#love the anger and the spite hiding behind every corner of grief. also i love how she's barely stable through it all skfjskfjdk

[vvanessaives]

WIP WHENEVER

i was tagged by @katsigian and @enverflymm, thank you so much!! <3

tagging: @devilbrakers @quickhacked @hibernationsuit @avallachs @halsin @mightymizora and whoever else wants to do this, i forgot who writes so if you want to jump on this go ahead

unethical autopsy under the cut, sorry

The slash had to be wider, so Violante provided by hand and blade. She blinked in rapid succession a few times and sank the dagger as far as she could into the torso. It was easy to part skin from bone, neither cared to put up a fight and stay anchored to one another, instead it was neatly separating as if the flesh desired to come off, to break down, to lose the battle for preservation.

Violante thought of peaches and kitchen knives, of summer. A contorted smile turned her mouth as she peeled the flesh off Ruven and her vision, perhaps her mind, slipped past his remains. The black rot that came in patches like the dented portion of the fruit, the fetid liquid overflowing from the orifices a sweet juice rippling down the fingers after a bite–nourishment and death, Violante swore she could taste the carrion on her tongue. Viscous but sweet, dry yet sapid, and wrong, oh so wrong and bloodcurdling and–

With a sudden retch she folded on the floor, her hand clasped the cloth covering the lower half of her face and promptly pulled it down. The coughing fits were intense, violent, and tore her throat as if something was trying to escape from there with teeth and claws, splitting her trachea. The hilt of the dagger hit the ground with a thud, a pearl of saliva hanging by her lips following suit. Violante's hand scrambled between dust and dried blood to find curved fingers, dull and darker than the rest of the body, and when found, she moved past and went for the wrist–still no pulse to be found, unsurprisingly. Fingernails teared the surface as she gripped it; she bowed impossibly low, forehead resting between the dirt and her own spit, arm circling her stomach like it was cramping. At that point, she was ready to look.

It was easier to stare at Ruven this time, he had no eyes to return her gaze. He had no head. Violante laughed–loud at first, the kind that made crinkles appear around the corner of the eyes, then quieter, irregular like a hiccup. She liked him quieter, she found. But how did his voice sound anyway? It couldn't be forgotten already, could it be? She retracted her hand as if it was burning; he was so cold it hurt. She didn't like him cold, she found as well, and she liked it better when the blood was hot and running instead of aggregated and frozen. A grin twitched to surface then a scowl and then again a smile, unsure if her lips wanted to stay up or down, if they had to express joy or grief. It did not matter, she had to focus so she pushed herself up and straightened her spine.

Do monsters have a heart?

The dagger exposed Ruven's gut. Maggots were feasting on the decomposing innards, swarming a stomach almost fully decayed, feeding off the intestines and the spleen until they would fall apart. Ruven was being consumed, as if he was nothing more than livestock. It was wrong, even in its inescapable nature. Violante couldn’t stop thinking of the word–wrong, wrong, wrong.

A pitiful sob, that’s all she allowed, then a murmur–It shouldn’t be you. She repeated the words until they filled the room like a prayer. It shouldn’t be you. It should be me.

She rubbed her face against her sleeve and stopped only when the friction began stinging enough to know her skin had reddened. Then, she resumed her work. 

The nose crinkled and the brow fell down at the squirming worms: attempting the intrusion from there was out of the question now. She retrieved the dagger and tentatively plunged the sharp end through the breastbone–a mere test. The blade felt dull when she attempted to stab through the breastbone, in the low candlelight she swore she couldn’t find a faint mark left behind. There was no other choice, she had to start sawing through his ribs.

#tag games #oc: violante #sorry one of my fave things to write these days is violante's grieving #i love how she suffers for the loss of the person and also for a part of herself that he took away with his death and at the same time i #love the anger and the spite hiding behind every corner of grief. also i love how she's barely stable through it all skfjskfjdk #my only problem is that she's doing freaky stuff only when no one is watching. i need someone to call her out soooo bad #anyways my beautiful insane woman i love it when she does anything <3

[secret-engima]

Last one! - the future’s blurry (but the past is a trap)

Time-Travel fic!!!!! Hmmmm- what fandom what fandom so many lovely choices....

FFXV. Because that’s my mood right now (as ever).

COR.

Cor Time-Travel fic. Cor who lives to see the end of the Long Night, Cor who HOPES and dreams of helping Noctis rebuild the kingdom after he restores the dawn, Cor who is Noctis’s godfather, Cor who PROMISED Regis the first time he held the tiny sleeping infant that is now a brave and wise king that he would PROTECT Regis’s son-.

Cor who stumbles into the throne room to see three brothers sobbing over the lifeless body of their fourth and king.

And Cor ... Cor breaks. He hides in some random, rundown apartment in the empty city and drinks and drinks-

“So this is how you’re going to accept fate? By drowning yourself in a bottle?” Scorns a voice he’s only heard one time in his life but still sends him scrambling for his sword. He whirls, heart in his mouth, blade in hand and sees not a towering suit of armor with glittering eyes, but a ghostly version of a fire-eyed twenty-something adult. A towering man of nearly seven feet, board shouldered and scarred on one side of his face, dark brown hair and piercing amber eyes that mark the Amicitia line, “I had hoped for better.”

“Gilgamesh,” Cor rasps and wonders if he’s lost his mind in his grief, “What are you doing here?”

“Well,” says the man with a sneer, “I should be moving on to the afterlife. I have been freed from my prison after all. The Prophecy is fulfilled.”

“Then why haven’t you?”

A pause, and the sneer, the confidence, fades away and leaves behind someone very tired and wrung out, “Because I have regrets, and you are the only one still alive for me to speak of them to. The Last Shield will not listen, he is lost in his grief and surrounded by the living. You are alone and you are open to my voice.”

Cor doesn’t like the sound of that at all, “You are not allowed to possess me.”

Gilgamesh laughs, short and sharp but oddly genuine, more animated than he ever was as a murderous suit of armor, “No. I have no desire for that.” Burning gold eyes lock with his, “I wanted to know if you still meant what you said that day.”

It takes Cor a minute to remember. Even if he knows what “that day” Gilgamesh means, it was years ago and he was an idiot at the time. Then Cor remembers, and his already broken mood sours, “I did. For whatever good it did. I’ve failed. They’re dead. Both of them.” Cor laughs and the sound is poison even to his own ears, “You were right. I am no Shield.”

“No. You are a Sword,” Gilgamesh corrects, “and you should have been treated as such. Instead you were sheltered and lied to, and those lies dulled your edge until you were useless to stop the death of those you cherished.”

Cor throws the bottle at the ghost’s head, listens to the shatter of glass as the ghost lets it phase right through him without a blink, “What do you want?” He roars at the ghost, fragments of his wild temper from his youth coming back to his bones.

“What my brother’s dear Shield is trying to say,” purrs another ghost that Cor hates even more, who also doesn’t blink when Cor draws his blade and tries to behead him, “is that we both feel terribly guilty. More than that, the rest of those who once were in the Ring feel guilty, and angry. We’ve also got a very spiteful and a very remorseful Astral respectively on our side in the matter, now all we need is a living human member of the conspiracy.” Ardyn Lucis Caelum, blue eyed and purified and just as dangerously mischievous as ever, grins at Cor as the human forms of Shiva and Ifrit manifest in his apartment, alongside far too many royal ghosts for Cor’s comfort (he firmly does not look at the ghost of Regis, sagging tiredly in a corner, the only one he recognizes other than Mors now that they are all human looking rather than giant statues with face masks).

“So,” The ghost of Ardyn purrs with a rueful smile, “what do you say to saving the world and your precious kings in one fell swoop and maybe spiting the Draconian along the way?”

And it’s a stupid idea. Cor probably isn’t even seeing any of this. He’s probably lying in the apartment, dying of alcohol poisoning and grief right now, hallucinating all of this as he goes. But if he isn’t.

If he isn’t...

“What do you need me to do?”

Their plan is simple on their end, and painful on Cor’s. They grab him and throw him back through time, drag him with them as one by one they use up the last of their magic and finally vanish, because for all Cor calls them ghosts, they are not. Living souls do not linger after they die, but memories can. Memories given shape and form by magic, and when that magic was used up and given away, the memories are shattered, turned back into the formless nothing they really were.

They carve open Cor’s being and pour their magic into it, Gilgamesh at the fore, leading the way through the howling abyss while each king and queen carves Cor open a little more and pours in the magic keeping him alive and sane as he plummets through time. Regis’s touch lingers longer than the others, a breath of apology on his brow before that memory too, shatters and falls away.

Mors’ fingers wrap around his wrist and Cor struggles for the first time as his blood burns under the king’s touch in a way the others had not, “Hold still,” snarls the man coolly, “I do this as a favor for my son and grandson alone. Hold still and let me work or you will die the moment you reach our destination.” Cor stills and his blood burns until Mors too shatters.

Then it is only Gilgamesh, Cor ... and Ardyn.

“Free me,” he whispers as he presses something into Cor’s hands (or maybe into Cor’s soul, it’s hard to tell where reality ended and magic began in this place), “Find my past self and free me, then give me this.” A chuckle, “Let’s see the Empire grow so strong without it’s Accursed to feed from.”

“What about Prompto?” Cor asks desperately, because he is here to save those he cares about, not condemn the man who was like a son to him to nonexistence.

“Have a little faith,” laughs the former Chancellor, “a King needs his Heart, and Noctis will have his. Now,” hands on his shoulders, a final yank from Gilgamesh, “Go.”

Cor wakes up.

He promptly rolls over and vomits onto the stone.

Gilgamesh, a towering suit of armor once more, watches him gasp and wheeze and shake under the too-sharp sensation of magic living in his veins and reality existing again after so much time falling through time and void without comment. When Cor is done and has staggered upright, Gilgamesh hands him a sword.

Cor leaves the Tempering Grounds unbothered by the things that lurk there and makes straight for the Rock of Ravatogh. He gains the waiting Infernian’s Blessing, then collapses in a caravan for the night after several days and nights spent walking without pause and sleeping on cold Havens without so much as a blanket.

After waking up and showering, he spends a good twenty minutes the next day cursing at a mirror.

He’s fifteen again. He’s fifteen years old when in the original timeline he would have been six (is six, somewhere out there the original Cor Leonis still lives and grows, unaware of an altered future counterpart).

He’s also not Cor anymore. His eyes are the same, icy blue and angry, his face shape is very similar-. His hair is not. His hair is black and thick and wavy, and under his skin, magic coils, deep and effortless and his, not a gift from another.

Those blasted ghosts turned him into a Lucis Caelum.

He thinks of Mors’ cold fingers on his wrist and burning in his blood, Mors’ angry demand he stay still if he wanted to “survive the destination” and swears louder.

Then he picks up his sword and disappears into the wilderness again. Let Shiva come find him. She had a talent for finding Lucis Caelums anyway.

She finds him in the Quay, as Cor steals a boat to make for Angelgard, she Blesses him and disappears, and in her wake is a winter mist that shields Cor’s journey to the isle from prying eyes.

He cracks open the prison with the magic he now has in excess, falters at the sight before him.

Ardyn looks a lot less like evil incarnate and more like a shivering, frightened, half-starved cat this way.

Also who hung up their prisoners on MEATHOOKS like some kind of slasher from a horror film?

Overdramatic Lucis Caelums, that’s who.

Cor hauls Ardyn down from his chains and carries the weak, disorientated Accursed outside. He can hear Ramuh stirring in the clouds as he takes the nameless Thing that Ardyn of the future gave him (magic, pure magic, an orb of it as bright as gold and the dawn) and crushes it against this Ardyn’s chest like he would a potion.

He sidesteps the black bile Ardyn heaves up like a drowning man ejecting water from his lungs, writhing and whimpering on the stone as Scourge smoke recoils off his body like it’s trying to escape, only to be burned clear by golden magic. Well. That was convenient. Pity he doesn’t have enough of those to cure the whole planet.

Ardyn stays silent, dazed and wide-eyed as Cor hauls him back to the mainland, steals some proper clothes and then bundles him in a caravan for the night. The man out of time flinches at every modern amenity, stares at the soup Cor roughly puts in front of him with confused eyes. Finally, tentatively, as if afraid of being struck (and that shouldn’t make Cor angry, it shouldn’t, this man killed both Cor’s kings and threw the world into darkness. He deserved whatever fear he felt, yet looking at him now Cor can feel nothing but pity and anger on the man’s behalf) he speaks, “Who ... who are you? You ... you healed me. I ... do not understand.”

And Cor pauses, because he ... isn’t Cor now is he? There is already a young Cor Leonis out there somewhere, and no one can know that Cor is one and the same person as that youth.

In the end he shrugs, “I don’t have a name.”

“...What?”

“I don’t have a name. I gave it up. It was the price for healing you.”

“Then why,” Ardyn asks incredulously, “did you heal me? I am a stranger to you, a monster.”

Cor scoffed. The Chancellor of his time was a monster. This man? This man was about as monstrous as a starving kitten, “Not anymore you’re not, so stop that.” At the sight of Ardyn’s frown, Cor rolls his eyes and says gruffly, “If it bothers you so much, give me a new one.”

Ardyn gapes, “You ... want me to name you. Just like that.”

“Is that a problem?”

The redhead stays speechless for a while and Cor busies himself polishing his sword and ignoring the fact that he’s now distantly RELATED to this man (and also, if he doesn’t miss his timeline, OLDER than Regis by several years. Thanks a lot Kings of Yore).

“Glaucus.” Cor twitched and looked up sharply, Ardyn shrank in his seat a little, “You don’t like it?”

It sounds too much like Glauca. But he couldn’t say that, and it was better than lots of other names Ardyn could have come up with. Even if he had no idea where Ardyn had come up with that name. Cor forced his shoulders to relax and went back to caring for his blade, “Do as you please.”

“Glaucus,” repeated Ardyn softly and Cor- Glaucus, resigned himself to having a name very similar to that of a traitor and imperial experiment.

Kind of fitting, considering the company he was keeping.

Glaucus set his sword aside and gestured toward the bed, “If you’re done eating, go get some proper sleep. We’ll be leaving once you wake up.”

“Where will we be going?”

Glaucus smirked and knew it was not a nice expression, “A place called the Tempering Grounds. There’s someone who owes you an apology.”

(anyway hi yes I have a new AU to keep. In it “Glaucus” is now an LC, specifically and according to blood test MORS’ kid and he’s about 4 years older than Regis. I shall expand on this new AU another time. Tagging @sparklecryptid @hamelin-born @a-world-in-grey @ean-sovukau @ertrunkenerwassergeist behold my newest insanity).

#SE asks #byakko4 asks #Secret Engima Rambles #title prompt #The Future's Blurry (the Past is Trap) verse #new au #ffxv au #time-travel fixit #cor leonis as an lc