#i'd be tiny next to lance

[delulujuls]

i'd give you the whole world if i only knew its price | ls18

am i a lance's girlie? no. am i becoming a lance's girlie? dont look at me

he seems so sweet idk why people hate on him

summary: lance's love language is giving gifts and when it came to giving something in return he'll accept only one way

warnings: none

pairing: fem!bffreader x lance stroll

The little girl sat on the curb, tears streaming down her rosy, tear-stained cheeks. In her tiny hands, she held her shattered helmet, unfit for further use. The girl wasn't crying because her father had scolded her for accidentally damaging the helmet. Instead, it was because, until she could find a replacement, she wouldn't be able to race with the other kids. That is, if there were any funds available for a new one.

Seeing the seven-year-old in tears, a slightly older boy, aware of the reason behind her distress, approached her with his newly purchased helmet in hand, crouching down in front of her.

"Here, you can have mine."

The girl stopped sobbing as he sat beside her, handing her the helmet, which she hesitantly accepted.

"I can't take it, my dad doesn't have any money left."

"You can take it, I always have two helmets with me."

The boy smiled at her, but uncertainty still lingered on her face. He glanced toward his father, who stood under one of the tents, observing the children a few meters away. Seeing the tearful face of the girl and the joyful expression on his son's face, he also smiled slightly and nodded.

"See?" he said, squeezing her hands that held the helmet. "My dad agreed. You can take it as a gift."

"Really?"

While her face was still wet from tears, her eyes no longer radiated sadness. Looking into the brown eyes of the boy, he nodded and he stood up, extending his hand.

"By the way, I'm Lance. Now, come on, it's about to start!"

"Please, Y/N, don't be like that."

The boy slumped onto the hotel bed, closely watching the girl's face on his phone screen.

"I'm sorry, Lance, but I can't."

She replied, her phone propped up against a coffee mug, engrossed in browsing job listings on her laptop.

"Why can't you just take it as a gift?"

Y/N scoffed and shook her head.

"Every month you give me some gift, Lance. Last month, as a 'gift,' you bought me a Birkin bag, and I don't even want to know how much it cost."

"You said your bag was falling apart, I wanted to make you happy."

She sighed and shifted her gaze to her phone. Lance looked at her attentively with his puppy eyes, visibly concerned. He wasn't seeing any problem here.

"The bag is gorgeous, and you have no idea how much joy you brought me," she said with grattitude in her voice. "But even a simple Target bag would make me happy, you know?"

"Yeah, probably. But this one is okay too, right?"

She laughed and shook her head.

"It's beautiful. Thank you very much."

Hearing her words, Lance breathed a sigh of relief. Seeing her smile, he did the same.

"So, if you want to repay me, let me fly you to Bahrain."

She lowered her gaze, and the smile faded from her face. Barely scraping by on bills and struggling to find a new job, spending her remaining money on plane tickets was the last thing on her mind. Even if, it could cover just one ticket.

"I can't afford to visit you, Lance."

"That's why let me take care of it. We haven't seen each other for so long, and I want to finally see you and start this season together," he said, looking at her worried face. Money meant nothing to him; he could send a private jet to pick her up, just to have her with him. "Please, Y/N."

She sighed and shook her head.

"I feel so embarrassed. I'll never be able to repay you for all of this."

"So, is it a yes? Can I book the tickets?"

He asked, hope in his voice, and a smile slowly crept back onto his face.

"Fine, but no more gifts this month, okay?"

"I'll try to meet that condition."

Lance and Y/N had been friends since the day he noticed her crying next to the carting track, holding her damaged helmet. They remained friends through all the years of go-karting, and their friendship persisted even when Y/N had to give up racing due to financial reasons.

At first, though she shudders at the thought even now, she hated Lance with every fiber of her being. It wasn't him she despised, but the obscene amounts of money his father had, providing him with everything he could dream of. Y/N was aware that Lance had both many fans and critics, so every time she came across unfavorable comments about him online, she felt embarrassed. After all, she used to cry and curse him every night, even though deep down, she didn't hate him; she just disliked the situation he was in, which she was not allowed to have.

Lance himself knew that without money, he would never have entered the serious world of motorsport. Numerous training sessions, expensive lessons, academy tests – Lance knew that money secured his current position, but talent couldn't be bought. He knew he could drive, and even the people who hated him online knew it too, disliking him simply because he succeeded. Being in Formula 1 cost the Canadian a lot, as he constantly felt like he didn't belong there. Even in the paddock, despite rarely facing personal comments, he knew many saw him as the boy with his daddy's big money. Lance often felt lonely, so he deeply appreciated every moment he could spend with Y/N. No one was as important to him as she was.

However, Y/N focused on being an ordinary teenager after giving up her motorsport career. She finished high school, got into college, even found a job and rented an apartment. Although her life didn't unfold exactly as she wanted, she stayed connected to motorsport through Lance, whom she supported as much as she could. Now things were getting complicated again as the season was about to begin, meaning she could only cheer for him from her couch. But for Lance, there were no such limitations. If he could solve a problem with money, he would. Furthermore, Lance found immense joy in showering Y/N with various gifts. Giving her presents was his love language, something that Y/N had no clue about.

"There she is."

Lance smiled at the sight of his friend, who stepped out of the taxi in front of one of the Bahrain hotels. She returned the smile, hugging him.

"I was talking about the bag, but it's nice to see you too," he teased, pointing to the Birkin she was holding, prompting her to playfully nudge him. Lance chuckled and embraced her, taking her suitcase and leading her inside the hotel.

"I hope the flight was okay and you're full of energy because we're going to a team dinner tonight."

"So, basically your dad is inviting us to dinner?"

She asked jokingly, looking at him as they entered the elevator.

"Technically, yes, my dad is inviting us to dinner."

Y/N laughed, "Well, Lawrence Stroll can't be refused."

Shortly afterward, they were on the right floor where both of them had their rooms. Lance handed her the key card and when she entered her room, she noticed a bouquet of roses and a small package on the bed.

"Lance..."

Turning around, she saw him biting his lip, trying to hide his smile.

"Yes, yes, I know, we had a deal. But these roses were practically free and the little gift next to it is, let's say, a shared one."

He explained, putting aside her suitcase. She also placed her bag down and approached the bed, picking up the bouquet of white roses. She smelled one and smiled, feeling their pleasant fragrance. Lance smiled too.

"You're impossible, you know that?"

"Open the gift."

He encouraged her, leaning against the wall.

She smelled the flowers once more and put them aside, taking the small package wrapped in black ribbon. As she untied it and unwrapped the light-colored paper, she discovered the familiar shade of green. It was a long, satin dress with thin straps, in the characteristic color of Aston Martin. She smiled to herself.

"I guess this is for tonight's dinner?"

Lance nodded, "Do you like it?"

"It's beautiful," she ran her fingers over the fabric, "I hope you have a shirt in the same color."

He chuckled.

"Don't worry, I won't disappoint you."

Indeed, at the agreed-upon time, Lance showed up at her door, wearing a shirt in the same color, black jeans, and matching shoes. He smiled at the sight of his friend, who opened the door ready to go.

"You look gorgeous. The color suits you."

Y/N laughed and closed the door behind her.

"That's good because otherwise, I would have to wear the white dress I brought with me, and someone might think I'm supporting Haas."

Lance laughed at her words, pleased to spend these few days with his friend. Honestly, he only stopped feeling lonely when she was around or when they had the chance to talk on FaceTime. Of course, it wasn't the same as having her physically by his side.

The evening passed in a pleasant atmosphere and time flowed effortlessly. Lawrence invited everyone who had arrived with Aston Martin to Bahrain, so instead of reserving a specific number of tables, Lance's father rented the entire restaurant for the evening.

Celebrating the team's excellent work during the winter months, the tables were adorned with champagne and white wine. Y/N had forgotten how weak her head could be, so after two glasses of wine during dinner, a slight buzz started to occupy her mind. Apologizing to Lance under the pretext of going to the bathroom, she stepped outside, sitting on the balcony. Despite being February, Bahrain offered pleasant temperatures, and even after the dark, a warm breeze caressed her exposed arms.

"Here you are."

The girl jumped, hearing his voice.

"You weren't around for half an hour, and I had the waitress check if something happened to you in the bathroom."

"I needed some fresh air."

Y/N replied, smiling at him. She noticed Lance's steps were a bit unsteady and a blush adorned his cheeks. When he sat next to her, she giggled.

"I can't believe we got tipsy."

Lance chuckled and rubbed his face with his hands.

"I won't lie, I'm feeling a bit dizzy."

Still giggling, the girl rested her head on his shoulder. Lance wrapped his arm around her waist and rested his cheek on her head.

"I'm glad you came."

"I'm glad you invited me."

"I'd give you the whole world if I only knew its price."

Hearing his words, Y/N raised her head and looked at his face. His brown, gentle eyes gazed at her affectionately and a faint smile played on the corners of his lips. Lance tucked a strand of hair behind her ear, gently caressing her cheek with his thumb.

"I hate that I can't give you anything in return."

Lance smiled, "Actually, there's something you could give me in return."

The girl raised her eyebrows inquisitively.

"You could be my girlfriend."

Y/N blinked several times, unsure if her slightly intoxicated mind was playing tricks on her or if she understood Lance correctly.

"Do you want me to be your girlfriend?"

"Oh, God, you have no idea how much."

The girl smiled and, without saying a word, cupped his cheeks in her hands and kissed him. Lance hugged her even tighter, returning the kiss, feeling a burst of fireworks in his stomach. He could bring her joy with money, and she could do it in just one way.

"I love you, Lance."

With love.

#f1 imagines #f1 #f1 one shot #formula 1 #f1 oneshots #f1 imagine #ls18 #lance stroll x reader #lance stroll x you #lance stroll #aston martin #aston martin f1

[shi-daisy]

Future Plans

Day 2! I'll be honest this entry is a bit short, cuz I was seriously stumped but I hope you like seeing Tammy in his soldier days. Hope you like!

@tamlinweek

Tamlin Week 2024- Day 2- Warrior/Poet

Future Plans

The bonfire burned brightly as they gathered around it and ate some rations before sleeping, Tamlin was about to fall over if Amdras hadn't wacked him in the back of the head.

"Eat before you pass out, princey!"

"Jerk."

"Leave Tamlin alone, Andy!" Rosencratz said as he took a sip of wine. "He saved our asses today!"

"Yeah! Just for bothering him it's your turn to talk!" Clavel told him.

The brunette twins and the rest of the squad didn't give up so he shrugged. "Fine. Once we are done with service I'll become a sentry and work until retirement, maybe get married ans have kiddo if I find the right person."

"Awww that's cute! Okay me next! I want to be a chef!" Lilianne, a blue haired blue skinned soldier spoke up. The tiny woman certainly always brought a good fight. Tamlin had no doubts she'd make honors when service finished.

"Ill cook with you Lili! What's say you, Lance? What shall you do?" A tiny male pixie spoke to their shadow wraith friend.

The tall grey skinned fae smiled. "I want to be a gardener. I love Spring! Moving here was the best decision I made!"

"I hear that!" Andras beamed, he was still pale and cold to the touch betraying his Winter heritage yet he seemed very happy to be here. "What about you, Tamlin? What shall you become after military service ends?"

What could he become? He wanted to be a traveling muscian but doubted that could come to pass before Oisin died and one of his brothers took the throne. Then he thought back to the parchments and verses that were on his pack along with weapons.

"I'd be a poet."

"A poet...That suits you, your limericks are always a riot!" Rosencratz said.

"Write about us!" Lilianne joked.

The rest of the group chuckled, approving his decision. He felt slightly bashful having a familiar moment that he sorely lacked at the manor with his blood siblings.

No matter, they'd go back home tomorrow and be done serving in two days. Tamlin intended to reward all his squadamtes upon the end of service. For now he wanted to sleep.

None of them quite heard the roaring monsters in the distance.

***

Death is certain as the sunset over the horizon

Today I stand before you with eyes of iron

That our farewell would come in a thousand years time

Not just as we are about to reach the end of the line

Rest well, in fields of daisies and marigolds

Until we meet again in times of old.

Tamlin finished reading as he stared at the coffins. Only he and Andras made it to the end of service alive, for the rest of the squad perished during the attack on their camp. Tamlin doubted he'd ever forgive himself for failing them. He spent his nights since swearing such a thing wouldn't happen again.

Tamlin put his feelings into reading the verse before collapsing into a fit of crying. Andras held him in a hug until he was quiet.

"That was perfect, you did very well. Come, let's go back and let the morticians do their job. I heard Prince Dorevan called the Autumn prince's to celebrate. Luce will cheer us up."

He smiled sadly. "Yes, it's been a while..."

He stood and let Andras guide him away as they left the room. With one last glance at his friends he swore he'd write them a thousand poems.

"C'mon big guy. I'll take care of you for them." Andras said as they walked away, unaware of the smiles on his ghostly friends faces.

Hopefully neither would join them any time soon.

#tamlinweek2024 #tamlin #Day 2: poet/warrior

[vldkeith]

keithtober💢🎃🔪 day 23: birthday 🎂 🎉 🎁 🎈

a/n: based on this art by @vldlance 🥺 hbd keith idk where i'd be without you. probably i wouldn't exist bc im a kinnie

🔗read on ao3

content included: birthday messages, well-rested keith, love, emotions, klance, little suggestiveness at the end

🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟

Emerging from a rare good night’s rest is, for Keith, like pushing himself through a wall of cotton candy—soft yet sticky, constantly catching on him and begging him to be pulled back into unconsciousness. He resists, though, because he has a feeling that today is important; did Lance say something was happening last night? Nothing rings a bell, but surely once he’s more awake, things will click into place. He doesn’t want to be a bad boyfriend who forgets important dates—

Keith blinks, suddenly sitting up. Wait a minute. There are…things, all around him in his room on the castleship.

Huh?

Scrubbing his eyes, Keith peers around himself anxiously, thinking of pranks and messes he’ll have to clean up later, and his eyes catch first on a paper garland hanging to his left, made up of alternating knives and black cats. Um, he thinks, squinting his eyes at it, okay…?

Then, a brief glance to the space right next to him finally makes everything fall into place. Underneath one of the paper knives sits two gifts, one wrapped pristinely in purple and another in a blue bag. Above them is a pink sticky note reading romelle made u a cat + knife garland ↑ written in blue ink.

Right, that was the important date. It’s Keith’s birthday.

The mystery event finally decoded, Keith stares around himself further, his heartbeat accelerating with joy at every new, tiny decoration he discovers. Next to him, above the gifts from Shiro (from Shiro, his reads, HBD, kid!) and Lance (for the EMO BOY of my DREAMS) is a simple blue paper-heart with love you, mullet! -L written on it. To his right, there’s a green note in Pidge’s handwriting, saying, your gift is in the training room. start the new “neko program” – Pidge 8)

happy b-day keith. this is a coupon for one free outing with your BF. <3, A, reads another, this time in pink. And underneath those is a large yellow package from Hunk, and a small purple hippopotamus plush with a ribbon on its head from Coran.

A “happy birthday” garland is hung up behind him. Confetti has been sprinkled all around him, covering his bed and, Keith discovers when he absently raises a hand to scratch his head, in his hair too. That realization makes him feel a little stupid for not noticing what was going on until he saw the garland from Romelle. Once he thinks he’s found everything there is to find, though, Keith allows himself a moment for his emotions.

Because, god, is he feeling them.

It’s the first time since his dad died that Keith has woken up to gifts, to an actual celebration of his birthday. More than that, though, is the fact that Keith can look at every single thing in this room and know how much he is cared for, know that he’s loved. It’s not just meaningless required-pleasantries; his friends care, and Keith can see that, from Romelle’s knives and black cats to Pidge’s “neko program.”

Keith Kogane has friends. Friends who want to celebrate the day he was born and appreciate him. That thought alone, nevermind the very tangible gifts sitting on his bed, is enough to make him raise a hand to his face and rub insistently at his eyes, trying to stave away tears of utter happiness.

Keith isn’t given much time to further delve into his feelings, though, because a second later his door is swooshing open, and there’s Lance, with the biggest grin on his face, running toward him and jumping onto his bed with a cheer.

“Hey!” Keith laughs, shoving at Lance as he picks up gifts and moves them aside to make room for himself. “Lance!”

“Happy birthday!” Lance singsongs, smothering Keith with kisses.  “I knew you’d be up by now!”

“Get off,” Keith exclaims, his voice hoarse with laughter. Lance starts kissing down Keith’s neck then, though, and that cuts him off with a gasp.

Lance raises his head and gives Keith a smirk. “I’m here to give you your gift, though.”

Keith raises an eyebrow and points to the blue gift still beside him, now a little rustled. “You already did.”

Lance rolls his eyes. “You know what I mean, idiot,” he says fondly, catching one of Keith’s (for once ungloved, since he’s just woke up) hands and pressing a kiss to it, eyes glittery and dark. Keith swallows thickly.

“Oh.”

Snorting in amusement, Lance climbs on top of Keith, nudging his legs aside so he can settle in the middle and nuzzle against Keith’s neck.

“Won’t be long, the others are dying to know your reaction,” he murmurs, his breath warm against the sensitive skin of Keith’s neck. Instinctively, Keith angles his head back, gives Lance better access. “But, you know. We can have a little fun.”

“Thank you,” Keith breathes abruptly, surprisingly himself with the sudden amount of genuineness. Lance pulls back, looking a little confused, so Keith elaborates, “For—you know, the gift. And all of this. I’ll thank the others too, but you’re here, and you’re giving me more, so…Thank you. It means—a lot.”

Lance’s eyes swim with emotion, and then he’s crushing Keith with a tight hug that has him coughing against Lance’s shoulder once he’s let go. Then, Lance sniffles a little, and Keith smacks him in the shoulder to try to keep him from crying.

“I love you,” Lance says emphatically, deadly serious. Keith laughs nervously, embarrassed, and looks away. “We all do. We love you.”

Keith swallows and nods, not really in the position to deny a fact that’s being made so abundantly clear to him. His reaction seems to satisfy Lance, though, because he smiles again and goes back to kissing at Keith’s neck, squeezing his hand as he does so.

Keith has never felt so surrounded by love. For once, he’s going to allow himself to enjoy it.

🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟

☕️ko-fi - so i can buy myself gifts for my kin bday fsdgdsfgs

#keith kogane #keithtober2021 #klance #voltron #vld keith #renfic #keith day 2021 🔪💢🌟

[andraaste]

I am not your enemy - Lance fanfiction excerpt

Hellooo ! There is an excerpt from one of my chapters on my fanfiction about Lance, translated into English (I apologize in advance for the quality of the translation...)

« Your powers are still there »

- Look, I don't even know why I decided to come see you here, but what is certain is that it was a mistake. We are definitely not meant to get along, you and me.

Pissed off and frustrated, I headed for the door to leave this stuffy place, when his hand grabbed my forearm and stopped my gesture.

- Andraste, calm down.

I didn't answer. I just waited for him to make up his mind to let go of me, still turning my back on him.

- You still haven't told me why you came here, he continued.

- I already told you, I had no particular reason, so let me go please. I thought you won't hold me back.

- I won't hold you back when you explain it to me.

His tone was dry, but nonetheless he pulled gently on my arm to push me to face him. With our sleeves rolled up, this was the first time our two bare skins had touched each other, the dragon usually always wearing gloves, and that contact felt like pricking my skin. Feeling a strange sensation arise in me, I finally unwrapped everything for him, trying to hold back my tears of frustration in the process.

- I feel lost, Lance. I feel like I have to start all over again, except this time around, a chasm seems to separate me from those I already knew. I am tired, my body can no longer keep up. And I feel ...

I looked for a moment at his hand, which was still holding my forearm firmly, the paleness of my skin contrasting sharply with the tanned complexion of his, before looking up at him.

- Incomplete, I finally concluded. I feel like my body needs to regain its powers, but I can't.

Lance observed me for a long time before lowering his eyes in turn.

- Look.

I followed his movement to discover a soft light escaping from my palm held between us. I was speechless.

- How...

My voice stopped. Why were my powers awakening at this precise moment? Since that famous training with him, I had tried several times to use them again, but each of my attempts had resolutely turned out to be luck.

Lance's fingers grew colder and colder and soon, faint streaks of ice appeared on my skin and descended to the heat source in the palm of my hand. When the two elements met, I felt an incredible force spread in me and with the same impulse, the light which escaped from my extremity suddenly burst a bluish color. My hand and arm were almost completely covered in ice, but yet I only felt a slight chill run through me.

He released the pressure on my arm before sliding his fingers until finally let go of me. When the contact between our skins broke, my light flickered for a moment before disappearing. No more sign of magic marked my numb member.

- Your powers are still there, Andraste.

He paused before adding :

- And obviously, they seem to react to mine.

I didn't understand exactly where he was going.

- To react to yours, what do you mean by that?

The dragon had let go of me, but he still didn't back down. His large build blocked my view, I only saw him.

- I don't know exactly, I’ve never had this kind of reaction before. But aengels and dragons have a rather complicated common past, that would explain some events like this one.

I thought back to the fight Leiftan and I had faced him seven years ago. Our powers had as it were merged that day. I thought this only happened because we were both aengels, but was it possible between beings of different origins ?

- Have you ever heard of people merging their powers? I inquired, nervous at the thought of his answer which I certainly wasn't going to like.

His gaze remained impenetrable.

- Apart from Leiftan and you, no, not that I know of. But our races being extinct, we know very little about these kinds of facts.

A memory came back to me then.

- And Fáfnir, he could tell us more !

Lance didn't move but I felt him imperceptibly tighten, which made me anguish. I asked the question that nagged me cautiously.

- Something wrong with Fáfnir ?

He seemed to hesitate to answer me for a moment, but finally spoke, his tone heavy.

- Andraste ... he breathed in contrition and I thought I saw a few sparks of ice escaping from his lips. Memoria is gone, he said, and the dragon's eye too.

I was speechless in amazement. He gave me a few seconds to digest the information before continuing cautiously.

- We don't know where the dragon souls are at the moment. Shortly before you woke up, quite a few unexplained events like this happened. Fáfnir is ... nowhere to be found, let's say.

For the first time, the man's gaze in front of me seemed to waver slightly. The dragon never let it show, but yet I knew it disturbed him more than he made it seem.

- Lance ...

- It's not important, he cut me coldly. We will inevitably find them eventually but for the moment, we cannot count on the knowledge of Fáfnir. However, I would like to know one thing.

I looked at him questioningly.

- How come my ice didn't do anything to you? You didn't seem to feel the cold.

I was taken aback. Granted, only Lance was the only one who really knew what was happening to my body after seeing the miraculous healing of my wound, and my unexplained blood loss, but I hadn't told him all the details I had. had counted on keeping for myself.

- It's probably because of this merging of powers thing, nothing more, I argued with a shrug that wanted to be nonchalant. We do not yet know anything about this phenomenon after all.

Unsurprisingly, the young man did not seem entirely convinced by my answer. He was definitely a formidable adversary, even in areas other than combat. It was my luck.

Cautiously, he moved closer to me, his gaze fixed on mine.

- So, you know if you trust me?

Getting a little closer, he lifted his hands and slowly directed them to my neck, probably giving me time to decide whether or not to let him.

- Let me try something, he whispered to me.

Cradled by the calm tone of his voice, I let his hands reach the thin skin that covered my neck. His long, slender fingers encircled the entire back of my neck, he barely touched me, as if he was afraid that I would push him away. I plunged my questioning gaze into his, his gaze totally focused on his task, when the tingling sensation I'd had earlier on his touch began again, this time where his hands covered me in.

His concentrated face was now tilted so close to mine that I only had to whisper for him to hear my question.

- What are you doing ?

I suddenly felt the same streaks of ice run through my skin. Rising to the bottom of my face, they marked my skin with a slight tickle. Despite everything, I only felt a small sensation of cold.

Lance smirked weakly.

- Breath, he intimated in a deep voice.

Without really knowing why he was asking me to do this, I still breathed weakly into the small space between us. It was then that with amazement, I observed light crystals of ice escaping from my mouth, until gradually transforming into a sort of bluish flame. I widened my eyes at this phenomenon, it was his dragon fire !

His smile widened then.

- A real little ice dragon.

A light expression floated on his face as he gently removed his hands from my neck, removing the last traces of ice that covered me. Slowly, he pulled away from me as well, putting a distance of convenience between us.

I was obsessed with the feeling of fierce power that had invaded me for a brief moment. So that was the strength of the dragons? This feeling of invincibility so primitive. I understood better why they were so formidable, when I had yet tasted only a tiny part of his powers.

- How did you do that? It was amazing!

The latter observed me, his face suddenly slightly serious.

- To be honest, I didn't think it would work. This is the first time that I have tried to impart some of my power to someone else, I didn't even know it was possible.

We both watched each other silently in the stillness of the room, each realizing the extent of the communion of our respective powers.

And it was ... almost scary, to be honest.

The dragon's voice finally broke our silence.

- Andraste, I will advise you not to tell anyone about this phenomenon for the moment, I do not yet know what that could imply.

I nodded without batting an eyelid, I totally agreed with that idea. On the other hand...

I fixed his blue eyes with a determined gaze.

- Lance, I would like you to help me regain my powers.

I paused, hesitating on what to do next.

- But maybe ... out of sight, like here.

He raised an eyebrow in disbelief, a thin smile on his lips.

- The little human wants to make clandestine dates in my room ?

(If you want to read Chapter 1, click on it)

#eldarya #eldarya lance #Lance #lance eldarya #eldarya fanfic #fanfic #fanfiction #eldarya boys #i am not your enemy

[outofbodyinjury]

theres some really skinny drivers huh. there's some videos of the rb/tr boys together and pierre is like an elf compared to the rest of them. charles next to ericcson was something, though next to skinny boi seb he looks normal. esteban is slenderman.

there's no normal <3 I like them w i d e but I also think it's interesting that no one really notes that Daniel is also a skinny boi, as you put it. His shoulders are pretty slim and he's honestly dwarfed by Max but he's got Big Energy which fools people.

Valtteri's wide. It's great. Nicholas is also wide, and no one pays attention to this but Romain has the most impressive shoulders you've ever seen. Haven't really looked at his waist, though. Dearly departed Nico Rosberg was pretty normal-ish, Lance is as well though he's taller and in certain photos from the back, he has this tiny little waist. I think I'd put him on the list.

#lance is perfect #i want his upper body #asks #f1 #also lance wears his race suit down a lot of the time and it really sets off his wasit #waist #god im not fixing that

[grey-eyed-menace]

So!

I'm coming straight outta left field with this one, but hey, some of the best things in life come from spontaneity!

Er... Maybe.

Anyway, here's my Pokèmon AU!

Featuring the Female Protagonists I played as, their names, general differences from canon, and personal headcannons I came up with during my first playthrough of each game!

...and how they fit into the wider world! Maybe. Kinda.

I'm only doing the main series females in this post, with potential a potential sequal in the form of the side game females!

I do know that the main series male's will have their own post though! Mostly because I legitimately cannot control myself, and it's already halfway done!

So, without a further ado...

Arden Forrest!

Childhood friend of Red Audra, and the maternal cousin of the one and only Blue Oak.

Chose Charmander as her starter, named the little guy Flare, and is extremely defensive of the nickname. She is/was ten! Sorry if her creativity wasn't up to par!

Ended up having to travel with Red because her mother absolutely refused to let her leave Pallet otherwise.

Simply stick with him out of convenience after Viridian Forest, mostly because at that point there really wasn't anything to gain in separating from him.

In this continuity she's the older sister of the Sun and Moon protagonists. More on that in Jericho's section.

At the end of her journey, her team consisted of Flare the Charizard, Lenz the Jolteon, King the Slowking, Knott the Vileplume, Skye the Pidgeot, and Blue the Raichu.

Raichu is a stuck up little shit, and pampered, the nickname was obvious. To her at least. Oddly enough, Blue the Raichu hates Blue the human.

The only reason Giovanni remembers her is because she straight up decked him across the jaw when he threatened to kill one of her Pokèmon.

Somehow ended up acquiring Silver as a travel companion for three weeks, Red was bemused. He was also incredibly confused when that feral eight year old showed back up three years later in the news.

Ended up hanging up her battling career shortly after she lost the championship to Lance, and handed over Flare to Red to battle on a more permanent basis.

She still trained the rest of her team, and still does, she just realized that despite her talent in the profession it just... Wasn't her calling. She wasn't as quite as in love with it as she was at the start of her journey.

Bounces around the world for a bit during the three or so years between the Blue/Red and the HeartGold/SoulSilver storylines, and after Lance wins the championship back from her. Trying to find herself.

She participates in the Galar league around the same time as Leon, Raihan, Sonia, and Nessa, mostly as a curiosity, and maybe as a way to try and reconnect with her battling roots, but jumps ship after Opal because fucking hell is their League a killer for self-confidence.

Her jersey number, for the record, was 069. She deeply regrets keeping the uniform years later.

She also finishes the Unova circuit, but doesn't challenge the Elite Four or the Champion, and she tries to do something in the Ferrum Region for a bit before packing up and returning home.

Perpetually pissed off that no one can remember her fucking name.

And no, it isn't about the Championship thing, she was fine with that, really, it's just that the moment she introduces herself ahead of Blue or Red people tend to either treat her like a commodity, or like she doesn't exist.

Made it through the Elite Four and beat Blue before Red.

So yes, she is the official record holder for the shortest Championship. Which, if you're wondering, is exactly thirteen hours, seven minutes, and thirty-three seconds.

She and Blue played Go-Fish for two hours while Red finished up with Bruno.

The ensuing eleven hour battle with Red both traumatized and bored Blue in equal measures.

Blue had the title for a week. Red bolted to Unova shortly after winning and declined the position, turning it back over to her. She proceeded to hold it for another six months before a match with Lance turned it back over.

Actually ends up as one of Professor Oak's lab assistants once she ends back up in Pallet, and... Eventually finds her calling in research.

She throws herself into her education with everything she has. And... Never really loses that passion and drive.

Has to be physically dragged to Passio during the Master's tournament/festival. Dragged. And no, that's not an exaggeration, Blue physically throws her over his shoulder, books their shared flight, and well, he basically kidnaps her.

If it makes you feel any better, he pretty much did the same thing with Red, only it was a private flight that was prearranged.

It makes her feel better, anyway.

She spends the entire tournament/festival in borrowed clothes.

She takes solace in mock-poker matches with Red, Grimsely, Lina, and, oddly enough, Cynthia and Steven Stone.

She does eventually end up becoming a professor in her own right, with a focus on Abilities and how they affect a Pokèmon's mental and physical growth, and also ends up with an engineering degree as well.

In her late thirties I see her taking over Professor Hasting's job for the Ranger association. Mostly because, in my head-cannon at least, Regional Professor status isn't all that it's cracked up to be, and at that point in her life the only reason she would even take over for Oak in any capacity is out of sentimental value for the Pallet Labs.

That, and it's a cushy job, plus she gets to see small children scramble around for over jumped flying tops. So really, it's a win-win.

Teases Jericho relentlessly over her relationship with Gladion.

Not that her romantic life is much better. Someone idly points out that Red is romantically pursuing her when they're nineteen and she proceeds to have a minor breakdown.

Or, you know, she just remains forever oblivious, and Red remains extremely passive in his pining.

Completely blind-sided by Blue's wedding, and honestly doesn't know what to think of his wife, but plays the role of doting aunt pretty well once they have their first kid.

Shows up in the White 2 storyline in a rental tournament, wrecks Rei's shit, comes back a day later during a Team Switch Tournament, and proceeds to destroy the battlefield.

Then, once Rei is the Unovian Champion, she comes for an actual vacation, and actively, and willingly, participates in the Cross-Region Tournament, makes it to the finals, wrecks Rei's shit again, and then destroys the Stadium when she goes up against Red in the semi-finals... Yeah, I'm not sure what storyline to put to the whole rage vent thing, but it's there. It exists. And Red pays for it.

I'm thinking Blue just gets in over his head a week or so before the tournament, and she quietly simmers all the while.

I think if I were to make a fic about her journey/life, I'd call it 'The Trials And Tribulations Of A Run Of The Mill Pokèmon Trainer'. Because... Ya know, against Blue and Red, she's actually a pretty average trainer.

Compared to Red, who'll have participated in over thirty league circuits in his lifetime, (and plowed straight through the champion in a pretty good chunk of them), Arden has only actively participated in maybe five, mantled a single Championship, and completed two other circuits, with the last three or so having her jump ship due to pressure, having to put it aside for prior commitments, or a simple lack of interest, (the incredibly vague Greece based region I have an idea for is incredibly interesting history wise, in universe, it's Gym and tournament circuit on the other hand... Lacks pretty much anything to make it even remotely interesting).

Red will be a living legend once all is said and done at the end of his career. While Arden has a single legal achievement to her name, the famed recognition of being one of three people to take down the Pokèmon equivalent to the Mafia, and a pretty average badge count for a career trainer.

Also, Lina loses to Red on Mount Silver. She knows, she was drafted as the referee because when she came to drop of Red's food for the week. She's pretty much payed off to say otherwise though.

And she doesn't know why.

She's convinced it's a conspiracy.

Fades into relative obscurity around the time of the Sun & Moon storyline, but her damn if her tiny fan club isn't dedicated.

Doesn't show up in Alola for the battle tree because Blue couldn't find her for three solid months.

No one knows what the fuck she was doing.

...she may or may not have been the Gates To Infinity protagonist.

There's a tiny aside to a Snivy named Leaf in article concerning Overgrow and how it affects the Snivy population at large though.

And that's Arden Forrest, a bit clunky, but hey, they're randomly ordered facts, not a character sheet. Next up is the Crystal heroine!

Marie Smith!

Traveled through Johto about three or so years before Arden, Red, and Blue began running around Kanto.

Older than her sister, Lina, by seven years.

I actually don't have all that much on her because I got to the third Gym on Crystal before my brother destroyed the Device I was using to play the game on.

What I do know, from this information, though, is that she disappeared around said time.

No build up, no cries for help, nothing. Just up and gone. She just cut contact with her family, things happened, and she's absolutely infamous for nearly killing three thousand people. Somehow, she's officially recognized as someone who completed the Johto Circuit though.

She got recruited by Cypher.

Again. Shit happened.

Oak blames himself for an incident in the Kiro Region, (Egyptian Region), pertaining to her.

Lina's entire journey is an event and a half because of her.

If I were to make these little things into a fic series, she'd get... Like a seven chapter mini-fic told from seven different people's perspectives throughout her journey.

Those people, in order, would be... Her mother, Whitney, Naoko of the Kimono Girls, Giovanni, Clair, and Oak.

With an extra chapter detailing her death during the Kalos invasion.

She shows back up in the Kalos storyline in this and traumatizes the ever loving fuck out of Serafina.

She chose a Chikorita. Who she loves dearly, even when she's pretty much gone off the deep end, and then some.

Lina Smith, local trouble maker, owner of a perpetually terrified Feraligator, and the best friend of the very weird Ethan Aurum, and the only person who seems to be on Silver's good side. Vaguely.

Oh so vaguely.

Youngest out of three children, her older brother, Gregory, is an incredibly average guy who's extremely confused as to what the fuck happens on her journey, and never NOT worried about her.

Parents died in a car accident some two years before the start of the storyline, is cared for by Gregory at this point in time

Don't ask why Greg is a thing. He just is.

Like Arden before her, Lina takes a very proactive approach to dealing with Silver during the Radio Tower Incident. Which involves decking him in the jaw.

Surprisingly, this is the part where there relationship improves.

Chooses a Totodile and names him Reyne, and is fiercely protective of him. The little guy could put a Sobble to shame... This also means Silver ends up with the incredibly overly energetic and affectionate Chikorita, all for my personal amusement, (said Chikorita is named Lyra, and no, he does not spoil her, shut your mouth Aurum!).

Her entire story isn't so much focused on her gym challenge or the reappearance of Team Rocket, as it is finding out what the fuck happened to her sister.

Ethan starts tagging along after Goldenrod, and starts to reveal he knows a lot more than he's willing to admit about the situation.

Gets caught up in a lot of nasty things, and nearly ends up dismantling an operation to kill Red, Lance, and Cynthia.

(Where are our favorite colored duo, and supporting tree, during all this you may ask? Why, still recovering from trauma of course! Like reasonable, sane, run-of-the-mill people. More specifically, Blue's officially taking over Viridian gym before the start of the Kanto gym circuit season, Red's fucking around in Hoenn for a good bit before coming to Mt. Silver just two months before Lina gets there, and Arden's in that vague Greece based region getting therapy.)

Her journey is just a really long incident report, and Looker has half a mind to slap her at the end of it.

A good portion of it is Ethan's fault though. Ethan, by the way, nails the looking right through you stare.

And a girl named Sarah Morgendy comes up a lot, although it turns out she's just a kid trying to protect her adopted brother from the shit shoe she got them involved in illegally.

The only two problems with that is she's about eleven and emotionally compromised.

Gets recruited by Interpol after everything is said in done.

Gets the code name Agent Lenz.

Demands therapy for herself, Ethan, and Silver. She gets it.

While she's training as an agent, Ethan and his mother move to Unova so that he can attend an Academy meant 'rising stars', and Silver becomes Elm's apprentice.

...somehow ends up married to Blue years down the line. They have two kids between them. Maria and Reginald

#pokemon #pokemon headcanons #pokemon pc's #kinda #the females all have different names and such! #the boys retain their canon names mostly because I cannot self-insert into them #Guess Which Girl Actually Has My Real Life Name! #Pokèmon Blue #pokemon heartgold #Pokèmon ruby #pokemon platinum #Pokèmon white #Pokèmon x #pokemon moon #pokemon sword #pokemon main series #pokemon+worldbuilding #again kinda #Arden is the only one with a therapist for reference #I mean #Sera lives with Ethan's girlfriend in Couriway Town Post Game #but that's not... really a substitute to professional help #Elle just cries #Hop... adjusts

[mxmearcstapa]

Maddening Lions Update #3!

[WARNING. SPOILERS FOR FE3H AHEAD. CURRENTLY PLAYING LIONS ROUTE BUY SOMETIMES I TALK ABOUT OTHERS AND SOME PARALOGUES OVERLAP SO SORRY IN ADVANCE]

So for a time, my roommate kidnapped me to play Minecraft (foxes!!) but the Madlions continue! And I have moved quite a bit further. So much further that I'm splitting this update into TWO updates because I have too dang much to say.

And DLC wave 3 is out! Regrettably, I am so late in this run that I am not making as much use of the sauna as I could, and I am missing like alllll the new quests and whatnot, but I am loving the new outfits! I got all my boys in summer wear, and most of the girls are wearing evening wear (unless they're mounted--summer wear overrides for combat, but evening doesn't because the skirt is too long).

I have class outfits overridden and I swear we're Valkyria Chronicles now but everyone looks dapper af and I don't care for the Mortal Savant outfit so really this is better

Here's what we've been up to!

The Great Bridge of Myrrdin:

HEY, LORENZ, YOU'RE ON THE WRONG SIDE.

This absolute sunofabitch comes at me ready to throw down as a level 40 Paladin and comes back home to us as a LEVEL 14 SOLDIER. I understand that I did nothing to improve him over time and I shouldn't be surprised, but honestly I expected at least his current class to stay unlocked. Was I gonna use him? No. But it was simultaneously hilarious and jarring. I even made a meme:

AND DEDUE IS BACK MY BOOYYYYYY!!

I keep forgetting that Dedue returns at the beginning of this chapter instead of the end. It's so inspiring~ I had him classed as a Warrior before he left, and he was about 5 levels behind (yikes) but he survived well enough. With the power of Byleth's healing and exp gain, he caught up quickly enough.

For this battle, our main force went up the middle, and Byleth and Dimitri went on a magical bridge adventure on the side. Even though I re-learned the hard way that I AM NOT A FRONTLINER at the start of the timeskip, I believed erroneously that Byleth would be okay over there. I am not ashamed to admit that I had to pull out the Sword of the Creator to end that shit sooner than otherwise.

Paralogue: Dummy Thicc Thickets:

Sometimes I forget that not every battle requires you to kill every last one of them rout the enemy. Sometimes the battle objective is to defeat the commanders.

This is not a battle I forgot that in.

So, uh, Marianne was about level 9 when we started this one. The rest of the roster was mostly mid-high 30s? With Dancer Flayn creeping up the highest around 39. With the power of torches, some trial and error (and Divine Pulse Intervention--thanks Sothis), thicc thickets (40% cover is #blessed), and aggressive Striding, we gunned it for Maurice and beat the absolute shit out of him before he could so much as protest.

Thicket is love. Thicket is life.

And Marianne gained a single level casting Physic. *tiny sad low exp gain flags*

Worst Class Reunion in History:

I learned from the last times I did this map. Hahaha. With all students recruited, Gronder was monumentally easier. And I can't speak for Golden Deer players, but for Blue Lions, I'm telling you: avoid the center hill. The not-Bernie archer could not do enough meaningful damage to anyone I put in their range, and most importantly, it gave us much-needed distance from Claude's disgusting wyvern range.

I like to see the special dialogue, so I went out of my way to send Dimitri to fight Edelgard. This is probably one of the most chilling interactions between the two of them. Holy cats does Chris Hackney deliver this shit.

Gronder is such an intense and important battle, and I wish so hard it was executed just a little better. The pieces are all there, but some don't fit together correctly, or create discord between story and gameplay. I have never quite understood why the Alliance chooses to so aggressively attack when my Kingdom intentionally stays out of their way. If the battlefield were covered in actual fog, it might make more sense (though SOTHIS it would be a NIGHTMARE). Instead, Claude comes off as capricious, not as a "Master Tactician."

But with some suspension of disbelief, Gronder still packs an emotional punch. And hot fucking damn, Chris Hackney's voice acting. The cutscene after Gronder is some of the most intense and moving shit in the game. The way his fucking voice cracks at, "But you seem to have all the answers, Professor," is utterly destroying. I love the Blue Lions for many reasons, but I'd recommend it just to get to this scene alone. It is beautiful and humbling.

Paralogue: One Big Turtle:

Hey did you know that Lethality procs off Gambits, too? Because that was an absolute delight to learn.

I almost didn't do this paralogue because of the FOG and Leonie and Linhardt being so low-leveled like anyone not on the A-team, but this was really the only chance I was going to get to fight a 3x3 beast on Blue Lions, so my curiosity won out. Plus, the dialogue in the cutscene leading up to this is some of my favorite. It is really a shame that Linhardt and Leonie don't have more dialogue/supports.

With enough torches, this level is reasonable, and fighting The Immovable was fun! Probably as much fun for me as it was for him. And I finally took Flayn to fight a Saint, which is a riot.

"Oh, hey, Cethleann!"

"UNCLE, SHUT UP!"

Next Update: Bernie/Petra Paralogue, Retaking Fhirdiad, Ferdie/Lysithea Paralogue, and Saving Claude!

Roster (post Saint-smacking):

To see the class progression, please check my earlier updates! It's a lot of text to repost 😭

Unit: Class (Most Used Weapons)

Byleth: Enlightened One (Brawl and Faith)

Dimitri: Great Lord (Lances)

Dedue: Wyvern Lord (Axes)

Ashe: Bow Knight (Bows) duh

Ingrid: Holy Knight (Lances, Faith)

Annette: Mortal Savant (Levin Sword+, Reason)

Sylvain: Mortal Savant (Burn until we meet again Reason)

Flayn: Dancer (Levin Sword+)

Felix: Warmaster (PUNCH!)

Gilbert: Great Knight (Axes, Lances)

Caspar: Wyvern Lord (Axes)

Hilda: Falcon Knight (Lance's, Axes)

You Two Should Kiss! (Intended Pairings):

• Dimitri and Byleth (I AM SHAMELESS TRAAAASSSHHH)

• Sylvain and Felix

• Ashe and Ingrid

• Mercedes and Annette

• Flayn and Dedue

• Caspar and Hilda

• Dorothea and Petra

• Ferdinand and Manuela

• Catherine and Shamir

• Hanneman and Lysithea (thankfully not romantic)

#fire emblem three houses #fire emblem #fe16 #fe16 spoilers #fe3h timeskip #fe3h #molly's madlions #maddening mode #madlions #my extra support points now go towards my matchmaking business #blue lions #in this house we stan Chris Hackney

[sodasyrup]

I love,,,,, domestic lava au... You should do more of it. I'd love to know more about reka and monty too!

BWAAA...

Okay as I said it’s an au with kittie (6kuro) so I’m gonna grab the things it said and I said lmao

warning its a LONG disjointed post bc im too tired to make. a good post fdhghdf

lovelypeaches08/28/2019cole and kai would settle down real late like....in their late thirties because they want to keep their children as safe as possible, being elemental masters and having enemies and all

at first wu wants them to fight longer and shit but hes OLD so who cares and theres probably conflict on thatbut kai and cole are old enough to realized they dont have to be controlled

so they get married, symbolically if anything, because they've been dating for probably a little over a decade now and known each other even longer, AND been living together for the same amount of time

theyre the first of the ninja to settle down, and they buy a small house in a village thats maybe an hour away from ninjago city

the tininess of the house is made up for by the largeness of the yard, where cole likes to garden, especially fruits and vegetables

cole works as a stay at home free lance artist, doing stuff like commissions, book covers, comics, etc for moneykai does something that puts his charisma to use, probably something in business that lets him advertise and talk a lot..he could never settle down for a stay at home job or anything, even with all his thrilling ninja stories

they have enough money from donations and awards to thrive off these jobs, and ninjago probably pays them kind of like retirement

cole cooks for kai so he always has a meal ready when hes home, so then kai cooks on the weekend

anyways, they have two kids, about 3 years aparti haven't figured them much out yet, but kai and cole cook and bake with themcoles parenting style is very protective and rather spoils them, while kai lets them do whatever as long as its not immediately dangerousthey balance each other out well, so their kids grow up loved and well rounded

lovelypeaches08/28/2019coles always buying them sweets and treats and Kai pretends to be annoyed but thinks its really cute

the kids go to a small school on the outskirts of ninjago city, and get asked about their parents a LOT. they kind of like the attention but it gets irritating

moving on to the other ninja who also start to settle down,jay doesnt really want kids, so he passes on his powers with ~science~ or something, but only when hes a lot olderhe does engineering at borg industries or something, and he messes around a lot but gets away with it bc hes the blue ninjahes like kai and coles kids Fun Uncle, since he lives in a big apartment in downtown ninjago city, with a bunch of cool techkai and coles family often take elongated road trips therejay thinks hes a cool relative but besides being super lenient hea actually kind of embarrassing lol

nya settles down a bit later than the rest of them, because she wants to live her ninja days to the fullesti could go on about my domestic samurai au but her and pixal have a kid who gets nyas water powersnya is much more eager to train her kid than cole and Kai are (they want to start properly training thwir children when theyre like 16, much to wus disappointment)nya doesn't force anyrhing on her kid but she doesnt protect her kid from the fact they'll have to train sooner or latershes determined on still changing the world, so she's a strong political leader, with innovative ideas who doesnt approve of ninjagos government and wants to change it for the betterShe also lives in downtown, but isn't as fun as jayher kid is younger than kai and coles, but kai and coles kids look up to them because they're very independent and skilled! their mom is also super cool, but not in a silly way. she rocks leather jackets and drives her kid around on a motorcycle

lovelypeaches08/28/2019zane is tricky for me...i like to imagine him sticking with lloyd to being a ninja or whatever, since hes going to be alive a lonnggg timehe also wants to respect wus wishes, so he teaches students and fights alongside lloydhe does so much less however, and finds a lot of time to visit his friends

kai and coles kids are shy around him at first, him being a nindroid whose still a ninja, but hes so much nicer and softer than expectedhe always brings them presenrs and enjoys quality time with them, so he's basically their favorite uncle

now lloyd continues his master training, to become the next master after wu dies. hed be the one to guide the next generation of elemental masters as well as their parents in training thembut don't worry, he gets a break too, since the other ninja help him out. hes much less burdened then wu was in the later years of his lifeok thats all i think

My commentary now

little boy whos like 3 and super wide eyed and excited and loves pink (when he foudn out zane at one point had a pink gi he asked if he could get one too)older girl around 6 whos a big daddys girl and loves to garden with cole and make mud piez

the little girl is the fire em - she had temper issues linked to autismz which they worked through her with early and never thought of it but she has a big passion for gardening they mistook for elemental connection when rly she just LUVS IT

little boy is em of earth - hes a natural born leader and stubborn, wide eyed and excitable. again bc they worked w both their kids about their tempers and such they never realized he was just naturally good at keeping his composure. also a lot like jay keeping morals upnaturally strong but both their kids are and i hc the super strength doesnt come in until peubertyz

shes a bit of a late bloomer with em powers but one day their little boy accidentally makes a pot hole inside the kitchen bc he was excited over zane cookingthey took too good of care of their kids and his true potential was simple bc he was a litol kid which was im going to live my best fcuking life with friends and family *rips a hole in the ground

kai and cole are the gross sappy parents that trade kisses n their kids are like thats DISGUSTING youre DISGUSTINGLY IN LOVE

Kittie pointslovelypeaches08/28/2019YEAYEYAYAYYEYAYAYEoh god the little boy is part scenecorelikenot full on scene but like punk y2kwhich is a part of scenealso at first cole and kai are super concerned being a ninja will be as mentally damaging and ack as it was for them at times, but lloyd and zane are genuinely good mastersbutnot to get sadbutwhen tragedy does happen somehow, since neither Lloyd nor zane can ease that, cole and kai are so good at helping their kids e thatthey help them recover from it without downplaying their kids concerns and feelings amd give good advice and loveand make being elemental masters a lot easier for their kids than it ever was for them

me again.....

they always get so fucking scared thokai custom makes weapons for themarmor too he spends hours upon hours making sure its perfect and even prays over them to keep their kids safe

anyway when kai n cole visit w them (idk if theyr just adopted at their current age or like.... adopted as babies or surrogate or?? idk but) they visit lloyd and kai softly says "Look! its uncle lloyd" and lloyd starts SOBBING hes just fucking bawlinghis eyes out and when kai offers to for lloyd to hold him lloyds just like are you suure arre eyyuuu thherye so smsmm all kaiii are yoruur suureee thheyrey babbeises

nya is hesitant but ends up being a really good aunt, i meanshe took care of kai /j

zane is a fav uncle and hes always making sweets for them jay is. also sorta a fav bc where zane comes jay follows and jay has a sweet tooth and also makes Cool Toys + hey wanna prank your dadsalso im dramatic and likekai and cole sitting down and having a convo about master wubc he was sorta a shitty mentor and they really REALLY dont want their kids going through any self confident issues nor over stressing bc theyr KDISeventually kai and cole talk to master wu and actually has wu face his terrible practice towards kids and wu accepting he was.............................a bad 'parent' in a senseblebleblelelelelelellekai works but cole absolutely watches over any training when wu is there at first but lloyd is the master now and lloyd is like..........................i dont want kids to go through what i went through kai is like i trust you but also i will murder every single one of you in this dojo if you ever hurt my little girlim doing what i do and taking an au and running im sorry ghdghdfhJACK RAMBLES....their son refuses to wear shoes he lieks dirt on his feet they never really think much of it but its actually really comforting for him to feel the earth under his feet and feel stablethey think its just a stim thing maybe? theyr unsurebut! turns out him Element(also a fear of heights)lloyd tries to be a serious master but hes a big ol goof and can easily be manipulated

ironically.......its the lil boy who often is like HEY!!!!!!!!!!! WE GOTTA TRAIN!

kai and cole agree not to tell anyone what theyre thinking of naming their little boy until he arrives so when the day comes kais holding this tiny little boy and holds him out gentlyand lloyd is already EMOTIONAL because this is a BABY and lloyd softly asks his name n cole cuts in like "hes named after a really brave dude, montgomery. but we're thinking monty as a nickname"lloyd, choking up:(hc garmadons first name is montgomery)

the girl is Reka which means sweet in maori (a personal headcanon for cole) and shes their sweetheart

lovelypeaches09/04/2019bhrnrng this is in domestic au but col and kai teachign their kids instrumentscole and reka wud play piano duets togetherand monty doesnt like instruments much but he likes to singlike a LOT he belts out a song for everythinghe just lieks his own voice

burdletutt09/04/2019HNGGG HFHMONTY LOVS BEING LOUD

lovelypeaches09/04/2019YEAAAHhes like the type who makes a song for everythingmonty voice we rr goinggg to the parkkkkk and the grass isss.........GREEENNNNNNN and there are LOOK THERE ARE SQUIRRRELSSSS and a playground and the skyyyyy isssssssssssss...*deep inhale* BLUEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE1E!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!kai and cole: you are literally so talented

jay tries really hard to be the Cool Uncle at firstbut Monty just :^TReka gives him an awkward chucklewhen jay stops being Cool ™ hes goofy and thats when they start giggling and liking him more

#sodask #Anonymous #dads au

[a-dakhtar]

hi, i love your fics! would it be okay if you did a voltron fic around lance with the prompt: reincarnation? i'd love it if you included shiro plsss!

reincarnation!!!

Lance was the last one left.

Behind him, fire. Before him, Haggar. And around him? Shiro,unnaturally still, the sound of his last breath still ringing in the Galrancontrol room.

“All alone, little blue,” Haggar rasped, hands outstretchedin welcome of her believed victory. “What will you do now?”

Lance struggled to breathe, helmet long lost, breathpainfully rattling within the cage of his chest. His bayard was sparkinguselessly in his hand, still in its dormant form, refusing to become anyweapon, and his armour- his armour was a mess. The air was thick withthe peculiar smoke of Galran fire, threatening to blind him to what little hecould see through the blood dripping into his eyes, but Lance-

-he didn’t-

-he didn’t have time for this.

The quintessence – the ball of rapidly growing whirlpool ofa million different colours – set his teeth on edge, dancing to the tune ofHaggar’s machination. The ship around him was groaning, breaking at the seams,threatening to crack open and let them loose into the silent void of space.

They’d lost Keith some time ago, the sound of a wet gasp thelast thing they’d heard from his comms. Pidge had gone next – staying behind atthe Galran communications array to buy them time, to buy the universe time,for as long as she could before she’d be overrun. Shiro had shoved Lance andHunk onwards, staying at their back to prevent them from running to her, tokeep himself busy with them so he wouldn’t go back himself.

Hunk had-

Lance bit back a sob.

He couldn’t let their deat- (his brain stuttered, stopped,restarted again)- their effort go to waste. He couldn’t let the memoryof the castleship exploding into a supernova of brilliant stars – visible froma passing observatory window they’d just passed by – be in vain. Hecouldn’t let Haggar think she’d won – even if she’d had the entirety of the Galranempire’s war ships and resources at her beck and call, even if they’d knownthis’d be a suicide run, their final act as a team, their last chance.

The tinnitus he’d thought his own doubled in volume, thequintessence surging past the container it had started in and-

oh god.

-pulling them in.

The air whipped around him in a sudden frenzy, pulling athis face and body like spirits torn asunder, the smoke and fire disappearingalmost as fast as it had come. Haggar stood in the eye of the storm, laughtercarrying over the deafening whine that tore into a howling shriek thatclawed down Lance’s spine.

He didn’t have much time left.

He had to stop her now, before the quintessence grewstrong enough to not need her guiding hand. Before it grew strong enoughthat Coran’s quiet fears over its power was realised. Before it grew strongenough that it would do the very thing it had tried to do more than tenthousand years ago, when a young Zarkon and Alfor had first stumbled upon it.

If only he had a weapon.

Lance let the quintessence sucking gravity pull him closer,twisted his body to try and navigate what little he could until he reachedShiro’s body prone form. For some reason – for some stupidreason – he tried shaking the older man awake, tried turning Shiro over tosee his face, to ignore the charred circle on his chest and the stillwarm blood that painted his mouth. A sob broke free before he could swallow itback, ignoring the desperate need to call Shiro’s name, to lie over him andjust stop, just rest.

First it had been Zarkon. Then Lotor.

And finally, Haggar.

Dozens of planets destroyed, entire civilizations draineddry of the magic that powered the universe. The Blade of Marmora used as anexample of what happened to any Galra that dared to defy her rule. Thousands ofher own soldiers, burnt up in experiments after experiments after experiments,until none remained but the masked druids she’d created by her side, and thewar ships she’d kept from Zarkon’s rule.

He couldn’t let her continue. He couldn’t just stop,couldn’t just rest, not when he knew that she still thirsted for more.For the knowledge of what would happen if she let the crack openonce more, if she let whatever was on the other side – whatever was strongenough to create Voltron – finally break through to their side.

He had to stop her.

His trembling hand ran through Shiro’s dirty, matted hair,stupid sentimentality making him waste precious seconds he wouldn’t be able toget back. His other moved to grab Shiro’s hand, to try and bring some peace bystraightening it out from it’s awkward position, but it bumped into somethinghard.

Something… oddly shaped.

He blinked the blood out of his eyes, staring at the black bayardstill gripped within Shiro's human hand.

If only he had a weapon.

Around him, the ship groaned, the sound of creakingmetal warning him of imminent doom. The wind generated by the now black hole ofquintessence tugged at him harder, Shiro’s body beginning ever so slightly toinch across the ground towards it.

His hands – his trembling, scratched up, raw hands – priedthe dormant bayard out of his friend’s loose grip. He didn’t know if he coulduse it. He didn’t know if it was even still working.

But.

“This,” Haggar began behind him, “is the dawn of a new era.”

But.

“This!” She crowed, delighted, “is the culmination often thousand years of work.”

But.

“This!” She screamed, the quintessence almost swallowingher whole when Lance turned to face her, “is my life’s greatestachievement!”

The bayard glowed in his hand. First purple, then red, thengreen and yellow and finally- blue. A solid blue, just like his armour, justlike his lion, solid and steady in its glow.

Lance remembered Allura – decked in her pink paladin armour– allowing them to leave her behind, knowing her place was at her podium,controlling the Castle of Lions with Coran as her aid. The way she’d watchedthem go, eyes begging to join them, but her lips shut tight.

He’d have one shot. Haggar wouldn’t allow anymore.

And so he breathed in, raising the still glowing bayard upto eye level. Breathed out, ignoring the bright flash of light it gave as itchanged into its active state.

And pressed the trigger.

#

Lance was the last one left.

Behind him lay the still figure of the man he stillconsidered his hero. Before him, visible across Haggar’s frozen face as shestared at him from across their self-imposed grand divide, was shockeddisbelief.

“All alone, little blue,” Haggar rasped, lone hand touchingthe new, perfect hole between her brows, fingertips rubbing the red blood sheshared with humans, not Galrans. “But it’s already too late.”

And around him?

The certainty that she was right.

He was too late.

The quintessence – the out of control ball of now blinding,golden white – sparked in every direction, the haunting shriek echoing into ahundred layered voices as Haggar fell gracelessly, arms wide open, into it’sterrifying maw. She disappeared within the piercing glow, and Lance stared indull horror as the magic pulsed, throwing a bolt of lightning so large atthe ceiling that it almost blinded him.

He struggled to breathe, repeatedly blinking theaftereffects of the lightning from his vision, and stumbled closer, not certainwhat to do. He’d only thought to stop Haggar, had hoped – hoped –stopping her would stop this, but-

-But he’d failed.

He was all alone, he was absolutely all alone,because Shiro was dead. Keith was dead. Pidge and Coran andAllura were dead. Hunk-

Hunk was-

His Hunk was-

Quintessance.

Lance came to a screeching halt.

The quintessence in front of him kept growing, somethinglike primal fear gripping him whenever he thought he saw something within it’sdepth. The ship wouldn’t last much longer, promising a quicker – relatively known– death in the form of the vacuum of space as opposed to whatever death thequintessence before him offered.

But something niggled at Lance’s mind. Something he’d onlyvaguely thought of, but never realised. He was the blue paladin, Allura wasthe blue paladin, somehow they shared the same traits to pilot the Blue Lion (-ainpain pain the gaping hole in his soul where she’d been pain pain pai-), andyet Allura had been able to nullify the quintessence that had threatened toblow out the entire sector back on planet Naxzela.

But he couldn’t- could he?

Something urged him forward, urged him to take another step,to- to try. Because he couldn’t stop now, not after everything, notafter everything. With each step, his back straightened, his thoughts-his thoughts became clearer, his conviction stronger.

He thought he felt the gentle waves of the ocean, for abrief moment. Thought he felt her, filling the hole in him she’dcreated, buoying him like a ship without sail to the safety of the shore.

But she wasn’t there. She’d never be there again. Just likehis friends, just like his team. And he couldn’t let that go to waste.

So Lance stood in front of the whirling terror that screamedat him, stood still as the light grew tenfold and began reaching for him, tinyclutches of burning fire pulling at his arms and legs and face.

He closed his eyes, shutting it all out, shutting the noiseand the pain that scorched every part the light touched. And he-

“Feel the energy,” Allura murmured, coaching them throughthe mind meld. “Feel the very essence of each other. Let their quintessenceimprint amongst you, and do the same in return. This,” she said proudly, as theteam released an exhale in unison, “is Voltron.”

-the light screamed, a distinctly human sound, thehundred layers of voices expressing their frightened rage at the sudden roar that echoed.

Lance snapped his eyes open, the sense memory of Voltronthrilling through his veins as he reared his arm up, the black bayard – the bayard,he still had that? – twisting horizontal so it aligned as if about to beshoved into it’s waiting slot, and did just that.

The light – the cruel, blinding goldish white – rippled aroundthe bayard, shrieking as it activated and glowed a brilliant blue that trickledoutwards like gentle streams branching from the raging river. It overtook thelight, glittering ocean crystals so painfully like the home he hadn’t seen inyears threatening to choke Lance, before it drained it all back into thecontainer Haggar had sprung it free from. The layered scream, the burninglight, the sheer terror suddenlydisappeared, cut short the moment the blue-black bayard drained it so.

His knees suddenly gave out on him, dropping him to thefloor.

His ears popped, but he heard no noise.

And around him, silence.

Somehow, he pushed and pulled himself towards the onlyvestige of warmth he had left. Shiro’s body lay sprawled closer to him thanbefore, his expression suddenly peaceful from what Lance had last seen. Hedidn’t have the black bayard with him anymore – swallowed with the light andeverything else – but he didn’t think Shiro would mind, all things told.

He finally gave in to the urge he’d had before, laying hishead across Shiro’s stomach, pillowing it against the hard muscles he’d alwaysadmired. Shiro’s hand – his human hand – was somehow still warm, warm enoughthat he could pretend, if he really tried, that Shiro was squeezing his handjust as hard as Lance was squeezing his.

His armour was all but gone at this point – burnt away bywhatever the hell had been struggling to come through from the other side – andhis skin, his everything, was on fire in a way that left him breathless.

Off to the side, something popped. Air suddenly beganwhistling away, as if escaping through a small, pinprick hole in a balloon.

So the ship had finally broken.

That was okay though. Lance didn’t want to be the last oneleft. He wouldn’t have been able to escape even if he could have stood up atthis point. He was always going to meet his end here.

But that was okay as well. He wasn’t afraid.

Somehow, he mused to himself, eyes slowly sliding shut, he justwasn’t afraid.

#

The coffee shop, branded ingeniously as ‘The Coffee Shop’, was located right at the doorstep of the sciences campus, in a perfect position for would be engineers and doctors and physicists to come stumbling in at all hours of the day to survive just a little bit longer.

Occasionally, Lance mused to himself with a grin, the lone law student would come staggering through, dazed and roughed up, a tie wrapped around their forehead like a badge of honour hailing the ridiculous party they’d just come from.

Who knew law students were wild, man.

Today, however, was a quite day. Close to noon but not quite, the coffee shop was bathed in almost incandescent sunlight, autumn heralding the view from their windows with red and gold leaves.

Few customers sat around the store, all in scarves and warm mitts, cradling their hot or cold drinks with a slow, languid warmth that settled deep into everyone’s pores.

Lance’s phone buzzed, grabbing his attention for a while, snickering at the ongoing war between his sister Talia and his brother Juan. The sibling group chat had recently undergone a purge; Juan, deciding the sibling group chat should remain the sibling group chat, and not include cousins upon cousins upon cousins. Talia had taken it as a declaration of war and rallied the flag of her wronged brethren, igniting the current warfare keeping his phone buzzing endlessly.

The door chimed in the distance, but Lance was too busy rapidly typing out a comment to hear. His brother unleashed a string of gibberish to truly get across his disbelief at Lance’s nerve, and then added a truly terrifying single emote of a cup of tea. It made absolutely no sense, but that was what made it terrifying - Juan was going to get revenge for Lance siding with Talia, and his only clue was the single, steaming tea.

“Um, hello?”

Crap.

“Hello!” Lance yelped in reply, shoving his phone into a pocket as he look-

-pain.

Pain lanced across his temples, drilling into his eyes with a ferocity that stole his breath away. Lance flinched, snapping his eyes shut to the Asian face he’d only caught a glimpse of, hands snapping up to his head in a vain attempt at stopping the pain.

It drilled into him for a moment, threatening to snap his brain in two, when, after what felt like an eternity, it finally began to fade, in pulses and waves, but fade nonetheless.

Wincing at the remnants that remained, Lance peeled open an eye, remembering the customer far too late.

The customer, tall and broad shouldered, stared back at him, something hauntingly familiar about his face. He was Asian, like Lance had noticed, older slightly, with a forelock of shocking white against a dark undercut. Scar across his nose (no, a part of Lance rejected, he shouldn’t have that, not here) that only added on to his general handsomeness.

And staring at him, Lance realised with an uncomfortable start, the sudden headache still whispering in the dregs of his mind, threatening to return with a vengeance.

“Uh...” Lance began cleverly, unnerved by the strange expression on the other’s face. “Can I... help you?”

“Lance,” the stranger replied, the name rolling of his tongue with a familiarity that did little to ease Lance’s trepidation. Nothing came afterwards, like how one would actually carry on after saying someone’s name, just... Lance.

How did this guy know Lance’s name?

Because, and here was the thing, right, because Lance would’ve known this person if this person knew him. He was like six foot four, a ridiculous beefy chunk of Asian prime meat, this guy, whoever the hell he was, would be a known entity on this campus, and if he knew Lance’s name, then damn well Lance would’ve known his.

But he didn’t.

And Lance didn’t like that.

He really, really, didn’t like that.

(purple, smoke, old, croaky voice, laughing, bright light, pain, pain, pAIN-)

No. (No.) Lance was not doing this again.

“What can I get you?”

The man stared at him, stared at him, and, almost in a daze (was he a law student? No, a voice whispered, not quite,), said, “Coffee, please.”

And that was good. That was easy. Lance could- he could do that. He made a noise of assent as he turned to do just that, hands working on autopilot as he tried to quieten the tempest of his storms. The drink was finished quickly enough, the amount ringed up, and the Asian quickly paid and took a sip of his drink.

“Huh,” the Asian said, finally breaking his creepy stare to look down at the drink in his hand. “Just... how I like it.”

And Lance-

He-

(two purple satchets of what was essentially sugar, a splash of Kalt”ej3FQJ/’c milk, and a little green cube that was basically mint)- who the fuck drank their coffee with mint?

Wait, he’d added... He’d added mint to the coffee? He-

He had.

Why had he done that? How had he known?

The headache surged, pounding at the space behind his eyes, and Lance- he-

“Oh, whoops!” -He grinned, slapping the expression and easy tone on with practised ease. “Sorry, but it’s my break now! I’m glad you like your drink, bye!”

The Asian suddenly looked alarmed, a hand (human, a part of him screamed, though if in pleasure or horror Lance could not tell) reaching up to- to what? Lance had no idea, and he didn’t want to know. “Wait, Lance-”

“Gotta go!” He interrupted, hives breaking out across his skin at the way the stranger said his name, at the way the stranger looked at him, like- like-

(-the ship was breaking around him, air was coming in, the walls were groaning, folding in-)

He burst into the backroom, startling Suzy, gasping for breath. He waved her off, pointing a hand at the shop behind him, and Suzy - bless her chemical engineering heart - gave him a thumbs up and flounced out with a loud, “Heave ho! Suzy is here to save the day!”

In the quiet of the backroom, Lance fumbled his phone out of his pocket, ignoring the fifty plus messages from the group chat, and pulled up a new text message. He typed out his message with shaking fingers, ignoring the headache that steadily drove at him, relentless, and waited with baited breaths until his phone pinged in reply.

Five o’clock tomorrow. Okay. Great. He could do that.

He was really lucky he had such a great psychiatrist. The headaches? The familiarity? The- the things he thought he saw sometimes? God, not now, not when midterms were so close. He could not lose it now.

Haggar would help him.

She always did.

#ayyyyyeeee #voltron #vld #lance #reincarnation #she has her hands on our boy's reincarnated state #but for what reason i wonder???? #shiro #poor shiro #personal talk no jutsu #asks no jutsu #fanfic no jutsus #Anonymous

[dent-de-leon]

I'd love for everyone do a vlog together, how do you think that would turn out?

Allura tries to start off with a nice intro. She talks about her paladins and all their roles, the importance of the Lions and Voltron’s cause. “As of right now, I’m piloting the Blue Lion.”

“And you’re the Heart of Voltron,” Lance adds. “And you have super strength! And you unlocked that awesome power-up with your space magic, and–”

“And it’s kind of crowded in here,” Pidge adds, because it is, and this tiny space was not built for the whole team to give sit-down interviews. 

There’s only one chair. It’s like the bridge all over again, and Keith and Shiro got used to sharing theirs, so they’re both trying to squeeze onto it as best they can. “Why don’t you just have a seat, Shiro.” “No no, you take it, Keith. I insist.” “But you look kinda tired, Shiro. Really, you should have it.” “But you’ve been off on all those Marmora missions! You’re the one that needs to rest–” 

Lance is still talking. He hasn’t stopped. He likely never will.

“Is it my turn?? Was that my cue?–That was my cue, right?”–Hunk, for about the fifth time. He’s fumbling with a few index cards he wrote beforehand, but now the order’s all mixed up and he’s not sure if they’re even relevant anymore. The camera promptly breaks then, and he spends the next ten minutes fixing it. Meanwhile, everyone else is talking over each other. “Wait, is this thing on?” “Hey Hunk, need a hand?” “So then, Matt made it to the finAL BOSS!” 

Finally the camera turns back on. By this point, Pidge is on a video call with Matt and Allura is in the middle of having a complex discussion with Lance about How Amazing Blue is. Keith’s sitting in the chair but Shiro’s sitting in his lap. The mice keep trying to chew the camera’s wiring and Hunk has to coax them away. Coran is checking all their systems just to make sure they’re good. 

“Hey if we’re all here, who’s steering the castle?” Lance asks at some point, because the question was just inevitable.

“Coran is,” Shiro says, because they decided that vargas ago. 

“Oh,” Coran says, from where he’s been sitting in his corner of the room. 

The ship abruptly keels over sideways and the video feed cuts out

#voltron #keith #shiro #lance #sheith

[keiths-stupid-mullet]

Do you send reference posts?! :00 I'm cosplaying Lance, so I'd appreciate some advice for his outfit, too, if that's cool with you! The jacket, the shoes, and his hair, would be nice? Please and thank you ^^

Haha, I just have lots of screenshots ready and I like helping people out, so I sometimes end up making reference posts, yeah :P Lance stuff coming your way, starting with the jacket. The front:

There are 2 vertical lines on his jacket that start under the horizontal stripes that are a tiny bit higher than the orange stripes on his sleeves. One of them is extremely close to the zipper, the other one is at ~1/3rd of the pocket. There are multiple dark parts: them hem of his sleeves, the jacket, on his shoulders (that goes down to his shoulder blades) and at the front under the hood. The hood is part of the jacket:

From the side:

From the back:

The inside of his jacket seems to be dark:

Next, the shoes:

(I’m pretty sure that while the black parts of the shoe stand out a little, they are exaggerated in the second picture). There is a weird little knick in his shoes and you can’t see the blue part from the front:

Aaaand lastly, the hair:

Short hair, a lil beansprout, bangs that go to just under his eyes. His hair grew longer throughout the seasons, so you don’t have to worry about getting it exactly right (the last pic is from s3 as opposed to the others that are all from s2). His hair is pretty straight, there are a few strands going up but if we view it from above-

-it’s like that. Hope this helped!! :D

#a² (answered ask) #midlygay #!!!!!! good luck with your cosplay!!!!!!! #i hope you have fun!!! :D #cosplaying lance should be fun; that's what he'd want at least :P

[ink-splotch]

hi! i'd love to hear what you think would have happened if wyldon hadn't let keladry stay after her first year!! love your writing :^)

“Mindelan, it may be that the best thing said of my tenure is that you were my student. Should that be the case, I am the wrong man for this post. I did all I could to get rid of you. Your probation was wrong. You know that, I know it. I was harder on you than any lad. Thank Mithros I remembered my honor and let you stay when you met the conditions—but it was a near thing. Next time, I might not heed the voice of honor.”

– Wyldon of Cavall (Squire)

Kel sat and thought about it all through the long summer– thought about joining the Riders when she turned sixteen, or going back to the Yamani Isles with her parents, or running away to become an unlawful bandit hunter. 

She drank tea with her mother and accepted her quiet sympathy. She wondered what was going to happen to Peachblossom. She did her morning glaive practice dances in the heady air of the tiny courtyard garden of her parents’ townhouse, where the cook grew herbs and spices in big overflowing boxes.

Summer rolled on. She sat, and she thought, and she did not tell her thoughts to anyone. On the first day of what would have been her second year of page training, she woke before the sun and had a quiet breakfast with her father, and then she jogged up the big dusty hill to the palace grounds.

When the pages trailed out of the building to the practice yards with dubious enthusiasm, she was waiting just outside their ground. Her chin was high, her shoulders loose while her hands gripped her weighted staff.

“Probationer,” Wyldon barked out her, when one of the boys went to fetch him. “Was I unclear in the spring?”

Kel stared him down, fingers white on her staff, and said, “I’m not a probationer anymore.”

“She’s a private citizen, just enjoying the fresh air,” Neal called from the other side of the practice yard fence. He got armor cleaning punishment for a week for his cheek and Kel lifted and lowered and struck with her staff to the call of the masters. Her staff hit thin air. The clack of the pages’ staves colliding hit her ears.

“That’s palace property,” Wyldon said ten minutes in, and plucked the staff out of her grip, so Kel followed the lesson with empty hands and brought her mother’s spare walking stick the next day.

They started calling her trespasser, after that, and Kel stood calm on the public grounds just on the other side of the practice yard fence, practicing her high blocks.

While the pages had riding practice, she sat in the dirt outside the riding yard and did the homework Neal smuggled out for her. He handed the finished assignments in for her, too, even though only Myles and the one Mithran priest who had never learned anyone’s names graded them. She took notes on what riding exercises the masters were assigning the pages and watched Neal where he sat on Peachblossom’s back like a sack of mulish peanuts.

“When I heard you weren’t t’ be coming back,” Stefan the hostler told her. “I wasn’t sure what would happen to the old lad.”

“Me, either,” said Kel, looking down at her math and trying to keep her face smooth and still.

When the pages went in for their seated classes, Stefan let her take out Peachblossom to try to exercises herself. Days the gelding was too tired, he found other mounts for her and Kel learned all their names– gentle Aubrey and fastidious Starfall and distractible, clever Redding and poor anxious Terence, who almost threw her more than once. “He comes by the fidgets honest,” Stefan told her and Kel brought extra apples for Terence when she could.

She still took on Lalasa when Gower found her feeding the sparrows in the courtyard beside her old rooms and asked her. Her parents’ townhouse had the funds to hire another maid, though Kel didn’t need or want a personal servant.

Lalasa pinched Kel’s torn clothes from her room all the same and returned them better hemmed and beautifully mended. Kel barely saw her, though she tried to leave a coin from her allowance on the piles of clothes she thought the young woman was most likely to steal away next.

She didn’t ask for the help and she told herself she didn’t want it, but she jogged up the big dusty hill to the palace grounds every day with her weighted harness weighing on her shoulders.

She stood just outside the low fence of the practice yards and ignored Joren’s comments and Zahir’s sneers and the rebukes of the swordfighting teachers– distraction, they said. Lump, waste, failure.

The sun beat down on her aching shoulders and she thought I could stand here forever, thought you are just noise and wind, I am a mountain. I will be here long after you cease howling.

Neal landed blows on Joren’s fingers, apologizing blandly to the masters for his clumsinesses, because Kel had ordered him to get in no fights for her honor. The sun beat down on the careful stitches of Kel’s cotton shirt, which fit as perfectly as Lalasa could manage from a shy distance.

She told herself she didn’t want the help, didn’t need it. Her harness weighed down her shoulders, her makeshift staff weighed down her arms, but the cotton laid light and kind on her back.

Read More (Ao3)

She climbed up to the palace each day for training, but the city was where she lived. She met a battleworn mutt stealing sausages and brought him home to her parents’ townhouse. Jump befriended the kitchen rat-catchers and napped out with them on the cobblestones in front of the house, the cats purring with their bellies bared for the sun.

The palace carpenters wouldn’t make Kel practice swords and staves weighted with lead pellets, no matter the coins she offered or the errands she ran. She found a carpenter down by the Goddess’s temple in town, instead, who had shoulders even Kel envied.

The carpenter set her to whittling buttons while she crafted her a sword to employ on the dusty air just outside the practice yards. Kel paid in carefully counted coins and tipped in chores and favors, and slowly she collected what she needed– a practice sword, a staff, a lance.

She helped the cook carry vegetables and cages of chickens home from market, helped the delivery men lug massive bags of flour from the backs of their carts, and called it strength training. Her shoulders grew broad, twelve and straining at the seams.

When she found Lalasa cornered behind the kitchens by a handsy grocer’s lad, she still chased him off and bullied Lalasa into learning some self defense, if she wouldn’t let Kel report him. But they held their lessons in the little kitchen garden and the kitchen help and the maids drifted out to watch from among the rosemary. They called out encouragement among the mint under the apple tree. The youngest stepped out to join them, and then the oldest, and soon Kel was pacing between them all, correcting their stances and the twists of their wrists in the herb-heavy air.

-

Kel planned to spend the week the pages were away in the field catching up on her studying, taking tea with her mother, and hauling stones to pave the front walk of the townhouse, but Eda Bell had other ideas.

Most of the fighting masters ignored the bulky twelve year old standing just outside the training yard, but both Shangs liked to linger by the fence and drawl loudly, “The foot extension on that high kick is just tough, isn’t it, Eda?”

“Oh, yes, one of the commonest mistakes, but to correct for it–”

Eda caught her on her way down the hill, one evening. Kel was tacky with dried sweat and itchy with horsehair, but she turned and waited for Eda to speak. “You should pack,” Eda said. “I told Wyldon I needed an aide for the trip, to fetch and carry for my poor old bones.”

“But, ma'am–”

“Don’t call me ma'am, child, honestly. He said that’s what pages are for, but I told him that of course it’d be improper to have a lad attend me.” She smiled, crinkling up her wrinkles.

“He doesn’t know you’re bringing me,” Kel said.

“If you’re not part of this program anymore, then he doesn’t get any say in what you do or where you go.”

“I think he thinks he might,” Kel said, but she packed a small bag and they rode at the back of the pages’ party, into the hills. Wyldon spotted her early on and Eda Bell smiled.

Last summer, Kel had climbed trees until she vomited behind bushes. She had fought spidrens standing shoulder to shoulder with her friends. This summer, when the boys set out to map and explore, she squared her growing shoulders and went after them. Merric cast a wary glance over his shoulder at her while Faleron nervously ignored the crunch of her feet in dry grass behind them. “The royal forest isn’t your private property, or Lord Wyldon’s,” Kel said levelly, into their silence.

“Yeah, and you’re not who he’ll give punishment duty to,” Merric snapped.

“I’d take it gladly,” Kel said and Merric shook his head. Owen stared back over his shoulder, wide-eyed, the same way he’d been staring over the practice yard fence all year. He almost tripped over a tree root with all his eager questions piled under his tongue.

They climbed down into the narrow valley, the cliffs curving around them, and they found the bandits there. Faleron froze– Merric scrabbled for a knife– and Kel stepped forward with orders in her throat.

She’d been calling out drills in the kitchen garden all year, trying to imagine she was Hakuin or Eda. She’d been watching each of her women for the way they stood, or struck, or twisted away from a hold, the places they flinched. She had been watching the pages from over the low practice yard fence, every hit, every blow, while she struck empty air– her feet stirring the same dust as theirs, her stance light on that same ground, except for the fence between them.

“Faleron, the horn,” she snapped out, snatching a spear from Owen’s hands. “Owen, they’ve taught you how to make mage light, yeah? Get in the back, blind them all you can. Merric, with me–”

They fought their way out and up the high narrow path to the clifftop cave. Kel borrowed his bow while Owen tried to remember his basic healing lessons from magic class. She didn’t look down, just shoved her shakes to the back of her head and got to work.

“We would have died without you there,” said Faleron, in that quiet way of his, when it was over and Wyldon and the local bandit hunters were riding into the canyon below. “I don’t know if Wyldon will believe it, or admit he does, or if even the other boys will have the guts to say it, but that’s what I’m going to tell him, Kel.”

“Of course we will,” said Owen hotly.

Merric glared over his shoulder. “Don’t talk about my guts, Faleron.”

Kel sent them all on ahead of her– the injured first, and then the whole. Owen was ashy, shaky, and grinning. She went last, her legs jelly below her as they hadn’t been for the whole fight, her hands pressed tight into stone. At the base of the cliff, she threw up beside the body of a man one of them had killed and Wyldon said something smug and dismissive she didn’t even bother hearing.

“No, sir,” said Faleron. “It’s just the heights.”

Kel wiped her mouth with the back of her hand while Faleron described the fight with Owen’s “jolly” interjections. Wyldon shook his head and she watched her feet, already looking forward to riding home at the back of the train with Eda. Her stomach curdled and curled in her belly– she could stand the blood, the calluses and the shouts, but the heights, even just the heights– she was still the only one of them who’d puked at the end of it all. She was still the only one among them who would go back to her parents’ townhouse, not the pages’ dormitories. She was still not strong enough.

She put a hand to Faleron’s elbow, in a quelling thanks, and then headed back to camp in silence.

In this world, Wyldon was not ordering her up trees or dropping punishments on her head that forced her up stable loft ladders or the palace walls. She had very little interest in forcing those same trials on herself, but as Kel rode home from the forest, she wondered– was that why he had told her not to come back?

She knew it wasn’t fair. She knew he had asked things from her he hadn’t of the boys, and she knew she deserved to be on that practice court. But she wondered– if she had been better, had been braver, would he have let her stay?

While the pages left their last class of that next day, their yawns and chatter rising in the air, Kel climbed slowly up to the lowest palace wall and stood there at the edge of it, sweat-soaked and shaking lightly.

She sat up there and did her homework. She was as many feet as possible from the edge, but the wind picked at her papers. Some of these papers would be handed back with Miles or the math professor’s corrections, but she knew many would end up in trash bins or tossed into hearthfires. She wrote two pages on the tactics of the Immortals war in a careful even script, trying to ignore the wind and to will her hand not to shake.

She still went up to the palace daily in the summer, to use their archery ranges, feed her sparrows, and ride Peachblossom, but she spent as much time as she could in the kitchen garden. The maids stopped by on their off hours and dropped off friends on theirs– local seamstresses who bent close to admire Lalasa’s beautiful stitchwork, candlemakers and trainee priestesses of the Black God and flower sellers.

Early in the morning, when the cooks were setting the day’s dough to rise and the maids were just lighting the fires, Kel would do her glaive dances under the pale sky and they would pause in the doorways to watch.

-

When Kel came down to the practice yard the second week of what would have been her third year of page training, there was a woman waiting for her. She was short and dark, with wide strong shoulders. Kel gripped her weighted sword, stepping into the same place she stood every day.

“Sorry,” the woman said and Kel, finally, placed her– Commander Buri, of the Queen’s Riders. “I’ve been out in the field with barely enough time to rinse the mud from my teeth. You know about mud in your teeth?” She smiled and she must have had time to rinse them after all, because her grin was sharp and gleaming. “You will.”

“Commander?” said Kel.

The swordsmaster was glancing balefully in Buri’s direction. “I’m palace-bound for a spell,” she said. “I could use a little practice to keep these old joints oiled properly, and I was told there’s a kid who comes down here every day to fight empty air.”

There was a wooden practice sword hanging easy in Buri’s grasp. Kel took a long slow breath and thought about still mountain lakes and the tall old stones that towered above them, unbending, unbowed.

“Unless the fighting with empty air thing is on purpose,” Buri said, and it was kind, smiling and kind, and Neal was watching them over the low fence and the swordsmaster was watching them over the low fence and the weight of Kel’s practice sword was pressing into her calluses.

“No, ma'am– sir, um… ma'am?”

“Buri,” said Buri, and lifted her weapon as the swordsmaster called first defense.

-

Buri came most days when she was stationed in the palace, but Kel fought air as often as she didn’t. The Riders got sent out to the north to help with raiders, and Kel thought about hauling in a standing cloakrack or something, just so she’d have something to hit.

But the week after Buri left she came down to find a mountain of a man slouching against the low fence and joking with the swordsmaster.

“Keladry,” said Raoul of Goldenlake and Kel managed, “Sir.”

“A little birdie– a little Buri? She is little, isn’t she– told me if a fellow wants to get bruised in the early morning this here is the place to be.”

Sometimes it was Raoul, sometimes it was other Riders– she learned their names: Evin, who plucked coins from behind her ears, and Miri, who talked of the sea. A Bazhir man in Own’s livery came with his pockets full of birdseed and dried berries for the sparrows who lined up on the fence to watch her– Qasim, who had listened to her on the spidren hunt, back when she had been a real page and not a stubborn trespasser.

Kel wondered, every time she stepped out to see a figure standing there, if she would be short and broad and red-haired and purple-eyed– but the Lioness stayed a legend, and a ghost. Kel wondered if she had disappointed her. If it had been the Lioness in her stead, surely she would have been good enough Wyldon would have been forced to let her stay.

-

After the pages’ seated classes and Kel’s own riding practice, she’d come down to the pages’ wing to feed the sparrows and do her mathematics homework with Neal, who craned over her shoulder to see how she did them.

“Here I thought abandoning my noble academic pursuits would save me from this sort of headache,” he said, squinting at her even script. Crown was preening herself on his shoulder and for all his scowling and whining Neal was almost frozen, trying not to jostle the sparrow. “I thought– bruises, blisters, yes, but only to save me from mathematics.”

“I believe bravery’s a rather important skill in a knight,” Kel said. “Be strong, buttercup.”

Neal snorted. “Hardly. Look at the Stump.”

“Lord Wyldon’s a fine knight,” Kel said softly.

“He’s a coward and a–”

Kel’s face didn’t move much, but Neal had been watching her for years now, and so he stopped. Crown hopped down his arm and took off for the tree in a flutter of speckled brown. “Kel,” he said, after her quill had paused over the page for long quiet moments. “You belong here, and he’s a fool and a coward for fighting that– for not fighting for it.”

“He’s the training master,” Kel said. “It’s his call. I don’t want to talk about it, Neal. I just want to learn.”

He sighed. “Alright, well, learn by teaching, will you, young one? Explain number five to me before I set it on fire and go back to university.”

-

Other pages found them, sometimes, where they had clambered into the courtyard, or tucked away in Neal’s rooms (with the door still open), or in a corner of the library. Even if she spent her mornings fighting air most of the time, or doing drills with conscientious adults, she went to sleep with bruises. If they didn’t come to her and yank her papers from her grasp, then she went out looking for them. She wondered if the younger boys would have taken her defense better or worse from the Girl than they did from the trespasser. Neal went with her, groaning and griping, and took punishment duty that Kel tried not to envy.

So when she heard footsteps nearing their library table, she did not assume they came in peace. She put down her quill because she was tired of having to cut new ones and she pushed back her chair so that they couldn’t trap her in her seat.

“Um,” said Owen, peering over his books the same way he peered over the yard fence at her.

“Jesslaw,” said Neal with a cheery boom and Owen took that for invitation.

“Um,” said Owen. “So, you’re, um, good at fighting, Kel. Ma'am.”

Kel watched him from over her open book.

Owen stammered, “I’m– not? You’re there, in the mornings, and you were there, with the bandits, so you might know that. But, um, do you think you could teach me?”

“I’m not even a page,” she said.

“But you’re the best,” he said, in a rush of speech that was closer to his normal cadence. “You’re the best that won’t– laugh at me.” He messed with his papers and looked at her eagerly. He reminded her of her nieces and nephews, whose puppy-dog-eyes she was well practiced at defying. But she could see the wanting in his little, stubborn frame– the way he wanted something he couldn’t have, the way he wanted to learn something they wouldn’t teach him.

“The first bell before dawn,” she said. “Mindelan house, in town, I teach fighting in the kitchen courtyard if you can get there. You don’t mind learning among girls, do you?”

“No, sir!”

She warned Lalasa that evening and Lalasa warned the others, because somehow she had ended up in charge of organizing this all. When Owen showed up shivering in the morning cold, the more social of the women pushed him to the front with the beginners and patted his cheeks. “I’ve been a page for almost two years now!” he protested. “I’m not a kid.”

“Then what do you need us for, little soldier?” one of the maids asked and faded back to practice holds and escapes with Lalasa.

That night, Kel went to sleep to the smell of rosemary through her open window, and woke to grey skies and familiar birdsong. For a long uncertain moment she thought she was back into the page dormitories, her narrow bed and her uniform folded up on the spare chair, the sparrows’ courtyard full of chirping life just outside her window.

But then she pushed herself up to sitting. Her flock of sparrows flitted through the trees and flower beds of the parents’ kitchen garden. Crown set down, lightly, on the bedspread.

“You found me,” she said, and the sparrow gave a sober little peep and hopped up onto her knee.

The year rolled on, through summer and to what would have been Kel’s fourth year of page training. She should have been fretting about the final exams, except she was just sitting with Neal and studying with him for a test they wouldn’t even let her fail.

She should have been worrying about four years of squireship, and who would choose her– if anyone would take that step and choose the Girl– but instead she just tried to decide if she was going back to the page grounds that next autumn. Would she just keep pummeling empty air on the other side of a fence from children? Would she grow old there, too stubborn to give up on a dead dream?

She didn’t talk about it, and Neal didn’t ask, just came by for cook’s pastries and bullied her into letting him heal up her bruises. (“I have my bruise balm,” she said.

“Yes, your mysterious benefactor, praise be. Why do you only accept help if you can’t see the whites of their eyes?”)

“But what if no one chooses me?” Neal moaned over teacakes in her mother’s parlor. Gladys, who had thrown Kel halfway across the garden that morning, hid a giggle as she bustled by the maudlin scene.

“Someone will choose you,” Kel said. “And regret it the moment you open your mouth, but all the same.”

-

In a different life, Cleon would have kissed her at Midwinter– but Cleon had never been brave, at least not for the sake of Kel’s dreamer’s eyes, and anyway Kel spent Midwinters with Lalasa and the other girls.

While her parents dined high and fine up at the palace, Kel walked the streets with a pack of giggling young women, toasting mulled cider in their best shoes, the city so lit by torches it almost seemed like day. Lalasa held Tian’s hand in the cold, and if Kel checked every alley they passed by for trouble, she noticed that Gladys and Portia and Hanna did, too. It was almost like patrolling with Neal– and Owen, too, these days– listening for bullies in the corridors and corners of the palace.

They stayed out until late those nights, until the sun rose up against the hills and they toasted and cheered to greet its arrival. The whole lower city slept late the day after, but Kel dragged her bones out of bed and up to the pages’ practice yard.

After years, Kel knew Buri’s tricks and tells, her belly-deep laugh. She knew now that when Raoul really struck the impact would shake straight through her weapon and rattle every bone in her body. He liked to ask about her classes, her family, her sparrows and Jump, so she shouldn’t have been surprised when he asked her one cold morning what she was thinking of doing next. “Given a little fieldwork,” he said, wiping his sweaty face on his sleeve after drills. “You’d make an exemplary bandit hunter.”

“She already is one,” Owen called from where he’d been panting and eavesdropping, and she glared at him until he waved and hurried off to riding class.

“He’s not wrong,” Raoul said, smiling at her. “And there’s not much more for you to learn here.” He waved a hand at the dusty yard around them.

Kel wet her lips. “I was thinking– the Riders,” she said. “I’ll be sixteen in a few years, and if I stay here and keep in practice.” Slowly growing older than the boys on the other side of the fence– too tall, too stocky, but somehow still too female, still not enough.

Raoul nodded, slow. “You’d do well in the Riders,” he said.

She nodded mutely, watching her toes and trying to remember her peace.

“You’d do well there,” he said, and it was hesitant in a way she’d never heard before, so she looked up. “But the Own could use you. I could use someone like you. If you’re interested?”

She lifted her face and saw him standing there, anxious, like he was afraid she might say no. “It’d have to be– as a standard bearer, or an aide, or something, but you’d see action as much as any of the men. And then if, after two years, you want to join the Riders–”

“I have to– I have to think,” she said, and turned and left him standing there beside the low practice yard fence.

She went out to the stables. She’d known what she wanted since she was seven, kneeling behind her mother amid burning paper and laminated wood. “It’s not about the shield,” she told herself, and it was as true as she could make it be. “It’s not fair but I knew that,” she whispered into Peachblossom’s side and he blew at her shortly. “What happens to you, if I go, old man?” Her hair was sticking up in sweaty clumps and she pushed it off her forehead. “The Own,” she said. “They go out there. It’s real. They fight for people, and isn’t that the point?” She had almost turned away from this all, once, before any of it had started– chewing through the word probation on a rivershore until a she had a run in with a spidren and a half-drowned bag of kittens and her mind had made itself up for her.

“Miss Keladry?” said a voice and Kel turned to see Stefan. “So you’re leavin’ us?”

She blinked at him slowly, trying to let her mind catch up to the question. “I hadn’t decided yet,” she said. “Lord Raoul…”

“It’s just– the bill of sale,” he said. “Peachblossom? He was bought, this morning, in your name– four years of stabling and feed. He’s yours.” Kel was standing very still, not moving, so Stefan added, “There’s note– here.”

She unfolded it in her hands. Stefan fed Peachblossom an apple while Kel unfolded it and steadied her breathing. Gods all bless, Lady Kel.

When she stumbled out of the stable, she went to find Neal. She would talk over tea with her mother and father, later, cradling warmth in her palms and trying to lay out all her choices. But she wanted to see Neal now, and listen to his sensible sarcasm, hear him laugh when she took things too seriously.

He opened his door and the flutter in her chest went still for a moment. “What happened?” she said.

“A knight– a knight came by,” he said. She pushed into his room when he didn’t usher her in and he turned and followed her inside like a puppet.

“I told you one would.”

“She,” he said, and Kel’s head snapped up.

“The Lioness,” she said.

“What other female knight is there?” Neal asked, breathless still, and Kel turned to fiddle with the little waving cat on his desk, her face shuttering closed.

“None,” she said.

“Kel,” he said.

“You going to take her up on it?”

“Kel, it should have been you,” said Neal. “She’s– she’s never taken a squire before. If she– if it was anyone, it should have been you.”

“I’m not a squire,” she said. “I’m not going to be a squire.”

He shook his head, running his fingers through his hair. “I’m sorry, that’s all. None of this is fair, and this, I just feel like I’m stealing something from you.”

“You’re not,” she said.

“Someone is,” he said.

“But it’s not you, so, please, just, don’t,” she said. She sat on the edge of his rumpled bed. “Lord Raoul asked me to join up with the King’s Own, as an aide.”

Neal sagged back against his desk and whistled. “Lord Raoul,” he said. “An aide, in the Own.” He laughed, color flooding back into his cheeks. “Kel, he’s basically making you a squire in all but name–”

“All but name,” she said.

“Gods, the ruckus this will stir up. The conservatives, Wyldon– MIthros, even the king.”

She shrugged.

“You going to take it?”

She looked at the cat waving from his desk, right beside his hip. “Yes,” she said. “I think so.”

He was smiling in a long slow slide, like he couldn’t help it. “Kel, this is wonderful.”

“And what about you?”

“You really don’t mind?” he said. “The Lioness…”

“I mind,” she said. “But I don’t mind you.”

“She said she’d teach me healing,” Neal said. “More than just the basic stuff the pages get, you know.”

His voice was soft and Kel swallowed down a million old jokes about going back to university. Instead she pushed off the bed, grabbed one of his hands in hers, and said, “Neal, that’s wonderful.”

-

That summer, she did not walk down the long corridor to the Chamber to try her mettle against it. Not every squire did– Neal thought it was a silly custom– but she wasn’t a squire.

Kel rode out with the Own not in Silverlake livery but in royal colors like the other men. Laurent hissed and spat about charity cases– it took one to know one. When they came back to the capital after months of mud in their teeth, the Own went to their barracks, Raoul to his rooms, and Kel to her parents’ townhouse.

They had tracked and captured the Haresfield bandits, Kel on the main field, attached to one of Third Company’s squadrons as amateur field medic and messenger. Flyn had called it non-combat and snubbed her at firesides, but Kel had cleaned her sword and dagger of other men’s blood, after.

Buri had greeted her in the command tent with that same big sharp smile and a warm clasped hand, when Kel came in with messages and missives. Qasim had teased her and passed her boiled eggs or jerky if she got excited and forgot to eat in mornings. He and Dom had teamed up to teach her all of the Own’s handsigns, and Dom tried to get her to laugh on their long dusty rides– but when they reached the capital again Kel left them at the stables, after she’d brushed and fed Hoshi and Peachblossom, and headed down to the city.

Her blisters had gotten blisters, those long months, but they’d all healed over and gone hard and tough in her sturdy shoes. She felt sturdy, with her saddlebags thrown over one shoulder, walking down this same old path from the palace grounds back to her parents’ home. The sparrows napped on her shoulders and the perches of her bags, except for the few who had chosen to stay with Hoshi and Peachblossom in the stables and pester Qasim for treats. She had walked this way every day for four years, away from a page training where she had never been welcome.

She wondered what card games Third Company would play tonight, what jokes and stories. She wouldn’t miss Wolset’s snoring or Lerant’s unhappy glare or the constant need to prove herself in the eyes of Flynn and everyone else. Even Raoul– he was the one who had taken her on and so to him more than most she felt the need to prove her worth.

But they’d wash the road’s grime from their faces and feet, flick water and tease the ones who slipped off to meet their sweethearts. They’d drag each other out, cleaned and coiffed. There’d been talk about swimming in the river, on the hottest days of the marches, and Kel wondered if they’d go through with it. Qasim had a favorite pub, with a shy chef who would sneak out to ask him for stories about all the places he had seen that she had only ever heard of. Kel had fought and slept beside them for months, but they’d turned left going out of the stables and she’d turned right. Her feet thudded against the familiar path and she watched pebbles run down the slope before her.

When she got close enough to the townhouse, the sparrows lit off of her in a flurry of beating brown wings. They swooped over the eaves to kitchen garden to rejoin with the larger flock, but Kel took the front door instead and found herself with an armful of teary Lalasa.

“Mistress Kel! Bethy said you’d arrived up at the palace, and oh, look at you, bursting out of every seam like I knew you would.” Behind Lalasa, Tian was smiling, and together they both pulled her out into the kitchen garden to look her over in the light. Maids peeked out see her, and the fishmonger’s daughter on a delivery, and the local seamstresses who were all trying to steal Lalasa away to their shops– they poked at her and remarked at her biceps and her new scars, called her pretty and teased her for not writing home more.

“Kel!” Owen came in with a shout from where he’d been working on his etiquette paper in the scullery.

“Don’t you have a whole palace to study in?”

He stuck his little blunt nose up in the air. “A growing boy’s gotta have wide horizons.”

“A growing boy’s got to have Cook’s teacakes,” Lalasa whispered to her.

“You’re all still holding the lessons in the morning?” Kel said, and Lalasa blushed prettily.

“Oh yes,” said Gladys. “Lalasa runs them. You should hear her drill sergeant’s voice, shakes the rafters.”

“Oh, shush, shoo, all of you, Lady Kel needs to clean up and to rest,” Lalasa said, flapping her hands at the gathered crowd– and they went. Lalasa blushed a bit more and then shoved Kel through the halls towards a hot bath and a fresh set of clothes. “They won’t fit right,” she said mournfully, but Kel turned and took her hands warmly in hers. Steam rose from the tub and she could smell lemon and lavender.

“It’s perfect,” she said. “Thank you.”

-

She asked Lord Raoul why, once– why he had taken her on. Why he had shown up to dawn practice for years, on the other side of that low fence, and tried to make her laugh. She flicked the beads of the abacus, juggling budgets and supplies in her head while she waited for his answer.

“There’s more than one kind of warrior,” said Raoul finally. Sixty pallets of dried venison, Kel thought, while Raoul talked about soldiers, knights, and Alanna the Lioness. Twenty five cases of clean bandages, she thought, and Raoul said, “Commanders, good ones, they’re as rare as heroes. Commanders have an eye not just for what they do, but for what those around them do.”

Raoul picked up a quill and toyed with it. Sewing kits, emergency water rations, twenty-five sacks of flour. “You’ve shown flashes of being a commander. I’ve seen it. My job is to see if you will do more than flash, with the right training. The realm needs commanders. Tortall is big. We have too many still-untamed pockets, too cursed many hideyholes for rogues, and plenty of hungry enemies to nibble at our borders and our seafaring trade. If you have what it takes, the Crown should use you. We’re too desperate for good commanders to let one slip away, even a female one. Now, finish that”– he pointed to the slate– “and you can stop for tonight.”

“Yes, sir,” she said.

“I don’t know if we deserve you, Kel,” he said, as she packed up to leave. “Tortall hasn’t done right by you, over and over, but we need you.” She stood in the door of the tent, gripping her papers and not speaking. “As long as you are willing to fight for us, as long as I can, I will give you a place to stand and do so.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“No, thank you, Kel. Sleep well.”

She didn’t, but it wasn’t for lack of trying.

-

On the progress, Raoul knocked conservatives out of their saddles when they challenged him, but it was Lerant who helped him into his armor. Kel helped Flyn argue logistics and housing with the progress quartermasters, standing shoulder to stubborn shoulder. She didn’t ever learn to joust, which seemed a rather silly pastime to her, but in her third year with the Own, Raoul taught her how to do that speedy, efficient stitch of his, and Qasim taught her how to walk quieter over leaves and broken ground, and she taught all Third Company a few moves with the glaive.

She raced Hoshi against speedy Bazhir horses while Peachblossom nibbled dry delicacies of desert grass. She buried Crown and Freckle in Persepolis. Yuki watched Neal across rooms, and Neal watched Yuki, and neither of them were driven to poetry.

Third Company built the yet-unnamed Fort Giantkiller up in the frigid north. The raiders were getting bolder, and more unified. Kel got kicked off construction duty early on, so Flyn snapped her up for logistics and scouting details.

Earthquakes, fires, bandits, pirates, hard winters– Kel’s shoulders were filling out further, her equipment getting caked with dust and mud from every corner of Tortall.

The leaves turned color again and Kel buried herself in an audit of all of Third Company’s gear. Raoul settled down beside her with a sigh and she kept the count of arrows going in the back of her head. “Four years,” he said. “If you were a squire, I’d be sorry to see you go now.”

Lalasa had gotten her hands on Kel’s King’s Own livery, stitched them up to fit her perfectly. She stood under their weight now, willing her hands not to curl into fists. “Sorry, sir,” she said. “That’s kind, and all, but I think I’d rather have my shield.”

“I didn’t mean–”

“That’s alright. Excuse me, sir.”

They headed back to Corus the next week. Raoul had reports to deliver in person, and Kel wanted to see Neal step out of that Chamber as a living knight. Her first stop when she got home was her parents’ house: for tea in the drawing room, and cookies and storytelling in the kitchen garden. Her second was Neal’s rooms, just off Lady Alanna’s. She and Yuki plied him with games and favorite foods, and tried to distract their friend and his tendency to overthink.

The morning of Neal’s Ordeal, Kel arrived at the Chamber’s waiting room before the sun rose. She had never been there before, never pressed her hands up against the cold stone door and asked for nightmares. She sat in the back, with Owen, but at the front of the room a stout red-haired woman waited, silent. Kel watched the back of Alanna the Lioness’s head and tried not to wonder, tried not to want the things she had already failed to earn. The stone bench was cold under her thighs.

“Neal will be fine,” Owen whispered to her. “Right? I mean.”

“Holding his tongue for a whole night?” Kel whispered back, squeezing the young squire’s hand as comfortingly as she could. “It’s gonna be tough, but I think he can do it.”

When Neal stumbled out of the Chamber– pale, shaken, but alive– alive– Alanna was the first up, with a blanket and some low comment that made Neal snicker. She squeezed his hand on top of the wool.

“Sir Meathead,” said Dom, grinning from the second row. Things were curling and curdling in Kel’s gut– pride, relief, and a festering of exhausted, bitter jealousy.

“You next,” she told Owen, trying badly to hold a smile, but everyone else was smiling too hard to notice where she failed.

-

In Neal’s first year as a knight and Kel’s fifth year with the Own, the war began in earnest. Stormwings circled the long ranks of men and supply wagons as they rumbled north, and Kel met a stableboy named Tobeis Boon. She’d never have a dowry, but she had years of wages and she bought Tobe’s freedom while Neal healed him up and Peachblossom stood guard.

“Taking in strays?” Raoul asked, raising a careful eyebrow with it.

“I learned from the best, sir,” she said. “You going to help me talk Flyn down about the lad, or not?”

“I suppose Third Company could always use another standard bearer,” Raoul said.

She grinned. “Lerant can take him on as a trainee.”

She didn’t have Haven holding her back from chasing down Blayce the Nothing Man– but she had never met the Chamber and it had never told her the Nothing Man was her job. She was one more soldier marching between the supply wagons, leaving long even tracks through the sludge and muck. Whenever Raoul could manage it, he’d lead the Own off to scout afield from the trudging ranks.

Kel was assigned to Dom and Wolset’s squad– an “aide” officially still, she couldn’t be promoted to anything, but in a fight Wolset and the others looked to her for direction. They fought a couple skirmishes from Giantkiller (the sight of Raoul’s face upon hearing the fort’s official name was something Kel would cherish forever), but then they were assigned on to help found an unnamed refugee camp a half day’s ride away. Tobe went where Kel went, and Raoul sent Lerant along with them “to continue standard bearer training,” which mostly meant learning his letters and eating full meals. When Tobe had nightmares he found Kel, and when he had questions he tended to find Lerant.

Wyldon had made Neal commander of the camp, to the confusion of everyone but Kel. “It’s because you’re kind,” she said.

“What,” said Neal. “I’m not kind. What is this slander? And this is the Stump– he’s not going to care if I’m kind. He’s going to care if I’m– obedient. And dead on the inside. That’s why he’s doing this– he’s trying to kill me, have you seen this paperwork?”

Kel, who was already halfway through Neal’s stacks of paperwork– putting them into piles of “trash,” “not time sensitive,” and “regarding something that is literally on fire, right now”–said, “He wants someone here who cares about the people. Who isn’t going to call them ‘commoners’ and just dally and dream about the glory of the war front. You’ll do the work, and he respects you for that.”

“You live in a weird fantasy world,” Neal told her.

Dom got her banned from any construction work, so she signed herself (and Neal, too) up for extra latrine duty. She took sentry watches, joined the patrols, and got assigned crossbow and combat training duties. Neal worked at setting up both the camp and its infirmary, dogging the steps of the head healer until the woman kicked him back to his study. “You need aides,” Kel told him, and then found out that what she was actually looking for was something miraculous and extraordinary called clerks.

She met Fanche in the dusty lane outside one of the barracks, where the woman managed to have a yelling match with Neal in which neither of them raised their voices above short, cutting snipes. Kel stood on the sidelines with a fellow who introduced himself as Saefas and who confided, “I’m going to marry that woman.”

“Oh, good,” said Kel. “One of these days I’m likely to strangle him.”

Kel went walking in the evenings, just like she had through the libraries and hidey-holes of the palace at home. When she found raised voices, she listened and stepped in where she could. When she found raised fists, she stopped them her drill sergeant voice if she could and her hands if she couldn’t. “You need a council for each of the housing blocks,” she told Neal. “Elected judges, something like that. They’ve got grievances and you can’t answer them all, no matter how many clerks we find you.”

“And you can’t answer them all, no matter how many strolls you go on, whistling,” he said. “Go find some Scanrans to kill, Kel, I’ve got this.”

There were children here the way there weren’t in Giantkiller. Tobe looked so much like a very small old man sometimes that when she first saw him racing through the main square with Loesia and Gydo Kel barely recognized him. He would still barely let her out of his sight for more than a few hours, and he’d gotten no better at asking for things he needed, but he cornered her at one breakfast to explain that Loesia and Gydo wanted to learn how to fight.

Kel thought about her latrine duty and Neal’s meetings with his new clerks and her nightly walks, listening for trouble, and how little time she had to sleep. She thought about being twelve, on the wrong side of the practice yard fence. “The first hour before dawn,” she told him.

Whenever Third Company made its berth in Corus, Kel would get up in the early mornings and make her way out to the kitchen courtyard. She always meant to lurk in the back and stretch out her limbs, but Lalasa would drag her to the front, smiling, and introduce her to every new young woman. Kel tried and failed to learn all their names and livelihoods, but Lalasa knew every one. Owen, who remained an unattached squire at the palace until the war started in earnest and he became an unattached squire at Giantkiller, had been Lalasa’s demo partner for years.

Loesia and Gydo were smaller than anyone Kel had ever taught. As she moved between them in chill morning air, adjusting stances and giving advice, she tried to decide if it made her miss Lalasa less or more.

When her squad was called back to Giantkiller, Kel thought about leaving Tobe with Neal, but the kid refused. “It’s safer here,” she told him. “And you’ll get to stay with your friends.”

“It’s safer with you,” he said and Kel sighed and told him to pack his things. She didn’t want him trying to trek on foot from Haven to Giantkiller in the dark of night if she left him behind.

She found him housing with the stable boys at Giantkiller and left Peachblossom and Hoshi to his care. Dom told her over a shared sentry watch that Tobe had taken it upon himself to look after the rest of the squad’s horses, too. “If they were cats, they’d purr when he stepped into the stable, but instead they just get snot on our shirts.”

She had missed the rest of Third Company, who welcomed them back with equal parts insults and warmly squeezed shoulders. Wolset dug up some rye from some friend of a friend, and she and Lerant ended up giggling into each other’s shoulders while Dom tried to hold a tune.

-

Neal was at Giantkiller, delivering reports, when the news came– Haven had been overrun. Passersby had seen the smoke rising and sent word on to the fort. Neal packed his bags with hands that shook, and Raoul sent Dom’s squad with him to assess the damage. Kel and Tobe fought with hissed whispers in the stables until she got him to stay in Giantkiller with Lerant. “I don’t want you seeing this, okay? You don’t need this, kiddo. Please, for me, stay here.”

“C'mon, Boon,” said Lerant. “I’ve got a hundred gauntlets to clean and mend, come help me out.”

Kel couldn’t imagine, as they rode down that long empty path and listened ahead for ambushes, what use they would be when they got there. “We can bury them,” Dom said when she brought it up at the fire that night. “Bear witness.”

“We should have been there,” she whispered. “Dom, the children– I taught them how to fight and then I went back to my big sturdy walls and trained patrols and war mages who can do more than light a candle–”

“Kel.”

“They deserved better,” said Neal, who Kel hadn’t realized was close enough to hear them.

“Not from you, Meathead,” said Dom. “They deserved better from the commanders and the Crown and all the rest, but not from you, okay? You did everything you could.”

“Not enough.”

“Get some sleep, both of you,” Dom said. “I’m both of your elder here, alright?” Kel shrugged and went off to lay out her bedroll in the dark.

They came upon Haven early the next morning and Kel could hardly say its name; it felt like a jinx on her tongue or some sort of cruel joke she’d unwittingly delivering the punchline for. Like Dom said, they buried bodies. They bore witness to the burned-out, mute stories of dozens of deaths– the unmarked Scanran bodies that lay around the body of a healing mage who had always fought with Neal over treatments; songbirds curled up in the eyesockets of dead killing devices; a corporal Kel had hated curled over a young brewer’s apprentice she’d taught to hold to a bow; craftsmen who had built Haven’s walls and cooks that had filled its bellies and stubborn hotheads who had given Neal so many headaches.

They dug through wreckage, dug deep trenches, and Kel kept count in the back of her head. “Neal,” she said, when her numbers kept coming up wrong, because Neal wasn’t keeping count of anything. “Neal, they’re not all here. Neal, the civilians– the children– we aren’t finding the bodies.”

“Do you think they got away?” said Neal, but Kel was already shaking her head.

Their orders were clear– clean up, bury the dead, report back to Giantkiller. There was a war on, and any Haven captives would be far into Scanran territory by now. This was a tragedy, but there was a war on and they were meant to be knights, not nursemaids, not shepherds or heroes.

They cleaned up. They buried their dead. They rode back towards Giantkiller and found twists of red yarn along the way, plucked from Meech’s balding doll.

“Neal,” Kel said, when she dismounted to pick up the first red breadcrumb. “You go on ahead with the soldiers. We’ve got some Own business, don’t we, boys?”

Wolset had dismounted, too. “Yes, sir, Lady Kel.”

Dom looked around at his squad. “Volunteer mission only.” Every man nodded and made no step to move on.

“I’m coming, too,” said Neal.

“You’ve got to report back to Wyldon,” said Kel. “Get the injured home. And it’s treason if you go, but Lord Raoul will back us up. If nothing else, we can’t let the Scanrans get materiel for a hundred new killing devices. He’ll understand.”

“Well, Wyldon will have to, too,” Neal snapped, and it was a sign of his shellshock that together Kel and Dom managed to bully him into riding on. They made it all the way to the river border with Scanra before Neal caught up– with Owen, Lerant, and Tobe in tow.

“You try talking them into staying home,” he told Kel when she nearly glared a hole through him.

“I won’t go back,” Tobe said when she turned to him. The Own were trying to hide their snickers around her. “And I can help with the horses.”

Neal and his Whisper Man connections got them over the river, and the motley crew of Own soldiers, knight, squire, aide, and standard bearers crept through the empty countryside. It was land like this, ravaged and abandoned, that Neal’s refugees had come from– the same land, just on the other side of the river.

Every step of the way, they found signs of the refugees fighting back. When they found the adults, they got weapons into their hands and headed on to find their children. A peculiar seer child, the last child left in all of Blayce’s home domain, said something about a prophecy, but Kel had never heard the Chamber hand her this mission. Fanche spat and sharpened her weapons. Dom napped in every spare moment, and Tobe whispered to the horses while Lerant shivered and complained of the cold.

Kel caught Lerant’s arm, before they went up to the keep, and said, “Keep an eye on him in there.”

Lerant scowled at her and it was so familiar an expression she almost smiled. “The kid’s not just yours, anymore.”

“I know,” she said. “Thank you.”

They snuck up to the keep through dark paths and illusory stone. When they found Haven’s children they barely recognized them, clean and coiffed, but they got them shoes, and weapons, and fought their way out. When it was all over– Blayce dead, and Stenmun, too– they left the enemy dead for the Stormwings. Neal healed wounds and counted heads, but Kel led them home.

-

Three months later, after Neal’s pardon and the convicts’ too, the king called Kel for an audience and she went. Tobe refused to let her go anywhere without him, so she dragged him south with her and left him to be fed, prodded, and mended in the hands of Lalasa and her parents.

She wasn’t sure what Jon wanted– if she was getting a condemnation or a commendation– but it turned out to be a medal and an invitation to face the Ordeal.

“How gracious of your majesty,” said Kel, which was something like a yes.

“I don’t think anyone could argue with that decision, after your service in the north.”

“Oh,” said Kel. “I’m sure they still will, your majesty.”

On her way out of the room, Wyldon caught her elbow and she let him. He had been hovering the back of the chamber, listening with his face full of something she didn’t bother identifying.

“I was stubborn, Mindelan,” said Wyldon, and she could tell it was like pulling teeth. “I should have listened to the voice of honor.”

He had more to say, curdling in his gut, she could tell, but she shrugged and moved past him. “My life should never have depended on the quality of your honor, sir,” she said and went on through the gates and out to the city.

-

They had her re-take the page end-of-year examinations for all the ones she missed. “Missed,” she said, as she repeated the news back at Giantkiller with a quite shake. Neal threw an arm around her shoulders.

“Ha, but you’re still barely older than I was when I took them,” he said. “Standing among all those children, reciting conjugations over the tops of their heads– are your sympathies for me soaring?”

“No,” she said, but she squeezed his hand.

She passed with flying colors, of course, returned for a few weeks from the ongoing war. Most of Third Company stayed in the north, but conflict was sparser with the loss of the killing devices, so Raoul came to Corus, too, with Dom, Neal, and Lerant in tow. Owen had seized Neal very seriously before they rode out and told him, “You cheer so loud for her, when she gets that shield.”

Like in other lifetimes, Raoul was one of her knight mentors for the vigil before the Ordeal. Wyldon came to her to offer to be the other, but she turned him down, and the king, too. She asked Neal, instead, and he had the audacity to be surprised by it.

“If you survive the Ordeal of Knighthood, you will be a Knight of the Realm. You will be sworn to protect those weaker than you, to obey your king, to live in a way that honors your kingdom and your gods. To wear the shield of a knight is an important thing. You may not ignore a cry for help. It means that rich and poor, young and old, male and female may look to you for rescue, and you cannot deny them…”

Kel sat through that long, cold vigil thinking of the realm– that dusty word that sounded in people’s mouths. She had ridden its hills and valleys with the Own, from mountain to shining sea. She had filled the larders of tiny villages with venison, leaned into Peachblossom’s shoulder as they shifted ruined timbers after fires and earthquakes, seen men bleed out on dry soil.

She knew the mountains, and she knew the scared, fierce refugees she had led back across its border. She knew the dusty streets of the Tortallan capital, and she knew the seamstresses and carpenters and fishmongers and blacksmiths’ apprentices who walked them. She had known for a long time who and what she was fighting for. When she stepped into the Chamber, darkness fell around her and she tried to hold on to that.

It was still a nightmare machine, and she still spat that name in its face, scared-certain she would not leave it alive and bitterly angry about it. She had had so many more nightmares, now, this protector of the small. She would not be going off to war with the paint still wet on her shield, and she recognized all the fears the Chamber was laying at her feet.

It took her to the top of the tree outside Fort Giantkiller, and it brought the wind while she clung white-knuckled to the branches. It dropped her in the canyon, twelve again but this time tongue-tied, trembling, to watch Faleron get an arrow to his right eye– Merric fall with an axe in his spine– Owen bleed out in the dirt–

She was walking Haven’s streets again, but this time they were her people– not just living in walls she had defended and abandoned, not just faces whose names were on the tip of her tongue– she felt like she carried all their stories and their squabbles, like she’d stood on a box in the eating hall and given them a speech about how she would keep them safe. They were her children and her clerks and her convicts, her burden and her ball-and-chain– except where were the children, where–

In the halls of Blayce’s hold, she saw Neal hit ground, silent and slack-faced in death. She plucked the bodies of sparrows from the blinded eyes of killing devices. Fanche took five arrows in the stomach before she went down to her knees, then her hands, then her side, curses bubbling red from her lips. Jump lunged for a killing device and Kel was too small– her hands fragile on weighted weapons– her reach all wrong–

She was standing on the wrong side of the low practice yard fence, her grip white-knuckled on her mother’s borrowed walking stick. “Was I not clear, probationer?” Wyldon demanded. Answers swarmed over her tongue. Her fingers ached.

She was clinging white-knuckled to a tree, too high above a wide featureless plain to be able to survive the fall. She was no good at letting go of things, but it didn’t matter– everyone got tired, even Keladry of Mindelan. Anyone’s hands could weaken. Anyone could be ripped from their high perch and die frightened, dashed down onto hard dirt and cold stone. What would it look like, when they pulled open the doors of the Chamber?

The wind screamed in her ears, and she closed her eyes. She did not scream back.

Are you trying to make me afraid? she thought. I am afraid, I have always been afraid–

The streets of Haven, silent; the whispering of bullies in the library; her feet pressed together in Wyldon’s office, that last day of that first year; Dom going down in the forest with an arrow to the shoulder, the first killing device stalking out of the shadows–

I am afraid because they matter, and I am small. There are so many ways I could be stronger, but I’m not. There are so many ways I could be braver, but I’m not. I will fear and I will regret, but I owe none of that to you.

She was no good at letting go of things, and she had sunk her fingers into this life, dug in her heels, roped herself to the mast of the ship and refused to plug her ears with wax. The wind screamed in her ears, the tree whipping back and forth. The ground was so far below. She remembered her brother holding her over the balcony, on a sunny childhood afternoon he didn’t even remember now. She remembered. She had been afraid for so long.

I did everything I could, she thought. I fought with everything I had, and it was enough, gods damn it. I was good enough. I was better than enough.

You can kill me here, you ugly bit of stone, and they will think it means that girls aren’t meant to be knights. But I know, and you know, and gods I hope the girls in the city know– that we belong here.

She had killed the Nothing Man. She had not given up on the Haven people– she had gone after them, over rivers and through stone, and she had brought them home safe. She had sweated four years on the same beaten-down dirt as the pages, performed every drill, parry, and strike. She had saved a bag of kittens from a spidren. She had had her mornings in the kitchen garden, in the pale light, and those would go on and on without her.

You can kill me, she thought. But nothing I did will die. It was enough. It was everything I had, and it was always enough. Loesia whipping a spear in front of her, like a glaive, like she’d spent dozens of pre-dawn hours practicing that smooth downward stroke. Lalasa in her shop, pins in her mouth and her hands busy. Tobe tucked up at a desk with Lerant, both of them leaning over his slow careful letters. Her mother’s low voice and her father’s steady hands and Raoul a lump in the curtains at formal events– Buri standing outside the pages’ practice yard, back when Kel still had to look up to meet her eyes. Meech chasing after Gydo’s ankles and Fanche with her hands on her hips; Dom cooking bacon over the fire and Jump waiting at his feet. She had fought for these things. She had gotten to see them, to live in their warmth.

I am afraid, she thought. She let go.

The tree vanished, and the wide plain, and the wind. Kel was in a still, dark room made of big stones. The grimacing face carved into the back of the door said You did well and she spat at its feet. Its laughter still ringing soundlessly in her skull, the door swung open and she stepped out into the light.

-

She stepped out and the realm was waiting in the antechamber– Raoul dabbing his eyes, Neal and Dom with Jump at their feet. Fanche was scratching Jump’s ears and Saefas was smiling beside Kel’s beaming mother and father.

When she got back to Fort Giantkiller and the new refugee camp they were building down the river, there would be cheering in the streets– ex-convicts and refugees, King’s Own and soldiers, nobles and knights– but for now there was Gladys and Tian, leaping to their feat. There were Corus fishmongers’ daughters and seamstresses and priestesses of the Black God who had been apprentices when she first met them in herb-heavy morning light. Here was everything she had spat in the Chamber’s face, everything she had prayed for in that long cold vigil, everything she had stood for in that practice yard dirt, ready to fight forever for something they told her she could not ever earn.

Lalasa sat at the very front, her fingers pressed up over her teary smile. Kel was smiling back, shivering, when Tobe hit her sternum with a thud. “I knew you’d make it,” he muttered, squeezing her tight, so she wrapped her arms around his still growing frame and lied, “Me, too.”

There was a soft touch at her elbow, so she lifted her head from where she was pressing her face into Tobe’s soft hair. A short, red-headed woman was standing in front of her, so proud her grin nearly split her face. Kel stared down at her, one arm still around Tobe, part of her heart still twelve beside the practice yard fence and sure the Lioness would have done better.

Alanna squeezed her elbow gently and said, “Gods all bless, Lady Knight.”

#raoul and jon have shouting matches throughout this #the sort where they call each other spoiled children #and thayet sends them both to their rooms #jon is trying to make compromises and keep peace and think about the big picture #and raoul is like there is TWELVE YEAR OLD KID down there who disarmed me wheni didn't meant her to #who's withstood so many things and words hurled at her #who keeps coming back and back #because she believes in what knighthood is supposed to be #more than any of those spoiled brats on the other side of that training yard fence #and you won't let her fight for you #it's not just cruel jon #it's stupid

[thatgirlonstage]

I'm not saying that I'd give you my first born in exchange for a continuation to the Lance revealing his feelings for Keith under the effect of weird space plants... But I'd totally give you my first born, a new Mac and the blood of a virgin.

Ayyyyyyy six months late (sorry, I know, I’m terrible) but trade out the human child for a puppy and you’ve got yourself a deal

Here’s the first part of this fic

And here’s the continuation, to heal the angst:

Keith had been weird ever since Wivicor.

Of course, Lance reflected, Keith was always a little weird, so it was all relative, but he’d changed in ways that Lance couldn’t account for. He wouldn’t make eye contact with Lance anymore, would barely talk to him. When Lance tossed an insult his way, instead of responding in kind, Keith went silent. If he ever found himself alone with Lance, he left the room as quickly as possible. Training sessions between the two of them eventually devolved into ominous quiet as Lance gave up trying to get Keith to talk to him. He would have worried Keith was ill, if he didn’t continue to interact with the rest of the team as normal. He’d laugh with Hunk at dinner, or peer over Pidge’s shoulder as she hacked into Galra systems, or talk long and quietly with Shiro. He even seemed to have a better relationship with Allura than with Lance.

Lance didn’t want to admit how much it stung. He nursed his wounds in private, trying to convince himself he was seeing something that wasn’t there. He knew Keith didn’t like him, sometimes was even afraid he flat-out hated him, but he’d thought they were getting better. Whatever dream that had been, Keith seemed determined to crush it. There was a hint of bitterness in his mouth whenever they formed Voltron now, a thread of something unpleasant that seemed to run between the two of them.

It was a small thing that broke his resolve. Unable to sleep, he stepped out into the hallway, thinking of getting a midnight snack or possibly just stretching his legs. Keith’s door started to slide open, he caught a glimpse of Keith’s startled eye, and then it slammed shut again. Something crumbled in his chest, but there was a tiny flame of fury there too. He stewed for a moment, considering his options, before he steeled himself, walked over, and banged on the door.

“Keith!” he shouted. “Open up!” The door stayed close. “Open your goddamn door, Keith!” He hit it so hard his knuckles stung. “Open up or I wake up the entire castle and we have this discussion in front of everyone.” The door slid open a single grudging inch, revealing Keith’s purple eye.

“Go to bed, Lance,” he said. Lance stuck his fingers in the door, hoping Keith was not actually mean enough to slam it on them.

“Not a chance, Kogane,” he said. “We need to talk.”

“No. We don’t.”

“Let me in,” he growled.

“No.”

“We need to talk and you know it. Unless you want Shiro to start chewing us out for being irresponsible Paladins and letting our personal problems get in the way of forming Voltron.” There was a moment of silence, and then the door slowly slid open the rest of the way. Keith was barefoot, in a gray t-shirt and sweatpants, arms crossed over his chest. His bedsheets were rumpled and the room was dark, but his eyes were bright and alert, undulled by sleep.

“What.” Lance shut the door behind him, flicking the light on. Keith squinted in the brightness.

“You know what,” he said.

“Humor me,” Keith said flatly.

“You’ve been acting weird ever since we got stranded on Wivicor. I thought we were getting better, Keith, I thought we might be becoming friends. Now you won’t even look me in the eye.”

“I’m looking at you right now.”

“Yeah, for the first time in weeks.” Lance crossed his own arms, matching Keith glare for glare. “That night in the cave. You were supposed to wake me up for guard duty, but you never did, and you lied about why. Then you barely talked to me the next day, and ever since then you’ve been weird. What the hell happened?” Keith’s eyes narrowed.

“Nothing,” he said. “I told you, I couldn’t wake you up.” Lance shook his head.

“Bullshit. You’re an awful liar.” They glared at each other for a long moment, before Lance gave in to the crumbling in his chest. He dropped his arms to his sides and sighed. “Please, Keith, just… tell me. I don’t get what I did wrong.”

Something cracked in Keith’s expression, and he sat down heavy on the bed, his head hanging low. His bangs dropped over his eyes as he shook his head. “You didn’t do anything wrong, Lance,” he said. “Please don’t think that.”

“Well what the hell else am I supposed to think?” he asked.

“It was that stupid fucking flower.” Lance blinked.

“The what?”

“You sniffed a flower on Wivicor and got all this pollen in your face. Do you remember?” Lance shrugged.

“Sure, a little, I guess. What does that have to do with anything?” Keith sighed.

“The pollen from the flower. It gave you some kind of alien infection. Later that night, when we got to the cave, you started… talking, but your voice was all flat and monotone, and you weren’t thinking about what you were saying. It wasn’t you, not really. And then you didn’t remember it the next morning.” Lance blinked.

“Well what the hell did I say?” he asked.

“Stuff I had no right to hear. Please, Lance, I’m trying to just forget it, you would never say those things really, not to me. I shouldn’t have heard a word of it.” Dawning horror constricted Lance’s chest.

“Keith,” he said, the word tight around the lump in his throat. “Whatever I said… I’m sorry, I wouldn’t ever say anything to hurt you, you have to know, I… I know we throw insults back and forth, but I don’t mean them, I mean, I’m not trying to actually upset you, I—” Keith’s head shot up, his eyes wide and wild.

“No!” he shouted, and Lance jumped. “I… I mean, no, that’s not… That’s not the kind of thing you were saying.”

“What, then?” Lance frowned.

“It was…” Keith took an stuttering breath. “You were speaking without a filter, basically, telling truths. Or I assume they were truths. You… talked about your family some, but… Mostly it was about me, and you and me, and how you…” Keith trailed off, met Lance’s eyes, swallowed, and finished the sentence. “How you feel about me.”

Lance had the odd sensation that gravity was shifting, changing. He was going to fall through the floor, and at the same time he was coming unmoored, floating out into space without a tether to pull him back to safety. His chest crumbled like ash. Keith continued, unstoppably, mercilessly, plowing through his words.

“You said you know – you think you know – that I hate you, but that you think that you might love me. You said you’d cried because you think I don’t… I couldn’t ever…” Keith looked down again, squeezing his hands into fists. “I should never have heard any of it. I should have blocked my ears the minute I realized something was wrong.”

“So now you know,” Lance said. The words didn’t seem to come from him. He couldn’t remember deciding to say them, they just slipped out, unbidden, from a voice very far away from him. “Now you know and you really do hate me.” Keith shot up so fast off the bed that Lance stumbled backwards and almost fell.

“That isn’t what I said at all,” he said fiercely. “But you deserved to tell me when or if you wanted to. Not like that. Never like that.” Lance backed up until he was pressed against the cool metal of the door, palms flat. He looked down at Keith, in his tattered grey sweats, mussed black hair falling over violet eyes burning with a fury Lance didn’t understand.

“I’m sorry,” Lance whispered. “I’ll just go. I’ll leave you alone, I swear.”

“Stop apologizing!” Keith shouted, and Lance flinched. The fury in his eyes calmed slightly. “Stop, please, because you’ve got entirely the wrong idea about all of this.” Lance frowned, biting his lip.

“What does that mean?” Keith’s hands chopped uncertainly at the air around him, trying to aid his explanation but seeming just as lost and unsure as his words.

“It means… God, Lance, I’m no good at talking about this. I’m mad because this spoiled something… I thought we were finally getting better, finally getting to be friends.”

“So did I,” Lance said, so quietly he wasn’t sure Keith heard. “Or hoped, anyway.”

“And I don’t know what I felt or would have started to feel but it’s not like I’m blind, right? I always knew you were pretty, anyway.” Lance blinked, feeling something in the conversation derail, something step out of line and jam up his thoughts, freezing his brain in place.

“You knew I was what?” Keith, however, didn’t answer, plowing through his words with a kind of desperation.

“It wasn’t like I had a crush, that’s too generous, but I think I knew, subconsciously, somewhere, that there was… there was potential, I guess? Well, I mean, I thought you were straight, too, which didn’t help. I really don’t know where my head was.” He glared at Lance. “But then you had to go and pour out this confession under the influence of some kind of alien drug, and you don’t even remember doing it. And that accelerated things in my head, got me to notice some things about myself, but now that I’ve heard you talking I can’t do anything about what I’m noticing because that’s unfair to you. And I didn’t want to hurt you by telling you what I heard. So I’m stuck. I just tried to avoid you instead, but obviously that was never going to work.”

“Keith,” Lance said slowly. His fingers curled against his palms, tapping uncertainly. “What are you talking about?”

“You, you idiot,” he replied. “You and how goddamn complicated you are.” Lance shook his head.

“I don’t understand.” Keith sighed.

“Oh, to hell with it all. I was never any good at words.” He closed the distance between them. Lance yelped, trying to scramble away, but there was nowhere to go. Keith caught his hands, reached up, and very gently placed a hand against Lance’s cheek. Lance froze. “May I?” he asked. Not daring to guess what Keith wanted to do, Lance nodded numbly. Keith leaned up and pressed his lips lightly against Lance’s.

The kiss was over almost as soon as it began, and Keith stepped back, holding up a hand. “Don’t say anything,” he said. “Not yet. Go to bed. Think about it. Think about how you feel, and whether you’re ready for me to know how you feel. Then come back and tell me, if and when and how you want to. Okay?” Lance still couldn’t breathe, but his chest wasn’t crumbling anymore. Something warm sat there instead, tethering him to safety. He smiled gently.

“Okay, Keith,” he said.

[Please do not send me prompts at the moment, I am working through old ones]

#answers #my writing #klance #voltron #dazzlingtiredeyes

[haikujitsu]

Hai ju! I'd like to request Unnamed Horror Story please and thank you. Hope all is well, it's been a while!

Hai Chin! Long time no chat, I hope you’re well!

Okay, Unnamed Horror Story it is. This isn’t quite 300 words, but this part works well by itself, I think. Warning for gore. (duh)

“Danny?” Jazz’s frightened voice cut through through the yawning void and brought him back.

Danny gaped, no air reaching his lungs, pain lancing up his right hand, ears ringing, dark crowding at the edges of his vision. His whole body shook. He was seeing in fractures– in splintered moments– of his own wide-eyed face, lips drawn down in a grimace of terror, neck a terror of glittering shards and blood.

Jazz’s face, pinched with worry, suddenly appeared in fractures next to his own.

Flinching back, pain knifed through Danny’s hand. He yanked it back instinctively and the pain multiplied, like tiny claws grasping at him, slicing his skin to ribbons, scraping exposed knuckles. He cried out and gripped it with his other hand, dizzy and sick from the pain. Blood oozed between his clenched fingers and filled the air with a stinging, hungry smell.

Something inside him grinned.

“Mom, Dad!” Jazz again, frightened, calling into the hall. “Danny’s hurt!” Warm hands seized his shoulders. “What happened?”

The contact made Danny gasp--it gave him a sudden visceral awareness that he was still breathing– how was he still breathing? He groped at his neck. Soft, untouched skin met his fingers, clammy with sweat, pulse thumping, muscles taut. No pain. No blood. No gash slitting his throat wide. He shivered, eyes battling with his other senses, with the deadly weight of that gaze that had chased him into oblivion.

Danny blinked and realized the splintered image was the mirror. Broken. Shattered by his hand, which had thrust into the glass where his reflection’s throat had been.

#ask meme #chintastic #hjfanfiction #gore #blood

[melonlordheroes]

Garon vs. Xander, Take Two (Part 1)

-A month or so ago...-

-All is quiet now with the majority of the Order of Heroes busied elsewhere, but at the door to the Grand Hero Battlefield stands a lone prince in armor. His hand nervously runs over the relief in the door, seemingly lost in his own thoughts as he prepares mentally for the challenge lying in wait beyond it.-

Xander: ...

Veronica: Preparations are complete.

Xander: Mm?

-Startled back out of his thoughts, Xander turns quickly to find his team from last time standing behind him. Quan offers a reassuring smile along with Olwen, who's intensely studying Thunderhead as if trying to memorize every spell in its pages. Veronica herself reaches over to pat Xander's back with a smile, earning one back from the Nohrian Crown Prince.-

Xander: I appreciate your assistance, Lord Quan. Olwen. Veronica.

Quan: It's nothing- a man's only as good as his oath. I'm confident we can get you through this battle this time.

Olwen: (looks up from tome, snaps it shut) I fully intend to support you. After what I learned from Corrinne and Corrin about Garon's actions... I'd never sleep at night if I didn't join with you against such a despicable man.

Veronica: Regardless of who I am or where I came from, the one thing I know to be true across EVERY Zenith is that you were kind to me. And I direly wish to repay you for that.

Xander: Still. Thank you, everyone. As per last time--

Quan: Leave Garon to you. (nod) I'd not dream of taking away such a vital victory. Olwen and I should be able to maneuver him about the field with minimal issues- then when the time is right...

Xander: Exactly. I'll be relying on all of you.

-With that, Xander leads the group of cavalry into the battlefield. Olwen takes position to his right, while Quan and Veronica cover the rear. Garon stares down his son from across the room... and begins to laugh.-

Garon: So, my eldest thinks himself king enough now? Very well. This ought to amuse me for a while...

Xander: ...

-Xander unsheathes Siegfried.-

Xander: ...Let's go. Father.

-The Grand Assha-- Hero Battle begins! Xander nods to his team to get into position as he charges into the range of the cleric and braces himself. Quan and Veronica head south to block off the routes by the walls while Olwen heads south by one get closer to Quan. The Cleric giggles as she runs forward swinging her Gravity staff. The attack connects with Xander, but his retaliation strikes are lethal. He takes in a quick breath and surveys the area as the rest of Garon's forces advance in and a Bow Cavalier and Red Mage Cavalier appear.-

Quan: Ah. Hello.

Veronica: (steps back and raises Hliðskjálf) Goodbye.

-Veronica and Quan blow away the two cavaliers. Quan leans back to ruffle Veronica's hair playfully, grip on Gae Bolg still firm.-

Olwen: Prince Xander, I'm moving into position- mind that swordsman, he's a swordbreaker.

Xander: (chuckle) No need to be afraid. I'm well out of his range.

Olwen: (laugh, smile) As you will, then. Lord Quan, I'm coming to reinforce you- that lance flier will be in next turn.

Quan: (huff) The ONE thing Gae Bolg can't kill--

-Quan slightly grumbles as Olwen takes stance behind him. Xander meanwhile scans the battlefield quickly and nods to himself stepping back only once. The green mage in front of Xander seems to notice something and nods to the infantry near her as she blasts Xander with a shot from her raventome. It does manage to sting him- enough to push him into Brazen range- but again, his return strike is more than enough to obliterate her as the swordbreaker infantry tries to close the distance and a red wolftome user appears with the lance flier Olwen mentioned.-

Veronica: (clicks her tongue) Oh, he thinks he's being cheeky does he?

Xander: (chuckle) All according to plan thusfar. Olwen?

Olwen: I'm well ahead of you. Lord Quan? Excuse me.

-Olwen bursts by Quan with a yell and smashes through the lance flier with a bolt from Thunderhead. Quan looks quite amused as he pushes ahead of her and gets into stance.-

Quan: And that's my cue. I'll handle the swordbreaker fellow. Princess Veronica?

Veronica: Coming! Xander, my spot should be safe.

Xander: (nods) Then, if you may.

-Veronica leads her horse to the far left, stacking up on Olwen with a tiny frown as she seems to realize something after doing some mental math.-

Veronica: Miss Olwen, Xander's not going to be able to oneshot that mage is he?

Olwen: You're correct, Princess Veronica. A second hit will finish him off, though.

Veronica: But-- oh. Vantage.

Olwen: (chuckle) I see you've been paying attention in class, though. Miss Tiki will be proud of her favorite student.

Veronica: M-me? The favorite...?!

-While Veronica ponders her newly-known status as "Miss Tiki's Favorite Student", the Swordbreaker runs forward to lock blade to lance with Quan. The Thracian lord grunts with some effort, but breaks the lock and gets in a good hit. A lone lance armor advances in, making him a prime target for Veronica who looks to Olwen for permission before moving back to her last spot. Olwen and Quan nod and begin to back up as to stay out of Garon's range. As Veronica returns, Xander rushes forward and brings Siegfried down on the Wolftome mage. The mage hisses as the sword's dark energy sparks through him, but just before he attempts to strike back Xander is able to bring Siegfried around and finish him off. The swordbreaker lets out a yell and smashes himself against Quan's lance only to be impaled with Gae Bolg and tossed into the air, vanishing into particles. A blue mage nods to the King of Nohr and heads toward Xander, who's breathing a bit heavily but seems prepared. The lance armor continues his advance, as does Garon, and the two axemen with him head toward Quan. Now with room to move, Veronica runs behind Xander as he unleashes Astra on the blue mage.-

Quan: (huff) Can't say I'm a fan of the axemen headed our way.

Olwen: All due respect to you, milord, but...

Quan: "Don't be a baby, they can't reach you". Right?

Olwen: Perhaps not the exact words I would have chosen, but sufficient to get my point across. (chuckle)

Quan: (nods, then looks to Xander) I'll hold my position here. My apologies, Prince Xander, you may have to deal with that Axe Cavalier for me...

Xander: No concern necessary, Lord Quan. I've quite got this handled.

Veronica: I've stacked up on him now, so he's within my ward. Will you be fine, Miss Olwen?

Olwen: (realizing how close Garon is, seething) I am absolutely fine, little one. Let that bastard come. Thunderhead and I are well prepared to deal with him.

Garon: (laughs- it's an almost barklike sound) Honestly... Xander, you should know better. You've cornered yourself now- the second that armor gets ahold of you, you'll die. A fitting end for a traitor...!

-Xander pauses, but shakes his head to clear it and adopts a defensive stance.-

Xander: I'm far less of a traitor than you are, Father. For your crimes against Nohr... and our family... it's my duty as Crown Prince to bring an end to you. (quietly) As it should have always been.

-The axecav screams and runs right, only to be batted away by Xander before he can so much as glance at Siegfried. The Lance Armor and Axe Infantry head for Xander, while Garon seems to have taken notice of Olwen and is headed for her. The Thracian mage grips her tome and glares the king down, ready to lash out with Thunderhead at the first second.-

#grand hero babble #melon lord heroes #THIS HAS BEEN IN DRAFTS FOREVER JUST TAKE IT