All of them! Jk, jk, but dang was it hard to choose, so many good ones 👀.
Let's say, 20 - Silrah
Fair warning: I legitimately have no idea what the fuck happened here, and I'm still not sure if I like the result, but I promised myself I'd do these as writing exercises and not linger on them, so ... here's this, whatever it actually is, and I'm sorry. 😅
20. things you said that i wasn’t meant to hear
“It should have been me.”
Granite bites into long fingers, presses cold and sharp and unforgiving against a callused palm. I should be bleeding is a hazy thought, distant against an agony that has never quite dulled.
“You should be standing here, and me in the ground instead. They needed you. They don’t —” Need me, and though the thought is bitten back it does not make it any less true. The children they shaped but never claimed are grown, have moved ahead, moved on, mended the world they had broken in the blindness of their own youth. It feels as if only she stands here still, rooted, chained to a past she cannot let go, all of her meagre wisdom spent, all of her energy leached into the earth that has claimed so much that she never dared reach for.
She is bleeding. The wound inside will never heal, and she does not want it to. Not when it is all she has left.
The trees above her whisper, oak and birch and ash, leaves shivering in the breeze. If she closes her eyes she can imagine his voice mingling with their sounds, his presence a ghost in this place that had been the only home they had ever been theirs, prison and sanctuary all at once. It is her imagination — how can it not be, when she still holds one end of a broken tether — but that does not stop her from turning her face upwards, searching for something she knows she will not find.
He had been up one of those trees when they first met, a lanky shape in Specialist blacks clambering between branches, but she knows better than to expect him there now. It has been years since either of them had time for such things — if, in truth, she ever had.
I should have made time. Another admission she swallows down, releasing the stone as she steps back. The greens bleed into each other, fade into the grey of the sky, blunting, blurring even as she tries to blink away the moisture welling in her eyes. I should have told you to let me go, to be free — that I wasn’t worth this. That I needed you. That this isn’t enough.
And yet —
(“Ms. Dowling would have known what to do.”
“Farah isn’t here. We have to figure it out ourselves”)
But she had been. She’d heard — both what he said and what he meant. And she’d tried to protest, tried to push a denial across the shattered remnants of what had once been an unshakeable connection, but that had been an older magic, ancient and implacable, born of the stones and soil of this place and the blood he’d spilled to call her back, and it would not be thwarted. A life for a life, but what kind of a life had he won for her, when half of her self was gone?
(“Forgive me,” he had whispered, and the confession had been the first inhalation her restored lungs made. Her first exhalation, when she realised what had happened, had been a scream.)
“It should have been me,” she says again, rough and hollow, as her hands fall lax at her sides.
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Supernatural
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Castiel/Dean Winchester, Castiel & Dean Winchester
Characters: Castiel (Supernatural), Dean Winchester, Sam Winchester, Crowley (Supernatural), Rowena MacLeod
Additional Tags: Touch-Starved Dean Winchester, Sam Winchester is So Done, First Kiss, Sassy Castiel (Supernatural), Men of Letters Bunker (Supernatural), Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Sloppy Makeouts, Castiel and Dean Winchester Use Their Words, lin-manuel miranda quote because I'm trash, Praying to Castiel (Supernatural), season/series11, amara(mentioned) - Freeform
Summary:
The Winchesters finally have a lead on Amara, but are in need of some assistance from Castiel who is nowhere to be found. Sam suggests Dean prays to him, but Dean refuses out of fear Castiel will catch on to his growing crush. Of course, Cas could never feel the same... right?
An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works
All we have is each other, he thinks, more than once. All we have is here, and it does not sting the way it had before.
Andreas finds both salvation and damnation, inextricably tangled together, in the years after Aster Dell.
Happy HEX, darling @skloomdumpster! It was a pleasure and a privilege to have you as my giftee, and I hope I’ve given you even a bit of what you were wishing to get. 💙💙
Lately my brain has been simultaneously work-induced mush and also firmly hyperfixated on the original Bridge Theatre Into the Woods run, so when @emylilas mentioned trying a fic challenge, I jumped on the idea. The strict wordcount of (multi-)drabbles are tough for me, but that and the idea of a trio of random generators sounded appealing. Three deep now, with some kind of interesting combinations, so I think I'll start dropping them here before eventually collecting them on AO3. Maybe that'll help keep me accountable!
The structure is character + fic type + one-word prompt ... though for this first attempt the last was shoehorned in after the fact, shh.
Cinderella's Father + angst/fluff + unrest
(wordcount: 100)
The truth he holds close to his heart is this: he had loved his wife.
To look on his daughter’s face pains him with the memories it wakes, the ghost he sees looking back more and more with each passing day. He had never thought to lose his wife, and so long as the girl is there he never will, but she brings the woman he loved both closer and yet impossibly far, and the older she grows the more difficult it becomes to look upon her.
(He will marry again, he promises himself, and he will forget that truth.)
An Archive of Our Own, a project of the
Organization for Transformative Works
Her eyes shutter briefly and she laughs, but there’s no humour in the low sound. When she looks back up again there’s something bleak on her face that hadn’t been there before, the mask of false calm stripped away to reveal a woman more shaken by her circumstances than she will ever admit aloud. “Apparently I’m dying.”
A frantic call brings Ben Harvey back to Alfea over the Solstice holidays, putting him in a race against time — and his own memories — to save a friend.
Happy HEX, my dearest ɦɨʟʟɨɛ (@crazycatfaery )! ✨💚🤣 It’s been an absolute delight to have you as my giftee this year. I hope this fic fulfils at least some of your Ben/Rose wishes … and maybe a bonus or two besides. With love from your favourite diabolical murder in a trenchcoat. 😘
An Archive of Our Own, a project of the
Organization for Transformative Works
When she raises hers in return, all she can feel beneath it is cold unbroken glass.
Investigating strange magic leaves Farah and Saul trapped on opposite sides of a mirror, with time ticking down while they try to unravel its secrets.
The first chapter of a multipart fill for @winxsource's WIPs and Chains event. You can thank @faytalepsy for the promise of an eventual happy ending, and @anne-in-dreamland for letting me screech at her.
Why hello there, neglected inbox! I'm so sorry I've been ignoring you. And I'm so sorry it took me freaking forever to write this one, Hillie -- hope you enjoy it! 💙
36. a kiss to give up control - [ also on AO3 ]
He watches as she paces the length of her office. The sound is so familiar he could play it from memory: heels a precise click against the wood, muffling slightly as she steps onto the carpet, then sharp once more before she reaches her desk, pivoting to start the process again. He knows exactly why she’s doing it — this only happens when she’s worked up about something — and he knows why just as well. How could he not, when he knows that today will deliver news that could change everything?
A year ago, this would have been alien to them both — but a year ago their world had not yet shattered. So much has changed; he need only look at her to see that made manifest, the elaborate twisted hairstyles and sleekly professional dresses she wears far more reminiscent of Solaria’s monarch than Alfea’s former headmistress. They suit her, but he wonders how much of her decision was born of distancing herself from Rosalind’s shadow. For such a small woman, their general still looms large over them all.
“What time is it?”
“Two minutes since you asked last.” He stretches out his legs, ignoring the glare she shoots him when he tucks one booted foot against the edge of the low coffee table. It’s good to know he can still get under her skin, but it’s better to find glimpses of his fairy underneath the put-together woman who has served out the year as Alfea’s interim headmistress. He knows she wants this; they’ve talked about it, after all, the two of them alone and also together with Ben, and Farah has made it clear this isn’t just about warding the place where they’d imprisoned Rosalind. Sometimes he thinks he knew how much Alfea called her before she did, when the Farah of before had been so intent on following in Rosalind’s footsteps and proving herself a hardened soldier. But even if she has not admitted it to herself, he can see how much she cares; why else would the decision they sit her awaiting leave her as twisted into knots as she is?
Click, click, and back to carpet-muffled thuds. She stops before him this time; he tips his head back, offers her reassurance along with a smile, watches the corners of her mouth twitch upward for a moment before she sighs once again, tucking an errant strand back behind her ear. “How can you be so calm?”
“Because we’ve done all we can. Either Luna holds up her side of this bargain and we have nothing to worry about, or she doesn’t and it becomes her headache.” The reality is not nearly as simple, when leaving runs the risk of Rosalind walking free after all of their efforts, but he doesn’t think the Solarian monarch is blind to the risks that would pose. She and Farah may have their own fraught history, but she’s not an idiot, and only an idiot could ignore the danger Rosalind Hale poses, knowing what they all now know.
She looks at him for a long moment, but says nothing before she resumes pacing. Saul sighs and leans his head against the back of the couch, closing his eyes and listening to the sound. There is still, by his calculations, the better part of a half-hour before the board will finish, and he’s pretty sure she’s going to wear a groove into the floor before then. And while, if he’s being honest, he’s not quite sanguine about the outcome of the meeting taking place right now, he’s better at hiding it — and better at admitting that they’ve done all they can at this point.
The knot of anxiety in his head pulls tighter with each step. The impact of her heels sets his nerves vibrating in response. If he doesn’t do something soon, one or the other of them may well burst, and so he pushes to his feet, glancing at his watch as he does.
Thirty-seven minutes.
She pulls to an abrupt stop when he plants himself in her path, eyes narrowing. When she shifts her weight to one side he reaches up, hands curling around her arms as he steps in close, closer, until her back fetches up against the bookcase and her chin tips back to look at him. “Saul, what —”
His lips against hers steal the rest of her words. For a moment she stiffens, surprise rather than protest, but when he pulls back just slightly her mouth chases his own until he tuts out a warning.
“Pretty sure in thirty-six minutes you’re gonna be the one in charge. Until they tell us, it’s my turn.”
Her eyes widen for a moment before she laughs, something soft and fond, and leans back against the shelf. “Go on, then, headmaster. Do your worst.”
The twist of nerves is still there in the bond, though, the tension still coiling tight inside her; if he released her, he is certain she would start pacing again. But just because he’s aware of how time is ticking down doesn’t mean he won’t take up the challenge of making her forget the meeting — and everything else he possibly can — in the time left them, and as he nips at her lower lip, the moan she breathes into his mouth only spurs him on.
An Archive of Our Own, a project of the
Organization for Transformative Works
She wants to believe it means more than that, when she knows Aes Sedai means servants of all in the Old Tongue, but she cannot recall the last time she saw an Aes Sedai in Tanchico.
As initiates of the Tower do, Liandrin learns what it means to be a member of each Ajah — and finds them wanting, as the shadow in her dreams knew she would.
