Chapter Text
Thinking about my long term running daydream about an oc taking Kim Rok Soo’s place. How that would change the plot. This thing would either be pure crack or straight angst with no in between (that or swinging like a deranged pendulum of mental instability)
Her name is Jane… *insert morbid joke about Jour here* and she wakes up in Cale Henituse’s body at the start of the novel instead of Kim Rok Soo, and is just
*horrified staring*
*insane panicked giggle*
You’re shitting me. Y-you *hysterical wheeze* You’re SHITTING ME. HELL NO. Hel- *panicked wheeze-laugh* Fuck. Fuck. Fuckity fuckfuckfuckfuc- *chokes on spit* Lord take me baaaaaack, I don’t have faith but I BELIEVE. PLEASE.
She is, not having a good time, fr 👍
Praising her near perfect memory to high hells and hardly able to hear herself over the sounds of Sonata in What The Fuck Universe blasting in her head. It will swiftly top the charts of mental soundtracks, right alongside those old standbys of Its Blorbo Time and Where Are My Oreos. Rip girly.
She overslept for university once and got dropped into a political hellscape nightmare of genocide and looming war on the backdrop of late 19th century medical knowledge and sanitation in a 16th century setting.
She is on the floor, trying not to vomit over the fact that she has a male body now, and Ron knocks on the door.
*blaring siren noises*
No way in satan will she be able to play Cale Henituse. She’s Canadian, she apologizes to inanimate objects! She’s never touched a bottle of alcohol in her actual life and dies of mortification anytime she has to tell people what to do.
Successfully pretending to be an alcoholic spoiled young master of a rich noble family? Lmao you’re funny - Jane, currently having a breakdown to the kazoo version of ‘it’s the final countdown.’
She manages a croaky ‘I’m fine’ that is in no way convincing and tries to pathetically peel herself off the floor - the floor… which is made of pure marble, and probably more expensive than her life, tuition, and organs put together.
*shaky cry-wheeze*
She stumbles up onto her feet and nearly falls over, again trying not to vomit as the reality of a male body reasserts itself, painfully adjusting to a different center of mass and body weight + shape.
She takes one step and debates letting herself trip and smash her skull into the floor,, maybe, with luck, it’ll kill her and take her out of this nightmare. That or she can blame all of her… everything, on a radical personality change from brain damage.
She doesn’t, and now she has to go and talk to … to t-the *insane giggle of hysteria* the trained assassin standing on the other side of the door.
The trained assassin, who will probably take her to see Deruth,, who will even more probably react very poorly to a stranger wearing the face of his firstborn son like a carnival mask, or a skin suit.
This does not bode well for her immediate future, or her long term future, or her any future actually now that she thinks about it. She’s not going to have a future.
They’re going to figure her out in seconds, bind her hand and foot and toss her into the dungeons like a criminal, set an execution date for sometime in the next three days, and that will be it.
*high pitch panicked sound*
Somewhere over the rainbow in the back of Jane’s head as she reaches for the door handle there is a shrieking tea kettle noise that is her sanity finally kicking the bucket and dragging her mental stability down with it.
She opens the door and Ron greets her with false concern and plenty genuine curiosity and suspicion that makes her feel like crawling into a hole and dying.
Over the noise of the first movement of the symphony This Man Has Killed People, characterized by its crawling centipede feeling and disassociative panic, Jane manages to deflect and cone Ron into guiding her to where the rest of the family is gathered in the dining room.
If she’s upfront about whatever the fuck this bullshittery is maybe it will score her some points into avoiding the execution and/or being tortured for information pipeline she has found herself speeding down like a particularly rickety raft rocketing towards the lip of Niagara Falls and certain doom.
That, and maybe she can convince them to postpone the execution by offering to give them all the information she has on the rapidly approaching Beginning of the End for free, without the need to torture her in any way whatsoever.
She shuffles her feet along the hallway and does her best not to wobble *insert losing five minutes to body dysphoria here* and by the skin of her fucking teeth shuts down Ron’s attempts to ask what’s wrong with something along the lines of ‘I’ll only explain once, you can wait until we get to the dinning room’
She wants to fucking die. Imagine snubbing someone who could kill you with utterly zero remorse,, *terror-hysterical giggle* couldn’t be her.
They get to the dining room and Deruth, Violan, Basen, and Lily look up when she and Ron walk in. The sudden wave of guilt at the shock and joy in their eyes over ‘Cale’ coming to eat breakfast with them threatens to eat her alive.
She’s about to tell them that their son/brother is effectively dead, that she has no idea what happened to him, and that she, a complete stranger out of space and world and time, has stolen his body for her own.
The heavy, ornate wooden door clicks shut behind her and the room goes blurry, tilting on its axis. Her tears spill over and the first warbled cry sends the room into concerned panic.
Jane stumbles away from Ron when he reaches out and she lands harshly on the floor in a way that definitely hurts,, she is too busy having a shitty fucking breakdown to notice,, and over the flurry of overlapping voices chokes out something like ‘I’m sorry’
She hates having breakdowns, they always manage to make her feel like trash that has been eaten and then regurgitated by a mangy fox onto the concrete sidewalk of a rundown city, but the tears don’t stop and neither do the words.
You know, when she said ‘explain to them what’s happened and then beg at their feet for life in exchange for information’ she meant that in a professional-collected way, not, ‘cry, emotionally manipulate them by making them think that their isolated son/brother with a crap attitude and a drinking problem finally hit the breaking point, and ultimately fail to get across the situation through her tears’ kind of way.
Eventually, after a solid ten minutes of nothing but incoherent sounds and a vaguely understandable litany of ‘I’m sorry’ ‘I’m not Cale’ ‘I don’t know what happened’ ‘I’m so sorry’ ‘I don’t know where he is’ ‘I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry’, Jane calms down enough to actually speak.
She looks up at the pale worried faces of the people that are still functioning under the assumption that she is Cale Henituse, and she is sucker punched in the gut by such an acute feeling of ‘I’m a monster’ that she almost throws up.
She doesn’t and instead steels her stomach and her voice, looks Deruth in the eye, and tells him as steadily as she can that her name is Jane, that she is not Cale Henituse, and that she does not know where his son is or what happened to him or why she is in his body, and that she is rather certain that this, whatever this is exactly, is not reversible.
She can tell that at first they don’t think she is someone else, that they think her words are the way ‘Cale’ is telling them about some identity crisis/realization (which is surprisingly progressive of them considering the fact that as far as she could tell from the eleven volumes she read of The Birth of a Hero the world is based on medieval Europe), but by the end of her explanation,, which may have turned into a shaky ramble, they believe her.
She’s kind of rung out from crying but in the background of her mind she is mentally composing her own requiem. This is it. This is where she dies. Goodbye cruel world.
*mental giggle of horror and panic*
Good news for Jane, she is pathetic enough to have convinced Violan of her innocence in the matter of body snatching,, and Violan has steamrolled an angry, spectacularly un-stab-le Deruth and an intensely suspicious Ron into not making hasty decisions of putting Jane’s head on the chopping block for crimes against all that is sacred.
Basen and Lily have been kinda shuffled over to the side of the room to stand together and stare at the stranger begging their parents and head butler for her life with the voice and face of their distant older brother that they never really knew.
They feel some type of way about it.
There is some vague horror, the knowledge that the person speaking and moving in Cale’s body is not actually Cale and instead a complete stranger they know nothing about, but they would like her to be spared anyway because, well, the opinion might be attributed to their age, Basen only fifteen and Lily only seven, but to them Jane does not seem bad. Not malicious or greedy or gleeful or anything.
After Jane had panickedly shouted ‘I have information on the future! Information that could be useful to you!’ when the denial on Deruth’s face began to shift towards rage and in response Ron had asked her to explain what she meant by that, she had glanced at them.
She had glanced at them with an expression that conveyed ‘I don’t want to scare them’ so clearly even those with poor vision could see it, and then asked for the date.
When Lily tells her the date Jane does an impression of a deflating balloon bc thank all the gods she doesn’t believe in, it’s before March 28th.
She predicts the Harris Village Massacre and feels shitty for doing so in front of children. Deruth meets her with hostility for threatening his people, Jane almost cries, and then stares at the floor when she replies that the people will be killed by a terrorist organization from the Eastern Continent called Arm.
She then talks through the flicker of livid fury across Ron’s face by explaining that the sole survivor of the massacre is a foreign looking swordsman named Choi Han who was out in the Forest of Darkness, where he’d been trapped for a number of years beforehand, collecting medicinal herbs to help with the illness the village chief was suffering from at the time of the attack.
Jane’s mind is at this point escalating in decibels Variations in Panicked Sounds and she is desperate for them to believe her,, so she adds on the information that Choi Han will arrive at the gates of Rain City on March 30th after running for two days straight at top speed without breaks for food, water, or rest, and that he will get turned away for lack of identification.
Violan, aka the only semi-stable adult in the room, moves past Deruth and motions at Ron to calm the fuck down even though she is becoming increasingly aware that he is very dangerous and that she has absolutely zero actual control over him,, and takes Jane gently by the hands and tells her in a steely voice that she will write out everything she knows, that measures will be taken to prevent the tragedy of Harris Village, and that if she is incorrect about the massacre or if they find out she is involved - Her life is forfeit.
So basically, Jane has nine days to endear herself to the important inhabitants of the Henituse Castle and to pray that this world is on the exact same timing as The Birth of a Hero or she’s deader than a doornail when the clock strikes twelve on March 28th.
Where is her fairy godmother because Jane really needs to speak to her about this deal.
(Somewhere in the divine realm the God of Death makes a very delighted, slightly offended face at the comparison)
Jane is not freed from her position on the floor, backed against the wall, as Ron slips out of the dining room on a near mindless order from Deruth to go retrieve Beacrox, Hans, and Hilsman to bring them up to speed on the latest shit-fuckery to grace the territory.
Beacrox because he’s Ron’s son and Ron would’ve told him anyway, Hans because he’s Cale’s main servant,, was his main servant?, Jane’s too busy listening to her head buzz around like a bunch of angry bees to have any sort of concept of what the fuck is going on anymore,, and Hilsman because he is undoubtedly going to have to be informed about why they’re sending soldiers to Harris Village.
Jane’s stress levels make a noise reminiscent of a crushed frog when Beacrox, a torture expert, walks in alongside Ron, a professional killer for the first forty something years of his life. Her life may be spared for now but she is under no illusions of who would be holding the blade when the execution date comes.
She’s tempted to laugh. High, shaky, uncontrollable. You know, the kind that really mentally unstable people do.
She wants the floor to open up and swallow her when the new people are informed of the body snatching. Beacrox looks suspicious and defensive, Hilsman looks alarmed, and Hans seems at once blank, shaken, and angry.
‘Insert panicked laughter’ oh someone get her out of here.
Someone who could dupe all these people into thinking that they were still Cale Henituse would be so much better for the j-job ‘more panicked laughter’ of saving the world.
But outside of Choi Han, she’s all this world has for intervention. All this world has for a hope of a future less bloody, less war-torn, less doomed.
She doesn’t even know everything. Not even just the smaller detail but the big important details. She doesn’t know the face, only knows the title, has but a vague grasp on the powers and even less than that on the strengths and weaknesses of the leader of Arm. She knows only a little bit more of such for the high ranking members of the organization. A large majority of Arm’s fighting forces are faceless, nameless soldiers to her.
She sits on the floor, the other adults in the room moving and removing and adding things so she can start writing down everything she knows about Harris Village, and sways a little to the tune of Waltz in Missing Information as she organizes her thoughts.
This- this is fine. It’s fine. She’ll just… treat it like a lore dump and not her predicting the mass slaughter of people who are now actually living and breathing.
*tea kettle noise of distress*
She’s fine.
🙃
She’s fine.
Jane spends the next three and a half hours sitting at the dining room table writing, trying not to freak out over Ron looming over her shoulder, failing, freaking out, and writing some more.
In the end she produces a surprisingly coherent and comprehensive report on the Harris Village Massacre (that the novel had been unnecessarily detailed was a common complaint in reviews, but the level of detail had appealed to Jane, which is why she’d picked up the series in the first place).
She’s thanking all the four leaf clovers she used to find as a kid right now bc holy shit was that a lot of information that will hopefully go into preserving her continued existence.
And the villagers continued existence.
She’ll probably lose her head if any of them die, although whether it’s literally or psychologically is yet to be determined.
Basen and Lily were shuffled out of the doors some time around when Jane was unceremoniously plucked off the floor and set in a chair as to not have to be around all the stressing/distressing things contained and talked about in the room.
They go sit in Basen’s room, have a good cry and a long talk about how they feel about the situation and what they both want to do about it. They probably slip away to Edro’s restaurant for some comfort from him because the man is essentially their grandfather too.
Deruth is sitting with his head in his hands,, which, by the way, is in no way, shape, or form stressing Jane out,, Hilsman disappeared sometime around the one hour mark after he and a still-present Violan finished hashing out a semi-concrete plan for the beginnings of increased security both in Rain City and beyond, and Beacrox and Hans had to leave to go attend their duties with the latter dully accepting Ron’s workload for the day when the older butler made no indication of doing the same.
Jane is *wheeze-cry-laugh of despair* already so tired of this life/nightmare and she hasn’t even been here for half a day yet.
She kind of really wants to go home even though there’s nothing waiting for her but her shitty, lonely apartment full of her granny’s things that she gave to her to take care of when she died two years ago and left Jane all by herself, and her university classes and crappy retail jobs.
Jane never had much luck with friends and she’d lived with her granny almost her whole life. Her mum had appeared out of the blue and shoved her into her granny’s arms one cloudy May evening when Jane was two with an angry terrified explanation of ‘I can’t do this, I’m gonna hurt her so you take her’ and the only time Jane had seen her after that was when custody was signed over. She’d never met her dad and she wouldn’t have even if she’d stayed with her mum because the bastard had bailed on her the second he found out she was pregnant.
Jane has been tired and lonely for a long time now, she just wants to rest in peace. She won’t get that even if she survives the nine days to prove herself valuable and they keep her around after she’s given them all the information she can, what with the current and future state of the world.
She’ll just have to… fix it. Somehow. Make it better. And then she can lie in the sun and not do anything.
*slacker life noises in the background*
Jane pulls her knees up to her chest, panics for a second about it being rude and disrespectful and then decides against what is probably better judgement that she doesn’t care and needs the self-comforting position right now, and stares up at Deruth, Violan, and Ron as they pass around and read through her positively jaw-dropping fifteen page report.
She’s surprised she managed to write that much but also not really. She’s always been a fast writer and it’s not just the number of assassins and a description of the death squad’s uniforms, but also:
- Paths of attack
- Fighting styles and the near unanimous kill methods used
- Weapons, both of the assassins and those used by the villagers in futile defense of their home
- The damage done to the village
- Something amounting to a play-by-play of the brutal, meticulous manner in which the death squad decimated the population of Harris Village
- Weak points, choke points, and hiding spots (all indicated on a detailed map)
- A lengthy four and a half page explanation on how the squad got into the kingdom, into Henituse territory, and to the village in the first place with out being detected or reported as suspicious involving another map, this time of the Forest of Darkness, marked with multiple potential routes (she may or may not have also implicated/explicitly called out several different noble houses from the northeast region, all of whom are allied with the northwest faction headed by the Stan March), and
- A page on Choi Han himself, including a sketch, a brief a explanation on his lack of identification that amounts to ‘he got abandoned in the Forest of Darkness, was stuck in there for multiple years, only escaped recently and was found by people from Harris Village who took him in’, and a blurb on his fighting style, strength, and some vague words on his character
When the older adults finish reading their faces are grim, shadowed by anger and betrayal and other things.
Ron is holding her account of the attack. His hands shake faintly and Jane wonders quietly to herself if it’s because he’s livid or if it’s because he’s remembering the attack on his own family. She thinks it’s both.
Violan tells her over Deruth’s expletive-filled muttering about traitors that if this information proves to be true it will probably have to be brought to the crown’s attention and Jane shifts, takes a deep breath, and the words stick in her throat.
Three sets of eyes turn to her and the level of dread in the room skyrockets in sync with the crescendo of movement five of the symphony We’re All Going To Die that blasts Jane’s mind with sound.
She tells them in a creaking voice that cuts out halfway through that it would have to be brought to the crown’s attention anyway because Arm is going to bomb the Plaza of Glory during the king’s birthday speech.
There is a long moment of silence for the ignorance that could have been.
Deruth and Violan share a look of pale horror that reminds Jane that it is already in the works for Basen to attend the celebration. Reading through the injuries Basen sustained in the attack had been enough to twist her heart already but it is even worse now that she’s actually seen him, her overactive imagination pasting the gruesome burns over his side and warping his right leg into a mangled mess trampled by the screaming crowd before Amiru had hauled him up off the ground and dragged him out of the way.
Maybe she can convince them to let her go in Basen’s place. Maybe she can prevent that, even if she can’t prevent the attack itself.
Jane had been about to plead as such when Deruth sighs, massages his forehead for a moment, and then asks her if there is anything else pressing that they should know about.
Jane considers this weary question a significant improvement from three hours ago when Deruth looked about ready to snap her spine like a twig for stealing Cale’s body. She takes a moment to stare at the tabletop and debate what she should tell them first.
*cricket noises*
Violan slides her another piece of paper and her quill in response to the pause for thought. Information on the Blue Wolf Tribe Massacre comes as easy as breathing.
As she starts writing again Deruth pulls Ron into a quiet discussion on what he knows about Arm,, because it’s obvious to anyone with eyes that Ron is familiar with them to some extent,, and Jane sympathizes so hard with the small wince Deruth makes when Ron explains that Arm is the reason he and Beacrox had to flee the Eastern Continent.
They’re taking this seriously. She’s surprised. She’d have thought that they would remain suspicious and hostile for, forever actually, but a lot longer than this. Maybe throw in dragging her to the nearest Church of the Sun God to purify her in hopes that this will be reversed or at least taking her to make a Vow of Death on her innocence and telling the truth about her predictions.
These people *wary side eye* seem to sort-of believe her already *more wary side eye* which is weird because she has just essentially killed their son/charge and told them that the world is gonna go down the crapper while wearing his face.
Maybe it’s because it’s Cale’s face. She can see that every time they look at her they have to remind themselves that it isn’t actually Cale sitting at the dining room table dutifully writing page after page of information.
Either way, they seem to have let it go for now,, they’re not over it, she isn’t stupid enough to think that suddenly they are completely fine with a stranger wearing their family member’s face, but for now,, as long as she is useful.
She feels kinda shitty, making them choose between grieving and addressing the looming threat she is slowly outlining like that.
Cale Henituse, whatever happened to him when she crash landed in his body, probably feels even more shitty if he can see what course the road has taken. His family moving past the sudden loss of him because his body snatcher, innocent as she might be of intentionally committing the crime, has information that could save lives,, every life but his own.
Her quill pauses over her paper, right in the middle of her explanation of the death squad’s method of child murder, and Sonata in Existential Crisis echoes over her mental speakers.
Wow. *panicked shaky cry-laugh* oh wow. She just killed someone and then cut out all the time his family should have been able to spend mourning his death by telling them that if they don’t do something in the next nine days some of their people’s fates are sealed.
Sonata in Existential Crisis combines with movement four of the symphony We’re All Going To Die into the hit remix So You Thought You Were Coping and Jane wants to cry all over again.
She sniffles a little, scrubs a hand over her watery eyes, and goes back to writing. She doesn’t have time to panic over becoming a murderer or that she essentially tap danced like a secretary bird to a snake’s head over all the sore spots of the people who will kill her.
She has decided, mentally, that after she’s finished writing about the Wolf Tribe Massacre she’ll write about Arm - what she knows about it as an organization, what she knows about its members, its goals, its allies, etc - an overview of sorts to let them get a picture of the threat.
Writing about Arm’s allies will segway into her talking about the Northern Alliance, because the sooner they know about that impending invasion the sooner they can start preparing for it - and hopefully not die.
The pace of the books had really picked up after the fifth volume (it had honestly felt a bit like the author was rushing) and while the two books after it had mainly focused on the far reaching aftermath of the Plaza Terror Incident, politicking, and character moments, by the beginning of the eighth volume war had been on their doorstep.
She’ll have to be clear that if they want to warn other southern countries they can’t warn Mogoru - or Caro, because Caro is allied with the empire - as Mogoru’s imperial family is closely tied to Arm.
*disassociative moment of processing*
*hysterical panicked laugh*
Oh god it’s all such a fucking mess.
The leader of Arm has hands in everything, pulling strings in the shadows like they’re all just puppets dancing to his tune. Like the world is a game of chess and he’s the master (so who’s the grandmaster?).
He never showed his face, not even once, over the course of the conflict covered by the last three books Jane had read. He hadn’t felt the need to, because everything was going according to plan.
Violan taps the space beside her paper with an elegant finger and Jane realizes that she has again stopped writing, her mind apparently more inclined to spin itself into knots with panic rather than doing anything helpful about the approaching end of the world.
She’d put her feet back on the floor at some point and she feels tempted to draw them back up as she mumbles a ‘sorry’ and prepares to return to writing about a suggestion of passing an early warning through the Flynn Merchant Guild as they do business with the wolves. She nearly startles out of her skin when Ron plucks the quill out of her hand with a benign smile and a not-suggestion of perhaps having something to eat.
She hadn’t realized she was hungry until he said it but she is actually kind of starving so she gives him a timid nod, folding her legs half under her on the chair. She figures it’s probably the height of disrespectful but none of them have said anything about her weird sitting positions so she continues to do so.
She thinks it’s maybe because it makes it easier for them to remember that no matter her physical appearance the person sitting at the table is not Cale, because Cale Henituse would never be caught dead sitting on his knees in a chair. Probably.
Not even seven minutes later,, which tells her that while she was writing and having a crisis they were doing things,, Ron walks back into the dining room with three plates balanced on his arms, one for Deruth, one for Violan, and one for her.
It’s kind of weird he isn’t eating with them to Jane’s modern sensibilities but he is their servant so it sort of makes sense. Sort of. In a hierarchy and power structure kind of way. He may have been the patriarch of an assassin household on par with the upper echelon of noble families once, but he’s a servant now, as high ranking and respected as he obviously is.
It’s kinda uncomfortable so Jane resolves to not think about it for the time being. She does feel a bit like a small useless child when Ron hands her a knife and fork after she stares for too long at the assembly of various types of cutlery on the table though.
She’d been about to cut into her food when her mind decides to blast Variations in Sanitation Violations to remind her that this world is based on medieval Europe, which is far from positively known for its sanitation practices.
She stops, stares, figures that it maybe won’t kill her and she’s too hungry and tired to care, and starts eating.
During her walk through the castle to the dining room she’d noticed that it wasn’t quite like what she’d been expecting on a sanitation level, so she’s choosing to take that, pray this world is like an actual fantasy world brought to life in the fact that it conveniently ignores the less nice aspects of history, and believe that the hygiene practices are something approaching semi-modern standards.
At least, being dropped into Cale Henituse’s body, she doesn’t have to worry about all the new pathogens in this world.
*biology brain moment*
Choi Han does though. In the middle of fuck all nowhere he probably doesn’t have to worry about it too much, so far away from the disease breeding ground of a city, but when he gets here he’ll have to be careful.
*biology brain moment again*
He probably brought a lot of pathogens with him from earth. :/
Maybe she can convince them to let her quarantine him for a bit, like, for a day maybe,, and also douse him in bleach because they don’t have lysol. Like, sure, he’s been here for fuck knows how many dozens of years and interacted with people already, but it can’t hurt to be extra cautious. They really can’t risk something like an influenza outbreak with war on the horizon.
Violan interrupts her germ spiral by asking her what made her stop writing earlier. Jane pauses to stare at her, fork halfway to her mouth, and then puts the cutlery down as the third movement of We’re All Going To Die, which really took to heart Liszt Invention #3: the devil has all the best tunes, begins to play.
Jane shifts in her seat, folds one leg up to her chest, and manages a explanation along the lines of ‘there’s a lot of’ *hesitation* ‘a lot of things in the future that are’ *hesitation again* ‘scary’
She shifts uncomfortably under their disapproving stares at such a lackluster answer, and then asks them if Rain City is their northernmost fortress in the territory. It is, she knows it is.
Deruth asks her why she needs to know that, and her response is something like ‘you’ll want to reinforce your castle walls, preferably to the point that it would take, like, a dragon to break through them’ *hesitation* ‘and’ *more hesitation* ‘ballistas. You’ll need them.’
The disapproving stares turn into stares of shock and Jane feels like she sort-of-maybe shouldn’t have said that, so she follows it up with ‘I plan on writing out an outline of the reasons for that after writing down everything I know about Arm, so it should be on your desk by’ *insert algebra lady meme here* ‘tomorrow morning? at the latest’
Violan inclines her to finish eating quickly so she can move to Cale’s study that some of the maids have spent the morning cleaning and get back to writing. Jane, inclined to keep her new head and thus ready to do as ordered, tucks back into her food.
She’s something of a picky eater and she has to admit, the food is rather good, especially considering Beacrox does practically everything by himself when normal kitchens of this vague time period have,, so many workers each.
As she finishes her food Deruth informs her that Ron and Hans will keep and eye on her,, when these decisions were made she has no idea,, and that she will work in Cale’s study and sleep in his room.
She can tell that saying such things pains Deruth so she gives him a meek nod,, that probably doesn’t help,, and follows Ron out the door.
He doesn’t say anything the entire walk to the study, content to simply observe in that silent unnerving way of assassins (somewhere in the background of Jane’s mind This Man Has Killed People transitions into the fourth movement), and the room he leads her to feels like the kind of space that movie Beethoven would play Moonlight Sonata in.
Which means it is (still) dusty, old, fancy, and covered in dappled lighting that lands on the abandoned pages and books just so. All that’s missing is an old piano.
She sits down at the desk and finds it comfy enough, allowing for a range of movement that will let her sit in a number of odd positions, and picks up her quill.
Ron continues to watch her like a hawk but he doesn’t threaten her beyond his presence, and she swiftly distracts herself from the uncomfortable silence by focusing on the information arranging itself in her head.
After writing an overview of the northern alliance she’ll have to take a detour to talk about the Stan March, and then the Plaza Terror Incident.
Writing an expose about the corruption within the imperial family of Mogoru as well as the Alchemist Bell Tower is important, but they’re on a bit of a longer timeline than the baby dragon trapped in a cave in Tolz territory and the rapidly approaching attack on the kingdom itself.
Jane writes for a few hours until her brain feels mushy, has a breakdown about having a male body that takes a thankfully patient Ron an hour to drag her out of, writes some more, eats the dinner brought to her by a more stable looking Hans at about nine, and goes back to writing.
She wakes up in Cale Henituse’s room the next day, apparently having fallen asleep at the desk, and all her fleeting hopes of everything being just a very vivid lucid dream (she wouldn’t put it past her imagination) are dashed the second she opens her eyes.
She goes about getting ready, loses forty minutes to a body dysphoria episode but she only throws up once compared to the three times of yesterday’s breakdown so progress, and tries her best not to squirm as a trio of cautious but professional maids dress her for the day.
She’s infinitely glad it’s women and not men that dress her but she would rather dress herself in all honesty. Not that she would be able to with the level of complexity of even a ‘simple’ outfit because she lived in hoodies and sweatpants outside of work uniforms, but she can dream. Either way, Waltz in Historical Clothing Is Trying My Patience plays in the background the whole time.
She is shuffled over to the study by Hans, who brings her breakfast thirty minutes later courtesy of Beacrox, and sits down to read through her writing to make sure it all makes sense and that she hasn’t missed anything.
When they had asked her how she knew the future she had honest to god kind of lied through her teeth but also not really. She’d told them that her people (all the other people on earth but they don’t need to know that) had a very strong predictive ability (technically true, anyone else could have read The Birth of a Hero and, presumably, ended up in her position) but that it required a very good memory to use in an effective manner (true, being able to remember all the little details mentioned in a series of books as long and information heavy as those written by Nelan Barrow is very rare).
They’d bought it thank fuck. *relieved panicked wheeze noise* She hadn’t really wanted to give them the existential crisis of telling them she’d learned about them and their lives (and also their deaths which she is decidedly not thinking about right now) in something as impersonal as a book.
Deruth comes to visit her some time after she’s begun detailing all the ways that the Stan March is corrupt (which includes a section on how diverting Taylor Stan’s imminent depression spiral and following murder is a good idea because he is genuinely the only one out of the three mostly-of-age siblings who is in anyway a good choice to take over after their father is disposed: not Venion because he’s so twisted it would be like reinstalling the marquess, and not Maya because she actually has crippling anxiety about leading and it would be nice to spare her that stress), and he looks like he’s standing before a grave as he walks into the room.
She doesn’t bring attention to it and simply slides the stack of papers over to him. She tells him as he picks the top report up that ‘there’s other information to go with it but’ *cringe* ‘it’ll probably take her a number of days to write it all out, if he’s thinking of sending it to the crown’
Deruth sighs and Jane feels compelled to apologize for all the grief she’s causing him (both stress-grief and grief-grief).
When he asks her to give a summary of what ‘other information’ there is she explains that there’s the Plaza Terror Incident (which by her own slightly pessimistic timeline should be written by about three this afternoon), the multiple other terror attacks that followed, the expose on Mogoru’s imperial family and alchemists, and the very long, in-depth report on the politics, battles, and casualties of the war (she does not want to be in the room when the king learns that if something doesn’t change his kingdom is damned).
She also tells him that there are other things that would probably be helpful to know (like the mermaids being allied with Arm, all the deaths of people who’s loss only further damned the world, the happenings of other kingdoms, and the fact that Arm seems to be targeting the remaining dragons and the world tree) but those are the parts that pertain to Roan’s future most specifically.
Deruth sighs again, world-weary like he wishes to go back to when he woke up yesterday morning and there wasn’t a stranger wearing his son’s face and he didn’t have the knowledge of impending doom weighing on his shoulders, and tells her that they weren’t going to act on anything beyond their own borders until her predictions are given some credit as truthful.
She nods agreeably at that and holds her tongue on telling him she’s sorry. He hands the papers to Ron, who’d been pulled into helping Deruth chart a rough course of action instead of watching her for today, makes a face like he was going to say something and then decided against it, and walks out the door to return to his office.
The rest of the day passes in liminal hours of writing, a brief break on the balcony for some sun and fresh air, more writing, Hans telling her that a group of knights, including Hilsman, will be setting out for Harris Village bright and early tomorrow morning after she started to spiral about what was being done to help them, even more writing, scarfing down the food Ron brought her at around seven, and then even more writing until she was dragged to bed at ten o’clock and put to sleep.
She wakes up on her third day in hell to the sound of Where Are My Oreos acting as her alarm clock for the first time since she got here. She’s in fucking withdrawals. She’s half convinced that the manufacturers put drugs in the icing to keep people addicted.
On top of dealing with not being able to eat foods that have been directly injected with pure sugar she also has to deal with the alcohol withdrawal because she has not touched the stuff since she unwillingly commandeered the alcoholic body of eighteen year old Cale Henituse.
Jane kind of hates this. Just a little bit. A lot a bit maybe.
And she’s also Not Thinking about how any of this works on like, an actual biological level. It’s not her brain in this skull and it’s a recipe for Sonata in Existential Crisis to wonder about it.
She gets up, struggles through getting ready for the second day in a row (she is so tired of the body dysphoria already, please can she just be female again), walks the familiar path to the study, sits down and starts writing.
Her mind has accepted it as routine now apparently. An exhausting one, both physically (her hand cramps so bad and her spine hates her for sitting for so long) and mentally (the special kind of strain that comes from knowing that if she misses something there are people’s lives on the line, her own included).
Hans is concerned. Just a little bit. Maybe. He’s not making eye contact with the fact that he’s concerned for the well being of the person that accidentally stole the young master’s body but, it’s still there. It’s kind of twisting his insides and he needs it to stop immediately.
He gives Ron a Look when the older butler walks into the study with food for the not-young master and receives a semi-indecipherable one in return after the man glances at the weirdly blank face of the woman(?)(The breakdown he’d been partially witness to yesterday morning had certainly indicted a woman, which is something he is determinedly Not Thinking About).
No help from that quarter. Back to square one.
A walk around the gardens maybe? That would probably be too out of character and raise alarms. Carefully monitored social interaction? Young Master Basen and Young Lady Lily had been badgering the count and his wife to be able to talk to the stranger wearing their brother’s skin after all.
He’ll bring it up. Somehow. She kind of really looks like she could use a break from all the doom.
By noon Hans is resisting the urge to tap his foot on the floor as Ron herds Basen and Lily over to the study to visit the not-young master after it had been decided that it would be better for them to meet the stranger when they were all aware of it rather than just finding a way.
Jane looks up when Ron walks in with the children on his heels with an expression that conveys that she’d expected to never see them again and that she’s very much wondering who thought it would be a good idea for them to be in the same room.
She pretty sure having your older brother replaced overnight by a stranger wearing his face counts as traumatic. Or something.
No really, who thought this was a good idea.
The two stand next to each other in front of Jane, shuffle their feet a little bit, and when Basen opens his mouth to speak Lily talks before he can say anything, cutting over the silence with something like ‘orabeoni is gone’
Jane wants to die.
Basen makes a face like he wants the floor to swallow him at the very very blunt way his sister describes the situation.
Jane gives them a guilty look and tells them that she’s sorry, and that if she knew how to get Cale back she would have. They both give her a small nod at that and Basen explains that they wanted to learn about her.
Jane thinks that letting kind, soft hearted children conceptualize her as a person with a life when she’s probably going to die sometime soon is a very bad idea.
She gives Ron a Look and motions Basen and Lily to take a seat, because apparently they were actually doing this. What follows is something like Twenty Questions.
They ask her her name (Jane Hastings), her age (24), her job (technically she works at a cafe, she also tells them that she’s something of a scholar and her field of study is humans), her favourite colour (blue, she’s basic), her favourite flower (bearded iris), and her hobbies (not much, she’s kind of busy and exhausted, but she likes orchestral music and plays an instrument occasionally (she talks around saying the word piano because she isn’t sure if that’s been invented here yet))
In turn she asks them about themselves, their likes and dislikes, favourite foods, favourite parts of the castle, etc. She avoids the topic of inheritance like the plague but indulges in Lily’s ramble about becoming a knight with a small smile.
When they leave it’s been a little over an hour and Jane maybe-sort-of stares at her desk and disassociates for like five minutes after the door shuts and it’s just her and Hans again.
That was fine. It’s fine. She’s refusing to take that as an indication of her future survival. She is not. At all. Totally. (Please. Please. Please let it be an indication that they aren’t going to kill her).
She goes back to writing, Sonata in The Future’s Bright, often transposed into the relatable meme version of Sonata in The Future’s Bright (It’s An Atomic Bomb), playing in her head.
She wraps up her report on the Plaza Terror Incident and double checks she added that segment on Redika explaining that he was eventually killed by other members of Arm, or at least people adjacent to it, although the whole situation was sort of unclear. Something to do with vampires and experiments.
If they can figure out what the hell he did involving vampires that got him killed they could potentially reveal that information after the attack on the plaza, where it then has the possibility of reaching the ears of his killers in the original timeline and causing them to fast track his death,, thus throwing a wrench in the plans for the other attacks that followed.
She hopes.
Jane remembers that his last name was mentioned to be Mawlin, and during the second confrontation with him he’d monologued about having ‘left behind his wealth for greatness’ so he was obviously of some renown, which should make him easier to find at least. Probably. Maybe.
*sighs like a five year old with old man energy*
She scuffs her foot on the floor and mutters petulantly about how maybe if Choi Han is on the scene from the start this time then maybe Redika can just die during the plaza bombing. That would be nice.
Time passes and Jane blinks and suddenly there is food in front of her, the light of the sunset streaming through the study’s windows, ten more pages of information on the various other terrorist attacks on Roan that came after the Plaza of Glory and three on the invasion.
Ron gives her a smile that she doesn’t buy for a second and a more genuine comment on her impressive work ethic (she’ll take that, who the fuck else can sit down for ten+ hours for days in a row and do nothing but write?).
She gives him a thanks that is more mild than meek, a sure sign that she is, by miracle of god and disassociation, acclimating to having murderers around her at all hours of the day, and does her best to not shovel the meal down her throat like a starving peasant.
It’s late when she takes pity on a sleepy looking Hans and decides to go to bed, the hallways still unfamiliar but she’s been so uniformly tired at the end of each day that she passes straight out when she goes to sleep rather than lying awake and jumping at every moving shadow and noticed sound.
It’s something she’s quietly grateful for. Now she’ll just have to she if she remains as such tomorrow.