That's more of a grey area, I'd say. Isabelle has done some very bad things, but the worst of them have been under Alec's direct instruction and supervision, with threat of violence if she doesn't follow through. Other bad things she's done without him making her do them are of course more clearly wrong, but then there's the environment she's in to consider. I don't have a clear-cut answer myself, and I would say that if Isabelle is a bad person, she's one with significant hope for redemption.

Absolutely! That would delight me, please feel free

You're meant to! It's a play on Mac the Knife. I just know I probably shouldn't put slurs in most social media handles

Twentyish! Probably just turned twenty. She's a few semesters into college when she meets him, and she started that at nineteen.

They grow apart somewhat with time not because of any bad blood or inherent differences but because Isabelle comes into her own as a grown woman and doesn't need to rely on Cy as heavily as she used to, but they remain good friends until Cy dies. I've always imagined they're the kind of friends where no matter how long it's been Isabelle is always welcome to call him and it will be like no time passed at all.

As for Isabelle's future, while I'm not sure she would ever get married and I haven't definitively built that far ahead for her in this AU, she has plenty of romantic relationships other than Cy—more romantic, probably, since those two were never in love with each other. I could see her settling down with a woman sometime in her thirties or forties.

Would and did. It was a fairly common feature of that kind of "punishment", and because Isabelle mostly associated someone getting hit in the crotch with jokes, slapstick, etc, she didn't put it together and was mostly just bewildered. It helped that of course the incidents were traumatic and she didn't want to think about them, much less contemplate whether they meant she was being molested by her own dad.

Cy being a college student was so long ago by the time Isabelle shows up that she never finds out what he did back then, especially because it wasn't really known.

However, about two years into their relationship she hears through a "friend of a friend of a friend" situation that Cy used to screw his students back when he taught at Trinity, and she does ask him about it. He tells her the truth, which Isabelle more or less confirms by talking to Lynn about it, and Lynn's openly critical way of discussing it helps reassure Isabelle that Cy isn't downplaying.

After a period of freaking out about it, Isabelle comes to the conclusion that because Cy wasn't violent with his students and because he doesn't do it anymore it isn't worth ending the relationship over—an example of Isabelle's very pragmatic, somewhat dingy sense of morality. She thinks the good Cy does her is more important than the moral gesture she would be making by dropping him, especially since the latter would be kind of hollow. Her lingering concerns fade with time.

Oh, things would be very different if Isabelle was assigned male at birth. Isabelle was born in the midst of Alec's turmoil over his twin brother, Bertrand, and Alec projected a lot of those feelings onto her even with her being seen as a girl. If she'd been a cis boy instead, Alec probably would've been even more repressive, fearing that Isabelle would ultimately kill him the way he killed Bertrand when she was a few months old. I'm genuinely not sure that Isabelle would've survived as a cis boy.

The good news is that if boy!Isabelle did live, Viola wouldn't be so harsh or cruel to him, because he would trigger her trauma less. She would probably still be very distant, but not as hostile. Still, though, overall I think Isabelle would be worse off as Alec's son. As it stands her being genderfluid adds enough complications.

Sure was! It was originally Victorian, with Isabelle being 17 in 1895, and even now canon is set in what I like to lovingly call 19whateverthefuck. The Nullverse version of the Underwoods are bumped up to be present day.

There's a little "share" button that puts a link and part of the text on my clipboard, which I then post manually on Twitter. Thank you very much for the kind words ^^

Two people have asked this question! To answer you both: yes, but the details I have are still kinda fuzzy so I'm working out exactly how it goes. I do plan on her leaving him, and she moves to London where she sort of disappears.

So many great questions! No worries about your initial wariness of her; I totally get it. The more minor ones first, in order: Her love language is quality time; I can't really think of any kinds of play off the top of my head that are "absolute no" rather than just "extremely bad idea but she could be talked into it"; in the Nullverse she's majoring in music; she doesn't cut Cy off so much as she just grows as a person and her life becomes fuller and takes up more of her time, as opposed to when they first got together and she was very isolated and didn't have much going on besides school and him. They definitely remain friends :)

As for how Isabelle came into my brain, of course given how dark many central aspects of her character are I'm sure you can extrapolate that there are some personal subjects involved I'd rather not get deep into. I will say that I mostly made her out of a desire to make some sense of things, to explore fear, desire, love, guilt, agency...all these things that her history and her relationship to her own trauma make her a very useful vector for delving into. At first, though, she was a much more shallow character and honestly kind of a twit! She was more Draco Malfoy-esque, very bratty and snobby and domineering. Then I realized what being the child of Alec and Viola Underwood would actually be like, and suddenly this whole well opened up for me to draw from. And now here we are!

Isabelle was pretty intimidated at first on both counts. She was a little bit scared of what might be expected of her as Cy's sub if he and Lynn went that extreme in their own dynamic, but as she came to understand that that's just a Cy/Lynn thing and not anything she'd be asked to do, she found it more impressive as a sign of the bond between them. With her concerns out of the way, she's also more free to find Lynn's dedication, denial, and surgery scar hot as fuck.

Alec started being physically abusive with Isabelle when she was young, so later on he can enact sadomasochistic kink in the guise of just being punishment. Isabelle doesn't inherently know that there's a difference between Alec beating her with his fists in the spur of the moment and Alec beating her with a riding crop in a more ritualized, intimate way. In her view, at that age anyway, it's all just pain that results from her being bad. She doesn't come to understand that Alec gets off on it until she's older.

Thank you very much! That's so kind of you, I really appreciate it

Many questions! I don't know what you mean by "how did she come to be" so I'm going to put a pin in that one for now (sorry, feel free to clarify in another ask!) but for the other ones: Isabelle likes punk/goth, pastel, and academia type fashion styles; Isabelle and Cy meet weekly at a cafe to hang out, and if they're in the MoodTM they head back to his uni apartment for kink, but they see each other outside of that weekly thing pretty often; and Lynn....

Isabelle has a tendency to expect every woman she meets, especially older women and especially women whose men she's sexually involved with, to loathe her like her mother did. So Lynn's acceptance of her into the dynamic between her and Cy is wonderful for Isabelle, and starts the process of Isabelle like...relaxing into the fact that she can be liked by and have a meaningful (non-romantic in this case) relationship with another woman. She admires the confidence Lynn has come to have by the time she's in her 60s, and often wishes she could be as unashamed of her own scars. She really respects Lynn's wisdom, resilience, and of course her dedication as a submissive to Cy. Lynn is kinda a mother figure to her in a lot of ways.

Viola spends years in denial of the fact that Alec is grooming their daughter until Isabelle, age fourteen, tells her about the first rape—after which she knows but blames Isabelle for what's happening.

That depends on who you ask, but the real answer is that she was twelve. Alec abused Isabelle in ways he could deny were sexual due to their lack of resemblance to traditional sex from twelve to fourteen, which is when he raped her and when Isabelle would say it started.

As far as I know I don't think that's Cy's thing! Probably not Lynn's either. But Isabelle certainly has the uhhh. parental issues for it

That's very interesting! It wasn't intentional; I named Viola that because of the symbolism of the violet flower. It works tho!

A combination of a LOT of factors, ranging from the way he was raised (his mother's abuse + the encouragement of truly awful behavior he got as baby English nobility) to untreated inherited mental issues and rampant sadism to the moral gutting he experienced first at the hands of his twin brother, then scraping by a living on the streets of Bali, then as right hand to a crime lord. But ultimately Alec has no desire to be a good person. Any of these things could have been resisted if he wanted to; he doesn't. Why exactly he doesn't is up for debate.

Sure is!

Viola didn't want to have Isabelle in the first place, and would have preferred an abortion. Alec talked her out of it pretty easily, but months later when Viola developed pretty severe eclampsia (featuring hallucinations and seizures) during the pregnancy, his methods of denying her an abortion became more coercive. This culminated in Viola giving birth in critical condition, and Alec took newborn Isabelle and left Viola to recover without so much as a visit.

Viola absolutely resents Alec for this, but she also sees Isabelle as "that thing that took my husband's attention and love away from me when I needed it most." Not to mention that Isabelle is at the center of Viola's most traumatic experiences. Alec uses this as a means to drive a wedge further and further between them over the years to enable his abuse of Isabelle. Jealousy is his favored tactic, as well as strategically activating Viola's trauma to make her want Isabelle as far from her as possible.

Isabelle is pansexual and panromantic, although she's a little slow to fall in love. She has some issues around her attraction to women, though, and tends to downplay it because she views it as doomed for one reason or another.

She sure does! In AUs where Isabelle comes to the States she tends to do so as a young adult, so she retains the accent. In canon, she stays in England.

Sure! Emphasis on the "general", I'm assuming, so I'll gloss over some detail. Isabelle was born to an aristocratic couple in England consisting of Lord Alec Underwood and his wife, Viola. Isabelle grew up hated by her mother and doted on by her father, but he became increasingly physically abusive and eventually sexually abusive. Their relationship was a very intense, psychologically manipulative one to the point that when Isabelle eventually escapes him, she still looks back on him with more love than anything...at least at first. She does end up realizing how fucked up everything was, but needless to say the environment she spent the better part of two decades in did a real number on her psyche.