orangefoxes

[orangefoxes]

Are you there God? It’s me, Mary

Despite her family’s wealth and notoriety (in certain circles if not with the general public), Mary was sent to public school. She’d been at the same school since year one, but still didn’t fit in. Her smile too sharp, her words too cutting, her games to violent. Soft things were not what Mary was meant for. Mary wasn’t a girl to befriend, she was a freak with a knife collection.

By the time she was in high school, Mary had begun to get angry. She came home stomping her feet and raising her voice and she slammed doors whenever she got the chance. She liked the noise. She’d gotten smacked by her parents more than once for it, but she wore the bruises like a fashion statement. Sometimes she’d even dig her fingers into them to make them stay purple for longer. Life just didn’t feel like it was what she was meant for. She lay in bed and flipped one her knives between practiced fingers and played at being dead.

At a gathering (her parents refused to call them parties) where they were hosting some American crime families, all eager to make links with someone powerful and away from the moriyamas, whoever the hell they were. Mary snuck away and sat in the garden instead of listening to their double speak. She practiced the new knife trick her elder brother Stuart had taught her. She hissed through her teeth as she slipped and cut her hand. She wiped the blood onto her skirt and tried again. This time she got it right, if awkwardly.

“Impressive,” a red headed man said with a smile that was all teeth. He had one of those smooth southern drawls that Mary had only ever heard on tv. “I bet I can do better” He’d snatched her knife from her before she could blink. He preformed an impressive trick, effortless and fluid. His blue eyes gleamed and Mary grinned. He liked knives too.

That was how she met Nathan Wesninski.

He was 24 years old.

She was 13.

He stayed in the country for months afterwards. Mary saw him every chance she got, ditching school almost every day and getting the bus to his hotel. When the time came for him to go back to Baltimore, he asked her to come with him. Told her he’d miss her terribly. She begged and pleaded with her parents to let her go with Nathan. They refused. Stuart wanted to kill him. Mary loved him. Her parents scoffed. She was 13. What did she know of love?

For anyone else, that would have been the end of it. But Mary wasn’t just anyone. She was a girl that had grown up in one of the most powerful crime families in Europe. She stole money and paid for forged documents and boarded a plane to Baltimore a week later.

Nathan’s house was large and fancy. One of those houses that were rightly called manors. He had once told her that it had previously been his childhood home. One of the first things she’d asked upon arrival was the whereabouts of his parents. He grinned and knocked the heal of one of his leather shoes against the polished wooden floor. “Six feet under, honey.” The smile didn’t scare her. Not yet, at least. Mary’s grandad had killed his entire family to keep the syndicate going, so the statement didn’t faze her. Instead, she only wondered if he had meant his words generally or if his parents really were buried under the house like she suspected.

Mary was on the tail end of 14 when she had Nathaniel. He had red hair and blue eyes like his dad, but he had her nose and mouth. She called him Abram. Mary’s parents had been right, she had known nothing of love. But now she did. Abram was perfect.

It was few and far between the she wasn’t covered in bruises. These weren’t the sort that you wore with pride, these were the kind that hurt when you moved, lasted for weeks and felt like they were stained onto your bones for longer still. Nathan didn’t stop there. His blade had met her skin whenever his mood had shifted too fast for her to track. Mary spent nights staring down at Abram’s perfect little face, his red hair beginning to curl like hers. The next time Nathan came at her with a knife, Mary bared her teeth and cut him back.

Mary was 16 and their bedsheets smelt like Lola. Mary thundered like she was 13 and fearless again. Let Nathan bruise and bleed for once.

They got married when Mary turned 18. Abram was 4. Nathan dismembered the vicar afterwards. He lifted Nathaniel up and span him around. Nathaniel laughed. Nathan’s hands stained his little suit red. Mary felt sick. She learnt then what she should have known all along. Nathan didn’t kill to further the mob, or at least not just because of that, he killed because he enjoyed it. Innocent, no nothing people, dead and tortured. For all that Mary had grown up around death and violence, it had not been like this. Never like this.

She called Stuart. Sobs wrenching themselves from her chest. He said he’d kill him, begged her to come home. She couldn’t. She couldn’t. He’d kill them.

It began to feel like she was walking with bare feet in a room of smashed glass. Scared in her own home. She jumped at shadows and flinched at sudden noises. She had never felt a fear like this before. She didn’t care for it.

Abram, her precious little boy, became quiet and timid. He’d learnt that his daddy was a monster. He had scars and bruises on his too young body and often had blood under his nails. Mary loved him. She couldn’t protect him.

She kept trying.

She took him to the little league exy games to get him out of the house. Watching him play, hearing him laugh, it was the happiest Mary can ever remember being. She smiled when ever he looked over at her. ‘Look mum, look what I did.’

Of course Nathan found a way to ruin that too.

Mary took the money and her son and she ran.

The first time she hit him, it was because he wouldn’t stop talking. She needed quiet to plan their next move. She was immediately so so sorry. He’d had his back cut open by Lola and just sat there, but one slap from Mary and he’d cried. She held him close to her chest, buried her face into his now brown hair (he looked more like her now that him) and rocked him until he stopped. Her precious boy. Her poor precious boy.

Unfortunately, it got easier to hurt him after that. But he just wouldn’t listen! She needed him to listen. To be quiet, unseen, to stop playing exy. She needed him to be safe.

She kept them in France for too long. She’d met a woman called Suzette. She was sweet and funny and invited them around for tea. Mary was lonely. She’d never had a friend before. Nathan caught up with them, Suzette was dead and Abram was bleeding. Her son was hurt, and that was on her. Anything inside her that had still been soft, Mary bricked up and filled in with cement.

Mary stitched Abram up, crying at the sound of his pain. She was glad his back was to her so that he wouldn’t see her weak. Abram looked at her and saw the strongest person in the world, but she wasn’t. She wasn’t.

She considered going back to England. Instead she took them to Germany. How could she ever face her family now? How could she pull them into this mess with the Moriyamas, who had no qualms against killing and manipulating family members to make a point.

It become a habit to always sleep back to back with Abram, or wrapped around him as tight as she could get. She was constantly reassuring herself that he was still there. He was still alive.

She catches him kissing a girl in Canada. She beats him black, blue and bloody. That girl would ruin him. She and everyone else would take his soft heart and crush it. He would become reckless and dumb and dead. He can’t make her mistakes. He can’t.

Her poor, precious boy. That heart of his will get him killed.

They’re in Seattle and she’s in so much pain that she’s in no pain at all. She drives until she can’t anymore. Abram is crying. “Promise me” he needs to be safe. “Promise me. Keep running, never look back, never be anyone for too long.” He’s crying harder.

She’s 13 and playing with knives in the garden. She’s 31 and choking on her own blood. Life was never what Mary was meant for.

She kept her eyes on his face.

Dear god, just let him be better than her. Just let him be better.

[orangefoxes]

I have read aftg too many times to count, did I somehow miss Mary being an assassin? Is that a cannon thing? I just imagined her hiding in their apartment with the blinds closed, lights off, cleaning her guns while Neil was at school

So it's not something that was ever stated outright, but I feel like Neil alluded to it many times. Also something Nora mentions in the Extra Content, for example:

-

So when I read that combined with other things Neil mentions like how Mary would never give up her family or her contacts, and how she kept their phone numbers on hand at all times. I think it paints a picture about Mary and the choices she made.

I mean I know thats all she knew coming from a crime family. But I just feel like if she wasn't going to her families contacts or leaving bodies behind, her and Neil might not have been found so often.

I mean I gotta assume it would be a lot easier to track the dead bodies of her contacts enemies then to comb through every sheep farm in New Zealand.

[orangefoxes]

I get bothered by all those people in the fandom who talk about how Andrew/Renee would totally win in a fight against Neil and how they’re always making him unable to fight and needing Andrew.

Like… Nathan and his Inner Circle taught him how to fight and use knives, his mother taught him how to fight and he most definitely used it all while on the run and his mother definitely drilled him everyday. Those instincts and reflexes don’t go away. They’re ingrained into his muscle memory and that knowledge was too important to his survival for him to just forget it.

Plus, Renee, and by extension, Andrew only know how to street fight. While that is useful and can save you out in, well, the streets, Neil most definitely knows how to fight in both the technical and street sense. You’re telling me that The Butcher of Baltimore, his Inner Circle, and Mary Hatford, daughter of a high-ranking member of the British mafia don’t know how to fight and weren’t taught by professionals? Andrew was taught how to street fight once a week inconsistently for two years (in canon). Renee doesn’t like using those skills.

TL;DR: Neil (or more Nathaniel) knows how to fight, stop making him a helpless damsel in distress. He’s not.

[orangefoxes]

mary: okay, i get it. you’ve had a really hard time lately, you’re stressed out. three men died.

abram: seven actually

mary: not the point. look, they’re dead now, and really whose fault is that?

abram: yours

mary: that’s right, theirs

[orangefoxes]

neil: can i keep the nightlight on?

mary: and provide the monsters with a beacon to your location? use your head, honey.

[orangefoxes]

andrew telling neil "i don't need to be persuasive. you'll just learn to do what i say" only for neil to walk him like a dog for the rest of the books

[orangefoxes]

Neil: *opens up his locker and blood spills out everywhere*

Neil: oh my god MY UNIFORM ITS STAINED

The rest of the foxes:

[orangefoxes]

Neil is more dangerous than Andrew. Neil is more dangerous anyone with the foxes. Send. Fucking. Post.

[orangefoxes]

I always think to myself wow Aaron is like such an asshole, but then I remember that Neil just showed up and immediately proceeded to blow up the team’s lives like he was shaking a cardboard box full of feral cats and then threw it at the mafia

[orangefoxes]

AFTG is so funny, it’s just three books of Andrew looking at Neil and going “You literally don’t make any sense” and Neil looking at Andrew and with increasing volume sighing “Thank fuck you’re here, you are literally the only person who makes any sense”

[orangefoxes]

Andrew u can’t commit murder on national tv 😔

[orangefoxes]

the undone cowboy writes to his sweetheart by silas denver melvin (click for better quality)

[orangefoxes]

It’s all “AFTG is bad” this and “AFTG is terribly-written” that but never “Nora was literally just writing whatever the fuck she wants and she managed to gather thousands of readers all over the world to forever obsess over 1029 pages of a stick-ball obsessed redhead running away from the mafia and his strange and morally-fraudulent found-family teaching him the core values of love and friendship and family—"

[orangefoxes]

Losing my mind over this review of aftg

[orangefoxes]

they're in love

[orangefoxes]

Neil, at any given moment:

[orangefoxes]

'yet'