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there comes a day when
i don't have to be a princess

──● merida
BRAVE

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Delaney woke up to the smell of wonderful breakfast, a dull pain echoing out of her head as bright light flooded her senses when she sat up. Light flooding directly into her vision. Groaning, she flopped back over on the pastel duvet of her bed, a shade of fluffy violet. Her sleep had been somewhat restless, plauged by a dream that lingered in the back of her mind.

A bright laugh pierced through the halls of the manor, and instantly she recongnized it as Raine's, bubbly and cheerful as it always was. Delaney, and many of the other siblings had the opportunity to live outside of the manor if they wanted to, but this semester with the fateful demise of their grandfather, she'd conffered with her siblings, and they'd decided to stick around to reassure that their father was perfectly okay.

A week ago, in September, his actions didn't seem promising. Not that she blamed him for feeling sorrowful, or anything like that, but she couldn't help the concern that bleed through her fingertips. She knew he had people, like Raine and Dexter, but she couldn't help but think he was closing himself off from letting people in, mostly because of his unfortunate luck with doing exactly that.

Delaney hoped he found someone. He would. She was sure of it. After all, love works in horribly mysterious ways. At least, it did in her opinion.

Pushing herself up out the bed, eyes now adjusted to the light as she picked up her phone, pocketing it. In another moment, she was flying down the stairs, quickly remembering that her younger siblings would be leaving for high school at any moment. She took the stairs cautiously, a habit she had ever since watching Yume take a rather terrible spill down them when she'd been ten years old. She'd come back with a bloody smile, and Delaney had promptly fainted on the spot.

She couldn't help the laugh that bubbled from her lips at the memory of when they were younger, running her hand down the railing of the staircase, dropping to the ground floor in a moment, and hurrying to the kitchen as another bout of Raine's laughter hit her ears. It rang across the house, a sound that never failed to make the house seem less empty. 

The table was full, as was the island, of her siblings, all of them it seemed. Evidently she was the last one up. Delaney quickly took the empty seat next to Jady, who gave her a quick smile. "Good morning!"

"Morning." She smiled back, echoing the sentiment as her eyes flicked across the table. Before she could take it all in, a plate was set in front of her, and Raine's voice, a little louder than she thought was appropriate for mornings, rang in her ears.

"Here you go, Dely." She could hear the smile in the older woman's voice as Delaney turned to look at the plate. It was half a fruit plate, making a crescent beside a couple of Belgium Waffles, a heavy lean into blueberries rather than an even distribution. Delaney nodded her thanks, picking up a fork as Jady squirmed in her seat next to her.

Kasumi, who was on the other side of her, glanced at her with a side-eye. Delaney pretended not to notice when Kas nudged Yume in the side with her head, and somewhat subtly nodding towards Delaney. Yume leaned behind the table, past Kasumi, and scanned her sister. 

"Hey, Del, did you sleep last night?"

Delaney sighed, putting her fork down and looking back to find both Kas and Yume staring at her, and feeling the slow pause of other conversations that rimmed the kitchen all around her by various siblings. It didn't take long at all for all of them to be waiting to hear her answer. Delaney knew she had a tendency for staying up late, lost in her work, but honestly so did the rest of her sibings. Which is exactly why they were so dedicated towards each other about health habits and sleep schedules.

"I did, technically-" That caused more than a few sets of muttered protest, but she shot a half-hearted glare through them. "I just had a strange dream. It was interesting."

"Interesting bad, or interesting good?" Across from her, Kei waved his fork around, "cause that will change any answer you get."

"Interesting weird." She leaned back into her seat, bringing her nail to her teeth to clip against it. "Just - weird, there was all this talk of magic, and our books were there-"

Elliot suddenly inturrupted her, uncharacteristic of him. "Wait. Wait." He paused. "Was the magic like silver, and it jumped from book to book?"

Delaney's eyes widened, and frantically she nodded, noticing that slowly her sibling's own eyes had wondered. Looks of confusion and realization began darting through each of them, and Elijah finally spoke.

"We all had the same dream?"

Reysa shook her head, "That can't be possible, maybe it's one of those shared hallucination things."

Akiho crossed arms on the table, leaning on his elbows. "Twelve of us? Sharing the same hallucination?" He shook his own head. "But it was a dream, it's not something that was real, so would that explanation even make sense?"

Jasiri clicked her tongue. "Doubt it, maybe..."

"Maybe?" Delaney raised her eyebrow, turning eyes to her sister as the rest of her siblings followed that way. She was sitting on a bar stool, looking out the window for a moment before looking back at them. 

"Maybe it was magic."

Skeptically, Elijah snorted, pushing off the counter he'd been leaning on. "Magic? Jas, as much as I appreciate your optimism, you can't be serious."

"Why not?" Her head tilted, sitting up a little taller. "Dad believes in magic, and so do I."

"I believe in science, Jasiri."

Kei waved his fork again. "You can believe in two things simutaniously. They aren't exact opposites. Like how people who follow astrology and things also can believe in God." 

"You can't be seriously considering this." Elijah sent his brother an exasperated look, clearly hoping him to be a voice of reason.

"I'm not saying I agree, I'm just saying that Jasiri believes in magic, it doesn't mean she can't believe in science."

Jasiri seemed quite content with that, smugly looking at him before looking back to Delaney, then eyes flickering to the others. "Besides, we all had the exact same dream, that can't just be random, it has to mean something.

Akiho mirrored Elijah's exasperation. "Probably that we're all going crazy."

As the siblings continued to bicker, a quick motion to begin to take sides, Delaney felt her side being poked. Kasumi was staring at her, eyes wide and alight, and whiteboard in her hand. On it, wrote: 'Look at the books.' 

Delaney nodded quickly, looking around at her siblings quickly, then slammed her hand on the table, hard. The sound ricocheted off of the room, and even with the guilt that pooled into her stomach as she watched more than half of her siblings flinch at the sound, she spoke clearly. "We need to look at the books. Lets see if they've changed or anything like that."

Glances were again exchanged, and everyone, some of them reluctantly, eventually agreed. They quickly were sprinting up to their designated rooms, and in less than a couple minutes, they were gathered in the main room, clutching books to their chest, setting them on the table as they were in the dream. The room was the same, and that hollow silence seemed to fill her ears the same way it had in the dream. She felt distanced from her siblings suddenly, eyes fixated on the books as they had been in her mind.

For a moment, nothing happened at all, but no one wanted to break the tension that had sliced between them all, gaze trained on what remained on the coffee table. Then there was a spark as morning sunlight ran through the skylight high above them, hitting Yume's pages first, and slowly, right there before there eyes, golden light, glittering with sunshine sparkles, began tracing the letters just as the silver light had done before. Wordlessly, each of them watched the flood of shimmering gold bounce from book to book, just like it had last night.

Delaney was rendered speechless, a mix of excitement, awe, and intimidation flooding her senses. Magic. It was real, and it was here, and-

"What the fuck." Merlene spoke first, eyes wide as she watched the traveling arcana. "What the actual fuck."

Junpei's voice was nothing more than a whisper, as if scared to frighten the golden power away into a scatter of showers. "What do we do?"

There was no answer. Not from any of them. Delaney opened her mouth to speak, but the words were caught in her throat, not that she had anything to say anyway. That unsettling feeling, almost a haunting kind of darkness felt like it had swallowed away any thought or action that might have been taken. The tension was thick, and the silence could be cut by a knife. Instead of a knife, Jady spoke at last, shifting once more on her feet.

"What do we do?" It sounded scared. and Delaney found her hand, taking it in her own. Jady looked to her, desperate for an answer, but Delaney found she had none. Instead, she looked to her older sister, Yume, whose eyes were glittering. Not scared. Not fearful. But sparkling with absolute awe and inspiration. She spoke, voice light and reassuring, and in an instant it seemed to not only soothe her siblings, but the looming feeling that had been eating away at their surroundings.

"We wait." Something heavenly flowed through her voice in open reassurance, laced with a musical lilt. "We wait to see what it does." In a sparkle of fireworks, the golden glitter splattered back onto their grandmother's journal, vanishing within the pages. Yume's gaze never faltered, never turned dark. "We'll go to school, and go one with our normal lives." She smiled, a light thing that brightened the dark corners of the living room. "Grandmother wrote about magic, in her journal, i'll look for more of it tonight, but from what I know, the magic carried in these books is fairytale magic."

"Fairytale?" Delaney tilted her head, feeling the weight of her older sister's eyes turn to her.

Yume nodded, gathering up the pages of her journal. "Grandmother wrote about how her love story was influenced by magic, dream magic, fairytale magic - like in the movies we watch."

"Don't tell me you mean Disney movies." Merlene sighed, sitting down on the couch, although her eyes never left the now eleven books that sat on the table.

Yume, determined as always, nodded. "Yes! Exactly like that - you know how disney magic is a thing?" She didn't wait for an answer, pushing forward. "Maybe it's our grandparents way to help us through in their deaths."

Jasiri leaned on the edge of the couch, eyes pulling slowly away from the table. "You think that their deaths triggered it? Why not anybody else's?"

"Because it was our grandparents legacy - another death couldn't have triggered it."

Hesitation bit at her thoughts, and she watched as Keitaro most gently put a hand on his twin's arm. "Hey, Yume? How much sleep did you get exactly?"

"I'm not imagining this." She snapped to Kei, and he stepped back, face unchanged.

"I didn't say you were, but, you realize how crazy this sounds, don't you?"

"Did you just see what we saw?" Yume waved towards the table, "What about this doesn't seem crazy?"

Keitaro seemed to consider that for a moment, and he and Yume were quiet for a moment, staring at each other. No one could decipher that twin language they seemed to have, the only one who'd come closest was probably Kasumi, but she specialized in silence, so Delaney wasn't surprised. Slowly, Kei nodded. "We'll go to school, but we aren't going to make any assumptions about whatever this magic is, got it?"

Yume seemed to consider this, then nodded. A compromise. "Fine. If we start seeing trends, or unusual things, we'll talk together." She broke eye contact with her brother, looking towards her other siblings. "Deal?"

There was mutters of approval and other affirming conformations. Once again, silence filled the room, and tense whispers of conversation darted through the hallways and rooms of the quiet estate.

It was broken by the sharp ring of Delaney's phone, making her jump, and scrambling to grab her phone, quickly answer the call. On the other side of the line, was her best friend, Venus Lennox, who sounded increasingly frantic.

"Laney! Where are you!?"

"What- Vee, what do you mean? What's wrong??" Delaney turned her head away from her siblings, shoving away any lingering thoughts of magic, and fairytales, and silly book love stories.

"What's wrong?? You aren't here! It's model day!"

Dread filled her throat as her heart dropped to the pit of her stomach. Model Day. The first school day of every month, designers were to pick models to dress. To learn how to accent their features, what coloration worked best for their skin tone. The styles they needed that made them look the most attractive. It was every month. The designers and models in scattered classes usually went every other month with who asks who to be their partner. This month, it was models, and Delaney wasn't there to be asked.

No doubt Benjamin had asked Venus. That was expected however. It was Venus' turn to have him, which meant Delaney was completely out of luck unless someone had planned to ask her, and was waiting for her to show up. 

"Delaney?? Are you there?" Venus spoke, sounding vaguely panicked.

"Yes- sorry - yes, I'm here-" Delaney didn't know what she was going too, and a rising panic had begun to fill her senses, flooding her mind with running thoughts. "Vee, what am I going to do??"

"Oh, I don't think you'll have to worry if someone's going to ask you, because they're waiting for you to show up." Venus hesitated, her voice quieting, "I'm worried about who it is, who's about to ask you."

Delaney almost didn't want to ask. Venus didn't give her the option of the unknown.

"Rune. It's Rune Stellan."

A wave of nasuea threw her off, and she placed a hand over her tittering stomach, staring at the phone in dead silence. Rune Stellan. One of the most fought over models in the entire school, who was always almost claimed the first moment she became available. She was lethally beautiful, and constantly surrounded by men who begged her for a date.

She turned down every single one of them without so much as a look up from her phone.

And the worst of it all, she was Delaney's straight girl crush, who she worked towards avoiding at every possible moment in time because goddamn it, she made it impossible to focus. If Delaney was the princess of that class, Rune was her equal. Her rival, and her teammate in the same way.

"Delaney?"

Without another thought, she hung up on her best friend, making a mental note to apologize to her later, and whipped back to her siblings, who were staring at her. Jady was now gripping onto Yume's arm, deep concern in her eyes.

Delaney thought she was going to throw up, but instead, she frantically shook her head, smiled weakly at them, only being able to whisper the word, "School", before she was flying up the stairs.

She wasn't sure about God, but she prayed that she would get there in time for someone else to ask her.

Anyone else to ask her.

Anyone at all.

✦

✦ OPHELIA ✦

- welcome to the first
arc of bookcase !

- please let me know how
it read for you <3

- don't forget to pm me 
your triggers, or let
me know you don't have any !

- i promise i don't judge!
and as a show of trust, i'll
tell you rn one of mine!
porcelin dolls and puppet
fear (like animatrons) bother
me a lot, so don't worry
about me judging you, i won't

- ily alllll

what is your character's favorite breakfast food ?
or what would they like to have for their birthday
breakfasts if they could have anything at all ?

──● answers