#wdid revival | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

sprites-writing · 8 months

Text

Chapter 13: Vigilante Shit

yeah I know its been like a year whatever

okay notes for this chapter:

1) It's no longer Miss Avocet that Freya found when taking Jake back to the present, it's now Miss Dove in case I decide to continue the series I don't have to work around Miss A being dead

2) I wrote this in less than 24 hours don't judge me too harshly

3) welcome to the wdid revival where its been four years since I wrote chapter one and my writing has improved drastically and I will (eventually) rewrite the first 2 chapters of this

4) also Freya is horny af for Enoch for a good portion of this because I was reminded about how fucking fine Finlay MacMillan is while rewatching the movie to write this

anyways Freya POV, 1523 words, enjoy

chapter 1 chapter 12

Between Miss Dove and Jacob, we were all quickly put to work.

Emma, Jacob, Enoch and I were put in charge of collecting tools for the others while they worked on latching the windows and barricading the doors. In the chaos, Abe’s nightly phone call was forgotten about until the familiar ringing filled the parlour.

The three of us glanced between ourselves before I gently eased the hoe from Jacob’s hands. “I think you should answer it tonight,” I murmured. Looking like he was half in shock, he nodded and quickly scurried off.

“Not entirely sure that was the best idea of ours, but yera, it can’t be worse than all the times we snuck out,” I said with a shrug.

Enoch gave a surprised snort, “Frey, I don't think anything can be worse than that.”

With a knowing smile, Emma took her section of the tools and left the sunroom. Enoch and I both hesitated, the makeshift weapons in our arms a glaring reminder that we were running out of time and yet still we stood there, our soft breathing and the racket from the parlour the only sounds.

“I’m proud of you, y’know,” whispered Noch. “Even if the others aren’t, I am. I’ll always be proud of you.”

I inhaled sharply. For some reason, this moment felt like it was crossing some unspoken line of ours, and it was quickly heading into a territory I wasn’t sure I was ready for.

“And because I know that wonderful brain of yours like the back of my hand, I know that you’re overthinking it but you, Freya Róisín Aoibh O’Sullivan, might have just saved us all.” The way he easily pronounced the Gaelic of my middle names sent a wave of hunger crashing through me. Although this was far from a new feeling for me, it took me by surprise every time.

It was like suddenly every single little thing he had done in the last sixty-five years slammed into me like a train. From the quirk of his lips to the gentle slide of his hand across my lower back to when his shirt was soaking after our weekly swims to the feeling of his fingers tangling in my hair while he slept, it all added up to me pretending like there wasn’t an ache in me that I didn’t think anyone else but Enoch could fix.

He smiled at me like there wasn’t anything different even though he had just added fuel to the fire inside me that he had lit a long, long time ago. As he walked away I stood there, trying desperately to shove the desire threatening to consume me down, down, down to where I could pretend it wasn’t there.

It wasn’t like I was some sort of blushing virgin. I was raised by my older sister for fuck’s sake. With no parents there to beat the fear of God into us for lusting, Máire had a habit of going after the boys around town and, more often than not, they’d end up in her bed. After enough times of Siobhan and I walking in on her, we learned to avoid our small house during the afternoons, instead playing with the other kids nearby. And, although it wasn’t allowed by Miss P, Victor and I found more than enough time to sneak away for an hour or so. Even if it benefited him far more than it benefitted me.

I sighed and resigned myself to the low heat pooling in my gut despite the horrible situation we found ourselves in. Returning to the parlour, I quickly started passing out the tools, trying to not let the way my friends, my family, were flinching as they took the tools, bother me.

Before long we were all standing against a wall, Miss Dove in front of us holding Miss P’s crossbow. “Now children,” she began.

I glanced at Enoch from where I stood beside him, wordlessly asking him if he was alright. I knew this would be killing him inside right now, remembering what happened in his loop in London. He squeezed my hand gently.

I’m alright.

I gave him a reassuring look and turned back to Miss Dove.

“Now that you’re all here, there’s a few rules. Your primary job is to stay safe. Leave the Hollow to me, I don’t want to see any heroics. Now, those of you with garden tools, I must insist that you—” Miss Dove was cut off abruptly as the Hollow pulled her through the window.

A mixture of gasps and shrieks left us as the danger we were in truly hit us. Jacob lunged towards the crossbow she had dropped and quickly aimed it at the window.

I frantically scanned the room, looking for some kind of sign as to where it was only to find nothing. The boards that were left from Miss D rattled as it entered the house, sections falling back into the garden.

As Jacob stood up, Enoch ran from where he was, throwing himself between Jacob and the Hollow.

“What are you doing Enoch?” I yelled. He glanced over his shoulder at me and his moment of distraction let the Hollow grab him.

Never in my life did I feel the terror that went through me as it picked him up. Not when Máire died, not when I killed Millie, not when Miss Gannett found me. The shadows from its tongues were the only thing that let me see what it was doing while he struggled.

I ran towards him, calculating where the Hollow was as I moved. I reached where I thought a leg was, my palm smacking the floor with a force I was only aware of because of the sound. It slammed Enoch into a window, shards of stained glass cutting my skin, desperation stopping me from feeling the pain.

I tried again, my hand aching from missing again as Jacob urged the others to get to the attic. For the third time I lunged, this time half a foot to the left and felt my hand grasp cold, scaly flesh. I squeezed, the Hollow’s tongues dropping Enoch as it died.

Completely forgetting that Jacob was still in the room, I rushed to my best friend. The moment he had stood up, I cupped his face in my hands.

“Are you alright?” He nodded.

I threw my arms around his neck, forcing him to take a few steps back as he adjusted. “Don’t do that to me again.”

“I won’t, I promise,” he said, burying his head in my neck.

We stayed there for a moment, just breathing each other in, until Jacob cleared his throat. With one hand, I flipped him off as Noch gently put me down.

The moment my feet hit the ground, the remainders of the window crumbled. Confused, I looked to Jacob only for him to be staring wide-eyed at the hole in the wall. “Run,” he whispered.

As we rushed to the stairs, the doors to the parlour were ripped off of their hinges, the second Hollow following us to the attic.

Once we were upstairs, Jacob quickly started to figure out a way for us to escape. “Okay. All right, um…” he looked around the small attic, twelve peculiar children watching him.

“Shit! It’s almost reset!” He opened the window, the familiar flashes of the bombs flaring outside. “Fiona, is there anything you can do with that tree?”

“Yes,” she said, nodding.

“Be careful, Fi,” begged Hugh.

Fiona slid out the window and down the slick, steep surface of the roof, landing on the gutter.

Once Jacob said that we were escaping through the windows, I turned to Claire, motioning to pick her up. She leaned away from me. “Claire Bear, I know you’re scared about my peculiarity but we don’t have time. The Hollow will get through at any moment and we need to get you out the window now.”

She hesitantly let me pick her up and hold her as we slid down the roof, the shingles scraping the shit out of my legs as I focused on not balancing wrong and sending both Claire and I to our deaths. Once we were down, I sent her over to where Jacob and Emma stood helping the younger peculiars to the tree branch Fiona had grown.

I turned back to where Enoch was holding onto the windowsill with one hand, helping Horace out the window. When he landed beside me, I yelled over the rain for him to “Go, go!”

“Enoch, come on!”

As he fell down the roof, I grabbed his arm to keep him from falling. “You’re not getting rid of me that easy!” he said. I rolled my eyes at him and started climbing over to the rest of the wards right when the Hollow burst threw the doors.

As carefully as possible, we followed the others down the branch, Emma and Jacob staying at the back to guide the little ones.

Before they even got to touch the ground, the bomb hit the house and we watched as the loop closed.

Pronunciation notes for her middle names and her sisters' names:

Róisín Aoibh: Ro-SHEEN Eve

Máire: Mor-uh

Siobhan: Shi-VON

yeah I'm well aware that that one line about the others flinching away from Freya when she gave them the tools is awkward but I can't be assed to fix it

chapter 14

7 notes · View notes

sprites-writing · 8 months

Text

Chapter 14: Castles Crumbling

Freya POV, 1350 words kinda all over the place because this is a filler chapter, shit's going down next chapter ;)

heads up that there's kinda graphic descriptions of injuries throughout, especially concerning blood, tldr if you need it at the bottom :) also heavy talk of insecurities/self-worth issues

chapter 1 chapter 13

By the time the rain stopped, we were down on the beach, the stars shining in the sky as if twelve lives hadn’t just been destroyed. I stood a few feet away from the others, their distrust in me breaking my heart into a thousand little pieces.

Now that the adrenaline had worn off, the pain from my wounds was making it hard to stand up straight. I had a bullet still lodged in my left shoulder, my right hand was sprained, if not broken from how hard I had landed on it while trying to save Enoch and I had easily a dozen deep cuts from the glass. Blood was slowly seeping onto my dress, staining the green a reddish-brown.

“I’m sorry, Jake,” Fiona said, “What do we do now?”

Jacob looked lost, leadership obviously not being something he was used to. “I-is there any sign of Miss Peregrine and that Wight?”

“Gone. They must have had a boat.” I shook my head, the motion sending more blood out of my shoulder and I clamped my most definitely broken hand over it.

“We need to go after them,” Jacob said, stating the obvious. “We know he’s taking her to Blackpool.”

“But Blackpool is miles away! The next ferry doesn’t go for hours. We’ll never make it in time,” said Millard.

“Not unless we go by boat too.”

I snorted, “Where the fuck are we gonna find a boat?”

Turns out there was a boat. Mind, it was easily 200 metres underwater, but there was a boat. Slowly, we swam down, Emma blowing air bubbles for us to be able to breathe. Every stroke of my arms sent agony flaring up my shoulder and down my back, the bullet had done more damage than I thought.

While Emma worked on filling the rest of the boat up with air once one room was sufficiently dry enough for us to breathe, the rest of us slowly moved room by room through the ship, finding enough bedrooms for each peculiar to have two, the engine room and a room full of skeletons.

Before long, we all ended up in the bridge. The angle that the ship had taken to get out of the water resulting in most of us falling against a wall. Once we were out of the sea, Enoch came and stood beside me as we all looked out at the island. There was no guarantee we would ever come back, let alone live past tomorrow.

I did my best to avoid everyone, including Enoch, for the next few hours. The betrayal in their eyes was too much for me to handle, especially while we rushed to Blackpool.

It was like every single good thing I had done in the last nearly seventy years had been erased in a matter of an hour. Every night spent drinking in the village with Olive and Emma meant nothing. Every time I took care of Wyn and Claire meant nothing. Every afternoon I soothed Fiona when she lost control because of Hugh, they meant nothing.

If I had to see my family look at me like I was a monster one more time…

In a way, they were confirming all the fears I’d had since I was thirteen. No one could ever fully accept that someone they loved could kill them and anyone else in seconds if their control slipped for only a moment.

I will always be on my own. I will never have anyone for long.

Maybe it was a gift of sorts to have seventy years of being loved, even if I had to hide such a big portion of myself to get it.

My spiral of self-pity was interrupted as I turned down the hallway that led to the room I’d claimed for the night. It was a good few hallways away from both where the younger and older wards were sleeping. Enoch was leaning on the wall next to the door.

“What’s wrong?” he asked.

“Nothing, everything’s fine,” I said, trying to push past him to open the door.

“Sure, that’s why there’s blood all over you.”

I half-turned to him, “I can fix it.” I didn’t like being shitty to him but it would keep him safe and I’ll be damned if that wasn’t my top priority.

He raised an eyebrow, he knew damn well I was bullshitting, “You can fix a bullet wound with one hand?”

I sighed in defeat and let him follow me in. While he found a first aid kit in the bathroom, I pulled off my dress and my cami underneath, leaving me in a soft bralette and bloomers.

I had just sat on the bed when Enoch turned around with bandages and tweezers in hand. At the sight of me, his jaw dropped slightly, “I didn’t realize it was so bad, I would’ve annoyed you into letting me help earlier if I knew.”

To be fair, I was looked a mess. I had rebraided my hair after getting to the ship but the water had wreaked havoc on my curls and had left them in a mat of tangles. My shoulder had stopped bleeding, but there was still blood crusted from my collarbone to my bicep. There wasn’t too much blood from the glass but that was only because they were still embedded in my skin.

“Where do you want to start?” he said, sitting down gently next to me.

“Bullet. Probably not good for it to stay in there long.” He nodded and I twisted so that he could see where it entered.

He unscrewed a bottle of whiskey and poured some on a cloth. “This is going to hurt like hell but we can’t risk infection, not right now.” Enoch wiped the cloth over my bloodstained skin and I hissed through my teeth at the sting. To say it hurt would’ve been the understatement of the century. It felt like it was burning through my raw skin.

After what felt like far too long, he had me lie on my back so that he could find the bullet. The tweezers were freezing as he dug through the muscle and flesh of my arm. There was a slight tugging feeling before the bullet was out.

“Here’s the little fucker,” he said, dropping it into my waiting hand. It was only a few minutes longer before I was stitched and bandaged up.

“Glass next?”

“Yeah,” I sighed, knowing that this was going to be a long process. Thankfully, it had been mostly big shards of glass that got stuck, the majority of the small pieces bouncing off me.

After another twenty minutes he asked “Is there anything else?”

“I might have, possibly, definitely broken my hand when I was trying to grab the hollow,” I said, scrunching my face up as I waited for his reaction.

Noch blinked twice, “What?”

I held up my hand. Two of my finger were at an unnatural angle and you could just barely see where one of my bones poked into my skin slightly. It was a miracle I could move my hand at all right now.

“Oh shit. That-that is definitely broken. I don’t know what to do with that.”

“Me neither. Maybe we could bandage it? So that it doesn’t get worse?”

“Alright, we can do that.” He gently wrapped my hand then redid the bandages on my arm and thigh from when Claire spilt her hot chocolate.

God, I thought, that couldn’t have been just three days ago.

There we sat in silence, Enoch cradling my fucked over hand in his like it was something to be protected, like I was something to be protected, and I suddenly realized what was going to happen. We were finally going to talk about the elephant in the room that we’d been ignoring for sixty years.

“Frey—” he started and I snatched my hand back.

I shook my head, clutching my broken hand to my chest as I stood up. “I-I can’t,” I said backing away until I reached the door.

And then I ran.

TLDR if the injury talk was not for you: Freya begins to distance herself from the others because she thinks she's worthless after how the others (minus Enoch) reacted to the death-touch part of her peculiarity. They go down to the Augusta. General talk of how they confirmed the fears she had for years about not being accepted for her peculiarity and maybe it was a gift that she got nearly 70 years of them not knowing. Enoch fixes up all her injuries even tho she's been trying to avoid him. Enoch tries to get her to talk about their feelings but she panics and runs off.

chapter 15

5 notes · View notes