Helloooo which characters do you write for on here ? Thank you :))
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Hiya!
Here's the list of characters I'm willing to write for, more will be added as time goes by. If you wish to request one that isn't here, shoot your shot and I'll let you know!
Please make sure that your request is somewhat detailed plot wise, I won’t be writing requests that are just requesting a pairing with 0 plot idea.
I write for all Gwendoline Christie characters on my main blog @milfsloverblog
I only write character x fem!reader.
male female fandom
• Charles Dance: any character
• Pamela Rabe: any character
• Cate Blanchett: Carol Aird, Lydia Tár, Lady Tremaine
• Harry Potter: Severus Snape, Lucius Malfoy, Narcissa Malfoy, Rita Skeeter, Petunia Dursley
• The Devil Wears Prada: Miranda Priestly
• Chilling Adventures of Sabrina: Lilith, OG Mary Wardwell, Zelda Spellman
• Tim Burton universe: Delia Deetz, Red Queen, Alma Peregrine, Mrs Lovett, Julia Hoffman
• Saw: Mark Hoffman, Amanda Young
• Dr House: Gregory House, Lisa Cuddy
• Alien franchise: Ellen Ripley, Ripley 8, David 8, Walter 1
• Addams Family (movies): Morticia Addams, Gomez Addams, Debbie Jelinsky
• Pirates of the Caribbean: Hector Barbossa
• Resident Evil: Lady Dimitrescu
• Yellowjackets: Natalie Scatorccio (adult) I’M ALSO WILLING TO WRITE FOR MISTYNAT!!!
A/N: Watched Suspiria and Whiplash back to back a few days ago, and this is what bloomed in my brain afterwards! Larissa is strict, authoritative, bordering on cruel. Reader is eager to please, pushing her own boundaries for a crumble of praise from the woman she has an unhealthy obsession with. I hope you’ll enjoy it as much as I do! <3
Morning rehearsal begins before the sun has properly decided to rise. The academy sits in a kind of blue half-light when you arrive, all long corridors and sleeping radiators, the windows filmed faintly with winter condensation. Somewhere upstairs, a piano stumbles through scales. Someone laughing too loudly in another studio gets shushed almost immediately.
Studio A smells of rosin, sweat, and old wood polished so many times it has developed a shine like still water. The mirrors along the far wall catch every movement with exhausting honesty. Girls are already stretching at the barre when you enter, their warm-up knits hanging from narrow shoulders, pointe shoes discarded in pale satin heaps beside dance bags.
No one speaks much before Larissa arrives.
You are three minutes late.
Not late enough for another instructor to notice, perhaps, but Larissa notices everything. You have learned this the way dancers learn most things, through repetition and humiliation.
The studio door opens behind you just as you tie your hair back, and the room stills with almost embarrassing immediacy. Conversations taper off. Spines straighten. Someone hurriedly removes their phone from the barre and tucks it away.
Larissa steps inside carrying the cold with her.
Snowmelt glimmers faintly at the hem of her black wool coat. One leather-gloved hand rests atop the silver head of her cane, though she hardly seems to need it. She moves with the same sharp composure she brings to everything else, as though even pain has been instructed to behave properly in her presence.
She surveys the room once. A practiced sweep. Inventory rather than greeting.
Then her eyes settle on you, moving from your face to your half tied bun.
“You were late.”
The words are not loud. They do not need to be. Larissa speaks the way surgeons cut. Neatly, without wasted force.
Heat climbs immediately into your face. “I’m sorry, Miss Weems.”
“You apologize as though it alters time.”
Around you, no one looks directly at either of you. The dancers at this academy have perfected the art of witnessing someone else’s destruction discreetly.
Larissa removes her gloves finger by finger and lays them atop the piano. “Don’t be late again.”
“Yes, Miss Weems.”
The pianist receives Larissa’s coat with the solemnity of someone accepting ceremonial robes, and then rehearsal begins.
“Barre.”
The room obeys at once.
That is the frightening thing about Larissa. Not that she is cruel—though she can be—but that obedience forms naturally around her, instinctive as breath. She does not command the room so much as arrange it around herself. Even silence seems curated in her presence.
The music starts softly. Slow warm-up exercises first. Pliés and tendus repeated until the body loosens from sleep. You settle your hand against the barre and try to ignore the lingering embarrassment beneath your skin, though embarrassment under Larissa’s gaze has a tendency to become physical. Your shoulders tighten. Your breathing shortens. Every movement begins to feel observed.
Perhaps because it is.
Larissa walks between the dancers while the pianist plays, correcting posture with economical precision. A lifted chin here. A pressed shoulder there. Her criticism is rarely theatrical. She doesn’t shout unless absolutely necessary. The disappointment in her voice is usually punishment enough.
“You look lazy,” she tells one dancer flatly. “I assume this is accidental.”
The girl flushes crimson and straightens immediately.
Larissa moves on.
You feel her approaching before you see her reflection in the mirror. Your body always notices first. Some humiliating instinct. Your spine lengthens unconsciously, your stomach tightens beneath your leotard.
“Shoulders.”
The word lands directly behind you.
You correct instantly.
“No,” Larissa says, and there is the faintest trace of irritation in it. “You’re stiffening, not opening.”
Her hand settles between your shoulder blades before you can try again. Warm even through the fabric. Firm enough to feel instructional rather than comforting, though your body has long since stopped understanding the distinction.
“Here.”
Pressure against your spine forces you upright. Not rigid. Supported.
Larissa’s hand remains there a moment longer than strictly necessary, and the awareness of it spreads through you like fever. She smells faintly of sandalwood and something colder beneath it, something clean and expensive that belongs in opera houses and nowhere near a studio full of sweating dancers.
“You collapse inward whenever you lose confidence,” she says quietly enough that only you can hear. “The audience will notice.”
You swallow. “I’m trying not to.”
“I know. Try harder.”
The words settle strangely inside you. Not praise. Not kindness. Worse, perhaps. Recognition.
Larissa steps away, and cold rushes back into the space she occupied. You hate the immediate feeling of loss almost as much as you hate the relief.
The exercise continues.
Outside, snow drifts softly against the windows. Inside, the room warms with effort. By the end of barre, strands of hair have escaped slick ballet buns and the mirrors are beginning to cloud faintly at the edges where bodies have brushed too close.
Larissa watches all of it.
“Swan Lake is in eight weeks,” she says during center work, clipboard balanced lightly against one arm. “At present, most of you dance as though this information has failed to concern you.”
No one speaks.
“You are technically proficient,” she continues, pacing slowly across the studio floor. “Unfortunately, technical proficiency without emotional discipline is how mediocre dancers convince themselves they deserve principal roles.”
Her gaze drifts across the room.
Lingers on you.
Moves away again.
The relief is immediate and shameful.
“Auditions for Odette will be next Friday,” Larissa says. “I suggest you begin behaving accordingly.”
The atmosphere changes at once. Competition arrives quietly but thoroughly, sliding itself beneath the skin of the room. Girls stop smiling at one another quite so easily. Corrections begin to sound personal. Every stumble becomes visible.
You can feel it happening inside yourself too, ugly and desperate. The role has rooted itself somewhere deep in your chest ever since the production was announced. Odette. White silk and tragedy. Fragility sharpened into precision.
You want it badly enough to embarrass yourself.
Perhaps you already are.
The rehearsal becomes brutal after that.
Larissa works the same turn sequence for nearly forty minutes, stopping the music every time someone falters. Again and again and again until fatigue begins unraveling technique altogether. Ankles shake. Breathing roughens. One dancer nearly slips during a landing and catches herself hard enough to bruise.
Larissa watches impassively.
“You are tired,” she says. “How devastating.”
The girl lowers her eyes.
“Again.”
No one argues.
You dance until your calves burn violently beneath your skin. Again until your toes feel blistered raw inside the pointe shoes. Again until the studio begins narrowing strangely at the edges from exhaustion.
Larissa’s attention settles on you more and more frequently as rehearsal drags on. You have never decided whether this is fortunate.
“You anticipate the turn before you trust it,” she tells you after stopping the music mid-combination. “Why?”
“I thought—”
“There is your first mistake.”
A few dancers laugh behind you.
Heat flashes across your face, but Larissa is already moving closer, her expression sharpening rather than softening at your embarrassment.
“You think too much while dancing,” she says. “I can practically see the calculations happening behind your eyes. Ballet is not mathematics.”
You nod quickly.
Larissa sighs through her nose, dissatisfied. “Again.”
You reset position.
The pianist begins once more.
This time you force yourself not to think about Larissa watching. Not about the mirrors. Not about the audience that will eventually fill velvet seats and decide, in a matter of minutes, whether you are extraordinary or forgettable.
You turn.
Land cleanly.
Continue.
The sequence finishes without error.
Silence.
Larissa studies you for one long moment. Her face gives almost nothing away, but you have become disturbingly skilled at reading the tiny shifts in her expression. The slight easing around her mouth. The near-invisible softening in her eyes when something pleases her despite herself.
“Better,” she says at last.
The single word settles into your bloodstream like alcohol.
Praise from Larissa is dangerous. Too rare not to become holy.
You spend the next twenty minutes chasing the sound of it again.
—
During the break, Isabelle collapses dramatically beside you against the mirrored wall, her tights already laddering slightly at one knee.
“I think she enjoys this,” she mutters, gulping water. “Not ballet. Human suffering specifically.”
You smile faintly, unwinding the ribbons from your ankles. “You say that every rehearsal.”
“And every rehearsal I’m right.”
Across the room, Larissa stands near the piano speaking quietly with the accompanist. Winter light spills pale across her profile from the windows behind her, turning the edges of her hair almost silver. Even exhaustion seems elegant on her.
Your gaze catches there too long.
Isabelle notices immediately. Of course she does.
“Oh, you’re doomed.”
You look away at once. “I don’t know what you mean.”
“Yes, you do.”
“I really don’t.”
“She humiliates you publicly ten times a day and you look at her like she hung the moon over the theater district.”
You feel your stomach drop hard enough to hurt.
“Keep your voice down.”
Isabelle snorts softly. “Please. She probably noticed your crush before you did.”
“No, she didn’t.”
As if summoned by the conversation itself, Larissa looks up.
Her eyes meet yours across the room with terrifying immediacy. Not accidental. Never accidental.
You look away first.
Cowardly.
Necessary.
“Break is over,” Larissa says.
The room moves instantly.
—
Partnering rehearsal begins badly and deteriorates from there.
The White Swan pas de deux requires a kind of trust that exhaustion makes difficult. Girls miss cues. Hands slip. Timing fractures apart under pressure. Larissa’s patience thins visibly as the afternoon drags on, though her anger remains frighteningly controlled.
“You dance like frightened prey animals,” she says after one particularly clumsy sequence. “Odette is not fragile because she lacks strength. She is fragile because the world insists upon breaking her.”
No one responds.
Larissa gestures toward center floor. “You. Demonstrate.”
Of course she means you.
You step forward while the others retreat slightly toward the mirrors. Your partner takes position behind you, one hand hovering carefully near your waist.
Larissa circles once around the pair of you, gaze sweeping critically over every line of your posture.
“Chin,” she says.
You lift it.
“Higher.”
Her fingers settle briefly beneath your jaw, tilting your face upward with careful pressure. The touch is entirely practical. Professional. Yet your pulse reacts with humiliating speed anyway, stumbling unevenly beneath your ribs.
Larissa’s thumb lingers for the briefest moment before she steps away.
“There,” she says. “Odette does not beg to be loved. She expects it.”
You spend the next several seconds trying to remember how breathing works.
The music begins.
You dance.
Or attempt to.
Larissa watches with such unwavering intensity that your awareness of her becomes almost physical. You can feel her attention moving over every imperfect angle before she even speaks.
Halfway through the turn sequence, your balance falters.
“Stop.”
The music cuts abruptly.
Silence folds over the studio.
Larissa approaches slowly, her cane tapping once against the floorboards.
“You’re afraid of the turn.
“I’m not.”
“You are,” she says calmly. “You anticipate failure before your body has even moved.”
Shame burns beneath your skin.
Larissa steps closer. Too close.
Her hands settle against your waist to correct your alignment, firm enough that you can feel the exact span of her fingers through the thin fabric of your leotard. Your body goes painfully still beneath the contact.
“Feel where your center actually is,” she murmurs. “You keep abandoning it.”
The warmth of her palms lingers long after she steps away.
“Again.”
This time the turn lands perfectly.
Larissa’s expression shifts almost imperceptibly. Not satisfaction exactly, but something adjacent to it.
Then she says, “Now do it consistently,” and the moment disappears.
—
By the end of rehearsal, your right foot is bleeding.
You noticed it nearly an hour ago when pain sharpened suddenly beneath your toes, warm wetness gathering inside the pointe shoe. You continued dancing anyway. Most dancers would. Ballet has a way of teaching people that the body is negotiable.
The studio empties slowly around you once Larissa dismisses the class. Girls limp toward the locker rooms carrying dance bags and exhaustion alike, complaining softly about bruised arches and strained calves.
You sit on the bench and begin massaging your thighs.
“You’re staying again?” Isabelle asks.
“I need to practice.”
“You need a priest. And medical intervention.”
You smile faintly. “I was off during the turns.”
“You were exhausted.”
Larissa noticed.
The thought arrives instantly, shamefully warm.
Isabelle studies you for a moment, concern dimming the usual amusement in her face. “She’s harder on you than everyone else.”
“That’s because she thinks I need improvement.”
“No,” Isabelle says quietly. “I think it’s because she sees more in you.”
Before you can answer, the locker room door opens.
Silence follows immediately.
Larissa steps inside. “Everyone out.”
No one argues.
Within moments, only the two of you remain.
Larissa waits until the door closes behind the last dancer before looking at you fully.
“You stayed after rehearsal yesterday.”
“Yes, Miss Weems.”
“And the night before.”
You nod.
“Why?”
The truthful answer catches painfully behind your ribs.
Because your attention feels like oxygen.
Because when you look at me, I stop feeling ordinary.
Instead you say, “I need to improve.”
Larissa watches you in silence for several long seconds. The fluorescent lights flatten the room harshly, but they do strange things to her eyes, turning them pale enough to look almost silver.
“You confuse suffering with discipline,” she says eventually.
“I don’t.”
“You do.” Her voice remains calm. “You romanticize your exhaustion. You wear it like proof of devotion.”
The accuracy of it leaves you briefly speechless.
Larissa has always possessed a terrifying ability to reach directly into the softest parts of people and press there without hesitation.
“You think destroying yourself for ballet makes you exceptional,” she continues. “It does not. It makes you interchangeable.”
The words hurt because they are true. Worse because some part of you still wants to impress her by surviving them.
Larissa sighs softly then, almost tired. “Studio.”
You obey at once.
Of course you do.
The mirrors look different at night. Less honest, perhaps. The darkness outside the windows turns them strange, reflections layered over shadow until bodies appear ghostlike at the edges.
Rain taps softly against the glass while you tighten your ribbons.
Larissa stands near the piano watching.
“You favor your left foot when tired,” she says.
You glance up too quickly. “I’m fine.”
“That was not an invitation to lie.”
Heat creeps into your face.
Larissa gestures once toward center floor. “Show me the turns.”
Your muscles ache violently now that rehearsal has ended. Fatigue settling properly into the joints and tendons. Still, you rise.
The music begins softly from the stereo.
You dance.
One turn.
Then another.
Halfway through the third, pain slices sharply through your foot and your balance wavers.
“Stop.”
You freeze immediately.
Larissa crosses the room without hurry, though something sharper has entered her expression now.
“You’re injured.”
“No.”
Her gaze drops toward the faint stain spreading through the satin of your pointe shoe.
Then back to your face.
“You are a very poor liar.”
Before you can answer, Larissa crouches before you.
The movement startles you enough that your breath catches outright.
Her hands close carefully around your ankle, professional and efficient in a way that only worsens things. She unties the ribbons slowly, fingertips brushing occasionally against your skin with absent precision.
You stare helplessly at the pale crown of her hair beneath the dim lights.
Larissa removes the shoe, the blood-speckled padding earning a quiet exhale through her nose.
“There it is.”
Humiliation floods you immediately. You feel absurdly close to apologizing.
“You continued dancing on this,” Larissa says.
“I could still dance.”
“That was not the question.”
Her hand remains lightly wrapped around your ankle, warm and steady.
Rain gathers harder against the windows.
“You are reckless,” she says quietly. “And you mistake recklessness for ambition.”
The words settle heavily between you.
Then her thumb brushes once against the inside of your ankle, thoughtless perhaps, and your entire body reacts like struck wire.
Larissa notices. Of course she notices.
Her eyes lift slowly to yours.
A pause opens between you, sharp enough to split skin.
Then she releases you and stands.
“Again,” she says.
You stare at her. “I can barely stand.”
“Yes.”
No sympathy. No softness. Only that terrible unwavering expectation.
“You want Odette,” Larissa continues. “You want greatness. Yet the moment pain becomes inconvenient, you expect permission to stop.”
“I didn’t ask to stop.”
“No,” she says softly. “You asked to be admired for continuing. You wanted me to see, to notice that you endured the pain. And you thought that I would allow you to stop.”
The words land cleanly because they are true.
Outside, rain streaks silver down the darkened windows. The studio has gone almost black beyond the overhead lights, the mirrors no longer reflecting properly. Only fragments now. A shoulder. A hand. Larissa’s pale face suspended faintly in glass.
Your foot throbs violently inside the ruined shoe.
Every muscle in your body aches.
Still, when Larissa repeats, “Again,” you straighten instinctively beneath the command, and hate the part of yourself that feels proud for obeying.
hiiiiii how r u doinnnnnnnnnnn i had sent in a request about a miranda priestly fic [it has details] and i dont want to sound demending but i just wanted to know if there was aything goin on w that plot or if u liked it , umm it was the one where miranda hires a buff photographer who becomes her gay awakening sooo i just want 2 know tyyyyyyyy
Hiya!! There are currently 26 requests in my inbox that I’m willing to write, some dating back to last year! Whatever request sparks something in me gets pushed to the top of the list, and whenever I finish that one, I go back to writing fics in the order they were requested. This is also a secondary blog, so I try to write for my main blog more often than I do for this one. I honestly can’t tell you when your request will be written or posted, but for now, it’s only been in my inbox for a couple of weeks, so trust me, it could be worse! 😭
Greetings, my liege. I hope all is well with you. I have seen thy earlier literary creations, and am in wonder of thy marvelous master of the language. I was wondering if thou may produce a literary piece concerning the trope of one's employer and their personal assistant. The employer in my mind would be Miranda Priestly, from the wonderful movie "The Devil wears Prada". The employee could be a female reader, if possible (perhaps a tad younger than the employer, if thou didst deem it right) , and the piece may be angsty, considering the employee would be married, and happily, that too. Perhaps some pining (unrequited) , if that is not too much to ask. I shalt be content even if thou may not find time to consider such a request. Once again, I hope all is well with thou.
Good yard, my friend.
Enjoy Your Evening
Miranda Priestly x fem!reader
A/N: Forgive thy humble writer for the long delay, I did lay down my quill for a time and wander from the realm of writing. Yet thy exquisite request lingered, and I thank thee most sincerely for it. It was a joy to bring to life. Enjoy!
Miranda says your name like it is a verdict. Not loudly, never loudly. Miranda Priestly does not raise her voice when she can lower her tone and make the air in a room thin enough to choke on. It is an art form, really.
You watch it land on other people—Nigel, a junior editor, an unfortunate intern who has chosen the wrong shade of black—and you learn quickly: there are worse things than anger.
Disappointment is one of them.
You are not an intern. You are not someone who can be replaced by the next wide-eyed girl with a freshly ironed skirt and dreams of couture. You are her assistant, her right hand, her calendar, her shield, her translator, her scapegoat. You have learned the weight of her silence and the shape of her needs.
You have also learned, with a slow, steady dread that has become background noise in your days, the way Miranda looks at you when she thinks you aren’t paying attention.
It is never leering. Never sloppy. Never hungry in any way you could dismiss as crude.
It is worse than that.
It is careful.
It is like looking at a door you refuse to open because you know what is on the other side would ruin you.
“Is it done?” she asks now, in the backseat of the town car, the city blurring past the window like it is trying to leave you behind.
You hold your phone low, your thumb hovering over the email thread as if it might bite you. Your other hand holds a garment bag that cost more than your first car. It leans against your knee, crisp and immaculate. A whole life sealed in tissue paper.
“Yes,” you say. “The Paris itinerary is confirmed. The fittings are scheduled. The dinner with—”
“Not that.” Miranda’s eyes flick to you, a quick slice, then away again, as if she cannot afford to look too long. “The florist.”
Your stomach drops in a way that feels like muscle memory now. You work at Runway, you are perpetually dropping something—sleep, appetite, composure, pieces of yourself you didn’t know you could lose.
“The florist is confirmed,” you say. “Peonies. White. No lilies.”
“Good.” Miranda’s gaze returns to her phone, the glow lighting her cheekbones. “And the cake?”
“Vanilla bean. The bakery will deliver at noon. I—” You swallow. “I also confirmed the seating chart with your… with the girls’ preferences.”
Miranda’s mouth tightens. Not annoyance. Something else. Something that almost looks like pain, except you know better than to name it.
“You have a life outside of this,” she says, and the words are so quiet you almost think you imagined them.
It is not an accusation. It is simply a fact, stated like the weather, like the stock market, like the inevitability of death.
You dare to look at her fully. Miranda’s hair is perfect. Miranda’s coat is a masterpiece. Miranda’s face is composed with the precision of a museum display. Her hands are steady.
And yet there is a slight tension in her jaw that wasn’t there this morning.
“Yes,” you answer, because she has asked, and you have learned never to let a question hang between you like a challenge. “It’s… it’s my anniversary weekend.”
“Hm.”
That sound contains multitudes. You have heard it used for fashion shows and political scandals and once, memorably, for someone’s attempt at humor. But you have never heard it used like this.
Like a bruise pressed carefully.
“You’ll be leaving early,” Miranda says.
You blink. “I—”
“It wasn’t a question,” she adds, and you almost laugh because of course it isn’t. Nothing with Miranda is ever a question. “You will leave at six. The car will take you home.”
You should say thank you.
You should be relieved.
Instead, a small, irrational part of you feels the way it feels when a door closes softly behind you, and you realize you didn’t even try the handle.
“Miranda,” you begin, because you have trained yourself to speak before you think when it matters.
Her head turns slightly. “Yes?”
Your throat tightens around words you do not want to exist.
I don’t need the car.
I don’t need you to notice.
I don’t need you to look at me like that.
What comes out is, “That’s… generous.”
Miranda’s eyes move over you—your lipstick, the pencil skirt you learned to walk in without wincing, the earrings that were “fine” yesterday, which is Miranda’s version of applause. Her gaze lingers a fraction too long at your throat where your wedding ring rests on a chain, thin and gold and utterly ordinary.
“Don’t make a habit of taking kindness personally,” she says.
And then she looks away, as if she has said too much.
You spend the rest of the ride staring at the reflection of the city in the window, your thoughts sliding and catching on each other like broken glass.
At home, your husband opens the door before you can put your key in the lock.
His smile is familiar in the best way, like warm light. Like the first sip of coffee. Like a song you don’t realize you’ve been humming until it stops.
“Hey,” he says, and his hands find your waist, pulling you in. He kisses your cheek, then your mouth. It is gentle. It is sure. It is a reminder.
You melt into it before you can stop yourself, relief making your knees soft.
“I thought you’d be late,” he murmurs.
“I was going to be,” you confess, and you lean your forehead against his. “Miranda let me leave early.”
He makes a face at the name, an old joke between you. “The dragon has a heart?”
“Don’t,” you say, automatically, because even now, even here, you feel protective in a way that does not make sense. “She’s… complicated.”
He laughs quietly. “So are you.”
There are candles on the table, and the kind of pasta he makes when he wants to show off, and a bottle of wine you’ve been saving for “a special occasion” because life is always too busy and special occasions have to be fought for.
You sit, you eat, you let yourself be held by normalcy.
And still—still—your phone lies on the counter like a loaded weapon.
You try not to look at it. You fail.
“You’re watching it like it’s going to bite,” your husband observes, half amused, half concerned.
“It’s work,” you say.
“It’s always work.”
You shrug, and the motion feels defensive. “That’s why they pay me.”
He reaches across the table and covers your hand with his. “They pay you,” he repeats slowly, “to be on call twenty-four hours a day, to get screamed at by fashion tyrants, to miss dinners, to come home exhausted, to wake up at three in the morning because someone wants a scarf?”
You squeeze his fingers. “I’m good at it.”
“I know.” His smile softens. “I just want you to be good at being here, too.”
You want to tell him you are trying. You want to tell him that you love him, that this is worth it, that you have a plan. One more year, two at most, then you’ll move to something saner, something that doesn’t come with stilettos and survival instincts.
You want to tell him that Miranda is not a person you can leave easily, not when she has wrapped her expectations around you like silk tightening.
You want to tell him so many things.
Instead, you lift his hand and kiss his knuckles. “I’m here.”
For a little while, it works.
At eight forty-two, your phone lights up.
You freeze.
Your husband’s eyes flick to it, then back to you. “Don’t,” he says gently. “It’s our night.”
Your throat aches. “It could be urgent.”
He holds your gaze for a beat too long, then nods as if conceding a battle he’s been losing for months. “Fine. Just… five minutes.”
You go to the counter. You don’t take the phone with you like a person making an innocent check. You pick it up like someone lifting evidence.
The text is from Miranda.
Where are the programs for the benefit?
You stare.
You have them. You confirmed them. They were printed. They are on your desk. You can picture the stack in your mind, crisp and perfect, like every other thing you handle.
You type quickly.
They’re on my desk in the office. I can have someone bring them to your apartment if you’d like.
Three dots appear immediately. Disappear. Reappear.
No.
Another pause.
I will need them in the morning.
Your mouth goes dry. Of course. Of course she does. It’s nine at night. You are in silk pajamas. There is wine in your glass and your husband’s laughter still warm in the air. Miranda does not care about any of that. Miranda only cares about the morning.
I can run by the office now and bring them to you, you begin to type, because your fingers know how this goes.
Before you can send it, another message arrives.
Enjoy your evening.
You blink, thrown.
Then:
Don’t come.
It should feel like mercy.
It feels like a hand hovering just above your skin, refusing to touch because it would burn.
You stand there too long, phone in hand, while the kitchen behind you hums with quiet. When you finally turn back, your husband is watching you carefully.
“Well?” he asks.
You paste on a smile. You have learned how.
“Nothing,” you say. “It can wait.”
He exhales as if he’s been holding his breath. “Good.”
You walk back to the table and sit down. The candlelight makes everything look softer than it is. Your husband pours you another sip of wine.
You try to drink it, and it tastes like metal.
The next morning, Miranda is already in the office when you arrive, which is unusual enough that the entire floor seems to be moving around it, whispers folding in and out of cubicles like smoke.
Emily looks at you with the expression of someone watching a car crash in slow motion.
“She’s in a mood,” Emily murmurs, which is a redundant statement, but you understand her anyway. “She asked where you were at seven. Seven.”
You swallow. “I—she told me to enjoy my evening.”
Emily’s laugh is sharp. “Did she now.”
You don’t respond. The programs are on your desk, exactly where they should be. You gather them up, smooth the edges with hands that have carried everything from couture gowns to Miranda’s reputation.
You knock once on the office door. You hear the inevitable.
“Come in.”
You enter.
Miranda doesn’t look up at first. She is reading something, glasses perched on her nose, the picture of calm authority. The room smells faintly of expensive perfume and cold power.
You place the programs on her desk with a quiet precision that is almost reverent.
“Here,” you say.
Miranda’s eyes lift.
For a moment, you are caught in the full weight of her attention, and it makes your lungs forget what they’re supposed to do.
Her gaze is on you the way it was in the car—careful, deliberate, like she is measuring the distance between what she wants and what she will allow herself.
“Did you enjoy your anniversary?” she asks.
It is the wrong question for this room.
You keep your face neutral. “Yes.”
Miranda’s mouth twitches, something like bitterness. “And you’re happy.”
Your pulse stutters. “Yes.”
She leans back slightly, as if the word has struck her. Her fingers tap once on the desk. A tiny sound.
“You’re very lucky,” Miranda says.
You don’t know what to do with that. Miranda does not talk about luck. Miranda is the architect of her own world. Luck is for people who don’t plan.
“I work hard,” you reply, because you are stupid when you’re nervous.
Miranda’s eyes narrow, and something in her expression shifts. Not anger. Something more intimate.
“You work hard,” she repeats softly, as if tasting it. “Yes. You do.”
A beat of silence passes. The office around you continues to exist—the distant clack of heels, the murmur of phones—but in here, it becomes thin, irrelevant.
Miranda stands.
When she moves, it is always with purpose. Even now, crossing to the window, she looks like she’s stepping into a photograph.
“I need you in Paris,” she says, staring out at the skyline.
Your stomach tightens. “Of course.”
“It overlaps with your—” She pauses, and you know she is choosing her words the way she chooses clothes. “With personal commitments.”
You swallow. “I could reschedule.”
Miranda’s head turns sharply, eyes catching you like a hook. “Can you.”
It isn’t a question.
It’s a dare.
It’s also, you realize with a sick twist of understanding, hope.
And there it is, the thing you have been avoiding naming, the thing that lives in the space between Miranda’s “Hm” and her rare gentleness, the thing in her gaze that lingers on your wedding ring like it is an insult and a prayer.
Miranda wants you to choose her.
Not in a childish way. Not in the way that would end with flowers and a confession.
In the way Miranda understands choice: sacrifice, priority, surrender.
Your hands go cold. “Miranda—”
She cuts you off. “You will come to Paris.”
Your throat tightens. “My husband—”
The word lands between you like a slap.
Miranda’s face does not change much. It doesn’t need to. You see it anyway, the flinch she refuses to let show, the fraction of a second where she looks like someone who has been reminded of a wound she pretends not to have.
“Your husband,” she echoes.
You force yourself to keep breathing. “We have plans. We—” You stop, because you don’t know what you’re trying to defend. Your happiness? Your marriage? Your right to be a person outside of Runway?
Or the simple fact that you can’t be what Miranda is asking for, even if she never asks it aloud.
Miranda’s voice is low when she speaks again. “Do you love him?”
It is the most personal thing she has ever asked you, and it is also the coldest. Like she is analyzing a garment: quality, stitching, worth.
You stare at her. “Yes.”
And you watch it wound her. Not dramatically. Miranda would never allow that.
There is another beat of silence, and in it you see the truth—the quiet, brutal truth Miranda never says because it would make her human in a way she cannot afford.
She has loved people who did not choose her.
She has built an empire anyway.
She swallows, and the movement is so small you almost miss it. “Then you should go home,” she says.
You blink. “What?”
Miranda turns away, as if looking at you is suddenly too much. “You should resign,” she says, like she’s discussing the weather again. “You are wasted here. You are… distracted.”
The words sting because they are wrong and right at the same time.
“I’m not distracted,” you say, voice sharper than you intend. “I do my job.”
Miranda’s laugh is quiet, humorless. “You do it well. That is not the issue.”
You step forward before you can stop yourself. “Then what is?”
Miranda’s shoulders tense. For a moment you think she won’t answer. She has never had to. People don’t ask Miranda what she feels. People ask what she wants.
When she finally turns, her eyes are bright in a way that feels dangerous.
“You have a life,” she says, and the words come out like a confession ripped out of her throat. “A warm, happy little life that you return to. And every time you do, you leave something here.”
Her gaze drops again, to the chain around your neck. To the ring you don’t wear at work because it catches on fabric and you learned, early, to keep your personal life from snagging on Runway’s sharp edges.
“You leave me,” Miranda says, barely audibly.
Your chest constricts, breath turning shallow.
She is not asking you to be her lover. Not really. Miranda Priestly does not ask for things in that way. She is asking for something worse: to be chosen over and over again, to have her importance proved by your abandonment of everything else.
It is not romance. Not the kind that would let you call it love and survive the word.
And yet it feels like love anyway, because it hurts in the same place.
“Miranda,” you whisper, because her name is suddenly heavy.
Her chin lifts, and you see the armor snap back into place. The moment is sealed up, filed away, made into something neat and unassailable.
“You’re dismissed,” she says.
Your hands curl into fists at your sides, nails biting into your palm. You want to say something perfect, something that will undo the damage, something that will make Miranda look at you without that aching restraint.
You want to tell her she deserves something gentler than this.
You want to tell her you are not a cruel person, that you never meant to become the sharp edge against her throat.
But you have also learned that Miranda does not accept consolation. Miranda does not accept pity. Miranda will take what you give her, and she will bleed quietly from the places you cannot touch.
So you do the only thing you can do that is kind.
You turn toward the door.
Behind you, Miranda speaks again, voice barely above the whisper of silk.
“Enjoy your evening,” she says.
It is not permission.
It is surrender.
You pause.
“You too,” you whisper.
And that is the cruelest thing you could have said.
Because Miranda Priestly does not have evenings.
She has work.
She has silence.
She has the echo of doors closing.
You walk out into the bright, busy hallway, and the world keeps moving, and you keep moving with it, your phone buzzing already with the next demand, the next crisis, the next proof that you are needed.
You answer them all.
And later, when you go home to your husband’s open arms and warm laughter, you will feel the echo of Miranda’s voice in your chest like an old bruise.
You will tell yourself you chose correctly.
You will tell yourself this is what love is supposed to be: a steady light, not a fire.
But some nights you will lie awake and remember how Miranda looked at you when she said you were lucky.
And you will understand, with a slow, nauseating clarity, that she wasn’t the only one pining.
You were just the only one who got to go home to warmth.
HI i just want to know which fics are currently in the works not just because i want to see if my request is among (us) them but also because i wanna know what other fics i and the rest of your audience can look forward to!!! IM ON ANON BECAUSE IM SCARED OF ACCIDENTALLY COMING OFF AS IMPATIENT SORRY IM JUST EXCITED
Hiya! I’m currently working on three fics for this blog—a Joan Ferguson one, a Miranda Priestly one and last but not least, a Tywin one! There’s currently 20 requests in my inbox (most of which I’m willing to write), and I’m also working on fics for my main blog. So it might be a while before you see your request on here!
(Larissa is not the principal at Nevermore, she is a fairly well-known writer) Larissa was "happily" married to a guy but lately she had started to feel lonelier for some reason until a new library opened in the city where she lived with her husband (I'm not going to specify which city) Reader worked at the library. She was the librarian and a fan of Larissa's work. When Larissa went to the library to read something, Reader got very excited and invited her to be part of her reading club. Offer that Larissa accepted because she didn't want to feel alone anymore, And also because Reader had caught her attention.
I'll leave the rest to your own imagination and I hope you take this request into account since it has really been on my mind for days😭😭
(Oh and also some smut because life is too short not to enjoy a good spicy reading😜)
Sorry if there are words that are not so clear, English is not my native language.
Hearts on the Shelf (nsfw)
AU author!larissa weems x librarian!reader
A/N: Hi anon! I didn’t 100% stick to your script—or rather I did but tweaked a few things so it’d fit my writing style—I hope you’ll enjoy what I did with your request! I love a good library AU. 🫶🏻
You always open the library before the sun has figured itself out. The door sighs when you unlock it, the lights hum and warm from cold to a forgiving glow. Cardboard still lives under the circulation desk—boxes from the last shipment that you keep forgetting to take to the back. The smell is new wood and paper dust and that crisp, high note of brand-new glue. You breathe it in like a promise.
On opening week you taped a handwritten sign beside the returns slot:
Reading Club—Thursdays at 7. Come as you are. Bring whatever book you can’t stop thinking about.
You didn’t expect many to come, but somehow managed to gather a few regulars.
Around noon, the door slides open and cold air rides in on a long black coat. You look up from your terminal—ready with your standard welcome—and the words get lost somewhere, stunned, on the back of your tongue.
Larissa Weems is taller than she looks on dust jacket photos. There’s a steadiness to the way she carries her height—nothing apologetic about it. Her white hair is done like a quiet argument against time. A red diamond sits bright on her ring finger, catching the light every time she moves, glittering like a boundary.
You’ve read everything she’s published. Twice. Sometimes thrice. When her third novel dropped, you read it overnight and came to work dreamy with lack of sleep, your heart feeling like someone had put a window in it and forgotten to close it.
Now she is here, not on a screen, not on a sleeve, but in your lobby looking at the new fiction table like she is hungry and trying not to seem so.
“Welcome,” you manage, and hear the breathless quality in the word. You try again, your voice steadier. “Welcome to the new city library.”
She smiles. It does something to your stomach you don’t have the language for. “Congratulations. It still has that—” she lifts her chin as if smelling the air— “first chapter scent.”
You laugh, and it comes out more honest than you intended. “I like to think so.”
Her glance slides to your name tag, and she says your name like she’s testing how it feels in her mouth. “Would you help me find something?”
“Anything.”
“Something that isn’t mine,” she says wryly, then softens. “Something I could read without hearing myself.”
You take her past the debut authors, past a small display of translated literature you set up because a patron said she’d never seen it highlighted here before. You offer her a small, sharp novel you loved last winter, and she turns it over in her hands like it might tell her a secret.
“Would you—” You hesitate. “I run a reading club on Thursdays. It’s very small. People bring what they’re reading and talk about why. You’d be very welcome.”
The red diamond ring flashes again as she passes the book between her hands. She looks at you. “That sounds…human,” she says. There is both longing and embarrassment in the word. “Are you sure you’d want me there? I wouldn’t want to take up all the air.”
“There’s plenty,” you say. “I promise.”
Her smile turns quiet and private, something that looks like it belongs in the margins. “Then I’ll come.”
You spend the rest of the afternoon insisting to yourself you are not counting down hours.
Thursday arrives on feet made of glass. It feels like anything could break if you touch it wrong. You arrange a circle of chairs in the back, half-hidden by the philosophy shelves, where the fluorescents turn soft over dark wood and the sound of the street becomes nothing more than an idea.
The regulars trickle in—the teenager with a pencil behind her ear, the couple who whisper fiercely about poems, the retired teacher who always brings cookies and insists they’re nothing, really. You keep turning toward the door.
Larissa walks in five minutes late, as if to make sure the group belonged to itself before she joined. She carefully chooses her seat, carefully folds her coat over the back of the chair, carefully places the book on her lap—the slim novel you recommended. The ring glints and then disappears when she laces her fingers together and sets them there, still and composed.
You start with your usual question—What is keeping you company this week?—and the story of the hour unfolds, one heart at a time. When it’s Larissa’s turn, she touches the cover like she’s patting a nervous horse.
“I wanted to read someone else’s music for a while,” she says. “I wanted to be taught how to want things again.”
It is honest enough that the group takes a breath together, and then the talk moves forward, not skittering around her name but not collapsing under it, either. She listens more than she speaks, and when she does speak, it threads through what everyone else is saying. She is generous with her attention. When the hour ends, no one rushes to leave. The teenager asks if writers ever hate their own sentences. The couple debates metaphors. The retired teacher wraps two extra cookies and slips them into Larissa’s hand with the quiet gravity of a sacrament.
After, when the chairs are stacked and the others gone, Larissa lingers among the shelves. You pretend to straighten a display.
“Thank you,” she says finally.
“For what?”
“For making a circle without making a stage.”
You nod. “You’re welcome.”
She draws the book to her chest, then taps the cover. “What should I read next?”
You pull a volume from the shelf. “This one has a mean first chapter. Not mean-spirited, but…unforgiving.” You glance at her. “I think you might like that.”
She tilts her head. “Unforgiving can be honest.”
“Honesty can be a kind of love,” you say, and then flush because it’s too big for a casual answer.
Her eyes do a small, startled thing, like you surprised her without scaring her. She leans in. “Yes.”
A moment lives between you like a candle cupped in two hands. You are suddenly aware of her breath, of the expensive, clean scent of her coat, of the fact that when she looks down at you like that, the library feels full of secret places.
A key turns in the front door—security, doing their check—and the moment skitters away. Larissa slips the new book into her bag, thanks you again, and leaves with her coat collar up against the March wind. You stay a little longer with the afterimage of her against the stacks and the knowledge that you are, once again, counting days.
She quickly becomes a regular.
Sometimes she comes for the club. Sometimes she comes mid-afternoon when no one else is around and asks if she can sit in the reading room. You start leaving the good lamp on for her, the one that makes a circle of gold on the table and softens anyone sitting inside it. She always chooses the same chair. You start to know the particular sound of the door when it’s her.
She returns the unforgiving book, a smile tucked into one corner of her mouth. “It was exactly as cruel as it needed to be,” she says. “I kept trying to forgive it. It kept refusing to let me.”
“Did you like that?” you ask.
“I liked being refused for the right reasons,” she answers, and something in you goes very still.
On a rainy Wednesday, she stands at the edge of the desk, watching rain stitch itself between the streetlights. She holds herself like she’s waiting to come back together.
“Do you ever read to feel less alone?” she asks.
“All the time,” you say. “It works, until it doesn’t.”
She gives a small smile. “And then?”
“Then I have to do something dangerous,” you say, and it occurs to you that inviting her to your club was that very danger. You clear your throat. “Tea?”
She follows you to the staff break room, where the kettle is old and the mugs are mismatched and nothing smells like anything except peppermint, coffee ghost, and the faint citrus of the hand soap. You stand shoulder to shoulder waiting for the water to boil, and the quiet between you is companionable. You hand her a mug. Your fingers brush, and you both pretend to be interested in the steam.
“Thank you,” she says. “I… don’t like asking for things.”
“Because you’re bad at it?”
“Because I was taught not to need them.”
“Those are not the same,” you say.
She looks at you like she might write your sentence down and chew on it later. The ring flashes when she lifts the cup. You notice how loose it looks on her finger today, the way winter loosens a window in its frame just before spring.
“Tell me about your favorite margin,” she says suddenly.
“My what?”
She smiles, a real one. “I’ve read your annotations in that book you recommended.”
Your cheeks heat. “Oh. Those. I—well. I’m trying not to sound like an undergrad with a crush on a metaphor.”
“You’re succeeding,” she says dryly, then adds, more gently, “I like the way you listen to a sentence. You ask it what it wants before you decide what you want it to do.”
The compliment goes directly to a place in you that believes itself unseen. “My favorite page is where the book realizes what it’s about, and it’s not what the book thought,” you say. “The page where it betrays itself into honesty.”
Larissa inhales. You feel it, the way you feel the hush right before a piece of music breaks your heart. She sets her cup down, controlled.
“Would you…show me where the quiet is?” she asks. “The quiet that’s big enough to hear that kind of page turn?”
You take her to the furthest aisle, to the square of floor between history and philosophy, where world reduces itself to the slide of a finger along spines. It is not quite a secret place, but it has the decency to behave like one.
“This is where I make the big decisions,” you whisper.
“What big decisions are there in a library?” she whispers back.
“Who I’m going to be when I leave,” you say, playful and not.
Her eyes are very blue when she looks at you. There is so much there—tiredness, stubbornness, a hunger that is beginning to admit its own name. For a second, you think she is going to step into that small square of space with you, closing the distance the way one closes a book. Instead she reaches out and touches the edge of a shelf with the tips of her fingers, making the books tremble as though exhaling.
“I could live here,” she says.
“You do,” you answer. “In a way.”
Her mouth tilts. “And you?” She doesn’t finish the question. She doesn’t have to. Do you live anywhere other than the quiet?
Your shoulders lift. “I’m trying.”
Two weeks later, she comes to the club with a slim folder and the look of someone who is doing something she told herself she would not do. After introductions and the usual scrappy chorus of people loving things, she opens the folder and takes out six pages of printed prose.
“It’s an essay,” she says in that careful, offhand way the brave have of announcing their own bravery. “About…beside-ness.”
You settle into the sound of her voice. It is lower when she reads, more textured. The essay is about the second chair in a room, about watching a door that never opens, about the way loneliness reorganizes furniture to see if it changes the shape of the air. It is about a woman who begins to write notes to the librarian in the margins of books—notes she never signs, because the writing is a confession. It is precise and clean and, in the way of clean things, devastating.
By the end, the couple is breathing like they’ve run somewhere. The teenager is licking tears off her upper lip like rain. The retired teacher puts a cookie on the table and smooths its napkin with a hand that shakes. You, who have collected other people’s feelings as a vocation, struggle to know where to put your own.
The discussion is richer than any you’ve hosted and gentler, too, as if the essay made everyone careful. When the chairs are stacked and the room returned to itself, Larissa stays seated, her pages face-down in her lap. She looks up once the door clicks shut behind the last patron.
“I don’t know how to go home after reading something true,” she says.
You set a hand on the back of a chair. It is only wood under your palm, and still you are aware of the line of your body from your heels through your spine to the top of your skull, the way you are aware of yourself when you are about to make a decision.
“Then don’t,” you say. “Not yet.”
The words move between you and hang there, a question that is half invitation. She watches your mouth when you speak.
You close the door to the reading room and flip the small sign to Closed. The city outside is black glass and rain lines. You check yourself in the reflection of a picture frame and then decide against it. This needs to be honest or not at all.
Larissa stands at the end of an aisle, her profile cut sharp by the lamp you left on for her—your lamp, the good one. She draws off her wedding ring. She holds it in her palm like she doesn’t know where it should go, then slips it into her coat pocket without ceremony. You can feel your pulse in your mouth.
“If you want me to put that back on, say it,” she says quietly.
“Do you want to?”
Her throat moves. “I want to want to. But I don’t.”
For a beat you both breathe like the other’s breath is instruction. Then she steps into your square of floor—into the place you told her is where you decide who to be—and you feel your life tilt on its axis to let her in.
“Tell me to stop if you need me to,” she says. Her hand comes to your cheek, long fingers cool from the pocket where the ring lives now, not on her body. She is asking permission with her eyes even as every inch of her reads intent.
The first kiss is an exhale. It tastes like peppermint tea and bravery. She is warm, her mouth deliberate, her height folding down to meet you. She kisses you like a paragraph when she knows where it is going—not rushed, but with an inevitability that carries its own momentum. You think, absurdly, that you will never again be able to look at the end of the philosophy section without flushing.
When she breaks for air, it is a short, startled sound, like a page tearing cleanly. She presses her forehead to yours. “I haven’t done something without permission in a long time,” she says. “It turns out I needed a better permission.”
“You can have mine,” you say, barely. “Take it.”
And she does.
Your back touches the bookcase as if the library itself wants to hold you up. She runs her thumbs along your jaw, then your throat, feeling your pulse like a footnote under her fingers. Her hands are big on you—confident, careful.
“Look at me,” she asks, and you do. The seeing makes it hotter. It makes it worse in the way you want. Her pupils are blown wide, the blue a ring you could fall through.
She unbuttons your blouse with the measured pace of someone unwrapping a secret because the unwrapping is the point. Every button is a click in the quiet. She pauses at the last one, glances up, and when you nod, she opens you. Her palm covers your sternum. You feel claimed and read at once.
“Beautiful,” she says, but it’s not a compliment so much as field notes—facts, recorded. She bends, kisses your collarbone, then lower, tasting a line across your skin until your breath is a tremor. When her mouth closes around your nipple, something in you that has been politely asleep sits up, lurches awake, and demands. You thread your fingers into her hair and try not to be louder than the room can bear.
She drops to her knees in a kind of kneeling that has nothing to do with prayer. Her hands slide over the backs of your thighs, mapping you like the sensible geography of desire. She looks up from there. “May I?” Her voice is sanded down by wanting, low enough that you feel it more than hear it.
“Yes,” you say. “God, yes.”
She undresses you only as much as she needs to, leaving half of you still librarian, the other half bare and reckless in the hush. Her mouth is warm and serious between your legs, her tongue finding a rhythm that seems like it always existed. You lean one shoulder to the books and clutch the shelf, aware in a far-off way of titles running under your fingers—histories of revolutions, philosophies of ethics—while your body writes its own essay in heat and noise.
She is thorough. She is patient. She is greedy. You come once, grateful thing that turns your knees unreliable. She holds your hips through it, murmuring into you, words you can’t catch but which feel like yes and more and again. She does it again, because she can, and the second time you shake so hard a book thuds to the floor and you both laugh breathlessly against each other like thieves startled by their own success.
“Come here,” you say, tugging at her shoulder because you’re suddenly furious with the distance of clothing and anything that is not skin on skin.
She stands. You kiss her with the taste of yourself on her tongue, the inarguable evidence of what you want. You help with her buttons this time, even as your hands shake. Under the lapel of her blouse, her bra is elegant and black. You mouth along the edge, slipping a strap down with your teeth, and she swears very quietly, a word that sounds educated.
When you push her against the opposite shelf, the lamp casts both of you in a soft gold that makes everything feel like the saxophone part of a song. You slide your hand into her underwear, and she is slick and hot and no longer composed. Her breath breaks on your shoulder. “Please,” she says. It is unadorned. It is perfect.
You touch her the way she touched you—attentive, greedy, with an editor’s focus. She tips her head back against the spines and closes her eyes, her mouth open in a hint of disbelief. You kiss the long line of her throat as your fingers find a rhythm and a pressure that makes her hips jerk. The shelf shivers with it. There is going to be a dent in the quiet tomorrow. You decide to live with that.
When she comes, it is with a sound she tries and fails to swallow. She bites your shoulder—not to mark, but to muffle—and you hold her through it, shocked by the personal, private intimacy of being the one to witness the moment she unravels. After, she breathes against your skin and laughs breathlessly. You could frame the sound and hang it.
You stay there, pressed together, letting the room reassemble around you. Rain needles the windows.
“I don’t know how to be careful with you,” she says into your neck.
“You’re doing fine,” you murmur, stroking the back of her neck, the place where loose strands of hair have finally given up the fight.
“I should feel guilty,” she says after a moment, eyes open on the nearest title as if it can advise her. “I don’t. I feel—” She searches. “Aligned.”
“Maybe truth does that,” you say. “Maybe it makes the furniture make sense.”
She lifts her head to look at you, and whatever she sees there resolves something in her face. She touches your cheek again, softer than the first time, like she is writing your features down to memorize later. “I want to read the rest of you,” she says quietly.
“You can,” you answer, just as quiet. “Come back. Tomorrow. Saturday. Whenever you can stand it.”
She grins—a real, reckless grin that sits young on her elegant mouth and lights the room better than the lamp. “Bossy librarian.”
“Hungry writer.”
She kisses you again because you both can. After, you put yourselves back together in the kind of silence that is not awkward, and does not apologize. You pick up the fallen book and reshelve it. She finds her ring in her pocket and holds it again, this time like a question that can be answered later. She doesn’t put it back on.
At the desk, you write your number on a library scrap slip because there is something right about it living among names and due dates. You slide it across to her. “For…administrative purposes,” you say dryly.
Her laugh is low and fond. She tucks the slip into her wallet like a talisman. “I’ll need to return a book,” she says, straight-faced.
“Of course. We charge late fees for bad decisions.”
“I’m done paying for those,” she answers. It lands like a vow.
She steps toward the door and stops. The city beyond is a rain blur. She looks at you a long second, not like she is saying goodbye but like she is pausing on a page worth rereading. Then she leaves, and you stand in the warm spill of the desk lamp, the library humming softly around you, every book a held breath.
You lock up, inventory your body with frank amazement, and take the trash out as if you didn’t just change your life between History and Philosophy. On your way home you replay the way she said aligned. The word sits under your tongue like a sweet.
That night, you sleep with the window cracked to let the rain in. Your phone lights up at 12:13 with a message that begins with your name and then: I’m thinking about the square of floor where people decide who to be. I think I chose you before I knew that’s what I was doing.
You stare at it, the simplicity and the audacity of it, the way it names what happened without apology. You type: Come read with me tomorrow. I’ll save your chair and the good lamp.
Three dots pulse, then vanish, then return. Yes, she writes. Please.
You lie on your back in the dark, smiling, and picture the ring in her pocket—like a period removed from the end of a sentence to see what happens when the line keeps running.
Hello! I hope you're doing well. May I request a Red Queen x reader fic where the reader is maybe her lady in waiting or her advisor or sth? Just generally her right hand and incredibly loyal. I just think Iracebeth deserves someone intensely loyal who is always staunchly in her corner (and very much in love with her).
Mercy in Red
Red Queen x fem!reader
A/N: I 100% agree with you. Iracebeth deserves someone to be a tad less suspicious of than others. I rewatched the movies to write this, had a lot of fun. Thank you for your request!
When Iracebeth calls, the castle leans closer.
Salazen Grum trembles with arches and nerves. At its center is the Red Queen—cruel, suspicious, paranoid. Courtiers arrange their smiles like offerings, soldiers stand stiff as pikes. You remain a step to her right, a half-breath behind. Her shadow, her right hand.
“Bring me my scepter, my left shoe, the list of fools, and a good threat,” she orders.
You hand her all four without moving. She notices. She always does. Her painted mouth flicks in a private smirk before she announces judgment on a trembling miller who miscounted grain.
Ordinarily: death. But she pauses over the note you slipped beneath her decree—Mercy will look good on You this morning. The capital Y is intentional.
“This is a day for straw-scented mercy,” she declares. “Be gone to the Ill-Smelling Stables. Scrub the pigs. Keep your neck.”
The court gasps. Stayne sulks. The story of her mercy spreads like sugared tart, and only you catch her small, sly smile.
Court disperses in flutters of chatter. Iracebeth remains seated, tapping her scepter against the floor until the echo suits her mood. You step forward, offering the kerchief she always forgets she needs. She takes it without thanks, dabs her painted lips, and mutters, “They will think me soft.”
“They will think you merciful,” you say. “And fear that they might be next to test your patience.”
Her eyes cut to you. “You make my cruelty into theater.”
“You make it into power,” you answer, steady. “I only hold up the mirror.”
She stares another moment, searching your face as if for treachery, then lets out a huff that is more laugh than sigh. “You are clever enough to survive me. That is irritating.”
“I hope to be more than survival to you, Majesty.”
The words slip, heavier than intended, but she only narrows her eyes in a way that makes your chest burn. “We will see,” she says, rising with a rustle of skirts. “Bring me something sweet. My tongue tires of iron.”
At dusk she discards the crown like a stone from her chest. You are the only one permitted into her chambers unannounced. You draw her bath, ready salve for the ache at the base of her skull.
She sighs when your fingers work the knots in her neck. Steam softens her sharpness. For once, she looks less like a storm and more like a woman exhausted.
“You showed me merciful today,” she says. “What did that feel like?”
“Like truth,” you answer, before caution stops you.
Her eyes open. “You believe that of me?”
“I know it,” you say. “You can be whatever you please. People mistake your sharpness for your only shape. I’ve seen the others.”
She studies you, gaze tight as ribbon. Then she veers away. “Stayne says spies lurk at the southwest bridge. He wants pikes filled with heads.”
“He always does,” you say. “We’ll bait them with false whispers, take them alive.”
She exhales, pleased. “Good. You think of how things will feel.”
“I think of you,” you whisper, but only the water hears.
When you dry her hands afterward, she lets you hold them longer than necessary. Her fingers, damp and unpainted, twitch once against yours before she pulls away. “Enough,” she says brusquely, though she does not look at you when she says it.
The next morning she is restless. You find her pacing the gallery, muttering threats to the marble busts that line the walls. When she notices you, her posture changes—not softer, but straighter, as if to remind you who she is.
“They whisper,” she snaps. “That I am unpredictable.”
“They are correct,” you say mildly. “And very afraid.”
Her painted mouth curves despite itself. “You defend even my temper.”
“I defend all of you,” you say.
For a moment, silence. Then she steps close enough that the scent of rose-oil and tart sugar fills your lungs. “If I ever believed you lied to me,” she says softly, “I would destroy you with more dedication than I have ever shown anyone.”
“I know,” you reply, and you mean it.
Something flickers in her eyes—satisfaction, or perhaps relief. She lifts her chin and sweeps past you, muttering, “See that you never test me.” But her sleeve brushes yours as she goes, deliberately, like a signature.
The assassin comes not by bridge but on the croquet grounds. He lunges from the hedges, dagger aimed at Iracebeth’s side.
You move before you think. Steel finds your ribs, and the world narrows to her scream—raw, unroyal.
“Stay!” she orders, clutching you. “I command you to live!”
The guards seize the man. Stayne bares his teeth, ready for beheading.
“Don’t you dare,” Iracebeth snaps, voice breaking. “He lives until I say.” Then, to you: “Do not disobey me now.”
“I am obedient,” you rasp, blood wetting your bodice. “Majesty… are you angry with me?”
“I am incandescent,” she spits. “Wrath, fear, fury. And I am not finished with you.”
And then—reckless—you confess it. “I love you.”
The air stills. For once, she has no words. She drags your hand to her painted mouth. “Obey me,” she whispers. “Live. Then we will discuss how thoroughly I return what is given.”
You wake in her chamber to candlelight. She has fallen asleep in a chair, your hand still clutched in hers. Without paint or crown, she looks almost like the girl who once begged her sister to love her.
When she startles awake and sees you conscious, relief floods her face like sunrise. “You impossible creature,” she mutters. “Magnificent. Disobedient.”
“I obeyed,” you croak, and she laughs, half-sob.
“You said you loved me,” she accuses.
“I meant it,” you reply. “It isn’t a task. It’s simply the name for what I’ve been doing all this time.”
She presses your palm to her cheek. “I am not easy to love,” she admits.
“I know,” you say. “But I do.”
Silence holds, then cracks. “Then I will try to be good to the thing that loves me,” she says. She tucks your blanket with officious tenderness and orders, “Sleep. Dream of me deferentially. Report in the morning.”
By dawn she is every inch a monarch. The assassin stands bound and pale. She descends the stairs like an orchestra tuning itself to her stride.
“The Right Hand of the Queen,” the herald begins—
“—the one who saved my inconvenient life,” Iracebeth interrupts, eyes locked on you. “Who will henceforth be obeyed as if their voice were mine, unless I claim I thought of it first.”
The court titters nervously. She pivots to the assassin. “For treachery I would remove your mind. But I am bored of blood. You will walk the Labyrinth of Reflection until you understand. If you cannot, walk forever.”
The hush that follows is admiration wrapped in fear.
Later, in a corridor red with light, she presses a gold ring into your palm—a heart topped with a crown. She slides it onto your finger herself, eyes intent.
“You will wear it where all can see,” she says.
“Yes, Majesty.”
“And tonight,” she adds, voice faltering in a way that makes you ache, “you will come to me. We must draft a schedule for being… ours.”
You repeat it back—“Ours”—and she smiles like the sun has at last chosen her.
In public, you are the Right Hand who ensures her decrees leave room for mercy. In private, you learn the grammar of her silences. She relapses into fury, and you let her. She softens into tears, and you do not tell. Sometimes her laugh is still a knife. But sometimes it is round as a pear, sweet and startling, and the whole castle leans closer to hear it.
You remain beside her, meticulously, fiercely, joyfully loyal. Not because she commands it—though she does—but because you choose it, each morning and each night. It is not a miracle. It is a muscle. And with it, you lift a crown.
A/N: Yes, seeing Larissa in that nurse outfit actually sparked some things in me. As usual, this is a tad bit angsty, but—rare occurrence on this blog—it comes with a happy ending! This is all I’ve been thinking about for the last three days. Enjoy!
When you were dreaming, it was all light and water. No—light in water. Ripples of brightness moved when you tried to look straight at them, drifting away with a bored grace, like they knew you would follow. Sometimes there was a voice, one you couldn’t name, measured and warm as the sun through bathwater. When it spoke, the light steadied. The world remembered how to be soft.
The day you surfaced, you thought you were breaking a window.
The first thing you knew was the panic of breath. Your lungs remembered before your eyes did, pulling against an invisible weight. Then the ache resolved into shapes, into the drawn lines of a room. You blinked and the ceiling wasn’t sky after all—it was tile, humming with fluorescent light. A half-drawn curtain, a vase with stubborn green on the sill. Your mouth tasted like metal. Your hands didn’t know where to live.
“Hey,” the voice said, like it had always said it. “You’re all right. Look at me.”
You dragged your gaze sideways and met a pair of blue eyes startling in their clarity. They made things still. The rest of her followed. Silver-blonde hair in a neat twist, pale pink lipstick, creased, pleasant lines at the corners of her eyes. White scrubs that should have been severe, but gentled in the way her hand hovered near your shoulder instead of claiming it.
“There you are,” she said, and you thought—there I am. “You’re safe.”
The word tangled in your throat. You tried to say hi, to ask how long. What came out was a raw scrape, and then the embarrassment of the oxygen cannula tugging as you moved.
“Easy.” Her hand settled on your shoulder, cool and deliberate. You knew the way someone touched when they were used to touching people: not hesitantly, not possessively. Like gravity.
You saw the badge then. Weems, Larissa.
“Wa—” You failed again.
“Don’t strain,” Larissa said. “You’ve been asleep. Your throat will be sore. Blink once for yes. Do you understand me?”
You blinked. One slow time. You discovered you had tears, and they rolled down into your ears.
“Good.” She smiled—only a little, like a secret. “Welcome back.”
The story of waking is not the story they tell you. There was no triumphant music, no sudden clarity. It was slow, a process measured in increments of care. You were a sandbar the tide kept trying to take back; Larissa stood there with patience, coaxing you into a shape you recognized.
It turned out you had been asleep for three months. A car, rain, someone else’s brakes. They told you the facts you could handle on day five. Day one, you received water on a pink sponge and a smile as steady as an IV drip. Day two, a physical therapist visited, all cheer and rubber soles, and Larissa moved your limbs in a rhythm like a lullaby made visible. Day three, you dreamed of an ocean whose tide knew your name. Day four, you cried because your hands trembled so much you kept spilling the spoon, and Larissa sat beside you and said, “It’s all right to grieve what’s hard,” in that quiet voice that made even the machines hush.
You learned the room in pieces, the way you learned your own body again. The clock’s short cough of a tick. Sun arriving on the floor like a visiting friend. The corridor’s symphony—wheels, laughter, low voices rising and falling like bedtime stories.
And Larissa.
She learned you first. She learned your chart, the numbers that tried to flatten you, the line of bites on your lip when you were frustrated, the way you went still before pain. She learned what music helped you sleep, that you preferred lemon ice to cherry, that you watched hands when listening. If you woke in the unkind hours, Larissa would be there, a hand with water, a whispered joke, the light dimmed to gold.
“You don’t have to stay,” you said once, the clock at a time you didn’t want to know. “I’m not your only patient.”
“No,” she agreed. “But I am your nurse.”
“Seems like semantics.”
“Semantics are where feelings live.” She capped your water and turned the cup so the straw laid just so. “Rest.”
You did.
There were boundaries. You knew that. Every touch had a reason, every kindness a script. Yet the human heart didn’t speak in laminated policies.
Larissa kept finding true things to say. She learned your rhythm and you hers. Your days folded into shapes that remembered the night’s corners.
When the speech therapist made you repeat phrases—My name is—, I feel—, I need—Larissa said, “Their job is to rebuild the parts of speech. Mine is to hold the scaffolding while you climb.”
“Do you talk like that to all your patients?” you teased.
She almost said yes, then changed her mind.
“No.”
“Lucky me.”
“That would imply luck exists,” she said. You wanted to ask what had taught her to be so precise with consolation. Instead, you nodded and held your blanket like a railing.
She never touched you without telling you first. I’m going to adjust this. May I look at your incision? This will be cold.The consent threaded through the routine made you dizzy with gratitude.
You didn’t talk about the accident on purpose. It came in flashes. Glass. Headlights. The prayer of a stranger dragging you out. You once asked for the clothes you’d been wearing. To prove to yourself you were more than a disaster’s aftermath. You wanted to say to a torn blouse: you had a life once. Larissa looked at you for a long second and said, “I don’t think that would serve you today.” You believed her.
She had a laugh she didn’t use often. The first time you made her laugh, you were distracting yourself from the burn of staples. She’d been describing the ward’s rotation schedule and you said, “You sound like you’re plotting a heist but the loot is morphine.” Her laugh came so unexpected your eyes stung. Look what you could still do: pull delight out of the air, like sugar out of caramel, like mercy out of a routine.
It would be more comfortable to pretend it didn’t change something in you.
It wasn’t that Larissa flirted. She didn’t. There were no lingering touches. But the way she listened wasn’t professional. Not only professional. You wondered if, in another life, she had been a headmistress or something equally exacting. Weems sounded like the name on the door of an office with books in it and a stained glass window.
You told her the story of your grandmother’s kitchen—the low windows, flour like winter, ceramic geese lined up on the sill as if waiting for the bus. Larissa listened like the geese mattered, like you would not lose this if she had her say.
You practiced standing. Then walking, the slow shuffle of your feet like you were learning the floor. You learned the corridor, the left turn that led to sun and the right that led to a window with a tree.
Larissa brought you a cheap little notebook with a fox on the cover. “For the words you don’t want to lose again.” You wrote down lemon, fox, Larissa. You almost crossed it out. You didn’t. You closed the cover and pressed your palm to it like a promise.
“I can’t—“ you started one morning when it was all too much. The way your muscles trembled with two steps, the indignity of needing help to brush your hair. You didn’t know what the rest of the sentence was and hated that, too.
“You can,” Larissa said, not unkind. “And when you can’t, I will.”
Something hooked behind your sternum. You wanted to say, You can’t keep me, you know. You wanted to say, I’m not yours. You wanted to say, You feel like a shore I will spend my life trying to find again.
Instead, because language was still a skittish thing, you said, “Stay?”
And she said, “Yes,” like a vow.
The thunderclap came in a day that looked like any other.
You were sitting with a blanket tucked over your lap, the war with your knees producing a ceasefire for the afternoon. Larissa was charting at the little table by the window, her posture elegant, the angle of her wrist making even a ballpoint pen look like a long-stemmed glass. The cheapest flowers in the vase looked expensive because they were near her.
A knock came at the door, then the body that goes with the knock: a small man with the face that comes from not sleeping enough. Dr. Reddy, the badge announced. He smiled at you in that thin, practiced way of physicians, all kindness and quarter-hours. Then he turned the smile off and looked at Larissa.
“Ms. Weems,” he said. “My office.”
The two words pulled like gravity. Larissa rose immediately. Her hand found your shoulder without thinking and then, visibly thinking, removed itself. “I’ll be right back,” she said, even though she didn’t know it.
She didn’t look back at you when she left. That should have been your first warning.
Seconds are very long when you count them. You counted sixty of them twice, and then you stopped because the room was too small for numbers.
When she returned, she was more Larissa than you had ever seen her. Not because she was warm, but because she was composed. She walked to the bed and checked your IV and your vitals, and asked you the questions like each was a stone placed carefully across a river.
“Larissa,” you said, her name tasting like a prayer again. “What did—”
“I’m being reassigned,” she said, and there it was—the cliff you didn’t see, the fall you didn’t feel until you were midair. She kept her voice clinical, the way people do when feelings are a hazard sign. “It’s been determined that a change would be in your best interest and in compliance with policy. Nurse Herrera will be taking over your care. She’s excellent.”
You said the first honest thing you could think of. “I don’t want Nurse Herrera.”
Larissa’s mouth trembled like a fault line you weren’t supposed to notice. “I know.”
“Is this—did I—”
“You didn’t do anything wrong,” she said, quick, firm. It was the first unprofessional sentence she had said all day. That meant something. So did the way she didn’t touch you.
You understood then, the part of the story you hadn’t wanted to look at. You, adrift after an accident that changed the geography of your insides, had reached for the closest thing that made sense. Larissa had been that thing. And she—human, careful, relentless with herself—had reached back before she could stop herself. Not with a touch. Not with anything that could be found inside a book. But with the kind of presence that was dangerous because it taught you the taste of ease.
“Please,” you said, and you hated the word, hated how child-small you sounded. “Please don’t—” You didn’t know how to finish that sentence, either.
She didn’t say anything for a heartbeat. In that echo, you heard everything she wanted to say and would not. Then she shook out the blanket two insultingly casual inches and tucked the corner by your hip like she had done a hundred times and said, “You’re going to be all right.”
“I was all right,” you said, and that was true, and also it wasn’t.
Larissa took a step back like it cost her something. Something open in her face closed. You recognized it because you were working on it yourself: the careful shutting of the door behind which you kept all the things you weren’t ready to grieve.
You said, “Larissa,” like the syllables might bring her back from wherever she’d gone.
“Ms. Herrera will be in later,” she responded, as if the word Larissa had slid right off her, as if it didn’t belong to her anymore. As if you were already someone else’s responsibility.
She left before you could ask her to stay again.
The days after were punitively ordinary.
Nurse Herrera was, as promised, excellent. She had a laugh that shook the bed rail and she swore like hand sanitizer wasn’t listening. She wore bright compression socks with pastry designs and called everyone honey without distinction. You liked her. It didn’t matter in the way you wanted it to.
All at once, the ward felt like a place where you had only imagined being seen. You understood that wasn’t true. You understood that memory attached itself to routine like burrs to a sweater, and if you’d been forever cared for by Nurse Herrera, you would have found a way to be cared for in that shape. But it was hard not to watch the corridor and hold your breath when you heard a familiar footfall. It was hard not to catch a glimpse of silver hair in the frosted reflection of the medicine cabinet and pretend for a second the world would return to the shape you had learned to survive in.
You saw Larissa three times.
The first, she was talking to a doctor and didn’t look up when you passed, your walker a contraption you resented for being so honest about your fragility. The second, you were in the common room icing your knees and she was at the desk laughing—the rare laugh—and there was a coffee in her hand she did not sip. The third time, you were almost strong enough to go outside and she was coming in, the automatic doors sighing around her like the hospital itself bowed to her passage. She did not turn her head, but the muscles around her mouth tightened like keeping it pleasant had cost her something.
On the morning you left, you watched the window for a long time and tried to feel grateful for the sun the way you had when you were stuck in bed. You tried to write thank you in the fox notebook without attaching it to a person you were not allowed to thank. You wrote lemon. You wrote fox.
Herrera hugged you in a way that should have been against some rule and whispered, “You do not owe this place your bravery forever. Go be messy.” You almost cried. You didn’t.
Larissa didn’t come to the door when you were wheeled past. You thought about asking, then didn’t. It felt like picking at a healing seam. It felt like a dare the universe would win.
Recovery at home is louder than recovery in the hospital. The refrigerator hums, the neighbor’s child learns a recorder, the pipes remember they’re a chorus.
You discovered whole categories of tired waiting underneath the others: the tired that comes from passing your couch on the way to the bathroom and wanting to collapse with your shoes still on; the tired that comes from stairs.
Worst of all was the absence of the particular silence between you and Larissa. It had been an ecosystem, delicate and precise. You caught yourself arranging cutlery as if she’d approve, calling objects by their medical names—gown instead of shirt—because it made you feel like you’d graduated from the last three months with a certificate stamped Allowed to Proceed.
You learned to walk, then to walk without the hiss of your breath announcing the effort. A month passed. Then another. Your scars learned the weather. The world came back in fragments. You woke after sleeping through the night and weren’t afraid.
What you didn’t do was go back to the ward. Except, you did, in your sleep—always in the moment before the knock on the door, Dr. Reddy’s summons, Larissa’s face closing like a window against rain. When you dreamt of it, you woke with the word you hadn’t said lodged under your tongue: Stay. You brushed your teeth around it like it was sweetness you refused to dissolve.
You thought you were doing well. You were doing well. Until you turned a corner into a café one late afternoon, and everything you’d contained recognized what it had been holding back.
It was raining. Not dramatic rain, just the steady, apologetic kind that slicked the streets and made the city smell like pennies. You’d walked farther than since the accident, a little daring, a little defiant, and every muscle in your pelvis voiced its opinion. You were proud of yourself, minus ten percent, because pride still felt like currency you shouldn’t spend freely. You stepped inside for coffee you didn’t need and warmth you did. The bell rung as you pushed the door open.
The café wasn’t busy. Two students argued about a poem, their hands doing the work. A man in a cap read a newspaper. A woman with a neat blonde twist and a coat that made navy look expensive stood at the counter considering the pastry case as if negotiating a treaty.
You almost turned around. It would have been easy: a pivot, a step back into rain, a story you could tell yourself about coincidence and fate and how you didn’t believe in either. You almost did it, out of mercy for your slowly mending heart. Then she half-turned and, perhaps rudely, you did not save yourself.
“Larissa,” you said, and thought—I have given away that name too many times and still I am not empty of it.
She looked up. There’s a kind of surprise that looks like fear you don’t want seen. For a second—which you felt was a gift—you saw Larissa forget how to make her face the thing that kept her safe. Then she remembered, and a hundred small muscles settled. She became once more the woman who could hold a thousand emergencies and still speak to you like it was only you she saw.
“Hello,” she said. That was all the word meant, and somehow it meant everything else you were both too careful to say. “You look well.”
“I brought all my ambition to the act of walking here,” you said, because humor had always been the rope you threw out without looking at how deep the drop was. “So if I sit down and never get up, it’s not personal.”
Her mouth did that secret thing, the not-quite smile. “Let me get your coffee.”
“I can—”
“Let me,” she said, and the word was not a command, not a request—but exactly what you needed.
You picked a small table by the window, absurdly proud of accomplishing the act of sitting. Rain performed its melancholy on the glass. Larissa brought over a coffee and a tea for herself, saucers and sugar placed with the exactness you remembered.
“You like lemon,” she said, setting down a slice in a tiny dish like a private joke. You laughed, and that was worse, somehow, for the way it rose in your throat like a miracle.
“I hated that you knew me,” you said, quickly, because if you didn’t, the air would fill with what you were refusing to say. “After they moved you. It made me—” You pushed the lemon with your spoon. “Lonely in a new key.”
Larissa stared past your shoulder toward the window, then back at you like she’d found something and left it there.
“I thought if I did not exist for you,” she said, “it would be easier for you to exist without me.”
It was a cruelty that felt like mercy. “It wasn’t easier.”
“I know that now,” she said, hands neat around her cup as if keeping them from making promises. “I am sorry.”
“Were you…in trouble?” The question felt childish and necessary.
“I was reminded boundaries exist to keep both parties safe,” she said. “And that there is a power differential that cannot be ignored. I know these things. I enforce these things. I had to be reminded anyway.”
“You never—” You flushed, embarrassed, then braver. “You never crossed the line.”
Larissa tilted her head, the smallest concession to humor. “No. But I leaned against it and warmed it with my hands.”
“I thought you hated me,” you confessed.
“I never hated you,” Larissa said, quiet vehemence in the never. “I thought of you every time it rained the week you left.”
“Why?”
“You liked the sound.”
“I like the closeness of it,” you said, surprised by your own honesty. “Like the world is narrow enough to cross.”
“I like that, too.” Her gaze rested on your face like a hand. Not demanding, not idle. Present. “How are you?”
The question had been waiting since the door with the bell. The answer arrived with the ache of being known enough that patter wouldn’t satisfy.
“Better,” you said. “Not good all the time. I get tired of being proud of myself. It feels like a full-time job.”
“It is,” she said. “And you are allowed to resent it.”
A kindness so exact it hurt.
“I missed you,” you said, courage doing its reps.
Larissa closed her eyes half a second. “I missed you.”
The air clarified, like mist taken by sun. You had thought the thing between you would gallop the instant you were out from under rules. Instead, it was still. A lake in the morning.
“I’m not your patient anymore,” you said.
“No,” she agreed. “You’re not.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means,” she said, “that if I’m close to you, it will be because we both chose it, not because you are frightened and I hold the key to the morphine.”
You laughed, helpless. “Romance is alive and well.”
“Inconveniently,” she said, and the nearly-smile flickered again.
She set her hand palm up. You placed yours in it.
“I wanted to kiss you every day after you woke,” Larissa said. “I imagined I could do the right thing and not feel what it cost. I am not that kind. It cost me anyway.”
“I would have let you,” you said. “Even if it broke me later. Maybe because it would have made something simple.”
“Nothing is simple,” she said. “That’s how I know it’s real.”
“Come home with me,” you said, reckless.
“Not tonight,” and the refusal wasn’t an ending. It was an adult decision. “Walk with me. Tomorrow, if you want, we’ll do it again.”
“I hate that you’re right about everything.”
“I am frequently wrong about breakfast,” she said, grave. “And easily convinced to eat pastries for dinner.”
“I’ve always wanted someone to call that a virtue.”
“It’s a practice,” she said. “Like recovery. Like hope.”
The rain had gentled while you weren’t watching. You finished your coffee and stood, your body announcing itself with complaint. Larissa didn’t fuss. She gathered your coat, helped you with the sleeve, handed it to you like a promise.
At the door, you paused. “Can I—”
“Yes,” she said, and this time when you leaned in, she came to meet you.
The kiss wasn’t dramatic or cinematic. It was honest. Warm and careful, then fierce in a way that didn’t take, only gave. Your scars didn’t vanish, your knees didn’t stop their argument with standing. The rain didn’t pause. The world didn’t notice. That felt right.
You pulled back with the smallest regret, the kind that promised return. Larissa’s eyes were bright like the early mornings in the ward when light came sideways across the floor like a secret.
You stepped out into the rain. Larissa fell into stride, not rushing, not guiding, the distance between you a decision. At the corner, she reached for your hand without looking. You offered it. It felt less like rescue, more like rhythm. The city breathed. You breathed back.
“Tell me about the geese,” she said, and the request was so specific you laughed, and did. You told her again about the ceramic birds lined on a sill, how love can look like small things lined up so they don’t run away. When you ran out of breath, she held the silence until you had more.
“Tomorrow,” she said, when your street appeared in sight, “we can buy lemons. And a plant that will thrive even with neglect.”
“I won’t neglect it,” you said. “I’ll teach it boundaries.”
She laughed—really laughed—and you thought you might get addicted to making her do that.
You reached your building. She kissed your temple, you closed your eyes and let your scalp remember the careful way her fingers had once combed your hair. You were not that person in the bed anymore. You were also still that person. Both things could be true.
“Call me,” she said, quiet, normal.
“I will,” you answered, and the words felt like a future you’d relearned how to want.
Upstairs, your apartment was exactly as you’d left it. You leaned your forehead against the door and smiled like someone who knew where the shore was. The rain spoke its soft language on the window. It sounded like a continuation.
On the table, your fox notebook waited. You opened it. The last word written there looked up at you like a dare. Larissa.
Under it, you wrote lemon. Then home. Then, because you’d earned it, one more word.
Hi :) I hope you're well x I have just been drawing a Brienne scene where she is polishing her sword by a river (I've not seen GOT), and I love how peaceful an image it is. I was wondering whether you might write care to write something where Brienne is maybe escorting 'reader' somewhere, or protecting her, and reader 'dismisses' her for the night, expecting the knight to go drinking and carousing, but instead finds her taking solace alone, surrounded by nature, and finding her peace by taking care of the sword that has saved her life on many occasions. Maybe seeing that makes the (formerly irritable/aloof/demeaning of Brienne) reader see her protector in a new light x
Thank you x
Down by the Riverside
Brienne of Tarth x fem!reader
A/N: Thank you so much for this request, it’s always a pleasure writing for Brienne. I almost feel jealous of reader and that sweet moment. I hope this will do justice to your piece of art! 💙
You had expected her to be gone by now.
When you’d waved her off at twilight with a careless flick of the wrist and a half-hearted, “You’re dismissed, Ser,” you assumed she'd take it as an invitation to vanish into town—drink herself to forgetfulness, perhaps, or find crude camaraderie among the sellswords who had begun to gather near the village inn. It’s what most knights did when released from duty. Even the noble ones.
But Brienne of Tarth was not most knights.
You’re beginning to understand that now, though you’d spent the last several days pretending otherwise. The journey south had been long and dust-coated, her silent presence at your back both a comfort and an irritation. She was everything you resented about the world of swords and oaths—honor-bound, duty-struck, unmoved by the subtleties of politics or manipulation. A wall of virtue where you preferred open windows.
She hadn’t asked for your story, which was surprising. Most protectors tried to unravel their charges quickly, sensing either threat or advantage. But Brienne didn’t prod. She didn’t flirt. She didn’t indulge in gossip or even much in the way of pleasantries. She simply was—towering, loyal, and ever-watchful.
You had mocked her under your breath, called her “my shadow” and “the maid of silence.” You’d said cruel things when the path grew tedious and tempers frayed. She never responded. Only blinked once, as if to bat away the sting.
But now…
Now, you find her by the river. Not by design. You had wandered away from camp hoping for quiet, or maybe for some restless movement to shake the thoughts from your head. You hadn’t meant to seek her. And yet, when you step through the low brush and catch the glint of silver in the dying light, you stop short.
Brienne sits alone by the water’s edge, legs crossed, boots set beside her, sleeves rolled to the elbow. Her sword lies across her lap like a sleeping creature, and she moves the cloth in slow, reverent strokes across its surface. Not polishing for show, you realize. Not for the gleam. But for the care. For the memory.
You stay half-hidden among the trees, watching.
The river laps gently at her feet. Fireflies have begun their dance. And though you see the heavy exhaustion clinging to her frame—her shoulders slumped with travel, her neck tilted slightly as if long burdened—you also see something you hadn’t noticed before.
Peace.
She finds it here. In the solitude. In the way the world narrows to a single blade and a quiet stream.
You don’t know what compels you to step forward, but you do. A twig cracks beneath your boot, and her head lifts at once. She doesn’t reach for the sword. Doesn’t rise. Only turns her face toward yours, solemn and still.
“You’re meant to be resting,” she says, not unkindly. “It’ll be another long ride tomorrow.”
You shrug. “Could say the same to you.”
A pause.
“This is rest.”
You fold your arms, not out of defiance but for lack of anything better to do with your hands. She makes no move to hide what she’s doing, doesn’t stiffen or retreat. You sense she has no need to defend herself. Not from you, not from anyone. Her solitude is not shameful.
But you feel shame anyway.
“I thought you’d be in the village by now,” you say, sitting down a few feet away, unsure why you’ve decided to stay. “Drinking. Laughing. Sleeping somewhere warm.”
She looks out toward the river. “I don’t often find what I need in places like that.”
You examine her face in profile—strong jaw, soft mouth, windburnt cheeks. There’s a quiet dignity to her that you’d mistaken for arrogance. But now… now you see the weight behind it. The history.
“The sword,” you say. “You’ve had it a long time.”
She nods. “Oathkeeper.”
There’s a story there. You wait. But she doesn’t offer it, and strangely, you don’t resent her for it.
You glance down at the blade. “You polish it every night?”
“When I can.” A pause. “A sword that serves you well deserves care.”
“And does it? Serve you well?”
She finally turns to look at you—really look—and her eyes are a stormy blue, striking even in the fading light.
“It’s saved my life more than once,” she says. “But it’s not the sword. It’s the purpose.”
You blink. “Which is?”
“Keeping those in my charge safe.”
You exhale slowly. “Even when they don’t make it easy?”
Brienne’s lips twitch, but it’s not quite a smile. “Especially then.”
You’re quiet for a moment, digesting that.
She doesn’t gloat. Doesn’t remind you of your own behavior. She simply lets the truth lie between you, like the sword across her lap.
“You think I’m ungrateful,” you murmur.
“No,” she says gently. “I think you’re afraid.”
That strikes deeper than you’d like.
You scowl. “Of what?”
“Trusting someone who doesn’t want anything from you.”
That silences you.
Because it’s true.
For so long, everyone who stayed near you did so out of ambition or lust or hunger for secrets. Even those who claimed to care always seemed to take more than they gave.
But Brienne, she hadn’t asked for coin. Hadn’t pressed you for answers. Hadn’t even flinched when you lashed out in your exhaustion and fear. She simply walked beside you, sword at her side, gaze scanning the horizon.
And here she is. Alone in the woods. Polishing a sword like a prayer.
You swallow hard. “Why do you do it?”
She doesn’t pretend to misunderstand.
“Because once, someone believed I was worth protecting. And now I try to do the same for others.”
You feel something twist inside you—quiet and painful.
“No one’s ever said that to me before,” you say. “That I was worth protecting.”
Her eyes soften. “Then they were fools.”
You turn away, blinking too quickly. You hadn’t meant for this night to shift you. You hadn’t meant to see her.
But you do.
Brienne, not just the knight. Brienne, not just your shadow. Brienne, sitting barefoot by a river, cradling the sword that has saved her more than once, the sword she uses to save others.
You draw your knees to your chest. Sit in silence beside her, neither of you speaking.
Eventually, she returns to her task, the cloth whispering over the blade.
You watch her work, and for the first time since this journey began, you feel safe.
Not because she’s strong. But because she cares.
And that, you realize, is rarer than any sword. More precious than any armor.
She glances sideways at you after a while. “You should rest.”
“Maybe,” you say. “But I like it here.”
Brienne nods, once, then turns her attention back to the river.
You stay until the stars appear, and when she stands to leave, you rise beside her.
