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[dragonlady7]

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sassaffrassa https://www.tumblr.com/sassaffrassa/714807190946529280/speaking-of-mob-boss-au-bomberqueen17-has-been :

speaking of mob boss au

bomberqueen17 https://tmblr.co/MEi4sKUjTkzs4ila4vEdnuA has been doing a lot of the heavy lifting on mob boss au re: historical details and lapsed catholicism and also wrote an absolute banger of an opening scene

image inspo https://shinelikethunder.tumblr.com/post/702035988479918080

oh ho ho

I wrote a whole opening scene for this in kind of a fugue state and idk when i’ll ever get back to it but here is this scene, anyway, or most of it, starting with an injured Roche fleeing a hit gone wrong and somehow fetching up in a confession booth in the middle of the night.

“In the name of the Daughter, the Mother, and the Holy Flame,” Roche whispered. Either it was the priest or someone had caught up to kill him. He could not run any more. “Amen.”

After a suitable pause, a low voice said, soft and gentle, “May the Goddess, who has enlightened every heart, help you to know your sins and trust in Her mercy.”

Roche breathed, wheezing a little with it. But the reflex was there. “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned,” he managed. “It has been–” and then he ran up against a wall. How long? How long had it been? “– I don’t know,” he admitted, ragged. “S– seventeen. Years? Years, since my last–” He had to pause for another ragged breath. “It has been seventeen years since my last confession,” he concluded.

There was silence for several breaths, as he contemplated that, the years spooling out– how long had his mother been dead? He hadn’t even stepped foot in–

But the priest was waiting, and she hated it when he lollygagged.

“My sins are many,” he said. “I– many.” This wasn’t the time for excuses. You were supposed to be brief. “I’ve killed. I’ve killed– I don’t know. And tonight there were. It wasn’t– there weren’t supposed to be.” He had to bite down hard not to sob, remembering– he couldn’t dwell on it. The priest wasn’t here for excuses.

“You can tell me, child,” the priest murmured.

“I can’t even remember them all,” Roche said, leaning his forehead on his clasped hands. “But tonight– tonight there– there were–” He breathed, biting down on the wave of horror that wanted to explode out of his mouth. “They shouldn’t have been there. That shouldn’t have happened.”

“I understand,” the priest said. “You came out to murder, tonight, but do you think your Goddess really cares what your motives were? So you murdered more people than you meant to, is that the difference?”

The priest’s voice had changed a little; it was the same speaker, but he’d lost some of the gentleness; no louder, but his tone was more pointed, a bit sneering. Suddenly recognition pierced straight through the fog of panic and pain clouding Roche’s awareness, and he stilled.

“Iorveth,” he breathed. Leader of the Scoia’tael, who were doing enforcement for Nilfgaard now; bad news, and his worst enemy of late, and he hadn’t thought the Squirrels had been out tonight but it stood to reason they’d been watching, had been the ones to tail him here.

This was it, then. He couldn’t run, he was cornered, and the Squirrels never ran alone. He was out of time.

“I am sorry for these and all of my sins,” Roche said, and while he was at it, he kept going into the part he was supposed to say at the end because he wasn’t going to get to the end, now. “My Goddess! I am truly sorry for my sins with all my heart. In choosing to do wrong and failing to do good–”

The door burst open and Iorveth loomed there, tall and magnificent, sharp features limned in the light from the sanctuary. Roche stared up at him. There was a revolver in Iorveth’s hand, and his long braid whipped around behind his back .

“I have sinned against you,” Roche went on, staring up into the barrel of the gun as Iorveth brought it around to aim at his face.

Iorveth’s beautiful face– inhumanly beautiful, but somehow even more so than was typical for his people– twisted in fury and he changed his grip, pulling his hand back and bringing the butt of the pistol down across Roche’s shoulder with a crack. Roche buckled under it, and then Iorveth grabbed him and hauled him out of the booth, out into the broad dark space of the church aisle, single light burning ineffectually through the cool darkness.

He scrabbled futilely at him, one arm useless, but Iorveth hadn’t hit him in the face, could have broken his skull, hadn’t.

Iorveth threw him down on his back on the floor, and Roche tried to roll away but the pain was so bad he couldn’t breathe, couldn’t move. Something was broken in his shoulder. Well– there was no point fighting.

“I have sinned against you,” Roche wheezed doggedly, “who I should love above all things–”

Iorveth brought his foot down onto Roche’s chest, pinning him in place, and the brutal shock of the pain of it went right through him. Oh something was definitely broken in his shoulder, and Iorveth knew it, from the way he rocked his considerable weight forward on the ball of his foot. White-hot pain blotted out everything for a moment, Roche’s vision gone grainy– the ceiling was too far away to see in the dark anyway, but after a moment the pressure eased and the grayness faded back to the black of the too-distant ceiling. Now he could see the single electric light was some distance away but was reflecting dimly off the shade of another lamp almost directly above them, its bulb dark but its brass shade gleaming.

Who I should love above all things, Roche thought, drifting– but I have denied You, he thought, thinking of all the times he’d turned his back, uncomfortably laughed along, looked away, walked past– I have denied You more than thrice, he thought grimly. The statue of the Daughter that surely stood at the end of the nave was lost in the shadow, and he could not see her.

He didn’t have the breath to continue, and he’d lost his place. “To do penance and to sin no more,” he whispered.

“I never would have guessed you were a member of the Church,” Iorveth sneered. “You hide it so well.”

“Never would have guessed it of you either,” Roche answered truthfully, with what little breath he could whistle out of his lungs past the pressure of Iorveth’s foot.

“I’m not,” Iorveth said.

“How did you know the priest’s lines,” Roche asked, drifting a little. A little light gleamed off the gun barrel. He would die here, unshriven, that was that. Being in a holy place wouldn’t save him. And he hadn’t properly confessed. And he hadn’t been talking to a priest anyway.

“I did some hard time in the Mother of Mercy orphanage,” Iorveth said, teeth gritted.

“Oh,” Roche said. Iorveth hadn’t taken his foot off Roche’s chest, and it was grinding the ends of the broken bone– collarbone, he dimly identified– together, and it was agony. He breathed through it. “Me too,” he added vaguely. “That’s funny.”

Iorveth pressed harder, and Roche’s vision whited out. He managed to get his hand up around Iorveth’s ankle, clutching feebly at it, but there was nothing he could do. “Don’t fucking mock me,” Iorveth hissed.

All Roche could see, at the center of his vision where it wasn’t grayed-out, was the barrel of that gun, and behind it, Iorveth’s face, and behind that, the faint brass circle of the half-lit lampshade, like a halo. “Hail, Holy Queen,” he whispered, “Mother of Mercy, our life, sweetness and hope, to you do we cry–”

Iorveth hissed through his teeth and stomped down on Roche’s chest, and the gray filled in the rest of his vision and he knew no more. (Your picture was not posted)