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…)
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.)
I got reminded about the nb!Gil/Loxmi au, so here is the general laydown
Inspired by the non-binary priests of Inanna (nsfw text in that one) and Balkan Sworn Virgins; the general gist is that people in Skifander can take a vow of honor in the temple of Ashtara and be viewed as a third gender. Mostly it’s done by people who wish to serve the goddess, but occasionally it’s used to take on a kolee-dok-zumil relationship with a mother that’s already taught their allotted plus-one. In those cases, it’s usually done by the parents while the child is still young, and renewed by the child themselves before they start training with real blades.
TDLR; feminine (where pronouns are concerned) but not female.
My headcanon for the “they don’t like twins” thing is that it’s based on Ashtara’s own relationship and struggle for power with her sister (see: Inanna and Ereshkigal), so by assigning Gil a different gender identity, Zantabraxus buys them more time. Now, instead of killing their son early to get him out of they way, they’ve bought time for both their kids to grow to maturity before they’re forced to fight to the death for their inheritance.
You can imagine why Klaus and Loxmi still choose to leave.
An important distinction here is that (because I have twin feels) Zeetha actually knows that they’re leaving. She doesn’t ask where they plan to go, so she has plausible deniability, but she and Loxmi swap headpieces (is there a word for their circlet faces?) so that they can check in on each other and make sure they’re alright. Zeetha explains it away as Loxmi accidentally taking the wrong one; Zantabraxus has her doubts, but doesn’t force the issue. Even though she’s pissed as hell that they left without telling her, she understands why, and why they thought it was necessary. (That doesn’t mean she has to like it, though).
Meanwhile Loxmi is getting a super intense crash course in Romanian and attempting to come to terms with the fact that she’s probably never going to be able to go home ever again, while traveling by foot through the wastelands with meager supplies because their airship crashed. What happens next could vary–they may run into Master Payne’s Circus, for maximum hilarity–but eventually they end up traveling the last leg to Wulfenbach by themselves.
(It’s been a few years since the end of the Other War, not that they know that, and the town’s been rebuilt. Not as well has it would have been with a spark there to design the defenses, but enough to keep it safe).
They come across a very, very large multi-headed snake construct. Loxmi decides to try and kill it with nothing but a spark fugue and a knife. Klaus decides to throw her over his shoulder and book it for the gates as fast as he can. Someone on the wall yells “Blue fire, is that Klaus?” right before the giant snake thing rounds the bend and they get distracted.
Half an hour and one giant snake corpse later, Klaus finds one of the older residents and gets an explanation of what happened to the town (what happened to Europa may or may not have been explained, depending on if they did come across the circus). “But where have you been?” the resident finishes. “And who’s the girl with you?”
“I,” Loxmi says, pulling herself up to her frankly minuscule height, “am Loxmi, sworn warrior of Ashtara, Princess-Chantress of the great city of Skifander.”
“My daughter,” Klaus says tiredly.
(This exact exchange happens again when they meet Barry, word for word, except Barry’s response is “You reproduced? With who???”)
*giggles incessantly at Barry’s response**also at tired Klaus trying to deal with Skifandran Gil*
The political situation would be very interesting! In part it’d depend on when exactly they return. I was assuming at least teenage Gil/Loxmi, which would imply a decade+ after the end of the Other war and time to settle, but I can’t imagine teenage Gil/Loxmi being anything less than an annoyingly tall and skinny weed and you say minuscule height, so… 9-10, maybe? Which would put this… fuck, timelines in Girl Genius, I don’t know. Gil is maybe 3 years older than Agatha, who was 3 when Barry rescued her (…maaaaybe…? If I remember right, and also if wherever I got that from wasn’t pure speculation on the fandom’s part?) which we don’t KNOW but probably wasn’t much after the end of the Other war, so that probably ended when Gil was about 5-6, so let’s assume about 4 years between the Other war ending and Klaus and Loxmi returning.
There would be rebuilding–towns have walls, at least, and other defenses, even if in some cases they’re still working on the buildings. There are definitely still revenants running around, and maybe soldier wasps too. Probably not slavers, just because they’d all have already been swallowed, but possibly a queen or two. There are some places in the continent that you just Don’t Enter if you want to live.
The Wastelands… well, they’re the Wastelands, but even worse. Sparks are simultaneously in a better and a worse state–in some cases, people turn to them as the best/only chance at salvation; in others, people murder them as the cause of all the problems. Which side of the line any given spark falls on depends partly on how well known, liked and trusted they are (and what resources they have) before they break through, and partly on pure chance.
There’s no Wulfenbach empire, of course, but honestly I think we’d at least have a number of smaller empires (there’s no way some sparks won’t decide that broken Europa is ripe for the taking, and nevermind their own town being just as broken), and also an Alliance. Barry doesn’t want to rule anything, and a lot of people are more that slightly leery of being ruled by Mechanicsburg, but Mechanicsburg is probably the strongest and safest place around anymore with only a few challengers (Sturmhalten, to start with), and Barry… well, he’s the only hero left. People will turn to him, and he might refuse to rule but he probably won’t refuse to coordinate negotiation and cooperation and trying to help all of Europa work together to get back on its feet, and that’s going to end up working out fairly similarly in a lot of ways.
(Not to the same extent–Barry won’t go conquering everyone who doesn’t want in what he and he alone refuses to call the Heterodyne Alliance, so there are exceptions and the Alliance doesn’t go as far as Klaus’s Empire did. But nonetheless, quite a few similarities, even if the Alliance does also tend to be a bit… stranger, in some things. That’s what happens when you get disproportionate Mechanicsburg influence in a system of government.)
Agatha… well. She’s the heir to Mechanicsburg, and unless Barry cooperates with the Castle and gets married (or has kids without getting married) she’s the only one. She is the most precious thing Mechanicsburg has or, at least for those with human lifetimes, probably ever will, and she is guarded fiercely. Suffocated a little bit too, maybe, especially by the standards of a spark who wants to just go out and DO THINGS. But as long as she doesn’t leave the walls of Mechanicsburg she’s mostly allowed to do what she wants, and she’s also taught extremely well–all sorts of science, and how to defend herself, and how to rule. And responsibility. Barry is very sure to personally teach her responsibility and morality. This does absolutely nothing to discourage her determination to get out of (safe, already taken care of) Mechanicsburg and go do something to help everyone who isn’t safe and taken care of yet.
So basically Loxmi and Agatha are going to go be heroes, and we dearly hope that Barry has accepted the jagers enough by now to send some with Agatha to help because no force on Earth or in space is going to stop those two from trying. If Barry (and Klaus) is very lucky and clever he might delay them a few years by offering to give them heroing lessons if they stick around long enough. Otherwise, the jagers are going to be regularly hauling back a pair of sulking kids who then yell at Barry and/or Klaus about how that town NEEDED their help!
…Not sure when or how exactly that whole “voice of the Other” thing is going to come out, but it will, and it’ll be awkward. Probably Barry knows enough to figure out what’s going on and can fill in everyone else though.
Age wise I was thinking Loxmi’d be somewhere between 10 and 13; I didn’t realize I’d forgotten to put that in the post, my bad.
I’m not certain that Agatha’s life would be that simple? Based on the ridiculous levels of paranoia we see Barry having in canon, I’m not convinced he wouldn’t dump a locketed Agatha off at the Clays and just straight up pretend she didn’t exist until he’d cleaned Europa out of revenants and Geisterdamen. Of course with Mechanicsburg he’d have people to yell at him about his choices, so that might even it out a bit… but I’m still fairly certain he’d have Agatha be enough of a secret that most of Europa doesn’t know about her.
Even if Agatha’s still a secret at this point, would she be kept in hiding for long once Klaus got back with his own kid? Like obviously she’s the Heterodyne and not just the heir to a minor barony, but now Barry knows he’s got an ally, and one who wants stability and safety for the same reasons as he does. So she’d be maybe 7-10, if Loxmi is 10-13? Which is still a ridiculously young breakthrough age if Barry takes her locket off then.
(And of course, once the Heterodyne has gone public, that’s when the Sturmvorauses get involved. Hi Tarvek! Who won’t have had Castle Wulfenbach to make his childhood even slightly better, poor thing.)
I know that Tarvek gets involved at some point, because he and Gil are rival frenemies in every universe, but I’m really tempted to have it be later in the timeline. I honestly can’t see Barry announcing her to the world at large until she’s educated, of age, and ready to take Mechanicsburg off his hands. Sorta like with canon Klaus and Gil, except Agatha has a support system and people who show her love and affection.
…because I want Loxmi to try and sneak A onto the train to Paris when she goes off to university, because when she gets announced Voltaire won’t let her in. Now is the perfect opportunity! (Barry is not pleased) (Klaus isn’t either but he finds it funnier)
So like, he’ll take the locket off her once Europa’s sorted out but then doesn’t announce her? Because I imagine it would be rather hard to educate her in statesmanship without either triggering a migraine or mentioning the fact that she’s a spark, and no way would Agatha keep wearing it if she knew what it was doing to her. I suppose if you’re going to have a secret childhood, Mechanicsburg is the place to do it – there’s no support system better than a small army of jägers. Does Loxmi know about her, or does she just know her as a girl in Mechanicsburg and not realise the significance?
(And sneaking Agatha onto the train is perfect. Very likely to get her kicked out by Voltaire, very likely to get you shouted at by Barry, but perfect none the less.)
It’s really weird to consider that Gil and Tarvek, based on other examples of them speaking like English prep school kids, could have called each other exclusively by their last names even when they were small children on really good terms.
I want to believe this, but: even Gil didn’t seem to know his own surname when he and Tarvek were friends as kids. So I propose that Gil called Tarvek “Sturmvoraus” all pompous-like, but Tarvek was just like “Hey Gil!” in some of the most hilarious exchanges two tiny children can have.
Okay, but. Can you imagine being a little village somewhere and the Lord Heterodyne and his Jäger horde descend on you. But they’re not raiding, they’re just on their way to raid somewhere else and you were in the way and they realised it was dinner time. So, since they’re not raiding, they just spread out to all the restaurants and bars and order dinner. Which they pay for.
I can totally imagine a terrified bartender trying to give away his beer for free to a bunch of Jägers.
*Jäger smiles with all his fangs*
“No vay. Dot vould be dishunurable. I got to pay de bill or defeat hyu in mortal combat.”
*Bartender looks like he’s being forced to jump down a cliff*
“…three silver coins please…”
*Jäger starts looking for change in his pockets*
*Bartender starts wondering if he’ll be savagely murdered because the guy doesn’t have enough money and his weird Mechanicsburg moral system demands it.*
Cheloneuniverse 