#the whole imprisoning him for eternity thing

[ratcandy]

alright baby after a full SEVEN HOURS, here's a rough little thing .

When I first got Shamura in my cult and realized they had seemingly completely lost their memories, I was just immediately reminded of this scene from Bojack Horseman and. well it plagued me for AGES until I finally went insane to make this thing.

'cause i mean . angsty ass men who have so much pent up rage towards a family member who treated them poorly but cannot properly express it due to said family member lacking any memory of it. amiright

some frames i like:

#not that I think Shamura was anything like Beatrice but u know #the whole imprisoning him for eternity thing #also take a shot every time the proportions on either of their designs goes COMPLETELY out of wack u'll be dead in seconds #anyway. good lird this took forever #but it's out of my brain now so i'm normal again #clamart #cult of the lamb #cotl narinder #cotl shamura #i mean. the other bishops are there briefly. do i tag them too? #yea ig #cotl kallamar #cotl heket #cotl leshy #<- but baby. small. puntable.

[quietwingsinthesky]

thinks about child-but-growing-fast amara and lucifer in the same room and gets ill.

#im gonna get called a homestuck again im SORRY its a good trope #she’s not his mom but she is. older than him and older than god and a being he helped imprison. #and the effects of that. here and now. are that she is so weak she has to relearn how to exist. #that she has to eat souls. tear them out one by one. you have to imagine that lucifer once saw her devour whole galaxies on a whim. #back when everything was moving in constant flux between destruction and creation. you have to imagine. #what is it to see her like this. is it pitiable. awful. comforting because she can’t hurt him right now and if he struck first maybe she #never could? #would he think about this moment this experience later when he’s made human. when he experiences a similar powerlessness. #anyway. lucifer gets out of the cage and trashes crowley’s place to kidnap his aunt-who-is-baby-right-now #u know me i love when characters go on the run together. what a weird little bond they’d form. #how do you overcome the anger at someone who helped cage you for eternity? does it help to know he didn’t escape your fate just because he #helped seal it when it was you? do you think they trade cage stories. #do you think lucifer tells her about how michael is still trapped in there and when he goes quiet. it’s not him who says he’s glad michael #knows what it’s like. it’s amara who says it. with an anger older than time. bitter enough to sting. #arms curled around herself because she’s hungry now. always hungry. tries not to think about what lucifer would taste like. (powerful) #sitting on a bench together watching people (souls. meals.) walk by. talking about prisons. talking about justice. maybe. or revenge. same #thing. and amara is leaning against him coiled tight through every muscle in her body and so so hungry. and when she says she’s glad michael #is suffering she isn’t really talking about him. but when she says it. lucifer lets out a breath. and says. me too. #and then he goes to find her something(one) to eat. #u see my vision. u do.

[utilitycaster]

Wizard Breakdown Tracker: Echoes of the Solstice

You know it, you love it, it may return on an as-needed basis for Campaign 3 now that Allura has entered the narrative and we know the fate of Caleb, but no promises: it's the Wizard Breakdown Tracker! As a reminder, I now include PCs because I make the rules; wizard NPCs are included on the very scientific basis of "do I have something I think is kind of funny or meaningful to say" so as always, if I left someone off, it was on purpose specifically to annoy you.

Astrid Becke: well her boss is missing, Caleb has expressed concerns in private to Beau about all of the Assembly, apparently the king is bedridden and has been for some time, and I suspect news of unsealed things being unsealed gets to her quickly; even if she isn't aware of the events in Blumenthal yet, she's about to be. Also, it's the apogee solstice. 8/10; ever the opportunist, it is a good time for her to try to become head of the Assembly, but also shit's gone real sideways.

Eadwulf Grieve: lost his title of hottest mage (men's division) to one Fjord Stone during the last Nicodranas County Fair and has been sulking ever since but more importantly the temple of the Raven Queen is doing Not Great Bob as of like an hour ago so a rare Eadwulf stress moment. 7/10.

Planerider Ryn: just lost her arm...but is unaware of it, so that's probably helping. technically cannot be calculated because she is a rock but spiritually like an 8/10 and that's only because she is remarkably unflappable; she just witnessed the Malleus Key and that should drive anyone up to a 10.

Allura Vysoren: has absolutely sensed a disturbance in the force weave and I'm sure Kima's feeling some bad vibes from Bahamut right now, but rather like Ryn she actually has some degree of sangfroid, a concept unheard of in the entire continent of Wildemount. 6/10.

Yussa Errenis: have you ever dealt with like, an ER Nurse, and unless something is actually exploding or someone is actually bleeding out they're like "yeah it be like that sometimes"? After you've been sucked into the Cognouza Hivemind while trying to do your silly little arcane investigations nothing short of the Calamity will ruffle you. He's an elf; he knows this solstice is wonky but also he knows this is Someone Else's Problem. Also Jester's left him alone for a whole 24 hours? Incredible. 2/10 and that's really just because he's still a little cranky about the disappearance of his blast scepter. As always: never change, king.

Prism Grimpoppy: by my calculations she's discovering that she's actually fucking incredible in combat right now. 0/10, she's doing GREAT.

Pumat Sol and sure, fuck it, Oremid Hass: I suspect the Zadash Wizard Contingent is dealing with some wild unsealed shit from the time of the Julous Dominion and they can't get in touch with anyone in the capital, but it's probably manageable. 4/10. On edge but not too bad.

Ludinus Da'leth: oh did your little plan to unleash the god-eater go a touch sideways? were you unprepared for the possibility of fucking all of magic? did you think it was going to be easy? did level 9 "Fuck Up Airship" and level 8 "Shield Against Werewolf" fail to save your bitch ass? As we've seen, he'll scramble and recover, unfortunately, but it's a well-deserved 9/10 right now. I love to see a plan fall apart.

Trent Ikithon: OH this motherfucker has LOST IT in prison. Like...he was able to put together a pretty elaborate situation, to be clear, but also he's gone bugfuck nuts and does not really improve. I think he's already broken down from the start having clearly been planning this exact scenario from the moment of his imprisonment honestly given that he appears to be going off of the frissons he picked up from Caleb and Essek shortly before he was captured, but regardless: he definitely ends it at a 10/10. Stuck in an egg for eternity, if he's even still a separate entity from Omentis. A well-deserved fate if ever there was one. Get fucked lol.

Veth Brenatto: hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha 10/10 you know she watched Luc leap through the teleportation circle as it closed and has been shrieking loud enough to be heard at the Chateau.

Luc Brenatto: the arrogance and naivete of youth insulate him initially, but Aggy's demise probably spikes it to a solid 6 minimum and it's definitely 9 during the battle. It goes back down pretty quickly though; see Caleb's entry.

Caleb Widogast: he keeps it together pretty well, honestly! Still I have to imagine he's kind of at a 7 or so this entire time with occasional spikes to 9 (NEIN) throughout, and I wouldn't fault him for finishing up the Blumenthal Brunch and then quietly locking himself in a soundproof tower room to scream, cry, and throw up for a while. Indeed, I would encourage it; Caleb should go have a good cry and hug a magic cat for a couple hours until he feels better, and then come back down to find that everyone except the clerics but DEFINITELY including Luc has implemented Spontaneous Apogee Solstice Oktoberfest to celebrate the demise of Trent, the engagement of Fjord and Jester, and the general experience of being alive, and is varying degrees of extremely wasted. This will of course bring him back up to like 7 as he realizes he has to return a hungover teenager to Veth and then goes down to a 4 or so when he realizes the clerics can fix that and Veth will probably be so glad that Luc is alive she'll ignore the rest of it.

Essek Thelyss: Our international drow of mystery looms large in the narrative, but does not make an appearance, which makes this premise extremely funny. I assume he's feeling kind of rough given that the Dynasty wizards are well-attuned to leylines and I would imagine he picks up that Sending isn't working and was broadly aware Caleb was going into danger, so he's certainly stressed, but Trent doesn't actually seem to know Where in Exandria is Essek Thelyss and is merely threatening blackmail. Honestly while we're at it, we don't know where Essek is because I wouldn't put it past Mr. Geometer Owner to have been at a solstice nexus and to have possibly experienced his own Solstice Shunting. In fact I assume Essek is blissfully unaware of these specific goings on re: Trent and is just experiencing The Anxiety for all of the previous reasons. (1d6+3)/10.

Known Gem Wizard Hotsauce Lutefisk: Hmmm. Things becoming unsealed, you say? The uninvited guest list (The Real Gelidon, Isharnai) for The TusktoothStone-Lavorre wedding may have gained an extra entry.

#i'm gelidon i'm the real gelidon and all the other gelidons are just shapechanging #critical role #critical role spoilers #wizard breakdown tracker #mighty nein #echoes of the solstice

[gabessquishytum]

This Vacation Romance/Honeymoon Suite one set off fireworks in my heart!!: https://gabessquishytum.tumblr.com/post/732821235748225024/dream-is-the-one-left-at-the-altar-too-much-too

I’m incomprehensibly attached to the Accidental Engagement trope — i.e. one character thinks they’re engaged and the other doesn’t realize. ALSO, I have this whole elaborate headcannon about how the Endless have no idea how marriage works because marriage has been SO many things in the billion years/species/cultures of existence. So like what if…

Dream visits Hob sometime after 2022 while he’s trying to make up for being gone/walking out on Hob & he’s agreed to see what this century has to offer. (And maybe his siblings are leaning on him a bit to actually experience the world a bit more — I mean, he’s the only one of them that has an actual very knowledgeable human guide! What a waste not to take advantage, right?!) So Hob — kind of panicking when Dream shows up asking to go on vacation — books the first available all-inclusive resort package Google serves up, and in a few hours they’re on a plane (because transportation is part of The Experience and sand is cheating). But at the front desk, there’s a problem…

Hob: Welp, they’ve double booked us. Damn Expedia! But good news! They’ve got an extra room after some last minute cancellation. It’s the Honeymoon Suite though, so… ah… *shifts awkwardly while yearning to spend a night in the Honeymoon Suite with Dream*

Dream *very seriously accepting this eternal commitment*: Ah, I see. Yes, Hob Gadling… Yes, I… I think I should like this. 

Hob: You sure? I mean, I wouldn’t want to make you feel…

Dream: I am certain. 

Hob: Really, we don’t have to! *really, really wanting to*

Dream *even more into it after seeing how gentle & caring Hob is being toward Dream’s feelings* : I understand. I accept this proposition, Hob.

As Dream follows Hob solemnly up to the penthouse Honeymoon Suite, he thinks about all the different ways he’s seen dreamers bound in union over the eons. This feels a bit abrupt, but it’s hardly stranger than some of the traditions that have existed. What a lucky chance that he should stumble into this experience with Hob!

(It might be Desire more than chance, but they are definitely not telling.)

As they approach the gilded door at the end of the hallway, Dream shyly takes Hob’s hand. If they are married now (and he saw the woman put their names into the computer, so it is done), then surely he need no longer suppress his feelings, so long as Hob is amenable.

And, yeah, is Hob amenable! He’d only imagined maybe getting a touch, even a lingering glance by the end of the week. But Dream melts into him and — though Hob checks in frequently to make sure Dream’s ok with everything — they spend a long, hot week tangled in the bedsheets, sipping margaritas, and getting up only for room service and bathroom breaks.

Back at home, he expects that that’ll be it for a while. Dream must’ve needed to blow off some steam after his imprisonment. But Dream shows up every day that week. He’s very busy, but he makes sure to pull the finest food out of the most renowned chefs’ dreams; he even packs some away every evening to make sure Hob has something to take to work the next day. He reads or sits quietly while Hob does his marking or lesson planning. Then they gently wash each other in the shower, and then Dream slips under the sheets with Hob. 

It’s so great that Hob is starting to get worried. 

Hob *taking Dream’s hand*: Dove, what is it? I’m not complaining, but are you… alright?

Dream (who has been self-conscious as he is still catching up on what husbands want/are like in 2022): It has been many years since I… since I was in this position. Is this not what you wish from a sworn partner?

Hob *sworn partner?*: I… yes?

Dream: When you asked me to complete the Honeymoon Suite rite, I thought of how I had… disappointed those I was sworn to before. As a husband, I have hardly been as thorough in my responsibilities as I have in other areas of my function. And yet, my heart leapt at the chance to try again — even on the spur of the moment — and our courtship had spanned so many centuries, that it seemed to make sense…

It is as Dream speaks, unravelling several millennia of complex emotions, that Hob realizes he has a spouse. Oh, and that he’s been dating Dream for six hundred years?!

This is so wonderful and delightful and I love the dialogue you've written between them SO much like omg it's so soft. The honeymoon suite rite 😭😭😭

Imagine how gentle Hob is with Dream, even while his heart races and he tries to navigate his brain around the idea of being MARRIED. To DREAM. He's pulling Dream in close to his chest and rubbing his back while quietly freaking out. He's so mad at himself for not knowing that they were courting this whole time! No wonder Dream was mad when Hob called him lonely and started banging on about friendship in 1889! Holy shit!

He should have been showering Dream in love, courting gifts, affection and all of that stuff!!! He has SO much time to make up for, he's so lucky that Dream agreed to marry him when Hob has accidentally been the worst boyfriend ever for 600 years...

Dream peeks up out of Hob’s chest and he's like "am I performing my duties as a 21st century human husband adequately? It is very important to me that you should be happy in our marriage." And Hob nearly hyperventilates (in like a good way) and just pulls Dream closer to convey that a) he is a very satisfied husband and b) he intends to be the best damned spouse that Dream of the Endless has ever had <3

#secondjulia #the sandman #dreamling #nsft

[waspredteeth]

Let's talk about Damian, the League of Assassins and the al Ghuls. A.K.A things to keep in mind when writing them.

You don't have to force yourself to comply with this, but there are some important facts you need to know and things you absolutely SHOULDNT do (be racist or orientalist).

Read on for a long post about Damian and the League and his family - giving context, some research and comic storylines, and characterization.

There are basically three different backstories for Damian.

Batman: Son of the Demon - technically, this baby is unnamed and not completely Damian. But the writer of that comic does still (sorta) resent that Morrison was able to write Damian in current comics while he wasn't. This baby was given up for adoption by Talia and we never see him again. Fans vastly prefer taking this backstory (me) because Damian is NOT a product of rape and Talia is written like herself.

Morrison's canon/the 2006-2011 era - the Damian we know and love. Kinda-sorta. So, in Morrison's whole run - Damian was raised in the League and trained as an assassin. One key point here: Talia DID NOT raise him. Morrison instead wrote that Talia only first met Damian when he was eight years old, and she was out of his life before then. Morrison also completely fucked up by writing Talia as a rapist who assaulted Bruce in Son of the Demon rather than the actual consensual sex they had. While it gave us the character, its not the complete version that many like. (and also its pretty racist)

Tomasi/Gleason's canon in Batman and Robin/Robin: Son of Batman - almost the same Damian as before, with one key difference: we actually get see what his training and life in the League entailed. Additionally, Talia in this version raised him from an infant, thus making his connection with her much stronger. A win/lose situation there. Talia would never raise her son under her father, but we do get a stronger mother/child bond than we ever had before. (Still fucked, but insanely better than Morrison).

From these three versions, only two utilize the League of Assassins in Damian's origin.

The League, then, is very important to his character. By extension, so should Ras right?

In Morrison's canon/the 2009 era - no, apparently. As per Resurrection of Ras al Ghul, he only sees Damian as a vessel for his soul. To stay eternally youthful and does not care for him as grandson in any way. This...is a lot. You could use it for angst. But it's also not in line with Ras' characterization. You could argue that this version of him and Damian have never interacted before but still.

Here's what you need to know about Ras al Ghul. He was and still is: a doctor. A man of science. He loves and wants to save the beauty of nature. Ras is an eco-terrorist. Not a generic assassin. He believes in the life of nature, animals, but he despises humanity for what they've done to the world. He has seen it all, and he canonically laments of loss of endangered species, of ruined habitats and long-gone animals he once cared for.

He also loves his family. A lot. The entire reason he becomes the Demon's Head is because his first wife, Sora, was killed by someone he treated, and then he was imprisoned and forced to co-habit with her corpse. Of course, over the centuries he's been alive, she's become only one reason for his existence, as we see how jaded he sees humanity and how little he trusts people. He latches onto Talia, his surviving daughter, because he loves her and he grieves her mother. He degrades Dusan, the White Ghost, because he cannot bring himself to love him. He was murdered by Nyssa because she felt betrayed and began to despise his love (and inaction). In current canon, Damian is his grandson and he loves him, despite everything.

Of course, it doesn't justify what he's done. But it's a crucial part of his character: the twisted love that cages. The love that binds and says it knows best for you - "I only want the best for you, I want to protect you, I want the world for you. Can't you see that? I can bring you something better." The fact that he's an ancient immortal only adds to the superiority he believes he's giving to his family.

We return to the League of Assassins. SO, the League was canonically created to further his ultimate goal: saving the planet. Again, eco-terrorism. The League exists to cull the human population. Ras believes in utopia, a world without any humans (even himself and his family). Ras is willing to die, eventually, like a really long time from now, if he gets to complete his goal. Thus, the League wholeheartedly believes in him, for the betterment of the world with their savior at the head. Exactly how the League treats their mission and Ras depends on the writer - but it's common to write them as a cult. Almost a religion.

We don't really get a lot about they operate. There are figures like Dr. Darrk and the White Ghost and all the stuff that comes up in Red Robin. We get some interesting ideas and characters in Robin: Son of Batman. But we don't get how the League works. There's no comic that does a step by step breakdown of their finances, operations, assassins, employees, what Ras actually does to lead and impart his vision to his followers.

We go the cult route, then. Here's something that I'm currently exploring and that I think others should too: The League is a global cult that believes in the holiness of death and the end of humanity in order to save nature/the planet. The League is far-reaching. It is eternal. It has existed for centuries, just as long as Ras al Ghul has.

Damian was part of a cult. Depending in your version of events, he was either taken from his adoptive parents or born into the League. Either way, he was indoctrinated. He believes in his grandfather's ideas. His training, canonically, began when he was very young. It was fast paced, trainer after teacher after teacher. He didn't grow attached to them, but he retained the skills. He is raised not just as an assassin. He is raised as an heir. A leader. An overachievement of talent and privileges. He embodies Ras' beliefs.

He is worshipped. A symbol of the cult. A prince. He is dehumanized. He is a figurehead, a piece of Ras that the common folk can touch and see. Damian believes in this superiority, misguidedly thinks they respect him and not the word of Ras. And there begins the struggle.

He grows up arrogant. Manipulated by his loving grandfather into something he really shouldn't be. But there is still Talia.

Either she only met him later in life when he was eight years old, or she was there from the beginning. In both cases, she would NOT stand for her son being treated this way.

Talia is not a completely non-violent character. She has killed before, and does not have the strict rules of Bruce. But she's not an assassin (at least , she didn't used to be). She can cry over a soul lost. She can shoot a gun but with a trembling heart. Talia was raised by her father with affection. She was sheltered, spoiled. She was educated and trained, yes, but she was not made into a weapon. She was taught martial arts for skills, protection, for Ras' paranoid benefit.

She was loved, but Ras has canonically hit her in moments in rage. He has canonically manipulated/threatened her to try and kill Bruce. I fully believe that she would want to protect Damian from as much abuse as possible even if they're both in the League.

You can interpret her split from her father as many things: her love for Bruce, her love for the world, her own love for her father and seeing in horror how twisted he'd become, her need for independence, to be her own woman without Bruce or Ras in her life, an abused child becoming an adult, etc.

Talia also canonically studied medicine (in Cairo). She believes in life. She would impart this onto her son. She wouldn't want him to grow up sheltered as she was, nor would she want him to become a weapon to be wielded. Talia would advocate for him to be taught arts and literature and respect for nature, and to try and give him some sense of normalcy. She was the one who let him keep Goliath. She would never kill Damian's pets (Morrison you have three days what were you thinking?!).

(EDIT: adding some more context to the Talia section of this post!)

After Talia healed Jason using the Pit and sent him to be trained, she left the League in entirety. For several comics, she was entirely independent and drifting - enjoying her life apart from Ras as her own woman.

For a brief moment in comics when Lex Luthor was the US President (yes that happened), he chose Talia to oversee LexCorp. Talia does not like Lex, but she agreed anyway in order to secretly change his company from the inside. While she put on a front to the public and Superman as another cruel businesswoman, in reality she was draining Lex's finances, shifting LexCorp into a more ethical direction, and digging up as much dirt as possible on Lex in order to take him down. She secretly gave Superman information on all of Lex's evil plans as she could, but didn't directly work with him. She wasn't LexCorp CEO for very long, but it was pretty much all she was doing until the events of Death and the Maidens. It can be assumed that while she was a CEO, Damian was being trained in the League in secret.

In Batman: Death and the Maidens, Talia was kidnapped and repeatedly tortured/resurrected in a Lazarus Pit by Nyssa Raatko (her half-sister) in order to brainwash her. She was killed, over and over and over again, then resurrected every single time afterwards in immense pain until she was filled with nothing but primal rage. Nyssa's goal was to use Talia as her own pawn against Ras in a revenge plot. The brainwashing made her a loyal follower of Nyssa, hate Bruce, and made her kill Ras without a second thought. Eventually, they succeeded in taking over the League - leading to the eventual storylines in Robin: One Year Later and Infinite Crisis where Nyssa is shown leading the League (before her unceremonious death). Ras eventually returns in the Batman: Resurrection of Ras al Ghul storyline that precedes Final Crisis/Bruce's death.

Some fans use this Pit event to explain Talia's butchered character in later appearances - making her abusive and cold to Damian and a full villain towards Bruce - as a consequence of this horrific brainwashing. It's definitely a far better explanation for her actions in Batman and Robin (2009) and Batman Incorporated than her sudden heel turn under Morrison. Unless you're completely re-writing her actions in the 2009-2011 era to be more in line with her original characterization, then this explanation is an easy add-in to explain her dynamic with Damian in your fic if you want.

You could take the complicated family dynamics of the al Ghuls and write some seriously heavy stuff on love and abuse and the cycles of trauma and violence. From Rúh to Ras down to Talia/Nyssa/Dusan down to Damian and Mara. It's one big circle.

Speaking of which, here's a list of all known al Ghuls for your convenience.

Rúh al Ghul - AKA Mother Soul. Ras' mother. She's fairly recent, but I think she's interesting enough to include. Unlike Ras' hard beliefs in science, Rúh is very spiritual and a practitioner of magic. Through her, it can be implied that every al Ghul has the possibility of learning magic. She believes in a figure called the Demon. Led the League of Lazarus on Lazarus Island, where she was basically imprisoned for centuries.

Ras al Ghul - real name unknown. The originator.

Sora - his first wife. Deceased. Killed by a raging prince who was healed by the Pit, as Ras did not know what it did back then.

Melisande - his second wife. Talia's mother. Half-Arab, half-Chinese. Deceased. Ras canonically met her at Woodstock (lol). She was murdered by Qayin, the antagonist of Son of the Demon. In some depictions (basically only Morrison) she was revealed to be alive and a fortune teller who hid her identity from Talia. (I think her being dead makes more sense for how Ras treats Talia, and her issues/love for her father).

Nyssa Raatko - I believe she's Ras' oldest child. Technically, she's been dead since Infinite Crisis and has not appeared in comics ever since. Canonically tortured and brainwashed Talia. Led the League for at least a couple months to a year. Half-Russian, part Arab and Chinese. Jewish ?, it's complicated. Canonically survived the Holocaust. Is immortal.

Dusan al Ghul - the first White Ghost. Albino. The forgotten and despised son. Still very loyal to Ras, does not call him father and instead calls him the Demon's Head. Mara's father. Is not immortal.

Talia al Ghul - the younger child. The beloved one. Damian's mother. Is not immortal.

Damian al Ghul-Wayne - you know already.

Mara al Ghul - Dusan's daughter. Damian's cousin. I think they're pretty much the same age. Raised in the League, led the Demon's Fist. Can be assumed to have been trained in the same subjects as Damian at the same time.

Compiling all of this, here's the things to NOT DO when writing the al Ghuls and the League:

Making them animal abusers, encouraging Damian to kill animals or showing him their deaths. The League stands for nature. They would not kill them unless its for food or mercy. It's insanely racist, even, to imply that a group of Arab-based people or Ras or Talia would gleefully brutally murder a puppy in order to teach Damian a "lesson."

Making Ras or Talia comically abusive. Ras would be hard on Damian and manipulate him. He's smart. He knows what he's doing all the time. He'd rather keep Damian's loyalty than turn him against him using physical violence. That doesn't mean he wouldn't ever threaten him, just..idk show some restraint when you write them interacting. On the other hand, Talia WOULD NEVER ABUSE HER SON. You could make an argument for Ras, but Talia would never ever hit her son unless she was forced to.

This is just common sense. DO NOT write the League or al Ghuls as racist, orientalist tropes. Research before you write? Use your brain. Please, I'm begging you. If you think of a concept you think might be problematic, look it up, try and find sources, ask around.

Make Ras weirdly obsessed with/in love with Tim. Seriously. What the fuck. This also weird and racist. I've seen horrendous tik-toks making shitty jokes over this. ITS NOT TRUE. STOP MAKING HIM A PEDO BC YOU THINK ITS FUNNY OR EVEN REMOTELY INTERESTING. Never once has Ras expressed a desire as making Tim "his bride" or some fucked shit like that. I'm going to beat you with hammers.

Having everyone take a dip in the Lazarus Pits/using them extensively to become immortal. As far as I know, only Rúh and Ras have used them frequently. Only they are the immortal ones, the ones arguably driven slowly mad by the unknown sciences of the pit. Talia is not immortal, she's not even that old, and she doesn't have the desire to be ageless. She has to be at least near Bruce's age, maybe younger than him depending on the timeline/your interpretation. Damian did not ever become exposed to the Pits until after he was killed in Batman Inc, and even then- he was NOT resurrected by it. (Actually I don't think he's ever been put into one.)

Having Talia hate Bruce. Like, No? Currently, they have more of a "we are Divorced but still care another but also we don't agree" dynamic. But they were once really in love, star-crossed even, they were married. But Ras and circumstances and even Damian pulled them apart. (I do think writing Damian as a child of divorce is both accurate and kind of funny).

Finally, demonizing all of the al Ghuls and making Bruce's half of the family Damian's saviors. THIS is racist. Full stop. Making his majority white family the "good ones" and "saving" him from his evil brown family is an insanely bad thing to write. We have to see it enough in comics, please don't write it into your fic. There can be redeeming things about the al Ghuls, about his life prior to meeting Bruce. Keep in mind, always, that Damian is part Arab/Chinese, that the al Ghuls are all a mix of Arab/Chinese ancestry and that they should/would be imparting their culture onto him. The League was where he was taught art, to appreciate animals. You could write Talia imparting certain tea preferences onto him, favorite cultural foods, practices, numerous languages. Ras is immensely proud of his own heritage, muddled by age it may be, there's no way he didn't let Damian express himself this way. I fully believe Damian is fluent in various Arabic languages and Chinese, and that his first language is not English.

My final message: think before you write. Consider the actual comics, in fact, I'll put one here for Ras.

Ras al Ghul: One Bad Day. Published 2023. Unfortunately written by Tom Taylor (sigh). Its still good though.

Ras kills some rich guys for facilitating the extinction of the wolf species you see. Of course, Bruce investigates.

Ras kills Bruce, keeps him dead for three months before resurrecting him in the Pit. Damian stays by Bruce's side. There's a lot more, but I implore you to read this comic for yourself to get the full experience.

Thus ends this post. Read this comic for yourself! Have fun writing them, just take these things into mind.

#dc #damian wayne #dc comics #ras al ghul #talia al ghul #league of assassins #batman #batman meta #dc meta #robin #waspdoesathought #racism #kinda #just keep in mind there's some insane tropes stapled onto the al Ghuls and perpetuated further in fics #a painted bird named tamer #writing advice ? #enjoy :)

[chvoswxtch]

Hey I have a Dark Matt x reader smut request.

Matt comes back from patrol and relieves his stress with reader but is rough and reader has bruises everywhere the next day when he notices the bruises he has a guilty conscience.

hello love! thank you so much for the request! I hope this is close to what you were looking for. ❤️

warning: contains explicit sexual content, minors please dni. word count: 1.9k

marks.

Dainty patches of violet and navy had begun to bloom on various patches of your skin. Along the column of your throat, down your arms, across your thighs. Matt’s fingerprints were embedded on your hips as if he’d stamped them with ink. You could even make out the perfect outline of his palm on your ass. He’d left various marks with his teeth on your collarbones, shoulders, and several across your neck, causing varying hues of maroon to rise to the surface. Last night had been…intense.

Roughness was not essentially new between you and Matt. Some nights when he came home from patrol, he was too amped up to even attempt to wind down. He only found calm in the release that you granted him with your body. Only after he channeled all that excess energy into bringing you both several rounds of pleasure was he finally spent enough to find peace in sleep beside you. You never really minded. Sometimes you even craved it. Making love to Matt Murdock, or even playful sex with him was one thing. But being fucked by the Devil of Hell’s Kitchen? That was a whole other realm of rapture. It made your heart swell with pride and excitement that you were his calm amongst the chaos; that you could subdue the devil with the portal to heaven between your thighs. But last night had been…different.

It started off normal. Matt slowly descended the stairs as he pulled off his gloves, a seductive smirk on his sinful lips as he took note of the way your heart rate increased with every step he took. You could tell by the look on his face what he wanted, and God if you weren’t ready to let him take it. Matt had been staying out extra late this past week, and you had missed him terribly. It had felt like an eternity since he’d last touched you. He wasted no time capturing your mouth, letting his hands roam all over the parts of you that weren’t covered by his shirt and then slipping them underneath to feel the rest of you. Everything seemed to be normal until he had you pinned beneath him on the mattress, and then it was like something inside him snapped.

Matt’s kisses became more rushed and forceful, almost bruising. He bit down on your bottom lip so hard, you swore he’d drawn blood and could taste the metallic tang on your tongue. His grip on your waist was rough, fingers digging into your flesh like blunt daggers. He had you completely trapped beneath his body, surrendered to his mercy, both of your hands imprisoned above your head in one of his as he fucked you at a brutal pace. The coarse growls that sounded in your ear sent shivers down your spine, but it was nothing compared to the feral look in his eyes. The normal golden honey had been eclipsed by onyx, and it felt like you were staring up at his devil mask rather than him. You couldn’t hardly recognize the face above you.

“Who’s pussy is this, huh? Who’s fucking pussy is this?”

“Y-yours.”

“Louder.”

“Yours…”

“Say it, louder.”

“Yours!”

Something about it felt off. You wanted to say something, but you couldn’t find your voice. He flipped you over without warning, and before you had a chance to feel the sting of his withdrawal, Matt was burying himself inside you to the hilt. He roughly shoved your face down into the pillows and set a brutal pace behind you. Your body jolted forward with every powerful snap of his hips, and every harsh slap of his palm against your ass. Matt reached forward and captured one of your nipples between his thumb and index finger, squeezing so hard it caused you to yelp. 

“Ah..Matt!”

“That’s it, let everyone know who’s fucking you this good. Let everyone fucking know.”

Matt fucked you mercilessly, but you weren’t enjoying it like you normally did. Something didn’t feel right. It felt like he was mad at you for something, like he was punishing you for something you weren’t aware of. You squeezed your eyes shut as you felt his pace getting sloppy, the guttural grunts behind you letting you know he was close. Matt let out a loud, animalistic groan as he came and it made you shudder. Your legs gave out when he released your hips and you fell onto your side on the mattress, curling up into yourself. Matt panted as he laid beside you, resting his hand on your waist.

“Fuck…sorry, I couldn’t hold it. Give me a second and I’ll help you finish.”

“N-no, you don’t have to.”

“You sure? You didn’t-”

“It’s okay. I’m really tired. Let’s just go to bed.”

You felt Matt tense up behind you, and you wondered if he realized just how rough he’d been. He silently wrapped his arm tightly around your waist and pulled you back against his chest, nuzzling his face into your neck and pressing a soft kiss to your skin. All night you laid there in his embrace trying to figure out what the hell had just happened. If he was mad at you, why was he cuddling you? Wouldn’t he have said something? What would he even be mad about? What had you done? You racked your brain tirelessly for an answer, but nothing came to mind. 

You could hear Matt cooking in the kitchen when you woke up. For a minute you thought maybe you had been wrong last night. Maybe you had read everything wrong. Maybe you were reading into things too much. But then you looked at your reflection in the mirror. Matt had certainly left marks on you before, but never anything like this. You nervously ran your fingers through your hair as you tried to figure out how to approach this. A light grasp on your arm had you flinching, and you turned just in time to catch the smile on Matt’s face drop into a pit of worry.

“What’s wrong?”

“Nothing.”

Matt sighed as he took a step closer, taking one of your hands into his.

“Sweetheart, don’t do that. You know I can tell when you’re lying.”

“I’m just…sore. That’s all.”

“Sweetheart-”

The hiss that escaped your mouth when Matt touched your shoulder had him freezing immediately. He tilted his head to the side slightly, eyebrows furrowing in concentration as his eyes darted blankly back and forth. Your heart started to race once you realized what he was doing.

“Matt-”

It was too late. His eyes widened in horror as he took in the state of your body. You sighed softly as you reached out to place your hand against his bare chest.

“It’s not that bad.”

“Not that bad? Y/N you’re covered in…fuck. Why didn’t you say anything?”

“I’m okay, Matty. It doesn’t hurt-”

“Don’t lie to me. If it didn’t hurt, you wouldn’t flinch when I touch you.”

“It’s just sore, that’s all. I’m okay. I just-”

Matt tried to fixate his gaze where your eyes were, his chest rising and falling a little quicker as he waited for your response.

“Just what?”

“I…are you mad at me?”

Matt’s eyebrows rose to the center of his forehead, staring at you incredulously as a dry scoff escaped his mouth.

“Am I mad at you? Are you-why would you ask me that?”

“Because that’s what it felt like, Matt.”

Matt’s mouth hung open for a second as he studied you, taking a cautious step forward and lightly wrapping his arm around your waist.

“What do you mean?”

“Last night…it…it felt like you were mad at me for something.”

“What? No…no sweetheart, of course not. Why would I be mad at you?”

“I don’t know, that’s what I couldn’t figure out. You know I-I don’t mind when you’re…last night just…it felt different. I don’t know-I just…”

“Was it too much?”

You hated the somber look on Matt’s face right now. You hated the guilt you heard dripping from his voice. 

“It was…just…not what I was expecting. I mean, did something happen? Were you upset about something? It didn’t seem like it when you came home…but I-I don’t know. Maybe I missed it.”

“You didn’t miss anything. Nothing happened. I wasn’t upset. I guess I…I lost control”.

Matt dropped his arm from around your waist and took a few steps backward, leaning against the bathroom counter as he nibbled at his bottom lip. He exhaled deeply as he rubbed his palms against his face.

“I’m so sorry, sweetheart. I didn’t mean to-”

“No. No, I-maybe I…maybe it was me. Maybe I…I don’t know. Maybe I thought I was in the mood for that, and I wasn’t.”

“I should’ve checked in with you first.”

“You did, Matty. I wanted to, okay? God I really wanted to. I don’t know what happened. I don’t know why it felt different, it just…I don’t know.”

“I pushed you too far. It’s my fault. I should’ve paid more attention last night. I should’ve caught that…that it was too much. I should’ve realized when you told me you didn’t want me to-I’m sorry.”

You cupped Matt’s face in your hands and brought his head down to press your forehead against his, lightly stroking your thumbs along his cheek bones.

“Hey, I know you would never intentionally hurt me. I know that. Maybe you lost control, maybe I was in a weird headspace. I don’t know. But either way, I know that and I trust you. I love you, Matty. It’s okay.”

“I love you, Y/N. So much. I’m so sorry-”

“I know. I’m sorry I didn’t say anything. I just…wasn’t sure what was happening.”

Matt sighed deeply as he gently wrapped his arms around your waist and held you against his chest.

“It won’t happen again. I promise.”

“Matty, I don’t mind when you leave marks. You know that.”

“Not like this. Not again.”

You shook your head slowly as you lightly trailed your thumb along Matt’s bottom lip.

“Matty, baby, I don’t mind them. Yes I’m a little sore, but that’s not why I was upset. I was worried I’d done something to upset you-”

“And that I took it out on you, like this. That doesn’t make me feel better.”

You sighed softly as you tilted your head back to look up at him, knowing this was a battle you were not winning anytime soon.

“We have got to do something about that Catholic guilt of yours.”

A faint smile appeared at the corner of Matt’s mouth, shaking his head slowly as he nudged your nose with his own.

“Good luck. No one’s found a cure for over two thousand years.”

“Hm. Well, I bet D doesn’t feel guilty about having his fun.”

“That’s because he’s kind of a dick.”

“But so much fun to play with.”

Matt arched one of his brows at your seductive tone, pushing lightly at your waist to put space between the two of you.

“No.”

“Aw c’mon, Matty-”

“Absolutely not. Come eat your breakfast.”

“But-”

“Do as I say, or I’m not letting him out to play again.”

“You don’t have that kind of self control.”

“Oh, you’d be surprised what I can commit to sweetheart.”

There was a taunting smirk on Matt’s lips and a flame of challenge flickering in his eyes. If there’s one thing Matthew Murdock was good at, it’s being fucking stubborn. You grumbled as you brushed past him, huffing as he chuckled deeply behind you.

“Good girl.”

#matt murdock #matt murdock x reader #matt murdock x y/n #matt murdock x you #matt murdock x fem!reader #matt murdock x f!reader #matt murdock x female reader #matt murdock fic #matt murdock smut #matt murdock request #daredevil #daredevil fic #daredevil smut #daredevil request

[turbulentscrawl]

can i rq general hcs for antonio? thank you 💜

I’ve been a little more hesitant to tackle the Hunters, (aside from Ithaqua) just because I’ve been unsure how much to lean into them being the “villains” of the manor. And honestly I’m still a little wishy-washy about their characterizations…but anyway, I’m gonna give it a go with Antonio here (because I’ve got requests for him ;) ) and you guys please feel free to tell me if it feels off.

-Antonio is, first and foremost, depressed. And all his coping mechanisms are self-destructive. When life got hard, he turned to alcohol, and then later to gambling. And then, you know, to making a deal with the devil or something. The combination of those broke his wallet, his love, and then his spirit. His fuse is shorter now as a result, but instead of blowing up he moreso just…deflates.

-Despite being a Hunter, a “bad guy,” he’s probably better now than he was before. The biggest issue now is really the whole possession thing. He’s not exactly what you’d call “in control” of his body a good chunk of the time. Exactly when he’s going to lose control is generally unpredictable, aside from feeling like an invisible string of hair has coiled around his wrists shortly before. It happens a lot in matches, where he’s otherwise hesitant to be all that brutal, as well as when his mood gets low enough like above. But when he is in control, history has made Antionio milder than he was before his initial spiral.

-He still really likes his alcohol, but he’s better about taking it in moderation now. The other Hunters help to keep him in check about this as well, if not because they care about him then because he makes for an annoying, hot-headed drunk. He tends to pick fights when he’s really wasted and why would they want to deal with that?

-Gambling is also still problem for him, but since money doesn’t matter in the manors it’s both less concerning and less thrilling. He and some of the other Hunters place bets on matches, staking things like higher-end foods and favors to one another. He’s often requested to play specific pieces of music for people when he loses—particularly ones he dislikes.

-Because of the greedy imprisonment he suffered, Antonio dislikes spending long periods indoors, and especially in his room. He spends as much time outside as possible, enjoying the garden flowers and a cool breeze. On full moons, when there’s nothing planned, he usually goes wandering about to try and find any survivors doing the same. He enjoys the fresh company, for the most part, and even considers some of them friends.

-Antonio is among the most displeased of the Hunters, regarding the set-up for matches. Despite his history as a violent drunk, he takes no pleasure in hurting people, and he’s bitter about possibly having to be “evil” for the rest of eternity. The fact that some of the survivors don’t hold the matches against him is a balm to his aching soul.

-While the violin is his instrument and weapon of choice, Antonio enjoys all of the arts. Any kind of music, visual, or performance. He understands the importance of self-expression, and loves to see people give themselves to it in earnest. What he dislikes are frauds. People who use art just to make a buck.

-The best love languages for Antonio are Quality Time and Acts of Service. He finds it incredibly sweet when others anticipate some of his needs and complete tasks for him in case his arms are taken and he’s unable to do them himself later. He also just enjoys spending time around his loved ones, it reminds him that he’s not some irredeemable monster. He prefers to show his love through Words of Affirmation and Physical Touch, often giving people sweet pet names and touching their arms.

-His hair is stronger than the game suggests. He can easily carry large items, other people, and even lift himself with it. He can hoist himself up to a second-story floor with relative ease, though being lifted by your scalp isn't exactly the most comfortable sensation, so he tries to avoid it.

#idv x reader #identity v x reader #idv violinist #antonio paganini x reader #turbulentscrawl

[luna-writes-stuff]

Eternally Missed, Bilbo Baggins

Song link

Fanfic, fem! reader

Fluff, mutual pining/oblivious reader

Word count: 3295

Tw: Not proofread. Race not specified, but could be implied as dwarvish. Self-degrading thoughts, mutual pining. Will they, won’t they. Slight angst. Misinterpreted feelings and actions. Oblivious reader, oops. That’s it?

Summary: Ever since laying eyes on your first, Bilbo knew it was you who he wanted to spend the rest of his life with. He tries to make this clear incredibly quick, fully aware of how little time he may have. But you were as oblivious as they came, and dismissed his proposals as platonic gestures. Until finally, he snaps, and just decides to tell you.

Buy me a coffee/force me to write more

“Chase your dreams away.

Glass needles in the hay.”

Throughout the journey, you could only be described as truly oblivious. Maybe not in your eyes, but definitely in those of the company. Their beloved burglar had fallen absolutely head over heels with you, yet there was something within you that simply seemed to not acknowledge it.

In hindsight, you might have seen it, or might have had a slight idea of what was happening, but the last thing you wanted to do was to get your hopes up. Thus, it was mere matter of a polite smile and dismissal without making it sound like a dismissal. You didn’t want to let him down, even though you had no idea of his true intentions.

You see, during the entire time of your travel to Erebor, Bilbo has tried to make it abundandly clear how fond he is of you. But between the running from imminent death, enemies luring around every corner and getting imprisoned every once in a while, the moments were never opportune enough. It didn’t mean that he didn’t try, but clearly, the ambiance was wrong. If he ever wanted to court someone, he’d propose it in his garden, under the clear nightsky of Hobbiton with a warm breeze in the air. Not after recovering for breath after having to run for thirty whole minutes, or in the dirty atmosphere of the Goblin caves. But fate did not seem to be on his side whatsoever. But he was nothing if not adamant.

“The sun forgives the clouds.

You are my holy shroud.”

The first time wanted to make his intentions clear during your stay in Rivendell. The dwarves had been bathing when he approached you, doubt and anxiety apparent in his features - but then again, when wasn’t it?

He had sat down next to you on one of the balconies, talking about anything but the mountain and the now known presence of the orcs. He had spoken about his home in the Shire fondly, recounting many tales of friends and neighbours. It was a nice distraction after the adrenaline of the travel had worn off.

In turn, you had spoken about your home and those waiting for you. He remembered the hesitance in his voice when he asked you about a suitor. You hadn’t even properly answered him at that to begin with. At first, you began to laugh, and talked about your parents. He thought you were mocking him, even though that was extremely unlinke you. But when you continued to rant and talk, it appeared to him that you had no idea what he was actually asking you. And he didn’t have it in him to correct you or to properly ask you. Perhaps it was a bit too early. You just met a handful of days ago.

Fortunately, he did not leave it at that.

“I just don't care if it's real.

That won't change how it feels.”

The second time he tried was when the group was making their way out of Rivendell. He had gotten some good rest and found himself comfortable enough to bring the conversation back up.

But you were distracted. He couldn’t tell back then, but he certainly could now. The talk with Bilbo had left you somewhat homesick. The comfort of Rivendell was almost begging for you to stay. You wanted to help the dwarves - more than anything, but you understood the comfort hobbits sought in their own homes.

You had given him brief, one-worded answers, your gaze absent. It had broken his heart that day. If you weren’t making your disinterest clear the day before, you certainly had then. It caused him to be silent for the rest of the travels until you crossed the mountains. Much to his relief, you stayed close to him, and didn’t part during the fight of the giants, but the new hit of adrenaline caused him to cling to you the entire time, a mutual action. Neither of you had realized how close the two of you were until you were roughly separated after a rough boulder collided between the two of you.

“I just don't care if it's real.

That won't change how it feels.

No, it doesn't change.”

That night in the cave you kept circling Bilbo. He had almost fallen from the cliff if it hadn’t been for Thorin. And the idea made you inexplicably sick. You liked Thorin, even as he had been harsh from the start, but the fact that you weren’t able to dangle off the cliff to save Bilbo had left you feeling somewhat powerless. And the only comfort you could offer the hobbit was your company and your tales.

It had caused his hopes to resurface again. Of everyone out there, you wanted to sit with him, and talk with him. Perhaps your absent answers were simply because you were tired, or too focused.

He didn’t know how to bring the topic back up, though. It had caused an awkward silence after you finished your talk. He still couldn’t quite tell if he was grateful for the floor to - literally - fall through or not.

“And you can't resist

Making me feel eternally missed.”

The first time he swore he could have kissed you, was after Azog’s confrontation with Thorin. The battle had left the king defenseless, and you had rushed to his aid. At your actions, Bilbo blindly followed, making sure his eyes were on you constantly. The eagles had come just in time to sweep you off to safety, but the entire flight had left him nauseous. If it wasn’t for Gandalf, both you and Thorin would have lain on that floor, completely lifeless. To make matters even worse, you had landed on a different eagle. So, Bilbo had no choice but to simply sit there with a heavy feeling in his stomach until he could finally stand again.

And when he did, he rushed towards you. This could have been his moment. He could have swung his arms around your waist, pulling you close to him, his lips finally touching yours in a manner he was only able to dream off, but when you stood a few inches from him, something in him had told him to stop.

In that moment, you swore he was going to kiss you. Instead, he gave you an uncomfortable hug, followed by two brief pats on the back. He had turned around immediatelym refusing to let you see his reddening face, leaving you with a slight frown. If he was going to kiss you, you might have just let it happen.

“And you can't resist.

And you can't resist.

Making me feel.”

The rest of the journey had been awful for him. In his mind, that awkward reunion kept lingering. His chance had been right there and he refused to take it for whatever reason. And to top it all of; you seemed to grow more distant from him, and it hurt him deeply. It bothered him so much, that eventually, the company began catching on. Fili was the first one to notice, and had given him a good talk about courtship and whatnot. It was all in good nature, but it had left Bilbo with more details than he might have wanted.

But simple hints in conversation seemed to not do the trick. And maybe dwarven courting ideals weren’t the best, but they were certainly worth the try. When he made his first move according to Fili’s advice, more dwarves began to catch on.

“Chase your dreams away.

Glass needles in the hay.”

He had taken his sweet time hunting down anything he could find. Food, especially for you, to prove that - in Fili’s words - he could provide. But when he had a chance of slaying a rabbit, he didn’t have it in him. Instead, he came back with fresh mushroom, some non-poisonous berries and leaves that would make an excellent soup. It wasn’t hunting, but it still gave him the idea that - yes; he could provide.

You didn’t think much of. You find it nice, and thanked him fondly for it. Yet, there were others in the company that might have been hungry, so you gave it to Bombur, so he could use it in his meal for the group. Bilbo had told you this was okay, but he couldn’t help but feel slight heartbreak when you asked him.

He wasn’t being clear enough. Stupidly enough, he seemed to take comfort in Fili’s words, so he had returned to him that same night, telling the dwarf about what had happened. He agreed that you might just need some bolder insinuations. So, it was time for the next part.

“The sun forgives the clouds.

You are my holy shroud.”

It was at Beorn’s house when he approached you with a small wooden sculpture he made. It couldn’t have been bigger than your palm. It was sloppy and crude, and nowhere near the excellent craft of the dwarves, but Fili assured him that it wouldn’t matter if the feelings and intentions were true. He had tried to create the birds you mentioned in your tales about home. You would speak about them fondly when he asked how your place was.

Again, you accepted the gift with much glee, thanking him an endless amount of times. A warm hug was shared - one that would remain in Bilbo’s mind for a long time. It was soothing, unlike the uncomfortable embrace shared upon the rock. This was heartfelt, and genuine. He remembered thinking that this was it; you had accepted.

But, you stuffed it in your pocket, promising to keep it close, before showing it off to the rest of the company. And that was it. No other words mentioned to him, or even slight hints that you were catching on. You seemed to remain oblivious. Now, Bilbo truly couldn’t tell whether this was because you simply had no idea what was happening, or if this was your way of letting him know you weren’t interested.

“I just don't care if it's real.

That won't change how it feels.”

There were so many more times where he tried to make his feelings clear. Countless conversations were held, more gifts were shared, he fought at your side, he would continue to bring you food, even if it was to be shared with the company. And you didn’t seem to catch on to anything.

What Bilbo hadn’t known was the true moment of the defeat you held whilst imprisoned by the woodland elves. Bilbo hadn’t known how you had been sitting against the wall in your cell, your knees up to your chest. He didn’t hear your own degrading words circling around in your mind about how you were just making things up. About how someone as sincere and kind as Bilbo could never show true interest in someone like you. How you had cursed yourself to stop thinking every gift he gave you, was to show you he wanted to court you - even though you were right to think those things.

The dwarves didn’t dare to speak about it. They didn’t know your words, but they knew your looks. They wouldn’t intervene. They knew how precious and fragily courtship was; one wrong word and it could cause huge grief on either side. Women were most treaured in their culture, and they’d rather die than see your heart break into a million pieces if Fili were to slip up or Ori would say something out of their norms.

They didn’t dare to let Bilbo know how helplessly you had told them that Bilbo wouldn’t come for them. That he was off to safety - as you had wished.

“I just don't care if it's real.

That won't change how it feels.

No, it doesn't change.”

It wasn’t until Smaug had finally been slain that Bilbo decided enough was enough. It wasn’t until Thorin had gone completely mad, that he decided that now would be the excellent time to share yet another one of your precious conversations.

Somewhere in the treasure chamber, you had collapsed behind a huge golden pile. Here, Thorin couldn’t see you. A brief break would surely escape his eyes.

You had shot up at the sound of footsteps, pretending to be searching through the endless piles of jewels. You were tired; your muscles were aching, your head was pounding from the golden light, you were starving and you felt as if you were going to fall asleep if you were to lie down again.

When you noticed Bilbo’s form approaching on top of the mountain you were working on, you uttered a sigh of relief, collapsing once again, knowing he wouldn’t dare to alert Thorin of your short break.

“And you can't resist

Making me feel eternally missed.”

“There you are,” He spoke, not needing to lower his volume, as the clattering of gold bounced off the walls, drowning out enough noise. You looked up at him with a kind smile: “Not much else to go to.” He frowned, sitting down beside you as he studied your features.

“I’m sorry, Bilbo,” You sighed, rolling your shoulders. “I’m exhausted.” “I can tell.” He muttered, worried evident in his eyes, a glimpse you caught. “Sorry.” “No, it’s fine.” You dismissed, knowing he had no ill intentions. Silence fell over the two of you, though this one wasn’t uncomfortable. In the weirdest location, it brough some sense of peace.

Bilbo fished into his pockets, placing a piece of bread and a small flask on your lap. “I brought you this.” Your heart warmed at the sight, a feather-light feeling entering your chest: “Thank you,” “I couldn’t sneak a full plate in. Thorin would notice.” “This is fine, Bilbo,” You assured, immediately starting your small meal. ”Thank you.”

“Yes,” he mumbled.

“You can't resist.

You can't resist.

Making me feel.”

He didn’t quite know what to do when you were eating. He came here with the intention of being honest with you. No turning around anything, no sugar-coating, just the proposal. If it was to be brief and boring, than so be it.

But, once more, something held him back. It didn’t seem right. He was going to run off this night for the Arkenstone, so if you rejected him, he wouldn’t really have to face you afterwards. But a hurtful rejection followed by betrayal might not have been the smartest move either. He was too much in his head when the words suddenly flew out, even surprising him: “Do you like me?”

You stopped chewing at the words, swallowing harshly as you looked at him, confusion in your eyes as your eyebrows furrowed together: “Beg your pardon?”

“You can't resist

Making me feel eternally missed.”

Bilbo recovered quickly, coughing slightly as he tried to defend himself. “It’s just that, throughout the journey, you keep creating distance between us. And we were so close at the beginning.” You nodded your head at that, cursing yourself silently for giving him the completely wrong idea. “Yes,” You hissed. “I do like you, Bilbo. And I apologize if I gave you the wrong impression.”

A huge weight lifted off his shoulders at your words, his chest suddenly feeling a lot less restricting than it suddenly had.

“You can't resist.

You can't resist

Making me feel.”

He watched your hands wander to your pockets, pulling out a familiar pebble as you anxiously toyed with it. Bilbo had given it to you after your escape from Mirkwood. You seemed to not be there completely, so he gave you a rock from the river so you had something to fidget with while Balin talked to Bard. He hadn’t known how much it actually soothed you, if only for the simple though of it.

“You kept that?” He asked curiously. “Of course I did,” You smiled, taking the pebble out of your pocket and laying it in the palm of your hand. “It was a gift. What did you think I would do with it?” “I don’t know.” The hobbit spoke honestly. “I’ve never seen them after I handed them to you.”

You breathed an ‘ah’ of understanding, before storing it back in your coat. “I kept them in my bag. Most of it has been stolen by the elves now, but some things still remain. You didn’t think I’d get rid of them, right?” When he didn’t answer to that, your hands found his, unconsciously sending goosebumps up his arm: “I would never. Not voluntarily.”

“Thank you.” He muttered.

“And you can't resist

Making me feel eternally missed.”

“Bilbo,” You began, retreating your hands as you thought over all that he had done for you. You might have been oblivious, but you weren’t stupid: “I do not wish to give you any unwanted impression of anything, but…” You trailed off, holding your breath as a bad kind of butterflies entered your stomach. “You have given me many things and kept me safe a numerous amount of times, and my gratitude exceeds my words, but…”

You didn’t know what to tell him. You didn’t know how. And there was no way to bring it lightly. Thus, with a hard swallow, you threw it out. “You do know that your actions look an awful lot like dwarven courting customs? I am pretty sure the company is convinced I am your spouse.”

His breath hitched at that. He came here to tell you, and now you were starting his conversation. What was he going to tell you? Honesty seemed so difficult now, but there was something in your eyes that hadn’t been there before. Some faint glance of recognition. And it gave him confidence: “They are.” He breathed, before quickly correcting himself. “Courting customs. Fili taught me.” “Oh,” “Yes,”

A second silence laid heavily, and neither of you really knew what to say to the other. So, per usual, Bilbo took the lead after a handful of hesitant seconds. “Um, but I’ve probably gotten the wrong hints from you so-”

“No,” You denied. “No, no, no. It’s simply that…This was intentional?”

“Yes.”

“Oh,”

“And you can't resist

Making me feel eternally missed.”

“But I understand if the feelings aren’t returned.” Bilbo added, already standing up from his seat. He was about to leave when your voice forced him to turn around: “Why me?” He couldn’t help but let a quiet scoff of confusion out. “I’m sorry?” “Of all the people out there, why me?”

Why you? He really couldn’t tell. He hadn’t met anyone in the Shire, and the way his life would have gone if it hadn’t been for Gandalf showing up, he might have never found anyone. Why you? He didn’t know. And he was honest to voice it: “I just know.”

“Oh,” You repeated, the sound coming out more as a breath than a pronounced word. “I am sorry. I wasn’t blind, though I doubt that will make you feel better.” You admitted. “I didn’t want to imagine things that weren’t there.” You didn’t see the way Bilbo’s face softened at that, or the way his heart fluttered when you finally spoke those words. “Thought I would save myself the heartbreak.” “You didn’t have to.” He sighed. Once more, he prepared to leave. And once more, he was interrupted by you.

“Bilbo?” “Hm?” He hummed as he turned around, a faint glimpse of hope in his heart. It only grew as you asked him your next question: “Once we get out of this, where will we go?” A bright smile came from his face as his breath hitched significantly. “Home, I suppose.”

You copied his smile, nodding your head at him.

“I’d like that.”

“And you can't resist.

And you can't resist

Making me feel.”

#november writings 2023 #the hobbit #tolkien #Bilbo Baggins #Bilbo #bilbo x reader #Bilbo Baggins x reader

[no-light-left-on]

So the Death of the Outsider lacks a chaos system and it makes perfect sense

(I recommend reading my other post on how chaos works in the DH universe first but it is not mandatory.)

The point of the chaos system is, at its core, a reflection of how a world already at its tipping point reacts to the player's actions: Dunwall ridden by the plague and oppressed by the Lord Regent’s rule, Karnaca bloodfly-bitten and slowly torn to shreds by the Duke with people scared after the recent coup.

Billie, however, simply exists as a person once the world has been tipped towards the better, Emily having reclaimed her throne and Karnaca slowly but surely steering towards better times. Her quest is not motivated by politics or by a falling empire. It is entirely personal to her, Daud, and the Outsider.

Billie is an ex-assassin. She puts the world on a tipping point, but she does not decide whether the world rights itself or comes crashing over the edge. She takes jobs from the black market, sometimes killing people for money, because that is all it is to her - a job. And while she may kill innocent people while at it, there is no more terror it can bring atop the cruel rule of the Duke and people dying in the mines. In the end, she will disappear into the shadows. It is just another mugging, another unfortunate murder of a father coming home in the evening. Nothing more, nothing less. No responsibility to take over it after.

She is dedicated to her quest, and that quest is not even hers - it is Daud's, and she is just going along with it out of maybe guilt, maybe old times' sake. She is not even that interested in killing the Outsider herself, has very little stakes in it, and decides to go through with it because it's what Daud wanted. There is no world that can react to her because she is the world that is reacting, in a sense, to Daud's wishes and the Outsider's subtle interventions.

Compared to, say, DH2 which takes place months before the events of DotO, Billie has very little to lose, no place to reclaim, no world to save. The results of her actions, no matter what they might be, won't change how the world is at the end of the game. Emily can choose whether a brilliant doctor lives so she can save lives, she decides whether the Howlers or the Overseers take over Batista, dictates who rules and with how much power, with what level of cruelty. Billie is killing a god, no matter what it takes, and there is little need for consideration of how this result is achieved.

The game does not even have targets, save for one, the Outsider himself. All the missions are about gathering intel and preparing for the job. The structure of the whole game is very different to serve the purpose of the plot and honestly it's a clever choice so that the focus remains on the one thing only - killing the Outsider.

One thing I did not mention in relation to chaos in my other post is that the chaos also influences the Outsider and his speeches at the shrines. Which, fair enough, it is just one more change in dialogue among many. But in the case of DotO, he is directly involved. He is not an observer anymore. He has real reason to be emotionally invested in what is happening and what Billie is doing. He needs to bait her into murder, or change her mind to spare him and free him from his eternal imprisonment. There can't be a change from interest to cynicism as Billie kills more people to get to him, because in the end, he is the target. He wants out of the Void by any means necessary, which means he has to be fully invested at all times. He has no reason to suddenly go soft and make subtle comments. He comes across as so much more malicious in this game, maiming Billie and being so incredibly cruel when he tells her that Daud has passed while she was away. All this because he can't risk her changing her mind, thinking to herself, “Hey, maybe he sucks but he’s not That Bad” and then turning on her heel to leave. He is trying to influence Billie instead, which he didn’t do with his Marked (unless you count his mentions of multiple possible outcomes as influencing, or him telling Daud about Delilah).

So no, the world won't change for you, the player. It won't change because you chose not to kill anyone, not even the contract targets, because if you don't do the dirty work, someone else will. And the Outsider cannot change either, because Billie is not changing the fate of an empire. She is changing the fate of Him, personally, and he cannot afford to let her choose the only bad choice - indifference. So there is no point in a chaos at all.

No matter what Billie does in the end, the outcome will be the same - the Void will change. sShe will change the universe as they know it, but no matter how she goes about it, the change will come. She is not faced with a question of what she wants the world to be. She was guided there by others, expected to do one thing - kill a god. The world has set her up, and now she has to react.

And so she comes to the Void and is met with the only choice that will matter: Is she going to show mercy, or remain the same?

#dishonored #doto #death of the outsider #daud #the outsider #billie lurk #another post on 'people dont understand chaos in these games and I am Upset about it' #while checking the wiki on the missions in doto so I wasnt actually forgetting anything I found out that someone got hired over doing #analysis of the game on twitter and harvey noticed #if this is all somehow correct and harvey sees it hi hello let me write dh3 I promise I wont make it into a dating sim #these are not tags I should be leaving under this post #anyways uh yeah there you go #dh #I should write that one post talking about how I interpret the chaos system in each game separately #also read the first essay. I am begging. its good #essays tag

[lokisgoodgirl]

The Clandestine Council: Clandestine F*cks [Avenger! Loki x Fem.Reader] 18+

Part of the Clandestine F*cks Collection [Link] A link to my Masterlist is HERE Summary: (19) Loki calls an emergency meeting with you, Wanda & Thor in a place that holds a special (hot) memory. Warnings: 18+ Minors DNI. Language. Smut. Megan. (w/c 3.2k)

You could smell the kit room before you saw it. A tang of leather armour and old sweat hung thick in the adjacent corridor, buried deep in the maze of Stark Tower. There were no fancy gadgets in the kit room. A glorified closet where dirty combat suits were flung after missions, discarded belts, boots, socks and cuffs littering the floor beneath the wooden benches that surrounded the walls.

It was also where Loki had rocked your world for the very first time. A dozen or more cloaks and tunics hung haphazardly inside the door, a testament that ‘I’ll get that later’ extended to superheroes too. Wanda had one folded over her arm as she looked up, watching as you crept in and shut the door. Three pairs of eyes rested on you as an awkward silence hung in the air, each attendee of the impromptu council waiting for another to speak first.

Wanda cleared her throat. “So, you guys are fucking, and no one can know” she said pointedly, clearly wishing she was still in bed. Loki’s brow furrowed, raising a finger. “Actually-” “Sorry-” Wanda continued, scrunching up her face sarcastically, “you guys are in lurve, and no one can know.” Loki huffed. Your stomach twisted as you anticipated the coming storm. Thor was shuffling on his feet, still trying to wrap his head around the complexities, while Wanda’s mission-bruised face angled towards your lover. His eyes were burning. “This isn’t new information, Laufeyson. Y/N told me weeks ago.” she drawled, rolling her eyes towards you. “I just don’t see what all the cloak and dagger of this..’council’ is about.”

“I didn’t tell her…” you muttered, gaze flickering to Loki. Wanda rolled her eyes again. “Oh yes, that’s right Laufeyson. Apologies. I saw you balls deep in my best friend backstage at the Expo. How could I forget.” Thor’s eyes widened, spinning a half circle towards his brother. “Balls-what?!”

Loki shook his head. “There has been a change to the nature of our need for secrecy since your departure to Sokovia, Maximoff. Rogers informed me of a clause added to the by-laws which state that new additions to our little team cannot have intimate relations with another for one year." He paused, as Wanda looked at him incredulously. Thor rubbed his eyes as Loki sighed, continuing. "Discovery now means I void my conditions here and will be imprisoned in Asgard for all eternity.” A moment of silence coated his closing words before Wanda whooped with laughter, covering her mouth too late to conceal the raucous sound. “I don’t think it’s that funny, actually.” Loki hissed, as Thor nodded. “Indeed, this is most serious, Lady Maximoff. We must be vigilant on their behalf.” Wanda’s choked laughter ebbed as your lips twitched. Her amusement was infectious. “I’m sorry- I’m sorry but...it is kind of ridiculous.” She wiped a tear of mirth from her eye as Loki frowned, pursing his lips. Wanda sighed, regaining her composure and turning to Thor. “So how did you find out?” The god’s gaze fell to the floor, kicking a discarded sock to the side. “I found a haphazardly discarded note, and that is all I wish to say.”

“Um, no…” Wanda drawled, wide eyes casting between you and Loki as she sidled closer to Thor. “Tell me. We’re all in this together, right? Y/N didn’t have time to tell me the gory details of this whole situation before they sent me off at a minute’s notice so puh-lease tell me. I am starved. It’s payment for my silence.” A pink blush was rising in Thor’s cheeks as he recalled the contents of the note, desperate not to meet his brother’s eyes. “There was talk of...commanding. Submission, you know...that sort of thing.” Wanda wriggled her eyebrows towards you. She raised them higher as she saw a subtle nod of your head towards Loki, still glaring at his brother.

Wanda's eyes lit up. “Really?” she murmured, clearly impressed. “Loki...Laufeyson.” “What?” he snapped, his eyes still burning into his brother’s reddened cheeks. Wanda shrugged, sitting down on the bench behind her and neatly folding the cloak on her lap.

“Oh, nothing. I just didn’t have you down as the submissive type, that’s all.” She smirked, enjoying the warning look on your face as Loki’s lips curled into a mischievous smile. “I can assure you, Maximoff” he began smugly, making you cringe, “that there is barely an element of your daily life in the past five months that has not been touched by our insatiable, primal lust for one another.” Thor grimaced, wrinkling his nose. Loki paced towards Wanda across the tiny room as she regarded him with innocent expectation, playing him like a fiddle. “...the safe house while you slept, the conference room, the diner while you stuffed your mouth with inferior sausage, the underground car park, the hood of Roger’s car..even against the windows of Stark’s precious panorama. I have brought your friend to rampant ecstasy that you can only fantasise of in each and every one. Multiple times. So do not presume that-” You had begun tugging Loki’s shirt halfway through his impassioned monologue, a sharp final yank signalling him to shut the fuck up. “I take it back. You’re the king, clearly.” Wanda hummed, smoothing the cape in her lap.

“I am a king...” Loki huffed, straightening his tie. Thor cleared his throat. “If we have concluded talking about my brother’s magic phallus…?” he grunted, a thin sheen of sweat forming on his brow.

Loki snorted derisively. “No magic, dear brother. Only expertise.” “Enough!” you hissed, running your eyes around the three members of your council. “Here’s the situation. We have just under five months until this rule becomes irrelevant. Until then, Loki and I will be cautious…” Thor and Wanda looked knowingly at each other. You rolled your eyes. “OK more cautious. We would appreciate if you could support us in that. So, no jokes in public, no comments. No slips in drunken conversations with Natasha…” you said, staring at Wanda as she feigned shock. There was a pause as you slipped your hand into Loki’s.

It felt divine, sharing your affection. A warm blanket wrapped around your heart against the cold winds of secrecy. “And...if it makes a difference. You two were the ones we would have told first, before Rogers...well, you know. We just wanted you to know that before-”

Knock Knock Loki snatched his hand from yours, all four bodies spinning towards the door of the kit room which had begun edging slowly open. Thor’s bulging arm flew to rest on the wall, a picture of forced causality as Megan from Operations popped her head through the gap. “Oh heyyy” she whined suspiciously, “I didn’t know you guys were all here.” Your stomach twisted.

“Lokes, can I speak to you for a mo? It’s important.” She winked, before disappearing from view. “Did I miss something?” Wanda murmured, as Thor shrugged. Your eyes met Loki’s; the silent conversation clear as he nodded softly. “I’ll be right back.” he said.

You watched him leave with a gnawing in your belly, the soft click of the re-enforced door vibrating in your eardrums. Wanda rubbed your arm. She didn’t know the context, but she could feel your anxiety. She looked around the room, new curiosity in her eyes. “Why did Loki want us to meet here? Surely there’s somewhere else...it’s not really his scene.” You looked away from the unforgivingly quiet doorway, silently thanking your best friend for the distraction. “He probably thinks it’s funny. This is where we first...you know..” She nodded with a wink, as Thor’s brow creased. “...Yes? Pray, continue.” he intonated, folding his arms. “Fucked.” Wanda turned to Thor in disbelief, “Jeesh, you really are stupid.” she grumbled. You listened to them bicker as your mind wandered to the first time. The first clandestine fuck of many that would come to rule your every waking moment. Between sarcastic barbs and thinly veiled innuendos, your acquaintance with Loki had grown slowly after his arrival. He was cold, distant...and yet intoxicatingly alluring in his disdain. You found yourself dropping your gloves an awful lot in this kit room after field training, enjoying the visceral feeling of his roaming gaze across your curves as you bent over. “Don’t think I haven’t noticed, Agent…” he had purred as you had unfurled to your full height clutching your wayward glove, “...the way you display yourself for me.” The memory made you shiver. His leather trousers hanging loose around his hips, the ties undone. The lines of his bare, muscled abdomen clenching as he kicked off his heavy boots.

The way his sultry voice had penetrated your core deeper than any lacklustre cock ever had. It had been layered with something new, a tinge of vulnerability that betrayed pure need beneath the haughty words. “Whatever do you mean?” you had said coyly, unbuckling the holster from your thigh as he closed the space between you.

He had stood close to you. Far too close to make denial anything less than awkward. He had known the possibilities of that were nil. You could smell the heat from his skin, the thin lace of cologne gripping the damp hair that hung loose around his cheekbones. His lips had pursed, gaze lowered as your fingers pulled the zip of your combat suit slowly down, revealing the curve of your cleavage. You remembered how he had groaned quietly at the sight, knowing that the thought of this exact scenario had crossed his mind many times with his large palm gripping his leaking cock in the confines of his rooms.

How many times had he cum over the thought of you wrapped around his length? Moaning his name as he pleasured you? The thought had made you dizzy. “I can think of many games we can play together, Agent” he had murmured, his fingers clasping over yours to hasten the descent of your zip, “but this impetuous denial is not one of them.” His lips had crashed to yours, pushing you back against the wall of coats in a mess of tongue and teeth. Unspent passions had overflowed into the air, low grunts and desperate moans mixing between you as the arms of your suit were deftly peeled away. Breathlessly you had pulled apart, stripping yourselves of the lower portions of your inconvenient clothing. You would never forget the awe that rose in your belly seeing Loki’s naked body in all its glory for the first time. The way he stood so confidently in the middle of the tiny, filthy room. His enormous cock as hard as the muscles that rippled across that taunt frame from his ankles to his jaw. He had kicked his trousers aside, those intense eyes blown wide with lust tracing over your body, memorising every inch as he licked his lips. “Agent, you are simply…” he had started, opting instead to take several steps towards you and grasp your ass firmly, pulling your pelvis tight against his hips. There had been no foreplay. Unless you counted the six weeks of teasing every damn day as you scoped each other from afar. Every stolen touch a teasing promise. Loki slammed into you, burying himself to the hilt inside your soaking pussy as you gasped. He was huge. “F-fuck me, Loki” you had stuttered, as he began to do exactly that. The two of you were merciless, your nails scratching down his back as he had growled his approval; powering his cock deeper inside you with every otherworldly thrust. For a moment, you thought it would split you in two. Searing pleasure soared upwards to the tips of your fingers as he forced your hands above your head. He held your wrists with one immovable fist, the other sliding to wrap one of your thighs against his waist. “Is this what you wanted Agent?” he moaned wantonly in your ear as he thrust into you, steadying himself against the coat-hooks as growls of pleasure rumbled in his throat. “More” you gasped, arching your back.

The thick softness of a fine cloak fluttered against your ass as Loki of Asgard fucked you against the mess of tangled kit straggled across the wall. He chuckled. “More, Agent? Greedy girl.” In the blink of an eye, he spun you to face the adjacent wall. Dozens of boots hung carelessly on a rack built against the brick. You fell forward, knocking several to the floor as you gripped the wooden hooks they exposed. “Fuckkk” you had groaned, eloquence leaving you as your teammate’s cock rammed into you from behind. It was even deeper from this angle, his hand pressing on your lower back as he bottomed out with a guttural groan. “Gods, darling…” he moaned, “y-you feel incredible, I-godss...”

You remembered how pride swelled at his pleasure, the needy satisfaction of knowing how he craved your mortal body. The walls of your pussy clenched, making Loki’s knees buckle. He fell forward, the taunt skin of his stomach smacking against your back. Gripping your hands holding on to the boot hooks, Loki rutted into you again and again as he panted like an animal. A primal carnival of pure lust as he took his fill above your rising moans of pleasure. “Give it to me, Laufeyson..I want your h-hot cum dripping down my l-legs” you whimpered, as another set of combat boots were shaken to the floor. A low growl came from behind you, somewhere between a snort and a chuckle as Loki rose up, his hands cupping your hipbones.

He pulled you flush against him with a jolt, making your eyes roll back. “Ladies first, darling” he muttered, rolling his hips, making you whine with need at the new sensation. You had never felt anything like it. The ridges of his length massaged you in places you didn’t know existed, pockets of pleasure lighting up like fireflies, thundering through your veins. “Loki...Lokiii...I’m gonna…” you whispered breathlessly while his fingers tightened their grip against your skin. “Yield to me, Agent…” he had murmured knowingly, growling as the walls of your cunt began to ripple mercilessly around his thick cock. Wanda's fingers snapping in front of your eyes broke you from your nostalgic trance.

Your touch had been tracing the nubs of the wooden boot rack, the memories as clear as spring water.

“Earth to Y/N” Wanda said sharply, as you got your bearings. “Sorry…” you muttered, casting your eyes towards the closed door. – Loki stood with his arms folded in the dim corridor. The bowels of Stark Tower that didn’t feature on the editorial of glossy magazines left a lot to be desired in terms of interior design. He could feel Megan’s eyes crawling over his biceps as he cleared his throat. “So, how may I be of assistance?” Megan slid towards him seductively, trailing her fingers across the wall behind her. “I think you know how you can assist me, Lokes…” she whispered, biting her lip. He rolled his eyes. “If that will be all, I really don’t have time for this-” Loki turned, before feeling the unexpectedly strong grip of Megan’s hand on his forearm. A desperate woman is not to be underestimated, Loki noted, as his eyes narrowed towards her. “I stopped by your rooms a few weeks ago to bring you a little gift. Me.” she giggled coquettishly, making Loki wince. “But what I heard...Loki-baby...it seems you’re very in demand.” Loki’s lip twitched at the memory of your hysterical lust while Megan hovered behind the door to his rooms. He restrained the smile, stoically waiting for her to continue making her flaccid point. “I have no issue with you seeing other women, if that’s what you’re worried about…” Megan murmured, running a finger down his chest as Loki stiffened. “A man with legendary appetites like you...it’s to be expected.” She pulled his tie, yanking him down so his ear was level with her lips. Her cheap perfume stung his nostrils, the jangle of her bangles making him shudder.

“All I ask is I have a slice of what you’re giving out. If I’m honest, the thought of sharing you turns me on...a lot.” Loki came to his senses, straightening as she released her grip. “Think about it.” she winked, he hand edging towards his crotch. “And Loki-baby…” she cooed, “I’ll make you forget that slut’s name in a second once you have a taste of what I can do...” He saw red, ingrained manners gone; pushing her against the wall as she cried out in surprise. The momentary fear in her eyes dissolved to rampant lust as he released heavy breaths above her, restraining himself from bashing her head against the paint. “Loki...save it for the bedroom, baby” she whined, her attempt at a smoulder hissing like damp ash. He growled, gripping the rough chiffon of her blouse into a fist. “How dare you presume that I could feel anything for the likes of you.” he sneered, nostrils flaring as her eyelids batted innocently. “I will say this only once. She is no slut. She is-” He caught himself, the words choking as he looked down at Megan’s overinflated lips stretching in a smirk. She giggled, sliding her hand over his fist gripped tightly to her blouse. “Playing hard to get, Loki...I like it. I like a challenge.” Loki let go with a growl, running his hands through his hair as he spun on his heels in frustration. Damn that Rogers. He turned towards her, finger raised to put her to rights once and for all. Megan caught it between her thumb and forefinger, leaning forward before he knew it and sucking the tip between her bulbous lips. “Enough.” he hissed, swiping his hand away, the venom in his tone poisoning the air. Megan straightened her blouse, a satisfied smile descending on her features. “You’re right, we wouldn’t want to get caught with your friends right next door, would be?” she murmured, licking her lips. Loki strode down the hallway towards the kit room, fury bubbling in his veins as he heard Megan’s shrill voice following him like noxious gas.

“We’ll loop back to this, Laufeyson” she called coyly, a faint air of professionalism returning. “We will not.” Loki hissed, not deigning her with a backwards glance. – You heard his heavy footsteps approaching, the gait betraying that something had happened. But of course it had. It was Megan. Loki slipped inside the door. “I think we should leave now.” he muttered, raising his eyebrows towards you. Thor huffed as he shuffled on his feet. “Shall we not even learn the clandestine nature of the lady’s urgent matter, brother?” Loki clenched his jaw, his stare flickering between the sets of eyes fixed upon him.

“Mischief.” he said grimly, making Thor chuckle. Wanda noted the colour leaving your face with a twitch of her brow, her suspicions proving more correct with every passing second.

The blonde god meandered around the wall of the small room, brushing his thick hand across the line of combat holsters hanging from ageing hooks. He saw a flash of red concealed under one of Barton’s muddy tunics, draped across the edge of the frame. “Y/N mentioned that this was the site of your inaugural lovemaking, brother” he chuckled, swiping the forgotten red cloak and inspecting it, pleased with his find. “Indeed.” Loki grumbled, casting his eyes again to the doorway.

Thor’s eyes widened, seeing a whole stash of his cloaks revealed by the discovery of the first; a veritable buffet of Asgardian finery buried beneath the mess. “I was wondering where these had disappeared to...I thought you had stolen them, actually.” There was a pause before Thor’s turned to you and Loki, a warning flashing in his stare.

“Your amorous activities…not on my cloaks brother, surely?” You felt your cheeks heat, as Wanda began to usher Thor towards the door; a bundle of red fabric balled haphazardly in his bulging arms. “Especially on your cloaks, brother.” Loki said, his lips curling in a satisfied smirk. - Tags

@lokischambermaid @lady-rose-moon @lokiprompts @siggytumbles @123forgottherest @mrsbarnes32557038 @moonlightreader649 @cakesandtom @daggers-and-mischief @tbhiddlestan83 @thedistractedagglomeration @gracecaldwellx @skymoonandstardust @mischief2sarawr @muddyorbs @fictive-sl0th @holymultiplefandomsbatman @ozymdias @thomase1 @wheredafandomat @lokikissesmyforehead @ladylovesloki @peaches1958 @trickster-maiden @ravenwings73 @dangertoozmanykids101 @toozmanykids @nerdy-fangirl-65 @ijuststareatstuffhereok89 @xorpsbane @demoiseller @anonymousfiction211 @daggers-and-mischief @five-miles-over @handsaroundmyneck @trojanaurora @nataliewalker93 @lonesomegrace @vbecker10 @michelleleewise @ladymischief11 @itsybitchylittlewitchy @filthyhiddles @loopsisloops @yelkmelk @silverfire475 @kats72 @sinsandguilt @mistress-ofmagic @simplyholl @mochie85

#loki x reader #lokismut #loki smut #loki x female reader #loki laufeyson #loki fanfiction #loki x yn #loki x reader smut #loki x female reader smut #loki imagine #loki oneshot #loki series

[lookinghalfacorpse]

all these lives and you’ve never learned a damn thing.  au where c!dream and c!sam have met many, many times in the past.

tw: mentions of violence, injury, blood, typical c!awesamdude behavior, implied c!awesamdream

---------

1)

- there’s only one, rotting book in the basement of philza’s cabin that tells the whole story.  a god of creation and destruction, sharp-featured and bright-eyed, and the Warden created to contain him.  the Wardens are a unique breed-- blind and single-minded, yet with a superior sense of hearing and smell, bound to darkness and skulk.  their name states their simple purpose: to imprison. no human could survive in the skulk for long, but for a god, the agony is eternal. even if he escaped, what would he face?  the angry and jealous pantheon that locked him away?  the mortals who no longer worship?  in his hands is the power of revival, and that’s exactly what he does; he recreates himself, later in the timeline, breathing air free of skulk spores for the first time in eons and praying that the future is kinder.

- (the Warden wails and screams, finding his prisoner gone.  when the God Prisoner cried, it was beautiful-- when the Warden cries, his sonic shrieks destroy the city around him)

- (what is his purpose now?  what name do they call him?  he was yours, he was yours, he was YOURS.)

2)

- he is a farmhand, and he is gentle.  a young man interested in racing, both on foot and on horseback, and he’s good at what he does.  he enjoys the company of close friends who he’s known since childhood.  some have moved to the city to study in big school-towns (’universities’, he thinks?  ‘campuses’?  is there a difference?) but he isn’t interested, and he feels claustrophobic in the crowds.  his horses need him.  historians discover a mural buried deep underground-- a depiction of a god of creation and destruction.  sharp-featured and bright-eyed.  the gods of old have locked him away, it says.  yet, he appears to be standing and breathing, right there in the stables, wearing muddy boots.

-superstition leads them to send five warriors after him.  among them, a childhood friend who studied in the city, mastering forgery, weaponry, and engineering.  he doesn’t make it easy for them-- he’s a runner, after all.  the chase is long. arduous.  he’s hungry, and there’s no time to stop.

- (an arrow through his left lung.  he’s gasping and retching on the ground, drowning in his own blood.  in his escape, he exploded the mural.  he doesn’t know why he did it.  spite, he supposes.  when the Goddess of Death takes him, she recognizes him, and she wonders if he’ll try again)

3)

- he is a traveler, and he is free.  a giant box of oddities and antiques is bound to his back, and he visits various villages to make a few sales before moving on.  he spends several days in a busy port town, befriending the locals.  he hears rumors of the prince-- an intelligent but aloof sort who spends time in the marketplace, enjoying what’s left of his youth before he inherits the crown.  he laughs-- you only hear about disguised princes in fairy tales.  he sells a hand-painted bowl from lands far south of the ocean to a handsome man with broad shoulders.

- (’he looks like a god,’ the prince thinks.  he’s not sure where the thought came from.)

- (he was yours, he was YOURS--)

- (”bring me the traveler in the green cloak,” he tells his guards, “he’ll be a fine addition to the throne room.”)

4)

- a butterfly and a spider.  the spider will not bite, but the web holds strong.  starvation settles.

5)

-  he is young, and he is in love.  he’s also a warrior, and he wears many scars on his skin, but he’s not thinking about that right now.  he’s known the blacksmith for years, and he’s thinking of a new way to fluster him.  hand-feed him an expensive chocolate from the neighboring town?  ask the tailor down the road to make something special?  even complimenting his craftsmanship seems to be enough these days.  the push and pull of new romance has helped him recover from the bloodshed-- he sees the chance for a new life, and it comes from the same man who made his weapons.

- “your handiwork kept me alive on that field, you know.”

6)

-  a piece of a broken mural lies underground.  a young king excavates the land, and it’s tossed into the ocean with every other rock and stone.  a lab is built there instead, and atop it, a mighty castle.

-  "I'm basically immortal! i don't have an heir because i won't ever need one. i'll just rule forever! and look-- the villagers are living much better lives with everything i taught them, and it's only gonna get better!" the king is charming, at least. clearly passionate about his work. but...

- "so what do you need me for?" he asks. he was only passing by, after all. on the run after his own kingdom was ransacked. the defeat was heavy on his shoulders, but he still had his life, and it was all he needed.

- "i-- what? isn't it obvious?" he paces, his hands splayed. "i want you safe inside these walls. with me." (he was YOURS) "just me and you. Don't... don't make me ask twice."

7)

-  the power of revival is in his hands again. he feels his heart beating in his chest. he makes plans.  he designs a structure-- dark and gruesome (no human could survive in the skulk for long, but for a god--) (starvation settles) (he’s gasping and retching on the ground, drowning in his own blood).

- (praying that the future is kinder...)

- “c’mon, punz,” he says, “sam is the only one who can do this.  trust me on this.”

#drabbles #dreblr #my demons speak #past life au #cdream #c!dream #csam #c!sam #c!awesamdude #c!awesamdream #awesamdream

[aralezinspace]

Pale II

~Part I~

A/N: Requested by anonymous- You asked and I have delivered, behold 3.5k of filth and feels!! Again, I hope anyone who needs this kind of comfort finds it in this story, and that if you are struggling with this yourself, know that you are not alone (I'm just a stranger on the interwebs but I'm rooting for you) and have access to the help you need 💖💖 tagging @fangirlmary

Warnings: smut, themes of eating disorders

~~Requests are open!~~ ~~Current WIPs~~

Dream’s vow sent a shiver down your spine. The words vibrated with raw power and promise. He pulled away from the kiss just long enough to let you catch your breath, his eyes raking up and down your form as you took shallow, almost heaving breaths.

“If it would aid you,” he rasped against your lips, “I would begin my worship tonight.”

Your breath caught in your throat and immediately dried it out. Dream’s eyes were wide open and expectant. You could tell he was asking for consent, and that he understood why his touch may be unwanted. He was doing the same thing you had done for him, back when the two of you had stepped into the more physical aspect of your relationship: he had told you of his imprisonment, how he was isolated from the entire universe for over a hundred years.

It would leave anyone uncomfortable in their skin, yearning for touch and connection, yet frightened and recoiling from any form of intimacy.

These thoughts whirled through your mind for a few moments that stretched into an eternity before coming to a screeching halt when you realized that Morpheus was still waiting for your consent. You nodded once, breaths still shallow with anticipation.

With a touch lighter than a midnight breeze, Dream brushed a stray lock of hair out of your face. The same hand tenderly cupped your cheek. You leaned into the touch, letting him hold the weight of your head in his palm. A gentle, serene smile touched your face.

“My love,” he breathed, his eyes still silver and swimming like a full moon reflected in the ocean. If only you could see yourself the way he saw you. How you appeared to radiate life and warmth from the very center of your being like a sun. You were the most beautiful creature he had ever seen or spoken to, and he was Dream of the Endless, one of the most powerful beings in existence.

With a sure but gentle touch, almost as if he were afraid of you shattering under his fingers, Dream helped manipulate your body to the plush rugs in front of the fireplace. A pillow manifested beneath your head as Dream laid you on your back. The heat of the fire gently rolled over your skin.

Dream hovered above you on all fours and leaned in. The fingers of one hand ghosted over every inch of exposed skin: across your forehead, down your cheek, ever so gently over your neck. His ghosting touch raised goosebumps on your arms, sent shivers down your spine, and left a trail of sparks in its wake. His usually cold hands had been warmed by the fire, and waiting power prickled his fingertips.

“May I?” he asked, soft and low. You nodded again, not even attempting to form words that you knew would just get stuck in your throat. Dream had utterly enchanted you, had you spellbound with his gaze and his touch. His hands moved to your shoulders and squeezed for just a moment. When they began to move again, you felt a tingling, like thousands of tiny grains of sand. As his hands moved reverently down your chest, your shirt vanished in their wake, slowly revealing your torso to his gaze.

You shook and shivered with anticipation. You were sure Dream could see each pounding beat of your heart beneath your breastbone. His eyes darted quickly over every inch of you, the silver slowly bleeding to black as his hunger grew. Inch by agonizingly pleasurable inch, your whole chest was revealed to Morpheus’ ravenous gaze, and his eyes drank you in like a man starved.

Instantly self conscious, your hands moved to cover your chest, to start the process of shrinking in on yourself, to make your body as small and vulnerable as you felt. Dream’s hands flew to your wrists, stopping your hands in their path. Without breaking contact, his elegant fingers unwrapped from your wrists and intertwined themselves with yours before slowly pressing your hands into the floor on either side of your head.

“Please, my love,” he murmured, briefly brushing his lips over yours. “There is no need to hide yourself. Every inch of you is beautiful beyond compare.” His lips moved over your jaw and down to your neck, his kisses becoming firmer and more insistent. He gently sucked his favorite spot on your neck- a little patch where your neck met your shoulder, dotted faintly with freckles.

A tiny, surprised gasp slipped out of your mouth at the gentle but insistent sucking and tonguing at your skin. He hummed, soft and low in his throat, taking encouragement from that one sound. Ever gentle and reverent, he pressed his teeth into the skin. Not hard enough to leave a mark, not yet, although he would gladly oblige if that’s what you desired.

Your hands flew into his hair and anchored themselves in the onyx strands, keeping his mouth at your neck. His teeth bit in just a bit harder, the sting of pain from his scalp sending his blood hotly coursing through his body to settle between his thighs.

Morpheus detached himself from your neck in favor of kissing you, his lips greedily devouring yours. You gasped, and he eagerly swallowed it down to hold in the center of his being, along with every other sound he intended to pull from you. Your lips eagerly met his, returning the gesture as best you could, showing him that his affection was not unappreciated. That the worship he intended to bestow on you would not go unnoticed.

Dream’s hands released yours in favor of sliding up your arms towards your breasts. You tensed slightly, your eyes about to flicker shut, almost unable to handle the intensity of his stare. He paused, one hand reaching up to lovingly caress your face. “Look at me, my heart.”

His voice moved through you in a rumbling caress like velvet-clad lightning. His words were tender, yet never lost the air of a king. It may have been phrased as a gentle urge, but there was no doubt he expected you to do as he asked. You took a deep breath and forced yourself to open your eyes, focusing on the bridge of his nose rather than meeting his gaze.

The open adoration on his face almost brought you to tears. He continued to stroke your cheek with his thumb. “Dream,” you choked, leaning into his touch. Words were clawing at your throat to get out, but hell if you knew what those words would be. Dream hushed you with another kiss, you whimpered against his lips.

“My love,” he breathed in your ear. The low rumble of his voice mixed with the crackling of the fire, making your skin tingle. “You need not do or say anything.” His hand against your cheek firmed in its touch; you could feel his power faintly crackling beneath his skin.

“Every atom of you is more beautiful than anything I could ever create. That is truth, and what I believe. I promised to worship you until you believe it as well, and then I will continue to worship you, and not stop until every star has burned out.” Dream’s lips tenderly pressed into the spot just beneath your ear before he whispered, “This I swear.”

He sucked in a breath, as if he couldn’t believe you were there beneath him, letting him see you at your most vulnerable. You always claimed Dream had pulled you under his spell, but the truth was that you had utterly and completely enchanted him. The way the firelight was reflected and danced in your eyes was nothing short of hypnotizing.

You stared back at him, also not quite believing that he was real and not just an apparition. The fire bathed half of his face in its warm glow while the other half remained in shadow, his eyes positively sparkling. Just when you thought he couldn’t appear any more gorgeous, he does something like this, positions himself just so, burning an even more ethereal image of him into your mind. Beautiful and terrible as the dawn, ancient and bright as a star.

“Let me worship you my love,” he growled, biting slightly harder into the spot beneath your ear. “I swore that you would not endure this alone any longer. And you will not.” His words rang with truth and the entire room vibrated with his power, but his unspoken words were just as clear: he would continue to pour his love and devotion into you, even long after you overcame this, as he knew you would. It would take time, and courage, but he knew you had the strength to do it.

You nodded again, relaxing your body into the floor. Your hands caressed Dream’s shoulders, trying to push his coat off. Your shirt had long turned to sand, and Dream was still wearing far too many clothes for what he apparently intended. He took the hint, shrugging his coat off and tossing it to the side.

You sat up to kiss him again, your fingers finding their customary place in his hair. You tugged on the strands every time his tongue rubbed against yours, and swallowed the barely repressed growls he let out. You could feel his hips pressing into yours, could feel how hard he was already. Every barely controlled press of his hips into yours made your core tingle and spark like fireflies.

Dream’s mouth latched back onto your neck as your hands slipped down his chest to the hem of his shirt, scratching at the skin as you urged him to remove it. He chuckled at your eagerness but refused to budge, not now that he had you where he wanted you: open and vulnerable beneath him.

His teeth dug into your skin with more force now, hard enough to leave a mark. Your short cry turned into a soft moan when he traded his teeth for his tongue, sucking and licking at the indents until his favorite spot on your neck was mottled red. Dream’s voice in your ear vibrated with his lust: “Wear this as a mark of my devotion, my love.” His mouth attacked your flesh again, biting and sucking and kissing until you began to writhe under him.

“Lord Morpheus,” you chided, trying to imitate his kingly authority, “You are still wearing far too many clothes.” Dream chuckled deep in his chest, playfully biting at your bottom lip. His shirt and pants slowly dissolved into sand, revealing him to your hungry gaze. Your eyes flickered up and down his bare body, in awe of his ethereal beauty as always.

His hands grasped onto your hips, fingertips briefly biting into the flesh before taking the time to slide devotedly down your legs. Like your shirt, your pants disappeared in the wake of his touch, like sand sliding over your skin as an ocean wave recedes. You shivered when you were totally bare, even with the heat of the fire. You could feel his gaze slide over you almost as if it were a physical touch.

His hands were firm as they moved down your legs. He curled down your body with his arms in front of him like a stretching cat. A very hot stretching cat, that just happened to be the ruler of dreams and nightmares, who held you frozen with the force of his gaze. With deliberate slowness, he lowered his head to your patch of curls and took a deep inhale, a low, primal growl rumbling from his mouth. His eyes briefly flicked back to yours, making sure you were okay. A high, soft “Mm hm” was the only answer you were capable of. A devilish smile spread across his face, and he began his worship.

Your hips jerked at the first touch of his tongue against your folds, veins of fire spreading outward from the point of contact. Insistent hands instantly pinned your hips to the floor and unnatural strength kept them there while Morpheus continued to use his tongue to carve his devotion into you. Your hands grasped his hair and yanked, keeping his head firmly in place. You felt his moan reverberate through your entire being, felt his hot breath on your wet flesh.

You tugged his hair again, and Morpheus attacked your flesh with even greater intensity, more devotion. His elegant fingers massaged your hips before moving down to squeeze and knead at your thighs, pressing them to the sides of his head to keep him firmly in place. He appeared a devoted disciple, prostrated in reverence before his goddess, but you knew Morpheus was anything but submissive.   

With one long, final suck, he withdrew from your throbbing core and dragged his lips back up your legs, taking the time to suck marks of his love into your thighs, the soft flesh of your stomach, the undersides of your breasts. He traded his mouth for his hands, firmly kneading your breasts while his mouth devoured yours. You could taste yourself on his tongue and in every corner of his mouth as he drew your tongue in.

As he pulled away, you sensed the question he wanted to ask before he even drew breath to ask it. “Yes,” you breathed, “Yes, now. Now Dream, please.”

Normally, Dream loved hearing you beg- it made his blood run hot to hear how much you wanted him, how desperate you were for his touch. The breath he didn’t need got stuck in his lungs every time he took in your lust blown eyes, heard your breathy pleas.

Not this time. His love, his devotion, his support… these were things you should never have to ask for, let alone beg. Not when he’d eagerly give them.

You took Dream’s cock in hand and guided it to your entrance, as if the sweet, breathy moans that slipped out of you weren’t evidence enough of your need. “Shhh…” he gently eased you with a lingering, kiss. “Allow me, my love. Let me in.”

His hand replaced yours on his cock and he brushed it against your core, coating it in the wetness that had been leaking from you ever since he laid you down in front of the fire. Your tiny whimpers drew him in faster than a siren’s song. Not willing to wait any longer, barely keeping hold of his famous self control, he pushed his cock into you, inch by agonizing inch.

Your back arched with a sharp cry as you felt him stretching you, pleasurable almost to the point of being painful. When he was fully seated inside you, you both took a moment to breathe, to feel your flesh pulse in time with each other.

Morpheus twined your fingers together and pressed your hands back into the carpet above your head. “Every bit of you is beautiful,” he breathed against your lips, his length twitching inside you. “Let me in, let me ease your suffering.” His hips pulled back just a hair’s breadth before easing back in. “Let me banish the darkness that says all of those horrible things that have culminated in your pain.”

He could feel you trembling underneath him, your entire body vibrating from the impact of his words. You sniffed and bit your bottom lip, trying to keep more pathetic whimpers at bay. You felt the threatening burn of tears behind your eyes, the emotions clogging up your throat.

You now understood why it was referred to as the mortifying ordeal of being known: never had you felt so painfully exposed, or so fully loved.

“I love you,” he purred against your lips, his tongue chasing the words into your mouth. He shifted his legs, his muscles rippling like sand beneath a wave as he rolled his hips into yours.

It was like lightning had struck the center of your being. Every thrust of his hips sent fire through your veins. His hands squeezed yours in time with his movements, you whimpered under the onslaught of sensation. “Dream-!” Your choked call of his name was somewhere between a gasp and a whimper, watery with your unshed tears.

He gently shushed you again and brushed his lips over a tear that slipped out of your eye. He rolled his hips just right to brush against a spot deep inside you, swallowing your moans with a lingering kiss. “I’m here,” he breathed, capturing your bottom lip between his teeth. He increased his pace, his thrusts reaching deeper. “Let go. I’m here.”

A hand released its grip and slid down your body, briefly stopping to give each of your breasts a tender squeeze while his other hand kept both your wrists pinned. By the time his hand made its way between your thighs, your hips were meeting his every motion, eager to reciprocate the devotion and reverence he was granting you in any way you could.

Nimble fingers rubbed over your clit in tiny circles, and even more heat coursed through you. With pleasure heating you from the inside and the fire warming your skin, you felt like you were burning alive. Your arms strained against Dream’s grip, you wanted to bury your hands in his hair and mark his back with your nails, but marble had more give than his hold.

“Please,” you groaned, “Let me touch you.”

Dream paused, watched you pant for breath. He shifted his grip on your hands and brought them up to rest around his neck. You instantly pulled him down into a need-filled kiss, raking your nails down his back in an effort to pull him closer. When the only way for him to be closer would be to sink into you, he began to move again, desperately rolling his hips into yours.

His touch on your clit became more insistent once he sensed you were close to falling over the edge. You could feel him throbbing inside you, dangerously close to his own end. His eyes were somewhat hazy, completely lost in you.

“Let go, my love,” he murmured in your ear, the words almost sounding like a plea. “Let go.”

You were helpless beneath him, couldn’t resist even if you wanted to. Which you didn’t. Your climax gently washed over you in a manner not unlike sinking into a warm bath. Your back arched again, and a sharp cry that shifted into a satisfied moan forced itself from your mouth. Your grip tightened around Morpheus, your nails leaving crescent shaped indents in his back. You panted for breath in time with his movements, and when you finally felt his hot release inside you, you held him so tightly your arms shook.

For a while, the only sounds were the crackling of the fire, your steadily slowing breaths, and the whisper of skin on skin as you held and caressed each other in the afterglow. Dream shifted his form just the barest amount necessary so that he was laying on the floor beside you with his back to the fire, holding you in the warmth of his embrace. His arms around you, the wall of his chest, his legs twined with yours, it all made you feel so very small, but so very loved and safe.

Your eyes were heavy, and you were about to succumb to sleep when your stomach gurgled like an insistent cat. Your eyes shot open, and a million emotions crossed your face in an instant. Morpheus instantly held your face in his hands with infinite tenderness, his eyes taking in every expression you made. You were hungry, your body was telling you it needed sustenance, and this basic need was causing you anguish.

“I’m here,” he reminded you softly. A platter of grapes, cheese, and crackers, along with a glass pitcher of ice water and a crystal goblet appeared within arm’s reach. A thought occurred to him: a good first step to overcoming this may be to help you associate food with love and care, rather than the pain that had grown your disorder in the first place. Some of the books he read had briefly mentioned this; anything was worth a try for you.

Dream spent the rest of the night feeding you small bits of fruit and cheese and pouring you goblets of water like an offering at an altar. With every bite, he reminded you in that soothing baritone that you were beautiful, that he was so proud of you, that he loved every inch of you. Every bite was followed by tender, loving kisses, and you quickly grew addicted to the combined flavor of Morpheus and the grapes.

The process was slow, but by the time you had finished the platter, you were comfortably full, strength had returned to your limbs, and Dream looked at you as if he had never beheld something so stunning in the entirety of his endless life.

This night was only the beginning, but as you drifted off to a contented sleep in his arms, the gently burning fire of hope in the core of his being told him there would be many more such victories for you in the future. He renewed his earlier vows in a whisper against your slightly parted lips, letting you breathe them in and hold them inside you:

“I will worship your body with love and care until you know and believe, as I do, that you are beautiful in every way, and then continue to do so. Through every victory and defeat, I will be beside you. You will not endure this alone, for I will love you through it all, until this universe comes to an end. This I swear.”

#The Sandman #The Sandman fanfiction #Morpheus x reader #Dream of the endless x reader #Morpheus imagine

[writingforatwistedworld]

Phantom bride event-Seeing you in formal wear (suit/wedding dress/whatever) Pt. 6

Character: Idia Shroud

Self-aware au

I do not take any responsibility for you reading this no matter which age group you are from!

WARNINGS: Yandere themes, obsession, marriage, fire, kidnapping, imprisonment

Idia thinks he already died

There is no way that you, the Overseer, would come rescuing him… IN WEDDING ATTIRE!!!

He would rather believe it if Lilia told him that he was his friend online than you being here (oh if he knew…)

Are you actually ding something like this? For him? The one who no one likes and thinks is weird??!

Mhm confirms it. He is right now in some sort of delirium

Idia thinks that for you he is nothing more than a worm

And then he becomes furious

How dare such a spoiled nuisance force you into a situation in which you have to bend to her wishes??!

Suddenly he wishes to be as powerful as Hades...

Being able to control the dead and make sure that they don't do too much havoc must be nice....

And now he is bursting into flames... OH GOD THE TABLES ARE BURNING!!! SOMEONE SAFE THE CAKE!!!!

Everyone is screaming, the whole thing is chaos and Lilia is screaming “BURN IT DOWN! BURN IT ALL TO THE GROUND!” from somewhere

Please handle your Idia with caution and care or have a fire extinguisher always with you

Afterwards please give him headpats, he needs it, you need it (and I need to see you doing it even more...)

Also, he might want to lock you up... he has been experimenting with electrical locks these past few weeks so... uh... mhm

But he loves you so much! Enough to burn down the world! Enough to keep you for eternity! Enough go bind you forever to himself!

Don't you dare to run!

#yandere twisted wonderland #yandere twst #yandere twisted wonderland x reader #yandere twst x reader #self aware au #yandere idia #yandere idia x reader #yandere idia shroud #tw: yandere #tw: obsession #tw: marriage #tw: fire #tw: kidnapping #tw: imprisonment

[cosmicjoke]

You know, it always stayed with me, when I first read “The Vampire Lestat”, the end, when Lestat reveals what happened to him in Paris with Armand, and reading it once again, I’m reminded of why it never left me.  It’s maybe the most heartbreaking thing in the whole book, and that’s saying a lot, considering all the tragedies of Lestat’s life up to that point.  Armand’s cruelty to Lestat here is breathtaking, the way he manipulates him, and then imprisons and starves him in order to place him in a desperate enough state to give testimony against Claudia and Louis, when already Lestat was in such horrifyingly dire straits.  Making it all the more heartbreaking is the way Lestat holds no ill will or grudge towards either Claudia or Louis for what was done, how he even feels he deserved what they did to him, and the way he had no intention of revenge, or even knowledge of their presence in Paris, but how Armand uses him to exact his own revenge for Lestat’s rejection, a thing Lestat never even conceived, and a thing even if he had understood, he couldn’t have given to Armand anyway.  It’s just so awful, and sad beyond words, the final blow being when Armand pushes Lestat from the roof of the tower.  God, it’s brutal.

And the sadness of it is really driven home all the more when so many years later, Armand finds Lestat again, and Lestat is rotting away, cut off so completely from life and the world and humanity, with no real will to live, and we see the tragedy doubled in Armand’s own loneliness and despair, the way he’s wrought his own ruin too, deserted by Louis, his duplicity and manipulation and assault of before rendering any kind of genuine reconciliation with Lestat impossible.  The way he tries one last time to win Lestat’s love and companionship, only he uses the same methods of deceit as always, conjuring illusions to win the love he craves.  And it’s far too late, too much bad history between them, too many mistakes made, and Lestat is too far gone at that point for it to have ever worked.

I think what really drives these scenes home in their tragedy too is the kind of juxtaposition of Lestat and Armand, the way their roles have in a way reversed, with Armand decked out in the modern finery of the 20th century, moving among the modern world, while Lestat lies in ruin beneath the foundations of a rotted out relic of a house from the 18th century, clothed in rags and lost in despair and physical degradation.  But both of them are totally alone still, cut off and outcast in their own ways.  Armand’s strange obsession with Lestat, continuing to hang about near to him, and Lestat’s consuming despair at last driving him under the earth.  It’s just such a powerful and poignant and heartbreaking study of loss and aloneness and what it means to be truly outcast.  I felt so deeply for both of them while reading this, even with the horror I felt at Armand’s cruelty. 

I think the paragraph that got me the hardest was this:

“The earth was holding me.  Living things slithered through its thick and moist clods against my dried flesh.  And I thought if I ever do rise again, if I ever see even one small patch of the night sky full of stars, I will never never do terrible things.  I will never slay innocents.  Even when I hunted the weak, it was the hopeless and the dying I took, I swear it was.  I will never never work the Dark Trick again.  I will just... you know, be the “continual awareness” for no purpose, no purpose at all.”

It speaks so hauntingly and with such sadness to Lestat’s true tragedy.  That he feels so lost in the world as this being with no purpose, no use, no point. 

His one and only consolation in life was this idea that he could give his life meaning through doing good in the world, and he’s left now an immortal who can give his eternal life no meaning at all.

Ah, I weep.

How can one not feel for Lestat?  How can one ever accuse him of being a shallow or frivolous person?  I’ll never know.  He’s anything but.

#Lestat De Lioncourt #The Vampire Lestat #armand

[my-own-walker]

OMG I love your work so much!!🤩😘

Could u maybe do JPM but where the reader is like stoned as fuck one day and he comes into their room and she's facetiming her cousin and their just laughing so much that they can't breath and just like crying because of it

If you feel comfortable enough to do it🤪😊😊

Oh! Sweet Nothin’

note: oh absolutely fuck yes anon!! thank u. i love this crazy mf. i’m not very good at happy stories but let’s give this a try ...

warnings: drug use, mentions of death and being dead

+++

I wasn't dead. At least not yet.

My stay at the Hotel Cortez had begun a year prior. I took a solo trip to the City of Angels to take some time away from my life in San Fransisco. Dead end job. Hated my family. The usual shit.

I had heard really fucked up things about the hotel so of course I decided to stay there. I had an affinity for all things murder and ghouls. The rumors of the place being haunted drew me there like a cartoon character being drawn to the scent of a pie cooling on a windowsill.

Little did I know how true the rumors would be.

It wasn't long before I was being pestered by every Tom, Dick, and Harry that forever resided in the place. I wasn't scared, though. Not in the slightest.

I pestered them back, making jokes about their eternal damnation and subsequent imprisonment behind the building's four walls. My fucked up sense of humor got me far in the Hotel Cortez.

My gall enticed one very unfriendly spirit. One whose name was only spoken in whispers around the place. James Patrick March. Yes, the guy who built the place.

He and I clicked instantly. I don't know what it was about me that made him choose to spare me. But we were instant lovers. In fact, the night we met he was already saying he loved me. Boy, was he weird in the best way.

The guy had a knack for violence. Well actually, a fetish for murder. But again, he didn't scare me.

Maybe that's why he chose to protect me. He moved me into his suite and everything. I became a permanent fixture in his space. In return, he kept me alive so I could continue to roam the living world.

I loved him. More than anything in the world. He was dark. He was terrifying. But he was mine. And he was so loving back.

He really tried his best to understand me. Being a twenty-something-year-old in the 21st century, I knew much about the world that he didn't. James died in the early 1930s. He retained his old-timey accent and style of dress. He was a true gentleman, well, besides the whole killing thing.

I, on the other hand, was a burnout loser from the Bay Area. I dressed in ripped jeans, flowy skirts, and Doc Martens. I had tattoos and a shag haircut. I smoked a shit ton of weed and was addicted to social media. I was far from a lady, let alone one like James' past lovers.

But maybe that's what made us work. I balanced him out. He taught me about the finer things in life, and I gave him a window to the outside world in return.

Only I would fall in love with a dead 120-year-old.

+

It was a rainy afternoon in LA, so I returned to the Hotel Cortez. I had been out shopping for rolling papers downtown.

Behind its walls was where I felt most comfortable. James was off doing...whatever a 1930s ghost does when I arrived back at the suite. Needless to say, I immediately dug into my new purchase upon my arrival.

James hated the pen I used to get high. He thought it looked silly.

'If you insist upon smoking, dearest, you should do it like a true sportsman,' he would say..whatever the fuck that meant.

I figured it was cleaner, but then he showed me the box with all of his supplies to roll his own cigarettes, so I obliged. He even gifted me with my own mahogany box for my 'smoking materials,' as he called them.

It had been a while since I rolled anything but I managed to get it done, albeit sloppily, and laid on our shared bed, smoking away lazily as I listened to the rain hit the windows.

My phone buzzed next to me on the pillow.

Incoming FaceTime call from Sasha.

Sasha. They were the only family member I kept in contact with. Sasha was my cousin and the only one that knew the truth about my whereabouts. They would call every so often to check in on me.

Sasha and I were really close as children. So close, in fact, that people would ask me if they were my sibling. They basically were, honestly.

I picked up the phone and hit the answer button.

'Sup bitch,' I answered, blowing smoke out of my nose after I spoke.

'Y/N you are always fucking smoking,' Sasha laughed. 'Do you ever give it a rest?'

'Weed, Sasha, is my best friend,' I replied, taking another drag.

'And not me!?' they scoffed, feigning hurt. "Oh, and we're rolling joints now? I didn't know we were so high class. It must be James' impact.'

'High class? Shut the fuck up,' I chuckled. The lock on the front door to the suite clinked and the door swung open.

'Hello, darling!' James shouted through the space as he closed the door.

'Sasha, he's back. I should go,' I started.

James was very old-fashioned. I tried really hard to not boggle his mind with too many new things at once. He had never met Sasha, let alone seen a FaceTime call. I couldn't imagine turning my phone to him, revealing a person talking in real-time on the screen. Television was trivial enough to him.

'No! It would be so funny. You gotta introduce us,' they pleaded.

'Y/N?' James called, footsteps getting closer to the bedroom.

'Please! Keep me on the phone,' Sasha chuckled. 'I wanna see his brain explode.' I couldn't help but let out a laugh. They were right. James' reaction to new things was always funny.

The door to the bedroom creaked open and James stuck his head in, eyes closed.

'My love, are you decent?' he asked. Sasha let out a giggle on the phone. 'Whatever was that sound?'

'James, it's fine, come in,' I laughed. I stood up and met him by the door, leaving my phone on the bed. He wrapped his arms around my waist, picking me up and spinning me around. He kissed me warmly and set me back down.

'Oh, how I missed you so, dearest,' he sighed.

'I missed you too, James,' I replied, glancing back at my phone.

'And I see you've made use of my gift!' he exclaimed. He inspected my handiwork and tutted his tongue. 'My, we have some work to do. Might I teach you how to roll properly?'

'Of course,' I assured, flopping back onto the bed, picking up my phone, and giving Sasha a look. They covered their mouth with their hand, stifling a laugh. Seconds later I got a text.

Sasha: Bro, he talks so funny I'm crying

I also covered my mouth to stifle a laugh. I was too high for this.

'You and that tiny light box,' James began. 'Whatever can I do to tear your attention away from it?' He removed his suspenders and placed them on the dresser, beginning also to unbutton his shirt.

'Actually, James, I want to show you something,' I giggled.

'It's funny?' he asked, cocking an eyebrow.

'Well, kind of. I want you to meet someone,' I continued. His head whipped around the room, looking for the 'someone' I had just mentioned.

'Where is this person, then?' he asked, panic creeping into his voice. He always got like this. Like I was some sort of magician or something.

'No, no, James, they're on my phone,' I explained. 'Here, I'll just show you.' I turned my screen to face James. Sasha smiled and waved.

'Hi, James!' they called out. He immediately retreated back toward the door like a cornered animal, eyes bewildered.

I couldn’t help but cackle. Sasha let out the laughs they’d been holding in as well.

‘What is this? What is the meaning of this? How are you doing this?’ he asked, rapid-fire. He inched closer to the phone as my cousin and I continued to crack up. In stitches over his cluelessness. He picked up my phone and stared into it. 'Who are you?'

Between laughs Sasha managed to croak out, 'I'm Y/N's cousin. I live in San Fransisco.' James handed the phone back to me and looked at me with confusion on his face.

'James, my cousin Sasha is doing something called FaceTime. It's a new way to call people,' I explained. 'You can talk to people from far away and you can see their faces. Isn't that wonderful?' He nodded, unsure of the whole thing.

'So, that person is actually talking to us right now? From far away?' he asked, trying to clarify things.

'Yeah James, it's just like a phone call!' Sasha continued from the other side of the phone.

I let out a stifled chuckle. He was really trying his best to understand. It was so cool to introduce him to new things, but the way he acted --like the technology was going to hurt him -- was, unfortunately, very humorous to me.

'Oh, James, it's okay, I promise!' I assured him, beckoning him closer with my hand.

He climbed onto the bed and settled in next to me, looking over at the FaceTime call.

'Girl, you are too high for this, I'm sorry,' Sasha cackled.

'No no, it's fine,' I laughed, turning my face to James. 'You gotta learn somehow, right, love?' He nodded.

+

Within minutes James had gotten the hang of talking face-to-face with someone through the 'light box.' So much so, in fact, he began to give a cigarette rolling tutorial, performing as if he were on a stage.

I had the camera turned to him in front of me so Sasha could watch him.

'Then, ladies and gents, we take the paper,' he declared in a sing-songy voice, holding up the rolling paper demonstratively.

Sasha and I continued to laugh uproariously as James taught us how to roll 'the gentleman's way.'

By the end of the lesson, Sasha had to go.

'Goodbye! Goodbye, Sasha! I hope to see you again soon!' James called out as he waved to the camera.

'Bye, bitch,' I added before hanging up.

'Wh-what? Do you not like your cousin?' he scoffed, confused.

'Oh, no no,' I giggled, 'that's just how we say goodbye...from where...I'm from...' A lie, but a necessary one. I didn't feel like explaining how saying 'bitch' can also be good.

'Well, I will be sure to say that next time, then! I wouldn't want to be rude,' James decided.

'Oh, my sweet, sweet love,' I sighed, placing a hand on his cheek. 'You are too good.'

'Now, what do you say we try some of this giggle smoke?' he suggested, handing me the joint he rolled. He produced a lighter from his pants pocket and flicked it, holding it out to me.

+++

Okay, I'm not sure if I love this or if I hate it but I hope I did your request justice! Thank you for sending it in. As always, my inbox is open! Thank you for reading.

#evan peters #evan peters fic #evan peters x female reader #james patrick march #evan peters oneshot #ahs #evan peters x reader #ahs fandom #jpm #james patrick March x reader

[see-arcane]

Penclosa (TEASER)

Summary: It’s been almost a year since Jonathan Harker made that fateful first trip to Transylvania. The monster that imprisoned him, that threatened his love, that died in a box of earth by two blades, has been gone for months. Yet Jonathan’s nightmares have never left. In fact, as the bleak anniversary nears, they have worsened. Van Helsing’s mesmerism has made no progress in freeing him from the nightly horror. But he has come from Amsterdam for a potentially fruitful visit to another professor. 

Prof. Wilson is playing host to a mesmerist of singular and uncanny power, Miss Helen Penclosa. On meeting the troubled young man and his wife, she is only too happy to help...

For a version that isn’t in Tumblr format eye strain mode, check out the Google Doc version HERE.

Prologue

Over the course of May through early November in the year of 18—, events of uncanny and unholy nature swallowed the lives of multiple innocents. Some survived. Some died. Some did worse. A monster was slain, victims were lost or rescued or both. The whole of these remarkable happenings and the horror therein were compiled into a single manuscript under the monster’s name. It was bound and stored behind the lock of a safe door. Not to be forgotten, but to have the nightmare imprisoned, if only in spirit. This manuscript and the monster inside it are finished.

The nightmares should have followed suit. For most of their valiant number, they did. Slowly. Stutteringly. Yet they had ended as life’s clockwork ticked on and turned the heartbroken and the harried forward into the future. Grief still exists, of course. Its melancholy tides ebb and flow and drown and trickle. But the fear is gone.

For most.

It has been nearly six months since Jonathan Harker brought the steel of the kukri blade down through Count Dracula’s neck, reducing the vampire to his dead elements. 

It has been nearly seven months since he woke to find Mina Harker screaming in terror and violation with the monster’s blood in her mouth, her neck still running red from where the monster had supped on her; all while the demon’s trance had frozen him in sleep. 

It has been nearly eight months since he lay bedridden in a hospital he thanked as much as dreaded for fear that the nuns would detain him as a madman as they nursed him through illness and ravings they took for ‘brain fever,’ the climax of which ended with Mina Murray exchanging the marriage vows with him there in his sickbed. 

It has been all but a year in full since the night Count Dracula locked him in the plush and bloody nightmare of his castle for two months of idle torment, teasing his cadre of inhuman women with the promise of the young solicitor’s throat, of his undeath, of eternity spent forever in those stone walls, a Thing feasting with them on the squealing fodder of humanity.

Jonathan Harker has killed the inventor of his nightmares. Yet those terrors churn on and on without their maker. Even with the anniversary of last year’s madness about to overtake the calendar, still his sleeping hours are so rarely his. It takes its toll on him. This he can allow.

But his wife has suffered his suffering too long, and this he cannot. Something must be done. Something will be done.

And in doing it, fate proves once more that monsters remain a reality.

Some of whom crave far more and far worse than the theft of blood.

 I

  The 14th of April. The first day Jonathan took his journal with him to work.

There was something too mortifying in the act of writing about the particular topic that needed purging to scrawl it with Mina in the next room, still scouring exhaustion from her eyes. Not solely for the subject matter, but for how shamefully repetitious it had become. So much like a child bleating for help over the same imaginary devils in the room. It was bad enough to have turned her sleep into an endless lottery game in which she could count on fair sleep only half the time while the other half was devoted to breaking him out of the cell his traitor mind dragged him to with gleeful malice.

The castle, the Count, the Weird Sisters, the damned October night of Mina’s bloodied lips, and his own red hands in allowing the monster to inflict himself at all. All had their encores in his dreaming theater. Some nights were bad. Some nights were worse. His best nights, so abhorrently rare, were ones in which he did not dream at all. And now, now that they were creeping through the thick part of April, inching towards the full fruit and pleasant air of May, he’d realized…

 No, why say it? Why bother? He would spit it on the page and be done with it. Ink turned to bile. Jonathan held off until the majority of the paperwork was muscled through and noon threw its golden shine in the window. He took the volume out of his breast pocket with care, feeling a twinge that was as much grim recollection as unexpected nostalgia. How often had this slim little traveler’s journal with its packed pages and creased cover slipped the notice of his jailor by dint of its hiding place?

Now here he was, hiding it from his wife, from his employees, from the whole of his world. Jonathan swallowed new bitterness under a tide of fatigue and brought out a pen. He wrote:

 JONATHAN HARKER’S JOURNAL

 14 April— Another night, another visit from the ghost of the Count.

He was as he’d been when he first drove me into his mountains. Only I knew it was him, lucid and afraid and without the kukri at my hip. When I tried to run for the coach that had brought me, it was gone. There was only the night and the cold iron of his grip dragging me into the caleche. The mountains did not take us up, but yawned wide as a stone maw, the horses driving us down, down, down into a shadowed hollow where those Powers exist that allowed a Thing like Dracula to manifest himself in the first place. Hell itself could not match the chthonic press and terror of that descent.

So I was convinced in the dream, made worse for the fact that the descent seemed never to end. There was only more down, more plummet, more drag, as though Dracula were merely a grinning fishhook and I was being reeled ever deeper, down to a place older and further than any of Dante’s circles. Thus I went, thus I cried out, thus Mina discovered me, all cold sweat and shuddering. Again.

Again and again and again. I do not understand it. How have the others moved on so freely when I am left still struggling in a mire of my own invention? Even Mina has moved past the need for any of my own ministrations to bring her out of sour dreams. It’s only me now. Always me. Now, inexplicably, I find the visions have grown not only worse, but more frequent. I expect it is the turn of the seasons that has stirred them to their peak. The calendar declares I am not far off from the day I first left for that trap of a business trip and set the whole horrid mess in motion.

What an evil thing to have even the dull plodding of the months turned into a menace. And for what? The mere memory of late spring tied with the coming of the Count? It is a miserable joke to play on myself. Worse still to have it affect Mina well after she escaped that unthinkable fate and survived the brunt of the demon’s greed. I must fix myself. Or, despite her pleas against it, I must resign myself to the guest bedroom for the sake of her own sleep.

The nightmares will come regardless. Better that at least one of us can take some rest in a night. But this is only temporary. The nightmares themselves must be addressed. Jack has already made the suggestion of a prescription. It would be a decent stall, or at least enough to permit me some blessed hours of blankness. Yet I don’t wish to grow reliant on erasing dreams altogether when I merely wish to join everyone else in the freedom of natural fantasies. I want rest, not a chemical concussion. But what other options are left to me?

Jonathan finally closed the journal when an answer failed to come after a quarter of an hour. The volume went back to his breast and his attention went out the window. Pastoral beauty peeked out in its sequestered places along the street. Birdsong rang out even amid the murmur of human life flowing down avenues and around corners. Living blood in angled veins. He pressed a hand to his eyes and pinched at an oncoming headache.

A year. Practically a year, and still his brain ran these incessant ugly laps. What a thing of glass he was compared to how Mina and their friends stood today. Dr. John Seward and Lord Arthur Godalming had climbed over the mourning of both the girl and the man they had loved. Van Helsing, at once weathered and sturdy as an ancient tree, had returned to his myriad works in Amsterdam and, on his occasional visits, had proven solid as ever.

And Mina.

Mina, Mina.

He thanked whatever gods or angels there were who guarded dreams that she, at least, had slipped the vampire’s gifts of regurgitated fear. Even if Jonathan’s own childish languishing jolted her into action, she did not suffer any similar horrors at this late stage. Spectral visions of beloved Lucy, of old Mr. Swales with his broken neck, of Dracula’s leering death mask face, and of the beckoning coven that were nearly her Sisters under his thrall—all these wraiths had come and gone months ago for her. Now there was only her husband left to coddle.

“It has to stop,” he told the air. “It has to.”

His mind ticked back to Van Helsing. To Mina’s own peculiar drowses as the condition bitten into her continued its steady creep. Down by day, up by night. But there, at the cusp of dusk and dawn, when her mind was entirely hers…

Jonathan frowned and went to his hanging coat. He took a small pocket mirror from its interior. It was one of many trinkets and tokens their band had all come into the habit of carrying. Just in case. Even the kukri remained fixed to his hip, still whetted and blessed, just as Mina kept the revolver and its sacred bullets drowsing in her reticule. For now, he satisfied himself with finding his face in the little glass.

The former deep brown of his hair still grew in its new silver-white. Clean-shaven, the shelves of his cheeks and the shadows under the bloodshot eyes stood out. A strange contrast to what the cheekier of his fellows had once called his elfin looks. Between the fringe of his lashes and the fetching slant of his features, there had been more than one reference made from old classmates about him taking side work in the style of Boulton and Park.

But in the present, almost as he’d been during that hellish month of October, he had become an optical illusion. From one angle was the winsome youth, from another the sleepless apparition both haunted and haunting. This he did not care for one way or the other…but the eyes. The eyes were what mattered, for they might be as susceptible as Mina’s gaze had once been. Enough to open the door of her mind and welcome Van Helsing’s careful mesmeric passes to the senses she could steal from Dracula in his traveling box. Considering how dangerously pliant Jonathan had been under the trio’s influence at the castle and, worse, beneath the psychic thumb of Dracula’s pressing him under an unbreakable slumber while he preyed upon Mina, there was surely a chance the Professor could find a foothold in him too. Assuming such suggestions fell within the man’s ability.

Jonathan had not done any real reading into the subject of hypnosis as either a practical profession or an amusement. That it was effective in some form was undeniable, as Van Helsing had proved. It had been enough to help Mina along to exercising her own sensory abilities, enough to carry something of a dialogue. But that had been only conversation. There had been no attempt to instill a command or perform the equivalent of removing a tumor from her dreamscape.

He pried at an eyelid and scrubbed crust from his lashes.

Do you expect to see a welcome mat and a valet pointing to the room where all the nightmares are put together? Right this way, sir, the Count has been toiling away at the things all day so he can have them ready for you by the evening.

He could almost laugh. Instead, he made a small coughing noise, like that of an animal with a sprain. God, but he was tired. Tired of being afraid, tired of being tired, tired of leaving Mina still playing nursemaid to a husband who was man enough to slay the monster and now boy enough to cling to her for fear of the bogeyman in his head. Tired.

“At least try,” he told the glass. His reflection looked unsure. “Try.”

It was by luck that Van Helsing had been called down from the Netherlands for an invitation that was as much business as holiday in his itinerary, but it was by the sight of Mina’s fatigue-glassed eyes that Jonathan worked up the nerve to part the man from his warm patter with Jack and Art. Mina kept his arm and he hers. He was less than surprised to find the old man’s cobalt stare had a sort of prophetic shine to them.

 Just like old times. If one can call a year ‘old.’

 “I think perhaps, there is something you wish to talk of in private?”

 “There is.” Even as he said it, he would have had to be blind to miss Dr. Seward and Lord Godalming’s gazes trailing after them. There were only five people to the parlor, after all, and three of them now in their own whispering cluster. Discretion was moot. “But I suppose it matters little either way. Secrecy has never been an ally within our circle as much as out of it.”

 At that, the old man bristled.

 “Secrecy on what point?”

“Nothing terribly dire,” Jonathan began, and was not sure how to finish. Mina found his hand. Her hold was still so warm against the chill of his fingers. They gripped each other as she stepped forward.

“Important regardless,” she insisted. “It’s a matter that might have a solution in your talent with mesmerism, Professor.”

At the mention of mesmerism, there was a curious shift in the air around Van Helsing. Jonathan swore he could almost see it. A tilt from apprehension to bemusement.

“How is that, Madam Mina?”

“We wondered if it was possible for such a process to,” a snugger grip upon his cool hand, one he returned, “aid with sleep.”

“Nightmares,” Jonathan offered under his breath. In his peripheral, he caught Jack putting his tumbler down untouched while Art turned to the former, his face a question. Jack offered a tellingly concerned glance back. “The ones that have stayed with me since,” his throat worked sharply, “last year. They have not left or lessened. It seems the nearer I get to the anniversary of that first stint in Transylvania, the worse they’ve grown. I can nearly set a watch by them.”

“I am sorry to hear such, my friend. Sorrier still to say I have not great practice in matters of tailoring dreams. Still, I will make my best attempt for you, and if it should fall short, there may yet be another option. Yet this I will not lay upon the table before we exhaust what we have before us now. Come, we shall make use of the couch.”

Bidding privacy an unceremonious farewell, Jonathan let himself be led to a chaise. Art made some comment to the next member of staff to try the door, informing her the room was not to be disturbed for the rest of the hour. Jack drew the drapes shut against the sunshine while the lamps were set aglow. Mina took the spot beside him, their hands now a woven knot of fingers.

“The trouble is, of course, that there will be no knowing if we are successful here in the present. To do as you hope me to do, it would not be so simple as bringing forth talk or suggesting an action here in the present. What is desired is hypnosis that sets the mind as one sets a clock. A susceptible mind will tick-tick-tick along, hit a certain hour, a certain stimulus, and then the command, if it is instilled right, shall be committed. This alone is a most difficult task even for those with the highest talents in mesmerism, needing the hypnotist to be canny and the subject to be pliant. There are cases where such effects have only been carried halfway, following some smaller impulse or other rather than bowing totally to the order given in the trance.

“And this is only to speak of acts attempted while the subject is conscious. Even Madam Mina, drowsy as she was in her trances while seeking out the senses of the Vampire, was not asleep or merely in the somnambulist’s state. To set a mind to perform a task—to outthink or to cut short a nightmare—requires not only the hypnotist’s skill and the subject’s susceptibility, but the sleeping mind’s compliance. It is a feat I have not come across yet in news of such budding sciences. But as we make the attempt now, we must have a manner of defining whether success is had or not.”

Here he looked pointedly at both Harkers.

“I take it you still keep to that so wise habit of filling your journals?”

“We do,” Mina answered aloud as Jonathan traced the lines of the book at his chest. “Do you mean for us to record the next instance of a nightmare or of a peaceable sleep?”

 “Both,” Van Helsing said, now digging in a pocket for a notebook of his own. “And, should the attempt be successful, the third potential result. That is, the happening of a nightmare which is cut short.” All eyes turned to him as he scratched out the three possible points in his pages: Nightmare, Sleep, Nightmare Blunted. “This would only be for the sake of proof, of course. The most desired result is that Jonathan should drop into sleep, either dreamless or unvisited by grim visions. In such a case, a report of nothing is the best report to have. Failing that, but still of good portent, would be the recording of a nightmare begun, but then felled by the order I am to feed his mind by mesmeric suggestion. It will be a cue that his dreaming thoughts are to act upon, the better to subvert its unhappy impulses in sleep.”

  Jack puzzled over this with one of his more hawkish looks.

“Is that not a precarious attempt to make, Professor? It seems a rather broad spectrum to program a mind to. If you say something in the line of, ‘If your dream is a bad one, stop dreaming,’ how is the sleeping mind to differentiate between nightmares versus a dream that is simply odd? The lines between what is fearsome, what is strange, and what is fantasy are blurred enough awake. Could this not tamper with his subconscious mind on a too-wide scale as he dreams?”

“You speak right, friend John. Success in such a way would also carry risk.” Van Helsing turned to face Jonathan alone, the callused pad of his hand finding the young man’s shoulder. “It is the echo of old fears that still find you, is that right?”

“Yes. It is.” The hand not holding Mina drifted to the handle of his kukri. He thought miserably of a babe grasping his blanket. “Even now.”

“Then that is the culprit to set your mind against. The fear of those monsters long vanquished by us. I say again that there is no guarantee that my own prowess is up to the task, just as I say again there is another possibility to attempt should our own fall short. But for now, we make our try. Arthur,” he said, turning to the lord, “we should, perhaps, douse more of the lamps and bring near only one.”

All was prepared.

The mesmeric passes were made.

And made.

And made.

Almost half an hour passed before Jonathan sighed. Notably not from any lethargy brought on by a trance. Everyone with a pen made their notes of the anomaly before them. This being that for those thirty minutes, Jonathan would seem to droop and settle into the trance for a moment. Maybe two. Only to then shudder and jolt back into full awareness. So it went on and on, down and up again, until Jonathan put a hand to his eyes.

“I swear to you I’m not doing it on purpose. I can feel myself succumb in bursts, I recognize the change and lull of the process. Consciously I strive to throw myself into it. But reflex yanks me back.” He dragged his hand from his eyes, feeling as if he had been awake a hundred years. “I think it is because of how I recognize it. Even if so much of me knows the truth and trusts you, there is some rankled animal where the rest of my mind sits. A riled thing that can only recognize your attempted trance as being like his. Like theirs.”

There was no need to name the parties in question. They of the hypnotic mist and lips lacquered red in babes’ blood and slumber inflicted like a cudgel. Yet Mina’s small hand was joined by its sibling in clasping his fingers. Jonathan could not quite bring himself to meet eyes with Art and Jack. Van Helsing wore concern mingled with something like the human translation of whirring clockwork.

“If that is the case, then the alternate route is the only other I can think of within the realms of this practice.”

“What route is that?”

“One that will require permission and confidences of persons I am to visit within the month. It happens, my friends, that I was contacted by a Professor Wilson, a man who teaches psychology as his trade, but who pursues the more fantastical roads of hypnotherapy, clairvoyance, and yet more outré psychic happenings as his passion. I have received summons from him before—last year, when we were all so deep in our dire works—and had to rebuff him outright. Now he sends for me again most ardently, to witness the work of an adept he has found in the field of mesmerism. Should his adulation be based even in a fraction of truth, this party might be able to lend some aid. If only because she seems to have mastered a form of hypnosis wholly of her own making when compared to what professionals and skeptics alike call the ‘standard’ of the process.”

“She? Wait,” Jack turned fully to him, now balanced between wonder and disappointment, “you do not refer to Miss Penclosa?”

“I do. You have reason to doubt the lady’s credentials, my friend?”

“I would not know her one way or the other, but I know Professor Wilson has grown no small reputation amid those who work in such circles as ours, and even those who neighbor it. There is not a single sanitorium, clinic, or traveling physician who has not at some point received some letter from the man, always to the tune of having some fresh discovery to tout that reveals itself as no more than a trifle or the poor man’s falling for a charlatan.” He looked up as Art hummed.

“Is this the same Wilson you say spent a month trying to find documented cases with a semblance to that Poe story? The one with the hypnotized dead man?”

“The same. Though I will grant him credit enough to say even he admitted it was a mere curiosity. Even so, his history of so-called proof does not bode well for Miss Penclosa’s supposed talents. I received the same summons, Professor, likely only for nearness’ sake, and duly binned it.”

Jonathan caught the prophetic gleam in the old man’s eyes again. The specter of a smile carved new wrinkles around them.

“And when did you receive your letter, friend John?”

“Two months ago. Why?”

“Because mine was received only last month. And that with documented sessions of remarkable new feats that were performed on a fellow professor who once counted himself a skeptic. While that subject has since quit himself of the sessions, Miss Penclosa appears to be able to reproduce similar examples upon total strangers in most routine fashion. That Wilson’s latest message is saturated with all the high joy of a child receiving an entire toy shop on Christmas morning suggests that there is at least some observable truth in the results as opposed to past dull findings.”

Van Helsing turned again to the Harkers, his gaze soft as gauze.

“For honesty’s sake, I will say there is, obviously, a chance that even if this Miss Penclosa is so very talented, it is possible she may not penetrate this new reflex of the mind that has grown to lash out at such powers. It is a good reflex to have in ordinary circumstances, I should think! But if you do wish to make a last try with the opportunities of hypnotism before turning still elsewhere, it cannot do harm to try with this seeming prodigy. At worst, she will fail as I have. At best, she might make a dent in the echo of old horrors. If you wish to come with me to Professor’s Wilson’s demonstration to endure a session with her, I shall be making my arrangements to visit in a week’s time. We can travel together.”

Mina looked to Jonathan and Jonathan to her. As had been the case before, and even more the case after the hell of last year’s trials, he felt sure he sensed something of Mina’s presence falling through his eyes and over his soul. It did so like a balm. Even if there were no words shared in such gazes, they never lacked for the delivery of a message. No more than she ever failed to grasp whatever he wished to say in his own glances. It was a joke between them which was really not a joke: that they could carry whole conversations with their eyes alone. A handy pastime for lighter moments and a relief in instances where no word could meet the task, either in speech or shorthand.

And so they looked. They spoke. They turned to Van Helsing.

“Might we have a day or so to think on it, Professor?” Mina asked. “If we joined you there would be matters to attend to for work and home first.”

“So long as you are decided before the week is out, all will be well. This Wilson lives in a small town not far outside Exeter and there shall be time enough to write and ask if I might introduce friends of mine to the talented lady in question.” He held up a hand before there could be a protest. “I shall make no mention of your particular situation, of course. Though I trust this Wilson enough to believe he has some truer proof than any he peddled before—he would not have sent so far for me otherwise, or been twice over so giddy in this letter than his last, which lacked any mention of Miss Penclosa—I must trust good John and Arthur when they say he is prolific in hunting attention. Even in his few messages to me, I can read he is too eager for his name in print.

“All this is to say, Miss Penclosa is the point of any visit from you, not her host’s studies. To her you bring your troubles, if she is seeming of good character, and she I will visit with you for the week I have set aside for the visit. It is to you both that the choice falls to, if you seek to ask her aid. Should she not be as we hope, or should this Wilson be too much the gnat at your side, wishing to make Jonathan a subject more than a patient, then I will make my whole apologies and seek for better avenues with you.”

 All this the Harkers took home to mull.

It was mulled over dinner, over books, over bath, over bed.

Even now, with Peter Hawkins’ dear Mrs. Mary Bentley still on staff, the habits of sparse living still locked them into the thin-pocketed efficiency of childhood and adolescence. They turned down their own covers and drew their own baths and had to be shooed out of the kitchen whenever mealtime demanded they make and wash the dishes themselves as they’d always done.

“I cannot tell which of you is worse,” Mary would chide them both. “You, Mrs. Harker, for trying to put a lady out of her situation, trying to balance a whole house on top of your work with that hammering typewriter. Or you, Mr. Harker! You, who’ve been dear Mr. Hawkins’ shadow and mine since you were scarcely out of the playground, studying up on law books and housework as if you meant to be your own husband and wife. I shall go positively spare with you two.”

As it stood, Mary had duly banished the Harkers from tidying anything but the master bedroom, its adjoining toilet, and their shared study, if only for courtesy’s sake. The kitchen remained an uneven battleground in which Jonathan and Mina might get away with preparing a small bite or a picnic, but they would ultimately be sent scattering away like cats otherwise. Tonight they’d made off like thieves with a tea service they had arranged themselves whilst Mary was distracted by a load of linen. Having lost the coin toss, Jonathan was the one to risk leaving the lady her own cup and a plate of biscuits waiting at the door while her back was turned.

“It’s only fair,” Mina insisted over her cup as Mary made her expected noises of disgruntled noises of discovery downstairs, muffled only briefly by the likewise inevitable sip and chew. “You are the one with the cat’s feet, darling.”

“Good enough for castle walls, cliff faces, and properties in Piccadilly.” He smiled as he said it and it almost made the words into a joke. That his hand drifted to his hip as he said them, and that he felt a brief flutter of anxiety until he remembered taking it off to don his nightclothes, dented the mirth.

Mina set her cup aside and went to him by the window. Here she joined him in another nightly ritual; judging the sill. To Mary’s bafflement and surprised delight, the Harkers had insisted on setting up box gardens to try their hand at aiding the kitchen and the flora. The chief crops being carefully tended garlic blossoms and certain wild roses. The latter were due to be handsome bouquets once in season, while half the blossoms of the former were harvested too soon—their petals graced the bedroom windows alongside dashes of the rose. A strange potpourri, and stranger still to use as a ward against potential invaders.

For anyone else, at least.

Jonathan set his cup gingerly down on the sill without disturbing the floral border and used both hands to overlap Mina’s own. She had folded her arms about his middle and the embrace left her chin just at the level of his shoulder if she propped herself on tiptoe. They simply stood there a while, holding and being held. After some minutes of this, Mina finally breathed against his back:

“It’s just a matter of your mind catching up, I think.”

“Mm?”

“Most of you knows the objective facts. Dracula happened. Dracula was put down. You and Quincey made dust of him.”

“Mm.”

“But Dracula did not strike any of us in the way he did with you. Not even Lucy. Not even me.”

His hands tightened over hers just short of clamping. They might have trembled.

“He did worse—,”

“No. He only did to me in person what he intended his Brides to do to you on his behalf. You were meant for the same fate, Jonathan. You were meant to be taken first. Before Lucy, before me, before anyone else who crossed his path by chance rather than machination. If such a fiend as him had one virtue, it was that he could be an admirable planner. And if he had but one truly human flaw, it was that he did a terrible and craven job of improvisation. It took only the smallest pinholes in his plot to dismantle the whole thing. The very smallest was that he preyed on me with his swap of blood, seeking some trite trophy and a spy who wound up spying on him in turn. But the largest, the very worst thing he could have done, was make Jonathan Harker his prisoner.”

Jonathan made a hoarse noise that wanted to be a sigh or a laugh but could manage neither. He turned in her arms so that she had to look him in the eye as she spoke. The bloodshot glass of them seemed to dare her to paint him as a hero rather than the fool whose job was to open the door for the monster in the first place.

Said self-loathing found no ally in her gaze now any more than it had in the year before. This was old ground and Mina knew the terrain better than any of his demons did. Gratitude and guilt swam in his throat.

“I know what haunts you,” she pressed on, “because it is the same thing that haunts me. ‘What else could I have done? Why was I not canny or quick or strong enough to do it?’ The answer to both, the answer that helped dislodge so much of my own poison dreams, was Dracula. A centuries-old monster holding all the cards, all the secrets, all the little tells and aids that might have unmade him sooner. He was superstition itself, hiding behind the guise of declaring his reality impossible. Even when you had the spade in your hand, ready to end him on instinct well before you knew what damage it could truly do, he had a trick to play in his freezing basilisk gaze. God knows poor Renfield suffered under its power. Between this and the swarm of his men coming to take the boxes—and even the elements which conspired to slam shut all sane exits from the fortress—you should have been doomed.

“You should have been left trapped in that stone box with his thirsty housemates, waiting on death at dusk and undeath forever after. That was his plan. That was what should have sealed his victory. Yet you made it out, darling. You and your journal and all the blessed knowledge that helped us draw the noose about him before he could swallow England itself and who knows how much more of the world from there. Don’t you see it?” Her hands had moved up to the cool sides of his face, trapping it in the small heat of her palms. “Any other man sent in your place, he would have been dead or worse and Dracula would have carried on unimpeded. He was always going to inflict himself on the people beyond his mountains. But you ruined it for him. That first vital flaw. And his last, with your steel in his throat.”

Her hands pulled him down until his lips were level with hers.

“You did not cause his evil. You and Quincey put it to an end. He cannot do anything more to you, to me, to anyone else. And I will tell you so a thousand times more until the spiteful traitor of your imagination gives up on spinning nightmares that insist otherwise. Alright?”

In answer, he pressed his mouth into the place it always fit upon hers.

In bed, he fought sleep until he couldn’t.

In the latest hours of night, he woke to his screams being stifled against Mina’s breast, her hands holding and stroking in their accustomed routes on his head and back, hushing and murmuring the memorized coos that always fished him shaking and sweating from the pit of his mind.

In the earliest hours of morning, when she had drifted thinly back into sleep, he took himself to the study to fall into his own narrow wisp of slumber. Frail but bottomless hours too deep to produce a dream. These were all he could rely on for rest.

In daylight, he and she called upon Van Helsing who sent his letter to Prof. Wilson the same day.

 JONATHAN HARKER’S JOURNAL

 18 April— All’s been arranged.

Hawkins and Harker will do without me from the 27th of April to the 10th of May. Even if Miss Penclosa cannot make the progress we hope for, Mina and I shall at least have leave to take in some quieter respite. Tuppeton sounds like one of those blessed towns on the edge between the congested bustle of true a city and the idyllic softness of a village. It is stately enough to produce a potent university, and that usually comes with an array of good distractions for students and faculty alike. I hope there are at least fine views to collect. Mina talks of seeking out a photographer’s shop and taking home a camera of our own for a souvenir. It's a nice thought and a genuine one, though my mind is addled enough that I think I can scent an underlying motive.

She wishes to steer me back into the cheer that was my wont before the whole mess. I’m certain she misses the Jonathan Harker who could fall in love with a vista for hours as surely as he’d be enthralled by the stories on a stage. He still exists, I think, but he is so much diminished under the weight of this shock-haired usurper that he’s smothered whenever Mina or a friend is not there to look for him. I want so badly for him to take back the throne from me even when I am alone.

God, let him have his life again. His days and his nights of peace. Let me fall asleep and never wake again, so that he can give joy and be joyous without so much creaking effort. I am still the frightened and frightening Thing that crawled out of the castle and hunted a man-shaped monster like a rabid hound. But even with my task fulfilled, Jonathan Harker has not come home, has not awoken, and so I am left to pantomime him in such a shabby manner.    

Ten days, ten days. That is all that’s left until we see if Mina has longer to wait for the husband she deserves. It feels so long.

Now she calls and it is time to leave you. Art is taking us all upon a theatre spree for all the good shows we can find before the week is out. There will even be an illusionist or two in the mix.

Perhaps if they impress enough, I will dream them into the next nightmare and all the fiends within can disappear into their hat.

 19 April— Nightmares again. As I only pretended to predict, they were given a new tint by the aftermath of last night’s visit to the stage. It featured one of the illusionists; pardon, a magician. He had some fairly stunning acts to do with vanishing assistants and volunteers, making impossible items appear in impossible places and the like. For the larger part of the show, we found ourselves most grateful to have a box, courtesy of Art. Mina and I have suffered a performance too many that was cramped by hecklers and snorers in adjoining seats.

And yet I might have been grateful for a snide skeptic nattering about how it was all a hoax when it came time for the hypnotism act. I should not have been as surprised, and certainly not as anxious, when I saw the performance. The poster outside was one of those garish sorts with pinwheel eyes and floundering hands that parody the far more mundane mesmeric passes employed in less theatric backdrops. Still, even knowing what I myself am planning to request in a week’s time, even believing that it was likely to all be staged, I felt a sickly tightness in my chest and ice turned over in my stomach.

Though I flatter myself that I gave nothing away to the others, Mina kept trying to catch my eye throughout, as though she could hear my thoughts pacing their frantic circles. I only met her gaze when the act took its turn from the humorous to the frightful.

The first subject, a stout man near the front, was the comic setup. Chosen because, as the magician insisted, he had read the man enough to know he was a skeptic. Perhaps even impenetrable to hypnotic suggestion! Would he like the chance to throw a sour note in the performance by being proof positive of the man being a shameless fraud? Yes? Then do come up, sir, and if he fails, the man shall have his refund for the trouble.

The stout man was put under a trance. We saw his face go from set in its aggression and smugness to a laxness deeper than mere boredom. The magician set him up with the command:

“What will you do if I ask something of you now?”

“Anything,” said the stout man.

“Do you know any songs? We are lacking for music here.”

The stout man’s first response was a nursery rhyme. He was ordered to sing it with gusto, and he did. Laughter from the audience. The magician silenced him.

“But that is too simple. Any man can sing, however poorly. Is there something you would not admit to the world for love or money, my friend?”

“There is.”

“Whisper it to me.”

The stout man whispered. The magician nodded, smiling.

“Very well. In a moment, I shall wake you from the trance. You will come to your senses assuming all you did was nod off out of boredom at my antics and rightly demand your refund once the show is up. You will return to your seat to wait out the show, baffled, again rightly, that all these fools in the audience would swallow this drivel when you just proved me a fraud. But then!” A look from him to the audience, conspirators all of us. “When you hear me say the word, ‘arachnid,’ you shall jolt up from your seat and shout out the secret at full volume. Hopefully with a better pitch than you butchered the poor Muffin Man with. Now, all of you,” addressing the audience again, “you are my assistants in this! Not a word or wink to give it away! I am trusting you!”

And so the stout man was roused from the trance and no one gave it away.

Then came the next half. One in which he paraded out his assistant, a girl who might have been young enough to be his daughter, shimmering and flouncing in her costume.

“Now,” said the magician, “my dear Angela here has been my accomplice in nigh every act you have seen on this stage. After this one, I fear there is a very fair chance she will quit me on the spot and leave me to slave over the finale solo.” Here he threw a simpering look down at Angela, “Oh, do say you won’t leave me, dear. You know that gawking lot out there in the rows frighten me terribly when I’m up here alone.”

“I shall have to think about it,” said Angela. “It all depends on what trick you mean to pull.”

“A dastardly one, I’m afraid. Quite insidious. But for a good cause!” After another minute or so of such patter, Angela inevitably consented to the hypnosis. Once under the trance, the magician turned again to conspire with we onlookers. “Now comes a secret about the fair maiden for you, ladies and gentlemen, one that I am certain a good deal of you poor girls can claim ownership of yourselves. Not a small amount of the fellows either. Miss Angela has quite a monstrous fear…” Here the magician lifted his hat off his head. There were a number of squeals, shrieks, and choked curses in the audience as something huge and spindly clambered down over his forehead. “…of spiders.”

The magician scooped the crawling thing off his face, frowned, then shook his hat over his open hand until another spider fell out. A third. A fourth. His whole sleeve was moving with the creatures.

“Ah, I see a few of you turning colors out there. There’s one poor gent getting fanned by his wife in the back row, I believe. But fear not! These little friends of mine are quite tame. There are precious few spiders whose bite can do the human body real damage. And yet, like so many of you, poor Angela cannot bear the sight of them!”

This he said as he dropped the first of the spiders upon her half-bare shoulder.

“If she sees so much as a bundle of thread on the ground, she takes off running, lest it get up and crawl after her.”

Every spider was delivered from him to her. All the while Angela stood in place, staring vacantly as they crept along her arms, her neck, her face, her hair.

“Which is a shame. Spiders are vital to keeping the world around us free of worse pests. Frogs can hardly handle them all. We owe our very air to the creatures for trimming the numbers of flies and gnats and bloodsuckers. I do wish Angela would see the value in them and, more importantly, see firsthand how harmless they are to her person. Let us see if she will. In three, two, one…awake!”

Angela woke. Angela saw. Angela screamed.

This she did with such convincing terror that her pitch struck a vein of memory in me just as sharply as it did in Mina. It was of a very particular key, that shrieking. The sound of horrid realization piercing the ear and the heart with its unwanted knowledge. Here I finally met Mina’s gaze as our hands locked hard within the other. Again, conversation was had without a word.

Did she want to go? Did I want to go? Was she alright? Was I?

Yes and yes, no and no.

But we were both of us nailed down for our friends’ sake. Art would have paled to know our reaction to the show while Jack and Van Helsing would have many a padded word to spare as we were herded out like skittish toddlers. No, we sat and we smiled and both quite missed whatever it was the stout man wound up bellowing once the magician said his magic word buried in a sentence along the lines of, “You see how she squawks and flails? All this over an innocent introduction to the arachnid family.”

Whatever the stout man stood up and shouted was half-lost in Angela’s diminishing screams as she ran off stage and the hysteric laughter of the audience, goosed as they were into the respite of humor to wash away the eight-legged shock. Angela did come out to bow with him. There was no telling whether she was merely a fine actress or simply boxed in by circumstance, but she smiled and bowed easily enough. I hope it was an act.

But whether it was true or not, the whole scene followed me to bed.

I will not pour every detail here. Some cannot be remembered. Many I simply would rather not. But the whole of it occurred back in Castle Dracula. The castle was on a stage and the Count had me march out to sit across from him at his carved table. Magician and assistant.

“When I say write, you will write your letters with my lies. Write.” I did.

“When I say work, you will clear my way to England. Work.” I did.

“When I say bleed, you will provide my draught. Bleed.” I did.

And, even with his teeth sunk in my throat, I heard him speak again:

“When I say sleep, you will let me and mine play as we like. Sleep.”

The dream ended with my sleeping myself awake, the sound of a laughing audience in my ears. They sounded like the tinkling of glass. Hands far colder than my own swarmed and crawled on me like spiders. Somewhere, Mina screamed.

And then I was in bed.

Rather, on the armchair I had tried for my bed in the study. By pure luck it was not a wretched enough dream to end with my crying aloud. Otherwise, Mina or Mary would have been through the door and at my side, playing witness to my latest miserable display. Though misery is still very much present without witnesses. I hate to slink away from Mina’s side, but I cannot win even a scrap of rest without fatiguing myself half-dead, and even then I damage her sleep each night with my own failure. But I repeat myself.

I write this here only to rid myself of a feeling of another sort of repetition. A repeat sensation or seeming portent; the same which haunted me in the prelude to my arriving in Transylvania. My dreams were bruised with fear well before Dracula had me in hand. Flickers of demons and spirits that whirled and dragged me on. Similar phantasms shadowed me as I made my escape from the castle. None were vampires, strange enough, but those elder others who Dracula must have taken scraps from in the unhallowed hollow of the Scholomance.

There was something of that alien quality to this latest dream too. Something about the change in Dracula’s eyes, about the odd alteration of castle to stage to…I don’t know. If not a stage, then some manner of diorama? A dollhouse? Something one step removed from living theatre. Even as those cold familiar hands scrabbled on me at the end, I knew they were nothing compared to the phantom grip that held me by the bones and brain. The one that nodded and walked me along, jumping the vampire’s hoops. If he was that vampire. If any of them were. Their eyes were not red, I know. Such an odd thing to strike me in the midst of all that surrounded it. Why should it matter what tint their eyes were? Ruby or emerald, wine or absinthe. Yet this gnaws at me too and I can’t tell why.

The whole mess comes from the stain of the show and the kneejerk worry of the visit to come. All I have on my mind is ‘What if it does not work? What if it goes awry? What if, what if?’ My thoughts gnaw themselves to shreds. Enough.

It will work or it won’t.

That is all there is.

Good-night.

 The Tuppeton Journal, 29 April

BANK ROBBER TO BE CAUGHT GREEN-HANDED?

 As spring rolls on and students hunker into their studies, all should be at its most sedate in our snug corner of Devon. But as of the night prior, it seems Tuppeton has reason to rise off its laurels and be on alert. This morning, the 29th of April, it was discovered that our own Bank of England had an unexpected visitor or visitors in the night. The bank’s groundskeeper, a Mr. Franklin Worth, spotted the signs first, though he tells our reporter that he first mistook it for mere animal vandalism.

“Tell the truth,” declared Worth, “I had a minute where I was madder than anything, seeing the windows like that. The sills had all just gotten a fresh coat of evergreen paint only the other day. Still damp and setting, not to be touched. My first thought was that I was looking at the work of some blasted cat or nightbird perching on the sill and ruining the job. Only when I got up close, I recognized the chips and grooves of someone working at the wood with a chisel.”

It was then that Worth contacted the bank manager who called upon the authorities. An inspection has since been made of the scene and an investigation is underway to trace the route of the suspected person or persons involved with the attempted break-in. Citizens are advised to be on watch for any suspicious activity in their area, to keep all lower windows and doors locked, and to please pass on to the police whatever applicable information they may have in the way of narrowing the search.  

  II

  Prof. Wilson’s home was a charming brownstone box set back in a frame of trees all frothing with blossoms. These boughs were only slightly more crowded than the interior of the building. From the parlor on, there were many a scholarly shoulder and erudite elbow to dodge as, much to the host’s delight, his discovery’s legitimate successes had apparently drawn enough of a crowd to merit his second party within a month’s time.

“Though I do regret to say my initial partner in the examination of Miss Penclosa’s skill has, ah, found himself busy with other affairs,” Wilson could be heard lamenting at odd corners around the throng. “Even so, quite excellent progress has been made in our sessions. Ah, if only we had started sooner! My wife has been hiding a positive wonder under my nose all these years.”

From her own corners, Mrs. Wilson could be heard sighing in turn, “You know, when I hear other wives lament about how their husbands are only interested in other women, it’s usually something predictable. ‘Oh, he’s got a mistress! Oh, he’s sniffing after some well-to-do daughter! Oh, he’s eyeing my best friend!’ While I can at least somewhat identify with the latter, how am I to take this particular turn? ‘Well, he has not started an affair with her, but if he could run away and elope with the very concept of her mesmeric ability, he would be on the first train out of Devon.’ What am I to do with that?”

There was lilting laughter in answer to this and a general jostling murmur packing the space overall. Whoever Miss Penclosa was, wherever she was in the chattering sea, there was no guessing for Van Helsing or the Harkers. Her apparent throne-to-be, an overstuffed armchair standing apart from the couches, was currently vacant and aimed at by a harried photographer’s daguerreotype camera. The fellow was trying his best to focus the lens under the focusing cloth while also trying to protect his box of plates from tromping guests. It was such a packed scene that one stocky visitor gnawing a cigar nearly bowled the tripod over with a wave of his hand; a lecturer’s gesture that had the photographer turn white and green by turns as he rescued his device.

In the face of all this, Van Helsing turned an apologetic look to the couple.

“I had not realized Wilson meant to pack a country of academics under his roof. A few guests, he said in his letter, not a circus. If you should like to make good your escape, I can perhaps have him open the door to you another day, and say to him you are not yet—,”

“Professor Van Helsing!” Prof. Wilson seemed to manifest all at once from the herd, both hands trapping Van Helsing’s in his own to shake. “I recognize you from…well, there are very few published works of note I do not recognize you from. Oh, it is an absolute honor to have you here, my friend. And are these the guests you spoke of?”

He had asked the question before he looked fully at the Harkers, both of whom had taken a slight retreating step away. Mina, Jonathan saw, was perused only with an instant’s interest before being dismissed. But the man’s gaze froze and somehow stuttered upon looking at him. It was a reaction Jonathan had grown accustomed to upon that final return to England. Perhaps one time out of three, he would find himself being gawped at rather than simply seen or, in certain blushing cases, ogled. This one-in-three phenomenon was almost always a result of his own mistake in failing to school his demeanor.

A failing that always came when he seemed to recognize something of a deriding edge in any glance in his wife’s direction, as was the habit he saw mirrored anyplace where the fairer sex dared to loiter where men with titles of education milled.

A failing that likewise always guided his hand to rest on the kukri’s handle.

Yet Mina gripped his other hand and anchored him back. Jonathan duly reset his face into a more cordial mask and turned his pinching of the blade’s handle into a lax gesture. It did a little to return some pallor to the gawking professor’s face.

“They are my friends, yes,” Van Helsing interposed, stepping forward and seeming to half-herd Wilson back into the clutter of people. “They have some passing interest in these so-intriguing fields of the natural and the more-than-natural sciences. Their holiday overlapped handily with my visit and so here we are. But I am a greater glutton for introduction. Please, do show me to what others there are in our learned fields. I am thinking I recognize Professor Gregg, the great ethnologist, orating in the next room…”

Within a heartbeat, the Harkers were left to their devices as their friend tossed a look of mingled apology and desperation back over his shoulder.

En sotto voce, Mina murmured, “‘Run while you can, go on without me!’”

“He is truly a man of sacrifice. Let us make our escape toward the table.”

For the host had indeed opted for a table rather than subjecting servants to the obstacles of winnowing through the rooms with over-heaped platters. Jonathan’s reach was longer and so he filched a suitable sustenance of canapés and two full flutes for them both while Mina led the way to an unburdened divan. They tucked themselves in at the far end to nibble and sip and try not to catch the other checking the time. Both failed and this jabbed a little laugh from them.

“It is bit much, isn’t it?” Mina smiled over an expensive and dainty offering that lasted only a bite and a half.

“I foresee us having quite a wait before the party thins. If even a quarter of these people are here for Miss Penclosa to put on a show, we may as well be back in the theater for them all to gape in comfort. I can’t even guess which of these ladies might be her. You would think she would have the run of the room rather than Wilson.” Jonathan frowned at his flute. “He speaks so much of his discovery when the discovery is someone else’s talent. You’d think he personally excavated her out of some mystic vault on expedition.”

“For courtesy’s sake, we’ll say he’s just excited at having living evidence for his pursuits.” Mina regarded him from under her lashes, her hand finding his once again. “We are neither of us strangers to the joy of having ourselves proven right on outlandish realities, after all.”

“True. I don’t mean to throw stones. Only we also have our fair history with dodging the risks of spectacle. Whether done in earnest or not, I’d rather not approach this Penclosa with the toll of being made into an exhibition.”

“Of course not. We can wait until all’s clear. Though, truth be told, I’d rather we had a less congested space to do the waiting.” Jonathan leaned in as she dropped her voice to a whisper of illicit intent. “I smuggled in two books.”

Jonathan feigned a gasp.

“Anthology for me, one of the new world guide books for you. Found it at the station when your back was turned.”

“Mrs. Harker, the hedonism of it all. I am aghast.”

“We could be especially daring and read it in full view of the assembly, Mr. Harker. But I would just as soon be a coward and take our rudeness outdoors. It really is too fine a day to burn cramped inside.”

This change in mind, the Harkers signed to Van Helsing from across the room and made their exit to the rear yard. It was a handsome view and mercifully lacking for fellow escapees, not counting the woman reclining in a floral alcove set in the garden. Jonathan might have mistaken her for a true sculpture for how well and still she was placed against the arch of trained vines. A lady tipping near the midpoint of life, she sat with the subtle but knowing posture of wise women of myth. An oracle or a sage who had swapped her robes for a swaddling high-buttoned ensemble of faded green. There was a washed-out fragility in her look that likewise brought old dressmaker models and abandoned toys to mind, as though she were a cracked figure left too long in the whitening sun.

It was all a canvas to serve the shock of her eyes.

Though they remained half-closed, the great size, the sharp slant, and the surprise of their misty jade stood out with all the power of a single stained glass window set in an empty house.

That she did not look up, and that her chestnut brows were knitted in some far-off concentration, suggested she had either not noticed their intrusion on her solitude or else she had no attention to spare for the couple if she did. The Harkers took a stone bench for themselves on the other end of the yard and fell to their pages. Engrossed as both were, it was still a short matter of time before their tongues fell loose as was their constant custom at home or abroad.

Mina spoke of the ghosts and mysteries scrawled into being, Jonathan gushed over foreign panoramas made vivid with their painted reproductions. They spoke of where they wished to go in Tuppeton once the attempt with Penclosa was made, what sights there were to see, what activities to try. Again, the novelty of their own camera was brought up. The topic turned on its ear to what a boon a photographer would be to Hawkins and Harker, having pictures present with whatever file might be laid before a client on this or that estate. This slipped into talk of the latest models that Remington had put out, trying to lure her in through the shop windows in Exeter.

Talk of which turned another corner into news she had been sitting on a while, waiting until a more buoyant moment to talk about it.

What news was that? He was as buoyant as he was likely to be for the day.

She had had her work accepted! Twice! True, it was only a little cozy interview with a train engineer for a local paper here, and a smaller ghost story for one of the penny dreadfuls there, but still!

He mirrored her thrill and the thrill was reverberated back by her, and so the better part of an hour was spent in alternately hearing the details pour from her in a jubilant flood or, for his part, dropping a goading comment or query to make the deluge to continue. The sight and sound of her delight was worth a ticket price in his opinion and he felt no need to hinder himself from taking advantage of her glee to help himself to her arm to make them lean against each other and the sturdy fence at their back. Had there been space enough on the bench, he might even have tried his luck at wheedling her to mimic a pose from home with his head in her lap and her voice overhead. Lacking the opportunity, he settled for bending himself enough to rest his chin against her thick crown of hair.

In this way he did not quite slip into the trap of sleep, but permitted his eyes and mind to rest against her and the balmy day.

“See that, Daniels? Picture proof of my point. This modern age has got girls so backwards they can’t bring themselves to realize when their prattle isn’t wanted. Have to jaw a man’s ear off and the rest of him into the grave before they can catch on. You can hardly think for all the squawking that goes on in streets and parlors these days. This New Woman twaddle has gone and broken the sensible lock that keeps a woman’s gossip shut in with her tea parties and sewing circles. Soon they’ll come marching into campuses, Diogenes in a girdle, trying to talk over the greybeards mid-lesson. Wretched state we’re coming to, I tell you.”

Jonathan Harker’s eyes opened like slow shutters.

Though he felt both of Mina’s hands fly to his, neither their grip nor their warmth were enough to keep him from standing.

“Jonathan. It’s alright.”

“It isn’t.”

His words went to her, but his line of sight remained unblinking and unmoved from the two men who had come out with their cigars. The one who had spoken gave him an appraising look from under a bushy duo of iron brows while Daniels pretended to adjust his spectacles. Jonathan recognized him as the one who had nearly swatted the camera over indoors. He had moved to a new cigar since then. He raised a slate brow at him.

“Is there some issue, young man?”

“There is, I’m afraid. The severity depends on whether your affront was meant toward women as a whole, or if you intended to be overheard by, and explicitly insult, my wife.”

“Hardly an insult, young man.” His cigar pointed idly at the flax of Jonathan’s hair. “Assuming you are a young man. You’ve got a face like the greenest upstart in a class, but a mop whiter than my own teachers. I must assume youth for your ignorance or addled hearing on your part. No, there was no insult. Merely a statement of fact for our times. A woman’s voice is meant for women’s ears or a music hall if she’s got a good tune in her throat. That’s how it was in a better time. I know, for I was there to enjoy it. I cannot speak for you or whatever nonsense your girl’s been putting you to sleep with, but that is the simple truth.”

Jonathan shared a look with Mina—

We may have to leave early after all. I apologize in advance if this trip was for nothing.

—and gave her hands a squeeze.

Then he was closing the distance between himself and his fellow conversationalist. He did not sprint or stalk. It was an almost leisurely pace. Yet it was leaden in a way that, this time, was not a matter of accident. In the corner of his eye, he saw Daniels abruptly retreat back indoors. The speaker stood his ground. If half a pace nearer to the door. Perhaps two. This close, he could now see the long accessory at Jonathan’s hip.

“Do forgive me, sir,” Jonathan hummed. “It is most rude to carry on our chat at such a distance.”

“Ah, you are a young buck after all. You truly think a discussion can be won with a puffed chest and a weapon you cannot even brandish without consequence.”

“What weapon, sir? This is but my letter opener and we are only having a conversation. A debate, even. I have evidence for my own side, you know. I have lived it. The greatest bliss of my life came from the Mother Superior who saw over my wedding and from every day and night that I’ve been lucky enough to hear my wife’s voice. I see you wear a wedding band, sir, and must wonder whether you have a wife or a mute housekeeper you’ve chained to your side with an empty act of matrimony. I must also wonder if she is privy to your insights regarding her and her like. Or worse, does she talk, sir? Does she read words and say them in proximity to your poor tender ears? My deepest condolences if so.”

Jonathan would have closed the distance already had the other man not retreated up to the door and made a pretense of merely leaning near its knob.

“She has her business as I have mine. It’s the drift of husbands and wives as they get on. You cannot know it yet, for you’ve not a speck of tarnish on your own rings, but the hour of Romeo and Juliet rots fast to Macbeth and his Lady before you know it. The moment you face a real trial and see each other in all your ugly colors—oh, yes, there’s ugliness aplenty under even the bonniest faces, do count on it—the truth starts rusting all the shine off. You…”

But the last of the man’s words dried at the sight of Jonathan’s smile. Though Jonathan could not see it, he felt the familiar shape of it. He knew it as keenly as the fear in Daniels’ face as he scuttled back inside. That fear had been with him up in the snow of Transylvania as he closed in upon the wagon and its cargo in the earth-box. The smile had been with him far earlier, when they had first gotten word that the Count’s ship changed course to flee. He’d read Dr. Seward’s own words on that instant and puzzled at them once before.

The dark bitter smile of one who is without hope.

He hadn’t known he was smiling then. No more than he had properly registered the retreating terror of the men Dracula had ordered to convey him back to the castle. All he had known in the moment was that there was an evil in existence and that he wanted it gone. So it was now, albeit with more cognizance in play. He knew the awful smile was on him again just as the grotesque radiation that had chased a flock of men away was hanging about him.

“You would not know a trial if it slapped you in the face with a court summons,” he heard himself say. “I suspect you know even less of the point to a marriage. Whatever self-gratifying lies you choke on, a marriage is meant for partnership. For love. Not a business deal or a trap to have some warm body filling out the bed and keeping the house tidy while you turn around and complain about the very person you chose to bind yourself to. Even so, I know the perfect woman does exist for you and your wise taste. To meet her, go to any dress shop on the street, pick out a mannequin, and you shall have the ideal mistress ever after.”

“Jonathan.”

Mina’s hand was on his arm. Jonathan turned to her. In the same instant, the man with the cigar tapped the neglected ash off its end and sidled hastily inside where he nearly collided with Daniels and two other onlookers crowded at the door’s ornate window. Through the gap there was some muttering in a worried tone and more muttering in a lilt that was curiosity pretending to be worry, then the door was shut. Jonathan swallowed a sigh and felt a belated rush of heat come to his face.

“Well. I do believe I’ve soured things quite thoroughly.”

“You don’t know that.” Her free palm floated up to his cheek. “Though you did worry me. You weren’t really about to come to blows over so petty a thing, I know. But why..?” She indicated the whole of the last few minutes with her eyes alone. In answer, Jonathan let something of fire and ice turn over in his own look. He boxed both her hands in his own, siphoning out their warmth as she gripped their cold.

“We did not risk Hell itself and battle its horrors just for mundane villains to get their unctuous way because it would be impolite to counter their rudeness with barbs rather than a turned cheek. I do not doubt that I survived as much as I did by dancing on eggshells at the start, nor do I regret the opportunity it gave me. But that was merely my risk then. More, by doing the ‘proper thing’ and leaving you wholly sealed off from our affairs and vice versa, you were left alone in the dark when—those nights when…”

“I know. We have gone over that.”

“Yes. But what all has been learned from it? Circumstances made it prudent for us to condense ourselves to be the least obtrusive, most benign caricatures of ourselves all our lives. Childhoods of charity and scraps and always bowing to what we were told was proper. Rules we did not dare break for fear of being burdensome. Rules that nearly destroyed us when powers that reigned outside those civilized borders used them as a noose. We would not have succeeded in the end if we had sat and waited and nodded our heads to what was proper start to finish. So it is even within these softer aggravations. Even if it wasn’t? I am not about to let any wretch, however great or small, take their venomous shots at you while I sit by.”

At this, Mina could not withhold her own small sigh. No more than she could resist resting her brow against his front.

“Ever my knight.”

He spoke down into her hair.

“You were mine first. And I admit you remain the cannier of us two cavaliers. I don’t foresee a warm welcome once the man goes flying to Wilson’s ear.”

“We aren’t here for Wilson. We might still approach Penclosa, whoever she is. And Van Helsing will surely take your side if it comes to pointing fingers. In any case, Miss Penclosa is the star of the show. It would be quite something if he suffered a supposed friend like that to insult her sex while coming to see her work.”

Jonathan almost replied, but a voice cut across the garden in a mellow tone.

“Supposing he was not already a skeptic of her, dear. The only members of an audience who are more adamant onlookers than admirers are hecklers.”

Both Harkers jumped as if pricked and whirled to spot the woman still sitting in her flowering alcove. Whatever musing concentration she had been steeped in was thoroughly broken, with all the light and life of her now consolidated in the great gems of her eyes. Jonathan found he could not avoid comparing them to that of some hungry housecat spotting a plump mouse. Nor could he avoid how wholly that gaze seemed to be latched onto him. He worried for a moment that he might have tripped himself and Mina into the verbal pit of a sermon. Sedate though much of her mien was, there was enough of time and gravity about her that suggested the potential of a tongue lashing similar to Mina’s more caustic fellow-teachers of etiquette.

Yet the woman allowed herself her own contrite smile and fluttered her hand as if to swat away Jonathan’s suspicions.

“Forgive my playing eavesdropper, both of you. Only, your show has been the most engaging part of my day since this latest pageantry began. I am only here for duty’s sake and could not suffer the crush in there any longer than you. Yet it seems the rabble have tried to leak out after us.” Her smile increased the smallest increment. “It is a most heartening thing to see it properly chased back from whence it came…did I mishear ‘Jonathan?’”

“You heard right, madam.”

“Alas, no madams on this side of the yard,” she lifted her left hand, barren of a band. “You may call me Helen, Jonathan. And you, dear?”

“Mina.”

“Engaged or wedded already?”

“Wedded,” she allowed her own plain band to flaunt its small shine against a sunbeam. “Fortunately.”

Helen smiled at this too and nodded, “Most fortunately. Whether that carbuncle of a lecturer wants to admit it or not, yours is the treasured status over any tawdry sham he’s trapped his poor wife into. I would wager even his mistresses must suffer, should he have them. Although, and I do apologize for prying, may I inquire if there was some manner of unhappy shadow in your lives of late that might want for hypnotic aid? If such is your case, I am certain you shall have your way regardless of any stamping of feet from your new friend.”

The Harkers regarded each other cautiously for a moment. Mina flung her message up into him as he passed his gingerly back. This had become something of a routine for them. While Jonathan had taken the lion’s share of shock on his head, even Mina had some threads of early silver cutting through the dark cloud of her hair, and there were times when one or both of them let slip a trace of the haunted months in their eyes.

Something had happened to the Harkers.

Something had left its mark on them.

In answer to inquiries, the Harkers always scraped only the top crust of truth off the larger story and repackaged it as the tale in full.

Thus they came to sit on Helen’s stone bench, for it was wide and she had beckoned them, and husband and wife held to each other as they recited the meticulously vague trials of the year before.

First, Jonathan had been struck with a terrible accident while on a business trip in Europe. The sort of accident that comes shaped like powerful persons with dark designs. He had scarcely escaped it, and had to do so while stripped of his property and papers.

Second, when he finally made it to civilization, half-dead and boiling with fever in a hospital, Mina had fetched him home and nursed him back from the brink. This should have been the whole of it.

But then, third, Fate had gone and afflicted Mina herself with a far more dire illness that had put her at the very knife’s edge of life and death. Jonathan had championed her then, and had his turn to pull her back to health. This, coupled with a long chain of morbid tragedies that saw too many friends going into their graves around the same time, had stained them over the course of only a few months.

“It was more than enough to weigh upon our minds for some time after,” Mina allowed. “Neither of us slept well even after the worst hours had passed. Yet Providence has taken a kinder turn with me, it seems. I have gotten past my nightmares and can allow myself simple dreams or wholly blank nights. But Jonathan…” Her lips pursed around the truth.

“I do not fall asleep anymore,” Jonathan said to the ground between his shoes more than either of his listeners. “I fall into nightmares, wake in terror, and then, when exhaustion grows too heavy to fight, my mind allows me to black out. It is a poor enough state on its own, but worse for forcing my bedmate to return to the drudgery of playing caretaker over some imagined—,”

“Stop,” Mina cut in. “You know that isn’t fair.”

“Nor is it a lie.”

“And your aim,” Helen hummed, “is to undo these nightmares? Have them banished by mesmerism?” Her eyes seemed nigh illuminated at the prospect. “It would be a trying attempt, even for a practiced hypnotist. One who practices in the ordinary manner, at any rate.”

“Does Miss Penclosa not operate in the ordinary manner?” Mina asked.

“No.” Helen’s smile at last showed teeth and a stray sunbeam fell in such a way on her eyes that they seemed to burn away half her face with their vibrance. “Not at all. I have seen many hypnotists make their attempts.” She fussed with the high collar of her dress, kneading at it as though it chafed. “Some are quite impressive. But none so far have shown the method or the ability that Professor Wilson has been so dedicated to making a display of. If it were otherwise, he would only have yet another lookalike act to be shrugged aside by his peers. I know firsthand that the ‘Performances of Penclosa,’ as I have seen him titling his observations, are undertaken with a method quite alien to anything else he or his peers have witnessed before. The how of it seems lost even upon the performer. All that’s known is that it is strange, but undeniably effective.”

“You sound as if you’ve witnessed her before.”

“I have. I can attest to her ability and character enough to say that, regardless of any opinion of Wilson’s or his poor choice of compatriots, she will undoubtedly be of a mind to assist how she can. Now, might I ask another question of you both?” Despite the last word, her gaze slipped pointedly to Jonathan and the watchchain glinting at his side. “How near are we to noon? I can tell the pitch of their clamor inside has changed and so it must be nearly time for the spectacle.”

Jonathan checked his watch and saw it was ten past twelve. As they all moved to rise, Helen sighed. Jonathan saw her craning around on her spot, frowning at a cluster of roses.

“What is it?”

“Oh, my crutch. I set it by me here and it fell back in the rosebushes.”

She had scarcely got past the third syllable before Jonathan had circled around to fish the thing out of the thorns. It was a striking piece fashioned from a well-worn length of oak. Though Helen took it in hand easily enough, he let her have his arm as a brace when she got to her feet. It took her a moment to actually release his sleeve, and then only because Mina gathered his other arm. Helen made a small noise close to a laugh.

“Goodness, but you are a sturdy one. Between your bearing and your choice of accessory,” she nodded to the kukri, “a charlatan clairvoyant would feign that they ‘read’ you as an ex-soldier. As I am neither, I must instead determine that you are a solicitor by trade and that you operate out of Exeter.”

That brought Jonathan and Mina both up short.

“You determined that from my arm?”

“From your seat. Rather, what you left there.” Helen pointed them back to the bench where Jonathan’s card case sat open on the stone. As Mina gathered it up and Jonathan set it more securely within a front pocket, Helen went on, “Before we head into the noise, a last question: Do you also live within the Exeter area? If so, I should like to know your judgment on the city and available living quarters in the area. I believe I am overdue to seek out new housing.”

“We can both vouch for it being something of a busy city, but it has its comfortable corners. In the event Mina and I get herded out the front door as soon as we enter the back,” he handed Helen one of the cards from his rescued case, “I should be happy to have you call on Hawkins and Harker to see about quarters in the area.”  

“If I may ask, for I cannot guess it by your arm or your card, are you in the firm’s employ, or are you the Hawkins or the Harker in the title?”

“Harker,” Jonathan admitted.

“A pleasure then, Mr. and Mrs. Harker.” She favored them with a last flash of her half-lidded stare before she turned them all toward the door. “I do hope we all enjoy the show.”

 Inside, a number of guesses were quickly proven right.

Jonathan’s new friend and some comrades gave him furrowed sideways glances. Daniels, seeing Jonathan see them, appeared to stutter some excuse before vanishing into another room. Others, clearly ticking off the minutes until Penclosa would appear to astound or confound, followed first this retreat, then the line of sight that had sent him running. Jonathan wished he had his hat to duck behind. Doubly so when his new friend—he decided to refer to him as Professor Carbuncle, lacking a better title—and his friends murmured their own asides to the gawkers. He pondered keeping his watch out to see how many minutes there would be between himself, Mina, and the hailing of a cab.

Before he could do so, Van Helsing filled the couple’s view, looking very much like a man trying his best not to look like a castaway frantic for an island to clamber on. His smile very nearly groaned with the effort to stay in place.

“My friends, I would risk many things for you. Life and death and worse. Yet if I must battle with Wilson’s voice another hour by my own self, I fear I shall try to do as good Jonathan did in time of action and make my exit by the nearest window. Have either of you seen this Miss Penclosa? Wilson only departed from me and my ears because Mrs. Wilson could not herself find the lady in the crowd.”

“Not yet—,” Mina began, but cut herself short when Helen laid a light hand against her shoulder.

“I’m afraid I lost track of time,” Helen said through a slight smile.

“Ah, then you are that Miss Penclosa? A pleasure to meet you,” he clasped her hand gently with a half-bow of the head.

“Likewise..?”

“Professor Van Helsing.”

“If you are a friend of the Harkers, then I will trust at once that you are of a fine character, sir. I do apologize for keeping them away. Please, might you tell me where I can find my poor Wilsons?” Van Helsing pointed the way, offering to take her arm to better break through the throng. Helen, Miss Penclosa, declined. She followed her crutch into the fray with ease. The Harkers could only stare after her.

Once her back vanished in the crowd, they divulged all that had happened in the garden to Van Helsing, starting from Prof. Carbuncle to meeting Miss Helen Penclosa on her bench. As they spoke, Jonathan spotted Prof. Carbuncle striding towards Prof. Wilson’s bobbing head as the latter entered to the room, now thoroughly incandescent with enthusiasm. This visage redoubled its glow when Prof. Carbuncle came upon him, though the cigar-gnawing man’s expression seemed to aim for stormy while landing only on puckered. Carbuncle seemed no match for Wilson’s patter either, for whatever words he had for the other man seemed drowned in a flood of exhilaration.

The hand Carbuncle had lifted to point Jonathan and Mina out was trapped in an instant as the gesture was mistaken—perhaps forcibly—for an agreeing handshake. Then Prof. Wilson must have gotten something out that caught Prof. Carbuncle’s interest more than revenge. His expression altered in a way that suggested not only doubt, but an eagerness to have that doubt proven right. Something near to a smile appeared on him as he gave Wilson a curt shake of the hand. The cool countenance was fractured a bit when Wilson abruptly turned to the parlor to announce:

“Attention my friends! I thank you for your patience. We have delayed some while in the hopes of not shorting any of the invited guests by beginning the display too soon. As it stands, it appears all are present and my guest and friend, the inimitable Miss Helen Penclosa, can now rescue you from my stalling.”

Miss Helen Penclosa made her official debut to general applause and a smattering of surprise as the room opened up to see her clearly. She had taken a spot on the overstuffed armchair with her crutch standing to one side. A soft smile turned to the guests.

“Hello. I must say I recognize very few of you this time around. The last get-together Professor Wilson was kind enough to throw had only a third the number. I must then assume that the two new thirds are comprised of one third those with some belief in what I mean to display and one third looking to pull down whatever mental chicanery is surely at work. The better to spare the latter’s time and get on to those here with genuine questions or desire to volunteer in earnest, I have submitted to Wilson that I should like to make my first demonstration upon one of the sincerest disbelievers present.”

The foggy green eyes slid unblinkingly to Prof. Carbuncle. There was a new cigar in his teeth and a sharkish bend to his lips.

“Professor Richard Atherton has obliged to fill the role. My thanks, sir.”

“You’ve mine back, madam,” Carbuncle, who was Atherton, spoke through his smoke. “How is it done, then? Do you need a pocket watch to swing before my eyes? Shall we have a staring contest until I’m dulled to sleep?”

“Not at all. Merely take your seat and we will begin.”

Penclosa nodded to the chair Wilson himself had dragged up to stand across from her own. Atherton took it with a laborious settling that suggested the showing of immense patience to amuse unruly children. As he sat, Penclosa stood. She did not make use of her crutch. Whatever injured wobble she might have in her faulty leg seemed to undo itself as she rose. Later, both Harkers and Van Helsing would agree that it looked almost as if her eyes were their own empowering force; as though they were what drew her up like a string raising a marionette. Her gaze certainly seemed to pump some notable new life into her tired countenance.

All watched as her look set into that uniquely feline expression of an animal centering its attention on an oblivious bird. Her arms raised and gestured in a series of swings and shapes that appeared almost like those of directing signals. It had none of the gentle sway of hands from an experimenting doctor or the theatric waggling from a stage performer. More than one witness would point out how very near it came to something ritualistic; the sort of motions seen in rites of religions or archaic dance.

Whatever their purpose, the motions and Penclosa’s stare had an effect on Prof. Atherton. A remarkably brisk one. His apparent confederates in the crowd seemed to take this for some act at first. Likely playing dim from the outset only to spring up and call the woman a fraud. And perhaps this had been Atherton’s goal as he took his seat. Yet as one minute ticked into another and into another, the man’s face seemed to become unstitched from within. Expression slackened, eyes glazed. The still-smoking cigar drooped in his teeth until it finally dropped and fell in his lap, flinging ash as it went. Thankfully it was no longer smoldering; he had stopped puffing on it some while ago and the thing did not have heat enough left to burn through his trousers.

Still, he did not startle at the drop. Nor did his hand move to clear his lap. Penclosa stopped her arms but still did not blink. She regarded the half-murmuring room, then silenced it by holding her finger to her lips. Once all was quiet, she turned her full attention back to Atherton’s drooping head. It was not the look of a woman or a cat now. Here was a high empress idling over the means of an execution.

She folded her hands before her and smiled.

“Professor Atherton, I have wonderful news. The hypnotism failed. Attempts were tried for hours and all the guests have left. You are free to speak honestly without fear of eavesdroppers.”

Atherton’s head raised an inch and something of his former expression drifted back into his face. He grated out a chuckle.

“Knew it,” he said in a dreaming voice. “Knew that crippled crone was all talk. All Wilson’s talk, anyhow. By next year the fool will be clamoring about some tart with a crystal ball and a deck of cards claiming she’s the next Oracle. Where’s my cigar?”

“A new box is being fetched. While we wait, let us talk. First, the crippled crone. How old would she say she is, at a guess?”

“Damned if I know. Has to be half-past forty.”

“And yourself?”

“Fifty-six as of last month.”

“And your wife?”

“Forty-one, alas.”

“And your mistress?”

“An even twenty-two. A springy dear, she is.”

“I imagine she must be. Is she at the party?”

“Lord, no. Nor the missus. One of her few virtues, not having any care for twaddle like mesmerists or spiritualism. Pity about the rest.”

“What is the rest?”

“The face, the gray, the days out with those harpy friends she meets with to talk about that American woman, that Bascom with her degree in bloody rocks and—,”

“I see. And this mistress, what is she like?”

“Blessedly quiet. A fine change of pace and a finer help in a man’s odds and ends. Good enough girl, though I fear it may be near time to break things off.”

“Why is that?”

“She’s been acting squirrely in that way women do when they’re working up to simper for something big. Money, a wedding ring, your solemn oath you’ll stay for the baby. Some headache or other. I do hate stepping away while things are sour. Better to cut things while they’re still sweet and she won’t think to get up to anything foolish.”

“Like telling your wife?”

“The wife scarcely matters. It’s telling the university that’d pull the rug out. Just look at that mess with Professor Gilroy. Ha, ex-professor, I should say. That debacle shows well enough how quick a position can be cut out from under your feet. I’d bet money he got hit by some brain bug or other, some undiagnosed fever, but just a few days of him playing eccentric killed his station. If little Ellie Daniels goes tattling it’ll be my position on the fire just for starters.”

Somewhere in the back of the room, a man’s voice drew sharp breath. Other voices muttered and shushed. There was a scuffle and rustle as someone was held back. Penclosa showed no sign of whether she noticed or cared about what colors the man named Daniels was turning and pressed on:

“That does sound serious.”

“Between her brother and the state of affairs with the soft-hearted and softer-minded infecting the realm of logic, it is infinitely serious. I tell you, it would not be half so precarious if it were not for all this New Woman claptrap infecting the mentality of our times. The next generation of men will live their lives bowing to every little infantile fancy of women and go hollering around on their behalf to intellectual betters, wailing the same tunes of false equality.”

“Most distressing. But that all sounds quite vague, if you don’t mind my saying. Mere hypotheticals all. Can you think of any recent example of such a thing?”

“Oh, yes. Not half an hour ago, as a matter of fact.”

“Goodness. What happened?”

“Some pup wrapped around his wife’s finger felt the need to come puff his chest at me over a little idle comment or other—,”

“Stop.” Atherton stopped like a cylinder plucked from its phonograph. “To this point, you have spoken as if there are no witnesses. You may continue to do so, Professor Atherton, but now you will do so without bluff or obfuscation. You will speak only the truth aloud until I tell you to wake. Tell me if you understand.”

“I understand.”

“Good. Now, to the best of your ability, repeat exactly what you said when you stepped out the back door into the garden.”

Professor Atherton repeated what he had brayed to Daniels, nigh verbatim.

“Why did you say so?”

“Because it’s true.”

 “Why did you say so right then?”

“Because of the girl nattering to her young man. I wanted her to hear. It heartens me to see them caught out of line. Especially the young ones. You have to nip them while they’re young and sponge-headed and susceptible to all the rubbish that wants to mold them out of what they ought to be.”

“And what ought they be?”

“In their place. Otherwise you get things like her husband.”

“And what thing was her husband?”

“Some—some tetchy little Prince Charming, huffing about insulting women and his wife and whatnot when I was just—just—,”

Atherton was turning somewhat purplish.

“You are struggling, Professor Atherton. That’s you trying to shake off the command for honesty. Tell the truth about her husband and you’ll be fine.”

The man seemed to chew his words another moment. Then, finally:

“The truth is he scared me. Truly, properly scared me, getting as close as he did. It wasn’t just the blade on his hip either. There was something wrong about him. Meeting his eye made my bowels turn to jelly. I felt certain he could hurl me against the brick like a porcelain doll hard enough to break me like one. Like he could take my head off like you’d pop a daisy from its stem and that he was considering doing just that, with or without that massive bloody Gurkha knife. That moment was the closest I’ve come to soiling myself since I was six years old. If his wife hadn’t made him look away, I don’t know that I wouldn’t have still been standing there, soaking my trousers because I couldn’t unhook myself from those awful eyes and all the black promises they were making.

“But he did look away and I got inside, thank God. He’d not lay a hand on me before witnesses. Certainly not in front of ones of actual importance versus the girl holding his tether, anyway. I have to talk to Wilson about him when I have the chance. If I can get a name out of him, I can see about seeking some proper recompense later. At the very least I can see the snow-headed bastard and his keeper are tossed out. I took him for some sort of young officer. Perhaps I can nettle things higher up his ranks.”

Penclosa nodded coolly at this. It was the first time she bothered to spare a glance for anyone other than Atherton, glancing first in the direction of Professor and Mrs. Wilson who had been turning alternate shades of cherry and chalk throughout, then at the Harkers. At Jonathan. For the moment he was bookended by both Mina’s grasp and Van Helsing’s heavy hand at his arm. Whether this was to support or halt him, he couldn’t guess, but he was grateful that they provided some small insulation between himself and the increasing number of inquisitive eyes steering his way. He now ached for a hat to hide under and an overcoat to mask the scabbard.

He felt fires burning inside his face as murmuring rose on their side, on the Wilsons’, and on the irate Daniels’. It was the sound of an intrigued audience before a stage play rather than a scientific demonstration. Jonathan could see there had even been a refilling of glasses and a fetching of concessions from the table as the show went on. Penclosa seemed to note this as well, finally retreating from her looming stance and retreating to her armchair.

“This has all been very enlightening, Professor Atherton. I give my thanks for your being so candid. Your last instruction is this: If or when news of these revelations leak out of this room and reach ears ‘of importance’ in your campus’ alumni—those few which are not already present—and you are called to elaborate on the features of it all?” Her eyes flashed like dim jade and her next words carried the intonation of a tolling bell. “You will tell the whole truth without any withholding, any muddying, any twisting of narrative for your benefit. Do you understand?”

“I understand.”

“Good.” She snaked out one hand to grasp the crutch. This she lifted just high enough so that it would make a resounding crack as she struck the floor. “Awake!”

Prof. Richard Atherton blinked blearily for a moment, like a man swimming out of a thick sleep. In the next moment, consciousness snapped fully into him as his teeth clicked shut. This confused him for a moment. Then:

“Damn! My trousers.” He snatched up the cigar and wiped at the ashes. “I will give you some credit, madam, for at least getting me halfway to the so-called mesmeric sleep. Or sleep alone, anyway. Though I’m afraid you’ve got your first poor mark for the hypnotist act. You may yet find a niche as an in-person sedative, however. There’s a number of colicky babes in the world who could use a nanny with that trick. You could…” Atherton was on his feet now and finally aware of the sharp looks thrown his way by the group at large, as well as the downright acidic glare coming from Daniels. Even Prof. Wilson, who had kept his notebook out and open, was scratching at the pages with a significantly strained shade of enthusiasm. “For God’s sake, what is it? Don’t tell me she actually got anything out of me. What, did she have me butcher a tune? Insult someone’s mother?”

“Ellie.” All heads turned to Daniels. Narrow man that he was, he seemed to quiver like a livid tuning fork. “My baby sister, Eleanor, has spent the last year and a half dancing around the name of a scholar she claims to be smitten with. One she has admitted to playing both secretary and editor to for numerous manuscripts; such that she has practically been penning the things herself. Our family has assumed it was just some unscrupulous student or other taking advantage and have tried numerous times to have her divulge the young man’s name or to break it off, to no avail. But it occurs to me that it has been roughly as long since you started crowing about what a loss it is to the modern man that he cannot flaunt a mistress with impunity, what with the advent of divorce gaining its little toeholds in the world of marriage. Adultery is no longer a sport, but a vice, you’ve said. You wouldn’t happen to be sharing that vice with little Ellie, would you, Dick?”

Prof. Richard Atherton suddenly lost all pallor under his beard. Something near to epiphany seemed to bring a hint of color back to him as he registered the mass of disapproving stares before turning wholly to Miss Penclosa in her chair. A glass of claret stood on the same end table she’d rested her crutch on. She met his gaze placidly as she lifted the wine for a small sip.

What came next was as paradoxically abrupt as endless.

Revelation had come to Atherton in the way of colliding dominoes. Daniels and little Ellie, the horde of glowering fellow faculty and distant strangers, witnesses all to some bleak secrets he could not appear to recall. Was it just the mistress he had spoken of? More? Whatever was said, it had even the men who’d been his allies a quarter of an hour ago either turning away from him or glaring at him with such disgust he might have rolled himself in sewage. Things had been said. Damning things. Worst of all, it would be speculated, was that he had said things he did not recall. He had been mesmerized and the whole of it had been erased from his memory as neatly as chalk lessons rubbed off the board.

He had been made a fool and he had done it to himself.

Because of her.

The docilely gloating little figure sat by her crutch.

Later it would come out from his former friends that he had, in fact, gotten a drink too many in him beforehand. He was many things by nature, but violent was rarely one of them. Not without a pond’s worth of inebriation in him. If not an excuse, it was a reason for what he attempted to do there in plain view of the parlor. He was the nearest body to Penclosa, after all, in that snug gap between the armchairs. It was quick work for him to dart forward, snatch up the sturdy length of oak, and raise it above his head with the heavy end aimed squarely at Miss Penclosa’s head.

It happened too fast for gasps, for shouts, for reaching hands, for jolts, for steps. Too fast even for Penclosa to do more than widen her bottomless eyes in shock.

The crutch came down—

Snick!

—and lost half of itself on the thick nap of the rug. Atherton made a high strangled sound like that of a boy a third his age yelping over a twisted ankle. Something was twisting, but it was a higher limb. One that dropped the remaining half a crutch as his forearm shrieked in Jonathan’s left hand. Jonathan’s right still held the bared kukri while his eyes held Atherton’s attention. Some would remark, in varying states of hyperbole, how suddenly cold they had felt in the white-haired fellow’s presence. A man of ice freezing the churlish other in place.

A whiff of ammonia hit the air. What Atherton had avoided since the age of six now went trickling down his leg.

“I think, Professor Atherton,” Van Helsing’s voice broke gently in, “it is wise for you to apologize to Miss Helen Penclosa, and then to sit in the foyer until police come to have their words with you.”

“To hell with the police,” Daniels grated out. “I’ll pay you a pound to give him a new elbow, Officer.”

Jonathan released a small breath and eased his grip enough to keep from fracturing the other man’s wrist.

“I’m not—,”  

All parties within the odd tableau were alerted by a tell-tale sound to the westward side of the room. The soft capping of a lens and the scrape-slide of a plate being taken out of a daguerreotype camera.

“Oh, don’t mind me,” sang the photographer as he stowed the old plate and prepped the new. The sun seemed to be shining through an otherwise nebbish grin. “Just need to reload, is all. Glad I packed double.”

Atherton seemed to choke on either an abundance or an utter deficit of words at this. He looked for all the world like a body waiting for the final beat of a bad dream to finally dump him awake and free in his bed. Instead, a small entourage of guests, Van Helsing included, guided him away. First to the toilet, then the suggested foyer. Prof. Wilson had already passed along to the first servant he could get hold of to send for a smattering of authorities. If not for an arrest, then for the inevitable explosion of circulated word that would ensue after. Mrs. Wilson had flown to Miss Penclosa’s side in the meantime, gushing apology and worry at such a rate that she appeared nearly to skip her breath.

 “I’m fine, Gloria, truly. It was all far too quick for a proper scare. Rather, our friend was.” Penclosa had to look down to find Jonathan now, as he had sheathed the kukri to pick up the two halves of oak. “I could barely follow you, young man. You must have practice with this sort of thing.”

Jonathan tried to smile around a noncommittal sound. His line of sight flicked between her and Mina who had caught a woman who’d toppled in a faint over the whole scene. She flicked her gaze back, mirroring his reflexive thought. Speak no evil.

“Not in this particularly, no. Solicitation is not quite so competitive a field. At least not yet.” He rose with the crutch’s pieces in hand. “I’m so sorry about this. I’ll pay for another.” Penclosa wrinkled her nose at this and seemed to swat the notion away.

“Better it be in half than in my head. I have spares, Mr. Harker.”

“Harker, is it?” A jaunty hand clapped him on the back. “What regiment, son? Look as though you’ve seen the far end of Hell and its backyard.”

This voice came from the first of many strangers who would approach Jonathan and Mina at intervals during Penclosa’s less dramatic demonstrations. Between softer displays—everything from comical impressions to impromptu dance performances to heartening instilled commands to inspire confidence or to regale with an old warm memory the subject had thought forgotten—the Harkers had to lose flake after chip after crumb of secrecy in dancing around the barrage of queries that found them, even with Van Helsing trying to play buffer. In order, the Harkers divulged the following:

No, he was not of any country’s military. Yes, he was just a solicitor. Yes, his hair was real. Yes, he had suffered a sizable shock in life. No, he would rather not speak of details, though illness was the least of it. Yes, she was the reason he made it through with mind and health intact. Yes, they were married. Yes, he was and remains quite adamant that she never be shown anything less than respect. Yes, she was adamant on his behalf in turn. …Yes, really, just a solicitor. Hawkins and Harker.  

Jonathan found himself with half his cards gone before the afternoon was out.

“Perhaps you should have new ones printed,” Van Helsing ribbed. “You could perhaps stamp a small kukri on each one. It appears to do good for your business.”

“It was just for politeness’ sake. Honestly, I’m just baffled at how,” Jonathan fluttered his hand uncomfortably as if to encompass the whole of the scene, “all that bluster translates to such friendly interest. I am more than a little stunned that I’ve collected more cards today than I manage in a week by way of day-to-day courtesy within the firm.” Mina found his hand again and drew circles over its knuckles. When he looked to her, he could not help reflecting her smile.

“Everyone loves when a hero gives a show. It’s such an assumed thing that evil acts can be gotten away with, the damage done without any hindrance. So it is a rare and happy thing when people get to see the stalwart knight appear with sword in hand to cut it down.”

“Yes, well. I still posit that I married the knight. I’m far better suited to being her faithful squire. Polishing her pauldrons and all.”

“Jonathan.”

“Mina.”

“My friends,” Van Helsing turned both their heads with his tone. “I believe the room is nearly thinned enough for our purposes. At least, so thin that we have become the most conspicuous of guests remaining. We, and the man with his iron grip upon the camera.” The Harkers looked up and found he spoke true. The herd had shallowed out to a few parties circling the Wilsons and the photographer going over something with Penclosa.

The latter man, a Mr. Greg Westman, had been almost as busy as Miss Penclosa and Prof. Wilson combined. There had been the images captured of Penclosa and her posed subjects, talks with the police who had arrived, both as a witness and a man who might have an impressive shot to share once all was developed, and with the inevitable circling fly or two of journalists who’d come sniffing at the sight of the authorities’ wagon. Westman was one of many rising amateur photographers inching their way into the professional field and, supposing his shots developed well enough, his daguerreotypes would find their way into print to better illustrate what might be pitched as, ‘The Misadventure of the Madam Mesmerist.’

“Mr. Harker, sir?” Westman approached them now, the two halves of the crutch under one arm. “Might I bother you for just one last shot? I’m down to my final plates and it would make a lovely closing piece for the paper if you could just come this way?”

While he spoke, he herded Jonathan toward Penclosa’s chair. Mrs. Wilson had brought down one of her spares from her room, a thing of ash wood, and it rested against the table where its predecessor had stood. Jonathan sheepishly held up the kukri as Penclosa smilingly presented her two pieces of oak.

“Perfect, thank you! Now if I could have just one more of—,”

“Pardon, Mr. Westman,” Mina said as she drifted to his side. “Might I ask what model this is and where we might find one? We have been going back and forth on picking up a camera for our own use and you seem to be quite natural with this.”

Jonathan sent her a silent thanks from the corner of his eye into the corner of hers. Of the sundry traits the Harkers could find reflected in the other, the ability to dislodge monologues from even the most reticent speaker was a most useful one. As a result, Greg Westman had duly pivoted into a history lesson on M. Joseph Nicéphore Niépce. Jonathan might have gone to join Mina but for something brushing his side. It was Penclosa, tapping him lightly with the tip of the halved crutch.

“Do sit. You’ll make me tired looking at you.” She nodded at the armchair still across from her, the subject seat. Her voice lowered an increment to keep from traveling too far. Say, to the Wilsons’ side of the space. “It is my turn to apologize, I think. I see I must have made an error in dropping even your surname to the crowd. I’d not realized your visit was so clandestine as to remain hushed on names as much as purpose.”

Jonathan did not sit, but hovered at its side. He kept his furthest edge of attention on the rambling patter of Mr. Westman for the duration that Mina had to withstand it and on Van Helsing who had moved with calculating nonchalance into the shrinking circle of visitors still caught in the Wilsons’ orbit. The rest he reserved for trying to parse the nature of Miss Penclosa’s stare. For she did stare, intentionally or otherwise. Her blinks were rare and slow and seemed almost unnatural in the backdrop of her mild face. As the day had worn on toward the late afternoon, he’d lost count of how many times he’d felt a sensation of being observed roaming on his brow or back, only to look up and see the mesmerist was in the middle of some pause between performance or discussion to look at him. Nor did she ever drop her gaze when caught.

With everything that’s happened between the garden, the guard duty, and the hypnotic gamble to come, you can forgive her wanting to keep an eye on you.

“It’s no trouble,” he said aloud. “We simply don’t wish to be obtrusive, and that much is our own foible. And again, I owe the greater apology for costing you your property. In hindsight, I’m sure I might have caught it if—,”

“It’s a glorified twig, Jonathan, not a family heirloom. It’s a better thing to have you end its career as a weapon with one hand and seize that lout with your other. The fact is you saved me from a most abrupt and ugly injury, if not an ending outright.” Here the windows of her eyes performed their slow shutter of a blink. “The least I owe you is my best attempt to assist in the internal injury that troubles you. That in mind, I believe we have come to the point where we must cajole our host into setting aside his notebook before he—,”

“Ah, Mr. Harker! Were you interested in a session yourself?” All heads swiveled as Prof. Wilson nearly bounded to the sitting area. Mr. Westman had mercifully taken his leave at that point, Mina having lured him towards the door by insisting she help carry his things along to wait for his hansom, him insisting back that he could carry it all, and so forth. Van Helsing had held Prof. Wilson back as long as possible, but the man’s gaze had landed on Jonathan leaning on the chair and the man had all but flown. He was already thumbing to a clean page in his book. “Where is Gregory? Gregory, wait just a moment if you have a spare plate!”

“Bradford.” Wilson glanced down to see Miss Penclosa frowning up at him. “You have already gotten more than your fill of successful examples, on top of the nigh guaranteed publicity of the police report once it turns to newsprint. Doubly so should my implanted command that Atherton speak the truth before his colleagues have reason to be set off. Mr. Harker has done more than any service a host could dare ask of a guest. More, a guest of a guest. The least we owe him is the dignity not to set him up as a prop twice in the same day.”

Wilson fidgeted with his notebook for another moment. His gaze bounced between the one sitting and the one standing.

“…So he is interested in a session? Is that so, Mr. Harker? I only ask for the purposes of tallying! These sorts of things live and die by records. How many successes, who the successes were, references on references. You would be astounded how stringent any credible journal is when it comes to such fascinating realms of science as this. They demand the most fantastic list of feats and yet will tear a work to pieces over the slightest fault. It is why I most earnestly insist on recording as much in the way of detail, you see, so if I could perhaps—,”

A tawny and callused hand landed chummily on Prof. Wilson’s shoulder. Van Helsing’s smile was at once buoyant and stiffly chiseled in place.

“Professor, I am most familiar with the trials of expressing the reality of the strange to stubborn audiences. Such is the case both within and without the precarious wilds of academia. Yet this is not the case of the present. For your purposes, you hunt for evidence, evidence, evidence, using volunteers and compatriots for the so vital need of the impartial proofs. But my friends, they are not volunteers. They are not for the consuming by even the wisest audiences. If it were so, there would be no need to wait for privacy. Good Jonathan, who has done a good service today and so much more before, he comes to Miss Penclosa seeking assistance, not to your peers for his name pulled across a heap of articles. Which is all to say, in plainer words, this is a matter of help. Of health!”

The cobalt gaze twinkled in its nest of crow’s feet. His hand tightened an extra chummy increment on Wilson’s shoulder.

“To spy upon or share the details in such a case would be to court the dangerous place where the confidences of doctors and patients lay. But I ramble so much. You are a man of ethics, Professor Wilson, and I would swear upon every title to my name that you would not err in such a way over one single session out of dozens.”

Prof. Wilson opened his mouth.

“Of course not, Professor Van Helsing,” Penclosa hummed over her glass. It was nearly empty now. “I know my dear Gloria would not marry a cad any more than I would stay under the roof of one. I certainly wouldn’t agree to be at the center of a study that would seek to abuse the trust of the sort of people which proof positive of my skill intends to aid. Which is the point under it all, isn’t it? Not just proving the full reality of mesmerism, but proving its usages beyond making people do tricks. If that were all these displays have been for,” a small smile flared up and vanished, “likewise our early work with Gilroy, then I would be most shocked. I believe I would have to take myself out of the study entirely if it were so.” She sipped the glass dry.

Prof. Wilson shut his mouth. Cleared something out of his throat. Fumbled with his notebook before ultimately, painfully, closing it.

“Yes. Well. I suppose if this is a matter of a, ah, therapeutic nature, I suppose…” He seemed to almost visibly wilt. Jonathan thought inexplicably that he might be looking at some distant uncle of Dr. Seward’s. Though Wilson’s manner was notably more excitable in his pursuit of examples, there was no missing the similar duo of hunger for fresh results and disappointment at slipped opportunity.

Jack had resigned from his role as asylum head not long after Quincey Morris’ funeral in America. He’d not given himself more than a week before he turned to the neglected matter of R. M. Renfield, paying for a plot in a proper cemetery and a new stone. A day after this ceremony, he had begun the work of disentangling himself from the sanitorium—a process that had been met with equal parts entreaties to stay on and older detractors urging him out the door—which ultimately ended with him founding his own psychiatric practice. The shift in work and its purpose, hearing and working toward solutions of a patient’s ills versus merely detaining and observing violent extremes of mental havoc, had gone some way toward tipping the man out of a stranglehold of depression. In fact, it seemed to fire him into a new tier of thrill over possibilities for treatment. Not merely in the matter of pharmaceuticals or enforced methods, but skills a patient may hone for themselves.

Though Jack never dared drop patient names in earshot, he had bounced ideas, successes, and frustrations off his friends on several occasions. The despondency seen when he was stuck upon a case that had been snagged in its progress was shown in flints upon Prof. Wilson’s face.

He wished to prove not only that he was right about the power of mesmerism, but that there was a point to him being so, and that it was not merely an amusing parlor trick. A hard thing to manage when the only real evidence he had was a stack of Penclosa’s demonstrations which did indeed take place in his parlor. Jonathan withheld a sigh.

“Professor. It’s true I would like some privacy for Miss Penclosa, myself, Mina, and Van Helsing. I do not wish my name to flung about any more than it’s already set to be with the issue of Professor Atherton. But supposing my own trouble finds a solution with Miss Penclosa’s help, I will at least consent to go on record as an anonymous example of successful hypnotherapy.”

Emphasis on anonymous.

But even this was enough to rekindle some of the light in Prof. Wilson’s face. The notebook speedily snapped open again and the pen resumed its giddy scratching.

“Oh, that is more than amenable, Mr. Harker! And quite right for such delicate work as this, of course.” Scratch, scratch, scratch. “Have you a pseudonym in mind? It will be a clunky thing to just place you as Mr. Anonymous or Mr. Patient.”

Mr. De Ville, Jonathan thought in a lilt so bitter it burned.

Mina returned to the room with Mrs. Wilson in tow, her line of sight floating to him. Jonathan stopped himself just short of beaming.

“Mr. Murray.”

 Prof. Wilson gave them his library to use and passed on his solemn oath that no staff would blunder through the door to interrupt. Mina and Jonathan took the wider of the couches while Penclosa claimed a chaise and Van Helsing settled himself in a chair. Van Helsing had his own notepad on hand and had given likewise solemn oaths in both the Harkers’ and Wilson’s direction that he would record only the most pertinent bullets of observation. This pointedly did not include Jonathan’s description of the following:

“There is not much more that can be told beyond what we explained in the garden. Last year, I suffered an experience of singularly horrific proportions. The sort which are on a scale of literal nightmare; utterly unbelievable to anyone of sound mind. Yet it happened. And though the physical shock of its aftermath is over, though the second and far more despicable illness of my poor Mina has come and gone, though all has been dealt with in the waking world that can be dealt with and healed…” His throat worked against a jagged stone as his hand trembled inside Mina’s. “It was two months that this event lasted for me last summer. All of May, all of June. This, combined with the illness that boiled my brain and body upon escape, on top of the very real, very dire threat to Mina that followed it—a threat I-I should have never—never let—,”

“Don’t.” A shadow of a whisper. But Mina’s voice gave it power, made it a salve. Her cheek pressed his shoulder while her other hand overlaid its twin in holding him. “The nightmares may lie to you, but don’t you dare do it to yourself awake. We are well past that.” Mina turned to Penclosa who sat once more in statue stillness, her own gaze intent. When she spoke it was still soft, but with an edge that bordered on brittle with its enforced calm. “Last year was one of suffering for us and for loved ones. There were many losses, great and small. Yet taken as the most unvarnished sum of time and effects, Jonathan found himself the winner of a most cruel lottery. Miscellaneous torments were all passed his way, and for far longer than myself or our friends had to endure. They have damaged his sleep ever since, but now, as the anniversary makes its return—,”

“How frequently?” Penclosa asked. As she did, she performed a blink. “Forgive my curtness. I ask because I already find no way to doubt the sincerity of Jonathan’s trouble. For a history to haunt him so deeply even as he throws himself between villain and victim like a wall suggests that whatever monstrosity inflicted itself on him before must be of a great scale. The only issue for us now is the timing. Before I can attempt to plant a countermeasure to his nightmares, if and when they next arise, we must define how often they occur at present. For example, Jonathan, do you expect you will have one as soon as tonight?”

Jonathan dipped his head in half a nod.

“I do. What used to be every other night is now almost routine. Last week I did not have a single night free of bad dreams.”

Penclosa grinned.

“Good.”

“Good?”

“Pardon. I fear some of Wilson’s scientific thinking has rubbed off. I say ‘good’ in that we have good odds of defining whether it will be my mesmerism that helps parry your nightmares or your mind merely deciding to quit the assault of its own volition. Of course, it would be most welcome if the latter were the case. If these grim dreams are truly tied to memories of what befell you a year ago near the same period, it could be they might reach a crescendo around the anniversary, then peter out to nothing as it passes. Only for them to make a return next year and around again. In truth, it seems as if your mind has conditioned itself in much the same way I might set a particular stimulus to make a subject react later.”

Penclosa raised her hand as if to illustrate a scenario:

“‘When the clock strikes ten o’ clock tomorrow, you will hop on one foot. The next time you smell fish, you will decide you must write a letter to someone.’ It all comes down to ‘When you notice X, then you will do Y.’ For you, the recall of the turning seasons to that soured period is having the same effect, albeit slowly. Subconsciously, you are reading into the calendar’s creep the same portents that led up to last year’s horrid experiences, and your dreams prey on you for it as if the events themselves are coming for a repeat performance. Now, I will not make promises as to how far my reach can extend in terms of permanently blunting the nightmares for good. Really, I can’t even say if this initial trial will bear fruit. But the trial is what matters before we attempt anything more extensive. To that end, I would like to ask how long you all intend to stay in Tuppeton.”

“We have two weeks planned out,” from Mina.

“And I shall be gone by this Sunday,” Van Helsing put in.

At this, Penclosa smiled anew and nodded, explaining, “That shall be enough to confirm things one way or the other. What I propose is this: I shall mesmerize you,” a look to Jonathan, “to see if I can prevent the nightmare you expect is inevitable tonight. Rather, and I apologize for this, to let the nightmare come upon you for just a moment, and then be banished by the command I place today.”

“I don’t believe I follow,” said Mina as she gripped Jonathan’s hand a little tighter. “Why not just halt the nightmare entirely?”

“Because,” Penclosa soothed back, though she frowned now too, “if the nightmare is not registered and then observed being thwarted by my countermeasure, we shall not know if I was effective or not. A wholly peaceful sleep might be written off as a fluke. Nothing to record, nothing to show one way or the other if the session had any positive effect that couldn’t be written off as a kind accident. Though I do swear to make sure it only exists long enough to be noticed, then quashed.” Her gaze returned to Jonathan. “It is imperative that you record all you can remember of tonight’s sleep. Every detail you can spare. And it is just as important that neither Mina or Professor Van Helsing let slip the description I will give you during the trance state. I trust you to be an honest fellow, but we cannot risk anything skewing your description after the fact.”

“That seems sound enough,” Jonathan agreed even as an unhappy crimp came to his mouth as he added, “though there is a last obstacle that we have not gone over.”

“What is that?”

“Me,” Van Helsing put in. “I am practiced in mesmerism myself, Miss Penclosa, and have succeeded in many cases. Jonathan, however, has proven a subject most hard to maneuver. I have gotten him near to trance, but his mind snaps out at me at the last moment and shoos the influence like a dog chasing out an intruder. And that with him all willing and trying with full consciousness to accept the hypnosis.”

Miss Penclosa’s brow did furrow for a moment at that. Her hand drifted up again to her high collar, scrubbing thoughtfully, or perhaps only itching. But her expression smoothed again as she turned back to Jonathan.

“I have had my hard cases in the past. Let’s see what happens. Mina, could you please give Jonathan the whole seat? When I begin, there can be no one to distract either of our lines of sight. Stand by with the Professor, if you would. Thank you.”

Once Jonathan was alone on the couch, Miss Penclosa stood herself up. Her strain in balance seemed somehow even less than the sudden strained vigor that had taken her in her demonstrations at the party. She stood erect and staring as her arms began their strange arches and swoops. Jonathan found each sweep sent a feeling of warmth gusting into him. A drowsy pulse that seemed at once to dull, to waken, and to pull him from himself. Yet all this was secondary to the new shock of her eyes.

As instructed, he had begun the session by focusing his gaze on her face. But in moments her face had burned off like steam to leave only the growing pools of her gray-green eyes behind. They were pools, were ponds, were a single merged mountain lake over which he found himself flying—

No no no the Sisters the Brides they are here in the room—

—falling—

—this drowse is not by choice, not playing dead, they want you still on the couch, want you wanting—

—falling—

—fight it fight their sound their mist their maws because after them—

—falling—

—after this—

—sinking below the surface like a flailing stone desperate for the surface—

—comes him. You feel it you know it he is here in the room he is there in your eyes in your neck in your head you let him do it let him into your life to eat and own and swallow whole he is coming to take it all and have you worse than dead get him out get away please please please not again please—

—and shuddering all the while.

—please…

Down, down, down he went into so dense a gloom that all light was thinned to a faint dancing glimmer on the water’s surface. Still he kicked, bucked, clawed at the water that sank him without drowning, crushing him down as if Poseidon’s own hand were dragging him below. He shuddered again, and seemed to gain a lap upwards; then was shoved down again. Back and forth, kick and foam, until he was sunk just deep enough that he could scarcely make out the surface’s light as a twinkling pinprick.

Which was the same instant that the water reversed its verdict. The moment the darkness turned complete was the moment he was rushed suddenly back up towards the light. He lunged to the surface as swiftly as a fish caught on a powerful line. As he breached the surface, he heard Penclosa’s voice call out:

“Awake!”

Jonathan came to with a jolt. Awareness returned to him with several announcements. One, that a faint glaze of perspiration had formed on his brow and that his hands had bent into claws within the cushion he sat on, almost tearing it. Two, that Mina was flying to his side with a look that could not decide between relief and anxiety, while behind her Van Helsing made a last hasty scratch upon his notes and followed her example from his other side. Three, that Miss Penclosa still stood, albeit by using the chaise as her support rather than the crutch. She too had a dew of exertion on her temples and her wan cheeks were flushed, but she smiled proudly just the same. The victor of some unknown duel.

“You were not overestimated, Jonathan Harker. If I had not had some little way in by the aid of your conscious mind, I don’t know that I could have gotten past the violent usher of your subconscious. But it has been managed and the foothold has been made. Should we have need to try again for greater measures—as I hope and expect we shall attempt tomorrow afternoon—the way in shall have its metaphoric door still chocked open.”

Jonathan blinked at her and at Mina and Van Helsing now bookending him.

“Was I really so resistant when I went under? I’d thought I was fairly calm as it began.”

“Only at the beginning, darling,” Mina took his hand and seemed to scour his face as if for signs of injury. “You quite worried us once the trance started setting in.”

“How so?”

“You seemed to be locked in a fight, my friend. An imagined battle in a dream. And you spoke.” This came from Van Helsing. While the weathered face was steady enough, Jonathan was less than heartened at the wild worry flaring in the man’s gaze. Fruitlessly, but instinctively, he lowered his voice to add, “You said, ‘Don’t let him in.’”

A nauseous chill flooded through Jonathan, blooming out from his core until he wondered if he might actually be sick right where he sat. But Mina squeezed his fingers in hers and he steadied.

“You were distressed for some time,” she admitted as one hand drifted up to his shoulder. Holding. Holding. He leaned into her and hooked his eyes to hers. “But it fell off as she went to work. The session was completed. She’s set something up in you. Something to trip up a nightmare should it come around.” Then, lower, “Tonight’s all arranged.”

They’d discussed said arrangement before ever arriving in Tuppeton. A small repeat of the lopsided nights of the year prior, in which days and nights were broken into shifts of uneven sleep to keep watch. Van Helsing had volunteered to be a conscious observer of the couple following Penclosa’s first attempt and to note whatever there was to note by way of triumph or failure in the battle between hypnotic command and dreamt assault.

“Remember,” Penclosa broke in, settling herself down again on the chaise, “record all you can recall on waking. Honest specifics.”

“I will. Are you alright?” He asked for the mesmerist seemed far more winded than she had appeared when working on the guests. She had ticked through those sessions with supreme ease. Now she sat wan and exhausted against the cushions. Even so, her smile redoubled at his question while she daubed herself with a handkerchief.

“This? Just the payoff of a most exerting day. Wine is fine but for these little spells,” she fluttered her hand at herself, “brandy is better. There is a decanter in the window…” Jonathan was already up and fetching it, likewise a tumbler. “Thank you,” she hummed, taking the cut glass as gratefully as if she were handed the Grail. A sip later she sighed and sank into the pillows. “I do sincerely hope to see you all tomorrow with good news. If we succeed in this small step, then the way towards greater leaps is possible. But whether it does so or not—,”

“Three o’ clock tomorrow afternoon,” Van Helsing assured. “We shall arrive with our news, whatever it may be. Deep thanks again for your aid regardless, Miss Penclosa.”

And there was little more to it than that, barring the necessary parting talk with the Wilsons. Yes, Van Helsing and ‘the Murrays’ would record all diligently. Yes, tomorrow. Yes, three o’ clock. Yes, yes, yes. Professor and Harkers parted ways in separate hansoms. Van Helsing headed back to the hotel to ensure he had a good heavy sleep to see him through the night watch while Mina pointed out how it would be a shame to waste the last of the day on heading back to their room when there was plenty of light left to enjoy the town’s little High Street, wouldn’t it?

It would. So they found a petite restaurant and took a late lunch that satisfied far better than what they’d nibbled at the party. They found a table that looked out on the windows and high old trees lining the tranquil avenues that were such a refreshing sight compared to Exeter’s clamor. Between bites, Mina nudged his foot under the table. Jonathan looked up from his cup to see her grinning in a way that spoke to her owning a secret that was only unknown to him because he had looked it full in the face and not seen it.

“What?”

“Nothing.”

“You’re lying.”

“I am.”

“So what is it?”

“Just thinking to myself that we shall have to add another address to the long-distance holiday pile when it comes time to send cards. It seems the good Sisters of St. Joseph and Ste. Mary shall have to share ink with Miss Penclosa.”

“I don’t follow.”

“You never do when you’ve gone and charmed another heart around your finger.”

“Said the pot to the kettle. And what charm? She was no more than sympathetic and professional—,”

“As sympathetic and professional as a mother learning that her child has scuffed a knee or caught cold for the first time. I got the impression she was only hindered from inviting you to lay down for a nap and broth because Van Helsing and I were there. If nothing else, her freedom with names shows an informality that I’d not have expected in someone with so moderate a demeanor, not counting her fire against Atherton. ‘Jonathan, Mina, Helen.’ There is a slight accent to her tone, same as Mrs. Wilson’s. Wherever they hail from, perhaps forenames come more freely.”

“Perhaps. And perhaps you’re reading too much into someone who takes courtesy and defense of the wronged as seriously as you do.” Jonathan batted his lashes and laid a hand to his chest. “Unless you mean to say you would not dote on a cause of mine even if I saved you from being struck with a heavy stick?”

“I suppose I would consider it. Idly.” She hid in another bite, another sip. Jonathan watched her and waited. “It’s just odd to me.”

“What is?”

“I don’t know. Even calling it ‘odd’ seems too tame for what I felt. Seeing it.”

“Seeing what, Mina?”

“You going into the trance. It was like watching the reverse of how you’ve been in your throes with the nightmares. On those occasions, I see you in distress and I can wake you out of it. You’re afraid, but then it breaks. I can always break it. But having to sit and watch you sink into that fear, or something so near to it—it made me want to jump up and shake you out of it. Or,” her words thinned out to a noise too small and ashamed to even count as a whisper, “or even knock Miss Penclosa off her feet to stop her work. It was an awful way to feel, but a worse thing to watch. I felt so strangely like a traitor sitting with Van Helsing as you sank into that horrible state before she finally won out and you went slack.” Jonathan’s hand went across to hers. It was her grip’s turn to tremble. She pressed on, “And somehow that was worse.”

“Worse how?”

“Because you looked just the same. Even before you said, ‘Don’t let him in,’ you looked just as you did that night. When he—when he had pushed your mind under and he—,” Jonathan stopped just short of crushing her hand in his. Her hold returned the favor. “You were limp, but you were struggling in your head just as she was struggling without, as though you two were fighting. Like you knew something was wrong and were clawing against it on the inside.”

“That is not too far from the truth,” he admitted. He told her of the lake that grew from Penclosa’s eyes, the fight he had made against the pressure of her hypnosis with animal reflex. “But it was not what he did to me. Likewise the Weird Sisters. Whatever irate creature lurks in the cellar of my mind, it read Penclosa as a threat even greater than Van Helsing’s softer attempt, and it fed fear up into me. Not that I can blame it any more than I can deride you for your concern. It was frightening for how unmoored I felt. She really does have a method all her own. Certainly one wholly alien to the mild haze that Van Helsing tried to push on me. But you saw yourself that she did no more than help. Or try, anyway. We shall see tonight.”

The tight grip had softened both ways to a mere cradling. Then Jonathan brought her knuckles up to press the gold band to his lips.

“I thank you either way for your concern. And for not tackling her.”

“Yes, well. No guarantees if tonight is unsuccessful. I should have to thrash her with my train guide in revenge.” Her attempt at a dour look cracked on the fourth word in and she batted his ankle with her shoe when he laughed. With food and drink now gone, they resumed their walk. While they’d not yet come by a shopfront with cameras in the window, they did find something smaller and sweeter in a jeweler’s display. Two somethings. Mina feigned a moment that it was a silly trifle, a saccharine one, really, and anyway it was more proper for a soldier and his wife, and…

“Oh, but haven’t you heard? I must be an officer of some kind. Witnesses all agree.” He slipped in the building before she could stop him. The unspoken warning sent by his look said that he would pick both if she did not choose her own. Chasing him inside, she saw him edging perilously near a pair of gold—

“I like the silver better,” she got out in a rush.

—then stood with her as the seller behind the glass cases came puttering up to point out every example in silver there was in his collection. To the man’s mild disappointment, the Harkers settled on a matching set with simple designs devoid of even a single scanty gem.

“We most definitely require a camera after this. We haven’t any photographs small enough for these.”

“We have this.” Jonathan tugged on a white lock of hair. Mina muttered again about soldiers and sailors.

But then, as Jonathan bowed so she might latch his chain on, she confessed, “Though I suppose we have risked as much as them. More than.”

“So we have,” Jonathan agreed, fastening her necklace at the nape. Back at the hotel they made their small snips before the toilet mirror, tying the cut locks with thread before tucking each in its locket. Jonathan sighed at hers. “This was a mistake after all. Yours looks as though you’re courting someone’s grandfather.”

“First, no one shall see inside but us.” Mina snapped the lid shut to punctuate as much. “Second, even if someone did see, it would not matter. They are not the one lucky enough to be your wife. If it’s someone especially young who saw, I could get away with telling them it came from some prince of fairy gentry.” She looped her arms about his neck. He hugged the small of her back in turn. “He courted me since we were small, better and sweeter than any ordinary man of England, wed me in a faraway land, and saved my life from a monster. With all these Grimm essentials out of the way, we are set to live our requisite happily ever after.”

“That is certainly a way to tell it. But my face is all wrong for it.” He tapped his cheek. “Too much of umber, not enough pearl.”

“Likewise for myself. But we can always say you were dreamt up by Scheherazade. The point is you are very much one of a kind and worth far more than the color of your hair. In any case, I wager you have more of jealous onlookers than anything. There are girls who would dunk their head in lime for a shade of blonde half as fair.”

“If I grow it out, perhaps I could make a new career by shearing it all off and peddling it to the wigmakers.”

“No.” The word was anguish.

“Oh, or I could go in for those rococo ringlets without having to bother with powder.”

“No!” The word was dismay.  

“Or I could just start making off with your pins and ribbons every morning.”

There was an affronted gasp as he tossed his head and she played as if she meant to hide away her pin box. Laughter bubbled. Then there came a knock at the hotel room’s door with Van Helsing’s voice on the other side.

“I am rested and I see you both are restless,” the Professor announced as he made ready his post in the far corner facing their bed. He decorated it with books enough to bludgeon a man and a flask full enough to revive him. “If you need aid in dropping off, I can always practice my next lecture upon you. Dear John can attest there is no better soporific aid apart from chloral.”

It was an odd scene that unrolled through the evening. Though both Harkers were appropriately swaddled in robes to bar the sight of nightclothes, there was an unavoidable air of being overseen by an uncle with a heap of tiresome family stories to impart in lieu of nursery tales. Van Helsing himself grew bored enough of his own topics that he gave it up and plied husband and wife for talk of their day following the visit with Penclosa. That rambled on pleasantly before snagging on the topic of the mesmerist’s winded stance following Jonathan’s session.

“Ah, you made note of it too? Yes, she did greatly, truly struggle as I have not seen any mesmerist do before. Perhaps she is right, that it was just something of a long day’s fatigue and great focus on her task that so tired her. Yet I wonder. Professor Wilson, he shared with me his notes taken in interviews with himself and herself and the former partner, Professor Austin Gilroy.”

By now he had abandoned his chair and moved up into his habitual stance and pace of the scholar before his staring rows of pupils. He seemed to ache for a chalkboard at his back, for his hands kept stopping just short as if to gesture at something written. The Harkers sat with drowsy raptness as best they could.

“To them,” Van Helsing went on, “ she claims that her method is much, much different than the hypnotist who has only his eyes and voice and hand as his tools. Miss Penclosa, she claims that it is her own mind she uses as the sole instrument; that her will is a thing she may use detached of herself to enforce a command. This takes some toll upon her physical self, coming as lethargy in good moments and true exhaustion in bad. Wilson, he said to me that this must only be an offshoot of the hazy land of clairvoyance. But that there is some truth in her description seems to have credence, I think we cannot doubt. She did wrestle with your subconscious, my friend, and it was a hard battle won.”

Mina paled as she listened. Jonathan more so.

“So she claims it is a psychic act rather than a standard trance?” Mina ventured with only a slight treble. “She sent her mind into him?”

“That is the claim. And yes, I too would worry, but for our playing witness. We saw and heard ourselves how difficult the matter was for her, and how careful her implanted instruction. More, an instruction meant only for his unconscious mind to undertake against the nightmares it manufactures. It is not an easy thing to trust those of extraordinary skill, I will grant, but in this case it seems we are all of us reacting with the suspicion owed to another party. One who had his reasons to do harm. Miss Penclosa has known all of us less than a day. That she would exert herself to such an extreme, risking her own well-being to breach the barrier Jonathan’s mind bricked over to stop any influence at all, shows a character more prone to aid than mischief.”

“Not counting the show with Professor Atherton,” Mina parried. She was now sitting straighter on the bed’s edge. “While I cannot say the fellow didn’t deserve a little shaming for being so shameless, she quite thoroughly gutted him of all his secrets on a whim. Considering Jonathan’s and my own experience with such powerful wills overriding our own, I cannot say I approve of only discovering the whole of the method now, after she’s already been and gone from his head.”

“Wilson did not see fit to tell me so until after the session as we escaped to our hansoms. But your point is fair, Madam Mina. We should have known beforehand.”

“She should have said—,”

“We should have asked,” Jonathan said, trying not to let it grow to a yawn. His eyes were beginning to burn even as new nervousness twisted in him. “We were so occupied with my trouble that we skipped over any inquiry or interest in her. Regardless of whether tonight works out or not, we should still give her better due for,” he stifled another yawn, “her efforts.”

Though perhaps adhering strictly to that track would only be another heap of tedium, he thought but did not have the energy to share. He imagined she had spent most of her time in a guest or gawker’s company alternately doing tricks or regurgitating interviews that only scraped the professional interest of her ability. Jonathan’s mind floated into a hypothetical world of people only ever asking him about the handling of properties, every day, every week. Intolerable.

He would try to make a better effort tomorrow. He would. He would…

Think on it later. Let him lay back and rest his eyes a moment.

Ten minutes of rested eyes later, Mina signed to Van Helsing to lower his voice. Carefully, they took some spare blankets off a chair in lieu of jostling him to get him below the covers. Mina departed from the bed with a last gentle squeeze of his hand before getting up to keep watch with her own books and journal at hand. When Van Helsing whispered that there was no need and that she deserved her rest, she whispered back that she could not rest if she were rolling in Morpheus’ own poppies. Besides, better to have two on watch than one, wasn’t it?

Memory flickered in the man as he opened his mouth and shut it again. Perhaps he smelled garlic blossoms again, perhaps he saw another resting body upon a different bed, waiting on awful dreams. If he did, he did not say. Only agreed that Madam Mina raised another good point. They settled in to wait.

Only two other rooms in Tuppeton were more pregnant with anxious anticipation than theirs.

In one, a man sat with his journal, scratching miserably at it to force some small half-page of a record into existence. He paused with every other sentence to look despondently on his toils of the last few hours: a coat and a screwdriver assailed mercilessly with turpentine. These had been crusted with a rich green paint earlier in the day. Earlier than that, even. No doubt as early as midnight.

He had cried upon seeing the stains that afternoon. Just sat on his bed and wept as he had thought only assailed women and babes capable of. Even now, pen in hand, his eyes carried a traitorous wet burn. Still, he wrote. Still, he waited. Still, he doubted now more than ever that his tormentor would be quit of these turns of the screw. First his professional status was laughed to pieces. Now his freedom as a law-abiding citizen was left balanced on a knife’s edge. Ah, no! Upon a window’s ledge.

Even as he wrote to the page that he had taken only five grains of antipyrine for his storming headache and that his fiancée was all that kept him from taking fifty, his thoughts strayed again and again to the bleak mercy of the bottle. His life would not be his until one or the other of this damned link was dead. He knew it. He took his knowing to bed where he dreamt of bottomless feline eyes and a future full of miserable waiting and worse revelations.

“Be done with me,” he whispered to the dark. It might have been plea or prayer. “Be done with me, you parasite. There is nothing for you here.”

The dark did not answer, but he bit his tongue all the same. No, it was not done for his enemy was not done. The screw would turn and turn and turn until…

He fell asleep on the mental picture of a screw turned so far it had drilled through the virgin wood until it splintered and the screw vanished into some inner void on the other side. Even there, he knew it was turning still.

In another room, a woman stood at her window. The moon fell in and pooled on her eyes. Even as a girl she had been wont to stare without realizing. Since her adventure up at the Suttons’ she found she could forget the chore of blinking for hours at a time. Many small things had changed since that trip. Oh, what a difference an evening could make. What a greater one could be made in a single afternoon.

Other eyes watched on behind her. Some glass, some porcelain, some wood, some cloth. They belonged to an accumulated crowd she had not been able to part with in childhood or adolescence. There were newer ones still in storage with the rest of the goods delivered over from Trinidad. She did not play with them, of course. But these old friends still went where she did. Her heart was soft in that way, as she would demurely admit. One of the very few but very deep sentimental touches she permitted herself in life. She supposed, quite rightly, that if her fancy was for shrunken heads or naked skulls, her friend’s husband would be no less accommodating to their presence.

He saw nothing about her beyond the potential anatomy of his future gloating before the disbelievers of his academic world. This was just as well.

The stargazer turned briefly from the moon to regard the dolls along their shelf and the puppets hung mid-pose on their coat hooks. All stared, all smiled.

She stood with one hand upon her crutch while the other gripped a card. The label of Hawkins and Harker was stamped on its front with the litter of address and business information below. On the other side were new additions.

Exeter.

Letter address.

Locale tour with Gloria (?).

Old furnishings from storage.

New furnishings with J.

The last was underlined twice. Circled. Underlined again. She turned the card gently in her hand and brought it up again to look over. After a moment, she held the slip of heavy paper to her lips.

“Not to worry,” she murmured to the print. “I’ll take care of everything.”

#in which the stage is set for a most romantic escapade with our good friend Jonathan Harker #hope you all enjoy the pile o' text #while I'm still working on this ^^^ I've also got another surprise cooking #I may or may not drop a little hint later this week :3 #but in the meantime #happy valentine's day #helen penclosa #jonathan harker #mina harker #abraham van helsing #austin gilroy #jack seward #arthur holmwood #the parasite #dracula #arthur conan doyle #bram stoker #crossover #my writing #horror #hypnosis #mesmerism