“The first rule of love,” her mother says, voice crackling over the phone, “is to never take more than they can give.”
Finola’s eyes dart to the shoebox under her bed and then back out the dorm window. Her room is on the second floor this year and she can see more of the trees than she can see of the grassy space preceding the dining hall. “I know, Mom.”
“Remember.” Her mother’s voice is sharp and Finola can almost see her heavy, thick brows lowering until shadows cover her eyes. “No clothing. No bags. Never any jewelry.”
Finola wraps her free arm around her waist and closes her eyes. The light breeze rolling through the window smells like eucalyptus and mint. Her mouth waters. “I know, Mom.”
“Those are the big things,” her mother says, “but remember that too many of the small things can amount to a big thing.”
The shoebox under the bed gleams in a stray ray of light. Finola licks her lips. “I know, but—I need something. I have to. I feel like she’ll disappear if I don’t.” The words are inadequate for the sick fear in her stomach each time she loses sight of her. The horrible certainty that something bad will happen if she’s not by her side. She rubs a hand over her mouth.
Her mother’s tongue clicks. “That’s old instincts, Finola. Fight it. You don’t want your father and I to pull you out of school, do you?”
The memory of watching her high school fade out of sight surfaces and, in that moment, she’s sixteen again. She can feel her heart beating too fast, the scream ripping out of her throat, the way the ropes chafed her wrists. She can smell her first love’s perfume, cloying peach, in the air. She can feel their separation like a death in the pit of her stomach, radiating up into her chest, her throat, her head.
When I was in 2nd grade, my school started a zero-tolerance policy for bullying. I want to emphasize that I started out very excited for this program. I was a small, visibly autistic child on a playground with fourth graders on it. In theory, this program might as well have been called The Rescue Babs Initiative.
In practice, however, zero-tolerance programs almost always sink into madness. The motivations never line up right - too many incentives for cheating.
The first victim of the program was actually my friend, Sam. I was standing next to him in line when one of the fourth graders gut punched him. There was no reason for the punch, he was just small and in arm's reach. Sam got the wind knocked out of him, but he managed to gasp out the phrase stupid motherfucker right as the playground aide ran over to keep the peace.
(Sam had an incredible vocabulary for a 2nd grader. Consequence of his dad being a recently divorced mechanic.)
Puncher got a two week suspension. That was fine. But Sam got a one week one for verbal abuse, which was beyond the pale. But that’s just what zero-tolerance is, right? No hitting became a rule everyone had to follow, and it didn't stop when someone hit us. So our options as kids were to somehow make like Jesus and ascend up to heaven… or solve things ourselves.
We started solving things ourselves.
I'll be honest, I think that was always the plan. A school can do a lot of things to reduce bullying, but if the goal is zero, there's only one path forward: Shoot the messenger.
---
My part in the story was a few weeks after that. Long enough to know that the school's new unofficial policy was to suspend kids that reported problems, short enough to have no idea how to defend myself. It turned out the 4th grader that hit Sam was part of a trio, and that trio had their sights on me next.
I asked some of my classmates what to do, and they said that the best idea was to just ignore the bullies. Refuse to give them a reaction. That was dogshit advice, but it was common enough in the early 2000s and it's not like I can fault 2nd graders for not knowing much about life.
Anyway. I took the advice and I ignored my bullies. I ignored them when they said nasty things about my mom, and I ignored them when they bounced soccer balls off my head, and the one time I broke was when the biggest of the trio grabbed my arm hard enough to leave finger shaped bruises. We were watching a movie in the gym when he did that, and I leaned over and told him he could hold my hand if he was scared of the dark. Which worked, thank God. The grip hurt bad enough I had to excuse myself for a bit to keep my composure.
I think a more mentally flexible kid would've changed strategies by then. Clearly, things were escalating. But it's hard for me to change my mind, so I stuck to my bad strategy, right up until the day the big kids caught me after school. I was crossing the baseball field when they got me. It was just one of those places you had to walk through to make it to the bike rack.
The big guy, again, was the instigator. He pushed me down then stood over me, yelling for me to get back up. But I knew that if I got back up, he'd just push me down again, and for whatever reason, their Bully Code didn't allow for kicking a kid that was already down. So I stuck to the grass, and they tried a bunch of things to goad me into standing back up. Eventually, I started kicking at them while on my back, and one of them took the opportunity to grab my leg. Second bully thought that looked fun, so he grabbed my other leg. Kicking me like that was off limits, but dragging wasn't, so they just started pulling me around that way.
They were so much taller than me that I was almost vertical during the pull so all my weight was put on my shoulders. And the fields were just made of unkind stuff. There was crushed gravel all over the place, spilled out from the divider between the big kid playground and the little kid playground, so every time they dragged me over a piece it just ripped a new gouge up my back. The ground itself was sunbaked caliche and dead crabgrass. There was a grit to it, like sand stuck to the outside of a clay pot.
It grated all the skin off my upper back. Everything between the bottom of my neck to the bottom of my shoulder blades. I don't know at what points I went from yelling, to screaming, to just crying, but I did, and I know they seemed almost giddy every time it changed. Eventually they finished off with one loop around the baseball diamond and that hurt the worst. The dust there stuck to the snot and spit all over my face and made it into a foul mud, and the same happened in my shirt. The dust stung like salt, and the gravel in the lines tore open a few more cuts for dirt to pour in. I remember them stopping, and actually crying again I was so relieved. It was done. Thank God, it was finally done. They were done hurting me.
They left me on my back near homebase. They'd finally got the reaction they were looking for.
It took me a few minutes after that to stagger back to my feet. I was able to wash the snot-mud off my face in the bathroom, but I couldn't bring myself to touch my back. It just felt like it was on fire. Then I made it back to the bike rack.
That’s where my older sister, Liz, was waiting for me. She was just a grade ahead of me but it always felt bigger than that. There’s some deep weight associated with being the oldest. She could see that I was dirty and tear soaked so she asked what happened. I didn’t know how to put it in words, so I just tried lifting my shirt to show her. It made a sticky, tacky sound coming up - like the plastic coat coming off a slice of American cheese. Tchhhhk.
I didn’t know how bad they’d got me before I heard that noise.
She looked at my back for maybe two seconds before telling me to put my shirt back down. I never actually looked at it when it was fresh, but I still had straggling scars by the time I got to highschool. Long silver-grey lines, visible mostly for the dirt still stuck in them. She looked a little sick when I turned around, but she kept it cool, which I really appreciated. I always hated crying in public, and I was half a hair from crying all over again. I don't think I'd have been able to keep it together if she'd freaked out too.
Instead, she just asked me some questions. Who did this, how long they’d been doing it, what I’d been doing, if I’d told anyone. Some 4th graders, a month, trying to ignore them, nobody.
She mulled those answers over. I could see her trying to chart a course forward - trying to figure out what it would take to solve this problem for good. She's always had this weird, sad, blank face that she'd make when she found a solution she didn't like. She'd make that face, then think some more, then make the face. Then think.
Eventually, she just made the face.
Don't tell the parents, she said. I can fix this. But only if you don’t tell them.
I believed her. She was the most capable person I knew, and her word was gold. So I didn't tell our parents. I biked home, and every drop of sweat that rolled down my back felt like acid on my skin. I remember getting home and beelining straight to the bath, because I needed something to put the fire out. Took that as my moment to cry it out again too. First time I'd cried was from pain, but the second time was from the cruelty. Second time took longer, but the nice thing about a cold bath is that the water never runs out. I could just pop the plug out with my toes and just keep rinsing and draining and rinsing and draining until my mind was as clean and empty and stark as the tub itself. Then I could go fill that emptiness up with Calvin and Hobbes.
It worked.
Mostly.
---
I spent the whole next week feeling nervous anytime I was outside and Liz wasn't nearby. Some days she'd beat me to the bike racks, and I'd be relieved as hell to just go home. Other days, I'd be the first one out, and then I'd have to spend a few minutes worrying about what I'd do if the big kids showed up. But they never did. Liz always got there just a few minutes later, and I'd pretend I hadn't been planning escape routes.
Friday, I was sweating by myself when she showed up a few minutes later than normal. She unlocked her bike but she didn't move to leave. She had this big, long cable-type lock, maybe six feet of braided steel. She folded it over in her hands so it looked like a swatter and swung it a few times in the air. Made it whistle like a falling anvil in a cartoon.
Today's baseball practice, she said. All Our Guys are on the baseball team.
Our Guys. Odd phrasing. Also, I actually hadn't known that about them, but I nodded along anyway. She wasn't really looking at me as she talked - she was inspecting the lock.
My plan, she continued, is to wait here until baseball's done. Me and you. When it gets time I'll send you outside the bike cage.
The cage was a chain link fence, maybe six feet tall, built all around the rack. They’d lock it after school as an extra precaution against bike thieves.
Your job, she continued, will be to hold the gate closed after they're all in. Keep em’ stuck. Think you can do that?
She was being very frank, which helped me think clearly. I didn't think I could actually hold the gate closed if all of them ran into it at once, but I knew where a big half broken cinder block was, and I knew if I could wedge it in there, it would hold. So I told her that.
Great, she said. Do that.
Then I went to go get the block. She gave the cable a few more experimental swings, right as I made it around the corner.
I'd been thinking in straight lines before that. Just meeting goals. It wasn't until that moment that I really allowed myself to know what was happening. That I allowed myself to have a choice.
I chose to jog a little faster. I wanted revenge.
---
I came back with the block a few minutes later, then we just talked like nothing was happening. The sun was shining, and we’d both gotten into bionicles, and it was easy to talk and be people. Normal, happy people.
But that feeling went away when I heard the coach tweet a long whistle. Me and Liz both knew that was the signal that practice was done. I walked out and got my bric while she folded the cable in half in her hand again. Then we both waited.
Eventually I saw the kids that drug me around the baseball diamond emerge from behind the portables. I watched them make a straight line back to the bike rack. They were laughing together, having a good time. Being normal. Like me and my sister. I realized I could let things be normal too. I saw my chance to let things go softball pitched to me, nice and easy, and I didn't even bother to swing. I didn't want normal anymore. I wanted this. I knew why my sister had that lock, and I'd thought about it, and I liked it.
God help me, I think I needed it.
The kids went inside the bike cage. I gave them ten paces head start, then put the cinder block under the gate. That was the signal Liz had been waiting for.
She blitzed those boys. There were three of them, and the smallest still had two inches on her, so they probably would have kicked her ass if they ever had a moment to think. But she never gave them that moment. She picked the biggest kid, and decided he needed the first blow. I remember how much muscle she put into that swing - the cable was so heavy, and she was so small, that it kind of swung her back as she made that first half spin. Like a dog getting wagged by its own tail.
It was a perfect connection. Flawless. She swung through her target, not at it, and the resulting slap that the cable made bouncing off the biggest kid's stomach was loud enough to echo through the cage. It brought a tear to my eye. It brought a tear to his eye too.
The trio split after that, bouncing around the cage like fresh broke billiards. I can't describe how Liz did it, exactly, but she managed to chase the boys back together so she could hit them all more efficiently. She had a real knack for getting them right between the shoulders, so I never got to see the real perfection of her work, but she wasn't above swinging for the arms or legs if that was all she had. Those marks I could see, and they were brutal. The welts were wider and thicker than my thumb, like giant purple worms were trying to burrow out of their skin. Some even bled. I cheered on every hit.
Liz, for her part, just had a sort of grim, single minded determination to her. She was so angry she was shaking, and so scared that tears just kept running down her face, and she was grinning all the way back to her molars, but the grin didn't get any bigger after a solid hit than a glancing one. When the kids started blubbering, she didn't change her process. I'd spent my time crying, she'd spent her time crying, of course they were getting theirs in too: That's what violence does. It brings tears. Sow the wind, reap the whirlwind.
Eventually, one of the kids split off from the main herd and scrambled up the fence, gecko-style. Liz let him go. It was either that, or take her attention off the other two. Easy choice.
Now, there were two kids left, the big one, and one of his smaller friends. Smaller friend did the same trick. I was worried he was gonna turn back, fight me and open the gate for his buddy, but he just fled for the hills. I remember thinking, damn, I hope they never forgive each other for this. I hope this ruins their whole friendship. I hope this festers into something awful.
The one kid that was left really was trapped though. He wasn't built for climbing and he had no one to work as a distraction for him. Every time he started trying to make it up the fence, my sister would just twist up like a spring, then swing the cable with both hands right into his spine. The slap it made every time she did that was loud enough to hurt my ears. He never made it more than two hits like that before hopping off the fence and just trying to run around some more. He could get Liz tangled up in the bikes for a bit if he really tried, but it never bought him enough time to actually get out. She'd always find her way out of the thicket, swing the cable, and send him running again.
Eventually, he just couldn't run anymore. He sat down, and my sister hit him a few times, telling him to stand up. He refused. He knew he was gonna get hit either way, so he might as well get hit sitting down. He put his arms up after a bit and let those take a beating too. Eventually he just started begging her to stop. So she did.
He cried he was so relieved. I remembered how that felt: It’s done. Thank God, it’s finally done. They’re done hurting me.
Liz told me to come in and show him my back. I took my shirt off, and I showed him a scab as large as a dinner plate. Cracked up like dry river mud.
He looked sick. Started babbling about how he didn't know. Said he thought I was crying because I was just a kid - that he didn't know he was actually hurting me. That he'd just wanted to get a rise out of me and didn't know it would take so much.
He didn't know he'd gone too far until it was too late.
And suddenly, it was like looking in a mirror.
Two snotty, welted boys, crying alone in the dirt. Backs burning like fire. Ashamed. Trapped. Realizing that they'd just done something awful, and worse, that they’d dragged the people that meant the most to them along for the ride.
I hated him more at that moment than when he drug me over gravel. I can’t imagine anyone wanting to kill anything but their own brokenness reflected. Looking at him was unbearable. Like staring straight into the sun.
I could've hit him again if I hadn't just gorged myself on violence. But I had. I was fat with it, sick and aching - anything more and I would have puked. So I just told him to get his bike and go. Please. Just go.
He did. He staggered to his feet, and he grabbed his bike before running away like all the demons in hell were following behind. All bar two. There was a swingset nearby, and once he was fully out of sight, Liz and I walked over to it. We picked two seats next to each other and sat for a while, talking until our hands stopped shaking. Can’t remember about what. We didn’t really know how to process what had just happened. Still don’t, to be honest.
Then we went home.
---
Thanks to @elisabethdeep-blog, @foldingfittedsheets, @amateurmasksmith, @caramel-catss @arataya, and @rozenkingdom for being my alpha readers.
And thanks @lizardho, for being my first friend, my best friend, and my childhood bodyguard. I know it took a toll on you. I'm truly sorry.
When Dr Aspen Greaves signed up for the Javelin Program, humanity's first foray into colonising deep space, they expected to wake up to life
For anyone curious, the total time stamp comes to almost exactly 18.5 hours. Phew! Enjoy!! I had fun making it! Thank you for giving folks permission to do this, @derinthescarletpescatarian!
So I don't really think that it's a secret that Boston has a significant Minotaur problem. It's a pretty common situation for older American cities on the East Coast- centuries of poorly-documented cowpath-style urban growth providing an ideal nesting ground, widespread electrification and plentiful steam tunnels that compensate for the loss of the temperate Mediterranean climate that they're used to. And all this on top of limited institutional knowledge of proper containment tactics at least up until the Greek diaspora started to really blow up in the 20th century. You only have to fuck up the safety checks on one cargo steamer coming in from the broad area of old Minoa and then basically any import controls you put in after that point are closing the barn door after the bulls are loose. So yeah, no secret, it's an issue.
I do think, though, that we've kind of let the specific narrative surrounding the issue get away from us in the usual fashion, the problem people picture when they hear "Minotaur" isn't anywhere close the to the problem as it exists on the ground. I mean people's minds immediately jump to the 1949 Boylston massacre, but let's be real, even though that was really politically useful for finally getting the exit fares on the T removed, that was still a black-swan event, right? Basically every mayor since, like, Hynes has lived in mortal terror of having to manage a repeat of something like that during the mass media era, let alone the smartphone era. So we've got these Theseus kill-teams with their titanium-composite ropes and souped-up cattle prods and bolt guns, we have these constant "track replacement" stoppages on the orange line, and it's fine. It's fine! There hasn't been a serious Minotaur thing within walking distance of a T stop since, like, 2006, which again you can mostly chalk up to the chaos surrounding the dig.
No, the actual danger zones, the silent killers are the exurbs, like West Roxbury, Roslindale, parts of Hyde Park. Relatively dense foliage, bad sightlines, far enough from the urban center that the response times are bad, foot traffic that's basically nonexistent for big parts of the workweek because everyone's either commuting or hunkered down working from home. And, of course, a steady stream of delivery drivers with no political ties to the area. Which is an important element, right? I mean it's kind of baked into the Minotaur's nature, that they have a very finely tuned instinctual awareness of the politics of their situation. Start snagging homeowners, there might be a ruckus. But Amazon does steady business everywhere, and Minotaurs are smart enough to cover their bases, to wait until after the drivers have dropped off your package or delivered your food. So yeah, watch yourself out there. One eye on the treeline at all times. And if you see an Amazon van left idling, get ready to run faster than the driver could.
A Genie offers you one wish, and you modestly wish to have a very productive 2017. The genie misunderstands, and for the rest of your life, every 20:17 you become impossibly productive for just 60 seconds.
“Well, it was a nice day.” You kiss your sweetheart gently on the forehead and sigh as the last remaining seconds of 20:16 tick away. “See you at 8:18,” you say.
Then it happens. Every ounce of fatigue or hunger leaves your body. The face of your beloved is perfectly still, their expression exactly the same. The ticking of the clock on the wall has stopped. Once again, it’s 20:17.
You stretch your arms and walk to the table with the homework for the three doctorates you’re working on. The work is mentally stimulating and enjoyable, but it’s finished far too quickly. You check your pocket watch and see that not even one hundredth of a second has passed.
You knew it was too soon to be able to see any movement on the watch, but you can never quite help yourself from looking early on every 20:17. Time to move on.
You clean your home, do your budget, then go outside and fix a noise that your car was making earlier that afternoon. (Oh how you already miss afternoons.) Then you go back inside, boot up your computer (which magically speeds up to keep pace with you as long as you’re in contact with it) and check for any new orders.
You’ve set up a website for the small business you started called “Magic Elf Services.” People in your area can pay a modest fee on your site to have different tasks and odd jobs done by “The Magic Elf” at 8:17pm every day. It was a little slow to get started, but word has spread and these days you have a steady stream of clients.
The money that comes in from the business is nice, but you’re mostly grateful that it gives you a clear list of things to do. You print off your updated list of clients, step outside, and start making your way through the neighborhood with your to-do list.
There’s the apartments down your street where several neighbors have hired you to tidy up, do the dishes, and mop the floors. You do the windows too, just to see if they notice. There’s the large house across town that paid the “Magic Elf” to clean out the gutters. After the first dozen jobs are done, you manage to stop looking at your pocket watch.
As near as you’ve been able to determine in the past, 20:17 seems to last for approximately one normal year. But it’s not exact. For one thing, it’s hard to keep track of “time” when everything but you has crawled to an almost total standstill. For another thing, time seems to move differently depending on how “productive” your behavior is. One time you tried to spend all of 20:17 sitting at home in your pajamas, but that was getting you nowhere, so you eventually gave up and got busy. (Though you defiantly stayed in your pajamas the whole time.)
During 20:17 your body doesn’t get tired, hungry, sick, or injured. You’re essentially tireless and immortal for the duration of the “minute.” So sleeping or eating away your boredom has never really worked for you.
One of the houses on your list forgot to follow the instructions and leave a key for you to get in. At first you figure you’ll just send them an email telling them to pay more attention and that you’ll do the job tomorrow. Then you decide to go home, get your locksmith tools, and come back.
After finishing up all the jobs on your list, you go into several other homes and small businesses in the area, performing tasks you hope they’ll find helpful, and leaving a hand-painted business card at each one. (The business cards don’t contain your real name just in case somebody thinks “The Magic Elf” should be subject to breaking and entering laws.)
Speaking of laws, you head down to the local police station to pick up your case file. You’ve been in contact with a detective who’s been investigating corruption within their department, and your ability to investigate unseen and get in almost anywhere between the ticks of the clock has proven invaluable. You see that they’ve also added five missing person cases to your file this evening, which certainly raises your interest in the job.
You make your way through town gathering evidence, and start making your way to the outskirts of town. Since you happen to be out that way (and you’ve already solved three of the five missing person cases) you decide to swing by the stone castle you’re building and do some more work there.
The castle walls stand about 20 feet right now, but you know they’ll be much higher when you’re done. You’re far from any roads and pretty safely tucked away, so for now it’s your little secret. You’ve been excavating and moving all the rock yourself, which has been much easier than you first expected since your body doesn’t get tired or sore. You’ve also got a nice system of tunnels going underneath the castle, and you dig and build more of that network for a while.
All that time spent underground has left you feeling rather lonely, so you walk back home to see the face of your sweetheart. Their facial expression has moved ever so slightly since you last saw them, which is a comfort to you. Looking at them gets your imagination going and makes you dream up a story you’d like to tell, so you sit on your couch, plug in your laptop, and write a book.
After you finish editing the last chapter for the third time, you finally allow yourself to look at your pocket watch again. Three seconds have officially passed so far.
pretty sure I first read this shortly after it was posted. I still think about it occasionally in my day-to-day life. I hadn’t realized it was already eight years old.
@fandomsunitedposts said “Pet Monsters” for a prompt!
Thank you for the awesome prompt, I hope you like it!
Ken stops trusting his dad when he’s ten, sitting on the couch and watching westerns. Sedan, Ken’s pet, is nestling under Ken’s shirt. Sedan’s been going through growth spurts lately, trying to figure what he’s going to be, and he hasn’t been so good at regulating his own body heat. So Ken does it for him.
Marcus, his dad’s pet, a huge, hundred pound bloodhound, is lying in front of the TV, snoring softly. He’s never been particularly fond of Ken, but Ken likes the look of him, lazy and content like his dad who’s eating potato chips out of his hand.
On screen, the sheriff twirls his gun, lighting up the deserted street with one, two, three shots. The bad guy, dressed all in black, yells and his pet roars. When the last crack fades, the bad guy is lying dead, flat on his back, and his pet, a fanged horse, is lying sightless next to him, dead before it hit the ground.
“They ain’t got wolves there, son,” his dad says, eyes glued to the screen. “Bad guys, they got proper evil things, unearthly things. There’s a reason the good guys shoot him in the heart, you know. It’s so the monster dies too.”
Ken’s heart leaps into his throat and, unconsciously, he presses Sedan closer into his stomach. Sedan’s been growing lately and last week, last week he’d sprouted another leg, bringing the count up to six.
alright here's the rundown. more detailed version coming soon probably. the things i do for you guys
(transcript of prologue below the cut)
It's a lavender sky this time, this world. A lavender sky deepening to aubergine over a city of neon and brass. It's beautiful in it's way, just like any other city on any other world.
I-prime hasn't bothered to learn its name.
He stands in the hotel window, watching the burnished streets below gleam with fading light. The rhythmic thrum beneath his feet signals the rousing of the club below. They're playing a song that I has never heard in his life, yet part of him remembers it all the same.
The blank-faced watch on his wrist chimes a single long tone. I-piece taps its face without taking his eyes off the path into the nightclub.
"Hello, T."
"You're not in position," T says through the speaker. Their voice betrays none of the frustration that I knows he must feel.
"I'm where I need to be," I-prime says.
"We talked about this—"
"Yes, you talked, that's what you do. I make decisions."
T-piece's response is cut off by further chimes from the watch. Short, long, short, short—then the voice of L comes through.
"There's no time," she says. "The Boss just Held onto J. It's on, it's now."
"As expected," says I.
With a snap of his fingers the air before him splits. I-prime reaches into the crack between two universes and retrieves his sniper rifle. He looks down its sights, out the window, down the gleaming street.
Someone approaches the door to the club. A tall, svelt man with a face that I-prime is so sick of seeing other people wear.
I wonder what this one's named, I-prime muses as he lines up the shot.
Izaak? Ignacius? Indigo?
As he pulls the trigger on himself from another life, I-prime knows it doesn't matter what this alternate is called.
J hears the shot go off above her. Hears O-piece suck in her breath.
"Fuck," L says somewhere to J's right, somewhere in the washroom the three of them just cleared.
A gentle gurgling echoes in her ears. J, blindfolded in the Hold, could tell herself it was just the sound of temperamental plumbing. She doesn't.
The hem of her shirt is damp from the blood of one of Z's alternates, and her fingers still thrum with the memory of the blade that spilled it.
When the Boss holds onto J-piece, she's always given a blindfold. Today it's a metal mask locked onto the top half of her face. Her head bows under its weight, but at least the rest of her bonds are light this time. The bars that appeared around her have left her space to move a bit. Her hands are merely cuffed in front of her.
The Boss must be almost over that fuck-up from last month.
And the fuck-up currently happening is not her doing.
"I's gone off-script again?" O says, his tone sharp but unsurprised.
"He must've spotted something up front," L responds. Hearing her, J-prime can picture the exact crease in her brow—the way her lips purse as she switches into damage-control mode.
"He won't have sightlines into the club from up there," says O. "J counted four alternates on the dance floor and one behind the bar. No pairs yet, but it's only a matter of time."
If it were anyone else presuming to speak for her, J would hate it. Even though she hates drawing attention to herself when Held even more. It's the sort of thing I-prime does all the damn time, and justifies himself with "If you didn't want me to say something for you, you should have spoken up sooner."
It's O-piece talking, though. And it's L he's speaking to. So she's alright.
"Someone needs to cover the front," J-piece says. She keeps her voice low, casual. She's pretending they're back in the office, by the vent next to the water cooler. Her shackled hands pull a cigarette from one pocket and her matchbook from another.
"You guys go handle it—I'll be safe."
It's true. Nothing native to this dimension can touch her within the grip of the Hold.
J places the cigarette between her lips and and struggles for the light—
Then a pair of warm, wide hands close around her own.
"Allow me," O says.
J smiles. Relinquishes the matchbox. Hears the strike—feels the flame come in close. Breathes in warm toxicity and the sweetness of O's scent.
She looks up as she exhales, to keep the smoke from O's eyes.
"Thanks, bud," J says.
Another hand brushes J-piece's shoulder—a gentle warning—before cupping the side of her face. This hand is slim, with perfectly rounded nails and a pinky ring.
J doesn't need those details to know that hand belongs to L. Only L-piece touches her like that.
L plucks the cigarette from J's mouth. There's a sharp drag, a slow exhale. J parts her lips wordlessly, and L returns the cigarette.
"We'll handle the set up this time," L says. "See you soon."
"We should hurry," O adds. "Those alternates are gonna be on the move now that I's kicked the hornet's nest. I'd hate to lose this world, it's got a pretty good funk scene."
J starts to agree—
But the shattering of glass and the howl of rending metal swallows all further discussion.
"That's—" J says.
"S and Z," O sighs.
"We gotta run!" says L.
And so they do, and J is left alone and blind with her tiny roll of warmth—too slight to even be called a flame.
And she could easily drown in the unfairness of it all, were she not a fucking professional.
It's time to go to work.
The fabric of reality above J's head splits like cracking eyes. A knife falls from the space between the worlds and catches itself, hovering. Another knife follows the first. And another. And another—
Z shines like an angel in the light of the burning debris falling around him. A grin on his face and a lit bomb in hand—unleashed.
S watches him fondly from the cover of a street pole
It's good to see him like this, she thinks. Even if it can't last for long.
"Back up a bit, Z!"
The voice of T-piece slices S from her reveries. She points her shotgun towards the club entrance, covering Z's retreat.
The brass grate road is scattered with the remains of a carriage and the mechanical steeds that once pulled it. Looking at the corpse of the alternate inside it—her own—S knows that Z's intervention came just in time. Even in death, the clone is fuzzy around the edges. There must've been two or three universes intersecting at that point already, and the rot was about to burst. If the clone had been allowed to lay eyes on S-prime…well, it’s a good thing Z got there first!
In through a crack in the base of S's mind flows a steady trickle of new memories—a whole life lived under violet skies—ended in flames within the carriage before her now. Samantha.
S dashes those memories away with a hum of her favorite showtune. It shouldn't be this easy, but she's had a lot of practice.
An L-clone crawls sobbing from the wreckage. Burnt and broken, with too many limbs and more and more eyes with each passing second—
S unloads into its center mass, stopping the reaction short. A satisfying gurgle rewards her.
This world is more spoiled than we thought, S muses.
Not that she cares all that much. It's one of those tech worlds that's killed most of its plants—S-prime couldn't even find a window-box to poach. Useless. It's been too long since she's had something new to add to the garden—
"S, on your right!"
A rush of air as someone sweeps past S's side. The familiar smell of sweat. Bare shoulders glistening in the violet city lights.
T-piece bounds over the wreckage like a young god of war, one hand swinging a metal bat and the other wielding a set of brass knuckles edged with an outward-facing blade—a trench spike. T dives low, a practiced movement taking them just under the spread of her shotgun. S fires again into the chest of the Z-clone running out of the club. She feels more than sees T-piece taking down somone in her periphery. The crunch of impact sounds suspiciously non-fatal—so it's probably some world resident looking to make themselves a hero that he's dealing with.
Whoever you are, be thankful sweet T-piece dealt with you before you got to me.
More bodies stream out of the club’s open doors, dressed in glitter and glass and wearing faces of panic—none of them known to her. S lets them flow around her unscathed. A twisting pair of Z-clones emerges and S is ready to meet them.
From down the street charge a gaggle of familiar faces—but before S can more than register them out of the corner of her eye a series of muffled shots drops them one by one.
Mighty I-prime. Efficient as always. The bastard.
A second later one of Z's bombs belatedly lands on the corpses and detonates.
"You fucking show off!" Z shouts towards I-prime's position above. "I had this!"
No reply save smug silence.
"Of course you did, darling," S says, turning to cover the other end of the street. "You're where you're supposed to be, unlike someone."
S waits for T-piece to tell them to focus, to save it for the post-mission angry sex (which never really works out the pressure points but it does soothe them for awhile)—but this time…
He doesn't.
Strange.
S's watch blares a sudden alarm—one short blast and three longs. She has scant moments to shield her face with a forearm before J is released from the Hold.
The windows on the ground floor of the club all shatter at once. A hailstorm of knives whistles above S's head. A warm mist settles over her skin—the blood of alternates, shed from J's blades as they fly by.
S whoops from adrenaline and delight. Z answers her with a cackle, his laughter rising up like a firework ascending to beautiful destruction. Z reaches up into the gap between the worlds and pulls down a string of firecrackers. He races towards the club doors and the battle beyond, lighting fuses as he flies.
“Wait!” T-piece screams. “Z, stop!”
S gets it a moment later.
In the street around the club they’ve encountered alternates of I, of herself, of L and J. Coming out of the club, however…
It’s just been Z.
We knew most of the Z-clones would be inside, that’s why we were supposed to cover down the street, not the entrance!
S bellows Z’s name.
All those Z-clones, in a world this badly spoiled—if they see their prime, is that a chain reaction we can even stop?
Z turns his head towards their cries. S prays for him to understand—
But before Z has a chance to stop himself, a higher power intervenes.
Emerald vines, thick as a wrist and lined with sharp prickles, burst from a fold in space beneath Z’s feet and entangle him. Z hollers in shock and in pain—but is halted.
“What the fuck?” Z calls, thrashing against the Hold.
S rushes to him. Fuck the fight, fuck the mission, and fuck I-piece for being in the wrong damn spot!
And T-piece doesn’t stop her. S glimpses them as her feet fly. T stands still and upright in the haze of blood and viscera. Their eyes carry a blunt anger that burns even from S’s periphery.
“Hold the line!” T-piece shouts. “I’m gonna find I. And have a talk.”
S doesn’t turn back to respond, only raising a thumbs up in acknowledgement.
Later, that will haunt her. That she didn’t turn to see T go.
On the bloody brass street S faces Z, furious and helpless, and embraces him. She presses her body against his thorns and nips at the lobe of his ear.
“I fucked up,” Z breathes into her neck.
“I know, darling. It’s okay.”
“It’s okay,” Z repeats. “I'm alright. Hold the line.”
“I know.”
One more squeeze—to make them both yelp, to intermingle the blood from fresh scratches, to remind Z that pain is nothing but together they are everything—and S returns her focus to the broken windows before her.
T-piece is right, S thinks. Z's right. Gotta focus. We can't go losing worlds for dumb reasons.
The idle thought slips through her brain like a trout through a stream, unopposed and unquestioned. It's something S simply knows—the same way she knows what dolphins are and who Judy Garland is and how the Martian Civil War was lost and that plants need light to grow.
I-prime doesn’t think it wise to consider himself just one piece among many. It might be fine for his co-workers (I has better things to do than monitor their carelessness) but him? He is I-prime. Set apart from the others in the Office. The original amongst a multiverse of alternates. The only I who is truly, wholly himself.
And I must never forget it.
With a squeeze of I-prime’s trigger the face of another pretender explodes into mist. The road is clear, for the moment. I-prime reloads his rifle and waits.
“Hey!”
From just below his window, a shout.
That voice is a familiar sort of grating, like an old chair that always creaks the exact same way. Hearing it, I-piece smiles—and must resist once more the temptation to let himself become part of a whole.
“I’m not leaving cover, T,” says I-prime. “You’ll have to find your own way up here.”
“As if I’d need your help to get up.”
“You claimed otherwise last night.”
“Oh, fuck off.”
A hand from below reaches up and swallows the end of his scope. T-prime hauls himself up to eye level using I’s own weapon as leverage. I makes a show of looking beyond, keeping watch over the street below. T clambers over and past him through the window and lands on his feet in the empty office. I-prime scans the street below once more, then pulls back and turns around.
“Hello,” I says. “Is there a reason you’re out of position?”
He intends those words to send T-piece into a rage—T’s much easier to handle when their reserve is broken—but they only huff a little. Disappointing.
It would be misleading to say that T is beautiful when he’s angry. T is always beautiful. But when truly angered, T-prime is splendorous. Like a righteous sunlit deity.
“Don’t pretend you care about assigned positions now.” T-piece dismisses their climbing gauntlets back into the ether. “You’re the reason Z got hurt.”
“Z got Held,” I-prime corrects. “It happens to all of us.”
“But it’s different for you!”
T surges into I’s space. They grab him by the collar and pull their foreheads together.
“You’ve never even gotten the chains,” T says through gritted teeth. “Z always gets the thorns, or worse.”
“The Boss appreciates my performance,” I says. It’s an effort to keep his tone neutral, but he does it. “It’s hardly my fault I’m the best at what we do.”
“It’s your fault you can’t even pretend to care!”
Their watches chime in unison—two long, two short.
Z.
An explosion from below shakes the floorboards. Plaster crumbles from the ceiling and pictures clatter to the floor. T-prime summons armored gauntlets and covers both theirs and I-prime’s heads. Debris rains down as they lock eyes. I-prime remains carefully serene as T snarls his frustration.
“You’ve always been an asshole,” T-piece says. “But I swear you used to care.”
I-prime leans in. His lips brush T-prime’s ear.
“I care about what matters.”
The moment I’s expecting arrives.
Turquoise ribbons erupt from the floor. They twine around I-prime’s limbs and torso, more decoration than restraint. I-prime relaxes into the Hold.
“You should get moving,” I-prime says. “I suspect Z-piece is about to bring the whole building down. Get things ready for me, okay?”
T snorts. They drop their arms, allowing white dust to speckle their hair.
“Don’t worry.” T turns toward the window. “You won’t be needed this time.”
“You always need me to handle the cleanup,” I-prime spits.
“What I need is for you to be better.”
A surge of choking rage denies I-prime the chance to retaliate before T is gone, out the window and back into the fray.
I-prime stews, incensed and alone, as the world corrupts around him.
I-prime bides his time in the Hold as this universe spoils around him. He listens to the increasingly frantic call outs from his watch with a satisfied smile.
S reports that the denizens of the surrounding streets have all been converted to clones. L spots the first cluster. Before she and J can deal with it, O finds another one.
Explosions, shaking. A thousand twisted wails all in Z’s voice. A matching cry through the speaker on I’s wrist—
“They see me!” Z-piece shouts. “They see me!”
Grim satisfaction paints a smile across I’s face.
He can’t see much in the darkness of the collapsed building, but he knows his time has come.
“That’s it.” T’s voice is weary even through the speaker. “I’m calling it. Bail out.”
“Wonderful,” I-prime says.
His watch chimes two short blasts.
On cue, the silken ties of the Hold draw I-prime upwards. The brass and stone debris is no more impediment to his progress than would be a morning mist. He gathers himself, eyes closed, ready for his moment.
The Hold releases him atop a pile of ash and twisted metal. The smell of smoke and sweat roll over him.
Fresh from the Hold, I-prime is free to wield his full power.
I opens his eyes. All of them.
Beneath a collapsing violet sky I-prime summons his rifle. Above his head spirals a cyan vortex of faceless, unblinking eyes. All shapes and sizes of eyes, painted across the fabric of that universe in bright neon and billowing upwards together like a cumulonimbus.
I-prime sees what he expects.
A spoiled world, bursting with rot.
Cracks in the sky, through which the stars of another universe shine. Masses of flesh, of bodies tangled together, screaming and raving and growing by the second. His co-workers, scattered, no longer fighting but fleeing.
I-prime raises his rifle.
He clears Z first. Removing the catalyst won’t stop the reaction at this point, but at least now Z-piece can’t make it any worse. J and L go next, in the same hit. They’re always so in sync with each other, it’s easy to line up the shot. O stands in the open and tosses I-prime a wave before the bullet caves in his chest. S tries to make it hard for him, dancing and leaping, but his eyes find their target all the same.
I-prime is at his strongest when a world is at its most spoiled; the more cracks in reality, the easier it is to see.
Just T left.
The splits in the sky have breached the horizon now. Cross-world contamination has begun. They need to leave, now, so the wound can be cauterized shut. I sees T below, alone in what remains of the street, surrounded by the crawling tide of flesh.
I’s finger hesitates on the trigger. He taps his watch.
“Evening, T,” I-prime says. “Care to rescind any statements?”
T-prime snaps their gaze upwards. I-prime knows T can’t see him the same way, but their radiant fury warms him all the same.
“You asshole,” T-piece says. “I should—“
A tear in the world opens beneath T’s feet. It swallows their words and their body. I sees them suspended over the interstitial morass. Sees them flail, sees them fall.
No.
I-piece pulls the trigger. He unloads everything into where that body fell.
No no no. It’s fine. I hit him. I got him. I always do. It’s fine.
Repeating this litany against fear, I-prime dismisses his rifle and retrieves from the ether a small, silver handgun. Before his thoughts can finish forming, before his heart provides a reckoning, I puts the barrel in his mouth. He closes his eyes, all of them, and pulls the trigger.
Z startles awake at his desk with such violence he nearly tips his chair. The half-empty styrofoam coffee cup wobbles dangerously. Before it can spill or settle on its own Z-piece backhands it himself. Cold liquid splatters the purple-gray fabric wall of his cubicle. Another mission, another stain.
Z screams.
He manages to steady himself just as the others start to return. It doesn’t take long, of course. I-prime is efficient, as always.
S-piece comes to him right away, sultry and queenlike, fresh gloss shining on her lips.
Where does she even get lip gloss all the time?
“Hey, darling.” S-piece leans over the back of his chair and drapes her arms around his neck. “That sucked.”
“Yeah.”
“Sucked bad, used teeth.”
“Yeah.”
“I liked the part where you went nova, though. Haven’t seen you like that in far too long.”
Z’s bad mood sweetens a bit at the weight of S’s head on his shoulder and the memory of blazing destruction.
Quick-approaching footsteps flips him back towards sour. Z-piece knows that brisk, irritating tread, would know it in his sleep.
I-prime blazes past Z’s cubicle without a sideways glance and—
It’s not like Z ever expects much from him after a mission, but…
I-prime could at least spare a glance!
Z explodes from his chair. He storms after I, S-piece flowing in his wake.
I-prime presses onward, his stupid wrinkle-free shirt perfectly tucked into his pants while Z isn’t even wearing shoes.
Z wants to tear that shirt from those proud, straight shoulders and stain it with coffee and blood.
That desire chokes itself out at the sight of T-piece, motionless, slumped over their desk. J’s standing over them, her hand hovering like an uncertain moth above their shoulders. L’s at her side, of course. O-prime is seated at her desk across the aisle from T’s half-cube, watching with her implacable neutrality.
And there’s something wrong about how T-prime looks sitting there, in a way that Z can’t place.
“What are you all doing here?” I-prime says, as if he hasn’t just rushed here himself.
“We need to debrief,” says L. “I wanna get the report in before the Boss asks for one, do some damage control, but—“
“But T-piece won’t wake up,” says O.
Shapeless dread, like a cloud of needles in Z’s chest. He wants to rush to T-piece’s side but the corridor between cubicles is too narrow and fucking I-prime is in the way.
S leans over the chest-high wall of T’s cubicle. She takes in his still form then shoots a dagger of a glance at I-prime.
“What do you know, I?” she says. “What happened before you came back?”
I-prime’s face remains smooth and composed.
“I cleared him as quick as I could,” he says. “But the crush of Z-clones got to him first.”
Nausea hits Z-piece like a wave. He shoulders past I-prime and forces his way into T’s cube. Behind him O says something about contamination, about how part of T-piece might need to be cleared.
Z shoves J aside, ignores L’s protests, grabs T-prime by the shoulders and drags him upright.
“Hey!” he shouts. “Wake up, T! Wake up and tell everyone you’re fine!”
The body beneath his hands shudders. Tenses.
T’s eyes open. Z sags in relief.
“Let go!”
T-piece flails back, away from Z, tipping his chair and crashing to the ground. He scrambles backwards, eyes darting between the people all crowded around him.
“Calm down!” L shouts. “We’re back! It’s safe!”
“Back from where?” T cries, pressed against the purple-gray wall.
“What do you mean, where?” Z says, dread like thorns in his mouth. “From the mission. The world I—from the world that spoiled. Where else?”
“I knew it.” O stands up. “They got spoiled. The Boss must’ve cleared his recent memories to—”
“Cut out the rot,” I-prime says. “Makes sense. Could be worse.”
I's right. Locking corrupted memories behind a firewall is rare, but it's happened to most of them. This is normal. It's fine.
T-prime looks up at the six people gathered around him like a cornered animal.
“Don’t worry, T, you’re alright.” L speaks with careful kindness. “You’ve been hurt on a mission, but it’s safe now. What’s the last thing you remember?”
Before T can answer, Z-piece realizes what seemed so wrong about him before. All of them carry a marker, a token, an icon of their names. O’s icon sits over his eye like a stamp. Z’s is a charm dangling from his collar. T’s is a tattoo on his shoulder.
That tattoo is gone.
There’s a collar around T’s neck now, one Z’s never seen him wear, and that’s where his icon now resides. Before Z can allow himself to contemplate what that might mean, T answers L’s question.
“Nothing.”
Icy silence. O sits back down.
“Nothing?” L struggles to keep her tone even.
“I know I’m T. That’s it.”
T’s wary eyes dart between them all. He gives no individual preference, spares none of them his suspicion. Z can’t see himself reflected in those eyes at all.
“You’re lying,” Z growls. He swings to I-prime. “He’s lying! There’s no way my—the clones couldn’t corrupt him so bad the boss needed to clear everything!”
I-prime’s cool resolve shows no sign of cracking.
“I saw what I saw,” he says. “It’s done.”
Z screams. He grabs the nearest object—T’s desk lamp, the one S and Z gave him after breaking his old model—and throws it as far and as hard as he can. In the shattering he finds no relief.
T flinches back even further and it’s like a stab to the gut.
“Who the hell are you people?” they say. “What even is this place?”
An old woman will arrive at the station at 2:47 AM, she will not have enough money to pay the fare, let her in anyway. She will then board an unscheduled train at 3:00 AM. DO NOT ATTEMPT TO TURN HER AWAY UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES.
It was either a joke or some train executive's wife, that's what I thought when my manager gave me those specific instructions.
He proceeded to stress them again three more times during orientation. No biggie, I figured, and set a reminder on my phone for 2:45 just to be safe. Other than that I was just shown how to work the ticketing machine and where to find the spare D Batteries for the ancient flashlight they provided me with.
At 11:50 PM the last scheduled train departed. By 00:20 AM all the disembarked passengers had milled off. There was only one other person at the platform, a young homeless man missing a leg. Probably a veteran of one war or the other, there had been so many recently. He was sleeping on one of the benches. My manager had said I was to politely urge any passengers remaining after midnight to leave. He did not seem like a passenger so I let him sleep. It is how I was raised.
At 2:45 AM my alarm went off. I put aside my book, made sure my booth was tidy in case the executive's wife or mother or whoever would come was going to inspect it.
At 2:47 AM she was there.
I did not hear a car, nor approaching footsteps. The Babusia was simply there when she had not been before. A heavily wrinkled old woman, with a crooked nose and a scarf tied around her brittle-looking grey hair. A knobbly wooden walking stick was held by an equally knobbly left hand. She did not seem like the mother of some rich rail tycoon. She reminded me of my grandmother.
But I had never met my grandmother.
"One ticket, please." she requested in a firm voice, placing a small handful of coins on the counter without looking up at me. Most of the coins were obsolete Kopeks, and even counting those it was not enough for half a ticket, but as I was told before I nodded my head and accepted her money. "Of course. "
It suddenly occured to me that I was not told how to print a ticket for this unscheduled train. Before I could remark about it, I saw that the ticket was already at the mouth of the machine. It was green, with red lettering, something the black-and-white printer should not have made. But yet it did. The printing seemed in cyrillic of some sort, but I could not read it.
"Your ticket." I presented, and without thinking added "Do you require assistance to climb the platform stairs, grandmother?" It is how I was raised.
"Yes. Assist me." she replied curtly, beginning to shuffle slowly through the dark station towards the platform. I locked up my booth, and caught up with her just before the stairs. I switched on my heavy flashlight with my right hand, and offered the woman my right to brace herself. Her grip was strong. She probably would have had no issue climbing by herself, but assisting a grandmother was always the right thing to do, even when her sharp fingernails dug painfully into my palm.
We arrived at the platform. The clock hanging from the ceiling read 2:56. She released my hand and took a few steps, then looked at the sleeping man on the bench. "A friend of yours?" she asked. I thought about lying; if she was truly an executive's family, perhaps hosting a friend would be a lighter offense than turning a blind eye?
"No, grandmother." I responded truthfully. "He is not breaking the rules, so I left him alone." It is how I was raised.
The woman hummed. She seemed taller than before. Taller than me. The night draped her shoulders like a shaul and my torch did not reach it. Her gray hair shone like woven starlight, and her eyes were the night sky. I could not look away.
"You are a well-mannered girl." she said, her voice echoing in my ears like silence. She placed something small and hard in my hand.
A train arrived. It had only one car. I think it had a steam engine. It may have walked on chicken legs. I could not look at it.
The Grandmother boarded her train without another word. I was alone in a perfectly dull train station. Almost. The homeless woman behind me mumbled and stretched her legs in her sleep.
Every time someone leaves kind words in the comments it makes my day! Even if I don't reply to each and every one (mostly because I can't think of something to say usually) I love it, so thank you all!
Oops, I never uploaded this one to Tumblr (which I only realized when someone else did, but then was kind enough to tag me, thank you)!
This is the comic that kickstarted my obsession with telling stories with as few panels as I could (usually 10-11 haha), so it’s got a soft spot in my heart.
As the OP with ADHD that frequently manifested itself in anxiety that I manage with organization, I’m feeling
real perceived
Because on the one hand I didn’t intend any of that consciously but on the other hand this was literally one month post-diagnosis when I wrote it. So….very accurate as literary criticism goes :D
Wizards live in towers, Princesses are kept captive in towers. You, a mage of wandering interests, come back to find half your towers upper floors occupied by a bored young woman. There are worse ways to find an apprentice.
She screams, so then you scream, so then she screams again, and your familiar jumps off your shoulder and runs away.
"I didn't think wizards were the, um. Screaming type," she says afterwards, when you've magicked up two cups of tea.
"Well," you say, "Well. Um. Maybe not most of them, no."
She blinks at you. You look down at yourself and realize you haven't even cast a hair-cleaning spell in a month, let alone actually washed anything, and you're wearing your travel clothes (aka pajamas). You quickly look back up so you don't come off as self-conscious.
"...I see," she says.
The cat is still sulking.
---
The way the curse works- she explains- is straightforward. Her father the King was getting antsy about only having a girl, and demanded help from the Fae to secure his line. They decided it was only fair that if they gave him power of one kind, they'd take away power of another.
"...So now you're in my house?"
She blinks again. "He's not allowed to marry me out," she says, a little slowly. Like what she's saying is obvious.
"Oh." You pause. She pauses. "So... now you're in my house."
"We didn't know it was your house," she grimaces.
But why are you in it? you think to yourself, but she clearly thinks it's obvious, so you keep your mouth shut.
"Well- it looked abandoned!" she cries out suddenly, making you jump. "There aren't very many abandoned towers around here, you know! And the other ones we checked out were- open to the elements, or- they had mold! He wasn't going to put me in a tower like that!"
"Well, yes," you say, "I have enchantments for that."
She buries her face in her hands.
---
After you've washed your- everything- and slept for at least 12 hours, the whole situation feels a lot more manageable. You find her on the penultimate floor, sitting with a glum expression at the table where you both had tea.
"Hello. Would you like breakfast?"
"It's well past noon," she says, then makes a face like she just ate a lemon. "Sorry. That was rude. I've been alone for like six months in here. Um, yes, that would be lovely."
As you touch the stones to unfold the kitchen and start the fire, she stares at you, her eyes getting wider and wider. By the time you've got the quickbread baking, and open the cellar to access your frozen sausages, her jaw has dropped.
"Er," you say, hands full of rapidly thawing meat. "It's all perfectly safe. It's kept in stasis, see, and-"
"Was that there the whole time?" she gasps, voice cracking.
You take a moment to figure out how to answer that in layperson's terms. "Well, sort of? It's in stasis, so. It's 'there' in the sense that you can access it. But it's not 'there' in the sense that. Mmm." You place sausages in the pan and raise your voice against the sizzling of hot oil. "It's cold in there because it's not on the plane that you and I-"
"The kitchen's not cold," she interrupts.
"Oh. No, the kitchen was just folded away. The cellar-"
"Folded away?"
You blink at her. She blinks back.
"...how have you been eating?"
"Basket and rope through the window. My father pays some of the peasants to cook for me."
"Sounds... elaborate." You poke at the sausages but it's too early to flip them. Then you realize: "Did you ever figure out how to unfold my water closet?"
She colors scarlet. "Chamber pot," she mutters.
---
"If you don't mind me asking... Why were you in the astronomy room?" you say, taking the plates away. "I, um. I was planning on fixing the telescope when I got back. So for right now it's just a long climb with nothing to do."
She heaves a long sigh. "I don't know. There was nothing to do anywhere. I was just looking from the highest point I could. It makes all the villages look like toys."
"Oh." You frown. "I hope you'll be happier with the rooms unfolded. I just didn't want them to gather dust while I was away."
She tilts her head, leaning in. "How long have you been away? We checked this tower a few months before I moved in, so it's been at least three seasons, right?"
You bite the inside of your cheek. "I... don't remember."
"You don't remember?"
"I wasn't on this plane very much. It's easy to lose track of how time flows here." You shrug sheepishly. "Long enough for a princess to move in, I guess?"
She looks sheepish too. "I am sorry about that. We'll find me a different tower."
"Oh, um... no, it's fine... I mean. I'm sure you looked at all the options available to you. I wouldn't want you to have to live in. Mold."
"But I'm in your house!"
"It's a lot of house?"
She stares at you. You would maybe describe her look as 'incredulous'. "You're... a wizard. Wizards live in towers. Because they're solitary and proud creatures."
You wince. "That is what they say, yes."
"I'm going to be honest, you don't seem very... 'proud'. I don't mean that as an insult!" she says, waving her hands. "I'm sure you are proud of things you've- done- or- you just don't seem. Arrogant?" She looks at you apologetically.
"It's just the easiest shape," you explain.
"What?"
"To create. With magic."
"...A tower?"
"Yes. Up is easier." Your hands go up to sketch incantation shapes in the air before you realize what you're doing and drop them again. "Boxes are easier to build, but towers are easiest to cast."
"...Why?"
"I could explain but it would take a while."
She huffs, then covers her face with her hands again. It takes you a second to realize that she's laughing.
"I'm sorry?" you say reflexively.
She keeps laughing. The cat steals the last sausage out of the pan and runs back downstairs with it.
---
You open up the kitchen, the sitting room and fireplace, the library, the water closet, the bathing room, the guest bedroom (she had been sleeping on the floor- with a mattress and blankets and pillows, of course, but still) and the study and laboratory, which you warn her not to touch without supervision. She nods, wide-eyed, and asks questions about how it all works and which stones to touch, which you try to explain, but it just leads to more questions.
You realize halfway through an explanation of location runes that: "Wait! Oh, I'm sorry, I should have asked what your preference is. I just set it up the way I normally do."
"You're saying something I don't understand again," she says, but she makes it sound friendly.
"Er- well- if you're living here, you should get a say in how the rooms are arranged?"
Her brows furrow. "You can rearrange the rooms?"
"Of course you can. You're just unfolding them, after all."
She squeezes her eyes shut like she's working through a tough problem. "You... can unfold them... to different rooms?"
"Yes?"
She stays like that for a moment, her entire face scrunched as she works through whatever puzzle she's stuck on. Then she suddenly grins, eyes open wide and sparkling, staring directly at you.
"I want to learn all of this," she says.
"Oh!" you say. "Okay. I mean, you should know it anyways, if you're going to be living-"
"No! Like- I want to learn all of this," she says, sweeping her hands to encompass the runes. "All of the- the folding, and..."
"You mean. You want to learn magic?"
"Yes!" She nods several times for emphasis. "I mean! This is the best thing I've ever heard in my life. You can rearrange the rooms?"
Privately, you think that's a fairly minor magical trick to get excited over, but- it is practical. "That's excellent! Really. I mean, I can't recommend it enough. Magic is the best thing in the world."
"It really is! It must be!" She nods, still staring at you, and grabs at your hand- you avoid flinching- and starts pumping it, like a massive handshake. "When can I start? Today? Right now?"
"Start?"
She takes a second to hear this, then freezes mid-pump. Her smile looks a little pasted on; manic. "As your apprentice."
"Oh. Oh. Oh! Um."
"I'm so sorry. I assumed, didn't I." She releases your arm and takes a step back. "You didn't say-"
"Oh, um, no, well, it's just. Well." You wring your hands. "I've never had an apprentice before. So I might not be very good at it?"
"Nonsense!" She looks back at you and you can feel a kind of desperate hope emanating from her. "You've been explaining all this stuff really well! I mean- it's a lot- but I feel like I'm getting it. We can figure it out."
The vote of confidence is unexpected, and warming. But, also: "Will it interfere with the. Your curse?"
She snorts and cocks an eyebrow. "Is your goal to try and marry me to combine our political powers?"
"No!" You bring your hands up and shake your head firmly. "No, no, no, no. Definitely not."
"Then no, it won't have any problem with that." She exhales and smiles half-heartedly. "It would be pretty funny if locking me in a tower resulted in me getting into a powerful marriage, instead of hiding me from one."
Now you're the one furrowing your brow. "Are you in here just to. Hide? From potentially getting married?"
She shrugs. "Basically. And a tower is traditional."
"...Traditional?"
"Well. Princesses in towers. It's a thing." She shrugs again. "You know."
"I really don't??"
---
The cat hops from the top of the wingback reading chair into the Princess's lap, interrupting her attempts at reading your old copy of Basic Wizardry Primer 1 from your own apprenticeship. (You magicked all the handwritten answers out.) She rolls her eyes and starts petting him, leaving the book aside.
You've spent yesterday and today unpacking your old books, preparing for continuing on your knowledge to the next generation. Your first apprentice! You knew it would happen some day, but...
Well. Much as you'd like to say 'you didn't expect it like this': Serendipity has power. You can't say no to a confluence like this.
That being said, you realize you have two burningly important questions to ask your new apprentice, and you've spent the past hour trying to figure out how to ask them.
"You're looking at me like I've got something on my face," she says suddenly. "I'm bothering you, aren't I? Should I give you more space?"
"Oh- no! No, it's not that. It's. Um. Well." No better chance than this. "I wanted to ask you. Something."
She nods.
"Some things. Plural."
She nods again, looking a little more concerned.
You pause.
She raises a hand from the cat's fur to make a motion like, go on...?
"Do you. Are you hoping that... this training will help you break your curse?" You frown and look down at your hands. "I know- um. There's probably more to it than just being locked in a tower. I don't mean to pry, but."
She sighs. When you look up, she's looking down at the cat. "I did think about that." She thinks a moment, then shrugs and looks up. "It would be nice, but it's not really my main goal, I guess. Magic just looks fun? Plus. I was never very good at being at court. It's so hard to not just say stuff. You know?"
You don't know but you nod with hopefully appropriate levels of sympathy.
"So... yeah. Now I just want to do magic, I think. At least for now. The curse is- it's not a big deal. How hard can it be to not get married?" She quirks a smile.
You exhale slowly. "I'm glad. Um... I ask because. You should know that we probably won't be able to break it. At least not with the magic I can teach you. Fae magic is..." you suck air through your teeth, "tricky."
She takes that in and nods solemnly, focusing on petting the cat and avoiding your eyes.
You don't know what the consequence for getting married would be, but based on what you've heard of Fae curses, it definitely will not be good. No one would enjoy having something like that hanging over them, especially when the terms were as vague as 'marriage' and 'powerful'; who knew how the Fae defined marriage and power?
"You said you had multiple questions," she says, breaking you out of imagining various horrific curses triggering on technicality. "What's the next one?"
You look up at her and bite the inside of your cheek. You hate asking this, but it's really unavoidable here.
"So, uh. What's your name?"
She stares at you.
"I. I never got the chance to ask."
She blinks.
You start to sweat. "This happened sort of quickly, so-"
"I am the Princess of the kingdom in which you reside," she says. "You have to know my name."
Modern AU where Shen Yuan accidentally sugar-daddies everyone.
So for the purposes of this, Shen Yuan's family is basically $10 Bananas levels of cluelessly rich. Shen Yuan has almost never had to look at the prices of anything he wants. He and his siblings all get an allowance from the family's main account, which increases when they reach adulthood, and in the interest of fairness his parents made it all the same size. So Shen Yuan gets the same amount of money for his daily living expenses as his older brothers with their penthouse apartments and vacation homes and private jets, at least from the family account (since he doesn't work, he doesn't actually make as much as them in total because they earn more on top of their allowances).
And the thing is, Shen Yuan genuinely just lives a lot more humbly. He likes people but what would he do with a vacation house? Anything really nice would probably require him to fly to get out there, and he gets sick as hell on planes. Living in the central city is also not great for him, because the air pollution is so bad. Having a whole house to himself would also be ridiculous. So he has a reasonable apartment, in a reasonable area, and he splurges every so often on purchases that make him happy and take-out food that he likes, and of course he pays a cleaning service to come in twice a week. Most people assume he's comfortably middle class and has some tech job he does from home, but he's been getting a lot more than he's been spending in his monthly allowances for years now, and the figures are big.
Enter into this environment author Airplane and his trash novels. Novels, multiple, because in this AU there's no PIDW, and instead after some alternate PIDW prototype got popular in the harem genre, Airplane decided to churn out a series of copy-paste shorter stories rather than recycling the same subplots in one massively long epic.
Shen Yuan of course discovers Airplane's writing and becomes as obsessed with it as ever, except this time he notices that if there are delays between new stories, they seem to clear up faster whenever he throws some cash at the problem. And also that the drops in Airplane's writing quality coincide with times when Shen Yuan was having health issues and not keeping up with his VIP purchases. So, he works out that Airplane's probably doing the writing for the money, and that when Peerless Cucumber isn't paying the most for it, Airplane starts listening to the other buffoons in the comment section more to try and entice them to pay his bills instead.
Peerless Cucumber leaves a comment on one of Airplane's latest stories that kicks off the two of them actually chatting, and Shen Yuan eventually gets to the point of offering to fund all Airplane's writing, in exchange for Airplane not doing his crap sellout stuff to appeal to other readers anymore. Airplane thinks he's joking or maybe mocking him. Shen Yuan asks how much it would cost. Airplane fires off a ridiculous number. Shen Yuan doesn't even blink and wires him the first payment. Then he gets annoyed because Airplane leaves him on read for a while, but that's because Airplane is staring at his account balance in shock.
Of course, it's Airplane who starts referring to Peerless Cucumber as his sugar daddy. Shen Yuan is just like "based on your sex scenes I don't think anyone would pay you for that" and Airplane's all "but you WOULD pay for my sex scenes ^_~" and Shen Yuan's like "technically I am actually paying you not to write that shit" and so on. Usual banter. The quality of Airplane's writing improves dramatically, a lot of his readership drops off but he does get new readers and gradually builds up an even bigger fanbase than before, and so on, it all goes pretty well. He eventually writes a few things that take off to the point of getting physical publications and international translations. Technically Airplane no longer needs Shen Yuan to pay all of his bills by that point but he's not going to tell Shen Yuan that! The contract's still good as long as he keeps writing!
Then one of Airplane's online acquaintances runs into some financial trouble and asks for help.
Liu Mingyan used to beta read for Airplane back when he wrote fanfiction (she was like thirteen, Airplane was unaware because internet and hey free beta), and it seems her family has hit a rough patch. She wants tips on how to go pro, but Airplane explains that it was extremely difficult and he mostly lucked out by finding a single wealthy backer. Mingyan wonders if the same guy would be interested in her writing, Airplane sadly thinks not because Mingyan exclusively writes kinky danmei erotica and Peerless Cucumber seems pretty firmly in the closet still and also generally prefers plotty and world-building heavy stuff.
But like, Airplane has definitely gotten a vibe off of Cucumber-bro, and Mingyan's gorgeous older brother does video streams of himself doing cool martial arts and swordsmanship stuff. So he asks her permission and when she gives it, he recommends Liu Qingge's videos to Shen Yuan, being sure to mention that the guy in question can't really afford to keep up with his hobbies and oh what a shame it would be if he had to stop making art like that.
Haha, Airplane, you're not subtle.
Even so, Shen Yuan watches the videos and immediately agrees that Liu Qingge is beauty in motion, and that it would be criminal to deprive the world of more videos of his sword. Swordsmanship! That is the, the art of, martial arts! Definitely. He clicks the donate button, reasoning out that he'll just send a donation about the size of his usual monthly payments to Airplane and call it his good deed for the day.
Liu Qingge is very confused by this new follower from nowhere who suddenly dumped a little over a month's rent into his account. One thing leads to another, with Mingyan and Airplane conspiring to try and get Shen Yuan as a permanent patron, and then Liu Qingge being let in on it. Except that Airplane keeps referring to Shen Yuan as his sugar daddy, and well... it's not like Liu Qingge doesn't ever get 'those' kinds of comments on his videos. At first he's embarrassed, then offended, then mortified that his own younger sister is apparently setting him up to make premium private videos for what he assumes is some old pervert who is going to want him to do untoward things.
However, their options are pretty bleak at the moment, and Liu Qingge worries that if he doesn't do this then Mingyan might. She even mentions something to the effect of having planned to offer herself, and only didn't because she wasn't this "sugar daddy" guy's type!
Teeth clenched, Liu Qingge asks Airplane stiltedly for advice on how to... appeal, to this wealthy benefactor.
In the end though it's not nearly as bad as Liu Qingge feared. He winds up doing more videos in costumes and cosplay, which ought to have been an untenable expense, but Peerless Cucumber always ends up covering the cost of whatever he invests in plus extra. Sometimes he sends Liu Qingge stuff with a request to wear it, but so far it's just been like, badass warrior-themed or historical costumes. Nothing overtly pervy. He does some LARPing, he makes enough to start doing horseback archery again, convinces some of his good-looking peers from various clubs to spar with him, and ultimately the most risque videos he ends up doing are the ones where he demonstrates how to put on certain kinds of gear. He still locks those ones behind paid subscribers only, mostly because he feels like he's doing something illicit now, even if he used to show more skin on his older videos any time he took his shirt off.
Peerless Cucumber doesn't leave creepy comments, either. In fact he seems genuinely nice and supportive, it's hard not to like him, and so even once his situation levels out Liu Qingge decides there's not really much need to stop making videos for him. (He maybe even gets a little giddy thrill over... well, sometimes he finds it all a bit... just when he thinks about Peerless Cucumber watching him demonstrate his physical prowess and finding that alone worth... ANYWAY--)
So that goes on for a while, before Yue Qi enters the scene.
Yue Qi is the childhood friend of one of Shen Yuan's older brothers (Shen bros!) and Shen Jiu owes him a big favor for something that he won't talk about. At least he won't talk to Shen Yuan about it. But Yue Qi is also not the type to ask for help, and Shen Jiu is very bad at offering it, so when Shen Jiu gets word that Yue Qi is having some difficulties making ends meet, he tells Shen Yuan to act as the middle man. Go offer Qi-ge money, he knows you're nice he'll just accept it, and then Shen Jiu will pay the actual bill.
Well it turns out that Yue Qi doesn't just accept it, of course he sees right through it, and gently but firmly tells Shen Yuan that he's not interested in burdening Shen Jiu further than he already has. Etc, etc, stoic stiff upper lips and no proper communication all around. Shen Yuan panics because it's not working and he's also genuinely worried about Yue Qi by now, so he tries to figure out how to make it compelling and basically blurts that, well, see, the thing is that sometimes he pays men to entertain him. You know. To like. Do things, for him. So. He could also pay Yue Qi? To do something for him?
Yue Qi gets the wrong idea entirely, and at first is like, oh, no, A'Yuan, you shouldn't be paying people for that! These things should just happen organically! But Shen Yuan is very adamant that he believes in compensating people for what they do for him, it's not like he can't afford to, and it gets awkward but Yue Qi is like well he does have health problems. It's perhaps difficult for him to meet people. So then he starts worrying about Shen Yuan and all these strange men he's apparently paying for "entertainment". Does his brother know about this?
No of course Shen Jiu doesn't know! He'd hate it, and Shen Yuan doesn't want to hear about how he's doing everything wrong with his life again!
Then Shen Yuan mentions that his prior house cleaning service up and quit on him (they didn't), and if Yue Qi would like to earn fair compensation he could just come over sometimes to help instead, and Shen Yuan would pay him just to tidy up and hang out for a few hours! Which Yue Qi thinks is a fantastic idea, actually, even if Shen Yuan is only doing this because of his brother, this will give Yue Qi a chance to keep an eye on him and his so-called entertainers. Even if he sort of... ends up also being one?
Shen Yuan keeps everything above board, though his apartment always seems perfectly clean and he overpays way too much (Shen Jiu is still footing this bill after all), and Yue Qi starts to think maybe he actually is being paid for intimacy. Of a sort that they're maybe still working up to? Shen Yuan usually has a very thin face after all. He's kind of got two minds about this prospect. On the one hand, he's got his situationship with Shen Jiu, so dating his brother would be absurd. But on the other hand, it's not actually dating, and he does like Shen Yuan, and maybe if they can be good company for each other then Yue Qi won't feel so depressed and Shen Yuan won't need to hire strange men so often.
Meanwhile it's come to Shen Yuan's attention, perhaps through an offhand comment he read online somewhere, that people who are struggling financially often also struggle to "treat themselves". Because even when they have enough money to be comfortable there's often the looming specter of deprivation, and etc, so he figures he should start buying some of his dependents more treats and things. Since they might not buy them for themselves? And also he's enjoying doing this but shhh no he isn't, it's a huge hassle, he's only doing it out of basic moral decency, etc.
So like, Airplane starts getting little things that he'd put on some public wish lists, clearly sent by Peerless Cucumber. And he tells Mingyan to make a list for Liu Qingge too, and sure enough, Liu Qingge (bewildered, slightly flustered) tries to figure out what he's supposed to do with an album from a band he likes and some high-end leather polish. Ultimately settles on playing the music and wearing his nicest leather in his next video. Yue Qi starts arriving at Shen Yuan's place to be plied with his favorite coffees and to have scented candles awkwardly foisted onto him (Shen Yuan does not know what Yue Qi likes in gifts) (he buys these presents himself they're not out of Shen Jiu's pocket).
So finally Shen Yuan's parents start to notice that he's been spending a lot more than usual, and start to worry that he's either been taken in by a scam artist or is secretly dating a gold digger or has developed a drug addiction or something. But asking things directly like normal people is basically illegal in the Shen family, so they decide to hire a private investigator.
Enter Luo Binghe, a young man of humble background who is struggling to make ends meet after the untimely death of his adoptive mother, and is using his P.I. job and his online cooking videos to help pay his way through school (scholarship student). Usually his cases are more like, cyberstalking someone to find out if they're cheating on their spouse, or helping someone planning a lawsuit accumulate evidence on their corrupt employer, or other things like that. When he gets the Shen Yuan case, the idea that the Shen family's son is paying for "company" is well within his list of probable answers.
Though this one is a little... peculiar?
Mostly because Binghe can't find evidence of Shen Yuan actually getting what he would, presumably, be paying for. At first Luo Binghe just goes through the online paper trails, using the info that the Shen parents give him to figure out that Shen Yuan is paying Airplane and Swordmaster Liu (*cough*) what seem to be exorbitant prices just for trashy fiction and cosplay videos. He assumes this is a cover, that someone's actually delivering drugs or going over for "private meetings" or at least actually sending dirty videos as well, but even when he pays for Liu Qingge's VIP access it's just tutorials and such. Neither of these guys are even on any of the sites that are more lenient towards hosting explicit content. Luo Binghe's aware that kinks aren't always obviously sexual, but people don't usually pay through the nose for the kind of content they can easily find for free all over the place, either.
He digs a little more but keeps coming up empty on evidence to clarify which of the many vices the Shen family's son is actually indulging in. Which is a problem because that's the information they're paying him to find out. Plus his curiosity kind of piques as he reads Shen Yuan's seemingly quite invested comments on Airplane's writing and Liu Qingge's videos, looking to see if there's any kind of clandestine code or pattern. But near as he can tell, whatever else Shen Yuan might be getting out of these arrangements, he does genuinely like the stories and videos too? Well. Sometimes. Sometimes he's actually scathingly vitriolic towards Airplane's writing.
Luo Binghe decides that surveilling Shen Yuan himself is probably the way to go. That gets more complicated in court cases, but since the Shen parents just wants to know what's going on and aren't planning on prosecuting their son for anything, it doesn't matter as much if Luo Binghe gets information in sneaky or underhanded ways.
So, Binghe uses the account he created to access Liu Qingge's videos to chat with Shen Yuan a few times, and then recommends his own cooking channel. Shen Yuan doesn't seem too interested in cooking, so Luo Binghe makes sure to include a video that has an image of himself in his recommendation, and then films a few new videos of himself cooking with his shirtsleeves rolled up to three quarters and a few more buttons than usual unbuttoned, adopting a more flirty persona than he typically does for his shows. He takes his cues from some of Liu Qingge's more popular videos for how to be enticing bait.
It takes a few videos, but eventually Shen Yuan comments. Luo Binghe latches onto the chance to start talking to him, playing up a persona of a vulnerable young man with little means who is trying hard to make it through school, etc, and sure enough Shen Yuan seems interested. Well, most predatory people like vulnerable targets, don't they?
However... Shen Yuan just sends him a chunk of money.
Luo Binghe is confused.
Isn't he supposed to ask for something or create some kind of expectation of repayment first? But, maybe this is his approach to handling new targets. Maybe he's just trying to lull Binghe into a false sense of complacency, before he starts indicating what he wants from all of this. Luo Binghe makes sure to move the money Shen Yuan sends him into a separate account, so that if the Shen parents get angry about it then he can return it as a gesture of good faith.
But Shen Yuan just keeps sending supportive comments and donations. Eventually he leaves a comment that alludes to how badly he'd like to taste Binghe's cooking, and Binghe is like finally, but when he implies that they could perhaps meet in person and Luo Binghe could thank him for his support by making him something, Shen Yuan backs off.
Things eventually progress to the point where Luo Binghe, who is a totally normal person treating this like a totally normal job still thank you very much, is basically camping out in the bushes in front of Shen Yuan's apartment building. At some point he conscripts the aid of his weird cousin (finding his birth family was how he got into this business initially), and then almost immediately regrets it because Shen Yuan helps get Zhuzhi Lang a job doing landscaping for his building.
Why would he want Zhuzhi Lang close but not Binghe? Binghe is much handsomer! He'd make an excellent target for seduction! >:(
Anyway eventually Yue Qi catches Luo Binghe lurking around like a creeper and is like, finally, I have caught one of these suspicious men, whilst Binghe is like oh so he does have a lover, well this guy sucks and is clearly not good enough for him, and they both try and chase one another off and Shen Yuan comes home to a heated passive-aggressive-politeness war being waged in front of his apartment. Eventually he realizes the misunderstanding and calls everyone together (zoom conference? in-person meet-up?) to clarify that he is not paying any of them for "special favors", that was just Airplane being deranged about his sense of humor, and then he has no idea what to do when the prevailing response seems to be disappointment.
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