#wizardwiththeironfists

[wizardwiththeironfists]

Paired | Leon & Ivy

Leon blinked as the young lady walked up to him. She spoke his name despite as far as he was aware they had never met before. Given what’s he’s been through in his short time as a Warden he tensed a bit wary at this fact til she showed off the numbers on her wrist. He blinked a bit surprised before removing his gauntlet focus slightly to stare at his own numbers that had turned up 00:00:00 as well.

"I uh probably should have paid more attention to that timer," he chuckled sheepishly as he replaced the glove. He rubbed the back of his head with his other iron clad fist not really sure what to do with the situation. He had been so focused on doing his job that the entire soulmate time had slipped his mind entirely.

"So, uh, how’d you know my name before we even met Ivy?" he asked. It wasn’t that he was unaware of the Archive just that he didn’t know what she looked like and didn’t know she went by Ivy. He shifted his weight from foot to foot as he stood there more then a little nervous.

[askthearchive]

Leon had to remove a gauntlet in order to check his wrist; Ivy knew many people had no inclination to pay their Countdowns mind, but aware as she was of the recent goings-on in this city, she wondered if this one simply hadn't the time. The surprise written on his face when he saw he'd hit zero himself attested to that theory.

When he looked back at Ivy, though, that surprise hardened into something just this side of suspicion. Wariness was perhaps a better word. He asked how she'd known his name, and it seemed by addressing him by it, she had started this conversation off on the wrong foot. 

"I apologize if I unnerved you," she replied, and meant that. "I know the names of many people I haven't met... I suppose I should have introduced myself as the Archive."

( wizardwiththeironfists )

[dangerouslyfluffy]

"wizardwiththeironfists started following dangerouslyfluffy"

-sniffs at him briefly, then growls once, warningly, before sitting down and looking at him intently-

[spellslingereva-blog]

[askthearchive]

wizardwiththeironfists replied to your post:Other Halves

((Given Leon’s occupation, he doesn’t actually have that good of odds outliving Ivy. But that probably just makes it worse. Also, I really like reading these insights you have.))

[[Hey, you never know, he could beat those odds. But either of them outliving the other by a long time would be really sad.

Thank you, by the way! I really appreciate that.]]

[askthearchive]

Other Halves

Thoughts on the Archive in the 'Countdownverse' inspired by this post, and prompts provided by both fridge-o-mancer and wizardwiththeironfists. 

For the most part, Ivy is fairly calm about the prospect of meeting her soulmate--the Archive has gone through it so many times that the process has lost a good deal of its novelty.

There is exactly one thing that she fears, although she won't admit it aloud: the prospect of her partner dying before they can meet. And prior to that meeting taking place, she not only fears it, but part of her expects it. 

Because, as it happens, her mother never met her own soulmate. The Countdown on her wrist was not set to run out until her late twenties, and as a teenager she fell for a man whose Countdown was also still running; they entered into a passionate relationship that Ivy's mother insisted signified that they were meant for each other, and that their Countdowns must be wrong. When the mantle of the Archive was passed prematurely to her following her own mother's sudden death, she considered neither her self-proclaimed soulmate nor her allotted one to be reason enough to live with herself and a child she resented. 

(Ivy knows the exact date and time that her mother should have met her soulmate. She was ten years old when it happened, and that day she received seven written accounts in four languages of people startled and distraught over hitting their zeroes and encountering no one. She's no stranger to those sorts of accounts and normally takes them in stride. But on that day, the knowledge that she was supposed to have called one of those seven family weighed on her mind and heart and she was inconsolable.)

Ivy is a cruel joke of an anomaly: the first Archive to have carried the mantle since birth, born of a mother she is well aware preferred death over knowing her own child. It would be all too fitting, she's thought many times, if circumstance denied her a soulmate as well.

Hitting zero and finding her match successfully assuages that fear, but a new worry quickly replaces it. She's been put together with a wizard now; compared to mortals they're incredibly long-lived, and while the Archive will endure, Ivy will not beyond a human's natural lifespan. One day, perhaps some eighty years from now, she will die and leave [ Jon / Leon ] to his remaining centuries without her. There will be another Archive, then--there must be--but though she will carry all of Ivy's memories, the bond of two halves made whole will no longer exist. 

Still, that of father and daughter will surely be some consolation. And to eighteen-year-old Ivy, eighty years seems a lot of time. That bridge is a long way off... enough that when it comes time to cross that bridge, they'll have worked out how.

[askthearchive]

00:00:00

In a universe where everyone is born with numbers on their wrists counting down to when they’ll meet their soulmate, send me 00:00:00 for my muses reaction to their numbers hitting zero when they meet yours.

When it came to this, Ivy was prepared for just about anything. Not only did she have thousands of memories of her predecessors’ Countdowns, but countless thousands more accounts written by others. So she was familiar with how this worked, and how strange the pairings that fate selected could be. Large gaps in age were the least, really, and quite common at that. Practitioners and non-practitioners were matched frequently as well: Archives past had often wound up needing to explain their unique situation to mortals previously unaware of the existence of the supernatural. Now and then, people found themselves face-to-face with soulmates of a gender they did not expect, or even a species they did not expect—humans and Scions were not unheard of, and though she had never received a reliable account, Ivy had even heard of humans matched to immortal Fae. 

Nothing, she was sure, would surprise her, and little worried her. The only possibility that did that was the one where her intended partner had, sometime prior to this meeting and entirely unbeknownst to her, died somehow prior to the time the two were due to meet. 

But when her Countdown ended—in the middle of a bright, hot summer day in Las Vegas—there was indeed someone standing before her, and more than anything else, Ivy was relieved by that fact. 

He was a young man—close to her own age, she supposed—and draped about his shoulders was a grey cloak Ivy recognized. That cloak meant he was a wizard; more to the point, he was a Warden of the White Council. It hardly took any effort at all for her to recall the White Council’s records, to skim through recruitments and assignments and discover which of them had most recently been charged with the defense of this city. 

"Leon Lichtenberg?" she asked, stepping closer, watching him curiously. "My name is Ivy. And I think you and I might be…" She let the words trail off, and raised her arm so that the inside of her wrist was visible to him. The numbers upon it were, for the first time in her life, still— 

00:00:00

( wizardwiththeironfists )

[spellslingereva-blog]

Voltorb!

Boom! Yeah yeah I see the theme here.

[headofthecouncil-blog]

Honored Merlin, is there any chance us Wardens will be getting a pay raise within the year?

The Merlin went to shake his head, but apparently his mouth reacted before he had a chance to.

"There is a possibility. It depends on your regions performance. It is quite a possibility after all that has happened though."