taz fic called "if there's a degree on his wall, I havent seen it" where barry lied HEAVILY on his resume when applying to the institute and hilarity ensues
Do you like to see Taako be sad and insecure? What about Barry?
Do you like overthinking plot points that are barely relevant?
Do you like using Taako as a vessel to talk about Lup?
Then do I have the fic for you!!
I just posted a fic called Mirrored Image about Taako, his image, and the Suffering game! You can read it here!
Relistening to TAZ Live in Dallas and Return of the Hogsbottom 3 gave me an idea for a mini-fic set during Petals to the Metal, focusing on the underworld of Goldcliff battle wagon racing going on in the background. So here is that, I suppose:
Maarvey, leader of the Hammerheads, stands in a dark room, walls lined with huge aquarium tanks, containing dozens of octopi in various sizes. The bright blue rings which cover the animals’ bodies glow like neon under the arcane dark lights of the office. At a desk across from Maarvey, sharply dressed and sitting comfortably, is a drow by the name of Venom, the leader of the Octet. Maarvey isn’t typically one to ask for help from his rival racers, but he is a desperate man today.
“What can I do for you, Mr. Maarvey?” The elf’s voice is cold and dark. His deep purple skin in the low light of his the office makes his expression almost entirely imperceptible, save for his illuminated and penetrating yellow eyes.
“I, uh, got an offer for you.” Maarvey feels almost meek in this moment, despite himself. He thinks of himself as a fairly imposing man—strong, gruff, mean, someone to be feared and taken seriously—in contrast, Venom is slender and elegant, not someone that Maarvey could ever see himself being intimidated by.
“What kind of offer?” Venom speaks calmly and evenly, yet the potency and presence of his words seems to curl and spread from him to encompass the entire space, like ink in water.
“The same one I already made to the Cricket Crew and the Raptorz,” Maarvey shows his hand in a feeble attempt to seem like the one in power here.
“There’s gonna be a new squad in tomorrow’s race, three guys in a wagon run on an E-23 Arcane Core. I want them dead—dead dead, in a mean and messy fashion. I will pay handsomely for their deaths.”
Venom grins, his teeth glowing fluorescently under the black lights.
“Let’s sign some papers.”
Later, in a different room, broadcasted images of the race are projected onto a wall, as a seated and well-dressed collection of criminals, city officials, businessmen, gamblers, and assorted movers-and-shakers of Goldcliff, watch themselves lose money. Venom (who never actually participates in the dangerous races) scowls and grits his teeth behind his mask as the Octopod, his largest and deadliest wagon, flips over, collides with two rival wagons, and explodes, taking with it two of his men and one octopus. Nearby, a beautiful human woman in a silver gown and a peacock mask takes note of the Drow’s change in demeanor—Tayana would recognize crime family royalty like him from a mile away, and her past experiences have taught her that men of his sort can be very pliable following a big hit like this, and thus can make for useful allies, at least in the short term.
“Run into some bad luck, handsome?”
As yet another wagon is obliterated in a fiery crash, a broad, toothy smile creeps across the face of a halfling in a maroon business suit and a mask resembling a gold dragon. His smile isn’t in response to the events of the race itself, which he rarely pays attention to, but rather to the growing viewership numbers as more and more people across Faerun tune into the broadcast. In the dirt road casino that is the Goldcliff Battle Wagon Racing League, Alfred D’gaul deals the cards. Regardless of the race’s outcome, any race’s outcome, he always wins.
Cpt. Captain Bain of the Goldcliff Militia sits nearby, watching the race intently through his wolf mask, eyes fixed on the Raven. In his pocket, he carries a glass bottle labeled with an apothecary’s note: Silverpoint Poison. Hovering above him, invisible and intangible, is the lich form of Barry Bluejeans, having only moments ago recomposed himself after being magically ejected from the Bureau of Balance moon base. He watches his friends on the screen, and for the first time in over a decade, he feels something almost resembling hope.
NO ONE (that I can find in the Klaarg tag on ao3) has written a fic detailing Klaarg's last few months between Here There Be Gerblins and Petals to the Metal. He mentions they've been a terrible few months. No One Has Written Out How He Got To Be Imprisoned By The Hammerheads. I've decided to embrace this burden now that I've finished torturing Cecil.
If anyone has any thoughts on how our boy Klaarg fared in the interim, please let me know. I'm open to all suggestions. Also if you have a fic that Has been written about this, LET ME KNOOOOW
[Montrose leaned forward, playfully shaking Emerich by the shoulders. “Keep up, Emerich! I have to turn him. I’ve gotta seduce him.” He feigned desperation, but it wasn’t too far off from how he was feeling. “Okay, buddy, you—” “I neeeeed him!” Montrose wailed, making sure to pantomime himself fainting onto Emerich’s shoulder. “No, no, you’re right, you pull out all the stops to try and seduce this straight guy, and we’ll see where that leads you.” Emerich said sarcastically. But Montrose takes it to heart.
—
After a meet-cute with (potentially straight) amateur wrestler, Beef Punchley, Montrose takes the long road to get in his pants.]
HII i was NOT expecting much of a response on my earlier beeftrose post but yall were very encouraging so here it is!!! the very first chapter of my silly little steeplechase au fic, the art of seduction!! more chapters to come so stick around? i thrive off of encouragement ߹𖥦߹
In the Margins: On the Pleasures of Reading and Writing
There were lines to be said. The correct string of words, the right pacing. You have every right. I am sorry, I am sorry. I am so happy for you. I missed you. Thank you. I am sorry. Yeah, you too.
Lup said, “You're doing it again Creech. Authorial intent. Knock it off, would ya? It makes my ears rings like a bitch.”
Afterwards, Lucretia took her potions every day - for her heart, her joints, her mind and heart. She stayed active, in a post-mission mindset. Someone had to; for good or ill, she was the one in place to do it. Kept her hours at the office - her earth-bound, Faerun-set office, there were renovations happening at the Moon Base. She was busy, busy, busy readying a successor for the Bureau even as it grew from what it used to be.
Rebuilding after destruction, present and past, included a great deal of paperwork. Conferences - the fear in world leader's eyes when they shook her hand - more paperwork.
Carey and Avi and Magnus and Lup - she wrote letters, postcards, called, visited.
There were lines to be said. The correct string of words, the right pacing. You have every right. I am sorry, I am sorry. I am so happy for you. I missed you. Thank you. I am sorry. Yeah, you too.
Neverwinter; a bowling alley, red, grimy walls, squeaky floors, scattered laughter and heckling at irregular intervals. Lucretia did not like the lighting, and Lup of course was set on breaking away from a fear of closed spaces - heavy ball in hand. Barry was off getting drinks. He'd been off getting drinks for a good while - either avoiding them or getting lost scribbling a theorem breakthrough on the back of a textured napkin.
Lup said her part, and then it was done with. Lup was extraordinary, incomparable, impossible, unstoppable. It did not particularly matter very much for her if Lucretia was unforgivable. Lup did the impossible all the time. She could do that too, and force her to pay for fries and tickets and books for the rest of her life to make it even.
Lup said, “You're doing it again Creech. Authorial intent. Knock it off, would ya? It makes my ears rings like a bitch.”
“I can't turn it off,” said Lucretia. It was the right thing to say. It also happened to be the truth.
Case in point: Lup made a disbelieving scoff. As Lucretia knew she would, and Lup knew she knew she would, to make a point out of it.
The knowing, still, after so much time, after everything, took her out and brought her out of herself. That was normal. That was part of having her great plot unveiled to the whole of this world, it seemed. Something to grow used to, among all the rest.
It was her turn. She missed her shot against the pins. She did not miss it on purpose, even: the ball made her wrists hurt. Also, in general, her wrists hurt - she'd had carpal tunnel since she was twelve, Angus better keep to the exercises she'd taught him or he'd end up the same way.
"I'm making amends where I can. I haven't even had that many palpitations."
Lucretia was a writer - the writer. Most days, she could think of up to twenty-two scenarios, plots and character arcs that might lead Taako to forgive her.
These were not just conjectures; they were as good as fact, if only because she knew him, and she knew herself, and she knew Faerun, where Gods played favorites and loose ends only ever tied as much as suited the possibility of a fun side quest.
Lucretia knew how to play the game. They had always been even, the two of them - at counting cards, charades night, moving people around them. He wouldn’t take shit from her now, but in ten years, in fifteen -
Thing was, she wasn't much interested in Taako's forgiveness.
Whenever they crossed paths, which was not often, Magnus cried. That, and he kept trying to get her to adopt one of the dogs he trains at his school. He only ever recommended mastiffs or water-dogs, something big and not very clever and good-hearted to love her. Carey and Killian had adopted a mutt, and now he seemed set on dispensing dogs to everyone he knew, and mildly cared for.
This was not a singular honor, naturally. Magnus cared so, so much. Lucretia always told him she would think about it, and she always arranged her thought so as to mean it honestly at the time.
For all her words, she had none to explain to Magnus she couldn't bear company, not in her living space, not to live with. That she could not have been followed along by any creature without thinking of Davenport, and that the pet of it all made her sick to her stomach, all the more because she missed Davenport very much.
So there was that. Lucretia would need to think of something to bring, for when he made up his mind to invite her over and talk it all out. A store-bought casserole or two. Treats for the dogs, books for the students. Tissues for them both, probably.
“Barry,” Lucretia said, and bent down to tie her shoe. Her shoe was tied perfectly, but that wasn't the point. The angle of it, Barry looming and looking down, was too obvious a scene not to sketch out.
“Madame Director,” said Barry, not looking at her. Lucretia did not wince, but in that specific way that made it clear she was trying not to grimace, just in case he got it out of the corner of his eye. Old habits died hard. Not much use apologizing for another application of high-handed authorial vision, anyway. Barry never accepted her apologies, he only ever heard them out.
Sometimes Lup came, and swept her away to bowling alleys, axe-throwing, poetry readings, all of it in basements and attics, closed and too hot or too damp. Bookshops, because Lup seemed to be determined to make up for lost time, and Lucretia had appointed herself a task of living her life in this one world, and that included Faerun's Best Sellers list, according to the The Neverwinterer's lit critics.
Sometimes Barry was there, too, picking up memoirs and browsing the comic books section, cracking up a little at the over-the-top performance Lup made out of reading love poems to him - at him, more accurately.
He was there, sometimes, because Lup was impossible, incomparable, extraordinary, and determined to bridge the gap, to force Lucretia smilingly and at umbrella-point down the gap. But sometimes it was only the two of them, the two girls, Lup heckling actors at the opera, or breaking her out of her too-bright landside office to shepherd her through the endless list of street food treasures she had already gotten to know.
That was easier. Lup did not go easy on her - but it was simply how they were, even now.
And then there was this, too.
Barry sat beside her on the park bench. Lucretia had taken to jogging, as part of her public image campaign to be around people who recognized her, to make them used to recognizing her, approaching her, and then ignoring her.
Her lungs made an effort to escape through her mouth - she was doing good time lately, for her age. Whichever number she went with depended on the day, and how much Wonderland made its consequences felt on her nerves.
The doctor said it was to be expected, anyhow. She had known this, but it had seemed the thing to do, going for another opinion, at this point in the storyline. And apparently there were other concerns for her to take into consideration. A whole future worth of things, blood pressure (very bad) and muscle strain (bad) and pain (variable, depending, too, on the day).
A great deal depended on the day. There was a future, and she was in it now. Long green grass, people pushing strollers. A teenager sat with a book of algebra and a variety of colored markers beneath an hazeltree, not far.
Barry watched her gasp out of the corner of his eye, she was nearly sure now. She wiped her face on her towel, and when she took it away he was staring without a blink.
It wasn’t that it didn’t happen everywhere she went, but she’d studied enough mathematics and visited enough worlds to know there was a sort of knock-on effect with these things. Words would spread, like a disease, and even more than that - the world would tilt, ever so slightly, into a satisfying narrative direction. She had to put the work in to let go of her grasp in it, after so long. Avoid the assassination attempts, hold the babies she was given to hold, gossip and accept accusations and sit down on park benches with strangers to talk it out. In as much as she allowed herself to delineate the turn of events, she expected it would grow easier.
Things with Barry wouldn’t be getting easier anytime soon. Lucretia didn’t need to be a master storyteller to know that.
A jay piped insolently from a nearby branch. Blue-brested. Lup’s favourites. He was a keen birdwatcher; had been, on every cycle, trying to record different species. Naming them, when there wasn’t anyone around to ask about it.
Now, the little winged thing squeaked, alarmed, and flew away from his nearness. Liches are not known for their ready welcome among beasts.
There wasn’t much to be said, was it? The birds scattered in an arch around them, swept hard angles away from Barry.
This was a thing that happened, now. Lucretia was a thing that had happened, now. Lucretia ran the same route every other day. Barry was there, at times; sometimes not. So it went.
So. Lucretia was kind of unforgivable. She had made the math on it, the bookkeeper's balance of trust - she'd known whatsoever was selling, alright.
This was fine. It's all fine. She's apologized, she's respecting boundaries. She's - well, not moving on, but there's plenty of paperwork to be done. Plenty of parties to avoid, and books to attempt to read. Getting used to living on anything but a moon's gravity is hell on her joints. She's started going to the theater, sometimes. Comedy plays, the ones Lup recommended. They were meant to attend one or another next week.
Next week, and Lucretia would still be kicking around. She had taken the second vial in her pantry, taken the antidote, nearly as fast as she ought to. It had seemed the thing to do, all things considered.
Lup didn't need to bother herself with Lucretia's near-death experience. It was her business, and Death's, and no one else need be involved.
Besides: “It would not be good for him, in the long term.”
"Yesh, uh, no," Kravitz said, setting down his scythe on the edge of her kitchen table. "All due respect, which I get is is, mm, debatable, this shit isn't going to fly, ma'am."
"Thank you for your concern," Lucretia said, rather kindly, and thought, loudly: Fuck off, will you.
Kravitz did not fuck off. Reapers rarely did.
“I take responsibility for a great many wrongs, but this one wasn't on me.”
Kravitz made a sound. It was one hell of a scraping, bony, skeptical sound. Lucretia took some umbrage to i, as a matter of fact.
The thing was, and it was kind of sad, but Lucretia wasn't even going to, like, jump off a cliff or ignore an assassination attempt or whatever. On account that she'd already done enough unforgivable damage to her family, and hating a dead woman might not be conductive to their healing process. She was a dick, not a dumbass.
The poison was a genuine surprise. Lucretia had not been counting on the poison.
It didn't make much of a dent, in any case. She had a number of antidotes on herself at most times, and this time wasn't different. The server at her favorite tea house broke down crying fairly easily anyway.
People she met remembered what the Relics had done and caused, now. Older people felt it worst, mostly. They had lost more to them; their bodies felt the grief differently, the rage. They knew the shape of the world was as it was because of wars and strife, resentment, cruelties.
Now, they had names and faces to point at and say, My mother, my father, my city, my life was ruined because of these villains from across the stars. Fisher had taken away a world's worth of memories of devastation, and left scars with no clear justification.
It had been a mercy, Lucretia had thought, hearing herself lay the words over her mind, writing them out over her mind. A mercy, a kindness, a necessary trade, the guarantee of peace. And it been, of course. That she did not doubt. There were gardens over stretches of land that had been minefields, before the Bureau cleaned them; there were tea houses, schools, dogs and bars.
The server's name was Clotild. Her mother, her father, her city: she remembered it now, with the staticky sharpness of a child's grief.
It did not happen to the others as much, she didn't think. Not to Lup or Barry, though that might be because they were liches. Merle talked it all out in his Town Council Happy Hour meetings, most of which apparently, Lup said, happened at his bar, and involved a good deal of beer all around. Magnus hadn't mentioned it to her.
Davenport, of course, would be alive to it, seeing it everywhere in his travels. He would remember everything, and count out the failures along with the victories, neat and tiny as he always was in his logbook.
Taako - she didn't know. Even as a friend; even as the manipulative narrator of his last few years. He was older than her, and elves had a different conception of time. He did not feel the guilt of it less sharply, she was sure of it; but it was different, for him. The world had years and years, he had seen worlds and worlds. Known people, and people, endless numbers of them.
Lucretia had taken her antidote quickly enough, anyhow. Walked it off well enough to talk things out with Clotild, apologized. Said all the right things, and meant them too. No police involved, no need for any nonsense like that. She'd tidied away the spilled cup, patted away the green tea out of the spot where she'd nearly died, and even taken the short walk home in record time.
So she had died a little, coughing and spitting over her kitchen table once the first dose of the antidote worked its way out of her system. So what? No harm, no foul. She'd woken up with the second vial of antidote in her still-warm hand. Her head ached; her chest burned furiously, her heart still not quite up to its proper temp; and there was a bounty hunter for the Raven Queen peering down at her.
Honestly: there wasn't a need for Kravitz to come and stare at the undergrowth at the back her mind like that. Half-death experiences weren't part of his work duties. That would just be working overtime, and also, an abuse of authority, in her books. Dead was dead was dead. She'd go to the Raven Queen soon enough, in any case.
Kravitz actually cracked a smile at that thought. It made his skull tilt precariously over his skeleton, but not uncharmingly so. It was also quite terrifying, Lucretia had to hand it to him.
"As you see, I am very well. All ready to trot out at least three more decades, the doctor says."
"No spoilers this time, I'm afraid, ma'am," Kravitz noted, a little laconic.
Inconveniently, she found herself forced to cough-laugh some blood against her sleeves.
Professional-like, with as much dignity as she could scavenge, she added. "Indeed. My apologies for the inconvenience."
Kravitz unfolded himself to his feet. There was a doubling, a tripling of the world, as Death crowded Lucretia's kitchen.
Death raised the hairs in the back of her sweat-dampened neck. Death ran its edges over her unused over, judged the bareness of her pantry. Death, who loved Taako, peered down at her, a neat, sketched out angle entirely out of her power, and frowned a little with its bare skull of a brow.
“No offense, Lucretia. But. Stop making decisions for other people, maybe,” Kravitz suggested. It was only a suggestion in so much as the words followed in one another in that order. The tone, and the clustering of steep shadows layered over each other, were rather more pointed.
He left a smell of sulfur when he went, which Taako probably thought was wildly attractive, she'd bet. The singe marks where the scythe had been never quite got out of the wood, but Lucretia didn't have guests at home to explain it to; and she didn't dislike the feeling of it beneath her fingertips when she brought her work home.
She went to the doctor again, after being poisoned. It seemed like the thing to do. Her jogging days went down; she swallowed it down, and took up hiking through the same routes, as much as the fist-sized muscle tripped up against her ribs allowed.
Barry left a scattering of nutritious grains for the blackbirds and the plovers, the pigeons and ducks, something for them to enjoy better than his presence. Lucretia understood it well enough.
The seeds filled up Lucretia’s hands with a sweet silvery sound, made satisfying arched when she threw them. Soon enough the birds grew quicker to approach her. One of them nearly brushed her head, in his hurry to pluck up a treasure of good food from her palm.
That much she didn’t understand half so well. But then, Barry had always been able to surprise her. Lucretia took what she was given and made the birds sing with it. So it went.
The thing was, Davenport didn't have favorites, as a Captain or a friend. The thing was: he couldn't stand to hear his name in her voice, now. Which was like. Fine.
The Thing was - the thing was, back in Plane 6, or 34, whichever it was, when Lucretia was the last one standing, or Had to turn around and leave her captain to be captured and killed or worse, Davenport was proud.
It had been the hard choice, the right choice. Even if they couldn't save anyone for good, he could still hold her shoulders, afterwards, and save the part of her that trusted him to be righteous, brave, steadfast, a bulwark and a guiding star.
He was so proud. He helped her wash her hands, sometimes, when she came back to life shivering and feeling them slick, burning up with guilt like a fever.
He could not be angry. In a way that had nothing to do with authority and autonomy, and everything with a hundred years of faithful command, Lucretia had been following the lessons he taught her.
Leaders were always disposable. Daventport had taught her that. He had told her so, afterwards, sitting in a quiet spot after the panic seeped out of her breath.
He sent her postcards, now. Sometimes there were no words in them, just a sleek print of a shoreline, a mountain range. A vulcano, once. Sometimes they were full of scribbled words, back and front too. Sometimes he scratched them all out, and what he sent her was the thing layered over - he words and the crossing out, the blotted image beneath.
After the Hunger was done with, they celebrated, and hugged. There was crying, and glad unbelieving laughter. There was a round of shots, and a round of headache potion, because, it turns out, getting a whiplash of several decades of memories causes one hell of an migraine. It is a time so strange the days seems to lose their proper duration. None of them would be lingering at the Moon Base, afterwards; but for that time, there was nowhere else to be than with each other.
Except for Lucretia. Taako would have started another gigantic fight if she’d tried to be all cozy-cozy, but that wasn’t a problem, because apparently the Madame Fuckin’ Director went and fell into a deep doze about half-an-hour into the party.
Just - nappin’, snoring, drooling, out for the count. Like she was nineteen again and their planet was just destroyed. Like she was still the kid Taako had spent a thousand sleepless night drinking tea and baking macarons with, praliné cookies, the works, waiting for the moment when she’d finally drop off to a stone-still sleep with her head on his shoulder, the one he used to think, on unmentionable sappy hours, was the best of them all.
She wasn’t, and he sure as hell didn’t think that now.
Ten years of lies and secret agencies and stealing people’s autonomy took it out of an old lady. Taako did his best to ignore her napping place and didn’t leave before draing a dick on her face.
He did get go find a blanket, though, cursing all the while. He didn’t forgive anything. But he did intend to hate her for a good long while, and he couldn’t do that if she got pneumonia and died, or whatever it was decrepit humans did, just to spite him, to have the last word.
Half-asleep in a corner of the festivities, on a tall stool with her feet draping over the linoleum, her cheek mashed to a tabletop -still. He wouldn’t put it past her. He wouldn’t put anything past her again, and wasn’t that a goddamn kick in the teeth: little Luce all grown up and worth hating way worse than the way he’d hate an enemy. Attagirl, and all that shit.
Lucretia didn’t know this for sure, of course. She supposed. She imagined. She woke up with a blanket tossed over her back, and the lines wrote themselves out in front of her eyes: the gestures, the words, the curl of Taako’s mouth. Killing disdain, but not indifferent.
Not yet, at least.
She’s just a baby, he’d told Lup, that first cycle. Look at her cheeks Lu, that’s straight up - an human infant we got here, what the fuck do human teenagers even eat, because he’d been messed up, sure, he’d grown up fast and bad himself, but this was some bullshit. He’d side-eyed the Captan’s decision to have Lucretia on the crew for years.
Lucretia knew this, because he had told her plenty of times, made it clear from the start. Lucretia had proven herself time and time again, but that wasn’t the point. Not for Taako, not really. She had known that, too. For nearly a hundred years, she had known this.
Merle and her had to meet, sometimes. Well, the Director of the Bureau of Balance and the Governor of Bottlenose Cove met, for all he refused to be called by the title.
It was fine. It was excruciating, at first, but that was fine enough, because it was Merle. He broke the tension with a half-mean little joke about tax records not being erased out of universal memory, out of all things, and Lucretia huffed out a laugh, startled out of it; then, it was easier. Lucretia signed the line at the end of the check to nearly all his requests for funding, as she did everywhere she brought the reconciliation and rebuilding branch of the Bureau too. The demand for a jacuzzi directly in front of the sea seemed counter-productive to her, but Merle assured her that it was crucial to the negotiations.
She didn't intend to linger, once the meeting was through. No use going to Chesney's, for all he invited her, half-awkward now, sweeping a broad hand over his beard, scratched it.
Lucretia ached all over with longing for no thing in particular - the other times she had seen him do it, probably. She thought the words, Ached all over, and only then realized that was what was what she was feeling. It was possible Lup was unto something there about an over-reliance on internal narrative to give shape to her life, she conceded.
Lup had also obviously spilled the beans to Merle, or Barry had. All day he had thrown peculiar little frowning stares at her, as if he were expecting her to drop dead. It was, she had to admit, sweet, in its Merle way.
"For new time's sake," he said. "Hell, Creech, the kids are with their mom, and I'm doing a whole nice thing here. Offering a hand, whatever. Don't leave an old man hanging. Town Council Happy Hour starts soon. I hear horizontal power structures are all the rage, and there's not even a little one-sided amnesia plots, either."
There was a great deal of beer, it turned out.
It was a good thing Merle had called her along after all. Horizontal power structures, her ass. The local Home Owner Association was going to kick his ass for the rest of his term if he didn't get regulations in order, the only reason he invited her was to have her look over his paperwork anyway.
This was a thing that happened, maybe, miles away and to the left of the main narrative voice:
Taako knew: there was no way he was forgiving her before she died. A hundred years, sure - well, maybe, who the fuck knew - but old humans were fragile.
A hundred years, maybe. He'd take a day off his fantabulous life to visit her overgrown grave, throw some hard truths around, scream a bit, get in the last word, and then move on.
It would be healthy. Closure. And then maybe he'd stop thinking of her whenever he saw a cute notebook, or heard someone snort-laugh, or made praliné cookies, would stop feeling that knife-sharp sense of betrayal, every time he remembered all over again what she'd stolen from him.
Whatever. That was a problem for future Taako. Current Taako didn't give a shit.
This was a thing that happened, maybe. Could be happening even now, in the house Taako lived in now, across a kitchen table cluttered with vials and papers, books and dough resting on the counter. Praliné on the stove, just because he felt like it, no reason, leave off, whatcha even talking 'bout, he didn't give -
"Babe," Lup said. "I think all the shits you're not giving are showing. It wasn’t that much of a poisoning attempt, anyway."
"Whatever, nuh-uh, they don't, shaddup," Taako said, and went back to looking through his newest scroll on longevity spells for frail humans. What the hell did they have going on, putting all that effort on a single beating heart, anyway? Bad design choices all around. "Check the mix, will you? It may be too salty."
The thing was, one day, quite soon, comparative to the universe and their mission and Taako's lifetime, Lucretia was going to die.
The thing was, the story thread was sniped and stitched in. There was nothing left, except an excess of future. Lucretia had three decades of it at least to spend, waste, work with, work in, work at. Wishful thinking was the least of her crimes. A girl could dream, as long as she didn't write it down. Lucretia wasn't writing anything down, these days. There was nothing left. Everything she had to say was put down, gesture over action, across the world's surface.
The plot settled down. The pages turned, turned again. Some others stories were in the middle still. Some were only starting - Angus, Avi, Carey, Killian, so many others. Lucretia could guess at some, suspect, predict spoilers and plot twists. The days stretched out in front of her, to be perceived in time.
There was no looming might crumpled inside her mortal bones anymore, no vast ripped out knowledge in her keeping. If it left her feeling hollow, that was of no particular concern to the turning of events.
When she spoke, her mouth did not thrum any longer with the reshaping of the world, and that was as it should be.
She tried not to feel the lack of it, these days. She rearranged her thinking - like lines on a page or a screen she did it. She closed herself to hypotheticals, foreshadowings, red herrings.
She used pen and cursors to write down work directives, approve building projects, alliances, edicts of regret and reconciliation, new names for old rooms in the same Moon Base. She would not be writing again. Not anything with a amnesia plot line to it or any plot at all, not again.
Authorial intent had to count for something. She had time enough left. She had to hope that it did.
Three decades of it, to work at. So sometimes she fell asleep at the kitchen table, so sometimes she fell asleep by the kitchen table, making the most of the moonlight coming through the window to go through her papers, the week's best-selling read, Lup's newest letter to squint at until she made sense of the new shorthand code Lup and Barry were fiddling with.
So sometimes she woke with a blanket over her shins, her stomach, her aching back. There was no one watching. No one reading her thoughts, not even herself. She had nearly signed everything, the Moon Base was nearly ready. The Bureau of Balance might end up getting another name soon; it was still in works.
Probably she had only conjured it half-asleep, and had forgotten about it. A girl could dream, in a footnote or in the margins, as long as she didn't write it down.
An Archive of Our Own, a project of the
Organization for Transformative Works
If you're craving some TAZ Balance content in the year of our lord 2025, please go check out my Taako & Lup fic! The summary makes it sound very sad (,,, and it is,,,) but it's got a happy ending and plenty of humor sprinkled in. I peaked with this fic, I'll never be as proud of anything as I am of this fic and I'm not ashamed to say that
Summary:
This shouldn’t feel different. It shouldn’t.
So why does it?
He knows the answer. It sits heavy and cold in his stomach.
He’s alone. He’s going to be alone. For months.
It feels real, this time. More real than it ever was, back when she’d collapse to the ground a mile below them only to materialize, fully intact, mere seconds later. It’s real.
Lup is dead.
(Or: Taako makes elderflower macarons for Lup every year for their birthday. She’s not always there to receive them.)
