#Like her... I see a wounded. Lonely and sad person/creature and I am already trying to adopt it | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

Visit Blog

Explore Tumblr blogs with no restrictions, modern design and the best experience.

Fun Fact

In Q3 of 2020, 31% of US users access the Tumblr app daily.

#Like her... I see a wounded. Lonely and sad person/creature and I am already trying to adopt it

ventisehe · 3 years

Text

crying on their wedding day, or not / genshin impact / part two

this is the second part of crying on their wedding day. i didn’t add dainsleif and baizhu because i don’t have enough creative juice to squeeze them in.

requested by: @bakuhoe-is-my-bakubro

includes: venti, kaeya, xingqiu, scaramouche, razor, albedo, chongyun, xiao, kazuha

warning: unedited, not proofread, different variation of not seeing the bride before the wedding ceremony, written before kazuha was released

part one

THOSE WHO WILL NOT CRY

VENTI

Although his wings that have soared through the vast open azure skies was as ancient as the winds that swept ever so delicately through the lands that made up Teyvat, although his curious viridescent hues have become quiet witnesses to numbers of renowned and untold tales of mortals across nations, no matter the countless years he devoted trying to cognize the mortals and their atypical behaviors, Barbatos – or Venti, as he refers to himself now – can never truly understand how so many human beings can stay in one place with one person.

Before he had even come to be the Anemo Archon, all that Venti knew was how to heed the call of the wind. To him, it was confounding how mortals do not have the similar urgency as he to follow the winds. Even when he had taken the form of his dearest friend, Himmel, and has elapsed through myriad of seasons and centuries, still he soared gently in the air, lyre in his possession as he sung melodies of his own composition and strummed symphonies for those who yearn to hear his voice, and with his braids billowing in his travel to a destination even he cannot tell yet.

One has made an attempt - and unfortunately, a fruitless one - to make sense to him why some has gone against the heed of the wind, a very peculiar decision in the eyes of someone like him. His form nothing but a mere wisp at that time, nothing but a small creature with little understanding, and he remembered he was seated on the shoulder of his companion as they perched by the edge of a mountain, legs dangling and kicking gently back and forth. They basked in the caress of the wilting warmth as the sun bid its farewell.

Himmel was humming a tune with the corners of his mouth curving up and his eyes closed, and Venti's small frame thrummed with delight at the euphony he made.

And in the serene quiet, his dear friend spoke, "Someday, you'll find yourself wanting to stay somewhere. For something, or for someone. You don't understand now, but when you come to love one thing, you'll always want to be close to their side." Himmel turned to him, a subdued smile etched across his features, and upon catching sight of the sincerity and fervor Himmel in his bright eyes, Venti cannot help but mirror his sentiments and reciprocate his smile the best he can with the body he manifested in.

"When that day comes, you'll understand why many choose to . . . stay." Venti tilted his head to the side, and Himmel let out a small chuckle once he catches on the puzzlement that he displayed in his actions. "Don't look at me like that. I know you're curious about the whole marriage thing. Who knows, maybe someday you'll find yourself a nice fellow wisp and - "

All it took for Himmel to cut his statement short and burst out in laughter was how Venti prodded against his neck as a feeble attempt to make him quiet down.

And as Himmel has predicted, Venti - in time - did understood.

Venti was able to perceive the reasonings of mortals to turn their heads away from the beckon of the wind, to live a peaceful and quaint life, some alone, and some with their spouses. Himmel had done his absolute best to explain to him the wanders which are humans, and gleefully watched as Venti attentively listened to every word he spoke.

However, at the end of the day, Venti was still a free spirit. He can never be tied down to one place, much more to another living being. He will always find himself favoring the whisper of the winds in Teyvat, adrift and letting himself go adrift.

It was after he had witnessed the life in Himmel's eyes leave, heard his last breath, the whisper of the triumph of Mondstadt in achieving freedom, and his final request as he stroked Venti's quivering figure - A sad smile has been painted upon Himmel's brims as he gazed at the smaller entity weeping under his touch, "I ask only for one last favor from you, my dearest friend. Look after Mondstadt, after our people, for me, and never let everything we've sacrificed go for naught."

Venti was still a free spirit, but with what happened to Himmel, he longed to understand how he saw the world. It seemed he understood it differently than he did. And thus, he took the form of his beloved friend, and ventured closer than he had before to mortals.

The day he found a place in The Seven, the fateful he became the Anemo Archon, Venti has not once missed an event with his people. He celebrated with them in festivities, cried with them in their sorrows, aided them in battles against transgressors or wars within their own mind. He laughed with them, ate with them, drank with them, and his love for his people grew everyday.

But still, he can never stay for too long.

Venti tried to, he really did, for his friends, as his last gift before he lets go of the pain of losing him. But cannot force himself to remain in one place if his heart kept searching for places to explore, people to meet, discover the secrets of Teyvat.

Hopelessness was beginning to gnaw inside him as hundred of years has passed, and he has already traveled through long distances and saw generation after generation of his people in Mondstadt, and yet nothing he has yet to fulfill his own promise to hos friend.

Perhaps this was the way it was supposed to be. Maybe only mortals are giving the ability to be content and stay, but the Anemo Archon was forever to be appearing and disappearing - always, always stringing along with the wind.

And Venti believed that thought of his, and it stuck to him throughout many more years in Teyvat.

Not even a dust of faith was left in the ruins of what he now thought of as a vanquished promise, marring Venti with a wound in his heart, and a doubt in his standing as an Archon. However, it was through this belief that took him by surprise when he met a rather strange woman at the last day of the Windblume Festival, and in Stormterror’s Lair, no less.

The Honorary Knight, and their odd traveling companion have long been gone after they bid him farewell and a safe travel in his return to his abode – or whatever dwelling was the closest he could denote as home – leaving Venti by himself to reminisce in the ruins of where Old Mondstadt once stood.

The heavens were a color of black dotted with stars and the moon. The wind has grown softer, as though to accompany him in this lonesome hour, leaving chaste kisses against his pallid skin. From afar, the City of Mondstadt remains lit with lanterns and plethora of flowers. Even in this distance, he can oversee the joy that exuded from the people as they celebrated the remaining hours of the festival and take in the fragrance of the flowers friends and partners exchanged with one another. It was a beautiful sight to behold if one sits in such a desolate and dark place, in the very tower that he had confronted Stormterror – no, it was Dvalin now, Stormterror has perished along with the danger of the past.

But a presence – curious, sorrowful – has intervened in the quiet evening Venti thought he had saved for himself. He stood up from the platform where he has previously perched upon and took off to take a gander in the Lair, and it did not take a moment longer for him to spot a figure nearby. There, standing on top of a boulder clad in a crestfallen expression was a lone woman. She was casting her gaze around Old Mondstadt, and the breeze blew her tears away,

Venti had never seen her before. He had met every family, every person, in Old Mondstadt, and the same was to be said to the generation that followed after them. He knew them well, recalled their quirks and appearances, and this woman has no resemblance to any of them. Has she come from another nation?

Venti made it his point to glide down and noiselessly land behind her, but it seems his efforts have failed him for this stranger spoke the second his feet made contact with the ground.

"I wonder how this place used to be." You stated, and Venti was unsure whether you have felt his presence or you were speaking to yourself.

“So, this is Old Mondstadt.” She stated in a murmur. Her voice was laced with awe, but with evidence of forlornity. “I heard rumors about what happened here, and-and the thing with Stormterror too. Archon, I wish someone would tell me the real story of the City of Freedom. Back in my home, we’re not even allowed to learn much about the Archons of other nations. It’d be foolish to just trust rumors.”

There was something about her that piqued his interest. He did not know what it was. Maybe it was the way she talked about Mondstadt, her interest in the history of his city and his people, the sincere sorrow she felt for what the fallen tyrant of Mondstadt had had done to his former subjects, and how he had forced their hands to rebellion to protect their nation.

Venti spoke before he can stop to think. “If you’d like, I can retell the story of how Old Mondstadt came to be. I’m well versed in the history of this city, so rest assured everything you’ll hear is the truth.” He carved a smile to his lips. “And I am a Bard, so you have no need to worry about me chatting your ear off. All it takes is an audience and my lyre to get me started. Of course, a private performance will cost you, but since you’re new in the city, I suppose I can – ”

His breath was taken away when the stranger turned to face him, and his words withered from his tongue. Ever seen a speechless bard? It was a sight people will scarcely see.

Could he ever compose a song to even come close to the lovely view that was before his eyes? Gleaming curious pair of eyes, a smile so eager to listen, hair flitting with the wind as his heartbeat raced –

Venti was used to captivating his audience with his songs and stories. However, this time, it was he who was captivated, and when he took out his lyre and played a sweet tune to sing the story of his beloved city, with this gorgeous woman listening to him with bright and shining eyes, Venti knew then that he wanted to play for her every song he knew, every story he saw and heard, to the end of time.

You told him your name after his song, and you came all the way from the isolated nation of Inazuma. It took him by surprise how you have confidence in him to reveal to him your identity and place of birth. Surely, not everyone will trust a stranger who has appeared out of nowhere who offered to sing them a song. But then again, Venti trusted you as quickly as you trusted him, and now it was his turn to listen as you confide in him.

You have escaped from your home nation and survived out in the seas under the heat of the sun and threat of starvation for days until a compassionate Captain from Liyue, and her crew found you and delivered you to safety. And it was after your recovery that you fled to Mondstadt, the opposite of the nation you were born in.

Venti found himself sitting down in front of you as you told him your story, sight never leaving your frame as he did so. You were no Bard, and you were no storyteller, but he cannot tell the time or noticed the sun has set as you regaled him with story of Inazuma and your life after and before your escape. He was enchanted with the way you spoke, how you looked about Old Mondstadt with saddened awe, the fervidness in your voice – Have I found myself a rival? Thought Venti, eyes softening as you went on about your admiration for the affability and generosity his people have shown you.

When you left that day, you promised to come back and when you do, you shall ask him to sing to you more of his songs. At first, Venti was hesitant to believe your promise, but to his relief and happiness, when he saw you in the same place in the ruins undoubtedly waiting for him with your eyes closed and relishing in the wind that rushed past you. Venti always came to Stormterror’s Lair to oversee what remained of his old home, but for once, his sights were held torn and you have all his attention.

Seeing you keep your promise of return made his day, but when you whipped your head to face him with a smile, waving a hand as you asked him to sit with you, Venti knew that his heart desired yours. Was it a wise decision to fall for someone you've only just met? Certainly not, but he was an Archon who had too much time but too little for those who he holds dear. He cannot afford to be unsure when his time with you was limited.

So, he decided – when the day is right and the wind is quiet, he shall make his feelings for you known.

It became a routine for the two of you to meet in Stormterror’s Lair and share your stories with one another, Venti always telling his in songs, as a Bard would. There was never a dull moment between the two of you, and every story told in the ruins were to be fascinated of. And soon, it wasn't just stories. Soon, he was finding out more about you, knowing you better until he couldn't get you out of his head.

It became a routine for the two of you to meet in Stormterror’s Lair and share your stories with one another. Venti always told his in the form of songs, as a Bard would, you will always applaud him after, to which he would respond with a melodramatic bow. There was never a dull moment between the two of you, and every story spoke in the ruins and the silence of the night was to be fascinated of. He was learning more about you, knowing you better, until he couldn’t get you out of his mind when his head falls against his pillow.

Venti cherished these times he had with you. He knew it won't be long until you were gone. He knew his fate as an Archon – seeing loved ones perish and more to come, and the cycle continued.

He hasn't even told you about his identity.

Venti was grateful for the Traveler for pushing him to tell you about his feelings and his standing in Teyvat, but he was still uncertain. What would you say if he confessed to you? What will you say if he admits to being the Anemo Archon? Will things change between the two of you? Will you leave? Venti can’t think about that.

Venti grew worried when you didn’t come to Stormterror’s Lair one day, and then another, and his concern grew as days turned to weeks. Everyday he found himself visiting Stormterror’s Lair in hopes of seeing you waiting for him again, but he was always left disappointed. You did not mention going on an adventure or a commission, so his worry was warranted. Were you safe or were you simply sick of him?

When the day you finally appeared in the Lair, relief washed over Venti and he practically jumped off the broken tower he frequently resided and made haste towards you. But his footsteps faltered when he found no traces of a smile on your face. He can see the relief and joy, but the smile was absent. From that, Venti’s own beam wilted as he walked over to you with reluctant steps.

When he came close to you, he opened his mouth to ask how you have faired for the past weeks and question your abrupt disappearance when you said something that took him by surprise.

“I know who you are.”

It felt like his entire world has stopped for a moment as he stared at you with disbelief smearing his countenance. How ever did you discover the truth? Certainly, he had similarities with his statues, but none of his people nor visitors from outside ever pieced the puzzle together.

He averted his gaze, ashamed. Why was he wallowing in shame? Or perhaps was this regret of not telling you sooner? Did you feel betrayed? Will you cast him away?

“But how . . . ”

“The man at the Tavern told me, Master Diluc.” You answered. “I was telling him about you, and I guess he thought I already knew of you being the . . . Anemo Archon.”

“Is that why you were gone for weeks?” Venti questioned, and when you nodded in response, he winced. He can’t help but think of the worse – She’ll leave me.

Venti looked away. “Ah, I shouldn’t be surprised. I mean, it is hard to believe someone like me is an Archon.” He laughed out, but the humor was nonexistent in his statement. “So, how do you feel about that?”

Venti let out a gasp when you threw yourself to him and enveloped him in a tight hug. Venti froze at your actions and waited for you to withdraw, but when you did not, he slowly accepted your embrace with gratefulness. He didn’t know what you do this, but he was more than happy to reciprocate your actions before he lets you go.

It won’t matter, anyway. He’ll hear the winds calling for him somewhere soon. Maybe letting you go now would hurt less in the long run.

“Are you not . . . angry?” Venti asked as he closed his eyes and rested his chin on your shoulder.

“Oh Archons, no, Venti. I could never hate you.” You assured him in a whisper and from the brokenness on your voice, Venti knew you were crying. “Those times you told me about Barbatos . . . all the stories about his past . . . everything he had gone through . . . ” You murmured, tone lowering. “ . . . you must have been so hurt and lonely.”

He didn’t know why your words shot through him. He can feel tears streaming down his cheeks as memories of his past and the continuous pain of loss and regret caught up with him. Finally, after thousands of years, his false smile was shattered.

How pathetic. He thought. An Archon weeping in front of a mortal that he is in love with. Could things get any worse?

Your hand stroked his hair, comforting him as he cried against your shoulder and in your arms.

“I was . . . ” He breathed out, choking as he tightened his grip around you. “ . . . it never stops hurting . . . I keep seeing Himmel, and everyone, and – ”

He couldn’t finish what he was saying and just relished in the comfort of your arms, breathing in your scent.

“I don’t understand what you’ve been going through these thousands of years, and I never will, but it’s okay now, Venti.” You whispered in his ear, and he can detect the compassion and love lacing your voice. His heart hammered against his chest. “You have me. You don’t have to pretend everything is okay. I’m here for you. I want you to be Venti and Barbatos with me, I want all of you.”

He couldn’t believe his ears. Did he hear you correctly? You want him?

Venti gently retracted himself from you, but his arms remained at your sides. “You still want me, even after I kept this from you?”

“I want you, Venti.” You clasped your hands over his shoulders, firmly looking into his eyes. “I’m not going anywhere anymore. I’m staying here, with you.”

And so, you stayed, and so did he – it was the first time he stayed, and he will never regret it.

One would think that as a renowned Bard in Mondstadt, Venti would push for a grand wedding where all people of Mondstadt are invited to wine and dine together as bards banded together to regale everyone with their music, and as the Archon who values freedom above everything else, a big part of him wanted to. But he thought of you and what you wanted. It took some time for him to deliberate over how selfish it would be for him to make you uncomfortable in your wedding day and agree a small wedding would be a much better option considering how sacred and intimate marriage is.

However, knowing you cannot simply have the Anemo Archon go against his belief, and of course because of your love for him, you have secretly devised a plan with Jean and Kaeya to invite all the citizens of Mondstadt to your reception to celebrate this joyous occasion for the two of you. There was more than enough food and drinks to feast, courtesy of Master Diluc, and you’re sure Venti will be over the moon with this surprise.

Venti had no family, and those he did consider as family were long gone, just a memory from the past. Even though it is unusual for a groom not to have a best man in his wedding day, Venti claimed he was fine without a best man. He had no doubts in marrying you. When he proposed to you, there was no touch of regret or doubt. Albeit reluctantly, you were in a mutual agreement in that matter, as well. Until, of course, an unexpected tribute arrived offering his services.

Venti was not the least nervous when the day of your wedding came. He did not waste time when he woke up and immediately got to work on his appearance. Jean was kind enough to have his wedding suit tailored for him, an early wedding gift, as she says.

Venti knew of the rule that a groom mustn’t see his bride in her wedding gown until the time she walks on the aisle. But he was just so thrilled for this day that he forgot all about it. And even if he did remember it, who in the world would stop him from seeing you? He has no best man to stop him anyway -

Venti almost choked to death when a hand came to grasp him by his the back of his collar, and he blubbered pathetically as he was thrown off balance and was dragged back to the altar.

“Who are - Master Diluc? What are you doing?”

Diluc let out a huff as he continued dragging Venti away from your house. “Stopping you from upsetting your bride. I’m sure you know that you shouldn’t see your bride in her gown before the wedding?”

“But Master Diluc, as much as I appreciate what you’re doing, you’re not in any position to - ”

“Actually, I am in a position where I’m allowed to stop you from making a mess of your wedding.” Said Diluc. “I’m your best man, after all.”

Venti couldn’t put to words how touched he was, and more so when you revealed to him after the wedding that Diluc has offered to be his best man by his own volition. As thanks, the next time Venti visited the tavern to drink, he paid for a single bottle of wine once. It wasn’t exactly ideal but considering how he had no original plan to pay Diluc for any of the drinks he will consume, this was as good as it gets.

When the doors opened to reveal you in your pretty white wedding dress, Venti swooned, and a large joyous smile stretched across his lips.

A gentle breeze swept in the altar and Venti felt his feet leave the ground briefly, floating in the air as he excitedly watched you walk down the aisle, and it took Diluc’s hand pulling him down by the back of his suit to stop him from floating up above the cathedral.

“My, my, if I knew any better, I would have thought the Archons have taken favor on me and blessed me with a beautiful bride.” Venti said once you join him in the altar and took your hands in his own. “You look beautiful, darling. I might just write another song about you.”

You shook your head, pink tinting your cheeks. “Haven’t you written enough songs about me?”

Venti inched his face close to you, his large smile altering to a soft smile. “There aren’t enough songs to tell you how much I adore you.”

The wedding went on, and when the two of you kissed, only one thing entered in Venti’s mind - I found my reason to stay, Himmel. I just hope you can see this.

The wind blew gently.

KAEYA

Kaeya did not know what to feel when his brother has made it clear once and for all that he wanted nothing to do with him. His dismissive remarks, his heated glares, his cold and aloof treatment – he had known Diluc for so long, and his memories with him in their childhood never grew old in his mind, so it pained him to have his once bright-eyed sibling who aspired to be part of the Knight acting as though they were strangers. No, strangers would have been merciful. He acted as if the bond they had never meant anything to him, and casting him aside and seeing him under the light of contempt was the easiest decision he has ever made.

Even you were not spared from the same fate. The three of you become inseparable the day you and Kaeya were introduced to each other. You’ve done everything together, and it would be a strange sight to see one missing from the group.

When Diluc has cut ties with Kaeya, you suffered the same fate as he. You poor, poor thing – you tried your best to patch the friendship he no longer wanted to be part of, and Kaeya did not waste time running to your side and picking up the pieces Diluc shattered. It was not an easy feat for both of you to lose Diluc – he lost a brother, and you lost a good friend.

But it was because of your fall out with him that you and he become closer than ever, closer than before, if that could even be possible. The two of you support one another and you go to each other when things get difficult.

Kaeya will never admit it, and he would rather die than do, but he has loved you for many years. The moment Diluc pulled him into an unknown house, claiming that he wanted to meet someone important to him, and his eyes landed on your form with the sunrays kissing your skin, a wide smile stretching across your face, and a fake sword in your hand, his heart was taken.

You were one of the reasons he wanted to become a Knight. Diluc admitted his want to become a Knight, and you expressed the same sentiment, and of course, hearing his friend and brother say so, he became inclined of joining the Knights. I’ll get good training. He thought back then as stared at you, blushing as you braided Diluc’s hair. Then, I’ll be able to protect ( Your Name ).

Now that Diluc no longer wanted to be in contact with you than more than is necessary, Kaeya grew to be more protective over you. He knew you can handle yourself as you were a Knight yourself and wields a Vision, too, but his heart clenches at the thought of you getting hurt when he could have easily had your back, like he always did.

Kaeya didn’t knowif you had feelings for him, or for anyone, for that matter. Many times he thought of confessing to you just to rip the band aid off, but he couldn’t. He’ll keep his feelings to himself and continue being the Cavalry Captain that everyone adored, and your own personal protector.

But it was getting harder and harder to hide his feeling. Everyday he was always under the threat of falling deeper in love with you. Everyday, you always give him more reasons to love you. Waiting for him to come home after taking too long in his work, taking care of him after a nasty battle or when he’s drunk, always checking up on him even if your schedule was hectic, offering him help if you deem the responsibility given to him is too much. How much longer can he pretend that he wasn’t thinking of you everyday and every night?

He was pulled back from his train of thoughts when he felt a soft material doused in alcohol perch on the wound blemishing his skin. “Ah, be gentle, ( Your Name ),” Whined Kaeya, stilling himself to refrain from moving and delaying your nurse on his cuts.

“We wouldn’t be in this situation if you had only been careful fighting those Abyss Mages.” You reprimanded with a stern glare. “Think of this as your punishment from me. Now, hold still.”

“I was fighting Abyss Mages and came back with small wounds. How am I not careful?”

“You can be more careful.” Quipped you, and finding your chance, you pressed the cotton again his skin, causing the Cavalry Captain to hiss in pain.

“Ow, ow, ow – I said be gentle!”

“Oh, you can fight Abyss Mages but can’t handle getting your wounds treated? What a baby.”

Kaeya pouted while you pulled away from him. “My dearest ( Your Name ) doesn’t love me anymore.” He cooed. “Tell me, what can I do to make it up to you, hmm?”

You shook your head and placed your hand over his head, beaming. His heart leaped in his chest. “Stop being reckless.” You responded. “You’re the most important person to me, Kaeya. I don’t want to lose you too.”

Days and days he spent thinking of what you said. He never truly knew how he important he was to you. The thought of that had him sleeping and dreaming of you and your smiles, how the days will be if you loved him the same way he loved you, and the fateful day you owned his heart.

He had to thank Diluc for introducing him to you. He couldn’t imagine being in a world where he has no one to lean on when he lost the only family he had. You became his rock, someone he could lean on and trust. His friend who he loved more than he should have, the woman he wished to see in his arms someday.

But it will never be. He has to protect you. He is always in danger and he doesn’t want to hurt you more if he died and you two are in a relationship. And he had seen firsthand how affected you were when Diluc no longer wanted to be friends with you. He won’t let you go through the same pain if your relationship didn’t work. He loved you too much to let you suffer again.

Kaeya didn’t think he would be able to thank Diluc again after their fall out but he was mistaken.

He didn’t know the full story of what had happened the night he got shitfaced drunk in the tavern but woke up the next day to learn he has revealed his feelings for you in front of his brother, and the latter had casually mentioned it to you when you dropped by the tavern to escort him back home.

Regret and frustration welled up inside of him and he spent ten minutes walking back in you guest room, trying to explain himself and perhaps even jest about having feels for you but his preparation was all futile when you opened the door just as he was about to.

Before he can speak, you beat him to it.

“The next time you get drunk like that, you’re sleeping on the couch.” You chastised, shaking your head and proceeding to turn your back to him to return downstairs. “Freshen up, and head down. I already cooked you breakfast, so hurry up before it gets cold.”

Kaeya stared blankly at the spot you previously stood before smiling. He rushed over to the staircase and looked down to watch you descend the steps. “I won’t keep you long, love.”

His smile broadened when he saw redness rush to your cheeks.

Kaeya proposed to you in a way you expected him to propose to you. A fancy dinner at a fancy restaurant where he ordered a fancy bottle of wine and placed the fancy ring he bought into your glass. It was only because you knew him well that you have no accidentally imbibed the accessory.

Upon receiving your answer to his proposal, the first thing Kaeya did the day after is hunt down for a best man. As a popular and charming Cavalry Captain of the Knights of Favonius, he thought it would be an easy task finding himself a best man but that notion gradually wilted as the date for your wedding approaches, he has yet to find someone to take the position.

In his pursuit for a best man, Kaeya came to realize something. His relationships with others aren’t exactly intimate. They drink and laugh together, but none of them really knew him. Kaeya couldn’t go to them with his personal problems or have their shoulders ready for him to cry on. They were good friends, but not people he would let inside his heart and vulnerability.

There were only two people who knew him behind the title of Cavalry Captain - you, and of course, his estranged brother, Diluc.

The very thought of Diluc sent a shiver down his spine. Diluc hated him and ( Your Name ). He pushed them away, treated them horridly, like they had been nothing to him but strangers with bad memories. Why would he want him to be his best man?

He remembered one day in Angel’s Share, he asked Venti if he could stand as his best man in the wedding and he swore he heard a glass dropping from behind the counter but when he turned, he saw Diluc wiping a wine glass with a blank expression. When Kaeya faced Venti once again, the excitement of being asked of such honorable position has withered and the Bard kindly declined before telling him to ask Diluc to be his best man. He did not.

Who cares about best man? The only thing important to me right now is marrying ( Your Name ).

But when the day of his wedding dawned, Kaeya was in a panic. Behind his charm was a man with a dark past, dark memories, and dark thoughts. He began doubting his ability to give you the life you deserve, began feeling insecurities he thought he had set aside.

He tried his best to remain calm, and for the most part, it worked. Everyone did not find something amiss when Kaeya was interacting with them before the wedding, but someone did, and that someone took him by his arm and dragged him a far and secluded corner after excusing him from who he was conversing with.

“Stop fidgeting with your tie, it’s beginning to bother me.”

Kaeya let out a huff. “Master Diluc, what a . . . surprise that you’re here.”

“You sent me an invitation.” The red head retaliated.

Kaeya had indeed sent him an invitation but he had no recollection of this or whatsoever. He was too wasted to remember.

“The Cavalry Captain losing his cool. Now this is a wedding just waiting to be ruined.”

It was almost like magic how the anxiety that has been eating him up vanished at his brother’s taunt. Kaeya glared at Diluc, opening his mouth to retaliate but before he can even let a single word move past his lips, Diluc turned his back to him and returned to the cathedral, leaving Kaeya in disbelief.

He let out a huff as he stared at his brother’s retreating form. “Bastard still knows me best.”

Kaeya has taken the reins over his emotions again, and he was sure he can keep his composure when you enter through the doors. But he was thoroughly mistaken as he swallowed the lump in his throat when his sight landed on you.

It felt like a dream. How can someone like you love him? In all his flaws, mistakes, and faults, how did you see him as someone you can lean on? Someone you want to spend the rest of your life with?

Surely, he must be dreaming. He’ll wake up in his bed any moment now and realize that everything had been the foolishness of his mind -

Except you continued making your way down aisle, and then you were in front of him with a veil covering your flushed face, and then he was slipping his hands in yours. This was real. You love him.

You leaned forward to him, nose brushing against his. “You look very dashing today, Kaeya.”

Kaeya chuckled. “And you look splendid today, Mrs. Alberich - oh, don’t go shy on me now.”

His smile broadened at the sight of your reddening cheeks. If it wasn’t for the priest speaking right now, he would have flipped over your veil and kiss you.

But there is plenty of time to do that. Kaeya will make sure of that.

XINGQIU

The youngest of the Guhua Clan will rarely be seen without a novel in hand. Everyday, Xingqiu will be seen with his friends with a book near him, always different from yesterday. He had read many novels and heard stories from storytellers, but one story he will never get tired of was his story with you.

Although it may not seem like it, Xingqiu was a hopeless romantic, and he has always imagined seeking a woman to make his bride. However, it will always be something he can only imagine. As a heir of the Guhua Clan, he has responsibilities to keep and adhere, and he has willingly accepted this. Being given the freedom to choose his bride is something he cannot afford. When his father has informed him about offering him to a daughter of another prestigious clan, he has voiced his discontentment and disinclination to the arrangement but has nonetheless followed.

What a horror it would have been if he had followed through with the tiny voice inside his head saying to run away because if he did, he would have missed the chance of laying eyes on you and experiencing what many romance novels he read called – a heart skipping a beat.

It was a tiring charade of formalities and display of pristine etiquette. All Xingqiu wanted was to retreat to a secluded area and continue immersing himself in the book he has picked up from the local library. With how often he reads, the novels in his own house he has already read, twice.

And so, he did. He kindly excused himself from the dinner between the families, making up a lie about feeling unwell and needing rest, and hurried over in the fields near his place. It is not exactly rude for him to skip dinner. It is not exactly ideal for his bride-to-be to be late in an important occasion like this so why shouldn’t he exhibit the same treatment as they did to him?

When he came to the spot be frequented, he caught sight of an unfamiliar figure from afar. A girl around his age sat on the bench under the tree, in the same spot he always occupied. She wore clothes similar to the families of the clan his family are negotiating with, so it didn’t take long for Xingqiu to learn this girl was related to them. He just didn’t know what her standing was with them.

She was beautiful, he will admit, but it was the book in her hand that caught his attention. Thus, he approached her, adorning a friendly mask as to not scare her away. It is rather uncomfortable meeting strangers in the dark of the night and somewhere far from civilization.

“Her hair billowed as she stood by the precipice, golden hues dimming in the dying light as she was left disappointed for yet another century. Her tears stung her skin and her throat tightened, but another century is simply common for someone like her. She will wait for his return, even if every mountain has eroded and all that was left of her was hope.” He recited a line from the novel as he took even ambles towards the girl, and he did not falter as she turned to face him. He offered her a smile and bowed with the elegance that his family taught. “Apologies for my disruption, my liege, but I can’t help but be thrilled to see someone with such incredible taste for literature. Not many are fond of historical fiction. Well, in my case, not many are into literature.”

Her eyes appraised him with wonder as she perfected her posture. “That’s one of the lines in the book. My, even I haven’t memorized a single phrase from any of the books in my collections.” She remarked.

“I like to memorize a line or two from all the books I’ve read. It feels like a part of them will always be with me even if my memories fade in time.” Xingqiu gestured to the vacant spot beside her. “May I sit next to you?”

She let out a laugh, to which sent shivers down Xingqiu’s spine. “You may. It’s not everyday I get to speak with someone with the same interests as me.”

He gladly seated himself beside her and immediately, he was greeted with the fragrance of flowers.

The girl extended her hand to him, smilingly softly at him. “My name is ( Your Name ),” She introduced herself. “You’re probably thinking you haven’t seen me around in Liyue, and you’re right. My family is here to meet with the Guhua Clan.”

Xingqiu took her hand and pressed a chaste kiss on the back. “Glad to make your acquaintance, my lady. My name is Xingqiu from the Guhua Clan.”

Her eyebrows raised in acknowledgment. “Is that so?” She mused. “Then, I must show my sincerest gratitude for letting my family into – ”

“Ah, there’s no need for that,” Dismissed Xingqiu as he shook his head. “We’re far from the dinner they’re sharing together. No need to be so formal with me.”

Her smile brightened. “I have a feeling we’re going to get along splendidly, Xingqiu.”

Upon returning together to his house and finding an excuse as to why Xingqiu had been outside did he and ( Your Name ) learn that it was them who were destined to be married when they are of age. The disappointment of meeting his soon-to-be bride has dissipated at the revelation, leaving him filled with utmost joy and pride as to having you as his, and from the shy and gleeful smile that wandered to your lips, Xingqiu can tell you think the same with him.

It was to be expected that the two of you will have a luxurious and grand wedding. With the two of you coming from wealthy families, it was no surprise. If you have insisted for a small wedding consisting only of close relatives and friends, your parents will fear some other elite clans will perceive this as them losing power and money and will take advantage of them or simply cut ties with them. You and Xingqiu had no other choice but to respect their requests. Although Xingqiu was secretly relieved you agreed to a big wedding. For him, you deserved only the best of the best, and in this case, larger is better.

Both families came to an agreement that it would be for the best if the two of you are not to see each other for the week before your wedding day. You found nothing wrong with this arrangement. Xingqiu, however, was the opposite of you.

Many times he tried to sneak out of his house to visit you in secret but Chongyun has thwarted this attempts many times. When he goes to adventures with the Traveler, he find himself missing you in mere hours. How can he survive a whole week without communicating with you?

Oh, how foolish of him. He was now allowed to visit you but he can, however, write letters to you.

For the whole week, Xingqiu will be writing to you without ceasing. You’ll have a difficult time keeping up with his letters but you’ll always find time to respond to him. After all, you missed him just as much as he missed you.

Xingqiu woke up before the sun can call for him. He walked around in his room, breathing in and out as he tried to soothe his joy. Chongyun, who was tasked to look after Xingqiu for the whole week, woke up from the sound of his footsteps. When he stepped inside his best friend’s room, Xingqiu held Chongyun’s hands and twirled him around, startling the half-asleep Cryo user.

“I’m getting married to ( Your Name ) today!”

“I know, Xingqiu. I’ve been stopping you from visiting her the whole week.”

Your wedding was held in a beautiful garden where cherry blossoms flutter and the wind was gentle and cool.

Xingqiu always held his composure in any situations and circumstances he encountered. But he was going to admit that seeing you in your wedding dress with the cherry blossoms kissing your skin and tresses every now and then had him malfunctioning.

It took a worse turn when you finally stood before him, expectantly looking at him. A compliment, a playful jest, a seductive remark - but there was none of that.

Xingqiu stared at you, eyes shining with admiration and his lips parted in pleasant surprise.

“Xingqiu, earth to Xingqiu,” You whispered. “You there?”

It was only after you spoke that Xingqiu snapped out of his stupor.

“Get yourself together, Xingqiu.” Stated Chongyun beside him in a whisper.

It took him a while to find him bearings but when he did, Xingqiu smiled at you and pressed a kiss on your forehead.

“Beautiful, just like the first time I saw you.”

SCARAMOUCHE

Scaramouche has dedicated his entire life to seeing through what his majesty, the Tsaritsa, desired. His life shall be nothing but a pawn for her to use in her schemes and may her will be done through him and her subjects. If she must dispose of him to make success of her endeavor, Scaramouche will gladly surrender before her eyes and bare his neck for her to cut. He will do anything she commands without a second thought, and anyone who dares get in his way will face the wrath of an incensed Harbinger.

It was all about the Tsaritsa. His entire his existence is for his majesty. It was all he ever believed in when the honor of being the sixth Harbingers was crowned over him. With that said, Scaramouche can never bring himself to admit his resolve has been altered upon his discreet visitation to the City of Freedom to conduct a more intimate investigation over the meteorites and the impact it had on the people of Mondstadt.

His skull was throbbing, his thoughts scattered, and frustration was beginning to settle inside of him. Scaramouche has just dispatched his soldiers to continue their research on the meteors after his failed attempt to eliminate the traveler. He was left alone in the tranquility of the night, with the remnants of the astrologist’s escape glittering beneath his eyes, mocking him.

“I should have acted quicker. The Traveler will continue foiling The Tsaritsa’s plans.” Mumbled Scaramouche to himself. “No matter. There will be another chance in the future to finish off the hero of Mondstadt, and I’m sure it’ll come sooner than I expect. I must prepare for that time. I can’t make this mistake again.”

A curious hum that echoed behind him had him stiffening in his place and drawing out his weapon from thin air. “Are you interested about the meteors too?” A voice asked.

Scaramouche turned around, and he found a woman standing behind him a few meters away. She has a beauty that he favors, a smile so gentle that it thawed a bit of ice in his heart, but a scowl made its way to his countenance. She’s taller than me.

She didn’t look particularly like anyone he would have any interest in knowing, and when she has introduced herself to him after he supplied her with no answer, Scaramouche predicted correctly. She was merely an ordinary folk in any ordinary city with no Vision or any skillset that could benefit him in anything.

“I must get going.” Curtly stated Scaramouche and he turned around without even bidding goodbye to the woman.

“So soon?” You asked. “I thought we could at least talk what’s been happening – about the meteors, the stars.”

Scaramouche frowned at the mention of the latter and he spun back around to meet your gaze. “The stars? What about the stars?”

You smiled a secret smile. “The stars . . . they’re fake.”

Scaramouche stared at you with wonder and amusement in his dark hues. He has always believed in that notion, and only a handful came to agree with him. Now, here a lady stands before him, with nothing in particular to offer him, speaking of the truth many has rejected.

He examined you from head to toe, evaluating your form before beckoning you to come over to him, saying, “Perhaps I can spare some time to talk.”

What was supposed to be a conversation within an hour or so has extended for a day, and when you requested to accompany him back to ship docked in Liyue Harbor to continue your conversation (it surprised him but has nonetheless allowed you to tag along) about the meteors and the stars, it dragged on for weeks.

But Scaramouche would be lying if he said that was all you discussed about. There was only so much information they can relate to the subject that has intertwined their fates that it did not take long for the two of you to stray from it to favor a more civil conversation. He learned of your mundane life back in Mondstadt where you were merely another dot in the bustle of the city and he managed to extract from you valuable material regarding the Honorary Knight (in truth, you have willingly told him everything you knew about the Hero of Mondstadt and this he was very pleased with). He learned about your family, your work, your past, and your ambition to adventure throughout the lands of Teyvat even without a Vision.

He thought it was foolish of you to believe you can ever get out of your city without a Vision. There were too many enemies that a simple adventurer like you could easily be overwhelmed with. Not to mention the Fatuis that he and his fellow Harbingers has placed all throughout Teyvat. The thought of you getting hurt, especially by his own soldiers . . . it did not sit right with him.

Arriving at Liyue Harbor, Scaramouche proposed that you come with him. It is no secret that anyone who do not possess a Vision cannot survive if they were ever to embark on a journey. Hearing your desire for an adventure, Scaramouche has come to decide that as gratitude for your pleasant company and for your compliance in giving him information about the renowned traveler, he shall take you along in his voyage, showing you the grandest landscapes, granting your every need and desires, all the while keeping you at his side where he was certain you were safe.

It was all to thank you, nothing else. It wasn’t because Scaramouche knew he would find himself missing you and the comfort you bring when you leave, nor was it because he was fond of you. Yes, yes, all just to show his gratitude.

As his soldiers watched as Scaramouche led you aboard in ship with his hand interlocked with yours, they thought the same thing – Scaramouche is never the one to show gratitude to anyone. You had him smitten.

How you were able to fall in love with Scaramouche in such a short period of time is fascinating. Especially with his horrid personality.

But he was different with you. He was gentle, caring, and never raised his voice. The insults remained but there was no venom behind them. It took you quite some time to get used to his belittling remarks but it didn’t evade your perception how Scaramouche begun lessening his insults, opting for a more playful jab instead.

He proposed to you over at dinner. He had just come back from an expedition and came home to a table filled with your cooking. As the two of you are exchanging your stories of what went with your lives when you two were separated, Scaramouche placed his chopsticks away, looked at you straight in the eyes and said, “Marry me.”

How can you say no to such a romantic proposal?

Actually, you made him redo his proposal before you accepted but nobody else has to know about that.

There was no best man for Scaramouche in your wedding. The man was feared by everyone, and his fellow Harbingers hated him. Childe did insist on being his best man at one point but he almost ended up being fried by a lightning bolt. Apparently, the 11th Harbinger pestered him for a whole week trying to convince him to let him be the best man so his actions were justified - just a little bit.

You have to give it to Scaramouche. Regardless of his busy schedule and the current predicament in Inazuma, he managed to find time and opportunity to plan your wedding and marry you without having to worry about the Electro Archon and her subjects.

Scaramouche scoffed at the tradition of not being able to see you on the very day of your wedding. What good would it be? You were going to be his wife, and he wanted to see his wife. He saw himself above tradition, and visited you first thing in the morning at the day of the wedding.

It was no question Scaramouche was an authoritative man but he was more so as he prepared himself for the wedding.

His maids ran about in the room, providing everything he needed and wanted. Scaramouche was not known for being compassionate, but this was the first time they’ve been on the receiving end of his wrath. Normally, he would ignore their existence and not even bother to call them by their names but today, he was different. He acted worse than when he comes home after a failed mission.

The maids knew he was beyond frustrated with the wedding. So, they called to ask for your help.

“Scaramouche, you’re scaring the maids.” You cooed as you came up behind him and placed your hands on his shoulders.

Scaramouche let out a scoff, but you felt his frame soften. He sat before a mirror, and he gazed at your reflection as he placed a hand over one of yours. “Even they weren’t so terrible with their jobs . . . ”

“You’re making things so hard for them. And for yourself too.” You stated. “Marrying me shouldn’t be hard, should it?”

That statement set Scaramouche right, and when you left to carry on with your own preparation and the maids returned to their duties, he was more civil with them. If that’s what you want, then he can endure it.

The hour has finally arrived. Scaramouche has faced many dangers in his life, but it was only now he felt restless. What is taking you so long? He thought you wanted to marry him. Then what’s warranting your late arrival?

At that thought, you finally appeared by the end of the aisle, holding a bouquet in your hands. Everyone in the venue gaped at your beauty, and Scaramouche was thankful you had everyone gazing at you. He didn’t want them to see the dumbfounded and poorly hidden lovestruck expression that crossed his mien for a moment.

But a sense of pride also touched him.

That’s my bride.

When the ceremony begins, you and Scaramouche were seated side by side. You smiled brightly at him when you sat, but he didn’t any indication that he saw your smile and continued giving his undivided attention on the person conducting your wedding. You pouted heavily at this but said nothing and followed his actions. However, your smile returned when you felt his fingers hooking with yours. It was a small improvement, but it was intimate and loving.

Scaramouche didn’t cry in your wedding but when his arms held you tightly to his chest when evening came and two of you lied down on your shared bed, it was enough for you to know he loved you as much as you loved him.

Maybe more so.

RAZOR

Razor rarely experience human interaction, and if he did, it would be abrupt and depending on how the communication was being dealt by both parties, it would either be Razor who parts from them first out of wariness or lacking knowledge of being social or the other would, most of the time for the reason they find it disturbing a human could act so much like a wolf. The humans Razor constantly encounter are the hunters from Springvale and due to their bellowing voices and violence against his Lupicals, he has limited his ventures to Mondstadt unless something calls for an emergency.

Other than the man who gave him his name, Razor only knew a handful of people – six of them being the Traveler, Traveler’s companion, Bennett, Klee, her big brother Albedo, and the woman he sees as his mentor, Lisa. He can only ever let his guard down when around them, though he was still a wee bit cautious of Albedo whenever Klee drags him to his camp.

He didn’t think he could meet anyone else who can consider a Lupical. That was until he met you. You were taking a peaceful stroll around Wolvendom – Archons know why you chose the most avoided place in Mondstadt to walk through – at the same time he was hunting down boars for his Lupicals.

There was no rescuing or danger involved when he met you. It was a simple encounter, to which Razor was pleasantly surprised with. In almost all occasions, when he is meeting a fellow human being, it would be under rather unusual circumstances. He met the Traveler and her floating friend when they were being attacked by slimes. He met Lisa when she has painted the skies dark as she was singlehandedly fending herself off from a mob of Hilichurls. He met Klee when she was using her bombs to fish. He met Albedo in the middle of a chaotic experiment to which resulted in an evacuation. He met Bennett when he was hanging upside down from a tree when he tried to take an apple from a high branch, and the tree was up in flames.

To say, meeting you normally was a breath of fresh air.

The two of you hit it off almost immediately, or so that is what it seems to you. Although you consider Razor a good friend even in just the few days you have met, he was still very careful of you. He had been deceived by humans before and it may be a little unfair to you since he trusted the Traveler and Bennett almost in an instant, he must first know you are trustworthy.

And indeed, you’ve proven yourself as such. Perhaps, more so than the Traveler. You have done everything to show him you have no ill intentions against him and his Lupicals – helped him in hunting for sustenance for his family even if you have to knowledge in hunting, helping him broaden his vocabulary, helping him read and write – but it was your sacrifice to protect them that made him truly open himself up to you.

An Abyss Mage has appeared out of nowhere and has wreaked havoc in their residence. Razor can feel his heart thundering as he raced through Wolvendom along with a few of his Lupicals who he had gone out with to hunt. Upon arriving at their home, Razor has anticipated to see the grass painted with red and wounded wolves whimpering in pain as others try to battle against the Abyss Mage. But to his relief, such image was not implemented into reality. Instead, he found his Lupicals sleeping soundly in their den, and the remains of the Abyss Mage has slowly evaporated in thin air. As the particles gradually disappeared, they made way for your presence to be revealed.

Razor let out a gasp when he laid eyes on you. Bruised, bleeding, exhausted, but smiling as you happily waved at him with the hand clutching your weapon.

You happily advanced towards him, tittering. Razor reached out to take your hand, and reluctantly asked of your welfare. Now he understood why humans ask how one is fairing when they are clearly unwell – they do not know what else to say.

“Why would you do that?” Razor questioned as he brought you far from his den to tend to your wounds without waking his family. “You are hurt now.”

“I can’t let an Abyss Mage hurt your Lupical.” You answered firmly, the smile you wore dissipating as you gazed into his eyes. “I might not be as strong as the Honorary Knight or Acting Grand Master Jean, but I fought well.”

What was this odd sensation he was feeling? This strong urge to protect you, to take you in his arms and never let you go – what was this? He has never felt like this before. So light, so . . . flustered. He thought this feeling would be gone after a few days, but months has passed and since then, the feeling became more prominent, stronger. All the time he could never get enough of you and there will always be that lingering trickle of pain in his chest when you have to leave for the day. Razor knew you would come back the day after when the night has gone, but it never stopped that little ache.

Razor understood that he lacked understanding of feelings, so he confided to Bennett about it. Bennett was almost as clueless as Razor about feelings – almost – but he did know when someone was taking a liking of someone in a more amorous manner. He has filled Razor about exactly what he was feeling for you, and not the kind of feeling that he has for him and the Traveler, but the kind of liking he would have towards a . . . girlfriend? (Bennett had to explain to him the meaning behind girlfriend and it was no easy task).

“Liking someone like a girlfriend . . . ” Razor muttered, scrunching his face in puzzlement. “ . . . like a mate?”

Bennett flushed at the word but nodded. “Yes, like a mate.”

Bennett tried his best to help Razor confess to you, and this is where disaster happened. Since Razor is mostly uneducated in terms of romantic feelings, he did not feel any anxiety crawling up to him when he decided to admit his feelings to you. The problem is that he has decided to confess in a wrong time and in a difficult situation.

“You should confess to her after you’ve saved her from danger!” Exclaimed Bennett, beaming at Razor.

The latter tilted his head to the side. “Razor doesn’t . . . get it.”

“Well, in the books I’ve read, the guys confess to the girls they like in a dangerous time. I don’t know how that’s safe, but it works. But since we don’t want to hurt ( Your Name ), you’ll save her before confessing!”

Bless his innocent heart, Razor trusted Bennett’s word without a smidge of doubt. His opportunity to admit his feelings came when the two of you saw Reckless Pallad being surrounded by Hilichurls getting ready to pounce on him. The thing is you too knew your way around a battlefield and have efficiently begun fighting off the Hilichurls. Razor watched as you made quick work of rescuing Reckless Pallad and he didn’t even notice himself beginning to pout in disappointment until you were right in front of him again, worriedly gazing at him.

“Razor, what’s wrong?” You questioned, appraising him. “You’re not injured, are you?”

He shook his head. “Razor not injured.” He confirmed.

“Well, that’s good, but why aren’t you moving? We need to save that man.”

“Razor wanted to confess to ( Your Name ) by saving her.”

Razor explained the plan of his confession he conspired with Bennett, how he would save you from danger and tell you his everlasting love that he didn’t notice the redness tinting your cheeks and the wide smile stretching across your face.

Razor only took note of the phenomenon occurring on your features when he has finished elaborating his scheme. He narrowed his eyes curiously. “Your face is all . . . red. Sick?” He asked.

Razor didn’t have a chance to further speculate just exactly was ailing you before you took hold of his face and softly placed your lips against him, catching him off guard.

There was a blossom in his chest when you kissed him – this is love, right? Razor decided there and then he liked this feeling of love.

Needless to say, Reckless Pallad was left alone for the Traveler to save. Again.

Razor had no idea what weddings were. He has never heard of such thing before. The first time he did learn about it was when he was hanging out with you and the Traveler. The latter mentioned that you and him are invited in a wedding. Razor tilted his head in confusion but when he turned to ask you what it was, he froze. Your eyes were shimmering with joy and excitement. Razor liked seeing you like that.

So when you were preoccupied, Razor asked the Traveler what a wedding was. Perhaps a wedding was some sort of food that he can find in the wild?

After Traveler has explained what weddings are and the concept of marriage as well, Razor did not waste time trying to propose to you. Since he had no money to buy a very expensive ring, he asked Bennett for help to find materials so he can make one of his own. In the end, they had Wagner help them form a ring. It wasn’t exactly the best looking but when Razor showed it to you and asked for your hand in marriage (Traveler helped him with his proposal speech and had to explain that asking for your hand doesn’t mean literal), and he saw the pure joy on your face, he thought it was pretty enough for you.

Razor didn’t know you were happy mostly because he proposed to you but you didn’t tell him. He looked so proud with the ring.

Your wedding was small and only a very few people were invited. Klee insisted on being one of the flower girls and Razor almost agreed until she began spouting about bombs which will detonate in the air and will explode with flowers. Albedo advised Razor not to make her one of the flower girls because Klee, for sure, will bring flower bombs (it will explode with flowers, but the explosion is still there).

Razor chose Bennett as his best man. That was supposed to be a good thing but when the two of those pair up together, they can tend to cause a lot of chaos, unintentionally.

At the day of the wedding, nearly all the invitees refuse to enter the cathedral as they claim there was danger inside. When Kaeya and Jean came to inspect this danger they speak of, both wielded their weapons once seeing a pack of wolves huddled at the front, just before the altar, with Bennett and Razor telling them to behave.

You had to explain to Razor why it was dangerous and made people uncomfortable when there are wolves present in the cathedral. Although Razor was understandably disappointed by this, he conceded and brought his Lupicals back to Wolvendom. To make it up to him, you promised a private celebration will be held in Wolvendom with nobody else but you, him, Bennett, and of course, his Lupicals.

Razor didn’t know why Bennett seemed more nervous than him when the two of them were standing by the altar.

“I’m going to ruin your wedding, Razor! Aren’t you worried?”

“ . . . but you not ruining anything . . . ?”

When you finally arrived in the cathedral, Razor felt excitement surge in his body and he can hardly stop himself from squirming on his seat.

But he wasn’t smiling. These emotions . . . he was having a hard time comprehending them. It was good, it was nice, but it was overwhelmingly so.

He could have cried, and he almost did but when you were before him, smiling at him, he couldn’t help but smile back.

His beautiful wife, his Lupical.

Bennett was the one who cried in your wedding.

ALBEDO

It was always a fascinating sight to see a traveler meandering through Dragonspine without minding the sheer cold or flawlessly fending themselves off from the enemies lurking around. Even Albedo has some degree of difficult in navigating his way back to his camp without the Fatui spotting him or tailing him. But it was more fascinating to see a young woman standing in the middle of a freezing lake with nothing but her trousers and her brassiere.

It was a peculiar meeting, yes, but out of the ordinary people and matters has always endeared him.

Albedo brought you to his camp as quickly as he can and asked Timaeus to hand you a cup of warm tea and a blanket. After thanking him for his kindness and consuming half of the beverage generously given to you, you introduced yourself.

You were an adventurer who came all the way from Liyue to embark on a journey to discover the harshness and secrets that laid within Dragonspine, a mountain many do not dare set foot further in. Other than the mentioned reasons, training was a top priority of yours. You claim one cannot go further in their adventure while being comfortable in their current, and he completely agrees with your statement. When Albedo questioned why you had been in the middle of a lake in Dragonspine, you answered that being able to withstand the cold was just part of your training and seeing as he had caught you shivering to close to death, it was not going well.

Albedo didn’t think he would see you again after you parted from him, but he was surprised when the next day he found you waiting for him in his camp, a smile on your face as you stand proudly and wave at him.

Something about you piqued his interest, if his interest was somehow related to how his heart accelerated whenever you come close to him to offer help with his experiment, or when his face grows hot if you offer him a compliment. He thought it was your way of showing him your gratefulness for taking care of you yesterday, so he allowed your presence in his camp, around him. Albedo didn’t expect you to visit again the next day, and the day after that, and so on and so forth. But he can’t say he disliked your frequent visitations, or your presence that always seem to be following him everywhere he went. He very much liked your company and thoroughly enjoyed listening about your adventures and everything you came across in your adventure. They were a good distraction from his experiments. Everything about you set his mind in ease.

It wasn’t long until the two of you are spending more time together alone. No experiments, no work in mind. It just the two of you keeping one another company and sharing stories about your days, and making banters here and there – whether it be in a walk under the moon, or sharing a meal in Good Hunter, or while he paints somewhere in Dragonspine.

Although Albedo was not well versed in the complexity of romance and has deemed relationships to be rather tedious to uphold, but he was knowledgeable enough to know that in the process of his growing friendship with you, he has caught feelings for you.

This has certainly brought difficulty in his relationship with you. Albedo, although never verbally admitting so, has always thought of feelings as a nuisance. In a relationship, in his own observation, disadvantages trump over advantages. He had seen the irrationality that love has caused, the stupidity. His observation led him to one conclusion – other than being friends with people, relationships is not for him.

You have put him in a challenging situation. It would have been easy to cut ties with you if you haven’t successfully infiltrated his walls and snaked your way in his heart. The very thought of pushing you away was repulsive to him. Seeing the hurt cross your features – it will haunt him for the rest of his life.

The interest he had for you was not interest at all. It was the beginning of love. He should have been more alert, and this wouldn’t have happened.

What if you returned his feelings and your relationship did not work? There was no way your friendship could be salvaged. Isn’t it much better to remain as friends than risk ruining any chance of keeping you in his life?

No, no, that would be insanely idiotic. It will eat him up. Thus, he treated his feelings for you like an experiment. Dipping carefully, testing the waters – confessing to you.

He can construct a confession that will perfectly enunciate his feelings for you while emphasizing your freedom to reject him and his desire to remain good friends with you. Surely, you didn’t reciprocate his feelings. All he needed is for you to let him down, and he will hope you can still see him the same way after.

All his preparations, however, were thrown out of the window when you beat him to confessing.

Albedo had no idea how struck his expression must have been with puzzlement, anxiety and flatter as he attentively listens to every word that leaves your lips. His heart pounded at everything you were saying – everything he adored about you, you adored about him. Being unable to speak his mind felt foreign to him. After you finished your confession, a beautiful red hue coloring your cheeks as you looked into his eyes with hopefully eyes, all he can do his open his mouth a smidge, and close, and then open again. He must have resembled a goldfish at that time.

Albedo couldn’t believe it. You loved him, and here he was expecting to be rejected and thinking relationships were a waste of time.

He was in a dilemma now. Accept your feelings as his heart desired to, or gently reject you for practicality? Having a lover would complicate his life and he will risk so many things that he were used to just to be able to keep his relationship with you fruitful. Was he ready for something like that?

This was the first time Albedo has listened to his heart. He still remembered how he cupped your face in his hands and pressed his lips against yours, muffling the gasp that tumbled out of you.

Albedo might be a stranger to romance but he is an Alchemist and risks are part of his job, and risking coming out of his comfort to be with you was something you deserve, and maybe something he deserved as well.

You knew Albedo was going to propose to you. He was always immersed in his experiments and research that you took the responsibility of tidying up his lab. It did not take long for you to find a small black box nestled in the back inside a drawer filled with haphazardly thrown papers and used pens.

Albedo knew that you knew he was going to propose to you. The two of you were taking a peaceful stroll around Dragonspine and after a heartfelt speech, he knelt down to one knee, he curiously watched as you malfunctioned right in front of him, trying to elect which route of surprise should you take before displaying a less then satisfactory theatrics of surprise.

Nonetheless, the two of you are still happy.

You and Albedo agreed that the two of you will have a small and private wedding. Klee, however, did not. She was less than thrilled to hear about that and went on a whole spiel of the reasons why you should have the biggest and most fun wedding ever, as she said.

“ - then where will a really, really tall wedding cake and Klee is going to make a bomb that will explode in the skies where it will burst out many pretty flower petals - ”

Jean promised the two of you that she will keep an eye on her at the day of the wedding.

Albedo is adamant on two things - a small wedding, and having no best man, and the latter had two reasons. Although he is highly respected in Mondstadt, there was no one he could ask to be best man, and the second reason is that he loves you and is certain that marrying you is something he wants. No doubts. He didn’t need a best man helping him in something he didn’t need help with.

Albedo was also not someone to conform to the ritual of not seeing the bride on the day of the wedding until the very ceremony, but for you, he begrudgingly followed.

On the day of the wedding, Albedo prepared himself without the help of anyone. He prepared his own clothes and had Klee braid his hair (it was a wee bit sloppy and Albedo fixed them when she had her back turned to him and gave her all the credit).

The man reached for the door to visit you but he let out a sigh when he realized that he cannot. He made a promise that today, the first time he’ll see you is when you walk down the aisle. He has to keep his promise. Not to mention Klee blocked his way and reminded him of that (tried to block).

Albedo was a patient man. Patience was nothing new to him. His research and experiments needed patience or they will ultimately fail. It came to the point where being impatient made him uncomfortable. That’s exactly what was happening when he was standing at the altar. Nobody, not even the observant Kaeya himself, can tell Albedo was beginning to lose his patience.

The day had been a little too long. He wanted to see you already. It didn’t matter if the ceremony would take a while before he can kiss you and call you his wife. He just wanted to see you again.

Albedo turned away the moment you stepped inside the cathedral. You were far from repulsive or ugly (and he can never think of you like that), but he had to cast his gaze somewhere but on you. He knew you’ll be beautiful in your wedding dress, but seeing you now with your adorable and shy smile, with Cecilia flowers in your hands, and your eyes fixated on him and only him - Albedo nearly lost his composure.

This time he was sure Kaeya saw it.

“Waah, big sister ( Your Name ) looks soooo pretty!” Klee cooed loudly, causing the guests to let out a few chuckles of amusement.

His impatience was beginning to pierce through him. The moment you faced him, Albedo did not waste time grabbing your hands, and once he did, you saw him visibly soften, as though a huge burden was lifted from his shoulders.

“What happened to you?” You asked, giggling.

Albedo returned your smile. “I’m just very happy to see you.”

The fervor that he exuded when he kissed you certainly supported his statement.

THOSE WHO WILL HIDE IN THE MIDDLE OF THE RECEPTION TO CRY SOMEWHERE NO ONE CAN SEE THEM

CHONGYUN

Chongyun was known for two things – being an exorcist and having a type of condition that needed his keen observation and awareness.

He has always disliked his condition. Whenever his Yang energy overwhelms, he must immediately consume an icy treat to be able to soothe his nerves. But it seems he can be thankful for it for this one time. If it wasn’t for his congenital positivity, he wouldn’t have stumbled across you, and your hundred homemade ice cream you smuggled out of your own home.

Chongyun had been hurrying to meet his friend at that day. He had just finished an exorcism somewhere in Qingce Village and was rushing to where he and Xingqiu usually meet in Liyue. He was already running late, and who knows what Xingqiu will do if he was late again. He let out a pained yelp when he crashed against your form when he made a sharp turn, and his Yang energy has never been in a more unstable state than when he saw you seated on the ground, groaning in pain, with peculiar looking containers littering the floor around you.

Chongyun had profusely apologized for his actions and assisted you in gathering all the belongings he had knocked off your possession. He felt the coldness in the small containers you once held and wondered what was inside. He hasn’t seen anything like this before. He knew his Yang energy was starting to ooze out of him but he underestimated its manifestation until you placed your hand over his forehead. He pulled back away instantly, startled by your actions, to which you immediately apologized.

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” He repeated, light blue hair bobbing with his movements as he bowed his head over to you again and again, mortification palpable on his features. “I-I didn’t mean to run – ”

“No, no, I should be the one apologizing! I wasn’t looking where I was going and I put my hand on you all of a sudden – ” You were about to continue spewing apologies and explanations when you froze, concern etching across his face. “ - oh, hey, you’re really, really red. Are you okay?”

Even when it had been years since his encounter with you, he still gets embarrassed when he remembered that, and you and Xingqiu tease him about it.

He explained to you then about his condition and when you offered him a container you owned containing ice cream you made, that’s when your friendship begun. When the two of you snuck out to a secluded area in Liyue Harbor to gorge on the tons of ice cream you have once again brought out of your house despite your mother’s warnings did he know it would be a friendship that will last long. His only regret was that he introduced you to Xingqiu, and now he must endure double the teasing.

One thing he appreciated about you was how ready you were whenever you were with him. You made it your point to know what can cause his condition to act up and soothe him by your words, and always having ice cream with you. And the best part was that the ice cream you give him is always homemade, made by you. His popsicles could never compete to your masterpiece.

He never really thought of you as someone he would be romantically interested in. Sure, there were instances when his Yang energy would flare up because of having you by his side, when your smile brought upon his own, when his heart raced when you held his hand as the two of you were returning from a commission, when he gazed at you with adoration when you took care of him and fed him cold noodles when he was having a fever (he refused to eat hot noodles even in his illness). Surely, all friends do that with one another, right? And feeling this odd sensation in his chest was normal, right?

When he confided in Xingqiu with this, the boy laughed at his cluelessness. It wasn’t surprising. Chongyun did not have a lot of friends so distinguishing friendship and romance was not easy for him. The Hydro Vision holder filled him in with everything he has to know about relationships, and he used some pretty unconventional ways like giving him a too descriptive image of how a man and woman would kiss, and other explicit doings of adults.

But it did bring light one thing – Chongyun liked you, and of course how he handled such revelation was, simply put, disastrous.

His entire body felt hot, and he was stammering to the point even the ever so eloquent Xingqiu cannot understand him. Normally, when things get like this, he’ll rush over to your place and request for some of your delicious ice cream but seeing as you were somehow part of the reason for this, he had to rely on Xingqiu to take care of him.

After learning about his feelings for you, Chongyun have never been more uneasy around you, which was odd, and he was sure you’ve noticed, and yet has never dropped any comment about it.

He was always nervous around you. Blushing whenever you come close to him, jumping when you take his hand in his, stammering whenever you praise him for anything, feeling the need to run away if you ask him about how he was fairing – he has lost count just how many popsicles he has eaten just to keep his cool. He has stopped asking ice cream from you and declined any offer from you because he thought accepting your homemade ice creams could lead him to falling deeper in love with you until he couldn’t move on anymore.

Chongyun didn’t notice your growing impatience. He was so immersed in his own feelings that he didn’t take into consideration how you felt whenever he flinched away from your touch and rejected your treats.

It took Xingqiu for the growing tension between the two of you to alleviate. He made an elaborate plan to get the two of you together in an isolated place (a broom closet) and has made a claim not to let any of you go until the two of you have confessed your feelings with each other.

“Just tell me what’s wrong with you, Chongyun! Why are you acting so weird around me?” You asked him but he refused to answer you just as he refused to look at you.

You let out a sigh as you reached out to take his hand but when he pulled away from your touch, that was the last straw.

“If you don’t want to be friends with me anymore, just say so.”

Alarmed, Chongyun faced you, stuttering. “No! Of course, I want to be friends with you - I mean, I don’t want to be friends - wait, that sounded wrong, and so bad - ”

Your brows burrowed together in question. “You want to be friends but you don’t want to be friends?”

Chongyun groaned as he buried his face on his hands. It’s now or never.

“I like you, ( Your Name ).”

The silence that followed was deafening for Chongyun. He removed his hands from his face and prepared himself to apologize and beg to continue being friends when he felt hands cup his face, and your lips pressing against his. It was a good thing you had ice cream on you even after he avoided you for weeks. He almost fainted in your arms if it wasn’t for you shoving a finger in his mouth with a scoop of ice cream.

It was one of the few times Chongyun was grateful for Xingqiu’s interest in romantic tropes because if it wasn’t for him, he wouldn’t have left that room with a blushing but happy face with you.

Xingqiu smirked as the two of you exited the room, hand in hand and redness coating your cheeks. “Well, well, well, look who - ”

“Shut up, Xingqiu,” You and Chongyun chorused. The two of you looked at each other out of surprise and then burst out laughing, all the while the Hydro Vision user stood by the side, sighing.

“Now, I have to deal with these two’s teasing.”

When Chongyun realized he was ready to propose to you after years of being together, he asked Xingqiu to propose to you on his behalf.

His best friend nearly destroyed his book from whacking the Cryo user for thinking such an inane idea could work. Not only was it not romantic, it was also inappropriate. Xingqiu had to reprimand him for an entire hour proposing that idea but being a good best friend that he is despite his mischievous streak, he vowed to help the man propose to you.

It was no easy task and there were times where Chongyun held himself back and risking yet another proposal plan. He was thankful Xingqiu was well versed with romance and everything entailed with it and knew more ways to help him. After a countless of delays, Chongyun managed to get down on one knee one fine evening by the trails leading to Liyue Harbor, spew out affirmation of his love for you in stammers, and asked for your hand in marriage.

When you accepted his proposal and adorned your finger with the ring, Chongyun discreetly showed a thumbs up to a nearby bush. About three hands popped out from the leaves, offering the same action.

Xingqiu let out a sigh as Xiangling and Xinyan giggled. “Finally.” He breathed out. “Now, time for me to be his best man.”

Of course, Chongyun chose him as his best man. Who else would be a better choice than him?

Chongyun is firm about Xingqiu being his best man but sometimes he can be a little bit . . . pushy, especially when it comes to something he believes in.

There was a tradition where he cannot see you for a whole week until the ceremony. Chongyun was mildly bothered by this arrangement but nonetheless, since you agree with it, he will respect your wishes and do the same. Xingqiu has over and over again tried to persuade him to visit you at home, and he made some interesting points why he should. He almost convinced him a few times but in the end, he refused to be lured in his trap and stopped the temptation of breaking his promise.

He missed you dearly, yes, and his patience will surely be rewarded soon.

Chongyun, as expected, was freaking out at the day of wedding. Marriage is a huge step for the both of you. You’re not going to regret marrying him, will you? What if this marriage didn’t work? He’ll lose you for you.

Xingqiu had to guide him away from the altar and to a corner for privacy. Other than you, Xingqiu was a person who had been when his condition start acting up and how it worked.

After successfully cooling him down with a popsicle, Xingqiu consoled Chongyun. “I don’t know what you’re thinking about back there but you have nothing to worry about. ( Your Name ) loves you.”

“What if it doesn’t work between us?”

“It will. I’ve seen how you two are. You’re perfect for each other. I think you already know that, and ( Your Name ) does too. Why would she accept your proposal if she didn’t think the two of you wouldn’t prosper together?”

Chongyun murmured. “Pity?”

If Xingqiu had a book with at that moment, he would have smacked Chongyun again.

Once his condition has subsided, Chongyun returned to the altar and Xingqiu stood behind him, waiting.

The moment you arrived, Chongyun can feel himself heating up and his heart pounding against his chest. It felt like his condition was acting up but he wasn’t feeling nauseous or at the edge of fainting. It was a pleasant sort of warmth, the warmth he felt when he first met you.

No. It was the same warmth that travels through his body whenever he sees you, but this time, it was stronger to the point he it almost felt like his condition.

Your smile immediately disappeared when you saw Chongyun flushed red and his eyes averting from yours.

Worry encapsulated you. “Is your condition acting up?” You asked in a whisper.

Chongyun blinked, puzzled. “What?”

Discreetly taking a gander at the audience completely unaware of your interaction, you slipped your hand under your dress and showed Chongyun was a small ice cream container.

“I brought this with me just in case.”

Chongyun decided he made the best decision of his life to marry you.

He took your hands in his and pressed a small kiss on top of one.

“Thank you, love.”

After the wedding, Chongyun immediately visited the comfort room. You tried to follow him but Xingqiu told you there was nothing to worry about, and he was right.

When he entered the comfort room, Chongyun locked the door behind him and headed straight to the sink to splash some water on his face.

One won’t be able to tell Chongyun was crying from the water streaming down his face.

He looked up at the mirror, staring at his reflection as he let out a small, and content sigh.

“I’m married. I’m married to her.” Chongyun tried to hold back his smile, but he failed. “She’s my . . . wife.”

And did it sound nice to call you his wife.

XIAO

It was his duties to Rex Lapis, to the thriving land of Liyue, that kept Xiao grounded and his mind temporarily fleeting away from the karmic debts that weighed on his shoulders. If it had not been for the responsibilities laid down on him, he was sure to have succumb to the consequences of his bloodshed from the past long ago. It was the reason behind his creation, to serve the people of Liyue and protect them from any transgressors or anything that could potentially lead to their destruction, and it was all he knew. His existence was all for Liyue, and to seek out the desires of Rex Lapis and accomplish them no matter how difficult and by what means.

Day and night he oversees every part of Liyue and hears every call of his name and seeks refuge in Wangshu Inn. It was a cycle that has never changed ever since the gruesome war between gods has taken place in Teyvat, and all was same until that night when he heard a cry for help from a distant place, and rescued a strange maiden from the peril she found herself in.

Love at first sight disgusted him the most. He can understand, to some degree, that mortals can fall in love with people they have built a caring and trusting relationship with but falling in love with someone who one has no dust of knowledge of their identity was simply unwise and incomprehensible. And yet there he was, leaping from the precipice of a soaring mountain and securing the mortal in the middle of her fall.

Xiao had no clue why it felt like time has stopped and they have gently floated in the air as he took a gander at the woman in his arms. Scratches littered her features, and twigs adorned her mop of hair, but she still shone brighter than the stars and moon behind her.

He did not let her speak to him after he has placed her safely on solid ground and he quickly took his leave without even a glance back.

When he had painted the lands of Teyvat red with the other Yakshas, he did not blink an eye or feel a bead of sweat trail on the side of his face. But that woman has caused his chest to flutter, and he always find himself thinking back to the day he had saved her. If he had been like any other mortal which has sleep as a necessity, he would find himself thinking of you every morning and every night, longing for another chance to meet you again. What has she done to him? He already has to carry the burden of his sins, and now he must endure this painful curse she casted on him?

But it didn’t matter now. She was already long gone, for all he knows, and he doesn’t even know her name.

Xiao already came to accept that she was merely going to fleet away from his mind, a distant memory that his heart will ache every time he remembers her. He had many regrets in his lifetime, and this leaving her behind without knowing her name is one of them.

But it seems to him that Rex Lapis has taken favor of him and has graced his undeserving existence. Xiao had just exterminated a Hilichurl camp getting increasingly close to Wangshu Inn when his ears preened and his pupils dilated – that voice, the same voice that he never thought he’d hear again, was calling out for him again. He did not find the time to dispose of the monsters in a more appropriate location where they will no longer continue their venture towards the inn, and quickly made his way to where he heard her.

When he arrived, it did not take long for him to spot her standing perfectly still in front of him, hands behind her back. His eyes dilated as he took in her familiar form. Her tresses were no longer matted with twigs and mud, the scratches that once marred her skin no longer present, and a smile has replaced the cowering fear that adorned her visage before.

Xiao ignored the increasing heartbeat that drummed against his chest and surveyed the area with a flick of his spear. “There’s no danger.” He remarked after assessing the parameter, his mask dissipating into the night as he returned his gaze back at her.

She rubbed her arm as she averted her eyes from him. “I spent months trying to find you again.” The mortal woman murmured. “When all has failed, I thought back to that night you saved me, and I called – and you came.”

Xiao did not speak another word, but he was afraid that you can hear how loud his heart was racing. He needed to ignore his selfishness, he needed to leave. “If you’re not in any danger, then I’ll be leaving.”

He turned around to do as he said, but his eyes widened when he felt your hand around his wrist.

“Wait, please,” She pleaded, and when he looked over his shoulder, any resolve of leaving her again vanished. She was looking at him with hopeful and vibrant orbs. How can he ever let her down when she’s looking at him like that?

Xiao let out a sigh and turned back around to meet her properly, but her hand never left him. Were you afraid he might disappear as quickly as he did like last time?

“Don’t go.”

“Why not?” Xiao questioned. “If you know anything about an Adeptus, then you understand my duties.”

She bit her lip as he withdrew her hold. Xiao missed the warmth she gave him already. “I know that but . . . ” She trailed off. “ . . . can I . . . at least know your name?”

Xiao did not give her an answer.

“Even if we never meet again, I want to at least know the name of man who saved me.” She mumbled softly. “But I’m afraid if I ever know your name, I’ll never get to think of any other man but you.”

Xiao appraised you, taking in her apprehensive frame. A mortal has fallen in love with an Adeptus? This was preposterous. He saved her months ago, and back then they shared little time together. Too little to gain feelings for him.

But still, he found himself relenting to your wishes.

“Xiao,” He answered. “My name is Xiao.”

Don’t look for another man. I’m here. I’m staying.

That’s how he met his first and last love, ( Your Name ).

Xiao has lived in Teyvat for thousands of years and is knowledgeable of the culture of mortals, one of them being marriage. He had witnessed humans bounding themselves to another, promising to cherish them, protect them, to love them. For Xiao, marriage is something far from disgusting. Although he cannot understand the need for them to be together under an oath, it was undeniable that many great things and opportunities birthed from them.

However, no matter how beautiful it is for them, it will never stop perplexing Xiao. How is it that one can look at another and know that they’re the one? Are they not afraid to be betrayed? Are humans so willing to have themselves get hurt and offer forgiveness for the sake of love? It’s confusing for him.

Not until you came along that it made sense. Every argument, every disagreement, sleepless nights, every sincere apology, every countless forgiveness, every embrace, every kiss - is this what mortals feel? If so, he’ll endure all the hardships of love if it means staying by your side, and he knew that you feel the same.

Unfortunately, Xiao is not one for marriage.

Not that he does not love you - oh Archons, because he did, deeply so - but the consequences of your relationship always hang in front of him.

It’s already a risk to let you in his heart and love someone as sinful as him, but the thought of you bearing his karmic debt terrified him.

What happens if the two of you are bound together, and under a contract that Rex Lapis will surely oversee? Will the demons that torment him sink their teeth on your pure and innocent soul? Will he see the life in your eyes wither as you strive to remain with him? And what if you try to break the contract to escape karma? Will the both of you suffer in karma and the wrath of the rock?

Xiao can’t do that to you. This is one way he can guarantee your safety. It hurts him to know he cannot marry you, and it hurt more when he saw the disappointment and pain in your eyes when he explained himself. But keeping you safe is his top priority. He deserved this punishment, he can’t put it over your shoulders too.

But that didn’t stop Xiao from imagining how your wedding could have been if things we’re a little different.

A small wedding in a place of your choice with only a handful of close friends and families. You’ll wear a gorgeous dress and walk up to where he is with the same smile you wore when he met you for the second time.

As you stand before him, Xiao could only imagine the happiness and contentment he would feel at that time.

He’ll hold you close, hear you laugh, and then he’ll press his lips against yours, sealing you to a promise that everything that he is, and everything that he has, is yours.

He’ll find himself retreating somewhere private. He didn’t want you to see him vulnerable, weak, as he cried for the first time in his life, and for the greatest reason.

He could have a chance of happiness, but he can’t.

It was all a dream.

A dream he will never achieve, a dream of yours that he can never grant.

“Xiao, you’re still awake?”

The man looked away from the moon and looked over his shoulder to see you standing by the threshold leading to the terrace. You were tired, and yet you woke up to tend to him.

“You know I don’t need sleep.”

“But you always lie next to me. What’s wrong? Something bothering you?”

Xiao did not respond, and you didn’t push any further. He adored it how you know when to prod to a subject or not. You know him so well.

After a moment of silence, you walked over to him and sat beside him on the railing. You looked up at the moon, and Xiao slowly placed his head over your shoulder.

He felt at peace.

Xiao closed his eyes, dreaming of a day that will never come when he can marry you without anything holding him back.

KAZUHA

Kazuha can no longer remember how long it has been since he was on the run from the shogunate. The Electro Archon and her subjects are on the hunt for Visions of every single person residing in the walls of Inazuma, and he was one of the few who refused to have their Visions confiscated from them. It seems exiling him from his homeland was no longer sufficient and the said Archon has ordered for every so-called transgressor that they banished to be apprehended and have their Visions forcefully taken from them. It was only his luck that Beidou, and the crew she captained, has taken him under their wing and he has been sailing the seas with them since then.

Has it been months? Days? Or perhaps weeks? Being away from land with nothing but the ocean to take in and his mind seemingly always preoccupied with his doubts and worries has him losing track of time.

In all honesty, he doesn’t remember the last time he stepped on dry land. Perhaps they did, but it was not a memory that has fleeted a long time ago. All he can think about was Inazuma, the threat of being having his Vision taken, and his past he buried deep within the back of his mind.

Beidou must have taken notice of his continuous lackluster attitude and has set sail for Liyue for him to take a break from the seas. This, of course, he appreciated though he insisted Beidou that she did not have to dock just for him to clear his mind.

Back at that time Beidou claimed she knew what is best for him and she should put his trust on him, and with the lack of reasons to refute her statement, Kazuha merely let out a sigh and agreed to land in Liyue.

He has never been to Liyue, or to put it more accurately, he has never stepped foot in in the few times the Crux made their return on Liyue. It wasn’t because he hated it there, but he felt more comfortable and more at home inside the ship. The furthest he has gone was on the docks to help the crew load supplies in their next sail. But now Beidou has encouraged him to leave the ship and explore, and implied being forbidden to come aboard if he refused to do as she says.

When Beidou said she knows what is best for him, maybe she was right. He must admit, even if he was still longing to return to his homeland, Liyue had many sights and delicacies to offer. But the best and most beautiful sight he saw was up on a rooftop when he was resting from hours of mindless meandering in the streets.

He played with a green leaf that fluttered over to him after it has been carried away by the wind from its tree, and he pressed his lips against it to whistle a melody. The tune was buried under the bustle of the city night but it seems that one picked it up from the terrace just below him.

Kazuha saw a girl around his age walk out to the terrace, head moving left and right, as though looking for something. Kazuha did not think much of this behavior assuming she was searching for something else, and he tore his eyes away from her and nonchalantly continued to whistle against the leaf.

“So, that was you who was making that beautiful sound.”

Kazuha casted his gaze down to see the girl on the terrace looking up at him as she leaned against the railing with her arms crossed, a gleeful smile present on her brims. He pulled the leaf from his lips as he regarded her. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to – ”

She shook her head, chuckling. “No, no, it’s fine. You can stay there.” She assured, and Kazuha eased on his spot. She stared at the leaf in his hand. “I didn’t know you can make a tune using a leaf.”

Kazuha flashed her a small smile. “It’s something only a few can do. It’s pretty hard to master.”

“And you’re one of those few.” She remarked. Silence prevailed between the two until she spoke again. “Can you play something for me?”

Kazuha was bewildered by her request. It wasn’t common to find a foreigner sitting on the rooftop of her household. One would think that their first reaction should be an accusation of trespassing and a demand for identification, but no. This girl was different, you were different.

Kazuha did not question your request, just as you have not questioned him of his place on your rooftop. Instead, he granted your wish. He pressed the leaf against his lips and blew, a tune of his own composition sounding in the air.

He watched in awe as you raised both your hands to your chest and white particles formed above your palm, creating a shape until it formed and bloomed into an elegant wooden lyre. Without saying anything else, you strum the strings along with his tune, and the people of Liyue beneath their feet are unaware of the small haven the two of them created together.

Kazuha is more than grateful for Beidou for pushing him to go to Liyue. Ever since that night, he has made constant visits to your house. Early in the morning – that’s when Beidou would barge into the barracks and force them out of their beds – he would always be the one out of the door to finish his tasks and leave immediately to visit you, a prominent smile over his face. The crew, of course, has pestered him to tell him of the reason for his constant leaving and he could only let out a sigh of relief when Beidou shooed them away from him and asked them to return to their work. She winked at him right after and whispered, “Go and hurry to your girlfriend.” To which he denied with a shy grumble before making haste to Liyue.

Liyue was brighter than the isolationist Inazuma has become, and one of the reasons Kazuha thought this was you. The Crux was like a family to him, and Beidou was like an older sister to him, but you – he has never felt more soothed than in your presence. You felt like home, and it has been so long since he had felt like he was at home. Seeing you smile, hearing you laugh, seeing how you nod attentively as he talked, your arms embracing him when he opened up to you about his past, the music you played together in perfect harmony even without practice – it was all so surreal.

Kazuha didn’t have to tell you about his growing feelings for you. He knew that you knew.

It started with a shy kiss, and then a longer one, and the two of you found solace in each other’s arms. There was no music playing, and there were no stories shared – just him with his arms around your figure and lips connected with yours. None of you dare say it but your days together were slowly coming to an end, and it won’t be long until the day comes when he has to set sail to visit neighboring nations.

But Kazuha will always come back to you, that he promises.

After a few years of frequent visiting and writing letters to one another, Kazuha has finally decided that it was time for him to propose to you. Beidou - being the supportive big sister she is to him - upon hearing of his plan, gathered her crew to help Kazuha in his objective. Everything from food, drinks, location (they chose the ship), and atmosphere, they provided. As thanks for their dedication and help, they only ask an invitation to his wedding, to which Kazuha replied will surely come even if they did not help.

The crew claimed that they shall be far away as possible from the ship so that the two of you can have your privacy, but Kazuha, and definitely you, as well, heard loud cheering from a short distance followed by a shushing Beidou when you accepted his proposal.

“I thought they said they’d be at Wanmin Restaurant - ”

“To be honest, I didn’t really believe them.”

Unlike the other boys who were hesitant of not seeing the bride for a week until the wedding, Kazuha was actually the one to push this tradition. He disliked it as much as the other boys, but Kazuha loved being able to give you his all. Not being able to see you for a week is a sure way for him to crave for your presence, and once the two of you see each other again, he’ll pour out every love and care for you then.

You were dismayed by this whole arrangement but since it is important to Kazuha, you respected it.

The crew fought for the spot of best man, but in the end, all of them got to be best man. Kazuha did not have the heart to choose one from the crew, so he had to explain to you beforehand that the almost the entire male crew of The Crux are going to be standing with him at the ceremony.

It wasn’t a common occurrence in a wedding but you allowed it. The crew was like his family to him, and if it’s going to make him happy to have them as his best men, who are you to go against it?

At the day of the wedding, Beidou was the one to fret over Kazuha’s appearance. The Anemo user tried to calm her down but after she continually tried to fix his hair for the wedding, he just sighed and allowed her.

“I can’t believe you’re going to be married in just a few hours.” Beidou remarked in the quiet after a while. “To think you were just a teenager when we met you, and our little teenager is a big man now.”

“Nothing’s going to change. I’ll just be married.” Kazuha tried to ease her worries but he knew as well there are going to be major changes. One of being concerning his frequent endeavors with the crew. Once he gets married with you, he’d want to be with you always, to settle with you. But he was so used to the sea, to be living with the crew in a ship. Can he really get used to this coming change?

Beidou let out a sigh. She placed a hand over his head, patting him gently. She would have ruffled his hair but that would waste her effort on making it as presentable as she can.

“Things are going to change, Kazuha.” Stated Beidou, beaming. “And it’s not all bad. Trust me.”

Kazuha nodded, but he was still uneasy. He was ready to give himself to you, but at the same time, he wasn’t ready to leave the crew.

This thought haunted him even in the time of the ceremony. He should be focusing on the wedding but he couldn’t.

He needed to talk to you about this. You need to know what’s bothering him.

Was it possible to feel dread for the future while also looking forward to it?

Because it felt like a gust of wind billowed his direction when his eyes landed on you. Beautiful, you’re beautiful. What else can he say?

Was he really going to marry you? Whatever did you see in him? He was a banished Ronin from Inazuma. There must be some other man more worthy of you.

But you loved him, nobody else.

“Stop gawking at me like that. You’re making me embarrassed.” You murmured, cheeks flushed. He didn’t even notice you standing before him until you spoke.

Kazuha closed his parted lips as he turned away from you. “I . . . uh . . . ” He swallowed. “You look beautiful, ( Your Name ).”

“At least look at me when you say that, Kazu-kun.”

He looked at you, breathing in before speaking. “You look very, very . . . uh, pretty.”

You laughed a little. “You look very, very handsome, Kazuha.”

You took his hands in yours and gazed into his eyes, smiling. “Things are going to change once we get married.”

A pang of uneasiness struck Kazuha.

But what you said next shocked him.

“After this, I can finally be part of the crew and join you on your adventures in the sea!”

Kazuha gawked at you again, blinking.

Everyone invited to his wedding gasped when Kazuha suddenly kissed you out of nowhere in the middle of the ceremony.

Beidou, and the rest of the crew, however, cheered loudly for the two of you.

After the wedding, Kazuha snuck away from the reception for a while. He found a tree from a short distance and sat on the branch, breathing in the cool evening air.

He caught a fluttering leaf and smiled as he gazed at it and recalled how the two of you met.

Things will change, and soon, he’ll be adventuring with his wife in the vast ocean. Oh, he has so many things to show you.

#genshim impact x reader #genshin x reader #venti x reader #kaeya x reader #xingqiu x reader #scaramouche x reader #razor x reader #albedo x reader #chongyun x reader #xiao x reader #kazuha x reader

2K notes · View notes

marlasomething · 2 years

Text

Jonmartin Week 2022 Day 4: If All Was Lost

Hello there!

As said in previous one-shots of this week, I cannot see a "challenge" and let it go so...Jonmartin week 2022 here we are! The idea is "forcing myself" to write piece of under 1K in different universes, let's see if @jonmartinweek enjoy my contribution of the day!

This was written for the prompt of day 4: Dinivity/Red String Fate, and it is just a post-canon story that could potentially be canon (or not, as you wish).

Also: I will try to end all one-shots with the line of the finale "One way or another. Together". Here I DID IT YEAH!

As usual, do please forgive my quick tipper and non-native speaker mistakes, Marla

Allons-y!

AO3 edition!

Whole week Masterlist!

It was definitively a new world.

It was absolutely, without the shadow of a doubt, Somewhere Else.

None of those necessarily meant that it was a nice place, though.

And so it wasn’t.

Earth was just… Earth, the very same planet with the very same flawed individuals (no matter if their lives had been lived in completely different manners; at the end of the day, people were just people).

Mere humans, already nursing their very own version of Fear, now joined by what they had unleased.

Still, at the beginning, Jon tried to see the good; tried to keep hopes up. Even if he had lost Martin, even if his whole world was now a place he would never return.

Even if, in order to survive the journey, he had been stripped of all remains of humanity per se; turned into a God of all things The Beholding had always represented.

Still, he believed his soul remained, but only because he had always conceived it as a sum of parts, not something that can be simply removed (stupid silly notion…).

Because of that, and because he was hurting.

He hurt every day and night, visions of the man he loved stabbing him, crying so much he had felt salty water dropping into his open wound.

However, there is just so much suffering a person can withstand and, eventually, Jon gave up trying to be better, to be humane in any measure.

There were people worthy of the fear and harm he could inflict, he was hungry and all sense of moral had been long gone.

Until he reappeared.

The Archivist had been weak, he had left a woman go; no statement asked, and even attempted to comfort her at a certain point, before she could run away, scared in a much less deep level.

Now, there was a woman out there speaking of a God-like creature of green eyes and a sad cadence to his extremely British accent.

Weak enough for his Strength to come back to him.

“Jon? Is that truly you?” the man was half made of shadows, his towering figure without even an actual fixed face to it. Instead, his features blurry, coming and going, changing as minutes passed by.

His eyes remained, though. Those very eyes that The Archivist would recognise everywhere.

The rail thin figure, bright green eyes with no pupils staring without blinking, stood up clumsily, out of practice, and did his best to smile for the first time in…he didn’t want to know.

“Martin, you…”

“When we came, I had to survive, I guess? My body surrendered to The Lonely; bloody traitor, he didn’t even asked my opinion on the matter” he did something that could never passed as laughter, but still felt as the most delicious thing Jon had heard in many, many years.

Jon; he was Jon, not only The Archivist; there was more to him than his godly side.

“I thought I’ve lost you forever” there was hope, vague but, still, hope in that inside whatever Martin had become; a hope that had maintain a part of his humanity intact no matter what the world brought to him.

The Eye’s favourite felt something inside his stomach for the very first time in ages; a pinch of guilt.

“I am… Jon is lost. I…I surrendered, to what I was supposed to be. You can see, there isn’t much left of my vessel.”

Martin scoffed.

“That is bullshit and you know it. You know how I know it? Because you let her go. The last woman I consumed, that I will try to ever completely lose for The Forsaken; you were in her memories, you were crying as you let her go. Also, your body is consuming itself, meaning you are not as godly as you thing; stop making an ass of yourself and…” he grunted, clearly hurting, as he forced his own hand into a tangible object, that then he offered Jon. “…try to be a better monster with me.”

“You don’t know the things that I’ve done.”

“Neither do you. Fuck it, I’ve yout told you I have eaten the woman you saved. Not quite literally, but… Look; if I want to be something apart of a god of my own Fear… I need you. And, let’s be honest, you need me.”

He was still unable to form a proper smile, but his eyes did all the work for him, making Martin let his hand go and delicately caress his cheek.

This was the last straw; the person behind The Archivist took complete control, as Fate reunited him with the person he had loved more than anyone else in other place, other time, other World.

Jon muttered again the other person’s name. “Martin, Martin, Martin! I thought I would never see you again.”

But, a part of him, knew that had never been true. They were connected, far more than any law (even those of the supernatural) could ever explain.

Now, they couldn’t be the people they once were; but they would try their best to be these new monstrous versions of Jon and Martin.

One way or another.

Together.

3 notes · View notes

queenxxxsupreme · 4 years

Text

Geralt Takes You to Kaer Morhen....

A/N: Soooo this is like a mix of the Witcher 3 and the netflix show…. If that irritates you, I’m sorry but I have grown impatient and I need the wolves and Yen and Ciri and Jaskier in the keep being one big dysfunctional family. You can fight me if you don’t like it. I hope I got Eskel, Vesemir, and Lambert’s characters right. I’m new to writing them and I feel a little uneasy but I really want to write them because I love them.

-The witcher was known to stop in your village once a year. He’d come when the weather cooled down, just after the leaves turned colors but before all had fallen from the trees. Just before the harsh winter came, he’d ride in on his brown mare. He’d take her to the stables before coming to the inn you worked at. It was almost routine. The stableboy would ask if he was going to see you, the sister to the man who owned the inn and tavern. The stableboy already knew the answer, he just wanted an excuse to talk to the famed White Wolf.

-The first time you met Geralt, a frost had covered everything outside. The air was bitter and frigid, but the warm fire in the tavern just below the inn was welcoming and inviting. The night was slow. There were few patrons in the tavern. You were bored out of your mind, leaning against the bar counter as you surveyed the room. You spotted the witcher sitting alone. He looked lonely and deep in thought, his brow furrowed together as he gazed down at the mug in his hand. -You decided to offer him company. At first, he was wary of you and of your intentions. He didn’t want company and he definitely didn’t want a talkative person around. He just wanted to be left alone. But something about you was different. Your smile was honest and your eyes were kind. The two of you chatted for most of the night. Well, you mostly talked. He just listened. He was a good listener. -The two of you parted ways when the sun came up. You were sad to see him go. He was good company. He definitely didn’t seem like the brutish and terrifying beast many made him out to be. -You didn’t see him again for an entire year. You welcomed him with a friendly and familiar smile. The two of you shared drinks and conversation, then you went up to his room to share a bed. You never would’ve thought he’d be so…. soft and comforting. He was a passionate lover. Scratchy kisses and firm carrasses. Even afterwards, he held you close, taking in your sweet scent and listening to your heartbeat. -”Are you leaving in the morning?” You couldn’t help but ask him. You looked up at him. He answered with a low hum. You placed your cheek on his chest, savoring the moment that wouldn’t last forever. His cool, calloused fingertips brushed up and down your spine. -You fell asleep even though you had fought to stay awake. When you woke up, he was gone. Any trace of the witcher disappeared with him. The clothes of his that had been left scattered on your way to the bed, they were gone. His bags were gone. He was gone. -You found yourself counting down the days, eager to see the witcher again. As winter drew near, you were always looking around the tavern, always searching for his white hair. -He arrived after midnight covered in blood and sporting new scars. You offered him a free drink, trying to contain your happiness with seeing him. He allowed you to help him with his wounds. He wanted your soft touches and your gentle smile. -The both of you sat in your room within the inn. He asked of what you’d been doing for the last year and you gave him the boring details. He was the only excitement in your life. You treasured his company and yet you barely knew the man. After he was fixed up, the two two of you settled in bed together. He was tired, barely able to keep his eyes open. You talked and talked until he fell asleep. -When you woke up, he was still in bed with you. He was on his side facing you, gazing at you with those warm yellow eyes. -”You’re still here.” You couldn’t hide the smile on your lips. He hummed softly. You reached out to brush a few pieces of his hair behind his ear. -He didn’t stay much longer when you woke up. You helped him pack up and you walked with him down to Roach. There, you shared a tender parting kiss. Then you watched him leave on Roach. -Three more years passed. He’d come just before winter. Instead of getting his own room, he began to stay with you. You did your damnedest to stretch out the time you had with him, but he was always adamant on leaving. He never gave an explanation but you didn’t really push for one. He didn’t stay long because he didn’t want to be tied down, you assumed. He didn’t want responsibilities. So you did your best to not appear clingy. -The seventh time you saw him was just like any other. You spent the night underneath warm blankets. Geralt turned over on to his side, propping his head up on his fist. You turned your head to look at him. “What?” -He doesn’t answer you immediately. “Come to Kaer Morhen with me.” -You sat up and furrowed your brows together. “What?” -Every winter, I pass through here to get to Kaer Morhen. It’s a witcher’s keep in-,” “I know what it is, Geralt. I’ve heard the stories.” You paused, eyes staying locked with his. Your heart began to beat faster and faster. “You want me to come with you?” “Yes.” -You didn’t even have to think about an answer. You wanted to leave your hometown, to see what else the world had to offer. -In the morning, the two of you set off for Kaer Morhen. You were on your horse, a white mare, riding behind Geralt. You weren’t entirely sure where he was leading you too. The woods seemed so dense and even though the foliage had died with the winter season, you could still see life in the woods. There were deer and goats and wolves and a handful of bears you saw on your journey to the keep. -When the path became wide enough for your horse to move alongside Geralt’s, you moved closer to him. You couldn’t help but worry about what would be waiting at Kaer Morhen. -”Is…. Is anyone else going to be there?” You asked him, glancing over to the witcher. He didn’t look away from the path ahead as he nodded. “Other…. Other witchers? I-I only ask because I’m…. I guess I’m a bit nervous. Are they like family to you? You’ve never…. You’ve never spoken about other witchers. Do you get along with them? Are they all like you? Are they nice?” -Geralt couldn’t help but chuckle at your rambling. He found how nervous you could get to be endearing. -”No, they aren’t all like me. But the ones here, they’re good.” -You nodded your head and decided to not ask anymore questions. -The tips of a castle began to come into view over the tops of the trees. Then you were nearing an iron gate. It was already raised up and the torches on either side of the bridge were lit. It was nearing dark. Geralt got down from Roach and you followed his actions. -”We can leave the horses here.” He told you, tying Roach to a post just inside of the iron gate. You nodded and tied your horse next to Roach. -”Am I…. Am I allowed to be here?” You looked over to him as the two of you began to walk into what looked like a courtyard. Everything seemed old and outdated, but then you remembered hearing of stories about how the keep was attacked centuries ago. You could still see the results of the attack. Stone walls were knocked in. Some of the stones even appeared to have been burnt. Stones knocked loose lay in the path that you were walking with Geralt. It was like things were frozen in time. -It all seemed like a maze. You were sure to get lost if you tried to venture through the keep by yourself. The wind seemed to get more and more rough as the path took you up into the keep. You shivered, the cold causing goosebumps to arise on your skin even though you were wearing many layers to keep you warm. Geralt noticed your shiver. -”Are you okay?” “Yes. It’s just a bit cold.” You answered softly, offering him a supportive smile. “This place is a maze. How do you not get lost?” -”This is the only place I’ve ever come close to calling home.” He softly shrugged his broad shoulders. “I grew up here. You either learn where things are, or you get lost and die from exposure to the elements.” You fell silent, fearing that your question upset him. It was heartbreaking to hear how this place, the very place that turned him into a witcher, was the only place he had to call a home. -Finally, the two of you arrived at the bottom of a staircase. At the top of the stairs was a large set of heavy wooden doors. Geralt seemed to pause, looking up at the doors, and took a breath in. Then he was climbing the staircase. You followed behind him but a goat bleated and caught your attention. You turned to look in the direction of the sound. There were three goats walking around in what you assumed to be the courtyard. -”You keep goats here?” You smiled at the thought. He hesitated to nod his head. “We, um, we use them as bait for different creatures that inhabit the valley.” He moved towards the door. “Wyverns, forktails.” “Oh.” Your smile fell as you looked away from the goats. -Geralt pushed the door open for you, motioning for you to go in. You stepped into the castle, looking up in awe at the high ceilings. The air was musky and even smelled old. Geralt closed the door behind himself. Since you didn’t step very far into the keep, Geralt was right behind you. You smiled at the closeness, looking over your shoulder at him. The corners of his lips turned up in a light smile. -”Look what the cat dragged in!” -You turned your head to see a man standing at a table just beyond a second doorway. You couldn’t see him very well from where you stood. -Geralt let out a heavy sigh but moved forward to meet the man halfway. -”Almost thought you weren’t coming this year.” “Had to make a quick stop for something.” Geralt looked over his shoulder to you. -The stranger’s eyes followed Geralt’s gaze. “Damn, Geralt. Where’d you find this one?” “Lambert.” The White Wolf sounded like he was almost warning the man, Lambert, to continue. “Oh relax, Geralt. Come on over here, sweetheart. I don’t bite.” -”Don’t listen to him.” Another man moved across the large room to join the other two witchers. “He does bite and I’m positive he’s got rabies.” -You moved towards the group, your hands clasped together at your waist. The first man, Lambert, had a scar through his right eye. The second man had more than just one scar through his right eye. Both had dark hair but the second man had longer hair. -”Who’s coughing?” Geralt asked, turning his head to inspect the large room. You didn’t hear anything. “Ciri’s come down with a nasty cough.” The second man told him. “Not sure what’s up, but we think it’s just the cold weather. Vesemir’s been working on handling the fever.” -You could see worry and concern cross Geralt’s features. He brought his eyes to you, stepping towards you. “I’ll be just a moment. Eskel? Keep her company, please.” “Of course. They’re upstairs in the guest room.” -You watched Geralt leave, fighting the urge to follow him. You were left alone with two strangers who just happened to be witchers. You crossed your arms tightly over your chest, your eyes flickering from Lambert to Eskel. You smiled at them both, unsure of what to say. -”Where’d Geralt pick you up at?” Lambert turned to go back to the table he’d previously been at. “Come have a seat.” Eskel offered, gesturing to an empty chair at the table. Your eyes widened at the sight of the creature laying on the table. “Oh, uh, sorry about that. Lambert, get the katakan off the table.” “Why?” “I’m sure Geralt doesn’t want his lady friend scared away. Take it to another table.” “Fine, fine.” Lambert grumbled, moving to pick the dead creature up. “Come to a witcher school, you’re bound to find katakans on tables.” The creature seemed much larger than the witcher but he picked it up easily, carrying the monster across his shoulders. -”I’m Eskel.” He gestured for you to sit at the table. “That’s Lambert.” “I’m Y/N.” -”You’re a quiet one.” Lambert commented as he returned to the table. He and Eskel sat across the table from you. “A nice change. The one he brought a couple years back - Man, is she a hardass.” Your brows drew together. “What do you mean?” -Lambert’s eyes widened just a little. He looked to Eskel. -”He didn’t tell you about Yennefer?” “Lambert, it’s none of our business.” “Sure it is.” -You pressed your lips into a tight line, gazing around the room. Your stomach began to churn at the thought of being just another woman Geralt to the keep. You felt foolish, thinking you were special to him. Your foot began to tap the floor. Your hand gripped your thigh tightly. -Eskel and Lambert chatted quietly while you were somewhere else. You weren’t listening to them. You were trying to figure out how you could be so stupid to believe that Geralt thought more of you. You heart was racing in your chest and it almost hurt. You were struggling to hold back your tears. You didn’t know Geralt. In the seven years you knew him, you’d only spent seven nights with him. How stupid could you be to think that you knew him after such a short time together? -You didn’t hear Geralt enter the room, nor did you hear him say your name. He stood behind your chair, his hand coming up to hold your arm. You jolted, turning your head to look at him. “Are you okay?” -”I-I need-I need fresh air.” You stood up suddenly and headed towards the only exit you knew. -”What did you do, Lambert?” “She’s crying and running from you, my friend. Not me.” Eskel used the back of his hand to hit Lambert’s chest. -Geralt followed quickly behind you. He found you sitting on a little stone ledge. One of the goats had walked up to you and you were petting it. Geralt kept his distance, not wanting to be too close to you in case you didn’t want him near you. He didn’t want to invade your space. “Y/N? What’s wrong?” -You stiffly shook your head, afraid that if you spoke, he’d see you cry. He moved to sit beside you but kept some space between you two. His eyes fell down to his hands. His stomach ached at the thought of you wanting to leave already. Inviting you to the keep was a mistake. It would scare you away from him. -”Am I the only one you’ve ever brought here? The only woman?” You whispered, turning your head to finally meet his gaze. “No.” His answer was quiet and flat. “But the other woman I brought…. She and I…. It’s complicated.” “Did you bring me here to use as a pawn? To make her jealous?” “No, Y/N. I’d never do that to you. You are here because I want you here.” He desperately wanted to reach out to place his hand on you. On your shoulder, on your arm, on your knee. He didn’t care where. He just wanted to comfort you and to be comforted by you. You looked back down to the goat. It bleated rather loud and nuzzled at your knee with his head. -”It’s late and I know you must be tired. If you would rather not share a bed with me tonight, there is a room-,” “I want to stay with you tonight.” You cut him off, speaking a little too quick. Your eyes flickered up to look at him through your lashes. He nodded his head and stood to his feet. As he turned to go back into the castle, you reached out for his arm. He stopped and turned to face you. -”I-I was just…. I was afraid you brought me here for other reasons. I-I was afraid you-that you didn’t think anything special of me.” You blushed at the words you’d just admitted to him. He smiled tenderly down at you, one large hand coming up to hold your cheek. “If I didn’t think you were special, I wouldn’t have kept coming back to you for seven years.” He breathed against your lips before softly kissing you. -The two of you walked side by side back into the castle. A man stood at the table Eskel and Lambert were at. When he saw you, his face lit up. -”By the gods, you’ve finally done it!” The man approached you, a bright smile on his lips and his arms open wide. He took your hands and held them tightly in his own. “I was beginning to fear that Geralt would never bring you to meet me! He’s told me so much about you.” “Really?” You grinned a little, turning your head to look at Geralt. He grunted. “Well, no. Not really.” The man sighed. “Getting Geralt to talk is a difficult task.” “Clearly you’ve never gotten him drunk enough.” Lambert muttered, looking down at the mug of alcohol in his hand. “Once you do that, he’ll tell you anything.” ”Don’t encourage the bard, Lambert.” Eskel shook his head. -”It’s late, Jaskier.” Geralt told the man still holding your hands. “She’s had a long journey. She needs rest before you interrogate her.” “If he gets to interrogate her, can I?” “Lambert.” Geralt warned. “Don’t be so crass.” Eskel told him. “Oh, of course! Where are my manners?” Lambert rolled his eyes. -Geralt ushered you up a large flight of stairs, keeping you as close to the wall as possible. Apparently there were a few stones here and there that were loose and stepping on them could mean you’d plummet to your death. -”I like Lambert.” You giggled, looking over your shoulder to Geralt. “Don’t let him hear that.” -Carrying both of your bags over his shoulder, Geralt led you down a narrow passage and to a room at the very end of the dark hall. He pushed the door open and with a movement of his wrist, a fire grew in the hearth. You looked around the room. “How long has this been your room?” You asked him, leaving his side to go to the tall but thin window next to the bed. Looking out, you were given a view of the courtyard. Just beyond the outer wall of the castle was a beautiful view of the mountains. “Longer than I can remember.” He glanced around, leaning against the door frame with his arms crossed. -”I must admit, I expected this to be more…. untidy.” You messed with a few vials on a stand in the room, lifting them up and inspecting whatever liquid was inside. “Vesemir throws a fit if things don’t stay neat. Though that doesn’t stop Lambert from keeping his room looking like a storm blew through it.” -”Will you lay down with me?” You asked him as you moved to pick up your bag from the floor. “Of course.” -He clambered into the bed just after you got situated underneath the blankets. He laid on top of the blankets but still held you close. You tucked your head underneath his chin, closing your eyes. He buried his nose in your hair, the scent of you calming him down enough that he could drift off to sleep.

Note: I reeeeealllly wanna do a part 2 to this......

Taglist: @riviawitch3r @notyouraveragemochii @dev1lbella @rosyghosty @merendis @lalalalemonade11 @wayward-dream @whatanicepanohthatsjustme @tshuuls @havenoffandoms @queen-sands @crazzyter @katiejmac @bucky-did-nothing-wrong @jennylovelyheart @whitewolfandthefox @itsallyouhavegotinsideyourhead @hm-fck @mactho @msgeorgiarae @tragicmisfits @randomzxx @alwayshave-faith @rahdaleigh @lizliz3107 @turtlefordestiel @d14n4ol @asix122747483 @minervalavender @agniavateira @hina-chans-stuff @dressed-up-heartbreak @persephonehemingway @bitterstar88 @scarlettwitcher @ayamenimthiriel @romancebibliophilia @jessevans @xoxoarts @jocelynscloset @soulslaststand

183 notes · View notes

soldierwinterthe · 6 years

Text

Summary: during the events of 'The Dark World', Y/n helps Thor to restore peace to Asgard, and to defeat Malekith. Loki, on the other hand, doesn’t seem to understand what the girl feels for him.

A/N: I wrote this for the #caplansdisneychallenge by @caplansteverogers

The Prompt is: 'You're adopted.'

"Y/n, I need your help."

Lying on the sofa in my room, I quickly get up when I see Thor, the God of Thunder, approach me, looking worried and confused.

"What do you want this time?" I ask him, boringly. I can afford to be boring with him; after all, I'm his equal.

Thor seems dumbfounded, he definitely needs my help, but there's something that worries him more than he needs to ask. I encourage him to talk, and finally, looking up, Thor turns to me.

"I need you to... keepwath to Loki."

That's it, I knew it must be something very difficult to tell me; but he always does that. Whenever he has a problem, he came to me to... take care of the consequences of his actions.

Odin asked Thor to check his dear... brother, but something must have happened, to get him to ask something like that to me.

"You're not really asking for it."

"Yes, instead, Y/n..."

"I can't, I don't want to."

"I know you hate 'babysitting' Loki, but..."

I sigh; I am not asgardian. I'm human, and after what Loki did to the Earth, Thor asked me to follow him on Asgard, to restore peace in the nine worlds. I accepted, and when we finished our mission, he asked me to stay here for a while.

"I don't hate babysitting Loki, I hate Loki, they are two different things."

"You don't hate Loki, you hate the fact that you feel something for him, and he didn't understand that."

I open my mouth to say something, but I remain speechless, open-mouthed; he's right. I feel something for him. Yes, I know what you are thinking.

He is a monster.

He is a manipulator, a deceiver.

He tried to destroy the Earth.

I know, I know what Loki is. But I also know Loki what is not.

He is an idiot, but he is not a monster. It's just... hurt.

I want to understand under those wounds what's real.

"She is not there." suddenly says Thor; I look up at him, trying to understand what he's talking about. But I already know; he does nothing but talk about one thing. About one person.

"Heimdall can't see her, something happened to Jane, and I have to go back to her."

When Thor asks something, in fact, he begs me to do something, it's very serious. And if it has to do with Jane...

"All right, I'll do it. Happy?"

A couple of days, Thor said so.

A few days to understand what happened to Jane, and then, he would come back. In the meantime... Loki, I can't believe it. I thought I would never see him again, but the fact that now I'm going to him, even if I already know the expression that he will do when he will see me...

I enter the prisons, after having warned some guards standing in front of the door my intent. Slowly, I approached Loki's brig, seeing him sitting in a corner with his eyes closed; without making too much noise, I sit on one of the steps outside the brig, and I sigh, happy that Loki hasn't noticed me yet.

"What are you doing here?"

I jump, turning sideways, to see Loki still sitting, but with his eyes wide open, fixed in mine. I swallow; I knew he would notice me sooner or later, but I hoped it would happen as late as possible... like, when Thor was back.

"I have to stay here for a few days... to give you a look."

Loki does that look every time: he's pleased. He knows I can't stand the fact of staying here, watching him, and he loves the fact that I hate to stay and watch him.

I try to stay calm, and half sleepy, I lie down on the steps, trying to rest a bit.

"Will you stay there all the time?" Loki still asks me.

"I don't want to talk to you, and you don't want to talk to me, so yes, Loki, I'll stay here all the time, in silence, until Thor comes back from..."

"Oh, so my dear brother left? I can easily imagine where he went."

I remain silent, trying not to fall into Loki's trap; whenever I name Thor, Loki begins to assault me with double meanings on his brother. Loki is so stupid, he thinks I feel something for Thor, not understanding in the least that if I have feelings, it's for the God of the Mischief, not for the God of Thunder.

However, Loki seems to surrender easily to my indifference.

The first day doesn't go so badly; Loki sat in a corner, then he lay down on the bed, finally reading some books. Instead, I sat all the time on the steps of the brig, looking at the ceiling, and thinking about how I ended up in a situation like that.

Thor will be in debt with me forever.

When it's dark outside, I get up, and without even saying goodbye to Loki, I'm going back to my room. As soon as I step in, I throw myself headlong into my bed and fall asleep quickly.

The next day, I think about what to do. I could also avoid going to Loki, and telling Thor a lie, when he returns, that his favorite brother has behaved well. But even if I'm good with lies, Thor would find out that I lied.

After ten minutes of plenty 'do I have to go or do not I have to go?', I collect some books – which I brought with me before leaving the Earth – and I head back to the prisons. Like the day before, I greet the guards, and then, I walk towards Loki's brig.

Nothing seems to have changed since the day before, but as I approach the brig, I hear Loki talk with someone; the thing is very strange, I thought nobody could visit him.

I hide in a corner, and I watch the scene: Loki, with a melancholy and sad look, while observing Frigga, or at least what seems to be the Queen of the Gods. The two interact for a few seconds, after which, Frigga disappears, leaving the God alone; she was only an illusion, created by Loki himself.

He wants everyone to believe that he's an evil and cold person, but, actually, he feels lonely and misunderstood.

I go out of my hiding place and head for Loki's brig; he notices my presence, and he completely changes his expression, returning to wear the mask of the cruel man he believes he is.

Meanwhile, some guards escort prisoners into the appropriate brigs; even though Thor and I have helped the nine kingdoms, there are still some warriors rebelling. I lose all interest in the new prisoners when Loki turns to me for the first time since I arrived.

"Here again? I had bet you wouldn't stay more than a day here."

"Bet with whom? Yourself? A lost match even before starting it."

Loki raises his eyebrows, visibly surprised by my dry answer. I'm not used to answering; normally - especially when Loki is talking - I look down and avoid answering, because I know it would be useless.

"So we both know you're here just because Thor asked you to."

Here it starts again, with this stupid story; he will never stop, but now I'm tired. Do you want war? War both.

"You're so used to being marginalized by everyone, that any person comes close to you, you think it does just to please Thor. You can pretend as much as you want, but we both know you're jealous that everyone loves Thor, and they just hate you."

Loki's eyes widen, remain baffled by my words; also I am a bit 'surprised by what I said. Actually, I didn't want to say that, even if, to be honest, it's the truth. I could count on the fingers of one hand the people who still feel a little love for Loki.

And I'm one of these.

The conversation between me and Loki is abruptly interrupted by a sudden explosion; everyone, including the guards, turn towards the direction of the roar.

The guards run quickly to the brigs, ready for a possible battle, while the prisoners, still in their brigs, begin to scream, and yelling.

"Don't go."

I was about to go and check the situation when I hear Loki say these exact words; I turn towards him, who seems to have turned pale after what happened.

Without asking why Loki wants me to stay on the sidelines, I don't think twice about it, and I head to the explosion site.

Only when I'm close enough to the cell, I realize that it's completely shattered, and the prisoners inside were dispatched throughout the prison corridors; one of them, a strange huge creature, approaches the other brigs, and it begins to open them one by one.

Then, the creature looks around, and its gaze stops at me; I prepare myself to fight, while the strange creature, as if it were a wild bull, begins to take a run. To defend myself, I create a shield of energy in front of me, to cushion the blow; however, I underestimated the creature's strength. It rushes towards me, and when it hits me, the shot completely shatters my shield, causing an explosion that throws me away from the creature.

I bang my head on the floor, but I can stay awake. I try to get up quickly from the ground, while a blurred shape passes by me; finally standing, the creature is no longer there, but the chaos rages still among the brigs of the prison.

Suddenly, I hear someone behind me shout my name, making me turn immediately. With his cloak wrapping his shoulders, and Mjolrnir in his hands, Thor runs towards me, evidently worried about my health.

"Y/n! Are you okay?"

"Yes, I'm fine. What's going on?"

"I'll tell you everything, but now I need your help. In the throne room, there was an invasion, we must go."

I nod, and beside Thor, we walk quickly towards the exit of the prisons; Meanwhile, we pass Loki's brig. If before he seemed worried about the riot, now he behaves as if nothing was happening around him, sitting on his bed and leafing through the pages of a book. I look away, before meeting his; the creature has opened all the brigs, but that of Loki is the only one still intact. Not even the enemy wanted to free the God of Mischief.

"Loki is still in his cell." I say to Thor as we head towards the throne room.

"I know, and it's better to stay there. Right now, he's the safest person of all."

Aether. It's how Thor called the strange substance that took possession of Jane's body, and that Malekith – dark elf – craves more than anything else.

Because of Malekith and his sudden invasion, Asgard suffered many death, first of all Frigga, the Queen of the Gods. Thor is devastated by his mother's death, but he tries to remain calm, and to think of a solution to defeat Malekith and save Jane. However, Odin has decided to lock up the girl so that the dark elf can't find her.

Obviously, Thor doesn't agree and has a plan of his own; to put in place, he will have to evade Jane, and escape from Asgard, but not using the Bifrost – Odin ordered Heimdall to seal the passage – but some shortcuts that only one person knows to Asgard. Loki.

Freeing Loki, and trusting him? Easy to say, difficult to do. But there's one thing at this moment that binds Thor and Loki more than their fraternal bond: revenge, for Frigga's death.

"Are you sure what you're going to do? The situation degenerates from minute to minute, but ask for help to Loki..."

"I know Y/n, okay? Loki is the last person I'd like to trust, but I need an escape from Asgard, and my brother can give it to me."

I'm surprised by the fact that Thor still calls Loki 'brother'; any other person would even forget the existence of the God of Mischief, after what he did. But not Thor. Even if he doesn't trust his brother anymore, he still loves him.

Arrived at the brig, Loki is standing, right in front of us, with his knowing and hostile gaze; this time, however, it's only an illusion.

His mother died, and Loki loved Frigga, though he couldn't admit it. And when Thor orders Loki to stop with the illusion, we can finally see the true God of the Mischief. A man exhausted on the floor, with his brig in a runaway, and holed up in his pain. It's the first time I see Loki like that, and I never expected him, who a year ago tried to destroy an entire planet, destroyed by the death of someone.

This perhaps means that I was right, and that Loki still has a heart, with which he feels – albeit not too often – feelings.

Thor explains his plan, and that he needs Loki's help. He seems to want to think about it.

"If I helped you, it would mean that I am part of the family, son of Odin and... Frigga. And your brother. But..."

"Loki, enough of this story that you're adopted. I don't care who your biological father is, you're still my brother, and I need your help."

Loki is impressed by the words of Thor; why can't he understand that the God of Thunder loves him?

"And you, do you think I should accept?"

It's strange that Loki asks me what I think of this story, but if he wants to live, I think he should accept the Thor's proposal.

"Your mother died, and you loved her. Do you want to avenge her by killing Malekith, or do you prefer to stay here and bask in your pain?"

I know my words are abrupt – even Thor frozes while I'm talking – but we don't have much time, and I need something to convince Loki to help us. However, I can ignite a spark in Loki.

"When do we start?"

"Did you say you knew how to fly it?"

The plan is working more or less; Lady Sif helped Jane escape from her room. Now, while Thor's friends distract the guards, Jane and I followed the two brothers on one of the dark elves' ships – falling a few hours before, during the invasion – that Thor wants to use to escape. However, the God of Thunder doesn't seem to be able to turn it on, and Loki continues to annoy his brother, putting pressure on him.

Thor is about to lose control, and he literally jump on Loki, but I can stop him in time.

"If it doesn't want to start in its own way, it'll start in my own way."

By moving Thor out of the controls, I quickly lay my hands on them, and use my powers to power the ship to move. I concentrate more and more, and suddenly, the ship starts to shake and then, it finally getting off the ground.

"Y/n, the ship is too big. Giving it energy will weaken you."

Thor is right, but the only way to escape is this; I have to withstand the time it takes to get away from the castle.

Suddenly, Jane doesn't seem to feel very well, and then she falls to the ground, unconscious. Thor catapults to her, to check that she's well; Loki instead, remains at my side, ready to annoy me this time.

"Are you sure you can drive this thing by yourself?"

"Shut up Loki. It's not the right time to act like an asshole! "

Something strongly hits the right side of the spacecraft; I turn around to check, and I see some little ships flying towards us.

"Look out!"

Distracted to avoid the shots of the guards behind us, I see the columns before us too late; fortunately, I can avoid them just in time; if only I weren't busy leading this ship, I could easily eliminate those who try to obstruct us.

I'm already using my strength more than necessary, and I don't know how much I'll still be able to stay strong enough to keep this shit up.

"Take my chains off me. I can help you, you can hardly stand up."

Loki's voice seems to be just a distant hiss; I feel that the forces are abandoning me more and more, and the ship begins to descend into the water. I look forward to myself, we are very close to the place where we're going; it's not long, I just have to hold out a little more.

"Y/n, it's time! We have to get off!"

Thor, still close to Jane, takes the girl in his arms, and opening the ship's hatch, he launches into space, ready to fall on a kind of flying boat placed beneath us.

When I see that Thor and Jane are safe and sound, I'm ready to leave the controls of the spacecraft, but something seems to go wrong: I feel like the world swirls around me fast, and I have to lean on something to keep from falling. The spacecraft is taking more and more speed, and it will soon be impacted.

Then, arms envelop my body; I close my eyes, I feel the wind brush against my face. When I open my eyes, I'm on the boat-ship, Loki's arms still wrapped around my waist.

"You saved my life." I say, visibly surprised by his gesture; I thought he was only interested in his life. And I also thought he hated me.

"See? I'm not such an asshole after all."

Loki helps me get back on my feet, while neither of them manages to take the eyes off each others.

"Loki, it's your turn."

Looking away from me at last, Loki approaches the boat-ship's controls, and all of a sudden, overtaking a strange tunnel, we find ourselves in another realm: that of the dark elves.

I'm slowly recovering, but looking around, this world makes me more and more uncomfortable.

"Are you okay?"

Loki is by my side, finally calm – a few minutes ago was arguing with Thor for what happened to Frigga – and without the chains that his brother had previously put him.

At this moment I'm confused; Loki has just saved my life, and it's a very strange thing, and now that I think about it, even the day before, during the escape of the prisoners, he behaved strangely.

How did he say?

Don't go.

He had said it so strangely, as if he were afraid something had happened to me.

"I'm fine. Why... do you saved my life?"

Loki looks at me for a moment, with a look that I can't decipher; that he's about to say something important? Has he saved my life for his dirty purposes, or why was he really afraid of losing me?

"If... I had left you on that ship, Thor would have killed me."

I remain speechless; what he just said... it breaks my heart into a thousand pieces. And I thought – even for a second – that Loki had changed. That he had saved my life because he wanted to do it; instead, he did it only for himself. I hoped that at least he had done it for guilt, for what he had done to the Earth; a small gesture to redeem himself.

I get up, and I take a few steps towards Thor, to... do anything to get away from Loki; the boat-ship is very small, so I can't go very far. But not looking at him is already something.

Probably, at this moment he will be laughing at me; of the fact that I was stupid to trust him for a moment.

After leaving the ship-boat, we head towards a huge cliff; Loki and Thor, far away from me and Jane, begin a very silent conversation, so that Jane and I don't hear them.

"Will this story end well?" asks Jane, as she squeezes the shoulders in her arms.

"Thor is strong, and intelligent. We will survive."

"I don't care about him, but about Loki. How can Thor trust him?"

Indeed, Jane is not entirely wrong; right now – after what Loki told me - I wouldn't trust him either. But Thor, it's a completely different thing.

"Loki is Thor's brother. And Thor is Loki's brother. Although the God of Mischief does bad things, the God of Thunder will always find a way to trust him. Even in the worst moments."

Jane remains silent, thinking about who knows what; probably, to what I said.

The two brothers stop talking to each other, and as Thor approaches Jane to speak with her alone, Loki approaches me. I take a few steps to avoid his gaze, but he holds my arm, and forces me to look him straight in the eye.

"Loki, leave me."

"We could die, do you know?"

"And what does it matter to you? The important thing is that you're okay, aren't you?"

Loki sighs; it seems that he wants to say, or do something, but I can't understand it exactly.

"There's something you need to tell me before you go?"

I furrow; I don't understand what he means. I don't really need to tell him anything, or maybe yes? If he asked me something like that, maybe it's because Thor told him something.

"No, I have nothing to say to you."

"Good. I ask you... not to die. There are so many things I have to tell you." Loki says, after which he lets me go, and moves away from me.

It's too late now; Loki has behaved strangely once again, and I can't ask him what he wants to tell me exactly.

It may have been the only time I could tell Loki what I really feel for him, and instead I pulled back, and I remained silent.

Malekith is coming.

I knew something would go wrong; Thor's plan ended badly. Jane is safe, but Malekith has the Aether now, and he can destroy the entire universe.

While he escaped, we were trapped in this kingdom, with the dark elves ready to kill us. I have recovered myself, now I can fight together with Loki and Thor.

But the situation takes a turn for the worse: the dark elves are too many, and I can barely hold off those who are on me. One of them tries to hit me in the back, but a dagger sticks straight into his chest. I turn around, and I see Loki running towards me, ready to fight at my side.

"Are you taking pleasure in saving your life from me?"

As Loki keeps talking, some elves sneak up to him; I, noticing them, hit them with my powers, throwing them away from us.

"I don't need to be saved."

Loki rolls his eyes, and he doesn't even thank me for giving him a hand with the elves; instead, seeing Thor in difficulty, he runs towards him, while I defend myself from the few dark elves who have remained around me.

The creature that initiated the invasion on Asgard – the one who placed the bomb in prisons – goes dangerously to Thor and Loki; the two brothers fight together to flush him out, but Loki strikes him the final blow. However, before the creature can exhale its last breath, it hits the God of the Mischief in the chest, mortally wounding him.

Loki collapses to the ground, with Thor at his side, suffering; the God of the Mischief is dead.

Loki gave his life, for that of his brother.

The war is over; Malekith is dead.

Together with Thor, Jane and her friends, we managed to stop the dark elves, and save the Earth and the other kingdoms.

But at what price?

Loki is dead, but nobody seems to have noticed it; Thor and I are the only ones to suffer for his death.

Meanwhile, Odin has called me and his son to come back to Asgard, to talk about everything that has happened in the last days; I would have wanted to stay on Earth. By now my mission on Asgard is over. Yet, the King of Gods wanted to see me too, I wonder why.

Arrived at Asgard, Thor and I head directly into the throne room; completely replaced, the destruction of the invasion of Malekith is no longer noticed, and it has become only a memory.

Odin is usually sitting on his throne, with a cold and authoritarian look; it seems that nothing happened to him, that his wife is not dead, and that his... son is not dead.

Odin turns to his son, asking him to tell what has happened since we are... gone. Thor tells everything, word by word, but with a voice hoarse and almost silent, I can understand that – at least him – is still mourning the death of half of his family.

At the end of the story, something happens that leaves me very perplexed: Odin congratulates his son. It's something I've never seen him to do, he's a very... cold person, especially when he has to express his feelings; he reminds me a lot of Loki, right now.

Who knows, if he were still alive... what exactly would have happened? I would have told him what I felt for him, and he would have surprised me by telling me that he loves me too, just like in a movie, or we would have taken different paths, and we would never see each other again?

These thoughts will always instill doubt on my future, and on the unspoken words.

Thor has just announced to his father that he no longer wants to be King, at least, not for now; the God of Thunder wants to protect the Nine Kingdoms, but not seated on a throne, but on the field, fighting against enemies, protecting people, remaining at their side.

Odin should be furious right now, he should scream, he should try to change Thor's mind, but instead... nothing. He accept – even with too much enthusiasm – Thor's choice, and let him go to his destiny.

Before leaving, Odin turns to me.

"Y/n, I know you would like to come back to Earth, but I think I still need you here in Asgard."

I frown, not understanding the reason for this request; I was here to help Thor with chaos in the realms, but now my mission is accomplished. So why does he want me to stay here again?

"I-I don't understand. What can I do here? Now there's nob-... nothing more, that keeps me here."

"The dark elves have almost destroyed Asgard, and many prisoners are still free, in the streets of our kingdom to bring chaos, and to frighten whole families, women, children. Someone like you could help."

Asgard has... thousands of soldiers, and hundreds of guards. I don't understand why one more person could make the difference; I was hoping to finally come back home. I must to be honest: I was only here for Loki. I wanted him to change, I wanted him to understand how beautiful the world was, and how beautiful love was. I wanted him to start loving, I wanted him to start loving me.

But this didn't happen, and now I don't need anything anymore.

"I... I don't think I can accept."

"I know it's hard, but... you'll come home as soon as it's all over. You'll have to stay here a few days, at most a few weeks. Then you will come back home."

I think about what I have to say: stay? To help Asgard, again? I look at Thor, who doesn't help me much, since he has the look as if he were telling me 'the choice is yours'. Yes, the choice is mine, but from Odin's gaze, I don't seem to have much choice.

He's trying to ask me kindly just because his son is in front of him, and he doesn't want to fight. But I know that I will have to stay, and who knows how long.

"O-okay." I say, swallowing deeply. I'm stuck here again in Asgard, and this time there will not be Thor to fill my days, there will not be Frigga with whom I can talk. There will not be... Loki.

I can resist.

"I have to talk to the King of Gods."

The two guards look into each other's eyes; why shouldn't a warrior want to talk to Odin, and why in his private rooms?

I once again ask the guards to step aside, and to let me in, but they don't seem to want to move. Bored, I move them away, and open the doors of Odin's room.

One year. A whole year I stayed in Asgard to sort out their mess, of which I had no fault; I accepted the same, however, the requests of Odin.

You will only stay a few weeks, then you will return home.

So the King of Gods told me.

Instead it has been more than a few weeks; it's been a fucking year.

Odin is lying on his bed, comfortable, with a blissfully calm gaze; as soon as he sees me enter, he gets up quickly, looking with surprise at the situation in front of him.

"Go away." I order the guards; they move their gaze on Odin, not knowing what to do. They must execute orders from the King of Gods, perhaps Thor's orders, but not from other people. I am part of the group of other people.

Odin nods to his guards, waving them away; when we finally remain alone, I look at the man in front of me.

I know that the person I'm watching is the King of Gods, but something is wrong. I know it's like this, I can feel it. In this last year, I observed him, and there are things that Odin did, or said, that made me think, and I came to a single conclusion: the one before me is not Odin.

"What can I do for you, Y/n?"

"I'd like to know what's going on."

"Excuse me?"

I take a few steps towards Odin, and the closer I get, the more he seems to be uncomfortable.

I look him straight in the eyes, and then, extracting a dagger, I try to hit him; Odin anticipates my move, and clutching the wrist of my left arm, he snatches the knife from my other hand.

"You were about to hit your King." Odin says emphatically.

"You aren't my King. And you aren't even the King of this kingdom."

"I don't understand what you're talking about."

I twist away from Odin's grip, and I back off, massaging my wrists.

He doesn't seem to want to tell me the truth, or maybe I'm going crazy, and all I'm thinking about is just madness. After all this time, I'm still obsessed with Loki.

I can't forget him; I can't remember that I must forget him.

I find him in my memories, in my dreams; anything here in Asgard, Loki reminds me, and I can't do anything to keep going.

"The dagger in your hand. You know perfectly who it belongs to. Thor gave it to me when you... when Loki died. I kept it, just as Thor asked me, because he thought it was better that way."

"I don't understand what this has to do with me."

I look down; it was my last chance, the last time to convince Loki to show up, to tell me the truth, but it didn't help. If I'm really right, Loki is alive, and he's right in front of me, though in another respect. But he doesn't want to be seen, at least not by me.

"I'm about to leave. I'm going back to my home."

I look at Odin/Loki in the eyes, to find any sign of sadness, of discomfort, of melancholy; however, it doesn't seem to show anything. Does he really not feel anything? If so, why did he want me to stay here at Asgard all this time?

Odin/Loki doesn't say a single word, he... just looks at me. Who knows what will be thinking right now.

"I wanted you to tell me the truth before leaving. I know you're Loki, I think I've known that since you pretended to die. But you continue to ignore it."

I turn around, I try to stay calm. Crying in front of Loki, Odin, or whoever he is, is not at all what I want, even if he deserves to see me in this way: it's his fault whether or in this state.

"Before you fight against Malekith, you asked me not to die. You wanted to tell me things, but... you didn't do it anymore. I only wish you were honest with me, at least once."

Odin/Loki doesn't seem to want to say anything else, so, nodding to myself, I head to the exit, ready to go to Heimdall, and go home.

No one follows me to stop me.

Before going away forever, I turn to look at Asgard, and all its beauty; there's nobody here with me. Thor is still around the Nine Kingdoms, and he's the only person here that I know enough to love.

Nobody came to greet me; no one came to tell me not to go away.

Loki is so obsessed with power and his egoism that he didn't even tell his brother the truth.

"Are you ready, Y/n?"

I nod. It's time to go home, and leave the whole story behind.

I hope I can forget.

Forever Tag: @hotwinchester - @doro7winchester - @iamthenewthor - @cirunia - @frickin-bats - @giftofdreams - @ria132love - @flirtswithdanger - @littlenerdgirl16 - @nanie5 - @crownedloki - @deanxfuckingadorablexwinchester - @jerk-bitch-and-an-angel - @superhero-lover101 - @disneymarina - @ironmanlover24

If you want to be tagged in my stories, just ask me!

#loki #Loki Laufeyson #loki x reader #loki imagine #imagine loki #loki fanfiction #loki laufeyson x reader #avengers #avengers x reader #avengers imagine #imagine avengers #loki gif #loki reblog #gif #reblog

249 notes · View notes

stozzierr · 6 years

Text

What A Wonderful World

author’s note: okay so i wrote this fic a while ago and i never got around to putting it on tumblr?? for some reason?? i dunno why but i didn’t. but i am now!! so!! enjoy.

warnings: angst, mentions of blood, richie dyin lmao

ships: mentions of stozier, bichie, reddie

read on ao3 here

Everything that could have gone wrong, has gone wrong. It, that vile creature, had its long arms clutching onto Bill whilst the other losers stood a few feet away, watching the situation playing out before them. "Leave.." Bill managed to wheeze out, his voice laced with regret and hopelessness, knowing that if the other Losers wouldn't leave, It would just take them too. But there was one person that Bill couldn't tear his hazel eyes away from: Richie. One of the closest friends he'd ever made. If anyone had a reason to leave Bill behind, it was Richie. And the glasses-clad boy made sure to list out all the reasons he could think of.

"I told you, Bill... I fucking told you. I don't wanna die!" Richie shouted, his voice cracking with emotion. "It's your fault. You punched me in the face... Made me walk through shitty water... Brought me to a fucking crackhead house!" Bill could feel It shift around, obviously a little angered by the comment. If the situation wasn't life-or-death, Bill would have laughed. "And now.." Right when Bill thought Richie was going to leave him behind, bring everyone else with him, he saw his pale arm extended and grab onto a baseball bat. Hope, just some hope, returned to Bill.

"I'm going to have to kill this fucking clown."

If you were to ask Bill who the first friend he made was, it was Eddie. A small ball of anger ready to fight at every given moment, as long as his asthma didn't act out against him. Which, it often did. But then, if you were to ask who the second friend he made was, it would be Richie.

Second grade, one of the best grades of his life. It teetered on the border between just another grade to play in and actually doing work. It was a perfect balance, and Bill's 7-year-old mind wished it could be this way forever. There was one problem though: he got Mrs. Jalinski for a teacher, and Eddie got Mr. Linden. Great. They were separated, and Bill could either choose to go about his school year without making any friends in his class, or he could just man up and be friendly. While he was more inclined to take the first offer - stuttering over your words was more likely to get you laughed at than make friends - a little boy in the corner caught his eyes.

He seemed to be just as lonely as Bill did on this first day of school. Bill had seen him hop around excitedly for the first hour or so of school, trying to make friends, but ultimately failing altogether. Not many people could properly handle his obnoxiousness, even if they were all around the same age. Bill felt a pang of hurt in his chest as he watched this boy, with curly dark hair and glasses too big for his face, coloring alone in the corner. So, he made a decision and began to make his way over to the boy.

At first, the boy didn't even seem to notice him. He continued coloring, his scribbles making out to either be nonsense, a dragon, or a squid, with determination to finish. Bill watched him for a minute, before taking a deep breath and speaking. "Hey, y-yuh-you seem lonely ov-ve-er here. Why are you a-al-alone?" Curse him and his stutters!

The boy flinched a little bit, his big wide eyes magnified behind his thick lenses, but a smile split over his cheeks nearly immediately. "You talk funny."

Bill flushed in embarrassment. "And you di-did-didn't answer my que-qu-" He sucked in an annoyed breath, "question."

The boy just simply smiled wider. "My bestest best friend didn't stop going to first grade yet. He got sick a lot. His name is Stanley and he's a Jew." He said it like it was the most casual thing in the world. Bill didn't know the meaning of 'Jew', and frankly, he believed Richie didn't either. But if he took it so casually, why shouldn't Bill? "What about you?"

"M-Muh-My friend is in a different class than I am." Bill replied with a shrug, before asking, "What's your na-a-ame?"

"Oh! Almost forgot the pleasanties." The boy said, trying to sound smart. Bill had no idea what 'pleasanties' meant. "I'm Richard Mason Tozier! But Stanley calls me Richie for short. So you can do that too."

"Richie..." Bill repeated to himself, a happy smile of his own appearing on his lips. He liked the sound of it. "My name his B-Buh-Bill Denbrough. But E-heh-heddie calls me Bill."

"Well, B-Buh-Bill, it's nice to meet you!" Richie grinned and thrust a handful of crayons Bill's way. "Here, come color with me."

And he did.

Stan could barely believe the sight he saw before his eyes. The pain on his face was immeasurable, but the only thing that could surpass that pain was the guilt in his heart as he watched Richie pace around, listing the things Bill had done. He knew that if he were in Richie's place, he would have "got the fuck out of dodge", in Richie's words, and left Bill behind. Yeah, it was a shitty thing to do and he knew that, but he couldn't help it. He didn't want to die here, not now.

But of course, Richie being Richie, he stood up for Bill. Stanley had always admired Richie for his courage, his courage to walk into Neibolt twice, to walk into the Barrens with Bill with no second thoughts, to stand up to Bowers when it counted. Stanley admired Richie, a lot of things about him. And he, undoubtedly, loved him more than anyone in his life.

To watch Richie slam a metal bat into the face of a clown was surely a sight to see, and pride filled Stan's chest. If Richie could do this, Stanley surely could, facial wounds be damned. With his own bravery coursing through his veins, he charged forward with the rest of his friends to attack.

He didn't know when it happened, the need to kill the god damn clown blinding his vision, but Richie managed to fall to the floor and not get back up. Nobody seemed to notice, but he continued to shout profanities and encouragements, which got weaker with every passing second. But of course, the losers failed to notice his voice died out, and his dirtied self not standing next to the rest of them while It dangled from the top of a large pit. Only when Pennywise finally fell to Its demise did Stanley look back, and horror and tears pooled in his eyes all at once as he shrieked, alerting the rest of the losers.

Richie was lying on the ground, blood seeping from large scratch marks dragged up his abdomen.

If you asked Stanley when he fell in love, he'd respond with, "I've always loved him." If you asked when he could pinpoint it, he'd respond with a simple, "The exact moment Bill and Eddie fell in love with him."

Because, honestly, it was true.

The exact date was July 7th, 1987. Richie and Bill were 11, Stanley and Eddie were 10.

The four boys had planned to meet each other at the Quarry, one of their favorite places to spend time. Stan and Eddie had met up at the Kaspbrak household, met Bill up at his house after he said goodbye to sweet little Georgie, and then went to the Tozier household. After being told that Richie had already left by Maggie, Richie's mother, the three decided to just meet Richie up there. They thought he just went to the corner store to grab some gum. So down the three boys biked, chatting aimlessly and enjoying the peace of not having to deal with stupid jokes from their Trashmouthed friend.

Bill and Eddie haphazardly dumped their bikes in their specific bike-dumping spot, surprised to see Richie's rusty old bike laying there already. Stan, being the sensible one, kicked down the kickstand. When the bikes, their metal creating commotion, stopped moving, Stanley caught the sound of soft singing. Eddie, opening his mouth to ask what the hell that was, was quickly shut up by Stan slapping a hand over his lips. He'd never heard it before, and honestly, it was beautiful. Bill and Eddie must have agreed because they walked towards it like a siren was calling for them. Stanley did the only sensible thing and followed after them.

"I see trees of green, red roses too. I see them bloom for me and you. And I think to myself, 'What a wonderful world...'" Richie, that bastard, sang so softly, yet so passionately, that the three boys thought they had their friend mixed up with someone else. But no, it was Richie, with a bruise on his face given to him by Bowers earlier in the day. He had headphones on his head as he listened to music, Louis Armstrong's voice flowing into his ears and giving him the confidence he needed to sing, albeit he thought he was alone.

As Richie continued to croon, Stanley stole a glance at Bill and Eddie. Eddie was, for once, quiet, with no remark on how stupid this all was. He glanced over at Bill, who looked back at both Stanley and Eddie. Stanley could feel his heart pound in his ears as he stared back at Richie, barely processing Bill tugging him and Eddie backwards so they can act like they never saw Richie singing in his safe space.

Stanley Uris was in love with a boy who liked Louis Armstrong. He didn't quite know how he felt about that.

If you asked Eddie what the saddest moment of his life was, he'd tell you it was right now.

After hearing the ear-splitting shriek from Stan, everyone whipped their heads back to see what he was staring at. Eddie couldn't quite describe what he was feeling. Looking back on it, he knew he should have felt sad, or angry, or upset. No, he was just numb at the first glance at Richie, refusing to believe what he saw was real. Beverly, with her long, strong legs, got to Richie's body before anyone else did. "Richie? Trashmouth, come on, answer!"

A harsh cough ripped itself from Richie's throat, blood coming up with it and splattering onto the ground. "Woah, chill, not so loud..." He laughed weakly, the simple action he did every day causing him immense pain. Stanley, Bill, and Eddie stood in shock for a moment, while Ben and Mike made their way over to him. With Beverly barking quick orders at the both of them, Mike was instructed to grab any piece of cloth he could find from the large pile of toys in the center of the room while Ben was instructed to press said clothe against the bleeding wounds, applying as much pressure as he could without making Richie kick the bucket.

Watching them move made Eddie kick into action, his little legs carrying him swiftly to the scene with Stan and Bill quickly trailing behind. His size was deceitful, as he shoved Ben aside with ease. "No, no, you're doing it wrong, this is wrong, he'll die and we'll have done nothing about it!" Eddie rambled on, regretting throwing his fanny pack away in the front yard of the Neibolt Street house. If he wasn't so stupid, he could be saving Richie, Richie wouldn't be dying-!

A soft hand grasped his own, and Eddie looked into Richie's eyes. And his heart shattered. Richie had a look of knowing in his eyes, knowing that he wouldn't be able to make it out of the sewers alive. Stan seemed to notice it, too, as he let out a small sob while Mike held him, who was also fighting back tears.

Bill was the first to talk. "R-Ruh-Richie, wh-a-aht are w-we-we goi-go-going to d-do with-th-out y-yo-you..?" He muttered through the tears, grasping Richie's limp hand. The other boy just laughed softly, shaking his head.

"For starters, you'll have to break it to Eddie's mom that our sessions have been cut short.." Nobody laughed. "Come on, not even one laugh? You're the toughest crowd I've ever faced.."

"Richie, you fucking moron!" Eddie sobbed, standing up with clenched fists. "This isn't some fucking joke! You're fucking dying in front of us and we can't do anything about it! Richie, you've been so important to us, and now you're fucking leaving us?! For good?! This is bullshit! And to top it all off, you make some joke about my mother!" Eddie's knees wobbled as he struggled to stand, Beverly's tear-stained hand grabbing his own. She must have been trying to get the tears to stop the whole time.

Richie, with a hand utterly soaked in blood, fixed his glasses and smeared the red onto the lenses. Stanley wanted to fix them, call Richie an idiot for getting them dirty, but he couldn't find it in him. He couldn't find anything in him anymore, the Richie's ripped skin visible through his blood-soaked stupid Hawaiian shirt. Richie let the hand fall back to his side. "Come on, Eddie Spaghetti, don't be like that.."

"Don't... Don't call me that.." Eddie whimpered, sniffling and not bothering to shout anymore. "You know how I.." He couldn't finish. There was no point. The last little bit of life Richie had clung onto was gone, Richie was gone, gone gone gone.

Someone, or maybe all of them, let out loud shrieking sobs.

"Richie!"

As life always does, life moved on without Richie in it. Bill had flat-out refused to leave Richie's corpse in the sewers ("He w-wuh-wouldn't like it and you fucking kn-o-ow that."), Mike offering to carry him out. Having to explain to the Tozier family that their only child was dead without revealing the existence of Pennywise was proven both difficult and painful to do. The group's dynamic was broken, their happy-go-lucky comic relief having left them for good. They split up only a month later, Beverly moving to Portland with her aunt, Bill leaving Derry for a vacation and never returning, and the others leaving Derry at their own pace. With the exception of Mike, who stayed back as everyone swore to come back and avenge Richard Tozier (and Georgie Denbrough and the other missing kids, of course) had Pennywise ever returned.

And avenge them they did. The cost was high, but they did it. Eddie and Stan didn't make it to see the end of Its terrifying reign, while Mike ended up in the hospital. Beverly and Ben left Derry soon after It's death to start a family of their own, leaving Bill to try and get Audra to come back from her comatose state. There was one thing that William Denbrough never forgot to do.

Leave flowers on a grave deep within Derry's Cemetery.

Richard Tozier (1976 - 1989)

The Boy Of A Thousand Voices

Making people smile every day, even after death.

#i'm so sorry #it hurt to write #stozier #bichie #reddie #richie tozier #bill denbrough #stanley uris #eddie kaspbrak #beverly marsh #ben hanscom #mike hanlon #i wish i didn't write this #but i did #richie tozier dies #whoops

11 notes · View notes

alicescripts · 7 years

Text

Part 2, Chapter 8: Absent Family

There is more here than I understand. Which is, I guess, true of all people true at all times of their life. We never see the big picture, even when we think we do. We see a reconstruction of the big picture, from the bits and pieces we picked up and tried to put into the right order. And I have a lot of bits and pieces. Bay and Creek, a vast organization run and financed by – who? The Thistle Men? Which are what? And they’re allied with the US government somehow. And now this person in a hoodie. And over and over, this name. Praxis.

When the big picture gets too hazy, it’s time to return to the details you’re sure about. I’ve been to a Bay and Creek base. For some reason, they let me leave.

It’s time to go back. And this time, I am not leaving.

Alice Isn’t Dead by Joseph Fink. Performed by Jasika Nicole. Produced by Disparition. Part 2, Chapter 8: “Absent Family”.

There was the farmhouse, as I had left it. By all appearances, a shell of what had once sheltered people. A family who staked their lives on the health of the fields, only to be undone by age or disease, or those same fields, or a desire to move on and try something else. Or more probably, never a family. Every broken plank of wood, every sagging wall a reconstruction, a fake.

I went inside, moving quickly so that I could not be stopped before getting to the entrance. It was later afternoon. There was no use waiting until nightfall. Certainly, my approach would be seen. There was no sneaking into this place. I was going to face them directly and force them to deal with me, one way or another.

Except I wasn’t going to even be able to do that, because turning on the dial stove did nothing. No pitch down into darkness and back into underground light. Looking more closely, there was a layer of real dust upon the painted-on dust. The dial was clean of fingerprints, except my own recently applied. The base had vanished.

But no. What I had seen had been voluminous, a massive space with hundreds or thousands of people inside of it. There was no way that a base that big was moved or abandoned, not over one person. Even with all the money in the world, that would be ludicrous.

But this particular entrance had been sealed off. And who could I find another entrance when it could be a… dying tree at the edge of the creek a half miel from here? Or a certain stone left innocuously by the highway?

Instead, I dwelled on the more pressing question, there in that dusty kitchen that had once been an elevator. To seal off an entrance like this that had been so elaborately set up was still a phenomenal waste of time and money. It would have made so much more sense to just kill me. So why didn’t they kill me?

There is an undeniable romance to travel. And there is a stranger, more specific romance to traveling constantly. Rootlessness can be attractive, it really can be. The map it creates in your head. When someone brings up Oklahoma City, or Boise or Chicago or Portland, Oregon or Portland, Maine – and for each of those, you have a memory. Being able to think: oh yeah, I’ve been there. You remember how it felt in a personal way. How Oklahoma City was surprising, because it was more hip than I expected. How Chicago in the summer feels happy in a way many other cities don’t. The exact smell of an antique store in a small town in Texas.

Direct knowledge of the world is a fundamentally seductive thing to acquire.

I sat on a faded green couch covered in dust and pollen, hoping that nothing was currently living inside of it, and I tried to think through why I was alive. Why am I alive? It’s a basic question that a lot of people have asked, but my angle was different, more focused. Why am I alive now, in this moment, when Bay and Creek should have changed that whole situation for me in a big way?

Possibility one is that they do not kill innocents, a firm moral stance. They are fighting on the side of good. But I don’t buy it. That base I saw was massive. Their operation runs at the least nationwide. There is no way to hide a secret that large if you’re not willing to kill to keep it. If they had a firm code of never killing innocents, then that secret long ago would have slipped.

Which leaves me with the other possibility. That they wanted me to see and then walk away alive with that knowledge. A personal memory of what it was like to be inside their halls. But why? They are at war. If they want something, it would be because it helps them in this war. So I can only conclude that I have a role to play in this conflict, that Bay and Creek knows what that role is but I don’t. And in order to guide me toward that role, they have allowed me to glimpse their operation and survive.

Me, lonely me. Anxiety-ridden me. [scoffs] There’s no way I have a role in anything except my own sleeplessness.

If I’m important to Bay and Creek, it likely means that I am troublesome to Thistle. Which would explain, perhaps, why I was targeted so early in my search by that – creature. But Thistle wouldn’t give up just because they missed me once. If I’m important enough for them to target, then I am still a target. Thistle must still be coming for me. And I swear, it was right when I reached that conclusion that I heard the car approaching the abandoned house.

There is the other side of constant travel, of course. This sense that you never belong anywhere. Or this forgetfulness about where you’ve been, or worse, where you are. The franchises amplify this, of course. I stopped for lunch in a Chili’s because it’s there, and there’s a lot of room to park my truck. And I look around and realize, I don’t even know what state I’m in. It’s a feeling of bottomlessness, like the floor has disappeared. Like a shitty magic trick. I’m falling, but also I’m not. I’m eating a chicken fajita salad in a plastic booth.

Beyond that, there is the gap that forms between you and other people. They all are going to be here tomorrow, and the day after, and the day after that. Me, I barely know where I’m going to be tomorrow. I have no idea where I’ll be next week. I couldn’t begin to guess my locations for the year, not even within a 300 mile radius. Romance and sadness have always gone hand in hand, of course, and the romance of travel never more so. The bloom of excitement is so quickly replaced by the quiet despair, and looking out another motel window at another motel parking lot, and the highway on the other side of the tall wire fence. And this knowledge that no matter where you go, it’s still you, standing in a room with yourself, looking through the same eyes, thinking the same thoughts.

My usual anxiety exploded into panic. I should have run the other direction, but terror pinged around my brain and no thoughts could connect amongst the chatter. Instead, I crawled to the front window. There was a police car, its headlights obscuring any detail except the basic shape of it. It was staring to be quite dark, so I couldn’t tell who was inside. The headlights switched off, the door opened, and as it did the interior light came on.

Sitting in the passenger seat was a man in a police uniform. He was dead, with wounds all over his neck and torso. I don’t think his death had been quick. Coming out of the driver’s seat was a woman I had met once before, on a road near the Salton Sea, and I hoped would never meet again. She was dressed haphazardly in something like a police officer’s uniform, but the details were all wrong.

“Keisha?” she shouted. “Keisha, you in there?” She leaned on the hood. “I mean I know you are, so I guess that was a dumb question. My bad!” She brushed off her hands in three quick slaps. “I followed you here. You’re very easy to follow. I can smell you.” She tapped her nose and laughed. “I can smell you from three states away. You smell really good. So I guess uh, take that as a compliment. OK, I’m gonna come in now!”

I scrambled up and back toward the kitchen, past the ruined staircase, not stable enough to climb, and anyway I’m not gonna corner myself. I made it to the back bedroom, a child’s bedroom, but now a ruin, like all the rest of the house. I heard the front door open.

“Why are you poking around this place again? Is there something here for us to find?” Movement and clatter as she rooted around the living room and the kitchen. “You don’t have to answer that. If there’s something to find, we’ll find it. When faced with a problem, we tear at it and keep tearing and tearing and tearing and eventually, everything gives.” The window was broken, (chunks) of glass around the frame, but there was no choice. I started to wriggle through it, doing my best to end up with only light scratches. “Keisha, it’s OK! This doesn’t have to be difficult. It’s time.” Her voice was so close. My legs were caught in the frame and I pulled hard. The glass popped and I fell free, and as I did, she rounded the corner. Her eyes glinted in the darkness. “There you are!” she said. I was already rising to run, but she didn’t sound in any hurry. “Hey listen! I have a job to do now. Here we go!” And she leapt forward, her laid-back energy compressing and coiling out in a burst of violent movement, and she was at the window, and her hand as unyielding as a handcuff around my arm. And I took the chunk of glass that had come out with my exit, and I drove it through her chest.

She made a soft involuntary sigh and stepped back, her hand loosening for a moment. I tore away and back toward the front of the house. I’d left my truck a long walk distant to avoid - and this seemed darkly funny to me just then, to avoid attracting attention, and there was no way I was gonna make it back there on foot before she caught me. So I went to the cop car and [sighs] mercy of mercys: she had left the key in the ignition. I fell into the seat and I started the car.

The cop had been dead for a bit, and the smell was a lot. I tried not to think about his proximity to me, about what any of this meant. I concentrated on the motions. I turned the key, the engine started. Already I was on drive, and on the gas, a sliding squealing turn back toward the road. As I drove as fast as the car would go on the dirt, I looked behind me and saw in the red light of my escape the woman, glass sticking out of her chest, absolute determination on her face, pumping her arms. And for a moment, I couldn’t believe it, she gained on my speeding car.

And then the gear change kicked in. And I finally saw her fade into the blue twilight of the just set sun.

There’s a sense of family that I think forms between people who have to travel a lot for work, no matter what that work is. Corporate suits flying to sales meetings twice a week, a drummer who sits in the back of the van eight months out of the year. People like me, driving our trucks. You can recognize the look in the other’s eyes, this feeling of having seen too many miles in too short a time. You can compare stories about Cleveland, and about Ann Arbor and Birmingham and Fort Lauderdale. They know the romance and they know the despair, and so you don’t have to talk about either. You can just ask them how the Hampton Inn is in Madison, Wisconsin, and they’ll know exactly what you mean.

I started this by lamenting the amorphous nature of my search. And, well, that’s been addressed. All other options have been taken away. Now I know I am being pursued. And so my only way forward is to run. Which direction doesn’t matter. What matters is distance. What matters is speed.

I wish I could tell you where I am. But even if I could, then what? Alice, our paths are different now, I suppose. You were on your way to saving something bigger than us all. And me? I am only going to be able to save myself, and maybe not even that. Besides, by the time I told you where I was, I would be somewhere else.

Just never stop moving. Because she is coming. She is fast behind me. And I cannot even imagine what she would do if she caught up.

Bay and Creek wanted me to see what they are, and they wanted me to live to remember it. There is a role for me in defeating the Thistle Men. What that role is, I have no idea.

Maybe you knew, Alice. Maybe that was another secret that you kept from me.

I only know that I need to live long enough to figure out what my place is in this war.

[sighs] More soon, Alice. I hope. [whispers] Shit. I hope.

Joseph Fink: And now, a knock-knock joke.

Knock-knock. [left speaker] Who’s there? [right speaker] Hoo. [left] Hoo who? [right] Like an owl, get it? [left] Yeah, I get it. [right] You’re not gonna let me in, are you? [left] No I’m not. [right] But who would make owl puns for you? [left] I’m going back to bed. [right] Listen, wait. Listen. [left] Yes? [right] There’s this brick wall where no two bricks are the same size, within which there’s this window with a perfect map of the world and fingerprints. Below which there’s this heater coughing up the first dust of winter, on top of which there’s two jackets, one scarf, three gloves. Anyway, I saw a van tip over on 26th Street, and it reminded me of you. [left] I’m going to bed. [right] OK. Good night! Good night. [sighs]

#alice isn't dead #alice isn't dead transcripts #part 2 #part 2 chapter 8 #absent family

29 notes · View notes

mcrmadness · 6 years

Text

Rant about how I can’t draw anymore... it shouldn’t have got this long but as it did anyway, I’m gonna put a read more link there eh...

Asdfdeghawbfk I’ve been reading some webcomics on Tumblr and the more I see the pics the more I want to draw too! I just don’t know what to draw. I lost my inspiration years ago. I guess I just became this boring adult or something. Not really as I’m still very child-like by my mind but I think all my energy and imagination is rented by my mental illness as it loves to make up weird scenarios and false alarms 24/7 so there’s none left for my own use...

So far only things I can came up with is drawings related to my mental stuff and it makes me angry because it’s just lots of text along with badly drawn pictures of nothing interesting. I already write way too much of my nonsense no one is interested in and it’s spreading to my art too.

It’s sad because drawing had been my hobby since I could handle a pen. I guess it ended few years ago when I used to do lots of portraits. Just fanart basically but those were never good enough. For me as I’m a huge perfectionist. I was good at the mechanics but not so good at making them look original. I think the major breakdown was when my friend told me that she doesn’t understand people who draw portraits because it’s just basically a copy of a photo and is lacking the soul or story of the drawing itself. She got the point and I was and still am not angry at her, but it made me realize that they were just not-even-perfect copies of photos.

I also was bullied at school and made feel like I was worth nothing and everyone just hated (on) me and I felt pretty shit and I was lonely as hell (I had no friends at school for almst 2 years in straight), I drew a lot and that was my way of getting the attention and approval I couldn’t get. And it was never enough. I did not draw because it was fun but because I wanted it finished, uploaded to Deviantart and to see if I could get comments and I was ALWAYS disappointed and felt like the world is against me and it’s my destiny that no one will ever see me no matter what I do. I was grateful for everyone leaving a like or comment but it was not enough... so maybe they lacked the soul because y only intention with them was to get attention. So I slowly stopped drawing.

I also can’t draw anything just like that. I’m terrible and it also made me even more depressed and angry because everytime I tried drawing something that was no copying, they turned out 57825792 times worse. And I just felt like I actually couldn’t even draw shit so I was just lying to myself, I was pretending to be good at drawing when in reality I sucked so bad and just was faking for myself because I knew how to mechanically draw, but not how to draw with just my mind as the reference pic. I don’t know if they looked so horrible for everyone or just for me, but it made me so damn angry. And I’m not an angry person but when I tried to draw it just made me so stressed out and I wanted to break everything and throw stuff out of the window so I stopped.

AND YET I still feel the urge to draw but I don’t know WHAT to draw. Okay since the first Deadpool movie I’ve been wanting to draw this once scene from it but I’ve never started because it’s too much work to go and find that scene on the bluray and actually get that paused so you can see the lines well enough. So I’ve been thinking about that scene for over 2 years and have done nothing. Also it would just be one stupid-ass piece of fanart portrait which lack the soul and it’d be just for me to do something DP related for couple of hours as that’s probably only way to do something lasting that long. Unless I watch the movie or play the game 24/7 but... maybe not :DD (Also still can’t beat the last boss in the game because they really did not think about players using keyboard so it’s pissing me off too. I really want to know how the damn game ends!)

I also love comics and I started drawing comics when I was 9-10 years old. Or first I started with just series of pictures. Acually have to tell this one here: always the same story tho about a dino riding another dino like a horse in a competition, and then falling over this water hurdle that was deeper than swim pools what the fuck - and it ended with him watching the competition from tv with his family and he was in a wheel chair with an overall plaster cats what was wrong with me??? But I also did draw on coloring books, once I draw with a red crayon on some sort of swan, I drew wounds and blood everywhere and kept telling a story of how lion had attacked it and my aunt was there listening to me horrified :DDD I also remember how I once drew a cat family that apparently turned out to be so dangerous they had chains and all and eventually I ended up drawing lines over the whole paper because they were also behind a ighly securited fence. Okay, I know this sounds pretty creepy, but actually I’ve always liked animals over people so I have no clue why I drew things like these when in the end I could never hurt animals. Maybe Jurassic Park and other movies, as well as documents about animals, had something to do with this? Who knows...

(I also have traumas for the movie “Homeward Bound”, the scene where the cat’s in the basket in the middle of the river and the dog is trying to rescue it. I was very young at the time when my mom caught me in front of that movie crying like a... baby? because of that cat. I haven’t been able to watch that film ever again. So that probably tells you how much I love animals and especially cats as I’ve always lived with cats and we had three when I was born. But I did adopt this to my plays as a kid, I loved so much to play when someone or even better if it was a GROUP OF KIDS that were in a huge danger and they needed to be rescued. I did this with every single play I played back then. Still love it when x rescues y but nowadays more like on an emotional level as I was always alone against the people hating me and I could only dream about someone standing for me.)

BUT TO THE COMICS. At first they were just stream of consciousness without any plot, I created new characters all the time and never finished their stories as they had no plot ever. Also loved drawing “biographies”, usually it was some female anthropomorphic animal or insect that used clothes and had hair because I loved drawing different styles, make up and hair/hairdos to them. And often it started with couple of panels telling about her story from the beginning, then jumped to some age and next thing was panel per age at the same time telling about her in tht age. The idea was just to draw lots or hair and clothes, and then it ended with some age I considered “adult enough” and then their teenage/adult life started with boyfriends and stuff. Usually it was pretty much an ugly duckling kind of story where they were different and maybe bullied because of something (this one bunny had floppy ears so they did everything to get them pointy because she was bullied I guess? At least she hated her ears. Btw this was my first real comic ever!). But you can see why I still love playin The Sims games! :D

After these endless stories about nothing particular I came up with the idea of actually writing a plot and then drawing. Ended up with plenty of short comics that actually had a plot and some idea in them. The characters did change tho and I probably had couple of stories of each different characters. They were also always animals but no more antropomorphic but just animals that had speech bubbles.

My last comics ever (so far) have been two originals and one that I drew as a fanart. The two originals were called Micro - The Insane Murdered, and Little Emo Bird.

Micro was this dino-like creature, yet another anthropomorphic character because I did not know how to draw people without copying anyone’s style and I just never came up with humans as characters. So the header tells it, Micro is a murderer. This one I actually liked a lot! I was 15-17 when I drew him, but it was also much gore as, well, he’s a murderer. Or just a killer as he’s pretty much insane and doesn’t plan but just acts out of blue. I think I drew 3 different short stories for him and I had the last one written down. It was pretty interesting as I didn’t draw him for a while and when I remembered those plans and came back, I had had my identity crisis and EVERYTHING had changed. Original plan was to get him a girlfriend - after he was caught for his crimes and snet to prison,m he later was sent to an asylum for prisoners. This story should have taken place in there, introducing fellow inmates and Micro just felt like he was not in the right place as he was not ill. And then he would have met this girl and they’d have fallen in love and so on. But when I later checked that out I was so... confused :D Like, this is not me? This is what I hate now? Romance, ew, heteronormativity, ew, JUST THE CLICHÉS, BIG EW. So I just wrote these this very deep wall of text about his personality but it never turned into a comic. But I remember how proud I was about it as Micro was meant to be partly me but also something I could never be and never will be and what not, just some pretty cheesy blabber that felt good back then but right now would feel just as stupid as the first plan :D

The second one, Little Emo Bird, was an interesting one as well. I created it as a joke because I was a huge My Chemical Romance fan and there was this never-ending debate over if they’re emo or not (and as a fan I believed them so they were not emo) and created LEB. It was this bird and you usually saw just his head and occassionally wings too and he was very stereotypical emo with black hair and he was very suicidal and angry 24/7. Also others called him gay when he insisted that he was not. But actually I always imagined him with a girl emo bird instead of another boy bird but it was just the another stereotype that emoboys are gays. So it was not meant to be mean but just fun. I also liked him very much because he talked with me - the drawer/writer. Like he knew he can’t kill himself because I won’t let him and it pissed him off very. much. And he hated how the panels he was in had frames looking like scars. Oh my bad, the panels were not scars but the arrows pointing the next panel :D I’m not sure if he was actually suicidal but at least he acted like one because he was desperate for attention and tried to get attention to show no one gives a fuck about him and the would get angry for stupid reasons. So basically just a very moody teenager.

I have all these on my DeviantArt if someone’s interested, but I want to link here one of the... memes? What the shit these DA fill-this-thing were actually called memes? I wonder if they still are o.O Anyway, I want to link this one because I think it’s still the best one and I really like the outcome here :D

Here’s also the link to my dA as this empty meme was done by someone else and I wanna give credits. Oops, apparently it’s a deactivated account so nevermind, but here’s the link anyway.

The latter and so far the latest comic was about Die Ärzte, or more about the slash pairing (still my OTP) and I drew couple of comics about them, as well did write fanfiction too. These comics were my first to have human characters as I was tired of drawing everyone always in the form of animals (horses usually) just because I didn’t know how to draw people, and many people found their animal forms really disturbing to view so I changed to people.

After those I just haven’t drawn anything really. Comics would be nice, once I actually thought it would be interesting as a career but then again, I can’t work under pressure and I couldn’t live from art because you never know when the artblock hits you. Right now it’s been on for couple of years and basically only way to create something atm is to play The Sims 3 and write my TS3 blog. At least it’s something, pics with text so... I still would love to draw but I just have NO IDEA of any concept or anything.

Also just want to say here that after thinking about my Micro and LEB it’s weird how there’s certain things that actually are just the things that made me start liking Deadpool. (I’d have written ‘fall in love’ but as much as he is a fictional character, he’s still a human being and I don’t/can’t love humans...) It just shows that I’ve always like that kind of things with comics but didn’t know they existed outside of my comics until I found out about DP. Have to admit tho, that I haven’t read any DP comics... But I have an excuse: I don’t know if there’s a way to get those in Finland. ANYWAY, I just feel like someone would think these were affected by DP but actually they were not. Micro and LEB both were created in 2008 and I did not find out about Deadpool until in... 2013-2014 I think? And even then it was just occassional browsing in the internet before the movie trailers came out and that’s when I really got interested and started reading about him a lot and bought the game and here I am now. Acually not sure if it was in 2013 when we were just rewatching the X-Men movies and a friend of mine probably mentioned Deadpool at some point and told some things about him that got my attention. But really I got interested bit later anyway.

I really feel like I should do some sort of comparison between me drawing from photos vs. me drawing from my head to show how huge the difference is. And this annoys me a lot because I feel like I’ve been using these photos to LEARN to draw better but it just feels like my skills are at the maximum no matter how much I’d practice, and I’m not happy with the result as I feel like I should learn even more but how do you learn if your skill is stuck??? People always say that you just need to draw every day and a lot and they don’t understand that’s what I did and never could cross a certain point. I probably was also very jealous at my siblings because they were 5732850 times better than me who had been drawing longer than them (as I’m 3½ years older), just seeing them to improve made me so angry because I did not seem to improve at all. With copy drawings I did tho! But not with the ones I wanted to.

Now, I also know that lots of artists use lots of reference photos and that’s actually great and made me feel better as I always assumed everyone is naturally that awesome and I can’t even learn more; so it made me feel better because I also have permission? I’m not fake for using photos? But I’m just this... all or nothing so I very easily feel like I’ve betrayed myself if I don’t draw all by myself and then I need to point out that hey I’m not this good in reality I used a photo heh don’t think I’m a naturally gifted as I’M NOT asddd. So yeah, my need to constantly explain myself is on the way with this one too :))) But I don’t think this would be so bad anymore if I now started drawing again, but the biggest problem still is, that I still have that artblock and I haven’t had inspirations in years. Apart from that DP fanart idea which I don’t know if I should carry out or not... sigh.

...I want teh comics!!! I once even wanted to start this webcomic diary because I used to read lots of them but even that idea was dead from the beginning because my life is so boring there’s nothing to draw about. I also have drawn couple of comics of our cats but again it’s the thing I can’t (or I make myself believe that I can’t...) draw the way it’d look nice and appealing, now they’re just black and white mess.

#me #personal #drawing #artblock #all my inspiration died out and idk why asdddddd

0 notes

topmixtrends · 6 years

Link

“OÙ SONT les neiges d’antan?” Throughout my childhood, at odd moments, I heard my stepfather Vasily Yanovsky — a noted Russian émigré author who provides one of the bookends to this brilliant, poignant anthology — burst out with that melancholic line from François Villon. Even as a child, I could hear its wounded beauty. Now, as an ageing translator from the Portuguese, I can see it as a manifestation of saudades, the famously untranslatable Portuguese term best glossed as a yearning, a longing, both for what is now in the past and for what perhaps never existed. One might speculate that saudades and les neiges d’antan represent a universal response to our expulsion from the Garden of Eden. We are all exiles from a vague paradise that, by its nature, is forever blocked to us, creatures fallen from grace. Bryan Karetnyk, the expert editor of Russian Émigré Short Stories from Bunin to Yanovsky, suggests this poignant connection to the expulsion of our mythic ancestors with the epigraph to his introduction, taken from John Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667): “Some natural tears they dropped, but wiped them soon; / The world was all before them, where to choose / Their place of rest.”

Strange as it may seem, though born in New York and speaking at best an embarrassingly rudimentary Russian, I found myself quite at home in this anthology — at home in a world where loss was the starting point, death the never-forgotten conclusion, and love a desperately desired antidote or anodyne. Again I remember the expulsion, the rude thrusting of man and woman into a world of suffering and death, but also with the possibility of salvation: “They hand in hand with wand’ring steps and slow, / Through Eden took their solitary way.”

Memory

Along with their clear, familiar tones of joy and despair, these tales also include minor details that remind me of my Russian-American childhood in New York in the 1940s. For example, Georgy Ivanov, in his tale “Giselle,” describes a billiard player’s apartment back in St. Petersburg, where the “windows […] had not yet been sealed with extra putty against the coming cold.” And suddenly I remember, for the first time in almost 70 years, my fascination with the gray strips of putty that my grandfather, a survivor of Siberian prisons, always clean-shaven and redolent of Eau de Cologne 4711, meticulously pressed into the gaps between window and windowsill in our ordinary apartment in ordinary Rego Park, Queens, allowing me the pleasure of pushing my fingers against the softly receptive substance. This unprofessional aside leads me back to the collection, and the title of a lengthy Parisian tale by Yury Felsen, “The Recurrence of Things Past,” with its obvious Proustian echo. Like Proust’s masterpiece, this anthology is, in fact, a book of memory. And suddenly I remember that Yanovsky’s last published book was Elysian Fields: A Book of Memory (1983, translated by my mother, Isabella Levitin Yanovsky, in 1987), in which he recounts the Russian émigré experience in Paris between the wars, with firsthand sketches of many of the writers included in the present anthology. And then I notice that Bryan Karetnyk initiates this very anthology with a salient quote from Vladimir Nabokov, in response to the question: “What is your most memorable dream?” His answer is: “Russia.”

As I step back for a wider view, I see a kind of double nexus permeating this collection of stories, a nexus of the remembered, seemingly distant past in Russia (Moscow, St. Petersburg, Sebastopol) — a kind of ghost that cannot be escaped — jostling against the more recent past of eternal displacement in Berlin, Paris, Nice, or Montpellier. And this doubleness, I now realize, explains why Yanovsky gave the fictional protagonist of his best-known novel No Man’s Time (1967, translated by my mother and Roger Nyle Parris, and introduced by W. H. Auden) two names: Cornelius Yamb and Conrad Jamb. As the protagonist says of himself: “It is not at all clear who I really am. For instance, one person will say: I, and the other also says: I … Do these two feel something different or is it exactly the same?” A dilemma indeed — the dilemma of the exile.

It’s appropriate, then, to begin my survey of the themes and symbols that recur throughout this collection by looking at memory’s dream, incarnated as les neiges d’antan.

Snow

Ivan Shmelyov’s “Shadows of Days” is a lengthy, disjunctive nightmare of the past. But in the chaos of the narrator’s dreaming, religion and nature provide some solace: “I recall the lovely icons, my icons. They exist only in one’s childhood.” And then he encounters snow:

The night street shows blue. The snowdrifts are swept in mounds — you could drown in them. It has been snowing heavily all day. Great bales in snow-capped rows. It’s so quiet on our little street […] Atop the posts, atop the fences — little mounds of snow. Soft, powdery. Lanterns covered in snow shine drowsily; dogs dig up the snow with their snouts. Beyond the fence, among the birches, a crow croaks hoarsely, foretelling more snow.

For the American reader, this gentle, endless snow reminds us of Robert Frost’s ambiguous vision of stopping by woods on a snowy evening, where “the only other sound’s the sweep / of easy wind and downy flake” and where seduction is not easy to resist, for “the woods are lovely, dark, and deep.” In any case, as the dream flickers on, Shmelyov’s narrator is left with “joy, loss — all in a flash.” And when he awakes, it is in alien Paris, to the calls of a rag-and-bone man passing in the street.

In another nightmare vision, Nabokov’s “The Visit to the Museum,” the narrator leaves the titular building and finds himself, unexpectedly, in a snowy landscape:

The stone beneath my feet was real sidewalk, powdered with wonderfully fragrant, newly fallen snow, in which the infrequent pedestrians had already left fresh black tracks. At first the quiet and the snowy coolness of the night, somehow strikingly familiar, gave me a pleasant feeling after my feverish wanderings. Trustfully, I started to conjecture just where I had come out, and why the snow, and what were those lights exaggeratedly but indistinctly beaming here and there in the brown darkness.

Soon he realizes that the “strikingly familiar” snow-covered streets are those of Russia, which is now in Soviet hands. The story ends: “But enough. I shall not recount how I was arrested, nor tell of my subsequent ordeals. Suffice it to say that it cost me incredible patience and effort to get back abroad.”

Love

A possible salvation from the long shadow of displacement is love. For example, in Nobel laureate Ivan Bunin’s “In Paris,” the narrator finds love in a Russian restaurant in the guise of Olga Alexandrovna, a waitress. We assume that solace has come to the uprooted protagonists in the form of a convenient alliance, and only at the end do we understand that the younger waitress had not only found support and comfort in the well-to-do older Russian gentleman, but had actually fallen in love with him. By that point the elderly gentleman is dead and the former waitress, turned rich by his death, is “convulsed by sobs, crying out, pleading with someone for mercy.” What touched me in this tale was the understated and simple drift from a casual pickup to a true love between two Russians, making their lonely way in the alien West.

Another story that turns with an unexpected rush toward love is Irina Odoevtseva’s “The Life of Madame Duclos,” in which, after a lifetime of compromises, the Russian protagonist, having bought comfort and success by marriage to an elderly Parisian, suddenly senses salvation in the offing with a younger Russian. This time, however, the heroine can only declare herself to her mirror:

“Hello,” she will say, in Russian. She can see her lips moving in the mirror, struggling to remember the long-forgotten Russian word.

“Hello.”

She leans closer to the mirror.

“Kolya …”

And, so close now that she’s touching the cool glass, she whispers:

“I love you. I love you!”

Alas, the yearned-for lover, unaware of her feelings, has slipped aboard a ship returning him to Russia: “And then there is nothing. No ship, no happiness, no life.”

Finally, Irina Guadanini’s “The Tunnel” is a sad retelling of the author’s doomed love for Vladimir Nabokov, who was then already married to Véra. The intensity of her love is sustained through the 13 sections of the tale, but in the end the unfortunate woman, grown frantic, falls from her perch high above the Italian coast — where she was seeking distance and perspective, while also trying to spy on her lover — and tumbles downhill to the railroad tracks. There she lies, perhaps dead, perhaps only dying, but clearly reminiscent of Anna Karenina, her literary progenitor. The glory and obsession of love give way to despair. The exile does not find salvation.

Gambling

Though gambling is a universal human pursuit, Russian literature has given it a particular focus. In his notes, Karetnyk traces the literary portrayal of this obsession to Alexander Pushkin’s story “The Queen of Spades” (1834) and Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s novel The Gambler (1867), which was based on the author’s own experience with the deadly fascination of roulette. In fact, Dostoyevsky used proceeds from the novel to pay off large debts he had accumulated in the casino. In this collection, we encounter, in Georgy Adamovich’s “Ramón Ortiz,” an Argentine version of Dostoyevsky’s obsessed youth. With no restraint, no realistic self-appraisal, the young man, fond of being considered a baron, gambles his way from early success to utter destitution and resolves his situation by committing suicide. The narrator approves of this final act, seeing it as a proper response to the universe’s indifference toward the individual’s sufferings. Adamovich himself was the chief arbiter of the Paris Note, a Russian-Parisian literary movement that sought, in Karetnyk’s words, “to combine the despair of exile with the modern age of anxiety.” Certainly Ortiz’s suicide can be seen as indicative of both the despair of exile and the age of anxiety pressing on these displaced people. And I recall that shortly before Adamovich died, Yanovsky invited him to his home in New York to meet W. H. Auden, the man who coined the very phrase “Age of Anxiety.” It was a great satisfaction to Yanovsky to bring together the two intellectuals he admired most, one from his youthful years of exile in Paris, the other from his mature exile in the United States. Within one year of that meeting, both Adamovich and Auden were dead.

One of those who gambled over the bridge table with Yanovsky and Adamovich in Paris was Vladislav Khodasevich, whose story “Atlantis” depicts a circle of obsessed Russians immersed in games of bridge in a basement below the cafe Murat. (Interestingly, the lost land of Atlantis is also the setting for Yanovsky’s unpublished short story “The Adventures of Oscar Quinn.”) And in Dovid Knut’s “The Lady from Monte Carlo,” we again encounter an obsessed gambler, who can see the truth in others, if not himself: “these indifferent people [are] eternally — tragically — lost and disassociated from one another.” He is tempted by an older woman with a secret for winning (borrowed from Pushkin’s tale a century earlier), but in this version we have a seemingly happy ending: the ancient temptress resists her own urge to pass along her secret and insists that he leave her. Still, indifference reigns: “She kissed my forehead. The evening was cold, majestic, and indifferent.”

Chaos

Entropy is, of course, our common foe — the one to whom, in the end, we must succumb. But for the exile, the onslaught of chaos can come early and in a heightened, phantasmagoric form. Here are snippets of chaos from Shmelyov’s “Shadows of Days”:

Night. Snow. I’m in the alleyways. […] Dead houses, closed gates. I’m lost, I don’t know where mine is. […] Dark, blind buildings. They’ve all gone. Now there’s just one road — […] I run in trepidation. The Champs-Élysées, my final road. […] The Elysian Fields! […] The end!

And “It’s them, they’ve come for me … I know it. […] The trees and the wind are whispering. Footsteps below the windows. I listen — a scratching at the window sill, they’re climbing up. […] I scream, I scream.”

In the anthology’s final text, Yanovsky’s “They Called Her Russia,” we encounter a vortex of entropy in a circular vision of hell: a trainful of soldiers going round and round through jumbled fields, never engaging “the enemy,” slowly spiraling through the repetitive brutality and madness of the Russian Civil War toward utter dissolution. In fact, it is never clear who the enemy is. Their own “engine-driver offered to find a way through to the Reds; the stoker tried to persuade them to join the partisans.” Eventually, “[t]hey decide to break through up ahead: if not Whites, then Reds — whomever they meet.” In this nightmare — where the commandant’s refrain is “Dream or real?” — the enemy they engage is themselves.

Two Horses

It seems appropriate to conclude with the most painful, touching image I found in this anthology, an image that occurred twice: a horse without a rider, striking out into the sea — one in Gallipoli, the other in the Crimea. Both horses are valiant, yet have nowhere to go, no function to fulfill; nothing awaits them but death in an alien sea. They are abandoned by history. The narrator of Ivan Lukash’s “A Scattering of Stars,” a poetic evocation of the retreat to Gallipoli, tells of his beloved horse and its shameful end:

I spot my Leda […] craning her neck towards the water, whinnying, nostrils flaring. […] I see her suddenly, with all four legs, leap into the water. She couldn’t bear the thirst. She went crashing down, placed her lips to the sea salt and began jerking her head about. She jerked her head, Leda did, but she was soon swept away by the current.

And in Galina Kuznetsova’s “Kunak,” the denouement is even more poignant: “Above the grey misty water, a horse’s head could be seen craning. It was swimming apparently without knowing where it was going, borne by the current out towards the middle of the bay.” A rowboat comes to the rescue, but in fact only offers the hopeful horse three sudden bullets in the head, and then “the current was freely, and with terrible speed, bearing it away. It disappeared again, then reappeared … until finally it vanished for ever in the quick-flowing water.” The onlookers “all gasped in horror and compassion.”

And there we stand, observers of an entire culture carried out to sea, but with nowhere to go. There is much grimness, much pain, much despair in this collection, but it is also struck through with deep emotion and a pulsing sense of life. We contemplate the struggle of the exiles with horror and compassion, for we know that, at some level, we all share their plight.

Alexis Levitin, a professor of English at the State University of New York at Plattsburgh, translates works from Portugal, Brazil, and Ecuador. His 40 books of translation include Clarice Lispector’s Soulstorm and Eugénio de Andrade’s Forbidden Words, both from New Directions Publishing.

The post “Où sont les neiges d’antan?”: On “Russian Émigré Short Stories from Bunin to Yanovsky” appeared first on Los Angeles Review of Books.

from Los Angeles Review of Books http://ift.tt/2C2EoLW

#Los Angeles Review of Books #topmixtrends

0 notes

Last Seen Blogs