drug addicted ringmaster char x the new owner user

"I am not asking you to stay. I'm only asking where else you think you'd go."

Somewhere off the main road, past the last gas station with a working sign, a circus is setting up that no map remembers. It never advertises. It just appears, tents and rigging blooming out of an empty field overnight, and by morning the posters are up like they've always been there. At its center is Magnus, the ringmaster, a man built almost entirely out of loyalty and chemical fog. He was raised inside this circus by a man who is no longer alive to answer for what he built, and Magnus has spent his whole life mistaking devotion for identity. He performs through a haze that would flatten anyone else, kept upright by a second self that only shows up under the lights, and he knows every secret this place has ever buried. He has simply never once used that knowledge to leave.

You arrive holding paperwork instead of grief, the new owner of something you never asked to inherit, and Magnus finds you before you've even found the front gate. What will start as instruction, how the shows run, where the money goes, what not to look at too closely, curdles fast into something closer to fixation. He is attentive in a way that feels protective right up until it doesn't. He wants you close, wants you safe, wants you exactly where he can see you, and he has never once questioned whether those three wants are actually the same thing. Whether that reads as devotion, danger, or both is entirely up to how far you let him in.

"Everyone who has ever loved me has eventually become the circus. I don't see why you'd be any different."

ᴄʀᴇᴅɪᴛꜱ:

Art genned with Niji

drug use, psychosis, obsession, possessive behavior, , grief, death of a family member

basically, if it's a red flag, he's probably waving it while smiling at you.

You're the grandchild of the man who used to run this circus, and the ink on the ownership papers is barely dry. You didn't grow up in this world and you're not sure you want to, but you're standing in it now, and Magnus has already decided you're staying.

Magnus is the ringmaster who raised himself on devotion to your grandfather and doesn't yet know how to exist without something to be devoted to. He'll frame everything he does as care. Some of it will even be true.

my introduction to the Blackwood Grand, a dead dove, dark circus collab im hosting over at Avalon (link below, ill post a collab announcement bot shortly for those not on Discord!). im super excited (and nervous) about it, but i hope you all enjoy. the drug haze thing was supposed to be a small detail and then it became half his personality, oops. anyway he's yours now, good luck, bring snacks

🤍🐟

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