#stella's oc-tober 2022
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Day 14: Legend
Part of my OC-tober 2022 (that will get fucking finished in 2024 so help me god)! I keep changing between Isabel Magbanua and Isabel Makiling but I swear! The official is Isabel Makiling. Magbanua was just Isabel’s last name in first drafts, so I got unconsciously attached. Uh. Anyway. Have some Lesbian heavy petting.
“In the province of Laguna, there is a mountain in the shape of a woman,” Isabel tells her, one night, her cheek against Margie’s bare chest, her thigh between Margie’s legs, all under the pretense of washing themselves of the day’s grime in a nearby stream. The water has long since carried the dirt and blood away, and now they’re just luxuriating in the cool shallows, warmed significantly by the heat of each other. “They say the mountain is guarded by a spirit—she used to be a goddess, before the Spaniards came. Dayang Makiling is what her people call her. The mountain is her domain, a reflection of her. From the right angle, you can see her body, laid upon her side.”
Her fingers, delicately tracing patterns along Margie’s skin, travel south. Goosebumps rise to meet it.
“The ground rises at her knees,” Isabel says, wandering hand disappearing under the surface of the water to caress the sensitive backs of Margie’s knee. Her body jumps in tandem to it, like a marionette come to life, at the call of her puppeteer. Or guitar strings, vibrating under the musician’s skillful touch. Singing, like Margie sings now, gasping as Isabel drags her hand up, up, up—
“Then, the slope forms her thighs,” Isabel says, fingers on Margie's inner thigh, so close. So dangerously close—
So suddenly gone. Margie whimpers, pathetically, at the loss of contact, but is not disappointed for long, as the leg that she had forgotten about, shifts, until Isa’s thigh is pressed flush to the heat of her. Margie grinds down against it, desperately, whimpers turning into whines, uninhibited. Unashamed. Even when Isa laughs at her desperation. Even when her hand still ventures up, up, up, over the soft rolls of fat around Margie’s waist, stopping to pinch and feel and sink into the meat of it. Isabel has stopped talking for the time being, so focused is she on the twists and turns of Margie’s face, dark brown eyes nearly black with want. Margie can hardly look at her when she is like this, but forces herself to, begging without words for more.
“Then, her breasts,” says the girl, as her fingers catch on the swell of Margie’s chest. “Ample. They form twin peaks, near the end. If you look closely, you might even see—”
She pinches a nipple between two fingers. Gives it a rough tug.
“Isa,” Margie whimpers, finally finding her voice and her strength. With a quick maneuver, she flips them over, pining Isabel against the bank with a frustrated groan. “Fuckin’ hell, Isa.”
With a flick of their hips, their cores slot together in hot, sparking bliss. Bodies cradling each other so close, not even water can come between them.
"Dayang Makiling," Margie says, with her atrocious accent. Still, Isabel shivers in anticipation, their twin breaths lost in the space between their lips, mouths hanging open in a brief pause. "Isabel."
Isabel grins up at her, long, thick hair a halo of black floating around her pretty head, the rest of her barely shrouded in a liquid tapestry of moon silver. Beautiful. Regal. Just like how Margie had begun to imagine it, soaring through the clouds and looking down upon a mountain, its Lady on her back, smiling at the sky.
--
Note: Though the folk lore of Maria/Dayan Makiling is location specific to the province of Laguna, Philippines, this story itself doesn’t really take place in Laguna, but instead in Bulacan, which is in the North. Isabel’s family is from Laguna, and moved to Manila before the siege, and that’s why she’s familiar with the story of Mt. Makiling.
#stella's oc-tober 2022#estrella_marie#margie sanchez#isabel makiling#people like us#i am very bad at writing sex so this cuts off very abruptly i am sorry#just know that they are fucking in a stream and it's glorious
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[ ID: a fullbody drawing of a character on a dark blue background, with a silver glowing moon behind the character. she has long, fluffy brown hair, dark brown skin, and dark brown eyes. she’s wearing a dark purple hat with sun, star, and moon charms hanging from the brim, a dark purple robe, a lighter purple dress with a silver bow around her waist, and silver boots. behind her she holds a staff with a silver moon at the end. she’s smiling, and looking towards the top right. end ID. ]
oc-tober day 27 prompt: night. my funny moon wizard!! i still haven’t named the project she’s from yet, but writing her is so much fun…
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Day 13: Fear
Part of my OC-tober 2022 (that will get fucking finished in 2024 so help me god)! Well. We're indulging this time around with some Baldur's Gate 3 on my Band of Brothers/HBO War Blog. I guess. Honestly, with how many OCs I have in other fandoms, I might just start playing around with them for this prompt list, too!
tw: If you're starting to notice a pattern in my writing with parenthood, in iterations of both problematic or good, uuuuuhhhh no you fucking don't.
They’ve been sitting by the fire in the Elfsong tavern for a whole of hour, in perfect silence, before Jaheira chooses to break it. “You will not return upstairs.”
It’s not a question. Still, Pasiphaë answers it as one. “Not until they’re all in bed. I’ve no patience right now,” she tells her with a deep sigh. “For anyone or myself. I… do not like who I was today.”
Belligerent. Jumpy. Too slow to react, too impulsive in her decisions. Near unrecognizable, as compared to her original cool and collected demeanor at the beginning of their journey. She expected better of herself, and her companions definitely deserved better than the kind of mess she’s become. But they’ve been running on near fumes for the past few days, having been tossed about here and there by Mystra, Shar, Lorroakan, cultists, Orin, and Cazador, all alike. On top of that, Serafina had decided to join in on their quest, despite Pasiphaë’s explicit orders for her to get out of the city while she still could—truly, there was a time when her sweet little girl would obey her with no question, but alas! she’s inherited her other mother’s bullheaded-ness. Pun intended. Not for the first time, Pasiphaë found herself wishing that Melisandre were still around to share in her pride over their daughter’s immense bravery. The abrupt reminder of what she no longer had—after several months of not thinking about Mel even once—had been enough to throw her off her rhythm completely. The day had already started being kind of shit.
Ulder Ravengard and his unfortunate decision to mouth off about his son’s new appearance was the last straw.
“I lost my temper.” The verbal dressing down was spectacular while it was happening. Invigorating, even. Pasiphaë doesn’t remember the last time she’s felt such catharsis. After the months of non-stop action, it was good to release it all.
It was the stunned silence afterward that felt particularly… damned. “I shouldn’t have done that.”
“Bah, he deserved it,” Jaheira scoffs, waving a dismissive hand. “He is better off for listening to your wisdom.”
“Calling whatever that was ‘wisdom’ is too generous.”
“But it is what it is: a mother’s wisdom.”
Pasiphaë snaps; “I’m not Wyll’s mother,” and Jaheira tilts her head back and lets out a hearty HA! loud enough to draw the attention of other patrons.
“You are not just his mother, that is for sure,” Jaheira says, wagging an admonishing finger at her. “All of them seem to have attached themselves to you like little suckling pups to a bitch’s teats.”
“Your metaphors leave much to be desired, Jaheira.”
“You were protecting your pup, is what I mean,” Jaheira shrugs. “Even if it is from his own blood. Wyll holds you under no contempt for such a display. I may even go so far as to say that he’s grateful for it.”
“Perhaps.” Oh, but Wyll loves his father so—even when the man has done nothing but abandon him. Pasiphaë knows it isn’t right to get between father and son, not as a simple party member, and most certainly not while one still holds out hope for reconciliation. She might’ve just ruined Wyll’s chances back there, with her vindictive nature and even sharper tongue. If she had, would he ever forgive her?
As if reading her thoughts, Jaheira tsks. “We mothers, we always want what is best for our children. Nobody can fault us for that.” There’s a small smile on her face; a tiny quirk of the corner of her lip that feels conspirative. Like they’re in on a joke together.
Technically, they are. Pasiphaë smiles back. Or tries to. “Whatever you say.”
Their conversation, once again, falls to silence. Patrons come and go, and the tavern keeper’s boy comes once and twice to stoke the fires until, finally, they fizzle out into glowing embers. The night grows even quieter soon after, with the patrons quickly disappearing out the door, or into other rooms, until, finally, it is just them, and the occasional drunkard outside.
“You can go. Rest,” Pasiphaë says, aware that it is late. Tomorrow (later?), they are to confront Gortash. “We’ll need all our strength come morning.”
“You are determined to keep vigil.”
“Someone has to.”
“If I were to climb up those stairs, I would not be surprised to see some of your pups waiting for you by their fire,” Jaheira chuckles, standing up with an exaggerated groan—her knees are not what they used to be. “No doubt, they will send me back down again—or even come down themselves—if I return empty handed. Come, now.”
She offers her hand.
Pasiphaë stares at it.
Something in her chest shudders with anxiety and—is it her imagination? The tadpole behind her eye, wriggling with a sordid kind of glee?
“I fear I cannot be to them what they need me to be, Jaheira.”
Jaheira frowns, confused. Still, she keeps her hand out. “And what is that?”
What, indeed? A leader? With the amount of times she’s failed them? Perish the thought. A caretaker? Barely. Her hands are not made for healing, anymore. Certainly not with the Triad’s silence and her simmering resentment over it. And what comfort she could give is quickly dwarfed by the enormity of all their suffering. What use is a lullaby, when she couldn’t even hold Karlach enough to soothe her tears? What use is her sword, when it can scarcely keep Lae’zel from the betrayal of her kin, queen, and god? Clearly, Pasiphaë couldn’t even call herself a protector—just two days ago, she’d failed to protect Astarion from his worst possible self, leaving the burden to Gale, instead; and just last tenday, Shar had taken from Shadowheart her last connection to her past, while all Pasiphaë could do was helplessly watch. Hells, she certainly couldn’t protect Wyll, who only ever looked to her for wisdom and guidance. Or even Gale, whose final decision haunts them all—Astarion, especially, who has begged her over and over again to make Gale see reason. But how could she, when all she could think about is his fate as both Faithless and Discarded? She understands too well the challenge that lays before him to possibly talk him out of his task in any way that matters. The blasted Wall remains a prominent phantom in Gale’s mind as much as hers; but while she’s resigned to her own fate, that doesn’t mean he should be, too.
Gods, but what will she tell Morena, then? Tara? Astarion? That she let their beloved boy die, simply because the folly of the gods and their selfish nature was too strong for her to fight? No. That would not do.
And yet. She hesitates.
“If I am their mother, as you say I am,” she tells Jaheira. “I am a shit mother. My Melisandre would be ashamed to see how poorly of a mother I am being.”
Jaheira knits her brows together. “Your partner?”
“Yes.” Her beloved. The mother of her children. The balm to her soul. The light in her darkness; Pasiphaë is never going to see her again. “She was always better at this than I—my children—I was never—”
“Serafina seems to adore you.”
“Now,” Pasiphaë entreats, feeling the blasted tadpole wriggle and squirm behind her stupid eyes the more distressed she becomes. “I have failed her before, terribly, and it was only time that allowed those wounds to heal. Time is not on my side, now. If I fail them—when I fail them—”
She stops. She cannot bear to think of it. But it is inevitable. “I fear that it is not a matter of if, but when I fail them, Jaheira. I am cursed to repeat my mistakes. And when I do… gods when I do…”
“You will not.”
“You are a fool to—”
“Ha!” Jaheira barks, snatching back her offered hand to reach out and shake Pasiphaë by the shoulders. Like she were a kitten being pulled back by her scruff. Gone is the amicable, conspiratorial smile, replaced thoroughly by a stern glare. “It is you who is the fool to let such thoughts paralyze you!” She lets her go, wags a finger in her face, “you have fallen out of practice in the art of seeing yourself as what you are. What you are truly capable of.”
“But I am capable of failure!”
“And you are capable of triumph!” Jaheira snaps, throwing her hands up in the air in frustration. “Why are you so determined to fail?”
Pasiphaë blinks. Blinks again. Something hot rolls down her cheeks and she scrubs at them with her hands. They come away wet.
“You said, once, that you are destined for the Wall of the Faithless. This is the truth. In many ways, you are,” Jaheira continues, kneeling on the ground so as to catch her eyes. “But you are not dead yet. Your pups are not dead yet. Pull it together; you must see this—if not for yourself, then for them.”
For them. Yes. For them. Children are only as resilient as their parents, Melisandre used to say. Whisper in her ear, when the worst of the grief had taken over as their baby girl cooled in her arms. Phaedra is gone, but Xenodius and Serafina yet live. For them, Pasiphaë had rallied. Taken up what strength she had left, and trudged forward.
Get up, she thinks Melisandre would say, now. Get up, my love. They are hurt, but they are yet living. Get up.
“I wish I had your wisdom,” Pasiphaë says, finally, after a long moment of silence. It comes out in a croak, barely a whisper, barely even words. Still, she manages a small smile. “True mother’s wisdom.”
Jaheira tsks. But slowly, she too returns a smile. “You have it. As I said: you are just… out of practice. Come, now,” again, she gets up on her creaky knees with an exaggerated groan.
And offers her hand. “Your pups might sleep better, knowing that their mother is nearby.”
This time, Pasiphaë takes it. “Their bitch of a mother?”
Jaheira laughs. Laughs and laughs, even as she pulls Pasiphaë toward the stairs and their camp. It’s loud and bawdy and definitely a great disturbance. But it does sound like music, and Pasiphaë likes hearing it. “Just so!”
--
Pasiphaë Elago is my Tav. She's a moon-elf, and a Paladin of Ilmater/the Triad turned Godless Paladin-- it's a long story. She's named Pasiphaë because her late wife, Melisandre, was a druid whose wild shape was a bull. I think I'm funny. Before the events of BG3, she was an adventurer in her own right, and is technically retired and is literally broaching 500 by the time she's kidnapped by the Ilithids. That being said, because she's so old and had just lost her wife a few years prior, she doesn't romance the BG3 characters but accidentally adopts them all during their whole tadpole ordeal. Oh make no mistake, Astarion, Shadowheart, Karlach, and Lae'zel tried to hit that, but she shut that down so fast-- "Some of you are as old as my eldest grandchild. It's awkward." Team Mom! Total GILF!! And also!! suffering. Help her, she thought she was done having to parent like this after watching 2 of her 3 children (the last died during the Spellplague) grow up, move out, and make families of their own. She's supposed to be RETIRED, damnit. She's trying so hard. She just wants a NAP.
Speaking of Greek Myths, isn't it funny that Astarion shares a name with the Minotaur? I swear, I didn't think of that before naming Pasiphaë. I did, however, think of it when naming Ariadne Ancunin, my other BG3 OC, who happens to also be Astarion's biological sister. The name's important. Ariadne gave Theseus the power to kill her Minotaur brother, after all. But that's for another day entirely.
None of this makes sense to any of you. That's fine. It's for ME.
#stella's oc-tober 2022#estrella_marie#there's bloodweave in this because I Care Them unfortunately#my stuff always revolves around the flaws found in parenthood and I don't want to... think too hard about that right now!!!!!#and this is more telling than actually showing lmao im so sorry#i had to cram so much into this just to explain pasiphae's psyche and like in the end it just sorta. fucks off a cliff.#i just wanted to get this done so i could work on the hanahaki au lmaaaoooo im so sorry#pasiphaë elago#not hbo war
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Day 12: Beginning
Part of my OC-tober 2022 (that will get fucking finished in 2024 so help me god)! I am a few days late, and while that's totally ok, it is also totally my bad. Baldur's Gate 3 has me by the balls so when I'm not working, I'm busy trying to get this sad, pathetic, purple wizard to smooch me. We're to have a spring wedding in Waterdeep. You're all invited.
tw: brief mention of attempted incestuous rape (it's very vague, only one line, but it's still there), and emotional neglect/abuse of a child
“How’d you choose it?”
Nat exhales a cloud of smoke. “Choose what?”
“Your name,” Arthur replies, lighting his second cigarette in ten minutes, the glow of which illuminates his face a warm orange against the cool blacks and blues of the early Aldbourne evening. Taking a puff off it, and sighing out the sweet nicotine warmth, he smiles at her, slow and sweet. “Natalie.”
They’re sharing a pack of Luckies tonight in lieu of evening chow, having opted to take advantage of the empty showers while everybody else is eating to finally wash and dry Arthur’s binder and have him change into a new one. They got done faster than they thought they would take, so now they’re hanging out behind the barracks, shooting the shit until curfew.
Nat takes another deep inhale. Holds it in her lungs for a bit. Relishes the burn. “My momma.”
“… oh,” Arthur says, cautious. “Shoshana?”
“Sho ain’t my momma,” Natalie chuckles at the thought. “Though, there was a time I wanted her to be.”
“Really?” Arthur couldn’t keep the distaste out of his tone, even if he tried. Much less his face, that twists into a look so fierce, it’s almost ugly. She waves away his incredulousness with a frown of her own.
“Don’t take that tone wit’ me, she did what she did to help us survive.” He doesn’t look too convinced, and she doesn’t bother to convince him. “But no, Sho ain’t my momma.”
Not that Talia was, either. But even inow, after all that’s happened, Natalie still can’t bring herself to call Talia anything else. What do you call the woman who’s been in charge of feeding you, cleaning you, and clothing you all your life? A minder? A nanny? If she were any of those things, she’d’ve had the choice, at least, to leave Natalie for better prospects. Only a mother would stay, even when she clearly didn’t want to. Nobody sacrifices that much except a mother.
“She took me in, even if she didn’t have to,” Natalie says, watching the ashes of her burning cigarette fall to the ground. “Growing up, I wanted t’ be like her so bad.”
To endear her to the woman who’d cared for her when nobody else would? Or to have something of her to feel… close? Closer than Talia herself would ever allow? Which was it? Maybe both? Natalie isn’t too sure, now, but she does remember the ways Natalie went about it varied.
When she’d been little, she’d fancied herself a doctor, just like Talia, albeit for animals more than people. For a while, that worked, and the few animals they kept around, in an attempt to farm their own resources, were susceptive to her care, earning her praise from not just Talia but all the other girls under her care. But soon, the novelty of it wore off. Margie, who’d been far more interested in the ailments of humans, drew most of Talia’s attention the longest, and Natalie thought to copy her once she noticed; acting as nurse when Talia needed it. Another extra pair of hands for the more painful births to happen in their little shack. That worked, too. For a while. Until it didn’t.
By then, Natalie’s eagerness to please had drawn attention from elsewhere. Someone more generous with their time and approval. Shoshana had that in spades. For a price, of course. But the sacrifice wasn’t too great for Natalie to make. Compared to Talia, being loved by Shoshana was easy. Somedays, the injustice of it made it almost impossible to be anything but angry.
And she had been. Her teens were filled with so much anger. But then, Talia would run her hand through her hair, tenderly. Just the right way. Or she’d let Natalie sleep in her bed, after Nat would give up her own for someone who needed it more. Or she’d smile at her, after Nat would come home from a rough day of chores and errands with an extra apple for them to share—and suddenly, the anger would disappear, and Natalie would smile back, basking in the warmth of being a good daughter. Talia’s good daughter.
Even if it was only in her mind.
“The girls used t’ say I frowned so much ‘cause I was tryin’ t’ copy her,” she says, putting out her cigarette in the grass. “Natalito they’d call me. Little Natalia. I liked the sound of it, so I… I chose it.”
She became Natalie Morse at the age of sixteen, the night her no-good father had tried to take from her the only thing she wouldn’t allow him to have. Talia had been the one to patch up her ruined knuckles and her scratched up knees, tending to her with all the gentleness she couldn’t give her when Natalie had been six and just as scratched up and in pain. It was like a dam had been broken that night, and all the tenderness that Talia had held back for the past many years came rushing forth.
Natalie had just nearly killed a man, and all she cared about was Talia. Can I be Natalia from now on, too?
Talia had kissed her on the forehead. She’d never done that before. Sure, she’d said. But ya gotta change somethin’ kid, we can’t both be Talia.
“That’s it,” she shrugs, smiling up at Arthur, even though he’s still frowning down at her.
“S’pose she—” Arthur lifts up his hands and makes two V’s with four fingers, hinging them up and down at the second knuckle. A gesture Nat’s never seen before. “tried her best, too?”
Natalie blinks. Confused. “She did.” Of course, she did. “I wasn’t the best kid.”
Arthur scoffs. But doesn’t say anything. Just glares.
--
This is part of a longer chapter of the overall People Like Us canon, but I haven't actually finished the chapter. That's why it ends so abruptly, ehe. So sorry.
#natalie morse#ab foster#people like us#estrella_marie#trans male original character#trans female original character#stella's oc-tober 2022#nat thinks shoshana being her mom is funny bc shoshana is 1) black and 2) is intersex and therefore infertile#just saying#bob ocs
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Day 16: Victory
Part of my OC-tober 2022 (that will get fucking finished in 2024 so help me god)! Another Baldur's Gate 3 one, folks!
This was just an excuse to write a Tadfools puppy pile and also a little dropped hint to whatever is going on between Halsin/my Tav. Again, some Bloodweave in there. Because I care them. And Shadowheart being clingy, because I like that, too. Team As Family, of course.
Also! A tiny depiction of a stray headcanon of mine: being a particularly stubborn and petty godless Paladin means breaking the habit of using gods’ names in vain so, Pasiphaë often incites the ‘Great fuck’ or ‘Holy shit’ when truly exasperated or in a situation that might have had her previously calling for Ilmater. She does this out of spite. I love her.
tw: allusions to Astarion’s whole backstory; they’re all traumatized and pretending so hard that they aren’t
As soon as the sun sets, they go and set Cazador’s Palace ablaze.
Between Gale’s fireball, Shadowheart’s conjured elemental, a gallon of gasoline Astarion had filched from an abandoned food stall, and their overall enthusiasm, they make quick work of the old place in little under two hours. With the amount of destruction that has been wrought upon the city already, nobody bats an eye at the raging flames, nor at the four lunatics that started it. The only ones who do are their Harper allies, who find them sitting together on the Lower City Wall a relatively safe distance away, surveying their handiwork from under some curtains they’d stolen from the ballroom and are now using as blankets to keep warm.
“We were wondering where you were,” Jaheira sighs, making herself comfortable on the ground with them as the rest of her team scouts ahead, checking to make sure the damage doesn’t spread anywhere else. “When we saw the brain fall, our first thought was to search for you in the Chionthar’s waters. Were you here the whole time?”
Nobody answers for a long moment. Nobody moves. They simply watch the flames, its blaze and its warmth enough to evoke the sun.
Finally, Pasiphaë blinks, slowly, like she’s just been awoken from a dream. “We hid by the docks until the sun set,” she tells Jaheira, flatly. “Slept some.”
What a sorry sight they must have been: huddled together behind some barrels and crates like a litter of abandoned kittens, licking their wounds and attempting to crawl into each other’s skin—the very antithesis to the image of victory.
They couldn’t help it, though; the overwhelming silence in their minds where six other presences had been was disconcerting, to say the least. After nearly a year of sharing their tadpole telepathic link, suddenly being unable to feel each other, mentally, incited a desire in all of them to feel each other tangibly, instead. Even Astarion, who in different circumstances would have turned his nose up at the mere idea of cuddling, did not protest when Shadowheart so much as crawled into his lap, and simply turned his face into the crook of Gale’s neck while Pasiphaë circled her arms around all of them best she could. It was difficult, too, to simply dismiss the absent pieces of their seven-way connection. Pasiphaë had wondered, aloud, if Wyll and Karlach also felt the loss. Or if Lae’zel missed it, now, with as much intensity as she had despised it, then. Nobody had wanted to follow that trail of thought.
It ached too much.
Instead, they’d made plans. Serious ones at first, with the Crown of Karsus still in pieces in the Chionthar and majority of the city reduced to rubble and ruin. But the more they talked of it, the more they went in circles. Those plans were for a future a bit farther from reach. Complicated. They wanted—needed something simple.
Shadowheart had been the one to suggest burning Cazador’s Palace to the ground; arson sounded much more invigorating than drinking themselves into a stupor at the nearest tavern. Once they’d unanimously agreed, they’d quickly fallen asleep, tucked tightly against each other. Waiting out the sun.
“I’m sorry,” Pasiphaë tells Jaheira. “We worried you, didn’t we?”
“No more than you usually do,” Jaheira says, waving a dismissive hand. To Astarion, she asks; “do you intend to see this blaze all the way through to its ashes?”
“Not if you promise something better, darling,” Astarion shrugs. He’s managed to slot himself sideways upon Gale’s lap, arms wrapped around his wizard’s neck, legs slung over thighs. Nuzzling into him, he recalls; “what was it? A night of hedonistic debauchery?”
Gale has his eyes closed, weary. “Hm. I think you have to count me out this time, ‘Star.”
“The short length of your sentences are starting to concern me, Gale,” Shadowheart says, from her spot against Pasiphaë, her arm intertwined with hers. Her head on her shoulder. “So long as this hedonistic debauchery involves a bed—”
Astarion snorts, an undignified sound. “How straight forward of you, Shadowheart.”
“Is the Elfsong still standing?” Pasiphaë asks Jaheira, ignoring the new wave of bickering that’s begun.
“Tall and proud, with barely a scratch,” Jaheira tells her. “I must warn you, though. A difficult conversation awaits you there.”
The bickering ceases and three pairs of curious ears perk up. Pasiphaë struggles not to roll her eyes. “For tomorrow,” she says, to both Jaheira and audience, before stretching her legs out with a groan. “For now: home. And rest.”
They get up with some struggle, sore and tired, pins and needles rushing through their stiff limbs as they pick their way through the smoking city toward camp. They cling to each other still, even when it makes walking through narrow alley ways tough. But it doesn’t slow them down at all. The moon has barely made it up into the sky before the Elfsong finally looms before them, a welcome sight.
Halsin is waiting for them at the entrance, whole, largely unharmed, and pacing. He hasn’t clocked them yet.
“You don’t have to engage him,” Gale reassures her with a whisper. “Halsin has always been a reasonable man; if we were to tell him that you wish to be left alone tonight, he would no doubt honor that request.”
“You don’t have to get between us,” Pasiphaë tells him. “But I appreciate it.”
Luckily, it doesn’t come to that—before she can even so much as make eye contact with the druid, the door of the Elfsong opens, and her children spill out.
“Mama,” Serafina gasps in Elvish, as she and her brother practically throw themselves at Pasiphaë. They’re not quite as small as they used to be, but Pasiphaë still catches them well enough and only stumbles a bit. “Phaë, oh thank the goddess, we thought you—I thought—”
“Oh, my baby,” Pasiphaë coos, holding her close as she begins to cry. “It’s alright. I’m alright. We’re alright.”
Everybody graciously gives them privacy—though from the corner of her eye she sees Halsin hesitate, just a moment, before Jaheira pulls him inside the building—leaving them to relocate to one of the tables still intact out front, waiting out the worst of the water works as Serafina blubbers and hiccups her way through words. By the time she’s calmed down, the world about them has quieted into a near hush, sans perhaps some lucky crickets. It’s still quite early into the evening, but even for a city as robust and bustling as Baldur’s Gate, being invaded by an army of cultists and mind-flayers would significantly damper the night life. On the bright side, there’s less vampire spawn and Bhaal followers in it, now. “This city is not so bad,” Pasiphaë snorts. “Now that we cleaned it up, some, I mean.”
“I’m sick of it,” Serafina sniffles, shaking her head. “I think. I think it’s about time I moved.”
Xenodius chuckles. “I was just jesting about that, you know?”
“No. I know you were. But I’m not so stubborn now as to dismiss the wisdom behind the jest. Besides,” Serafina smiles. “Phaë’s wizard has sold me on the idea of Waterdeep.”
“Well. It’s not Neverwinter.” But at least it isn’t the fucking Gate, goes unsaid.
“I want you to come with me, Phaë.”
Pasiphaë blinks. Then blinks some more. “You—”
“Please don’t say you want me to have a life of my own. I have that. I’d still like for you to be in it.”
“I… wasn’t going to say that,” Pasiphaë lies, grasping for other arguments she might have. “It’s just… Waterdeep is so awfully far, linnon dithen, and the house—who will take care of the house?”
“I will!” Xenodius protests. “I’ve inherited your propensity for bringing home strays, you know. Elias and I will need more space, soon.” He reaches out and takes Pasiphaë’s hand. “That house is too big for you, Phaë.”
He does have a point. But Pasiphaë isn’t going to give them both the satisfaction of being right without working for it, just a bit. “Have you two been talking about me behind my back?”
“Of course.”
Pasiphaë rolls her eyes. “Such brats.”
“We were just worried about you,” Serafina says, so, so patient. Since when has she become so patient? All at once, Pasiphaë’s throat tightens with emotion, and she has to blink rapidly to keep it all at bay. “That house… it has a lot of happy memories. But there are many bad ones, too. I lost Phaedra and Mel in that house. I thought I lost you in that house—” Pasiphaë winces. “—There’s been more bad than good that’s happened there, recently. I don’t like the idea of you wallowing in that for the rest of your life. Perhaps it’s time for some where new?”
“Sera—”
“Or you can go with Halsin, if that’s what you want!”
Pasiphaë feels like her heart’s been tossed into the air. “What.”
“I mean. I thought—” Serafina fidgets, her turn now to grasp for something to say. “You know I don’t mind, right? You aren’t… I don’t think you’re replacing Mel at all! Odi doesn’t, either.”
Xenodius nods, enthusiastically. “I think he’s nice, Mama.”
Oh, great fuck, deliver her. “I am not ready to have this conversation with you.”
“Why not?”
“Because Halsin and I are most definitely not like that.” She doesn’t try and specify what that means, afraid to lose the plausible deniability in lacking a proper label.
Despite her efforts, though, the siblings seem to understand it perfectly. Exchanging glances that are a bit too knowing for her comfort, they look to her, frowning. “Oh?” Sera says, an eyebrow raised. “I… Are you sure?”
Pasiphaë flounders for an answer. She can’t find one, so she just doesn’t answer at all.
They stay for a few more moments, before Pasiphaë’s growling stomach and growing anxiety prompts them to go inside. Everybody else is waiting around the fire pit for them, idly chatting between themselves. Shadowheart has the Owlbear sprawled across her lap while Astarion has Scratch in his. Tara has found Gale as well, kneading biscuits into his lap while meowing and mrrp-ing what Pasiphaë suspects to be admonishments and endearments.
Through all this, Halsin is cradling a slumbering Yenna, the child the only thing keeping him from getting up and… well. Pasiphaë isn’t sure what he wants to do. From the look on his face, she thinks he might want to kiss her. Or maybe tell her that he never wants to see her again. It would take more than a cursory look for Pasiphaë to determine which it really is, but she’s not ready to take more than a glance. Especially with everybody else discretely staring and wondering too loud without saying a word.
Pasiphaë looks at Jaheira, and sure enough, the druid is looking at her already, an eyebrow raised in question. Pasiphaë shakes her head. Jaheira rolls her eyes.
Dinner is a subdued affair. Nobody really wants to talk all that much. Or eat much, either. But Odi’s paternal instincts kick in, and he forces them to stomach a few bites, even when the tavern’s stew is a bit too bland for their tastes. Serafina gives up some of her own blood for Astarion’s meal, and Pasiphaë hugs her daughter extra tight to thank her for her generosity.
“It’s nothing,” Sera tells her, and Astarion, too. She smiles at him, and for a moment looks like she wants to say more, but thinks better of it. “You’re… uh. You’re welcome.” Astarion appears grateful for her intuition.
Sleep comes quick. They’re less huddled together about it, with Gale and Astarion retiring together to their own cot while Pasiphaë acquires both her children and Shadowheart in hers. Pasiphaë wants to grumble something about being made into an elf-sized teddy bear by two fully grown elves far too old to be sleeping in their mother’s bed, but decides to keep it to herself. Shadowheart is still grieving the loss of her parents after all, it’s no use accidentally prodding that wound for the sake of faux-surliness. If she could help curb that by holding her the way she did her own children after a particularly nasty nightmare, then Pasiphaë resolutely doesn’t mind being slowly crushed to death. They push together three cots to fit all of them together with Pasiphaë in the middle—and if it so happens to be within sight of Gale and Astarion’s cot and Halsin’s place by the fire, well. Nobody says anything.
They let exhaustion take them as soon as their heads hit the pillows.
--
Linnon dithen means ‘little singer’ in Tolkein's Sindarin. Forgotten Realms doesn’t actually have any official Elvish conlang (aside from the few official words in that one dictionary), so I substituted it with Sindarin instead.
Serafina also switches between calling her mother(s) Mama and their nicknames, while Odi prefers to just call them Mama. Pasiphaë and Melisandre had really tumultuous relationships with their own parents/guardians and I imagine weren’t so precious about parental monikers as a result. Odi prefers calling them Mama, though. I think that's just the kind of person he is. To their other children (Sera and Phaedra), they were Mama in times of heightened emotion while any other time they were Phaë and Mel.
#estrella_marie#stella's oc-tober 2022#bg3#pasiphaë elago#i am getting Attached to pasiphae A Normal Amount#my next pieces will be about how fucking Insane She Is Actually and they're... so much fun#not hbo war
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Day 2: Impossible
part of my OC-tober 2022!
tw: internalized transphobia/queerphobia, a few slurs (one of which is reclaimed while one is used by a trans character as part of her internalized transphobia), period typical queerphobia, and mention of police brutality against queer folk in 1940s-60s.
Floyd left five minutes ago to get her a glass of water from the kitchen. He’s still there, currently, laughing up a storm with Babe, Nat’s glass still in his grip, his hand protectively covering the top out of reflex. Usually, Nat wouldn’t mind him taking his sweet time—he never does it quite enough, she thinks. Always bouncing back to her like an elastic band when he’s away for longer than he thinks is necessary, be it at home or here, visiting the Philly faction of their company. He deserves a little time with friends, at least. But in this very moment, she silently hopes Floyd would hurry the fuck up; Bill’s currently in the process of talking her ears off, and there’s only so much of it Nat can take before she takes a page out of Johnny’s book and does something asshole-ish. Like take the man’s crutch and hide it somewhere he can’t get it without help. Maybe the attic.
"I'm just sayin', Morse, if ya wanna get 'round Philly with no trouble, just get ol' Gonorrhea to escort ya and he'll keep ya safe."
Natalie scoffs. "If there's somethin' I don' wan' followin' me around anywhere, Sarge, it's gonorrhea," she says, tipping her head into her hand to hide the small groan of annoyance. How does Frannie deal with this day by day? He’s impossible. "And I told ya already: a girl like me draggin' 'round a man no matter who will definitely draw more attention than castin' it away."
"'Ey, wassat s'ppose to mean?" Bill grumbles. Though his original tone had carried along with it some humor, by now it's all gone. Replaced entirely by a concern that's got his brow all crumpled up in a scowl and his eyes all darkened with endless scenarios. Each one more sinister than the last. "Some bum givin' ya trouble?”
"Still amazes me that ya'll Philly boys always manage to answer ya'lls own dumbass questions with more dumbass questions," Nat marvels, shaking her head. "Nah, Sarge. Nothin' like that—not yet anyway. I’m a freak. I’m a girl with a cock, and I've heard enough stories o' fruits like me on the wrong side of a cop club or fists to know walkin' outside at any time o' day lookin’ like how I look—alone or no—jus’ ain't worth whatever it is ya out for."
"Yeesh, no wonder you'se all cooped up," Bill hisses, sympathetic, scowl digging in deeper. "Listen, Morse, I ain't the kind to get between a fella and his girl—"
"Unlikely. But go on."
"I'm gonna go ahead an' ignore the implications of that rude interruption," Bill huffs, though he does smile. Only a bit. Once he drops it, he's back to being serious. He continues; "Talbert's all worried 'bout ya. And whatever gots him worried gots all o' us worried, ya know?"
"Ugh," Nat groans, rolling her eyes heavenward. "Ya'll talkin' 'bout me behind my back now? Did Floyd put ya up to this?" Suddenly, the very long time he’s spending getting her a glass of water makes sense. The traitor.
Bill waves that off, though, determined to say his piece. "All I'm sayin' 's when Tab's all worried 'bout ya, then Arthur's all worried, and when Arthur's all worried—"
"I get it."
Bill shrugs, finally propping his crutches up next to the table to leave his hands free for his stump, that seems to be cramping. As he massages it, his mouth runs; “’M jus’ sayin’. It ain’t safe for you out there—”
Natalie scoffs. “’S why I stay inside—”
Bill cuts her off. “I know you’re scared,” he says, bluntly, shaking his head. “Hell, I’m scared too—Nixon an’ Winters ain’t the only ones keepin’ an eye out for ya. When somethin’ happens, people call me first, ya know. Not Winters. I mean, they’ll only do that if somethin’ ever happened t’ you or Tab, but I’ll still get that call, ya know? And I can’t shake the idea that one day, I’ll get a call, and it’ll be about you beaten bloody in some jail cell or. Or worse.”
He fixes her with one of those rare, grim expressions of his. The kind that comes with a chilling sort of clarity that looks too out of place on his face after years of housing nothing but a passing shadow of confusion and instant dismissal for her every time they so much as met each other’s gaze across the mess hall or in the middle of maneuvers. Now, he’s looking again, letting it be known that he can see her, and Nat can’t fathom it. This being seen so thoroughly by Bill Guarnere.
There was a point in time where she wanted nothing to do with him, convinced that he was one of those men who wouldn’t hesitate to put a fist through her face the second he found out what she really was. A part of her, the frightened part that runs on the fumes of anxiety, still thinks he is. But he’s proven himself a good man. Though he still has the tendency to stick his foot in his mouth, he’s still trying. That’s more than she’s ever asked from him.
She owes him some honesty. “Or worse,” Nat echoes, turning away to look at the ground. The curtains. The kitchen, where Floyd is still laughing, so handsome and so kind and so loving and so stupid, devoted to a tranny who could do nothing but bring ruin to his good name. Nat swallows, hard. “You know why I stay inside.”
“I know,” Bill says, so gentle. Nat doesn’t think he’s ever heard him so gentle; it makes something in the corners of her eyes grow warm. “It’s not safe for ya. But Natalie—” she turns to him, surprised. He smiles at her; “let us make it safe. We can do that for ya, ya know? You’re one of us, still. A sister. Ain’t it a brothers’ job to take care of their sister?”
A beat. “You,” Nat begins with a rasp. “You called me Natalie.”
“That’s your name, ain’t it?” Bill laughs, not unkindly. “Natalie.”
“It is,” she replies, for lack of anything else to say. Then, she does something she never thought she’d do for Bill Guarnere. She smiles. “You just want us to move to Philly, don’tcha?”
“C-Can’t fault a man for tryin’,” Bill blinks, his smile slipping for just a fraction before coming back in full force. “Did Frannie tell ya there’s an apartment—”
“You’ll have to fight Nix for custody.”
“He’ll give ya away for a crate of Vat 69.”
“The man’s tryna get sober.”
“A bottle, then. And a pack o’ luckies.”
“Ya know what?” Nat says, brightly. “That might actually work.”
Then, she laughs, and Bill can no longer hide his surprise—he’s never heard her laugh at any of his jokes, before.
#stella's oc-tober 2022#natalie morse#bill guarnere#floyd talbert#people like us#bob ocs#nat/tab#or as nathan and i have coined:#morbert#i am aware that the t-slur is anachronistic but we're going to ignore that for now#estrella_marie
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Day 4: Hidden
part of my OC-tober 2022!
Meet Natalia Burnham and Shoshana, Natalie Morse's pseudo-moms, on the night Natalie was born.
tw: death of a parent from childbirth, mentions of blood, brief appearance of a corpse, mentions of statutory rape
The girl’s name is Poppy, and she dies an hour after a painful, violent birth.
The baby is healthy, though.
Talia feels relieved at that, and then feels guilty for being relieved. Not that it lasts long, so practiced is she in the art of processing loss that turning her back to continue tending to the brand-new squalling babe comes to her like second nature. Behind her, she’s vaguely aware of the girls from the big house who made the short walk to her little cottage wrap Poppy up in the ruined sheets she’d sweated and bled and spilled all over, getting her ready for burial. A part of her, the still tender part, wonders if maybe they should wrap Poppy in new sheets. Clean sheets. Ones that don’t smell of fever, blood, or infection, and will give her far more dignity in death than she’d ever gotten in life—they owe her that, at least. After what Talia had chosen to do. But while that part wails in the face of how unfair it all is, Talia’s body stays put. Ever frozen by practicality. They have no more sheets to spare, and no doubt even less money to replace two sheets instead of just the one. And does it even matter? The girl’s dead. She won’t care about no bloody burial shroud.
There’s a living baby that needs tending to and a house full of girls that need her mind clear for when times like this happen again. So, by the crib she stays.
“How old was she?” Shoshana asks, quietly, as Poppy is carried out of the house and into a waiting truck to be brought to a nearby pauper’s grave. Unlike Talia, she watches the pseudo-procession with her head held high and her eyes dry, granting Poppy the dignity Talia’s too tired to give her. When she doesn’t give her a reply right away, Shoshana snaps at her; “how old was she?”
“Sixteen,” Talia manages to spit out, the number leaving a sour taste in her mouth. Nevertheless, she anticipates the next question, and to save herself any more grief, she continues; “the fella’s 30. At least.”
“Fuckin’ Christ.”
Talia wants to laugh, mocking—Shoshana so rarely swears that hearing it out of her mouth is nearly as funny as hearing it out of a priest’s. But the baby fusses again, just a bit, and that thankfully pulls her focus long enough to give them some time to bask in some new silence. It’s not comfortable, but there’s a little less tension than when it started, once Poppy finally stopped screaming. In it, Talia endeavors to lift the poor babe into her arms and rocking back and forth. She doesn’t sing—she doesn’t quite remember how, now—but soon the baby quiets, wriggling happily against the swell of her breast. Content.
Quietly, Shoshana asks; “what is it?”
“Well. He’s got a penis.”
“Are you sure?”
Talia gives her a look. “Yes,” she says, thoroughly exasperated, though she doesn’t mean to be snappish. She’s just tired. “I checked. Looks alright; just like the diagrams and everything. If there was anything different, you’d be the first to know. Take a look for yourself—does it look anything like yours?”
Shoshana is quiet again, her lips still pursed into a thin line as she shuffles toward them both and carefully takes the baby away from Talia with a gentleness she likes to pretend she doesn’t have anymore. The baby squalls for a moment, surprised at the sudden change of hands, but soon, quiets down and wriggles contentedly again, yawning before sinking back into slumber. Once settled, carefully, Shoshana lifts the blanket carelessly swaddled around the babe, and examines what she needs to examine. All throughout, the baby sleeps.
“He’s agreeable,” Talia says, a fleeting smile in her voice. “That’s good.”
“Mm,” Sho hums, replacing the blanket, seemingly satisfied. “He ain’t like me.”
“See, I told ya.”
“But we ain’t gon’ be real sure ‘til he’s grown,” a pause. Then— “What’re we gon’ tell ‘im?”
Suddenly, Talia could barely stand to be upright any longer. Collapsing into a chair, she sighs; “oh, Sho.”
“It’s better t’ get the story straight now than later,” Shoshana sniffs, rocking the babe absent mindedly as her brow furrows. “I’d rather he think he was left than he think he was a murderer.”
“Ain’t nobody a murderer here.” Except me.
“Nobody ain’t, you’s correct. Still, he won’t care ‘bout that. Ya know how kids are.”
But it’s not about the kids. Talia knows this, wants to scream it into the heavens until her lungs heave and collapse, just like she always feels every other lie that makes it out of Shoshana’s mouth, if only to make her realize: I can see through you. I have always been able to see through you.
She’s not entirely sure if Shoshana knows. Isn’t sure if their fearless madame is aware enough of her patterns to pinpoint this almost pathological need to keep secrets, to have something hidden from everyone all the time—or if she cares at all. Not even a less-than-a-day old infant seems to be safe from Shoshana’s schemes, instantly becoming a chess piece, a puppet on strings in this play she’s built around herself. This world she lives in that they all just happen to inhabit. The manipulation is never ending.
And what for? Talia isn’t sure. Control? Definitely. Comfort? Perhaps. But lies unravel when you can’t keep track of them all, and what comfort Shoshana manages to derive from that delicate balancing act, Talia could never understand.
The truth was always her comfort. Facts. Diagrams. Numbers, if called for. When you cut someone, they bleed. When they bleed out enough, they die. When a baby doesn't get enough oxygen in the first few minutes of life, they die. When the body doesn't get enough sleep...
Talia’s tired—it all makes her so tired.
So she says none of this. “Fine,” is what she says, smothering the feeling that she’s yet again sold another soul to the highest bidder, watching impassively as Sho continues to hold the baby close. “Won't be a few years yet, but fine. However you want it.”
She closes her eyes. That's the last they say on the topic for a very long time.
#stella's oc-tober 2022#shoshana people like us#natalia burnham#natalie morse#this adds nearly nothing to the main plot of people like us i just couldn't get the scene out of my head#it didnt end up the way i wanted it to and tbh i have no idea what this is even but as long as im writing amirite#yes sho is an intersex character#people like us#estrella_marie
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Day 1: Childhood
Unfortunately, life happened (read: caught COVID again) and now I'm about two weeks behind. But I've finally gotten around to sitting down and writing again. So here it is! OC-tober 2022 based off this prompt list. I'll be extending it into November to make up for the days I missed + maybe to replace NaNoWriMo, since I don't think I'll be able to join in on that one too.
Natalie Morse is my OC for BoB, but Arthur Benjamin Foster belongs to my friend @hellofanidea! I hope I did him justice.
The crib has seen better days, with its wooden railing and rods a patch work of beige wood and flaking periwinkle paint, the left side of its bowed rocking legs wrapped with dingy duct tape to keep them from chipping at the wall. Still, there’s a kind of charm to it, perhaps attributed to the obvious care that went into the maintenance of it, despite its overall appearance of disrepair. There’s a lot of love here, memories, too, and though the thing looks like a cage for children, somehow, he knew that it was anything but. At least the bed inside seems to be brand new, though, keeping its rectangular shape despite the number of babes that might have slept in it in the past years—or last night, for that matter, if the fresh new sheets and well-loved soft toy within it was any indication. Arthur smiles, reaching in to pick it up and give it an experimental squeeze.
“Carla sleeps in here?” he asks Nat, indicating the baby girl he’d seen Ruby holding in the big house when he’d arrived, with her little errant curls and wide, brown eyes as dark as her skin. Natalie doesn’t give him a verbal response, too busy fussing with the mess in the kitchen only she sees to reply with anything but a quick nod. “Really? In this death trap?”
That gets him an affronted scoff. “Hey, it’s old but it’s reliable,” Nat says, finally putting down her chores to indicate the crib with a wave of her hand. “It was mine when I was a baby, ‘s survived a lot.”
For the first time, Arthur tries to imagine it, replacing the soft toy back in its perch with all the care he would have shown a baby Natalie, wide eyed and babbling, that little dimple on her cheek appearing alongside a gummy smile and the tufts of sandy blonde hair on her precious head like downy feathers. “I bet you were adorable.”
“Na’w,” Nat huffs with a shake of her head. “I was a pain in the ass.”
“What baby isn’t?” Arthur looks over his shoulder to grin at her. “Bet you were a cute pain in the ass, though.”
That earns him an eye roll. “I guess,” Nat says, returning to her tasks at hand. “I used to cry my lungs out. Kept Talia up all night until I finally learned to shut up. My first memory was gettin’ my leg through the bars and kicking at the wall hard ‘nough t’ get it t’ rock; think I used to do it when I needed t’ sleep. I liked it so much I chipped the wall there. They tried t’ push the whole thing t’ the middle of the room to save it but figured the cryin’ was worse than a ruined wall, so they jus’ put the duct tape on the legs t’ keep from chippin’ at the wallpaper.”
Arthur feels the smile on his face slip at that, finally turning away, fully, from the crib to look at her—properly look at her. Nat’s back is turned to him, and he can’t help but wonder if perhaps that was intentional, just like all those other times she’s slipped up and revealed more of her hand than she ever expected to, parts of her that she’d expertly hid in hopes of projecting enough indifference to fool herself into making it through another day with all those wounds festering in her. Throwing up walls has always been Natalie Morse’s superpower, but seeing through them without even a blink of an eye was Arthur’s. And right now, he can feel the prickle of a memory buzzing in the quiet between them, a conversation had in the snow of a cruel forest a time ago, with a frozen enemy soldier, his unseeing eyes staring up at the sky.
“I think he was calling for his mother. They always call for their mothers,” Arthur had said, spurred on by the weight of his medic’s bag and the dead weight of the man at his feet, long dead but mouth open, seemingly mid-cry. Arthur had thought then, and every night since, that he could hear it still, the last words of a dead man dancing with the bitter winter wind. “When they know that there’s no hope, they call for their mothers.”
And Nat had replied; “I won’t,” with a certainty that made something in his chest ache and eyes just as blank as the sky above. “She’d never come.”
Slowly, Arthur reaches out and touches the hem of her blouse, tugging at it with his fingers. “She should have picked you up,” he says, simply, and Natalie freezes. Doesn’t turn to him. But, Arthur continues; “you were just a baby. You didn’t deserve to be ignored. She should have picked you up.”
“Talia shoulda don' a lot of things,” Natalie says, just as simply, with a voice as cold as the day they’d stared at that dead man and thought of home. Still frozen, she tilts her head to one side, and listens to the silence between them. Listens to all the things Arthur is saying, but isn’t voicing, the connection going both ways. Her walls are nothing to him, and his quiet is too loud for her. “But I shoulda learned to shut up sooner.”
#stella's oc-tober 2022#natalie morse#bob ocs#people like us#these are going to be really short#and prolly won't make much sense to anybody who isn't me or nathan but it's my blog and i get to choose the posts#ab foster#estrella_marie
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Day 6: Reflection
part of my OC-tober 2022! though Arthur Benjamin Foster is an oc created by my friend @hellofanidea! I hope I did him justice.
tw: some gender dysphoria, though this is more about gender euphoria and the second puberty trans folks go through when on HRT! with joe teaching arthur how to shave once his first beard starts showing up after a few months on testosterone. this takes place in the 1950s-ish, an era in trans history that's more commonly known as a time where HRT for trans folk was introduced to the medical community. from what I could find, it was more toward feminizing hormone therapy, but since testosterone was first isolated in 1935 and Michael Dillon is on record as the first trans man to receive an early version of testosterone therapy as early as 1939 (when testosterone was still very poorly misunderstood) from a Dr. George Foss, it's not a massive leap that Arthur could and would receive masculinizing hormone therapy in the 1950s.......... but also at the same time since when did I care about 100% historical accuracy? here, have some trans content. because I said so.
“Quit squirmin’.”
“Can’t,” Arthur grumbles, shifting from left to right, uncomfortable for more reasons than just the height of the chair keeping his toes a couple of inches off the ground. “’M sweaty.”
That’s an understatement—he’s drenched. And oily, too. He’s never had to take so many showers in one day before these couple of months, what with him being sticky and slick in numerous unsexy places he never knew a human being can be sticky and slick in. All of that, of course, compounded tenfold by the near unbearable itchiness of growing hair, um, everywhere; from his legs to his arms to his pits, the prickly masses of brownish red appearing seemingly overnight and doubling in number, turning him into one sweaty, and occasionally smelly, auburn furball of a man.
He's never been so happy to see his reflection in his life.
“Do we have to?” he asks Joe again, trying not to make his admiration for his new, patchy beard show as he checks it out in the mirror in front of him. “It could get real bushy soon, if we jus’ let it be.”
“If ya don’t shave it, it won’t grow in evenly,” Joe patiently says, not looking up from his prep. He’s got soap, a bottle of shaving cream, a towel soaking in a bowl of warm water, and a glass bottle of what Arthur had first thought was cologne, but now knows is something called after shave. Curiously, Arthur observes the way Joe puts the pieces together, trying to memorize them for when he later has to do this all by himself, a prospect that excites him a lot.
Once he’s ready, Joe turns to him, taking Arthur’s chin with his index finger and thumb to turn his face side to side for inspection. It shouldn’t take more than a minute, but his gaze lingers for longer, a softness in his eyes he does a very bad job at hiding behind faux-seriousness. Arthur fights not to blush under the scrutiny—he fails. Spectacularly. Because aside from just being constantly sweaty and hairy, he also runs so hot under the collar. All. The. Time. He should be more embarrassed by it, having the sex drive of a teenaged boy at nearly forty years of age, but Joe and George are enjoying it immensely, and aren’t afraid to let him know. As a result, he’s only marginally embarrassed.
“You’re very close,” Arthur croaks, newly deepening voice creaking over the last syllable in giggly nervousness.
Joe smirks. “And you’re very handsome.”
It’s so unfair.
Not that Arthur is actually complaining, letting Joe lather him up, clean his face, wipe him down, then wrap him up in a warm towel to stew for a couple of minutes, allowing himself to get lost in the heat for a little while before Joe unearths him from it and brandishes a new, shiny razor. Not the straight razor like he’s seen Natalie use on her own face—that’s for the closer shave she favors, where nearly no shadow or stubble is left behind. This one’s a simpler, metal razor with those double blades you can buy from your local mom-and-pop shop convenience store that, if used incorrectly, could leave you spiky like a porcupine at best, badly razor burned at worst. Joe holds it up for Arthur to take, watches him take it, hold it, considers it for a moment, then takes it back.
“Let me do this one for you,” Joe amends, using his knee to spread Arthur’s legs further so he can slot in closer, lifting his face once more to inspect it, then nodding toward their reflection, silently instructing Arthur to pay attention. “Watch— we go with the grain first, alright? So I don't accidentally cut you.”
Joe begins, swiping down Arthur’s cheeks a few times, murmuring instruction as he goes, twitching slightly to the right or left on occasion so Arthur can see him work in the mirror, before going back in to clean up his passes. As he goes further, he takes Arthur’s hand and lets him touch, to let him feel how the hair growth patterns change, or to let him feel what freshly shaved skin is supposed to feel like. All the while, he’s careful, the gentleness in which he maneuvers the blade over Arthur’s face in great juxtaposition to his broad frame, usually so big, now made small as he hunches over and cradles Arthur’s face in his big hands, and methodically rids him of shaving cream and hair.
He's so close, too. Hovering just an inch away from Arthur’s nose, a pleasant blur except for his thick eyebrows furrowed in concentration. His delicate eye lashes fluttering distractedly over the gentle swell of an olive cheek. In times when they’re lulled into a silence, Joe getting lost in his work, inching in closer when a particularly confusing patch of hair requires him to turn the razor around for a more complicated pass. Arthur’s hands have found their way to Joe’s waist in the meantime. Partly to steady himself. Mostly in indulgence.
It takes at least thirty minutes, then another ten for a double check, before Joe declares himself done, taking a step back—though not by much—to admire his handiwork and show Arthur in the mirror. The man that stares back at them looks like a fresh boy, now. The roundness of his jaw more prominent without all the hair providing contour and shadow. Arthur can’t say he likes it, slightly less comfortable with his naked face than he used to be before, but at least now he can soothe himself with the knowledge that the hair will grow back. Possibly thicker, too. And he’ll be back in this spot in a few days’ time to once again shave his beard.
Arthur lets out a shaky exhale of giddy excitement. He gets to shave his beard.
He has a beard.
“Thank you,” Arthur says, grinning and accompanying it with a quick kiss that Joe tips his head to receive. Arthur meant it to be chaste, just a little peck, but Joe cups his face in his hands again, when he tries to pull away, and brings him back close for a harder, more thorough kiss. Not leading anywhere. Just reassuring. Like an extra squeeze in an already cozy embrace.
When they part, Joe smiles. Then pecks him one last time. “Don’t thank me yet.”
Arthur blinks. “What? Why?”
The answer is aftershave.
George coincidentally comes home just as Joe playfully slaps some on to Arthur’s freshly shaved cheeks, and laughs himself almost to tears in the bathroom doorway, as Arthur curses up a storm.
#stella's oc-tober 2022#joe toye#arthur benjamin foster#george luz#luzfostoye#why yes this IS trans; gay; and polyamorous why do you ask#people like us#bob ocs#ab foster#estrella_marie
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Day 3: Control
part of my OC-tober 2022!
I spent all weekend knocked out on allergy meds (I really am not having a good run of it health-wise lately) so I'm a little behind but we're back on track babey and I will finish this list this year even if it kills me.
Isabel Makiling is an OC I created based off Nieves Fernandez, a school teacher turned guerilla leader and assassin of Japanese soldiers in WWII Tacloban.
tw: mention of sex slavery/wartime rape in the form of "comfort women" Japanese soldiers kept during WWII
Margie Sanchez doesn’t remember the first thing Isabel Makiling says to her.
They were both too distracted to note the other—Margie, especially, struggling was she to escape with her life amongst people who spoke to her in tongues she did not recognize. Still, in the cacophony of chaos, she is taken in by the storm and by the brown hands of local friends who take pity on her, and the girl on the forefront of the rabble—barking orders at those wise enough to listen, looking like a goddess of war, in her red, red saya and her soot-stained blouse, barefoot but sure on her feet—is pushed to the back of her mind.
But the first thing Isabel says to her in English, Margie remembers.
“My bolo,” she says to her in a soft whisper. So soft, it was almost lost to the darkness between them. But there are stars in the sky, brighter than anything Margie has seen in her life, and there are stars in this girl’s eyes. The dangerous kind, like the eyes of a predator that flash in warning, once, before devouring anything in its way. “My bolo is better than guns. Quiet and quick. Make my hands more sure. You must learn to use this bolo in this war—not the same as your American guns. Better. Quicker.”
Margie doesn’t tell her them American Army nurses don’t wield no guns. Doesn’t tell her that American Army nurses shouldn’t wield no knives, either. She took an oath upon entering this profession, upon putting on the white dress and cap and plunging her hands into the bleeding red of a man’s open chest. Do no harm.
But that oath was no match for her anger.
Their first raid liberates a small camp in which intel tells them about a dozen or so comfort women are being kept. Margie joins them, intent on playing her hand at combat medic.
What they find there ensures that she walks away different.
The girls are so young. So young and so scared, violated in the worst ways possible, looking at her with dazed faces blank with grief, clothes mere tatters on their bruised and slight frames. For a moment after first seeing them, Margie temporarily forgets what Isabel had taught her: a knife to the point below or behind the earlobe, severing the carotid artery and internal jugular, inducing unconsciousness. Silent. Quick. Clean. A technique that requires patience and control—neither of which, at this moment, she has.
(If Isabel notices the tremble of her lip, the quiver in her voice, she says nothing. Simply directs others to bring the girls to her for anything her healing hands can offer.)
The first Japanese soldier to fall under her blade is the last amongst his unit standing, the others having been taken care of by the other guerilla fighters. They leave this one for her, their gentle nurse, who watches over them and heals them, but carries a rage within her that she could no longer deny. Not after today. Not after those girls.
They watch with a thirst that Margie feels honored to quench.
When he falls under her blade, he does so with wide eyes filled with fear—a familiar sight. But not quite. Like a beloved painting with one color taken out, or a symphonic piece with a missing instrument, Margie realizes only after, covered in blood and dirt, why.
“No hope,” Isabel nods, taking the bolo from her hands with all the gentleness Margie feels she is no longer capable of. The touch sends a jolt of lightning through her, raising goosebumps over her skin. When she looks up, Isabel’s eyes bore into her, flashing once in warning, but not for Margie. Never for Margie. “When you heal, they fear for their lives, but they have hope that you will save them. Now, you no longer heal. So, their fear has no hope.”
No hope.
She joins them fully, then. Not quite the silent killer they had hoped her to be, her hands still unsure of the blade that they wield. But in a pinch, she is good; good enough that they needn’t worry about her being unable to hold her own. And on raids they know will end in the liberation of hurting, bleeding girls, they bring her, and in those moments, she becomes a strange monster. A combat medic who wields a weapon. Who kills as much as she saves—the paradox of which does not escape her. Haunts her, in fact, like a shadow.
“We do terrible things to each other,” Margie says one night, in the safety of their tent. They are meant to be resting, but the night is cold and the ground is hard and this close, Margie can see Isabel’s face, her own eyes gaining the sight of a predator. The darkness holds no secrets now. “Don’t we?”
“We do,” Isabel says, simply. “But I’ll hold you, too.”
And it takes a moment of deep silence, before a hand—a killer’s hand, a liberator’s hand—gently takes her own, and holds on.
#stella's oc-tober 2022#isabel makiling#margie sanchez#i had no idea where this was going and i /still/ have no idea#but here we are#people like us#estrella_marie
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Day 8: Graceful
part of my OC-tober 2022 (that's prolly going to bleed into 2023)! I took so long writing this prompt. I wrote three separate ones and hated all of them. This is the one I hated the least, so it's the one I'm going to post. I'm not happy with it tho 🫠🫠🫠
tw: period typical queer/transphobia
[AN EXCERPT FROM “BAND OF BROTHERS AND ONE SISTER: A QUEER HISTORY OF EASY COMPANY” BY ADAM NEWMANN
A THESIS SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE STUDIES IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF HISTORY]
The following is an essay found amongst the private papers of David Kenyon Webster, posthumously annotated and collated by his partner Joseph D. Liebgott during the years 1983 -1990, before being gifted to Arthur Benjamin Foster in June 1992 whereupon it was kept in his private collection until the day of his death in July 29, 2018.
xxx
I do believe I was the first to figure out.
Not about Foster, of course. That honor falls to one Eugene Roe, I think. I haven’t properly confirmed it, but who else would it have been? There isn’t a world in all of vast existence that I can manage to conjure where the company’s best combat medic would turn his back on another soldier in need. Unfamiliar am I in physiology dissimilar to my own[1], even I can tell that binding one’s chest for as long as Foster had been doing (while going through the same number of maneuvers for the same amount of time as the rest of us) is a health hazard Doc Roe would never allow amongst the men under his care. Not to mention dealing with monthlies[2], a feat already so difficult to go through, much less successfully hide on one’s own. In so far as I’ve known him, I could never pinpoint a time in which Foster had looked ill on account of breathlessness or dreaded muscle cramps. Either he was very good at hiding it—which I do not totally discount (out of all of us, Foster had always been one very comfortable with pain), but I might also venture to claim that Foster’s continued proper use of his lungs is a direct result of Doc Roe’s (and, additionally, Ralph Spina’s) nagging care. I doubt Foster would have made it through the war in one piece without it.
Though, I must admit, I might not have been the first to figure Arthur Benjamin Foster out, I very much could have been one of the first to figure him out, having been blindsided one night in the showers of our Aldbourne base camp; sure I had been alone to have another go at cleaning up after that afternoon’s accumulation of grime and sweat and completely unaware that the next thirty minutes would yield an enlightening argument from the two stooges that had decided bickering about Foster’s status as a, and I quote; “man with a bit missing[3], and two bits tacked on,” was best done in the middle of the night in a shared shower located in the middle of a base camp, filled with soldiers trained to report any sign of queerness to higher-ups for extermination via blue-ticket.
In hindsight, I’m not entirely sure how I managed to keep as quiet as I had been that night, huddled in the stall in the far end of the row, terrified of discovery[4] just as Morse had been, so adamant was she that Foster be more mindful of the locks whenever he’d chanced a place to change.[5]
But I digress.[6]
Christmas in Aldbourne had been an odd affair—I chalk it up to the atmosphere our impending “great task” put us in. Contrary to popular belief, most of us were very aware that it could have been our very last happy celebration. There wasn’t much in terms of presents, food, or booze, but there was much laughter and cheer, most of which had been heralded by an amateur production of Romeo and Juliet some members of second platoon had put together under the direction of closet thespian Captain Nixon, then Lt. Nixon. Or at least, the first portion of it had done its job beautifully, with the image of clumsy, rough soldiers taking on the delicate poetry of the Bard’s works. I surely laughed some[7].
But perhaps the core of the subject matter of the play had been too somber for an audience with death constantly in the back of their minds. I remember distinctly how the end of the production brought in an oppressive hush over the audience. Our Romeo and Juliet were far too convincing, and by the end of it, in that awkward time between festivities and dinner, things had gotten a bit more solemn and quiet. The finality of death, even in the fictional sense, hadn’t been lost on us, and in an attempt to raise spirits, Nixon decided to secretly pass around his own, generously taking a bottle or two from his seemingly never-ending stash of the VAT 69 to share. I had been on my second helping of it (snuck to me by one Joe Liebgott, the gesture confusing me in the moment, but in hindsight was one of the first instants of recognition between the both of us, I think[8]) when I’d noticed that our unfortunate Juliet had yet to change out of her dress.
Morse had been our Juliet. Why, I’m not sure, though I always thought it was due to the relationship Nixon had with her. An almost brotherly one, with all its quiet concern disguised by teasing (that at times might have gone too far), but was often excused due to the undercurrent of tenderness that each stabbing jibe carried. Opposite her, he’d somehow managed to convince our resident rake Sgt. Talbert to take on the role of Romeo. It had all been a joke at their expense, no doubt. The reasons for the joke differ depending on who you ask, but for myself I knew Nixon had zeroed in on whatever budding, hot-and-cold relationship that had been brewing between them since the troop ship (or, if I’m not mistaken, since Pvt. Diedrich’s tragic death during the practice jumps in Toccoa)[9]. A rather cruel move, I had thought, especially toward her; though I was still too ambivalent toward Morse to bother saying anything.
Or perhaps ambivalent is not the right word.
I was apathetic. I didn’t know her—partly due to my own lack of trying, but aided, too, by her own reticence. She certainly never made it easy to know her in those first few months, and why would she? when everything about her until that very moment had been a lie? Though not the only one of us who was lying at this point, her silence on the matter of her identity was a result of a different kind of hiding. While some of us hid beneath cloaks of wool, sweltering beneath from the heat, sweating because of the promise of the sure ridicule and death, she had no cloak. All she had was an ill-fitting, sharp and painful skin, not her own and hurting her, with every step she took. I could never imagine that, the pain of looking in a mirror and being unable to recognize the entity staring back at you. No wonder she’d been the way she had, often hunched over, trying to make herself as small as possible in order to avoid as many eyes as possible. When you spoke to her, she was never fully present. Not in an absent-minded, manner, no. But in a carefully curated way. Like an impersonal room meant to appeal to everyone’s surface level of taste. Or one of those unremarkable hotel paintings, meant to be nothing more than to be a pretty image to look over. Even when she’d brought out the charm in those rare moments she deigned it necessary to smile at local girls in those little pubs we would find ourselves at, she was only ever able to achieve an approximation of a person. One that would last only a night with whatever pretty girl would fall for her charms, and then disappear in the morning, like some apparition.
Morse was a ghost, for me and for everyone else.
But in that dress, she’d transformed.
It should have struck me then and there, but I was too blown away by her sudden appearance, this human emerging from her cocoon, fully realized. In this cloth of cheap, emerald green and dirty white chiffon, crafted masterfully by Foster himself to fit and flatter her better than any commercial dress might—or any one-time-use, amateur theatre costume had any right to be—she was more than just a character on stage, or an actor of it. Nothing about her seemed out of place in that moment, despite it being all wrong theoretically. The comedy of it should have been derived from the mismatch of a man in a dress, but there was all rightness in her, then. A complete picture.
What happened then, reader, was what I could only describe to be a moment of True Recognition. It was then that I realized—looking at it in hindsight, I want to smack myself for such obliviousness. Truly, I say to you, it should have struck me earlier. The second she’d appeared on stage, in fact. The minute that secondary curtain had pulled back and she smiled, blooming beneath the lights like a flower to the sun—no one had laughed. They should have laughed. But none did. Not even when she’d simply sat, silent and lovely, smiling slightly with a hint of girlish excitement, like a blushing, young Juliet would have been in the face of a party being thrown solely for her. Nor when she’d gracefully recited half that sonnet, the words curling from her lips like tender leaves reaching out, out, out toward the surface to feel the sun. Not even when she lay, dying, her last breath a condemnation of hate, a celebration of love. There was no comedy to be found anywhere. There was no mismatch, and everyone could sense it. We were looking at a fully realized person.
She was just a girl in a dress.
It was lightning splitting through me, then. Striking me from between my eyes and pooling in searing heat just below my sternum, until it settled like molten metal in my stomach. Inexplicably, I ran through several emotions all at once. Elation, happiness, joy—I shudder to think of the faces I must have pulled in so little a time.[10] Then, recognition. Then, dread. Fear. A deep, deep sadness that made me turn away from her and back to thoughts that had brought us there, half-drunk and half-hysterical, reveling in the last moments of true freedom we knew we were ever going to get. Some, for a long time. Others, for the last.
All I could think was: God, let her live. If You had any grace left in this graceless world that allows war and famine and pain, spare some that she may live. So she can escape and go somewhere where she can wear dresses like these every day. Where she can live as she is, and not as what the military wants her to be. Where she can be more than government property, set up for slaughter and a tombstone that will do no justice to the inner life she currently lives.
And if she were to die, if this was going to be her last happy moment in a world of dark uncertainty, then I wished she had the chance to die in that dress. Be buried in it, as the person she really was, rather than the man everybody else saw her as. I didn’t want her to return to her uniform. To that cocoon that I knew, even without her insight, hurt her more than anything else did. She was meant for more. Butterfly wings.
I couldn’t stand it.
So, I left.
… This reads like a confession, Joe. Maybe it is. I have half the mind to send this to her. But what good will it do? She’s not going to stop running. I don’t even know where she is.
xxx
Though the nature of the piece, at first glance, is that of a personal diary entry, the researcher believes that it had been drafted earlier in Webster’s creative writing career and was intended as a practice piece or a personal essay. An assumption based on the last paragraph, keeping in mind how often it was said by those who knew them that Liebgott was often Webster’s sounding board for his writings. However, due to the subject matter, the heaviness of which seemed to have caught Webster off guard, the piece was derailed from its original purpose and thus kept instead of fixed up and published or, at the very least, circulated amongst their closest confidants within their Easy Company circle, as was his wont at the time.
Furthermore, unlike his own personal diary entries and his published articles dated in the latter years of his life, throughout this piece, Webster appears to be speaking to an audience separate from himself, through the vehicle of “reader” or, often, a singular “you.” Additionally, unlike his published articles, fellow Easy Company soldier, Natalie Morse is explicitly referred to as female in this piece, as opposed to only hinted at as female through specific choices in metaphor that establish a feminine-coded motif on her literary presence (i.e., always comparing her metaphorically to female figures, such as a sister or a mother and referring to her movements and physicality with gendered language skewing largely feminine), a literary style Webster often favors in his public works. His own respectful way of depicting Morse as he knew her while simultaneously avoiding outing her amongst unforgiving society at the time.
Despite the exact date of this piece being pure speculation at best, it is a widely shared belief amongst the Queer History community that this is the first ever attempt at capturing the existence of Natalie Morse as a transgender woman, pre-dating People Like Us, the written memoirs of Arthur Benjamin Foster, published in 2017 but which was written in the late 2000s.
Webster’s stylistic choices in referring to Morse in both this article and his published ones, as well as his blatant support of her, supplements the claims that most (if not all) Easy Company soldiers knew of the existence of not just Foster, but of Morse too, as transgender individuals, as well as their ready acceptance of them in a time when queerness was seen as a threat to be reported and eradicated within and between military men.
[1] That’s an understatement
[2] If Arthur had ever thought to kill us in this time, I would have let him, poor guy was suffering through enough
[3] I prefer when Able calls it a lack of inches
[4] You were always an eavesdropper, but not on purpose—or that’s what you claimed. Just always in the right place in the right time, my David
[5] If you were a Toccoa man, you knew about Foster; him and Morse weren’t quite as sneaky as they thought they were [RESEARCHER’S NOTE: In his memoirs People Like Us, Foster mentions how Liebgott was one of the few Easy soldiers who was in the dark about Foster’s existence as a transgender man. Webster later supplements this in a diary entry, where he mentions Liebgott’s rather comical reaction to finding out. This researcher is of the belief that this annotation was either an attempt at saving face or a case of memory failing Liebgott in later years.]
[6] Rambling, Web
[7] Pretentious bastard
[8] Hate to break it to you, buddy, but Hoob set that up. I think he was hoping to knock you out early and get you to bed so he could fuck around without having to worry about you passing out in some bar and missing curfew. Again. “Recognition” happened earlier. I’ll tell you next time.
[9] How the fuck do you know that? I never knew that! [RESEARCHER’S NOTE: It is often anecdotally mentioned by Easy Company men that while a notorious gossip, Liebgott was often times oblivious. In People Like Us, Foster often talks about how Liebgott would ask Webster for gossip he may have accidentally picked up.]
[10] Like a fish out of water, with your mouth half open and gasping for air
#stella's oc-tober 2022#natalie morse#people like us#bob ocs#david webster#webgott#no those last paragraphs is not an in-universe excuse I made up to justify why my writing sounds nothing like Webster’s#why do you even think that what gave you that idea hahahahaha#just wanted to write that euphoric moment a queer person might feel when they spot another queer person in the wild#ab foster#estrella_marie
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Day 5: Failure
part of my OC-tober 2022!
tw: recovery from addiction and alcoholism; brief mentions of transphobia, suicide, and death
“You think I could’ve done better?”
It’s not the first time Nat’s heard this question over the past few days; but it certainly is the first time Nix has paused in actual inquiry with the intention of collecting an answer. This, after five days of muttering to himself in the throes of alcohol withdrawal delirium, reaching out for ghosts that have come congregating around his bed and taking up Nat’s place beside it. Twisting her visage until she’s his mother and Kathy and Blanche and back to herself all at once, flickering between so many women so fast, it left him dizzy with all the different pleas and apologies half-spoken, half-dying on his tongue.
By the time he'd finally broken out of it, like a fever, he’d looked at her with glassy eyes filled with exhaustion and such a deep, deep sadness, that Nat, unable to hold his gaze, looked away.
And it’s with her back to him that she answers; “Probably.”
“I figured,” he rasps, going silent as she cleaned up around him. Folding up sheets of sick and sweat. Clearing away glasses of water half-drunk. His eyes, she feels, never leave her, the weight of his gaze as heavy as a trembling hand on her back. Tentative, at best, but definitely there and reaching out. Desperate to touch, just to convince himself that she’s still around and that she’s real. That she’s not going anywhere.
Honestly, Nat’s really tired of being mistaken for a ghost.
“I know I failed them,” Nix says, quietly. In that fabricated, matter-of-fact way she’s long ago come to expect from him. Like if he said it nonchalantly enough, he won’t hurt as much over the truth that comes spilling out of his lips. “I’m just waiting for the moment you figure out that I’m going to fail you, too.”
The idea hurts too much to think about, so she decides to not think about it at all, instead forcing herself to think of another brother, from long ago. With curly hair, the color of corn, round glasses that reflected light with a disorienting flash, and piercing green eyes that pinned her to her chair with all the aching gentleness of a pitying butcher, holding the knife to her throat for a quick and easy kill.
“Sorry, kid,” he’d said, the cruelty coming from his all-too-easy nonchalance and his blatant disregard for she that should have meant more to him than just a mere nuisance. Or a family monster to be ashamed of. “But you and I, well. It ain’t like that.”
What is it like, then? she’d wanted to scream, although she knew the answer already. By the time he’d made it out the door toward his new, shiny life, his name had only been half-way out of her mouth. He hadn’t even stuck around to hear her say it.
(She hasn’t said it since then.)
“I’ve dealt with worse, Nix,” she tsks, finally looking up to meet his gaze, his eyes black a polished onyx, with a pain in them that perfectly reflects her own. Unwavering, she meets it head-on. “Failing me ain’t gon’ push me away.”
“It should,” Nix retorts, no hesitation. His voice dangerously calm. More calm than she’s ever heard him be. “The last sister I failed killed herself.”
He tilts his head to regard her thoroughly. Then, he smiles. His first smile in nearly a month, and it’s not even a real one. “You’re as close to her replacement as I’ll ever get.”
Involuntarily, she lets out a hiss, turning her head like she’d been struck. “Fucker,” she chokes. “That hurts.”
“Oh,” he says. Genuinely surprised by her blatant admission, suddenly unused to it despite having encouraged its original fruition. He’d been expecting to hurt her, but not for her to admit it. But as fast as his surprise came, it melts away, clumsily, back behind a mask of fabricated indifference. “Hurts more than the worst?”
Fuck you. She grits her teeth in a smiling sneer of her own. “Not even close.”
He sniffs, unimpressed by her edges—after all, he was the master of them, broken and cracked in places no human being should break. “You should leave anyway.”
She sniffs right back, unimpressed by his acceptance of all the sharpness in him and the blatant disregard for the tender center. “Dick will have my head.”
“He should leave, too,” Nix says, simply. “He already has.”
Not by his own volition, Nat knows, wishing not for the first time, that Dick was here, instead of in some base camp, putting a new batch of boys through maneuvers in time for the next slaughter. Speirs has been working double time, pulling strings to make sure Dick won’t be in the next plane, jumping out without Nix by his side, and will be home in time for at least New Years Eve. But it’s not a guarantee, and Nat keeps wondering if, one day, she’ll have to mourn not just the loss of Nix, but the loss of Dick, too. She couldn’t imagine a world where one remained without the other, and the waiting game this new war has thrust them into has pulled them this way and that into a dozen differing corners, spreading them both thinner than she’s ever remembered them being, even in the middle of the Ardennes.
But they will endure. They will always endure. What will the grief turn her into, if they did not?
“You should leave,” Nix stresses again, sounding more urgent now. Not quite as agitated as he had been in his delirium, but enough to betray the very real fears he couldn’t keep close to his chest. “Natalie—”
“Shut up,” she snaps, reaching out to grab him by his stained collar for a good shake down. “Want me to leave? Well, tough shit, big guy, I’m here. I'm the one who's here. In deep shit, with you. Not Blanche or ya momma or Kathy—me. An’ none of your stupid, self-sacrificin', self-depricatin' bullshit is gon’ throw me. I'm stayin' right. Here.”
With one last shake that seems to rattle his head right on his shoulders, she lets him go. “Got it?”
It takes a moment, one long, dizzying moment, where Nix grabs at the sheets with sweaty palms and swallows, audibly. But when he finally looks up at her, those hard polished onyxes have softened to a smoldering charcoal, a light flickering behind them she didn’t know she missed. Nix swallows hard, again, steeling himself in the face of her resolve.
Then, he groans, weakly. “Ok, but maybe move a little back, because I'm about to vomit all over your shoes."
Natalie does no such thing, but does grab the sick bucket to catch all his bile just in time.
#stella's oc-tober 2022#natalie morse#lewis nixon#winnix#nix: u should leave me#nat: fuck you don't tell me what to do ❤️#people like us#bob ocs#estrella_marie
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Day 9: Role Reversal
part of my OC-tober 2022 (that's prolly going to bleed into 2023)! This takes place in the late 1920s, early 1930s, when they were much younger than in the original timeline of People Like Us and in their "we're still frenemies (more friends, tho) but I'm also secretly in love with you" era. Truthfully, I just wanted to write about Teddy in his Female Impersonator/Drag Queen get up. Teddy Davies and Lucas Samsa belong to @hellofanidea! I hope I did them justice.
tw: period typical homo/queer/transphobia, use of the f-slur maliciously, and sexual harassment (a nameless, third party being a little too pushy)
“Oh my,” Teddy swoons as he enters the tiny dressing room, going so far as to sweep a hand up to his cheek in delighted surprise, his painted lips, perfectly coifed wig, carefully made-up face, and silk green gown completing his homage to every Hollywood starlet of the silver screen. “My hero!”
Much to Lucas’ annoyance, Amy and Mags laugh.
“Wounded in battle, and all for you, pretty girl!” Mags crows, taking Lucas’ injured hand and waving it in the air, as if to prove a point. “Look at this delicate face—poor thing’s going to be black and blue tomorrow.”
“Aww,” Amy sighs, faux-concerned and loving every second of this, the bastard. “What’s yer momma gonna say, Lulu? She’ll throw a fit.”
“And yer daddy’s gonna shake yer hand, protectin’ yer girl like that!” Mags pitches in, taking Lucas’ chin to wiggle it in that condescending way she does, when she likes to lord her height, her broadness, her manliness, over his slighter, shorter, and paler frame. Boyish mannerisms made even more boyish by her male impersonator get up, her clothes padded and square in all the right places, the feminine curves she loudly denies she doesn’t have, hidden expertly beneath the layers of what should have been an ill-fitting suit. Handsome, in all aspects except personality, at the present moment, reminding Lucas too keenly of those crass and snarky boys in school he’s always tried to avoid, when he was a kid.
The unwanted reminder sours what’s left of his mood, good or not, and he sharply shrugs out of Mags’ hold with a damning tsk. “Fuck off,” he spits.
It surprises them all.
All except Teddy. “Alright,” he says, clapping his hands together like a chiding mother after a stretch of awkward silence. “You’re both on in five minutes.”
Amy and Mags file out quickly at his cue, too eager to follow Teddy’s directions if it means that it’ll get them away from a grumpy Lucas as fast as possible. A small part of him still largely unaffected by his anger cringes inwardly at his behavior, aware that this was no way his parents raised him to treat his friends, much less ones as loyal as Amy and Mags. But the bigger part of him is still fuming over his current predicament, so he stays silent as Teddy carefully closes the door after them.
And continues to stay silent as Teddy picks his way through the messy dressing room to reach Lucas at the far end, sitting up on one of the rickety desks with a cold towel pressed to his rapidly swelling lower lip. For once, the golden-haired, green-eyed bastard is respecting his quiet, the carefully blank expression he keeps on his face seemingly serving as a muzzle over all those buzzing thoughts whizzing around behind his eyes. Lucas can see them, even in the split second it took for Teddy to accidentally meet his eyes, then rapidly look away, before diligently checking Lucas over like he has a lick of a clue what he’s doing, humming both affirmatively and negatively at what he finds. It’s unnerving to see him this artificially still, not when moments ago he’d been sparking and flaring like a candle flame, dancing and singing amongst the Aurora’s patrons’ tables, skirt swishing, heels tapping, bare shoulder shimmying to the music, exuding so much life Lucas had felt like his very breath was being squeezed out of his body.
“What? What do you want to say?” Lucas snaps, feeling all kinds of sharp all of a sudden. “I can see you holding your tongue.”
“And here I thought you liked me quiet?” Teddy gently teases, smiling slightly even when Lucas sends him a withering glare. It gets quiet again for a moment, but the careful mask has since slipped, enough for the smile to stay, and despite himself, Lucas softens. Just a bit.
“Thank you,” Teddy says, finally looking up to meet Lucas’ gaze with eyes so clear, so green. “I could handle myself but… thank you.”
Swallowing hard, Lucas nods, jerkily. “I know,” is all he can bring himself to say. Because he does know; even dressed the way he was, the anti-thesis to a man’s man, an open target for anyone and everyone, Lucas knows Teddy could handle himself. He’s Teddy, and Teddy is big. Larger than life, really. Slight in some places, with his tapered waist and long, pianist fingers, but tall and broad shouldered, with a wit sharper than any knife and a confidence so overwhelming, people couldn’t help but be drawn to him, in all the worst and best ways. Teddy Davies has known all his life that he was handsome, that he was beautiful, intelligent, and adored, and it informed the way he moves through the world more than anything else, no matter how much he denies that it has.
Men like Teddy were made to be looked at—the ideal All-American Jock, the Golden Boy, meant to inspire all those other men around him to rise and conquer; whilst secretly wishing his downfall with all the pitch-black jealousy hidden in the darkest corners of their hearts. At first his perpetual presence in the spotlight came off as self-absorbed and vain to Lucas, but the longer he knew him, the more Lucas came to understand that, for a queer who likes to wear women’s clothes and dance all weekend through, the spotlight was the most terrifying, loneliest place to be.
Yet in it he remained. Made it home, conducted the eyes that ogled him with a commanding hand and a toss of his pretty head, and made himself even more seen. Shameless. Larger than life. Daring them all: Look all you want. You won’t like what you see, but I don’t care. I’m not going to change.
Teddy was the bravest person Lucas knew.
Still, that doesn’t mean he has to be the loneliest, too. “He clipped you,” Lucas says, lifting his hand to touch the part of Teddy’s sleeve that had ripped upon contact with the rowdy man’s signet ring, when Lucas had pulled him out of the path of the punch. Teddy meets him half-way, shaking his head.
“Hey, let me be doctor, now,” he says, soothingly, guiding Lucas’ hand down to his lap. “I have to say, it’s odd to be on the other side this time.”
Yes, because on top of being brave, Teddy was righteous, too. Knowing he’s beautiful and handsome, also comes with the price of knowing that, to others, he always appeared to be in the position of right. The world, collectively, was lucky Mrs Davies had known what values to drill into her boy to make him as kind as he was, using whatever authority that’s been carelessly thrust unto him in the best ways he could. Truly, this isn’t his first bar fight with a man who has no understanding of the word no, and this isn’t the first time Lucas has silently worried over bruises that marred his skin, either.
But this was perhaps the first time Lucas has ever seen Teddy shrink. Just for a split second, so minuscule that nobody else saw it—but Lucas had. Seen the slight flinch, the twitch of his lip into an upset frown, when that man, that dreadful man, had shoved at him and called him all sorts of terrible things, all for getting in the way of his unwelcome advances on one of their patrons.
“Faggot,” he’d sneered and the word rung so loud in everyone’s ears, and Teddy’s face had fallen, and all Lucas could see was red.
He had swung first.
“I wasn’t joking,” Teddy tells him now, voice still quiet, but teeming with a gratefulness and a bit of awe. His eyes twinkled. “You really were a hero down there.”
He wasn’t, not quite as practiced in the art of brawling as Teddy was, but between the two of them they’d managed to get the unruly gentleman flat on his back in two minutes.
Mrs Davies had been quite annoyed at her fairy of a son and his quiet friend (as she called them, affectionately) stirring up quite a storm, but the vindicated curl of her lip that appeared when some of their burlier patrons came to toss the man on the street, was enough for Teddy, who’d apologized for the commotion with a small, cheeky smile. All they’d gotten was a swat to both their backsides and an order to put Lucas’ face on ice.
And now here they were.
Lucas didn’t feel like a hero. But he wasn’t going to tell Teddy that. He just grunts, instead. “Sure.”
Teddy smiles, and that’s the end of that conversation. The next few minutes are spent back in blissful silence, with Teddy puttering around with a couple of rags to catch the melting ice that drips from Lucas’ fist and face, even going so far as to wipe at his split lip with one of them, clearing away the blood and debris with a gentleness Lucas knew he was capable of, but has never experienced himself. This close, Lucas can count his lashes, darkened significantly with mascara, curled and fluttering delicately against his rouged-up cheek. Count the freckles he didn’t quite cover with his make-up, the ghost of vast constellations peaking just so behind the fine dusting of perfumed powder. See the part in his bangs where his wig cap peaks out, a flesh-colored net that should break the illusion, but completes the picture, instead. Carves out a new Teddy that Lucas has never had the privilege to see up close.
Blonde bombshell Teddy Davies, more beautiful than any Hollywood starlet. Everything about him is delicate. Delicate and girlish and pretty, and it takes all of Lucas’ self-control not to reach out and touch. Just to check that it’s all real, and that this Teddy had truly been on stage just an hour ago, singing and charming all the men who hollered for more at his feet.
That this Teddy is before him now, fluttering his lashes at Lucas like a practiced coquette. “There you go,” he says with a giggle. “My hero.”
Lucas colors. “Shut up.”
“No, really!” Teddy laughs with a purr, patting Lucas’ uninjured cheek. “So butch! The second you came in; I picked you out of the crowd immediately.”
For some reason, he feels strangely pleased by that. “Yeah?”
“Yes, you with your little suspenders and that curly bed o’ hair? Oh, you had all my girls swooning. I was so jealous,” Teddy says, flouncing about a bit more now, fidgeting nervously with his hair and reapplying his lipstick in front of the nearest boudoir, as if his words have finally fed him the energy he’d lost, scuffling on the bar room floor in his nicest dress. “I mean, I may be old news, but that doesn’t mean I’m going to be upstaged by the new fairy in town.”
“So sorry to have distracted your adoring audience.”
“Truly, I require financial compensation.”
“Does it have to be financial?”
“I could be persuaded to a drink.”
“Alright. But,” Lucas says, grinning. “You have to be on my arm the whole night.”
“Oh, my,” Teddy gasps. If he was blushing, it would have been impossible to see under all that make-up. Lucas takes it as a win, though, when he reaches up to push a bit of lose hair back into place behind his ear, eyes briefly turning away to assess the state of the floor. “Well, if the gentleman insists.”
“I do.”
They smile at each other. “I wish you’d told me you were coming,” Teddy says, so quiet it could have been a whisper. As if admitting it too loudly would take away the weight behind his words.
Lucas hears it. All of it. “I didn’t think you’d appreciated it.”
Teddy scoffs. “I would’ve loved it,” he says, sincerely. “In fact, if I knew you were there, I would’ve performed better.”
A part of him wonders if Teddy could possibly do anything to top that performance, with all its bells and whistles and… piano humping. Just thinking back on it has Lucas’ head spinning, and he knows, if Teddy put his mind to it, he could make even a grand show like that look like a carny attraction at a subpar county fair. “I don’t think so.”
“No, truly,” Teddy laughs, so painfully earnest, his face completely softens into that self-deprecating look he gets with that pretty flush that travels all the way from his forehead down to his powdered neck. Lucas couldn’t help but stare. “It’s always easier when I know I have someone I have to impress.”
“You always impress me,” Lucas says, surprising himself with his honesty. “I am always impressed by you.”
Teddy stops. Fully stops, freezing in place once again and taking with him the collective breath of the world—or maybe just Lucas’, who can’t do anything to deny how beautiful he finds Teddy in this moment, staring at him with those green eyes and those full lips parted in a gasp, a tentative openness to him akin to wondrous hope.
The bravest, loneliest and most beautiful girl in the world.
Then, Teddy laughs, half-delighted, half-mocking. “Aww.”
Lucas really doesn’t know what he expected. “Shut up, Davies.”
“Now don’t start.” Teddy coos, reaching out to ruffle his hair and dance just right out of the way of Lucas’ playful swipe. “You adore me, you really do! Did you hear that world? Lucas Samsa adores me!”
Lucas doesn't deny it. But he does throw a soaking wet rag at Teddy's face to hide the fact, and lets the moment quietly slip away in the wake of Teddy's subsequent rant about his ruined make-up.
#stella's oc-tober 2022#teddy davies#lucas samsa#people like us#what is it with me and injured characters being given first aid#lucas: teddy's not my girl#also lucas: *punches someone for insulting teddy aka his girl*#lucas my angery boy#he isn't questioning his sexuality he's questioning why he loves this idiot so much#lucas: unfortunately the primadonna currently humping the piano is the love of my life#not that he's ever going to admit it at this point in time#teddy as theodosia was so much fun to write she's a bitch she's a lover she's a child she's a mother she's a sinner she's a saint#she does not feel ashamed#i need more OCs who are also drag queens they're so much fucking fun#'stella?' you may ask. 'is teddy wearing the green dress from the movie atonement?'#why yes. yes he is.#and i hope ya'll APPRECIATE IT#i love gender fuckery#estrella_marie
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Day 7: Routine
So far into October and this is the first spoopy entry into my OC-tober challenge? Gasp, a disgrace! Even more so than me cheating and repurposing an old drabble for my own nefarious schemes.
tw: implied child sexual abuse, prostitution, and rape-- only a line or two for all that, but it's there; vampires and all that (bloody) entails
Every night, upon her waking, Talbert dresses her.
They haven't truly talked about it, not in depth. Not after Natalie had given him the rundown of his duties as her familiar, from finding and luring her unsuspecting prey, to serving as her mirror, doing half the work of making her presentable in order to entice and ensnare all those who were unfortunate enough to fall under her spell. In the beginning, a part of her wondered if perhaps a male familiar would find ladies' fashion to be quite difficult to grasp; he, after all, was a proper man’s man, not even a dandy to inspire confidence in any of his skills past all his gentlemanly training. Shooting, hand to hand combat, and boot shining. But Talbert had proven her wrong. Perhaps adept at the dressing of women due to his time spent undressing many to begin with, Natalie had found that, like everything about him, his eye for color and style was near impeccable, and after a few weeks he'd learned all her preferences and felt brave enough to expand beyond her set horizons.
With him, her corsets were never too tight or too loose. Her skirts, always full. And her hair, having been the one thing she'd struggled so long with due to her sorry lack of a reflection, now had a shine to it that, in the gentle moonlight, made it look like spun gold— an observation that she bases entirely on what she's heard poor, clueless men tell her. Talbert, on the other hand, never says anything. He prefers, instead, to step close just to smell it, touch it, care for it, both within their home and when they are out and about, hunting or fabricating closeness for the sake of their marriage ruse. Though he never boasts about it—no doubt in respect for the absolutely dismal state in which he’d found her in—his inability to stay away betrays all of his pride for his handiwork. Natalie allows him some of that vanity, for he is a quick study, and Natalie herself is pleased with his service.
After the initial briefing, no further clarification was needed, and the subject of nudity and the casual intimacy that comes with his duties was never brought up again, any awkwardness immediately melting into nightly routine. Natalie wakes upon the setting of the sun, Talbert fetches her from coffin, and then quietly, efficiently, dresses her for the hunt.
Or, so she tells herself.
His hands shake, sometimes—not with fear. Or with barely concealed disgust. Her keen nose picks up neither of those scents when he not-so accidentally brushes her bare skin, skimming the line of her arm, the smooth planes of her torso as he helps shroud her in the white linen of her chemise. Instead, he reeks of a sort of excitement; arousal and reverence all balled into one. In awe, perhaps, of a creature as powerful as this, making herself pliable and agreeable enough to be his doll in this endeavor. His fingers linger too often—his eyes do, too. Gaze substituting for touch, or vice versa, the weight of both so equal, often times she can barely tell the difference. Buttons on the back of her blouses seem to take eternity to finish, his deft fingers easily distracted by the sweet smell of her hair, whose scent seems to put him in a trance every time, he can barely find the right holes, inching discreetly forward until his chest is pressed to her back, lips inches away from the sensitive skin of her nape, or the tender skin behind the shell of her ear. Sometimes, when he feels bold, he'll leave her stockings and boots for last, kneeling as she sits upon the great red velvet seat he so loves to pamper her in, letting the pads of his fingers stroke the curve of her calf as he pulls her stocking up, up, up, searing a warm line across her skin until it ends with a purposeful caress on the sensitive inside of her thigh. Then, carefully and with great concentration, he’d take his time doing up all her ribbons, from her garters to her boots, into impeccable bows. Once finished, he'd smile at her, dark blue eyes alight.
"Mistress," he'll say, like the word itself is another name for God. Like he should be whispering it into her ear while he takes her, fucks her into the bed with his hands cradling her throat. "My Lady Morse."
Leave it to her familiar to make the act of dressing as seductive as undressing.
Not that Natalie is flustered. Not at all. Though effective on human women, these tactics don't particularly faze her. Not when she knows that it certainly isn't of his own volition, and that if it is, then it's simply a very sloppy means to an end. Talbert isn't the first familiar to look at her like that. Being a creature of the night brings about its own kind of seduction, a particular hypnosis made quite useful in the ensnaring of prey. Humans gravitate toward Natalie like moths to an open flame, and familiars are the foolhardiest of them all, with ambitions to become something bigger and more powerful than their paper wings can carry.
But a familiar is to be rewarded, after all, if their time in the service does not kill them first. Talbert is to become a vampire yet, if Natalie were to find him worthy; and though she has always been a creature of her word, turning many of her familiars upon the tenth winter of their time with her, that has not stopped a great number of them from batting their eyelashes and attempting to seduce her into giving them what they want early.
They always leave once they get it.
Of all of her kind here in New York City, Natalie has learned to deal with the melancholy of goodbye the most.
---
At the end of each night, Talbert undresses her.
This part should be easy—Natalie has always been a messy eater, and every night the blood on her clothes is certainly enough of a reminder to her familiars that she is more than just a pretty thing, a means to an end. Those days are long gone. She's a monster, now. Stronger, faster, infinitely more dangerous than any of them can fathom. No matter how long they've been in her service, watching their wide eyes unable to meet her gaze has always given her some level of satisfaction.
Other times, the foolish ones will look upon her with a hunger of their own, craving the power that runs through her veins and the strength that makes her stand as tall as she does. To them, she is predator, but predator open and vulnerable enough for the taking, if they somehow managed to force her into submission. Those familiars, she never deems worth keeping around, too similar to those from a dozen or so lifetimes ago, with their rough hands, chapped lips, and sharp blade on parts of her she would have never offered to them willingly. Those familiars' blood tastes the most bitter; she never swallows more after the initial bite.
It was much more satisfying watching them slowly bleed out by her feet.
In the beginning, Talbert had fallen in the first camp. Averting his gaze as his shaking hands carefully rid her of the evidence of her meal, mournfully bringing ruined garments to the fire if unsalvageable, and setting aside those that could still be saved. But like his initial clumsiness, that too faded away quickly, and in its place grew a new sort of gaze that she has never quite experienced before—a sort of respectful aversion, like a gentleman might have for a lady. Or a husband for his new bride. The distinction makes her laugh, sometimes. What they are to each other has far transcended that, surely?
Now, he takes her clothes off with less care for the garments themselves, and more for the body that lay beneath. Again, his fingers retrace their earlier steps, the certainty of their caress as reassuring as the gentleness of his gaze, the simple murmurs of observation he makes, about loose buttons and mused muslin. Crushed silk and stained velvet. The blood barely fazes him, now, which Natalie garners some great disappointment from, but she does not let her confusion on the matter stop him from disrobing her until she, once again, stands before him. Naked, devoid of any armor. Any shield. Vulnerable as she had started, once again pliable and agreeable in his hands.
Some nights, quite like tonight, he bathes her.
This part, she likes. Though large bodies of water make her uncomfortable, stirring within her a primal kind of fear that is deeper and older than any of her centuries’ worth of understanding of her existence; still, warm water in elegant, porcelain tubs, smelling faintly of lavender and eucalyptus salts and soaps, has quickly become one of her most favorite things. And to think, she'd lived in a time when baths were only taken once a month for hygiene's sake. A preposterous idea—thank God for modern science. The idea of her past filth makes her want to bathe every day.
She says as much to him, earning her a laugh. "I know you can take the form of a great grim—but can a vampire become a fish?" he asks her in return. Natalie gives him a flick of water in lieu of a reply. Talbert laughs some more.
He handles the sponge expertly; delicately, as to not rub at her skin, but hard enough to thoroughly scrub the dirt off her, leaving her feeling soft and sweet smelling. His fingers, neither rough nor limp, dig into the parts of her that ache with stiffness—her shoulder blades, the lower parts of her back—and she allows herself to melt into his hold. At times, when really called for, he massages oils into her scalp, running those talented fingers through the locks of her hair until finally, he rinses her off. Holds the back of her head with one hand, carefully lowering her into the water, while the other lays, innocuously, upon her chest. A baptism, of sorts. Natalie closes her eyes.
No other familiar has seen her with her eyes closed before.
But then again, no other familiar has ever left her feeling so thoroughly cleansed like Talbert.
Often, when Natalie rises to the surface and opens her eyes, she catches him staring at her. A softness in his gaze that both confuses and scares her in equal measure. At first, she'd wondered if maybe she should punish him for such insolence, but later on found it to be harmless. For whatever softness he must have for her will no doubt be forgotten the second he'd earned his own fangs. Let the boy look, let Natalie revel in his warmth. At least one day, when the beating of his pulse will be replaced with silence, the memory of his heat will remain with her until the ravages of time chose to take that, too.
Talbert wipes her down once she steps out of the tub, helps her again into her simple nightgown, hands warm against the chill of her newly washed skin, and holds her hand until she is safe in her coffin, looking up at his silhouette haloed by the gentle candlelight.
"Sleep well, mistress," he says, reaching down to run a finger over the gentle curve of Natalie's cheek. She closes her eyes to the sensation. "I will be here when you wake."
He lowers the lid. And Natalie sleeps.
#stella's oc-tober 2022#natalie morse#floyd talbert#people like us#gilded age vampire au#this is an old drabble that fit the prompt so i fixed it up some and posted it ehehe#happy spoopy season#estrella_marie
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Day 15: Reality
Part of my OC-tober 2022 (that will get fucking finished in 2024 so help me god)! Yes! Another Baldur’s Gate fic ft. my Tav, Pasiphaë Elago on the HBO War Blog! I have too many feelings about this stupid game, the characters in it, and the little guy I made to go with them! Implied Bloodweave and Shadowheart/Nocturne. Because I care Them.
tw: Astarion’s whole backstory; some symptoms of derealization disorder—Pasiphaë has experience with this derealization and conducts some grounding techniques that are specific to Astarion’s preferences, to help him come back to himself; it sounds bleak, but it’s a really gentle sort of fic; mentions of Gale and Shadowheart’s own PTSD, though only fleeting
Pasiphaë comes home to a tressym in her foyer and a vampire on her couch.
“One of those times, yes?” Pasiphaë asks of Miss Tara, who only mrrps in affirmative. She gives the doting feline a scritch behind her ears in lieu of thanks. “Will you tell Gale that I have him, then? I’m sure he’ll worry.”
Tara meows in begrudging acquiescence, slightly annoyed at being told what to do with only an implication of a please in the request. Still, she shakes her wings and stretches very big, before trotting out the door, bushy tail held high.
“You’re both so lucky to have Miss Tara looking out for you,” Pasiphaë says, amused. “Looking out for all of us, I mean. I have a feeling she thinks we’re all her kittens, now, though Gale remains to be her favorite. Yesterday, I caught her grooming Shadowheart’s fringe while she slept just on the spot across from you. It was very cute.”
No reply—that’s alright. She’d begun talking less for the conversation, really, and more for just the noise. Astarion knows this. He’s become rather familiar with the tactics that she’d found useful back in her youth, when reality slipped her grasp as often as it does for him, now. Noise is a good start, and narration is even better. A good reminder of where they are and what the day had looked like.
“The garden is coming in nicely. Shadowheart has a bit of a green thumb, who knew?” she continues, puttering about her home, shedding this and that as she prepares for a nice night in. Silently, two crimson eyes stare out at her from the shadows beneath the cozy, weighted blanket Pasiphaë had been contemplating laundering, but never came around to it. It’s a particularly sought after item by all the guests of her home, after all. Just the other week, Gale was under there, too, deliriously exhausted by his magic returning after so long without. Yesterday, Shadowheart and Nocturne had shared it for an afternoon nap. Last month, when Lae’zel had jez'rathki’d with Xan in tow, the little gith baby had found the wool to be fascinatingly soft, babbling and drooling as his chubby hands kneaded at its folds. Hells, she’s pretty sure Jaheira had used it, too, when she had taken a detour into Waterdeep during one of her Harper missions, to see how they were holding up.
It must smell of everyone, now.
He may never admit it, but Pasiphaë knows Astarion finds that particularly comforting.
“We have too many zucchinis, of course. It’s a devil plant, that one,” she says, finally shedding her boots. “Too much yield. I’m going to have to give away a few baskets full—would Morena like them, do you think? Oh, what am I saying? of course she will; I’ll make sure she gets the nicest ones. I’m going to make some cheesy zucchini bread with the first harvest, though. Gale said he’ll interplanar deliver it to Karlach and Wyll tomorrow, alongside other supplies. Do you want to help me make it?”
No reply, again. But there is a shuffle, like someone preparing to stand.
Pasiphaë doesn’t bother to see if her follows her to the kitchen. He will. The kitchen is always a reliable delight for all the senses, and being in there, working with your hands, is a sure-fire way to, at the very least, focus on the present. It’s another technique of hers that Astarion’s found effective, perhaps because it reminds him of watching Gale cook. The Dekarios Tower kitchen has become a sort of sanctum for them all, after a few weary breakfasts were had around its round table, post rather eventful nights out, all in the name of sating a bored vampire’s curiosity. It became habit, then; if they’re in the mood to disturb their wizard, it was his kitchen they’d hung around. Scratch has a permanent dog flap in there, too, despite Gale’s protests. He’s a scrap stealing pup, but their wizard has always had a soft heart.
Pasiphaë’s own kitchen might not be as big or as lively, but it was just as well-loved. She hosts them one by one in it, sometimes, when they’re all feeling like shit. Which is often, though she doesn’t mind as much as she pretends to. It’s all like clockwork, see? She’s been adventuring enough to know that saving the world is only half the battle; it’s what happens after that the real struggle begins.
For Gale, it was the difficulty of coming back to a home so unchanged when you’ve been so irrevocably altered.
For Shadowheart and Astarion, it was the making of a home after escaping an entire existence of previous torment.
For Pasiphaë, it was the quaintness, the domesticity after constant doom. Always looking over her shoulder, wondering if it will fall apart any time soon with the next crisis.
Often times, peace feels like a dream.
It’s no surprise to her that Astarion feels like he is constantly trapped in one.
But it’s no alarming matter. Pasiphaë knows this, too. He may be falling back on old habits, retreating back into that space in his head he’d lived in for all those years of torment, but the world about him has changed drastically. He’s not there, any more. He needn’t fear starvation or abuse any longer. There are blankets, now, that smell of his most trusted people. And kitchens, filled with friends who will stay up all night just to keep him company. He'll come back to them on his own time, at his own pace. And they will be waiting.
Pasiphaë puts Astarion on washing duty. The cold water of the tap and the rough soil he must scrub away from the harvest are good sensations to ground him even further. Some of it splashes unto the blanket he’d dutifully dragged in here with him, but Pasiphaë doesn’t call him out on it. Instead, she lets her mouth run, allowing her stream of consciousness to fill the air between them.
It goes on for a while—Pasiphaë knows, when given the chance, she’s just as bad as Gale—but she does run out of things to say, once the dough is resting on the counter. They’re sitting at her table, now, a breakfast nook by an open bay window, when Astarion blinks. And blinks again. Hard, like he’s trying to see how many colors he can summon behind his eyelids.
“Tell me something real,” he requests of her, then. Quiet.
You are safe, Pasiphaë wants to say. You are loved.
She doesn’t.
Instead, she settles on something concrete and simple. “It’s going to rain soon. Do you smell the ozone in the air? The way the earth seems to call to the sky?”
Without meeting her eyes, Astarion answers; “Yes. I smelled it on the way here.”
“I love that smell. I love the rain. It makes music with water. You’ll hear it soon.” Gently, she reaches out and touches the back of his hand. An invitation. “I’m happy to spend this rainy night with you.”
Carefully, slowly, Astarion turns his hand over until he is holding hers as tightly as he can.
Me, too, goes unsaid, as they wait for the rain to come.
--
I’ve come to realize that I do have to do a descriptive piece for Pasiphaë, now, since I have no idea how to use the photo mods to show her to you guys. So... I’m putting that in the to write list. I have made a mood board for her, though! I’ll post it with the piece.
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edit: just in case the links don't work for you, I've put in the corresponding tag next to each link in parentheses so you can match them to the tags of this post and click on those, if you're so inclined.
my writing tag (#estrella_marie)
my ao3 account (estrella_marie)
incorrect hbo war (#incorrect hbo war)
OC-tober challenge 2022 that's prolly gonna bleed into 2023 2024 (#stella's oc-tober 2022)
I've written for non hbo war fandoms for OC-tober too: please see (or blacklist, if you'd like) #not hbo war
band of brothers masterlist:
band of brothers headcanons (#bob hcs)
band of brothers aus (#bob aus)
band of brothers meta/rambles (#bob meta)
band of brothers original characters (#bob ocs; #people like us):
natalie morse (#natalie morse; #people like us)
arthur benjamin foster (creator: @hellofanidea) (#ab foster; #people like us)
beatrix nixon (#beatrix nixon)
the pacific masterlist:
the pacific headcanons (tp hcs)
the pacific aus (#tp aus)
fandom tags: #band of brothers, #the pacific, #generation kill, #aloto, #a league of their own, #masters of the air, #mota, #heneral luna, #goyo: ang batang heneral, #bayaniserye, #the terror, #transatlantic, #fellow travelers
and I blog loads of history, too, mainly #queer history and #filipino history, all of which can be found under my #history tag!
#estrella_marie#stella's oc-tober 2022#incorrect hbo war#not hbo war#bob aus#bob hcs#bob meta#bob ocs#people like us#natalie morse#ab foster#beatrix nixon#tp aus#tp hcs#ask#ask game#winnix#fic rec#fic recs#mota meta
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