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talkfastromance4 · 1 year

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Hardships, Happiness, Hemmings--a magazine article--Luke&Lily

**this is a MOCK magazine page**

a/n: Hi! I wanted to try something different and I also just wanted to write about Luke gushing about mama and the kids😊 I hope you like it!

Word count: 1.8k

Enjoy!

•••

Article by: Claire Tucker

Flowers line the walkway to the front door and after a doting doorbell rings, the first thing before me is a brown eye-ed bulldog-terrier mix named Petunia, known famously as the dog owned by the tall, blond-curled Australian frontman of 5 Seconds of Summer, Luke Hemmings. He’s smiling warmly and then the quick patter of feet on the hardwood is behind him followed by an excited question, ‘who is it daddy?’

Luke swings his second daughter, Posy age 5, in his arms. She waves hello and asks who I am. ‘This is the nice lady interviewing us, remember? Come on in.’

An episode of Bluey plays on the tv where his other children, Lily (9) and Oliver (1) sit happily on the couch. Oliver waves, Lily gives a quiet yet polite hello as Posy introduces me to her siblings. From the outside they’re seen as a rockstar’s family, but on the inside, they are a family just like any other. Toys are everywhere, grocery lists line the fridge and a month’s calendar is filled and color coded with each child’s extracurriculars.

CT: How do you manage all of their schedules while you’re working on new music or are on tour?

LH: All of it couldn’t be done without my wife, y/n. She’s got everything down to a T and I have reminders on my phone as well. Being home on most days is really helpful while she’s at work so I can take Lily to ballet and Posy to karate. Their uncles are a big help.

CT: What’s the hardest part of parenting?

LH: There are hard things but having a partner is what makes it all better. We have difficulties like any other family; getting them to bed isn’t always easy, making sure homework is done, asking permission to use a toy instead of just taking it (he chuckled at that) Posy is always taking Lily’s things. We’re working on asking first.

CT: You share custody with Lily’s father, Cory Stone, was it hard at first? Because you’ve been with y/n for…almost ten years, now?

LH: Yeah, ten years. There were some rough spots in the beginning of our relationship and I was so nervous to meet Lily in the beginning. She was only one at the time, but I knew if she didn’t like me, I wouldn’t get another date with lovie. Lily and y/n have such a close bond.

CT: Lovie?

LH: Oh, sorry (he blushed) that’s my nickname for y/n. I always call her lovie. But um, Lily and I got along great right away and soon, I saw her like my daughter. Cory is great, and so is his wife Ella. They have a beautiful little girl, Violetta who absolutely adores Lily, Posy and Oliver.

CT: So you’re all a big blended family?

LH: Definitely. It takes a village to raise kids and our village is big enough to do just that. We have so much love and support and we want to make sure we’re supporting and helping them in any way we can.

At this point of the interview, y/n Hemmings joins us with a pitcher of lemonade and some blueberry muffins she said Lily made. y/n joins us for the second part and sits intimately close to Luke who greets her with a soft kiss to the cheek and an arm flung around her shoulders.

CT: Oliver is your youngest and you shared very briefly with fans that it was a somewhat difficult pregnancy. How did you maneuver that as a couple?

LH: It was very hard. My main concern was how y/n was doing after it all happened. She had to have an emergency C-section but as soon as her eyes opened, she was the mama bear I’ve known and loved all along. She demanded where our son was, what his condition was and that we needed to see him as soon as possible.

Y/NH: You make me sound horrendous. (she said this with a laugh and a hand to cover her face)

LH: No! Lovie, you woke up and were fierce. You always put our children first and it never ceases to amaze me.

CT: And how is Oliver doing now?

Y/N: He’s so wonderful, he loves to laugh. Because he was born prematurely, he hasn’t been talking yet so we’ve been Signing with him and he’s caught onto that pretty quickly. He loves snow.

LH: Yeah, we went to a cabin and it was the first time any of the kids saw snow, Oliver loved it the best. When it’s raining here, he’ll go to window and sign ‘snow’ and he pouts everytime that it’s just rain.

CT: Y/N, what is it like at home while Luke’s away touring with the band? How do the kids handle it?

Y/NH: It’s always hard the first few weeks. The kids miss him terribly and it’s hard to explain timezones but we always mark a spot on a map where he is. We FaceTime with him as much as we can and when he’s home, we always make the most of it even if it’s for a few days.

CT: Luke, how is it with you?

LH: I have yet to find the best way to get used to being away from them but honestly, I don’t think I will. It’s always hard to be away from my family and especially when they’re younger and going through milestones. I’m happy I was able to see Olly walk for the first time, but I missed Posy’s fifth birthday. So when I’m with them, I cherish every moment.

Y/NH: And he’s the best dad, he’s always present and supportive of whatever they want to do. He and Lily love to sing together, he helps Posy with her karate and yes, he does wake up whenever Oliver is crying. We’re a great team and I couldn’t have asked for a better husband. The way he welcomed Lily into his life too…I’m sorry, I’m going to start crying. I’m a bit emotional.

CT: I understand you both wanted to talk about another hardship you faced as a couple and as a family.

Y/NH: Yeah, I had a miscarriage last summer and it really caused a wedge between me and Luke. I wasn’t handling it well, I wasn’t opening up with him because I was trying to process what happened. I kept thinking it was my fault, but I couldn’t dwell on that because I have three children to care for. I didn’t want to lose it in front of them so I kept it all bottled inside.

LH: I tried to uncork her bottle but it was hard. We were both thinking and assuming the wrong thing of what the other wanted and we started to see a marriage counselor. We went through some sessions, we did a technique she suggested and it got us through. From the outside we held it together, but on the inside, our family has gone through so much in the last several years. From y/n’s pregnancy being difficult to Oliver being in the NICU for weeks, normal sickness that come with children, touring and being split apart, and the miscarriage…

Y/NH: We’ve had so many hardships, but within those hardships there’s been happiness and a ton of help from our friends who are more like family. Luke’s parents were so amazing and flew out to help when needed. We have so much love surrounding us, it’s incredible.

CT: It sounds like you two have created a wonderful life. Anything to look forward to in the next year?

LH: We’re just taking it one day at a time. Our anniversary is coming up soon. Might plan a trip with the guys over the summer and we’ve got a double ‘first’ birthday for the twins.

CT: That’s right! Michael and Crystal are still the new parents, how’s that going?

LH: Great, Michael still calls and asks me for advice.

Y/NH: Luke is a pro at the blanket wraps, he can do it in thirty seconds flat.

Just as our interview was coming to an end, Lily, Posy and Oliver ran out with Petunia hot on their heels. Posy leapt into Luke’s lap reaching for a muffin and Lily made sure Oliver walked carefully to y/n. The Hemmnigs’ may have gone through some tough trials, but the love they exude is evident.

***

“Are you sure you can’t tell I’m pregnant?” you ask staring at the pictures in the magazine article.

“I’m sure,” Luke kisses your shoulder as he pours himself a cup of coffee. “The kids are covering you and in our pictures, your dress is billowy enough it covers it. Look how beautiful you are.”

“Stop,” you blush then start giggling when he places soft kisses on your neck. “When is the video supposed to show?”

��I think it’s live now. Claire said as soon as the magazines were out, the website would release the video on social media.”

You check on the kids who are playing outside with Petunia, you know Lily will make sure Posy and Oliver are safe, and sit down at the table. Luke pulls out his phone and opens up Instagram to find the video that he was already tagged in.

Along with the interview and small photoshoot, the magazine did a video of your whole family. Luke opens it and presses play.

It starts off with a close-up view of your walkway full of flowers, then Petunia’s nose poking at the camera. Posy appears next waving at the camera, and Oliver is seen crawling behind her. Luke gives a small tour of the house and his music room where Lily is practicing her ballet. She becomes bashful and hugs herself to Luke. The cheek kiss he gave you outside during the interview was shown, and a bunch of other kisses during the photoshoot.

After the family group photos, Ashton came by to keep the kids occupied while you and Luke had photos taken. Ashton was seen a few times in the background with the kids. There were photos of you seated on Luke’s lap, his arm wrapped around you. This was the first time you’ve ever done something publicly with him and he could tell you were nervous.

“Just pretend it’s Andy and Sarah, lovie,” he told you stroking circles on your back with his thumb.

The photos were lovely and you were thankful you were given hard copies of them all. Your favorites were of you and the kids on the couch, the kids playing together in the grass and the one of you and Luke smiling and kissing each other.

“What do you think?” Luke asks when the video ends on a fade out of your whole family doing group photos. Oliver started to cry and Posy was getting restless.

“It’s perfect,” you smile then touch your belly, “I can’t wait for this little one to get here.”

Taglist: @calumance @in-superbloom @calpalirwin @karajaynetoday @wiiildflowerrr @sunshineeeluke @littledrummeraussie @suchalonelysunflower @hoodhoran @thew0rldneedsmcreycghurt @sunshineeashton @ashtonsunflower @mymindwide @itjustkindahappenedreally @seanna313 @mulletcal @pandaxnienke @celestialams @in-a-world-of-fandoms @blairscott @writersdare

#luke & lily #luke & lily oneshot #luke & lily fic #dad!luke #luke hemmings writing #luke hemmings fluff #luke fluff

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transfemzedaph · 1 year

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Ravager beef hc? :D

🪱

okay prepare for a lot of writing sdjfbjd

so okay context for this hc overall is that there are hybrids of the newer mobs but most of them like they dont know theyre hybrids till the mobs like appear but theres some cases where the hybrids like do exsist before the mobs properly exsist in minecraft. idk i know how this works in my head but i dunno if that makes sense

so beef is born a lil baby ravager hybrid in like a pillager group, one day when hes still quite young he gets left behind somewhere whilst theyre travelling or sth - no one looks for him or anything because ravagers dont really care for their young so yeah

he gets found by a very kind villager lady who like adopts him and teaches him everything about the world and players and such, one of the things she told him was that the players dont know about the ravagers or even the pillagers yet so he should always hide his ravager-ness from them (cause like the worlds that exsist are very developed but the ones that the players end up in arent as advanced its like weird)

the village he grows up in is fairly small, nestled into a cliffside but sometimes a wandering trader visits, bringing gifts and stories of far off lands and beef is so curious about it and so when hes old enough he leaves to explore the world

he ends up in mindcrack full of players and new friends but its clear this world isnt the same, the villagers are weird and wrong, he keeps his horns filed down and his sleeves long enough that it covers the markings on his arms (cause like the ravagers have the bluey silver like cuffs things and in my brain like when the baby ravagers are born the magic pillager guys do like a thing that makes bluey kinda markings on the ravager where the cuff things go and like its a thing like this ravager is owned and isnt like a wild one and also makes it like magically easier for the cuffs to like stay there, so beef has the markings)

then he joins hermitcraft with lots of people, new friends and old, and he still hides it, he ends up telling the nho during season 5 during the whole jungle shit, like sth abt the them being trapped and beef has to tell them bc his horns are growing and he cant file them down - although beef is unsure if bdubs actually remembers

beef wasnt technically in season 6 but when he returns in season 7, everyone knows about ravagers now, and beef knows its a hybrid friendly server but he still doesnt tell anyone, he does use his part ravager status to his advantage a little in decked out (the ravagers always hesitate and are slightly reluctant to attack him bc they know hes part ravager)

season 8 he still doesnt tell anyone but the whole alien transformation thing happens which makes beef feel real weird and bad bc of his hybridity, so he decides he will tell everyone before season 9

every like new world beef goes to his horns revert back to their original state so beef is kinda glad he doesnt have to do anything with them this time when he starts the new season, he walks into the pre season meeting before they enter the world, sleeves rolled up and horns on display

he feels v awkward abt it and is kinda just like uh so im a ravager hybrid and everyone is like :o oh, x asks how long hes been hiding it and if thats why he wasnt there in s6 - bc remember that thing abt like hybrids like being activated when they appear in the like game that i mentioned at the beginning - and etho who is like standing net to beef scoffs at that and beef is like uh no ive been a hybrid the whole time which everyone is very surprised by bc like born hybrids arent exactly rare and even happen with the newer mobs but mostly the born hybrids from the newer mobs happen after theyre like in the game

when i say in the game i mean when they got added to the game like yknow but like this isnt a game for the people bc its just their life but phrasing things is hard

thats all i have rn and tbh i so badly wish i could draw so i could do like a thing w a body of him to show what he looks like bc of him being a hybrid but eh whatever

#original post tag #this is so long im so sorry #🪱#ravager beef tag #ask tag

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platypanthewriter · 4 years

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The Dragon’s Prince

Chapter One: Humans Aren't Furniture

Steve knew he was in the right spot when the first villager to see him--a man with a huge bruise on his forehead--yelped and ran, clutching at what looked to be a solid-gold chamberpot.

“I heard there’s a dragon here,” Steve called out, standing in his stirrups. His horse sighed. “I don’t want any trouble--I definitely don’t want your chamberpots--”

“Who the hell are you?” A young woman poked her face over the fence near his elbow. “What’s that sword for, then?”

It was both convenient and annoying, Steve thought, to be travelling without his entourage and ceremonial armor. “This sword wouldn’t hurt him.” He grabbed the hilt and pulled a few inches of blade to show plain steel, not the slick, greenish sheen of an anti-magic enchantment.

“Mmmm,” she hummed, squinting.

“His privateer license expired, is all--” Steve shrugged.

“Go away! You’re here because he ate our sheep!” a kid yelled, and Steve sat back down in the saddle, brushing snow off his arms.

“Is that what happened?”

“He just strolled into town and asked whose sheep he’d eaten,” said another villager, hanging out a window. “Been up on north field. Hucked treasure at everyone.” More of them were venturing forth, one of them holding a golden harp.

“Broke my front tooth,” said the kid, yanking her lip back to show a gap, “--he was naked.” Steve stared between his horse’s ears, and the kid smacked his boot. “You gonna take all the stuff he gave us? It was too much, but he gave it to us.”

“No,” Steve grimaced at the guy hiding in plain sight “behind” a tiny shrub, “--no, keep your...chamberpots, I understand a trade caravan will be coming through, if you want to sell some…” he trailed off as a villager waved and pointed him to a ceramic vase larger than she was. “Uh, some of his...gifts. They usually keep track of where he’s been.” A cheer went up around him, and he sighed. Definitely the right place, he thought. Now I just have to convince him to listen to me. And risk his life. If anything, he felt more tired, and he rolled his shoulders, hiding his wince as it strained the bandages under his jacket. While I’m doing those two impossible tasks, maybe I can convince him to put on pants.

After some negotiation--and a stern refusal to accept harps or encyclopedias in payment--Steve stood at the base of a fall of boulders, and began to climb. He started scrambling faster as the sun set, and the boulders shifted, and caught his boot. He froze, taking a shaky breath, and clung to the rock face, remembering the expression on General Hopper’s face after Steve received his orders.

“Why not a dragon that responds to summons,” Hopper had gritted out.

“We need a fire dragon,” Steve had echoed his father’s words in his own voice, and tried to sound certain. “He--he doesn’t kill anyone outside his license. I just--I don’t know what I can offer him. He could be in danger from them too, and they didn’t give me any--I can’t go to a dragon, even that dragon, and say “Please fight our battles, we’ll definitely figure out something to pay you with later--”

“There was that bandit.” Hopper had shaken his head, and stomped away.

Steve had imagined himself seared black, and speared on a tree like a butcherbird’s breakfast, and wondered semi-hysterically which had happened first.

“E-except that,” he’d agreed. “I’m--I’m sure there was some--”

“He is a dragon,” Hopper muttered.

Steve yanked on his leg, yelling at the flash of pain, and the boulders shifted again, sending an avalanche of rocks and dirt down slamming into his shoulders, and the back of his head.

When he awoke, he was warm, and clean, and everything was bright through his eyelids. “...oh shit,” he whispered, curling tighter, “--I’m dead, and now everyone else will be dead--”

“Whoa there,” breathed a voice next to his ear, “--pretty boy.”

Steve stilled, opening his eyes on gold, and golden scales, because the voice of a dragon was unmistakable. It rumbled all around him and blew across the skin of his back like bellows over hot coals. He swallowed, closing his eyes again. Of course I’m naked.

“I know, touching me feels like heaven,” the dragon continued, “--but I have to ask. What drives a prince...to climb a landslide...to knock on my door?”

Steve tried to stand, and found his right foot was a sea of pain. His vision went starry.

“Whoa, whoa,” the rumble said, and smooth scales curled around him. Steve allowed himself to be propped up, then lifted, grabbing at the talons around his butt and ribs, and blinked into the face of the gold dragon. He’s young, he thought distractedly, his head’s barely the size of a pony.

“My--I’ve been sent--”

“Are you a present?” asked the dragon, ignoring him. “I took your giftwrap off, it was a bit--” it waved a claw, “--torn, after I dug you out. I think you’d look great on this rock here,” it held him up to a slanted boulder the size of Steve’s bed, and tugged some furs from a pile to toss over it. “I think your ass would really bring the room together.”

“My--what,” Steve tried to turn, and the dragon leaned its head within view, teeth bared in what Steve suspected was an annoying dragon grin. “My--I am not--I am his Royal Highness Prince Steven of Hawkins, Duke of Harringtown and Knight of the Realm, and I have been--”

The dragon sniffed him, and he resisted jerking away, swallowing. “Why send you out without your guard? You were wounded before you came here,” it informed him, and he stared back into enormous, bluey-gold eyes.

“I know that.” Steve gritted his teeth.

The dragon’s grin widened. “Entirely-gold hoards are out this year. I think a prince’s smooth skin would really make it pop.”

“I thought you didn’t eat people.”

The dragon blinked, then huffed. “I’m just saying you’d look nice lounging--”

“I need your help,” Steve hissed.

The dragon momentarily stopped trying to angle him different ways in the light. “What are you offering?” he asked, the flames flickering in his throat.

Steve rolled his eyes. “I don’t know what you want. You must have enough money,” he waved at the piles of treasure, “--this isn’t even your main horde. And you aren’t paying taxes, like you agreed to do when you applied for your privateer license--”

“...you.” The dragon went still, running a knuckle down Steve’s face, and then met his eyes again and laughed. “As--as decor, naturally--”

“In a cave where you put me?” Steve asked, to clarify. It was better than being roasted, he figured, or dropped onto a spike. “I’ll need to ask you to defer my payment until--”

“One night, with you,” the dragon interrupted, turning its face away. “I mean, if you can’t tear yourself away after--”

“One night?” Steve squinted at him, and then grabbed for the dragon’s talons again, kicking for balance as he was suddenly lowered to the floor of the cave. The mountainous gold coils and wings folded and curled inward, packing themselves impossibly tiny until they resolved into a human-ish shape covered in shining scales, and sporting dragon horns.

He crouched, frowning at Steve’s swollen foot, then smirked up. “One night...with me.”

“Oh!” Steve almost clapped in realization, but caught himself, blushing, as the dragon-man leaned his face into his scaly hand and cackled. “Just…” he trailed off, rephrasing his objections, until he remembered the amount of people at risk, and the whole reason he was there. Maybe he enjoys sex where the human survives, he told himself, and held out his hand.

The dragon took it in both of his, edging much too close for a handshake, and held it, grinning, as though he was delighted Steve had offered it, and didn’t intend to give it back.

He leaned closer, his clawed thumb rubbing gently at the skin between Steve’s knuckles, and licked his lips, his gaze dropping to Steve’s mouth, and Steve barely had time for a startled inhale before he had warm lips pressed to his. Up close, the dragon looked a bit like a very expensive costume, Steve thought, like someone at a masquerade ball, when he would wonder whether the person pressing him into the wall knew who he was kissing. He wondered, now, whether the dragon had ever attended.

The gold was digging into his butt, and his foot throbbed, but the dragon’s warm bulk was surprisingly cozy. He had unreasonably long lashes, and soft lips, and Steve let himself relax into the kiss, licking curiously into a dragon’s mouth. He found it nearly steaming hot, and thankfully clean of singed bandit. The pile of treasure he was lying on shifted.

He winced as something jabbed into his side, and the dragon reached over--still licking gently into Steve’s mouth--and bent the metal arm of it back with a grating creak. The reminder that a dragon could have crushed his skull with one hand, and instead was running soft fingertips along his jaw--and shifting scaly knees so as not to jostle his sore foot--made him feel a bit like jelly inside, and he laughed into the kisses, panting. He pushed himself up on his elbows, into the kiss.

The dragon hummed, grinning against his mouth, and dropped alongside him. His hands were pleasantly hot, running up and down Steve’s ribs. “You should see what I’ve got, before you agree to anything.”

“What?” Steve murmured back, tossing a leg over the dragon’s waist.

“We can--we can make sure this is fine--after I’ve saved your humans.”

“What--what do I call you,” Steve whispered into the kisses, and the dragon pulled back to grin at him, then leaned in for another kiss, and another.

“You don’t--you don’t know my name?” He kissed Steve’s lips again. The skin was starting to feel tender.

“You’re designated by color, ability, and area,” Steve rambled, accepting kisses when he paused. “--it’s--mm. It’s a mess--the way you keep flying around--I thought your name must be some--some Dragonish growly noise that--that they didn’t know how to spell, which, rude--” he panted into another kiss, losing his train of thought.

“...Billy,” he snickered into Steve’s ear. “You always let strangers do this?”

Steve remembered with a jolt that he’d been sent to bring a dragon back, whether it required his oath or his life, and he shook his head. “It’s dangerous, what I--what I need from--”

Billy bit, oh-so-gently, up the side of Steve’s neck, and he groaned, losing track of his words as his eyes fluttered shut. “You finally came without your guards.”

“Were you waiting to get me alone?” Steve snorted. “If you weren’t giving pornographic statues to children, you wouldn’t rile everyone up so much--”

Billy snickered. “It was heavy! I didn’t wanna carry that thing! Fun though it was.”

“She was eleven--”

“Oh, she kept cows, she’d seen worse. You probably bought it from her.”

“We couldn’t very well--”

“So she’s better off, now. Several times the price of a couple cows.” Billy’s teeth shone sharp in his grin, and he leaned in to run his knuckles up Steve’s side. “I’ve got some treasures I’ve been saving for you…actually, here--” he leaned off the edge of the rock, then held up a vial of sparkling silvery fluid.

“It’s--it’s just my ankle,” Steve stared at it. “We can stop by a healer on the way back, there’s no need for--”

“You’re hurt,” Billy uncorked it with his teeth, “--that’s what it’s for. If I’m not paying attention, and you get hurt again, it’ll use it up later, maybe. Maybe your tears will start healing the sick.”

“How would I even find out that was happening,” Steve asked, frowning at the vial. “You should sell that stuff to some kingdom with a dying queen, or something.”

“Or maybe,” Billy whispered, “--you’ll live as long as a dragon. Try for that one.”

“How am I supposed to try for something--”

Billy grinned, sticking it in Steve’s mouth, and Steve drank it, staring at him over a potion worth as much as...a prince’s ransom, he wondered. A king’s castle?

“Why didn’t you drink it yourself?” he asked, as Billy frowned at, tapped it, and tipped the last drop onto Steve’s extended tongue. “You could--”

“I’m a dragon,” Billy licked his lips, watching Steve’s mouth, “--you think I’m going to get hurt? You’re fragile. If something happens--”

“Why do you care about me?” Steve asked, lowering his eyes to flex his suddenly-painless foot. He reached down to tug at the loosened bandages. They were stuck together with blood. “I mean--”

“You--you’re the prince,” the dragon laughed, tossing the empty vial against the far wall, and Steve nodded, biting his lips.

“Right.”

“No, I mean--” Billy crouched in front of him, cocking his head to catch Steve’s eye, “--everyone knows what you’re like. We know what you do, because you’re the prince. You’re on coins--”

“I’m valuable.” Steve nodded, keeping his shoulders relaxed, and giving his best public ‘welcome’ smile.

“No,” Billy pushed him back, climbing over him again, and kissed his nose, “--no, I mean--I know you, I read every copy of the Imperial Gazette--”

Steve snorted, bursting into cackles of laughter. “You think you know me through that?!”

“...no,” Billy muttered, his gold scales pinkening.

“What’s my favorite color?” Steve grinned up at him, and Billy leaned in for another kiss.

“Gold,” he whispered. “The best color.”

“...I do like yellow a lot,” Steve whispered into the kiss, and Billy squeezed him.

“I know enough about you,” he mouthed along Steve’s ear, “--to know I want to know everything about you.”

Steve’s heart pounded, and he took a shaky breath, then cleared his throat. “...what kind of name for a dragon is ‘Billy’,” he mumbled, his head muzzy with warm hands and bright smiles. “Shouldn’t you be. The Slayer. Something about fire. Smog.”

“Rude,” the dragon whispered against his mouth. “Billy the Slayer?”

One more question, Steve thought, before he burns them all away, kissing me. “Wha--Billy.” he cleared his throat, leaning into the hand on his head. “Wait. Why did you burn that man?”

Billy punched his shoulder. “You saw his crimes!”

“I didn’t,” Steve raised his eyebrows, tugging a fur over himself, and lying back against the boulder with a sigh, “--because you didn’t send in your paperwork, like usual--my lungs are full of bandit flesh now--you couldn’t just break his legs and drop him at a guard station--”

“I--I definitely sent--” he paused, thinking. “I didn’t.” The dragon scrambled away, sliding down the mound of treasure in his tiny human form. “Ah, here they are--”

“How do you fill them out?” Steve asked. “Do you use your claws? With your eyes shut? Because that would explain--”

The cavern brightened with a poof of flame. “I use a quill--look--” he clambered back up the shifting mounds of treasure, waving a handful of papers, “--see, look, he stuck his cock in places it wasn’t wanted, so I stuck a tree through it. And set him on fire.”

Steve grimaced, finally relaxing. “Oh. Well. That’s fair.”

“And then I threw his golden chamberpot at the first person I--”

“Who has a golden chamberpot,” Steve started snickering, and couldn’t stop, curled against his warm dragon. Eventually the days travelling wounded caught up to him, and he mumbled his replies, then snored, with the vague impression of gentle claws combing through his hair.

@neonlaynes @tracy7307

#harringrove #harringrove for Australia #stranger things #platypan #platypan fic #art by neonlaynes #Lookit Steve's squishy face!!#Squish his face Billy!#Steve needs a break #Billy needs a prince #All the best interior design guides advise one

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dontyoudarestiles · 7 years

Text

Fic: A Voice of Naught and Night

First attempt for Gradence, hope everyone enjoys!

(Original) Percival Graves/Credence Barebone | E (Explicit Sexual Content In The Future) | ~4500 | Chapter 1 of ?

Summary: Percival Graves is a detective in the small Irish village of Perth, living in the shack along the sea his father had lived in and his father before him. Raised on myths of merrowmaids and selkies, when he finds a mute, beautiful boy washed up on the shoreline, he can't help but provide shelter. And eventually, love.

| ao3 |

Graves

The boy who washes up on the seashore is mute. Pale and salt-soaked, he’s curled up in a ball near shallows, protecting the naked slip of his belly and the curve of his genitals from the knife-laced wind. When Graves first sees him, he thinks he’s a faerie from one of the silly legends his da liked to tell back in the day—skin as soft as powdered snow, hair as black as pitch and drenched from the sea, cheeks ruddy and pretty as the sunset. But Da’s faeries never had lips that went bluey or nail-beds that flushed purple from the chill or flesh that froze in the cold Irish December. “Are you alright?” Graves shouts over the whistling wind. The boy says nothing. For a short second, Graves thinks about just walking away. Because he can see Trouble lurking over the boy’s shoulders, hiding in the shadows of a clenched jaw, stalking the boy’s feet. But then he sees the eyes. Dark and liquid and wild, they flutter and thick lashes beat against the boy’s high, cold-flushed cheek, and Graves reaches out.

It is nothing to shrug off his coat and place it about the boy’s delicate, frozen shoulders. The boy shudders into it, clutching at the fabric jealously with blue fingers, and that makes up Graves' mind. He carries the boy home in his arms, a slight, kitten-weak thing that clings to Graves' shoulders tremblingly. Graves can’t remember the last time someone touched him in this way, if anyone had ever touched him in this way, desperate and trembling. And although he knows the boy is snuggling down into his shoulder in search of his body heat, and not out of affection, Graves can’t help the flush of pleasure from the sweet touch, can’t help but close his eyes as he feels strands of wet hair brush against his cheek and settle icily against his neck.

“Don’t worry, you’re safe now,” he whispers and feels the boy shake. His home isn’t much, a tiny cabin sat on a high sand bank that overlooks the craggy shore, but the boy only looks about wonderingly and closes his eyes greedily as they step into the living room, the warmth sweet and loving on his chilled body. Graves runs the boy a steaming bath, worried for the state of the little fingers and toes. They are more a pale blue than a dark, evil purple though, so he thinks the digits are safe from frostbite, but still. He blows on them with his hot breath, instructs the boy to do the same while he gathers towels and lays them on the radiators to heat up. The boy makes a little noise of pleasure once Graves settles him into the bath, a soft “oh,” that sends shivers down Graves spin as the hot water splashes and smacks against numbed, slicked skin. He’s a pretty little thing in the water, long hair swirling about him like a cloud of ink in the water, white skin flushing peach and apple from the heat, eyes gone dewy with pleasure. But he’s too weak to wash himself, fumbling fingers nearly dropping the soap and he can barely raise his arms to splash his face with warm water. He makes a wretched sound, frustrated and sniffling, and Graves' heart breaks. “Here, love, let me, c’mon.” The boy watches quietly as Graves kneels next to the tub, ignoring his aching knees (he’s just turned forty last month, his bones aren’t as young as they used to be) to help this soft-eyed boy who needs him. And it’s a strange feeling to be needed for something as mundane and as simple as taking a bath. A strange, but heady feeling, being needed, a surge of power that makes Graves shudder from it. But power or not, Graves takes the soap and a soft washcloth gladly and runs it down the sweet dip of the boy’s spine, so thin and delicate that he can count the gentle bones. The boy hums happily, lids half-open, and it fills Graves up with a well of warmth, not unlike drinking a hot drink on a dreary day. It’s only when Graves starts washing the thin little chest and smooth belly that he sees the bruises. They’re mottled all over the boy’s soft hips and thighs, patterning the boy from dark blues and purples to shades of rotted green and yellow. Graves is frozen at the sight of them, cupping one slim thigh as he stares at the ugly print of a man’s hand on this boy. A red film descends over his eyes, tinting everything in shades of blood, and he can feel his heartbeat throbbing with anger.

(The very thought of the boy, sobbing and in pain under the heavy weight of a faceless, cruel-fingered man makes Graves' stomach roil, a beast roaring in his chest, fingers clenching around an invisible throat).

He only jerks out of his trance when he feels the boy quivering. At first, he thinks the poor thing is cold and reaches out to start the hot water tap, but then he glances at the boy’s face. The tears slide like rain droplets down the boy’s cheeks, some of them slipping over the plump of his bottom lip, and his nose goes bright from sniffling. “Oh, love,” says Graves softly, sleeves heavy with water, knee caps aching from kneeling too long, and he draws the boy close, lets the sweetling dampen his shirt as he cries. He feels the soft, smooth skin under his arms, hears the boy stuttered, hitching breaths. “It’ll be okay. It’ll be okay.” Inside, he thinks what happened to you? What are you running from?

…

Graves dries the boy with heated towels, and it’s a challenge—the boy cannot stand, eyes glazed and not all there, unable to help. His skin now burns with sweet fever, delirious, and so he lies listless in the tub as Graves pats him dry. It’s easy to carry him from the bathroom, a white towel dangling from boyish hips. Graves places the boy onto the cover of his bed, and it’s startling, the moon skin bright against the dark sheets. The boy swallows a few Tylenol with a little coaxing and draws long pulls of water from a tall glass Graves keeps by the bedside. It’s only once the boy settles against the comforter that Graves kneels in front of the boy, sliding reassuring hands over the little one’s wrists when he whimpers in confusion, skin hot to the touch.

(Graves refuses to think about how easy it is, to get on his knees for the soft-eyed creature, a priest supplicating himself before God and his angels.)

“I don’t want to, darling, but I have to check,” he whispers into the night.

The boy trembles, but nods as Graves gently, so gently, unwraps the towel from around the boy’s waist, revealing the plush, bruised thighs and the plump, soft cock. Graves sucks in a breath—the boy is so white, the few points of color the beautifully pink nipples, flushed cheeks, the berry mouth, and peach-headed cock.

(And the ugly, spattered bruises, but thinking of it gives Graves heartburn).

But Graves is not here to gawk without reason, and so he gently spreads the boy’s legs. The sweetling lets out a little cry, but there is no shame, only gentle confusion, and the boy only sighs as little as Graves trails a finger down his little ass to press at the smooth, silky skin of his rose.

Graves does not linger, simply feels the untouched flesh, not allowing himself to look, and retreats, blushing like a milkmaid felt up the first time, but unbearably relieved. The boy is furled tightly and dry, no blood or wounds or abnormal ridges that Graves can feel.

If the boy had shown signs of sexual assault, Graves doesn’t know what he would have done. He doesn’t.

But the boy was not harmed in that horrific manner, and Graves breaths a prayer of thanks to God for the first time in years.

He tears his eyes away from the sweet swell of hips and avoids looking at the pretty pink bundle between the boy’s white legs. He’s trying to be good, trying to be kind, so he wraps the boy up in soft fleece blankets and herds him out of the bedroom and in front of the warm, fire-flaring hearth of the den. The boy shivers, still nude, as Graves scrambles around looking for clothes.

But still, the boy doesn’t speak. He responds a little as Graves gently clothes him in his softest longsleeve and sweatpants. “C’mon, love, head up,” Graves murmurs, helping the boy pop his head of curls through the hole. “Good job, good job. Give me your feet now.” The boy’s lithe, pale legs slip into the pants easily, and Graves is very careful not to let his fingers linger anywhere inappropriate. It’s rather funny, at first, to see how very ill Graves’ fit the boy, sleeves hanging loose over thin fingers, the sweatpants dragging across the floor, but then Graves looks too long and it becomes arousing—the silkiness of a bared shoulder, the lovely hollow of the throat, the sharp jut of his pelvis poking up over the waistband.

Graves feels hot, dazed, meets those depthless, fever-bright eyes, and jerks out of it. He mumbles an excuse and busies himself by moving his little lumpy sofa as close as he can to the fire, so the boy can settle and thaw more easily. He’s in a bad way, breath thick and rattly in his chest, and Graves can picture him slipping, growing cold and blank, and a sudden terror fills his lungs like ice-water.

“Please don’t take him,” Graves finds himself praying. “Please, Lord, don’t do that to me, please.”

...

Graves stays awake half the night watching over the little one. He dozes in his favorite armchair, ten minute stretches at a time, slams open his eyes awake to smooth the thick, damp hair away from the boy’s heat-slick forehead and tend to the low-lying fire. He coaxes cool water down the boy’s throat, rearranges the blankets, is even able to get the boy to swallow a few mouthfuls of sweet porridge in a slight moment of clarity. The boy himself wakes Graves up a few times during the night, shrill little whines from nightmares pulling Graves out of his sleep and drawing him to the boy’s bedside.

“Go to sleep, sweet, shh,” he murmurs, and the boy settles, tossing and turning receding under Graves' gentling.

God against all odds is kind for once, and the fever breaks a few hours after midnight after raging like a forest fire for most of the night. But still, Graves doesn’t retreat to his room, but curls up more properly in his chair and grants himself sleep.

It’s only when the sun stretches grey-lavender fingers across the clouded sky that he gets up, puttering around to make breakfast and brush his teeth, letting the boy rest for a mite longer. “What happened to you?” Graves murmurs aloud, and is almost startled when the boy shifts and sits up, awake. “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, lad.”

The boy trembles for a moment, eyes wild and blown wide for a moment before recognition sets in, and the shoulders untense. Thankfully, the boy seems incredibly alert compared to only a few hours before.

“It’s alright, lovely, you’re safe here.” Graves keeps his voice low and smooth. The boy’s hair has dried into long, glossy ringlets, and Graves can’t help but brush his fingers through them gently, feeling the silk curl against Graves' rough, wind-chafed skin.“There’s a lad. Could you tell me your name?”

The boy blushes at the gentle touch, but shakes his head, taps his throat. Can’t speak. But then a light blooms in the dark eyes. He mimes writing in the air, hands and arms trembling with the effort. Luckily it only takes a few moments for Graves to track down a pen and paper. Credence, scrawled in a swirly, girlish cursive, stands black and striking against the white of the paper. “Credence,” Graves reads aloud, a heavy name. “You’re safe now. I swear it.” Credence smiles, and, with his lips pink and soft instead of paling, chapped blue, he looks like the most beautiful thing Graves has ever seen.

The boy writes quickly, but his hands tremble clumsily with exhaustion, and the long sharp strokes nearly rip the page in two carelessly.

What’s your name?

Graves is faintly ashamed at not having introduced himself from the very beginning—his Mam would’ve surely killed him for not minding his manners.

“Ah, I’m Graves. Or Percival, but hardly anyone calls me that anymore, not since Uni.” He huffs a laugh, deliberately soft so as not to startle the lad. “What are we goin’ to do with you, then, eh?” Credence blinks up at him, butterfly-shy and nervous, and he goes for the pen again, but the boy fumbles and there’s the clatter of metal falling to the ground, and the boy is going pink and wet-eyed with frustration.

“I’m so sorry, lovely,” Graves murmurs, reaches out to the pat the little weak hands and put them into the boy’s lap to rest. “But you’ve got to be patient. You nearly died out there.”

Credence bows his head, staring out at the flames in the hearth. The flicker of light across the high cheekbones and the deep lips and dark eyes make Graves blink and wonder if the boy really is a faerie come to life.

…

DS Tina Goldstein doesn’t know when to mind her own damned business.

“I’m sure we can manage just fine, Graves. It’s only a week off. I’m just worried—you haven’t taken a vacation day since last Christmas,” and her voice dips with suspicion. “Is everything alright?”

“Oh, yeah, I’m fine,” Graves mutters into the phone-mouth, casting long, distracted glances at the pretty boy asleep on his couch. “It’s—erm, it’s family business, you understand. An old aunt called up.”

“Oh.” He can hear the confused frown through the phone. “Well, let me know when you’re ready to come in.”

“Of course, yes.” Graves half-heartedly makes vapid small talk for a few more minutes before they say their goodbyes and what not, and the phone clicks into its holder when he puts it down. He tiptoes carefully into the sitting room, knowing Credence is dozing gently, unwilling to wake him. The boy sleeps deeply, lashes casting long, deep shadows on his cheeks in the firelight. He’s sprawled on the couch, half covered by the mountain of blankets and pillows Graves had collected for him, and even though Credence looks incredibly comfortable and warm and safe, Graves has such an intense urge to carry him to Graves' bedroom and tuck him gently in bed that he wonders if he’s losing it. He clenches his fists and tries to distract himself by turning to the book he’d abandoned before finding Credence on the seashore. But his heart’s racing and his thoughts are full of Credence, the faerie he fished out of the sea, not the droll protagonist or her lackluster love interest, and five minutes passes before Graves realizes he’s been staring at Credence in repose instead of turning the page. He slaps the book shut with a sigh, and gives in. He sits next to the boy napping on the couch, carefully touches the smooth brow to check for fever. Credence is warm, but not sickly, and instead looks remarkably healthy for someone literally spat out of the sea only a day ago. Cheeks flushed prettily, breaths deep and even, he could’ve been anyone’s son, sleeping through a perfectly good Saturday, avoiding schoolwork and responsibilities. Or perhaps someone’s lover, drowsy from post-coitus and happy and spoiled. Graves hates to wake him, but it’s been a good five hours and the boy hasn’t had anything to eat since the fever broke. So he touches the warm shoulder and murmurs, “Wake up, lovely, wake up. Time for a quick bite.” Credence wakes like he’s swimming up from a deep pool, slow and elegant, lashes lifting gently, legs and arms shifting under the blankets, the smooth arch and stretch of a neck and the waggle of fingers. “Hullo there,” Graves whispers, unbearably charmed. Credence smiles brightly, eyes muddled for a moment before clearing. The boy sits up, rubs a fist in his eye too roughly for Graves' tastes, and yawns, little pink tongue curling like a kitten’s. “Had a good nap there, did you?” Graves says. “Hungry?” Credence merely blinks at him, and there is a low grumble of hunger from the boy’s stomach. Credence blushes and Graves laughs. “That answers that, I think.” Graves stands. “Do you—what would you like? Do you eat meat?” Credence nods, looking around for his little pen and pad of paper, and Graves retrieves the items from his writing desk, knowing the boy is still too weak to stand by himself.

“You think you’re strong enough to write some today?” he asks. The boy nods eagerly. He proves himself by scribbling a little note and pushing the crumpled paper into Graves' palm, fingers soft and cool and only trembling the slightest bit. Thank you. The words follow Graves to the kitchen, where he fixes sandwiches for them both and brews a hot pot of tea. “Time for a change of scenery,” Graves says, coming back into the living room, only to find Credence trying to stand on his own—unsuccessfully. The boy is clinging to the back of the couch, trying to rest his weight on legs too weak to cooperate, and Graves scoops the boy up quickly, just in time to see the boy’s knees buckle. “Jaysus Christ, are you insane?” Graves yelps. Credence is a trembling, warm, terrified weight in his arms, and the boy hides his face in Graves' neck. “Oh, love, you’re not well yet. Yeh have to have patience.” Credence makes a little, dissatisfied noise, and Graves huffs a soft laugh, ruffling the long curls at Credence’s nape. “It’s okay, it’s okay. Just a small bump, don’t worry.” He carries the boy into the kitchen, sits Credence down at the table, making sure he’s comfortable. “Good?” Credence nods shyly, staring at the little cup of tea sat next to his hand. Graves scratches the back of his neck sheepishly. “Wasn’t sure what’cha liked, exactly. Didn’t know if you preferred sugar or not.” He quickly pours two spoonfuls of sugar into the tea, watches the powder melt down and tries not to think of what Credence would taste like after drinking it, warm and sweet and earthy. The boy smiles up at him gratefully, and Graves feels the tops of his cheeks warm before he clears his throat loudly and focuses on his own food. But even that distraction is short-lived, because although Credence can’t speak, he can hum and make little, satisfied noises that disarm Graves terribly. He glances up and he doesn’t know why it’s so satisfying, seeing Credence devour the food with the reverence of a priest receiving communion, but Graves feels a flood of warmth in his ribcage, a sort of self-satisfaction humming in his blood, and he thinks I did that as the boy makes his little happy noises, soft hums, eyelids falling to half-mast with pleasure. …

Credence

Graves, the man who’s rescued him, is kind. His voice is a low, gentle burr, his hands are large but soft on Credence’s paper-frail skin, and he has a light in his eyes that the Other Man didn’t. His home is warm and his hearth is lively, and Credence could stay and stare at the flicker of the flames forever and never be restless.

The food Graves makes him is strange, but good. There is no tang of salt or bitter aftertaste of fish, but instead tender, savory meat placed between sweetbread, the crunch of lettuce, the soft give of cheese. He eats greedily, never having tasted anything so good before.

Warm and full and good, he thinks to himself that he wouldn’t really mind being caught by this man. Not really.

…

Graves

He wakes up two mornings after the boy appears to an empty house, and he panics. The couch is neatly made, the blankets folded and pressed, the pillows rearranged prettily, and Graves is terrified. He becomes an idiot for a good few minutes before he finds his mind enough to glance outside and—oh. A pale figure, down by the shoreline. Credence is bent down, ankle-deep in the very water that had tried to kill him only a day ago, water lapping at his hands playfully, and he looks up guilelessly when Graves calls his name. There’s a quick smile, visible from even this distance, and Graves breathes. “Credence!” he calls, and there’s an overwhelming sense of relief, yes, but also fury. The boy was so weak the past day he could barely walk, and he wakes up this morning and has the gall to dare the universe to try and drown him again? He’s not dressed for the weather, either, only an overly large sweater and soft, damp-hemmed sweatpants barely protecting him from the chilled wind. The boy straightens with obvious effort as Graves reaches him, but he’s still smiling, the fool, and Graves is about to yell at him for risking his life and thinking himself invincible when the boy reaches out and the wrath dies in Graves' throat. Credence’s hands are freezing and wet, and so are the smooth, glossy pearls that are dropped into Graves' palm. Graves freezes. “What’re these?” Credence just smiles and blinks up at him, closes his lax fingers around the little treasures. A gesture: for you. Graves stares at him, down to the pearls, and back again. They really are quite gorgeous, smooth and hard and cold, like perfectly rounded ice that won’t melt, and they’re worth more than what Graves could make in a lifetime. An almost overflowing handful, and the boy just gives them to Graves. “Where in the seven hells did you find these?” Graves finally forces out. But Credence shakes his head and steps back when Graves holds them out again. “Credence, I can’t take these,” Graves insists, thrusting the little pearls into the boy’s chest. “I can’t, I won’t. Do you know how much these are worth? What you could do with this type of money?” But Credence looks at him, pleading with his eyes, plum mouth trembling, and if the boy starts crying because Graves won’t take money that’s rightfully Credence’s, Graves' going to have a stroke. “We—we should talk about this inside,” Graves stammers, shoving the goddamn pearls into his pocket.

It becomes very evident that Credence only made it this far out from sheer effort, because he walks very slowly and very carefully. The second time Credence nearly lands on his face, slim feet stumbling in the damp sand, Graves scoops the boy into his arms and carries him the rest of the way and feels a sense of déjà vu that he never wants repeated. Even the memory of Credence naked and cold and near death makes something freeze deep in Graves' gullet, and a reddish cloud of anger gathers in his chest as he thinks about what he would do to anyone who tried to hurt the poor lad. “Cocoa first, and then we’re going to have a chat,” he says forbiddingly, but the boy only ducks his head down into Graves' neck, breath sweet and warm against Graves' throat, and tightens his grip on Graves' shoulders. Graves feels his anger fade in favor of exasperated fondness. He presses his lips to the wild curls, and thinks I’m in trouble.

Credence likes the hot cocoa quite a bit despite it being made from store bought powder and not from Kowalski Quality Baked Goods, Graves' favorite. The boy sips carefully, but reverently, and Graves has to audibly tell the boy to slow down.

“It’s a bit rich, innit?” he says with a wink. “We don’t want you getting any tummy aches, now.”

Credence blushes delightfully, and Graves only lasts a few minutes of watching the boy drink slowly before pushing a little platter of butter biscuits towards the boy. He’s seen the Credence’s ribs in the bath, stark and terrifyingly vivid against the skin. He never wants to see his boy so thin again, could never deny him hot food or drink because of it. When Credence became his boy, he’s not quite sure. But so it is.

Credence smiles, but then frowns as Graves places the not insignificant pile of pearls on the middle of the coffee table, the clink and clatter of them ringing out in the kitchen. The boy produces his pen and pad from nowhere, scribbles something quickly, insistently.

For you, Mr Graves. A thank you.

“Credence,” Graves says lowly, seriously, and catches Credence’s eyes so intensely the boy stares with alarm. “I swear on me life, on me Mam in heaven, that no matter what happens, no matter how well or how ill you get, you will always be welcome here, free of charge. This?” He picks up one of the pearls, rolls it between his thumb and forefinger, puts it down again firmly. “This isn’t necessary, my boy.”

The boy looks faintly embarrassed at the display of kindness, head dipped down and cheeks red, and Graves captures one of the little pretty hands in his bearish palms before the boy can retreat.

“Oh, you’re such a good, kind boy,” Graves says fondly. “So considerate."

Credence looks stunned, and then hides his pleased smile and kittenish eyes in his shoulder, squirming with delight, and it takes everything in Graves not to lean over and ravish the boy where he sits.

“Good boy,” he whispers instead. “My good, lovely little boy.”

#gradence #credence barebone #percival graves #credence/graves #gradence fanfic #mywriting

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krisrampersad · 7 years

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My Discoverie Columbus Lost and Found from New World To Old LettersToLizzie Sneak Preview

Dear Lizzie,

I discovered Columbus when I was about four years old and then I lost him again to rediscover him one fine sunset, his parts cut up and scattered across my world and yours, the way he cut up our continent and our peoples that became Your Majesty’s Empire.

Early explorations

I still remember the expression on his face. Pa looks baffled. So far, he is able to answer all my questions that end-of-July morning - the kind of morning that begins with sunshine warming the weathered unvarnished wooden gallery, bathing it in soft light and lending a calm cosy to the holiday feel. But every farmer’s daughter knows – if she took the time from the more pressing global inquisitionings – a day like this could brew thunder and torrential rains by mid-afternoon.

I must have agitated him, this early morn. He asks me to bring him a cigarette – his brand, named after an avenue in the city - and a box of matches.

I hand him a Three-Plumes match from its yellow box, a product of Trinidad Match Limited since 1887, it reads. I could read. Before that it was just a yellow box with red markings, and the dark red scratch sides. Reading material was scarce in rural Trinidad so I had taken to reading anything I could find and that usually was the packaging of any item. I would later learn that 1887 was the year Parisiens began to lay the foundation for the Eiffel Tower; and that Britain passed the Act to unite Trinidad with Tobago as it celebrated the golden Jubilee of Queen Victoria, just like your recent jubilee celebrations, and ours, Liz.

Pa scratches the match against the side of the box like my sister would, some years later, do a scratch lottery. It flares over the edge of the cigarette and flickers out, leaving a light stream of smoke behind it. He put it to his lips, leans back, closes his eyes and draws hard on the tobacco that has soothed many a shamanistic and other agitated spirits for millennia. It has also attracted as gold many-a-pilferer, marauder and cutthroat pirate to our parts from yours, as you well know, Dear Liz.

It is rare discovery for me as a child - Pa at home at this time of a morning. He is usually long gone by the time we are up, usually awake from 2 am. We would know from his deep coughing, caused by a head cold he caught working as a forester in his younger days which would hasten his end of days. By peek of dawn he would have already left for the vegetable garden or to the market to sell its produce that was our main source of income.

Now, facing the onslaught of curiosity, he is perhaps wishing he had kept this routine and head out early as I bounce around him in the early morning trying to get answers for these enormously challenging thoughts of universal import that collide like meteors in my child’s mind.

“So how did Columbus discover Trinidad?” The question pops into my head and pops out of my mouth as questions tend to do from near-four year olds. I am conjuring up a pale man in fancy pants, frilly shirt and embroidered waistcoat with funny wavy white hair dripping down to his shoulders as I had seen in my sisters’ history book. Reading material was often limited to their text books and I would take sneak peaks, thumbing through them to see the pictures. They open-up the windows of my imagination.

In my child’s mind, Columbus is now unfurling - from over our island and pulling onto his ship - an enormous sheet bellowing out with the wind. I had watched many times as Ma or one of my sisters made our beds, shaking out a freshly washed bed sheet. It would bellow out, before settling on the bed. The process of covering and uncovering and surely discovering too, was a normal household routine.

Though he never complained nor showed annoyance, it is the kind of question that probably made Pa, the object of my incessant questioning, wish I was in that place where all precocious youngsters are sent so someone else would answer their impossible questions about how the world works - school. I am not yet enrolled in any of the illustrious British-styled public schools – the legacy of your Governor Lord Harris and subsequent governments, Lizzie - which were sure to offer the answers to these impertinent thoughts of an infant. The closest ones are just about a mile in any direction to one of which I was destined to walk to and from, sometimes barefooted, over the next seven years – tall punishment for a few questions – talk about how curiosity kills the cat, as schools kill curiosity!

Ma calls out to me. She ladles out boiling cocoa from a big iron pot resting on the mud fireside with a metal kalchul which she bought from Mawah in Princes Town. She would go to the town just to chat with Mawah’s mother, leaving me to wander around looking at all the curiosities in this shop that seems to have everything, including the traditional wooden kulcha, and flat wooden dablas used to turn roti on the chulha, dhal ghotnis of all sizes – wooden swizzle stick with zig-zag edges on its round base and the biggest enamel basins and iron pots one could imagine.

The utensils for its preparation might have evolved, but not centuries and several languages and cultural adaptations could alter cocoa, the pre-Ice Age plant, more than 21,000 years old, and its primordial connections as food of the gods across world cultures. Even European botanists could find no better substitute than to translate its value - Theobroma (Theo/god; broma/food) and the echo of its ancient MesoAmerican/Caribbean, pre Olmec, preMayan roots: kakaw with slight variations in inflections: Theobroma cacao. Today, its most common global identification as chocolate still echoes its ancient primordial resonance. Once Columbus helped Europe discover it, there was no turning back. Cocoa now covers some 17 million acres of global soil, with nearly 4 million tonnes produced every year. It has become the foundation of Swiss identity, and a catalyst for the centre of social interaction in kingdoms far and wide. A global strategy for the conservation and use of cacao genetic resources as the foundation for a sustainable cocoa economy now guides an International Cocoa Organisation, an international network of cocoa producers and International Cocoa Genome Sequencing Consortium who meet annually to upgrade strategy, redefine directions for the future of chocolate, its by-products and co-industries.

Though no longer a formal currency as it was used in mesoAmericans - about 100 beans could then get one a finely handwoven shawl - with increasing scientific evidence that it reduces high blood pressure and can positively impact cancer and cholesterol rates, I’m sure, Liz, that you concur with women the world over who testify that this remains one of god’s essential provisions of heaven on earth.

To the steaming cup of fresh cocoa, its oil already forming a film around the edges of the cup, Ma adds a touch of bliss. She tilts the condensed milk can into a bluey-green enamel cup, stirs it and hands it to me.

‘Careful, it hot!’ she warns, nodding in Pa’s direction. Ma is not one for much words.

I walk back to the gallery tentatively. The oil, temporarily disturbed, returns to curl around the edges of the cup. The aromatic steam of cinnamon, clove, bayleaf, nutmeg and cocoa drift out and up. You would agree, Dear Lizzie, in that moment, it is not difficult to understand why Europe turned half the world upside down, raided east and west, and went to war for the likes of this.

I hand the cup to Pa and run back into the kitchen. Ma hands me a smaller version of the same bluey-green enamel cup, with own serving of ‘cocoa tea’, though that in itself may violate indigeneous practice that reserved enjoyment of cocoa for ritual use only by men who fought nations for the privilege - the second of four Anglo-Dutch wars was fought over cocoa, in England’s favour, in the 1660s and on which the wealth of the likes of the Dutch East India Company was founded then trading its primary wealth in cocoa beans. As was most other pleasures of primitive planet-of-the-apes type cave-men, cocoa, too, was considered toxic for women and children.

Not so in our wooden dwelling. Ma had spent most of the night grinding the chulha-parched cocoa, adding cinnamon and bayleaf and grated nutmeg, Taking handfuls of the ground cocoa, moist with its own oils, between her palms, she had lovingly moulded them into oval shaped balls. They are already hardening this morning and by tomorrow, before boiling, we would have to grate it on the grater Pa made from pounding holes closely together with a nail onto a piece of galvanise, bending it into a semicircle, and nailing its edges against a short, flat piece of wood.

The still lingering aromas of last night’s cocoa production hang on the wooden floors and walls of the entire house and spill out to envelope the village in the way the porridge from The Magic Porridge Pot had crept out of the house in that Enid Blyton book I would later read.

Pa didn’t seem to think I am violating any gender taboos, either, when I reappear with my own cup of steaming cocoa, which seems to me, on hindsight, a very patriotically appropriate way to commemorate one of the last Discovery holiday days Trinidad and Tobago would know. Indigeneous to Trinidad, the Trinitario is one of the world’s three main varieties of cocoa – a unique offspring of our geo-botanical connections with the South American mainland as a more resilient, higher yielding and natural hybrid of the two others – Forastero and Criolla. For Your Majesty’s information, our cocoa might be old world Americas, but had produced another New World hybrid - the cocoa panyols, an ethnic group of intergenetic mixes between native peoples and other migrant streams who joined them here – Your Majesty’s people, Europeans, Africans, Indians and others.

On this July 31 morn both Pa and I are unaware that it would be some years yet before Apple computer technologies would name its application programme interface (API), cocoa.

The steam from his cup of hybrid cocoa is beginning to subside. Pa takes a sip, inhaling deeply its aroma. I have never seen him this relaxed.

“Why he not up yet? Wake him?” I ask Pa, nodding in the direction of my brother’s room, hoping for chance at an excursion to visit some other part of Trinidad on this holiday. As my brothers and sisters grew older, our wooden house was expanded over the years: a room added here, a corner boarded in there, and this was a new room my brothers and his friends added at the end of the gallery.

Pa’s answer triggers the steam of questions from my condensed milk-sweetened, cocoa-lubricated tongue.

As he had every Sunday afternoon, my brother had routinely polished the silver angel with its transparent plastic pink-tipped wings perched on the bonnet of his baby blue Cortina taxi the day earlier, before he also lathered the entire car, and himself, to be covered in white soap suds. Sometimes he would cover his whole face and head in suds and try to scare us. He succeeded once when he sneaked up on me. I screamed so loudly, that I stumbled over a root of the enormous chenette tree in our yard in trying to run away from him as he looked like a jab jab from a Carnival band.

Native to our part of the world, the chenette tree, like cocoa, also predates Columbus by thousands of years, and its fruit is known in various pronunciations as genip across South Central America and the Caribbean. The more melodramatic injections into its nomenclature occurred when European botanists wrapped their tongue around its sticky pulp. Discovered for Europe in Jamaica and named by Patrick Brown as he had 103 other genera in the mid-1700s, Brown, an Irish botanist who worked as a doctor across the West Indies also produced A Civil and Natural History of Jamaica until our oh-so-inhospitable-to-Europeans clime sent him a-packing as it has a few others, like the man who invented television whom we will discover later. Brown gave chenette its botanical name, Melioccus bijugatus which was subsequently described and placed in its soapy genus group by Dutch-born Austrian, Nikolaus Joseph von Jacquin who has an orchid named after him; had Mozart teach music to his children and named a couple of his pieces after them, and in honour of whose work in the Caribbean, Austria in 2011 issued a special commemorative silver coin issue.

The Spanish dubbed it limoncillo/mamoncillo in some of their territories. Contented to translate rather than rename, the English called it Spanish lime another characteristic misnomer as it is, Liz, most unlike a lime or lemon, as an apple is from an orange. I believe this is the origin of the application of the Trini word ‘lime/liming’ as a pasttime of ‘doing nothing’ or hanging out with friends. The towering chenette tree in our yard was a village icon. A piece of wood nailed to its trunk formed a bench and under its soothing cool became the district’s social hub – for liming, all fours card games and even serious meetings; informal craft groups; Hindi, Bhajan singing and other classes, and village events planning – all right in our front yard. That might be also the original meaning of the word community leadership, until it was endowed with other connotations decades later.

I did not know any of that technical stuff, then, nor that chenette was a fairly substantive source of calcium, carotene and phosphorous, when as children we sucked the pulp or roasted the seeds, and so indelibly stained our clothes much to Ma’s displeasure. We noticed too, that its stickiness restricted our tongues, but that it also had a constipation effect, also to Ma’s displeasure. She would have to spend sleepless nights as we complained of stomach pains from having gorged too much, though she made sure she had adequate supplies of seina leaves to administer when necessary to relieve constipation. I hear on the grapevine, Liz, that roasted chenette seeds are now gaining currency as a treatment for diarrhoea.

Loved and hated, the tree contributed substantially to our chores as we had to daily sweep up masses of its constantly shedding leaves. Our water copper, used to boil sugar at one time in the once thriving sugar industries, but now serving as our fresh water reservoir, had to be protected from its droppings as it sat directly under the tree. My younger brother and I would splash around in its massive bowl on weekends before emptying it, scrubbing off any moss that had accumulated around its edges and then refilled it with fresh water and covered it with galvanise.

“Why he not up yet,” I ask again, growing impatient as the beautiful day seem to be slipping away.

I am curious as to why my brother is not stirring in the room in the gallery. He is usually up and out while it was still dark, in the predawn, to take villagers in his Cortina to their workplaces in ‘town’, Princes Town - named, Lizzie, as you know, for your grandpa George V and grand uncle Edward after they visited as princely lads. It was known as Kairi to the native peoples who find Columbuscrawling up our coast, as indeed was the entire island, when Columbus was doing his discovering, until Spanish Catholic missionaries gathered them around a church and school and renamed it Mission. At the time of your grandsire’s visit, Lizzie, it was then little more than a few scattered shacks with the church and school set up by Spanish Catholics. A later school and church, set up by missionaries from your then North American colony – Canada - will conjure up the old name, Iere, but shortly after their visit, it was proclaimed Princes Town, a name it still holds.

It must please Your Majesty to know that the two poui trees the Princes planted in the yard of the Church of England in the town also still stand, 134 years later. So far they are winning the battle to resist the giant tropical termites whose Queen, leading her colony of nymphs and soldiers, are constantly waging war, threatening to make a meal of the princely pouis.

Princes Town itself has grown into its name, and out of it too – maybe ready for city status even, if the powers that be would take note - as it is now aggressively edging off what used to be the lush tropical rain forests described by your writer-traveller, Charles Kingsley who, At Last, made it here for A Christmas in the West Indies in the latter half of the 1800s. It must have been his writings that brought your grandsires here; and certainly too, geological reports of the 1850s eruption of the mud volcano at what the Spanish had labelled Devil’s Woodyard that had also attracted Kingsley. The indigeneous people’s had long worshipped at it for its connections with the mysterious underworld that provided the trees, fruits and roots that nourished them. The boggy soil and forested district did not deter Kingsley continuing the journey to Devil’s Woodyard, but your grandsires were waylaid by the pomp of planting of the pouis, as you may know since it is part of the Royal lore.

Princes Town now continues to encroach on the once-canefields that provided the raw materials for the sugar, molasses and rum factories that augmented British waistlines and coffers. You may want to know, Lizzie, that this town, named for your grandsires, has done the empire proud, with reputedly the highest numbers of drinkers in the country – one of your Empire’s enduring legacies in these parts from the practice of paying estate workers near rumshops - but that’s for another letter, to come.

But it was not rum in my Pa’s cup this July morn. I’ve never known him to be excessive with the bottle, but he didn’t abstain either. He is drawing patience from the aromatic, freshly brewed cocoa in the enamel cups Ma bought from the lady in the store crammed with enamel and other household paraphernalia in Princes Town. Ma and the lady would stand for hours chatting away in Bhojpuri while I wander around the overstocked shop.

Though they never spoke the Trinidad-adapted Indian language, nor Hindi, to us, both Pa and Ma could read and write Hindi. They could both read and write only a smattering of English and by that were defined as illiterate. So this conversation on this morning about our Discovery with my Pa is in your mother tongue, Liz; which Pa and Ma had adopted for us, though it was not their mother tongue, in which, if I may humbly point out, Your Majesty, versed as you are in one of some of the European languages, might yourself be considered illiterate.

The oil from the cocoa hangs on to the top of Pa’s lips, forming an artificial moustache on his hairless face and head. It made him look funny and a laugh is trying to force its way through the many serious questions on my lips. I held it back - the laugh; it is the questions I can’t stem from pouring out.

I have never known Pa to have hair on his face, nor head either. The baldness makes him look stern at times. Villagers call him The Sheriff and sometimes I knew why. His grey eyes would blaze right through you when his lips tremble and his voice raise in anger. In those times I know not to ask the questions about how the world works that popped into my head and onto my tongue as somethings more perplexing must be troubling him. Like how he would feed his family because someone had crept into the garden that night and stole all the crops he had nurtured over the last months which he hoped to sell so we could have what household things we need. I’d bite my lip to keep the thoughts in, then.

Not now. This mild morning, sipping his home-made cocoa, he is as mellow as the Eastern spices in it.

“He not going to work because it is a holiday today,” he is answering my question about my brother’s late-sleeping, while I try to suppress my giggle over the milk-moustache over his upper lip. An unusual quiet hang over the village, serene, without the routine morning bustle of people getting ready of school, for work. Few others are stirring, taking advantage of this ‘holiday’. My mind is on high drive.

“What holiday?” I ask, perked.

“Discovery Day.” He even seems a bit happy, then, to be home to sagely field the curiosity of his youngest daughter; you will understand anew, Liz, as you have a couple lil great grand royal ones around that age now added to your household.

“What is Discovery Day?” The questions keep popping out of my head, spilling onto my tongue and out of my mouth, even before I know they are there.

“It is the day Christopher Columbus discovered Trinidad.” Pa had never gone to one of the British-type schools but he always knows all the answers, it seems. And though he could not read any of the storybooks, which are my presents on birthday and Christmas, he could talk about any topic under the sun, I thought, and he could recite the whole Ramayan in its strange Sanskrit or Hindi text and explain the strange parables in the lines as villagers often called on him to do. And he could study any Whe Whe chart with their strange Chinamen faces and letters and tell what number would play at the man they called ‘the banker’ who functions from a secret place because Whe Whe is illegal and police is always searching for the law-breakers like him.

Pa was no longer with us in the mid-90s when the post-Independent Trinidad and Government introduced a legal machine-driven version of the game which licence operator through a selective process. The traditional version, still illegal, has remained popular; the official version has the audacity to often complained that it takes about fifty million $TT (five million Great Britain Pounds) away from the State every year! Maybe if he was still around with the million-dollar jackpots we could win a million or two; or I could have won him a million or two. Here’s how.

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Pa liked to bet on my dreams. He said I had ‘straight dreams’ and would even send me to sleep in mid-afternoon so I could tell him what I dream for the evening betting session, as the Whe Whe banker ‘opened the bank’ morning and evening. As he didn’t scoff at whatever my overactive imagination churned up in my dreams, he made me confident of dreaming. I guess he neverthought I would make a career of this dreaming thing. He would ask me for a number to bet on and would always place a bet on my choice saying I gave him straight wins. That made me warm inside, like freshly boiled cocoa tea sweetened with condensed milk. When I helped him win a bet he would give me a five-cent coin; or if it was a big win, a shilling, which I popped into the wooden piggy bank that did not look much like a pig. He had made it for me with the small slit at the top to throw in the coin and a wedge at the bottom that twisted out to let the coins drop out. With those savings, I could buy myself whatever I wanted for Christmas or anytime, no questions asked. As I began to read, ‘anything’ was almost invariably story books, of course, like The Magic Porridge Pot. Even before starting school, I was already an avid listener to my sisters reading to me, and to unending epic romances Pa would roll out night after night, mostly from some secret store in his imagination that none of us can remember, though it was a childhood experience that none of us can forget.

I guess he thinks that his last answer, ‘Discovery Day’, would quell my questionings. He lights another Broadway. I know it as his favourite brand because he would send my brother or sisters, and me when he thought I was old enough to walk the road alone, to Ganesh, the village shopkeeper, to buy. On days when market sales were good he would buy a whole carton. We would know to ask for DuMaurier, instead, only when Braodway was out of stock because the sales van only came into the village once a week.

Though smoking tobacco seems now to be more identified with the Frenchman, Jean Nicot de Villemain, (hence nicotine) who took it to the French court in the mid 1500’s after Columbus introduced it to Europe following his discovering it on his first voyage in the region the natives called Haiti, but which Columbus called Hispaniola, my father was participating in a 7000-year old kingly shamanistic tradition of the Caribbean and the Americas - a tradition now practiced by nearly two billion people across the globe, despite an intensive and powerful anti-smoking lobby. One can sniff new tensions in the air as recent research and development suggests smoking as a potential cure for high blood pressure, asthma and tuberculosis. A new odourless, tasteless white protein extract from its leaves promises to be every masterchef’s dream ingredient as a salt-free, fat- and cholesterol-free low-calorie substitute for mayonnaise and whipped cream and can take on the flavour and texture of several foods and beverages.

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Oblivious to all of that, engrossed in inhaling, Pa is unaware that smoking tobacco was considered - by the people who first inhabited our soil before Columbus and his bunch decimated them - a divine gift. They believed its exhaled smoke carried one's thoughts and prayers to heaven. Pa looks the part, shamanistic, dreaming and relaxed as if communing with some higher authority as he ease back on the wooden bench he had made with his saw, chisel and smoothing plane. I had gathered up the chippings that fell of the plane and put them in the fowl coub, as we called it, behind the house. My fowl pet had just had chicks – eight little yellow delights that I would feed on scraps of left over roti and rice while talking to them about the unfolding mysteries of the universe. I had a pet goat too, that I untied and took to graze on roadside grasses on evenings. There was much to do, but first I had to finish with this inquisition.

I absorb his answer: ‘Today, Discovery Day, was the day Christopher Columbus discovered Trinidad.’ Something did not fit there. My chick’s mind isn’t sure what it is. I know Christopher Columbus from the picture with the three triangle ships in my sister’s school book. Once, when I am visiting some relatives, one of their children had a Ladybird book about Columbus. He is in fancy pants and long shoulder long white ‘hair’ which I would later learn was a wig that fancy Europeans and massa-like Trini people in courts and the Parliament like to wear. In the picture book, Columbus’ shirt is bellowing in the wind. He looks soft and effeminate as European men in their garb of that era. His three ships of varying sizes are on the sea behind him. Black haired, wide-eyed, brown people are peering at him from the bushes. Maybe it is they who discovered him; not he discovered them. That’s how thought pop into my head and out of my mouth.

“So how Christopher Columbus discover Trinidad?”

My question brings Pa back from where he had gone with the warm cocoa inside him and the cigarette already nearly half done.

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He looks at me. “You would know all about that when you start school.” It did not cross my mind that he did not have an answer and that the question was baffling many others more than my own child’s mind.

Pa calls out to Ma. “You ready?” That is his cue for her to accompany him to the garden – having for the morning, already finished washing the clothes of all of us, prepared breakfast and made lunch too, cleaned the house and washed the dishes.

My rare morning discovering our Discovery with my Pa at home is over. I scramble up to accompany them to the garden, not waiting to be asked; secretly hoping that might get some more answers.

The giant bedsheet bellowing out from over the island and collapsing on Columbus’ ship settle in my mind’s eye, before which also swirls experiences of cocoa, chenette, and tobacco, all of which predated Columbus’ discoverings, and the eastern spices and we who came thereafter.

When the sun rose that July 31, it was only the dawn to a near lifelong quest for my holy grail – knowledge of it all, and uncovering the puzzles of the discovery of Trinidad that was before Columbus discovered then. It has taken me to many parts and through many sunsets.

Even though Discovery Day has been wiped off the calendar, he still haunts the landscape, and is stamped on national emblems inspiring the false knowledge that marked his own Discoverie, and mine.

One fine sunset, then another, then another, I gathered and pieced together the skeletal knowledge in the bones he had scattered all over the Caribbean from Puerto Rico through Cuba, Santo Domingo, across Jamaica and your colonial archipelago to Trinidad, from Mexico to Argentina, and the Americas and across in Europe through Barcelona and Seville and Italy, Portugal, and Spain, as discovered, too, Columbus’ own bones. Scattered in pieces and fragments in which he cut up our land and our history and our Discovery in the blood soaked soil still violently echoing in the bones of ghosts in their sleep-walking dreaming state they tell one story. But for me gathering the pieces, like our collective story, they spoke to me of the yet undiscovered El Dorado, at treasure trove of buried knowledge echoing down the ages even now, through little known corridors and crannies, the knowledge bridge from Columbus to us that can soothe and calm like cocoa balm when cocoa is no longer god, nor king, but you still a Queen, Your Majesty, Dear Lizzie.

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