what if the clays got caught in a really bad accident when agatha was younger (still wearing her locket) and she was left to fend for herself, an orphan in all respects.
wait shit beetle would totally pick her up right
tarsus ‘i have no problem using agatha to manipulate wasps and revanents’ beetle.
….does she have any personal connection to beetle at this point because. im kinda thinking about her running off and attempting to hunt down her uncle barry now that her parents are dead and. yeah holy shit kid agatha is not going to take that well. but anyway.
yeah.
beetle: “okay, i can work with this, *is probably actually upset about lillith and adam since…were they friends? but is attempting to stay objective*, *turns around and the heterodyne girl is fucking Gone*
So, ficlet happened. I don’t know how to do a cut, sorry.
°•°●°•°
Agatha hadn’t slept in two days. How could she, when everything hurt so terribly? She sat, grey-faced and hollow-eyed, staring at the caskets.
Adam and Lilith were dead.
It felt unreal, impossible, like she was living in a nightmare. Small details floated to the top of her mind with startling clarity, like the gears on the valve of Herr Schmidt’s oxygen tank, or the thread of the stitches around Madame Rupert’s wrist. The dull headache that had lingered since the accident pulsed with her heartbeat.
The the grit of the dirt in her hand made her skin feel itchy and prickly. As the earth began to fall with hollow thumps on the wooden lid, Agatha felt her world slide sideways. She was alone now. Completely and utterly alone.
People were talking to her now. What had happened to the rest of the service? Someone shook her hand, and she felt the sand clinging to her fingers slide against their palm, curiously vivid. She wondered at the delicacy of skin and nerves, how they could signal the presence of such a tiny irritant to her (broken) brain.
Who would want a girl who couldn’t help you with the chores half the time, who couldn’t live without terrible terrible headaches leaving her lying in a dark quiet room for hours, utterly useless? Her black dress was too small on the shoulders, and it pinched.
Someone was leading her away now. She looked back, searching for her parents out of habit; the grief hit her again like a physical blow, and her headache drove another spike of pain into her skull. She became conscious of words again some time later.
“–Stay at my house, just unti–”
“–Know where her uncle is? I –”
“–oor lamb, she hasn’t stopped crying for hours now; what do you–”
Agatha touched her face, almost experimentally, and stared at the moisture on her finger tips, smudging the grave-dirt into mud. Oh. She was crying. Interesting.
“–gatha? Agatha, sweetie, can you listen to me? We need to look at your locket, dear. ”
Agatha looked at her blankly. “Uncle Barry said never to take it off. ”
“We’re trying to find your uncle, sweetie, and we’re hoping it has some clues. It won’t be for long. You can take a little nap and we’ll be done with it by the time you wake up, alright? ”
Agatha touched the trilobite at her throat. She shouldn’t take it off. Uncle Barry said. It had her only pictures of her parents. She wanted her parents. She wanted Adam’s smiles and Lilith’s hugs and she wanted Uncle Barry.
Agatha yanked it off and held it out. Her neck felt light and odd. “Please.” Her voice cracked. “I want Uncle Barry.”
A big warm hand closed over hers. “We’ll find him, Agatha.”
The little girl fled to her room, and fell into an exhausted sleep.
Strong emotions can cause sudden and violent breakthroughs, and without the locket, Agatha’s dammed genius was finally free to sweep forwards, carrying her along in the flash flood. By the time Dr. Beetle came looking for the secret Heterodyne that evening, Agatha was already gone.
aaAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH
oh man this is so good. and your kid agatha!! i love her!! and (lot of “ands” here hah) the way you described how fragmented her throught process was during the funeral…i just, love this, thank you for taking the time to write it!!
@hands-of-blue re: your tags, I think you mean “castle wulfenbach” (child Agatha in castle heterodyne is a WHOLE OTHER THING though I like it) and yes, that is the logical progression of events…befriends Gil who is probably still reeling from the Tarvek Incident. and there are enough jaegers around that the generals are going to find out sooner or later.
…Yeah, I meant Castle Wulfenbach. I really don’t have an excuse for that mistake?
Although…there’s still wild jägers wandering around the wastelands, right? Pick up a tiny Sparky child, “Oh shit this is a Heterodyne? Who’s is she? Where are the OTHER Heterodynes? What’s going on?”, and I’m not sure what tiny Agatha would make of jägers but she’s tired and angry and in the middle of breakthrough so it would be…interesting.
Basically it would turn out like most other “Agatha raised by jäger” AUs that people have, except this time there wasn’t Barry to instruct them on what to do with her, so now we’re just relying on the jägers to be sensible which isn’t really the best course of action. It’s totally within the realms of reason for them to decide that since she’s broken through (and so young! She’s going to be such a good Heterodyne!) she’s obviously old enough to start being the Lady Heterodyne properly, especially since the Lord Heterodyne and the potential other Lord Heterodyne are probably dead, let’s send her into the Castle with a bunch of minions to do the heavier work, she’s smart enough to figure it out. And then we get tiny Agatha as the Lady Heterodyne, still getting over her parents’ deaths but having suddenly found a whole new family and also a homicidal castle, and Then Klaus Happens. (Also Aaronev proposed a political marriage between her and Tarvek within half an hour of getting the news. Klaus is Not Pleased by that either.)
Maybe the jaegers happen to pick up Agatha’s trail and smell Heterodyne so they follow? Meanwhile Agatha is In No Mood to be scared or to put up with nonsense(or, alternately, if we assume it’s Da Boyz maybe their nonsense actually gets the first non-madness-place smile out of her since the funeral).
God imagine Carson’s reaction when Agatha arrives and he realizes that the new Heterodyne is an actual child no older than his grandson.
Also Klaus really, /really/ wants to get to Agatha because he has Questions and also because /the Heterodyne is an orphaned child being raised in Mechanicsburg/ who also knows nothing about ruling or anything so he views her as basically a powder keg waiting to go off.
I feel like Oggie would be good at getting a strange child to trust him, he’s the only one who’s had any experience after all. If Jenka happens to be with them at the time, I feel like she’d be a decent parent? Or is in change of keeping everything under control until they reach Mechanicsburg, at least. Da Boyz being the ones to pull her out of the madness place is so sweet and possibly kind of angsty. (For some reason, they remind Agatha of her parents. She’s not quite sure why.)
Van and Agatha growing up together! Friends! Well, actually she’d view them as friends, he’d view it more as a “let’s do what the Mistress says because she builds tiny death rays for fun”. The Mechanicsburgers have high hopes for their new Lady Heterodyne, she’s getting the hang of it awfully quickly.
And smol Agatha ruling Mechanicsburg is definitely a powder keg, you/Klaus got it in one. Let’s face it, all the Mechanicsburgers will basically do anything she asks/orders (she thinks she’s asking nicely, but not everyone sees it that way. She’s a Heterodyne saying she wants something, of course you obey her.) And it’s only a matter of time until she orders something to be done, and someone who ISN’T a Mechanicsburger does as they’re told straight away, and that’s when everyone starts to realise exactly what’s going on.
Not sure about Jenka, at least not long-term. Though maybe she’s the sort of person who just treats kids like miniature adults, which is good in some respects and not so much in others. I think you’re right about Oggie though. Especially since Agatha isn’t afraid of any of them, so that’s one major obstacle that isn’t going to matter. He probably wouldn’t be as good with a kid who isn’t 1)in a long-term sparky rage keeping her from being scared and 2)has multiple familial reasons not to be so afraid of jaegers.
(Possibly later this means that everyone knows that Jenka and Da Boyz are the Lady Heterodyne’s favorite jaegers. I’m sure it’s not uncommon for Heterodynes to have favorites, and they were the first people to try to help Agatha in a way that wasn’t “we’ll take you to the Baron and let him deal with you”)
Little Agatha gets Van into so much trouble. To her credit, though, she probably gets him out of it too. Though “the Mistress told me to” would probably be a fairly effective excuse for most people. Carson would probably think of it as a way for Van to learn how a seneschal redirects the Heterodyne to slightly better courses of action.
Yeah, maybe a few years(months?) in that happens and maybe even the first time it’s put down to sparky charisma but then it can’t be ignored and things get even messier. Aaronev would probably step up the attempts to get Agatha into the chair if he wasn’t keenly aware that the jaegers and the Castle will not tolerate any kidnapping.
I feel like Jenka wouldn’t try and pander to her (not more than a jäger normally does to a Heterodyne at least), like you said, she treats her like an adult? She probably wouldn’t let the others pamper her too much. And yeah, they totally become her favourite jägers/honour guard, and Gkika is probably her surrogate mother. Smol Agatha and smol Van getting into adventures is so great, and Carson alternates between being kinda proud of him and despairing of the future generation.
Re your tags – Tarvek would totally sneak off to Mechanicsburg to try and ally with Agatha, and I like to think that Vi would come too? I wonder if Anevka would throw her chances in with Tarvek after she realised that there was no way Aaronev was going to be able to kidnap Agatha? She seemed like one of the more sensible ones out of the Sturmvarious clan, and she would certainly recognise where the best chances lay.
oh, i adore the thought of gkika as her surrogate mother. poor traumatized agatha and her new family. do you think she throws herself into learning about Medical Things both so she can step into her role as the only one allowed to really fix the jagers and also to prevent her new family from dying like (both of) her old one(s) did?
vi has to come
vi is Required
and lmao yeah– honestly the biggest problem with anevka and tarvek might face jumping ship is the whole “geisterdamen in the basement” problem. how old is anevka? old enough to get away with taking control of sturmhalten and etc? because………..well, if anevka decides to commit to throwing her lot in with tarvek, is tipping the baron off about the Horrible Things their father was up too that they were absolutely not aware of in the slightest a viable plan
Oh, Agatha would completely throw herself into learning about fixing the jägers for exactly that angsty reason you mentioned. I feel like she wouldn’t cope very well at first with the way they all just throw themselves into danger to protect her (or for fun), because guess what happened last time? It’ll probably take her a long time to get over that “Everyone is going to die if they get into any danger and I’ll be left alone again” thing, if she ever does. It definitely gets liberally applied to Gil and Tarvek after she becomes friends with them.
Smol Violetta in Mechanicsburg getting to wear nice dresses for parties with Agatha but also getting to clamber around on roofs, because she knows she won’t fall because the Castle can catch her (unlike when she normally has to do it). Just. Violetta getting to grow up without being constantly abused by her family and forced to fight. Even if Tarvek has to leave Mechanicsburg for whatever reason (part of a plan probably) he leaves her behind? And tells everyone that it’s because “she’s a spy” and waves Vi’s latest scribbley letter as proof. (It’s telling Tarvek about the party that Agatha is holding and asking him if he (and maybe Anevka if she’s nice) wants to come. Not exactly prime spying material.) She’d probably learn to fight and sneak and everything anyway, but because she’s not being forced to do it she’s just much healthier, mentally.
I feel like Anevka would be sort of reluctant to tell the Baron of all people – I know we’ve technically never met the real her, but she seems like she’d be much too suspicious of his motives, and the family as a whole doesn’t have a great impression of him after the Tarvek Incident. I do think that rallying support from the non-Jove sectors of the family would be an option for her, though? We know from quite recently that the number of people who supported the Geisterdamen/Lucrezia was actually quite small, and Tarvek and Anevka probably be completely aware of the fact that they all thought Aaronev was a Bit Strange. I like the idea of Anevka stopping behind as the Loyal Daughter after Tarvek left, making it look like she’s after his position as heir to Aaronev when she’s actually secretly plotting against him with half the family. She decides that she can be regent for Tarvek until he’s old enough, and hopefully by then that whole Storm King thing has turned out alright, and then she gets to keep Sturmhalten for herself.
So what you are saying is this happens:
“You’re going to Mechanicsburg? Well, I suppose that’s a good move; being the Heterodyne Girl’s ally will help cement your claim, especially if you get her to trust you. But why are you bringing Violetta?”
Tarvek raked his hands through his hair. He had started growing it out recently, and it was in that awkward, messy intermediate stage and generally looked terrible (some dark secret part of Tarvek thought this Agatha really ciuld have had better timing). That is not to say that the frustrated hair clawing did not make it worse.
“I had orders for her to fake my presence here for a while; some dirty clothes and dishes could have extended the time before anyone noticed I was gone by almost three weeks. Yet, she has decided that it would be much more fun if she came along under the pretense of adding validity to my claim of being a prince, and not just a random spark in a land walker. And she threatened to tell on me if I didn’t take her along.”
Avenka stifled a snort of laughter behind a dainty gloved hand.
“Oh my, yes, that would do it. And so you came to me. I’m hurt that I’m your second choice, little brother.”
“Violetta can claim she was just following her leige’s orders. You would be an active accomplice. If this gamble goes poorly, Father will not be pleased. It would be…Awkward being the mythic Storm King, rising to bring peace to Europa if the Heterodyne Girl was violently opposed.”
Avenka sighed. “Yes, there is that. Well, I can fake your presence in the lab for a bit; blame your absence on a long term fugue. Try not to muck up too badly, hmmm little brother?”
This AU needs a name/tag because this thread is magnificent, but long. I really don’t wanna call it the orphan Agatha AU. 😦
i think @hands-of-blue‘s been tagging it ‘mechanicsburg au’?
Yeah, I’ve been tagging it as “mechanicsburg au” just because that’s the defining feature, that bby Agatha turns up in Mechanicsburg and everything spirals from there. I was torn between that and “smol heterodyne au” to be fair, either works and neither are overly angsty.
on the downside, we did miss out on the chance to call this the ‘little orphan agatha’ au
Oh, mean. Not fair. Stop giving me bby Aggie feels.
(Also, she’s technically an orphan because no Bill or Lucrezia, and doubly technically an orphan because no Adam or Lilith, but on the upside she’s been adopted by hundreds of centuries-old super soldiers and a homicidal building, so…)
yupppp
#i mean if you want to be technical #canon is little orphan agatha #this au is just a VERY orphaned agatha
see, i wouldnt say canon agatha is little orphan agatha. although hah yeah, this au is definitely VERY little orphaned agatha.
Fair enough, canon Agatha isn’t quite so little. Pre-canon Agatha on the other hand definitely counts.
(I’m still so amused by the fact that you came up with this originally and @pedantic-blanket-fort wrote the ficlets and so on, and then my major contribution was tagging the wrong castle. Heh.)
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