Rise Up, Oh Heart, For There is Another Battle to Win

Anonymous asked: prompt: B, ship: E/R. Also I am reading things we lost in the fire and it's wonderful! Thank you for sharing!

2: At my worst, I worry you’ll realize you deserve better.  At my best, I worry you won’t. (I’ve never been better.)  

Modern AU motherfuckers. Behold, I have written fluff.  And thank you so much, I’m so glad you’re liking ‘things we lost in the fire,’ <3

Grantaire tugged at the cuff of his blazer, trying to resist the urge to pick at his outfit with nervous fingers.  Eponine and Bahorel had selected it for him, and although Bahorel wasn’t particularly menacing, Eponine had a key to Grantaire’s apartment, a Sharpie, a switchblade, and even odds on using either one—he wasn’t in a rush to disobey her. So, nice jeans, a graphic t-shirt, and a blazer it was.  It didn’t mask the fact that he still looked semi-exhausted, but Cosette had informed him, in her sweetest and most anxiety-reducing tone, that as long as he wore a thin layer of stubble, he looked much more the lovelorn artist than the over-caffeinated grad student.

He was pretty sure she’d only said it to make him stop hyperventilating, but it was a nice sentiment.

“R!” Enjolras shouted from down the hall.  “You’re going to be late!”

“Fashionably late is a thing that exists, Apollo,” Grantaire said, giving one more nervous tug to the blazer before he stepped away from the mirror.  “How do I look?” he asked Enjolras, holding out his arms and trying to look Enjolras in the eye instead of letting his gaze wander to a safe corner of the ceiling.  “Ridiculous?”

“Shut up, you look incredible,” Enjolras said.  “And fashionably late may be a thing that exists, but not when you’re going to your own thing.”

“Sure it is,” Grantaire said, dragging his eyes away from the ceiling with difficulty and flicking a glance at Enjolras.  “You really don’t have to come, it’s not a big deal.”

Enjolras shot him a Look and knocked one foot against the floor, not quite a stomp, but enough to make the sole of his shot thud loudly as he plucked pointedly at the lapel of his red coat.  “It’s your first gallery opening.  If you think I’m not going, you have another one coming.”

“It’s not really, Cosette’s father–”

“Don’t care!” Enjolras interrupted, sharp and bright and grinning.  He stepped over and pressed a kiss to the corner of Grantaire’s mouth.  “R, love, it’s going to be fine,” he murmured, taking Grantaire’s hand.  “You didn’t get this because Valjean knows the gallery owner, you got this because your paintings are incredible, and you’re going to go let a bunch of people with a lot of money tell you so.”

“Yeah,” Grantaire breathed, and offered Enjolras a shaky smile.  “I don’t deserve you.”

“I strongly disagree.”

“I know. I hope you never realize you’re wrong,” Grantaire said, and his smile was more earnest this time.

“Are you ready?”

“Never better, Apollo,” Grantaire said, breathless, and let Enjolras steer him out the door.

For @littlestartopaz: 34 - Vision/Wanda

When you’re around I don’t know how to hide my feelings.  I count in binary, in my head.  zero one one zero one one and you count clouds. (while you count clouds)

So it was going to be a stand-alone Vision/Wanda thing but then I started it after eight hours of researching WWI and???  Instead it’s an immediate prequel to the first Vision/Wanda fic I ever wrote, it’s mostly Natasha being smug, and Wanda doesn’t even appear, I don’t know what happened.

Natasha prided herself on being difficult to sneak up on.  It had served her well for their brief stint in Wakanda, but now they were in America again, scattered up the East Coast, and she was sitting on the roof of one of her less secret safehouses, watching the sun go down.  And any dense half-blind idiot could see a six-foot bright red robot in a cape descending onto a roof in Middle of Nowhere, Appalachia.  

The only reason she didn’t immediately yank out the gun she’d tucked away under the corner of her blanket was because Stark, Banner, and Rhodes were all about as subtle as…well, a six-foot bright red robot in a cape.  She was confident that she’d notice them coming, and if she didn’t they deserved to cuff her.

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For @twistedangelsays: AU where Wolfgang takes up his uncle’s criminal empire.  Obviously, spoilers for the special episode of Sense8.

• So Wolfgang’s uncle was a fucking crime king.  He doesn’t know why he’s surprised.  He’s all ready to shoot the offer down and go on his merry way—who the fuck offers a quarter of Berlin to some safecracker just because he happened to off the old boss, anyway—and then…  He imagines Sun, in prison because she wouldn’t throw her brother under the bus, and her dark eyes glittering in the harsh light of her cell. He imagines Nomi, constantly reaching out to visit them in order to not go stir-crazy in the hiding places the American government is forcing her into.  He imagines Lito, barely treading water against the downward drag of prejudice, and Capheus, who has already swapped so much of his innocence for medicine. He imagines Will, already taking on the pale look of an addict to protect them all.

• Look, it’s simple.  Wolfgang has always been good at looking out for number one, and now number one is an eighth of a whole.  Looking out for number one, these days, means making sure that he looks out for all of his fractional selves, and they need money, and clout, and somewhere safe.

• He takes the offer.  He’ll figure it out as he goes.

• It’s dark in Seoul when he visits Sun that night—he’s really gotten himself in over his head this time, and he needs her steady presence—and she gracefully flips herself down from where she’s doing a handstand against the wall.  He’s sitting against the wall of her cell when he says, “I’ve got a fucking story to tell you.”  Sun nods, folding herself into a cross-legged position, and he takes a moment to wonder how he’s supposed to explain.

• He can’t come up with anything particularly diplomatic, so he takes a deep breath and says bluntly, “My uncle was in charge of a quarter of Berlin, and it turns out I’m his fucking heir.”

• Sun stares at him like it’s the craziest thing she’s heard in weeks, which he finds unlikely.  “What?”

• Wolfgang bares his teeth and says, “I got promoted.”

• It’s a fucking trip to explain it to the others. Kala is disappointed, which…he wishes he was surprised by that, but it’s not like he’s lied to her about who he is. Nomi probably rolls with it best, except for Capheus, because Capheus is just unconquerably happy whenever the cluster is together and no petty little criminal empire is going to change that.  He hugs Riley and gets a kiss on the cheek from Lito and actually laughs like a kid when Wolfgang admits to the situation.  Nomi starts making suggestions immediately, and under any other circumstances Wolfgang might be offended, but the truth is that he needs the help, so he nods and writes down what she says.

• Riley is the first one to bring up the obvious question, because for all that she’s quiet and shy even within their cluster, she’s ferociously loyal.  “So,” she asks, a quiet murmur that nonetheless brings debate to a halt, “can you help get Sun out of prison?”

• Sun looks up in surprise from where Lito is teaching her a clapping game to keep her busy in her cell.

• Wolfgang grins.  “Well, I didn’t take the offer for the fucking benefits.”

• It’s unfathomably weird, some month and a half later, to have a tiny Korean woman in a business-formal dress turn up at his door, really truly there and scowling at his bodyguard (he only has one, and only because he couldn’t make him leave).  She’s been yelling in Korean for five minutes by the time someone gets Wolfgang, and her frown evaporates as she throws herself at him in a hug.

• “Look!” she shouts in Korean that he understands, dragging him outside into the perpetual Berlin rain—worse than usual today, plastering her hair to her face. He lets himself be dragged, because it would be bad for his reputation if he was beaten up by this tiny woman, and Sun-Capheus-Riley-Lito grabs his hands to spin in a circle.  “I am free!”

• “Yeah,” Wolfgang laughs, feeling his fractional selves at his back.  “Yeah, you are.”

a short letter to those who left

Let’s get one thing straight.

I am a star.  Not in the metaphorical sense of a shining bauble to coo over and capture in camera flash, but in the fierce and wild sense of the cosmos.  I burn white-hot, powered by an engine humanity cannot dream of touching, strong enough to alter the very matter of myself, to merge the unmergable atom.  My parents are a solar wind and a nebula, a thing cast out and a thing destroyed, and I am what they have spun me into being as, a thing untouched.

And you are not.  You are tiny.  You have looked up into the sky on your little world and seen the speck of light and named me and drawn me into constellations, but you see a memory of the dead and distant past.  You could not bear my present.  My touch would burn you, my light would blind you, and so you cling to the small light of my past, and I spin my planets and moons in a song you will never hear, and mourn the fact that you could not stand with me as I am.

So next time you wish you could reach up and touch me and make me into that small light, remember: I am a star.  You have not had a hand in my creation save to throw petty stones and place me in pretty pictures with cruel stories, and you will not have a hand in my future.

And to the small light, remember: this is only a distant memory.

Anonymous asked: If you are in the mood to write pain (and, really, when aren't you in the mood to write pain): Rachel/Tobias during the early war

*mean cackling* So when I’m in a very particular mood about the little girl I used to be and how much she was screwed over, I tend to take it out on my characters.  Ergo, I am banned from touching my Alleirat story until our houseguest leaves, and will instead be writing Animorphs because how much worse could I make it.  Sorry.  And since this got pretty long and also there’s not exactly loads of Animorphs fic, I crossposted it to AO3.  If you like Animorphs, maybe comment on that shit or something.

here we stand (with our arms folded)

It hadn’t even been twenty-four hours since the disastrous attack on the Yeerk pool, the sun still over the trees at the edge of the forest where it butted up against Cassie’s farm.  The horse she’d morphed, whose quick legs had saved Cassie and one single woman the night before, was loose in the field, and Rachel was cross-legged on a crate in the barn as Cassie murmured to a wounded rabbit.  Rachel felt dazed, with exhaustion and shock, as if every blink and turn of her head demanded a fresh calibration of her brain, a new moment of I’m alive and nothing is okay.  She’d spent an hour in the shower after getting home, with the water as hot as she could stand, but she could still feel the grit of the Yeerk pool floor on her palms and feet, and kept expecting to catch a glimpse of Hork-Bajir blood on her human teeth in the mirror.  

Cassie didn’t seem much better, her hands still where she would usually be smoothly going through her tasks and her voice mindless nonsense, as if she was as numb as Rachel.  The silence wasn’t quite tense, but there was an unmistakable taut feeling that kept even the noisiest patients subdued and quiet.

“Did Jake say why he wanted to talk to us?” Rachel finally asked, and Cassie glanced up, shaking her head.

“No,” she said. 

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Anonymous asked: So, you mentioned there are different type of magic users in your Alleirat story. Any chance we could get a break down of the different types?

GODDAMN RIGHT YOU CAN

So I suppose the thing that bears mentioning that the way magic works in Alleirat is that a magic user (called a ‘worker,’ except for those who use fire magic) has inherent ability for a mode of using magic—they can channel magic in fire, in water, in plants, in metal, whatever, but they can’t do magic in anything else.  Someone who can channel magic through living plants can’t do the same with thread or water or fire, and they’ll never be able to learn.  So this can get REALLY specific really fast—someone might specifically be a silk worker, for example, or a bronze worker.  It’s more common, however, to specialize into a wide category, like ‘weather’ or ‘metal,’ so I’ll cover a few of the more common and/or pertinent ones.

• Fire magic, obviously.  Fire magic is revered as blessed by the Wanderer, the Alleirai god of fire, battle, and lies.  Brenneth, the main character, is a smith, which—in this universe—means that she’s specifically a broadly trained blacksmith with the ability to work in fire magic.  (Fire magic users are called fire smiths, not fire workers.)  This is pretty much what it says on the tin, with one major exception: unlike most fantasy universes where a mage can summon and throw fireballs, this is mundane fire, which means it needs fuel.  A fire smith of sufficient power can project a pillar of fire, but it’s incredibly short lived and impractical as a weapon.  Combat fire smiths generally carry small grenade-like packages that splash flammable oil over their target, when they can then ignite with ease.  

• Brenneth is something of an exception to this rule, because her trademark is something called white fire—white in Alleirat indicating death/deadly.  White fire isn’t actually white in color, but it’s the colloquial name for dragon fire, which needs no oxygen and no fuel save for the magical power and anger of the wielder. Brenneth earned her title of Fireheart by her preferred fighting style of igniting her sword with white fire—she refuses to teach this trick to anyone on the argument that it’s a dangerous technique with the potential for mass destruction, and she expects it to die with her.

• Weather magic, also obviously.  Weather magic is revered as blessed by the Lady of Stars, the Alleirai goddess of storms, stars, and fallen things.  Crispin is a powerful weather worker—and a fallen thing, and yes I am very pleased with that goddess.  Again, pretty much what it says on the tin, although to varying degrees.  Some weather workers expend themselves completely bringing down a single lightning strike, others—like Crispin—can rally hurricanes and still be standing.  Crispin is one of only a very few weather workers in history to be powerful enough to summon winds that are sufficiently strong and precise to carry him.  Much like fire smiths, combat weather workers often use an aid to direct their magic—it’s energetically taxing to aim lightning strikes, more so the further from one’s self the strike is going, so many weather workers carry rapiers.  They strike the rapier, which is close to themselves and strongly conductive, and then direct the charge at their target.

• Plant workers are also pretty much what it says on the tin, with the exception that a lot of plant workers have actual plant heritage—briatan are tree-people, descended from the universe-equivalent of dryads.  The briatan are more powerful, but less precise than pure human planet workers.  Isla Akekrei, generally known as Krei, the daughter of Brenneth’s old right hand woman and Brenneth’s new military ally, is briatan and a powerful plant worker—akekrei means oak. Krei, like many briatan plant workers, has tattoos in various plant-based inks on her arms, which she can manipulate and move around at will, and, also like many plant workers, she wears cuttings of vines and other plants on her person, which she can use as weapons.  You know that scene in Sky High where Layla flips out?  Yeah, like that.

• Flesh workers, ironically, are probably the most feared people in Alleirat, save Crispin himself.  Flesh workers channel magic through living flesh, which means they’re the magical healers in-universe.  However, a flesh worker is equally capable of healing a mortal wound or of clapping their hand to someone’s chest and making their heart explode, making every bone in their body shatter, or flaying them alive. The moment blood stops moving through the body, a flesh worker’s power is no longer capable of affecting an individual, but up until that point…  As long as they have skin-to-skin contact, a flesh worker can do pretty much whatever they want, no matter how physiologically improbable it is.  The only thing they really can’t do is reattach a completely severed limb. Incidentally, this is the most common kind of worker overall—and again, there are degrees—and the most common type of worker to go full dark side.  There’s a whole cadre of flesh worker assassins because, shocker, they’re the best at it.

• Death workers, on the other hand, are viewed in a similar way to healers in most fantasy universes—people literally cannot fathom a death worker going dark side.  Death workers are basically a variant on necromancers, with the ability to see spirits who’ve become trapped on the “wrong side of the day” (Alleirai religion says that spirits exist between days/on the other side of a day, and keep watch on their loved ones) and raise the dead as…puppets, I guess.  It’s very rare that the latter ability is used, and generally death workers are sort of like grief counselors/priests, responsible for performing funerals and speaking to the bereaved.  

• That being said, death workers are fearsome in combat.  There are stories from back when Alleirat was a bunch of small warring city-states, millennia ago, about death workers at war, and this is how they usually go.

• Two armies have been at war for years, and one, City-State A, is finally losing.  They know that if City-State B wins the war, they’ll sweep in and slaughter everyone left in City-State A, burn their cities—the traditional Sack of Magdeburg-esque situation.  So, a powerful death worker who’s been serving to ensure that all the spirits of the dead are safely on the other side of the day goes to her lord.
• “Lord,” she inevitably says, “I have the power to end this war, here and now.”  
• Her lord demurs, because what she’s offering is horrific in the Alleirai culture—you never ever tamper with a dead body except to put them to rest in the manner specified by the dead person.  This is a capital crime.
• “I will do this, and you cannot stop me,” she says.  “So bring in all the guards and tell the camp to go to sleep, and I will save us, and then I will die for what I’ve done.”
• Her lord agrees, because what other choice is there?  And the camp goes to sleep, and the death worker walks out onto the battlefield, where the bodies of the dead are neatly laid out and waiting to be laid to rest.  She stands in the middle of the dead, and she reaches out her hands, and all around her, they stand and take up weapons and march toward the enemy lines.  There is a single night of battle.  Every enemy soldier who falls is raised to march in the death worker’s army, and there are always more dead bodies to drive forward.
• The sun rises. The camp wakes.  The enemy lines are decimated, littered with dead bodies, and some distance away, somewhere with a clear view of the entire battle, the death worker lies dead.

• The worker wreaking havoc as a weapon of a lordling when Brenneth and Crispin come back to Alleirat?  A death worker fallen through from Earth named Hoshiko, with no friends, no support, and a conviction that she’s going insane.  ILY Shiko, I’m sorry I’m mean.

Anonymous asked: AHHHHH THE NEW CHAPTER WAS FUCKING AMAZING. I was that anon (sorry) and i just have to say... that fight between R and E made the wait #fuckingworthit. It was beautiful and you are beautiful and I love this fic.

OH AND I FORGOT GAV AND R GIVE ME LIFE👌👌 EVERYTHING ABOUT THIS WAS JUST BEAUTIFUL

MY DUDE I’M SO GLAD YOU LIKED IT.  And trust me, no one is more exasperated than me with the delays, I would be 100x happier if I could say ‘fuck this noise’ and just write all day every day.

ALSO I’M GLAD THE FIGHT WAS WORTH IT BECAUSE I PROCRASTINATED MY THESIS ALL DAY.

silver-soliloquy asked: WOW, your novel sounds fantastic!!

Thank you so much!  I’m kind of relieved it sounds like fun to people, because it has eaten my whole brain and put every WIP fic on hold and demanded not just a language but also a functional harbor code for drums/horn/lanterns, and it has haunted me that I might be wasting my time on something boring.