#agent pru

it’s a long way down, a long way down - a holy hell au inspired by the creep series

there are stories are stories on stories on stories about matches made in heaven. about two pure souls destined for the other, finally reaching a ‘happily ever after’ after going through trials and tribulations that, honestly, are played out and boring.

that’s exactly what fergus macleod would tell you, anway.

he’s been inhabiting his mortal coil for a few decades now, engaging in his favorite activity--serial murder.

but lately, something has--gone out.

he’s lost his light. his passion for killing.

so he gets an idea, and puts out an ad for a videographer.

he’ll make a documentary, he decides. a magnum opus to relight the blood and the violence that had brought him so much joy over the years.

what he didn’t expect was andi.

not her beauty. not her courage. not her wit, sharp enough to make a god bleed.

and not her fangs, and a thirst to rival his--even if her moral compass was a bit more lawful.

enough of stories about matches made in heaven.

talk to me about a match made in hell.

(these--particular films are not easy watches, though i personally enjoy them. the sequel is my favorite, but remember when i said ‘explicit sexuality’ in the first warning post? the especially applies to creep 2. when i imagined this au it was less in-line with the main narrative of the movies and more, say, a meet-cute story you’d overhear at an addams’ family function.)

mini soundtrack sampler includes: lovelytheband, ‘buzz cut’ + catfish & the bottlemen, ‘longshot’ + albert natural, ‘sara loves her juicy fruit’

red sun rises like an early warning - an ancient cares au inspired by sleepy hollow

sleepy hollow was often called a “sleepy” village, in the way that meant that nothing ever happened there. marie van tassel, daughter of the richest man in town--and immediately intrigued by the arrival of one police constable walter vaughn, sent all the way from new york city--would disagree. especially in recent years.

the headless horseman had returned.

and marie, for all the occult studying she’d done far from the gaze of her father’s watchful eyes, still so haunted after her mother’s brutal and untimely passing--couldn’t figure out why.

she knew exactly who he was. what he was. but why had he returned? what had woken him?

and could see really be that mournful, when it had sprung start the machinations of fate that brought walter right to her doorstep?

“i have shed my tears for boom... and yet my heart is not broken. do you think me wicked?”

“no... but perhaps there is a little bit of witch in you, marie.”

“walter, why do you say that?”

“because you have bewitched me.”

mini soundtrack sampler includes: frank sinatra, ‘witchcraft’ + creedence clearwater revival, ‘i put a spell on you’ + the rolling stones, ‘sympathy for the devil’

drunk and driven by a devil’s hunger - a safety nets au inspired by apostle, co-starring @agent-thorn​

it was only five years into the birth of an entirely new century, and her twin brother had been taken; her father, lost in his grief, was utterly useless.

it was all up to parker jensen.

she found a fake pass easy enough, slyly dancing her way through conversations with began with “you know, i don’t remember seeing you at any of the prayer meetings...” until finally, finally, they reached that accursed island.

she’d never been to wales before.

she had no idea what to expect.

what are you supposed to expect, when you’re all alone on a solo rescue mission going toe-to-toe with what can only be described as a cult?

but ivar--son of the enigmatic priest of the island, malcolm--was a nice surprise.

the only nice surprise that she’d find.

it wasn’t until she caught jeremy, sneaking home after what she could only guess had something to do with ffion, that she got her first flash of what would be a more and more grisly truth.

this island had its own god.

and something much more sinister than genesis had happened on this soil.

mini soundtrack sampler includes: bakar, ‘hell n back’ + mumford & sons, ‘little lion man’ + neil reid, ‘mother of mine’

let that fever make the water rise - a grace & choice au inspired by the ritual

it was supposed to be like a vacation. diana hadn’t had one in at least fifteen years. vida, even longer.

so why not hiking? why not the kungsleden--the king’s trail--in northern sweden?

the first two days were bliss. nothing but rolling hills, clear skies. up until:

“ah fuck!”

“vida--shit, vida, are you okay?”

“yeah, i’m--urk!”

“all right, that was not a reassuring noise, let’s have a look at that--”

vida’s left knee went from pink to a swollen blue to an agonized, deep purple tinged with green over the course of next day. diana couldn’t bear to watch her struggle to keep up, especially when this was supposed to be a romantic break, nothing as taxing as the fieldwork happening back home.

by the light of a campfire, diana studied their map, humming. “what if we just cut through the forest?” she asked. “if we just went as the crow flies... it cuts the time in half. and you need medical attention, vida, we can’t keep going on like this.”

“has the battalion cleared this area?” vida returned her question with one of her own, eyes shining. the reflection of the fire made them look like stones polished by a river. “we wouldn’t run into anything, would we?”

diana smiled. “nothing we couldn’t handle, love, i’m sure.”

and diana didn’t change her mind when they set off the next morning... up until they found the disembowled carcass of an elk, placed up high in a tree like a religious icon.

she thought of morgan.

“diana, what--what put that up there? something had to have put that up there!”

mini soundtrack sampler includes: billie eilish, ‘bury a friend’ + two feet, ‘i feel like i’m drowning’ + coldplay, ‘paradise’

you can hear the river from my burial bed - a secret gardens au inspired by the legends of slenderman & mercy black, co-starring @agent-hood​

she wouldn’t say she wouldn’t remember. she did.

it was just that caroline janson had been in therapy for so long... she was no longer sure what of shards of her memories were real, and what would be, as dr. ward would say, hallucinations.

but she knew one thing: she was glad to be coming home.

“i hope chicken’s okay for your first night back,” parker began gently. “i’m just now realizing i forgot to ask--”

caroline smiled at her, “chicken would be great.”

she watched parker’s profile, as she opened her mouth, then closed it, then opened it again. finally, she inhaled, then began, “you know... carter’s missed you since you’ve been gone...”

caroline rolled her eyes. “parker. it’s been a decade and a half. i seriously doubt it.”

“hey, who knows my brother better right now, me or you?”

that earned a huff... and a grin. subdued, but still there. “... okay. fine. but... maybe not tonight.” parker glanced at her once, and nodded.

“i understand. besides, maybe i want you all to myself for the first few days, anybody think about that?”

and caroline laughed.

and she wished that it felt like she wasn’t still being haunted.

mini soundtrack sampler includes:  oingo boingo, ‘dead man’s party’ + shaed, ‘trampoline’ + corrina repp, ‘only a beat’

don’t let it shake your steady thread-cutting hand - a royals & robots au inspired by kristy

it was hardly tilde’s idea to spend thanksgiving alone harvard. but between the pandemic, the weather, and her own growing agitation at her father’s behavior...

it just seemed easier.

and it wasn’t all bad. she still had prudence, who opted to stay with her out of love (and perhaps a lack of family--but she didn’t ask). and they had run of essentially the entire campus--there were several buildings that stayed opened, even over the holiday. the library being one.

but it wasn’t until one night, when they made a late night trip to a convenience store not far from tilde’s housing that things became... strange.

“pru. ... pru!” she whispered, snacks in one hand, the other on pru’s elbow. “... i think she’s following us.”

“she?” pru asked, lowly, careful to keep her eyes down, as if they were just having a very, very difficult time decided on what kind of poptarts they wanted.

tilde, face oddly blanched, couldn’t find her voice, so she just nodded.

at the end of the aisle, a figure in dark hoodie and skinny jeans passed out of view.

one of pru’s arms went around tilde’s waist. “don’t worry. i’m sure she’s just here at the same time as us. it’s a small store.”

tilde would remember that when she got home in time to find a snuff film loaded onto her laptop.

“oh shit--oh shit, oh god--!”

this is why she preferred halloween.

- field missions haven’t been cancelled, per se, it’s just that per lilith’s decision, fieldwork has been cut way, way down to only the most severe of cases. unfortunately for seraphim and succubus, they are the senior agents most called-on in these situations. merlin and harry, on top of dealing with kingsman business during the outbreak, try to keep in touch with them as often as they can. rougarou and cherub crafted them special facial masks that can fend off both mundane disease, and their supernatural variants.

- and speaking of our beloved team e-key, they have been busy. between aiding in finding a cure/treatments, everyone coming in or out is tested. even technical officer vichama has been all over the main medical wards, and she’s a downright recluse most of the time. this would be worrying if our medical staff wasn’t hella competent. if you don’t see any of those three outright panicking, then it’s not a compete apocalypse yet. pru has been granted the privilege of being roanoke’s liason between statesman and local scientific teams. we’re doing the best we can.

- beyond all of the scarier stuff, though, we still have people trying to make the most of our being stuck in the manor (and outside the manor–don’t worry, bracken’s fine, technical officer delta’s with him, i think they’ve turned the post-mission time into a kind of romantic getaway until all this blows over). for instance, houdini’s given s e v e r a l agents makeovers. she managed to make lycan perfectly resemble thandie newton. wendigo flirted with her terribly for about ten minutes before he realized it was amy, and then pre-emptively sent a ‘dude i am very very very sorry’ message to eggsy.

- the scribe and archivist have taken to reorganizing the entire library and archives, as well as cleaning out the artifacts basements. technical officers wyvern, drake and longma teamed up to create a way to digitally store old mission logs, files and images ages ago, but gladly stepped up to help catalog new stuff. this is the most organized our downstairs rooms have ever been, and now we have lots of room for any new objects that we need to bind and keep safe from the world. … and we probably owe sentinel hazard pay after some of the things he had to touch.

- they say that necessity is the mother of invention. sprite has proved that that is absolutely not true. the real mother of invention? boredom. the longer that she’s essentially trapped in her shop, the more that it becomes like a game: what mundane object can i make into a weapon or a shield? last i checked, both seance and crowley were down there with her. between seance’s aesthetic sensibilities and crowley’s rather macabre humor, i’m curious to see what exactly she’ll have crafted by the time the quarantine is lifted.

it had happened so quietly in the woods in wakanda.

the roanoke estate—could not quite say the same. although in the beginning, it was. an unnatural hush, something translated into a spike in activity on our monitors in the basement. sol about knocked his coffee over and quickly called over drake, “dude, look at this—what the fuck is happening in africa right now?”

drake frowned, “this—wyvern! wyvern, c’mere for a second, sol and i are clocking a signal that—that looks—“

his voice trailed off as he looked upwards. wyvern was walking towards them from his desk at the other end of the basement, very slowly, with his hands over his stomach like he felt ill.

and then he just—he just—

“what the fuck. what the fuck.”

he was gone. just a substance that looked like some mix of fine grain dirt and ash, which quickly dissolved into nothingness.

“okay, sol, you saw that, right, you saw—“

“drake, i don’t feel so hot…”

but when drake turned, sol was gone.

tears of pure terror began to sting his eyes.

“shit. shit.”

something was wrong. something was very, very wrong, and beyond the extent of their doomsday protocols.

there had been no warning.

and if he was unsure before, he knew the absolute second that screaming began to echo through the estate.

he had never torn up those stairs fast in his entire life, already yelling, “annabelle? annabelle!”

there was no time.

mothman went mid-sentence, putting his shirt on, getting ready for the day, talking to specter over his shoulder. his speech had halted, slightly, and he frowned. then breathed. and broke apart. louise was on his bed, stunned into silence, unable to breathe.

cherub fell to her knees as exactly half of our medical ward turned to dust and suddenly the machines all began to read as flatlines, because they were no longer attached to healing bodies.

elfin had literally just kissed rougarou’s forehead three seconds before he felt a pull. not fae. not demonic. something—something else. “aly, love, i—“ that was all he got out. aly let her mug slip from her hands and it shattered on the kitchen floor.

pru—as something rather inhuman—remained untouched. our metallic grace, even now. but judas stumbled through the door, one of his arms already gone, and pru fell to the ground with him as the rotting traveled down his side and left him short a leg. “i’m scared,” he said, in a hushed tone. pru put a gentle hand to his face, but by the time she’d thought of a response, the dark spread over his eyes. he fell through her hands like ground glass.

and charlie—poor charlie. he held nova’s face in his hands. she went slowly. he had the upper half of her fading frame in his lap. everything below her knees was gone. “what—what is this? what’s happening?” ellie could just swallow, tears brimming in her eyes.

“it’s okay… it’s going to be okay…” she tried to reassure him, and failed. he let out a sob, and his own tears fell on her cheeks. “i love you, charlie.”

drake ran smack into hood as he rounded a corner, knocking the wind of out of both of them. “parker? parker, what the fuck is going on?”

“look, i don’t know, this isn’t like anything i’ve ever seen. it’s not fae. everyone’s—everyone’s—” her voice went up a pitch in panic.

“go get lilith. she’s going to know exactly what to do to fix this, okay? go, now, i have to find anna!”

and hood nodded, wiping at her face, as they blitzed past each other in opposite directions.

hood would get to lilith’s office just in time to see her cradling the white lady in her arms on the floor before her desk. but only for a moment.

“lilith.” hood’s voice broke then. “lilith we—we have to stop it, we have to do something.”

but lilith knew. as soon as she’d heard the snapping of that cursed gauntlet through the aural spaces of the earth, she knew. she quietly got to her feet—and pulled hood into a hug, smoothing her hair. maternal. “parker, dear—we can’t stop it.”

“don’t go.” arizona thought that maybe if she held phoenix close enough to her, the sun hitting her back and wind ripping across the estate grounds—she could stop it. and phoenix, having never known death before, was more surprised, than frightened. but—

one hand went into arizona’s hair, and he pressed his lips to her temple before he left her embrace. “you will never lose me.”

but she did.

drake finally hit the wing of the manor closest to his room. she had to be there. she had to be. and nightcrawler was—huddled in the corner with her arms around her knees. “toma?” he asked quietly, taking one step closer to her when she didn’t immediately acknowledge him. “toma. you okay?”

she was staring at the opposite corner of the hallway. “‘geist was there. adam, he—he was right there and then he wasn’t. he wasn’t, drake.”

“look, everything’s fine, hood went to go get lilith. we’re gonna—we’re gonna fix this, okay? just stay right here, yeah? okay? toma, nod if you can understand me.” she wouldn’t meet his eyes but nodded twice.

that would have to work.

sentinel tried to hold on to the scribe for as long as he could. she faced the unknown without a single trace of fear, or pain, or anything that wasn’t the absolute acceptance painted over her countenance. she felt it reach up her throat, going in a line up her torso, and for a moment, pushed herself back from walter to look into his eyes. they were swimming with tears. she just grinned. “it’s strange, isn’t it? out of everything… this…”

sentinel’s form shrugged as he found himself holding nothing, yet it was like he bore the world upon his shoulders. iuniore had stayed hidden behind a shelf, next to gramr, who held her solidly and let her cry into his shoulder. “everything’s going to be fine…” he kept repeating. if you said a thing enough times, then it would come true, right? isn’t that how this worked?

jd saw chimera from across the underground hangar and began to run towards him, fresh off the field and already feeling a pulling in his gut, a fistful of dread that weighed the same as a boulder. he never made it. chimera was screaming his name as he disappeared among our jets, cars and bikes. the more macabre would wonder if perhaps the ashes of him still remained on the shell of some porsche or volkswagen.

cerberus wondered if maybe the fact the he was in a different form that saved him.

which meant that he watched, powerless, as gowrow cracked into pieces. “son of a bitch.” his words echoed in the space he left, and hans cowered in the wake of his death.

he could smell it everywhere, death.

crowley was drawing circles, circles and sigils and wards. he could not draw them fast enough. he tried to put up invisible walls against the thing that ate seance up from the inside out. “i promise i will find you again.” she wasn’t there when he slammed into hands into the table so hard the skin on his knuckles cracked open and bled, and he screamed, a sound so full of rage that it traveled through the walls and up floorboards.

archivist heard it. and she kept checking herself, am i still solid? am i still there? hurriedly searching through the oldest books she had, because there had to be something in here, had to be anything in here, the screaming was boring into her brain, there had to be something—

drake heard it as he finally found annabelle hiding in his closet, her hands over her ears, which he moved to his face. “oh thank god, oh thank god you’re—“

oh.

annabelle sobbed silently, holding his face in her hands, as he left.

of course, our manor was not the only place wrecked into halves, broken bonds.

the statesman headquarters were doused in just as much hell.

“look at me.” tequila hadn’t been this pissed off and terrified in a good long while. “look at me elfie. you’re gonna be fine. okay? you are gonna be okay—“

sprite just leaned into him. not that there was much of her left to lean. it had surrounded her heart. and it was—strange, to still be wavering on the edge of consciousness, being able to breathe, but unable to feel your own pulse. “shhhh, sh sh sh… everything will—“

tequila just looked to champ, who’d had every trace of color drained from his face. “get roanoke on the phone.” he looked like he’d aged ten years in ten seconds, and his voice came out so weakly, that tequila wasn’t sure that ginger had even heard him. “now. this—we need back up. call lilith.”

houdini had no words. one moment, whiskey was there, a hand around her waist, a mug to his lips, morning light pouring into his kitchen.

and then he wasn’t.

she didn’t get a chance to say goodbye. it took him quickly. and—in the aftermath—she wondered if perhaps that was like a mercy.

and ashes mixed with ocean water in every single oceanic kingdom. the gauntlet had seen them, it knew what was under the waves. and it would do as it was bid, no matter how deep the waters were.

nereus’s last thoughts were of raziel. he didn’t weep because he was dying. he wept because she would never know that her face was the last thing that he wanted to be thinking of.

and ondine—she’d been down for a diplomatic meeting.

she’d never come back to kentucky.

if rum had known he was going to lose the love of his life and his best friend within the same three day time-period—“rod? you feel that?” that was all gin spoke before it circled his throat and broke apart the rest of his head—he would have reconsidered getting out of bed.

and meanwhile london—london had been split in half. a ripping apart on a scale that no one had ever seen.

succubus and harry had been walking around one of the public gardens, one for the flowers, the other for the butterflies, but both mostly for each other. and rae’s cries joined the rest of the city’s as harry, who’d gotten a little ahead of her, abruptly stopped, turned—and just looked at her.

she kept her eyes on his as he disappeared, and was never once able to read his face.

she was not the only one. because eggsy couldn’t find lycan—or his sister.

and even after it hit him, even after michelle had collapsed in a corner of their house and no amount of eggsy calling amy’s name would make her magically appear—he kept crying out for her.

succubus had never driven so fast back to the estate.

zed and roxy met her, faces pale and eyes bloodshot.

rae couldn’t stop crying. “something—something—“ she felt like she was choking. “we have to call borley, okay? where’s morgan? and merlin?”

“… where’s harry?”

“he’s—“

there’s no time. rae tried to snap back into agent mode as hard she could, but man that’s difficult to do when it feels like your world is ending. “he’s gone. we have to get ness. c’mon. morgan’s probably with merlin, this is—we’re gonna call it a code black, which means we need backup now. let’s go.”

it was too quiet in the basement.

they found merlin, standing in the middle of the basement, completely silent and motionless. facing away from them.

for a moment, no one spoke.

eventually, he must have sensed them there, because he turned—holding a very familiar flannel shirt in his hands.