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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"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?"

"Well, everybody thinks I'm jailbait, so. That's a problem. But they probably would have thought that anyway, because." He gestured toward his baby face. "'How old are you, anyway?'" said as suspiciously as possible, "is totally what every guy wants to hear from every guy he ever hit on, don't you know."

"You start having to begin every conversation with, 'Hi, I'm Gray, yes I'm older than I look, I've graduated college, I've just got one of those faces that'll look this way forever.'" She winked at him. She was called that clever, whether or not the Nephilim judge agreed or not. "If you sound all world-weary enough, I think you can sell it."

"Worth a shot," he said. "Probably won't work on the hot pirate, though. I already asked him if he's a eunuch." Yeah, you were probably screwed in the not-good way there, buddy. "Pro tip? Even if the vampire lady's advice sounds good it probably isn't."

SORRY NAVAAN.

Arden blinked at him, and then blinked again. "...You thought advice from the crazy vampire doctor sounded good?!"

A pause as she somehow managed to sound even more flabbergasted than before. "Especially when that advice is ask a guy if he's a eunuch?!"

Gray. Gray. Gray.

Edited 2024-09-05 03:27 (UTC)

Gray groaned and slumped over on the desk, hiding his head in his arms. "I know," he said, muffled, and then looked up and repeated, "I know! But he was not picking up what I was putting down and I couldn't remember what the right slang was in the eighteenth century!" And seriously, Arden, left to his own devices his pickup lines were so bad.

Don't ever tell her about the squirrel one, Gray. She enjoyed respecting you.

"Have you considered asking, y'know, Bellamy for ideas?" she asked. Or literally any of his other brothers. Maybe a few people at Krave. Some very personable demons. Lazarus--mmm, the jury was still out on that one. "Goddess, at least 'nice shoes, wanna fuck?' isn't also insulting."

Maybe in the new and improved future where Gray spent the next few years yelling at Lazarus to suck less, he came up with a pickup line for his soulmate that did not involve squirrels!

Gray scoffed at that. "Bellamy doesn't have to hit on people," he said. "Bellamy's Bellamy. He looks like that and people come to him. Like...sex moths. And, honestly, at Krave..." Oh, was he going down? That was a yawn. He was going down.

"Oh no," Arden said, and went to try to catch Gray to settle him somewhere comfortable until he could wake up again.

Maybe she should start stashing blankets and a Squishmallow here just in case.

"Sleep well, Gray," she said and went back to straightening pages.

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