Scribbles and Snippets

“I’ll kill you for this, someday.”

He stared at the tall serious blonde, caught off-guard by the matter-of-factness of her statement.

At his silence, she raised her eyebrows in a graceful arch. “You can’t really be surprised.”

Gathering his composure, he snorted derisively. “Surprised you think you could. But I expected something more… dramatic from you.”

“Oh? Well then.” She took a half-step backwards, spreading her hands wide and beginning to chant rapidly under her breath. A sudden wind gusted through the hall, swirling around her and pushing him back towards the wall as it built.

Abruptly she flung her hand towards him, pointing imperiously as the hall went dark and a massive arc of electricity raced across the wall behind her. “Be wary, [name] cy’[mentor],” she declared, projecting over the rushing air. “You have been marked for death, and the Valkyrie shall come for your soul.”

A sudden intense blast of wind knocked him backwards, briefly stealing his breath away before dropping the hallway into an eerie silence. It was a moment before he realized Sigruko had vanished.

Later, being lectured for shorting out an entire hallway…

“You should know better than this, Sigruko.”

“Well, he wanted me to be dramatic,” she replied calmly.

Luke’s expression was an all-too-familiar pained grimace.

part I is here, part II is here, and credits yet again to KissofJudas and also the lovely Wystie for being awesome and charactering.

As luck would have it, the person walking in the door was Zita: his other Kept. The one he actually meant to have. She was dressed for the occasion (Hell Night) in something white, tattery and ghoulish, but the otherwise perfect effect was ruined by two large grocery bags.

She spotted the two boys on the sofa and paused in the doorway. “Lost lamb, is it?”

“Zita!” Leofric leapt to his feet, both glad for the interruption and nervous about it simultaneously. Zita, he was sure, was not going to be happy. Death was imminent. “Zita, um, this is Gabriel, he’s, uh, I kind of, it was, uh…”

Gabriel turned in his seat towards the small girl. “I seem to have managed to accidentally become a piece of Leofric’s property.” He sighed quietly but didn’t seem particularly distressed about it. “Zita. That’s a fascinating name. It’s a pleasure to meet you.”

Zita folded her arms, tapping her foot menacingly. “Leo, are you replacing me already?”

“No!!!” Leofric looked, sounded, and was absolutely horrified at this thought. No one could replace Zita, that was ridiculous. He’d only just finally managed to get her! After waiting almost an entire year of having to let someone else take care of her because… well. Because. “It was an accident!”
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continued from here, credits once more to KissofJudas where due~

Leofric ushered his newly and accidentally acquired Kept into the suite, glancing around as he closed the door behind them. Thankfully, it was still empty; the rest of his Crew must still be out in the halls. Maybe he could get everything straightened out before the others even found out. (He didn’t even have the faintest idea how Zita might react… With luck, no one would get bitten.)

He flopped down onto the sofa with a heavy sigh, looking up at Gabriel. “Okay, explanation time. Sit down.” He started to gesture at the free half of the sofa, but stopped in chagrin as Gabriel abruptly sat on the floor. He’d completely forgotten; he needed to be careful what he said, now. Giving orders he didn’t mean would just make everything worse.

Gabriel spent a moment looking bewildered – a reasonable reaction to finding himself unexpectedly and inexplicably sitting down. At least for a brief moment, after which he quickly climbed back to his feet.

Leo cleared his throat softly, feeling embarrassed and a vague sense of dread, like when you know you’re going to get a lecture for something you did that you shouldn’t have. He finished the gesture, waving the other boy over to the sofa. “You can sit down if you want; this’ll take a while.”
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Leofric always knew what was going to happen. It was not just a fact of reality; it was the fact, the one on which all the others were pinned. There were things that were going to happen, and Leofric knew exactly what they were.

This was not to say he knew every detail about everything. His knowledge extended more to generalities like somebody getting married eventually than to what he was going to have for dinner tomorrow night.

For example. At that moment, he was seated in front of his computer at home reading a paper for his graduate thesis, and while completely irrelevant to that activity there were a number of things that he, absolutely and unequivocably, knew.
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Special thanks go to KissofJudas, whose character Gabriel is, and who assisted me greatly in dialogue and brainstorming.

Leofric slid into his seat, resisting the urge to drop his books onto his desk and instead placing them down quietly. It had only been a week and a half and already this whole “laying low” thing was starting to drive him nuts. But Cya said it was for the best, so he was going to do his best.

Which meant not making loud, attention-drawing sounds when arriving at class.

It really didn’t help that the class coming up was history (his least favorite of all his classes, ever) and that he had absolutely no one to talk to. A quick survey of the other students in the room just proved the point. Not a single person he’d so much as talked to before, and he didn’t think chatting up the new students counted as “laying low”. He still wasn’t even sure what that meant he was allowed to do.

His musings were interrupted by another few teenagers walking in, one of whom was in fact one of the new students. Tall (even taller than Leo), pale and handsome (in a pretty sort of way), with dark hair, glasses and a reserved air more appropriate to BBC period dramas than literally underground magic schools. Leo recognized him from phys ed (no, he hadn’t actually paid attention to who else was in his history class before), but this was the first time he’d actually looked at the other boy.

In a subconscious mental shift that would only be noticeable if you were a nosy telepath poking around the blonde boy’s head, the new student was instantly assigned a type, a role, and a rough outline for the rest of his life.

Before Leo had time to consciously catch up with his own reality, he found himself scooping up his books and relocating to a desk neighboring the Seventh Cohort student. He sat down with a friendly grin, dropping his books on the desk with a quiet thunk.
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