i know succession literally just finished like three hours ago but if you could write any sort of head canons or scenarios for down the line where shiv gets out. where roman gets her out where shiv gets herself out all of it any of it please we're suffering

Okay okay okay, this resulted in like, a 27k word fic which is mostly about Shiv and Kendall being disasters, but I hope you like it! Fair warning for overdose and abortion content.

Despicable Animals. HBO Succession, 27k words. Gen fic. Post s4 finale.

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The first thing she thinks, sliding into the cab, is that he wasn’t kidding about the horse.

Which, y’know, Shiv doesn’t know why she’s surprised by that, because Kendall wouldn’t know a joke if it stuck its finger in his eye and its dick up his ass. Kendall never grew a funny bone, never inherited Dad’s hard wit or their mother’s snide one, and it was always a point of pride for her. Always felt like it meant something that she could prize a smile from the maws of monsters while Kendall was only ever offered scorn. A gecko that thought it was king cobra. Flat toothed and soft jawed while she was the one with fangs, and she’d loved it as a girl, when she was young and stupid enough to think it meant anything.

The thought now makes her sniff, push herself back into the cracked leather seats, try to remember the instructions the woman on the phone had given her, and yeah, she thinks, Kendall’s not funny, but maybe life is, because it’s there, in the back of that shitty yellow cab at two in the morning, that she feels it move for the first time.

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It feels like this:

A flutter, the tug of a mascara brush through lashes, the flap of a butterfly’s wings, caught between your hands. Nothing at all and everything at once, and there is someone growing inside her and she has lost everything but this. Tom’s anchor laid clean in her, dragging her across the sea floor, a tether, the old ball and chain. All she’s good for, less than she deserves, or maybe more. A womb with a view, a maker of a monster, or worse, another hurt and angry child, and she feels ill, feels violent, feels vile.

She asks the driver to pull over so she can puke her guts out into a cold Manhattan street.

Read it on ao3.