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i-am-a-secret-ssshhh · 9 days ago

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The Rain is Especially Loud Tonight

Synopsis: The Prefect gets hurt due to Crowley's negligence.

TW: Injury, Stitches, Medical Stuff, Prefect gets caught under a collapsed Ramshackle

Part 1 (here), Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7 (coming soon), . . .

Tick Tick Tick Tick

The room would be completely silent were it not for the ticking of the clock on the wall.

The environment was more comfortable than your usual medical setting, but it still felt cold in a way.

The door creaked open and in stepped professor Crewel. "Hey, Pup." His voice lacked its usual stern tone one would hear in the classroom; instead, his voice was gentle and almost hoarse.

The hoarseness was no doubt a result of him screaming at the headmage in a roar you shiver even recalling. He had spent hours tearing into the man for his gross negligence and irresponsibility.

"Pup?" His voice became more worried when you failed to answer.

"Sorry." A meek, rasped voice leaves you throat. Your throat burns with dryness despite the 6 glasses of water you already drank, and it feels like every syllable echoes through your head and causes an intense, throbbing pain. You don't recognize the voice that claws its way out of your throat as your own.

You hear the soft scrape of a chair on the floor next to your bed. "No. Don't apologize, Pup." Rocking your gaze slowly over to him its clear to you, with the way his jaw clenches and unclenches while his eyes search the blanket covering you, that he wants to say something, but isn't sure what.

You slowly rock your head to look forward again. "Everyone's been in such a panic. . .and it's my fault, I-"

The man cuts you off as you choke on your words: "Pup. This is not your fault."

"But-" Your throat feels like its been given a massage with a thousand razor blades. The coughing your attempts to speak cause only make the pain worse.

Crewel quickly grabs another glass of water and holds it up to your lips for you to drink. "But nothing, Pup- Keep those arms down or you'll re-open the wounds. That old building was bound to collapse at some point. We all knew it. If the fault is on anyone it's on us staff. Crowley made you stay there, and we didn't stop him." The glass cup clinks slightly too harshly onto the nightstand as he sets it down.

Silence falls between the two of you.

Tick Tick Tick Tick

The ticking of the clock numbs your thoughts. You force your mind to stop focusing on the pain radiating from every inch of your body and instead listen to the steady ticking of the clock. The only other sound that can be herd is the occasional hurried footsteps outside the door as the other staff do their best to take care of the situation.

Your injuries have already been treated by a specialty team sent from STYX the moment the news got to them. They were the only ones aside from Grim, Leona, and the staff that had seen your mangled form before you were wrapped up like a mummy. You didn't have to ask how bad it was. Seeing Crowley throw up at the sight of you was enough to tell you it was bad.

The STYX team had spent nearly a whole 24 hours stitching you back together like some ragdoll and rearranging the many pieces of you that had been ripped and jostled out of place. If not for them. . .well, you don't want to think about it. If you looked like a mummy on the outside, you were sure that under the bandages you looked like Frankenstein's monster. There really wasn't a single bit of you that got out of that death trap unscathed.

You were kept in the school infirmary instead of being carted off to some high-tech STYX facility only because they needed to operate on you as soon as possible and didn't want to move you too much after the initial procedures. They made do by shipping a ton (literally speaking, more like 3 tons) of medical equipment to the school, most of which was now littered around the infirmary in a rushed yet professional way.

Despite your closeness to your friends, the only people who had come to see you were the staff. It's not that none of your friends wanted to see you, but that they weren't allowed to. The doctor's worried having them in so soon, when they were still full of hysteria from the news, wouldn't be the best idea. They weren't able to text you either as your phone had been crushed in the collapse.

"How's Grim?"

Professor Crewel hums: "Physically, he's pretty unscathed. He just has a few scrapes and bruises. Mentally, he's a bit traumatized."

You supposed that made sense. You didn't remember much, but what you did remember was Grim's voice. He had been returning to the dorm from after school detention when he found the building in shambles on the ground. He called out to you but your lungs were filled with debris and your torso was being crushed by layers of rubble. The dorm ghosts met Grim at the edge of the junk pile that used to be a dorm and confirmed that you were inside and that you needed help. The ghosts talked to you as you laid there, not being able to physically move anything off you themselves. They kept you awake and assured you that Grim was getting help.

Not long later you heard shouting. Two of the ghosts stayed with you while the third went out to meet the staff and fill them in. You were told after the fact that that's about the time they called up Leona to use his unique magic so they could get you out as soon as possible (that was the first time many saw the lion run).

You were blanking in and out of consciousness when they found you, but you remember them finding you. The feeling of the weight of the rubble lessening as it was methodically turned to sand and removed (in order to not end up crushing you with sand instead), the small grains dripping on your face, and eventually, the full force of the pouring rain battering your face as the last of the rubble was removed from above you. You remember Leona's manic eyes turning horrified, Crowley puking, and worst of all, Grim's face.

"STYX sent over a few trauma counselors. There are ones assigned specifically to Leona and Grim as well since they saw some of the worst of it." Crewel finally broke the silence again.

"And you? You and. . .the other teachers were there too. . .and Sam."

"Calm down, Pup. We've all had evaluations done to assess how we're handling it. We'll be fine.

"What about. . ." Your voice trails off, but from the look in your eyes, Crewel can tell what you were about to ask.

"What about the headmage?"

You nod, wincing slightly when the motion disturbs an injury on your neck.

"He's under investigation." Crewel responds after a brief pause. He knew that you surely couldn't be all that fond of the crow, but as you saw it, he was probably also your only ticket home. Crewel looked up to gauge your response, but your face remained neutral.

"And you, Pup? I obviously know you aren't doing particularly well physically right now, but what about mentally?"

"Hm?"

Crewel hesitated, not wanting to dig around in a mental wound and make it worse, "You were. . .under there for a while. I'm sure it must've been. . .scary."

You think for a moment before responding: "Was I really under there that long? It didn't feel like it. . .I think I passed out a few times." Your mumbled words put Crewel at ease in a way. He's not happy that you had been passing out, but he was at least glad that you weren't stuck under there fully conscious and feeling every second tick by as if it were an hour.

"Hmm. I see." Crewel nods. "I ought to let you rest now. A counselor will stop by tomorrow to talk to you about what happened." He stands up as he says this, his knuckles still white from how tightly he'd been gripping the fabric of his pants. "Rest well, Pup."

You simply nod, this time more carefully as to not disturb your wounds, and watch him walk out. When the door closes you swear you hear a choked sob.

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i-am-a-secret-ssshhh · 16 days ago

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and when you catch me ; kaeya alberich

content tags/warnings ; roommate!kaeya x reader, gn!reader, no pronouns used, fluff, slight angst if you squint, modern au, slight fanon characterization of kaeya sry lolol

word count ; 2.4k

now playing ; plot twist - niki

Before you came, Kaeya used to spend his mornings in complete silence. It’d only be broken by the occasional slurps of coffee and the creak of the hardwood floors when he’d saunter across what used to be a lone apartment.

Before you came, Kaeya used to spend his Fridays and weekends going to bars and flirting with anyone his sparkling eye catches on. He’d have an expensive whiskey in hand, seductively drinking from it with a smirk as he’d never break eye contact with the person he was conversing with, their flusteredness going very much noticed.

Before you came, Kaeya used to order takeout to suffice for dinner, spending more money on a single meal than proper groceries. He’d pile up the single-use plastic containers and cutlery in the garbage, going faster than them than a box of cigarettes.

Before you came, Kaeya used to go out on the balcony and fill the night air with the smell of tobacco pushing out through his nose and lips. He’d feel the sting of the nicotine in his lungs, lavishing in its pain masochistically at the stroke of midnight when sleepless nights took over.

Kaeya’s heart was free and unbound. He was an eligible bachelor with no intention of caging himself in a relationship despite the many sweethearts that desired to capture his heart for themselves. He loved the freedom given to him by being single and loose, with no one to boss him around or tell him the correct direction of life. There was no one to take away his third glass of wine for the night, no one to cook him homemade meals, no one to tell him off for smoking nearly a pack of Marlboro in a single sitting. There was no one to sit down with him on a Friday night to watch a 1990’s romcom with cheap popcorn, there was no one to quietly sing out classic jazz in the morning dawn, there was no one.

Until you came.

When you came into Kaeya’s life, you came into it by accident. He was working with you in a group project and he found you both cooperative to work with and easy to talk to and throughout the period, he was able to genuinely call you a friend. You would’ve been a perfect target to seduce if it weren't for the fact that he would routinely see you for the next month or so until the project was finished, meaning an awkwardness that was waiting to blossom would have to come sooner or later if he did take initiative. You began ending up sharing Kaeya’s simple two-bedroom-one-bathroom apartment when you accidentally slipped out one day whilst working with him that your landlord was going to raise your rent by a hefty amount through a soft laugh.

Kaeya had looked at you almost amazingly—almost surprised at how you were so calm. He remembers that you went straight back to your laptop after mentioning the feat before he had broken the silence with the simple phrase he didn’t know would change everything.

“Do you want to move in with me, instead?”

Honestly, he should’ve known better. Who asks a person he had known for only three and a half weeks to move in with them? But you were out on a whim, and though you would’ve never admitted it, you needed the help. As if a broke grad student like you could afford a shoebox apartment whose rent was twice the amount of Kaeya’s.

It had taken him a good hour of convincing you to move in with him, telling you that his apartment was larger than life and most certainly needed more people to fill up the void. You were only half-convinced afterwards, but he supposes the glimmer in your eye when you spotted the untouched reading nook with a gaping window sill staring out of the city was the kicker for you to move in.

It was a quick move—your apartment was so small you were able to move everything you owned into only one trip. Kaeya had purchased most things like cups or bowls in doubles or even triples, so there wasn’t even a need to get more cutlery or furniture. He had always felt like his apartment was meant to be shared considering the large amount of empty space he’d often wander around or how much he’d contemplated actually needing six bowls in the cabinet.

He wasn’t accustomed to having to do more batches of laundry on the weekends at first—nor was he accustomed to coming home with the TV on, having the kitchen smell faintly of basil, marinara sauce, and meatballs. The evidence that someone else was home besides him didn’t grow on him so quickly. It made him uncomfortable for a bit, even, knowing his personal space was now overlapping with another’s.

But as the weeks went on, as the months went on, he began to grow used to the piling dishes in the sink from the night before. He began being used to the hamper being half full with the week only being a third done. He began to smell the aroma in the air in the evening, trying to guess what you had cooked prior and searching if you saved him some.

And those silly little habits became routine as you slowly attached yourself to his life without either of you realizing it.

Kaeya supposes that those little things that you did were the very things that made him lose himself in the one thing he thought he would never get tangled in.

And damn, did he despise it.

To have someone pay this much attention to him without the feeling of desire and lust is something all too foreign to the libertine. The way you noticed his little things made his heart sting. You had memorized his coffee routine after the first week and never went a day without it having been prepared and ready for him in the mornings. You noticed how he always sets the TV volume at either an even number or at a multiple of five and never changed it to anything else. You noticed how he’d fidget in a sort of nervousness—whether that be picking at his fingernails or toying with the cuff of his sleeves—when he would ask you if you made him something alongside your dinner. And the answer was always.

Kaeya had eaten alone by himself ever since he blossomed into his teenage years. Adelinde, in the old family mansion he used to live in, was his only company, but even so, she would merely stand idly a few feet away from him as she waited for him to finish his supper only to clean up after him. The conversations rarely lasted a minute between the two anyway.

It traveled to adulthood, eating alone. The company that tagged along with him whenever he’d eat out with friends made him uneasy—talking while eating made him hasty. So Kaeya ended up just skipping friend dinners altogether and would catch up for drinks at a later time.

But when you had patted the chair next to you on the kitchen island the evening you moved in, that uncomfortability he held so strongly had chipped away ever so slowly with every dinner you had with him.

Kaeya would find it strange, at first. How do people talk whilst eating without being gross and spitting out food? How do people manage to hold conversations when one should merely focus on finishing their meal? He didn’t understand how you had so much to talk about in a single slice of time with him and still manage to enjoy the meal you ate. That sort of multitasking didn’t exist within him.

But he slowly realized that it wasn’t the food that connected people as they ate together.

It was the time spent with each other. Food just happened to always be in the foreground.

He didn’t even realize he began looking forward to those dinners with you until he had complained you ate dinner without him at that singular time when you nonchalantly mentioned the food was in the fridge before he forced you to eat a second dinner with him or else he wouldn’t let you go to bed.

“Kae, I’m full—”

“Don’t care,” he huffed, pushing your stiff form from the living room to the kitchen, “We’ve always eaten together and that’s how it’ll always be.”

“Just get the food from the fridge and eat it in the living room!” you exasperated.

“No, it doesn’t feel right,” he insisted and plopped your pouting form into your usual seat near the island. “We’re eating together and that’s final.”

But it wasn’t when you made that little comment that one moonlit evening that you had pulled him into a whirlpool of strange feelings without being conscious of it.

There was a time that Kaeya didn’t have work while you did, and he ended up sparing some of that time attempting to learn a recipe as a thank you for cooking him lovely homemade meals (it didn’t even turn out half bad despite being a menace in the kitchen when he attempted to help you!). Being the extra person he was, he had covered the island with a satin tablecloth and had picked up a neat flower arrangement from the florist down the street to plop into the vase gifted to him by the elderly landlady that claimed he should one day be her son-in-law.

The candelabra that held up three candlesticks was perhaps a little too much, he had thought seconds before you had walked through the door. By then, it was too late to remove or add any little details since upon entering your shared home, you had commented on the sweet aroma that wafted the air from the oven, not knowing that it had just finished up baking a simple lava cake.

It was only after you had finished the three-course meal that he prepared that Kaeya realized what he had prepared for you unintentionally.

“It’s almost like we’re on a date!” you had laughed lightly.

Kaeya paused as your giggles died down, staring at you almost incredulously, trying to take in what you just said without thought. “H-huh?”

“I mean,” you cleared your throat with the prepared wine and gestured to the preparations. “Look at this. The flowers, the candles, the moonlight. You can’t tell me this doesn’t give ‘ dinner date’ vibes.”

He could only stare at your blurring figure for a second or so before muttering, “Yeah… I guess it is like a date…”

That pivoting point was what made Kaeya start noticing the little details adorning your being. How you always reached for a specific cup for tea, what you liked to wear according to your wardrobe, those sort of little petals of yourself that slowly fell into his palms began to decor him in your little habits.

And it was sort of comforting.

He’d never admit to falling in love. Oh, no, that wasn’t the case at all with him. His little gifts to you and acts of servitude and occasional warm touches to you were not droplets of love… they were mere… favorited affection… as Kaeya would nickname it.

But love?

Absolutely not. That’s too much of a title.

Him noting to get you that ivory ivy-patterned dress once his pay cheque came while you both window-shopped in autumn was not love. Nor was idly wrapping himself around you and resting his chin on your forehead as you cooked, breathing in your scent and feeling the softness of your skin. Neither was carrying you to bed after falling asleep mid-movie and tucking you in before counting your breaths as he laid his head next to yours. And don’t get started on how he would get too worried if you still weren’t through the door at the designated time you said you’d be home by to the point where he considered calling the authorities (only for you to graze in three minutes later), because that was just him worrying about your safety like any other ordinary roommate. Love was not embracing himself in your warmth during the coldest of nights in your room, under your comforter. It wasn’t listening and singing to the songs you liked, and it most certainly was not making sure you both had time for an “outing” with each other every Saturday of each week.

Love isn’t wrapping you up in his scarf immediately when you give the smallest sneeze as a chill passes by. Love isn’t excusing himself early with an outing with friends when you text him if you want to catch up on the show you were watching together. Love isn’t contemplating whether the title of calling you his “lover” would suit you, nor were the imaginations of holding your face in his hands with his lips tenderly kissing yours as the flurrying feeling inside him melds together into a pool of amorous yearning for you and you only.

Love doesn’t keep up late at night a room away from you, wondering if you thought of him as much as he thought of you that day. Love doesn’t make him weak in the knees when you gleam a glorious smile at him at peak happiness—the type of smile where your cheeks hurt a little bit and your eyes crinkle so much, the whites aren’t visible anymore. Love doesn’t make him stare at your ring finger, wondering what size it is and how a jeweled band would look around it.

Love doesn’t make him do any of those things.

Kaeya Alberich does not love you in that sense.

He is one hundred percent sure of that.

…

“Kaeya!” you call from the front door, poking your head in with a concerned look on your face. “You said you were ready? Our brunch reservation isn’t gonna eat itself—you know how busy it gets on Saturdays.”

Swallowing thickly, Kaeya shoves his hand inside his coat pocket smoothly. “I’m coming, I just need to find my wallet,” he lies nonchalantly, “Start the car, I’ll be down in a few.”

You eye his right hand suspiciously for a moment. “Alright…” you murmur with a raised brow. “Don’t take too long though, I’m getting hungry!”

With a quick creak of the door and the snapping of a lock, Kaeya lets out a tense breath before pulling his hand out. Opening the modest white velvet box, he glides his thumb on the delicate sapphire promise ring, making sure it’s free of any marks and spare dust before closing the box and tucking it safely into his pocket again.

With another sharp breath and a quick fix of his hair, he whisks himself out to face what could be the most important day of his life.

… or maybe he’s ninety-nine percent sure.

a/n ; this was an old work i had totally forgotten about until i was cleaning up my drive and decided to post merely because i thought there were some tidbits that deserved their spotlight. the original title was actually "and when i catch you", but since it centers kaeya's perspective, i tweaked it a little bit to make it more fitting :>

anyways, thanks for reading as always!! your time, comments, and reblogs are always appreciated and never unnoticed <3

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