free trader beowulf

"Yvonne was the best of us. She was kind, a true nurturer. She genuinely cared about everyone in the safehouse—which, if you knew the way things were, before, you'd know how rare a thing that was. She had big dreams, a grand vision for what the future could be, and she...she felt so strongly about it that it blinded her, somewhat, to the insurmountable problems that stood in her way. But she would have stopped at nothing to fight for what she believed in, and truthfully? Given the chance, I don't think Yvonne would have done anything differently."

"No elitist bullshit. We're all on the same team, here."

"Cheating and conspiring in-game is fine, but the Push leaderboard is sacred."

"If you finish a box of cereal or bag of coffee, just be an adult and replace it."

"Don't fuck with our cute lil' zombie in the upstairs closet, ya know what's good for ya."

"Definitely don't wear Xiomara's clothes, or peep inside that box on the shelf in the closet where she keeps the most delightful pink sparkly toy made a silicon—even if it was a totally honest mistake!"

"Most of the others in the safehouse would say 'their stars,' but for me, it's...the way energy moves around someone, that first catches my attention."

"Look...we all piss each other off now and then—some more often than others, sure—but that's what being a family is. The point is we choose to stick things out, together."

…

“Still an Auror Rue,” Katie offered with a sharp toothed smile, “best not to talk to me about unsanctioned killing and murders. I like you but I can’t condone all that, at least without knowing a way to get you out of it.” Rue was the only one ever willing to crack a joke or beer with Katie when she came ‘round the Safehouse, the rest of them eying Katie’s boots and shiny badge with trepedation as if she hadn’t just meal prepped their starving asses. “Course us Aurors can always give a little… leeway to informants and deputies even if they are made improper and in the field.” So many wizards and witches during the Wars had kill counts, sanctioned by the Aurors would couldn’t keep up with fights and battles and skirmishes and flatout murders on suburban magical streets.

Katie listened carefully to Rue’s own story, and the way she said could say her name – Katie sucked in a sharp breath through her nose and let the wave of empathy course through her veins. Sharing grief, trauma-bonding as the younger Aurors said, was sacred. Rue lost her love, Katie lost her Mum (again), and both deaths had left their lateral scars through their chests.

“They’ll pay,” Katie hissed, “these people aren’t allowed to fuck with our lives like this.” She didn’t know about Rue but losing Lydia had left a fucking crater - in the Division, the Department, her fucking relationship, and Katie’s own fucking head. These stupid fucking Daughters thought they’d get away with it all, Max investigated them for years she knew, blew that right up as well. Katie couldn’t fix anything for Max, couldn’t bring Lydia back from the dead, couldn’t get Seren’s howls of grief from her skull, nor shake the feeling of Athena’s hand on her should as she apologized for Lydia’s death. Katie only had her wand, her rage, and a brain hardwired to find a solution - that’s all she had to offer anyone her entire life. 

Katie only had two speeds - create and destroy. Hunching over the vein of magic with Rue, a smile grew over her face as she plucked the earring from Rue’s palm. Why not both? She tapped the earring with her wand - skin, blood, hair follicles - more than even a shit potioneer needed to scry and find. It was a veritable sack of gold for an alchemist and potioneer of Katie’s caliber which was leagues above a silly little Mastery at this point. 

“Do you know her name?” Names held power, and Katie knew more than a few spells that could tie the girl up in knots until they found her. For shits and giggles. “I’d like to know the name of the woman who decided that stealing from us was a good idea.” Katie hooked her chin over Rue’s shoulder, grinning sharply. “Look at that cute little face…” the Gryffindor cooed, “I want to see it melt… or be crushed… ohh! or maybe even burn.” her head was pounding, blood thrumming, and a sharp tingle grew in her nose as she stared at the woman’s face, etching her smile and eyes into her brain. “Oh Rue, darling we’re going to make her hurt so good for us.”

“Bait, yah, but you ain’t like the other fuzz, is you, Katie?” Rue replied impishly, dancing around the petite auror like the shadow of a flame on the wall. “You’re the good kinda fuzz—peach fuzz, innit…” She grinned and batted her lashes, not shying away from the pointed innuendo. And why not? Just because the love of Rue’s life had been horrifically murdered didn’t mean she couldn’t spit game in the face of a peng ting like Katie Thorne, now did it? After all, Rue wasn’t dead—yet.

And there was something so attractive, so intimately familiar about seeing another woman who was fueled by the same blistering coals of fury that had ravaged Rue for five long years, fusing her to the charred remains of her life as an often unwanted participant, like a torch that could not be snuffed out until it had fulfilled its final purpose, burned through one more dark night.

“Dunno what she called herself before running with these cunts, but Ralphie tells me they call ‘er Inez…” She could feel the auror’s breath hot with excitement on her neck, and Rue bubbled with giddy adrenaline at each new word that was uttered like smut into her ear, each one stroking the scaly black-red beast that had long slumbered within Rue until it stretched and preened with violent hunger, until the pyromancer could practically feel smoke and flame gathering into a low snarl at the back of her own throat and the beast’s jade eyes peering out from behind her own.

Rue shivered with a ripple of anticipation, a premonition of the glorious carnage to come. “Reckon this is the bit where I say this is the start of a bee-yoo-tee-ful friendship, innit…” She pocketed her phone, and then said, “…what say we mosey back to yours ’n I’ll tell ya everything I know? Ya can’t ever be sure who’s listenin’, ‘round ends like these…”

.

The Eyebright was half working now, Katie blinking sunspots from her eyes even as she tracked the magic as it faded from her sight. When the eyebright had fallen ebbed, the pain washed over her, and the Captain hissed restraining herself from clapping a hand over an exposed wound. 

Lydia had given them all horror stories about Eyebright showed them in carefully plastered up posters what it could do to a body if they relied on it - if they didn’t dose right. LaPlante supposedly lost a chunk of her arm to it but no one wanted the old bitch to strip and show the marks of it. But Katie, for all her magical fuckups and continuous embarrassment to both the badge and Lydia, knew how to dose herself. She knew when the addiction of a pain or dreamless sleep took hold and carefully weaned herself off. Katie could measure a teaspoon of sugar down to the granule, could make most of her potions in her repository in her sleep. Where others struggled with Polyjuice Potion, Katie waved away any thought of fucking up something she considered remedial.

So as the Eyebright faded, and Katie hungered for the next hit to further her investigation she was swayed by a single piece of advice any professor had given her - never let yourself be consumed. So the Captain stood, and uncapped a medical potion from the interior linings of her peacoat. Micah was good about keeping them stocked, he strengthen the healing magic in Katie’s brews the pair making a fine charmer-potioneering team when they didn’t bicker. 

“Satan is a brother to me,” Katie answered, throwing back the potion like a shot, a flutter of light emitting from her melted cheek like when a child put a flashlight to a blanket, “we have Sunday dinners and chat about his boyfriend Judas, wonderful dancer, terrible chef and friend.” She continued with her flippancy, but scanned Rue for any amount of emotion. But she found the other woman wonderfully blank and frankly it relaxed Katie. No one came here guarded unless they had enemies in the building. “I’ll not worry you with the semantics, I’m just doing some high level investigating of the crime scene,” highly illegal and frankly stupid, but that was Katie MO - it’s what Lydia had hired her for, “ “But I’m a seasoned Auror Captain with a badge and license to kill, so it’s safe for me here, but not for you.”

Though… the Hedges were enemies of the Daughters, the true extent Katie didn’t know. She acted as a den mother somedays, but feeding someone and strengthening their wards didn’t mean you washed their panties. That said, she couldn’t imagine them coming to do an investigation, they wouldn’t really know where to start Katie thought. The art of tracking, tracing, detecting and picking apart a magical crime scene was the work of doing the Gordian Knot without the sword and bluster - it required finesse and spellwork to make the seams unravel and find the real shape beneath the threads. 

“Unfinished business huh, you’re going to have to give me more than that Rue. I know you. You’re not stupid you know this is a highly active crime scene and you’ve read the papers,” with Lydia’s face plastered all over, talking about arrest rates and kill counts, nothing about her love for ice-cream nor taste for dumplings. 

But, tit-for-tat, Rue wouldn’t say shit unless Katie offered her something. So she grasped that little thread of magic, that knotted golden thing that had destroyed Ashworth from the inside out. Tethered to her magical core, a little heartbeat she knotted around her pinky, “filum magicae lux apparent,” the little trick to making magic visible and Katie held it aloft, glowing and pulsing, razor thin not unlike a heartstring. “That Commander they killed was mine, and I don’t intend to simply cry about it.” 

‘Lydia’s vicious stupid daughter.’ Fuck Seren but she knew one thing - Katie was a vicious scrap of a thing. Gryffindor’s motto was fuck around and find out, and whoever owned this thread of magic had never fucked with a woman like Captain Katherine Thorne before.

.

Rue snickered a laugh, warming immediately in the presence of Katie’s flippant attitude and ability to make light of the circumstances, even if others may have found their humor inappropriate; Rue loved the Free Traders with all her heart, but they could be so fucking serious, sometimes. “Mandem your fam, huh? You’re jokes, Cap…”

She gave a shrug and a smirk at the implication that it was dangerous for a hedge witch, here; it was generally believed within the hedge community that the only place any of them were truly safe was at their safehouse. Rue tucked her hands into her pockets and leaned toward Katie to say conspiratorially, “Reckon if I’ve been doin’ magic all these years without one’a them fancy wand licenses then I don’t need one to kill, neither.” And then she grinned evasively at the auror’s gentle probing, until Katie wisened up and did things the hedge way—playing a card from her hand to get one played in return, like a game of Push; the exchange of carefully measured give-and-take that defined their culture and guided their lives.

Rue whistled, impressed; she stepped forward and crouched down to examine the glowing thread that Katie held taut. She was about to say something cheeky when Katie revealed another piece of information, one that was arguably even more valuable, at least to Rue; so this was personal for Katie, too, was it? From where she was crouched, Rue tilted her face up toward the auror, the sharpness in her bright green eyes softening into something that resembled compassion. “I’m sorry for that…” she said with sincerity that was rarely seen on Rue, “…they took someone of mine, too—the one, rather. She was—” But it felt wrong, to muck up Yvonne’s memory by sharing what was left of her light with this dark, wretched place.

Rue swallowed the lump in her throat, glancing down and then shoving back up to standing by pushing her hands against her thighs. She put on a lopsided smile and said with a shrug that was slightly more forced, “…the Swamp Twots wiped out most of the Free Traders, about half a decade ago. Nasty turf war, the sorta thing that don’t make it into your papers…” That was when she noticed that the strand of magic Katie was holding suspended in the air was stretched in Rue’s direction, pulling like the lead of a dog who'd caught a scent, like it was magnetically attracted to something on her person.

Her brows pulled together and she said rhetorically, “‘Ello, whot’s this then?” Rue—who’d been minted a career pickpocket since before puberty and tended to nick things almost compulsively—had been pocketing little trinkets the entire time she’d been in the house. She pulled pilfered items out of various stash spots on her body until one—a single gold earring—caused the magical thread to pull tight, straining against Katie’s hold, and pulse with iridescence. Rue’s eyes lit up with interest. “Gotcha. And who might you belong to, my lover…”

Now they had a solid lead. Rue kicked at some debris to clear a small space on the floor before setting the earring down on it. To Katie, she said, “Stand back a beat, would ya? Don’t want a chung ting like you in the line’a fire now, do we?” She gave a rakish wink, then cracked her knuckles and performed a complicated tut that ended in her blowing a stream of air over her upturned palm down toward the earring. A ring of fire in shades of seafoam and turquoise ignited around the object on the ground, crackling for a moment before shooting off in a splintered trail, out of the room and down the hall, leaving a scorch-marked trail of ash on the linoleum. Rue grinned, and jerked her chin at Katie in indication to follow.

She whistled a jaunty tune that sounded like ‘follow the Yellow Brick Road…’ as they walked on either side of the burn trail, dull greenish embers smoldering here and there as the fire extinguished. The path led them into one of the bedrooms and disappeared beneath one bare bed. Without thinking twice about it, Rue laid down on her stomach and peered beneath the bed, then swiped an arm underneath it and withdrew the other earring’s match. Not entirely necessary, but having both would make it easier to scry for their owner, if it came to that.

liturgy iii

            Max ordered her out of the house three days past Lydia’s funeral, with those steady eyes and blunt mouth.

          There was some non-combantant Aurors with a face so pretty it made Katie’s head hurt lurking around her people, around Lydia’s department.

          Evangeline had called her cell phone. There were several letters unopened on her kitchen table Hogwarts friends. There was a concerned message in her work inbox she’d immediately ignored upon seeing the handwriting. There was a photo of her exiting the Funeral Hall splashed on the front page paper:

CMDR. ASHWORTH’S PROTÉGÉ COMPLETES SECRATIVE AUROR FUNERAL HONORABLY

CMDR. SQUINT ANSWERS BLISTERING QUESTIONS ABOUT DEATH OF BELOVED CMDR. ASHWORTH

CAPT. THORNE ON THE CASE! NEW DETAILS FROM CLOSE SOURCES SAYING THE CAPT. HAS NOT TAKEN A SINGLE DAY OF BEREVEMENT.

          All staring at her, morning, noon, and night. Lydia’s profile. Katie’s profile. Max’s profile. A rotating triad splattered through the pages intertwined with images of Seren.

CMDR. REESE’S MOURNING RISE TO DEPARTMENT HEAD.

EXTRA! CMDR. REESE AND CMDR. ASHWORTH’S ENEMITY…AND ILLICIT? AFFAIR?

          Katie burned that, watched the Daily Prophet single the edge of her loose white shirt, the cursemark growing daily as Katie expended more magic to continue to comb the forensic scene. Her squad back home running after Killer leaders. Her Majors back on their jobs. Her Max in the office dealing with attacks from all sides that Katie was still split on whether or not she deserved.

          All of Katie’s attention was here, on the ground, kicking at literal rocks and shuffling through invisible strands of magic. She reached into her jacket pulling from it a flask that was filled with Wide-Eye potion and took a long glug from it, feeling it fill her brain, as if she’d washed her eyes out with peppermint. Momentarily Katie was sure she could see the spells in the air –

          Eyebright, Katie thrust her hand into her coat pocket and opened a pack and began to shuffle through. She had to have at least a gram of it… she hadn’t ever used it in the last year of fieldwork. It was too expensive for the Department to allot in their yearly supplies, too expensive for even most security firms to get a hold of, nearly impossible to find on the street. The ground up bones of a Dhampir, the dried blood of a Changeling, and lastly the most damning ingredient the brain matter of a Hippocampus calf only 30 days old and slaughtered.

The going rate for a gram of Eyebright was 10,000 galleons.

          The perks of being a Crime and Forensics Investigator included the raids. Katie was no Roland Sidewinder with his shiny Silver Raider badge, but she had her sleight-of-hand and when a gram of Eyebright popped up in the field two years ago any Auror in her Department would have snatched it up. No question they’d all lifted one or two of the rarer ingredients from their crime scenes once it’d been cleared as not being part of the gruesome murder before her. Katie knew for a fact that LaPlante sported Werewolf Fang blades that she kept straped to her wrists, Jansen had managed to pillage a dozen half-born giants one year (which had lead to internal review but still he managed to keep them), what was a gram of Eyebright?

          With a triumphant smirk Katie pulled the clothe-of-gold from her pack, and set the pouch onto a table, carefully undoing the string and letting it come open.

          The powder was iridescent, it shimmered over the clothe-of-gold, lighter than air it began to hover above the fabric and Katie hovered her fingers over it.

          Eyebright did what nothing else could it made faded magic visible, it make the unseeable noticeable and it caused a type of blinding pain that only someone who desperately wanted it could use. Lydia admitted to using Eyebright during the War in her most desperate time, the ability to see spelled traps, shaded alchemy, the cause of potions, view the true shape of transfiguration – Wix were not supposed to do that. The strain of it had landed it’s prolific users in St. Mungos, and it’s stupider ones being driven made to see the thousands of layers of magic within the community.

          Katie pressed her three fingers into the powder smearing it until it stuck to the grooves of her fingerprints, stuck against her sweat and closed her eyebrows.

          Ashworth would have never allowed a Hunt to go unfinished.

          She smeared the powder over her eyelids, the left, then the right, and waited with baited breath for the world to snap into place. But she greeted only darkness, and for a split second Katie feared opening her eyes.

          Lydia would have told her to fight the fear, was she a Gryffindor or not?

          When the Captain’s eyes opened the entire house was blinding – the scars of magic left bright traces in the floor, blood magic hanging like stains, Katie stared as she found traces of spells that had never been recorded used that night. Then carefully began to step around a crime scene so carefully plotted that Katie could recite it back to her trainers like a trail.

          But instead, she was greeted with Magic she didn’t know existed, at least not in practice.

          “Voodoo huh…” Katie leaned down to examine a working table that had been thrown to the ground, finding strange magic she didn’t recognize, the use of blood wards and something most called ‘deity’ magic. A type of magic that worked in dedication to a greater magical being. Salazar had practiced this so-called deity magic to Basilisks it was rumored. The earliest of dragon-tamers had started as worshippers. From every corner of the world Wix had used their magic as power and prayer, though prayer and devotional causes of Magic had fallen aside. Though, Penny recalled, the Hawkins wolves and other Clans referred to the Moon as a God of some kind. It wasn’t often studied, but Katie had seen the laboratories of wizards attempting to call on the Beyond for necromancy, seeking out what muggles would call demons or monsters who existed in the Underworld.

          It was all a bit too existential for Katie, even when she studied necromancy and practiced it quietly to herself.

          “Now what have you fuckers been up too…” Katie knelt beside the fallen alter and followed the traces of magic, the thicker strands of obviously a powerful Witch… some of those traces exited the property and didn’t double back. In each strand an essence of magic fluttered, whether it was a particular scent or gloss to the thread.

          This thread was knotted and gold, it wrapped and snaked through the doors like a great serpent, a cobra striking out and where the magic left the cord it splintered and crackled around like lightning.

          Katie’s skin was buzzing, with the interest of a scientist Katie proded the meat of her inner arm and found it bleeding under the lightest of pressure. The skin around her face was growing tight, it felt as if it were melting and when Katie reached to touch her cheekbone she found muscle and bone waiting, skin acting like wax and the Gryffindor let out a hazy sort of giggle.

          Too much Eyebright then.

          Nothing to do for it now, not when this magic was sprouting like a seed before her, flowering, each layer like the ring of a cut tree. Katie’s head was pounded, the beat of war drums in her head as she followed each strand, her body swaying and sweating blood and viscus. Eyebright always went for the face and arms first, then the back, the stomach, thighs, calves and feet for last. It ate you up, using your body and energy and magic to allow you to do the impossible, acted in sacrifice to the magic you called upon.

          Katie could pay Lydia her body a thousand times and still do it again with an apolgy for not being better.

          The Gryffindor found the room, where the girl and boy had witnessed Lydia’s death. Where Athena had watched Ashworth fade into a nothingness that no-one knew the true outcome of. The cord was splintered like roots, sinking into the place where they’d staked the form of Lydia’s both, all rigid muscle and a tight spine.

          The coffin contained a half-gram of the body, Athena had managed to retrieve a gram and turn it over. The only thing Katie would ever thank her for, even as she promised quietly to bright hell around her ears. The other half-gram was tucked into a vial, and it had hung from Katie’s beltloop for the last week and a half, taken from the mortuary she’d slipped into and been allowed privacy. The last link to her Commander, the last aspect of her body.

          The last aspect of magic that could tell them how it happened.

          Katie knelt, knees creaking and opened the vial.

          It pulsed with the same knotted magic; it was intertwined so deeply in the purple of what Katie knew to be Lydia that it seemed like it was consuming it. Swallowing the essence whole, stealing and storing its power – her power, her magic, her lifeforce.

          Katie reached for the clothe-of-gold and took off the last of the Eyebright, clenching the packet her hand as the pain wreaked havoc through her body.

          But the golden knotted magic remained in her Mind’s Eye, as if seared, as it burn. Katie flicked her tongue out into the air as a serpent might, tasting it, the muddy clean that belonged to soaked mud and storm air. In that fleeting second as the Eyebright finally faded, Katie knew she’d always have the taste of Lydia’s murderer in her mouth.

          The door behind her creaked open, and Katie, a bloodied mess of a woman, half the skin of her face slouching off, eyes shot through with broken blood vessels, blood flowing freely from her nose, ears and the corner of her mouth turned. Her entire left arm, from the tips of her finger to her elbow covered in black, searing deeply into her skin, smoking and consuming her inch by inch.

          “Now, what the fuck do you think you’re doing here?”

Out of all the hedges in the FTB safehouse, Rue had spent the most aggregate time in the company of Zombie Ralph.

It took some trial and error, but eventually they figured out that even though Ralph wasn’t an Inferius, he still wouldn’t fuck with fire.

Which made Rue the optimal candidate for little chats with the monster. She’d sit inside the upstairs closet, surrounded by a ring of fire as a barrier, for hours and hours on end—especially after Seth was exiled.

It wasn't that Rue didn't agree with Nate’s decision to kick Seth out of the safehouse, after what they’d done. It’s just that Seth had been Rue’s last tie to their lives before; they’d grounded her, balanced her out.

So with Seth gone, Rue was going rogue.

This Ralph was different, Rue soon discovered, from the one they all knew and loved. He was sarcastic, and bitter, and oftentimes outright aggressive. Most of the time, it was like talking to a monster that was simply wearing Ralph’s face and eyes.

But every now and then, there’d be a flash of the real Ralph hiding inside the monster, just out of reach; a downward tug of his eyebrows, the way one cheek would dimple within the creature's grotesque grimace that made it almost seem to echo Ralph’s dreamy, gentle smile.

Painstakingly, Rue started to gather information. With effort, and patience, she was able to get Zombie Ralph talking more readily. Ralph told Rue that he remembered every minute of being cremated, that he could still feel the flames licking at his skin. After that story, Rue took care to temper the flames that shielded her in his presence.

Ralph told Rue that he remembered being remade—his body, his essence being woven together again, thread by thread.

“What’d you see, while you were gone?” Rue asked, and what she meant was, did you see loved ones again, on the Other Side? Did you meet Yvonne?

But Ralph told her his soul, his shade, his lifeforce—whatever it was, it was no longer with him. Only the barest ghostly trace of it existed within the thing that he was now—remnants of it, like a handprint on fogged glass.

He knew, somehow, that the rest of it had not been destroyed. But he didn’t know where it had gone.

Ralph remembered the Daughter who had lured him in, manipulated him before planting that overdose curse on him like a venomous kiss. Inez, she was called; the one from the Instagram photo.

And most importantly, Ralph told Rue where to go looking for her.

The exterior of the Daughters’ safehouse was a run-down secondhand shop. The front door had been blown clean off, and everything in the front room had been destroyed or looted. Fragments of glass littered the floor, crunching beneath Rue’s boots like sand as she walked through the ravaged, abandoned place.

A curtain of hanging beads clacked together as Rue parted them and was led into a long hallway, with floors made of dated linoleum. To the left was a sitting room—or at least the empty carcass of one, left to rot. Bits of broken ‘70s furniture were toppled and strewn about, bleeding out stuffing, with upholstery bearing the scorch-marks of magic.

To the right were bedrooms, all minimally furnished save for some orange-brown shag carpeting and bare beds. Some of the nightstand drawers had been left ajar, clearly emptied. It was all too eerie to look lived in; someone had made a hasty run for it.

Adjacent to the last bedroom, there was a big open room with a kitchenette and dining table. This room looked to have suffered the worst, with dried blood and gore staining the floor and the walls, the windows all blown out. Rue skipped this room, for the moment, in favor of a tiny sliver of light that was coming from a crease in the wall at the end of the dead-end hallway. Rue held up her palm and summoned a bouncing little flame to hover there, casting light around Rue like a torch. She studied the wall, and then shoved against it; it gave way with a groan, revealing a hidden staircase, made of black iron and spiraling upwards.

She crept up the stairs, cradling her fireball, feeling like someone from Scooby Doo. As if just around the next corner, a demonic beast with slobbering black fangs would jump out to fight her.

But the upstairs room—though clearly nicer, and not demolished as the rest of the house was—was, again, empty. This room stank of magic—thick stuff that stung your nose and scratched at your throat, like a perfumed apothecary perched at the mouth of hell, battered with brimstone gone stale. Yellowed skulls and bones lay on low tables, and vials of all sorts of colors and shapes and sizes lined hexagonal shelves on the walls. Upon closer inspection, Rue gleaned that every vial was full of thick, viscous blood—bright red in some vials, and so dark it was almost black in others.

“Yeugh…” Rue muttered in disgust, before a hissing sound behind her made Rue stumble as she whirled around, dropping the vial in her hand to shatter at her feet and toppling others on the shelf. “What the—”

Stretching down, suspended from the rafters, was an absolutely massive, gargantuan snake, as thick as Rue’s arm. “No, nope. Fuckin’ fuuuuuck that…” she said to the snake, who was still hissing at her menacingly, before scampering back down the stairs.

She’d barely set both feet back on the ground floor when Rue heard another presence in the house.

Immediately, she flattened herself again the wall, disappearing into shadows as she held her breath. There was someone moving into that big room, the one with the kitchen. Rue scaled along the wall of the hallway on silent feet, falling easily back into the muscle memory; in her old life, before she’d joined up with the Free Traders, Rue had commonly been a runner for her old gang, tasked with casing potential houses to steal from and squat in, to route exit strategies and carry out petty theft operations to provide herself a few days’ worth of food and shelter.

She peered around the corner and saw a small-statured woman in uniform, doing—something. The longer she watched, the harder it was for Rue to make sense of what she was seeing. The woman was muttering to herself, ambling around in drunken paths along the stained linoleum, occasionally shuddering and emitting unhinged bursts of laughter like the certified neighborhood crackhead.

And Rue was about to leave the nitty to it—what did she care who doped themselves into insanity in this funhouse of blood and decay?—when the woman stepped into a patch of light, and turned, and Rue recognized her—despite the fact that half her face looked like it was puddling off like some melted gelato.

“Oh Captain my Captain…” Rue acknowledged, striding into the room without a single trace of fear or apprehension. She flashed Katie her hedge witch ranking tattoos, black stars that climbed up Rue’s forearms, merely out of habit, many years ingrained with the particulars of safehouse courtesies and etiquette. “…I got unfinished business with these bitches, we go way back. Seems like they split, though…say, bruv, are you gonna be a’right? Don’t take this the wrong way, but it looks like Satan herself chewed you up and shat you dead out, innit.”

giggle-me-this​:

Nate wasn’t accustomed to feeling so uncharacteristically content, and he definitely didn’t know what the fuck to do with—ew, could he even say it?—optimism. 

But it was drowsy with a haze of these foreign feelings (not to mention, you know, actual physical exhaustion) that Nate managed to nod off tucked beside his girlfriend.

For, like, fifteen minutes.

Nate very reluctantly forced his eyes back open to take in Xiomara’s gaze of molten gold hovering above him, looking—perhaps this was even the most unfamiliar of all—contrite. 

He looked away, while she said what she had to say, too tired to hide the way the words wrenched him open from the inside but unwilling to also witness Xiomara’s pity for him, either. He took a moment to let it all dissolve into the gelatinous numbness that had besieged his mind, and then Nate took Xi’s hand from where it was scratching softly along his jaw and he kissed it, and then he sat up. He sighed and rubbed his eyes, shaking off his desperate desire to just fall back into unconsciousness and avoid this—which seemed more intoxicating and tantalizing to Nate in this moment than any narcotic he could think of. “It’s okay, Xi. I get it. Let’s go.” And Nate took Xiomara’s hand, and together they went to face the others.

It seemed to come as a surprise to many amongst the safehouse when Nate said that he’d seen the dream journals before. Rue tried to get on his ass by questioning why Nate hadn’t mentioned it before, that maybe it could have prevented—but Xiomara shut her down swiftly and thoroughly, which Nate honestly found pretty impressive, considering how senior of a figure Rue was within FTB. Xi really had stepped into her own as a respected member of the safehouse, rather than an unwitting sideline observer, while Nate had been MIA. Go figure.

Collectively, they were at it for hours—each of them silently flipping through every journal, fighting to contain their grief over how tangible this made the missing hedge amongst them, before passing it off to the next person and opening the next one. Sometimes they’d have to confer as a group, over certain images. Piece together events. Seth had picked up a veritable rainbow of colored adhesive tabs from an office supplies store that corresponded to FTB’s representative members—which would have been pretty funny, under other circumstances. If someone found a dream that was theirs, they’d tag it. Confirmed and possible premonitions were marked with an ominous little red flag.

There was one full-page spread that Nate had been puzzling over for a while, unable to shake the feeling of dread that looking at it pricked along his spine. Finally, he held the book out for the others to see. “Hey, guys…what do you make of this one?”

Xiomara’s tabs were lime green, but the paintings were so common and uniform, she barely needed to identify them. All of Ralph’s representations of her dreams were crusted with heavy black paint, spots of red. The Dark Place. So Xi spent her time searching for confirmed premonitions, which was difficult given prior to Ralph’s death, she rarely spent time socialising with the Free Traders.

Her thumb smoothed over a red tab, then her fingers curled into a fist. As the last one around the circle, Xiomara knew the others had seen it, but no one had picked it up as a possibility. Nate hadn’t picked it up as a possibility. She tried not to let it offend her- he was addled with grief, at the moment. Xi closed the diary, tossing it onto the coffee table when Nate called them all to discuss another.

She frowned, leaning her elbows on her knees and clasping her hands together, digging her nails into her palms. 

“That’s a tattoo,” Ruma spoke up, folding her arms and moving to walk behind Nate, squinting down at the painting. She pointed, “Hand-tapping. Someone’s getting a hand-tapped tattoo. Some sort of symbol…?”

“That’s got to be Ralph, though. It looks just like him.” Xi managed, shaking her head. She could hardly imagine the soft-spoken wix, who sometimes got a fright when the microwave beeped unexpectedly, getting an especially painful tattoo.

The book was passed around again, until it landed in Rue’s lap, who was so outraged at its contents she almost threw it across the room. There were a few shouts of displeasure, people who had been holding the diaries gently and reverently- before Rue glared around at them. “It’s those fucking voodoo twats,” Rue spat, “She had that. Yvonne. They did that to her before-” 

The way Rue spoke her name brought out a side Xi hadn’t seen in the other before. Rue was always so hot-headed, incendiary. She said her name, Yvonne, and her voice almost broke. Xiomara, who had no idea what was going on, frowned, then leaned back in her chair, “I’m sure there’s a story here, and we can all talk about it later. But can we just… Stop? We know what it is. Or we think we do,” She raised a hand at Rue’s protests, “We can’t do anything right now. Everyone’s fucked from today. Can we just- Stop.”

Rue liked Xiomara—really, she did. On principle, Rue could appreciate anyone who showed a little bit of fire and grit about them, who bit back when the occasion called for it, who could stand the heat.

And Rue believed—as all of them did, the ones in the know—in the power of the gunpowder-magic that lurked beneath Xiomara’s skin, Rue could envision with starry eyes what an asset the prissy blonde would be, if Xiomara were on their side on the day the Free Traders once again faced off with their enemies—the treacherous snakes who had picked off the Free Traders like rats, forced them to cower underground like vermin for the past five long years.

So knowing all of that, Rue liked Xiomara just fine. But fucking hell if Rue was about to roll over for her like a flea-ridden bitch just because Nate had finally decided to grow a pair and come home, or else he’d run out of the good shit and was on the wrong side of sober with nowhere else to go, and now that the whole fam was reunited and shit they all had to play nice because that’s what Ralph would have wanted, reh teh teh…

Well, fat fuckin’ chance, innit. Just because Xiomara had gotten them perky little nips tweaked on playing Scout Mother for a beat, that did not mean she was giving orders around here. Maybe to her little Nittyman, but not to Rue.

She opened her mouth to spit fire, but before she could, Tess jumped in and said, “A little bit of time to rest and process isn’t a bad idea—why don’t we vote on it?”

So they voted on it, and the decision was made to table it, for now. Carefully, silently, they gathered up Ralph’s dream journals and packed them into a box, to reexamine again later.

And then they all retreated to their separate corners of the safehouse; Nate and Xiomara to their room, Harriet to hers. Rue and Seth were in a glorified laundry room, half-talking and half-just sitting with their own thoughts, when Tess discovered them.

She shut the door and said with a note of suspicion in her voice, “What are you two up to?”

Rue said, “Nothin’,” at the same time that Seth said, “It’s nothing that need concern you, right now…”

Tess rolled her eyes and said, “Bullshit. If it’s a Free Trader Beowulf matter then it concerns me—it concerns us all. And don’t tell me some crock about pulling rank and ‘secrets for my own sake’ because you know I hate that, you know what I went through with the Cannibals—”

“It’s not like that, Tess…” Seth said in a calming, reasonable tone.

“Oh yeah? Well what’s it like, then, huh? I’ve got a right to know what you’re holed up in here plotting—”

“Fuuuckin’ hell, Tess,” said Rue dismissively, “Can you par off it for half a sec with the all for one buki? Ralph is fuckin’ dead innit and we’re all bare vexed—”

But Tess was having none of it. “Fuck off, don’t do that. We’re all—upset, over Ralph. You aren’t the only one…”

The silence, the weight of their grief and their loss, suffered again far too soon, hung heavily between them like rain-sodden linens clothes-pinned to a line.

And it was true—they had all of them loved Ralph, each of them in their own way; it wasn’t something that could be compared or weighed against, just as little as it could be properly expressed in words.

And more than that—they were all guilty, for letting him die when they were meant to watch over him. His family.

“It’s Xiomara…” Rue admitted finally, to the lonely stagnant quiet. “…Howie reckons’er discipline could be weaponized.”

Tess frowned, and considered this. “Isn’t that dangerous?” And then, a moment later, “How much training does she need?”

Seth opened their mouth to respond, but Rue surprised them all by shaking her head and saying, dark and resigned, “Don’t matter, anymore. We let ourselves get distracted by it, could almost taste the blood…and Ralph died in that fuckin’ bathtub, all alone, while we was up our arses chasin’ revenge. So…” She made eye contact with Seth, remorse that Rue refused to let spill glimmering in the depths of her green eyes like dragonfire. “…I’m done. Let the Swamp Twots rattle their bones and claim their next prize—I’m done caring.”

Both Seth and Tess looked like they wanted to say something to console Rue, but she didn’t need their fucking pity, and she shoved out of the room before they got a chance to say a word, grabbing her rucksack and slinging it over one weathered shoulder.

She made her way to the upstairs washroom at the end of the hall, and she sat down on the brand-new tile—where Ralph’s bathtub used to be.

Rue pulled Yvonne’s journal, battered and weathered with time, out of her bag. She opened it to a random page, and hovered the tips of her fingers over the words she had read thousands of times, so many times that she had them committed to memory, but that still offered Rue not the faintest glimmer of understanding. She never touched the pages directly—Rue would never trust the ravenous flame that lived inside her fingers—so violent and unruly and insatiable—with something so precious, so sacred.

“I’m sorry, Eve. I—I tried…” Rue whispered to the pages, the last remaining vestige of Rue’s charred and ravaged heart, in atonement for all of the myriad ways the woman had failed the dead.

I was the match and you were the rock Maybe, we started this fire We sat apart and watched All we had burned on the pyre

[ 𝐂𝐎𝐌𝐏𝐀𝐍𝐘 ] ― Rue hears a sound when she should be alone

Prudence Arabella Attaway—known to her friends as Rue (or she would have been, if she had one single fuckin’ friend left out there—) was laying in the fetal position on the floor in the middle of the glorified cupboard that she called an apartment. It was, indisputably, an absolute shithole—made even shittier by the fact that every centimeter of it, from the dingy low-rise ceilings to the cheap laminate floors to the paper-thin walls, was scorched, blackened and charred like it was some poor sap’s flat in Pompeii post-volcano, rather than just your average dump in Northeast London. All the furniture and personal items that had once made it livable were melted, disintegrated into heaping piles of ash around the space. 

Except for the girl who laid untouched in the middle of the burnt ruins with her rucksack, a smudge of color on a canvas of black.