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jawsandbones · 4 years

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I’ll Go First - Chapter Ten of Ten

Rating: E

Summary: An unexpected leader, unlikely allies. Bound by the Breach, Alexi Trevelyan is trying to hold it all together. Thankfully, he doesn’t stand alone.

Pairing: Cullen x Male Trevelyan

AO3 Link: Click Here

Chapter Ten: Gold Colored Lions

art by @rennybu

A hand curls into his cloak, while the other threads into curls already existing. Even though Cullen is the one lifting him up, it’s as if Alexi is the one cradling him. Gentle, against the back of his head, moving in slow, affirming circles. There is open talk now spreading throughout the Great Hall, even some delighted laughter. A handful of visiting Orlesian nobles mark the affection, and file away the memory for an exaggerated retelling later. Cullen doesn’t care. His senses are filled with other things. “You’re finally here,” Alexi says, “I’ve been so worried.”

It doesn’t take much for Alexi’s feet to once again touch ground. “You and the others disappeared, and there was no sign of you at the temple, and no word. I – we have all been worried about you and the others with you,” Cullen says as he crouches down and picks up Alexi’s staff for him, handing it to him. He takes it and holds it with both hands, his grip tightening as Cullen continues to speak, his voice lowering as he does. “I was terrified something had happened to you.” Alexi reaches out, his hand shyly brushing against Cullen’s, wrapping his index finger around his.

“I’m sorry, there’s so much to tell you,” he says.

“Yes, and you will have your chance to tell us all, Inquisitor,” Josephine says as she emerges from her navigation through the crowd, goes to stand with them. “I’ve given instructions that we in your inner circle are to have a briefing this evening, after dinner. It should give those of us who have just returned time to freshen up.”

“Thank you Josie,” Alexi tells her with a smile, “it’s good to have Skyhold back in your capable hands.” Dagna attracts Josephine’s attention, and schedules a chance to talk about more supplies for the underforge. Leliana is coming towards them as well, and Cullen can see Cassandra speaking with Barris and Fiona. He looks at Alexi, pulled into a conversation with Krem, discussing the next step for the Chargers. Cullen clears his throat, and pulls his hand back from Alexi’s.

“I should be with Cassandra, helping our troops get settled. I’ll see most of you later, at the briefing. Until then,” he says, giving a nod as he begins to walk away. True to his word, he throws himself immediately into his work. The couriers are frequent, and numerous. Reports are being compiled, brought together, and a larger picture of the Arbor Wilds begins to take shape. The movements of their battle, the gains and losses. The list of gains is short. The list of losses continues to grow. Names are given to him, those of the dead and their closest. As he pours over the list, Cullen knows there will be many long nights lost to letter writing.

Equipment will need to be repaired, remade, and reordered. They have lost numerous swords, and there’s quite a bit of armor that will need attention. Stack after stack of things needing to be done is added to his desk. There will be time enough for that later. As afternoon wears down, evening approaching, Cullen finally makes his way to take a bath. He’d already changed into something else, had his clothes sent away earlier to be cleaned. This area of Skyhold is quiet, reserved for the use of the Inquisitor’s advisors. He’s grateful for the privacy, the quiet. It’s the first inch of silence he’s had in a very long time.

He sinks down into the bath and half groans with relief as tense muscles meet hot water. Cullen sinks even further, feet resting over the edge, arms on the rim and head leaning back. He closes his eyes, listens to the echo of water dripping against stone. It takes time for him to release the tension he’s been holding. Letting go, relaxing, have never been a strong suit. So when he hears the knock, he very audibly groans. “I’m not to be disturbed,” he half barks it, “put it on my desk or find Belinda.”

There’s silence and then, “I’m sorry,” Alexi’s voice a gut punch to Cullen, “I’ll see you at the briefing later.”

“No! Alexi, please come in,” Cullen says as he sits up in the bath, “I thought you were someone bringing me another report.”

“Josephine has had me thanking nobles and diplomats all day,” Alexi says as he closes the door behind him, “I only just escaped.” Cullen begins to make the motions to cover himself, then silently admonishes himself. “If you’d rather be alone, I’m sure we can find another time.”

“I’d rather you stay. I apologize, I shouldn’t have snapped.”

“At me, or some poor courier?” Alexi says with a smile as he leans his staff up against the wall, and braces himself against the rim of the tub as he crouches down. He crosses his arms, lets his chin sit on the back of his hand.

“Both,” Cullen says, “it’s a bad habit I’m currently failing to break.”

“You’ve been under a lot of stress these last few weeks. I think you can be forgiven,” he says as he lets one hand loose, a single finger dipping into the water. Almost immediately it’s that much warmer, as though no time had passed at all since Cullen first entered. “I don’t want to make you repeat things we might talk about in the briefing, but… you’re alright? You didn’t get hurt?”

“I’m fine. A few cuts and scrapes, but they’re nothing. The most I am is tired. What about you?”

“A little bit, but it’s nothing to worry about. I’m fine now,” Alexi tells him as he spins his finger round and round in a circle, casting out small ripples. His head tilts somewhat, his cheek leaning against his hand, and Cullen thinks he might have counted all of Alexi’s freckles from memory while they were apart. “It was awful waiting for you all to return. I – I wasn’t exactly sure what to do. I know the plan if we got separated was to return to Skyhold, but,” he shakes his head.

“We received Charter’s raven but I had to touch you with my own hands before I could dare hope it was true. Your staff, ah, Leliana found it in the temple. I brought it back with us, although I see you have a new one.” It’s somehow taller than Alexi, curled into a spiral at the top. It seems untamed, wild, small branches extruding from it in places. The middle section is wrapped in bands of leather, something gentle for Alexi to hold onto.

“Harritt worked with one of the mages to make it for me. I’m grateful, but I do miss my old one. I’ll have to transfer all my mess from it,” he says.

“What happened? Where did you go?” Cullen asks.

“I’m going to be terrible and make you wait for the briefing,” he says with a slight smile.

“Hm.” Alexi laughs at his grunt of displeasure. There’s an echoed edge to it, to all their noise, and together they break the silence far more than the dripping of water, flickering of torches. There’s an ease in his presence, one Cullen feels each time he is with Alexi. Other people are – confusing. Complicated. They drain him. Alexi only ever replenishes him. Impulsively he reaches out, his hands closing over Alexi’s.

“When we were marching back, we – I… I was thinking of things I had meant to say to you.” Cullen speaks softly, and so Alexi shifts, and using his echo as his guide, he makes sure he’s facing Cullen.

“Something else about being a Templar?”

“No! Maker – no.” Cullen laughs, but it’s wavering, gone as quick as it came. He clears his throat. “No. About us.” He feels Alexi’s hand tighten around his. His dark curls frame his face, and a few dangle gently, loosely, against his forehead. His hair has gotten long indeed, those curls reaching his cheeks. Alexi licks his lips and Cullen watches his tongue drift over his pale birthmark, to the darker freckle at the opposite side, at the very edge of his lower lip.

“Is something wrong?” Alexi asks in a small voice.

“The opposite.” Cullen shakes his head. He doesn’t see the shake, but Alexi does feel the small flecks of water against his face. Both of Cullen’s hands are now wrapped around his. “I know I have much to do. I haven’t – proven yet, that I meant the words I promised you in the library. I do, and I will. Perhaps it’s selfish saying this while I still need your help but…” he trails off, and then lifts his gaze to Alexi’s face, studies it carefully. “Alexi, I love you.” He sits up that much straighter, as though a weight has been lifted, and shifts that much closer to him, until their noses can practically touch. He’s dizzy with giddiness, and he says, “I love you,” again, just to make sure that he’s properly said the words.

Alexi is uncommonly still, worryingly silent. He breathes shallow as he remains unmoving, and Cullen’s stomach twists. “Unless I’ve overstepped,” Cullen stammers out as he drops his hands back into the water with some force, “maker’s breath.” Before he can hide his face in his hands, Alexi is reaching over him, across the width of the tub. He catches the briefest sight of the widest grin before Alexi is half standing, putting a foot in the water. “What –”

Water spills, overflows, seeps from the tub as Alexi half falls on top of Cullen. His sweater and jacket float briefly before they start to sink. Cullen’s hands are on his hips as Alexi straddles him, his hands on his face, moving through his stubble. Alexi’s so close to him, his thumb moving over his lips. “You mean it?” Spoken in a breathless whisper.

“I do.”

“Say it again.” His thumb is still a bridge over his mouth.

“I love you.” As he speaks, Alexi traces the words and the smile begins to spread. The moment his thumb leaves, his mouth takes its place. His fingers curl at the corners of Cullen’s jaw as his nose presses against his nose, discomfort lost in the urgency and the vital need of the kiss. They press together without grace or thought of etiquette, Cullen’s arms wrapping tightly around him. He pulls Alexi’s bottom lip between his teeth, and runs his tongue over his birthmark. Alexi is half pulled down by the weight of all his wet clothes, but neither seems to mind or notice.

“Aren’t you,” Cullen says in the inhale, in between desperate re-arranging, Alexi’s unceasing barrage of sentiment, “forgetting something?”

“What?” Alexi asks hoarsely as Cullen’s kisses find the corner of his mouth. Cullen pulls away his scarf with one hand, sets it afloat, and Alexi tips his head back, closes his eyes, and feels teeth against the bulge of his adam’s apple. He presses a kiss to the goblet of his throat, the slight circle of his collarbone, wraps his arms tightly around Alexi’s waist. Alexi’s fingers are carding through Cullen’s hair, his other hand at the nape of his neck, plants kisses like butterfly wings all about the crown of his head.

“‘I love you too’,” he says.

“Oh! Oh.” Alexi immediately throws himself forward, sinking them both even further into the water, his palms pressed against the bottom of the tub. “I love you too,” he says, his voice crystal clear beside Cullen’s ear, “I love you.”

“I love you too.” He savors the amused smile, and carries one of his own. Cullen has his hands linked around Alexi, resting gently against his lower back. This kiss is sweet, softer, and kinder. Alexi’s curls tickle against Cullen’s face, but he barely feels the itch. He’s too focused on how content he feels, how full. Something long locked has found its key, and Cullen holds him gratefully.

“I feel like my heart’s going to burst out of my chest,” Alexi says as he rests his head in the crook of Cullen’s neck, wraps his arms around him. They press against the free spaces of his back, waist, submerged in water.

“Mine too,” he chuckles, rubbing Alexi’s back in slow circles. He’s completely soaked, waterlogged, the bath nearly empty, but his touch brings with it warmth, a hint of magic. Alexi shifts forward, raises himself back up to straddle Cullen. He takes the opportunity to fix his posture as well, and his hands go back to resting on his hips. Alexi’s hands rest on Cullen’s chest, and Cullen watches as his cheeks begin to flood with crimson.

“I leapt in without thin-”

“Commander,” accompanied by an efficient knock, “you wanted to know when dinner was ending.”

“Yes,” Cullen calls out as he cups Alexi’s face in his hands, guiding him back to his lips, “thank you!” He leaves wet streaks across Alexi’s cheekbones, as they listen to the footsteps fading.

“Let’s go find you some dry clothes,” Cullen says, “and grab a bite to eat.”

“Alright,” Alexi murmurs, and as the kiss settles, neither make any actual effort to leave.

The Great Hall is closed for the evening. Josephine oversees the single table being brought in, the map being laid upon it. She flips through the parchment attached to her board as she stands just before the raised platform, underneath bright moonlight filtering through the large stained glass windows. Shifts have begun to change, and the only other ones who wander through are soldiers and guards. Guests have been tucked away, rooms found and furnished. Josephine chews at her inner cheek, parchment resting on the back of a single raised finger. One last piece until they have the full story of the Arbor Wilds, and then she can begin crafting her replies to Ferelden, Orlais and the Free Marches of the threat they still face.

She flicks her glance upwards at the sound of chairs being pushed in, and the table almost takes up the length of the hall. Flipping through page after page, finding the list, and she counts the chairs once again. There are extras, a number insisted upon by Leliana. Josephine grumbles to herself, remembering her wry smile as she asked for the extras. More secrets, but Josephine was holding out hope that this one would be pleasant, considering the smile. Drinks are being laid out, platters of food. Alexi will sit at the head, of course, his advisors around him – Josephine places the name tags, grumbles to herself once again at the spots she can give no names.

Once their work is finished, Josephine promptly dismisses the others. She ensures the proper doors are locked, the proper doors are open. Then, she places her board down at her own assigned seating, and begins to go through the various reports once again. So lost in the working of memorization, that the drink being shoved in front of her is enough to startle her. “Whatever you’re looking at can’t be so bad to deserve that look,” Dorian tells her as he takes a sip of his own drink. He shakes the glass for her, and Josephine takes it quickly before it spills.

She half reels when Sera appears at her other side, palm slapping onto the table as she leans over, beginning to flip through the papers at an unreadable pace. “It’s all numbers, innit? Ah shite, found the words.” Sera’s a mouth full of grins, choppy hair brushing over the bridge of her nose, round apples of her cheeks. Her ears seem permanently pointed upwards, unlike the more expressive wavers of Solas, flat wariness of Fiona. Despite the… chaotic nature of her, Josephine’s always enjoyed Sera’s presence – even when she has to scold her.

“Sera,” Josephine says, a simple request to stop touching her things. Sera grumbles, makes play at a tantrum by stamping her feet, rolling her head back. Still, she drops the parchment dutifully, then slides over to drape her arms over Josephine’s shoulders, hugging her tightly, and her pointed chin goes to rest on her own wrist. She’s warm and wrapped, and Josephine pats her arm with a smile. Dorian is wandering around the table, looking for his spot. The others are beginning to filter in as well – Merrill is playing cat’s cradle with Cole, while Varric holds the yarn for them. Cassandra and Solas arrive just before Iron Bull and Vivienne do, walking through the door in the middle of Bull apologizing for something sheepishly.

Blackwall covers a yawn with the back of his hand, while Cole holds down both long ends of his hat, shy eyes peering out from underneath it. They gravitate towards the table, their seats, and the chatter becomes loud, unfocused. “You’re forgetting that this isn’t just a briefing. This is also a celebration for our hard-won victory,” Dorian says, “even you can afford to relax once in a while.”

“We have not won yet,” Cassandra says at the other side of the table, her fingers drumming against it. “We were supposed to be starting already.” She throws this sentence at Cullen, who takes a breathless spot beside her. He doesn’t wear his usual regalia, settling for a simple tunic and trousers, his sword and belt. Cullen clears his throat, doesn’t look at her.

“I was, ah, delayed.”

“And where is the Inquisitor?”

“I’m right here,” Alexi says with a smile. He’s wrapped up in warmth, and the colors of his clothing actually currently match, without a single piece of fabric clashing with another. Josephine and Vivienne both silently and separately consider marking the date. Sera makes a whirling show of pulling out Alexi’s chair, pushing it in for him. Then she’s bounding down the table, pulling on Blackwall’s beard as she takes the seat next to him.

“You never used to be late. The rest of them are a bad influence on you, Schatzi,” she says, waving a vague hand down the table. Alexi chuckles, turning the staff in his hands, the newly returned bells chiming slightly. All the things that were on his broken staff have now found their way to this one. Cassandra looks from them, to Cullen, her eyes narrowing as she goes. Cullen keeps his gaze solidly on the flickering candle by Solas.

“Don’t say that. It couldn’t be helped, Cass. I wasn’t late on purpose,” Alexi says, the smile resting easy. She grumbles but lets the issue drop. Alexi settles, and the smile doesn’t leave. He casts out his echo, wrapping around each and every one of them. He knows the shape of their colors by heart, the way it feels to touch them with his magic. They are permanently etched, these friends of his. Alexi bites his bottom lip, tries to stop the smile from spreading any wider. It surrounds his every thought, slips into the forefront from time to time. He tries not to deliberately seek out Cullen. It’s hard not to, considering Cullen is currently burning with the brightest blue Alexi has ever seen.

“Don’t get up,” Leliana’s sharp voice cuts across conversation as she walks into the hall from the closed corridor. She moves to stand by where Alexi sits, at the head of the table. She puts a hand on his shoulder, gives it a fond squeeze. “Now, I am sure you’ve all noticed the empty places. Before the Arbor Wilds, I had sent messages to trusted associates. They arrived a week ago, but thought it best to wait until I could introduce them to the Inquisitor. I believe you’ll find them a useful resource.”

“Don’t oversell us Lels,” says the one leaning in the doorframe, arms crossed, “otherwise I’ll be stuck doing the heavy lifting to save the world again.” They’re short, slender but not without muscle. Their feet are bare, save for the wraps of their tight leggings which are held in place underneath their arches. Multiple sashes are wound around their waist, a few hanging down loosely. They don’t hide the sword at their side. A small patch of skin is visible just before being covered by high-necked dark fabric, a simple and short breastplate. Their shoulders, upper arms, are bare save for the wrapping held in place by gold rings just above their elbows, around their middle fingers. The sigil of a griffon is emblazoned on their chest.

Alexi, for his part, finds assured and confident teal, shadows of grey. Whispers of red and black writhe throughout, veins of power and corruption. He watches their shape push forward, waltz closer. “Hero and Warden-Commander of Ferelden. Arl of Amaranthine and Champion of Redcliffe. Also the one and only Dark Wolf.” Alexi rises to his feet as The Warden stands before him. “Rory Surana, at your pleasure, Inquisitor. I’ve brought with me the best the Wardens have to offer.”

“I am not a Warden, but I am the best.” Rory’s shadow, made of flesh and knives. He keeps his chin high, the grin wide and charming. He has thrown back the hood of his dark cloak, and wisps of strawberry blond hair curl over pointed ears. “Zevran Arainai, formerly a Crow of Antiva. I am now a freelance assassin although my time is mostly occupied by protecting the fools I call husband.”

“I object to being called a fool,” Rory retorts instantly.

“I’ve been called worse.” Even Alexi has to tilt his head upwards, to be sure his eyes are nearest to the shape of his face. He is wide, his colors strong yet soft. “Alistair Theirin, at your service. Out of us all, only Zevran’s not a Warden.” One by one, the rest of Rory’s Wardens introduce themselves.

“Nathaniel Howe.”

“Sigrun! Just – Sigrun.”

“Velanna. Also just of Velanna.”

“Uh. Yeah, Anders. Also just Anders,” he says, clearing his throat halfway through. The only thing which breaks the silence is Varric and Merrill both enthusiastically waving their hellos, and the screeching of Cassandra’s chair moving backwards as she rockets up to her feet.

“I’ll take this opportunity,” Rory says in a sing-song voice, wrapping an arm around Alexi’s waist and leaning into him, their head against his chest, “to remind those gathered that Anders has returned to the Wardens and is underneath my authority. We punish, and protect, our own. So long as he remains with us as a proclaimed Warden, the Chantry cannot touch him.” Alexi isn’t sure where to put his free arm as Rory hugs themselves around him.

“I’m pleased to meet you all,” Alexi says, finally letting his arm rest over their shoulders, “I can’t thank you enough for travelling so far to help us.”

“Well, when both Leliana and Morrigan are signing letters together, you know it’s serious,” Alistair says.

“We have better ways of communicating than simple letters,” Leliana tells Alexi.

“I was trying not to blow our secret-magic cover,” Alistair says, sounding particularly wounded. Rory leans away from Alexi momentarily to fondly curl their fingers underneath Alistair’s chin.

“Anders, and – and – You knew! All this time you knew where the Warden was and how to get in contact with them,” Cassandra seethes, her fists pressed against the table, “you’re just as bad as he is!” She throws an accusatory finger down the table, landing pointedly on Varric. He immediately throws up his hand in surrender, laughs, and gives Leliana a small wink.

“Oh, you have no idea how bad I can be, Seeker,” he says, “no idea. Just wait to see who else I drag in here.” Cassandra makes a guttural noise of disgust. The last one doesn’t need any introduction. Carver has already moved to where Merrill and Varric are seated, and he’s ruffling his hand through Merrill’s hair with a sincere fondness.

“Now I know what you’re thinking and the answer is yes, absolutely you may,” Rory says, pulling Alexi’s attentions back to them. They take the arm from off their shoulders, and raise Alexi’s hand to their face. “I have a fantastic jawline. Wander as you like.” It’s hard not to be swept up in their bravado, the smile feeling like a permanent fixture on Alexi’s face whenever they speak. They’re true to their word. Their jawline is indeed, fantastic. The bridge of their nose is wide, forehead clear and hair parted down the middle. It comes to an end around pointed ears. Alexi can feel an earring – starting at the tip, followed by a long chain that connects to the other part at his lobe.

“I’m a mage – and no, I don’t have a staff, I have a sword. Correct! I am a primarily offensive mage both in magic and some would say personality, but who finds the time to listen to those people. Now, I know you know this was coming, but I showed you so now you have to show me. Anchor,” Rory says. Alexi removes his glove, places it on the table beside them, and obediently holds out his hand. Rory’s fingers are exacting, bordering on the edge of painful. “How wonderful. It’s as if there’s no bottom to it, just a void that goes on forever. Were you injured recently? Or did you aggravate it?”

“I – how did you know?”

“Leliana told me it was like a cut across your palm. This is not a cut. Now I know it was already naturally spreading at a slow pace, but something’s accelerated that. I can see bits of the fade in the webbing between your fingers. I can feel the veil warping around it. Has it always been this noticeable?” Alexi shakes his head, gives quiet disagreement. “That’s what I thought.” Zevran and Alistair, flanking Rory, lean in from either side.

“That looks disgusting,” Alistair says, “no offense,” added quickly.

“It does look rather unique,” Zevran says, tilting his head, “I feel as though I am falling down an impossibly narrow and long corridor.”

“I bet all you pretty Circle mages and defensive apostates didn’t think to attack the anchor directly. I can see you’re simultaneously healing and reinforcing the area around the anchor to keep it contained. That’s the problem with all you healers. You don’t have an attacker’s imagination,” Rory says. “Do you take any particular offense to my using a bit of blood magic?” Alexi bites the bottom of his lip, thinking for a moment, then shakes his head. A toothy grin flashes across their face.

Rory pinches the round circle on one of their rings. A small blade unfolds at the center. They cut their thumb across it, smear the blood between it and their index finger. Then they outline the anchor in red. Through his echo, Alexi watches the blackened pitch rise up in Rory’s colors, and it begins to wrestle with the leaking green of the anchor.

“Ah! I get it. You’re using the blood as a tacking edge,” Merrill says, sneaking into the circle, utterly dwarfed beside Alistair. “I hadn’t thought to do that.”

“It’s not as small as it used to be, and I doubt it ever will be again, but it’s stable and I’ve bought you some time, you’re welcome,” Rory tells Alexi, as they reach for his glove, and put it back on his hand for him with surprising care. “I’m not sure how often you’ll be able to do such a thing. Using magic to resist it... it’s like throwing a bucket of water into the ocean and expecting the tides to change.”

“Thank you,” Alexi says.

“Now I suppose introductions are in order? Oh! There are name cards in front of everyone, perfect. Whoever did this is a genius and has my gratitude,” Rory says as they move to take the spot opposite Alexi, down at the other end with the rest of their group, who are already seated. Josephine hides a pleased smile, and sits up a little straighter. Alexi settles back into his own seat, Leliana taking the spot next to him – opposite Josephine and beside Cullen.

“Thank you Warden Surana, everyone, for agreeing to aid the Inquisition during this difficult time. I know that many of us are tired from the day and the journey. On that note, shall we begin?” Josephine stands as she speaks, flipping through her parchments, “the combined Inquisition and Orlesian forces struck at the heart of the Arbor Wilds to keep Corypheus and his army from obtaining an object which could allow him to enter the Fade directly. This object, the eluvian, was broken, while both the Inquisitor and his group disappeared after Corypheus’s arrival on the battlefield. Inquisitor?”

Josephine sits neatly while Alexi rises a little more unsteadily. He twists his hands around his staff. His voice is quieter, softer than hers, but it almost seems to demand more attention. “The most important thing first, I guess. Corypheus died at Mythal’s temple.” The collective inhale catches him off guard. “Not! Like that? Not – permanently.” Sera’s chair is wobbling back and forth as she rocks with laughter, arms wrapped around her waist as she heaves, pausing only briefly to wipe away tears. Alexi’s face grows hot.

“He ain’t wrong though!” She says, her chair slamming back down level. “Coryphefuss walked into the ward thingies, and then he fookin’ burst up into ashes and job done, yeah? Nope! Blighter burst outta the body like –” she makes a series of squelching noises, complete with graphic hand movements “– and then there he was! Not dead! All new! ‘S nasty.”

“It’s the Blight. He uses it somehow. He keeps all those Wardens around him because if he dies, he can sacrifice one of them to live again,” Blackwall says. All the Wardens, Zevran, exchange the same worried look. Beside him, Leliana’s hand has clenched into a fist and she too, is looking down at Rory. They have their legs crossed, feet up on the table, one arm crossed while their other hand plays with their lip.

“A not particularly well known secret is that the Archdemon must be killed by a Warden,” Rory says, “otherwise the Archdemon will not die. It uses the taint in the same way. But with an Archdemon, a Warden is a key to cancelling it out. We’re the closest source of blight, but our bodies and souls are busy being outs. It kills both the Warden and the Archdemon.”

“Wait. If it kills both the Warden and the Archdemon, and you’re the Hero of Ferelden because you killed that Archdemon, then how are you still alive?” Varric asks, leaning forward, looking at Rory. Rory simply yawns, stretches, and falls back into the same position they were before. They smile at Varric and shrug.

“Ask Leliana.” Varric slumps back into his seat with disappointment.

“Please continue Alexi,” Leliana says, her legs crossed, one elbow on the rest, and she isn’t hiding the smug smile. Everyone knows Varric will get nothing from her.

“Calpernia and her entourage had gone ahead while Corypheus… reformed. We managed to temporarily lock him out of the temple while we chased after Calpernia. We discovered that Corypheus was not only hoping to obtain the eluvian, but also the Well of Sorrows. The Well was the collected knowledge of all those who toiled in Mythal’s favor. Their experience, what they learned… the lives of all these ancient elves, but – But I’m getting off topic. Calpernia was meant to be its vessel, but we… dissuaded her from that path. She decided it was better to simply take the Venatori and leave before Corypheus could make her his slave,” Alexi says.

“And where is this ‘well’ now?” Cassandra asks.

“Hello!” Merrill chirps, waving at her. Varric turns to her, legitimately startled.

“Daisy did you keep a secret from me?” Merrill smiles as she presses her fists into her lap, her shoulders tight and her back straight.

“I have a lot of secrets, Varric! Most of them are naughty things about Isabela,” she tells him in a whisper.

“The Well is part of Merrill now, and it’s already helped us. It gave us the answer to making sure when we kill Corypheus, he stays dead. The dragon he commands. We need to kill it first,” Alexi says. “Rory, all of you… being Wardens, it isn’t safe to be near Corypheus. Merrill has a plan for taking down the dragon, but we still shouldn’t take any chances.”

“Agreed,” Rory says instantly. “Although just once I’d like to not be in mortal danger at all times. Why do we never go anywhere fun anymore? We should take another honeymoon in Antiva.” Both Alistair and Zevran are agreeing at the same time, with the same eager fervor.

“With the Well being part of her,” Cassandra says, ignoring the distractions, “does this mean it is now out of Corypheus’s reach?”

“Yes,” Alexi nods, “we took both the eluvian and the Well from him. He did put up a good fight.”

“Corypheus confronted us while Merrill was still taking in the Well,” Solas says, “we managed to delay him long enough for her to finish, then open the eluvian for our escape. I disagree on it being a ‘good’ fight. I doubt the others look back on it with fondness either. We very nearly lost you, Inquisitor.” Cullen looks from Solas to him, and Alexi twists a hand in all the extra fabric of a sweater.

“Yes, but – the important thing was that it worked,” Alexi says.

“It sounds like he was close to winning,” Rory says, “I bet he’s pissed. We’re adding ourselves to the guard rota. We’ll stay around Skyhold. I’d place a hefty amount of coin on a wager he’s on his way to you right now to finish the job.”

“How close was it?” Cullen is asking quietly. Cassandra’s wearing the same look, with a slightly more severe twist.

“Schatzi. You told me it was nothing,” she says.

“The Inquisitor, Morrigan and myself had erected a barrier to keep Corypheus from reaching Merrill. It did not stand for very long. Blackwall attempted to intervene, but Corypheus’s magic was too powerful. Sera’s arrows could not seem to reach him, and our magic seemed to serve only to annoy him. The Inquisitor used the anchor to open multiple rifts behind Corypheus, to pull him back. It caused great strain on the anchor, and the Inquisitor, and Corypheus used this to send a particularly severe spell through the gap in our defenses. This is where his staff was broken. Our only option was to run, so when Merrill unlocked the eluvian, we did so,” Solas says. Cassandra’s grunt tells Alexi that he’ll hear words of concern later. Cullen’s silence means there will be a long discussion. Alexi forces down the lump in his throat.

“So in terms of the Inquisition’s next move – it’s what, to wait for Corypheus?”

“According to you, he’ll be coming here,” Dorian says.

“Not that it happens often but there is the possibility of my being wrong,” Rory says, “so…?” Alexi slowly shrugs.

“We’ve exhausted every bit of information we had about what he might do. He no longer has his closest lieutenants, the ability to bind more demons to Wardens, but while some of his army have either deserted with Calpernia or were defeated, he still has a considerable force. As well as his dragon and himself,” Alexi says, “all we can really do is continue sending our scouts out to search for his base, so that we can end this.”

Rory claps their hands together, removing their legs from the table. “Good. Then it’s time for a game of Wicked Grace,” they say. Merrill claps her hands together in delight. Iron Bull is already filling up his plate with whatever he can find nearby, while Sera is kneeling on her chair to pluck and choose what she wants. Conversation has broken out, ranging from the unrelated to squarely on Corypheus, but all of it comes together in one sound. Cole moves to perch on a stool by Alexi, put his head on his shoulder, and whisper the names of all his cards to him. Varric is laughing while Cassandra struggles to understand the rules, shuffling the cards in her hands time and time again. Vivienne and Dorian both talk leisurely together over Iron Bull’s back.

In all the distraction, Rory finds his way to the opposite end of the table. They pull on one earlobe, and lean in at the other side of Cullen’s face. “You and I need to talk,” they say quietly, letting go of his earlobe, heading towards the door to the gardens. Cullen spares one glance to Alexi laughing at Leliana, as she cups her hands and shouts down to Alistair that she is most definitely going to ‘fuck him up’. Hardly anyone notices their sudden and coincidental absence.

Rory waits for him under the moonlight, their arms crossed, and their back facing Cullen. Grass flattens under his boots as he makes his way towards them. “You know I spent years thinking about what I would do if I saw you again. Punching you in the face was first on the list. I always wondered how it would feel,” they say as they slowly turn. Cullen stops, still a fair distance away from them, a conflicted frown twisting on his brow.

“I’ve been thinking of what I would do if we met again, as well. More often, recently. I thought of what I would say but it –” Cullen stumbles backwards, raising a hand to his face. The punch landed cleanly, Rory’s fists clenched tightly.

“Just as satisfying as I thought it would be,” they say, lunging forward again, winding their fists into his tunic, pulling him upwards to face them. “We’re gonna fight.” They push him back roughly, and draw their sword. It hums with low magic, Rory’s eyes shining with it.

“Wynne and Irving saved you last time,” they say, “There’s no one here to defend you now.” They circle him, arms open in confidence. They hold their sword where the point doesn’t extend towards the ground, but instead upwards, close to their arm, tip pointed at the sky. They were already a dangerous mage at the Circle, powerful and watched. Now – blood mage, the use of a sword – they have changed. Grown.

“I don’t need them to defend me,” Cullen says as he slowly draws his own blade, “I’m not the same man I was then.”

“Men like you never change.” Right. Left. Right. Right. Left. Underneath. Back step, swing, and turn. They move in the narrow spaces of the garden, metal glinting in moonlight, taking care to avoid the carefully planted herbs, flowers. Rory moves with assurance, ease, constantly putting Cullen on the back foot. Just when he thinks he might be stabilizing, Rory presses some advantage, turns in a way he doesn’t expect. They don’t fight like a soldier. They fight like a strange combination of Templar, and Crow.

And Mage.

He feels his leg practically being yanked off, throwing him to the ground. He barely rolls out of the way before Rory’s sword is planted in the grass where his neck once was. Cullen scrambles to his feet, both hands wrapped tightly around his sword. They practically slip into the ground, appear behind him, the stench of petrichor, spent magic, all around them.

“You’d have a chance if you silenced me,” Rory says as they swoop underneath the swing of his blade, bouncing upward on the balls of their feet to punch their fist hard up into Cullen’s jaw. “Silence me!” They complete it with a kick, bashing Cullen back down the ground, where his sword finally skitters away from him.

“I can’t,” Cullen says as he props himself up on an elbow, wipes away the blood from the edge of his mouth.

“Why not? Don’t think I can win without my magic?” Rory says, gesturing wide.

“I stopped taking lyrium some time ago. I’ve lost my Templar abilities,” he says.

“Bullshit.” Cullen moves himself up enough to sit, knees slightly bent, resting an elbow on one as he rubs his jaw.

“Is there any ‘silence’ around me? Do I feel like a Templar?”

“Did your Inquisitor tell you that? We’ve been keeping an eye on him, you know. Leliana asked it of me special. I’ve been protecting him while you’ve been romping through forests. I was here, you know, when they came back,” they point to the door Cullen knows to hide Merrill’s eluvian, “it was worse than what they said in there. All of them were in a panic. Morrigan and the other fuckin – bald guy, were practically carrying the rest, all of them knocking on death’s door. Alexi the worst of all. Everyone got treated to a gruesome lightshow from the anchor, and all the while he was screaming your name.”

Rory lets the sword slip from their hands as they flop down on the ground beside Cullen. They mirror the way he sits. “Leliana told me. The moment you were chosen to be Commander. If she were there,” they tighten their fists, “you would have never been recruited. You’re lucky she went to fetch Josephine while Cassandra was still in Kirkwall.”

“I know.”

“I hear Hawke’s dead now. Hear she punched you too.”

“Yes.”

“Good. You deserve it.” Rory stretches their legs out in a flat v with their posture horrible, hunched over as they rip out grass. “I was always pretty confident no one would ever give two shits about you again. Especially not a mage. Comforting knowing you were at least gonna be alone for the rest of your life. ” Their nose crinkles as they frown. “I thought you were one of the good ones. Easy going. Actually fucking… cared. A little. Maybe. More than the aged fuckers who’d beat us silly because all they could remember was that mages were bad. So maybe I was a little relieved to see that you were okay. Then I found out who you really were.” Cullen closes his eyes, shies away, as the pile of grass hits him in the temple, rains down onto him.

“’Kill the mages’,” they mock, “’you never know when one will turn on you!’” Cullen’s hand moves from his jaw to his forehead, clenching tightly.

“I was afraid. I was too proud to admit it or ask for help, so I twisted it into hate. I was – am – still terrified of mages. Every night I’m back in the tower, watching demons burst out of the people I was supposed to protect. Then every mage was only that possibility. They would turn, they would trap me, and they would do that again,” his words tremble. “Now I – I have been asking questions. Listening. Trying to learn and I – Alexi told me he’s afraid of that for himself, as well. Every day. He said it’s the same for every mage he’s met.” Cullen lets his hand fall away, and when he looks at Rory, his face is wet with more than just blood. Rory frowns.

“Yeah,” they say.

“How do you live with that fear?” he asks.

“I just do,” Rory says.

“I’m sorry.” Cullen has the wind knocked out of him as Rory crashes into him, slams him back into the ground. Their hands wrap around his throat.

“You don’t ever get to feel sorry for me,” they shout mere centimeters from his face. “For no mage! We don’t want your fucking pity! You don’t know anything!”

“Ruaidhrí Surana!” Whispered severely from one of the garden balconies, Morrigan is wearing a simple robe, her hair loose around her face. “Dueling, and now shouting? I am attempting to spend meaningful time with my son, and put him to bed. Hands off.” Rory rolls off of Cullen, rising to their feet, moving to collect their sword. “Sheathe it. Sheathe it now, Rory. Do not make me come down these steps. You will not give me that look. Tis you who are the problem, tis not I. Was it not this afternoon Leliana explicitly told you not to make a scene with Cullen? This is a scene.” She hisses out the words with authority. The door slams, then bounces away from the frame as Rory runs to the Great Hall. Morrigan says nothing to Cullen before she slips back inside her room.

Cullen lies where he’s been flattened, sighs as he watches the stars. That was not how he was hoping it to go. He’s not sure how long he’s there for. He waits until the ringing in his ears is over, the pounding in his head. The whole of his leg aches, as does most of his hip. He knows his jaw will bear the worst of it in the morning. He closes his eyes, listens to the cold mountain wind. He realizes he needs to move when he nearly nods off to sleep. He means to roll over, find his sword and return to his quarters. His eyes are caught by a flower nearby, with dark leaves.

“I win again!” Merrill cheers as she throws her arms up into the air, cards triumphantly spread across the table in front of her. Varric drags a hand over his face as he folds.

“You’re merciless Daisy,” he says. Josephine is slouched in the chair, her hands folded over her lap, chin practically touching her chest. Sera is under the table, asleep, again. Conversation has tapered off into small murmurs, tidbits of things. Rory is curled up in Alistair’s lap, the man’s arms wrapped around them, shielding them. He’s speaking to Zevran, who is leaning forward in his chair, elbows on the table, chin in his hands, smiling at Rory’s form. Leliana is now lounging, completely draped, in Rory’s former chair and is speaking across Alistair to Velanna. Alexi is running fingers through Cole’s hair, sitting on the floor with his head on Alexi’s lap and his hat on the table. All the rest have retreated to their quarters. One by one, others are shaken awake, sent away, and the Great Hall empties.

Only one person passes through, after, who isn’t a guard. He’s washed away the blood, the grass stains, tended to the bruises as best he could. He’s changed his clothes, seems to have bathed again, and wears his usual regalia. A few specks of dirt follow behind him. He climbs the twisting stairs, takes a deep breath outside the closed door. He runs a hand through his hair again. There’s still light flickering from underneath the gap, so he should still be awake… Cullen forces himself to stop stalling and knocks gently at Alexi’s door.

As it creaks open, Boots slinks around the edge, scurries through the gap between Cullen’s legs. “Cullen? Is something wrong? Are you hurt?”

“I know it’s late but – but I was thinking about… today,” as he talks he shifts his weight from one foot to the other, squeezing the makeshift bouquet tightly with both hands, “I happened to get a good look at the gardens tonight, and I, I saw these flowers and they have leaves the same color as your eyes – but ah, they also smell very nice and I thought, maybe, you might like them.” Alexi steps into the doorway as he raises his hands to Cullen’s face, gentle on the tender swelling around his jaw, his eye.

“Who did this to you?”

“It’s not – I’m fine, don’t worry,” Cullen says as he feels Alexi’s heat seeping through his palms, and the faintest itch of magic speeding the process of his healing. Kind touch brushes away any remnants of hurt. “I could find a vase for these flowers, if, if you want them?” The laugh chokes out of him awkwardly and Cullen squeezes his eyes shut, clamps his jaw shut in distress so hard his teeth click. “Maker’s breath.” Luckily, when Cullen opens his eyes, Alexi is smiling. Fingertips move from Cullen’s cheek to the back of his hand. Alexi’s other hand drops to Cullen’s chest, and his smile grows.

“Why are you wearing your armor?” Alexi asks.

“I ah, aha, is it silly that I’ve always felt more confident with armor on?” Cullen says, moving his free hand to the back of his neck. Alexi’s thumb is moving slow over his knuckles, felt as much as it’s able through his gloves.

“It’s not silly,” he says, “did you come here to give me flowers?”

“I was hoping we could continue our discussion from this afternoon,” Cullen says.

“I was hoping for that too,” Alexi says, smile breaking wider, radiant and unbridled. The dimples come instantly, easily, and Cullen watches his freckles, birthmarks, move as he speaks. He follows him into his quarters, and closes the door behind them. Alexi is reaching out, searching for the edge of his desk. It’s a momentary search, met with success. Cullen takes the vase as it’s handed out to him, and he puts the flower inside with no great grace. “Tell me what they look like.” Alexi’s fingers move over the back of his hands, and Cullen has never felt so frustrated by the presence of gloves.

“The leaves are almost entirely black,” he says, not looking at the flowers at all, but at Alexi, “but there are little flecks of brown. The petals are soft,” and he’s putting the vase on the desk behind Alexi, “the color of embers.” He takes off his own gloves before he reaches for Alexi’s closest hand. He begins to remove his glove, finger by finger. He puts it aside, with his own, and swipes a thumb over Alexi’s lifelines.

“That day,” Cullen says as he moves to Alexi’s other hand, begins to perform the same ritual, “in the Arbor Wilds, in your tent. You shocked me.”

“I did?” Alexi asks as Cullen puts this glove aside as well.

“Before then, I don’t think I’d ever thought someone could be nude even while clothed,” he says, unwrapping Alexi’s scarf. He’s pleased to watch Alexi make little loose fists while his cheeks color. Cullen opens his jacket, his sweater underneath, and finds the hem of the shirt closest to his skin.

“I had hoped you might come by,” he murmurs. The words nearly bring Cullen to his knees. He holds Alexi’s hands in his own as he tilts his face upwards, his nose brushing against Alexi’s.

“I have spent a lifetime holding myself back, when you’re the one person I should have – I thought I’d lost you at the Temple. Maker, all that time I’d wasted, and I never got to tell you all the things you deserved or the future I imagined for us –”

“The future you imagined for us?” Breathless words stop Cullen’s own in their tracks. He squeezes his hands tightly.

“At one time, I believed I would always be a Templar.” Cullen laughs ruefully. “Now I know the Inquisition will not be here forever, and I do – I do see a future for us outside of it.” He barely raises his voice above a hoarse whisper, as though speaking the words might break some spell, chasing this wanted future away. “Perhaps somewhere in Ferelden, near the mountains. A place with plenty of land and… a few mabari. I – I had been thinking of perhaps creating a place for Templars to be cared for. The ones who want to be rid of lyrium, and the ones who are too far gone. You helped me so much and I couldn’t hoard that to myself. I’ve been working with Fiona –”

“You’re working with Fiona? On what?” Cullen chuckles softly, fondly.

“I was getting to that part,” he tells him. Alexi’s forehead touches lightly against his as his cheeks color. Alexi makes a show of shutting his jaw, biting his lips, and Cullen can’t help but laugh. “There’s been enough secrets to divide Templars and mages. There isn’t any reason we shouldn’t share. So… She and a few other mages have been pouring over every Templar text I had with me, as well as anything I could add. A few of the mages are interested in researching how to handle lyrium addiction, and would be willing to help look after Templars which is – I did not expect –”

“You handed over Templar secrets? To apostates?”

“I… well, I suppose.” For some reason it makes him grin from ear to ear. “Meredith would be horrified.” Alexi’s grin mirrors his as his hands escape Cullen’s, and move to gently tug the cloak from his shoulders. Slung over the desk with all the rest and it takes a moment for searching fingers to find the clasps of his armor. Cullen handles the other side and soon enough, it’s on the floor. Alexi runs his hands over Cullen’s shoulders before he dives forward, practically swallows Cullen in the hug.

“There should be a garden,” Alexi says, and Cullen feels his heart pounding loud and wild in his chest, as his arms slowly wrap around Alexi’s waist, “and a place for cats. Somewhere for other mages and physicians to stay as well, so that it’s easy for us to share research.” Alexi’s hands fidget at the back of Cullen’s tunic, splay in the space between his shoulders as he continues shyly, “Our house should be small, but comfortable. A large bed though, big enough for at least two mabari and a cat to be there with us. We’ll take care of every stray, and… perhaps a goat? I’ve always liked goats.”

Cullen holds him tightly, practically lifts him off his feet. “You can have as many goats as you want,” he swears it faithfully. Alexi’s hand moves though the curls of Cullen’s hair, while Cullen breathes him in, savoring the weight of him.

“Tell me all the things I deserved?” Alexi gently questions. The hug slowly loosens as his forehead rests against Cullen’s once again. One arm stays draped over his shoulders. His other hand curls fingers against the stubble at the corner of his jaw. Cullen thinks he might be able to feel the warmth blossoming in his cheeks.

“There were certain things about my life I had accepted,” he says, “and then you rather changed, well… everything.” He searches upwards, lips ghosting against Alexi’s. “I could barely breathe when they brought me the pieces of your staff. I realized I never told you how much your kindness, your friendship, has meant to me and how I – how I think I was in love with you from the moment we met. You’ve never been far from my thoughts, and-! Oh, oh Maker, you’re crying.” Cullen pales, and in a panic, he brings his hands up to Alexi’s face, trying to wipe away the tears as best he can. His palms are warm, his fingers trembling, but his touch is tactile, grounding. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”

There’s a wet hiccup, a delighted giggle, as his touch slips from Cullen’s cheek to the nape of his neck. “Why are you sorry? Cullen I’m happy, I’m so happy,” he says, his laughter settling on Cullen’s lips, and he keeps him close for the kiss. Cullen’s once again wrapping arms around his waist, searching upwards, pulling at Alexi’s jacket. There’s no room to move backwards, and Alexi’s half sitting on the edge of the desk. Cullen moves a hand underneath his thigh, and places himself between Alexi’s legs.

Cullen looks at him under half-lidded eyes. It’s as though his cheeks are dusted with gold. A moment of silence, of finding a way to breathe, warm against Alexi’s lips. “Can I take this off?” He asks, giving Alexi’s jacket another tug. A small nod, and it’s slipped off his shoulders, falls in a heap around him on the desk. He raises his arms in the air, and Cullen pulls his sweater free as well. All that’s left is the tunic, so close to his skin, but Cullen is close too. He moves his hand over Alexi’s shoulder, coming to rest at his arm, fingers touching against goose prickled skin. The other is still at his hip. Alexi tips his head back when he feels Cullen’s mouth at his neck.

“Mhmm, Cullen, kiss me,” Alexi says hoarsely, slinging an arm over his shoulders. He surges up to Alexi’s mouth, and they both break into small bits of laughter when their teeth click together. Alexi’s thumb ghosts over Cullen’s lips, touch moving gently over his face. This kiss is lighter, sweeter, the wings of a butterfly. It deepens slowly, Alexi’s hand clenching into a fist at Cullen’s shoulder, the other at his cheek, the corner of his jaw, his fingers brushing against the curls behind his ear. Cullen’s arms are warm around him. Safe and solid, protecting and proud. He feels like quiet, stronger when he holds him.

Shyly fumbling, and they exchange murmurs, kisses, as Cullen helps Alexi remove his shirt. As he puts it aside, all of Cullen’s movements still. Alexi’s cheeks fill with color, his hands curled at the edge of the desk, as he half leans away. “Alexi,” Cullen sighs his name as he chases after him, fingers moving at his collarbone. “Alexi, Alexi.” Mouth against his skin, he follows the meandering trail of his birthmarks. “You’re so beautiful Alexi.” Across the goblet of his throat, over the width of his shoulders. Trailing down his arms, over his chest. His knuckles brush against the soft locks of hair that trail from his navel to the hem of his trousers.

Cullen’s shirt is more hastily removed, thrown to the ground as he moves to embrace him once again. His hands move up and down his back as he pulls at Alexi’s lower lip with his teeth, takes advantage of the surprise to open his mouth, press his tongue inside. Alexi meets him enthusiastically, his hands exploring every inch of him that he can. Over his back and the bumps of his spine, the width of his chest, the ridges of his ribs. The hard muscle of his belly, the sharp v of his hips. Alexi is softer, slimmer, and Cullen thinks he might lose himself utterly in the feel of him. “There are three birthmarks, on your left shoulder,” Cullen says, hand drifting at his arm as he kisses them each.

“You have them trailing down your throat,” he continues, a hand at the nape of Alexi’s neck, his tongue moving over each dark one which marks him. He leaves a mark of his own, and Alexi groans, his hands trembling on Cullen’s shoulders. He moves lower still, to the cluster of birthmarks at his ribs, the one right beside the bone of his hip. There are freckles everywhere, dusting him without reservation. His hands deftly undo the lacings of Alexi’s trousers, and his breath hitches as he does, his hands tangling in Cullen’s hair. Cullen helps him step out of his trousers, his hands moving up his legs from ankle to thigh.

Cullen swallows, his mouth suddenly dry when he sees the birthmarks on his thighs, noticing for the first time how long and lithe Alexi is. His fingers slip into the hem of his undergarments, and he helps him out of them the same way he did for the trousers. He is – “gorgeous,” Cullen murmurs, as he closes his eyes, runs his tongue over the birthmark which graces his inner thigh. Alexi’s head tips back, eyes closed, biting his bottom lip as his chin wobbles and the moan threatens to escape. It comes out as something muted, low, and when Cullen rises to his feet, the first thing he does is kiss that attempted composure apart. He cups Alexi’s face in his hands as he presses his tongue into his mouth, each movement done with desperate urgency.

The vase tips, falls over, flowers spilling out as Alexi slaps his hand back to keep balance, to push back with a desire that matches Cullen’s. His mouth is warm, wet, tongue insistent without being forceful. Alexi winds his legs around him, pulls him closer, leans forward into him as Cullen’s hands slip down his back. One stays splayed, holding him steady, while the other moves to cup his ample ass, until he pulls Alexi up and into his arms. Alexi wraps legs around him properly now, arms linked around his neck. Cullen carries him to the couch, carefully sitting down onto it. Alexi’s in Cullen’s lap, knees pressing into the cushions.

Alexi’s hands move to Cullen’s face. He gently kisses Alexi’s fingertips as they move over his lips. They trace the swell of his cheeks, the bridge of his nose. Cullen watches him, hands resting on his hips, his thumb moving in slow affectionate circles. Alexi leans forward, gathering up Cullen in a hug, his hand tangling in his hair at the back of Cullen’s head. He holds his face close to his chest, and Cullen’s grateful to listen to the quick beat of Alexi’s heart, the breathless want which trembles through him. “I can’t tell you how many times I have dreamed of you,” Cullen says, “of this.”

“They’re good dreams, then, I hope,” Alexi says, still running his hands through his hair.

“Yes,” and his voice sounds like an echo, even to him, “yes, the best” he says again more firmly. His hands move over Alexi’s thighs as Cullen leans back, and Alexi follows his lead. His palms plant themselves on Cullen’s knees, his back arched, watching the swirling blue of his colors. They seem to bleed out of him, sink into his own. Alexi feels his face flush deeper, his belly twisting as his heart pounds that much faster. He’s seen this with Varric and Hawke, with Rory, Zevran and Alistair, with countless others. He never thought he might feel it for himself.

Alexi’s entire body reacts at the first brush of Cullen’s touch against the head of his cock. Cullen watches the way his brows twist, teeth biting into his bottom lip again, fingers bruising around Cullen’s knee. If there was a spot without gooseflesh before, there isn’t now. He shudders, an involuntary thing, and Cullen chokes back a low groan as he realizes exactly how sensitive to touch Alexi actually is. His hand wraps around his hard length, the other at his hip, and he begins to stroke him slowly. Alexi’s mouth falls open, breath coming in quick bursts, curling hair falling over long lashes. His hips seem to follow Cullen’s hand, chase his touch.

“Cullen, Cullen,” he says, suddenly leaning forward to hold his face, kiss him firmly. Before Cullen even realizes what he’s doing, Alexi is moving deftly, spreading Cullen’s legs, lowering himself to kneel between them. He takes off Cullen’s boots, throws them aside. His hand palms Cullen’s cock through his trousers, before he finds the knot of his lacings, begins to undo them. He drags his trousers and undergarments underneath and off of Cullen, moving with ease.

“Wait, Alexi, I –” his words are immediately shoved aside, every other thought banished from his mind as Alexi wraps his mouth around the head of his cock. Cullen groans, head tipping back to lean against the backing of the couch, his hand tangling in Alexi’s hair. One of Alexi’s hands stays wrapped around the base of Cullen’s cock while his arm moves underneath Cullen’s leg, brings it onto his shoulder, and pulls him closer towards the edge of the couch. Cullen’s eyes flutter open, and immediately his breath stops seeing Alexi bent over him. His cheeks hollow, mouth moving up and down Cullen’s cock, tongue swirling in maddening circles around the head of him. “Please, Alexi, please, before I–”

Alexi sits back, coming free with a vulgar pop. His hands press into Cullen’s thighs, his head leaning against the one over his shoulder. He bears that weight with ease. His brows knot with concern, “is something wrong?”

“No, Maker, no, no, I just – I uh, had been hoping that tonight we would… so I – prepared myself, the way I had read in the books, and – Maker, Alexi, if you do that anymore I will not last long,” Cullen says as he feels his entire body heat with crimson.

“You read books? About this?”

“I – I didn’t know, and I didn’t want you to be disappointed,” the words tumble out of his mouth in a rush. His leg falls to the side as Alexi moves forward, his arms wrapping around him, tilting his head upwards to find Cullen’s mouth.

“I won’t be,” Alexi says in between the kisses, “I couldn’t,” at the edge of his mouth, “I’m not.” Alexi is more of the aggressor this time, his fingertips pressing against Cullen’s spine, his tongue pushing into his mouth. It’s fierce, without reserve, and when Alexi moves, a line of spit links them for a moment before it breaks. Back properly on his knees once again, encouraging Cullen forward. He slips underneath Cullen’s leg, lets it rest in the crook of his arm as his hand wraps tight around the armrest. His other hand moves between them, effortlessly calling the grease to the palm of his hand.

“Does that mean you -?” The question hangs as Cullen curls into Alexi’s touch, allows him ease to brush fingers against his entrance.

“I followed instructions,” he says, all of it coming out in a rush, “I’ve been practicing. I’m tired of wasting time. I don’t want to do that anymore. I want you, and I don’t want to pretend that I don’t. And – and I wanted you to know how much I want you, but I’m not very good at words so I thought, perhaps, showing you would be… better. So yes, before I came here,” Cullen clears his throat, “I’m ready.” Alexi straightens, leans forward, and covers the area around Cullen’s mouth in kisses before resting his head on his shoulder.

He takes himself in hand, covers himself in slick. It takes a moment to find the right spot, testing the entrance, slowly pushing inside. As he does, he captures Cullen’s mouth with his own, swallowing the moan as Alexi buries himself in deep, his hips pressed up against his ass. The magic is second nature, so his hand is free of slick when he raises it to Cullen’s face. “I love you,” Alexi murmurs, “I want to see you.” Cullen closes his mouth around Alexi’s thumb, forehead pressed against forehead. “Cullen.” It makes him want to cry, to hear the fondness with which Alexi speaks his name.

It’s Alexi who’s crying instead, the tears rolling free down his cheeks, salty as they twist on his lips. He keeps a white knuckled grip around the arm rest, Cullen’s leg a comforting weight. His other leg twists around Alexi, perches against the back of Alexi’s own leg. Alexi pulls out, pushes back in with the same slow consideration. Cullen’s eyes are blown open, Alexi’s hand moving over his face. He feels the quick way he breathes, the way his jaw clicks back together whenever Alexi thrusts against that spot. Every miniscule change in expression, every hitched breath – Alexi savors all of it.

One of Cullen’s hands trembles against Alexi’s chest. Over his heart, feeling it drum against his touch. “Ah,” Alexi’s mouth gasps open as he slides in and out of Cullen, his tightness capturing and dragging out every last bit of pleasure. “Ah, ah… Cullen!” Magic is seeping from him. His eyes squeeze closed, focusing on the rhythm of his hips, he doesn’t notice. Cullen does. It’s full of warmth. It wraps around him, seeking to cover every inch of him. It’s intoxicating, an echoed assurance of Alexi’s want of him. “Cullen, I love you, I love you, I love you.”

His hand moves from Alexi’s chest, around his hip, cupping his ass, encouraging each and every thrust. Deeper. His back arches, his face flushed, Alexi fills him so good. A warbling hum, trembling, each time Alexi fucks up into him. Muted grunts and groans shared between them, the occasional sloppy kiss, tangling of tongues. His hand never leaves his face. He follows each expression, feels every whispered word. “Mn, Alexi,” Cullen says as his other hand moves between them, wraps around his own cock, matching strokes to each one of Alexi’s thrusts, “Alexi, I love you too, I love you so much.” His voice cracks, hoarse and longing, learning how good the words feel in his mouth.

“I’m close, ah, Cullen, Cullen,” he repeats his name like a prayer, holy and revered, filled with emotion he can’t put proper words to. He doesn’t need to. Cullen understands. He echoes Alexi’s own name in the same way. He gasps as he begins to feel it, a spark that begins in his gut, begins to set off fireworks across his entire body.

“Alexi, me – Alexi, I’m,” Cullen says before Alexi presses another aching kiss against his lips. They pull each other along. Cullen’s breathing is ragged, while Alexi is exuding waves of prickling magic, his knuckles white as he holds tight to the couch. In the spaces between his fingers, around his hand, the wood of the armrest begins to sprout small clovers, bursting to the brim with life. Cullen spills against his own belly while Alexi half collapses against him, unable or unwilling to pull himself away from him.

“I never knew it could be like that,” Cullen says, once the stars begin to fade from his vision. Alexi hums his agreement, brushing his nose against Cullen’s, full of affection. It takes them minutes before they finally begin to move in earnest. They laugh together shyly as they help each other to their feet, sway in each other’s arms. Their hands tangle together and they are more than a few centimeters apart. They exchange quiet words, affection, as they clean, stealing kisses where they can. The clothes Cullen borrows from Alexi are warm, fit him almost perfectly considering most of Alexi’s things hang off his thin frame. Cullen still has to roll up the sleeves, and tuck the length of the pants.

Cullen collects their clothes, fixes the vase, while Alexi crawls into bed. He’s more than pleased to crawl in beside him, delighted when Alexi twists a leg over him, bringing them both close together. They lie side by side, Cullen’s gaze drifting over him as he brushes back hair from Alexi’s face. He softly smiles as he makes a note of all his small movements. How after he licks his lips, it almost seems to pull his bottom lip back so that he can bite at it briefly. How his nose twitches before a sniffle, how his eyes seem to reflect everything. “There are many things I wish I could change,” Cullen says, “but I don’t dare risk change to this. I don’t dare risk you.”

“In the morning, you should offer me your coin again,” Alexi says sleepily, his eyes closing as he inches forward to press a lingering kiss against Cullen’s lips. He remains that close, forehead against forehead, nose against nose. Cullen’s smile widens, an arm underneath Alexi’s neck, wrapped around him along with the other. Legs tangled up, and it’s so easy to fall asleep that way, with him.

He’s not entirely certain why he’s awake, not until he hears the hard tumble at the other side of the bed. Alexi’s weight falls heavy against the floor, a hand wrapped around his wrist as he begins to scream. Cullen is on his feet instantly, blindly going towards the sound of him, barely registering the flickering green light which fills the room. He gathers Alexi up in his arms as he shakes, the anchor on his hand so excruciatingly bright that Cullen can’t even stand to look at it. Unsure of what to do, how to help, he clamps his hand over his and struggles to hold it tightly. The screams are ragged, pulled from his throat as the tears stream down his face. “Alexi!” Alexi writhes in his arms, his teeth clamped together, his back arching.

“Cullen, make it stop,” agonized and wet, sobbingly incoherent, “make it stop, Cullen, please!” Cullen struggles to keep his hold on Alexi’s hand as it shakes out of Alexi’s control. His magic is overflowing once again, but this is raw, sick, not his own. He needs – he can – he could – Cullen’s jaw clenches. He could silence it. Alexi would keep a stock of lyrium somewhere in his room. He knows the risks. A shock to his system, the mages had said. Lightning strikes somewhere deep in the anchor and the veins trailing up his arms, his neck, all light up bright green. This scream is ragged, choked, until no sound is left to come out. Creaking agony and any risk is worth it just to stop this from happening to him.

“Cullen,” Alexi sobs, his head rolling against Cullen’s chest as he curls up against him, still holding tightly to his hand.

“Alexi where do you keep your lyrium?” Cullen asks urgently. Alexi shakes his head, the blood beginning to ooze between their palms.

“No, no, no, no,” he repeats it mindlessly, through his raw and scratched up throat, overflowing tears.

“I have to –”

“No. Breach!” Alexi heaves the word as something rich fills Cullen’s senses. The overwhelming flavor of petrichor, ozone, fresh soil after rain. It collides with the anchor and Alexi twists with renewed pain, screaming out as Cullen tries desperately to hold him steady. The anchor bubbles, fills, and Cullen can feel his palm sizzling with burnt, dead flesh as the anchor eats into him. He doesn’t let go of Alexi.

“Solas,” Cullen says, the decision made as he puts the pain out of his mind as he’s done a thousand times before. He pulls Alexi up with him, his arm around his waist, holding him up and starting for the door. He means to run, take Alexi with him but Alexi is reeling away from him and he –

“Let go. It’s coming! Let go!” Their hands fly apart, and Alexi tumbles forward, his hands shaking around the handle for the balcony. He stumbles through, arms outstretched and raised towards the sky, anchor sizzling all the while. It could almost be mistaken for the rising sun. Alexi faces the direction of the approaching fireball, the ghostly barrier slipping from his fingertips. He cannot simply stop it. He must do more than at the Winter Palace. He remembers Hawke, her lessons in the desert. He doesn’t stop it. He catches.

With a wrenching cry, he unleashes it back in the direction it came from. Cullen watches it go dim halfway through its arch. “He’s here,” Alexi pants, temples beaded with sweat, “Corypheus. He’s here.” Cullen moves quickly. They dress with whatever they can get their hands on, grab their gear. As they race around the bannister, Cullen grabs a fistful of his own cloak, and puts it over Alexi’s shoulders. Almost at the door, they stop when Alexi cries out again, falls backwards against Cullen. He has to hold him up as pain wracks through Alexi’s body, and the anchor flares.

Cullen squeezes his eyes closed, turns his face away. The brightness of it is almost blinding even through his eyelids. The petrichor, that sense of magic, was the fuse. Now, it is lit. All of Skyhold shakes with the explosion, and Cullen watches in horror as the breach once again takes shape in the sky. “Like a scab,” Alexi says weakly, with chattering teeth, “he peeled it off. Opened the wound.” Cullen wraps an arm around Alexi’s waist, and then pulls his other arm with his uninjured hand over his shoulder. He practically hauls Alexi down the stairs. Alexi keeps his other arm straight at his side, and the anchor spills itself onto each hurried stair, scurried stone. The Great Hall is unmitigated chaos. Josephine stands near the throne, attempting to reign it in. He pushes them through frantic diplomats and nobles, merchants seeking shelter.

In the sunrise, Leliana’s flaming hair is easy enough to spot. He decides she is the best direction. Halfway to her, Alexi tugs out of his grasp, quickly forms the barrier. Catch. He cries out, goes to his knees when it hits. This one is different from the first, the magic far more forceful. Vivienne puts her hand under Alexi’s other arm, and together with Cullen, they raise him to his feet. Her magic soon joins his, a purple bloom. He holds it, she pushes. Together, they send it back with precision.

“He’s here for me,” Alexi says, “I can –”

“Respectfully darling,” Vivienne interrupts Alexi, “but whatever you’re about to say, do shut up. This is not going to be another Haven, or Halamshiral. We stand together. There is no retreating.”

“The Orlesian soldiers are guarding and guiding the refugees and faithful down the mountain path towards Redcliffe, and then our forward scouts can take over protecting them,” Leliana shouts as she jogs over towards Alexi, Charter close on her heels. “Charter tells me that Corypheus has all that remains of his army. He’s ignoring the camps and he’s headed straight for the fortress.”

“I’ve instructed our mages to position themselves on the battlements. We are prepared to defend Skyhold!” Fiona tells them. “We will need many lyrium potions. As many as you can give us.”

“You’ll have them!” Dagna says, as she materializes a runner beside her, ready to take stock of their needs. The others are making their way out into the courtyard, quickly spotting their group and making their way over. Half of Sera’s hair is slicked upwards, stuck in whatever position she was sleeping in. Dorian is the opposite, his is devoid of its usual upwards motion.

“The Templars have already gone with the Inquisition army out into the field, under Barris,” Fiona says. Solas shifts from one foot to the other, his staff moving with him as Blackwall keeps a hand on the hilt of his sword.

“Rory and the others are guarding the road up to Skyhold,” Leliana says, as the Iron Bull and his Chargers join them. The mages all flick their gaze towards the horizon at the same time. Cullen feels the hackles of their magic rise, pins and needles on his skin. The rescued mages, forgotten and free apostates, are the ones who catch it this time. With the attention of the others so caught in this, Alexi leans against Cullen.

“Can Skyhold handle a full scale assault?” Alexi asks him quietly. Cullen struggles with the answer.

“Corypheus’s magic is an unknown quality,” Solas says.

“We could probably repel his army. Corypheus himself is another matter, and that dragon,” Cullen says.

“I’m ready for it,” Merrill says eagerly, eyes shining.

“We’ll divide his attention,” Alexi says, holding up his hand, the anchor. “Krem, you go with the Chargers to defend the gate. You’ll find Morrigan with a few Wardens, one of which is the Hero of Ferelden. If the Inquisition forces fail, you’re our last line of defense. Once the Orlesian soldiers have returned, they’ll need to be sent to bolster our forces and keep Corypheus’s army as far away from Skyhold as possible.”

“Where will you be?” Rory asks.

“On the field,” Alexi says, clenching his jaw. “Blackwall, Cassandra, Iron Bull… Cullen. Cole, Sera, Leliana and Varric. Dorian, Solas and Vivienne. Merrill. Corypheus will come at me personally again. He did it at Haven, and again at Mythal’s temple. He’s following the anchor. I’m asking you all to protect me, and to help me kill Corypheus once and for all.”

“D’ya really think we’d say no?” Sera asks, bouncing up and down. “Let’s fuckin’ kill Coryphy-shit!”

“We’ve got this, Boss,” Iron Bull says, grin wide as he hefts his axe between his hands.

“I will not abandon you Schatzi,” Cassandra says.

“You’re not going anywhere without me,” Dorian says.

“I’ll protect you,” Blackwall says.

“You can count on me, darling,” Vivienne swears, her hand moving to his shoulder.

“May the Maker guide my arrows,” Leliana says, testing the string of her bow.

“I want to help. I can be hard to see. I can kill things that would hurt people,” Cole says softly.

“At your lead, Inquisitor,” Solas tells him.

“I’m ready!” Merrill repeats again, with no less vigor.

“Shit,” Varric rubs the back of his head, “we’re really doing this, huh? Bianca and I have your back, kiddo.” Cullen’s hand slips into Alexi’s, gives it a small squeeze. Alexi takes a deep breath. The cool wind of the Frostback Mountains slips through the courtyard, and the fur of Cullen’s cloak on his shoulders brushes against Alexi’s neck.

“Alright. Let’s go.”

“I’m fucking tired,” Rory snarls as they sweep through a line of ghouls. Paltry things, hardly comparable to Darkspawn. They move low to the ground, their sword sweeping upwards. They pull at another with their magic, dragging it easily into Alistair’s own waiting sword. Morrigan is static, rising lightning, crashing thunder. She burns with wild power, ready to defend her friends, her son, to the bitter end. Carver boots down another, keeps it pinned as he raises his greatsword, and plunges it down.

“Those beds are nice,” he growls as he wrenches it free, moving onto the next. Anders and Nathaniel move in tandem together, back to back. Nathaniel is a barrage of arrows, one after another, while Anders sweeps his hand upwards and sends ice spiking upwards. Velanna burns through it with flame, and together they send their attackers into nothingness. Sigrun and Zevran both wield two blades, yet use them entirely differently. Zevran is the knife in the dark, the death before realization. Sigrun announces her death plainly, the slash across tendons before plunging into soft flesh.

“Rory!” They whirl at the sound of their name, the all too familiar music of Leliana’s voice. She’s accompanied by a green light behind her, a right crowd of people. Krem crashes into the ghouls, an indestructible battering ram, yelling all the while. The Chargers give the Wardens a needed reprieve to re-group themselves, solidify their formation, and push back any that challenge them. Dalish’s magic entwines with Merrill’s and Velanna’s. Together the three of them burst an unimaginable amount of vines from underground, dragging the ghouls down to suffocate.

Grim and Sigrun defend Rocky while he maniacally laughs, lighting the fuse on one of the round packages he hands to Skinner. She sends it flying, and a column of flame erupts farther down the road. “What do you need?” Rory asks, glancing at Alexi, the anchor, the group following behind them.

“A path,” Alexi says. The grin begins to spread wide across Rory’s face.

“I can do that for you.” Overhearing, Alistair reaches out and plucks Zevran back by the scruff of his hood, while Rory walks past them. The other Wardens are recognizing something, the same as Alistair, and keep the Chargers out of Rory’s way. Rory turns their sword upon themselves. Plunging straight through their belly, tip emerging out through their back. Their hands leave the hilt, arms opening wide as their back twists back, the blood bursting free and high – spinning strands of red wire, blooming out wide.

They slice through the ghouls, the demons, and a few of the venatori which have summoned them. Their blood the sewing needle and thread, they weave a macabre pattern. They divide them, create a path. Rory pulls it all back, and their flesh stitches back together as they pull the sword from their body. Their reputation is well deserved. “You have your path, Inquisitor!” They waste none of the time Rory has bought them. While the others go ahead, Leliana stays behind. They go not towards the camps, the easiest path, but around to the other side. Cullen still has an arm around Alexi’s waist, supporting him as another wave wracks him, the anchor shuddering.

“It’s likely he’s using the orb which created the mark,” Solas says, moving to Alexi’s side, examining the anchor. “It will augment his already considerable power, Inquisitor.” A warning. Alexi puts it aside for now. Instead he directs what attention he can towards the hurt he feels radiating from Cullen, the palm of his hand. They move quickly down into the valley, running across the field. Almost everyone looks up when they hear it. Merrill laughs when she sees it.

“It worked Alexi! He’s coming!” She says, as the wide wings of the red lyrium dragon cast an impressive shadow down upon them. The others keep running, she doesn’t. The voices of the well are loud, but not unkind. They unite into a single will, and Merrill trembles with the change. The feel of it is intoxicating. Flame rolls on her tongue, coal burns in her belly. Weighted and solid, yet light and free. Her wings are strong, proud. Moss grows on steel scales, mold and mushrooms on sharp claws. Varric watches this newest dragon take flight, meeting the red lyrium exhale with a burst of bright flame. He can feel the heat of it even from so far below.

Alexi tips forward with a cry as the anchor spasms, and Cullen is only barely able to catch him in time. On his knees in the grass, his hand wrapped around his wrist, trying to still the shuddering force of it. “I can still silence it,” Cullen tells him, “one of the others is sure to have a vial –”

“No!” Alexi barks it roughly. His hair hangs low over his eyes. Sweat drips down his temple. He shivers, despite Cullen’s cloak wrapped warmly around him. He leans against Cullen. “Don’t – please. Anything but that,” he says it so weakly that all Cullen can do is hold him.

“Uhh… might want to start running again. We’ve got a problem,” Varric says, slapping his hand urgently against Cullen’s back. He looks over his shoulder, and his stomach sinks at the sight of Red Templars on the ridge.

“I can stabilize it, but I will need time,” Solas says, moving to kneel in front of Alexi, calmly gathering up his hand once again.

“You will have it,” Vivienne says, turning her staff, moving to stand behind Cassandra, Blackwall and Iron Bull. They have already formed the line which their enemies will not cross. Dorian stands beside her, taking a deep breath as he centers his will. Cole pulls his daggers from his belt. Sera has an arrow knocked, ready to loose. Varric keeps Bianca steady, keeps close guard of the three on the ground. He casts a glance to where Merrill and the dragon still tangle overhead.

“C’mon Daisy,” he murmurs, practically a prayer.

The Red Templars break, water against rock. Cassandra and Blackwall are unmovable, their shields unbreakable. As they hold back the Templars, Vivienne reaches out, her hand flat, splaying all five fingers. She reaches between Cassandra and Blackwall as the lightning webs between her fingers. It sparks out, cuts an arc from Templar to Templar. Dorian finds what remains of them, brings them back up, and this time, they turn upon their fellow Templars. Iron Bull is a charger through and through, fighting into the fray, laughing all the while. Cole is careful at his side, a shadow, finishing off all those Bull cannot see.

The ground shakes beneath his feet and Iron Bull turns in time to see a behemoth charging towards him. He grins, holds his axe tightly, and solidifies his stance. Arrows embed themselves into the behemoth as it approaches, and they burst into brilliant white light. Bull covers his eye as the lyrium explodes, the behemoth rendered into shards. “Nice, Sera!” He bellows.

“Wazzat? Wazn’t me!” She shouts back. Varric meanwhile, is hollering.

Sebastian’s white armor glints in the rising sun, readying his next series of shots. Fenris is a blur of blue, lyrium lines alight, and Isabela is leaping in laughing at his side, daggers raised high. Aveline moves to reinforce the wall, Donnic at her side. She knocks one of the larger Templars flat on its back, and together, she and Donnic make quick work of it. “Good to see you again Seeker,” she says to Cassandra, giving her a respectful nod. Cassandra is in shock, her mouth agape.

“How – you – what?” She stutters.

“Varric wrote to us, said you might need our help,” Aveline says.

“For Hawke,” Fenris says.

“I thought we were going to have breakfast first!” Isabela says as she dances between blades, spinning up, slashing out. While Isabela moves high, Fenris stays low. He cuts the Templars down to size, his sword indiscriminate. He slips through them, permeable and unafraid.

“Where’s Carver?” His voice is water over gravel, and Varric catches it easy.

“And Merrill!” Isabela calls out.

“Carver’s back at the gate with the Wardens. But Merrill, she – look up!”

“Oh, she must be delighted,” Sebastian says warmly, with a fond smile, following the green dragon’s trail.

Bull feels the ground shake once again, and looks for the next behemoth. Confusion, when he finds none. The earth beneath his feet heaves, begins to buckle, and starts to pull free. He isn’t the only one. Cullen keeps a tight hold on Alexi as the ground beneath them begins to rise. Isabela stumbles, clutches onto Fenris with one hand and reaches for Sebastian with the other. He gladly takes it, struggling to maintain his balance. Sera and Cole are half in Cassandra and Bull’s arms, while both Blackwall and Dorian are moving to stand. Aveline and Donnic help Vivienne to her feet. The Red Templars are left scattered, most left on the ground.

“You have been a troublesome gnat, but do not let us forget every other time we have quarreled, Inquisitor,” Corypheus snarls, appearing from seemingly out of nowhere, the red orb spinning in his hand. Cullen reaches for his sword, and when he draws it, the metal breaks against Corypheus’s barrier. The magister easily reaches down and plucks up Alexi as Solas struggles to contain the destructive magic hurtling from the orb. “I will throw you down here, once and for all, and then crush your pathetic Inquisition.”

Alexi struggles with cold, spindly fingers wrapped around his throat. Solas has contained most of the anger, calmed some of its anger. But not all. Alexi wraps his hand around Corypheus’s wrist, and releases all the walls and barriers he had put in place. The anchor unravels, begins to devour, eat into Corypheus’s flesh as rifts begin to form in the spaces between Alexi’s fingers. The two dragons fly past, great wings beating, crying out, Merrill’s teeth sunk into the neck of the other.

Corypheus snarls, snatching away Alexi’s hand. Red magic, darker than even Rory’s blood, sinks deep into Alexi’s flesh. He screams out as the anchor activates, closing the rifts it had just opened. Knives and needles plunge into his hand as Corypheus tightens his grasp, casts the anchor back into dormancy. “Tell me, where is your Maker now? Call Him. Call down His wrath upon me. You cannot, for He does not exist. I shall deliver you from this lie in which you linger. Those who bow before their new god shall be spared,” Corypheus says, dropping Alexi’s arm.

“Fuck… you…” Alexi chokes out, his feet still dangling. Corypheus’s attention is caught by a streak of red flashing across the sky, as Merrill pours her flames directly into the corrupted dragon’s throat. With disgust, Corypheus drops Alexi and disappears once again, appearing on a platform closer to the fighting dragons. Cullen crawls forward, checking over Alexi with worry as he coughs air back into his lungs. A tear through parchment, and Corypheus is opening rifts of his own making.

“Why do they always summon demons?” Isabela pouts, twirling her daggers, “why can’t they ever summon something fun?”

“He’s trying to keep us separate. He can’t handle all of us,” Alexi says, crawling away from Cullen, towards the edge of their platform. His staff in one hand, he throws out his other towards the platform below. “Dorian!” He looks up while Blackwall hacks away at the demons near him, and instantly catches onto what Alexi is trying to do. They link up their magic, rope of another quality bound to the platforms, and begin to pull them together. They’re searching for others, reaching for Vivienne. Solas is stabilizing their hold, reinforcing their magic.

“They at least seem to stay up, it’s just a matter of keeping them together,” Dorian says, wiping the sweat from his brow as they manage to all gather once again.

“Vivienne, perhaps we could –”

“Yes, I was thinking the same thing,” she says as she faces Solas. They take inspiration from Merrill. Roots twist and gnarl, binding the separate floating pieces together. Isabela is holding the back of Varric’s tunic while she tips him over the edge, looking wildly for any sign of Corypheus and the dragons. Through fog and cloud, bursts of blue and red. It’s impossible to tell who’s winning. Isabela pulls him back to stand properly on the platform.

“Well?” she asks.

“You can’t see shit,” he tells her with a shrug.

“How do we get back down then?” Alexi is asking his other mages in hushed tones. “We could use force magic, a barrier to cushion it but –”

“That would take immense power, concentration and time – two of which are not exactly at our disposal right now,” Solas says.

“I hate to agree but we’d be pushing against Corypheus’s magic. It’s more likely what we’re standing on would break into pieces and I happen to enjoy being alive,” Dorian says.

“Corypheus will be back, once the matter of the dragons are decided. He wants to kill Alexi, parade the fallen Inquisitor around,” Vivienne says frankly, “we wait for him, we kill him, and then we slow the fall.” Cullen’s hand is laced with one of Alexi’s, and he holds his sword in his other hand. Broken, but the jagged edges can still defend him.

“Then we better hope Merrill wins,” Dorian says.

“She will,” Alexi says. He takes stock of their injuries, casts out his echo. Fenris whirls, eyes narrowing, until Sebastian smiles, and puts a hand on his back. Alexi takes effort to breathe in deeply, breathe out just the same. Cuts and scrapes disappear, bruises soothed. Nothing serious, save for the fact that they’re running low on both mana and stamina. His whole body aches from the overuse of his magic. He can’t worry about it now.

A screech, a bellowing echo of a dragon’s dying cry. “Which one was it?” Isabela asks nervously, afraid to get close to the edge.

“I don’t know,” Varric murmurs.

Their question is answered soon enough. Sunlight bounces off green scales as Merrill breaks high into the sky, climbing to them. The shift happens in mid-air. Isabela throws open her arms wide, catches Merrill as she falls into her embrace. “Did you see me? I was a dragon!” She says, legs wrapping around Isabela’s waist. She’s steadied by a hand underneath her thigh, one at her back as Merrill sways in Isabela’s arms.

“I did see you! You won!” Alexi focuses his attention on Merrill. A few broken bones, cuts and scrapes. He heals what he can, what he’s able, but he knows it isn’t all of it. Still, that fact doesn’t seem to bother her.

“I won!”

“Get ready,” Fenris says, lyrium markings activating once again. Sebastian presses the arrow against his bow, while Varric holds up Bianca. They stand on edge. There’s no telling where he may come from. Cassandra’s eyes dart back and forth, while Blackwall keeps his shield raised as he turns. Aveline and Donnic are back to back, both of them at the ready. In their silence, they can hear the sounds of fighting below. The distant clashing of swords, magic cast and returned. Alexi swallows panic, the need to be there.

“Let it end here. Let the skies boil. Let the world be rent asunder.” The red orb hovers by Corypheus’s face, turning between his misshapen claws. At the sound, everyone immediately springs into motion. The barriers go up fast and strong, Alexi summoning all of his reserves. Vivienne lets her signature lightning spring loose, but it’s cast away by Corypheus’s own barrier. He’s handling the nearby warriors with ease, slapping away Cassandra, throwing Bull into the dirt.

“I will bind you as I have bound so many before,” Corypheus snarls as he rounds on Cole.

“I am no demon… and you are no god.” Cole flits at the edges, always just out of his grasp.

“Then die with the rest.” Corypheus squeezes his hold around the orb. It bleeds magic, corrupted by Corypheus’s very touch. Fenris is the first to break through, fueled by lyrium markings, bringing his sword upwards. Dorian neutralizes the spell Corypheus is casting before the intent can fully form. Corypheus barely steps out of the path of his sword, and Isabela presses the advantage. She works in tandem with Bull, pushing him in the direction they want him to go. Solas is building up the power between his palms, and he releases it forward, a slow arrow made of light. Whatever remains of Corypheus’s barrier is extinguished in an instant.

Blackwall angles his shield downwards, side by side with Aveline, and Corypheus’s expelled flames go nowhere. Sera is unhooking potions from her belt, throwing them at Corypheus, all the arrows gone from her quiver. She shouts all the while, “piss! Shit! Fuck!” Corypheus unleashes the elements, finds them swallowed up by Alexi. Heaving breath in the back, the skin around the anchor leaking blood. One arm slung over Cullen’s shoulders, as he holds him up.

“He can’t stop all of us,” Cullen is telling him, “just hold on.”

Corypheus stabs forward, catching Cassandra in the side. She screams as he lifts her in the air, throwing her back to the ground. He unleashes lighting as Blackwall springs forward, and it cascades over his shield and armor. Sera is screaming far more unintelligibly now as Aveline and Donnic struggle to defend their fallen comrades. Varric is clicking Bianca’s trigger, panic jittering through his jaw, but each pull creates the same result. No more bolts. Isabela and Merrill are both on the ground, bloodied. Fenris and Sebastian are barely holding their ground around them, steps faltering and unsteady.

With the orb, Corypheus sends a line of hard energy, as if the dragon’s beam, straight through Dorian’s shoulder. Vivienne’s staff breaks underneath his fist. Cole is a broken doll, slumped against Iron Bull. In his other hand, Corypheus carries Solas’s limp form. “Stay here,” Cullen tells Alexi, slowly lowering him to his knees. He grasps what remains of his sword.

Alexi brushes away the tears with the cloak Cullen had put on his shoulders that morning. Cullen’s own cloak, the only extra bit of protection he could offer Alexi. He feels something hard press against his face. With trembling fingers, he reaches into the inner pocket. He pulls out Cullen’s coin, clenches it hard in his fist. There isn’t much left. He’ll need to use all of it. More than that. The orb is a shining beacon in his dark. He reaches out his hand, the anchor beginning to flicker back to life once more. “…me,” a whimper, “come to… me!” The beacon grows brighter. It snaps from Corypheus’s hand to Alexi’s, as he stands on shaking legs.

“No!” The cry is furious, anguished, wrenched out of Corypheus. He begins to move forward, ignoring all the others, reaching towards Alexi and the orb. Alexi holds his other hand open. He uses the coin as a focal point. It’s a spark, reactive, and the lightning crackles between his fingers, just the way he’s been taught. He’s learned his lessons well. He yells as the anchor’s power links up with that of the orbs’, calling the lighting to it. It burns through the middle of the coin, crackles around the orb.

A spear. Straight through the middle of Corypheus, catching him midstep. From the center, the rift begins to emerge. “Dumat! Ancient Ones! I beseech you! Aid me! Dumat!” Corypheus’s body begins to contort, pulled in cracked bone by bone into the rift. Alexi turns his attention heavenward. The breach burns in the distance. It barely takes effort to reach it from this distance with the orb. His magic, the anchor, sighs into the breach. Clouds swirl around it, that sickly green, until they’re dispersed – giving way to clear skies. The rift closes, its job complete, and all at once, everything gives.

His stomach drops as the platform begins to plummet. Alexi searches with his echo frantically, finds most colors dimmed. “Alexi!” Cullen is reaching for him, unable to reach him. A deep breath. In, out. Alexi reaches into the well inside the orb once again, closes his eyes. He focuses on the shape of the platform. Every jagged edge, feeling for the depth, weight of it. He pulls, upwards. He forms the barrier as a blanket below. He slows their descent, just in time.

The orb drops to the ground, cracks into pieces.

The platform lands, his magic releases. Cullen struggles to his feet, stumbles towards Alexi. There’s blood dribbling from his nose, from his mouth, as Alexi reaches for Cullen’s hand, presses the coin into his palm. There’s a burnt hole through its center. “I’m sorry,” Alexi whispers to him before his eyes roll back, he tips forward. Cullen dives forward, catching him in his arms, and gently goes to the ground with him.

“Alexi?” Cullen asks, his hand trembling on his cheek. “Alexi!”

He’s not sure what he dreams of, if he dreams at all. There are moments which feel strangely close to real. Arms around his body, holding him close. A hand laced in his. A hand against his cheek. A voice, whispered by his ear. He knows the voice is warm, and he thinks it might be calling him home. His eyes are slow to open, but the darkness doesn’t change. He reaches for his magic, finds the well exhausted. How long has it been this way? He aches with the absence of it. No echo. Alexi winces as he pushes himself up to sit, hands pressed into the blankets. Bed. He leans back against the headboard.

His hand, arm is wrapped. The anchor is a dull drumming pain, flaring with each beat of his heart. His head pounds, his throat parched but – alive. That he’s certain of. He twists, his hands moving over the bed, looking for the edge. He finds someone warm instead. His fingers move over crossed arms, into curly hair. Alexi moves closer, a hand on the nape of Cullen’s neck. He feels his head slowly raise, hears the sharp intake of breath. The bed creaks underneath Cullen’s weight as he kneels forward on one knee, scooping up Alexi in the hug. Alexi’s hands settle on his back, delighted laughter forced out of him. “Did we win?”

“Yes,” Cullen says breathlessly, “we won.” Alexi tightens his hold around Cullen, his chin on his shoulder, the tears beginning to spill.

“How is every – everyone else?” Alexi asks through a wet hiccup. There are holes in his memory. Exhaustion, no doubt. He knows he saw all those dimmed colors however.

“Safe. They’re fine, Alexi, everyone’s fine. A bit beat up but that’s because the second best healer in the Inquisition has been busy trying to heal the very best,” Cullen says, leaning back, holding Alexi’s face in his hands. The kiss is aching, tender, lingers. “You scared me, again.”

“I was trying not to make a habit of it,” Alexi says as Cullen takes a seat at the edge of the bed. They lean against each other, hands coming together and pulling apart, only to come together once again. Cullen’s startled when Alexi suddenly goes rigid and breaks into a gasp. “The coin! Cullen, I’m so sorry, that was – oh no, I’ve ruined it.” He sounds so dejected and put out that Cullen can’t help but laugh, hug him closer.

“I’ve had Dagna working on something while you were asleep,” he says softly. He holds one of Alexi’s hands open, palm facing the ceiling. Cullen reaches into his pocket, and carefully places it into his hand. Alexi runs curious fingers over smooth rounded edges.

“Is this -?” Alexi asks, gooseflesh breaking out all over his skin, hair standing up. His eyes are wide, and he’s seeking Cullen’s voice, the quickened way which he breathes.

“If you’d like it to be. I was also thinking if not now then… at least it’s a promise of the future,” Cullen says, closing Alexi’s hand over the coin, now ring. Alexi bites his bottom lip, nodding eagerly, leaning wholeheartedly into Cullen. He rests his head in the crook of his neck, his hand shaking in the front of Cullen’s tunic. Cullen puts his hand over his, runs his thumb over his knuckles. “I love you Alexi Trevelyan. That will never change.” It makes Alexi cry a little bit harder.

“I love you too,” barely raised above a whimper, still Cullen smiles when he hears it, feels the ring on Alexi’s finger. “I love you.” It’s hours before they finally untangle from each other, softly talking. Cullen fills in Alexi on the days he’s missed, that Vivienne suspects his magic will be unusable for a few weeks but will come back. Alexi trembles when he hears that Solas has disappeared, taking the shards of the broken orb with him. Dorian suspects it shattered after Alexi had used up all its power and pushed it past its limit to close the breach. Landing the platform was the end of it. The Wardens have gone to Weisshaupt, save for Rory, Alistair and Zevran. Morrigan and Blackwall have stayed, but their intention to leave with Rory is well known.

Varric has been thrilled to have his friends around, and their laughter has been what’s kept worry about Alexi from growing too strong. Still, Cullen never left his side. Cassandra, Leliana and Josephine have managed to solidify the Inquisition’s power, affirm their victory over Corypheus. Red Templars, Venatori and rifts still remain, but while the Orlesian army will head home, most of the Inquisition forces have chosen to stay. The mages have their tower, and the support of Barris and his Templars. Knowledge is freely exchanged – a partnership of equals. Leliana will be making broader changes, when she is officially crowned Divine Victoria.

Cullen helps Alexi take a proper bath, change into clean clothes. He barely has to do much, more than Alexi if asking for his opinion or reaching for a steadying hand. Although he’s slept for so long, there are still dark circles under his eyes. Alexi leans into Cullen’s touch when he puts a hand against his cheek. He wraps his hands around Cullen’s wrist, hums contentment before he leans down. Cullen returns the kiss gladly. “Are you ready?” He asks. Alexi nods. They hold hands as they go down the stairs, and Cullen holds open the door to the Great Hall for him. A great hush falls as he steps out. A chair scrapes, and then even more, all of them up and on their feet, racing for him.

“Schatzi, I’m so glad you’re alright,” Cassandra sobs as she aggressively wipes away the tears from her cheeks. Iron Bull claps a hand onto Alexi’s shoulder, gives him a hard shake, the only noise escaping him sounding more like a relieved squeak than anything else. Blackwall falls into him with a hug, patting his back, repeating ‘good man’ as he does.

“You’d think the man enjoys breathing,” Dorian drawls as he shoos the others aside so that he can have Alexi’s full attention, hugs him just as heartily as Blackwall. Varric forces Alexi down, pulling him down by the ends of his scarf, so that he can give his cheek a big, wet, affectionate kiss. Boots takes advantage, hops up onto Alexi’s back, and finds his place in Alexi’s hood.

“Oh darling, you did give us all quite a scare,” Vivienne says while Cole rests his head on Alexi’s shoulder once he’s straightened up. The wide pursed smile is comical on Cole’s usually deadpan face. Josephine is sobbing in agreement with Vivienne, Leliana chuckling as she hands her a handkerchief.

“You’re just in time Inquisitor,” Rory is saying, “we were just about to start a new round. Care to join us?”

“I’d be happy to,” Alexi says, feeling fit to burst. He squeezes Cullen’s hand. Cullen squeezes back. He turns, leans towards him, and they share one more kiss before they settle into their seats at the table.

#cullen #inquisitor #cullevelyan #dragon age #cullen x inquisitor #cullen x m!inquisitor #trevelyan #m!trevelyan #cullen x trevelyan #cullen x m!trevelyan #dragon age inquisition #dai #writing #mine #I'll Go First #Alexi Trevelyan

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allthecolorsofourlove · 4 years

Text

i’ve sort of found the time between tests and trimming and taking my dogs on walks to think a bit. so i’ve been thinking a lot about myself recently, about lidded eyes and overheating in a twin sized bed and seeking out the cold wall. and i’ve been thinking about how hard my heart was squeezed between round hands with blunt fingernails and splayed out fingers and how to reshape it after all that.

i have also been thinking about how i can’t call it what it was. i can’t call it by it’s name, because then i give it power and i am weak and she was strong enough to hurt me like that. he told me the other night at like 4 am that he would have told me ages ago if he’d had known that i can’t see my own mental scars. look, you can even see me avoiding the right words here and now, when language is all i really have. i still don’t want to say it, but i will. she traumatized me.

and yknow, recently i’ve been thinking about that trauma, and what it did to me. who i became after that. the contractors didn’t just come into my house, there are now miles and miles of brick walls and trenches into october and we banned the color blue, while painting my dining room wall the same shade. there are songs i can’t listen to anymore, food i can’t eat without making a face after years of an existence as a human garbage disposal.

and most importantly, i think about how i became stingy. i am frugal with this love, i am somehow selfish in my selflessness, and i am terrified. i never used to fear kissing someone but now all i can think about is how that kiss, how one single brush of the lips is an action that only leads to loss. loving you will lead to losing you, so why should i even bother? we create something just to break it over our knee ten months later underneath stage lights in front of our whole town. why the fuck should i even bother?

this all leads me to think about how this applies to you. you’re new to me, in a very old way. it took me four years to realize how i feel about you. do you understand how insane that is? my pseudo little brother asked me some questions in such a little brother fashion and i smoked some weed but not really enough to have a good time with it and then i loved you. gold, and orange, and mauve, and winter. you’re very winterized, for someone so warm.

all of this is to say i have been thinking about if it’s worth it to love you. i don’t want to put you through my mental meat grinder, and i cannot nor will not lose you, ever in a million years. and yet this yearning to shove my hands under the hem of your shirt and tuck your hair behind your ears and lend you my coat in the goodwill parking lot kind of states that one day i will lose you. i am not quite sure how to cope with that. i don’t know how i am going to live without your hard rock cafe leather jacket or your brightly colored vans or your wooden rosary hanging by your rear view mirror that at this point is nothing more than a representation of your family and a reminder of your catholic guilt that kept you from realizing you were gay for so long. and i know that if you ever read this you’d probably say i was being dramatic, and that none of these things really mean for sure that i would lose you and that you are more mature than she ever was and that “damn ma you really want to put your hands up my shirt?” with some stupid blushing emoji that makes me want to kiss you stupid and also punch you in the mouth. i want to like you so ridiculously much. and i think i do, for the first time i think i found somebody who made me stop thinking of her and who really knows all the parts of me that i shove into closets with the light off and put high up on shelves and pretend don’t exist. i wanted to like someone else. i tried a few times, but even a year ago almost to the month i considered this thought and this color and the taste of boba and bento boxes and market chips in the front seat but i brushed it off as a fantasy. and now here i am, i guess.

no one knows me like you do, and i’ve been thinking that that might be what is so scary about this: if i fuck this up, and i mean really fuck this up, i can’t replace you. there will never be anyone else in this world like you to me. this is new, and old at the same time, and i’ll never be able to replace the old you, and that scares the fuck out of me. but still, even with all of that, even with my heart having gone through a fucking playdough extruder, with a disdain for red and blue and lots and lots of scars, i still want to give this a go. i guess that’s the point, right? you bother with the whole mortifying ordeal of being known because of someone who makes you want to bother with it. i have another shot at something good. i really hope this is something good, yknow what i mean? like, this year has fucking sucked and if i could be a knight in shining armor for you and save the whole damn thing i would be more than happy to. or if you would prefer some 1950s all american man from an old movie musical i could do that too, even if i would just be a butch in a suit who can’t really dance but just wants to prove that chivalry isn’t dead. or, or honestly i can just do the small things if you’d prefer. i’ll just open your car door and carry your weight and pick up your hardships for you and hold you when you need me to, all you have to do is ask.

what i’m trying to say is that i have been thinking that actually, yknow what, i am dying to bother with this whole terrible mess for you. i am desperate to show you that, and what it’s like to really love and to maybe even love me and truthfully i am desperate to love you back in return. i am going to swallow glass and fire and swords and her, and pretend like this doesn’t make me sick with worry for the future just because i want to sit in your lap and memorize every single part of your face and watch your pupils blow out every time i walk into a room. i am crazy about you, and you’re so beautiful. you make me feel brave or stupid or maybe just flat out gay enough to try. and i really hope i don’t hurt you. i hope you’ll like me still, even when you really, and i mean really get to see what a fucking idiot i am when i love you like this. i hope you’re willing to give it a try. i am more than willing to.

(i could hold the door open for you at starbucks, too, if that means anything at all.)

#long post #poetry #writing #creative writing #poem #poems #poet #lesbian poet #prose poetry #poetic prose #prose #spilled prose #love prose #writings #creative writings #love poem #lesbian prose #lesbian writer #lesbian poetry

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oneyeartoparty · 4 years

Text

Meeting At Long Last - Chapter 3: Setting Sail

AO3 Link: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24753607/chapters/63739450

As Lily pushed open the cabin door, she felt the rush of cold air filter through the gaps in her armour. She only removed her armour when necessary, and rarely outdoors, and so the brief feeling made brought for the nostalgia of the sun on her skin and the wind dancing through her hair as it had during her carefree days spent on Dawn Island.

Coming out of her thoughts, she observed the man in front of her. Thatch was a near spitting image of his wanted poster, right down to the pompadour hairstyle and goatee. What had changed was subtle and had come naturally with age. New wrinkles and age spots had appeared that were once not present and prominent scars had faded into nearly invisible intents in the skin. Still, his age didn’t dull his warm smile, nor remove the friendliness from his eyes. If anything, it only served to enhance his friendly demeanor, evoking the feel of wise older figure from a fairy tale that helps the hero during their quest.

“Hey Lily, I’m Thatch! Fourth Division Commander and head cook. It’s good to meet the sister Ace has talked about so often. I’ve brought you some breakfast, I figured you might be hungry after last nights events.”

Bringing his hands forward, Lily saw he held a wooden platter. Across its surface were morsels, all different, but exquisite in their way. Much of what was present she recognised, but others were strange; a neon green star with a scattering of pepper atop, a piece of blue-tinted fish and oddly what she thought resembled a cherry blossom petal.

As strange as some of the food was, the care put into making the food was evident, and she knew it had been some time since her last meal. Taking the platter in her hands, she grabbed the piece of fish. Carefully lifting the bottom of the mask, she felt a slight resistance from the straps that held it in place as she placed it in her mouth.

It was delicious, undeniably so. Even with her non-existence palette, every bite was a joy.

“This is scrumptious!”

“I’m glad you like it. I made a mix of different things, so you were bound to like something here.”

Satisfied that Lily had liked his cooking, Thatch took the opportunity to hop onto the railing, crossing his legs and placing his hands on his knee before addressing her again.

“Come sit up here with me. Its more comfortable than the floor and we get a table out of it.”

“Are you sure the platter won’t fall off? I don’t want to waste it.”

“Don’t worry! The wind and sea are calm. I’d be more worried about Ace returning and inhaling it.”

Lily gave a small laugh in response. “Quite true, I’ve lost some goods meals to his blackhole-for-a-stomach.”

Handing the platter to Thatch, who placed it beside him, she joined him on the railing and grabbing another morsel. The man seemed content to wait as Lily ate before re-starting the conversation. Still, the more she ate, the more she felt energy return to her, and with it, a strange bravery that often eluded her in social situations with strangers.

“Just how much had Ace told you about us?” She asked as she grabbed another item from the platter.

“Talking about you and Luffy is one of his favourite topics. He’s told us a lot about the three of you as kids.”

“And as adults?”

“Not as much. Can’t make too many stories where you’re seas away from your family. He does make sure to check out every newspaper we get for news on you two, though. You’re not famous, but you were mentioned a few times thanks to some of the bigger bounties you’ve brought in. No front pages, but that still didn’t stop Ace from showing us.”

He pauses for a moment, undoubtedly thinking over his many conversations with her brother.

“Come to think of it, there were never any photos of you, just mentions, so Ace filled us in on your appearance.”

“I’ve changed my attire a bit since we last saw each other, but I assume he mentioned the mask?”

“Yeah matches his description too. A smiling white rabbit with a pink nose and chubby cheeks. This one not made of wood though, is it?”

“The old one became damaged during a fight with a bounty in the North Blue, so I had it replaced. This one looks the same, but its made of a special type of coloured one-way glass. It's more sturdy and comes with adjustable straps, so it's more comfortable to wear for longer periods. They even included some fabric that covers my hair and keeps it flying out during combat.”

Reaching up, she detaches the black fabric from the top edge of the mask, allowing her white hair to flow free.

“White hair for a white rabbit, it suits.”

Lily nodded in agreement as she focused on folding the fabric and placing it into a small pocket on her breast.

“Do you take it off often? Ace has never mentioned you without it on.”

GhOsT. MoNsTeR. FrEaK

His words unintentionally brought forth flashes of those she once knew. Their voices had long since faded into nothingness, but their words remained, carved into the core of her mind with serrated fingernails.

“NO!” She shouted with an abruptness that startled the man beside her.

“No… only in private.” She said in a nervous whisper, trying her best to defuse the awkward situation she had created.

I’ve ruined things again. Of course, I have. “Ok, I’ll let the other know, so they don’t bother you about it. Some of them can be nosy when it comes to new people.”

His words caught her by surprise, and when she turned to face him, she didn’t see a look of judge or rejection that had become commonplace to her. There was only an accepting smile.

“Thank you, that is incredibly kind,” her happiness coming through with every word she spoke.

He shook his head “Nonsense, it’s decent and not helping the sister of my crewmates is an absurd thought. Changing the topic to your brother, Ace is currently with Pops. Saw him get called in on his way back from his cabin, so I decided to find you. I was going to anyway since I thought you might appreciate some food.”

“Ace did warn me we might bump into each other.”

Thatch let out a light chuckle.

“I figured he would’ve, and I don’t blame him. When he first joined Hartua and me were the biggest flirts on the ship. Since he was placed in my Division at the time, he got a first-hand look at our antics. Every island we’d visit was another opportunity to find new people to spend a night with. But then…”

He looked down fondly at the easel mark on his wrist.

“You found your soulmate?”

He nodded.

“His name is Aisuru. We met when the Moby traveled to Fishman Island after a few pirate crews started a ruckus. I’d gone into a bookstore to look for new cooking books when we bumped into each other. He got such a shock from finally seeing colour he tripped over and whacked me in the face with his tail.”

As Thatch finished, he burst into laughter, and Lily followed suit. His energy was infectious, and she noticed it was easy to get caught up in the positive energy he extruded.

“I’ve taken him up to the surface a few times so he can see things with his own eyes. He loves seeing everything he’d only been able to see in painting and books. Shame we can’t travel together, but he has no desire to be a pirate and its safer for merfolk to stay on Fishman Island.” Thatch turned to face her. “Have you found your soulmate yet?”

Lily shook her head. “Not yet. The mark on my wrist hasn’t changed at all.”

“Ahh, so you’ve got a mark then?”

“Yes, it has been a black dot my entire life, I doubt that will change.”

And it shouldn’t.

Thatch gave her a reassuring pat on the back, “I know you haven’t asked, but don’t overthink it. No point worrying about this stuff, it's too all-consuming. Instead, why don’t we go check the ship?” Thatch said as he hopped off the railing, landing gracefully then smoothly tucking the now empty platter under his left arm.

Ace’s warning flickered into her mind. “A tour? I’m not so sure…”

“Please, it would be an honor to show you around.”

And so, with a nod from Lily the tour began.

For the next hour, Thatch and Lily journeyed around the Moby Dick, exploring the ship’s prominent locations. As promised, their impromptu tour started with the galley.

Lily hadn’t doubted Thatch when he said it was massive, but her mind had still failed to picture the actual size of the room and everything in it.

The room was split down the middle by fridges, countertops, ovens, stoves and other equipment she didn’t recognise, as were the walls. There were fewer people than she expected, with most of those present were preparing ingredients for the next round of dishes. She could see potatoes being peeled, carrots sliced, and from somewhere unknown came the scent of cooking beef.

There was pride on Thatch’s face as he viewed the galley that she thought was reserved for master artisans who had spent years mastering their craft, learning every aspect they could from the mundane to the wonderful.

“Given my love of cooking, I doubt you’d be surprised to hear this is my favourite part of the ship. But I’m not one of those cooks who’d keep this place locked up tighter than a Marine Base. If you ever want a snack or to make something, you’re always welcome.”

The smile that formed on Thatch’s face was like a beam of sincerity, making it obvious he wanted her to take him up on the offer.

Their next stop was the main dining area of the ship. It was substantially smaller than the galley which perplexed Lily, given the size of the crew. The tables and chair were placed haphazardly, a clear sign that the crew would move them about as needed.

“We often feast on the deck. Even if we don’t, the crew are all on differing shifts, so we’ve never had to worry about this place filling up. Of course, you’re free to eat here anytime and just between us.”

He leaned closer to her and whispered in her ear, “The best stuff comes out late at night. That’s when we drink a little and focus on making the food more interesting.”

Unsure if she should trust food that the head chef himself labelled ‘interesting’, Lily simply nodded, which seemed to satisfied the cook.

“Alright, off to our final stop.”

The final leg of the tour was the longest as their destination was on the other side of the ship.

The infirmary sat toward the back of the boat, away from the where most of the crew’s activity, no doubt to give the sick and injured some much needed quiet time as they recovered.

“And this is our final stop, the infirmary. “ Thatch stopped in front of the door that precisely matched every door Lily had seen so far, excluding the red cross that sat toward the top.

Its always the doors shipwrights seem to cheap out on. No doubt this habit of theirs is going to haunt me later.

Not noticing his companion’s distraction, Thatch gripped the handle but hesitated for a moment.

“Don’t worry. We’ll make sure you don’t see the inside of this place after this visit.” As he spoke, Lily felt a protectiveness in the man’s voice.

Did I make a friend? Lily wondered.

As soon as she entered the room, Lily got the impression it was the very definition of sterile. Every surface had been cleaned to perfection. It was as if anything unclean lived in fear of entering the room, and, she thought, if this fear were to have a source, it would have to be the room’s only current occupant, excluding her and Thatch.

Marco was seated at a desk with his back to them, the sound of pen hitting paper reverberating from his direction. He hadn't acknowledged their presence, but she had no doubt he knew he now had company.

“Thatch, why am I not surprised you managed to sneak Lily away from Ace?”

“Not my fault Pops wanted to talk to Ace before he could get back from his cabin. Besides, I couldn’t leave our guest hungry, could I?” Thatch said with a chuckle.

“So, this has nothing to do with irritating Ace after he drank your sake last week?”

“Not entirely, especially now I’ve gotten to know Lily, she’s great!”

While no audible groan came from Marco, it was easy to imagine one. She felt that situations like these were a common occurrence, much to the dismay, and likely amusement of those watching.

“Good to see you currently lack patients. We all prefer it when this place is empty.” “We might have a few once we join back up with Jozu and Izu, depends how their much resistance they encounter,” Marco replied, continuing to scribble away on whatever lay in front of him.

“Might not be much, depends how much the Marines care about us laying our claim to that island. They can’t pay the Tribute, but it's close to one of their main patrol routes. S’pose it depends who is nearby when they get there.”

“Commander Thatch!”

The conversation was halted by the arrival of a scrawny man who’d burst through the door. Sweat glistened on his face and neck and his brown hair stuck to his head like it was drenched in glue.

“Pops wants to see you urgently.”

Despite his breathlessness, the man disappeared as soon as he finished speaking with Thatch moving to follow.

“Take care of Lily for me, Marco! And don’t fight her this time,” Thatch said as he closed the door behind him.

And so, with a gentle creak, her tour guide left leaving her alone with Marco. With its closing, she braced herself for the expected loneliness and anxiety to surge forward and consume her like a storm front pushed by a great wind into the path of a tiny fishing boat.

She waited. Then waited a little longer, but nothing came.

It was perplexing, but pleasantly so. An escape from the depressing normal she had long been accustom to.

“Are you feeling, ok? No cuts or other injuries from your fight with Mozo?”

Lost in her thoughts, she overlooked Marco rising from his chair and coming to stand in front of her. Now able to fully take him in, she saw he wore a long-sleeved, unbuttoned white shirt that served to displayed his muscular chest and the jolly roger tattooed across it. A few faded scars were also visible, marks earned from his decades of piracy.

He was observing her with a keen eye, looking for signs of injury or sickness, but with only her hair exposed, even his expertise was struggling to find any obvious clues.

“None, I got out without a scratch.”

A small, relieved smile appeared on his face. “Good, but if anything starts hurting you, come find me, ok? We might’ve not had the most friendly start, but I’ll look after you so long as you’re on this ship. Speaking of last night...”

He paused for a moment, considering his words before continuing.

“Lily, I need to apologies to you for what I did last night. I shouldn’t have assumed so hastily that you were a part of the attack. I deeply regret that I almost hurt you”. The sincerity of his words flowed off him and seemed to fill even the furthest reaches of the room.

She answered him without hesitation. “I accept, and please don’t feel horrible. You had good reason to act as you did.”

The grin that plastered his face was as sincere as his apology. “Alright. Maybe as a way to make up for the mistake, I could show you my favourite place on the ship? If you want to, of course.”

“Sure, lead the way.”

So, she followed, all the while bemused by why she felt comfortable with a man who had tried to fight here just hours before.

Marco took her to the stern of the ship. It had been a silent journey, though Lily noted that her companion would often glance behind him as if checking she was still following, adjusting his pace if she was more then two steps behind him. It wasn’t an act of caution, but instead of care. He wanted to make sure he didn’t abandon her.

Maybe he’s a fast walker and doesn’t want me to lose him?

With a skill only gained from years of practice, Marco placed his hand on the railing and hoisted himself up before spinning himself around, so he faced the sea. Comfortable, he turned his head to face Lily.

“Let me help,” he held out his hand toward her, a lazy but friendly smile overtaking his face, and she felt no hesitation from within herself as she lifted her hand to take his.

The ease with which Marco lifted her made her realise just how strong he was. Given his position, it would’ve been more surprising for him to be weaker. He would need more than a powerful devil fruit to be a Commander on the crew of an Emperor.

Firmly seating herself on the railing, she let go of Marco’s hand and took in the view.

Belle Island was now in the distance. The ship hadn’t been sailing for long, as she could still make out many of the details, including the town’s harbour. But these were fading, and the sea and sky were starting the blend into one as they often did when things were calm.

There were no words shared between the two as they watched the island before them fade, but she felt they were unneeded. At this moment, merely sitting together and staring into the distance was enough to make them both content. She didn’t know how long they’d sat their together, as the only gauge was a slowly shrinking island. Eventually, though, something encouraged Marco to speak.

“Lily, I hope you’ll come to love being on this ship as much as I do.”

The comfort his words brought her warmed her chest. It was a pleasant feeling, and so she decided to embrace it and ignore the oddness of that sensation coming from someone so new.

She went to reply but paused when she heard an odd sound coming from behind them.

Lily compared the sound to a ferocious beast stampeding across an open plain as it chased its prey. But as it grew louder, she realised it wasn’t many sets of footsteps but rather just one. It didn’t take much thought to realise who it was.

“Hello you two!” Ace shouted out, blissfully unaware that his thunderous footstep had already announced his arrival.

“Hey, Ace,” Marco replied, while Lily gave Ace a small wave.

Ace gave the pair a curious look that he swiftly covered with a wide grin.

“What you guys look at up there?”

“Watching the ship set sail,” Marco said nonchalantly.

Ace craned his neck to see the view but seemed to lose interest quickly.

Suddenly, and with the grace of a drunken Sea King, Ace climbed onto the railing, squeezing his body between Lily and Marco. Lily noticed she had to put up little resistance to keep her place, but the sounds of a scuffle from beside her told her there was a miniature war for space occurring between her two companions.

Eventually, the scuffling ceased as Ace sat fully upon the railing, signalling his victory. He turned to face her with an enormous grin, his pleasure at having won evident.

“Oi Ace, you almost pushed me over the side! Marco said with an irritated tone.

“If you moved over you wouldn’t be in danger of falling, would you?”

“Me? You’re the one trying to push in. Why do you want to sit in the middle anyway? You can sit on either side of us.”

“Why does it matter Marco? I wanted to sit in the middle!”

It was a light-hearted fight, one between close friends that had no malice or hatred. If they were children, she would call it play-fighting, but as adults with two powerful devil fruit abilities, it had become what Lily would describe as a play argument.

An unseen smile graced her lips as she watched them.

It is good to see Ace has made close friends here.

She looked out into the distance once more. Belle Island was turning into a speck and was soon to fade altogether. Some seagulls had followed the ship, but even they seemed to be getting further away, their circling expanding as they became discouraged by the growing distance between the boat and the island.

The bickering beside her had simmered, replaced by the start of a plot by Ace to get back at Thatch for his ‘shenanigans’, with Marco offering suggestions on the best ways to exact revenge.

It looks like this might be fun.

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nad-zeta · 4 years

Text

Match up duo (◠‿◠✿)

if it’s not bothering you i want to request a matchups for ikevamp. i’m not sure if it’s okay to just sent my photos alone but i’ll gave you a short description of myself.

i’m very very short (4'9"). i’m asian and have long black hair. i usually like to wear comfortable clothes but i’m also into goth and pastel.

for my personalities i’m an aquarius, infp-t, i like writing stories/drawing. i like rock/metal music, i like travelling and nature but i don’t mind being inside a lot. i’m a sweet tooth too. mostly i like things that are unique, that not many people know about it.

i consider myself open minded, adventurous, i like to learn new things, i value my freedom. i don’t easily get along with new people but i can be the most talkative person if i knew them well enough. sorry if it’s too long, thank you so much.. i love your blog

Hi, love thank you so much for the request! @blue-imagica No way its never a bother I love doing these requests (◕ω◕✿) I’m so sorry it took me 2 million years to get this to ya! Also, I apologise in advance if it sucks hehe I decided to try my hand at the ikevamp match up in honour of best boi Isaacs route dropping lol Thanx so much for being so sweet I’m super glad you have been enjoying my writing

(/‿＼✿) ❤🔥

Anyways...... hope you have a wonderful day dear and I hope you enjoy it, love! ❤🌼

So I match you with.......................... Vincent

Selfie match up part

The first time this boy sees you he is completely captivated

You remind him of the summer, so bright, pure and innocent

He can’t tear his eyes away from you or, your jet black hair, its unparalleled dimension and the way it naturally flowed in the wind catching the rays of sun and shining

Your dark hair is so thick and shiny, and he is inspired by the way it cascades down your delicate soft skin like waves of midnight on a sandy beach

He is utterly and entirely inspired by you, and he wishes nothing more than go up to his art studio and paint you

All he wanted to do was paint those dark eyes of your, those eyes reflecting the deepest shades of the earth, shining with so much love and warmth.

And oh how easy it is for him to get lost in the universe of your eyes, he loves the way they sparkle and shine, lighting up with a thousand stars when you introduce yourself to him.

If Vincent had to describe you as something it would be an angel, the way you extrude warmth and love, and all he wanted to do was get to know you.

He could easily envision himself with you, the two of you laughing and cuddled up together under the shade of a tree in the midst of a flower field.

Matchup part

You wandered through the mansion aimlessly thinking it was still part of the museum. You found yourself walking into the most beautiful art studio. You looked around and hung on the wall was a painting you knew all too well. Starry Night, you loved that painting, TBH you loved it so much it was actually your phone’s wallpaper at some point. As you continued to admire the paintings that filled the room, a young man with soft blond hair and ocean blue eyes walked through the door. You were awestruck, he was absolutely beautiful, you wondered if you had died and gone to heaven. Your face flushed, as you were rather shy and didn’t do too well with new people. It definitely didn’t help that he was staring at you with stars in his eyes.

Finally, the young artist broke the silence “Oooh I’m terribly sorry for staring, how rude of me, my name is Vincent.” You gave a small smile, how ironic was it that his name was Vincent, he certainly had the same painting style as Thee Vincent van Gogh. You gave a small introduction, and before the two of you could chat, Sabatian burst through the door. He looked at you in shock and disbelief “You, Miss, how did you get in here”, you stared at the butler in confusion “Through the big wooded door, wait isn’t this part of the museum.” With that, Sabastian grabbed your wrist and escorted you to Comte’s room.

Le Comte explained your current situation very calmly over snacks and tea. You were shook, not only did you go back in time, but you were now roommates with the worlds most historical figures and to top it all off they were vampires! You didn’t know if you wanted to laugh or scream. You low key though all of this was a dream that is until, Arthur almost bit you when you went to get a glass of water. Luckily for you, Vincent appeared just in time to save you. “Arthur, what do you think you are doing? You mustn’t scare her like that, it’s quite rude,” before Arthur could defend himself or spit out a flirty comment Vincent gently grabbed your hand and lead you away to his room “I’m terribly sorry for Arthur’s rude behaviour, he is super nice once you get to know him.”

You were honestly so spooked and freaked out, that you felt uneasy sleeping in a house full of vampires, especially after one just tried to bite you. As if reading your thoughts Vincent gave you the most angelic smile and asked “Would you like me to stay with you and guard you tonight? I was planning on staying up and painting anyways” You gave a small nod, you were already starting to drift off to sleep, from the long day full of surprises.

You woke up the next day to Vincent’s sunshine smile and honesty you wouldn’t mind waking up to that beautiful smile every day. It was so bright and warm and seemed to melt away all your troubles. You and Vincent made your way downstairs for breakfast. To say Vincent was overjoyed when he found out you were a fellow sweet tooth would be an understatement! It was something the two of you bonded over, and it actually brought you out of your shell a bit. Since that day Vincent would take you to all his favourite cafes to treat you to all sorts of sweet treats.

As the two of you ate your delicious dessert, you found yourself opening up more and more to the painter. The two of you would literally talk each other’s ears off for hours and hours. By the time the two of you made your way home from a day out in the town the sun was already setting

You loved to draw and sketch, and when Vincent discovered this fact, he was overjoyed. One night as the two of you were sitting and sipping on tea together, he spotted your sketchbook laying on the table, and his eyes lit up in delight at your beautiful sketches. As he continued to page, you remembered that you had sketched him paining one day and before you could reach to stop him from paging through your book, he spotted at the exact sketch you didn't want him to see. Your face went red in the sweetest of blushes. You keenly eyed Vincent as he traced his fingers over the sketch, he was completely awestruck. He turned to give you the biggest brightest smile, you definitely didn’t miss the faint blush on his cheeks

Honestly, the two of you had long ago fallen madly in love with the other.

Vincent was determined to make his feelings known one day. The two of you often walked together through nature in search of the perfect scene to paint and draw. The two of you had recently come across a vast, beautiful flower field. It had become somewhat a tradition for the two of you to once a week have a picnic in the field and just enjoy the quiet, peaceful scenery. Often the two of you would lay on the blankie and look up at the sky, cloud watching. One day as the two of you were laying beside each other watching the clouds, Vincents hand gently bumped yours. You smiled and bumped his hand back. He then slowly moved his hand to intertwine his fingers with yours. Both of you turned your heads to look at each other. “I have something I need to tell you” Vincent had a slight blush forming on his face as he beamed up at you “ik hou van jou.” As the phrase left his mouth, he turned away in embarrassment, you sat up and tugged at his hand, you gave him the biggest brightest smile as your other hand moved to cup his cheek “I love you too Vincent”. The two of you then gravitated to meet in the sweetest of kisses. That afternoon the two of you cuties walked back home together hand in hand. You were going to ask Comte of you could stay in the past indefinitely.

The two of you angels made the cutest couple. Often the two of you could be found spending hours and hours together. Vincent would paint, and you would draw. Your favourite was travelling with the young artist. You loved to travel with Vincent and go to all sorts of art exhibitions that would showcase his beautiful paintings. After, the two of you would always wander around hand in hand, on the hunt for a café selling sweet treats. After both of you stuffed your faces with confectioneries, you would walk it off, by wandering around the park/nature together. As the two of you walked Vincent would occasionally lift your hand that he was holding to his lips and kiss the back of it, just to give you a small reminder of how much he loves you.

In fact, this boy absolutely adores you and will 100% drop small little kisses on your temples, forehead, nose and cheeks. Vincent’s all-time favourite is to just rest his head on your lap after a long day of fun and adventures, learning new things together and having fun new experiences. He loves it when you pull your fingers through his golden locks and read your newest piece of writing to him. He absolutely loves to listen to your short stories and poems. Sometimes as he rests on your lap, his mind drifts back to the first day you met, and he thinks it must have been fate, for you to have not only wandered through the door into the mansion, but also for him to have found you in his art studio. Like the universe itself sending him his very own angel to love and to hold for all eternity

Other potential matches................. Theo

I hope you enjoyed this love and i hope you have the best day ❀◕ ‿ ◕❀🌈🔥

#ikevamp matchup #ikevamp #ikevamp vincent #vincent van gogh #Ikemen vampire vincent #vincent #ikesen matchup #ikemen matchup #match ups #vincent matchup

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nikkxb · 4 years

Note

For the "scene in a fic" ask: "Claiming" (bc I read it last night and was like O.O whoooo) and also Defensive Interference (bc it seems to be your longest recent Inuyasha longfic! And though I have not read it yet I do plan to :D)

That Scene Asks || @lilly-white

Ohhh man. That fic’s a trip, isn’t it? I had a blast writing it and it’s...really interesting to think about it this way. So Claiming was mixed part of ‘writing something new’ and ‘playing around with styles’ and ‘wtf is going on just get it out already’.

It was the chase scene. Completely drove the story. It set the tone, it set the lore, it set the universe, it set the power dynamic, it set so much of it. I had even finished writing the first smut scene and thought I was done before realizing that the chase scene also set the resolution and them just fucking wasn’t enough to really establish the kind of chase Kagome led Kouga on.

“Lady Kagome, have you prepared your decision?” Ginta, the southern beta, asked.

Swallowing the nervous bile that had rose to the back of her throat, she nodded.

Before either of them could say anything else, a tall figure emerged from the tree line behind the betas. He was a primitive picture of a predator; strong, corded muscles bulging as they moved, blue irises in a sea of red focused solely on her. Blood was splattered across the armor adorning his chest, on the fur covering his forearms and waist, and dripping down from the long, sharp claws extruding from his right hand.

The Goraishi. Her King had his crown.

Kagome stared at him, watching his slow approach carefully. He stopped a few yards away, simply watching her, waiting for her response as his betas silently moved from between them. His aura was erratic, pulsing in waves over her, caressing and punishing her in surges of energy, telling of a caged animal desperate to be free.

The kind man that would help her at times gather firewood was gone. The levelheaded leader who handled village disputes with fairness and justice had disappeared. Standing in front of her was the demon, the beast who always lurked under the surface, the bare essence of the man who had kept a protective eye over her.

She had thought long of this moment, of her choice. She had battled herself between reason and want, thought and desire. In that exact moment, as she lived the decision she had been thinking of, she abandoned the thought and reason she had clung to and listened to her heart.

Her grip tightened on his sword and she ran.

That part specifically was what drove the entire thing.

Aaaaaaand for Defensive Interference. Oh boy. So I explained what started the fic here, but I have a difference answer for what’s actually keeping me writing it. (Tagging @pointyobjects because this is the second part to that answer.)

I do not make it a secret that I struggle with this fic. I have abandoned it a thousand times in my head and then a new lovely reader comes along, comments their way back into my heart, and I grind out another chapter. It’s a cycle. (My current plan is if I can actually manage to sit down and finish out some fics like I did All That Glitters, DI is high on that list of attempts because I want to finish it.)

The scene that keeps me going back to it is a little murky. It’s changed so many times throughout the course of the story. At first, it was Kagome’s acknowledgement that she fucked up -- she was supposed to appease Sess’s ridiculous demands while also trying to keep Kouga happy and just not being good to herself or her relationship. However, it’s not working out that way. Things have really changed. So now, the scene that’s driving me is--

I don’t know. And that might be why I’m struggling with it so much.

I have a couple scenes in my head. Kagome and Kouga-centric scenes change with the tide, but I think the one scene I really want to happen now is Sess’s growth. It’ll probably take a bit, but a conversation between him and Kouga that’s civil and a conversation between him and Kagome that’s respectful.

I really need to think about it.

#people talking #lilly white #my stuff #claiming #defensive interference #how dare you make me admit that there's no plot whatsoever to this story #but...it was eye opening to realize i don't have a scene driving it #i think fixing that problem might help with a lot more #lilly-white

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justlookatthosesausages · 5 years

Note

Frozen X OUAT prompt - Anna kills Rumplestitskin and she becomes the Dark One. Elsa and Kristoff goes to Misthaven/Enchanted Forest to find her and they find out what happened to her.

(oooooh so dramaaaa, me likey)

=======

“Don’t you see? We both have magic now. We can be so close again. I understand you better now. We’re the same.”

Anna’s voice was so deep and so high at the same time, like a creaking voice that stops the blood in the veins of whoever would hear it. She was threatening. It was such an odd attitude coming from Anna that both Elsa and Kristoff were stunned, standing still, with wide eyes. How could this be Anna? Yet they knew that it was her. It was painful to watch, but she was in there, somewhere. It wasn’t a trick. Anna was there, menacing, disturbing, and she had that cackling giggle that sounded nothing like her usual heartwarming laugh. Her teal blue eyes had turned to dirty yellow. She had become the Dark One.

“Look”, chimed Anna with that scary and wavy voice again. “We can have so much fun, both of us!”

She moved her fingers, and a flame appeared in her right hand. It accentuated her dirty long nails and reflected in her extruded eyes, and she had a lunatic smile that showed her insanity, filled with rotten teeth. Elsa noticed all those changes and almost threw up right away, but she restrained herself with her mouth behind her hand, the same posture she had since a good twenty minutes. The elder was devastated by the situation. How can that person… This… Be her sister? What did this creature make with her sister?

“Where is Anna?” Frowned Elsa, and she couldn’t believe that she asked this question out loud.

Anna giggled. “I’m right here. Standing in front of you. Need some glasses, sissy?”

Elsa’s eyes widened, disgusted by the way she acted. Anna would never have such a behavior.

“What happened to you?”

Anna waved her hands in a theatrical manner, the dark green scales on her skin shimmering. “I became the Dark One! New powers, new me! And may I say, better me.”

Now it was a sentence Elsa didn’t agree with at all. “You’re not better. You’re…” She was about to say worse, but it wasn’t it. “You’re something else.”

Anna just puffed and walked away, going back to what she was doing before Kristoff and Elsa came to find her. “This is me, queenie. Just get used to it.”

The blonde was about to say something, but Kristoff had stepped forward.

“No, this isn’t you. This isn’t the Anna we know. This isn’t the Anna we love.”

Elsa was touched by Kristoff’s words, and his deformed voice, due to the ball in his throat. Nevertheless, it didn’t affect Anna at all. “I don’t even care about you. You mere… Human. You don’t even have magic, how are you even useful?”

The two others couldn’t believe their ears, and their mouths dropped, which amused Anna so much that she burst of laughing with a maniac head whip. “Oh, you two. You’re so ridiculous.”

Elsa dared to walk to her, a move that she was scared to do until now.

“Anna, that magic you have now… It’s… It’s bad magic. I can feel it. It feels like… Rotten magic. Do you understand?”

The younger lifted an eyebrow.

“Why, are you jealous?”

“Certainly not. You’ve become everything I ever feared I would become.”

Kristoff turned to Elsa, impressed by how explicit she was.

“That type of magic you have in you, right now… It’s bad, Anna. Really, really bad.” Warned Elsa. She closed her eyes, to focus even more on the disturbing feeling it procured her. “It’s so dark… And bitter…”

Anna groaned, which made her opened her eyes again. “Damn, you’re so boring.”

She dismissed them with a wave of the hand as she turned away. “Just leave, you two. I’ve had enough of you.”

“Anna!” Exclaimed Kristoff. “I’m not leaving without you.”

The Dark One’s shoulders slumped with an annoyed sigh as she has her back turned to them. “Fine. Never leave then. Just die here.”

There was something in the air, and Elsa barely had the time to perceive it when Anna suddenly twirl around, and threw a giant fireball at Kristoff. He couldn’t jump aside, for how fast it was. Thankfully, Elsa had instinctive reflexes, and formed an ice wall right in front of Kristoff to save his life. The fire extinguished on the ice surface, and Elsa stared at her sister with disbelief. She melted the shield and yelled.

“ARE YOU INSANE?”

“Maybe so.”

She lifted her hand again, this time aiming at Elsa. The Queen pointed both her hands immediately, getting prepared for a defense.

“I wouldn’t want to have an ice versus fire fight against you, Anna.” Frowned Elsa, being clear enough that if Anna wanted a magic duel with her, she would regret it.

The younger giggled, and bent her head.

“What, you think I only have fire magic? Oh, sweetie.”

Anna made another move of the wrist, and suddenly Elsa’s throat felt tight. Very tight. Way to tight.

She gasped as the felt strangled, searching for oxygen but failing at it. Her eyes widened, and she reached to her neck to get off some fingers, but there were none. Anna was chocking her from where she was, effortlessly.

“ELSA!” Exclaimed Kristoff, running to his sister-in-law.

“Uh-uh”, menaced Anna, and she lifted her other hand to strangle Kristoff as well.

He lost his balance as she did, and briskly fell to the floor. It got on his knees, closing his eyes and trying to get the grip out of his neck. Both him and Elsa were gasping for air now, and it amused Anna to no end.

“I just realized that if I kill you both now, I could become Queen of Arendelle. Awesome, right? Think about that. All that power.”

At the word ‘power’, she reinforced her magic grip, and they groaned with the pain. Elsa’s eyes started to fill with tears because of how bad it hurt, but also due to sadness.

“A—Ann—Anna…” She tried to say despite the lack of air.

The Dark One was quite impressed she could form words, and turned to her with fascination.

“P—Please… This isn’t—You…” Muttered Elsa, staring at her little sister through her tears. “You’re… You’re better than that…”

Something shifted in Anna, but she blinked at the sensation, chasing it away.

Elsa was almost out of oxygen, and the pain was so high that she would faint any second and probably never wake up. “An—Anna… I love you.”

There was a beat, and Elsa’s eyes slowly closed, her energy leaving her. She started to see black veils, and thought that her time had come.

Anna frowned, and blinked, and right before fainting, Elsa could see something different… Her eyes had turned back to blue.

But Elsa’s knees buckled, and along with Kristoff, they dropped to the floor.

However, before their heads hit it hard, Anna disappeared in a puff of smoke and suddenly appeared right next to them, and held both of their waists with each arm.

“I got you.”

Elsa’s eyes opened slightly when she heard the different tone in her voice, and Kristoff turned his head to her. The pain in their throats was gone, but they coughed loudly at the sudden return of air. Anna lifted them and softly sit them up.

“Here. Are you okay?”

Her eyes were darting from Elsa to Kristoff, checking their state, making sure they were breathing normally. Elsa’s vision unblurred, and she tried to understand. Anna’s voice was different, warm, caring… Normal. Yet her appearance still was the same scary one. Only her teal blue eyes were indicating a change. It was weird to see them on a face covered with scales.

“…Anna?” Asked Elsa, still recovering her breath.

The younger nodded, like if she was too scared to confirm out loud. She had a smile, but one of those cute little ones she had before, not the winces full of teeth she had made during the past hour.

Anna put a hand on Elsa’s shoulder.

“I don’t know how much time I have. Listen. You have to find a knife. Like a little sword. A dagger. A weird, wavy, odd knife. There’s my name on it. Don’t ask, just do, okay? It’s somewhere upstairs, but I can’t remember where. No, don’t interrupt me. Listen to me. Questions later. You have to find it, you take it in your hand, and then you call my name. Got it? Please.”

Elsa wanted to make sure she was okay, ask her so many things, but she had her eyes in Anna’s the whole time, and they were filled with urgency. She knew they hadn’t much time left, and trusted her. She stood up with as much energy as she could, and ran to the stairs.

#asks #anonymous #this is so tense i felt like writing an actual episode of ouat #ouat #frozen ouat #frozen #i end on a cliffhanger on purpose if you guys wanna write the follow up hehehe #frozen prompts #ouat prompts #frozen fanfics #frozen drabbles #frohana #snow sisters #dark one anna

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artificialqueens · 5 years

Text

i hope you've got the time [to keep that air between your lungs] (Trixya) - PinkGrapefruit

[trixya soulmate au]

A/N - this has taken me way too long. thank you to meggie and frey for being the angels they are and getting me through this in one piece - i love them both more than they know. enjoy!

Seeming when I’m older that it’s younger how I feel

Learning that you only get the raw end of the deal

First one to the finish line, but the last one left to know

Second place adorns you no matter where you go

It started on a Monday, except it didn’t - not really.

It started on the day she was born, in a small town in Russia where the rain hadn’t stopped for three days and everyone was a little on edge. It started when the doctor, a sweet old man from St Petersburg, announced loudly, “It’s a girl!” and then, much quieter and with a little sorrow, “and she has a soulmark.” It started when she was five and asked her mama why she had a flower on her arm, and the woman cursed and told her to be quiet, because ‘good girls don’t ask questions.’ When she never heard of the word ‘soulmate’ spoken in the small town she grew up in, not a speck of blood in the snow as the lily rooted its way into the crook of her elbow. When she cried going through test after test to see if they could remove it, uproot it. When a nurse tried to pull the lily out, tried to yank her second heart straight from her arm. It started when they moved to the USA when she was eight, her father explaining in a hushed tone that the small ‘sm’ in her passport wasn’t anything special. And then it changed.

It changed in seventh grade when they did a lesson on soulmarks in biology and the teacher was so proud to show off the daffodil on the back of her neck that Katya almost cried. It changed when she watched Alaska’s black dahlia start to uproot itself from her calf midway through a sophomore baseball practice because she saw an exchange student through the fence - their eyes meeting for a brief second before a petal fell onto the grass next to them. She watched them fall in love, until the flower had long removed itself, leaving a faint outline of the flower that had scarred under her skin. It changed when she learned she was one in a million - an urban myth, a soulmate. Half of a whole, unbreakable.

It changed when she met Trixie.

Well I’ve been out to Austin, back to Boston

Where I’ve been

Following the highways in my hand

It’s a Monday in spring and Katya is 19, but she feels like she’s 30. The cold of Boston has started to dissipate; instead, a warm breeze tickles her ankles through the DIY rips in her jeans. She is that kid, and she is proud of it. Her long sleeves cover the slight protrusion of a soulmate mark, but if you were to look closely enough, you could make out the raised stem of a lily following the river-like path of her veins under the white jersey.

She raises her keep-cup to her lips, lets the bitterness of the coffee overrule the sap that’s filling her mouth more and more often these days, the flower routing deeper into her body with each passing day. She hums to herself as she sketches, letting her ankles catch the sun a little as she sits on her coat on the Charles River Esplanade. Katya is majoring in mechanical engineering at MIT with a minor in women and gender studies - something she finds almost fulfilling when she isn’t frantically sketching out a design that would have been done weeks ago if it wasn’t for the new girl in her team. She’s bright blonde, wears heavy makeup and big, pink dresses to the lab; it’s a different kind of feminine to Katya’s messy hair, messy jeans, messy aura of comfort, and she isn’t necessarily intimidated, but she is stressed. And distracted.

“Who in their right mind wears a dress to the engineering labs?” she’d whined down the phone to Alaska after the girl’s first day. “It didn’t even cover her knees.”

“As if you cared about her safety,” croaked the girl, knowingly. “You’re just a whore who can’t focus.”

“And you’re paying for a linguistics course?” Katya bit back, laughing as she said it.

As she’s lost in her thoughts, a text comes through. She chuckles as she reads it, types out a hasty reply before throwing her possessions into her rucksack. She drains her coffee, ready to return to the flat and see what in the name of hell is going on.

“Your lollipop came round,” yells out Alaska before Katya has even locked the door. The girl shakes off her jacket and stands on the back of her Docs to get them off, shot-putting the cup into the sink from the doorway and letting out a little whoop when it goes in on the first try.

“My lollipop? That’s new,” she responds, launching herself onto the couch with a huff.

“Lollipop, Candy Cane, Sugarplum Fairy? They’re all the same to me.” The girl rubs the scar on the back of her leg subconsciously, checking her watch as she does so. “Shouldn’t Sharon be home by now?” she questions, reading the ache in her leg.

“Said she set off a few minutes ago,” reads Katya from Alaska’s phone - the other girl grabbing it off her when she realises.

She stands up, potters into the kitchen to make a fourth cup of coffee and tries to start a conversation over the whistling of the kettle.

“So Trixie was here?” she yells over the din, answered only by the nodding of the giant space buns sticking up from the back of the couch.

“Uhuh, said something about a double major being shit and meeting somewhere at six-ish.”

“Alaska, you bitch!” she shouts as she checks the time on the oven. It’s five forty-five and she’d promised to meet Trixie at a little cafe twenty minutes away (not that she’d realised, the river seemed to speed up time).

She sprints out the door like she’s on a mission. She sort of is.

When I go back to Wisconsin

And when I come home again

Has anybody out there seen my man?

Trixie never intended to do engineering. She intended to do fashion design and become, well, a fashion designer, but life doesn’t always go the way you plan and, like a cat afraid of water, she’s swimming now.

She switched to MIT in her third year because she was told she could, decided to swap design to design engineering and then mechanical, because two days before school started again, she was told they weren’t running that course - double majoring in biology too, because why the hell not. She thinks like a fashion design student, but works like a physicist - something that’s made her very few friends in the new course, but someone she appears to be especially at odds with is Katya. It’s not a cruel rivalry - nothing about it is malicious or rude, they’re just very different. Katya thinks like an engineer and dresses like an edgy art kid, Trixie - doesn’t.

It’s been three months since she got there and she feels she should probably make peace. It’s definitely her own choice, not the spines that are tearing holes in her clothes as they slowly extrude from her arm. The way they twist in her vein like a bad cannula, bruising, til her arm looks like a galaxy and her freckles are the stars. She’s started bandaging over the worst bits, the spikes getting stuck in her coats, so when she takes them off, they pull and tug. She’s not stupid, she knows what it means. But she doesn’t have to be excited about it.

He parents had always explained soulmates very nicely and concisely, and like they were a choice. Like she didn’t have to have one, like it could go away. They’d said ‘Trixie, darling, that cactus isn’t everything, you are more than it,’ and yet she’s always treated it like it was. Like it ruled her destiny - she believes it does.

They meet on a sunny Monday in April, Boston raining intermittently, but the sun trying its very hardest, like a halogen bulb about to blow. She reckons she has enough time to redress her arm before the other girl arrives, takes a seat in a comfy armchair by the window, ripping off the cover like it isn’t pulling out parts of her heart - tiny needles that were once veins. Maybe it’s because she has her eyes closed in pain that she doesn’t notice Katya. The girl floating in, pausing at the counter to get a refill in her reusable cup and pulling out a metal straw for Trixie as she sits down opposite. She looks in awe at the Gymnocalycium in the crook of her arm. How its tiny spineless flowers sit flush to the skin, while the rest seems like it’s jumping out.

“So,” she says, breaking the silence. “Hi.”

Coming home reminds you that you ain’t got long to go

‘Til you can’t make it to the mailbox, not in all this snow

I hope you’ve got the time to keep that air between your lungs

I hope you’ve got the hand to pull the plug when that day comes

Their tutor calls them into her office on an unusually hot day, both women sweating under their respective overalls and cotton dress. Katya feels the heat like it’s under her skin, splitting muscle from fat with a hot layer of wetness that makes her shiver a little. She’s the sweatiest woman alive, or so she likes to say, but the stuffiness of the basement office isn’t helping the way her skin crawls under the chino cloth. Trixie, despite being significantly less covered, doesn’t seem to be faring any better. The humidity makes her skin flush the colour of cyclamen flowers in the summer.

Katya feels a tug in her arm as she watches the girl listen intently. It’s like the lily has a mind of its own, and she’s not stupid, but she’d like to keep her denial for a little bit longer. It smells like pink gin and tastes like comfort.

“I want a paper on the advancement of bionic prosthetics on my desk in two weeks. It’ll be 20 percent of your final grade,” the teacher drones as if it hasn’t crossed her mind how absurd of a task it is. It probably hasn’t, and it makes Katya’s blood boil in a way that she isn’t so willing to chalk down to heat or some form of ailment that this flower is definitely giving her. Can you boil sap? She vows to google it when she gets home.

They leave in a discontented silence, Trixie thumbing the loose edge of her bandage as they let the slight breeze remove the sheen of moisture covering them. The light hurts their heads a little, but so does the assignment, so they can’t win. Katya texts Alaska a series of angry emojis and the girl replies with a squid.

“Two weeks? Fucking ridiculous,” Trixie mutters under her breath, eyebrows furrowed and teeth gritted slightly as she stomps down the stairs ahead of the other girl.

“I know!”

They sit in a huff on the cool concrete steps of the main block. The height of the building casts a shadow that they bask in as they grumble, each wondering how exactly they got stuck together.

“How do we do this?”

“How much do you like the library?”

Well I’ve been out to Austin, back to Boston

Where I’ve been

Following the highways in my hand

After two days, they have a permanent table in the library. It’s in a private study room off to the side, which the librarian has stuck a reserved sign on. When Katya goes to ask who’s reserved it, the woman just hands her a key and the rest is history. It’s nice though, they can leave their notes there instead of taking them home and forgetting them (after Trixie did that one morning, Katya didn’t speak to her for four hours).

The shorter girl thanks god that her minor finished months ago, is almost grateful that this project means she won’t have to do any more stupid things at the same time. She feels something that could almost be called empathy for Trixie, her biology professor throwing lab work after lab work at the girl, like she’s a women’s softball player and not an overworked college student. Trixie can play softball, that’s just not the point.

She divulges this information when Katya returns with two coffees, a black for herself and a sakura latte for Trixie. She doesn’t point out the irony that the girl is willing to drink the thing that’s killing her, doesn’t think they’re there yet. They discuss the ins and outs of everyone’s favourite lesbian sport and there are points where Katya even laughs.

They are high on life and caffeine when they lean in, slow, tense. The air feels humid and full of pent up stress that drips down the walls like wet paint - smells like despair and tastes like tea leaves. Katya takes two fingers, tucking Trixie’s blonde hair behind her ear before moving them under her chin, pulling it up, so it is angled in a way that leaves her vulnerable. She looks so pretty, eyes closed and lips parted and they almost forget where they are. Then the clock strikes eleven and Trixie’s eyes snap open. She is like a Cinderella when she realises how close their lips are (an inch, maybe less), and she jumps away like she has been burned. Like Katya’s fingers were candles, flaming and hot.

Katya wishes for a second that she had not felt the flower’s roots loosen around her lung, snake their way out of her aorta and her small intestine for a second there. It would make it all easier to accept as Trixie runs out of the room in a state of panic. The dark blonde reaches for the dredges of her coffee, downs what is left as she rubs on the protrusion taking up her forearm. When she coughs, she feels it shift and it hurts. She supposes the pain reminds her she is alive. She wishes it wouldn’t.

When I go back to Wisconsin

And when I come home again

Has anybody out there seen my man?

After a few more days of quiet working, Katya notices something. It’s not a subtle change, comes rather suddenly, but the girl she is working with looks different. Trixie has lost weight, her eyes are hollow and dark as she flicks the pages of research they have been doing for hours. Her hair, that once glistened like it contained the sun, looks limp and flat. There is no sheen, just plain yellow. She has to work up the nerve to ask what has happened as the girl sips her water.

“Are - are you okay?” She hates the way her voice breaks. She hates how Trixie’s voice sounds even more.

“Uhuh, peachy,” comes the other girl sardonically. Her voice is unnaturally hoarse as if she has been screaming for days on end. Katya winces at the sound of it.

“Are you sure? You don’t look well.”

Trixie turns, makes eye contact with her for the first time in days and it’s like Katya was looking through a façade as she sees her skin grey under the warm lights of the study room.

“My body is a temple that has been overtaken with weeds,” she chuckles and the other girl wants to make a joke about poetry slams and spoken word but, ironically, she cannot find the words. She does not know the prayers to make this go away.

They return to the complacent silence they held - it is not comfortable but it does not feel so much like thorns.

When Katya gets home that night, she falls onto the couch, eyeballing Sharon and Alaska cuddling, but more so the Thai food they have spread on the coffee table.

“’Lasky, Shar-Bear,” she starts, earning a cold glare from Sharon and a gesture towards the food. She picks up a random noodle dish and helps herself as she continues. “I think Trixie is the one.”

“Trixie?”

“Lollipop, Candyfloss, Barbie - That one, yes.”

“And she’s the one?” Alaska’s eyes narrow, she might have known this, but the urgency with which the idea is being conveyed now frightens her a little as she melts a little further into Sharon’s side.

“Yes,” replies Katya, mouth full of noodles, “And I don’t know what to do.”

“How much time you got?” enquires Alaska’s partner, muting the television less out of common decency and more pure nosiness. Katya pulls up the sleeve of her sweatshirt, reads the lily like one would read a watch. The marks and clocks are rather similar in their idea, she muses to herself, although only one predicts your death. She doesn’t think any deeper into that.

Sharon mutters something under her breath that sounds like 'Jesus,’ but could have easily been anything else.

“You might want to work fast, Kitty-Cat, that flower isn’t gonna wait much longer.” As Katya looks down, the penultimate petal falls off - she inhales sharply. Sharon definitely mutters 'Jesus’ this time.

Hippodromes and hedons sipping Seagram’s from my mug

Pills at all the parties that we sweep beneath the rug

Figuring that loving’s just the kind of dice you throw

Can a cactus and a lily find a common pot to grow?

It ends on a Monday too.

Trixie keels over after they have handed in their paper, a couple of pages tear-stained and one slightly darkened (although Katya swears she did not spill coffee on it). The blonde falls into Katya’s arms as they walk down the shallow steps outside the main building; it’s almost in slow-motion as the girl has to reach to grab her safely. She retches a couple of times as she lays there, eyes streaming as she holds her stomach like it’s falling apart.

It feels like it is.

Trixie’s always wondered if cacti have spikes on their roots, and, based on this moment and this moment alone, she truly believes that they do.. She feels every organ is being squeezed, the air forced out of her lungs, acid out of her stomach and blood from her heart. Her pulse is simultaneously skyrocketing and bottoming out, and her mouth is filling with the artificially sweet taste of sap. Her mama always told her that she would never have to know what it’s like to never find your soulmate, and the worst part is that she did find hers. All five feet and four inches, with dirty blonde, messy hair; paint splattered rucksack and ripped jeans; loves books but loves maths more, nerd. But she can still feel the roots of her love tearing her up inside as she looks into Katya’s eyes through the sheen of tears.

She cannot hear what is being said through the pounding of her heart and the all-encompassing ripping of her organs. It’s like a violin playing Dvorak’s 'New World,’ but the strings are loose and the bow is torn up and there is no sheet music. It’s an awful cacophony of suffering and hopelessness.

She does not feel when she closes her eyes.

She does feel when everything stops.

Well I’ve been out to Austin, back to Boston

Where I’ve been

Following the highways in my hand

When their lips touch, Katya wants a cosmic supernova. She wants to feel a universe expand and collapse in a second between them, some fiery explosion that tells her this is right. She needs bright lights and flashing words in the sky, 'congratulations dumbass’ spelt out in fireworks. She gets none of that.

Instead, she feels the unmistakable tug of heartstrings as they pick up a song she’d long forgotten, years after dropping violin in sixth grade. She feels her fingers move to the second fret of the A string, vibrato against the low wheezing of Trixie’s breath, the only sign she’s still alive. Her body plays Largo by memory as the lily snakes out of her vena cava. It’s uncomfortable, like pulling out a tooth or popping a dislocated elbow back into place, and as the low G swells in her heart, she feels something push against her sleeve.

She pulls away with a start.

Gently moving Trixie’s head further onto her knees, she rolls up her sweater, hands shaking a little. When it moves past her elbow, a lily falls onto the concrete next to her.

She feels its loss like a dead weight in her arm.

It’s hard to explain how it feels to lose something so dear to you, even if it means you gain something more. The lily that had caused so much grief, so much pain as it rooted its way deep into her being, gone in an instant. An uncomfortable few seconds followed by a lifetime of freedom. She examines the arm with fervour, the flower having left no exit wound, just a perfect scar.

It is then she has the idea to check on Trixie’s.

The girl lets out a heavy breath followed by a hacking cough as Katya twists her forearm. Surely enough, the cactus has left an imprint of buds and needles on the soft skin. It feels a little rough to touch but still has the thrum of a heartbeat under it, rooting it home.

Trixie studies Katya for a little, before moving her head up to meet the girl. She doesn’t taste of sap anymore, she notes, but of strawberries. She decides that it is now her favourite flavour.

When I go back to Wisconsin

And when I come home again

Has anybody out there seen my man?

“So, this is Lollipop,” Alaska teases when Katya brings her girlfriend over for the first time. It’s like an obligatory meet the family dinner, except they’ve already met and they’re ordering Chinese.

When Sharon turns up, she gives Trixie a once over before mouthing something along the lines of 'nice ass’ to Alaska, who rolls her eyes a little before nodding. Ever one for subtleties, Sharon repeats the same sentiment to the girl in question, who blushes the colour of raspberries and mutters a quiet 'thank you.’ The older girl decides she likes her.

“So, Candyfloss, what’s your flower?” questions Alaska once they’re deep on champagne and sweet and sour chicken. Trixie buries her head in Katya’s shoulder for a second, before rolling the sleeves of her dress up to reveal the cactus she’s had painstakingly tattooed over her mark.

“It felt a little more permanent,” she justifies as the other girls goggle, Katya looking smug. “Plus you couldn’t really see it before.”

Her girlfriend takes her hand gently in her own and presses a featherlight kiss to the tattoo.

“I love it, babe,” she whispers and when they kiss, it tastes of strawberry chapstick and she feels the supernova she’s always wanted.

Has anybody out there seen my man?

[alternate ending]

Katya feels Trixie go limp in her arms and wonders if this is where the train stops. If this is where she gets off and never returns to the land of the living, destined only to act as a word of warning to everyone. Romeo and Juliet could never.

She feels the lily tighten its hold on her heart, learnt enough biology during a work placement with pacemakers to envision its roots working their way into her right atrium through the superior vena cava and down into the ventricle. Imagines it as it snakes back up and out the pulmonary artery and round through her lungs. It goes back through the pulmonary vein and into her left atrium and ventricle, before exiting her aorta like some weird bread plait, but less tasty.

As the pressure increases she wishes they’d gone somewhere more comfortable, because the concrete steps digging into her back are almost as bad as the way her kidneys are twisting to accommodate her second heart.

The taste of sap burns the back of her throat, and as she slips under, she swears she feels a whisper of strawberries on her tongue like a promise. A solemn goodbye.

Heaven has more pink than she imagined.

Tags - rpdr fanfiction, trixya, trixie mattel, katya zamolodchikova, shalaska, sharon needles, alaska thunderfuck, angst, fluff?, eventual happy ending, also contains an alternate ending, lesbian au, soulmate au, pinkgrapefruit, concrit welcome

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Seeming when I’m older that it’s younger how I feelLearning that you only get the raw end of the dealFirst one to the finish line, but the last one left to knowSecond place adorns you no matter where you go It started on a Monday, except it didn’t - not really. It started on the day she was born, in a small town in Russia where the rain hadn’t stopped for three days and everyone was a little on edge. It started when the doctor, a sweet old man from St Petersburg, announced loudly, “It’s a girl!” and then, much quieter and with a little sorrow, “and she has a soulmark.” It started when she was five and asked her mama why she had a flower on her arm, and the woman cursed and told her to be quiet, because ‘good girls don’t ask questions.’ When she never heard of the word 'soulmate’ spoken in the small town she grew up in, not a speck of blood in the snow as the lily rooted its way into the crook of her elbow. When she cried going through test after test to see if they could remove it, uproot it. When a nurse tried to pull the lily out, tried to yank her second heart straight from her arm. It started when they moved to the USA when she was eight, her father explaining in a hushed tone that the small ‘sm’ in her passport wasn’t anything special. And then it changed. It changed in seventh grade when they did a lesson on soulmarks in biology and the teacher was so proud to show off the daffodil on the back of her neck that Katya almost cried. It changed when she watched Alaska’s black dahlia start to uproot itself from her calf midway through a sophomore baseball practice because she saw an exchange student through the fence - their eyes meeting for a brief second before a petal fell onto the grass next to them. She watched them fall in love, until the flower had long removed itself, leaving a faint outline of the flower that had scarred under her skin. It changed when she learned she was one in a million - an urban myth, a soulmate. Half of a whole, unbreakable. It changed when she met Trixie. Well I’ve been out to Austin, back to BostonWhere I’ve beenFollowing the highways in my hand It’s a Monday in spring and Katya is 19, but she feels like she’s 30. The cold of Boston has started to dissipate; instead, a warm breeze tickles her ankles through the DIY rips in her jeans. She is that kid, and she is proud of it. Her long sleeves cover the slight protrusion of a soulmate mark, but if you were to look closely enough, you could make out the raised stem of a lily following the river-like path of her veins under the white jersey. She raises her keep-cup to her lips, lets the bitterness of the coffee overrule the sap that’s filling her mouth more and more often these days, the flower routing deeper into her body with each passing day. She hums to herself as she sketches, letting her ankles catch the sun a little as she sits on her coat on the Charles River Esplanade. Katya is majoring in mechanical engineering at MIT with a minor in women and gender studies - something she finds almost fulfilling when she isn’t frantically sketching out a design that would have been done weeks ago if it wasn’t for the new girl in her team. She’s bright blonde, wears heavy makeup and big, pink dresses to the lab; it’s a different kind of feminine to Katya’s messy hair, messy jeans, messy aura of comfort, and she isn’t necessarily intimidated, but she is stressed. And distracted. “Who in their right mind wears a dress to the engineering labs?” she’d whined down the phone to Alaska after the girl’s first day. “It didn’t even cover her knees.” “As if you cared about her safety,” croaked the girl, knowingly. “You’re just a whore who can’t focus.” “And you’re paying for a linguistics course?” Katya bit back, laughing as she said it. As she’s lost in her thoughts, a text comes through. She chuckles as she reads it, types out a hasty reply before throwing her possessions into her rucksack. She drains her coffee, ready to return to the flat and see what in the name of hell is going on. “Your lollipop came round,” yells out Alaska before Katya has even locked the door. The girl shakes off her jacket and stands on the back of her Docs to get them off, shot-putting the cup into the sink from the doorway and letting out a little whoop when it goes in on the first try. “My lollipop? That’s new,” she responds, launching herself onto the couch with a huff. “Lollipop, Candy Cane, Sugarplum Fairy? They’re all the same to me.” The girl rubs the scar on the back of her leg subconsciously, checking her watch as she does so. “Shouldn’t Sharon be home by now?” she questions, reading the ache in her leg. “Said she set off a few minutes ago,” reads Katya from Alaska’s phone - the other girl grabbing it off her when she realises. She stands up, potters into the kitchen to make a fourth cup of coffee and tries to start a conversation over the whistling of the kettle. “So Trixie was here?” she yells over the din, answered only by the nodding of the giant space buns sticking up from the back of the couch. “Uhuh, said something about a double major being shit and meeting somewhere at six-ish.” “Alaska, you bitch!” she shouts as she checks the time on the oven. It’s five forty-five and she’d promised to meet Trixie at a little cafe twenty minutes away (not that she’d realised, the river seemed to speed up time). She sprints out the door like she’s on a mission. She sort of is. When I go back to WisconsinAnd when I come home againHas anybody out there seen my man? Trixie never intended to do engineering. She intended to do fashion design and become, well, a fashion designer, but life doesn’t always go the way you plan and, like a cat afraid of water, she’s swimming now. She switched to MIT in her third year because she was told she could, decided to swap design to design engineering and then mechanical, because two days before school started again, she was told they weren’t running that course - double majoring in biology too, because why the hell not. She thinks like a fashion design student, but works like a physicist - something that’s made her very few friends in the new course, but someone she appears to be especially at odds with is Katya. It’s not a cruel rivalry - nothing about it is malicious or rude, they’re just very different. Katya thinks like an engineer and dresses like an edgy art kid, Trixie - doesn’t. It’s been three months since she got there and she feels she should probably make peace. It’s definitely her own choice, not the spines that are tearing holes in her clothes as they slowly extrude from her arm. The way they twist in her vein like a bad cannula, bruising, til her arm looks like a galaxy and her freckles are the stars. She’s started bandaging over the worst bits, the spikes getting stuck in her coats, so when she takes them off, they pull and tug. She’s not stupid, she knows what it means. But she doesn’t have to be excited about it. He parents had always explained soulmates very nicely and concisely, and like they were a choice. Like she didn’t have to have one, like it could go away. They’d said ‘Trixie, darling, that cactus isn’t everything, you are more than it,’ and yet she’s always treated it like it was. Like it ruled her destiny - she believes it does. They meet on a sunny Monday in April, Boston raining intermittently, but the sun trying its very hardest, like a halogen bulb about to blow. She reckons she has enough time to redress her arm before the other girl arrives, takes a seat in a comfy armchair by the window, ripping off the cover like it isn’t pulling out parts of her heart - tiny needles that were once veins. Maybe it’s because she has her eyes closed in pain that she doesn’t notice Katya. The girl floating in, pausing at the counter to get a refill in her reusable cup and pulling out a metal straw for Trixie as she sits down opposite. She looks in awe at the Gymnocalycium in the crook of her arm. How its tiny spineless flowers sit flush to the skin, while the rest seems like it’s jumping out. “So,” she says, breaking the silence. “Hi.” Coming home reminds you that you ain’t got long to go'Til you can’t make it to the mailbox, not in all this snowI hope you’ve got the time to keep that air between your lungsI hope you’ve got the hand to pull the plug when that day comes Their tutor calls them into her office on an unusually hot day, both women sweating under their respective overalls and cotton dress. Katya feels the heat like it’s under her skin, splitting muscle from fat with a hot layer of wetness that makes her shiver a little. She’s the sweatiest woman alive, or so she likes to say, but the stuffiness of the basement office isn’t helping the way her skin crawls under the chino cloth. Trixie, despite being significantly less covered, doesn’t seem to be faring any better. The humidity makes her skin flush the colour of cyclamen flowers in the summer. Katya feels a tug in her arm as she watches the girl listen intently. It’s like the lily has a mind of its own, and she’s not stupid, but she’d like to keep her denial for a little bit longer. It smells like pink gin and tastes like comfort. “I want a paper on the advancement of bionic prosthetics on my desk in two weeks. It’ll be 20 percent of your final grade,” the teacher drones as if it hasn’t crossed her mind how absurd of a task it is. It probably hasn’t, and it makes Katya’s blood boil in a way that she isn’t so willing to chalk down to heat or some form of ailment that this flower is definitely giving her. Can you boil sap? She vows to google it when she gets home. They leave in a discontented silence, Trixie thumbing the loose edge of her bandage as they let the slight breeze remove the sheen of moisture covering them. The light hurts their heads a little, but so does the assignment, so they can’t win. Katya texts Alaska a series of angry emojis and the girl replies with a squid. “Two weeks? Fucking ridiculous,” Trixie mutters under her breath, eyebrows furrowed and teeth gritted slightly as she stomps down the stairs ahead of the other girl. “I know!” They sit in a huff on the cool concrete steps of the main block. The height of the building casts a shadow that they bask in as they grumble, each wondering how exactly they got stuck together. “How do we do this?” “How much do you like the library?” Well I’ve been out to Austin, back to BostonWhere I’ve beenFollowing the highways in my hand After two days, they have a permanent table in the library. It’s in a private study room off to the side, which the librarian has stuck a reserved sign on. When Katya goes to ask who’s reserved it, the woman just hands her a key and the rest is history. It’s nice though, they can leave their notes there instead of taking them home and forgetting them (after Trixie did that one morning, Katya didn’t speak to her for four hours). The shorter girl thanks god that her minor finished months ago, is almost grateful that this project means she won’t have to do any more stupid things at the same time. She feels something that could almost be called empathy for Trixie, her biology professor throwing lab work after lab work at the girl, like she’s a women’s softball player and not an overworked college student. Trixie can play softball, that’s just not the point. She divulges this information when Katya returns with two coffees, a black for herself and a sakura latte for Trixie. She doesn’t point out the irony that the girl is willing to drink the thing that’s killing her, doesn’t think they’re there yet. They discuss the ins and outs of everyone’s favourite lesbian sport and there are points where Katya even laughs. They are high on life and caffeine when they lean in, slow, tense. The air feels humid and full of pent up stress that drips down the walls like wet paint - smells like despair and tastes like tea leaves. Katya takes two fingers, tucking Trixie’s blonde hair behind her ear before moving them under her chin, pulling it up, so it is angled in a way that leaves her vulnerable. She looks so pretty, eyes closed and lips parted and they almost forget where they are. Then the clock strikes eleven and Trixie’s eyes snap open. She is like a Cinderella when she realises how close their lips are (an inch, maybe less), and she jumps away like she has been burned. Like Katya’s fingers were candles, flaming and hot. Katya wishes for a second that she had not felt the flower’s roots loosen around her lung, snake their way out of her aorta and her small intestine for a second there. It would make it all easier to accept as Trixie runs out of the room in a state of panic. The dark blonde reaches for the dredges of her coffee, downs what is left as she rubs on the protrusion taking up her forearm. When she coughs, she feels it shift and it hurts. She supposes the pain reminds her she is alive. She wishes it wouldn’t. When I go back to WisconsinAnd when I come home againHas anybody out there seen my man? After a few more days of quiet working, Katya notices something. It’s not a subtle change, comes rather suddenly, but the girl she is working with looks different. Trixie has lost weight, her eyes are hollow and dark as she flicks the pages of research they have been doing for hours. Her hair, that once glistened like it contained the sun, looks limp and flat. There is no sheen, just plain yellow. She has to work up the nerve to ask what has happened as the girl sips her water. “Are - are you okay?” She hates the way her voice breaks. She hates how Trixie’s voice sounds even more. “Uhuh, peachy,” comes the other girl sardonically. Her voice is unnaturally hoarse as if she has been screaming for days on end. Katya winces at the sound of it. “Are you sure? You don’t look well.” Trixie turns, makes eye contact with her for the first time in days and it’s like Katya was looking through a façade as she sees her skin grey under the warm lights of the study room. “My body is a temple that has been overtaken with weeds,” she chuckles and the other girl wants to make a joke about poetry slams and spoken word but, ironically, she cannot find the words. She does not know the prayers to make this go away. They return to the complacent silence they held - it is not comfortable but it does not feel so much like thorns. When Katya gets home that night, she falls onto the couch, eyeballing Sharon and Alaska cuddling, but more so the Thai food they have spread on the coffee table. “’Lasky, Shar-Bear,” she starts, earning a cold glare from Sharon and a gesture towards the food. She picks up a random noodle dish and helps herself as she continues. “I think Trixie is the one.” “Trixie?” “Lollipop, Candyfloss, Barbie - That one, yes.” “And she’s the one?” Alaska’s eyes narrow, she might have known this, but the urgency with which the idea is being conveyed now frightens her a little as she melts a little further into Sharon’s side. “Yes,” replies Katya, mouth full of noodles, “And I don’t know what to do.” “How much time you got?” enquires Alaska’s partner, muting the television less out of common decency and more pure nosiness. Katya pulls up the sleeve of her sweatshirt, reads the lily like one would read a watch. The marks and clocks are rather similar in their idea, she muses to herself, although only one predicts your death. She doesn’t think any deeper into that. Sharon mutters something under her breath that sounds like 'Jesus,’ but could have easily been anything else. “You might want to work fast, Kitty-Cat, that flower isn’t gonna wait much longer.” As Katya looks down, the penultimate petal falls off - she inhales sharply. Sharon definitely mutters 'Jesus’ this time. Hippodromes and hedons sipping Seagram’s from my mugPills at all the parties that we sweep beneath the rugFiguring that loving’s just the kind of dice you throwCan a cactus and a lily find a common pot to grow? It ends on a Monday too. Trixie keels over after they have handed in their paper, a couple of pages tear-stained and one slightly darkened (although Katya swears she did not spill coffee on it). The blonde falls into Katya’s arms as they walk down the shallow steps outside the main building; it’s almost in slow-motion as the girl has to reach to grab her safely. She retches a couple of times as she lays there, eyes streaming as she holds her stomach like it’s falling apart. It feels like it is. Trixie’s always wondered if cacti have spikes on their roots, and, based on this moment and this moment alone, she truly believes that they do.. She feels every organ is being squeezed, the air forced out of her lungs, acid out of her stomach and blood from her heart. Her pulse is simultaneously skyrocketing and bottoming out, and her mouth is filling with the artificially sweet taste of sap. Her mama always told her that she would never have to know what it’s like to never find your soulmate, and the worst part is that she did find hers. All five feet and four inches, with dirty blonde, messy hair; paint splattered rucksack and ripped jeans; loves books but loves maths more, nerd. But she can still feel the roots of her love tearing her up inside as she looks into Katya’s eyes through the sheen of tears. She cannot hear what is being said through the pounding of her heart and the all-encompassing ripping of her organs. It’s like a violin playing Dvorak’s 'New World,’ but the strings are loose and the bow is torn up and there is no sheet music. It’s an awful cacophony of suffering and hopelessness. She does not feel when she closes her eyes. She does feel when everything stops. Well I’ve been out to Austin, back to BostonWhere I’ve beenFollowing the highways in my hand When their lips touch, Katya wants a cosmic supernova. She wants to feel a universe expand and collapse in a second between them, some fiery explosion that tells her this is right. She needs bright lights and flashing words in the sky, 'congratulations dumbass’ spelt out in fireworks. She gets none of that. Instead, she feels the unmistakable tug of heartstrings as they pick up a song she’d long forgotten, years after dropping violin in sixth grade. She feels her fingers move to the second fret of the A string, vibrato against the low wheezing of Trixie’s breath, the only sign she’s still alive. Her body plays Largo by memory as the lily snakes out of her vena cava. It’s uncomfortable, like pulling out a tooth or popping a dislocated elbow back into place, and as the low G swells in her heart, she feels something push against her sleeve. She pulls away with a start. Gently moving Trixie’s head further onto her knees, she rolls up her sweater, hands shaking a little. When it moves past her elbow, a lily falls onto the concrete next to her. She feels its loss like a dead weight in her arm. It’s hard to explain how it feels to lose something so dear to you, even if it means you gain something more. The lily that had caused so much grief, so much pain as it rooted its way deep into her being, gone in an instant. An uncomfortable few seconds followed by a lifetime of freedom. She examines the arm with fervour, the flower having left no exit wound, just a perfect scar. It is then she has the idea to check on Trixie’s. The girl lets out a heavy breath followed by a hacking cough as Katya twists her forearm. Surely enough, the cactus has left an imprint of buds and needles on the soft skin. It feels a little rough to touch but still has the thrum of a heartbeat under it, rooting it home. Trixie studies Katya for a little, before moving her head up to meet the girl. She doesn’t taste of sap anymore, she notes, but of strawberries. She decides that it is now her favourite flavour. When I go back to WisconsinAnd when I come home againHas anybody out there seen my man? “So, this is Lollipop,” Alaska teases when Katya brings her girlfriend over for the first time. It’s like an obligatory meet the family dinner, except they’ve already met and they’re ordering Chinese. When Sharon turns up, she gives Trixie a once over before mouthing something along the lines of 'nice ass’ to Alaska, who rolls her eyes a little before nodding. Ever one for subtleties, Sharon repeats the same sentiment to the girl in question, who blushes the colour of raspberries and mutters a quiet 'thank you.’ The older girl decides she likes her. “So, Candyfloss, what’s your flower?” questions Alaska once they’re deep on champagne and sweet and sour chicken. Trixie buries her head in Katya’s shoulder for a second, before rolling the sleeves of her dress up to reveal the cactus she’s had painstakingly tattooed over her mark. “It felt a little more permanent,” she justifies as the other girls goggle, Katya looking smug. “Plus you couldn’t really see it before.” Her girlfriend takes her hand gently in her own and presses a featherlight kiss to the tattoo. “I love it, babe,” she whispers and when they kiss, it tastes of strawberry chapstick and she feels the supernova she’s always wanted. Has anybody out there seen my man? [alternate ending] Katya feels Trixie go limp in her arms and wonders if this is where the train stops. If this is where she gets off and never returns to the land of the living, destined only to act as a word of warning to everyone. Romeo and Juliet could never. She feels the lily tighten its hold on her heart, learnt enough biology during a work placement with pacemakers to envision its roots working their way into her right atrium through the superior vena cava and down into the ventricle. Imagines it as it snakes back up and out the pulmonary artery and round through her lungs. It goes back through the pulmonary vein and into her left atrium and ventricle, before exiting her aorta like some weird bread plait, but less tasty. As the pressure increases she wishes they’d gone somewhere more comfortable, because the concrete steps digging into her back are almost as bad as the way her kidneys are twisting to accommodate her second heart. The taste of sap burns the back of her throat, and as she slips under, she swears she feels a whisper of strawberries on her tongue like a promise. A solemn goodbye. * Heaven has more pink than she imagined.

#rpdr fanfiction #trixya #trixie mattel #katya zamolodchikova #shalaska #sharon needles #alaska thunderfuck #angst #fluff #eventual happy ending #lesbian au #soulmate au #pinkgrapefruit #concrit welcome #submission

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twitchesandstitches · 5 years

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Hyper Brain Jane Growth Comm

Commission fic roughly set in the Labbound AU by me and Alt-Hammer, but non-canon to that AU.

Contains hyper growth typical of my work, but is mainly focused around hyper brain/head expansion.

-----

It had been many years on Earth, since the Lalonde family had made the mysterious discoveries of cloning and other technologies. Along with the other three great families, the secrets of gene splicing and the beginning of modding: self-controlled evolution and altering the body, and with it, the birth of the troll species, and others to come.

But in those days, the legality of their existence had been a serious conflict, and that was always on the minds of some of those, like Meenah the Elder, and her heiress.

“Fer frick’s sake, girl,” the husky and incredibly resonant voice from the speaker said, making little metal fixtures in the walls rattle. “Sit up and quiet hiding when you talk. You’re my heiress. You should be making people quiver and cower when you sit up!”

“They do, ma’am, really!”

A snort. “Trying ta avoid yer tits knocking ‘em down doesn’t count.”

The voice, for its vulgarity, was a beautiful voice. The kind that hotwired your brain and hit the ‘YES MA’AM’ buttons. A primordial voice of authority, one suited to an ancient warlord or a modern corporate officer; someone of a less charitable mindset might ask if there was genuinely a difference between the two: same amount of ruthlessness, and while the carnage was less physical, it was no less obvious.

Jane Egbert - though she took the surname Crocker as pat of the legal technicalities to be the heiress to Meenah the Elder, troll celebrity, top CEO and firm fighter on behalf of trolls and all the other sapients to come from Lalonde Labs - did not feel she had the same effect, even when she was easily the most physically intimidating human in history, if you discounted fertility statues that had quite a strong resemblance to her. She was aware of the fact that she was an ultra-curvy giant of a woman, nearly as much troll as human from all the genetic treatments and even the human percentage was balanced with more cerebral-enhancing cybernetics than anyone else on record. Beneficiary of fertility on par with a troll and the enhancements to breast size and milk production that came with it, and quite a few visible signs of trollish traits, as though she were transforming into one.

It was quite a sight to see a woman more than eight feet tall, with hips even wider than that and breasts quite visibly requiring special bras to absorb the excess milk she was producing, looking mortified. She was so big that any normal human could be driven to stunned meekness by the sheer scale of her; a Polynesian woman, she had grown to immense size from all the breast enhancement, muscle reinforcing, fertility amplifying, and general boost treatments known to the public at large, and quite a few that weren’t. Girthy, a bit chubby, she had the motherly look of someone fully prepared to gestate dozens of children in a single sitting, even if she had never actually had any. Her proportions were massive, on par with trolls; breasts as large as beach balls scaled up to her size and weighing several hundred pounds each, a mammoth backside that required several chairs each… she looked exactly like the model superwoman of the modern age, and had featured in the Crocker Corp’s posters. ‘Take our stuff’, they seemed to say, ‘and you can be gorgeous like her!’

That was before the… other treatments. The ones designed to make a perfect heiress out of her, and more akin to the woman who had adopted her, with all the strengths thereof. She didn’t have human ears, but smaller versions of the colorful frond-like displays that grew from sea dwelling trolls, and feathery gills grew along her throat and the sides of her body. She couldn’t wear gloves, not with those heavy claws and webbed fingers (perfect for swimming), and long, powerful fangs shone in her mouth. Even her eyes, bright blue, had a hint of trollish slit pupils. To say nothing of the small but functional pair of wings flapping from her back!

From the speaker, a kind of two-way phone made popular by the corporation that Jane was poised to take over some day, there came a sigh. On the other end of it, somewhere on the other side of the world, Meenah Peixes the Elder was rolling her eyes. “Try to at least look cool in front of the workforce while you hold the fort down, okay? Ya wanna be taken seriously, try not to blush at everything.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Jane said.

There was a pause. “...Just ma’am?”

“Yes, Condesce?” Jane tried again, using the nickname that the elder Peixes’ batch friends had coined in their youth. The Signless, the Dolorosa, and the rest; they had become troll celebrities and unintentionally set the stage for their growing people’s culture to take titles as a form of self-identity.

There was a longer pause. And then a more heartfelt sigh. “You CAN call me Meenah. Y’know. Or mother. Or… look, you don’t work for me, okay? I ain’t yer boss.”

Jane wiggled uncomfortably, causing something small and metal to glint in her cleavage. “...Yes, ma’am,” she said, looking at the ground, or at least her cleavage. It was too big to actually see any floor. She clutched at the metal object, like holding the hand of a loved one to feel more confident.

There was one last final sigh, and it spoke to a lot of regrets. Mistakes made with parenting, words you couldn’t take back, and one last attempt to try to fix it, with a fear of doing it wrong all over again. “...You’ll keep me posted on important crap going on, yeah? Like that meeting coming up.”

Jane’s heart sank, and her stomach felt queasy. “Yes. I’ll… I’ll represent our cause well.”

Meenah the Elder sighed, and there was a strong impression of eyes being rolled. “I’m doing my part here, but you’ll have to make a good case. C’mon! You can do it. I believe in ya, girl.”

“I’ll… I’ll do it!”

“That’s the spirit!” There was a sound, as if of a kiss being blown. “Don’t tell no one, but love ya.” The speaker disconnected.

Jane sighed in relief, and sat back, and her free hand came up to rub at her temples, right above a sub-dermal implanted augmenting her brain’s processing power. “Ugh…” She winced at what felt like a fairly rough headache.

The metal in her hand shimmered to life; this was not a metaphor. It glowed brightly, with a faint red color striking against a black casing, and a single bright red light glowed. It was alive, a person in its own right. Not life in the same way as cells and blood, but life in electricity and silicon: a true artificial intelligence. This particular one, having a wicked sense of humor and taste for irony that had probably been inherited from the family that had produced him, had named himself after a famous antagonistic AI; he called himself Hal Strider.

Various mechanical synapses wired into her kicked in, and the comforting presence of a familiar mind extruding into hers, at the border of consciousness, rather like a worshipper prostrating themselves before a deity. Hal’s mind hovered, and remotely took control of a small set of speakers Jane carried for this purpose. “Sup, Jane. You’re kinda freaked out.”

Jane groaned. “How can you tell…?” She asked with only a bit of sarcasm.

“I got my ways. Reading that your hearts, all three of ‘em, are pumping mad. Blood pressure is… hoo, that’s not healthy. Shoot, your muscles are tense, especially the ones built into support your… chest. And you’re getting one monster of a headache.” He stopped, perhaps in apology. “Also, it’s kind of obvious you’re freaked out. I’ll order some meds for that headache.”

“You’re a treat, Hal.” Jane slowly got up, dreading going to work. She enjoyed being an administrator, but that meeting loomed over her, and she felt queasy at it. ‘It’s just the possible future of extreme modding, all the potential benefits of self-controlled evolution and all that at stake. And if it’s penalized, trolls and carapacians and the other sapients could be legally prosecuted for having them built in… it’s all on ME.’

She sighed again. “No pressure.” She stood up straight, causing some hefty sloshing from her massive breasts, and cracking from her suit. Oh well. She had a job to do! She pocketed Hal’s corporeal container back into her cleavage, where he sank deep, right against her chest… right against her heart. It beat a bit faster, but definitely not from stress. She patted her upper swell of mammary, enjoying the feel of him so close. “Any medical issues to report?”

There was the briefest pauses from Hal, and Jane later would think this was probably a relevant point. As an artificial intelligence, Hal thought FAST; any hesitation from him was just for deliberate effect, or imitating human social behavior. He thought so fast that he never needed any time to check and report.

But any kind of pause, from him, was the equivalent of waiting several hours to just think really, really hard about something important.

In the span of that pause, Hal looked over Jane’s biology, checked her cybernetic implants, and all the rest. This was actually his job, at least in the official records, because ‘health care officer’ for the world’s most important heiress looked a lot better than ‘personal companion’ for a paycheck. There was some interesting activity going on with her brain. She was thinking so much lately, and her intelligent implants were processing over time, and there was something going on there… Hal noticed something odd there, in her brain chemistry. Chemical markers of something else-

Oh. Yes, of course. The… stuff Meenah the Elder had used to transform Jane from an ordinary, if modded, human into the behemoth she was growing into. All Hal knew about it is that it was absolutely off the books, and had come in a syringe. It hadn’t been manufactured; it had come from somewhere, and best as he could work out from the data he’d mined in old communications between the founding families, had something to do with some site that had started… well, everything.

No one did know exactly how Mom Lalonde, Roxy the First, had created the technologies and genetic splicing techniques to create the trolls in the first place. Or how easy the creation of the carapacians was, as if she had been working from a template. And there were other mysteries there… like that mutagenic stuff Meenah the Elder had used on Jane, treating it first with her own genetics, as if to fashion Jane into her own daughter in the physical sense.

It would seem it was still in Jane’s body. It was working all the time, slowly transforming her in subtle ways, making her a true fusion of human and troll, producing all kinds of mutations, and now it was interlacing with Jane’s cerebral implants and intelligence-boosting mods. And it was doing… something.

In that pause, Hal took a long time to figure out if he should tell Jane about all that, as he was honor bound to do, or if it was better not to worry here. In the end, AIs have hearts as much as anyone. Jane was stressed enough as it were. “Don’t worry about it,” he said, and onto Jane’s augmented reality-capable glasses, he made a little avatar of himself giving a thumbs up and a wink.

Jane smiled. “You’re sweet,” she said, and off they went to the offices.

Things did not improve much from there.

Several hours in: several hours of signing off on paperwork in her adoptive mother’s name, personally answering letters about their work that ranged from the merely offensive to the politically extremely disastrous if handled wrong. And then the mod stuff, addressing the medical aspects that were so crucial to their long-term success; they had to focus on the benefits of it to stay relevant in the eyes of the world, and they needed to fix so much…

Jane sighed in her office, Hal close at hand and presently extending himself into a terminal for this purpose. Letters flashed as he relayed several messages from Feferi and Roxy the Younger, and their suggestions for improving mods, and sent them to the labs once Jane gave her okay.

With the pain in her head, like something was trying to hammer its way out of here and making shocks that were hurting her spine, balancing the needs of modifications that could prove vital to the company’s success, and the welfare of all trolls and other beings, Jane was feeling physically ill; it was just too much, all at once.

“I can do this,” she mumbled to herself. “I can do it.”

“That’s the spirit,” Hal said soothingly. “Hasn’t that stuff I got you done anything yet?”

Jane clutched her head. She swore she could feel her skull moving beneath her fingers. Little hairline segments opening, and things sliding around, very gradually. And...pressing against her fingers? It was an illusion from the pain.

It had to be. “It’s not working…!” She hissed, shutting her eyes. Hal turned off visuals to her glasses, blanketing it in blessed darkness. “Ah… that’s better.”

Hal did the digital equivalent of relaxing… and then froze up. Aw shit, he thought.

The alert got past him, and a video call appeared on a TV. “Hello, miss acting executive,” said an oily voice doing its best to be deliberately unpleasant.

Jane stared at it. “Uhhh. Oh no…”

She was a human woman, of ordinary and unmodded build, and she had a certain look of someone who just love bringing bad news, and takes too much joy in being unpleasant. She smiled, thinly. “May I assume you are the representative of your company’s chief officer in this meeting?” she said, and wiggled her fingers at ‘chief officer’. She probably had wanted to say ‘animal’ instead, and gave the words a nasty spin that had the same effect.

Jane groaned. Dealing with bigots who openly wanted trolls declared subhuman creatures was not something she was fit to do in her state. She blinked hard, trying to focus; the whole world, even with her glasses going to full visibility again, swam in and out of focus. She cried out, pain stabbing hard right from inside her skull.

And again, and another one, and one more, harder than before: she clutched her head, oh god it HURTS!

The representative stared at Jane with poorly concealed distaste, eyes lingering sourly upon Jane’s gigantic cleavage, the faint moisture visible upon her suit from inside, and the other bits of what she had once referred to as ‘oversexed grotesquery’. “Perhap we might… reschedule,” she said nastily. “To account for your troubles. An implant misfiring, perhaps.”

“N-no!” Jane cried out. “I can attend- ah!” she clutched her head, falling onto the desk. Her breasts made it creak as they slammed down, and the rest of her bored down all the way, and the poor desk couldn’t take all her weight. It slowly folded inwards, and then burst, exploding over the room.

The monitor fell onto the floor. It was cracked, and where Jane heard the sound of dollars going up in smoke for nothing, she also heard the representative sounding pleased about her suffering. “This, I’m so afraid, will not look good for the use of implants and modifications. Not if they can backfire so terribly. I will recommend that we postpone the meeting. Ta~” The video ended.

Hal could sometimes be blunt. “Aw, shit.”

“No, no no no!” Jane thrust a fist onto the floor and it shook. She almost punched right through it. “I fucked up! I was working for barely one day, I was supposed to be a good heiress and I already fucked up!” She clutched her head. “And my head hurts, it hurts, oh goddammit stop HURTING!” She raised her head up, to headbutt the ground in a desperate attempt to do SOMETHINg to make it stop.

“Jane, no!” Hal cried out.

Jane yelled, in anger and pain and frustration but mostly the unending agony in her head-

The room went blue.

Psionics flooded out from her, energy bubbling up and exploding outwards in a single pulse, and the walls exploded. Or they ceased to exist, or exploded SO fast, and in such fine form, that they might as well have been annihilated. The blast kept going but got weaker, bowling desks over and trapping the employees. It kept going, setting off alarms and rattling drinking coolers, and all the way to the outer office windows, where the glass shook. This was pretty impressive, when they’d been built to tank anything short of a direct meteor strike.

Hal, silently, noted that Jane’s psionic put out had just risen to that expected of a fully trained goldblood specialist. “Jane…?” Hal asked. “How long have you been able to do that?”

Jane stared open-mouthed, a few bits of rubble falling on her. “I… can’t.” She swallowed. “And I just keep digging myself deeper. Oh, look at all this damage…!” she clutched her head against another fresh stab of pain, and now, she didn’t even notice a swell of blue from her hands flare up at it. She wasn’t in much of a position to be aware that as the pain rose, so did her psionic ratings, while something in her head changed.

Hal did, though. “Uh, Jane?”

“WHAT.”

Hal gave up. “I’ll call someone to help you get out of here.”

Jane’s impulse to insist she could handle this and convince the officials not to postpone the meeting faltered beneath another brutal swell, and a grinding sound in her head. “Oh God… okay, okay! That, that would be best. Okay. Do it. Please…?”

She laid down there for some time, her head grinding and the pain swelling and rising in random waves. And there, Jane realized something odd. With each peak of pain, when the hurting hit the point where it was so bad she could barely think, she kept having ideas.

She didn’t know where they came from. It was as if something was pushing them together, and some part of her was working things out. That the pain was making something happen, and she was figuring things, working through them.

As Hal ran his request out to the first available person, Jane held a hand out and fumbled in the rubble. Still laying down, she found a little tablet that had survived the destruction. She couldn’t look directly at it, not with that screen glare, but she could feel it, and she typed out on it. She sent it.

As an attendant was brought in to escort Jane home, the labs were surprised to receive a write up on a mod formula that had been puzzling them for a while; it was a perfect one, an absolutely ideal suggestion that stood up to all testing. And the really tricky bit?

When they’d sent it upstairs for review, it had only been a concept. Not a fully fleshed out mod; that took months of constant research and testing to do, and Jane had finished it in moments. She’d figured it out.

Upstairs, Jane was being helped to her feet with the help of a black carapacian who called himself the Archive Ranger. “Up you get, ma’am,” he said cheerfully, supporting her massive frame with a small forklift.

“Uhhh…” Jane groaned.

“Uh, Janey. If you give me access, my implants are all over your nervous system and brain; I can shut off your pain receptors for a while-”

“DO IT, PLEASE.”

Hal did so. Jane felt satisfying numbness, and almost fell over. She clutched her head, in relief-

And froze. There was rubble in the way, obscuring her head from sight, but she still felt something round there. Protruding out from her skull, inhumanly. And she still felt her head grinding, shifting…

Transforming. Growing.

For, as the rubble fell away when she was lifted up, it revealed her head in full.

And that, from directly above her eyes, her head had swelled into a perfect sphere.

The Archive Ranger peered. “Um. You, uh. Feeling okay, ma’am?”

Jane breathed in. “What the fu-”

-----

It was a few hours later. The pain was still gone, courtesy of Hal’s presence, and that just left room for Jane to get extremely upset.

Well, not upset, per se. More angry. Or ‘blisteringly furious’.

“You could have told me!” She yelled, stomping around in one of the palatial expanses of her private suite, doing her best not to fall over. She’d been figuring that out for a while, but now she was having to balance not just gigantic hips and hyper-productive breasts larger than her torso, but… well.

That. She felt up her head again, gingerly, as if trying to remind herself it was real. Her fingers slid up from her jawline, to her temple, and there. Where she expected hair, her skull had grown up, swelling upwards, outwards, at a fairly steep angle. Her fingers slid across a strange combination of trollish, human and mechanical bits, all of it growing together in a curious melding. Swells of biomechanical implants that had grown larger from some unknown process, chitinous structure growing beneath the skin to support her new growth, and human skin, thicker than usual. And yet another troll bit, interwoven into ordinary brown skin, vein-line conduits of psionic energy, glowing a vibrant shade of light blue.

She was now in the same league as the Captor line of trolls, in terms of raw psionic power. She wasn’t sure how to feel about that.

Mostly she was concerned about how, according to the x-ray scans that had been taken, her brain had expanded. It had grown outwards, and her skull’s expanded size, for all its disturbing girth, was actually a fairly thin layer. Robust and armored, to be sure, but almost all the mass was her brain.

Her thoughts moved fast, so fast they doubled in on themselves, they criss-crossed and planted new mini-thoughts that blossomed on their own, to unexpectedly arrive at another point and yield insights that felt so perfect, so sublime. It was a pleasure, feeling the depth of her thoughts, the sudden clarity of it.

“You could have told me,” she said again, trying to hold on to the anger. And not focus on how good it felt, thinking so… so profoundly, with such perfect clearness. And the air on her enlarged head felt so nice. It was odd, but so pleasant. Her body shivered at the sensations, and after the horrific headaches of earlier, this was a welcome change of pace.

“I…” Hal hesitated. Another one of those little pauses, so significant in a hyper intelligent AI. “Shit. You’re right. You’re correct, okay? I was scared, okay? I thought you were too stressed out, and when i picked up there was something going on with your head, I figured… I don’t know. Just a little mutation.”

Jane indicated her expanded cranium. She pointed at what had presumably been a intelligence-boosting implant. Somehow, it had grown larger, from a sub-dermal machine to a large swath of smoothly moving machinery, with an oily motion, arcing upwards into a shape uncannily like a troll’s horn. “This? A little?”

“I didn’t realize what was going on! Okay!?”

“How!? You’re a super intelligent AI, how could you not pick that up!?”

Hal tried to figure that one out. It wasn’t as if Jane’s changes had been subtle. “Best as I can figure out, your skull changing was the cause of all that pain, and, I don’t know, something with it boosted your psionics. Built in a better energy network? It interfered with my readings too much, and I was stretched thin. I had no idea any of that was happening!”

“Hmph.” Jane tapped her foot. “Okay… okay then.” Several dozen ideas ran around, meshed together, and sixteen conclusions presented themselves. “That sounds about right.”

“I suppose we could call Meenah the Elder,” Hal said. “We can figure something out-”

“No!” Jane cried out, her eyes wide, ad psionic energy rising around her. “We can’t! It hasn’t even been a day! I need to show her I can do this! I’m a worthy heiress, I need to prove it!”

“But-”

“I can handle this!” She glared at the nearest camera that she knew he was seeing her through.

It lowered dejectedly. Hal gave in. “Okay, okay… so. What do we do then.”

Jane glanced to a nearby computer. She sighed, going over to it and sitting down in the quadruple chair arrangement, suitable to her gigantic backside. “Well, for one, I start working from home. I might as well set a good example; even unexpectedly mutated, I still do as I promised!”

“Wait, don’t forget to-”

There was a crash. And the distinctive sound of a troll-scale chair falling over.

“And perhaps we can get something up her to support my head,” Jane said, from the floor.

Several days passed.

Several days of heady, rampant mutation.

Jane sat at a bench of sorts, examining a holographic blueprint of what appeared to be a purely synthetic body; a robotic shell, capable of fulfilling all relevant biological capabilities, particularly those related to reproduction.

She leaned forward. A harness looped to her head, linked to several wheeled poles to support her head, moved with her.

Her head was far from reaching its final growth. It had only gotten bigger, nearly doubling in size; it was nearly as large as Jane herself, and strangely it didn’t feel that heavy. Jane suspected that her psionics were being naturally diverted into supporting its weight, a minor use of her growing powers she didn’t even have to think about, and Hal’s investigations supported this.

Several glowing spots, reservoirs of psionic energy, shimmered like cyan sunspots on the side of her head. Peaking atop it, her cybernetic bits had just gotten bigger, angling further and further, projecting into distinctive horn shapes, which felt rather appropriate to her.

All of today’s office work is done, she thought to herself, the notion blazing past so fast it had a dozen other variations analyzing the idea from every angle. Her thoughts were coming faster these days, and more clearly; it was like having twenty other Janes thinking with her, and each day, her head got bigger, and her intelligence seemed to be growing as much as her brain was; she felt the peak of some strange singularity, hovering before her.

Surely it wasn’t usual to find… pleasure in just thinking? But here she was, a cool shiver sliding up her back with every moment of pontification. It felt like being milked; an almost shameful pleasure for how different it was from the human norm, and there was so MUCH of it!

The work of an entire week’s worth, finished before breakfast. Jane contemplated that, as fast as she could pull off work now, having an entire day with nothing in particular to do felt a bit daunting. Now what?

Thus, her pet project.

Jane, in addition to her brain, was significantly bigger than she’d been that day she had come from the office. Her appetite had grown truly terrifying; she felt compelled to just eat and eat, fueling her brain’s expansion, but it was going to the rest of her body. She was wider, taller… mostly a lot taller. She wasn’t sure how much so, but she’d had to smash through doorways, mostly with her expanding hips, and none of her clothes fit either. She expected she was upwards of ten feet tall now, and only getting bigger.

“So, what are you working on here, Jane?” Hal said, a camera tilting towards her.

“I assume you recall the project to create truly functional bodies for synthetics,” Jane said,typing on a keyboard and entering in new schematics.

“Hah, yeah. Of course. It’s only been everything I ever wanted.” He made an irritable synthetic noise. “Trapped in these shells that can’t feel, away from you except by proxy… it sucks. It’s literally the worst. Get a dictionary, look up ‘The Worst’, and you’ll find these sucker shells next to ‘em.”

“Yep.” Jane’s head did not wobble much, being about the only part of her that didn’t. It was smooth, gleaming faintly, with not a bit of hair at all now. It did crackle faintly with blue light as she thought about several significant things at once. “The problem with making a chassis that can support a digital consciousness; not being the root of it, but just a channel for it.”

‘The same way I ride in whatever shell I can get.”

“Yes. And of course…” Jane felt conscious of her potential. Her broodmother potential, in fact. “No one’s been able to work out a way to make a synthetic body that’s actual virile. Capable of reproducing.”

Hal paused for a significant amount of time. “...No. They haven’t.” Bitterness and longing twanged from his words.

“I expect that there’s ways to make synthetic reproduction work through creative application of genetic templates and delivery systems,” Jane said thoughtfully. She was built for breeding, she’d redesigned herself to be the ultimate reproductive force just like any troll woman, but… she’d never had any person she really wanted to do that with. Except for one, and he was physically incapable of it. He didn’t even have a body.

Jane glanced down at the schematic. Until now, at least.

Hal spoke up. Something seemed to have been on his mind. “We can, you know, reverse the change. Get into talk with Roxy or Feferi. They know mutation better than anyone else. If you don’t want this, we can reverse it…?” The tone hung in the air, a delicate question.

Jane let the thousands of possibilities for rebuttal soar inside her mind, circling about and becoming more loud and furious, and she reveled in how good it felt to let the thoughts grow. The clarity of her thinking, the speed of it. She felt so… smart.

“Nah,” Jane said, opting for gentleness. She reached into her cleavage with a sloshy sound as her boobs shifted, and cradled Hal with a tough. “I’m… fine with this.”

And that was the amazing part. There was no lie there. She really was happy with this.

Reflectively, she thought that it would have been surprising to others. This mutation was by far even more extreme than her fusion of troll and human traits; she’d been straddling the line between species as is.

But, as shocking as it was, as utterly inhuman this change was…

Between the pleasure of her thoughts and the vastness of her growing intellect, the expansion of her psionic abilities, and the simply physical sensations, this felt good. The thought of going back was horrifying, and it made her feel faint, and small.

She never wanted to feel small again.

That reminded her; the meeting had been rescheduled after all, the bulk of her growth rendering her unable to attend any discussions about that, and soon it would be time to prove she could handle her duties.

She swallowed. She still wasn’t feeling confident enough…

But perhaps, she thought as twenty two ways of pretending to be confident and steely of purpose instantly were plain to her, she could fake it really well. She could out think her foe here, for sure.

Her stomach rumbled. “Hal, sweetie, can you order a fifty-course meal? I’m feeling peckish and growing this much is hungry work!”

“I’ll order up the tailors again,” Hal said dryly.

She waved a finger scoldingly at the camera. “Don’t tease.”

Weeks passed as the meeting was arranged, and Jane went through a period of ‘oh god I’m making so much trouble happen, this expense is all because of me’, but some common sense came through when she thought about the situation. As Hal agreed, even if this wouldn’t look good for her image that they had to postpone a meeting on her account, the time spent organizing everything, from catering to preparing agendas to securing an appropriate venue with the right amount of prestige, was time Jane had to prepare herself.

She wouldn’t have been prepared on that meeting day. And her thoughts moved fast, and examining everything from all the possible angles, the idea emerged within her wondrous brain that she could still have done it that day. By the skin of her teeth, perhaps, but she still could have secured victory.

Meenah the Elder had all the world to pick from for her heiress. She had chosen Jane, and now Jane had the perspective to think that maybe the wily leviathan had seen something she hadn’t.

“An interesting choice of school,” Jane observed during her training regimen, as she called it. She sat at a table, laden with food to supercharge her body and a number of mutagenic package serums, running up in IVs to various parts of her body. Before here, surrounded by small mountains of food that Jane’s ravenous appetite considered a small snack, there was a small folder and it was opened to a record of the woman responsible for rearranging the meeting, seemingly just to mock Jane.

“How so?” Hal asked. Jane turned, and leaning over the table, there was a robot. It was Hal, at last in a new body, handcrafted by her. Not the most advanced sort, she had to admit, but it was the best she could do on short notice and Hal, Hal was not picky. A crude shape, similar to a crash test dummy, but he was there.

His body was just a test run, an essay in the craft she was creating all on her own. She’d make better ones. But he was holding her hand. He looked so small, for the body was human-sized, and she was already troll-sized, and his palm barely fit over one knuckle. But she could feel him, and he could feel her.

Even if she didn’t relish all the marvelous results of her enlarged brain, that alone would have made the change worth it.

“Take a look!” She handed the folder over, minding her head, and she had to lean down heavily to pass it down. Lots of things bumped into one another; her constantly swelling breasts, creaking heavily and wetly against her pajamas, made the table creak beneath them, and her expanded her almost crushed the dishes beneath it.

Hal took it. “School created by her parents, huh. And no non-humans allowed… blanket ban of AIs… charming. We’ve barely existed for more than a few decades, too. That’s a fast ban. I’m kind of proud; my people are truly irritating bastards! And her parents were also involved in politics were dealing. Nepotism there, I imagine.” He flipped through the rest of the folder, and just for fun, hacked into the relevant servers and pulled all information on her. “Okay, got the rest of it, so have fun with a personality outline. Good for strategies.”

Jane tapped her head smugly. “I’ve already figured that out, but you’re a dear. Thank you. I think I should begin my regimen for today, then.”

“No problem.” Hal began powering up the IVs, fluids pouring up into Jane. He considered one that ran up into her brain. “You’re sure about this, then?”

“Yes!” Jane’s expression was a little delirious.

Hal did a few calculations, mostly concerning the experimental nature of the mod she was applying to her brain. Mental enhancement, augmenting memory storage, processing speed, and introducing the capacity for creating shelf-minds to briefly examine a question from multiple perspectives. It was not terribly subtle as an enhancement; most of the other Crocker Corp mods of this nature simply amplified existing capacity, but this one did rearrange the structure of the brain to improve it.

He looked up. Jane’s brain was bigger than she was now; several times bigger than her, eclipsing her and it was still growing. Her skull had fully reshaped around it into a kind of cartilaginous support as hard as armor, complex networks of psionic light producing a fascinatingly complex arrangement around its curves. He wasn’t sure how this stuff would change her brain… but if Jane wanted it, he wouldn’t argue.

Hal happily considered himself an absolute bastard, but when it came to Jane, he was a doormat. “Full force on those mod delivery systems!” Jane commanded, and he did so.

She squeaked, happily, as they hit her system. Many of them were amplification mods, designed to expand on your existing shape and traits (and existing mods), and since Jane was so modded up, they had a lot to work with. Her clothes creaked, built to support her massive body but unable to withstand the pressures of her growth all at once: stitches popped as her breasts grew, expanding by a troll cup-size every few seconds, heavily swelling outwards. Her milk production ramped up, supported by some enhancements Jane had worked there with a clever little addition that made her breast tissue synchronize with her brain; more boob size and milk amplified her processing power,

Her hips grew, waistband creaking and popping right off. Her belly, already so heavy and dense, grew out and just over the swell of her groin, right onto thighs that were growing individual larger than some troll boys on the spot. It didn’t help her legs were getting longer, her bones expanding and reshaping to support such architectural weight. Jane visibly grew upwards, even as her hips grew wider than a couple trucks parked together, her backside swallowing up and crushing the chairs she sat on as it billowed out.

A foot taller. A couple feet, then three feet. Jane kept growing, taller and taller, right alone with her curves getting bigger, her enlarged breasts instantly filling up with brain-boosting milk, and she squealed with delight as her clothes popped right off, burst from her body’s best efforts to outdo itself.

And her brain was shifted, squirming from within. Jane’s eyes crossed as she momentarily blacked out. The change didn’t take long, but it was by far the most complex happening in her body, even exceeding the troll/human hybridization process. Hal supposed it was like upgrading a motherboard while the terminal was still on; you had to have some shutdown.

A fairly human brain design was being reworked from the ground up; her brain, beneath the skull, became a complex arrangement of zig-zags and criss crossed knots, not doing individual jobs but becoming a mass of interconnected processors, linked together to a central core. Amplifying it, adding additional layers to itself, and what that brain had originally been capable of was redefined, evolutionary missteps corrected instantaneously and improved upon.

At this point the other mods kicked in; the boosters, the additional intelligence amps, and some cybernetic upgrades.

Jane’s eyes opened and she squealed in delight when her head expanded. Her eyes almost went cross as her head began rapidly growing. Not an inch at a time, but rather, a whole foot, all in a second. Visibly her head swelled, skull reforming into something much more flexible, rather like an organic balloon, just to keep pace with it.

And like a balloon it grew! As if invisible hands were spreading raw material into it and kneading it all into place, Jane’s head grew larger, and larger still. It got even rounder, with nodules of cybernetic relays, ports popping up like fins, curling whorls where her chitinous support plates and psionic networks knitted together and then grew bigger.

It was already bigger than Jane, who by now was over fifteen feet tall. A proper troll size, close to what Meenah the Elder had been at her age. A brain over sixteen feet around, nearly twenty five feet across, radiating enough raw psionic energy to erase a small mountain-

And it was still growing. It pulsed from within, glowing blue with just a hint of more neon fuchsias.

And Jane gasped, on the verge of something grand and alien, but good. Her eyes shone like someone who saw the shape of the universe, and the code thereof. She put her hands up to her head, eyes wide and full of delight. “I can see it! I understand it!”

“Understand… what?” Hal asked, baffled.

Jane took a deep breath and nearly shouted, “Everything!”

The weeks of waiting, and additional growth for Jane and all her different plans to be worked out, came to an end. The meeting, and its possible implications for the future of modding and the Lalonde offspring species, was upon them.

Jane was late, citing transportation difficulties. This did not pass unnoticed by the meeting crowd.

“The poor mutant has likely gotten herself wedged in some doorway or something,” the representative who had reorganized the meeting in the first place said with a tutting sound. “Or I dare say all those artificial hormones she’s flooded her body with have done terrible things to her memory.”

“Allowances for size problems were accounted for,” objected a thin fellow who was taking a ‘wait and see’ attitude to the whole matter at hand. He was starting to suspect some kind of personal vendetta from the first representative, and it was starting to grate at him.

The representative smirked. “They wouldn’t be necessary if they didn’t permit mutation into such overlarge forms.”

“If that was the case, the trolls would be harshly penalized for being born over the legal limit of size,” observed another person. They didn’t sound like they thought this was a good thing, or a bad thing. They just said it.

“Which would be cruel and inhumane, to punish people for their biology,” another woman said, more sternly. This got a few nods, but not many, from the fence-sitting portion of the representatives.

The first representative smiled in a very nasty way. “We’ll see.” Those on her side of the ‘lets just be absolute bastards’ crowd nodded. Though in a non committal way. They were intending on making life just the worst for trolls and those like them, but they weren’t going to put themselves onto a bullseye for it.

There came a sound, as if of footsteps, so heavy they made the walls shake even in this auditorium selected for its size. “Ah,” said another. “That must be-”

The door opened. A foot, in an elegant high heeled shoe longer than a child’s bed, crashed into the floor. Then the walls abruptly exploded into a perfect silhouette for something very big to step though; expanding hugely for monstrously huge hips, even more for breasts that looked like they needed trucks to support them, and then, an enormous globe glowing like a blue son.

The awe-inspiringly big woman, as large as any troll, dd not step in. She took another movement and floated into the air, seemingly as light as a leaf. Behind her, the wall rubble floated back into place and sealed itself back into solid form, as though it had never been broken.

“Her,” the figure who had spoken finished weakly.

“So sorry I am late,” Jane Crocker said smoothly, doing her best to hide her screaming nervousness and keep up the pretense of a Cool Business Leader Who Knows Her Stuff. “But then you were all warned, but I apologize again.”

They stared up at her, and the general attitude was of meekness and terrified shock; most of them had never actually been in the same room as a troll before, and weren’t the type to be around people who enjoyed modding themselves; it was their first time seeing someone three times as tall as a human, and so curvaceous, or floating with telekinesis.

It was probably more relevant to their shock that Jane's head, above her eyes, was a massive ball generating so much psionic energy it glowed like light, so thickly that it had taken on solid form and rather resembled her old hair style. Light blue, at that. And it was so massive, taking up a good chunk of the auditorium where she was; it had to measure almost fifty feet across, at least!

“What the fu-” the first representative, the dreadful one, started to say, her eyes widening in disgust and shock.

Jane held up a finger. “Ah. Please let’s not be vulgar?”

The representative stopped. She kept staring, openly repelled. “What have you done to yourself…?! You’re not even human anymore?”

Ah, perfect! Jane repressed the urge to smirk victoriously. Her foe was presenting an overly antagonistic front, and setting herself up to look like the bad guy. This was almost too easy. Her gigantic brain, and all the intellectual boosts it provided, gave her no less than twenty six thousand different routes, each perfectly assured to give her what she wanted, to discredit her foe’s position.

She selected one. ‘Miss, I apologize but whether or not a certain degree of modding voids my species is not the subject of this meeting, nor is it entirely appropriate to comment upon. May I ask that we proceed with the meeting?”

“Ah, yes,” another representative said, rather dazed. He coughed. “First on the agenda, I believe. Now, as representative of the… the biggest modding corporation in the world…” he paused again, trailing off. He kept glancing at Jane’s… well, everything. Jane had to admit that perhaps the low cut of her business suit was rather daring but she was feeling proud of her handiwork in reshaping herself.

“Are mods dangerous? Please!” This was the obnoxious representative, again. Jane had to give her credit; she was dogged. “You WOULD be the expert on that!”

Jane was pleased, despite the insult. The woman had likely prepared a line of questioning intended to poison the meeting against even a moderate position for modding, a subtle one, and Jane’s appearance had rattled her so much, she was showing her hand without thinking.

Making sure to keep her poise and calm demeanor intact, Jane replied evenly, her glasses gleaming in reflection from her cyan aura. A background susurration of her thinking went around, providing perfect counters to everything that might be used against her, and a stray thought observed that Jane’s glass effect probably made her look very spooky.

Jane made her point, briefly but winding her words with so much sincerity and earnestness that just objecting to them would be deeply offensive and cruel. Certainly it would make an opponent look bad, and the woman who had started all this looked uncertain how to proceed.

Appropriate, then. The whole reason that dreadful woman had rearranged the meeting had been to humiliate Jane. And Jane’s position of course; that was a political thing, Making your opponent look back, striking at their position through proxy.

Well, Jane thought. Two could play that role.

Jane reinforced her point, with no less than sixteen different arguments that also served as counter arguments for… well, at least twenty five separate retorts that were in the seventy-six most likely statements she would have to face. That was just off the top of her head of course; she had much stronger arguments in store if they really pushed her.

And she hadn’t cried at all, or showed a sign of her nervous she actually was! She was getting good at pretending to be confident.

About fifteen minutes in, there was something of a problem. “Well, I… ah… that is… I believe Miss Crocker, Egbert…? I think you’ve nicely summed up our side's position on the matter,” said a man who Jane felt certain was on her side. He looked faint, all the same, too unsteady to be certain of what he was really saying.

Jane blinked. She had seen something like this coming, her mighty brain had worked it out, but it was a surprise all the same. “But it’s only been fifteen minutes!”

“Well, yes,” said another. “You thought of everything you needed to say!”

The opponents shook their heads glumly. “What am I supposed to say to any of that?” one managed, shrugging. The first representative didn’t say anything at all. She had a venomous look, but from what Jane had gathered from her, that was just her default state of expression.

“...Oh,” Jane said, using those valuable pauses to work out what to say next. “I am so sorry, everyone!”

“No need, miss,” and this, surprisingly enough, came from the crowd opposed to her position. “I must say. I’m still not comfortably with the idea of injecting things into yourself, or eating things that do things like that to your body… but it’s helped you think faster and better, yes?”

“But of course,” Jane said primly. “The corporation I work at, we are laboring all the time to make such products available for everyone. In more subtle forms, if that pleases you.” She tapped a cybernetic extrusion that looked like the tines of a crown. “It may seem… an unusual choice, but we are all about personal freedom and respect of the body. I can assure you!”

“Certainly something to think about, ma’am,” the speaker replied, and Jane did not miss the switch from ‘Miss’ to ‘ma’am’.

This, of course, left them with nearly six hours left, and not really much less to do for the meeting. In all honesty, she hadn’t seen that coming at all.

Life went on.

Those with a political ear to the ground, or who a close on the research communities, heard of the restrictions around modding being lightened, or at least that they were being considered for it. Trolls, carapacians, and others sighed in relief, grmly waiting for the next government-sponsored threat to their existence, but felt a bit better about this support.

That said, the precise events of the meeting were unknown to most people. The authorities involved were too embarrassed to own up to what had actually happened, and were keeping the particulars under wraps.

This was certainly interesting to Meenah the Elder, known to her friends and employees as the Condesce. She fancied herself a shrewd political player, even if it was mostly of the ‘smash your face against the wall until the wall breaks’ kind of play, and badly wanted to know the specifics.

“Couldn’t tell ya, I didn’t actually attend,” said Li’l Hal, sitting across from her on her personal jet, and he was drinking a cup of milk that was apparently of excellent source, with a hint of alcoholic spice. This was interesting to the Condesce, as he was. Well. In a physical body.

Of all the people to have arrived specifically to meet her at the eve of her trip ending and escorting her to Jane’s mysterious post-politics retreat, she had not expected Jane’s assistant. Particularly in person.

Several questions posed themselves. She settled for, “How the hell did you get a body?”

Hal smirked. His physical body was obviously robotic; a shining and shimmering automaton modeled broadly on the human form, with a hint of carapacian, and facial features from all of those. He didn’t have many features from humans; his antipathy towards the species that had made them was rather infamous, and no doubt he had refused to honor his makers in any way possible with his design.

“Jane designed it,” he said.

She paused. “Janey.”

“Yep.”

“Janey built you a body.”

“Yep.”

“Janey, who has absolutely no interest in mechanics, worked out a branch of robotics we’ve been trying to figure out for decades.”

“Yep.”

“And in the course of mah little trip out, yeah?”

“If I said yep again, would that be redundant.”

Meenah the Elder scoffed. She sat back, a giantess even by the standard of trolls, her engorged figure so enormously swelled that it was said her bras qualified as architectural support and her custom chairs made from old tanks. “Sure, fine. Don’t tell me, chumbait.”

Hal chuckled again, in that very dark way he’d worked out to make people as worried as possible.

Meenah glanced outside. The jet approached an island, the sea visible far below. It offended her ancestry to be so far away from the sea, which was a bit perplexing when she was the first troll of her blood color, but you couldn’t help how you felt. “Huh. That’s the island the Harleys keep all their weird experiments at, right? Where they test the new lusii and keep those big monster things at.”

Hal glanced out the window. A pteranodon was drifting in view, without paying them much interest. “The dinosaurs and stuff. Yeah. Nepeta comes here for hunting and isolation when she’s pregnant.”

“So what’s Janey doing here.”

Hal scratched the side of his arm absently, apparently itching. “She’s working on something and she’s finishing a round of transformation. I guess she wanted to be alone in peace for it.” With a hint of smugness he added, “Except for me.”

“Don’t go breaking yer arm patting yourself on the back,” Meenah the Elder said dryly. “Ya only just got the body.” She glanced out, looking pleased. “Transformation, eh? Janey’s sent me messages ‘bout that. She finally growing big as a troll, like I always figured?”

“Well. Uh. She has. But…?” Hal felt uncharacteristically uncertain. “What DID Jane tell you?”

“Talk about how she’s gotten bigger. And she thinks she’s full of herself.”

“She what?”

“Y’know. She said she’s got a swelled head. Ain’t a bad thing. She knows how good she is, now!”

“I. okay. Wow. I think you may have misunderstood what she meant. I mean. She IS big like a troll now, but-”

“But what?” Meenah the Elder frowned. “Whatta ya getting at?”

Hal considered just telling her, and decided against it. Firstly, it would be a breach of Jane’s trust, telling people without her say so. Secondly, she wanted to greet Meenah the Elder in person, on this eve of her great success. And three, and perhaps most importantly, it was gonna be goddamn hilarious.

“Better to show you,” he said, and successfully did not burst out into a round of maniacal cackling.

The jet touched down onto a runway on a part of the island not particularly frequented by recombinant tyrannosaurs produced by the Harleys (and the meek personalities of kakapo birds, apparently) or rampaging lusii grown to kaiju size from unforeseen complications in the mutations, and the gigantically curvy older troll was pleased by the palatial estate sprawling partway into the sea. Jane liked the finer things in life, and Meenah approved. A short distance away, was… Meenah squinted.

A hill, floating in the air? And beneath it was some kind of round building. Hrm, she considered. Janey was working on some kinda experiment. Worth investigating.

Hal escorted her out and led her, not to the estate, but to Meenah’s surprise, to the hill.

As they got closer, she became aware of a radiant light she had initially believed was a fancy lightshow, but as they walked up a path going to it, she felt the distinctive tingle and skin rippling pressure of psionics. Very powerful ones, at that. “The hell is she doing here? Some kinda psionic battery?”

“That’s… technically true,” Hal said. “I wouldn’t know, though. Not my field.”

She grunted in disinterest.

They came up to it, and small bits of stony rubble, with bits of moss there, were gently floating down. Blue light engulfed them and, as they fell, were reshaped. Carved, perhaps, by an unseen hand. Meenah looked up and saw the hill above them, eclipsed by the vast shape overhead, being changed. The rough edges were being smoothed out, ground down. Little statuettes and gargoyles were extending outwards, getting longer and more ludicrously detailed. The middle of the hill’s bottom half looked like an overworked stonemason’s idea of perfect Gothic architecture, and it was spreading to the rest of it.

Meenah held a hand out. A bit of hill was formed into what was unmistakably a small hand that pressed against her palm. It turned blue and fell away. “Some serious psionics there! Is she carving the damn thing!?”

“I guess so?” Hal said, shrugging.

Meenah looked down, and stars extended from beneath her toe claws. They rose up, moving upwards, all the way up to the top of the hill, but below the big globe above it.

Her wings, fashioned after a manta rays, fluttered and closed. “Guess we go up,” she said, and did so. The stairs didn’t creak beneath her weight, but flexed at the same time her monster hips did. She tried to swat Hal off the stars behind her with her tail, just for mischief, but he dodged it without comment. It was an automatic reaction from her, too.

Meenah came to the top. “Janey! Where are you, girl!?”

“Hey!” A voice said brightly, from in front of her.

Meenah looked up, towards the globe, and for a moment her vision failed her. She saw Jane, sure enough, and from her perspective, floating right below the big globe above them. A globe that was radiant blue, and obscured in a way that made it hard to make out. Jane looked different; bigger, wider, more of that sweet troll bigness.e

Meenah held her arms out, commanding. “C’mere, didn’t come halfway around the world and not get a hug first thing!”

Jane slowly floated down and inside, Meenah thought: ‘Psionics? Hell yeah! That’s a big change, how’d you get to do that!?’ She had been working on that upgrade for a while now. The big globe came with her, so perhaps it really was a battery of some kind.

Jane’s arms, broad and thick with muscle but thicker with softness, came around Meenah’s middle and squeezed her tightly. Meenah hugged her back, and took stock of her in a second; bigger body, much bigger, way more curvy. Hips huge enough to wreck doors; she was a little below Meenah’s elbow and just the right size for a tall troll girl, breasts so big they made up most of her body weight - good and milky, from the sound! - and at this point Condy took in face.

Or rather, Jane’s head.

The globe she had seen was Jane’s head. That massive round shape, larger than an entire apartment building, was a part of Jane! Her head expanded outwards above the temples, into a complex curve of chitinous support frames and complicated psionic networks and great chunks of cybernetic designs, all glowing with so much blue light that it looked like a rather calming star.

Meenah could feel the power emanating from her. That Jane wasn’t even trying to float, and hold up the hill, and carve it up at the microscopic level, all at once.

“Holy shit, yes,” she breathed out, with a rather frightening grin.

“I did it!” Jane said, full of delight and joy. “I did so well at that meeting!”

“I knew it, didn’t I?” Meenah agreed. “Told ya, all those years, you had it! And you did good!” She hugged her again, and then clasped the closest curves of Jane’s enlarged head. “And what’s this beauty I see, eh?”

“Um. The mutagens in my system reacted with my brain boosts and my head sort of … swelled. I tried to tell you.”

“What’s it do for ya? Huh?”

“Psionic boosts,” Jane said promptly. “And a vast increase to intelligence! And, oh, all manner of things. Better reasoning ability, memory retaining, new forms of thinking…”

“Learning a whole new branch of robotics, in a day?” Meenah said.

Jane blushed. “That too…”

“Ya robot boy’s body looks nice.”

“Thank you!”

Meenah patted Jane’s head. It was firm to the touch, very solid, and crackled against her skin. “So, that’s what you meant by a swelled head, huh?” Jane nodded, almost bonking Meenah it he rhead, and this gave Meenah the opportunity to note that the largest bits of biomechanical parts looked like horns. Long, rather thin and… she tried to ignore her hearts skipping a beat. They looked like, her own horns.

Meenah hugged her again. Full of pride, no small amount of respect, and a lot of professional fascination with what Jane had done. “Don’t you tell no one, but I’m this proud of ya. Knew you had it in you.”

Jane grinned, and for once, the pride she felt was not feigned. “Aw!” She thought, in rapid succession, of the best thing to reply, and the obvious one suggested itself. “Thank you… Mother.”

Meenah’s expression, the delighted widening of that smile into something more genuine and sweet, was the finest thing she’d ever seen.

#/#//#///#////#/////#my writing #fics #twitchy!jane crocker #twitchy!homestuck #commissions #i am not actually into brain growth #but this was a commission and im willing to do stuff that's not my kinda thing if its for comission!#queued

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pink-grapefruit-cafe · 5 years

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I’d forgotten it’s Wednesday. I could really do with some opinions on this one so please throw them into my anons! It’s not even 1/4 done i don’t think but have some Trixya!

Seeming when I'm older that it's younger how I feel

Learning that you only get the raw end of the deal

First one to the finish line, but the last one left to know

Second place adorns you no matter where you go

It started on a Monday, except it didn’t - not really.

It started the day she was born, in a small town in Russia where the rain hadn’t stopped for three days and everyone was a little on edge. It started when the doctor, a sweet old man from St Petersburg announced loudly, “It’s a girl!” and then, much quieter and with a little sorrow, “and she has a soulmark.” It started when she was five and she asked her mama why she had a flower on her arm and her Mama cursed and told her to be quiet because ‘good girls don’t ask questions’. When she never heard the word soulmate spoken in the small town she grew up in, not a speck of blood in the snow as the lily rooted its way into the crook of her elbow. When she cried going through test after test to see if they could remove it, uproot it. When a nurse tried to pull the lily out, tried to yank her second heart straight from her arm. It started when they moved to the USA when she was eight, her father explaining in a hushed tone that the small ‘sm’ on her passport wasn’t anything special. And then it changed

It changed in seventh grade when they did a lesson on soulmarks in biology and the teacher was so proud to show off the daffodil on the back of her neck that Katya almost cried. It changed when she watched Alaska’s black dahlia start to uproot itself from her calf midway through sophomore netball because she saw the exchange student through the fence - their eyes meeting for a brief second before a petal fell onto the grass next to them. She watched them fall in love until the flower had long removed itself, leaving a faint outline of the flower that had scarred under her skin. It changed when she learned she was one in a million - an urban myth, a soulmate. Half of a whole, unbreakable.

It changed when she met Trixie

Well I've been out to Austin, back to Boston

Where I've been

Following the highways in my hand

It’s a Monday in spring and Katya is 19 but she feels like she’s 30. The cold of Boston has started to dissipate and instead, a warm breeze tickles her ankles through the DIY rips in her jeans. She is that kid and she is proud of it. Her long sleeves cover the slight protrusion of a soulmate mark - if you were to look closely enough you would make out the raised stem of a lily, following the river-like path of her veins under the white jersey.

She raises her keep-cup to her lips, lets the bitter of the coffee overrule the sap that’s filling her mouth more often these days, the flower routing deeper into her body with each passing day. She hums to herself as she sketches, letting her ankles catch the sun a little as she sits on her coat on the Charles River Esplanade. Katya is majoring in mechanical engineering at MIT with a minor in women and gender studies, something she almost finds fulfiling when she isn’t frantically sketching out a design that would have been done weeks ago if not for the new girl in the team. She’s bright blonde, heavy makeup, dresses to the lab kind of feminine and Katya isn’t intimidated but she is stressed. And distracted.

“Who in their right mind wheres a dress to the engineering labs?” she’d whined down the phone to Alaska after the girls first day. “It’s not even a covering dress.”

“As if you care about her safety,” croaked the girl, knowingly. “You’re just a hoe who can’t focus.”

“And you’re paying for a linguistics course?” Katya bit back, laughing as she said it.

As she’s lost in thought a text comes through. She chuckles as she reads it, typing out a hasty reply before throwing her possessions in her rucksack, draining her coffee and returning to the flat to see what in the name of hell is going on.

“Your lollipop came round,” Yells out Alaska before Katya has even locked the door. The girl shakes off her jacket and stands on the back of her docs to get them off, shot-putting the cup into the sink from the doorway and letting out a little whoop when it goes in on the first try.

“My lollipop? That’s new.” She responds, launching herself onto the couch with a huff.

“Lollipop, Candy cane, sugarplum fairy? They’re all the same to me.” The girl rubs the scar on the back of her leg subconsciously, checking her watch as she does so. “Should Sharon be home by now?” she questions, reading the ache in her leg.

“Said she set off a few minutes ago,” reads Katya from Alaska’s phone - the other girl grabbing it off her when she realises.

She stands up, potters over to the kettle to make a fourth cup of coffee and tries to start a conversation over the whistling of the kettle.

“So Trixie was here?” She yells over the din, answered only by the nodding of the giant space buns over the back of the couch.

“Uhuh, said something about a double major being shit and meeting somewhere at six-ish.”

“Alaska you bitch!” She shouts as she checks the time on the oven. It’s five-forty-five and she’d promised to meet at a little cafe twenty minutes away (not that she’s realised, the river seemed to speed up time).

She sprints out the door like she’s on a mission. She sort of is.

When I go back to Wisconsin

And when I come home again

Has anybody out there seen my man?

Trixie never intended to do engineering. She intended to do fashion design and become, well, a fashion designer but life doesn’t always go the way you plan and like a cat afraid of water, she’s swimming now.

She switched to MIT in her third year because she was told she could, decided to swap design to design engineering and then mechanical because two days before school started again she was told they weren’t running that course - double majoring in biology too because why the hell not. She thinks like a fashion design student but works like a physicist, something that’s made her very few friends in the new course but someone she appears to be always at odds with is Katya. It’s not a cruel rivalry - nothing about it is malicious or rude, they’re just very different. Katya thinks like an engineer and dresses like an edgy art kid, Trixie - doesn’t.

It’s been three months since she got there and she feels now she should probably make peace. It’s all definitely her choice and not the spines that are tearing holes in her clothes as the slowly extrude from her arm. The way they twist in her vein like a bad catheter, bruising til her arm looks like a galaxy and her freckles are the stars. She’s started bandaging over the worst bits, the spikes getting stuck in her coats so when she takes them off it pulls and tugs. She’s not stupid, she knows what it means. She doesn’t have to be excited about it.

He parents had always explained soulmates very nicely and concisely and like they were a choice. Like she didn’t have to have one, it could go away. They’d said ‘Trixie, darling, that cactus isn’t everything, you are more than it,’ and yet she’s always treated it like it was. Like it ruled her destiny - she believes it does.

They meet on a sunny Monday in April, Boston raining intermittently but the sun trying it’s very hardest like a halogen bulb about to blow. She reckons she has enough time to redress her arm before the other girl arrives, takes a seat in a comfy armchair by the window, ripping off the cover like it isn’t pulling out parts of her heart, tiny needles that were once veins. Maybe it’s because she has her eyes closed in pain that she doesn't notice Katya, the girl floating in, pausing at the counter to get a refill in her reusable cup and pulling out a metal straw for Trixie as she sits down opposite. She looks in awe at the Gymnocalycium in the crook of her arm. How it’s tiny spineless flowers sit flush to the skin while the rest seems like it’s jumping out.

“So,” she says, breaking the silence, “Hi.”

#work in progress wednesday #this one is a wild ride y'all #if you think i have a plan you are wrong

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easyfoodnetwork · 4 years

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The Lack of Flavor in ‘Emily in Paris’ Is Only Emphasized by Its Meals

Courtesy of Netflix

Among the Netflix series’s set pieces are a boulangerie, a brasserie, and a bistro, which represent Paris as artlessly as the show’s American protagonist

Democracy in the United States is either in its death throes or just a very painful midlife crisis. We’re a country led by a very sick, very silly old man. Meanwhile, a non-ideological virus is metastasizing thanks to ideological idiocy, and a fly is the star of the vice presidential debates since it is slightly more meme-able than systemic racism. Meanwhile, I’m trying to decide whether to pay for COBRA or child care. Recession turns deeper, expressions turn dire. Sartre looks like a Hallmark card. And amid all this chaos, more chaos: Netflix releases Emily in Paris.

What could have been, and should have been, a blissful escapist confection, the Darren Star — he of Sex in the City and Younger — production is instead a croissant of poop and pee that proves, as Sartre entitled his play, there is no exit. The remit of this review, like all Eater at the Movies, is how food plays into the show. In this case, all of Emily in Paris’s ineptitude can be refracted through the show’s boulangerie, brasserie, and bistro, which, like every other aspect of the city, is simplified into inane simulacra, a fetishized form whose richness and texture has been stripped away through Instagram filters and the willful trite presuppositions, not to mention arrogance and cupidity, of the titular character, Emily.

Though the series bursts with an admixture of Parisian errata and cliche, the first true food moment doesn’t pertain to Paris at all but to Chicago, the former home of Emily Cooper, the social media manager hero (with fewer than 50 Instagram followers?) who has left the Windy City for the City of Light. Upon meeting her boss’s boss at the Parisian marketing firm to which she has been assigned, the man says, apropos her home city, “I know Chicago. I’ve had the deep-dish pizza there.” Emily begins to say how proud Chicagoans are of it when he interrupts, “It was like a quiche made of cement.” To which Ms. Cooper replies, “You must have eaten at Lou Malnati’s.” There are literally endless fictional pizzerie to slag off. Combine any vowel-heavy chain of syllables and you have a mediocre joke that would land almost exactly the same. And yet, no, Emily in Paris chose Lou Malnati’s, a deep-dish institution in Chicago since 1971. Sure, it’s a chain, but a small one, and there might be (certainly is) better deep-dish pizza out there, but why pick on Lou? This isn’t David versus Goliath as much as Goliath flicking boogers on David, and to what end? In a bid for insider specificity, the series shat on a small business. And if the argument is made that any publicity is good publicity, that simply proves that the inherent ickiness of the character is, sad to say, true to life: that all we have is spectacle.

We are, I think, quite rightly in need of some sort of frothy fantasy. I mean, how many times can you refresh the New York Times or rewatch The Social Dilemma or listen to the next NPR Politics Podcast? But it is equally true that in times as trying as these, which are — and here is a truth out of which we can not wriggle — a consequence of our dysfunction, the hitherto benign escape routes we previously took reveal themselves as not quite as benign as we thought. Would Emily in Paris hit differently if it weren’t also true that we are watching in real time how social media has rendered reality subservient to our easily shared interpretations of it? I dunno, does smoking look so cool on film when your grandfather died of lung cancer? I think not. Despite the beauty Paris has to offer, the show is built on an ugly and insidious premise. Everything is content. Nothing is real unless extruded into a social media algorithm, ratified in its existence by the likes of others. There is no present. There is only post, and posting.

Almost countless times through the first three episodes, Emily and the other characters demonstrate a complete disregard for reality in preference for the platforms of social media (in the show, these posts float on screen, complete with followers and hashtags, like ethereal projections.) Paris isn’t Paris but, as Emily tells her Chicagoan boyfriend while Facetiming as she walks, “The entire city looks like Ratatouille.” Meaning that the character’s entire frame of reference is itself a cartoonish recreation, a copy of a copy of a copy.

In another instance Emily’s friend Mindy Chen, one of the very few people of color to make an appearance in this unrelentingly white show, says, “Have you ever had ris de veau?” to which Emily replies, “Why? What is that, rice with veal?” to which Mindy replies, “That’s what I thought too. I think it’s brains or balls, but it tastes like ass.” As a frequent and fervent eater of ass, I can say affirmatively this is not the case. Ris de veau, which are sweetbreads, are not brains, balls, nor ass, but the thymus. This isn’t Chef’s Table and we don’t need a slow-motion disquisition on it but, for the love of God, would it hurt to close the loop on that in some way so that the error, and yes, defamation of a protein doesn’t stand uncorrected? No, and the reason is that reality doesn’t matter.

Now, it should be mentioned that Emily’s paramour, Gabriel (Lucas Bravo), is a chef; in fact, he is the chef at the bistro at which the ris de veau conversation takes place. He is incredibly handsome. So handsome. Like if Armie Hammer procreated with one of the sturdier barricades in Les Mis — Gabriel would be the gorgeous offspring. I mean, even though I’m quite upset about this true excrescence while contemplating his torso and face, I’m filled with jouissance, with all its Barthesian overtones of orgasmic joy. And I guess the contemplation of his beauty has put me in a good mood too, because honestly the acting throughout the series is really strong and Paris’s beauty does emerge from the shitshow unscathed and even if the boulangerie are nothing but blank parodies of themselves and the scenes within them are riddled with continuity errors, to see such vast array of batards, baguettes, pains au chocolat, croissants, and brioche is enormously pleasurable. But anyway, as angelic as he is, Gabriel can’t save this carnival of fart smell.

Look, there is smart-dumb and dumb-dumb and the archetype of an ingenue American in Paris is well-trod territory both in the hands of Star himself (viz. the “An American Girl in Paris” episodes of Sex in the City) as well as by luminaries such as Godard in A Bout de Souffle. Sometimes a naif from the Midwest is a divine fool, recognizing truths unseen by those accustomed to them. But Emily in Paris is dumb-dumb. That is to say, the show is silly in ways that I can’t imagine they meant to be. Consider the croissant. At one point, as an indicator of Emily’s rapier wit, she takes a picture of a gaggle of French women, fresh from spinning, enjoying a post-workout smoke. “#Frenchworkout #Smokin’bodies” she writes in a judge-y Instagram caption. Unremarked upon is the fact that Emily, still clad in her running outfit (which reveals, it might be noted, a totes shredded six pack), is holding a croissant — which is totally fine, but an indulgence all the same. This falls into a pattern that presents paradoxes without comment and which seem sloppy rather than provocative. The most egregious example, I think, takes place at the bistro where, unbeknownst to Emily, her potential new boyfriend Gabriel works as head chef. In a trope as well done as a Shake Shack patty, she sends her steak back, complaining it is undercooked. This is then followed by a brief very American diatribe about how, in America, the customer is always right. Is she supposed to be ridiculous or relatable? At any rate, the steak is sent back to the kitchen and then presented almost immediately with the predictable reply that the meat is cooked as the meat should be cooked. Emily is on the edge of advocating for herself when she catches sight of Angel Gabriel and, in an act again of unremarked-upon deflation, quickly backtracks to say the steak is perfect as it is. What are we left with but an increasingly futile hope that this is all pretext for a massive late-season volta in which Emily, like Oedipus or Creon, realizes her shortcomings, gouges out her eyes, and exiles herself to the periphery? No, this fantasy holds as little promise in Emily in Paris as it does in Washington, D.C.

There’s an early scene when Emily first meets her new best friend, Mindy, who is working as an au pair despite (or in spite of) her familial wealth. In this scene, the pair are sitting in a Parisian park and Mindy’s charges, two towheaded French children, are playing by a fountain. Without asking, Emily snaps and shares a picture of the kid to her account @emilyinparis, demonstrating her growing habit of photographing and Instagramming people without their consent. In this instance, I got so mad I had to get up and do a lap around my living room. What irked me so much was that taking a picture, let alone sharing it, of minors is so fucked up and, as it happens, illegal according to France’s Penal Code (Sec 226.1) and yet here passes without mention as if it were de rigueur. The gesture takes something beautiful and alive and, with an unthinking sense of entitlement, pins it like a dead monarch for the display and edification of others, imprisoning it behind hashtag bars and digested in the maw of a rapacious feed. And this gesture, which is essentially one of disrespect, is at the heart of every line, in every bite of every morsel of every meal that is served in Emily in Paris. To see something you know is beautiful made to bow in order to enter through the narrow aperture of idiocy makes one lose one’s appetite. Sure, Paris is a city of lights, of beauty, of love and, yes, croissants. But the more you love Paris, which is to say, the more you love life, with all its complexity, nuance and agenda- and metric-defying splendour, the more you’ll find Emily in Paris unpalatable, if not downright degueulasse.

Joshua David Stein is the co-author of the forthcoming Nom Wah Tea Parlor and Il Buco Essentials: Stories & Recipes cookbooks and the memoir Notes from a Young Black Chef with Kwame Onwuachi. He is the author of the six children’s books, most recently The Invisible Alphabet, with illustrations by Ron Barrett. Follow him on Instagram at @joshuadavidstein.

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Courtesy of Netflix

Among the Netflix series’s set pieces are a boulangerie, a brasserie, and a bistro, which represent Paris as artlessly as the show’s American protagonist

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#Blogger #cooking #Eater #food #recipes

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