#⠀⊹ ˖ 𖥸 ─ ASUNDRIES.

[asundries]

VISARA. PLEASE. aventurine + YELLOW HYACINTH + evanesce + metanoia AND MY LIFE IS YOURS.

thank you for this request. it’s so apropos. brought to you by the gender envy lamenting i have daily over aventurine.

LIKE BLOOD IN THE SAND, A KISS IS A BRUISE IS ENDURANCE. ⏜⠀ . ⠀⟡

STARRING… ─ aventurine & gn reader. ✁ ... ❝ Aventurine is such a gorgeous, glittering spectacle, it pains you to look at him. He makes you sick with something that can only be akin to desire. ❞ CONTAINS… ─ 1.8k words. angst. not a healthy dynamic. cannibalism as a metaphor for envy? (not graphic, just symbolism). aventurine and reader are both aroacespec coded (by my own experience). crossposted on ao3 (i have some clarification and thoughts in the notes there).

Aventurine captures your attention the moment you lay your eyes on him. 

You’re not special for that, of course. Aventurine captures everyone’s attention—how could he avoid it, with his flaunting, his peacocking. He’s the focal point of any room he walks into, effortlessly; he’s the clean-cut gem catching the light in the center of a museum, boxed in by glass, look, don’t touch. 

But the thing inside is so breakable, and so is its shield; it’s more of a warning than any true protective measure. You will bleed, it cries. I will make you bleed, with my unpolished edges and my broken glass. You will have me, if you escape, but it will hurt.

And you want to. Some strange part of you wants to shatter the case, scrape off your skin, set off the alarms, and run. You want to bleed for him. You want to expose bone. You want to possess what he is, even if it hurts. You think he realizes this every time you hold him, the way you sink your nails a little too deep, but, truthfully, you’re not sure. You can never be sure with him.

You can bite, but I taste bitter.

He’s beautiful, and expensive, in the way only faux things are; aventurine masquerading as jade, pyrite fooling people into thinking it is gold, et cetera. You think that’s the point. You think you love him anyway. 

Bitter, like a toxic plant.

You want to dig your fingers into him the way you would the mud of a gold-filled riverbed. You’re impatient, and go in with your hands instead of a sifter. It’s less lucrative this way, little flecks slipping through your grasp and washing away down the current, but you can feel the weight of the gold, and the mud, and the frigid river water on your palms, and that’s enough of a trade-off. 

Bitter, like rat poison, like vitriol.

Every time he undresses in front of you, you can’t help but think of the space between each bone of his as something to excavate; the honeycomb holes spanning the gaps between each of his ribs and the rain-catcher dips of his collarbone. He tastes like sweet rot when you kiss him pliant, and you can hear something thudding behind the cover-up of those ragged breaths, something to prove he’s still alive beyond his half-hearted grasp on your clothing. 

It makes you nauseous. 

You’re sick at the sound, and you’re sick at the feel. You hate the pressure of his lungs as they expand, and you hate the mellifluous tone that accompanies each breath he takes, like he can’t possibly breathe without saying something. Something important. Loud and clear.

Bitter, like brightness, like a poison label, like the skin of a frog. Don’t touch me, it’ll kill. Neon is nature’s warning.

Your face is tucked into the crook of his neck, buried like a head in the sand. Your hands dig into the fabric of his shirt. You can feel his heart pounding beneath it.

“Is something wrong?” he breathes, taking pause. “If you want, we can—”

“No,” you say, cutting him off. You pull back to look at him for a second. Half of one. His gaze catches on yours. Bright, dead eyes. He’s so disheveled, yet still so effortlessly perfect. 

Something about it makes you feel strange. Hurried. Feverish. You drop your head back against him and close your eyes, trying to erase the image from your mind before it makes you feel even worse.

Bitter, bright, like his gaze on you. 

Your own heart is rapid in your chest, horrible and frantic like a prey animal, but betraying you like a bad dog. He could kill you, right now—his hands could close around your throat, he could flip you over, he could. But you’re the one with yours clenched into fists in his shirt, resting on him, above his most vulnerable places. You should feel powerful, but you feel sick.

Sweet. 

Aventurine is fool’s gold, all unpolished edges and dead fish eyes, and if you did pry that chest open, you would find nothing but a stone heart. You know that much. 

“Nothing’s wrong,” you say. You decide it’s best to stay where you are, face tucked into the crook of his neck, the closest you can be without truly feeling his heartbeat. You don’t want to look at him. 

His hands run up your back, skittish. “Are you sure?”

Aventurine is such a gorgeous, glittering spectacle, it pains you to look at him. He makes you sick with something that can only be akin to desire.

“Yes,” you say, lips meeting his throat again. “I’m sure.”

You love him. And this is what love is. Enduring. Wanting. Aching. 

Aventurine had captured your heart the moment you laid your hands on him. 

—

Aventurine is used to being seen as an object. 

Truthfully, he can’t do anything about it. An object is an object, and objects can’t just become people, so he takes it into his own hands. If he’s going to be seen as meat, a pretty gem to ogle and leer at and price and buy, that might as well be the point. 

They bet on you because you look good. 

They bet on him because his odds looked good, and his body looked better. 

They bet on him despite the fact his odds were abysmal. One in thirty-five. So it was only his—

You look good.

He believes it now. Because that is now the point, his desire, his intent. He looks good, he thinks. Now, he really, truly does. Not good as in pyrite, and pathetic, and dirt-streaked, and bloodied. But good as in golden, and flashy, and adorned. Truly. 

And the main point of it all, what he goes back to, over and over again: they can’t have it.

Bright like pyrite. Bitter like honey.

—

“What, you don’t trust me?”

Aventurine says the words with such slimy confidence that you don’t want to trust him. He’s all contrivance and reddened, flaky fish scales, the way he smiles at you like he wants something. But you place your hand on his waist to brush past him in his sterile kitchen, and you feel him tense. Almost imperceptibly, but there nonetheless.

“No,” you say, grabbing a glass out of his cupboard, just to see what happens. “Not really.”

He laughs, swirling his own glass of water absentmindedly, staring into the whirlpool it makes like he wants something from it. Like he expects it to swallow him whole instead of vice versa.

He looks at you the same way, you realize. Dreading. You wonder, idly, if he hates it as much as you do.

“Aw, come on,” he drawls. He sounds like he’s jesting, but you knew if you looked back at him his bright eyes would be just like a warning label. “Do you truly have such little faith in my… luck?”

Look, don’t touch. 

He downs the water like it’s something stronger, and sets the empty glass on the marble counter with a loud clink. By the streaky look of the cup, you suspect the water had been sitting out a few days, collecting dust and left to taste like silt.

“I don’t. Your luck is… yours. It’s not mine.”

You get water straight from his fridge’s fancy system, cold enough to hurt without the need for ice. Reluctantly, after bracing yourself, you turn back to look at him. He smiles. Dead eyes. 

“You’re right.”

—

Aventurine thinks about love, and he thinks about playing dead. 

Sometimes, when you hold him, he does that; plays dead, limp in your hands. Pliant, like a softer stone than aventurine is, almost malleable. You always stop touching him; your hands fall away from his waist and your lips leave his neck (which you always kiss on the right side). You always seem relieved when he gives you this excuse. To stop touching him. To pull away, because you’ve held on to something rotting for far too long, and his perfume can no longer mask the smell of iron under his nails or the decomposition in his gut. 

He can’t help it but play dead when he’s afraid: in the bloody river, face down and nearly out of air, drifting away from his sister because any sort of grasp on her hand would give him away; at the poker tables, eyes like a dead fish, boring into the cards like he wants something from them (he does); in the cradle of the Nihility, wading through a river a bit colder than the ones he was used to. He plays dead because playing at being truly alive would be much harder to pull off. 

Your hands are always dry, and always freezing, and they always feel like the sand of Sigonia The desert was always terribly cold at night. 

The desert was Gaiathra Triclops’ body, and the rivers her blood, and the rainfall both a blessing and her tears, and the idea that anything like her is laying their hands upon him again—that golden touch, that good luck, blessings are curses are blessings—makes him feel sick every time. 

When Aventurine thinks about luck, he thinks about the warmth of blood streaking through frigid water. He thinks about heartbeats. The shock of hot and cold and the rush of adrenaline. He thinks about pyrite buried in riverbeds. He thinks about death. 

—

It’s not his luck you want.

Love isn’t feeling sick when you hold someone, and sicker when you kiss them, you know that now. The only thing you can think about when you finally have Aventurine’s fragile ribcage between your grasp, when you hold all that he is—from his leaden lungs to his stone heart—between your hands, is that you want it for yourself.

Not him.

It.

You think about Adam’s rib. You think about breaking it off. You soothe the bruises on Aventurine’s paper-thin skin with a gentle hand. He doesn’t deserve your ire, or your hunger. Or maybe he does, and maybe you’re just a coward. Either way, you can’t bear the idea of bringing that body pain. 

You want, so badly, for it to be yours, that you’re soft with him. Even as you want to bite, even as you want to tear, even as you want to consume and become—you’re as kind as you can be, with your nails sunk deep into the wet sand of him—

You think about Eve’s body, born from a single bone, and you think about what you could be if you had the strength of all of Adam’s extra marrow. You do nothing. Nothing but dig your fingertips into the riverbed; nothing but fish for the pyrite; nothing but stain your fingers with the blood from salmon upstream.

Sweet like honey. Sweet like something rotting. 

Aventurine captures you the moment you realize it isn’t him you want.

[asundries]

WEATHERED, WHETHER WARMED OR SEARED. ⏜⠀ . ⠀⟡

STARRING… ─ firefly & gn reader. ✁ ... ❝ She knew you’d say that, too. You always do, as if it is a new, wondrous revelation each time, not a habit both of you have fallen into time and time again (just as that very sentence is as well—again and again. She hears you coming and then she can hear it in her mind, far sooner than you actually speak it. I thought I’d find you here. You knew you’d find her here). ❞ CONTAINS... ─ 2.1k words. bittersweet. intended as platonic. this is a secret santa fic for the wonderful @singularity-sam — i hope you have an amazing day filled with whimsy and cheer!! i haven’t written for firefly before, so i hope i did her justice. (i guess it’s a perfect time to start — merry christmas and happy rerun day to her as well!!)

Firefly is no stranger to extremes. 

First, there is the cold. 

Her “birth”, unnatural. Her bones felt like metal buried, rain-worn, marrow soft and skin so fragile, barely fully formed by the time her face breached the world. The artificiality of the engineered amniotic fluid she was adrift in for her first many moments was cold, so too the walls of that false egg, and the floor beneath her feet, and the exoskeleton she is ill-fitted with, and the spindly long-nailed fingers of the Empress, the first living thing she ever touched.

Nothing alive should be that cold, really. And neither should any start of life be so frigid and impersonal. 

It stays cold for a while. Then, engulfing, all-encompassing, there is the hot laving of fire. 

The stars do not stand still, nor are they unyielding. Infinitely, they dance and sway behind the rippling of the hot air rising off her burning world. Fyreflies are vastly brighter, to her, yet they emit no warmth. The stars must be freezing, too. 

There is never anything between this hot and cold. There is no soothing cool, and no comforting warmth, and anything lukewarm is simply the manifestation of her sensation’s atrophy under the relentless pressure of frigidity or torrid heat. Only ever extremes.

— —

Firefly’s body always hurts a bit more when winter comes. There is little she can do to warm herself, really; there is the cold metal of her armor and the enveloping flames of activating it, but that is only painful in another way. 

Even so, it’s more bearable in the comfort of a home. There will forever be a lingering ache, but the heat from a fireplace, from the warmth of people she’s begun to—in her mind only—call family, is much better than the all-engulfing flames she knows otherwise. She sits back on the couch and stares holes into the smoldering wood. 

On the days where Firefly can’t do much, she reminisces. 

The Stellaron Hunters, namely you, were the first lukewarm thing that she had ever felt. It’s a strange comparison to make—happiness and safety with something so seemingly mediocre, but it works. The twists and turns of different people, like moods, like temperatures—Kafka’s welcoming, warm; Blade’s taciturnity, cool; Elio’s… kindness, in his offer, a bit of both; Silver Wolf’s playfulness (fun, if a little tiring), warm again, for the most part; your… well, she didn’t know what to make of you at first, so she couldn’t say for sure—without ever falling too far into extremes. 

It’s funny, really, how such a bland feeling brought her such comfort; the sensation of nothing at all, yet no sort of emptiness to be found. It was nothing like that constricting egg, or the hard armored body she typically resides in. There is a softness in the holding of hands, in the holding of people, so unlike the harsh conditions of her life as it has been. She’s content.

“How are you doing?” you ask, peeking your head in through the cracked-open door. 

Firefly turns to look at you. “I’m okay, thank you.”

Her eyes immediately fall from your face to the tray you’re carrying. It’s wooden, handles notched in the sides, filled with food and drink (namely, two mugs of what she assumes is hot cocoa, one with marshmallows and the other with whipped cream), and decorated with festive additions on every square inch of space that is not already occupied by some sort of snack. It’s overkill, but it’s sweet. She smiles, and wonders how you managed to bring it all the way here without spilling something.

You set the tray down on the coffee table. She glances at it briefly—she doesn’t need to eat or drink much, but the gesture is kind, and she appreciates the thought nonetheless.

“Do you feel any better?” you ask, gently nudging the blanket she’s using closer to her so you can sit. She pulls her legs back a bit to give you more room. The couch dips beneath your weight and pulls her a bit closer anyway.

“I’m still sort of tired,” she says, picking up her drink and blowing on it. “But I do, a little.”

You smile. “That’s good. You worked hard. You deserve the rest.”

When she brings it to her mouth to take a sip, it’s just as she suspected—hot chocolate, no bitterness at all, nearly even too sweet. But it’s not hot, really—the temperature is perfect. Warm. 

——

Firefly was surprised the day she learned stars burned. If fyreflies gave off no warmth, yet still shone brighter than the sun, then stars surely paled in comparison to their beauty—such gentle, giving light, without the need for any destruction at all. A living thing. Fleeting. 

She knows stars will burn out, too. But it’s much slower. And you cannot hold a star in your hand, cannot feel a star illuminating every proof-of-having-lived line of your open palm, cannot choose whether to crush it or hold it close. Some say the beauty of life lies in the ephemerality of it. Sometimes Firefly agrees. Other times she thinks about how horribly unfair that is, that beautiful things should be allowed to last forever, that fyreflies should not die three days after their creation, that flowers should not wilt the moment they are cut from the stem. But that is only two extremes. Human life is much more intricate. The line of thought is irrational regardless.

She tilts her head back and lets her sight be swallowed by the darkness of the light-polluted sky. She narrows her eyes, gaze a little blurry focused so far away, and thinks she would prefer the company of a fyrefly to the stars. But they don’t exist for her anymore, not where she is now; they are fleeting, just as she is, and most perished in that all-engulfing flame. Though she moves around so very much, she has never seen another anywhere else in recent years. 

So, in their absence, she sits on the roof every night and stares out—the city lights of wherever she’s staying often obscure them, render them hazy in the swirl of candied ink and over-used paper, but she swears something in their scattered, hand-written lines speak to her regardless. Like the purpose-filled existence of every short-lived fyrefly, burning brightly before its destined end. 

The harsh scent of gasoline from the city is cloying, even from afar on the lone rooftop. The thickness of it is like stagnant smoke in her lungs, but the wintry night air flowing in from somewhere farther away—almost scentless, but damp with melted snow and crisp with re-forming frost—washes it away until it’s nothing but a distant memory. 

Snowfall is a lot like the cascade of ash. Hot enough and the heat feels frigid, freezing enough and the cold feels like fire—either way, what they have in common, hand-in-hand, face-to-face, is that they are extremes. Two sides of the same coin. The wind blows her hair away from her face, and as it carries in more snow-sodden clouds for the wintry sky to cry from, Firefly feels a snowflake alight upon her nose.

She brushes it away, and tears her gaze from the vastness of it all. She takes a deep breath and looks towards the small-in-comparison harbor instead. She watches the boats go by, the dancing light on their decks, the waving sky’s reflections in their wake, muted stars rippling like echoes in the hull-churned surface. It can be lonely, but it’s also peaceful, calming in a way nothing else is, from summer’s cloying night heat to winter’s biting cold, and back and forth, and again, and again. It’s become routine, no matter the city. You joining her has, too. (Which may, admittedly, be the reason it isn’t so lonely at all.)

Firefly wrings her fingers out, a bit cold by now, sighs, and cracks her knuckles one by one. She hears your footsteps along the rainswept roof long before she sees you.

“I thought I’d find you here.”

She knew you’d say that, too. You always do, as if it is a new, wondrous revelation each time, not a habit both of you have fallen into time and time again (just as that very sentence is as well—again and again. She hears you coming and then she can hear it in her mind, far sooner than you actually speak it. I thought I’d find you here. You knew you’d find her here).

She smiles. “You always do.”

There is no part of the script that says anything of this, implicit or explicit, but it happens over and over again regardless: Firefly steps out onto the roof to watch the stars, and you follow approximately fifteen minutes later, just in time for her to begin to feel the chill. (Though she could easily don her armor and chase the cold away herself, she finds that same familiar comfort in allowing you to do it for her.) You say “I knew I’d find you here”, and she says “You always do.” 

Or something similar, of course, as this was indeed not part of the script. Sometimes the same, sometimes with a roughness in your voice that comes only with the lingering disruption of sleep, sometimes a bit more exasperated if she promised to stay inside that night to rest. Either way, you are never upset for long, really.

“It’s windy,” you say, slowly sitting yourself down next to her, careful not to slip on the shingles. “And wet. You’re not cold?”

The unmistakable hint of disdain for the weather in your voice makes Firefly laugh. 

“Cold? A little.”

You take that as an excuse to inch closer. She doesn’t mind. Not at all.

You take her hand, fingers running over her cold ones, clutching them between your palms until you seem satisfied that they’re warmed. Even then, you continue to hold her.

“They’re pretty,” you murmur, gaze casted up at the little sliver of sky still visible through the encroaching clouds. “The stars.”

She nods. “They are. I wish you could see a Fyrefly—they’re sort of like little stars. They’re truly beautiful.”

You turn to her, a grin on your face. “…Aren’t you one?” 

“That’s… not what I meant.”

“I know. But you light up a room enough to be one, I’d say.”

She rolls her eyes, but that smile, that genuinely warm one that comes with the breaking off of a laugh, still tugs at the corners of her mouth. “Light up a room? What, with Sam’s flames?”

“Mhm. Yeah, totally.”

Your head falls against her shoulders, your arms encircling her side. She lets her cold cheek rest against your hair. It’s a strange feeling, no matter how many times it happens, no matter how many quiet nights you and her spend like this, so closely entwined, the same sky envisioned—it surprises her each time, the gentleness of it, the tenderness she feels in your arms. It’s soft, in contrast to tile floors and metal bodies and spindly fingers. The wind blows harder, and with it comes more snow in flurries, tangling in her hair and settling on her skin, melting upon it. You giggle softly, undeterred, and hug her tighter. 

“Are you sure you don’t want to go back inside?” she asks when you begin to shiver. “I don’t think the snow is going to stop anytime soon.”

“Not until you do.”

“You seem colder than me, though.”

“So?”

“So… why stay out here with me? I don’t want you to freeze.”

You sigh, eyes fluttering closed. A snowflake lands on your eyelash, and she resists the urge to brush it away. “You’ve asked that before.”

“I know,” she says. “You’ve never answered.”

You look up at her then.

“Because I want to, Firefly.”

And it has nothing to do with destiny. Nothing about these moments were ever scripted, nor would they ever be. It was your choice, and it was hers, time and time again. That’s what made it so wonderful.

She knows she should go back inside soon, that she should settle back into her armor and truly rest—she’s been out of it for a while, and it’s probably taking a toll, and she should allow her body to recuperate. But that should be on her terms, too. And, strangely, she’s in a lot less pain than normal, so, for now…

“Can we stay here a bit longer?”

“Of course.”

In your presence, the cold eases just a bit, and when you hold her… Even outside in the midst of winter, Firefly feels something akin to warmth. 

With you, it’s never in the extremes.

[asundries]

⠀⠀⠀⠀# 𝓐𝐒𝐔𝐍𝐃𝐑𝐈𝐄𝐒 ﹒⎯⎯ ⠀a⠀ clean ⠀YA ⠀short ⠀story ⠀collection ⠀written ⠀by ⠀RAINSWEPT, published ⠀by ⠀STELLARONHVNTERS.⠀⊹ ˖ ⠀

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