three phone calls, for the prompt “who do you call when it’s late at night.” ft. tselel/caym, rys/natalya, sajaa/alexei. tw: mild sexual implication.
Midnight broke coolly over the city. Not even broke; more a soft sort of splintering, a finger, perhaps, or a toe—something easily snapped and even more easily ignored. A darkening in the already dark shadows. A faint chill creeping into the air, just behind the even fainter chill of the wind. The Ways yawned a little wider, luring and lurid and so, so easy to stumble into, one missed cross street or misplaced step on the curb away from plunging into a nightmaric paradise.
Tselel walked down one of them, effortlessly weaving her way along the border. One foot in Faerie and one in Humane, the both of them tugging at her ankles like two feral cats fighting over a piece of meat. The only difference was that Faerie wasn’t afraid to use its claws.
If she took sixty-one steps down this Way, one for every midnight moment and an extra for luck, she’d find a park bench stranded exactly between the two realms. It was said if you put your head in Faerie and your feet in Humane and took a nap, you’d dream of your heart’s desire. It was said if you put your feet in Faerie and your head in Humane, you’d get about as good of a night’s rest as you could expect from sleeping on hard wood outside. That, or end up abducted. Bit of a dice toss with that one.
Tselel was willing to roll those dice.
Forty-two, fifty-seven, sixty-one steps and there it was: splintery white wood held together with rivets of brass, parked right where the two ways wound into each other.
She plopped down on it. It was damp, because rain had passed through earlier, and cold, because it was dead winter and things tended to get a bit frigid around that time. Power prickled against her skin, the bench’s magic brushing up against her own and trying to assert dominance.
Tselel closed her eyes and made a stab at sleep. Opened them again. Balled her jacket up beneath her head to serve as a pillow. Drummed her feet against the bench until it made an alarming creaking noise. Gave in and pulled out her phone, which helpfully informed her it was twenty past and thirty-one degrees out, as if she couldn’t tell that from the angle of the moon and her breath collecting, pale-white and steaming, before her face.
Her lives had refilled in Diner Dash; she played them through, and after all the breakfast truck levels, then tucked it back into her pocket. Sleep still felt far away. Civilization felt further still, the night hollowed of life, even the typical sounds of the city coming to her muffled, unreal and dream-like, having to pick their way through the different paths before they could be perceived. Borders were such lonely places.
Perhaps she could call Caym. It was an unbidden thought, rising too fast for her to avoid it, and unwelcome, too.
Tselel didn’t need him. She never needed anybody, especially not to help her do something as simple as fall asleep, but she did want him, with a sudden, desperate seizing of her lungs. Him, and the quiet of his office, and the strains of techno music that drifted just below it all. Not the familiar litany of questions she could count on if she did call—where are you, who are you with, what are you on, what do you need, shall I come fetch you, in that order—but him. Just him.
She re-fished out her phone and played a few rounds of Solitaire but that didn’t kill the wanting, either.
Before she could talk herself out of it she was dialing. There was just enough time to hear the first tinny ‘brrring’ before Caym picked up, already speaking.
“Where—”
“Don’t talk,” she interrupted. “Don’t ask questions. Don’t think questions. Literally, not a fucking word.”
The silence tipped from interrogative to inquiring, then over to accepting. There was a click as he placed his phone down on the desk; the sudden, heightened hiss of static as he switched to speaker. And then the soft scratch of his pen against paper, filling the pre-morning, the sound of his breath just beneath, in-out, in-out, so clockwork regular she could think him a fae.
Tselel closed her eyes and breathed along. Eventually, she dreamed.
o.O.o
Midnight broke coolly over the city. Natalya watched the numbers on her stove flip from 11:59 to 12:00. They were neon green and the brightest thing in her apartment aside from her phone screen, lending her kitchen a faintly radioactive air.
A few moments later her phone’s clock followed behind. That was worrying; she might need to replace it. She made a mental note about looking into what newer models were worth the expense, and, after that, which dealer to buy it from to dodge as much of market price as she could, and then went back to staring at her contacts list.
Karla’s number sat right at the top. She was probably awake—Natalya didn’t think that woman ever slept, not really—and she’d even more probably pick up, sleeping or not. Maybe she’d want to hang out. They could get takeout. Have that marathon of Fast and Furious they kept meaning to have before it got pushed by another order, another job. If nothing else, she’d show up, if she asked for her to.
Natalya allowed herself a second to picture it: Karla standing in the doorway, sure as anything, a crate of Monster in one hand for Natalya and a crate of Red Bull in the other for herself, sleeves rolled up to flash those fang-mouthed tattoos. Then she scrolled a little further down and hit the contact marked only with a spider emoji.
The line rang and rang and rang, on and on until she thought it was sure to go to voicemail and then, just before she could hang up and pretend it was an accidental dial and call Karla, it stopped.
“Natalya.” The voice on the other end was cool and sticky-soft, the faintest ribbon of amusement running through it. She closed her eyes at the sound.
“Rys.”
“What can I do for you?”
“I need…” She didn’t know what she needed. She hadn’t planned this far ahead; had only been thinking of the itching beneath her skin, of the desperate, driving need to call someone do something now now now now. “Something,” she decided on.
A hum came down the line. Another picture replaced Karla—Rys with his many eyes crescented, his head tilted in that particular way of his when he was deciding whether to indulge her or leave her to drown. When he spoke, teeth carved that image up to slivers thinner than the amusement and twice as deadly.
“I’m at a club,” he said, and then, “I’ll send you the address.” And then, a laughing postscript, “Don’t wear your jacket.”
And then, “Or your underwear.”
And then, “Or your glasses.”
o.O.o
Midnight broke coolly over the city, a flood of shadow and starlight, seeping into every inch of the neighborhood. ‘The Wrecks,’ the inhabitants affectionately called it. A ramshackle collection of houses and shops scrounged up from the forgotten edges of the city, creaking and tilting and one good gust of wind away from shattering into so much plywood and glass. Sajaa loved it with a fierceness that nearly stopped her heart.
But that was when it was the Wrecks, when she could look out at the piecemeal, piercing buildings and see it in all its shambling glory. In the dark it was just another room. Another building. Another not-home.
She crept from her bed, smoothing the sheets to erase her presence, then made her way down the winding halls and up the wrought-iron stairs to the roof. A dim moon was shining and a few stars scattered the sky, battling with light pollution for a place. Wind nipped at her hands and cheeks. With a shiver she pulled her robe tighter around herself—a protection, a hiding place—and leaned up against one of the chimneys dotting the roof.
Then she called Alexei.
He picked up on the third ring; his voice, when it came, was breathless, as if he’d run across the room to answer. “Sajaa? Is everything alright?”
“Everything’s fine. I just wanted to call.”
“It’s late.”
There was no reproach in his words, only a statement of facts. She blushed regardless, tucking her head further back into her hood as if she could shield herself from his non-existent gaze, her eyes falling to the concrete beneath her boots.
“I wanted to call,” she repeated. “I wanted— I wanted to hear your voice.”
“And now you’ve heard it.” He laughed. A moment later she echoed the sound, the wind snatching it away before it was fully out. “I’m joking, Sajaa; I’ve missed your voice too. How is it there? Strange, I imagine. No wonder you’re not sleeping.”
“It… Yes. It is strange.”
More than strange, it was marvelous. Awe-inspring. In the scarce few weeks she’d been with Rin’s crew, Sajaa had seen more miracles than she knew how to process—girls halted on the brink of death; an enclave raised by godly hands; storms made of magic that swept through in minutes, leaving everything changed in their wake.
Now she found herself grasping for the mundane (in contrast) confines of her old life. The silence on the line was heavy with what she didn’t say, the end of her sentence gaping around the lacuna of all that she wanted to tell him: how it scared her, how it thrilled her, how she wasn’t calling him to remind her of home but to remind her of him, to give her something to cling to that wasn’t the Archive’s doctrine or the mission or the promise of greatness her future held. To give her a reason to come back.
She swallowed. The sound echoed. The words remained unsaid.
“Can you go out to the roof?” she asked.
No answer came but the rustle of fabric, the click-click of a door unlocking and then re-locking just as quickly. Footsteps echoed through the phone. Another door creaked open and then the rush of wind filled the speaker, drowning out Alexei’s movements.
“I’m there,” he said, a moment later.
The Archive’s territory was a spine of glass and light on the horizon; Sajaa searched it desperately, seeking the towers of the building she’d lived in. Was that a red smudge she saw? Probably nothing more than a trick of the light, but she could still pretend it was him, looking back at her across all those dark miles.
She kept her eyes fixed on it, scared to blink lest it vanish. “Tell me a story, Alexei.”
“About the Salted Lady?” Another laugh, this one softer, truer, and Sajaa’s mouth twitched in an answering smile.
“She’s not a drink,” she told him primly. “But, no. I’ve heard too much about the pirate gods lately. Tell me about one of yours. Your favorite.”
Eyes open, watering against the cold and the strain, she stood there and let him spin her a tale of the Frostbitten Queen and her silver scythe until the night had passed and dawn lit the horizon with a pale glow.
ft. aiyan as the world’s most vicious avatar and arin, who is doing his best.
“Earthbending is different than firebending. If fire is about power, about energy, then earth is about will.”
Aiyan scoffs. Arin ignores her serenely.
They’re out in the countryside surrounding Ba Sing Se: all grass and tree and rock, the sun filtering warm and golden through the leaves. A mountain rises above them, so picturesque it could have been plucked from a painting. Creatures tunnel through the earth beneath their feet. He doesn’t share that little tidbit with his new apprentice. She doesn’t seem the type to appreciate things like ‘animals’ and ‘life’ and ‘non-destructive ways to use bending.’
“Here.” He draws to a halt in a clearing. Aiyan stops a fews paces away; the boy following her a few beyond that, settling himself on a fallen tree trunk to observe. His eyes reflect the light strangely. Arin ignores that, too. “We’ll practice here. No one will see us.”
“Disturb us,” Aiyan corrects.
“Yes. That, too. As I was saying. Earthbending is…well, I’ve always thought of it as a certain way of thought. It’s about looking at the world and saying 'move.' It’s about saying 'no, you will not.' It’s about saying ‘I will.’”
You will not burn this village. You will not kill these civilians. You will not change me, hurt me, love me into an unfamiliar shape; you will not keep me here in the dark. I will beat you, stand up to you, leave you, and you cannot stop me because I am as relentless as the earth itself.
“It’s about stubbornness,” he adds, and laughs. The sound rings hollowly through the air. “I think you know something about that, don’t you, my apprentice?”
“Don’t fucking call me that.”
“As you wish, apprentice mine.”
Aiyan snarls.
Arin settles into an opening stance, still laughing. Or, well. Something close to an opening stance, at least; his form has always been a hybrid creation, hammered together with inherited knowledge and his knowledge and other’s knowledge. The end result is something too rigid to be called waterbending, too fluid to deserve the term earthbending, but it’s his. And he will pass it on to this strange, spiky girl, because someone has to show her how to shape rock and it might as well be him. Also, it might minimize how many master earthbenders get a fistful of fire to the face.
Multitasking. Arin is good at it.
“Copy me,” he instructs. “It doesn’t have to be exact.”
Grudgingly, AIyan copies him. Her legs are too close together, her arms tucked tight to her sides—like Lucien, he thinks, and then shakes the thought away—but she’s got the rough idea so he lets it go. Form is something to be discovered, to be crafted. He will not interfere in her journey.
“Good job.”
A boulder the size of a badgermole’s head stands in the center of the clearing, dark gray, weatherbeaten from time. Moss creeps up its sides. Unmovable. Eternal.
“Now” —his arms raise, smooth— “I say: Move.”
The rock moves. It rips out of the ground in a shower of dirt and pebbles and a sound like a thunderclap; a family of gilacorn living beneath it scurry for cover. Arin keeps it hovering in the air for ten, fifteen, thirty seconds, the world held shaped in his fist, and then drops it. Slides back into a vague approximation of a closing form. Smiles.
“Okay! Your turn, apprentice mine. Make me proud.”
Aiyan takes out half the mountain on her first go. The scurrying of animals becomes a whole fucking stampede, trees smashing into kindling, rocks bouncing down the slope, carving destruction. A plume of dust raises high into the air, blocking out the sun. Arin nods.
“We’re gonna need to work on your control a bit, but that is a solid start. Nice work. Tea break, and then we can try again. This time let’s try and move something smaller. Like a pebble.”
ft. arin, a (forlorn) box of doughnuts, and three minutes of my writing ability. for the anon and also @hechiceria 💜
Arin stared at the cashier. The cashier stared back. The box of doughnuts sat on the conveyer belt between them, sadly and forlornly.
"Your card was declined," the cashier said, as if the beeping cash register wasn't enough to clue Arin in.
"Cool," Arin responded, because he wasn't one of those dicks who yelled at employees for saying obvious and probably-part-of-their-training things.
"So you can't, um, buy the doughnuts? Sir."
"Cool," Arin repeated.
They stared at each other a bit more. The doughnuts looked even more forlorn. They looked like some of the powdered sugar had fallen, forlornly, off. Tragic.
"Please hold."
Arin took out his phone and texted a rapid confess your love for me via paypal into a message chain with an unsaved number. Waited. Thirty seconds later his phone chimed with the incoming notification that one hundred dollars had been deposited into his PayPal account.
The sender was an X. The message was a 🖤.
Arin hit transfer and handed his card back. "Try again."
a small bit of arin and kessen interaction. prompt used
“You don’t hate me?”
“I don’t have the energy to hate you. Or anyone. I’m just tired.”
Kessen hovered awkwardly on the roof, the wind whipping coldly across their skin. Arin slumped against the railing next to them, chin on his crossed arms, staring out across the glittering mess they called a city. The night hollowed him out, reduced him down to the bare essentials: a sweater, plants in his hair, the strange, sharp smile that was his and someone else’s all at once, stealing across his face when he forgot to pay attention.
“But I’m stalking you,” they protested. “That’s a violation of privacy. I report on what you do, who you meet with, the route you take to work. I’ve invaded your house.”
Kessen wasn’t sure why they were trying to make Arin hate them. They liked Arin, unsettling and strangely cheerful as he was, even if he did walk entirely too quietly. It was just… It was hard, to like someone they would probably be called on to kill. To drink his coffee and listen to him talk about High Seelie verb conjugations, all the time thinking of the fastest way to put a blade in his throat if Caym sent the right text.
“If I got mad at every person who was hired to stalk me, I’d hate half the city.” Arin spared him a quick glance, smile as rueful as it was reassuring. “I don’t intend to hold Caym’s actions against you, Kessen. Besides, the only times you’ve ‘invaded my house’ I invited you in.”
“They’re my actions too. I don’t understand why you won’t just—”
“Please.” The soft word cut through the rush of words. Protests withered and died beneath the gentle firmness in Arin’s tone, the faint shake of his head. “Not tonight.”
Tired, he’d said. Arin looked a lot of words to Kessen, and tired was one of the nicer. Exhausted sprang to mind. Weary. Ready-to-fall-down-and-never-get-up-again. A thin, hunched shape, fingers bone pale where they wrapped around the railings, the darkness eating away at his form.
“Are you okay?” Kessen asked hesitantly.
Another brief glance, another of those too-sharp smiles, teeth gleaming in the wash of light from the city’s magilectricity. It wavered around the edges, the corners of his mouth trembling with the effort to sustain it. His dark eyes looked like they could swallow worlds.
“Not really.”
“I can….go find another rooftop to stalk you from? If you want to be alone?”
“Yes,” Arin said, already turning back to the view. “I think that might be for the best.”
Their first date is a disaster, although not for any of the reasons Arin had expected. He sits on the hood of Caym’s car and watches the house before him cave in with a soft thump, spitting golden sparks high into the night air. Smoke drifts upwards in lazy spirals, blocking out the weak light of the stars.
Across the stretch of dead lawn Caym stands with his hands tucked deep in the pockets of his slacks, watching the fire burn from mere feet away. The fire light paints his face in deep orange strokes, eyes unreadable in the molten glow.
It’s disquieting, to say the least. Arin had looked at Caym, with his pressed suit and sharp smile, and expected to be pointed in the direction of a computer within minutes of their “date.” Instead he’d found himself ushered into Caym’s sleek car at nine on the dot, Tselel driving them out to the middle of nowhere. Deep country: sprawling fields and limitless sky, buildings dotting the landscape like paint drops splattered from a careless brush.
The hood of Caym’s car is fire-warmed beneath him. Arin runs his fingers over the glossy paint job, tracing each whorl of flame trapped flickering beneath the surface, and tries to think. His mind still lingers on the hungry rush of fire, the weight of Tselel’s arm around his shoulders as they’d watched the house burn, flames eating across the floor and up the walls. It must have been soaked in accelerant it’d gone up so quickly, the fire devouring the whole groaning carcass within minutes. And Caym had lit the match.
“Having fun?”
Arin glances over at Tselel, perched on the car next to him. A thin sheen of sweat clings to her skin, and she’s shed her leather jacket in concession to the heat, her bruised arms outstretched as she watches the fire with an intensity bordering on frightening.
“Is it always like this?” he asks instead of answering. It seems safer and besides, Tselel’s been hanging around Caym for nearly a year, ever since she threw a self proclaimed neo-Nazi boy down three flights of stairs. If anyone knows what chaos surrounds Caym, it’s her.
The smile she gives him is red-tinged, heat from the fire shimmering across her face.
“Sometimes. Caym’s not usually so hands-on. He prefers to delegate.” Arin can imagine all too well: Caym behind a mahogany desk, giving orders in his cool, controlled voice, world burning in neat swathes beneath his gaze.
Tselel glances over at him and then, impulsively, leans in so close Arin catches a whiff of pomegranate and ash drifting from her hair. “I like it better when he comes. It’s more interesting.”
Interesting. Arin is aware of the places Tselel favors; dark alleyways and underground fight clubs, death matches fought beneath the eyes of those with the money to gamble. High praise, or a warning. Perhaps both.
“I see.” He turns back to the fire. It’s dying down, the raging inferno dwindling to a smolder. A half hour more and it’ll be gone, leaving behind a charred husk and the ashes of whatever Caym had sought to destroy.
Tselel regards him, some of the intensity draining away, replaced by cautious hope. Arin scrubs harder at the paint, feeling it blister beneath his fingers. He keeps thinking of the thin match in Caym’s hands, sputtering fitfully in the night air. Caym might as well have lit Arin on fire when he’d dropped it. Perhaps that was why he’d bothered to take Arin all the way out here, where the dark velvet sky melted into the horizon. Where houses went up in a flash and everyone turned a blind eye to the smoke blocking out the moon.
“So, you in?”
Tselel’s body is very warm beside his, her hand resting so close their fingers brush. Across the lawn Caym still stands, a slash of darkness against the light spilling from the wreckage. There’s enough fire left to limn his face with red, the smoke rendering the sharp edges of him into a softer blur.
“Yeah,” he says, and threads his fingers through Tselel’s. “I’m in.”
bc it’s no longer in the canon, have a six month old one-shot ft. 2/3 of the unholy trinity
“Don’t tell Caym.”
Arin’s voice is a small, broken thing, half smothered in the thick night air. Tselel pauses with her cloth still in the stream, glancing up at him. His eyes are large and miserable, almost black in the dim light of the moon, his mouth a thin, worried line below them. Blood still streaks his face, fair skin tinged pink where she’d done her best to scrub off the stains.
“He can help.”
Help you, she means, or maybe help me. Tselel has killed her fair share of people, knows how to handle the aftermath of taking a life: a bath, a bottle of alcohol, her mouth on Aline’s/Remy’s/Caym’s. But this is Arin, who bandages her hands after a fight, who feeds stray animals with his own meager rations, who is always gentle, always kind. Who has never raised his voice to another person, much less a weapon.
“You—” Arin winces at the word and she backtracks hastily. “We need to tell someone.”
“No.”
“It was a surprise attack, Arin. None of this is your fault.”
The whisper of wind in the trees. A flash of silver. Hands around her throat, choking, her world narrowing to a streak of red. And then Arin, standing above her with a knife, magic crackling around him like a halo.
“I don’t want him to see.” His voice wavers, cracks again. Tear tracks are still evident on his face, cutting clean lines through the mess of blood. “Don’t tell him. Please.”
She opens her mouth, closes it again. Tselel understands wanting to impress Caym, to make him smile and throw an arm around her shoulders, the cool weight of his power washing away all of her doubts. And she understands the confused affection Arin holds for him more than she cares to admit.
“Alright,” she says. “I won’t tell him.”
Arin’s hands curve around one of hers in a white-knuckled grip, leaving red smudges on her skin. She squeezes back just as tightly.
“Thank you,” he whispers.
“Yeah. Of course.” Tselel dredges up a smile and offers it to him. “Let’s finish cleaning you up and get back. We don’t want them to come looking for us.”
She lifts the cloth out of the stream, pauses with it pressed to his cheek. Water droplets drip off his chin onto the ground below.
“Next time,” she says, “It will be easier.”
Arin blinks down at her, wild-eyed and blood-smeared, magic still flickering around his head. He looks every one of his fifteen years and a century older, too.
The hood of Caym’s car is fire-warmed beneath him. Arin runs his fingers over the glossy paint job, tracing each whorl of flame trapped flickering beneath the surface, and tries to think.
tagging @aesterea, @haphazardlyparked, and @petitgalaxy
