demons dreaming, knowing i just needed to realign...

[theresalwayshope]

reminds me of you.

Allison half-gaped, half grinned into her phone at the image of a baby black panther, all claws and patchy black fuzz for fur. It was the cutest damn thing she'd ever seen in her life, and it made her melt in all the right ways.

How dare Jason make her squishy.

Mock pouting at her phone, she texted him back as she crossed the apartment to head for the kitchen. It was a Saturday, she wasn't working, and she was still red enough from her beach adventures that she was giving the Boardwalk a break for the day. So far, she'd cleaned the apartment, worked on her summer reading assignment, done laundry, restrung both her compound and her recurve bows, and sharpened her ring daggers.

She was bored, idle...and idle was not good.

Not since Lydia had left.

Like most terrible things that happened, she was doing her best to forget. She hadn't spoken to anyone else about it, not even Scott...she hadn't really spoken to anyone about much since the day she'd realized it. A text had bounced, her apartment was vacant...and she knew that people came and went, that was how Darrow worked. It just...hadn't happened to her yet.

And everything she'd heard had been right: losing a packmate was like losing a limb. She wasn't gone, but...she wasn't here.

So the text was perfectly timed, a distraction...a slice of very real joy to make her forget how much it hurt, how lonely she was without her best friend. It filled her with all the warmth and safety and fierce, visceral affection she felt for him.

Leaning against the kitchen counter, she texted him back with a grin.

how dare you imply i'm an adorable baby kitty! just for that? you have to come over and help me eat muffins.

She sent the text, deciding on impulse that making a batch of muffins was going to be next on her list. Hell, she'd make a few dozen, give some to Kenzi and Bruce, along with Aramis and Porthos.

And then, after a moment's thought, grinned, biting back a giggle as she sent a second text.

and possibly strip search me again.

Blushing at her own gall, she sent the text and tossed her phone on the counter so she could enter the kitchen and start pulling out what she needed for muffins. She had everything except eggs, blueberries, and chocolate chips. Maybe cranberries and oranges, too, she didn't just want to bake one kind...

Leaving the dry goods on the counter, Allison dashed back to her room to swap cutoffs for a nicer pair of denim shorts underneath her tank top. Glancing at her reflection in the mirror over her vanity, she tried not to see Lydia sitting on the edge of the bed behind her, pointing out that she should put on some makeup in case she ran into the boy...

Allison swallowed past the tightness in her chest and drew a deep breath, pushing the pain aside.

Thread the needle. She's gone and you can't bring her back.

When she felt calmer, she ran a brush through her hair and headed back out to the kitchen to grab her phone. Sliding on a pair of flip flops by her front door, she grabbed her keys off the end table...

She nearly missed it. The only reason it even caught her attention was because it was wedged midway through the split ring on her gemstone keychain, half on and half off.

Like she was meant to see the innocuous little USB drive dangling next to the sparkly, oversized plastic diamond along with the rest of her keys...relics from home, those that were part of her new life in Darrow.

Dangling from her keys like it once dangled from her grandfather's keys...

Standing with the front door open, midway towards leaving, Allison left it hanging there, ajar, forgetting herself as she darted back in to grab her laptop off her desk. Rushing back to the living room, she booted it up and, with shaking fingers, slid the USB drive off her keyring so she could plug it in.

She waited for the drive to open as she clicked on it. Her heart was slamming against her ribs and her vision felt fuzzy around the edges.

When the lone file appeared on her desktop browser, she thought she might faint.

Thread the needle, Allison. Thread the needle, keep it together...oh God...

She double clicked the file and watched it open.

She started paging through it. Words, sketches, etchings...some in French, some in English, some in the archaic Latin that Lydia was no longer there to help her translate.

The entire Argent bestiary was here. In her hands.

Ready to be filled with new races, new truths...whole new worlds for her family to fight and learn about and educate themselves on.

New peoples, new races...and now she could bring them all home.

(Allison's first item in Darrow! Denizens of the Bramford Building, feel free to pass by and see her apartment door just hanging open, same for friends who might drop by to visit! She's also too deeply distracted to be paying attention to her phone, so feel free to come over if she's not picking up and freak out to find her apartment door thus. :P)

Comments

[theresalwayshope]

"It's over nine hundred pages, and growing." Allison admitted, scrolling through a couple of pages for his benefit. "A lot of it is untranslated, both French and Latin, classic and archaic. Before Darrow, I didn't know vampires were real, but if my family had ever encountered them? They'll be in here."

Just then Allison clicked over to a new page. The magnification on the page was enhanced, meaning only the lower right hand corner was visible, displaying a few words written in French, as well as a name scrawled in faded script.

René d'Herblay

Allison promptly clicked past it.

"I do remember an entry I read once about bat like shapeshifters--"

[afineseamstress]

Aramis breathes in sharply, the name there and gone again so swiftly he's almost dizzy with it, could almost believe he hadn't seen it at all, but why would his imagination provide that of all things? "Allison," he says, laying a hand over hers, though he does not know how to return to what was previously seen, only that he must not let her venture any further form it.

"What meaning could it have," he asks, "A name written on these pages? Surely not one of authorship."

[theresalwayshope]

Allison blinked as Aramis reached out to catch her hand, glancing between him and the computer screen. He looked a little like he'd seen a ghost or something...pale and wide-eyed, and she hadn't really shown him anything yet.

"Everything entered into this bestiary was put there by a member of my family." She assured him. "I mean...not everything is signed or labeled, so it makes research hard, but there are a few things in here...and some are names I see a lot."

Turning back to the computer, she clicked through a few entries, stopping when she saw names she knew.

"See? There's Louis Geroux...Beatrice Argent...René d'Herblay...Louis d'Herblay...Portia d'Herblay...the d'Herblay name comes up a lot in some of the really old stuff."

She paused, suddenly realizing that maybe Aramis had recognized the name.

"Like...four hundred years old." She went on, looking up at him. "Did you know them? Or of them? The Argents are from Paris, and some of them were tight with the nobility. That's one reason the fleur-de-lis is the symbol of our family. We use it on our arms so other hunters can identify our kills."

[afineseamstress]

Aramis watches her scroll through the names, some of them known, some not, some all too well, and feels the blood drain from his face for this Portia d'Herblay. He stands, wiping a sudden cold sweat from his face, his hand going to his shoulder after to rest against the pauldron.

"It is a...common practice for a soldier to leave their old life behind," he explains. "We live as Musketeers, and we know we will die as one - what reason is there to be anything but?" Aramis' gaze is distant, unfocused, even as his fingers trace the fleur-de-lis. "When I joined the Musketeers, Aramis is the name I took for myself. Before that, I was an Herblay." Aramis looks back to Allison, his stricken expression a far cry from the one he usually bore.

"René d'Herblay."

[theresalwayshope]

Allison was genuinely worried as she watched him, peering at the pallor of his skin and the way he was fidgeting...

Then everything just...stopped.

For a moment she could only stare at him, the Musketeer in her living room. Aramis of the Three Musketeers, all charm and chivalry and...impossible skill with a musket and a blade.

A man, faced with the supernatural, that took up the hunter's mantle, ready to fight in the name of God and humanity. A man who served the king of France himself, who embodied the familial loyalty that was part of the Argent heritage...the code of honor, the Code of the hunt...

With a shaky breath, Allison leaned forward and rubbed her hands over her face. "So...that's you? You're telling me...there are no other Herblays in France? I mean...is that your handwriting?"

[afineseamstress]

"I have had little need to write my name over the years," exhales Aramis. A Musketeer's word is his honor and his bond, and though he had often been at study in church, Aramis prefers to write his prayers upon his heart.

Spying a pen and paper errant on Allison's counter, Aramis takes hold of both, hesitating only a moment before he scrawls the name he'd long since left behind. Carrying it back to the computer, he holds the scrap up with trembling hands.

It's a match. A near perfect match, right down to the looping H. "Sang dieu," Aramis swears aloud.

[theresalwayshope]

"...yeah, what you said." Allison breathed, staring at the twin signatures in shock. Part of her was thrilled, elated to not just connect with her roots, but to know she had family with her again, blood of her blood. Sure, maybe a DNA test would show something, but Allison was convinced.

She'd have to investigate further...was he a great grandfather? A cousin? A great uncle?...but he was definitely an Argent, so to speak.

Part of her was also shocked, though, even a little angry...because he was one of the men who forged the original Code.

Except he hadn't yet, because he was just starting out. He was just beginning, just learning...he didn't know yet what his actions would do in the future. Specifically, what they would do to her.

"I think," she began in French, "the man who wrote these pages and the man who sits next to me are the same. Here, you were bitten by a vampire, but it is possible that in France, you were struck down by a werewolf on the full moon. Perhaps a fellow Musketeer was bitten by an Alpha and did not survive the change, perhaps you simply saw a wolf's true form and were horrified. Either way, you have chosen a hunter's path twice over."

She paused, then hesitantly reached for his hand.

"You're a good man, Aramis...and you have a good heart. I'm proud to know we share blood, but if you truly want to learn to hunt...to slay evil...I need to tell you about the family the man on these pages helped build...and about the innocent blood that is on his hands, blood I never want you to carry."

[afineseamstress]

Aramis watches her fingers close over his own, his only proof that the contact is happening, for his own hand is quite without nerves. "A man hopes his actions will have some impact," he says, voice tinny to his own ears. "That they will reach into the years beyond his death, that his life will have meaning through the decades, even centuries. It is a foolish dream, and one better reserved to great men, but still I held it."

Aramis draws a breath. "The way you speak now gives me cause to dread it. I have only begun, and yet there is a René whose hands are dirtied in ways I cannot fathom. Please, Allison, be as frank as you can, but also be kind. I do not think I can bear new burdens I have not yet earned."

[theresalwayshope]

"I do not blame you for the actions of the man in these pages, Aramis." Allison assured him softly, scooting clouds to him as her fingers tightened around his. "And in some ways, I can even forgive that man his zeal. I promise you, I will be kind...all I want is to show you his future. I want his honor to remain your own, and to see to it that you are stripped of his ignorance and his hatred."

She paused, then leaned over to click onto a page done in digital type, accompanied by a high resolution picture of a half-transformed Jackson Whittemore, pulled directly from his coroner's report.

"And how that ignorance very nearly cost me everything."

And with that, Allison told him everything.

Occasionally referring to the bestiary, she told Aramis how she discovered her legacy, how both her parents nearly killed the boy she loved and how it resulted in her mother's death, an event she described in cold precision and with open disdain. She detailed the Code, how it guided the hunt and the actions of every Argent, down to what a hunter was expected to do if they became what they stalked. She described her training, as a soldier and a leader, the high standards and strict regiment children adhered to in her family, doubly so for the women they held in such high regard.

She told him, also, about the innocent werewolves that lived in fear of her family. She told him about the other families that lived only to enforce the Code, and about men like Gerard Argent who were so twisted, they used their own children as pawns, as weapons in a supernatural chess game where the only prize was power.

And she didn't hide her part in it. She told him about her place in her pack, how her grief warped her after her mother took her own life, even how she nearly killed children her own age and enjoyed it, and then had to give up the first love she ever had because of the blood she had spilled, ending with her week in the city she spent as a werewolf.

"As the head of the family now, I changed the Code." She concluded quietly. "And you should know I've made it known to my pack that I want the bite of a werewolf if my life is ever in the balance. That's part of the new Code I want to perpetuate: that the gift of life will never be sacrificed in the name of honor. This new Code is what I want to teach you...a better way than the one the man in these pages followed, one built on the noble intentions and wisdom that same man aspired to...could have achieved if he hadn't been blinded by something darker, much the same way I was for a short time."

[afineseamstress]

"I have never valued hatred," says Aramis when her tale is done. "The God I believe in stands for love, not cruelty, and I seek to honor Him above all. I cannot imagine a life spent chasing power, treading so many beneath me in the name of vengeance." And, privately, he knows it is possible it was not he who warped this code into something so hateful, but it would be hubris to assume he could not fall.

"Any man may fall," he says aloud. "And every man stands on the precipice. I have felt grief, Allison, and keenly." After Isabel, after their child, after Marsac and so many of his poor brothers in Savoy, and each time it nearly claimed him, but Aramis has not fallen yet. With Porthos by his side, perhaps he never will, and he will not fall for the jagged scar on his throat, either. "And I believe in honor, but honor is not the same as pride. The honor to which I swore fealty honors good acts, by any hand, be they Musketeer or criminal or wolf."

[theresalwayshope]

The way he speaks makes it hard to doubt anything that Aramis ever has to say...but watching him now, looking at his face, feeling the earnestness in every word that falls from his lips.

And as she watches...she can actually see it. The sharpness of Gerard's gaze, Gerard's conviction, her father's quiet dignity and strength...even his face, the eyes and the nose, just a bit, are familiar in the reflection she sees every morning.

The blood of the Musketeers runs through my veins. she mused. It filled her with a strange sort of pride.

"I believe you." she replied quietly...then scooted closer, impulsively wrapping her arms around him for a sideways hug. "And for what it's worth, the name Musketeer means nothing: Aramis, René d'Herblay, I am proud to call you family. You and Porthos both."

Because nothing could convince her that, while there might have been a legitimate blood relation from some affair or another, at least some of the Herblays weren't orphans the two of them adopted once they finally realized how much they loved each other.

And that made Porthos as much her ancestor as Aramis.