DAMAGED GOODS

You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.
MARY OLIVER / Wild Geese

               It begins, as any and all tragedies do, with a man's blood on a little girl's hands. Bordeaux wine diluted with salt water and spilt on stolen canvases and marble buried in a little corner of Oregon. Syrupy and honey-like in its texture, metallic and rotten in its scent. It begins with a Father who is no such thing, and a Daughter who never requested to be such. The thread snaps on an unassuming night—no forewarning, no fraying, only the cut of a pair of sharp, antique silver scissors and the resounding symphony of gunshots like a requiem to artists of days past.

           Juliette LeRoy is an observer. Growing up in a house where her every move was subtly watched, she learned to gaze with even more discretion—don't let them see you coming, kid, and sure as shit don't let them see you leave. It is a tale as old as time: the student bests the teacher, takes his lessons and sharpens them like knives, hones them, turns them on him. They brought it upon themselves, Juliette says, what is their indignation born from? She does not care to find out. She cares naught for men who underestimate her; not until their eyes are widening in fear as they realise their mistakes.

           Five years go by, and Juliette has seen another ocean. She has met another father and told him, as she looked in his eyes with all the fury of a little girl who holds onto grudges like children her age hold onto their parents' hands, no, thank you. She has seen the mother dig a grave and throw herself into it, patiently waiting for someone to cover her decaying body with dirt. She knows the sisters and keeps them at arm's length with the pitiful excuse of not wanting the poison in her veins to drip onto them, were she to be cut. She has traded the jewels and the Magrittes for the heaviness of a striker's racquet. Portland is far away, La Rochelle farther even, and New Orleans is not home, but it could be.

           Enter, David Wymack and his rag-tag team of misfits and ticking time-bombs threatening to detonate and devastate everything in their wake who offer her a place among their ranks, where the likes of her  ( read: young adults running from something, children buried years ago and who only just crawled out of their early graves, all of them damaged goods )  can pretend at not being hopeless long enough that they may, somehow, manage to make the statement true.

           Once scattered across the country akin to the broken apart pieces of an accursed doll that only ever brings terror when tacked together, monsters are brought together on court that too often seems like a battlefield—twins in nothing but the blood that runs in and out of their veins, a cousin desperately attempting to keep all the cracked pieces of a new family together, a once and soon to be again legend terrified of his own podium, a hungry thief dying to own things that did not belong to another first, and a newcomer with secrets spilling out of him like an overflowing sink. The press calls them lunatics, hazards, traitors, and the Class I teams believe hard as stone they will have the last laugh.

           Only, the past can never be escaped, and neither can vultures. When cunning foxes steal the less repulsive half of their ticket to Championships, a toy promised to them nearly a decade ago and a girl who forced a debt upon them, the discarded branch of the Moriyama empire decides they will not sit back and watch as it happens. They will take what is rightfully theirs.

           But Juliette asks them, then, can you truly steal from a thief? Can you kill a killer?

JULIETTE 'JULES' LEROY
Palmetto Foxes / #11

A lover? Maybe. Something tender,
anyway. But tender like a bruise.
MARIE RUTKOSKI / The Winner's Kiss

PALMETTO FOXES
Danielle 'Dan' Wilds / #01
Kevin Day / #02
Andrew Minyard / #03
Matthew 'Matt' Boyd / #04
Aaron Minyard / #05
Seth Gordon / #06
Allison Reynolds / #07
Nicholas 'Nicky' Hemmick / #08
Renee Walker / #09
Neil Josten / #10
David Wymack / Coach

& &

Darren Moore / Edgar Allan Ravens
Riko Moriyama / Edgar Allan Ravens
Célia Duval-Chastain / USC Trojans
Tara Duval-Chastain
Katelyn McKenzie / PSU Vixens
Prof. Olivia Banks

THE MOTHER'S SON: Why do you still call him that? He's not your real father.
THE FATHER'S DAUGHTER: There's a certain type of ruin only a father can leave behind.

CREDITS — i do not own the all for the game series, all credit for its plot and characters and disturbing points go to nora sakavic. that said, some things will be changed in this story, mostly the whole casual trauma dumping side of things. honestly my memory of reading the books is fuzzy and very mixed with all the fanon material i've been inhaling for years, so, yeah. i'm gonna try, at the very least, acknowledging the numerous obvious issues in this story.

WARNINGS — mentions of torture, mentions of past child abuse & neglect, mentions of past/off-screen sexual assault, murder, mentions of gun violence, threats of & actual physical violence, drug use & addiction & overdose, underage drinking, alcoholism, reckless driving, mental health issues (post-traumatic stress disorder, eating disorders, dissociation/derealisation), references to self-harm, depictions of medication withdrawals, unhealthy coping mechanisms, violence, implied/referenced sexual content, minor character deaths.

also, i think i should throw that out here, too: the characters in aftg are all messed up! they are assholes with fucked up moral codes and they do shitty things and say shittier things even, and juliette is not an exception to that rule! i, of course, do not condone the characters' actions—whether they're mine or nora's. this is a work of fiction, and its characters don't reflect on the author's opinions or values.

DTS — to the lovely lovcdrunk who is always the first to hear about my stories and #1 supporter every time. they also made the cover for this fic, which is absolutely gorgeous if you ask me! and of course to my fellow kevin day enjoyer, jeanskirstein <3

NOTE — and here we go again! new acc, same old me. if you're here from my main account, welcome back, and if you're new here, well, hi :)

let's start in order: aftg is a trilogy, but this fic is going to be told in five acts, with a short pre-canon act based on the monsters' first year, which is going to be a mix of my fuzzy memories of the extra content and my own plot, and a short post-canon act because the king's men ends with a lot of loose threads and i'm too much of a perfectionist to not carefully tie up my stories. what that means is that we're not gonna be seeing kevin very soon, because i really want to set things up properly. once he's here though he'll be here to STAY.

kevin & jules are absolutely everything to me. literature and arts gf & literature and history bf. queen bf & king gf. i could go on. they're a mess, though, so don't expect any kind of emotional awareness or intelligence. give them a minute.

also! kevin's trauma from the nest is going to be a lot more developed than it is in canon—which isn't complicated seeing as it's literally ignored throughout the entire series. it's not going to be, like, graphic and particularly triggering, but it's going to acknowledged. so, yeah, just a heads up.

anyway! i don't think you need to have read the series to read this fic. i actually don't recommend the series to people out of principle. but if you're here out of curiosity from one of my other fics, i say stick around? maybe? just make sure you've read the trigger warnings, because it's heavy.

lastly, if you've read my other fics, you know i like to sneak some french in there whenever i can (cue: enjoy the silence & twin skeletons) and stick the translations in the end notes; and i could do the same in this story, but there's actually so much french in it that it would be very annoying for people who don't speak it. besides, if i did that, i'd have to do the same with the german dialogue, and all of my german teachers have successfully pissed me off to the point of swearing off ever speaking it again, so i'm not putting myself through that shit. also, there's a bit of italian in there too, and i don't speak a word of it nor do i trust google translate & reverso. so, yeah. it'll be mentioned what language is spoken in the same way it is in the books. i'm picking practicality over flexing being multilingual.

this is getting long, so i'll shut up. hope you enjoy !!

— harley !

PARASITEVES | 2023