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thepersephonecabin · 5 years

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Red

So I finally finished my @festivebastion fic for @greaseonmymouth! Sorry it took a while, but hopefully you like it!

read on AO3!

Pairing: Alcibiades/Caius Greylace

Rating: General Audiences

Summary: Returning to life from exile has good days and bad days for Caius Greylace, but Alcibiades is always there for him to lean on. After a particularly bad breakdown, Alcibiades decides that Caius needs some good old-fashioned rest and relaxation in the country air. How will Caius take to life on the farm and meeting Yana and Al's family?

They had a code for when one wanted to see the other. “Red.” It was a nostalgic way of remembering their time back in Xi’an, daring to wear red to the peace talks while also continuing their relationship, their this, whatever this was.

Caius had been the one to come up with it. Over their time together, Alcibiades had realized that Caius was actually rather sentimental in his own way, although he wouldn’t have thought so at first. After all Caius had gone through as a child, Al had expected him to destroy all the reminders of his time with the Esar, but it hadn’t been the case. The first time he’d been allowed into Caius’s Miranda apartment in Thremedon, he’d been surprised to find one such remnant in display.

It was an ornate vase, porcelain blue with gold leaf, sitting atop a white pedestal. The flared top narrowed before flaring into a globe-shaped bird’s cage which broke up the glass top and bottom of the base with delicate, gold bars, trapping a glass bird within. It was the only blue in the purple scheme of Caius’s lounge, making Alcibiades wonder how Caius, ever conscious of the surrounding color scheme and always the first to criticize the clashing tones of people’s clothes and interior design choices, could stand the way it stood out in the room.

Upon inviting Al into the flat, Caius had disappeared into the kitchen to bring out tea and pastries, leaving Al to wander around the lounge. When Caius reappeared, he’d been bending down to pear through the bird cage vase, internally remarking at how he could wave his hand behind the vase and see it through the cage.

“Oh, do you like my vase?” Caius chirped. Without waiting for an answer, he went on, “It was given to me by the Esar when I was barely eight. It had been part of the Bastion’s blue wing, and I spent so much time admiring it, he said I could have it if I did well enough in my velikaia training with Antoinette.”

Ah, Antoinette. That explained it. Of all the people Caius looked back on from his youth, it was his old mentor that he remembered most fondly. He’d always seemed to have a soft spot for her, even going back to their period sequestered in the Basquait with the plague, when he seemed to be hurt at finding out Antoinette had spent all that time in the same building quarantined with them, but never coming by to see Caius.

“It’s ridiculous. You couldn’t put anything in it,” Alcibiades said.

Caius tsked at him, “Not every vase is for carrying water. Can’t it just be visually appealing?”

“No,” Al argued. “A vase is a container. It’s meant to contain things.”

Caius sipped his tea. “You needn’t insult my belongings just because you are incapable of appreciating the aesthetic, dear.”

And that had been that. That had been months ago, and by now, Alcibiades had been to Caius’s apartment enough times that he didn’t pay the vase any mind. He hardly remembered it existed until the day he received a one word note from Caius- “Red.”

Something about the message worried him. It wasn’t unlike Caius to send vague notes, but the handwriting was all wrong- shakey and near illegible. Caius’s normal hand was looping, impeccable cursive. Alcibiades supposed that Caius could have asked a servant to pen the note, but generally, Caius preferred to keep his correspondence private.

“Did he say anything else?” Alcibiades asked, turning the parchment over in his hand.

The courier, a young lad in a flat cap and gloves with holes in the fingers, shifted from foot to foot, scratching his back. “No, sir, will there be anythin’ else?” He held up a hand for payment, and Al scrambled in his packet for a chevronet.

“No, thank you,” he said, dismissing him. He’d better just go straight to Caius, not bother with a reply.

By the time he got to Ciaus’s apartment, it was approaching the afternoon. He knocked on the door, only to be met with a muffled, “Come in,” from inside.

Al entered, finding the foyer empty. “Hello?” he called.

A choked, “In here,” called back from the lounge.

Something was very wrong. Caius sat on the floor, head bowed. Alcibaides couldn’t see his face through a curtain of white-blonde hair, but by the shaking of his shoulders, Al knew he was crying. He cradled a bloody hand in his lap, the blood staining his immaculately pressed silver trousers and frilly white shirt. In front of him were the shattered remains of the bird cage vase.

“Caius… what’s wrong?” Al asked, moving forward cautiously.

“I… I broke the vase,” Caius said, flinching as the glass crunched under Al’s boots. “I didn’t know what to do, who to call.”

Al knelt down, reaching out for his hand. “It’s just a vase. Come on, let me see your hand and get some bandages.”

“It’s not just a-“ Caius began before cutting himself off and looking away. “No, you wouldn’t understand.”

“Try me.”

But Caius stayed silent. Al sighed, and stood up before moving to the bathroom to find the first aid kit. Caius didn’t offer any further information as Al came back, cleaned away the blood, and bandaged the cuts on his hand.

When he was done, Al pulled Caius up and said, “Come on, pack a bag.”

“Where are we going?”

“Home.”

Al didn’t need to say more. He kept a small flat in the city where he stayed whenever he needed to deal with the Basquait or Magician business, but he and Caius both knew his home was hours from Thremedon.

Caius had enjoyed his time back, relearning the city after years in exile, but Al had long suspected it had taken a toll on him as well. Having missed so much while he was away, combined with the vicious rumors of Thremedon’s elite had left Caius reeling some days. The worst, in Alcibiades’s opinion had been the first ball Caius attended at the palace following the end of his exile. No one had been pleased to see Caius return, never mind the fact that he had saved the peace talks by preventing Emperor Iseul’s attempts to sabotage them and the failed assassination attempt on his younger brother, the new leader of Xi’an. While Alcibiades and the other Magicians returned from Xi’an as heroes, Caius was still regarded as dangerous pariah. The other nobles never faltered in sharing their opinions of him, the freak who nearly killed another Magician ages ago. The night had ended in Caius accidentally shattering a champagne flute with his grip, then leaving near tears. Alcibiades had no doubt living in the city had continued to push Caius’s mental health to the limits. He only hoped that Caius would benefit from being removed from the city for the time being, not relapse even harder from being in the country as he was in exile.

The carriage ride into the country was more quiet then Alcibiades could imagine Caius could be. Usually Caius was so chatty and full of life, even in the most needless and incessant of conversations that Alcibiades had no idea how much he’d grown used to Caius’s voice until now that he remained silent.

Finally, around an hour into their journey Caius spoke, “He was going to have me killed, you know. For the Magician.”

Alcibiades didn’t need to ask who “he” was. The Esar had never been especially well-loved by the people of Volstov, at least not more than any other ruler. However, following the news of his sudden decline into a comatose state and Esarina Anastasia’s rise to the throne, more and more people had begun seeing the areas where his dedication to the empire had been left wanting. As a former member of the Esar’s inner circle of Magicians, even, or perhaps especially, at his young age, Caius had seen the lengths the Esar could go to for success, even when it came with great cost- a cost so frequently paid not by the Esar himself, but rather by one of his endless line of expendable pawns.

“How do you know?” Alcibiades asked.

“Another Magician acquaintance of mine who was also in his service at the time. She had been there when it happened. Apparently, the only reason he decided against it was because Antoinette threatened to abandon him if he did. I’m told he agreed with the stipulation that she cut ties with me,” Caius explained.

“That’s good, though, isn’t it? It means she hasn’t been avoiding you because of you. She was probably just trying to protect you from what he’d do if she tried to contact you after you got back.”

“It’s been months since he fell asleep, though, and she still hasn’t said anything,” Caius refuted.

“She’s a busy woman. What with the change in power, I’m sure she’s got a lot of ground to make up seducing the new empress,” Al grunted, rolling his eyes.

Caius scowled, “Really? What would poor Yana think to hear you speak of a lady like that? Besides if you think she hasn’t already made progress on that front, you aren’t up on your court gossip.” Alcibiades gaped at him and Caius scoffed, “Oh, come now, surely you didn’t think you were the only one in the empire to be interested in more than one sex.”

“Of course not, I just thought she’d wait until the Esar’s throne got cold before moving on to the next monarch.”

Caius hummed. “Yes, well, Nicolas was hardly the most attentive partner one could ask for. I could hardly blame the Esarina for wanting someone to fill the gap.”

“Now that I can see,” Alcibiades relented, just as the carriage began to roll to a stop. “Seems like we’re here.”

It seemed that “poor Yana” was a misnomer. Yana, though barely five feet in height, was a whirlwind of a woman. As soon as he met her, Caius realized he had been mistaken to ever think she was “poor” anything.

Upon first stepping out of their carriage and looking on to Alcibiades’s family farm for the first time, Caius broke out of his sadness long enough to worry that he’d be intruding. After all, Alcibiades had been too busy taking care of Caius’s nonsensical meltdown to send message ahead to let Yana and his other family that company was coming. Not to mention, if Caius had known he’d been coming to a farm in the country, he would have surely have worn something more appropriate and less made for the fashions of Thremedon. He should have worn something more sensible and humble. As it was, he was draped in a blue, satiny dress. He supposed to someone more familiar to the countryside’s overreliance on cotton and burlap he practically looked like a painted member of Our Lady of Fans.

Though, if Yana thought anything like that of him, she sure didn’t show it. She simply took one look at him, then slid her gaze to Alcibiades and said, “I wish you had told me you were bringing your special friend. I would have gotten out our nice china.”

“You have plain china in addition to fancy china?” blurted Caius. “How quaint! Al just keeps the plain kind, and I just keep the fancy kind. Oh, I’m sorry, I’m getting ahead of myself. I should introduce myself, I’m Caius Greylace.”

“Oh, don’t worry, child, I knew the moment I saw you who you were. My boy has told me so much of you, I knew you must be the famous Caius. I’m Yana.”

“Yana…” Al said reproachfully.

Yana gently whipped his arm with the washcloth she held in her hands, “Oh, don’t start with me. Dinner is nearly ready, bring your Caius in to the dining room and say hello to your siblings.”

It turned out Alcibiades had many siblings, though he explained that not all of them were siblings by blood. Yana never failed to take in someone in need of a home, and had taught her children and grandchildren to do the same. This resulted in a large, loud group of seemingly endless siblings and aunts and uncles and nieces and nephews.

One woman, brunette and smiling wide, tried to deposit her toddler in Caius’s arms but he had been too shocked to respond, so Alcibiades plucked the child from his mother’s arms, swinging him around and tipping him upside down, eliciting happy giggles and squeals from the boy. “He isn’t used to being around kids,” Al explained. “We’ll break him of that soon enough.”

Another child, this one appearing to be a girl, ran up, clutching Al’s leg. “Uncle Al! Uncle Al! What did you bring me?”

“What did I bring you? I brought you a person, isn’t that enough? This is my friend Caius.”

“Oooo, your friiiiieeeend,” the girl chorused, before looking to Caius for the first time. Her eyes widened at the sight of him. “Are you a princess? You look like a princess.”

“He’s a bo- Ow!” Alcibiades began, but Caius slapped his chest before he could finish. Whatever he said would only be half true anyhow. Caius’s relationship with binary gender was precarious on the best of days.

“I am,” Caius said, “and what is your name, sweetheart?”

“Antigone,” she answered. “I like your dress and your shoes.”

“Thank you, darling. Maybe if your parents say yes, you can come over tomorrow and try on some of my dresses,” he told her. “Though, they may be a little big on you.”

She let out a pleased noise, before running back to her mother , presumably to ask permission right away.

Yana pushed her way through the swinging doors, a steaming pot of stew in her hands. “Alright, alright everyone settle down so we can say grace and eat.”

And they did, and it was good.

It stayed good until the next day after lunch. Caius was in good spirits after meeting everyone and in his new habitat. They had enjoyed dinner and retired to Alcibiades’s childhood bedroom. After a rough day and being introduced to so many new people, he had thought it was best to let Caius have a nice quiet night just the two of them, and Caius had been downright affectionate with gratitude for Alcibiades taking care of him, and they had cuddled all the way into sleep.

The next morning, Caius had been reasonably accepting of being woken up by roosters at dawn once he was awake enough to get excited about being in close proximity to roosters. He had eagerly gotten out to try his hand at feeding the chickens, then nearly wiped out, slipping in the mud. Then Antigone and her sisters had come over to play dress up. Caius was thrilled when they all curtsied to him, as the news of Caius’s supposed status of being a princess had spread, and the troop spent hours marching around in Caius’s high heels and skirts before Yana called them to eat sandwiches for lunch.

No, the trouble had started after lunch, when Caius was helping Yana wash and dry the dishes. He’d insisted in helping because he was a guest in her home, after all. It had all went wrong when under the soapy water, Yana cut herself on a knife. She yanked up her hand, and Caius, unthinking, grabbed it to help.

Alcibiades could see the change from across the room. Yana’s entire body went relaxed, and Caius’s eyes contracted as hers dilated. He was halfway to them before he even realized it, but Caius raised a hand, motioning him to stop.

Caius looked like he was ready to crack, but he took a breath to steady himself and spoke, “Yana, dear, everything is fine.” Tears welled up in his eyes, and his voiced cracked on his last word. “I need you to remain calm. I’m going to leave now, and you need to stay here. Alcibiades will take care of you.”

Caius bolted, running at top speed to Al’s room. Al caught Yana as she snapped out of Caius’s trance. “Yana, are you alright? I’m sorry, I didn’t know he’d do that.”

She shook her head, “You need to go to him. Al, you don’t understand… when he touched me, I felt him, this profound sadness. A sadness like that shouldn’t come from a boy so young. I’ll be fine. It’s just a little cut. He’s hurting far worse than I am. Go. Go!”

Alcibiades went. Caius in his bedroom was doubled over sobbing into his hands. At seeing Al he sobbed even harder, “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, I didn’t mean to I swear. I just wanted to help.”

Al took him into his arms, “It’s okay, Cai. You didn’t hurt her.”

Caius buried his face in his chest, and repeated, “It’s okay, it’s okay…” like a prayer.

Caius and Alcibiades didn’t always stay at the farm, but it never seemed to stop Caius from carving a place out there. Caius helped take care of the animals. He had even refused to leave the barn when Bella, one of Yana’s cows, had her calf in the fall. Caius seemed to have an uncanny way of making the animals calm around him. Alcibiades was half tempted to credit it to some velikaia mind trick, but Caius simply waved his hand at Al and said, “Don’t you recall that I had a pet tiger for a time? Taming a horse or a pig should be short work comparatively.” This was immediately followed by Caius encountering horse dung for the first time, but he never let Alcibiades tell that part of the story.

Caius had also been readily accepted by Al’s family, which wasn’t necessarily a surprise given Yana’s “We take all kinds here,” principles. He had especially bonded with some of the women of the family thanks to their similar reading habits. Every time Caius and Al visited, it seems that the hens of the house gathered for an informal book club meeting in which males, Caius excluded, were prohibited from joining because they, “just wouldn’t understand.”

Al had made the mistake of sneaking a peek at Caius’s book when he laid it down once. He made it through half of one sentence- “Floriana’s chest heaved as she reached down to stroke the man’s girth and-” before he dropped it in disgust, just in time for Caius to re-enter the room and see it.

Caius tsked wordlessly at him, picking the book off the floor and bending the pages that had been bent in the fall back into place.

“You read that filth?!” Alcibiades exclaimed, fighting the urge to wipe his hands against his clothes as if they were dirty.

Caius gasped in mock offense, placing a slender hand to his chest. “This is literature, General. I’m sorry you can’t appreciate it for its worth.”

“Worth?! It’s dime and nickel trash!”

“I do not criticize your testosterone-rich war novels, I shall expect you to respect my reading choices as well. This is why we don’t invite your brothers to sit with us as we discuss our books,” Caius said. “You big strong men have no taste.”

“You mean this is what you talk about with all my sisters?” Alcibiades looked horrified.

Caius rolled his eyes, “I don’t see why you should be so surprised. There’s nothing to be ashamed about some harmless fantasizing. Maybe you should join us, sometime. I think the average man could do well to learn from these books about what their partners want. You would make a rather dashing romantic hero yourself.”

“Thanks, but no thanks,” Alcibiades said, blandly. “I’ll take a rain check.”

“Suit yourself, general. We meet next Thursday afternoon if you change your mind.”

If Alcibiades had been smart, he would have remembered to steer clear of the den Thursday, but going about his daily business it must have slipped his mind that Caius’s perverted, little book club was meeting until he walked in with freshly cut wood logs hoisted over one shoulder to find half the females of his family gathered in a circle with books on their laps.

“General, what a pleasant surprise. You aren’t here to join us are you?” Caius asked from his favorite wingback chair, ankles crossed and with the close-lipped smirk he always had when he’d found something to toy with.

Al bit back a snappish retort, and replied, “Nope, just here to put some fresh kindling in the fireplace before it gets any colder outside.”

“How gallant of you, dear. I’m sure we’ll all enjoy the heat,” Caius said, earning a chorus of giggles from the women around the room. “Are you sure you wouldn’t like to pull up a chair? We were getting ready to discuss the part where the protagonist is whisked up into the man’s arms and thrown over his shoulder, rather like all that wood you’re carrying.”

Al felt his face flush, turning to Caius once more now that he had deposited the logs into the fireplace. “You’d like that, wouldn’t you?” More giggles came from around the room. “For me to join, I mean.”

“You know I always enjoy your company, General.”

The next time they sojourned to the farm, it was the beginning of winter and time to celebrate the winter holidays.

Once more they found themselves talking for great lengths of time during the carriage ride from the city, this time surrounded by all the shiny, foil wrapped presents Caius had insisted in bringing for all of the family. Even with as crowded as the carriage was now, Caius had fretted for days that he hadn’t bought enough to give to everyone, despite Alcibiades trying to assure him that if anything he had gotten too much.

“I haven’t embarrassed myself, have I, Al?” he asked, gazing at the presents as the carriage took them further away from Thremedon. “I was so worried that I couldn’t possibly repay your family for their kindnesses over the past year that I didn’t consider that I might make them feel bad for not being able to afford such expensive things for me.”

“It’s a bit late to return everything,” Al grumbled. “Everything will be fine. The presents aren’t the real meaning of the holiday anyway, so I’m sure everyone will be pleased with what you got them.”

“Of course, they’re the meaning of the holiday,” Caius scoffed. “You don’t expect me to believe in that tosh about Regina-“ He paused suddenly. “I apologize. Of course you do. You’re the most pious man I’ve ever met.”

“What you don’t? Believe in Regina and the holiday and everything?” Alcibiades asked.

Caius smiled thinly, “No, I never have. I can certainly see the appeal in it. It must feel rather comforting to believe that there’s a higher power looking out for you, controlling your fate. That if things are meant to be they’ll be. But, no, I’m afraid if there is anyone is to blame for my mistakes in life, it is me.”

But, when it came time to exchange gifts, Caius showed no lack of enthusiasm for the holiday celebrations. As expected, the gifts Caius received were significantly plainer than what he had given everyone else, but he was no less excited to get them. Yana had sewn him some nice, cotton dresses to match the ones more common to the countryside farm life. He immediately had tried them on and loved every stitch and seam put into them.

“Al, Al, look!” he exclaimed, sticking his foot out at Alcibiades. “You can see my ankles!”

“Yeah, now you won’t have to worry about all your ridiculous skirts getting dragged through the mud and filth all the time like the rest of us,” Al said, making room for Caius on the couch.

“You love my ridiculous skirts,” Caius replied, pushing the foot he’d displayed earlier at Al’s face in retaliation.

“Yeah, yeah, well, settle down, you’ve got one more present to open.”

Caius cocked his head to the side, “Do I? I thought that was the last of them.”

“This one’s from me,” Al said, handing Caius a box.

“A present from the General. I do hope it’s appropriate to open in front of the family,” Caius teased, already pulling at the box’s ribbon and wrapping paper. He pulled open the box and stilled.

“I hope it doesn’t upset you. I knew it meant a lot to you, so I got it fixed. But if the memories are too much, you don’t have to keep it,” Alcibiades explained, watching Caius pull the once broken vase with the bird cage from the box. The cracks had been sealed with gold-dusted lacquer.

Caius hugged the vase to him for a moment, before reaching for Al and pulling him in for a kiss. “It’s perfect. Thank you.”

After returning to the city, they saw each other again at the Esarina’s New Year’s ball. Alcibiades was dressed in a new red military uniform coat given to him by Caius to replace his “ratty” older one. At first Alcibiades had resisted the new coat, insisting that his old one was perfectly fine, but he had to admit that his old uniform had seen better days. After all, what better way to show Caius his interest than by appreciating the gift he’d been given?

On his third glass of champagne, he finally found Caius among the crowd, and he was dazzling.

Dressed in head to toe in scarlet, Caius sported a floor-length gown bejeweled in rubies with a long cape flowing down his back from his shoulders. When he caught Alcibiades looking, he quirked his blood red painted lips, and with a single finger beckoned Alcibiades to him. Alcibiades took one step to him, and he turned, weaving through the crowd, then down the winding palace halls to somewhere more private.

By the time Alcibiades caught up to him enough to wrap his arms around Caius’s tiny waist and pick him up, his ears rang with Caius’s laughs, and all he could see was wonderful, beautiful red.

#volstovic cycle #havemercy #alcibiades #caius greylace #festivebastion #greaseonmymouth #rebloggable

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geneshaven · 6 years

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Grounded (Arrow 613)

After watching 613, I kept thinking how a lot of the characters on Arrow (sans Oliver, Felicity and John) should be grounded and sent to their rooms. Leading the pack is William and the Newbies. And maybe the writers as well, for the lame way they killed off Cayden James and slipped in Diaz as if no one would notice the tepid turnstile the villains came through this season.

So, William sneaks out of the Bunker after Oliver told him to stay put, that it’s dangerous out there. He shows up in the field and cries about being scared and not wanting to lose his dad like he did his mom on Lian Yu. Thanks for that reminder, William. Oliver needed to stay focused while he faced the bad guy and William uses his dead mother as a justification for following his dad. Did Felicity’s talk with him in 611 mean nothing? Did she not convince the lad that what Oliver does is dangerous? After 611 and the heartfelt family feels, William seemed to have a handle on his dad’s vigilante lifestyle, that he understood why Oliver is out there protecting those he loves and the city they live in. Felicity told him that he (as she does) has to believe Oliver is going to be okay. William conceded to this and appeared willing to follow in his step-mom’s footsteps.

Does William not trust Felicity or John or Auntie Thea? Does the boy not understand what Team means? All four of his new family members (and yes, I am including John) have knocked on death’s door. They understand what it means to have one another’s back. They understand that they are stronger together than on their own. It is all about trust---and faith. So disregarding the team’s safety because William was afraid---it doesn’t track.

So William, you’re grounded.

The Newbies. Since they went their separate ways and created their own facsimile of a Team, I have felt nothing for them but a slow burn. Their self-righteous, we-are-the-victims mentality is one of the most ridiculous storylines Arrow has served up. Okay, I’ll just say it---without Oliver’s influence and guidance, Curtis and Rene and Dinah would still be adrift in the mess of their lives, angry and in pain and without direction, without a place and purpose to channel it through.

Rene is the worst of the three. He was wearing hockey gear before Oliver brought him into the fold. He was running in blind (aka Barry’s early days) and taking on the villains who were clearly elevated in skills and tactics and just plain menace. I mean come on; Anatoly got the drop on him and shot Rene with his own gun. Apparently, the writers would have us believe that Rene lost track of and the reasons for trusting and being loyal to Oliver when he caved in under the pressure and manipulations of Agent Watson. He should have trusted Oliver the same way Oliver trusted him. He should have instinctively known that Oliver has his back. The Green Arrow has saved Rene’s ass multiple times. But over the last couple of episodes, Rene has become a stranger to what he was becoming under Oliver’s tutelage. He was doing well at the Mayor’s Office, as well as part of Oliver’s elite team of vigilantes. He was almost close to becoming endearing to some of the fanbase who has hated him from the start. Wasn’t it Oliver who saved him from Church? Wasn’t it Oliver who risked his own life going over that highway overpass to rescue Rene before he was crushed from the fall? Wasn’t it Oliver who cleaned up the mess Rene created by going solo after Samson? And wasn’t it Oliver who opened the door again on winning back Zoe? The way Rene is now blaming Oliver for all that is bad in his life, (most of which he created himself) warrants canceling his Team membership card.

So Rene, you’re grounded.

Curtis, as always, has been written so poorly. Okay, if you roll the series back two years, Curtis had some promise at the start of Season 4, but the episodes were few and far between. He had tech skills. He was married (happily?) He did develop Felicity’s chip that made her walk again. He hacked a bunch of bees and saved the day. And if I remember correctly, Oliver inspired him to stay in Star City and fight for his home.

We all knew (via the comics) that Curtis was going to morph into Mr. Terrific; T-Spheres and all. I remember there being a sense of excitement by this. But at the start of Season 5, after being beat up by street thugs, Curtis was already putting conditions on Oliver bringing him onto the Team. Oliver asked him if he could identify the ruffians who whooped his ass. Curtis said yes and he will happily tell him--- under one condition. Oliver was right in his assessment that Curtis had the least amount of experience then the rest of the candidates when it came to mixing it up with the criminal element of Star City. His nightly beatings cast doubt over his ability to hold his own. He lost heart. Then he lost Paul (maybe he blames Oliver for that too.) Then he lost his appeal.

I won’t even get into the writer’s thinking he could fill Felicity’s computer and hacking shoes. I think they tried too when she was plummeting down her rabbit hole, but it was only annoying and felt just wrong.

There was one more instant when Curtis tried to be appealing to the fanbase. It was in 520. He brought, or had Oliver pick up, Chinese food and bring it back to the Bunker to go with wine in the garage. (Clearing my throat)….He brought our OTP together. Okay, it was a flashback, but we got some nice Bunker sex out of it. So good on you Curtis.

Now, he has added indignation and being a professional victim to his resume. He has sided with a traitor (Rene) and a secret-keeper that could have compromised the Team (Dinah.) All of them broke the #1 rule in vigilanteing---trusting one another.

Curtis, you’re grounded.

Dinah. I’m sort of on the fence where she is concerned. On one side, Dinah has blown away any doubts of who the more effective Black Canary is on the show. Her fighting skills make Laurel Lance look like she is slap-fighting her opponents. Dinah is more fluid and is one mean mother with the staff she uses. Her fights are just more exciting to watch. And her sonic cry? Come on, really? She can stop a speeding train with it. Laurel could muster up a loud noise to disrupt her opponents hearing, and she could occasionally cause glass to shatter. So yeah, I am way more of a Dinah fan for reasons.

Having said that, the whole Vigilante/Vince thing kind of seemed last minute to me. When Vigilante came on the scene last year, even then I did not really invest myself in him. Maybe it was because I was in numb disbelief over what was happening with Olicity. Then Vigilante went away and Adrian Chase became all the eggs in the bad guy basket. Did the writers already envision Vigilante’s part to play in Season 6?

(Me speaking for the writers--- (“Okay, let’s bring Vigilante back. Wait, even better, let’s make it Dinah’s ex. Yeah; he was killed the first time, but what if he was caught in the same meta wave that turned Dinah into a sonic badass? We can throw him in with Cayden James and Diaz and Anatoly and Black Siren. But we’ll also make him a double agent, with his old feelings for Dinah still intact. Hot damn, it will be some wonderful contrived drama and it will keep the fans guessing.”)

Uh sorry writers, but I could not climb aboard that toxic ship. I think it ruined the potential of Dinah being a good character. That is not set in stone---there are still ten episodes left, so who can tell at this point? And now because Vince was killed the second time by Black Siren, (a conflict of interest if there ever was one) Dinah has gone off the rails, the same kind of train wreck she was when Oliver convinced her to come make a difference on his team. She wants revenge and is blinded by it. No more Mr. nice guy (uh, I mean girl.) No more self-reflection or trust or belief. Oliver made all of it happen (through the pain surging through her mind) by calling her on keeping her new, reunited relationship with Vince a secret, an act that could have seriously hurt the team.

Dinah, you’re grounded.

So, all the Newbies had a part in screwing the pooch. To them, it was Oliver who instigated their righteousness. Do any of them remember Evelyn? Do they remember being put in Gilligan’s Island style cages, and the island being blown up? Heck, Evelyn even gave them all cute, handmade Christmas stockings. They might as well have been filled with razor blades.

So yeah, Oliver put you all under surveillance. He was not going to be compromised in that way again. Maybe the question he should ask the rookies is---if one of them (say Rene) decided to throw the other two under the bus to save themselves, wouldn’t you want to know what each was doing. Wouldn’t you want to see it coming? It’s pretty simple for the kind of lives all of them lead. Oliver made some pretty harsh sacrifices over the years to keep integrity in his crusade. Apparently, the Newbies are not willing to go as far.

Episode 614 looks like all this is going to come full circle. Hopefully it will end this awful storyline and put everybody back on track for a strong finish to the season. If Dinah and Rene and Curtis can realize that they bit off more than they can chew by taking on OTA, maybe taking a bite of that humble pie will fulfill their hungers of becoming stronger than what might be out there that could destroy them. And it doesn’t include blaming the ones who invited you to the crusade.

One quick note…Lance has completely gone up around the bend. Maybe it’s time for another intervention, before Black Siren (not Laurel) shows him that drinking is safer than listening to her BS.

Lance, you’re grounded.

Everybody is grounded.

@it-was-a-red-heeler @memcjo @almondblossomme @dmichellewrites @inevermindyou @flowerandsunshine @1106angel @tdgal1 @louiseblue1

#613 #i'm done with the newbies #until march 1st

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ink-splotch · 7 years

Note

hi! i'd love to hear what you think would have happened if wyldon hadn't let keladry stay after her first year!! love your writing :^)

“Mindelan, it may be that the best thing said of my tenure is that you were my student. Should that be the case, I am the wrong man for this post. I did all I could to get rid of you. Your probation was wrong. You know that, I know it. I was harder on you than any lad. Thank Mithros I remembered my honor and let you stay when you met the conditions—but it was a near thing. Next time, I might not heed the voice of honor.”

– Wyldon of Cavall (Squire)

Kel sat and thought about it all through the long summer– thought about joining the Riders when she turned sixteen, or going back to the Yamani Isles with her parents, or running away to become an unlawful bandit hunter.

She drank tea with her mother and accepted her quiet sympathy. She wondered what was going to happen to Peachblossom. She did her morning glaive practice dances in the heady air of the tiny courtyard garden of her parents’ townhouse, where the cook grew herbs and spices in big overflowing boxes.

Summer rolled on. She sat, and she thought, and she did not tell her thoughts to anyone. On the first day of what would have been her second year of page training, she woke before the sun and had a quiet breakfast with her father, and then she jogged up the big dusty hill to the palace grounds.

When the pages trailed out of the building to the practice yards with dubious enthusiasm, she was waiting just outside their ground. Her chin was high, her shoulders loose while her hands gripped her weighted staff.

“Probationer,” Wyldon barked out her, when one of the boys went to fetch him. “Was I unclear in the spring?”

Kel stared him down, fingers white on her staff, and said, “I’m not a probationer anymore.”

“She’s a private citizen, just enjoying the fresh air,” Neal called from the other side of the practice yard fence. He got armor cleaning punishment for a week for his cheek and Kel lifted and lowered and struck with her staff to the call of the masters. Her staff hit thin air. The clack of the pages’ staves colliding hit her ears.

“That’s palace property,” Wyldon said ten minutes in, and plucked the staff out of her grip, so Kel followed the lesson with empty hands and brought her mother’s spare walking stick the next day.

They started calling her trespasser, after that, and Kel stood calm on the public grounds just on the other side of the practice yard fence, practicing her high blocks.

While the pages had riding practice, she sat in the dirt outside the riding yard and did the homework Neal smuggled out for her. He handed the finished assignments in for her, too, even though only Myles and the one Mithran priest who had never learned anyone’s names graded them. She took notes on what riding exercises the masters were assigning the pages and watched Neal where he sat on Peachblossom’s back like a sack of mulish peanuts.

“When I heard you weren’t t’ be coming back,” Stefan the hostler told her. “I wasn’t sure what would happen to the old lad.”

“Me, either,” said Kel, looking down at her math and trying to keep her face smooth and still.

When the pages went in for their seated classes, Stefan let her take out Peachblossom to try to exercises herself. Days the gelding was too tired, he found other mounts for her and Kel learned all their names– gentle Aubrey and fastidious Starfall and distractible, clever Redding and poor anxious Terence, who almost threw her more than once. “He comes by the fidgets honest,” Stefan told her and Kel brought extra apples for Terence when she could.

She still took on Lalasa when Gower found her feeding the sparrows in the courtyard beside her old rooms and asked her. Her parents’ townhouse had the funds to hire another maid, though Kel didn’t need or want a personal servant.

Lalasa pinched Kel’s torn clothes from her room all the same and returned them better hemmed and beautifully mended. Kel barely saw her, though she tried to leave a coin from her allowance on the piles of clothes she thought the young woman was most likely to steal away next.

She didn’t ask for the help and she told herself she didn’t want it, but she jogged up the big dusty hill to the palace grounds every day with her weighted harness weighing on her shoulders.

She stood just outside the low fence of the practice yards and ignored Joren’s comments and Zahir’s sneers and the rebukes of the swordfighting teachers– distraction, they said. Lump, waste, failure.

The sun beat down on her aching shoulders and she thought I could stand here forever, thought you are just noise and wind, I am a mountain. I will be here long after you cease howling.

Neal landed blows on Joren’s fingers, apologizing blandly to the masters for his clumsinesses, because Kel had ordered him to get in no fights for her honor. The sun beat down on the careful stitches of Kel’s cotton shirt, which fit as perfectly as Lalasa could manage from a shy distance.

She told herself she didn’t want the help, didn’t need it. Her harness weighed down her shoulders, her makeshift staff weighed down her arms, but the cotton laid light and kind on her back.

Read More (Ao3)

She climbed up to the palace each day for training, but the city was where she lived. She met a battleworn mutt stealing sausages and brought him home to her parents’ townhouse. Jump befriended the kitchen rat-catchers and napped out with them on the cobblestones in front of the house, the cats purring with their bellies bared for the sun.

The palace carpenters wouldn’t make Kel practice swords and staves weighted with lead pellets, no matter the coins she offered or the errands she ran. She found a carpenter down by the Goddess’s temple in town, instead, who had shoulders even Kel envied.

The carpenter set her to whittling buttons while she crafted her a sword to employ on the dusty air just outside the practice yards. Kel paid in carefully counted coins and tipped in chores and favors, and slowly she collected what she needed– a practice sword, a staff, a lance.

She helped the cook carry vegetables and cages of chickens home from market, helped the delivery men lug massive bags of flour from the backs of their carts, and called it strength training. Her shoulders grew broad, twelve and straining at the seams.

When she found Lalasa cornered behind the kitchens by a handsy grocer’s lad, she still chased him off and bullied Lalasa into learning some self defense, if she wouldn’t let Kel report him. But they held their lessons in the little kitchen garden and the kitchen help and the maids drifted out to watch from among the rosemary. They called out encouragement among the mint under the apple tree. The youngest stepped out to join them, and then the oldest, and soon Kel was pacing between them all, correcting their stances and the twists of their wrists in the herb-heavy air.

Kel planned to spend the week the pages were away in the field catching up on her studying, taking tea with her mother, and hauling stones to pave the front walk of the townhouse, but Eda Bell had other ideas.

Most of the fighting masters ignored the bulky twelve year old standing just outside the training yard, but both Shangs liked to linger by the fence and drawl loudly, “The foot extension on that high kick is just tough, isn’t it, Eda?”

“Oh, yes, one of the commonest mistakes, but to correct for it–”

Eda caught her on her way down the hill, one evening. Kel was tacky with dried sweat and itchy with horsehair, but she turned and waited for Eda to speak. “You should pack,” Eda said. “I told Wyldon I needed an aide for the trip, to fetch and carry for my poor old bones.”

“But, ma'am–”

“Don’t call me ma'am, child, honestly. He said that’s what pages are for, but I told him that of course it’d be improper to have a lad attend me.” She smiled, crinkling up her wrinkles.

“He doesn’t know you’re bringing me,” Kel said.

“If you’re not part of this program anymore, then he doesn’t get any say in what you do or where you go.”

“I think he thinks he might,” Kel said, but she packed a small bag and they rode at the back of the pages’ party, into the hills. Wyldon spotted her early on and Eda Bell smiled.

Last summer, Kel had climbed trees until she vomited behind bushes. She had fought spidrens standing shoulder to shoulder with her friends. This summer, when the boys set out to map and explore, she squared her growing shoulders and went after them. Merric cast a wary glance over his shoulder at her while Faleron nervously ignored the crunch of her feet in dry grass behind them. “The royal forest isn’t your private property, or Lord Wyldon’s,” Kel said levelly, into their silence.

“Yeah, and you’re not who he’ll give punishment duty to,” Merric snapped.

“I’d take it gladly,” Kel said and Merric shook his head. Owen stared back over his shoulder, wide-eyed, the same way he’d been staring over the practice yard fence all year. He almost tripped over a tree root with all his eager questions piled under his tongue.

They climbed down into the narrow valley, the cliffs curving around them, and they found the bandits there. Faleron froze– Merric scrabbled for a knife– and Kel stepped forward with orders in her throat.

She’d been calling out drills in the kitchen garden all year, trying to imagine she was Hakuin or Eda. She’d been watching each of her women for the way they stood, or struck, or twisted away from a hold, the places they flinched. She had been watching the pages from over the low practice yard fence, every hit, every blow, while she struck empty air– her feet stirring the same dust as theirs, her stance light on that same ground, except for the fence between them.

“Faleron, the horn,” she snapped out, snatching a spear from Owen’s hands. “Owen, they’ve taught you how to make mage light, yeah? Get in the back, blind them all you can. Merric, with me–”

They fought their way out and up the high narrow path to the clifftop cave. Kel borrowed his bow while Owen tried to remember his basic healing lessons from magic class. She didn’t look down, just shoved her shakes to the back of her head and got to work.

“We would have died without you there,” said Faleron, in that quiet way of his, when it was over and Wyldon and the local bandit hunters were riding into the canyon below. “I don’t know if Wyldon will believe it, or admit he does, or if even the other boys will have the guts to say it, but that’s what I’m going to tell him, Kel.”

“Of course we will,” said Owen hotly.

Merric glared over his shoulder. “Don’t talk about my guts, Faleron.”

Kel sent them all on ahead of her– the injured first, and then the whole. Owen was ashy, shaky, and grinning. She went last, her legs jelly below her as they hadn’t been for the whole fight, her hands pressed tight into stone. At the base of the cliff, she threw up beside the body of a man one of them had killed and Wyldon said something smug and dismissive she didn’t even bother hearing.

“No, sir,” said Faleron. “It’s just the heights.”

Kel wiped her mouth with the back of her hand while Faleron described the fight with Owen’s “jolly” interjections. Wyldon shook his head and she watched her feet, already looking forward to riding home at the back of the train with Eda. Her stomach curdled and curled in her belly– she could stand the blood, the calluses and the shouts, but the heights, even just the heights– she was still the only one of them who’d puked at the end of it all. She was still the only one among them who would go back to her parents’ townhouse, not the pages’ dormitories. She was still not strong enough.

She put a hand to Faleron’s elbow, in a quelling thanks, and then headed back to camp in silence.

In this world, Wyldon was not ordering her up trees or dropping punishments on her head that forced her up stable loft ladders or the palace walls. She had very little interest in forcing those same trials on herself, but as Kel rode home from the forest, she wondered– was that why he had told her not to come back?

She knew it wasn’t fair. She knew he had asked things from her he hadn’t of the boys, and she knew she deserved to be on that practice court. But she wondered– if she had been better, had been braver, would he have let her stay?

While the pages left their last class of that next day, their yawns and chatter rising in the air, Kel climbed slowly up to the lowest palace wall and stood there at the edge of it, sweat-soaked and shaking lightly.

She sat up there and did her homework. She was as many feet as possible from the edge, but the wind picked at her papers. Some of these papers would be handed back with Miles or the math professor’s corrections, but she knew many would end up in trash bins or tossed into hearthfires. She wrote two pages on the tactics of the Immortals war in a careful even script, trying to ignore the wind and to will her hand not to shake.

She still went up to the palace daily in the summer, to use their archery ranges, feed her sparrows, and ride Peachblossom, but she spent as much time as she could in the kitchen garden. The maids stopped by on their off hours and dropped off friends on theirs– local seamstresses who bent close to admire Lalasa’s beautiful stitchwork, candlemakers and trainee priestesses of the Black God and flower sellers.

Early in the morning, when the cooks were setting the day’s dough to rise and the maids were just lighting the fires, Kel would do her glaive dances under the pale sky and they would pause in the doorways to watch.

When Kel came down to the practice yard the second week of what would have been her third year of page training, there was a woman waiting for her. She was short and dark, with wide strong shoulders. Kel gripped her weighted sword, stepping into the same place she stood every day.

“Sorry,” the woman said and Kel, finally, placed her– Commander Buri, of the Queen’s Riders. “I’ve been out in the field with barely enough time to rinse the mud from my teeth. You know about mud in your teeth?” She smiled and she must have had time to rinse them after all, because her grin was sharp and gleaming. “You will.”

“Commander?” said Kel.

The swordsmaster was glancing balefully in Buri’s direction. “I’m palace-bound for a spell,” she said. “I could use a little practice to keep these old joints oiled properly, and I was told there’s a kid who comes down here every day to fight empty air.”

There was a wooden practice sword hanging easy in Buri’s grasp. Kel took a long slow breath and thought about still mountain lakes and the tall old stones that towered above them, unbending, unbowed.

“Unless the fighting with empty air thing is on purpose,” Buri said, and it was kind, smiling and kind, and Neal was watching them over the low fence and the swordsmaster was watching them over the low fence and the weight of Kel’s practice sword was pressing into her calluses.

“No, ma'am– sir, um… ma'am?”

“Buri,” said Buri, and lifted her weapon as the swordsmaster called first defense.

Buri came most days when she was stationed in the palace, but Kel fought air as often as she didn’t. The Riders got sent out to the north to help with raiders, and Kel thought about hauling in a standing cloakrack or something, just so she’d have something to hit.

But the week after Buri left she came down to find a mountain of a man slouching against the low fence and joking with the swordsmaster.

“Keladry,” said Raoul of Goldenlake and Kel managed, “Sir.”

“A little birdie– a little Buri? She is little, isn’t she– told me if a fellow wants to get bruised in the early morning this here is the place to be.”

Sometimes it was Raoul, sometimes it was other Riders– she learned their names: Evin, who plucked coins from behind her ears, and Miri, who talked of the sea. A Bazhir man in Own’s livery came with his pockets full of birdseed and dried berries for the sparrows who lined up on the fence to watch her– Qasim, who had listened to her on the spidren hunt, back when she had been a real page and not a stubborn trespasser.

Kel wondered, every time she stepped out to see a figure standing there, if she would be short and broad and red-haired and purple-eyed– but the Lioness stayed a legend, and a ghost. Kel wondered if she had disappointed her. If it had been the Lioness in her stead, surely she would have been good enough Wyldon would have been forced to let her stay.

After the pages’ seated classes and Kel’s own riding practice, she’d come down to the pages’ wing to feed the sparrows and do her mathematics homework with Neal, who craned over her shoulder to see how she did them.

“Here I thought abandoning my noble academic pursuits would save me from this sort of headache,” he said, squinting at her even script. Crown was preening herself on his shoulder and for all his scowling and whining Neal was almost frozen, trying not to jostle the sparrow. “I thought– bruises, blisters, yes, but only to save me from mathematics.”

“I believe bravery’s a rather important skill in a knight,” Kel said. “Be strong, buttercup.”

Neal snorted. “Hardly. Look at the Stump.”

“Lord Wyldon’s a fine knight,” Kel said softly.

“He’s a coward and a–”

Kel’s face didn’t move much, but Neal had been watching her for years now, and so he stopped. Crown hopped down his arm and took off for the tree in a flutter of speckled brown. “Kel,” he said, after her quill had paused over the page for long quiet moments. “You belong here, and he’s a fool and a coward for fighting that– for not fighting for it.”

“He’s the training master,” Kel said. “It’s his call. I don’t want to talk about it, Neal. I just want to learn.”

He sighed. “Alright, well, learn by teaching, will you, young one? Explain number five to me before I set it on fire and go back to university.”

Other pages found them, sometimes, where they had clambered into the courtyard, or tucked away in Neal’s rooms (with the door still open), or in a corner of the library. Even if she spent her mornings fighting air most of the time, or doing drills with conscientious adults, she went to sleep with bruises. If they didn’t come to her and yank her papers from her grasp, then she went out looking for them. She wondered if the younger boys would have taken her defense better or worse from the Girl than they did from the trespasser. Neal went with her, groaning and griping, and took punishment duty that Kel tried not to envy.

So when she heard footsteps nearing their library table, she did not assume they came in peace. She put down her quill because she was tired of having to cut new ones and she pushed back her chair so that they couldn’t trap her in her seat.

“Um,” said Owen, peering over his books the same way he peered over the yard fence at her.

“Jesslaw,” said Neal with a cheery boom and Owen took that for invitation.

“Um,” said Owen. “So, you’re, um, good at fighting, Kel. Ma'am.”

Kel watched him from over her open book.

Owen stammered, “I’m– not? You’re there, in the mornings, and you were there, with the bandits, so you might know that. But, um, do you think you could teach me?”

“I’m not even a page,” she said.

“But you’re the best,” he said, in a rush of speech that was closer to his normal cadence. “You’re the best that won’t– laugh at me.” He messed with his papers and looked at her eagerly. He reminded her of her nieces and nephews, whose puppy-dog-eyes she was well practiced at defying. But she could see the wanting in his little, stubborn frame– the way he wanted something he couldn’t have, the way he wanted to learn something they wouldn’t teach him.

“The first bell before dawn,” she said. “Mindelan house, in town, I teach fighting in the kitchen courtyard if you can get there. You don’t mind learning among girls, do you?”

“No, sir!”

She warned Lalasa that evening and Lalasa warned the others, because somehow she had ended up in charge of organizing this all. When Owen showed up shivering in the morning cold, the more social of the women pushed him to the front with the beginners and patted his cheeks. “I’ve been a page for almost two years now!” he protested. “I’m not a kid.”

“Then what do you need us for, little soldier?” one of the maids asked and faded back to practice holds and escapes with Lalasa.

That night, Kel went to sleep to the smell of rosemary through her open window, and woke to grey skies and familiar birdsong. For a long uncertain moment she thought she was back into the page dormitories, her narrow bed and her uniform folded up on the spare chair, the sparrows’ courtyard full of chirping life just outside her window.

But then she pushed herself up to sitting. Her flock of sparrows flitted through the trees and flower beds of the parents’ kitchen garden. Crown set down, lightly, on the bedspread.

“You found me,” she said, and the sparrow gave a sober little peep and hopped up onto her knee.

The year rolled on, through summer and to what would have been Kel’s fourth year of page training. She should have been fretting about the final exams, except she was just sitting with Neal and studying with him for a test they wouldn’t even let her fail.

She should have been worrying about four years of squireship, and who would choose her– if anyone would take that step and choose the Girl– but instead she just tried to decide if she was going back to the page grounds that next autumn. Would she just keep pummeling empty air on the other side of a fence from children? Would she grow old there, too stubborn to give up on a dead dream?

She didn’t talk about it, and Neal didn’t ask, just came by for cook’s pastries and bullied her into letting him heal up her bruises. (“I have my bruise balm,” she said.

“Yes, your mysterious benefactor, praise be. Why do you only accept help if you can’t see the whites of their eyes?”)

“But what if no one chooses me?” Neal moaned over teacakes in her mother’s parlor. Gladys, who had thrown Kel halfway across the garden that morning, hid a giggle as she bustled by the maudlin scene.

“Someone will choose you,” Kel said. “And regret it the moment you open your mouth, but all the same.”

In a different life, Cleon would have kissed her at Midwinter– but Cleon had never been brave, at least not for the sake of Kel’s dreamer’s eyes, and anyway Kel spent Midwinters with Lalasa and the other girls.

While her parents dined high and fine up at the palace, Kel walked the streets with a pack of giggling young women, toasting mulled cider in their best shoes, the city so lit by torches it almost seemed like day. Lalasa held Tian’s hand in the cold, and if Kel checked every alley they passed by for trouble, she noticed that Gladys and Portia and Hanna did, too. It was almost like patrolling with Neal– and Owen, too, these days– listening for bullies in the corridors and corners of the palace.

They stayed out until late those nights, until the sun rose up against the hills and they toasted and cheered to greet its arrival. The whole lower city slept late the day after, but Kel dragged her bones out of bed and up to the pages’ practice yard.

After years, Kel knew Buri’s tricks and tells, her belly-deep laugh. She knew now that when Raoul really struck the impact would shake straight through her weapon and rattle every bone in her body. He liked to ask about her classes, her family, her sparrows and Jump, so she shouldn’t have been surprised when he asked her one cold morning what she was thinking of doing next. “Given a little fieldwork,” he said, wiping his sweaty face on his sleeve after drills. “You’d make an exemplary bandit hunter.”

“She already is one,” Owen called from where he’d been panting and eavesdropping, and she glared at him until he waved and hurried off to riding class.

“He’s not wrong,” Raoul said, smiling at her. “And there’s not much more for you to learn here.” He waved a hand at the dusty yard around them.

Kel wet her lips. “I was thinking– the Riders,” she said. “I’ll be sixteen in a few years, and if I stay here and keep in practice.” Slowly growing older than the boys on the other side of the fence– too tall, too stocky, but somehow still too female, still not enough.

Raoul nodded, slow. “You’d do well in the Riders,” he said.

She nodded mutely, watching her toes and trying to remember her peace.

“You’d do well there,” he said, and it was hesitant in a way she’d never heard before, so she looked up. “But the Own could use you. I could use someone like you. If you’re interested?”

She lifted her face and saw him standing there, anxious, like he was afraid she might say no. “It’d have to be– as a standard bearer, or an aide, or something, but you’d see action as much as any of the men. And then if, after two years, you want to join the Riders–”

“I have to– I have to think,” she said, and turned and left him standing there beside the low practice yard fence.

She went out to the stables. She’d known what she wanted since she was seven, kneeling behind her mother amid burning paper and laminated wood. “It’s not about the shield,” she told herself, and it was as true as she could make it be. “It’s not fair but I knew that,” she whispered into Peachblossom’s side and he blew at her shortly. “What happens to you, if I go, old man?” Her hair was sticking up in sweaty clumps and she pushed it off her forehead. “The Own,” she said. “They go out there. It’s real. They fight for people, and isn’t that the point?” She had almost turned away from this all, once, before any of it had started– chewing through the word probation on a rivershore until a she had a run in with a spidren and a half-drowned bag of kittens and her mind had made itself up for her.

“Miss Keladry?” said a voice and Kel turned to see Stefan. “So you’re leavin’ us?”

She blinked at him slowly, trying to let her mind catch up to the question. “I hadn’t decided yet,” she said. “Lord Raoul…”

“It’s just– the bill of sale,” he said. “Peachblossom? He was bought, this morning, in your name– four years of stabling and feed. He’s yours.” Kel was standing very still, not moving, so Stefan added, “There’s note– here.”

She unfolded it in her hands. Stefan fed Peachblossom an apple while Kel unfolded it and steadied her breathing. Gods all bless, Lady Kel.

When she stumbled out of the stable, she went to find Neal. She would talk over tea with her mother and father, later, cradling warmth in her palms and trying to lay out all her choices. But she wanted to see Neal now, and listen to his sensible sarcasm, hear him laugh when she took things too seriously.

He opened his door and the flutter in her chest went still for a moment. “What happened?” she said.

“A knight– a knight came by,” he said. She pushed into his room when he didn’t usher her in and he turned and followed her inside like a puppet.

“I told you one would.”

“She,” he said, and Kel’s head snapped up.

“The Lioness,” she said.

“What other female knight is there?” Neal asked, breathless still, and Kel turned to fiddle with the little waving cat on his desk, her face shuttering closed.

“None,” she said.

“Kel,” he said.

“You going to take her up on it?”

“Kel, it should have been you,” said Neal. “She’s– she’s never taken a squire before. If she– if it was anyone, it should have been you.”

“I’m not a squire,” she said. “I’m not going to be a squire.”

He shook his head, running his fingers through his hair. “I’m sorry, that’s all. None of this is fair, and this, I just feel like I’m stealing something from you.”

“You’re not,” she said.

“Someone is,” he said.

“But it’s not you, so, please, just, don’t,” she said. She sat on the edge of his rumpled bed. “Lord Raoul asked me to join up with the King’s Own, as an aide.”

Neal sagged back against his desk and whistled. “Lord Raoul,” he said. “An aide, in the Own.” He laughed, color flooding back into his cheeks. “Kel, he’s basically making you a squire in all but name–”

“All but name,” she said.

“Gods, the ruckus this will stir up. The conservatives, Wyldon– MIthros, even the king.”

She shrugged.

“You going to take it?”

She looked at the cat waving from his desk, right beside his hip. “Yes,” she said. “I think so.”

He was smiling in a long slow slide, like he couldn’t help it. “Kel, this is wonderful.”

“And what about you?”

“You really don’t mind?” he said. “The Lioness…”

“I mind,” she said. “But I don’t mind you.”

“She said she’d teach me healing,” Neal said. “More than just the basic stuff the pages get, you know.”

His voice was soft and Kel swallowed down a million old jokes about going back to university. Instead she pushed off the bed, grabbed one of his hands in hers, and said, “Neal, that’s wonderful.”

That summer, she did not walk down the long corridor to the Chamber to try her mettle against it. Not every squire did– Neal thought it was a silly custom– but she wasn’t a squire.

Kel rode out with the Own not in Silverlake livery but in royal colors like the other men. Laurent hissed and spat about charity cases– it took one to know one. When they came back to the capital after months of mud in their teeth, the Own went to their barracks, Raoul to his rooms, and Kel to her parents’ townhouse.

They had tracked and captured the Haresfield bandits, Kel on the main field, attached to one of Third Company’s squadrons as amateur field medic and messenger. Flyn had called it non-combat and snubbed her at firesides, but Kel had cleaned her sword and dagger of other men’s blood, after.

Buri had greeted her in the command tent with that same big sharp smile and a warm clasped hand, when Kel came in with messages and missives. Qasim had teased her and passed her boiled eggs or jerky if she got excited and forgot to eat in mornings. He and Dom had teamed up to teach her all of the Own’s handsigns, and Dom tried to get her to laugh on their long dusty rides– but when they reached the capital again Kel left them at the stables, after she’d brushed and fed Hoshi and Peachblossom, and headed down to the city.

Her blisters had gotten blisters, those long months, but they’d all healed over and gone hard and tough in her sturdy shoes. She felt sturdy, with her saddlebags thrown over one shoulder, walking down this same old path from the palace grounds back to her parents’ home. The sparrows napped on her shoulders and the perches of her bags, except for the few who had chosen to stay with Hoshi and Peachblossom in the stables and pester Qasim for treats. She had walked this way every day for four years, away from a page training where she had never been welcome.

She wondered what card games Third Company would play tonight, what jokes and stories. She wouldn’t miss Wolset’s snoring or Lerant’s unhappy glare or the constant need to prove herself in the eyes of Flynn and everyone else. Even Raoul– he was the one who had taken her on and so to him more than most she felt the need to prove her worth.

But they’d wash the road’s grime from their faces and feet, flick water and tease the ones who slipped off to meet their sweethearts. They’d drag each other out, cleaned and coiffed. There’d been talk about swimming in the river, on the hottest days of the marches, and Kel wondered if they’d go through with it. Qasim had a favorite pub, with a shy chef who would sneak out to ask him for stories about all the places he had seen that she had only ever heard of. Kel had fought and slept beside them for months, but they’d turned left going out of the stables and she’d turned right. Her feet thudded against the familiar path and she watched pebbles run down the slope before her.

When she got close enough to the townhouse, the sparrows lit off of her in a flurry of beating brown wings. They swooped over the eaves to kitchen garden to rejoin with the larger flock, but Kel took the front door instead and found herself with an armful of teary Lalasa.

“Mistress Kel! Bethy said you’d arrived up at the palace, and oh, look at you, bursting out of every seam like I knew you would.” Behind Lalasa, Tian was smiling, and together they both pulled her out into the kitchen garden to look her over in the light. Maids peeked out see her, and the fishmonger’s daughter on a delivery, and the local seamstresses who were all trying to steal Lalasa away to their shops– they poked at her and remarked at her biceps and her new scars, called her pretty and teased her for not writing home more.

“Kel!” Owen came in with a shout from where he’d been working on his etiquette paper in the scullery.

“Don’t you have a whole palace to study in?”

He stuck his little blunt nose up in the air. “A growing boy’s gotta have wide horizons.”

“A growing boy’s got to have Cook’s teacakes,” Lalasa whispered to her.

“You’re all still holding the lessons in the morning?” Kel said, and Lalasa blushed prettily.

“Oh yes,” said Gladys. “Lalasa runs them. You should hear her drill sergeant’s voice, shakes the rafters.”

“Oh, shush, shoo, all of you, Lady Kel needs to clean up and to rest,” Lalasa said, flapping her hands at the gathered crowd– and they went. Lalasa blushed a bit more and then shoved Kel through the halls towards a hot bath and a fresh set of clothes. “They won’t fit right,” she said mournfully, but Kel turned and took her hands warmly in hers. Steam rose from the tub and she could smell lemon and lavender.

“It’s perfect,” she said. “Thank you.”

She asked Lord Raoul why, once– why he had taken her on. Why he had shown up to dawn practice for years, on the other side of that low fence, and tried to make her laugh. She flicked the beads of the abacus, juggling budgets and supplies in her head while she waited for his answer.

“There’s more than one kind of warrior,” said Raoul finally. Sixty pallets of dried venison, Kel thought, while Raoul talked about soldiers, knights, and Alanna the Lioness. Twenty five cases of clean bandages, she thought, and Raoul said, “Commanders, good ones, they’re as rare as heroes. Commanders have an eye not just for what they do, but for what those around them do.”

Raoul picked up a quill and toyed with it. Sewing kits, emergency water rations, twenty-five sacks of flour. “You’ve shown flashes of being a commander. I’ve seen it. My job is to see if you will do more than flash, with the right training. The realm needs commanders. Tortall is big. We have too many still-untamed pockets, too cursed many hideyholes for rogues, and plenty of hungry enemies to nibble at our borders and our seafaring trade. If you have what it takes, the Crown should use you. We’re too desperate for good commanders to let one slip away, even a female one. Now, finish that”– he pointed to the slate– “and you can stop for tonight.”

“Yes, sir,” she said.

“I don’t know if we deserve you, Kel,” he said, as she packed up to leave. “Tortall hasn’t done right by you, over and over, but we need you.” She stood in the door of the tent, gripping her papers and not speaking. “As long as you are willing to fight for us, as long as I can, I will give you a place to stand and do so.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“No, thank you, Kel. Sleep well.”

She didn’t, but it wasn’t for lack of trying.

On the progress, Raoul knocked conservatives out of their saddles when they challenged him, but it was Lerant who helped him into his armor. Kel helped Flyn argue logistics and housing with the progress quartermasters, standing shoulder to stubborn shoulder. She didn’t ever learn to joust, which seemed a rather silly pastime to her, but in her third year with the Own, Raoul taught her how to do that speedy, efficient stitch of his, and Qasim taught her how to walk quieter over leaves and broken ground, and she taught all Third Company a few moves with the glaive.

She raced Hoshi against speedy Bazhir horses while Peachblossom nibbled dry delicacies of desert grass. She buried Crown and Freckle in Persepolis. Yuki watched Neal across rooms, and Neal watched Yuki, and neither of them were driven to poetry.

Third Company built the yet-unnamed Fort Giantkiller up in the frigid north. The raiders were getting bolder, and more unified. Kel got kicked off construction duty early on, so Flyn snapped her up for logistics and scouting details.

Earthquakes, fires, bandits, pirates, hard winters– Kel’s shoulders were filling out further, her equipment getting caked with dust and mud from every corner of Tortall.

The leaves turned color again and Kel buried herself in an audit of all of Third Company’s gear. Raoul settled down beside her with a sigh and she kept the count of arrows going in the back of her head. “Four years,” he said. “If you were a squire, I’d be sorry to see you go now.”

Lalasa had gotten her hands on Kel’s King’s Own livery, stitched them up to fit her perfectly. She stood under their weight now, willing her hands not to curl into fists. “Sorry, sir,” she said. “That’s kind, and all, but I think I’d rather have my shield.”

“I didn’t mean–”

“That’s alright. Excuse me, sir.”

They headed back to Corus the next week. Raoul had reports to deliver in person, and Kel wanted to see Neal step out of that Chamber as a living knight. Her first stop when she got home was her parents’ house: for tea in the drawing room, and cookies and storytelling in the kitchen garden. Her second was Neal’s rooms, just off Lady Alanna’s. She and Yuki plied him with games and favorite foods, and tried to distract their friend and his tendency to overthink.

The morning of Neal’s Ordeal, Kel arrived at the Chamber’s waiting room before the sun rose. She had never been there before, never pressed her hands up against the cold stone door and asked for nightmares. She sat in the back, with Owen, but at the front of the room a stout red-haired woman waited, silent. Kel watched the back of Alanna the Lioness’s head and tried not to wonder, tried not to want the things she had already failed to earn. The stone bench was cold under her thighs.

“Neal will be fine,” Owen whispered to her. “Right? I mean.”

“Holding his tongue for a whole night?” Kel whispered back, squeezing the young squire’s hand as comfortingly as she could. “It’s gonna be tough, but I think he can do it.”

When Neal stumbled out of the Chamber– pale, shaken, but alive– alive– Alanna was the first up, with a blanket and some low comment that made Neal snicker. She squeezed his hand on top of the wool.

“Sir Meathead,” said Dom, grinning from the second row. Things were curling and curdling in Kel’s gut– pride, relief, and a festering of exhausted, bitter jealousy.

“You next,” she told Owen, trying badly to hold a smile, but everyone else was smiling too hard to notice where she failed.

In Neal’s first year as a knight and Kel’s fifth year with the Own, the war began in earnest. Stormwings circled the long ranks of men and supply wagons as they rumbled north, and Kel met a stableboy named Tobeis Boon. She’d never have a dowry, but she had years of wages and she bought Tobe’s freedom while Neal healed him up and Peachblossom stood guard.

“Taking in strays?” Raoul asked, raising a careful eyebrow with it.

“I learned from the best, sir,” she said. “You going to help me talk Flyn down about the lad, or not?”

“I suppose Third Company could always use another standard bearer,” Raoul said.

She grinned. “Lerant can take him on as a trainee.”

She didn’t have Haven holding her back from chasing down Blayce the Nothing Man– but she had never met the Chamber and it had never told her the Nothing Man was her job. She was one more soldier marching between the supply wagons, leaving long even tracks through the sludge and muck. Whenever Raoul could manage it, he’d lead the Own off to scout afield from the trudging ranks.

Kel was assigned to Dom and Wolset’s squad– an “aide” officially still, she couldn’t be promoted to anything, but in a fight Wolset and the others looked to her for direction. They fought a couple skirmishes from Giantkiller (the sight of Raoul’s face upon hearing the fort’s official name was something Kel would cherish forever), but then they were assigned on to help found an unnamed refugee camp a half day’s ride away. Tobe went where Kel went, and Raoul sent Lerant along with them “to continue standard bearer training,” which mostly meant learning his letters and eating full meals. When Tobe had nightmares he found Kel, and when he had questions he tended to find Lerant.

Wyldon had made Neal commander of the camp, to the confusion of everyone but Kel. “It’s because you’re kind,” she said.

“What,” said Neal. “I’m not kind. What is this slander? And this is the Stump– he’s not going to care if I’m kind. He’s going to care if I’m– obedient. And dead on the inside. That’s why he’s doing this– he’s trying to kill me, have you seen this paperwork?”

Kel, who was already halfway through Neal’s stacks of paperwork– putting them into piles of “trash,” “not time sensitive,” and “regarding something that is literally on fire, right now”–said, “He wants someone here who cares about the people. Who isn’t going to call them ‘commoners’ and just dally and dream about the glory of the war front. You’ll do the work, and he respects you for that.”

“You live in a weird fantasy world,” Neal told her.

Dom got her banned from any construction work, so she signed herself (and Neal, too) up for extra latrine duty. She took sentry watches, joined the patrols, and got assigned crossbow and combat training duties. Neal worked at setting up both the camp and its infirmary, dogging the steps of the head healer until the woman kicked him back to his study. “You need aides,” Kel told him, and then found out that what she was actually looking for was something miraculous and extraordinary called clerks.

She met Fanche in the dusty lane outside one of the barracks, where the woman managed to have a yelling match with Neal in which neither of them raised their voices above short, cutting snipes. Kel stood on the sidelines with a fellow who introduced himself as Saefas and who confided, “I’m going to marry that woman.”

“Oh, good,” said Kel. “One of these days I’m likely to strangle him.”

Kel went walking in the evenings, just like she had through the libraries and hidey-holes of the palace at home. When she found raised voices, she listened and stepped in where she could. When she found raised fists, she stopped them her drill sergeant voice if she could and her hands if she couldn’t. “You need a council for each of the housing blocks,” she told Neal. “Elected judges, something like that. They’ve got grievances and you can’t answer them all, no matter how many clerks we find you.”

“And you can’t answer them all, no matter how many strolls you go on, whistling,” he said. “Go find some Scanrans to kill, Kel, I’ve got this.”

There were children here the way there weren’t in Giantkiller. Tobe looked so much like a very small old man sometimes that when she first saw him racing through the main square with Loesia and Gydo Kel barely recognized him. He would still barely let her out of his sight for more than a few hours, and he’d gotten no better at asking for things he needed, but he cornered her at one breakfast to explain that Loesia and Gydo wanted to learn how to fight.

Kel thought about her latrine duty and Neal’s meetings with his new clerks and her nightly walks, listening for trouble, and how little time she had to sleep. She thought about being twelve, on the wrong side of the practice yard fence. “The first hour before dawn,” she told him.

Whenever Third Company made its berth in Corus, Kel would get up in the early mornings and make her way out to the kitchen courtyard. She always meant to lurk in the back and stretch out her limbs, but Lalasa would drag her to the front, smiling, and introduce her to every new young woman. Kel tried and failed to learn all their names and livelihoods, but Lalasa knew every one. Owen, who remained an unattached squire at the palace until the war started in earnest and he became an unattached squire at Giantkiller, had been Lalasa’s demo partner for years.

Loesia and Gydo were smaller than anyone Kel had ever taught. As she moved between them in chill morning air, adjusting stances and giving advice, she tried to decide if it made her miss Lalasa less or more.

When her squad was called back to Giantkiller, Kel thought about leaving Tobe with Neal, but the kid refused. “It’s safer here,” she told him. “And you’ll get to stay with your friends.”

“It’s safer with you,” he said and Kel sighed and told him to pack his things. She didn’t want him trying to trek on foot from Haven to Giantkiller in the dark of night if she left him behind.

She found him housing with the stable boys at Giantkiller and left Peachblossom and Hoshi to his care. Dom told her over a shared sentry watch that Tobe had taken it upon himself to look after the rest of the squad’s horses, too. “If they were cats, they’d purr when he stepped into the stable, but instead they just get snot on our shirts.”

She had missed the rest of Third Company, who welcomed them back with equal parts insults and warmly squeezed shoulders. Wolset dug up some rye from some friend of a friend, and she and Lerant ended up giggling into each other’s shoulders while Dom tried to hold a tune.

Neal was at Giantkiller, delivering reports, when the news came– Haven had been overrun. Passersby had seen the smoke rising and sent word on to the fort. Neal packed his bags with hands that shook, and Raoul sent Dom’s squad with him to assess the damage. Kel and Tobe fought with hissed whispers in the stables until she got him to stay in Giantkiller with Lerant. “I don’t want you seeing this, okay? You don’t need this, kiddo. Please, for me, stay here.”

“C'mon, Boon,” said Lerant. “I’ve got a hundred gauntlets to clean and mend, come help me out.”

Kel couldn’t imagine, as they rode down that long empty path and listened ahead for ambushes, what use they would be when they got there. “We can bury them,” Dom said when she brought it up at the fire that night. “Bear witness.”

“We should have been there,” she whispered. “Dom, the children– I taught them how to fight and then I went back to my big sturdy walls and trained patrols and war mages who can do more than light a candle–”

“Kel.”

“They deserved better,” said Neal, who Kel hadn’t realized was close enough to hear them.

“Not from you, Meathead,” said Dom. “They deserved better from the commanders and the Crown and all the rest, but not from you, okay? You did everything you could.”

“Not enough.”

“Get some sleep, both of you,” Dom said. “I’m both of your elder here, alright?” Kel shrugged and went off to lay out her bedroll in the dark.

They came upon Haven early the next morning and Kel could hardly say its name; it felt like a jinx on her tongue or some sort of cruel joke she’d unwittingly delivering the punchline for. Like Dom said, they buried bodies. They bore witness to the burned-out, mute stories of dozens of deaths– the unmarked Scanran bodies that lay around the body of a healing mage who had always fought with Neal over treatments; songbirds curled up in the eyesockets of dead killing devices; a corporal Kel had hated curled over a young brewer’s apprentice she’d taught to hold to a bow; craftsmen who had built Haven’s walls and cooks that had filled its bellies and stubborn hotheads who had given Neal so many headaches.

They dug through wreckage, dug deep trenches, and Kel kept count in the back of her head. “Neal,” she said, when her numbers kept coming up wrong, because Neal wasn’t keeping count of anything. “Neal, they’re not all here. Neal, the civilians– the children– we aren’t finding the bodies.”

“Do you think they got away?” said Neal, but Kel was already shaking her head.

Their orders were clear– clean up, bury the dead, report back to Giantkiller. There was a war on, and any Haven captives would be far into Scanran territory by now. This was a tragedy, but there was a war on and they were meant to be knights, not nursemaids, not shepherds or heroes.

They cleaned up. They buried their dead. They rode back towards Giantkiller and found twists of red yarn along the way, plucked from Meech’s balding doll.

“Neal,” Kel said, when she dismounted to pick up the first red breadcrumb. “You go on ahead with the soldiers. We’ve got some Own business, don’t we, boys?”

Wolset had dismounted, too. “Yes, sir, Lady Kel.”

Dom looked around at his squad. “Volunteer mission only.” Every man nodded and made no step to move on.

“I’m coming, too,” said Neal.

“You’ve got to report back to Wyldon,” said Kel. “Get the injured home. And it’s treason if you go, but Lord Raoul will back us up. If nothing else, we can’t let the Scanrans get materiel for a hundred new killing devices. He’ll understand.”

“Well, Wyldon will have to, too,” Neal snapped, and it was a sign of his shellshock that together Kel and Dom managed to bully him into riding on. They made it all the way to the river border with Scanra before Neal caught up– with Owen, Lerant, and Tobe in tow.

“You try talking them into staying home,” he told Kel when she nearly glared a hole through him.

“I won’t go back,” Tobe said when she turned to him. The Own were trying to hide their snickers around her. “And I can help with the horses.”

Neal and his Whisper Man connections got them over the river, and the motley crew of Own soldiers, knight, squire, aide, and standard bearers crept through the empty countryside. It was land like this, ravaged and abandoned, that Neal’s refugees had come from– the same land, just on the other side of the river.

Every step of the way, they found signs of the refugees fighting back. When they found the adults, they got weapons into their hands and headed on to find their children. A peculiar seer child, the last child left in all of Blayce’s home domain, said something about a prophecy, but Kel had never heard the Chamber hand her this mission. Fanche spat and sharpened her weapons. Dom napped in every spare moment, and Tobe whispered to the horses while Lerant shivered and complained of the cold.

Kel caught Lerant’s arm, before they went up to the keep, and said, “Keep an eye on him in there.”

Lerant scowled at her and it was so familiar an expression she almost smiled. “The kid’s not just yours, anymore.”

“I know,” she said. “Thank you.”

They snuck up to the keep through dark paths and illusory stone. When they found Haven’s children they barely recognized them, clean and coiffed, but they got them shoes, and weapons, and fought their way out. When it was all over– Blayce dead, and Stenmun, too– they left the enemy dead for the Stormwings. Neal healed wounds and counted heads, but Kel led them home.

Three months later, after Neal’s pardon and the convicts’ too, the king called Kel for an audience and she went. Tobe refused to let her go anywhere without him, so she dragged him south with her and left him to be fed, prodded, and mended in the hands of Lalasa and her parents.

She wasn’t sure what Jon wanted– if she was getting a condemnation or a commendation– but it turned out to be a medal and an invitation to face the Ordeal.

“How gracious of your majesty,” said Kel, which was something like a yes.

“I don’t think anyone could argue with that decision, after your service in the north.”

“Oh,” said Kel. “I’m sure they still will, your majesty.”

On her way out of the room, Wyldon caught her elbow and she let him. He had been hovering the back of the chamber, listening with his face full of something she didn’t bother identifying.

“I was stubborn, Mindelan,” said Wyldon, and she could tell it was like pulling teeth. “I should have listened to the voice of honor.”

He had more to say, curdling in his gut, she could tell, but she shrugged and moved past him. “My life should never have depended on the quality of your honor, sir,” she said and went on through the gates and out to the city.

They had her re-take the page end-of-year examinations for all the ones she missed. “Missed,” she said, as she repeated the news back at Giantkiller with a quite shake. Neal threw an arm around her shoulders.

“Ha, but you’re still barely older than I was when I took them,” he said. “Standing among all those children, reciting conjugations over the tops of their heads– are your sympathies for me soaring?”

“No,” she said, but she squeezed his hand.

She passed with flying colors, of course, returned for a few weeks from the ongoing war. Most of Third Company stayed in the north, but conflict was sparser with the loss of the killing devices, so Raoul came to Corus, too, with Dom, Neal, and Lerant in tow. Owen had seized Neal very seriously before they rode out and told him, “You cheer so loud for her, when she gets that shield.”

Like in other lifetimes, Raoul was one of her knight mentors for the vigil before the Ordeal. Wyldon came to her to offer to be the other, but she turned him down, and the king, too. She asked Neal, instead, and he had the audacity to be surprised by it.

“If you survive the Ordeal of Knighthood, you will be a Knight of the Realm. You will be sworn to protect those weaker than you, to obey your king, to live in a way that honors your kingdom and your gods. To wear the shield of a knight is an important thing. You may not ignore a cry for help. It means that rich and poor, young and old, male and female may look to you for rescue, and you cannot deny them…”

Kel sat through that long, cold vigil thinking of the realm– that dusty word that sounded in people’s mouths. She had ridden its hills and valleys with the Own, from mountain to shining sea. She had filled the larders of tiny villages with venison, leaned into Peachblossom’s shoulder as they shifted ruined timbers after fires and earthquakes, seen men bleed out on dry soil.

She knew the mountains, and she knew the scared, fierce refugees she had led back across its border. She knew the dusty streets of the Tortallan capital, and she knew the seamstresses and carpenters and fishmongers and blacksmiths’ apprentices who walked them. She had known for a long time who and what she was fighting for. When she stepped into the Chamber, darkness fell around her and she tried to hold on to that.

It was still a nightmare machine, and she still spat that name in its face, scared-certain she would not leave it alive and bitterly angry about it. She had had so many more nightmares, now, this protector of the small. She would not be going off to war with the paint still wet on her shield, and she recognized all the fears the Chamber was laying at her feet.

It took her to the top of the tree outside Fort Giantkiller, and it brought the wind while she clung white-knuckled to the branches. It dropped her in the canyon, twelve again but this time tongue-tied, trembling, to watch Faleron get an arrow to his right eye– Merric fall with an axe in his spine– Owen bleed out in the dirt–

She was walking Haven’s streets again, but this time they were her people– not just living in walls she had defended and abandoned, not just faces whose names were on the tip of her tongue– she felt like she carried all their stories and their squabbles, like she’d stood on a box in the eating hall and given them a speech about how she would keep them safe. They were her children and her clerks and her convicts, her burden and her ball-and-chain– except where were the children, where–

In the halls of Blayce’s hold, she saw Neal hit ground, silent and slack-faced in death. She plucked the bodies of sparrows from the blinded eyes of killing devices. Fanche took five arrows in the stomach before she went down to her knees, then her hands, then her side, curses bubbling red from her lips. Jump lunged for a killing device and Kel was too small– her hands fragile on weighted weapons– her reach all wrong–

She was standing on the wrong side of the low practice yard fence, her grip white-knuckled on her mother’s borrowed walking stick. “Was I not clear, probationer?” Wyldon demanded. Answers swarmed over her tongue. Her fingers ached.

She was clinging white-knuckled to a tree, too high above a wide featureless plain to be able to survive the fall. She was no good at letting go of things, but it didn’t matter– everyone got tired, even Keladry of Mindelan. Anyone’s hands could weaken. Anyone could be ripped from their high perch and die frightened, dashed down onto hard dirt and cold stone. What would it look like, when they pulled open the doors of the Chamber?

The wind screamed in her ears, and she closed her eyes. She did not scream back.

Are you trying to make me afraid? she thought. I am afraid, I have always been afraid–

The streets of Haven, silent; the whispering of bullies in the library; her feet pressed together in Wyldon’s office, that last day of that first year; Dom going down in the forest with an arrow to the shoulder, the first killing device stalking out of the shadows–

I am afraid because they matter, and I am small. There are so many ways I could be stronger, but I’m not. There are so many ways I could be braver, but I’m not. I will fear and I will regret, but I owe none of that to you.

She was no good at letting go of things, and she had sunk her fingers into this life, dug in her heels, roped herself to the mast of the ship and refused to plug her ears with wax. The wind screamed in her ears, the tree whipping back and forth. The ground was so far below. She remembered her brother holding her over the balcony, on a sunny childhood afternoon he didn’t even remember now. She remembered. She had been afraid for so long.

I did everything I could, she thought. I fought with everything I had, and it was enough, gods damn it. I was good enough. I was better than enough.

You can kill me here, you ugly bit of stone, and they will think it means that girls aren’t meant to be knights. But I know, and you know, and gods I hope the girls in the city know– that we belong here.

She had killed the Nothing Man. She had not given up on the Haven people– she had gone after them, over rivers and through stone, and she had brought them home safe. She had sweated four years on the same beaten-down dirt as the pages, performed every drill, parry, and strike. She had saved a bag of kittens from a spidren. She had had her mornings in the kitchen garden, in the pale light, and those would go on and on without her.

You can kill me, she thought. But nothing I did will die. It was enough. It was everything I had, and it was always enough. Loesia whipping a spear in front of her, like a glaive, like she’d spent dozens of pre-dawn hours practicing that smooth downward stroke. Lalasa in her shop, pins in her mouth and her hands busy. Tobe tucked up at a desk with Lerant, both of them leaning over his slow careful letters. Her mother’s low voice and her father’s steady hands and Raoul a lump in the curtains at formal events– Buri standing outside the pages’ practice yard, back when Kel still had to look up to meet her eyes. Meech chasing after Gydo’s ankles and Fanche with her hands on her hips; Dom cooking bacon over the fire and Jump waiting at his feet. She had fought for these things. She had gotten to see them, to live in their warmth.

I am afraid, she thought. She let go.

The tree vanished, and the wide plain, and the wind. Kel was in a still, dark room made of big stones. The grimacing face carved into the back of the door said You did well and she spat at its feet. Its laughter still ringing soundlessly in her skull, the door swung open and she stepped out into the light.

She stepped out and the realm was waiting in the antechamber– Raoul dabbing his eyes, Neal and Dom with Jump at their feet. Fanche was scratching Jump’s ears and Saefas was smiling beside Kel’s beaming mother and father.

When she got back to Fort Giantkiller and the new refugee camp they were building down the river, there would be cheering in the streets– ex-convicts and refugees, King’s Own and soldiers, nobles and knights– but for now there was Gladys and Tian, leaping to their feat. There were Corus fishmongers’ daughters and seamstresses and priestesses of the Black God who had been apprentices when she first met them in herb-heavy morning light. Here was everything she had spat in the Chamber’s face, everything she had prayed for in that long cold vigil, everything she had stood for in that practice yard dirt, ready to fight forever for something they told her she could not ever earn.

Lalasa sat at the very front, her fingers pressed up over her teary smile. Kel was smiling back, shivering, when Tobe hit her sternum with a thud. “I knew you’d make it,” he muttered, squeezing her tight, so she wrapped her arms around his still growing frame and lied, “Me, too.”

There was a soft touch at her elbow, so she lifted her head from where she was pressing her face into Tobe’s soft hair. A short, red-headed woman was standing in front of her, so proud her grin nearly split her face. Kel stared down at her, one arm still around Tobe, part of her heart still twelve beside the practice yard fence and sure the Lioness would have done better.

Alanna squeezed her elbow gently and said, “Gods all bless, Lady Knight.”

#raoul and jon have shouting matches throughout this #the sort where they call each other spoiled children #and thayet sends them both to their rooms #jon is trying to make compromises and keep peace and think about the big picture #and raoul is like there is TWELVE YEAR OLD KID down there who disarmed me wheni didn't meant her to #who's withstood so many things and words hurled at her #who keeps coming back and back #because she believes in what knighthood is supposed to be #more than any of those spoiled brats on the other side of that training yard fence #and you won't let her fight for you #it's not just cruel jon #it's stupid

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imgilmoregirl · 6 years

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Vowed For Eternity (Chapter 21)

AO3 Link

Lost Love

Slowly departing from her son, Fiona turned around, her breath getting caught on her throat. Malcolm. The last time she saw him, Blue had turned him into a pre-teen again, but now he was just her man once more and she didn't think twice before running towards him, jumping into his arms and smashing his lips into a kiss. He caught her with a suffocated laugh coming up through his throat.

It was unbelievable and yet it was real. His body was back on its form, a short beard had grown on his face and scratched hers slightly as they kissed. Fiona pulled away looking deep into his blue eyes and running a hand through his light-brown hair; there were tears streaming down her face and he cupped her cheeks, staring down at her in awe.

"I can't believe it's really you!"

"I can't believe you are here," Malcolm answered.

Behind them, Rumplestiltskin cleaned his throat, uncomfortably moving from one foot to the other as he cradled his daughter and tried not to look into his parents’ direction.

"I'm sorry to interrupt, but I would like very much to get home to my wife," he said, urging to get out of there.

Fiona turned around, the most radiant smile filling her lips as she took Malcolm’s hand in hers and dragged him to where the former Dark One was still awkwardly standing. It was in that moment that Rumple got his first good sight of his father. He could recognise some of his own lines in the man’s face, but he shrunk with uncertainty.

"Malcolm, this is our son, Rumplestiltskin” Fiona introduced them, “and beautiful baby daughter, Colette."

Laughing with delight, Malcolm approached him, tapping a hand to his back as he analysed his face carefully. Malcolm had only seen him once in his life, right after Rumple was born and they were happy for just a little while before the Blue Fairy came and destroyed their hopes.

"You're a fine lad," he said, eyes dropping to gaze at Colette. "And look at this, I'm a grandfather!"

"Aye," Rumple smiled weakly, before the need of getting out of there felt too big to be ignored and he insisted: "Uh, Belle is waiting."

"Of course," Fiona agreed, leaning her forehead against Malcolm’s shoulder. "I can't wait for you to meet her and Baelfire."

Belle woke up to the sound of her son crying. She slowly sat on the bed, rubbing her fists at her swollen eyes, still reddish from the long the she had spent weeping against the pillow after her father told her that Blue had taken Colette. The whiny sounds of the babe filled the room, but for a long moment, she didn’t find the strength to stand up and attend to Baelfire’s needs, feeling too shattered to do anything other than start crying again.

It was a good surprise when a golden cloud of smoke appeared by her bed’s side, bringing her husband in. She gasped when she saw the little bundle he had wrapped in his arms and Belle quickly reached for it, stretching her arms to receive the babe from him.

"Rumple…" she murmured, nuzzling her nose to Colette’s brow. "Oh, my love, you found her."

"Did you ever doubt I would?"

"No," Belle assured, still hearing Baelfire’s squeals. "You came just in time. Mind to get Bae for me?"

He nodded, turning around to make his way to the crib, where the babe was fussy around, waving arms and legs in the air with a certain despair. Rumple picked him, supporting the head and watching as his movements got less agitated.

"Don't cry, my boy,” he murmured, “everything is alright."

Walking back to Belle, he handed her the second child and she gave the twins a meal, until they were both sated and with eyelids closing, ready to go back to sleep. Rumple helped her straightening her nightgown and sat by her side as she cradled the children, one in each arm, looking at then with a stunned smile.

"They are perfect," Belle whispered.

"And they are all ours."

His hand caressed Baelfire’s little head gently, thinking about how much things had changed along the last months. It seemed it was in another lifetime, that he had come here to Avonlea to make a deal with the king, asking for his daughter’s hand in marriage in exchange for the kingdom’s safety. A family had never been on his plans, nor did truly falling in love with the princess or losing the darkness that lived inside him for so long.

Rumple could still remember about Belle’s frightened face as she was walked down the isle to become his wife, the moment when he decided he could never act like the monster he was, near her. It changed everything and each decision they had made since then had led to this moment and he would never regret any part of their story, although he knew he still needed to make it up for a lot of his mistakes with her and their children.

"Yeah," she agreed in a low voice. "Alright, you get Bae to the crib and I'll take Lette."

Nodding, he took the little boy from her arms and placed him back inside his crib as she did the same with their daughter and for some minutes, they stayed there, just admiring the incredible sight of the two small lives they had created together. Then, Belle turned around, palming a hand to his cheek and stroking him with her thumb, causing Rumple to close his eyes and lean against her touch.

"Your skin feels so soft now," she marvelled. "You look so different."

"Don't you like it?"

"I do, but I'll take some time to get used to this new you. Although I didn't love you any less than I did when you were the Dark One," she guaranteed, stealing a sweet kiss from his lips. "You're so handsome."

He kissed her again, probing from this mouth which’s taste was the only one he needed to feel for the rest of his life – one he now knew, could end naturally, without any dagger’s power keeping him from getting old beside her – and was all he would ever want. Rumple encircled his arms around her waist, spreading butterfly kissed through her face.

"Come to bed my beauty,” he invited, feeling weary, “you need to rest before one of those two beautiful twins wake up in need of you."

"You might be right," Belle giggled, dragging him with her and making his chest her pillow for the night.

He held her as close as he could as he relished in hearing the silence of night as her heavy breath filled the room. And for the first time in too many years to count, there were no voices in his head.

Fiona's magic took them to her chambers at king Maurice's castle; it was no surprise for her that Rumple hadn't followed them. She took a seat in the chaise by the fireplace silently watching Malcolm wander around the room with a stunned expression.

"So, where exactly are we?"

"Avonlea," Fiona explained. "Our daughter-in-law is a princess."

"Oh," he blinked, "she is?"

He slid to the empty space near her, taking Fiona’s long, slim hands in his and rubbing at her fingers. It had been too long since she had been allowed to have this kind of gentle contact with anyone. Fiona had been locked in the Dark Realm, then in Rumple’s cage and only recently, with the arrival of her grandchildren, she had rediscovered some joy in this life.

"Yes," she confirmed. "Very kind, smart, a good mother for what I saw these last few months."

"It's good to know that even though Rumple had a terrible life because of us, he still found happiness."

She so agreed with him, because there was nothing better than seeing her son happy and getting the great future he deserved, after all the suffering he had been through, but Fiona couldn’t help feeling slightly sad when she noticed he was already a grow man and she had lost all the precious moments she should have watched as his mother.

"Sometimes I still dream about what it would have been like if we got a chance of raising him," Fiona confessed "I feel so guilty for not being there for him."

Malcolm brought her hands up, pressing a long kiss to her knuckles, just like he used to do before, in a time where all she felt was in love and reckless. It was good to know that somethings hadn’t changed through the years they spent apart.

"Once, a fairy told me that life has a tricky way of doing perfect things," he said with a small grin. "We may have been denied the future we wanted, but now we are here, after hundreds of years. If we hadn't being separated from each other the lad wouldn't have met the princess and those twins would never exist."

"You're right," she murmured, locking her lips with his and slowly moving herself to let her curves mould to his body. "I missed you, Malcolm."

One of his hands covered the back of her head, while the other rested firmly on her hip. None of them had expected to see the other again and being there in each other’s arms knowing their son was safe and their whole family would be alright, Fiona decided she could never receive a greater blessing than that.

"And I missed you too,” Malcolm assured her. “I love you, Fiona. I will always love you."

When she kissed him again, tears were falling to her eyes to bath his face. Everything was perfect in that night and she felt pretty sure there was nothing better in life than loving and being loved.

Rumplestiltskin finished lacing Belle’s bodice and gave her a worried glance. She looked happy and healthy, the babies were fed and asleep with a nurse looking out for them, but yet, he didn’t want to leave her chambers. It was about time to end their journey in Avonlea and he wasn’t complaining about that, because he hated living under other people’s roof and leaving like he was in doubt with them.

He longed to be back to the Dark Castle, where he could finally set up a decent nursery for the children and fix somethings before he and Belle started to really live their independent lives again, however that meant he had to have dinner with king Maurice and his parents which he wasn’t exactly excited to.

"Are you sure you don't want to stay another day in bed?"

"No, Rumple, I've told you a thousand times," Belle said rolling her eyes at him, clearly tired of that question being asked over and over. "You locked me in here for a week and I'm eager to know your father. Fiona talked a lot about him."

He furrowed. The mention of Malcolm not helping to calm his nerves.

"I don't know if you should do it," the former Dark One mumbled.

Belle certainly didn’t understand his point, because her eyebrows narrowed amusingly with confusion as she splayed her hands on his chest, tracing the patterns of his golden waistcoat.

"Do what?"

"Meet Malcolm."

"Why not?" She asked, still looking puzzled. "Your mother showed him the babies and you two have been talking the whole week! Even my father said they were nice people."

Yeah, stupid king Maurice, he though, just when he needed him to complain about his parents and say they were all freak people and that he wanted them very far away from his castle, the man said he liked them and invited them to dinner. Things couldn’t be more ironical.

"Aye,” he agreed, “but I don't truly know them, Belle. I know they are my parents, but it doesn't feel so!"

"Calm down, my love. Look at me," she pleaded, digging her fingers onto his hair and petting it. "It's alright to feel uncertain, but they are willing to be a part of this family, so we should try."

Breathing in, Rumplestiltskin nodded. His wife’s sweet voice was soothing to his nerves; he loved how her faith in people seemed to never fade, no matter what they did in their past, or anything else. Belle was the most forgiving and loving person one could ever met.

"Yes, I guess you're right."

"Let's go," she encouraged him, taking his hand and dragging him out of the room.

They crossed the corridors, seeing people bow respectably for them when they passed, whispering greetings and congratulations over the birth of their children and for the first time he felt that they were not fearing him, which was strange, but in a good way. He never thought he would feel so happy for not frightening the others with only his appearance.

When they reached the hallway that led to their destination, Rumple saw his parents coming from the opposite side they were and Fiona immediately smiled.

"I thought you would already be at the dining hall," Belle said, stepping forward to take a good look at them.

"We got late," Malcolm explained, smirking at her as he glanced back to his son with an arched eyebrow. "So, this is your wife, lad? She is a pretty lady."

Rumple nodded. Belle blushed.

"Thank you, sir. It is really nice to finally meet you."

"I can tell you the very same,” Malcolm said. “I'm already in love with my grandchildren, they are beautiful and I'm glad my son has someone like you by his side."

Passing an arm around her waist, Rumple allowed his wife to lay her head on his chest, marvelling at how tiny she was without her high heels. It was something he rarely payed attention to, but he really appreciated her small features.

"Well, I couldn't be happier and I can't wait to go home," Belle guaranteed. "Have you two thought about where are you going to live?"

"Your father was kind to offer us a cottage on the village," Fiona told them.

"Really?” Belle gasped, finding herself almost unable to believe those words. Her father had hated Rumple from the very start and he didn’t think good of Fiona until some days ago when she helped to rescue Colette. “Oh, that makes me happy. It seems he truly changed his mind about you all."

"I'm grateful he did," her mother-in-law assured.

It seemed the good surprises weren’t soon to end, which was good, because the hell of a year they had, all of them needed some time of pure peace and happiness.

"Should we go on and have a nice dinner with the king then?" Rumplestiltskin suggested.

And as Belle agreed, the four of them followed their way to the king’s dining hall, where they would have a great time and worry about nothing.

#rumbelle fic #gift fic #rumbelle #mine #writing #rumplestiltskin #belle french #ao3 #dark castle

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malemblogs · 7 years

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A quick rewind to the summer

While my blog might have been inactive this summer, I certainly wasn’t. With ‘Festival Season’ in our sites this May, I started working with a company called PTL who have standing contracts with a number of festivals around the country supplying the toilets for both arenas and campsites, as well as providing luxury toilets and showers at certain festivals, I began working, alongside my sister Tamara, with the festival site crew as a supervisor for the crew, affectionately known as ‘the penguins’ on the festival grounds. While I didn’t spend a lot of time onsite around production or during build and breaks, I still had my eyes opened and my mind blown seeing how much has to happen for a festival to happen, I’d compare it to a town being built easily. The toilets are a small part of what goes on, but an essential part of it, everything from the water, to the power to the roads and walkways have to be added to the site before anything can happen.

The first two festivals I worked at were both no camping events, which were the easier of the two, we had between 100 and 300 toilets on each site and were over seeing seven crew only, which for the most part was relatively easy, the crew had been split into groups and assigned toilet blocks to cover, and it was our job to ensure they had everything they needed, ensuring they got lunch and most importantly making sure the job was being done. In that group of seven we had a group of three lads (for lack of a better word), who tested and tried our patience every day for these two festivals, trying to find three young men in a crowd of 10,000+ was not an easy thing to do, especially when they’d taken their high vis off, we made it to the end of day having tracked them down and sniffing out their hiding spot, and got the job done. I learned really quickly that some people don’t care if they have toilet roll or not towards the end of the night, I mean some people don’t even care if they have a toilet or not! Towards the end of the night at Field Day, we were severely understaffed, so it was one of those days I had to get stuck in and deal with the toilets myself, I have found condoms, knickers, used tampons, a portaloo where they’d managed to shit on the floor, a toilet that was wall to wall covered in shit, let me say, those units aren’t big, there’s about enough room to go in, sort yourself out, and leave again, you have to go a long way out of your way before you can poop on the floor. Field Day opened my eyes to just how disgusting people can be, and over the rest of the summer they didn’t let me down.

The first real festival I ever saw through from start to finish was Download festival at Donnington Park, while I have worked at festivals in the past, it was always as part of a backline crew and a matter of in that morning, set up, do the show, pack down and get back on the bus. This was a new kind of monster. From the get go I knew that this wasn’t going to be anything like Common People or Field Day, we would be here for 8 nights, camping in tents, if it wasn’t for the fact the company also provided luxury showers and toilets for this festival alongside the portaloos, I’d have been a wreck by day 3.

This time round, we probably had the hardest crew to deal with out of all of the festivals but definitely also one of the most fun, jumping from seven to twenty-one, among them, the most difficult man I’ve ever known to work with, Rusty, a 32 year old kleptomaniac, ADHD suffering, manic depressive with tendencies to lie, who can’t be left on his own by recommendation of a doctor, who refuses to do what he’s told or asked unless he is watched and followed like a hawk all day, above and beyond everything he put us through that weekend, was the hour he vanished and when I did finally find him, he’d spent the hour helping a random punter get a large amount of drugs out of his body, I can’t fathom any reason a grown man would want to help anyone do that, never mind a stranger. Between Rusty and the rest of his friends, managing the staff at Download was one of the most stressful experiences I’ve ever had, but the rest of the summer felt like a breeze in comparison. After Download, my boss said to myself and my sister, ‘If you can manage Rusty, as effectively as Rusty can be managed, you can manage anybody.’ I haven’t yet found that to be untrue.

While I thought that Download was a new kind of beast when I got there, being blessed with luxury showers and only having to cover campsite toilets, honestly was a gentle introduction to the big beasty a festival site really is, the following festivals we worked at required our company to look after toilets in the Main Arena, Camp Bestival saw us covering the entire festival site, including staff toilets, and had us managing up to 30 staff at one time, most of which were between 17 and 21, surprisingly enough, while the younger crew did tend to sneak off more for a cheeky wee song here and there, I had the most trouble at one of these festivals with a middle aged couple called John and Theresa. They started off by sneaking their dog onto the festival site, and continued to be late very morning and then refuse to wear shoes while working in and around the toilets and who tried at every opportunity to tell you stories of their glory days. You go to any festival site and you look at the punters, you see festivals and the people there operate on a different set of rules, it’s almost like all normal social constructs go out the window, people really just do whatever they want, people like John and Theresa live their life by festival rules all the time I reckon.

Latitude was one of the most beautiful festivals I had the pleasure of working at this year, the woodland entertainment areas, the pink sheep and just the general atmosphere was lovely, however professionally Latitude was a bit of head melt for us, the toilets were just eating stock and on one occasion an hour passed before we were able to get stock to the blocks that required it, also because it’s such a big site, even on a buggy, getting from where our stock was to the blocks that needed them could take between 10 and 20 minutes depending on traffic. Speaking of traffic, on a stock run toward the end of the first working night here, going over a bump in the road, my phone fell out of my hands and proceeded get run over by one of the big gulpers, you know the truck ith the septic tank on it, and it crushed it to bits, even apple couldn’t fix it. Despite the problems we faced, people seemed to think the toilets were well looked after and relatively clean, and two of the penguins ended up getting a £30 tip. It ended up being a fun festival and to top it off we also got a cheeky photo in with Dick from Dick and Dom.

It was also at latitude I gained a newfound respect for the portaloo, after a few drinks I thought it would be okay to brave the long drops, if you don’t know what these are, it is essentially a hole in the ground with, in this case, a long plank of wood with holes cut out, with a metal cage plonked on top like cubicles, I didn’t know there was no toilet roll provided, it was the last night of a 3 day festival and I wasn’t mentally prepared for it. If you’ve never used one, try and keep it that way.

Camp Bestival was one of the more interesting festivals I worked at production wise, it takes place just kind of in and around a village, and I often was on a main road on the buggy to get from A to B, not that I minded, because the festival was laid out like this, on the last night a friend of mine who lives fairly locally was able to make it onto our campsite and with the help of twenty-something penguins shrouding her from security, we smuggled her into the festival site itself, that night is a whole other story in itself.

At this point, it’s been a long summer, I’ve packed and unpacked my suitcase more times than I’d have liked to, and I was getting really sick of seeing it, it’s not the same as just living out of a suitcase, those little teasers of home and living like a regular person make it harder. And it’s feeling like this I leave for V Fest, the end of festival season is near and I can feel my bed. I didn’t like V Fest, it was a lot like Field Day, only younger, the number of children at this event was insane, I spoke with some of the security and drug dog handlers about the measures in place dealing with the punters and drugs, and all in all it was very lax, the general idea was they’re predominantly after dealers, but if they are alerted to a punter with a small amount of drugs, of any age, they confiscate it and it goes no further than that. After possession, it’s out of their hands. V Fest also cut the number of staff they wanted from us by 50, but didn’t cut out the corresponding number of toilets, so we were all stretched very thin, and didn’t have access to the buggy, meaning in a crowded site full of drunken teenagers, me and Tamara had to carry stock around, and also try to track down wandering staff. The women’s toilets at V Fest were beyond foul, women are a special kind of disgusting after spending a few days drunk in a field, I have been physically attacked by a grown woman over a roll of toilet paper, there was used sanitary items thrown around the cubicles, women opening the storage unit and throwing toilet roll around the main arena, I could go on but I feel as though the rest of the stories are too graphic for this kind of a blog, but I’ve seen more stranger bodily fluids at this festival than I ever wanted to, ever. The only thing I will say for working at the toilets on a festival like this, people feel sorry for you, we got free rides on the carnival rides, and as soon as people see the penguin logo, there’s discounts too.

Straight from V Fest we had 7 hours at home then onto Leeds, which was an absolute dream, as there were no portaloos involved, just the Seat of Luxury toilets, and the worst thing we had to face was the occasional chancer trying to get in without paying and the smell of the long drops next door. I got to see Eminem, who I spent my childhood listening to, we had the luxury toilets, got some free food, danced, sang, drank and generally was merry, of course though, as is my luck, after having such a great week, once it came to our journey home, we ended up stuck in Leeds for 4 more hours than we were meant to, at this point in the village all the food traders were gone, the water points had been disconnected, everything is dead and none of us had any food left, no more bottled water, not even any beer! It’s amazing how quickly a festival site managed to rip itself down, after weeks of building and work going into it, as soon as possible, it comes apart again.

Looking back on this summer, I notice now that because our bosses trusted us, we spent most of the summer left to our own devices for the most part, and personally the only other time I’ve been left to my own devices on a job is when I’m not responsible for anything else, being put in a management position without much previous experiences, especially as someone who struggles with anxiety, was one of the hardest things in the world I thought going into it, but it came so naturally once I was there and knew what I was going. Initially our boss said they were going to go with different candidates, people who’d worked for the company before and knew the festivals and what was expected, but just has a gut feeling about Tamara and I, and took a chance on us, and I think I can say it’s mutual that we’re glad they did. At each of these festivals, the head of the company and her son who acts as Sales Director as well as the Site Project Manager visited to ensure the job was being done up to standard, he ended up posting about myself and Tamara on his LinkedIn he was so impressed with how we were doing, especially as we were just students, myself without any experience of a festival beginning to end, and having never managed people before. Another thing I didn’t really think about before I starting doing this was how to go about motivating people, it’s a hard thing to do, motivating a group of tired people at the end of a festival to perk up and make sure they’re feeling good about it and making sure they’re coping well, especially those who’ve over indulged the night before, and being able to motivate them and help encourage them to work better is hard after they’ve spent several days in a field dealing with strangers shit all day, pun not intended. It wasn’t something I saw myself being good at but I ended up getting along really well with the penguins, while still managing to get them to respect me.

I know you’re not meant to pat yourself on the back, but I spent a summer completely out of my comfort zone, spent for the most part, in and around the waste of strangers, I can safely say if I never manage to smell another festival toilet block it will be too soon. Even after the many, many, many sleepless nights shivering, and being cold, and wet, and tired, and stressed out, I wouldn’t trade my shitty summer for anything, I learned a lot more about festivals than I thought I would doing this job, but even doing the toilets, if you use your eyes it’s crazy how much you notice going on at any one given time. While I might not have gotten to see and be a part of the same side of the festival as my colleagues got to, when I do actually get to I’ll at least have the satisfaction of knowing I started from the bottom, and I’ll always be nicer to the people working the toilets.

(You’ll be pleased to know there are no photos of the aforementioned toilets)

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