Tag Archive | character: dyfri

Rohanna, her Second Year

Oct18

Twelfth in a series of character-building vignettes following a bunch of characters through their time at Addergoole & beyond.

“And what will you do?”

Professor Fridmar was staring at her. Rohanna knew this was supposed to be unnerving, but she couldn’t bring herself to feel anything but a little amused.

“What, you mean ‘now that I’m free?'” She shrugged, and tried not to laugh at the professor. At her Mentor, even if she’d had to growl and grumble to get him to agree. He hadn’t liked her reasons. Neither had Dyfri. That was the point. “It’s not like Dyfri yanked the chain that much.”

“But the chain was there, nonetheless, and now it is gone. Dah, what will you do now that you are free?”

“Same thing I did while I was under the collar.” She didn’t understand what the big deal was. It was a collar. It was a few rules. And then it was gone. She’d been through that before a time or three.

“You are going to wander around seeing how many people you can annoy and how much effort it takes to do so?”

Rohanna felt a grin coming to her face. “Yes, that was part of the idea. Probably continue to sleep with cy’Linden, because that confuses everyone.”

“And your animals?”

Rohanna felt her expression soften. “You’ll let me keep helping, right?”

“And if I say, only if you stop sleeping with all of cy’Linden?”

“Then I say, you are giving me a rule and not a frown, and then I stop sleeping with some of cy’Linden.”

“And if I say, only if you come to my bed?”

She tilted her head. That was a new one. “I say, ‘well, Professor, I didn’t know you cared.'”

“And you do it?”

“With your promise.”

“Animals are a very important thing to you.” He said it like a fact, which it nearly was. Rohanna corrected him.

“The animals are the only thing.”

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/584248.html. You can comment here or there.

Rohanna, her first year

Jun12

Third in a series of character-building vignettes following a bunch of characters through their time at Addergoole & beyond.

I haven’t written about Rohanna before, but Dyfri shows up here, as well as here/.

Late December, Year 10 of the Addergoole School.

“Seriously?” Rohanna flopped back down in her chair, making as much noise as she could with the sitting.

“Seriously. Ro, I want to talk about the way you’ve been acting.” Dyfri looked at her with big, green eyes, somehow managing to make it seem like he was looking up at her, despite the fact that he was standing and she was sitting.

“What about it?” She kicked her feet out, taking up as much space as possible. He might have said sit, but he hadn’t said sit nicely. Yet. Dyfri was weird with orders, really. He’d dance around giving her any orders at all, and then suddenly pop out with a whole bunch of ridiculous orders out of nowhere. “I’ve been acting like me.”

“Really?” He pulled up the second chair and sat down, backwards, like he was trying to be casual. Like he was trying to be her friend. “It looks to me like you’re trying to cause as much trouble for me as you possibly can.”

Rohanna felt a surge of guilt. Bad girl. Troublesome Kept. She pushed it down ruthlessly. “Maybe you should let me go, then. Since, you know, I’m so much trouble.”

“We both know I’m not going to do that. If I let you go, someone else will just grab you. And you’ve been doing pretty well at making yourself all the enemies, Ro. You don’t want one of them to grab you, believe me.”

She didn’t need the order. She knew that. “I know what I’m getting into now. They won’t be able to sneak up on me and grab me like you did. Trick me into it.”

“They won’t need to. The guys – and girls – you’ve pissed off, they’ll just go straight for the Control Mind and you’ll find yourself saying the words anyway.”

“Like being Kept.”

“And then you will be Kept. By someone not as nice as me. So, tell me, what do I need to do to get you to stop acting out so much?”

The order – whether he’d meant it or not – forced the truth out of her, when she hadn’t decided yet what she was going to tell him. “Order me not to.”

“Seriously?” It was his turn to look incredulous.

She yanked on the necklace he’d given her – seashells! – in lieu of a collar. “I’m yours. You won’t let me go. I Belong to you. Act like it.”

“Ro…” He looked like a sad kicked-puppy, and Ro felt even worse. “I don’t want to be that guy.”

“You’re responsible for me.” She fought through the rising guilt to be as firm as she could. “Be responsible.”

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/540611.html. You can comment here or there.

Belated rescue

Aug28

This is to Dulcinbradbury‘s commissioned prompt “A rescue that happens long after the physical need for it has passed. (But it’s just as necessary all the same.)”

Author’s note: This is set in Addergoole, my webserial, which in turn is set in my Fae Apoc setting (Landing Page (LJ Link)) – the Year 8/9 stuff happens several years after the serial’s main timeline.

In this setting, a twist of magic allows people to Own (“Keep”) other people in a mind-control manner, which often is imposed on new students via trickery their first year. Also, Dyfri is a merman of sorts.

Dyfri hadn’t been able to help Evie last year. He’d done everything he could to get to her first, but Calvin had grabbed her, Owned her, and that was, as they say, all she wrote. Calvin being what he was, she’d soon been forbidden to talk to him at all, and he’d stayed away so as to not make life harder on her. He couldn’t, he knew, take Calvin on in a flat-out challenge. He’d struggled with a way to make it happen, but the bigger boy wasn’t stupid enough to come into the water, where the bias in the fight would have swung the other way. So he waited, and swore a lot, and plotted.

Calvin, like most Keepers in Addergoole, wouldn’t hold on to a girl more than a year. The teachers got really unhappy about it, and so did the other students. So on the last day of classes, Dyfri waited, and was there when the asshat kicked Evie out of his room with two garbage bags of stuff.

“Let me help you carry that?” he asked, as gently as he could.

“Go away, Dy,” she answered tiredly. “I don’t need this.”

“Just a bag, Evie,” he countered, and, raw from the crying she’d obviously been doing, she agreed.

A bag, that day. Dinner the next week. He treated her like a feral animal, plying her carefully with simple, innocuous things: food. A walk out in the Village. A sarong his mother had, inexplicably, sent from Hawaii. Every time, she’d tell him to go away. Every time, he’d coax her into one small thing.

It took half the summer for her to invite him into her room, cautiously, an invitation laden with assurances that he wouldn’t touch her without her permission, wouldn’t hurt her, wouldn’t work magic on her. The door had just closed when she turned on him, pounding her fists against his chest.

“You didn’t stop him. You just stood there. Just let him take me. Just let him…” Her words broken down into sobs as Dyfri took the punches and the accusations, knowing he deserved them all. “You…” another sob, and then, in a tiny voice they would both, later, pretend she hadn’t used, “hold me?”

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/120691.html. You can comment here or there.