#crfic

Essek meets up with Reani. The Lightbringer is working very very hard to take a softer and more nuanced approach to the obliteration of all evil. It’s hard not seeing the world in black and white. But the good news is community service is excellent restitution. It would suck, after all, to stab hot boi Essek to death after their mutual friends literally sent him to hang out with her. Reani and Essek fight crime. (Whether Essek likes it or not.) * Essek does an impressive job of not reacting when he enters the bakery and Reani is waiting with a flower crown in hand. Jester warned her he might resist a little, but that flower crowns are good for twitchy time wizards with bad people after them. (Which is, according to Jester, the situation Essek is in presently.) He arrived via translocation to the outskirts of town about ten minutes ago and made his way, apparently, without incident into the city and to the bakery Jester had instructed him toward.

Reani ignores a small flutter of infatuation, there and gone like a passing smile, when the very pretty friend of the Mighty Nein gives her a very quick up and down. His eyes are pale lavender, squinting slightly in the light inside the bakery. He’s wearing a heavy, fur-lined cloak that drapes to the floor, covering his entire body, but as he moves into the room and pulls his hood down, Reani can see the shaved white sections along the side of his head have started to grow in a little. He’s basically as she recalls him from their briefest of meetings nearly two years ago.

“Reani, I presume?” His voice is gently accented and resigned, it seems, to what’s coming. “Jester insisted this was necessary?”

Reani nods brightly, beaming as she holds out the elaborately looped circle of lily-white and gently purple flowers.

“Welcome to Uthadurn,” she says.

Fjord had one thing clear: he needs to deal with his past, close it, before he can even begin to imagine a future. Or so he thought. And yet, now that the moment is here, now that they stand outside of Uk’otoa’s third temple, well aware of the horrible dangers waiting for them inside ready to stop them, it dawns on him that he might not have a future after all. Not if this goes wrong.

They barely made it out of the other two temples. Jester almost drowns in the first, all of them nearly get crushed by the second one... and that was without a hoard of Uk’otoa’s henchmen trying to kill them. If this goes wrong...

As his little family prepares to fight to fix his old mistakes, Fjord can feel a sense of urgency grow inside his chest, like a ticking clock, like a growing bubble about to pop. Adrenaline ticks through his body, all too aware that his hours might be counted. Even with the Wildmother on his side, this could be it. 

“Jester,” the name comes out of him breathlessly when his lips can’t hold it back anymore. 

She’s by his side already, eyes unusually serious, jaw set, willing to go to war for him like she’s been since the second he met her —gods know why. 

“This is it, uh?” She tries a smile, nervous. 

“Yeah. It would seem so,” he nods slowly. He might not get another chance. “Jester, I- I just- Whatever happens in there, I just want you to know I love you.”

Surprise colors her face as her eyes open wide. And then, she looks sad.

“Are you just saying that because you think we’re gonna die?”

Fjord frowns. Is he? No, he realizes. At least, that’s not the main reason. He just wanted the chance to say it, at least once, after thinking it so many times. 

“No,” he smiles. “I’m saying it because I hope we don’t die, and then we can talk about it. If- if you want.”

A smile blooms in her face.

“Good,” she sighs. “Because I love you, too.”

“Y- you do?” He arches his eyebrows. She didn’t have to say it back, not really. She only needed to know. But she did. She just said- “Oh. That’s- that’s great!”

“It is!” She is beaming at him now, a smile wide and excited and full with life. 

“Alright,” fear fades away inside him, leaving only resolve in his chest. He is not dying today. None of them are. Not when there’s a future where Jester loves him back and they can see where that goes. “So let’s kick this stupid snake’s ass and then we can, uh, maybe do something about it. Yeah?”

“Okay,” Jester nods firmly, with the kind of belief that can turn archfeys into gods and criminals into friends and orphan boys into heroes. 

“Okay.”

Fandom: UnDeadwood (Web Series)

Relationship: Reverend Matthew Mason/Clayton Sharpe

Summary: 

Arabella bursts back into her office. "You decent?"

Clayton scowls, clearly in the middle of hobbling back to bed. "Would it have stopped you if I weren't?"

"Not in the least. Seen one, seen 'em all," she says brightly. "Good news, Sharpe, you get to leave the kind hospitality of my office. The Reverend has graciously offered to put you up until that leg finishes healing."

"No need to do that on my account, Reverend." Clayton looks away, clearly uncomfortable with the gesture.

Summary: Wilhand dies. If Pike were as used to being left behind as she pretends to be, this would all be a lot easier.

Characters: Pike, Wilhand, Grog, Keyleth, Vax (kinda), Gilmore, JB, Scanlan, Vex, Percy, and the de Rolo Children

Word Count: 23k

A/N: This is a post-campaign one exploration of Pike dealing with Wilhand’s death. There’s some heavy stuff in it, but writing it helped me get through a rough time.

The light shines bright around her, so bright.

She reaches out as far as she can to try and grab it, her fists closing on glacial, empty air. It should be warm, shouldn’t it? Shouldn’t she feel heat erupt through her chest? The blessing of Sarenrae has always been a warm thing. A gentle thing. But that doesn’t make sense, because the beams are hitting her body now, enveloping her hands, and all she can feel is cold—

Chapters: 1/1 Fandom: Critical Role (Web Series) Rating: Teen And Up Audiences Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence Relationships: Beauregard/Jester Lavorre Characters: Beauregard (Critical Role), Jester Lavorre, Yasha (Critical Role), The Mighty Nein Additional Tags: Resurrection Rituals, (ship doesnt come until the end really), (was originally beau/yasha/jester but I was informed of age differences and edited to respect that, Team as Family, we're all love Yasha So Much Series: Part 1 of CR lgbt week Summary:

The Blooming Grove is beautiful and in the wake of the final battle Essek Thelyss doesn’t know what to do with himself. Might as well talk about how Trent Ikithon is gonna hunt him down and murder him. That sounds about right. Caleb Widogast has a different conversation in mind.

*

The quiet after a battle is not something, personally, Essek Thelyss has an over-abundance of experience in.

His career trajectory within the Dynasty had been an unusual one, co-opted by competing interests and his own ambitions as they dovetailed (or diverged) from the demand of his political standing. But the body of his work has only included hands-on violence but a few times outside of training, though his training was extensive enough that it remains a quick-twitch reflex within him. (The Dusk Captain, reviewing the academic body of his life before his appointment to Shadowhand, ensured he saw enough violence to understand it completely enough to not take it lightly.)

The point is: He fully doesn’t know what to do with himself now.

Episode 139 AU: Essek gets off the Dark Star spell against the Mighty Nein, forcing them to fall back and leave Essek, for a time, alone with Lucien in the Astral Sea. AKA: Lucien finally gets a good look at the random spare wizard guy whose been hiding in the back this whole time. Written off this post.

*

In this universe, the only difference is ten feet.

In the three-dimensional combat field of the Astral Sea above Cognouza’s screaming skyline, Essek Thelyss is floating just behind a shattered rooftop, out of sight from Caleb, Jester, or any of the arcane casters who are – to their credit – very distracted. So no one sees it. So no one dispels it.

In the moment it happens, Lucien himself doesn’t make note of it. There’s a spare on the battlefield. He hadn’t really bothered to pay attention to them right up until the exact second said spare put a fucking gravity fissure up the back of his head. Lucien makes a tactical note of them, casts one of his many gazes toward the spellcaster and absently feels it take purchase. The semi-autonomous part of Lucien that is rage says, FUCKING KILL THEM ALL, and the spare’s mind buckles under. Then Beauregard punches him in the face and Lucien almost forgets about the spare entirely in his new zeal to fuck her up.    

No one really notices that the spare is under Lucien’s control.  

Until they set off a black hole in the center of the battlefield.

Mollymauk Tealeaf wakes up in a grave by the road ten years after he died. Things have gone a bit wrong since then and he might be the only one who can set things right… since it’s the Mighty Nein themselves who’ve gone wrong. AU: Where Molly comes back to yell at his super-powered Level 20 friends. (AO3 - part1) (AO3 - part 2) (AO3 - part3) (AO3 - part4) (AO3 - part5) (AO3-part6) (AO3-part7) (AO3-part8) (AO3-part9) (AO3-part10) (AO3-Part11) 

***

“Fuck,” Mollymauk whispers.

His eyes are closed. He keeps them that way.

He says to himself, “That’s… fucking great.”

Molly stands rigid, hands knotted against his chest because that’s where, in his moment of death, he’d been clasping Jester’s hand against his breastbone. The air smells of torn grass and air after rainfall. The wind is up, warm ribbons of air tearing at his clothes and he knows, somehow, there’s a storm on the horizon in a dimension where weather should mean nothing. The breeze chills the tracks of salt water on his cheeks. The bones in his fingers ache from gripping.

Why and how can he weep as a nothing but a soul? Seems shitty.

Hands take him by the shoulders.

“Mollymauk!” The scent of dust and bone. “Are you alright?”

It’s a cold grip; slender thumbs pressing to the inside curve of his bicep with such strange and impossible force. Like a slim-fingered golem is gripping him with obsidian fingers. For a moment Molly keeps his eyes clenched, so no light can get though. He closes his fists even tighter against his chest, but the phantom heat of Jester’s skin is already fading from his palms despite the fact it was never there to begin with.

“Weird,” Molly says.

“Mollymauk, that death was different.” The fingers squeeze, words urgent. “She’s got a breath of annihilation in her and when she kills you, it hurts you down to the—”

“I can feel where Jester’s hands were.” Molly presses his knuckles tighter into his sternum. “Odd, right? She didn’t actually touch me. This is just… not the real me. Hey, is my body just lying there in front of her?”