Name: Asher Irving Brooks Occupation: Bodyguard Age: 27 (April 25, 1998) Sexuality: Straight Species: Hunter Clan/Pack/Coven?: Fellowship Hometown: Burlington, VT (Later Bellingham, WA) Relationship Status: Recently Single (Whoops) Personality Traits: Focused, Meticulous, Stubborn, Unstable
TW: Gore, abusive relationships, attempted murder of a partner, delusions
001. Your dad’s not dead, but he is a deadbeat. When the custody battle comes, it’s not a fight: he hands you over to your mother and cuts ties as quickly as he could. You never get the time to learn why, not when she pulls you out of school and your days turn into training, to getting ready to live the life she pictured for her son. You’re Fellowship, not Brotherhood, and she makes sure you know it’s about the Brotherhood’s witches, the willingness to cut deals and get into bed with things that could do so much more damage than any one vampire or werewolf.
002. You grow up in a bubble-wrapped childhood, juxtaposed with the harsh reality of what you’re being taught to do. You ask her to take you on a real hunt and it’s the same every time: not until you’re older, not until you’re good enough at this to be safe. When your first real hunt happens, it’s not what you expected: the adrenaline rush, the chase, the pride of getting a kill is all undercut by the vampire’s slit tendons and your mother’s bloody knife.
003. You have real hunts eventually. Bloodsuckers, curse-weavers, and flea-bitten wolves, and you keep score like a game, tally marks in a notebook like you’re working towards something. There’s a degree of obligation sinking in, some disconnect from your mother’s fervor for the job. It's restlessness, the idea of doing this forever, no end in sight, no one big thing to get rid of to make it all be over. You get impatient, get sloppy, get reckless, and when the curse hits you, ripping something from you that you’ll never get back, you don’t even see it coming.
004. It’s not bad luck. That’s the silver lining the witch tells you when you finally eat your pride, call your father and get him to get one of his less unbearable magical connections to figure out what that hunt had changed, what that curse had done. Not bad luck, just an absence of good. The odds don’t favor you anymore, and they never will. Games of chance break even on the best days, no chance of a push into profit. You can’t rely on luck anymore, no chance of chance being on your side.
005. There’s a bitter taste in your mouth, always. Real or imagined, it lingers after the curse, and you cross the country, looking for new hunts and a new start. You have two jobs now, and that’s what hunting is, a job. You don’t have a passion for it, not really, but you can’t imagine kicking it, not when you’ve sunk so much of your life into it. You meet her at your other job, the one that actually pays, sitting in a cafe, typing away while she brewed coffee. Juniper’s one of the few good things the universe decided to give to you since that curse hit.
006. It’s two years before you get her to agree to live together, before you finally wear her down. It might’ve been earlier, but with her herbalism stuff being run out of her home and your constant “business trips” to hunt out East, it takes some time. You’re already moving in boxes when she confesses the secret she’s kept from you, that she’s a witch, a potioness. That bitter taste starts to make more sense now. The extra time she’d put into making your drinks, the way she’d set it aside when she was dealing with others, adding things. The curse back home might’ve taken your luck, but this fucking witch took your heart, made you love her, made you care about her in spite what should have been your better judgement.
007. She doesn’t get it. She doesn’t get that you’re trying to help her with this, that she just needs to stay inside, stay in the fucking basement like you told her, and you’ll find a way to fix this. There’s got to be a way to cut off someone’s magic, there’s got to be some way to do it, some way to salvage the one good thing that was yours, that was given to you.
008. There isn’t. Fire’s the only way to fix it, to burn this whole relationship off the face of the earth, out of your head. The doors are barred, and the old house is just kindling waiting to catch. She’s not yours anymore. Trapped in that house, she’s nobody’s. You don’t stick around to watch the fire spread further than that door.
