Kit Fawkes (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
fauxfawkes) wrote2021-01-27 05:02 pm
fauxfawkes) wrote2021-01-27 05:02 pm
Part Three: Italian Interlude
Title: Italian Interlude
Universe: The Kitverse
Warnings: Spoilers for Godchild, but that's about it.
Summary: The merry adventures of Kit Hargreaves, and the trouble he gets up to in the two worlds he calls home.
Notes: Part 3 of the KitVerse; make sure to read the other works first, for context!
▶ The One Where Kit Hargreaves Rides a Train and Also Gets Tempted by What Remains of DELILAH
I want to write a story about Kit riding a train. This is because anybody who has ever mentioned the word "train" around me is well aware that I FUCKING LOVE TRAINS. I swear I want to go to Disneyworld and just ride the train all day. WHAT'D YOU DO IN THE MAGIC KINGDOM, ALEX? I RODE THE TRAIN, BABY. :DDD
Traaaaaaaaaains.
Anyway, I was trying to figure out an excuse for Kit riding a train in the first place, and I eventually found my answer in a pair of lines from the ending of Godchild, where the tower is falling and the White Owl's about to take off for parts unknown, and the remainder of DELILAH looks down and says:
"All we must do is find another lord of darkness. This time one that won't be swayed by something such as "love". In any case, the underground activities of DELILAH in several countries will cause a massive war...
The flames of that war will undoubtedly burn the entire world to ashes. Let us meet again at the end of the world."
Which means we've got an interesting built-in premise here. DELILAH didn't end with the fall of the Cardmaster (is that a sequel hook I see, Kaori Yuki?); only that chapter of its overall existence did. There's still war brewing on the horizon, and still the very real chance that the organization could rise again under a new master, whoever that may be. HMMM.
Here's the funny thing: Crispin said himself Kit could've been a pretty fearsome dark wizard if he wanted to be, didn't he? The Magician is a card of infinite possibility; he opens the Fool's sack and shows him all the tools at his disposal, making it clear that he can take any path he chooses. And for Kit, already a child of two worlds, he's this kid of sort of infinite possibility. His future is what he makes of it, and there are dozens of them he could make. Is he Christopher or is he Kit? Will he be a king or an earl? Will he choose London or Daventry? Will he save the world...or will he end it? It may not show in his eyes, but he's got the Hargreaves curse in him, that much is undeniable. Which means I'm contractually bound to make his life miserable and ridiculous or something in the process, IDK.
So anyway, you know what Kit needs more of in his life? Poison. Everybody loves poison! All except for the people who drink it. Anyway. So the premise is still kind of up in the air, but probably it starts out with Kit trolling around somewhere and overhearing two kids pulling a floating wooden box out of the London river, and upon closer inspection, it turns out that there's a girl inside! And she's very pretty and exceptionally pale and also incredibly dead, even though there's no mark on her to indicate what might've killed her. There is something strange, though--as she sits there in the sun and the police are summoned, a few flies wander down and alight on her hands, and promptly drop dead themselves. Suspicious.
Kit suspects poison, naturally (and there are probably at least a few overheard conversations from the police about poison and the name Hargreaves and that eccentric count who always seemed to know more about it than could have possibly been righteous, but no, it couldn't be, he's been dead for a year), and so he and Crehador start doing some snooping, because it's Crehador's lot in life to always get stuck being the sidekick to bossy aristocrats. And eventually they end up with a lead that the box she was sealed in was constructed in Italy (and probably there's some Italian flora or fauna inside the box to help confirm this, who knows), and therefore it must have come from Italy, and therefore let's road trip to Italy to find out what is up with this girl whose corpse kills flies instead of feeding them. Possibly also Kit touched a bit of magic Victorian litmus paper to her cold dead lips and it turned a significant color and LO AND BEHOLD, HER KISS IS POISON, OH SNAP.
So then Crehador's like THIS IS STUPID but they cross the Channel and catch a train in France and ride along down into Italy in a swank compartment with an awesome view (and possibly meet some Significant Cast on the way), and then they truck down to some unspecified locale in Italy, which is probably either Venice or Rome (it'd be eerie to have DELILAH holed up in the Vatican, wouldn't it? But also a bit overdone, so who knows), and then they get there and Crehador's like SHIT YEAH TIME FOR A VACATION FILLED WITH VICE AND EXCESS and proceeds to flirt it up with all the women and decorates their rented rooms with ridiculous red velvet curtains and wanders around shirtless and barefoot and generally just Crehadors all over the place. MEANWHILE, Kit starts scoping out the local terrain and tries to find a lead, and quite possibly gets distracted by a Mysterious Beautiful Girl With Loose Ties To The Mystical And/Or Occult (come on, he is Cain's son) and basically shenanigans around awhile investigating stuff.
And then eventually the mystery is revealed that DELILAH is holed up in whichever city they're in, and they're using the cellular science Alexis was using to try to recreate a body for Augusta in combination with the research into Mikaela's spider poison, and basically are manufacturing girls that put a whole new spin on the phrase "deadly doll", because they're mass-producing Rappaccini's daughters and probably planning to use them as assassins to help to rebuild their international base by killing a bunch of plot-significant people in positions of power and replacing them with DELILAH loyalists who can then help the organization reclaim some of what they lost during Cain's intervention in his war against Alexis.
And this is great and Kit is naturally repelled by the thought, except that then somebody (maybe one of those Plot Significent People from the Train) pops up and is like SURPRAIS I KNOW WHO YOU ARE AND WHO YOU ARE IS THE CARDMASTER'S GRANDSON and a bunch of people in robes are like OH SNAP and Kit's like WAIT WHAT WHAT WHAT and somewhere in his Roman den of iniquity Crehador releases his grasp on a scantily-clad woman long enough to sit bolt upright through a cloud of opium smoke and go OH FUCK.
So then the dudes in robes knock Kit out and are holding him captive and probably go manufacture an impromptu Young Hot Augusta Clone or something because everybody knows the true way to manipulate a Hargreaves is by giving them a relative to bang, and then Kit's probably all drugged up and woozy but escapes his cell because he'd be a pretty sucky magician if he didn't know how to pick a lock, and then he wanders around in a daze until he finds the poison garden where they keep the clones until they become poisonous themselves, and then he's all tripping out and there's poison in the air and the girls don't know what the hell even because DELILAH hasn't gotten much better at making them not crazy or not soulless when they clone them, and then there are BIBLICAL REFERENCES and GARDEN OF EDEN METAPHORS and references to CAIN LEAVING THE GARDEN but NOW KIT IS ENTERING IT and he's just kind of all bewildered and rumpled in his shirtsleeves and stoned out of his mind on the worst trip of his life but whatever, bro, he's got this.
And then like I don't know maybe Crehador's badass falcon (whom I am now naming Skippy) finds him because Skippy totally likes Kit (they BONDED while he was recovering from getting BOOM-HEADSLAPPED back in "And Bids You All Adieu" or something, IDK), and Kit's like SKIPPY IT'S YOU and Skippy is like CAW, MOTHERFUCKERS and Kit signals where he is and Skippy gets away just before the Plot-Significant Henchmen come and find him in the garden and are like WELP HERE WE GO and haul him back to the main evil guy, whoever that is in this story.
So then they shoot Kit up with the antidote so he stops tripping out and he wonders if the garden he saw was really all a dream or if Skippy was really there and he's just all fucked in the head, and then they bring in the Young Hot Augusta Clone and fuck around with him on the "so by the way your grandfather and grandmother were siblings so your dad's a child of incest and by the way this chick you find hot is a clone of your grandmother so GUESS IT RUNS IN THE FAMILY, LULZ" level, and that leads into the whole "so wouldn't you like to be the new Cardmaster and lead the world to its unholy doom and destruction" thing, and then Kit deals with a bunch of personal demons and issues and just when we're reaching the ultimate peak of mindfuckery, along comes Skippy again and he's hauling Kit's cane (don't ask how, he's just hardcore). And then Kit's eyes light up as he tosses out some badass line like "NEVER, MOTHERFUCKERS" (which is eerily approaching meta considering Young Hot Augusta Clone is, y'know, standing right there) and then yanks all the magic out of the wand in his cane at once and just BRINGS THE FUCKING HOUSE DOWN on these guys.
And then the girls in the garden escape the wreckage because they're outside and relatively sheltered from the wreckage, but Kit escapes the destroyed building and goes outside to find them and gets stuck watching as they all dissolve instead (and recoils in horror a little, very DDD:), and then surveys the garden and puts on some kickass black leather gloves and starts taking clippings of all the plants and securing them in some convenient glass jars within a convenient briefcase he conveniently happened to find somewhere, and then Crehador shows up with his shirt actually on for once and Kit's looking like hell warmed over but he's got an interesting glint in his eye and that arrogant swagger (probably more like a wobble, at this point) in his step, and so they get their stuff and it's case closed and they go hop on a train to head back to London and Kit sleeps the whole way home.
And then in the epilogue Crehador comes home one day and discovers that Kit has hijacked a whole room in his apartment to set up his poisonous plant grow operation (which is doubly ironic considering grow houses and Crehador and opium--I'm picturing Victorian heat lamps and ridiculously high anachronistic power bills), and Crehador's like KIT WHAT THE HELL and Kit's like helloooo, my darlings~ and making kissy faces at his doom!plants and Crehador's like my god you're more like your father every day.
AND THEY ALL LIVE HAPPILY EVER AFTER THE END.
Universe: The Kitverse
Warnings: Spoilers for Godchild, but that's about it.
Summary: The merry adventures of Kit Hargreaves, and the trouble he gets up to in the two worlds he calls home.
Notes: Part 3 of the KitVerse; make sure to read the other works first, for context!
▶ The One Where Kit Hargreaves Rides a Train and Also Gets Tempted by What Remains of DELILAH
Traaaaaaaaaains.
Anyway, I was trying to figure out an excuse for Kit riding a train in the first place, and I eventually found my answer in a pair of lines from the ending of Godchild, where the tower is falling and the White Owl's about to take off for parts unknown, and the remainder of DELILAH looks down and says:
"All we must do is find another lord of darkness. This time one that won't be swayed by something such as "love". In any case, the underground activities of DELILAH in several countries will cause a massive war...
The flames of that war will undoubtedly burn the entire world to ashes. Let us meet again at the end of the world."
Which means we've got an interesting built-in premise here. DELILAH didn't end with the fall of the Cardmaster (is that a sequel hook I see, Kaori Yuki?); only that chapter of its overall existence did. There's still war brewing on the horizon, and still the very real chance that the organization could rise again under a new master, whoever that may be. HMMM.
Here's the funny thing: Crispin said himself Kit could've been a pretty fearsome dark wizard if he wanted to be, didn't he? The Magician is a card of infinite possibility; he opens the Fool's sack and shows him all the tools at his disposal, making it clear that he can take any path he chooses. And for Kit, already a child of two worlds, he's this kid of sort of infinite possibility. His future is what he makes of it, and there are dozens of them he could make. Is he Christopher or is he Kit? Will he be a king or an earl? Will he choose London or Daventry? Will he save the world...or will he end it? It may not show in his eyes, but he's got the Hargreaves curse in him, that much is undeniable. Which means I'm contractually bound to make his life miserable and ridiculous or something in the process, IDK.
So anyway, you know what Kit needs more of in his life? Poison. Everybody loves poison! All except for the people who drink it. Anyway. So the premise is still kind of up in the air, but probably it starts out with Kit trolling around somewhere and overhearing two kids pulling a floating wooden box out of the London river, and upon closer inspection, it turns out that there's a girl inside! And she's very pretty and exceptionally pale and also incredibly dead, even though there's no mark on her to indicate what might've killed her. There is something strange, though--as she sits there in the sun and the police are summoned, a few flies wander down and alight on her hands, and promptly drop dead themselves. Suspicious.
Kit suspects poison, naturally (and there are probably at least a few overheard conversations from the police about poison and the name Hargreaves and that eccentric count who always seemed to know more about it than could have possibly been righteous, but no, it couldn't be, he's been dead for a year), and so he and Crehador start doing some snooping, because it's Crehador's lot in life to always get stuck being the sidekick to bossy aristocrats. And eventually they end up with a lead that the box she was sealed in was constructed in Italy (and probably there's some Italian flora or fauna inside the box to help confirm this, who knows), and therefore it must have come from Italy, and therefore let's road trip to Italy to find out what is up with this girl whose corpse kills flies instead of feeding them. Possibly also Kit touched a bit of magic Victorian litmus paper to her cold dead lips and it turned a significant color and LO AND BEHOLD, HER KISS IS POISON, OH SNAP.
So then Crehador's like THIS IS STUPID but they cross the Channel and catch a train in France and ride along down into Italy in a swank compartment with an awesome view (and possibly meet some Significant Cast on the way), and then they truck down to some unspecified locale in Italy, which is probably either Venice or Rome (it'd be eerie to have DELILAH holed up in the Vatican, wouldn't it? But also a bit overdone, so who knows), and then they get there and Crehador's like SHIT YEAH TIME FOR A VACATION FILLED WITH VICE AND EXCESS and proceeds to flirt it up with all the women and decorates their rented rooms with ridiculous red velvet curtains and wanders around shirtless and barefoot and generally just Crehadors all over the place. MEANWHILE, Kit starts scoping out the local terrain and tries to find a lead, and quite possibly gets distracted by a Mysterious Beautiful Girl With Loose Ties To The Mystical And/Or Occult (come on, he is Cain's son) and basically shenanigans around awhile investigating stuff.
And then eventually the mystery is revealed that DELILAH is holed up in whichever city they're in, and they're using the cellular science Alexis was using to try to recreate a body for Augusta in combination with the research into Mikaela's spider poison, and basically are manufacturing girls that put a whole new spin on the phrase "deadly doll", because they're mass-producing Rappaccini's daughters and probably planning to use them as assassins to help to rebuild their international base by killing a bunch of plot-significant people in positions of power and replacing them with DELILAH loyalists who can then help the organization reclaim some of what they lost during Cain's intervention in his war against Alexis.
And this is great and Kit is naturally repelled by the thought, except that then somebody (maybe one of those Plot Significent People from the Train) pops up and is like SURPRAIS I KNOW WHO YOU ARE AND WHO YOU ARE IS THE CARDMASTER'S GRANDSON and a bunch of people in robes are like OH SNAP and Kit's like WAIT WHAT WHAT WHAT and somewhere in his Roman den of iniquity Crehador releases his grasp on a scantily-clad woman long enough to sit bolt upright through a cloud of opium smoke and go OH FUCK.
So then the dudes in robes knock Kit out and are holding him captive and probably go manufacture an impromptu Young Hot Augusta Clone or something because everybody knows the true way to manipulate a Hargreaves is by giving them a relative to bang, and then Kit's probably all drugged up and woozy but escapes his cell because he'd be a pretty sucky magician if he didn't know how to pick a lock, and then he wanders around in a daze until he finds the poison garden where they keep the clones until they become poisonous themselves, and then he's all tripping out and there's poison in the air and the girls don't know what the hell even because DELILAH hasn't gotten much better at making them not crazy or not soulless when they clone them, and then there are BIBLICAL REFERENCES and GARDEN OF EDEN METAPHORS and references to CAIN LEAVING THE GARDEN but NOW KIT IS ENTERING IT and he's just kind of all bewildered and rumpled in his shirtsleeves and stoned out of his mind on the worst trip of his life but whatever, bro, he's got this.
And then like I don't know maybe Crehador's badass falcon (whom I am now naming Skippy) finds him because Skippy totally likes Kit (they BONDED while he was recovering from getting BOOM-HEADSLAPPED back in "And Bids You All Adieu" or something, IDK), and Kit's like SKIPPY IT'S YOU and Skippy is like CAW, MOTHERFUCKERS and Kit signals where he is and Skippy gets away just before the Plot-Significant Henchmen come and find him in the garden and are like WELP HERE WE GO and haul him back to the main evil guy, whoever that is in this story.
So then they shoot Kit up with the antidote so he stops tripping out and he wonders if the garden he saw was really all a dream or if Skippy was really there and he's just all fucked in the head, and then they bring in the Young Hot Augusta Clone and fuck around with him on the "so by the way your grandfather and grandmother were siblings so your dad's a child of incest and by the way this chick you find hot is a clone of your grandmother so GUESS IT RUNS IN THE FAMILY, LULZ" level, and that leads into the whole "so wouldn't you like to be the new Cardmaster and lead the world to its unholy doom and destruction" thing, and then Kit deals with a bunch of personal demons and issues and just when we're reaching the ultimate peak of mindfuckery, along comes Skippy again and he's hauling Kit's cane (don't ask how, he's just hardcore). And then Kit's eyes light up as he tosses out some badass line like "NEVER, MOTHERFUCKERS" (which is eerily approaching meta considering Young Hot Augusta Clone is, y'know, standing right there) and then yanks all the magic out of the wand in his cane at once and just BRINGS THE FUCKING HOUSE DOWN on these guys.
And then the girls in the garden escape the wreckage because they're outside and relatively sheltered from the wreckage, but Kit escapes the destroyed building and goes outside to find them and gets stuck watching as they all dissolve instead (and recoils in horror a little, very DDD:), and then surveys the garden and puts on some kickass black leather gloves and starts taking clippings of all the plants and securing them in some convenient glass jars within a convenient briefcase he conveniently happened to find somewhere, and then Crehador shows up with his shirt actually on for once and Kit's looking like hell warmed over but he's got an interesting glint in his eye and that arrogant swagger (probably more like a wobble, at this point) in his step, and so they get their stuff and it's case closed and they go hop on a train to head back to London and Kit sleeps the whole way home.
And then in the epilogue Crehador comes home one day and discovers that Kit has hijacked a whole room in his apartment to set up his poisonous plant grow operation (which is doubly ironic considering grow houses and Crehador and opium--I'm picturing Victorian heat lamps and ridiculously high anachronistic power bills), and Crehador's like KIT WHAT THE HELL and Kit's like helloooo, my darlings~ and making kissy faces at his doom!plants and Crehador's like my god you're more like your father every day.
AND THEY ALL LIVE HAPPILY EVER AFTER THE END.