Writer of fanfiction, (and other things), Rumbeller, Tolkien fiend and some time teacher of many weird and often strange things (as well as a teacher IRL).
Fandom: Once Upon a Time (TV)
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Relationships: Belle/Rumplestiltskin | Mr. Gold
Characters: Belle (Once Upon a Time), Rumplestiltskin | Mr. Gold, Mad Hatter | Jefferson, Red Riding Hood | Ruby, Grace | Paige (Once Upon a Time), Jiminy Cricket | Archie Hopper, Knave of Hearts | Will Scarlet, Widow Lucas | Granny, Anastasia, Queen of Hearts | Cora, Blue Fairy | Mother Superior, Baelfire | Neal Cassidy
Additional Tags: AU, Angst, Violence, archeology, psychic questing, Religion, spirituality, Magic, Romance, Smut, Supernatural Elements, Major Character Injury
Series: Part 1 of Dies Irae
Summary:
A strange man confronts Doctor Belle French after one of her lectures and claims to need her help. He also claims to know that she is troubled, and can offer her protection. When events transpire that lead Belle to take up that offer, a desperate search begins to translate a series of ancient inscriptions, and Belle and her friends - both old and new - face increasing danger as they try to find answers and secure the truth before it can fall into very wrong hands, and possibly threaten every living thing in Storybrooke and beyond!
Read on AO3
Chapter 30 - Veritas Alienata
Belle had been at the grants office records for three afternoons running, which had required a cover story that she wasn’t entirely proud of: a paper on institutional funding patterns in archaeological research, which was at least true in the sense that it was the kind of paper she could plausibly write, even if it wasn’t the one she was actually working toward.
The records were tedious in the extreme, the way that real intelligence work apparently was. There was nothing dramatic, just names, dates, transfer histories, and foundation subsidiaries with names so deliberately unmemorable that Belle suspected someone had chosen them for exactly that quality.
She had learned, across those afternoons, that the foundation behind her scholarship had at least four other names it had operated under across the years, each one folding into the next with the kind of bureaucratic camouflage that made tracing money considerable more difficult than tracing people. She did both anyway.
She was there for a fourth afternoon when she found it, just a name in a donor acknowledgment list, three subsidiaries removed from the foundation’s original name, attached to a relatively modest contribution toward a research initiative she didn’t recognize, and which, when she checked, no longer existed under that title.
Neal Cassidy.
She sat with that name for a moment. It meant nothing to her on its own. What meant something was the placement of it - close enough to the Congregation’s financial architecture to be notable, recent enough that it wasn’t simply historical noise, and attached, in a separate cross-reference she found twenty minutes after the first discovery, to a different document entirely: a property lease in a city she didn’t recognize, co-signed by someone whose name she did.
Meissa.
Not the surname. There wasn’t one on the lease, just the single name, the same single name Belle had heard across a corner table at the faculty dinner some time ago.
She wrote both names down, underlined the connection between them, and sat back in her chair in the quiet of the archive’s reading room, and thought, with the clarity of finding something she hadn’t expected to find, that she had just found someone who moved between two worlds that were not supposed to share a name in common.
She brought it to Jefferson the following day at Granny’s diner over tea that had gone luke-warm while she explained the trail that had led her there.
As usual he listened with his full attention. When she said the name, Neal Cassidy, something happened in Jefferson’s expression that she would have missed three weeks ago, before she had learned the grammar of his face.
He didn’t go pale. He didn’t flinch, he just became, for a fraction of a second, considerably more still than he had been a moment before, like a held breath that was more still than an ordinary one.
“You know him?” Belle stated as much as asked.
“I know him,” he confirmed.
“Who is he?”
Jefferson was quiet for a moment, staring into his cup that sat on its saucer and she could see the deliberation in his eyes. How much belonged to him to give away.
As if to confirm her thought, he said, finally, “That’s not entirely mine to tell. Some of it is. Some of it isn’t.”
“That’s the same thing Archie said about the Wound,” Belle said, “And about the schism.”
“It’s a similar shape, for a similar reason,” Jefferson said.
Belle looked at him steadily. “He’s connected to Gold.”
“Yes.”
“Personally.”
Jefferson held her gaze for a long time.
“Yes,” he said. “Personally.”
“Is he dangerous to us?”
Jefferson sighed, before he said, “I don’t know. I don’t think even Gold knows that, fully. He’s— complicated in ways that don’t resolve cleanly into a side.”
Belle absorbed this, and didn’t push further. She had learned across weeks of conversations, exactly which doors opened with patience, and which ones simply needed to be left closed until someone on the other side decided to open them.
“I found something else,” she said instead. “A property lease, co-signed by Neal Cassidy, and someone using the name Meissa. No surname.”
Jefferson’s stillness deepened again, just briefly.
“You should take that to Gold,” he said. “Not me. That part is— that part is entirely his.”
“You’re sure?”
“I’m sure,” Jefferson said archly.
---------
When she arrived at the shop that evening, Gold was, unsurprisingly, at the table. The lamp was on, and a folder was open in front of him that he closed when she came through. Not hiding it, she understood, simply finishing one piece of attention, before giving her the whole of the next.
She put the notebook page down in front of him, with the two names and the connection drawn between them in her careful hand.
Gold looked at it for a long time without touching it, and Belle thought, dryly, that he looked as if he thought the page was going to bite him.
“You found him,” he said quietly. It was not a question.
“I found a name.” Belle said. “Jefferson told me the rest belonged to you.”
Gold was quiet. She watch the internal weighing in his expression much as she had done Jefferson’s earlier that day, and translating what she had learned to read across many visits, as he decided how much of the framework was ready, except that this time the calculation had a different feeling behind it. It felt like something closer to a man steadying himself before stepping onto ground he’d avoided for a long time.
“Neal is my son,” he said.
Belle didn’t say anything immediately. She hadn’t expected something like that. She had assumed, from the careful texture of Jefferson’s deflection, that complicated and personal meant a former colleague, a contested loyalty, something institutional with sharp edges. Not that.
“He’s… inside the Congregation,” she asked slowly. “In some capacity?”
“In an outlying capacity,” Gold said. “He’s… not a believer. Not an operative, as far as I know. Just… someone who drifted into proximity with them through his own estrangement from me, and stayed there longer than I think he intended, telling himself, I imagine, that he understands what he’s involved in better than he actually does.”
“You’ve known he was there?” Belle tried to conceal the painful almost-horror in her voice.
“For some time,” Gold said, “Yes.”
“And you didn’t tell Jefferson?”
“Jefferson knew,” Gold said. “There was nothing useful in saying it aloud between us. It changes nothing about the operational picture and it costs us both something to discuss it that neither of us has the time to spend.”
Belle frowned. “You could have let me find this out on my own. Eventually. Without telling me anything.”
“I could have,” Gold agreed.
“And yet you didn’t.”
“No,” Gold said. “I did not.”
“Why not?”
He was quiet for a long time, looking at the page still on the table in front of him, and the two names with the line drawn between them.
“Because our mutual obligation runs in both directions,” he said, “and because I think you’ve earned the right to hear this from me, directly, rather than assembling it from words and names in documents and silences until you arrived at a version of the truth that wasn’t quite the whole of it.”
Belle held his gaze. “Thank you for telling me,” she said.
She sat quietly for a time, processing the shape of what she now knew. Gold had a son. Estranged. Inside the Congregation, in some capacity that Gold himself couldn’t fully define.
“The lease,” she said. “With Meissa’s name on it - Blue’s name - what does that tell you?”
“That she’s closer to him than I’d like,” Gold said. “Whether that’s deliberate cultivation, the way she cultivated you, or simply proximity that happened because he was already there when she arrived, I don’t know yet.”
“You’re worried about him.”
Gold looked at her for a very long time.
“Yes,” he said eventually. “I am. Which is, I’ll admit, a complicated thing to feel about someone who hasn’t spoken to me in longer than I’d like to count, and who I’m not certain would want my worry even if I offered it.”
Belle felt the painful sympathy rise in her and said, quietly. “Both things can be true.”
“Yes. They can.” Gold said.
She looked at the page between them again. “I’ll keep looking,” she said. “Carefully. I won’t do anything with what I find without bringing it to you first.”
“Thank you,” Gold said.
“You’re welcome,” Belle said, and reached to close the notebook, and tucked it back into her bag.
That night, she did not write anything else. Some of it, she understood, was past the writing stage. Held instead, the way Gold held things; the way the inscription itself held the Wound - both things true, and neither one resolving the other.
These gifs appeared on my dash right when I was outlining a particularly painful part of Dies Irae: The Dark One's Telling. Such is the irony of Tumblr.
Fandom: Once Upon a Time (TV)
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Relationships: Belle/Rumplestiltskin | Mr. Gold
Characters: Belle (Once Upon a Time), Rumplestiltskin | Mr. Gold, Mad Hatter | Jefferson, Red Riding Hood | Ruby, Grace | Paige (Once Upon a Time), Jiminy Cricket | Archie Hopper, Knave of Hearts | Will Scarlet, Widow Lucas | Granny, Anastasia, Queen of Hearts | Cora, Blue Fairy | Mother Superior, Baelfire | Neal Cassidy
Additional Tags: AU, Angst, Violence, archeology, psychic questing, Religion, spirituality, Magic, Romance, Smut, Supernatural Elements
Series: Part 1 of Dies Irae
Summary:
A strange man confronts Doctor Belle French after one of her lectures and claims to need her help. He also claims to know that she is troubled, and can offer her protection. When events transpire that lead Belle to take up that offer, a desperate search begins to translate a series of ancient inscriptions, and Belle and her friends - both old and new - face increasing danger as they try to find answers and secure the truth before it can fall into very wrong hands, and possibly threaten every living thing in Storybrooke and beyond!
Read on AO3
Chapter 29 - Iniuriam Hominis
He almost didn’t see it.
That was the part that would stay with him afterwards. Not the discovery itself, but how close he’d come to just driving past it entirely.
He’d been thinking about Grace, and the pleasure that had become ordinary now, of just driving to collect her on a Thursday evening that no longer felt like it was something stolen that he had to justify to himself. The ordinariness of that thought was exaclty the reason that he’d nearly let the car slip past his attention unexamined.
A sedan was parked two houses down from the Hanleys’. It was facing the wrong direction for someone simply visiting a neighbor. It was positioned with deliberate uselessness and he understood at once that it had been placed there for observation, and not for convenience.
He didn’t slow down.
He drove past at the same speed he’d been driving and turned at the next corner as though that had always been his intention. He parked three streets away.
He sat in the car with both hands on the wheel as the engine wound down, doing as he always did before anything else: breathing, slowing his own pulse by an act of will that had taken too many long years to make reliable; separating the part of him that wanted to already be running back toward that street from the part of him that knew running was the worst possible thing he could do.
Then he got out, and walked back the long way, through the gap between two yards that he’d mapped without ever quite admitting to himself why, the first week Grace had moved to stay with the Hanleys.
He approached from behind and stood at the car door for a moment before he did anything else, aware, in the almost clinical way he’d trained himself to be aware of his own body under stress, that something inside him had gone very quite and very cold in the instant he understood what he was looking at. It was not the loud quiet of restraint. It was the other kind. The kind that came before, not during, the worst of things he had ever done.
He thought of Priscilla for exactly one second. He didn’t see her face, or hear her name in his mind. The thought was of the exact shape of a moment eight years ago when he had understood, too late, what had already been taken. Then he put that thought away, because he could not afford it in that moment, because Grace was a hundred feet away behind a window with the lights coming on, and putting it away was the only thing standing between that exact moment, and something he wouldn’t be able to undo afterward.
In the next breath, he opened the car door.
The man’s hand moved, too slow, toward something. Jefferson had it pinned before conscious thought even arrived. He closed his own hand around the man’s wrist with a pressure that wasn’t yet pain, but the unspoken promise of it, delivered in a heartbeat.
“Don’t,” Jefferson said, and that was all for a moment. He simply looked at the man whose training had just told him, Jefferson could see, that nothing in it had prepared him for what was happening.
“You’re watching her house,” Jefferson said.
“I don’t—”
Denial.
“You’re watching her house,” Jefferson said again. The same words. No louder. The repetition worse than volume would have been. “Say it back to me so I know you understand what’s happening here, and what I’m asking.”
“I’m,” the man swallowed, “watching her house.”
“Whose house?”
The man didn’t answer.
Jefferson tightened his grip fractionally on the wrist he was still holding. Not yet enough to break anything, but enough to make it clear that yet was the operative word.
“Whose. House?” he said a third time.
“Yours,” the man said. “Your kid’s.”
Something happened inside Jefferson’s chest - gone cold - at the word kid coming out of this man’s mouth. Fast. Total. Entirely silent. His face didn’t change. That was, he understood, even as it was happening, the most dangerous version of himself there was: the one where nothing on the outside revealed anything true about what was happening underneath. He let go. Stepped back.
“Get out of the car,” he said.
The man got out.
In an instant, faster than vision, Jefferson stepped toward him. He rested one hand on the roof of the car, obscuring the flash of metal that he brought to rest low, against the man’s thigh. Resting there, not pressed, not even threatening. Just there.
In the moments that followed, Jefferson didn’t raise his voice even once, and he found, afterward, that he didn’t even remember every word of it. That had never happened to him before, not ever, in as long as he could recall. He remembered pieces.
He remembered saying, “You do not get to use her. Not once. Not ever. Not as a threat. Not as leverage, not as a word whispered in a planning meeting three steps removed from anything like where we are right now.”
He remembered the man’s face, drained white, and yellowed in the tint of the streetlights flickering to life overhead, when he continued, “I have been very careful, for an extremely long time, about how much of myself I let into the work. You have just told me there’s no point in being careful any more.”
He remembered, with total clarity, the last thing, the thing that came out lower than anything before it - almost gentle - almost whispered, as to a lover, “Go back. Tell them exactly what you saw tonight. Tell them I didn’t raise my voice. Tell them I didn’t even seem angry. Tell them that’s the part they should be afraid of.”
He stepped back, and with a flick of his wrist, closed and pocketed the knife, then pointed to the still open door of the sedan.
“Get in,” he said. “Drive.”
He didn’t blink as he watched the man obey.
Jefferson stood on the sidewalk for a long moment after the car had gone in the quite of an ordinary residential street at dusk with lights coming on in windows up and down the block; a neighborhood settling into its evening with no idea what had almost happened on its doorstep.
He became aware, distantly, detached, that his hands were not entirely steady. It was not the tremor of adrenaline working its way out of his body that had been ready for violence. It was something underneath that, something closer to the precise opposite of fear that was still finishing its work in him even with the car already gone.
He stood there until it passed. It took longer than he expected.
Afterwards, he walked to the Hanleys’ door and rang the bell. By an act of will that he had been practicing for eight years, he composed his face into the one Grace knew as her father’s, and nothing in it could betray what had just happened two doors down.
Missus Hanley opened the door. Grace was already behind her, bag over her shoulder with her face holding the familiar expression of her looking for him. He had never once been able to watch it without something happening inside of him that he had no name for, and he didn’t need it to.
“Ready?” he said.
“Ready,” she said.
He took her bag, and tucked her into his side as they walked to the car together. He didn’t look back at the place where the sedan had been parked, because looking back would have shown her something in his face he was not willing to let her see.
He just listened, keeping her close as she chattered about her day, her week at school, the thoughts she’d had about the latest book that she was reading and that she asked if they could read together for a while after dinner and before bed.
He called Gold from the car once Grace was settled in the back seat with her headphones in, their volume loud enough that he was confidence, but not certain, that she couldn’t hear him.
“They sent someone to the Hanleys’,” he said when Gold answered, and shared the logical supposition that had settled over him in the few moments it had taken to dial, and for Gold to answer. “One man. Watching the house. They think I’m responsible for what happened in the university car park. They were looking for leverage.”
The silence on the line lasted longer than Gold’s silences usually ran.
“Is she safe?”
“She’s safe,” Jefferson said. “I caught it before it became anything.”
“What did you do?”
Jefferson glanced in the rear view mirror. Grace was looking out at the street lights sliding past, entirely unaware of how close the evening had come to being something else.
“I’m not sure I can tell you exactly,” he said honestly. “I don’t remember all of it.”
Gold’s pause was entirely different this time.
“Jefferson?”
“I know,” Jefferson said. “I know how that sounds.”
“Did you hurt him?”
“A part of me thought about it,” Jefferson admitted, “but no. I didn’t touch him beyond getting him out of the car. I didn’t need to.” He paused. “I think that frightened him more than if I had.”
Another long silence followed, and Jefferson could almost hear the thoughts passing through Gold’s mind and being dismissed one by one.
“What did you tell him to take back?”
Jefferson thought back on his words, the ones he remembered and the shape of the ones he didn’t.
“That she’s not on the table,” he said, “Ever. That if anyone tries this again, I won’t be having a conversation.” He paused. “And that they should be more frightened of how calm I was, thank if I’d gone feral.”
“Were you calm?”
Jefferson considered the question with the honesty it deserved. It was the same honesty he’d been giving Ruby across kitchen tables and counters, and a back room that wasn’t his.
“No,” he said finally. “I wasn’t anything close to calm. I think I was the opposite of calm, wearing calm, because the opposite of calm would have terrified Grace if she’d seen it on me, and I am never letting her see that. Not once. Not for any reason.”
He took a breath, summoning calm again as he felt his emotions winding up again inside.
“Find out from Cora,” he demanded, “whether Blue actually believes it was me, because if she does, this isn’t finished. It’s just found a worse direction to go in.”
“I will,” Gold promised, then, “Jefferson?”
“Yes?”
“Stay home. Both of you. I’ll handle what comes next.”
Jefferson hung up. He drove home with his daughter in the back seat, headphones in, looking out at the street lights, and did not let any part of what had just happened leave the front seat with him.
Final Edit of Dies Irae, Chapter 29 - should be posted later today.
Final draft of Dies Irae: Vespers
Detailed outline of Dies Irae: Lauds
Outline of Dies Irae: The Dark One's Telling
Detailed outline of Dies Irae: The Vessel's Telling
Final Draft of Dies Irae: The Templar's Telling, Chapter 5
Also, trying to mentally prepare myself for being back in school next week. (I'm STILL not ready.) Currently I'm eating breakfast, and getting ready to head in for some important meetings today. The joys of being a department leader.
So, that's me, feel free to ask questions, as always. My inbox is here.
Dies Irae: The Templar's Telling - Chapter 4 - Dangerous Man
Fandom: Once Upon a Time (TV)
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Relationships: Belle/Rumplestiltskin | Mr. Gold
Characters: Mad Hatter | Jefferson, Red Riding Hood | Ruby, Belle (Once Upon a Time), Rumplestiltskin | Mr. Gold, Knave of Hearts | Will Scarlet, Widow Lucas | Granny, Grace | Paige (Once Upon a Time), Jiminy Cricket | Archie Hopper, Blue Fairy | Mother Superior, Queen of Hearts | Cora, Baelfire | Neal Cassidy
Additional Tags: AU, Angst, Violence, Theology, Philosophy, Magic, spirituality, Supernatural Elements, Archaeology, Eventual Romance, Eventual Smut, Major Character Injury, MCD
Series: Part 1 of Dies Irae: The Tellings
Summary:
Seven hundred years old and carrying two lives in a single head, Jefferson is the Order's Templar: the man at the boundary, the keeper of doors; the one who stands between the people he loves and the thing coming for them. He tells the whole of it — the Wound and the Words that hold it, and the found family assembling across hundreds of years around a plain brown cup. He is the one with the flat, accurate voice who has learned to say hard things plainly and to file every grief behind a locked door.
But there is a wrongness in the telling that only his doubled head can feel: an absence with edges, a rescue that isn't coming, a marker missing from the formation. This is the account of what that absence cost, of presence achieved and proven worth its price, of a wall taken down on purpose, and of the two words the whole thing comes to rest on.
Read on AO3
Chapter 4 - Dangerous Man
Before Monday was Edinburgh, and I should tell you about Edinburgh, because you have seen me tired and you have seen me gentle and you have seen me grieve a woman's ordinary life in a lecture hall, and if I leave it there you will have the wrong idea, and the wrong idea about me is the kind of thing that gets people hurt.
I am a dangerous man.
I have been avoiding saying it plainly because it’s the sort of thing that sounds like a boast, and it’s actually the opposite of a boast. It is a confession, and a weariness, and the single most stable fact of my existence across seven hundred years.
I hand over cards, and I drink bad tea, and I stand at the edges of rooms grieving in advance, and all of that is true, and underneath all of it, always, is the other thing, the thing I am for, the thing the Order found in a boy in a field and has been using ever since, because it turns out that a man who can hold two lives in one head can also do the kind of work that breaks most people who attempt it, and it doesn’t break me. It has never once broken me, and that, not breaking is the part I would ask you to be frightened of, if you were the sort of person I ever needed to frighten.
Doctor Reid was that sort of person for one evening.
Let me tell you how it’s done, because the how is the whole of what I am, and I’d rather you saw it clearly than imagined something with more loudness and violence in it.
Reid had taken an apartment in Marchmont, in one of those Edinburgh tenements that stand in a row like upturned ships, all bay windows and pointed gables, respectable, and anonymous, and built to absorb a visiting academic without showing any trace of him.
I let myself in during dinner. I didn’t force anything; forcing leaves marks, and marks are conversation, and I didn’t want a conversation with anyone but Reid. I sat in the chair by the window. I didn’t put on a light and then I did the only thing the work actually requires, the thing that is nine-tenths of everything I’ve ever done in that other capacity: I waited.
People misunderstand waiting.
They think it’s the absence of action, the empty part before the real part starts. It is the real part. Waiting is the work. A man who can truly wait, who can sit in a stranger's chair in the failing blue light of a northern evening and simply be there, without fidgeting, without rehearsal, without building any relationship at all with the passing of the time - a man who can do that has already won every confrontation that follows, because he has already demonstrated, before a single word, that he operates on a different clock than his subject, and the subject feels it in the animal part of himself before his mind has caught up.
Reid came in, reached for the light switch and stopped, because some older, wiser part of him had already registered that the room was occupied by a stillness that didn’t belong to it.
"Close the door, Doctor Reid," I said.
He did.
That is the whole thing, right there, in the first five words and his response to them. He closed the door. He didn’t run, didn’t shout, didn’t flip the switch. He closed the door and stood against it, and in closing it he told me everything I needed to know about how the evening would go, which was: easily.
Some of them are hard. Reid wasn’t going to be hard. Reid was a man whose only real commitment was to his own continuation, and a man like that can always be reached, because you only have to show him, clearly and without heat, where his continuation actually lies.
I have watched men perform this work with menace, with the raised voices, invasion of space, with implied and sometimes explicit violence, and it’s amateur, all of it. It’s the tell of someone who doesn’t have the other thing and is compensating. Menace is emotional. Menace is a man telling you what he’s willing to do; which means he’s negotiating; which means there’s a version where he doesn’t do it; which means there’s hope, and hope is what makes subjects difficult.
I never negotiate and I never threaten, because a threat is a future and I don’t deal in futures. I deal in the present arrangement of facts, and the present arrangement of facts, laid out quietly enough, is more frightening than any threat, because it has already happened and can’t be argued with.
So I didn’t threaten him. I told him what I knew. I told him about the coffee in the Grassmarket, and the photographs, and Langer, and the eight thousand pounds he thought was insulting and was about to learn was the most generous number he would ever be offered. I told him I’d read four months of his correspondence and been in his office seven weeks before. I told him about Cassidy - I’ll come back to Cassidy, there’s a great deal in that name that I didn’t know the weight of yet - and I watched each fact land and close a door behind it, one after another, until Reid was standing in a room with only one door left open, which was the one I was holding.
"I don't know what you think I have, but—"
"Doctor Reid."
His name. That’s the only instrument I used all evening, his own name, returned to him quietly each time he reached for an exit, and each time it stopped him the way a hand on the chest stops a man, except I never touched him, I never rose from the chair until the very end. His name in my mouth was the whole of the pressure, because of how I said it, which was patiently. With infinite patience. With the patience of a man who has all the time in the world and no particular investment in how long the process takes, and that patience is the most frightening thing I own, because most people's fear is metered by the fear of the other person. They can feel the aggressor's impatience, his nerves, his need for it to be over, and they can work in the gaps of it. I have no gaps. I’m not nervous. I’m not in a hurry. I will say your name as many times as it takes and the saying will cost me nothing, and somewhere in the third or fourth repetition the subject understands that he is not up against a man's temper, which has limits, but a man's attention, which does not, and that is the moment they give you everything.
There was a moment - there’s always a moment - where he tested it; a moment where he began to say and if I don't… He got as far as "And if I—" and then he looked at me, and I looked at him, and I did nothing at all.
I want to be precise about that because it’s the truest thing I can show you about what I am: I. Did. Nothing.
I didn’t narrow my eyes, or set my jaw, or lean forward. I simply continued to look at him with the whole of my attention and let him finish the sentence into that attention, and he couldn’t.
The sentence dissolved in his mouth. He couldn’t locate, in my face, the thing his sentence needed in order to be completed, the anger, the threat, the human antagonist who could be defied, because it wasn’t there, and a man cannot defy an absence. He can only stand in front of it and slowly understand that the future he was about to describe has already been foreclosed, not by my will, but by the simple arrangement of the facts, which I was merely reading aloud.
He gave me everything. It took twenty-five minutes. The laptop, the cloud account, the phone cache, the backup he had forgotten his own router was making - I knew about the router because knowing about the router is the job. The job is knowing about the router when the subject has forgotten it exists, and I stood by the window and watched him perform each surrender as a separate, small death, and I felt, watching him, the thing I always feel.
Not triumph. I need you to understand there’s never any triumph in it. What I feel, doing this work, is a kind of sorrow so old it’s stopped having a temperature, because I am watching a man discover the exact dimensions of his own smallness, and there is nothing to enjoy in that. There’s only the doing of a necessary thing to a person who has made himself necessary to do it to.
And then, at the end, I gave him the door.
That’s the part that the men with menace never understand, the part that makes the difference between what I do and what a thug does: you must always, always give them the door. Not as mercy, though it is mercy, and I will not pretend the mercy doesn’t matter to me, because it is nearly the last of my humanity and I spend it deliberately on people who have not earned it precisely because spending it on the deserving would prove nothing. You give them the door because a man with no way out is unpredictable, and a man with exactly one dignified way out will take it every time, and the taking of it makes him yours far more reliably than fear ever could.
"There are two ways to proceed from here," I told him. Then I laid them out, evenly, the way you would explain two train routes to a stranger: the first, where this is the end of it and he goes home and makes different choices; the second, which I would prefer not to have and which he would prefer not to have, and which was therefore in both our interests to avoid.
I did not describe the second.
Describing it would have been a threat, and I do not threaten. I named that it existed, and was worse, and let his own imagination furnish the room, because a man's own imagination is always more thorough and more frightening than anything I could say, and it has the additional virtue of being his, so that when he chooses the first door he experiences it as his choice, freely made, which it is, and which is the whole point.
"I'd encourage you to make the decision tonight," I said. "While your thinking is still clear."
He made it. Of course he made it. They almost always make it, the Reids of the world, because the whole of them is arranged around continuation and I had shown them, patiently, where continuation lay.
And then, at the door, with my hand on the frame, I did the one thing I did not strictly need to do, the thing that was not procedure, the thing that was me leaking through the operator the way I always leak through eventually, because seven hundred years has not managed to sand me down to pure function and I have stopped hoping it will. I told him about the work he had been selling. Doctor French's work. I told him he had read enough of it to know it was significant - and he had, that was why he was dangerous, a thief who cannot read the value of what he steals is a nuisance but a thief who can is a threat and I told him that the people he was selling it to would not have used it well.
I didn’t say it to absolve him. I said it because it was true, and because I wanted one true thing to be in the room with him after I left. I wanted one thing that was not about his own small survival, one accurate sentence about the actual weight of what he had almost done, so that if there were anything in him larger than self-preservation - and there is, in most people, buried, unused - it would have something to catch on in the years to come.
That is not mercy either, not quite. It is closer to husbandry. You tend even the poor soil, on the chance that something grows.
When I looked up, he was still processing it, and I left.
In the stairwell, going down; in the field in Champagne seven hundred years ago and also right then, a boy I had trained put his hand on my arm and asked me if the thing we did was a good thing, and I told him what I always told him, what I have never once fully believed and have never once stopped saying: it is a necessary thing, and necessary is the only kind of good our sort are permitted.
He died believing me.
Most of them die believing me.
That’s the other work I do, the quieter kind, the giving of a bearable version of the truth to people who need to be able to keep going, and I have never decided whether it’s a kindness or the deepest cruelty I’m capable of, and I have done it so many times that the question has worn as smooth as a stone.
I sent the message from the close off the Royal Mile.
Materials secured.
Then I stood for a moment in the September dark with the castle floodlit at the end of the close, not looking at it, because the things most worth looking at are better encountered when you are not looking for them, and I let myself feel, for exactly as long as I permit it, the tiredness that this particular work leaves in me, which is different from the tiredness of grief. Grief is heavy. This is thin. This is the tiredness of having been, for an evening, purely the instrument, the edge, the thing the Order forged me into, with all the rest of me - the man who liked Belle's lecture, the man who tips waitresses too much, the man in the field - folded away and held in abeyance so that the edge could do its work unclouded. Coming back from that, refolding myself into a whole person, always takes a little while, and always costs a little more, and I have never told anyone that it costs, because the whole value of me is that it appears to cost nothing.
The phone buzzed.
Understood. Monday.
I understood. On Monday, Belle French would walk into Gold's shop. The photographs were secured. Edinburgh was closed. The groundwork Gold needed was laid, and everything was converging on Monday, the way everything always converges, quietly, on the day it has been arranged to converge on.
I put the phone away. I was suddenly overcome by the tiredness, the thin kind and the heavy kind at once, which happens sometimes, the two tirednesses arriving together like the two lives. I had a flight the next afternoon. I had Grace's recital on the twenty-third, which I would attend the way I attended everything of hers in those years, from the back, at a careful distance, believing the distance was love. I have told you about that, about the room I was always across, and Grace’s was the largest room and the widest distance, and the one I regret most, and I was still years from learning better, still years from the day the distance nearly cost me everything and I finally, far too late, came up the stairs for my own daughter.
But that is later.
For now there was Edinburgh, closed and dark and indifferent, and a flight, and a recital, and a notebook on a kitchen table in Maine that I had never seen and yet knew, in the way I know things, contained more than its owner yet understood.
I walked toward Waverley. The castle stayed lit behind me. I did not look at it.
I am a dangerous man.
I needed you to see it once, plainly, done properly, without noise, so that you would understand what it costs me to be gentle, which is that the gentleness is a choice, made by someone who does not have to make it; the only kind of gentleness that means anything at all.
Now I can tell you about the shadows by Ruby's stairs. Now that you know what was standing in them.
🎱 ⇢ post your AO3 total stats
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🛼 ⇢ describe your latest wip with five emojis
🥑 ⇢ you accidentally killed somebody, which mutual(s) do you text for help?
🥤 ⇢ recommend an author or fanfic you love
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🌻 ⇢ tag someone you appreciate but don't talk to on a regular basis
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🧃 ⇢ share some personal lore you never posted about before
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It’s been so awesome to see your creative juices flowing all summer. I know you’re looking at the end of summer vacation as a writing deadline. Is there anything you can do that will allow you to keep engaging in the creative work you love without burning out?
Honestly, I hope so, but I won't know what the "terrain" is like until I know more about the school year.
Last year, a big part of my burnout (apart from the sheer weight of the workload) was my co-chair - let's tell it like it is. When someone is systematically erasing your very existence with their monumental fuckery, it does tend to shut you down. That's what happened in a nutshell - there's more, but it's fairly specific.
I know there are going to be some changes at the district level, and I don't expect it'll be anything that will actually REDUCE the workload or make life any easier, why would they do that? But I can hope.
But is there anything I can do? To be fair, just having so much material almost ready already is going to help keep the creativity moving forward, which is why I've been outlining like a crazy thing. I'm so excited by this project, this concept, and everything that has come along with it, that I want to get it out there - I want to share.
Speaking of which, it's Tuesday - which means I should get the next Templar's Telling chapter out today. (Weather permitting, she says as the thunder rolls in. LOL)
Thank you for the ask, my friend. I hope to keep putting the story out there for you to enjoy. Your comments have been very inspiring. :)
Today I plan on working on stuff, trying to 'beat the deadline' for getting things at least in part outlined, so that I don't end up stalled and blocked in a couple of weeks when the new school year starts. I have noticed that when I'm not writing, I'm a sore headed bear.
So, I'll be continuing the outlining for The Dark One's Telling, and hopefully get at least part way into His Telling before my brain shuts down from creativity.
So feel free to ask questions about anything you'd like. I'll try and give you some good answers.
As I write this, my plane is taxiing to the runway to begin the flight back to NC.
I had a fun, but very bittersweet time at the 60th anniversary Star Trek convention. Getting to see good friends who live a long way away is always great until you have to say goodbye. That moment was today, just a few short hours ago, so my heart is light, but heavy, so heavy, at the same time. Both things are true. And, since we are told that this is a weight restricted flight, I'd better reach for the light half - for now.
In writing news, I'm still plugging away at the various parts of the Dies Irae pics. Next up is the next chapter of The Templar's Telling. I feel like I'm running out of time to get all the outlining finished.
I've also been thinking about Cobra: In Your Prayers. We will see what happens there.
One very cool thing that came out of the convention was sitting with @peacehopeandrats and a friend, a youngster whom we've known since she was a wee baby. So much so that I consider her more of an adoptive daughter of sorts, and helping her to organize her OUAT fan fic thoughts. He idea is crazy good, and I really hope that she goes ahead and writes it. Coaching The Next Generation of fic writers, the irony is not lost on me.
School starts again, for the teachers, in a week. I'm not ready. Actually though I have to go in on Wednesday for a Department meeting, and a student meeting as well. That's what leadership gets you. You go back ahead of everyone else... and I'm still not ready!
So now, in the amount of time it has taken me to type this post, we are in the air, and on the way home.
Honestly if I see guys who look like this in the same restroom as me. I don't give a shit. Everybody just has to clean their hands.
"Transgender “Compliance Crew” Protests Discriminatory Bathroom Law Across Kansas
(Press Release)
EMPORIA, GREAT BEND, DODGE CITY, GARDEN CITY
Yesterday two groups of transgender men in bright yellow “SB 244 Compliance Crew” t-shirts traversed Kansas to use women's restrooms as an act of malicious compliance with SB 244, an anti-transgender bathroom bill that requires people to only enter public facilities based on a doctor's observation of their genitals at birth.
Three demonstrators went to the Emporia Public Library, the Lyon County Historical Society museum, and the David Traylor zoo in Emporia Kansas. At each location, these men (who have frequented men's facilities for years) entered the women's restroom. They used the restroom, washed their hands, and exited a few minutes later. One startled library patron came in as they were washing their hands and hastily exited to complain to the library staff. The library staff seemed aware of the law and its unintended consequences. Charles Osman, one of the demonstrators, said, “I feel really nervous going into a women's room. I mean, it's been so many years since I used them. But this is what the law requires.
Three other demonstrators traveled to Wetlands Water Park in Great Bend, Long Branch Lagoon Water Park in Dodge City, and The Big Pool in Garden City. These bearded, burly men entered the women's locker rooms, changed their clothes in a locked stall, used the restroom, washed their hands, and quietly exited. At Great Bend and Garden City, backlash was minimal – a couple of disapproving looks, confused glances, and hurried exits – but in Dodge City they were reported to a manager and confronted about their presence. The manager shouted, rushed children out of the restroom, and called the police. The men had a discussion with the manager and the police and explained the situation, including uncomfortable descriptions of their bodies. Both parties mentioned that they had never heard of SB 244 nor had been notified by any government entity of its passage.
“I could easily continue using the men's restroom under the radar”, said Ray Vieux, one of the demonstrators. He continued, “in fact, I have been. As I've enjoyed public pools, zoos, parks, race tracks and more this summer, I've broken this law numerous times, enough to land me in jail several times over if I had been reported. I wasn't reported, though, and today's action tells me why; because I look like what most people think a man looks like. Apparently people have a problem with someone who looks like me entering a space that they've determined to be for people who don't look like me - even though the law requires me to do so.”
While supporters of SB 244, including Attorney General Kris Kobach and Senate Majority Leader (and gubernatorial candidate) Ty Masterson, billed it as a way to keep men out of women's spaces, it clearly requires some men to enter women's spaces. Segregating people by suspected genitalia does nothing to improve public safety; it does quite the opposite by opening Kansans up to sexual harassment and discrimination. At no point should anyone be asking anyone else what genitals they have in public.
Organizers announced plans to continue demonstrating in public facilities across the state to draw attention to the harms of gender policing and pressure lawmakers into repealing SB 244.
For more information about the Kansas Compliance Crew, visit kscompliancecrew (dot) org"
Fanfic writers, reblog if you’re okay with people sharing the links to your fics to their friends and/or for fic rec posts without having to ask for your permission first
(I saw a debate about whether or not it was okay for people to share fic links around without asking the authors first, since some authors may not be comfortable with the links to their fics being shared around on twitter or tumblr. so I thought this post could be a blanket permission for authors who were okay with the links to their fics being shared around!)
For goodness sake, rec the fics. Rec them on Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook, Bluesky, Instagram, Snapchat, Discord, or the reanimated corpse of MySpace. Rec them on Pinterest. Rec them by semaphore, smoke signal, or Morse code. Rec them via a page ripped out of a college-ruled notebook and folded into a tiny triangle and flicked across a classroom while the teacher is looking in the other direction. Heck, rec them on Slack, Teams, email, text, postal mail, or a message scratched with a long stick into snow, sand, or dirt. Just rec the fics.
Today’s seven sentences come from chapter 3 of Dies Irae: Vespers.
The secondary binding documents were in the third box. He opened it with the care that very old things deserved regardless of what they contained and began to read.
They were in Latin, mostly, with interpolations in two other scripts he could identify and one he could not, which was unusual. The archive’s founders had generally been meticulous about consistency of record, and they were not, as he read them, doing quite what the secondary binding documents were supposed to do. They were not documenting the establishment of the Wound-Keeper line. They were documenting something that preceded it; something that the Wound-Keeper line had been built around, the way you build a wall around a thing you need to contain.
He read for an hour without stopping.
We still have about 20 Chapters to go of Dies Irae before we get to Vespers so it’ll be a while, and the above may change before posting, but feel free to ask questions (and I will try to avoid spoilers).
The core conceit of Lord of the Rings is pretty funny. You are a twenty three year old in a suburb of Maine. The little bracelet in your grandpa’s attic has an inscription on it that is the password to the world’s entire nuclear arsenal. It is up to you to walk to the only hydraulic press in the world, located in Arizona, before the FBI finds the bracelet, kills you, and enslaves the suburb of Maine you currently live in
Also the 90-year old hobo that your grandpa beat in a rap battle for possession of the bracelet while hiding from the Romanian secret police really loved the bracelet because it was coated in small amounts of LSD and tried to hunt and kill your grandpa to get it back. He was then apprehended by the FBI and instantly gave them your grandpa’s address. Seal Team Six is about to break down your door and shoot you, says your local congressman who can also do cool magic tricks
There's a guy in NY who MIGHT be capable of destroying the codes but won't coz he simply wants to spend time with his wife. So it's up to your grandpa's old friend in rural Ohio to get you the friends capable of finishing the task.
The hobo was correct about the LSD. Unfortunately you now know this for a fact. You’re pretty sure you’re still going to make it to Arizona as long as you don’t let your boyfriend know about the pink and blue octopuses that have been following you since Kentucky.
Fandom: Once Upon a Time (TV)
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Relationships: Belle/Rumplestiltskin | Mr. Gold
Characters: Belle (Once Upon a Time), Rumplestiltskin | Mr. Gold, Mad Hatter | Jefferson, Red Riding Hood | Ruby, Grace | Paige (Once Upon a Time), Jiminy Cricket | Archie Hopper, Knave of Hearts | Will Scarlet, Widow Lucas | Granny, Anastasia, Queen of Hearts | Cora, Blue Fairy | Mother Superior, Baelfire | Neal Cassidy
Additional Tags: AU, Angst, Violence, archeology, psychic questing, Religion, spirituality, Magic, Romance, Smut, Supernatural Elements
Series: Part 1 of Dies Irae
Summary:
A strange man confronts Doctor Belle French after one of her lectures and claims to need her help. He also claims to know that she is troubled, and can offer her protection. When events transpire that lead Belle to take up that offer, a desperate search begins to translate a series of ancient inscriptions, and Belle and her friends - both old and new - face increasing danger as they try to find answers and secure the truth before it can fall into very wrong hands, and possibly threaten every living thing in Storybrooke and beyond!
Read on AO3
Chapter 28 - Mea Culpa
Gold had told her only that they were meeting someone, and that Belle should just come without expectations, preparation or rehearsed position. He wanted her, he said, simply present and watching. She didn’t ask who. She assumed by the way he asked that she already knew.
She was right.
Cora was already seated at the café when they arrived. She had a corner table where the light was good. She had obviously chosen the seat for what it would let her see, and not for comfort. Belle noted that she looked exactly as she had in the library, which unsettled her. It had been a long time since that encounter, and a great deal had happened, yet it seemed to Belle that Cora had simply continued existing in the same composed, elegant style the entire time, untouched by any of it.
She looked up as they approached. Her eyes went first to Gold, a flicker, brief, the kind of charge that pass between two people who have known each other for so long that even a glance carried history, then she looked at Belle.
“Doctor French,” she said, “You look tired.”
“I’ve had a demanding week,” Belle said.
“Yes, I imagine you have,” Cora said.
She gestured to the empty chairs with the ease of a host rather than a guest, though the table was hers only by virtue of her having arrived before they had.
“Two of my colleagues,” Cora said, without preamble, while they sat, “are currently incapacitated. One with a wrist that, I’m told, will not be useful to him again this year. The other with a headache and no memory of the relevant… events.”
“You’re well informed,” Gold said.
“I’m always well informed,” Cora said. “It’s the only quality I’ve never had to work particularly hard at.” She looked at Belle. “I’d like to know who did that to them.”
“Why ask me?” Belle asked.
“Because Gold won’t tell me,” Cora said, “and you’re considerably worse at concealing your reactions than you think you are.”
Belle fought to keep her expression neutral.
“There,” Cora said, with something that was almost warmth. “That’s the reaction.”
“I didn’t bring her here to be interrogated,” Gold said.
“My dear Gold,” Cora purred, “I’m not interrogating. I’m observing. The distinction matters, even if you’ve never found it convincing.” She turned her attention back to Belle. “It wasn’t Jefferson. He’s efficient, but he’s never been that fast, and he doesn’t break bones at angles a body shouldn’t allow. I’ve seen his work, and as terrifying as it is, this wasn’t it.”
“Then you have your own theories,” Belle countered.
“I have one theory,” Cora said, “and I find it considerably more interesting than the operational failure it represents.” She paused. “Your friend. The one from the diner. No, you’ve never mentioned her to me, I’ve simply been paying attention. The waitress. She has a particular… strangeness.”
“You’re guessing.” Belle accused.
“I never guess,” Cora said. “I assemble. There’s a difference, and it’s the same difference between intelligence and luck. Only one of them is repeatable.”
Gold said nothing. Belle understood, from how still he was, that this was not a conversation he intended to confirm or deny on her behalf, and that the decision of how much to give to Cora belonged, in the moment, to her.
“I’m not going to discuss who did what to your colleagues,” Belle said.
“No. I didn’t expect you to,” Cora Said. “But I find the silence almost as informative as an answer would have been. She reached out and turned her cup in its saucer, an unhurried, deliberate motion. “I’ll tell you something for nothing, since you’ve given me nothing in return and I’m feeling unusually generous this afternoon.” She paused to allow her dry humor to settle, “Blue is not pleased. Two operatives, gone for several days, against a target she believed was thoroughly unprotected by anything she hadn’t already accounted for. She is recalculating.”
“Recalculating toward what?” Belle asked.
“That,” Cora said, “is the question I came here partly hoping you’d help me answer, and partly already knowing your wouldn’t.”
“You sent them,” Gold said. It wasn’t a question.
“I… authorized the approach, yes,” Cora admitted. “I didn’t authorize the method. There’s a difference there too, though I expect you’ll find it equally unconvincing.” She looked at him directly, and intently, for the first time since they’d sat down. “I told Blue that direct acquisition was premature. She decided premature was acceptable, given the timeline. I was wrong to let her decide without pushing harder.”
“You’re admitting fault.” Gold said.
“I’m stating a fact. I find admitting fault and stating facts about my own miscalculations to be the same exercise, performed for different audiences. You may interpret that however suits you.” Cora said.
Belle watched the exchange with the attention she gave to everything that mattered. There was, she noted, something underneath the precision of it. It wasn’t warmth, not exactly. It was far more complex than that, but held, in any case, the kind of ease shared between two people whose antagonism had calcified into something closer to professional respect. It was decades after decades deep, worn smooth by the repetition, the way a stone in a riverbed is worn smooth by water that never stops disliking it.
“You two have done this before,” she said. “This exact conversation. Different details. Same shape.”
Cora looked at her then, with the same, genuine interest she had shown in the library, sharpened by something new.
“Yes. We have. More times that either of us would care to count, I imagine.” She paused. “He’s better at it than I am, which I find irritating in a way that only being bested by someone you respect can be irritating.”
“I’m not better at it,” Gold said. “I simply have less to lose by being honest.”
“That,” Cora said, “may be the most pointed thing you’ve said to me in a decade.”
She turned back to Belle and suddenly changing the subject said, “You’ve solved the third register.”
Belle didn’t answer immediately, taking a moment to recalibrate her attention toward even greater caution.
“Don’t try to hide it. I can see it,” Cora said. “I see it in how you’re carrying yourself. You’re suddenly someone who has stopped circling around something and started standing inside it.” She studied Belle for a moment longer before adding, “Be careful what you do with it, and be careful who else solves it before you’ve decided what to do.”
“Is that a threat?” Belle asked.
“It’s a courtesy,” Cora said. “I extend very few of them, so you should consider yourself fortunate.”
She rose, empty handed, since she had brought nothing except herself.
“Doctor French,” she said. “Gold.”
She left without waiting for either of them to respond, the same way she had left the library when last she had met with Belle, without looking back. The door closed behind her on a conversation that had revealed exactly as much, Belle realized, as she’d intended and not a fraction more.
Belle and Gold sat for a moment in the quiet she left behind.
“She warned me,” Belle noted, “again.”
“Yes,” Gold said.
“She’s not entirely on Blue’s side.”
“Cora,” Gold said dryly, “is entirely on Cora’s side. She always has been. At the moment, Cora’s side and ours happen to have some overlap.”
“And when they don’t?” Belle asked.
“Then we deal with whatever arrives,” Gold said. “It’s not productive to plan for every version of Cora before she’s decided which one she’s going to be.”
Belle looked at him sideways. “You almost sound like you respect her.”
Belle saw him consider that with more care than the question seemed to warrant.
“I understand her,” he said at last. “That’s different and occasionally, as today demonstrated, more useful.”
Belle looked at the empty chair where Cora had been sitting.
“She admitted she was wrong,” Belle said, “about letting Blue make the approach.”
“Yes, that’s new.” Gold said.
“But is it significant?”
Gold was quiet for a moment. She had learned to read his silences more accurately with each day that passed, and read this one as genuine consideration rather than deflection.
“I don’t know yet,” he said. “But I intend to find out.”
Here is the final line (at the time of posting) from my writing this week:
And in a house on Aldermoor Street, the stone floor was cold and patient, and had been waiting, he understood with the clarity of a man who had run out of reasons not to understand it, for much longer than that night.
My plan for tomorrow is to post chapter 28 of Dies Irae.
