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thebluestbluewords · 1 year

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Rhyming is hard

This is about 90% an excuse for me to write Banter, 9% jokes about murder, 1% plot. I wrote the dialogue for this over a year ago, and scavenged it from my drafts to clean up yesterday.

“Mirror, feel my evil presence,” Evie chants, clutching the mirror in one hand like it’s a call phone. “Show me the location of our parents.”

“That’s seriously the rhyme you’re going with?” Mal asks, leaning over the table to stare at the mirror as Evie sets in down in the middle of their huddle.

Evie frowns. “What do you think rhymes with parents?”

Mal’s nose scrunches up as she thinks. “Errants? Aberrants?“ she offers. “Um, clearance?”

“Insurance,” Jay adds. “Which won’t help against theft here, cause apparently they’re all too good for that. Don’t buy a phone from the guy in town unless you’re okay with getting it stolen, by the way.”

“Don’t tell me that.” Ben says firmly, leaning over Evie’s head to see the mirror as well. The black smoke curls angrily, like the magic contained in the mirror is trying to escape the glass and smash their faces in for daring to use it for frivolous things like checking up on their parents, and then begins to clear.

“Incoherence?” Carlos offers, drumming the very tips of his fingers on the table. “I think your rhyme was good though, Evie. I’m just offering suggestions for next time.”

“Shut up, it’s working.” Mal gasps, pushing him out of the way as the smoke inside the mirror swirls into the beginnings of a clear picture.

The background resolves itself first, into a deep grey wall made of rough stone. The figure standing in front of it is small in stature, which is made all the more obvious by the gigantic crow sitting on her shoulder.

“My mother,” Mal says, sounding almost disappointed. “As alive and evil as ever.”

“Didn’t need a mirror for that one, babe.” Evie says fondly. “Pretty sure we all remember what she looks like, considering that she’s been the bane of our existence for the last sixteen years.”

Mal, on the pretense of leaning closer to the mirror, puts her hand over Evie’s on the table, interlacing their fingers. “Maybe Ben wanted to know, and also shut up. It’s changing.”

The mirror is changing, but not to a nicer sight. The background darkens, and the view of Maleficent monologuing to Diablo fades out. The background turns a nasty, muddy shade of grey-brown, and the figure visible in the mirror doesn’t look much nicer. He’s filthy, for one thing, and he’s wearing a collection of leather scraps that would be better suited to a scarecrow than a living person.

He’s also swinging a shovel at the wall with what looks like increasing violence, and his hair is on fire.

“Dear old dad,” Mal drawls. “Great to see him expanding the cave for once.”

“Is that Hades?” Ben asks, in a tone that could generously be described as ‘strangled’.

Mal laughs. “Yeah. My mom wanted a powerful kid. She didn’t pick him cause he’s a great father, she picked him ‘cause he’s one of the most powerful entities on the isle. And I guess ‘cause he was DTF, or whatever. Chernabog isn’t much for procreation.”

“Wow.”

“I can’t raise the dead or anything,” Mal explains, eyes still locked on the mirror. “Not even a fly. I just get some sick highlights in my hair when I use his fire, and some cool shit happened with a ouija board once.”

“That’s, uh, cool!” Ben manages, before the mirror swirls again, and a new face comes into view.

“The Evil Queen,” Carlos says, reaching out to touch the side of the mirror. “Do you think the mirror’s showing her in better light because it’s magic and it likes her better, or does her castle just have better lighting?”

“Mother’s castle has flattering light,” Evie says, but it’s her turn to stare at the mirror, eyes blank and lips slightly, beautifully parted. “She keeps it that way on purpose. For visitors.”

“Not that you got many.”

Mal’s hand is warm and firm over Evie’s own. Her exile should be an old wound by now, but even old injuries, even ones that can be treated softly now, still ache sometimes.

In the surface of the mirror, the Evil Queen is stabbing a needle, over and over, into the soft flesh on the inside of her legs. Behind her, there’s an intimidatingly large stone cauldron resting on a low fire.

“Is she—“

“She’s fine,” Evie says quickly. She’s still staring at the mirror, but she’s looking through it now, like she can’t bear to see her mother through the magic. “That’s what she does, most days. She’s just waiting while the cauldron heats up.”

“Pretty fucked up.”

“It’s not anything magical,” Evie says, but her voice is soft and she’s still focused on the mirror. “It’s acupuncture. She’s doing it for weight loss. And the cauldron isn’t magical either, it’s just some makeup compounds that don’t come over on the barges.”

Jay whistles, low and long. “That’s a pretty big cauldron for some makeup, princess.”

Evie startles out of her stare. “Oh, we sold it. She’s not boiling children’s skulls or anything like that. It’s a foundation base. She boils down some of the plants that come over and then adds pigments for each customer. It’s a pretty good business practice, and if we didn’t like somebody it was really easy to sneak something a little bit nastier than just pigment into their bottle.”

“Oh.” Ben says. He’s leaning over Evie’s shoulder to see the mirror, and he doesn’t pull back, but his shoulders tense at the mention of Evie’s mother slipping something untoward into a bottle. He’s got sort of a thing about poisons and edible spells, which is understandable. “I see.”

“Evil, babe,” Evie reminds him, tipping her chin up to look him in the face. “We didn’t exactly have a lot of other options.”

Unseen by Evie, the mirror swirls again. This time, it reforms to show a crumpled skeleton, surrounded by pieces of rusty metal.

“Uh, who’s that?” Ben asks after a moment, staring over Evie’s shoulder again. He looks a bit like someone watching a car wreck happening, but in a casual way. Like watching a car wreck on TV, maybe.

Evie glances back down at the mirror, and then recoils visibly at the pile of bones. “Oh, ew. I guess I didn’t word the request very well. That’s my father’s corpse.”

“Is that a dungeon?”

“It’s my mother’s dungeon, yes.” Evie explains. “She had my father killed down there shortly after I was born.”

“I’m sorry.”

Evie shrugs. “Thanks, I guess. She had him killed when I was a baby, so it’s not like I ever got to know him.”

Mal drops her head onto Evie’s shoulder. “Not like he was a big loss.”

“Come on, M,” Evie says fondly, tipping her head so that it rests on top of Mal’s, just for a moment. “Just because you don’t like your father doesn’t mean we all have to hate ours.”

“You never knew yours!” Mal points out. “And he was a man, E. We all know what men on the island are like.”

“I could have liked him.” Evie insists. “He might have been better that your dad. Not everyone is a bad parent.”

“Right, just everyone on the isle, then.”

“I know my dad,” Jay adds, leaning over to insert himself into the girl’s space. “Not to sway our data here, but I agree with Mal. There’s way more bad parents on the island than good ones, and my dad’s shit. Mal’s dad is shit. Evie’s dad is dead, so he’s not doing great either—“

“It’s changing again!” Carlos points out, smacking the table next to where Evie’s set the mirror down in order to argue better.

Five heads snap back to attention as the mirror swirls, and reforms into quite a different view. The background this time is bright grey, the color of the sky on a rainy spring day, the sort of day where the sun is trying and failing valiantly at breaking through the cloud cover. There’s a shop in the foreground, with a garish pink and green sign declaring it to be ‘the goblin mud spa’, and a bright copper car parked out front. There’s a woman in the front seat of the car, holding the steering wheel with one hand, and balancing a dirty glass in the fingertips of the other.

Carlos makes a soft, sad sort of noise. “…oh.”

On the surface of the mirror, his mother throws back the remainder of her drink.

“Is that normal?” Ben asks, leaning in to get a better look. “Drinking and driving isn’t exactly legal.”

Carlos’s hands aren’t visible, but there’s a sense of nervous, fidgety energy from him anyway. “…Yeah. She does that a lot. Goes away, drinks a lot, comes back stupid.”

“Magic mirror, move on,” Evie whispers, after they all stare for a long moment at the unmoving view of Cruella and her beloved car.

“Why isn’t it changing?” Mal asks. “It didn’t show my mom for this long.”

“You don’t wanna know,” Carlos mumbles, around the fingertip he’s got in his mouth. There’s a drop of blood smeared on the corner of his mouth, and it’s not entirely clear if his hand was bleeding before or after he started chewing on it. “Trust me.”

Mal frowns. “I totally do. Telling me I don’t want to know something is basically like slapping a neon sign on it telling me to keep digging until I find out. How do you not know know this already?”

Carlos sighs, and reaches out with his other hand to hover his index finger just over the surface of the mirror, above where his mother is pulling the strap of her soft leather purse over her shoulder. “That’s my dad. Human remains count, and that leather she used for her purse is the biggest piece of him left.”

Mal tries to recoil away from the mirror. but they’re so tightly packed around the table that she really just ends up shoving herself harder into Evie’s side. “Oh, gross. That can’t be hygienic.”

Carlos stares at her. “It’s leather. Humans aren’t any different than cows inside. Is wearing cow leather gross?”

Mal’s pale cheeks are somehow even paler than usual. “Yes,” she snaps. “It’s different.”

“It’s fine, you just have to process it properly,” Carlos says, leaning ever so slightly closer to her. “And besides, it’s not like there were any concerns about fluid bonding when she scraped the flesh off his skin. They’d already been there, done that, had a kid to prove it.”

“Gross,” Mal groans, burying her face in Evie’s shoulder. Conveniently, Evie’s wearing her coat with the mini caplet attached today, and Mal pulls the extra leather over her head. “You ever heard of a thing called TMI?”

Carlos smiles, but it’s not a very nice expression. More like an animal showing their teeth. “Evil, remember?”

“That’s horrible.” Ben says firmly. “I don’t mind knowing, but it’s still awful, and I’m glad you’re not there anymore.”

“Yeah, well,” Carlos mumbles, sitting back now that his point’s been made. “It’s changing again.”

The mirror clouds over with dark swirls, and clears to an image of Jafar, standing behind the counter of a shop while a woman in an emerald green dress examines a handful of jewelry that’s spread over the counter between them.

Jay waves a hand at the mirror, middle finger firmly up.

Ben laughs. “I take it there’s no lost love there?”

Jay grins. He’s still flipping off the image of Jafar in the mirror, even as the picture shows him carefully slipping one of the rings onto the woman’s finger, mouth moving like he’s flattering her the whole time. “Nah. Not really. He’s charming and all, but not a great parent, you know?”

Ben’s nodding before the words are even finished. “Yeah, that’s fair,” he agrees. “My dad isn’t exactly warm and fuzzy either.” Mal’s mother might be charming when she wants to be, and Evie’s mother is beautiful and dangerous and enticing, but Ben’s father has made a career out of walking the line between being loved and being feared, and neither of those things has made him the kind, attentive parent that Ben needed. Even more than the others, he can understand the pressure of having a career politician for a parent. “I wish you’d been able to get away sooner.”

“Me too,” Mal agrees, reaching across Evie to tap her fingers on one of the scars that runs, white and twisted and bold, across Jay’s wrist. “Your dad’s a dick.”

The mirror swirls again; the picture resolves into a patch of ocean. Very deep, dark, empty ocean.

“Is that the ocean?” Evie asks, staring. “I didn’t think any of our parents were the sort to get murdered by pirates.”

Jay makes a funny sort of choking noise. “That’s my mom,” he says, eyes locked on the mirror. Under the glass, the ocean undulates with the great swells of very deep, open water. “She drowned herself.”

“I thought the spell prevented that?” Ben asks curiously. “The spell was supposed to prevent anyone from dying under the barrier.”

Jay snaps his head up to look at Ben, and if his eyes are a little red, well, nobody else is close enough to notice.

“The spell doesn’t work all the time,” he explains, voice low and even. “You can get around it if you destroy the body. Scatter the remains, or burn them beyond what the spell can handle, or let the sharks deal with you. People who really want that way out usually go with the sharks.”

“I’m sorry.”

Jay lifts a shoulder. “It is what it is. Can’t blame her for taking the only way out.”

“Still.”

Evie’s gasp breaks whatever sympathetic moment might have happened, and her hand shoots out quicker than a snake to grab the mirror as it starts to shift again.

“Oh? Magic mirror, what—“

The picture solidifies before she can finish the command. A beige room, with a man sitting at a desk comes into view.

“Why—“ Mal starts, but Ben is faster, and he leans down over Evie’s shoulder to tip the mirror up for a better view.

“That’s my dad?” Ben says, sounding thoroughly confused by the discovery. “He’s not— he’s just sitting in his office. He’s not on the isle of the lost or anything like that.”

Evie tips the mirror back down towards herself. “Ah, I guess I didn’t specify well enough when I said whose parents we wanted to see. My bad, Ben. You got caught up in the spell too.”

“Are we going to see your mom next?”Mal demands, shoving her head further into Evie’s space to get a clear view of the mirror, which really isn’t large enough to be seen by five people at once, especially not when two of them are sitting on the same chair. “What does she do all day?”

“I….don’t know,” Ben says slowly. “I guess we’ll see. I think she hangs out in the library, mostly. With grandpa, if she doesn’t have state duties to do with my dad.”

The mirror swirls, and the surface turns brilliant, spring green.

“It looks like she’s outside?”

Sure enough, Queen Belle is standing outside, in the center of a ring of trees. There’s a book in her hand, and as she reads, she rocks back and forth slightly, her mouth moving around the shape of words that the mirror can’t play for them. Or possibly won’t. Evie’s been working on control of her powers, but when the spell is board enough to sweep a whole extra person in their attempt to see what their parents are up to, it’s possible that asking the mirror to help them ‘see’ their parents was a bit too literal. Or maybe the mirror can only do auditory assistance when it’s coming from the whole mirror, and not just the broken shard Evie keeps in her palm-sized frame. Maybe some of the magic was lost when her mother ground the shard to size, or maybe the magic is weaker than it should be, and there’s something deeply wrong with the state of magic in Auradon.

Or maybe they’re just not very good at directing spells yet.

Ben slaps his hand on the table. “Oh, that’s the glade above the lake!” he exclaims. “It’s enchanted. No wonder the mirror showed her too.”

Mal frowns. “You have an enchanted glade?”

Ben beams at her. “Yeah! It’s up the trail from the enchanted lake a bit. Kind of by the cliffs up there. It’s really pretty in the fall, when the leaves are all changing. I guess she’s been riding out there sometimes. It’s one of the most magical places in the kingdom.”

“She looks pretty happy,” Evie says thoughtfully. “D’you think that’s why the magic included her?”

“Yeah, guess so.” Ben says, shrugging. “I don’t really understand magic, but I know the glade is supposed to be one of the most magically powerful sites in the kingdom. It’s a nice place to read, I guess?”

“Ben.” Mal says sharply, as the image of Queen Belle turns, book still in hand. “Why is your mother reading a spell book?”

#my fic #descendants fic #rotten ot4 #only it’s actually very heavily implied ot5 because I know what I am about #descendants #mal bertha #evie grimhilde #jay son of jafar #carlos de vil #ben florian

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black-rose-writings · 1 year

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Okay, I have been hit with an idea again.

Darklina Twilight AU.

The only major alteration to Twilight universe that I am doing is that all vampires can procreate and fully vampire babies can be born, but the practice is frowned upon in modern times, because it poses a threat of exposure, both through the child and the frequent feedings the mother must undertake to carry the pregnancy to term.

As for our cast of characters:

Alina and Mal are cousins, both are 16, almost 17, who have been in foster-care together for their entire lives. They move to Forks as a distant relative of Alina agrees to take them both in.

The vampire clan in town is currently known as the Safin family (they cycle through last names to cover their tracks better, depending on whose turn it is to play parents). They are not strictly vegetarian, but they tend to stick to the diet while in the Forks area, to keep peace with the wolves.

The eldest vampire of the clan is obviously Aleksander. He's a born vampire, coming from Greek Judea (born somewhere in the 3rd century BCE), with a Jewish mother and a Greek father. He and his mother spent his youth travelling around the Mediterrenian and he spent about a century in his "teens" (or when he physically looked like a teen, because full vampire babies age slowly) serving the Volturi, before he set to travelling again, though they didn't depart on bad terms and he's kind of considered a Volturi proxy by a lot of other vampires. He still controls shadows, basically the same way as his Grisha version does - this also allows him to walk outside in daylight without sparkling. Unlike most vampires, his eyes are permanently black, regadless of how fed he is. He has spent a considerably portion of his life in Russian territory, including as a military and political figure. He ended up travelling to the US in the aftermath of WWI.

Ivan was the first person he turned. Ivan was his second-in-command while he served an early Russian ruler, who was wounded in battle and Aleksander decided to turn him, as he'd grown quite attached to him. Ivan has the ability to control bodies of humans the same way he does as a Heartrender, but work only partially on vampires.

Genya was the second person to join the little family. She was a slave girl renowned for her beauty, who was sentenced to death for poisoning her master. Because the poisoning suited Aleksander's needs, he decided to save her and turn her into a vampire. She has the ability to change hers and others appearances, which the clan uses to simulate aging and appear more human, allowing them to stay in one place for longer.

Fedyor was the next to join. He was the son of a nobleman and he and Ivan started a relationship while he was still human. Ivan then had to leave for some reason and Fedyor found another boyfriend. Unfortunately, the two got caught and were sentenced to death for sodomy, because 17th century. Ivan rushed back and saved Fedyor. Fedyor also has body-controlling abilities, though his are more in the realm of healing - he can speed up human healing, help vampires regrow destroyed body parts (though this requires both him and the person being healed to be very well fed on human blood) and, when working together with Genya, they had learned how to manipulate vampire venom, allowing them to either stop (at least in early stages) or speed up the transformation process.

David was the last person to join before the clan left for the US. He was a young engineer who got drafted into the military. He met Genya, who was working as a nurse to stay with the men of the clan on the front, and ended up figuring out, what she was. After some discussion, the clan faked David's death in an explosion and turned him into a vampire. He's able to manipulate metal, though it requires a lot of concentration on his part and is thus near-useless in battle.

The newest member of the clan is Zoya, who was turned in the late 80s. She run away from her abusive family and attempted to cross the states to reach her aunt, who lives in Seattle. Unfortunately, she run into a vampire, who attacked and almost killed her, but was distracted from finishing the job (he was hunting in the clan's territory and decided to just run away and avoid confrontation). She can manipulat wind, but she is still a relatively young vampire and isn't able to fully use those powers. She is also reason the clan is in Forks at the moment - she wants to keep an eye on her aunt and cousin, who still live in Seattle.

David and Genya are currently taking on the parent role and are Tailored to look to be in their late 30s, despite both of them having been turned significantly younger, while the rest of the clan is attending high school.

I don't really have a plot idea, just a vague aesthetic.

#shadow and bone #grishaverse #twilight #darklina

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