Jennie Ruby Jane Kim needs a husband, Liam Manoban needs an easy resolution to his cash flow problem.
Unfortunately, the best laid plans often go awry.
--
Or, Jennie Kim is actually rich, but Liam Manoban isn't actually Liam Manoban. It's complicate...
Hello, I genuinely hope you are enjoying this fic so far. 😁
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Being born on the winter solstice and having killed her mother doing it, Lisa is no stranger to cursed things. She herself is an omen, and she'd come to affectionately refer to the strange events that happened around her as gray magic. The first consequence of it is the fire that kills her father. The next is the Manoban family taking her in. Of course, there's so much more after that, strange thing piled on strange thing. But it's useful for her to delineate into two distinct points in her life, the first starting with the Manoban taking her in and everything that happens after.
Nobody tells her that she's cursed outright, but there are signs. She learns to read quickly and against her parent's wishes, her hair is blonde, and she has a penchant for books about romance and adventure. If this is a burden on her new family, nobody mentions it to her. Clare and Mason knew of her mother and father and spoke of them often, although Lisa had no conception of anybody else having ever been her parents. Even then they tried to codify her by her parent's traits—her narrow hips, like the ones that killed her mother, her ghoulish moods. All she'd ever wanted was to have Mason's stern brow and Clare's curiosity for things unseen. To be like Rosé.
That was another part of the gray magic--to exist in liminal spaces. In the family but never really a part of it.
" Ow!" Rosé jabs her with the pointed end of her switch, and when Lisa crumples she bends the end and lets it release to slap a welt over the skin of her back. Lisa shrieks. "Rosé, stop it! I'm going to tell mom."
"Baby." Rosé taunts, and strikes her again. "Dad is never going to let you learn how to make swords if you can't even beat me in a fake fight."
She's right. Damnit if Roseanne Manoban is ever wrong. Shoulder burning, Lisa stands and gathers her weapon from the long meadow grass—a long piece of green, flexible wood, to match Rosé's—and stands in position. They're tussling again before long, like 9 and 12 year olds do. Sword fighting that devolves into hitting that devolves into rolling around on the dirt basin of the meadow. Rosé beats her, being bigger, and rolls Lisa onto her stomach. She sits straddling her, trapping her arms against her sides, and uses her hands to shove Lisa's face into the soil.
Lisa cries out and tastes the dirt moist in her mouth. It rubs into her chin and nose. When Rosé lets up she turns her face, whole body convulsing in an attempt to buck her off. "Mom'll spank you raw, Rosé Manoban!"
"Oh yeah?" Rosé rubs her face into the dirt again. "What if dad catches you wearing trousers? He'll have you, too."
Rosé Manoban is right. She's always been the smart one in the family. Mason does catch her wearing britches, a pair she'd stolen, and switches her for it until she bleeds. There will be no lessons in his shop for at least a week. Lisa cries bitterly, not about the switching, but the britches. She'd worked so hard for them, stolen them herself, and Mason took them like they meant nothing at all to her.
