Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

• Canon happens. I assume they remake the Promise, then break out into the human world, and there is some sort of new Promise that ensure the Demons won’t eat them anymore. That doesn’t mean they like them, however. There are more ways to harm someone than by eating them, funny enough.
• The humans that do not treat them like cattle treat them as stupid, normal children. If they weren’t to be put in labs then they would need to be separated and lost to the foster system. Emma and co. travel to Minerva’s estate in the human world to establish their own sovereign nation where they can regroup and grow.
  • They send out scouting groups that search for any humans left in the demon world and bring them over.
  • It’s not only a castle, but land, and a small, underdeveloped, abandoned village. It’s a start.
  • (The land is roughly based on Mont St Michel.)
  • They call the town Neverland; they’re taking back this name for their town where children can be children and not be soldiers.
• They survive, they grow, they live. Focus is shifted onto establishing partnerships with the outside (human, and demon) world instead because they can survive alone, but they can’t really live
  • They LIVE! Gillian and Nigel start a crafts & makerspace cafe. Gilda starts her school in Neverland. Nat becomes a viral YouTuber. Anna is running a salon while she studies for the MCAT on the side—Norman is spearheading legal issues to get all his siblings into their choice of universities. Phil moves out, takes Carol with him to study at Oxford.
    • Gilda and Anna had dreams to wear pretty clothes and they are 100% the Best Dressed teacher and hair-artist/aspiring doctor, respectively. You are allowed to have different dreams from when you were 11!!!!!
    • Insert the Don fic, <from the ground up (build all the foundations)>, where Don suffers a mid-life crisis of what-is-he-supposed-to-do-now but solves it real quick (because he is not Ray, and doesn’t like to suffer and wallow in his own misconceptions of his self-worth) and builds some houses
  • In mornings, Violet and Emma go jogging, then hunting.
• Emma has shot a man who tried to hurt her family and Norman is back, at Emma’s side. Ray gets the two of them together. Afterwards, he isn’t quite sure of his place anymore—Norman and Emma are happy (check) and his family is surviving, and on their way to thriving (check). Rationally, having achieved his two life goals should make him happy. He tells himself that, and denies evidence of otherwise.
  • They make the big plans. They finalize it. At the final meeting Ray realizes he’s zoned out, when asked for his opinion, and Emma prompts, “I think it’s good. What does Ray think?” and he swears because shit, he never used to zone out like this, he doesn’t know. But. Emma is nodding. Norman is nodding too. There’s no time to do it again. He says, “yes” and feels spacy the rest of the whole day.
  • See, Ray trusts Emma’s judgement now. Has trusted it since Goldy Pond, maybe earlier. She’s got Norman with her to make her plans come to life. Norman’s back from being Minerva. Neither of them need Ray to curb their illogical decisions anymore.
• Norman gets the offer from a University to do research, which he ignores because everything he needs is right here, and he still is working on the Ray problem.
  • Norman is too traumatized by the demons to see them as deserving to live, and this is where he and Emma have their first disagreement. I want to be like her, Norman thinks, and I can’t. Emma wins their fight, of course, because at the end of the day Norman will support Emma’s ideals. He just finally realizes that they can never be
  • This is where Ray comes in, in the After; Ray who has all the same right to be as traumatized but isn’t (Ray He may not think he deserves the same forgiveness, but he forgives others, this burned Hufflepuff. He’s willing to accept demons who have shown him kindness, simply because he has seen the worse in humans too.). Ray helps Emma with the Demon Treaties because Norman can’t; he gets illogical; he gets scary; he turns into Minerva. At first Oliver does because the Goldy Pond kids have so much more exp w/ Minerva but Oliver is busy. Ray is designated Emma-handler and vice-versa anyways (They all grew so much in 1.5 years!).
• Emma and Norman move out of the castle and into the house Don builds for them. They convince Ray to move in with them, and Ray, a dumbass, agrees and rents a private room from them.
  • Emma wants to yell RIGHT NOW that that is NOT WHAT THEY MEANT.
    • DON WANTS TO YELL RIGHT NOW that HE BUILT THIS HOUSE WITH THREE PEOPLE IN MIND.
  • See, the house has a guest bedroom and a master bedroom but Emma tells Ray he can’t have the guest bedroom. She means he is with them in the master but Ray just goes, “Jeez, fine, I’ll put a futon in the study then.” He wants the basement but that is Emma’s gym. He’s already knocked off-kilter but this almost messes him up more, if not for the moments when they’re sitting three around a dining room table and he forgets all that he’s done, and it feels
• Zach and the security team are good. Ray fucks up his ankle on rounds and Anna demands he be taken off active duty for 3 months. Ray finds it so easy to agree.
  • Ray sleeps in and stays in bed and in a burst of energy, takes apart his alarm clock for fun, but then loses energy before putting it back together.
  • Emma and Norman, busy as they are, notice. Ray sleeps through cooking lunch and dinner; the first time they make sandwiches but the third time they sheepishly call up Gillian and Pepe for food instead.
  • During this time, Norman sics Anna on Ray, in what is both an ingenious but also cowardly move. Anna claims to be here to check up on Ray’s ankle, even though they both know it’s fine, and she’s really doing a psyche check on why Ray is now sleeping 18 hours every day.
    • It’s exhausting, Ray finds, keeping the mask on, then Anna leaves and the mask drops and Norman enters and Ray has no energy left. He snaps, why do I always have to be weak around you.
    • Cue Norman coming clean about what being Minerva meant to him, and how really, that wasn’t Norman at all.

• Ray finds the Minerva (the first one)’s abandoned library and ends up with a new job, accidentally. He just spends the majority of his waking hours there and before long is helping children who come in find their books and re-shelving and cleaning up messes.
  • Norman is the one who sent him past it on a supply run.
  • Before long, people are being sent to the library if they’re looking for Ray. He helps fix electronics, too, when Nigel’s busy. Norman is definitely the one sending kids over to Ray.
• Emma (& Norman & Ray) adopts Buddy—a three-legged golden retriever who she finds during one of her and Violet’s hunting excursions. Having an animal is also good, and with Emma and Norman’s busy schedules, most of Buddy’s care falls to Ray. He finds he doesn’t mind.
• Three months have passed but somehow Ray is still at the library? He went back to security only to be chased down by Jemima who had wanted to return a book that was going to be overdue, and before he knows it Zach and his security team are telling him that they’re fine, go be a boring librarian.
• Books and the solitude help his depression. He takes time off to get lost in new fantasy worlds and he breathes and doesn’t take every breath for granted. Emma and Norman start appearing at his library for the most inane reasons.
  • Emma and Norman have started their “tell Ray he is already a part of our relationship plan”. This starts with dropping off lunch for Ray, who is maybe only a little bit avoiding them on the basis of giving the couple ‘space without a thirdwheel’
  • This is where 'to have and to hold', marriage fic, starts, roughly! You can skip ahead to the character sections if you don't want to be spoiled. 
• Norman is glad Ray is feeling better. Ray has always been meant for more, though, and he needs a little push, so Norman asks for work advice. Ray tells Norman to marry Emma (for political reasons, but also because Ray is still doing his damnest to be the best wingman). Norman blinks, thinks: we can work with that.
  • Really, it messes up all of his and Emma’s plans, but it’s also a necessary thing, the more Norman thinks about it. It helps that they were already planning something, then.
• Emma is weirdly huffy about the wedding, and Ray becomes suspicious. Norman and Ray play chess.
  • Now that Ray’s head isn’t stuck completely in Depression Land he realizes he’s missed a lot of things. Norman and Emma are planning something.
  • They are playing the Long Game because depression takes time. Ray needs time. (Norman needs time.)
• Noremma get the political wedding together quick and it goes wonderfully, if not Perfect, because Perfect requires a third person to also be there.
  • They don’t go on a honeymoon, insisting they’ll have time for it They don’t wear rings, either, it drives Ray crazy.
• Norman loses to Ray in chess, giving him a King and a Queen, only, he doesn’t, not really.
• It takes two months—there’s so much work to do in the office, after the wedding, but they finally make it to corner Ray. (It also takes some time because Paperwork re: honeymoon)
• EMMA FINALLY GETS TO BROWBEAT RAY INTO MARRYING THEM
• They get married!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! That evening!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! No time like the present amirite. Phil comes back from University for the reception. Yuugo & Isabella’s ghosts clink champagne glasses a la canon.
• They go on a honeymoon to France and Spain, so Ray and Norman can live their childhood dreams of travelling.
• When they come back there’s a Lot of Mail for Norman and it’s the university research offer. Norman gets browbeat into doing something about it and also swings Anna into medschool while he’s at it.
• Also Norman and Ray make Emma’s dream come true, finally. (She rides a giraffe in VR.)

These kids All Need Therapy but All of them are very rightfully concerned about adult doctors. Ray and Norman read books and psychoanalyze each other. They have built a community where everyone has some sort of support system though.

I also want to make a few notes about their characterization in ‘these hands’ and ‘to have and to hold’. I wrote this back in the Goldy Pond days—and extrapolated their personalities from what canon we had then. A lot of it still rings true at its base for me, but there’s a few things that I think need explaining, theorywise, since canon didn’t exactly go this way.

Emma:

Emma’s story is about the dance between compassion and naivety. She doesn’t want to just save Ray and Norman, she wants to save her whole family. Then her whole family becomes every cattle children. Then every cattle children becomes every innocent demon.

At the same time, she’s willing to sacrifice lives when the other force is a danger to her family—see Leuvis. But Emma’d started justifying that because they were /demons/, she’d othered demons in her head. When Mujika, Leuvis, and the demon settlements she tours in the Search for Cultivada arc shows her otherwise, she starts wanting to save them too.

I’d predicted the natural conclusion to Emma’s arc to be her needing to kill a human who was a danger to her family—the true test of how far she’d go, since she could no longer justify it to herself by saying they’re a demon. I think she struggles with this, but overall comes out fine and stronger for it. That is why Ray knows he no longer needs to protect her. She’s not naïve, she just compassionate.

The one finale Emma scene I made up that I reference and unfortunately did not happen is post-war but still in the demon world, Emma loading her rifle and readying herself for the fallout. Isabella, having returned and switched allegiances, takes her rifle from her, telling her softly, my dear, you've done enough. In canon we get Emma discarding the rifle when reuniting with Phil, which fulfills the same poetic purpose of ‘regaining innocence’, but I will likely still reference the Isabella scene because I think Isabella needed that too.

Ray:

THIS RAY HAS NOT TURNED BACK TIME WITH EMMA. NOR WAS HE MADE TO TAKE CARE OF HIS WHOLE ENTIRE FAMILY + MORE WHILE EMMA FUCKED OFF WITH AMENESIA AND NORMAN SPED AHEAD WITH A LASER POINT FOCUS ON FINDING AMNESIAC EMMA INSTEAD. This is important because in the former situation Ray has directly experienced Emma’s near-holy ordinance and in the latter situation Ray would’ve stepped up and filled in Emma’s shoes. Other people depending on Ray makes him speedrun through his own issues and resolve them quick, as seen in the demon chase directly following their escape.

Instead, in vowsverse, Emma and Norman and his entirely family are doing well and good, and that’s the only reason Ray’s body subconsciously allows himself to break down like he’s doing here with depression.

In canon he’s worked through a lot more of the guilt than I expected him to! In vowsverse he’s struggling a lot more with how he almost let everyone die because he was too scared to hope, like how Emma did.

Norman:

Oh boy! I wrote much of this before Norman / Minerva reveal even fully happened in canon. Here’s what I did know though: our two chapters of Lambda!Norman we got, he talks only of wanting to see “Emma, Ray” again (and occasionally “Emma, Ray, his family”). Then suddenly Minerva pops up wanting to save everyone? That’s not Norman. That’s Norman wanting to be Emma, because Emma has always, always been Norman’s compass. He’s lost in Lambda without her to direct him and Ray as his tactician; he tries to imagine what they would think and it all goes so, so wrong.

( I actually have a Norman character study series on this, his Lambda experience & post-Minerva rebirth, ‘my old friends become new again’. )

I somewhat correctly extrapolated that this all goes terribly for him. He fails, somewhere—probably not his plan, but probably fails Ray and Emma and they have to drag him back to himself. I thought we were going to get a bigger war and like an actual warfield and shit, where Norman lied & ran off first and then Ray and Emma catches up (this is the ‘Ray meeting Norman’s eyes in a warfield, mouthing, promise to never lie to me again’ scene). Norman and Ray are two sides of the same coin when it comes to self-sacrifice and I explore that in ‘a million bad habits to kick’, a timeloop fix-it AU.

ANYWAYS in vowsverse Norman is no longer emotionally Minerva but he still occasionally takes on the mantle of it for official purposes. I did not predict Mike Ratri at all—what I thought would happen and sorta allude to is that Peter burns down Gracefield, Minerva’s wills/documents for the children when they travel over to the other side, and himself in one final swan song, as the children escape to the human world leaving the burning blaze behind. Norman’s title as Minerva is now defunct, seeing as the Gatekeeper and related documents are dead, and the human world just thinks of this boy as, yes, the kid leader, but still a fucking kid. Minerva is more of a title that gains respect within the cattle children community itself, and Norman’s okay with that since he’s got Emma & Ray back to guide him again.

There’s also a part of Norman that’s completely fucked with how much time he’s lost, playing at being Minerva and distancing himself from Ray and Emma? He’s not completely fixed of that habit yet, as we see in ‘to have and to hold’ but he’s trying.

OH and as for fullscore trio, relationship-wise?

My personal headcanon is that Norman loved Emma first, and realized he loved Ray as he discovered Ray’s planned sacrifice/in the early days of Lambda. Ray fell for Norman and Emma from the age of 7—those two are the only reason he didn’t succumb to worse depression after he found the truth of the house. Ray knows about Norman’s crush on Emma since Gracefield, and post-escape he refuses to act on his own feelings for Emma out of respect for (the late) Norman’s feelings on Emma. He feels it would be unfair! Also that he doesn’t deserve it.

Emma loves them both but also loves everyone dearly, so it takes her a while (post-canon) to really understand that oh, she wants Norman and Ray differently than how she wants, say, Anna, in her life. No more, no less. To be honest, I lean towards writing the trio as soulmates—undefined platonic or romantic—just life partners. There was a point during this where I wrote Emma as aromantic (possibly you can read ‘to have and to hold’ that way) but that doesn’t mean she’s not ready to spend the rest of her life with Norman and Ray.

But yeah because of the sheer amount of love flowing from her (and she’s so busy too!) she doesn’t quite understand she loves them different, and they have different needs than her to understand that. She tells Ray and Norman (and like, all her family) “I love you!” all the goddamn time so Ray especially does not understand that she wants a relationship with him?

Isabella

In the original vowsverse Isabella is dead. There’s a deleted scene from ‘these hands’ that may show up in a future story of them all visiting her grave, and the cattle children graveyard in general. I wasn’t sure if she was served at Tifari or if she died in the finale at the time of writing, and definitely wavered between both while writing, whoops.

Definitely did NOT expect the canon ending for Isabella though, but I don’t try to retcon it in vowsverse because it fit with Ray’s development in this verse. I just wish it didn’t happen the way it did. He needs someone to tell him to take care of himself, for once, but Mama knows Ray does best, heals best, when he has family relying on him. I think it’s selfish of Isabella though, still.

In vows remix? Isabella gets to be even more selfish. She grows old surrounded by the family she loves in a cottage by the seashore. She gets everything she fucking wanted in life, despite her feeling like she doesn’t deserve it most days. (yes, this is the cottage by the seashore from Inception fic)

Oliver

Y'ALL I WAS SO SURE HE WAS GOING TO DIE NEXT. (Lucas' dying speech to Oliver literally pointed to Oliver being the next to die okay!! I thought Emma needed a third emotional hit for the last arc!! I thought we were getting a bigger war.) So I literally wrote scenes with '<insert Oliver's replacement>' here. If I make a vague reference to them being sad about Oliver it's because at the time of writing I truly thought he was not going to make it and I am so sorry. He has been edited to be alive but I've been sending him off to some sort of Ratri/international relations role so he's not in Neverland all the time and I don't have to rewrite too much. 

tl;dr for differences from canon

• Emma doesn’t lose her memories, but instead promises an IOU to the demon god
• They cross over from Gracefield House in some sort of portal situation, leaving Peter, the House, and Minerva’s documents all burning in a blaze behind them
• The human world is mostly still standing, despite rebuilding after the Fourth World War, and the orphanage/child service system is still the same shitty system we got today, so they escape and do their own thing
• The portal between the demon world / human world aren’t all closed—they do trips back and forth to keep bringing back cattle children/Sisters/Mothers from the rest of the Plantations. This is largely glossed over because I was not sure what was happening. But when I mention the Demon Treaties, this is Emma & Ray negotiating peace with the Demons (the Promise just opened portals and made sure they wouldn’t be eaten, but like, they could still be harmed).
  • I also randomly replaced ‘Demon Treaties’ with a vague international affairs treaty at several points in ‘to have and to hold’ because I figured it wasn’t happening midway through 2019 whoops?
  • In ‘holy ordinance’ the portals have all been sealed off.