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.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

"...Are the candies because he's older?" Arden asked, lost on that. She'd vaguely gotten some of the color-coding of the glitter: red for wrath, purple for royalty, gold for greed, green for envy, she wasn't really sure what blue had to do with lust but it might just have been 'the color of glitter Gray had left,' but the Werther's confused her.

"Pride then," she said, because process of elimination was helpful that way. "How does that...manifest? Is that a good word?"

"They're his favorites," Gray explained. "We like to say Al's like a grandpa. He likes his tea and his candies and his books and whatnot." And he had glued them to the card so he could explain that to Arden and make Al seem somewhat less intimidating.

Gray could go on for hours about how Pride tied Alastair into knots, but he said, "Alastair's gonna come off really arrogant. That's because he is, but like...you know that Beyonce song? 'Ego'?" He shrugged. "He can back it up. Al's the oldest. Not just of the seven of us, but of all the Nephilim. The same way Lucifer was the firstborn of the angels, before he fell. That means he's...stronger."

Arden relaxed a bit at that. "Oh, that's something I'm used to. Arrogance is kind of par for the course for most Othersiders. Even if it's not as intense as Alistair's is, it's still something I'm at least used to."

She looked thoughtful. "So, by being the First - the First among Firsts, since you're all sons of the First to fall after Lucifer - he kinda got a measure of power more than everybody else? Like when you first start cutting a cake, before you realize you've gotta make sure there's enough for everybody?"

Now she was wondering what the birth order was. And if it mattered for anybody but Alistair.

"Ooooh, I bet Envy hates that."

"You'd be surprised." Running their circus was enough of a pain in the neck that even Daman mostly landed on sympathy.

"But, yeah. Alastair has power over us. Like, if he gives me a direct order, I have to obey it. Most of the time he doesn't have to do that because we obey his orders anyway, but...he can. If he has to. And a lot of the things the rest of us can do he can do just a little bit extra. Any of us can put a human to sleep with a touch." That probably came as news to Arden, but Gray was moving on to, "Al's the only one who can modify their memories. But what you really need to know about," and possibly the point of this entire presentation, "is that he knows when you lie to him."

"Oh?" Arden asked, and then, "....Oh. Okay. Um. What did you tell him?"

She was not a very honest person, Gray. Oh huh. More stuff on her soul for Wrath to see, if that worked on her.

"I'm gonna guess he doesn't like that very much."

"I told him that you were human. And my friend. And you're from another universe so it's not like you have to worry about the stuff a human from our universe would, anyway." And by the end of their conversation he was pretty sure that Alastair had been aware Arden wasn't a totally mundane human, on account of how he'd agreed to let her come to their house.

But he wasn't telling Arden that. He was telling her, "It doesn't work over the phone, anyway," because that was true. "And you can, like, leave stuff out or tell him something that's true but doesn't really answer his question." Getting around Alastair's truth-sensing was something all of Gray's brothers had honed to an art form, and Arden didn't even have to worry about him reading her thoughts! "Just try not to directly lie, okay?"

Arden nodded slowly. "Do you think he'll ask?" He knew the question she meant. "Do you think it's better for me to just...say?" She looked a little uneasy. "A few weeks ago, I - well we, Cal was there with me, thank the goddess - got jumped in Baltimore because they knew who I was. I don't know how they did, but...that's got me a little shook up. But on the other hand, like...your world isn't mine? And I dunno..."

She trailed off and then something Gray said snagged her attention. "What do you mean? About the not having to worry about stuff a human from you universe would, I mean?"

Arden was not gonna like hearing this! At all! "We fight demons," Gray explained, "and obviously the demons don't like that very much. Our house is warded to the gills, they can't even find it. But...a long time ago, Raiden had this boyfriend who was staying with us. And he left the house one day and the demons took him. They tortured him until he told them how to find our house and get past the wards, and then they killed him. And then they attacked our house, and Castor and Daman almost died. And since then we don't let humans in our house. For their own protection as much as ours." Wait, there's more! "Like, Alastair doesn't even let Joseph come to our house, and he's been his partner for..." Gray had to think about it. "Almost forty years." YEAH.

"So it's up to you? I told him that since you're not gonna stay in our universe it's not the same kind of risk, but." Gray shrugged and did not mention that he had very slowly and carefully told Alastair that it was very important to Arden that everyone know she was just a normal garden variety human, or that Alastair had replied with, "Ah," followed by telling Gray that if he thought it was a good idea of course she was welcome.

A VERY NORMAL, SUPER GARDEN VARIETY, PLAIN OLD HUMAN.

"And I'm very happy not knowing either of those things," Arden assured him quickly. Not that that would save her if demons decided that she looked torturable, but at least she wouldn't have any useful information to give up.

"I think...I think that if Alastair directly asks, I'll tell him what's what," she decided. "Or...well, any of your brothers, I guess. Since it's their house and safety that's on the line here. But if they don't directly ask, I don't see a reason to bring it up."

It would definitely stay a suuuuuper secret then, too. No way it could possibly come up other than his brothers asking!

"And there aren't any demons running around the Otherside. We don't have angels or demons."

"Honestly? They probably assume you're not human, because Al's letting you in the house. But since they know about that Grimm lady they probably think you're like her. I don't see any reason for it to come up." Ahahaha.

"You don't have any angels?" That was great! Angels were assholes. Obviously, so were demons, but angels, man.

"I mean," Arden said quietly, "my mom was. Grimm and Duke call me a cousin sometimes."

"Oh!" Gray said. "I didn't know that!" That explained why Grimm was hanging around. "Are you, like, actually related, do you know, or..." Probably fell under 'none of your business,' Gray.

Arden shook her head. "Nah, I think it's just, like, an overall kinship thing," she said.

To have known her mother and to have never told her about it? That would just be unspeakably cruel. Her relationship with Duke might be complicated and her relationship with Grimm downright fraught, but they'd never keep her mother's very identity from her.

"They were also the ones who found me, in foster care. Well, Duke was. He had a vision. Visited me at night in the liminal space before sleep." A slight quaver in her voice, the tiniest wince, a hand coming up to grasp something beneath her shirt. "Brought Grimm along with him a few times before they decided to bring me to Callista's attention."

They might have a good reason? Fucked if Gray knew what it might be, but it was possible! "It's good that they found you," Gray said. "And not, you know, somebody else."

Well. They sure did have...some...reasons, anyway.

Hey, real quick and for no reason, did Bellamy ever regret hookups?

"Me too," Arden said fervently. "They recognized what I was and knew that Callista could protect me better than they could, and for all that that's it's own fuckin' thing, it wasn't half so bad as puberty would have been in foster home number whatever at that point." She gave him a smile filled with tired irony. "Puberty kinda hit me like a hurricane."

On occasion!

Gray gave her a sympathetic look. "I don't think it's a walk in the park for anybody." He'd been lucky, for a certain value of lucky, that Sloth had been in full effect his entire life. A few of the others had had much wilder rides, and Lazarus had had zero sympathy for their struggles.

But Gray couldn't think about that too much because he wasn't allowed to murder Lazarus.

Cool cool cool cool. Again, totes no reason. Probably wouldn't even come up ever!

"Yeah, but I was definitely glad to be somewhere where people...understood it better," she said.

It would have been bad to have gone through all that around humans who had no idea the Otherside even existed.

Eventually, Duskwatch would have been sent in to check it out, and well. They'd gone over what would happen then.

"Was it like that for you...?" Arden asked. "Or...I think you said you all decided you were brothers at...eight? So you clearly knew already..."

Lazarus could eat a bag of dicks. Also, if he wanted to outsource that job...Like, obviously not Arden, but Liliana would probably do it for free.

"Oh," Gray said. "Okay, so, it's kind of...complicated. We were all in different situations until we were eight. Um. Some of them weren't good. But I was with my dad, my dad raised me, so I knew all along! And my dad was great! He was also totally evil and he still wants to conquer the world and subjugate humanity, but he was a great dad. And then the angels found out about this prophecy about us, and they sent Lazarus to go get us. By which I mean kidnap us, mostly? I know Bell came willingly, and Daman was basically feral in a forest so I don't think that counts as a kidnapping." You know. Technically.

"Anyway, he raised us until we were eighteen. It was like. You could think of it like boot camp." You know. Boot camp for eight-year-olds that you kidnapped. "I don't think he was used to kids. He was one of the earliest angels and that whole generation was made, not born. And we were, you know...he never really knew how to deal with our sins. So it was, um. It was not great. And some of my brothers' sins didn't really kick in until puberty, so that was...yeah.

"But if they'd stayed with humans that would have been really bad, too, so I get what you mean about it being better than the alternative."

Edited 2024-09-05 02:07 (UTC)

So, funny story, Gray. 'Boot camp for eight-year-olds that you kidnapped' was not a normal sentence. Just as an FYI there.

"Did you ever go and find your dad again?" Arden asked, which meant she wasn't focusing on a little kid living near-feral in a forest, even if that kid had (would have?) more power in his pinky than she probably ever would.

Oh, he knew. But it was what it was, and he hadn't come up with a gentler way to explain it.

"My dad's still around. He's the...sort of the co-leader of the forces of Hell with this demon named Phoenix." Who was apparently Bellamy's fated mate, and every time Gray thought about that he felt like he was going to have a nervous breakdown. "I see him around every now and then, but it's usually on like...a battlefield. It's not...we disagree too fundamentally. On, you know, the subject of enslaving humanity. So." Gray shrugged. It was what it was.

Okay, Gray. You needed a few Raiden-sized bottles of ambrosia and to just drink until you forgot everything you'd learned.

Great. And now Arden had to think about how if Lazarus hadn't kidnapped Gray, he might also have ended up as part of the forces of Hell and that would almost certainly put a damper on their friendship.

What with the planned genocide and all. And also, probably not coming to Fandom.
But the planned genocide was also a pretty big one.

Instead of articulating any of that, Arden just blew out a long breath of air. "Fuck," she said eloquently. Because how else do you respond? "Uh, so circling back around. Any other advice for me? Don't take it personally if Daman's kind of a dick to me for no reason, try not to envy him when it's just me, check my stuff before I leave, don't lie to Alastair...?"

Gray was acutely aware that if he had not been kidnapped by an asshole, he would probably have grown up to be a monster. It was something he and Castor, who had also loved his father, had talked about sometimes, after they had been exposed to what was really going on and come down on the side of humanity.

Alastair, who had been raised by his father and Lucifer until Lazarus took him, never shared his thoughts, but Alastair never shared his thoughts about a lot of things. It probably said a lot that Alastair had not hesitated for a second to kill Azazel when he got the chance.

"Yeah, this got kind of heavy, didn't it?" Gray asked rhetorically. "I think that's pretty much it? You already know about me and Ray, and, well, there's no way to prepare you for Krave except to go there. There's really nowhere else like it."

"I mean, it's no shitty society based on way too much murder," Arden teased, because, honestly, that would be a hell of a competition that she absolutely did not want to indulge in. "But...yeah. It did. And I'm glad it did? I feel like I know you a lot better now."

She tilted her head. "So why are you here? Pretending to be younger than me?"

"Oh, this is gonna sound dumb," Gray warned her as he scuffed a hand through his hair, and then shrugged. "It looked like so much fun in the movies? I watch a lot of anime and stuff when I can't get out of bed, and...yeah. Being a teenager looked nice." Because he had never gotten to do that before. He had been in boot camp the whole time. "And I've got this baby face so I was like...let's see if I can pull it off."

Arden did laugh, but it sounded fond and amused, not mocking. "And?" she asked. "Worth the experiment? As fun as you'd hoped?"

Fandom Library, Wednesday, September 4th

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