Stolen From The Dash

Stolen from the dash

Starter call! I do better plotting but I’m willing to try lol.

Multis please specify!

for @infernalsocialite , it started as a parlor trick….

Anne fishes the little bundle out of her pack, clearing the table with an impatient swipe before she sets it down. The kerchief falls open at a touch, revealing the strange mismatched deck and the worn leather notebook embossed with a burning match. She glances up as she arranges her tools; she isn’t dumb enough to trust a devil, whatever promises might have been made to lead to this moment. It’s clear this isn’t entirely a game to her well before she starts shuffling.

As she shuffles, cards fall out—three of them, none matching. She put the deck away and arranges the cards: a ghost holding a leaf surrounded by nine sticks, a black candle on a white background, and a sign hanging under a skull. Though this card had text, none but TAVERN could be easily read upside down.

“Nine of Wands. A sort of a…growth card. Ye’re tired, but ye’ve fought t’carve out a space for yerself. In the past, ye’ve used this space t’regain yer energy, launch new plans. It’s a good card in a bad position: in the past.

“Then there’s the black candle. This one en’t standard,” Anne admitted. She opened the notebook and flipped through its contents, pausing to read the passage when she encountered it. “‘The candle implies ritual. Not necessarily magical ritual, though that is sometimes a factor. Recognize the rituals of yer life and think of their effect on ye.’ I’d hazard a guess it’s a non-magical ritual, ‘cause that next card is Death.

“Not literal death, mind—but change. An end to something that needed t’end. This deck’s stacked full of Death cards. Each one is a different death, and this one’s Mundane Death. The end of little day-t’-day things. Everything changes, everything ends. The journal calls it ‘beautiful.’ I call it ‘bittersweet.’ And that’s just in yer future.”

Nobody asked but I still feel like sharing. 😌

Anne is surprisingly sexually inexperienced, which is a fucking delight to write! Real change of pace for me. Now, don’t get it twisted—she’s not a virgin. She’s just had less sexual experience than one might expect out of a pirate, particularly one with her reputation. (Like much of the rest of this blog, that’s the whole damn point!)

TL;DR?: Anne has very little experience but she’s very good at oral.

cw for Anne’s abusive marriages below

it’s not detailed but it’s still not pretty and i’d rather not trigger anyone with my dumb thoughts lol

Most of Anne’s inexperience can actually be directly traced back to her first marriage. Friendly reminder that she was sixteen (in my canon) when she married James. She’d had one lover before him; it ended badly the same night it started. Then there was James, a relationship that slowly twisted and soured into a very similar shape with a remarkably similar ending. I won’t go into all the sordid details, but a year or so into their marriage, Anne learned something: James didn’t care if she got hers or not. That made two of two people she’d slept with that didn’t care, one of which was also horrifically abusive. She learned fast that if she got James off, he didn’t care what happened next. So Anne got very, very good at giving oral. It was the fastest way she learned to get James off and off her back.

To no one’s surprise but Anne’s, her next lover was similarly inattentive to her needs. Two’s coincidence, but three’s a pattern—Anne, at age nineteen, came to assume sex really was just a chore of the marital bed. (There’s a reason it was referred to as a “duty,” she assumed, and now’s when I remind you this was a common line of thought among women at the time.) She started to assume sex and everything that came with it was just more of nature being a bitch to women: they cramp and bleed once a month if they’re not pregnant, eventually the cramping stops and hot flashes set in, and sometimes they become unbearably horny with no satisfying way to take care of the issue. To the point where, while married to Jack, she began to assume arousal was like some kind of bodily signal that she needed to seek him out and so often did.

Now, this isn’t all to say that Anne’s never gotten off. Fear not! She just…hasn’t gotten off with a partner. A little while into her marriage to Jack, he started snubbing her advances. One night Anne was frustrated by it all and decided to make the arousal go away by mimicking intercourse. She just hoped it would be enough to loan her some peace, but in the process she ended up discovering a few things about herself. Like her clit. And that she can enjoy sexual contact past vicarious enjoyment through her partner, under the right circumstances. The next time she slept with Jack, when he was done and she…wasn’t, she finished herself off. That was one of the last times she slept with Jack.

Starter call! I do better plotting but I’m willing to try lol.

Multis please specify!

Anne raised her own eyebrow in return, unimpressed and challenging. Her standing agreement with the fiend aside, she found his methods to be…unnecessarily dramatic. Dead’s dead, aye? Overkill like this for an impersonal murder just seems a waste of energy to her. She’s never seen an excavated heart, though.

She steps closer towards that piece, intrigued to see it still beating even with a spike shoved through the meat of it. Quite the wonder in her eyes.

“Don’t make this any less gross just ‘cause ye can do grosser.” Gingerly, she touches the heart; it’s still warm, though it’s cooling fast in the open air. Still twitching like there’s veins attached, like there’s still blood to be pumped. A heart without a body to own it is proving to be a tragic sight, burning its way into Anne’s brain.

" . . . gross. "

Walls dripped with blood, bodies torn apart, and limbs strewn like broken dolls. A heart, still faintly pulsing, hung skewered on a spike, the air thick with the stench of death. At her odd remark, Raphael raised an eyebrow, his lips curving into a smirk. "Oh, darling," he purred, "if you think that’s gross, you clearly haven’t seen what I’m capable of on a bad day."