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There is really nothing else to say.
Title: Just Curious
Fandom: Black Jewels Trilogy (are you kidding? I'll let you know when this changes.)
Prompt: 055. No
Word Count: 713
Characters: Lucivar, Luthvian
Warnings: Absolutely nothing. Well, a bit of language in reference to Lucivar's parentage, but...
Summary: Lucivar wants to know who his father is, and Luthvian really doesn't want to talk about it.
Lucivar looked up from peeling a potato at his mother where she was chopping onions. He frowned and set down the knife. “Luthvian?”
He never called her ‘mother’. He didn’t think she would approve.
She didn’t pause to glance at him, the knife working efficiently across the vegetables, chopchopchopchopchop turn the cutting board chopchopchop. “Are you done already? Cut them up like I showed you.”
“No, I’m not done.” He hesitated. “Who’s my father?”
He thought he saw Luthvian’s hand slip, the knife stuttering on the cutting board. The next moment she had regained her pace and he thought he might have imagined it.
“It isn’t important. He doesn’t care about you.” There was a harsh note in Luthvian’s voice that made him want to flinch. He stood his ground.
“I want to know who he is.”
“Was,” Luthvian snapped. “He’s dead now.”
Lucivar did flinch at that, years of dreams evaporating in a moment, regardless of whatever dark hints Luthvian had given him before.
“Was, then,” he said, determined not to back down. Not this time.
The knife sped up and he could hear her annoyance. “It doesn’t matter. It was his choice not to acknowledge you. He chose to be no part of your life. Don’t try to make him a part of yours.”
“Why not?”
Luthvian turned her angry eyes on him and for a moment he recoiled, afraid she would strike him. “He threatened to kill you when you were only a few hours old. Do you want a man like that in your life?” She asked, coldly.
Lucivar looked down. “Do you know?”
“Know what?” Luthvian snapped.
“Who my father was.”
The knife stopped. Lucivar glanced up and cringed at her angry back, tense and turned on him. “What are you saying?” She asked in a voice that was far too even.
He shook his head, but not quickly enough. Her slap stung and he fell back, startled. “You will never suggest such a thing again,” she hissed, in a voice that was nearly unrecognizable. Lucivar nodded quickly.
“It was just something I heard…”
She shook him. “Never!”
“I just want to know…who he was…”
Luthvian’s voice grated painfully. “All you need to know about him is that he didn’t care about you. He didn’t love you, he never loved you. He didn’t care about either of us.” She picked up the knife again and began chopping raggedly.
“But –“
She slammed the knife down on the counter. “Leave it, Lucivar!” She yelled, and he drew back at the gleam of tears in her blazing eyes. Flinching, he looked back down at the half-peeled potatoes. “I don’t – want to talk about it.”
He picked up knife and potato again, shoulders hunching and wings pulling into his body. “All right.”
“He didn’t even want you,” she said. Lucivar felt the well of bitterness and pain and sliced viciously at the potato skin. It took a moment to recognize the pain as the knife bit into the meat at the base of his thumb. He watched the bright, red blood well around the knife for several moments.
“Luthvian,” he asked quietly, at last. “Do I look like my father?”
“Lucivar, do I have to…” She began angrily, but she trailed off, one hand closing around his wrist and drawing the knife out of his palm.
He looked up at her – not much, though, he’d grown – and added, quietly, “I’m sick of being a half-breed bastard.”
Luthvian was wrapping a towel around his hand painfully tightly. Her mouth seemed to tighten, but she said nothing.
“Someday I’ll find him,” Lucivar said, stubbornly, “Or his grave, or whatever’s left.”
Luthvian shook her head and tied off the makeshift bandage. “Wait here,” she said tersely. “I’m going to go get some bandages.”
When she returned, she looked him in the eye and her words were clipped. “Sometimes you are far too much like your father for your own good.” Then her eyes closed off and she set to bandaging his hand. He let her, wondering how much of what she told him was true, and how much of it was lies. And if it mattered.
Ultimately, he was and always would be a bastard. No amount of graves or searching would change that.
Title: Vengeance
Fandom: Black Jewels Trilogy
Prompt: 073. Cry/Tears
Word Count: 1,036
Characters: Lucivar, discussion of Jaenelle and Daemon
Warnings: Discussion of violence, implied sexual stuff, sadpuppy!Lucivar
Summary: The other side of that one I just wrote. Lucivar has only one thing left to live for.
He was numb as he was dragged back to the slave pens, dragged into the humid darkness and pushed back into his cell. He did not try to spread his wings, not even to try to dry the wreck of what was left of them. He sank down into a crouch and stared at the blank wall opposite, muddy water dripping slowly down. Once, in a fit of thirst, he’d tried to drink it, but it had tasted of raw sewage and dead flesh. It wasn’t worth the little lukewarm moisture it gave.
He could feel his knees trembling and leaned back into the wall, the stone cold on the bare, still raw skin of his back. It didn’t matter anymore, though. None of it, none of it mattered anymore. It would never matter again.
He called up the one picture he had of her, the one memory, of her standing in the courtyard, head slightly tilted, her blue eyes bottomless and her hair like a golden halo around her small, exotically beautiful face. It was still clearer than any other memory he owned, because he treasured it, thinking it the only glimpse he would have of her for eight years or more. For the years that would pass slowly if at all until he could meet her, serve her. He’d never thought it would be the one memory for a lifetime.
He clenched his jaw and felt the sting of tears beginning in his nose and throat. He bit them back savagely, tasting blood as he bit his tongue by accident. He turned his thoughts to Daemon.
Seven hundred years ago, Tersa had told him that he had a brother, and that that brother was Daemon Sadi. Since then, they’d torn apart countless courts, destroyed countless of Dorothea’s witches, fighting side by side for that one thing they were both waiting for, that had been promised them: Witch, a Queen they could serve. So when Lucivar had known that Witch walked the land, he’d known that Daemon would find her, if he could not, that Daemon would keep her safe, and that ultimately, he would find Daemon and, with Daemon, his Queen. He’d trusted that Daemon would protect her with his life. He’d forgotten that some things don’t change.
“Bastard,” he hissed under his breath, jerking to his feet, shivering. It was cool underground, even with the air still and damp as it was. His wings flared automatically and he tightened his jaw at the stabbing pain where the membrane was rotting away.
Even when he’d been placed here, given a death sentence, it hadn’t mattered. Because he’d known that at least Daemon had found Jaenelle, and if he didn’t survive to see her…Daemon would take care of her. He’d known that as much as he’d known Daemon’s conviction that he was born to be her lover…
He wheeled and slammed his fist into the wall with a cry somewhere between rage and anguish. Betrayed. He’d been stabbed in the back before. He’d been whipped to within and inch of his life before. He’d suffered hours of unending pain before. But none of it had hurt like this, because she was never going to come, now. She was never going to be his Queen. He would never teach her how to use a knife or an Eyrien stick or how to hunt game and read trails. He would never be able to protect and serve her. Because he had trusted, because he’d forgotten what he, of all people, should have known best.
Daemon and the Sadist were not two people. They were one and the same. And Daemon had betrayed him, had betrayed Witch. He thought of the sheet, covered in blood, remembered touching it, and retched savagely, his stomach revolting at the terror and pain he’d felt just at that brief brush with his mind.
“Why,” he asked, crossing to the front of the cage, hands curling around the bars where they longed to hold flesh. “Why?”
He could not understand, did not understand, and didn’t care. In the end, it was all the same. Jaenelle was dead. Witch was dead. The last hope had died, and the dark, wet heat in the mines would slowly devour his wings, and then his soul.
He’d told the truth to Dorothea, meant every word. If Daemon came here, when Daemon came here, then Lucivar would be waiting to rip out his heart. He would rip out his own, with it, but that didn’t matter. He was dead anyway, and there was only one thing left to live for, one reason to stay alive.
He closed his eyes and tried to call back the image of her, but it wasn’t right. Her mouth was slack and open, blood trickling from her nose, bruises on her white throat, splayed on the ground, dirt staining one cheek, limbs limp and lifeless as a doll, the smell of blood harsh in his nose. It didn’t take much to imagine Daemon, to imagine him seducing her, drawing her close with the skill he’d used to destroy so many witches – how could he have forgotten? – and then –
The Eyrien war cry tore from his throat without him being conscious of making it. He would not. He could not –
He bit his lip hard, drawing blood, taking solace in the coppery tang as it dripped over his lip and down his chin. His own blood. His, not hers.
One bright-eyed reason to live. One bright red reason.
He closed his eyes and folded his wings about himself, ignoring the pain. At least there was still pain. Pain meant that he was still alive, still able to fight.
Still able to extract the price from his brother’s body. Everything has a price, and this would be Daemon’s for Jaenelle’s life. Not nearly enough to pay the debt, but it would serve for a beginning, as he would serve for the end.
One drop of blood hit the floor with a small plip. Lucivar opened his eyes and looked down at the little drop of deeper black on the gray stone floor.
If he could not live for Witch, then he would live for Vengeance.
Title: Briarwood
Fandom: Black Jewels Trilogy
Prompt: 046. Wicked
Word Count: 321
Characters: Jaenelle, sideways.
Warnings: mention of pedophilia/rape
Summary: The only certainties were the beginning - and the end. And the voice...
It began, usually, with a strange tickle in the back of the mind. Just a small, niggling sensation that did not go away. Then it would change, when your eyes were closed, to a whisper, a voice just out of hearing range murmuring in your ear, keeping you from sleep. After that, it worsened rapidly. Some of them felt their hands gone, chopped off and bleeding, and yelled themselves hoarse trying to summon help for a wound that did not exist. Others simply screamed and writhed around their bellies, thrashing in unexplainable pain that tied their insides into knots, death a mercy that refused to visit. All felt cold hands on them in the night, cold, dry hands, and the voice, gradually growing louder, whispering, whispering…
Sleep abandoned them, but the voice did not. She – it was a she, an unearthly, horrible voice that vibrated strangely with the words they almost-but-could-not hear in a weird parody of a child’s reedy voice –
And as they reached with trembling hands to seize a knife to spill their blood and end the dreams, they froze, hearing at last the deadly words, understanding their curse.
Briarwood is the pretty poison.
It was said that every one of the infected men spend their last hours screaming until their lungs simply collapsed, unable to tell what had so terrified them, unable to blink, as though a single image was emblazoned upon their eyelids where they could not look away. It was whispered, after the secret of the disease came out, that each man had seen the first witch they had broken, but of course, no one knew. No one was left alive to tell, no one who could say that the image they had seen had been simply of a lady, clothed in Darkness, her face in shadow, whispering her deadly incantation without a shred of mercy, a shard of pity.
There is no cure for Briarwood.
