#dark!guard

I have so many, some I have already posted about, but here are a few:

Andy likes to be worshipped, and although she doesn't expect her immortals to worship her quite so literally as countless mortals once did, she does expect them to worship her in other ways that echo it well enough. Gifts of treasures and indulgences, acts of service, bloodshed and deaths being left at her feet like a cat dropping a mouse for its owner, and pleasure in every sense of the word. Offerings like these make her blood sing and bring a coy smile to her face.

Joe and Nicky are possessive. They don't like it when mortals mess with them, whether the intention was bad or borderline flirtatious. When Quynh is lost to them, they raze the very village that had accused Andy and Quynh of witchcraft to the ground, slaughtering every person involved in the trial. They shadow Andy in the centuries that follow; enemies and mortals seeking just a night with her end up meeting their blades. They do the same to every soldier that they pass when they search for where Booker has been hung, and in the centuries that follow, leading up to Nile, nothing changes.

Booker is devout in his worship and indulgent in every sin he had once been told to avoid. There is a selfishness in his acts of selflessness, and he doesn't care. He does everything for himself, for Andy, for Joe, and for Nicky (for Quynh too, if she wasn't buried under the sea).

Andy orders them to "act normal" when she first brings back Nile. Not as their true selves, of course, they don't want to scare her off. So they play everything safe, luring in Nile with simple truths about themselves, while keeping the things that they've done, that they do, buried.

Give us a Dark!Andy who has become possessive of the others after losing the first two immortals she found after being alone for thousands of years. A Dark!Andy who doesn't even like it when a mortal gets close to the others, no matter how good or kind they seem, because the loss of Quynh and Lykon isn't something she can watch repeat (even if it means keeping the others under lock and key within her reach).

Give us a Dark!Joe and Dark!Nicky who are overly possessive and protective of each other and the others while doing it all in the name of love. Because love can be volatile and bloody, it can be sharp teeth and sharper smiles, and making choices that seem extreme for the sake of love. As two romantics forced into immortality after experiencing religious extremism and severe war are going to have a dark edge to them.

Give us a Dark!Booker who kills and makes morally questionable choices to keep his immortal bond family tied to him because he can't lose his family again (no matter how much he wishes to lose himself still). A Booker who has become a wolf in a man, stalking alongside those that he knows is his, even when he knows full well that they are no better than he is.

I do! (NSWF warning for below):

When they finally find Booker, hanging from a tree for days with a burlap bag over his head, he is (understandably) a mess. Physically, he is filthy, and mentally, he isn't quite all there. So once they get to an abandoned farmhouse, with a tub and access to a well, it is Andromache who takes it upon herself to clean him and whisper in his ear that he's safe now. The mortals won't take him from them again.

It is Andromache who manipulates him into leaving his family during the first few decades of his immortal life. Yusuf and Nicolo are content to wait it out, but Andromache has always been selfish and possessive. She doesn't want Booker to go back to his wife or his children, no matter how much it pains him.

In truth, Andromache sees too much of Quynh in him.

It is Andromache who gives him the name 'Booker', an English form of his surname Le Livre, at least in meaning, when they are in America during the Civil War. Napoleon III favoured the Confederacy, despite France's official declaration, so Andromache felt it safer for him to not carry his name.

In turn, due to her disguise as a male Union soldier, Booker proceeds to name her Andy (a rising nickname at the time).

Some time after naming each other, once another war comes to an end, Booker finds himself killing for her. Of course, he has always killed for her, but this time it is different. There isn't a reason for the man before him to be dead other than the fact that he had followed Andy around after his life was saved. So fascinated with the short-haired woman who wielded an axe. It made something awful curl deep inside Booker and...well...he wasn't seeing an end to it that didn't end in death.

It doesn't help that Andy enjoys Booker being her shadow. She seems to thrive on him being jealous and possessive of her just as much as she is when it is Joe or Nicky acting in such a way. The pleasure of being worshipped as a Goddess once never did go away.

It goes both ways. Once the twentieth century rolls around, speakeasys and nightclubs form into existence. Booker has always enjoyed music, smoking, and drinking, and people gravitate to him. More than Andy would like. She takes to tying him up every night that she has to kill another mortal for getting too close. She reminds him that he doesn't belong to anyone that isn't immortal. That he belongs to her. She even threatens to leave him imprisoned, even though they both know she would never do such a thing.

They always commit espionage together. Which usually ends in a game of cat and mouse, predator and prey, once the job ends. Andy is always the better hunter, yet Booker enjoys being found, even if it means feeling her blade cut into him as she rides them both into a climax.

I've been playing around with ideas for Dark!Quynh with my tog fic on ao3, so I am so happy you asked :)

To set the stage: Quynh spent roughly five hundred years in blinding darkness, the spikes of an iron maiden cutting into her body, holding her in place, extreme water pressure instantly crushing her lungs, sinuses, and ears, causing catastrophic internal injuries, all while drowning, over and over again, not counting her fingernails and bones being broken from trying to bust out, as her body heals itself over and over again...why that would make anyone insane (tog 2 robbed us of this, but the fandom likes to gloss over it as well).

So dark!Quynh comes into the world with a shroud of insanity and rage in her that not even finally being able to have relief was able to tame.

In this au, there are certain things she wants, or so she tells herself:

She wants Andy to suffer for not finding her, but she equally doesn't want to be alone. She doesn't see the point in saving humanity from its suffering, yet she finds herself enjoying the finer things that the 21st century has to offer.

Booker is the easiest one for her to find. His first death and the dreams she shared of him gave her enough of a glimpse of the passing world, enough of a tether, for her to hunt him first.

They kill each other multiple times. Quynh needs an outlet that isn't mortal, and Booker hates himself enough to endure it. Of course, Booker has his own agenda (1. To go back to his immortals and 2. To never let anything befall Quynh again), so he sets the two of them off on a game of cat and mouse. He spurs her on enough to get her to chase after him, killing her when he can, and Quynh kills him just as quickly and brutally, depending on how badly he annoyed her at the time.

Quynh isn't so easily manipulated, however, and Booker quickly finds himself in chains and servitude to lure the others in.

An inevitable reunion that comes to a point when Quynh sends a rather threatening message to draw them out: Andromache comes, or Sebastian takes her place at the bottom of the sea.

While Quynh and Booker meeting were predator and prey, Quynh and Andy reuniting is akin to a supernova.

Andy wants nothing more than to drag Quynh into her, into them, to ensure that nothing ever happens to her again. That she can never leave again. While Quynh is an opposing force to the extreme:

Quynh wants Andromache to feel an ounce of what she had suffered. She wants to throw her into an iron maiden with her bare hands and watch as she disappears beneath the waves. She wants to take the others from her, leave her alone for a thousand years, and take herself away from Andromache's reach, too. To collide into her until her bare hands are broken from breaking Andromache down piece by piece.

Only Joe and Nicky make it clear (eyes sharp, faces pulled into snarls at the thought) that they will not allow physical harm to come to Andy by Quynh's doing. Booker is no better, even in his imprisonment, and Nile...well, Quynh has many thoughts about the young woman who is Andy's new pet, with her sense of justice and forgiveness, yet she knows when she is outnumbered.

The most she can do is vow to herself that she will fight Andy and the others, even if it takes a millennium, to make them feel a mere piece of the volatile emotions that coil deep within her.

And she knows, deep down, that it will be a long time regardless. The bond they all share, the dreams, the connection, makes it to where none of them will ever truly be free of the other.

(That is something that not even time can fix.)

Bonus Bullets:

Quynh grows an instant fascination with cellphones, instant messaging, Google, and Uber Eats. She kills a man for his sports car and holds a woman prisoner for her clothes once she crawls from the seaside and gets her bearings about her.

Quynh has no issue killing mortals, especially the wealthy ones, for the things that she desires. It doesn't take long for her to acquire an entire villa and a yacht off the coast of the French Riviera. (She makes Booker hide the bodies while she stands over the graves in sunglasses and a silk robe, a glass of wine in hand.)

Joe and Nicky are a little too eager to kill for her (and cook and give gifts like a cat leaving a dead mouse on one's bed). She doesn't trust them at first, but she is equally keenly aware that they are willing to bite her to keep her in place (they make that clear when she tries to leave, once, to a club, only for her mortal plaything to wind up dead).

Nile is the most normal and mundane of the group. Quynh knows this is due to how young she is, so she allows the normalcy. Art museums, new clothes, perfume shopping, and endless music come to fill her days around Nile. Not that she will admit that she has grown a fondness for it. (This doesn't change the fact that Quynh wants to wrap her hand around Nile's throat until she forgets her name and comes to worship her, but Quynh has always been a tad selfish on that front.)

Anon, I am so sorry it took so long for me to respond to this. I have not been much of a person for the past two months. Anyways, Dark!Booker time:

Over time, Dark!Booker just becomes more jaded and less empathetic. He was by no means a perfect person, or even a good person, in his mortal life, but immortality strips him down of what little good he did try to carry. Dark!Booker makes bets on people's lives and destroys their livelihoods to the point where they wish he had just killed them instead. He is equally a 'yes' man. This doesn't make him mindless by any means, but when Dark!Andy wants something of him, it never matters what it is, he always says 'yes'. No differently than Dark!Nicky and Dark!Joe, quite frankly, as they all follow Andy like a pack of starving wolves. The key difference is that Dark!Booker is a selfish man. He always finds something for himself in whatever Andy is having him do. Whether he is torturing some poor family because the father wronged Andy, or they need to ruin someone's fortune for several generations to get funds for the next decade or two. Dark!Booker doesn't think twice about anyone but himself (and the others, although that consideration, too, is selfish).

I sure do!

After the first thousand years, Andromache stopped caring whether innocent people lived or died. Not out of cruelty, necessarily, but because every mortal life kept becoming more fleeting.

Andromache had always been a leader, a Queen, so when all of those who knew her in her mortal life are gone, and her people have created an entirely new culture, with a new name, it is far too easy to manipulate them into worshipping her as a Goddess. Of course, during this time, she wasn't known as Andromache.

Andy still likes being worshipped even in the 21st century.

She is possessive of those whom she loves, almost to an obsessive degree.

After Lykon dies and doesn't come back, she swears to herself to never allow any immortals after him to leave her. After Quynh is lost, she refuses to allow the others to part. There is no leaving for another country or even another town. They stay together. Andy refuses for it to be any other way.

Andy is entirely responsible for Sebastian being separated from his wife and children. She doesn't allow him to return until she is certain that death is going to take them.

NSFW Warning

Dark!Andy has to have some kind of pain with her intimacy. Choking, cutting, and hitting. There are very few instances where she doesn't have it rough or slow and torturous.

As much as she takes charge of all things, there are times when she does allow the others to dominate her. She loves it more than she admits, but at the end of it all, she is still the one in control.

Nile, Booker, Joe, Nicky, and Quynh wake up in the middle of the Anatolian Steppes with no idea how they got there. They put their differences aside to try to figure out what the fuck is happening and where the hell Andy is?

Only they quickly are captured by warriors on horses and dragged to a yurt-like home in an encampment and there she is. Andromache. Only it isn't their Andromache.

This Andromache sits upon a throne and is being called Artimpasa.

This Andromache is worshipped as a Goddess with prayers and bloody sacrifices thrown at her feet and she looks at them in shock when Booker (because of course it is his luck that this should happen) heals from death and comes back to life.

She looks at them all with shock, and then a maddening glee that comes with a smile with too many teeth. Because this Andromache has been alone for nearly two thousand years and suddenly she isn't alone anymore.

She is quick to tell her people that these new strange people are Gods too. That they will be hers. Even if they don't seem to understand that just yet.