#this is also little claudia | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

armchairaleck · 5 months

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Alright, Claudia piece I've been thinking of..

The s6 trailer both consolidated these thoughts and made me wonder if this was a bit eccentric, but hey... I wanted to write it, so..

No real warnings I can think of, it's just dark magic and stuff..

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I am my father’s child.

I used to think I was more like my mother. I look like her.

People would tell me that, the ones who’d used to know her. Oh, you have your mothers eyes, they said, or her smile, or her laugh. I had the same black hair as her.

Once I had that hair.

It’s more white than black now.

That’s what I remember the most about her, the way when she held me close her hair would cascade over me, like a dark curtain and tickle my face. The way it always smelt of almond soap, a smell that was peculiarly hers. A smell that was all the warm things in the world - the cakes she used to bake with raisins in, the scarfs she would knit for us when the autumn winds came, the armchair where I used to sit curled in her lap like a cat. Since she left I’ve never smelt anything quite like it again.

Other memories I have are more vague, the sound of the piano drifting through the wall while I played by the fire. I never needed to pay it much attention, but there was always some odd comfort in hearing it and knowing that she was there. The nights when she and my father would read us stories together, my brother nestled under my father’s arm, myself between the two of them and I would rest my head on her chest and absorb the soft vibrations of her voice.

There were other things I didn’t understand, adult things, strange mysteries. My brother lying in bed for days, my mother and father arguing, my father and Kpp’Ar arguing, and the way that suddenly the arguing simply stopped. The voices ceased.

I discovered that people could leave as if you meant nothing, as if all the hidden parts of you that you wanted them to love were not important at all.

When I was six my mother left. I watched her take her things, two leather saddle bags sitting on the bed, each possession that she carefully folded into them.

I remember her wrapping the necklace that my father gave her in a cloth. It was my favourite thing of hers, a gold chain with a green stone that matched her eyes. I’d always loved to play with that necklace, to watch the light of the sun catch on each edge of it and cast its ghostly glimmer over her skin.

Her other things went later, picked up in a carriage, and the holes that they left simply remained empty spaces that my father never filled.

I didn’t say goodbye.

I watched her throw on her travelling cloak. I told myself I wouldn’t cry. I told myself I would be strong, but I ran up the castle battlements all the same. I couldn’t help that. One last glimpse I’d told myself. When I saw her growing smaller, getting further and further away, I wanted to catch her, I wanted to run straight back down the stairs and chase after her, but I knew it was no good. I would never be fast enough, and when I shouted the wind only whipped my voice away.

She didn’t turn back.

I didn’t cry then. It wasn’t until much later and always alone. I was my father’s child.

For years I thought I was not like him, he was always so serious, he rarely smiled. Years passed and the warmth on his face grew less and less, his eyes became dead places that the light couldn’t reach. I didn’t think I could ever be like that. Soren and I used to laugh about it, the more solemn he grew the more we felt we had to smile. We both knew there was something missing, something we had to cover with jokes until it almost seemed as if it was okay, as if we were just like any other family, but we weren’t. We could never be like that.

When I was seven my father let me work in his study. I liked it there. In the summer the sun came in through the tall windows and I could watch its path along each stone and always know the time of day. When the wild grey winter came and the winds howled outside the castle walls, that was when I felt happiest, the fire crackling, my father bent over a book, and the rain hammering down against the window. The two of us together lost in some other world that belonged only to us.

He would show me things, little tricks he called them. The way you could make a ball of fire from an emberback spider and let the flame play on your palm without burning your skin. The way you could take the feather of a lunarflare owl and use it to make objects dance in the air as if they were being pulled by invisible strings. He often did this, he would bring our toys alive and conjure up forests and magical creatures for my brother and me before we went to bed.

Later he showed me his other study, the one that twisted down spiral stairs, deep into the earth, where the stones radiated their cold chill over everything. Ours were the sunless places, damp and dark, where no one else liked to tread. There he showed me other things. A way of conjuring a half-life from ashes sprinkled over flame, and the way you could make it bend to your will. He showed me how to split essence from matter and ways of keeping each suspended in a half realm that was neither death nor life. Together we delved into long forgotten secrets, found hidden things lost to time, and discovered other things that belonged only to us.

He taught me that there was an answer to every problem if you searched hard enough.

There were things I learnt down there that I will not speak of, for they are better hidden. There is a deeper darkness to magic, one of blood and sweat and pain. My father taught me this, but he asked me not to call on it unless the need was dire. This magic had a cost to it, a sacrifice that you alone must make. It is hard to understand, most people call it evil, perhaps it is, or perhaps it is simply something they have no words to describe and so it frightens them. It is easy enough to hate what you fear.

They want this magic though, when there is no other choice, they desire what it can give them, and they take it. Once my father bought land back to life through the heart of a titan and the sheer force of his will. I was the only one who knew the true price of it and yet even then I found something about it that soared beyond beauty. I knew that one day I too would do beautiful things and that no one else would see the wonder in them.

I saw the way people looked at my father, with fear in their eyes, the way they would one day look at me.

There was a dream I had when I first did dark magic.

It seemed almost endless and full of possibilities. There was a little girl there. She was just like me, but her hair was bleached bone white, and her skin was brittle like parchment that had been left too long in the sun. I liked her. She smiled at me and held out her hand and she led me away into the trees.

The woods grew thick and knotted, twisted this way and that, and they held out their branches like hands. We slipped between them and she showed me many things. There was a river, dark as blood, and on its bank strange creatures danced, their eyes held flames of different colours, their teeth were sharp and yellow and yet they did not frighten me, I wanted to dance with them. The girl taught me the names for all of these things and they slipped off her tongue like quciksilver.

We went looking for lost things that were impossible to find and yet there was some comfort in the seeking. Fire blazed around us and we jumped through flames. I did not mind, it was no different from the way my world seemed to burn around me.

This other place was somehow reassuring. I felt I could find things there instead of losing them and I wanted to stay, I wanted to get lost there forever, to follow each path as far as it went.

I remember the wrench of waking from that dream, my father was beside me, his face pale in the candlelight and he held me. I knew that this was a place he had also been to.

I found a way to go back there, a way to it through the edge of your dreams. Each night before I went to sleep I closed my eyes and imagined it in great detail, the little girl with the dark eyes, the twisted trees and the paths, the red river and the dancing. Each night the dreams returned and I went further and further into them.

I talked with serpents, they taught me peculiar things, the first words for everything, the ones that had been lost even to the dragons, the magical words that had moulded the world into being and they sat strangely on my tongue. There were great owls that let me ride on their backs, their cold black feathers sleek beneath my hands. They flew me up above the world until I could see more than the human eye had ever viewed. I could see the way the world shone, moon and sky, earth and ocean, sun and stars, all of these things linked by dark magic and some other, unknowable power that existed beneath it all. I sang wordless melodies with creatures that seemed too fantastic to exist until the air moved in patterns with our tune.

I told my father about these dreams and I saw the worry on his face. He was always tired. He told me I mustn’t go too far, he told me to remember my way back, and he told me a story of a child who got lost in their dreams like that. Of the changelings that existed there, of the way they would take a child and leave only a slumbering body in its bed, a body that would never wake again.

After that he went to great trouble to get me a primal stone so I could cast other magic. I felt a wild storm raging behind a perfect sphere, and I learnt many spells of the sky, but even though I knew it intimately, even though I felt its fury and its bite, it did not draw me like that other magic.

I could not stop my dreams, I would not have wanted to. The little girl was always there waiting for me and we grew up together. It was nice to have a girl to play with, the castle was full of boys and they couldn’t share my secrets the way she did. Dark sister, she called me and we made pacts of blood and bone and our hearts seemed to beat as one.

I dreamt of a spell that would make my mother come back. I believed there had to be such a spell, there was magic for so many other things, that if I could only find it our lives would be complete. My father would be happy again, my brother would return to the boy he had once been, the one who liked my magic, the one who asked for me to watch him while he slept and keep him safe.

Years passed though and my mother did not come back.

I grew used to it, and then I grew so that I would not have known what to say to her if she had returned. She would have known nothing of me. I felt it with my brother too, the way I could no longer share some mysteries, the way I had to hide parts of myself just as my father did.

The years did something to my father, they seemed to alter him until sometimes he was almost unrecognisable to me. The more he worked, the more it seemed to cost him, and yet he was driven like me to go on.

There were days when my father sat with his head in his hands as if he no longer knew what to do. He gazed for hours at the wall, or stared at a book without ever turning the page. I asked him what was wrong but he couldn’t seem to tell me.

I was older then though, I could piece things together. I had learned to read him the way he had once read me and I wanted to help him. Perhaps I thought I would lose him too, that he would get lost in those dark places that seemed a part of him and that I would wake one day and find he too had gone.

So I listened at doors, I slipped into his study when no one was there, and I leafed through his books and papers until I knew what he wanted and why he despaired of it. Some things are nothing much more than dreams, shapes that once emerged from misty glades but have drifted now beyond time, into some other place where the grass is a richer green.

He wanted the horn of a unicorn.

There are a thousand stories that have been written about unicorns. Tales of their pity, of the way they harnessed the ocean, sky and earth into stones and gave them to humans once, that these were the original primal stones used to give us magic. That they could shift their shape this way and that and even disappear completely. Some people said that they had been hunted from this world, others that they had simply slipped through a veil into another realm completely.

A thousand stories but not one sighting, not for centuries if you believed the books.

Still I felt that I might try, I might somehow find a way. Not because I had any great skill or power, but simply because I had once seen the way laid out for me.

It happened when I was quite small, not long after my mother left. I had wandered through the shell of what had once been a home. It was cold and empty then and I was filled with sadness, I felt as if my whole world was crumbling around me and I longed to stop it. Right in the heart of it I found a creature made of rock, and its sorrow flowed like the sea. I thought that perhaps if I could stop its sadness that mine might also end one day.

When I set it free the creature gave me a map, not the sort of map you could follow by points on a compass, it was only a place you could feel for, reach into with your heart, and if the heart longs for something hard enough perhaps there is still a way to find it.

My heart longed for so many things.

Years later when I needed it, I knew somehow the way that I must go and the secrets required to get there.

First you must cover your eyes because it wouldn’t do to see the way. Cover your eyes and sing the secret songs. Then you must walk into the woods quite without fear, if you are afraid the woods would simply swallow you up, these woods are very cold and dark. You will feel the chill, wet bark beneath your fingers, and you will hear the crunch of leaves on the ground that sound like brittle bones breaking beneath your feet. You will sense a hundred things out there that are ready to turn you to smoke and you must never flinch.

The further you walk, the more your hope will drain from you and that is when you will know yourself truly, and what you can endure.

I could bear these things, the world had already taught me that, so I walked on until the darkness seemed to fade and I could feel a light beyond me. A voice rang out and filled my mind, it was the most wonderful sound I had ever heard. It told me to uncover my eyes and I did, and the beauty I saw was ethereal. It was something quite beyond anything I had ever imagined, I wish I could describe better, it seemed to shine with starlight as if it had stepped down from the heavens themselves. At the time I believed I would never forget a single hair of it, but there must have been some magic because now I can only see it vaguely, the fleeting outline of its form, the exquisite lines of a face so fine and gentle and kind, and its dark eyes that seemed to stare right into my soul.

I didn’t have to tell it what I wanted, it already knew. Only afterwards did I know the cost of it, that removing the horn of a unicorn denies it the ability to shift into its true form, that in giving me this gift its shape would be lost to it forever. The creature shifted in front of me, became a pale girl with sky blue eyes and I held a horn in my hands, it glowed and its light grew brighter and brighter until the girl and the woods and the trees all disappeared and the sun burst in through my window.

Later it seemed as if this too had been a dream. I awoke in my bed and the first thing I looked for was the unicorn horn. It was there beneath my pillow. I could feel the magic of it, it felt far more powerful than any other object I had ever held, even the sky stone could not touch it. When I gave it to my father his face lit up. He had not looked so happy for a long time, and he took my hand in his own and he told me that everything would be alright.

After that I knew I would never find my way back to the lands of my dreams. There were things I had seen now that were not really for human eyes and could never be explained. I knew that in looking for them I had lost something else.

I never had the dreams again, I never saw the girl with white hair, but she was already a part of me by then, I could talk to her whenever I wanted because the shadow of her was in me. Still there was a sadness to this loss that I cannot put in words, a void that has existed in me ever since.

Later on there were other losses, greater still. My brother left. There were other mysteries, far more arcane perhaps, things that involved the very essence of returning life from death, I had to piece together the only things that remained to me and I will not tell you of that or you would never sleep sound in your bed.

Mine is a different sort of slumber now, it does not give much rest and when I wake I’m always tired.

Now I understand the bone deep ache. It is our own devotion, these things my father taught me in his way. Ours are the places no one else will comprehend, the parts of us we have to kill, and when we do you wonder why there is nothing left.

I loved my father because it is harder to look into darkness and survive than it is to fool yourself that some trick of the light can save you. People will burn their eyes out staring at the sun and they will think it is better to be blind than to know true darkness, to taste the depths our souls contain. He was the last thing I had left and I could not let him go.

I was a little girl once and the world took from me, it took all the things I loved one by one, now it is my turn to take.

I am my father’s child. I hold onto things that are broken and I squeeze until there is nothing left.

I thought I had something of my mother in me, but I do not.

I am my father’s daughter through and through.

#tdp claudia #might bung this on Ao3 but I am also tired so not tonight..#plus I hear first person POV is hugely hated there so since all my stuff is laughably unpopular I'm a little dubious..#ehhh idk why tho.. some of my fave books are first person pov..#anyway I love Claudia.. she can do no wrong by my low moral standards..#writing

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tending-the-hearth · 1 year

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Thinking about how much Steve loves his original kiddos SO much.

Like he loves all of the kids and would absolutely die for every single one of them, but Dustin, Max, and Lucas are his.

They’re the first ones he protected, the first ones he risked his life for, the first ones he met and connected with.

Mike pretty much refused to get to know Steve because of their history, he never had a chance to connect with Will and El on his own, but Dustin, Max, and Lucas?

those were his kids from the absolute beginning of everything.

Dustin saw him walking towards the Wheeler's house, he could have gone anywhere else, but he saw Steve and said "i pick him", and Lucas and Max did the EXACT same thing, watching him go up against the demodogs with nothing but a nail bat, shoving Max back and putting himself in front of a trio of kids he barely knew inside of the bus.

Steve literally knew Max for a few hours, and he didn't know she was Billy's sister until he showed up, but he heard the fear in her voice, and did not hesitate to step up against the man who had been making his own life a living hell.

Steve probably knew he couldn't win against Billy, but the second he saw him going after Lucas, an innocent kid who was just trying to befriend the newest arrival in town? I firmly believe that's the moment where Steve said "those are my kids, and nobody fucks with my kids"

and when Erica gets involved the following summer? Yeah, Steve knows she can handle herself, but she's also younger than any of the Party was when they got involved, so he's a little extra protective of her, checking in on her when he goes over to help Lucas practice for basketball tryouts

and don't even get me STARTED on Lucas and Steve bonding with each other post-season 3. I think Steve and Dustin get a little separated when the Party got to high school, because Dustin became so excited about being part of Hellfire, and as much as he tries to help Max, she's moving away from everyone, so Steve absolutely feels like he's losing his kids a little. But then Lucas shows up, and tells him he's going to try out for basketball, and all of a sudden, Steve's got special time to spend with Lucas, where they just talk to each other. Lucas talks about struggling with school, and worrying about Max, and finding his place, and Steve gets it all.

just... special movie nights that consist of Steve, Dustin, Lucas, Max, Erica, and Robin.

Arcade afternoons what have Max surrounded by her favorite people as they cheer her on at whatever game she's playing.

Basketball games post-everything where Lucas looks at the stands and sees them screaming and cheering for him.

Erica and Dustin going to the gym one afternoon to help with the relief efforts and seeing Steve being held back by Robin, Jonathan, AND Argyle as he screams at Andy for touching HIS little sister (and if Erica gives Steve the biggest hug she's ever given anyone after that... well, that's her business).

the way they form a little second found family within the main Party?? how they all love each other so much and tell each other things they'd never tell another soul???

#god they're so important to me #this also turned into me adoring steve and the sinclair siblings #like yes steve getting adopted by claudia is very very valid #but can we please talk about steve getting adopted by the sinclairs????#shhhh the sinclair siblings are secretly steve's favorite kids #stranger things #steve harrington #lucas sinclair #max mayfield #dustin henderson #erica sinclair #this little secondary party group also leads into my favorite hc #which is dustin and erica platonic soulmates supremacy #like dustin and max are 100% brother and sister #but dustin and erica give off steve and robin vibes in the BEST possible way

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