Tag Archive | character: doug

Half-breed of Heart

Written to clare_dragonflys prompt. Doug is a character from Addergoole (The Original Serial), Addergoole: Year Nine, and the current Addergoole: a Ghost Story.

💪

Doug was not a Mara; he was not one of the pure-blooded Warriors, the Protectors of the fae.

He had been aware of that since the moment he Changed – if he hadn’t been pretty sure of it long before that.

His father was a Mara who did not have Mara children.  His mother was the halfbreed daughter of a Daeva (the Inspirers, the succubi, the pleasure-givers and pleasure-takers); said Daeva did not bear Daeva children any more than Doug’s father could have Mara.  The chances of Doug being Mara were about as slim as the chances of him being elected president of the world.

His Change had just cemented that: his wings that would never sustain flight, his body that could not take damage the way that a Mara’s could.

The thunder that rumbled out of him when he was particularly irritated.

The fact that he was, when touching someone, when touching someone with his feet on the ground, stronger than his father or than any other Mara he’d ever gotten to spar with him.

He wasn’t a Mara.

Right now, he was damn glad of that.

His student Hestia – his newest, his youngest, his smallest student, Hestia – had felled the monster.  She had done a damn good job of it, especially for someone whose Change was not warrior-related.  But then the monster had made one great final heave – and landed on top of Hestia.

Hest weighed maybe 110, most of it muscle – but there was only so much muscle could do for you without any leverage.  Her spear was still in her hand, but she’d dropped her blade.

And the monster weighed almost as much as three elephants combined, and was twice as fat.

Doug grabbed the nearest long thing – part of the building they’d been fighting in, a beam or something.  The building probably needed it.  He needed it more.  He set his feet in the dirt, let his toes feel the ground below him, and pulled on the thunder.

He shoved the stick under the monster, aiming carefully, not wanting to hit Hestia, and he pushed.

Three counties away, they were closing their windows.  The sky flashed and sparked.  The ground  flashed and sparked.

The corpse of the monster lifted, an inch, a handspan, a foot, two yards.  Doug heaved, the world sparked, and the monster flew a couple feet through the air and landed with a wet thump.

He scooped Hestia up into his arms, muttering healing Workings and curse words at her indiscriminately.

 

 
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Love Meme: Doug and Fridmar, Cxaidin and Zizny

The meme is here: Give me the names of two characters and I will tell you why character A loves character B.

Here are rix_scaedu‘s and kelkyag‘s first prompts. Doug and Fridmar are from Addergoole; Cxaidin and Zizny from Dragons Next Door. To quote Zizny in an earlier piece:

“For a grown adult dragon, the pronoun is ‘thez.’”

“Theza” is the possessive.

Doug and Agmund Fridmar

Some people went into battle like a well-oiled machine. Doug’s father, for example; he moved with sparse, sharp movement, did what needed to be doing, and drank afterwards with the same mechanical precision.

Some people fought like it was sex: with ridiculous intensity, angry, wild, some strikes almost like caresses, some like orgasms. Of the Thorne Girls, Massima fought the most like that, and she fucked like she fought. Afterwards, she drank as if she was going to take the bottle to bed with her, too. Sometimes Doug felt as if he envied the bottle, and other times he pitied it.

But so very few people fought like a dance, like every move had a place and yet was beautiful. So few people fought such that you could choreograph your movements around theirs and they would notice and do the same right back at you.

Agmund Fridmar, big, fierce, bearish Agmund, fought like a ballet, like a symphony, like a dance, and afterwards, when they drank, his movements had the same precision.

Once, once, Doug had thought of an old and awful quote on dancing bears: “The marvel is not that the bear dances well, but that the bear dances at all.”

That proverb had it wrong, Doug was sure. The marvel of Agmund Fridmar was definitely in how well the Bear danced.

Cxaidin and Zizny

Zizny had fire.

In a literal sense, of course, all dragons had fire. It was their birthright, their gift, their curse.

But dragons were a long, long-lived race, one of the oldest, and they tended, after a few times of setting their nest alight, to be calmer, more thought-out creatures than their flamey breath would suggest.

Zizny was not calm.

Zizny questioned resolutely. Not only the assumptions of others, not only the writings of dragons and other-creatures of the past, but theza own assumptions, theza own truths. Zizny would ask one day why the sun was rising as it always had, and then the next day ask exactly why the dragons got along with humans – or, perhaps, why they shouldn’t get along better with said humans. Thez would question the entire stork arrangement and then snarl at a passing centaur for some comment about dragon history and its habit of going up in smoke.

(This did happen, sadly, but most of the very important dragon records were carved in stone or etched in metal. Very heat-durable metal).

Cxaidin loved Zizny’s fire, the sparks that seemed to fly off whenever Zizney was involved in a new quest, the way thez made Cxaidin question even thezself. Above all, and after all, and in spite of all, Cxaidin loved Zizny’s heat.

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Mentor… and Student

Rix_Scaedu‘s commissioned continuation of Mentor-Student. Her name is Eurydice; it just never comes up in conversation.

“Well,” Doug admitted to the angry young woman in front of him, “we’re stuck with each other. They think we can work together.”

His Student – or so it seemed it was going to be – raised her eyebrow at him. “You sound so thrilled. Don’t go throwing me a party or anything.”

“Well,” Doug grunted, both embarrassed and annoyed, “you’re right. It’s not how it’s supposed to go.”

“Wait.” She leaned forward. “Say that again.”

Doug didn’t bother asking which part she wanted to hear. He could guess. “You’re right.”

“Awww, yeah.” She lit her lighter again. “I could get used to that. So you don’t like ‘em screwing with the system, either. So why’d they stick you with me? We can ‘work together?’ What’s that code for? You can brainwash me better?”

Doug barked out a laugh. “Not the brainwashing sort.”

“So what then? Are you the arsonist sort?” She flicked her lighter again. Doug imagined that had made some adults flinch, back out in the world. Maybe here, too, considering the fires she’d already lit.

Doug wasn’t worried. He muttered a Working and flicked up a small flame in the palm of his hand. “Sometimes.”

Her eyes widened. “Woah.”

Doug felt his lips curling into a real smile. “Woah,” he agreed. He closed the hand to vanish the fire and gave himself a moment to think about the words he’d use.

“Forget why they wanted us together,” he started slowly. “They are not responsible for this. I can teach you.” He watched something in her face start to close up and he made a wild guess. He smiled the way he might at the start of a battle — a little fierce and a lot ready. “And I’m not afraid of you.”

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Mentor-Student

He’d tried “no,” “fuck no” and “no way in a billion fucking years.” Doug had tried everything he thought he’d work and a few things he’d known wouldn’t, but in the end, he’d lost anyway. His father had put his foot down, and Doug had found himself sitting in his own office, staring across his desk at a new student.

“I’m going to be your Mentor.”

She glared back at him and worked her mouth for a moment, like the whole idea tasted bad. “They told me. Thought we were supposed to get a choice.”

Doug swallowed most of a laugh. “Yeah, me too. Guess we blew that one.”

She raised her eyebrows, raised her bic, and lit up a tiny flame. “Rock on.”


Un-slump-me prompt call

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Down, Down, Down – a Patreon Story

This is written to Clare K. R. Miller ‘s request for “…more Doug being awesome? More of this.”  It follows after the linked story, which itself follows, in part, after Addergoole: Year 9.

~

Doug was back in a war zone. They were in the bowels of Addergoole, battling creatures that would not see reason. They’d brought Agmund down with them — three of Doug’s cy’ree, two of Luke’s, and two of Agmund’s were guarding the rear, in case anything got through — but these creatures seemed impervious to Panida Workings. Just in case, they’d tried Intinn and Tlacatl. Nothing.

“They are either animals or they are Makers,” Agmund had declared firmly. “If they cannot be read by Intinn, they are animals.”

Whatever let him sleep at night. Doug ripped his blade through another one and began to burn the body before it had stopped bleeding. These things, if you didn’t get them all the way dead on the first go, they got back up again. Whatever they were.

“That’s the last of them, I think.” Luke cleaned his blade on the scorched, ashy hide of the creature. It looked like the unclean offspring of a warthog and a wyvern by way of a platypus, and now by way of a woodchipper and a fireplace. “I hope Laurel’s figured out what the blazes they were doing down—”

“Hsst.” Doug moved forward, tracking the faintest sound. “There’s still something down here.”

They each muttered their own not-here Workings, silencing them, hiding them, and strode forward. Doug’s wing-stubs twitched with each broken wall and glass-windowed door. He wanted to cleanse this place with fire, the whole thing. He wanted to bury it.

He saw a faint shimmer as Luke — hopefully it was Luke — pushed open the next door. Doug readied a fireball and his blade.

That wasn’t a monster. He pulled the fire back so quickly it nearly scorched his throat, before he had processed more than that. Those weren’t monsters. They were people. Those were kids.

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Hurt/Comfort Meme Answer 1: Drunk, Admund/Doug

To Rix_Scaedu‘s prompt to my H/C prompt here. After Into the History of Addergoole.

When he wanted to really, really get shit-faced, when he wanted to puke until his stomach was empty and then drink more, Doug didn’t go to Maureen and he didn’t go to his father.

He and Luke emerged from the sub-basement of the school quietly, and just as quietly went their separate ways. Doug scrubbed quickly, washing the ichor and gore off his skin, threw on the first thing that came to hand, and went to Agmund’s.

The Bear opened the door without question. He took in Doug’s expression and poured two glasses of vodka. “Sit,” he said, tilting his head at the big leather couch. “Sit, I will get the bottle and the bucket.”

Agmund never asked questions, and he never told Doug it was time to stop. And when it finally came to drunk tears, when Doug sat leaning over a bucket of mostly-clear vomit, sobbing shamelessly, Agmund passed him water and patted his back.

“…They were kept alive,” Doug muttered. “Alive down there. And we never knew.”

“We never knew,” Agmund reiterated, and passed Doug another glass of vodka.

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Into the History of Addergoole

Written to Clare’s commission for “More Doug.”

Nineteen-sixty-nine (or so, as canon suggests)

“This is the place.” Luke twitched his shoulders in the way that meant, somewhere under his Mask, his wings were flapping. “There’s the village, over here. We’re still building the houses. Regine calls them cottages…”

“I thought there was going to be a school.” From where they were standing, what Doug could see was a barn and a wheat field. The gesture his father had made indicated, as far as Doug could tell, more wheat field.

“There will be. Here.” Luke started towards the barn. Doug sighed, because what else did you do when your centuries-old father decided to be laconic, and followed, because he’d come this far; he might as well hear the old man out.

The barn, inside, looked like other barns Doug had been in. The sunlight poured in through the cracks. The smell of old hay permeated the air. And, hidden behind a half-wall of cracked, grey wood and under a hidden trap door, a long stairway led downwards.

The trap door, Doug noted, was only wood on the top; the underside was steel, and heavy steel at that.

“Regine bought this place from the U.S. Government. It’s a mess, still, but we’re working on it. The nice thing is – it’s built to withstand bombs. It’s also built to withstand fae.”

The grey concrete stairs suddenly seemed far more ominous. “The U.S. Government is fighting fae?” He paused. “We’re fighting fae?”

It might as well be we, since if his dad was fighting things, Doug would end up fighting them, too. His mother & grandmother would never forgive him if he didn’t.

“I don’t think they were fighting fae.” Luke turned on the stairs to look at Doug. “We’re not, either. But it’s always good to have a fortified location.”

Yes, Dad. Doug was old enough not to roll his eyes at his father. It didn’t mean he didn’t want to. “So you have a government bunker designed to withstand fae, under a wheat field. I thought this was going to be a school.”

“Said that already.”

“Still waiting for an answer.” The trap door closed on slow hydraulic lifts, and, as it did, lights came up. They were walking into a warehouse, metal shelves lining the walls, crates filling the shelves.

“We want it fortified, because building a school for fae kids is like putting a target on your building and asking the Nedetakaei to show up.” Luke walked into the warehouse. “We want it hidden for the same reason. And… there’s the other problem.”

“Other problem?” Doug knew, or, at least, he was pretty sure he knew. He was hoping he was wrong. He’d been hoping his father had gotten over that particular bit of stupidity.

“The Return.” Luke’s wings were Masked, but Doug could tell from the sudden breeze that he was flapping them. “It’s going to happen sometime in the next century.”

The same stupidity. “Dad, precognition is unreliable. You taught me that.”

“I did. I also taught you to be prepared for the worst….”

“…and ready to enjoy the best. What sort of enjoyment is there going to be in here?” He gestured at the crates lining the walls. “I’m depressed just walking in here.”

“We’re still working on it.” Luke was smiling. Doug mistrusted that smile. “Regine’s been spending money like it grows on trees.”

“She’s a Grigori; don’t they do that in their gardens?” The question came out sour; Doug wasn’t the least bit sorry. Regine had dragged his father away from home for most of Doug’s life.

His father barked out a humorless laugh. “They might. Come on.”

Doug followed. The hallways were concrete, the walls cement block, the closely-spaced doors steel with wire-reinforced glass. “Look…” He meant it as a joke, but it came out sounding nervous. “I know we don’t get along, but you don’t need to institutionalize me.”

“That’s what they were doing.” Luke swung open a door. The room on the other side was small and dark, shadows lingering in every corner. Doug noticed immediately that there was no handle on the interior of the door, and nearly as quickly saw the chains hanging from the far wall. “We don’t know yet what they kept here. There’s a lot of paperwork to go through, and Regine and Mike have only just started.” He closed the door. “They’re all like that. There’s a whole bunch of ripping out of walls to be done, first, and I called in some favors to get the place re-wired.”

“You know electricians?” Under his Mask, Doug’s broken winglets shifted uncomfortably. This place was too tight and too open. “Can we rip out some walls now?”

“Let me give you the full tour, first. There will be plenty of time to rip out walls, but you have to know what you’re looking at first.”

It was fair. Doug didn’t want fair. “Why are the halls so big?” Luke could spread his wings comfortably in here.

“Gurneys.” The word was clipped, almost spat out. Doug didn’t pursue it further, and Luke took the opportunity to change the subject. “We’ve already ripped out a few walls. Down here, we made a gathering room. We need someplace to… heh. Gather.” He shifted, rolling his shoulders. “Right down here.”

It seemed like they were hurrying, but Doug didn’t mind at all. The floors echoed. The doors seemed to stare at him. Out of the corner of his eye, he thought he saw something moving. It made him want to bolt, or to hit something. Neither reaction was very useful right now.

When Luke opened the doors to the “gathering place,” Doug could tell immediately that other people felt the same way about the concrete halls. They’d started the renovations here. Wood paneling lined every wall to chair height; the walls above the paneling were painted very pale blue. The dangling fluorescent fixtures had been replaced with indirect, hidden lighting. A few tables were scattered about – wooden tables, with stout legs and comfortable chairs. The floor itself had been carpeted in soft, plush stuff that felt like early-summer grass underfoot.

“A break from the institutional?” He could smell food cooking, and surprised himself by having an appetite.

“The whole place will be like this – eventually.” Luke scuffed at the carpet with one booted toe. “Carpet’s easier on hooves, they tell me. And it softens noises. Workings for that, too. So it won’t echo like a cave.”

Cave was a nice word for it. Doug took in the gathering room. “It’s like a different place.”

Here, he could imagine kids being happy. Bouncing around, throwing things, getting the carpet dirty, laughing. They’d get a chance to act human. He coughed. “A school?”

“Something between a high school and a college, the way they figure things now. And being Mentored. If the Council doesn’t shut us down-” Luke shifted his weight. “If they don’t shut us down, it’s going to be -” Doug watched his father choose and discard words. “It’ll be interesting.”

Doug looked around one more time. “Yeah,” he answered dryly. “‘Interesting’ is gonna be a word for it.”


After Year 9

To say the sub-sub-basement was a mess was not remotely covering it. They had – Doug was fairly certain – gotten all the students out. Now it was him and his father, looking around the wreck.

Doug’s shoulders twitched. “This is…”

Luke snarled. “How did they hide this? Unless…”

They both knew how he was going to finish that sentence. Unless Regine knew. Unless Regine had willingly built her school on cages full of… something.

Doug shook his head slowly. “No.” It nothing else, it had disrupted learning far too much – and, more than learning, breeding. Regine did not like disruptions.

Something whimpered far away.

Doug checked his weapons and rolled his weight forward onto the balls of his feet. “Still something left down there.”

“It’s disturbing.” Luke strode forward. “The set-up to keep those… things alive. It stinks of Workings. Not just the Workings we put on the place. Old Workings, and technology that didn’t exist in the fifties.” The breeze in the hall was sudden and ended just as quickly.

That’s what you think is disturbing? Doug raised his eyebrows at his father.

Hunting-Hawk twitched his shoulders. “Yeah, yeah. The whole thing is a mess. And there’s shit we haven’t found yet.” He gestured in the direction of the whimpers, which were growing louder.

Dough checked just his machete and his pistol and nodded sharply. “Let’s clean.”

The cracked tiles were uneven under their feet. The walls, once painted an institutional off-green, were scorched, the paint bubbling, the cement block underneath chipped. The foundation pillars were still strong – reinforced by Working after Working, these would hold up to an apocalypse. But everything else was in ruins.

They had cleared the fourth floor already. Now, they were in the labyrinthine mess beneath that. The halls were wide, too wide. “Gurneys,” Doug muttered. Under his Mask, the stumps of his wings twitched.


the below cut for author snidieness.

Continued in Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/creation?hid=2846820&rf=200475

If we’re being honest, this story was in part to thumb my nose at a “volunteer critic” who tried to take me to task for this line: “‘This place used to be some sort of government facility,'” here.

“You can’t just put this sort of line in here without thinking about it,” to paraphrase.

I have always resented the implications: 1) that I didn’t think about that line when I wrote it.

2)That I couldn’t backfill backstory whenever I wanted.

So, to that person, I say nyah, nyah, nyah.

And I thank my readers for letting me nyah a little. 😉

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Kink/Fluff/Angst Meme: Doug

This story starts in the middle of Doug Gets a Hug and ends after it. Doug, Ana, and Teal are Addergoole characters.

The girl had a boy. So help him, Doug was not going to make it through her four years sane.

She – Ana, Anastasia the dancer, Ana the pert, Ana oro’Willow – didn’t exactly have a boy, because Teal himself had an oro’ at the end of his name, and his Keeper was the possessive sort. But when Teal and Ana danced – and Teal danced, of course he did – Doug could watch the sparks. And that wasn’t all he could watch. It was a good thing neither Keeper was in the habit of visiting their dance practices.

He wasn’t going to survive the next four years, but it might be a fun way to go crazy.

~

She’d been waiting for him the day after Willow left, leaning against his apartment door and wearing a little trenchcoat that was unseasonable, unneeded inside, and entirely tantalizing.

She’d at least waited until they were inside his apartment – but not until the door was all the way closed – to show him exactly how much she wasn’t wearing underneath. And then, for several athletic, dexterous, and wonderful hours, she’d shown him quite a few other things.

Doug was happy. He was actually smiling, something he couldn’t quite remember doing before, or at least not in quite a while. But, being himself, he couldn’t help poking at it.

“What about the boy?” She had her head pillowed on his chest, so he was talking to the top of her head. “You like him.”

She looked up at him, a smile dancing on her lips. “Nobody ever said I only had to ‘like’ one person.” The smile slipped, her expression and her voice suddenly serious. “Did they?”

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/888418.html. You can comment here or there.

Two peeks at Doug

Year One:

Doug watched the new students coming in to the brand new school. They were fresh-faced, some of them, while others were already bitter and untrusting. They were so young, all of them, and so human-seeming.

His son was among them, Donegal, who he hadn’t gotten to raise. He watched the boy moving through the crowd, and found himself fading into the background. Now was not the time to try to raise the kid; now was the time to do his job.

Two tall, dark boys – brothers, Doug thought, but not twins – moved their way through the crowd as if they were pushing aside brush. Doug watched the way they moved, the shorter one aping the taller one’s movements. They were going to be trouble.

“First day of school.” The woman standing next to him finally spoke up. Laurel, Doug thought her name was. “This’ll be interesting.”

Doug cleared his throat, and found he had nothing to say. He settled for “yeah.”

Year Fourteen:

Ana was pregnant, and Doug was doing everything in his power not to glower, hover, growl, and in general act like (as more than one woman had called him) a royal pain in the ass.

He was fairly certain that he would have been a hovering, miserable, overprotective dinosaur (as Ana gently teased him) even if she hadn’t been carrying his child, his child, as well as the boy Teal’s, but he couldn’t guarantee it. Doug was in love, and it messed everything up.

He watched the fresh-faced new Cohort, just a month into the year and still looking so very young, so very human. A short, stocky irish boy – notable in that he was shorter than either Doug or his father – met Doug’s eyes and grinned, arrogant and insouciant.

“They’re shaping up to be interesting.” Laurel Valerian laid fingers on Doug’s arm in a way that would have, from another woman, seemed possessive. “I think this is going to be a good year.”

Doug shifted his weight onto his heels. The Irish kid was looking at Ana. Looking was fine. Looking was fine. He cleared his throat and made himself look at Laurel. “Yeah.”


I’m not really sure what to put in for context here…

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December Meme – Day Nine (@rix_scaedu)

The Meme

Today’s prompt is from [personal profile] rix_scaedu: Doug

Ah, Doug.

For those of you going who? Doug is a character in Addergoole.

He started out as back-up porter and security guy, and looked like Luke, which led me to extrapolate that he was Luke’s son. The fact that he later turned out to be Mike VanderLinden’s grandson means that he probably doesn’t look THAT much like Luke – but that was later.

When I needed a dance teacher for a RP character (Kylie), he became the dance teacher; when I needed someone who Mentored monster-hunters (rather than the White Knights that were cy’Luca*), that became Doug. And when he had to show Kylie Masking – well, then I learned what his Change was.

Of all the background characters in Addergoole, I think he’s evolved the most. He is still definitely the Mentor for monster-hunters and riot grrls. He’s the dance instructor, and a later RP timeline gave him a love interest in another dance student.

(And yes, I love the conflict there between dance students and monster hunters and the one time I convinced Doug to take a male Student…)

Mike sleeps with students willy-nilly. Doug, who is as much his father’s son as he is his grandmother’s grandson, doesn’t refrain from teacher-student relationships, but he goes into them, like he goes into everything, slowly & deliberately. His Name is Brontosaurus for more than one reason, after all.

Doug is one of my favorite characters, & I should write more about him.

/Looks at queue/

Maybe someone ought to commission me to write more about him… <3

* cy’: of the cy’ree of, that is, one of the Students Mentored by.

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