your wand again, and you wanted to go on a rant about how you weren’t actually going to hurt him (even as much as you wanted to). But instead, you fought against his dead weight to raise the cuff attached to your wrist upward, and then you began firing off spells.

“Alohomora!” You tried the first and most obvious one, and naturally, it did not work. “Aperta!” You tried something a bit more advanced, and still nothing.

“Wow, I actually thought that would work-” George began.

“Shh.” You cut him off, trying to think.

You dug through your knowledge for something a bit more advanced - and you thought of a lock breaking spell that you had read about in a rare Japanese spell book during your time at Hogwarts. Back when you had spent most of your time studying because your social life really hadn’t been that great.

“Hirake Kagi!” You spoke the words sharply, hoping that you remembered the pronunciation well, causing a small bright white light to fire off into the small key hole beside your wrist.

When you tugged on the cuff - still, it was locked solidly tight, and you heaved a grand sigh of frustration.

“Okay, well, that didn’t work, so-” George began to speak again, but you found yourself ignoring him.

You raised your wand again, this time firing off curses toward the short chain that attached the two of you.

“Confractus!” You fired a simple spell with the intention to break the chain, and nothing happened.

“Reducto!”

A large bright white beam of energy burst out of your wand, and as soon as it hit the small chain, it was deflected off the seemingly unbreakable metal and ended up hitting a nearby display of products, destroying a few of the boxes and knocking far more of them over into a heap on the floor.

“Ignitis!”

You moved on to fire, causing a bright orange beam to come shooting out of your wand, one that was also deflected off the metal - this time with slightly worse consequences. The ensuing fragments of energy singed up George’s arm and began to light his coat on fire, and caused you to jump back as particles of ember threatened up toward your face before sizzling out.

“Woah, woah, stop it!” George demanded, grabbing your wand from you and putting it on the counter.

Luckily, he had a decent amount of experience with this kind of stuff due to his and Fred’s early failures with their products, and he didn’t panic - he simply brought his free hand up and began aggressively patting out the fire until his jacket was only dully smoking, which did impress you. You liked that he could be calm among chaos.

“You’re going to kill one of us!” He added on, sounding slightly annoyed himself. Perhaps he had a point. “And trust me, you don’t want to be chained to a dead body that you have to lug around. I am a lot heavier than I look, love.”

The affectionate nickname gave a confusing twist in your stomach, and you glared at him.

In the back of your mind, you did consider the fact that you didn’t want to be chained to his dead body - because it would be terribly inconvenient, and because at the end of the day, you didn’t want to see him hurt. Even if you wanted to strangle him with the chain of the cuffs to prove a point, you would have stopped before he lost consciousness.

“Well what do you suggest, if you’re so clever?” You hissed at him.

He grinned at you.

“Leave it to a Slytherin to try and brute force her way out,” He said, reaching into the breast pocket of his jacket for his own wand.

“This isn’t about Slytherin or Gryffindor, or any of that pathetic bullshit.” You griped, shaking your head. “Whatever, just - what’s your idea?”

He raised his wand proudly and announced his spell.

“Accio key!”

Then, from seemingly every corner of the shop (including the pile of junk that had landed at his feet after he had emptied his pockets), with drawers opening and doors upstairs creaking open, about a dozen different keys came hurling at the two of you. You instinctively ducked down to avoid the sharp metal that would have pierced your skin and likely left harsh gashes due to his lack of foresight. The cuff tugged on your wrist as a reminder of your predicament, and you conveniently used him as a shield for the oncoming debris, hearing him let out a few grunts as some of the keys inevitably hit him.

“Oh yes, that was clever.” You griped sarcastically. “That was downright brilliant!”

“Okay, fine, not my best moment.” George sighed as you stepped out from behind him. “Just help me look through these and see which one is the handcuff key. And then I’ll unlock you and you can be free for the rest of the weekend.”

He let out a tired huff as he bent down and began picking up the collection of keys off the floor, putting them on the counter to go through them.

“And Monday.” You added on. “I’m taking Monday off because of this little stunt.”

“Fine.” He quietly agreed.

The more keys you looked through, the more anxious you became. You recognized each of them - a ring of keys that unlocked different doors in the shop, a key with a fuzzy dice on the end that was a spare for Ron’s Muggle car (that Fred and George maybe had permission to use), a spare key to Ron’s apartment in London in case of emergency, a spare key to the front door of the shop that Fred had lost months ago, a key to your apartment upstairs, a key to the desk in Fred and George’s office, but -

“You’re sure that none of these is the right one?” You pressed, panicking.

“Yes, I’m sure.” George replied, sounding slightly downtrodden about it himself. “It was a little one, a tiny small key-” He gaped, gesturing with his fingers, showing you the intended size.

“And you lost it!” You cried out, angry and upset at the same time. “Oh, you idiot!”

George sighed in defeat and you kicked the counter in front of you, causing all the keys laid out on the countertop to rattle, along with the change that was sitting in the open cash drawer from your still unfinished closing count. Strangely, this caused you to come up with a new idea.

“What shop did you buy the handcuffs from?” You pressed, turning to him with a bright, relieved smile on your face. “We can just go there and buy another set for the key!”

George’s face twisted into a sickly, nervous expression. Your smile immediately dropped, teeth clenching down so hard that your jaw began to hurt as you glared at him even stronger now.

“What?” You demanded harshly, not even opening your mouth to grind out the word.

He was going to kill you with stress before the night was even over. Then he was going to be the one dragging around a dead body.

“I - I didn’t buy them.” He confessed, his voice quiet and obviously embarrassed.

Unable to resist the urge this time, you reached up and slugged him, delivering a harsh, solid punch to his shoulder. He let out a grunt.

“Okay, maybe I deserved that-”

“What did you do?!” You demanded. “What the hell did you get me into?!”

“Look, I’ll fix it, I swear-” He began to ramble out apologies, but you were more interested in something else.

“Where are the handcuffs from?” You asked, slowly creeping into insanity, and definitely losing your patience.

“I found them in Harry’s desk.” He rushed out the words all at once, and your mind began to spin.

You had to guess that he meant Harry Potter.

Which meant that you were truly fucked.

Harry wasn’t officially an Auror, at least not yet. The Ministry had been trying their best to charm him into the program since The War had ended, and this included having him work as a freelance agent on only the most attractive and exciting criminal cases - something that he and Ron liked to talk about a lot. It meant that his name and picture could be slapped all over the Prophet whenever he brought in a high profile Death Eater that had still been on the loose.

Because he didn’t officially work with the Ministry, he didn’t have an office at their headquarters (even as many times as they kept offering him their best, most gorgeous offices, including all the perks). He had told you once that he hated the idea of being ‘cooped up’ underground all day. Though you didn’t see how his current accommodation was much better.

You had been to Grimmauld Place a few times during your time as a member of The Order of Phoenix, but you had only found out that it was Harry’s inheritance and current place of residence a few months after The War. Hermione had invited you over there for dinner (you did appreciate being included, even if Ron and Fred often showed their disdain for her trying to do so). Harry had proudly showed you his office and the many keepsakes within - trophies that Dumbledore or others had gifted to him, and creepy, cursed objects that he had trapped in glass cases that had come with the Black family home.

You could only imagine what kind of ancient demonic magic was keeping the handcuffs from being destroyed.

(Little did you know, these handcuffs were a relatively new pair of Muggle handcuffs that one of the other Aurors had modded with many intense, advanced spells and given to Harry with the purpose of keeping their perps from escaping.)

“It’s not my fault!” George insisted with a yell. “He just left me alone in there with all that stuff! And his desk was unlocked! And I wasn’t even looking in the drawers for a pair of handcuffs, I was looking for documents with some kind of gossip! And when I found them, how was I not supposed to use them for some greater nefarious purpose? It’s entrapment!”

“Just shut up!” You snapped. “Shut up and let me think!”

You became breathless from screaming for a moment, and after you gulped in air, you spoke again.

“What the hell are we gonna do?”

It was more of a rhetorical question, speaking to yourself as you truly took in the utter horror of the situation at hand - being chained to another person with seemingly no way to escape. But naturally, George had to crack another joke.

“I thought you wanted me to shut up so you could think,” He mumbled quietly.

You rolled your eyes sharply.

And strangely, it was your annoyance with him that fueled your next idea.

“Harry’s desk…” You mumbled out. “Maybe he has another key? We have to go and talk to him.”

George frowned again.

“Harry is in Romania.” He said. “Apparently he’s on some top secret mission. Ron couldn’t stop blabbering on about it, so it must be really important.”

Romania. Great.

You clenched your fists incredibly tight, jabbing your nails harshly into your palm, trying to distract yourself from George’s presence. Not ending up in Azkaban for murder was the singular motivation that kept you grounded for a few moments as you forced yourself to take deep breaths rather than to scream.

“So what do you suggest?” You huffed out, your voice quivering with ill-concealed rage.

“We could try Bill?” George posed. “He works with cursed objects sometimes. He might know more about this than we do. He might know how to break us out without the key. I’ll send him an Owl?”

You let out a breath of relief, for once, actually glad that the Weasley family was so large that they had members of such varying degrees of expertise.

“But we have to get to the Owlery before it closes.” He added on, looking at his watch on his free hand.

Before you could blink, he was attempting to move around the counter, dragging you with him in a sharp jolt, causing your shoulder to pain harshly. Your mind took a moment to kick in and realize that you had to walk along with him to avoid that dragged-along effect. Even if Bill could solve this, you would still be stuck close by George for the next few hours.

Great.

As he headed toward the door, going for the Owlery on the other side of Diagon Alley, you realized something even more terrible - he was about to parade you through the streets chained to him. It was the most foolish, embarrassing thing ever, and though it hurt your wrist, you gave a harsh yank back on the cuffs, causing him to hiss in pain quietly and stop dead in his tracks.

“What?” He asked as he looked over his shoulder toward you, his tone now becoming ripe with annoyance.

��I am not being paraded around as your new accessory!” You argued. “I already look foolish enough wearing this gaudy apron! I don’t want to have to explain your unique brand of stupidity to other people!” You demanded, shaking the cuffs for emphasis.

“Well, we are currently stuck together, so if I need to mail an Owl, you’re coming with me!” He shouted back, trying to pull you toward the door once again.

Instinctively, you reached out and stomped on his foot to stop him (your wand still sitting on the counter where he had put it). Your high heeled shoe made a firm imprint in the middle of his expensive dragon-hide oxford and caused a shooting pain through his foot that had him howling and jumping back, glaring at you.

“Okay, stop it!” George huffed at you, wagging a finger tightly in your face that you resisted the urge to reach out a bite simply to spite him. “If we’re going to be stuck like this, even if it’s only for a few hours, we have to agree not to wound each other.”

He would never try to physically hurt you, no matter how upset he was, but he mostly wanted it to be a mutual agreement so that he would be safe from you.

“Fine.” You sighed. He did have a point. Devolving to petty fighting would only make things worse.

Then, you thought of something that would make going out in public a bit more bearable.

“Give me your coat.” You demanded.

“What?” He gaped at you, confused.

“Just give it to me!”

He began to remove it from his free arm, but then he realized a glaring problem - with his hand in the handcuffs, he wouldn’t be able to remove his jacket off the arm that was attached to yours. You saw this issue too and let out a huff, grabbing the fabric from him anyway - it would still work fine for your purposes. You took it as far down his arm as you could and then draped the fabric over your joined wrists, doing your best to conceal the handcuffs from any public eyes. Still feeling the chain biting into your skin as the distance tugged on your wrists, you moved to grab his hand, hating how blazen warm his skin was as you laced your fingers with his to keep him still.

“You know if you wanted to hold my hand, you could’ve just as-” He began to say, smirking at you.

“Shut up.” You hissed at him. “Just go.” You motioned toward the door, and the two of you finally set off.

To the late-afternoon stragglers in Diagon Alley, the two of you would have looked like a simple couple holding hands as you walked along, too lovestick to let each other go. No one would have suspected that you were actually chained together under the fabric of George’s coat due to an ill-timed, poorly thought out ‘prank’.

Apparently it was almost too convincing.

George paid for some supplies at the Owlery to write his letter, and of course, he had to be the one to write it because he had conveniently set this up so that his proper, dominant hand would be the one free and anything you wrote with your non-dominant hand would be awful chicken scratch. You almost had to wonder in the back of your mind if your spells had gone so wrong because you hadn’t been using your proper wand hand.

But you couldn’t linger on those thoughts for long, because the woman behind the counter kept eyeing the two of you heavily as your joined hands rested on top of the counter under the folded fabric of his jacket.

“You two are just the sweetest, aren’t you?” She said, smiling at both of you past thick wrinkles, clearly endeared by a young couple. “It’s just so sweet to see a couple so in love that they run errands together - just can’t leave each other’s side, not for a moment.”

“Oh we’re certainly attached, alright.” You replied, knowing that the woman was too rosy-eyed to pick up on the bitter sarcasm in your voice.

“I wouldn’t trade my Y/N for anything,” George added on, giving you a fake, gooey smile. You resisted the urge to hit him again. “We’ll be back here soon mailing the wedding invitations.”

You gave him a sharp glare for this comment, especially when the woman giggled brightly at this and started asking George more questions - wanting to know about what day your wedding was planned for and how long the two of you had been together. You were thankful when he wrapped up the conversation with her and mailed off his letter to Bill, and after some more dreadful hand holding back down the street, the two of you got back to the shop.

He locked up behind the two of you and you both decided to wait for the reply upstairs in your apartment. You hated feeling embarrassed by the bits of mess that you had naturally left in your apartment, not knowing that anybody else would be seeing it anytime soon. Random dishes in the sink, an unfolded blanket on the couch, random magazines around. You wanted to rush to clean up, you wanted to do something -

“We should probably sit down.” George said, pulling out one of the chairs at the small kitchen table. “It might be a while.”

You didn’t even have the energy to respond with anger.

You simply pulled out the chair opposite and collapsed into it, glad that you could yank off your apron over your head and throw it to the side.

…

You and George waited in silence for the return Owl.

You picked up a nearby book, trying your hardest to read when his presence was so distracting, and he simply sat there, contemplating (hopefully considering his life choices and thinking about the consequences of his actions). About an hour passed before there was light tapping on the window, and you were grateful to look up and find a brown barn owl there, waiting for the two of you. George rushed up to open the window and you let out a hiss of pain as he inadvertently tugged on your wrist, still not used to being so closely attached.

“We’re still attached, moron,” You grunted out, rushing out of your chair to follow him.

“You know, you don’t have to call me a moron every five minutes.” George sighed. “I know that what I’ve done is stupid.”

He opened the window and took the envelope from the owl and slipped a coin into a pouch on its leg as a tip for the delivery - clearly another Owlery owned owl.

“If you knew that, then you wouldn’t have done it.” You replied dully.

George didn’t reply any further, too busy ripping open the envelope to read the letter while you closed the window. You were curious, but too nervous to read over his shoulder; even when you took a glance at the paper, you found the handwriting too messy to even make-out. Though with the way George was murmuring under his breath as he read it, apparently he could understand it just fine.

“Oh.”

“What?” You snatched the letter from him, though you didn’t bother to read it, looking from the parchment to George’s once again nervous expression. “What?”

“He said that he knows a good professional Ministry curse breaker that he can get us an appointment with.” George announced, forcing a grin. Clearly trying to make you feel better about the news.

You had a feeling that there was a very large ‘but’ coming. And when you didn’t say anything - when you didn’t start celebrating, instead staring him down with an imposing look, leaving the air open for more words, George provided you with it.

“But the next available appointment is in two or three days.”

“Two or three days?!” You screamed, your throat becoming sore from how much you had screamed that day. “Have you stressed the exact nature of our predicament to him?”

“Yes!” He assured you. “But these are very busy people! And they’re dealing with situations much more life-threatening than ours at present!”

George Weasley had handcuffed himself to you, and now the two of you were stuck together.

...

Continue Reading Here: Part Two - Epoximise

A/N: I will ask you kindly - if you enjoyed this fic, please reblog it or comment something meaningful down below. I would love to have a conversation with people who enjoyed the fic and sat through the entire thing to be able to read this ending message.

Typically, with a multi-part fic, I would have some kind of reblog and comment goal at the end asking people to give the fic a certain number of comments and reblogs before I post the next part, but I have found that even this doesn't get people to meaningfully engage with fics. The last time I did this with a fic, the goal was not met, and it has been sitting there for months with enough likes to have more than doubled the goal, but people just don't give a fuck to actually comment or reblog. They just leave a like and move on without caring how much effort it actually takes to write a 30k, 40k, 50k fic.

If you're going to comment, I don't care to know if the writing quality was good or anything like that (because it doesn't really start a conversation when people go "this is so good!" it just makes me nod and throw a thumbs up - I want to have genuine conversations about my fics and what is happening in them), I do want to have a genuine discussion about the plot of the fic, the dynamic between the characters, and what you anticipate will happen in the next part - I want to talk about your experience reading it and how that experience differs from other fics. I don't just want to be praised (in fact, I don't want to be praised at all), I want to have fun talking about the characters and the universe here.

Because in case it passed your notice, writing a 50k fanfic (which, this adds up to 50k between both parts) - is a lot of work. And all I ask for in return after putting in hours and hours worth of hard, back-breaking work into a fic like this and then posting it for free, is that people take a few minutes to discuss it with me if they took the time to read it.

Also I ask for the courtesy that people please don't hound me and bother me by asking when the next part is coming out.

The next part will be posted when I am finished editing it, and that could be in 2 days or 2 weeks or 2 months, or even 2 years from now if something comes up. Stick around my blog if you want to see it, especially because I will be posting updates about the progress. And for reference, the next part will be the final part - this is not a series, this is a oneshot that has been divided in half for more convenient editing and reading.

That's all. Even if you don't comment, I hope you enjoyed it, and I hope that you have a great day. <3

#sundrop writes #george weasley #george weasley x reader #george weasley x slytherin reader #george weasley smut #george weasley x you #george weasley x y/n #george weasley fanfiction #harry potter fanfiction #harry potter smut #harry potter fandom

408 notes · View notes

moonstruckme · 1 year ago

Note

Are you going to continue the roomate James series? I’m actually in love with it😍

Yes! Thank you for reading <3

part 1 │ part 2 │ part 3 │ part 4 │part 5 │ part 6 │ part 7 │ part 8 │ part 9 │ part 10 │ part 11 │ part 12 │ part 13

roommate!James x shy!reader ♡ 804 words

“Honey, I’m home!”

A smile tugs at your lips, even as you roll your eyes to yourself. James has become more and more fond of these pet names, and of announcing his comings and goings like he’s worried you’ll miss him. (He’s never gone long enough for that, though you might actually miss him if he were.) If you don’t respond in some way or another, he’ll—

“Hey.” He pokes his head through your cracked door. “You alive in here?”

You pause in folding your laundry to give him a deadpan look. “I could have been in my underwear.”

He looks mildly horrified. “I’d hope if you were, you’d close the door all the way.”

“You know, I did manage to stay alive even before you moved in.”

James leans on your doorframe, giving you the sort of lazy grin you have to pretend doesn’t scare butterflies into flight in your stomach. You really hope that wears off soon. “See, but now I’m convinced if I don’t check on you, you really will die and it’ll be my fault.”

“How would it be your fault?”

“Classic case of roommate neglect. I smell the rotting coming from inside your room, the police come, they ask How did you not know your roommate was dead for a month? I reply, Well, officer, she said she could be galavanting in her underwear at any moment. They put me in handcuffs and I spend the next five to fifteen years having Sirius bring me cigarettes I don’t want so that I can trade them for ramen noodles in the yard.”

You scoff, fighting a smile. “As if you would ever eat ramen.”

“That’s what I’m saying, sweetheart. You’d be forcing me upon desperate times. But hey,” he raises his hands in a show of surrender, “I didn’t come in here to discuss prison currency. Would it be alright with you if I had friends over tonight?”

“Of course,” you say, looking back down to match a pair of socks. “You don’t need to ask every time, it’s always alright.”

“Thanks,” he says warmly, “but it makes me feel better to ask. What do you want on your pizza?”

You blink. “Me?”

“Yes, you.” He smiles. Butterflies all over again. “You don’t have to hang out with us to eat it—though we’d love to have you—but I’m not just going to order pizza to your own apartment without having any for you.”

“It’s your apartment, too,” you remind him. “That’d be a very normal thing to do.”

“Irregardless.” James waves you off. You wrinkle your nose at the word choice. “What do you want?”

You swallow a sigh. There are some things, you’ve found, James is nearly impossible to argue with about. If you really dig your heels in, sometimes you can make him move first, but you don’t feel like it right now.

You do the next best thing you can think of: choosing the least obtrusive option. “Cheese is good with me, thanks.”

His eyes narrow like he knows what you’re doing, but he says, “Got it. I’ll let you know when it’s here.”

“Thanks.” You turn your attention back to your laundry. James lingers in the doorway.

A month ago, you would have kept ignoring him, working on the (unfounded) hope that he’d go away. Now, you look up.

“Do you think you might come downstairs and hang out?” he asks. He has a strange look on his face, one you can’t quite decipher. “You know you’re always invited.”

You give James a terse sort of smile. He’s not stopped inviting you to do things since the day he moved in. Your open invitation has been made very clear, and you’ve been accepting it more often lately. James is someone who makes it easy to feel close to him. He tosses pet names at you like they’re nothing, comes to check on you when he gets home, pretends he needs to go grocery shopping just because you need a ride to the store. Last week, you’d sat down to watch a movie with him and woken up to a black screen, your cheek smushed into his shoulder and his head resting atop yours.

Somehow, you’ve let him spill into your life without meaning to, and now you have these childish, crush-like reactions whenever he smiles a certain way or calls you pet names with that familiar bent to his voice. You know you just need time to sort these feelings out. It’d probably be ideal to keep yourself from spilling into his life as much as possible in the meantime.

But it’s hard to deny James anything when he’s so sweet to you. And he’s nice. His friends seem nice.

“I might,” you say.

“I’ll take the win,” James replies, smiling. These butterflies are seriously inconvenient.

1K notes · View notes

coldilikeit · 8 months ago

Text

Yandere Batfam x Camp half-blood (Neglected reader)

DC x Pjo

Part 7

Again like- a lot of timeskips

____________________________

Present

"Yellow? You- you're giving me yellow?" Duke's brows furrowed at the color

Batman sighed "is something wrong with it?"

"no- just, everyone has dark colors, I don't wanna be a lightbulb"

"you will take what you'll get" Batman escorts Duke to the exit "Training starts tomorrow"

Bruce slumps in a chair, his hand crawling to a tv remote

"Okay- so- I'm bored right now, here is my cover of rolling in the deep------" A small nine year old kid holds a hairbrush as a mic

Countless videos of this child playing all by themselves, they found the iPad in the kid's room, while trying to search for a clue of what kind of person his child could be

-----"okay so, I'm on patrol right now, it's not allowed to record but loooook!" The camera pans to three small kittens in an alley

Bruce remembers, He made the kid throw the kittens back out on the street, Now he wonders how they felt when he let Damian's pets wander around the manor

__________________________

11 years old (Name)

"-You are no longer needed since Damian is here now"

The kid tightens their grip on their clothes "Is it that easy for you to replace me?" They asked, voice wavering, and their head lowering so Batman wouldn't see the tears that would fall

"(Name) I need a proper vigilante, not bait, so far you got attacked three times today alone" he pinched his nose

"And I managed to fight them all! If you're gonna turn Damian into a vigilante that's fine with me, but you're excluding me all together!?"

"this is not a discussion. If I ever find you in that suit again you won't be allowed to even get out of the Manor" he coldly said and turned away

(Name) has stayed away from the library since that day

____________________________

Aquaman stands before the council of governments and the justice league

"we are not responsible for the ocean's uprising! My empire has been doing everything to calm the ocean down, but it does not listen to my trident anymore!"

The sky and the seas have been raging lately, the shores have been rampaging, the justice league forced to evacuate sea dwellers

Wonderwoman spoke up "Aquaman is right, it is not his fault, it... It is the gods"

The crowd murmured in confusion

"Zeus and Poseidon have been having disputes, A powerful weapon was stolen and both sides are accusing each other, it is best to try and appease even a little of the gods anger, and pray they won't share their wrath with the humans" She finished

An uproar started

"You mean to tell us, lives were lost because of their arguing!?!"

"They're gods! Why can't they just talk amongst themselves?!"

"this is why I pray to Jesus... He is real right?" A reporter asked

"he is, but he's from a different Pantheon" Wonderwoman answered

"It's ALWAYS about fucking weapons, humans fight for nuclear weapons, and the gods fight about them too?"

"Do they need a spokesperson? I'll sort out their fight for them if they want"

A reporter raised his hand "Is there a place safe from their anger?"

"Well... Egypt is under the control of the Egyptian gods, but even, they are in conflict, Set is currently causing chaos, Boston and the land of the Vikings are protected by the Norse... Unfortunately- Loki has been freed from his prison and is also causing chaos" Wonderwoman sighed in stress

"But so far, no other Pantheons have been fighting, go to them, pray at them to protect you, just don't try to do anything that will anger the already angry gods as is, we might be the butt of their anger if we do"

With that the meeting ends, but not their fear though

___________________________

6 months later

"NNGGGHRRROOAAARRR" A roar from the Colchis bulls shakes the camp

Gerald Thanes (An ares kid) charged at the bull but was thrown at the table nearby

"What the fuck is that" you scream, A girl from your cabin grabs your hand and you run, "Can't we help!?"

"We can but we have to be careful, get a weapon or run to the armoury for protection first" with you guys being in a safe space now, she lets go and hugs you "I'll call on some dryads to help with the fire, stay safe okay?"

"you too" you say as you grab a spear on the floor, you throw it at the bulls feet, it nicks some gears off of it, but then It starts to charge at you

You ready to point your spear but then

?????

What?

It was running but it wasn't going anywhere, you walk to the side to see a cyclops holding it by the tail

He looks at you "Hi! :3 I'm Tyson"

You smile awkwardly "I'm (Name)"

Then two figures hug you to the ground

Percy laughs "I missed you so much!", Annabeth smiles at me "(Name)... let's finish this quickly, I want to tell you a lot of things"

Clarisse grunts as she gets thrown in our direction "can the three of you stop being sentimental! It's not the right time"

"Nice to see you too Clarisse" Percy says

______________________________

@delias-stuff @sadslasher13 @ellaprime7 @wpdarlingpan @mountvesuvu @chinxinsomnia @nathaly36 @vanessa-boo @bat1212 @ceramic-raven @sweetconnoisseurgardener @dhanyasri @bella-wolf100 @shortnsweetsposts @roseapov @d3sperate-enuf

849 notes · View notes

sorceresssundries · 11 months ago

Text

'Time can prove to be a trickster on one's recollections - what would be multiple lifetimes for others now separate me from my captivity... Perhaps I have lost perspective on what happened to me.

I... have not had true confidantes for some time. The Shadow Curse robbed me of almost all my peers, and replaced them with the weight of responsibility. Perhaps that caused me to gild undeserving memories of my youth. '

Discussion of mental health below the cut.

Halsin breaks my fucking heart, man.

He spent so long shouldering the weight of the curse that he neglected dealing with his own shadows.

Right before this, he mentioned being chained to a bed for three years as a prisoner, yet he has convinced himself it may not have been as bad as it seemed, thinking perhaps he was actually a 'guest.'

As someone with CPTSD, I'm convinced Halsin has some form of it as well. Trauma and (C)PTSD affect the areas of the brain where memories are formed and kept. When traumatic memories are recalled, the perception of them can be altered leading to self-blame or minimisation of the trauma's severity.

Halsin's struggles are often downplayed, especially by him. - He doesn't have a tadpole, he isn't trying to ascend, he isn't being tempted by a dark path, and he doesn't require you to convince him to be good. He plays the part of the healer well, despite still needing healing himself.

Time can be a fixer, but it is also a trickster—and the more of it that passes, the trickier memories associated with trauma become to unpick. Centuries have passed for him.

I'm happy with the outcome of the game for Halsin, that he gets to relax, settle, and find his place alongside nature in the land he helped to free—but I almost wish there was more to explore with him. He deserves the world.

Sorry, i'm not sure what the point of this was I just have a lot of feelings about Halsin.

#baldurs gate 3 #bg3 #halsin bg3 #halsin #halsin sliverbough

389 notes · View notes

pinkchaosnight · 8 months ago

Note

so here is my adar request. basically in which the fem!reader is taken in ep 5 instead of galadriel. once in adar's tent (during ep 6) they talk and get into a heated discussion about sauron and eregion. their banter gets so intense that glûg walks inside to see if everything is okay and then they both snap at them in union and then glûg whispers something like "oh no, dad and mom are fighting" idk something humorous lol. (excuse my grammar mistakes - English is not my native language). i need tension like air.

omg , tysm for this ask. its absolutely flawless. i enjoyed this ep so much! i have initially thought of doing a small imagine but somehow it turned it into this long, also i diverged from the ask slightly too🥹. i have changed some dialouges and scenarios. i hope you enjoy them!

pull of threads - (adar × fem!reader)

summary: dinner with adar is never straightforward is it? when especially you are captured and essentially sort of a prisoner?

(reimagined rings of power ep 6 where reader gets captured instead of Galadriel)

pairing : adar x female!reader

notes : english is not my first language, so i apologize in advance for the errors you might encounter. i have not properly edited, so please let me know if you find any error.

the uruk leader seated across you is poking his food with a vigour, as he regards you with suspicion. humiliation might be the nicest thing you can describe about what you are feeling right now, (along with some other feelings too but you blatantly ignore them) being captured as a prisoner. you were Lady Galadriel's friend and the her aide, until a few months ago when you retired from your post. everything that was going on was so overwhelming that you had to step away from your duties and that's exactly what you did. you travelled around, mostly staying in woods and forests and praying orcs don't chase you. you almost succeeded too until you recieved a letter from Lady Galadriel stating she needed your help, now that they are going to warn Celebrimbor about Halbrand being Sauron. you were reading her letter without a care for your surrounding that unfortunately resulted in you being captured and brought to the uruk camp. and thats why you were currently in this situation, being seated in front the uruk leader. Adar, he is called, as you recall from the days Lady Galadriel captured him many months ago.

the tent which was made up of dirty rags, was surprisingly warm, with a fireplace and a huge table laden with food. combinations of food that seems almost a disgrace to the plates it hold ; with berries, onions and meat. whoever did the dinner should be tossed into the cliff. the said uruk leader was now biting into a piece of meat from god knows what, as he watches you. if he is hoping to catch something from your expression he has another thing coming for him, as you keep your face as emotionless as you can, although Eru knows for how long.

" from my brief time in your Commander's capture, I guessed she was intent on finding Sauron. almost consumed by the thought of it, one might say." his words sliced the depth of silence that hanged between you and him.

" former Commander. and it is none of your concern what her intentions are. who are you to know her mind? you who could not even resist the allure of Sauron's words?" you reply in a monotonous way, hoping he doesn't find anything there.

Adar stops as he hears those words, as he slowly puts down the piece of food he is chewing. he remembers the first time he saw you; being chained up after being captured by Galadriel. all around him was dark but you came with a jar of water and a loaf of bread for him, when everybody was kind of neglecting him, except for when they needed information and torturing. that simple act of kindess and the conversions that ranged from 'hello' to a simple 'have a good day' that followed from your side warmed what little was left of his beating heart. he remember you being firercely loyal to Galadriel yet having a mind of your own to speak if necessary. he remembers how you disagreed when your commander spoke of his children as slaves. and above all, he remembers how you exuded a sense of warmth in that cold space.

now he looks at you in surprise as he leans forward "former?"

you squirm uncomfortably in your seat. after all, how could you let him know that one of the reasons why you left the army and being her secondin command, was his words? the converstion between him, Lady Galadriel and you, when he was captured really messed up your perceptive. other elves could not see but you saw what he was trying to say; that the uruks were just as worthy of lives and living as other creations of Eru, as each had a heart. you remember disagreeing with Lady Galadriel when she mentioned them as slaves, and Adar's eyes flashing in you direction, with ambiguous emotions.

shaking out of your reverie you say "yes, i am no longer her second in command, so its really useless to have me captured in here. i can offer you nothing. "

adar chuckles at your statement, as he rises from his seat and strides towards you. he stops infront of your chair, as he looks at you with an intense stare. and you couldn't help but stare back at him. those eyes, surrounded by scars and years of mutilation, made your heart ache with pain. you wonder what he was thinking, what he was plotting behind those somber eyes of his. you always wondered what happened to him after you ran away from the campsite that day. you retired and wandered in woods after that incident, with nothing to keep you company but fragments of him in your memory. love and hatred have a fine line separating them; you often heard from your friends and in those lonely nights on the woods you wandered if that is true. if you can cross that line with bravery. something that you are afraid to reveal to anyone. he was the one in your mind and on the other side of that fine line, as swirls of feeling wound up in your heart. a dangerous feeling to have for man who is going to kill you......one day.

"who says you can offer me nothing?" he says as he strides close to your face and tucks a strand of hair back. funny he did that because you had the same thought too, of brushing the loose hair of his and tucking it back. "my children found this in your bag" he says as he pulls out the scroll from a table behind you. "we know the elven army is approaching to find Sauron, in Eregion. And that has all the confirmation i want. and i know Halbrand is Sauron"

desperation washes over you as you see the scroll of paper Lady Galadriel wrote and gave you to read before she parted ways. you never got a chance to read the rest of paper as she and you went seprate ways, before you got caught by his minions.

" whatever your plan is, it is not going to work " you say with venom, as you stand up in anger (or so you thought stubbornly), coming face to face with him.

"do you know what Sauron promised me? " Adar asks you as he studies your expression flits from anger to confusion "children, he promised me children. and he made that promise into weapons of wars, my children mere tools for his gratifications, something which can be eradicated at his whims" he says, his voice a tad quite and flushed with sadness. it took all my willpower to keep my hands from reaching his and comforting him.

" you are going to kill him Eregion, aren't you?" i ask as realisation hits me a few seconds later. he moves back a few paces, widening the tantalizing distance betweeen us and doesn't reply as he keeps his back to me.

" you cannot, i think it is his plan too. i just have feeling in my heart this is exactly what he wants. for you to lead your army to him. we must ask Lady Galadriel's advice" i say as he turns and shoots me a look of disbelief.

"why should i listen to the words of someone whose race is hellbent on eradicating us from the face of this plane?" he shouts as he paces towards you, shaking with anger. "i did not capture you to hear your advice. Eregion will fall and Sauron with it" he says as closes the distance between us, trapping me between the chair and him.

"i want Sauron to fall too, i want to kill him and make sure he is permanently wiped off from this earth. but not in this way." i shriek in his face, which was merely inches apart from mine.

"i do not know why you care if i lead my army or not " he hisses as he moves back from me again, his eyes capturing my own ones in anger and perhaps sadness.

there is a tipping point for everyone's anger and you could feel his words pushing you to yours. you could no longer hold the feelings erupting inside you as you shouts." i care because this will all be ending in blooshed. i care because all my loved ones are going there and i don't want them to die. i care for the lives that will be sacrificed if you chose to follow this foolish plan of yours. and i care that something will happen to you and you will not make it out alive"

reality of the words registers in your brain as soon as the words escape your mouth. you have opened your heart and mouth and let all the dam of emotions you kept inside to turn into a river. and now you are going to suffer the consequences, preferably being submerged in those same waters, which you so kept in binds inside your now erratically beating organ.

Adar was stunned, staring at you in utter silence. his heart tingled, with the same warmth he felt months ago in your presence. his ears has always been the receiver of abuse and bad news, never the object to receive the sentiment with which you uttered the words quite a few seconds ago; words with care...and love. he slowly steps forward you, his hands unclenching from the remnant of his anger and reaching towards your face "you ....care about me.....?" his voice is a mere whisper, tinged with something you couldn't place. this goddess, this beacon of kindness care about him?

you wanted to melt into those eyes of his, that is oh so mysterious and perhaps you would have, if the tents did not flap open suddenly.

" lord father, glûg here. i heard shouts coming from outside. i was worried and just came inside to check if you are okay and if nan--" glûg stops as he sees you standing closely to his lord father. you notice his surprise being replaced with a slight smirk in your direction.

"get out" adar and you both says in unison, as you turn towards the orc in annoyance.

"certainly lord father" glûg says as turns away to exit "just lover's quarrel, lord father and naneth better make up". he exits as quickly as he can, muttering to himself.

you turn your head towards him, only to catch his eyes searching your face "yes i do care about you...." your voice is shaking but not in anger and with some other emotions you tried so hard to bury.

a flicker of emotions passes over his eyes as he glazes his vision over you "you think you are the only one who cares? why did you even think i captured you instead of your Commander, when i could have easily caught her and gotten the information too? why did you think you never encountered any orcs while you were sauntering through the woods? never have you escaped from my mind for a moment from the day we met. i tried so hard to keep every emotions i am feeling, hidden from you. but tonight i can't and i won't. i know i am a monster, an abomination for someone so kind as you. but tonight i am baring the one thing that has not been tainted by the evil , to your hands."

he places your hand on his chest, as you your eyes brim with tears. you feel his heart beating erratically, mirroring yours. "from the day you pulled me from that dark abyss, i decided that this heart will only belong to one person, to the one person this heart wholeheartedly loves."

time stops as you hears his words, it is like honey being poured into your ears. "so does mine too" you reciprocate, as you places his hands on your chest. "you are neither a monster nor an abomination. you are beautiful as Eru's any other creation. i even left the army because of you. because you keep on invading my everyday thoughts. and i kept thinking of how you are my enemy and i how i should hate you. but my heart never responded to any negative emotions, for all it had was love for you."

fianlly you can let this emotion run free, this plaguing need for him that you tried so hard to conceal. you would have stood there for eternity, for all of your immortal life, with his warm hands pressing yours into his chest. no words are exchanged betweeen you two in these seconds; no words are needed as the beating of your heart and the measure of your breath are enough to convey the feelings pouring off from both of you. he slowly closes the already miniscule distance betweeen you, as you step forward at the same time too, the tantalizing distance between your lips almost unbearable. you can feel his breath near your mouth, as your lips part with breathlessness and need. you just need to lean forward and place your mouth. you slowly reach forward, just enough to press the lips against his----

" lord father, i got a sudden report that---what is happening here?" glûg's voice rang across the tent as you and adar both turned to his direction.

" GET OUT GLÛG" you both cries in unison as poor glûg scurries off, being banished from the tent second time. but not before he catches a warm smile passing over his lord father. glûg catches from his peripheral vision, of his lord father pressing a chaste kiss in your cheek before placing his forehead against yours and smiling a genuine smile, which he has never seen.

'things will be good from now on' glûg thinks as he passes over to the next tent, thinking of the elf that thawed the ice of his lord father's heart. the one his lord father told him about months; the one lord father instructed him to call naneth in the future. and the one who made his lord father whole again after eons.

extra notes - all the asks i got, i will update them by this week itself, tysm for requesting! please leave a like and reblog and if you enjoyed reading them. hope everyone have an amazing day :)

#adar #adar x you #adar x reader #adar rings of power #the rings of power #adar x oc

301 notes · View notes

homeboundmonsters · 3 months ago

Text

Javert: Prison and Desire.

Struggling to formulate this but here it is anyway, a mini essay. This is a very abridged version of some ideas that have been percolating in my mind.

I think something not often discussed is the effect being born and raised in a prison would have on Javert’s understanding of affection and love. I think a lot of Javert’s confusion over his desire for Jean Valjean come from his early experiences and upbringing.

Javert’s desire for Jean Valjean is often expressed through violent imagery: tiger’s claws and teeth -leaping to bite; a spider catching a fly in its web; a cat toying with a mouse in its claws. Javert struggles to process desire as something that can be tender or intimate. He struggles with gentleness and affection. This can even be seen in how when he finally realises and recognises his own desire for Jean Valjean it is considered a form of destruction or forced change: claws being made to unclench, ice being melted; or as a form of submission: a dog submitting to a master. For Javert desire can only be expressed by violent taking or through complete submission of oneself to another. The roots of this can be found in his childhood.

We see the effect of prison on Jean Valjean: it takes a normal, loving family man and turns him into a man capable of murder, a man who interacts with society and processes his emotions through bouts of anger and violence. Javert has experienced what changed a grown man into a potential murderer in his most formative years. We know from his pre-suicide letter that Javert spent sometime in a woman’s prison witnessing the abuse of female prisoners who were given more space between bars most likely in order to facilitate sexual favours that would be coerced from them by guards. It is highly likely that during his developmental years he witnessed acts of sexual violence alongside acts of generalised violence. His small skull is associated, during the period Hugo was writing, with childhood neglect as it was caused by a baby being left too long lying on their back. This suggests that he lacked motherly attention or affection. Not to say that his mother did not love him, but it is highly likely that due to her circumstance she would not have been able to give him the input required. This was common for many children of the poor, but combined with growing up in a hostile environment surrounded by violence, sexual violence, and the removal of freedoms as a punishment for non-compliance we can begin to understand how Javert might grow up to associate violence with desire or love.

Javert’s natural submission to authority, his ability to disappear, his acute observational skills, his unwillingness to criticise those in power, the correlation he makes between destruction of identity (giving up his career and leaving into obscurity) and punishment can all be tracked to his experiences in childhood. Javert has spent his formative years living in fear, learning to make himself small and becoming hyper aware of what is around him at all times to avoid abuse. This has left him a damaged and vulnerable individual with no solid sense of internal security. He has never had love or stability, he has been deprived of affection, and has lived in an environment of constant physical and psychological abuse. We know from modern studies that these things quite literally change the brain anatomy of children growing up in these conditions. For a newborn baby the earliest form of love is being fed by their mother, and so food comes to be one of the earliest forms of comfort. Javert was no doubt seeing sex traded for food and for safety from physical violence, hence it would formulate in his mind not to equate to love or emotional intimacy but as a form of currency. Affection too, feigning love or preference, a tool for survival. How, in these conditions, can we expect him to develop into a psychosexually healthy individual? Hugo states that Javert is a virgin and, although we know Hugo did this because of his weird hang-up about virgin= good person, we can suppose that Javert’s virginity stems from a deep-seated trauma associated with his development within a sexually violent environment.

Then, as young adult, Javert moved to working in male prisons. In France, during the 1800’s, prisons had some of the highest rates of recorded homosexuality in the country and it is likely that all throughout his career as a prison guard Javert was witnessing acts of sexual violence, or acts of consensual but unlikely to be safe sodomy. As he went through puberty he would have been only interacting with male/male acts of sexual violence. Whatever he might have felt would have been confused with fear and awareness of the inherent danger that existed within male/male sexual relationships in prison. Male/male sexual desire, although legal in France by the time of Les Mis, was still something considered morally reprehensible and as belonging in the underbelly of French social life. When Javert desires Jean Valjean, he desires him through the framework of violence because he has spent a lifetime witnessing sex as an act of violence or as a framework through which power and control can be expressed. He wants to have power over Jean Valjean- that is to say arrest him- and at the same time experiences this strange conflicting but also correlating desire to possess and ‘devour’ ‘his convict.’

When he finally recognises his desire for what it is, and detaches it from his desire to arrest Jean Valjean, his desire transmutes itself into a desire to submit. This is because, for Javert, submission has been his norm: one must submit to authority in order to survive it. When he sought to destroy Jean Valjean, he was secure in his understanding of male/male desire, when he realises what he desires is something more tender- a dog licking the intruders hand- he finds himself adrift unable to process his feelings. How can male/male desire be tender? How can it be loving? How can it mean devotion and choosing to submit in the understanding that you will be safe and unharmed? This is outside of Javert’s psychological vocabulary. This is also why Javert cannot understand Valjean’s freeing of him at the barricade: authority means violence. Valjean has authority and chooses mercy. Javert has no previous experience with or understanding of love and so has no groundwork on which he can build. Valjean at least had familial love in his sister/mother figure, his father, and the love of his nieces and nephews, but how does one begin to approach loving another human being when they have lacked even that? Love is not a natural occurrence it is a learnt behaviour and one Javert has never been taught.

I think this is part of what I find so interesting about Javert, so often he is criticised for not living up to modern moral expectations and yet so little consideration is given to the traumatic circumstances that existed throughout his childhood and which formulated his rigid perspective of the world. How can one who has never experienced mercy be expected to know how to give it? How can one who has never been loved be able to offer it? Javert has lacked the basic structure of society and has learned to survive under tyrannical rule, that is not something so easily shucked off in adulthood. Despite leaving prison, prison never left Javert and it shapes every decision, every flaw and every fault he struggles with throughout his life.

#les mis #valvert #les miserables #javert #literary analysis

110 notes · View notes

achaotichuman · 2 months ago

Text

Cool discussions guys, have we considered the possibility of after years of work and planning, Nyx causes a successful rebellion against the Inner Circle, and ultimately shakes Prythian's entire governemental system, causing an upheaval of the status quoe? Which whilst in retrospect is a net good for the entirety of Prythian's people, after the initial rise and battle, Nyx is left with Rhysand locked in the Prison since its the only place that can hold him, Cassian is dead and Nesta has left without a trace, Morrigan and Elain too, and Azriel lives with Eris in the Autumn Court. So, now all that remains of the only family he ever knew is his grieving mother who hates him with all her heart, but can't stop loving him.

He has a newborn sister whom Feyre had been so excited for since she knew all risks of a winged birth were now removed, and she finally had the chance to have the birth experience she wanted. Now that had been ripped from her, because she had her daughter after the Inner Circle's downfall. Now, with her spiraling depression and grief of a man who isn't dead but might as well be, she swings violently between coddling her daughter and not allowing anyone, especially not Nyx, to touch her. To entirely ignoring and neglecting her, leaving Nyx to struggle as he attempts to raise his own sister, whilst trying to pick up the pieces of a government now in pieces on his own.

#a witch a warrior and a reckoning #nyx archeron #feyre archeron #rhysand #critical rhysand #but not the focus #acotar au #acotar headcanons #my fic #acotar fanfiction #acotar #a court of thorns and roses

56 notes · View notes

fanfictilltheend · 1 year ago

Text

❤️‍🔥Violent Heart Part 1: ♪All I've ever learned from love was how to shoot at someone who outdrew you ♫ (or the VERY DARK Stepdad!Mechanic!Covict!Joel x Afab!you one)❤️‍🔥

A/n: It's here!!!!!! 18+ Only. This took me 7 freaking months so you mofos better like, reblog, and comment. This is both my most and least personal fic I've ever written and it is dark and relies heavily on plot (no smut until part 2 but i swear it's worth the backstory!!!!) READ ALL OF THE TAGS DO NOT COME FOR ME UNLESS YOU DID THIS FR FR. This ones for my dark joel fangirlies(guys and NBies) and the daddy issues fam ily ❤️‍🔥 (also not me naming my fic in part after hallelujah by leonard cohen but there is a reason!!!!!!!!!!)

Summary: The story starts with Part 1 where afab!Y/N is a child and Joel is her new stepdad and this story explores their relationship. Themes of abusive family, domestic violence, child abuse, daddy issues, physical violence, murder, stepcest (kinda b/c he is divorced from her mom technically but she grew up with him as her stepdad), infidelity, age gap, and more are explored throughout the fic. PLEASE READ SPECIFIC TAGS (part 2 tags will be added with the release of part 2). Part 2 picks up with Y/N at age 20 and how her relationship with Joel has changed and gets steamier. NOTHING SEXUAL OCCURS BETWEEN Y/N and JOEL until Y/N is 20!!!!!!! Also check out this playlist of music that's in the fic!!!!

Tags (PLEASE READ): Afab!you, stepdad!joel, mechanic!joel, convict!joel, no apocalypse au, Mentions of sex (little detail), mentions of male masturbation, infidelity, domestic abuse/violence, sibling abuse/violence (no one ever talks about sibling abuse but it’s very real), physical child abuse, neglect, allusions to past domestic violence, cursing, brief mention of pedophilia and kidnapping (David), allusions to committing future pedophilia (David), threats, cancer mention, Sarah death discussion, Tommy death mention, murder, prison, mentions of god and religion, fights, general violence, alcohol consumption, using music lyrics to move the plot, daddy issues, use of y/n

Word Count: ~15k

PART 2 (coming soon)

Ao3 Link

Violent Heart Masterlist

Full Masterlist of all my work

Joel Miller is not a good man, that he knows like the backs of his calloused hands.

He knows loss too, feels it burrowed in the hollow cavity of his chest. Sees it in the face of every little girl he meets.

The memories sting.

He knows pain, deep in the depths of his character, down to the fundamentals of what makes him something that resembles a human being. The belts, the bigger hands, the harsh words, and then the grief. The recent Bring back my babygirl! The ancient ¡Basta, Papí, por favor, no Tommy, no Mamá! ¡Por favor no esta noche! The indignity of begging, always reduced to begging to a cruel man, an indifferent doctor, a cruel universe.

He knows hard work, how to work with his hands. He knows the grit and grease of labor. Sees the cogs turning in the engines he fixes, relates to them. Feels like he knows them intimately because he is one too, chugging along day after endless day. But no one dares fix Joel Miller.

Until…

Her name is Erica and she’d like her front bumper replaced, please. She has long eyelashes and a soothing voice. And she has money too, at least more than he, who is almost broke from the cost of Sarah’s medical bills. She comes with baggage, Joel can tell from looking into her eyes, but then again so does he. And he hasn’t been laid in god knows how long.

She takes him on a date and he lets her. She reveals she has two kids, but Joel doesn’t care. They fuck at her place while the kids are at school and she wants it soft, like her hands, and that’s how Joel gives it to her.

A week later, Joel has moved in, which is good because his rent was due and he couldn’t pay it. He still hasn’t met the children.

***

It’s Joel’s day off and he’s sitting on the couch in his new home. His back hurts, but that’s nothing new. He’s got an excellent view of their nice, big backyard with a wooden fence. The kind of home he would have liked to have given Sarah. He sighs. Technically, nothing is wrong.

Then he sees it. It takes him a second to realize what is going on. It’s a whirlwind. He sees the back gate open and two tumbling forms fall over the threshold onto the manicured grass. One form is bigger, a boy of about twelve or thirteen beating the shit out of a much smaller form, fists flying. The other form is a little girl, no more than eight, defending herself like her life depends on it. Perhaps it does with the way he’s going at her.

This must be the son, Aiden, and the daughter, Y/N.

He’s a good boy, really, but he has anger issues sometimes. He’s been through a lot. That’s what Erica said, but Joel does not see a good boy. He sees a bully. A disproportionately violent one at that. Nothing that tiny girl could have possibly done could warrant the brutality he sees before him.

Anger is something else Joel knows intimately, and that is what he greets when he runs outside to end the fray.

“Stop that!” he roars, pulling Aiden off of Y/N.

“Who the fuck are you!?” the boy screams, fury and hatred radiating off of his entire being.

He continues thrashing and punching at nothing as Joel restrains him.

“I’m gonna kill her!” he screams, his eyes bulging.

“What the hell happened?” Joel growls, still holding onto the livid boy–verging on young man.

“She ripped up my paper!” he bellows. “For no fucking reason! I worked hard on it!”

“It was a lie,” she says with so much conviction Joel almost flinches.

He looks down at the little girl, her nose bleeding, her right eye turning purple. She has tears streaked down her face, but she is not crying. Her shirt is ripped. The first thing he thinks of when he sees her is Sarah. Of course it’s Sarah, how could he not think of her? But this little girl is different, has a different look in her eye. This look is much harder and feels like she’s lived a thousand lifetimes. He thanks god Sarah never looked that way, but somehow he wants to hear about everything this little girl has experienced. Something twangs in Joel’s chest that he has not felt in what feels like an eternity.

“It was not a lie, you stupid bitch whore!” Aiden shouts angrily, still fighting back against Joel’s unrelenting grip. “Take that back!”

“No, you take it back! Dad is not a hero. You could’ve picked anyone to write about and you choose him? After everything he’s done?” she screams herself.

The sound of her voice is powerful but desperate. Joel feels himself needing to know more and bury himself deep inside her experiences.

“SHUT UP!” Aiden yells, finally ceasing his movements.

A tear falls from his cheek.

“If I let you go, will you stop whooping your sister?” Joel snaps firmly.

“Get away from me, you stupid cuck!” Aiden curses, turning his energy to Joel. “Who the hell are you to me? Fuck you! I’m out of here!”

He wriggles out of Joel’s grasp and Joel lets him go and Aiden storms back out the rear gate, slamming it behind him.

“You alright?” he asks Y/N.

Joel crawls over on his knees, still upright, closer to her.

“Had worse,” she shrugs, running a hand through her messed-up hair.

She wipes the tears and blood from her cheeks.

Joel shudders to imagine what she means.

“He always like that?”

“Yeah,” she nods. “So you Mom’s new boyfriend?”

“Something like that,” he nods back. ”’M Joel. Joel Miller.”

“I’m Y/N,” she says a bit mournfully. “Here,” she continues suddenly, reaching out a small hand to his cheek. She wipes blood (hers) gently off his stubbly face. “Didn’t mean to get ya dirty.”

Joel is nothing short of touched. He wasn’t even aware he could still have such a feeling. His cheeks go rosy pink. His heart pulses. He stares at her delicate hands and notices a long, thin scar on her left middle finger.

“‘S no trouble, sweetheart,” he hears himself reassuring her. “Let’s get you cleaned up. Could even mend your shirt if ya want. Know how to sew and all.”

He reaches out a large hand, but she flinches at the sudden movement. A dull ache wells up in Joel’s chest.

“Not gonna hurt you, honey. Swear it.”

He wants with every fiber of his being for her to believe him, for it to be true.

She takes his hand.

***

That evening Erica is still not home, working late Joel supposes. It is nine o’clock when Aiden slinks back into the house.

Joel stops him from making his way up the stairs. He is more than familiar with the art of creeping.

“Think you oughta apologize to your sister,” he says as gently as possible. Maybe he can impart some manners onto this unruly child now that he’s calmed down some. “You beat her real bad. You’re much bigger than her.”

“I’d do it again,” Aiden hisses, his eyes cold. “It makes me feel better.”

And then, to Joel, the answer is simple. What do you do with a bully who won’t repent? Fight him back. Show him who’s boss, who’s bigger.

He grabs Aiden by the arm in a flash of anger and drags him up the stairs. The boy screams and flails, but that doesn’t deter Joel. He brings him to the room he assumes is his, the walls covered in sports posters and memorabilia.

“Take off your shirt,” he growls, a familiar fury pounding inside his chest.

When Aiden protests, Joel does it for him, ripping the kid’s shirt nearly in half. Rage floods through Joel’s veins and he can’t exactly place why, but the feeling is very real and bouldering through him at an alarming speed. He knows this feeling, feels strangely at home there.

He undoes his belt and brings the leather end down on Aiden’s back, not the buckle like his father used to do. Joel does have some decency buried deep in his chest. And then he loses himself to the unyielding anger.

“You get ten,” he snarls. “Don’t you lay a hand on your sister again. Is that understood? Now you answer to me.”

No response except for a scream.

“I said , do you understand?” Joel roars, bringing down the belt.

Rage consumes him like a drug. He barely registers what he’s doing. The belt goes down again and again. And somehow, through the screaming and the pain, and the intoxicating feeling of being completely in control for once, Joel’s line of vision wanders to the bedroom door. In all the excitement, it was left ajar and out in the hallway, sitting on her knees is Y/N. Joel immediately expects fear, despair, revulsion. When Tommy would watch him take a beating his face would betray the most acute sense of hopelessness and terror and the waterworks would begin. But Y/N just stares at him unflinchingly, at what he’s doing. She doesn’t cry, she simply sees. Too much for a child, and yet, she watches. She does not intervene, doesn’t even try to. And for the tiniest moment, her and Joel’s eyes connect, and he feels a sense of calm, of comprehension, of recognition in that uncannily knowing gaze. Her irises sparkle and Joel feels…something that he cannot entirely articulate. Seen? Accepted? Understood? Joel knows logically what he is doing is an ugly, vile thing — he has never claimed to be a good man. Practical maybe, but never good. And yet, Y/N sees it — sees him — and she doesn’t look away. She cocks her head slightly, and images of Tommy grimacing in revulsion and fear as Joel mercilessly beat up their childhood neighborhood bullies to the point of unconsciousness pop into his mind, of the haunting look in his brother’s eyes. Even Sarah could not stomach his violent heart when she witnessed him beat up some pervert with a camera that had looked at her funny at the mall. Even though it was for her — to keep her safe. She had stared at him in disgust and pity. She had not seen him then at all.

But now, looking at Y/N, for the briefest moment, Joel can swear he sees something resembling a smile flicker over her serious face. And though it goes as quickly as it comes, he feels the familiar sensation gnawing at the bottom of his stomach: primal and untameable, soft and vulnerable, but fierce and loud at the same time. He feels an inexorable, inescapable sense of care and devotion to this child. But most of all, because she sees him, truly sees him, and does not turn away in disgust, Joel Miller feels the gut-wrenching, unquenchable sensation of love deep in his chest. For the first time since Sarah died on that hospital bed, weak and unwell from the chemo he could not afford, he feels alive .

***

Things fall into a tentative routine. Every morning, Joel wakes up in bed beside Erica. They fuck the night before more often than not, but always in that same slow way that doesn’t do much for Joel. It’s enough to get off, sure, she isn’t an unattractive woman, but he’s mostly there for the meal ticket and roof over his head. He goes to work at the auto-body repair shop, Erica goes to her job at her law firm. The kids ride the bus to school. He gets home in the evenings before Erica and spends time coexisting with the children. Usually, he kicks back on the sofa, rubbing his sore back, and watches television, minding his own business. Aiden mostly avoids him, doing god knows what in his room. He bullies his sister cruelly and Joel punishes him when he sees fit. Erica knows what he does to Aiden and either doesn’t care or approves. He never lays a hand on Y/N though. She warms up to him slowly, cautiously. Most evenings she sits on the far end of the couch and Joel on the other, but as she gets used to him and sees that he’s not a threat, at least to her, she scoots closer.

The children’s father is no longer in their lives from what Joel can tell, which is perfectly fine with him. When Joel’s heart does not feel full of lead, he plays the guitar. Y/N sits and watches him. She is a quiet child, but unrelentingly brave. When Joel lets the TV blare, he rarely cares to pay much attention these days, she stays and watches with him, no matter what is on and never complains or asks to change the channel. Blockbuster zombie apocalypse movie? She watches. News special on America’s most dangerous serial killers? She watches. Documentary on venomous snakes? She watches. Should Joel be letting her watch this crap? Who the fuck knows? He isn’t her father. And plus, he won’t admit this to anyone, hardly even himself, but he likes having some company. It makes everything feel…less. And he likes that she doesn’t try to make him speak. Sometimes there are no words and he thinks Y/N understands this. Unlike Erica who yaps every second of the day. But Joel stays polite and plays along. He has to.

But he will not lie, Aiden gets on his very last nerve. There is something that Joel cannot quite place that makes him feel like he has known this boy his whole life even though they are as familiar as perfect strangers. All siblings fight and rough-house. That is normal. Hell, he and Tommy used to fight rough and tumble all the time. But the way Aiden bullies Y/N is something else entirely. And most times, it is unprovoked. And he is so much bigger than she is, growing bigger by the day.

Joel’s beatings have not stopped Aiden’s anger and sadistic attitudes, but they do make sure that he takes some kind of physical consequence for his crimes. It makes Joel feel better and he thinks it makes Y/N feel better too. And some days he gets so fucking mad at Aiden that he thinks not even god could stop his wrath even if the boy turned into Mother Theresa herself! Okay, maybe that’s extreme, but another part of Joel thinks maybe it’s not. The truth is, though he is loathe to admit it, some days, he is not in control of his anger. Some days he punches so hard, his knuckles bleed and he has to stop for a second to come back to himself. Others he goes so roughly on Aiden that he causes the kid to become bloody and he feels ashamed of what he’s done. But there are other days, very dark days, where he wishes he could do it over and over again. He convinces himself he’s doing it for Y/N and not some other sinister ulterior motive he does not care to dwell on…

One night, a few months into Joel’s new living arrangements, he walks through the upstairs hallway to his and Erica’s bedroom, passing the closed door to the bathroom that the kids share. He has done this what feels like a thousand times before and doesn’t think anything of it until he stops and realizes he hears Y/N singing.

♪“ Someday, my pain / Someday, my pain will mark / You…”♫ she sings softly.

He can barely hear it over the crash of the water from her shower, but her voice is beautiful. It pulls at Joel’s shrunken heart, deep inside his long-dead chest. Her voice has an eerie quality to it too, almost haunting. He’s not sure of what song it is, but he finds himself wanting to know. Eventually, she stops, and Joel goes to bed, but her voice echoes in his mind for hours as he lies awake in the dark.

The next day, Joel is sitting on the couch when the kids get home from school. Y/N joins him on the other side of the sofa as usual. They watch reruns of some unfunny family sitcom.

“Heard you singing last night,” he finally grunts unceremoniously.

Y/N goes very still.

“Sorry,” she mumbles, avoiding his gaze. “I’ll be quieter next time.”

Joel looks over at her. He realizes she looks terrified.

“Ain’t no problem with it,” he tries to explain, confused. “Thought you sounded nice is all.”

“You tryna trick me?” she stammers, tears collecting in her shimmering eyes.

“What? Trick you? What you crying for, honey? You didn’t do anything wrong.”

Joel is genuinely flabbergasted.

Tears trickle down her cheeks. What has he done this time? he wonders. But he is concerned more than anything. Hell, he hasn’t seen her cry like this since the day they met. Not even last week when Aiden slammed her head into the metal oven in the kitchen (luckily it was off or Joel would have really killed him that time).

She sniffles, looking conflicted, then collects herself as best she can manage.

“M-my dad didn’t like when I would sing. ‘Specially if he was in a depo…I forget the word…deponition? Deposition? When he was on the phone for work, I mean. If I was being too loud. Or too shrill. He didn’t like that one bit. He’d get mad…” she trails off.

“The way Aiden gets mad?” Joel asks very slowly, not truly wanting to know the answer.

“Yeah,” she nods after a while. “Except he’s a lot bigger. And stronger. He…he broke my arm once. But it was on accident I think. He got me ice cream after.”

Anger, red and hot, pulses through Joel’s veins. What hadn’t this child endured at the hands of angry men?

“What did your mother do?” he bites out, almost unnaturally calm from trying to control himself.

“Well, most of the time he’d kinda like hit her around, I guess? But the time he broke my arm was the time she made him leave for good and they got a divorce and all. Aiden says it’s my fault he won’t come around anymore. He was so mad. He loves Dad so much. I don’t understand it though because even though Dad likes him a lot more than me, Dad would still be so mean to him sometimes. Mom says I don’t even know all of it...Promise I won’t bother you with singing though, okay?”

“Sweetheart,” Joel says as softly as his blinding rage will permit. Somehow, when he’s with Y/N, he finds he can control himself better. “I’ll never get mad at you for singing. Or being too loud. Or anything. Never gonna put my hands on you. I’m sorry if what I do to Aiden scares you or made you think that I would ever do such a thing to you.”

“It doesn’t scare me,” she shakes her head. “When you get rough with Aiden, you do it because he did really bad, to protect me. It’s like with you there’s rules that make sense. Aiden chooses to be mean and violent so you choose it back to him. With my dad, it was different. It was like I could breathe wrong and I’d get in trouble. Get in trouble for things I couldn’t control or help. Sometimes I did bad, I know I did, but I also know there were other times where I wasn’t hurting anyone and he’d still hurt me so badly. My dad never got mad at Aiden for hurting me though. He thought it was funny, I think. Sometimes he’d kinda like sick him on me. Kinda how you could a dog.”

Joel doesn’t know how to respond, doesn’t know the right words. He figures he can only show her with his actions who he is and she will just have to learn to trust him. If her father ever enters the house though, he will wring his neck. That’s for certain. Thank God he doesn’t come around for his sake, Joel’s, and the family’s.

“I was just thinking,” Joel finally says. “If ya want, I could learn how to play that song you were singing on my guitar and maybe you could sing it for me sometime?”

“M-maybe we could sing it together?” Y/N asks tentatively, her eyes wide. “Singing in front of other people is kinda scary.”

“I haven’t sung in a while,” Joel sighs. “Might be rusty.”

“That’s okay,” she grins hopefully.

Joel wants to take a photo of that rare sight and keep it close for as long as he lives, torn in his pocket or snug in his wallet, he doesn’t care.

“Joel?” she asks a little cautiously, breaking him from his thoughts. “Can I ask you something?”

“‘Course, kiddo,” he says as gently as he knows how.

“Who’s Sarah?”

His heart stops. His blood runs cold.

“What? How did you–”

“You were talking. In your sleep yesterday,” she says, shrinking away a little and Joel feels sorry for scaring her again. “When we were watching Dexter . Well, you fell asleep right before. You were snoring and all, but you were also talking and mumbling that name. You sounded sad and scared.”

Joel should definitely not have allowed her to watch that! But that is hardly the point right now.

His heart squeezes so tight it burns. What was there to say about Sarah – the entire reason his life had had any purpose? His perfect babygirl? The light of his life?

He could lie. So easily too and Y/N would never know. He could say nothing at all. Hasn’t even told Erica about her yet. Hardly ever speaks to anyone about her these days.

And yet…

“She was my daughter,” he hears himself say softly. “She…got sick. Died of leukemia a while back. She was twelve.”

He reaches into his pocket and pulls out the wallet he was just thinking about. Inside is a tiny school photo of Sarah – the last one she ever took. It’s faded a little, but she’s still smiling so big she could block out the sun. He shows it to Y/N.

“I’m sorry, Joel,” she says and she really does look sorry.

Not the way his co-workers and customers say it – almost as a reflex – to fill the void in the conversation. Her eyes are shimmering.

“Nothin’ to do about it now,” he shrugs, running his thumb over the photo paper, softened with age. “But she was so damn special. My whole world.”

He has learned to repress the tears, not to show weakness, that is not hard. Not anymore. But the anger that broils up inside him – the injustice of it all – how he was unable to help her. Unable to save her. He feels almost like a child again, powerless in an unforgiving, unrelenting world. He wants to fight back!

He is so angry he begins to shake and his hands clench into fists.

He wants to flip over the fucking coffee table – fling it across the room! He wants to punch in the glass of the flickering TV screen until his fist is broken! He wants to–He wants–

He just wants his babygirl back…

A sob, small and foreign rises in his throat, but he pushes it down.

He thinks Y/N knows though. Can see the vulnerability in his eyes.

She reaches out a small hand and touches his fist, pushes it down gently into the soft fabric of the couch so he’ll stop shaking. It doesn’t entirely work, but he thinks he appreciates the effort.

“I don’t know if this is the right thing to say,” she begins a bit skittishly, still not entirely trusting the hulking, raging man above her. “But I think I would have liked to have been her friend.”

And for the first time since Sarah died, Joel sobs .

Y/N pops up from the couch and Joel’s heart cries out louder in his chest for her to come back, don’t leave me too as he tries to suck the tears back in. It doesn’t work though and liquid gushes down his cheeks. He doesn’t think he can take the rejection, the loss of her. But thankfully, she returns just as quickly as she went with a handful of tissues stuffed into her small fist.

“Here, Joel,” she offers. “Here. Don’t cry.”

Joel does cry though. He’s ashamed he’s broken down in front of this literal child, and he doesn’t let out much noise, but he doesn’t take the tissues either. He can’t.

She’s so sweet though, or maybe it’s because she is truly afraid of him now, of his wrath, he’ll never really know, but she frowns and reaches out a little hand, the one with the scar on the middle finger, and tries to wipe up the tears.

The paper of the tissue tickles his cheeks.

“Shouldn’t havta…” he tries.

“Didn’t mean to make you…” she answers.

A pause.

“You didn’t, honey. That was all me,” he assures her finally.

She lets out a sigh of relief and soaks up the last of the salt water from his face, brushes the tissue gently against his nose. It tickles, causes him to snort. He smirks a little.

She smiles back shyly, she can’t help it, he can tell.

“You know,” he says thoughtfully after a few moments of silence, sighing deeply. “I reckon she would’ve wanted to be your friend too…”

***

A few months roll by. Things are virtually the same except Y/N seems more comfortable around him now. Maybe it’s because she saw his weakness up close and personal, his Achilles heel —— knows how to coax it out of him now if she has to. Or maybe it’s because she truly trusts him. Whatever the case, she sits closer to him on the couch now, still giving him a respectful foot of distance though of course.

Once in a blue moon, she sings for him and he tries to keep up with the lilting sound of her high voice. She says she likes his low, deep voice just fine, it’s just she still gets nervous singing in front of other people so it’s still a rare occasion. His favorite is when she sings solo and he gets to strum along for her and really listen. Sometimes her voice cracks in a very specific way that some might find to be a flaw, but Joel would never.

Aiden makes fun of them and calls them the ‘Von Trapp Family Singers.’ Are they a family? Joel wonders.

One day after work, Joel goes to the library to find some sheet music for a song Y/N likes. She treasures the photo-copied paper like a gift as Joel deciphers the notes he can actually read for her. She color-codes each one carefully in magic marker so she can remember the differences between them.

The next day, Aiden burns it up with a lighter he has acquired from God knows where. Joel confiscates it – the last thing he needs is this particular child setting fires – and It doesn’t end well for Aiden. He limps for damn near a week. But some days, when Aiden is calm, he joins Y/N and Joel in front of the TV if a sports game is on. He doesn’t sit on the couch though, just the floor. He doesn’t say much to them but does get invested in the good and bad plays of each game, gets sore if his team is losing. On one particularly good day, when the Rangers hit a grand slam, and Joel was actually paying attention, he and Aiden actually high-five.

Things are going…well? Is that the right word? It is a foreign concept for Joel. For Christmas, he gets Y/N guitar, Aiden a book on boxing so maybe he will redirect his anger into somewhere productive, and Erica a spa-day kit for 20% off that he saw at CVS (he never claimed to know what women want). Aiden is neutral, surprised, he thinks, that Joel even got him a present. Erica is actually appreciative and returns the favor with some new socks and underwear.

“A practical gift for a practical man,” she says, kissing him on the forehead.

Joel supposes he appreciates the gesture.

Y/N, though, is thrilled.

“Thank you, Joel! Got you something too,” she says excitedly, bouncing up and down in her red and white pajamas.

“That’s not necessary,” Joel chides, leaning over to pick up the wrapping paper that was strewn across the living room floor.

But secretly he is curious. He didn’t think she even had any money of her own…

Aiden opens the cover of the boxing book with disinterest, eyeing the new guitar distastefully.

Y/N jumps up, leaves the room, and returns with a small plastic baggie in her hands. Inside are little, different bits of colored plastic clumsily and haphazardly cut into tiny, sharp-looking, badge-shaped pieces. One he recognizes is from the top of a yogurt container he put into the recycling the other day, another one from the top of a Gatorade bottle.

“Here ya go!”

She shoves the plastic bag into his large hands enthusiastically.

“Thank you,” Joel responds, still unsure what he was given.

It reminds him of when Sarah was young and would come home with some sort of abstract macaroni painting from kindergarten and he would nod and smile knowingly when she explained that of course it was Two dinosaurs getting married, Dad. Duh!

“You could try one on my new guitar,” she offers, a little disappointed when he doesn’t have more of a reaction. “You said you lost most of yours…”

Joel immediately feels guilty and then it clicks. She tried to make him guitar picks! His heart clenches with emotion he can not quite identify.

He pulls a little orange one out of the bag and accidentally nicks the edge of his finger. Because of the way it was cut, no doubt with uncoordinated child’s hands and a pair of scissors, the edges are much too sharp to serve as an actual guitar pick without damaging guitar strings or apparently Joel’s finger. Dumb kid. But he’s beyond honored anyone would take the time to do such a thoughtful thing for him.

He hisses softly and sucks the blood off his finger.

“Oops,” she says, horrified. “Shoot. Sorry, I–”

“‘S no trouble,” he interjects dismissively. “Love ‘em. Was my fault anyway. I’mma be honest with you though, sweetheart; don’t think the guitar strings can handle these babies.”

“Oh,” she says softly, trying to keep the disappointment out of her voice. “Oh, yeah, okay...”

She deflates, looking down at the carpet.

Joel selfishly lets her be sad for a beat before swooping back in to be the one to save the day.

“But here’s what I’ll do…”

She looks back up at him with an intoxicating kind of hope in her eyes.

He takes his wallet out of his back pocket and slips the orange pick into the photo slot next to the picture of Sarah. He returns the wallet back into his pants.

Y/N positively beams. Brighter than the sun, even, Joel thinks.

Aiden yawns purposefully loudly and rolls his eyes. Erica looks touched and maybe even a little proud of her choice in men. But Joel didn’t do it for them. The only reaction in the world he cares about is hers.

Y/N is still grinning, bouncing on the balls of her feet again. But then she does something new: she leans in and hugs him, wrapping her little arms around his waist, burying her face in his flannel shirt, pressing against his tummy.

The world stops for Joel.

At first, he just hangs there limply, awkwardly. Literally forgets what one is supposed to do in such a situation, but then instinct kicks in and he wraps his arms around her too and squeezes ever so slightly. It’s a more cautious hug than Sarah would have given him – she would have squeezed him half to death – but Y/N is still holding him. Someone small and warm is holding onto him for the first time in what feels like an eternity. And just like that his past is rhyming with his present and it is the most beautiful sound Joel Miller has ever heard.

Joel Miller is not a good man, no, but maybe, just maybe, he thinks he could be one for Y/N.

***

Joel tries to be good. He does. His first order of business is stop beating on Aiden – especially in front of Y/N. No amount of violence towards the kid seems to do any good anyway – he still hurts her. And Joel is sick of bandaging her up and wiping the blood from her cheeks; something has to change. Not that he wouldn’t do it a thousand times if he had to. He’d do anything for the girl, that he is sure of. And the truth is, Aiden is close to getting big enough to really fight back. And Joel knows if Aiden really lays a hand on him, he’s not sure he will be able to control himself enough to not inflict permanent damage. And he doesn’t want that. Truly.

So at first, Joel thinks about having Erica send him away to a wilderness camp for troubled children or some such program he sees mentioned on reruns of Dr. Phil. She has the money to do it too. But she won’t send him away. She refuses, loves him too much. Protecting Y/N seems as far down on her list of priorities as ever. She is useless at disciplining him, always has been, so it is up to Joel to find another solution. So the next thing he tries is to set the boy up in boxing classes. This is risky since it might just teach him new ways to hurt Y/N, but at least it will be a place to direct his anger.

It works for a while, to his and Y/N’s immense relief, but that leaves Joel nowhere to take out his anger. He tries to ignore it at first and shove it down, but it starts to come out in little ways. At work, he barks at a customer who locks his keys in the car he’s trying to fix. At home, he shouts at Erica for missing Y/N’s school play. The rage leaks out of him, pours off his entire being. He tries jerking off more to increasingly violent porno magazines to calm himself down since Erica is sure not satisfying him. It doesn’t do enough though, not really. Finally, he tries boxing at the local gym himself, but it is not enough either. Boxing has rules. The first sorry sucker he gets in the ring with, he beats to the point of unconsciousness. Two men have to pull him off to get him to stop. They kick him out immediately.

So Joel tries going to the bar after work with the guys from the shop and drinking a little to take the edge off. That actually helps somewhat. He’s careful about it, never comes home drunk, never drinks in front of Erica or the kids. But what helps the most are the bar fights. He’s careful about that too. Only fights the assholes, which there are many of. Switches up the bars he goes to. But some motherfucker slaps a girl's ass without permission? Joel’s on him in seconds, watching like a predator from the shadows. Some dude throws a drink in the bartender’s face? Joel clobbers him half to death. And sometimes? People in the bar applaud him, even cheer him on. It’s probably because they’re intoxicated, but that’s how he justifies it to himself like he’s some kind of goddamn vigilante. Deep down he knows he is something much, much uglier. But at least he’s not doing it to Aiden, a child. And more importantly, at least it is away from Y/N.

***

One day, Y/N falls sick. It starts out as what seems like a cold with a nasty cough. Kids are little germ factories, Joel knows that. He tells himself it is nothing to worry about – that all kids get sick sometimes. The first few days she lies on the couch like a zombie, coughing incessantly into her elbow and sleeping a lot. She snores ever so slightly which he finds charming. Joel stays home from work with her because Erica has to be in court and they watch lots of nature documentaries and daytime talk shows.

Then the coughing gets worse and Joel’s brain stops functioning properly and he has trouble explaining why. He feels more on edge, more agitated. Erica takes Y/N to the doctor and comes back with a diagnosis: walking pneumonia. Nothing too serious, lots of kids get it. She is prescribed antibiotics and is supposed to drink lots of fluids and wait it out. But when Erica tells Joel the news of what the doctor told her he is holding a glass of water and it shatters in his large hand, cutting the skin of his middle finger.

“Fuck!” he yells.

And he cannot articulate precisely why, but he feels good that there is a justified reason to yell.

Erica wipes his hand and cleans the glass up.

“Gotta go to court again today, honey,” she says like everything is fine and normal. “Can you look after her today? Call in sick? She’s in bed. Going through it.”

Joel nods and she is gone like this whole thing is nothing. Like her precious, living breathing child is not suffering in the room above his head.

He climbs the stairs and enters Y/N’s room. He doesn’t often spend much time there. The walls are painted pink and differently shaped dolls and stuffed animals line the white vanity across from her canopied bed. He does not think he has ever seen Y/N play with any of those specific toys, come to think of it, or express any interest in the color pink (no doubt Erica’s secret passion for interior design rearing its ugly head). He vows silently, one day, to paint the walls any color she wants.

But there she is, sprawled out in her bed coughing a nasty cough. Something shifts inside Joel at the sound. She looks unwell and weak and so small.

“Hey, honey,” he says softly, almost robotically.

Something is not right. He sits on the edge of her bed, feels her burning forehead. He takes her temperature gently with the thermometer that goes in her ear. He feels that weird sensation like he’s been here before even though he has hardly ever entered her bedroom. One hundred and four degrees Fahrenheit it reads when it beeps. Joel swallows a lump in his throat that he didn’t realize was there.

She coughs pathetically. She looks out of it, her eyes far away. Joel’s heart throbs painfully.

Y/N is mumbling something incoherent now. Joel leans a little closer so he can decipher the words.

He makes out something like: No, Dad. Don’t. Stop, please. Please, not tonight.

Joel stops breathing.

She must be delirious from the fever.

And then she’s crying. Quietly, but crying all the less. And this time, unlike every time he has seen her tears before, she sobs. Actually makes noise, her chest wracked with it.

Then she coughs so hard she starts to wheeze and it hits Joel so ferociously he practically loses his grip on reality.

When Sarah was sick she had leukemia, a blood cancer. And cancer requires treatment. Expensive treatment. But of course, Joel hadn’t cared. He would have sold every item he owned to save his child, would have traveled to the ends of the earth if he had to, done literally any and everything in his power to protect her. So he paid for most of her chemotherapy with high hopes. Desperate hopes, but high ones. It had been her best shot at getting better according to the doctors. And the thing about chemo is, the side effects can literally be deadly. Joel is not a man of science, but the doctor explained that those drugs kill the bad cells that make up the cancer, but also the good ones. It fucks with your immune system, weakens you. Makes you lose your hair, vomit, and or be so weak you can barely walk. All that happened to Sarah. Joel felt like a traitor taking her to those treatments. Logically, he knew they were necessary, but he always felt like he was the one doing those awful things to her. It eviscerated him, left him raw and empty, and helpless like a child.

But in the end, it was the pneumonia that killed her. Her body couldn’t fight it off. She’d died in a hospital bed, Joel at her side, holding her hand, unable to do a single damned thing except scream .

Y/N coughs again, simultaneously pulling him from his thoughts and throwing him back into them. His heart is pounding in his chest to Do something! But there is nothing to be done, nothing he can do! Why can’t he ever seem to protect her?

She looks up just then, notices him for the first time since he entered the room, still crying feebly.

“He hurt me,” she whispers up at him, her eyes glazed over and glistening with tears. She reaches out for a handful of his dark blue work shirt and pulls it tightly to her. “He hurt me. And I couldn’t–I c-couldn’t…”

And then he is holding her, not quite sure how, but he is holding her trembling body to his chest and he will not let her go. Not for the world, not for anyone. He will not lose this child. He wraps his arms around her, holds tight. He will keep her safe, no matter the cost.

“It’s okay, babygirl,” he whispers. “I got you.”

***

Joel and Erica get married that spring. They agree on a private ceremony in front of a judge with only Y/N and Aiden in attendance. When Aiden hears the news, he throws a fit, He breaks dishes and punches a hole in the TV set which sets Joel’s teeth on edge. But Y/N is overjoyed. In the end, he and Joel adorn what Joel considers monkey suits and Erica wears a beautiful white dress that accentuates her figure. Y/N wears a frilly pink dress and carries a basket of pink roses. Joel never thought he’d be a married man and yet here he is. He imagines Sarah in attendance too and his heart aches. This is his life now.

He refuses to wear a ring.

***

Time passes. Long stretches of time where things feel–dare he think it–normal.

Aiden doesn’t beat Y/N, but begins to get into fights at school. Joel saves his violence for the bar scene which he begins frequenting more often.

Erica starts working later, gets promoted in her job. Fucks Joel less and less, not that he cares very much.

Joel goes to back-to-school nights and family cookouts. He teaches Y/N to play the guitar and how to fix car motors. In both these activities, she is no natural, but she tries her best and listens well. She smiles more than he’s ever seen. He drives her to sleepovers and Aiden to boxing practice. He paints her bedroom walls orange.

Things feel stable.

Two Christmases pass.

And then things take a downturn.

***

One evening, Joel returns home from work later than usual. When he arrives home in his truck, he notices an expensive sports car in the driveway. Erica has affluent friends, sure, but he’s never seen this particular car before. Something about that doesn’t sit right with him.

He opens the front door with a creak and Erica intercepts him before he can make it to the dining room table for dinner. She presses a hand to his forearm bulking with muscle.

“Don’t freak out,” she whispers urgently.

Joel stops and hears the sounds of people eating dinner and a man’s raspy voice speaking.

“Freak out about what?”

He makes his way past her to the dining room. He sees a man he does not immediately recognize sitting at the head of the table, Y/N is flanking one side of the table next to him and Aiden the other. He is conventionally handsome and wearing an expensive pinstripe suit. When he looks up, he smirks at Joel. Joel thinks he looks kind of like Aiden if you were to squint. And then he understands who he is.

“The fuck are you doing in my house?” he growls, lunging forward.

“ Your house?” the man smirks again, unflinching.

He looks Joel over, examining his mechanic’s uniform, the grease stain on Joel’s cheek.

Erica grabs Joel. She pulls him back out into the hallway.

“Tell him he’s not welcome here,” Joel snarls, trying to get a look at the man over Erica’s shoulder.

She pushes him backward gently. Instantly, he is worried for Y/N, for all intents and purposes alone in there with the man who abused her and this entire goddamn family for that matter. He catches a glance at her and she looks terrified . Aiden, conversely, Joel sees, looks like he just won the lottery, staring up at his dad in adoration. Joel doesn’t think he has ever seen him look so happy.

“This is important to them,” Erica snaps quietly. “That’s their father. He has a right–”

“Get him out of here or I’ll kill him,” Joel says deadly quietly. “He what? Doesn’t show up for over three years and you think that–”

“I know that he has a right to speak to them. I am their mother and they need a sense of closure. Aiden needs this. So you will sit down at that table and have an amicable dinner or so help me God, Joel.”

Erica never speaks to him like this. He is shocked.

“Fine,” he snarls after a while, his chest heaving.

He can hardly think straight while Y/N is in there alone with that excuse for a man. Better he be close to protect her instead of thrown out of the house.

He walks back in with Erica, who sits next to Y/N, leaving Joel nowhere to go but next to Aiden.

“I’m Derek,” the children’s father says, leaning over the food Erica has prepared to shake Joel’s hand.

Joel doesn’t take it.

“And you must be Joe? The new husband.”

“Joel,” he replies shortly.

He looks over at Y/N who is trying to be brave, he can tell, but deep in her eyes, looks petrified.

They eat dinner in tense silence until Derek breaks it and begins bragging about his golf club record, the latest client he’s been representing, his new girlfriend, Sylvia.

“See, she’s helping me become a better man,” Derek insists with a forkful of steak. “I know I haven’t always been…the greatest of fathers or partners, but she really convinced me coming here would be a good thing. That it would be healing. You guys will meet someday, I’m sure.”

Joel leans forward toward Derek, reeling at the idea that this man could possibly be back in the picture of his family’s life, but Erica reaches under the table and squeezes his knee in a death grip and Joel holds himself back.

Aiden hangs on his father’s every word. Erica looks somewhat intrigued after she lets go of her husband’s leg. Y/N screams silently at Joel, who tries his best to communicate without words that he will keep her safe.

“And I know I’ve missed quite a bit,” Derek continues. “Which is why I brought these. Sylvia’s idea, really.”

He reaches down toward his feet and pulls out a fancy golden gift bag and takes out two presents. He hands one to Aiden and the other one to Y/N. Aiden rips his open excitedly. Inside is a hunting knife with a red handle.

Great, Joel thinks.

Y/N doesn’t move though, stopped like a deer in the headlights.

“Open it, girl,” Derek sneers.

She looks over at Joel.

“Go on, baby,” he says softly, heat pumping through his blood.

She unwraps the pink wrapping paper and finds a Barbie doll in a clear plastic box. Joel has never seen her play with dolls at all come to think of it.

“Isn’t that thoughtful?” Erica smiles cautiously.

“Thanks, Dad,” Aiden says enthusiastically. “Can’t wait to show the guys at ROTC.”

“Good for you, son,” Derek grins. “Serving our country is the highest of honors.”

Joel suddenly tries not to think about Tommy blasted to bits halfway across the world in Afghanistan, his body in such bad condition all that he got left of his baby brother was a finger and two bent dog tags.

Aiden beams.

“Well,” Derek barks, eyeing Y/N distastefully. “Aren’t you going to say anything?” he taunts.

Joel sees where Aiden gets it from. This arrogant, bullying behavior. He shifts in his seat, ready to strike if necessary.

“Thanks,” she says very quietly.

Derek grins in a kind of satisfaction that makes Joel want to go over there and punch his daylights out. He almost does too until Erica kicks his shin beneath the table and he controls himself.

Y/N frowns. She looks over at Joel, then back at her father. Something ripples across her face, but it goes so quickly Joel cannot assign any meaning to it. But she looks ever so less scared somehow, more angry almost, but not quite.

And then after about ten minutes of somewhat peaceful eating and Derek making Aiden and Erica laugh with stupid anecdotes from his court cases while Joel and Y/N exchange looks, it happens.

Y/N’s hand reaches forward and knocks against her glass of coke. It goes flying over in Derek’s direction and drenches him in the sticky liquid, staining his suit.

“Sorry, Dad!” she squeaks immediately. “Oh my god, I–”

“You little slut!” he roars in response, almost like a reflex, backhanding Y/N across the face with lightning speed and accuracy. “Do you know how much this fucking suit cost!?”

The force of the blow is so strong it knocks Y/N from her chair onto the ground.

Before a coherent thought can even go through Joel’s head he is on the other man, slamming him up against the wall behind him by the throat.

“Joel, don’t you dare!” Erica yells, but it is too late.

Joel sees red and can’t exactly recall what he does next, but it goes something like this:

He squeezes around Derek’s throat and bangs his head backward against the wall a few times. The other man tries to get a punch in, but Joel ducks and kicks him in the balls. Derek crumples to the ground and Joel gives his chest another hard kick. He whines pathetically.

Aiden gets up then, but Erica uses all of her strength to pull him back before he can get involved in the mix. He resists, shouts something that Joel cannot make out, but Erica manages to keep him from the two men with a great amount of effort and struggle.

Derek is on the floor now and Joel is straddling him, landing punch after ruthless punch down onto his head. His nose begins to bleed, but Joel keeps punching.

“HOW DARE YOU?” he roars down at the trembling, gushing man on the floor.

There is so much blood splurting all over his face, dripping down onto his expensive stained suit, and the floor that Derek almost stops looking like Derek. Joel sees Aiden’s face in his features. And then there is so much blood that it could be anyone’s face screaming back at him for mercy. It could be those creepy, asshole men at the bar. It could be the much bigger kid who always used to beat up Tommy every day in the schoolyard. It could be that damned head doctor who let his babygirl die. It could even be his no-good, bastard, alcoholic papá .

He turns his head ever so slightly while still delivering punches. Erica has Aiden in a bear hug. She is screaming for Joel to stop. Aiden is bellowing something that sounds like, You bastard, I’ll kill you! Get off of him! I’ll kill you! And then Joel sees Y/N still on the floor from where she was knocked. Her face is still turned in the same direction it was slapped into, but she is not crying or screaming. Her eyes are dancing.

They connect with Joel’s.

He knows he is supposed to be a good man for her, but she doesn’t seem to mind his deviant behavior. He stops then, though, because otherwise he thinks he will kill the man and he doesn’t want Y/N to experience that. He steals a glance at her again and she looks ever so slightly disappointed, but her wide-eyed expression tells Joel that Christmas has come early this year. She sends him a look of gratitude and Joel thinks that maybe he did act like a good man for her after all in the case of this vile, pathetic person who is supposed to be her father.

Finally, Joel stands up. He walks over and reaches out a bloody hand to Y/N and pulls her gently from the ground. Even after she’s standing upright she doesn’t let go of him.

Derek gets up after a while, wiping his sleeve over his face to try to tame the excess blood. Joel thinks that maybe he broke the man’s nose. He feels not a shred of remorse. The other man spits on the ground at Joel’s feet and leaves without saying goodbye to his ex-wife or children, slamming the front door behind him.

Erica is not pleased with Joel’s behavior. Aiden is shouting and screaming. He breaks a plate by throwing it onto the floor with a loud crash. Joel leans over and grabs the knife his father gave him and sticks it in his front pocket so Aiden doesn’t feel tempted to use it. Y/N’s small hand is still in his.

When Aiden is coherent enough to listen to instructions and all screamed out, Erica sends the children upstairs to bed.

Joel tries to walk Y/N up to bed to tuck her in, but Erica stops him.

“ Not you,” she growls at Joel.

She is livid in a way Joel has never seen before. For a moment, he seriously wonders if this is the end of their relationship.

The kids scamper upstairs and Erica yells at Joel for ages.

At a certain point, he stops listening. He doesn’t try to argue back. Doesn’t care to. He is actually calm now, though his chest is still heaving from the exertion, more calm than he’s been in ages. He knows that she will never understand why he had to do what he did to Derek. She lives in another reality where his violence is not acceptable if she has to bear witness to it. She doesn’t care about Y/N the way she is supposed to. Never has. Doesn’t know or see her. Not the way Joel does. Has too big a soft spot for Aiden. Tolerated Joel’s violence toward him though like a coward. Maybe deep down she knew he needed some kind of discipline? But when Joel lays a hand on her scumbag of an ex-husband that’s what’s too far? When he hurt her own daughter? When Joel himself was responsible for hurting her own precious son? Where was her outrage then?

But he voices none of this. Pushes it down. He cannot lose her. Not this house, not the kids, not the financial security. Never Y/N.

Erica banishes him to the couch for the first time in their relationship. Joel doesn’t mind.

Hours later, late into the night, he hears soft footsteps walking down the stairs. He rolls over on the sofa to see who is approaching. He wonders if it is Erica there to apologize because he knows her well enough to know by now that she will forgive him eventually. She will forgive anything it seems. But it is not Erica at all.

“Joel?” a little voice asks quietly. “You up?”

“Yeah, baby,” he replies. “You okay? I’m so sorry he pulled that shit on you.”

Y/N shrugs.

“Sorry I…I didn’t stop it before it happened,” he admits like a secret.

She shrugs again.

“‘M sorry she made you sleep on the couch and all,” she replies.

“‘S no trouble. I don’t mind.”

“But it’s my fault you got in trouble in the first place.”

“Y/N, you ain’t done nothing wrong,” Joel tells her seriously.

It’s hard to see her in the dark, but he thinks she’s grimacing guiltily.

“I just wanted to say…” she begins hesitantly. “Thanks for like sticking up for me and all that. You…you’re the only one who does.”

Joel hides a smile from his babygirl. Something inside him likes being that person for her, he cannot lie to himself. Likes being the one she can count on.

“You were like some MMA fighter,” she continues. “But then all the blood was like in The Shining .”

One day, not long ago, Joel had fallen asleep on the couch when The Shining came on and Y/N had watched the entire thing out of her own free will. That movie had frightened the shit out of him as a kid!

“I’m sorry if I scared you, sweetheart.”

“You didn’t,” Y/N replies matter-of-factly. “I wasn’t scared of what you did for a second…I know that’s messed up, but I kinda wanted you to…”

She trails off.

Joel understands.

“I kinda, please don’t get mad, but I sorta knocked the cup over on purpose,” she admits.

Joel’s eyebrows go way up on his forehead in surprise.

“It’s just,” she babbles quickly in self-defense. “Mom and Aiden were like giggling and hanging onto every dumb thing he said and it scared me. I thought they might let him keep coming around and start liking him again. And I also knew he hadn’t changed too. I could tell on account of how he was looking at me in that same mean way he always did. And I also knew you’d save me like you always do and you had this angry look in your eyes. I knew what you would do. I could feel it in my gut…”

“You little shit!” Joel smirks.

He has to give her credit where credit was due – that was incredibly shrewd. Dangerous, but oh so clever. She played everyone in that room like a fiddle. Joel is honestly kind of proud.

“You mad?” she asks tentatively, biting her bottom lip.

“Nah,” Joel grins. “At you? Never. You shouldn’t have had to let him hurt you to get him away from you, but you protected yourself and that’s the most important thing. If I had to do it over, I would.”

Y/N smiles.

She’s a fucked up little girl, but Joel is a fucked up man, and they both live in a fucked up world.

“Got your back,” he grunts. “Remember that. Now scurry along back to bed and get some rest.”

“G’night, Joel.”

***

Time passes.

Erica forgives Joel of course and Derek never comes around again.

Y/N and Aiden grow bigger.

They go on camping trips and Joel teaches Y/N and Aiden how to fish. Never thought he would see the day where Aiden was willingly listening to his instructions, but the day comes anyway. Of course, the boy’s favorite part is cutting up the bloody fish guts like Joel’s used to be as a child. Y/N likes the part where you wait for the fish to bite. She sits next to Joel on the grassy river bank, the sun shining down on the lazy lake they are camping by, and smiles softly to herself.

Another two Christmases pass.

All the while, Joel is visiting the bar more and not necessarily to drink. His violent streak is getting worse somehow. He thinks, though he’s no goddamn shrink, that it might have something to do with the fact that he and Erica are not having any sex. Their relationship is still amicable and she is still sweet to him, and he tries his best to be to her too, but in the bedroom is mostly crickets. Joel jerks off, of course he does, but his fist is no substitute for a warm body.

Joel causes such a scene at the bar he frequents the most, that the cops have to be called. He ditches the place before he can get arrested, but he’s getting worried about his behavior. Something must change.

So then come the women. They practically throw themselves at him. Never has he thought he was that attractive until women literally offer themselves up to him on a silver platter after saving them from some drunken creep. Joel had always declined until now. But Joel is only a man. He fucks them rough and dirty (with their permission of course – Joel is not a good man, and a lot of things, but he isn’t a fucking rapist) in the bathroom stalls, in the alleyways. In the moment it feels good and helps him let off some steam, but after he feels guilty. And it doesn’t satisfy him much more than with Erica if he really thinks about it. One thing that Erica has over these women who let him act out his violent self is the look of devotion in her eyes. That’s always the thing that gets Joel to cum in the end when he does get to fuck her.

He would leave her, she isn’t that special to him if he’s honest, but she offers him a twofold sense of stability he has never known in his life. The first fold is the financial stability that has evaded him all of his days. The second is the feeling of family . Something so mundane and normal. And despite her flaws, she treats him so well – better than Sarah’s mother ever did. And most importantly, he doesn’t think he could leave Y/N. Not now. Not when she looks at him like he is the universe. Not even Aiden whom Joel has (begrudgingly) begun to see the traces of himself in.

***

This particular muggy, summer day begins normally. Joel goes to work, fixes a Chevy Impala’s fluid tank. And then he walks in with an old, beat-up Honda Accord.

His name is David, and Joel has heard of him through murmurings and bar stories and whispers at community barbeques. He’s a notorious neighborhood legend, whose house kids cross the street to avoid. He is the boogeyman at the end of the cul-de-sac.

The story is, though through the many versions Joel has heard some of the details get muddled, that he kidnapped and raped a twelve-year-old girl (that part all versions agree on). Some say he was supposed to have ten years in prison, others say twenty, but whatever the number he got out in one for “good behavior.” In jail, he supposedly devoted his life to God and became a preacher.

Joel doesn’t want to help him, but his boss hisses at him that money is money and he’s going to serve the man whether Joel likes it or not.

There’s something wrong with the exhaust pipe, so Joel bends down and takes a look at it. He opens the trunk and sees a box of Bibles next to a plastic bag of zip ties. His blood runs cold.

“The fuck is this shit doing in your car?” he growls, referring to the zip ties.

“The Bible is the word of God, Mr. Miller,” David replies, eyeing Joel’s nametag. “Would you like one? I’m always trying to spread The Good Word.”

“You know that’s not what I’m talking about,” he spits, looking over to make sure his boss is not watching.

“If you must know, though it’s none of your business, those zip ties are for my garden to help hold up my plants. They are remarkably useful,” David smiles sickeningly politely.

And that’s when Joel loses it just a little.

He picks up the ties and pockets them.

“Listen here, you pedophile piece of shit,” he snarls. “If I hear about you stepping one goddamned pinky-toe out of line–”

“Hey, Joel!” A little voice calls.

The breath is knocked from Joel’s lungs.

Y/N bounds up to them holding a brown paper bag out of nowhere.

“You forgot your lunch! Mom dropped me off so you could have it. It’s tuna though. I hate hate tuna. But you’ll eat anything so I hope it’s good for you at least,” she babbles.

“Baby,” Joel says very quietly, his heart thrumming in his ribcage. “Right now’s not a great time. Why don’t you go on home and I’ll catch up with you later?”

Then she notices David. By the fact that she doesn’t immediately leave, Joel determines she has no clue who he is.

“Hello, young lady,” David smiles, eyeing Joel knowingly. “I’m Pastor David.”

“Uh, hi,” she says.

Joel thinks he might actually kill him.

“Would you like something to take home with you?” he asks.

Y/N blinks in confusion as Joel steps in front of her.

“She’ll be going now, won’t you Y/N?” Joel suggests dangerously.

“Here,” David says before she can respond.

He hands her a black-covered bible.

Y/N takes it, looks at the cover, and laughs. Joel and David both look down at her in surprise.

“No offense, ‘Pastor David,”’ she smirks. “But I don’t believe in that shit. Here, you can have it back,” she offers.

He takes back the book somewhat defeatedly. And Joel grins internally.

“Bye, Joel,” she tells him, still smirking.

She side-hugs him quickly and returns to Erica’s car.

“How dare you even look at her–” Joel booms at the sad, pathetic excuse for a man once she is out of earshot.

His hands are clenched into fists and they are shaking. Every part of him is on fire.

“I think I’ll be going now,” David interjects lightly. “I can see my business isn’t welcome here. You have a beautiful daughter, Mr. Miller. Quite a mouth on her. Shame if something were to happen to her…Oh, the things someone like me could make her believe…”

Joel reaches back his fist to punch, to pummel, to kill, but suddenly, another hand grabs his and holds it in place. Joel’s boss has materialized behind him and is holding him back. Good thing too. It’s probably the only thing that saves Joel’s career and David’s life.

David winks and drives away as the boss begins to reprimand Joel who is still shaking and fuming.

All he knows is this: If anyone touches his babygirl he will not hesitate to put them six feet under, no matter the cost to himself. He will not hesitate to get blood on his calloused hands. He will not hesitate to kill. And this time? His baby will not sustain a single scratch . He will not wait for her to get hurt before he acts.

***

Joel wants nothing more than to go home and spend time with his babygirl and wife and even his step-son if he will allow, but there is blood popping and oozing and broiling and churning under his skin like billowing, bubbling lava. If he doesn’t do something about it soon he will explode worse than a volcanic eruption so he heads to the seediest bar he can think of. He makes his way inside and sits right up at the bar, already occupied by a few people. He orders a drink (his usual: whiskey on the rocks) and waits for the impending opportunity for violence he is sure is lying in wait.

He cannot believe the shit that came out of ‘Pastor-fucking-David’s’ sick, perverted mouth and that he almost lost his job over it. He lets that thought charge him up into a rage, his fists clenched so tightly they are beginning to ache in the joints. He cannot believe that disgusting little fucker had the audacity to say that horrible scummy bullshit in his presence when he would do anything to protect that innocent child. He takes a drink of his whiskey and knocks it back in one gulp. He would do anything , ‘Lord’ only knows. He snickers to himself sinisterly.

And while he’s on the topic, fuck God! When had He ever done a single damn good thing for Joel his entire miserable life except maybe to give him Sarah and then take her away like she was nothing and not the entire light of the universe wrapped into a small, vulnerable person? Joel doesn’t know much about the bible, truth be told, but he remembers a few things from his Sunday school days. He remembers that people are created in the image of God and the stories he remembers most are from the Old Testament which heavily featured a God of absolute rage. Maybe that is the way he is god-like, built of anger and revenge and wrath and the sick, pathetic hunger for power that lurks inside most people.

But he also remembers Jesus being meek and mild. Joel never understood that desire until he had Sarah and then Y/N in his care. If Joel could snap his fingers and make himself some fundamentally kind and caring man he would, but he can’t. Joel Miller is not a good man. He tried to be for Y/N, he truly did, but look at everything he’s done in the time he’s known her: he used Erica to get financial stability and roof over his head, he’s cheated on her numerous times, he beat Aiden, a child, and everyday the weight of that guilt grows greater as he begins to truly understand how wrong that was, and he beat his babygirl’s pathetic excuse for a father (but still her father) in front of her. He also beat people in bar fights and that time at the gym. And the thing is: is he even a little bit sorry about any of it – except for maybe what he did to Aiden? No, not even a little. And he’d do all of it again if it could mean getting to spend time with his babygirl, Y/N, again. His babygirl who FUCKING DAVID tried to threaten!

And the problem is: who knows what that fucker is capable of? The police and the judicial system let him out after one year which can only be described as a colossal moral failure and a massive miscarriage of justice. It wouldn’t take much for David to really figure out where they lived and grab Y/N and throw her in his trunk like he did that poor other little girl. Maybe that’s paranoid, but Joel knows better than most that when a man wants to do a dark thing he will find a way to do it. Joel does not want to live his life constantly looking over his shoulder as some horrendous pedophile lives freely.

And then he turns his head to look down at the rest of the fairly busy bar and he sees him . None other than David himself, drinking a beer. Joel cannot believe his luck. It is like all of the light in heaven has aligned to give him such a gift. A part of him is screaming to not engage because Joel is sure he could kill him for what he said about Y/N. But the rest of him is already standing up and grabbing David by the shoulder and–

“If you know what’s good for you, you’ll get the fuck out of here now ,” he snarls. “Almost lost my job because of you, you sick fuck. You’re lucky I give you a warning and don’t wring your neck on the fucking spot.”

David turns around, Joel’s fingers digging into his shoulder.

“Proverbs 24:1 and 2,” he quotes calmly. “‘Do not envy wicked men or desire their company; for their hearts devise violence, and their lips declare trouble.’”

“What the fuck is that supposed to mean?”

“It means perhaps I will be leaving. I don’t care to spend my time with wicked men such as yourself. And I have many preparations to make for what is to come. How is your daughter doing since we last met?”

Joel’s heart runs cold.

“Get my baby’s name out of your goddamned mouth .”

“Hope we run into each other soon,” David grins as he gets off the barstool and dislodges himself from Joel’s grip. “There is a lot I could teach her.”

He turns to leave. Disgusting coward, Joel thinks. He could let the man go. But then what? Live in fear of him? Let his precious Y/N live in fear of him? Joel is tired of living in fear, of resigning to a cruel man in a cruel world, and he will never do that or let Y/N do that ever again.

And then David leans in so close that Joel can smell the alcohol on his breath and the sweat on his skin.

“Can’t stop thinking about her pretty little hands around my–”

Joel doesn’t let him finish. In that moment he knows what will transpire. He picked this seedy-ass bar for a reason: so that no one will bother to stop him.

He lands the first punch with ease, doesn’t even feel the pain till minutes later. The force of the blow to David’s head is so strong he slams down into the ground. It is so violent that David’s eyelid starts to bleed and the skin around the impact spot becomes puffy and dark.

David shouts for help, but no one in this place gives a fuck and even if they did everybody knows who he is and what he did so they don’t give a shit two times over.

Joel continues the assault. Punch after punch reigns down on the other man as blood begins to coat his features. David tries to get a punch or two into Joel’s stomach, but Joel straddles each of his biceps and holds him down so he can continue hitting. The longer Joel hits, the better he feels. This time is different. This time he does not see the features of every man he’s ever hated in the face of his victim. This time he sees only David’s disgusting smirk in his mind’s eye. This time he only thinks about how he is saving Y/N from a lifetime of fear and cruelty. This time Joel will not let his adversary get a strike in first. This time he will be the one to stop the fate of impending devastation that lies in the palms of David’s shaking and broken hands. This time he can save her .

When Joel is done with his hands, he is panting heavily. He moves on to his feet, kicking the man’s gut sadistically, his trembling hands, his face. Crunch , goes David’s skull. And then he is not moving or breathing.

Joel stops.

A lick of fear trails against the inside of his stomach, but the rage, always the rage warms his stomach like a rush of flames.

So he keeps going. He bends back down and squeezes the man’s throat just to make sure. It’s good he did too because David’s bloodshot, viens-having-burst eyes snap open and David makes a pathetic little squealing noise and Joel squeezes harder, rougher, with more conviction.

In the end, it takes longer than he thought it would.

Joel only stops when he hears sirens blaring in the distance. He looks up for the first time since the assault started and sees all of the patrons staring at him in revulsion and fear. The bartender actually has the phone in her hand. Joel guesses she was the one to finally call the cops. He guesses he was so sadistic and violent that even this shitty place had seen enough. He thinks to run, briefly, but where would he run to? Everything he has ever wanted in life is now going to be closed off to him. But he saved Y/N and that makes everything worth it. It has to have been worth it.

Joel puts two scarred, calloused fingers to David’s pulse point, as blood (his and David’s) drips down from his knuckle onto the wooden floor and feels nothing.

When the cops handcuff him and take him away, he doesn’t resist. He comes quietly. He cannot ever really be a good man for Y/N, he understands that now, but at least now she and he may know some peace of mind after what he’s done.

***

The time leading up to the trial is a blur.

Erica pays for an excellent lawyer, but divorces him on the spot. It seems there are some things even she will not forgive, and apparently murder is one of them. She allows the children to see him one last time in cold, sterile police interrogation room. A court-appointed child advocate social worker must be present. They allow him to have his handcuffs taken off for the first time since he was arrested. The kids are told he accidentally killed someone in a bar fight and for legal reasons he leans into the “accidental” part.

Aiden comes in first. He knew who David was and tells Joel he did the right thing. Joel is surprised. He reaches out a limp hand, dirt caked under his fingernails, and shakes Joel’s for the first time since they’ve known each other and they part ways on good terms.

“You’re not my dad,” Aiden tells him quietly. “But you always put up a good fight to be there.”

And he leaves.

Joel is more touched than he wants to believe.

Y/N’s visit is much more difficult.

“How could you!?” she screams, standing by the door the second she sees him as he sits at the interrogation table, his chair turned toward her.

At first Joel thinks she means how could he killl another human being. Y/N didn’t seem to know who David was after all. But that’s not what she is mad about.

“How could you leave me!?” she shouts, tears in her eyes. “You’re going to be taken away from me! Mom is leaving you because of this and that means you aren’t like my dad anymore. You’re going to forget all about me and never get to see me again because you killed some dumb man who tried to give me a bible?”

“He was not a good man,” is all Joel can say.

He can’t be the one to tell her more, hasn’t told anyone how David had threatened her. Not even his lawyer. He doesn’t want to scare her, doesn’t want to admit to anyone he let those words even get to leave that shit stain’s mouth.

“I don’t care!” she shouts again. “I want you!”

And then she bursts into tears and runs into his chest and Joel holds her against his orange jumpsuit and starts to feel tears trickling down his own cheeks.

“Never gonna forget about you,” he nearly scolds her into hair. “How could you ever think that, baby? You’re my babygirl. I’ll get out one day and come right back to you, understand?”

“But Mom–”

“You’ll be grown by the time I get out and won’t have to worry about what she says. But I’ll tell you this: you might feel different about me by the time your grown up and however you feel I want you to know I’ll respect that. But I ain’t gonna forget about you. Not ever.”

“Your time is up,” the court-appointed social worker states.

“No!” Y/N shouts, burying herself deeper into Joel’s embrace. “NO! I’m not leaving! I won’t leave you!”

Joel hugs her back tightly, crying into the top of her head as she sobs softly into his chest.

In the end, the social worker has to pull her away as she screams.

“I love you, Y/N!” he calls to her as the social worker drags her from him. “Never gonna forget you, babygirl. Remember that.”

All Joel can hear back is a broken wail.

***

Erica attends the trial; the kids are forbidden. Joel’s defense claims it was a drunken accident and goes for manslaughter. Because he killed a known child molester he has no trouble while he waits in jail. He is even considered a hero by some. No one tries to fuck with him and that’s how Joel would prefer it since if he gets into too many fights it will just add to his sentence and he must get out and get back to his babygirl if she’ll still have him. His lawyer tells him not to mention the threats that David made toward Y/N because it will look like more of a reason that Joel would have had to intentionally kill him as opposed to accidentally like the manslaughter plea would have the court believe. Joel listens. He does exactly what he’s told because this lawyer is good and he needs to get out someday for christ sake.

In the end, he gets ten years and his lawyer tells him he could get eight for good behavior.

Eight years, if Joel can manage it.

They take him away to prison in handcuffs. Erica sobs. It is the last time he sees her.

***

Joel always wondered if his temper would land him in prison. Now that he’s here things go surpringly well. He gets a reputation for being the murderer of a child molestor and people respect him, listen to him when he bothers to speak. He keeps things in order and people start to refer to him as the “pod boss.” He also reads a lot in his cell, tries to help people with their cases and appeals if he can. And if someone steps out of line, Joel is more than happy to put them in their place so long as he can avoid attention from the guards, who he actually mostly gets along with to their faces, but behind their backs beats people to a pulp. No one ever dares to snitch on him and he is considered on the right track to get out for good behavior early.

Time passes — painfully long stretches of time.

He has a lot of time to think, to read. He reads every book in the prison library over the time he is incarcerated. He reads parenting books, self-help books, books on trauma, books on abuse, books on anger management, books on meditation, books on spirituality (nothing sticks in that regard though, he is still furious like God, but less so these days). Somehow his anger has started to simmer down a notch.

But he worries his babygirl will forget about him, or worse grow to hate him. He’s not sure he’ll survive that.

Luckily, or he might have withered away and died, somehow Y/N convinces Erica to let her write him a letter once a month and have one call with him on Christmas.

Christmases quickly become his favorite day of the year.

Y/N writes him religiously. She talks about how angry she is at him, how she misses him, how she finally fixed the motor on Joel’s old pickup truck, how some boy gave her a love letter on Valentine’s Day, how she thinks of him every day.

Joel never tells her what David said about her, lets her believe he is just some violent, drunken idiot. He writes back how much he misses her, how he read a new book this week, how prison food is shit, how he’d probably greet that boy with a shotgun if he thinks he’s getting anywhere with his babygirl, how his whole heart beats for her.

She’s allowed to send him one photo a year, her most current school photo, and Joel hangs them on the wall of his cell so he can see her beaming at him at his highest and lowest moments along with the tiny picture of Sarah he managed to save from his wallet.

Aiden even sends him a card each Father’s Day. It never has anything written in it except for whatever stupid pun or text the card came with, but Joel reads between the lines with that one. Each one seems to whisper to him louder and louder, I love you and I forgive you. Joel writes him back, “Thanks, kiddo. -Joel” He hope that conveys the thousands of sorrys he wants to scream from the rooftops and say straight to the boy’s face. He will someday when he gets out. He makes himself promise. He hears from Y/N when Aiden joins the marines.

When Joel gets to actually hear Y/N’s voice on the old prison phone it’s like the most beautiful sound he has ever heard except for maybe Sarah’s voice. She babbles away about her life and what’s she’s up to and he hangs on every word like gospel. He barely gets a word in, but prefers it that way. Wishes he could hear her singing. Once, when she’s sixteen, and sounds so woefully grown up it hurts Joel’s entire heart, she hums a little absentmindedly and he can’t get the sweet sound out of his head. Her love for him never seems to waver and that is a blessing that Joel will never forget, the only thing he would thank this cruel God for. And of course, his love for her never wavers either. She is the only beacon of light for him in this dark and mundane existence. She is his everything.

***

When Y/N is eighteen and no longer under her mother’s control, she comes to visit him in person. This is the first time they have seen each other in six years. Despite their loving correspondence, Joel is nervous to see her for the first time since her childhood. He worries about how awkward it might be.

When he sees her walking into the dinky little family meeting room, his entire mode of existence changes.

She looks so beautiful, so grown-up. Sure she had always been a cute little kid, Joel always thought that, but now she is a woman. Tears come to Joel’s eyes. When her eyes connect with his, he feels so seen .

He tries to get a word out, but before he can she is running to him, into his arms and Joel has never felt something so perfect in his entire life. He knows he has never felt a love like this before. Not even with Sarah…something about this is different somehow? Joel is not too in touch with his feelings, but he’s trying to be more attentive to them these days with nothing left to do but read about such topics as “emotional regulation” and “mindfulness.” He’ll come back to this thought later though…

Y/N begins to babble into his ear, something about missing him and not wanting it to be awkward, but this is the furthest from awkward Joel has ever felt.

Joel has never been a man of many words so all he can think to say is,

“Missed you, babygirl.”

She grins at that, brighter than all the suns of all the planets in the universe (Joel has been reading about those too) and he laughs for the first time in what feels like a lifetime.

She laughs too, wipes tears from her eyes, and says,

“Missed you too, Joel. More than you know.”

Joel thinks that can’t possibly be true for that is all he has known for the last six years and possibly his entire life: missing her.

She comes once a month, drives an hour just to see him, and she tells him about college and later her very own shitty apartment. Her mother has thrown herself into her work and Aiden is serving his second tour. She makes good grades and has a stable boyfriend that treats her well, she swears. Joel couldn’t be happier for her, except the boyfriend business does make him want to crush that little fucker’s head in for some reason.

***

The last time Y/N comes to visit before his release (eight years to the day for good behavior) (she is 20 damn years old already!) something feels different to Joel. When he hugs her to greet her, he’s suddenly very aware of her body, the curves of it, her softness. Her hair smells so good, he doesn’t want to let go of her and then to his intense dismay and shock he feels himself getting a little excited down south. Immediately, he lets go of her, feeling like a pervert, praying she didn’t and doesn’t notice. He doesn’t see any obvious signs from her and the two sit down (Joel rather quickly) at the flimsy, nailed-down table and they talk of Joel’s impending release. All the while, Joel is trying to stay calm. He convinces himself it was just an accident and that he hadn’t been around any women in what felt like an eternity and that’s what led him to get worked up. But when Y/N leaves to go home he feels a kind of dull longing in the bottom of his gut. A different kind of longing then what he had felt for a younger Y/N. Joel tells himself not to repress for the first goddamn time in his life and let himself feel. And he does. He feels butterflies and yearning and need, a great big need inside himself. And then he knows what else he feels: the gut-wrenching, unquenchable sensation of love and beneath that, primal, base, and self-loathing: desire .

In his solo cell (that he has acquired because he is the pod boss and respected) he jerks off to those thoughts, touches himself to those feelings. When he cums unusually hard, he feels an overwhelming amount of shame. Of this, Joel knows, he will never ever tell another soul. Joel also knows he will not hurt his babygirl any more than he already has, intentionally or not, not ever. But then again, being a good, upstanding man has never really quite been in his arsenal, has it?

Tags (LMK if you wanna be tagged!): @toxicanonymity @motelprincess444 @epicrainbowsheep @anama-cara @sheepdogchick3

@denileisariver @lochnymph @mewantpeepaw @fandomdaydreamer @r3dheadedwitch

PLEASE COMMENT LIKE REBLOG IM BEGGING IM PLEADING IM CRYING

PART 2

Violent Heart Masterlist

Full Masterlist of all my work

271 notes · View notes

picaroroboto · 3 months ago

Text

Family, sacrifice, and heroism in Canto 7

Let me preface by saying that as common as they are in fiction, tropes and themes about family can be hard to talk about because family can be a difficult topic for many people, and as a meta poster I don't want to reveal too much about my own issues while trying to discuss video games. But on a post I made the other day about Ryoshu a commenter left a note to the effect of "are any parents actually suited to being parents?" and I think those words are gonna stick in me for a while.

On that note Don Quixote the First Kindred AKA Dad Quixote is probably one of those sort of imperfect parents, given how he created his Family largely to heal his own loneliness. There is lots of genuine love between him and his Kindred, no doubt or argument there, but the suffering the Bloodfiends went through while following his orders not to drink blood seems tatamount to abuse and neglect. Restraining their appetite in order to not harm humans is a heroic sacrifice for the greater good, but the others lacked his strength of willpower to endure the hunger - maybe he could power through it knowing it's a heroic sacrifice, but the rest don't feel the same because heroism is his dream and not theirs. It could be said that as a parent he holds his children to high expectations that they in the end are unable to reach.

Of course what they do to him in return is terrible, downright biblical torture with the Christ-like imagery of being nailed to a structure, but worse than the physical suffering is the way he is psychologically broken by the loss of his dream, not just the adventure with Sancho but the way his children betrayed his ideal of coexistence. Now believing his dream to have always been impossible, he turns from his heroic sacrifice for the greater good and resigns himself to sacrificing his dream for the good of the family, at the expense of both his great suffering and the lives of human victims of La Manchaland. At one point he says "I am no longer the only one with claim to my body? It must be used...for the good of my Children..." He may be the Father of the Bloodfiend clan but here he expresses something like a distressing view of motherhood that forces women to devote everything to their families.

And the ideal he sacrificed and sacrificed for wasn't even his, at least not at first, he picked it up from Bari and her stories. Ironically her title of "Knight of the White Moon", in the original novel it belonged to a character who was trying on behalf of Quixote's family to return him to sanity, essentially beating him at his own game by dressing up as a knight and challenging him to a duel on the condition that he'd return home if he lost. The best scenes in the novel are ones where other characters get drawn into Quixote's madness and are left wondering who is actually crazy here: him, me, or the whole world? Like one of my favorite scenes, where he mistakes a group of police and the chain gang they are leading for slavers with captives, and charges and frees the prisoners - like he's got a point there, the incarceration system is little different than slavery with any other name.

Back to Limbus, the Sinner Don Quixote often seems like a fool because she just can't understand that The City is an incredibly unjust, corrupt place, but like her original she is also a question - who is the fool here: the cynical world, or the idiot who believes in justice? Time and again her belief leads the Sinners into trouble, or leads to no result at all, but because she keeps trying to believe, the other Sinners get infected by her optimism a little and are there to push her back when she's on the verge of abandoning her principles once her memories return and she sees what has been done to her father.

I know I said at the start that I don't want to reveal much about myself in meta, but I have a thing for stories that treat heroism seriously. Allowing your hero to see both the dark and the light in the world, to be tested by ambiguity and failure and suffering, makes them so much better than a story where the hero always wins just because they're the hero; a battered and imperfect hero in an unjust world becomes a light amidst darkness like a star in the night...anyways that's why I love Canto 7, even the anime-like action sequences and power of friendship moment, because it is truly fitting. Don the Sinner has awoken from the dream in learning her past and having to fight a battle that was neither just nor easy, but has also chosen to continue dreaming, in choosing to continue believing in things like justice and friendship despite everything she's been through and will continue to go through on her journey.

...And I guess this post got away from me and my original intent, but that's what happens when you set off on an adventure, isn't it?

#limbus company #don quixote lcb #canto 7 #canto 7 spoilers #meta posting on my art blog

53 notes · View notes

johannestevans · 5 months ago

Text

Strange Liberty

Dark fantasy fiction. A young man convicted of manslaughter is sent to a magical prison.

Rated M, 27.5k, dark fantasy with some M/M dark romance on the side.

Salvo Caine, cursed with a magically sapping touch, is convicted of manslaughter and dispatched to an island prison. Once there, he’s offered limited freedom — and affection — by the cold and manipulative prison warden, Guillaume Villiers.

Read on Medium / / Read on Patreon / / Leave a tip.

Good bit of age gap sexiness, and some medical and care-giving kink as well. Note CWs for the expected violence of the prison system; past chronic illness and child neglect; threats of, discussion of, and attempted sexual violence; traumatic death; power struggles and fucked-up dynamics.

----

He arrives in the middle of the fucking night, and Redford leans up against the open trap, watching as the guards come in. They’re all soaked through from the fucking rain, must have had a bad boat trip over – he looks fucking tiny in between all the guards coming in with him. Half a dozen guards would normally be the standard to transport a whole coach of new meat, but they always put a whole unit alongside this sort of inmate.

When the guards part, Redford gets a good look at him, slim and slight with a thick cloud of hair and very big eyes. His ankles and his wrists are cuffed, chains running between the four points and making him move slow.

He stumbles and collapses to the floor on his knees and elbows, making the chains rattle, and Redford can’t even hear the names the guards call him or the things they snap at him over the roar of everybody else watching him come in.

Already, he’d been able to hear the quieter talk and laughter up and down the rows of cells, prisoners talking about him – now, on the floor with his ass in the air, that’s too much not to react to.

“That arse looks like it’ll bruise nice and easy!” he hears Rand call from the floor below, and he hears other jeers and compliments – about the lad’s ass, about his thighs, how tight his boycunt’ll be, how pretty his lips are, how they’ll be happy to show him what real men get up to behind bars.

It’s always like this, with the cuffed mages.

Half the men in this prison have suffered at the hands of magic-users like them, and even if they hadn’t, the attitudes they come in with are enough to hate them over. Even the big, more muscular ones get this sort of intimidation – they’re usually arrogant sorts, used to relying on their magic instead of any strength or agility, and with their magic dampened, they end up pretty easy to push around, and they deserve it, too.

Haughty, over educated, always acting like they’re too good to be in here with the rest of them.

Redford is the first to get at him in the morning when he comes out of the new arrivals’ cell. He doesn’t look like he’s slept, dark bags under his eyes, his lips chapped and bitten bruised, and he doesn’t meet a single man’s eye as he nervously steps out of his cell.

Red shoves him up against the wall, and he drags in a hitched breath, his big eyes going wide – Red’s belly is flattening him back against the stone, and he can feel him trembling, feel how warm he is. Red leans in and breathes on the side of his neck, blows air over his ear, but he doesn’t say anything.

“How long are you in for, sweetheart?” Redford asks softly. “You even know what deep shit you’re in?”

The new meat’s gaze is fixed on Red’s upper chest instead of his face.

There’s a clicking of a tongue behind him, and Redford steps back from the new inmate, making him drop like a weight. He stands back and straight to attention as he glances back at the warden, who’s standing in the centre of the corridor, leaning on his cane.

“Warden Villiers,” Red says.

“I wish you weren’t so quick to make new acquaintances at times, Mr Redford,” Villiers says mildly, and Red grins at him. “In my office, Mr Caine, if you would.”

Caine cringes, looks anxiously between Redford and Villiers both, and when he looks up to meet Red’s eyes for the first time, there’s something pleading in them. It only lasts a second, and then he’s trailing after Villiers down the corridor.

Redford watches them go, and hums thoughtfully to himself before he heads to eat.

* * *

Salvo shivers as he follows up the stairs to Villiers’ office, feels the chill on the back of his neck, insinuating itself under his skin. Villiers moves slowly, leaning heavily on his cane for the support it can give him as they ascend – he speeds up a little once they’re on even ground. Salvo risks looking up at the older man as they move, looks at how thin he is – even thinner than Salvo is himself, pointy and angular under his black suit, which is narrowly tailored.

He wears boots instead of shoes, although they’re not like the guards’ boots. These barely make any noise at all on the smooth lacquered floors, and they come in tight to the ankle and the foot.

A guard opens the door for Villiers, and Villiers nods his head for Salvo to step into the room ahead of him.

After crossing the threshold, painfully aware of Villiers’ gaze on the back of his neck, he goes to stand in the middle of the room, in front of Villiers’ desk.

It’s warmer in here than in the prison proper, a fire crackling in the hearth, which has a firmly bolted set of guards around it and a very small trap on the front with only just enough space to reach in and move coals and kindling.

“Thank you, Rusk, you’re relieved.”

“… Sir? But he’s, um…”

“I have a firm handle on our new addition, Rusk, I don’t need your assistance.”

Villiers closes the door behind the guard, and Salvo hears his bootsteps recede down the corridor.

Salvo swallows as Villiers slides the lock across and then moves into the room. He sets his cane in a bucket with an umbrella to one side, and Salvo watches the way he favours his good leg as he moves across the room, laying his hands on the side of a bookshelf, then on his desk, to support himself.

“Are you frightened?” Villiers asks.

Salvo doesn’t know what the correct answer is, and says nothing.

Villiers goes on, as if he’d said yes, “I would be too. You heard the baying of those jackals out there as you arrived – fresh meat, they called you. And those men are passionate carnivores.”

Salvo presses his lips together, gripping his fingers against one another in front of his belly, and he risks a glance up at Villiers’ face. It’s a somewhat handsome face, although severely featured – his eyes are a dark blue, his eyebrows thick and dark in colour, his upper lip very thin, his lower lip thicker. He’s got very thin skin, and in places Salvo can see the blue show through of his veins, especially on the side of his neck and where his throat adjoins his head.

His face droops on one side.

“You had a stroke?” Salvo asks. He doesn’t mean to ask the question – it comes out of his mouth unbidden, and when Villiers smirks at him, the smile is lopsided, stronger on the left side of his face than his right.

“That’s right,” he says quietly. “You were a nurse, yes?”

“No,” says Salvo. “I’m just a care assistant.”

“You didn’t want to pursue nursing?”

“Didn’t have the marks for university. I was looking for an apprenticeship, but it’s hard to get a place.” He frowns, and looks down at the rug beneath their feet, an antique thing with a dark green and blue pattern. “Won’t be able to get one now.”

“Why not?”

“DBS check.”

“Magical crimes aren’t always included on mundane criminal records,” Villiers says mildly. “It’s decided on a case-by-case basis upon your release.”

Salvo doesn’t say anything, but he does exhale, feeling at the same time relieved, and also as if a trap is being laid for him.

“Why am I here?” he asks.

“I think you should know that by now,” says Villiers snidely, and Salvo presses his lips together, clenching his jaw to keep from snapping back, because that is a trap.

“Why am I in your office, sir?”

“Well, that’s rather up to you,” Villiers says, his voice softer now. His boots still don’t make any sound as he comes out from behind his desk, and Salvo doesn’t move as he watches the shadow of the other man in his peripheral vision, feels him come closer. The older man’s breath is warm on the back of his neck, making Salvo shiver and have to resist leaning back into him – he smells very faintly of coffee, mostly smells of shaving foam and camphor oil. “Why would you like to be in my office, Mr Caine?”

“I don’t understand.”

“Young man, this is a prison filled to the brim with hardened criminals. Many of them, despite being so inclined, haven’t known the touch of a woman since they were incarcerated – pretty thing as you are, I’m sure you’ll do in a pinch.”

Salvo doesn’t say anything, but he can’t stop himself from letting out a short, abortive sound when Villiers lays his hands on his shoulders, grips them, presses his narrow thumbs into the tension on the back of his neck. He’s so unused to being touched, and it feels painfully good, makes his skin feel like it’s singing – he leans back into it, and he lets out another small noise, this one of loss, as Villiers steps away and releases him.

“Your fellow inmates will make use of you,” Villiers says, “and short of fucking you, I expect they’ll push you about a bit, bruise you, hurt you here and there. You’re an easy prospect to bully, with your magic dampened and that protection stripped from you. Do you want that?”

“To be bullied? No, I don’t think so.”

“And to have them fuck you?”

Salvo thinks of the noise it had made when he’d come in and they’d all been shouting and banging on the walls, laughing, how loud it had been. It had been… overwhelming.

He’s spent a long time avoiding crowds, groups of people, avoiding anyone who might be forward in trying to touch him, speak to him, want to fuck him. His whole body aches with want, but not for that.

“Are the guards meant to let them?” Salvo asks.

“No,” Villiers says. “Any guard I caught abusing an inmate, I’d have punished – any guard permitting it, I’d punish myself. The so-minded inmates tend to hide this sort of thing, of course, and guards rarely advertise it either.”

“That sounds like an excuse.”

“It is – but a true one. I don’t have enough guards to watch each man twenty-four hours a day, though, or even just the pretty ones who might prove a temptation.”

“Am I pretty?”

“In here? You’re a vision.”

“You’re suggesting something. An alternative.”

“Offering something, rather. Protection, if you’d like it.”

“From other inmates?”

“You’ll be with the general population through most of the day – work duties, recreation outdoors. But I can arrange particular bathing and bedding arrangements for you.”

“Bedding,” Salvo repeats.

“Quite,” the warden says. “A bed to lay your head on, no cellmates, no risk.”

“Except from you.”

“From me? Young man, what risk do you think I pose you? Look at me – an infirm old man, no risk to anybody at all.”

Salvo looks up at Villiers’ face again, at the sly expression there, the amusement writ in his glittering eyes and lopsided smile.

“What do you want, if not sex?”

“I’m offering out of the goodness of my heart,” Villiers says with utter insincerity, so transparent about it that Salvo almost marvels at it. “We both know you’re not a criminal like the majority of my other charges.”

“I’m a murderer.”

“A manslaughterer,” Villiers corrects him. His tone is surprisingly kind as he says, “I actually tried to refuse you, insist you go to a more appropriate institution than this one, but the decision was out of my hands.”

Salvo looks down at his own hands, gripping tightly at one another, tighter now. His knuckles hurt, and are going white from the clenching in his hands. “You’re not going to fuck me?”

“No. Have you had sex before?”

Salvo nods.

“Consensually?”

Salvo hesitates, not certain how to answer, but then he nods.

“Hm, well. Nonetheless, no.”

Salvo shifts his hands, and he feels the weight of the two metal bands around each of his wrists. When he’d been brought in last night, a chain had run between them to keep him halfway bound, but they’d taken that away when they’d left him to his cell. Now, the cuffs just sit around each of his wrists and ankles, simple bracelets of silver. He can see the sheen of the magic in them when he looks at them directly, watch the pulse of it through the metal in rhythm with his heartbeat – in rhythm with the magic inside him.

“You didn’t have to come to prison to have those fitted,” Villiers tells him. “You wouldn’t even have had to have them commissioned – any good doctor would have provided them free of charge.”

Salvo opens his mouth, closes it. “There is a gnawing hunger in me,” he whispers after a pause. “These cuffs prevent me from harming anybody, true, but they also prevent latent magic from flowing through me. I eat, but I starve; I drink, but I thirst. Ever since they snapped shut around my limbs my bones began to ache.”

“That hunger is part of your penance, then,” Villiers says, and Salvo closes his eyes, but nods his head. “I read the statement you gave at your trial, that you wish you’d chosen differently.”

“Wouldn’t you have?”

Villiers limps around the table and sinks down into his chair, making it creak, and Salvo automatically sits to keep his downcast eyes from being so close to Villiers’ face, to keep from keeping his stare.

“I thought it would be enough,” Salvo murmurs. “Separating myself from magical life, magical society, living and working with mundies. That I could keep myself intact, and still live.”

“You crossed paths with your victim by happenstance, I take it?”

“He wouldn’t have touched me, only he recognised me,” Salvo says. “Recognised my father’s features in mine. He caught my hand, and it was…”

He thinks of it often. Every day, every night, when he sleeps, when he wakes – it’s impossible not to think about. He thinks of how it was as though his flesh came suddenly alive after being halfway to comatose for so long, as though lightning were alive under his skin, sizzling out of his veins. He recalls craving more of it, the reflexive need to be closer, much closer, to sate the painful hunger in him.

“He didn’t know to— he didn’t think to push me off or away. He didn’t know that… He laughed, was delighted, and he kissed me back when I kissed him. I had effectively been fasting for years, near to a decade. I leeched from him all he had before I knew what I was doing.”

“A horrible way to die, I’m informed,” Villiers says. “To have the magic wrenched from you, sapped from your very cells – like having the blood bled from you all at once.”

“He didn’t have time to scream,” Salvo says. “But yes, it hurt him a great deal.”

“At least it was quick.”

“I fail to see a silver lining.”

“A guard will collect you when it’s time for lights out,” Villiers says. “Off you go.”

Salvo silently nods his head, and as he leaves the room, can’t help feeling he’s made some sort of deal with a devil, going along with the offer as given.

* * *

Redford watches the new mage as he comes back from the stairs, not with the warden this time – Villiers is a freak of some proportions, always likes the strong mages, always likes the trim and pretty ones.

“He used to be an assassin, you know,” he says when Caine finally comes down onto the main floor, and Caine glances his way, but doesn’t let his gaze flicker all the way up to Redford’s face. He stands there with his hands clasped in front of him, silent. “Villiers.”

“How the fuck was he an assassin with a bum leg?” asks Rosen next to him, and Pike grips the back of his neck as Redford laughs.

“He used to be an assassin,” Redford repeats. “Killed people the world over – then he had a stroke, couldn’t hack it anymore.”

“’Cause of his leg.”

“It’s not just the leg and the facial droop,” says Pike. His gaze is on Rosen’s neck as he keeps rubbing his thumb into the base of it. Redford can see the mark higher up on Rosen’s throat where Pike must have bitten him last night.

Caine has drifted closer to them, albeit without saying a word.

“Strokes on different sides of the body damage different parts of the brain,” says Pike. “Difficulties with language, or with writing, mathematics… But that can include differences in personality. He was a wild man before – he’s cold now. Collected, but cold, cautious.”

“You speak as though you know personally,” says Caine, but he doesn’t lift his eyes up. “You don’t look old enough for all that.”

“I’m not so old,” says Pike, and Redford watches the way he looks at Caine, the way his eyes rove over the new meat’s body. He’s not interested in sex, of course – he likes a man for the blood inside him, and with a skinny little thing like Caine, there’s not much blood to spare, even without the taint he’d complained before that the cuffs leave on the stuff when you tap the barrel.

“He was killing into his forties,” Redford says. “He’s fifty-six now, had the stroke years back. Came to be warden here after getting out of rehab.”

“His personality used to be different?” Caine asks.

“Why?” Redford asks mildly. “You like his personality now?”

Caine might not speak much, but he’s got a nice voice. It’s stronger, warmer, than Redford would have thought from the looks of him, so slim with his big brown eyes, the fluff of his dark curls around his head.

Caine doesn’t answer, so Redford reaches out and grips him by the hair, slides his fingers through the curls and tightens his hold experimentally – Caine goes loose and breathless immediately, his lips parting, his eyes widening. A blush darkens his cheeks and his knees look loose. He doesn’t try to drag away, doesn’t seem to be following Redford’s hand out of reflex, either – he’s up on his toes, pushing up into more of the touch.

“Leave the kid alone, Redford!” barks Cornell from the other side of the hall, and Redford lets him go.

“You have a heartbeat like a mouse’s,” Pike says. He’s a freak, and doesn’t make any attempt to hide it – Caine, to his credit, doesn’t let it put him off. “Quiet and fast.”

“What are you in for?” Rosen asks, and Caine’s eyes flicker up to him. Rosen’s smaller than he is, and he looks Rosen in the eyes.

“You first,” he says.

“I killed a guy,” says Rosen, and Caine stares at him, his eyes widening further, his lips parting.

“You did?” he asks, and Rosen laughs before Pike slaps him upside the head.

“Theft,” Rosen says, chuckling. “Cars. A bus. A train, they charged me for, but I didn’t steal that.”

“Only ‘cause you couldn’t drive it off the tracks,” Redford says, and Rosen laughs. “Now you.”

“I killed a man,” says Caine, and Rosen laughs again.

Caine doesn’t. He stands there with his hands still clasped in that way he has, still. He looks like a little statuette of a saint.

“Oh, shit,” says Rosen. “He have it coming?”

Caine’s gaze flickers to Redford’s chest, but not all the way up to his face. “No,” he says. He looks like he’s sad about it, like he regrets it, but then his eyes shift upwards and he meets Redford’s gaze, something in Caine’s face goes hard. “Do you?”

Red grins down at him, and as soon as he shows his teeth, Caine retreats, turning away – one of the guards takes him through his paces, shows him around the place, tells him the schedule.

The evening time, through, he disappears.

He doesn’t stay in the new transplants’ cell and doesn’t get moved in with someone else’s either – Redford wonders if he’s been put in confinement on his own, all the better to keep him “safe”, but when he’s passing Beck Virgo’s cell a little before lights out, Beck tells him.

“Saw him out of the window,” he murmurs as Red passes him a cigarette through the trap. “Trailing behind Villiers like a fucking puppy.”

“Huh,” Redford murmurs, and thinks on that as he continues down the corridor.

* * *

The guest bedroom in Villiers’ lodge, separate from the prison proper, is modest, warm, and comfortable.

It’s nothing like the cell he’d been in, nor the cells that he’d seen in the prison – each has rather narrow bunks, thin mattresses, thin blankets, battered pillows. The sheets are cheap, made of crisp white cloth, and they’re all laundered en masse in the basement, but not with particularly forgiving products. A prison bed is not meant to be a place of comfort or ease, after all, nor the cells themselves.

This guest bedroom is made to serve one man, a lush double bed in the middle of the room, the bedspread red and silken, the fabric smooth under his fingers. There’s a chair and a desk to the side of the room, and Salvo stands with his hands rested on the desk, looking out over the hill.

The window doesn’t open, is just a set of wide panes, but at least there are no bars. Salvo can see the old stone sprawl of the prison over the island, can see the forestry either side; in the distance, he can see the pier, a boat tethered and waiting. The waters are choppy this evening, and although he can’t hear the wind through the thick glazed glass, he can see the trees whipping one way and the other.

“Comfortable enough for you?” asks Villiers, standing in the doorway.

He’s undressed, and Salvo stares at his body – he’s still wearing his suit trousers, but instead of his boots he’s wearing crushed velvet slippers, and belted over his chest he’s wearing a fine silk brocade smoking jacket, green and gold. If he’s wearing a shirt underneath, it has a low collar or none at all – where the smoking jacket is open, Salvo can see the edges of Villiers’ collarbone, the hollows in it; further down, he can see the curls of hair on his chest.

Salvo’s hands twitch at his sides, and his mouth feels dry.

“Yes,” he says. “Yes, thank you. Is there some hidden consequence about to be sprung on me?”

“Am I going to clamber into bed with you, you mean?” Villiers asks, arching one eyebrow. “No, young man, I’m going to sleep in my own bed, where I belong. This door will be locked as I depart – you have your own bathroom, where you might pursue your evening ablutions, take a shower, and so forth. Any items you purchase from the commissary, books from the library, items you receive by post once your approval comes through, you might keep all these things here in your bedroom.

“In the event prisoners are confined to their cells during day time, you will be escorted to my office, whereupon you will either rest there with me or be brought here and locked in. Beyond such extenuating circumstances, however, you will not be able to return to your room here in the course of a day – you might want to keep that in mind when you consider what to bring out with you, your books, writing implements, and so on.”

“Yes, sir,” Salvo says. “Do you want me to be raped, sir?”

“What a curious question,” Villiers says, his blue eyes dark, his smile still dangerously sly. “Why ever would you ask it? I’ve made rather unorthodox choices if my desire was to have you victimised, bringing you here, isolated from the other prisoners, or even the guards.”

“I’ve never been at home with unorthodoxy,” Salvo says honestly, looking cautiously at the other man. “It strikes me as unpredictable.”

“I’m predictable enough,” Villiers murmurs. “I’m sure you’ll have the way of it quite soon.”

“They said you used to be very different, the other prisoners. Before you had a stroke.”

“What would they know of it?”

“Only hearsay, I suppose.”

“Hearsay, yes. Hearsay, and rumour.”

“Is it true?”

“Does it matter?”

“Why wouldn’t it?”

“If I am different than I was before my stroke, the change is now permanent. What does it matter to you, young man, if I was different before now?”

“Aren’t you interested in how different I was, before I became an inmate here?” Salvo asks.

It’s the right question, and posed right too – Villiers stares at him, his expression retaining exactly the same slightly smug expression it had before, and then he exhales, smiles, adjusts his grip on his cane. He seems satisfied.

“We’ve plenty of time to get to know one another, Mr Caine. And many evenings ahead of us to do so.”

“Is that the purpose of my being here?” Salvo asks, and Villiers chuckles quietly, pulling the door closed and locking it behind him.

Salvo takes to his bed and sleeps well despite it all.

* * *

Salvo Caine is a funny sort.

Red doesn’t see any problem some mages being raped when they come into the nick, the ones that deserve it – there are men in this place who’ve spent all their years chained or controlled by very powerful or just quite sadistic sorcerers, and it’s more than a little catharsis for them to take out all that pain on whoever the fuck comes in chained and manacled. They go all their days able to hurt anybody they like, able to get away with all sorts, and when they finally get done for it, the tables are turned on them, and suddenly the scum under their feet get to turn around and give them the same shit back.

It’s not nice, no, and maybe it’s not really moral, but he couldn’t give a fuck.

Morals and ethics are limited in a place like this – when you live out your nights and half your days in a little grey box with bars on the door, there’s no fucking space for them. Red himself has never gone in much for rape – it doesn’t turn him on like it does some of the others, and he’s got a job concentrating on keeping his cock hard if he’s wrestling with whoever’s underneath him in the process, but it’s not because he cares that it’s fucking wrong, any more than punching a man’s lights out is wrong. If he deserves it, if he’s fucking earned it, who cares?

But in all honesty, he doesn’t much go in for men at all, although there’s as little room here for choice as there is morals and ethics – when he fucks a lad in here, it’s typically the ones like Salvo Caine. Round in the face, with a bit of plumpness to them, enough softness to sink into – his hair is soft too, all fluffy with thick dark curls, and with his big fucking eyes, he looks girlish enough, even without turning him around.

In all honesty, soft as it might fucking make him, it’s not the sex he misses – he wasn’t married, no, but he had a few regular women he’d take up with depending on where he was working, and it was the sharing a bed he missed, the feeling of someone sleeping beside him, smelling her perfume, touching her hair.

Caine is an odd duck, and it’s not like he could be mistaken for a girl to glance at him, at the shape of his shoulders or his body, the way he moves. He’s not a very big lad – he’s plump and has good flesh on him, but there’s a delicacy to him, pear-shaped and short, most of the plushness around his middle and his thighs, less on his chest and about his shoulders. He walks very carefully, like he’s nervous of making any noise at all.

Red’s not surprised when he hears someone talking about it, about what he’s in for – it’s not as if Caine’s going to be the only lad in the nick for something that wasn’t his fucking fault, something that basically amounted to a twist of fate or an accident, but that doesn’t mean he has to like it, has to approve of it.

All his life, he’s made certain trade-offs – as a lad when he was training up for the glass trade, he remembers learning how to fiddle the books from the out, remembers laughing conversations as they bought sand or panes or whatever else, about how much one thing was and how much they’d write down it was. Smuggling had been a pretty natural extension of it all, once he was running his own business, bringing things in from abroad and secreting the illicit alongside the legit.

It had been getting into the latter that had got him fucking pinched, working in with the Pikes out of Lashton and trafficking too much in drugs and highs for it to be ignored or overlooked.

It wasn’t that he hadn’t cared, per se – that’d be fucking stupid, it’s not like he enjoys it here – but he had felt the weight getting bigger and bigger, felt the other shoe getting too heavy not to drop, felt the shadow of it all over his head. When he’d come home to find the coppers going through his house and the pig leaning against the wall with the warrant in his hands, at the same time as the pit had gone out of his stomach and nausea had come clawing up his throat, he’d even felt a bit of relief.

Not out of guilt – who’d feel guilty for stealing from the fucking king? Cunt’s in a fucking coma, he’s not missing any of the tax – but just because he couldn’t bear the anticipation of it, of waiting for when he was going to get caught, and then the anticipation was gone and done and dusted.

And this is punishment enough – the fucking boredom of it, every day the same, no activity to take up your time except chat, books, and working the body in between working shifts. It’s not what people think the punishment will be in prison, but it fucking is.

Caine often filters over to them in the course of his days ahead for all Red threatens him, and he seems decently at home with them, at home with Pike and Rosen and all.

Red’s known this junior Pike a few years – he’d seen him about for years even before he’d taken on the smuggling jobs himself, and more than once on the outside, he and Pike had gone out for pints together, or at the least, Pike would find Red where he was at the bar and insist on paying for his drinks, always flush with cash.

“What do you think of him?” Pike asks now as Caine shuffles obediently off after Cornell to be escorted up to Villiers’ house, laying his chin on his hand and watching thoughtfully as Caine’s shadow disappears after the rest of him. “I bet he’d taste fucking great if it weren’t for them cuffs.”

“You like ‘em with a bit of meat on them, don’t you?” Red asks, and Pike laughs, laying his arm around Rosen’s shoulder.

“Clearly,” he says.

“Mind your tongue, or else you’ll not be drinking from me again,” says Rosen, flicking Pike’s hand, but he’s smiling all the while, and Pike chuckles, nipping at the shell of his ear.

“I’m waiting anyway,” Pike says seductively. “Keeps you from getting anaemic.”

“Prick,” mutters Rosen, but he’s gone from smiling now to grinning, and Red smiles at him.

He likes Rosen well enough – he’d come in a month before Pike had, and Red had stepped in to keep some of the lads on 10 from roughing him up for being a Jew. It’s all very well roughing a lad up for having done something, it’s another for doing it because he’s had his cock clipped and says his prayers on Friday nights instead of Sunday mornings.

“He’s lived a fucked-up life,” Red says. “But you’d be hard-pressed finding a man in here that hadn’t. I don’t think he should be in here, anyway.”

“Why not?” Rosen asks. “He did kill that man.”

“Not on purpose,” Red says, shrugging. “They only take a hard line on it ‘cause they can’t do anything until after someone gets hurts, lads like him, and they wish they could do it from the out. He’s just another sort of vampire, really – he can’t help the way he is.”

“He can live without it,” Pike points out, his hands twitching – he wants a cigarette, Red supposes, but he can’t have one until tomorrow unless he wants to set off one of the fucking smoke detectors. “Then again, technically, so I can I.”

“Can you?” Rosen asks, raising his eyebrows, and Red looks at him in surprise as well, but Pike shrugs his shoulders.

“Wouldn’t be comfortable by any means, but I could probably get by on an iron-rich diet, a lot of raw and rare meat, shit like that. Vampirism is a bit different in a fae body than a human one – we get a bit more sustenance from magic than you sorts do, depending on the families we come from.” Pike exhales the way he might if he had a cigarette to hand, blows out air and obviously doesn’t find it quite satisfactory. “I think Caine did the best thing he could. Lived amongst mundies, worked with them – made sure anyone he might touch wouldn’t be too affected by it in the event he sapped anything from them. That man reached for him, he said, touched him without thinking – some family friend or the like. He should have fucking remembered who he was, what touching the man would do to him.”

“You’d think the guilt would be enough punishment,” Rosen says quietly. “I think it’d kill me, that sort of guilt – to know I’d killed a man, a man I’d known, liked, loved, even. Without even realising it was him, without a cause. Without coming in here as well.”

“You have enough guilt just by living, seems to me,” Red says, and Rosen laughs, then comes over looking a bit more thoughtful, pensive.

“And him,” he says quietly. “Him too.”

* * *

Salvo receives his work duty after a few days in the prison – basic enchantment work. He has to sit an exam to show he knows how to write out the symbols, to show that he knows how to properly draw them or carve them into a piece of material. His cuffs remain in place, of course, and none of the prisoners are permitted to charge their enchantments themselves anyway to keep people from enchanting weapons or explosives – they simply lay out the runes and they’re enchanted later, off the island.

Some of the prisoners are enchanting furniture and larger pieces of mechanism and machinery, but judging by how they talk to one another, how they chat, several of them were tradesmen or wizards on the outside – they’re at home with magical plumbing and complex warding structures, some of them with licenses under their belts and specialist training. Salvo is not given anything so complex or large: he paints the enchantments into little gift items, charming welcome mats to clean off shoes, charming keys and small signs to create small lights, even enchanting a few toys here and there.

Every day is the same: he goes down to the prison for breakfast, eats, attends his work duty, eats lunch, finishes his work, has some free time, which he often spends reading or sitting quietly, listening to others talk. Generally, he gravitates toward Rufus Redford – he prefers “Red” to Rufus, and Salvo doesn’t fault him that – and his friends: Callum Pike and Ira Rosen.

Red is a confident man, tall, square, and thick with muscle – he’s one of the tradesmen that works in enchantment, although he doesn’t use precisely the same skills he had on the outside. He’s a trained magical glazier, apprenticed when he was fourteen and left school early to take up the work – he’s worked for years with huge panes of glass, fitted windows in all kinds of public buildings, even in some of the royal palaces, even in Camelot Castle itself – but here on the prison work detail he mostly enchants craftsman’s tools or complex pieces of magical machinery, scaffolding, and things like that.

According to chatter around the prison, Red is in on tax fraud on a large scale, and a lot of organised theft that he’d done through his work, never doing the stealing himself, but organising for others to do it – Salvo gets the impression that he and Pike were already familiar with one another before meeting in prison.

Pike is in for some violent convictions – not murder, mostly aggravated assault and battery charges – alongside a long history of drug trafficking offences, and has been inside for short stretches twice before; like Red, Rosen is in prison for the first time, although Rosen’s sentence is a good deal shorter.

Rosen’s only going to be inside for another twelve to eighteen months – Red has close to a decade left on his sentence.

“How long you got?” he asks one afternoon at lunch, and Salvo looks up from his plate to meet Red’s brown-eyed gaze. He has a few scars on his face, and on the backs of his hands – one, on his forehead and cutting through his eyebrow, is from an enchantment he messed up when he was scarcely eighteen, the pane of glass exploding outwards and the shard only narrowly missing his eye.

Rosen and Pike aren’t paying attention, engaging in a very flirtatious game that Salvo can’t determine the precise rules of, but seems to involve a lot of trying to finger one another’s wrists while kicking each other under the table.

“Six years,” Salvo answers.

“That’s a long time for an accident,” Red says disapprovingly. “Half my sentence, that, and I did what I did on purpose.”

“No one died from what you did,” Salvo points out, and Red sighs, shaking his head. “The point was that I was irresponsible, I think. That I should have taken better precaution, should have worn cuffs like these.”

“They hurt, don’t they?” Red asks, raising his eyebrows, and when Salvo doesn’t say anything, he says, “I’ve seen a lot of mages wear those – here inside, sure, but in my line of work too, seen cloistered mages have cuffs like that, to keep them from going mad from the amount of magic around them, or to keep them from harming others. One thing to wear them for a quick outing outward, or to opt into wearing them out of some fucked up religious sadomasochism – one man’s torture is another man’s kink and all that – but it’s another to wear them every day just to fucking live, isn’t it?”

Salvo looks back at him, and then asks, “Is this you showing compassion for my perspective, the better to catch me by surprise when you turn on me?”

“And when am I gonna get the opportunity to turn on you, when you’re Villiers’ special little lad?” Red asks dryly, tilting his head and looking back at him with his lips twisted in a grin. He’s got uneven teeth – his jaw’s slightly uneven, Salvo thinks, from when he boxed as a teenager and a young man – and Salvo finds that he likes that. He likes how they look, like how much his teeth show his expression when he smiles. “Follow you back to the old man’s house after dark?”

“Don’t tell me you’re jealous of the warden’s special attention,” Salvo says.

“Something tells me I’m not his type,” Red says.

Salvo wonders what Red would say, if Salvo told him. If Salvo told him Villiers hasn’t touched him yet, nor seemed even to want to – if Salvo told him that he sleeps in his own very comfortable bed, in his own room, that Villiers barely even sees him most days, let alone speaks to him, with him.

Most nights, he’s escorted back to Villiers’ house by a guard, doesn’t walk back with Villiers at all, and Villiers has already retired to his office or his own bedroom for the evening. Would Red believe him, if Salvo said that Villiers hasn’t touched him yet, and he’s not sure the old man ever will? Does Salvo even believe the latter part himself?

“Does he frighten you?” Salvo asks.

“Villiers?”

“Yes.”

“He’s a frightening man,” Red says. “Scary sonuvabitch, he is.”

“You’re a good deal bigger than he is,” Salvo points out. “He hasn’t a size advantage on you as he might on me – quite the opposite, in fact. And he’s elderly, and… infirm.”

“That the word he used?” Red asks wryly, insightful in a way that Salvo might like, if he let himself like men much –if he let himself like anyone who wasn’t a mundie, any longer. “Infirm?” When Salvo doesn’t reply, Red says, “He likes that people think of him that way, people that don’t know what he is, don’t have an idea of who he is. He might be crippled by that stroke of his, but that doesn’t make him any less fucking lethal. It’s injured dogs that’ll harm you the worst, when it comes down to it. They’ve got less to lose.”

“Only when you have them cornered,” Salvo replies, setting his fork down on his plate. “An injured dog is only a threat once you start trying to corral it – d’you really think the old man is dangerous to you now, here?”

“He knows who I am, knows my name, has my file, holds the key to my lock-up,” Red says. “To everyone outside of this fucking place, I’m a bastard with a laundry list of things to punish me for, on an island far away from everybody – here, I’m nothing, and he’s God.”

Salvo considers this, considering too the fact that Villiers is more his god than Red’s, has more power over him – has even more privacy to do to Salvo as he pleases than he might Red, where there at least are, if not other prisoners as witnesses, there are other guards. Salvo has nothing, alone in Villiers’ house with him, but his word and Villiers’ own.

“I’m an atheist,” decides Salvo, and that makes Red laugh – he has a good laugh, barking, sort of rough and throaty – before he turns back to the others to talk to them.

On Thursdays, the allotted day of his prisoner number, Salvo goes into the prison library and withdraws three books – the limit – and throughout the week returns them through the slot before waiting impatiently for his opportunity to retrieve new books.

He has no one to call on to transfer money to him for the commissary, and he’s on a long waiting list for a prisoner assistance program on the mainland to get back to his letter to see about transferring some money from his own accounts, so he doesn’t buy anything there – the prisoner wages for their labour are low, though not as low as they are in mundie prisons, he’s fairly certain. A day’s labour can actually buy you something, anyway.

“You have a very fine hand,” Villiers remarks one Thursday evening as they walk back to Villiers’ lodge together. It’s raining, but the rain isn’t especially heavy, just falls in a very fine mist that sticks to his hair and the back of his neck and his hands. He’s carrying his books inside the leather satchel Villiers had handed him for the purpose, to keep them from getting wet. “I examined your handiwork from today. How long has it been since last you pursued enchantment?”

“Not so long,” Salvo murmurs. “I used to whittle when I was a child – it was supposed to hone my concentration, keep me calm. I wasn’t very good at animals – I was a bit better at architecture, at carving lighthouses, cabins, castles, towers. Enchantment was a bit more concentrated still, carving very small figures in place – I’d carve buildings and make them light up, make windmills turn, water flow, similar to the kind of stuff I’m doing now.”

“Those skills will serve you well here,” Villiers says. “Would that schools were upfront about what education will best serve a young person when they’re inevitably incarcerated.”

“Inevitably?” Salvo asks, and Villiers makes a quiet, amused sound.

“Something of an inevitability with you, young man,” he says, and the two of them step into the corridor, Villiers leading Salvo not to the bedroom that serves as his cell but through to a small sitting room, some armchairs beside a fire, a chess table set up and waiting. “Do you play?”

“Not really,” Salvo says. “I whittled some sets, but never liked to use them.”

“I’ve never been much of a man for the game myself,” Villiers says, sinking into one of the armchairs and gesturing with one long-fingered hand for Salvo to take the other seat, which Salvo does. This is only the third time he and Villiers have sat down together once they’re in the house – the first time, when Villiers had first brought him up here, a cold night a week back where Villiers had invited him to read beside the fire where it was warmer than in his room, and now. “It’s the sort of thing expected of a man my age, a penchant for chess games and long hours whiled away with a broadsheet newspaper.”

“You must resent it,” Salvo says as he picks up a pawn and moves it forward. “Getting old – being disabled.”

“Of course I resent it,” Villiers says mildly, moving a knight. “You would resent it too, and will do, as you grow older – you chose to remain intact, after all, no matter the risk it posed others. You only accepted this condition of chronic pain when it was forced upon you. Age forces such things upon us all.”

Salvo says nothing, reaching forward for the next piece. “You were an assassin, before. That’s what they say about you.”

“I was,” Villiers says, his lips twitching. “Although outside of a blunt and straightforward place like this, various polite epithets are applied to the profession instead – attaché, intelligence agent. I served the crown a good many years – from the age of fifteen onwards.”

Salvo frowns, furrowing his brow. It’s one thing for a man to be apprenticed as a glazier as a teenager – as an assassin seems a bit much. “What, you were in the army?”

“I was enrolled in a private school,” Villiers says. “A military school in Scotland, Sons of Cumhaill. I was born in London, not in a particularly affluent area, but I earned a scholarship as a young boy, and boarded from then onwards. Sons of Cumhaill, upon its founding a millennium back, was originally a school for the children of knights and high-ranking battle mages, or for titled youths in need of blooding before they might lead their family lines. The reason for dispatching one’s children there has changed, but much of the syllabus remains the same – training in traditional weapons, battle magic, poisons and venoms, battle tactics, and so on, alongside a rather robust focus in other valuable subjects. History, literature and culture, magical sciences, languages, politics, economics…” He gestures vaguely with his weaker hand – he can’t lift the arm as high as he can his other, and the hand is a little limper on the wrist than seems entirely right, the fingers unable to complete the easy movement the ones on his other hand can. “A feeder school today for the army, for certain areas of the civil service, for the Knights’ Circle.”

“Wow,” Salvo says, and he’s unable to hold back his curiosity as he looks repeatedly between the board and Villiers’ face. Villiers isn’t as old as those he’d worked with in the care facility, many of whom were in the later stages of dementia or struggling with other debilitating and degenerative conditions, but he’d always enjoyed the aspect of the job that concerned making conversation, listening to older, wiser people talk about their lives.

Salvo’s never been an adventurous sort and doubts he ever will be, lacks the natural appetite for such things, but despite not being very interesting himself, he’s always enjoyed showing interest in other people, talking to them.

“Wow?” Villiers repeats, arching his eyebrows, the very word coming out dripping with irony, not fitting his accent and his careful enunciation. “Does it truly seem so lofty?”

“Maybe a bit. Are you, um…” Salvo doesn’t know how to ask the question exactly as he moves his bishop. “How posh are you, exactly? Like, for you to get this scholarship, you’ve got a posh accent, but is that… yours, or did they train it into you?”

Villiers laughs. It’s a reserved laugh, compared to how some men laugh, his head turned to the side, and Salvo is fascinated at the stillness on one side of his face versus the other, the way the paralysed muscles can’t mirror those on the other side. He likes it, actually, sees a strange sort of handsomeness in it like he does in Red’s uneven teeth and jaw – like in some art, where people use asymmetry.

“I’m not as posh as I sound, no, though it’s too ingrained in me now to be an affectation,” Villiers says. “My father was a mundie, a drunk, walked out on my mother. In her youth, she was a dancer, a performer, and then became a teacher. She developed a magical intolerance after an injury, had to carefully measure her direct exposure to active magic and enchantment, so we lived in a non-magical area of town.”

“I knew a girl like that,” Salvo says. “Hers was part of an immune condition, but we went to the same magical therapy centre – for her, it was regular controlled exposure to help her body not go overboard with the allergic stuff, for me, I was meant to be trying to train in my power.”

“She had more success than you did, I hope.”

“I think a bit more,” Salvo murmurs, shrugging. “They tried her with a fleshturner, to see if they could reach in and basically just make her nervous system a bit less sensitive, but that didn’t work, and then they tried different steroids and stuff. When we were really young, you’d see she was sick with it, like she’d have hives and stuff always, and her skin was really bad – for me, going through puberty made my problem much worse, but for her, I think it really helped and made it more manageable.”

“These conditions aren’t as well-understood, and thus aren’t as predictable, as we would often like,” Villiers says, shrugging his shoulders.

“Were you resistant to magical treatment for the stroke? Same genetics?”

Villiers looks mildly surprised, and Salvo likes that look, as well, likes the slight wideness of his eyes, the way he leans in just slightly. “Quite right,” he says softly, and his gaze roves now over Salvo’s body, over his chest, his neck, before back up to his face. Salvo feels warm, and he wishes it was just arousal, wishes it was just him wanting to fuck the old man, but Villiers isn’t exactly his usual type, older, thinner, angular.

The hunger he’s feeling, the intimacy he wants, is… different.

“To return to my anecdote, it was nineteen eighty-three, two days after my birthday. My mother had sent me the new David Bowie on vinyl, and I snuck away from evening rec to listen to it up in the music tower. We weren’t meant to go up unaccompanied, cretins that we were, all of us, liable to damage instruments or try to dangle one another out of the window.”

Salvo blinks, trying to imagine it, Villiers, angular and awkward limbs in the way of a teenager, upside-down with some other boy gripping his ankles. “You got dangled out of a window?”

“More of a dangler of boys than a danglee by them, for my sins,” says Villiers, and Salvo hears himself laugh. When he moves his pawn, Villiers is quick to take it – so quick that their fingers brush against one another.

Villiers’ demeanour might be naturally cold and flat, but his fingers are warm, and Salvo feels the bone-deep ache inside his guts, the craving to get these bracelets off him and soak that warmth and the life that powers it into himself. Ever since poor Brownie died underneath him, ever since he felt the crackle of his magic into his fingertips, he’s hungered for it, wanted it. He’d never tasted it before – the power had been latent until he’d started puberty, and it had been weak at first. He’d sapped a little from people, but not enough to hurt them, just to make them a little tired and drawn. About the same time as he’d had a significant growth spurt, when he’d gotten taller and started to gain more weight and muscle, his absorption rate had changed too.

Augmented – significantly.

Overnight, it had gone from something of a joke, an unfortunate side effect of his company, even a party trick from time to time, to a genuine risk to everybody around him.

“So you listened to the record?” Salvo asks, and Villiers exhales.

“Not that night, no. His majesty, the king regent, was sitting at the music room’s piano when I made it up the stairs.”

Salvo doesn’t know that he’d be able to cope with it if he went out somewhere and came back to Myrddin Wyllt sat in front of him, or any knight, or any kind of famous person, really. He’s never really felt at home with fame and influence. “Would have figured him for the drums.”

Villiers chuckles. They’re each making their moves fairly quickly, black and white pieces lining up on each side of the board.

“And what, he asked you to kill someone?”

“Wanted me to kill the music teacher, in fact.”

“So you did it?”

“Gladly – I’d never liked him much, and he hated David Bowie.”

“Is that why the crown wanted him dead?”

“No, he was a spy, apparently,” Villiers says, although he frowns as he says it, furrowing his brow. “Something like that, anyway – you may well think ill of me, young man, but I didn’t ask many questions. A very attractive and powerful mage was offering me money and his permission – his approval, even – to kill a man in cold blood. I was hungry for the chance, and quite eager for it.”

There’s something chilling in how easily Villiers says it. Salvo couldn’t even call it a confession, he doesn’t think, because there is no implication of regret or shame, no play at secrecy or modesty – he says it openly and with a remembered relish, and his tongue comes out from his mouth to wet his lower lip. Salvo looks down at his knees, trying to make sense, or to somehow organise, the tumultuous emotions tumbling over one another inside him – the craving and the hunger and the desperate, greedy want; the shame and the horror and the disgust at the fact that he wants it; the faint wish that it was a regular lust, a normal person’s lust and desire; the jealousy at the ease Villiers finds, for being the sort of person he is.

“You didn’t…” he starts, and the question goes dry and dusty on his tongue.

“Hm?”

“You don’t sound guilty,” Salvo says. “You don’t sound— you killed him. And you talk about it like it was easy, like you always, like you always wanted it. Didn’t you have, don’t you have a conscience?”

“No,” says Villiers smugly, making his move. “I’ve never been burdened with such a thing. Since I was very young, what I craved, what I wanted, was blood, death, feeling another man’s life in my hands, and having the power and the privilege to snuff it out.”

Salvo feels a mix of sick and desperately, almost painfully hungry. His fingers twitch as he looks out over his pieces, at where Villiers has moved his king to. “Do you think it would be a burden, if you’d had one?”

“It burdens you, doesn’t it?” Villiers asks snidely.

“Check,” Salvo says, moving his queen, and Villiers looks critically down at the board, then sighs with a lopsided smile that genuinely is quite handsome, Salvo thinks.

He considers what it might be like to kiss the old man, wonders what it would feel like, if he’d be able to feel the weakness on one side of his mouth rather than the other – and then all of a sudden he imagines the rest, imagines that it might be like to sap the magic out of him through his mouth, imagines feeling that hot, desperate tingle in his own lips, in his tongue, sinking down his throat and suffusing him. He imagines the electric, overwhelming thrill of it all, imagines that hot, giddy flow of someone else’s power in him, someone else’s life in him.

He hasn’t kissed anybody on the mouth since he was fifteen himself, at the same age Villiers was killing a man, and back then it had been just a warm tingle against his lips, a sort of heady rush around his ears and heating his face – he knows what the real thing feels like, now, knows what it feels like to sap the force from the whole of someone’s body, to be suffused with stolen energy. He knows what it feels to have someone else’s soul subsumed into his, and it’s the best feeling in the universe, and he hates himself for wanting to taste it again.

“You dastardly little thing,” Villiers says, not without pleasure or satisfaction as he takes the head of his king under his fingertip and tips it over. “You set quite the little trap for me, didn’t you?”

Salvo smiles faintly. “You’re bored here,” he says quietly. “With the prisoners, with… this.”

“Often, yes,” Villiers agrees.

Salvo studies him for a few moments, and there’s a distant ache inside him, a faint compassion that pangs against the inside of his rib cage. Is Warden Villiers spared that as well, the same as he is a conscience? “Why work here as a warden, if it’s so boring, if you want for company so badly that you’re taking a prisoner out of the main lot and bringing him here to lose to him at chess?”

“It’s quite simple,” says Villiers in mild tones, and then he moves so quickly that Salvo almost doesn’t see him, that he’s not cognizant of what’s happening until Villiers is on top of him. The older man’s weight is incandescently warm in Salvo’s lap, straddling his thighs and pinning him back in the winged back armchair, and half of his cane has been drawn back from the rest, showing the blade sheathed inside it.

Salvo can’t breathe, can barely even think with the heat of Villiers in his lap, his bony knees digging in against the sides of Salvo’s thighs, and compared to the warmth of the older man’s body, the blade of his secret sword feels very cold against the underside of Salvo’s chin.

He feels dizzy, because he’s terrified, certain that Villiers is about to slit his throat, is about to bleed all the life out of him for real, no metaphor and no magic about it. Villiers’ expression is cold and haughty and he smells of a subtle cologne, one that’s just a little bit sweet, makes Salvo want to lean in for more of it. Red was right. An atheist he may be, but here is Villiers demonstrating how godly he is, how absolute his power is over Salvo here, without witnesses, without an audience, without any protection at all.

Paradoxically, as frightened as he is, there’s arousal too, heat sinking down and tingling between his legs, heat between his thighs.

“I have complete authority over each and every one of you,” Villiers says in a very quiet whisper, and Salvo breathes in very carefully through his nostrils, but when he swallows, an involuntary reaction, he feels the twitch of the blade against the skin, probably cutting off one or two hairs. “I could kill you right here, young man, and little fuss would be made of it – it isn’t morality or fear of surveillance that keeps me from bringing you into my bed, chaining you to it, if I wished to.”

“And when my sentence was up?” Salvo asks faintly, feeling dizzy, and Villiers laughs. “Would they ask where I was, to have me released?”

“Such terrible behaviour,” he says faux-seriously, pouting out his lips and stroking the thumb of his bad hand, mostly limp, against Salvo’s chin. It still feels as warm as the other, even if he can’t move it as well. “We had to add a few years to your sentence.”

“Oh,” says Salvo. He wonders what Villiers would say, if he was to tell him that he and Red used the same words as one another, describing Villiers’ position. He wondered if Red and Villiers had had this conversation before. “You— Why did you have to stop being an assassin, when you can still move like that?”

“You’re very good at flattery, boy, did you know that?” Villiers asks, tilting his head to the side and looking more than a little amused, his lopsided smile almost indulgent now. With his good hand, this time – it only takes the flick of a wrist to put his blade back into its sheath and set the cane aside – he spreads his hand on Salvo’s chest to brace himself, then eases himself up and out of his lap, onto his feet again.

Maybe it’s just because it’s not as fast, but this movement is a little clumsier, and Villiers has to be careful about which side he’s putting his weight on, has to lean his good hand on the chair to steady himself as he stands again, and then gets his cane beneath him again.

“I’m not good at flattery,” Salvo says. “I’m not really good at socialising, to be honest – I was okay when I was working, talking to people, letting them talk, trying to make them feel good, make them feel safe, make them feel human even though they were sick, or disabled, or just really, really tired, and in a lot of pain. But I’ve not been able to go out, basically, since…”

“The core of effective flattery is always the appearance of sincerity,” Villiers says mildly. “Being truly sincere is just another way to go about it, I suppose. You don’t seem very frightened for a man who’s just had a blade held to his throat.”

“My life’s in your hands either way,” Salvo says, adjusting himself subtly in his seat, because his cock is hard and it’s not as well-hidden in his loose prison tracksuit trousers as he’d like. He tries to shift the head of his cock against his waistband to keep it from pressing forward too much, but the way that Villiers’ eyes flicker downwards makes it clear it doesn’t matter how subtle he makes his erection appear. “The blade was just an example.”

“Quite right, of course,” Villiers says, and then the blade is bared again, and this time the very tip of it is resting on his shoulder, the silver of polished metal catching the light. Salvo stares down at it, at how sharp it looks, and very carefully, very slowly, glancing up at Villiers – for what? Permission? Approval? Just to see the older man’s face not change? – he touches his finger to the side of the blade and immediately draws it back with a quiet hiss.

“Thought it would be blunt, did you?”

“Not really,” Salvo says, and tries to make sense of the multiple wants and lusts inside him, the way they tangle with one another, the way they twist about each other like vines. There’s something almost like a whine, almost like a moue, in his voice – which he doesn’t let out on purpose – as he asks, “You’re really not going to fuck me?”

“Never,” promises Villiers, and he slides the blade in closer, drags the tip over the line of Salvo’s collarbones through his clothes before it comes to rest in the hollow of them. “If I pierced here, through this little hole in the bones, useful little target on a thinner boy like you, I could cut right through your trachea. You’d aspirate on blood, unable to draw oxygen into your lungs, and what leaked out of you would froth and bubble.”

Salvo’s cock gives a desperate twitch between his legs, and he doesn’t make a noise, but it shows in his face, he thinks – Villiers laughs at him, and makes a show of sheathing his blade his time, sliding it back into its place with a quiet shkkt of noise.

“What a curious boy you are,” Villiers says. “Satisfy my curiosity, won’t you – would you rather I kill you, right here, enjoy the powerful eroticism of a cruel and nasty bastard like me threatening you just like this, perhaps with my boot against that precious little cocklet of yours for you to grind against,” (now Salvo does let out a helpless, embarrassing noise, and his trackies feel a little bit wet at the pre that dribbles from the head of his prick), “or would you rather slake your thirst and drink all there is from me? Sate that hunger of yours, gorge yourself on my magic until I’m dry?”

“You’re part of the way intolerant to magic, you said,” Salvo says to avoid the question, although he’s so full of want that his prick throbs – he’d been horny after drinking poor Brownie dry, no matter that the man was never attractive to him, a friend of his dad’s. He’d been stunned on the floor in the street, Brownie laid out and pale and still and going cold beside him on the cobbles, and for all his fear and horror and guilt, at the same time he’d felt blessed and beautiful warmth and satisfaction and satiation… and his cock had been the hardest it had ever fucking been, on the verge of coming even as the mage cop had come to cuff him, even as the magical police had cordoned off the area and taken away his corpse, and begun to take his details down.

The high hadn’t dissipated for hours, until he was alone in his cell, and only then had he felt cold enough to start sobbing over what he’d done.

“You might not even make a good meal,” he adds.

“Perhaps not,” Villiers allows. “But any sustenance at all is nectar to the starving man, isn’t it?”

“I’m going to go to sleep now,” Salvo says, getting to his feet.

“Go to bed, at least,” Villiers says dryly.

The door hasn’t even had time to lock behind him before Salvo has his hand around his cock to pull desperately on it, to get himself off.

* * *

Later that week – a Friday – Salvo is caught as he makes his way to his work detail, grappled and hauled into a cell, and he tries to shout out a protest, call for help, but a palm is already pressed tight over his mouth. He’s terrified of it, obviously, terrified, and yet a part of him sings for how much he’s being touched, how the hands are grabbing at him, at his thighs, around his waist, up at his shoulders, even though the hands touching him are a bit clammy.

“Where have you been going at night, eh, you pretty little muzzled pup?” asks the voice in his ear, and Salvo doesn’t recognise it, tries to raise his frantic eyes to get a glimpse at whoever it is in the cell mirror, but they’ve obviously smashed it and had it taken away. There’s a gap on the wall where the mirror is meant to be, a different colour to the rest, and while there’s newspaper bits pinned up, some animated pin-ups of actresses and models, Salvo can’t glean anything from them.

He tries to squeal out a protest as a shoelace is strung through the gaps in his cuffs and used to hang his wrists over his head, up over one of the top bunk’s posts, but this bloke is obviously old hat at this, keeps his palm pressed fast against Salvo’s lips. He’s dragging down Salvo’s bottoms with his hooking thumb and his hand is a little cold and clammy where it slides down between his arse cheeks, thumbing at his dry rim, and he whimpers, but he can barely hear it, jolting when the same hand squeezes his bollocks and plays over his soft cock.

He’s at the wrong angle, his arms behind him and hooked above his head, his shoulders wrenching and feeling like they might well be dislocated any moment. His don’t tear up but he can feel the blood rushing through his veins, feel the adrenaline pumping, and he tries to kick, but it’s painful to let his shoulders take any of his weight in this position.

“Think I’m getting the first go, aren’t I?” asks the man behind him. “Haven’t heard anybody else bragging about it, and I know everyone’d be crowing at having had the privilege.”

“Let him go, Mason,” drawls a Brummie accent from behind them, and Salvo looks desperately back at Callum Pike standing there, Rosen hovering behind him like a wide-eyed shadow.

“Fuck off, Pike,” hisses Mason – Daf Mason, he guesses, the ex-miner in for rape who was in the papers, and Salvo watches Pike make a big show of sighing and adjusting his sleeves.

Where Rosen is small and round, plumper than Salvo is, and has sort of anxious, eager movements, often seeming like he’s vibrating from the inside, Pike is often inhumanly still. It’s not do to with being a vampire, Salvo doesn’t think, but maybe more to do with his being part-fae, or maybe just personal to him – when Pike goes still you can’t even see him breathing, barely see him blink, and that’s how he settles whenever he’s not talking or playing a game.

He looks like his dad, people say, some northern mob man who’s famous enough for people to know what he looks like, not that Salvo’s ever heard of him, though people say his dad doesn’t do stillness like Callum Pike does. He’s big and tall, lanky with a runner’s muscle on him, and he does parkour, apparently – people have said that the reason he goes inhumanly, inorganically still like that is because he blends in with the gargoyles when he climbs tall buildings, but Salvo doesn’t know that he believes that.

Pike isn’t still now: he moves as fast as the warden had the other night, is nothing more than a flickering blue before Salvo’s eyes, and then the weight of Mason behind him is gone, and he hears the other man groan.

Rosen has to climb up on the lower bunk to reach and undo Salvo’s bindings – the double knotted lacing is deceptively hard to snap, even without Salvo being hung at a painful angle, but Rosen undoes the messy knot with quick, skilled fingers.

Salvo rubs at his sore shoulders as he stands up straight and turns to look at Mason. Pike has him sat on the floor, leaning back against Pike’s chest, looking like a spider with a fly what with how long his legs and arms are contrasted with Mason’s stouter, more contained form. Mason’s eyes are glassy and his body has gone limp, and Pike is wiping his mouth with the inside of his wrist as he pulls back from the bloodied marks on the juncture of his shoulder, where he’d dragged back the man’s shirt to sink his teeth in.

Releasing his grip on Mason’s shirt collar, the bite is hidden as the fabric snaps back, and Pike drops Mason unceremoniously to the ground with a dull thump as he gets to his feet.

“You alright, Caine?” he asks casually.

“Yeah,” Salvo says. “Prick.” He kicks Mason hard in the ribs, and Mason’s so out of it with Pike’s vampiric venom that he doesn’t even jump, though he does groan quietly after a second’s delay. “Thank you.”

“Thank Ira,” says Pike, nodding to Rosen who – seemingly out of reflex – is rifling through the top drawer of Mason’s side table. “I didn’t hear you, I was sucking off Lee Havers down the hall.”

“Sucking off his neck, or…?”

“His cock,” Pike says helpfully, and Salvo huffs out a quiet laugh.

“Thank you,” he says as Rosen comes away from Mason’s things looking mildly disappointed. “You didn’t really think he might have the keys to some kind of vehicle?”

“I suppose not,” Rosen admits immediately, and Salvo feels his lips twitch into a tired smile as Pike laughs, gripping the back of Rosen’s neck in that effortlessly easy, possessive way he does, squeezing. “A man does live in hope – I just forget, I suppose, where I am.” He sighs, full of soft yearning. “I won’t be able to get my hands on a vehicle until I’m out again.”

“Did they take away your license?”

Rosen lets out a dismissive noise and waves a hand. “Never had one.”

Salvo’s pleased to have read him right, but as he trails after the two of them he looks at Pike’s hand on Rosen’s neck, wonders what it feels like. Vampires’ skin is cold, he’s heard – heard Rosen good-naturedly complain about it, even, but what would it feel like, the energy of him?

Pike splits off from them, loping back down the corridor to finish off Lee Havers, Salvo guesses, and he and Rosen fall into step beside one another.

“You on enchantment detail as well?” he asks.

“No, no,” says Rosen. “Embroidery, me.”

“Embroidery?” Salvo repeats. He’d said when he was going through the list of work options that he sewed at school, and the guard doing his assessment had actually laughed and told him no, that he wouldn’t be able for the sort of needlework they did here. He’s even peered into the room where they’re at it on his way back, and he’s never noticed Rosen in there, but the guy’s usually late for everything – who he has seen at work are very, very old fae, the ones that don’t speak English and won’t make any effort to learn, the ones that simmer with magic he can feel even with the cuffs on, that make his mouth water and his vision swim.

“Yeah, thanks to my granny, it’s seven faeries older than sin and then me. They’re nice enough, even if they try to use Hebrew with me sometimes and end up mixing it up with fucking Aramaic, not to mention that as you can imagine, their idea of Jews is, uh, a little old-fashioned. Fuck, it’s ancient-fashioned. I can’t do enchantment – too dyslexic – and I can’t sit still long enough to do some of the other crafts stuff. You can’t get bored doing this kind of sewing, though, ‘cause you have to work in sync with one another and go fast, layer magically charged threads over one another, the fabrics, all that.”

“You like it?”

“Not really,” Rosen says, “but it’s better than bouncing off the walls, I suppose. Does he fuck you?”

Salvo looks sideways at Rosen, who looks politely interested, but if he thinks he’s asked something rude, he doesn’t seem worried about it.

“Villiers?”

“Yeah,” says Rosen.

“No,” says Salvo, more to see how Rosen reacts than because he thinks he’ll really believe it – he’s only young, really young, about twenty, twenty-one. “Why, would you fuck him?”

“Probably not,” Rosen says, shrugging. “I think his face is creepy, the way his mouth droops on one side, and I don’t like how he talks.”

“His accent?”

“No, the, uh, what is it, a slur? From the stroke.”

“A slur, yeah,” says Salvo. “Though it’s rather mild, I expect it was much worse in the recent aftermath.”

“I don’t really like old guys,” Rosen says. “I’ve fucked them, obviously, to get my hands in their pockets for their keys or their phones, but I wouldn’t fuck them for the sake of it. No offence if you like to fuck old guys, it’s just not my thing.”

“None taken,” says Salvo. “I don’t really have that much experience.”

“What, you’re a virgin?”

“Not quite, but I’m basically celibate,” Salvo says.

“’Cause you’d kill people by fucking them?”

“Not mundies,” says Salvo.

“Why not fuck mundies then?” Rosen asks. They’re lingering in the corridor now, and Salvo knows he might be late for his own work detail, but Rosen obviously doesn’t care – he’s teetering back and forth from his heels to his toes, looking up at him with astonishing, kind of unsettling attentiveness. “Is it like, you can’t be open with them or whatever?”

“I don’t know,” Salvo says. “I worked a lot, and I would be tired, and I tried a few times, um… Apps. Or going to bars. And I just wasn’t good enough at it to make it happen, to actually get a guy to come home with me, or take me home, and it’d be months or years in between me actually trying, because it was just… It was excruciating. I don’t know why. It made me feel horrible.”

“Shame?” Rosen asks. “Do you hate your body?”

“Um,” Salvo says. “I don’t think so. Why, do you hate yours?”

“Sometimes,” Rosen says, with the same incredible frankness with which he asks questions, and Salvo actually feels breathless with it. “Sometimes I only really feel okay ‘cause I’m behind the wheel of something, and then it’s like that’s my body instead of this. All this flesh – not just ‘cause I’m fat, but I guess that’s part of it. All my family used to pinch at me, at my cheeks, my arms, anywhere you could pinch, really. You can’t pinch metal or fibreglass, and even if someone tries, you don’t feel it – and you’re going too fast for them to try anyway.” Rosen laughs, a scattershot sound that matches perfectly with his rapid fire, kind of clumsy way of speaking, but there’s something about the laugh that doesn’t match up with how he talks, a sort of tonal disconnect. “Anyway,” he says, and instead of saying “bye” or “see you later”, he just turns on his heel and walks away.

Salvo rubs the back of his neck, smiling faintly, and goes to work himself.

It was good to talk to Rosen right after – it’s twenty minutes later that he remembers Daf Mason nearly fucking raped him, and then he throws up in the workshop sink.

* * *

Red walks with the lad back to the main block after they’re done working. He’d asked if the lad was ill, but he’d dismissed both the guard looking over him and Red, and then just worked in even more palpable silence than usual. He’s never chatty during his work detail, but at least he’ll sit closer to other people and smile or laugh along with the conversation going on, listen more attentively if someone tries to give him advice, whatever else.

Most of today he’s in his own fucking world, and he’d barely eaten anything at lunch, had mostly just sat there with his tray in front of him, barely touching what was on it before drifting back to work.

“You need to eat something,” Red says behind him when they’re in the queue. “Just get the rice if you can’t stand to taste anything, but get a full portion.”

Reluctantly, Caine takes a bowl of rice, half-heartedly putting some boiled carrots in it at the last minute, and he sits and eats in silence across from Red at the table until Rosen and Pike come to join them.

“You feeling okay?” Rosen asks, and then adds, “Start to sink in, did it?”

“Yeah,” Salvo says hoarsely.

“Mason tried to fuck him this morning,” Pike says when Red doesn’t say anything, but looks across at them askance. “Had him trussed up when Ira got me to come in and rescue him. Speaking of, it seems my consequence for that has arrived.”

“Fuck’s sake, Pike,” growls Cornell as he stalks across the bar, and Pike is stone-still as the guard grabs him by the collar and drags him up from his untouched tray. “You could have fucking killed him.”

“I’ve never killed a man in my life,” Pike says unconvincingly as Cornell hauls him away, and Red watches as Caine half-stands to his feet, looking like he wants to protest.

“Because he helped me?” Caine asks, looking horrified. “What are they going to do to him?”

“Solitary for a few days,” Rosen says. “It’s not like they can take his fangs out.”

“Or cuff them,” says Red.

Caine looks even greener now than he had earlier, but after a little quiet coaxing from Rosen he does sink down onto the bench again, and he reluctantly begins to eat again.

“They’ve put him in solitary before,” Rosen says. “It’s not as though it bothers him any. He wouldn’t have stepped in if he wasn’t willing to make the trade-off, a few days of extra boredom in exchange for stopping Mason raping you. You’ve never been raped before, have you? I don’t recommend it, you’re better off without.”

That makes Caine blink a few times, not seeming to quite make sense of Rosen’s tone. Even before he’d been brought to the nick, he’d known more than a few lads with personalities like his – more than a few lads who’d had blows to the head like Rosen had had as a lad and all, the sort of head injury that douses out a man’s impulse control like a fucking church candle, and makes him talk like bullet fire.

Surely, working with old folks and the demented, he’ll have met people that talk a bit more frankly than others, but unless you knew already, he supposes, you’d never know Rosen had an extra impact on him one way or the other. He’s said to Red that he was always more impulsive than his siblings even before he took a brick to the side of the skull, and that you never know what’s natural and what’s from concussion.

Daf Mason’s a victim of repeated concussion and all, though he’s the more traditional headcase, Red thinks, the one that people might imagine. Angry, and a raper.

“I know I’m better without it,” Caine says slowly. “Just— Just that it’s not right, Pike being punished for stepping in in my defence. I’ll talk to Warden Villiers about it.”

“Oh, do you think maybe if you offer to suck him off or something, he’ll let Pike out early?”

Red can see that initially Caine is just straight up taken aback by it, by the way that Rosen just comes right the fuck out and says it, but then he sees the wires connect and cross in Caine’s head, the way he connects the idea of Villiers shoving his cock into Caine’s throat with wherever Daf was gonna shove his earlier, and Red grabs Rosen’s already-empty bowl from in front of him and slides it in front of Caine to catch the bulk of the vomit.

“Oh,” says Rosen, not without sympathy, and pats his shoulder, which makes Caine, in a flop sweat under his tracksuit, jump and shudder, and then lean into the delicate squeeze of Rosen’s pretty little hand. “Oh, it’s okay. Villiers will probably take it out worse on Mason anyway – what with you being his special case and that.”

Caine retches harder, and Rosen makes a face but awkwardly exchanges his now-full bowl for one another lad passes them from the next table over.

“Oi! Guard!” Red shouts over his shoulder. “One of you screws come be of some fucking use, would ya? Bring a mop and all!”

* * *

“He was only helping me,” Salvo says for the third time, feeling out of sorts and strangely unbalanced, because he’s in his bed and has a blanket over him, a glass of water next to another glass of flat lemonade on the bedside table next to him, a slice of very thinly buttered toast on the plate beside it. It has a few bites taken out of it, but more than half of the slice is still left – Villiers had stood over him and ordered him to take each bite, ordered him to chew, to swallow, to take a sip of water to ease it down, at the same time he confined him to his bed. “Warden Villiers, please, he only—”

“I understand your protest implicitly, Mr Caine, you need not repeat yourself again,” Villiers says coolly. His cane is hooked on the back of Salvo’s desk chair, and the man himself is leaning back against Salvo’s desk, looking down at him in his bed.

He hadn’t fainted, fully, but he’d been so stressed and sweaty and nauseous from throwing up on top of barely eating all day that his knees had gone weak when the guards had gotten him up, and Villiers had ordered him up to the house immediately.

“Mr Pike is under express instruction, as all vampires in this prison are,” Villers says, “not to bite his fellow inmates. A vampire cannot be easily milked of their venom because they typically produce it too quickly, and Mr Pike, like so many of his unfortunate provenance, has rather powerful venom in any case. Were Mr Mason a diabetic, or otherwise under the weight of some condition that makes him particularly vulnerable to such venom, Pike might have killed him as easily and quickly as having snapped his neck. He is given a measure of blood each week to sustain his appetites, and he isn’t to augment that diet.”

“He drinks from other inmates during sex,” Salvo mutters, reaching reluctantly for his lemonade and taking a sip of it. He’d felt fucking wretched, watching Villiers drizzle a little sugar into the glass and make it fizzle, stirring it until all the carbonation was gone, “that it not spur on your nausea any further”.

“He isn’t to do that either,” says Villiers, his arms crossed over his chest. You’d not know one was weak, with him supporting them like this against his breast like this. Salvo doesn’t really understand why it bothers Rosen so much, the slur – it’s so mild, you’d easily think it was just from his posh accent rather than from the stroke. “Although he’s good enough not to render his willing cohorts fit for the infirmary. Intimate contact between inmates is itself prohibited, I might remind you, but regardless of how Pike penetrates his cohorts – or indeed, is penetrated by them – we avoid official evidence of the fact so long as his partners are not hospitalised.”

“And what about Mason?” Salvo asks bitterly, putting the glass down on the coaster before reaching reluctantly for the toast and forcing himself to take a bite of it, to chew it, to swallow it down. It’s cold, and it feels too thick and heavy in his mouth, and he hates it, but he sees Villiers incline his head slightly in visible approval, and he doesn’t hate that.

It’s the only thing today after Mason, except for Rosen babbling at him when he’d forgotten about it, that he hasn’t hated completely.

“Dafydd Mason is recovered from his stupefaction, and will be fine come morning, I’ve no doubt.”

“He tried to rape me,” Salvo says. “He tied me up and he stripped my trackies off me and he was going to rape me. He touched me. He touched my—” He squeezes his eyes shut as he feels his stomach turn over, trying to swallow down the nausea, feeling the toast wanting to come back up on him.

“More lemonade,” Villiers orders, and Salvo’s hand trembles a bit as he drops the plate in his lap and picks up the lemonade, swallowing a bit more down. He thinks the sweetness of it will make him gag, but it overwhelms the nausea, actually, the acidity of it and the sugar at once, and it fucking annoys him, actually, because Villiers is looking at him kind of smugly from his place on the other side of the room. “Why did you not call for a guard?”

“He had his hand over my mouth,” Salvo says. “He grabbed me in the corridor and pulled me in, and as he tied me up and stripped me and— He had his hand over my mouth the whole time. I couldn’t say a thing, I was making noise but no one could hear except Ira, who went and got Pike.”

“Who pulled Mason off you, knocking him out with his bite, yes?”

“Yeah.”

“And then?”

Salvo stares at him. “What do you mean, and then?”

“You didn’t call for a guard then,” Villiers says. “You left Mason on the floor of his cell, a puddle of drool collecting under his gaping jaw, and took the effort to bruise one of his ribs before you left him there.”

“How’d you know it was me did that?” Salvo asks, looking at his plate instead of meeting the older man’s eyes. “Not Pike? Or Ira?”

“Mr Rosen is not violent – to the point of pathology, he avoids violence, in fact, though I must say his vegetarianism makes providing healthy and satisfying kosher meals rather easier whilst avoiding potential interference from other inmates, so I suppose I ought render no judgement on it. And had Mr Pike kicked Mason in the ribs, he would have broken one, not just left a bruise.”

“I don’t like you,” says Salvo, and Villiers laughs richly and quietly, supporting his weak arm with his other as he unfolds them, and then leaning back further against the desk, rolling his shoulders.

“I’m wounded, I’m sure,” he murmurs. “You did not call for a guard, young man. Mason was not discovered until two hours after, and he could easily have died. Mr Pike would be spending more than three days in a solitary cell had he brought that about, I must say.”

“So? He’d just tried to fucking rape me,” mutters Salvo, tearing into the toast with his fingers and finding that it’s strangely cathartic, tearing it in half, so he tears it into quarters, and then eights, and then tries to tear it into sixteenths, but mostly by this point he just has crumbs all over his hands and on the plate and a little bit on the sheets. “Why the fuck should I have called for a guard?”

“You forgot, didn’t you?” Villiers asks, arching an eyebrow. “I know that Mr Rosen likely did as soon as he left the room. He’s forgotten his shoes more than once before whilst wandering the halls – his sewing companions consider him quite the queer little thing.”

“Maybe Pike forgot.”

“Mr Pike is well-familiar with the drill, by this point. He didn’t forget a thing.”

Salvo glares at him, and Villiers smirks his cold, lopsided smirk. “It didn’t occur to me,” he admits, shaking out his crumby hands and putting the plate back on the counter, and Villiers walks forward and takes hold of the top sheet in his good hand, supporting himself on the side table with his weaker elbow and sweeping the sheet back with a surprising speed and strength, letting out a sound like a sail filling with a gust of wind. He shakes out all the crumbs before he passes it back, and Salvo smooths it over himself.

“You were never a nurse,” he says.

“Never,” Villiers agrees. “I’ve always been rather more comfortable ushering someone toward death rather than out of its clutches.”

“You’d be handfeeding me if you could,” Salvo accuses him. “Would have brought in the plate and glasses, would have tucked me into bed. Bet you’ve tampered with an IV – have you ever put one in?”

“No,” Villiers says softly.

He’s standing very close, now, leaning on the end table instead of the desk – he’s so much closer, and it’s more intimate, like this. Salvo has to lie back on his pillows and look up at him, and it’s even more unequal, even more imbalanced, the dynamic between the two of them. Salvo can’t stand the idea of touching himself, not at the moment, but there’s heat between his legs, and his cock is half-hard even before he breathes in the sweet scent of Villiers’ cologne, and he loves it, craves it. He wants to bury his face against Villiers’ belly and feel the touch of his cold, slim fingers in Salvo’s hair, touching his fingertips against his scalp, wants Villiers to hold Salvo’s body to his.

“We’re not meant to put them in, care assistants – we’re not trained for it,” Salvo murmurs. “Not accredited, anyway, and you’re meant to be. Inserting IVs and taking them out, that’s an invasive procedure – I got sent on a training course to take and process blood samples, but I should never have been doing IVs or catheters. Understaffing being what it is, though, if I wasn’t doing it, or one of us doing it, there’d have been a Hell of a wait, sometimes, so they just showed us, and taught us how, and unless we were getting inspected, it was…” Salvo exhales, tapping his fingers against the sheet, against his knees. “It’s delicate work, the tourniquet, the needle, finding the vein. There’s so much power in it. There’s so much, um, vulnerability in it. It’s just this portal right to their insides, to their heart. You can put anything in it – too much medicine, too little. Insulin to really fuck somebody up, but not even that, though. All you really need is a little bubble of air.”

“You needn’t inform me of that,” Villiers says softly. “As I said, I’m more familiar with those latter points than I would be any actual nursing.”

“That’s what I mean, though,” Salvo says. “I always wanted to help people, care for people, yeah. I always craved it, I always… My dad had a pacemaker put in, and two different women on my street were nurses, and one of them minded me after school, and that was even without all the check-ups I had to have, as a child, the extra attention. I liked it. I liked the way nurses talked, and I liked how people paid attention to them and how they gave instructions and orders and help and I liked how physical it was, the, the knowledge. Like they could go into a cupboard and look at all this equipment, all these weird little devices or bits of tubing or whatever else, and just know how to use all of it to help you, to heal you, to fix you. But it was the power of that, really. I’ve always felt a bit bad about it, but it’s not like you’re going to judge me, like you’re going to fucking care. I liked nursing because it was authority – more authority than a doctor, sometimes. You never hear the doctor going, “Actually, nurse,” and correcting what they’ve said, but nurses are always stepping in when the doctor’s fucked up.”

He looks up at Villiers, whose expression is not so obvious in its smirk now, but whose attention is fixed on Salvo’s face, studying him intently.

“You’d like to be feeding me,” Salvo says. “You’d like to be bringing the glass to my mouth instead of trusting me to do it myself – you’d like to force each bite, each mouthful of water or lemonade. You’d massage my throat to make me swallow, even, if you had the chance.”

“Teasing me with such seductive talk will not convince me to release Mr Pike any earlier, young man,” Villiers says, his voice a little bit hoarser, a little more resonance in it. Arousal, that is, arousal, and want. Salvo swallows.

“What will it get me?” Salvo asks, and Villiers laughs quietly, then picks up the plate with his good hand and walks away.

“Go to sleep,” Villiers orders him. “No work detail for you tomorrow – you can take your choice of confinement here, or in my office.”

“How cold is your office?”

“Quite.”

“Here, then.”

“As you will,” Villiers says, and after setting the plate down in the corridor, he pulls the door shut behind him.

* * *

Caine doesn’t come down from the warden’s house at all that day. The screws won’t say anything about what’s up with him, but when Red asks Kim Adder, he says that there was a little dispensation, that he was confined to bedrest in his own quarters, but was noted down on the infirmary log as being unwell.

Not much of a surprise, that.

“Hello, Red,” says Rosen when Red steps out from the workshop, and Red raises his eyebrows at the sight of the lad, reaching out and touching his knuckles to the back of Rosen’s forehead, because he’s pink all over, and sweating.

“Seems like you’re red,” he mutters. “The fuck happened to you, you jog down the corridor?”

“Oh, there was a fight in the embroidery hall,” Rosen says, reaching up and wiping his face with his sleeve. “I had to run – the old faeries can do all sorts to each other, but it’d fuck me up, I’m not two thousand years old and with skin as thick as tree bark. The magic that would give them a little burn would go right through me.”

“Right,” Red says, raising his eyebrows, but he puts his hands in his pockets and walks alongside Rosen down the corridor, toward the canteen. Rosen hadn’t eaten lunch with Red – he’d been chattering away with some recent new transplant who’s in from London for arson, and is apparently an old schoolmate of his. “D’you mind if I ask you something?”

“No,” says Rosen.

“Why’re you in a magical nick, not a mundie one? Was it a magical train you tried driving off?”

“Not that I got caught, but they knew I had done,” Rosen says mildly. “And they decided they couldn’t trust me not to blab away to mundies and not keep secrets – I’m no good at keeping secrets.”

“Fair enough,” Red says. “That what had those old tree fuckers going mad at each other? You blabbing secrets?”

“Didn’t fully follow a lot of the conversation, to be honest, I normally don’t,” Rosen says. “The way those old pricks talk to each other is fucking weird – it’s not just the language they use, I’ve kind of been starting to pick up some of the, um, I think it’s too old to even be Welsh, it’s some kind of Brythonic. But they talk in verse and riddles and stuff with each other, so even if I can make out the words or recognise names and things they’re saying, it’s well beyond me to understand what they actually mean. They were doing some sort of poetry thing today, a bit, um… I don’t know, they were roasting each other. Something about someone’s daughter, maybe? And fucking her? I don’t know. But old Bleiddgwn flipped his fucking lid, and he was properly screaming at Cadllew, and they were already angry at each other, and then Toutorixs said something else, like, commenting, or a joke, and then they were all trying to rip each other to shreds. I had to run out, and then French had to flip that switch, you know the one that locks the room down and chokes all the magic out? They’ll be in there for days until they’re either calm enough to come out or until they fall into hibernation, so either way, I don’t have work detail for a while.”

Red blinks a few times, because it takes him a little while to actually comprehend that Rosen’s stopped talking – how the fuck he makes sense of what those ancient cunts are saying, let alone what the protocol is around them, he has no idea. Most of the inmates keep a wide berth from the prisoners that have been imprisoned at his majesty’s pleasure long before this prison island was even built, and have sentences that last centuries or millennia instead of being decades at the most, for their own fucking safety, not to mention their own sanity.

“Hibernation?” he repeats. “What, like fucking bears?”

“If they’re starved of magic for long enough, yeah,” Rosen says evenly. “But apparently they normally tire themselves out fighting and arguing before they get to that point. Fingers crossed, though! I wouldn’t be able to embroider on my own, so they’d have me doing something else. No Caine today?”

“Apparently he’s ill,” Red says.

“Oh, right, okay,” Rosen says, and furrows his brow. “Yeah.”

“You want to help me with a job after dinner?” Red asks, and Rosen lights up.

He doesn’t ask for any details at all, of course, before he says, “Sure!”

It’s not like Red wants him doing anything particularly risky in any case – Rosen chats up a fucking storm to the trustee mopping the floors in the infirmary, the doctor’s already gone off for the evening, and Red knows that the infirmary nurse, a little prick called Julian with eyebrow piercings, will be off getting high at this time of day.

All he wants is to pay Daf Mason a little social call – and funny enough, he doesn’t find the prick in situ.

“Is there a reason yourself and Mr Rosen are wandering the corridors with no-doubt pilfered sets of keys?” Warden Villiers asks in withering tones, and Red straightens up, his hands behind his back.

Rosen’s eyes widen, his lips parting, and he says anxiously, his gaze flitting back and forth, “Erm, hello, Warden, uh, we’re not, we haven’t been, I’m—”

“Don’t trouble yourself attempting deception, young man, we both know it beyond your capabilities,” Villiers advises, and Rosen blows out air from plump lips, and he looks reluctantly at Villiers’ outstretched good hand, palm up, before he drops the tools from his pocket into the warden’s grasp – a bobby pin and two half-melted embroidery needles. “Mr French said you weren’t injured in this afternoon’s fracas between your fellow needleworkers. He is correct, I hope?”

“Yessir.”

“Why were you loitering about the infirmary, then?”

“Where’s Salvo Caine?” Red asks, and Villiers’ uncanny gaze flits to Red’s face, his thin lips twitching. He’s a scary cunt, and there’s no mistaking that, but it’s not like it’s Red’s first time dealing with scary academic-seeming types, the ones with more power and danger simmering under the surface than you can see in their muscles or feel in their magical fields.

“Ill from yesterday’s escapades, still,” Villiers says.

“And Daf Mason?”

“Mr Mason?” Villiers repeats, and tilts his head to one side, then smiles a coolly satisfied smile. “You really thought Mr Pike would face punishment for stepping in, but Mr Mason would face no consequences for his actions at all?”

“Is he in solitary?” Rosen asks, and Villiers nods for Red to open up the door for them to go downstairs, which Red does, Rosen going ahead of him onto the landing.

“No,” says Villiers, and shuts the door after them.

* * *

“Dress yourself for dinner, if you would,” Villiers had said when he came back from the prison proper, and Salvo thinks about it when he shadows, plays it over and over in his head, turning it over. In Villiers’ posh, stupid accent, made up and learned to make him scarier as an assassin or as a spy or whatever the fuck else, it sounds like it’s a bigger thing than it actually is.

For dinner, like it’s an occasion, like they’re in some period drama, like he’s gonna put on a tail coat and fancy trousers and nice shoes and a bowtie, and like there’s gonna be all lords and ladies sitting down around the dining table and prawns in a dish and a butler pouring drinks.

He puts on his issued trackies, and a t-shirt, and his sweatshirt, and he walks out into the corridor through the unlocked door to his room and down toward the little sitting room where they ordinarily eat together, if they share a meal. It’s never an inmate that serves them, not like how inmates work down in the kitchen – Salvo’s actually never seen whoever it is that serves them in Villiers’ house, and he’s not sure if there’s even a person doing it at all, or if it’s all enchantment.

He knows that the place gets swept and cleaned – he tries to keep his room tidy because he’s just that sort of man, but sometimes if he doesn’t fully make his bed if he’s in a hurry to go in the morning, or if he spills something on the desk or spills shampoo or something on the bathroom floor, it’s always cleaned up by the time he’s back. His sheets get changed once a week, and a lot of the time, he can see that someone’s hoovered or scrubbed the floors or done something like that in the sitting room or in the hall.

Normally when Villiers calls him to come eat dinner, there are plates already on the little table for them, but there aren’t tonight, and the chess board isn’t laid out either.

“Ah, there you are,” says Villiers, and he walks forward, sliding past Salvo and back into the corridor, then gesturing with two fingers for Salvo to follow him down the hallway, which Salvo does. “Feeling better, I hope?”

“Yeah,” Salvo says. “I was a bit bored, to be honest. Finished all my books.”

“Those Lawrence Kidd romances again?”

“Two of them,” Salvo says. “The other one was an Agatha Christie. Where are we going?”

“Oh, through here,” Villiers says in smooth, easy tones, and leads him through the door and into Villiers’ home office. It’s a much warmer affair than the one he has in the prison proper, a fire burning in the hearth, and there’s a fancy brocade wallpaper on the wall. On the other wall is another door, this one slightly ajar, and Salvo peers through it, because that’s Villiers’ bedroom.

He has dark violet bedsheets made of cotton, not silky at all, and Salvo gets a glimpse of the brass bar beside the bed that’s obviously there to help him up and down, and—

Villiers closes the door shut.

“Not what I brought you here for, young man,” Villiers tells him, and limps across to his desk, where he slowly spins his chair around. It’s a big, leather-backed thing, so that until it’s turned around, Salvo can’t see what’s in it – who’s in it.

His mouth goes dry as he looks at Daf Mason, his hands cuffed behind his back, his ankles chained together, a gag like a horse’s bit stuffed in his mouth, forcing his teeth apart. Salvo stares at him, uncomprehending, unable to breathe, his heart beginning to speed in his chest, sweat beginning to gather on his skin, beading on his forehead.

His stomach clenches tightly like a squeezed balloon, and he’s glad they haven’t eaten dinner yet, glad that he was left with a plate of sandwiches for lunch that he ate before it was even one o’clock.

“What the fuck?” Salvo demands, the words coming out in a whisper, as if he’s scared of Daf Mason hearing them. He’s not really frightening, now that Salvo sees him like this – he’s been thinking about him on and off today, trying to remember glimpses of him he’s seen about the prison, thinking of him on the floor. He’s not a big man, by any means – solid and stout, but not really big, not that intimidating. “What the fuck, Warden, you can’t just—”

Villiers has stepped close to him, close enough that Salvo is distracted by the scent of his cologne, so distracted he doesn’t realise that Villiers is reaching for him, touching him with his surprisingly warm fingers – so distracted he doesn’t realise why Villiers is actually touching him until the cuffs fall aside, dropping into Villiers’ hands, the left, then the right.

Salvo actually feels dizzy for a second, magic rushing through him like he’s just been dropped into a river of magical flow, and he feels the hot bleed of it through his veins, under his skin, feels the incredible sing of pure energy in his head, between his ears, on his tongue, in his heart, his belly, in his very core. He whips back and steadies himself on a wall as he adjusts himself to it, his eyes closed tightly, his heart pounding.

It's like the world temporarily ceases to exist, like it’s just him and all the magic around him instead, and it’s surprisingly very intimate, feels good and comforting and warm. It’s like magic itself is cradling him in its embrace, enfolding each of his limbs, cradling his body, stroking through his hair, even.

He’d forgotten.

Salvo had forgotten how good it felt, sometimes, all the magic in the world – he’s been wondering of late how the fuck he used to manage it, how he used to stand it, not being touched, the awful skin hunger, the awful starvation in his muscles and in his flesh for other people touching him, not just for hugs or squeezes, not even for kisses or whatever else, but even just the casual touches of other people. Brushing shoulders with people in a corridor, feeling the weight of others in the crowd around you, wrestling, shaking hands, high-fiving, even.

Not like Mason’s touch, no, not the grip of him, the violence of it, the fucking invasion of it, but everything else, everybody else.

The magic isn’t a substitution, but it’s good. It feels right, natural, satisfying, and he slowly breathes in through his nose, steadying himself and standing up straight as he looks across to Warden Villiers and Daf Mason.

He can feel the magic in the room. He never used to feel it much in the care home or in his own apartment – he could reach out and feel the electrical circuits sometimes, the flow of the wiring around his flat, separate from the concentrated magic in enchanted items of his own, in warded or enchanted furniture.

It had never been like this.

The whole of the island is singing beneath his feet, the soil rich with magical salts and proteins, magical root systems from trees and flowers, the ground rock heavy with magic from whenever this island was constructed a few millennia ago. He can feel every brick around him, taste on the air the order in which they were laid, can even imagine the ghosts of the men who’d laid those bricks – fae labourers, many of them, indentured to the crown for resisting the march of King Arthur’s army.

He can feel the age of Villiers’ huge, mahogany desk, feel the solid wood of it and the magic that gathers and settles in its grooves and secreted knots, in its enchanted brass knobs and handles; he can feel the enchantment on each of the furnishings and devices in the room, everything from the privacy charms on his in- and out-trays to the anti-pest ones stitched into the rug beneath their feet and inscribed on the bottom of his bookshelf.

He can taste them, all these magicks, discrete from one another, feel how scattered and chaotic the older magic feels, how untethered and sprawling it is; he can feel the straight lines and rhythms of the newer charms and enchantments, the magic channelled and controlled by careful inscriptions of symbols and writings; he can feel the life in it all, the energy.

Daf Mason burns brighter than the fire does.

Villiers does have a pulse to him, a font of magic buried in his chest and letting more magic flow through his body, but he’s a lighter, less saturated grey where Mason is a hot burn of white energy, pure and wholly concentrated and radiating outward, and Salvo has never felt so incredibly and unspeakably hungry.

He can barely breathe, staring at Mason, unable to separate the detestable man in his vest and trackies and careful bondage, doused in a flop sweat and struggling helplessly against the leather seat beneath him, from the sweet fucking nectar that flows through him. Salvo can see it, feel it, taste it – magic gathers in the very core of a person, runs up and down their spinal column and out from their heart and their brain, flowing through the bulk of their nervous system and their arteries and capillaries, but Mason has been in magic all his life. Was raised in a magical home, learned enchantment as a child, worked in a magical mine, is now kept inmate in a magical prison, probably even raped magical victims – every ounce of magic in him, Salvo knows as intimately as he knows his own heartbeat.

Magic clings in caps around the tips of his fingers, where he’s been enchanting all his life, and gloves his palms leaving gaps where the enchanted wooden heft of his pickaxe wasn’t in contact with his skin; his hair and fingernails aren’t as doused in magic as his skin is, seeming paler and less saturated than the rest of him; if Salvo stripped him naked and then stripped the top layer of skin off his back, he might even be able to read the old ghosts of the runes inscribed on the inside of his armoured mining vest, where the enchantment has left its ghost within Mason’s body from so many decades of use.

Salvo’s thighs touch Villiers’ desk, and Salvo blinks, laying his hands on the wooden surface, staring down at it before he looks back at Mason. He hadn’t even realised he was walking forward, hadn’t realised he was even approaching him.

Daf Mason looks fucking terrified, tears on his cheeks, snot on his top lip and shining yellow in his stubble.

He looks at Villiers, who is watching him keenly, hungrily.

“You’re letting me,” he says, and his voice sounds strangely hollow in his own ears as he slowly moves around the desk, advancing closer. “You’re— you’re letting me? I can… There’s so much in him, it…” He tries to remember what it felt like to be nauseous, but there’s too much of a roar inside him to remember what the fuck something as awful as that felt like – he can’t remember what it felt like to be nauseated and ashamed and horrible with Brownie’s corpse on his conscience, and he can’t remember either what it felt like to be terrified and scared and on the verge of throwing up at the memory of Mason’s hands on his body, Mason’s bondage holding him in place, the thread of Mason behind him. All he can feel, all he can really concentrate on, is the hunger, the need, and better than that, the knowledge of what the satiation will feel like, what wonder it will be to taste him. “It’ll kill him,” Salvo says weakly. He can barely hear that last part.

He can hear Mason’s useless, pathetic begging, even through the gag in his mouth – he can’t really make out the words, but he can hear his desperate fumbling in English and then in Welsh, which Salvo doesn’t even speak. How many people have begged Mason like Salvo didn’t have a chance to yesterday morning, have begged him not to hurt them, not to rape them, not to tie them up? How many people have plead for mercy and haven’t had it from him, or haven’t had the chance to do so because he gagged them first, like Villiers has gagged him?

“And what are you robbing him of, if you take his life?” Villiers asks in a silken voice that weaves around Salvo’s heart and feels like it’s making itself at home inside his skull, inside his heart, inside his fucking soul, and he likes it. He likes the sound of Villiers’ voice, the taste of it. “The chance to ravish another unwilling party, to emasculate another prisoner? To bash in a fellow’s brains, embarrass himself, be cruel, be ugly, be…?” Villiers trails off, and then gestures to the struggling, sweat-soaked Mason, pushes out his lips in a mocking pout, and Salvo looks at the slight weakness of his lips on one side of his mouth, and wonders what Villiers would do if he kissed him there, on that loose corner. “Look at him, Mr Caine,” Villiers says. “Is it even the moral choice, to spare him?”

Salvo could touch Villiers instead.

He could reach out and grab Villiers instead, grab his wrists or his throat, touch his cheek, even kiss him – he could touch Villiers and sap from him, and show him exactly what he deserves, give him what he’s asking Salvo to do to Mason…

But Mason burns so much brighter, and maybe he doesn’t deserve it more – but Salvo deserves it more. He doesn’t want revenge against Villiers, doesn’t crave to take anything from Villiers, because Villiers has never taken anything from him.

He closes his hands around Mason’s neck, moans aloud at the sudden shock of lightning-fast power crackling up through his palms ad up his arms, and Mason chokes and stiffens up and stops struggling and fidgeting all at once, frothing at the mouth as he chokes on air around the bit.

Oh, but it’s ecstasy.

He can feel the stutter and shudder of Mason’s swallowing throat under his thumbs, but it’s nothing compared to the sensation of the feed, of the way all the magic gathered under Mason’s skin, running through his veins and coiled about his bones, held in his every cell, transfers to Salvo instead. He feels as though he’s flying, as though he’s soaring, feels the rush in his ears, crackling over his skin, a whipcrack of wonder—

It's not like how it happened with Brownie.

With Brownie, he hadn’t even known it was coming, had gone from nothing to everything in one moment and not truly been cognizant of what was happening, had never experienced the like of it before. He’s more in control of himself this time, more attached to himself. He’s aware of the moment that Mason’s body, cold, his eyes dead, falls back in the chair, Salvo’s hands releasing him.

Mason’s cold sweat is clinging to his palms, and Salvo flexes his fingers, feeling the pulse of energy under his skin, and feeling strangely satisfied, strangely… whole. He stares down at his own hands as he clenches and stretches out his fingers, slowly rolling his head on his neck, his shoulders, his elbows, feeling oddly like a glass that’s been filled to the brim, but not poured over.

He looks to Villiers, who is watching him intently, and he sees and feels the energy that runs through Villiers, too, the magic in the core of him and that flows through the conduits he’s made up of, but what he doesn’t feel, he finds, is hunger. Want, yes, desire – want for the older man to touch him, hold him, want him, but not to drink from him.

“I don’t feel cold,” Salvo says. It comes out in a soft and mystified whisper, and Villiers hums a sound of comprehension, or perhaps of understanding, or maybe just acknowledgement. He’s holding out a tray, and Salvo obediently takes the two bracelets back off it, sliding them onto his wrists and clicking them into place.

It’s as if the room goes suddenly dark again where before it had been drenched in light, his connection to the magical flows around him abruptly cut off by the enchantment in the cuffs, but he doesn’t feel like he’s drenched in darkness, doesn’t feel as though he’s been dropped into some dark pit.

He can feel his heart beating, is aware that his breaths are even, that his blood must be flowing through his veins, that his organs are at work.

“A hunger sated, yes,” Villiers says. “I’m not surprised that warms you. Come, I have a bath run for you.”

It almost doesn’t occur to him that he could protest, let alone that he’d want to, as he follows after Villiers not, disappointingly, through to his own bedroom, but into the corridor and then to the master bathroom, which is very warm. A few candles are lit around the darkened room, and Salvo strips off his clothes as indicated, sinking then into the bath.

This is Villiers’ own bathroom, more brass bars around the room to support him standing and moving, and Villiers draws over a brass-legged stool before stripping off his cardigan. He’s wearing a dark brown wooden vest over his shirt underneath, and after hanging the cardigan up on the back of the bathroom door, Salvo watches as he rolls up the sleeve on his bad arm, and before he can start with the other, Salvo reaches out with his still dry hands and rolls it up for him. He neatly folds the shirt cuff up and over, trying to mimic the same angles Villiers had used on his other side, up to the elbow.

There are more scars on Villiers’ forearms, the insides of his wrists and elbows – places where the hair on his skin has been burned or altered, marks where he’d been cut, even a messy, fatter wound that he thinks was maybe from a bullet, or was from something else with a straight path, like a sharp pike or stick.

Villiers keeps his weaker hand in his lap as he reaches for a glass jug and fills it from the water, pouring it over Salvo’s head and wetting down his hair as he obediently tips his head forward. There are no bubbles in the bath, but it’s fragranced with salts and smells faintly of flowers and a fruit, he thinks maybe peaches or apples.

“Your father was ill when you were growing up, you said, a pacemaker. Your mother?”

“She worked,” Salvo mumbles, grateful for the curtain of hair hiding his face from Villiers’ gaze. He doesn’t feel any compunction about being naked in front of the other man – a part of him is frustrated that he’s not looking at Salvo’s body with any particular desire or hunger, but that doesn’t sting so much feeling Villiers’ hands on him, moving over his body.

“Who bathed you, as a child?” Villiers asks.

Salvo is quiet, leaning closer to Villiers’ hands as he pours cool, creamy shampoo through Salvo’s hair and massages it into the curls, squeezing and combing his fingers through to ensure he gets as much coverage as he can with his one working hand, the other remaining rested on his knees.

“Does your sapping effect impact a pacemaker?”

“Not as a matter of course,” Salvo says. “I can, um, be aware of electrical fields and stuff, but I don’t really impact them. But he had other stuff wrong with him, and he was ill a lot, and tired a lot. So he couldn’t touch me much, because it’d take so much more out of him than someone else.”

“And your mother?”

“She was already tired from work.”

“And grandparents? Other family members?”

Salvo doesn’t say anything, leaning his cheek into the gentle scrub of Villiers’ narrow fingers as they rub behind and at the underside of his ears, massaging down the back of his neck. It feels good, sends thrills down his spine, and he likes how strong Villiers’ approach to it is – he likes the authority with which Villiers moves his head one way and then the other, how he tilts Salvo’s head for him to pour water over his scalp before smoothing it out.

“I suppose I can imagine it,” Villiers says mildly. “Relatives sitting back from you, coaxing you and tutoring you through combing your hair, brushing your teeth, how best to wash yourself, not touching you and demonstrating as they ordinarily might for a small child. Were you aware of the casual touches your childhood was robbed of by your condition, hm? Cognizant of the way other parents and relatives reached out and touched children of the same age as you – stroked their hair, patted their cheeks, held their hands or gaze them affectionate squeezes and half-hugs? Did you understand why you were an island, even before you were old enough that your touch was a death sentence, and not a promise of mere discomfort and exhaustion?”

“They touched me at check-ups,” Salvo says, although he doesn’t know why he says it – is it a defence of his family, an excuse? An assurance he’s not as stunted as Villiers must assume he is? An explanation about why he is the way he is about care? “Making sure I wasn’t adversely affected by it, that I was still growing, that I was…”

“Were you a rich boy, of course, or from some more established magical family, your condition would have been treated very differently. You’d have been dispatched to a boarding school with as rich a magical field and history as they might find for you, appropriate sources of sustenance brought to you.”

“Victims,” Salvo says.

Villiers shrugs. “Perhaps. But were you trained from youth to control this need of yours, not to mention regularly fed, perhaps you wouldn’t sap so strongly from those you touch. No boarder was suggested, no alternative school?”

“I didn’t have the grades,” Salvo says, vaguely remembering the way his mothers’ smile had faded as she’d excitedly torn open the envelope with him watching, the way it had slowly dripped from her face and faded into the ether like evaporating steam.

“They wouldn’t have seen you as having anything to offer, I suppose,” Villiers says. “No money or storied blood, no especial academic or magical ability. Only a hungry mouth to feed, and to what benefit?”

Villiers massages conditioner into his hair, and then he has a washcloth in his hand and he’s scrubbing in slow, rhythmic circles over his shoulders, his neck, the top of his chest, his arms, and then his belly, between his thighs. He’s not remotely horny about it, isn’t sexual about it, and Salvo’s own arousal isn’t actually that overwhelming, isn’t as satisfying as the pure intimacy of it, and not just the warmth and comfort of Villiers’ hand on his body, the scrub of the soap and the cloth and his fingers, but the control of it. He feels like he’s just so much more hot water, like he’s part of the bath he’s stewing in, he’s so relaxed, not having to think at all, not having to put any of his thoughts or feelings in order – all wants and needs and anything he might think about dissolve into the water as well, and all there is, all there needs to be, is Villiers’ hand guiding Salvo’s body to where he wants it, and then Villiers’ hand making him clean.

“This is what I was talking about,” Salvo says when Villiers reaches over and pulls out the plug of the bath on the chain. “The power of it, care. Complete authority.”

“Indeed,” Villiers murmurs, standing up and reaching for a towel from the heated rail. Salvo looks at it, the way he holds it out, obviously higher held in one hand than the other, looks at the tight clutch of his weaker hand around the lower corner of the towel, and Salvo stands up and steps onto the bath mat, exhaling as Villiers wraps the towel around him – and at the same time, wraps Salvo in his arms.

Salvo smells his cologne and smells the pomade he uses in his hair, feels the soft wool of his vest, feels the heat of Villiers’ body.

“Do you think I’m pathetic?” Salvo asks.

“Hardly the correct question, young man,” Villiers murmurs. His breath smells faintly of coffee, and looking up into his face, Salvo stares into the terrifying freeze of his icy blue eyes, their noses brushing against one another. “A more suitable question might be – if you are pitiable, as is your concern, is it pity I feel for you… or something else?”

Salvo feels like he’s been drenched in hot water for a second time, searing over his flesh, and this time he is aroused, is keenly aware of the heat between his legs and the fact that his body is tight up against the warden’s, and the warden’s breath is intermingling with his, and is close enough to kiss.

“Take the towel from me, if you would,” Villiers orders him quietly. “Bathing you I might attend to sitting down – drying you off would be a dangerous gamble against my ability to keep my balance.”

“Sorry,” Salvo says, taking the towel, and Villiers laughs.

“What on earth are you sorry for, stupid boy?” he asks, raising his eyebrows, and grips Salvo by the jaw and squeezes. It’s not painful by any means, is a firm grip but a gentle punishment, and fuck, but he’s hornier in this moment than he’s ever been in his fucking life, Villiers laughing at him, holding him like this. “Do you want me to kiss you?”

Salvo’s breath hitches in his throat, and he feels his lip quiver, leans forward. “Yes,” he whispers.

Villiers leans in, gripping the side of the sink to better support himself as he does so, and their noses brush against one another again, and he can feel the heat of Villiers’ breath as much as he can smell his coffee. He squeezes his eyes shut, waiting for Villiers’ lips to touch his, but they don’t – they glance over the side of his cheek, and then his breath is hot against the shell of Salvo’s ear, and his knees go weak at the thrill it sends down his spine.

“Earn it, then,” Villiers almost growls into his ear, and Salvo is humiliated by the fucking noise that squeaks out of his throat, involuntary and desperately eager. “Get yourself dry and return to your room, young man,” Villiers tells him as he pulls away, throwing his cardigan over his shoulder as he grasps hold of his cane and opens up the door. “Your dinner should be waiting for you.”

“Fuck me,” Salvo mumbles, and Villiers laughs again.

“That, I will not do,” he says, and limps off down the corridor.

* * *

When Caine is allowed back down from his special little holding cell up in Warden Villiers’ house, whatever the fuck that looks like, he comes down with a smile on his face. It’s a dreamy smile, distracted, and Red wonders if the lad’s gonna be distracted from his work detail, but he isn’t at all. He writes like a demon, moving a lot quicker through his little toys and small things than he normally ever does, carving runes into place or painting them onto wood panels with confidence and ease.

He’s pleased to see Callum Pike and all, and when the four of them sit down to lunch together, Pike gives Caine a grin.

“What, you thought they’d fucking lock me away forever?” he asks.

“I just feel bad you were put in solitary on my account, that’s all,” Caine says.

“Where is he, Mason?” Pike asks, casting a look around the hall – it’s a question Red’s interested in hearing the answer to, and he looks at Caine’s face for an answer, but his pretty brown eyes don’t show any sign of guilt or regret. He, like Pike, casts a look around the room, tracing the lines of the long tables looking for Daf Mason’s face. “You seen him about?”

“Went looking for him in the infirmary yesterday, but there was no sign of the prick. What’d you tell him, the warden?” Red asks, and Caine does look a little uncertain now, pressing his lips together and twisting his mouth just a little.

“I told him what happened, what Mason did,” Caine says. “That it wasn’t your fault, that you shouldn’t be in solitary for defending me. But he didn’t say anything about punishing Mason any extra, or putting him in solitary, or…” He looks down at the canteen table, nervously fingering the edge of his fork. His voice is very quiet as he asks, “Do you think he hurt him? Warden Villiers, do you think he hurt Mason in defence of me?”

“I bet it wasn’t just to defend you,” says Rosen pleasantly, patting Caine’s hand in the most comforting way he’s capable of. “I bet he goes looking around for excuses to kill people, sometimes. He probably gets bored that he’s not allowed to any longer.”

Caine stares at him blankly, seeming distantly horrified and not going exactly how the fuck to cope with that, and Pike laughs.

“You should come work with us when you’re out,” he says, reaching across the table and patting Rosen on the side of one plump cheek. “Sort of lads I could refer you to’d be more than happy to have you nicking cars and trucks for them.”

“It’s no wonder recidivism rates are so fucking high with you recruiting, lad,” Red says, and he looks across at Caine, who slowly begins to eat his meal.

“I don’t think my family would be very pleased if I became a drug-runner on top of stealing cars,” Rosen says.

“Why not?” Pike asks. “My da’s just another kind of florist, he and your da are two sides of a penny.”

Rosen sniggers, and Caine looks across to him as he keeps eating from his plate.

“Your family are florists?” he asks.

“My dad and his two brothers, and a few cousins,” Rosen says, nodding his head. “My mother’s sort of the opposite – less of a green thumb, more of a death touch, you know. Liable to make a flower wilt just by touching it.”

“I have something like that myself,” Caine says, and Red stares at him – it takes Rosen and Pike a few moments for them to register that Caine’s actually made a joke, especially given that the lad doesn’t smile or grin or wink or do anything like that. Rosen laughs uproariously, tapping his little feet on the floor as Pike wheezes, slapping the side of the table, and Caine smiles a thin-edged smile, and seems to… Not get bigger, exactly, but fold out from himself a bit, not so small in his place.

“You never killed someone, before you killed that fella?” Pike asks.

“No,” Caine says. “When I was small, it wasn’t enough to harm anybody – make people tired, make them irritable, more than that. They wouldn’t realise what it was, often enough, wouldn’t realise why it was bothering them, if they touched me casually. I had to go to a mundie school – magical schools, even knowing what I was, teachers would touch me, lean on the back of my chair or tap me on the head or… And they’d start snapping, me gruff, annoyed. Like people who are ill, you know, it’s not controllable. A history master nearly slapped me once for scratching a scab before he got hold of himself and remembered who he was, who I was. I never had that once I was in with mundies.”

“I got slapped around at school,” Pike says. “Mind you, it was normal back then.”

“Why, when’d you leave school?” Rosen asks.

“I left early, I was fourteen, I think. ’81.”

“’81?” Rosen repeats, aghast. “So, what, you’re sixty-seven?”

“Sixty-six,” Pike corrects him, apparently offended. “Not sixty-seven ‘til November.”

“There was me thinking you were younger than me,” Red says, laughing and shaking his head. “All the time you’ve said fucking “age before beauty” to me about buying the first round!”

“Well,” Pike says, shrugging his shoulders. “You look it, don’t you?”

Caine laughs at that hard enough to choke on his overcooked potatoes, and Rosen pats him hard on the back as he coughs and swallows down a mouthful of water to try to ease it down.

“I’ll remember you fucking laughing at that, lad,” Red promises him, injecting all the bass he can into his voice. “There may well be consequences.”

Caine’s eyes flash with a bit of energy, and as he wipes away the choking tears from his eyes and wipes his mouth with the back of his hand, he says, “Alright,” with a note of challenge in his tone. “Consequence away, old man. How old are you, sixty-five?”

“You little prick,” Red growls at him, half-laughing himself, but Caine only beams at him, all easy smiles.

Daf Mason doesn’t turn up, in the next few days, but things get back to normal.

After another two days, the ancient fae that make up the rest of Rosen’s fucking sewing circle tire themselves up, and Rosen reluctantly returns to his work detail instead of dossing about in his cell all day, although at least he stops complaining about being fucking bored when everyone else abandons him.

Caine keeps up the fast pace at work, often finishes up a little earlier than he used to, and one evening as Red finishes up for the day, he finds Caine lingering in the corridor outside of where they’re embroidering. The door is slightly ajar, and Red swallows hard, clutching at his own chest to try to cope with the unholy fucking vibrations that sing through it.

He fucking hates it when the old fae sing together, the noise of it putting the fucking willies up him. They’re all twice the size of most fae you’d see today, those old cunts, as tall as the trees they’ve sprung from with skin like tree bark, so that Rosen looks even smaller than usual when he’s in there with them.

The sound radiates out from the embroidery workshop and into the corridor and right down the halls, bouncing off the tiled floors and the undecorated walls, and it makes Red’s ribs feel like they’re vibrating, and he feels it on the inside of his ribs, the inside of his skull, the inside of all of him.

It’s a waulking song, or something like it, a song to keep them in rhythm with one another as they work, Red guesses, although when he hovers behind Caine and looks into the room over his shoulder, he sees that they’re done working for the day. They’re trying to teach Rosen the song, judging by how they’re all sitting in their chairs and have their faces angled toward him, one of them moving fingers that look like tree roots in rhythm to keep Rosen on beat, and he’s nodding along.

Red can’t make out Rosen’s voice in amongst the noise they’re making, a collective sound louder than a choir of fucking thousands, louder than a church organ if you had your ear right to the pipes, and it should hurt, it’s so fucking loud, but it doesn’t hurt, exactly. What it does is make his bones feel like they’re shivering, makes all his nerves fucking jangle, and he looks to Caine.

His expression is one of soft and quiet awe, his thumb tugging and playing repeatedly over one of the metal cuffs around his wrists, his lips parted, his eyes as big as fucking plates. When the fae stop – oh, God, fuck, it’s like if trees could sing, it’s like if they were singing right from the core of the fucking Earth – it’s an unspeakable relief, and Red leans against the wall, exhaling.

One of the fae stands now, and he says something in his unearthly and ancient voice, the language guttural. Red’s no big Welsh-speaker himself, but he can hear the ghost of the Welsh in it, he thinks, or the roots of it, although it sounds closer to fucking Latin to him.

“Um,” says Rosen. “He said, um… Something like, asking if you’re imagining what he tastes like?”

Caine smiles at the fae – Red can’t even tell them apart, but he thinks this one is Toutorixs, because a crown of bramble thorns, complete with blooming white flowers, is sprouting around the crown of his tree-trunk head – and puts out his hand.

“Oh, erm, Salvo, they don’t, they don’t shake hands,” Rosen starts to say urgently, but Toutorixs reaches out and winds his root-like fingers around Caine’s outstretched fingers, around his palm, around the base of his wrist.

Caine gasps, but instead of pulling away or shouting out loud, he leans in closer, and his eyes shine gold for a moment, the cuffs around his wrists flashing so brightly they look ready to fucking melt, before the screw in charge of the embroidery crew, French, barks, “No contact between inmates, you know that! Stop— doing whatever you’re doing!”

Toutorixs pulls back and lets out a gut-wrenching sound that must be a laugh, because all his friends join in, and Caine and Rosen follow after Red toward the canteen, Rosen soon beginning to chatter on about something or other – horse-racing, Red thinks, although he can’t make himself tune into it properly, still trying to work that awful sound out of his head.

He’s quiet as he eats, as quiet as Caine had been before – and just as quietly, apparently, Caine follows after him to his cell when he goes there instead of playing a game or watching TV or anything else.

“You’re bottom bunk?” he asks softly as Red slides into his bed, which has two blankets on, one that Sandra had sent in for him when he complained about the winter chill his first year in, and another Patience-May had brought in when she’d visited for his birthday earlier that year, sewn together of all different flannel shirts she’d gotten from the scraps bag at work.

“Nah, Churn is more than young enough to jump up there himself without having me do it,” Red says, and he watches as Caine steps slowly around the room, looking at Red’s books and Churn’s, looking at the pictures Churn has up on the wall of his daughters and his wife, and at the painted picture Sandra’s daughter had sent in for Red of the flowers in their garden.

“You have children?” Caine asks.

“No,” Red says. “But the women I take up with, some of their kids like me.”

“Even though you’re in prison?”

“They don’t know the difference between me being in the nick and being away at work.”

“I suppose not,” Caine says, and toes off his shoes.

Red leans back in bed and lifts up the blanket, and the lad apparently needs no more invitation to slide between the blankets and in close, and Red exhales at the feeling of Caine’s body warm and soft against his. He doesn’t know what shampoo the warden’s giving him in his house, but it smells very nice, of nectarines. When he slides his hands underneath the waistband of his tracksuit bottoms, he finds that the flesh of the lad’s thighs and arse is just as generous as it looks, and he sinks his fingers into the warm yield of it, squeezes.

Caine sighs luxuriously, leaning in closer and burying his nose against Red’s chest, banding his arms around Red’s middle, and as Red keeps pressing and massaging at his buttocks and thighs, kneading at them like bread dough, he feels Caine’s prick against his thigh, feels the lad grind against him.

“I hope you don’t think I’m going to fuck you,” Red murmurs into his curls, “unless you feel like going door-to-door down the corridor and seeing what you can trade for a tab of sildenafil.”

“Is every man in this prison fucking impotent?” Caine asks in a grumble, although it sounds pretty fucking sleepy to Red, and Red laughs.

“Only the fucking old ones you keep throwing yourself at,” Red tells him dryly, and he waits for the lad to argue with him, for him to debate, for him to keep grumbling, but he doesn’t do any of that. Red keeps squeezing the flesh under his fingers, rubbing back and forth, and with his other hand he reaches up and combs lightly through his hair.

“Feels nice,” Caine says quietly. “No one’s ever touched me as much as since I came here.”

“No touching between inmates, remember,” Red tells him. “And I don’t think the warden’s meant to be touching you either.”

Caine doesn’t answer.

He’s fast asleep, breathing quietly in and out, and Red enjoys the heat of him and the softness of him and the scent, too. Not like a woman, no, but almost like being at home with one, until one of the screws comes along to break them apart. He wouldn’t mind fucking him, by any means – he might well ask one of the other lads about trading him something for his ED if Caine likes the sound of it – but this is nice on its own, just sitting here and soaking in the lad’s heat, the magic of him.

Red closes his eyes and lets himself doze until Cornell comes along to get them out of bed again.

* * *

In the observation room that adjoins Warden Villiers’ office, Salvo stands at the window and looks down over the canteen, where most of the long tables have been folded away for the evening, and a few of the lads are sat around, playing chess or basic boardgames, or reading books, or sitting around and watching TV.

It’s frosted on one side, the glass, and he hadn’t even realised it was an observation window – he doesn’t think he ever realised it was actually a window at all, and wasn’t just a big pane of frosted glass behind the metal balcony with emergency stairs coming down, separate to the wall.

Red is playing cards around a table with Rosen and Pike, and from this angle he looks to be a bigger man than he is, in contrast to Pike’s gangling limbs and Rosen’s round but confined little form, broad as he is. Salvo thinks of how warm he is, when he’s under the blankets and pressed up against Red’s broad, hairy breast, very different indeed to the warden’s spindly but muscular form, all joints and flat, hard edges of muscle.

In the past few weeks, he’s been touched so much.

Touched by the warden, not just when he’d given Salvo a bath a few weeks ago, but in the intervening period as well – reaching out to adjust his clothes or his hair, touching him as he passes him by in the house, brushing his hands as they play chess together. Once, yesterday, leaning over ostensibly to take the salt from the table at dinner, and taking the opportunity to breathe in Salvo’s ear.

Touched by Rufus Redford, petted and touched here and there, touching or chucking his chin or his cheeks or the back of his neck, and where they’ve been able to sneak it without being told off by the guards, Salvo curled up to doze in bed with him, or sit with his head against his lap or his belly while the TV is on and it’s deniable enough that Salvo is sat on the floor in front of the sofa or the bench.

Touched by others, too. Toutorixs, of course, had gripped his hand a few weeks ago and sent magic flooding through him even through the cuffs – they’re no match for the old fae and how much magic flows through them, and the others of the ancient fae have made a game of it, Rosen seems to think, reaching out to touch him when he walks by, zapping him with bits of pure magic that ripple right through him, no matter that the guards bark at them whenever they catch him at it.

Other touches, too. Brushes in the corridor, standing in line, and on Wednesday, when they’d been outdoors for exercise, Pike had taught him some wrestling grapples and holds. His hands are cold, his palms rough, but it had still felt good, had made him feel somehow real, feeling the weight of Pike’s thigh against his chest or his arms around his chest, or feeling the solid weight of Pike’s body under his own as Salvo tried to keep him pinned or still – especially, the whole time, feeling Pike’s laughter and Salvo’s own running through both of their bodies.

“Feeling hungry?” the warden asks as he enters the room, and Salvo turns back to look at him as he approaches, his cane making only the tiniest noise on the ground, his footsteps utterly silent. Salvo can only make out the noise of the cane’s grip against the floor because he’s so used to listening for it by now. “Even with those would-be dryads supplementing your diet.”

“I thought dryads were meant to be pretty young women,” Salvo says.

“I’m sure they’d present themselves as such, if they felt like it,” Villiers says dryly. “But that would rather lead to unwanted attention in a prison like this, as I’m sure, by now, you’re aware.”

The warden is warm behind him as he comes closer, and Salvo quietly exhales and leans half an inch backward, feeling today’s pin-striped waistcoat against his back.

“I’m told you were dozing in Mr Redford’s cell once again yesterday,” the warden murmurs in his ear, and Salvo shivers at the warmth of his breath tickling over the lobe of it. “Has he fucked you yet?”

“He can’t get it up without a pill,” Salvo says. “Same as you.”

“Vasodilators are contraindicated for previous victims of stroke, as I’m sure you know,” Villiers says, his voice quiet but his tone amused, and Salvo can feel his smile against the back of his neck as he reaches past Salvo to rest his cane against the wall. “In any case, it isn’t dysfunction that prevents me from fucking you, young man, but disinclination.”

“Am I meant to believe you don’t actually want to fuck me?” Salvo asks, feeling as though hot water is beginning to flow under his skin as Villiers tugs up Salvo’s shirt with a finger and bands his weaker arm tightly around Salvo’s middle. He opens up his hand, but he can’t grip very well with it or easily manipulate his fingers – it’s mostly with the strength of his elbow and his arm, and the tuck of his chin against Salvo’s shoulder, that keeps him upright. “The way you touch me. The way you look at me.”

“I’ve never found myself vulnerable to the siren’s call of penetrative sex,” Villiers says as, with his good hand, he slides his fingers up under Salvo’s sweatshirt and plucks at one of his nipples with a graceful, artsy movement like he’s playing a string on an instrument, and Salvo whimpers at the sudden sear of sensation it sends through his chest and rocketing down his spine. His cock is hard, and his knees threaten to go weak. “Ah ah,” Villiers starts sternly. “You’re the only thing holding me up, boy – keep those legs strong and solid, unless you want us both clattering to the floor.”

“You’ll clatter, maybe, being all bones,” Salvo mutters, heat rising in his cheeks as he squeezes his eyes shut, feeling Villiers laugh against his neck, his thumb and forefinger teasing and tugging over his nipple. “Or shatter. What do you mean, siren’s call? What, you’re like, asexual?”

“A side, I believe is the modern parlance,” Villiers says, and before Salvo can grumble about that, Villiers drags his teeth down the side of Salvo’s neck, making him whine. His eyes shoot open, terrified for a second that everyone downstairs will be able to hear him through the glass, that even if they can’t see his face, they’ll see the two shadows of him and the warden, and know it’s him, know what the warden’s doing to him, that they’ll be watching. “How does it feel, when those fae touch you? Comparable to your feast on the soul of Dafydd Mason?”

“I don’t believe in souls,” Salvo says breathlessly, then groans softly as Villiers plucks at his other nipple, flicks over the tip of it with his neatly-groomed nail, his other hand sliding slower and gripping at Salvo’s hip. Villiers’ hands are so warm and his fingers are so clever and it feels good. He tilts back his head, turning it to the side and moaning when Villiers shows his approval by licking a stripe up the side of his neck, nips the edge of his jaw, then the lower part of his ear.

It's not the same – it hadn’t been the same. The way the fae touch him tastes different to when he’d touched Mason, for want of a better word – their magic is older, richer, comes more from inside them than it flows through and gathers in them as it does in human beings. Even through the cuffs, even at a glancing touch, it overwhelms his senses and the core of him, but it fills him and leaves him fizzing over with it.

Mason had… sated him. Wholly and entirely, and a little bit more than that, but it had felt natural, though perhaps he shouldn’t think of it that way.

“Do they suspect his demise is down to you?” Villiers asks, sliding a hand up to grip the base of his throat as he bites down harder now on the side of Salvo’s neck, as if he’s some kind of fucking vampire instead of Salvo, and then Villiers shoves him forward, against the glass. He’s able to put more of his weight on Salvo like this, his hand going from Salvo’s neck down between his legs instead, his fingertip tugging at the ring of Salvo’s arse and making him squeak out a sound. “Do they know you to be a killer twice over, and hungry to lay waste to a third victim?”

“No,” Salvo groans, reaching clumsily back for Villiers, one hand reaching back to squeeze his narrow arse, making Villiers let out a short, sharp, breathless laugh. “Why, d’you think I should fucking advertise it?”

“Temper temper,” Villiers says, and uses the waistband of Salvo’s tracksuit bottoms to ease his way onto the floor, and Salvo stands up straight, whipping his head around to stare down at the older man aghast.

“You can’t be on the fucking floor, what about your knees? Sir, you can’t—”

“It’s not as though I’ll be down here long, is it?” Villiers retorts – that’s all the warning Salvo gets before he licks a hot, wet stripe from the back of Salvo’s bollocks up to his hole, and the sensation wrenches through him, right up his hard and aching, dripping cock. All of a sudden, he’s coming, white spattering the frosted glass of the window in front of them, his eyes tearing up, and he tries to stop himself from going wholly limp, bracing himself on the bar.

He’s breathing heavily, unable to catch his breath, somewhere between hotly satisfied and a little embarrassed.

“Told you so,” says Villiers.

“Fuck off,” Salvo says, and Villiers laughs.

“Help me up, would you?” Villiers asks. “I am so very old and very infirm, and my thoughtless young lover has abandoned me to the floor.”

“I could kick you.”

“I invite you to try.” He really does, too – Salvo would never, could never, he doesn’t think, but when he looks down at Villiers on the floor, braced on his better knee more than the weaker one, he sees that the old man is more than braced for it, that he’s hungry for it, wants to scrabble with him, wants Salvo to try to hit him, just so that Villiers can pin him down to the floor instead.

“Not today,” Salvo mutters, a little too flustered to actually sound at all stern, and offers the old man his arm to help him up – as soon as his knees don’t feel so much like fucking jelly.

* * *

It’s Rusk and French that grab him just before lights out and knock him out with something like fucking chloroform. They don’t frog-march him up the fucking hill, and they don’t let him make his own way either. He just wakes up in a leather chair in an even fancier office than Villiers has in the prison proper, his ankles tied together, his wrists cuffed behind his back, a gag in his mouth.

Red sits back in his seat, looking around the room, at the fancy floor-to-ceiling bookshelves filled with leather bound and gilt books, at the astronomy equipment next to the window, an astrolabe and an armillary sphere, and more shit he’s seen in plenty of fancy offices like this one, but has never learned the name of. There’s a fancy rug that’s probably centuries old rolled out on the hardwood floors, and all the furniture is good, heavy, antique stuff, and he can feel the enchantment in all of it, feel how old the subtle magic is, even if he can’t feel the age of the wood.

Up on one wall are a bunch of frames: Villiers in a line of other bureaucrats or maybe other assassins, receiving some kind of medal or award from the king regent; a portrait of a young Villiers alongside a severely featured but happy-looking woman he guesses must be his mother; a few calligraphed certificates covered in more bits of gilt and fancy ink for his various degrees, declaring him Guillaume Copernicus Villiers, BSc, MA, MSc, MMSc, PhD.

He's been in a lot of offices like these over the years, talking about how they’re going to fix the windows, what sort of glass or framing would suit best the architecture and mimic the original style, what sort of enchantment they can put in, what carpenters and joiners, what masons, he’s going to be working with.

He’s never felt at home in them, exactly, but Red’s gotten used to them, almost comfortable with them. He’s learned the names of the old-fashioned astronomical equipment, or vintage navigational tools, or basic entomology and demonology, learned to recognise certain bits of taxidermy. He’s learned the basics of these fancy posh cunts’ hobbies and interests, so that he’s more comfortable talking to the bastards, and they’re more comfortable giving him a big fucking tip.

He never thought he’d die in an office like this one. Figures.

“Fuck off,” says Salvo Caine as he crosses over the threshold, staring at Red in his chair, and Red marvels at the expression on his face, at the way he shoots a fierce glare at Villiers and seems very surprised at the fact that it’s Red, but not surprised that it’s fucking somebody.

Lied through his teeth about Daf Mason, and Red never even suspected he was lying.

Caine isn’t wearing his bracelets, Red sees – when he casts about to look for them, he sees them on a tray next to Villiers, and Villiers himself who’s standing up straight and wearing a fucking green and gold housecoat over his clothes, like some fella in a vintage advert, all settled in his pyjamas.

“You aren’t hungry after all?” Villiers asks, gracefully arching an eyebrow.

“Not him,” Caine hisses. “Not h— he has a family.”

“I can assure you, he doesn’t.”

“He has women he goes to see, women who love him – kids who love him.”

“And you?” Villiers asks in mild, dry tones, sounding for all the world like he’s about ready to laugh in the lad’s face. “Do you love him? This trafficker and embezzler, hm?”

“Easier to love him than a fucking, a murderer and a creep!”

“Maybe so,” Villiers says, delicately shrugging his narrow shoulders. Keeping his weight braced on his cane, he holds out the tray with his other hand, Caine’s cuffs rested on them. “By all means, then…”

Red looks up at Caine as he slowly approaches, his pretty hands held awkwardly in front of his belly. It’s been nice, the past few weeks, having Caine in his bed, feeling the softness of him, the warmth of him, smelling the fancy scents the warden apparently bathes him in for his own fucking pleasure, it seems. Strangely, ridiculously, he wonders in the moment how Caine dresses himself when he’s not in the nick, what scents he likes to wrap himself up in.

Caine’s gaze lands on Red’s face, and Red meets it. They’ve not been talking much, really, not about the things that matter, not about the things that catch in the chest or in the mind – if anything, Caine seems pretty content to be petted and played with more like a cat than a young man.

He’s overheard him talking to Pike, though, once or twice, the past few weeks, about the hunger he feels, about the need inside him – he’d been downplaying it, obviously, if he’d fucking killed Daf Mason.

He doesn’t struggle.

He’s not fucking stupid – he knows damn well he won’t be going anywhere, up here in the warden’s office, tied up in his chair, the warden being an assassin with however many titles and qualifications after his name, the lad with a fucking death touch in front of him, not having his bracelets on. There’s no sense in struggling, not now.

The only man with Red’s life in his hands is Caine – and it’s only in his hands because Villiers has put it there.

“I don’t want to hurt him,” Caine whispers to Villiers. “Why’d you fucking gag him? He’s not like Mason.”

“If you don’t wish to sate that hunger gnawing in you, boy,” says Villiers in tones as dry as dust, but again, the bastard is still visibly on the verge of fucking laughing, “by all means—”

Caine swallows as he comes closer, his hands up close to his chest as he meets Red’s gaze, biting the inside of his pretty plump lips – Red’s not even fucking kissed them. That’s what he gets for beating around the bush, isn’t it?

“Sorry, Red,” says Caine, and then his hands are whipping out, and Red closes his eyes as tightly as he can so he doesn’t feel it coming.

It doesn’t come.

The tray clatters to the floor, the magic cuffs jangling before they hit the rug and go quiet, and Red opens one eye to see that Caine has one hand gripping at Villiers’ hand and the other wrapped around his throat.

* * *

“Oh,” says Salvo, because Villiers’ skin is beautifully warm under his hands, as warm as it ever is, and he can feel the magical flow beneath the older man’s skin, is cognizant of the glow of the other man compared to the rest of the room.

He’d noticed, before, that Villiers’ magical glow was lessened compared to Mason’s, and it’s lessened compared to Red’s. Some people have thicker skin than others, thicker skin or thinner veins, so that you don’t see their blushes as much when the blood comes to the surface, and this is like that, he thinks. Villiers has magic in him, but it’s deeper under the skin, harder to get at – like Pike or another vampire would be hard to cut or bite your teeth into, because their flesh is harder, denser.

“It might behove you to know,” says Villiers, utterly unaffected by the touch of Salvo’s hands against his skin, even as he turns his hand up to playfully tickle the underside of Salvo’s wrist, “that apart from building up self-defence techniques and immunities to various poisons, I was trained to resist draws like yours as a matter of course.”

“You fucking cunt,” Salvo whispers, and Villiers laughs, his thumb sliding warm against Salvo’s palm, pressing against it. It feels nice. Salvo’s never been able to touch another magical person since he was a kid without killing them – and never without hurting them, without tainting their feelings for him.

He wants to stay angry, wants to stay pissed, but a part of him is sparking to life inside because Villiers is touching him, and it feels nice.

“You can’t win every chess game, dear,” Villiers says, and tugs Salvo’s hand to enclose around Red’s throat instead. “Checkmate.”

Salvo sees Red’s eyes bulge and his expression of relief explode into panic and fear and pain, hears his choking sound of terror, and he can’t focus on compassion right now, because all that matters is the rush of Red’s magic into his hand, into both his hands when he puts the other on Red’s cheek, draws from him entirely.

He should feel terrible, should be beside himself with guilt, but he doesn’t – it feels wonderful. It feels wonderful, feels sublime—

“Good man,” says Villiers, and kisses his fucking cheek. “You’re free to come for dinner whenever it suits you.”

“Free, am I?” Salvo asks, and Villiers chuckles, patting his arse as he limps away.

“As much as you’re good, young man,” he says, and goes out into the corridor.

Red’s body is already going cold, but the room is warm, and as he feels the pulsing spread of stolen magic all throughout his body, rippling under his skin, Salvo feels very warm as well.

FIN.

#original fiction #writers on tumblr #authors on tumblr #original characters #age difference #musings

73 notes · View notes