#the gals (gn) on discord heard me screaming my head off as i was writing it and i'm sure i sounded like an idiot

[gingerbreadmonsters]

Heeyy Ginger~~ 💕 self-love time! talk about which ones of YOUR creations (edits, artworks, fanfics) you like the most then send to other creators to do the same 💕

warning for 18+ discussion under the cut! minors dni please <3

WAIT THIS IS SO SWEET DON'T 😭😭😭

hmmngmgnhmg it is, of course, impossible to choose a favourite child - but i think if i had to pick just one to talk about then it's got to be blood sugar, baby!

this fic was written in the wake of imperium: cataclysm in late november of 2022, basically because prime universe!william solaire is really really hot already and imperium!william - aside from having literally no screentime, so i can say whatever i like about him - has the potential to be hot AND evil, which for me is like the ultimate combination 🤩🤩

my version of prime!william is very much a man who loves his children more than anything else - he won't let them get away with anything, per se, but he absolutely loves those two to pieces and holds his family very very close to his heart. imperium!william, then, takes that love and (as for everything in the imperium) whacks it up to eleven - so what happens then?

the solaires, for better or worse, really get the short end of the stick during catacylsm, so i really wanted to talk about what alexis and vincent's fates might have meant for william - what it might have done to him, feeling both his progenies die in such quick succession, and what that would have made him do now.

in canon, we also have that first william audio where lovely meets him for the first time - this fic is sort of my answer to that, i guess? it's never clear if they ever met in the imperium before vincent died or not, but i think it's unlikely they ever did. it also felt kind of boring to me, that they get rescued by asher but then we never hear anything about them again, so the idea of william kidnapping lovely and staging this first meeting was born!

the vibe of this fic rests quite heavily on the aesthetics of it all - the room around lovely (and william himself, now that i think about it) gets described in a way that's trying to show the reader that the house is quite old and quite expensive! things like william's gloves and handkerchief, the addition of a mantel clock, a chest of drawers, heavy curtains on the windows... all of those things are meant to suggest that we're dealing with a man who's very wealthy, and combined with lovely's restrained, confused body, there's the implication that he's also very powerful.

(obviously, we get that in the dialogue and the narration as well - william and lovely both mention the fact that he's a vampire king, and although lovely doesn't really know what that means, it's not difficult to infer that it means he's got a lot of money.)

the way that william speaks was actually not as difficult as i thought it would be to write - it's supposed to be slightly stilted, archaic, and a little bit awkward! it's referenced towards the beginning when lovely notices 'letters sticking and sliding where [they] don’t expect them', but that's all meant to get across the point that william a) is speaking with a noticeable french accent, b) is much, much older than lovely (by hundreds of years), and c) is much more formal in his speech than vincent was, and that lovely's used to.

in every iteration of this, lovely was always going to be tied to the bed for the whole time. while that does make for quite a nice (if obvious) reminder of the power dynamic here, there were actually two more significant reasons for having the scene play out with them stuck there: the first is that the idea of being tied to a bed has a whole load of, uh, explicit connotations that i wanted the reader to have in the back of their mind - sex and vampires kind of go together anyway, and i wanted to make william extra extra hot in this one because i think it's what he deserves and also i am an equal-opportunity vampirefucker and everyone deserves the chance to think about getting fucked by the sexy powerful rich vampire king, this is my contribution to society

the second reason is literally no more complicated than i wanted this to echo various conventions of film, specifically with an eye to horror and melodrama - our poor captured protagonist has been caught and is being tied to the railroad tracks, while our villain is busy monologuing up a storm.

(and wow, does william monologue in this one! you can probably tell that i wrote the dialogue first, and then went back in to fill in the rest - he really doesn't shut up at all...)

however, william was never going to be a purely evil character for me - i did my best to make him as sympathetic as possible, while still adhering to the conventions of the imperiumverse and making it clear that this is a world where the boundaries of socially acceptable and morally justifiable behaviour are absolutely not the same as the prime universe.

part of that is tied to that slightly laissez-faire, hand-wavey 'we're in the imperium, anything can happen' mentality that i like, but to me his attitude of 'i have to preserve anything i can of my children, anything at all just to prove that they existed' comes from a place of very deep, very tragic loss. it's an expression of desperation, of bitter regret, and of absolute and screaming grief.

this is a man who loved his children more than anything else in the world and who is not willing to let them go, and is now calmly explaining to lovely why that love justifies keeping them captive indefinitely. it makes sense to him, although he's not keeping them in exactly the same way that vincent kept them. vincent kept lovely as a food source - william is keeping them as a souvenir. he's hoping that lovely remembers vincent as fondly and as lovingly as he does.

lovely... isn't really sure if they do or not, but they're not immune to the imperium either - they were kept by vincent long enough that the stockholm syndrome had time to reasonably set in, enough that they definitely associated vincent with survival, with warmth and food and human contact, but can't quite figure out if what they're feeling is actually love. they're strangely upset that vincent never told them he had a sister, and they're surprisingly fine with the idea of getting revenge on vincent's killer. however, they know that what vincent did was, on some level, wrong - hence their confusion, and their slightly contradictory behaviour.

it's all about survival rather than affection for poor lovely, as shown by them asking william to stay ('if he leaves, there’s no telling when - if ever - he’ll come back for you. Call it personal experience.') but also refusing the water he offers them ('Like hell you’re drinking anything he gives you.'). they don't trust william, but they've learnt that the best way to survive is to obey.

the ending with william trancing lovely is deliberately ambiguous - does he turn them? does he keep them as a human? it's entirely open to interpretation, but my personal version is that he keeps them human for a little bit in a sort of weird, vincent-esque way? they're kept in much better conditions than vincent had them in, but it's william's twisted attempt to emulate his son, and feel closer to him by doing things as vincent did them (hence why he calls them 'my little thrall-to-be'). then, after that, he does turn lovely into a vampire to keep them 'preserved' forever, eternally attached to him and kept in his house.

it's implied that there's some degree of attraction there, at least in a sexual sense ('You shiver slightly, but you’re not sure why. “Oh, is that it? That’s what you want - to be good for me?” A playful smirk. “You spoil me, darling.”'), but the extent of that is also up to the reader's interpretation. all i'm saying is that he's hot on purpose, the long hair and the gloves were absolutely on purpose, and i don't blame you <3

my favourite favourite part of this has got to be that last dreamy bit ('There’s a house in the woods, a very long way away...') - if i remember correctly, i think i wrote that bit quite early on but saved it, because it didn't really fit the tone of the rest. it's designed to read like a closing montage sequence in a film, where the dialogue has finished and the music is coming to a finale, and i think it mostly worked...?? idk i'm just really pleased with how it turned out, especially the sensory description there! the house that lovely mentions is deliberately left unclear - you can decide whether i meant it to be vincent's or william's. i have to keep some secrets, after all 🥰🥰

honourable mentions: get in, loser!, a ring on the carousel, motion capture, resist and elongate, mad or sublime, five more minutes

#girl who writes essays for a one paragraph question uh oh #thank you so much for this ask!! too damn nice to me i tell you #been in a bit of a writing slump since the mer fic so v nice to think happy thoughts abt an older piece :DDD #i say it about them all but this really is my baby #the gals (gn) on discord heard me screaming my head off as i was writing it and i'm sure i sounded like an idiot #but i'm pretty pleased with the result #this one more than anything is a love letter to more cerebral and psychological horror #as opposed to the gorier 'bury the hatchet' or the uncaring viciousness of 'wrapped up in clover' #i mean this fic isn't EXACTLY psychological horror in the classic sense but ykwim #ginger speaks to lovely blogs #<333333333333333333