#thread that collapses the rest of the piece when its gone.

[basilpaste]

me when i can use thread snapping as symbolism.

[storiesbyrhi]

Witch!Reader x Bat/Vampire!Eddie Munson Series Masterlist The Grimoire The Timeline

Warnings: canon typical violence, horror genre typical violence/some infrequent gore, swearing, animal death, no beta, death in childbirth (mentioned, not described), abusive parents, suicide, spiders/bugs, warnings updated each chapter.

Synopsis: No witch has stepped foot in Hawkins since 1845, but when Vecna opens the ground and poisons the town, a voice begins to call to you. Have you been brought back to this cursed place to heal the townspeople’s wounds, to save a hexed bat that always finds its way to you, or to redefine your history with a reunion 150 years in the making?

Chapter Summary: Liminal spaces. 3515 words.

1587

Knock, knock.

Edward screamed awake. There was daylight coming from somewhere, so he had some sense that he’d made it through the night. Something was wrong. But there was stillness and it was at odds with how he felt.

He squinted around, gaze landing on the man who saved him. He was wide awake and had pushed himself into the corner of their hideout. His mouth opened like he was going to speak to Edward, but quickly he abandoned the act. There were enough clues on his face though. Beyond the grief was disbelief.

Edward didn’t need the man to tell him that he had died. He remembered the agony. The nothingness after it. Then, a force dragging him back, knock… knock… knocking as it went.

The men looked at each other.

“Thank you,” Edward said, his voice hoarse and barely audible. “But… you must leave…” Maybe he meant ‘you must leave and see what is left of your people,’ or ‘you must leave for I do not know what is to become from me,’ or maybe something else. Whatever the meaning, it was understood.

The man nodded once and began to crawl through the hideout. As he passed Edward, he brushed his knuckles along Edward’s jawline. It was a tender and kind touch, the very last of its kind in the new vampire’s life.

It was not as though Edward had been consciously aware of his heartbeat throughout his life, but he as soon as he was alone, he was shockingly aware of the lack of it.

His body was completely and utterly silent.

He laid in the dirt, closed his eyes, and tried to rest. He prayed to a God he had never believed in for a short second life. Let me rot into this earth. When the itch of his eyes turned prickly, little needles scraping against them, Edward realised there would be no rest.

If he couldn’t shut his eyes, he would focus on something. He looked around, determined that he was in a small hollow under a tree surrounded by dirt and bark debris. There was a spider – the largest Edward had ever seen – with spindly legs and smooth motion. She was starting a web, only two pieces of silk threaded so far.

The pain was rolling back into him, like it was furious that he was trying to distract himself.

The pain was heavy, pinning him to the dirt floor with enough force he couldn’t move even his little finger. Bubbly, frothy heat. His blood undergoing an unholy chemical reaction. Edward’s muscles tensed and he couldn’t scream, his jaw locked firm. All he could do was whimper.

It was worse than sea sickness. Worse than a hangover. Worse than a gut punch. The nausea tore his stomach to shreds, the ache pulsing through his spine and permeating his entire body. He cramped until his eyes rolled into the back of his head.

He did not fall asleep or become unconscious, but Edward slipped away for some time. When he saw the spider again, he came back, sure that it had been hours. It had been at least half a day’s worth of pain, he thought.

Four.

Four glittering threads of webbing.

Only a minute had gone by. Each second agony.

The nausea didn’t leave, but it was joined by new kinds of pain that felt unfamiliar to Edward. His lungs didn’t work anymore, didn’t need to work, but he still felt short of breath. Claustrophobic. It was not just the hideout closing in on him but the entire world, collapsing in on his hollowed-out body. The weight of it. The history of its suffering all catching up and pressing into Edward like he was the catalyst for it all.

It continued like this. He couldn’t be sure what was real and what was poetic imagery. Did it feel like he grounded his teeth into a gritty pulp, only for new ones to take their place? Or did that actually happen? Did it feel like his bones were coated in molten metal? Or did that happen? Did it feel like each of his fingernails had been slowly ripped from their beds? Or did that happen?

Half a web. She’d spun half a web. Such a good spider.

Edward’s ears may as well have been filled with dirt. He couldn’t make out sounds. Maybe the ocean… or was it a chorus of screams? The roar of flames? No. No. Silence. There was silence. Maybe. Knock, knock.

A voice? Yes. Edward could hear his father calling his name. It must have been his father because anyone who knew him from the colony would have been calling for Wayne. So, his father…

Daddy?

No. There was no voice. Nobody calling.

Silence.

His skin hurt. He wanted to scratch. He needed to. But he couldn’t move. It hurt.

Hurt.

Hurts.

Check the web.

Only one more thread. She’s getting there, though. The day was soon to grow old, Edward decided, because it was getting cooler. Or was that just him? He was cold. He knew he was cold. He was dead and dead things are cold.

Dead.

The pain travelled. Uncharted. No map for Edward to follow. Free falling. Then, worse than the complete unknown, the tiniest flicker of recognition. There was something in the pain. If he could just focus and think, maybe he could place it. To what end, he didn’t know. What function could naming the pain serve?

Web.

It was complete. Edward would have done a second take if he could have moved his body. The spiderweb was finishsed, glistening in the thin rays of orange light that had filtered in from the world above. How much time had passed? He reconciled with the fact that time did not mean anything. Not anymore. Not ever again.

The spider was gone. His eyes flicked around, looking for her. Was she a friend? An adversary? Food? Edward didn’t know. It hurt to move his eyes so much, so he stared at the web and waited.

Fire.

Meat.

Salt.

Ocean.

Burning.

Had he been able to smell the whole time or was the sense coming back to him? Edward didn’t care. Didn’t care that the scents could mean people were close. Close enough to help. Even if help came in the form of being put down. He was watching the web be built. No. No, that’s not right. He was looking for the spider? No. The spider was gone. It was all gone. Except the pain.

Hurts.

Dirt. He could smell the dirt. The layers of forest mulch. A dead animal decomposing. Mud and moss. Salt. Salt. The ocean.

Hunger.

Hunger.

Please, God.

It was hunger. Edward’s pain took the same shape as hunger. He knew it well. The scraps thrown to him by his father. Warm meals cooked by the nice neighbour when he was left home alone for days on end. Hot, dusty afternoons on the farm. Sneaking apples. Apples. Appie pie from the farmer’s wife. Food. Hunger. Hungry.

Eat.

Eat.

Eat.

The hunger demanded attention. Now that the revelation was clear, Edward couldn’t think of anything else. The monster took over, its primal need to quench an unholy thirst.

Drink. Drink. Drink. Drink. Drink.

Finally, Edward’s body could move. He snapped up into a sitting position, scrambling around the small space. He crawled out the same way the man had left, only to recoil when the sunlight touched his skin. He tumbled back into the hideout, hissing like an animal.

DRINKDRINKDRINKDRINKDRINKDRINK

He dug down in a frenzy, pulling worms from the ground and swallowing them whole. He ripped the bark from the trees, searching for anything. That’s where she was. The spider. Edward didn’t recognise her. She was being chewed into a pulp before she knew she’d been found.

Suddenly, Edward’s stomach heaved. His whole body rippled with it. It all came back out. A gooey mess of saliva and half-crushed insects.

 DRINKDRINKDRINKDRINKDRINKDRINK

There was no planning. Only action. Edward held his arm to his mouth and bit down. It was easy. New teeth. He wriggled his teeth to make the holes in his flesh a little wider, a little deeper. The blood didn’t flow, but he could suck.

He did it again. And again. Until his arm was a patchwork of open wounds and bite marks.

Blood, he learned.

He needed blood.

His own would quieten the voice demanding it, but it would not be enough.

Edward sat motionless. The pain was subsiding. His thoughts were returning. He was himself, but not really. He looked down at his arm. I cannot die, he reasoned. He’d sucked enough blood out that it would have killed a mortal man.

A boy born through violence. Raised by it. Drenched in it. It was inevitable that it would come to this. Wasn’t it? He could run from it. Pretend he was better than it. Fated, he thought. He was fated to become a monster.

The shadows moved across the hideout, slowly dissolving into twilight’s darkness.

It didn’t need to knock to tell Edward it was there. Edward had felt it come. He had heard the monster walk through the woods, a straight line to the tree, and call for his son. He crawled through the bug vomit, through pieces of his own flesh, through dirt.

Out in the night, Edward stood, unsteady on his new feet. The monster had heard stories about turnings going wrong. It wasn’t an exact science, though, he suspected Edward did not get enough vampire blood in the beginning. Then, his first human feed would be much too delayed. Mostly, bad turnings meant a true death. They would not revive as a vampire. But Edward… the monster did not know what to make of Edward. He was undead. He would need blood to survive. But there was something wrong with him. Some residual humanity. A shell of a conscience.

He would never truly be one of them.

Edward followed the vampire to what was left of the second attempt at a Roanoke colony. A majority of the English had been slaughtered. Drank dry. Some had managed to flee, finding safe haven with the Native Americans – who had also come under attack but faired better as they knew where to hide from the vampires. They would never return, instead assimilate, and move south to Croatoan Island. Almost a third of the colony had been turned. There would be nothing and no one to find when Governor John White returned in 1590.

What was left in front of Edward, though, was a handful of humans. Edward could smell it. Warm. Fresh. Blood. He was upon one of the humans before he could think. Nobody had to teach him how to become a monster, he’d been watching them all his life.

With the human blood, Edward’s arm healed. There were no scars, and there would be none until he first met witchfire years later. Edward travelled with the vampires, his new colony, but remained an outsider. He adopted an American accent. He taught himself, his education robust and deep. He did not hold back. He lost himself in the darkness. It was easy, in the end, giving up his soul.

When he was alone, Edward would bite through the flesh of his arm, just to see. There was no real pain. A kind of blood. But death? Never death.

He killed countless humans, not distinguishing between the ones who deserved it and the ones who didn’t. He pulled witches apart. Terrorised fae. Pain and fear were left in his wake. He wrote his own story, decided he was evil. That maybe, he always had been.

In 1836, his colony was moving through the American Midwest when they heard of a growing population in the flatlands of Indiana. The humans were protected by a coven of witches. This will be fun, Edward thought.

…

1986

The shopping list that had grown longer and longer was finally made redundant. Your Walmart shopping cart was full of all the things you needed to make the trailer a home. Clothing, linen, nice tea that was sold in a gift pack for a birthday. A television, modern snack food, and a lot of VHS and cassette tapes.

Eddie pushed the cart, following you down the aisles. It was late but still busy; Walmart seemed to exist in a liminal space. It was both a destination and a thoroughfare. Nobody belonged there but everyone was welcome. And, it seemed entirely unaffected by the events that had taken place in Hawkins. It was as if you were in a bubble.

You turned to Eddie, ready to ask him if there was anything else he would like or need. His gaze was fixed on where a group of children, unsupervised and hyped up on sugar, were pulling basketballs out of their packaging. The kids were throwing them at each other in a chaotic game of dodgeball.

“You can’t eat them,” you whispered to Eddie.

He shot you an amused look. “Oh? Not even one?”

It didn’t even cross your mind to wonder what your coven would think of you. Instead, you were utterly charmed, smiling back at Eddie.

It was then that a rogue basketball collided with your face.

Before anyone saw, Eddie had collected the ball and thrown it at the children with such force it looked like three of them were knocked to the ground by an invisible force. They scattered – some running crying to their parents, others evading Walmart staff.

Eddie was in front of you, cradling your face in his hands. His panicked expression told you there was blood. You lifted your fingers to your split lip, feeling the wetness.

“I’m okay,” you told him. “Are you?”

His eyes flicked from your mouth to your eyes. He nodded slowly.

“Okay. Let’s get our stuff and go, okay?”

He nodded again, following you to the checkout. As you stood in line, sucking on your bottom lip, you could feel how ill at ease Eddie was. You reached for his cool hand, willing him to take in your warmth and let it ground him.

In the car, you said, “I can heal it, if it’s bothering you.”

Eddie’s eyebrows creased together.

“Did you forget that I’m a witch? A healing witch?”

He thought for a moment. “Why haven’t you healed it? If you can?”

You shrugged. “Sometimes it’s good to feel… normal. Human… And it’s kind of comforting, feeling the wound. Then the healing. Scab. Scar. I don’t know… Not everything has to be fixed with magic.” Also, you didn’t hate the metallic tang of blood, but you left that part out.

“If it does not hurt you, it does not bother me.”

On the ride home, Eddie was introduced to Iron Maiden, and naturally, their very own Eddie.

…

Having a vampire around the house proved to be somewhat convenient. Eddie easily carried in the shopping, lifting the CRT television like it weighed nothing. He whipped around the trailer, piling the now-dry clothes into a washing basket, and moving things around.

“Eddie! EDDIE! Stop. Stop!” you yelled, laughing. “You don’t have to…” You waved your arms randomly. “…All this. Just sit. Pick a movie to put on. I’ll do this stuff.”

He looked skeptical, and you burned to know the person he had been before his undeath. Still, Eddie did what you asked, slinking over to the couch and making his selection.

You liked nesting. Folding laundry and putting it away. Changing bedsheets. Lighting scented candles. You built yourself a home while Eddie watched The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Halfway through you thought maybe you should explain that the film shouldn’t be taken as a demonstration of modern culture, but as something far more punk. Subversive. Countercultural, really. Instead, you let the vampire sit there in awe at the singing and dancing.

“I fear, I am failing to understand the meaning of this,” he confessed as you sat down next to him with a cup of lavender and lemon tea.

“Most people do.”

Once again, you disregarded your natural sleep cycle with reckless abandon. The next tape in the VHS player was Dracula. You giggled as it started.

“This is about thirty years old, but it is easily one of the greatest vampire films. Its legacy is… I can’t really explain it. But this is what people think of, mostly, when they think of vampires.”

Eddie was unconvinced. Despite his memory loss, there was knowledge embedded in his DNA. He pointed out every single inaccuracy of the film.

“Wood? Wood cannot kill a vampire. No matter how sharp their stake may be!”

“GARLIC?!”

“Sunlight burns, but it cannot kill.”

It did occur to you, this time, to wonder about your coven. You wondered if throughout history, all that time witches spent trying to defeat vampires, if any of them had met one like Eddie. To learn from.  To form an alliance with.

Probably not.

“Oh, if this offends your delicate sensibilities, just wait until Fright Night. That came out last year. The special effects are cutting edge,”

“Are the vampires this… foolish?”

Poor Christopher Lee.

“They are… more monstrous… Demonic.”

Eddie looked pleased with that, which was painfully ironic.

“You have to see Blacula too. And there are some others you are very much obligated to see,”

“And of witches? How accurately are you portrayed in these films?” he asked.

Bewitched. Bell, Book and Candle. Suspiria. I Married a Witch. Black Sunday.

“About the same. Though, witches are only sometimes the villains,”

“But never in real life,” Eddie commented, antagonistic but not cruel.

You shrugged. “I guess I don’t know anymore.”

The credits of Dracula rolled and you crawled along the carpet to switch all the electronics off. In the quiet, you turned around and leaned upon the coffee table-turned-makeshift altar. You and Eddie looked at each other. You were a breath away from saying, ‘I should go to bed,’ when Eddie suddenly said-

“I believe we knew each other.”

You knew what he meant. Before. Before the hex. Before whatever had happened. You nodded.

“We were, perhaps, friends,” he continued.

Again, you nodded. A tear formed and rolled down your cheek slowly. Eddie folded onto the carpet opposite you, leaning across the altar.

“Why does that make you sad?” he asked.

“I don’t understand why I could have done this to you… Why I can’t remember you… I’d remember you.” There was desperation in your voice and it spoke of what was being left unsaid. The shared thought both you and Eddie had. That maybe, perhaps, you were more than friends. “Tomorrow I’ll ask The Witches Who Came Before. Demand they tell me more,”

“Does it work like that?”

“No… but maybe they’ll make an exception,”

“Do you think they know of my existence here, in this form, in this time?”

“They’ve got to. I’ve thought about it and I didn’t realise at the time, but they told me that you would fight alongside me, against Vecna. They’ve got to know,”

“And yet they have not… warned… your coven?” Eddie was choosing his words carefully.

You shook your head. “It’s weird… Nothing makes sense… but…” But we do.

“Tomorrow then,” Eddie whispered, standing up and holding a hand out for you to take.

As he led you down the hall and into bed, you chewed your lip and tried to swallow the heaviness you felt. Like he had the previous night, Eddie climbed under the covers with you. His watchfulness wasn’t unnerving; it was comforting. You stared back at him.

Eddie sensed your anxiety. He slid closer to you, moving at a pace that you could see and stop him if you so wished. You wouldn’t, of course. He pressed his forehead to yours and brushed his nose along the bridge of yours. When you breathed out, he sucked in your exhale, sweet with life and longing.

If he were alive, Eddie’s heart would have been racing. He kissed your forehead, soft and gentle. Tentative. Inquisitorially. Your skin was hot against his lips. When you nuzzled closer to him, he smiled and kissed the tip of your nose. Eddie could hear your heart. It was racing enough for the both of you.

It was natural. His mouth had been here before. He kissed your cheek, then with chaste, your lips. You didn’t push him away or cry out for help. You made a small happy humming noise, so sleepy and on the cusp of slumber that Eddie was apprehensive to keep you awake. One last kiss, he thought.

Your lips touched and your mouth opened, just enough to let his tongue taste you. It was over before it began. You settled and tumbled headfirst into a dream.

Eddie was still. Frozen. The taste. The taste in your mouth was not lingering lavender or buttery Hostess CupCakes. It was not tangy life or witch branded spit. It was copper and salt. Split lip red.

Then, everything all at once.

Blood of my blood.

Eddie remembered everything.

End Note: DID ANYONE GUESS THAT EDDIE'S ORIGIN STORY IS THE MYSTERY OF THE ROANOKE COLONY? If you go back and read the first part of this section (Eddie's story), there are so many clues.

Also, I am not sure if it was clear, but the person who rescued Eddie from the vampire's attack was the same person he came across in the forest that day he went for a casual AWOL walk. I like the idea that this one moment of non-violence, when they first met, led to him being rescued, which is ultimately the reason he retained his humanity.

Shout out to @courtingchaos for helping me with this chapter. And to @eddiemunsonbignaturals and @jadehowlettthewolf - I hope you liked the incorporation of your suggestions.

Lastly, put yourself in our Little Witch’s position for a moment… Let’s say you and Eddie both get your memories back… What would you do first, right there in the moment? Then, that day? And beyond that? I may or may not be writing ahead in the story, and if you have requests or ideas for what you’d like to see happen, now is the time to speak.

Love you all! xo Rhi

Fic Taglist:  @paranoidmunson  @idkidknemore @paprikaquinn @stardustworlds @loz-brooke @wyverntatty @vintagehellfire @dark-academia-slut @scarletwitchwhore @becks1002 @mrsdollardog @heyndrix @luceneraium @rosaline-black @devilinthepalemoonlite @goldencherriess @iamwhisperingstars @wiltedwonderland @blueywrites @breezybeesposts @jadehowlettthewolf @spikesvamp79 @foreveranexpatsposts @tortoiseshellspells @wingedpeachjudgegiant @stardustmunson @live-love-be-unique @fangirling-4-ever @reanimated-alice @b-irock @gh0stlybunnie @myown-worstenemy-2003 @woozzz @cyberxlust @hiscrimsonangel @buckysbarne @m00nlight101 @word-wytch @spicysix @briasnow-blog @goth-cowgirl-03

All Eddie Taglist: @solomons-finest-rum @ruinedbythehobbit @sweetpeapod @thorfemmes  @corrodedhawkins @grungegrrrl @lilzabob  @averagemisfit03 @ches-86 @ilovecupcakesandtea @onehotgreasymechanic @hazydespair @mel-the-fangirl @eddies-hid3out @siren-lungs @aheadfullofsteverogers @hiscrimsonangel

[musutofu]

【 I’ll Be Gone 】

♡ pairing | Dabi x ᶠᴱᴹ Reader

✑ word count | 2.1k

✎ genre | angst

✗ warnings | absentee father!Dabi

The passcode is still his birthday. 0-1-1-8. There was a moment of hesitancy before the light flickered to green, beeping its quiet acquiescence as he ducks inside the apartment. The hall light blinks awake with a dull click, washing the entryway in a wave of stark white light. It stings after spending the night walking aimlessly, wearing at the soles of his shoes as he waded through the dark underbelly of the city. Abandoned shops with sun bleached newspapers covering the cracked windows, alleyways crowded with refuse, and sidewalks littered with shards of glass. The city has nearly been brought to heel, the horizon standing half decimated as the yellowish blue glow of light pollution traces out the shapes of hollowed out buildings slipping from their foundations. Cars still sit in the streets, doors hung open and windows shattered, some dented and dusted with rubble where the city began to collapse around it. 

The streetlights hardly lit anything. Tall poles serving to mark each mile he’d wandered as the fluorescents hummed a fading song overhead, moths crowding around the few spots of light that hadn’t been lost when the city went to shit. It’s his fault, he knows. Partially, anyway. He played his own cards in the hand that threatened to level a piece of the country and he was proud of it. He’d gotten what he wanted. At least a fraction of it. But what was that worth now? There was still more to do, another plan to enact, but now he finds himself content to toe off his boots in the light of a home that will never be his. 

He’s comfortable enough in it though. After spending so many nights here there’s a gentle wave of nostalgia that colors the familiar smell that permeates the apartment. He’s glad for it. It doesn’t smell like rot and decay, doesn’t carry the scars that marr the rest of the city. These few blocks had narrowly escaped the chaos that unfolded just a short walk away. He hadn’t thought to worry about it at the time but now he’s grateful. There’s hardly anything he cares about in this life. Not even himself. But the two people that call this place home will always be important to him. It isn’t love. He can’t bring himself to imagine what that would feel like. But he feels obligated. The one thing he’s always been good for is dedication, determination. He won’t let this be the one place he lets that falter. 

The hall light clicks out as he wanders further inside, past the door he should open to the one he knows he shouldn’t. It’s cracked slightly, a pale thread of blue light glowing from within. Little blue stars dot across the ceiling, keeping the room from complete darkness. Just enough light to see the baby sleeping soundly in his crib. The tiny thing he is even after all these months, though bigger than he remembers. His face has more shape now, too, features beginning to fully form. Tufts of snow-white hair blanket his little head as pale lashes flutter softly as he dreams. So strange, he thinks, that this little person could look so much like him. The baby’s mother had always called him pretty. Not that he ever believed her. It was hard to see beauty in a face that was scarred and held together with metal and vengeance. He couldn't die yet. Couldn’t succumb to the deterioration his Quirk was causing. Even his body knew he shouldn’t be here, but he had things he needed to do before he turned to ash. None of which included his son that had those same eyes that he did. 

His fingers are rough but he wants to touch, to be sure this isn’t a dream. It’s selfish to want it to be real but he’s never been a particularly altruistic person. He’s here because he wants to be. He walked all this way. Impulsive as it was, he isn’t going to draw the line at something so simple.  

“I’ll leave soon.” He says, hardly a whisper but his voice is so fried that he can hardly speak above a gravely drawl without shouting. He feels her watching him, heard her wake and move down the hall. There’s a board in the hall that creaks. He’d skipped it as he slipped past her room but he heard her coming. Her shadow lingers in his periphery as he traces his fingertips across his son’s cheek. His skin is like a dumpling. Round and warm. The baby stirs at last and he expects tears, a warbled cry to break out as his eyes settle on the monster leaning over his crib. Instead, he sneezes, hard enough to scrunch his whole body. It’s probably the ash that seems to follow him everywhere but when he tries to pull his hand away the baby follows, tiny fingers wrapping around his pinkie. 

“You shouldn’t be here.” She says at last. Her voice is thick with exhaustion, low and warm and familiar in a way he wishes it wasn’t. He could get lost in it, in her. But he has things he needs to do. 

“I know.” He wants to pick the baby up, to hold his son just for a moment. “I’ll leave soon.” She sighs but doesn’t tell him to get out. They’ve reached an impasse with these things. If she wanted him gone she could fight him. Kick and scream and wake her neighbors and call the police. Instead, she resigns herself to the chair in the corner, drawing a blanket around herself. If she didn’t want him here she would’ve changed the door code. It’s still his birthday. 0-1-1-8. It used to be something different. Something he never bothered to remember. But he woke her up one too many times banging on her door in the early hours of the morning when the sky was still dark and his pounding fists would wake the whole floor if she wasn’t quick enough. But it’s still his birthday. He wouldn’t have raised hell tonight. If the little light had turned red and denied him entry he would’ve walked away. Probably for the last time. It would be all the closure he’d get from all this. Certainly more than he’d deserve. If he were a better man he wouldn’t need closure. He’d be here. With her. With him. But he’s never been a good man. 

“Bring him here.” She says when the baby begins to squirm, screwing his face up again like he’s going to sneeze but he begins to cry instead. But never lets go of his father’s finger. Father. He hates the word. Feels disgusted by it, unworthy of it. Even still it’s what he is. Some truths can never be denied. The past won’t be forgotten and the present won’t be ignored. The baby is as wriggly as a snake trying to squirm loose from his arms as he carries him to his mother. She tucks him into the blanket with her, lifting her shirt to let him eat. He shouldn’t but he can’t stop himself from noticing that the shirt must’ve been his. Stolen and old, it’s loose at the neck and the letters have been faded by too many washes. It hangs too big on her frame as she lifts it away to feed his son. It’s wholly mesmerizing in a way he can’t place. And if she minds his staring she doesn’t mention it. 

He expected that much at least. He’s seen her in various states of undress but this feels entirely more intimate than he deserves to see. But he’s nothing if not selfish. His eyes watch his son as he nuzzles against his mother’s skin, slowly falling back to sleep with the rocking of the chair as he eats. He knows the routine. The bouncing and burping before laying him back in his crib. The sleepy little noises that gurgle from his son pluck at something inside him, long buried and forgotten. So much so that he can’t even place the feeling. He turns away and comes face to face with his child’s mother. She looks beautiful and he can’t help but hate that he thinks so. Ratty shirt and tied-up hair, tired bruises beneath her eyes. She looks like a mother. A single one at that. And she is. But she still looks too pretty for him to look away. Every time he sees her it might be the last and he doesn’t want to waste a moment feigning disinterest when it’s painfully obvious he can’t stay away. Something about her will always pull him back. He doesn’t want there to be there. Shouldn’t be. He’s above attachment in every instance except for this. What reason could he possibly have for falling back to her like she’s the gravity keeping him center? 

He looks over her again, willing himself to see her as something expendable now that she’s lost her newness. But he’s never been able to be rid of her the way he could toss aside anyone else. She frowns at his staring, fingers playing at the tattered hem of her shirt as she rolls her weight nervously on the balls of her feet. She has no reason to feel so anxious in front of him. She’s the one with the future. All he has is the here and now and he hates to admit that he’s happy to be here with her. He doesn’t deserve the feeling. Not after all he’s done. But she lets him. Maybe that makes her just as bad as him but he can’t bring himself to see her as anything other than perfect. 

“I’ll leave soon.” He promises but doesn’t move. He doesn’t want to leave yet. He wants to be here with her. It’s why he walked all this way. For these stolen moments where he can be greedy in a way he’ll never deserve. She accepts his kiss when he leans in, wondering if she cares that he tastes like blood where his lip is split. She’s just as terrible as he is. Being with him, having his child. But it’s a different kind of terrible. Where he’s self absorbed she is generous. Of course she doesn’t mind the blood. This isn’t the first time he’s come to her in such a battered state. And like always she holds him together. Maybe that’s why he came tonight. The battle ended days ago but he felt himself unwinding, coming loose at the seams. But if he sank any lower into insanity he’d lose sight of his purpose. So here he is to let her stitch his mind back together. She’s seen parts of him he can’t even remember. His memory is a tarnished mess of black holes where the trauma wouldn’t let him see. She’ll never be as awful as him. Not when she’s the only one that cares enough to hold him together. 

“What are you going to do when I’m gone?” He asks. It’s another act of selfishness. Wanting to know if she can truly see past him. See a life where he’s not in it. 

“I don’t know.” They both know it’s a lie. But it’s a good one. It’s what he wanted to hear. 

“I’ll have to leave soon. And I don’t think I’ll be back.” He could never stay away. Even when he tried he found himself watching her from afar. But this time will be different. He’ll be gone forever. He thinks of his son and hopes he’ll never know he had a father. It’ll be better that way. 

“Where are you going?” She asks. To hell, he wants to say. To some unending flame that will burn him for eternity. Or maybe there’ll be nothing and his mind will fully unwind at last. 

“I don’t know. But it’ll be far away from here.”

“I’ll visit.” She hums. “I’ll find you. Every January.” She walks him to the door, hand tight in his, and kisses him after he tugs his boots back on. 

“Good luck, Touya.” She sounds happy as she closes the door but she isn’t quick enough to hide the wetness growing in her eyes. He leaves her crying and thinks about going back inside. But he doesn’t know how to comfort her when he’s the one that caused all this in the first place. 

This time he’s certain that if he ever goes back the passcode will be changed. 

[thespacelizard]

still, now, my wardrum heart

@fluffbruary day 27! an introspective Zariel piece today, because i love her. up on AO3 here.

In which Zariel struggles with stillness.

Waves sweep softly over an infinity of silver sand. Her fingers slide through it, the motion followed by a faint cascade of perfect chimes as each grain returns to the whole. Harmonised, always. Zariel looks up at the shimmering calm of the twilit sky and breathes slowly. It’s a miracle still, to breathe slowly. To allow her heart to beat like a heart, and not a war-drum.

She leans back against Lulu, whose mammoth form—though large—is but a speck among specks on this endless beach that stretches out, eternally, from the base of Mount Celestia. Lulu shifts and snuffles; one huge, liquid gold eye cracks open, confirms sleepily that Zariel is still there, then closes again.

They come here a lot of late. They came here a lot of old, but gone are the days of drawing battle plans in the sand, and whispering impossible dreams into the surf. Now Zariel is content to simply be, and Lulu is ecstatic to be with her.

Only…she trails her fingers through the sand, grooves that collapse in on themselves the moment her hand lifts away. She’s not content. She doesn’t know if she will ever be content again—if she was ever content to begin with. She suspects she was only ignorant, and then she was outraged, then prideful, and foolish, and lost.

She does not know if it is possible to be content, or if such a state is merely a construct meant to pacify.

Zariel’s hand strays to the blade at her hip, bound to its scabbard with delicate peace-thread. She’s sworn not to draw it again unless there is dire need. That she will not run headlong into any fight she can find to prove herself—the Seven Heavens do not need her to prove herself, but she’s afraid she’ll want to anyway. Her form implies redemption, but how can she earn forgiveness sitting quietly on a beach?

Lulu would say she doesn’t need to earn anything, that what she needs is to rest. To find stillness, and peace, and joy, the way she used to have it in abundance. Soaring the skies of Mount Celestia, up through the highest heavens she can reach, with Lulu at her side—this does bring her no small measure of joy. And seeing Lulu happy; this too brings her pleasure.

Lulu deserves happiness, after all the years of misery Zariel put her through.

Something silver darts through the waves. The sharp, bright movement spikes adrenaline through her heart, and without conscious thought, her fingers wrap tight around her sword hilt. Her eyes catch her instinct before she can draw the blade; just dolphins, souls, traversing their afterlife. A moment later, they’re out of sight, and Zariel relaxes her grip.

She’s still not used to being here. She keeps waiting for the ground to crack open and unleash screams of agony, for the skies to bleed, for the azure clarity of the rivers to run with bloody carnage. It’s so hard to get the war-drums out of her heart.

Lulu keeps encouraging her to forget, to move on. Because Archduke Zariel was not her Zariel, but some other creature—the real Zariel was trapped inside that monster, screaming and weeping at the atrocities the Lord of the First committed. Why shouldn’t she move on, when it wasn’t her that did those things?

It was her. Every part of it was her, and now she’s seen the kind of person she can become, she’s afraid that if she does move on, if she forgets for even a moment, she’ll one day make the same mistakes again. Thus the peace-thread, and the promises of pacifism, even though she wants to fight, aches to. She’s terrified that if she does, she won’t be able to stop.

Zariel moves her hand from hilt to wrist, running her fingers over the soft, white silk that wraps her stump. There have been countless offers to repair it, and countless pitying looks at her continued refusal. They think she’s choosing suffering, that it’s a penance, but it’s neither of those things.

It’s a consequence. Because people like her—angel or Archdevil—spend too much of their eternities free from consequence.

Lulu snorts and raises her head. Her trunk ruffles Zariel’s hair. “You’re doing that thing again.”

Zariel pets her trunk. “What thing?”

“The thing where you get all thoughtful and sad.”

“I’m not sad.”

“But you are thinking.”

“Yes.” Zariel shifts so she can see the face of her oldest, dearest friend. She smiles, because Lulu likes her smile. “You do not need to worry.”

“Promise?”

“I promise.”

Lulu huffs, and settles more comfortably into the sand. Then, without warning, she shrinks back down to her ordinary hollyphant size. Zariel topples over with a cry as Lulu swoops up in a trail of golden sparks, laughing.

“You always fall for that!”

Zariel spits celestial sand and wipes her mouth. “Fly fast, little hollyphant. I shall give you a ten second head start.”

“Generous today!” Lulu calls, already speeding away. By the time Zariel is on her feet, she’s gotten a generous lead along the infinite shore, and it will take some doing to catch up with her. For someone so small, Lulu is deceptively fast.

Zariel leaps into the air and as she chases down Lulu and her laughter, she feels her maudlin mood falling away. It will be back, she knows, but for now there is the wind in her face and her friend in the skies, and though her heart pounds, it remains just that—a heart.

[writingsbychlo]

Prince Noah with his twin boys something about that - like the boys look just like him- his literal clones but are totally mama's boys. Maybe they are in the phase where they get possessive whenever Noah kisses their wife

finally finally getting around to clearing out my inbox now I'm free of uni, so, enjoy!

The feeling that woke you was the mattress shifting under your body. The motherly instincts kicked into full gear, stretching your arms out in preparation, in case one of your boys had arrived post-nightmare in search of comfort. You were quickly corrected, however, by the feeling of lips tracing soft kisses along your jaw as golden sunlight flashed through the gap in the curtains.

Instead, as your arms stretched out, large and calloused palms wrapped around your wrists, looping them around his neck before the full weight of your husband’s body was descending on top of you. 

“Good morning,” Your voice was broken, a little raspy as you blinked into the light of the morning, fingers threading into his hair as your other hand smoothed down the expanse of bare skin on his back. 

“Morning, sunshine,” His response was whispered into your skin, followed by a scrape of his teeth across your pulse-point, and your sleepy haze rushed away on a soft gasp as your body sparked alight under his touch. “Sleep well? Dream of me?” 

Another hand skated down your side, as your leg propped up, bracketing at his hip, his lips beginning to trail their way back up. “I actually dreamed about—”

“Don’t ruin it.” His huff was pouty, you didn’t even have to see his face to know it, and when he lifted himself up from your neck to finally catch your gaze, it was to your giggling. After only a second longer, that expression cracked, and his face become more of a smile, matching yours, as your foreheads came to rest together. “Tell me you dreamed about me.”

“Alright,” You gave a heavy sigh, retracting your hands to settle on his face, tracing your thumbs across his cheeks, from one mole to the next. He toyed with his lower lip between his teeth as he waited, noses brushing, breaths shared. “I was dreaming about that one time, on our honeymoon…”

“In the hot tub?” He groaned, body collapsing a little further into you until you were surrounded by his body heat, every inch of him pressed up to you. Hips bracketed between your thighs, grinding softly, and a whine climbed your throat. 

“I was going to say on the last night, we didn’t even make it all the way through the suite.”

“Oh, yeah…” His voice trailed off, lips sealing your own in a kiss equally as passionate as he had that night. The very same night you’d gone out for one last boozy dinner, stumbling out of the elevator and barely making it inside the hotel suite you’d rented before he’d bent you over the closest piece of furniture. That dress you’d been wearing and its broken strap was still sitting somewhere in a drawer, waiting to be sewn back up. “You screamed your loudest that night.”

“I came my hardest that night too.”

“That can’t be true, my darling. We’ve been together for ten years, you’re just insulting me, now.” His teeth nipped at your lips instead, a breathy whisper of his name when he tugged. Your hips started to set a steady rhythm, rocking slowly back and forth together, a quell of heat beginning to develop in the bottom of your stomach. “Perhaps you simply need reminding?”

“Is that going to be my first anniversary present?”

“First, second, I think we could even get to three,” The soft lines of age that were just beginning to show on his face smoothed out as he dipped, peppering kisses to your lips and cheeks as you panted together, fisting his hair. As a moan tore free from your lips, a little too loud, your cheeks heated and you paused, waiting in the silence. 

“Noah, door.” Your thoughts were rapidly clearing, especially as the fingers of one hand began to trail along his spine of their own accord, tracing the hem of his worn-thin pyjama pants.

“What?”

“The door, check the door is locked, before—” 

“Mama!” The first squealing voice bounced off of the walls almost as loudly as the door did, flying open and bouncing off of the rubber-stop, padded footsteps bolting across the smooth wood floors. 

“Mommy!” The second, almost identical voice followed, and the sheets were tugged around your bodies as a little fist began to pull on them to climb up. Noah groaned, no longer pleasure but sheer annoyance, before he gave a breathy laugh. 

“Dada, move!” The solid-sounding slap of a small but meaty palm on his shoulder sounded out, and your husband gave an undignified noise, rolling off you and back onto his own side of the bed as you propped yourselves up in the pillows. 

“Now, that’s not very nice, is it, Jamie?”

He only shrugged, crawling up into your lap as his brother followed behind, and you brushed a hand over his messy bed hair, not failing to notice the similarity in the chocolate strands to their fathers. Leaning over his side of the bed, he hauled your other up onto his lap, Eren’s little lip poking out a dissatisfied dimple between his brows, showing off his sadness.

“What’s wrong, Errie?”

“I want cuddles too!” His little voice broke, his twin turning from where his cheek had been resting on your neck to sit on your shoulder, staring at his brother silently. 

“I’ll give you cuddles, c’mere, buddy.” Noah held out his arms, and instead, Eren gave a harsh wail that had you both wincing.

“I don’t want your cuddles, I want mommy’s cuddles!” At that, before tears could start overflowing, Jamie sighed heavily, before scooting over and patting your other thigh over the covers. 

“There’s room for both of us, stop crying. You can’t always cry.”

“Jamie! You’re very mean today.” Your scolding fell on deaf ears as he only shrugged, fingers punching in your sleep shirt as he nuzzled his face back into your neck, Eren quickly matching him on the other side, far more content now. Stretching from the bed, Noah scoffed down at your smug grin, rounding the bed towards you and leaning over your body to kiss the top of each boy’s head. Then, he followed to you, pressing a soft kiss to your forehead as well, and receiving another shove. This time, from Eren.

“No, Daddy.”

“What do you mean, ‘no, daddy’? Where’s my love this morning, huh? This sucks.” Eren followed much more like his dad, settling him with an equally bored look as you’d seen your husband give a thousand times, and you chuckled.  

“Oh, no, does Daddy want some love this morning?” 

A dark look flashed through those golden eyes, and he shook his head, biting back a smile at you as he brushed a hand over Jamie’s hair. “Don’t start something you can’t finish.

At just four, the boys had no idea what you were talking about, babbling between themselves as you smirked at your suffering husband. 

“You’re pure evil. I’m going to go and get started on your breakfast. I’ll take the boys so you can get up.” Hooking his hands under Jamie’s armpits, he didn’t hesitate to lift him off, even when the boy’s eyes went wide and he shrieked his anger loud enough for the neighbours to hear. Settling him on his hip, he reached out for Eren, wiggling his fingers at him. “Let’s go, buddy. We’re going to make your mom some breakfast, c’mon.”

You gave him a little nudge, and with a frown, he left, letting himself be scoped up onto the other hip as Noah carried them from the room. You could hear his chatter all the way down the stairs, everything from bribing their love to managing an argument, and you finally got up from the sheets. 

The clock read, only just past six in the morning, and you suppressed a groan, feeling like you were back in college all over again with how early your kids liked to wake you. It was perfect, even if it was torture.

Straightening out the sheets and finding your slippers to combat the cold floorboards, you swung a dressing gown on over your shoulders for warmth. Grabbing a spare jumper and the larger pair of slippers, you made your way towards the voices in the kitchen. 

Sitting on the counter, legs dangling precariously over it, Jamie was stirring a bowl that Noah was holding, while Eren lay upside down over his chair watching a cartoon on his iPad. Scooping up the tablet you were sure his father had no idea about, Eren shot back up straight, reaching for it desperately as you turned it off. 

“No TV before midday, you know that!” You tutted, sealing the device away on top of the fridge where he couldn't get it, even with his best efforts. 

“But— Daddy!”

“Oh, now you want Daddy, huh?” He smirked, looking up, batter spattered on his face from Jamie’s violent stirring. “Nope, I’m with your mom on this one. You know the rules.”

You grinned, dropping Noah’s slippers next to his feet, watching him shuffle them on gratefully. You reached your arms around him, typing the sweater at his narrow waist for later, and he twisted his head to the side, lips puckered. Granting him a sweet kiss, he smiled, and Jamie made some very dramatic gagging noises, pushing the bowl away and climbing down the chair steps he’d made to go and find his brother. 

“Y’know. I think we need a daughter. We have momma’s boys, it only seems logical that she’d be a daddy’s girl.”

“You want another just because you’re feeling neglected?” You grinned, watching him pull away to find a frying pan, and begin heating it up for the pancakes. Reaching around him to grab at a handful of his ass, he jumped but smirked, smacking your own lightly and stealing another kiss. “I’ll make you feel less neglected later, I promise. Just wait ‘til we drop the boys at your brother’s house.”

“Oh, I’m counting the seconds, sunshine.”

[rainbowchewynuggets]

Hellboy & The Gatekeeper (pt 9)

The monstrous ancestor has nearly closed the gap between itself and the exit.

Hellboy hops from the ledge and surfs roughly down the wet clay wall. He pulls his gun and fires at the thing’s cracked body. It appears that breaking its bones apart isn’t enough. It animates itself in disjointed pieces like the ghost it is. Hellboy skids to the ground and catches his breath. It’s hard. The oppressive atmosphere makes his lungs heavy and cold. He can barely feel his limbs. Realizing he’s almost out of time, he turns his attention to the creature’s head.

A lucky attack sends some more boulders his way. He throws them at the nest of spines that cover the ancestor’s skull. Only a few break off each time. An agitated roar fills the cave. Claws narrowly miss pinning him against the wall. Repeat.

His windows of opportunity get narrower and narrower, especially when the monster pulls in one of its other hands to try to catch him. But he’s winning. With so many spines cleared away, he can see light shining through cracks around the thing’s eyes and temples. He keeps going. One more hit. Then two. The second one leaves a large star-shaped fracture square in the center of the field of stumps on its forehead.

The creature lunges. Hellboy sees it coming, but his legs fail to fire in time. He nearly gets thrown back through the light. His wind escapes him again.

Hellboy’s arms tremble as he hoists his frame off the ground. He rests on an elbow and readies the gun for one more shot. An earsplitting clamor erupts from the thing’s throat, but falls dull on Hellboy’s ears. The vibrations shake his arm. It doesn’t matter. His target is wide.

The muzzle flashes. A bullet rockets through the air toward the glowing cracked forehead.

It passes through without a sound, as if it were a mere projection in a horror show.

Hellboy looks at his gun. His fingers and the rocks beyond him are visible through the heavy gray steel. He looks at himself. He’s barely there.

Hellboy: Ugh… crap.

The monster opens its overfilled jaws even wider and bellows noise, as if to laugh.

The man stares at it with contempt. He can’t will himself to do much else.

That’s when he notices a tiny purple-white figure cresting the creature’s head. He squints to focus his tired eyes. It’s the Gatekeeper.

They climb unsteadily, either from keeping one hand around the long narrow support beam or from the powdery substance that falls from their body in sheets with every movement.

When they reach the damaged frontal bone of the ancestor’s skull, they plant their feet and stand up at their full height. They look to be closer to their original height, if a bit taller. The little Keeper raises the beam over their head. Big chunks of the possessed form fall away from their body like plaster. Angry tears stream from their eyes.

Gatekeeper: BEGONE!

The Gatekeeper plunges the rod through the wound on the thing’s face. Its skull collapses with a hollow sound. Its body instantly erupts in a flash of light. Its voice is gone in a clap of silence.

When the flash passes, the room is dark purple and lightless. The Keeper tumbles to the ground in a mass of wet dust. They get up in their old body again with a few more tendrils and warts than before. There’s a long thread growing just under their right eye. They rub it with their wrist as they run over and help Hellboy get to his feet. Everything is violently shaking.

G: We have to get out. Now!

Hellboy follows without the breath to answer.

They both step out of the dead world. The big man instantly finds the energy to move himself and lets the Keeper lead at a run. The floor of the temple violently undulates. Pillars as wide as oak trees shatter and crash into each other. Massive sharp chunks of overhanging coral fall all around them as they head back to where they came in.

Out in the dim valley, the same thing is happening to the townspeople. They pull each other out of their homes and run together in groups to evade the rapidly terraforming land.

Up in the Gate temple, the sand moves in waves so steep that the Keeper and Hellboy must leap from peak to peak and slide down the sides of mountains. The floor takes the walls with it as it bucks and rolls so that it becomes impossible to tell up from down.

They reach the coral forest. The entryway has been turned on its side, swallowing down the sand and whatever else like an open mouth.

The ground evens out at the bottom long enough for Hellboy to get his bearings among the shadows of the branches. The Keeper isn’t there. They shout down to him from where they've perched on the horizontal archway.

G: Go on! We’ll find our way somehow. When you get back, tell them… tell them all I’m sorry.

A beat passes between the two. The Keeper expects any variety of damning responses. But Hellboy only raises a hand in valediction.

H: Take care, kid.

They’re separated in falling rubble. Hellboy gets thrown headlong through freezing, burning dusty sand as the dimensions pull apart in waves of purple fire that grade to red and orange. Dust washes over him again and again, burying him deeper until there is no movement at all.

Deprived of air, Hellboy jerks awake.

He shoves his hand through the dust and touches open space. Worming his way out, he finds himself in the actual completely normal abandoned farmhouse basement, having emerged from a pile of purplish gray dust and ash. The evening light streaming through the hole in the ceiling casts a yellow silhouette over the empty stool and the charred stone floor.

He gets up with some difficulty and drags his aching carcass up the short staircase to fresh air.

The sun is about to set. Regina is still there, leaning on her truck to stretch her good leg. She spots him coming out of the basement doors and balks at his injuries.

Regina: Jeez. Did you get that thing, or did it get you?

H: Yeah, I got it.

R: You need a ride to the hospital?

He casually brushes the dust off of his shoulders.

H: Nah. I feel better already. But I could really use a phone.

R: There’s one at the bar in town.

H: Perfect.

————

Next

Prev

First

(Epilogue on Halloween! 🎃)

Index

[luaslieb]

OMFGG guys! She’s gone! I can’t believe she left so soon tho! Like I know Liz wasn’t the most popular but you could just see how much potential she had! I mean we all knew she could be no replacement for Boris but he had run his course. The bookies clearly favoured a ‘Rishi’ era when she took over but Truss was such a bop tho! Like that cheese clip we got as a teaser when her casting was announced?? Sensational.

The start of this season was so good tooooo. The Queen dying and all the big set pieces were incredible!! Its such a shame that the rest felt so rushed when they did that so well! Like we normally get more time to develop the issues and themes of each new PM’s era but with Truss’ it was like they wanted to speedrun it from the beginning?

I still can’t believe her run was so short. Even Theresa got longer in the role and she wasn’t nearly as interesting! It did kinda feel weird to me the way they decided to pack so much into her run but leave all those plot threads untied by the time she went. It wasn’t even stuff you’d expect? Like the ‘pandemic’ plot point was never mentioned despite being like the setting for Boris’ run. Don’t get me wrong, I thought the ‘imminent and total collapse of the British economy’ plot was super interesting and definitely could have been sustained for the typical 3 series run we normally get from a PM (even if those are becoming increasingly rare) but it just didn’t hit quite as well as Covid did in terms of ‘imminent disaster’ factor.

 Tbh the whole way Liz left seems kinda odd to me too. Like I found out in a lecture that she was going and everyone was just in shock?! And I know a running gag in the show is the U-turns but a U-turn that big seemed really OOC. Like we got it with Kwasi and it was like the epitome of comedic timing done right but Liz’s? It’s clear the writers wanted to wrap her run up but they seemed to do it quite poorly. Maybe Truss just didn’t want to do it anymore? Like to me at least it seemed that with all that economic talk and ministers resigning they were seriously building up to some big end of era finale like we got at the end of Boris’ run. But maybe they got their funding cut and had to cut stuff off to bring it to a close earlier than they expected. I think that’s why we weren’t shown the fighting in the commons on screen. It was like they didn’t have enough time or money to put the sets together and get all the extras back for it.

I really did enjoy the speculation about who would be next though! Like with a regeneration you’re never really sure. We were all so certain that it would be Rishi last time and were kinda shocked when we found out about Liz. So, this time I obviously considered a Rishi run but I was still kinda surprised when I found out! And who was expecting that Boris could return? Even if it never came to be lol.

 It’s insane how mainstream the show is becoming too! There was a guy in my lecture wearing a ‘Ready for Rishi’ T-shirt! And there were posters up around my halls about Liz when she left! Plus, I actually found out Rishi would be the next incarnation through reading people’s laptops following the liveblogging of it in classes! Like its crazy how big our community has grown!

As the talk on campus about it seems to have died off a bit now I’m realising I’m kinda scared about the new series? Like if this one was so chaotic I really doubt the next one could be much better? But I guess we’ll have to wait and see. RIP Truss. You deserved better:(

[ptergwen]

idk if ur requests are open rn (if not please ignore this!!). so we all know the vlog peter made in civil war, well imagine him watching that over and maybe other vlogs he made with ned, the reader and mj while he thinks back to when everyone knew who he was and remembered him? idk thought this sounded sad

the value of a moment

w/c: 2,021

warnings: nwh spoilers, angst here and there

a/n: even though this tore me to pieces i loved writing it so much :,( thank you for such a wonderful idea i appreciate you sending it in <3 i hope y’all enjoy

-

peter collapses on his bed and breathes out a long sigh, exhausted from unpacking. he just got settled in at his new apartment. there’s a draft that lets in the chilled winter air, and the flickering lights struggle to illuminate the tiny space. it was all he could find on such short notice.

the city that never sleeps seems so quiet these days. but, it’s louder than ever in peter’s head. there’s a nagging voice that’s constantly reminding him of how royally he screwed up.

peter had made the heroic decision to sacrifice himself quite literally to save the world. in turn, he lost everything; his aunt may, his best friends. he even lost you, the absolute love of his life.

although, it isn’t you who’s gone. it’s him.

a multiversal threat was upon earth. because peter had caused it, the only way to stop it was by erasing earth’s memories of him and therefore his identity. now, he has to start fresh.

he wonders how you’ve been since it happened. what you’ve been up to, if you’re taking care of yourself. peter is hanging on by a thread. he hopes you’re doing better than he is.

as he shuffles into the kitchen for a snack, an unopened moving box catches his eye. it’s still taped up, with fragile written across it in black sharpie. he must have forgotten about this one.

peter carefully rips the cardboard where it’s taped, a smile stretching across his lips when he sees what’s inside.

there are postcards he sent may from your school’s trip to europe, drawings mj did of him, ned’s lucky hat. what especially piques peter’s interest is an old camcorder he used to make vlogs on. he’d documented some of his most special memories with that thing.

he did it for moments like this, when he’s feeling lonely and needs reminding of the times he wasn’t.

peter grabs the recorder and brings it back to his bed. he takes a seat, beginning to search through its contents.

he plays a video of you and him.

“no, no, no! that’s not how you do it!” you giggle, skipping over to stand behind peter. he’s in front of your mirror and fiddling with the collar of his suit jacket. “hands off, pete. i got it,” you assure him.

peter does as you say, his features displaying a light blush and a grin. he aims the camera at the mirror so it shows you straightening his collar.

you chew on your lip in concentration, your arms winding around peter’s neck to reach the front. he zooms in on your hands working their magic, and zooms back out once you’re finished. you rest your chin on his shoulder and press your cheek to his.

“all done,” you beam proudly. “thanks, baby. what would i do without you?” peter smiles twice as big. you hug his waist, peter flipping the camera so both your faces are in frame. “god only knows,” you mumble to the camera.

peter gasps in mock offense. you peck his cheek, then head off to touch up your makeup.

“so, here we are at y/n’s. getting ready for homecoming,” peter explains to his camcorder. “it’s gonna be awesome! it’s actually my first one… unless you count last year.”

“we don’t talk about last year,” you sternly state. peter puts the camera on you while you apply lip gloss. “good call,” he affirms.

you cap your gloss and pucker your lips at him. he slowly lowers the camera down your body, revealing your entire look.

“my date, everybody. how pretty is she?” peter closes an eye, zooming in on you. “drop dead gorgeous,” he adds. you try to cover your face, so peter seizes your hand and squeezes it in his. “say hi, y/n/n!” he chuckles out. “to who?” you question. “i dunno, future us?” peter’s tone is soft, his fingers toying with yours. “our future children? grandchildren? great-grandchildren-“

“i’m gonna stop you right there, pete,” you interject with a breathy laugh. “or else this’ll never end, and we’re already running late.” peter’s eyes widen. “we are? crap!” he squeaks.

he flips the camera around again, to which you lightheartedly roll your eyes at. you gather both your things while peter wraps up.

“ok, um, we gotta go meet ned and mj. babe, do you have the tickets?” peter calls the last part to you. you wave your homecoming tickets in the air, peter grinning. “phew. we’ll talk to you later. bye, everyone!” he looks at you expectantly. “so long, suckers,” you salute the camera.

you thread your fingers through peter’s to lead him out of your room. he sets the camcorder down and ends the video, your intertwined hands in view as it cuts off.

with a sad smile, peter begins to rewind the video. he pauses it when he gets to you kissing his cheek.

he remembers that night vividly. how tightly you held onto him as you swayed to the music, the way your breath brushed his skin every time you whispered in his ear, your eyes sparkling whenever they would lock with his.

you two were so happy, so in love. nothing could touch you then. if you only knew what was to come.

peter continues to skim through his videos, before he dwells on that thought for too long. he chooses one with a thumbnail that makes him quirk a brow.

you’re versing ned in a game of dance dance revolution at your local arcade. mj cheers you on while peter records, capturing the rather epic battle.

“look at them go,” peter narrates. the camcorder is focused in on yours and ned’s feet as you hit the moves. “right, y/n! that’s a right!” mj shouts to you and points at the arrow on the screen. “come on, pick up the pace! leeds is catching up,” she coaches you. “i’m going as fast as i can, em,” you tell mj, out of breath.

“less talking, more dancing!” ned chastises, spinning around on the platform.

the two of you follow the routine on the screen with intensity. peter films you both from your side, where mj also watches. he briefly moves the camera onto mj so he can do a mock interview with her.

“the people wanna know, who are you rooting for?” he questions. “are you team y/n or team ned?” he zooms in. mj glances side to side before staring into the camera blankly. “um, team y/n. girl power… or something like that,” she replies in her usual monotone.

you and ned can be heard giggling in the background.

“what about you?” mj asks peter. he scoffs behind the camera. “team ned for sure,” he reveals. “really? not the mrs?” she offers a smirk, you jumping around behind her. “no way. you know what they say, bros before hoes,” peter confidently answers.

he realizes his mistake as soon as the words leave his mouth. mj squints at him.

“not that y/n is a…” peter turns the camera on himself, grimacing. “i’m just gonna edit that part out. back to the game!”

him and mj tune back in right when the game is over. you groan in defeat, patting ned on the back in congratulations.

“the scores are in, folks!” peter announces. “and it looks like…” you jog up to peter and sling an arm around him. “ned won,” you pant, skin glistening with sweat. peter keeps the camcorder on you two. “aw, did he? sorry, babe. you’ll get ‘em next time,” he winks into the camera. “good job up there, though!”

mj gives ned a celebratory fist bump. you shake your head at her, muttering, “traitor.”

“we’re about to go for round two. wish me luck!” you pat peter’s hip, ready to run off. peter catches your wrist gently between his fingers. “not so fast! you should hydrate first,” he chuckles.

he hands you his water bottle from your table. you wordlessly rip off the cap and chug down what’s remaining. peter whistles at this, impressed.

“ah. the cool, refreshing taste of water,” you wipe your lips, placing the empty bottle back on the table. “what a champ,” peter remarks. he follows you over to the game, guiding you by your back. “edward leeds, i’m ready for you!” you declare as you hop onto the platform. “not the full government name,” ned puts a hand over his heart.

“you’re still at this?” mj suddenly appears in front of peter, tapping his camera lens. he jumps and nearly drops the camcorder. “oh my god, when did you-“

the video ends just like that, present day peter snickering at his past self.

god, he misses you three so damn much. he misses ned’s silly antics, his banter with mj, everything about you. you made the perfect group.

peter has considered reintroducing himself to the three of you, but that would undermine him doing what he did in the first place. you deserve your chances to live a life free of the chaos that peter parker causes. so does he.

at least he has these tapes to reminisce on.

tears fill peter’s eyes when he skips to one video in particular. he plays it, and the tears immediately fall.

“is this thing on?” may speaks to the camcorder. although she’s barely visible in the darkness, the camera picks up her bright smile. “aha! here we go,” she murmurs, focusing the device.

“hey there. peter must’ve left you in my car by accident when i drove him to the airport,” may explains. “he wanted to bring you to europe. i think it’s for the best that he didn’t, though,” she lowers her voice to a whisper. “his stuff got blown up… long story.”

she twists around to peek into the backseat. her smile widens.

“anyway, i just picked him and y/n up. we got back to the apartment a little while ago, but…”

may films the two of you, fast asleep on each other in the backseat of her minivan. you’d arrived home from your infamous europe trip earlier.

your heads are bent together, each of you laying on the other. you’re sharing peter’s sweatshirt as a blanket. you have an arm draped over his stomach, and he has both arms secured around your shoulders.

“they’re out cold,” may laughs softly. “i can’t bring myself to wake them. just look how precious,” she coos, steadying the camcorder on yours and peter’s sleeping forms. “besides, they could use the rest. europe was eventful,” she understates. “well, that’s one way to describe it.”

she’s right. you two are drained, peter especially after his battle with beck.

there are deep bags under his eyes and cuts littering his entire body. you’d helped him bandage them to the best of your abilities. you dawn a few scratches of your own, which peter kissed each of.

“my boy,” may says to herself, reaching out and ruffling peter’s hair. he leans into her touch even in his unconscious state. “that mysterio did a number on you, huh?” she observes.

she fixes peter’s sweatshirt so it’s covering the two of you better, then turns back around in her seat.

“i figured i’d show this to them once they come to. they’re gonna be humiliated,” may grins wickedly. “ugh, i can’t wait. thanks for dropping by!”

may blows a kiss to the camera before shutting it off.

peter turns off the camera after the video ends, his teardrops covering the screen.

may never did have the chance to show you two. this was the first time he saw that.

he can’t believe how good he’d had it. if he thought life was tough then, it’s impossible now. what got him through it was all of you, only everyone he’s ever loved and who’s loved him is no more. you only exist in the camcorder gripped in his shaking hands.

peter holds the recorder to his chest. this is the last of what he has left not only of his people, but of himself, too.

sometimes, you’ll never know the value of a moment until it becomes a memory.

[exilethegame]

“it takes me seven days to stop being in love with you” for syfyn pls <3

“It takes me seven days to stop being in love with you.” - Syfyn

The Brazen Griffin is daring and bold. She charges into war fearless of death, taking hits that would kill any other person and using her body as a shield for a country that would rather watch her bleed to death than waste its resources stitching her back together again. They say she is given a week to recover from the wounds inflicted on her--  a week to rest before leading the troops in place of The Commander. This? This The Brazen Griffin would be able to do, she thinks.

But she is not The Brazen Griffin. She is Syfyn Javall, and she just lost the love of her life.

She keeps her composure as they examine the wounds and bandage them. She takes the pain of dead flesh being cut and muscle being sewn back together without cringing. But the second she is in her room again, the door locked shut behind her, she collapses into a heap of feathers and blood, withering sobs rattling through her entire body. She screams, slamming her fist against the floor because the enemy is not a person she could ever hope to fight. 

A hole is in her chest where her heart must be-- that is the only explanation for the all-consuming emptiness that is slowly breaking through each and every one of her ribs to swallow her whole from the inside out.

One day passes.

One day passes, and it is after a night of restless sleep that leaves her shaking and paranoid, looking over her shoulder and half-expecting to see them, covered head-to-toe in the blood of her friends-- of her family. The only family she ever really knew, anyway. What little dreams she has are plagued by their screams and desperate eyes. She had been too weak to save them. Too weak to hurt The Commander to keep the rest safe.

So The Commander hurt her first.

She doesn’t leave her room that day. She unbandages and rebandages her wounds over and over again, staring into the wall and struggling to remember what their voice had sounded like before they snapped. When had they changed? What had caused it? Was it her fault? Had she missed something? She had promised to follow them through hell and back again. She had sworn to die for them. And at some point between then and now, she had also sworn her heart to them.

They had tried to stop it-- but who was she to try and stop them? She had said it belonged to them, anyway.

The second day passes.

The night before she dreams of them. Their fingers had threaded through her feathers and their lips had ghosted over her skin. She had traced their scars as she had countless times before, fretting and worrying as The Commander assured her they were healed-- they didn’t hurt anymore. They were just scars, afterall.

She looks at her own healing wounds in the mirror. Is that what these are? Just scars? They’ll simply fade away with time and be nothing more than some distant memory?

No-- no, she thinks not, and there is a fierce bitterness in that thought that leaves even her in silence.

Hate them. She should hate them. And maybe she does.

On the third day she forces herself to eat despite the way the texture is all wrong and the taste is all off. It makes her more sick than anything, struggling to not gag on each piece of food that is chewed and forced down.

War does horrible things to people. Everyone is scared of dying in battle, of getting hit by a rogue arrow or being speared like a fish. But real fighters know it’s not death you have to fear-- it’s this: the withering guilt, shame, and emptiness that grabs hold of you and refuses to let go like the tide does the shore.

Normally The Commander would be sitting here with her, forcing her to eat and drink and sleep and wash.

But they are not here.

On the fourth day she manages to bathe. She scrubs her skin with her nails until the water has gone brown and red-- then she drains and starts again and again and again. But there is one spot she does not touch, does not dare to clean or rid of.

A single bloody handprint remains on the side of her face, a ghostly shadow forever holding her and drawing her near and saying, it’s okay, as they slam the dagger into her side.

The fifth day she spends in bed, watching the ceiling. The sixth she unwraps her forearm and stares at the claw marks there, placing her own fingers over the scars. This is the closest she’ll ever come to touching them again.

On the seventh day she gets out of bed and stares at her reflection. She stares at the necklace on her neck-- one piece of two. It taunts her, and just by staring at it she can still hear their laugh and smell their skin. She rips it off and throws it so suddenly that she is left questioning what she just did as her chest heaves.

Today she is not Syfyn Javall. Today, she is The Brazen Griffin, stand-in Commander of none, her troops dead because she had been too cowardly to hurt the one she had loved. 

She makes an oath to never be so weak as to repeat that mistake ever again.

[alderaani]

still i find you there

summary: after Rako Hardeen, there are several things that need fixing.

written for @codywanweek and the day 1 prompt fix-it. I fully intended to have more days completed for this, but given that it’s *checks notes* day 5, it’s probably not going to happen. this is very angsty and perhaps a bit melodramatic, but the heart wants what it wants. also catch me forgetting obi-wan was wearing his vambraces when he ‘died’ and having to stretch to make it work for me. warnings for grief, percieved death and all that good stuff.

-

He’s alive.

It seems impossible. It feels entirely predictable. And yet...Cody can’t make himself believe it. He saw Obi-Wan die, the grainy security-holo footage of slick Coruscant rooftops showing little more than a bolt of red and a lone figure reeling, falling. No sound, no clear faces, and yet...He knew that red hair. He knew that posture, how it could startle like that if timed very, very well.

It had been the only thing that made it real.

It had been a terrible idea to look at the footage, just like Rex (and Fox, and Wolffe, and Boil) had told him, but he couldn’t help himself. He’d needed something to help him break out of the stupor, the long silences, the staring at the door like Obi-Wan was going to walk right through it. The war didn’t stop just because someone had died, and the GAR hadn’t cared about the cataclysmic shockwave it had sent through Cody’s life.

They’d sent the 212th packing to Mimban within a day of the assassination, and Cody had nearly gotten his head blown off after leaving his left flank wide open, expecting the snap-hiss of a lightsaber to cover him. Instead Wooley had been his salvation, yanking him back at the last second and roaring that he needed to get it together. It had been like walking in a dream.

Watching the holo had worked. It had convinced some deep, desperate part of himself that Obi-Wan really wasn’t coming back. That somehow he was going to have to carry on alone, or worse, with another Jedi, whose differences would grate at him like a knife paring into bone.

And in the end, it had all been a lie.

Cody takes a deep breath and leans his forehead against one of the blaster racks in the armoury, the durasteel sharp and cool on his skin. His knees shake and he grips the shelf edges until his fingers hurt, just standing there, just breathing. 

His heart feels big and swollen in his chest, gluttoned with relief and anger, paired with a sharp, aching grief that now, more than ever, has nowhere to go. There’s no reason to harbour it; he should know better. 

He just can’t help it. 

He’d stood through the shuttle landing, through the torturous debrief, through strange, hairless Obi-Wan meeting his eyes and explaining earnestly that ‘if it hadn’t been classified of course he’d have said something…’ without so much as a twitch, but a great yawning chasm in his belly had opened and only kept getting wider the longer they kept making small talk about provisions, and reopening Obi-Wan’s quarters and a million other things that had happened since he’d - gone away. In the end he’d excused himself, planning to retrieve the personal effects he’d personally cleared out of Obi-Wan’s quarters because he’d needed to feel close to him, after, and there hadn’t been any other practical reason to go in there.

Except now he’s standing here, the relevant box at his feet, and he just can’t move. 

Eventually the trembling in his legs slows, and he lifts his head from the shelf, turning instead to slide down it, using it for balance until he hits the floor. His knee thunks against the crate as he collapses, the scant things inside clinking against each other. 

That had been one of the worst things; Obi-Wan always filled a room. His presence was a gentle, quiet, pervasive thing. Cody had held his small collection of two plants, a meditation mat, a few trinkets from planets visited and a lightsaber maintenance kit and felt nothing. 

He swipes ruthlessly at his face with one hand, thumbing under his eyes to scrub away the moisture. 

He needs to get moving. They’ll be looking for him soon. 

Instead, his knee has dislodged the thin fabric covering the crate, and his eyes catch on the vambrace stacked on top, the straps frayed and snapped. Cody had helped paint this one and its pair, had shown Obi-Wan how to get the colours to take properly to the unwieldy plastoid. 

He’d been the one to break it, too. Obi-Wan had just come out of the field medstation, bruised to shit but still smiling, and Cody had crowded him against a powered down holostation in the empty command tent and yanked at his clothes, just needing to feel his pulse under his skin, to feel the warmth of him safe and alive. It had been too much for the worn out armour to bear. 

Two cycles later Obi-Wan had been on his way to Coruscant again, and there had been no time to fix them. It’s stupid, but Cody had taken one look at them on the little desk, in the space that had once been Obi-Wan’s room, and all he’d been able to think was that he hadn’t been properly protected. Cody had broken his armour. Cody had left him vulnerable.

Obi-Wan’d taken his spare set, of course, but he’s always complained that they chafe, and if there’s one thing Cody knows, it’s that if your armour isn’t right you aren’t fighting at your best.

He reaches for the broken piece now, thumbing the frayed synthleather and the chipped paint, yellow and red and faint scuffed up grey. 

He knows now that it wouldn’t have made a difference to what happened, but he still heaves himself up to his feet after a moment and goes to the supply closet, pulls out a new strap, and sits back down again, committing to unpicking the stitching of the old before he can attach it.

He should’ve done this sooner. 

He should’ve been more careful. 

He should’ve been there.

He should’ve - 

He could have - 

He’s crying.

He’s crying, and he doesn’t realise it until the salt is heavy on his cheeks, until his neckline is wet, until his vision blurs so hard he can’t see. Cody makes a low, animal sound and curls over the vambrace, his fingers stilling against the threads. 

His throat aches, his face is swollen, his body hot. He feels sick, and disoriented, overwhelmed in a way he can’t name.

“Cody?” 

He flinches like he’s wounded, turning his face away from the door, like it will hide the evidence of his weakness. He knows he’s failed when Obi-Wan’s breath sucks in, so loud in the quiet. 

“Cody?” His voice comes again, much closer this time. “Will you...will you look at me?” 

Through the haze, Cody catches something that does make him turn. Obi-Wan sounds...hesitant, so uncharacteristically tentative that it cuts through the rest. 

He wipes quickly at his face, smearing the mess, and gets his eyes just clear enough to find Obi-Wan’s face, so foreign and smooth but so dear for all that. His eyes are still the same, glacier-heart blue, and worried, right now, focused on his face. 

“Oh,” Obi-Wan whispers at whatever he finds there, then reaches out, stutters halfway through, and drops his hand. His wrist is bare, and his robe sleeves flop backwards.

“I was trying to fix it,” Cody croaks, shifting to unveil the half-mended vambrace. “Before I brought it back. I broke it, and then you left without it and then you -”

It’s Obi-Wan’s turn to flinch back this time, while Cody greedily drinks him in, taking in the changes to his face, the way the lack of a beard makes his jaw look sharper, his features look younger. The stubbly fuzz of his hair is odd, true enough, but it’s still him.

“I - I never thought,” Obi-Wan says haltingly, and now Cody frowns, because it’s so unlike him to lose his words. Obi-Wan’s eyes flicker away, then back, like he’s steeling himself. Almost like he’s afraid. 

“I never imagined you’d feel responsible - Cody - I’m so sorry -” 

He reaches out, his fingers loosely catching Cody’s wrist this time. Cody feels it, the warmth of his hand sharp and electric. Tears spring to his eyes all over again; it’s the first time they’ve touched since he walked Obi-Wan to the hangar and he kissed him goodbye behind a LAAT/i. He’s replayed it so many times since, thinking he’d never get another, but the memory does the reality no justice, failing to preserve the way heat floods under his skin. 

Obi-Wan moves to take his hand back, and Cody traps it there, anchoring his fingers and dipping his head, just breathing through it.

“If I could have told you,” Obi-Wan continues. “I would have, I swear it, I -”

“I know,” Cody says instantly, because he does, he’d never doubt it. “I know you couldn’t.”

Their fingers curl more securely together, calluses and knuckles finding a home against their pair. 

“I didn’t know if you’d be angry,” Obi-Wan says. Cody shakes his head before he even thinks about it.

“It was your duty. I just -,” he squeezes his eyes shut again, voice breaking. The deception had made him angry. He can admit that, but it was never directed between them. The war stops for no-one, after all. “I can’t believe you’re still here.” 

“I promise, I always intend to stay,” Obi-Wan murmurs.

Cody’s smiling when he kisses him, so full his cheeks ache with it. It tastes of salt and bitter-sweet and just a hint of desperation, their hands clasped with the vambrace cradled between them. 

Then Obi-Wan draws him in, tucking his head under his chin. Cody presses his wet skin to the hollow of neck, listens to his heartbeat, and weeps.

[theskywaslookingback]

[AO3] - [read the rest of the series here]

Martin has the TV set to a low murmur, letting Bake Off reruns play in the background as he combs his fingers through Gerry’s hair. It’s warm in the flat, the summer worming its way in through the cracks of the place and turning everything hot and tight. The fan is louder than the TV, oscillating back and forth between the two bodies slumped on the sofa and the one on the chair.

Jon grumbles as the movement rustles his papers, his glasses low on his nose and gaze intent on the paper he’s reading.

“You know,” Gerry says from his comfortable position on Martin’s lap, “if you didn’t assign so much work, you wouldn’t have so much to grade.”

Martin pinches Gerry’s ear in admonishment as Jon makes a noise of protest from his comfortable perch on the arm chair. Gerry yelps and then laughs, swatting at Martin’s hand.

“I’m just saying, you do this to yourself.”

“Hush,” Martin says, tugging gently on a lock of black hair, “It’s too hot to deal with you.”

Gerry hums, picking his head up enough to wink at Jon who just sighs in reply. Gerry settles back in and Martin resumes his petting. It’s nice, despite the heat, one of the very few days they have to spend together. Jon had offered to help out with a summer class at the university that had been overbooked and Gerry had recently been promoted to manager at the bar he’d been working for, which was all phenomenal and Martin was so proud of them both, but it left them all with shockingly little time together.

Martin’s thumb strokes down Gerry’s neck, rubbing over an old tattoo of an eye, pressing down slightly at the pupil. Gerry huffs a breath into his lap and turns just enough to look at him. “Hi,” Martin says.

“Hey.” Comes the soft reply, warm and fond.

Martin would very much like to kiss him, but that would require a level of flexibility he’s never possessed, so he settles for bringing his own hand up to his palm and kissing the center of it before setting it back down lightly over Gerry’s mouth. He can feel the smile tugging at Gerry’s lips before his palm is being kissed in return and Martin brings it back up to his mouth. “Tea?” He asks after finishing the ritual.

“Christ,” Jon says, letting his papers and pen fall onto the small table at his side. The pen jumps at the small shock and rolls off onto the floor. “Please? If I don’t take a break I may actually start pulling my hair out.”

“Well we wouldn’t want that.” Martin says.

“Mmm, I don’t know.” Gerry says, tapping his finger to his chin as if in indecision, “Bald can be sexy. I seem to recall a time when you shaved your head and it didn’t look that bad.”

“Oh?” Delight suffuses through Martin like honeyed sunshine, “Now that’s something I would have loved to have seen.”

Gerry’s face lights up and he sits bolt upright. “Wait here a second,” he says before hopping off the couch and bounding toward the bedroom. There’s a loud crack, like the door has banged off a wall, and then the sound of things hitting the floor in a hurry.

Martin looks over at Jon, bewildered, but Jon just gives a helpless shrug, looking just as lost as he feels. He’s about to get up and go see just what the hell Gerry is doing when he comes tearing back into the room, clutching something in his hands.

“Look!” He crows, clearly pleased with himself, and hands out a book to Martin.

It’s not very large, about the size of a standard journal, and bound in worn, brown leather. The front of it is scuffed, the top corner bent inward like it’d been stepped on or stuffed somewhere and left like that for a long time, forgotten. “What is-“

From the chair he hears Jon say, “Is that-“

But Gerry drowns them both out with his plea of, “Open it!”

So Martin does.

Inside the front cover is a mess of pen drawings and doodles. A stylized eye, a moth, an anarchy symbol, a middle finger, half of them overlapping and the lines blurring. There’s a burst of black in the top right, a dark blot like a burst pen. In the center of the mess are big blocky letters, all caps.

PROPERTY OF GERRY KEAY

Below that, in a much smaller font that Martin can only decipher from years of recognition and practice.

and Jon Sims.

Martin looks up at Gerry who just grins and flops back down on the couch next to him, pressing hard up against his side like he’s eager to watch. Martin flips to the next page.

There’s a polaroid taped to the center, two young boys staring up at him with twin grins of mischief and joy. The boy on the left has chestnut brown hair cropped short. His mouth and hands look sticky and stained a bright red, the likely cause of which being the ice lolly stick still clutched in his right hand. The boy on the right is much smaller, with unruly black hair and red stains on his button down shirt and a matching red mouth. At the bottom someone had written in a tight, cursive script ‘Gerard and Jonathan, August 1999.’ Someone had drawn an ice cream van on the bottom of the page. At the top, in Gerry’s capital letter font, were the words PARTNERS IN CRIME.

The following pages are similar, photos taped onto the pages, sometimes overlapping each other. Some were clearly taken by Jon’s grandmother - the two of them dressed in suits for some function, the two of them sitting at a table and studying, the two of them asleep in the backyard. Others were clearly taken by the two themselves - Gerry smoking a cigarette and flipping off the camera, Jon holding a bottle of beer, Jon reaching for the camera and looking angry, Gerry riding a skateboard, Gerry on the ground with his skateboard upside down next to him. Some of them held commentary - WE LOOKED LIKE TWATS we were eleven!, Gerry has never once landed a kick flip HEY!!!!, we stayed up waiting for the meteor shower, BEST MATES FOR LIFE. Even more held doodles - ocean waves crashing against a rock, a pair of doves, zig zag mazes and tic tac toe, a lit cigarette and a bottle of beer.

“Ah-ha!” Gerry exclaims when Martin is more than halfway through the book, jamming his finger down at the picture taped there.

Martin jumps and looks at him.

“I knew it was in here,” Gerry says smugly.

By this point it looked as if Gerry had already started dying his hair black and growing it long, almost past his shoulders. His eyes were rimmed in black eyeliner and he had at least two piercings that Martin knew hadn’t come with parental permission. Next to him was Jon, hair buzzed down to his scalp and scowling impressively at the camera, wearing a too large leather jacket and a t-shirt for a band Martin had never heard of.

“Oh!” Martin says, grinning, “It looks so good!” He looks up to gauge Jon’s reaction, maybe even tease him a bit, but the words die quickly in his throat.

Jon’s looking right at Gerry, his face a mass of emotions that Martin is at a loss to try and describe. His eyes look wet.

“Jon?” Martin asks, concern tugging away his amusement and leaving it raw.

Gerry’s head snaps up, his own smile rapidly disappearing in the weight of Jon’s gaze.

There’s a long moment where none of them say anything and the room is stifling from the heat and tension. Martin looks between the two of them, trying to piece together what on earth could possibly be wrong, but he’s coming up short on pieces to work with.

It seems like forever before Jon finally says, “You kept it?” The tone of his voice is raw and brittle.

Martin very gently closes the book and sets in down on the coffee table.

Gerry’s mouth opens and closes a couple of times, confused noises eeking out like the squeaking of a rusted hinge. He seems almost as lost as Martin is. Finally his words take shape and land on, “Yes? Yeah, of course I did. Why wouldn’t I have?”

Jon’s eyes flicker away, to the oscillating fan and then to the TV kindly asking if they were still watching. He picks at a loose thread on the chair, fingers working anxiously. “I thought…after your mother- after you left- I thought that…”

Gerry’s eyebrows pull together, his lips tipping down into a frown. “What? Did you think I’d thrown it away?”

Jon shrugs, first one shoulder and then the other, like the collapse of a building. “Just kind of...assumed.” His hands were wringing together now, picking at the skin gently and scratching at his wrist. “After the...after the funeral we weren’t really talking, and then you were just...gone. Thought maybe…” Jon shrugs again, this time lower, hunching himself down smaller, “maybe you didn’t want to remember.”

Oh, Martin thought distantly. Gerry’s mother, Mary, had died when he was only 16, apparently by suicide. It had been a sudden, violent thing that had sent Gerry’s childhood spiraling in a direction he couldn’t control. Less than a week from the time his mother had died, Gerry had been uprooted from the home in Bournemouth he’d always lived in and made to move in with a distant relative named Gertrude up in London. He’d barely had time to process any of it, let alone let Jon know what was happening. It was over ten years before they’d seen each other again, and the gap had always been a sore spot for both Jon and Gerry.

Gerry makes a choked noise and crosses the room in quick strides to kneel in front of the chair. He gathers Jon’s hands in his own, cradling them together. “No,” he says, so softly Martin can barely hear him, “Not you.” He brings their hands up so he can kiss the backs of Jon’s hands, brush his lips over the knuckles. “I never wanted to forget you.”

Jon’s breath hitches.

Martin watches Gerry hold Jon’s hands to his face and mumble something that he can’t make out. Jon’s fingers twitch in response and he huffs out a breath. After a moment he gets up and goes into the kitchen to make them all some tea, flicking the switch on the electric kettle and rummaging through the pantry to find the container of lemongrass tea that he knows Jon likes and the mint tea that Gerry prefers. It doesn’t take long, but he likes the ritual of it anyway. He gathers their two mugs in one hand, and his own mug of a spicy black tea in the other and heads back into the sitting room.

Jon has moved over to the couch, tucked under Gerry’s arm with the book in his lap.

Martin smiles and sets their tea down.

When Jon looks up, Martin bends down and kisses his forehead and then grins wider when Jon’s nose and forehead scrunch up.

“Okay?” Martin asks.

Jon waves at him dismissively but makes a grab for his shirt when Martin turns like he’s going to take the chair. “Yes,” he says, exasperated, “come here, please.”

Gerry squishes himself into the corner and pulls Jon closer to make room, so Martin sighs and fits himself in next to them on the sofa. It’s a cramped fit, but ultimately worth it for the way Jon relaxes against him, flipping absently through the book of memories on his lap.

“Gerry had a point, at least.” Martin says.

“Hm?”

“You looked good with a shaved head,” Martin says too lightly, “might be a good summer to try it again.”

Jon’s protests are drowned out by Gerry’s instant and joyous peal of laughter.

Jon says something about ‘nothing being sacred’, the tips of his ears burning, while Martin tries to hide his grin in his cup of tea. He almost succeeds.

[willowcrowned]

Grey Apprentice AU (Installment #4)

aka Sith!Obi-Wan AU Flavor II 

(Previous parts: x x x)

Qui-Gon paces the length of his and Obi-Wan's small sitting room, first once, then twice, then a third time. He looks up, expecting the usual dry comment from Obi-Wan on jedi masters’ peaceful bodies and minds, but he’s not there. Of course, that’s the problem in the first place: Obi-Wan is gone, off on a ship with a figure that felt like a maelstrom of darkness in the Force, and he’d left with a wink. The man must know something Qui-Gon doesn’t, but what it is, he can’t guess.

He turns, pausing at the entrance to Obi-Wan's room. He normally doesn’t enter without permission; it’s an invasion of Obi-Wan's privacy— privacy to which he is well entitled— but in this case...

Qui-Gon grimaces, opening the door. He won’t snoop, won’t do anything other than have a superficial look. At the very least it might calm him down to have tangible evidence of Obi-Wan's intention to return. When they’d left, he hadn’t taken the black bag he usually keeps with him, a velvet thing smaller than Qui-Gon's palm. Obi-Wan wouldn’t have left it if he thought he’d be gone for more than a week.

The room is just as Obi-Wan had left it, tidy and empty, with a plant on the desk next to a picture of his friends, a spare cloak hung up on the peg next to the door, and a blanket folded perfectly at the foot of his bed. It’s the room of a knight, not of a padawan, Qui-Gon realizes, and he has to push down the surge of pride and guilt that seems to swell up in his chest more and more often these days.

He frowns, for the first time noticing the odd pressure building in his brain. It’s a strange, blunt, thing— the marked absence of something, rather than its presence. He scans the room once more for the offending object, for the first time noticing an odd red glow from the closet. Qui-Gon pauses. He’d said he wouldn’t touch anything, but— The glow grows brighter, and he can hear the Force calling to him from it, not light, not peaceful, but not unkind. Qui-Gon sighs, and opens the closet door.  

The glow is coming from the floor, within the black bag Obi-Wan had left behind. Qui-Gon looks at it, a furrow forming in his brows. It’s not Obi-Wan's habit to leave things on the floor, and the cleaning crews haven’t been in their apartments since they left. When he picks up the bag, intending to return it to its place on the shelf, a white-hot pain sears through his hand, and he drops it. The bag tumbles to the floor, and out of it falls a holocron.

It’s the last thing Qui-Gon notices before the onslaught of darkness hits him, pressing him beneath a tsunami of emotion. The fury slams into him first, not so hot as the zabrak’s had been but far, far, deeper. Qui-Gon falls to his knees without noticing, forced to sustain the mental battering of his shields. He can feel them weakening even as he clutches them tighter, being torn away bit by bit like an old house in a storm.

How is no one noticing this, Qui-Gon wonders. How come no one has come in to see what this endless wave of darkness is— this storm with no light.

The first tear in his shields happens, and he works it shore it up, plugging it with whatever he can think of: random bits of trivia, a poem, a meal he shared with Obi-Wan. Stay, he tells them, give me time. The pieces do not stay, each layer being ripped away until all that’s left was the look on Obi-Wan's face as he realized the sandwich he’d bitten into was filled with candied ants. Then, abruptly, the maelstrom stops, and Qui-Gon is left grasping for the pieces of his shields, the void around them quiet once more.

“Do forgive my intrusion,” a female voice says, dry and unapologetic as Qui-Gon struggles to get control of his breathing on the floor. “You know how it is: better safe than sorry.”

Qui-Gon falls back, resting against the wall as he tries to catch his breath. “What are you?” He says, injecting his tone with as little worry as he can manage. “What are you doing here?” What are you doing in Obi-Wan's room, he wants to add. What have you done to my padawan?

Zannah’s nose scrunches slightly, halfway between amused and disgusted. “Your shields are down, Jedi.”

“I wonder why that is,” he manages.

She shrugs. “I’m not going to apologize.”

Qui-Gon patches up his shields, weaving the skeleton of the old threads of memory into a new place, beside several strong pockets of compulsion. It won’t be enough to stop the woman if she attacks him again, but it might gain him a few seconds of reprieve. It will have to be enough.

“As for your questions,” the woman says once he’s finished, “A Sith, sleeping, Obi-Wan brought me here, and I’ve done nothing to him.”

“Nothing,” Qui-Gon repeats, disbelieving, the aftershocks of her attack still filtering through his mind.

“Yes,” the woman says. “Pleased to meet you. I’m Darth Zannah. I’d tell you to sit down, but, well...” She gestures to him collapsed on the floor.

Qui-Gon shakes his head, trying to disseminate the information. “Does he know you’re here? Does he know what he brought back?” Surely not, he thinks. Surely Obi-Wan wouldn’t have knowingly brought a Sith into the heart of the Jedi temple.

“I should hope so,” Zannah says, “given that I’ve been training him for twelve years.”

“Twelve—” Qui-Gon freezes.

“Yes,” Zannah agrees, “since Bandomeer.”

“Impossible,” Qui-Gon breathes.

“Is it?” Zannah raises an eyebrow in a perfect imitation of Obi-Wan— or, no, all this time Obi-Wan must have been imitating her. Qui-Gon remembers when he picked that little habit up; it had been the months after he’d turned seventeen, just beginning to grow into his too-long limbs, still gawkish and almost awkward. Then, over the course of their mission, his gait had grown smoother, countenance more graceful, and his awkward smiles at Qui-Gon's jokes had turned into an amused raised eyebrow and half-smirk. 

It had felt odd at the time, watching the maladroit child he knew turn into a clever, subtle, adult, but he knows it now as the sign of Obi-Wan growing up, leaving Qui-Gon as a student and returning to him as a friend. He remembers the white stone of the city, remembers the late spring blossoms of the sea-roses, remembers the first time Obi-Wan had turned that quizzical look on him— and feels the taste of the memory, sweet with the blossoms, turn to ash in his mouth.

“How—” Qui-Gon starts, mouth dry. “Why—”

“I offered him knowledge,” Zannah says, not unkindly, “and companionship not to be found in the constraints of Jedi.”

“Why train him?” Qui-Gon asks, clutching at proof that she has not— could not— have trained Obi-Wan. Obi-Wan is kind, and clever, and selfless, and none of the things a Sith should be. He cannot have lied so fully for so many years. He cannot. “Why not train someone else? Someone you wouldn’t have to corrupt first?”

Zannah gives him an incredulous look. “You think I’ve corrupted him? Have you forgotten Ghé’aiit so easily? That was not the behavior of one corrupted.”

Qui-Gon feels ire stir deep in his chest, at her prodding, guiding rhetoric, but the memory springs to him unbidden.

It had begun as a trade dispute. Three families, each the head of a government and of a trade sector. The Jedi had initially been brought in to facilitate negotiations; those had lasted all of two nights, ending with Obi-Wan kidnapped and in chains— a hostage for the third family. Qui-Gon hadn’t known that at the time, of course. He’d only known that Obi-Wan was gone and the place where their bond was had turned to a jagged mess of edges before it disappeared into nothingness.

He’d found Obi-Wan again, oblivious to Qui-Gon's presence, escaped and facing the Third Peer, who was holding a blaster to his sister’s head. It would have been easy, laughably easy, for Obi-Wan to let him shoot her, claim he had gotten there too late to save her, and arrested the Third Peer with little risk to himself. Instead, Obi-Wan had lain down his blaster, and braced himself for the shot.  

(Later, when their bond was back and whole, Qui-Gon had blocked it off again, too overwhelmed by fear and relief not to yell at Obi-Wan. How could he yell at Obi-Wan, when he’d done exactly as a Jedi should do? But how could he not be angry, not be furious, that he had lain down his blaster and braced himself for death as if it were second nature? How can I forgive you, Qui-Gon had thought then, for almost leaving me? How will I be able to let you go when it’s time?)

“He scared me too,” Zannah says softly. “When I heard what he had done, I could barely restrain myself. Foolish, loving, Jedi, and their need to do the right thing.”

“I hope you don’t think,” Qui-Gon says, tired, “that I trust you.”

“No,” Zannah says. “You’re not a stupid man, on the whole. I hope you will trust Obi-Wan, though.”

Qui-Gon sits straight up, reminded of what had caused his agitation in the first place. “Obi-Wan. You sent him after that darksider?”

“Darth Maul,” Zannah agrees. “I wouldn’t fear, he’s not a match for Obi-Wan— merely the servant of the Sith Master.”

“You would send Obi-Wan to do another Sith’s dirty work?” Qui-Gon doesn’t hide the curl of his lip from her, meeting her gaze head-on. “I thought the masters were supposed to discard their apprentices themselves.”

“I do not,” she hisses, eyes flashing, “do that creature’s dirty work.”

“Lady Zannah—” Qui-Gon replies coldly.

“Lord, actually,” Zannah corrects, and all of a sudden the fire has left her eyes. “The title is ‘lord’ regardless of gender. A Sith Lady is a different job entirely.”

“Lord Zannah,” Qui-Gon corrects, making sure she can hear the eye-roll inherent in his tone, “Are you implying that not only are you embroiled in a rivalry with another Sith clan, but that you have, in fact, created your own?”

“We call them houses,” Zannah replies. “Mine is that of Athén. And you are correct, Obi-Wan is a part of it. We are a House of two.”

Fantastic, Qui-Gon thinks bitterly, and his patch-job must not be as good as he thinks it is because he swears he hears Zannah chuckle. He sighs. “Out of curiosity, what is the job of a Sith Lady?”

“A combination of cultural advisor, archivist, and magic user. And occasionally a consort.” Zannah smiles a wickedly sharp smile. “I much prefer being a Lord.”

Yes, Qui-Gon thinks, not caring that she can hear it. You would.

-

 Some notes:

-Yes Zannah did name her house after her dead wife, who is in turn named after Athena, because I am a basic, basic, bitch

-Yes, I did borrow the line about Sith jobs from the Enchanted Forest Chronicles. Patricia C. Wrede I’m so sorry I’m using your work for my nonsense AUs but also those books shaped me as a human, so. Too Bad. They’re a part of my writing now.

- I included a bug-eating joke because apparently I am constantly under the compulsion to talk about people in sw eating bugs. I have no excuses

[lightrises]

"Only in allowing her to pass..." — Hornet, The Radiance, and the means by which Hallownest turned its victims against each other

A quick note: I read Hollow Knight as an anti-colonialist text. As such I'll be touching on topics related to colonialism as it's depicted in the world of the game, and said analysis will reflect both a sympathetic take on The Radiance and a critique of The Pale King that won't pull its punches. If this sounds up your alley, hello and thank you for the read! Let us be sad about these bugs together.

———

So!! A while back I realized something about pre-canon that felt rather... "curious" is one way to put it, I think. To wit: for all the effort and scheming and determination The Pale King poured into trying to get rid of The Radiance, neither of his plans involved directly killing her.

Was that his long game? Well, sure, that seems clear enough. His tack changed from luring the moths away from their god and creator to a more literal form of incarceration once the infection became a factor, but at its core the end goal never really changed—The Pale King very sincerely wished to destroy Radiance via obsolescence. The Seer lends us foreshadowing to confirm as much:

[Image descriptions: Two screenshots from Hollow Knight, showing the Seer and Ghost in the Seer's alcove at the Resting Grounds. Across both screenshots, the Seer tells Ghost the following: "None of us can live forever, and so we ask those who survive to remember us. Hold something in your mind and it lives on with you, but forget it and you seal it away forever. That is the only death that matters." End description.]

(Which, by the way and given the context, talk about an extremely unsubtle allusion to cultural genocide huh!!! Whew.)

In any case, we're left with a whole bunch of machinations which build up to... well, two very roundabout attempts at committing deicide. That's kind of weird, all things considered! Why not just do the deed in one fell swoop and get it over with?

This could be for any number of reasons. Maybe the king was devoid of the means to instantly kill another higher being. Maybe his personal sense of scruples stopped him short of signing off on MURDER murder (although, y'know, the aforementioned genocide + eternal imprisonment = still cool and copasectic apparently!). Maybe the long drawn-out cruelty was the point. Maybe the idea of playing fuckign 4D chess with the circumstances was too delicious for him to pass up—that man did love to tinker and stick his claws where they sure as hell didn't belong—or maybe it was a little bit of All The Things. Who knows!!

But interrogating The Pale King's methodology on this count isn't what I'm here for, at least not really. The main reason I raise this question at all is that in her own way, Hornet did too.

"I'd urge you to take that harder path... "

See, going by The Pale King's actions and what The White Lady explicitly says, they both foresaw two outcomes wrt the infection: it can be allowed to spread, or it can be contained. At Teacher's Archives, Quirrel acknowledges the fact that Ghost is expected to do... something about this, but he doesn't elaborate on what HE thinks that's supposed to be apart from the obvious "Gotta bust into Black Egg Temple first". Hornet is the one person who presents to us—to Ghost—what's framed as a third option: confront and destroy the infection at its source.

And she doesn't bring it up like it's just another tactic for Ghost to consider, prim and indifferent to what they would do. She nudges them towards it, actively, up to the point where she throws herself into the fray against Hollow at a juncture that's uniquely dangerous to her and her alone just to make that option feasible.

Even when she's couching it in disclaimers that this is still Ghost's decision to make (and let's be fair, she's extremely not wrong about that lol), no one can pretend Hornet is unbiased. It's obvious in that buttoned-down Hornet kind of way that she is way the hell done with the increasingly tenuous stalemate that's kept Hallownest's desiccated corpse from collapsing in on itself. Personally it's hard for me not to read some Toriel Undertale-esque "My father was too entrenched in his own foolishness to pursue any course of action that would have DEFINITIVELY ended this" shade into her stance here, regardless of whether that's strictly true in canon.

And that bit—Hornet's hopes for an end to Hallownest's stasis, moreover her grim calculation of what needs to be done to get there—that's the bit I find super interesting but likewise tragic and depressing as shit, on multiple levels. In no small part because a) canon itself gestures towards Hornet feeling conflicted about the very plan she's pushing, and moreover b) she has at least two (2) damn good reasons to feel that way.

So, what do I mean by that? Let's look here first:

[Image description: A screenshot from Hollow Knight, of Hornet and Ghost inside the Temple of the Black Egg, standing in front of the unsealed egg itself. Hornet has been struck by the Dream Nail and her dialogue is displayed as follows: "... Could it achieve that impossible thing? Should it?" End description.]

As the curtain is about to drop on things one way or another, Hornet thinks,

... Could it achieve that impossible thing? Should it?

Now, looking at that last bit it's easy to go "Oh no, Hornet's worried that Ghost won't survive killing The Radiance!" And I do think that's part of it: Hornet is, categorically, not her father. By endgame it's clear she's not content to view her Void-borne siblings as tools to be used then disposed of. She's also well aware that as a healthy autonomous Vessel amongst the countless dead, Ghost is the only person left alive who has a fighting chance against The Radiance. Knowing someone is the only qualified candidate for the job doesn't make encouraging them to embrace a probable death sentence any less of a bitter pill to swallow, though. And odds are on that this sentiment extends to Hollow too, who IS going to die no matter what happens here. To put it bluntly, it's more than reasonable to conclude that Hornet hates the absolute fuck out of this.

But I don't think that's all there is to it either. Remember what I said earlier about The Pale King's bids for genocide? Well, it's not like the man deigned to limit his efforts to just the moth tribe.

"We do not choose our mothers... "

On top of everything else—an infected Hallownest being all she's ever known, the fact that she only exists because of the infection, the list goes on—Hornet has spent her life wedged into a position that's been uncomfortable and terminally unglamorous at best: she is both a daughter of her father's kingdom and of Deepnest.

Deepnest, which like the moths and many others was here long before the wyrm and his lady wife swanned onto the scene and the God Become Bug laid claim to everything the Light touched plus a considerable amount of change. THAT Deepnest, which has fought claw and thread to retain its sovereignty against same-said settler king, and for which Herrah not only surrendered her life but also agreed to bed her worst enemy, all in hopes of securing a viable future for her people (put a pin in that last part by the way, I'll come back to it soon).

Two Worlds, One Family (Ft. An Indigenous Woman Trying Her Damndest To Work With What She's Got Versus An Imperialist Who Only Signed Up For This Because He Needed The Political Favor THAT Badly, So It's The Height Of Dysfunctional Actually). Fun times!!!!

The baggage this entails for Hornet is gnarly enough without implications made by The White Lady and the pre-canon timeline of events and even Team Cherry's dev notes that the king may well have looked at baby Hornet, gone "YOINK", then ensured she spent the lion's share of her childhood reared within the pearly auspices of his Pale Court*. That would be rather advantageous for Him Specifically after all, the potential to mold a born foe into a future ally and even have her trained in combat under the same tutelage as her doomed sibling. And far be it from him to stop a grown Hornet—his own flesh and blood too!—from making Deepnest her forever home if she so pleased. He totally wouldn't be reneging on his "fair bargain made" by doing this one simple thing until Hornet came of age, not t e c h nic c a l l y.

If that is indeed the case, there's a non-zero chance Hornet's formative years were a hot mess of cultural alienation and being a good deal more privy than most to just how much of a bastard her father could be. There's an equally non-zero chance that at some point she stood or sat within earshot as The Pale King finally, finally dropped all pretense and euphemism to name the Light for precisely what (for who) it was.

See, in conjunction with the question that started this whole dang train of thought I've been asking this one too: Does Hornet know? When she speaks of confronting "the heart of [the] infection" does she know she's talking about not just a literal person but someone very specific? The Radiance, who god though she may be shares skin in the game alongside Hornet as a native woman screwed over by the same settler king, likewise deprived of her kin and saddled with a life gone horrendously pear-shaped?

I'll assume for the sake of exploring the possibility and because I think it's a likely one anyway that yes, Hornet does know. She knows, and despite everything can't help empathizing. She might even look at Radiance and see bits and pieces both reflected and slightly inversed in her own mother: Radiance was forced to the sidelines while her people—her children, the brood she was meant to lead and care for—died out under The Pale King's rule, and it's no stretch to assume she's at least as upset about that as she has been about everything else; Herrah too took drastic measures for her people's sake, trying to head off annihilation by relegating herself to the sidelines in an act that was as much calculated risk as an attempt to find wiggle room and leverage in the face of a nasty proposition.

A calculated risk that, if things continue as they are, might well amount to nothing as the rest of Deepnest gets eaten alive by the infection. It survived The Pale King's advances for so so long, only to fall here. Herrah's sacrifice would be for naught; the other tribes—themselves the king's victims—would keep succumbing to the infection too.

And this is where things fall apart.

"... or the circumstance into which we are born."

Let's be clear: I think Hornet is wise enough to know what's what here, that all the carnage and suffering falls on her father's head for starting this slow-motion trainwreck in the first place. Hallownest wasn't always Hallownest. This domain was Radiance's home first, along with many others. It was the worm-turned-king who rolled up on the scene unsolicited and decided this was a ""'problem""" that had to be """solved""".

But the fact of the matter is that he's gone and The Radiance is here, raging, seemingly inconsolable. Above and beyond being Deepnest's rightful heir, Hornet isn't in a position to countenance more splash damage even if the grief and fury fueling it makes perfect sense. She can understand without ever bringing herself to love Radiance, and she can bend her knee to practicality even if she hates the everloving shit out of it because the fact that it "has" to end this way isn't fair.

This lends itself to one last awful conclusion: that Hornet has probably considered and (rightly or wrongly) discarded the possibility that Radiance can be saved, at least not without dragging more collateral along for the ride. If even her mother and every other enemy to the king seemed to dismiss talking Radiance down as an option way back when... well. Why should Hornet hope for any better after things have escalated so far?

Again, it's practical. A practical net good is what Hornet strives for. And again, it fucking sucks.

For extra tragedy points, this makes Hornet's extended crypticness around Ghost followed by her last minute casting about for a reason to tell them "Wait, don't; not just yet" that she never voices even more of a gut punch. She can't bring herself to burden Ghost with the context that haunts her so, least of all when it might weaken their resolve to go through with what (she thinks) needs doing.

It's the "same song, different verse" which led to the mantis tribe and Deepnest being pitted against each other: Hallownest rigged the game so that two women who could have been powerful allies—who have a mutual vested interest in driving out settler rule—wound up poised as enemies instead. And how awful is that? The king for all his being extremely fucking dead still gets the last laugh, because outside of a miracle the game never manifests Hornet can salvage what her mother started and look forward to a future where Deepnest pulls itself back from the brink if and only if The Radiance dies.

Resolution comes at the price of a completed genocide. Add two more dead siblings to the unconscionable pile thereof, while we're at it. That's what it boils down to whether or not Hornet can bear to articulate it as such, and there's no grace or even a properly bittersweet ending to wring from this clusterfuck. And that is rough.

———

* This has been better explained elsewhere, but a quick rundown: The White Lady tells Ghost that Hornet and Herrah "were permitted little time together." On its surface this can be taken to mean that Hornet was still very young when Herrah was shipped off to Eternal Dreamland—except this doesn't jive with the fact that we meet Hornet as an adult. If the stasis kicked in once the Dreamers went to their rest, which in turn halted the aging process for every living bug in Hallownest, AND before all this Hornet experienced little by the way of quality time with her birth mother... I think you can see where I'm going with this.

To top it off we've got Team Cherry weighing in ominously from their dev notes on Herrah: "As part of the agreement for her alliance and her role as a dreamer, King gave her a child (Hornet). Was she allowed to keep this child or was she taken away?" This isn't confirmation by itself of course, but given additional canon details (see above): Can I get a "yikes" in the chat fellas.

[thehouseoflamentation]

Breeding Season (11 vs 1) ~NSFW~

You knew the brothers had been acting strange for the past few days but this was just ridiculous. First it started with excuses to avoid hanging out with you, then they began ignoring your messages and calls, and now here you were sitting in the dining hall for breakfast with none of the brothers in sight. You could expect this kind of behavior from Mammon or Levi but Beel? You knew he wouldn’t miss breakfast for the world so the fact that he wasn’t at the table inhaling a stack of pancakes was more than enough proof that something was wrong.

Mammon wasn’t in your room that morning either and you know Lucifer would never wake up this late so you started searching the house for any clues that would shed some light on your current circumstances. You tried calling them and checked all of their rooms but none of them were there, not even Levi which only made you more concerned. After spending an hour scouring the house you ended up back in your room, exhausted and not a single step closer to finding the reason behind the brothers’ disappearance. It wasn’t until you collapsed on your bed that you noticed a red envelope sitting on the edge of your nightstand. Your name and today’s date were written on the back of the envelope. It wasn’t there when you went to sleep last night which only made it seem even more suspicious. Tearing through the paper covering, you pulled out the letter from within and began to read.

“MC, as a valued exchange student your presence is requested at the Demon King’s Palace for further instruction in the program. We hope you have enjoyed your stay in the Devildom so far but due to recent developments we believe you need additional guidance. Sincerely, RAD Student Council.”

Well, that explained why they were nowhere to be seen that morning. Still, the whole situation felt rather odd. Diavolo would never call the brothers out so early unless it was some kind of emergency and even then he would have made at least one of them stay with you for safety’s sake. Not to mention it didn’t clear up why the brothers had been giving you the cold shoulder for nearly a week now.

Following your only lead, you decided to go through with Diavolo’s request, hoping to get to the bottom of this mystery somehow. As you approached the gates of the palace you were surprised to find Solomon waiting at the entrance as well. You could only assume the demon prince wanted to have a word with all two of the humans involved in the program which made you feel a little more secure knowing that you weren’t the only one being put on the spot. As you walked past the gates towards the front doors you started to feel anxious. Diavolo’s vague letter and the brothers’ dismissive behavior made it impossible for you to shake the feeling in the back of your mind that something was wrong. Solomon was quick to notice your apprehension and reached out for your hand, lacing his fingers between yours to settle your nerves.

“Don’t worry, there’s no way Diavolo would harm either of us. It would go against everything he worked to establish. Just calm down and try to relax….trust me you’ll need it more than you think....”

You flinched for a second, unsure whether to feel comforted or concerned over his words. Just as you were about to question his last comment, the doors of the palace suddenly parted revealing Barbatos on the other side. He welcomed you both and immediately led the two of you down a number of hallways and stairs until you found yourself standing in front of another set of doors. Following his lead you entered the room only to realize you weren’t brought to a meeting room but Diavolo’s private chambers, the demon prince himself along with the rest of the brothers stood in waiting. They stiffened and fidgeted as their gaze fell on you but they quickly reigned themselves in as Diavolo began to speak.

“I’m truly glad you could join us today MC. I’m sure you must have many questions but I’d like you to take a moment to remember your last….exchange student review.”

At those words your mind quickly flashed back to that fateful day you spent in Diavolo’s office. You remembered how you toyed with him until he snapped and bent you over his desk to ravage you to his heart’s content. Your face started to grow heated as the memories came flooding back.

“Since you were so eager to help me last breeding season, I assume you have no objections to being a little more generous with your body this time around?” he continued as he slowly drew closer to you.

Your eyes scanned the room. Each demon seemed like they could jump at you at any moment, their restraint held back by a thread as your intoxicating scent permeated the room. It all made sense now. Why they were acting so strange, why they were ignoring you, why they distanced themselves from you at every turn. They weren’t avoiding you out of spite or hatred, they were avoiding you because every single one of them was in heat.

You gulped silently before nodding at Diavolo’s proposal. It amazed you how one small gesture instantly changed the demaneor of everyone in the room. They all looked at you the same way predators stared down their prey, each of them just as ravenous to have you for themselves. You heard the doors of the bedroom shut and lock as Barbatos smiled back at you, his placid expression perfectly hid his true intentions. Before any of them could lay a hand on you, Solomon cleared his throat and straightened up to face the small crowd of demons in front of you.

“Aren’t you forgetting something? Or perhaps I should remind you all of our little agreement?” His smug expression drew out curses and looks of disdain from the others, but even then Solomon simply let out a chuckle at their reactions and proceeded to pull out a worn piece of paper from his pocket, “Why don’t you tell MC about our deal, Diavolo? After all it's only fair that they know what you’re about to put their body through. Don’t you think?”

You could feel the tension in the room start to rise but Diavolo proceeded with his explanation regardless, “Breeding with a demon is one thing MC, but to breed with several demons at once we needed a spell strong enough to induce the human equivalent of a heat cycle within your body to make it capable of breeding with all of us without the risk of over exhaustion. And while the spell does exist, it’s so rare that we weren’t even able to find it within Satan’s mountain of spellbooks. Solomon was kind enough to lend us the only copy left in the three realms but on one condition...”

“Go on...” the sorcerer smirked and playfully prompted the demon prince to continue despite the dirty looks he was getting from around the room.

“.....he gets to have you first...” Diavolo’s voice trailed towards the end as he crossed his arms and took a step back allowing Solomon to move closer to you.

You understood now why everyone was on edge. Standing before you were the seven rulers of hell and the demon prince himself and yet Solomon, a human, was holding them all back telling them to wait their turn. Each of them were beings made to give in to their deepest desires so the fact that they could only sit back and watch while they supressed their heat induced urges felt like nothing less than torture for them.You’d be lying if you didn’t admit this was the most clever and twisted power move you’ve ever witnessed.

After giving you one last look of reassurance, Solomon pulled you in close and began reading the incantation scrawled on the paper. You could immediately tell something was different as warmth began pooling at the center of your core, quickly spreading to the rest of your body. It was starting to get hard for you to stand so Solomon carried you to Diavolo’s bed, placing you gently onto the sheets as your body adjusted to its new heat cycle. Once you got used to the new sensation coursing through your veins, Solomon started undressing you until you were bare for all to see.

Meanwhile, Diavolo, Barbatos, and the rest of the brothers started shifting into their demon forms from the side lines. Your scent was already irresistible but now that you were in heat, it was impossible to stand there and watch without letting some tension out. Claws, tails, and wings all began manifesting as each of them shed their clothes and approached the bed. Even though they couldn’t indulge in your sweetness just yet their desperation drew them as close to you as Solomon would allow.

The sorcerer was just as affected by the spell as you were, his restraint long gone as he eagerly left kisses and hickeys all over your body. One of his hands played with your nipples while the other dipped between your legs letting your arousal drip onto the sheets. As shady as Solomon was he wasn’t malicious by any means so he allowed the demons a bit of solace to satiate their lust. Without stopping his administrations, he took your clothes and threw them off the side of the bed. It wasn’t much but the fabric had your concentrated scent and they were eager to take in as much of you as they could while they rubbed themselves off.

You were already so wet from your heat but Solomon’s teasing was far from over. Removing his hand from between your legs he took a moment to admire your arousal coating his fingers before bringing them back to his mouth, moaning as the salty taste hit his tongue. He didn’t have to look away from you for a moment to know how badly he was tormenting the others. Grumbles and hushed remarks could be heard throughout the room but they did little to relieve that passionate fire burning deep within each demon present. Still longing for more, Solomon spread your legs apart and peppered your thighs with kisses before plunging his tongue into your deepest part. You could feel him smirk against your skin as he drove the rest of the demons to the brink of their jealousy. Your hands delved into his silver locks bringing him closer and making it easier for him to curl his tongue around your weak spots. When his mouth moved away you groaned at the lack of contact but soon realized he was only stopping to give you something much better. Positioning his cock at your entrance, he rolled his hips forward coating his length in your arousal while he grinded against you making your eyes roll back reflexively as you let out a loud moan. Your voice, your scent, your body, it was all too much for the demons to bear and yet it felt so far away, so out of reach from where they stood.

After than moan, there was little left to hold Solomon back. He snapped his hips forward, shoving his length deep inside of you with a single motion. He was going to give you some time to adjust but with the way you were rocking your hips against his you were basically begging to be fucked. He wasn’t gentle. There was no need for him to treat you so delicately while your voice and body cried out for him to ram his cock into you until your mind went blank. With every thrust a new wave of pleasure hit you stronger and more intense than the last. The ecstasy of it all made you unable to do anything but move in sync with Solomon’s hips and moan his name endlessly much to the envy of the demons that surrounded you. After grinding against a particularly sensitive spot, you could feel yourself tighten around him as the heat inside your stomach continued to build. After several more thrusts all the tension in your core was suddenly released as you came, your walls closed in on his cock driving him past his limit and milking him until every last drop was either inside you or spilled on the sheets.

As Solomon pulled out of you and rolled off the bed you could feel the mattress immediately dip under new weight. Before you had the chance to fully ride out your orgasm you found yourself being flipped onto your stomach as another cock was shoved inside of you. The feeling of having your walls suddenly stretched from such girth made you dig your fingers into the sheets, tears welling up from both pain and pleasure. Diavolo hummed to himself as he rubbed your back and left a trail of kisses down your spine in an attempt to calm you down. Even though he wanted to start moving as soon as he entered you he gave you a moment to get used to his size. Being a demon, he was much bigger and thicker than Solomon so he had to be careful if he didn’t want to break you, he could always do that later anyways but for now he wanted everyone to get a chance to feel as good as you made him feel last breeding season.

Once your breathing settled down, Diavolo’s hands left your back. His fingers now traced up your neck and pushed into your mouth, padding over the soft flesh of your tongue as you feebly drooled and licked his digits. “Lucifer, why don’t you take the other end?” Upon hearing those words your half lidded eyes shot wide open. You felt a sharp pain as your hair was gripped and pulled, forcing your head to be level with Lucifer’s dick. He pressed his member against your cheek, precum already dripping from the head. Diavolo’s fingers left your mouth only to be replaced with Lucifer’s cock, his length reached far deeper than any fingers could as he grabbed your head and pushed himself further and further down your throat.You flinched and struggled beneath him while your throat stretched to accommodate his girth which only increased due to being in his demon form.

Through all your tears and quick shallow breaths you were finally able to take in his full length, your lips now wrapped around the base of his dick. With your body penetrated from both ends, you tried to calm yourself for a moment but found yourself suddenly choking as you felt Diavolo’s hips suddenly crash into yours. Neither of the demons before you could wait any longer. You closed your eyes and braced yourself as claw-like nails dug into your soft thighs while Diavolo pounded into you from behind. Ever the sadist, Lucifer proved to be no easier to handle. His hips bucked and thrusted into you while his hands remained buried in your hair ready to give you another sharp tug for every second you failed to service him adequately.

Despite being preoccupied with two demons, the others felt no need to restrain themselves from having a taste, a touch, a small piece of you to help them ease the tension that coursed through their bodies. While Lucifer and Diavolo’s wings made it hard for the others to come near you, it sure as hell didn’t stop them from trying. At first, you couldn’t quite tell who was where but you were certain you felt hands roam up and down your back and stomach. You felt teeth drag across your chest, only stopping to bite and pull at your nipples. You could only assume Beel started getting impatient and wanted to sneak a nibble while Lucifer was focused on face fucking you. At the same time you felt something smooth and cool brush past one of your legs. You looked down only to realize Levi’s tail had coiled itself around your thigh giving you a good squeeze every few seconds. Every part of your body felt like it was being ravished from different directions, the tension inside swelled once again as you drew closer to your second orgasm.

Diavolo’s hips were now moving at a reckless pace, every inch of his dick rubbed against your walls as he slammed into you mindlessly chasing the climax that was just beyond his reach. Lucifer was just as reckless and twice as merciless compared to Diavolo. His fists tightened around your locks as he spent every bit of energy he had shoving his cock down your throat over and over again. At this point he didn’t care if you choked, if anything seeing you gag and cry as you sucked him off was probably just what he needed to push past his breaking point. If only he knew he was about to get exactly what he asked for.

As the three of you grew closer and closer to cumming you suddenly felt teeth sink into the crook of your neck, striking one of your weak spots and sending a jolt through the rest of your body. Your ass backed up against Diavolo, inadvertently causing him to ram his dick directly into your deepest, most sensitive parts. At the same time your stifled moans made your throat vibrate around Lucifer’s cock. The stimulation was so amazing he couldn’t stop himself from thrusting into you as deep as he could, hitting the back of your throat and making you choke in the process. Your body tightened and convulsed around both of them sending all three of you off the edge at once. Neither of the demons moved an inch until they released everything they had inside you. Your legs trembled as you felt Diavolo spill his hot seed deep within you, the thick fluid only made the warmth in your core grow and intensify until it was almost unbearable. Meanwhile Lucifer took pleasure in watching you squirm and struggle to breathe as he pumped his load down your throat, his hands gripping either side of your head as he forced you to swallow every last drop.

When they finally pulled away you barely had enough energy left to stay on your hands and knees. Your body fell onto the sticky mess of sheets as you focused on steadying your breathing and preparing yourself for the next round of demons. From the corner of your eye you saw Mammon smirk to himself as he approached you. You thought nothing of it at the moment until your eyes met his and the realization finally hit you. The sudden bite that triggered your climax earlier wasn’t just a random act in the heat of the moment, it was planned! The last time you and Mammon got it on he covered your neck in hickeys and accidentally stumbled across one of your weak points. He never mentioned the incident again so you thought he had forgotten all about it. You never expected him to use it on you to make his turn come sooner. That sly bastard!

Still, you couldn’t complain when he swept your hair to the side to kiss your face and comfort you as you tried to calm yourself after being dominated by two of the strongest demons in hell. You let your mind slip for just a second and in that small amount of time you found yourself now lying on your back. Mammon left a trail of kisses and hickeys down your body starting from the weak spot on your neck and leading down between your legs. His mouth only left your skin to growl and hiss at his brothers who were far too pent up and eager to wait for the second born to finish toying with you.

"Damn it..l was your first so I should have been...well whatever it doesn't matter. I wasn't your first this time but l'll be damned if l'm not the best guy you get today!!"

Greedy as always, Mammon kept his wings outstretched making it hard for the others to even get a glimpse of his precious human. Even so his victory was short lived as a certain envious demon finally had enough of his brother monopolizing your attention. Once Mammon positioned himself between your legs and started entering you, Levi made his move. In one smooth motion he crawled on top of you and straddled your torso, effectively blocking Mammon’s view of your face with his back. Before the avatar of greed could retaliate you wrapped your legs around his waist forcing his cock to sink deep inside of you before he even had the chance to react. You could feel your walls stretch once again but the slight amount of pain was worth it seeing the great Mammon reduced to a sensitive quivering mess. Payback never felt so good.

Once you adjusted to Mammon’s size your focus soon turned back to Levi, he licked his lips while his eyes roamed between your face and torso as if deciding which to indulge in first. A low rumble came from his chest and erupted from his throat as a deep, almost deranged laugh.

“Ahhhhhh....hahh....ahHahAhHAHAHA!!!! I’ve always….ALWAYS!!! WANTED TO TRY THIS!!!!!” Without any hesitation, he moved his dick between your breasts, placed his hands on either side of your chest, and pushed your soft mounds together until they pressed against his shaft. He always dreamed of rubbing his hard, slick cock against your chest and now he could finally fulfill that desire. Seeing you in such a lewd, needy state must have worked him up more than he led on as his tail coiled around your wrists, securing your hands and forcing your arms above your head. As restricted as you were, you still found a way to tease the demon before you. Levi continued fucking your chest, rocking his hips back and forth when suddenly you leaned your head forward to take the tip of his dick into your mouth. Your tongue caressed the underside of his shaft and flicked across his slit as you bobbed your head in sync with his thrusts.

Before you got too caught up pleasuring Levi, Mammon slammed his hips against yours to pull your attention back to him and make you remember just who was fucking you. You had never seen either of the boys become as possessive as they were right now. Greed and envy manifested in their purest forms, dominant and unwilling to yield so much as an inch of you to anyone else. Mammon’s thrusts were rough, erratic, and sloppy but still managed to hit all of your most sensitive spots. Every time your insides twitched and clenched around him he pounded into you even harder, gripping onto your thighs for leverage until dark red marks appeared on your smooth skin.It wasn’t long before you felt yourself being driven to the edge once more, your core tightened around Mammon while you moaned against Levi’s cock. The avatar of greed truly lived up to his name as he pushed into you as far as he could on his final thrust, marking your deepest parts with his seed. Levi on the other hand did the exact opposite, marking you in a completely different way. At the last second, he pulled away from your mouth and chest and started stroking himself instead. You were confused for a moment but soon realized what he wanted and stuck your tongue out eagerly taking in whatever cum coated your mouth as he came all over your face. Neither of them were willing to part from you but they knew they couldn’t keep the others waiting. After coming down from his high, Levi uncurled his tail from your hands and moved off of you before wiping the remaining fluids off your face with one of the sheets. Mammon on the other hand wanted to enjoy the feeling of you wrapped around his cock for as long as he could but once he pulled out he couldn’t help but smirk as he watched his cum slowly drip out of you.

As soon as he took a step back Satan took his place, not wasting a single second as he rammed his full length inside of you and started thrusting. You winced at the sudden intrusion but quickly adapted to his size and pace once the dull pain you felt melted into pleasure. Seeking a bit more leverage, he hooked one of your legs over his shoulder and turned you on your side making it easier to pull you close and shove his cock into the deepest parts of your core. You were so busy keeping up with Satan’s reckless pace you almost failed to notice something hot and wet drip onto your cheek. When you finally had the strength to realize what was going on you found yourself just inches away from Asmo’s dick, his arousal already leaking onto you. Your throat still burned from Lucifer and Levi’s abuse but that didn’t stop you from taking him into your mouth. You immediately began sucking on him, swirling your tongue around the head of his cock before moving down to his shaft.

You had to admit though, it was hard to stay focused on Asmo with Satan fucking you at the same time. The moment he entered you his hips kept going at a rapid pace, mercilessly pounding into your core without a single shred of restraint. However, the avatar of wrath still wasn’t satisfied. Holding onto your leg in a vice, he craned his head down leaving deep bites on your inner thigh. It made you shudder to think about the amount of scratches, bruises, and bite marks he would leave behind when he was done with you but at the moment you couldn’t care less. Your mind started to drift from the pleasure when suddenly out of nowhere, Satan stopped moving and pulled out completely. Confusion was apparent on your face as you shook your hips for him to continue, wondering why he stopped in the first place. It wasn’t until you saw him realign himself with you and shoot you the dirtiest look imaginable that you understood what he was planning. You closed your eyes and braced yourself as you felt him thrust into you again with full force. His pace was different now, as he pulled himself out each time only to slam back inside you with all his strength. His movements were so rough every part of you jolted and trembled each time his body collided with yours.

Meanwhile, even with Asmo’s dick still in your mouth you had trouble staying still long enough to service him with how erratic Satan’s thrusts had become. If only you knew how royally fucked you were for neglecting the avatar of lust during his heat. Asmo paid no mind to his brother, he was no excuse for you to stop paying attention to him and he was going to make sure you knew that. Asmo’s hand brushed away the tears and sweat that formed on the side of your face before tilting your head up. His smile was sweet but only skin deep. You could tell from his eyes there was nothing but carnal desire and jealousy behind that pretty face.

“You know MC...if there’s one thing I can’t stand it’s being as perfect as I am and STILL BEING IGNORED!!!” Yanking your hair by the fistful he held your face in place, forcing you to look up at him while he fucked your mouth however he pleased.

You didn’t think things could get any rougher until you felt several sharp teeth bite into your back, right between your shoulder blades. The pain made you jolt and squirm but you could barely move away with Satan and Asmo gripping onto your body. Beelzebub was beyond starving now, he wanted to sink his teeth into anything and since you were the tastiest thing in the room you had his full attention. As Beel left bite marks and hickeys down your back you felt a firm tug on your wrist. The bed was already crowded but Belphie wasn’t about to sit back and let everyone else have fun while he was left to pleasure himself on his own. He took your hand and guided it back to his erection forcing you to stroke him as he thrusted against your palm.

The stimulation from all four of them was too much. Before you knew it the heat and tension within you built up until it all came apart as you passed your limit once again. Even as your walls tightened around Satan he still wouldn’t stop pounding into you until he poured every drop of his thick load inside you and rode out the afterglow of his orgasm. Asmo was just as relentless, waiting until you swallowed everything and licked off the remaining cum that dripped down his cock.

Once Satan and Asmodeus pulled out and stepped back, Beelzebub and Belphegor were quick to trade places with them. As Beel hovered over you he started licking, sucking, and biting all the parts of your body he didn’t get a chance to put his mouth on yet. There wasn’t an inch of you that wasn’t grazed by his teeth and tongue. The ecstasy of it all made you feel like you were melting. Too preoccupied with Beel you failed to notice Belphie slowly slip his body under yours. After positioning himself beneath you right where he wanted, Belphie nodded at Beel signalling him to continue with the next part of their scheme. In one effortless motion Beel wrapped his arms around you and lifted you up, your head rested against his chest as he moved to seat himself on the bed and lower you back down….onto both his and Belphie’s dicks.

You flinched as you felt their hardened lengths poke at your entrance and feebly clung onto Beel’s torso as you braced yourself for what was about to happen next. Tears started welling up in the corners of your eyes as the twins pushed your hips down stretching your insides until you took in every inch of them. Your arousal and all the cum that had been pumped into you made it easier for them to slide in but it was still an arduous task nonetheless. You tried to adjust as best as you could but neither of the demons had any patience left to spare. If you wouldn’t move, you were simply going to be moved. Burying their fingers into your hips and thighs they moved in rhythm, Beel lifted you up while Belphie forced you back down, both of them thrusting into you in sync as they bounced your hips. You couldn’t do much aside from wrap your arms around Beel’s neck and bite down on his shoulder as their pace got faster and rougher. Seeing you so vulnerable was such a turn on for Beel and after covering you in bitemarks he found it cute that you tried to leave your own little mark on him.

Meanwhile as Belphie continued pounding into you he became fixated on your back, a clear view of all the bruises and bitemarks that peppered your skin caused a devious plan to form in the back of his mind. Facing Beel there was no way you could see what he was up to, making it all the more enjoyable for Belphie. Without warning he raised his tail and brought it down on your lower back. A sharp pain ran through your body making you curve your back from the sudden contact as your hips jerked forward unconsciously. At first Belphie only did it to tease you but after feeling how you tightened around him as he whipped you, he now had all the more reason to continue. Several loud slaps echoed throughout the room as Belphie delivered strike after strike leaving dark red stripes down your already battered back. With each successful hit your back arched and your walls squeezed tighter and tighter until the two demons on either side of you reached the end of their ropes. Both of them gripped onto your waist forcing your body down while they thrusted into you as deep as they could one last time. Having taken in so much already you could feel your belly start to swell as even more cum was pumped into you. With barely enough strength left you slumped against Beel’s chest for support as both of their cocks twitched and pulsated inside you still dripping semen into your core. Once they pulled out of you, all the cum that had been poured inside began dripping down your thighs and onto the sheets.

You were so full you didn’t think you could take another load, luckily that’s what the spell was for. By now your body had nearly gone limp from the ceaseless pleasure you were subjected to but even so your heat gave you all the energy and libido you needed to last as many rounds as you could take. Each of them had their chance to fuck you but it was far from over. As long as they were still in heat, they would need to breed with you until the season was over or until your body gave out. Which ever one came first. Too tired to move you noticed a familiar figure step into your field of vision once again. Diavolo looked down at your bruised, bitten, cum covered body and merely smirked while his hands reached to cup your face, planting a kiss on your forehead.

“Such a good, obedient human....I knew we made the right decision choosing you.”

For the rest of the afternoon, they each took turns sharing you. There wasn’t a moment when your mouth, chest, hands, or entrance was left unoccupied. You weren’t sure how you were able to fit Beel’s girth down your throat or how you managed to survive both Satan and Lucifer taking you at the same time but you attributed it to the effects of the spell. In the heat of it all your mind grew hazy as you struggled to process who was doing what to you. All you could comprehend was the feeling of pleasure washing over your body as the demons bred you to their heart’s content. Your body had been marked by each of them in one way or another; be it scratches, bitemarks, or semen, not a single inch of you was left untouched. You weren’t sure when it happened but as passion and desire pushed you past your physical limits you lost whatever consciousness you still had and drifted off to sleep.

When you woke up you were startled to find you couldn’t see, speak, or even move. You were blindfolded, gagged, and bound with ropes; still naked and just as sore as you last remembered but now you were clean and no longer sticky with saliva and cum. You fought against your restraints until you felt the familiar feeling of leather strike your skin causing you to groan helplessly into the gag as you tried to process what was going on.

“They were quite the handful weren’t they?” A familiar voice rang out from the silence.

“Being a butler is never an easy job you know. Always following orders, barely having any time for yourself, putting all of your desires aside for the whims of your master. Though I must admit there is one rewarding perk Diavolo promised in exchange for taking care of you...”

As his words trailed you felt a hand run through your hair seconds before it formed a fist pulling you up to face him.

“....I get to have you all to myself”

With that he dropped you back onto the bed enjoying the sight of you struggling futilely against your bonds. As you stirred on the sheets and tried your best to loosen the ropes around your wrists and legs you noticed a faint sound just beyond earshot. You stilled yourself for a moment to figure out what it was only to realize it was your own voice, moaning and crying out in ecstasy as wet slapping noises played in the background. Confused and embarrassed you began to writhe once again, wondering just what kind of game Barbatos was playing.

“Hehehe….you always act like such a perfect, innocent little human. To think in reality you’re nothing more than a dirty cockslut who’s only desire is to be bred over and over again. Now I admit, it would be easy to use my powers to rewatch your little performance as many times as I like but having a video copy at my disposal makes it much more convenient.”

As his words ran through your head it finally dawned on you. Diavolo, Lucifer, Mammon, Leviathan, Satan, Asmodeus, Beelzebub, and Belphegor, you had sex with all of them but not Barbatos. You realized now he wasn’t holding himself back or letting the others go first simply out of duty or courtesy as a butler, he was getting off on recording every shameless, perverted thing you did that night. Now he had a full uncut video of you drunk on sex, mindlessly sucking and fucking several demons at once without a care in world. As the video played you soon became too embarrassed to respond or struggle any longer, accepting your circumstances and lying silent on the sheets.

“Don’t worry, I won’t share it with a single soul. In fact, I’ll even delete it if you want! But only if you behave and be a good little slut for me just like you were for them last night. Now does that sound fair?”

You didn’t have much of a choice so you accepted his offer, nodding with the blindfold and gag still in place. In the background you could hear the rustling of fabric and the sounds of a belt being undone as footsteps drew closer to you. The gag was the first to go, only being removed to be replaced with Barbatos’s cock. He made no effort to be gentle with you as he immediately forced his dick down your throat. He had enough watching and waiting. He’s served the needs of Diavolo his whole life and now it was his turn to be serviced. Taking out all his tension and frustrations he quickened his pace, ignoring your pleas for air as he let his hips move as rough as he wanted. It was hard to use your tongue with how fast he was going but you managed to rub a particularly sensitive spot on the underside of his shaft. You couldn’t see his face but from the way he was groaning and twitching in your mouth you could tell he was close. With one last thrust he reached his limit, coating your throat with his hot seed before pulling out and letting the rest of his load spill onto your face. Attempting to catch your breath you lied on your stomach, panting and coughing from Barbatos’s rough treatment. You barely had time to recover before you felt the ropes around your legs come undone as he gave you your next order.

“Lift your ass and spread your legs. Now.”

His tone was cold and stern, an ever present reminder of what was at stake if you failed to obey him. As you curved your back up and parted your legs you felt the same sensation from just a moment ago, a whip. The strike was just as harsh and unforgiving as earlier except now it struck you right across your ass. One after another Barbatos laid into you until your supple skin was marred with red, swollen welts. Still under the effects of your heat your arousal had dripped down your legs and stained the sheets by the time Barbatos was finished toying with you. You were more than ready for him now. As he joined you on the bed you could feel his weight shift on the mattress. It was the only warning you got before he pushed his length inside of you and started moving at his own pace without a single moment to spare. With one hand on your back and another on your hip he pushed you against the bed as he plowed into you harder and faster with each passing second. Unable to see with the blindfold on, your senses intensified making every thrust rack your body with unimaginable amounts of pleasure. While Barbatos ravaged you from behind you stilled yourself under his grip, panting and moaning out his name as you drooled on the sheets. The familiar feeling of heat pooling deep within you was a clear sign you were close causing you to start rocking your hips in rhythm with his as you tried to get as much friction going as possible. You could feel yourself start to tighten, your release just seconds away when Barbatos bent down, his lips softly brushing against your ear.

“Don’t cum until I say so. If you really aren’t the needy slut that you appear to be you can at least do that much.”

Tears dampened the blindfold around your eyes as stray droplets rolled down your cheeks. You were already teetering at the edge of your own limits but now you no longer had a choice. Gripping at the sheets till your knuckles turned white, you pressed your legs together and hoped beyond all hope that he would give you permission to cum before you surpassed your breaking point. As you finally managed to calm your breathing down it felt like you just might have a chance at completing Barbatos’s order until…..*SLAP* You felt his hand strike your ass just as hard as the whip from earlier. It wasn’t fair by any means but he never said he wouldn’t play dirty. Each strike was harder than the last and just as satisfying. The heat and tension inside you built up much faster than before. With one last slap everything you were holding back came undone. You finally had the relief you desired but all at a price.

“Such a shame. And I was just about to let you cum too. Oh well...” his voice feigned pity as he picked up the pace once again.

Despite being sensitive from your climax Barbatos had no restraint or mercy left for you, overstimulating you until your moans became incoherent and your mind went blank. It wasn’t long until Barbatos joined you in your ecstasy, letting his hot seed stain your insides before pulling out and covering your body with the rest of his load. Once he pulled out he undid the ropes and the blindfold but you made no effort to move from where you were. You failed and now that video was proof of it. You expect Barbatos to reprimand you, tease you, or degrade you but to your surprise he did none of those things. Moving to sit beside you he brought out his D.D.D. and deleted the video before your very eyes.

“I know I said I’d only delete it if you behaved for me but I don’t think I’ll be needing it anymore… after all you’ve just given me something far better.”

As he stood from the bed you soon understood what he meant. Scattered around the room were several video cameras. Each of them immortalized your little breeding session with Barbatos in different views and angles. You weren’t sure if this was better or worse, you could only sit there in shock as Barbatos collected the cameras and excused himself from the room leaving you behind with your thoughts.

You closed your eyes and tried to get some rest before any more demons came but you were only successful in getting a few minutes to yourself before the door swung open once again. This time however it wasn’t a demon intruding on your peace, quite the opposite actually. Rolling onto your side you were once again greeted by Solomon who was now dragging a blushing Simeon in by the collar.

“I bet you didn’t know this MC, but angels actually have breeding seasons too! They’re just really good at hiding it. Isn’t that right, Simeon?”

The angel gave no response in return only shielding his eyes with his hands once the heat in face became unbearable.

“You were so adamant about holding yourself back even though I was kind enough to invite you from the beginning. I can only guess you were trying to protect your virtue as much as theirs but after what the demons did...well...why don’t you take a look at what’s left of them?”

Reluctantly, Simeon did as he was told parting his fingers just enough to get a glimpse of you. What he saw next made his heart sink. Over the past few months he’s spent with you, you’ve gained a special place in his heart. He treasured you more than anything and now here you were, his precious little lamb lying before him covered in countless bruises and bitemarks while your body was marked with the scent of demons. Words couldn’t describe the emotions that ran through him as he stared at you, a dull twinge of pain slowly spreading across his chest. A part of him couldn’t believe what they had done to you and yet….another part of him couldn’t believe what he missed out on. As soon as that notion crossed his mind Simeon shook his head as if doing so would realign his morals and purge himself of all the sinful thoughts that slowly crept into his conscience.

“It’s not too late you know. They’re just as eager as you are and besides the effects of the spell won’t go away for about a week. Don’t you want to help them?” Solomon’s words were as sweet as honey but Simeon wasn’t going to let himself be swayed so easily.

“I-I...I....” Simeon’s lips trembled as he turned his head to the side, fighting the urge to give into his desires and take away whatever innocence you had left.

“Hmm...the way I see it you have three options. You can leave now and let me have MC to myself, you can stay and watch me have my way with them, or….you can fuck them like you’ve always wanted...” Solomon’s words tempted the angel more than anything he’s been through before. Still withholding a proper response, Simeon remained silent where he stood, his fists clenched so tight his nails dug deep into his palms. Solomon’s persuasion had worn him down to his core, however the sorcerer still had one last card up his sleeve. Striding towards the bed, Solomon began removing his clothes before pulling you into a deep kiss.

“Well Simeon...whether you choose to leave or stay it seems you’ve already decided not to lay a hand on them...and if that’s the case then I’m sure you won’t mind if I go ahead and just-”

“NO!!!”

Raising his voice for the first time, something inside Simeon had finally snapped. The room went silent as Simeon pushed past Solomon and joined you on the bed. His heart was heavy with guilt and jealousy but that didn’t stop him from cupping your face and claiming your lips with his own. Though filled with passion, the kiss was softer than anything you experienced these past few days. His touch was just as delicate, gracing the surface of your skin to avoid causing you any more pain. After carefully massaging your chest he bowed his head down to lick and suck at your nipples while his free hand travelled between your legs. In all his gentleness, he never let his mouth part from your body, tenderly kissing over every bruise, bitemark, and lash until no part of you was left untouched by his lips. Slipping in a finger then two more he worked you up slowly until he was pumping and curling his digits inside you at a steady pace. When he finally shed his clothes and positioned himself between your legs he couldn’t muster the strength to look you in the eyes, too shy and embarrassed at how far he had fallen into his own desires.

Placing your hand on the side of his face you stroked his cheek with your thumb, making him turn to face you once again. As you gazed into his eyes you noticed something, a feeling that went beyond any form of lust or perversion. Love. You had seen glimpses of it in the others before him but it seemed to radiate off Simeon as naturally as light from the sun. Wrapping your arms around him you pulled him into a warm embrace, the sudden contact made him shudder due to the effects of his heat but he accepted your affection whole heartedly. It wasn’t until Simeon’s hardened length pressed against your thigh that you both recalled the situation you were in. Moving back between your legs he eased his member inside you until you took him in from tip to base. His pace was slow as he thrusted into you, cradling you in his arms as he buried his face in the crook of your neck.

“MC...my sweet little lamb...you have no idea how much I’ve longed for this...for your body, for your love, for you….”

Simeon’s breath was hot against your ear as he whispered sweet nothings to you between his moans. His thrusts soon became faster and rougher as he finally gave in to the effects of his heat. In a split second you felt a change in the air and a quick flash of light. Looking up, you realized the source of it was none other than Simeon, his snow white wings now visible and outstretched on either side of you. You felt so heavenly to him he didn’t have the restraint to hide his angel form any longer. While he pounded away at your core you felt yourself getting close once again, your walls tightening around his cock until he reached his limit with you. As you came together he pulled you close against his chest, letting his wings envelope you in their warmth as he finished inside you.

With both of you collapsed on the bed Simeon cuddled up against you unwilling to let you out of his embrace for even a second. It took awhile for you to notice but as you looked away from Simeon for a moment you realised that Solomon was nowhere to be found. His clothes weren’t there so he must have left in the middle of your lovemaking. You considered telling Simeon but you had a feeling it could wait. You were literally resting in the arms of an angel, there was no need to ruin it with some trivial detail. Closing your eyes you laid your head on Simeon’s chest enjoying his warmth as you began drifting off to sleep...until an irritated voice pulled out of your slumber.

“Who let the angel in?” Lucifer’s brows furrowed as he stood at the doorway, his brothers just a few feet behind him.

“I did!” Solomon piped up from behind them, “Consider him my plus one.”

Once they entered the room their eyes widened in shock as they got closer to the bed. All the marks they left on you the other day had healed. Not a single scratch was visible on your skin. They all stared at you for a good minute before shifting their gaze to Simeon. Turns out those angel kisses were more than just a sign of affection. None of the brothers were all too happy with what they saw. All the scratches, bruises, and bites they marked you with were gone, as if they never happened at all. The tension in the room started to grow but luckily Diavolo arrived just in time to resolve the situation.

“How kind of you to finally join us Simeon! Up until recently it seemed like you had no interest in our little meeting but from what I’m seeing now I guess it’s safe to assume you’ve changed your mind?” Diavolo took a step towards the angel, his demeanor still calm and composed while Simeon’s face flushed red as he stared at the floor and gave a quiet “yes” in response. Diavolo chuckled at his shy display of honesty before gesturing for the others to come closer. Taking your chin in his hand Diavolo tilted your head to meet his eyes once more, “This isn’t quite what I had imagined when I said I wanted to unite the three realms, but then again who am I to turn down such a golden opportunity...”

A million different things ran through your head as each of them drew closer to you, surrounding you from all sides, however one singular thought remained in your mind, “This is going to be a very long breeding season.”

For the next two weeks, all classes at RAD were postponed under the order of Lord Diavolo. None of the students could complain about a sudden two week vacation….except for a certain exhausted exchange student….

[belovedgamers]

not today, tomorrow

Ao3 link! (comments appreciated <3)

rating: teen and up no archive warnings apply

more eternal duo content about reincarnation au and post-Banquet feels :D /rp

It has been a week since the Banquet.

Eret cannot sleep.

He has tried. Kind of. Sort of. Maybe. He has, at least, attempted to try.

But it hasn’t worked.

And it’s not like they particularly mind.

It has been a week since the Banquet.

Eret has not stopped moving.

Well, she refuses to stop moving, does not feel like they should. It would be… It would be wrong to stop. Foolish did not give up his life for hers so she could waste it in idleness.

(Her legs hadn’t moved, her hands had been immobile and her very lungs had frozen, when he was taken, you did nothing—

They do not know how to forgive themself for that.)

She can’t just… stop. There’s… There’s no time for pauses, no time for quiet, only time to move forwards. Eret builds, and he digs, and he does his best to keep away from everyone else’s land of sight.

(your fault your fault your fault what did you do for them but make a toast and place your hopes in their clawed hands what did you do but kneel before your execution what did you do but spill ichor over obsidian with your lies—)

She does not want to stay idle anymore. And… and she doesn’t really know what she would do with rest, anyway. Eret has much to do, builds to finish, people to look after. Legislation does not happen overnight and without supervision. They have already failed enough.

(Now, isn’t this so much better?)

(... the darkness… within you...)

It’s been a week since the Banquet.

Eret knows. They could tell you the exact amount of minutes that has passed.

Even if the hours pass them by as they fill out paperwork, as they pile stone together and mine for andesite, Eret knows how much time has passed them by, knows the information as well as they know the back of their hand.

There is a golden watch around her wrist.

For Eret, it says, the letters carefully carved in its lug. She has never seen Foolish’ writing, but there is a certainty in his heart, born from the proud look in his emerald eyes the night of—

Born from the proud look in his emerald eyes that night. This is his handwriting, measured and neat so it will fit their name. She has not seen him write, but she has seen him type in the communicator, and knows that his typing is a mess. The idea that impatient, active Foolish sat still, the thought that he carefully, delicately carved these letters, one stroke at a time, on a surface so tiny, not for the grand memory of a build to impress others but for this detail that nobody else would see, it… it…

(“Anything for you, old pal.”)

It’s too much to consider. They do not dwell on it.

He’d carved a small figure in the crown of it, too, a poppy.

It’s her favorite flower. She does not know how the god knew.

(he looked at them with bright, proud eyes and extended a hand, come look, he said, he pleaded, a field of red stretched before their eyes, old pal, he was trying to not be weak, to let himself be vulnerable, there was a look in his eyes, look, i have made you a gard—

Shhhh.)

She does not know how he knew. He does not know, and it’s slowly making him desolate.

Sometimes, he finds himself angry at the god who so graciously gave her this gift. It was much easier to go on about her life when she didn’t know a part of themself was missing.

(and do you know he spoke the truth? perhaps he was simply a liar—)

But that sounds ungrateful, and it sounds wretched. Those thoughts make her out to be someone she does not wish to be. He would like to be worthy of Foolish’s sacrifice. He would like…

He is so tired. So very tired.

He must keep moving.

It has been a week since the Banquet.

She has not slept a single day of it, yet he is not tired.

Physically so, at least. There is a buzz thrumming on his veins, a shimmering sensation over her skin. She has not slept and yet she is not exhausted. He goes without eating but is not starving. He hadn’t felt thirsty until he tasted water. She spent hours mining for andesite, armorless, and not a single mob strayed close.

(Tell them their importance to the Universe.)

It has been a week since the Banquet.

She looks down at their hands. Not a single scratch. Not even a bruise. Even though her hands were bare, even though he hasn’t stopped for hours, in days, there is not a single ache in their body. There is nothing that hurts. Not even their back, usually tired after cartography work, after building and finding more resources, tired from the weight of their guilt, does not hurt.

She finds herself in front of a mirror.

The person who stares back does not look like a monarch. The person who stares back looks flawless, unweighted, magical. Beautiful.

He has not changed out of the dress since... that night, and yet there is not a single tear on it besides the ones from the Eggpire’s trap, not a stain or a loose thread. Their crown is gone—

all their gold is, only the watch remains, she cannot stand the look for it but she could stand much less to lose it

— and so is the corset, the shoulder pads, but the red gown still flows and falls, precious in its detailing. There are no bags under their eyes, no grime in his hair. There is nothing wrong with them.

(You look lovely, the captain had said, present tense, when they found each other by the spider spawner, when she showed Eret her graveyard.

Eret builds and Puffy does too. Different families of the same typeface. Different translations of the same text.)

Her hands shake, she steps closer. She is barefoot. How has she not stepped over a rock? How is he not hurt? Why are their heels not sore?

He steps closer.

There is a fine line of gold around her throat, settled into skin.

(You look lovely.)

(Does it know we love it? That the Universe is kind?)

Totems do not heal an injury from before the mortal blow.

But with Eret, there was no mortal blow at all. They know magic, and that night they felt it sink into their body. It had nothing to heal, nowhere to go. It could not reach Foolish, so it curled around her heart.

And the Universe, even then, watched.

The gods are the Universe’s favorite children. One of them died for Eret. It will not let her get hurt. It will not let his sacrifice go to waste.

No matter how much they deserve the pain for taking Foolish away from the living.

(You are not alone.)

Eret collapses into the mirror, catches herself with one hand. Suddenly, they feel like crying again.

You idiot, she wants to tell him, wants to scream it to his face. He wants to tell Foolish off for this. They want to make sure he knows to never do it again, that his life is not a trading card, that she does not want it, that she would rather die herself than see his body dissipate into divine light again and be haunted by his spirit, by his love, by his fear.

But she can’t.

He is back. She knows he is. Sam had told her, when they discussed the Banquet as Puffy collected some dirt, the words he sacrificed himself for me had spilled from her mouth before he could stop them.

Sam had looked at them with a mixture of pity and guilt.

(Those had been his friends once, had they not? Bad and Ant and Skeppy. The Badlands, a land of chaos, a land of love. Always together. Bad and Ant had been Sam’s choice of prison guards.)

(And Ponk had been his choice of beloved.)

(And Hannah had been his chosen ally.)

Sam had said he was with Ranboo and I last night and had closed his mouth around something else he’d wanted to say.

But Eret must have looked pitiful enough, because he’d continued after a pause.

He was pretending nothing was wrong.

Eret’s heart had broken.

She cannot see Foolish, because inevitably she would bring up his sacrifice, and whatever fragile peace Foolish had built around himself, she’d destroy.

He doesn’t want to hurt him anymore.

(All you would do would be to hurt him, guilty, harmful, poisoned, you are but a wicked seed of pain.)

She cannot see Foolish.

So she ignores her communicator when it rings.

(—always late, old pal, you should keep your communicator on you at all times, i will send you signs across the sky, here’s a messenger, did you seriously just leave me waiting—

No.)

It keeps beeping as she retrieves her sickle, as she finds the mirror again.

It keeps beeping as she throws the sickle towards its surface, as the mirror shatters at her feet.

Not a single piece of glass sinks into her skin.

(All you do is destroy. You were not meant for peace.)

(You are growing restless.)

It keeps beeping. She keeps ignoring it.

Eventually, it stops.

Hours pass before she retrieves it.

Old pal.

Hello.

We should talk.

Tomorrow after sunrise.

If you can.

See you soon.

There is not a single mistake in these messages. It strikes her more than it probably should.

(You are not alone.)

Her hands are shaking again. Maybe they never stopped shaking at all.

It has been a week since the Banquet.

Foolish sacrificed himself for them.

(“How do you always keep waiting?”

“I have infinity laid before me.”)

(When he spoke of their past, he looked so sad when you did not recall, guarded and wary and hurt.

What have you done but hurt him?)

We should talk.  

The words echo in their head. They can hear it in Foolish’s voice even if they have never heard him speak them.

Perhaps he should go. The time Foolish proposed is early in the morning but it’s not like Eret has been sleeping. They haven’t even changed, even though it’s been nearly two weeks and counting. They should… They should go. If Foolish wants to see them, maybe they could talk, and he did promise to figure out their memo—

(“Its okay, Eret.”

Your fault. Your fault. Your fault. Your fault.)

Perhaps he should go. But the time Foolish proposed is early in the morning and it’s not like Eret has been sleeping. They haven’t even changed, even though it’s been nearly two weeks and counting. They should… they should rest.

“Maybe next week,” she whispers to no one, to the Universe. “Maybe we can meet next week instead.”

If Foolish wants to see them, maybe they could reschedule.

It has been a week since the Banquet.

It can't hurt to wait a little longer.

.

.

.

.

.

“Just… just let me check something,” Foolish tells the creatures at his feet. “Just let me… Let me see… Just a second…”

But no matter how many times he looks at it, his communicator stays empty. There is no message, no call, there is no rushed footsteps from his portal, no apologetic grin.

“Just let me check…”

.

.

.

.

.

(Sometimes, through the noise of its thoughts—)

.

.

.

“Hey… Hey… Hey, forehead, hey—

can you hear me— Hey, it’s—"

.

.

.

(—almost at the familiar door—)

.

.

.

"— it's me— Hey—  

Eret?”

.

.

.

(I wish to tell them that they are—)

.

.

.

(Wake up.)

.

.

.

.

.

There is a cat by the steps of Eret's castle. It looks a little like a toasted marshmallow.

Eret finds it some food. He sits in the steps while the cat eats from a bowl that may have been too precious to use for a pet's food once.

"Do you have an owner, kitty?" They ask, scratching between the cat's ears. It looks too well-kept to be a simple stray, but there is no name tag around its neck. Then again, name tags are rare to find, that might not mean anything.

The cat simply blinks at her and bumps its forehead against her hand.

Maybe she should give him a name.

[tenspontaneite]

The Ceracurist (Chapter 3/?)

Even after these past months, she wasn’t yet used to it. Another Full Moon spent alone.

(Chapter length: 10.4k. ao3 link)

---

“Did you go to the game night?” Was Ethari’s first question when she called him the next day.

She rolled her eyes at him. “Yes, Ethari.”

He looked delighted. “Did you make friends?”

She hesitated, thinking about it. “…Well, I did beat them all at Antiquitora,” she said eventually. “And you were right, they did appreciate that.” She paused, and added “I’m probably going back, I think.”

She spent the next ten minutes having details pried out of her so warmly and kindly it hardly felt like an interrogation at all. Ethari was good at that. Finally she secured her escape via the need to leave for training, and was farewelled with considerably less fretting than usual. When the call dropped, she was about to shut down the Sunbeam module entirely, but then-

New Contact Requests, said the alert in the corner. Rayla blinked, nonplussed, and opened it, already having a decent idea of what she’d find. Sure enough, there were three new requests from codes she recognised: Kazi, Nihatasi, and Callum. She lingered there for a while, feeling bizarrely overwhelmed, then finally accepted all three of them.

She didn’t linger by the computer, after that – she had training to get to. Rayla paused at the door to perform a final once-over of her armour, then grabbed her swords and left.

 ---

 Rayla stumbled back into her room in late afternoon, covered in about three different kinds of mud and her body aching all-over in the aftermath of prolonged exertion. She spent the next two hours with rigid discipline: cleaning herself, cleaning her armour, checking her weapons. She cooked unenthusiastically and ate, then finally felt justified in utter collapse. She landed face-first into her bed and fell asleep immediately.

Three hours later, she woke to a stirring of magic in her veins, prickling over her skin, all the hairs on the back of her neck standing on end. Slowly, she blinked her eyes open, and pushed herself up; every hint of soreness from training was completely gone. She turned her eyes to the window, staring at the Moon rising full and resplendent past the horizon. Something deep and instinctive in her delighted at the sight of it. But something else twisted, sharp with the pang of homesickness.

Even after these past months, she wasn’t yet used to it. Another Full Moon spent alone. She sighed, and tried not to think of the festivities that would surely be beginning back home. It was moonrise; Ethari and Runaan would be at the Circle by now. Had the dancing already started? With the Moon this high, it must have.

She stared unblinkingly out of the window, turning thoughts over and over in her head. It wasn’t right to be alone at Full Moon. It wasn’t right to spend it all indoors, either. She couldn’t do much about the first thing, but the second…

Silent, Rayla slipped outside. A few of her wingmates were out in the common room, chattering drunkenly with each other near the table. She blinked, slowly, and exhaled. When she passed, they didn’t see her; only started with surprise at the open and close of the door. She crept through the streets like a ghost, visiting each of the parks and training grounds in turn until she finally found one unoccupied: a small stand of well-kept trees, and a fountain that reflected the full body of the Moon in its burbling waters. It would do.

It was no Circle. There were no runes in the ground – nothing here that awaited the careful precision of the lunar dances, nothing that would light up at her passing. But it was better than nothing. Rayla pulled at the moonlight until she was nothing but shadows flickering in the shadows of the trees, and danced.

There were plenty of moondances that could be done alone, and she circled the fountain with all of them, one by one. A tracery of magic hummed in the air at her passing, whispers of light following her; magic summoned by her motions, without the guidance of a Circle’s shaping. Even formless and aimless, it was beautiful. So, for the pleasure of it, she spun through those motes of moonlight and held them flickering in the shadows of her skin; light and dark woven together.

When she was done, she felt…not joyous, maybe, or exhilarated, as a celebration back home might have left her. But she was satisfied. Calm, and a little less sad. With the Full Moon still high above her, its magic brimming in her veins, Rayla headed home once more.

She didn’t bother to hide herself this time, and when she came through the door and passed by the remaining wingmates still up and awake, they saw her perfectly well: skin night-dark, eyes glowing, the edges of her form blurring into the shadows. They were all of them Sunfire and Skywing, and went a little quiet as she went by them; she wondered if they’d ever seen one of her kind at Full Moon before. Somehow, she doubted it.

Finally, Rayla arrived at her door, disarmed its security, and closed it behind her. She sighed, standing for a moment in the moonlight through her window, and considered it. Sleep would be a lost cause for another few hours, probably. So, somewhat inevitably, she ended up checking the computer. Browsing the mageskein was probably the best way to kill a few hours, and it wasn’t like she had anything else to do, this time of night.

Except: her Sunbeam module was still on, humming inside its casing, and…when she looked, it had projected a few message alerts onto the screen. Hesitantly, she checked them.

One was from Ethari, wishing her a good Moon, and entreating her once again to visit a Circle for it. Somewhat belated, that. One was from Kazi, confirming the time of their rematch tomorrow, as well as the address. Nihatasi had sent another, packed with effusive praise for her gaming excellence, insistence that she return, and an offer to come by the house whenever she wanted. Rayla shook her head at that, reluctantly amused. It wasn’t as though she’d met many nomads before – not in a social setting, anyway – but so far, Nihatasi more than matched their reputation for being aggressively sociable.

The last message was from Callum, and she steadfastly pretended that she wasn’t any more interested in it than the rest. He’d cheerfully thanked her for coming to the game night, said he hoped she’d come again, and then made an inquiry about her gaming tastes. Did she play computer games? If so, which were her favourites?

With the slow, halting uncertainty of the socially awkward, Rayla responded to all of them except Ethari’s. Kazi’s was easy enough, she just had to say ‘thanks’ and ‘see you tomorrow’. The other two took more doing. To Nihatasi, she expressed her thanks, and her assurances that she intended to come to a game night again. She said nothing about the house visit. To Callum, she reiterated her intentions to return, and admitted that, yes, she did like computer games, but hadn’t had the opportunity to play many of them, for lack of the necessary modules or a computer with the right specifications.  

Given the hour, she certainly didn’t expect any response, so she switched active modules to the mageskein to start browsing. News headlines on the home site vied for her attention: something about the outcome of the latest Katolis-Evenere expedition into the wastelands; the most recent public appearance of the Dragon Prince with his esteemed parents; a gossip piece about some Katolian royal’s birthday. She checked the second one for images, and sure enough, there he was: the young prince Azymondias, still tiny in comparison to his queen mother…and, in the background, a few Dragonguard standing at the ready. Rayla spotted her parents and smiled. She clicked to transfer the picture through its Sunbeam link and waited.

The other module hummed, her computer making distressed noises as it attempted juggling the inputs of Sunbeam and Mageskein at once. The unit at home wouldn’t have had any trouble, but this one…she sighed, and waited, and was eventually rewarded when her Sunbeam successfully imported the image and displayed it full-fidelity, with all the depth and nuance of lighting that a flat picture could never convey. She filed it away, and was about to switch back, when she saw the alert.

A new message. At this hour? It had to be at least two in the morning by now, surely. She checked her clock to be sure, and, yep. 2:14am. She eyed the icon with consternation, then opened it.

Callum had responded. She stared, brow furrowing as she read. Hey, glad to hear back from you! He opened, cheerfully failing to acknowledge the fact that it was currently stupidly late. The rest of it was perfectly normal too; commiserating about her lack of access to proper computing, commenting that yeah, I didn’t get to play any EX games until I moved here, and you know what WX graphics are like, and which ones did you get to play? Any I’d know about?

Rayla reread its entirety several times, mildly flummoxed. At Full Moon her emotions were all closer to the surface than usual, so there was an undeniable thread of glee in her chest about this unexpected late-night contact, but…well, she was curious. In her limited experience with the ways of other students, the only reasons a non-Moonshadow would be up this late would be ‘partying’ or ‘insomnia’. Or ‘last-minute coursework’, but that was unlikely to apply when term was already over. So: You’re up late, she wrote, without thinking about it, and sent it back without responding to any of his actual questions. She’d begun composing a belated second message, but apparently Callum was a lot speedier with typing than she was.

Haha, yeah, I kind of lost track of time. Gaming, incidentally. She thought he must be used to significantly faster systems and transfer times than she was, because that was the entirety of that message, and then he sent another one: What about you? What are you doing up?

Rayla blinked, then settled herself a little more comfortably in her chair, since it seemed like, well. Like there might be a conversation happening, here. She brought the keyboard further forward. It’s Full Moon, she responded to him, a little dryly. Her computer took its sweet time about sending the message, as usual.

Oh. It is? After a pause, during which he presumably looked out of a window or something, he said Huh. So it is. Does it keep you awake?

She paused. Kind of, she wrote, slowly, and then wasn’t quite sure how much more to divulge. Eventually, she wrote It’s kind of hard to sleep through when it’s still high. I’ll be okay in a couple hours.

That must be so cool, he answered, which seemed a weird thing to say to a statement of Moon-induced insomnia. I’ve used artefacts to cast moon-magic before, but it must feel totally different when you’ve got the arcanum. What’s it like?

Rayla stared at her screen. She recalled the implications of him being a mage student, and was suddenly brimming with curiosity. I don’t know, I’m not a mage, she wrote, and then paused. Do you cast a lot of artefact magic, or was that a one-time thing?

She probably should have just outright asked about the mage student thing, rather than trying to be cagey about it. He probably wouldn’t have minded. Except, that turned out to be unnecessary, because the next thing he wrote, as if it were perfectly natural and unsurprising, was Well, I’m doing a thaumaturgy / thaumatology masters, so I definitely cast a lot of magic, yeah. Then, while she was still gawping at that, he followed it up with Listen, do you want to call?

What? She sent back, astonished, still in the middle of trying to process the concept of a human thaumaturgy student. She couldn’t quite get her head around it. How did that even work?

It’s okay if you don’t, he clarified. But your Sunbeam seems to have kind of a lot of connection lag, so it’d probably be faster to talk, you know?

Rayla was, in fact, using a fairly old edition of the Sunbeam module, which did have to establish a new connection for every individual message it sent and received. It was what was cheapest, and the lag was just…an unavoidable side-effect. She called more often than she messaged anyway, so it was rarely relevant. Except, apparently, now. It’s two in the morning, Callum, she sent to him, bewildered.

And we’re both awake, he pointed out, as if it was perfectly reasonable to call someone you’d only met twice before in the middle of the night.

Her first instinct, fuelled by bemusement and social anxiety, was to say no. Her second instinct was quick to the scene, with some very definite opinions about interacting with Callum, even at as weird an hour as this. She hesitated, wavering.

In the end, it was a glance at the Moon through the window that decided her. Rayla was emphatically not a mystical person, but even so, there were things that were deeply culturally ingrained. And one of those things was Full Moon is community time. Family, or friends, or a wider community – it didn’t really matter, but you weren’t supposed to be alone. This…probably counted.

Yeah, okay, she typed in the end, foot tapping under the desk with a frisson of tension. But only for a bit.

He didn’t waste any time about it, just sent the call request. Rayla took a quick moment to check she hadn’t made a mess of herself dancing, realised it was something of a moot point when everything attached to her was veiled in shadows, and finally accepted the call.

Callum’s room was startlingly brightly-lit when it appeared in the monitor, and it hurt her eyes a bit. She blinked rapidly, fighting the urge to squint, and glimpsed what looked like a well-appointed loft room with an unexpectedly dense population of easels. She could see at least three of them, most of which occupied by some sort of paper or canvas. She blinked, nonplussed, then steadfastly did not react when his face came into view. It moved around jarringly as he adjusted the lightcatcher, then finally settled.

He grinned at the screen, looking sleepy but in good enough humour, and said “Hey! Wow your room is dark.”

Rayla opened her mouth, closed it, then blinked. “Oh, right, your eyes,” she said, embarrassed. She generally only ever called her family, whose night vision was perfectly equal to hers. Humans, as well as most other elf races, were not nearly as well-suited for the dark. “Can you even see anything?”

“I can see your eyes,” he volunteered helpfully, looking amused. “They’re glowing. Really brightly, actually.”

“Yeah, that’s the Full Moon,” Rayla told him, already standing to go for the switch of the wall lamp over her desk. She’d never actually had cause to use it before, other than testing it when she first moved in, so the soft blue light it produced was almost wholly unfamiliar. “Is that better?” She asked, moving back to her chair.

“Well, I can actually see your room now, so-“ he started, then cut off abruptly as she settled back down in front of the lightcatcher. “Oh, wow,” he said instead as he stared at her, eyes wide.

Rayla ignored the self-conscious twinge in her stomach and frowned at him, folding her arms. “What?” she demanded.

He startled, as if only just realising what he’d said. “Oh. Um, sorry?” he attempted, weakly. “It’s just – I’ve never seen a Moonshadow elf all, er…” he waved expressively at her, contrite. “You know, Full Moon-ish?”

Oh. She eyed him, determined that he wasn’t messing with her, and relaxed a little. “What, not even in the Honour Games?” She asked, after a moment.

“Well, I mean, sometimes. But that’s usually in broad daylight, you know, and from a distance, and broadcasted.” He shrugged, a light dusting of pink rising in his cheeks, like he was embarrassed. “Kind of different to…” he nodded to her via the lightcatcher, smiling sheepishly.

“Suppose it is a tad different to a close-up Sunbeam call,” she conceded, lips twitching.

“I should’ve expected it, really, considering it’s full moon and everything,” he said ruefully. “Sorry, I’m not exactly at my brightest at two in the morning.”

Oh, that was right. It was the middle of the night. She squinted at him. “Then shouldn’t you be sleeping, instead of sunbeaming random Moonshadow elves?”

“Well, you’re up,” he said, as if this was a perfectly logical reason for him to be awake too. “And it’s not like I have to be up early.”

Lucky for him. She thought of the training and the Antiquitora rematch she had scheduled for the day, and suppressed a sigh. It was sometimes truly inconvenient to live in a mixed-race city that didn’t automatically expect the day after Full Moon (and the day of and before New Moon, of course) to be a rest day. “Wish I could say the same.”

He winced sympathetically. “Can you not cancel whatever it is?”

She opened her mouth to say no, stopped, and frowned. She hadn’t yet missed training even once. But…it wasn’t like attending every session was compulsory. And she did train three other times a week…and besides, a Sunday morning short session had never fallen on Full Moon recovery day before. “Probably, honestly,” she admitted. “My – uncle wouldn’t even tell me off for it. Moonshadow elves aren’t supposed to work the day after a Full Moon.”

“Because none of you can get to sleep the whole night?” He asked with interest, as if the cultural habits of her kind were genuinely intriguing to him. “Makes sense, I guess.”

Rayla huffed and shook her head. “Kinda. Mostly it’s because, traditionally, we’re supposed to spend moonrise to moonset with – family, or the community, or whatever. And we’re not much good for anything except collapsing once the Moon’s gone. So we all take the next day off.”

He blinked at her curiously, but if he wondered why she wasn’t currently out spending the Moon with her rightful community, he was tactful enough not to ask. “You should skip your thing, then. Whatever it is,” he determined, after a moment. “Get some actual sleep.”

“Says you,” Rayla said, wry. “You don’t even have a stupid magical reason to be up this late.”

“Does a technomantic game count as a stupid magical reason?” He grinned at her, his smile lopsided and full of humour. Her stomach did a weird flip-flop. “I mean. It is magical.”

Despite herself, she snorted. “And it is stupid,” she allowed, lips twitching. “As far as reasons to be sleep-deprived go, anyway.”

“Worth it,” he claimed, cheerfully. “I don’t have work till the afternoon anyway, so I’m fine.”

Rayla nodded at that, then a moment later actually recalled what his job was, and practically felt her face heating. Thank the Moon – literally – for her skin currently being too dark to show it.

He noticed some sort of reaction, though. Maybe her shoulders had hunched a bit. He tilted his head at her, a little rueful, and said “Yeah, er, about that. I wanted to apologise, for the others talking about it, yesterday? Couldn’t have been super comfortable.”

Abruptly hyper-aware of the weight and presence of her horns, Rayla did her best not to sink into the chair. “…It’s fine,” she muttered, embarrassed. “It’s not like you told them about it, they just guessed.”

“Yeah, I definitely wouldn’t tell them about who my customers were unless my customers said something about it first,” he assured her. “Not really professional, you know? We’re supposed to be confidential about it.” Suddenly, he smiled again. “Then again, it’s not like I usually end up meeting my customers at game night, so that part tends to be easier to manage.”

“Usually?” she asked dryly, ruthlessly suppressing the urge to lift her hands and hide her face behind them.

“No, yeah, you’re definitely the first time that’s happened,” he admitted. “It was kind of a surprise.”

She thought about how she’d reacted to seeing him appear through that door yesterday. “Just a tad.”

“A good one, though!” he claimed, cheerful. “It was nice to meet you properly.”

Rayla was tempted to say something along the lines of you know, where I come from, touching up someone’s horns is considerably more than a ‘proper’ meeting, but that was too mortifying to express, and he probably knew it anyway. She couldn’t imagine anyone becoming an experienced ceracurist without learning all the assorted implications that sort of thing had. “Even though I kicked your Archdragon across the board?” She questioned eventually, when she found her voice again.

“Even though you totally kicked my butt, yeah,” he agreed readily, looking far too pleased about it. “It was a great match. You’re crazy good at that game.”

An involuntary smile pulled at her lips. “Well, Kazi’s better,” she said, pleased despite herself. “They’d have had me easily, if they weren’t playing Ocean.”

He didn’t argue with her. Clearly, he understood the game plenty well enough to know the truth of that. “Still the second-best player I’ve met,” he insisted staunchly. “Is Antiquitora one of the computer games you said you did play? You must’ve put in some serious practice time.”

Rayla snorted. “I wish. No, the only games I ever actually got to play were on a gameship, just the one time, when I was…” she frowned, trying to remember. “Thirteen, maybe? Good long while ago.”

He perked up, expression brightening. “I love gameships,” he enthused. “There’s one that comes by Gullcrest twice a year, and I swear, all the students in the entire engineering department just disappear on board until it leaves. It’s crazy.” After a moment, he admitted “Well, to be fair, I disappear on board too, so, you know. It’s not like I can judge.”

She blinked, and leaned forwards. “What clan is the ship?” She asked, with considerable interest.

“It’s a joint management. Serat-Demani,” he said, watching her knowingly.

“Moon above,” she swore, and he grinned.

“Right?” Looking exceedingly pleased with her reaction, he took that as his cue to go into extensive, exacting detail about the wonders that a fully-stocked, state-of-the-art Demani entertainment airship had to offer. She listened raptly the entire time, interjecting with questions about the rates, the facilities, the games. If it was a Demani ship, it had to have Skycrawler, surely? What was it like? Was the gameplay everything it was said to be?

In the end, Rayla didn’t think she could really be blamed for losing track of time.

Callum was in the middle of enthusiastically praising Scion of Shadow, with particular attention to its unusually enjoyable stealth mechanics, when out of nowhere a yawn cracked through his sentence. He seemed fully ready to keep on talking once it was done, but Rayla sat up a little straighter, and for the first time in a while remembered that it was the middle of the night. She consulted her Moon-sense, and then the clock, and then buried her face in her hands.

He cut off mid-sentence, inquisitive. “What?”

“Callum, it’s nearly four in the morning,” she informed him, lowering her hands to stare at the clock, consumed with a baleful sense of having been betrayed by the passage of time.  “The sun’s probably not even far off rising.”

He blinked, looked to the side, then blinked again. “…Huh,” he observed, a little sheepish. “Yeah, that’s…later than I usually stay up.”

“It’s later than I usually stay up, even on Full Moons.” Technically true, for the ones she’d spent at university. At home, though…moonset was, after all, later than sunrise in summer. Full Moon celebrations usually concluded once everyone’s skin was back to normal, but not always.

Callum shot her a weird look, long and appraising, before he spoke. “You’re still all…Moon-shadowy, though.”

“That won’t stop for a while yet,” she informed him, and shook her head. “I can probably get to sleep by now, anyway. Or another hour off, at most. You…” For a moment, she inspected him, spotting the signs of tiredness in his bearing. “You won’t have that problem, I think. You look knackered.”

He offered a rueful smile. “I’ll probably pass out the second I lay down, yeah,” he admitted. “I kind of lost track of time. Again.”

She rolled her eyes at him. “Well, I’ll just go now, then, so you can’t get distracted again.”

Hastily, he sat bolt upright. “But there was something I wanted to-“

“Tomorrow,” she told him, firmly. “Or…today, technically. Later, anyway. Whatever it is can wait.”

He opened his mouth, closed it, then smiled sleepily at her. It looked far more endearing than it had any right to. “Well, okay then.”

Rayla nodded to him, said “Thanks,” then leaned in and shut the call down without a further word. Sunbeam’s active connection died down, Callum’s face disappearing from the screen, and she leaned back in her chair to fix the ceiling with a long-suffering stare.

On one hand, Ethari would’ve probably been delighted to hear she’d spent a couple hours of her Full Moon socialising, as a proper Moonshadow elf ought to. But on the other….Ethari could absolutely never, ever find out about this. If he knew she’d been up chatting with someone, losing track of time, for actual hours…she’d never hear the end of it. To say nothing of how he’d react if he got wind that she – that she might sort of-

“Ugh,” Rayla grumbled to herself, wiping a hand over her face.

She stared at the ceiling for a good long while, experiencing a variety of emotions that she wasn’t keen on thinking about too hard. She also spent a not inconsiderable amount of time thinking about the conversation, running it over in her head, thoughts stubbornly fixed on Callum. This was how she ended up realising that she’d never actually asked about the mage-student-thing, and she still had no idea how that worked.

“Ugh,” she said again, more emphatically, and finally left her chair. She left her room to perform some necessary ablutions in the bathroom she shared with the next room over, then returned to draw the curtains. Without the direct moonlight through her window, the magic in her skin started to stutter a little. In ten minutes or so, she’d be back to normal again…and, with luck, she might be asleep by then.

Begrudgingly, Rayla peeled herself out of her clothes and threw them haphazardly onto the floor, not even bothering to watch the magic desert them, and climbed into bed. A suboptimal amount of time later, she was asleep.

 ---

 “Goodness, you look tired,” said Kazi, welcoming Rayla in. Rayla, for her part, was a little too exhausted to feel particularly awkward, which was nice. “Was the Full Moon particularly trying?”

Rayla’s lips twitched. At least this one knew when Full Moon was. “No more than usual,” she said dryly, bending to remove her shoes when Kazi made noises about it. “Just, you know, getting enough sleep is kind of a lost cause.”

“Oh, I know the feeling. Or at least somewhat,” they commiserated, leading her through to a small and cosy-looking living room lined with bookshelves, and then through to a somewhat larger dining room, whose table was…occupied. Very thoroughly occupied. Rayla tried not to look at it too closely until she had a chance to inspect it properly. “There was a solar flare a few years ago, and of course I and the other Sunfire elves couldn’t sleep for days. It was quite the experience! And I’m sure you know how the Skywing elves get when there’s a particularly powerful storm abound.”

She had, in fact, had occasion to see what Skywing elves looked like when they were storm-drunk. It had been funny, up until it got annoying. “Probably more of a pain for them and you, really, since none of you take anything like moondust,” she volunteered after a moment, mouth turning up with wry sympathy. She’d hate to be a Skywing and be subject to random, unpredictable bouts of their equivalent of being moonstruck. “You all get the full effect of it.”

Kazi looked a little curious at that, but didn’t ask. “Yes, I suppose so. We should be thankful our magical overload is not so consistent as it is for you. In any case-“ they gestured towards the table. “Please take a seat wherever you prefer! Would you like any stimulants?”

Rayla blinked. “…Could you repeat that?”

“Tea,” they clarified, eyes merry with humour. “Or perhaps reveillant, or coffee, by your preference. I have all three, in some measure.”

For a moment she’d wondered if she was being offered something illegal, which…looking at Kazi, she was quite sure had been on purpose. She shook her head, reluctantly amused, and said “I could try some reveillant? I’ve only had it once.”

“It is not especially common, in a Skywing city like this,” Kazi allowed, already heading in the direction of one of the doorways. They kept speaking as they disappeared through it, still perfectly audible to her ears. “But I always keep a supply. It’s the only one that tastes particularly good cold, after all, unless you are very creative with your teas.” There was the sound of a cupboard opening, and then a good bit of rummaging.

During the wait, Rayla cautiously selected a seat at the table and settled there, finally letting her increasingly wide eyes rove over the board set up across it. She was still gawping conspicuously when Kazi returned, brandishing three brown paper packets of what she assumed to be reveillant.

“Do you prefer unflavoured, citrus, or mixed berry varieties?” they inquired mildly, hiding a smile when they saw her inspecting the board.

“Er, berry?” Rayla offered, only half paying attention. She was too busy looking at the intricate detail on the hand-carved and probably hideously valuable Antiquitora board. There were no pieces on it yet, but even just the tiles…it was astonishing. All of the terrain had been dyed and varnished in different colours, with careful attention to the different biomes. It all gleamed. The ocean tiles had even been coated in some kind of resin, making them look wet. The artisan had even mimicked the effect of the edge of an underwater continental shelf seen from above, with an area of lighter ‘water’ closer to the ‘coastline’.

“Berry it is,” Kazi said, sounding quite smug. Rayla didn’t have the chance to see what their face looked like, because they’d already disappeared back into what she assumed was the kitchen. She spent the next five minutes of beverage preparation time inspecting the game board with undisguised admiration. Rayla wasn’t one to usually pay much attention to art, but…this was game related art. It was different.

“The set you brought to the game night wasn’t your one set, then,” Rayla finally commented, when Kazi reappeared. She accepted her cup with exacting care, not wanting to risk a drink spillage near a board like this. She was honestly surprised Kazi allowed drinks so close to this thing.

Kazi smiled, disproportionately small for the amount of self-satisfaction in it. “Yes, it’s my more portable set,” they said pleasantly, and took a seat across the table from her, setting down their own glass. “This one…well, I certainly do not take it out of the house.”

“I can imagine,” she expressed, uncertain whether to be jealous of the board or just plain impressed. She wouldn’t even want something this pricey. She’d constantly be worrying about damaging it somehow. But, even so…the hint of avarice remained. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”

“The various tile-pieces and figures are quite a sight themselves, I think,” they said, evidently extremely pleased with themself. Rayla wondered how many people they invited round for Antiquitora for the express purpose of showing off this set. “Have you decided your faction for today? Once we have that settled, we can begin setting up.”

Rayla snorted, lips turning up into a half-smirk. “Depends what you’re playing as.”

Kazi beamed back. “Do you have a preference? I am perfectly open to suggestions.”

She considered it. Allegedly, Kazi was most beastly when playing Earth or Sun. Rayla herself was best at Moon and Sky…and Sky was exceptionally poorly matched against Earth. Sun’s best counters were Earth and Ocean. Moon wasn’t great against Sun, but not terrible either. “Take Sun,” she decided, eventually. “I’ll do Moon. I want to see for myself how much you wipe the board with everyone when you get to play properly.”

If Kazi had been smiling before, they looked positively frightening now. Not that their smile had widened, or anything; they just seemed to have a way of looking disconcertingly menacing while beaming pleasantly at you. “I will do my best to arrange that,” they said, and reached for three boxes: Moon, Sun, and the tiles and dice and cards.

Setting up would have gone more quickly if not for Rayla’s interest in inspecting the various gamepieces, and Kazi’s interest in flaunting them. Most of the units, from citizens to mages, were all carved in beautifully varnished wood. The Hero and Archdragon figures, though… “Is that gemstone inlay?” Rayla asked with disbelief, inspecting her Lunar Archdragon and turning it this way and that.

“The Lunar Archdragon has mother-of-pearl inlay, in fact,” Kazi said pleasantly. “And, yes, some very small gemstones for the eyes.”

She shook her head at that, half-impressed, half in disbelief. “Where did you even get this?”

“It’s an heirloom,” they elaborated, which made sense. The only other way for someone to have a set like this would be by being ridiculously rich, or by knowing an insanely skilled craftself. “Hence why it has the standardised continent shape. It does need fairly careful maintenance, though. I paid to have some of the varnishing redone recently, for example. But for me, the joy of owning a set like this is well-worth the upkeep.”

Rayla nodded. It wasn’t her sort of thing, personally, but she understood well enough. “I bet you try to get people over to play you every chance you get,” she said, amused. “With a board like this…”

“It would be quite a shame otherwise, yes,” they agreed. “I must thank you for obliging me! This board so rarely sees a high-level game.”

She huffed, amused, and kept unpacking the gamepieces one-by-one. Kazi had to know that they were the better player. If she’d barely beaten them when they were playing Ocean and underestimating her for most of the game, she certainly wasn’t going to win now. “I’ll see what I can do.”

Eventually, when everything was set up, they rolled the starting conditions and began playing. Kazi very obviously knew what they were doing with the primary advantages of the Sun faction – agriculture, population, and military might – but Rayla was perfectly well acquainted with a proper Moon playstyle as well. She leaned into the espionage and intrigue skillset as heavily as she could manage, wreaking political strife in Kazi’s territory wherever she found an opening. When Kazi could find them, her units died; but that certainly wasn’t always.

Even so, the outcome was something of a foregone conclusion. The game lasted a while, because Rayla knew that her main defence against the Sun armies was if they couldn’t find the Moon cities, and planned accordingly…but Rayla hadn’t succeeded in assassinating the Archdragon, and hadn’t managed to get the Sun citizenry to demand a leadership duel either. So, unsurprisingly, Kazi eventually managed to field an assault that broke through the illusory barriers protecting Rayla’s stronghold, striking at her Archdragon precisely on the turn before New Moon. It died of its injuries the turn later.

Rayla considered the board carefully after that. Her best chances of winning against Sun would be crop poisoning, Archdragon assassinating, leadership disputes, or revolution. She’d managed the first and had been making decent headway on the latter two, but, in the end…it wasn’t close enough. She smiled ruefully, and said “Moon concedes.”

They nodded, having expected that, and smiled beatifically. “It was a marvellous game,” they said warmly, already reaching over to begin clearing the pieces. “Thank you very much for it.”

“I don’t know, it was a pretty solid victory for you.” Her voice was dry as she reached out to help, handling each of the intricately-carved figures with care. “You’re obviously the better player, here.”

“Yes,” they agreed, neither modestly nor boastfully, simply as the fact it was. “But nonetheless, you are certainly the best player I’ve encountered in-person in a very long time. Certainly the only one I didn’t arrange to meet with beforehand. It was a good game, no matter that you lost it.”

Rayla dipped her head, smiling a little. It wasn’t like she enjoyed losing…but she’d appreciated the challenge enough to make up for it. She’d ceased finding any sort of challenge back home a long, long time ago. “Yeah, it wasn’t bad.”

Kazi reached for another piece, paused, then eyed her consideringly. “Would you…like to discuss it?” they asked, tilting their head, watching her.

She glanced up, surprised. It was hardly an unfamiliar concept. She’d watched enough matches broadcast on Sunbeam to know how it went; when two top-tier players concluded a match, they talked about it afterwards. They discussed each other’s plays and strategies, pointed out mistakes, considered where there was room for improvement…

The only after-game discussions she’d ever had had been at Runaan’s knee, when she was still small and didn’t know the game nearly as well. It was weirdly flattering to be invited to do it now.

“…Yeah,” Rayla said, eventually, and sat back down. “I’d like that.”

Kazi beamed like the Sun they’d just used to trounce her. “Very good.”

The next half hour involved more talking than Rayla thought she’d done at a time in months…or, well, she would’ve said so, if not for last night. It was certainly a good second-place contender though, and by the end her voice was feeling a little tired from overuse. They concluded the discussion, packed away the gamepieces and board, and then were done.

“But of course, you must stay for another drink,” Kazi said, and whisked her empty glass of reveillant away. “You liked the berry infusion, yes? Excellent, I will get you another.” Good to their word, they did precisely that, and returned in short order.

Rayla did feel a little more awake, on that second glass of the reveillant. It was effective stuff; as much or more so than coffee, with (in her opinion) a considerably better taste. She was debating the merits of asking Kazi where they got it when they spoke up first.

“You’ll be returning, I hope?” they said, and it took Rayla a moment to think of what they meant.

“….Here?” she guessed. “For a rematch?”

“Well, yes, naturally.” Kazi pushed their glasses up, smiling a little. “I had assumed as much. But, no, I was referring to the game society. You’d be an excellent fit, I think.”

Rayla blinked. “Oh.” She thought of the previous night, and hunched down a little in embarrassment.

“I know it was only a very small group when you visited, but I have the impression you prefer that, anyway,” they said, neatly demonstrating that they were as unnervingly good at reading her as she’d sort of inferred. “It can get rowdier in term time – at least at the official meetings. The meet-ups at our houses are much calmer – usually just the core group.”

“Which is?” Rayla asked, a little reserved now, if only to disguise the fact that she really didn’t need convincing. She might have, after just the Friday. But after this…after yesterday…

“Myself, Callum, Nihatasi. Usually Pava, but often he spends the whole time tinkering instead of playing.” They shook their head, amused. “In term time – well, usually I’d say to expect Evairas, but he is spectacularly busy these days, so perhaps not.”

“…They sent messages,” she commented, after a moment. “Callum and Nihatasi, I mean. Pava didn’t.”

“Pava tends to forget Sunbeam exists for weeks at a time, don’t mind him,” Kazi assured her. “Nihatasi and Callum though, I’m not at all surprised. Nihatasi adores new people, and Callum…” they eyed her, just a little speculatively. “Well, I think you impressed him. Has he invited you to Tuesday, yet?”

Rayla blinked with consternation. “Invited me to what on Tuesday?”

“Game meeting, at the house,” they clarified. “It’s hardly an official thing, but it’s often Callum’s house that has everyone over. He hasn’t invited you over, yet? Well, he will. I am quite sure of it.”

For a long moment, she looked into her glass and the dark red liquid therein, pondering it as if it held all the answers for how she was supposed to respond. “If you say so,” she said, finally, and lifted her glass to drink.

“I do,” Kazi claimed serenely, and gracefully changed the topic to (naturally) more about Antiquitora. By the time Rayla finished her drink, she’d learned that Kazi played broadcast games online fairly regularly, under a handle that she recognised; she’d watched a good few of their games before.

“Is there a story behind that skein-name?” she asked, undeniably curious now that she was acquainted with the elf behind it. “’Finguistician’.”

Kazi laughed, like she’d surprised them. “Oh, that,” they said, mirthfully. “It’s something of an in-joke. You see, I have my doctorate in Linguistics – specifically, in non-verbal linguistics. Various sign languages, Draconic Corpus, and so on. I made a joke once, when I was still an undergraduate in a sign-language module, that the course should be called finguistics, given, well,” they waggled their fingers at her.

She snorted, amused. “Did it catch on?”

“Sadly, no. But I do call my sign language classes for the public ‘finguistics’, and no one can stop me, because I am the teacher.” They giggled a little to themself. “Perhaps in time it will become a more widely-used term. I would like that; it would be very amusing. In any case, that is where the handle comes from.”

Rayla thought, for a moment, about a moment from the game night: Kazi and Callum had used some sort of sign language with each other for a second, hadn’t they? She considered asking about it, wondering what his background in that was. Did he take any of Kazi’s lessons, or had he learned some other way?

In the end, she bit her tongue and said nothing. After a little more idle conversation, she eventually made her leave, farewelled at the door by her cheerful host. Without the game to bolster her, she swiftly began to really feel her exhaustion. Stimulants or not, she was so tired that a headache was starting to pound luridly behind her eyes, almost enough to make them water.

She headed home intending to collapse back into bed and nap – if the lingering effects of the drinks allowed her to, anyway. Which was why she was considerably displeased to arrive back to find her wing busy and full of noise and various elves milling about. The halls were crowded. She was about to say “What the fuck”, or perhaps “Shut up, do you know how bad my headache is right now”, but before she had the chance one of the closest elves (some wingmate she didn’t know the name of) spotted her and shouted down the hall “It’s her, she’s here, she’s not dead!”

All eyes went to her, and an immediate chattering started up. Rayla stared, utterly nonplussed, fighting the urge to pull on the Moon and take advantage of a state of near-invisibility to just retreat to her nice, privacy-sealed bedroom. The noise cancellation ought to take care of this racket.

After a few seconds, a face she actually had a name for pushed forwards. It was Stavian, a Skywing elf from her bellatorium, still in armour from training. “Rayla,” he said, sounding very relieved. “Thank goodness, we were about to call for an official search!”

Rayla had no idea what was happening. “What in Xadia’s name is going on here?” she demanded, finally, and her irate tone seemed to remind him that he (for some reason) customarily seemed to be quite intimidated by her. He shrank back a little, and as he did, a few of the rest of the Honour Games team started to appear.

“You didn’t show up for training!” he said, defensively. “And from anyone else that wouldn’t be much of a big deal, but you’ve never missed a day before. And then when we went to check on you afterwards you weren’t here.”

“And none of your wingmates knew where you were,” added one of her teammates: Fiera, a particularly tiny Skywing mage with hair and feathers dyed a distinctive lilac colour.

Rayla stared for a few more seconds, then wiped a hand over her face. “It was Full Moon,” she said, very slowly, her patience already somewhere on level with the floor. “I didn’t get to sleep till around five; of course I wasn’t going to go to morning training.” She ignored the fact that, if not for Callum, she absolutely would have. He’d been right; it was completely reasonable to miss training on a Full Moon rest day, and if they had a problem with that they could bite her.

The vast collective of people assembled in the halls all looked very embarrassed, suddenly. And honestly, they should be. Moonshadow elves were definitely uncommon in Gullcrest, but surely someone should have known it was Full Moon, and made the obvious conclusions. “Oh,” said Fiera, weakly. Her wings drooped a little. “That…makes sense.”

Now looking very abashed, Stavian echoed “Oh.” The crowd of assorted wingmates and guests, probably attracted by the initial hubbub, started to grumble and dissipate.

Rayla sighed, and rubbed at her eyes, attempting to scrounge some sort of positive emotion from beneath her absolute crankiness at being confronted with a noisy group of people when she was this sleep-deprived. “Look,” she attempted, tiredly, “It’s…nice you were worried. I didn’t realise anyone would be looking for me.” She searched for something appropriate to say. “I’ll…put a note on my door, if something like this comes up again?”

Her teammates, four of whom had shown up, nodded contritely. “Sorry for bothering you on a rest day,” offered another of them, starting to shove the others towards the door. “We’ll see you for training tomorrow, right?”

“Yes, I’ll be there,” Rayla looked longingly down the hallway, where her bed awaited. “I don’t exactly make a habit of missing training, you know.”

“Yeah, you’re very – dedicated,” Fiera said, in the tones of someone trying to be diplomatic, still being ushered doorwards. “Have a good rest day!” she called, right before the rest of them filed out and the wing became something approaching quiet again.

Too tired and too grumpy to have much emotional response to the whole thing, Rayla turned and headed down her hallway without a further word. The wing was still bustling, and it was more of a relief than usual to close her door on it; the privacy runes hummed lethargically as they activated, but the noise level outside cut off sharply enough that for once she didn’t mind their quality too much. They mostly did their job, and that was all she really needed.

It turned out that the effect of the reveillant couldn’t really complete with post-Full-Moon sleep deprivation; Rayla crawled into bed and fell asleep more or less instantly.

She woke some hours later, stirring at the sound of some computer module or other humming as it reactivated from idling. It wasn’t loud by any means, but she was quite sensitive to new or changing sounds in her vicinity, so it was enough. She blinked her eyes open, rubbing grit from their edges, and stumbled out of bed with a glance at the clock along the way. Moon-sense said it was late afternoon; the clock was a bit more specific about it, and said 6.33pm. The sky outside was still blue and light, but in that summer-evening way, where the sun had fallen low enough to cast long shadows between the city buildings. It was still bright enough to make her tired to look at.

There were new messages on her Sunbeam.

Rayla dropped into her desk chair and eyed the icon tiredly, uncertain if she was awake or rested enough to deal with any further social contact today. In the end she decided there probably wasn’t any harm in checking them, so…she looked. Kazi had thanked her for the game, and sent her some sort of invitation to make an account on…what looked to be the skeinsite that hosted the high-level Antiquitora broadcasts. She wasn’t sure what the purpose of that was, and didn’t have her head on sufficiently to figure it out, so she left it for later. Ethari had asked how her Full Moon had been. And…

She sighed, not sure whether to be pleased or embarrassed, because: Callum had left messages, too. Fairly recently, actually.

They read Hope you got to sleep okay, and how are you feeling? There was no mention of whatever he’d supposedly wanted to mention before the call ended, so he’d probably forgotten, or…something.

She debated whether or not to reply now. She found she was a little wary of…something. She wasn’t quite sure what. Making a fool of herself, maybe? She’d already spent nearly two very late-night hours sunbeaming him, and…that was already…well.

In the end, Rayla spent about five minutes trying to wrestle some semblance of reason past her sleep-mired brain, finally concluding that she was probably unlikely to come across as an infatuated idiot by responding to a couple of messages. Then, slowly, she picked at the keys to write back: Kind of knackered, but okay. While that one was processing, she hesitantly sent another: Just woke up from a nap. I think it helped?

She left the computer to visit the bathroom, tidying up her hair and washing her face with cold water. It did little to make her feel more alert, or to remove the weird muggy haze of exhaustion from her head, but it was better than nothing. She contemplated getting something to eat, but knew she wasn’t going to be up to cooking tonight. She went for one of her bottles of emergency moonberry elixir instead, which were so full of nutrients they probably counted as some kind of soup.

That in hand, she returned to her computer….and, somehow, wasn’t surprised to find that Callum had already replied. Was he just constantly glued to his computer, or what?

Well, at least it’s apparently traditional to be tired after full moon, I guess? He’d written, light-heartedly. At least you got a nap! Although it’s kind of late. Won’t you have trouble getting to sleep later?

Rayla shuffled forwards in her chair to respond. Nah. There’s a neat trick you can use to get to sleep at night if you’re a Moonshadow elf, and if it’s not Full Moon. Just need to shine a bright light in my face and I’ll be good. She hadn’t had to use it in a while, but she knew where the thing was: on her windowsill, to soak up sunlight during the day. It’d do the job just fine.

The pause in response seemed to be longer than connection lag would account for. That’s so weird, and cool, he marvelled, eventually. I just looked it up. They call them sun lamps?

Yep. Flash of sunlight in a dark place gets us sleepy pretty much every time. Moonshadow elves tended to be mostly diurnal by practice, but naturally, they all had the wiring for a nocturnal lifestyle. Bright sunlight in the eyes after being in the dark would usually trigger tiredness, even in elves perfectly used to going about in the daytime. Sun lamps were extraordinarily simple as far as enchanted objects went, but extraordinarily useful for Moonshadow elves with weird schedules.

What about if someone turns a light on in a dark room? He asked, apparently fascinated.

Nah. Has to be sunlight. It’s pretty specific.

That’s so cool, he reiterated, from that bizarre well of enthusiasm he seemed to have for banal magical elements of everyday life. Rayla waited to see if he’d write anything more, and after a moment, realised she’d started smiling. She wasn’t sure when that had happened. Eventually, he did send something else: I’d ask if you wanted to call again, but you should probably, you know, be getting actual sleep.

What Rayla intended to write then was something along the lines of, ‘yes, you’re entirely correct, I need to sleep for like twelve hours if I’m not going to be a useless wreck for training tomorrow’.

Instead, what she ending up sending was keep it half an hour or less, and you’re probably fine.

I’ll set a timer :) he typed, complete with smiley, which was something she’d never actually encountered outside of the mageskein before. And then he called her.

“How’s the light level?” she asked him, when the call resolved. It wasn’t yet far into sunset, so she thought there ought to be sufficient lighting in her room to see by, but who really knew with humans. She certainly didn’t know how bad their eyes were.

In his own room, Callum was bathed in the warm glow of the light through his windows, shaded the same pink-orange that she was. He was smiling, even as he pretended to squint exaggeratedly at her room. “Yeah, I can just about see,” he said, obviously teasing. “It’s not dark yet.” A pause, and he took a moment to look her over a little more directly. He was a little more concerned when he added “Are you sure it’s okay to be calling? You really do look tired.”

“I think I’ll survive half an hour, Callum,” she told him wryly, and one corner of his lips twitched upwards.

“Yeah, fair enough.” He hesitated for a moment, like he was summoning his nerve for something. “Listen – I wanted to ask before, yesterday, but – there’s going to be a sort of casual gaming night? At my house? On Tuesday. The others will be there. And my housemates, er, obviously.” He cleared his throat. “Sorry if it’s short notice, but – do you want to come?”

Rayla stared at him, half bemused by the offer itself, half at his apparent nervousness. “Kazi said you were going to invite me,” she said, a little too nonplussed to offer any more intelligent response. “I guess they were right.”

He blinked. “You’ve been talking to Kazi?” A pause. “No, wait, what am I saying, of course you’ve been talking to Kazi. There’s no way they’d let someone who beat them at Antiquitora get away.”

“We had a rematch today, actually,” Rayla admitted, lips twitching. “I let them take Sun. Naturally they destroyed me.”

“Ow,” Callum said, with feeling. “I’ve been on the receiving end of Kazi playing Sun before. It’s…” he searched for the words. “Really something.”

She smiled, remembering it. With a few hours separating her from the game, she realised she’d enjoyed the experience more than she’d anticipated. The discussion in particular had been welcome. “I’m just glad to be able to play someone new, honestly,” she confided. “Though it’d be nice to do it again when I’ve actually slept.” A second later, she remembered he’d had an almost equally dubious bedtime, and inspected him critically. He looked surprisingly okay, actually. A little tired, but not like he’d been up most of the night. “Did you sleep in late, or what?” She asked then, a little amused. “You don’t actually look tired.”

He laughed sheepishly. “Yeah, I didn’t wake up till around lunchtime,” he admitted. “I had to go to work after that, though.”

Rayla paused, still very unsure of how to respond to mentions of his work. “And…was that okay?” She asked at last, uncertainly.

“Yeah, actually. I had a pattern etching appointment, and those are some of my favourites,” he said, brightening. “This one wanted one of my new designs, too. It turned out great!”

She’d seen something about that on the posters in the waiting room, she thought. “That’d be the…buzzing patterns into the horns?” She asked, faintly.

“Mmhm. I use sort of a really small thin version of an electric buffer, and work the etching in that way,” he agreed. “I draw the design on first and follow the lines, and then after you can either just polish it up and leave it, or like, fill with metal or something. It takes a while, but, you know, that’s kind of just how art works.” He shrugged. “It looks great, anyway.”

Rayla thought of her looming appointment, maybe a week or so away, and found she was entirely unprepared for thinking about that. “You…seem to kind of do the art thing a lot?” she hazarded, as a distraction, nodding to the nearest easel. “Painting?”

He turned to look, then grinned back at her. “Yeah! I mean, art is…well, I probably draw more than I game, and that’s really saying something. I do all sorts, kinda. I’ll have to show you some of my sketchbooks sometime.” That seemed to remind him of the question she still hadn’t answered, and he abruptly looked nervous again. “So. Er. Um. About Tuesday…?”

She tried, very hard, to keep an even expression. “Er,” she managed, and then finally: “…Yeah. Sounds good? I’ll…be there.” Wherever ‘there’ was. She did have the address written down, but hadn’t actually tried to figure out where it was in the city yet.

Callum straightened up, brightening. “Really? That’s great!” A second later, he amended “It’ll be really nice to have someone new over! We’ll have food and stuff, too.”

She paused at that. “Should I bring anything?” Hospitality expectations tended to be very different depending on culture, so it merited the question.

“Nah. Well, if you want, you can bring snacks or food, but you don’t need to. We have loads.” A second later, he added ruefully “Kassa has some…pretty strong opinions about how fully-stocked a kitchen should be.”

“That’s one of your housemates?” she remembered.

“Yeah! Actually, I lived with Kassa and her mom for a few years before. They sort of hosted me, when I was…well, when I first came to Gullcrest.” He amended his sentence half-way through, as if realising he was about to say too much. She was intensely curious about that. “This house is her family property, too, so we don’t have to pay much on it. We moved in when Kassa started her undergrad.”

She blinked, filing that information away. This had something to do with the mystery of him doing a mage’s masters at the age of eighteen, she was sure of it, but… “What about your other housemates?”

“Nihatasi moved in because we had room and she was a friend,” he said, matter-of-factly. “Soren…” he hesitated. “Well, he’s a childhood friend of mine,” he settled on eventually. “So he came to study here, and he took the last spare room.”

Rayla eyed him, but didn’t question him on the obvious secrets clamouring behind his words. “Looks a lot roomier than usual student wings, at least,” she commented finally. “These rooms are pretty cramped. And the runework is pretty worn-down. My door makes this horrible droning noise every time the wards come on.”

He made an ‘oof’ sound. “I’ve visited student wings before. They’re…well, they’re okay. Definitely prefer this house though.” He eyed her curiously. “Is yours at least one of the ones where you get one bathroom between two people? Because I knew someone who only had one bathroom for twelve, and it was terrible.”

“That sounds disgusting,” she said, making a face. She could hardly imagine how terrible that would be, with how some of her wingmates were. “I’m so glad that’s not me.”

“So glad,” he agreed, and before she knew it, they were off on a weirdly engrossing conversation about the merits of student living compared to home life. He was pretty evasive about it, but she got the impression he’d been used to a fairly fancy home before he came to Gullcrest, and he’d been astonished at what student wings were like.

Rayla was in the middle of describing how chaotic move-in day had been, with so many elves hauling all their boxes of things in at once, when a shrill ringing started up from over Callum’s voicecatcher. He reached hastily to the side and disabled some sort of egg timer that had gone off, settling back into view with a sheepish smile.

“That was the timer,” he said, apologetically.

Half an hour, already. It was a little disconcerting how quickly it’d gone by. “I’d better try to turn in for an early night, then,” she offered, weirdly reluctant to hang up.

He hesitated a fair bit, too. “Probably a good idea,” he agreed, wry. “We can talk again later?” His tone went questioning, at that. A little hopeful.

Rayla resisted the urge to bury her face in her hands. “…Yeah, sure,” she sighed, more and more exasperated with herself for just how much she wanted to talk to him.

Callum smiled again, the edges of him lit up from the light of the falling sun. “Later, then,” he said, and hesitated once again. Then he reached out, and the call disconnected. Sunbeam minimised to its idling overlay around the edges of her screen, the background of Silvergrove scenery back to the fore.

She sighed, and leaned back in her chair. Ruefully, she spend a while reflecting on exactly how in trouble she was. Then she did as a responsible elf on their Full Moon rest day ought, and went to attempt an early night.

She managed it almost as soon as it was dark enough for her magic rune-rock to work. Thank Xadia for sun lamps, honestly.

  ---

End chapter.

Yeah so this is basically completely unbetaed, even by me, because I’ve been frantically trying to churn out a complete chapter this week in time for the Modern AU day of rayllum month. There will be typos, there will be clunky sentences, that’s just what you get for a rush job. I’ll return to it and do some editing in the morning.

Re: the Antiquitora. ‘Would you like to discuss the game’ *hikago fandom origins vibes intensify*

  Worldbuilding notes for this chapter:

Moondances: specific ritual dances made to react with the runic Circles that Moonshadow elves use. The dancing is used as a form of spellcraft, to cast enchantments or strengthen the magic of a community. The Full Moon dances in Silvergrove for example are integral for keeping its magical defences running. (piaj)

EX and WX: East Xadian and West Xadia. A more modern and correct term for the human and elf/dragon sides of the continent, respectively.

Artefact magic: primal magic cast with a power source other than your own arcanum. E.g. a primal stone, a moon opal.

Thaumaturgy: the practice of magic casting.

Thaumatology: the study of magic.

Lightcatcher: magic camera, basically.

Voicecatcher: magic microphone, basically.

Honour Games: a fun sport :) more on this later.

Technomancy/technomantic: alternate proper term for magical engineering.

Antiquitora notes: while the game has been steadily gaining complexity over time, the game at its fundamentals is very old, and quite traditional. It’s considered a respectable strategy game, and Runaan certainly would have approved of Rayla showing an interest in it when she was younger. Modern variants tend to adopt features and ‘house rules’ that don’t strictly conform to traditional standards, though.

East Xadian computer games: though boasting dramatically better visuals and audio than human technology is currently capable of, the limitations of elven computing mean that computer games are extremely expensive, and difficult to integrate into lesser systems. Most elves will never be able to run the best gaming modules at home.

Nomad Gameships: Brevili nomads are well known for their magical engineering, and produce some of the most advanced technomantic games there are. Owing to the limited number of elves who can actually afford to buy them, they get creative with the marketing: many clans field airships whose sole purpose is travelling around as a sort of mobile arcade, landing at various destinations for a set amount of time, during which customers can pay for access to the many assorted games they have on offer. Demani, as the clan that (a good long while ago) invented the airship in the first place, boasts the most impressive facilities on their ships.

Skycrawler: a game so advanced and finicky that its developers haven’t yet figured out how to get it to run on less advanced systems than the gameships’ computers. There are a handful like these, usually the newest and most technomantically complex titles, and their release on gameships usually serves as something of a ‘beta’ build while they refine the technology for more accessible use. Imunaviga was one of these, and was very recently released for public purchase.

Imunaviga: as several commenters guessed, this is indeed a Subnautica expy. Rayla is not at all keen on the idea of playing it. I spent probably too much time working out the worldbuilding and plot for the elf AU version of this game. It was a lot of fun though.

Scion of Shadow: a well-regarded game with a Moonshadow elf protagonist, involving a lot of stealth gameplay, a highly-lauded storyline, and in-setting ‘fantasy’ elements; i.e. they’d be considered fantasy in this fantasy setting.

Magical overload states: Natural events that cause high levels of ambient primal magic can induce some very unusual effects in beings with the relevant arcana. Terms include ‘moonstruck’ for Moonshadow elves, ‘sunstruck’ for Sunfire, and ‘storm-drunk’ for Skywing. (piaj)

Moondust: a magic-dampening drug taken in different dosages based on the phase of the moon, to dampen the effect of the lunar cycle on Moonshadow elves’ bodies and minds. Not all Moonshadow elves take it, but most do. (piaj)

Reveillant: Sunfire elf beverage made from the dried berries of a shrub with stimulant properties. Some preparations are very strong and are restricted, but preparations from the berries are mild and very popular. (piaj)

Draconic Corpus: a sort of full-body sign language spoken by dragons incapable of complex vocal speech. Given this accounts for the majority of dragons, it’s generally useful to understand some of, even if bipeds are generally incapable of speaking it properly. (piaj)