iron: a darkling short [image credit]
word count: 1k
aka: gracen stayer gender thoughts.
trigger warnings: depictions of child abuse; references to sex (not graphic); mentions of self harm
gracen has a gender! how about that!
Politically speaking, she supposes, she could say that an ugly woman is barely a woman at all. If man and woman are categories drawn in opposition to each other, if womanhood is linked to male desire, at what level of unfuckability is she excluded from either category — or whatever. That’s about as far as Gracen can take those kinds of thoughts. She isn’t made for theoretics. She’s made for pragmatism and pantsuits and whatever she can touch and whatever gets her through the day. She is a woman insofar as men feel threatened by her, by the amount of space she takes up and the amount of magic in her body and the way her smiles are never convincingly kind.
She was fourteen when Cressida came out. Which is to say, when Cressida grew her hair out overnight, a magical display impressive enough to almost overshadow the point about her gender. Gracen watched the subsequent whirl — the new wardrobe, name, pronouns; puberty blockers and a legal gender marker change — with a detached sort of recognition. It was around the time she started to take note of the way she looked at girls. There was some sort of mirroring inherent in it, she thought: Gracen, longing after the female frame; Cressida, climbing inside of it.
Still, she got the sense, just as creeping and uneasy as her gradually dawning lesbianism, that if it had been her who did it, who shed her old self like a skin, burned phoenixlike with reinvention — if it had been her their father might have felt differently. Might have been a little less militantly prepared to cut bureaucratic corners, to bull his way through the legal red tape. The trajectory of Cressida’s transition was arranged within weeks. The golden boy became the golden girl, and Leovald brooked no argument from anyone in the city. And he would not do this, both of them know, for his other two daughters, were they really his sons.
They aren’t. If Gracen were a man she’d have said so by now. Nor is she anything else. It’s not like she’s not aware there are options; Jasper Greenwood’s both, after all, and thus neither, in a way. But then again. She’s never had any interest in being anything like Jasper Greenwood. That battle she’ll leave to him, along with all his others — not battles he picked, but battles he chooses to keep fighting, about which she will not condemn or envy him.
In the end, with herself, it comes back to pragmatism. If she has no desire to be anything but a woman, if her experience of gender is limited to clashing against displeased men (and clashing in a different way against certain women), then she’s a woman. A cisgender woman, because that label’s never bothered her, either; it fits as comfortably on her shoulders as she thinks “woman” ever fits on anyone’s. If she has ever wanted to be a man, it wasn’t about being a man. It was about wanting them to take her seriously. It was about thinking Leovald might love a son.
Of course she is not the same type of woman as her sisters, but then, she is not her sisters. Cressida is soft, angelic, golden-haired, a self-made girl in old-fashioned lace; Ruby is a blade, hiding acrylic claws and a bloody-lipsticked mouth behind a shield of low-necked dresses and short-sharp skirts. Gracen respects that. Both of them. In fact she admires them for being what they are.
(She does love them. She does not say so. In some ways it’s easier if they don’t think so, because then they don’t have to read it in the constellations of bruises clouding her arms beneath her shirt.
She has no self-harm scars. However cruel it sounds, she finds the thought almost silly. The night she saw Vergil Greenwood’s sleeve ride up, saw him scratching surreptitiously at the secret he can hide from his family but not from her sharp gaze — that night she stood in a corner and chewed on the thought, and chewed on the absurdity of her surprise that that was something people actually did. Gracen has a scar on her upper arm. From being pushed stumbling backward into the edge of a desk. Another flecks her cheek just below her left eye. That one, which feels like a study in irony, is from Leovald’s wedding ring. She has no need to make her own scars. Another gift from Daddy dear.)
Gracen admires both of her sisters for being what they are. She is not them. She can’t be. To try to be Cressida would be dressing herself in sheep’s clothing. To try to be Ruby would be dressing in drag. Gracen barely looks presentable in the dark dresses Leovald requires she wear to functions. She only feels right in men’s clothes, in pants that obscure her hips and jackets that smooth her chest. She’s never wanted to cut her hair, which falls past her waist; she does not want to look like a man. She wants to look like a force to reckon with. Ugly she can wear as a shield, which makes the suits her armor.
When she fucks women she is in control. Always. In being in control she can make it breathtaking. She can twist her fingers gentle-precise-masterful as her partner’s roaming hands find her hips her breasts her silky swaths of hair — always pressing kisses to her partner’s neck chest collarbones, always strong and guiding and leading and serving and lost in it. There’s never reciprocation; she’s never on her back. Stone butch, is what they call it, and both of those words fit like her suits, fit like the bedsheets around her when afterward she sprawls out across her partner’s bed, disheveled and naked and ugly and scarred and free.
Stone butch. Iron butch, is how she thinks of herself. Iron-fisted she wields her power. Iron-fisted she’ll rule this city when Leovald is gone. Cressida is Dovermorry’s princess. Ruby would kill to be queen. She’s welcome to that. Gracen is, and always has been, her own king.
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thank you for tagging me, @yvesdot :-) all of these are coming from darkling... because what else. side note: all of these words appeared almost a hundred times so i think we have darkling as an aesthetic right here.
quiet (from act three): [alcohol tw]
“Dad had… a drinking problem,” Vee said, twisting his fingers together. “I mean - he’s fine now. But he used to drink… a lot. Too much.” Dancing around it. Like Jasper’s a child. Like Jasper hasn’t seen how Dad drinks at Guild events, anyway.
Apparently it was bad-bad after Vee’s mom died, though. Bad enough that people outside the family noticed. Whispers in the Guild say it wasn’t the first time, either. Jasper has a quiet suspicion that it first got bad around seventeen years ago, when the scandal dropped.
little (from act four):
Ruby’s scowl borders on a pout, the kind she used to give Leovald when they were cute little kids. Or, rather, when Ruby and Cressida were cute little kids, and when Gracen was just little.
soft (from the interlude):
“Cain and Abel,” they mumble, very softly, “Abel and Cain. Cain kills Abel; Cain buries Abel; Cain’s left running. If Abel crawls out of the ground and hunts him down who’s who.”
& dark (from act five)
In medieval times they thought fate was a wheel. Fortune’s wheel - turning and turning and turning. Always cycling. Always bringing you from a peak to a valley, from a loss to a win, up and down and up and down. Nauseating. Endless.
That’s the thing about circles. The endlessness. When Vee held their halo in their hands, drowning in those dark nights in the storm, when they felt the glowing edges cut into their bloody hands - they were thinking about circles. Circles and coins and ouroboroi and halos, always halos, because once you put these things in motion they just roll on and on and on -
Whatever is happening right here, right now, at the center of a storm, at the center of Dovermorry, it started rolling a long time ago.
i’m going to tag @avi-burton-writing @haldimilks @harehearts and @themillionthdraft if any of you would like! (no pressure, of course.) your words are pretty, blue, twitch, + light!
leovald stayer has an iron grip on the city of dovermorry and enough magic to bring the world to its knees. he also has three daughters.
presented in their signature colors, of course.
gracen / 21 / cold, cunning, controlled.
"I raised myself. I raised my sisters, too. Leovald taught me one thing: business. And now he's surprised I turned out this way?"
ruby / 19 / red-hot, reckless, ruthless.
“I’d ruin her if I could. She’s older. So I have to be better. Or I have to make her worse.”
cressida / 17 / the golden girl, the prodigy, the angel.
“Now I’ve - I’ve ruined everything? Because I didn’t want to play the game? I don’t get the game; I never have. I’ve been telling everyone that. It’s not my fault if no one listens.”
(tagging @guulabjamuns and @bluejaybabbles for now! no darkling-specific tag list yet oops)
thank you so much @alicewestwater for tagging me in this KHDFKSDFSDKBFSDBSD god this was. a ride and a half. (characters from darkling!)
RULES: tag your characters as florida man news headers.
leovald
jasper
cressida
rory
vee
gracen
ruby
dany
vee, cressida, and rory
the whole book
(gonna tag @avi-burton-writing @guulabjamuns @smashwritebook @junedottxt and @maria-is-writing if any of you want to do this DKFHDKFBSD... no pressure!!)
me making female ocs two years ago: while i want all of my fictional women to be three-dimensional characters, and while some of them do very bad things, i want to make sure all of them have depth and few of them are strictly “villains” -- since most of my female ocs are wlw i don’t want to make them all awful people because i feel like that toes the line of sexist and homophobic and --
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the word love is used SO many times it’s a constant idea underlying everything but. here. have jasper being snarky. from chapter 4, “control:”
He shakes hands with Caemus Caldwell. He shakes hands with a bunch of other mages, too. He answers some inane questions about school (it’s great, he loves being sent away from his family for nine months of the year, and yes, he’s home early, but it’s only because he’s a massive fuckup!), about what he wants to major in someday (criminal psychology, and that’s true, it’s definitely because he watches true crime TV shows and not due to genuine interest in the subject!), how he feels about his dad’s job (please! reelect dear Papa to the mayoral seat, or we shall be ever so des-ti-tute at home!) - and finally Dad lets him go.
& from chapter 22, “stains:”
“Is he dead?”
Ruby raises a hand to examine her bloody nails. “He wasn’t. You can place your bets on how far he’ll get through the woods.”
