Synopsis: In the quiet, bone-deep silence of the Bridgerton ancestral home, Anthony has learned that fatherhood is a series of sharp awakenings. When his six-year-old daughter, Cecily, stumbles into his bedroom gripped by a nightmare of his own death, Anthony is forced to confront the echoes of his own childhood trauma.
While Kate provides the emotional warmth that anchors their family, Anthony finds himself navigating the terrifying vulnerability of being a "hero" to a child who fears his absence. A quiet, midnight vignette of a man realizing that while he cannot promise forever, he can provide the steady heartbeat of the present.
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A Note on the Text: This is actually my very first time sitting down to write for this fandom! I was recently re-watching Bridgerton Season 2 and found myself completely stuck on Anthony’s character arc—specifically his deep-seated fear of loss and how that might manifest once he finally had a family of his own.
I really wanted to see a version of Anthony who has done the work, even if the "practical" side of him still struggles with finding the right words. I hope I did Kate and Anthony justice; their dynamic is so special to me, and I just had to get this specific scene out of my head and onto the page. Thank you for reading my first attempt!
The house was quiet in that specific way it only was after midnight — all creaking wood and settling stone, the kind of silence that made every small sound enormous.
Anthony heard the footsteps first.
Six years of fatherhood had done something strange to his sleep. He had gone from a man who could sleep through a thunderstorm to one whose eyes opened at the sound of a door handle turning two rooms away. Kate said it was proof he had a heart. He maintained it was purely practical.
The bedroom door opened approximately three inches. Then stopped.
Anthony didn't move. Beside him, Kate made a small sound that meant she was awake too but was going to pretend otherwise for exactly thirty more seconds before she intervened. They had developed an entire language of non-verbal communication about their daughter that neither of them had ever formally agreed upon.
"Papa."
It was barely a whisper. He sat up.
Cecily stood in the gap of the doorway in her white nightgown, dark hair loose and wild around her face — she had Kate's hair, that untameable quality to it — and she was clutching the doorframe with both hands in the way she did when she was trying very hard not to cry.
"Come here," he said.
She crossed the room at a run and he caught her, lifting her up onto the bed, and she pressed her face immediately into the side of his neck. He could feel her breathing — fast and shallow, the particular rhythm of someone coming down from genuine fear.
Kate sat up without pretense now, reaching over to smooth a hand down Cecily's back.
"What happened, janu?" she said softly.
"A nightmare." Muffled against Anthony's shoulder. "A bad one."
"Do you want to tell us?" Kate asked.
A pause. The little body in his arms was already beginning to settle, the way children did when they simply needed proximity — as though fear could not survive the presence of a parent. Anthony had always found this particular truth both touching and terrifying.
"You died, Papa."
He felt it land somewhere in his chest.
"There was a carriage," Cecily continued, still not lifting her head. "You were crossing the street and it came very fast and I was trying to shout but I couldn't make any sound come out. And then it was over and Mama was crying and I couldn't find you anywhere and I kept looking—"
"That's enough of that," Anthony said.
She finally looked up at him. Her eyes were wet — Kate's eyes, brown and fierce even at six years old, even at this hour, even in the middle of something that had frightened her badly.
He tried to think of what to say. This was always the part he found more difficult than he cared to admit — not the holding, not the being there, but the words. Kate was better at it. Kate had a warmth that translated effortlessly into language. He tended to lead with practicalities.
"It was a dream," he said.
"I know that," Cecily said, with a trace of indignation that was entirely inherited from her mother. "I know it wasn't real, Papa. But it felt real."
"Yes," he said. "It did."
Something shifted in the way she looked at him. Children were perceptive, he'd learned. They could tell when an adult was simply managing them versus actually understanding them.
"Were you ever scared of that?" she asked. "Of someone dying?"
Anthony was quiet for a moment. Kate's hand found his under the blanket.
"Yes," he said. "When I was young. Quite often, actually."
Cecily seemed to consider this. "What did you do about it?"
"I worried a great deal," he said, "to very little effect."
Cecily laughed — a small, involuntary sound that broke through the remnants of her fear. He felt the knot in his own chest loosen by degrees.
"That doesn't sound very useful," she said.
"It wasn't. Your mother eventually sorted it out." He glanced at Kate over Cecily's head. Kate's expression was doing something complicated — amused and fond and slightly undone all at once, which was an expression he had come to associate with moments she would bring up later when they were alone.
"That is not quite how I would characterize it," Kate said.
"You're characteristically modest."
"You're characteristically revising history."
Cecily had settled fully against him now, her weight heavy in that boneless way of children falling toward sleep. Anthony tightened his arm around her.
"I'm not going anywhere," he said, quietly, to the top of her head. It wasn't an eloquent thing to say. He knew it wasn't a promise he could make with any certainty — that was the particular cruelty of loving people, that you couldn't guarantee them anything except your intention. But she was six. And she had come to him, specifically, because he was the one she was afraid of losing.
That would stay with him.
"You could sleep here," Kate offered. "If you'd like."
Cecily made an affirmative sound that was mostly asleep already.
Anthony did not put her down.
He made no move to transfer her to the middle of the bed, or to suggest she might be more comfortable in her own room, or to do anything at all except sit there with his daughter tucked against his chest while her breathing evened out and her small fists slowly unclenched from his shirt.
Kate watched them both for a moment. Then she lay back down, her shoulder pressed warm against his arm.
"She has your stubbornness, you know," she murmured.
"She has your temper," he said.
"She has your terror of anything happening to the people she loves."
He didn't answer that.
Outside, somewhere, a clock struck the half hour. Anthony stayed exactly where he was.
Summary: The first time you met Anthony Bridgerton, he ruined your favorite dress. The second time, he tried to ruin your argument. By the third time, he was simply ruining your ability to think about anyone else.
A story in six parts (and one very smug sister).
I. The Introduction
The first time you met Anthony Bridgerton, he spilled wine on your dress.
Not by accident, you were fairly certain.
You had been mid-sentence — making what you considered a rather brilliant observation about the futility of the Season's marriage mart — when his elbow connected with your glass and Bordeaux red bloomed across your ivory skirt like a wound.
"My sincerest apologies," he said, in a tone that suggested he felt none.
You looked up. He looked down. He had the sort of face that made you immediately suspicious — too handsome, too composed, with dark eyes that assessed you the way a solicitor might assess a contract.
"Do you make a habit of destroying women's gowns," you asked pleasantly, "or am I simply fortunate?"
Something flickered in his expression. Not quite a smile. Close, though.
"Only the gowns of women standing in the middle of a corridor," he said. "It is a doorway, not a drawing room."
"And yet here you are, standing in it as well."
A pause.
"Anthony Bridgerton," he said finally, because apparently that was supposed to settle something.
"I know who you are." You handed him your empty glass. "Do be a dear and fetch me another."
You walked away before you could see his face.
You would later learn from Eloise Bridgerton — who had witnessed the entire exchange and had not stopped laughing for a full ten minutes — that her brother had stood in that doorway for a rather long moment, holding your glass, looking, in her words, "like a man who'd just been struck by lightning and wasn't sure if he'd survived."
You filed this information away and thought nothing of it.
II. The Garden Party
Three weeks later.
"She argued with Lord Ashton for twenty minutes about crop rotation," Benedict told Anthony, watching you from across the garden with unconcealed delight. "Twenty minutes, Anthony. She won."
"Fascinating," Anthony said, not looking up from his book.
"She's looking this way."
"I don't care."
"You've read the same page four times."
Anthony closed the book. "I am resting my eyes."
"On the page?"
"Benedict."
"She's coming over."
Anthony stood up straighter without meaning to — a fact Benedict clocked with the precision of a man who had been waiting his entire life for exactly this kind of ammunition.
You appeared at the edge of the garden path, parasol resting on one shoulder, expression carrying the particular brand of amusement that Anthony was beginning to recognize as your default when he was involved.
"Lord Bridgerton," you said. "I didn't realize you read."
"I didn't realize you did anything other than argue with people," he replied.
"I argue and I win. There's a distinction." You glanced at the book's spine. "Voltaire. Interesting choice for a man who seems so allergic to nuanced thought."
"I assure you, my thoughts are perfectly nuanced."
"Mm." You looked unconvinced. "What did you think of his position on free will?"
A beat.
"Which one?" he said.
And then — infuriatingly — you smiled. Fully. Like he'd passed some test he hadn't known he was taking.
"Good answer," you said, and walked on.
Benedict waited approximately three seconds before dissolving.
"She likes you," he said, in the same awed tone one might use to announce a royal decree.
"She tolerates me," Anthony said, sitting back down, reopening his book to the wrong page. "There is a distinction."
III. The Observation of Lady Bridgerton (Senior)
Violet Bridgerton was not a foolish woman.
She had raised eight children, survived the death of her husband with her dignity intact, and successfully navigated seventeen Seasons without losing her mind entirely. She knew things. She noticed things.
What she noticed, currently, was her eldest son refilling your tea before you'd even realized it was empty.
He hadn't looked at you while he did it. That was the tell. Men who felt nothing looked directly at the person they were serving. Men who felt something looked anywhere else, terrified of what their face might do.
"He doesn't even like tea," Hyacinth said in a very loud whisper to Francesca.
"He likes her tea, apparently," Francesca murmured back.
Violet said nothing. She simply smiled into her cup and waited, the way mothers do, with the particular patience of someone who already knows how the story ends.
IV. The Rain
It rained on the afternoon of Lady Danbury's outdoor reception, which was either cosmic irony or divine intervention, depending on your perspective.
Everyone scattered. You did not scatter fast enough. Anthony, for reasons he would later be entirely unable to explain to himself, did not scatter at all.
You ended up under the same elm tree at the edge of the estate's garden, two feet apart, watching the rain sheet across the empty lawn.
It was quiet.
The particular kind of quiet that has weight to it.
"You could have made it to the house," you said, after a moment.
"So could you."
"I didn't want to ruin my shoes."
"I didn't want to—" He stopped.
You looked at him sideways. "You didn't want to what?"
"Nothing."
"You were going to say something."
"I wasn't."
"Anthony." It was the first time you'd used his given name. You hadn't planned to. It had simply... arrived, the way things do when your guard slips for a moment. "You can say a thing without it meaning anything, you know."
He looked at you then, which was a mistake on his part, because you were looking back, and the rain was very loud, and you were close enough that he could see the slight furrow between your brows that meant you were trying to read him.
"I didn't want to go in," he said, simply. "Yet."
The furrow smoothed out.
You looked back at the rain. "Neither did I."
Neither of you said anything else for a while. The elm dripped steadily. A bird somewhere complained about the weather. Anthony's shoulder was very nearly touching yours — or perhaps it was, slightly, just at the edge, where your sleeves met — and neither of you moved away.
When the rain stopped, you both walked back to the house with several appropriate feet of space between you, speaking of nothing in particular.
Eloise, who had watched the entire scene from an upstairs window with Benedict and a shared cup of tea gone cold, said: "They're going to make this so difficult."
"Oh, absolutely," Benedict agreed. "It will be wonderful."
V. The Ball (The Almost)
The Featherington ball was too warm and too crowded and the music was half a beat too fast, and you had just successfully avoided three separate suitors and one very determined marchioness when Anthony appeared at your elbow.
"You look like you're planning an escape," he said.
"I am planning an escape," you said. "Would you like to help or are you here to be an obstacle?"
"Purely decorative," he said, with a gravity that made you press your lips together to keep from laughing. "There's a terrace. East wing."
"Is this you inviting me to a terrace, Lord Bridgerton?"
"This is me informing you of a terrace's existence. What you do with that information is entirely your business."
The terrace, it turned out, was empty and cool and smelled like night-blooming jasmine, and the music from inside was just muffled enough to become pleasant rather than oppressive.
You stood at the railing and let the night air do its work.
"Why do you come to these things," you asked, "if you despise them so thoroughly?"
"Duty," he said.
"That's a very sad answer."
"It's an honest one."
You turned to look at him properly. He was looking at you in that way he had sometimes — not the assessing look, but the other one, the quieter one, the one that made you feel like something significant was being decided somewhere behind his eyes.
"What?" you said.
"Nothing."
"You keep saying that."
"And it keeps being true."
"Anthony." There it was again. His name in your mouth, doing something to his expression he clearly had not planned for. "What are you thinking?"
A long pause. The jasmine. The muffled strings.
"That this is the only part of these evenings I don't despise," he said, quietly. "This. Specifically."
Your heart did something inconvenient.
"Well," you said, after a moment, with the last shred of composure you possessed. "Someone has to make them bearable."
"Yes," he said. "Someone does."
He was not talking about the evenings anymore. You both knew it. Neither of you said so.
Inside, Eloise was actively elbowing Benedict. Benedict was grinning so hard his face hurt. Lady Danbury, who had appeared out of nowhere, as she always did, looked at the terrace doors and made a sound that was halfway between satisfaction and exasperation.
"They'll figure it out," she said, to no one in particular. "They're both too clever not to." She tapped her cane once on the floor. "Eventually."
VI. The Confession (Dragged Out of Him)
It was Eloise who broke first. Which was, really, inevitable.
"I cannot watch this anymore," she announced at breakfast, setting her fork down with the finality of a woman making a political declaration. "It has been two months. Two months of almost-something and meaningful looks and you refilling her tea without being asked, and I will not—"
"Eloise," Anthony said, in his best Viscount voice.
"Don't Eloise me. You like her."
"I find her tolerable—"
"Oh, please." She gestured expansively with her toast. "You read her favorite author after she mentioned him once in passing. Once, Anthony. Casually. And you went home and read the entirety of his published works."
A silence.
"I was curious."
"About Voltaire."
"He's a very influential—"
"I will scream," Eloise said pleasantly. "I will stand up in this dining room and scream, and I will not stop until you admit it."
Benedict, from behind his newspaper, contributed: "I'd let her. She means it."
Anthony set down his coffee. He looked at the table. He looked at the window. He looked at the ceiling, as though it might offer him a viable escape route.
Then, with the expression of a man giving a full confession at gunpoint:
"She is not tolerable," he said, through his teeth. "She is— She is rather extraordinary. And deeply irritating. And she said my name two weeks ago and I have not— it has been—" He stopped. Pressed his fingers to his brow. "This is absurd. I am the Viscount Bridgerton. I have managed estates and ledgers and the entire weight of this family since I was eighteen years old. I handled it all."
A pause.
"And then she handed me an empty wine glass."
Eloise put her face in her hands. Not from embarrassment — from trying very hard not to explode with delight.
"Go," she said, from behind her palms. "Go and tell her. Please. For the love of all of us."
Epilogue: The Telling
You were in the park. Reading. Voltaire, as it happened — which Anthony would later call fate and you would call coincidence specifically to irritate him, a tradition you intended to maintain for the foreseeable future.
He sat down beside you on the bench without asking.
"You're in my light," you said, not looking up.
"I need to say something."
"Can it wait? I'm at a very good part."
"No."
You looked up. His expression was the most unguarded you'd ever seen it — no composure, no careful arrangement. Just something open and slightly desperate and very earnest.
"Oh," you said softly.
"I have been," he began, and then seemed to decide that sentence wasn't going to survive and tried again. "You are—" Another failure. He exhaled. "I find that I am entirely—"
"Anthony."
He stopped.
"I know," you said.
A beat.
"You know."
"I've known for a while."
"And you—"
"Yes," you said, simply. "Obviously. Did you think I stood under that tree in the rain for the weather?"
He stared at you. Then something shifted in his face — slow, like sunrise, like a man realizing he's been worrying about a problem that was already solved.
"You are," he said, "extraordinarily maddening."
"I know that too," you said, and went back to your book.
He did not move from your light.
You did not ask him to.
Somewhere across the park, Eloise Bridgerton punched Benedict in the arm in triumph.
Pairing/Characters: Anthony Bridgerton & Isla Bridgerton (OC)
Genre: Family Fluff / Hurt-Comfort / Angst
Rating:General
Warnings: Discussion of grief/parental loss
Synopsis: At six years old, Isla Bridgerton is an expert at collecting facts, observing beetles, and noticing the things people don'tsay. She knows she doesn't have a Papa, and she knows that asking about him makes her mother’s eyes go shiny. But when a garden party encounter leaves her with a "heavy-water" feeling she can't explain, it’s Anthony—the brother who usually stands on high places looking important—who sits in the dirt to help her find the words for what she's missing.
Author's Note: I’ve been sitting on this (and many other things) in my Notes app for ages. I finally decided to stop hoarding my drafts, so enjoy this sudden, aggressive burst of content. Also, just to manage expectations: once this Notes app purge is over, I will be returning to my regularly scheduled programming of silence and mystery.
The thing about being six years old was that nobody told you anything properly.
They spoke around you, or over you, or in the particular soft voices that adults used when they thought you were too small to understand — voices like blankets, like they could wrap the truth in something warm enough that it wouldn't leave marks. Isla Bridgerton had been six years old for three months now and she understood considerably more than anyone gave her credit for, which she felt was a very great injustice, but she was also six years old and did not yet have the words for injustice, so mostly she just felt a prickly, restless feeling in her chest that she didn't know what to do with.
She also understood that she did not have a papa.
Other children did. This was a fact she had assembled quietly, over time, the way she assembled other facts — collecting them like smooth stones from the path at Aubrey Hall, turning them over, examining their weight. Colin's friend Thomas had a papa who attended his cricket matches and shouted embarrassingly from the sideline. Penelope Featherington, who came to call sometimes, had a papa who read the newspaper very loudly at breakfast and was not particularly interested in Penelope, which Isla had observed and filed away as strange, because if you had a papa, why wouldn't you want him to be interested in you?
Isla did not have a papa to be interested in her or not.
She had a papa, technically. Mama said so. Mama said Papa was in heaven and that he loved Isla very much and had held her when she was a baby and thought she was the most wonderful thing he had ever seen, and Isla understood that this was true and also that it was very far away, farther than the garden wall, farther than London was from Aubrey Hall, farther than she could reach.
She could not remember him. She had tried.
She remembered something warm. She thought she remembered something warm. She wasn't entirely sure if that was a real memory or a dream she'd had about a memory, and she didn't know who to ask because every time she tried to ask, the adults got the blanket voices again, and Mama's eyes went shiny, and Isla would feel the prickly feeling get worse and then feel terrible for making Mama's eyes shiny, and so she had stopped asking.
She had not stopped wanting to know.
The Ashworth's garden party was Mama's idea.
Isla was not entirely sure what a garden party was in principle — in practice it appeared to be: many adults standing in a garden, talking about nothing, holding glasses of things she wasn't allowed to have. She had been introduced to approximately eleven people whose names she immediately forgot. She had been told she was charming by a woman in a yellow hat. She had eaten three strawberries and one small cake shaped like a flower and then Gregory had dared her to see how high she could climb in the Ashworth's oak tree before Benedict noticed and she had gotten quite far — four branches, a personal record — before Hyacinth spotted her and screamed.
But Hyacinth had now been taken inside for being too loud near the rose beds, and Gregory had been absorbed into a group of boys near the fountain, and Benedict was talking to someone with a lot of hair about something that involved gesturing at the sky, and Mama was with the other mothers, and Anthony was doing the thing Anthony did at parties, which was stand somewhere elevated and look as though he owned it.
Isla was therefore free.
She wandered to the end of the garden where the flowerbeds grew a little wilder and the noise of the party faded to something distant and manageable. She found a patch of grass beneath a broad apple tree and sat down in it without particular concern for her dress, which was white, and which Mama had requested specifically that she please try not to ruin this time.
She was looking at a beetle when she heard it.
"Up we go, poppet — there she is, brave girl—"
And then a laugh. A child's laugh, the best kind of laugh, helpless and full.
Isla looked up.
Not twenty feet away, on the other side of a low stone wall, was a man — a big man, tall, with a kind face — and he was holding a small girl above his head. The girl was tiny, smaller than Isla, maybe three or four, with dark pigtails that swung as she was lifted, and she was laughing so hard she'd gone red in the face, arms flung out like a bird attempting to take flight.
"Again!"
"Again? What am I, a carnival ride?"
"Papa—"
"Oh, very well."
And up she went again, and laughed again, and the man laughed too — a warm, low, rumbling sound that Isla felt somewhere in her middle before she heard it properly.
She watched them.
She didn't mean to watch them for very long. She had the beetle to attend to, and also she was working on a theory about which type of cloud was softest based on their shapes, which was a serious ongoing investigation. But she watched them.
The little girl said something Isla couldn't hear, and the man bent down to listen — bent all the way down, right to her level, his big face tilted toward her small one with an attention that was total and unhurried, as though whatever she was saying was the only thing happening in the world. Then he nodded very seriously and took her hand and they began to walk together along the path, her small hand entirely lost inside his, and the little girl skipped — skipped — every third step, because why wouldn't you skip when your papa was holding your hand?
Isla watched until they went around the corner of the hedge.
She looked back at the beetle. It had moved while she wasn't watching. She looked at her own hand, resting in the grass. It was a small hand. There was a grass stain developing on her right knee, which Mama was not going to be pleased about.
The prickly feeling in her chest was doing something different now. It was doing something that was less prickly and more — heavy. Like when she'd swallowed too much water swimming in the lake at Aubrey Hall and it sat in her stomach wrong.
She did not quite understand what was happening. She understood that she had watched that man hold his daughter and that it had made the heavy-water feeling come, and she understood that the heavy-water feeling had something to do with not having a papa, and she understood — in the blurry, difficult way that six-year-olds understand things they haven't been given proper words for yet — that she was sad about something she had never had.
How could you miss something you'd never had?
She was still working on this problem when a shadow fell over her.
Anthony had been watching her for approximately two minutes before she noticed him.
He had noticed her slip away from the party with the practiced ease of someone who had been tracking younger siblings through social engagements since he was nineteen years old and could have drawn a map from memory of every hiding spot any Bridgerton had ever used within a ten-mile radius of London. Isla was not as subtle as she believed herself to be, which was a quality she shared with everyone else in their family.
He had followed with the intention of steering her back toward the party before their mother noticed the grass stain, which was already substantial, because Isla approached the world in the manner of someone who had not yet been informed that clothing had feelings.
But then he had come around the path and seen her sitting under the apple tree, and he had seen, on the other side of the wall, Lord Ashworth with his youngest daughter, and he had watched Isla watch them — watched the way her face went through something it didn't have the practice to conceal — and he had stopped.
He had stood there long enough that he could no longer pretend he had only just arrived.
Isla looked up at him. Her face was doing its best to be normal, which meant it was doing the thing where her brows came down very slightly and she pressed her lips together — a Bridgerton expression, their mother's expression, the expression of someone managing something they did not wish to discuss.
She was six years old. She was very bad at it.
He should say something about the party. He should say something about their mother, about the grass stain, about going inside. He opened his mouth with the intention of saying any of these things.
"Did you find a good spot?" he said instead.
She blinked. "There's a beetle," she said, pointing. "It's been walking in a circle. I think it might be lost."
Anthony looked at the beetle. The beetle was, in fact, walking in a somewhat erratic circle. "Mm," he said. "Could be. Beetles do that."
He sat down.
He sat down fully on the ground in his good coat, right beside her, with his legs bent awkwardly because he was much taller than the patch of grass seemed to have been designed for. Isla stared at him as though he had done something extraordinary.
"You'll get grass on you," she said.
"Mm," said Anthony.
She looked back at the beetle. He looked at the beetle. The garden party carried on somewhere distant and irrelevant.
"Anthony," Isla said, after a while.
"Yes."
She was quiet for a moment. She was picking at the grass near her knee — a careful, concentrated picking, not looking at him. "What do papas do?"
The question landed very quietly. He felt it in his chest.
He kept his voice level. "What do you mean?"
"I mean—" She squinted, working it out. "What do they do. Every day. What are they for."
What are they for. Anthony looked at his own hands, resting on his knees. He thought about his father's hands, and the specific way they had ruffled his hair in a manner that was supposedly cursory and was in fact deliberate, done with great care.
"Different things," he said. "For different families." He paused. "Why do you ask?"
She shrugged. It was a very small shrug, and entirely unconvincing. "That man," she said, with studied casualness, "was holding his little girl up in the air."
"I saw."
"She liked it." Another pause. "She called him Papa."
Anthony looked at his youngest sister. She was sitting very straight, the way she sat when she was trying to be big about something, chin lifted slightly, hands in her lap around a fistful of grass she didn't seem to realise she'd pulled up. Her white dress had grass stains on both knees now. Her dark hair was already escaping whatever arrangement their mother had put it in that morning, as it always escaped every arrangement, as it had done since she was born.
She looked, he thought, terribly young.
She looked like someone who had been quietly carrying something too heavy for her size and had not yet learned that you were allowed to put it down.
"Isla," he said. He said it the way he said very few things, without the Viscount in it. Just her name.
Her chin wobbled. Just once. She pressed her lips together very hard and the chin stopped wobbling and she stared at the beetle with great ferocious attention.
"I don't remember him," she said. Her voice came out smaller than she'd started with. "I keep trying but there's nothing there. Hyacinth said she remembers his coat but I don't even—" She stopped. Swallowed. "I don't remember anything. And it's like—" She looked down at her fistful of grass. "It's like being hungry but you don't know what food is. You just feel the hungry part."
Anthony's throat did something that he was going to categorically refuse to acknowledge.
He reached over and picked up his youngest sister and put her in his lap.
She made a noise of surprise — "Anthony—" — and then, because she was six and because he was warm and because she had been carrying the hungry feeling by herself for longer than she should have, she stopped arguing about it and leaned against his chest with the boneless trust of small children and dogs, and he wrapped his arms around her, and she was very small.
"He had big hands," Anthony said, into the top of her head. "Like shovels. Completely ridiculous. The rest of him was perfectly proportioned and then just — enormous hands. He used to say it was because he needed them to manage all of you."
Isla was very still.
"He used to wake up before everyone else," Anthony continued. His voice was careful, even, carrying each word with intention. "Just to sit in the garden with his coffee before it got loud. He said those were the best twenty minutes of his day. Just the garden and the quiet." A pause. "Then it would get loud. He never minded."
"Did he—" Isla's voice was small and careful, feeling its way. "Did he hold me? When I was a baby?"
"Constantly." No hesitation. "You were — you screamed rather a lot, actually, the first few weeks, which — it seems consistent. But he figured out that if he walked with you, you'd quiet. So he walked. All night sometimes, up and down the hall at Aubrey Hall with you against his shoulder, and he'd be exhausted the next morning but he always said—" Anthony's voice shifted slightly, into something that wasn't quite an impression but carried an echo of one, lower and warmer, "— 'She just wanted company, Anthony, can't blame her for that.'"
Isla made a sound against his chest. Not a word. He kept going.
"He called you his best surprise," he said. "Because you were the last one. He said — he told me once, he said every time your mother told him there'd be another one he thought he couldn't possibly love any of you more than he already did, and then you arrived and proved him completely wrong. Every single time." He rested his chin on her hair. "He said you had a look about you, even then. He said you were going to be trouble."
She laughed. It was watery and small and entirely real. "He said that?"
"He said it with tremendous affection. It was, coming from him, a very high compliment."
She was quiet for a moment, digesting this. He could feel her heartbeat settling.
"Is that why you make that face when I do things?" she asked. "The face with your eyebrows?"
"I don't make a face."
"You absolutely make a face. Hyacinth says it's your most-used face."
"Hyacinth," Anthony said, with dignity, "is eight years old and I have no idea what she's talking about."
Isla laughed again, more genuinely this time, and then seemed to hear herself laughing and went a little quieter, and leaned against him more firmly.
"Anthony?"
"Mm."
"Do you miss him?"
It was a direct question, the way only small children asked them — no buffer, no route around it, just the question sitting between them in the afternoon air.
He thought about saying of course, brisk and kind. He thought about deflecting toward something reassuring. He thought about what it would mean to Isla, who was carrying the hungry feeling, to be told the truth by someone who was not trying to protect her from it.
"Every day," he said simply. "I miss him every single day."
She nodded, slow and serious, like this was information she needed and was now filing away carefully.
"Me too," she said. "Even though I can't remember."
"That's allowed," he said. "Missing something you can't remember is allowed."
They sat under the apple tree for a while longer. The garden party carried on. The beetle resumed its investigation. The afternoon settled around them like something gentle.
Then Isla sat up very suddenly, with the mercurial energy of six-year-olds who have processed something and moved on with remarkable speed, and looked up at him with an entirely different expression — bright, practical, slightly imperious.
"Can you lift me up?" she said. "Like that man was doing."
Anthony looked at her. He looked at his coat. He thought about the garden party and Lady Ashworth's guests and his entire reputation within the ton.
"Please," Isla added, as an afterthought.
He stood up, lifted her, and held her up above his head in Lady Ashworth's garden in full view of approximately thirty members of polite society.
She laughed — helpless, full, entirely undignified — both arms out like she was trying to reach the clouds, and Anthony did not think about who was watching or what they were saying and held her steady, and she was not so very different from the weight he remembered in his arms when she was three weeks old and screaming, except that now she was laughing.
"Again!"
"You are," Anthony told her, "the most demanding person I have ever met in my life."
"Again, Anthony—"
He obliged.
He would always oblige.
Later, when she was grown, Isla Bridgerton would tell her own children about their grandfather — his ink-stained hands, his enormous laugh, his best surprise — and she would tell them also about the brother who had sat down in the grass in his good coat and made sure she carried something worth having.
Both things could be true at once.
She had learned that under an apple tree, at six years old, holding onto the living proof of it.
Summary: Being the daughter of an Oxford Professor didn't prepare you for the ton, and it certainly didn't prepare you for the eldest Bridgerton. After three months of careful distance, the Ashworth ball changes the geometry of everything.
A/N: Three months of academic pining and a very mediocre waltz. Anthony is finally committed, and his brothers are going to make it everyone’s problem.
You had not come to London looking for a husband.
This made you, by the ton's estimation, either admirably principled or catastrophically naive — and Lady Featherington, who had agreed to sponsor your season with the pained generosity of a woman doing arithmetic on your prospects, clearly held the latter view. She never said it outright. She didn't need to. The particular tilt of her head when eligible men were announced said everything her mouth was too polished to articulate.
You were the daughter of Professor Edmund Y/L/N. A man of letters, modest income, and the quietly radical conviction that filling his daughter's mind was a more worthwhile endeavour than filling her dance card. He had taught classics at Oxford for thirty years. He had read to you in Greek before you could read in English. He had died two winters ago, leaving you the cottage in Oxfordshire, his library, and a familial connection to Lady Featherington distant enough that she'd had to squint at the family tree to locate it.
London was not your world. You moved through it carefully, observantly — noting the patterns with more curiosity than anxiety. You did not particularly want to be decoded by it.
What you had not anticipated — had not remotely budgeted for — was Anthony Bridgerton.
The introduction had been unremarkable on its surface.
Violet Bridgerton's dinner table, a Tuesday in March. You had been seated three places from him, close enough to be aware of his presence in the way you were aware of weather — not always looked at directly, but felt. He was the sort of man a room organised itself around without meaning to, not because he demanded it, but because something in his bearing made the geometry of any space more logical with him at its centre.
He had looked at you once, early in the evening, with the directness of a man accustomed to forming quick judgments. You had looked back, because you hadn't yet learned that this wasn't done, and he had glanced away first.
Later, in the drawing room, he had moved through pleasantries with practiced ease and found his way, without apparent intention, to the bookshelf where you were examining titles with genuine interest.
He stood a foot away, looking at the same shelf. Said nothing for a moment.
Then: "You look as though you are conducting a study."
"I am," you said, without turning. "Is that a problem?"
The pause had texture. "Not remotely," he said — unhurried, unperformative — and something in that evenness made you turn after all.
He was looking at the shelf. But there was something at the edge of his expression that was not quite neutral.
"Your father wrote on Thucydides," he said. "The essay on the Melian dialogue. I read it at Oxford."
You looked at him properly. That was not what men said at dinner parties. "You remember it?"
"I disagreed with it," he said — the opinion first, before any social lacquer — and glanced at you. "Considerably."
"How fortunate," you said pleasantly. "I helped him write it."
A pause, longer this time. "Did you."
"The third argument is mine entirely."
Something moved behind his eyes. A recalibration, swift and private. He looked back at the shelf. So did you. The party continued in the warm distance, and neither of you said anything further, and it was the most interesting conversation you'd had all evening.
That had been three months ago.
Three months in which he had not done anything as straightforward as tell you what any of it meant.
What he did, instead, was this: refilled your wine at dinners before you asked. Remembered — without acknowledgment, without fanfare — that you took your tea without sugar. At the Pemberton garden party, you had made a half-formed observation about Thucydides, mostly to yourself, and he had replied from three feet away as though he had been waiting for precisely that sentence. The conversation had lasted forty minutes and covered three centuries.
He had called on the Featherington house four times. Always with a stated purpose — a book from Violet's library, a conveyed invitation — under pretenses thin enough to see through, which Lady Featherington received with barely concealed triumph and which you received with the careful blankness of a woman keeping her own counsel.
He looked at you the way a man looked at something he had not yet permitted himself to want.
You looked at him the way a woman looked at something she had not yet permitted herself to acknowledge wanting.
Three months of this. The distance between you unmoved by a single measurable inch, and yet somehow, continuously, more significant.
The Ashworth ball was the grandest of the season — suffocating rooms, adequate champagne, the whole machinery of the marriage mart at full capacity.
Anthony arrived with his brothers at half past nine. Benedict, easy and quietly amused by everything. Colin, genuinely delighted to exist. And Anthony half a step ahead, jaw set, scanning the room with the practiced cool of a man who was not looking for anyone.
He found you in four seconds.
You were with Lady Danbury, near the east wall. You were wearing a deep blue that he was not going to think about, and you were laughing at something Lady Danbury had said — the real laugh, not the social one, the one that got away from you sometimes — and Anthony looked away quickly enough that only Benedict, standing beside him, would have noticed.
"She looks well," Benedict observed, to no one in particular.
Anthony said nothing, accepted a drink from a footman, and said nothing more.
"Dorset's here," Colin said, from his other side.
"Good for him," said Anthony.
"He's heading toward the east wall," Colin continued, with the mild, relentless delivery of a man who had identified an excellent sport.
Anthony's glass stilled in his hand. "Is he."
"He is." A pause. "He's very tall, isn't he. Wouldn't you say he's tall, Benedict?"
"Remarkably."
Anthony turned to look at his brothers with an expression of complete composure that communicated, very clearly, that he knew exactly what they were doing and that they should stop immediately.
Colin looked back with the serene blankness of a man who had grown up the third of eight children and was immune to intimidation.
"Go away," Anthony said quietly.
"We're simply standing here," Colin said.
"Both of you."
"It's a public ball, Anthony."
Anthony turned back to the room. Across it, Dorset had reached you and was bowing over your hand, and you were smiling — not the real smile yet, but warming toward it — and Anthony took a very measured sip of his drink and did not say anything further, which was the most effort he had exerted all evening.
Mr. James Dorset was easy company. You had established this at a previous gathering, where he'd asked a question about your father's work that went beyond pleasantry, and the few minutes of conversation had felt like breathing after a long time in a tight room.
He offered his hand for the first set. You accepted, because you were a woman at a ball and this was what one did, and also because you were not going to spend your one London season standing at the edge of a dancefloor waiting for a man who had spent three months being elaborately, beautifully unable to say anything direct.
The set was lively. Dorset was a good dancer and genuinely funny, and you were laughing when the figure brought you close — the real laugh, the one you couldn't always govern — and you were entirely, deliberately not thinking about anything else.
You thought about it slightly when the dance ended.
You accepted Dorset's arm back toward the edge of the floor, and you saw Anthony before he saw that you had seen him. He was where he always was at these events — positioned slightly apart, observing the room with that composed, careful attention — but something in the set of him was different tonight. Tighter. Less arrived at.
He looked at you. Not the quick sidelong glance he usually permitted himself. A direct look, brief and unguarded, that he pulled back from almost immediately.
Then he looked at Dorset, and something moved across his face that was gone before you could name it.
Dorset, to his credit, read the situation with the quiet intelligence you had liked about him. He excused himself with perfect ease — refreshment, a friend across the room — and then it was just you and Anthony, side by side, watching the floor begin to clear for the next set.
The silence between you was not uncomfortable, exactly. It had too much in it to be uncomfortable. It was the kind of silence that required both people to actively maintain it, like holding something fragile.
"Dorset," he said finally.
Not hello. Not good evening, Miss Y/L/N. Dorset.
"He asked me to dance," you said. "I danced. I believe that is the conventional sequence of events at a ball, my lord."
The my lord was deliberate. You used it when he was being particularly difficult, and he knew it, which was evident in the slight tightening of his jaw.
"He is going to ask you again," Anthony said. It was not a question.
"Possibly. That is also his prerogative."
"You should not accept."
You turned to look at him fully, which required some effort, because looking at Anthony Bridgerton directly and without warning was a slightly disorienting experience. He was watching the room rather than you — he almost always watched the room rather than you, as though direct eye contact were a line he had drawn somewhere — jaw set, glass in hand, every inch of him the composed, unreadable Viscount.
Except that the composure was doing slightly less work than usual tonight.
"And why," you said carefully, "should I not accept?"
A long pause. The kind Anthony used to purchase time, you had learned. To construct an answer that said what he intended without saying what he meant.
"Because two dances," he said finally, "will end up in Whistledown. And that is the last thing you need."
"Is that your concern," you said. "Whistledown."
A beat.
"No," he said. Quietly. Not looking at you.
The word landed between you and stayed there.
You kept your eyes on the room. Your heart had done something unhelpful. "Then what is?"
He was quiet for long enough that you thought he wasn't going to answer — was going to retreat back into the elaborate diplomatic distance he had maintained for three months, was going to say something about the weather or his mother's Thursday plans or anything, anything except the true thing.
Then he said: "I find it difficult."
That was all. Three words, careful and stripped down to almost nothing, and yet — from Anthony Bridgerton, who carried everything with both hands and showed none of it — it was very nearly everything.
You turned to look at him. He was still looking at the room, the long line of his jaw, the studied composure. But his hand — the one closest to you, hanging at his side — had moved. Barely. Almost nothing.
Almost.
His fingers brushed yours. That was all it was. The lightest graze, the length of one breath, in a crowded ballroom where everyone was looking elsewhere and it could mean nothing and also, in the vocabulary of restraint the two of you had been speaking for three months, meant everything.
You did not move your hand away.
Neither did he.
"The next set is a waltz," he said, after a moment, in a voice that had very carefully resumed its normal register.
"I know," you said.
"I don't —" A short exhale. "I'm not a particularly accomplished dancer."
"I'm aware," you said. "Benedict told me."
Something flickered at the corner of his mouth. Not quite a smile. The precursor to one, the thing that happened in him before he allowed it. "Of course he did."
You stood there together, in the middle of all that noise and candlelight, and the waltz began behind you, and neither of you moved except that your hand turned, just slightly, so that your fingers rested properly against his.
He looked down. Then up. At you — fully, directly, the whole unguarded weight of it — for the length of time it took you both to understand what the other was saying without saying anything at all.
"One dance," he said.
It came out low and careful and certain, in the way that things were certain when a man had spent a very long time making up his mind.
"One dance," you agreed.
He offered his arm. You took it. Properly, correctly, the way things were done — but his hand covered yours where it rested in the crook of his elbow, and he held it there, and that small pressure said everything that three months of careful distance had been building toward.
You walked onto the floor together.
He did step on your feet. Twice. He apologised both times with a clipped formality that made it nearly impossible not to smile, and the third time you laughed before he could speak, and he looked down at you and the formality broke open into something warm and real.
"You're laughing at me," he said.
"I am," you said.
"You're supposed to be gracious about it."
"I was very gracious the first two times."
"You were," he allowed, and the corner of his mouth lifted, properly this time, the real version — and it was so rare and so unguarded that you felt it like a hand pressed briefly to your sternum.
You looked up at him. He was already looking at you.
"There," he said quietly, so that only you could hear it, and you understood — somehow, with complete certainty — that he was not talking about the dancing.
From across the room, Colin leaned toward Benedict.
"Did he just —"
"Yes," said Benedict.
"And she —"
"Yes."
Colin exhaled. "Finally."
Benedict watched the two of you move through the waltz — Anthony concentrating with visible effort, you correcting his footing so gently it looked like following — and felt, beneath the habitual amusement, something considerably more like relief.
"He's going to be insufferable about this," Colin murmured.
Characters: Anthony, Kate, Meera (OC Daughter), Lady Danbury
Rating: General Audiences
Synopsis: When eight-year-old Meera Bridgerton decides that a roof is the only appropriate response to a slight against her mother, Kate and Anthony have to navigate the terrifying gap between being a Viscount/Viscountess and simply being parents who are desperately, helplessly in love with their "extraordinary" child.
Author’s Note: I just really needed to write about Kanthony being the most competent, most in-love parents in the world. Meera is definitely a mix of Anthony’s "protective-to-a-fault" genes and Kate’s "don't-mess-with-my-family" fire. Also, let's be real, Anthony would absolutely sit on a roof just to be at eye level with his daughter.
The note arrived at half past two.
Anthony read it once, set it down, read it again, and then looked at his wife across the breakfast table with the expression of a man recalibrating.
"She's on the roof," he said.
Kate looked up from her correspondence. A pause — very brief, very controlled. "Which roof."
"The Danbury roof."
Kate set her letter down. "Why is she on the Danbury roof."
"Lady Danbury does not say." He turned the note over. Nothing on the back. "She says only that Meera climbed there at approximately one o'clock and has refused to come down, and that she would consider it a personal favour if we came and dealt with—" he checked the note — "our extraordinary child before she takes a year off my life."
Silence.
Then Kate stood, smoothed her skirts, and said: "I'll get my coat."
Anthony was already at the door.
They did not speak much in the carriage. They did not need to. Kate's hand was on the seat between them and at some point Anthony's had covered it, not urgently, just resting there — the weight of it familiar and deliberate — and she had turned her palm up without looking at him.
This was not a thing they discussed. It had simply developed over years, this language without words, and Kate had long since stopped being surprised by how fluently she spoke it.
"She's fine," she said.
"She's on a roof," he said.
"She's your daughter. She's calculating load-bearing angles up there."
The corner of his mouth moved. "She's your daughter. She climbed up there in the first place."
Kate said nothing, which was agreement.
Lady Danbury met them at the door looking like a woman who had made her peace with the afternoon but intended to be compensated for it.
"East slope," she said, before they had spoken. "She has been there ninety minutes. She took biscuits." A pause. "I passed them up myself. She said thank you very politely."
Something moved across Kate's face. Anthony saw it — he always saw it, had made something of a private study of all the things that moved across Kate's face when she thought no one was looking. It was there and gone in a moment. Fond. Helpless. Entirely in love with her own child.
"She is well?" Kate said.
"Perfectly comfortable," Lady Danbury said, with feeling. "It is the rest of us who are suffering."
Anthony went up first.
He was, objectively, too large and too formally dressed to be climbing through an upper window onto a sloped roof, and he was aware of this, and he did it anyway without particular ceremony because Meera was on the other side of the window and that was the only calculation that mattered.
She was sitting against the chimney stack with her knees drawn up, looking out over the garden below. She had a biscuit in one hand. Her hair had come half loose from its ribbon. She looked, he thought, heart-cracking small against the sky.
She heard him and looked over. Then back at the garden.
"Hello, Papa."
"Hello." He settled beside her on the slope, which is not something he had anticipated doing this afternoon, and looked out at the same garden. After a moment he said: "Nice view."
Meera glanced at him sideways. "You're not angry?"
"I'm a great many things. I'm working through them in order."
She was quiet.
"What happened," he said.
She told him. Haltingly at first, then all at once, the way she did — held it and held it and then gave it over entirely. He listened without speaking. He had learned this from Kate, who was better at it than he was, who had taught him that listening completely was its own kind of language.
It was, in short, this: Cecily Hartington had said something at Lady Danbury's afternoon visit for daughters, and Meera had said something back, and what Meera had said had been — accurate, she maintained — but the nature of it had caused Cecily to cry, and Lady Danbury had separated them, and Meera had made the calculation that the roof was preferable to the parlour.
When Meera finished, the garden was very quiet below them.
"She said Mama didn't belong here," Meera said. She said it simply, the way children say things that have cost them something. "That she never would. That everyone only pretends, because of—" She stopped. "Because of you."
Anthony was still.
"I said something back," Meera said. "About her singing. It wasn't—" She turned her biscuit over in her hands. "It wasn't kind."
"No."
"But Papa—"
"I know." His voice was very even. "I know what she said, and I know why you answered it. And I want you to understand that I am not angry about the why." He turned to look at her properly. "I am frightened about the roof. Those are two different things."
Meera looked at him. She had Kate's eyes, exact, and they were doing the thing Kate's eyes did — measuring him honestly, giving him the same.
"The slope is manageable," she tried.
"Meera."
"It is quite gentle—"
"You are eight years old and you are sitting on the exterior of a building and I aged ten years between reading Lady Danbury's note and arriving at this window." He said it plainly, no performance in it, just fact. "So when I say I am frightened, I need you to receive that seriously."
She looked at him for a long moment.
Then she leaned over and put her head on his arm.
It was not quite an apology. It was something better — the specific gesture of a child who understood that she had scared someone she loved and wanted to close the distance. Anthony put his arm around her, tucked her in, and looked out at the garden, and did not say anything for a while because he could not trust his voice to stay level.
"She's wrong," he said finally. "About your mother."
"I know."
"Your mother belongs—" He stopped. Started again, more carefully, because this mattered and he wanted to get it right. "Your mother walked into a world that wanted to make her small, and she simply refused, and eventually the world adjusted. That is not a woman who doesn't belong. That is the only kind of woman worth belonging to a world."
Meera was quiet. Then: "Is that why you married her?"
He thought about it genuinely, the way she deserved. "I married her," he said, "because she beat me at pall mall and I had no idea what to do with someone like that. And then I spent several months being extremely foolish about it before I came to my senses."
Meera looked up at him. "How foolish."
"Heroically foolish. Legendarily. Do not ask your aunts. They will tell you, and they will enjoy it."
She laughed — the real one, the full one that scrunched her face — and he felt it in his chest the way he always did, like something resolving.
"Come inside," he said. "Your mother is waiting."
Kate was at the bottom of the staircase.
She had the look she wore when she had already received the summary and composed herself — still and straight in the way that was doing real work underneath. She looked at Meera coming down the stairs and something crossed her face, quick and total, that she didn't quite manage to contain.
Meera reached the bottom step.
"Mama, I'm—"
Kate stepped forward and folded her into her arms, which was not what Meera had been expecting, and after a brief startled moment Meera held on with both hands, her face pressed into Kate's shoulder.
Kate looked at Anthony over their daughter's head.
He looked back.
There were entire sentences in it — she's all right, I've spoken to her, she was defending you, I know, I know she was — and none of them required words, and both of them knew it.
Kate pressed her lips to the top of Meera's hair. Then she pulled back, held her daughter at arm's length, and looked at her with the expression that was stern and warm at once in the particular way that only Kate had ever managed.
"The roof," Kate said.
"Papa already—"
"I am not Papa." Kate tilted her head. "The roof, Meera."
Meera had the grace to look genuinely contrite. "The slope was—"
"If you tell me the slope was manageable," Kate said, pleasantly, "I will ensure you are not allowed near a garden trellis until you are forty."
Meera's mouth closed.
"You frightened me," Kate said, simply. No theatre, no elaboration. Just that, delivered quietly, with the directness that was Kate's most devastating quality and always had been. "Enormously. Do you understand?"
"Yes, Mama."
"Good." She smoothed Meera's collar. Her hands were very gentle. "Now go and apologise to Lady Danbury. Sincerely. With your whole face."
Meera went.
Anthony came to stand beside her. Close — not quite touching, but close enough that Kate could feel the warmth of him, which she had once found annoying and had long since reclassified as one of her favourite things.
"She defended you," he said quietly.
"I know."
"From a roof."
"I heard."
He didn't say anything else. Kate looked at the doorway Meera had gone through, and the thing that had been pressing behind her composure for the last hour moved through her all at once — swift and enormous and gone again.
Anthony, without looking at her, offered his hand.
She took it.
Meera slept on the way home.
She made it approximately six minutes before she was simply gone — the absolute total unconsciousness of a child who has spent ninety minutes on a roof and all of her considerable reserves on being brave about it. She slid sideways against Kate's arm and Kate adjusted without thinking, settled her in, and Meera's hand found Anthony's across the gap and held it even in sleep.
The carriage rocked gently. London moved past the window.
"She told me," Anthony said quietly, "why she went up."
"I know why she went up."
"Kate—"
"Anthony." She looked at him. "I know." She said it the way she said things she'd made peace with — not without feeling, but settled. "It is not the first time someone has said it and it will not be the last. What matters is—" She looked down at their daughter asleep against her arm. "What matters is what she hears from us."
He looked at her for a long moment. The carriage light caught his face, and he had the expression he got sometimes that he didn't seem to know was visible — unguarded in the way he only was in private, in the particular privacy of the three of them.
"You know," he said, "she said something on the roof. About why I married you."
Kate raised an eyebrow. "What did you tell her?"
"The truth. That you beat me at pall mall and I had absolutely no idea what to do with you."
Kate was quiet for a moment. Then: "That is a terrible reason to marry someone."
"It is an accurate reason."
"It makes me sound like a curiosity."
"You were a curiosity." He met her eyes. "And then you were everything else."
Kate looked at him. He looked back. Between them, Meera slept on, one hand in her mother's arm and one hand in her father's, held from both sides without even knowing it.
Kate reached across with her free hand and picked a piece of roof tile dust off Anthony's shoulder.
He caught her hand before she withdrew it. Held it there, against his chest.
Neither of them spoke.
Outside, London went golden in the late afternoon light, and the carriage carried them home.
Pairing: Jim Moriarty x Female Original Character (Eleanor Holmes)
Warnings: Brief mention of smoking
Synopsis: Growing up as the youngest Holmes sibling—and the only girl—Eleanor has mastered the art of being "patient." To her brothers, it looks like passivity; to Jim Moriarty, it looks like a challenge.
After eight months of a relationship built on intellectual parrying and "calibrating" condiments, the secret is finally out. When Sherlock sends a four-word summons to Baker Street, Eleanor has to navigate the collision of her brother’s protective fury and Jim’s penchant for theatrical chaos. In a world of deductions and hidden agendas, Eleanor might be the only person capable of stopping Jim in the middle of a sentence—and the only one he’ll actually stay for.
Author’s Note: I’ve always been fascinated by the idea of a third Holmes sibling who isn't a secret government official or a high-functioning sociopath, but someone who just... observes.
This is a rewrite focusing on the "structural problem" of being Eleanor Holmes. I wanted to explore a version of Jim Moriarty that isn't just a villain, but a restless mind that finally found someone who doesn't need the end of his sentences explained. It’s less of a romance and more of a mutual recognition of two people who are "tired of the performance."
Hope you enjoy this look into Eleanor’s flat and the inevitable mess that happens when Baker Street finds out who she’s been having tea with.
Eleanor Holmes had spent the better part of her life being underestimated.
It was, she had come to understand, a structural problem. She was the youngest Holmes by seven years, the only girl, and she had grown up watching two brothers be quietly regarded as aberrations of nature while she was simply regarded as clever for her age, which was the sort of compliment that expired when you turned twelve. She had her mother's face and Sherlock's eyes and some third thing that was entirely her own — a patience that looked, to the undiscerning, like passivity.
It was not passivity.
Jim had clocked this approximately four minutes into their first conversation. He had been the one to seek her out, which she'd worked out within a week of meeting him — the seemingly chance introduction, the particular restaurant, the too-convenient parking of their schedules. She had said nothing about any of this. She waited to see what he would do.
What he had done, over the course of several months, was become genuinely interesting, which she had not prepared for.
On a Wednesday evening in November, Jim was sitting at her kitchen table doing what he always did when he was bored, which was find increasingly elaborate ways to appear comfortable while being comprehensively restless. He had rearranged her pepper grinder, her notepad, and a stray pen twice already. She was watching him do it from the doorway.
"You could just say you're bored," she said.
"I'm never bored in your flat." He tilted the pepper grinder half an inch. "I'm contemplative."
"You reorganised my condiments."
"They were in a terrible order. Alphabetical but without any regard for frequency of use. It's the kind of system that sounds logical and is actually just smug." He looked up. "You've been standing there for forty seconds."
"I was waiting to see if you'd move the mug."
He glanced at the mug. Then at her.
"It didn't need moving," he said.
"Twenty minutes ago you moved it twice."
A pause. He smiled — that specific Jim smile, the one that started small and usually preceded something that made her want to laugh and be slightly alarmed simultaneously. "I was calibrating."
"You were bored."
"Contemplative, Nell."
She sat down across from him. He had an energy, always, that she'd stopped trying to describe to herself in comfortable terms — the particular electricity of a mind that never, not once, switched off. Being near it was like standing too close to something that ran on a different voltage. She'd stopped finding this unsettling around the third month. Now she found it, perversely, restful, the way people who slept near train tracks eventually couldn't sleep without them.
"Sherlock texted me," she said.
Jim's expression did not change, precisely, but something in it sharpened. "How many words?"
"Four." She set her phone on the table between them.
He looked at it. Come to Baker Street. Now.
"Mycroft," Jim said.
"That's what I think."
"Your brother has a surveillance network with approximately seventy active operatives in this borough alone." He leaned back, fingers laced loosely in front of him. "I'm honestly touched he took this long. I've been making it quite easy for them." He said it with a specific lightness that she recognised as the thing he did when he was enjoying himself in a way that he thought was probably inappropriate to openly enjoy.
"You wanted them to find out," she said.
"I wanted him to find out." The distinction seemed to matter. "Mycroft finding out is logistics. Sherlock finding out is theatre."
She looked at him for a moment. This was the thing she had stopped pretending was simple — that Jim's relationship with Sherlock was something entirely separate from whatever this was, and that those two things had orbited each other from the beginning without her permission.
"I'm going to go," she said. "And when I come back, we're going to talk about the fact that you engineered this."
"I didn't engineer it," he said mildly. "I merely declined to hide." He picked up her pen and turned it over in his fingers. "There's a difference."
Baker Street was cold and lit wrong, all amber streetlight and fog, and she was up the stairs before Mrs Hudson had done more than begin a sentence. Sherlock was standing in the middle of the flat when she walked in. He was not doing anything. He was simply standing, which meant he was furious, because Sherlock in motion was Sherlock managing himself and Sherlock completely still meant he had not yet found the container for whatever he was feeling.
"How long," he said.
Not hello. Not even her name. Straight to it.
"Several months," she said.
Something moved across his face and disappeared. "Define several."
"Eight."
The silence was extraordinary. She watched him process it — watched his eyes do that thing they did, moving without actually moving, rapid internal computation running beneath the surface. Then he crossed the room in four steps and she held her ground.
"He approached you," Sherlock said. It wasn't a question.
"Yes."
"And you knew."
"Within a week."
"Then why—" He stopped. Started again, lower. "Why didn't you leave."
"Because I wanted to see what he would do." She kept her voice level. "And then what he did was interesting, and then it was something else, and here we are."
Sherlock turned away sharply, which meant she had said something that he didn't have an immediate counter for. He went to the window. The line of his shoulders was rigid.
"He is using you," he said, to the glass. "To get to me. That's the mechanism. That's the only mechanism that makes sense—"
"I know that was the original intention."
"Then you understand—"
"Sherlock." She waited until he turned around. "I am not stupid."
"I know you're not stupid. That's what makes this worse." His voice cracked on the last word, which she knew had startled him because his jaw set immediately afterward, that reflex suppression she'd watched him practice their entire lives. "You are the only one of us who functions like a normal person and you've chosen the one individual on the planet specifically engineered to—"
"He didn't choose me to damage me."
"You can't know that."
"I can read a room, Sherlock. I've been reading rooms my whole life, including rooms that had you and Mycroft in them, and I promise you my baseline for emotionally complicated is considerably higher than yours." She sat down in his armchair without being invited, which she knew he hated. "I see him clearly. I am not under any illusions about what he is."
"Then—"
"And I'm still here." She met his eyes. "That's the part you can't deduce your way out of."
Sherlock stared at her. Then he did something she had not expected: he sat down. Not his usual dramatic collapse into the chair — he sat on the sofa in a way that looked almost effortful, elbows on knees, and looked at the floor.
"He'll hurt you," he said. Quietly. Without performance.
"He might."
"Nell."
"I know." She softened, fractionally. "I know, Sherlock."
"If he—" He stopped. Whatever he had been going to say apparently did not survive contact with the air. He pressed his lips together and was silent for a long moment. "I want to talk to him."
"No."
"I am going to talk to him."
"You're going to threaten him, which will do absolutely nothing except entertain him, and I will not be a prop in whatever you two are doing."
He looked up sharply.
"Yes," she said. "I am aware that there is a thing between you and him that has nothing to do with me and that my being with Jim is, for both of you, at least partially about that thing. I find it exhausting. I refuse to perform it."
Sherlock was quiet for a long time.
"You are," he said finally, "genuinely the most aggravating Holmes."
"I'm the most honest one," she said. "You find that aggravating because it's harder to argue with."
He made a sound that was not quite a laugh. Then he looked back at the window. "I won't pretend to be fine with this."
"I don't need you to be fine with it. I need you to not do anything catastrophic in the next seventy-two hours."
"I make no such promises."
"Sherlock."
"I said what I said."
She stood up, collected her coat, and paused at the door. She looked back at him — still sitting in that unusual, effortful stillness, lamplight on his profile, the whole complicated machinery of him running behind his eyes.
"He's not using me anymore," she said. "That's all I can tell you. What you do with that is up to you."
This was not unusual. She set the kettle on and took off her coat and noticed that he had washed the two mugs in the sink from earlier, which was unusual — Jim did not clean up after himself out of any domestic virtue, he simply forgot to care about things like dishes. He only did it when he was doing something else with his hands because his mind was elsewhere.
She found him on the fire escape.
He was leaning against the railing with a cigarette, looking out over the backs of the buildings with an expression she had learned, slowly and without a guide, to read. The city noise came up from below — distant sirens, someone's music three floors up, rain just beginning.
He didn't turn around but he knew she was there.
"How is he?" Jim asked.
"Angry. Scared. Expressing both exclusively as the former."
"Mm." A pause. He took a drag. "He'll come, you know. Won't be able to help himself."
"I told him not to."
"And that will absolutely work," he said pleasantly, "right up until the moment it doesn't."
She leaned in the doorframe. "Are you going to be horrible when he does?"
Jim considered this with apparent sincerity. "Define horrible."
"Jim."
"That's a genuinely ambiguous word, Nell, I'm not being difficult—"
"You are always being difficult, that's not the question. The question is whether you're going to do something that makes my life measurably worse."
He turned around at that. He had an interesting face in the half-light, all angles and that specific watchfulness that never entirely went away — it was, she had decided, the face of someone who had trained himself to never stop calculating and occasionally, in unguarded moments, found the calculation arriving somewhere he hadn't expected. He was looking at her like that now.
"I'll be on my best behavior," he said.
"That is genuinely more frightening than a threat."
He smiled. It was a real one — the rare kind, without the performance around the edges — and it disappeared quickly the way real ones always did with him, like he hadn't meant to produce it.
"I didn't engineer it entirely," he said, which was as close as Jim Moriarty was ever going to come to a concession. "The beginning, yes. I arranged the beginning. I'm not sorry about that." He dropped the cigarette over the railing and watched it fall. "The rest of it I didn't plan."
She was quiet.
"That's not a confession," he said, preemptively.
"I know."
"I'm simply stating a fact about the limits of—"
"Jim." She stepped out onto the fire escape beside him. He was warm despite the cold, which she had noticed from the very early days and never mentioned. "I know. You don't have to annotate it."
He looked at her sideways. "You're the only person who does that."
"Does what?"
"Lets me stop talking." He said it almost clinically, like he was reporting on someone else. "Everyone else needs me to finish the sentence. You stop me in the middle and you already have it and you don't need the rest." A pause. "It's very annoying."
"You love it," she said.
He said nothing. This was, she had worked out, Jim-for-yes when the yes was something he'd rather not hand over voluntarily.
Below them, a cab went past throwing light up the side of the building. The rain was settling in properly now.
"Come inside," she said.
He followed her in without argument, which was its own kind of answer.
She was most of the way asleep. Jim was not asleep — she could tell by the quality of the quiet beside her, the faint tension that meant his mind was still running its routes.
She reached for the phone.
I don't like it.
But I've seen your face when you're being managed and this is not that.
Don't let him blow anything up.
— SH
She stared at it for a long moment. She thought about texting back something measured. She typed three responses and deleted them.
She typed: That's the nicest thing you've said to me in four years.
The reply came in under ten seconds.
Don't push it.
She set the phone down. Jim had not asked. He didn't ask about Sherlock, ever, which was the carefully maintained fiction they had both agreed on without discussion — that the Sherlock-shaped thing existed in a separate room and they didn't go in there.
But she saw, in the dark, the slight shift of him turning his head toward her.
Synopsis: In this charming addition to the Bridgerton family chronicles, the focus shifts to the youngest (fictional) sibling, nine-year-old Isla Bridgerton. During an "exquisitely dull" visit to Lady Danbury’s townhouse, Isla’s keen observation and stubborn streak lead her on a solo mission to rescue a stray dog.
A/N: I wrote this because the Bridgerton alphabet ended at H and I decided Anthony hadn't suffered enough. Also, the transition from "Menace Younger Siblings" to "Stressed Older Siblings" is a pipeline Gregory and Hyacinth were born to slide down, and I wanted to witness the carnage.
The visiting hours at the Danbury townhouse were, according to Hyacinth Bridgerton, exquisitely dull.
"You said that already," Gregory told her, from beside her on the settee.
"I'm saying it again because it remains true and also because no one is listening to me."
"Isla is listening."
They both looked at the chair beside the window where their youngest sister had been sitting for the past half hour with the particular stillness of a child who was not, in fact, listening, but was instead watching something outside with great focus.
"Isla," Hyacinth said.
"Mm."
"What are you looking at?"
"A dog."
Gregory leaned over to look. Across the street, visible through the gap in the window curtains, a small brown dog was investigating a lamppost with impressive commitment. It was, he had to admit, a reasonably good dog.
"It's going to run off," Isla said.
"Dogs do that," Gregory said. "They tend to come back."
Isla said nothing. She had that expression she got sometimes, the quiet considering one, where you could not quite tell what conclusion she was arriving at. She was nine years old and she had her mother's composure and her father's specific variety of stubbornness and a combination of both that none of her older siblings had fully worked out how to manage.
Gregory did not think enough about this expression.
Thirty minutes later, when their mother came to collect them from the parlor and return to the waiting carriages, Isla was not in her chair.
The thing was, it had seemed entirely reasonable at the time.
The dog had been clearly lost. Anyone could see that. It had no owner in view, it was turning in small anxious circles, and it had looked up at the window directly at Isla in a way that she chose to interpret as a plea for assistance. She had slipped out through the side door — unlocked, which was hardly her fault — and followed it three streets east before it disappeared around a corner into what turned out to be a rather narrow service alley.
The alley itself was fine. She was not afraid of alleys. What she had not anticipated was the gate.
It was a low iron gate, the kind that latched on the other side, which she had climbed over because it was not particularly high and the dog had clearly gone through it. The problem materialized on her return trip, when the hem of her dress — a good muslin, recently let out at the cuffs because she was apparently still growing — caught magnificently on the upper hinge and lodged there with a stubbornness that rivaled her own.
She had tried pulling it free for several minutes. She had tried climbing back over despite it. She was now standing half-on and half-off the gate in a position that was neither dignified nor comfortable, holding her weight on her arms while her hem remained firmly attached to the ironwork, in an alley approximately four streets from where she was supposed to be.
She came around the corner at a near-run, Gregory half a step behind, and stopped. She looked at Isla. Isla looked at her.
"You're stuck," Hyacinth said.
"I'm aware of that, thank you."
"On a gate."
"Yes."
"Why are you on a gate."
"There was a dog. It appeared lost and I followed it and I climbed over but the hem—"
"The hem caught."
"The hem caught."
Hyacinth pressed her lips together. Gregory had turned away slightly, which meant he was trying not to laugh. Isla was not offended by this. She would probably also be trying not to laugh if it were Gregory on the gate.
"Alright," Hyacinth said, with the manner of someone taking charge of a situation, which was a manner Hyacinth adopted frequently and with great commitment. "I'll hold the fabric. Greg, lift her."
"I can lift myself," Isla said.
"You've been trying that for ten minutes, clearly."
"Eight minutes."
Gregory came forward and took her by the waist and lifted her while Hyacinth worked the fabric free from the hinge with quick, competent fingers. There was a tearing sound that made all three of them wince.
"It's not bad," Hyacinth said, examining the hem. "Not good, but not bad."
"Mama will notice," Gregory said.
"Mama notices everything," Isla said. She smoothed her skirt. Her arms ached. She was, though she would not have said so, quite relieved. "Thank you."
"Don't thank me," Hyacinth said. "You are in considerable trouble."
"I know."
"Anthony is going to—"
"I know."
They walked back in relative quiet, Isla between her two older siblings, Gregory close enough that his arm occasionally brushed hers in that particular way that meant he was checking she was alright without saying so. He was like that. It was one of the better things about Gregory.
Benedict had apparently materialized out of nowhere at the carriages, which he was prone to doing, and was now leaning against a wheel with an expression of mild academic interest as the three of them approached. Anthony was standing several feet away in a posture that Isla had privately catalogued as controlled agitation, which was different from actual fury in ways that mattered.
She walked up to him with her chin level.
Anthony looked at her for a moment. Then at her dress. Then at Gregory, who gave a minuscule shrug.
"You left," Anthony said.
"I did," she agreed.
"Without telling anyone."
"Yes."
"Without asking permission."
"There wasn't time." She explained the dog. The gate. The hem. She delivered it the same way she had described school lessons to her governess — factually, without embellishment, because she had learned that embellishment tended to make Anthony's expression do worse things.
Anthony was quiet when she finished.
"The dog is irrelevant," he said.
"He was lost."
"Isla."
"He looked lost."
"The dog," Anthony said, with some effort, "is irrelevant. What is relevant is that you were four streets away with no escort and no one knew where you were, and—" He stopped. She could see him arriving at the thing beneath the anger, which was the thing he didn't say, which was I was frightened. Anthony never said that directly. He was not built for it. But she knew what it looked like.
She looked up at him. "I'm sorry," she said. Not as a performance. She meant it. "I should have told Hyacinth first."
A pause.
"Yes," he said. "You should have."
"It won't happen again."
"That I sincerely doubt," Anthony said. But something in the set of his shoulders changed.
"She did find the gate entirely on her own merits," Benedict offered cheerfully from the wheel. "That takes a specific kind of initiative."
"Benedict," Anthony said.
"I'm only saying. At nine, I hadn't climbed anything sturdier than a fence."
"You climbed the folly at nine," Gregory said.
"That's structural, not initiative—"
"The carriage," Anthony said, with enormous, practised patience, gesturing.
Isla climbed in. Benedict followed, dropping down beside her with theatrical flair and producing from his coat pocket an orange, which he offered to her with a raised eyebrow. She took it. The carriage moved.
Hyacinth sat down across from her and gave her a long look that contained several things at once — residual alarm, relief, and the specific exhausted fondness of someone who had expected this sort of afternoon.
"Next time," Hyacinth said.
"There won't be a next time."
"There will absolutely be a next time. Next time," Hyacinth said, "tell me first."
Isla peeled the orange and handed her half.
Outside, London rolled past in all its noisy afternoon colour, and somewhere — she hoped — a small brown dog had found its way home.
Synopsis: In the quiet, bone-deep silence of the Bridgerton ancestral home, Anthony has learned that fatherhood is a series of sharp awakenings. When his six-year-old daughter, Cecily, stumbles into his bedroom gripped by a nightmare of his own death, Anthony is forced to confront the echoes of his own childhood trauma.
While Kate provides the emotional warmth that anchors their family, Anthony finds himself navigating the terrifying vulnerability of being a "hero" to a child who fears his absence. A quiet, midnight vignette of a man realizing that while he cannot promise forever, he can provide the steady heartbeat of the present.
· · ─ ·✶· ─ · ·
A Note on the Text: This is actually my very first time sitting down to write for this fandom! I was recently re-watching Bridgerton Season 2 and found myself completely stuck on Anthony’s character arc—specifically his deep-seated fear of loss and how that might manifest once he finally had a family of his own.
I really wanted to see a version of Anthony who has done the work, even if the "practical" side of him still struggles with finding the right words. I hope I did Kate and Anthony justice; their dynamic is so special to me, and I just had to get this specific scene out of my head and onto the page. Thank you for reading my first attempt!
The house was quiet in that specific way it only was after midnight — all creaking wood and settling stone, the kind of silence that made every small sound enormous.
Anthony heard the footsteps first.
Six years of fatherhood had done something strange to his sleep. He had gone from a man who could sleep through a thunderstorm to one whose eyes opened at the sound of a door handle turning two rooms away. Kate said it was proof he had a heart. He maintained it was purely practical.
The bedroom door opened approximately three inches. Then stopped.
Anthony didn't move. Beside him, Kate made a small sound that meant she was awake too but was going to pretend otherwise for exactly thirty more seconds before she intervened. They had developed an entire language of non-verbal communication about their daughter that neither of them had ever formally agreed upon.
"Papa."
It was barely a whisper. He sat up.
Cecily stood in the gap of the doorway in her white nightgown, dark hair loose and wild around her face — she had Kate's hair, that untameable quality to it — and she was clutching the doorframe with both hands in the way she did when she was trying very hard not to cry.
"Come here," he said.
She crossed the room at a run and he caught her, lifting her up onto the bed, and she pressed her face immediately into the side of his neck. He could feel her breathing — fast and shallow, the particular rhythm of someone coming down from genuine fear.
Kate sat up without pretense now, reaching over to smooth a hand down Cecily's back.
"What happened, janu?" she said softly.
"A nightmare." Muffled against Anthony's shoulder. "A bad one."
"Do you want to tell us?" Kate asked.
A pause. The little body in his arms was already beginning to settle, the way children did when they simply needed proximity — as though fear could not survive the presence of a parent. Anthony had always found this particular truth both touching and terrifying.
"You died, Papa."
He felt it land somewhere in his chest.
"There was a carriage," Cecily continued, still not lifting her head. "You were crossing the street and it came very fast and I was trying to shout but I couldn't make any sound come out. And then it was over and Mama was crying and I couldn't find you anywhere and I kept looking—"
"That's enough of that," Anthony said.
She finally looked up at him. Her eyes were wet — Kate's eyes, brown and fierce even at six years old, even at this hour, even in the middle of something that had frightened her badly.
He tried to think of what to say. This was always the part he found more difficult than he cared to admit — not the holding, not the being there, but the words. Kate was better at it. Kate had a warmth that translated effortlessly into language. He tended to lead with practicalities.
"It was a dream," he said.
"I know that," Cecily said, with a trace of indignation that was entirely inherited from her mother. "I know it wasn't real, Papa. But it felt real."
"Yes," he said. "It did."
Something shifted in the way she looked at him. Children were perceptive, he'd learned. They could tell when an adult was simply managing them versus actually understanding them.
"Were you ever scared of that?" she asked. "Of someone dying?"
Anthony was quiet for a moment. Kate's hand found his under the blanket.
"Yes," he said. "When I was young. Quite often, actually."
Cecily seemed to consider this. "What did you do about it?"
"I worried a great deal," he said, "to very little effect."
Cecily laughed — a small, involuntary sound that broke through the remnants of her fear. He felt the knot in his own chest loosen by degrees.
"That doesn't sound very useful," she said.
"It wasn't. Your mother eventually sorted it out." He glanced at Kate over Cecily's head. Kate's expression was doing something complicated — amused and fond and slightly undone all at once, which was an expression he had come to associate with moments she would bring up later when they were alone.
"That is not quite how I would characterize it," Kate said.
"You're characteristically modest."
"You're characteristically revising history."
Cecily had settled fully against him now, her weight heavy in that boneless way of children falling toward sleep. Anthony tightened his arm around her.
"I'm not going anywhere," he said, quietly, to the top of her head. It wasn't an eloquent thing to say. He knew it wasn't a promise he could make with any certainty — that was the particular cruelty of loving people, that you couldn't guarantee them anything except your intention. But she was six. And she had come to him, specifically, because he was the one she was afraid of losing.
That would stay with him.
"You could sleep here," Kate offered. "If you'd like."
Cecily made an affirmative sound that was mostly asleep already.
Anthony did not put her down.
He made no move to transfer her to the middle of the bed, or to suggest she might be more comfortable in her own room, or to do anything at all except sit there with his daughter tucked against his chest while her breathing evened out and her small fists slowly unclenched from his shirt.
Kate watched them both for a moment. Then she lay back down, her shoulder pressed warm against his arm.
"She has your stubbornness, you know," she murmured.
"She has your temper," he said.
"She has your terror of anything happening to the people she loves."
He didn't answer that.
Outside, somewhere, a clock struck the half hour. Anthony stayed exactly where he was.
AN: Requested by @ohyesmarvel, ly darlin! I hope you like it, idk if it’s okay or not, if you don’t I’ll write something else for ya, love.
Summary: He’s alive?!
Word count: 1,333
Warnings: A little depressing at the beginning, warning to those who may get triggered by the talk of suicide/death. Happier ending. Pretty fluffy. Some strong language.
After Jim Moriarty’s death, you’re life changed completely. You couldn’t live in the flat anymore because it reminded you too much of him. You were lucky enough to never be identified as Jim Moriarty’s flatmate so when you left you were free to do you pleased.
You bought a smaller flat with some emergency money that Moriarty always had at hand for you whenever you needed it, and you started over.
It was hard.
At first it was so hard you didn’t know if you could do it. You didn’t know if life was worth it if Jim Moriarty wasn’t in it with you. He always kept you on your toes, he made life exciting, he made it scary, he made it unpredictable and he made it worth a thousand life times.
You knew this all sounded so cheesy, so cliché, and so sweet but it was far from it. Jim was far from it.
Summary: Moriarty teases Sherlock because he slept with you. Sherlock’s little sister.
Word count: 777
Warnings: Mentions of smut, Moriarty teasing Sherlock
“You know Sherlock, you’ve got quite the sister there.” Moriarty swaggered around the room. The two men had just watched you leave the building and climb into a taxi. You didn’t realise that Moriarty was in Sherlock’s flat, you had only come to Baker street to pick something up from Mrs Hudson that you had left after the previous visit.
What Sherlock didn’t know is that you and Moriarty were involved. Moriarty was like your drug, your addiction, the guiltiest pleasure of them all.
It all started after Moriarty kidnapped you. You two got talking and Moriarty realised just how interesting the youngest Holmes was. He realised just how much he liked your company and then it was all down hill from there.
You couldn’t help but fall for the psychopath. It was the whole show he put on whenever he was around that pulled you in. There was many layers to the man, you had managed to peel away the material ones.
The below are songs that would fit HP and the WOL. They are in a vague order to the parts of the story where they may fit. Thus, some minor spoilers BUT perhaps not the way you would think they are hehe.
Let Your Heart Hold Fast (#10) is THE main song for the fanfic, it’s what I write to and encompasses everything I feel about the story.
1. Echo – Jason Walker
“I pretend I’m alright but it’s never enough. Cause my echo, echo, is the only voice coming back.”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pxpLxb5jHO0
2. They Live in You – Lion King Soundtrack
“There’s no mountain too great. Hear these words and have faith. They live in you. They live in me. They’re watching over everything we see.”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n2OmNwx61Lc
3. Those Voices – A Very Potter Musical
“I know you. I’ve seen you in a dream an old familiar scene from somewhere. You know me. There’s a glowing in your eyes, I know and recognize from somewhere.”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oQzIFxG0tCs
4. Cinematic by Cool Hand Luke
“The other night I had a dream, it unfolded to the silver screen. A tragic fire, some tears were shed, I woke to find our hero dead.”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KcWbXng5RNo
5. Wide Awake by Katy Perry (Gavin Mikhail cover)
“I’m wide awake. Yeah, I am born again. Out of the lion’s den. I don’t have to pretend.”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UfATxZPaI_U
6. Hey Jude – The Beatles
“Hey Jude, Don’t let her down. You have found her, now go and get her”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eDdI7GhZSQA
7. Paris is Burning – St. Vincent
“We are waiting on a telegram to give us news of the fall. I’m sorry to report that dear Paris is burning after all.”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=306lg4GQ1_o
8. Losing your Memory – Ryan Star
“Cause this is what dreams should always be. I just want to stay. I just want to keep this dream in me.”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4tVuk0fZufQ
9. Brothers by Dean Brody
“Well I have my heroes, but the one I love the most. Taught me how to hunt and swing a bat …. And said I’m sorry that you have to push me home and I said hey, this is what brothers are for.”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CU43LznNVLY
10. Let Your Heart Hold Fast by Fort Atlantic
“All my desperate calls, echo off the walls. Back and forth and back again. To believe I walk alone. Is a lie that I’ve been told.”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kBqWtdMpies
11. If I Die Young – Sam Tsui Cover
“Lord make me a rainbow to shine down on my mother, she’ll know I’m safe with you when she stands beneath my colours …. The sharp knife of a short life, well I’ve had just enough time.”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gu9-5SS8V8M
12. Everything Ends – A Very Potter Senior Year Soundtrack
“You have loved, you have lost, how could this be happening. All alone, on your own. But you shouldn’t give up.”
Summary: Some fun headcanons for being the youngest sibling in the Mikaelson family!
Author’s Note: Requested by anon. This was so much fun writing! I love the Mikaelsons and it’s been some time since I last saw it, so it was definitely cool to revisit the fandom through this, hope you enjoy! <3
Let’s get the obvious one out of the way. Everyone is HELLA protective of you, no questions asked.
Klaus takes it upon himself to approve (usually disapprove) any suitor you bring home.
Rebekah makes sure you A) are dressed well and B) are surrounded by faithful, loyal friends. She knows like no one else what’s it like to be lonely.
Elijah is there to guarantee you won’t make a fool of yourself, you’re educated and proper, and that you’re prepared for the world.
Kol is the one who lits a fire under your ass and get you back into your passions and ambitions. Never a dull moment with him.
Then there is your eldest sister, Freya. She’s either there as your mentor or your big sister, which usually means she’s there for you whenever you need a fun getaway to let loose or for emotional support.
And everyone has their unique, specific way of showing you love.
Klaus buys things, that’s just him. He shows real emotion though, sometimes.
Rebekah spends time with you, as does Freya. Usually at home watching a movie, or doing something domestic like baking.
Elijah takes you out to see the world, usually art or food. Museums, restaurants, opera’s, musicals, sightseeing. You two always end up strolling on some street after the event and (trash) talk about whatever you were doing.
Kol talks, surprisingly. He’s a great talker and you always seek his advice, which he happily gives. Your talks are one of the things that make your bond so special.
When you were heartbroken once, it took a lot for Klaus not to rip the person’s head off and instead sit by your side and comfort you. He did though, and you were very thankful.
Elijah is your go-to person to go to when something’s wrong though, Klaus usually appears when things really hit the fan.
Freya out of everyone, even Klaus, feels the most protective of you.
She slipped a powerful protective charm in your bag once and it has done its job wonderfully.
Kol once beat up someone who was harassing you, only because you insisted he didn’t kill them.
You, along with Rebekah, are the ones insisting everyone spends time and attention to family traditions and celebrations.
You two are one heck of a party planning duo, no one stands in your way. Not even Klaus, who has been known to tremble at you giving orders on where to hang up those garlands.
