Untitled

Read on Ao3

When the battles are done, Rivertown claimed and the Bureau licking their wounds, Rupert wades through the aftermath with a clipboard and pen for weeks. He has lists of the injured and dead to help process, damages to structures to inventory, agreements for aid to file. Schedules to adjust, because while they’ve won, nobody trusts the Bureau an inch so they’re still running a loose sentry detail - they want there to always be a few people on hand for emergencies, too, because more than one building that was only just standing as the dust started to settle has collapsed since. Sez has a never ending stream of informants scuttling by, and Rupert transcribes for her to pass on messages and warnings and requests.

They won, but Rupert’s a historian at heart, still, a bureaucrat as much as he’s a hero (and he’s very good at both) - he knows that the aftermath of this will be a lifetime, and then some.

Y'all made a Beanstalk books fandom wiki????

Here is a picture of my cat rolling around in a sunbeam because that's how I FEEL

jack farris and his callus, feeling wrong without dirt on his feet, padding around the quiet branch office in thick socks but not his heavy boots but it doesn’t make him feel safer it just makes him feel worse

gloria jetpacking clem, cuddling up, feeling the bumps of broken and healing bone on his arms

rupert holding laney’s hands, with much less dusty gunpowder between her fingers and more sticky sparks that she gets out from under her nails now, shaking minutely. rupert feeling so so frustrated, that his hands can heal things he’d never known and doesn’t even really understand, still, but they can’t heal this. laney holding rupert’s hands, so so glad that they might shake and her wrists might hold blast-shaped scars for the rest of her life, light against dark skin, but she can curl her hands around his without bandages now.

Laney/Rupert - Future. (this ended up being more about the scooby gang as a whole than just those two but whoops)

Years later, there are books. 

Grey starts collecting them, when he finds the first one, and keeps them on a special shelf in the library: a university paper, mailed by George, that cites some of Laney’s methods in a discussion of Elsewhere Theory; political treatises in other cities, condemning Rivertown or using it as a call to action. 

George laughs, when she sees the shelf on a visit. She’s still got dust on her boots, half a PhD and a field camp behind her up north. “You want books?” she said. “I’ve got books. You seen the sort of things they’ve written about the Giantkiller and the Dragon Slayer, the Pied Piper and the Merry Men?” 

Grey perks up. “Nonsense? Is the sort of things nonsense?” 

“Utter, utter nonsense,” she says, and promises to steal him some books from the Bureau Library. “They owe you,” she says, when Grey complains. He’ll always complain. She’ll never stop stealing him books.

The shelf becomes a bookshelf, becomes a wall. Jack doesn’t read them, or Laney, but sometimes Rupert will read bits aloud to Sez for the comedy of it. 

“Ms. Sezly Ruedotter, Queen of Rivertown,” Rupert quotes, and Sez almost bowls over laughing. She’s still got a headache from arguing with a committee all morning. Surely if she was a queen of this beautiful rat’s-ass town there would be less committees, or at least maybe they’d listen without her having to stand on a table. 

Grey finds Jack and George most in folklore, in collections of ballads and in dry academic patronage of quaint back-country culture. He finds Sez in pamphlets, quoted baldly or badly-- a demon, a hag, a savior, a rebel, a firebrand. He gets extras of those and sends them home to Sez’s wife, Sally-Anne, who laughs herself as silly as Sez does about it. 

Years later, there are books. 

Years and years later, Rivertown is a city of sleeker automobiles, of elevators and canned music. Cross-country networks of stabilized portals revolutionize trade, communications, and travel. The far reaches of the globe are steps away for anyone with a few coins in hand, and it transforms the way people meet, connect, build, war, love, and live. 

Rivertown is not the heart of the world, nor its greatest cultural light. But sometimes travelers step out of the yellow glow of a portal to stir up the dust of its streets. The river stench rises up on hot summer days. The closest bare grass hills are farther away from the city center now, but they still roll on the horizon. 

The travelers pass a plaque where the first mayoral house of Rivertown once stood. They tour what remains of the Academy, climb preserved stairs up to battered little rooms. 

There are books, and some of these travelers have read them. Some of them are here because they read those books and wanted to see the kind of place those distant legends came from, once upon a time. 

All of them are here, stepping out of a yellow glow, coming from halfway around the world, because once a young woman was told she had no power, and that young woman said no. 

Jack is remembered best in ballads. There are books, sure, a few autobiographies, but his story always lives best in campfire songs. George has her ballads, too, but she is remembered best in the studies, books, and discoveries built on the back of her groundbreaking research work on dragons (co author: Bidi Jones). 

Grey’s inventions outlive him, but so does his library, which stands in Rivertown with open doors long after he is nothing but a name on a plaque. Rupert is rarely recollected, except for some two groups of people: those quiet few enthusiasts who specialize in efficiencies, in archiving, in city planning, in project management.

Laney is remembered in history books. 

Some of the travelers want to be portal engineers. Some want to be sharpshooters, because that part of her story didn’t die with her either. Some want to live lives they were told they could not have, and they find comfort in her story. 

Some want to invent something entirely new. They step out of the yellow glow of the portal, a new season on their skin, and watch the sparks fall behind them. They think, with something like awe rising in their chest, something like determination, like recognition: once, this was not a possibility that existed in people’s minds. Once, Laney Jones said, “what if I...“ and the world changed.

Some things are remembered. Some things last, even if no one writes them down or puts them on a shelf. 

AU where everything is the same in @ink-splotch‘s Leagues and Legends universe, except people can see soul bonds strung out between themselves.

Spoilers for Remember the Dust under the cut

The threads looked as though they would slip away from George’s fingers at any moment. They hadn’t used to; once upon a time they had coiled around her left fingertips to merge with the creases of her palms, just like - so far as she’d heard - everybody else’s. She’d had a fair handful, even if most of those were the ubiquitous gossamer connections she’d barely been able to see, but one or two had been strong enough to see clearly, only fading to invisibility when her closest friends and caretakers were out of the village.

So today is St. George’s day, and I felt like that was a good time to write some George-focussed Leagues and Legends fic, springboarding from a throwaway line/moment in RtD. This was supposed to be fun?? and probably happy? But I got sidetracked by her goddamn tragic backstory (includes details around the dragon incident from RtD, and other spoilers)

Weeks after the dust settled in Rivertown and she’d gone home, George sat up straighter in the library with delayed recollection, and stared fixedly ahead of her before dissolving into hastily muffled giggles. I told them it was none of my business. The Seeress walked into Rivertown, into the long shadows of what she’d done, and I decided to go take a nap because it wasn’t my problem.

The thought came to her again that evening, and she cried over her cup of cocoa, because for a short while that fight, that endless burden, that enmity, hadn’t been hers to carry.