The Grimoire’s Chosen (Worm AU/Celestial Grimoire)

A/N: Here's the new Chapter! Which also means the next four chapters are up on my Patreon for early access as well as the chance to vote on the direction of the story!

Jason lays down the law. He's very impressive too. Until he does something dumb.

-x-X-x-

“No.”

He’s not sure where it comes from, this sudden well of inner strength. Maybe its his power. Or maybe Jason is just done being walked all over. All throughout his life, it feels like all he’s done is let himself be stepped on. Growing up in the shitshow that is Brockton Bay, TAing for Carol Dallon, working at that shitty coffee shop. Just one thing after another.

And now, finally, he gets the opportunity to do something that actually sounds relatively engaging and rewarding. Very rewarding, to be fair. But still, teaching someone else, while it might not be his lifelong dream or passion, was something he’d always enjoyed doing. He’d been looking forward to tutoring Vicky for this next month, even if it would probably be a lot of work.

But no, here she was to rain on his parade. Just when he thought he was getting out from under the boot, just when he was getting some breathing room, here she was to try and stomp him back down again.

“Excuse me?”

Jason is very aware of the floating bombshell in front of him and her ability to put him through a wall if necessary. He just doesn’t give a shit at this point.

He could have invoked Carol’s name, of course. He could have threatened to tell Vicky’s mother what she was planning, or even tried to use Carol to garner some sympathy from the young blonde heroine. After all, if she fails the exam at the end of the month, he can probably kiss that internship at Carol’s law firm goodbye. Obviously, Vicky doesn’t know about that part. She doesn’t know he actually has something to lose.

And yet… he doesn’t tell her. In the face of Victoria Dallon’s building scowl, Jason just stands his ground.

“That does not work for me, Ms. Dallon. I was hired to do a job and I will be doing it. I may not be able to take your test for you…”

At this Jason pauses, because he actually knows quite a few students who have tried to make some money on the side by taking tests for other students. Not something he would do, so he amends his words.

“Rather, I will not be taking your test for you, so I can’t stop you from purposefully failing. However, until the month is out, I have been paid to tutor you and prepare you for your exam. I will be here every night to do so until that time, and you will participate. So sit your ass down and let’s get to work.”

Victoria Dallon stares at him from where she’s still floating a foot off the ground, her eyes wide as he looks right back at her. Finally, her voice almost soft, she asks the obvious question.

“… And if I don’t?”

This was where he was supposed to invoke her mother’s name, Jason imagined. Force her to at least put in the work or else he’d tattle on her to Carol. But Jason doesn’t do that, not even now. Instead, he points behind him.

“Then I’ll walk out that door, return the money to Crystal, and she can find someone else to be your stooge for the next month.”

He can tell his words have caught Vicky completely off guard. Maybe she was ready for him to try to use Carol to browbeat her into submission, but it’s obvious she wasn’t ready for him to threaten to quit on principle. Frankly, Jason himself could scarcely believe he was doing it.

Would he have been willing to go this far if he didn’t have his powers to fall back on? Maybe not. It wasn’t like he’d be going back to the coffee shop if Vicky forced him to make good on his ultimatum. But even if he was forced to quit the tutoring job… he’d be alright. He’d make it work and find some way to keep himself off the streets.

All his life, Jason had given up his principles time and time again for the sake of survival. Now that he had powers though, he didn’t have to keep his head down and just submit to those more powerful than him anymore. He could finally hold his head high and tell the people trying to step all over him to fuck off.

Silence has fallen in Victoria Dallon’s apartment and Jason deems it to have gone on long enough, so he speaks up again.

“Make your choice, Ms. Dallon. Ass on the couch, or I walk out the door. What’s it going to be?”

Another brief pause… and then Vicky floats over to the couch and sits down on it next to her discarded Glory Girl costume. She doesn’t look particularly happy about it, but she looks more bewildered than angry, truth be told.

Frankly, Jason is feeling much the same way, though he tries his best to keep his own bewilderment off of his face as he makes his way over to the living room’s single chair, pulls it over to the other side of the coffee table between him and Vicky, and sits down. Clearing his throat, he pulls out his laptop and spiral notebook as well as a pen.

“Let’s begin with what subjects you think you’re weakest on and go from there. Tonight will be mostly about developing a game plan for us to operate off of for the rest of the month.”

“… Fine.”

Just as Vicky starts talking however…

Ding!

Blood, Death, and Demons – Modus – 400 Points

Blood magic, necromancy, and demon summoning. What fun. The magics of Praes are dark ones, appropriate to those in service to the Gods Below. Your knowledge of the ritual magic of Villains is amazing, allowing you to bleed out a few prisoners in order to keep a massive area growing bountiful food, letting you call powerful demons with little risk to yourself, or forge powerful pacts with the greatest among them, allowing you to single-handedly turn the flow of entire battles. You have five years of training in these magics, and your spells are stronger, and can grow stronger still with sacrifices, either of blood, or of your own defenses.

You now have 600 Points saved up!

At first, Jason barely glances at the pull, distracted by Vicky and assuming from its high cost that it’s going to be another building or another esoteric power of little ultimate value to him like the ‘Creative Solutions’ pull he’d gotten before this one. But then his eyes actually catch on to what he’s reading and he finds himself freezing in place.

Blood magic, necromancy, and demon summoning. Literal satanic shit, not that Jason was very religious growing up in a world like Earth Bet. If God existed, he could go fuck himself. And if demons were real, they’d long since written Earth Bet off as a lost cause at this point. Place was a shitshow without supernatural forces.

And yet… could Jason really afford to pass up on such an opportunity? Five years of training in three separate types of magic. A guarantee that his spells would be stronger and could get stronger even beyond that. And… it wasn’t like he actually had to hurt anyone. It wasn’t like he had to do anything. It was just knowledge. Knowledge that he wasn’t sure he could really afford to pass up.

Before he can second guess himself, Jason pulls the trigger.

Keep.

Blood, Death, and Demons Purchased. 200 Points Remain!

Only belatedly does Jason suddenly worry about what the effect of having five years of magical knowledge all shoved into his head at once might feel like. As Vicky is still begrudgingly talking about what she needs the most help with in terms of her education, he feels a sudden building pressure start in the middle of his eyes.

As the knowledge starts trickling in, there’s a low-grade headache to deal with, but if this is how bad it is, he feels like he can probably handle it. So long as it’s just a trickle and not- oh fuck.

It all hits at once, the pain in between his eyes increases immensely, and Jason cries out before darkness takes him.

-x-X-x-

… What the fuck even was her life? Victoria Dallon sits there on her own couch after having let herself be browbeaten into talking about all of her greatest scholastic deficiencies by the guy her cousin Crystal has a crush on… only for him to suddenly shout and pass out right in front of her.

Vicky’s mouth opens and closes as she takes in his slumped forward on the opposite side of her coffee table. She was… what the fuck did she do now?!

When her mother had demanded that Vicky finally go back to college, Vicky had been less than enthused about the idea. Fortunately, she’d been able to work something out without having to do anything TOO drastic. Well, by her mother’s standards it was still pretty drastic. After all, if Carol found out exactly who was going to be sponsoring Vicky’s heroics going forward, she would almost certainly flip her lid and go ballistic.

But Crystal had said Jason was cool, so Vicky hadn’t really thought about the possibility that he might rat her out to her mother when she’d told him everything. She’d assumed that her cousin’s crush would be chill about stuff.

Instead, far from being chill, he’d laid down the law in a way that Vicky had to admit, might have left her panties a little wet. Jason was a handsome young man, and Vicky could understand why Crystal liked him. And when he’d gone ahead and told her in no uncertain terms what was going to happen… well, it’d only made him hotter in her eyes if she was being honest.

He hadn’t even tried to bring up her mother. He hadn’t used Carol’s name to try to force Vicky to comply whatsoever. He’d just given her an ultimatum, and one that Vicky fully believed he was ready to carry out despite what Crystal had told her about his lower class lifestyle. That sort of conviction was honestly impressive. And sexy.

Of course, him basically telling her to give him a list of all of the things she was worst at, even if it was purely her worst subjects in school… that was a little less sexy. Still, she’d been soldiering on while also considering how badly she would be betraying Crystal if she tried to get into her sexy new tutor’s pants… when Jason had suddenly let out a shout of pain and collapsed right in front of her.

Finally rising from the couch, Vicky swallows thickly as she stares at Jason’s unconscious form.

“Um… Jason? Please tell me you’re just fucking with me or something?”

Unfortunately, Vicky knows what an unconscious person looks like compared to someone faking being unconscious. Don’t ask her HOW she knows that, but she does. Way too well. And Jason… he isn’t faking.

Making her way over to him, she hesitates before shaking his shoulder.

“Jason, please for the love of god, wake up. Please don’t pass out in my damn apartment, do you have any idea how bad this is for me?”

Fortunately, he’s breathing steadily. Unfortunately, she thinks she sees a single drop of blood leaking out of his nose. Whimpering, Vicky flies over to her kitchen, grabs a paper towel, and rushes back over to… gently dab the blood away. Fortunately, the nose bleed isn’t massive or anything. Barely seems to last half a minute and only takes the one paper towel to handle.

Unfortunately, once it’s over Jason still hasn’t woken up. What the fuck even was that? Vicky was sure it wasn’t her aura. She’d gotten pretty good at controlling when she turned that aspect of her powers off and on, and while Jason’s immediate refusal of her plans had almost caused Vicky to activate it on instinct to try and intimidate him into submission, she’d managed to bite back on that impulse.

So it wasn’t her aura. But then, what? What the fuck? And… did she need to take him to a hospital? That would be so fucked. SHE would be so fucked. Her tutor goes unconscious during their first tutoring session and has to go to the ER? Nope, not going there. But then… that only left Vicky one option.

Flying over to her phone, she grabs it up and places a call. It rings for a few seconds before finally…

“Lavere Clinic speaking.”

Grimacing like she always does at hearing THAT name, Vicky nevertheless thanks her lucky stars that it’s her actual sister who picked up rather than one of her assistants.

“Amy, I need your help.”

There’s a pause at that, before Amelia Lavere, aka Amy Dallon, aka Panacea, lets out a long, drawn-out sigh.

“You’ve been doing so good too, Vicky. You know this means I can’t…”

“It’s not like that, Ames! I’m still on the wagon! I haven’t hurt anyone in a year! This has nothing to do with my hero work or our upcoming sponsorship or anything! I just… you know how Mom has been on my ass about university and she put Crystal in charge of finding me a tutor?”

“… Considering you wouldn’t stop complaining to me about it the last time we met for dinner, yes Vicky, I’m aware.”

“W-Well Crystal found someone. A cute guy named Jason who she secretly likes but won’t make a move on. A-And he came over tonight for our first tutoring session… and kindofsortofpassedoutinmylivingroom!”

There’s another brief pause as Amy has to process Vicky’s sped-up speech.

“Vicky, your aura-!”

“It wasn’t even on Ames; I swear to god! I had it turned off, I KNOW I had it turned off. The dude just passed out on me, completely independent of anything I did, I swear it!”

“… You know I don’t do brains, Vicky.”

Vicky winces, glancing down at Jason’s unconscious form. God she wished he’d just wake up so she could tell Amy it was a false alarm and hang up this call. But nope. He’s still out like a light.

“I know you can’t fix them Amy, but you can still scan them right? I just need you to come over and check what’s wrong with him. If it’s something you can fix, great! If it’s not, then I’ll fly him to the hospital myself, I promise. I just…”

She trails off there, because they both know it doesn’t need to be said. Vicky having to bring Jason to the hospital, regardless of what was wrong with him, would almost certainly be picked up by half a dozen news stations by tomorrow morning. And then it would all be fucked. The last year of Vicky staying on the straight and narrow with her hero work, Amy’s clinic slowly gaining popularity despite their mother’s attempts to destroy the business, and their plans for Victoria to be an officially sponsored hero of Lavere Clinic.

All of it could go up in flames, though mostly the parts involving Vicky would be the most likely to go up in flames. Amy wouldn’t be able to risk her clinic’s reputation, not when it was just starting to recover from all of Carol’s attacks, on Vicky if she were damaged goods.

“… Fine, Vicky. I’ll be right over.”

“Thank you Amy. Thank you, thank you, thank you.”

“… Yeah. No problem, sis.”

With that, the other end of the line goes dead and Vicky turns to stare at her handsome, assertive, and rather sexily domineering tutor. It’s been a long time since she nervously bit her nails. Years and years. And yet… her fingers creep towards her lips, even as the blonde frantically waits for Amy’s arrival.

-x-X-x-

A/N: I mean, what was he supposed to do? Say no? xD

-x-X-x-

A/N: Will try to keep this up to date at the end of every chapter, get on me if I forget please. Though if it gets too out of hand, might have to change it at some point.

Jason's current banked points:

200 Celestial Points

Jason's current powers:

• Flash Air (Gained in Chapter 1)

• Transformation Pendant (Gained in Chapter 4)

• Keen Eye (Gained in Chapter 4)

• Blood, Death, and Demons (Gained in Chapter 6)