-_- Sorry for spamming.
Title: Kiss Me Like I Paid For This
Fandom: Squarewarts in the past...?
Characters: Zoe Reese
Rating: PG-13
Note: :| The Dudesons are immortal and very essential to the SW universe.
“To Zoe's new cubicle!”
“To the cubicle!”
Zoe Reese held up her glass in the circle of her friends' glasses, hooting loudly at the toast before gulping down the alcohol. After two long years, she had finally, finally, gotten her own cubicle with her own map and her own pins.
That might have seemed crazy, but to the ambitious young Auror, it was the most amazing thing to have ever happened to her. Twenty years old, and her life was rolling along perfectly. Great job, great boyfriend, great friends, a great partner.
-
“Luke!” Threading her arm through her very adorable partner's, Zoe bumped her hip against his, and one Luke Skywalker smiled down at her serenely.
“I see that you're energetic as usual, Zoe.”
“You're the calm that completes me, Luke~”
The two of them had only been together for a few short months-five, if one wanted to get technical-but it was truly the best friendship Zoe had ever been in. They were trusting of each other, had a detailed knowledge of the other's strengths and weaknesses, and no matter how loud, obnoxious, intrusive, and just generally annoying Zoe could get, Luke treated her with the same soft amusement that made her really like him.
Luke continued to smile at her. “I would be more compelled to believe that if you were single.”
“Are you talking about Manny? Say the word, Luke, and he's gone.”
Manny Dudeson was a great boyfriend. Fantastic, really. When you ignored that he was her boyfriend. He was uncomplicated and didn't hold any expectations for Zoe. She thought he was a lot of fun. She was young, after all.
But Zoe didn't believe in love, and she didn't delude herself into thinking she was in love with Manny, or ever could be. Magic was her entire life.
-
It was the law of the natural order than when one dictator, one dark wizard, one being of evil, was taken out, another would pop up in the former's place. Zoe has pinned his picture to the center of her wall. Adamantis. His name is Adamantis. Further down, she has other pictures pinned, and colored strings connect them all. Lambert Malmaris and his supposed love, Aura. Tymmie, whose moving picture gives Zoe the creeps like nobody's business.
The names Malmaris and Adamantis are recognizable. Old names. Pureblood families from Rome.
“It's always the purebloods that try to wage war.”
“Does that mean you're going to?”
The final string is tied from Tymmie to some unknown female, no name. Turning from her board, Zoe shrugged at Luke, who has entered her organized mess of a domain. “I shall be the first to turn the tide of such horrible things, Skywalker. We're going to take these creeps down, just you and me.”
Zoe couldn't help but laugh along with her partner.
-
Happy twenty-one has the young woman in the Solo home, Luke having dragged her there so she wouldn't have to spend it alone. Her mother had died when she was five, her father at seventeen, and the Reese family only had little Zoe left to carry on the name, which was the sad fate of many pureblood families.
Leia has a way of intimidating her, though. It may have been her birthday, a day of relaxation and pigging out, but going to that home had Zoe actually brushing out her sun-kissed hair until it shone and wearing actual clothes that showed off her feminine body.
However, it turned out to be one of the best birthdays she ever had.
Zoe walked away with a friend in Leia, which was nice. Working as an Auror had been destroying her friendships with others who didn't understand the high demands of her job. Such silly people they were.
-
“I hurt all oveeeer,” Zoe whined, collapsing on the bed. Manny leaned over her. His grin was infectious, and she was happy to smile back, tugging at his shirt with a little pout.
“I thought you just said that you hurt all over,” her sort of boyfriend pointed out to her.
“Yeah, but I want you to make me feel all better, baby. Isn't that what healers are supposed to do?”
The letter that arrived in the next minute had the woman going yet again, despite the pain, despite the very delectable naked man in her bed, and she was back in the office in a half hour.
“I'm sorry to have called you back in,” Luke said, and she held her hand up to him, shaking her head.
She didn't want any apologies. Her job was her life. She had made peace with that years ago. “I'd ask you to make it up to me, but you'd say something about how it would bother our partnership, and I would rather have you watching my back than anything else.”
-
Zoe's whole career centered on Adamantis. Her obsession. Her ticket to eternal glory. It was not the greatest feeling in the world, but in actuality, she was jealous of Luke, who had already been able to take down a dark wizard. Even if said dark wizard was his own father. He already had the flame of eternal glory. Had already saved the world and instilled a little more hope into it.
She wanted to do the same. She wanted to be able to be that woman who cut the bad guy down before the world could fall to its knees at his beck and call.
Luke knew how she felt.
Well, of course, she had told him about it. Because that was for the best.
“I don't want to keep this feeling on my chest. Even if we take him down together, I'll be happy. So we have to do our best, Luke! We have to do our best so that everyone will know my name.”
“This is a very selfish reason to want to help bring the world back into peace, Zoe.” It sounded like a lecture.
She didn't care. “Yeah, it is. But I won't quit. I won't stop.”
-
Pictures did nothing, nothing, to serve the real Adamantis justice at all. Sitting in her hospital bed, Zoe realized how disgusting that thought was, but it wouldn't go away. It persisted to nag at her even weeks after she had seen him face to face. It had been a world of spells flashing back and forth as they finally had the group cornered, good versus evil. Dark wizards and Aurors alike were killed. Injured.
And all she could remember was the way he had smiled at her and how her heart had sped up, not from adrenaline but because a desire for that smile to be hers had begun to infect her.
For the first time that she could recall in the two and a half years that her and Skywalker had been partnered together, she doesn't tell him what's on her mind. No truth.
-
“I left Manny.”
Leia looked up, surprised. “I thought you were comfortable with him.”
“Yeah, but he deserves better than me. I'm never going to give him anything that he wants. He wants marriage and commitment and children. It's just not anything that I'm really into, you know?” Zoe leaned forward, rubbing her hands against Leia's bulging belly, as she had done everyday since being told about the pregnancy. For good luck, she said. Leia had happily informed her that was rubbing the Buddha's belly, not hers.
“Not even a little bit? There is nothing wrong with settling down.”
“Settling down with Manny is just not what I want.”
Truth. Zoe still knew what that word meant. She hadn't lost her grasp on honesty.
But with each day that passed, she found herself longing to see her enemy again.
-
Stupid.
She had been stupid.
She had gone in alone, and that was going to be her end. But she had been so compelled, so drawn to prove herself, that her lust and desires were fake, something she was just holding on to because of some weird phobia she couldn't name yet.
Now he had her cornered, and his nearness made her want to faint.
Zoe was innocent. A bright beacon of innocence that he wanted. At least, that was what he whispered in her ear as he pressed her against a wall, his right hand buried in her thick hair and his left holding the wrist of her wand hand.
“I've wanted you ever since that day. You are a goddess.”
She stared at the wall opposite them, eyes wide with awe and terror. His mere presence, his overwhelming aura, it was too much. Too much, too much. Why... Why did she want him to want her? To love her?
“In three minutes, your fellow Aurors are going to be storming in. Either they are going to find nothing, or they will find your body.”
“Okay.”
It was the first crack in her innocence.
-
His Followers called her his little pet. He fed her and kept her, and she was his to order around.
Once, and only once, she wondered if he had cast the Imperius Curse on her.
But that was silly. She wanted to be with Adamantis. Wanted it more than anything, because she loved him. He was so kind to her and whispered how he loved her in her ear.
-
The second crack came the first time Zoe took a life from the other side of the battlefield.
The woman was young and arrogant. Had to die. The words of the killing curse were heavy on her lips and she threw up afterward.
Not long afterward, 'Wanted' posters went up with her face.
She wondered if Luke had a new partner.
-
It didn't take long for the angel's face to dissolve and reveal the devil beneath. Apathetic was truly the best word for him. Cold. Calculating. Everything was like a game of chess for him, something she found he enjoyed to play. He taught her the game and forced her into matches.
Zoe only won once against him.
“I'm pregnant.”
-
When the child was placed in her arms, Zoe's innocence had finally, and irrevocably, shattered to shards. This infant shouldn't have been born, shouldn't have existed at all. It's the worst thing she could have ever done, giving birth to this creature, a beautiful blessing and curse. How could she have done this? How could she have brought this child out into the world? The tiny girl slept soundly, curled against her mother.
“Atertra,” Zoe cooed, pressing her chapped lips to the soft skin of her daughter's bald head. Unlucky. That was what Atertra meant. Because this innocent and fragile being had the worst luck to be born to the worst parents.
“A girl.” Cold and distant, Adamantis glanced the child over nodding to himself. Terror filled the new mother. “She will be beautiful, a princess in the new regime.”
She didn't believe his lies but she smiled anyway.
-
Atertra looked so much like her father that it killed Zoe inside. The smile, it was all his. Bright and wide and mischievous, even at four years old. The only difference between the two was that her unlucky child's smile was wholly real, with a spark of life behind it. They had the same hair, the same bone structure. Atertra was a daddy's girl.
Adamantis spoke of his child as though she were a little warrior, another soldier for his war, one that could be trained from scratch and would help to give birth to his new empire. It was then that Zoe realized she had to do something, she had to save her daughter. If she would do nothing else in this world, let it be her final sacrifice to the old ideals she had held to.
It seemed like such a world ago. Twenty eight years old, but she felt so much older.
-
“Stanton...” Zoe clung to the younger man, the only person that she could trust in this dark world. His hand rubbed against her back in a soothing manner. “You have to help me. She's just a child. She's so young, please.”
“He will go after the both of you,” Stanton said with harsh honesty, and the woman nodded, staring up at him with wide eyes, full of terror and hope.
“I already know. I'm going... I'm going to take her memories. So he can't track her. He'll never know.”
“She's a witch, Zoe. Atertra is a witch. He'll find out.”
She took a step back, blinking away the tears stinging at her eyes. “Yeah, but it's the only hope I have.”
-
In retrospect, when Zoe had thought it would be a good idea to steal some poor muggle bastard's car and drive it, her six year old daughter in the back seat, speeding down the highway, she should have decided differently. What the hell did she know about driving? Desert surrounding them on all sides, the crash seemed inevitable. And deliberate. Pulling Atertra out, wand in her hand, she blasted the metal death trap first, then turned her wand on her child.
The love of her life.
“Mama?” Atertra stared back up at her with her large brown eyes, confused and scared.
Hesitating for a minute, Zoe took her necklace off, the moon amulet that was the only thing that comforted her these last seven years. She placed it around her daughter's neck. “Forgive me, baby.”
The light that flashed from her wand was bright.
-
Sitting some distance away, Zoe watched the woman step out of her car and approached her baby girl. Stanton apparated next to her, his hand on her shoulder, almost comforting. “I led them away. They think you're both dead.”
“How many years do you think they'll keep believing that?”
“I doubt Adamantis does.”
She paused, reaching up to grab the young man's hand, squeezing it. “I've always wondered how muggles live.”
Fandom: Squarewarts in the past...?
Characters: Zoe Reese
Rating: PG-13
Note: :| The Dudesons are immortal and very essential to the SW universe.
“To Zoe's new cubicle!”
“To the cubicle!”
Zoe Reese held up her glass in the circle of her friends' glasses, hooting loudly at the toast before gulping down the alcohol. After two long years, she had finally, finally, gotten her own cubicle with her own map and her own pins.
That might have seemed crazy, but to the ambitious young Auror, it was the most amazing thing to have ever happened to her. Twenty years old, and her life was rolling along perfectly. Great job, great boyfriend, great friends, a great partner.
-
“Luke!” Threading her arm through her very adorable partner's, Zoe bumped her hip against his, and one Luke Skywalker smiled down at her serenely.
“I see that you're energetic as usual, Zoe.”
“You're the calm that completes me, Luke~”
The two of them had only been together for a few short months-five, if one wanted to get technical-but it was truly the best friendship Zoe had ever been in. They were trusting of each other, had a detailed knowledge of the other's strengths and weaknesses, and no matter how loud, obnoxious, intrusive, and just generally annoying Zoe could get, Luke treated her with the same soft amusement that made her really like him.
Luke continued to smile at her. “I would be more compelled to believe that if you were single.”
“Are you talking about Manny? Say the word, Luke, and he's gone.”
Manny Dudeson was a great boyfriend. Fantastic, really. When you ignored that he was her boyfriend. He was uncomplicated and didn't hold any expectations for Zoe. She thought he was a lot of fun. She was young, after all.
But Zoe didn't believe in love, and she didn't delude herself into thinking she was in love with Manny, or ever could be. Magic was her entire life.
-
It was the law of the natural order than when one dictator, one dark wizard, one being of evil, was taken out, another would pop up in the former's place. Zoe has pinned his picture to the center of her wall. Adamantis. His name is Adamantis. Further down, she has other pictures pinned, and colored strings connect them all. Lambert Malmaris and his supposed love, Aura. Tymmie, whose moving picture gives Zoe the creeps like nobody's business.
The names Malmaris and Adamantis are recognizable. Old names. Pureblood families from Rome.
“It's always the purebloods that try to wage war.”
“Does that mean you're going to?”
The final string is tied from Tymmie to some unknown female, no name. Turning from her board, Zoe shrugged at Luke, who has entered her organized mess of a domain. “I shall be the first to turn the tide of such horrible things, Skywalker. We're going to take these creeps down, just you and me.”
Zoe couldn't help but laugh along with her partner.
-
Happy twenty-one has the young woman in the Solo home, Luke having dragged her there so she wouldn't have to spend it alone. Her mother had died when she was five, her father at seventeen, and the Reese family only had little Zoe left to carry on the name, which was the sad fate of many pureblood families.
Leia has a way of intimidating her, though. It may have been her birthday, a day of relaxation and pigging out, but going to that home had Zoe actually brushing out her sun-kissed hair until it shone and wearing actual clothes that showed off her feminine body.
However, it turned out to be one of the best birthdays she ever had.
Zoe walked away with a friend in Leia, which was nice. Working as an Auror had been destroying her friendships with others who didn't understand the high demands of her job. Such silly people they were.
-
“I hurt all oveeeer,” Zoe whined, collapsing on the bed. Manny leaned over her. His grin was infectious, and she was happy to smile back, tugging at his shirt with a little pout.
“I thought you just said that you hurt all over,” her sort of boyfriend pointed out to her.
“Yeah, but I want you to make me feel all better, baby. Isn't that what healers are supposed to do?”
The letter that arrived in the next minute had the woman going yet again, despite the pain, despite the very delectable naked man in her bed, and she was back in the office in a half hour.
“I'm sorry to have called you back in,” Luke said, and she held her hand up to him, shaking her head.
She didn't want any apologies. Her job was her life. She had made peace with that years ago. “I'd ask you to make it up to me, but you'd say something about how it would bother our partnership, and I would rather have you watching my back than anything else.”
-
Zoe's whole career centered on Adamantis. Her obsession. Her ticket to eternal glory. It was not the greatest feeling in the world, but in actuality, she was jealous of Luke, who had already been able to take down a dark wizard. Even if said dark wizard was his own father. He already had the flame of eternal glory. Had already saved the world and instilled a little more hope into it.
She wanted to do the same. She wanted to be able to be that woman who cut the bad guy down before the world could fall to its knees at his beck and call.
Luke knew how she felt.
Well, of course, she had told him about it. Because that was for the best.
“I don't want to keep this feeling on my chest. Even if we take him down together, I'll be happy. So we have to do our best, Luke! We have to do our best so that everyone will know my name.”
“This is a very selfish reason to want to help bring the world back into peace, Zoe.” It sounded like a lecture.
She didn't care. “Yeah, it is. But I won't quit. I won't stop.”
-
Pictures did nothing, nothing, to serve the real Adamantis justice at all. Sitting in her hospital bed, Zoe realized how disgusting that thought was, but it wouldn't go away. It persisted to nag at her even weeks after she had seen him face to face. It had been a world of spells flashing back and forth as they finally had the group cornered, good versus evil. Dark wizards and Aurors alike were killed. Injured.
And all she could remember was the way he had smiled at her and how her heart had sped up, not from adrenaline but because a desire for that smile to be hers had begun to infect her.
For the first time that she could recall in the two and a half years that her and Skywalker had been partnered together, she doesn't tell him what's on her mind. No truth.
-
“I left Manny.”
Leia looked up, surprised. “I thought you were comfortable with him.”
“Yeah, but he deserves better than me. I'm never going to give him anything that he wants. He wants marriage and commitment and children. It's just not anything that I'm really into, you know?” Zoe leaned forward, rubbing her hands against Leia's bulging belly, as she had done everyday since being told about the pregnancy. For good luck, she said. Leia had happily informed her that was rubbing the Buddha's belly, not hers.
“Not even a little bit? There is nothing wrong with settling down.”
“Settling down with Manny is just not what I want.”
Truth. Zoe still knew what that word meant. She hadn't lost her grasp on honesty.
But with each day that passed, she found herself longing to see her enemy again.
-
Stupid.
She had been stupid.
She had gone in alone, and that was going to be her end. But she had been so compelled, so drawn to prove herself, that her lust and desires were fake, something she was just holding on to because of some weird phobia she couldn't name yet.
Now he had her cornered, and his nearness made her want to faint.
Zoe was innocent. A bright beacon of innocence that he wanted. At least, that was what he whispered in her ear as he pressed her against a wall, his right hand buried in her thick hair and his left holding the wrist of her wand hand.
“I've wanted you ever since that day. You are a goddess.”
She stared at the wall opposite them, eyes wide with awe and terror. His mere presence, his overwhelming aura, it was too much. Too much, too much. Why... Why did she want him to want her? To love her?
“In three minutes, your fellow Aurors are going to be storming in. Either they are going to find nothing, or they will find your body.”
“Okay.”
It was the first crack in her innocence.
-
His Followers called her his little pet. He fed her and kept her, and she was his to order around.
Once, and only once, she wondered if he had cast the Imperius Curse on her.
But that was silly. She wanted to be with Adamantis. Wanted it more than anything, because she loved him. He was so kind to her and whispered how he loved her in her ear.
-
The second crack came the first time Zoe took a life from the other side of the battlefield.
The woman was young and arrogant. Had to die. The words of the killing curse were heavy on her lips and she threw up afterward.
Not long afterward, 'Wanted' posters went up with her face.
She wondered if Luke had a new partner.
-
It didn't take long for the angel's face to dissolve and reveal the devil beneath. Apathetic was truly the best word for him. Cold. Calculating. Everything was like a game of chess for him, something she found he enjoyed to play. He taught her the game and forced her into matches.
Zoe only won once against him.
“I'm pregnant.”
-
When the child was placed in her arms, Zoe's innocence had finally, and irrevocably, shattered to shards. This infant shouldn't have been born, shouldn't have existed at all. It's the worst thing she could have ever done, giving birth to this creature, a beautiful blessing and curse. How could she have done this? How could she have brought this child out into the world? The tiny girl slept soundly, curled against her mother.
“Atertra,” Zoe cooed, pressing her chapped lips to the soft skin of her daughter's bald head. Unlucky. That was what Atertra meant. Because this innocent and fragile being had the worst luck to be born to the worst parents.
“A girl.” Cold and distant, Adamantis glanced the child over nodding to himself. Terror filled the new mother. “She will be beautiful, a princess in the new regime.”
She didn't believe his lies but she smiled anyway.
-
Atertra looked so much like her father that it killed Zoe inside. The smile, it was all his. Bright and wide and mischievous, even at four years old. The only difference between the two was that her unlucky child's smile was wholly real, with a spark of life behind it. They had the same hair, the same bone structure. Atertra was a daddy's girl.
Adamantis spoke of his child as though she were a little warrior, another soldier for his war, one that could be trained from scratch and would help to give birth to his new empire. It was then that Zoe realized she had to do something, she had to save her daughter. If she would do nothing else in this world, let it be her final sacrifice to the old ideals she had held to.
It seemed like such a world ago. Twenty eight years old, but she felt so much older.
-
“Stanton...” Zoe clung to the younger man, the only person that she could trust in this dark world. His hand rubbed against her back in a soothing manner. “You have to help me. She's just a child. She's so young, please.”
“He will go after the both of you,” Stanton said with harsh honesty, and the woman nodded, staring up at him with wide eyes, full of terror and hope.
“I already know. I'm going... I'm going to take her memories. So he can't track her. He'll never know.”
“She's a witch, Zoe. Atertra is a witch. He'll find out.”
She took a step back, blinking away the tears stinging at her eyes. “Yeah, but it's the only hope I have.”
-
In retrospect, when Zoe had thought it would be a good idea to steal some poor muggle bastard's car and drive it, her six year old daughter in the back seat, speeding down the highway, she should have decided differently. What the hell did she know about driving? Desert surrounding them on all sides, the crash seemed inevitable. And deliberate. Pulling Atertra out, wand in her hand, she blasted the metal death trap first, then turned her wand on her child.
The love of her life.
“Mama?” Atertra stared back up at her with her large brown eyes, confused and scared.
Hesitating for a minute, Zoe took her necklace off, the moon amulet that was the only thing that comforted her these last seven years. She placed it around her daughter's neck. “Forgive me, baby.”
The light that flashed from her wand was bright.
-
Sitting some distance away, Zoe watched the woman step out of her car and approached her baby girl. Stanton apparated next to her, his hand on her shoulder, almost comforting. “I led them away. They think you're both dead.”
“How many years do you think they'll keep believing that?”
“I doubt Adamantis does.”
She paused, reaching up to grab the young man's hand, squeezing it. “I've always wondered how muggles live.”