fandomhigh | Fandom Library, Wednesday, September 4th

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Fandom Library, Wednesday, September 4th

The library was on some kind of origami kick. At least, she was assuming it was the library? There were origami how-to books scattered across the table, crumpled up sheets of origami paper from attempts that didn't quite work out, and even a few interesting finished pieces. Arden was charmed right up until she saw a bunch of books huddled on the safety of the circulation desk, their pages also folded into the beginning of shapes.

"All right!" she called across the library, not fussed about whether or not she was making too much noise for a library, this was important. "We do not use other library materials for origami paper! Not books, not magazines, not periodicals, not things I'm forgetting off the top of my head! Origami paper only!"

She wasn't sure if it was gremlins or the very stacks themselves that sighed and grumbled at her announcement, but she didn't care. Not since she was going to have to spend the rest of the afternoon attempting to unfold and flatten pages in much-abused books.

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Gray slouched into the library carrying a stack of cardstock that might be shedding glitter. Look, he thought all arts and crafts projects required glitter. Blame his classes. "Hey, Arden," he said. He had heard the yelling, so he added, "I can come back?"

Somewhere, Navaan was proud of her contribution.

"So long as you're not here to use pages in books to practice origami, you're safe!" Arden called back. "Hey, Gray, what's up?"

"Wasn't planning on it," he assured her. "Although I do make a mean crane, now that you mention it..." He shook that off. "Since you're going to be visiting soon, I thought I should introduce you to my brothers." He flashed a grin at her. "Don't worry, there won't be a quiz." The quiz was meeting his family. "This is just so you have a better idea what you're dealing with and aren't just like, 'There are so many of you and you're all so tall.'" Except Gray, of course.

"Oh, yeah!" Arden said, briefly forgetting that she had already been told to avoid two of them and focusing on the part where there were new people to hopefully convince she was pleasant and nice and likable.

Look, she was a recovering people pleaser but we all had relapses, okay?

"Are they all tall?"

Look, the 'is he cute or is he just tall?' dilemma is real.

Technically, she had been told to avoid Galen. Daman was self-avoiding, but Gray would get to that in his presentation.

"All of the Nephilim are tall," Gray sighed. "We get it from the--fallen--angels. Daman's on the short side and he's six feet."

And then there was Gray.

"Here, we'll start with an easy one," Gray said, brandishing a photo of an incredibly gorgeous blond man whose eyes had been, Gray knew, photoshopped to look hazel. The card was edged in blue glitter. "A hint: I stole this off one of his hookup app profiles."

Edited 2024-09-04 15:51 (UTC)

Maybe it was the exact color of Miss Lambe's eyes! Would that make Lydia any happier?

And if they did just happen to be sort of a blue-green that changed with the light, whatever. That color could belong to anybody. It was just a very pretty mix of colors!

"...Oh," Arden said quietly, eyes very big. "Oh. Um. Yeah, I'm pretty sure I know who that is. Hi Bellamy. He's. Uh. Oh no."

"He's Lust," Gray said, with the absolute lack of care for that fact that came with having Bellamy for your brother for the past however many thousand years. "He will flirt with you, unless that makes you uncomfortable in which case he will shut it down. Fun fact, though, Lust is kind of unique? You're probably thinking about, like, sexy lust, but sometimes it flips and he's bloodlust." Bellamy was a lover and a fighter! "But we won't be in battle so that doesn't matter." He was just rambling. "Next contestant."

Next was a guy with bright red hair, green eyes, and a bunch of piercings. Ears, eyebrows, lip, nose. Basically everywhere he could stick some metal His card was edged in gold glitter. "Okay, so he's been to the island but I think it was before you were here. This is Castor." Gray jiggled the card. "Can you guess his sin?" Or remember what Raiden said?

Well, yes, Arden had been thinking about sexy lust, because had Gray seen his brother? And she hated to admit it, but there was also something kind of hot about the other kind, just in that competence is really sexy and--

OH LOOK IT'S A DIFFERENT BROTHER. SHE WAS GOING TO LOOK AT HIM NOW.

Gold star for Arden. "Castor, he's..." Give her a second, Gray, you rattled her.

Gray is Sloth, Raiden is Gluttony, Daman is Envy, Galen is Wrath, Bellamy is stupidly hot. Five down, two to go, meaning Castor is...

"Greed, right?" she checked. She'd been leaning that way, but the gold glitter made her think she was right. She could also see Pride, in like a counterculture way, but she was going to go with her gut instinct.

"Ding ding ding!" Gray confirmed. "So, what you need to know about Castor is that he's kiiiind of a klepto. He sees it, Greed wants it, it ends up in his pockets without him even really thinking about what he's doing. So you'll want to go through your stuff before we head home, and if anything's missing Al can make Cas give it back."

"O-oh!" Arden said, brows contracting. "I'm not sure I'll have anything he wants? Like, none of my jewelry is even good jewelry, it's all cheap shit from, like, Claire's and the Walmart we looted."

Gray shook his head. "Doesn't matter. Our sins aren't logical. Like, I could be in the middle of an actual battle for my life and Sloth will decide I've done enough for right then and it's time to take a nap." He shook himself out of his whining. "As long as it's shiny or sparkly that's enough to catch Greed's eye. When Ray was moving out there was a whole thing about some measuring cups that look gold.

"And also, it doesn't matter if it's not worth much money, it's yours, so, if it's missing you deserve it back. But it's not really Castor's fault. You can't get mad at us for what our sins make us do, even when it's really, really annoying. We can't win against them." Did Gray sound exhausted? Yes, because this shit was exhausting to live with.

"Okay, so Greed's basically a magpie, gotcha," Arden said, because sometimes she thought in birds. "I think that's where I keep tripping up. Like, I can't think of anything that I might have that it would make sense for either Greed or Envy might want, but it doesn't have to make sense. It's kinda just like...weather. There's no controlling it, it's a thing that happens and expecting rhyme or reason from it's just dumb."

Beat.

"...Am I getting it?"

Gray was nodding along. "You're getting it. And speaking of Envy," he presented her with a green glitter-edged card with a photo of a very pretty dark-haired, bronze-skinned guy with the most incredibly green eyes you'd ever seen ~~who doesn't have a PB because I can't pick between like, four pretty guys~~. He might even out-pretty Bellamy, but he looked considerably less thrilled about having his picture taken. "Meet Daman."

"Oh!" Arden said. Yes, again. "He's not white!"

And then clapped a hand over her mouth because that wasn't one of the things we were supposed to say out loud, Arden ~~at least, not where the white folks could hear~~.

"No?" Gray said, and then clarified, "I mean, no, he's not? In human terms, anyway." He looked at the picture of Daman. "He gets it from his father, and he was a fallen angel, so." He shrugged. "His mother was Dacian. That's in what's now Romania."

Wait. Go back. "Oh! We're not...none of us are actually related by like, blood. I don't think." He and Alastair didn't know anything about their mothers, so. Who knew? "Our fathers were the first seven--well, eight--angels that followed Lucifer when he rebelled. The Supreme Being cursed their firstborn sons, you see, and that's us. The Cursed Sons. It's a whole...thing." Gray was now picking awkwardly at the corner of one of the two remaining cards, which was shedding red glitter all over his clothes.

"...Oh," Arden said, because apparently that was just how she was going to respond to everything now. "I knew about your dads being fallen angels, but I guess I always thought--well. I guess I didn't ever really think. You're all just brothers, so I figured..." Now she was feeling very stupid. "I mean. Not that you have to be blood-related to be family. I'm sorry I just...assumed stuff."

And was very grateful that they were having this now, so she didn't say something like, 'you're not white!' to Daman. Would he even understand? Get why it was almost a startle reflex? Being a Nephilim, did he even notice? He was probably always used to being a single face in a crowd...

She shook her head. "Did the eighth angel not have a son?" she asked, trying to shift the conversation to the topic that was clearly not super-awkward and emotional!

...Whoops. Again.

"No, he did," Gray said quietly. "Kallias--Melancholy--died. A long time ago."

Way to bring down the mood, Gray! "We decided to be brothers," he explained. "When we were eight." Actually, they had probably been nine or even ten by that point, but honestly it all bled together into one long miserable slog of training for several years there. "It's...you don't need to worry about that. It was a long time ago. Anyway. Daman."

No, Gray, Arden was probably going to have some questions about some things you'd just said there.

"I'm so sorry," Arden said softly. "I know my parents left a hole and I never even knew them. Losing your brother--" especially a brother he'd had for however many hundreds (thousands?) of years "--must be so much harder. Even if it was a long time ago."

Arden did have questions. Many questions. Questions she might even circle back around to asking sometime (like how had Kallias died? Weren't they immortal? Okay, probably not those, but maybe the whole 'deciding to be brothers thing'), maybe even after the parade of ~~hot~~ brothers here, but right now it seemed kinder to just move on.

So, yeah, she would be worrying about that, thank you.

"So, Daman. Envy. Might find stuff to envy because of reasons."

"Envy is a bitch," Gray told Arden earnestly, shaking Daman's photo a little bit in emphasis. "It's so hard to live with." They didn't compare, because that set off a couple of the sins, but the general consensus among the brothers was that Envy and Sloth were the two hardest sins on their bearers: Gray's physically; Daman's mentally. "It's like I said, there's no logic to it. If you're holding an ice cream cone, Envy will make Daman all bitter and envious that you have an ice cream cone and he doesn't, even if there are more ice cream cones in the freezer and the freezer is right there."

Pause. Regroup. Stop ranting about how frustrating Envy was. "So. Yeah. You might not even see Daman. He doesn't really...it's for his own sanity, you know? If he's around us--anyone--too long Envy starts working on him, so he mostly keeps to himself. Ray likes to have us all eat at least one meal together when we're all home, so, maybe then, or you might see him at Krave. If everyone else is envying him, the beast is fed, so he dances there a lot."

"Yeah, I'm pretty sure I can find a couple of things to envy about him, so maybe that'll help," Arden said. Hot, confident, open about his powers, loving and understanding family...Yeah, a few things. "But it does sound really hard. Having to stay alone to protect yourself and everybody else."

Didn't sound familiar, not one bit.

"Uh, is there anything I can do to help, if that triggers with me as the target? I mean, it sounds like he'll probably leave, but...anything?" Beat. "I guess that's open to everybody. Y'all are opening your home to me, the least I can do is try, you know?"

"Not really," Gray sighed. "It is what it is. If you could try not to think envious thoughts about him, that would help--when it's not a crowd and he can pick up where it's coming from, that's harder on him--but no one can control that completely, so..." He shrugged. "Just, if he's bitter and cranky or just walks out of the room...that's just Daman. Speaking of cranky."

Gray flipped up the next to the last card, the one with red glitter and a glowering guy with a buzzcut. "Galen. Avatar of Wrath. Short-tempered and overprotective." Did Gray sound fond? Yes, because that was his bro.

~~somewhere, canon!Adrian perks up~~

"Raiden told me to just avoid him," Arden said. "Which, you know, can do. Is it just everything that sets him off? Or is it more anything can?"

That...also seemed like it would be very hard on someone.

"The second one, mostly," Gray said. "He's very...tense, because he's always waiting for it, y'know? Which makes him mad. And then once he does get set off, he gets mad at himself for being mad about whatever it is, and then it spirals, and...yeah. It's...not great.

"Galen has kind of a bonus gift. We don't know why." ~~It was because in the first book everyone was going to be able to do it but then the writer changed her mind.~~ "It must be tied to Wrath somehow. But basically, if he looks a human in the eye he can see, like, all the darkness in their soul. All that ugly stuff we all have. I don't know if it would work on you since, y'know. But what you do with that information is up to you." Gray thought Arden would be fine, considering she was a sheltered teenager and also not human, but he wanted her to know it could happen anyway.

She had a lot of petty little sins though! Her own little forays into envy and lust and wrath, the kind that made her feel guilty because these were her friends and resenting them for things was unfair.

But goddess did she feel them.

She didn't think they made her a bad person, but there would definitely be at least things for Wrath to notice. ~~And then laugh at because, honey you are babytown frolics~~.

"Now I'm half-tempted to let him look to see if he can tell, you know? What does he do with that? Like. Just sits on it? Calls people out? Tells you you're being a jerk...?"

Edited 2024-09-04 20:47 (UTC)

"It depends," Gray vagued. "On, like, what he sees, and also what kind of mood he's in." Not that he was ever in a very good one.

"Okay, okay. Last but...the opposite of least, we have Alastair." Just the most arrogant ice prince you ever saw surrounded by purple glitter, with Werther's Originals glued to the corners of the card.

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