#gibsonton | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

he-flies-with-his-own-wings · 2 years

Note

throwing ideas your way in case you want them (NOTHING underage): 1- dick loves being held by bruce (bruce loves it, too; whispering sweet and filthy things to him depending on the mood); 2- phone s*x or s*xting/pics; 3- au where they're not heroes (lawyers, drs, bankers); 4- skinny dipping or another getaway; 5- mutual m**turbation; 6- dick surprising b with something really nice/meaningful.

yo are we allowed to have p()rn on this website again, because if so maybe i'll take a run at a few of these other ideas sometime too. but in the meantime, here's a piping hot #6 for you!

perfectly safe for work unless your work doesn't want you using tumblr during business hours. established relationship, no smut, lots of feels, light angst. tried to do my best by romani dick & jewish bruce and then fell down a rabbit hole of 20th century circus town history.

thank you for your prompts and please, folks, feel free to keep 'em coming!

-----------------------------------------------------

These days, when mail addressed to Dick Grayson arrives at Wayne Manor, which hasn’t been his legal residence in like a decade, it’s generally an excuse for Bruce to have a little fun with it.

(“This relationship is very new, still,” he said the last time, sitting somberly across from Dick at the breakfast table with an envelope in his hand. “Things are delicate between us, Dick.”

“I understand that. We’ve talked about this before, Bruce. I know you want to take things slow.”

“I do. That’s why I’m concerned. It’s far too early to be telling everybody at -” as he looked down at the envelope with a solemnly furrowed brow - “Gotham City Bank Preferred Platinum Visa Rewards Card that we’re moving in together.”

“Very funny.”

“I know you’re preapproved for a special offer with 0% interest APR, but -”

“Oh, just give me the goddamn envelope and shut up.”)

But this time, both he and Alfred see the return address on the big cardboard box when it arrives, and they know whatever is inside, they can’t joke about this.

Gibsonton, Florida has been the winter home of circus and carnival performers since the early Depression. Its unique zoning laws allow residents to keep everything from monkeys to elephants to giant tents and trailers on their property, and in its glory days it was a safe, albeit colorful and bizarre, home for all kinds of people who might have been treated like freaks anywhere else. Pop Haly had been born there, back when the town was at its wildest, and had always spoken of it fondly, though in Dick’s time the circus traveled so far and wide that they didn’t really take whole winters off anymore the way they used to, so his memories of the place were more fragmented.

It would not take Batman - or even an ordinary detective - to figure out what’s in the box. Alfred gets there just as quickly as Bruce.

“Master Richard did mention plans for the circus to sell off some of the assets that were no longer in use, in order to reinvest them in the new permanent site,” the butler ventures. “I do not recall specifics, but I would imagine property -”

“And somebody going through it for sale found something that belonged to the Graysons.”

“Would you like to call him, sir, or shall I?”

Bruce shakes his head. “It’s Wednesday. He’ll be here at seven for dinner anyway. Leave it on his bed in his old room. He might want to be alone when he opens it. We don’t have any way of knowing what’s in that box, or how it will make him feel.”

He doesn’t get answers to either of those questions that night. Dick finds Bruce in the study and kisses him hello with an easy smile, but it falls off his face like a painting on a loose nail when he hears the word “Gibsonton.” He’s alone upstairs for so long that Alfred has to put the chicken pot pies back in the oven to keep warm, and when he comes back down to the dining room he’s uncharacteristically reserved and somber.

“What did he tell you?” Alfred asks Bruce quietly, as he helps the butler carry the dishes into the kitchen, leaving Dick staring wordlessly into his coffee and playing with a brownie he isn’t really eating.

“Nothing. I didn’t ask.”

“Not even to see if he was all right?”

“He’s not all right,” Bruce says simply. “It’s private, Alfred. If he wants to tell us, he will.”

But he doesn’t say anything over coffee and brownies, and he doesn’t say anything as he puts the box in the trunk of his car and drives home, and he doesn’t say anything for days and weeks afterward.

Bruce still doesn’t ask. But he hasn’t stopped wondering.

* * * * *

It’s nearly two months before the topic comes up again.

It’s a nice night, warm for October, the skies clear. Bruce is sitting alone with a cup of coffee on one of the benches near a corner of the grounds where the leaves are already turning. He still has a few hours before it’s time to leave for patrol, and it’s peaceful here. His parents liked this spot. It’s gotten easier, slowly but surely over the years since Dick came into his life, to live alongside their ghosts without feeling quite so . . . haunted. He can remember the nice moments without as much pain. When he was little, after the fall leaves were raked up into piles but before the landscapers hauled them away, Bruce was permitted to jump in them. He liked the crunching sound.

He hears the same sound behind him suddenly, an odd coincidence, and turns to see Dick approaching across the flagstones, scattered red and gold leaves crackling under his feet.

“You’re early,” he says, smiling, and moves aside to make room on the bench.

“Alfred said I’d find you here.”

Everything okay?”

“Yes. Yeah. I just had something -” Dick pauses, shaking his head a little like he’s gathering his thoughts, and takes a seat beside Bruce. They look up at the stars in silence for a few moments. Bruce doesn’t press him. Dick will talk when he’s ready. He always does.

“So you probably remember that box,” he says finally. He doesn’t look at Bruce as he speaks. “The one that came here for me.”

Bruce nods. “I remember.”

Another silence.

“You know, I kept waiting for you to ask me what was in it,” Dick says.

“It was private.”

“Like you’ve never seen me opening the mail and asked, ‘oh, a package! Who’s it from?’”

“I know exactly what Gibsonton is, Dick. Did you want me to ask, or were you afraid of me asking?”

“I don’t really know,” says Dick.

“Are you bringing it up because you want to tell me now?”

This silence lasts even longer than the others. Bruce doesn’t reach out to touch him, or turn to look at his face, but he lets his knee shift leftward just a centimeter or two, enough to bump lightly against Dick’s. I’m right here, the gesture says. Take your time.

“There was a warehouse on the property,” Dick finally says, eyes fixed on the trees in front of him. “All the other outbuildings were empty, easy enough to get them ready for the sale, but behind the stable there was a big old bunker of a thing I didn’t remember when the real estate agent sent me the photos. All she told me at the time was that the guy who was managing the property had found some personal effects in there and needed access to Pop Haly’s list of addresses of former employees. It was full of shelves with crates and bins on them, labeled, personal things people didn’t want to take with them on the road. I didn't think anything of it, I didn't assume there'd be anything in there for me, so I just sent over the copy I had in the paperwork he left me. But it must have been old -"

"Because the address he had for you was here."

"Gibsonton was home base, see," Dick goes on. "The place they always came back to. Sometimes when you were going out on a long-haul, you might leave a box there for the crew to watch over, if there were things you didn’t want to get lost or broken from months of traveling in a caravan.”

His voice has been impressively steady up until now, but when Bruce hears it begin to break a little, he steps in to let Dick breathe for a moment.

“So the property manager went through the warehouse to ready it for sale,” he guesses, “and found a box with your name on it. Things you didn’t go back for, because you stayed here in Gotham and didn’t go back to Gibsonton when the rest of the circus did.”

“Not my name,” says Dick, and he reaches out for Bruce’s hand.

Bruce exhales deeply. “Oh.”

They sit there like that for a long time. The moon’s almost full. A faint breeze shivers through the tree nearest them - a dogwood, which always erupts into riotous white and pink blossoms each spring - and a few red-gold leaves flutter downward.

“They left a bunch of things in Gibsonton that they didn’t have room for anymore in the caravan after they had me,” Dick says. “Things from their life before.”

“I see.”

“Things that were fragile, or delicate, or just things that there wasn’t a daily use for, so they had to choose between that and, you know, diapers and a stroller and all that. We never had a lot of room. And going from two people to three people in the same tiny space -”

“Of course.”

“They left a lot of things behind,” Dick says, and there’s something strange in his voice. “They left a lot of things behind, to make room for me.”

Bruce turns and looks at him, and squeezes his hand. “You don’t need me to be the one to tell you that nothing they left behind in a cardboard box in Gibsonton, Florida was more precious to them than you were,” he says, “but I’ll say it anyway, if it would help you to hear it out loud.”

Dick gives him a fleeting, weary smile before moving in closer, resting his head on Bruce’s shoulder. At the implicit signal that Dick wants comfort, that proximity and touch are now more important than the distance and silence he’d seemed to require when he first sat down, Bruce puts his arm around him, letting Dick curl up into the massive, sturdy wall of his chest. It seems to ease something in the younger man, who lets out a long, exhausted sigh.

“The biggest thing in it was a lamp," Dick says. "The base is a glass elephant. Mom told me about it once. She’d had it in her bedroom as a little girl. She’d dreamed of joining the circus because she wanted to make friends with an elephant. They’re matriarchal, did you know that?”

“I did.”

“Mom had dreams as a little kid of a trapeze act starring her and a bunch of girl elephants. They would be her best friends, she said. It always made me laugh when she told me about it. They left the lamp in Florida after she got pregnant; Dad was afraid a kid running around a space that small would knock it over, and he knew it was special to her. He always said someday, after they’d retired, they’d buy a little house somewhere, and -”

Dick’s voice breaks off. Bruce squeezes his shoulder.

“We always think we have more time,” Bruce says simply.

Dick nods. “Yeah.”

“It’s nice that you have it now.”

“That was the biggest thing in there,” Dick says. “There were some antique-looking books, and a really old dress - like a prom dress maybe. And some jewelry - nothing, you know, fancy, they weren’t rich, but things that were special. A few pieces that I think were maybe my grandmother’s. I remember them from photos. And a glass box full of shells. They must have collected them somewhere. Maybe on vacations, or maybe when the circus was traveling and hit seaside towns. Dad always liked to go to the beach on days off if we could.”

He sits up, pulling away from Bruce a bit, and reaches into his pocket to pull something out of it - something small enough to fit inside his closed fist, which he doesn’t open right away.

“And then there was . . . there was something else.”

Bruce turns and looks at him. Dick’s eyes are thoughtful, and warm, and a little sad.

“I think she forgot it was in her jewelry box,” he says, looking down at his hand, still clenched tight around something Bruce can’t see. “She talked about it a lot, actually. She always believed she’d lost it somewhere. She wasn’t a terribly superstitious person, it wasn’t that, not really, but it was a habit. And it was special to her. She’d gotten it from her mother.” He opens his palm and looks down into it, but Bruce still can’t quite see what he’s holding. “And the first thing I thought when I opened the box . . .” He shakes his head suddenly, looking up at Bruce with his eyes suspiciously bright. “I’m not explaining this very well,” he says apologetically.

“Take as much time as you need,” says Bruce.

Dick opens his palm all the way, and holds it out for Bruce to see. It’s a tiny gold oval, tarnished and faded. It looks very, very old. Bruce isn’t Christian, but he’s seen enough holy medals to know one when he’s looking right at it. And despite the fact that whatever graven image the medal once held is impossible to make out - probably long since worn down by decades' worth of fingers rubbing it for luck - he knows enough about Mary Grayson to make an educated guess.

“Saint Sarah?” he guesses. “Patron saint of the Romani.” Dick nods. “This was your grandmother’s?”

“At least,” says Dick. “Maybe older. Mom didn’t really know. She said that her mother gave it to her as a child, for protection, and told her that nothing bad could ever happen to her as long as she had it with her.” He closes his eyes. “She didn’t know it was in the jewelry box, she didn’t know it was in Gibsonton,” he says dully. “She thought she’d lost it. Used to joke about how that meant she was unlucky now. It was funny, when I was little. Every time she got stung by a bee or something went wrong at rehearsal or she was the only one in the whole circus who caught whatever cold was going around, she and Dad would laugh about it. ‘If only you’d had your Saint Sarah medal, this would never have happened.’” One bright tear wavers for a moment on his thick black lashes before falling. Bruce watches its slow progress over the rise of Dick’s cheekbone and down his jaw, wanting to kiss it away but uncertain whether that’s pushing the moment too far. “The medal was in the jewelry box all those years,” he whispers, “and they only left the jewelry box in Gibsonton because they had me.”

Bruce is a pretty good detective, true, but he also knows Dick Grayson better than anyone else in the world, and Dick doesn’t need to say it out loud for Bruce to know exactly what fear is haunting him.

“Your parents’ death was not your fault,” he says quietly, moving closer and leaning forward just enough to rest his forehead against Dick’s. “Even if your grandmother’s belief was provable, Dick, even if the medal truly was some kind of talisman invoking the protection of a patron saint - well, I know very little about saints, but I have a hard time imagining any of them granting or withholding their favor as capriciously as that. Your mother didn’t discard it, after all. She didn’t give up on Saint Sarah because the medal was lost. Perhaps she had her own kind of private rituals or devotions that she maintained in her own way.” He takes Dick’s empty hand and squeezes it. “Or perhaps she had less need of a talisman in her life to make her feel like the luckiest woman in the world,” he murmurs, “once her child was born and she realized how blessed she really was. Maybe she allowed herself to forget it because she didn’t need it anymore, the way she had when she was a child. Maybe it was all right for her to let it go. Mary Grayson always seemed to me like a woman who made her own luck. And her life was more than the worst thing that ever happened to her. She would be happy that her things have finally come home to you, Dick, but she would never, ever want you to blame yourself for being the reason that she’s gone.”

Dick sinks heavily against Bruce’s chest, not fully crying yet but not able to speak either. Bruce can feel the emotions pressing him down with a palpable weight. He’s so preoccupied with listening to Dick’s breathing to make sure it’s steady and he isn’t heading towards an anxiety attack, that at first he doesn’t notice the feeling of something small and warm and hard being pressed into the palm of his hand.

He looks up at Dick, who closes Bruce’s fist around the medal and lays his own hand over it before lifting his head to meet Bruce’s eyes.

“I know you don’t believe in it,” he says. “I don’t even know if I believe in it. But I need you to take it. I need you to have this, Bruce. Keep it with you, and don’t let it go. I’ll sleep better if you do.”

“Dick -”

"I lost you once," Dick says roughly. "I'm not going to lose you again."

Bruce closes his eyes. He doesn't know what to say.

“If anything ever happened to you, and I wasn’t there,” Dick tries to say, but he can’t quite get the words out.

“Dick,” Bruce says softly. “I’m honored to hold a piece of your family’s history. I’m honored to have this. It’s priceless to me, to have something in my life that belonged to your parents. I don’t want you to think that I don’t . . .” He swallows hard. “That I don’t know what this means.”

That your family is my family. That my family is your family. That if they were alive today, Mary Grayson would be my mother-in-law one day and Martha Wayne would be yours. That it would matter to you, that much, what they thought of me, and what I thought of them.

“So yes,” Bruce says. “I’ll keep this. I’ll keep it forever. I’ll treasure it. But I don’t need a talisman to protect me and keep me safe, Dick. I already have you. And you’re all I need.”

#brudick #brudick fic #my fic #fic prompts #from the inbox #bruce wayne #dick grayson #batman #nightwing #bruce wayne x dick grayson #brucedick

25 notes · View notes

slippinmickeys · 2 years

Text

Out of the Little Grove (16/18)

“This is a dark place,” Teena said, looking around. “Of old magic.” She rose from where she’d been kneeling next to Monica and wiped the dust off of her hands.

Scully wasn’t sure whose question the witch queen was answering, but it had been on the forefront of her own mind. Though the sun shone and the air smelled clean and bright, there was something ominously off about the area where their balloon had been pulled down, the shadows a little darker than they ought to be.

The scouting party had not yet returned from their sojourn to investigate what Mia had seen from the air, though Scully remembered Byers saying it had been close. It had been almost an hour since they’d left. Scully ran a hand over her stomach as if trying to soothe a restless child – though in reality she was the one who needed soothing.

Langly sat on the dusty ground next to her, absently petting the soft white fur of Ondima.

“Our dæmons,” he said thoughtfully, looking up at Teena. “Will they get their voices back?” It was the first time he’d spoken since his compatriots had left with Mulder and Weera, and the first time he’d ever spoken directly to the witch queen.

“Once you leave this place,” Teena said, turning on her heel and limping slightly as she made her way to where her son had left not long before. “All will be as it was.” She seemed distracted, and Scully was concerned about her limp.

“Are you injured?” Scully called out.

“Yes,” the woman called back over her shoulder. “But it does not matter.” Scully found it an odd answer, but Teena turned back toward them and sighed.

“They should be back,” said Samantha from Scully’s other side. She was still on her knees next to Monica, who was now able to sit up – her leg freshly healed by her queen and the witch princess.

“Yes,” Teena said, sighing as though about to do a chore she found distasteful. “They should. We shall have to go after them.”

Jasper, who had been hopping along at Teena’s feet, flapped his wings, trying to take flight. He managed to get a few feet off the ground but was forced to flutter back down. He cawed once at his witch.

“Dead air,” Teena said, peering around as though she half-expected to see something or someone. “It’s what brought down the balloon.Though it doesn’t account for the cloud-pine failing. You won’t be able to fly.” The last bit was directed at her dæmon, who snapped his pink beak in irritation.

She turned to Monica. “Can you walk?”

Samantha helped Monica to her feet. Monica winced as she put weight on her leg, but nodded to her queen. “I can walk,” she said. Scully rather admired her mettle.

Teena pulled her bow from her shoulder. Its wood was gray and it was larger than the bows of the other witches and had odd runes carved into its side. She strung it with the ease of a Gibsonton strongman, and looked around a moment, nocking an arrow to the string. She pulled back and released. The arrow sunk deeply into the tree holding the balloon in its snarled grip.

“Arm yourselves,” she said, turning to what remained of their collective. “The air isn’t so dead we cannot fight. And we may need to.”

Scully began to regret handing her weapon over to Frohike. As if reading her thoughts, Langly scrambled to his feet and handed her his air pistol.

“I defer to your marksmanship,” the man said, pushing his spectacles further up onto his nose.

Scully checked the gun’s firing mechanism, and from the corner of her eye saw Hendrick lean down and give Ondima a quick appreciative headbutt.

Without another word, Teena turned on her heel and made her way quickly, even with a limp, down the path that led through the tall stone spires. Scully could make out the footprints of the other four people in the dirt at their feet as they walked, and eventually Teena paused where the path forked. Scully could clearly still see the footprints of the others heading down the path to the right, but Teena turned and stared down the path to the left for a long minute. When neither Samantha nor Monica questioned her, Scully decided to hold her tongue. Eventually, the queen nodded to herself and continued on down the route her son had taken.

When Scully herself passed by the fork, she thought she heard a scatter of pebbles on dirt down the left-hand path and paused, but hustled on when she didn’t hear anything else. Eventually the trail widened out further and they came to the wreckage of a massive silver zeppelin.

Scully sucked in a breath. All five people and their dæmons paused on the small rise to take in the sight.

“This is the heretic hunter’s ship,” Samantha said, turning to her mother and letting little emotion into her voice.

Scully’s stomach did a flip.

“No doubt it’s what the squirrel saw from the air,” Teena said, limping forward a few steps.

“But…” Langly began to say before his voice tapered off. He shot Scully a pleading look.

Scully’s mind flashed to the terrifying moment when the grappling hooks sunk into the side of their balloon and Krycek and his men began climbing on board. She could see the zeppelin behind them in her mind’s eye. She found her voice again. “How?” she asked. “How did it get here, the same place we are?”

Beside her, Samantha, who had been on high alert, lowered her bow as a thought occurred to her. Her face went dark.

“The alethiometer,” Samantha said. “He must be traveling with it. And with someone who can read it.”

“He may be able to read it himself,” Teena said matter-of-factly, turning to her daughter. “He shall have to be killed. As will anyone with him.”

“Perhaps that nasty work has been done for us,” said Monica, nodding toward the wreckage.

Teena nodded at her without a word.

“I’ll go,” said Samantha, and she scrambled down the slight incline to where the wreckage of the zeppelin lay. She hopped down into the murk of the cabin and emerged a few minutes later, coming back to rejoin the group.

“Nothing,” she said as she approached. “But there are footprints. Fox’s and the others.

“But where did they go?” asked Langly.

No one seemed to have any answers. Scully couldn’t stand the useless feeling that had been building up inside her and stepped forward, shouting as loud as she could:

“MULDERRRRR!”

There was no response but the flapping of the torn zeppelin fabric in the wind.

XxXxXxXxXxX

Mulder turned on his heel, wondering if he’d actually heard something or if it was more of an echo in the bone. No one else in the group turned to look, so he figured it must have been in his head.

They were heading back to where they’d left Scully and the others, bearing news of the discovery of Krycek’s ship. The thought that the man was somewhere around made Mulder more than a little anxious, even though he trusted his sister and mother to look out for Scully. He transferred his pistol to his other hand, rubbing his damp palms against his pants to dry them. Why weren’t they back yet? It seemed like they had been walking far longer than it took them to get to the zeppelin.

Frohike, who was leading the group, seemed to have the same thought at the same time. He pulled up quickly, causing everyone behind him to pull up short, scattering the dirt at their feet.

“This is taking a lot longer than it should,” the little man said.

Byers and Weera, who had been walking together, quietly talking, looked over at him.

“You must have taken a wrong turn,” said Byers.

“A wrong turn where?” Frohike said, defensive. “There is only one path back until we get to where the paths fork, and we haven’t gotten to the fork yet.”

“He’s right,” Mulder piped up from where he was bringing up the rear. “But,” he said, looking around. “This doesn’t look the same.”

And it didn’t. The path they’d walked to get to the zeppelin had been fairly wide, the spires leaving enough room for the party to walk three abreast – with dæmons – if they so chose. Here it was beginning to narrow, the rocky pillars towering above them so that it felt like they were leaning in, like the skyscrapers in New Amsterdam.

“Should we go back?” Weera asked, directing her question to Mulder.

“Let’s keep going,” Mulder said after a moment, debating the merits of turning back around. “I want to get back to Scully. But maybe Cass and Mia could go take a look?”

Everyone saw the sense in this and Mia jumped off of Byers’ shoulder. Cass changed herself into a buff-haired gibbon and easily climbed the rock above them, ascending to the top of the closest spire and then fluidly brachiating through the towers as though she were born to do it. After several minutes, both dæmons came down and returned to their people. Cass raised her arms in a human-like gesture of confusion and she shook her head. Mia simply chittered in Byers’ ear, who turned to everyone else.

“We’re agitated and puzzled,” he said, reaching out to run a hand over Mia’s small head.

“Join the club,” said Frohike. Beside him, Annie wrung her paws nervously.

“Let’s just go,” said Mulder, the feeling that he needed to get back to Scully growing more and more persistent. An odd sense like Déjà vu was pinging around in his head, and when Cass – still in gibbon form – jumped onto his back to cling to him nervously, he physically startled.

Not five minutes later, they rounded a small curve and found themselves staring at the mouth of a cave, a dark gaping maw in the surface of otherwise dense red stone. Frohike gave a small hollo of alarm and took a step back. The hair on the back of Mulder’s neck stood on end.

“Go,” said Frohike, turning around and not waiting for the others to do the same. “Go back.”

“Yeah,” said Mulder, turning around himself. But when he rounded the small curve to go back the way they’d come, the path wasn’t there. What was there was the same gaping mouth of the same dark cave.

XxXxXxXxXxX

With one last look at the zeppelin, Teena turned and faced the others and their dæmons.

“I’ve had quite enough being the prey, sisters,” she said, pulling back the string on her bow with a sharp twang and pulling her shoulders back to stand at her full height. “It’s time we become the hunters.”

A change seemed to come over the two other witches at Teena’s pronouncement, a flash of wily erudition flashing through their eyes.

“What do you mean?” Scully asked.

Teena turned to her and for the first time her eyes softened. She reached and ran a lock of Scully’s hair through her fingers, tucking it behind her ear in a matronly way.

“You’ve the hair of a vixen,” the old woman said. “My son was right to choose you.” Scully cocked her head to the side, a question still on her face. “We’re running the hounds to ground, little fox,” Teena went on. “Courage.”

“Dana,” Samantha said, turning to Scully. “Stay by my side. Richard, Ondima. We shall need your eyes and ears. Nephew,” she said, addressing Hendrick, who looked surprised to be addressed thus by the witch. “Stay close to her. And keep your wits about you.” At this, Thorcan, who stood nearby and whose head reached nearly to his human’s thigh, gave a high pitched call that seemed out of place from such a large creature.

Jasper flapped his wings once and Teena leaned down and brought the dæmon to her shoulder. She turned on her heel without another word, limping her way back down the path over which they’d come. When they arrived at the fork that Scully remembered passing, Teena stopped. She looked at the two younger witches.

“Prepare yourselves,” she said. “This is a place of old magic, unfamiliar with and to you. Do not rely on your powers. They may not work here."

"Will yours?" Samantha asked.

"I will call my powers forth. Whether they respond to me is another matter entirely." With this, she followed the path to the left and Scully felt a dump of adrenaline hit her bloodstream, the baby in her belly gently fluttering in response.

As they walked, she noticed that everything felt a little different, from the air going in and out of her lungs to the light sounds of their footfalls, which seemed to echo from the wrong directions. Hendrick issued forth a low, constant growl.

Where the other path had opened up and gotten wider, eventually leading to the low open area in which they’d found the ruined zeppelin, this one seemed to get more and more narrow, the rocky spires growing taller, the walls pressing in until they were all walking, people and dæmons, single-file, their elbows occasionally brushing the rocky surface.

With Samantha in front of her, Scully glanced back behind her once to make sure Langly was still there and was surprised to find him at least twenty feet behind her, though his footfalls sounded as though he were about to trod on her heels. When she turned again, puzzled, Langly was only a step behind her. She stopped short.

“What’s wrong?” Langly asked, pulling up himself, his voice nervous.

Scully shook her head, second guessing her instincts. “Nothing,” she said, and continued walking.

Several minutes of eerie shuffling later, there was a cool puff of wind that hit Scully’s face, as if the earth had exhaled, and there was something familiar about the scent of the air, something she couldn’t quite place. From her side, Hendrick looked up at her with bright, eager eyes. And then they rounded a small curve and were met with the end of the line; the grim mouth of a cave sat before them, its opening as round and dark as a plum.

Teena went in without a word, and everyone else followed.

The cave was dank, with a faint hint of sulfur, and the air itself cool – there was the distant sound of steady dripping which only stood to remind Scully that she hadn’t had anything to drink or eat in hours. She’d been used to Mulder practically pushing food and water on her, a new trait she found both sweet and vaguely irritating. The thought of her partner brought her up short.

The light from outside didn’t penetrate far into the dark space, and after a moment, Scully heard Teena mutter a quiet incantation and then a low blue glow came to life in the witch’s hand, not as bright as anbaric light, but with a steady underwater pulse. Not moments later, a second and third light winked to life further up into the cave, to the left and to the right. Scully heard Monica make an appreciative sound in her throat.

“‘Tis a fine spell, Mother,” Samantha said quietly, stepping forward and looking around at what they could now see of the cave. “How many lights can you cast?”

Teena took a moment, her fingers working in the air around the ball of light in her hand. “I cast only one,” she eventually said. "It's not acting as it should."

"Well," said Langly, "at least we can see."

Monica subtly nocked an arrow to the string of her bow, and they all took several steps forward.

The dripping sound was growing louder as they moved into the cave and Teena swung the arm holding the light to the side, trying to get a look at its source. The other lights, still further into the cave and on either side of them, moved as well.

Scully was the first one to see it. She gasped, the sound echoing off the walls of the chamber. There was a stalagmite very near Teena’s hand, and Scully watched as water ran along its surface, not flowing down, but up, so that when it reached the tip of the rocky protrusion, the droplet of water rose up to the ceiling where it plunked into a large pool, concentric circles widening out from where it landed. Fear flooded through her in a vasoconstrictive rush that made her almost giddy.

"Are we on the floor?" Langly asked, his voice wavering. "Or is that pool of water on the ceiling?"

The urge to flee was overwhelming and the only thing that kept her from turning tail and loping out of the cave as fast as her legs would carry her, was the low distant sound of her name being called out from far away.

Scully !

It wasn’t a whisper, nor a shout, but a call, and it echoed quietly off the walls of the chamber in the dry baritone of Mulder’s voice.

“Fox,” said Samantha as though informing herself, and Scully watched as Teena nodded, muttering something so that the light she held moved to float in front of her. She pulled her bow from her shoulder and tested the string.

“Further up and further in,” she said, and moved forward silently, deeper into the cave. Scully looked to the quiet, unnatural water on the ceiling, and put all her psychic focus on Mulder. Finding Mulder, getting to Mulder. She was stiff with panic, her breath coming in quick little gasps. Mulder, she thought, trying to focus, and Hendrick pressed his lanky bulk into her leg, shoring her up from the outside.

They moved forward as a unit, the pulsing blue glow of light growing eerier the further into the cave they went. Above them, the water seemed to move in a slow stream, going the same direction they were, wending its way around stalactites ( or were they stalagmites? she thought) to a point deeper in the cave.

The area they were in seemed to go in a gradual slope up, and when they finally crested the rise, Scully saw the faintest hint of sunlight ahead. The desire to surge forward toward it was immense, but Samantha, who had stayed close, put a silent hand on her arm. She very subtly pointed up. There on the ceiling of the cave, standing in front of the pool like an upside-down Narcissus, was a dæmon in the shape of a rat.

The animal looked at their reflection in the water and skittered off into the dark.

#the x-files #his dark materials #fanfic #my fic #msr #au #prompt #out of the little grove #wip

14 notes · View notes