Fuck, I haven't written for a kink meme in half a decade... There is no such thing as thread necromancy on Dreamwidth, right?
I know you'll never see this, OP, but who knows. Maybe someone will stumble across this in 2025 and enjoy.
Copious amounts of incestuous angst - sex only offscreen, fortunately or unfortunately. My working title for this was Crippling Codependency In One Month Or Less. (Perhaps inaccurate on the timeframe, but it's the thought that counts.) Actual title comes pretentiously from Tennyson's The Lady of Shallot.
Felix/Jenna; some Saturos/Menardi and insinuated Alex/Mia.
Unbetaed and unedited, and it's been forever since I wrote a fic at length, so I'm aware it may have serious flaws. Hope there's nonetheless something for readers to enjoy.
Felix doesn't feel like her brother.
Perhaps it's insane to think that, but Jenna doesn't know what else to think. Her family's been dead for three years. She grieved, she suffered, and at last she laid them to rest in her heart. To find her brother alive again, barely resembling the boy he was when she lost him...
Maybe it's the circumstances. Maybe, if he had quietly returned to Vale and revealed himself to her, she could work through her shock and confusion and happiness in peace. Maybe it will anyway, and it just hasn't sunk in because she's in a daze from being kidnapped by two lunatics and their smiling friend, with Felix treating them as reluctant allies but allies all the same.
Her heart is in turmoil, and her mind's in worse. Kraden's little help; the old scholar has his own troubles, and she half-worries the breakneck pace at which the strangers are driving them will be his undoing. She's hardly about to turn to them for comfort, and something about their friend, affable though he might be, sends ice down her spine.
So, stranger with her brother's face or not, she turns to Felix, because she has no one else.
Felix awakens with a start as something brushes up against him.
The sharp feminine cry is no monster's, though, and so he shakily lays down the sword he instinctively seized. "Jenna?" he asks, sitting up.
"I... I'm sorry," comes the stumbling reply, and his gut twists. He nearly attacked... If his reflexes had been faster, he might have...
"What are you doing in here?" he asks, rubbing his eyes. A sigh comes from beside him.
"I can't sleep," his sister confesses after a long pause. "I need to sleep, I know. Those... people... are early risers, and I know we'll be up at the crack of dawn, but..." Her hair brushes him when she shakes her head. "I can't sleep," she repeats. "Even with all the marching we've been doing, I've barely slept at all for days... I just keep thinking of Isaac and Garet, and..." Silence. "I just thought... I don't know if you remember, but when we were children, if I had a nightmare, I'd creep in to..."
"I remember," he says, laying a tentative hand on her shoulder. It's strangely difficult to think of her as that little girl; he left behind a gangly girl, little more than a child, and found a bright-eyed young woman. It... disconcerts him. More than anything else, watching the young woman Jenna had become in his absence sank the dagger into his gut that he could never really go home again. "I'm the one who should be sorry. I've just... acquired instincts..."
"Traveling with those people, I'm not surprised," she mutters; even as she speaks, she leans into his hand, and he first stiffens, then relaxes. It's more acceptance than he feared he would get. "Felix?" she says after a moment.
"Yes?"
"So... that's all I want you to do. Just... please, hold me... like you used to..."
Felix hesitates, then reaches over and wraps his arms around her. "Thank you," she murmurs, burrowing her head into the crook of his neck and holding him close.
It's not long until her body relaxes, and her breathing falls into the deep rhythm of sleep. It's him who stays awake, staring into the darkness, until light starts to leak through the thin walls of the tent.
"Our parents are alive?"
Her voice rises to a near-scream, and she fights to keep from tipping over that edge. A mad part of her mind doesn't know why she's surprised. These two saved Felix, after all; why should they have only saved him? Why not both of them, and...
"Kyle too," he confirms, and a hysterical laugh bubbles out of her mouth. She presses her hand over it before more can emerge. This is all a dream, this is all an insane dream, nightmare mingled with her most desperate prayers. Her brother, her parents, and even Isaac's father are all alive and well - that's how she knows it's a dream. She's had this dream so many times, after all, even if the kidnapping is new. She'll come to believe it, even knowing it can't be true, and then she'll wake to the sun shining in her eyes, and a grief in her heart that no amount of joy and sunlight can ever fill...
"Provided you continue to cooperate, of course," the blue-skinned man says, gesturing with his roast Vermin-on-a-stick, and she nods absently. Come to think of it, she remembers Isaac and Garet telling her about the strangers they saw on the night of the storm, who beat them into unconsciousness and fled - these two must be her sleeping mind's reconstruction of the odd descriptions they gave. That's how they made it into the dream.
Maybe it's still the night before Kraden's planned visit to Sol Sanctum. The thought of going to that place must have brought up memories of the storm, and... and she'll wake, and find herself in her own bed. All of it, a mad dream... Nothing more...
She gives a weak little laugh into her hand, and wonders if this is what it's like to go mad.
"We will cooperate," Felix says in a tired voice, as though he's had this discussion many times over. "When will you believe me?"
"When you stop looking like you'll bolt the moment you figure out how you can," the pink-skinned woman says, lowering her own haunch of meat.
"I... I understand the necessity, it's just..."
"The dangers of Alchemy, the dangers of Alchemy," the blue-skinned man scoffs. "Yes, of course. The whole world might be destroyed because some idiots might, someday go mad with their their Psyenergy. Just imagine what devastation they might wreak! Why, Weyard itself might even crumble away!" He bares his teeth. Jenna notices absently that they look more like some animal's than anything belonging in a human face. "Wouldn't that be horrible, Felix?"
Felix just gives a sick sigh and looks away.
This is nothing more than a dream, a dream of madness, Alchemy, and the dead risen once more. It has to be.
Jenna stares into the campfire and wonders when she'll wake up.
It takes a week for it to really set in that it isn't a dream. That, on the night of the worst storm of living memory, the same thugs who beat two children and left them unconscious in the mud also dove into a roaring river and saved four lives even their own neighbors had given up for dead.
For their own reasons, of course. But she has no room to complain: how many nights did she spend on her knees, praying and pleading that she'd give anything, anything, to have some miracle occur, to have someone suddenly announce that her parents and brother had been found alive, however strange the circumstances or how far from Vale that might be, and they'd be reunited shortly? The error is only hers, that she underestimated the strangeness of the Wise One's providence, and fell into the folly of insufficient faith.
It's easier to bear her present circumstances if she clings to the thought that even these people might be agents of the Wise One's will. No matter how mad their quest or how brutal their natures, it might be that exalted will that they serve their purpose in some greater scheme, and her along with them. She was never that pious back when she was in Vale - but her brother and parents were dead then. Seeing a miracle in the flesh - traveling alongside a miracle in the flesh - made one reevaluate one's faith.
Even so, it's hard to cling to that in the face of harsh reality, in the endless drudgery of days of trundling through unfamiliar terrain, of the strangers always insisting on taking the most direct route even if it's the most difficult, of sickness from what rations they can scrounge off the land and fear of whether she regained her family only to lose her friends. Her only reassurance is the thought that, if the Wise One were so generous as to spare her family, he could not be so cruel as to allow two innocent boys to be robbed of their lives through no fault of their own.
But were they innocent, in the Wise One's eyes? After all, they had violated the inmost sanctum, even before others had followed them in... That was sin enough, the elders would say...
Kraden's no help in times like these: she can barely stand to look at the old man when she thinks that his cajoling and persuading might have cost Isaac and Garet their lives, and he lacks the knowledge to confirm or deny her worst fears. The two strangers are less than useless: the man says they're probably dead, with a strong undertone of serves them right, and the woman says brusquely that they'll play dead if they know what's good for them. That friend of theirs, the blue-haired Alex, speaks a few words of comfort, but she soon recognizes the soothing and empty tones of a trained healer - she knows it well enough, from her grief after the loss of her family, and knows also its abject uselessness in the face of true tragedy.
Felix is her only comfort. When she voices her fears to him, he's the only one who will wrap his arms around her, holding her close and assuring her that this world is stranger than can be imagined. That the same chance that found a boulder coming down and destroying his world could find him vomiting water on a strange riverbank, white-hot pain from his broken ribs lancing through his half-conscious haze, as a woman's voice shouted that she'd just pulled out another...
His voice is soothing, and his temperament steady; she can lay her cheek against his chest and forget about everything else. Alchemy, grief, and fear... None of that matters as long as this tall, handsome stranger with her brother's name is holding her in his arms.
Some distant dread twists her gut at that thought, but she doesn't know why. He is tall and he is handsome; what's wrong with that? Why should she have a feeling of approaching doom, as intense as the dawn and inevitable as the dusk, from recognizing a fact?
Why does she feel like she's going mad?
He didn't expect it to be this hard.
Not so long ago, he was the most reluctant member of their traveling group. Saturos and Menardi - nothing short of the gates of Hell would daunt them, and he's not sure those would be enough. Alex... wants it as badly as they do, perhaps even more. And he can't tell why. The reason Alex has blithely given him, in a private discussion, is that Imil will be next after Prox as the world rots... but that doesn't explain the hunger in his eyes, the way he smiles when he thinks no one is looking.
No, none of them have doubts. It used to be only him. He, at least, could bury his guilt in the thought that he hadn't been a member of the throng guarding Sol Sanctum for years, that he was doing it all under duress - that his parents' lives hung in the balance. He couldn't be blamed for what he was doing, even if it brought a death for the world in fire rather than ice. He was just...
But seeing his sister like this, so miserable and vulnerable... It unearths that guilt and makes it fresh. A brother should protect his little sister, not aid in her kidnapping. And the strong man he sees reflected in her eyes should be helping a young woman in need, not petting her and soothing her like a beast shying away as it's led to the slaughter.
He's a failure as a brother and as a man. Concepts such as 'duress' and 'duty' fade before that truth, and any loyalties lying in a land far to the north pale in comparison to the girl who clings to him like a shipwrecked sailor to a rock. Out of habit as much as fidelity, he tries to block out that creeping knowledge, telling himself he must quash his personal misgivings in subservience to greater goals, but... not strongly. Perhaps not for long.
Menardi would say he'd already been a failure as a man, of course, and laugh in his face at the notion that he could have thought differently. But he knows who would be in her thoughts as the ideal of a man - sees it every time her guard's down and her gaze wanders, sees where it inevitably fixes and stays. He has no desire to become like Saturos.
That man would call him ungrateful, and slyly ask how there could be such ingratitude after all he's done for Felix, for his family... but Saturos never does anything without an expectation of later repayment. There's no kindness in that man, and little conscience - none, except for the look in his eyes when he and Menardi stand before the memorial in Prox to those who perished at Sol Sanctum, still and solemn as statues amid the falling snow. In their name and for their memory, those two would do anything, harm anyone, raze anywhere that stood in their path in the quest to carry out their comrades' last mission, and prove to an uncaring universe that their lives were not for nothing. They are madmen, and he is... what? If they are madmen, how much madder he who follows them?
If Jenna only knew how he was failing her... he clings to her as much as she to him. She's the unshakable evidence he used to be, should be, more than Saturos and Menardi's obedient servant - more than a warm body attuned to Venus Psyenergy, existing only as a key to a faraway lock, to be cast aside and left to wander where he will once his purpose is done.
More and more, he's beginning to wonder where that might be, and whether it will wait for the hour they've decreed.
Out Flew The Web And Floated Wide [Felix/Jenna, M] [1/4]
I know you'll never see this, OP, but who knows. Maybe someone will stumble across this in 2025 and enjoy.
Copious amounts of incestuous angst - sex only offscreen, fortunately or unfortunately. My working title for this was Crippling Codependency In One Month Or Less. (Perhaps inaccurate on the timeframe, but it's the thought that counts.) Actual title comes
pretentiouslyfrom Tennyson's The Lady of Shallot.Felix/Jenna; some Saturos/Menardi and insinuated Alex/Mia.
Unbetaed and unedited, and it's been forever since I wrote a fic at length, so I'm aware it may have serious flaws. Hope there's nonetheless something for readers to enjoy.
Felix doesn't feel like her brother.
Perhaps it's insane to think that, but Jenna doesn't know what else to think. Her family's been dead for three years. She grieved, she suffered, and at last she laid them to rest in her heart. To find her brother alive again, barely resembling the boy he was when she lost him...
Maybe it's the circumstances. Maybe, if he had quietly returned to Vale and revealed himself to her, she could work through her shock and confusion and happiness in peace. Maybe it will anyway, and it just hasn't sunk in because she's in a daze from being kidnapped by two lunatics and their smiling friend, with Felix treating them as reluctant allies but allies all the same.
Her heart is in turmoil, and her mind's in worse. Kraden's little help; the old scholar has his own troubles, and she half-worries the breakneck pace at which the strangers are driving them will be his undoing. She's hardly about to turn to them for comfort, and something about their friend, affable though he might be, sends ice down her spine.
So, stranger with her brother's face or not, she turns to Felix, because she has no one else.
Felix awakens with a start as something brushes up against him.
The sharp feminine cry is no monster's, though, and so he shakily lays down the sword he instinctively seized. "Jenna?" he asks, sitting up.
"I... I'm sorry," comes the stumbling reply, and his gut twists. He nearly attacked... If his reflexes had been faster, he might have...
"What are you doing in here?" he asks, rubbing his eyes. A sigh comes from beside him.
"I can't sleep," his sister confesses after a long pause. "I need to sleep, I know. Those... people... are early risers, and I know we'll be up at the crack of dawn, but..." Her hair brushes him when she shakes her head. "I can't sleep," she repeats. "Even with all the marching we've been doing, I've barely slept at all for days... I just keep thinking of Isaac and Garet, and..." Silence. "I just thought... I don't know if you remember, but when we were children, if I had a nightmare, I'd creep in to..."
"I remember," he says, laying a tentative hand on her shoulder. It's strangely difficult to think of her as that little girl; he left behind a gangly girl, little more than a child, and found a bright-eyed young woman. It... disconcerts him. More than anything else, watching the young woman Jenna had become in his absence sank the dagger into his gut that he could never really go home again. "I'm the one who should be sorry. I've just... acquired instincts..."
"Traveling with those people, I'm not surprised," she mutters; even as she speaks, she leans into his hand, and he first stiffens, then relaxes. It's more acceptance than he feared he would get. "Felix?" she says after a moment.
"Yes?"
"So... that's all I want you to do. Just... please, hold me... like you used to..."
Felix hesitates, then reaches over and wraps his arms around her. "Thank you," she murmurs, burrowing her head into the crook of his neck and holding him close.
It's not long until her body relaxes, and her breathing falls into the deep rhythm of sleep. It's him who stays awake, staring into the darkness, until light starts to leak through the thin walls of the tent.
"Our parents are alive?"
Her voice rises to a near-scream, and she fights to keep from tipping over that edge. A mad part of her mind doesn't know why she's surprised. These two saved Felix, after all; why should they have only saved him? Why not both of them, and...
"Kyle too," he confirms, and a hysterical laugh bubbles out of her mouth. She presses her hand over it before more can emerge. This is all a dream, this is all an insane dream, nightmare mingled with her most desperate prayers. Her brother, her parents, and even Isaac's father are all alive and well - that's how she knows it's a dream. She's had this dream so many times, after all, even if the kidnapping is new. She'll come to believe it, even knowing it can't be true, and then she'll wake to the sun shining in her eyes, and a grief in her heart that no amount of joy and sunlight can ever fill...
"Provided you continue to cooperate, of course," the blue-skinned man says, gesturing with his roast Vermin-on-a-stick, and she nods absently. Come to think of it, she remembers Isaac and Garet telling her about the strangers they saw on the night of the storm, who beat them into unconsciousness and fled - these two must be her sleeping mind's reconstruction of the odd descriptions they gave. That's how they made it into the dream.
Maybe it's still the night before Kraden's planned visit to Sol Sanctum. The thought of going to that place must have brought up memories of the storm, and... and she'll wake, and find herself in her own bed. All of it, a mad dream... Nothing more...
She gives a weak little laugh into her hand, and wonders if this is what it's like to go mad.
"We will cooperate," Felix says in a tired voice, as though he's had this discussion many times over. "When will you believe me?"
"When you stop looking like you'll bolt the moment you figure out how you can," the pink-skinned woman says, lowering her own haunch of meat.
"I... I understand the necessity, it's just..."
"The dangers of Alchemy, the dangers of Alchemy," the blue-skinned man scoffs. "Yes, of course. The whole world might be destroyed because some idiots might, someday go mad with their their Psyenergy. Just imagine what devastation they might wreak! Why, Weyard itself might even crumble away!" He bares his teeth. Jenna notices absently that they look more like some animal's than anything belonging in a human face. "Wouldn't that be horrible, Felix?"
Felix just gives a sick sigh and looks away.
This is nothing more than a dream, a dream of madness, Alchemy, and the dead risen once more. It has to be.
Jenna stares into the campfire and wonders when she'll wake up.
It takes a week for it to really set in that it isn't a dream. That, on the night of the worst storm of living memory, the same thugs who beat two children and left them unconscious in the mud also dove into a roaring river and saved four lives even their own neighbors had given up for dead.
For their own reasons, of course. But she has no room to complain: how many nights did she spend on her knees, praying and pleading that she'd give anything, anything, to have some miracle occur, to have someone suddenly announce that her parents and brother had been found alive, however strange the circumstances or how far from Vale that might be, and they'd be reunited shortly? The error is only hers, that she underestimated the strangeness of the Wise One's providence, and fell into the folly of insufficient faith.
It's easier to bear her present circumstances if she clings to the thought that even these people might be agents of the Wise One's will. No matter how mad their quest or how brutal their natures, it might be that exalted will that they serve their purpose in some greater scheme, and her along with them. She was never that pious back when she was in Vale - but her brother and parents were dead then. Seeing a miracle in the flesh - traveling alongside a miracle in the flesh - made one reevaluate one's faith.
Even so, it's hard to cling to that in the face of harsh reality, in the endless drudgery of days of trundling through unfamiliar terrain, of the strangers always insisting on taking the most direct route even if it's the most difficult, of sickness from what rations they can scrounge off the land and fear of whether she regained her family only to lose her friends. Her only reassurance is the thought that, if the Wise One were so generous as to spare her family, he could not be so cruel as to allow two innocent boys to be robbed of their lives through no fault of their own.
But were they innocent, in the Wise One's eyes? After all, they had violated the inmost sanctum, even before others had followed them in... That was sin enough, the elders would say...
Kraden's no help in times like these: she can barely stand to look at the old man when she thinks that his cajoling and persuading might have cost Isaac and Garet their lives, and he lacks the knowledge to confirm or deny her worst fears. The two strangers are less than useless: the man says they're probably dead, with a strong undertone of serves them right, and the woman says brusquely that they'll play dead if they know what's good for them. That friend of theirs, the blue-haired Alex, speaks a few words of comfort, but she soon recognizes the soothing and empty tones of a trained healer - she knows it well enough, from her grief after the loss of her family, and knows also its abject uselessness in the face of true tragedy.
Felix is her only comfort. When she voices her fears to him, he's the only one who will wrap his arms around her, holding her close and assuring her that this world is stranger than can be imagined. That the same chance that found a boulder coming down and destroying his world could find him vomiting water on a strange riverbank, white-hot pain from his broken ribs lancing through his half-conscious haze, as a woman's voice shouted that she'd just pulled out another...
His voice is soothing, and his temperament steady; she can lay her cheek against his chest and forget about everything else. Alchemy, grief, and fear... None of that matters as long as this tall, handsome stranger with her brother's name is holding her in his arms.
Some distant dread twists her gut at that thought, but she doesn't know why. He is tall and he is handsome; what's wrong with that? Why should she have a feeling of approaching doom, as intense as the dawn and inevitable as the dusk, from recognizing a fact?
Why does she feel like she's going mad?
He didn't expect it to be this hard.
Not so long ago, he was the most reluctant member of their traveling group. Saturos and Menardi - nothing short of the gates of Hell would daunt them, and he's not sure those would be enough. Alex... wants it as badly as they do, perhaps even more. And he can't tell why. The reason Alex has blithely given him, in a private discussion, is that Imil will be next after Prox as the world rots... but that doesn't explain the hunger in his eyes, the way he smiles when he thinks no one is looking.
No, none of them have doubts. It used to be only him. He, at least, could bury his guilt in the thought that he hadn't been a member of the throng guarding Sol Sanctum for years, that he was doing it all under duress - that his parents' lives hung in the balance. He couldn't be blamed for what he was doing, even if it brought a death for the world in fire rather than ice. He was just...
But seeing his sister like this, so miserable and vulnerable... It unearths that guilt and makes it fresh. A brother should protect his little sister, not aid in her kidnapping. And the strong man he sees reflected in her eyes should be helping a young woman in need, not petting her and soothing her like a beast shying away as it's led to the slaughter.
He's a failure as a brother and as a man. Concepts such as 'duress' and 'duty' fade before that truth, and any loyalties lying in a land far to the north pale in comparison to the girl who clings to him like a shipwrecked sailor to a rock. Out of habit as much as fidelity, he tries to block out that creeping knowledge, telling himself he must quash his personal misgivings in subservience to greater goals, but... not strongly. Perhaps not for long.
Menardi would say he'd already been a failure as a man, of course, and laugh in his face at the notion that he could have thought differently. But he knows who would be in her thoughts as the ideal of a man - sees it every time her guard's down and her gaze wanders, sees where it inevitably fixes and stays. He has no desire to become like Saturos.
That man would call him ungrateful, and slyly ask how there could be such ingratitude after all he's done for Felix, for his family... but Saturos never does anything without an expectation of later repayment. There's no kindness in that man, and little conscience - none, except for the look in his eyes when he and Menardi stand before the memorial in Prox to those who perished at Sol Sanctum, still and solemn as statues amid the falling snow. In their name and for their memory, those two would do anything, harm anyone, raze anywhere that stood in their path in the quest to carry out their comrades' last mission, and prove to an uncaring universe that their lives were not for nothing. They are madmen, and he is... what? If they are madmen, how much madder he who follows them?
If Jenna only knew how he was failing her... he clings to her as much as she to him. She's the unshakable evidence he used to be, should be, more than Saturos and Menardi's obedient servant - more than a warm body attuned to Venus Psyenergy, existing only as a key to a faraway lock, to be cast aside and left to wander where he will once his purpose is done.
More and more, he's beginning to wonder where that might be, and whether it will wait for the hour they've decreed.