#i hope you like this i tried making a proper graphic set but i failed miserably | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

silversatoru · 3 years

Note

Hi, I just finished burdens and OML 🥺🥺🥺

May I request some sort of megumi x reader continuous where the reader ends up becoming a powerful sorcerer (or a cursed spirit👀 whichever you’d like tbh) megumi and the reader somehow cross paths again a little while after the break up and he witnesses her fighting for the first time? I just know that boy would fall in love all over again but she’s moved on and he feels guilty and just angst? And maybe fluff idk. I’m new to requests so I hope I did this right, thank you so much❤️❤️

burdens pt. 2

a/n: hello, part two of this not-so-lovely story is finally here. every single one of you is allowed one free punch to my face for taking so long to write it,,, i’m so sorry. this is its fourth rewrite and it got a little darker than expected but it’s finally done,, i hope you enjoy <3

fushiguro megumi x f!reader

synopsis: you finally see megumi again at the kyoto sister school goodwill event

tags/warnings: angst, some graphic depictions of violence, character death

word count: 3k

“Do you know how tired I am of watching the people I love die? Things would be so much easier for me if you just stayed the fuck away”.

Megumi’s bitter words were on repeat in your head — the harshness of his voice leaving a hollow feeling carved into your chest. Tear-stained cheeks and shaky breathes had become your new normal these past few days. Tight, sharp pains filled your empty stomach, waves of nausea coursing through your body.

You’ve had no motivation to get out of bed lately, nevermind to shower or cook yourself a proper meal — honestly, for all you cared you could rot away in your blanket filled bed. You checked your phone like a fiend too, thinking that eventually, a miraculous text from Megumi would appear and make everything better. It never did.

He’d completely ghosted you since that dreadful day, and that hurt more than anything. You’d held onto a sliver of hope that maybe, just maybe, he hadn't meant what he said. But as the days continued to pass, your hope quickly dwindled.

To say your current state was shameful was putting it lightly, and you were embarrassed at how poorly this was effecting you. You liked to think that you were strong, motivated, independent — that you didn't need some douchebag just to feel happy. But truth be told, breakups are fucking hard, and it's okay to not be okay for a while — or at least that's what you kept telling yourself.

So when you were trudging miserably down the street to your local convenience store and you saw a familiar pair of jujutsu sorcerers, you wanted desperately to sink into the ground. You made a quick turn to head to a different shop, but it was too late, you were spotted.

“y/n! hey!” Two lighthearted voices sang through the air, filling your ears and making your heart clench in your chest.

You turned around and anxiously approached them, your unkempt hair and baggy eyes sending looks of concern across their faces.

“Hey girl, you good?” Nobara shot you a sideways glance, Maki raising a suspicious eyebrow.

“Yeah, uh, ice cream,” You croaked, speaking for the first time in a couple days, “I’m here for ice cream, that’s all”.

“Yeah, but why do you look like a fucking zombie?” Maki pushed her eyeglasses further up her nose, her sharp eyes looking you up and down.

“Ah, he didn’t say anything to you guys, did he?” You shook your head, heavy eyes falling to ground as you refused to meet theirs.

“Don’t tell me…” Nobara’s face contorted, “Did he break up with you?”

You nodded, a pitiful chuckle falling from your lips, because if you didn’t laugh, you’d start sobbing right now.

Maki threw her arm around your shoulder, pulling you to her side and ushering you into the store, “It’s okay, men suck. Hang out with us today”.

Meanwhile, Nobara trailed quickly behind the two of you, anger seething from her teeth and steam practically billowing out of her ears.

“That fuckhead! I swear I’ll fuck his shit up big time, he won’t even know what fucking hit him. I knew that boy was stupid but shit, this is a whole new low for him! I-,” She continued to ramble and rant as Maki led you through the store, picking out drinks and snacks to help ease your pain.

The three of you ended up in a nearby park, sitting around a small picnic table and gorging on the massive array of snacks. Lighthearted conversation and lots of food make your chest ache a little less, and you even found yourself laughing and chatting as if things were normal. You’d told the two of them all about that day, about Megumi’s irrational words and his tragic breakdown that led to some kind of fucked-up break up sex.

“So, how are we gonna get back at him? Egg his car? Put bleach in his shampoo? Bugs in his food? God - it’s a shame his dad is dead because from the pictures I’ve seen that man was FINE and revenge sex—,”

“Nobara,” Maki shot her idiot girlfriend a dirty look, and the orange-haired girl quickly shut her mouth, “As much as I support any idea that revolves around ruining a man’s day, I don’t think revenge is the healthiest coping strategy here”.

You were tracing your eyes around Maki’s face as she spoke, and you found yourself carefully inspecting her purple glasses that rested softly on the bridge of her nose. And that’s when it clicked, the light bulb ignited in your head and you knew exactly what you wanted to do.

“Maki,” your voice was urgent, “You don’t have cursed energy, you can’t even see them without your glasses!”

Her face twisted and her nose scrunched, a look of distaste in her eyes, “I know?”

“So, you could teach me, right? You could help me learn how to use some cursed weapons?”

“Yeah! You have to Maki, then she can beat his ass with me,” Nobara chimed in.

“That’s not a bad idea actually,” Maki’s mouth formed an evil grin, “Could you imagine his face after watching you exorcise a curse?”

The three of your conversed for a bit longer, speculating and potting about training, weapons, and your very own pair of curse-seeing glasses. By the end of the night you had a plan, and a pretty good one if you say so yourself.

From that day on, teary eyes and achy hearts were a thing of the past, not because it was that easy to get over Megumi, but because Maki didn’t even allow you the time to feel dismal anymore. You met her everyday after classes without fail, and everyday she would train you until you thought your arms would fall off. After months and months of sore muscles, sweat, and the occasional injury, you were convinced that Maki was incapable of feeling pity or remorse for other living things. Every time you speculated about quitting, she’d set a fire under you, unafraid to remind you how weak you still were.

The green-haired sorcerer had ultimately decided that you worked best dual-armed -- a long, lightweight blade in each hand. On your final day of training, she officially gifted the two swords to you, as a “graduation” gift.

Skill-wise, you were by no means as incredible Maki, but you definitely held your own, and the progress you’d made in a mere 8 months was astronomical. They’d introduced you to a strange silver-haired man at some point, Gojo, who had taken not only an interest in you but also your plot against your ex-boyfriend. He cackled to himself when you told him why you were here, going on and on about how priceless Megumi’s face would be when he saw you.

Your appearance was highly anticipated, so why not debut at one of the biggest jujutsu events all year? The Kyoto Sister School Goodwill Event — Gojo thought it was the most perfect idea.

You tried hard to exude confidence as you walked at Nobara and Maki’s sides, but behind your arrogant facade your stomach was twisting itself into knots. Truthfully, you were scared to see Megumi again after so long.

And when your eyes met with his as you walked into the meeting room, you thought you just might pass out. You thought you were ready for this — but the look of complete shock, fear, and anger on his face as he looked you up and down almost made you regret all of it.

“What’s going on?” Megumi’s words were incredibly calculated, an edge on his voice.

His question was pointless, however, because judging by the fact that you were wearing a jujutsu tech uniform and had two swords sheathed at your sides could only mean one thing. Your hair was longer now too, and your frame was wider with an extra layer of muscle from all the training — you almost looked like a different person.

“I’ve been training with Maki, I-,” You spoke up to explain yourself, but you weren’t even granted the opportunity.

“No, no, Maki, what the hell did you do?” His eyes were shaky and laced with concern.

“I only did what she asked me to. I’m not the one who gave her a complex about being weak, you did that,” Maki shrugged, “and she’s not your girlfriend anymore dude, what do you care?”

Absolute confliction flashed through his eyes, uncertainty and madness swirling in his irises, “You’re right, I don’t care. Let me know when the event is starting”.

He took a sharp turn out of the room and let the door slam a little too hard behind him. The sound of his icey voice and the door shutting with unkind force was all too reminiscent of the night you broke up. Burying every emotion you had deep into your stomach you gave Maki a small, reassuring smile and plopped down on one of the couches.

“Alright, so when does this thing start?”

after the start of the event

Fighting the Kyoto students was proving to be much harder than you initially expected, but you were holding your own at Maki’s side. The two of you had easily taken down a small, kind, blue haired girl named Miwa, and now you were watching an emotional battle between Maki and her sister unfold.

Wait here, she’d told you, I want to do this one myself. Take some notes on my form and watch our backs, okay?

Okay, you’d said, a little confused but ultimately finding a nice spot up in a thick tree to carefully observe from. Maki was truly a force of nature, and it seemed like the other girl never actually had a chance of winning. It was honestly only a few minutes before the small black, haired girl was slumped against a tree and Maki was making her way back to you. Things were looking good, two of Kyoto’s student’s were down already and adrenaline was pumping through your veins.

You couldn't quite shake the awful feeling churning in your stomach though, and Megumi’s face was haunting your thoughts. You hadn’t seen him since before the event started, when an odd, pink haired boy jumped out of a box and freaked everyone out. Nobara had later explained who he was and what had happened, and you wondered how many awful surprises Gojo had planned today -- first you, then that.

A small rumble rippled under your feet, and Maki grabbed your arm as you watched a giant brown vine lurch it’s way out of the ground a few hundred yards in the distance.

“That technique doesn’t belong to anyone from Kyoto,” She shot you a look of concern and determination, “let’s go check it out”.

You gave her a firm nod, the two of you making your way towards the horrifying wooden vines. By the time you managed to arrive, Inumaki was already down and so was a dark-haired boy from Kyoto. A muscular, white curse with black markings and wooden branches for eyes was moments away from taking Megumi on all by himself — thank god you got here in time to help.

Megumi, however, was horrified when he saw you jump over the tall roofed building with Maki at your side. He’d just watched two incredible sorcerers get their shit rocked by this curse, there was no way you would stand a chance against this thing. But before he could even try to stop you, you and the green-haired sorcerer were flying through the air and taking shots at the curse. The two of you worked perfectly in sync, the months of daily training finally paying off.

He watched with intent glazed over his eyes, his heart threatening to lurch up his throat. You were a spectacle, and he always thought you were beautiful but seeing you now with dirt and blood stained clothes, cursed weapons gripped firmly in your hands, you truly were ethereal. He hated it though, he hated that he was falling in love with you all over again, especially under these circumstances. Guilt and anxiety was eating away at him — why did you have to get involved? Why couldn’t you have just stayed away like he told you to?

He was quick to join the two of you, sticking close to your side to protect you if need be — but, even with all three of you together the curse still had the upper hand. Maki had been swatted to the side, her back slamming hard against one of the tiled roofs and knocking her unconscious. It was down to just the two of you now, beads of sweat causing your hair to uncomfortably stick to the back of your neck. This was something that Maki’s training could have never prepared you for.

Megumi was getting tired, taking one wrong step and losing his footing momentarily. The curse saw this as a perfect window of opportunity, sending a spiral of vines and branches hurling for Megumi. It was fast, but the adrenaline coursing through you helped you to move faster, launching yourself through the air and intercepting the attack. The barky, wooden vines twisted violently through your stomach, shooting clean through your back and ripping a violent scream from your throat.

It hurt so bad, feeling the plant wriggle through your organs and tear you apart from the inside out. The curse retracted his vine a few moments later, leaving your mangled body to fall helplessly to the roof. Tears rippled from your eyes, your body shaking and seizing as you coughed up a few sprays of blood.

A long, strong pair of arms scooped you up instantaneously, and your head was resting against a firm chest — probably Megumi, but you didn’t quite have the energy to open your eyes to check.

“We’ll take it from here, get her to Ieiri!” You heard a pair of deep voices yelling to Megumi, but it was too foggy and far away for you to understand what they were saying.

Megumi was seething with anger, moving as fast as his feet could carry him and he ran through the school. As you waved in and out of consciousness, you batted open your eyes, stealing quick glances at his twisted features and — were those tears on his face?

“I- I’m sorry Megumi… I think I finally understand what you were so afraid of all this time,” Your voice was barely a croak, “when I saw it coming, I couldn’t stomach the thought of having to watch you die. I suddenly just thought I would do anything to keep you safe”.

Yeah, those were definitely tears, you could see them a little clearer now. His eyes were red and his cheeks were dried with salty streaks.

“You’re so thick-headed,” he mumbled, his grip around you tightening slightly as he picked up his pace, “I wish you would have made that realization before there was a giant hole in your stomach”.

“Me too,” You hummed, but you weren’t really in any pain anymore. The pain had subdued to a sweet warm sensation inside your stomach, and an intoxicating sleepiness was washing over your head, “I was angry for a long time, but I’m not mad at you anymore, Gumi. I hope you can forgive me too”.

You offered him a tiny smile, but the blood leaking from between you keeps made it anything but sweet.

“There’s nothing to forgive you for, you never did anything wrong,” He spoke quickly, his voice quiet and cracking.

“No, but we’re not gonna make it to Ieiri, I know that and so do you,” You fell into a violent fit of coughs again, sputtering red splatters all over the front of his uniform.

“Shut up”.

“It’s not your fault, none of it was ever your fault,” you choked out once the fit of coughs subsided — and you weren’t just talking about yourself, you were talking about all of the unfortunate tragedies he’d witnessed throughout this life.

“And you’re allowed to be selfish sometimes, you know? I hope that when you meet someone, your soulmate even, you can allow yourself to love them with every part of you”.

The words painfully left your lips, but you meant every single one of them. You were starting to realize that you and Megumi were never meant to make it to the end. You weren’t his soulmate, you were here to help him grow, so that when he did finally meet them he’d be ready.

“You deserve to be loved, Megumi,” You looked up at him with big eyes, but his face was starting to get really fuzzy now.

Your fingers were going numb and your mouth felt like it was filled with sand. You were so tired, letting your eyes flutter shut and your head rest softly against Megumi’s chest. You felt him stop running, you could even hear him screaming at you — but it was too far away for you to hear. You drifted closer and closer to eternal sleep, your soul swollen with love for the boy who broke your heart.

Megumi didn’t even feel sad when you stopped breathing in his arms — he just felt hollow. More empty and broken than he’d ever thought possible. You were the most incredible person he’d ever met — someone with extreme motivation, who acted with no fear or hesitation, who always had love to give, even when he didn’t deserve it. He’d never forget you, not for as long as he’d live anyway.

Even when he did meet a new girl a few years later — a compassionate, brave girl, who reminded him a lot of you — he wouldn’t forget. He wouldn’t forget your words and for the first time in his life he’d let his walls down for her. He’d allow himself to truly love, and be loved in return.

And maybe you were right, maybe he did deserve to be loved like this, because god, he finally feels whole again when she’s around. He just wishes you were still here so he could say thank you.

#megumi angst #megumi fushiguro #fushiguro megumi #fushiguro megumi x reader #megumi fushiguro x reader #megumi x reader #angst #fushiguro megumi x you #fushiguro x reader #megumi x you #megumi fushiguro angst #jujutsu kaisen x reader #jujutsukaisen #jjk x y/n #jjk angst #jjk x reader #jjk oneshot #this is sad i’m sorry

608 notes · View notes

norabrice1701 · 3 years

Text

Dance Card - Ch. 1

A Historical!Zemo x Fem!Reader Fic

Summary: In which the glitterati of 1840 Sokovian society knows that you'll end the season as the new Lady Hugh Drysdale but a single dance with H. Zemo upends your world.

(extended summary here!)

Link to Series Master List

Chapter Warnings: Language, non-graphic violence against women, mid-1800s period typical attitudes, social anxiety, hints of dark/creepy vibe Zemo, lush period romance tropes

A/N: So excited to bring this contribution to the Brühlette fandom (but also, this fandom's so active & passionate & talented, it's giving me mild anxiety haha). Historical setting in the transition between Regency & Victorian eras, and inspired by the creative tones of "The Great" and "Bridgerton" with hints of CACW AU. Also, a lot of Zemo's barony estate was directly inspired by the Biltmore Estate. If anyone is interested in a tag list, please let me know & I'll be willing to start one! Cheers and hope you enjoy, NoraB

Chapter 1: The Ball

The season had progressed well, much to your father’s surprise. While he had every expectation that you would find a worthy suitor, he never dreamt that you’d find favor with the visiting Lord Hugh Drysdale, grandson to the Marquess Harlan Thrombey. You didn’t know what arrangement – if any – that your father had made with the young lord, but each formal ball found your dance card partners fewer and fewer until only one name dominated.

It should be scandalous. It just wasn’t proper for one young man to occupy so much of your attention and time without a formal declaration of intent, or a formal engagement. But Lord Drysdale cared little for the gossip of old hens (in his words, not yours).

You knew better than to let your tongue run away with you. Your father saw to it that you were taught better in the absence of your mother. That was why he structured your upbringing in the strictest tradition, the strictest propriety with only the best governesses – no one was going to accuse you of not comporting yourself as a proper lady of society despite being raised by a widower.

Your friend approached you in the grand foyer, looping her arm around yours with a warm smile. “You look lovely, as always. That color brings out your eyes – Lord Drysdale is sure to notice!”

A blush tinged your cheeks as your lips pulled to a small smile. “That would indeed be a nice compliment.”

“I still don’t see why he hasn’t declared his intentions. Everyone knows he occupies your dance card, and you make such a handsome couple – I can see why no one else would dare approach you. How could they possibly hope to compare?”

True enough, Lord Drysdale cut a devastating figure in well-tailored suits with his perfectly coiffed sandy hair, sharp jawline and sea-blue eyes. He oozed the charismatic charm of the indulgently wealthy, but he tempered it with a brazen acerbic edge that you didn’t always know how to respond to. His startlingly blunt, oftentimes rude comments never failed to take you by surprise. It only made you wonder how he acted in private.

You looked at your friend with a polite, well-practiced smile. “While Lord Drysdale is indeed most pleasing company, I’m sure there are plenty of other men who could match his equal.”

If not surpass it, possibly. It wasn’t that you didn’t like Lord Drysdale, but you honestly weren’t sure you cared for the idea of marriage to him. But you also knew that you wouldn’t be given a choice.

You tried to force away the unpleasant thoughts, instead focusing on the ebb and flow of the formal crowd around you, the gentle strains of music echoing off the marble walls, and the cooling heat of the midsummer night. Taking a firmer hold on your friend’s hand, you moved into the ballroom. “But enough about Lord Drysdale. I want to hear more about your promising Viscount – did he indeed come to call?”

Your friend’s face brightened with a twittering laugh as she enthusiastically shared the update. It made you smile to see her so happy. It certainly sounded like young love, however, you only had a carefully curated selection of novels to reference for romance. But that didn’t stop your governess from explaining how emotional love in marriage turned to physical love between a man and woman. The explanations – however awkward, and oh how your face had burned with embarrassed modesty at the prospect of letting a man touch you there – had helped ease your fear and confusion during your body’s physical transition from girl to young woman. And though you didn’t fully understand it, you could now begin to recognize the stirrings of physical attraction. You could certainly feel your heart jump each time Lord Drysdale pressed his soft lips to your knuckles, his eyes burning through yours, his scent warming your blood.

But none of that explained why the man across the room suddenly caught your attention. Your gazes connected in passing, but you couldn’t stop glancing back at him. He didn’t stand remarkably tall among the men he conversed with, dressed in a well-cut, dark formal suit. His face bore neatly trimmed facial hair, his chestnut hair elegantly styled above dark chocolate eyes in the ballroom glow. He didn’t hold himself with the obnoxious bearing of arrogant wealth, but surely he had to be somebody in high societal standing in order to be in attendance at tonight’s ball.

But that only begged the question - why hadn’t you seen him before?

Your friend gently shook your arm with a soft laugh. “Goodness, I didn’t realize I bored you so much!"

“No, not at all.” You tore your gaze away, feeling your cheeks flush. “I just noticed a new face across the room – seems unusual for so late in the season.”

Your friend started to crane her neck, looking around. “Oh, I love new faces! Where is she? What color gown is she wearing?”

“It’s not a woman, but rather a man.” You turned your gaze back to the small group, blinking in surprise. The man had disappeared. Turning your head, you also searched the sea of faces, trying to find him.

“Well, where is he?” Your friend asked again, her excitement palpable.

“I don’t know…but I just saw him. He was there one minute, and the next…” It baffled you. Surely, he hadn’t just left, but how could someone move so invisibly through this crowd?

“If you see him again, please do let me know. Aleksandra has yet to find a suitable match, so perhaps we can make introductions. Perhaps I could even add him to my dance card! I still have a couple of openings.”

You absently agreed, not bothering to mention your own dance card. It would sit blank for the entire evening, yet you would dance almost every dance with the same man. Lord Drysdale wouldn’t have it any other way, and everyone had come to learn that as the season progressed. It didn’t matter that he visited his grandfather from out of the country, that he planned to leave at the season’s end. You weren’t naïve to the whispers around you.

Everyone expected you to leave Sokovia as the new Lady Hugh Drysdale.

Your friend spotted her beau through the crowd, her face lighting up as did the charming Viscount’s. She slipped from your arm with an excited smile and a promise to find you later in the evening. You easily agreed, tipping your head in farewell as the Viscount whisked her away towards the dance floor. Instinctively, you started to search the crowd for Lord Drysdale.

It simply wouldn’t do to miss the first dance.

Sharp chocolate eyes cut to yours through the flow of people, pinning you in place. The unknown gentleman closed the now short distance between you and you couldn’t look away from him. You couldn’t say why, but something about the intensity of his presence struck you.

He tipped his head in greeting, his mouth lifting at the corner as he spoke. “Good evening. Please forgive my forwardness, but I couldn’t help noticing you across the room.” The acknowledgement that he noticed you staring at him across the room went unspoken, but amusement was evident in his eyes.

A blush stained your cheeks as you bit back an embarrassed smile. “Then, please forgive my forwardness in return. I’ve heard it is uncommon to see new faces this late in the season.”

“A telling observation.” Something sparked in his gaze, despite his neutrally pleasant expression. “I regret to say that I have been abroad for far too long, but as the saying goes, it is good to be home again.”

“Then, welcome home, sir.”

He waved you off gently. “That is not necessary, please.”

You stared back at him in surprise. You expected him to make the formal introduction – in fact, in full decorum, you shouldn’t even speak to him without one - but he looked completely unbothered by subverting such societal norms. His calm, however, did nothing to ease your growing anxiety. Slowly, you wet your lips. “I hope you’ll forgive me, but I do not know how to address you.”

The sly amusement that suffused his face didn’t help. His gaze drifted down and you drew an involuntary deep breath, feeling your breasts push against the constricting, low-cut fabric of your evening gown. He sought your right hand, extending his own in open invitation as he spoke. “May I have the honor of an opening on your dance card?”

You stopped breathing altogether. No one but Lord Drysdale had asked for your hand in months, and he knew he didn’t need to fill out your dance card. If you accepted this current offer, this stranger would see your dance card was blank, and how could you possibly refuse him? But how could you possibly explain the situation otherwise?

The man’s watchful eyes swept your face, his face pinching in concern. “Are you well, miss? You look positively stricken.”

You looked up, feeling your cheeks burn brighter. “Yes, yes…I’m alright. I just...I don’t know how to answer your question.”

He took a slow step forward, his face filling out with the most disarming, boyish smile. It did such wonders for his eyes. “It was not my intention to cause you such distress. Please forgive my misstep, and allow me to make amends.”

You resolutely did not jump when his fingers brushed the edge of your wrist, searching out the decorative ribbon that held your dance card. Panic burst in your chest as he drew it and your slack arm towards him, opening the slim booklet. You dreaded his response – the look of dismissal, of regret, of wondering what was so wrong with you that you had an empty card.

But none of that came.

He simply reached for the affixed pencil and wrote across the small page while you waited on baited breath. He folded your booklet closed, lowering it to hang from your wrist once again. Fixing his gaze to yours, he gave a short bow from the waist, inclining his head. “I look forward to the honor. Until our dance, miss – please take care.”

You couldn’t summon words fast enough as he turned on his heel and melted back into the crowd. Stunned and flabbergasted, you fumbled for your dance card, staring at the neat, sharp letters. Of course, you had assumed he would take the first dance – what a scene that would make. But as you stared at the name etched next to the ninth waltz, you couldn’t begin to understand the man.

H. Zemo

Surely, that wasn’t his real name. Was it? Your dance card may be empty these days, but you still remembered how each gentleman tried to outdo the other with the most impressive display of titles and letters. In fact, you remembered how Lrd. H. R. Drysdale, Esq. barely fit on a single line.

“There you are. My belle of the ball, as always.”

You snapped the booklet closed, glancing up with wide eyes as the broad, imposing figure of Lord Drysdale approached. His face pinched with vague irritation and confusion as he spoke. “Did I startle you? I swear you scare easier than a rabbit, my dove.”

You summoned a polite smile. “Pardon me, please. I was…looking for you and lost my train of thought.”

“About me?” He arched his brow as if to ask how you could possibly forget someone like him, but then he broke into a wide smile, holding out his arm. “Sounds like I’ll have to do better – something special to make sure you never forget me. Come along, sweet.”

In Lord Drysdale’s arms, the opening waltz blended into the second and third. As he turned you about the floor in time to the lilting tunes, you couldn’t help your gaze that wandered over the crowd. You hated that you were actually looking for him, but you couldn’t stop. You wanted to know more about him.

Zemo.

No title. No formal introduction.

Just H. Zemo.

Since no one competed with Lord Drysdale for your hand, he didn’t always pause for the customary refreshment after each dance. But you didn’t mind and you weren’t in danger of fainting from the summer heat despite the constriction of your corset. Lord Drysdale was sure-footed and surprisingly graceful for a man of his height, even if he did look perpetually bored.

His voice drafted over your shoulder as he dutifully looked ahead. “Don’t you ever tire of this?”

“Tire of what, my lord?” You didn’t meet his gaze, continuing to look over his shoulder. It simply wasn’t done – he needed to stay alert for other dancers, and it wasn’t polite to stare at him.

“This…show, this farce. Wouldn’t you just rather take quiet nights behind closed doors?”

You did your best to ignore any salacious implications despite the heat that rushed to your cheeks. “Not at all. My days are for reading and needlepoint, and I always find music and good cheer to be a welcome finish to pleasant days.”

The eye-roll sounded in his tone. “God, you sound like my mother. And that’s all well and fine, but every other goddamn night? You shouldn’t have to suffer anymore.”

Your stomach clenched. This wasn’t possibly going to be the night he formally proposed, was it? You did your best to summon an innocent response. “I appreciate your concern, my lord, but I don’t consider myself having suffered.”

“No?” He scoffed, indignant. “You’re a woman – shouldn’t you be desperate for a husband, at least one child, and a manor to run? Parties and balls of your own to organize, etcetera?”

Yes, those were things that you should want. It was what you were expected to want. But all in good time. You didn’t know if you were exactly ready to be a wife – or was it just his wife? And you certainly weren’t sure if you were ready to be a mother. How could you? You never knew your own mother, so how would you know what to do as a mother?

Despite your uncertainty, you kept your head held high and the polite smile on your face. Just as your governess had instructed. You spoke softly so only he could hear. “All in good time. There is ‘a time to every purpose under the heaven’, and mine simply has not come yet.”

“Oh, you are darling – we should have these conversations more often.” His hold tightened on you ever so discreetly and you heard his soft chortle. “You are indeed as lovely and innocent as they say.”

His words didn’t strike you as complimentary, and you couldn’t help the tiny shiver that raced down your spine as the music drew to the final notes. Was that the eighth waltz? Your stomach lurched on the horrifying realization. You instantly started glancing around with wide eyes, hoping beyond hope that Zemo wouldn’t make a scene. That Lord Drysdale wouldn’t take offense.

But as other couples moved from the dance floor, Lord Drysdale took your arm and led you aside. He pressed his lips to your knuckles, his icy eyes burning through yours. “Please excuse me, my dove. I think it is time I had a conversation with your father.”

Your heart leapt in your chest at the implication, unable to stop the involuntary lift of your lips. This moment should be exciting – the one you’d dreamt of since childhood. Yet it didn’t dislodge the sense of dread that knotted in your gut. You nodded, unable to do anything but watch him turn and strut through the crowd.

Goodness, were you really going to leave the ball tonight as Lord Drysdale’s betrothed?

You tried to shake from the thought, to resign yourself to it - anything to break your stunned stupor. But only when you noticed Zemo weaving through the crowd did you blink back to yourself, strangely feeling your body relax in his presence.

He offered a polite smile and another tilt of his head in greeting. “I do hope Lord Drysdale has not overexerted you this evening. Had I known he intended to monopolize your company, I would have requested an earlier dance if only to spare you a moment’s rest.”

“Your concern is appreciated, but I still feel quite refreshed.”

Approval shone in his gaze as he held out his arm. “Then, please allow me the honor.”

Your heart hammered as you stepped forward. Of course, you were aware of the implication, the statement this would make while Lord Drysdale sought your father in the billiard room. But surely an open refusal of Zemo now would create a bigger scene. Everything would be more easily explainable once an arrangement with Lord Drysdale was finalized with your father, and that thought raced another shiver down your spine. Or was that from your hand resting against Zemo’s forearm? Your skin touched dark, fine fabric, but you could easily feel the heat and deceptive strength of him beneath.

Your mind spun as you all but melted into his arms, standing the appropriate distance apart and feeling his hand burn against your shoulder blade. He moved with a practiced grace, a tell of his upbringing, and it was easy to fall into step with him. You knew you attracted weighted stares as you turned about the floor in Zemo’s embrace, but it was hard to care. He wore a cologne that clouded your senses, drew you towards him to observe the slope of his neck and the mole that rested just beneath his right ear. Tingling heat raced along your skin, settling deep in your belly as your feet seemed to float on air.

Warm breath drifted against your cheek and with startling clarity, you realized that he had turned to face you. Up close, his molten eyes revealed drops of amber and you wanted to search out each one. But as he gently cleared his throat, the spell broke and everything rushed back.

You were no longer dancing - in fact, he had led you towards the edge of the dancefloor, and now you just stood in his embrace. And before that, goodness - you had been staring at him, and him at you….

You shook your head, trying to understand. Maybe you weren’t as refreshed as you thought. Your hand slipped from his shoulder to touch your temple, drawing a deep breath.

He didn’t miss any of your reaction, opening his body position to the nearby balcony doors. “Perhaps some fresh air? You look near-faint.”

You nodded quickly. “Yes, thank you. I think that should help.” Anything to help clear your head, to erase the intoxication of his close presence.

The cool night breeze hit your cheeks with palpable relief. You didn’t realize just how lightheaded you’d become. He kept a steadying hand on your arm as you stepped out into the pale moonlight, and you couldn’t help but be grateful.

“Here,” his voice drew your gaze towards his other hand which now held a crystal flute of champagne, “this might also help.”

With a small nod, you accepted, letting the chilled liquid wash over your tongue. Only as you swallowed did the thought occur to you. Where did the champagne flute come from? There were no servers out here. Had he…? No. No, it wasn’t possible that he had planned ahead to place the flutes on the balcony, ready and waiting.

Was it?

You watched him drink from his own flute, muscles of his throat working above his crisp collar in the distant light.

Who was this man?

“Who are you?”

He turned towards you, his face betraying nothing. “You read my name on your dance card.”

“H. Zemo,” you repeated, shaking your head, “with no title? No...anything?”

The corner of his mouth lifted with a cynical edge. “None that would impress you.”

You ran your fingers along the flute’s stem to curb your building anxiety. “But you are somebody…?”

“Everybody is somebody.” He said, lifting the flute to his lips for another sip.

“Then why not say so plainly?”

He cut you with a sharp look and an enigmatic curl of his lips. He took a step closer and your breath caught on another wave of his cologne. You tilted your head back to hold his gaze, your heart fluttering as the fingers of his steadying hand traced gently against your forearm. His voice dropped to a soft, dark whisper. “He has it wrong, you know.”

You shivered, goose pimples racing along your arm under his touch as it moved up to the sleeve of your dress. You gasped as his fingers danced across the fine fabric until they met the neckline, skimming the line of your collarbone ever so tenderly. Heat boiled in your belly at the touch, your breath coming in short, quick bursts.

He tilted his head, observing you closely. “You’re not a dove at all.”

You sighed as his hand cupped the slope of your neck, rising to cradle the gathered hair on your nape. His thumb just skimmed your jawline beneath your ear, and your toes curled. Everything about this moment was so wrong, but nothing had ever felt so right. Your head tilted instinctively into his touch as he held you there, eyes dark with wicked intent.

“In my eyes,” he spoke softly, “you’re a raven.”

You exhaled a trembling breath. “Wh-what does that mean?”

He smiled ruefully, swiping his thumb one last time before his hand fell away. The cool night air burned against the scorching heat his touch left behind as you reeled, bereft in the wake of his retreat.

He tipped his flute, drinking the rest of the champagne. With a lick of his lips, he set the empty flute on the table where it originally rested before he turned back to you. “Thank you for the honor of your company this evening. It has been a rare privilege.”

Your face pinched in bewildered confusion. “Wait...I don’t understand, please. You - you don’t even know my name.”

He recited your name perfectly, and your eyes grew wider. How did he know you when you'd never heard his name before?

He reached for your free hand, and with a half-bow worthy of any proper gentleman - despite the impropriety of the entire situation - he pressed your knuckles to his lips. “Until our next meeting, be careful, my raven. And if he hasn’t told you - the shade of your gown makes the colors in your eyes even more stunning.”

You sputtered for words as he lowered your hand to your side. “No, wait - you can’t...please come back!” But he continued to walk away as if he hadn’t heard you, ignoring your pleas and disappearing down the balcony, blending with the passing shadows before opening a door further down the balcony to re-enter the ballroom.

Your hand clenched around the champagne flute in frustration. What impertinence. What utter disrespect. No one had ever so blatantly ignored you or dismissed you so completely. What had you done to deserve such confusing, dismissive treatment? And why couldn’t you shake the lingering scent of his cologne?

With a frustrated breath, you stepped forward to set your mostly full champagne flute back on the table next to his. It sat, pristine and empty - the only physical testament to his presence. The man might as well have been a ghost otherwise. Unconsciously, you licked your lips as you stared down at it, your hand rising absently to trace around the rim, feeling the drops of liquid where his lips had touched.

A loud bang sounded and you jumped, turning towards the spill of bright light from the flung open balcony door. Lord Drysdale stood hulking in the doorway with a thunderous expression. “What are you doing out here?”

You took a deep breath to try and calm your racing heart, jerking your hand back from the flute. “I was just taking the air.”

“Don’t lie to me.” He said, advancing as he shook his head sharply. “Everyone in there saw you. Hell, even I can see that you weren’t alone out here.” He snatched your wrist in his hand, pulling you close, giving you nowhere to run, your eyes nowhere to hide. “So, I’ll ask you again - what the fuck were you doing out here?”

You recoiled on the crude curse, desperate to turn your head, whimpering as the pressure on your wrist increased until words spilled out of you. “It-it was just a dance! He signed my book - it was empty. We came out for air. There was champagne - that’s all! Please!”

His gaze snapped to the booklet that dangled from your wrist and he abruptly released his hold to grab at it. Tearing the cover open, you watched his eyes sweep over the neat writing with furious venom. His lip lifted in a snarl as he ripped the booklet in half, leaving the tattered remains dangling from the ribbon. His hand returned to your wrist, his other bracketing your shoulder, anger blazing in his eyes. “You do not ever fucking let that man touch you again. You’re mine, you understand? Mine.”

Your breath came in rushed gasps, a tear staining your cheek as you winced in pain.

His grip tightened, tugging you even closer. “And nobody touches what’s mine.”

“It-it wasn’t…,” your voice shook, “it wasn’t like that.”

“Bullshit it wasn’t. Now, here’s what you’re going to do.” His tone brokered no argument. “You’re going to find your father, and you’re going to leave. I do not want to see you again for the rest of the night. When you’ve had a few days to think everything over, I’m going to call on you, you’re going to apologize, and there will be new rules going forward. Do you understand me?”

You reeled at the implication of his words, shaking your head slowly. “It’s too early to leave, I can’t just-!” Your words cut off on a cry as he squeezed your wrist harder, twisting for emphasis.

“I said,” he repeated with deadly calm, “do you understand me?”

You froze with icy terror, forcing a hard swallow before your voice worked. “Yes...yes.”

He didn’t look convinced, but after a long minute, he released you and stepped back. Smoothing the lapels of his jacket and aligning his cuffs, he paid you no mind as he turned back for the ballroom.

Your legs felt on the verge of collapse as you watched him retreat, unable to shake the feeling that you had just escaped a near death experience. Shock numbed you and your eyes swam with tears, a couple of which rolled down your cheeks. Quickly, you sniffled them back, trying to hide your obvious distress as you wiped at your cheeks.

You couldn’t let everyone in the ballroom see you like this.

But what would your father say? What had he and Lord Drysdale previously conversed about? Did he expect you to return fully betrothed?

You drew another shaking breath, numb and stricken as your feet carried you forward with stiff movements. The minutes blurred together as you found the footman outside the billiard room and requested your father’s presence, as you begged off the rest of the ball due to a headache, as you settled into the carriage across from your father draped in your evening shawl.

You had watched his face pinch in obvious concern and confusion when he greeted you outside the billiard room, and none of it had abated. His gaze was a heavy, steady force across the carriage, darkening with each passing minute as you said nothing.

He sighed heavily. “Are you going to make me ask what’s wrong? Did you do something foolish?”

You looked to your hands in your lap, trying to cover the sad remains of your dance card. “Not on purpose.” Again, you felt tears well in the corners of your eyes.

Your father hummed, clearly unimpressed and losing his patience. “And just what does that mean?”

“I don’t know.” You could still hear Lord Drysdale’s words echoing in your mind, and you honestly didn’t know what to make of them. Did he really expect you to apologize? What about him? Your wrist still ached from his rough handling.

“Did you refuse him?”

You looked up at your father, wide eyed. “Refuse him?”

“Yes, you stupid girl. He approached me, asked for your hand and I gave my permission. Next thing I know, you’re standing in the hallway an embarrassing, near-blubbering mess.” He sighed again, disgusted. “So I ask again, did you do something foolish?”

“He never asked me - I didn’t refuse him,” you shook your head, drawing a trembling breath, “another gentleman approached me for a dance, my card was empty...I-I couldn’t refuse him.”

Your father reached across the carriage, his hand striking your cheek with a stinging crack. You drew a pained gasp, your hand flying to cradle your aching cheek as tears spilled over.

“You stupid, stupid girl.” He snarled, reaching his wit's end. “You should know by now that Lord Drysdale is a very proud man, and you just did him the worst insult. We’ll be lucky if he doesn’t rescind his proposal of marriage before the night’s out.”

You shook your head, sniffling, fighting to keep your voice even. “That’s not what he said - he said he’d come to call, that I should apologize, but-”

“But nothing! You will apologize. You will grovel. You will vow to never cause him such an affront ever again.”

Your wrist throbbed harder with each word, matching the pulse of blood in your inflamed cheek as everything bubbled over. “I didn’t do anything wrong! He’s the one who assaulted me, grabbed my wrist -”

“Stop the coach!” Your father pounded his dress cane against the floor of the carriage as his voice carried, and the carriage rolled to a rough stop. He reached across you for the door, opening it to the dark night. “Get out. I said get out, daughter. You need a good walk home to clear your head. For you to think on your words and your priorities.”

You sat frozen, stunned by his words.

Again, he rapped his cane agaist the carriage floor. “Now!”

Startled into motion, you shakily climbed out of the carriage onto the dirt road. Your father’s voice continued to carry as he closed the door. “You know the way home. Follow the main road and you won’t get lost.”

You didn’t bother to acknowledge him before he called for the coachman to resume. With tears blurring your vision, you watched the carriage disappear down the road leaving only a faint trail of dust in the distant moonlight. It wasn’t an exceptionally bright night and the surrounding trees cast long, ominous, shadows.

You gathered the edges of your shawl tighter around you, feeling more vulnerable than you could ever remember. You wanted nothing more than to burrow beneath your bed covers and never come out again. To avoid your father for weeks. To never see Lord Drysdale again. To fall into the arms of the man with chestnut hair and chocolate eyes.

The last thought startled you. Where had that come from?

Sniffling back tears, you started down the road still clutching your shawl tight. Your heeled shoes certainly weren't made for long walks, let alone on rough, rutted roads, and it didn’t take long before your feet started to ache. But it did give you time to think.

Could you demand an apology from both your father and Lord Drysdale? It would be wonderful if they both came to that realization on their own, but you doubted it. Your father stood the better chance of remorse, though. He’d never been deliberately cruel to you before, and even something as important as your marriage prospects shouldn’t change that. Perhaps he’d even turn the carriage around and come for you.

But as you continued down the road with only the gentle rustle of tree leaves and weak moonlight for company, your hope faded.

You sniffed again, tripping on a rut that was deeper than the shadows suggested. Hissing as you regained your balance, you tried to ignore the blistering ache on your heels. All at once, you heard rushing footsteps through the tall grass as shadowy figures emerged from the trees. With a sharp gasp, you tried to move away, but you were surrounded by four men before you could think.

“Pretty lady out on a night like tonight.” One of them leered.

Another one agreed with a hum. “Too pretty to be out so late.”

You shook your head, heart racing as fear crept along your spine. “Please - please, I’m just trying to get home.”

“Home?” A voice drifted over your shoulder, and you turned with wide eyes, watching the men behind you advance. “Oh, we’ll be your perfect escorts, pretty lady.”

Your shoulders hunched defensively, nowhere to run as the men started to close in around you. “No, no – please! Stop!” Blinded by fear, you took both ends of your shawl in hand, swinging it towards them as if to beat them off. Rough hands found the silk of your gown, restraining your arms as your shawl fell forgotten to the road. You cried out, desperate for them to stop – for any kind of help – as you struggled against their hold.

“Now, now, missy.” One of them said, clamping a meaty hand over your mouth, muffling your cries. “Don’t make this harder than it needs to be.”

You continued to thrash as they manhandled you off the road into the grass and the shadows of the trees.

“You’re obviously worth some money,” another said, a hand grabbing for your neck, “and we’re gonna get it.”

You cried out as your necklace jerked roughly against your skin and the aged clasp broke. Laughter rang around you as more hands pawed for the ring on your right hand. Acting without thinking, you parted your lips, biting the man’s hand still covering your mouth. He howled in pain, recoiling as his hand fell away.

His face twisted in fury as he glared at you, still held by the other men. “You spoiled bitch!” He lunged towards you, wrapping his thick hand around your throat. You gasped for breath, frantic to scream but only a choked noise escaped. Again, you tried for a breath only to gasp at nothing. Hands still grabbed and ripped at you – your legs, your feet, your hands – but you couldn’t be sure where exactly. Black spots ate at your vision and the world turned fuzzy. Their voices went distant in your ears as your protests faded.

Air suddenly returned to your lungs, burning in your throat. Your body fell roughly to the ground as you heaved aching breaths. Tears streamed from your eyes as you trembled in the frightening, eerie stillness. Overcome with fear, stress and exhaustion, your head dropped to the grass as darkness closed in.

Link to Ch. 2

#zemo #zemo x reader #zemo x you #helmut zemo fanfiction #helmut zemo x reader #helmut zemo x you #baron zemo x reader #baron zemo x you #daniel brühl #daniel brühl x reader #fanfic #wannabe writer #helmut zemo

190 notes · View notes

eldritchqueerture · 3 years

Text

Hello! This is a project for @summer-in-the-archives-event that I worked on with @horizonindigo! We came up with the idea together and based our individual works around the poem I wrote, included in the fic. You can find their absolutely amazing art here!!

I freaking loved working on this one and I got more and more excited as we progressed. I also surprised myself with the poem itself a bit, definitely didn’t expect it to end up quite as cool, if I may say so myself. It was incredibly fun to write.

Big shoutout to @sunflowers-and-frogs for beta reading, I love you bestie <3

I would like to thank all the mods that made this event possible! It’s my first time taking part in anything like this and it was really, really fun, so THANK YOU <3 Love you guys :3 Anyways, enough of my rambling kdfjgkjsdfg

Rating: Teen And Up Audiences Archive Warning: No Archive Warnings Apply Category: M/M Fandom: The Magnus Archives (Podcast) Relationship: Martin Blackwood/Jonathan "Jon" Sims | The Archivist Characters: Martin Blackwood, Jonathan "Jon" Sims | The Archivist Additional Tags: Hurt/Comfort, Canon-Typical The Lonely Content (The Magnus Archives), Kissing, Excessive Tea-Making, Set in Episodes 159-160 | Scottish Safehouse Period (The Magnus Archives), Poetry, Love Confessions Warnings: self-esteem issues, typical Lonely content, discussions of free-will and determinism, graphic kiss

Summary: As Martin fights the remnants of the Lonely's influence on their ride to Daisy's safehouse in Scotland, he focuses on his feelings for Jon to keep him tethered to reality. He watches Jon be himself in the safety of the cottage, share these small intimacies of domesticity and the words come to him as a poem weaves itself into the pages of his notebook...

He feels the taste of salt in his mouth, as he looks out of the car window at the rapidly falling away landscape, covered in the darkness of the night. He feels Jon’s presence next to him, focused on driving but glancing every so often at him with concern. Martin feels like he should say something, somehow fill the silence that has befallen them, but no words ever find their way to his mouth. He stays quiet, watching the trees pass them by, trying to ignore the anxious churning in his stomach. He’s always been pretty good at filling awkward silences with chatter; at least before the Lonely. Now… he can’t help but feel bothered by Jon’s presence, even though he did all of this for him, even though this is what he’s wanted all this time; it’s like a splinter, prickling at his mind, almost causing him physical discomfort. He swallows and feels the salty taste on his tongue; he discards the thoughts and tries his best to breathe through the discomfort, instead focusing on the sensation of Jon’s warm hand on his.

Martin used to be the warm one; he’d always been generating heat and his mind goes back to the early days in the Archives when the basement was cold in the winter and both Tim and Sasha used to gravitate towards him with their respective cups of tea during breaks. Now his whole body is cold, the chill of the ocean breeze and fog having settled in his bones so deep he thinks he’ll never feel warm again. The thought isn’t sparking any emotions in him though. It’s just a thing that he’s learned to accept, just as the fact that he’ll always be alo—

“Do you want me to put on some music?” Jon asks with another one of his glances. Every time, he raises his eyebrows a bit, and tilts his head to the side; Martin expects the concern in his eyes, but he sees something else there as well. He’s been afraid to put a label to the expression for the fear he’s reading him wrong, but the bolder part of his mind tells him it’s fondness.

Jon’s hand is warm, and his thumb grazes the skin of his palm just a little, as if not sure he’s allowed to. Martin looks down at their hands and feels warmth spark in his stomach; he smiles.

“I’m sorry I’m—I’m not really good at the whole, uh… small talk thing,” Jon adds with a flush, turning his head back to the road. “I should probably be talking about something, though, to, uh… to keep you here. I suppose.” He visibly cringes at his words.

“It’s—It’s fine, Jon,” Martin chuckles, and Jon relaxes, fixing him with a quick smile of his own. “I’m just… you know.” He looks down at their hands again and has a brief feeling they belong to someone else. Not him. Never him. “I’m not quite… out of that. Yet.”

Another look of concern. Martin feels heat prickling at his cheeks and he’s a little bit glad, because at least it’s a feeling. He interlaces their fingers and looks out the front window.

They spend the ride in relative silence. Jon tries a couple more times to start small talk and fails; they stop at a gas station at one point and Martin takes out his notebook when Jon disappears inside the station to pay for gas. He flicks through it and his eyes stop at an unfinished draft; he started writing it shortly before Peter took him down to the Panopticon, but he’d only managed to get a few first lines down. Despite still feeling the cold in his bones and his mind being clouded by the remains of the fog, words come to him, and he starts scribbling. He continues to do so even when Jon comes back with tea and an assortment of snacks, blushing just a little bit when Jon shoots a curious look at the notebook. He doesn’t ask and Martin is thankful for it. He’s not the sort to show his drafts to anyone, especially to the subject he’s writing about.

It’s 1am when they arrive at the cottage; they’re both exhausted and they quickly take their bags inside and lock the door. The cottage is small and practical, just Daisy’s style; it’s also quite dusty from months of abandonment. Martin yawns as he opens one of the bags to get the essentials. They should leave unpacking and cleaning for the next day.

He hears Jon’s footsteps on the wooden floor coming back from the initial run of the house and he turns to tell him that, but the somewhat sheepish look on his face stops him in his tracks. Has he ever seen Jon look sheepish before?

“So, uh, obviously this was Daisy’s safehouse when she was, well… Avoiding people,” he says, not meeting Martin’s eyes.

“I hope ‘avoiding people’ doesn’t mean killing them in this context,” Martin snorts, not sure if he’s entirely joking. The humour is lost on Jon, however, as he looks at him confused for a moment before he processes Martin’s words.

“Oh, no, no, I-I don’t believe she, uh… She just slept here.” Jon shifts awkwardly. “And that means there’s uh, there’s only one bed.”

Martin’s eyes widen and his lips form a little “Oh”.

“Of course, if you’re not comfortable with sharing, I can just take the couch, you need some proper rest and I’m used to running on low sleep” —Jon averts his gaze as he speaks. He grabs his bag and walks over to the couch, and Martin wants to stop him talking and just say that they should share the bed, but his voice seems to have left him at this crucial moment. He just stares as Jon places the bag on the couch and looks back at him, aware of the silence. “Martin?”

Martin swallows, a familiar cold freezing his toes. He feels the damp sand underneath his bare feet and a chill runs down his spine. He blinks and tightens his grip on the bag he’s been holding. This is real, he is real, Jon is real.

“You need good rest too,” he finally manages to say, and he’s surprised by how clear and normal his voice sounds; it makes Jon relax a bit. “We should share the bed, if-if you are comfortable with that.”

A small smile appears on Jon’s lips and a warm feeling fills Martin’s stomach again; he knows the smile is for him.

“Okay,” he says softly and picks the bag up.

They manage to keep the awkwardness of it to the minimum; they’re both very tired and at one point it just doesn’t matter anymore. Jon hands Martin a separate blanket and he pushes the disappointment down into a void inside him where he keeps feelings to come back to when he’s alone. It would be foolish of him to hope for cuddling since they haven’t talked about anything yet.

He expects to fall asleep as soon as his head touches the pillow, but he finds himself awake in the darkness after goodnights are said (Jon’s voice sounds so soft and tender Martin has forgotten all about his earlier disappointment). He’s laying on his back, eyes closed, and he feels Jon’s presence on his right. His breathing is steady, not yet slow enough to indicate sleep, but calm and relaxed. Martin peeks out through half-lidded eyes – he hasn’t gotten used to the darkness as much yet, but he can see Jon laying on his side, facing him, his eyes closed and his hair loosely framing his face. One of his hands rests close to his head on the pillow. Martin blinks, fully opening his eyes now and smiling softly. As his vision clears, Martin notices Jon frowning ever so slightly, and he wonders if the faint lines between his eyebrows smoothen when he’s asleep.

“Is watching people sleep a usual activity for you?” Jon whispers with amusement as he opens his eyes and Martin gasps with surprise and looks away, feeling heat prickle at his cheeks.

“Wha—uh, no! No, of course no—Sorry, I—” He rambles, and he thinks he might just die from embarrassment when he hears Jon laugh quietly.

“It’s fine, Martin.” He shakes his head with a sigh. “Really. I-- Sorry, I thought a joke would, um… lighten the mood somewhat.”

Martin risks a look at him and wonders if the red on his cheeks is visible through the darkness. Jon looks at him with that expression again, something Martin would very much want to classify as fondness if it didn’t feel so impossible. But now that he thinks about it… Would it really be thatfar-fetched? Jon had gone into the Lonely just to get him out. Would he have done that for anyone else? Martin rolls his eyes at himself in his mind, of course he would. He did go into the Buried, and it was for Daisy, a person who has threatened him multiple times, kidnapped and almost killed him. If Jon was ready to lay down his life for her, out of all of them, it shouldn’t be surprising he would do the same for his assistant; it says nothing about his feelings on the matter.

Martin’s memories of the Lonely are hazy. He remembers the cold, the dampness, and the loneliness. He remembers his thoughts, the lonely ones, and how they felt both alien and familiar at the same time. He remembers the comfort, the feeling of fitting in, but also the pain and the fear, just before they were numbed by the cold and the fog that made him forget. And then suddenly, Jon was in front of him, looking at him with desperation on his face, tears in his eyes glowing with a green light. Was it Jon calling for him, or just the Beholding?

“What are you thinking about?” comes Jon’s voice and Martin realizes he’s been staring into the air for a while. He blinks and looks back at Jon.

“Uh…” He searches for words before he gives up on trying to come up with an excuse. His voice is quiet when he speaks. “Why did you do it?”

Jon blinks at him a couple times and rises to lean on his elbow, to better look at Martin.

“What do you mean?”

“The Lonely,” Martin says, not meeting his eyes. Jon is wearing a blue t-shirt with a logo of a band Martin doesn’t recognize; the shirt is loose and it uncovers one of Jon's shoulders which would probably be distracting if Martin’s mind wasn't chilled by the remnants of the fog. “Why did you come for me?”

Even without looking at him, Martin sees Jon’s forehead ripple. A while passes as Jon searches his face and the thought that he shouldn’t have asked starts creeping up to Martin’s head. Shouldn’t have brought any attention to the subject, he should just be glad, he should—

“I care about you, Martin,” Jon says in a very gentle and quiet voice, like he’s afraid anything louder would take away the meaning of his words. Martin looks up at Jon and the hint of that intense blush from before makes it back to his face. “You’re… You matter to me. You will always matter to me.”

Martin can’t stop a small smile appearing on his face and Jon mirrors it.

“Thank you,” Martin whispers, feeling a warmth settle in his chest, finally driving the cold away.

“Anytime.” Jon lays his head back down and settles back with the right hand near his face. “Sleep well, Martin.”

Martin closes his eyes contentedly and he curls up on his right side, facing Jon, as if trying to keep this warm feeling from escaping his chest too soon.

“You too, Jon.”

---

Martin wakes up alone in an unfamiliar bed, the smell of foreign covers filling his nostrils and for a second he panics. He opens his eyes and the memories come back to him; their late arrival at the safehouse and laying down to sleep next to Jon.

He sits up, looking at the space Jon had occupied. It’s vacant now, just the curled up covers he left behind, but it manages to bring a blush to Martin’s cheeks, nonetheless. It feels so… intimate to know that they slept next to each other. It makes him feel warm and cosy.

Martin gets up and goes to the bathroom before he finds Jon in the kitchen. He’s humming quietly as he finishes cleaning the table and he looks up when Martin enters.

“Good morning, Martin.” He smiles and Martin’s afraid he’s going to melt. He takes a quick look around and notices that their sparse kitchen supplies are mostly unpacked, and the kettle is already on the stove.

“How long have you been awake?” He asks; some of the shock must have made it to his voice because Jon looks amused.

“Two hours or so. I’ve always been a morning person.” He shrugs and finishes cleaning the table. “Tea?”

A smile lights up Martin’s face and he gets swept up by the familiarity of the activity, while Jon busies himself with fixing up some breakfast. As both of them work in the kitchen, Martin notices the casual brushes of their skin and touches of the shoulders. He doesn’t know if he’s doing it consciously or if it just happens naturally, but he knows that Jon’s open demeanour is drawing him closer than before. He wonders if he’s been like this ever since he woke up from the coma, and there was just no one to appreciate it.

The morning is relaxed, the casual conversation flowing a lot smoother than the day before, and after breakfast they set out to clean the whole cottage and go down to the village to buy some actual supplies. The village is small, but the local shop provides all the essentials they need; for a moment Martin forgets about everything outside of that village and shopping for groceries with Jon, as if this is their life now, in the Scottish Highlands, living together in a cottage. They talk about cooking dinner, and the cows they passed on the way, and Martin thinks he could get used to that.

The bubble bursts when they finish up and Jon decides to call Basira. She picks up after a while and updates them on the absence of both Jonah Magnus and Daisy. Basira says she’ll send some statements up to them when the Institute stops being an active crime scene, and a shadow passes over Jon’s face. Wrapped up in a conversation about their taste in dinner dishes, it was almost too easy for Martin to forget food isn’t the only sustenance Jon needs. He finds it easier to forget things ever since the Lonely. They walk back to their cottage in silence, Martin grabbing Jon’s hand as soon as he lets go of the phone.

When they get back, Jon declares he’s going to take care of unpacking and cooking, and even though Martin knows Jon to be stupidly stubborn, he’s surprised by the strictness with which Jon insists he sit back and relax. Martin doesn’t really complain; he’s spent his entire life caring for others and, to be honest, it does feel rather good to be on the receiving end for once. He watches Jon from the couch for a while, before he takes out his notebook and looks over the poem he wrote in the car.

Wisps of mist conceal my eyes

A lone indulgence to lose one's face

And soothing a part inside that cries

With chilling sadness and numbing grace

The steadfast rhythm of waves ashore

As ocean breeze leaves a taste of salt

The words forgotten, erase what I swore

Until I hear your voice once more

I wondered many times what it might be

That we finally took to calling "us"

What would be left if we broke free

Of dread and horror's eternal grasp

The Eye looms aloft, ever-present dread

Watching all, eternal lids apart

You made your choice unaware you were led

By strings of web, against your heart

Jon starts humming under his nose in the kitchen as he cuts something on the board; the water in the kettle boils slowly and fills the air with a quiet whistle. Martin smiles while shooting a subtle glance at Jon; he seems to notice his gaze and falls quiet, but a smile lights up his face when he sees the fondness on Martin’s face. For all this talk about Jon “losing himself” in the role of the Archivist, this seems as human as you can get. Martin never favoured the approach the other archival staff took to the knowledge of the significance of Jon’s position, and he often wondered how they could look at him and see a monster. Of course he made bad decisions, but so did everyone. They’ve seen or read about so many avatars giving into the powers that fed them and yes, maybe Martin is biased, but Jon was nothing like them. They’ve all been caught in this huge web of statements that turned real; the more they struggled to break free the more tangled up they became, and it wasn’t Jon’s fault that he ended up in the centre of it. He knows Jon tried to make right choices every step of the way. Can you really blame a human being for failing to completely resist something that’s beyond mortality and human reality? One way or another they ended up here, together, and yes, maybe the Eye and the Lonely are still looming as very tangible threats, and Jonah Magnus is nowhere near being stopped, but at least they’re together now. Martin remembers thinking the Unknowing was the endgame, the last chapter of this horror for them, and he remembers the hopelessness of their story getting a bad ending that essentially pushed him into the Lonely; now he feels a different kind of an end approaching – he dares to be hopeful. Maybe everything works out in the end? Maybe, if they were safe and happy, it wouldn’t actually be the end of the world.

Martin looks down at his notebook and starts writing, sticking the tip of his tongue out in concentration.

What is a monster? Where is the line

That would separate us from the world

All I know is our paths align

And we together can battle the cold

You cut through the curtains of mist and See

The green glow fades when our eyes meet

My lips form a soft and quiet plea

To be loved has never felt so sweet

To be loved is a new feeling for me

I only know how to love from one side

But with you I hope we can once be free

Maybe ignore the whims of the tide

Although I know we're not nearly through

I taste and savour your voice, your breath

If only for a moment, we can start anew

And I will follow you even to death

As he stares at the last word of the finished poem, his hand with the pen hovering over it, he registers that his eyes have watered a bit. He blinks the tears away quickly as Jon sits down on the couch next to him, looking at him with a gentle worry. Martin looks up at the two mugs of tea he’d placed on the table.

“Did you make tea?” He asks with mock bewilderment, and Jon scoffs at him.

“I know how to make tea, Martin.” He nudges him with amusement, that gentle worry not quite gone from his eyes. “What are you writing about?”

Martin falls quiet, pressing the notebook to his chest in a knee-jerk reaction.

“Thought you didn’t like poetry,” he huffs out a laugh that’s only a little bit self-conscious. Jon shrugs, reaching out for his mug and taking a sip.

“I don’t understand it. And yes, I have been known to dislike it at times, but… Maybe I could be swayed to give it another shot.” Jon rolls his eyes fondly and looks at Martin out of the corner of his eye, a look that says ‘for you’. Martin grins, heat pricking at his cheeks once again.

“You see, i-it’s all about emotion.” He places the notebook gently on his lap face down and reaches for his own mug. “You w-want to put all of your emotions into words in a-an artistic way, that has a rhythm and, uh, and feels alive. And you want your, uh, your readers to feel that, that emotion through your words.”

Jon listens attentively and his eyes aren’t leaving Martin’s face; at one point Martin gets distracted by it and forgets where his explanation was going. Jon’s gaze has always been intense, in different ways throughout the time they’ve known each other. At first it was judgemental, the gaze of his boss, full of unmet expectations; then it was piercing, watchful and suspicious; as time passed, it seemed to gain more and more weight of the Beholding, something Tim always complained about. After Martin had joined Peter Lukas, the rare glances he got from Jon were full of yearning that Martin didn’t understand at the time; didn’t want to understand. Now, it’s that gentle fondness, interweaved with something intangibly sad and Martin feels an urge to hug him, to bring him close to his chest and never let go; to bury his face in Jon’s hair and protect him.

They move to place their mugs at the table at the same time and snort, amusement quickly turning into a fit of laughter. Jon throws his head back a little with it and Martin wonders if he has ever seen him laugh so openly before. He didn’t think it was possible for him to fall in love with the man even more, but once again, his heart proves him wrong. He stares at him with a lovestruck expression and thinks they should really talk about it. Martin doesn’t know where to start though and Jon seems to be thinking in a similar direction because his expression shifts into gentle seriousness.

“Martin, I…” He starts and bites his lip. “I need to apologize.”

Martin straightens a little; it’s not exactly what he expects.

“I—The way I used to treat you…” Pain and guilt flash through Jon’s face as he looks away for a moment to gather his thoughts. “It was not okay. None of it was okay. And I’m—I’m really sorry for that. It doesn’t—I know it doesn’t change anything that happened, but I” —he sighs. “I really am sorry. I hope I can, somehow, uh… somehow make it up to you.”

Martin reaches for Jon’s hand, and he looks down in surprise; Martin sees his eyes start glistening.

“I’m sorry for everything that happened to you.” He continues in a whisper and his eyes are locked on their touching hands. “I’m so sorry about the Lonely. I’m sorry that you’re trapped in all of this with me, and I would understand if you decided to leave—”

“Jon.” Martin squeezes his hand and Jon’s eyes shoot up to look at him.

“I’m sorry, that’s not an apology,” he sighs again. “I just… I’m sorry, Martin. About everything.” His other hand grips Martin’s. “I’m glad you are still here. I’m—I’m so glad, you d-don’t even know,” he laughs.

“I think I do.” Martin smiles gently. “Thank you for saying that. I’ve—I've forgiven you for a lot of it a long time ago. A-And the rest just isn’t your fault.”

Jon frowns.

“The Lonely was always there,” Martin shrugs. “Peter Lukas was just… a catalyst, I think. But now I have you.” His finger grazes the outside of Jon’s palm and his heart flutters in his chest when he sees that small smile appear on Jon’s face. “And you can’t be blamed for Elia—Jonah’s games. We’re all just… a bunch of people who didn’t know what was going on until it was too late.”

Jon’s eyes fall as he nods slightly.

“He’s still up to something,” he says quietly.

“Figures,” Martin laughs bitterly. “But we’re here now. And frankly, I don’t really want to think about him when we’re finally…” The word ‘together’ gets stuck in his throat, as if it would breach this fine line of ambiguity they’ve drawn between themselves. Jon seems to fill it in and his eyes land back on Martin.

He’s never wanted to kiss him more than he does right now. Jon's eyes are wide and glistening with something that looks suspiciously like hope, and his fingers gently graze the outside of Martin's palm. Warmth spreads in his chest and his eyes flutter a little, not breaking the eye contact. He wants to pull Jon close to his chest, to run his fingers through his hair and feel his breath on his own skin. To really feel like he's there, next to him, with him.

Before he can follow through with any of that, something sizzles in the kitchen, loud in the silence, startling them both.

“Food!” Jon chuckles slightly before he jumps to his feet and rushes to the kitchen, while Martin snorts and follows him. Jon stirs the pan with curry and sighs with relief when he sees it's not burned. He turns down the heat anyway and checks on the rice.

“Jon, this smells amazing,” Martin says, peeking into the pan with cheese and spinach. “I didn't know you could cook.”

“Well, contrary to the popular belief I was a functional human being. For a while,” Jon snorts and leans against the counter to look back at Martin. “It's Palak Paneer, my grandma taught me when I was a child.”

“It looks fantastic,” Martin grins, and Jon rolls his eyes in mock exasperation.

Even though the moment's lost, the remains of the feeling can be felt between them as they prepare the plates and take the food to the table. They easily fall back into usual chatter and, as soon as they’re finished, Martin jumps to wash the dishes. Jon relents after extensive affirmations from Martin that he's alright and he can definitely take care of a couple dishes in the sink, and he drops onto the couch with a content sigh instead.

Martin finishes up with the dishes and dries his hands on a towel.

“Do you want some tea?” He asks and hangs the towel back on the rack. When there's no response, he turns to the couch. “Jon?”

Something sinks in his stomach when he sees that the object that consumes Jon’s attention is the poem he’s finished; he scratches his neck, as his cheeks take on a pink tinge. “Oh…”

He walks up to the couch, unsure, trying to gauge Jon's reaction. His face seems tense, he squeezes the notebook in his hand so hard his knuckles go white, and his eyes are focused at one point on the page.

“Um... Jon?” Martin asks weakly, his heart drumming in his chest so loud he's sure both of them can hear it.

Jon jumps to his feet, startled, and looks up at him with eyes wide, like a deer in the headlights. Martin instinctively raises his hands in a placating gesture, as Jon registers his presence, looks down on the notebook in his hands, and quickly puts it on the table as if it stung him.

“Martin, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to look, it was just there and—”

“Hey, Jon, it’s alright!” It’s maybe a little not alright, since the poem is nothing short of a love confession and a wish Martin had no right to assume would ever be true, so Jon reading it is less than ideal. Martin rushes to gently place a hand on Jon’s shoulder but when he recoils from the touch, Martin withdraws his hand, cursing everything about himself.

“No, I, uh…” Jon runs his hand through his hair, eyes darting between Martin, his hand, and the notebook frantically. “I shouldn’t have— uh, it’s—it’s your private business, what you write about, so—”

Martin is sure he’s tomato red on the face by this point and hopes against hope that the afternoon light filtering through the curtains obscures it just a little. Jon, on the other hand, doesn’t have the embarrassed blush that usually darkens his cheeks; instead he breathes fast, his hands shaking ever so slightly. Martin sees him hunch just a little, making himself smaller.

“Um, yeah, I, uh—” He starts fidgeting with his fingers. Did the idea of—of love frighten Jon so much? He was stupid to leave it out in the open and now Jon knows, and it’s not how he feels, so he hates him… “I’m sorry.”

Jon’s eyes snap to him, his eyebrows furrowed in confusion.

“For what?”

Martin huffs out something like a pained laugh.

“Th-That’s not exactly how- how I wanted to tell you.” He wrings out his hands and shoots Jon a pleading look. What’s done is done and the only thing he can hope for is for Jon to let him down easy and never speak of this again.

“Tell me?” Jon looks down at the notebook again and there’s the worry again, stark on his face. He breathes out, slowly, and looks at the floor. “I don’t—I don’t even want to think this is a possibility…”

Martin doesn’t need to imagine what it would be like to be stabbed, if he wanted to - he’s pretty sure the acute pain of his heart shattering in his chest is close enough. His mind tries to catch up to the emotions, slow them down just a bit, because something seems off, and isn’t this a weird way to reject someone you must have known had a crush on you? But his throat tightens with the swell of pain and shame and Martin blinks away the tears welling up in his eyes.

Jon sighs and plops down on the couch, hiding his face in his hands and pushing his glasses up to his forehead.

“We d-don’t have to talk about it, if—if you don’t want to,” Martin says quietly. He sits down next to Jon, careful not to touch him in any way, and puts his hands between his knees.

Jon lets out a bitter laugh.

“Isn’t that what they—the Web would want? Just… mindlessly follow, go with the flow until something… irreversibly bad happens?”

Martin turns to Jon with a frown.

“Wh—What?”

Jon looks at him with something glistening in his eyes and Martin can see the lines of pain and misery written on his face like they belong there.

“The web,” he says faintly. “Strings of fate. I—” He lets out a breath. “Was I just being manipulated this whole time? Was I ever really—Did I ever have a choice?”

“Jon... what are you talking about?”

“You—You said I was...” He reaches for the notebook and points at a verse with his finger. “’Made your choice unaware you were led by strings of web against your heart.’ How—W-Why did you say this?”

Martin stares into Jon's green eyes with concern, yet parts of his heart start to weave themselves back together. However confused and worried Jon seems to be, none of it is directed at Martin; he looks at him with desperation, almost pleading, and he realizes they’ve been having two different conversations at the same time.

“Oh-Oh, God, Jon, I-I didn't mean—I just, it's a-a metaphor, just that, you know,” he takes a breath. “It does remind me of a web, the-the way we got caught up in Elias' plans.” He looks down, his cheeks burning as he remembers why Jon would get caught at this specific phrase. “I'm sorry for, uh, using that, it was just the first thing that came to my mind and—”

Jon exhales next to him and Martin risks a look up. The uneasiness isn't gone from his face but he relaxes just a little bit, enough to stabilize his breathing.

“I'm sorry for this… this whole thing, Martin.” He gestures at nothing in particular and it's his turn to look at the floor, as if it's all of a sudden the most interesting thing he's ever seen. He starts fidgeting with the notebook. “I'm just—What if it’s true?” His voice goes higher at the question and he closes his eyes. Martin squeezes his arm. “What if I am just... Just a puppet? An inhuman, helpless puppet in the hands of—Of some spider pulling the strings?”

A tear rolls down Jon's cheek and Martin grabs one of his hands. It’s small and still shakes a little; he tries to put all the protectiveness he feels into this small gesture. Jon doesn’t recoil this time, instead taking a moment to watch Martin’s hand clasp around his.

“Jon,” Martin starts softly. “You're still you. You're not some—Some spider puppet that can't make choices.”

“But what if—”

“You've made a choice to go into the Lonely for me.” Martin bumps their knees together lightly and Jon looks up at him. “I don't suspect any webs would need me alive to push you into it. It was You.”

Jon looks him in the eyes and Martin barely stops himself from reaching up to his face to wipe away his tears.

“Or it just makes us think that we have a choice but are ultimately helpless against fate and everything we do is determined by intricately crafted circumstances,” Jon whispers. “Maybe free will is a lie.”

Martin blinks.

“Jon...”

“Maybe I was never able to stop it. Any of it.” Jon’s voice grows more horrified and even though his eyes are directed at Martin's face, he seems to be looking somewhere past him. “Maybe nothing we try to do really matters.”

“Jon.” Martin’s voice gains a bit of force, even though he feels all but sure. “What do you see?”

Jon frowns. “What?”

“Look at me and tell me what you see?” The force is gone; the sentence sounds more like a feeble suggestion than a request, but Jon's eyes refocus on Martin's in a frown of confusion.

“What do you mean?”

“We're here now,” Martin says quietly. “And yeah, maybe our decisions are all predetermined or whatever. I still think it matters that we try. I think our experience matters. And you're not a-a monster without free will, Jon. You care about people, and you’ve sacrificed a lot for other people. You've made your own choices and, no matter if they were good or bad, they were still yours. And I think that matters.”

Jon blinks at him for a moment, then his shoulders slump with a sigh and he interlaces their fingers. Martin doesn’t miss it and he feels warmth in his chest.

“I've always been afraid of—of my will not being my own anymore,” he confesses quietly. “Of, uh... of not knowing the difference.”

“I get it,” Martin nods. “If it’s any consolation, I see a lot of Jon in you still.” Jon looks up at him with surprise and Martin gives him a half smile. “I see a very changed Jon but it's still Jon.” He strokes Jon's palm as his heart picks up the pace. “The same Jon I've first fallen in love with.”

Jon exhales softly, his face caught in a soft surprise, and Martin smiles around the dull ache in his chest.

“You don't have to say anything. I'm sure you've known for a while, but I just... I wanted to say it.”

With every second that passes in silence, however, Martin's cheeks grow hotter, and he concludes that this might have been a mistake.

“I-I'm sorry. M-Maybe I shouldn't have said that, I… I don't want things to get weird or anything, so, uh, we can, we can just forget—”

“Martin.” Jon says his name in a soft and kind of inquisitive way that makes his heart bounce around and transforms the ache in his chest into swirling butterflies again. Martin looks up and Jon’s head is tilted to the side, his face still wet with tears, but he notices something hopeful glitter in his eyes. “I love you too.”

Martin frowns, suddenly wondering if he isn't dreaming. Is Jon really saying what he thinks he is? Did he hear correctly? Maybe he misheard—

“I have for a while,” Jon's voice is still quiet and soft. “I didn't want to say anything because I thought it was too early after the Lonely and you might not feel this way anymore, but...”

Martin swallows, acutely aware of how loud his heartbeat is. He squeezes Jon’s hand and smiles slightly.

“I... I didn't know,” he whispers, not trusting his voice to cooperate.

“As soon as I woke up from the coma, I wanted to tell you,” Jon says. “I thought I was too late; that it took me too long to stop denying the feelings I had because I didn’t know how to deal with them, and I'd missed my chance.” He laughs bitterly.

“So that’s what it was about,” Martin whispers, as Jon's actions towards him throughout his time as Peter Lukas’ assistant start falling into place. Jon looks at him with a frown, so he adds, “The ‘let's gouge out our eyes and escape'.”

Jon scrunches up his nose and clears his throat.

“Yes, well. Yeah.”

Martin chuckles quietly.

“I don't think I would have lasted in the Lonely if I understood then. But then again. It didn't really matter in the end. It didn't help.”

“But it was your choice,” Jon echoes Martin's words from before and their eyes meet again.

“Yeah. It was my choice.”

They stare into each other's eyes for a moment, losing track of time, before Jon smiles slightly and looks back at the notebook.

“I really am sorry for not asking your permission, though,” he says. “I got so caught up in the metaphor I didn’t even finish it.”

Martin blinks, the warmth from his chest spreading to his cheeks again.

“D-Do you want to?”

Jon smiles softly, this new smile that Martin has only seen in the past couple of days, always directed at him.

“If you’d let me.”

Martin needs to look away, unable to handle the affection in Jon’s eyes. He mumbles an ‘okay’ with a smile that’s not entirely under his control and gets up.

“But I am making that tea whether you want it or not, waiting for someone to finish reading something is a torture.”

He hears Jon laugh as he heads back to the kitchen.

When he comes back with two steaming mugs, Jon is waiting for him with a smile and his nervousness dissipates with his next words.

“I like it,” Jon says. “Apart from the, uh, web metaphor, obviously. It's hopeful.”

“Y-You do?”

Martin swallows; the pleasant tingling in his stomach is back. He places their mugs on the table and reaches out to join their hands again. Jon intertwines their fingers immediately and caresses the outside of Martin’s palm with his thumb.

Jon looks down at the verses again and smiles softly, almost sheepishly, a familiar blush darkening his cheeks.

“I—I don't know if there would be anything for us outside of. You know. The fears and all that,” he grimaces. “At least, for me. But, uh…” He looks at Martin again with a hopeful expression that makes Martin melt a little, and he gently caresses Martin's cheek with his free hand. “I really like the thought of it.”

Martin's brain might be short-circuiting at this moment and all of his thoughts take form of fuzzy static.

“Me too,” he says, suddenly breathless. Jon's hand rests cupping his cheek and, are they a bit closer than they were a second ago? Jon's gaze slides down Martin's face to his lips and he feels he might faint right there and then. He doesn't, instead gathering up his courage to take a breath.

“Can I kiss you?” Jon asks first and Martin feels his lips form a grin.

“Please,” he breathes out; the next second their lips meet, soft but urgent, desperate and sick of waiting. Martin's hand dives into Jon's soft hair, fingers scraping the delicate skin of his head and earning him a low sound from Jon's throat. They pull each other closer and find a rhythm to lose themselves in for just a moment; the sensation of Jon's tongue swirling in his mouth, of his slender fingers on his cheek and his neck, the pressure of his body against his chest; all of it making Martin dizzy with happiness.

Martin pulls away when his lungs painfully remind him breathing is still a necessity and he opens his eyes to look at Jon – His soft lips, his nose, his pockmark scars, and his eyes, green yet with no trace of Beholding in them. He takes him in whole, with all of his flaws and all of his virtues, and he feels seen in return, seen by the man he loves and who loves him. The weight of it all hits Martin like a crashing wave and he pulls Jon in for a tight embrace.

“I love you,” he whispers against his shoulder, and he feels Jon's arms tightening around his torso.

“I love you too, Martin.”

#tma #the magnus archives #tma fic #summer in the archives event #niki.writes #jonathan sims #martin blackwood #jonmartin

61 notes · View notes

imagine-otome-games · 3 years

Text

Missing [GI Diluc/???] [P.1?]

Pairing: Diluc x Fem!Reader (Tried to keep it neutral but just in case) (Seemingly one sided)

Warnings: Cursing, angst, implied smut but no majorly graphic stuff, maybe I’ll do a continuation from a different point of view?? Ooop. This is my first genshin fic, I hope I did alright.

Did you find him-

A/N: I’m aware Genshin isn’t an otome game but uhm.. idiot brain.

“ Pʟᴇᴀsᴇ, ᴘʟᴇᴀsᴇ ғᴏʀɢɪᴠᴇ ᴍᴇ Bᴜᴛ I ᴡᴏɴ’ᴛ ʙᴇ ʜᴏᴍᴇ ᴀɢᴀɪɴ.”

Under the cover of heavy rain and roaring thunder, you stare at the place you could no longer call home. A place you should have never allowed to become your home when you knew how you felt for someone in it.

Some things should not be mixed- some things just aren’t meant to be. His silence spoke volumes and you could no longer withstand the blatant rejection and regret. At least that’s how it felt to you and with no one to correct you-

Another flash of lighting, one much too close for your liking, sends you back to that night. The memories are so vivid despite how hazy your mind had been that night.

He gripped you as if you were his last lifeline, as if he were absolutely starved of you. You never knew this man could be so greedy- so lustful and almost demanding were it not for some of the gentleman in him still having some control. Enough control to go from gripping you so tight you knew there might be bruises, to cradling you so softly. Holding you as if you were the world’s most precious jewel. Caresses so soft and warming it was dizzying.

His lips stole your breath and sense of self. They took what little bit of rationality you might have had left. They whispered soft sweet nothings to you with breaths so gentle it sent shivers down your spine. His lips stole parts of you, you weren’t aware had existed.

Your name on his tongue sounded damn near ethereal. Might this be what it is like to be loved? Or was this lust in beautiful disguise?

He had you as if he’d had you thousands of times before and may never have again.

He brought you to utter completion over and over and over again. It seemed never ending- it felt like the confession you’d been waiting with bated breath for. It was as if you were being blessed.

Perhaps you weren’t his first, but maybe you could be his last. His forevermore.

The rain that night was violent. It demanded to be heard but you had ignored it. There were better sounds to be heard, ones you kept tightly locked up within the safety of your mind. No matter what could or would be said, they were yours. They were meant for you and no one could take them.

“Diluc...?”, you had called that morning, but you gained no response. He was not there. He wasn’t holding you like you remembered when you drifted off into sleep.

The other side of the bed was cold to the touch. If you didn’t know better, you’d have assumed that your hazy memories were nothing but a lovely dream. Yet you did know better.

You weren’t the type to sleep so.. bare. Dreams don’t leave marks either, or a bittersweet aftertaste.

Maybe it would be better if it had been a dream.

“ Mᴀʏʙᴇ sᴏᴍᴇᴅᴀʏ ʏᴏᴜ’ʟʟ ʟᴏᴏᴋ ᴜᴘ.. Aɴᴅ, ʙᴀʀᴇʟʏ ᴄᴏɴsᴄɪᴏᴜs, ʏᴏᴜ’ʟʟ sᴀʏ ᴛᴏ ɴᴏ ᴏɴᴇ..”

The days that soon followed suit had quickly turned to months. Nothing was said of that night. He wouldn’t look at you. He didn’t even speak to you and every time you tried he would just.. find an excuse to leave. It was odd to you and jarring, to put it nicely.

Diluc did not seem like the type for a one-night stand, let alone to essentially have one and not let the other person know it was just that. He was blunt and to the point. He didn’t come across as secretive but perhaps he was trying to let you down easy. In which case he failed. Miserably.

A simple ‘we shouldn’t have done that’ would have sufficed.

Instead you received silence and avoidance. In your mind, that translated to ‘I regret what I’ve done’ and much more. So you made your plans to go. Secretly hoping he’d come and talk to you while doing so. You were hoping he’d find out and stop you.

‘How foolish’, you thought to yourself as you trudged further out into the pouring rain.

Diluc did nothing of the sort. Though you left without a proper word, he still let you go in a sense.

This was the most anti-climactic break up you’ve ever had, if you could call it that. Yet it still hurt the most. Somehow.

You had to fight the urge to turn back and force him to speak to you. What would that do though? What if what he had to say was worse then the silence you had been facing?

Throughout the entire journey to Liyue this was all you could think of. Multiple scenarios of what he might say, each one drifting into the one you wished would be true. Wishes don’t work like that unfortunately...

“To whomever this may concern,

I have decided to leave. I apologize for overstaying my welcome. Thank you very much for having me, but I just can’t stay. I need to have my own place and my own things.

I’m sorry.

_____.”

You wondered if Diluc ever found the letter you left on your bed. Or maybe one of the maids found it first. Would they give it to him? Would he have told them to throw it out? Even after a few months in Liyue you still wondered how he was doing. Did he think of you in passing? Did anyone in Mondstat even miss you? Had anyone noticed if you left? Well of course some of them did. There was a bard you used to see daily- you missed his infectious laughter. A certain captain enjoyed teasing you and.. well, you missed a Tavern owner..

Liyue was beautiful, there was no doubt about it. The way the sea breeze felt so cool at night- the hustle and bustle of the people and passing boats, there was always something to see and do. Commissions were easy to come by and the pay was fair. You found yourself a nice little place to call home within this city. You had lovely neighbors and a great view. Liyue was a nice place to live.

Still, you missed the nostalgic breeze of Mondstat. The cozy homes and well-knit community of its people. Not to say Liyue wasn’t tight knit but... it was just different. There were some things Mondstat had that Liyue did not. People you couldn’t find here- people you wished would just happen to visit by chance. You wanted to see them again.

You were homesick for a place that wasn’t really your home for long. Homesick even as you enjoyed the warm sea breeze as you sat at the edge of the dock. The sun was setting, gifting you beautiful orange and pink hues to stare at. Your commissions were done for the day and you simply felt.. lonely.

A strong gust of wind blew past you, a nostalgic scent filling your nose with it making you hug yourself softly. You felt yourself missing everything once more...

“You cold, girlie?”, someone asked as the wind blew again. It was harsher this time, almost as if it were pushing you towards this stranger- or maybe it meant to pull you away? You couldn’t tell. All you knew was that the winds in Liyue weren’t quite as.. mischievous as the winds in Mondstat.

A stranger with orange hair stood before you, a little grin on his lips that went well with his blue eyes. They seemed to pierce through you. It was as if he was searching for something within you. He seemed to find nothing, though. He stood with his arms crossed, leaning forward to get a better look at you. With him so close, you could clearly note the look in his eyes.

He’s up to no good-

“I feel like I’ve seen you somewhere else... could be wrong though. You just seem familiar..”, he says when you remain silent.

For but a fleeting moment, you forget you’re hurting. Whether that is from confusion or... something else, is something that remains a mystery to you.

For now, all you could think of was this handsome stranger, and how something within you found him familiar as well.

“ Isɴ’ᴛ sᴏᴍᴇᴛʜɪɴɢ ᴍɪssɪɴɢ? Isɴ’ᴛ sᴏᴍᴇᴏɴᴇ ᴍɪssɪɴɢ ᴍᴇ ?”

#genshin impact x reader #diluc x reader #genshin impact diluc #diluc ragnvindr #genshin diluc #genshin impact #ari writes #hi im alive #hahaha uhhh #this is my first try at genshin #idk if i should put the other chara in the tags bc its not about him #asdfg

164 notes · View notes

tenspontaneite · 3 years

Text

The Ceracurist (Chapter 3/?)

Even after these past months, she wasn’t yet used to it. Another Full Moon spent alone.

(Chapter length: 10.4k. ao3 link)

---

“Did you go to the game night?” Was Ethari’s first question when she called him the next day.

She rolled her eyes at him. “Yes, Ethari.”

He looked delighted. “Did you make friends?”

She hesitated, thinking about it. “…Well, I did beat them all at Antiquitora,” she said eventually. “And you were right, they did appreciate that.” She paused, and added “I’m probably going back, I think.”

She spent the next ten minutes having details pried out of her so warmly and kindly it hardly felt like an interrogation at all. Ethari was good at that. Finally she secured her escape via the need to leave for training, and was farewelled with considerably less fretting than usual. When the call dropped, she was about to shut down the Sunbeam module entirely, but then-

New Contact Requests, said the alert in the corner. Rayla blinked, nonplussed, and opened it, already having a decent idea of what she’d find. Sure enough, there were three new requests from codes she recognised: Kazi, Nihatasi, and Callum. She lingered there for a while, feeling bizarrely overwhelmed, then finally accepted all three of them.

She didn’t linger by the computer, after that – she had training to get to. Rayla paused at the door to perform a final once-over of her armour, then grabbed her swords and left.

---

Rayla stumbled back into her room in late afternoon, covered in about three different kinds of mud and her body aching all-over in the aftermath of prolonged exertion. She spent the next two hours with rigid discipline: cleaning herself, cleaning her armour, checking her weapons. She cooked unenthusiastically and ate, then finally felt justified in utter collapse. She landed face-first into her bed and fell asleep immediately.

Three hours later, she woke to a stirring of magic in her veins, prickling over her skin, all the hairs on the back of her neck standing on end. Slowly, she blinked her eyes open, and pushed herself up; every hint of soreness from training was completely gone. She turned her eyes to the window, staring at the Moon rising full and resplendent past the horizon. Something deep and instinctive in her delighted at the sight of it. But something else twisted, sharp with the pang of homesickness.

Even after these past months, she wasn’t yet used to it. Another Full Moon spent alone. She sighed, and tried not to think of the festivities that would surely be beginning back home. It was moonrise; Ethari and Runaan would be at the Circle by now. Had the dancing already started? With the Moon this high, it must have.

She stared unblinkingly out of the window, turning thoughts over and over in her head. It wasn’t right to be alone at Full Moon. It wasn’t right to spend it all indoors, either. She couldn’t do much about the first thing, but the second…

Silent, Rayla slipped outside. A few of her wingmates were out in the common room, chattering drunkenly with each other near the table. She blinked, slowly, and exhaled. When she passed, they didn’t see her; only started with surprise at the open and close of the door. She crept through the streets like a ghost, visiting each of the parks and training grounds in turn until she finally found one unoccupied: a small stand of well-kept trees, and a fountain that reflected the full body of the Moon in its burbling waters. It would do.

It was no Circle. There were no runes in the ground – nothing here that awaited the careful precision of the lunar dances, nothing that would light up at her passing. But it was better than nothing. Rayla pulled at the moonlight until she was nothing but shadows flickering in the shadows of the trees, and danced.

There were plenty of moondances that could be done alone, and she circled the fountain with all of them, one by one. A tracery of magic hummed in the air at her passing, whispers of light following her; magic summoned by her motions, without the guidance of a Circle’s shaping. Even formless and aimless, it was beautiful. So, for the pleasure of it, she spun through those motes of moonlight and held them flickering in the shadows of her skin; light and dark woven together.

When she was done, she felt…not joyous, maybe, or exhilarated, as a celebration back home might have left her. But she was satisfied. Calm, and a little less sad. With the Full Moon still high above her, its magic brimming in her veins, Rayla headed home once more.

She didn’t bother to hide herself this time, and when she came through the door and passed by the remaining wingmates still up and awake, they saw her perfectly well: skin night-dark, eyes glowing, the edges of her form blurring into the shadows. They were all of them Sunfire and Skywing, and went a little quiet as she went by them; she wondered if they’d ever seen one of her kind at Full Moon before. Somehow, she doubted it.

Finally, Rayla arrived at her door, disarmed its security, and closed it behind her. She sighed, standing for a moment in the moonlight through her window, and considered it. Sleep would be a lost cause for another few hours, probably. So, somewhat inevitably, she ended up checking the computer. Browsing the mageskein was probably the best way to kill a few hours, and it wasn’t like she had anything else to do, this time of night.

Except: her Sunbeam module was still on, humming inside its casing, and…when she looked, it had projected a few message alerts onto the screen. Hesitantly, she checked them.

One was from Ethari, wishing her a good Moon, and entreating her once again to visit a Circle for it. Somewhat belated, that. One was from Kazi, confirming the time of their rematch tomorrow, as well as the address. Nihatasi had sent another, packed with effusive praise for her gaming excellence, insistence that she return, and an offer to come by the house whenever she wanted. Rayla shook her head at that, reluctantly amused. It wasn’t as though she’d met many nomads before – not in a social setting, anyway – but so far, Nihatasi more than matched their reputation for being aggressively sociable.

The last message was from Callum, and she steadfastly pretended that she wasn’t any more interested in it than the rest. He’d cheerfully thanked her for coming to the game night, said he hoped she’d come again, and then made an inquiry about her gaming tastes. Did she play computer games? If so, which were her favourites?

With the slow, halting uncertainty of the socially awkward, Rayla responded to all of them except Ethari’s. Kazi’s was easy enough, she just had to say ‘thanks’ and ‘see you tomorrow’. The other two took more doing. To Nihatasi, she expressed her thanks, and her assurances that she intended to come to a game night again. She said nothing about the house visit. To Callum, she reiterated her intentions to return, and admitted that, yes, she did like computer games, but hadn’t had the opportunity to play many of them, for lack of the necessary modules or a computer with the right specifications.

Given the hour, she certainly didn’t expect any response, so she switched active modules to the mageskein to start browsing. News headlines on the home site vied for her attention: something about the outcome of the latest Katolis-Evenere expedition into the wastelands; the most recent public appearance of the Dragon Prince with his esteemed parents; a gossip piece about some Katolian royal’s birthday. She checked the second one for images, and sure enough, there he was: the young prince Azymondias, still tiny in comparison to his queen mother…and, in the background, a few Dragonguard standing at the ready. Rayla spotted her parents and smiled. She clicked to transfer the picture through its Sunbeam link and waited.

The other module hummed, her computer making distressed noises as it attempted juggling the inputs of Sunbeam and Mageskein at once. The unit at home wouldn’t have had any trouble, but this one…she sighed, and waited, and was eventually rewarded when her Sunbeam successfully imported the image and displayed it full-fidelity, with all the depth and nuance of lighting that a flat picture could never convey. She filed it away, and was about to switch back, when she saw the alert.

A new message. At this hour? It had to be at least two in the morning by now, surely. She checked her clock to be sure, and, yep. 2:14am. She eyed the icon with consternation, then opened it.

Callum had responded. She stared, brow furrowing as she read. Hey, glad to hear back from you! He opened, cheerfully failing to acknowledge the fact that it was currently stupidly late. The rest of it was perfectly normal too; commiserating about her lack of access to proper computing, commenting that yeah, I didn’t get to play any EX games until I moved here, and you know what WX graphics are like, and which ones did you get to play? Any I’d know about?

Rayla reread its entirety several times, mildly flummoxed. At Full Moon her emotions were all closer to the surface than usual, so there was an undeniable thread of glee in her chest about this unexpected late-night contact, but…well, she was curious. In her limited experience with the ways of other students, the only reasons a non-Moonshadow would be up this late would be ‘partying’ or ‘insomnia’. Or ‘last-minute coursework’, but that was unlikely to apply when term was already over. So: You’re up late, she wrote, without thinking about it, and sent it back without responding to any of his actual questions. She’d begun composing a belated second message, but apparently Callum was a lot speedier with typing than she was.

Haha, yeah, I kind of lost track of time. Gaming, incidentally. She thought he must be used to significantly faster systems and transfer times than she was, because that was the entirety of that message, and then he sent another one: What about you? What are you doing up?

Rayla blinked, then settled herself a little more comfortably in her chair, since it seemed like, well. Like there might be a conversation happening, here. She brought the keyboard further forward. It’s Full Moon, she responded to him, a little dryly. Her computer took its sweet time about sending the message, as usual.

Oh. It is? After a pause, during which he presumably looked out of a window or something, he said Huh. So it is. Does it keep you awake?

She paused. Kind of, she wrote, slowly, and then wasn’t quite sure how much more to divulge. Eventually, she wrote It’s kind of hard to sleep through when it’s still high. I’ll be okay in a couple hours.

That must be so cool, he answered, which seemed a weird thing to say to a statement of Moon-induced insomnia. I’ve used artefacts to cast moon-magic before, but it must feel totally different when you’ve got the arcanum. What’s it like?

Rayla stared at her screen. She recalled the implications of him being a mage student, and was suddenly brimming with curiosity. I don’t know, I’m not a mage, she wrote, and then paused. Do you cast a lot of artefact magic, or was that a one-time thing?

She probably should have just outright asked about the mage student thing, rather than trying to be cagey about it. He probably wouldn’t have minded. Except, that turned out to be unnecessary, because the next thing he wrote, as if it were perfectly natural and unsurprising, was Well, I’m doing a thaumaturgy / thaumatology masters, so I definitely cast a lot of magic, yeah. Then, while she was still gawping at that, he followed it up with Listen, do you want to call?

What? She sent back, astonished, still in the middle of trying to process the concept of a human thaumaturgy student. She couldn’t quite get her head around it. How did that even work?

It’s okay if you don’t, he clarified. But your Sunbeam seems to have kind of a lot of connection lag, so it’d probably be faster to talk, you know?

Rayla was, in fact, using a fairly old edition of the Sunbeam module, which did have to establish a new connection for every individual message it sent and received. It was what was cheapest, and the lag was just…an unavoidable side-effect. She called more often than she messaged anyway, so it was rarely relevant. Except, apparently, now. It’s two in the morning, Callum, she sent to him, bewildered.

And we’re both awake, he pointed out, as if it was perfectly reasonable to call someone you’d only met twice before in the middle of the night.

Her first instinct, fuelled by bemusement and social anxiety, was to say no. Her second instinct was quick to the scene, with some very definite opinions about interacting with Callum, even at as weird an hour as this. She hesitated, wavering.

In the end, it was a glance at the Moon through the window that decided her. Rayla was emphatically not a mystical person, but even so, there were things that were deeply culturally ingrained. And one of those things was Full Moon is community time. Family, or friends, or a wider community – it didn’t really matter, but you weren’t supposed to be alone. This…probably counted.

Yeah, okay, she typed in the end, foot tapping under the desk with a frisson of tension. But only for a bit.

He didn’t waste any time about it, just sent the call request. Rayla took a quick moment to check she hadn’t made a mess of herself dancing, realised it was something of a moot point when everything attached to her was veiled in shadows, and finally accepted the call.

Callum’s room was startlingly brightly-lit when it appeared in the monitor, and it hurt her eyes a bit. She blinked rapidly, fighting the urge to squint, and glimpsed what looked like a well-appointed loft room with an unexpectedly dense population of easels. She could see at least three of them, most of which occupied by some sort of paper or canvas. She blinked, nonplussed, then steadfastly did not react when his face came into view. It moved around jarringly as he adjusted the lightcatcher, then finally settled.

He grinned at the screen, looking sleepy but in good enough humour, and said “Hey! Wow your room is dark.”

Rayla opened her mouth, closed it, then blinked. “Oh, right, your eyes,” she said, embarrassed. She generally only ever called her family, whose night vision was perfectly equal to hers. Humans, as well as most other elf races, were not nearly as well-suited for the dark. “Can you even see anything?”

“I can see your eyes,” he volunteered helpfully, looking amused. “They’re glowing. Really brightly, actually.”

“Yeah, that’s the Full Moon,” Rayla told him, already standing to go for the switch of the wall lamp over her desk. She’d never actually had cause to use it before, other than testing it when she first moved in, so the soft blue light it produced was almost wholly unfamiliar. “Is that better?” She asked, moving back to her chair.

“Well, I can actually see your room now, so-“ he started, then cut off abruptly as she settled back down in front of the lightcatcher. “Oh, wow,” he said instead as he stared at her, eyes wide.

Rayla ignored the self-conscious twinge in her stomach and frowned at him, folding her arms. “What?” she demanded.

He startled, as if only just realising what he’d said. “Oh. Um, sorry?” he attempted, weakly. “It’s just – I’ve never seen a Moonshadow elf all, er…” he waved expressively at her, contrite. “You know, Full Moon-ish?”

Oh. She eyed him, determined that he wasn’t messing with her, and relaxed a little. “What, not even in the Honour Games?” She asked, after a moment.

“Well, I mean, sometimes. But that’s usually in broad daylight, you know, and from a distance, and broadcasted.” He shrugged, a light dusting of pink rising in his cheeks, like he was embarrassed. “Kind of different to…” he nodded to her via the lightcatcher, smiling sheepishly.

“Suppose it is a tad different to a close-up Sunbeam call,” she conceded, lips twitching.

“I should’ve expected it, really, considering it’s full moon and everything,” he said ruefully. “Sorry, I’m not exactly at my brightest at two in the morning.”

Oh, that was right. It was the middle of the night. She squinted at him. “Then shouldn’t you be sleeping, instead of sunbeaming random Moonshadow elves?”

“Well, you’re up,” he said, as if this was a perfectly logical reason for him to be awake too. “And it’s not like I have to be up early.”

Lucky for him. She thought of the training and the Antiquitora rematch she had scheduled for the day, and suppressed a sigh. It was sometimes truly inconvenient to live in a mixed-race city that didn’t automatically expect the day after Full Moon (and the day of and before New Moon, of course) to be a rest day. “Wish I could say the same.”

He winced sympathetically. “Can you not cancel whatever it is?”

She opened her mouth to say no, stopped, and frowned. She hadn’t yet missed training even once. But…it wasn’t like attending every session was compulsory. And she did train three other times a week…and besides, a Sunday morning short session had never fallen on Full Moon recovery day before. “Probably, honestly,” she admitted. “My – uncle wouldn’t even tell me off for it. Moonshadow elves aren’t supposed to work the day after a Full Moon.”

“Because none of you can get to sleep the whole night?” He asked with interest, as if the cultural habits of her kind were genuinely intriguing to him. “Makes sense, I guess.”

Rayla huffed and shook her head. “Kinda. Mostly it’s because, traditionally, we’re supposed to spend moonrise to moonset with – family, or the community, or whatever. And we’re not much good for anything except collapsing once the Moon’s gone. So we all take the next day off.”

He blinked at her curiously, but if he wondered why she wasn’t currently out spending the Moon with her rightful community, he was tactful enough not to ask. “You should skip your thing, then. Whatever it is,” he determined, after a moment. “Get some actual sleep.”

“Says you,” Rayla said, wry. “You don’t even have a stupid magical reason to be up this late.”

“Does a technomantic game count as a stupid magical reason?” He grinned at her, his smile lopsided and full of humour. Her stomach did a weird flip-flop. “I mean. It is magical.”

Despite herself, she snorted. “And it is stupid,” she allowed, lips twitching. “As far as reasons to be sleep-deprived go, anyway.”

“Worth it,” he claimed, cheerfully. “I don’t have work till the afternoon anyway, so I’m fine.”

Rayla nodded at that, then a moment later actually recalled what his job was, and practically felt her face heating. Thank the Moon – literally – for her skin currently being too dark to show it.

He noticed some sort of reaction, though. Maybe her shoulders had hunched a bit. He tilted his head at her, a little rueful, and said “Yeah, er, about that. I wanted to apologise, for the others talking about it, yesterday? Couldn’t have been super comfortable.”

Abruptly hyper-aware of the weight and presence of her horns, Rayla did her best not to sink into the chair. “…It’s fine,” she muttered, embarrassed. “It’s not like you told them about it, they just guessed.”

“Yeah, I definitely wouldn’t tell them about who my customers were unless my customers said something about it first,” he assured her. “Not really professional, you know? We’re supposed to be confidential about it.” Suddenly, he smiled again. “Then again, it’s not like I usually end up meeting my customers at game night, so that part tends to be easier to manage.”

“Usually?” she asked dryly, ruthlessly suppressing the urge to lift her hands and hide her face behind them.

“No, yeah, you’re definitely the first time that’s happened,” he admitted. “It was kind of a surprise.”

She thought about how she’d reacted to seeing him appear through that door yesterday. “Just a tad.”

“A good one, though!” he claimed, cheerful. “It was nice to meet you properly.”

Rayla was tempted to say something along the lines of you know, where I come from, touching up someone’s horns is considerably more than a ‘proper’ meeting, but that was too mortifying to express, and he probably knew it anyway. She couldn’t imagine anyone becoming an experienced ceracurist without learning all the assorted implications that sort of thing had. “Even though I kicked your Archdragon across the board?” She questioned eventually, when she found her voice again.

“Even though you totally kicked my butt, yeah,” he agreed readily, looking far too pleased about it. “It was a great match. You’re crazy good at that game.”

An involuntary smile pulled at her lips. “Well, Kazi’s better,” she said, pleased despite herself. “They’d have had me easily, if they weren’t playing Ocean.”

He didn’t argue with her. Clearly, he understood the game plenty well enough to know the truth of that. “Still the second-best player I’ve met,” he insisted staunchly. “Is Antiquitora one of the computer games you said you did play? You must’ve put in some serious practice time.”

Rayla snorted. “I wish. No, the only games I ever actually got to play were on a gameship, just the one time, when I was…” she frowned, trying to remember. “Thirteen, maybe? Good long while ago.”

He perked up, expression brightening. “I love gameships,” he enthused. “There’s one that comes by Gullcrest twice a year, and I swear, all the students in the entire engineering department just disappear on board until it leaves. It’s crazy.” After a moment, he admitted “Well, to be fair, I disappear on board too, so, you know. It’s not like I can judge.”

She blinked, and leaned forwards. “What clan is the ship?” She asked, with considerable interest.

“It’s a joint management. Serat-Demani,” he said, watching her knowingly.

“Moon above,” she swore, and he grinned.

“Right?” Looking exceedingly pleased with her reaction, he took that as his cue to go into extensive, exacting detail about the wonders that a fully-stocked, state-of-the-art Demani entertainment airship had to offer. She listened raptly the entire time, interjecting with questions about the rates, the facilities, the games. If it was a Demani ship, it had to have Skycrawler, surely? What was it like? Was the gameplay everything it was said to be?

In the end, Rayla didn’t think she could really be blamed for losing track of time.

Callum was in the middle of enthusiastically praising Scion of Shadow, with particular attention to its unusually enjoyable stealth mechanics, when out of nowhere a yawn cracked through his sentence. He seemed fully ready to keep on talking once it was done, but Rayla sat up a little straighter, and for the first time in a while remembered that it was the middle of the night. She consulted her Moon-sense, and then the clock, and then buried her face in her hands.

He cut off mid-sentence, inquisitive. “What?”

“Callum, it’s nearly four in the morning,” she informed him, lowering her hands to stare at the clock, consumed with a baleful sense of having been betrayed by the passage of time. “The sun’s probably not even far off rising.”

He blinked, looked to the side, then blinked again. “…Huh,” he observed, a little sheepish. “Yeah, that’s…later than I usually stay up.”

“It’s later than I usually stay up, even on Full Moons.” Technically true, for the ones she’d spent at university. At home, though…moonset was, after all, later than sunrise in summer. Full Moon celebrations usually concluded once everyone’s skin was back to normal, but not always.

Callum shot her a weird look, long and appraising, before he spoke. “You’re still all…Moon-shadowy, though.”

“That won’t stop for a while yet,” she informed him, and shook her head. “I can probably get to sleep by now, anyway. Or another hour off, at most. You…” For a moment, she inspected him, spotting the signs of tiredness in his bearing. “You won’t have that problem, I think. You look knackered.”

He offered a rueful smile. “I’ll probably pass out the second I lay down, yeah,” he admitted. “I kind of lost track of time. Again.”

She rolled her eyes at him. “Well, I’ll just go now, then, so you can’t get distracted again.”

Hastily, he sat bolt upright. “But there was something I wanted to-“

“Tomorrow,” she told him, firmly. “Or…today, technically. Later, anyway. Whatever it is can wait.”

He opened his mouth, closed it, then smiled sleepily at her. It looked far more endearing than it had any right to. “Well, okay then.”

Rayla nodded to him, said “Thanks,” then leaned in and shut the call down without a further word. Sunbeam’s active connection died down, Callum’s face disappearing from the screen, and she leaned back in her chair to fix the ceiling with a long-suffering stare.

On one hand, Ethari would’ve probably been delighted to hear she’d spent a couple hours of her Full Moon socialising, as a proper Moonshadow elf ought to. But on the other….Ethari could absolutely never, ever find out about this. If he knew she’d been up chatting with someone, losing track of time, for actual hours…she’d never hear the end of it. To say nothing of how he’d react if he got wind that she – that she might sort of-

“Ugh,” Rayla grumbled to herself, wiping a hand over her face.

She stared at the ceiling for a good long while, experiencing a variety of emotions that she wasn’t keen on thinking about too hard. She also spent a not inconsiderable amount of time thinking about the conversation, running it over in her head, thoughts stubbornly fixed on Callum. This was how she ended up realising that she’d never actually asked about the mage-student-thing, and she still had no idea how that worked.

“Ugh,” she said again, more emphatically, and finally left her chair. She left her room to perform some necessary ablutions in the bathroom she shared with the next room over, then returned to draw the curtains. Without the direct moonlight through her window, the magic in her skin started to stutter a little. In ten minutes or so, she’d be back to normal again…and, with luck, she might be asleep by then.

Begrudgingly, Rayla peeled herself out of her clothes and threw them haphazardly onto the floor, not even bothering to watch the magic desert them, and climbed into bed. A suboptimal amount of time later, she was asleep.

---

“Goodness, you look tired,” said Kazi, welcoming Rayla in. Rayla, for her part, was a little too exhausted to feel particularly awkward, which was nice. “Was the Full Moon particularly trying?”

Rayla’s lips twitched. At least this one knew when Full Moon was. “No more than usual,” she said dryly, bending to remove her shoes when Kazi made noises about it. “Just, you know, getting enough sleep is kind of a lost cause.”

“Oh, I know the feeling. Or at least somewhat,” they commiserated, leading her through to a small and cosy-looking living room lined with bookshelves, and then through to a somewhat larger dining room, whose table was…occupied. Very thoroughly occupied. Rayla tried not to look at it too closely until she had a chance to inspect it properly. “There was a solar flare a few years ago, and of course I and the other Sunfire elves couldn’t sleep for days. It was quite the experience! And I’m sure you know how the Skywing elves get when there’s a particularly powerful storm abound.”

She had, in fact, had occasion to see what Skywing elves looked like when they were storm-drunk. It had been funny, up until it got annoying. “Probably more of a pain for them and you, really, since none of you take anything like moondust,” she volunteered after a moment, mouth turning up with wry sympathy. She’d hate to be a Skywing and be subject to random, unpredictable bouts of their equivalent of being moonstruck. “You all get the full effect of it.”

Kazi looked a little curious at that, but didn’t ask. “Yes, I suppose so. We should be thankful our magical overload is not so consistent as it is for you. In any case-“ they gestured towards the table. “Please take a seat wherever you prefer! Would you like any stimulants?”

Rayla blinked. “…Could you repeat that?”

“Tea,” they clarified, eyes merry with humour. “Or perhaps reveillant, or coffee, by your preference. I have all three, in some measure.”

For a moment she’d wondered if she was being offered something illegal, which…looking at Kazi, she was quite sure had been on purpose. She shook her head, reluctantly amused, and said “I could try some reveillant? I’ve only had it once.”

“It is not especially common, in a Skywing city like this,” Kazi allowed, already heading in the direction of one of the doorways. They kept speaking as they disappeared through it, still perfectly audible to her ears. “But I always keep a supply. It’s the only one that tastes particularly good cold, after all, unless you are very creative with your teas.” There was the sound of a cupboard opening, and then a good bit of rummaging.

During the wait, Rayla cautiously selected a seat at the table and settled there, finally letting her increasingly wide eyes rove over the board set up across it. She was still gawping conspicuously when Kazi returned, brandishing three brown paper packets of what she assumed to be reveillant.

“Do you prefer unflavoured, citrus, or mixed berry varieties?” they inquired mildly, hiding a smile when they saw her inspecting the board.

“Er, berry?” Rayla offered, only half paying attention. She was too busy looking at the intricate detail on the hand-carved and probably hideously valuable Antiquitora board. There were no pieces on it yet, but even just the tiles…it was astonishing. All of the terrain had been dyed and varnished in different colours, with careful attention to the different biomes. It all gleamed. The ocean tiles had even been coated in some kind of resin, making them look wet. The artisan had even mimicked the effect of the edge of an underwater continental shelf seen from above, with an area of lighter ‘water’ closer to the ‘coastline’.

“Berry it is,” Kazi said, sounding quite smug. Rayla didn’t have the chance to see what their face looked like, because they’d already disappeared back into what she assumed was the kitchen. She spent the next five minutes of beverage preparation time inspecting the game board with undisguised admiration. Rayla wasn’t one to usually pay much attention to art, but…this was game related art. It was different.

“The set you brought to the game night wasn’t your one set, then,” Rayla finally commented, when Kazi reappeared. She accepted her cup with exacting care, not wanting to risk a drink spillage near a board like this. She was honestly surprised Kazi allowed drinks so close to this thing.

Kazi smiled, disproportionately small for the amount of self-satisfaction in it. “Yes, it’s my more portable set,” they said pleasantly, and took a seat across the table from her, setting down their own glass. “This one…well, I certainly do not take it out of the house.”

“I can imagine,” she expressed, uncertain whether to be jealous of the board or just plain impressed. She wouldn’t even want something this pricey. She’d constantly be worrying about damaging it somehow. But, even so…the hint of avarice remained. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”

“The various tile-pieces and figures are quite a sight themselves, I think,” they said, evidently extremely pleased with themself. Rayla wondered how many people they invited round for Antiquitora for the express purpose of showing off this set. “Have you decided your faction for today? Once we have that settled, we can begin setting up.”

Rayla snorted, lips turning up into a half-smirk. “Depends what you’re playing as.”

Kazi beamed back. “Do you have a preference? I am perfectly open to suggestions.”

She considered it. Allegedly, Kazi was most beastly when playing Earth or Sun. Rayla herself was best at Moon and Sky…and Sky was exceptionally poorly matched against Earth. Sun’s best counters were Earth and Ocean. Moon wasn’t great against Sun, but not terrible either. “Take Sun,” she decided, eventually. “I’ll do Moon. I want to see for myself how much you wipe the board with everyone when you get to play properly.”

If Kazi had been smiling before, they looked positively frightening now. Not that their smile had widened, or anything; they just seemed to have a way of looking disconcertingly menacing while beaming pleasantly at you. “I will do my best to arrange that,” they said, and reached for three boxes: Moon, Sun, and the tiles and dice and cards.

Setting up would have gone more quickly if not for Rayla’s interest in inspecting the various gamepieces, and Kazi’s interest in flaunting them. Most of the units, from citizens to mages, were all carved in beautifully varnished wood. The Hero and Archdragon figures, though… “Is that gemstone inlay?” Rayla asked with disbelief, inspecting her Lunar Archdragon and turning it this way and that.

“The Lunar Archdragon has mother-of-pearl inlay, in fact,” Kazi said pleasantly. “And, yes, some very small gemstones for the eyes.”

She shook her head at that, half-impressed, half in disbelief. “Where did you even get this?”

“It’s an heirloom,” they elaborated, which made sense. The only other way for someone to have a set like this would be by being ridiculously rich, or by knowing an insanely skilled craftself. “Hence why it has the standardised continent shape. It does need fairly careful maintenance, though. I paid to have some of the varnishing redone recently, for example. But for me, the joy of owning a set like this is well-worth the upkeep.”

Rayla nodded. It wasn’t her sort of thing, personally, but she understood well enough. “I bet you try to get people over to play you every chance you get,” she said, amused. “With a board like this…”

“It would be quite a shame otherwise, yes,” they agreed. “I must thank you for obliging me! This board so rarely sees a high-level game.”

She huffed, amused, and kept unpacking the gamepieces one-by-one. Kazi had to know that they were the better player. If she’d barely beaten them when they were playing Ocean and underestimating her for most of the game, she certainly wasn’t going to win now. “I’ll see what I can do.”

Eventually, when everything was set up, they rolled the starting conditions and began playing. Kazi very obviously knew what they were doing with the primary advantages of the Sun faction – agriculture, population, and military might – but Rayla was perfectly well acquainted with a proper Moon playstyle as well. She leaned into the espionage and intrigue skillset as heavily as she could manage, wreaking political strife in Kazi’s territory wherever she found an opening. When Kazi could find them, her units died; but that certainly wasn’t always.

Even so, the outcome was something of a foregone conclusion. The game lasted a while, because Rayla knew that her main defence against the Sun armies was if they couldn’t find the Moon cities, and planned accordingly…but Rayla hadn’t succeeded in assassinating the Archdragon, and hadn’t managed to get the Sun citizenry to demand a leadership duel either. So, unsurprisingly, Kazi eventually managed to field an assault that broke through the illusory barriers protecting Rayla’s stronghold, striking at her Archdragon precisely on the turn before New Moon. It died of its injuries the turn later.

Rayla considered the board carefully after that. Her best chances of winning against Sun would be crop poisoning, Archdragon assassinating, leadership disputes, or revolution. She’d managed the first and had been making decent headway on the latter two, but, in the end…it wasn’t close enough. She smiled ruefully, and said “Moon concedes.”

They nodded, having expected that, and smiled beatifically. “It was a marvellous game,” they said warmly, already reaching over to begin clearing the pieces. “Thank you very much for it.”

“I don’t know, it was a pretty solid victory for you.” Her voice was dry as she reached out to help, handling each of the intricately-carved figures with care. “You’re obviously the better player, here.”

“Yes,” they agreed, neither modestly nor boastfully, simply as the fact it was. “But nonetheless, you are certainly the best player I’ve encountered in-person in a very long time. Certainly the only one I didn’t arrange to meet with beforehand. It was a good game, no matter that you lost it.”

Rayla dipped her head, smiling a little. It wasn’t like she enjoyed losing…but she’d appreciated the challenge enough to make up for it. She’d ceased finding any sort of challenge back home a long, long time ago. “Yeah, it wasn’t bad.”

Kazi reached for another piece, paused, then eyed her consideringly. “Would you…like to discuss it?” they asked, tilting their head, watching her.

She glanced up, surprised. It was hardly an unfamiliar concept. She’d watched enough matches broadcast on Sunbeam to know how it went; when two top-tier players concluded a match, they talked about it afterwards. They discussed each other’s plays and strategies, pointed out mistakes, considered where there was room for improvement…

The only after-game discussions she’d ever had had been at Runaan’s knee, when she was still small and didn’t know the game nearly as well. It was weirdly flattering to be invited to do it now.

“…Yeah,” Rayla said, eventually, and sat back down. “I’d like that.”

Kazi beamed like the Sun they’d just used to trounce her. “Very good.”

The next half hour involved more talking than Rayla thought she’d done at a time in months…or, well, she would’ve said so, if not for last night. It was certainly a good second-place contender though, and by the end her voice was feeling a little tired from overuse. They concluded the discussion, packed away the gamepieces and board, and then were done.

“But of course, you must stay for another drink,” Kazi said, and whisked her empty glass of reveillant away. “You liked the berry infusion, yes? Excellent, I will get you another.” Good to their word, they did precisely that, and returned in short order.

Rayla did feel a little more awake, on that second glass of the reveillant. It was effective stuff; as much or more so than coffee, with (in her opinion) a considerably better taste. She was debating the merits of asking Kazi where they got it when they spoke up first.

“You’ll be returning, I hope?” they said, and it took Rayla a moment to think of what they meant.

“….Here?” she guessed. “For a rematch?”

“Well, yes, naturally.” Kazi pushed their glasses up, smiling a little. “I had assumed as much. But, no, I was referring to the game society. You’d be an excellent fit, I think.”

Rayla blinked. “Oh.” She thought of the previous night, and hunched down a little in embarrassment.

“I know it was only a very small group when you visited, but I have the impression you prefer that, anyway,” they said, neatly demonstrating that they were as unnervingly good at reading her as she’d sort of inferred. “It can get rowdier in term time – at least at the official meetings. The meet-ups at our houses are much calmer – usually just the core group.”

“Which is?” Rayla asked, a little reserved now, if only to disguise the fact that she really didn’t need convincing. She might have, after just the Friday. But after this…after yesterday…

“Myself, Callum, Nihatasi. Usually Pava, but often he spends the whole time tinkering instead of playing.” They shook their head, amused. “In term time – well, usually I’d say to expect Evairas, but he is spectacularly busy these days, so perhaps not.”

“…They sent messages,” she commented, after a moment. “Callum and Nihatasi, I mean. Pava didn’t.”

“Pava tends to forget Sunbeam exists for weeks at a time, don’t mind him,” Kazi assured her. “Nihatasi and Callum though, I’m not at all surprised. Nihatasi adores new people, and Callum…” they eyed her, just a little speculatively. “Well, I think you impressed him. Has he invited you to Tuesday, yet?”

Rayla blinked with consternation. “Invited me to what on Tuesday?”

“Game meeting, at the house,” they clarified. “It’s hardly an official thing, but it’s often Callum’s house that has everyone over. He hasn’t invited you over, yet? Well, he will. I am quite sure of it.”

For a long moment, she looked into her glass and the dark red liquid therein, pondering it as if it held all the answers for how she was supposed to respond. “If you say so,” she said, finally, and lifted her glass to drink.

“I do,” Kazi claimed serenely, and gracefully changed the topic to (naturally) more about Antiquitora. By the time Rayla finished her drink, she’d learned that Kazi played broadcast games online fairly regularly, under a handle that she recognised; she’d watched a good few of their games before.

“Is there a story behind that skein-name?” she asked, undeniably curious now that she was acquainted with the elf behind it. “’Finguistician’.”

Kazi laughed, like she’d surprised them. “Oh, that,” they said, mirthfully. “It’s something of an in-joke. You see, I have my doctorate in Linguistics – specifically, in non-verbal linguistics. Various sign languages, Draconic Corpus, and so on. I made a joke once, when I was still an undergraduate in a sign-language module, that the course should be called finguistics, given, well,” they waggled their fingers at her.

She snorted, amused. “Did it catch on?”

“Sadly, no. But I do call my sign language classes for the public ‘finguistics’, and no one can stop me, because I am the teacher.” They giggled a little to themself. “Perhaps in time it will become a more widely-used term. I would like that; it would be very amusing. In any case, that is where the handle comes from.”

Rayla thought, for a moment, about a moment from the game night: Kazi and Callum had used some sort of sign language with each other for a second, hadn’t they? She considered asking about it, wondering what his background in that was. Did he take any of Kazi’s lessons, or had he learned some other way?

In the end, she bit her tongue and said nothing. After a little more idle conversation, she eventually made her leave, farewelled at the door by her cheerful host. Without the game to bolster her, she swiftly began to really feel her exhaustion. Stimulants or not, she was so tired that a headache was starting to pound luridly behind her eyes, almost enough to make them water.

She headed home intending to collapse back into bed and nap – if the lingering effects of the drinks allowed her to, anyway. Which was why she was considerably displeased to arrive back to find her wing busy and full of noise and various elves milling about. The halls were crowded. She was about to say “What the fuck”, or perhaps “Shut up, do you know how bad my headache is right now”, but before she had the chance one of the closest elves (some wingmate she didn’t know the name of) spotted her and shouted down the hall “It’s her, she’s here, she’s not dead!”

All eyes went to her, and an immediate chattering started up. Rayla stared, utterly nonplussed, fighting the urge to pull on the Moon and take advantage of a state of near-invisibility to just retreat to her nice, privacy-sealed bedroom. The noise cancellation ought to take care of this racket.

After a few seconds, a face she actually had a name for pushed forwards. It was Stavian, a Skywing elf from her bellatorium, still in armour from training. “Rayla,” he said, sounding very relieved. “Thank goodness, we were about to call for an official search!”

Rayla had no idea what was happening. “What in Xadia’s name is going on here?” she demanded, finally, and her irate tone seemed to remind him that he (for some reason) customarily seemed to be quite intimidated by her. He shrank back a little, and as he did, a few of the rest of the Honour Games team started to appear.

“You didn’t show up for training!” he said, defensively. “And from anyone else that wouldn’t be much of a big deal, but you’ve never missed a day before. And then when we went to check on you afterwards you weren’t here.”

“And none of your wingmates knew where you were,” added one of her teammates: Fiera, a particularly tiny Skywing mage with hair and feathers dyed a distinctive lilac colour.

Rayla stared for a few more seconds, then wiped a hand over her face. “It was Full Moon,” she said, very slowly, her patience already somewhere on level with the floor. “I didn’t get to sleep till around five; of course I wasn’t going to go to morning training.” She ignored the fact that, if not for Callum, she absolutely would have. He’d been right; it was completely reasonable to miss training on a Full Moon rest day, and if they had a problem with that they could bite her.

The vast collective of people assembled in the halls all looked very embarrassed, suddenly. And honestly, they should be. Moonshadow elves were definitely uncommon in Gullcrest, but surely someone should have known it was Full Moon, and made the obvious conclusions. “Oh,” said Fiera, weakly. Her wings drooped a little. “That…makes sense.”

Now looking very abashed, Stavian echoed “Oh.” The crowd of assorted wingmates and guests, probably attracted by the initial hubbub, started to grumble and dissipate.

Rayla sighed, and rubbed at her eyes, attempting to scrounge some sort of positive emotion from beneath her absolute crankiness at being confronted with a noisy group of people when she was this sleep-deprived. “Look,” she attempted, tiredly, “It’s…nice you were worried. I didn’t realise anyone would be looking for me.” She searched for something appropriate to say. “I’ll…put a note on my door, if something like this comes up again?”

Her teammates, four of whom had shown up, nodded contritely. “Sorry for bothering you on a rest day,” offered another of them, starting to shove the others towards the door. “We’ll see you for training tomorrow, right?”

“Yes, I’ll be there,” Rayla looked longingly down the hallway, where her bed awaited. “I don’t exactly make a habit of missing training, you know.”

“Yeah, you’re very – dedicated,” Fiera said, in the tones of someone trying to be diplomatic, still being ushered doorwards. “Have a good rest day!” she called, right before the rest of them filed out and the wing became something approaching quiet again.

Too tired and too grumpy to have much emotional response to the whole thing, Rayla turned and headed down her hallway without a further word. The wing was still bustling, and it was more of a relief than usual to close her door on it; the privacy runes hummed lethargically as they activated, but the noise level outside cut off sharply enough that for once she didn’t mind their quality too much. They mostly did their job, and that was all she really needed.

It turned out that the effect of the reveillant couldn’t really complete with post-Full-Moon sleep deprivation; Rayla crawled into bed and fell asleep more or less instantly.

She woke some hours later, stirring at the sound of some computer module or other humming as it reactivated from idling. It wasn’t loud by any means, but she was quite sensitive to new or changing sounds in her vicinity, so it was enough. She blinked her eyes open, rubbing grit from their edges, and stumbled out of bed with a glance at the clock along the way. Moon-sense said it was late afternoon; the clock was a bit more specific about it, and said 6.33pm. The sky outside was still blue and light, but in that summer-evening way, where the sun had fallen low enough to cast long shadows between the city buildings. It was still bright enough to make her tired to look at.

There were new messages on her Sunbeam.

Rayla dropped into her desk chair and eyed the icon tiredly, uncertain if she was awake or rested enough to deal with any further social contact today. In the end she decided there probably wasn’t any harm in checking them, so…she looked. Kazi had thanked her for the game, and sent her some sort of invitation to make an account on…what looked to be the skeinsite that hosted the high-level Antiquitora broadcasts. She wasn’t sure what the purpose of that was, and didn’t have her head on sufficiently to figure it out, so she left it for later. Ethari had asked how her Full Moon had been. And…

She sighed, not sure whether to be pleased or embarrassed, because: Callum had left messages, too. Fairly recently, actually.

They read Hope you got to sleep okay, and how are you feeling? There was no mention of whatever he’d supposedly wanted to mention before the call ended, so he’d probably forgotten, or…something.

She debated whether or not to reply now. She found she was a little wary of…something. She wasn’t quite sure what. Making a fool of herself, maybe? She’d already spent nearly two very late-night hours sunbeaming him, and…that was already…well.

In the end, Rayla spent about five minutes trying to wrestle some semblance of reason past her sleep-mired brain, finally concluding that she was probably unlikely to come across as an infatuated idiot by responding to a couple of messages. Then, slowly, she picked at the keys to write back: Kind of knackered, but okay. While that one was processing, she hesitantly sent another: Just woke up from a nap. I think it helped?

She left the computer to visit the bathroom, tidying up her hair and washing her face with cold water. It did little to make her feel more alert, or to remove the weird muggy haze of exhaustion from her head, but it was better than nothing. She contemplated getting something to eat, but knew she wasn’t going to be up to cooking tonight. She went for one of her bottles of emergency moonberry elixir instead, which were so full of nutrients they probably counted as some kind of soup.

That in hand, she returned to her computer….and, somehow, wasn’t surprised to find that Callum had already replied. Was he just constantly glued to his computer, or what?

Well, at least it’s apparently traditional to be tired after full moon, I guess? He’d written, light-heartedly. At least you got a nap! Although it’s kind of late. Won’t you have trouble getting to sleep later?

Rayla shuffled forwards in her chair to respond. Nah. There’s a neat trick you can use to get to sleep at night if you’re a Moonshadow elf, and if it’s not Full Moon. Just need to shine a bright light in my face and I’ll be good. She hadn’t had to use it in a while, but she knew where the thing was: on her windowsill, to soak up sunlight during the day. It’d do the job just fine.

The pause in response seemed to be longer than connection lag would account for. That’s so weird, and cool, he marvelled, eventually. I just looked it up. They call them sun lamps?

Yep. Flash of sunlight in a dark place gets us sleepy pretty much every time. Moonshadow elves tended to be mostly diurnal by practice, but naturally, they all had the wiring for a nocturnal lifestyle. Bright sunlight in the eyes after being in the dark would usually trigger tiredness, even in elves perfectly used to going about in the daytime. Sun lamps were extraordinarily simple as far as enchanted objects went, but extraordinarily useful for Moonshadow elves with weird schedules.

What about if someone turns a light on in a dark room? He asked, apparently fascinated.

Nah. Has to be sunlight. It’s pretty specific.

That’s so cool, he reiterated, from that bizarre well of enthusiasm he seemed to have for banal magical elements of everyday life. Rayla waited to see if he’d write anything more, and after a moment, realised she’d started smiling. She wasn’t sure when that had happened. Eventually, he did send something else: I’d ask if you wanted to call again, but you should probably, you know, be getting actual sleep.

What Rayla intended to write then was something along the lines of, ‘yes, you��re entirely correct, I need to sleep for like twelve hours if I’m not going to be a useless wreck for training tomorrow’.

Instead, what she ending up sending was keep it half an hour or less, and you’re probably fine.

I’ll set a timer :) he typed, complete with smiley, which was something she’d never actually encountered outside of the mageskein before. And then he called her.

“How’s the light level?” she asked him, when the call resolved. It wasn’t yet far into sunset, so she thought there ought to be sufficient lighting in her room to see by, but who really knew with humans. She certainly didn’t know how bad their eyes were.

In his own room, Callum was bathed in the warm glow of the light through his windows, shaded the same pink-orange that she was. He was smiling, even as he pretended to squint exaggeratedly at her room. “Yeah, I can just about see,” he said, obviously teasing. “It’s not dark yet.” A pause, and he took a moment to look her over a little more directly. He was a little more concerned when he added “Are you sure it’s okay to be calling? You really do look tired.”

“I think I’ll survive half an hour, Callum,” she told him wryly, and one corner of his lips twitched upwards.

“Yeah, fair enough.” He hesitated for a moment, like he was summoning his nerve for something. “Listen – I wanted to ask before, yesterday, but – there’s going to be a sort of casual gaming night? At my house? On Tuesday. The others will be there. And my housemates, er, obviously.” He cleared his throat. “Sorry if it’s short notice, but – do you want to come?”

Rayla stared at him, half bemused by the offer itself, half at his apparent nervousness. “Kazi said you were going to invite me,” she said, a little too nonplussed to offer any more intelligent response. “I guess they were right.”

He blinked. “You’ve been talking to Kazi?” A pause. “No, wait, what am I saying, of course you’ve been talking to Kazi. There’s no way they’d let someone who beat them at Antiquitora get away.”

“We had a rematch today, actually,” Rayla admitted, lips twitching. “I let them take Sun. Naturally they destroyed me.”

“Ow,” Callum said, with feeling. “I’ve been on the receiving end of Kazi playing Sun before. It’s…” he searched for the words. “Really something.”

She smiled, remembering it. With a few hours separating her from the game, she realised she’d enjoyed the experience more than she’d anticipated. The discussion in particular had been welcome. “I’m just glad to be able to play someone new, honestly,” she confided. “Though it’d be nice to do it again when I’ve actually slept.” A second later, she remembered he’d had an almost equally dubious bedtime, and inspected him critically. He looked surprisingly okay, actually. A little tired, but not like he’d been up most of the night. “Did you sleep in late, or what?” She asked then, a little amused. “You don’t actually look tired.”

He laughed sheepishly. “Yeah, I didn’t wake up till around lunchtime,” he admitted. “I had to go to work after that, though.”

Rayla paused, still very unsure of how to respond to mentions of his work. “And…was that okay?” She asked at last, uncertainly.

“Yeah, actually. I had a pattern etching appointment, and those are some of my favourites,” he said, brightening. “This one wanted one of my new designs, too. It turned out great!”

She’d seen something about that on the posters in the waiting room, she thought. “That’d be the…buzzing patterns into the horns?” She asked, faintly.

“Mmhm. I use sort of a really small thin version of an electric buffer, and work the etching in that way,” he agreed. “I draw the design on first and follow the lines, and then after you can either just polish it up and leave it, or like, fill with metal or something. It takes a while, but, you know, that’s kind of just how art works.” He shrugged. “It looks great, anyway.”

Rayla thought of her looming appointment, maybe a week or so away, and found she was entirely unprepared for thinking about that. “You…seem to kind of do the art thing a lot?” she hazarded, as a distraction, nodding to the nearest easel. “Painting?”

He turned to look, then grinned back at her. “Yeah! I mean, art is…well, I probably draw more than I game, and that’s really saying something. I do all sorts, kinda. I’ll have to show you some of my sketchbooks sometime.” That seemed to remind him of the question she still hadn’t answered, and he abruptly looked nervous again. “So. Er. Um. About Tuesday…?”

She tried, very hard, to keep an even expression. “Er,” she managed, and then finally: “…Yeah. Sounds good? I’ll…be there.” Wherever ‘there’ was. She did have the address written down, but hadn’t actually tried to figure out where it was in the city yet.

Callum straightened up, brightening. “Really? That’s great!” A second later, he amended “It’ll be really nice to have someone new over! We’ll have food and stuff, too.”

She paused at that. “Should I bring anything?” Hospitality expectations tended to be very different depending on culture, so it merited the question.

“Nah. Well, if you want, you can bring snacks or food, but you don’t need to. We have loads.” A second later, he added ruefully “Kassa has some…pretty strong opinions about how fully-stocked a kitchen should be.”

“That’s one of your housemates?” she remembered.

“Yeah! Actually, I lived with Kassa and her mom for a few years before. They sort of hosted me, when I was…well, when I first came to Gullcrest.” He amended his sentence half-way through, as if realising he was about to say too much. She was intensely curious about that. “This house is her family property, too, so we don’t have to pay much on it. We moved in when Kassa started her undergrad.”

She blinked, filing that information away. This had something to do with the mystery of him doing a mage’s masters at the age of eighteen, she was sure of it, but… “What about your other housemates?”

“Nihatasi moved in because we had room and she was a friend,” he said, matter-of-factly. “Soren…” he hesitated. “Well, he’s a childhood friend of mine,” he settled on eventually. “So he came to study here, and he took the last spare room.”

Rayla eyed him, but didn’t question him on the obvious secrets clamouring behind his words. “Looks a lot roomier than usual student wings, at least,” she commented finally. “These rooms are pretty cramped. And the runework is pretty worn-down. My door makes this horrible droning noise every time the wards come on.”

He made an ‘oof’ sound. “I’ve visited student wings before. They’re…well, they’re okay. Definitely prefer this house though.” He eyed her curiously. “Is yours at least one of the ones where you get one bathroom between two people? Because I knew someone who only had one bathroom for twelve, and it was terrible.”

“That sounds disgusting,” she said, making a face. She could hardly imagine how terrible that would be, with how some of her wingmates were. “I’m so glad that’s not me.”

“So glad,” he agreed, and before she knew it, they were off on a weirdly engrossing conversation about the merits of student living compared to home life. He was pretty evasive about it, but she got the impression he’d been used to a fairly fancy home before he came to Gullcrest, and he’d been astonished at what student wings were like.

Rayla was in the middle of describing how chaotic move-in day had been, with so many elves hauling all their boxes of things in at once, when a shrill ringing started up from over Callum’s voicecatcher. He reached hastily to the side and disabled some sort of egg timer that had gone off, settling back into view with a sheepish smile.

“That was the timer,” he said, apologetically.

Half an hour, already. It was a little disconcerting how quickly it’d gone by. “I’d better try to turn in for an early night, then,” she offered, weirdly reluctant to hang up.

He hesitated a fair bit, too. “Probably a good idea,” he agreed, wry. “We can talk again later?” His tone went questioning, at that. A little hopeful.

Rayla resisted the urge to bury her face in her hands. “…Yeah, sure,” she sighed, more and more exasperated with herself for just how much she wanted to talk to him.

Callum smiled again, the edges of him lit up from the light of the falling sun. “Later, then,” he said, and hesitated once again. Then he reached out, and the call disconnected. Sunbeam minimised to its idling overlay around the edges of her screen, the background of Silvergrove scenery back to the fore.

She sighed, and leaned back in her chair. Ruefully, she spend a while reflecting on exactly how in trouble she was. Then she did as a responsible elf on their Full Moon rest day ought, and went to attempt an early night.

She managed it almost as soon as it was dark enough for her magic rune-rock to work. Thank Xadia for sun lamps, honestly.

---

End chapter.

Yeah so this is basically completely unbetaed, even by me, because I’ve been frantically trying to churn out a complete chapter this week in time for the Modern AU day of rayllum month. There will be typos, there will be clunky sentences, that’s just what you get for a rush job. I’ll return to it and do some editing in the morning.

Re: the Antiquitora. ‘Would you like to discuss the game’ *hikago fandom origins vibes intensify*

Worldbuilding notes for this chapter:

Moondances: specific ritual dances made to react with the runic Circles that Moonshadow elves use. The dancing is used as a form of spellcraft, to cast enchantments or strengthen the magic of a community. The Full Moon dances in Silvergrove for example are integral for keeping its magical defences running. (piaj)

EX and WX: East Xadian and West Xadia. A more modern and correct term for the human and elf/dragon sides of the continent, respectively.

Artefact magic: primal magic cast with a power source other than your own arcanum. E.g. a primal stone, a moon opal.

Thaumaturgy: the practice of magic casting.

Thaumatology: the study of magic.

Lightcatcher: magic camera, basically.

Voicecatcher: magic microphone, basically.

Honour Games: a fun sport :) more on this later.

Technomancy/technomantic: alternate proper term for magical engineering.

Antiquitora notes: while the game has been steadily gaining complexity over time, the game at its fundamentals is very old, and quite traditional. It’s considered a respectable strategy game, and Runaan certainly would have approved of Rayla showing an interest in it when she was younger. Modern variants tend to adopt features and ‘house rules’ that don’t strictly conform to traditional standards, though.

East Xadian computer games: though boasting dramatically better visuals and audio than human technology is currently capable of, the limitations of elven computing mean that computer games are extremely expensive, and difficult to integrate into lesser systems. Most elves will never be able to run the best gaming modules at home.

Nomad Gameships: Brevili nomads are well known for their magical engineering, and produce some of the most advanced technomantic games there are. Owing to the limited number of elves who can actually afford to buy them, they get creative with the marketing: many clans field airships whose sole purpose is travelling around as a sort of mobile arcade, landing at various destinations for a set amount of time, during which customers can pay for access to the many assorted games they have on offer. Demani, as the clan that (a good long while ago) invented the airship in the first place, boasts the most impressive facilities on their ships.

Skycrawler: a game so advanced and finicky that its developers haven’t yet figured out how to get it to run on less advanced systems than the gameships’ computers. There are a handful like these, usually the newest and most technomantically complex titles, and their release on gameships usually serves as something of a ‘beta’ build while they refine the technology for more accessible use. Imunaviga was one of these, and was very recently released for public purchase.

Imunaviga: as several commenters guessed, this is indeed a Subnautica expy. Rayla is not at all keen on the idea of playing it. I spent probably too much time working out the worldbuilding and plot for the elf AU version of this game. It was a lot of fun though.

Scion of Shadow: a well-regarded game with a Moonshadow elf protagonist, involving a lot of stealth gameplay, a highly-lauded storyline, and in-setting ‘fantasy’ elements; i.e. they’d be considered fantasy in this fantasy setting.

Magical overload states: Natural events that cause high levels of ambient primal magic can induce some very unusual effects in beings with the relevant arcana. Terms include ‘moonstruck’ for Moonshadow elves, ‘sunstruck’ for Sunfire, and ‘storm-drunk’ for Skywing. (piaj)

Moondust: a magic-dampening drug taken in different dosages based on the phase of the moon, to dampen the effect of the lunar cycle on Moonshadow elves’ bodies and minds. Not all Moonshadow elves take it, but most do. (piaj)

Reveillant: Sunfire elf beverage made from the dried berries of a shrub with stimulant properties. Some preparations are very strong and are restricted, but preparations from the berries are mild and very popular. (piaj)

Draconic Corpus: a sort of full-body sign language spoken by dragons incapable of complex vocal speech. Given this accounts for the majority of dragons, it’s generally useful to understand some of, even if bipeds are generally incapable of speaking it properly. (piaj)

#rayllum #rayllummonth #tdp callum #tdp rayla #college AU #modern AU #the ceracurist

35 notes · View notes

wakaoujisenhime · 3 years

Text

Our fireplace - Keigo x reader

A/N: This right here is a special present for @bluuenvy for the Secret Santa event fyeahbnha hosted! Hope you have a great holiday! I tried to implement as much of your interests/wishes, which you shared with me, as I could and hope that you’ll enjoy this fluffy story even a little bit! (*´◡`)

I also tried my hand at graphics and hope that it’s enough to count as a second present! Please enjoy! ❤️

Tags: Hawks/Keigo x reader ✅ SFW ✅ fluff ✅

━━━━☆ ━━━━☆ ━━━━☆

You were woken up rather sudden and unwillingly as the sunlight which shone on the empty space next to you reached your closed eyes. In an attempt to escape the bothersome light you turn your back to your windows and look at the dimly lit room with squinted eyes. The slight fragrance of your boyfriend’s cologne was still lingering and it made you remember the way his arms would always wrap around your body and keep you warm during all those nights immediately made a smile appear on your sleepy face.

Despite still feeling tired you stretched your body and reached for your glasses on the nightstand next to your bed, while doing so you managed to catch a glimpse of the clock.

8:35 AM…

You sighed and leaned your back against the headboard. It usually didn’t surprise you to wake up alone, but today you at least hoped to be able to have your beloved next to yourself. Sadly him being a pro hero meant that things like this would occur daily and you had no choice but to accept it.

Another sigh escaped your mouth as you slowly got up and made your way to the kitchen, ready to prepare some breakfast and start your first free day since long ago, but much to your surprise a plate of your favorite breakfast meal was already standing at the center of the kitchen island and a small note was leaned against the edge of the plate. You take the small paper and look at the familiar handwriting.

Good morning sunshine, hope I didn’t wake you up this morning (though maybe I should have). I wish you a Merry Christmas and hope that you’ll make the most out of today’s first half, ‘cause I get to have you all to myself during the second half. Just make sure to be at home by 6 PM, trust me...you won’t regret it.

Love you, my dear

While you read that note, you failed to notice the wide grin that had spread across your face. The mere thought of your boyfriend having prepared something for the two of you additionally to his plan of coming home earlier than he had ever managed before made your heart race with anticipation. You started humming to yourself while you ate your warm breakfast.

Today is going to be a great day…

With that thought in mind, you finished up eating, put the dishes away, and made your way to the bathroom. Your plan for today was to mainly spoil yourself and do some shopping, since thanks to work you weren’t able to go on a good shopping spree for quite a while.

Surrounded by the warm and bubbly water of your bathtub you let your thoughts wander, thinking about whether you should invite some of your friends to accompany you, but you decided against it, remembering that today was a special holiday they’d probably like to spend alongside their families and significant others. Thanks to your thought process, the idea of spending Christmas alongside your beloved entered your mind once again and before you could suppress any upcoming scenario that popped into your head, you saw a small smiley face on the mirror shelf unit above your sink. Your eyes widened as you remembered the day Hawks had drawn this small emoticon. The two of you took a bath together on that day and when you started drying your hair in front of the mirrored shelf he made fun of your pouty face. He said that you should try and look more cheerful so that you prevent any wrinkles from forming on your beautiful and young face. Since the mirror was still partially fogged back then, the little face had stayed there, and it unexpectedly brightened up your mood.

“Alright, let’s do this!” you happily cried out and raised both of your fists into the air, determined to make this the best day of your life.

After pressing the play button on your phone’s favorite playlist and turning the volume to max, you began to dance while you dressed yourself up. As for today’s outfit, you picked one that you considered your favorite: black skinny jeans, a dark purple top, and a grey pullover with dark-colored patterns. Now that you were dressed up, you once again returned to the bath to do your hair, since having long hair meant a lot of struggles, but you never considered it that way...if anything you absolutely loved it and you’d gladly spend almost an hour playing with it or fixing it, and indeed it took you 40 minutes to fix it the way you wanted it to be. With a triumphant grin, you placed your hands on your hips and admired the subtle hairdo that perfectly complemented your facial features.

Perfect...now I’m all set.

Instead of pausing your loud music, you simply plugged your headphones in and continued dancing to the vibrant beats that roared through the small speakers as you progressively left the apartment.

——

After getting on your regional bus which would drive you right to the heart of the city where all of the shops would stand so close to each other that they resembled a tight-knitted pearl necklace, allowing not even the tiniest space for a side alley. You took a seat next to the window and looked out, relishing the familiar places of your vivid hometown. As soon as the vehicle passed a couple of your favorite stores you once again remembered some of your past dates with Keigo and thanks to the energetic J-Rock music that dominated your playlist, the scenes you recalled were mostly positive. Even though you were in a slight daze something caught you off guard. A pair of red wings flashed before your vision and you were so taken aback that it took you a short while to actually process what you had seemingly witnessed. You reluctantly turned your head back a bit, trying to make sure that your eyes weren’t deceiving you, but the bus had already passed the shop in question and the trademark of your boyfriend was nowhere to be seen.

Am I finally starting to see things?

Your stop finally arrived and the moment you got out of the bus, the festive mood of the city finally hit you in all its glory. Holiday lights, garlands, colorful posters announcing sales or wishing passersby and customers a merry Christmas. Everything was so full of life and bright that the immense urge to visit every single shop overcame you, a tingly feeling you know too well. The city center was brimming with life and not only tourists and locals were present, but also some folks from the outskirts had decided to drop by and enjoy what the usually stressful and oppressing collage of high buildings had organized for the festive days. Your excitement went through the roof as you walked a few steps, letting your eyes roam around, and that’s when you first took notice of the variety of street vendors that loudly advertised their products and food. Everything seemed so welcoming and warm and if it weren’t for your little “promise” with Keigo, you would’ve spent your entire day jumping from one store to the other, trying as much of the food out as your stomach could take. A silent giggle escaped your lips at the sheer imagination of yourself going through with that plan, but enough of that. You were here to spoil yourself and no one was going to stop you from it.

A few hours passed by and within those you had visited a handful of shops. You had paid a visit to your favorite clothing store, which you left with two full shopping bags, full of new different tops, jeans, jackets, and a few beanies you’d occasionally put on. Next, you visited one of the many music stores your city had constructed, looking for the newest release of your main Japanese rock band as well as for some merch to go along with it. Further down the street was a small and barely noticeable building, its size was minuscule in comparison to the ones which surrounded him and unlike them, it had no modern façade, it was a simple brick building with very few Christmas decorations. And this small store was something you considered your getaway on lonely days or just bad days in general...it was your favorite bookstore. You were always over the moon when they had the latest release of your favorite genre of books, namely mystery novels. The staff there was similar to the building’s exterior: old but proper, super friendly, and attentive to any type of customers. They adored you and you did so as well. That mutual fondness you had for each other lead to many conversations on different topics, you sometimes even sat down and drank something together, but the main thing they did for you was set the newest releases to the side and wait for you to pick them up.

When you opened the wooden door to the store the familiar chime of the small bell above the door frame rang out, notifying the two owners of your arrival.

“My dear, welcome! How have you been?”

Another wide smile adorned your lips as you took the old and skinny hands of the owner into your own, squeezing them lightly. The two of you exchanged greetings, chatted a bit, and then his facial features dropped a little. His voice sounded sad as he confessed to you that there were no new novels for you to pick up. His seriousness took you by surprise, but you just giggled and reassured him, that it was no problem whatsoever, you were here to give them something in the first place. Their surprised and touched expressions warmed your heart, and after exchanging dozens of hugs you exited the store and resumed your shopping spree…

“No way! Bakugou look who’s there!”

The sudden loud but cheerful voice caught you off guard and as you turned your head to its source you saw a familiar duo amid the countless other pedestrians.

“Kirishima! Bakugou! What a coincidence of meeting you guys here!”

“There’s nothing coincidental about this and you know it.”

Both you and the red-haired young man squinted your eyes and raised your eyebrows at the grumpy blond, who immediately got flustered and tried to hide it with countless insults that weren’t bad-mannered in the least. Ignoring his usual tactics Kirishima and you shifted your attention to each other and started chatting up a storm.

“Have you been out shopping for presents as well?” he asked with his typical lively voice. You smiled and answered that this was more or less the case. The three of you resumed the walk and talked about today’s plans.

You found out that the former 1A planned a get-together at a restaurant and Bakugou made sure to stress multiple times that he wasn’t here voluntarily and that Kirishima had forced him to go shopping for some small surprises for their former classmates.

“And what about you, don’t you have anything planned with that birdman of yours?” If you weren’t between these tall men right now, the blond would’ve gotten elbowed by his friend, who now had to resort to glares only.

“Bakugou, you can’t ask her something so personal!”

“Why not? Didn’t we tell her about our plans too?”

“She’ll share it with us if she feels comfortable, ok? It’s way more private than our get-together!”

“You little-”

Much to their surprise, your giggles were what interrupted their small bickering and after a while, the two of them couldn’t hold back and joined in. After calming down you just shook your head and told them about the small note he had left behind but after suppressing all those lonely thoughts for the entire day, your facade finally dropped and so did your expression. You couldn’t take it anymore, this entire time you had spent in the city, trying to spoil yourself, one couple after the other entered your sight and as if to spite you, all of them recreating some of the cutest couple moments you had experienced alongside Hawks. It was as if all the couples had come up with a plan to constantly rub salt into your wound and you really hated being that overdramatic, but you really couldn’t help it.

So what if I want to be with him on Christmas?

Is it bad that I want him by my side on a holiday one is supposed to celebrate with their loved one?

You suddenly felt a big hand pat you on your back and it startled you. Turns out that you had been saying all of these things out loud. Now both men were looking at you with a worried and sympathetic expression, it was no secret that you were embarrassed about your sudden outburst and just as you were about to apologize to them, Bakugou sighed unexpectedly audible, catching the two of you off guard.

“You know I’m probably never going to hear the end of this, but I can’t keep this up anymore...not when you’re like this,” he paused and looked at you “before I met up with Kirishima, I saw that bird further down the street, mumbling to himself that he had to quickly go back home and start preparing for something or else he wouldn’t make it. So chances that you meet him at home right now rather than later...are rather high.”

That’s all he had to say and the perhaps biggest grin you had ever mustered appeared on your face a couple of seconds after he had finished his little confession of sorts. You really wanted to stay with them for a little bit longer but the thought of meeting Keigo earlier than expected prevailed, so you hugged them goodbye, wished them and their classmates a pleasant night, and finally gave Bakugou a quick and rather unexpected kiss on his puffed-out cheek. Kirishima stopped him from releasing his quirk under the broad daylight while they were in between all these innocent people and earned himself a reward kiss on his cold red cheek as well.

The drive back passed by quicker in comparison to earlier and you were really thankful for that since you couldn’t wait to meet your beloved any longer.

“Keigo!”

Your loud voice mixed with the quick and sudden way you opened the front door startled the winged man so bad that he even let out a silent yelp. He was so surprised by your premature visit that he just stood there in the middle of the living room with two beautifully wrapped presents in his hands. You were quite surprised yourself at the way your home had changed in those few hours you were away, but that was secondary right now because something on your boyfriend caught your attention. He wore a fluffy white pullover which you secretly knitted for him over the course of a few months, it was supposed to be his present for today which you had put underneath the small Christmas tree the two of you decorated a few weeks back.

“Ok wait, I can explain!”

While he put away the two boxes in panic, you simply jogged up to him and jumped into his arms, almost knocking him down. Before he could say anything, you began kissing his lips passionately and after a few of your kisses, he decided to just drop his explanation for the time being and enjoy your affectionate behavior, which he of course returned with as much love as you had given him.

When the two of you finally separated, he took the initiative and began talking: “So before you start showering me with questions all I want to say is that I was planning on surprising you with a joint dinner, some presents, and your favorite dessert. Unfortunately, someone caught me in the middle of my plans so now…you’ll have to wait quite a bit for me to finish everything up, sorry about that sunshine I reall-”

“It’s ok Keigo I don’t mind! If anything...I’d love to help you out with it and even though that might ruin your planned surprise, I honestly don’t care for it too much. I just want to be with you today.”

Your bluntness had always been something he admired you for and it was no secret that he still had some problems with expressing his feelings without any restraint and that’s why he really appreciated it when you made the first steps. Back when the two of you had first met it was the exact opposite: he was the open and pretty forward person while you were a tad shyer, but after the two of you gradually grew closer to each other your roles reversed. Nonetheless, you both complement each other perfectly and every day was but another great adventure.

The two of you moved your conversation to the kitchen where you guys finished up the rest of the dinner and talked about your day. That’s also when you finally answered the question he was constantly bringing up, namely why you knew that he’d be back at home earlier than he promised.

After you guys put some of the meals in the oven and let the others cool down, your boyfriend took you by the hand and dragged you to the fireplace he had lit some moments ago, urging you that it was now your turn to open your presents.

Keigo sat down cross-legged in front of you and watched you open the boxes with big eyes. You picked the bigger one first and when you finally reached the present you couldn’t help but laugh. It was a beige cardigan which also seemed like it was self-knit, similar to the pullover you gave him. Both of you couldn’t help but burst out laughing at the similar thoughts you guys had for a present. Next up was the smaller rectangle box which was way harder in comparison and even though you tried your best to not damage the wonderfully chosen present paper, your curiosity got the best out of you and soon you were ripping one small piece after the other...and forth came a book.

“N-No way! Keigo is that what I think this is?”

“Well...if you’re thinking about the newest volume of your favorite suspense novel, then yes, this is indeed it!”

You happily cried out his name and once again threw your arms around his neck, but this time it was him who attacked you with millions of kisses. Keigo then took you into his arms and leaned his back against the couch. Both of you remained in that position for a short while, his calm breathing, and a little quickened heartbeat were having a quite calming effect on you. The warmth the fire next to you provided made you sleepy on top of that and just as you were about to close your eyes and doze off, your beloved’s voice brought you back to reality...

“You know sunshine...if there is something like a past life then I’d like to believe that we were destined to be together but didn’t manage to do it.”

It was surprising to hear him speak of past lives since this was normally a topic you were interested in and often thought about, Keigo on the other hand usually listened to your theories and imaginations and added his opinion occasionally, so hearing him initiate it this time was a little worrisome. But you knew better than to interrupt him, so all you did was squeeze his body tighter and remain silent yet attentive.

“I rarely imagine stuff like that, but on days like this I just can't help but wonder if I really deserve this much happiness...d-don’t misunderstand me though, I’m really really thankful for you, our relationship, everything! But everything is going so smooth that I just can't help but overthink it and maybe we weren’t in a relationship in our past lives, but ended up leading a good life despite that, so now...”

Silence followed and you heard how his pulse had remarkably quickened the longer he talked about it, knowing Keigo his thoughts had already begun drifting into the darkest of abysses, and you weren’t going to let that happen.

“...Now you’re thinking that something bad might be waiting for us in the future...as payback for our good life but bad relationship type of past life?” you asked as you looked up to the worried facial expression of your lover, whose only reaction was to nod. You sat up and looked him directly into his eyes while your hands squeezed both of his cheeks.

“That’s not how past lives work Keigo and you know it. I don’t want you to plunge yourself in darkness over a theory with no basis. Since when were you even that type of guy who believed that...what did you call it again...mambo jambo?”

He smiled and gave your palms a gentle kiss, but he remained silent, waiting for you to finish.

You continued trying to reassure him, telling him that no matter what you guys were going to face in the future you’d always have each other and even if that one random theory he came up with should happen one day, you promised him to never leave his side.

And this seemingly meaningless promise is what drove Hawks to come out of his comfort zone in the following months, he also started coming home earlier from work and patrols. All in all, he began spending more time with you and you had nothing against it, if anything you appreciated him thinking more about your joint life as well as himself.

One day when you once again got woken up by the sunlight you felt how someone caressed your cheek and then the mattress tilted as the weight which was next to you disappeared. It took you a few minutes to wake yourself up and look around for your lover, but then you noticed something on your hand. Your eyes widened and you immediately jumped out of your bed, looking for Keigo, who was smiling to himself as he took a seat in front of your fireplace and patiently waited for you...

#fyeahbnhasecretsanta #bnha x reader #mha x reader #takami keigo x you #hawks x you #bnha fluff #mha fluff #━𝙱𝙽𝙷𝙰 #━𝙼𝙷𝙰 #━𝚅𝙸𝚂𝙸𝚃𝙾𝚁'𝚂 𝙴𝙲𝙷𝙾 #bluuenvy

36 notes · View notes

sourbat · 3 years

Note

hmmm let’s go hammertooth, either first time making them cry or first time making them laugh :3c

“The first time making them cry.”

This was a daunting task, but I think I made the message clear without going overboard with the details. Nevertheless, I will give a fair warning here. Although not graphic, the ficlet does contain a disturbing scene. Please read with caution.

Here’s Magnus making Toki cry, and Toki making Magnus cry for the first time.

“Did you know dog food is safe for human consumption?”

The words echoed in the room long after Magnus had uttered the cursed sentence, wafting in the difficult, heavy air already weighted with the putrid stench of canned meat byproducts. It clung to the walls, suffocating in the claustrophobic setting made worse from the recent memory of the off-putting, wet concoction of blended duck, peas and chicken liver hitting the bowl with a wet smack. The bowl was tossed on the floor, spilling some of its gritty contents across the concrete, alerting its intended consumer of what was in store. Still, it was the words that brought out the red already adorning the corners of Toki’s sunken eyes, lips curling from the smell and repulsion despite the hunger.

“After the war,” Magnus added, admittedly pleased that, after some days of mostly silence and empty stares, he was finally garnering a satisfying reaction. “Government learned people were starving and living off the stuff. Had to regulate it, make it safe for people to eat…”

He hadn’t the pleasure to witness the strained face Toki made to accompany his whines, fidgets and heaves from last night’s stitching, all of which felt unusually refined, almost controlled. The cheap vodka barely managed a stifled hiss, a meager cry that was promptly snuffed in favor of words. Quite the accomplishment, given the skin had turned rosy and puffy, the earliest signs of an infection. Perhaps that was why Toki had thanked him for closing him back up, and why Magnus was left frustrated, plagued with a constant dissatisfaction towards his hostage’s compliance.

“Whats?”

He took a step forward, though, in Toki’s eyes, might as well appeared as a massive leap forward with how he trembled. He stumbled back, nearly slipping over his palm. Magnus wondered if the reaction was strictly out of fear, or from a lack of proper meals. He hoped for the former, but knew the later could still work in his favor. After all, Toki needed something to keep his body regulated, and after having his wound treated and stitched, required the additional calories. How else would he get better? He needed the energy.

Very calmly, Magnus told Toki this, and watched as the man’s befuddled demeanor turned mortified over the knowledge that he, from here henceforth, would be dining on canned dog food.

“It’s safe to eat,” Magnus stated flatly. “So…eat.”

Pale, and shaking from lowering blood sugar, Toki shook his head at Magnus. Tears started to fall down his ghostly white face, and Magnus took it all in, grinning.

Toki sniffled beneath him. “I…don’ts understands…”

…

“I don’t understand.”

A white sting shot across Magnus’ chest as he struggled through the words. His wetted, stained eyes filled as the memory played once more, ending right as Toki from months before started to break into pleas, to now, at his own miserable, murky reflection shaking as a spoon carrying gelatin gravitated closer to his chapped mouth.

Since waking up in the hospital, it’s been nonstop agony. Whatever pain medication the whitecoats offered him wasn’t nearly enough to keep the perpetual ache at bay, the horrid backdrop of pangs and muted prickles–like a million needles lacing his heart–that serenaded his every waking moment. Every breath felt like a personal attack against himself, heart expanding and giving way to the unique, but threatening feel of his lungs grazing his ribcage, his sternum held together with frail wires. Finally, there was Toki, at his bedside, almost daily, insisting on offering him a straw for water, a spoonful of broth, a moment of time…

The spoon holding the green gelatin neared. The smell of sugar filled Magnus dry mouth with saliva, but he turned nauseas once he saw the shade of green, his stomach knotting with acid from the continued memory of what occurred in the basement. He saw the small morsel, and he shook his head at it.

“Why are you doing this?” he asked through the pangs now pulsing across his brow.

Toki shrugged. His small, but expanding pout only gave the subtlest hint as to how offended he was from the question, and the irony behind it all.

“Them doctors says you ams not eatings,” he answered, giving Magnus what he had failed to supply all those pleas ago.

Afraid of worsening his migraine any further, Magnus only bore a miserable frown. “I’m not.”

“Buts you gotta, Magnus,” Toki implored, bringing the spoon up against Magnus trembling lips. “Here, tries this jellies.”

He turned his head away from the food. “…Toki, I–”

The exhale he performed from talking rattled up his throat, stopping him from going any further, or risk coughing and sending another unbearable stab across his healing chest. Sickened, Magnus sank into the pillows keeping him upright while Toki let the large gelatin cube fall back into a bright, plastic bowl.

Determined, he brought the spoon down. “I cuts it in halves.”

“Just…just stop…”

Toki blurred as Magnus’ eyes filled with tears. He could no longer make out the man–the god–whatever he was…standing before him. Why him, of all people? How, after all of this?

After everything he did?

The smell of sugar and tangy, artificial lime flavoring filled Magnus’ nostrils. Magnus opened his eyes, allowing his guilt-ridden tears to fall and flow down his face, all before the man he had tortured. Tears that were laden and heavy from the medication, the constant loopiness, spinning and dull stab across his head, his beck and chest. And his heart…his heart…

Magnus sniffed, pressed half his face into a stiff pillow as he exhaled a pained cry. A large hand pressed against his back, holding him in place as he coughed and writhed. Once it was over, Magnus fell back, exhausted beyond comprehension. Toki remained standing beside him, smiling despite the tears and antics, and still carrying that blasted spoonful of gelatin in his hands.

“Gots to try Magnus,” he said, lifting the spoon. “Ams not going to gets any better if you don’ts eats.”

The words struck him harder than any cough, cry or palpitation. Though it hurt, he agreed with a nod, and after some work, managed a small bite of the treat. Magnus sniffed again, fighting through tears and half chews as the food disintegrated in his mouth, making him want nothing more than to recoil. Beside him, Toki cheered him on, rubbing his back and telling him to keep going, to not give up, to swallow it all down. Despite the haunting memory, Magnus obeyed, lips turning inward from the odd textures, but stomach coming alive from the sweet impact developing across his taste buds. As he forced down the first of many swallows, Magnus gagged, and while Toki congratulated him on a job well done, he wondered what in the hell he did to deserve all of this?

#magnus hammersmith #toki wartooth #magtok #hammertooth #metalocalypse #tw: implied torture #crying #lampmeeting #thank you

15 notes · View notes

ethelindawrites · 3 years

Text

October 2

Fictober, Prompt 2 - "You have no proof."

Original fiction.

Warnings: magical battle of sorts, non-graphic description of someone being dead.

The man clutched the scroll to his chest and looked at me as if I had just insulted all of his ancestors.

“Of course I won’t hand it over to you! It is mine, and acquired only at great trouble and cost!”

“And you didn’t stop to think about why that might be the case?” I asked him, keeping my voice even and my face calm. He had no idea what he was holding, and it was going to cause trouble for more than just him if I couldn’t stop him from using it.

“Obviously, because it confers a great boon to the user,” he huffed, as if this was obvious.

“It was stolen,” I said, losing a little bit of my temper, “out of one of the most secure magical facilities in all the known lands. I know that you know this, because that is why the thieves you hired to steal it charged you so much, and why you had so much trouble finding anyone to even attempt the theft in the first place. Has it not occurred to you that it was under such heavy guard because it doesn’t do what it claims to do, rather than because it does?”

A brief – very brief – flicker of doubt crossed his face, but then it settled into a scowl again.

“You have no proof,” he spat at me, “no proof at all of those rumors! Have you ever even seen it yourself?”

I had not, of course, looked at the scroll myself. Its rolled-up exterior was all anyone I knew had ever seen.

“No one,” I said slowly and meaningfully, “who has ever looked at that scroll is around to tell us what exactly happened to them.”

“And when I gain the promised powers,” he sneered, “I certainly won’t be remaining in these petty little principalities either. Are there not vast cosmos to explore? Lands beyond even the Empire? Why should I or anyone else who has gained such magical control be contented to stay where we were trapped before?”

In that instant, I knew there as no way I was going to be able to convince him to hand the scroll over. It would almost have been better if past attempts to use it had left behind an immediate devastation, because at least then the connection and disappearance of the user would have been obvious.

Unfortunately, the harm was not so obvious. It was something creeping, insidious, a spreading blight that our known magics could slow but not completely cease or reverse, as the people of this very area had come to know all too well.

That was why it had taken so long to identify this scroll and its use as the likely cause, and it was only the previous Emperor who had ordered it found and destroyed.

Someone – we still did not know who – had convinced both the Emperor and the senior Magic Council that the potential backlash from the scroll’s destruction was too dangerous to attempt, and so it had been locked away.

Locked away…but not destroyed.

This man was not responsible for that decision, but he was certainly the latest in a line of pawns being used by whoever had been responsible for it. Unfortunately, there were always men who thought that they could get something for nothing, and who were unwilling to work to earn their way, preferring to leech off of others in one way or another.

I tried one more time, just in case. “It is proven beyond doubt that blight has spread in every place where this scroll has been used, and no other possible cause has been found. There is a price for everything, and it is clear that this price for using this scroll is everything the user has to give and more. For your own sake, if nothing else, I implore you not to use it!”

He scoffed. “It is all rumor, begun by powerful men who wish to keep power limited to themselves. You have no proof.”

I took one quick breath, then another.

“Very well,” I told him. “In that case, since you have admitted to the theft of this scroll, then I will take the steps authorized by the Council.”

And, I had already decided, one that had definitely not been authorized by them. I thought of the nearby villages, and hoped desperately that they had listened to me.

“You really think you can arrest me?”

“Yes,” I told him, “and it’s the one way you might make it out of this alive, so I’d recommend coming quietly.” I pulled out a talisman and activated it, conjuring a pair of magical restraints for his wrists. “Set the scroll down, and let me bind you, and I’ll send you out of here.”

I would, too, if he stopped now.

But his hands were already untangling the cord holding the scroll closed. “So that you can use the scroll yourself? You must be mad to think I’ll give it up now! All I have to do is open this scroll and then I’ll be—”

I snapped out a scroll of my own with one hand, flicking another two talismans across the room. One latched onto the scroll, yanking it out of his grasp just before he could start to unroll the paper, while the other hit him with solid force to slam him back against the wall. Grabbing the other end of my scroll with my now-free hand, I spoke the activating word as the stolen scroll hovered briefly between us. There wasn’t much time before he’d grab it back and he wouldn’t hesitate again—

Deep purple lines of magic burst from my scroll, binding the other in a sphere that filled with the hottest fire magic could conjure, pulled from the heart of a volcano.

Instantly, I could tell that something about the other scroll was fighting back, and fed more magic into my spellwork, keeping the conjured fire burning at full strength. Slowly, the resistance lessened, and I squinted at it through the containing sphere and the flames. One end of the other scroll seemed to be burning now, and that was enough, the fire would take care of the rest, and I could burn myself out permanently if I wasn’t careful, using such intense magic was always a risk…

I stopped myself from drawing my active stream of magic back just in time.

Only the barest hint of other, gibbering voices underneath the coaxing whisper in my mind had alerted me that something was wrong.

Doing the opposite of what that whisper said seemed like the best possible thing I could do, so I reached deep and poured absolutely every drop of magic in my body into my scroll.

It hurt, and I could trace the damage being done to the magical veins as the pain spread and branched along them.

But the fire kept burning, and burning, and burning, and now the only voice the other scroll could conjure was a gibbering, shrieking thing as it finally began to heat, and then singe, and then blaze.

Still pouring my rapidly dwindling magic out, I gasped for air against the pain, and didn’t stop.

At the moment when the last of the scroll vanished into ash, power exploded outward and slammed into the containing sphere.

A scream wrenched itself from my throat as I tried and failed to hold the spell against it, and the backlash threw me back into the wooden wall of the house that crumbled under the power almost before I made contact with it. With that barrier gone, the next thing for me to slam into was a rock that I did not remember being anywhere near the house itself, and black engulfed my mind.

Rain woke me, an unknown amount of time later.

Rain, in this place that had not seen rain for nearly two years.

There was almost nothing left when I finally managed to stagger to my feet and hobble over to where the house had been. The man who had stolen the scroll lay where he had fallen, and his staring eyes and the stillness of his body told me that he was dead. I could not summon even distant pity for him right now, given that this was undoubtedly a kinder fate than he would have found through the scroll. But he had given me the chance I needed, so I would make sure that he received a proper burial at some point.

Some of the stone foundations and part of the chimney were all that remained of the house itself. All the wood and thatch, and even the trees for a wide distance around were gone, fallen into a gray, dead-looking dust now turning to mud beneath the rain.

Concerned, I let myself slump to my knees, and pleadingly summoned a spark of violet from my battered body. But the dust felt inert, magic-less, and the ground beneath it felt different too. It was hard to describe what the blighted areas felt like, but it wasn’t like this.

And there was the rain.

I knelt there for a long time and didn’t examine too closely how much of the wetness on my face was rain and how much was tears.

There would be consequences, I knew. I could tell already that I probably wasn’t going to fully recover from this, if at all, and there was still the question of whether there really had been someone out there trying to keep the scroll intact. Given how insidiously it had protected itself, I wasn’t so sure about that anymore, but it would still have to be investigated.

There would be time, now. The scroll was gone.

So I let myself weep, and then I pulled myself to my feet again, and began the long, slow, painful walk to the now-distant edge of the forest. I let the returning villagers catch and carry me when they found me, unable to go another step.

And for the first time in a very long time, I let myself hope.

#fictober21 #fantasy #vaguely implied horror #magic #cursed objects #or something like that #oh look I managed two days in a row

3 notes · View notes

ladyandherbooks · 4 years

Text

Through the Moon: Moon family and Phoe Phoe

Reading the sneak peeks for the grahic novel "Through the Moon" finally gave me the motivation to post my theory about what I think will happen.

Rayla

Rayla isn't going to discover that her family and Viren are actually alive, instead she will decide to accept their deaths and begin to move on.

Why? Because the fact that all 4 of these characters are actually alive is such a big deal, especially to Rayla, these revelations will be kept to (hopefully) season 4. We have to remember that many fans of the show won't buy this book or even know that it exists. Because of this the events of the book have to stay consistent with the show's storyline. So Rayla coming to the conclusion in the graphic novel that Viren and her family are dead ensures that the story remains consistent to her beliefs at the end of season 3 i.e. she believed that all 4 of these people were gone for good.

However, that doesn't mean that someone else can't be given the revelation that someone dead is actually alive. Which brings me to my next theory.

Ethari

My guess is that at the end of the graphic novel we'll get a short scene or a picture of a shocked Ethari finally seeing that Runaan's Heartbloom flower is still glowing. This will then set off his arc where he tries to learn the truth about why his husband's flower sunk but continued to glow. He'll be shocked, confused and a little hopeful and so he'll decide to do his own research, not stopping until he learns the truth behind such a phenomenon.

He won't tell Rayla because he won't want to give her any false hope of Runaan being alive. First he'll start in the Silvergrove, researching on his own and then consulting with mages when he finds nothing and when that avenue yields no results he'll make the fateful decision to pack up and leave his home.

Because season 4 is titled Earth he'll take the Heartbloom flower and go and see the Earthblood elves, the masters of minerals, jewels and living creatures.

The one bonus of Rayla being ghosted is that it prevents her from discovering his secret and learning that he has left the Silvergrove. He'll take some of his Hawk arrows in order to keep in touch with and to possibly send her a message if he learns that Runaan is actually alive.

So Ethari, carrying Runaan's Heartbloom arrives in Earthblood territory, and begins his next round of research and meetings with mages and craftsmen. Eventually these efforts yield results and Ethari realises that Runaan is alive but currently under the influence of a very powerful spell or ritual. Ecstatic and worried Ethari, finally knowing the truth, knows that he has to come up with a plan to find Runaan before he tells Rayla, because once he does tell her nobody will be able to hold her back from trying to save Runaan.

So why would Ethari be the one to be given such a revelation. Well for a few reasons.

1) Ethari is a minor character, so having him discover Runaan is alive in the graphic novel won't affect the show's storyline by having it being first revealed or teased in the graphic novel. Everything I just wrote about Ethari's journey, at least 90% will happen offscreen during the time skip between seasons 3 and 4. We, as much I as Iove Ethari and would happily watch a few seasons of him trying to discover if his husband is alive or dead, don't need to see this journey as Ethari can tell us and Rayla the abridged version in a couple of minutes when he finally sees her again. He, unlike Rayla, would not require an entire episode or season dedicated to this part of his story. Instead it will be just a nice little bit of trivia for dedicated fans.

2) By having Ethari do at least 90% of the research offscreen and inbetween seasons by the time he actually reunites with Rayla and tells her the truth, he'll be at the tail end of his journey. It means that the characters are only days or a couple of weeks at the most from reuniting with Runaan, Lain and Tiadrin.

3) Runaan, Lain and Tiadrin need to be found soon so that their storylines aren't rushed. They have alot of things to learn and need to be able to work with humans before Aaravos enacts his big plan for Xadia. This is especially important for Runaan, a character who we've been told more than once is meant to have his own storyline. He needs to be freed soon so that the proper time is given to his storyline, especially when it comes to his relationship with Rayla, the princes, the ever increasing possibility that he will lose his arm and what that means for his future, his views on humans, Rayla's ghosting and the fact that he is the only currently living character who knew the truth about Aaravos' mirror.

Phoe Phoe

While it's more likely that something big might happen with Phoe Phoe I'd be very surprised if the novel ended with Phoe Phoe being reborn as again, this seems like something big enough that it would have to happen onscreen.

Not long after season 3 premiered I made a long post about Phoe Phoe and the Nexus that I'll abridge here. I believe that Phoe Phoe has been the familiar or mount for every Nexus guardian since its destruction. Phoenixes are immortal, rare and powerful beings so it would make sense that Phoe Phoe is already an ancient creature who. Then we have this bit of info given to us by Ezran in 2x04

Phoe Phoe is bound to the Nexus so having her aid the generations of elves that have lived there makes sense.

So my theory is that Phoe Phoe, an ancient and powerful Moon Phoenix is the one who chooses the next guardian and, given the important of cycles and balance to those connected to the Moon chooses to die and reborn when a new guardian is required.

Here she is as as a young chick with a younger Lujanne, propably not long after Lujanne became the Nexus Guardian.

So during the graphic novel the kids will return Phoe Phoe's feather to Lujanne just in time for the full moon. Lujanne, believing that Phoe Phoe's death was premature and therefore not a true indication of her time as guardian being up tries to resurrect her but fails. It is then that she realises that her time as guardian is coming to an end and now she must perform her final duty, she must find someone Phoe Phoe believes is worthy to succeed her.

This search will then be recounted and finally come to a conclusion by the end of season 5, allowing Phoe Phoe to be reborn just before the second time skip which will then give her time to grow up and bond with the new guardian before we see her again in season 6.

As to who I think will be the new guardian? My guess should be obvious if you follow me:

Plus wouldn't it be interesting if we get Ethari first realising that Runaan is alive in the same story that Phoe Phoe decides that it is time for a new guardian.

In conclusion: While the "Through the Moon" won't provide a whole lot of answers for the main characters it will actually help to set up and hint at some very important moments and arcs for some side/supporting characters and we will see these play out over the course of season 4 and 5.

#tdp spoilers #through the moon spoilers #Rayla #Ethari #Phoe Phoe #Lujanne #Runaan #Lain #Tiadrin #Ruthari #Runaari #tdp speculation #tdp theory

86 notes · View notes

silverspectre · 4 years

Text

the ghosts of a scream || locklyle

👻 pairing: anthony lockwood x lucy carlyle, eventual implied holly munro x lucy carlyle

👻 genre: angst, post-series au

👻 words: 1.2k

👻 tags: ANGST like goddamn this hurts a lot, mentions of alcohol & purposeful intoxication, talks of trauma, implied depression, pretty graphic meltdowns i am Sorry, ~metaphors~

👻 what to expect: “It was the bitter aftertaste of truth that always stung him in the end.”

👻 a/n: so i Actually Exist! this was written actual months ago (see: may) and as my summer courses have ended, i’m posting this! special thanks to @toishi for beta-reading this!! i hope you guys enjoy :>

👻 inspired by: my love, i still by i’ll ; a few years later by block b ; stay here by gaho

"You'll stay with me?" "Always. No matter what it is, my heart will always choose you, Luce."

It had been years. Lucy could no longer hear ghosts, and nor did she want to. Her head was sick and the voices kept echoing in her ears - a reminder of the suffering, the pain, the resentment. She and Lockwood no longer had things in common besides the trauma. The relationship grew tiring, like a repeated day of chores. Regardless, even if she couldn't see ghosts, her ghosts of the past haunted her in every waking moment.

Lockwood wasn't doing any better. She knew that much from George, who seemed to be the somewhat most sane out of the original Lockwood & Co. trio. Holly was thriving, Kipps was alright. How Lucy envied Holly. There was no hate toward Holly Munro; no, no, no, rather, hopeless longing replaced that anger. If only Lucy was perfect like Holly....

"You're sure you'll be alright without me?" "I'll be fine, don't worry about me." Lockwood had restrained himself from calling her 'baby'. If he was honest, Lockwood still loved Lucy. it was a plain fact; a parasite plaguing the back of his mind. He knew she was the one for him, but he had to respect her decision.

It was nights like these that he drank. The alcohol was his poison, and he'd hope to make it his cause of death. He couldn't go on without her, it hurt too much. These thoughts weighed his heart like the weight of the world on Atlas's shoulders. His heart was so, so weak.

Where had he gone wrong? What had he done? He was so, so sure Lucy had been his. He would always be hers. She'd left him once before, and the months proceeding were hell. At least he'd gotten an excuse to see her then. Now, there was none. Memories haunted him worse than any Type 3, and as much as he drank, he could not forget.

He couldn't forget the way she left, the way he let her, or the way he'd cried for the first time in a long, long time, slouched against the kitchen cabinets. The way he completely broke down, knees cuddled to his chest and head bowed down. The way his hands shook and the tears he tried to wipe away only kept pouring down his face. The way he blamed himself, yelled, screamed and almost punched a wall. No one was there for him now.

Because he was stupid. He just lied, brushed her off like dust. Lucy was more than that - but he still lied to her, pretended to be fine for her sake. But he knew - he could never brush it off - the fact that he'd always love her, even if the slippery words sugarcoated in strawberry syrup told him he didn't. It was the bitter aftertaste of truth that always stung him in the end. How could he have let this happen?

"Come off it Lucy, you know I'd die for you." Somehow, Lucy found herself knocking on Holly Munro's door. Somehow. Holly lived alone, being single. Holly was always there for Lucy; she'd know what to do.

"Lucy! What a pleasant surprise." Holly was, as always, dressed casually yet somehow managing to make it look gorgeous. A cherry red apron was tied around her waist.

"Is this a bad time?" Lucy asked.

"Of course not! I'm just baking. The cookies are almost done. Why don't you step inside?"

Upon doing so, the scent of said cookies greeted her, warm and inviting. "So, what brings you here?" Holly asked, untying her apron and hanging it on a hook. She gestured for Lucy to sit on the couch, which Lucy did. "Have you been alright?"

"I want to move on over Lockwood."

She raised an eyebrow. "Oh? Is that so?"

"Just... I feel like moping about it weighs me down. I want... I want to feel happy again."

Holly sat down next to Lucy. "That's understandable. How do you want to go about doing that?"

"That's the thing. I dunno. Everything feels.... pointless. I want to date more, but I don't know many people - and besides, I'm afraid it won't be the same as before."

Holly nodded, listening patiently. You could really tell she was listening, making proper eye contact and following everything Lucy said. That was the thing about Holly: she was so caring, thoughtful, and patient. She never made it feel like you were bothering her.

Ding. Her oven timer sounded.

"Where d'you think we'll be a few years from now?" "Together. Happy." The pain was always immense. It twisted and turned, coiling itself around Lockwood's heart or even himself - it was too hard to tell. It suffocated him, made it impossible to breathe. The pain was a snake, constricting around his heart until the feeling was gone but still ever-present, until sadness was the only thing Lockwood knew, and tears were the only thing he could produce. A crying Lockwood was far from a pretty sight.

He wanted to scream, but his throat always seemed too dry. He wanted to go numb, feel nothing, but his eyes always seemed too wet, his heart's bleeding incessant. He drank, but the alcohol could not cure the wound inside him. It closed him up for a night, but the morning after was always shittier than the night previous. It was a failed strategy, but it was a routine, and a strategy, to the very least. Something he could do, and pretend it worked.

"I want to live my entire life with you."

"Is that so? I want to live the entire afterlife with you." The more they spent time together, the more Lucy fell for Holly. The more dates she'd set up that felt entirely meaningless. With Holly, she needn't worry. Everything drifted away when it was only Lucy and Holly. She was always so considerate and caring, and her laugh sent butterflies rushing to the pit of Lucy's stomach. Lucy hadn't felt this way in years. Holly Munro was perfect, but not the jealousy-invoking kind of perfect. She was the kind of perfect that made you want to kiss her.

Months passed with failed date after failed date. Holly was ever-patient, but Lucy new she couldn't wait. She'd confess, she could totally do it! Well... What if...? Holly wouldn't... But how would...?

"Penny for your thoughts? You've been staring at a wall for 5 minutes, Lucy."

"Why do you love me, Lockwood?" "There isn't a reason not to." Lucy and Holly Munro were dating. Lockwood couldn't remember exactly how he found out, but he did. They looked so happy together, just as he and Lucy had years back. Maybe they were happier. After all those years, Lucy had been the better one out of the relationship. Lockwood felt like he did nothing in that time after the breakup, wasting it, even though the initial hurt and pain had never numbed truly. He felt worthless. Like he could do nothing. Everyone around him was happy, so why couldn't he be like them? What had he been doing wrong? Tears ran dry but his heart cried blood and liquid pain that could only be described as a mixture of regret and agony. He screamed. The walls echoed, then everything fell silent. Obsolete of sound, as if it was trying to erase his feelings. Devoid of anything, but he could still feel the pain. His hands trembled, shook, and he grasped one hand with the other but the shaking was ceaseless and he could only drape a shaky arm over his eyes. He couldn't bare see the light, shining and blinding him, obliterating his senses. When would he be okay?

He screamed louder than the blinding light.

A dark, dark silence.

#lockwood & co #anthony lockwood #lucy carlyle #lockwood and co #holly munro #locklyle #lucewood #munlyle #holly munro x lucy carlyle #lockwood x lucy #fanfic #drabble #angst #fluff #l&co #lockwood #fanfictionm #*silverspectre #lockwood fanfic

32 notes · View notes

dirthavarens · 4 years

Text

Nature (Dragatha)

Fandom: Dracula (2020)

Characters: Count Dracula, Agatha Van Helsing, Original Character(s) Relationship: Dracula/Agatha Rating: Mature Warnings: Graphic Depictions of Violence Word Count: 7,005 Summary: ‘Because you need to feed,’ she told herself too often. Nearly fifty years as a vampire and she still craved blood at every and any given moment. Vampires were like that. Vampires were like a lot of things.

[READ ON AO3]

{pt1} {pt2} {pt3}

or read below::::

-----------------------------------------------------------

Agatha Van Helsing never lost control .

A lie she told herself over and over. A vampire cannot betray its nature, not entirely, and she was testimony to that. No creature could overcome baser instincts, not when survival was at stake.

The war had run her ragged, to the point of weeks without rest or proper feeding. She’d steal away for a moment, trying to find blood that wasn’t tainted by the smell of death. The human had to be alive. The dying were always her safest bet, those beyond chance of recovery, those left behind on the battlefield gasping for breath, the life leaving their eyes.

Agatha discovered rather quickly that feeding from the dying had more negative side effects than it was worth, but she persisted. Her skin paled, her hair thinned, her hunger grew near intolerable. Times like those, she wished she had Dracula in her head, just so she could argue against what would be his very obvious answer of feed.

She had tried and failed for forty-five long years, and she hardly wanted him awake to know of the chaos that currently ravaged the world. He would have a field day, taking whomever he so pleased. Scientists working to the bone to produce stronger, faster, more effective weapons of mass destruction. Generals and strategists, black operations agents, spies, warriors on both sides, hungry for bloodshed, for justice, for stability.

Occasionally, she had argued with him, imagining him in her mind as she wandered the camps at night. He’d tell her to just give in, just a taste, just feed on one truly living soul and be done with it. Any vampire with a brain still in their skull would. It was natural for her to be starved, to want every ounce and then imbibe in even more. She was a vampire, after all, and vampires were not as complicated as she had conjectured.

“Something to eat, a bit of company.”

-------------------------------------------------

She had been on the earth for eighty-seven years, over half of which had been spent in a state of undead, dracul, nosferatu; A vampire.

And the death around her, seeping into her bones, reminded her constantly. Every day another bone to set, another amputation, another transfusion. Blood was around her constantly, stale and fresh, and she felt her patience dwindle by the second. She would bark at nurses, throw instrument trays, snap saws in half with her hands. All to keep her fangs from showing, her eyes from flooding crimson; anything to abate the beast she so vehemently claimed not to be.

Agatha drew in a breath as the morning sun crept into the tent, bathing her pallid face in its iridescence. She hadn’t fed in over two weeks. Too many deaths too quickly. Too much work to do, not enough sleep in the world, and not a second to herself.

She turned to the clock that ticked away at the wall. Six-thirty, a whole two hours of sleep and she was awake again, ready to take on yet another blood-soaked day. Agatha sat up, stretched, and grabbed at her head, thumbs massaging at her temples. Had she not gone through this several times in the past, she would have never guessed vampires could even have headaches.

‘Because you need to feed,’ she told herself too often. Nearly fifty years as a vampire and she still craved blood at every and any given moment. Vampires were like that. Vampires were like a lot of things.

An unfamiliar face walked into the doctor’s resting tent, an accented ‘knock, knock’ sounding before a man presented himself.

Agatha turned her head to take the man before her in. He was little taller than she was, though that hadn’t said much as she was a particularly tall woman. He was young, his olive uniform without stains, life in his eyes, brunette hair cut neatly under his beret. A french soldier, clearly.

“Pardon, madame. I thought this was the tent of the off-duty doctors. I’m afraid I may be a little lost.” The young man’s hurried speech gave Agatha’s headache no relief, and her thin patience no quarter. The assumption, however, she was used to. No man wanted to submit his life to the hands of a woman when healthy. They didn’t care whose hands brought them back to life, pleading for the pain to stop, begging for morphine, for death.

She shook the thought from her head and dropped her hands into her lap. “No, you’re in the right place. I’m Dr. Van Helsing, you may call me Agatha. What can I do for you?”

“I heard there was a lady-doctor!” He straightened his posture. “I am Corporal-Major Mathieu de la Fontaine. Please, forgive my presumptuous behavior?”

At least he had manners.

“I was to report for a physical, madame. My platoon just arrived, my lieutenant directed me to your tent,” explained the Corporal-Major as Agatha stood. She made sure not to step too closely to him so soon after waking. The sound of a relaxed pulse in such a high-stress environment would sing too sweetly to her. “If you wish, I can wait until another doctor comes by, perhaps?”

She looked him over and shook her head. “No, that won’t be necessary. Why did he send you to the off-duty tent?”

Mathieu frowned, his discomfort plain on his face. “The active tents are..”

“Being used for more pressing matters. I see,” Agatha finished for him and the pitcher of water on the desk. “Might I offer you something to drink while I fetch the forms? We don’t keep them in here.”

“Oui, j’ai soif. But I have the necessary papers here,” he said as he reached into the pocket of his vest. She grabbed the papers offered to her and immediately started reading over them. “Name, date of birth, all of the information you could need down to my blood type.”

“O-positive,” she muttered to herself. Good. He could possibly be of great use, maybe even save lives. “Do you know how valuable your blood is, Monsieur de la Fontaine?”

“I heard that vampires prefer O-negative,” he joked with a laugh, his teeth still white and all in place. If only he understood how funny the situation truly was. “I apologize, I shouldn’t make such jokes during war.”

“One should always cling to humor, even in dark times such as these. It makes managing stress a little easier.” Agatha smiled at him and directed him to take a seat on the cot opposing her own. She could hear his pulse as he walked by her. Slow, unperturbed, untainted. “Besides, I think vampires would be more likely to choose victims based on who they are and not what type of blood they have.”

She poured him a glass of water, handed it to him, and continued reading over admission charts. He had earned his rank quite rapidly early in the war, but clearly had time to rest between then and now. How that was possible with the Nazis having nearly seized all of France was beyond her, but she would not question it.

He was twenty-seven, approximately 180 centimeters, 80 kilograms, no visual or hearing impairments. No history of breathing trouble, was vaccinated for Polio…

The more Agatha read, the more she wondered why he had even been in need of a physical. Or why he was even in a war at all. He had a law degree from the University of Bordeaux.

“Alright, Corporal Major,” she began as she strode to a small filing cabinet filled with extra supplies. “I’m going to have to ask you to strip.”

His physical went without a hitch, though Agatha could hear his pulse like it was beating in her own ears. He carried an interesting scent, most of the French did. History was important to them, culture, and all of those sweet indulgences she had refrained from in life.

“Van Helsing,” he started as he fixed his beret in place. “That is not an English name.”

“No, it isn’t. My family is Dutch. I guess you can say I’ve lived in England most of my life.” Most of her afterlife, at least.

“How fortunate for us that you are here. My life could be in no better hands, I’m sure of it. I’ve never seen anyone with such a steady posture,” he returned with another smile before leaving the tent, completed forms in-hand.

Agatha realized then that she had been holding her breath during the examination, careful not to take in too much of the young man. She did not need to know his plans, where he was going to be, when he’d be alone.

Her day passed with agonizing slowness, each action seeming tedious as she cleaned infections and set up infusions. Infusions. She had to make a note of de la Fontaine, to suggest him to another possible donor, but did not want to imply she wished to do the task.

By the end of her shift, she was covered in a slew of liquids ranging from blood to she wasn’t quite sure, but it smelled worse than death. And a vampire knew the stench of death better than most. The sun was setting in the sky and she knew what awaited her. She had a full night to herself, a full night of rest, a full night of hunger.

“Dr. Van Helsing!”

A newly familiar voice caught her attention as she went to hit the nearest body of water. She needed to feel clean, if only for a moment.

“Corporal-Major. How are you settling in?” She did not want to see him right now, but was polite all the same.

“Very well, all things considered. I saw you working earlier and thought maybe you could use a drink?”

If he only knew.

Agatha shook her head and watched his smile drop a little. How hopeful and full of life the young were. She would be lying if she said that she didn’t wish he would hold to it. “I’m afraid I’m in desperate need of some form of cleaning.”

“The baths are usually occupied with the men,” Mathieu returned with a frown, his smile gone.

“And most don’t mind when a woman walks in, I assure you,” she noted, her words sardonic. Even a four-hundred year old vampire had more control of his tongue than they did. “I have somewhere private I like to go.”

“Perhaps after?” He was a persistent thing and Agatha turned the idea over in her head.

While she did not drink alcohol, or at least hadn’t tried to, since receiving Communion nearly half a century ago, perhaps there was no harm in the company of a few happy faces. After all, humans were social creatures and his life would most likely be snuffed out on the battlefield. Agatha had been a friend of death at this point and knew she would be able to handle it should he grow on her.

“Perhaps,” she echoed.

He gave her the information of where he would be and who he would be with if all went according to plan. She nodded, made sure she stressed that there was a possibility of her absence, and continued her trek away from camp.

There was a waist-deep creek a couple hundred yards from camp, hidden amongst trees too thick to fight through. It was her private place to bathe, to think, to escape the gurgles of the dying. When she came to it, she stripped bare and sank into the cool water, mindful to not step on any possible life underfoot.

Agatha closed her eyes and let her chest still as she submerged herself in the water, her body sinking to the bottom. Of all the benefits being a vampire had, being able to lie at the bottom of that particular creek was squarely number one on her list at that moment.

She was still for nearly half an hour, her mind playing memories like films in a theatre. Some were her own, others were his, and all of them eased her tense muscles, an unfortunate side effect of not feeding. She could find an animal, surely, but they provided little energy. There were many ways Agatha could feed. The dying, the sick, those too weak to carry on. She could steal donations.

She wouldn’t. The dying still had living blood, but they were exhausted, often emotional and frantic. The ones resigned to death already tasted as such and she would be sick for days after feeding on the ill.

She considered drinking from the Germans, but she would sooner be staked than dine on a Nazi. To hear those thoughts in her head...No, bullets would suffice. Mortars would suffice. She would sooner let the streets run with their blood than dare to feed from one.

The answer was plain, but she refused. She was more than a beast. She knew herself and understood the rules by which she lived. Agatha had taken an oath as a doctor to help any life in need. She could not feed on the living, she mustn’t, and her fists clenched as she rose from the water.

Agatha breathed in and opened her eyes to see the sun had at last gone to rest. Dark enough to wash, dark enough to relax, dark enough to sneak back to base without anyone noticing; her clean uniform a blessing for which she’d never be grateful enough.

She caught sight of new faces as she entered the camp. All varying ages, some clearly lying to make themselves older, others very obviously lying about medical conditions, not that the lieutenant-colonel cared. He had lives to waste ever since the Americans joined a few months prior. Those were the truly fresh faces, the ones ready and eager for blood, for glory.

Their enthusiasm wouldn’t survive the week, but hopefully they would.

She spotted the Corporal-Major among some other new individuals and cursed herself when he met her eye and waved her over. Agatha knew she had belabored her answer, but apparently that had meant little to the young man as he reached down and pulled two bottles of wine from a sac.

“I know we’re not supposed to have them, but I couldn’t resist. English wine doesn’t...settle right.” A laugh, the other men joining in. They were French, too. Mathieu looked to Agatha. “Lady’s choice. Red or white?”

“I enjoy both,” she said reflexively, damning herself. They weren’t her words. “Enjoyed, I should say. I don’t drink.”

“Mon amie! That won’t do. Middle of a war and you don’t drink? How ever do you settle your nerves?” His response earned him an impartial smile. “You’ll return to your husband a hysterical mess.”

Her husband?

She glanced at her ring and felt something ache inside of her, overriding her hunger for a moment. The weight pressed upon her chest and burrowed into the pit of her throat. He was definitely no husband. She wouldn’t even begin to entertain such an idea. It was entirely laughable.

“Ah, Dr. Van Helsing, je désolé,” de la Fontaine’s voice broke through her thoughts and she blinked at him, confused. “You must miss him very much.”

She did.

“He’s probably sleeping. It seemed to be his favorite pastime before I left.” She brushed the subject off, burying the memory of him as best she could before smiling at Mathieu. “Red.”

“I knew you were a woman of taste. Now that we’ve made the important decisions, I would like to introduce you to some members of my platoon.”

She learned the names of each man, all coming from different backgrounds but all ready to get back into the action. They were confident, placing much on faith, and as the cork popped out of the bottle, they cheered.

Mathieu handed her the bottle first, a grin on his face.

It struck her then, that in the months she had been there, no one once invited her to do such a thing. Naturally, she had patients in for consultations, follow-ups before they were flown out of the zone. Occasionally, a man would wander into her tent and she would be forced to break a finger or two, secretly delighting at the snap of their quick but effective punishment.

They’d say nothing, of course, lest they compromise themselves in the process.

She reached for the bottle and breathed the scent of the wine in. The spirit smelled nearly unrecognizable to her, bitter, too harsh. An idea struck her then. This was nothing more than another test.

Can vampires drink alcohol or consume anything that was not blood?

She brought the bottle to her lips and took a slow sip, letting it soak her tongue before swallowing.

Her stomach churned almost immediately and she swore she could hear his voice calling her foolish. She handed the bottle back, her hand coming to her mouth, before she hurriedly shuffled away. Agatha bent over, grabbing at the nearest object to support herself as her body purged itself of the wine. She looked to her right, to see that it was Mathieu holding her steady and immediately felt embarrassed, searching for an excuse.

“Are you alright? I know the English don’t have taste, but it couldn’t have been that bad.” He was a poor liar and even worse at hiding his emotions. His concern might as well have had flashing neon lights pointing to it. Agatha heard his quickening pulse drumming wildly. The rapid tempo of the deep pumps of his heart.

“I’ll be fine. I haven’t eaten since yesterday? The day before? I should have known better than to try alcohol as my first meal,” she explained, not entirely lying. She couldn’t remember the last time she fed. She wiped her mouth as she fixed her posture. “I think it would be wise if I retired for the night.”

Mathieu nodded, let her go, but did not move away from her. “Let me assist you back to your tent. I will not see a sick woman go unattended.”

“I appreciate the concern, but I am a war physician and have been through much worse than a stomach ache. I will be fine. Please, return to your men and give them my warm wishes.” Agatha would not be alone with someone so healthy now that her stomach demanded proper feeding, snarling furiously at her.

He gave a moment’s pause, frowning at her, but acquiesced to her wishes. She could feel his eyes on her back as she walked back to her section of camp.

The sounds of the camp layered in her mind as she tried to find sleep, turning restlessly upon her cot. Everything within her pushed her out of bed and she sat up, her stare empty as she tried to cling to rationality. Logic could not play here, logic would tell her to feed. Rationality considered the great possibility of consequence.

Her nails extended and hardened faster than she had ever felt them. She grit her teeth as she felt them scrape against the metal, screeching unpleasantly. If she let go, and she knew she mustn’t, Agatha would find herself unable to save herself. She needed a minute.

Just a minute.

One… Minute…

Her eyes slipped shut as she drew in a breath and searched for a familiar face. He was the last person she needed to see, the one who would tempt her forward, let go, release the beast. But he was there, nonetheless, staring at her from the sea, the water to his chest in the grey light of morning.

One…

Her time in Transylvania. Crimson turned black in the moonlight as it poured in from the small window. The pillows stained as a gurgle sounds in a throat, a cry from another.

Min…

Jonathan Harker before her, telling her the story of Count Dracula as his fiancee sat to her left. She had been such a frightened girl and with great cause. Her basement, her study, her refuge.

His memory.

How wonderful she had tasted on his lips. He had torn through a convent, armed and ready with wolves, but for all the entertainment… She was the unexpected main course. And she could feel his teeth sinking into her neck as if they were her own.

...minu…

His blood on her tongue as she suckled at his wrist.

Breathe.

Agatha shot up, her jaw unclenching as her eyes opened, and looked out into the night. She had been trying to sleep for nearly five hours, but could not stand to be around others any longer. The glorious stench of blood was too close to her and she would not let herself lose control.

An animal.

She would find something small, something to curb her appetite enough to sleep. The watch was doubled at night and she would have to be careful. Nothing she hadn’t done before, nothing she wouldn’t have to do a thousand times more before this damned war was over, it seemed.

Agatha found her escape and took it, slipping into the forest and wasted not a second getting as deep as she could. Gunfire sounded in the background, most animals would be hiding, then. She would have to locate them by sound.

She heard a heartbeat, too close, too strong, too human.

Too soon.

“Mon amie?”

Dammit.

“Mathieu, what are you doing out here?” she asked without turning around to look at him. If she looked, he would see, he would know, and she would have to either kill him or drug him. “You should be back at base.”

She heard his weight shift, a sigh leaving his lips as his heart rate settled. So strong, so lively beneath his skin, she could still hear the pump, pump, pumping away in his chest. She raked her claw against the inside of her palm to keep time with it.

“I could say the same for you,” he replied, voice neither defending nor accusing. “But I could not sleep and decided to inspect our surroundings, see if there were any vantage points for Hitler’s puppets to have.”

He took a step forward, misplaced his footing, tripped, stumbled, caught himself on a tree.

Agatha instinctively turned to help but was drawn to his hand. Bark and dirt may have gotten in the way, but the aroma was undeniable.

She clenched her fists, damning every aspect of her existence, cursing Dracula to stay in his box and rot. They settled on it not having been entirely his fault, but it was easier to blame him when he refused to listen to her, refused to answer her.

“Nothing to fret over, ju--”

Agatha was inches away from him, his hand in hers as she inspected the wound. It was nothing more than a scrape but the potency of his blood was irresistible.

“Dr. Van Helsing?” he called, his pulse increasing. She refused to look up, refused to look at him as she stared down at the red in the night. “Your teeth…”

“Yes, they do that.” She was caught. “I’m a vampire.”

She turned to him, sparing him nothing as she released his wrist. Her teeth jagged, eyes red, and claws sharp to points…

“They aren’t real,” Mathieu protested, refusing to believe what was in front of him. Another Adisa. “Dracula is a fictional character, a silly creature from a picture made to scare people.”

She brought a finger to his lips, silencing him. “I have lain with the Devil and know him plain. And he is far more terrifying than any film will ever be able to portray.”

He stared blankly at her, unsure of how or where to move. She could smell his indecision in the air and took advantage of it. Agatha threw him to the ground and listened to the way his ribs cracked beneath her force. She grabbed his face in her hand and tilted his neck, holding it to expose as much flesh as possible, her fingers tightening. His jaw snapped under the pressure, the pain causing him to cry out. The sweet note echoing in her ears as she stared at the artery pounding furiously at his throat.

He tried to say something, tried to protest, but she gnashed her teeth into his skin, sinking deep into his artery and drank. She could hear the snap of his neck, as she pushed harder against his smashed jaw. His life flooded into her, his memories, his dreams…

------------------------------------------------------------

Agatha gasped as her eyes opened. The light of the day was fading as she lay tangled up on the couch in her study. Dracula’s naked body curled tighter against her and drew her closer, placing a kiss at her temple. She pressed into him, secretly delighting in the comfort of his hold.

The study was the darkest room in the house, save the cellar, and he refused to sleep in the box of dirt that she, in fact, brought from Transylvania. Her bedroom had too thin of curtains for him to be comfortable laying in while she slept.

“Everything alright?” he asked quietly after some time of holding her, his breath creeping over her skin as he spoke.

“I’m fine, just hungry,” she replied and shrugged out of his grip, immediately missing the warmth and pressure of him against her.

“Nightmare, I take it?” He sat up after her, following her with his eyes as she stood and took a few steps forward.

“You weren’t listening?” She turned to face him, genuinely surprised.

“Not this time,” he hummed cheekily, his eyes moving hungrily over her form. “You looked exhausted this morning after our shower. I figured you could use some time to recuperate. I did it for fifty years, I won’t fault you a few hours.”

“So you just what? Stayed on the couch all day?”

His brows knit together defensively at her question as though trying to think of a smart remark. But his face relaxed as he leaned back against the cushions, sighing in defeat.

Her dream nearly made her forget that she had finally fished him out of the sea. Seeing him stretching against her couch, faking a yawn, gave her all the reassurance she needed. When he stood and pecked her lips, she was doubly reassured.

“What else was I supposed to do? You are the worst vampire in the history of vampires, one dark room, while the rest of the place is swimming in sunlight,” he shivered, repulsed by the very notion of stepping into the sun. She would break him of it in time.

Her stomach twisted in a knot and she gave an annoyed breath. Ever since she fed from him the night prior, Agatha hadn’t been able to rid herself of her hunger. Not during their short break, where he begrudgingly accepted the glass she poured him, not before she went to sleep, not now.

Her reserves were well-stocked once she knew for certain that she was waking him, she would manage.

“You could have gotten up, I would have gone back to sleep. There are plenty of books in here to read and I doubt you would have been bored,” she returned, her voice unintentionally sharp. With a breath, she relaxed. “Come, I’m sure you’re hungry and you need to put clothes on. Neighbors are as nosy as old nuns and I don’t need them asking why there’s a naked man in my home.”

“Get thicker drapes.” He pressed his lips to her forehead and she went tense under him, her stomach flipping angrily again. “I don’t claim to be an expert, but I’m certain you’re supposed to be relaxed after sex, joyful even. Why don’t you tell me about your nightmare?”

“No,” she shot back as she opened the door, ensuring that the sun was down before stepping into the hallway. She took the short walk through the hall and stopped at her bedroom door, knowing full well that it was not going to be an easy sight to see.

However, Agatha had not anticipated the magnitude of the destruction they caused. It looked like a crime scene.

The sheets were torn, jumbled mess on the floor along with her pillows, both stained with blood. The wood of her headboard had an impressive chunk splintered from it and the mattress was just slightly askew on the frame. She blinked as she stepped inside, immediately gathering the sheets and comforter in her hands. There was no saving them, and she’d need at least a new headboard. Maybe metal.

Had they really been that rough?

Yes.

Had she enjoyed herself as much as the heat dripping down to her core at the memory?

More.

The sheets were discarded, they were dressed, and the room was cleaned. Dracula mainly talked about nothing important, trying to lure her back into the bed. As enticing as the idea was her hunger gnawed at her interminably, closing off her mind to anything else.

“You really don’t feed from the vein?” he asked as he stood in her kitchen once again, Agatha grabbing the decanter from the liquor cabinet. “Agatha, you know you’re starving yourself.”

“It suffices,” she replied, voice even. The thought of feeding from a living human appealed to her less when he provoked her. “Not everyone is as gluttonous as you.”

“Gluttony or not, you’re still feeling my hunger. You and I both know that you won’t be satisfied until you’ve drunk your fill from the nearest vagrant,” he postulated, his hand covering hers around the thick glass container, the blood within swayed. She released the neck of the decanter, letting him take it and grabbed two glasses from the same cabinet. Two, beautiful, crystal, custom designs etched into them.

He caught them in his peripheral and felt like marble, a breath. He approved. “But you… you, don’t feed from vagrants, do you? Agatha, have I rubbed off on you?”

She set the glasses in front of him with little patience, ignoring his poor attempts at getting her to admit to something he already knew. Agatha was a woman of logic, she always had been, but the way he stared at her, a wolf, had her clenching her teeth. Her hunger grew. The tempter, the snake in the garden.

“No, I don’t. I feed from specifically selected people based on health. Donations.”

“Donations,” he echoed, disappointed as he poured them each a glass. “It’s unlike you to take advantage of people.”

A drop of guilt fell through her and spread through her veins. He spoke the truth, but she had little other choice. Either take the bags or risk taking lives. It was simple but felt wrong, not entirely aligned with the urges gnashing their teeth from within. His urges.

Damn him.

Agatha looked at the fine crystal, the liquid within causing her to salivate, swallowing as her gaze shifted to the much thicker glass of the decanter. While imprudent and nearly uncivilized, the gifts she had made for them--no, just for him, they were no couple--would remain unharmed. She could feel him watching her, studying her, and wondered what she must look like. Her silence deafening as she stood, motionless, her eyes shifting between the glass and the decanter. Self-control or submission.

“Agatha,” he mouthed, letting his breath form her name as it left his lips. Dracula knew what weighed her down, what bore so relentlessly through her, just as he knew the only proper solution.

With a breath, Agatha shifted her weight and took the glass he offered. There was a glint of surprise in his expression when she moved her gaze to him. He was only six inches taller than her, but he towered over her, the constant abyss that lured her in.

“Cheers.” He raised his glass to hers, his eyes darkening as he brought it to his lips.She was too busy drinking to make a snide remark about his inability to control his histrionics.

The liquid streamed down her throat with ease as she finished it quickly. Agatha opened her eyes, having not realized she closed them and saw him still watching her. He hadn’t moved, the rim of the glass resting comfortably at his bottom lip, the blood no closer to his mouth.

“I said before that I was hungry, it is your doing, after all,” she specified as the grips of her hunger made no attempts to loosen. “Go on, I think you’ll find it to your liking.”

He sniffed at the contents of his before taking a sip. A chilling grin spread upon his lips, jagged edges of his teeth visible, as he brought the glass down. His claw tapped lightly at the glass as he ruminated on the flavors; his smile grew before he finished it, gluttonous as always. The veneer chipping away.

As if she was one to talk.

Another glass shared between them both and then another, draining the decanter as Dracula probed her, antagonizing the beast of her hunger. He relented only when the container was empty.

“Alright, Agatha, have it your way. But I still need to feed properly and I’m sure the people are very much alive, war being over and all that. The victorious afterglow of battle is a beautiful thing, fills your chest with so much...life.” His words sent a chill to the center of her spine, splintering off like lightning through her nerves.

“Surely you don’t think I’m going to let you leave to do as you please?” Agatha watched as he turned on the sink, rinsing his glass out and then hers, setting them carefully into the basin below.

“No, I don’t. In fact, I expect you to accompany me,” returned the Count with a smirk. “I know you’ll follow me if I decide to leave on my own. But I’d much rather have you at my side while the night is still young.”

“A moonlit stroll?”

“If nothing else. I’ve been in a box for fifty years, I need to stretch my legs, get a taste for what life is like. I need information and your bags aren’t giving me enough,” he said as he stood close to her and took her hands in his. The Count’s thumb traced over the ring on her finger, his face softening almost imperceptibly.

Against her better judgment, Agatha agreed to his proposal, shoving a flask in her coat before they left, just in case.

They walked for what seemed like eternity, winding up and down streets, through alleys, all in silence. Agatha thought it wise to keep moving, lest she catch an all too enticing scent on the breeze. She thought for a moment, wondered where they could go, and directed them towards the water. The cliffs were a beautiful sight and mostly peaceful. Since the war, it had been a place for the occasional petty crime. Drug deals, vandalization, indecent exposure twice on the same day, by the same man.

He seemed preoccupied, lost in thought. His silence disturbed her and she contemplated listening in but tucked her arm under his instead. If they were going to be out this late at night, she might as well take every precaution to not get stopped by anyone. She could feel the flask burning in her pocket; craved what was inside of it, despite knowing she did not need it.

She wanted it.

His pace slowed when he felt her worm her arm between his side and bicep, hooking into his elbow. No one had done that for centuries, not without prompting, not without his opiate, not without the promise of something more. She would never stop surprising him, even as he could hear the dam of her self-control splinter into ever growing faults.

She needed to feed.

“Have you finally grown tired of hearing your own voice?” she asked when the silence became too heavy.

“Never.” He wore the grin of an alleycat as they walked farther along the cliff. The water below them churned against the rocks, a sound so familiar she was able to tune it out and focus on his words. “I figured you would want to give me a tour to keep me from draining someone dry. But don’t worry, I’ll be sure to drain your stockpile when we get back.”

“Of that I have no doubt,” she admitted and pulled her arm from him. He let out a breath of disapproval and pulled her back to him, hand tight around her waist. “Afraid I’ll wand--”

She could smell it.

Fresh, alive, a numbing song in her head as she struggled for control over the snarling monstrosity within her. How could she have not noticed it earlier? How did she not hear, not know? Dracula had been…

He’d been silent.

“Count Dracula!” She struggled against him as his other hand came around her and held her back to his chest. “Release me at once.”

“Need I remind you that it was you who led me here? My dear, you’ve been sniffing out something to eat this whole time.” His accusation burned like fire at her ears and she shoved her elbow into his chest. “You can’t fight it forever, you know.”

“I most certainly can, now release me so I can assess the situation. I’m a doctor and there is clearly someone in need of assistance. Stay here. I don’t want you killing a possible patient.”

He gave an annoyed growl and let her go, Agatha sparing not a second to hunt down the scent. She felt starved, nearly mad with hunger as her feet delivered her to the scene, blood staining the ground black in the moonlight.

A young woman. Red of hair, short and unconscious on the ground. There was blood pooling from a wound in her abdomen. Agatha knelt beside the girl, no more than twenty-five, and began inspecting her, trying to bring her to consciousness. But her blood sang to the former nun, lilting sweet poetry to the beast within her, mesmerizing, astounding, addictive, alive.

Something in her broke, and her fingers entered the wound. Hot, inviting, untainted. No organs had been harmed, and Agatha curled her fingers, tearing at the flesh of the woman’s abdomen, and brought them to her mouth as she heard an agonized moan from below.

Discordant, pitiful, and a distraction as Agatha lapped every last trace of blood from her fingers. She brought her free hand to hold the girl’s--Anna’s--mouth shut and looked down at the poor thing with blood-tinged eyes. “Please, be still. For both of our sake. I won’t be long.”

‘ Don’t be slop-- ’

She shut him out of her mind as she clamped down on the girl’s carotid. With a snarl, Agatha tore it from her neck and descended upon the human’s neck, drinking deeply, greedily. Her hand dipped into the wound once more, tearing it open, wanting to feel as the body went limp from the inside.

There was a surge of energy in her veins, a gnawing that told her to drink deeper, every drop, every last whisper. And she obeyed, clutching at the open wound, crawling under the skin to be closer to her heart. So shallow, so nearly empty, but the organ persisted. Agatha pressed down, cracking ribs between her fingers as she dug, face parting from the woman’s neck as the blood began to bitter.

Only when she could feel the very nearly still heart, did Agatha’s hand steady. With her mind in a frenzied haze, she gripped the organ and tore it from the corpse. The final shreds of life that drizzled into her throat were magnificent, directly from the source, not the vein. Her fangs sank into a valve, ensuring the last drops were not spared, when she heard him behind her, a low, approving rumble sounding in his chest.

He lowered himself beside her with a hand at her back, careful to fix his attire as he crouched. Agatha released the heart and dropped it to the lifeless body below. Her eyes were nearly black as she panted before him, blood hot on her breath and teeth covered in bits of muscle and shards of bone.

“You may understand the rules of the beast, but not even you can turn your back on its nature,” Dracula finalized as he reached for her face, cupping her bloodsoaked cheek. “I couldn’t bear the thought of you waking like that again.”

She was beyond shame, drenched in the blood of another, as she looked upon him. Stilling in his hold, Agatha was unsure if she should lean into his touch or snap his wrist. Her body made the decision for her as she fell back, away from the corpse, and away from him. She swallowed as her eyes befell the horror of her work.

It reminded her of an infamous killer who had stalked the streets nearly sixty years prior. She had caught wind of the massacres in a letter from her detective friend, asking if it could possibly be the work of a vampire or other supernatural being. It was possible, but the man was never caught and went silent after completing his work.

“Pull yourself together, Agatha. You’ve seen much worse than this,” he started absently as he scooped the body from the ground, tucking the heart in the cavity she created. Dracula peered over the cliff, sizing the distance, and let the corpse plummet into the frothing waters below without sticking around to see if it hit the bottom. “There you go. Back on your feet. Feeling better?”

She stood as he turned around and wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. It did little to fix her appearance, but the way Dracula looked at her would convince a blind man otherwise. She shivered at the sight, curling in on herself as she swayed between disgust and satisfaction. He was right. A beast can only deny its nature for so long, but she was more than such a creature.

She had to be.

#my writing #dragatha #vampire!agatha #dracula 2020 #bbc dracula #bbc dracula fanfiction #dracula fanfic #dracula x agatha #god dracula is such a DICK and I LOVE HIM #dracula #count dracula #agatha van helsing #f in the chat for my baby boy mathieu #also anna but fuck anna she's not important #sorry for how sloppy the end was y'all #i was exhausted but ever a man of my word #i had to post it before bed

33 notes · View notes

akusaiisreal-changemymind · 4 years

Link

Chapter 4: Memory Plague and Catching Up Fandom: Kingdom Hearts Rating: Mature Warnings: Underage Relationships: Isa/Lea (Kingdom Hearts), Axel/Saïx (Kingdom Hearts), Demyx/Ienzo (Kingdom Hearts), Riku/Sora (Kingdom Hearts), implied Aqua/Terra (Kingdom Hearts) Additional Tags: Alternate Universe - Royalty, Alpha/Beta/Omega Dynamics, Past Mpreg, de-aged character, Rating May Change, This is basically if Kingdom Hearts was a period novel, Slow Burn, Fluff and Angst, Mentions of past abuse, Non-Graphic Violence

The halls of Oscuro Castle were cold and silent, almost devoid of life. Xehanort had always remembered it being that way, even as a small boy. He paid the quiet no mind and instead listened to the rhythm of his boot heels thumping softly against the carpeted floors of the castle’s private upper levels.

A single guard stood by the door that led into a bed chamber. When she saw Xehanort approaching out of the corner of her eye, she immediately straightened her posture and greeted him formally.

Xehanort nodded at the guard as she let him into the room. When he stepped in, he was not at all surprised to see the lump on the bed hadn’t moved despite it being nearly noon. He walked over to a small table where a pitcher sat along with an untouched platter of bread and various fruits for breakfast. He lifted the pitcher and crossed back over to the bed, slowly pouring the contents of the pitcher all over the blankets.

He was glad that it turned out to just be iced water. It would have been a shame to have wasted good wine.

The sleeping figure jerked awake, sputtering when some of the liquid got into his mouth and up his nose. Xehanort stopped pouring and waited patiently for the younger boy to stop flailing around before greeting him. “Good day, Vanitas.”

“Fuck you.” Vanitas hissed. He was already a grumpy riser and being woken up so rudely didn’t help. “Why did you just walk in here and wake me up like you own the place?” When Xehanort raised an eyebrow at him, he rephrased. “I mean, like there’s a fire or something?”

“Xigbar has returned from home, so I’ve scheduled a family meeting in the council chamber that will take place three hours from now. I expect you to be there awake, fully dressed, and attentive.”

“Don’t you typically have to have a family for a family meeting?” Vanitas muttered darkly.

Xehanort ignored the jab and continued. “Ansem will be arriving today, so he’ll be there as well. There’s been some new development. It’s very important that we all discuss it together.”

“Yeah, fine, but can you get out now? I’m not exactly in a proper state of dress.” Vanitas gestured with the fist firmly gripping the blanket wrapped around his waist.

Xehanort didn’t outwardly react. Instead, he turned sharply on his heel and headed for the exit. “I’ve told you before you’ll catch a chill sleeping like that. Remember, the council chamber in three hours. I don’t want to have to come and get you again.”

~•~

Isa hoped against all hope that this new habit of blacking out and waking up in a strange location wouldn’t become a hobby.

This time he had awoken to the taste of something repulsively bitter being shoved into his mouth. He was tempted to spit it out the moment it touched his tongue, but he was prevented from doing so. All of his limbs felt like lead, leaving him unable to lift his arms and push against the slender fingers keeping whatever was in his mouth firmly in place.

“Don’t you dare spit this out. This fruit contains bismuth subsalicylate and it’s the only thing that’s been keeping you from vomiting up your innards for the past few weeks.” Someone leaning over him scolded him fiercely.

His vision was swimming and his mind was groggy, so the face of whom he assumed to be a doctor was obscured. Isa’s senses had even failed to let him know there was a cool towel laying over his forehead until the person’s other hand removed it to press a palm against him. “Good, your fever has finally gone down. Keep this in your mouth while I get my needle to replace your stitching.”

The voice of this person washed a wave of familiarity over Isa. Except, instead of feeling nostalgic, it instead gave him a prickling sense of annoyance. He remembered being nagged by this pitchy, nasally tone too many times to count in childhood – now again as an adult.

The blurriness of his gaze subsided after several seconds of blinking up at the light fixture dangling from the high ceiling; naturally, Isa chose that moment to rotate his head to the side just enough to watch as an older man shuffled around the room. His eyes widened the moment they took in the sight of blonde hair and a white coat.

“Lord Physician Even?” Isa queried, face scrunching in perplexity. Though his words were somewhat muffled by the medicine still stuffed into his mouth, the Court Physician spun around as soon as he was addressed.

“Very good, Isa. It seems you’ve finally regained coherency which means you’re not long from recovery.” Even crossed back over to where Isa lay on the bed, needle and stitching coil in hand. “Now, do you know where you are as of this moment?” He pulled up a stool and sat down beside Isa to begin his work.

Isa winced at the first signal of pain, but tried to refocus on his thoughts. He noted that this bedroom was different than the last one he’d woken up in, bigger with more lavish décor. It’s possible that he might have been moved to a guest chamber, but for what? He did a mental step by step of what led him up to this point.

He was on the ship with Xigbar and was rendered unconscious. He woke with an injury. He wandered around for a bit in the mansion until he found a secret passage to crawl into. He happened upon a hidden room where the air was stifled with the nauseating mixture of incense, candles, and white leaf tobacco. Then a man came into the room. He was –

“Lea!” Isa cried out at last, attempting to sit up. A hand immediately flew up to his chest to stabilize him and firmly push him back against the mattress. Isa went back down without a struggle. “I’m – I’m in his mansion, aren’t I?”

“Yes, you are.” Even answered and continued working on the stitching. “He sent for me to come and tend to you the moment he knew of your identity. Evidently, his young wards have been up to a bit of mischief and brought you here in secret – not that it’s a problem now, of course. If anything, Lea considers it a miracle and didn’t want to leave your side.”

Young wards? As tempted as Isa was to get him to elaborate further on that, there were more pressing matters that needed explanation.

“Where is Lea now?”

“I had to drag him away from here so that he could attend his meeting. His father is always less than amused when he strays away from his duties.”

Isa sighed. He had not been at all intending to meet Lea until he had had everything settled with King Ansem and his task. Now that Lea already knew it was only going to complicate things and create a distraction. He was already set back significantly due to catching ill.

“Speaking of the king, does he know that I’m here as well?”

“Now, that, I couldn’t tell you.” Even replied. “However, knowing his sources, it's likely he’s found his own ways of finding out by now.”

The implication of the King Ansem essentially being omniscient almost caused Isa to break out in a cold sweat. Simple task, his ass.

Once the stitching was completed, Even gently pressed a finger against the tender skin to make sure it was secure.

“Well, I believe that’s all that needs tending to today.” Even stood up from the stool and began to put his materials away. “I have to be getting back to the clinic. I’ll have a messenger sent to the castle to inform the prince of your awakening. Until he arrives, I advise you get some rest.”

“Yes, I’ll be sure to. Thank you.”

~•~

Trapped .

That’s exactly what he was. All but pushed into a marriage with a man he didn’t know in a land he had no recollection of arriving to. Isa had been living with the Lord of Dusky Province for several months now and it seemed at this point there was no chance of getting back home. Especially not in his current condition.

“The physicians tell me you’re about six weeks along now.” The lord entered the room with a saccharine smile on his chiseled face. He was very handsome, Isa couldn’t deny that; however, something about his smile was off-putting. It wasn’t like Lea’s. “Why did you hide this from me, mūnchairudo? Don’t you think I would like to know I am to be a father?”

“I wasn’t sure what to think of the news myself…” Isa muttered without turning away from the mirror. He pressed a palm into his belly. It was still a bit flat. He jumped slightly when he felt the alpha brush up behind him and tower over him.

“This is for you.” He slid something onto Isa’s neck before stepping away. Isa looked down and noticed that it was a silver necklace with a thick chain and a sapphire gem in the shape of a crescent moon attached. “It matches your hair. Isn’t it lovely?”

Lovely …lovely…

“It’s been lovely doing business with you, good sir.” Weeks later, Isa stood around a corner in secret and watched as his lord husband handed a pouch of coins to a rough looking individual. “Here’s your final payment, as promised. Though, I must say, the omega you delivered to me is more trouble than you had advertised. Very strong-willed.”

A cold feeling settled into the pit of Isa’s stomach.

“Told ya he was a fighter. It took a lot for us to get him off the ship to bring him here and it’s gonna take a lot to break him in. Good luck.”

“I won’t be needing it. I think I have him fairly under control by now.”

He heard the sound of movement heading in his direction and he fled. As he ran, he felt the cold feeling in his body twist and morph into something else. Something stronger.

Rage .

“You told me that I was found in debris from a shipwreck and you had no idea how I’d gotten here.” Isa stormed into the bedroom that night and confronted him with fury. “All this time, I thought I survived that raid because the Foretellers spared my life, but now I find out it was because I was kidnapped and sold! You made me think the death of my parents was just a tragedy!”

Rage …hatred…

“Well, that’s because it was, mūnchairudo.” The lord was propped in a chair with one leg crossed over the other as the valet poured more brandy into his glass. He was completely unfazed by Isa’s anger. “An orchestrated tragedy, but it was a tragedy nonetheless. All events of life are caused by man and the decisions we make. Destiny and those precious ‘Foretellers’ your people worship don’t exist.” He plastered a false smile onto his face, sweet enough to distract from the sinister man behind it. “Now be good and have a seat. Your stress can’t be good for the babe.”

The babe…that was no more.

“How pitiful.” Out of the corner of his eye, Isa saw the alpha standing with his back against the wall, arms folded and looking on without empathy. He watched Isa writhe in excruciating pain on the bedroom floor, occasionally coughing up black sludge. “You would rather do this to yourself than have my child?”

Isa lifted himself up as much as he could on shaking limbs. “I’d rather die!”

…Die.

A pause, a scoff, and then the sound of footsteps leaving the room was all that followed. Before the closing of the door, the lord replied in an amused tone, “Very well. Who am I to deny you the pleasure?”

Isa lived, of course. However, the price of life came with a deep feeling emptiness in his heart. The hollow feeling wasn’t because of the loss of a child he never had the chance to know. As horrible as it sounded, he wasn’t sure if he would have had the ability to love something created by the object of his burning ire.

He felt empty because the poison he ingested not only ensured that he would not birth that child, but also no others.

One of his biggest purposes in life, a purpose that had been instilled in him since he was twelve, had been stolen from him. All because he wanted to feed his animosity towards the monster who ripped his life away from him.

…Die.

But he wasn’t done feeding it.

Nights later, he met his lord husband in the bedroom again. The lord looked sickeningly serene as he told Isa that he forgave him for his stupidity while stroking his hair.

Die .

Isa lied to him. He told him that he had forgiven him, too, and they could put it behind them.

Die .

Isa brought wine, encouraged him to drink it as he pushed him to lay back on the bed. He wanted to get him loosened up, slow his reflexes.

Die …die…

A cocky look settled on the lord’s face when Isa moved to straddle his hips. His eyes slid closed as he waited for pleasure that would never come. Isa reached up and removed the necklace from his neck — the necklace that was given to him as a gift.

DIE NOW.

In one swift motion, Isa wrapped the necklace around the lord’s neck and twisted it tightly to cut off his air. His grip didn’t relent, no matter how much the other man thrashed and tried to claw at his face. Isa couldn’t even feel complete satisfaction at the gruesome sight: the man’s face purpling from oxygen deprivation and his eyes bulging out of the sockets. He only felt the emptiness in him grow in replacement of his unbridled hatred as he watched the soon-to-be late lord suffocate below him –

“Ow. Shit, that’s a strong grip.” Someone cursed from outside of his dream. The voice was low and tired, but still effective enough to pierce through his torturous dream haze.

When Isa cracked his eyes open, the room was dark. He could only make out the faintest outline of a figure by the bed. He looked down a little further and saw that he really was gripping the other person’s hand harshly with his own, inadvertently mimicking the actions of himself from the past. Despite this, he could feel alpha pheromones giving off a serene, comforting aura and didn’t even attempt to fight against his body as it was instinctively soothed into relaxing.

Isa slackened his hold with a murmured apology before he asked, “Lea? Is that you?”

“Yeah.” The response sounded relieved, as if he was waiting to hear him speak. “Hold on. Let me get the light.”

He moved away just enough to reach over to light the oil lamp on the stand by the head of the bed. It wasn’t enough light to flood the entire room, but he was able to see Lea much better and take in his appearance. He was supporting the upper half of his weight against a chair he was straddling, staring exhaustedly down at Isa with bags beneath his eyes.

He looked significantly older than the last time they saw each other. The same could be said about himself, of course. However, Isa felt as haggard and unkempt as a homeless pup and his current appearance was equivalent to this feeling, no doubt. Lea’s aging, though, seemed to improve his looks as he no longer possessed such boyish and rounded features. The light of the flames from the lamp danced across Lea’s sharp face and lit up the green of his eyes like gemstones.

For the first time in his life, Isa felt like he was in the presence of an actual prince rather than just a boy he grew up with. Something about this new feeling was disconcerting. Isa was going to tell him that, but stopped himself as he lost his nerve.

Why would he ever voice such a ridiculous thought out loud? Lea would think he was still spiraling from fever.

“Sorry for the inconvenience,” Isa muttered instead. He used his elbows to push himself up on the bed until he was leaning against the headboard. “I incurred quite a debt for your hospitality and am more than willing to rep–”

“Stop that.” Isa tensed at the sharpness of the tone immediately cutting into his attempt at conversation.

“Stop what?”

“You fucking know what.” Lea tired expression had morphed into an annoyed glower and he straightened himself up in the chair. “You’re doing that thing where you act like ‘the perfect man of class’ when you’re either really uncomfortable or trying get on someone’s good side. I know you wouldn’t try hard to win my favor of all people, so it’s got to be the first one.”

Isa ducked his head to stare down at his fists gripping the blankets. What Lea had said wasn’t exactly untrue; however, the tone he took wasn’t helpful. He was talking to him like a child. “I was trying not to make this awkward…”

“You’re making it awkward anyway by not talking like a normal human being.”

“Well, what would you have me do, Lea?” Raising his voice, he picked his head back up to settle his own glare onto Lea. “Pick up where we left off? Tell jokes and pretend like nothing has happened? Sorry, not everyone can be as charismatic as you under unfavorable circumstances.”

“Who said anything about pretending? Fuck, Isa, I just—” Lea cut off his own sentence with an aggravated huff. “I guess – I don’t know. I was hoping you would at least explain this.”

Lea reached into his vest and produced the letter that Isa had given to him. It was crinkled and creased from spending so much time shoved into pockets.

“You wrote this for me.”

“I did,” Isa said. “That should have been made clear when I wrote your name on it and gave it to you.”

“You can’t tell jokes, but you have no problem being a smartass, huh?” A slight smile tugged on Lea’s lips for a split second before he turned serious again. “I haven’t read it yet because I wanted to ask you about it first.”

“As I said before, I had always planned to write to you. I was keeping my promise.”

“Right, duh.” Lea averted his gaze and rubbed the back of his head. Isa noted that he, too, still had old habits of discomfort. “I guess I didn’t think that promise was still pending because…well, you know.”

“I had even started on a letter the day we disembarked to sail to Corona. It wasn’t as lengthy as that one because I never got to finish it when—” Isa’s voice caught in his throat and the indifference of his usual mien slipped as reality sank in for the first time since the incident. “When our ship was...”

All this time, he had forced himself not to think about any of it. The thought of how his parents were so brutally murdered for the gain of a corrupt noble and idiots who loved on conflict disgusted him. He refused to allow his captors, his tormentors, the pleasure of watching him grieve. Even now, Isa again fisted his hands into the unfamiliar sheets as he angrily tried to blink away the tears burning at the corners of his eyes.

Why did they even have to die? Maybe destiny was punishing Isa for being a stubborn youth and going against his set path, but his parents had done nothing wrong.

“We were attacked by pro-war activists from the Empire. Those bastards.” He hissed between stilted breaths. “One could only assume they saw the Paxian symbol on our vessel and decided to attack us. Perhaps to incite retaliation.”

“Well, it worked. The sad part is that they weren’t even proper Empirical soldiers, just a bunch of crazies with ships and weapons. Our navy took them down within a month.” Lea told him, and he wasn’t surprised. He had concluded for himself a long time ago that they were, as Lea put it, just ‘a bunch of crazies’.

Lea continued, “We were also told there weren’t any survivors. I guess they never found out you got away. It’s like a miracle.”

With the old wound now fresh again, Isa had to quickly bit his tongue before he could heatedly retort that he didn’t get away from anything. Though he himself knew the truth of his own fate shortly after the raid, it would do him absolutely no good to tell Lea or anyone else about it. It would only invite more questions that would eventually lead to his connection to Xehanort.

“Yes. A miracle, indeed.” He replied, sharply.

Lea, unaware of the reasoning behind such a clipped response, slowly slid his hand into Isa’s again. “Hey, Isa, listen. You’re alright now. I won’t ever let you out of my sight again, okay?”

“That wasn’t exactly something I was worried about, Lea.”

“Good, because I mean it.” Lea rubbed a thumb over Isa’s wrist. “See? You actually opened up to me a little bit. That wasn’t so hard, was it?”

Isa could sense the conversation was finally starting to move to a lighter atmosphere on Lea’s end. Even though Isa still hadn’t recovered enough emotionally, he knew answering with a snarky quip would ruin bring them back to square one.

He chose to humor Lea. “I suppose not. Ironically, though, I’d say it’s easier to get more expression from me when I write my words. Hence, that letter.” He gestured to the pages still folded in Lea’s grasp.

“Then I guess I better get reading – eventually,” he said, placing the letter back into his vest. “Now, I’m too busy. Father’s been killing me with paperwork and council meetings lately.”

“How unfair. Why he doesn’t just give that those tasks to his heir? Oh wait.”

Lea scoffed and pressed his palm to Isa’s forehead, easing him back down into the pillows. “Get some more rest. Geez, you’re somehow mouthier than the kids I live with. Can’t wait for you three to meet each other.”

“Oh, right. Even mentioned that you have ‘young wards’ now. I see that your obsession with fostering strays is still intact after all these years.”

“They’re good kids. You’re going to love them, I swear.” Lea paused for a moment before reaching out to squeeze Isa’s hand again. “I’m…glad you’re home, Isa. I really did miss you.”

“Yes. Me too.”

Lea nodded once and stood up from the chair with a stretch. After he blew out oil lamp, he spared one final glance at Isa – who had already dozed off again – before closing the door and taking a long walk back to his own bed chambers.

#akusai #leaisa #isa #lea #kingdom hearts #ao3

13 notes · View notes