OFC/reader soul‑travels into the Twilight world when she sleeps, appearing like a ghost. First time the Volturi kings see her, she’s in modern pajamas → scandal! She visits different eras, even meeting newly‑turned Carlisle and inspiring him to hunt animals. The kings keep calling someone the mysterious “fourth king” (pretty sure it’s Jasper, her God of War). A witch warns she’s in danger from this traveling, so one king steals a strand of her hair while she sleeps to help bring her to their world. Also remember a statue of her in Volterra.
Does anyone know this fic? Might’ve been deleted from AO3 😭
This might be a… lot… to ask, but since first reading ACOTAR i could not help but imagine what it would have been like to be Under the Mountain in Feyre’s place. Then, after falling in love with the bats, that thought transformed: what if all the bat boys were there and they met human!reader there? Either she was in feyre’s place (poly!bats, everything else the same as the plot in acotar, just feyre is replaced) or as feyre’s sister (cazriel, idk how to justify her being brought back to life alongside feyre).
Unfortunately i can spiral this into a series so idfk how you’d fit it into a one-shot (mby focusing on the trials and aftermath?)
But y’know
Food for thought
this definitely challenged my skills as a writer but i had fun with it! thanks for the request! hope i managed to do it justice <3
poly!batboys x human!reader under the mountain [1.9k words]
CW: ANGST, suicidal ideation, hopelessness, suggestions of torture, Amarantha, the Attor, allusion to Rhys’ SA, mostly hurt with some comfort
Your skin burns in every place it meets the cold, damp stone of the dungeon floors, despite the fact that you’re quite sure it’s cold enough to induce frostbite if you can’t bring yourself to move before too long.
You can’t bring yourself to move.
You’re surprised you can feel anything at all anymore, surprised your nerve endings haven’t all died along with the last bit of hope that once fluttered its tiny, battered wings against your chest.
Your chest is hollow now; empty, gaping.
Dark.
The darkness has surrounded you, has settled over your skin and sank deep into your bones and you think if you haven’t made a home here in it, it has certainly made a home in you.
You’re not making it out of here; no one’s making it out of here. You’ve doomed all of Prythian with your feeble humanity. You’re no saviour; you’re a fool. Pathetic.
You can’t close your eyes because each time you blink, your mind is flooded with the image of all the people you’re going to let down. Lucien, your first friend in the fae realm. You think of his mother and her quiet support of you in thanks for saving her son. You want to wretch at the memory now; you didn’t save him.
You’ve doomed him, you’ve doomed all of them.
The screaming starts again, though you can’t be sure it ever actually stopped.
You wonder if you’ll scream when your time comes. You wonder if Amarantha will draw it out, enjoy her time with you like she’s enjoyed the agony of her countless other victims, some of whom still exist on her walls, in the ring on her finger.
But you doubt you’ll even survive long enough for Amarantha to have her fun with you; you’re not sure you’re even going to survive the night.
You’re helping Nature along in her valiant effort to reclaim you, the way your already rotting carcass has started to seep into the cold stone beneath you. At least out of the two of you, Nature will be successful in her endeavours.
Another scream pierces the air and you time your exhale with the ringing of it. You don’t bother sucking in another breath until your lungs burn.
It’s a few moments before you realize a quiet has settled in the dungeons, and you only become aware of it when your dark cell darkens even further.
Maybe death has finally come to claim you, shadows settling in inky little pools of whisps beside you like the darkness has also decided to lay down on the floor in solidarity.
Resigned to your fate, you close your eyes in surrender. The heat of the tears you didn’t realize you still had in you fall over the bridge of your nose and sting so violently that you think you might actually be hypothermic.
The shadows surrounding you are disturbed by movement, though not your own.
“C’mon, princess,” a voice murmurs, hints of desperation present in his tone despite barely raising his voice at all.
A solid warmth lands on your arm and it feels like a branding iron.
“You’re freezing,” the voice continues, the warm weight rubbing up and down your arm like it’s trying to imbue its own warmth into your very soul by means of friction. “C’mon, you can’t give up on us now, yeah?”
Neither the voice nor the warmth is going away, so you eventually peel your eyes open.
The tip of a bat-like wing permeates your vision, illuminated only by an ominous red glow with no discernible origin.
Despite your previously mentioned early stages of decomposition, you manage to go scrambling away from the mass.
“Hey, hey hey hey, whoa,” the voice—Cassian, the Night Court’s general—cautions. “Hey, it’s okay. You’re alright.”
Your responding inhale is ragged, your eyes quickly flitting around the cell to ensure it’s only him in here with you.
“Who’d you think it was?”
Shadows skitter towards the door of your cell, as though peeking beneath the threshold to keep an eye on the comings and goings.
You try to tell him, but your throat is so tight with panic and dry from disuse that you choke on the first attempt. “I- the…Attor.”
Cassian’s face screws up in a sour expression. “Ouch.”
Your wide, disbelieving eyes move to meet his, and his face softens again. “No, gorgeous. The Attor isn’t in the practice of checking on prisoners in the dungeons.”
You work to catch your breath, still painfully disoriented as you lean against the stone wall. “And you are?”
His lips turn up at that, a hint of the warmth that this horrid place has tried to snuff out of him present in his weary eyes. “Only my favourite ones.”
You can’t bring yourself to smile, so you suck in a breath and blink instead, humming in acknowledgement.
“Thank you,” Cassian whispers.
“For what?” you ask, heavy eyes falling closed.
“For breathing. It’s one of our favourite things that you do, you know.”
Your brows furrow, wondering which part of that sentence makes the least amount of sense to you. You don’t do anyone favours by breathing.
“Our?” you settle on.
Though you don’t see it, his smile brightens the entire cell. “Well sure, gorgeous. You have met my mates, haven’t you?”
You’re still not entirely sure how this whole mate thing works in the fae realms, but you’re quite sure you know who Cassian is talking about. Rhysand—High Lord of the Night Court—and the other Illyrian (the other owner of bat-like wings that do not belong to the Attor) Azriel; a shadowsinger, though you don’t know what that is or what it means.
It’s not as though you’ve had a whole lot of time to interact with any of them; you’re not exactly here to mingle and make friends. Seeing as you’re supposed to be saving their lives, your time under the mountain has been spent enduring Amarantha’s cruelty, surviving her trials, and feeling sorry for yourself.
“They like when I breathe, do they?” you ask around a sigh.
“Very much.”
You manage to open your eyes, catching Cassian’s concerned expression before he schools it into something a touch more discreet.
“Well, enjoy it while you can, I guess,” you murmur, raising your hand to rub at your eyes but thinking better of it when you realize how filthy your hands are. “I don’t think I’ll be doing a lot of that for very much longer.”
“Don’t say that,” he argues, reaching into a pocket to pull out a vial of purple liquid and pulling the cork from the top. He holds it out to you expectantly.
“What’s this?” you ask, though you no longer have the self-preservation skills to wait on his answer before you throw back the minty concoction.
Unfortunately, it doesn’t immediately take you out of your misery.
“A little something for the pain,” he explains, accepting the empty vial back from you.
“Rhysand already healed me,” you argue, knowing you have the bargain tattoo on your hand to prove it.
“I don’t mean the physical kind,” Cassian corrects gently, and your eyes sting.
“What are you doing down here?” you whisper instead of crying in front of him.
“Checking on you,” is his simple reply.
You want to ask why, but you’re not sure you actually want to know the answer. You settle on, “how?”
The siphon on his chest pulses slightly, despite the fact that most of his power has been siphoned by the horrid creature that is Amarantha a few stories above you in the mountain.
“Well, Rhys is keeping that wicked witch…occupied,” he explains carefully, echoes of the sneers you’ve heard from Prythian citizens—Amarantha’s whore—sounding in your mind. “And Azriel is keeping watch.”
With that, a few of the shadows come scurrying back over to you before returning to the cell door.
“Just to check on me?”
Cassian offers you a sad smile, tilting his head at you. “To check on you.”
One shadow flicks Cassian on the back of the head. “Son of a- and Azriel’s shadows stole the tincture for you.”
Your eyes flit back over to the dark mass of…dark. “The- those are Azriel’s?”
Cassian nods, and you’re so lost in your thoughts—tallying up all of the times you’ve felt the shadows encompass you like a cloak as you wept, or the subtle flickers of darkness you relied on during your first trial with the giant wyrm—that you don’t notice Cassian has pulled out a bowl of stew until he’s holding it out in front of you.
“When we get out of here, he’ll tell you all about them. Alright?” Cassian promises, the words falling from his lips like a vow and you want to scream, you want to throw the bowl of—still hot, somehow—stew at him, you want to ask him how he could be so foolish as to think that any of you will ever see the outside of this mountain; that you have any chance of making it out of this alive.
“And I’ll take you flying; I won’t even fly like an ass, okay? I’ll take it slow, show you all my favourite sights from the sky. Rhys can take you anywhere you want to go, show you every court—even the continent, if you want. He’ll buy anything you could ever dream of, you’ll never want for anything. Just please hang in there, okay? Please.”
You don’t realize you’ve started to cry until he’s reaching forward with a gentle hand and brushing away a salty track with his thumb. He looks horribly pained and deeply apologetic when he says, “I have to go.”
“What?” you manage, still not entirely sure you didn’t actually die an hour ago and this isn’t just some strange post-death, pre-reunion-with-the-Mother hallucination.
”I have to go,” he repeats, his other hand mirroring the first as he brings your head forward to kiss the space between your brows. “The rotation is about to shift. I’m sorry. You’re okay.”
You think he might say that last bit more for his sake than your own.
“You’re okay,” he says again. “I’m sorry.”
And then he’s gone. The cell feels so much colder, so much lonelier, so much more despondent without his presence.
You sit there with a contraband bowl of stew in your hands and tears streaming down your face as the screaming starts up again and your heart pleads its desperate case to give up the ghost for an indeterminate period of time.
And then, oddly enough, you hear music.
Gentle notes at first, lilting and soft as they sift through the cells of your walls before growing stronger, more bold as the song progresses. Shadows appear from the cobwebbed corners of the ceilings and swirl about as though dancing to the tune currently plaguing your cell.
Then, one nudges your hand, forcing your gaze down to the quickly cooling bowl of stew in your hands, and you think of warm hands and eyes as you take a bite, and then another. You end up finishing the bowl before the song even ends and a few shadows disappear with the evidence of your contraband in tow.
fuck it. be creative even if you never really *make* anything. write out plot synopses of stories and then move on. design OCs you'll never use. make mood boards and concept art and don't do anything with them. life's too short to forget everything that inspired you and creation doesn't have to be "complete" to be worth the time you put into it.
I like to fuck around and waste time for at least ~6-10 hours per day, and let me tell you, that really puts some pressure on your schedule. you have no idea how busy I am
