#birl writes

[birlwrites]

so uh.

i posted a new chapter of ttdl.

[elijahrosefanclub]

Just imagine Elijah proposing to Isaiah at midnigh (at new years)

tHE LONG-AWAITED RESPONSE TO THIS PROMPT (which i love and think is super cute): it got a little long so i’m putting in a cut but here it is on ao3!

my new year’s resolution is you (2k words)

New Year’s Eve is probably Eli’s favorite day of the year, in all honesty, and there’s a very simple reason why. For at least six hours, every year, usually around midnight, he is pretty much guaranteed no bullshit. Everyone is busy partying and drinking, and while that might cause problems for the LAPD, it is so out of Eli’s jurisdiction. And that means that New Year’s Eve is the one night a year when Eli is not awake to see the clock tick over from 11:59 to 12:00. In fact, it’s the one night a year when he always gets over six hours of sleep.

It’s fucking fantastic.

There’s a yearly Vindicators party, and his routine is that he goes when it’s early, when the party is just starting and all the snacks are still well stocked, and he has precisely one glass of champagne and then leaves and is generally in bed by ten PM.

Once he and Isaiah had moved in together, she’d changed her own routine a bit— for the last couple of years, she’s always been home by midnight. At one point, he had asked why, and she’d responded that this way, she gets to start the new year with him even if they’re both sleeping. Actually, especially if they’re both sleeping, because hopefully that’ll be a sign of how the new year is going to go.

(It’s a running half-joke between them, how little they each sleep. Isaiah always gets caught up in one thing or another, and Eli finds it hard to step away from Mission Control even when he’s personally vetted the entire night shift and found them competent. Half-joke because they know it’ll catch up to them eventually, but that day hasn’t arrived yet and it might not arrive until retirement. So for now, they’re fine.)

It’s been eight minutes since Isaiah texted that she was on her way back. Normally, Eli wouldn’t have seen the text— it’s about eleven-forty, and usually he charges his phone at night in the kitchen to avoid sitting in bed watching security feeds of Mission Control on his phone. (There’s a landline in the bedroom in case someone actually needs to contact him at night and by some miracle he’s not already at work.) But tonight, he is ready and waiting. Isaiah should be back by eleven-fifty, and then he only has ten minutes to kill until midnight.

He wants it to be obvious that he’s still awake, because Isaiah’s years as a super mean that her fight-or-flight response is very well developed and tends toward ‘fight’. So surprises are bad. To that end, he’s made sure that the lights are on and there’s some music playing. 

He is ready.

Unfortunately, now it’s 11:43, and he has a lot of time in which to do nothing. And he would be lying if he said he wasn’t a little nervous— well, not nervous, per se. More like, he’s anticipatory. And also nervous because unknowns, no matter how probable a certain outcome is, always make him nervous.

Sometimes Eli wonders why he decided to go into managing superheroes instead of, like, accounting.

Regardless, he is here now, and he’d rather be here than in the financial department of some faceless corporation, so here he’ll stay.

But he’s going to make some hot chocolate. 

There is a right way, a wrong way, and a desperate way to make hot chocolate. The right way is on the stove with actual chocolate and milk. The wrong way is with chocolate syrup. The desperate way is with cocoa powder or a hot chocolate mix. Eli doesn’t disapprove of the desperate way, not really, but he avoids it when he can. That’s why it’s called the desperate way.

That’s also why he’s melting chocolate discs in a double boiler at 11:48 PM. Eli likes hot chocolate because he doesn’t like sweetened coffee or tea, but he needs something to fill the void of 'dessert beverages’, and over the years hot chocolate has become his go-to drink when he doesn’t need caffeine and herbal tea just isn’t cutting it.

Besides, it would be presumptuous to open a bottle of champagne now. And it would go flat.

He’s just started pouring in the milk when he hears a key in the lock and the front door swings open. It’s 11:51. And it takes everything in Eli to not immediately stop what he’s doing and freeze like he’s just been caught red-handed stealing. 

Okay, so he’s a little more nervous than he thought he was. Whatever. He can deal.

He keeps pouring the milk, focusing intensely on the stove, and looks up once he hears Isaiah’s footsteps stop in the doorway to the kitchen. “How was the party?”

She’s leaning on the doorframe, her green scarf still around her neck, smiling in the sort of way that makes Eli think (correctly, because he’s spent a lot of time seeing how her face changes) that she doesn’t know she’s doing it. “It was good. I was worried that Elliot might feel awkward since he hasn’t been with us for very long, but I think he’s found his niche on the team. Also, he can seriously hold his liquor.”

“There is pretty much nothing that would surprise me less,” Eli says drily. “Nothing blew up?”

Isaiah laughs and steps away from the doorframe. “No, we save that for when you’re around.” She approaches the stove and puts her chin on Eli’s shoulder, wrapping her arms around his waist. “So what are you doing up so late? Ooh, hot chocolate." 

"Well, I haven’t been awake for midnight on New Year’s Eve since before we met. I figured it would be nice to actually stay up with you. And the hot chocolate is… it’s honestly just because.”

“Hmm.” She’s silent for a few moments, and then she says, “Are you distracting yourself so you don’t obsess about whether anything’s happening in LA that might need the Vindicators?”

“That’s entirely possible?” Which it is, technically. Even if Eli has never been less focused on the Vindicators than he is at the present moment. He can let Isaiah think that’s why he’s making hot chocolate at almost midnight.

She shifts a little bit and he feels a kiss on his jaw. “I understand that. But if anything happens, Tanis will probably know before you do.”

“What? Why?”

“Her phone isn’t fifteen feet away from her and she has the same news alerts set up that you do.”

That’s fair. 

The chocolate and milk look pretty evenly mixed at this point, so Eli turns off the stove. “How long until midnight?”

“It’s 11:56.”

Okay. Four minutes to kill. He can do this.

He turns around to grab mugs from the cabinet, but Isaiah’s already pulling two down from the top shelf, and some neuron fires in Eli’s brain to remind him that the ring is still tucked behind his ties in the bedroom and he has four minutes and he somehow has to get it and bring it back here without Isaiah noticing.

Hmm.

He carefully pours the hot chocolate from the pot into the mugs (no matter how careful he is about it, it’s still probably the scariest thing he does regularly, including walking into the super training facility without checking to see if anyone is practicing projectile warfare), sets the pot back down on the stove and covers it, hands one mug to Isaiah, and says, “I’ll be right back, I’m going to grab a sweater.”

Problem solved. Also, the extra layer of the sweater means that it’ll be harder for Isaiah to tell immediately if he has anything in his pockets.

On his way out of the kitchen, he checks his phone where it’s charging on the counter. 11:58. Okay. Cutting it a little close, but he can do this. 

Eli tries very hard not to visibly speedwalk out of the kitchen, but once he’s safely in the hallway, he jogs as quietly as he can into the bedroom, grabs the first sweater he sees, tosses it over his arm, pulls out the ring and stuffs it in his pocket, and then heads back down the hallway to the kitchen while putting the sweater on.

When he returns, Isaiah is studiously covering her hot chocolate with marshmallows, and she says, “We’ve got like thirty seconds until midnight. Ready?”

“So ready.” In more ways than one.

He grabs his hot chocolate and sets it down next to hers, and like he thought, she’s got a clock pulled up on her phone counting down the seconds until midnight. Twenty seconds. 

Wow. Fucking years, and now all he’s got is twenty seconds. The anticipation honestly might kill him. (But that would be an incredibly stupid way to die, and above all things, Eli abhors dying in stupid ways.)

Fifteen.

He has to time this right if he wants to do it at exactly midnight. This is something Eli has known all along, but now his brain is positively yelling it. Did he mention he should have gone into accounting or something boring like that? 

Whatever. Still worth being here, now, even if, as he has definitely mentioned, he is fucking nervous as fuck.

Ten. Countdown time.

Nine. Okay, single digits. Getting closer.

Eight. Eli casually takes the most minute sip of his hot chocolate just for something to do with his hands.

Seven. He puts the mug back down on the counter.

Six. Shitshitshitshit.

Five. It’ll only take him about a second to kneel, but he definitely needs to get the ring out of his pocket first.

Four. Which he does, carefully holding it to his side out of Isaiah’s sight. He can’t quite work out how to open the box one-handed, but that’s okay, he’ll figure it out— 

Three. No more time to think about it.

Two. He turns a bit so his knee won’t slam into the cabinet underneath the counter.

One. He kneels.

It’s such a simple motion— just kneeling. When it comes down to it, there’s not a lot to be stressed about. He does this to tie his shoes. But the thing that makes it different, that makes it something that’s important, is the ring box in his hand that opened so easily that he can hardly remember doing it, can hardly remember anything about the past few minutes except that they all seemed to go by so fast compared to the eternity of thoughts passing through his brain in what must only be a second, because then the clock ticks down to Zero and Isaiah turns and sees empty space where he was standing next to her, and then looks down, and—

He can see the moment of comprehension on her face, the instant her mouth drops open the tiniest bit and her eyes begin to shine and he hasn’t even said anything before she’s dropped to the floor too and she’s saying “Yes, yes,” over and over and is it really the new year? Because it feels like time has stopped right now, like his heart is waiting in breathless anticipation for the next chance it has to beat, and it still feels like a daze, not like a dream because he is too viscerally here. The little details are popping out at him like they never have before— Isaiah still hasn’t taken her scarf off and the end trails on the floor, but she doesn’t care, because that’s an old scarf that has been through the years with her, and he can feel every single point where the velvet of the ring box makes contact with his hand, and when he takes the ring— gold, slim, beautiful without being ostentatious— out of the box and hands it to her so she can put it on, he feels the cold relief of the metal, how it warms up almost instantly when he touches it, and he can hardly believe this is happening but at the same time it feels like it was fated to happen, like it couldn’t not happen. 

But instead of saying all that, because he’s not sure he could make it make sense out loud even if he wanted it to, he says, “I love you so much,” and then he says, “Happy New Year.”

[birlwrites]

scrapbook snippet: do better

bellatrix pov of a (non-gory) part of chapter 4 of lachrimae!

-

Regulus takes off his mask, and he looks like a baby.

He's ten years younger, so Bellatrix has never thought of him as a full adult, really—not that she should, he's only sixteen, and that just barely—but he's a proper teenager, the type who shuts himself away in his room to write to his friends all the time, who thinks he's being so subtle about his enormous crush on the Rosier boy, who gets sulky when things don't go his way even if he's good at slapping a neutral expression onto his face, keeping a tight leash on his emotions the same way Cissa does. (He sulks the same way Cissa does, too, but she did a much better job of not panting over Lucius in public.)

But Regulus now, curled up in the fetal position, backed against the wall looking up at the Dark Lord, rumpled hair and wide eyes over a smattering of freckles and a slackened mouth—maybe that's a good thing, his jaw was so clenched that she wanted to crack it open before—he doesn't look like a proper teenager, not at all the secret-keeping Seer Bellatrix was tasked with tracking down and bringing to a personal initiation.

Less a secret weapon and more her baby cousin, out of the shallows for the first time, not sure how to stop treading water and just swim.

He's going to have to learn to do better than that.

[birlwrites]

scrapbook snippet: the origin of the bloodfinch

this is a piece of bloodfinch worldbuilding that was more fun to write up as a story than as notes - here you go! it's about 700 words, and it's set long before the time of the story. this is how the story would be told in finch's time

-

In the time before the king was King, and was but a man, he had a brother.

The two were inseparable in the way of the sides of a coin: opposites, but bound together until they seemed to be one creature. The elder was Cynefrith, and he was humble, a hand-worker, a healer and harpist, steady as a sun-warmed stone. The younger was Wilnoth, and he was bold, a story-teller, weaving between tales of the saints and tales of his own battlefield exploits with ease, for theirs was a time of battle and unrest. Warlords fought and scrabbled for territory, clinging to the edges of their lands with blood-soiled fingertips, and it was Cynefrith who believed most strongly that this could not go on. Upon their father’s death, Cynefrith intended to approach other warlords with open hands, speaking words of peace, forging alliances and treaties so that all could flourish. He spoke often of this to Wilnoth.

But it was not to be.

As their father lay on his deathbed, Cynefrith left his bedside and walked a secret path into the forest. He was a healer, but he knew the limits of his power. It was his habit to seclude himself when a hard battle had been lost, and though his father still clung to life, Cynefrith, his heir, would have no time to grieve alone after his death.

So Cynefrith walked, alone, singing to himself as he went, the better to calm the ache in his heart.

Wilnoth eventually took his place at their father’s bedside, to keep him company, but he expected Cynefrith to return soon.

And Cynefrith did not.

And Wilnoth said, “He will return before our father passes,” and all believed him.

But their father’s breathing weakened, his pulse faltered, and still Cynefrith did not return.

Wilnoth could not leave their father’s bedside, but it was a time of unrest, and he was shrewd in the ways of war, and he ordered warriors out to search for Cynefrith, and they went. The night stretched out, dark and cold, a chill in the air that settled into the bones of all who saw the emptiness at Wilnoth’s side.

When their father died, near dawn, Wilnoth did not weep, but he rose and said, “All must join the search, but do not tell Cynefrith of what has happened in his absence; bring him to me, that I may tell him, in the way of family.”

And all scattered into the forest, bearing lanterns, and Wilnoth was among them. In the early light of daybreak, he searched, ceaseless, calling out the name of his brother, until finally he remembered Cynefrith’s secret path. And he followed it, loud and clarion in the new sunlight, and he came to a clearing nestled between groves of graceful trees, and he saw his brother resting in a bed of flowers.

Wilnoth called to him, and thought him asleep, and touched his arm to wake him, and Cynefrith did not stir, his body cold and pale with dew, for Cynefrith was dead.

For a day and a night, Wilnoth wept, sick with grief for his father and his brother, and his men took Cynefrith’s body back to their village and found that Cynefrith had been stabbed, dried blood crusting over his back, and they spoke of rival warlords, of revenge. But Wilnoth, who had not left the clearing with his brother, returned on the next bright morning, and he spoke to them as a king.

Wilnoth spoke of a vision, of a bloodred bird, impaled through the heart but singing merrily, and wherever its blood touched the ground, there grew flowers. And a heavenly voice sounded, and it told Wilnoth this: that the bloodfinch could sing for twenty years so injured before dying, and that the flowers of its death-blood would give him strength. And in exchange for this strength, he must be the one to unite the land, not through the treaties Cynefrith spoke of, but through power. And when there was one kingdom, healed and whole under one banner, then Cynefrith’s death would not be in vain.

Having spoken thus, Wilnoth, for he loved his brother, left his people to seek out the bloodfinch.

[birlwrites]

chapters 21-24 of lachrimae are up!!

[birlwrites]

An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works

Chapters: 32/32 Fandom: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling Rating: Mature Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence Relationships: Regulus Black/Evan Rosier, Regulus Black & Barty Crouch Jr., Regulus Black & Emma Vanity | Slytherin Quidditch Captain, Regulus Black & Black Family, Regulus Black & Tom Riddle | Voldemort, Regulus Black & Poppy Pomfrey Characters: Regulus Black, Evan Rosier, Barty Crouch Jr., Emma Vanity | Slytherin Quidditch Captain, Bellatrix Black Lestrange, Tom Riddle | Voldemort, Original Female Character(s), Walburga Black, Orion Black, Rabastan Lestrange, Poppy Pomfrey Additional Tags: Seer Regulus Black, First Wizarding War with Voldemort (Harry Potter), Marauders Era (Harry Potter), Regulus Black Needs a Hug, Regulus Black-centric, Sentient Number Twelve Grimmauld Place, Trans Evan Rosier, Angst with a Happy Ending, Mutual Pining, Walburga Black's A+ Parenting, Orion Black's A+ Parenting, Regulus Black Deserves Better, Suicidal Thoughts, Blood and Gore, Cannibalism, Torture, au where slughorn cares about his students, Suicide, I swear it's a happy ending, Non-Consensual Drug Use, Depression Summary:

Regulus Black has known he will drown since before he was old enough to put it into words.

He's never told anyone—not his friends, not his family, not his Divination professor, because a Seer is a powerful tool, and the last thing he wants is to be turned into a weapon.

But Britain is at war, and Regulus's secret is not as safe as he thinks it is.

--

this fic is now completed at 116k!! thanks for following me into horror writing, it means a lot to me 🫶 i had a GREAT TIME making regulus suffer horribly!!!!

[birlwrites]

guess what's completed....... LACHRIMAE!!!! CHAPTER 32 IS UP!!!

[birlwrites]

chapter 6 of lachrimae is up!! wEEKLY UPDATES FROM NOW ON YIPPEEEEEEEEE