#i remembered how to render and i started frothing at the mouth
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Lastochka AU - Seven Seas - 1
Pairing : Nikolai x F!Reader ( OC/Mini MacTavish)
Summary: Going against the odds of society's expectation and prejudice, you made a name for yourself as Lady Fortuna of the sea. but one day ....
AU to my Lastochka series
WARNING: Mature Theme. swearing. violence. inaccurate period/historical depiction. or languages. or facts. everything.
A/N : Well, I started another AU. Thanks to @gamergirlbonestaskforce141riot's mouth frothing render of Buccaneer!Nikolai. Please go check out her wonderful renders and story :D
and oh... this was suppose to be part of the 141 challenge ooops I was tooooo late. sorry @glitterypirateduck! oops.
Main masterlist
Credit : @gamergirlbonestaskforce141riot
“Pirate! Starboard!!”
“Captain! They are getting closer!!”
You knew this wasn’t going to be an easy journey. You had a hunch about it the moment you boarded the ship. And usually your hunch never fails you.
“That’s a Schooner. They might look small, but they will catch up to us no matter what we do. We will never outran that ship.” you heard the Captain mumbling, as he looked through his telescope, trying to identify the ship.
Putting down the telescope he sighed. “The only chance of escaping is to face them.”
Treasurer might be a government commissioned ship, but being a merchant ship and designed to carry cargo and goods, it was never equipped with the heavy cannon or artillery like the naval battle ship. A chill runs down your spine. They have no choice but let the pirate board the ship and fight them in close combat.
“Arm yourself! Ready for battle!” The Captain yelled at the crews,before he turned around and escorted you back to your resting quarter. “Lady MacTavish, you will be safer down there than up here. Go.”
You wanted to argue with him but you know better than disobeying a Captain’s command.
This is probably the first time you have met with real danger on the sea after years of sailing.
You started sailing with the merchant ship from the day you became of age.
You have begged and bribed your father for years to be a passenger to sail on one of the merchant ships that sails from Port Inbhir Nis to London, delivering the orders of whisky and woven goods from your parent’s distillery and farm to the clients down south.
“Please Da! I have never been to London before! Besides, Johnny will be there too, you have nothing to worry about.” you begged.
Lord MacTavish sighed. Putting down the document he was reviewing, he leaned in, clasped his hand and frowned. He looks straight into your eyes, tries to reason with you.
“You know how superstitious the crews are about taking women onboard a ship…” he started.
“I can pretend to be a man!” you countered.
“Not that easy you know..”
“I got an idea!” you clap your hand together, as another excuse comes up. “Social season is starting soon in London, So…”
“You can get there by land….”
“Will be too late. You know how long it takes! Plus my bottom will be so sore by the end of the journey…”
“Language, Mini.” your father warned. “You've never been on a ship or boat before..” “River boat Da, I've been on a river boat once.” “Fine. once. But the open sea is a totally different business. The unforgiving waves, the danger…”
“Da. After growing up with Johnny, do you think anything will faze me?”
“... True.”
“Just remember to behave a bit more like a lady….” not waiting for him to finish his words, you surge forward and give him a big hug.
“Oh thank you Da! Thank you!” you pepper kisses on your father’s face, all excited. You knew your father wouldn’t say no to you. You have always been the jewel in their eyes, their precious little gem. You were brought on in a very unconventional way compared to the other noble ladies. Sure, you have learn how to read, write, etiquettes, languages and sewing like other girls, but you also run around like a wild goose with your older brother Johnny, learning how to fight, use swords and roll around in mud, climbing trees, all the un-lady like things you can think of? You’ve done it.
“I hope I am making the right decision… Now just try to convince your Ma…”He mumbled as he patted your back.
He manages to find a merchant ship that is willing to take you onboard, after paying a nice sum of money to the Captain and the crew to take a young lady and a few of the servants onboard with them.
When you reached London at the end of the journey, the Captain was amazed how smooth sailing the trip was.
“I have been going up and down this stretch for the last fifteen years, I have never,ever had a more uneventful but smooth sailing journey than this!”
Second, third, and fourth journey was the same. Rumours started to spread that contrary to the superstition, you were a lucky charm, a sure guarantee for a fast and safe journey.
Suddenly everyone is fighting to take you onboard. To your parents’ surprise. They would have thought you will be giving up on the “sailor’s game” by now but instead you have come home with your brother blabbering how much fun you had and all the invitations you have received from various Captains for more journeys in the future.
They reluctantly let you continue on after they discovered people were willing to pay good money to have you onboard. You were also helping to manage your father’s business by dealing and expanding clientiles in London, also sometimes going across the channel, into the continents.
You slowly made a name for yourself not just being Lady MacTavish, but Lady Fortuna, lady luck, the one who brings good fortune and safety for anyone who travels with you.
Gossips spread within the social circles. Good gossip, bad gossip.
Good gossips of how other ladies are envious of you, how much freedom your parents gave you despite being a lady, being a woman.
Bad gossips of how you must have slept around to gain so many favours and names amongst the merchants and sailors, how you were only just a northern barbarians
But you ignore the rumours. You were just happy you have become an independent woman. Even with reassurance from Johnny he would look after you in the unfortunate event of both of your parents passing, you don’t want to be dependent on anyone. You don’t want to be a burden. What if Johnny’s future spouse hates you and kicks you out of the house?
How many times have you witnessed yourself the stories of young ladies with not a penny under their name, ditched by their siblings after their parents passing, nearly ending up on the street. You were glad she was in the position of wealth and social status to reach out to help resettling those girls, helping them to find a respectable job to bring in some income.
You are proud of what you have managed to achieve. And you are thankful for your family’s support, no matter how reluctant they are at the beginning.
And for years, things have been peaceful… until today.
Well, if your father knows the dire situation that is happening right now, he probably regrets the decision he made way back to them to let you step onto ships.
The sound of crews yelling and running around on the main deck was getting more frantic as the minute went by.
Your poor young maid huddles in the corner of the room, shaking and sobbing. This was the young girl’s first time on a ship, after hearing your reputation, she eagerly volunteered to accompany you on the journey, never expecting to be in such a dire situation.
“Aye, to hell. I cannot just sit here like a damsel in distress…” you came to the conclusion after pacing up and down in the small room while listening to the yelling and screaming up on the deck.
You open your trunk and throw all the clothes onto the bed as you dig right to the bottom.
“Ah here it is.” you dragged the Claymore out from the bottom of the trunk. You never thought this day would have come. Johnny had insisted you pack the sword for each of your travels (to your Ma’s aghast).
“I just wish I never have to use this thing…”
“Neither do I, my dear sister. But, if anything happens, I wouldn’t be there to protect you, but it comforts me that you will be well equipped, and show those enemies what a Scottish lass can do.”
“Here, take this.” You shove the fork and knife that was left on the table from meal time into your crying maid’s hands. “Lock and block the door after I go out, and go hide under the bed or closet. Understand??”
“But my Lady…”
“That’s an order. Follow it.” you gave her no room to argue and marched out the door.
You storm up the staircase, dragging the sword behind you. You pushed open the double door that leads towards the upper deck.
You were greeted with the chaotic sight of yelling, screaming and the metal sound of swords clashing together. No one seems to have noticed you emerging from the door as they were all focused on fighting their enemies. You would be lying if you said you aren’t scared witless. But what else can you do? You are in the middle of the sea, nowhere to escape, instead of hiding in the cabin and crying about your imminent death. You are a MacTavish! Proud Scottish! You will fight until your last breath if you have to.
Qui audet adipiscitur, Audeamus.
The family motto that has been drilled into your brain. Make your ancestors proud. As your grandfather repeats day in and day out when he was still alive.
Quickly scanning through the deck,you were relieved to see everyone is still alive, if not only slightly injured. Maybe your Lady Luck magic is still working, but for how long you wondered. It wouldn’t be long before a casualty appears if you don’t do something.
Following the sound of the familiar voice, you spotted the Captain, towards the quarter deck, currently in a deep battle of what seems to be the Captain or the Commander of a pirate ship.
Quickly mumbling a prayer under your breath, gathering your courage, you hauled the sword up onto your shoulder, silently thanking Johnny’s insistence of dragging you into training with the sword everyday until he ran off to London after purchasing himself an officer position.
Everyone stopped dead in their tracks and automatically parted ways as they spotted you, a noble lady, with a broad sword that is nearly as tall as you, marching towards the front of the ship, full of purpose, like a highlander marching into her last battle. None of them dared to stop you.
“Stop the fighting at this instance!” You bellowed out the order. Your Captain’s eyes widened as spotted you over the shoulder of the enemy, dodged out of the way just in time as the enemy tried to aim at his neck.
The whole ship came into an eerie silence as the fighting came to a halt. Only the sound of crashing waves and seagulls screeching could be heard as everyone turned their attention to you.
You stab the claymore onto the deck floor in front of you, resting your hands on the end of the hilt.
“My Lady… I told you…” you hold up a hand, silencing the Captain. Giving him a look. I’ll handle this.
You just hope the plan you have formulated in your brain will work. Even if it comes at a cost.
The tall man, who you assume is the Commander and Captain of the pirate ship, slowly turned around, while swinging his sword around at the same time, taking aim at your face.
Don’t back down Mini, Don’t back down. You keep reminding yourself as you shuffle your feet wider, standing firm.
For a second you could see a flash of surprise from his body language. “A noble woman, a Scottish one too.well, that is something new.” The man smirked, while scanning you up and down. But not in a leering way. You have been enough men to distinguish the difference between someone who is looking at you like a common whore and someone who is trying to suss you out.
You took a quick glance at him yourself, trying to guess his origin. Eastern European? You deduced from his slight accent. Possibly well educated, for commanding fluent English. Tall, well built with strong arm muscle, slightly dark skinned as all the sailors have from long voyages under the sun, black sleek hair with a slightly rugged beard.
Quite a handsome man, you have to admit.
“Where are my manners?” he took off his traveller's hat, taking an exaggerated bow, all the while still keeping his eyes on you. “ Commander Nikolai, Captain of Chimera, Privateer, at your service.”
“Privateer..” you mumbled. “sleekit basturts.” Trying to make himself sound more grand than a pirate is he?
“What was that?” He smiled, but you know the smile doesn’t quite reach his eyes.
“Nothing.” you rolled your eyes.
You returned the greeting, announcing your name and clan name. “... of Clan MacTavish.” you said proudly. You could see a flash of confusion followed by recognition in his eyes. Has he heard of your family before? But where could he have heard it from?
“I have a proposition for you.” you tilt your head, ignoring that question you have in your head, and putting your plan into motion.
He cockily raised an eyebrow as he lowered his sword, suddenly taking interest in what deals you have to offer.
“Take me instead. And whatever cargo you want. All I ask is for you to let my crew go, with enough food and water for them to sail to the nearest port.”
“My lady!!!” Your Captain and any crews that were close enough to you gasped, shocked by the idea and protesting. You turned your head to look at him for a few seconds, giving a stern look. Please trust me on this. You pleaded with your eyes.
“Keeping a woman onboard? Bah! That will certainly bring bad luck! I mean look at what happened.. “ one of the pirates with .. what seems to be a sack or cloth over his head, waved his hand and laughed. Your crew booed and jeered at the idiot who clearly hadn't heard of your reputation and the luck you have brought for them.
You ignored his jeering and took a step closer to the Pirate’s Captain, “Give me one month, and I can prove to you, I can bring you more money and luck you wish for. If not, feel free to go ahead and ask my parents for a ransom.” you tilt your head up confidently. Or try to act confidently. You were actually panicking and formulating alternative plans if he doesn’t accept the offer. Maybe you should have just swung your sword and chopped his head off just now when you had the chance.
But some weird part of your heart told you not to do it. That intuition you always trust.
This man might have some use to you later on. You decided.
“So, what do you think?” you pushed him again.
Nikolai stared at you with a serious expression on his face, calculating all the odds.
“Alright.”
“You.. you agree?” you replied, with surprise in your voice.
“Why are you so surprised?” he laughed at your shocking expression.
You made an unlady-like face, “Because you are my enemy? The one who attacked us? A pirate?”
“You never have to be scared of me, Lady MacTavish, I might be a Privateer…”
“Pirate.” You reiterate it again. “You just ransack a merchant ship that is technically owned by The crown, so you are not a privateer.”
“Fine, Pirate. I might be a pirate, but I do have a set of morals and standards I follow.”
“Is that so? Maybe you should be weary of me instead, Captain.” you smirked. “You never know if I might just poke your eyes out during your sleep.”
“You are not brave enough to do that.” he taunted.
“Watch me.” you smiled, taking a step forward and jabbing his chest with your finger, deliberately digging your nail into his flesh. “What MacTavish promises, MacTavish will do.”
Xxxxx
Johnny MacTavish waited at the port with excitement. He hasn’t seen his sister for a few months, and was quite eager to see her again.
But what shocked him and his friends and fellow soldiers when they saw the Treasurer finally docked at the port days behind schedule, with no cargo to unload, only with a very dejected and injured crew walking off the ship.
Without you.
Johnny rushed towards the Captain of Treasurer, who looked at him with an apologetic expression as he pushed a letter and ring into Johnny’s hand.
“Please give this to Johnny, along with the letter.” You pushed the gold ring with the family signet along with a hastily written letter into the Captain’s hand. “You and the crew should be alright until you reach the port. The luck should follow with my ring. Not a worry there.”
“My lady…”
“Go. I will be alright. I’ll make sure of that. Oh, please make sure my poor maid is well compensated. I wouldn’t be surprised if the poor girl decided to run away from the job the moment she arrived at the port.”
Johnny gripped onto the letter with a shaky hand. Pirates!! Pirates have taken his precious sister!!!
“What is going on here? Where is your sister Johnny?” A gruff voice behind Johnny made him
“Captain Price..”Johnny took a deep breath and turned towards his own Captain,with the rest of his crewmates following behind him. Johnny took a deep breath in, as calm as he could and slowly explain the situation to him, along with Captain of Treasurer.
“... Did you say Nikolai?” Captain Price frowned when he heard the name mentioned.
“Of Chimera. Who claims he was a privateer for the Crown.” Captain of the Treasurer added.
“ … Shit.” Captain Price lowered his head as he pinched the bridge of his nose. “That muppet…” he mumbled.
Johnny’s eyes flashed with surprise, but before he could ask the question, Kyle Garrick, the young soldier who became fast friends with Johnny since the day he joined, perked up, “Captain.. You know this Privateer.. Or the Pirate that kidnapped Mini?” he asked.
“Worked with him a few times actually. Under the command of the Crown. He is an extremely capable sailor and soldier. People often underestimate how destructive he could be. I am surprised Mini managed to strike a deal with him to let the crew leave with just losing the cargo. ” Price commented.
“Also with her.” Johnny growled. Glaring at the Treasurer’s Captain as he speaks.
“Not his fault Johnny. She made a valiant effort to try to reduce the casualty and losses to minimum. You should have seen her on the deck. Swinging the Claymore around like a true Scottish woman.” one of the crew walked past, trying to defend their Captain.
Johnny let out a faint smile as he heard the crew describe how you challenged the pirate, the bravery, that's the stubborn Mini he knows.
Johnny shook his head. No, this is not the time to admire his sister’s bravery. Her life and also her… her virtue is in danger here! He looked pleadingly to his Captain, hoping he would come up with a plan or help him to rescue his sister, with or without Crown’s permission.
“I want to say you should be worrying for your sister but..apart from that muppet shouldn’t have attacked a Crown owned ship.. It’s Nikolai that might be in more danger here.”
“.. HUH.” Everyone looked at Captain Price with confusion.
“ I am actually more worried for Nikolai…he might have met his match.” Price mumbled cryptically.
“... I .. I don’t understand, Captain?” Johnny asked, perplexed by his Captain’s words.
“Trust me on this one, Mini should return without harm.” Price patted Johnny’s shoulder. “But we still need to go chase after them.. Stupid idiots need to be reined in before this gets into further trouble with the whole British Isle.”
Oh Mini, what mess have you got yourself into? Johnny wondered.
All he knows Ma and Da and their ancestors will be half proud of what you have done but also twist his neck off if he doesn’t get you back to safety fast enough.
prompt used for 141 challenge:
Alternate Universe/AU
Enemies to Lovers
Dare/Bet
You never have to be scared of me
Tag list:
@homicidal-slvt
@nrdmssgs @siilvan
@roosterr
@preciouslittlecreature
@gamergirlbones
@whydoilikewhump
@alypink
@ashwasherelol
@okayyadriana @liyanahelena @miyabilicious @caramlizedtomatoes @celshideout @merkitty49 @abbeyrjm-blog @shyravenns @okamimarta @gazs-blue-hat
#cod nikolai#nikolai cod#nikolai cod x reader#nikolai cod x f!reader#taskforce 141#nikolai reboot call of duty#call of duty Nikolai#call of duty#nikolai cod x female reader#cod x reader#cod x you#mini mactavish#mini mactavish universe#sofasoap writes#crack fic#dont take it so seriously
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Ride Me Like a Harley
Part 1 | Part 2 of The Prospect & The President
A/N: Here’s Part 2 of this 2-part series with Jax and a gender-neutral reader, based on the below requests! *The idea is that this fic can be enjoyed from the perspective of any reader, with no reference to gender-specific features.* Anyone reading as a woman can just imagine that SAMCRO admits women! (hard to believe, I know, but hey this is fanfiction 🙃)
Pairing: Jax Teller x gender-neutral reader
Warnings: smut, swearing, dirty talk, anal sex, dom!Jax (being bossy as fuck while you ride his cock)
Requests: Request 1 (+ follow-up) and Request 2 from @malethirsty
Word Count: ~3k
... Continued from Part 1 [Read Here]
So it’s finally happened. Tonight you were finally patched in. The excitement of joining the club lives up to everything you’d imagined. After all of the hazing and humiliation, the brutal process of initiation... it feels so good to know it was all worth your while.
And now it’s time for celebration. A couple of other prospects were patched in too, the same time as you, and the Sons are throwing a huge party to welcome you all to the crew. A big bash at the clubhouse with limitless bitches and booze. Bikers gone wild, in true SAMCRO style.
Thankfully, all these festivities help to distract, take your mind off the fact... that you still can’t get over your stupid obsession with Jax. Can’t get over that task, from a few weeks ago, that had put you on the fast track into SAMCRO. Just as Jax had promised. You will never forget how the President savagely teased and taunted, that the patch would be yours nice and quick... if you did just one little thing: sucked his big dick. Standing there like a motherfucking king, Jax knew how eagerly you’d jump on it.
Well, at least he was honest, you think as you throw back another drink. Speeding up your admissions process was exactly what you’d wanted. You’re just glad Jax kept his promise.
You spend most of the night pretending you don’t notice as he silently flirts with you from across the room, in all the ways that make you melt for him. Glancing at you over his shoulder, for no reason, simply for the sake of teasing. Flashing all those dirty little smirks and winks.
Fuck him, you think, knowing you surely never will. The President had ordered you to suck him off for one specific purpose; now that you’ve performed that service, your reward has been fulfilled. When you followed that order, you couldn’t have hoped that a meaningless joke of a blowjob would take things between you and Jax any farther...
Like he’s reading your mind, Jax approaches you now from behind. “Hey, you know why this is such a big night for our charter?”
You turn toward him and end up losing yourself in his blue gaze, admiring every feature on his flawless face. Dumbstruck as always. The universe is clearly conspiring to make your attempts to get over this man even harder.
As your eyes lock on his, Jax flicks his tongue between his smirking lips, ruining you the way he loves to do. “Well, thanks to you... our club just got a hundred times hotter.”
Ugh. Does he have to be corny as fuck? He knows that his praise always gets you all horny and hot and bothered...
And you’ve honestly had enough. Tonight you’re gonna put your foot down: now you’ve finally joined the club, Jax either has to stop fucking around, fucking you up... or just start fucking you, full stop. One or the other.
For fuck’s sake, you hope it’s the latter.
You spent so many months enduring teasing and torture from all of the Sons—no one more so than this dirty bastard—and in some ways, you have to admit it was fun. But tonight you are done. Done with doing whatever it takes, just to move up the ladder. Done playing along with the President’s games. Because damn it, your dignity matters.
Ever since Jax demanded that you suck his cock, then just left you to grovel in shame, feeling shitty as fuck, you’ve been struggling to put back together the pieces that shattered.
But now you are an actual member. The President has to remember, and has to start treating you better. You’re not just a plaything for Jax Fucking Teller.
Never mind that the thought of being a plaything for the king turns you on to no end... you just have to pretend that it doesn’t. Your willing submission is just what he’d want. And you won’t ever let him humiliate you into such a position again. You just won’t.
“Jax, I think you should stop this,” you snap as you set down your shot glass, attempting eye contact, but quickly averting your eyes because otherwise you’d fucking die from his hotness. “Seriously, just stop with this... all of this nonsense. I’m sick of your shit, to be honest.”
The President pauses and arches his brows up. He clearly has no plans to stop. The cute crow eater standing at the bar just handed him a frothing mug of beer, hoping to catch his attention with tits popping out of her top, but Jax’s focus is on you alone as if nobody else is even here.
“Sick of my shit?” he repeats your words, wickedly snickering at you because he is the worst. You will never get over your thirst, and he knows it. “Nice try, bitch. This whole fucking club is my shit, in case you haven’t noticed. I own it.”
Oh shit. There he goes acting like the king he is, exuding big dick energy that makes you fall to pieces. You down another shot, to drown out your instinctively submissive thoughts. Struggling to stifle back your inner whore. Yes, sir, you’re desperate to answer. The whole fucking world is yours. Yes of course. Yes, Master. You are a god.
Why does he have to be so mind-blowingly hot...? It really sucks, the way this evil bastard, just existing like he does, has your ass so totally fucked. His presence never fails to blow your mind to bits, rendering you a speechless piece of shit.
The king reaches to run his ring-clad fingers slowly across your new patch, the small strip of fabric that you have so proudly attached. His touch feels like a goddamn attack. Reminding you, just as he’d said, that SAMCRO is the property of Jax. “And now you’re a part of it. Don’t act as if you don’t love it.”
Fuck this shit. You try to pull back; you’re determined to act. Dead set on doing exactly that. “Don’t touch me, Jax.”
“DoN’t ToUcH mE, jAx,” he mocks, with a sadistic little laugh. And he’s so savage that you honestly can’t manage. Might just drop down onto your knees to bow before his crotch, right here and now and let the whole room watch, as you worship his cock.
On impulse, your eyes drop to his jeans and you notice a bigger-than-usual bulge. Jax is hard as a rock. What the fuck? You know he loves to tease you and crack jokes, making you choke, watching you turn to mush, taking advantage of your silly little crush—but since when does it get him off this much...?
He leans in closer, wraps his arm around your shoulder, and you can’t think anymore. Melting into his touch and moaning like a whore. Engulfed in the rich scent of Jax Fucking Teller.
“Bitch, you know nobody ever looked better in leather?” he breathes into your ear, scandalous words for you alone to hear. “Look even hotter now that you’re a member. Fuck, I couldn’t take my eyes off you all night. But you already knew that, right? Think anyone would notice if the two of us snuck out of here? Together?”
At this point Jax’s arms are the only thing holding you up. You’re about to pass out right in front of the whole fucking club.
And the bastard won’t keep his goddamn dirty mouth shut. “Tell me how much you wanna get fucked in this kutte, you filthy little slut.”
Oh my Goddd... You want nothing more than to surrender, but then you remember—the pain you had felt, literal living hell, when the President shot his whole load down your throat and then left you alone and abandoned, like it never happened. The worst sense of emptiness you could have ever imagined.
You swore to yourself that you’d never allow him to do that again. Definitely not the night of patch-in. Your first night as a part of the crew, and already he’s set on destroying you? Seriously, though? Fuck no.
So you pull back. “Look, Jax—before I earned the patch, I let you go ahead and burn me like a sack of trash. But now I’m done with all of that,” you state, shoving him further away. Forcing yourself to resist even though you can feel that his dick is so fucking erect... You try to keep your words plain and direct. “Now that I’m not just a pathetic little prospect, don’t you think maybe you should show my ass some damn respect?”
As soon as you’ve said it, you realize that you probably shouldn’t have used the word ‘ass’ in that sentence. But you had. And Jax makes sure to take advantage of that fact.
“You want me to respect your ass?” he suggestively asks, moving in close to you before you can even attempt to step further back. “Well, with an ass looking like that, what’d you expect?”
Ugh—why does he insist on relentlessly fucking you up? You try to push him off. “Jax, just stop...”
He pulls you close again and interrupts. “Y/N, listen—I know I’ve been treating you bad, and I get that you’re mad. And you have every right to be. It’s just that...” his voice trails softly, quietly, as he pushes you up against the bar, not even caring if the whole room sees how fucking close you are, “...after the shit that happened, I thought I could try to pretend. To deny what I want. Keep up the act of the cold heartless President I’m always trying to be. But I can’t. Understand?”
... Understand? No, you don’t. You blink up in silence at this glorious god of a man. What does he really want...?
And so he goes on. “Ever since then, I haven’t stopped thinking about you, Y/N. Not for one fucking minute,” he boldly continues, his heated confession infused with such passion you almost believe that it’s true. Very nearly convincing you, somehow. “I mean it. I mean—shit, every time I see you now, I can’t stop staring at your mouth. Thinking about my dick in it.”
Well, at least that you can believe. You remember the look on his face, so aroused and amazed, and the stars in his gaze when you’d swallowed him down all the way. The way he’d groaned and heaved, just before you allowed him to fucking explode. Jax had looked so euphoric when blowing his load, like his dick had found heaven deep down in your throat, never wanted to leave...
“Want you, Y/N. More than I’ve ever wanted anyone. It scares the shit out of me, honestly—but now I’m finally done trying to hide,” he declares, burning holes through your soul with the heat of his stare, till you’re totally wrecked. And with the words that he says next, you’re pretty sure you’ve died. “Tonight... I think it’s time you take this big dick for a ride.”
***************
Thanks to those words knocking you dead, you can’t remember when and how you ended up in Jax’s bed.
He threw you over his shoulder, you’re pretty sure. Hauled you up to his dorm, barged through the door, manhandling you like a whore. It’s all a blur, raw hormones raging up a storm. He needs you now, as much as you need him. Or even more, somehow. True to form, the President takes on his role as your complete and utter dom, now that he has you in his room. He owns your whole entire ass, without a doubt.
“This ass is fucking mine,” he rasps, throwing you facedown on the mattress and attacking you with feral hands, forcefully yanking down your pants. Taking your bare cheeks in his grasp. His dominance feels so divine. “God, look at that. So fucking hot. So fucking perfect. Wanted this so bad, ever since the day we met. You said you wanted me to show it some respect?”
His palm comes down against your naked skin, with a delicious little smack that stings like hell, pleasure and pain pairing so well. Heaven-sent sin. His touch upon your cheeks makes you so weak. Can’t even speak. Jax hasn’t even fucked you yet and it’s already the best sex you’ve ever had. You need his big fat dick inside of you so fucking bad...
“Tell me, bitch,” he mutters, bending down over your body, tearing off your kutte and shirt and biting at your shoulder, every move he makes a hundred shades of naughty. Grazing his savage hands over your ass as his touch makes you shudder and twitch. “Still want respect? Or is this perfect ass of yours desperate to get fucking wrecked?”
Though you’re incapable of speech right now, you manage to form words somehow, when you feel him reach down to spread your legs. You moan and groan out loud, breathless. “Fuck yes—fucking destroy me, Jax...!” you beg.
Next thing you know he’s naked too, hot sweaty skin sliding against you, smooth and slick. Good God, he moves so fucking quick. “This tight ass ready for my dick? You ever taken anything so big?”
No point in answering that question—um, of course you haven’t. But the thought of Jax’s massive shaft splitting your ass in half sounds like complete heaven.
“Don’t wanna break you yet...” he says, shifting in one swift motion till he’s on the bottom, holding you firmly in place in top of him. Looking up at you with his trademark cocky grin, hands all over your heated skin. “First time I’ve got you in my bed—if I destroy your ass, it’ll be the last. We can’t have that.”
“I want it, Jax...” you gasp, a total mess as you reach to caress the sculpted muscles of his chest.
“I know,” he laughs, dealing your ass a playful slap. “Of course that’s what you want, you greedy little slut. Just gonna take it nice and slow.”
“But—ohhh....” you moan, realizing what he means all of a sudden, as he starts to dominate you from the bottom.
“Mmm, there we go,” Jax goads you on. Keeping a tight grip on your hips, he guides you into position on top of him—on instinct, you reach down to grab his delicious dick, lining it up with your hole. A cry of bliss leaps from your lips, as your ass finally comes in contact with his cock, wet with the precum leaking from the tip. It feels so fucking beautiful. Won’t even need to be lubed up because he’s wet as fuck.
You take your time easing yourself down onto his enormous length, which takes a lot of self-restraint. You want him all the way; you crave the pain. But like he said, this is your first time in his bed. Jax Fucking Teller knows his size and strength. He doesn’t want tonight to leave your poor ass torn to shreds. Not yet.
“You look so fucking gorgeous like that,” he says, gazing up at your face, knowing his praises always get you good and wet. “Sitting down on this big juicy cock. So damn desperate to get fucked.”
In the state that you’re in, descending on his dick and ascending to heaven, you can’t even say much. “Jax... ughhh...”
Soon enough, you finally have him buried in your ass balls deep, and it feels so painfully good that you might just collapse in a heap.
You do your best to hold yourself up; Jax’s dominant hands and his calming words help you to do your damn job. “That’s a good little bitch. Nice and steady. Stay with me. You ready? I don’t want you missing a second of this.”
Then he starts thrusting upwards, all slowly and gently at first, and you find yourself grinding back down on him, hips moving in an instinctual rhythm. Feels so good that you’re sure all your insides are going to burst. And you love how it hurts. You’ve lost conscious control of your limbs, but your body apparently knows how to do its own thing. Always knows how to follow the lead of your king.
Jax looks so fucking pleased as he lies back admiring the view.
“Now put your kutte back on, why don’t you. Told you nobody wears leather like you do,” he suggests, smiling as you obediently grab the vest that he’d recently stripped off of you and flung onto the mattress. You’ve always wanted him to fuck you in this kutte, make you his dirty little slut. Just like he’d said back at the party. “Yeah, just like that, Y/N. Go on and start my fucking engine. Ride me like a Harley.”
And those words are all you need to fucking hear. You grab hold of his broad muscular shoulders, anchoring you as you steer; Jax wraps his arms around your back to pull you closer, bring you near. So you can listen to the filthy shit he whispers in your ear. Reminding you that you’re his dirty little whore, and that his big cock is all yours. You hear him loud and fucking clear. And you want time to stop right fucking here.
You may have started as a lowly little prospect, crushing on the President... but now you’ve earned a lot more than respect. You’ve earned the right to take his big dick for a ride, to feel him driving all the way inside, splitting your tight hole open wide. Tonight and every night. And it feels fucking perfect. Better than you’d ever dreamed, filling you up until you’re bursting at the seams, more than you could’ve ever asked.
This is the first time Jax is fucking your ass—it’s hands down the best sex, the best ride of your life... but it sure as hell won’t be the last.
***************
Hope you enjoyed this, and would love to hear if you did! ✨
If you’d like to read another fic that I’ve written with Jax and a gender-neutral reader, I’d recommend Make It Rain! 💦
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sparks and embers - chapter 4
Characters: Poe Dameron x Original Female Character, Kylo Ren x Original Female Character
Story Tags: Explicit (18+), Canon Compliant/Divergent (Set after TLJ), First Person POV, Love Triangle, Slow Burn, Enemies to Lovers, Porn with Plot, Hurt/Comfort, Kylo Ren hates Poe Dameron
Chapter 4 - Fun
Words: 5.7k
Chapter Tags/Warnings: The biggest warning I can give is that this was my first ever attempt at smut - ever. Mutual masturbation, one party technically unconsented.
Read on AO3 or Start from the beginning
~
It was paradise and torture, all rolled into one.
He looked unbearably delicious sitting on the ‘fresher stool, facing away, towel draped carefully below his waist. Steam rose in swirling clouds from the floor around him, making the air heavy as I drew in slow, measured breaths.
Poe didn’t look up as I moved past the open curtain, and I could only assume it was because he felt as uneasy as I did. Without much control over myself, my eyes traced the droplets wriggling down his back over his now unwound muscles, wanting nothing more than to draw my fingers over, to feel his smooth skin on the tips.
It was all so enticing, and the throb in my centre becoming harder to ignore. I was forced to put more thought into my movements as I stepped towards the shelf in front of Poe, wondering if he noticed the side glances I attempted to get a better view.
Now is not the time Alexys.
The remark shook me back into sensible thinking, realising Poe was in a vulnerable position, and he trusted me enough to see him like this. He wouldn’t want to be gawked at - he genuinely needed assistance.
With a newfound sense of responsibility, I took the shampoo from the shelf and rounded back behind Poe’s head, his hair glistening with moisture, looking at nothing but my hands. He was silent along with me, probably bracing himself for this stranger to mangle their fingers awkwardly into his hair.
I squirted a stream of liquid shampoo on his head, the icy temperature of it making him tense for a moment, noticing when he raised his bandaged hand to grasp the side railing of the chair. Timidly I began to run my fingers through the portion of I’d covered, building the soap up into a foam, continuing to spread it through the rest of his wettened mop.
There was a warmth that soon arrived, spreading through my chest as I drew my fingers in and out, a warmth that felt less salacious and more… kind. And it would have stayed that way if Poe hadn’t hummed a low moan.
Oh maker, you are not making this easy.
As soon as it bristled past his lips he bolted upright.
“S-sorry,” he stuttered, evidently surprised himself at the sound he’d made. “No one has washed my hair before, I mean if you don’t count my parents when I was a child. It just felt... nice.”
I didn’t respond, making the air hang thick with our silence. Nothing I could say was going to make the moment any less awkward for the both of us.
After briefly stopping the twirling movement of my fingers following the… sound, I continued my lather over his scalp, making sure every particle of dirt, sweat and most likely blood was caught in the froth of soap.
When content with my work I reached over his shoulder and unhooked the detachable shower head, my eyes still trained on anything other than his bare skin. After angling it down, I pressed the start button on the handle, the flow of water hitting my bare feet as I made sure the water was an acceptable temperature before letting the cascade of soapy water rush down his spine.
With my hand I began to guide him to tilt back so I could safely wash out the soap just above his forehead. In this position I could see more of his face, his eyes squeezed tightly shut, eyebrows wrinkled like he was uncomfortable.
“Is the water too hot?” I peeped, pulling the shower head away.
His eyes opened in a flash, startled by my question. “No! Not at all! I was just lost in thought about… Uh… How to fix BB-8. It’s fine, really.” He shifted in the chair, his bandaged arm still gripping onto the rail while his casted arm rested rigidly over his lap. As I moved the water stream back to his hair, his eyes closed again, this time without the tautness I’d noticed before.
After all the shampoo had been thoroughly rinsed I began the process again, only this time with conditioner. I didn’t ask if he actually wanted it, since it was more out of my own habit, but he didn’t stop me when I grabbed the bottle and jetted the thicker liquid into his hair, continuing to slowly massage it into his tresses.
It became somewhat relaxing, methodically weaving my fingers to evenly spread the silky lotion to every strand. He moved uneasily again, and I noticed the hand holding the rail was clutching tightly, his bicep tensed hard.
Maybe I’m terrible at this.
Deciding it was time to finish this embarrassing experience, I started up the water and rinsed Poe’s head free of conditioner, again seeing the strain washing over his face as he leaned back, like he was trying to conceal it from my view.
I rustled a fresh towel over his scalp, leaving his hair only slightly dampened. “I’m sorry if I hurt you,” I mumbled. “I’m not used to washing patients’ hair.”
Poe immediately twisted his torso, looking up to my face. I gritted my teeth as I registered his contracted abdominals. “What are you talking about? You didn’t hurt me.”
My eyes flickered to his arm. “You just seemed really... tense.”
“Uh,” Poe mouthed, the sound muted. I watched his eyes move down my chest, pupils swollen against his brown irises. He didn’t continue. He seemed lost for words.
I followed the trail his stare had made down my torso, sucking in an alarmed breath. I’d diverted so much of my thoughts towards Poe I hadn’t recognised the spray of water that’d soaked through my white cotton shirt, my bra now starkly visible through the dampened fabric. The cloth clung tightly to the curves of my breasts, leaving extremely little to imagination.
Of-fracking-course.
I laughed. A body shaking cackle that bounced off the tiled walls around us.
Any embarrassment in me simmered to hilarity at the thought of Poe’s face with my chest readily on show. His illuminating smile continued to flash as he chuckled along with me, and I couldn’t help but relish in it for the moments in which we continued to snicker.
When my laughter died down, I sighed, not exactly attempting to cover myself. He’d already seen what I had on display. “Well I think I’ve done just about as much as I can,” I jested, a smirk still drawn on my lips. “Do you think you can get yourself dressed? There are more night-clothes in the cupboard behind you.”
“I think I can manage,” he grinned back, seemingly relieved at the disruption from whatever tension had risen during this whole endeavour.
And with that, I sauntered out from the ‘fresher, closing the door gently behind me. My heart pounded to the beats of memories dashing into my mind, barely able to strangle a coherent understanding of everything I’d felt. It was all I could deliberate on as I entered my living quarters at the end of the hall and changed into new shirt - navy blue this time. My mind desperately tried to collect all the emotions I had experienced in the last 30 minutes and render some form of comprehension from them.
It was clear, I’d grown unprofessionally attached to Poe, so quickly, and more than any other human I’d encountered.
You like him.
It was a simple answer, yet it felt childish, to have developed a juvenile-like crush so soon after our meeting. I knew it was more to do with his appearance than our limited interactions, even though they were still somewhat endearing. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d experienced any of this heart fluttering emotion.
There were a few men that littered my past, but I had yet to experience the all-consuming, overwhelming need for someone that made people do irrational things, and I was sure no-one had ever thought of me in that way.
Only fleetingly had I endured any type of loneliness during my time on Raxus, and it usually passed as I woke to a new day - my work and my patients being wonderful distractions. I’d become so independent, so self-sufficient, that I never yearned to have someone become the centre of my universe.
Come now Alexys. You know that is not the reason why.
I gripped the sheets at the edge of my bed I had found myself sitting on.
You cannot let anyone too close. Not unless you want them to die along with you.
Before I could let the voice cause me to dive into an ocean of panic, I heard the ‘fresher door click closed.
“Alex?” Poe called from the hallway.
My feet planted onto the floor as I stood, letting the anxiety dissipate into the air around me. “Back here Poe.” I listened to his footsteps plod along the floor as he limped towards my living quarters, along with a few quiet huffs of effort. When he came into view at the entrance he still looked as appealing as before, even without his bare skin on show.
“You live in your clinic?” he questioned, looking around the apartment style quarters I’d constructed with the help of a few locals.
It was simple, efficient. The sizable room had everything a normal home would contain, all pulled into one. Kitchenette and dining table to the left, living room with a small two-seater sofa at the back wall, and my bed and closet to the right. A door leading to an ensuite ‘fresher was in the far right corner, one I only used if an overnighter patient was with me.
“It’s so I can still monitor a patient’s condition when they’re unable to return home yet. Remember, I’m the only doctor for thousands of kilometres.” I motioned to the holoscreen on my bedside table that would usually be displaying the vitals for any patients connected to monitor lines. There were only flat lines and zeros there now.
Poe cocked his head. “You don’t ever stop do you?”
“What do you mean?”
“Being a doctor, looking after people. Even in your own quarters you’re still in that mode.” He hobbled further into the room, taking in the space around him.
“I’m sure you’re the same with your work for the Resistance.”
“True,” he conceded. “Being in the middle of a war tends to do that to people.”
I couldn’t hold back a cynical snort.
His eyebrows crinkled together. “What did that mean?”
Kriff. I wish I hadn’t done that.
“I didn’t mean anything by it.”
“Just tell me,” he grumbled.
I pressed my lips into a hard line. I didn’t really want to start a heated discussion about the futility of this war with a Resistancepilot. But from the interactions I’d had with Poe so far, I doubted he was going to let this go.
“It’s just… Don’t you see the pointlessness of it all? Even if you overcome the First Order – how long will it be before another enemy rises up, or your new leaders become the same ruthless dictators themselves?” My voice grew less apprehensive, straightening myself into a more confident pose. “People are fickle. They change. Their emotions rule them beyond anything else, and because of that they can be manipulated so easily. People who swore fealty to one side can be dragged onto the other. The cycle never ends. There will always be more war, more fighting, more innocent deaths.”
Poe stared at me, bewildered. “You think it’s pointless to fight back against the First Order? People who conquer or destroy planets simply for more power? You’d rather we let them do as they please, letting billionsof innocent people die?”
“No of course not-” I started, already regretting every word I’d said.
“But that’s what you just implied, isn’t it? How can a doctorhave such a bleak view of the galaxy?”
I sighed, more at myself for opening my big mouth. “I’m just a realist Poe. People fight, we can’t help it. And those with the most power will fight to keep it, no matter how. I’ve just… I’ve seen too many people die, or damaged for the rest of their lives, for me to think war can ever generate peace.”
Poe’s eyes narrowed, his demeanour darkening. “You don’t think I’ve seen people, my friends, die or horribly injure themselves? You don’t think I’ve seen what war does? I still want to keep on fighting. I haveto. For the people that I’ve lost, who gave their lives for the rest of us, and the people I could save. Because people deserve a galaxy without a tyrant like Kylo Ren deciding who should live and who should die. Somehow, in your eyes, you think it’s pointless to even try?”
I didn’t have any type of acceptable answer. It was rude of me to point out the flaws of war with someone who had risked their life, and most likely come close to death because of it. “I’m… sorry Poe,” I insisted softly, settling back down on the edge of the bed. “It’s not my place to give my opinion on matters like this. I truly apologise if I offended you.”
I glanced up from twiddling fingers to see his delicately confused expression. He exhaled loudly, as he wobbled painfully to one of the chairs of the circular dining table across the room, straightening his injured leg out to rest it.
“I’m sorry too," he said, exhaling. “I’ve been living my life with the Resistance for so long I forgot there might be people who don’t believe in the cause like we do.”
“It makes sense,” I remarked. “Sometimes you get caught up in the bubble of the world around you, it’s hard to see beyond it.”
He nodded. “That’s very true.”
We sat in silence for a moment, both letting the heated exchange dry out into passing memories. Poe continued to peer around the room, his eyes scanning with a subtle scrutiny. “So what do you do when you’re not being a doctor?” he asked, the fierceness from before completely replaced by his normal cheerful tone.
“You mean in my free time?”
“Yeah. Do you have anything that keeps your mind away from all that... doctor work?”
I felt my face crinkle into confusion. “I… I don’t really.”
His expression mirrored mine. “You don’t have any hobbies? Something you do just for fun?”
“Uh…” I started, raking through my brain for anything I did outside the realm of my work. “Huh. I guess I don’t. I may just be the most boring person alive.”
Poe chuckled, and shook his head. “That’s definitely not true.” He met my eyes, flashing me a comforting grin. “You’re just hyper-focused on your work. Trust me, I get that. Sometimes all I even dream about are war council sessions and my ship interface. But you’ve got to switch off eventually, otherwise you’ll go insane.”
I was slightly dubious at that sentiment, since I’d made it over 4 years without slipping into insanity, but Poe’s question made me take check. Truthfully, I couldn’t remember the last time I had fun, when I felt joy in something other than making ill people better again.
Poe could see my face begin to fall. “Hey come on, let’s try now. You’ve only got me as a patient, and I am in no need for your treatment right now. Think of something you used to do, or always wanted to, and we can have a go of it together.”
His sudden eagerness to help made my heart swell. “Uh... sure. Okay.”
Poe nodded once without speaking, urging me to search through my mind for an idea. But it was hard to think when I kept looking at his face, now melted into an enthusiastic smile. I made my eyes glare at my feet, since they would be significantly less distracting while I attempted to think of a supposedly fun activity.
Even when I’d finished my work for the day, on the rare occasion I had no overnighters staying with me, I simply returned to these quarters to have dinner and prepare myself for sleep. In the moments between, all I tended to do was read over current news and research on my data pad, sometimes flicking through medical texts if I was stumped on how to deal with a patient’s condition, especially when it came to rarer alien species. Generally, I would be so tired from the day that I never needed to pass my time with anything remotely hobby based. My focus would be to eat, use the ‘fresher and settle into an easy slumber.
And in this singular moment, I realised how monotonous it all was.
Poe saw me struggling, although probably not knowing it was at the realisation that I had no idea what fun was anymore. “Okay, how about games? Surely you’ve played at least one holo or card game in your life?”
“Well yeah, but that was years ago, and I don’t have any-” I stopped mid-sentence, the flicker of a memory rising into my mind’s view. “Wait here a second.” Hopping up from my bed, I made my way to the office, switching on the light. A large wooden desk sat in the centre, littered with old patient notes I had been in the middle of updating when my life had been so suddenly interrupted with Poe’s appearance.
I ignored them to walk towards the storage cupboard behind it. It took a few minutes of rummaging through stacks of files and old pieces of obsolete medical equipment to find what I’d come in here for - a small, rectangular metal case the size of my two hands, snatching it from the shelf I’d mindlessly placed it on nearly 3 years ago.
Bringing it back with me into my quarters, I quickly sat at the dining table next to Poe, who turned to face me with a look of intrigue. I opened the case, exposing the contents inside. “An old patient of mine gifted this to me, promised to teach me how to play. He… never got the chance to.”
My mind wandered in the memory of the older gentleman who had been struck down with Quannot’s syndrome, only lasting a few days before his unavoidable death. I recalled how much I mourned his passing, distressed at how little I could do to ease his pain before he left this world.
“Sabbac!” Poe burst, interrupting my sombre reminiscing.
I shook myself back into the current reality. “You know how to play?”
“Of course, almost every being in the galaxy knows how,” he scoffed. Only after he noticed me shifting awkwardly in my seat did he realise what he’d said. “Uh, sorry. Come on, I’ll teach you.” He continued to pull the cards out of the case, laying them out face up in a specific order. “Okay, so this is the Flask suit...”
*
If we were playing for real money, Poe would have put me in the red.
“23? Again? You’re definitely cheating,” I grumbled, huffing into my seat, not for the first time of the evening. After I’d grasped the basic concept of the game, we’d played for hours, time passing quickly in the midst of bluffing and strategy.
Poe was evidently enjoying the immaturity of my tantrum, laughing softly as he pulled the last of my chips towards his already immense pile. “I guess beginner’s luck didn’t really work out for you in this case,” he sniggered.
I pouted, watching him stack the chips neatly in coloured towers. “Well, I’m out. You took me for all I’ve got.”
“But didn’t you have fun?”
I nodded and grinned, conceding even when I’d been horrendously beaten, but was a combination of both him and the game we’d played that made me feel an unfamiliar contentment warm my body. I eyed him marvelling his chips, an expression of pride filling his features. “You really like winning, don’t you?”
“Being with the Resistance, you kind of get used to savouring the wins when they occur. Doesn’t happen exceedingly often.” His thoughts seemed to drift away, and in his face I knew he was pondering over the state of affairs back at base with him missing.
“I have no doubt they’ll be searching day and night for you,” I soothed, hoping I guessed correctly.
Poe attempted a smile, but it dissolved when a large sigh breathed past his lips. “I’m doing my best not to worry. The people there, they’re all smart and capable, but we had a plan… and I haven’t been able to see it through. We were running out of time as it is. I can only imagine how concerned they'll be after not receiving a report in over two day cycles.”
“It’ll be okay,” I said softly, tentatively placing a hand on his upper arm, above where I’d placed the plastic cast. “I know it sounds kind of naïve, but when I’m overwhelmed, especially in my work, I break everything down into smaller problems, and try to face the most pressing one. The big picture doesn’t matter, it’s all about solving the most concerning challenge at the time. And little by little, the whole situation becomes… easier.”
“It does sound a little naïve. But… I like it.”
“It worked for me when I was trying to save you.” I gave his arm a reassuring squeeze.
Poe didn’t respond. He seemed to ruminate in his own mind, his mouth in a forced, hard line. I watched as his eyes glanced down to where my palm rested around his bicep, then back to me.
His gaze was suddenly heated, smouldering, so intense it locked me into place, a ribbon of flames darting through my veins. I noticed the speckles of gold hidden through his irises, as it occurred to me how close our bodies had become during the time spent sitting at the dining table. The air around felt dense, the only sound I could register my own gradual breathing.
Poe's vision wouldn’t move from mine, his blazing stare a stark difference from the rest of his softened features. It felt as if his movements were in slow motion, the way he lifted his bandaged arm, a hand reaching up to my face.
I remained unmoving, even when my entire being began to flicker with electricity, igniting sparks at every nerve ending on my skin. Fingertips finally touched my cheek, grazing over it so delicately, yet still making the energy glowing through me intensify, as if trying to break free from my body.
Poe began to lean closer, and unconsciously I mirrored his movement, wanting nothing more in this moment than to feel his lips on mine.
Stop this Alexys. Stop it now.
The voice caused me to jerk backwards, pulling myself away from Poe’s touch, rising abruptly out of the chair. “This is… this is inappropriate,” I peeped, rushing directly to my ensuite ‘fresher, clicking the door closed. With my back pressed against the door, I slid slowly down until my rear hit the tiled floor.
I could still feel the heat of Poe’s fingertips on my cheek, a painful reminder of what I’d run away from. But the echo of what the voice had demanded still rattled through, and I knew it was right. I knew I couldn’t let myself get too close - I couldn’t give in to the sudden desire that had shimmered inside my chest.
It would cost me my safety, my work, my purpose of being. I’d risked everything to get here, given up all I knew of home. I wouldn’t let it all be in vain on the whim of my emotions.
There was no way to stop it, the lone tear that strolled down my cheek. It was a mere fraction of the sobs I wanted to express, both despair and frustration gripping me in a strangling hold.
With shaking palms held front of me, I traced each creased line in the flesh with my eyes. Not for the first time, I cursed at the energy that flowed through them, unlocked from the depths of my consciousness and healed those who needed it the most, those who would have otherwise died when even the greatest medical care couldn’t save them.
I’d kept it hidden for my whole life, the Force I’d been born with and couldn’t escape from. I’d concealed it from everyone, including my parents, keeping a far enough distance to hold my secret within my mind.
Only two outcomes came with exposure. One being I would be recruited, trained as a Jedi and guilted by the Resistance to join a war I didn’t believe in. The other being hunted by the Sith, or any kind of dark side user, and killed for showing any type of prowess with the Force like so many younglings before, or swayed into the war to fight on their behalf.
There was no way either side would allow me to slip from their grasp once they knew. They would never tolerate my neutrality and let me stay here in the countryside of an Outer Rim planet, doing exactly what I wanted to do. Heal.
Why me? Why did this have to happen to me?
Because you do not want it.
That’s cruel.
Such is life.
*
I wasn’t sure how long I spent sitting on the ‘fresher floor, ceaselessly on the verge of tears, yet never allowing the emotion to fully break. A creeping feeling of humiliation had started to filter in a short time ago as I recounted over and over how abruptly I’d run from Poe.
My eyes hadn’t caught the glimpse his face after I wrenched myself away from his hand, yet all I could do was imagine it now, features struck with shock and rejection. I’d barely heard him leave my quarters after I’d shut myself away, faintly recalling his right leg still making a larger thumping sound when he walked into the hallway, closing the door behind him.
That memory had taken place hours ago, and my body was beginning to ache after another large portion of time connected to hard tile.
The only thing I wished for now was the comfort of my bed, to sleep away this evening and wake to a fresh day. But I couldn’t. There was still a patient to look after. I needed check on Poe’s condition, update vitals, make sure his wounds were still healing. For my own benefit, I would rather wait for the morning when some of the lingering awkwardness would have dissipated, but there was no possibility of sleep without being sure he was still in good health.
Plus, I hadn’t told him about the food supplies waiting in the clinic cupboard. Being so distracted by playing cards I'd never made us dinner, and he needed all the sustenance he could get to heal properly.
With a fragile resolve to get it done and over with, I peeled myself from my sitting position, joints popping at the movement after being inactive for so long. I peered slowly through the door, on the small chance Poe was out there waiting to greet me, but it was just the empty quarters that filled my view.
For a reason I couldn’t discern, I began to tread lightly towards the hallway door, the stillness of night sending a quick shiver down my spine. Before opening it I glanced back at my chronometer on the bedside table.0200.
He was probably asleep by now.
Hesitation washed through me, knowing if that were true I shouldn’t go poking him awake just to assess basic vitals. But the urge was too strong, pushing me to step into the hallway, tip-toeing cautiously over the floor.
I was halfway down when I heard Poe’s low exhale echo through the passageway.
Hm, maybe he was dreaming.
My movements halted, waiting for another sound to confirm my guess. Soon enough, a louder sigh floated towards my ears, tainted with an emotion I couldn’t name.
I continued to tread ever so lightly towards the clinic entrance, noticing the lights had been shut off except for the lamp at Poe’s bedside softly illuminating the room. I shifted carefully closer, almost at the doorway, Poe’s relaxed breaths still filling my ears as I took nimble steps towards the noise.
When a low, breathy moan swirled into the air, my body froze.
The fire in my lower abdomen crackled to life at the sound, making my limbs heavy, locking me where I stood, hidden from view.
Another moan, louder this time, rumbled past Poe’s lips, and I savoured the way it hit my body. My hearing strained to collect every wavelength of sound coming from just outside the hallway entrance. There was movement, a rustling of fabric of some sort, a slight creak of the bed frame.
I could feel my throat growing tighter, fearful of my breath alerting him to my presence, as the realisation of what was happening - what he was doing - finally dug its claws into my skin.
Poe groaned in pleasure as I began to recognise the sound of a repetitive slippery motion over flesh, the flames inside bursting into an inferno, the fever hottest between my legs.
I leant my back on the hallway wall closest to Poe’s hospital bed, fearing my knees would buckle underneath me. His breathing became faster, more passionate, as the pace of his movement grew more rapid.
Inside my mind, I was bombarded with hypothetical images of his body in the next room, a strong hand gripped tightly around the shaft of his length, shifting up and down. The gasps he continued to make fell into time with my imagination, the sound of skin making a slicking friction keeping rhythm with the urgent pumping of his hand I visualised with impeccable realism.
My fingernails scraped at the wall, eyelids shut tightly while Poe’s delicious moans sent shockwaves through my circulatory system. I’d never felt so much lust in my life, knowing if I caught any other male in this vulnerable position I would have scuttled away quickly, mortified. Yet the reality of Poe touching himself a few metres away, not knowing I was here listening to his rising pleasure, made an urgent craving throb between my legs, one that needed to be relieved. Now.
Little care had been paid to my sexual needs in the last 4 years on this planet. Suddenly, it felt like I had to give into it otherwise I might die.
Poe’s breath hitched, a sharp inhale indicating he was getting closer to his peak. The singular noise made me slip my hand down past the border of my leggings and under my panties, sliding a finger down in between my folds. A slick moisture was waiting, more than I’d ever felt in previous encounters.
Dragging two fingers through it, preparing myself, Poe’s groans became hungrier, desperate. As soon as I began the motion of relieving the ache below, fingers gliding gently over my swollen clit, the flames fizzled, only to be replaced with an immense sparkle of electricity radiating from low in my core.
I inhaled sharply, like Poe had done, and hoped he was too lost in his own pleasure to notice the sound I’d made. When the steady noise of his hand running smoothly over his shaft continued without pause, I knew I’d not broken my cover.
My thoughts intensified to him, envisioning his arm tensing as he held himself within his grasp, his chest bare with muscles contracting along with his movements, a thin layer of sweat glistening on his skin.
Fingertips slid quickly back and forth over my pleasure point as I pictured his face contorted in both effort and enjoyment, his mouth opening only slightly as luscious groans seeped from his throat. I grit my teeth to stop from moaning myself, an undeniable bliss growing stronger with each swirling motion. My chest heaved through silent breaths I couldn’t articulate with noise, mind muddled with overwhelming images of every part of Poe’s body I so desperately wanted to see with my own eyes.
But I refused to move. I didn’t want to break the course of the moment, wishing for nothing more than to hear the sound of his release, knowing it would push me into my own. He wasn’t rushing into it, almost as if savouring this time alone, moans rising only to fall as he slowed his pace again.
I didn’t do the same.
The circling over my clitoris continued to accelerate, tiny instances of my waiting climax peeking their way out every so often, telling me I was getting closer to falling over the edge.
My legs were shaking, being held up by pure resolve to prevent any noise resonating from my body. Poe was speeding up his movement again, but this time he didn’t slow, stuttered sighs escaping his chest, and it hastened my climbing pleasure. I was close, I could feel the tipping point bubbling under the surface of my skin.
Slowly, I heard him growl a few barely comprehensible words.
“Ugh… Alex... yes...”
My release abruptly exploded through me at the sound of my name on his lips, pleasure pulsing in overflowing waves over every portion of flesh. Front teeth bit hard into my bottom lip, preventing the whine I desperately wanted to set free. It was the most intense sensation I’d ever felt, sparks flickering in both the deepest part of my core and the nerves of my limbs, making me shiver in delight.
Quickly, I was all too sensitive, pulling my fingers away, eyeing the sheen of moisture that covered them. My attention was again caught in Poe’s moaning, as he too reached his peak, muted gasps coming in jolts as he finally came, obviously attempting much like me not to make any excessive noise.
Eventually he began to heave in relief, breaths hissing gradually through his teeth. We both stayed in our positions for a minute or so, relishing in the afterglow of our separate orgasms, the flames I’d felt down below settling into smouldering embers.
I was mulling over the pleasure I’d gone without for years, when I heard Poe rustle in his bed, feet softly plodding on the floor. It took two steps for me to finally realise.
He’s coming this way.
~
Next Chapter
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In the Fields of Asphodel (My Regrets Follow You to the Grave) | Chapter Three
Eleanor Blum didn’t know what to think of this man, this Peaky Blinder devil that made all of Small Heath cower before him, this almost-stranger with his dead wife and dead stare, but she wished he’d stop showing up at the flower shop she worked in. And that he’d stop looking at her with those blue eyes of his.
Follows aftermath of Season 03 throughout Seasn 04. Tommy x OFC.
Warnings: Depictions of child abuse, antisemitism towards OFC (slurs), canon-typical violence, canonical deaths, sexual themes, etc.
Word Count: 12K
Chapter One ❀ Chapter Two
Ao3 ❀ Wattpad
Chapter 3: Celandine (Joys to Come)
She met her uncle for the first time barefoot and half-feral, wearing old blood on her fingers and streaked across her dress.
When they called Eleanor down to Headmaster Grafton’s office, her fingertips were still tender from embroidering dresses at the local dress shop earlier that morning. She rubbed them against the pleats of her skirt as she took the stairs two at a time, willing the sting away. Having left her shoes somewhere under her bed, still caked in mud from the rainy day, her big-toe poked out of a hole in her pantyhose and hit the wool carpet with every step. It scratched.
When she was younger, maybe eight or nine, the sight of the big oak door with its perpetual dust settled into the engraving of Mother Mary would’ve made her break out into a cold sweat, a phantom sting of leather hitting raw skin making her spine stiffen and her eyes water.
But she was thirteen now.
It sent a jolt through her system, seeing the door already open. Usually, the headmaster made all the girls knock before entering, waiting until they started to shift on their toes or rock on their heels. He liked spending long hours complaining to all the teachers, disparaging the young orphan girls’ lack of discipline. Sometimes, if he caught them fidgeting too much, he’d rap their knees with his cane.
Once, when she had been sneaking to the kitchen for a quick snack—she was the favorite of the cooks, but don’t tell anyone—she’d seen him frothing at the mouth over when one of the girls got snot on his new coat, due to some awful crying jag earlier that afternoon. His face had been a very fierce shade of red, she recalled, as he’d paced about in one of the empty classrooms, hands flicking about. The color disguised the faint pockmarks on his cheeks and the paleness of his complexion. Eleanor preferred it. He looked more… human, that way. It was nice knowing he bled like any other man.
Today, however, the door was open. Inside, sat the headmaster with one of Eleanor’s least favorite teachers, Sister Sarah, whose lips pressed into a smear of rosy pink rogue as soon as she caught Eleanor at the doorway, barefoot and with smudges of rust smeared down the cream of her skirt. She liked to say the lip color was all-natural, but Eleanor knew better. Across from them, in an over-large chair of what she knew was buttery-soft leather—she once got in trouble for curling up and falling asleep in it at nine-years-old, near delirious from a nightmare of her dead mother and having snuck out of bed and hunkered down in the unlocked office—sat a man she’d never seen before, his back to her.
The headmaster was a man with light hair and even lighter eyes—this chilled, near clear grey—with a thin, cruel mouth. Slim in that fashionable way wealthy people always were with pearls dripping down the languid lines of their throats or Patek Philippe watches wrapped around the delicate curves of their wrist bones. Eleanor was envious—they never had any awkward bits, no hollowed cheeks that looked scooped out with a melon spoon, no knees that stuck out in knobs of bone under paper-thin dresses.
“Anne,” Headmaster Grafton beckoned, hand waving her inside. Eleanor bit her lip to avoid doing anything stupid, like curse him out or attempt to deck him, and felt the familiar sting of her front teeth sinking into the torn skin. Her knobby knuckles weren’t very good for punching, unfortunately, quick to bleed with the semi-fresh welts stretched across them from Sister Martha, the only teacher who still rapped her with the leather strap when she got an answer wrong. The only teacher who ever called on her anymore.
It said something about her that Sister Martha was perhaps her favorite person here.
Grafton clucked his tongue, waited until she stood across from his desk, hands folded in front of her. She kept her eyes on the carpet, this fluffy, garish thing the color of blackberry wine, and his eyes on her forehead seared into her skin. “Anne,” he said again, and it made her want to tear at her hair, or maybe his eyes, those cold eyes—because, yes, Anne was her middle name, her mother’s name, but it wasn’t fucking hers. And she’d stopped biting at her nails, recently, and they’d grown long enough to do some damage if she tried. She could do it.
Eleanor, apparently, was too Jewish of a name, and while none of the staff or teachers could do anything about her last name, as full-on kike as it was, they could switch out Eleanor for Anne. Saint Anne, at least, was the mother of Mary.
Eleanor, christened Anne, baptized anew.
(There were nights when she was laying in her bed, still damp from when one of the older girls had dumped buckets of ice-cold rainwater into the sheets—or on one particular occasion, from being freshly scrubbed of pig’s blood from the butcher’s a street over; the stains never came out—where she just repeated her name in her head. Over and over again. Mouthing around the syllables, tasting them on her tongue just so she remembered. Just in case. They’d scrubbed out the Yiddish with lye soap, the language of her mother, but her own name she’d keep.)
The next bit of what the headmaster said sounded off to Eleanor’s ears: a record scratch, a jerk of a needle. Nothing but a string of words. And now her eyes were on this stranger.
Even sitting, he seemed towering to Eleanor, a looming presence—a well-built man going soft in the middle. He looked like he could snap Eleanor’s wrist with the press of his pointer finger and thumb, but when she risked a glance at his face, swiveling her neck very covertly, his face was made up of long lashes and crinkles at the corners of his hazel eyes. On his head was a shock of red hair, left wavy rather than gelled back slick and going strawberry blond at the temples. His cheeks were peppered in white-as-snow stubble. This man could’ve been ancient as time itself or, maybe, thirty-five—Eleanor didn’t know.
But what caught her attention most was that word the headmaster said—that word. Uncle. Your uncle. This strange man with too-expensive clothes and a floral lapel pin, this was her family, her kin. Eleanor spun on her heel, away from Grafton and towards this new man, this silent man whose brown leather loafers must have cost more than her entire wardrobe.
“You’re Ma’s brother?” she asked, unable to believe it. Even through the blurred memory of her five-year-old self’s eyes, her mother had been a woman made up of dark colors, brunette curls near black and skin that tanned brown in the sun. This man was all light, all pale gold. But it was the only explanation that made any sense.
She’d seen a photo of her grandparents once, obviously red-haired despite the black-and-white, and thought maybe that explained it. Though they had possessed much darker complexions.
Her uncle—her uncle—blinked. “No,” he said, short and to-the-point but not cruel, and his voice was feather-soft. There was an odd lilt to his voice she’d never heard, a funny way he spoke his vowels. “Your father’s brother, actually. Will Connolly.”
An Irish last-name if she’d ever heard one.
Eleanor stared at Mr. Connolly. “My mother was a whore,” she said, tone gone flat between grit teeth. Grafton hissed. Sister Sarah snapped out a sharp “Anne!”, but that wasn’t Eleanor’s name, so she didn’t respond. On the fine-boned features of her so-called uncle’s face, she looked for any traces of shock. There were none. Not even a furrow of his faintly-lined forehead. “How d’ya know I’m his?”
Mr. Connolly only smiled. “You may not see it, but we look a lot alike, you and I. I haven’t a doubt.” She opened her mouth, shut it again. She couldn’t find the words. “He passed, unfortunately. Last summer. But he wanted to know you. Make things right.” At some point, Grafton opened his big mouth again, and some sort of grown-up talk ensued, but Eleanor couldn’t get herself to focus, couldn’t rip her eyes from this stranger’s face.
She tried to be sad—hearing that this man, her father, was dead.
But her head was stuffed with cotton; her very system gone numb.
In a flash, the headmaster’s hand white-knuckled her shoulder, his form too hot along her back, and Eleanor went very still. Felt her limbs lock into place. Her heart stuttered. “Be good, dear,” the man said, and his tone was saccharine, sticky sweet as a bubblegum cigarette. She didn’t answer, didn’t breathe, and in a moment, she heard the click of Mrs. Lynch’s sensible shoes before the door shut behind them both with a heavy thud. Eleanor’s eyes flinched closed.
After a breath, or two, and a silence so heavy it weighed down her shoulders, she sat in a recliner across from Mr. Connolly, crossing her legs at the ankle as she slumped into the velvet material. She could be a lady when she wanted to be. But one foot couldn’t stop tapping against the carpet. The one with the bare toe. Eleanor took in a deep breath. “It’s lavender, isn’t it?” she asked, abrupt, and he arched a brow at her, leaning forward, hands propped up on his thighs and elbows bent. “That pin.” She gestured with the jerk of her chin.
He laughed. It was a low sound, rumbling deep within his chest. Warm. “Keen eye. Aye, it is.” The tied sprigs of lavender were delicate for such a large man, the feathery fronds rendered in silver, and the whole pin perhaps smaller than the stretch of his thumb. It really was beautiful—she wanted to sketch it with the charcoal pencils hidden beneath her mattress. “It was me mother’s.”
Even more embarrassing, she wanted to hear that laugh again. He hadn’t been laughing at her. It hadn’t seemed unkind at all.
But when she looked up from a scab at her knee, she saw his expression didn’t look like he wanted to laugh much anymore. His own gaze was glued at a spot by her right wrist, and for the first time, the man that was probably her uncle looked rattled. His jaw clenched. His eyes perhaps a bit wide, blue and brown and green. There was a flush to the tops of his cheekbones that hadn’t been there before.
She took a quick glance down, then darted back up to stare at him again. Her sleeve had ridden up.
Eleanor bit at her lip. He saw. It didn’t matter. It didn’t.
(“Little pig,” one of the girls said, almost loving, almost fond as she held her down into the dirt and muck of the backyard, and another pressed the glowing eye of her cigarette into the skin of her forearm. This girl’s hair was in pretty blonde braids, frizzed in the summer humidity, and her grip was tight on her wrist. The cigarette steady between her fingers. The flesh sizzled and sizzled while she held it there, and Eleanor thought of the mud caking the back of her hair and of the blue of the sky and of how much she didn’t want to cry. While they laughed and laughed and laughed.
But, no, it didn’t matter now. It didn’t.)
Eleanor tugged down her sleeve without looking away. The thin, healed skin of those circular burns disappeared behind the stained cuff of her dress shirt. Say something, she thought her eyes might have said when they locked with his, and her skin felt like it was burning all over again, hot and too tight. I dare you. Mr. Connoly’s lips pursed. Then he opened his mouth.
“Anne,” he started. And didn’t seem capable of saying anything more.
If she squinted, he really did look like her a little—in the straight arch of his brow, the curve of his top lip. The own red of her hair. The freckles across his nose bridge were fainter than her own, but the shape of the nose itself was the same. A fair counterimage, masculine where she was either soft or gaunt. “It’s Eleanor,” she said after a beat, and her voice sounded strange to her own ears, like from somewhere far away. She flexed her toes against the carpet. Knew there was no place to hide. She’d corrected him—this stranger that wanted to take her across the sea, this man who, from the sound of it, wanted to bring her home with him.
To her eyes, the hands resting on his pressed trousers seemed the size of boxing gloves.
Her heartbeat pounded in her ears, got stuck in her throat. She swallowed around it. But all Mr. Connolly did was cock his head, just so.
“Eleanor?” he asked, and his tone was mild as milk.
“My name,” she explained.
He sounded puzzled. “But they call you Anne?”
Eleanor shrugged, picked at a run in her hose. “Because it’s my middle name,” she said. Because they’re bastards, she thought. “But I wanna be called Eleanor if I’m comin’ home with you,” she told him, pushing onward. Maybe she was imagining it, but she thought the corner of his mouth quirked, just a little. “Not Ella or Ellie or anythin' like that.” She paused. “Please.”
And the stranger that was her uncle smiled, wider than before. “Call me Samuel, then.” And he reached out to offer his hand to shake. She leaned forward to take it. “Eleanor.”
❀❀❀❀❀❀❀
After a month at Sam’s home—what the few staff there dubbed Narrow House due to its long and low layout—Eleanor made her first grave mistake.
Narrow House was the most strange and most fantastical place Eleanor had ever stepped foot upon. While it was in Chelsea, London, a place with a good bit of bustle from the glimpses she’d catch outside the car window, the sycamore trees that sat shoulder-to-shoulder at the front of the house cut off the outside world, blanketing the whole place in shade. It felt like a place for the fae. Not for man. The first two weeks of near silence she experienced, only disrupted by the rustle of leaves and the static hiss of cicadas, had left her jumping at every sound at night, curled up on top of her covers and hiding her face in her knees. Waiting for the monsters to come.
There weren’t any, of course. She should’ve known better—she wasn’t a kid, anymore.
Or maybe they were very shy monsters. Either way.
Truthfully, Eleanor couldn’t recall her reaction towards the place when she first stepped into the house, just the feeling of Sam’s hand settled feather-light between her shoulder blades. The way her eyes were welcomed by warm hues of gold and cream and deep red. A few leafy plants draped over a table just at the entryway; senses itching, she wanted to touch the waxy film of the heart-shaped leaves but flexed her fingers instead. There’d been a similar plant on Sister Agnes’ desk; it had always looked so parched.
(By the time she hit ten years old, she’d mastered the art of tip-toeing on her stockinged feet, having learned which floorboard squeaked, which route ensured the most carpet coverage. There was a single board in the main lobby that shrieked a blood-curdling sound if you hit it with your big toe just so—she’d learned that the hard way.
At night, when all the other girls were pretending to sleep, too afraid of a lashing to even breathe out-of-turn, Eleanor would go to Sister Agnes’ desk with her cup of water, steps hidden amongst the cacophony of gasps. Walking in wide sweeps over the creaks and sighs and moans of the wood and never spilling a drop.
The nun called its sudden revival an act of God. Maybe it was cruel, but she let it die after that.)
The entryway was dotted with chairs stacked high with pillows and throws, and through the open doorway to her left, she caught a flash of what could have only been a chandelier, though she’d never seen one outside of a magazine, all delicate cut crystal spiraling down, hung over a long and dark dining table that seemed to stretch into infinity.
Before she could absorb any of it, however, an electric jolt of fear overcame her, stole the breath from her lungs. A giant mass of dark fur appeared from another room, launching itself in her direction. Eleanor went rigid.
Trapped between her uncle’s hand and this eldritch horror, there was nowhere to turn.
“Sweet-Pea,” Sam said in a stern voice she’d yet to have heard from him, one that came from somewhere deep in his chest, and she flinched so hard she thought her bones must’ve ground together.
But he needn’t have used it, because the shadowy figure had already sat back on its hind legs right at her feet without any prompting, slobbering globs of drool onto her patent leather shoes and looking up at her with big, patient eyes. Its tail beat against the ground.
“Hi, Sweet-Pea,” she said, faint. The big dog near came up to her chin. She had to yank back her own hands when they automatically reached out to pet it—its coat looked so thick she thought that once she buried her fingers into the coarse curls, they’d be done for. They’d sink so far in they’d never come out again.
“He’s still a puppy,” Sam said, sounding apologetic. Tall and skinny with paws too big for his stick-thin limbs, and no longer a blurred-out nightmare created by his quick scamper towards her, the only thing frightening about Sweet Pea was his magnificent height. His teeth were exposed in a doggy grin, tongue lolling as he panted. “He gets excited.” His hand moved from her back to her shoulder, giving an awkward two pats that made Eleanor go even more still. He dropped his hand fast. The next words came out soft, a gentle nudge, “You can pet him if you want.”
And so, she had, resting a tentative hand on his head. His fur wasn’t very soft, she found out, but the feeling of his head butting against her stomach for more attention made a smile bloom on her face before she could bite it back.
Later that day, she’d met the rest of Sam’s pack. Besides Sweet-Pea, his Irish Wolfhound, there was Fennel, a Spinone Italiano; Ginger, a Border Terrier; Lady Susan, a Scottish Terrier; Cricket, a Rough Collie, and Billie, an English Water Spaniel. Though she’d asked after the breeds—more to be polite than anything, because men always seemed to get so worked up over their dog breeds, or at least the headmaster had—all the names spun around in her head, muddled and mixed. Though, Billie’s name was impossible to forget from the start: the stout pup with his chocolate fur was as round and fat as a sausage link, and as soon as she’d offered the little guy a treat, he’d nipped it out of her hand and rolled over for a belly rub.
Very quietly, she’d whispered an “I love you” to her new friend—because how could she not?—and she’d ducked her head at her uncle’s chuckle.
It was still a really nice laugh.
They’d spent a good twenty minutes where Sam would drop treats into her palm to bribe the dogs with, showing her how to make them roll over and sit, to beg with their paws up and to run circles and other tricks. Eleanor learned a lot in that short time. That Lady Susan had a very imperial look to her whenever she demanded treats, arching her head and narrowing her eyes as if to say: “Well? ”. That Fennel had a love for licking between toes, as she’d left her shoes at the door. That Cricket’s fur felt like a cloud. By the time they were done, her clothes were littered with dog fur, white and brown and black stuck to the grey of her dress.
Her uncle had also promised a tour and an introduction to some of the staff, but one look at the overwhelmed expression on her face once they’d hit the sitting room, full of ceiling-high bookcases and couches that could seat a small army, and he offered to show her to her room instead. Her head still spinning over the fireplace as he guided her up the stairs. He left the door cracked open before he left.
“Come get me if you need me, yeah? I’m just across the hall,” he’d said, and she’d nodded like she’d meant it. He didn’t look convinced. “Bathroom’s the door next to this one,” he told her, a wrinkle to his brow, and was gone with the pad of footsteps on hardwood.
That night, she’d slept on top of the covers of a bed that could’ve housed four or five of her fellow orphans. Afraid to disturb that array of artful pillows at the top of the bed, she curled up at the bottom in a tight ball. Velvet and silk and in colors she’d never thought she’d be able to touch with her own hands. She still wasn’t sure she could.
The summer night meant it wasn’t even that cold.
That night, Billie hopped up onto her bed while she laid with her eyes wide open, listening to the wind whistling through the trees, feeling ungrateful and homesick and wanting the midnight roar of Brooklyn’s streets. Wanting her mother. He’d pressed his wet nose against her cheek, and she’d cried into the soft, downy fur of his chest until her eyes grew so puffy, she had no choice but to close her eyes and sleep. Eleanor was only glad that Sam couldn’t hear her. She’d mastered a silent cry years ago. It had taken a while, but she’d learned.
(You see, the headmaster liked to watch. Until it got boring. He’d bring the nuns in to witness. Maybe he spoke—she wasn’t sure. Her knees dug into the carpet; she could feel the indents form on the scraped-up skin there, red and raw and irritated. Bits of fluff sticking to half-formed scabs, still gooey with tacked-up blood. And the belt buckle clinked with every swing. It made more noise than her. One day, she promised herself, she wouldn’t even cry at all. The headmaster liked to watch, so she bit at the inside of her cheek until she bled, until salt and snot ran down her chin and dripped onto that hideous fucking carpet, the color of blackberry wine. Until it got boring.)
But it was different now, weeks later. Eleanor had learned the layout of the place, the few staff that her uncle kept around the house. And she knew his habits—what he liked. What he expected from her. As long as she was good, he’d keep her around, and maybe he’d even end up liking her a little bit.
She’d done so well until now.
It’d began over breakfast, a butter knife dripping marmalade hovering over her burnt toast as her uncle set down the newspaper in a rustle of pages, peering down at her through the thin frames of his spectacles. There was a sense of finality in her uncle’s expression that made her mouth go dry. A scraping sound reverberated throughout the kitchen, knife on toast.
Eleanor didn’t feel so hungry anymore.
It was a shame, too—she'd only just started allowing herself these bits of extra luxuries. Climbing under the covers at night. Picking a mint leaf off the plant in their windowsill to taste. Taking the dogs on a walk without asking for permission. Drawing a bath instead of washing up with the sink and a rag. Running her fingers along the spines of Sam’s books, instead of just using her eyes.
Marmalade. She liked it when the bits of rind stuck to her teeth, chewy and sweet.
“I think it’s time we get you a new wardrobe,” Sam said, and she felt dread wash over her, settle into the chinks of her armor. She knew what that meant; she knew what he was going to say. “I called the family seamstress”—and who the fuck has a family seamstress, anyhow?—“and she agreed to come over today to get your measurements.”
Eleanor opened her mouth. Closed it. Opened it again. “You don’t need to do that. My clothes are fine,” she said, voice low, and hoped the defensive bite in her words was heard only by her. No such luck. By the wrinkle that formed at Sam’s brow, that wasn’t the case; if her tone hadn’t alerted him, the way her hand shook the triangle of toast in her grasp was clue enough. The toe peeking out of her stocking met the hardwood of the floor as her whole foot began to tap against the surface in a full-blown jitter.
Sam seemed to piece together his words very carefully. “Eleanor,” he began, and Eleanor’s knees were shaking so bad she feared rattling the table with the force of it. When he got serious, his speech went much more formal. “I am your guardian. I know... you feel as though you don’t need new things. And I’ve held off for all these weeks. But being as I am in a place to provide you all the luxuries in life, I feel as though getting you clothes that do not have holes in them—and aren’t several sizes too small, at that, clothes that actually fit —is more than reasonable.” This had to be the most she’d ever heard him speak in one sitting. His eyes were roving her face, but her face was already directed towards the poached egg on her plate, not him. “D’ you understand?”
Eleanor nodded. Her cheeks blazed.
Sam let out a breath she hadn’t realized he’d been holding in the first place. “Alright then,” he said around a sigh. Like a burden had been lifted from his shoulders after her compliance. Like her opinion had mattered to him. “Good. Mrs. Davies’ll be here at two. Eat your breakfast now, eh?” There was a smile in his voice when he said it, but she scrambled to shovel in the remains of her breakfast anyhow, gulping orange juice and scraping the runny yolk off her plate with the crust of her bread. Smearing marmalade across her face in her gusto. He didn’t say it like an order. But just in case. Her stomach churned.
Orange peel was still stuck in her teeth when the sun hit her face, fifteen minutes later.
It was always coolest out in the early mornings, so that’s when Sam (and now her, it seemed) did the garden work. This was his normal morning routine, he’d explained to her, until the winter frost made it near impossible to go out until midafternoon when the sun was at its height. The mist felt like a balm to her frayed nerves, brushing against her skin; the morning dew coated her shoes in a gloss. Taller blades of grass left wet trails on the stretch of tights over her ankles.
Autumn was just beginning to touch the trees, glimpses of ochre and pinpricks of cherry red among all the green like a child’s finger-painting. The white stone pathway was framed by heather growing taller by the day, sprigs of pinkish-purple, or lilac, that tickled the pads of her fingertips when she brushed through them. Though, she and Sam kept having to replace their mulch whenever the dogs dug it up. Said path led to a man-made pond stocked with fat, happy koi; they nibbled at her fingers for food when she stroked her hands through the water. She wasn’t sure how long she spent knelt by the pond in the first few weeks, just watching it ripple under her hands, disrupting lily pads that were sent bouncing on the waves
Sam had cut her some of the heather to hang upside down in her closet, bundled up with dental floss and left in the dark on a clothing hanger to dry out. It didn’t have much of a scent, but its color had made her eyes sparkle at the very first sight of it. She couldn’t wait to hang it in her room; maybe on one of her bedposts, if it didn’t shed too much.
Besides helping with maintaining the heather, she also pruned the asters planted in clusters out in the sunlight, placed close to the patio furniture. She liked the touches of yellow and purple at their centers best. “You could press one, if you like,” Sam told her one day in early September when they’d just began to bloom. She hadn’t been able to tear her eyes away. “I could buy you a book for it. You could collect any you want.”
Eleanor hadn’t responded, wondering if it was a test—ribbing her, attempting to trip her up into asking for too much—but she hadn’t needed to speak a word. Her uncle plucked a flower from its stem, bright white against the tanned calluses of his hands, and held it out towards her until she offered up cupped palms for him to drop the bud into. It landed center face down.
“I’ll get you one,” he had said as if that transaction settled it, simple as that, and now, weeks later, a leather-bound journal rested on her bedside table. Parchment paper was tucked away in one of the drawers, though she wasn’t allowed to touch the iron without permission.
This rankled at her, sometimes. She’d worked as a seamstress’ assistant, for God’s sake, but Sam insisted, and Eleanor didn’t dare protest. In any case... It felt. Nice. To be worried over.
Among Sam’s backyard and dedicated garden, there were countless other flowers Eleanor had gotten acquainted with, though their names she had yet to quite master. White and pink autumn crocuses, she could identify without a pause or hint of self-doubt, but the miniature yellow blooms with their outreaching pistils she could not, for the life of her, recall any details of. Just that they liked hugging warm walls in the winter, shielded from the biting cold.
Currently, Sam was ruining the fine wool fabric of his trousers, knees sinking into the damp earth, checking on his radishes with careful touches. He patted the spot at his side. Eleanor rushed to kneel. His smile was a small one; she was graced with no baring of teeth. No threat. Not bite. Just a smile. He offered up the bag of mulch at his other side. “They’re not retaining moisture,” he explained, in that voice he often used when instructing her in any way, patient and steady with little variation in tone. No abrupt rises in volume that made her skin prickle with nerves. “Mulch will help with that. But we’ve gotta keep it a real thin layer, y’ see, like this.”
Eleanor heaved in a breath and let it escape in a little puff of air. “Why thin?” she asked, tentative, and watched her uncle’s eyes light up.
“Good question,” he praised, and Eleanor felt her ears burn, felt her cheeks pull with a reluctant grin. Sam grinned right back. “If you’ve got too thick a layer, it’ll keep any water from getting in, from reaching the roots. Ruin all your progress then, won’t it?”
The rest of the morning passed in this manner, checking all the plants, watering and pruning and patching up holes in the mulch from overzealous paws, before the housekeeper, Ms. Catherine Moore, let out the dogs at 11 AM sharp, a pitcher of what looked to be lemonade in hand. Eleanor inwardly cheered: lemonade was her favorite. The dogs chased each other throughout the garden, nipping at their siblings’ tails and rolling in the dirt. From where Eleanor now rested, sweat beading her brow as she took cover beneath the picnic table’s umbrella, Cricket trotted over, resting her head on her grass-stained knee with a flick of her mane and a small yip escaping her mouth. Eleanor dug her hand into the scruff of Cricket’s neck, offering a scratch—that fur was still cloud-soft.
From the corner of her eye, Eleanor watched Ginger, unkempt and often indifferent towards the other dogs, make straight away for Sam. He was lounging in a chair opposite to her, nursing a cigarette; the strands of his hair unshaded by the umbrella lit up a striking red-gold, like fire woven into thread. Her hair never looked so brilliant. “Little monster,” he greeted with a smile, inviting the dog onto his lap for pats. “I know it was you, digging up the mulch. Menace that you are.”
Ms. Moore reached them then, pitcher clutched in one plump fist close to her chest and two glasses pinched between the fingers of her other hand. The ice rattled within its glass container, sloshing the juice near over the brim and swirling the ladle in the pitcher ‘round and ‘round. Up close, Eleanor saw bits of fruit suspended within, sliced strawberries and what looked like quartered peaches, dying the drink more orange-pink than yellow where they settled at the bottom.
The pitcher, then the two glasses, were set against the patio table, cushioned with a pinky. Ms. Moore was a woman even older than her uncle, perhaps sixty years old, with a crinkle-eyed smile that she shot at Eleanor right now, head ducked under the umbrella to escape the sun. She pulled from a pocket in her apron two straws.
Eleanor took one when it was offered to her and watched with eager eyes when Ms. Moore began filling up a glass, holding the ladle still to avoid spillage; the housekeeper then used said ladle to spoon out several more pieces of fruit, slipping them into the glass with barely a splash. “Here you are, Miss Eleanor. You look parched.” She clucked her tongue, and the fine wrinkles around her mouth creased deeper. “Samuel, now y’ know I told you to get that girl a hat, didn’t I? She’s goin’ t’ burn right up at this rate.”
She’d never heard anyone else ever call her uncle Samuel, but being as Ms. Moore had worked for the family since Sam was in diapers, Eleanor imagined she was the exception.
In any case, Eleanor didn’t think she’d burned in her whole life, spending hours beneath the rays of the summer sun, skin growing darker and darker still. New freckles peppering her skin. But it was sweet—that she cared at all. She hid a smile behind the brim of her glass.
The few hours left until the arrival of the seamstress blurred by, her nose buried in a book that Sam recommended for her, a collection of short stories. Her fingers were coated in remnants of juice, having reached into the glass to pull out chunks of peaches, syrupy and dripping. They stuck against the pages if she lingered too long. She was more than halfway through “The Yellow Wallpaper,” wondering at what that smooch must’ve been that the protagonist was seeing, wrapping about her room and marring the paper that was driving her so mad, when Ms. Moore came back again, an odd look in her eyes when she peered over at Eleanor, squinting in the sun. Sam looked tense. His eyes flickered to Eleanor.
“Mrs. Davies is here, Samuel, in the parlor.”
And oh. She’d forgotten. She’d forgotten all about the seamstress.
This was where she mucked it all up.
A subtle shiver taking over her fingers, she tucked her book beneath her armpit before wiping imaginary crumbs off her skirt. Eleanor took a very deep breath, one that rattled in her chest. Mustering up a smile for Sam, one that felt like an open wound stretched across her face, she sat up. Her chair pulled up hunks of grass as she pushed it back. “You don’t need to come,” she said, tried to mean it.
Sam just shook his head. “It’d be rude of me, not welcoming a guest. And Mrs. Davies is an old friend of me mother’s, besides.”
Mrs. Davies was a small and squat woman in her late fifties, shorter even than Eleanor, who stood just a few inches below five feet at thirteen. Her cheeks were round and pink, her hair a dark blond. Barely greying. Her skin looked almost leathery, and those round cheeks pushed her eyes shut with the force of her smile. All smile lines.
“Oh,” she gasped, as loud as a gunshot even across the room, and only the pressure of Sam’s hand at her back prevented her from flinching back and away. Her voice was fairy-soft, airy and light. Like it could just float away with the wind. “She looks just like Winnie! Your mother had the same nose. And her hair, Samuel,”—yet again, with the Samuel, was that an old lady thing?—“such a lovely shade of red, it is.” That bright smile was spun her way. Sam slowly inched her forward, bit by bit by bit, until she was a mere handshake away from the older woman. “We’re going to have such fun together, dear. Every girl deserves pretty clothes.”
Eleanor didn’t know what she deserved, but it didn’t feel like this, trapped in the too-hot room of her uncle’s parlor, baking from the heat radiating off the fire-place. Those red bricks of the mantle, she knew, would be warm to the touch. Trapped in this room, to be poked and prodded. Left exposed. Don’t be so dramatic, she scolded herself.
This is what her uncle wanted.
And shirts that fit would sure be nice. No snags. No missing buttons.
Her uncle’s hand was heavy on her shoulder, this barely-there pat; she was ready for it. Didn’t flinch. There was a smidge of satisfaction burning away in her chest at that. “I’ll be just outside, then. Put on the kettle,” Sam said as if trying to reassure her, and he held out a hand for her to place her book into. With one last pat, a little stronger this time, he was gone with the click of the door behind him. Instead of looking at Mrs. Davies, she traced with her eyes all the titles on the bookshelf behind her instead.
She didn’t seem to mind. Out of the corner of her eye, Eleanor noticed the length of measuring tape curled around one wrist. “Alright, sweetheart, we’ll get into all that you’re lookin’ for—oh, I can just imagine you in dark green, you’d look so sweet, or some rose. So precious! But first, I really do need your measurements.” She beckoned Eleanor closer still, to where she was standing in the middle of the carpet, her little brown heels set against the cream with its deep red patterns, vines and roses twined into diamond-esque shapes. Eleanor tried not to drag her feet.
She was right in front of Mrs. Davies, now. “Thank you, ma’am, for agreeing to do this,” Eleanor said, because she could be a polite little girl if people let her be.
Mrs. Davies cooed. “Marge is perfectly fine, dear.”
“Thank you, Marge.”
Marge stroked her hands up and down Eleanor’s arms from shoulder to elbow, like soothing a startled animal, and Eleanor felt her whole body lock up in reply. “Alrighty now,” she said, and her voice really was just like a fairy, “let’s get to it.” Eleanor tried relaxing at the sweet sound of it, uncoiling her tense muscles bit-by-bit, starting with her toes and finishing with her shoulders. Best to start small and build up. Marge kept pushing onward. Hands still on Eleanor’s arms. “Take off your clothes for me, Eleanor dear.”
Static.
“’M sorry?” Eleanor asked, and her voice was not her own, something stretched thin and alien. The hands were gone, now, and Marge was unrolling that measuring tape from around her wrist. For a moment, Eleanor just counted how many times it unwound: one, two, three, four, five... Quick, practiced jerks that she missed if she blinked too slow. Six, or seven?
“Well, I’ve got to measure you, don’t I? And all that extra cloth gets in the way. We want these to fit you nice, with just a bit of growing room.” Marge went on to mumble something about “Samuel needing to fatten her up, just look at those boney arms,” but Eleanor’s ears were roaring, louder and louder and louder. She couldn’t hear a thing.
She couldn’t think; she couldn’t think; she couldn’t think—
Eleanor must’ve said, “Okay,” must’ve agreed, because her hands were moving on their own accord, reaching up to undo the first button of her blouse without needing any guidance from her mind at all. But they shook so bad, these tremors that jerked at her fingers and strained her knuckles, that she couldn’t get the button free from the loop. Her breath rasped in her throat, coming quicker and quicker: it was like breathing through a straw. She squeezed her eyes shut. It was just a fucking button, just a fucking button.
(Whenever Grafton got irritated, truly irritated, he clicked his tongue against the roof of his mouth. This awful, wet sound. He did that now. Eleanor kept her eyes on the carpet, traced the pattern there with her eyes over and over again. Counted how many loops there were in a sequence. Sixteen. It was an ugly fucking carpet, she thought. She thought that every time. “Shirt. Off,” he said after he was done clicking, and she undid her buttons one-by-one. She did not raise her eyes to the belt. But still, her chest tightened with the anticipation of it, the slap against bare skin, and she couldn’t breathe. She couldn’t breathe.)
She couldn’t breathe.
If she saw the scars—if she told Sam, he wouldn’t want her anymore. Just seeing the burns trailing up her arms made his jaw flex, made his eyes go all dark and wet. She’d saw. It’d upset him. He wouldn’t want her. Eleanor gasped for air, moved her hand up to her throat like she could somehow coax out the breaths trapped within in. She couldn’t breathe.
There was a concerned sound, this slight lilt of a question being asked. A shuffle. A brush of air. And then, there were hands on her arms again.
Eleanor flinched so hard she swore it must’ve wrenched her shoulder out of socket.
The hands left, but it didn’t matter. Eleanor sank to the floor, knees-to-chest, and clapped her hands over her head. Watched the world fall in a blur of colors, even behind closed lids. Like a flicker of flame, red and orange and terracotta. “Samuel,” and this she did hear, high-pitched and hysterical, sounding far off even though it must’ve been shouted right in front of her. Must’ve been screamed to be heard through the water and sludge, the mud that clogged her ears, her throat. “ Sam! ”
There was a bang. The rattling of hinges. “Fuck,” a man’s voice said, and Eleanor thought she must’ve recognized it. Curled up as she was, all the soft parts tucked away, it was easier to focus, a little. “Get out, Marge. Go,” and there was an unsteady pause, “go and turn off the stove, please.”
In response, there was a click of the door shutting once more. And footsteps, sharp and clear before becoming muffled by the carpet, sounding off closer and closer. It was followed by the creaking of old knees. She smelled Sam’s cologne, woodsy and a little sweet. Like vanilla and cedar. But it was so safe, curled up in the dark of her knees, so she just tightened her hands over her head.
A sigh, soft but close enough that it ruffled her hair. “Eleanor,” Sam said. “Eleanor, love, what’s wrong?” She’d never been called love before.
“Please don’t be mad,” she whispered into the skin of her knees.
“What? ”
“Please don’t be mad,” Eleanor gasped, ragged enough that it scraped, and felt the tears welling up in her throat. Salty, like sweat and blood and other unpleasant things. She swallowed them down. “I’m sorry. I tried to be good. I’m sorry—I’m sorry.”
“Eleanor, no, no.”
“I’m so sorry. I-I, I—” She choked on her own breath, coughing and sputtering.
“Hey, hey,” he shushed, and she could hear the fluttering of his clothes, the shifting fabric of the light cardigan he wore. “Just look at me, okay, love? Please just look at me.”
Her arms ached, and her head pounded from the stress of holding back tears with nothing but a fraying strength of will. She let her hands fall from where they, without her knowledge, hand become entangled in her hair. Her scalp stung. “There we go now,” Sam said when she peeked out from behind her knees, raising her head to meet wide, concerned hazel eyes. There was a sheen of sweat on his brow. “There’s my niece.” Eleanor shook her head, though at what she didn’t know, coughing again when she tried breathing in.
“Whoa there. Just breathe with me, okay?” And Sam took in a deep breath, holding it in before letting it out again. Eleanor found her attention hyper-focused on the rise-and-fall of his chest. “In through the nose,” he said, “and now out through the mouth.”
She wheezed on the first exhale, but by the third, it didn’t hurt much anymore. Sam looked almost boneless with relief. Eleanor stared down at her knees, felt her bottom lip begin wobbling. A damning tell she couldn’t shake.
“Eleanor,” he breathed out, sounding like a deflating balloon, and her eyes shot up to look at him again. She would never get sick of hearing her name; she wondered if that was why he said it so often. “Eleanor, you don’t have to be sorry, okay? Not at all.”
Eleanor shook her head, violent enough that her curls went flying. She had to clear her throat to speak, and her voice came out hoarse. “But I think I upset Mrs. Marge.” That damn fucking lip wobble again—it made her feel five-years-old; it made her feel small. “I was bad.”
Seemingly speechless, Sam stared at her, knees on the carpet and hands limp at his sides. He was making that expression she’d feared before, where his eyes went all dewy, and he looked, for all the world, like she’d socked him in the jaw. Wounded. One of his hands, massive enough that it could wrap around her wrist two, three times, reached out. Up towards her face. Eleanor flinched her eyes closed. He sucked in an audible breath.
This was it. This was it.
But Sam just placed a hand on her cheek, cupped her jaw. His palm was softer than she thought it’d be, even with the callouses. It made Eleanor feel strange. Warm. If she pressed in closer, she worried the touch might burn her.
(“Look at me when I’m speaking to you, young lady,” Grafton said, and his fingers had a tight grip on her jaw. She looked. She thought his eyes were very grey, and she didn’t want to think about what else she thought.
Later, when she was in an empty lavatory, scrubbing at the crescent moons on her palms with soap that stung, she thought back to that moment, when his hands were on her chin, thumb and forefinger pinching the skin there. His nailbeds were well-maintained. Clean, pushed-back cuticles. Her mother had always taken good care of her nails. “Look at me when I’m speaking to you, young lady,” he’d said, and she had thought his eyes were very grey. She had thought that if he moved those fingers any higher, she’d bite them clean off, bite through blood and bone. She wondered if she’d done it, if she’d be picking his veins out from between her teeth right about now.
Eleanor ended up throwing up in the sink. God, hopefully, no one heard.)
“Eleanor,” her uncle said, like trying to call to her from underwater, and she blinked. Couldn’t remember where she’d gone. “Eleanor, I’m never going to hit you. Not ever, y’ hear me?”
And Eleanor said back, instant, “I hear you.” It was what she was supposed to say.
Sam’s brows furrowed. “No,” he insisted. Brushed a curl from her eyes with a finger. It had a half-healed cut from what looked like garden shears. “I feel like you aren’t understanding me. Even if you think you’re bad—and you’re not, Eleanor, you’re not. But even if you ever are, I will never hit you. Do you hear me?”
“I hear you,” she said, and she almost believed it, too.
Later, she told Marge that she’d like a green dress, maybe, if that was alright. And that she enjoyed mother-of-pearl buttons. Marge said she could have whatever she liked. She got measured in her shift, and Sam lounged on one of the couches, reading from a large tome with deckled edges. And it was alright. It was all alright.
❀❀❀❀❀❀❀
She wore that green dress when she met her father’s wife for the first time with her two children—her half-siblings, she couldn’t comprehend it—in tow. Whenever Eleanor felt her nerves start to rise, her palms start to itch, she’d trace the daisies Mrs. Marge had embroidered on the sleeves and breathe a little deeper, a little steadier.
When Sam had come to her, hands wringing nervously in the doorway of her bedroom, she hadn’t known what to think. Learning that her father had been married when he was with her mother... Well, that hadn’t been a shock. Married men had laid with her mother all the time; she may have been only six years old when she’d been taken to the orphanage, but she hadn’t been stupid. Or blind. She knew the look of a wedding ring, even if her mother had never worn one herself.
Learning that Sam wanted her to meet her late father’s family, his wife and his children... That had given her pause. Eleanor had stared at him, aghast, mouth agape; her attention entirely torn away from the journal in her lap. Her pen, still pressed deep into the paper, left a spreading stain over the dot of one of the i's, a black cloud of ink. She’d been practicing her cursive, the careful loops of it—Sam was in the process of picking out tutors for her, and she’d sworn to whatever higher power there was out there that she would not be an embarrassment—but how ugly her uppercase S was no longer mattered.
“Sam, they’ll hate me,” she’d blurted, digging her fingers into the fabric of her comforter. Sam had looked at her then, the agitated fidgeting of his fingers slowing to an abrupt stop, and he’d strolled over to sit beside her before she could barely blink.
“It’s impossible to hate you,” he said, which Eleanor knew to be a lie. “And if they tried, they’d be out of our house, wouldn��t they? Just like that.”
And so, here they were.
Josie Connolly was a woman who loomed over everyone around her without even trying, easily above six feet in her lace-up boots, and made all the taller with her hair piled high on her head, its color so dark it was near black. Like Grafton, she was thin in that fashionable way, slim wrists encased in lavender gloves and the curve of her cheek both sharp and soft, silk over steel. She peered down her nose at Eleanor from where she stood behind Sam, near hidden in his shadow. Sam stepped forward to take her coat, and never, never had Eleanor felt so exposed from one pair of grey eyes, so stripped down and flayed. Which was saying something. “She looks more like you than Will,” was the first thing past her lips, the slim line of her eyebrow raised in some sort of amusement gone sour.
To be fair, Eleanor thought, being faced with your dead husband’s infidelity would make anyone bitter.
Her uncle’s smile was a brittle thing. “Josie, good to see you. As always. Hello, Junior. Hello, Lottie. Merry Christmas.”
That’d been another thing Sam had fretted over—whether a Christmas dinner would insult her Jewish sensibilities. Like she hadn’t grown up in a Roman Catholic orphanage. Or, perhaps, she noted, an amused curl to her mouth, that was why he asked at all. He always got scowly at the slightest mention of her time there, though he tried his best to hide it.
It’d been almost cute, watching him leap up from the edge of her bed to pace the length of her bedroom, flinging his hands about in endless motion, his sleeves rolled up and the freckled skin of his forearms stark against the background of her dark green walls, recently painted. It was one of the first times that Eleanor thought they really looked related, like kin. The way he puffed stray strands of hair out of his eyes, his wrists too busy lolling this way and that.
“You’re laughing at me,” he accused, once he’d paused long enough in his rant of telling her, for the fifth or sixth time, that her comfort was paramount, that they could schedule a different date—that'd it’d been Josie’s idea, anyhow, not his own—to actually take a good look in his niece’s direction. He sounded very pleased.
“I’m not,” Eleanor protested, but she was still smiling. “Christmas dinner is fine, Sam, honest.” In truth, she’d liked Christmas back at the orphanage, if only because the sisters were nicer that time a year, less likely to strike out with the leather strap. Christmas cheer and all that. Besides, Christmas dinner was almost always more delicious than any other meal of the year, more plentiful: potatoes and chicken, green beans fresh from the market. One year, they’d even got slices of pumpkin pie. Christmas time was very kind to orphans, even Jewish ones.
It hadn’t compared to making latkes with her mother for Chanukah—her mother had never allowed her to grate the potatoes, and she remembered, even now, watching with saucer-wide eyes as the pile of shreds grew and grew and grew, a small mountain on their kitchen table. The smell of onions caramelizing in Bubbe’s cast-iron skillet, the promise of them being jammy and sweet, almost buttery on her tongue. The bubbling of the vegetable oil on the stovetop. She’d scoop applesauce onto her mother’s latkes, heaps and heaps of it, until Anne scolded her for the mess. Withholding laughter that glittered behind her eyes. “You can’t fit all that into even your big mouth!” Her fingers had always been so tender, wiping at the applesauce oozing from the sides of her mouth, down her sticky chin, that the memory of it all always made Eleanor want to shut her eyes, to wrap her arms around herself and lean into that great love again, even if only the remnants of it.
Not to mention the honey and apples on Rash Hashanah, the perfect treat to her five-year-old eyes and tastebuds. And challah, eggy and so, so sweet: sweet as everything was meant to be in the New Year. The bread perfectly round, braided by her mother’s careful hands. Its top always so crunchy. Her mother hadn’t been a religious woman, not at all, but “Food is the language of love, my sweet, and our family has passed onto us so much of it.” No, Christmas couldn’t compare.
But maybe all Christians were kinder on Christmas, even to the bastard children of cheating, bastard husbands too dead to curse their names. The thought perked her up. It felt like a silly hope, but one she was willing to cling to. “Besides,” Eleanor told her uncle, giving him her most nonchalant shrug, like the thought of meeting the family of the man she hadn’t been good enough for didn’t send a chill down her spine, like it was better than fine, “it’s just a dinner.”
Just a dinner, indeed.
The kids behind Josie were perfect and pretty in the way that made Eleanor’s teeth clench, that made her want to tuck her hands behind her back and scratch at the half-healed scar tissue, scaly and ugly, that stretched across her knuckles. She did not do that.
The younger one, Charlotte, shot her (their) uncle a smile—there was a gap where one of her canines should’ve been. She looked like she belonged in a Monet painting, all strawberry blonde hair and soft pastels. Up close, Eleanor noted her eyes were the palest shade of green she'd ever seen. “Merry Christmas, Uncle Sam!” Their chins might’ve been the same, she thought, as she tried not to fidget when those pale, pale eyes fell on her face.
William Jr., sixteen, was a carbon copy of his mother, already towering over all of them, even Josie, with skin so light it was translucent. “Merry Christmas.” His voice was nasally from what was probably a cold, if the red tip of his nose was any indicator. He didn’t look at her at all, trained his gaze studiously on Sam, on his mother, on the wall coat rack where he placed his winter jacket. On anything that wasn’t her. It wasn’t subtle.
“This is Eleanor,” Sam said—like they couldn’t have known. Abruptly, he was behind her again, his hands curled around her shoulders; his presence warm at her back. It was almost baffling, how quickly Eleanor eased under his touch. Felt some of the tension leach out of her. She’d been grinding her teeth without even noticing it; her gums felt tender. At least I’m doing it with you, she thought. At least it’s you. Josie’s eyes were narrowed in on her. Her own gaze trained on the woodgrain of their floor, Eleanor straightened her spine and choked out some form of a hello, pleased to meet you. And steeled herself for the rest of the day. You’ve got this.
There was one thing she could say about the whole affair: dinner, at least, was delicious. Her plate was piled to the point of excess by Sam, slabs of dark turkey meat, stuffing and gravy, roasted potatoes with garlic, cranberry sauce, and some strange pancake-like side called Yorkshire pudding. By the time she was less than a third of the way through her meal, her fork not even scraping the bottom of the plate, her stomach had begun cramping to the point that she felt vaguely ill.
Normally, she could get away with feeding scraps to the dogs when this happened, slipping them bits of fat among other treats under the tablecloth while Sam looked the other way, their teeth closing around the food so gentle their canines barely grazed her fingers at all. But Josie didn’t like dogs, apparently, so they were all out playing under the watch of Ms. Catherine. Eleanor longed to join them. She nibbled at a Brussels sprout.
The small talk was unbearable.
“Have you gotten your invitation yet?” Josie asked her brother-in-law, cutting her potatoes into dainty, bite-sized pieces. Sam arched a brow as if to say: be more specific. She gave a light scoff in reply, popping a morsel into her mouth and chewing carefully, lips pursed, before speaking up again. “Don’t be daft, Sam. You know I mean Leo Amery’s New Year's soirée.”
Sam shrugged. He looked elegant in a way that Eleanor could never pull off. “I believe so. To be honest—I didn’t pay much attention.”
Charlotte, who had lit up at the mention of the party, made more sprite than girl from the glittering of her eyes, shot an affronted scowl Sam’s way. Her nose crinkled. “You’re so boring, Uncle Sam! It’s going to be perfect this year—Mum promised I could go. The invitation said the theme's A Midsummer Night’s Dream!” It looked, for a moment, like she was about to start waving her hands around, enthusiasm clear in the way she vibrated in her chair, but a cool look from her mother had her settling back down. Her smile shrank. Still, she pushed on, in a much more sedate tone. “Summer in winter. Fairies and magic, isn’t that fun?”
“Very fun,” Sam agreed, shooting her a smile, voice kind enough he seemed almost sincere, even to Eleanor’s ears. Charlotte smiled back, but her eyes were on Eleanor now, her head cocked to one side.
“Are you going to come, Eleanor?” Maybe she was imagining it, but the younger girl seemed almost pleased at the thought.
Josie clapped her hands, a thunderous sound that sent Eleanor into a fit of flinching. “Yes, how about it, Eleanor?” She said her name in this slick, mocking way that made her feel filthy just hearing it.
Eleanor exchanged a frantic look with Sam from where he sat at the head of the table. Will Jr., who up to this point had been silent and motionless at her side besides the steady consumption of his plate, turned to look at her with his mother’s grey eyes. Well? he asked. She opened her mouth but couldn’t find the words to speak. She could imagine nothing more hellish, dressed up just to be stripped to the bone by the sharks of London polite society.
“Eleanor’s got time,” Sam responded for her, and there was a firmness, a finality, to his reply that had Josie straightening in her seat. It was quite the feat—her posture had already been impeccable. “And if I never had to go to one of those stuffy things again, it’d be eons too soon.” His smile had an edge, and Eleanor hid her own, blotting her mouth with her napkin. “Though, fairies do sound nice, Lottie. You’ll fit right in.” Lottie beamed at him from her place beside her mother.
Whatever reply Josie had on the tip of her tongue, it was disrupted by one of the cooks trotting in, a jolly man named Joseph who clutched a large platter in his hands. Following close behind was June, a part-time maid, who darted about the table with whispered apologies as she gathered up plates and used silverware. Eleanor forked over her still overflowing plate with poorly-hidden relief. June stopped just long enough to tut at her, a smile lingering at the corner of her mouth. “You’re too thin by half, miss,” she scolded, quiet enough not to be heard over Lottie, who in a surge of passion, started regaling to Sam her recent sewing project, something about embroidering a landscape into the hem of a dress. If she weren’t her half-sister, only a year out from her father’s death and sitting shoulder-to-shoulder with his widow, Eleanor would want to pick her brain for what exactly that entailed.
“I’m saving up for dessert,” Eleanor lied with the bat of her lashes. June just shook her head and moved on to hoist Junior’s empty plates on top of the pile. Meanwhile, Joseph had sat several dishes in the center of their table: a fruitcake, a Yule log, and to Eleanor’s equal amount of dread and delight, what looked like an apple tart.
This is the end of me, she thought, eyes wide. “Thank you, Mr. Joe,” she murmured as the man walked past, and he shot her a grin before disappearing through the door with a whirl of his apron. By the time she had looked away from him and back towards the table, Sam had set a sizeable slice of apple tart right in front of her, the filling already oozing onto the plate. She shot him a look of betrayal. The corner of his mouth quirked up, even as his eyes blew wide in mock-innocence.
For a blissful moment, there was just the sound of forks hitting ceramic and a pleased hum or two. Even Josie picked through her slice of Yule log with something close to relish, patting away imaginary crumbs or smears of chocolate ganache between bites. It was almost peace, that thrum of tension from the start near silent.
Then Junior opened his mouth for perhaps the first time since they sat at the table, head twisted Eleanor’s way. “D’ you even celebrate Christmas, Eleanor?” Silence. He said her name the same way his mother did: like it was something rotten in his mouth. Like it was something to be spat out. Josie’s face peeled back into a smile.
It would’ve been beautiful if her eyes weren’t so cold.
“Um,” Eleanor stuttered and could’ve heard a pin drop. Charlotte’s head perked up in interest over her tart, and Sam opened his mouth to speak, so she pushed onward. “I did celebrate it. At the orphanage with everyone else, like I’m doin’ with you. But no, um, I don’t personally celebrate Christmas.” She thought it sounded rather diplomatic of her. Sam’s shoulders uncurled, just a little.
“Right,” Junior pushed onward, and he leaned into her direction far enough she could almost feel his breath on her face. The high points of his cheeks were very pink. “Because Da didn’t just fuck a whore, he had to fuck a Jew, too.”
Eleanor didn’t know what to say to that. It was true. Sam looked like he wanted to spit. “William—”
Josie cut in, clearing her throat and scolding, “Now, Junior, language,” but it was the most pleased Eleanor had ever seen her. Lottie looked pale, even paler than usual, slinking back into her seat, sweet tooth forgotten; she looked so much smaller than before, this girl who already had Eleanor beat by a few inches at eleven years old. That thrum rose to a near roar.
Sam scraped his fork across his empty plate, a deafening, obvious screech. It cut through the tension like a knife through butter. “I’m getting awful tired, Josie,” he said like there were several things he was getting tired of right about now. But his tone softened, directed towards Charlotte. “My old age must be catching up to me.”
Eleanor didn’t look up from the tart, uneaten, on her plate. Josie’s voice grated, smooth and polished as it was. “Well, it’s getting late.” Junior didn’t say anything at all; his eyes were still burning a spot into her cheek.
They left with the adjusting of coats and kisses and hugs sent Sam’s way, and only Lottie waving her a goodbye, a simple wiggle of her fingertips before her mother grabbed her wrist and tugged. The closing of the door sounded like a gun going off. Bang.
Staring into the empty space where they once were, Eleanor didn’t really know how to feel, her body slumping into a chair set up against the wall of the wide entryway. She sank, boneless, into the countless throw pillows, covering her eyes with the palm of her hand. Her head pounded. “You didn’t have to make them leave, y’ know. It's okay that they're mad at me.”
Sam let out a sigh that was equal parts exasperated and fond. “Eleanor, what did I say when we first discussed them coming over?”
I know what you said. Still. “But they’re your family,” she insisted, pulling back her hand to glare up at him.
“So are you.”
Sam looked at her, backdropped by the several feet long pastoral painting behind him, and must have seen something in her expression—bewilderment, maybe, or discomfort at that bewilderment—because he let out a great sigh. With a rustle of clothing, he crouched in front of her, his forearms resting against his thighs. The set of his jaw said, look at me. And so, she looked. Really looked. He still had a smile for her, small and warm.
“And I like you better,” Sam told her, eye-to-eye with her now, and his words spoken with that sort of earnestness in his voice and demeanor that he always had around her, that made her ache when she lingered on the thought of it too long. Like poking at a still-healing bruise. Eleanor tucked her smile into her hand, but it didn’t matter: he grinned back.
❀❀❀❀❀❀❀
The Chelsea Physic Garden glasshouses were some of the most beautiful structures Eleanor had ever seen in her twenty-four years. The long glass panels stretched high above her head, matching on either side and meeting in the middle. Plants bracketed her and Sam, the foliage so thick it near shielded their guide from sight, a stout, middle-aged man with his eyes on his watch ever since Sam told him a verbal tour was unnecessary.
Huge benches ladened with terracotta pots, blossoming with blues and pinks and purples and reds. Pops of color so bright they were practically eyesores. She thought The Garden of Medicinal Plants’ section on herbal remedies had been her favorite, based on smell alone, or maybe the pond at the center of the garden itself, chock-full of lily pads and mosses, boggy and messy and alive, rife with aquatic life, but this, this took the cake.
Eleanor was staring, eyes growing bigger and bigger as she tried to take it all in, when Sam knocked into her arm with something sturdy. It crinkled against the sleeve of her blouse—the present he’d brought with him, tucked safely underneath his arm no matter how much she whined and cajoled. “Finally caving, old man?”
Sam rolled his eyes. “Just take it, old woman.” He bugged out his eyes, all drama. “Twenty-four! Already one foot in the grave.” She ripped it out of his fingers with a bark of a laugh.
“I doubt you’ve got more than a pinky toe in yours. Gonna outlast us all, remember?”
It was his turn to laugh. “Just open it, Eleanor. Before I go greyer, yeah?”
Eleanor could live the rest of her life without another gift, but the sound of ripping through wrapping paper was still one of her favorites. All the destruction without any of the guilt. She peeled back the final layer and went still. “Oh,” she whispered, breathy, near soundless.
It was a flower dictionary, with deckled edges that fit the tips of her fingers perfectly, the leather of the cover worn and well-loved. The gilded title sent a rush of familiar fondness through her, a rush so strong she was almost dizzy. She laughed. “Where’d you find this? It looks exactly the same.” Exactly the same as the one she’d gotten for her first birthday from Sam, fourteen years old and curious about anything she could get her hands on. Sam hadn’t really seen the appeal in the language of flowers, she knew, but he’d indulged her anyway. It’d been the only thing she’d asked for that year, the only thing she’d really wanted.
She’d used it for years, a great reference for whenever she wanted to sketch a particular flower, but it’d been chewed up by Sweet Pea right before she turned eighteen years old, made a total ruin of slobber and teeth indents, the ink all smeared and the spine cracked clean down the middle. An apparently rare edition he’d scrounged up for the first time at an old bookstore in East London, she thought she’d never see the likes of it again.
“I have my ways.” Laughing again, Eleanor just shook her head, grinning so wide it hurt.
There was an odd bump between the pages, a groove where everything else was smooth, and when Eleanor went to inspect it, expecting a bent page, she found a pressed flower instead. Bookmarking a page of tiny, yellow petals and even tinier rows of font, was a celandine plant, its ruffled leaves still attached. Perfectly preserved.
“I did some reading,” he explained, when Eleanor couldn’t get herself to speak. She shook her head until she could breathe right again.
“You’re such a sap.”
He gave her that smile, the one just for her. And Eleanor tucked the book tight against her chest, holding on. She bumped his shoulder with hers. “Ready to go home?”
#tommy x oc#tommy shelby x oc#tommy shelby x reader#thomas shelby#thomas shelby x oc#thomas shelby x reader#peaky blinders fic#peaky blinders#peaky blinders fanfic#tommy shelby fanfic#tommy shelby fic#ada thorne#ada shelby#polly gray#michael grey#arthur shelby#john shelby#jessie eden#lgbtq+#tw antisemitism#tw k slur#tw child abuse#bisexuality#oc#ofc#original characters#fanfic#bbc#slow burn#slowburn
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hm, im a pretty casual gamer and i probably wont be able to actually play any other zeldas since the switch is my only console. My favorite tone is darker but with bits of hope but i also like light hearted things! My fave thing abt botw was the characters, how every npc was unique and had a different personality. I also loved the champions! I also liked the setting, that they failed and now had to try again. I also liked Link!! I thought his character was great! i wanna know more abt him!
My heart of hearts is SCREAMING at you to watch a let’s play/full playthru of Majora’s Mask. You can’t really do “cutscene movies” with Zelda like a lot of other games because fully-rendered cutscenes weren’t a thing til BOTW (and... neither was voice acting, for the record. BOTW/AOC is the only zelda with True Voice Acting xD)
BUT Majora’s Mask ticks a lot of your boxes. It’s probably the darkest Zelda game but there’s a lot of bittersweet to it? The synopsis is you’re basically trying to prevent the end of the world in this one specific town, and along the way you get to meet every single person in the town and learn about their entire lives. All the NPCs have stories, incredibly rich ones more often than not, and they all operate on set schedules. So there’s a 3 day, 24-hour cycle and you can mess with time, and you see them doing the same things in the same places at the same times, consistently. It’s really cool!
It’ll grab at your heart but for me, someone who can’t really handle dark/depressing media, there was never a point in MM where I felt like the story was devoid of hope. Things seem very catastrophic and you run around wondering how you can stop something as big as the end of the world but the whole game just kinda feels like you’re laying in a bed with your loved one while bombs go off outside. I cannot explain the tone, but I think you’ll love it. Both the 3DS remake and the original N64 MM look really nice, but I think the N64 version has a bit of a leg up because the low-poly rendering makes the creepy bits of MM extra creepy in a way the 3DS doesn’t.
(This game is also a sequel to Ocarina of Time, but do know you literally do not need to know anything about OOT to play it. The game gives you everything pretty much immediately.)
If you like Link specifically I’d also say Skyward Sword would be a fun one for u!! It’s on the more Lighthearted side tone wise but it’s the game that gives Link the most personality. He’s intended to be a blank slate because the idea is to project yourself & your motivations onto him (they named him for this, he’s the link between the player and the world) but a few times they’ve veered away from that and decided to kinda give him his own feelings and thoughts.
Skyward Sword is about the first Link ever really. Back in the timeline before a lot of Zelda Lore would come into play. And instead of living in this vast, sprawling kingdom, him & Zelda are just childhood besties about to graduate high school. The game literally opens up on their equivalent of, like, prom night sfdgfsghgf.
But what’s cool about Skyward Sword is that because Link has this incredibly emotional connection to Zelda right off the bat, he spends the game pretty much frothing at the mouth intent to protect & save her once the Plot kicks in. There’s never a scene in the game where you can’t see everything he’s feeling painted directly on his face, which is not actually that common for other Links! The chemistry between him and literally every other character really thrives because of this. While some people probably enjoyed the freedom to make their own interpretations of Link, in Skyward it’s really clear what his relationships with everyone are, and you get to learn what kind of person he really is much more easily than in, like BOTW where you have to go digging through diary entries to find out anything about him.
Skyward Sword, being the first chronological game in the timeline, also just has a lot of awesome lore for the franchise as a whole. Like you get to see where the master sword comes from!!!! its actual origin!!! and you get to learn about why Link and Zelda and Ganon keep getting reincarnated and living out this same battle in more or less different ways throughout the ages. You get to learn stuff you didn’t think even mattered, like why there’s a red bird on the Hylian shield, or why Link wears that stupid green outfit in other games. You get to learn wtf Zelda was talking about in BOTW when she talks about the sword “having a voice” and “speaking to her.” Lots of cute stuff to set the tone for the series.
my LAST recommendation is Twilight Princess but the conundrum here is I HAVE NEVER BEATEN THAT ONE because every time I try I just can’t get into it. but do not let my trepidation steer you away it is very much a Me Problem, TP is widely considered one of the best Zeldas of all time. It, like Majora’s Mask, is darker-toned, and from what I can tell has a Pretty Emotive Link as well who has a whole life in the tiny village he starts out in, so I think you’ll probably like that one too! I just cant do my long rambling about it dfghdfghfggf
ANYWAYS hopefully this helps. skyward sword & twilight princess have pretty comprehensive “cutscene movies” but you really gotta watch an LP for Majora to get the full scope of the game. Majora is ALL about the sidequests. If you want reccs for who to watch I’m always gonna say Chuggaaconroy because the respect he gives to the games he plays & their tone is unparalleled & also he’s autistic so you know you’re getting infodumping about the lore at every fucking turn which I LIVE for.
I am so happy you’re enjoying Zelda and hopefully this ask inspires you to dive in!!!! Remember there’s no wrong way to do it! These games are made to be accessible at any point haha. Keep me updated if u want, I’m super excited to learn what you discover!
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Ain't Gonna Be The Last
Red Dead Redemption 2
Arthur Morgan, John Marston
Drabble / Short FanFic - 1194 words
Warnings of gun violence and blood
Written by @fallnangelcreations
Can also be read at AO3 here
Under normal circumstances he would speak his mind, or at the very least ask questions, but, with a gun against his head a man makes much different decisions.
The distinctive click of a hammer being pulled back seemed as loud as a canon, as the barrel of a gun twitched against his temple. Arthur's hands were at his sides and raised shoulder height in surrender, not daring to make a move. He was standing, it was dark, and he had no memory of how he got there.
A shot was fired and a shocked cry of pain wracked through the bewildered outlaw. The bullet tore a searing hot path through the back of Arthur's knee, forcing him excruciatingly to the ground, catching himself from falling completely by landing on his remaining good knee. The gunshot causing crimson to pour down his pant-leg and pool slowly in the dirt beneath him.
The man behind the dual revolvers, held one still pressed firmly to Arthur's head. He was yelling, screaming, nearly frothing at the mouth. But each syllable uttered sounded muted, as if beneath a distorted ocean of water, and Morgan couldn't make out a word of it. His vision was starting to fade in and out, in slow, rhythmic pulses. And the world around him was beginning to brighten between pulses, though shapes.. They were blurry.... soft... and difficult to see...
Bright.
Dark.
Bright.
Dark.
Each time his heavy eyelids pulled open, Arthur struggled to keep his focus a little longer.
The instant his eyes next fell closed, he knew something had gone very wrong. A sharp pain exploded atop his head, and something warm was trickling down his forehead across his eyes. Arthur gasped, and every sense at his disposal intensified for the simplicity of a split second. The actions of reality rushed to him. And a loud shot rang out, as an echo of one man's fate realized a moment too late.
The sound of the gunshot faded into nothing, replaced, a stilled heartbeat later, by the thud of a body hitting dry red dirt. The cracked topsoil thirsty to soak up the quickly flowing pool that turned the earth a deeper hue.
Silence.
A breath was exhaled, and drawn in again raggedly.
Trembling, Arthur lifted his eyes to a glint of silver on the ridge above the canyon in which he had camped. There, in silhouette, stood John. Lowering the rifle clutched in his hands from a firing stance.
Arthur reached up and felt his head, then wiped at his eyes and trailed them to the body of his attacker, laying in the dirt behind him. The bullet had grazed the top of the outlaw's skull and struck the O'Driscoll standing behind him.
It was a man who had a personal vendetta against Dutch's boys, beyond simply following orders. He had managed by happenstance to find Arthur camping alone, and attacked him in his sleep.
The spotted memories of what took place flooded back to the outlaw, as he toppled to a sitting position on the ground and clasped his injured leg while hissing in a breath through his teeth.
Arthur remembered being yanked out of his tent from a dead sleep, and tossed onto the ground beside the smouldering embers in the fire pit, by someone surprisingly larger than himself. He had managed to get to his feet and went for his gun, but it wasn't there. He threw a few disoriented punches into the dark, but only one of them struck home. It hadn't been enough, and something collided with his his head, rendering him unconscious.
When he came to, it had been sudden sharp clarity for the span of a minute, enough to understand his position; he had been somehow standing with a revolver pointed at his head.
He remembered the anger, the yelling, but ... there hadn't been only one angry male voice shouting into the night, there had been two. The other had been... Marston.
The dark haired man's footsteps could be heard haphazardly clambering his way down the hillside, causing lose rocks to skid, and John to cuss a blue streak when he slipped and skinned the palms of his hands in an effort to catch himself. Consequently sending his rifle flying down the incline ahead of him. "God damn it!" He cried out again.
John didn't pause a beat once he picked himself back up, and grabbed his gun while sprinting. A panicked look in his eyes was easily displayed by the sunrise on the horizon, which was dusting the sky with rich golds and pinks.
Arthur had already torn cloth from his blood soaked pants, and was tying it tight around his leg by the time John reached him. Dizziness continued to wash over Arthur, but he fought it off, knowing it would do neither of them any good if he passed out now.
And as the still youngest member of the gang crouched beside him, Arthur realized he had never been more grateful to see John in all his life, until that moment, when he was able to take in the full weight of everything that had happened, and what it meant if John hadn't been there. Truly he couldn't get away with calling John 'kid' anymore, even if he had been of adult age for a few years now.
The injured outlaw did what he could to keep Marston calm in order to stave him away from panicking further. The younger man never was very good at patching wounds, so Arthur had to give instructions on what to do every step of the way, up to the point of being helped onto John's horse; he was too woozy to ride on his own.
John quickly packed up the elder's camp and mounted Old Boy, as the sun finally crested over the top of the ridge on which Marston had been standing, when that fateful shot was fired. Arthur glanced toward it, then slumped forward, resting his forehead on the darker outlaw's shoulder.
"Ya saved my life, John. And one day, I'mmm.. I'm gonna find a way to show you what it ... what you.. mean to me." With those words Arthur went slack, slumping his full weight against the smaller frame of the man before him.
John grunted and scowled, reaching behind himself to shove Arthur back into place when he felt the man start to slide. He figured Arthur would pass out, too much blood was lost not to. The younger man just wished his mentor would have done it in a way that wouldn't have left him awkwardly crushed by the other's weight.
He heaved a heavy sigh, then whistled for Arthur's horse to follow. Muttering, "Dumb ass." Before urging his own horse to go. A few yards down the road he glanced to the unconscious cowboy, who was snoring and drooling down the front of Marston's shoulder.
"You don't gotta repay me.. I know what we mean to each other." John murmured, knowing Arthur would never hear him. "We been savin' each other since we was kids. It's not the first time, and I'm sure it ain't gonna be the last."
#Red Dead Redemption 2#RDR2#Arthur Morgan#John Marston#Cowboys#Wild West#Red Dead#Red Dead Redemption#Drabble#FanFic#Falln Post#My Art#Fic#RDR2 FanFic#RDR2 Fic#RDR2 Drabble#My Writing
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A Real Boy - Chapter 10
Mythical beasts are supposed to stay in the mythical realms, according to Jason. Especially since they're really not supposed to exist. Like, it looked like someone pulled out a JK Rowling book and conjure the most obscure and ridiculously named creature there was.
"I'm not sure if I have to be more concerned that you actually knew the name and specifications of that creature, or that the..." Jason paused his grumble to actually roll his eyes, "--Snallygaster actually exists and is flying in front of me right now."
"I'm..." Conner visibly gulped. "I know the answer of your question number one, but number two is... yeah. I'm absolutely concerned. It's solid."
"No shit, Sherlock." Jason snapped. "And it went through Rachel's soul-self as if it was simply a fog and dragging Cassie behind it. Shouldn't you be there and help your girl out? Like, maybe to make that thing hold still?"
Conner looked somewhere between mildly offended and mildly... scared. And if Tim wasn't feeling the latter, he would have snickered.
As it was his first return to San Francisco for the guys' weekly hangout was rudely interrupted when they saw a massive snallygaster flying over the city.
"This is not what you meant by 'wishes came true', is it, Jason?" he had to check.
"Oh, goddess! No! You can't wish for a made-up beast to come to life - let alone one as big as that. This is more of a rabbit-out-of-a-cat kind of magick. Only the rabbit has wings and the hat was probably... large." Jason replied. "Hold on..." with the last warning, he finally heeded to Tim's mental request to go and check what the creature was made of so that Tim could rearrange its molecules.
"I should help Cassie," Conner mumbled and flew to where Cassie was digging her heels - quite literally, to stop said creature from causing any more damage to the city blocks in front of it. Bart was busy removing people from its path, literally and physically. Rachel was busy removing people's memory of them, not the beast, per sé. Because it would be easier for her to visualize the five of them and pluck said images out of people's brain than a creature that was sure to make the evening news. State news.
"Okay," Jason was back by Tim's side. He, fortunately, could make himself invisible to non-magickal people and magickal people alike if he wanted to. "that creature was non-organic. He's made of fiberglass."
Tim cocked an eyebrow at him. "Seriously."
"Yep, would you like to taste a feather?" Jason replied, offering a single, arm-length feather to Tim. Without even touching it, Tim realized that it was, after all, fiberglass. He sighed.
"Bart, I need you back here. Cassie, Conner, can you make that thing stop for one second, please? Two at most." Tim called through their communicator link. "I need Bart to make a controlled tornado to amplify my spell."
"Strength." Jason corrected.
"Bzzz, same difference!" Bart exclaimed, already standing by Tim. "Whirlwind it is, you want it to expand just as it hit him, yes?"
"Working on it, and I'm starting to get pissed at it..." Cassie growled. "Kon, make it like that old Star Wars movie and wrap it low!" she ordered. Conner took her lasso, wrap it around the creature's legs, and gave her a thumb's-up sign. Cassie roared, and her eagle familiar screeched to form a bolt of electricity that Tim was sure could fell a few elephants and five rhinos. Still, considering the creature was the size of a six-storey building, it was... only shocked.
But the shock rendered it standing still for just enough time for Tim to channel his magick through the wind tunnel, small tornado that would amplify said magick by laws of physics.
"I hope Cassie's armor is not fiberglass..." Jason quipped, just as the yellow beam of Tim's magick started to envelop the creature. "What are you turning it to?"
"Dust. What else that's not dangerous to the surrounding area?" Tim snapped his reply. "And Cassie's armor was given by the Greek Gods. I don't think they do fiberglass..." he added as an afterthought, as Bart vacuumed the dust and deposited it into Rachel's soul-self, where it would then be teleported to hell or something; just in case it would morph back to the creature and/or endanger anyone who inhaled it.
"Cassie's armor, thankfully, forged through heart of a dying sun and was made from the hide of the Nemean Lion by Hephaestus. So no, magick can't alter it." Cassie replied as she landed by Tim's side. "Good thing it's a hot day. People would think they're heatstroke-ing."
"Yeah," Tim sighed as Conner and Rachel also landed on the same roof he was standing on. "This... yeah, we need to hold a serious meeting, guys - of what Bruce Wayne had offered me."
"Okay," Cassie started, but Bart cut her off before she could say whatever was on her mind.
"This serious meeting will still be held over pizza, yeah?"
"Bart!" Cassie snapped. But Tim hold up his hand.
"Yeah, yeah... Kon, card." Tim reminded. Conner handed the credit card to Bart, who squealed and zipped off even before anyone could say anything.
"Thank goddess I wasn't assigned to that kid... I'd be very, very tired..." Jason quipped.
"I get tired just looking at him go, and I can actually reach his speed..." Conner remarked. "Anyway! This is about the Bruce Wayne meeting last... what was it? Tuesday? Wednesday?"
"Thursday, actually, Conner. You've known me all these times and still don't remember that I only have Thursday afternoon free from classes..." Tim replied dryly.
"What about Bruce Wayne?" Cassie wanted to know. "Diana is frothing about him and I think she has a crush or something. Which is weird because Wayne is like... dense. Not Diana's type at all."
"Rae, can you get us back to the island, please?" Tim prompted. Rachel just nodded, and a thick black smoke enveloped them all. Tim's mind momentarily wondered and analyzed the difference between Rachel's teleportation smoke and Jason's. Jason's was white, thin, breathable, but singeing the eyes due to its lengthy linger. Rachel's smoke was deep black, thick like fog, cold when breathed in, and dissolved within less than two seconds.
"Don't think of how to replicate this smoke, Timmers, it's hell-related." Jason quipped, tapping his forehead gamely.
"I'm not! I'm..." Tim started, but sighed as the outline of the meeting room - a.k.a. the dining table - in their basecamp started to come to focus. "No, not the smoke. I just wondered if... I can't help wanting to know, you know." he told Jason, and Rachel, who looked at him quizzically.
"You have already decided," Rachel remarked, annoyingly able to read Tim's mind. Well, actually, she literally is able to read minds, only that Tim distinctly remembered that he had specifically asked her not to. As Tim glared back at her as she walked toward the meeting table, she blithely replied, "no, Timothy, I did not read your mind. It was there all over your body language." she paused and turned to look at Tim. "Not everything needed demonic mind-reading abilities."
Tim rolled his eyes. "Okay, fine. I have decided for myself, that is. I'm... I've promised that I'm not going to sell the idea to you guys, but merely presenting it. Because I want you guys to decide on your own." he said. "Bart? You good?"
Bart, still on his commlink and probably about halfway to Nevada, commented. "Yup, I'm going to this amazing pizza place in Vegas and... yeah, you keep talking."
"There's a good pizza place in Vegas?" Jason mouthed, and Conner snickered.
"Okay, while we wait for Bart, why don't you start from the top, Tim. I got the feeling that this has something to do with you," Cassie decided, glaring at Jason.
"Hey!" Jason protested. "Well, kind of. But not entirely. It has more to do with Tim."
Tim sat down at the head of the table, inhaled deeply, and began. "Okay, yes. It did have something to do with Jason. But his part was just the push I needed to do something. It - whatever 'it' is - was started with my mom, apparently.
"As you all knew, my mom died while protecting my dad from this... insane voudou man called Obeah Man. But after my visit to Bruce Wayne's place a few days ago, I found out that my mom was not 'just' - quote-unquote - a hero for saving my dad. She was a hero long before that...
"Her job back then was to collect artifacts that are real and dangerous, and switch the ones in museums with fake ones--"
"--woah... a Real-life Lara Croft!" Bart quipped. The whole team, even Jason, groaned.
"Yeeeah, kind of. Only she's not only getting them for personal collection and stuff. Definitely not my family's personal collection. Instead she would send them to the Justice League via Bruce Wayne; where they would then defuse or destroy the dangerous ones. Wayne's job is to generally investigate those who had used or had been known to have owned or used, or has been looking for a specific artifact. He's assisted by the Oracle--" Tim stopped again as there were sudden screeching and slamming sounds coming through the comm-links. "Bart? You okay?"
"Pizza's fine, guys! So am I. I just lost concentration for a bit and almost cause a pileup!" Bart giggled. There was another collective groan. "Hey! The Oracle! I mean, isn't anyone else stoked at that? The All-Seeing Oracle!" he added excitedly. "Did you get to meet them? Can we go meet Oracle?"
Tim sighed, tried to pick up where he'd left off when something else struck him. "Okay, anyway-- wait, why are you so excited about Oracle? You know something I don't?"
"Just the legends!" Bart replied. "That they had singlehandedly dismantled the King Kobra cult without even being seen, and the King Kobra staff is in their hands even before the cult's priests knew it was missing. That the priests swore up and down that it was as potent as before the last time they'd used it, and it was like, a few days before it went missing and there have been no break-ins and whatnot." he ended the sentence as he appeared right in front of them with two large bags of pizza boxes. "Your card," he handed the card to Tim.
"Okay, wow... I mean, I didn't know about King Kobra or whatever that is..." Tim remarked as a massive slice of pizza was placed right in front of him. "Thanks, Jason. I usually would just wait until they get one before getting myself one."
Jason snorted. "From the pace of it, you'd be lucky if you can still snag the mozzarella remnants from the lid." he quipped.
"Hey! Some of us need a lot of calories, alright?" Bart protested semi-lazily as he practically inhaled his third slice.
"Okay, pizza's here. We've eaten. Tim, continue, please?" Cassie prompted.
"Right. Long story short, Bruce told me that he has had us monitored for a while, and knew that we've been trying to defend the city in our way. He offered to train us, especially in the physical aspects of what we do, so that we can be more effective and maybe would cause less property damage.
"The thing is, this came with Jason's warning that the future would be a lot more dangerous for us, the young ones in particular; and more specifically kids like us who are yet to either manifest their magick, or have manifested but did not have a place to train like we do. His argument is that if we can get like, professionally trained; we can be the fodder between the untrained new magis and the older ones and stuff like that. And if we end up facing something we can't handle on our own, we can call them for assistance." Tim finished the last two sentences in quite a record time that, if they weren't used to Bart's speedy speech-pattern, they might not catch on.
But they did.
"So they want us to be the JL's sidekick." Conner concluded.
"Partners," Tim clarified. Conner scoffed.
"Right. Since when would adults see us as equals?" he retorted. "Anyway, why would we need them? Aside of the possible emergency contact and whatnot? We're good on our own."
"I can't disagree with Conner. I mean, I love Diana and Donna with all my heart, but when it comes to mystics, they could be a hella hypocritical." Cassie agreed. "If I hadn't promised I'd keep everybody in check and focused on keeping the lot of us invisible, they'd have barged in here and like, drag me outta here kicking and screaming, probably."
Tim gritted his teeth quietly. Cassie had a point; in spite of her half-sisters being in teams of their own, they tend to be overbearing when it comes to what they perceived as Cassie's 'safety'. Never mind that she was almost as invulnerable as they are, or almost as strong and controlled. Or that she actually has a mother who could educate her on life in general.
"Rachel? Bart?" He tested.
Bart shrugged, "hey, I'm happy as long as I'm with you guys. So whatever the majority goes, I'm going." he replied. At 13, Bart was still significantly younger than they are, and could end up as a liability if he wasn't being fostered by another speedster, Max Mercury, who has a daughter who was older than they all.
"Rachel?" Tim asked.
"I see that Bruce Wayne is not the daft playboy persona he showed off in public. His mind has so many facets and turns that even I couldn't see - likely blocked off by his daimon. But even with my vote, we would be in a stalemate, Tim." Rachel replied in her soft voice. "How about we mull this through the week, and by next weekend, you can present some compelling argument or evidence why we should join them."
"Alright," Tim sighed and started to take a bite of his slice - two slices now, because Jason apparently got impatient and was kind of concerned at the speed of Bart finishing the pizzas.
"Alright, now we go do fun stuff!" Conner decided.
Jason was quiet, and it took way longer for Tim than necessary to realize that the quiet should have been seen as ominous.
#Tim Drake#Jason Todd#Conner Kent#Cassie Sandsmark#Bart Allen#Rachel Roth#a snallygaster#no-capeAU#JayTim#Magi!AU
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G is for Gadgets and Gimmicks {1/3}
A/N: This is what happens when you watch a lot of Hallmark movies: an obligatory bookstore AU with a twist. Based on this prompt (x), in which anti-technology Bookstore Owner meets Computer Geek, and bickering ensues. Enjoy!
Also available: on AO3
***
com∙pro∙mise (n.)
a settlement of differences reached by mutual concession
***
At six minutes to six on Sunday afternoon, the cheap, brass overhead doorbell rings for the first time since noon.
“We'll be closing soon,” Oliver calls from the back corner of the cafe area.
The high-pitched ding is an unwelcome interruption from his crucial task of determining which scones are worth wrapping up and saving for tomorrow morning’s rush hour (at most, twenty-five extra customers beyond his regular clientele) and which ought to be pitched. He starts disposing of the near-burnt scones shoved in the back row. He needs to remember to not let Rene handle any of the baking. That kid would eat rocks if it came down to it.
While Oliver is usually not opposed to whipping up some fresh dough for his customers, he has been on his feet for the last nine hours and would prefer to head home early and maybe catch an hour of television and actually get some of that alleged decent night’s rest everyone’s always telling him he needs. Everyone being mostly Thea and Rene.
Besides, after dumping out ten perfectly charcoaled pocket pastries, he still has a dozen or so left on the tray that are decent enough to sell. He shuffles the most stale pastries towards the front row for his 11AM executive assistant and personal assistant late-breakfast-early-lunch-snack-run personnel from the business tower across the street, those fresh-out-of-grad-school, starry-eyed do-gooders, who are always checking their emails and won’t be able to taste the difference.
He almost had one of those once.
He wonders how much easier his life would be if he had a personal assistant now.
Of course, he’d have to pay said assistant, and he’s not exactly drowning in excess and privilege like he was a decade ago.
He’s the untrained owner of a small bookstore buried in a downtown city. And maintaining a struggling bookstore in a struggling economy is an arduous task at best and a depressing venture at worst. So, most work days are roughly somewhere in between. Mediocre. One day bleeds into the next until he forgets what day of the week it is until he checks the schedule.
When Oliver reads for leisure (ironically, he has very little opportunity to read for leisure), all the startup models and self-help books and even the occasional tycoon novel say the same thing: selling your soul to save your business should feel normal.
Unfortunately, the uncontrollable ingredient in this scheme called bookselling is the market.
He’s lucky if his small store makes it onto the back page of the monthly Starling City Living. Not that anyone buys magazines nowadays. Not that anyone has the time or desire to browse second-hand and third-hand books.
So he does what he can to keep his store afloat, cutting the staff’s hours and preserving day-old pastries and leaving that irritating antique bell afixed over the door. He’s been opposed to the doorbell from the start, but it came with the lease, and Thea thinks it’s good luck and swears it adds to the aesthetic of the place. Rene calls it a gimmick, and Oliver is inclined to agree with him. Nearly everything about this job is a gimmick.
As though on cue, a pair of heels pounds against old wooden floors, signaling the approach of his lone customer and pulling him up from behind the counter.
Oliver pastes on his best Customer Service smile, one truly useful skill he’s acquired thanks to an irregular attendance to dozens of high-end parties growing up. “What can I get for you?”
His smile slips when he sees her.
She, quite literally, takes his breath away.
While her fashion sense screams Complicated Order, she also exudes a soft demeanor and remains fixated on her small infernal device, wearing an adorable furrow between her eyebrows, thumbs flying a mile a minute.
The advantage of unhealthy technological immersion, however, is that it allows him to study her undetected. A Study In Scarlet of his own making.
His gaze travels slowly from her heels and blood-red jacket to her high blonde ponytail and feminine glasses and Neon Pink lipstick that is somehow flattering to her face. She wears so many shades of red that she looks like she escaped from a Valentine’s Day ad. He wonders if she’s one of those poor weekend executive assistants with a propensity for espresso and no social life.
She startles him when she finally looks up from her phone, and he recovers by trying to push one of his socialite smiles back onto his face, though it feels even more fake than usual.
The cute blonde throws out her question before he can repeat is. “Hi, could you tell me what the passcode is for the WiFi?”
What? He blinks. “There is no WiFi here.”
“What?” She sounds horrified, like he’s just told her her dog died. She seems peppy enough to be a dog person.
“I’m sorry, I don’t understand--which, for me is kind of new. How exactly do you expect to run a business in the twenty-first century without accessible WiFi?”
He swallows. She sounds like his landlord. And his sales rep. And pretty much every other millennial who's miraculously managed to glance up from their rectangular deathtraps long enough to wander into this place.
He's annoyed that she's taking their side--and a bit irritated with himself for being attracted to her in the first place.
“Well, if you don’t like it, you can leave.” He doesn’t need the extra five minutes of labor and $3.50 profit her one cup of coffee was going to provide him anyway.
She flinches, and he regrets his gruffness immediately, but it’s too late. Her mouth pops open. She is clearly taken aback, and frankly so is he at his own behavior, that his pride has hurt a stranger and ruined a perfectly good sale.
She blinks a few times and then rallies enough gumption to tilt her chin up at him. “Fine.”
Before he has a chance to apologize, she spins and marches away, her ponytail flapping like a golden military flag. She is three steps from the door when a loud crackle of thunder shakes the room, and the sky opens up, unleashing buckets of water. Sudden gusts of wind begin spraying the rain sideways. The street is a wind tunnel of gushing water.
Oliver groans, moving around the counter to find his visitor in scarlet struggling to unfold her umbrella in as quiet and dignified a manner as possible.
“Your umbrella’s not gonna do you much good in this storm,” Oliver tells her.
Her shoulders tense again, this time with surprise but less agony.
He’s doing better. He can be civilized. He takes a hesitant step closer, softening his voice. “It should pass in a few minutes. Why don’t you grab a seat, and I’ll get you a cup of a coffee?” She shifts uncomfortably, avoiding his eyes. “It’s on the house,” he adds with a twitch of a smile, not that she notices.
She nods. “Thanks.”
The rain does not let up in a few minutes. If anything, it worsens. So Oliver devotes their extra time to concocting a supreme cup of coffee to make his guest feel better. (Any consideration he might have given to save face for the sake of his business is long forgotten.) He froths some half-and-half and at the last second decides to add honey and a sprinkle of cinnamon on top.
“I hope this isn’t too presumptuous,” he says when he reaches the corner chair she’s nestled herself into. “You look like a cream and sugar kind of gal.”
Her eyebrows lift. “Because I wear a skirt?”
“I…” He freezes. He honestly has no idea what to say to that.
She accepts the steaming cup with a teasing smile. “Cream and sugar is perfect. I just wanted to see if I could render you speechless, too.”
“I deserve that.” He crosses his arms and leans against the window, putting a small but safe distance between them.
She takes a few sips, and then her eyebrows pull together. For a second, he’s worried that maybe the milk’s turned sour. But then she says, “Oh wow. This is actually really good--not that...not that I was expecting it to not be good. It’s just it’s so hard to find a decent cup of coffee these days. I don’t really consider myself to be a coffee snob--though, I don’t suppose anyone would consider themselves to be a snob.” She lifts two fingers to make air quotation marks around the word snob. And the way her lips pucker and nose scrunches up makes her seem youthful and winsome.
“But honestly,” she continues, “the coffee at the office tastes like watered-down battery acid, and Starbucks is always so crowded and overpriced, and I’m already behind on this week’s data interface plans and…. I’m sorry. You don’t want to hear all of this.”
His lips twitch. Now that she’s apparently forgiven him, she really is quite the talker, isn’t she? “Actually, it’s kind of nice,” he tells her honestly. “You don’t mind if I start straightening things up? You’re welcome to stay as long as you like.” So what if he doesn't get to watch his hour of television tonight. So what if he doesn’t get to crash early. Sleep is overrated. Isn’t that why he owns a coffee shop?
“Thank you. I could use a break.” She visibly relaxes, sinking deeper into the chair.
“Boss keeping you busy all weekend?” He tilts his head toward the skyscraper across the road.
She hesitates, an uncomfortable look crossing her face. But it vanishes just as quickly. “Um...yes, you could say that.”
They shift into an easy, contended silence, as Oliver organizes the R through T shelf in literary fiction. He may not have finished his degree, but he knows Ra comes before Ru.
Eventually, he asks her about her work, and she chatters away, incessant and vivacious. While a third of what she says goes over his head, Oliver is unsure whether her job in the world of computer science truly is more exciting than his average, analog lifestyle or if she just possesses the natural ability to make everything sound exciting.
“Normally, I don’t like to brag about my job, but this week we have a really big sales pitch to make in front of our board of directors. My team and I have been slaving over this device for weeks, and a lot of company jobs are riding on the design. And I’m the one who’s going to be giving the presentation, and as you can see I tend to ramble….”
It takes him a moment to realize she’s waiting for a response.
“What kind of device is it?” he asks, glancing back over his shoulder to let her know he is fully engaged--or at least, as fully engaged as he can be--in their mostly one-sided conversation. He notices the rain has stopped, but she no longer appears to be in a hurry to leave. Something warm settles in his chest.
“Oh, it’s a, um, biometric chip implant that hopefully can be embedded into any spinal nervous system and help repair paralysis.”
“Wow. Really?”
She shrugs. “That is the plan.”
“And you designed it?” He hops down from the ladder.
“Not me. One of my...colleagues. I’m more of a numbers girl. I do all the back-end coding to support the engineering design. I’m like the Crick to his Watson--though, really, I suppose I’m more of the Rosalind Franklin in this scenario, who was basically cheated out of her Nobel Prize.”
He blinks, feeling like he’s completely lost the trail of her thoughts.
Thankfully, she finishes with, “They discovered DNA.”
He nods once. “Right. I do know what DNA is.”
She smiles brightly, and at once he feels both more foolish and more worthwhile under her scrutiny.
As she begins slowly packing up her things, the Lost Treasures section catches his eye. He picks up the book before he’s really made the conscious choice to do so. “Hey, I don’t know if you like to read or if your boss gives you time to read. I don’t even know if this is something that you would enjoy but…”
Wow, he is failing at this. Has it really been this long since he’s talked to a woman other than his sister about something other than her coffee order? Thea’s voice suddenly fills his head. Geez, Ollie, just spit it out.
He shakes his head, stretching out his hand before he can change his mind. “Here.”
She stands and glances down at the book. Code Girls: The Untold Story of the American Women Code Breakers Who Helped Win World War II.
“It’s a recent acquisition, and what you were talking about made me think about it. I know it’s not the same thing. I mostly read history books myself, and I just thought… You don’t have to read it if you don’t want to. And if you don’t like it, you can always bring it back. No charge.” Does he sound as ridiculous as he feels?
“Oh. Well, and I mean this in the nicest way possible, I’m actually not much of a reader. I mean, other than the occasional novel on my Kindle.”
His hand falls, and he tries to ignore the way his heart pinches strangely at the malicious word kindle. “Oh. Right. Of course.”
“But you did just give me a free cup of what is unquestionably the best coffee I have had in months. The least I can do is pay you for the book.”
She reaches for her wallet, but he stops her. “No, I mean, it was my suggestion so…”
She wears that adorable frown of hers, eyebrows scrunching together. “Last I checked, this is not a library. You’ll never make it if you just keep giving away your product. That’s like Business Management 101.”
He huffs a short laugh. “Consider it an apology. For the way I acted...earlier.”
She finally relents, tucking the book inside her purse. “Okay. But next time, I will be paying for my coffee.” She points a finger at him, silently demanding that he keep up his end of the bargain.
“Next time?” He raises an eyebrow, wishing his heart not to cling to an indifferent promise. She is just being polite, he reminds himself. There is no guarantee he’ll see her again after today.
She tips her head, thoughtful and almost...flirtatious? No. That can’t be it. This is just part of her odd but sweet personality. “Despite your current lack of WiFi, I kind of like it here. This room has a nice, vintage, back-to-the-Victorian-Era ambiance.”
He smiles. If Thea were here she’d be graciously demanding a customer review for their online presence. Maybe he can pitch that as the company slogan at their next staff meeting. Verdant Books: the right place for a nice Victorian Era experience.
“I'm Felicity, by the way.” She holds out her hand to him, and his heart beats a little faster at the way her slender, strong, perfect fingers feel wrapped around his own.
“Felicity.” He likes the sound of her name and the pleasing way his lips and tongue move together to form the word.
Even after their hands go still, she doesn’t pull away, and he doesn’t release her. An amused look crosses her face. “This is the part where you tell me your name,” she whispers playfully.
He clears his throat. “Right. Oliver.”
Is it possible her smile grows, or is he merely imagining things? “Nice to meet you, Oliver. Bookseller and Barista Extraordinaire. By the way, the term barista is not meant to be emasculating at all. It is a compliment of the highest order. If I were a queen, I would dub you Knight of the Java.”
She winces, clearly embarrassed, a blush blooming on her cheeks.
But Oliver laughs, a real, full laugh, something he hasn’t done in a long time. “That’s not a bad title.” Coming from anyone else, the title would have sounded cheap, like one of those paranormal teen books Thea is always pestering him to try. But coming from Felicity, the title adds another facet to her intriguing, gemmed character. After all, some titles are misleading; some titles are commemorative; and some titles are significant just by who their author is.
***
Tag Team: @dust2dust34, @mel-loves-all, @releaseurinhibitions, @scu11y22
(Let me know if you wished to be tagged in the updates!)
#olicity#olicity fanfic#olicity fanfiction#olicitysquee#olicity au#oliver x felicity#my stuff#my fic#shelley does fic#g is for gadgets and gimmicks
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Tempestuous Phantoms Excerpt (Claire)
Posting in hopes of some criticism ( this is a first chapter so yeahhh)
⚜
SHE POURED THE poisoned tea into the traitor’s cup.
The Madam was nursing her hand with a champagne-doused handkerchief; glaring at the dog “Wolfish mutt, isn’t he? He might even give me rabies.”
Claire Rayleigh chuckled; the sound a whisper in the rhythm of the ongoing storm. She might have acted more sensibly under present circumstances had it not been for her pounding migraine. It was an ‘amusement’ in itself to endure a day of tedious tasks, to deliver court commissions to a Queen she wasn’t even affiliated with (and only obeyed because she had other businesses in this place that prolonged her stay, making her bound to her authority).
But to find the Madam lurking drunkenly in her office−sprawled against Claire’s satin sofa with a bitten hand, helping herself with her own stash of champagne and a beloved set of vinyl playing in her gramophone was the last straw for her.
She couldn’t wait to get out of this damned country.
“Anarchy protects what’s mine,” Claire replied matter-of-factly “Including my manor. Whatever the hell you’ve ingested must’ve been strong enough for you to forget you were trespassing in my residence.”
“You didn’t change the locks.” the Madam drawled in her silken voice “I was feeling nostalgic. After all, this used to be my home.”
“Yes, well, you should’ve considered the sentimental value before you handed me the deed.” Claire set the silver tray on the table adjacent to the sofa and offered the Madam the cup “Here, it’ll warm you.”
Anarchy growled, clearly displeased at the gesture “Easy, boy.” Claire petted him; though it didn’t change his tense stance one bit.
“I much prefer your feline companion.” the Madam remarked “Though little thing always runs off.”
“Veda goes wherever she pleases but she always returns.” Her hands fumbled for the contents in her drawer, eventually finding her smoking pipe. She turned to the windowsill, watching the raindrops and trail of smoke obscure her view of the golden-lit streets. Though in reality, she was really observing the Madam through the reflection of the glass.
Despite the cold weather, Madam Seymour de Flerida was more appropriately dressed for the bedchamber− long locks of burgundy-dyed hair, a diamond choker on her neck, a face heavily painted in branded cosmetics who wore a scarlet and black-laced silk negligee with a panther fur coat slung on her shoulders. Despite the glamour she bore, she didn’t seem happy with whatever she had. It seemed her brown eyes only lit up during a party or when she catered her services to rich clientele.
Could that be why she became a turncoat? It was hard to imagine she would betray a Queen who offered her compensated income (illegal business aside). The most likely reason that sprung in Claire’s mind was a personal grudge of some kind. After all, caged emotions eventually simmered into catastrophic ends.
“This is some savory tea,” Madam Seymour complimented “Lemon mint, ginger, and something else.”
Claire struggled to hide a crooked smile “It’s imported from New Amrhys.”
Images flashed in her mind’s eye: An old man’s wily grey gaze, tresses of dark hair adorned with red blossoms, crinkled smiling eyes, silhouettes of the elite in a masquerade, a whirlwind of dances, drinks, laughter and dancing and dancing…
She screwed her eyes shut before the bloodcurdling screams begun.
“You never talk about New Amrhys, your childhood home.” Seymour bobbed her head to the side; her glossy lips pouted.
Her eyes opened to the sight of lightning flashing in the window “There’s simply nothing to discuss.” Claire inhaled the toxic fumes from her pipe “Though, it was known as Amrhys in my time there.”
“What’s changed?”
Tendrils of smoke enveloped her face “Apart from the dethronement of the Dimasalang heir, I wouldn’t know. It’s been a decade since I’ve stepped foot in the place.”
“Come now, humor me. The storm is still vigorous.”
Claire raised a brow “Let’s start with what you know, then.” Damned poison, she thought. How much longer of this nosy nonsense must I endure?
The Madam’s sultry giggle accompanied the tune’s melody “How about the fact that your name is actually not Rayleigh?”
For a few steady moments, only the vinyl made a sound; the singer’s vibrato drowning Claire’s stream of thoughts “I beg your pardon?”
Seymour made a satisfied noise “Don’t play coy with me, darling.”
Claire snapped her fingers twice to summon Anarchy to her side. Tension built in her taut shoulders “I’m about as coy as a fish in an empty pond. What are you on about?”
Madam Seymour stood, a lazy grin plastered on her face “Could the fish be flopping due to lack of remembrance, then?”
It was difficult to be present at the conversation when her thoughts and the downpour hummed louder; contesting the white noise that echoed in her mind. Her innards felt like a gooey mesh as her heart fought to pump presence of mind in her system. No one, not even the Queen, knew she was an amnesiac. It wasn’t something she was open about, though it was no surprise. To have intelligence over the political intrigues over the aristocrats who co-ran the country, to know the meticulous details of information on local and foreign figures …
She would know what went on in the lives of others, but could not bring herself to remember her own; the greatest irony for a spymaster.
To have that weakness exploited by someone who could use it against her was not ideal “I have no love for your subtlety, Madam. Try to use small words, if you can.”
The woman walked idly; encircling her like a vulture “You’re still wearing suits and putting on airs- ruthless, mysterious. A brooding foreigner struts to the Queen’s court, snatching her favor, and you didn’t think anyone would conspire to bring you down?”
“So, I’m a target for one your debauched associates, is that it?”
A beat of silence answered her rhetorical question. It was an answer in itself: Not yet, but in time.
Seymour opened her glossy mouth to speak, but only a strangled noise came out. Her face contorted in confusion; clearly not understanding what had just occurred. Her hands went to her neck, her grip adjusting to her internally-tightening throat.
In that instant, the Madam’s black eyes turned accusatory “Y-you-”
Her knees buckled as Seymour made gnarled noises; hands still on her throat, as if her grip would stop what was to come.
Claire rubbed Anarchy’s left cheek- a silent command from his owner. Find Veda, get out of the house. In obedience, the dog barked to affirm and ran towards the door.
She sighed and sat in her office chair, fingers scrambling for some paper and ink. The scratches of the plume almost tuned out the restrained cries of pain. She wasn’t even in the mood to write an encrypted report after dealing with the aftermath of the Queen’s dirty work.
“Worry not,” Claire said at last, her lavender seal imprinting on the black envelope “The poison’s slow-acting. Plenty of time for you to suffer.”
She looked at the Madam; still kneeling with a reddened face, blue veins protruding from her neck “Powdered wing of the barrlado, the most poisonous butterfly in the world.” Seymour sounded impressed.
Claire slid the envelope aside for later delivery “A small dose equates a long-awaited death; enough renders you semi-paralyzed and half-witted.”
“At your mercy, you mean.”
Claire threaded her fingers together “Maybe the dosage wasn’t nearly enough. In any case, you know why you’re here.”
“Whatever you’re about to accuse me of, it doesn’t die with me-”
“A claim with legitimate evidence hardly seems accusatory to me. It seems more like the truth.” Claire pulled out a drawer and withdrew a large book with a covering of purple velvet, throwing it unceremoniously in front of the Madam “Does that look familiar, my dear? I’m sure it does.” The Madam’s eyes gave away nothing, but Claire knew better. After all, it was the woman’s personal ledger.
“A book of sums in your own handwriting, several expenses linked to ‘charity work’,” Claire glared at her knowingly “Though we both know just how generous your traitorous heart can be.”
A smile tugged at the Madam’s lips “Perhaps it’s something we can agree on.”
Claire fumbled for several pieces of paper “And let’s not forget the correspondence between you and the very people who have laid siege to the Parliament’s Square. Brilliant encryptions, your bastards gave my cryptographers a hard time.”
The Madam coughed violently, froth building at the corners of her mouth “Deities-damned, why are you being so casual about this?”
The other woman was busy eyeing a photograph “Because I’ve heard the Inferno is a difficult place for the spirit to be, so I decided to ease your conscience a little.” Claire’s turned the picture over: A black and white photo of a group of elitists, one of which was the Madam herself, her dolled-up face merely a half-smile amongst the wolfish grins of her debauched peers “I thought you might want to see your death warrant.”
“But that photograph isn’t mine; none of the people there even have that copy.”
“None other than the photographer.”
The Madam spat her foamy saliva “Yes, none other than the dead photographer.”
Claire chuckled “The fact still remains that you’re heavily involved with the terrorist attacks. You’re a funder that even held a grand party or so it says here on one of the letters.”
She could hear the Madam’s teeth chatter as she knelt in the spot she was rooted in. Even if Seymour attempted to harm her, the effort would be rather futile, given the five figures closed around her in a circle.
The woman had no sixth sense of any kind. Only Claire could witness how their eyes were bloodshot and distant, their complexions translucent from the trappings of the afterlife. But they would not know peace until Seymour met her end; their grip on her said as much.
Surprisingly, it wasn’t the spirits that surrounded Seymour that brought her concern. It was the Queen’s command.
Claire Rayleigh was above all a negotiator of intelligence, not an assassin-for-hire. She sold her services during the skirmishes that transpired in the war; learning their numbers and their tactics to weaken the opposing forces into surrender.
But that beautiful morning bore bad news after bad news. A messenger had announced in the throne room that the enemy had intercepted Claire’s spies-the very same souls that now held her- laid siege to Parliament’s Square, marched there with the royal Colonel’s head wavering as a makeshift banner of victory.
When she had managed to uncover the truth of the war, of the traitors within the country, Claire immediately reported it all to the Queen; the order was swift, subtle yet seemingly absolute.
“The Inferno is boiling for another soul. See to it that they meet the place half-way, no?”
Madam Seymour snickered “So that’s what our beloved Queen has been up to? Orchestrating my demise?”
“Before you make hers, yes.” Claire stood and knelt before the Madam, her deft fingers tracing the lines of the choker she had on “If you had enough fortune to fund a terrorist attack, why bother stealing the Queen’s jewelry?” She twisted the band of diamonds in such a way that it choked the Madam further. Porcelain hands clawed at her gloved ones, but to no avail.
The five spies gripped on her tighter, rendering the woman paralyzed as Claire curled her fingers “That bitch you call your queen is a usurper,” Seymour squealed out “Bribing criminals to do her bidding while allowing them freedom in exchange of surrendering their illicit businesses that made them rich in the first place?” A husky cackle escaped her lips.
“This is how you repay the Queen’s mercy?” Claire countered, tilting her head in curiosity “By siding with the tyrannical father she overthrew?”
“I would rather kneel to an ambitious man of principle than a bitch whose tail is tucked between her sore legs.” Seymour whispered with an obvious effort.
“Well tonight you kneel to Death, and nothing can save you now.” With a sudden tug, the clasp of the choker flies off its hinges “You disappoint me, Seymour.”
Claire had never seen the Madam smile as wide as she did then, despite the trickle of blood oozing from her nostril “Wait for your turn, Rayleigh. I promise you, you’ll meet your due. You might even join me, one day.” Silence was no solace to Claire’s racing heart “Or will that day be this one?”
She looked at the waiting corpses; their figures waiting for her order “Not today, I’m afraid.” Claire nodded once to them all “Be at peace, my tempestuous friends.”
This elicited a confused glare from Seymour, but in an instant, there was a harsh ripping sound. Claire could see the essence of ether separating from the Madam’s corporeal body.
“I swear on my soul, Claire Rayleigh! The truth of Clarita Aguilar will be unveiled, and by the Deities’ mercy, the rest of the world will know of your treachery. Not even you can protect her then!”
The five souls were adamant in their tug-of-war, with the Madam refusing to be apart from her corpse. Seymour began a petty catfight- tugging their hair, slapping their faces- that ended in the spies restraining her by the limbs, escorting her to the mouth of the hearth.
Into her inferno.
And while her soul left, her corpse lay by the carpet. Her neck still donned the veins that the barrlado had pumped in her system; leaving her beautiful complexion marred, as her soul always had been.
Annoyingly, Seymour de Flerida’s death only left her with more questions. True, she had uncovered many more figures linked to the recent disaster on the ongoing war, but it was just merely the beginning.
Claire knelt to the Madam; her fingers hovering over Seymour’s eyes to close them “Rigartis en morta, muy il rigar muert”
Born of spitfire, and so to the flames you shall return. It was an old saying in Amrhys, to those who chose the wickedness within them until the very end. It was meant for the stubborn, for those who did not conform in any aspect in life except for their own belief. To those who did not bow to anything other than themselves.
To their phantoms that were to be reckoned with.
Claire couldn’t help but frown. Aguilar. The name wasn’t particularly notable. It didn’t strike any sense of recognition, even after several minutes of pondering over the thousands of names she had come to encounter. She made a mental note to investigate the relevance of this Clarita Aguilar to the loss of her memories. But at the same time, her impatience got the best of her. Whenever a mystery was uncovered, another question was left in its wake. Claire searched her pack for a cigar. The cycle of it all unnerved her to no end.
She found herself staring at the Madam; thinking of the possible turn of events upon Seymour’s downfall. The harlots would probably print missing posters by the third day of her absence, as per protocol. They would eventually reinstate a new madam due to the popular demand amongst its patrons. Though the dispersion of the ‘prized starlets’, as Seymour affectionately called them, seemed like a more likely scenario. Claire knew of the several girls who were tired of their trade. They would probably use the Madam’s disappearance as an opportunity to escape her control and return to their provinces. In all honesty, Claire would have preferred the shutdown of the brothel altogether. While she had no arguments over anyone’s libido, she was of the mindset that the Jhinsen would fare better in their diplomatic communications if they didn’t have the reputation of being infatuated by whores; evident in their active participation in the power play of the kingdom.
Claire struck a match and held it to a cigar’s tip; abandoning her smoking pipe for a safer alternative. It was made of mint with tampered sage; a salve for her impatience and stress. It wasn’t as gratifying as tobacco, but she had to discipline herself, so it’d have to do.
She made a move towards the cadaver but stopped when a hard substance pierced her shoe. It broke her from her thoughts when she saw she had stepped on a diamond. Her gaze then wandered to the trail that surrounded Seymour’s head like tiny stars. The spymaster proceeded to pick up the pieces of jewelry. Oddly enough, pain gradually built in the back of her eyes as she picked up each diamond. Claire winced, gritting her teeth. Something wasn’t right.
The diamonds were placed on a knapsack Claire took from her inventory. She dumped them on her table and searched the office for some disposable cloth. The spymaster wracked her brains out, a realization at the tip of her tongue.
And then it struck her.
Knowing Seymour de Flerida, a disowned Duchess from the West Shore, the act of thievery would be beneath her. That meant she didn’t steal the Queen’s jewelry, it was most likely bribed to her. Perhaps someone close to the Queen’s quarters gave a tip to the Madam, a secret leftist in the kingdom.
There wasn’t a shortage of sorcerers in the kingdom, either. The spymaster may not know much about the magic in this realm, but she knew enough to identify when sorcery was inflicted. She glanced at the diamonds. Upon closer inspection, she saw that the diamonds lost its sheen; a faded grey that gave her a distinct aura of something otherworldly and sinister.
It’s a cursed necklace.
Claire knew assumptions wouldn’t solve anything, but it somewhat cleared her mind. But she was certain of the hex in the diamonds. There was no mistaking it.
In a whim, she grabbed the knapsack and threw it into the fire. It made a crisp noise; comparable to the sound of something frying in a pan in high heat. She watched the fabric gradually burn into a pile of embers, unsure whether her actions were wise or whether it had any effect at all. But for once, her migraine had prompted her to care lesser than usual.
A bark echoed next to her. Anarchy was sitting right beside his owner with his head tilted to the side.
“I’m almost done, dear boy.” Claire muttered to her companion. There still had to be another errand done before the spymaster could call it a day: proper disposal of the body.
She proceeded to dial numbers on her telephone. For a few agonizing seconds, Claire waited for the person in the other line. It seemed like an eternity when a gruff, accented voice answered “Yes?”
“A crate of white wine meant for Eden Redwick has found its way to my doorstep by mistake.” Claire said in a clear, steady tone. It was a coded message that meant ‘her will has been done’ “I was hoping you’d deliver them to her.”
A beat of silence “Ah, she’s rather particular with the wine she consumes.” The man answered “When was the brew manufactured?” It seemed peculiar at first to speak in codes, even in a private conversation. Unbeknownst to many, there were organizations that were privy to telephone calls, mostly the people who connected incoming calls to the receiving end and had to listen in on the call to ensure the connection was operating smoothly. Though only a member of Claire’s circle of spies guarded her line, the palace security still valued discretion above all else, always using codes that not even Claire’s lackeys were aware of.
“1879.” 18 was the postal code of her neighborhood (Viridsville), with 7 being a corresponding street and the 9 being the number of the houses the lackey will pass by. It was a code they’d thought of a year ago, when the Queen needed to deliver something to her address, with none the wiser. The code wouldn’t have worked had she been under a different city (the year might have been peculiar), but whatever goes…
“I’m afraid they don’t accept wine that hasn’t brewed for at least 20 years.” The person on the other line interjected “It’s yours at your discretion.” He’ll be here in 20 minutes, Claire thought. Though 20 years is exactly how it’ll feel.
“I see,” Claire feigned confusion as she spoke “Tell Eden I send my warmest regards.”
“Duly noted. Good night.” And just like that, the line had cut off.
Claire glanced at Anarchy who was sniffing the Madam sprawled at the carpet. He growled in distaste.
Claire sighed “Don’t worry, she’ll be out of our hair soon enough.” She rubbed the dog’s tawny mane “We just have to wait for the jolly fellow to meet me by our doorstep and Seymour will be whisked away to wherever the Queen wants her to be.”
After wrapping Seymour’s body up in a cocoon of black cloth, Claire half-walked, half-ran towards the street while carrying the light-weighted body. Her manor was a little bit more elevated than the rest of the houses, which in retrospect, made it easier to miss in the night. While Claire hadn’t checked her clock, she figured it was at least two in the morning. Not even the company of Anarchy lessened the tension she felt upon standing by the street lanterns that bathed the area in gold light. The street was deafeningly quiet; no household awake within miles. As was expected, no one was allowed to be up past curfew yet.
Claire allowed herself to think. After this errand, she was going to hand in a letter of resignation. She reached for the black envelope from the inner linings of her coat. The lavender wax had an engraving of a swan, the crests of the Rayleighs, of the crone who had fostered her.
She had to go back to New Amrhys, where she could get some answers. She had to figure out why when she thought of the kingdom that was once her home, she only recalled an old man’s stern glare, the faint scent of musk and pine and the horrible hotness of spilt blood.
Claire snapped out of her reverie as Anarchy began to growl viciously. She looked sideways for any signs of the man she conversed with in the telephone. But no one was in sight. “Anarchy, snap out of it.” Claire hissed in a low tone. But uncharacteristically, he still barked off. It took a second for Claire to realize Anarchy was fixed in a direction that was out of her peripherals.
When she turned to where he was facing―
All of a sudden, the nape of her neck felt awfully cold.
Normally, the sight of a child wouldn’t alarm her. But her inhumanness― her dark, limp tresses of hair that did little to hide her abnormally large eyes with slit irises, the billowing white dress and the stillness of her gait― petrified Claire on the spot. The golden light seemed nonexistent as her form absorbed none of it; merely a whirl of black and sickly white.
Claire slowly reached for the inner linings of her coat once more; this time to grab a pistol nestled in her camisole. Although informally abandoning the practice of faith altogether, she began to chant a prayer in her mind, to any god that would listen. Her finger hovered over the barrel; the sound of the click so audible that it elicited a thin-lipped smile from the child.
“It doesn’t work that way.” A tiny voice whispered in her ear
Claire barely made it twelve steps before an explosion shook the entire lot and lit the mansion in a burst of flames. The impact of the convulsion sent her reeling; eventually rolling unceremoniously into the dirt and concrete.
Her eyes peeled at the commotion. Flames…
A burning ballroom was the last thing her mind’s eye had seen, bodies strewn everywhere around her as the noise of her neighbors kicked in. A young man’s masked face came into view; three scars above his brow the last thing she saw as darkness claimed her.
#novel#chapter#chapter1#tempestuous phantom#fantasy#beta reader#in need of critique#critique#political fantasy#book
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Dark Nights: Metal #1
I thought this series was going to be about how the meta gene is tied into Nth metal and not some fifteen year old metal head's idea of a cool black light poster.
Apparently time travel makes you vomit blood.
I thought the page after that scanned page was going to declare the new age was the Age of the Bat. But it didn't. It declared it was the Age of Metal! After reading that, you're supposed to make guitar noises with your mouth and bang your head and throw up some devil horns. You might even fuck a goat, if you're super cool.
I'm not sure when the Age of Metal began. There was the Golden Age and the Silver Age and the Modern Age (and maybe some other metallic ages I don't remember). Perhaps the Age of Metal just means the time when superhero comics began? Or did the Age of Metal start when Peter David gave Aquaman long hair and a hook for a hand?
Mongul currently has the Justice League battling for their life on his new Warworld. This takes place almost immediately after Mongul was punched into orbit by General Zod, so editorial demanded that Batman mention something about how this makes no sense, continuity-wise. He doesn't say it to help explain it! He just says it because editorial was all, "You know we're going to get buttfucked hard on this by the Fangenders¹, right? You need to get out in front of this shit." And Snyder was all, "Okay, okay. Batman will be all, 'This doesn't make sense!' But then Superman will be all, 'Stop over thinking things, you stupid fucking hypocritical moron living in your parents' basement and not adding any value to anything because all you do is destroy things with your Internet criticisms!'" And the editor was all, "Yeah, maybe that. But tone it the fuck down. You're sounding like Cullen Bunn anonymously defending his shitty Twat Lobo comics on harsh but hilarious blogs offering valid critical reviews."
The Justice League's powers have been rendered inert by...well, it doesn't really matter what by. It's the same old shit as usual. The heroes are too powerful so to create dramatic tension, you remove their powers. Snyder does offer a few ways that their powers can be dampened by invoking red sons and vibration domination technology and Gorgon pasties just so the Fangenders can nod enthusiastically and think, "Yep! Yep! They should have seen this coming! This is just like Justice League #45²! Idiots." Of course, those are the powers with fairly easy explanations for how to suppress them. He doesn't explain how he's keeping Cyborg from utilizing his Mother Box technology. Or how Green Lantern's ring isn't working (although, I mean, really? It's probably just out of charge like in 95% of Green Lantern comic books). And how did he stop Aquaman from talking to fish? Oh, you know what. Mongul probably decided Aquaman could keep his stupid power.
Oh, just so Scott Snyder doesn't feel like he was being too subtle, I got it. It's the Metal Age and the entire Justice League is being forced to wear armor by Mongul!
Some of it is super sexy titty fucking armor!
Toyman has also been captured by Mongul, probably because Scott Snyder needed enemies that the Justice League could kill without Batman getting on everybody's dick about murder. Toyman tells Mongul the name of the toys that will kill the Justice League is Fulcum Abominus. Mongul pulls out his dick and begins sucking it because he's smarter than me and that apparently means something to him. I shouldn't feel too stupid though because why should I have known what a fulcum is? I've never owned a Warworld and seemed to have missed the adolescent phase where Roman soldiers intrigued me as much as women's nipples. I suppose the name means the Justice League will be battling an abominable shield wall? A close formation made up of Yetis? Or maybe just a few transforming robots.
Judging by Mongul and the crowd's reaction, the Aegea Formation must be where the Justice League creates an illusion that they're running away. Either that or this is Greg Capullo's way of telling Snyder to fuck off because he's going to draw whatever the fuck he wants.
I'm not four years old so the crowd chanting "Do not run! Pain is fun!" doesn't amuse me. It does make me question why I've spent so much of my life reading comic books though.
It's at this point during the battle that I need to apologize to Scott Snyder. It's my first apology of the new season but it won't be my last. The problem with writing the critique as I'm experiencing the "art" is that I tend to point out flaws before the artist has a chance to finish. It's like when I'm in the middle of cleaning a floor and somebody thinks they're the next George Burns and says, "You missed a spot!"³ So, um, my apology is that I assumed Snyder couldn't think of ways to dampen the powers of the other Justice League. But he continues explaining how they've all been shut down. Green Lantern's gauntlet has a mini-black hole. And you know what they say about black holes when they're not making anus jokes, right?! Not even Green Lantern light can escape! Plus it's a mini-black hole so don't worry about how heavy and dense it is. Even though it must be even denser than a non-mini black hole if it can still capture light in its gravitational pull. And Aquaman has lost half of his strength to the vambraces made from glass forged in the heat of Apokolips!
Each creature in the Fulcum Abominus has been designed to counter one of the Justice League members. So not only do they not have their usual powers, they have to battle creatures that wouldn't care if they had those powers anyway! Wonder Woman can't even outsmart hers because it has a Cassandra Engine! And we all know what that means! Well, most of us do. Those who don't can always watch old reruns of Red Dwarf.
I hope the solution to defeating the Fulcum Abominus isn't to switch opponents because that's been done fifteen thousand times. Although it would be more original than just having Batman defeat them all after the rest of the Justice League are incapacitated. That's been done about sixteen thousand times. I can't think of any other way this conflict might end. Maybe it'll have something to do with the metal! Or maybe Toyman will have programmed the Fulcum Abominus to turn on Mongul once he's done sucking his dick. He'll be drained and distracted at that point!
Batman comes up with a plan to be eaten by Toyman's machines. He comes up with it the way Dr. House came up with solutions to his medical mysteries. You know how somebody would say just the right word and he'd sort of glaze over into a fugue state for a few seconds before snapping back and yelling, "I am a genius! You people are all idiots! And this show shits on the scientific process to pander to people who believe intuition is some magic panacea that comes out of the ether!" Anyway, Wonder Woman says "Formation" and Batman is all, "That's it! Formation! These machines were formated by Toymanster! If I reach into the gaping maw of this one, I'm sure to find a WayneTech Emergency Shutdown Switch!" Or something. I mean, there is a button in the creature's throat and it does have a bat on it and Batman does push it. But it doesn't shut the thing off at all. It just makes it eat Batman.
By pushing the buttons in the throat of the creature (which Batman realized by knowing that the command to form the fulcum formation was done by a cry from the back of the throat (because Batman knows everything (which means Toyman must know everything because you can't give subtle clues to people who know everything if you're a dumbshit like me...I mean Mongul))), the Justice League turn the machines into Voltron armor. This allows them to "form up" like the Roman formation and turn into a giant robot. Batman is the head, of course. Aquaman is the balls.
Is that why Snyder introduced the stupid rhyming chant earlier when it made no sense because the Justice League wasn't running? Just so Batman can act childish now? Eh, works for me! I mean, I'm the guy who chose to write that Aquaman was the giant robot's balls.
Instead of saying "ass" on the next page, Snyder inserts the title page and credits. Apparently the logo for Metal is a Satanic Hexagram. Can hexagrams be Satanic? They made it into a six pointed star but not so that it looks like the Star of David. It's got some bend to it. But the star is enclosed in a circle with symbols at each point. Those symbols are combinations of Justice League symbols and the bat symbol. So Wonder Wobatman and Superbatman and Aquabatman and Black Computer Batman and Green Lanterbatman and the other one. It's totally metal. Also the word metal is textured like the bumper on a pickup truck. Is that metal? I mean, it's metal, literally. But is it metal, 80's figuratively?
When the Justice League return to Earth, they find a mountain has appeared in the middle of Gotham. Apparently it didn't kill too many people because the city somehow made room for it. But Batman is still upset by it for some reason. Probably because he's thinking about how he vowed to never let anybody else be crushed by a mountain after his parents were crushed by that mountain in that alley.
The Flash finds a door inside the mountain with a pseudo-Challengers of the Unknown symbol on it. It's an hour glass with most of the sand in the bottom half. That's probably not a good sign, right?
Inside the door, they find a cryogenic pod with five people inside. I bet one is a white woman, one is a white man with blond hair, one is a white man with brown hair, one is a black man, and one is white man with red hair! Nearby the pod is Red Tornado. They don't seem to recognize him even though earlier somebody mentioned Aquaman's hook hand. If they remember that, they should surely remember Red Tornado!
The Blackhawks appear, led by Lady Blackhawk, Kendra Saunders. Get it?! She's still a hawk! Oh, Scott Snyder! You're so fucking clever! I bet Geoff Johns hates the fuck out of you. It always hurts to be usurped. I imagine. Nobody has ever been able to usurp me. Or wanted to?
Lady Blackhawk tells everybody that this is the start of an invasion but she can't tell them who is doing the invading. That's called dramatic tension! It's also called bullshit writing. Just fucking say it, you resurrected nutcase! Instead of revealing cool shit, she spends a few pages taking everybody to Blackhawk Island where she has a map of Grant Morrison's Multiversity. She's all, "Nth metal is this thing that's behind all these things. It's such a crazy thing! Hawkman, the most boring hero in the Multiverse after Aquaman, has been studying it his entire lives! Yeah, you heard me right! I said lives! He decided it didn't come from anywhere in the known Multiverse through assumptions and poor science. Unless over the course of all his lives, he had time to use good science? You know what? Who cares? Just believe me when I say it must have come from somewhere else. He didn't know where until he binged Stranger Things last year and Eleven turned over the Dungeons and Dragons map. That's when he was all, 'A-ha! That's the one place on the map I didn't search! The other side of it! The dark side of it! The Dark Multiverse! And now that I've decided that the known Multiverse is much like a two dimensional representation of it, the other side of the map must exist in reality! A Dark Multiverse!'"
"I'm not the worst," mumbled Aquaman.
Ha ha! Wanting proof! How silly!
I like how Kendra wanted proof of Carter's theory which caused Carter to want to prove her wrong. What the fuck does that mean?! You don't prove somebody wrong who just wants some evidence that your theory is reality! You just prove your stupid theory. I already hate this new version of Hawkman. Yes, I'm biased because I've hated every version of Hawkman so I didn't have far to go to hate this one. But I hate him more passionately than I ever hated the other ones and I haven't even met this one yet! The other ones I just sort of hated for no real reason. This one is a scientific idiot.
Kendra isn't much for science either. She just found the word wagon over and over again because a wagon would carry a dark beast named Barbatos from the Dark Multiverse into the Non-Dark Multiverse. And then she decided that Wagon was the root of the name Wayne (you know, wainwright? Wains! Wagons!) which must mean that the Wagon was Batman and he was the bad guy. That's when the Blackhawks pull their guns on Batman. But they don't shoot him in the face for some reason. Some heroes they are!
Red Tornado begins screaming about the door being left open which probably saves Batman's life. He then flips the fuck out which means he'll be dismembered in a few pages. His stories always end in dismemberment.
Batman steals Kendra's Nth Metal and races back to the Batcave to destroy the Multiverse in the pursuit of knowledge.
The Nth Metal reveals Carter Hall's diary hidden in Wayne Manor. It's there to tell Batman he was right to pursue whatever he's been pursuing. The mysteries of the Nth Metal, I guess. And once he's been proving right, he's visited by Dream of The Endless. Well. I guess Snyder can still surprise me without me needing to make a snarky comment about how dumb his twist is. I don't know why Dream has appeared but it's pretty cool that he's been allowed back into the regular DC Universe.
I'll say this about Metal: it's entertaining and interesting. But it's also built upon the dumb shit that Scott Snyder likes to build his retcons. So far we've learned that the Meta-gene is actually the Metal Gene because Nth Metal is behind all superpowers. We also learned that Nth Metal couldn't have come from anywhere in the DC Multiverse so it must have come from the other side of a two-dimensional representation of the Multiverse. I know that's just a metaphor but I bring it up because it's a metaphor from Stranger Things. The other big twist is that Wayne means wagon. In both the meta/metal and wagon/Wayne plot elements, we see the thing Scott Snyder bases almost all of his stories on. He starts small by looking at words and their meanings to expand those observations into a bigger story. Usually I'm just annoyed by them. But this time, he gets to really fuck around with the DC Universe by making this Nth metal/meta-gene connection and I'm always up for a good buttfucking of the DC Universe.
Oh yeah! How can I mention all the word play without mentioning the Dark Nights title of the series? Oh, probably because it's been used before. But this time it's the Dark Nights bring the Dark Knights of the Dark Multiverse! It's boner and/or lubrication inducing!
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¹"Fangenders" is my inclusive term for what was once thought of as Fanboys. Being an obnoxious comic book know-it-all knows no gender boundary.
²I don't actually know what happens in Justice League #45. But if you were instantly angry at my lack of knowledge, you're a Fangender. That was the whole point, dum-dum!
³I have a floor cleaning business. This isn't just an analogy of a thing I rarely do. It happens all the time. I'm getting angry just thinking about it! I should probably footnote George Burns as well but what's the point? You have access to the fucking Internet, lazy!
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Naruto OCs: Surviving The Uchiha Clan Massacre
This is a serious topic in the Naruto fandom. People seem to froth at the mouth if you even think of having an Uchiha OC post-massacre.
But, I am not one those people. There is a little leeway for Uchihas to live after the Uchiha clan massacre. It just takes some creative thinking. There are several holes that can be taken advantage of.
Before I go any further, allow me to explain to those unfamiliar with Naruto or its sequel series Boruto what the Uchiha clan massacre is, the basics of the Uchiha clan in general, and why living members of the Uchiha clan after this event are unlikely.
The Uchiha clan were a founding clan of Konohagakure (Hidden Leaf Village) alongside the Senju clan. The Uchiha and the Senju were enemies before they made a truce, and founded Konoha. The Uchiha were said to have had a greater capacity for love than other people.
However, they inherited a bloodline called the Sharingan that literally evolved with extreme emotions. The extreme emotions in question often ended up being the death of a close friend or family member. The Sharingan was born out of the pain of that loss. Several Uchiha went off the deep end after losing too many comrades.
The Nidaime Hokage Senju Tobirama realized this. He did not trust the Uchiha. He put them in charge of Konohagakure’s police force to keep them out of politics. The regular villagers treated the Uchiha clan okay, but the high ranked ninja of the village kept an eye on them. The Sandaime Hokage Sarutobi Hiruzen and his advisers forced the Uchiha to all live together in a compound after one of them was suspected in the Kyuubi attack.
The Uchiha clan grew bitter towards Konohagakure thanks to the Hokage and his advisers’ actions towards them. They started making plans for a coup d’etat. The clan leader’s eldest son Uchiha Itachi started spying on his clansmen for the village. With the assistance of a disguised Uchiha Obito, he killed his clan upon orders from his village at age thirteen for their impending treason. Only his younger brother Sasuke was officially spared from the slaughter.
While the massacre has been on orders, Itachi was forced to defect from Konohagakure right after. He joined the terrorist group Akatsuki. The regular villagers of Konohagakure thought the massacre was a random tragedy. Few knew the truth until after Itachi’s death around eight years later.
Note the second-to-last sentence. Most of the villagers thought it was a random tragedy. That means that no one knew the truth about the Uchiha clan being marginalized or that they were plotting treason. Any actions the higher-ups took against the Uchiha clan had to be discreet.
With that in mind, I will list the most likely ways for a member of the Uchiha clan to survive or otherwise exist after the massacre. Note that since the elders ordered the Uchihas’ deaths that your OC would likely not stay in Konohagakure afterwards.
1) Becoming a missing-nin before the massacre, preferably before the Kyuubi attack.
Madara, Obito, Itachi, and Sasuke do not have a monopoly on being defectors. Other Uchiha would have good reasons to defect as well. They could be tired of how their clan is treated, or may not agree with the Will of Fire. I suggest defecting before the Kyuubi attack as the Uchiha clan were kept a very close eye on after that.
2) Retiring from ninja work and moving away from Konohagakure pre-massacre.
The Hokage has say over ninja in their active roster, but that authority diminishes once a ninja goes into retirement. Not every ninja stays on for life. An Uchiha could decide to settle down, pursue a civilian job, and raise a family like anyone else. The situation would become more plausible if the Uchiha in question moved some distance away from Konoha.
Hiruzen could try calling the Uchiha back after the Kyuubi attack, but his authority would be minimal at best. The process could become complicated. The retired Uchiha could have a business they run at this point, be employed, have a spouse, and may have produced children with said spouse.
That even presumes the retired Uchiha can be located. Evidence in the Naruto series points to the Uchiha breeding among themselves for the most part. It’s presumably to keep the Sharingan to themselves. An Uchiha with an outside spouse might be disowned from the clan. Such an Uchiha might not be able to be traced from letters or other communications if their clan cut off communication with them.
It would take time to close down a business or otherwise put notice into the Uchiha’s place of employment, a new place might need building in the compound so the Uchiha and their family has a place to live, the Uchiha would have to do something with their current residence, the Uchiha’s family would need a cart to carry their belongings, and any children or spouses would need immigration papers. This would add up very fast. Forcing the retired Uchiha to move back to Konohagakure would become impossible if they moved to another country altogether.
The elders may want every Uchiha dead, but they appear pragmatic. They might decide that wasting a lot of time, money, and effort on one Uchiha would not be worth it. Shimura Danzo could attempt sending his ROOT agents, but they would be in big trouble if local ninja caught them. The Hokage and his advisers might not even know the retired Uchiha’s current address. They will probably drop the issue.
3) Coincidentally being on a mission at the time of the massacre, preferably some distance away from Konohagakure.
Remember how the Konohagakure citizens thought that the Uchiha clan massacre was a random tragedy? While Hiruzen and the elders got away with confining them to a compound, they could not prevent normal business like Uchiha ninja going out on missions with their teammates. Missions keep on coming as Konohagakure’s source of income. Barring all Uchiha ninja from missions with their teammates just before the massacre would have looked a little suspicious, yes?
The important thing to remember is that Itachi fled Konohagakure soon after he killed everyone in the Uchiha clan compound. He joined Akatsuki shortly afterwards. He was declared a traitor, so he would not have been able to stick around for any late-comers. He would not have been able to go on a killing spree of Uchiha on missions across the Hidden Countries, either. It would take too much energy out of him. An Uchiha on a mission would mainly be on the lookout for Danzo’s ROOT agents.
An Uchiha’s chances of survival increases the further away they are from Konohagakure at the time. They certainly have a chance of defeating ROOT ninja sent after them. Keep in mind that the ROOT ninja will have their work cut out for them if the Uchiha is in another country. While the seals on their tongues will prevent them from spouting secrets, their masks and other ANBU regalia could link them back to Konoha if local ninja detain them. That would be bad.
Plan on how Hiruzen will deal with all of these Uchiha who suddenly have to fear death if they come back home. He may well deliver communications with an altered version of what happened, and order the Uchiha and/or their whole squad to fake the dead. The Uchiha could be placed under a special ninja witness protection program or given a new identity. If he decides on the first option, he will probably set up the basics for the Uchiha’s new life as a sort of severance pay.
4) Traveling away from Konohagakure around the time of the massacre.
Being a ninja does not prevent someone from going out on vacation as long as they approve the vacation days with their village leader first. Uzumaki Naruto and Jiraiya had participated in a festival while searching for Tsunade; no one batted an eye at them despite their forehead protectors. Several Konohagakure clans have allies they occasionally meet with outside of the village, including the Uchiha. Forbidding an Uchiha from taking vacation days would look just as bad as barring them from missions.
An Uchiha in this situation would have to look out for ROOT ninja. Should they make it back to the village, the Sandaime would likely sit them down to explain what happened. The Uchiha would be informed that they could no longer reside in Konohagakure for their own safety. They would probably fake their death on orders, and move somewhere else. Other options would be placing them in ninja witness protection program of some kind, or changing their identity.
5) Being a civilian Uchiha out on business at the time of the Uchiha clan massacre.
This one is simple. Not all Uchiha are ninja. Non-ninja have more of a range of movement than shinobi do. People that are part of certain industries will sometimes need to travel to business meetings. Hiruzen would not have that much authority over them.
If Hiruzen knew of such an unaccounted for Uchiha civilian, he would probably order a ninja to escort them to Hiruzen’s office upon the civilian Uchiha’s return. The Uchiha would then be given an account of the massacre, and warned that staying in Konohagakure was no longer safe for them. Hiruzen might even help them find a new place to live depending on the circumstances involved.
6) Faking the dead during the massacre, then fleeing the village.
This one would take some skills and good luck to pull off. But, if the Uchiha could render their breathing undetectable and stayed still for a while on the bloodied ground, Itachi, Obito, and Danzo’s ROOT ninja would stop paying attention to them. Even an Uchiha loyal to Konoha would understand that this was no longer their home with other Konohagakure ninja attacking them. They would probably be roughing it for a while, but would eventually find another place to live.
7) Being conceived between an Uchiha and an outside party when the Uchiha was on a mission. Preferably, a long-term one that happened a distance from Konohagakure.
Do you think that the Uchiha were free of indiscretions? The Hokage’s advisers would have trouble targeting a half-Uchiha baby for death if even the Uchiha clan is not aware of their existence. The Uchiha parent would likely do everything they could to conceal their child’s existence. Even a female Uchiha would not have much trouble doing so if she left the baby with the father’s family.
Uchiha usually have either black or brown hair and black eyes. That look is so common that a half-Uchiha in a non-Konoha location would not be given a second glance. The chance of being recognized as one decreases if they inherited their non-Uchiha parent’s hair or eye color. The Sharingan might activate, but the half-Uchiha would likely be a teenager by then at minimum. Mission babies are probably as safe as it gets.
8) Being born outside of Konohagakure from any of the previous groups.
People reproduce. It’s a fact of life. If an Uchiha has had a baby outside of Konohagakure’s walls, and the Uchiha parent is already off the grid, there’s not a lot the elders could do. Uchiha from any of the previous situations could settle down and have children away from their original village. The Uchiha child may or may not know about their bloodline or clan history depending on the circumstances.
There is one thing that will be universal, however. The child will likely be warned to avoid Konohagakure like the plague after the massacre if they can help it. Most Uchiha in the situations above will know that their former home is no longer safe. That could apply double post-Fourth Shinobi World War thanks to Sasuke, Obito, and Madara’s actions.
Having a living Uchiha OC after the massacre is possible. You just have to be careful on how you plan it out. Do not make them closely related to Sasuke and Itachi unless it’s an AU. A third Uchiha sibling would change the canon story significantly.
Remember not to make too many post-massacre OCs. While there are holes to be had, Itachi, the elders, ROOT, and Obito were as thorough as they could be considering the different variables. Have a nice day.
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