#98
“And lo! Here approaches my best knight,” the king announces to the jester as the knight squeezes through the door. The poor jester looks thankful to see her as he hurries out of the king’s gaze. “Come, show me your skill.”
The knight throws a few carefully angled swings for the king. He watches with a delighted expression, but she can see the soullessness in his eyes. Her stomach flips uncertainly.
“You are an excellent swordsman, knight,” he says flatly. “Now, tell me, why should I allow you to stay within my walls?”
The jester averts his gaze awkwardly. Is she about to get fired? “… Because I’m an excellent swordsman and your best knight,” she tries, and the king huffs in his telltale way of saying WRONG.
“Perhaps that was on me for being unspecific.” He picks up a wine glass from the golden table next to his throne, swirling it idly. “I hear you liaise with dragons.”
The knight’s attempt to keep her expression neutral fails miserably. The king watches with keen interest as her eyes widen and her mouth moves in an abysmal attempt to form some sort of defence. She’s acutely aware of the jester watching curiously too—whatever she says next will be the castle’s gossip for the next month. Maybe two if nothing of interest happens before then.
Well shit. Might as well fall into treason headfirst.
She reaches a hand into the front of her breastplate, earning a soft squeak from something inside. The king leans forward on his throne. The jester peers as close as he dares.
Her hand comes back with a short purple string laced around her fingers. Or she does at first glance, and closer inspection reveals her ribbon to be a tiny dragon, yawning and digging tiny claws into her fingers.
The king roars so loud the dragon startles. The knight and the jester don’t fare much better. “Beast!” he howls.
“Beast! Beast! Beast! Beast!” the room echoes back to them.
“You bring this creature within my walls?” he demands. “You slander my name—my rule—with your disregard to my kindness for you?”
“She’s harmless!” the knight cries over him. The dragon isn’t a fan of the racket, and is making a great effort to slip up her sleeve. “She looks after my finances.”
“Disgusting beast,” the king spits.
“The dragon,” the jester says quietly, valiantly ignoring the way the king’s stare snaps to him, “is your accountant?”
The knight fishes a coin from her pouch, gently tapping the dragon with its edge. Its gaze snaps to her gold, its past endeavour with her sleeve forgotten as it grapples for her coin. It twists its body around it excitedly, gnawing at the edge like a toddler, a quiet hum emitting from it as it does.
“That noise it is making,” the king shrieks, “it is going to attack!”
“No!” the knight shouts over him. “It’s like a cat—she’s purring. It means she’s happy.”
“Dragons do not purr,” the king retorts, but the dragon is undeniably making a noise that sounds remarkably like purring. The jester takes a cautious step closer.
The knight tucks her finger under her chin, giving it a hearty scratch. The dragon’s humming gets louder, her eyes closing blissfully at the touch.
“How does it… work?” the jester asks. The knight offers him a smile that she hopes conveys how grateful she is for his interest in the face of the king’s disgust.
“She takes my coins—my salary, my earnings, anything.” The knight adjusts her hand so the dragon sits more comfortably in her palm. She doesn’t seem to mind, too busy clamping her jaw around the gold to notice. “She keeps a hoard no one but her can find. I earned her trust, and whenever I need money she gives it to me.”
“She is a thief,” the king spits, but the rage is losing momentum in the face of such a cute little thing. The knight doesn’t miss how she’s suddenly not an ‘it’.
“I give her all the money she has. She’s just better at keeping money than most humans,” the knight says with a grin, “because she doesn’t spend it all in a tavern.”
The jester snorts. The king raises his eyebrows. Silence falls for a moment as they all watch the dragon get comfortable in the knight’s hand, her tiny body choking her coin, a claw wrapped around her thumb as she nestles in and closes her eyes.
The jester lets out a short “aww,” that’s louder than he probably intended.
“Tsch,” the king says. He leans back in his throne like he’s lost interest. “A beast is a beast. I am most displeased you were disloyal to my word, knight.”
“I apologise, your majesty,” the knight says. It’s all she can say, really. “I will fix things.”
“You… may keep the thing,” the king continues after a moment of intense deliberation. The knight attempts to not to look too surprised. The jester doesn’t even try. “But it is your accountant and nothing more. If I discover it torching my palace I will execute both it and you.”
“Accounting is what she’s best at, your majesty,” the knight says brightly. “You’ll never have to see her again.”
The king nods shortly, though his gaze is traitorously locked onto the purple ball in her hand. “I would not be adverse, knight,” the king says slowly, like he doesn’t quite want to, “if you felt it right to study. We did not know dragons purr, or like coin.”
“Your majesty?”
“Gather your resources and come back to me with knowledge of the beasts.” He waves a hand dismissively. “I will reconsider your treasonous actions if you can prove that your creature poses no threat to my rule or my people.”
A lot of questions are rattling through her brain. “Your majesty, what do—”
“That is all. Jester!” The king turns his attention away from her and back to the jester as he takes centrestage, looking a lot less stressed than before. He gives her a subtle nod and the lightest smile—a small gesture between the servants of the castle, a simple well done.
The knight leaves the hall with the king’s uproaring laughter following her. The dragon stays curled in her hand, and she runs her thumb over it carefully, the dragon’s body warm and prickly to the touch.
A knight to a scholar in one conversation. She doesn’t even know how to write.
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Since one of the careers that Bernard studies is physics these are my headcanons.
-When the finals are approaching, he starts saying the important formulas or concepts out of nowhere. Like he'll be in his apartment, he'll be hugging with Tim on the couch and start reciting the Euler-Lagrange equation, or he's cooking dinner and start reciting the thermodynamics laws.
-Sometimes he will start throwing away scientific facts that he learned in class and found interesting. Like the multiverse or time travel. Tim, even though he has experienced them from first hand and had to know about them to fix some robin situations, he will listen to Bernard with all the love in the world and ask him for more details regardless of whether he already knows them.
-During the exam season Bernard hardly sleeps and his caffeine consuming increases to the point that even Tim is worried but once the last exam is over he will fall asleep a whole day and then come back to normal.
-Sometimes when he leaves class and a concept is very abstract or he doesn't understand how it works, he gets frustrated and will complain to Tim about his decision to study this, but as soon as he understands it, forgets this frustration.
-His main dream of him is to be a chef but it does not mean that he likes what he studies even if it is not what he wants to do for the rest of his life. Also, it gives him a different perspective to make his own recipes
-Lab reports are an ordeal, calculating uncertainty and dispersions is what he hates the most but in the end of the day. Laboratory practices are what he loves most about studying science
-Since he is doing a double major with biology, he likes evolution biology. He was considering doing his thesis describing with complex networks what could be the passage between microscopic and macroscopic life. Or maybe something about medical physics. (Let's not let health science Bernard die since he's no longer an EMT).
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11. what would your muse consider their worst failing?
hello, @absensia, and happy sunday! thank you so much for the ask :D i just want y'all know that i appreciate every single one of these!! but alright, well... to tell you why barton views this particular thing as being his worst failing, i'm going to have to give you some backstory first. so please bear with me while i explain! so, as you may or may not know, barton currently has four kids. two of which are biologically related to him and the other two being adopted. though, back whenever he was first starting off as the dollmaker, barton actually had five kids. and this fifth child he had was named julien.
julien was different from the rest of his siblings, like jack is, in the way that he seemed to have experienced some form of trauma before barton had even adopted him that caused him to be very sensitive in relation to other people's emotions and actually made him act a bit jumpy. but this didn't change the fact that julien was kind of affectionately regarded as ' the best of all of them ' by barton's other kids whenever he was still around; and that was because julien would often try to protect his siblings, even in situations where he could get severely hurt, and he seemed to have this sort - of mellowing affect on barton because of just how likeable of a person he was.
the best way that i could describe what made him so special is that he was SUCH a good listener and had a way of making people feel welcome around him, which may be a bit surprising to hear considering the often dark + terribly gory reputation of the mathis family, but julien also really didn't like what he had to do while he was a part of their family sometimes. so you can imagine that whenever barton lost him to someone as sadistic as the joker... he was beyond devastated. not only because julien was like a figure of light in a family that could be the epitome of overwhelming despair, but because barton was the one who told him to go assist the joker with one of his ' schemes, ' as the man had contracted his help to do a rather grisly act to him — which would be to cut off his face — and julien had never come back from that meeting with him.
and although one could make the argument that barton couldn't have possibly known that that would happen, especially considering that he didn't know the full extent of just how bad the joker was at the time, he still very much blames himself for it. because barton believed that he should've known better in the end and gone there himself instead of treating this job like it'd be like any other one that they'd done, when it really wasn't. now just to give you some more context before i go on; if there's one thing you should know about barton, it's that his relationship with his children are probably his most complicated, so i do believe he does hold some kind of genuine love for them... but it's not a love that anyone can easily understand and one that likely isn't healthy at least half the time either.
but he felt legitimately torn up inside about it even a year later, and today, it's still isn't something that he likes to talk about. it was by far his greatest failure both as a father and as a person in his eyes. plus, knowing the fact that julien died alone and probably in a lot of pain, too? it was so painful for him that barton would swear up and down that it felt akin to someone shooting him right through the heart. so, if you were to ask him what he would do if he could go back in time and change one thing about his past, barton's answer wouldn't be that he would save himself from the cruelty of having to grow up under wesley's roof, or to make it so that his mom didn't have to leave him and he'd actually get to know her, or even to spend more a little more time with marcy... though, trust me, he has thought about all of those things.
it would be that he'd save julien. because he deserved so much better, in his eyes, than to be killed at the age of seventeen whenever he still had his whole life ahead of him and to have his comments about him being scared to go confront the joker completely dismissed. and this is also something that barton hates himself for. how to feels to have your feelings disregarded is something that barton is shocking familiar with, after all, and it's not a good feeling at all. but the fact remains that he can't do anything about his death now. all barton can do is grieve him at night, whenever he has no choice but to be alone with his thoughts, and he looks at past photographs of their entire family that have long since faded. of julien.
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