#ENDED UP BEING REALLY CRUEL AND ONLY USED TO BE SAD ABOUT FOR A FEW MINUTES BEFORE MOVING ON

[dyketubbo]

sorry to like. any of my followers who followed for qsmp just to see me be abnormal about doomsday . ive got like issues

[kavehater]

Do I have to start saying not that anyone would care in that super duper passive aggressive way to guilt people into caring or what

[fatesundress]

⭑ for the love that used to be here. tom riddle x reader

summary. you and tom are the only muggle-borns in slytherin, until one day he isn’t.

tags. angst, afab reader who is referred to as a witch a few times and rooms with girls but i don't think i ever use she/her pronouns or say the word girl/woman, biggest warning is that this is SO long (idk what compelled me to write a year 1 – post-hogwarts fic but here we are twenty thousand damn words later), blood purity and bigotry, dumbledore is greatly offended by the bonding of two orphans until he can capitalise on it, frequent wwii mentions (specifically the blitz), book clerk tom, MURDERER TOM… ministry reader, kissing, smut once they’re 21/22 May all the minors in the room exit at once, more angst, sad ending kinda, me spreading a very personal and very nefarious tom riddle agenda that is canon to ME but probably only like two other people

note. i need a shower and an exorcism after writing this shit. i'm exhausted. i don't even remember half of it. but i'm also SO stoked, this is my little (very large, frankly) 100 followers celebration! i've only been on here for about a month and the love has been so crazy so thank you mwah mwah mwah ♡

word count. 21.8k (i know... i KNOW)

You learn quickly that your shade of green is not the same as theirs. The rest of them are emeralds, even at that age — they glitter with their parent’s polish. You are flotsam, sea-sick, envy green; the putrid boiling stuff that brews in your cauldron when you look away for a second too long, and, really, it’s more of a stain than a colour at all. There is a fraction of a second where you find something powerful in that. You are not an easy thing to remove. And then it’s gone, because they want to so badly.

You learn, with a bit less tact, that you doesn’t actually mean just you; that it’s you and him whether you like it or not.

He evidently does not.

“It has to be completely fine,” Tom says to you in Potions, his voice small then but just as practised.

You narrow your eyes. “‘Scuse me?”

“I said the powder has to be completely fine.”

“I heard you completely fine. I know how to read.”

He stares blankly at you before returning to his own station, and that’s that.

It isn’t unheard of for muggle-borns to be sorted into Slytherin, so you’ve been told, but one glance around your common room and you can see it’s pretty damn rare.

There’s Tom Riddle, there’s you, and there’s a seventh-year girl whose knuckles are always white like she’s spent so long with her hands balled into fists that they don’t know how to do anything else. Tom Riddle is a prat, the girl is too old and unapproachable even if she wasn’t, and you are very good at being alone.

That decides it. Flotsam still floats.

Everything is — fine. It’s fine for months; you have no one and need no one and sometimes you catch a jinx in the back of Charms that zips your mouth shut or bends a foot the wrong way (a cruel reminder of how much more these people know than you) and your broom occasionally pivots so sharply the Flying professor has to stop you from careening into a wall and breaking enough bones for a week’s worth of Skele-Gro, but it’s fine. 

…It’s just that he’s insufferable.

The boy is eleven years old and he speaks like he’s stealing glances at an invisible lexicon between every word, more refined than any of the orphans you grew up with which makes you wonder which sort he’s surrounded by, and you take it upon yourself to theorise in passing if you could ever scare him badly enough his real voice would slip and he might just appear human for once.

Only it becomes clear when you’re stirring awake in the Hospital Wing after a mysterious bout of dragon pox (conveniently, all the pureblood children developed an immunity after catching it young) has rendered you bed-ridden and pockmarked, that you don’t think anything can scare Tom Riddle. He’s suffering just as well in the bed beside yours to keep the contagion to the two of you, and he’s all cold, eddied rage under sallow skin and beetling bones. 

“They’re going to kill you,” he says after three days of silence, when the room is dusted in moonlight so thin it’s like squinting through cinema noise or mohair fluff to try to see him.

You blink at the vague shape of him. “What?”

“If you don’t hurt them back, eventually, they’ll just kill you.”

In hindsight, it’s an assumption so hastily bleak only a scared child could make it.

I want to hurt them, you try to say, but for what follows you cannot: I want to hurt them but I’m not good enough to do it.

You roll over and pretend to sleep, and in the morning, you hurt them anyway.

It’s Avery who’s unlucky enough to be the first to test you when you’re three assignments behind in Transfiguration, still a bit groggy from your last dose of Gorsemoor Elixir, and actually, physically green. He tugs your hair and stings your cheek with the promise of “bringing a bit of colour back to your face” and it’s sort of funny how banal it is compared to the other transgressions you’ve been dealt — that this is the thing that makes you bare your teeth, grip your wand in a hand that still can’t hold half of it, and send Avery flying across the room with a Knockback Jinx.

Tom sits with you in the Great Hall for dinner that night, and he never really stops.

You practise spells by the Black Lake between classes and he’s anything but kind about the ordeal, but you teach each other. You end your days with singe prints and sore wrists and you often take more damage than he does, but sometimes, as spring settles in with warm tones (apple and jade and moss — all the greens you’d never imagined), you leave with less bruises than he does. It hardly feels like friendship. It feels much more like purpose.

When summer comes you don’t write to him, and you don’t expect he will either. You don’t suppose you’ve actually written a letter in your life. Instead you try new wand movements under your quilt every night and wait for August’s departure on a big red train.

You sit together when the day does come. He asks you if you’ve been practising. You frown and tell him you’re not allowed to use magic outside of school.

Second year is nothing but monotonous, antiquated theoretics. Most everyone complains. You don’t see why they should — they’re already aeons ahead of you — but that means you finally have a chance to catch up in your less-than-school-sanctioned meetings with Tom while the rest remain practically stationary. 

Deputy Headmaster and Transfiguration professor Albus Dumbledore is imperceptibly less soft with you than he was last year when you make the apparently poor decision to sit beside Tom on the first day, and you file the subtle shift in demeanour into some mental cabinet to review later.

You find workarounds with the librarian, Madam Palles, inclined to sympathy for the poor, orphaned muggle-borns to grant relatively unfettered daytime access to the Restricted Section so long as you keep it tidy and none of the books leave the library. That’s where things get a bit more interesting.

For a month you remain innocuous as can be. You browse through rare historical tombs and foreign biographies that would charge more galleons than you can conceptualise, and you never leave so much as a tea stain on the parchment. You smile at the Madam when you return the key each night, and walk back to the dungeons with your hands behind your back. It is, of course, totally unrelated that a month is what it takes for Tom to master the third-year curriculum’s Doubling Charm. An entirely separate affair when you meet him in the most secluded alcove of the library, slip him the key, and stifle your grin as he duplicates it perfectly. 

You discover Christmas break is your favourite time of the year. Nearly all the purebloods go home. The Slytherin dormitories are effectively halved.

It’s two weeks of earnest, uninterrupted work and sleep without fear of waking up with jelly legs or whiskers.

Madam Palles, most nights, makes a slight, drowsy effort of searching the library for leftover students before she casts the lights out and closes the door. Then, it belongs to you and Tom.

You’re splayed rather ridiculously over one of the big reading chairs on Christmas Eve, Lore of Godelot in hand, enthralled by a chapter detailing his controlled use of Fiendfyre through the power of the Elder Wand.

Tom is cross-legged and sat straight, his brows furrowed in concentration.

“What’ve you got?” you ask, leaning over to answer your own question.

Tom as good as rolls his eyes, holding up the book to give you an easier look.

“Magick Moste Evile?” You scrunch your nose. “Bit much, don’t you think?”

“It’s the stuff they’ll never teach us.”

“I wonder why.”

He steals a glance at your own book and smiles in that smug way that makes you want to slap him.

“What, Tom?”

He shrugs. “You might want to know you’re reading stories about the author.”

You look down. Lore of — Godelot wrote Magick Moste Evile? 

It shouldn’t really be surprising. Three chapters ago your book was recounting his months in Yugoslavia grave-robbing magical burial sites.

“Whatever,” you mumble, “It’s just a biography. Least I’m not reading the words out of his mouth.”

“Well, they’d be out of his quill.”

“Oh my God, Tom, shut up.”

All good things must come to an end. Term resumes and your hackles are back up. 

Abraxas Malfoy, Antonin Dolohov, Walburga Black and the best of the worst of your house have returned, sleek-haired and insatiable and deranged, truly, in such a manner that you don’t think you can be blamed for the instinct you feel every time you pass them to lunge like a wild predator or run like wild prey. All Tom does, though (and so you follow, because he’s standing with you and who has ever done that?) is meet their gazes with equal assuredness. He never seems bothered. He never seems animal. You are still all hammering heart and heavy lungs, and you are learning not to see the world through the eyes of someone who’s only ever had their fists to fight. You have magic, you remember. You’re good at it. You could hurt them, if you really wanted.

Not much is different that summer than the last. The war is hard. The food is hard to chew. You chip a tooth. You’re too afraid to fix it with the Trace on you, but you still smile because you will, and everyone seems put off by that. What is there to smile about? 

You suppose, for them, it’s a question with few answers. 

For you — you’re back on a big red train musing about the functions of muggle warfare with Tom Riddle, chucking a useless card from a chocolate frog out the window and moaning about how you wasted the sickle you found under your seat.

He’s gotten very good at ignoring your theatrics and going right back to whatever it was he was talking about. And you note, unrelatedly, he almost looks like he’s learned how to open the windows at Wool’s. (You dare not suggest he’s doing something so ludicrous as sitting in the sun too, but this is a start.)

Dippet, or the Minister, or whoever it is that’s in charge of the practicality of the curriculum, has become fractionally less stupid in the last three months.

You don’t have to rely on nights in the Restricted Section or weekends at the Black Lake to actually learn something anymore. Of course, without the assistance of those illicit extracurriculars, you wouldn’t be able to match up to your peers the way you are this year, but it’s nice to duel with dummies instead of motioning your wand vaguely over a desk, and you and Tom still climb the notice boards in rapid succession. 

They hate you for it. One of your roommates makes a pointed effort each night to glare at you from her bed like those jelly legs are back on the table, Orion Black (two years younger but just as nasty as his cousin) nearly trips you on your way to Divination, Abraxas Malfoy develops what you think borders on obsession with Tom, and for once it feels almost offhand to not care about any of it.

You’re beginning to think even at its best, Hogwarts is remarkably insufficient. This leads you to books mercifully unrestricted so you can read about a few of the other magical schools for comparison. Beauxbatons is renowned for providing most of the worlds alchemical developments, Uagadou’s early propensity for wandless magic makes it unfathomably more practical than Hogwarts, Durmstrang (though you scoff at their violent anti-muggle sentiment) teaches the Dark Arts as something beneficial rather than unforgivable, and — what do you learn here? Even with the hair’s-breadth of magical leniency you’ve been allowed this year, it’s no surprise so few recognizable names in wizarding history are Hogwarts alumni.

“Let me have a look at that,” you say to Tom one evening, when he’s peering once more over the pages of Magick Moste Evile. He’s a purveyor of knowledge in all forms, but he always seems to come back to Godelot in the end.

He raises a brow, handing it to you like your intrigue doubles his. “No more reservations?”

“Don’t get ahead of yourself. I’m only curious.”

“Curiosity—”

“Killed the damn cat, I know.” You glare at him through the pages. “I think that’s you, in this case though, since you’re the one in love with the bloody thing.”

He shakes his head as he reclines in the low light of the Restricted Section, muttering something that sounds like “ridiculous,” or “querulous,” or something else unimaginably fucking annoying.

You might be wrong. Retract your last quip and expunge it. If Tom’s in love with any book, it’s the behemoth dictionary he’s been spitting stupid adjectives out of since he was eleven.

But Godelot’s musings on the Dark Arts are fascinating enough that you can understand the appeal. He’s no wordsmith, and you appreciate that in a way you’re sure Tom deems regrettable, but his points are straightforward but thoughtful in such a way you can read in them how he was guided by the Elder Wand through everything he did. There’s a stream-of-consciousness to them. Something doctrinal you’re surprised to enjoy for all the obligatory English creed they washed your mouth with at the orphanage.

“Find what you’re looking for?” Tom asks, combing with little interest through the tomb you’d put down in favour of his.

“I’m not looking for anything. I’m just…” You sigh. It’s almost painful to say. “I think you were right, and — oh, shut up, don’t look at me like that — I don’t think we’re learning anything here. Not really; not as much as they do at other schools.”

“Of course,” he says blankly. “Hence this.”

This — restricted books and furtive duels — should not be necessary. 

“You know that’s not gonna be enough. For the rest of them, maybe, but not us.”

He tenses how he always does at the reminder of his difference. And you get it. Sometimes in moments like these you forget the reason you’re here in the first place. It isn’t just the rebellious divertissement of two academically eager students, it’s… survival. What future do you have as a penniless orphan in wartorn London? What future do you have as a muggle-born Slytherin who’s apt with a wand when there are a thousand more your age, just as skilled and twice as pure? 

It isn’t enough to be as good as them. You have to best them, and you have to do it forever.

The night stumbles into an exhaustive silence because you both know it’s true and it’s a bit too heavy right now. The answer isn’t in this room. Just you. Just him. So you sit in the dark and you stare through that muffled nighttime noise playing tricks on your eyes. The worst of the world can wait until morning. 

The worst of the world has impeccable timing.

A fault of both sides of the coin; the muggle world is a travesty and the wizarding world is just a bit fucking late, really.

So there’s the newspaper. It’s October first and the date reads September tenth. School owls are a joke and you can’t afford anything better.

And it’s a dirty, ashen grey. It smudges your green if you ever had it at all. You were born to this and you will return to it always.

BOMB’S HAVOC IN CROWDED PUBLIC SHELTER

MOTHERS AND CHILDREN AMONG THE CASUALTIES

DAMAGE CONSIDERABLE, BUT SPIRITS UNBROKEN

All you can hope to do is pass the paper to Tom and wonder without words what you’ll go home to.

The answer is very little when the summer clouds your vision with dust and you stand dumbly with your suitcase in front of nothing at all. You’d tried your best until your departure to keep up with muggle news, but it had remained, routinely, a month behind with the owls. By the time June arrived you were still holding your breath through May. Tom had attempted to reason with Dippet for summer lodgings at the school but you were both denied in light of the exquisite mercy — the bombs have stopped! The Blitz has ended! Go back to the aftermath and make do with the craters.

It’s a bit ironic that Tom’s orphanage survived and yours didn’t. At least you can finally see what all the fuss is about.

In truth, it’s more strange than anything. You feel unreasonably like you’re impeding on a part of him that has never belonged to you (if any of him does); that place where you intersect but never draw attention to. You remind yourself you had no choice in the matter. The system puts you where it wants to, and these days the options are slim. But it’s — the walls are amber-black tile and plaster, lined with sanitary-smelling hospital beds and a cupboard per room. Per room, you think; you’ve got one of those now, and with only one girl to share it with. 

You figure the reason for the extra space is probably not one you want to know.

Anyway, you don’t actually see Tom for two days. The caretakers bring you a tray of dinner that’s vaguely warm and a bit too salty and you sleep off the debris you think you breathed in that morning, half-sated and sun-tired.

But then you do see him, and he’s in these funny uniform shorts and a thick blazer and your greeting is an offhand joke about the scandal of his knees that he doesn’t seem to appreciate. He eyes your muggle clothes while you wait for your own set and you know you really don’t have any room to judge. 

He doesn’t, or at least doesn’t say he minds your relocation.

You spend half the summer waking up in the middle of the night to acquaint yourselves with the London tube stations, and the other half in whatever crevices of the orphanage you aren’t harangued by Mrs Cole every five seconds, which are far and few between. She seems to have decided fourteen is old enough an age to worry about your intentions unchaperoned, like it’s the bloody 1800’s, and admonishes you and Tom relentlessly despite only ever finding you quietly buried in useless books. 

You begin to miss Madam Palles and her invaluable pity. Everyone’s an orphan here. No one’s sorry.

“What’s his deal?” you ask one stuffy afternoon, reclining in your creaking seat to prop your legs on the desk.

Tom knocks them off (he’s so well-mannered that you sometimes push these little gestures of impropriety just to bother him) and glances at the target of your question. Some broad, blond boy who skitters down the corridor a shade paler than he arrived. You’ve yet to properly introduce yourself to anyone you don’t have to, so names are muddy when you try to apply them to faces.

He shrugs, but there’s a flash of something in his expression you’re fascinated to realise is unfamiliar. “He’s an imbecile.”

“...Riiiiight, but that isn’t a proper answer.”

You smile. Legs return to table. Timeworn Oxfords muddy the surface. Tom scowls. 

“There was an altercation last year,” he says tersely, “he’s rather fixated on the matter.”

“An altercation.”

“Very good, that is what I said.”

You narrow your eyes and he sweeps your legs off the desk again, gaze catching the unmistakable ribbon of an old bullied scar on your shin. 

“And I suppose you’re above such incidents,” he muses.

You cross your arms and huff. He always wins games like these.

You’re grateful when you return to Hogwarts in one piece after your final night of summer is spent underground, and the certainty of knowing where you’ll rest your head for the next ten months cannot be understated. 

But the worst thing has happened, and you blame it on the flicker of a moment where you missed Madam Palles like it was some jubilant, accidental curse to ever miss anyone. A foreign thing you remind yourself never to do again. 

She’s only gone and jinxed the locks to the Restricted Section so they cry like newborn Mandrakes when Tom’s replica key clicks in place.

For a second you both stand there looking stupidly at each other. Getting caught was a fear two years ago; you’d almost forgotten it was still possible.

Tom is quicker to collect himself. He grabs you by the arm and casts a Disillusionment Charm, and you don’t burst running out of the library like two blurry suncatchers reflecting the candlelight as your instinct heeds; you cling to the shelves and you slither silently to the door. (You’ll make a joke about it when you can breathe.)

Madam Palles the Traitor comes heaving into the library in her nightgown, a blinding blue light baubled at the end of her wand, and it’s really just theatrical at this point to use Lumos bloody Maxima when the basic spell would do the job just fine.

“Has she suspected us the whole time?” you say on gasp once you’ve made it to the dungeons.

“Perhaps someone else has,” Tom suggests.

“What? Malfoy?”

You think it’s a good first guess. It could have been any of the Slytherins, upon consideration, but Malfoy seemed most fixated on Tom last year and it wouldn’t surprise you to learn he’d been observant enough to follow you to the library and notice you don’t leave with the other students.

But Tom quashes the idea. “I’m doubtful. Malfoy is attentive, but Madam Palles is hardly partial to him.” (He had, in second year, set one of her books on fire while studying offensive spells.) “I suspect it was someone with more influence.”

Only no one has more influence than Abraxas Malfoy. The rest of the Slytherins follow him like lost pups. But then Tom might mean —

“A professor?”

“It may be.” He says it like he’s already decided his suspect.

He is, as always, and ever-infuriatingly, correct.

It’s that file you tucked away for later, reoccurring when you return to Transfiguration in the morning like a second epiphany: Dumbledore.

He assigns the term’s seating arrangements, which he’s never done before, and there’s something in his tone when he pairs you with Rosier that feels intentionally like not pairing you with Tom. You don’t think it’s paranoia clouding your better judgement, and by the way Tom’s gaze hardens as he takes his seat beside Malfoy, neither does he.

Dumbledore is suspicious for a number of reasons. He disappears for weeks at a time. The Prophet writes articles on his sightings in Austria and France like he’s an endling beast. He’s being sighted in Austria and France — two notable countries in Grindelwald’s ongoing war. Perhaps ancillary, you’ve decided the charmed glass repositories he uses to hold his old artefacts are the same ones encasing the least permissible books in the Restricted Section. And if that isn’t paranoia (which, you’re willing to admit, it may be) then you assume he has them so proudly on display because he wants you to know.

You consider it a warning.

Tom does not.

“Just give it up,” you hiss over a game of wizard’s chess, “I bet we’ve read every book in there twice already anyway.”

His jaw ticks as the sole indicator of his annoyance, and he takes your rook. You scowl.

“Tom, that man thinks you’re devil-spawn. You know he’s just waiting for an opportunity to catch you doing something wrong.”

“So?”

It sounds so petulant you think he’s been possessed by his eleven-year-old self. Then you think he was a lot wiser at eleven.

“So?” You make an aggressive move with your knight. “So don’t give him one!”

He stares at the board and his breath is just a trace sharper and you hate that you know him like this and no one else. You wonder if he knows you like that too, but resolve with ease that he does not. You’re hard frowns and lewd jokes and trousers torn at the knee to bare scars with stories you wish you could forget. There’s no mystery there. Tom is nothing but — gordian knots and fixed expressions and little patterns to learn like the rules of this stupid game between you. You must know Tom Riddle by every atom or not at all. And that isn’t a choice, really. You’ve never known anyone else.

“Are you stupid, Tom?”

You glance at the board. He’s got Check. A terrible, true answer.

“No,” you finish. “Then don’t act like it.”

Your king glances at you and you nod. He falls. The game is resigned.

Tom acts stupid.

Dumbledore knows.

It all happens very fast.

You strike Tom harder in the arm with Confringo than is likely necessary that night, and he returns the favour with a Knockback Jinx that thrusts you into the shallows of the Black Lake.

You gasp. The cold water feels like it’s swallowing you whole when it strikes, an envelope sealed around you and licked shut for good measure. Everything holds to you, and it’s fucking November. Your senses are so overwhelmed that you forget to murder Tom the instant you sink in. You forget to do much of anything.

You wade trembling out of the lake when sense returns and Tom huffs, peeling off his robe to treat the burn on his arm.

“You—idi—iot,” you mutter, trying to find the incantation for a warming charm but the words get stuck between your chattering teeth. “You stole a re… stricted book.”

Tom glares daggers at you between his poor healing job and you scowl, mincing through the grass and grabbing his arm. “Fucking imbec-cile…”

You’ve done enough damage that if he were anyone else you’d be proud of yourself, and somehow, simultaneously, if he were anyone else you’d be able to manage a pinch of guilt. But he’s Tom, and you know him by every atom, so you cannot be proud, and he’s Tom — he retaliated by tossing you in freezing water and now your clothes are clinging sodden and heavy to every inch of you, so you certainly can’t be guilty either.

“I borrowed it,” he says tightly. As if that means anything at all. And then he takes his robe and drapes it spiritlessly over your shoulders. “You could attempt communication before curses.”

“I could attempt communication,” you scoff, uttering a charm to partially close the gash on Tom’s arm, “Fucking h-hypocrite. I did communicate. You lied.”

“I —”

“Omitted information? Withheld the truth? Watch your mouth or I’ll steal your fucking dictionary, Riddle.”

You swear a great deal when you’re cold and mad, apparently.

“I won’t be caught.” His calm is infuriating. “It would hardly earn expulsion regardless.”

“It doesn’t matter! He knows it’s you! He was staring at you all class!”

“So nothing novel then.”

“D’you want me to blast you again?”

His lips form a flat line. No. That’s what you thought.

You sigh, clutching his robes in your fists to quell your trembling. “What’d you take, anyway? We never touch the encased stuff.”

That is, you assume, why Dumbledore was vexed enough about the whole thing to mention it in class today. A highly valuable book has gone missing, from a repository you dare conclude belongs to him, and he has to pretend all the while not to know it’s Tom who took it. You are out of the question. Theirs is some delicate vendetta you can’t begin to unfurl.

“Nothing anyone should miss,” Tom says, a complete non-answer as he stops to murmur a warming charm you could probably manage yourself by now.

“Tom.”

“It was an encyclopaedia. It’s entirely in Runes. I suspect it will take months for me to decipher.”

“God’s sake,” you groan. He really is exhausting. “I think Dumbledore’l take his chances and loot your dorm before that happens.”

Tom wipes a stray droplet of water from your cheek. His fingers are soft. “We should return. You look half-drowned.”

“I am half-drowned, dickhead.”

And you accost him in hushed tones the whole walk back. Runes, Tom, really? Threw me in the damn lake over a Runic Encyclopaedia? He accosts you just the same; You burned me first.

It does, in fact, take Tom months to decipher the Runes, and he’s quite secretive about it. He won’t let you see the book, won’t tell you what it’s about, won’t indulge your queries on how far he’s gotten or if it’s worth the way Dumbledore bores his eyes into the pair of you in the Great Hall with nothing but the glass of his spectacles to soften his censure. You consider — well — you consider taking your chances and looting his dormitory.

The day everything changes starts the same as any. 

You muse over breakfast about muggle news and how the way Tom holds his wand when he casts defensive spells is too sharp when it should be circular. He argues. You soften the criticism by telling him his offensive magic is stellar but you’ll always beat him in defence if he doesn’t swallow his damn pride and listen to you for once. (So, really, you soften it very little.) He doesn’t take Divination so you don’t see him until Herbology that afternoon and he’s silent enough during the hour you share with your wormwood plant that you know he’s done it sometime between breakfast and now. 

Tom has cracked the book.

It’s late spring and the night takes longer to settle than it did in the winter. Errant sunbeams still sparkle on the water when you meet him by the lake, and it’s warm enough to forgo a coat.

“Are you going to tell me what it’s about now?” you ask without preamble, arms crossed over your chest as he approaches.

He hands you the book like it’s worth something to you without his explanation, but you’re intelligent enough to gather something from the illustrations of two twined snakes embroidering the cover.

“I should have suspected it sooner,” Tom says before you can comment. “By the way Dumbledore acted when I told him… I should have known he would have wanted to keep it from me.”

“Tom, I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“It’s an Encyclopaedia on Parseltongue and its known speakers.”

You flip through the pages and none of it means anything. “Parseltongue?”

“The language of serpents,” Tom supplies, and the two of you walk along the edge of the forest. “It’s almost exclusively hereditary.”

“Okay, so, what — you’re trying to learn it anyway?”

“I have no need.”

You frown. “You… you already know it.”

“I always have,” he says, and there’s something almost unrestrained in his voice. He’s proud in a new light, and it takes you a moment to understand and you’re not sure why exactly it makes your heart sink, but —

“You’re not muggle-born.”

“No, I’m not. And Dumbledore knows.”

“So, he —” You try not to sound crushed because why should you be? Why should it matter that he isn’t some exact reflection of you? He’s at your side, he’s still there, he’ll always be there — “How does he know?”

“When he came to Wool’s to inform me I'd been accepted at Hogwarts. I hadn’t known anything, certainly not that speaking to snakes is emphatically rare, so I asked him. He said it was ‘not a peculiar gift.’ Perhaps to keep my interest at a minimum.”

“Why would he lie?”

“Because it isn’t just that I’m of magical blood. I’m a descendant of Salazar Slytherin.”

You can’t be faulted for laughing. It’s not often Tom makes jokes, let alone funny ones.

“That’s good, Tom. Morgana used to have tea with my great-great-hundredth-great-grandmother, so that works out nice.”

He sighs, taking your hand and leading you further into the woods.

“Are you trying to murder me?”

“I might.”

“You’d be the first suspect.”

“No, I wouldn’t. You’ve far too many enemies.”

Not by choice, you start to scold, and then he stops, not so far into the Forbidden Forest that you’re afraid, but far enough you understand this is not something he’d chance showing you in the open.

He closes his eyes and whispers, and it’s — decidedly not English. And you know the sound of a few other languages, at least; this doesn’t sound like words at all. His consonants are pointed, his S’s stretched, the syllables repetitive but separated by a difference in cadence someone less perceptive might not notice. 

It shouldn’t be surprising; it’s exactly what he told you, but it startles you how much it reminds you of a snake.

“Tom?” you murmur, unsure at the prospect of speaking some ancient, unknown language into the air of the Forbidden Forest, and, underneath that, still reeling with the knowledge that this is real at all.  You’ve pinched yourself a few times to make sure.

There’s a low susurration in the grass, wet with dew that catches the moonlight, and you gasp, clinging to Tom’s arm when you see the blades part in helices for the space of an adder.

“It’s all right,” Tom says softly, almost elsewhere, his eyes zeroed in on the snake. “It won’t hurt you.”

You’re still by the balance of his arm and some petrifying awe as he extends a hand to the grass and the adder coils around it, weaving upward to his shoulder.

“Oh my God. Oh my God, Tom.”

The adder points its beady gaze at you, and Tom whispers something else in that strange language before it retreats in agreement or compliance or whatever could come close to expression on the face of a fucking snake, and maybe you’re dreaming this despite your pinching. Maybe you’ve lost your mind.

“Hope you didn’t just tell it to bite me,” you try, and it comes out half-choked.

He smiles. It’s partly for you and partly for this venomous little thing on his shoulder, and that’s a bit startling. Tom Riddle smiles for adders and you and not much else. 

“Should I?”

And all you manage, for whatever reason, is, “Don’t be like them now that you’re not like me.”

It’s out before you can stop it, welling from a small, scared place that embarrasses you to return to. A hospital bed when you were eleven. The walls of a bedroom ravaged by bombs.

Tom’s smile fades. “We’re nothing like them.”

The thing is, neither of you know that’s the day that changes everything.

You celebrate your fifteenth birthday in the Deathday ballroom with Tom, a stolen dinner pastry, a green candle, and a few sad ghosts. You try to learn how to dance. Tom thinks it’s silly. You tell him that’s only because he’s upset he keeps stepping on your toes.

Summer blisters when it comes.

Some of the children take jobs as mail-sorters and steelworkers and you clasp for whatever you’re (one) allowed and (two) capable of, which isn’t much. You’re both old enough at the end of the day to explore London on your own, opting to spend as much time away from the orphanage as Mrs Cole allots, but you only have knuts and pennies and you warn Tom it would be unwise to swindle muggles and risk a letter from the Ministry. So you work where you’re needed and you eat the rationed nonsense you always do and you miss Hogwarts terribly. It’s much the same: you’re together, you’re hungry, and you’re nothing like them. 

And then it’s different: Tom makes Slytherin Prefect, is suddenly tall, and you wonder in fleeting moments if his face has always suited him this well.

A stupid remark. You fervently ignore it.

Fifth year begins and you have almost the same number of electives as you do core classes, Tom has duties in his new role that take much of his spare time, and despite popular belief, you and him are not a mitotic entity, so this splits you up more often than it had in previous years. Which is fine. You still have plenty of things to talk about during meals and between duels, and you reckon you’ll share DADA until you graduate.

But in his absence, your attentions are forced elsewhere, and you should be grateful they land on something potentially promising.

It’s like Transfiguration just clicks for you this year. You’ve never been the greatest at Transformation (importantly though, you’ve also remained far from the worst), but fifth year launches you into Vanishment and something about that feels like a perfect equation. There are no complicated half-numerals and objects stuck between inanimacy and being — just unmaking the made. Nothing or not. You’re fucking excellent at it. You glean the theoretics fast and then the practise comes like breathing. Even the purebloods struggle as you Vanish Dumbledore’s Conjured garden snakes in brilliant tendrils of light. You exult unabashedly when you brush past them on the way out of class — who was it that didn’t belong in Slytherin?

You say the same to Tom and he rolls his eyes, but the amusement is there.

“Think you can talk to my snakes for me?” you tease, nudging him on the path to Hogsmeade.

“If they’re yours, I doubt they have anything worth discussing.”

And Dumbledore is… a hue nearer to the man you remember from first year. He praises your improvement and smiles when you can’t hide your giddiness as if equally impressed.

He doesn’t shelve people the way Slughorn does (you’re dismayed to find Tom has been invited to join the Slug Club and you have not) but you think if he did you’d be rapidly climbing your way to the top. Maybe get put in one of those neat little repositories he keeps all his best treasures in.

Dumbledore does, however, offer additional assignments for those who are interested, and tasks you with a few if you’re up to the challenge.

You always are.

The Tom-Dumbledore-Encyclopaedia debacle is apparently either resolved, or your part in it forgotten. 

Tom humours you when you’re both singed at the fingers from duelling, yours dipped in the lake while he buries his in the cold moss, about how Abraxas takes the seat beside him at every Slug Club dinner. He tells you he pretends to be very interested in the Malfoy’s business affairs and their stock in the Bulgarian Quidditch team’s win this coming spring. He tells you he finds it amusing to let Abraxas think he can make Tom his pet. Tom says he considers searching for Salazar Slytherin’s fabled Chamber of Secrets and showing Abraxas what a real pet looks like. You smack him in the arm.

He’s had an ego forever. He just has a few too many reasons for it now.

And maybe that’s why you push harder in Transfiguration, dedicate the majority of your studies to it, spend your Saturday nights scrutinising advanced techniques while Tom makes nice with Potions experts and politics with people who don’t even know what he is but like him anyway. It’s patronising, of course — borderline fetishistic; not a real like — but it scares you. Tom Riddle would not allow himself to be anyone’s pretty mudblood show pony if he didn’t have an ulterior motive.

Everything changes but the observable truth that he is still insufferable.

You’re lucky to see him twice a week if it isn’t in class, and the way it starts is so slow you don’t even fully understand what’s happening until Christmas break when Abraxas stays a few extra days and leaves by Dippet’s Floo instead of the train.

You don’t dare ask where Tom has vanished to in that time or why the hell Abraxas Malfoy would willingly subject himself to unnecessarily extended time at school with all his lackeys gone, and it isn’t because you don’t want to. It’s because he won’t tell you himself. It’s because you’re terrified the answer will feel like a broken promise, and you’ve come to realise (it’s been there for so long; such an obvious, tiny thing that you’ve never stopped to really dissect it) that it’s quite difficult to know someone at every atom and not love them a little bit.

You’re suddenly aware of the risk of it: you love him like an inextricable piece of yourself, and, well, you’ve seen war. You know what amputation looks like. You’ve seen the remains of structures designed to stand forever, and you’re strong like them — casts and gauze in all the weak spots because you remember the pain of breaking them — but those were blows dealt without the complication of loving the bombs behind them.

Tom is the green on your robes, the dragon pox tinge you sometimes think never truly faded when you look in the mirror too long, and all the shades you never imagined. Apple, jade, moss. The beginnings of emerald. (No, he couldn’t be that.) 

You wonder what the world would look like if he stole those colours back, and it’s much worse than some brutal decimation; it would leave you with too much. You would just be you without him.

So you love him into June like you always do, and you pluck his Prefect badge off on the last day of school and tell him it makes you jealous like a joke when it’s half-true. 

It’s raining when you walk to the train together, miserable for what should be summer but not at all remarkable in Scotland. Tom wipes it from your cheek. Your wrists are sore from vanishing bits and bobbles all night while you still can, never truly prepared for three months without magic, and you curl into your seat as soon as you’re in it. Tom wakes you up when you arrive back in London, startling you to find that you fell asleep at all.

It rains a lot that summer. There’s nothing much to see in the city and you can’t get anywhere else (you note: the Trace cares little about broomsticks but you can’t afford one of your own and flying might be the only thing Tom is bad at) so you’re stuck to the library again with a noseful of old paper and a certain prose that magical literature cannot replicate. You theorise a lifetime of reckoning with the mundane forces one to be more creative.

Perhaps it’s the cold that makes you sick. Perhaps it’s the state of your meals. Either way, your final weeks before sixth year are hell. Biblical, blazing hell.

The nurses aren’t sure what it is — another influenza epidemic you’re the first in the orphanage to catch — but they isolate you immediately and there’s not much care they can offer. 

You hear Tom arguing with one of them outside your door but can’t make out the words. Everything is dizzy, sweaty, halfway to unconsciousness but without its relief. You’d take dragon pox over this.

Some days later (though you can’t be sure because it feels like bloody centuries), he’s at your bedside, and you think even if you were lucid enough to ask what horrible thing he’d done to change the nurses’ minds, you wouldn’t. 

But you know he’s not beyond breaking wizarding law, because he’s muttering healing spells with a hand to your damp forehead, and you hazily find yourself reaching for him, trying to shake your head no.

“Not allowed,” you mumble. Your throat is sore and your nose is stuffy. You sound terrible and you probably look worse.

Tom is slightly blurry but you think he’s staring at you. You know if he is it’s with the utmost incredulity.

“Not allowed,” he repeats slowly. It’s very easy to picture him clenching his jaw. “I wonder, if the Trace is so exact that it can detect all forms of magic, it can’t also detect malady. You’re burning — and I’m to consider whether saving your life might be illegal?”

He’s angry. He’s angrier than you’ve seen in a long time; and you can actually see it now. His magic courses through you and your vision clears, bit by bit, until your depth perception steadies and you realise he’s closer than you thought. His jaw is, in fact, clenched.

You move to catch his wrist and manage it this time. “Tom.”

“Don’t argue,” he says thinly.

“You’ll get sick.”

His face is far too neutral for the way his fingers stroke your damp cheek. “Hm. Then it’s a good thing you’d break the law for me too.”

Of course he’s right — you love him. Which makes it a good thing he doesn’t get sick.

Some of the younger children do. The fever comes overnight for a girl who wasn’t in the orphanage last year, and it takes her by the next.

When you get back on the train to Hogwarts, the virus is circulating Britain and you’re livid. 

What Tom said is true; you consider the Trace’s precision and the details of the laws on underage magic — how one of the technicalities is that a young witch or wizard may be absolved of the consequences if the circumstances are life-threatening. You think about how it supposedly doesn’t care about broom-riding or Portkeys or Floo travel, and if the Trace is that complex, surely it understands sickness.

You only wonder if the Ministry would understand it. There haven’t been any epidemics in the wizarding world since Gorsemoor cured dragon pox in the sixteenth century, and when there isn’t healing magic there are antidotes and Pepper-Ups and herbs that muggles simply don’t have. The fatality of a fever of all things is not something you imagine could be comprehended by the sort of people who sent you and Tom back to London in the wake of the Blitz.

Of course, the Ministry hasn't written to you, you haven’t been forced in front of a representative from the Improper Use office, and you have no real reason to be upset.

You are regardless. 

It shouldn’t even be a thought: you immolating into oblivion protesting rescue because one of you might get in trouble for it.

A world you’ve never much cared for is blanketed in ash and its people are dying and you can’t help them. A girl is dead. You’ll return next summer and there will certainly be more.

Life is for the magical, you find. The muggles can burn.

It’s what makes you start to panic this year, knowing you’ve only got one more after it. You have no idea what you’re going to do after school, and it doesn’t help that Tom doesn’t appear to share the sentiment. He’s got Head Boy in the bag and when he isn’t with you he’s with Abraxas, who can surely provide him connections if whatever game Tom is playing at works (and you have no doubt it will), but it’s like you said in third year: that isn’t enough for you.

You remember with a small ache that you no longer means you and him.

And then — it makes sense. You feel incredibly stupid.

“You told him, didn’t you?” you ask Tom the first opportunity you can get him alone, in the glum blue light of the Deathday ballroom on your way back from supper.

He sighs like it’s a conversation he’d hoped to put off for longer. “You’re referring to Abraxas, I presume?”

“You’re referring to — yes, you prick, I’m referring to Abraxas. Of course I’m referring to Abraxas, or are there others? Dolohov and Nott seem unusually enthralled by you, now that I think about it.”

“And for a reason I’m supposed to be aware of, this is an error on my part. Should I be apologising?”

“Why did you tell him, Tom?!”

“Why?” he deadpans.

You throw your hands up. “Oh, for fuck’s sake.”

“Shall I provide you with my itinerary as well? Would you accompany me as I tour the third-years around Hogsmeade? Or can you do me the favour of trusting me to make my own decisions with the nature of my ancestry?”

“You’re keeping something from me and there’s a reason,” you say, stepping closer to him, “and forgive me if I want to know what it is when you were willing to tell me you’re the Heir of Slytherin and you can talk to snakes. What — what could possibly be bigger than that?”

Tom returns your approach with one of his own. His eyes are steady, dark, thick with lashes and you can’t reminisce on the details of the rest of him because that would be strange for a friend to do. Stranger to do it now, when you’re angry with him and there’s two sleeping ghosts in the corner and he’s framed by deep indigoes like the ripples in the Black Lake and — you’re doing it anyway.

To be short, he’s close, he’s very beautiful, and sometimes you despise him.

“Trust me,” he says again, without the derision of the last time. “This will change things for us.”

You frown, but it’s a weak upset in contrast to the explosion you came in here willing to make. There were at least twenty questions you meant to ask and you only managed one.

You are not his keeper. You know that. 

“Change them for the better, Tom,” you say on a sigh.

He blinks, and you think he’ll respond with a nod or a slightly offended ‘of course’ but he does not. He blinks and he just keeps looking at you. It’s disarming. It probably resembles the way you often look at him. There’s a rationale somewhere; you never see each other anymore, life is so incredibly busy, maybe he’s forgotten what you look like.

And he does nod, finally, but he does it with his thumb brushing the corner of your lip.

What? Sorry. What’s going on?

He pulls it away like he’s heard you. “You had something.”

You’re almost positive you did not.

Transfiguration this year brings Conjuration, which is an advanced and welcome distraction, and even more exciting when you consider no longer having to Vanish things you have no idea how to bring back. Dumbledore’s is one of three N.E.W.T classes you’re taking — Defence Against the Dark Arts and Alchemy besides. It’s easily your favourite.

You share it with eleven other Slytherins and twelve Ravenclaws. Four of them are muggle-born, and it’s hard to describe the ease you feel among them because you don’t think you’ve ever had anything resembling ease with anyone but Tom.

Your schedule is more crammed than it’s ever been, but it’s good. Two of the Ravenclaw girls invite you to Hogsmeade every other weekend, you share butterbeers when you can afford one, you study until you collapse, you take Dumbledore’s extra assignments and consider trying out for Chaser on one of your more restless evenings before waking up in the morning and resolving there is such as thing as too much of a good thing. Best not to get ahead of yourself.

Your contentment is remedied quickly.

Someone is found unresponsive in the dungeons. Dippet makes an announcement at breakfast that the boy isn’t dead, rather, petrified. No one is quite sure the cause, but the Headmaster warns a few minor precautions, suggests a buddy system, and says that after dinner studying should remain in everyone’s respective common rooms rather than the courtyards or library.

You know next to nothing about petrification, but the victim is muggle-born, and you suspect it was the result of a poorly performed statue curse by one of the many blood zealots in your house. The whole thing makes you hold onto your wand a smidge tighter, but you’re adamant not to let it drive you to paranoia like it would have a few years ago.

Tom nods at your theory when you manage to escape to the Black Lake together in November.

“That isn’t unreasonable,” he says. High praise.

You sink into the moss, sighing. “Do you think there’ll be more?”

He looks out onto the lake, the lapping waves, the crystalline beads that furrow them, midnight algae and flotsam you don’t think you belong to anymore.

You peer up at his silhouette in the dark. “Do you think whoever did it will do it again, I mean?”

“I don’t know,” he says finally, and after another pause: “but I don’t think it would be you.”

“How’s that?”

“No one would be senseless enough to try.”

And he sinks beside you with that, breath shaping the cold in steady, rhythmic clouds while yours are scattered. His robes brush yours and you take his arm with a sleepy hum, tracing patterns in the stars until your eyes feel heavy and he insists on taking you back to your dormitories.

One of the Ravenclaw girls, Marigold Wright, distracts you with a spare blue scarf and an invitation to her next Quidditch match. You watch from the stands and cheer as she catches the snitch to beat Gryffindor.

It’s a bit strange — having a distraction — having a friend. Mari is kind, smart, a good study partner who’s as keen on stepping into the advanced theoretics of Human Transfiguration a year early as you are. She’s funny in a vulgar way, introduces you to all her friends, shows you the best way to sneak into the kitchens, and you sometimes wonder if she was sorted wrong, but — her methods are creative, and she’s definitely intelligent. She’s also definitely not Tom.

You see less and less of him and more of her, Dumbledore, the Ravenclaw common room and the pages of progressive Transfiguration methodologies. He sees less of you and more of Abraxas, Dolohov and Nott and all the other purebloods, Slughorn’s soirées and Prefect meetings that cut into meals.

It happens again.

Second floor lavatory. A girl called Myrtle Warren. She isn’t petrified.

There’s a vigil the following week and her parents are there, two muggles whose sobs wrack the Great Hall even as the students clear out. Flowers descend from the charmed ceiling, little bluebells and white chrysanthemums.

You cry that night. You can’t remember the last time you cried.

This time, you don’t have to seek Tom out. He catches you on your way back from Alchemy and brings you to the Deathday ballroom with a melancholy glance in your direction that you don't hesitate to follow. You realise it’s an odd place to continue to end up in, but no one else goes there and you suppose that makes it yours.

You’ve seen Tom skinny and sickly and olive green, but today his eyes are circled with veined violets and the lack of summer sun this year has whittled him grey once more. He’s still beautiful. He’ll always be beautiful. But he’s tired and — sad — and for the six years you’ve known him you aren’t quite sure what to do with that.

You don’t spend too long pondering it. You just hug him with the dawning newness of a thing like that; a thing you’ve never done, and never really thought to do. (You ask yourself in bewilderment how you’ve never thought to do it before.)

He’s warm. He’s uncertain. He doesn’t reciprocate immediately. 

And then he does, and you understand without caveats or concerns that you stopped having a choice in your destruction the moment you chose him. He’s home, and that’s going to ruin you one day.

Your arms tighten around him and his around you, the rhythm of his breath holding you to earth when you begin to float away. Nothing makes sense in this moment but the mercy that in all the death you’ve seen, you swear to God you’ll never see his. As long as you’re alive, he must be too.

And there’s something to be said about the innate self-slaughter of loving a person (of loving Tom Riddle, especially): that it’ll cleave you in two, that you’ll say feeble things in his embrace that you should be above saying, like ‘I’m scared’, that his hand will find the back of your head and he'll tell you he knows, that that should not feel like enough but it will be. You’ll clasp your hands under black robes and hold this singular embrace together by the faulty adhesive of your fingers. Maybe you’ll cry again, like your body can suddenly comprehend its capacity for it and is making up for lost time.

The first sign that something is wrong, more than the obvious grievance of the death itself, is the Ministry’s happy acceptance of Rubeus Hagrid as the culprit.

The boy is maybe fourteen years old, half-blood — half human, mind — and no one has a bad word to say about him other than he likes to keep eccentric pets. Which leads you to wonder what pet he possessed with the ability to petrify one student and kill another and what cause he’d have for it in the first place besides two terrible, miraculous accidents.

That question draws an even stranger path. Mari says over butterbeers (on her, bless her soul) that she read somewhere years ago that Gorgons can induce petrification, but that she doesn’t remember much else.

One of the boys in DADA says that his father’s an auror, and heard from him that Hagrid’s pet was some sort of arachnid. Tom deducts five points from his house after class with a scowl on his pale face, muttering about conspiracy.

The second sign that something is wrong is that only one of those things would need to be true for the entire case on Hagrid to be called into question. If Mari’s memory serves right, how the hell did Hagrid come into ownership of a Gorgon? (Could Gorgons even be owned?) If the auror’s son is worth your credence, then what species of arachnid is capable of petrification?

You take to the library.

Unsure of where to begin and hesitant to draw attention, your research lingers into Christmas break and stalls some of your extracurriculars in Transfiguration. Tom is busy enough not to notice the new step in your routine, and you’re grateful not to have him breathing down your back, telling you you’re looking in the wrong places or you shouldn’t be looking at all.

The third sign is the end. 

You wish to retract it all. There are time-turners and memory charms and potions that could dizzy you enough to manipulate the truth; there is anything but this. You’d suffer the consequences for the bliss of loving him with one more day before the ruin — you’d write it down to remember through the fog: look at him, duel him without wanting to hurt him, kiss him to know that you did it at least once, have him, be had. You never will again.

He’d shown you the adder. He’d joked about the Chamber of Secrets. He’d spent months disappearing with Abraxas, earning the trust of the sons of the Sacred Twenty Eight. 

And he’d killed Myrtle Warren.

So it’s statue curses and Gorgons and Tom — speaking to serpents when no one else can, buttressed by pureblood boys who want people like you dead.

Don’t become like them now that you’re not like me.

He’s something else entirely.

What do you do in a moment like this? Panting into an empty library at a revelation you wish you could unknow, fingers digging into the hickory of your desk — another memory carved among the initials and hearts; how do you stand from your chair and leave like the world outside this room is the same as it was when you entered? There’s nothing to orbit. You are cosmic debris, tea dregs in a barren cup, flotsam.

You stand; and you tell no one. Not even Tom.

His presence in your life is so infrequent that you don’t even have to come up with excuses for your distance until three weeks after your discovery when you’re paired together in DADA to practise stretching jinxes. 

You almost laugh. He’s standing beside you, tall (lanky like he was when he was a boy if you look long enough) and serious, and you love him without knowing who he is anymore. You’ve skirted corners to avoid him and sat with Mari during lunch and breakfast like he’s some scorned lover to escape confrontation from and not someone who held you through a grief inflicted by his hand. 

“You look tired,” he says, inspecting the daisy you’d been tasked to elongate.

You glance at him. You are tired. It’s exhaustive, bone-deep, aching like nothing you’ve ever known, and maybe that’s why you can look at him and smile sadly instead of thrashing against his chest screaming for what he did. You suppose it happens enough in your head to satisfy. When you can sleep, you sleep to the thought of it. The waking moments are just blank.

“Mhm,” you hum, transfiguring the daisy stem back to its regular length.

Tom observes it with curious eyes. “You’re getting good at that.”

“I’ve been good at it.”

His lips turn, a small frown before he puts it away. You make the observation that he’s tired too; there are still bags under his eyes and his hands tremble ever-so-slightly with his wand when he loosens his grip on it.

His own doing and still you flicker with some relentless hope that he's drowning in regret.

“Sorry,” you say. A ridiculous thing. Do you intend to slowly push him from your life with weak disinterest and diverging academic avenues? As if he were something extricable. He’d never let you.

You’ll have to confront him, and that’s a revelation that holds its weight on your chest until you think you'll suffocate under it.

You’re in the blue light of the Deathday ballroom with a face you've never worn before when it happens, deep into spring, and you know then that you were wrong all those years ago.

He sees all of you.

Takes you in in the flash of a second and maybe it’s your quivering jaw that reveals you or the flint of betrayal in your eyes waiting to be struck and lit. Yes, you were wrong — Tom Riddle knows you at every atom too.

“Are you going to let me explain?" he asks before any hello. His jaw is tight but there’s nothing else to go on to judge his disposition. He's settling into impassivity like an animal drawing its shell. You will not be allowed in if you're going to make it hurt, and you might be the only one who can.

“Explain," you copy with a hard exhale, “Just tell me it wasn’t you. That’s all there is to say."

He stares at you. There’s nothing there.

“Tell me, Tom.”

Your breath catches on an automatic please but you don’t want to offer him that.

“I cannot.”

Then make me forget, you want to scream. Let it be summer. Let us work for pennies and breadcrumbs and be no one together.

It’s late winter and it’s too cold.

“You killed her,” you say quietly.

“If I told you I did not wish for it, would you even believe me?”

“What are you… so it was an accident?”

“There was — an opportunity presented itself that may never have come again; that does not mean I don’t find the nature of it regrettable.”

“Regrettable.” You’re laughing or crying or both, and you must look unwell. Halfway out of your mind.

He’s so composed in the face of it that it only makes you more incensed.

“You told me to change things —”

“You killed someone! Can you understand that?”

“You nearly died,” he hisses, “and if I am to apologise for recognizing it only as the first of many times, I will not. If I am to apologise for doing whatever is necessary to prevent it, I will not. The hand we were dealt will not be the hand we die to — so yes, I understand it. And one day so will you.”

“Don't," you spit, and your anger must look pathetic under your welling tears. “Don't you dare tell me that this was for me.”

“Do you want me to lie?”

“What could her death possibly bring me, Tom?”

“Her death is the first step to —”

“God, stop dancing around the fucking question!” Both hands have wound their way to your head, clutching at your skull like the brain matter might spill through one of the cracks he’s wearing down. “Just… tell me.”

“You recall Godelot's work," he says stiffly. The question of it takes you by surprise, peels the moment back like the rim of a fruit and you're left uncertain.

All you can do is nod, arms falling to cross over your chest.

“There was one form of magic he refused quite concisely to impart. I searched the Restricted Section for days, and under Dumbledore's watch that was not an easy thing to do."

You stole from him, you're urged to remind him, but it's something you'd say with a nudge of annoyance and a roll of your eyes. Such admonishment is small and far away.

“I found it at last in one of the repositories," he goes on, “Secrets of the Darkest Art."

“...What?"

“It's called a Horcrux,” he says. “Murder, by nature, splits the soul. The Horcrux simply makes use of the act; puts the soul fragment into something imperishable so that it is protected, rather than abandoned. In turn, your life cannot be taken. By malady, by magic, by sword — the vessel is destroyed but the soul lives on.”

You blink, feeling dizzy. “Myrtle was the sacrifice.”

“Myrtle was there,” Tom remedies.

“How lucky for you.”

“The circumstances could be ameliorated if one were to be made for you. I would have preferred it be someone who deserves it.”

“For — you’d do it again? Again, Tom?”

His brows crease, and even his upset seems contrived. There’s this barricade he’s placed that you, in all your infallible knowing of him, cannot puncture. It’s agony to begin to question what he could possibly be keeping from you in a confession like this.

“You killed someone, Tom. You — I would never ask you to do that. I would never live at the cost of someone else."

“No, you would not,” he agrees, though he shakes his head like it’s incredulous of you. “Do you think, even if I knew it were certain,  a summons from the Ministry would have stopped me from saving you this summer? Do you suppose the threat of punishment would cause me to waver at that moment? I know it would not hinder you. So, you have your lines and I have mine — you never needed to ask.”

And now it hurts. The emptiness clears and you can't stand yourself for crying, but you do. It comes out in ragged, breathless sobs, clasped behind your palm as you turn away from him. 

You've loved him since you were eleven. It's always been you two — it was always supposed to be you two. What is there to say to him? He's blurring in your periphery like in the midst of your sickness, and there's nothing he can do to heal you this time. Your vision will clear and Myrtle Warren will still be dead. He'll still be a stranger in the face of the boy you love. 

“Why," you whine, a wet, hollow stain in your voice you've never cried enough to hear before. “Myrtle was — wasn't — uh —" You swallow, hysterics severing your words. You can't really think right now. Your body wobbles and your head feels puffy and hot. This might be shock. 

Tom scowls like it irritates him to watch you push yourself, like this is just the unfortunate effect of you depleting your energy in a duel, not eating correctly, treating yourself carelessly. 

Of course you can't stand or talk or think. You're you, contemplating a life without him.

“Sit," he says in frustration. You smack his hand away when he reaches for you, but the world has turned a shade darker and you're slipping into it. 

He tugs a chair towards you with a silent charge and a reprimand, and your body doesn’t possess the wherewithal not to collapse into it the second it’s under you.

After a moment you can speak again, shaking hands steadied by your knees. “Did you… did you think I wouldn't find out? You know, the only thing that can petrify someone besides a serpent is a Gorgon. And — where would Rubeus Hagrid have found one of those?"

“I thought I would have time.”

“To come up with a good lie? Something I’d sympathise with?”

He bites his cheek. “Evidently the particulars matter little to you.”

Fuck him. “Fuck you.”

“Very cogent.”

“No, fuck you, Tom. We could have — we only had a year left and then we could — we could've done anything we wanted." You're crying again. You don't have the energy to be embarrassed. “And you chose this."

He’s indignant as he steps closer. “With what money? For what life? We are better than all of them and it’s never mattered. It never will; you know that. You told me that. You’re angry now, but you must know the truth of it. I would not forsake you. I would not lose you.”

You blink up at him, mouth stuck with some cottony feeling and cheeks stiff from crying.

“You have lost me, Tom."

He stills as if suspended. Some maceration must follow but it doesn’t.

You stand on weak legs to look him in the eyes. You wonder if he can see the love in yours. You wonder if he knows you will walk away despite it. (Of course he does. You’ve never lied to him.) 

You think about how his fingers seem to always find their way to your cheek and you put yours to his. The bone there is sharp, but the skin is soft. Boyish. 

There isn't a word for a goodbye like this. It shouldn't exist and so it doesn't. You just leave.

You fail your N.E.W.T courses. Quite spectacularly.

Mari sits beside you on the train with a soothing hand on your shoulder, and doesn’t ask what’s rendered you into a comatose husk since March. There’s no crying. You chew numbly on soft caramels from the trolley and stare out the window onto the hills.

That summer is spent in your bedroom unless you’re forced elsewhere. A new girl with skin so white it’s nearly translucent sleeps in the bed beside yours, taking meals on trays like you did in your first days here, tracing the cracks in the tiles, humming to herself in the dark. She makes you feel less pathetic for doing much the same. 

You’d been right in your assumption that there would be more dead upon your return, and wrong that there would be more empty rooms. There are always more orphans being made.

And then you receive a letter. It isn’t delivered by owl (only for secrecy, you assume, because there are no muggles who’d be writing to you) but it’s stamped with a vaguely familiar crest. Not Hogwarts’ waxen seal, but something undoubtedly magical. A cockroach and a cup, you think, squinting. Transfiguration.

You tear the envelope open and pull the letter out.

It’s from Dumbledore. Some of it melds together, but the key words stand out.

Spoken to Dippet… Exceptional promise… N.E.W.Ts… May be reconsidered… Upon dispensation… Be well.

Be well.

You are not. You are something half-drowned and half-burned, never enough of one to quell the effects of the other. Sunlight is sparse through your side of the orphanage. On the radio, they warn a pattern of one bomb every second hour. The only other warning is the sound when they fly overhead, and if you can’t run fast enough —

You write your answer in a crowded tube station with a spotty ballpoint pen. Tom is there, looking between you, the dust, and your shaking hands as if to say: tell me I was wrong.

Some of your letter melds together but the key words stand out.

Thank you, Sir. Whatever you need.

It’s a shock that you live to seventh year. It’s a shock that you do it without him — though he watches, and in his gaze you feel regressed. You’re alive, yes, but there’s something there… his dead weight, death-grip; his haunting. They always speak of the dead as something heavy. Something that holds onto you even after it’s gone.

You find that to be true.

Dippet’s condition that you remain in Dumbledore’s N.E.W.T class is that you achieve more than the standard requirement. Essentially, your final exam will be much harder than everyone else's: Human Transfiguration, mastery of petty Transformation (through the means of Wizard’s Chess pieces), Conjuration and Vanishment of various delicate objects — all done nonverbally.

Even Dumbledore seems sceptical, but it translates to more rigorous practise rather than resignation, assignments he doesn’t even task to Mari, though she’s just as good, and you can’t begin to understand why he cares so much. 

“I’ll entrust you with these while I’m away,” he says before Christmas break, sliding a sheet of parchment your way with a flick of his wand.

You frown, unfolding it. His instructions are always short now — you’ve learned to decode his meaning well enough without much exposition. 

Teacup to gerbil — to cat, and inverse.

Inanimatus Conjurus spell (cockroach and cup, as instructed) to be Vanished when perfected.

Study Antar’s Doctrine. Miss Wright will act as your partner.

Due February.

It’s far too much to be done in that time. “Sir?”

Dumbledore lugs a messenger bag over his shoulder that appears small, but he carries it in such a way you suspect it’s magically extended. He smiles wistfully, pushing his spectacles up the bridge of his nose. “You know, I often regret how much this war asks of me. A consequence of my own doing.”

Right — Grindelwald. Sometimes you forget between awaiting the next muggle paper. War is everywhere.

You nod. “I hope… Good luck, Sir.”

Another half-smile as he twists open a jar of Floo Powder, and then he shakes his head with something you almost decipher as amusement. A brittle sort. Tired. “Good luck to you.”

And then he’s gone, in a swath of green flames that do nothing to inspire any desire for Floo travel in you.

Antar’s Doctrine is simultaneously prosaic and grandiose. They read like excerpts of a journal and you yawn into them over your morning tea, stirring amongst the first-years, who are the only people at the Slytherin table you can stand to sit with. Your blood status is apparently nullified by your age, and the worst they do is look at you funny. You aren’t sure what Abraxas’s — Tom’s (the new hierarchy never fails to stagger you) — lackeys would do if you sat with the other seventh-years instead. A part of you longs to know. They certainly don’t bother you in class the way they used to, you aren’t tripped in the corridors, but you wonder how far Tom’s influence can stretch. He is the Heir of Slytherin, and he’s earned them. But you are nothing.

You’d like it if he would let them hurt you. You think the incentive would be enough to hurt him back. And God — God, you want to. You want to hurt him almost as much as you want him.

You practise through the doctrine with Mari, as Dumbledore directed. When you’re able to sever Antar’s egotism from his abilities, you can see why Dumbledore would recommend his book to you. It feels like slipping through a crack in glass without shattering the whole thing. You weave in and back out, and Mari grins when she returns from the shape of a teapot to her body without you needing to utter a word to do it.

In the back of your mind, you’re aware what you’re doing is nearly unprecedented. It’s spring, you’re months away from eighteen, muggle-born, and mastering nonverbal Human Transfiguration like it’s a Softening Charm. Mari tells you you’re the smartest person she’s ever met. It makes your cheeks go hot to hear such open praise, worse when you snap out of the thought that you believe her.

Grindelwald falls. The school celebrates in whispers until the evidence is in front of them — Dumbledore, returned without a scar, a new wand in his hand — and then they’re cheers. The feast that night is a great one, and he toasts to you from the end of the staff table, a discreet tilt of his cup before he takes a sip and returns to converse with Professor Merrythought.

You take from your own, and your eyes land on Tom, spine of his goblet tight in his hand. He’s looking at you like you’ve affronted him somehow. You could laugh — by choosing Dumbledore. Of course. As if it was a choice at all.

But if it bothers him… if it feels anything at all like the betrayal you felt, then — good.

You drink, and don’t look away.

By the time your N.E.W.T.s arrive you have a renewed confidence that you’ll succeed, even with the obstacle of performing each exam wordlessly.

There are only twelve students who came out of your sixth year class, so to divide resources for the tests is no grand task. You’re given a Wizard’s Chess set, a desk with assorted vases and goblets, an intricate epergne (you had to whisper to Mari to learn its name), and a Ministry worker borrowed like some laboratory mouse. You suppose it makes sense, though — you’re all capable enough of Human Transfiguration not to mutilate anyone, and performing on a classmate could obfuscate the results. It’s far easier to Transfigure someone you know than someone you don’t.

You start with the chess set, Dumbledore and the Ministry worker observing you as you turn pawns to knights and rooks to kings, the minutiae of the pieces drawing sweat to your brow. They change, and change, and change, and you don’t mutter an incantation once. The Ministry worker puts the set away and directs you to the glass. You Switch the vases with the goblets, Vanish them, and Conjure them again. The Ministry worker takes notes. Dumbledore nods affirmatively at you and you can exhale. The epergne is the hardest; so kitschy and elaborate you don’t know where to start when you’re tasked to Transform it into an animal. 

An animal — like that isn’t the vaguest instruction you’ve ever received.

You look at it on the desk, mirrors and glass and gold on protracted arms, and you go for the first thing you think of because the Ministry worker is staring at you like you’re inept and you see it in his eyes — this is the muggle-born one, this one can’t do it. 

You’re better than them. You can do it forever.

The epergne spins at the dip of your wand, and emerges more than an animal. A big glass tank appears in its place, round and gold-rimmed, water lapping at the sides. Inside it is a jellyfish. Emerald green, bobbing, tentacles and oral arms coiling against the glass like the limbs of the epergne had spanned its centre.

The Ministry worker swallows. Dumbledore smiles.

“And — and back?” the worker says, like that will be the thing that stops you.

You point again, mouth tight with irritation, and reverse the Transformation. A droplet of water smacks your face and you’re lucky to be so hot you can disguise it as sweat. You suspect even an error that small would cost you a mark.

You wipe it away. A strange thing happens; you imagine Tom brushing the water from your cheek at the Black Lake. You imagine his fingers in the rain.

The Ministry worker steps closer with a shameless frown. He tells you to turn his hair red. You do. He regards himself in the mirror and scribbles something down. He tells you to turn it back. You do. To grow him a beard, to change his clothes, to make him taller, shorter, this and that — all read from a list he does not appear enthused to recite. You do it all.

He shakes Dumbledore’s hand when it’s done, duplicates his notes for him to keep, and follows the other Ministry workers through the fireplace when everyone’s exams are finished.

You find out you’ve passed with an Outstanding on your birthday.

Mari drags you to the Three Broomsticks to celebrate, butterbeers on her. (They always are.)

“Can’t believe we’re about to graduate,” she says into her cup, froth on her upper lip.

You sigh into your own, partially giddy and mostly nervous.

Mari squeezes your face between her thumb and finger so your frown is puckered. “Chin up, genius. You’ll be excellent.”

You push her hand away but can’t help a small smile. “Outstanding,” you correct.

“Outstanding!” She bursts out laughing. “Bloody ego on you now…”

“Well, I am the smartest person you know.”

“I take that back.”

She pushes out of her chair with a slightly inebriated wobble. “Going to the loo. Don’t touch my chips.”

Your hands raise in surrender, and you steal only one when she’s gone.

You aren’t the only ones here to celebrate. (Your birthday and your mutual achievement, yes, but the Three Broomsticks is filled wall-to-wall with seventh years drinking their final nights at school away.) There’s music charmed to reach every corner, even yours at the little alcove hidden from plain sight. It’s nice to watch from here — the stumbling, the kisses meant for mouths that land drunkenly on cheeks and noses, the barkeeps that roll their eyes as soon as they turn away from all the newly adult customers, not yet learned or careless in their drinking manners.

It is not nice to be occluded from plain sight in such a way that you don’t notice Tom Riddle until he’s inches away from your table. It is not nice that no one else notices either.

On instinct you don’t make any impressive exit. He slides into the booth next to you and your brain short circuits for a moment at the warm familiarity of his presence beside you. Then it occurs that it’s been more than a year since this was remotely commonplace — that you cannot forget the reason why.

There’s not much time to decide whether you want to be vicious or indifferent or to debate on past precedent which would bother him more. You haven’t attacked him despite being concealed enough to do it unnoticed, and you haven’t shoved furiously out of the other side of the booth.

Indifferent it is. 

“Can I help you?”

“You’re causing quite the stir,” he says, taking one of Mari’s chips.

You’re allowed. It’s infuriating when he does it.

“Am I?”

“It’s enough to fail a N.E.W.T level class and be expressly petitioned back, but to have a special criteria set for your exams and manage an O on top of it all…” He inclines his head as if to appreciate your face so close after so long. You should not let him. “You are incomprehensible. It terrifies them.”

“They’re afraid of the wrong mudblood, then, aren’t they?”

Indifference effaced. You’re angry.

He seems to have come prepared, and shrugs your scorn off like a scarf you would have forced him to wear winters ago. “Of course, they have no reason to suspect Dumbledore might have ulterior motives.”

Ulterior — you certainly hope he isn’t suggesting this is based on anything but your merit, but then — you couldn’t begin to understand why Dumbledore cared so much, could you? You’d made brief inspections of his disdain for Tom in second year, his waning shades of kindness and the matter of his stolen encyclopaedia, but you hadn’t… you hadn’t thought at all about how his dedication to your progress only begun after you’d stopped sharing a class with Tom, how it had developed as you began to drift from one another in fifth year and accelerated in sixth after the first petrification and Myrtle’s death. How Tom had worn you down with a weighted glare at Dumbledore’s little toast.

It wasn’t because you had chosen Dumbledore, you realise. It was because Dumbledore had chosen you.

“Why don’t you worry about your pets, Riddle?” you snarl, “I’m sure there are bigger problems with your lot than my exam results.”

Something in his face shifts at the name. You swell with distorted pride.

He mends the reaction by looking you over in more detail, his features schooled into something he must know you can’t deduce. You try not to squirm under the intensity of it.

He reaches almost mindlessly for your collar (there is nothing mindless about it, you’re sure) and smooths the fabric gently with his fingers. “I always liked you in this colour.”

You blink. His thumb just barely brushes against the skin of your neck before retreating, and your mouth falls open.

“Don’t do that,” you say. Truly a sad attempt. Your repulsion is more with yourself than him, and that’s not at all right.

Where is Mari?

“Your friend was at the bar, last I saw her.”

You stare at him with wild eyes. How the hell — ?

“You were always easy to read,” he supplies, and leans in so you can follow his line of sight to the tiniest sliver of the bar visible between two columns, where Mari looks deeply engaged in conversation with Leo Ndiaye, one of the Gryffindor Chasers.

You take a sharp, exasperated breath at her antics. She might be more in love with the competition than the boy himself. They’d never last without Quidditch to bind them, but you can’t fault her for wanting a bit of fun.

“Well then —” 

Right. Tom hasn’t actually moved away. You turn and his face is just there.

His eyes dart forthwith to your mouth, and — no. No, he won’t be doing that and neither will you.

“...I’m off to bed.” Stop talking to him like he’s your friend, you think miserably. Stop looking at him like he’s your —

“That would be wise.”

He’s still looking at your lips.

No one else is looking at you at all.

It could exist in just this moment, you deliberate; separate from everything else.

Except nothing about Tom exists in its own moment. He’s all over you all the time, skin and bone and soul. You hope you still have a place in the broken fragments of his.

“So I’ll be going now,” you say again.

“I haven’t protested.”

But he’s leaning in, and he has to know that’s impedance enough.

“But you will.”

His lips touch yours. “Yes, I will.”

You grab him by his shirt and you’re kissing him. You’re kissing each other like either of you know what the hell it means to kiss anyone, but you’ve learned the rest together, haven’t you? Your noses bump and you don’t care. You just need to kiss him, and — God, you make some noise against his mouth and the hand cupping your face spreads to capture more of you, greedy and wayward — he needs to kiss you too. It’s a horrible thing to know. It leads you to pose too many questions.

The need must have begun as want, and when did the want begin? How long has he looked at you and wondered what you’d feel like to kiss, touch, mark? (He’ll never have the latter. You swear that.)

You’re pulling away in intervals. “You don’t have me, you know.”

“I know,” he responds, lips on the corner of yours.

“You still lost me.”

“I know.”

“I hate you.”

He pauses for a moment. “I know.”

You kiss him again. Long and soft, memorising his cupid’s bow and the tip of his tongue, and when one of his hands moves to your waist you part from him like you’ve been burned.

“I —” You resist the urge to touch a finger to your lips, standing abruptly from the table and adjusting your shirt. Your body feels like an evolutionarily faulty vessel, too easy to please, though you can’t imagine it responding to anyone else this way. Or perhaps your mind is the problem. Not wired well enough to resist an evidently bad thing. “Goodnight, Tom.”

You thought there wasn’t a word for your goodbye, but that’s it. So simple it sinks you. Goodnight, Tom. I’ll dream of a morning where I wake up beside you, but you won’t be there.

He grabs your hand before you can go, licking his lips and it haunts you to think he’s savouring you. It stings a place deep in your chest you’d spent all year trying to heal.

“My door is always open,” he says.

He lets you go.

You graduate with Mari’s hand in yours, and you aren’t afraid.

Dumbledore requests that you stay for the summer to help him prepare for the first year’s curriculum in the fall. It’s a ridiculous opportunity for someone your age — free lodgings and a stellar impression on your resume, and — you can only accept it with an ire you haven’t felt since the spread of influenza in muggle Britain.

If he’s offering you lodgings now, he could have done it all along.

It sends you down a horrible train of thought while you move your things from the Slytherin dormitories to a little chamber a few doors down from the staff room; Tom will be removed from Wool’s this year. Will he stay at Malfoy Manor? But Tom is still publicly muggle-born — Abraxas’s parents would never allow it. Will he find a job, a flat? Will he swindle muggles once he turns eighteen and the Trace is no longer an obstruction?

You think of him often. You think of his offer.

My door is always open.

Plenty of doors are open to you now. Why should you want to go back to his?

Still, the Second World War ends in November and you feel like you can breathe at a depth you never could before. The school doesn’t celebrate like it did with Grindelwald. No one but you seems to care at all.

It’s a tempting door.

The year passes in a blur of graded papers and lessons Dumbledore sometimes involves you in and sometimes does not. Most of the first-years care little for you, but there are two Slytherin muggle-borns who look at you like a new sun to orbit. Everything is worth it for that.

You see Mari when you can, and find she’s training with the Italian Quidditch team, who apparently are smart enough to care more about skill than blood. She says she misses the complexities of Transfiguration, but any career in it was always going to be yours. Smartest person she knows, she reiterates. Biggest ego too.

The next summer Dumbledore informs you of a posting at the Ministry. Something small with a smaller wage. He emphasises the weight of his personal recommendation, but that you won’t be respected unless you claw tooth and nail for it. You don’t take long to consider a chance to make an actual income with an actual career doing something muggle-borns simply don’t do before you’re nodding assuredly and asking him what you need.

Better clothes are first, and all you can afford until further notice. You take to Gladrags with intent to purchase for the first time in your five years of wandering in the shop with eyes bigger than your wallet, and the owner looks at you with distrust when you slide her your sickles.

The Ministry job is truly, infinitesimally, insignificant. 

It’s far down in the Department of Magical Accidents and Catastrophes. You’re a glorified secretary, and you recall the few times you’d worked as a mail-sorter during the war. It’s some sick irony that you’ve landed yourself in a pile of paper once more.

But the money, though offensively scant to someone with better options (and it’s infuriating the options you deserve), is more than you’ve ever had, and within the next year you’re able to leave the castle and take a cheap room at an inn in Hogsmeade. You’re close enough to Dumbledore to aid him when he needs you, but far enough to feel like your school days are departed, and you need not worry about memories lurching unexpectedly at every corridor. 

A sick part of you still reaches for your mouth sometimes to remember what it felt like to be kissed. That part of you wishes for Tom. You could kiss him into oblivion. You could find a way to make it hurt him back.

My door is always open.

Then you’ll slam it bloody closed.

Mari invites you to her first professional game and you cheer for her in the stands, a green, white, and red scarf around your neck in place of her old blue.

She wins and you get drinks in a muggle pub. You kiss a man at the bar. You go home with him. His hair is dark, but not dark enough. His lips are soft, but the shape is wrong. He makes you feel good, but you wonder if in another life, the dream is true; you roll over in the morning to Tom beside you, and he makes you feel better.

When you can find time between the monotonous demands of your job, you’re in the Transfiguration classroom, staying behind to help the Slytherin muggle-borns with their Switching spells.

It’s one stupid accident the next fall that changes things.

A muggle bank has been robbed, and whatever idiotic, panicked witch or wizard was behind it apparently found themselves incapable of getting the deed done with a simple Imperius Curse (you can’t imagine, based on the scene, that they’re above Unforgivables), and somehow ended up leaving the building half-charred and teeming with at least six bank tellers Transformed into birds, two chirping into the floor tiles with broken wings.

“Renauld’s on it, though,” your coworker says when the news finds your department.

“Renauld?”

He’s a year older than you, a pureblood with parents in high places, and endlessly fucking hopeless.

“Well, yeah —”

You push out from your desk, files fluttering behind you. “Renauld will expose the whole damn wizarding world if he touches that building.”

“But McCormack sent him.”

“Where is it?”

“I… McCormack said that —”

“Where is it, Flack?”

“Um. Um, near King William, I think. Moorgate or, um —”

That’s good enough. You toss the Floo Powder into the fireplace and go.

The place is a mess. You don’t even have to look for it. There’s some ward around the street, bouncing muggles away like an invisible end to a map they don’t even register is there. At least that’s handled right.

But you slip through it and curse under your breath at the muggles trapped inside the wards. They’re like fish prodding at the dome of their bowl, and some run up to you demanding explanations when they see you unaffected by it. You brush them off — Obliviation is not your strong-suit — though you do shout at a pair of DMAC wizards uselessly standing guard outside the bank.

“What the hell are you doing?” you ask on approach. “Renauld’s supposed to handle the inside, yeah? You deal with fixing them.”

You point toward the frantic muggles, and the officials just regard you with vague confusion at your presence. “Renauld said —”

“Oh my God! Fix. The muggles.”

You afford nothing else before pushing past them to enter the bank.

It’s quite impressive, actually; Renauld, the result of generations of foolproof breeding, is waving his wand around like he’s just stepped out of Olivanders for the first time.

“Heal their wings,” you say without greeting.

Renauld jumps. “What? What are you doing here?”

“Heal their damn wings. They’re easier than human limbs and healing magic’s the only thing you aren’t completely shit at.”

“Who authorised you?” he hisses.

“I did.”

In hindsight, it should have gone horrifically wrong. Your wand could have been taken and your life might have been over in all ways that matter, flung back into the muggle world where you’ve always been told you belong.

But Renauld vouches for you. You Transform the walls, you fix the burns, you mend the bank to something presentable. A muggle robbery — dangerous, financially tragic, but believable. And your suggestion to heal the injured bank tellers in their animal forms might be the thing that saved them. When Renauld mends their wings and regenerates their blood, you Untransfigure them, and the other DMAC officials alter their memories with haste.

You were completely out of line and utterly right.

It isn’t something people like you are allotted.

Your probation period is dreadful. You hide in your room at the inn most days, Vanishing little stained panes on your window to feel the warm breeze of air before you Conjure them again. You help grade papers, though Dumbledore is displeased with you and the night is a silent one. He assures you curtly that he’s doing his best with the Ministry to amend this.

And… he does.

With Renauld’s help and the corroboration of the other DMAC officials, you’re back at work by the start of the school year.

It’s a slow process — almost eight months of meaningless paperwork — before the next incident occurs and you’re hectically ushered to the scene like a belated understudy. And then it happens again. And again. And again.

There’s really no choice but to promote you.

Your heroics are torn from a Gryffindor cloth, so says Flack. You urge him never to say such a thing again.

By your twenty-first birthday, you think about Tom almost exclusively in your sleep. You’re much too busy to think about him anywhere else.

The summer is warm and Hogsmeade is lively. You’ve vacated your room at the inn for a little house on the outskirts of the village, decorating it how you like — discovering what you like. You’d never had a chance to find out before.

Mari visits when she can once you have your fireplace connected to the Floo Network (you yourself prefer Apparating) but her name is slowly working its way from the Italian papers to the British ones, and she has so much to tell you there isn’t possibly enough time in her days to tell it. There’s also the matter of Leo Ndiaye, who has, recently, gotten on one knee and proposed to her. If there had been a bet on them ending up together, you would have been out enough galleons to put you in debt.

After especially gruesome days at work, you and a few colleagues make a habit of getting sherries at the Siren’s Tail, complaining that sometimes the nature of your work is akin to an auror’s but without the notoriety and pay.

“Oh, please,” says Emilia Alves, twirling her straw, “have you seen the shit the aurors are up to lately? I’d rather be a blimmin’ Unspeakable.”

“You’d have to be able to keep your mouth shut for that, Alves.”

Emilia punches Renauld in the arm.

“What are the aurors up to?” Flack asks.

“I dunno much. There was a murder all the way in Albania, s’posedly. Reeked of dark magic.”

“Nothing new,” you join, and then frown. “Why’s our Ministry dealing with it though?”

“I dunno. I got word from Hillicker that the Albanians didn’t know what to make of the mess. They’ve never seen anything like it.”

“Hillicker’s not a source,” Renauld scoffs.

“Yeah? Why don’t you ask your daddy for something better?”

“Alves, I’ll have you know —”

You lean in over the counter. “What do you mean they’ve never seen anything like it?”

She grins. “Why? Storming a bank robbery wasn’t exciting enough for you?”

You roll your eyes, taking a drink.

That ought to be the end of it. One extraordinarily lucky incident to push you up the career ladder was rare enough — there is absolutely no way digging around a case that has nothing to do with you or your department could ever end well.

But something about it itches.

You make nice with Hillicker. She’s a year younger than you and far too kind for her own good, and she gushes freely about her husband’s work as an auror (they must be a perfect match for him to gush freely about it with her). It’s a bit manipulative. You have no excellent excuse for it, but… ambition, and all that, you suppose. Flack’s Gryffindor theory is studded with holes.

You are green, through and through.

Emilia’s updates are meaningless when you garner so much information that you’ve already heard everything she has to say over drinks, and at this point her and Hillicker might be a step behind you. Emilia still only knows about Albania; peppery little details of half a story. Hillicker discusses an assortment of murders with no real string between them, and Dumbledore regards you with cool heeding when you bring up the matter with him.

You see him little nowadays but you’ve never been close in any true sense, traces of resentment budding over the years like rainwater collects on glass until the stream finally slips.

You visit Hogwarts mostly for your Slytherins, fourteen or fifteen now, unafraid of the distinction of their blood.

And then there’s one night after you turn twenty-two where drinks take place at yours for a change, Mari and Leo included and happily wed. You have no sherries but your ale is just as well, and it’s only you and Renauld who are sober by the time everyone else is vanishing into the fireplace and going home.

That makes it much worse when you sleep together. 

There’s no excuse of having had a glass too many — so sorry, I’ll be on my way then, and him stumbling over his trousers to get out of your hair. Of course, he does that anyway, scratching the nape of his neck when he reaches your doorway in the morning.

“Thanks for the — well, you have a nice home — I do think I should —”

“Yes.”

“Right.”

“Oh!” He turns around at the last second. “Er — I know you’ve become a tad obsessed with… Hillicker mentioned another, anyway. Hepzibah something. Killed by her own elf, the aurors suspect.”

“Oh,” you echo, sheets pulled up to your shoulders. “Thanks, Renauld.”

“I thought you might like to know. Don’t be daft about it.”

You’re incredibly daft about it.

There’s something reminiscent about Albania in this case that wasn’t there with the others. The tide of dark magic ebbing across the scene, the cherry-picked information released in the Prophet, the claim of an old, dumb House Elf who poisoned her mistress like the Albanian peasant killed in some insoluble accident. 

The itch exacerbates.

You see him in your dreams again. He peers over Runes in a stolen encyclopaedia, he whispers to an adder on his shoulder, he kisses the corner of your mouth and it isn’t enough. He kills you, again and again. You kill him too.

You wake up and he isn’t there.

It’s a new low when you’re invited to the Hillicker’s anniversary dinner and you end up digging through the drawers of their study halfway through the night.

The Albania file offers nearly nothing. There was the charred residue of dark magic imprinted on a hollow tree in the fields of the peasant’s hamlet, but nothing detailing more than a blank imprint of the Killing Curse in his eyes. Still, you tuck the knowledge away for the file of one Hebzibah Smith, whose tea did indeed have traces of poison, but whose den was also ripe with a layer of darkness that didn’t line up with the Ministry’s tale of senile elf.

And then there’s the forgotten matter of her being a purveyor of ancestral artefacts. The file doesn’t recount whether any are missing, since the woman was wise enough not to proclaim all her possessions to the world, but it’s something. A scratch.

You travel to Albania that Christmas. The neighbours in the peasant’s hamlet have skewed memories, so they provide little help, but the man’s house was left almost untouched.

You tear the place apart and Transfigure it back together when you’re done.

All you find, in the end, is a scrap of an old envelope in a suitcase.

R.R

It could be that it’s old. The cursive seems ancient enough. But you swear the letters have the distinct shape of quill ink — too artful for any pen — and maybe that wouldn’t matter if it weren’t for half a wax seal stuck to the torn edge of the envelope. Stained but silver, the barest hint of two ribbons, a crest, and the letter H.

You return to Hogwarts posthaste.

It’s snowing in the courtyards and you waddle with a duotang under one arm to pretend you’re here for something scholarly, an array of excuses prepared in case you run into Dumbledore, but you don’t.

The Grey Lady is as beautiful as she’s rumoured to be. 

You ask her about her mother, and she’s silent, an expression on her face like you’ve struck her.

“Is it found?” she whispers. The snow floats through her.

Your heart hammers as you consider how to approach this. She thinks you know more than you do, which means there’s something to know.

“Yes,” you say. And you dare further with the context you know, “In Albania.”

“Oh,” she hums. “Oh…”

And if she means to say more she doesn’t seem able, washing away through the balusters, then the walls. You think of your house ghost and what he did to her, and you feel sorry for a second.

Madam Palles expels you from the library the moment you find what you’re looking for, and you rush past a throng of staring students to the staff room fireplace. It’s too far a walk to the border of the castle wards to Apparate. You bite back the preemptive sickness, get swallowed by the flames, and go home.

There are blanks to fill in but you do it easily. Rowena Ravenclaw’s diadem. Hepzibah Smith and her assortment of unregistered artefacts. The stain of dark magic. Something so rare not even the aurors recognized it.

But you do, because he told you.

You wonder on your search to find him what object he used when he killed Myrtle Warren. Nothing special, you think — maybe even the closest thing he could find. These murders involved more preparation. He got to mark them however he wanted.

It’s almost disappointing to find him here. In a little flat over Knockturn Alley with a view of charmed coalsmoke and the brick wall of another shop. 

It’s as tidy as his room at Wool’s, the only dirt the irremediable age of the building itself. The whole place looks almost slanted, large enough only for the bare necessities; a kitchen, a toilet, a bedroom that looks more like a closet, and a study/dining room/den you can’t imagine he hosts many gatherings in. You rescind the mere thought. Whatever gatherings Tom Riddle is having these days, you’re sure you can’t begin to imagine at all.

You wait, legs crossed on an old loveseat, fiddling with your wand.

The door clicks open when the snow has turned to hail and there’s no light but the few scattered candles you’d lit on the mantelpiece. 

It strikes you only when he’s standing before you that it’s his birthday.

You’re in Tom Riddle’s flat, on his birthday, adorned by the orange glow of half-melted candles, and you know everything.

He eyes you carefully, a hint of surprise at the sight of you after four years that even he needs a second to recover from. And then he's even, inscrutable Riddle again, and you dare to think, come back.

“I placed wards," he says, hanging his bag on a rack by the wall.

“I thought your door was always open.”

You see his posture change from just his silhouette.

“Wards never work in Knockturn,” you offer additionally, “not really. There's too much conflicting magic; one border cuts into another; leaves a little sliver behind if you’re smart enough to find it. You should know that." 

He turns to you. You take in a moment to acknowledge how he's changed. It's hard to see in the curtained moonlight, and it seems unreasonable to imagine he’s grown, but you think he has. An inch taller, perhaps. Two. Maybe the dress shoes. His arms are bigger under his button-down, but not enough to consider him muscular. His black hair isn't as perfect as you remember, and you suspect a long day of work undoes his curls. You always liked him better that way in school, after a night duel at the Black Lake, his robes askew and his hair a mess. Evidence that you were the only one to dishevel him. Now you were — what? Did he even think of you anymore? Yes. You'd always think of each other.

“Duly noted. What are you here for?” He tries your surname like a foreign language.

You cross your arms, and you're acutely aware that he's observing your changes too. You're not the matchstick witch he once knew. Your emotions are cultured now, taut to mirror his. You wear dull, formal grey, and that glowing green tinge that should be gleaming on you is under a thick carapace. That’s for Mari, Flack, Emilia — even Renauld. Not for Tom.

You wonder if he knows it was Dumbledore who put in the word that got you this uniform. You wonder if he resents you for it.

“There’s been talk at the Ministry," you say finally, “A string of murders. Whispers of something — some dark magic they don’t understand. And you know they're careful about things like that after Grindelwald."

“A string of murders... Hm. That might imply you understand a connective thread. Is there some sort of accusation being made?”

“Oh, I'm sure you'd be flattered by accusations. There’s not enough there, as it stands. Just whispers." You sink more comfortably in the seat and the springs make a concerning sound. “But I know you."

His hard, sharp gaze falters for a moment. You watch the flames dance behind him, the firelight playing against the lines of his shoulders, and feel your heart skip a beat. “Who else is speculating?"

“No one." Your fingers brush over the book spines on the coffee table. “I guess their attention hasn't been drawn to a book clerk yet, even if you have taken residency... here." You say it with no shortage of disapproval. 

Knockturn was never where Tom belonged. You'd once imagined a flat together in muggle London, taking the telephone booth to the Ministry together, changing the world together. It's a wish that's a lifetime away now.

“Is this a warning? I assure you, I don’t need the condescension.”

“I'm not warning you," you scoff, “I — I'm seeing you. God knows I'll probably never get the chance to do that again once you get yourself locked up in Azkaban, which you will." 

You sound exasperated. You sound half-pleading. “What are you doing, Tom? Is this — this is really what you want?"

“Yes."

You shake your head. “I don't believe that." And then some of that fiery spit returns to you, and you feel like a child again, stuck in the London tube stations holding his hand at every plane that flew overhead, scowling that you needed his reassurance. Scowling that you were afraid.

“Well, your conjecture is ever-appreciated. Shall I lend you mine? Shall I congratulate you on your revolutionary position at the Ministry? Or is it Dumbledore I should afford my thanks?”

“I earned this,” you hiss.

“You deserve it,” he amends. “But do not lie to yourself and pretend that’s why you have it.”

“Fuck you.”

He smiles. “There you are.”

“I don’t need your congratulations, Riddle. Dumbledore doesn’t need your damn thanks. But,” you say, biting back the snarl that wants out, “you could thank me. After all, I could turn to the Ministry any minute with the truth of your heritage. I could tell them about Myrtle, the Horcrux — Horcruxes.”

The humour dissolves from his face and you despise the immense glee it brings you.

“Oh, did you think I didn’t know? Didn’t understand the connective thread? You are sentimental under all that… fucking posturing, you know. I’m sure it’s all very romantic to you — making Horcruxes out of Hogwarts artefacts. Shame it’s such an insult to your intelligence.”

“Very good,” he says after a long, terse silence. You’re sure he’s thinking just the opposite.

You hum, meddling with your nails. “So what’s your plan?”

“I’d need a Vow for that.”

You laugh. “I’m not that desperate.”

“You’re also not an auror, are you?” He tilts his head appraisingly. “And yet you’ve found your way here.”

“How many do you plan to make? How many people do you plan to kill?”

“A Vow.”

“Absolutely not.”

“Tea, then? Biscuits?”

“Oh, I shouldn’t. I read in the paper the other day about a poor old woman who had her tea poisoned.”

“Hm. Terrible shame.”

Your fist clenches around your wand. “Is it paying off well, Riddle? It must be a good life if you’re willing to split your soul to hell and back to have more of it.”

He smiles at the barb in your words. “You never were good with subtlety.”

“I wasn’t trying to be subtle. This place is horrific.”

“I was referring to your inability to see more than what’s directly in front of you.”

“Oh, really? And what more should I see than a boy who’s very good at getting weak men to bow and do very little else? I’d try to see the bigger picture, but I reckon it wouldn’t fit in here.”

Tom regards you colourlessly. You are slate, Ministry-grey, impermeable like palace portcullis. 

“I suppose I should have killed you.” He says it with the nonchalance of a forgotten chore. He says it like you’re a stain. 

He doesn’t say it like he feels any terrible urgency to remove you; and you think, this time, you’d feel more powerful if he did. You think it’s far more debilitating to sit here and be looked at like he regrets wanting you alive more than he wants you dead.

“Yes,” you concur, “I suppose you should have.” 

You place your wand down on the table and scoot your chair away for good measure. “It’s never too late to rectify your mistakes.”

Tom, for a moment, looks surprised. That makes you feel powerful. You’d take more of that.

“You have wandless magic,” he tries. A weak recovery.

“Scout’s honour, Riddle.”

He doesn’t move for a moment, then fixes his wand in his hand and rises, doused in the same inscrutable calm that always used to drive you mad. Now something in you gleams with the knowledge that he only ever looks like this when he’s trying not to look like anything at all.

He steps closer and it gleams brighter. It trembles inside you and you know, distantly, that this is insane. You’re weighing your life on a childhood trust that was shattered years ago, and you don’t think you’ve ever been that good at faith, but he’s approaching you and that gleam you feel is reflected in his eyes and you just… know. Your spilled blood once crawled with his. There’s no undoing that. Half of you is made of the other.

“I should have killed you,” he repeats.

It’s a murmur. Stilted. Angry, even. Angry that you made him this and there’s no fucking rectifying it — what a joke that is. What an immensely you thing to suggest.

“Yes,” you agree.

It’s a breath. Low. Proud, even. Proud that you’re his only mistake and he’s going to make it again.

Tom kisses you. It’s a murder of its own kind. You kiss him back, and — you were always going to kill each other like this, weren’t you? It’s you and him whether you like it or not.

There should be no love in it. You know that. Love is far behind the both of you, stifled in a gasp at the back of your throat on your eighteenth birthday and the soft, selfish hands of a seventeen year old boy. This is mutual destruction. Spite and teeth and skin that’s cold under your fingers.

He was your first in everything but this.

You push back at him and feel the hunger, the need in him, like a flame as he kisses you deeper and harder, and you find yourself losing yourself to it all over again, like you're back in the dark alcove of a pub where you told him goodbye, pushing to extend the juncture. And then he lets out a hitched, gravelly sound; not a moan but enough to make you shudder.

You pull him onto the sofa and crawl onto his lap.

“How long?” he asks thickly.

You don’t have to ask what he means. You bite against his neck, nails under his shirt as you struggle to pop the buttons open. There must be a violence in all your want for him because if there isn't it's just loss. It's just another thing you'll give him without taking anything back. 

“Sixth year," you pant, “in the Deathday ballroom when we fought for the first time. You — ah — you put your thumb on my mouth. Since then."

You hear a sharp intake of breath, and his hand moves up your back to pull you impossibly closer. His voice is ragged. “Should I tell you how long I’ve wanted you?"

You shudder a breath. “Since —" And it's a bit hard to talk with the way he's rolling your hips — “Since when?"

His lips twitch into a mirthless smile, hands spanning your thighs as you start to rock against him. “When you burned me, and I sent you into the lake." 

You swallow, agonised by the slow pace his grip forces you to keep when all you want to do is go faster. 

“Your uniform was terribly wet,” he says, mouth tracing your jaw. “Did I ever apologise for that?"

“N-no.”

He tuts, the hushed sound warm and deadly on your neck. “Bad manners. I must have been distracted."

Oh. Oh, you think. It seems pointless to flush in the position you're in now, but the knowledge that he wanted you then and you hadn't even known is... all the more devastating. 

But you shiver at the question of how he’d wanted you, in what amount of detail, in what precise way. You almost want to ask. See it for yourself. 

You don't think you'd manage the words. He’s hard underneath you and your head wants to lull toward his shoulder but a big hand holds you from one side of your jaw down the length of your neck, his tongue laving up the other. Instead you’re balanced only by his hands and his mouth, rolling against him because it’s all you can do like this.

He’s marking you, you realise with a gasp, and your fingers bury in his hair to remove his mouth from its descending assault on your collar. Not that. You’d sworn against that.

Your fingers return to his buttons and he copies you by finding yours, pulling at the fabric tucked into your trousers until it’s discarded entirely. You press your hands to the planes of his chest and watch him, your mouth agape as his eyes linger on your chest.

His heart is pounding and he must know you’re about to comment on it because his lips are on yours again and he adjusts his position and your fingers dig into his shoulders at the delicious new feeling of him pressing into your thigh. 

You move for his belt. He moves for your zipper. It’s some sort of race, whatever you’re doing, and you’re at an unfair advantage when you’re still fumbling with his buckle when his hand is already carving a slow path to the band of your underwear. You're scalding under the journey of it, little stars pricking you under every new inch he explores.

He dips in and your eyes wrench shut, grasping frantically for his wrist.

“Shh,” he says softly, caressing your cheek with his spare hand, thumb finding your mouth how it did all those years ago and you want to curse him. The fucker knows exactly what he’s doing.

You shake your head, chest rising with heavy breaths as you return to his belt and scrabble to unbuckle it.

“So tense,” he murmurs. The hand at your cheek draws over your lower lip before it falls to your back to hold you closer. “Rest now.”

And his fingers trace you where you want him most, brushing past your clit as he pulls his face back to watch you.

You sink into the feeling, still swaying on his lap, a half-efforted attempt at finding friction in the hardness between his legs that feels fruitless because it won't be enough until he's inside. Your hand just grips onto the fabric of his unzipped trousers and stays there. It’s a pause. An obstacle on your path to him that you need just a moment to recover from before you’ll make him feel just like this. Better. Worse. It’s hard to tell which is which.

He’s stroking at you now, pleased by the way you lurch against him with every touch.

You have to recover, you have to make it even, you have to… you…

A finger presses inside and you moan.

“You came back to me,” he whispers, close enough to be kissing you but there’s just the stutter of his breath. It's a fucking religious thing to say, the way he does it.

“Doesn’t make me yours,” you breathe.

He shakes his head. “I know. You’ll still take it though, won’t you?”

Oh, fuck.

He makes a sound of approval. “Good.”

Good. Fine. Your hands slip from his zipper to the meat of his thighs, pushing yourself forward so the shape of him is firmer against you, and Tom slips another finger in.

You’ll take it, won’t you? Yes. 

Maybe you don’t need to tear him at the seams (though you want to) to make it even. Maybe this is punishment enough. That he can have you like this and it still won’t make you his, that he’ll give you everything and you’ll lap at it with half the greed he possesses.

You ride his hand, clutching his shoulders, rocking your hips. You take all of it, and it builds something delirious inside you, that it’s him doing this, his perfect fingers, the shape of his lips, the soft dark of his hair when you find your hands in it again. The feeling makes you stutter, and he has to move you by the waist himself to keep the momentum when you can't do it yourself.

He’s painfully stiff, pushing up against you with a degree of self-control that feels like it can only end disastrously for the both of you, and you start smattering kisses down his cheek. You tilt his head back and lick a stripe down his neck. Rest now, you'd say if you could.

But he adds a third finger and your head falls, a cry planted in his collar when you come, and you don't think you say anything.

Tom holds your legs steady, guiding you through it like this is just another one of his studies. You are what he knows better than anything else, and still he wants to learn more.

“Look at you,” he mutters, dipping you back to press his lips down your chest, unclasping your bra while you’re still breaking, the sensation swelling again when he takes a nipple into his mouth.

“Tom,” you try to say. Your mouth is the sticky sort of dry that words refuse to come out of.

“Will you give me more?”

Give, not take. You fuss into a stolen kiss, grappling again with his trousers, pulling them down until you can palm him through his boxers.

He hisses, gripping your wrist like he hadn’t just done the same to you, and then he’s pulling you up and off the couch, trousers discarded with what must be magic because you blink and they’re gone. Greedy boy. (You have no room to judge.) Your back is to the wall an instant before his fingers are on you again, pushing your underwear down your thighs until it falls at your feet like they despised to ever part from you.

You arch to feel him press against your stomach, pushing off the wall so that you can meld to him but he just closes in on you to do it himself.

He goads the heat from you when his fingers push in again, still wet, coiling how you like, where you like —

“Want you,” you protest shakily, hand on his abdomen.

That must kill him a little, because he curses under his breath (a thing he never does) and the immediate absence of his touch is cruel when he goes to free himself from his boxers. You reach for him without thinking as he does, and he pins your hand beside you when your fingers so much as graze the length of him.

You sound frail, but you have to ask. “Is this how you wanted me?”

A cruder version of you would go on. Is this how you pictured it? Taking me against a wall? Have you waited for it all this time?

And you don’t belong to him but you’re so incomprehensibly, contradictorily his. You’ll want him forever. He could do anything, and you’d be his. You could haunt him into his lonely eternity, and he’d be yours. Then, you suppose — haunting him makes him yours by principle.

Maybe you already do.

Tom practically growls into your mouth, pressing against you and — God, it’s skin on skin. He's right there. You could push forward and —

He slides in. You cry out at the feel of him inside you, the angle of it like this.

“I wanted you,” he says lowly, your legs wrapped around him, “everywhere.”

You’re gripping him so tight you think he’ll bleed under your nails and somehow you still feel on the brink of collapse when he thrusts deeper.

“I thought mostly of your mouth,” he rasps. “It felt depraved to imagine it wrapped around me, but then I thought of you splayed out before me instead. That maybe you’d like it if it was my mouth on you.”

You whimper.

“Would you like that?” he asks, hands spanning your hips to snap them into his, like you are a piece removed from him he seeks to reattach.

If you wanted to answer you couldn’t. You’re clinging to him and the rising surge inside you, carved between your legs like something sweltering and unfixable. It rushes in and he pulls out of you. He pushes in and you cry for the release of it, the moment the wave lurches over the edge, but he won’t let you have it.

“But,” he says, and your eyes want to roll back at how heavy his restraint is, callous in the tone of his voice, some leash at his neck he must tug himself lest you take it from him — “If I knew how well you’d take me like this, I would have thought of it much more.”

Taking him, again — you don’t feel at all like that’s what’s happening. You feel possessed. You are buoyant in his arms: his and his and his.

“You can — uh — you can — ”

"Hm?" He brushes down the slope of your brow, your cheek, back to the edge of your mouth, wiping a trail of saliva from your chin. “Poor thing.”

And he slams into you again, drawing a mewl from you that slices your unfinished thought.

You clench around him, flames wild and fluttering at every contact of his skin on yours, and there are too many to count. Too many points where they intersect, just some blend of bodies connected at every curve.

“You’re going to give me more,” he says, like it’s an epiphany when you already told him you would.

You remember then. What you meant to say. “You can take me too.”

You feel him twitch inside you, his pace stilling for a moment, and the thumb on your lip slips into your mouth. Your lips close around him and he curses again.

He fucks you with a finger in your mouth and his teeth clamped over your shoulder, soothing the sting with his tongue. His pace is too slow when he drags his free hand between your legs, but you understand its purpose well enough that the mere recognition almost destroys you. 

He’s patient in bringing you to the edge because there's time here. A slow agony that severs you from the rest of the world until it splits you down the middle. And he may not ever have it again.

You have to promise yourself he’ll never have it again.

But the movement of his fingers against the same spot he’s hitting inside you is too much at once, and you won’t last. You drool around his thumb. You let him mark you. You can see on his neck you’ve marked him too. And you hope impossibly there’s a scar. You hope the little death you coax from him claims him as yours for eternity, keeps him even when you're gone. You tighten, lurch for the edge, and make him mortal once more.

Tom holds you there, your cries reverberating as he sinks another finger in your mouth, and then he’s gasping at your neck, peeling back to look you in the eyes when he spills into you. Your eyes screw together and he releases the sounds you make by holding you by the jaw instead.

“Look at me,” he says, and for the strained need in it you do.

You come down to earth and you kiss him, wetness dripping down your thighs as he pins you to this moment. You love him. You’ll always love him.

He’s still inside you when he’s secure enough to bring you to his bed, only removing himself from you when you’re safely in his sheets, legs surrendering their grip on his waist as you pull apart. You pant into the cold linen of his pillow. Everything smells like him. There’s something empty now; the reason you came today; the reason you left four years ago.

You love him and it isn’t enough. Not even to look at him, the sleepy hint of the boy you knew in his eyes, and know that he loves you too.

“Goodnight, Tom,” you say, finding home in the warmth of his chest.

You’ll dream of a morning where you wake up beside him, but you won’t be there.

[somerandomdudelmao]

Okay okay hear me out.

We all know that Donnie was devastated to discover what happened to his brothers. But in light of the most recent update, new meaning has been added to the panels of him watching their deaths' play out.

Look at him here. At first glance, it simply seemed that Donnie was grieving the loss of his brothers. "We lost. They're all gone. My dumb dumb brothers sacrificed themselves. I'm alone."

BUT after today's update, we realize that NOOO he's not just regretting that they're gone, he's BLAMING HIMSELF. Not only is he sad, he feels GUILT.

Looking back, his face clearly says, "I could have stopped it. I could have saved them. I failed. This is my fault."

"If I had been with you, the outcome might have been better." What hurts is that Don is RIGHT. He WAS the keystone of the resistance. Everything does indeed fall apart soon after he's gone (hence the episode name). It's a cruel, ironic twist on Survivor's Guilt-- because in that timeline he didn't survive. He was gone. And he blames himself for being gone.

We often talk about Future Leo's guilt over the apocalypse, but Future Donnie's guilt is not to be taken lightly. It actually makes a LOT of sense for him to blame himself for his family's deaths. We know that all dear Donton has ever wanted is validation for his tech, and his tech is his way of expressing to his family that he loves them. Ergo, all Donnie wants is to make tech to protect his family to Show Them That He Loves Them.

This is probably why he opened up to Raph, all but admitting his guilt over the less-than-perfect security system: it was like saying he and his love failed to protect them for long.

The character analysis deepens~

Here (and throughout all of The Little Things, really) we see him taking steps to make sure his brothers (and the resistance) will be taken care of. Delegating everything, even The Little Things (ah HA) all to ensure that all he does for them (to prove his love, of course) continues to happen.

Even here, when Donnie has been hanging onto life for so long that the Kraang are shocked he's still alive, Donnie wants to help. He could not "sit here and listen to them get killed," because he is Donatello, and he loves his family. Cass, you said it yourself: Violence is his love language. Rushing into battle, decimating the Kraang, saving his family. Because he may be dying, he may be clinging to life by a few threads, but he is Hamato Donatello and he loves his family.

But in the end, that's what he does. In the end, he DOES sit there and watch them get killed. Watches with his very own tech. One. By. One. They. Die. And deep down, Donnie thinks that if he would have been there, he could have found a way to make a generator NOT from Raph's heart. That he could have supported Mikey enough to keep him from disintegrating. That he could have protected Leo in those final, self sacrificial moments.

Donatello blames himself for not being there for his brothers. He blames himself for his tech not being flawless enough. He blames himself for dying on them.

Which is why he won't rest until they're ALL back home.

He is Mr. "I Can Fix This", so of COURSE he's going to fix this.

And afterwards, when his family is SAFE and HOME and TOGETHER he's going to apologize for "letting them die" and he's FINALLY going to get some SENSE knocked into his OWN dumb dumb brain (probably by Dr. Delicate Touch). His brothers love him because he's DONNIE. I cannot WAIT for the moment when they make him realize that they didn't miss his tech, they missed HIM. He's gonna realize just how utterly loved he is and I'm so excited for you, Cass, to show us that moment.

(I apologize; this got out of hand quickly, but the analysis has been bouncing around my head all day and I NEEDED to share it)

OH THIS IS ONE GREAT ANALYSIS RIGHT HERE

[evilbihan]

A guide to writing Tomáš

This is a Bi-Han centric blog, but I really want to talk about the mischaracterization of Tomáš too because it irks me to no end and I believe he deserves better. Not to mention that most of his mischaracterization usually comes at Bi-Han's expense as well.

Tomáš is not the sad, broken, overly sensitive crybaby the fandom likes to portray him as. Every time I see yet another version of the same fanart where poor Tomáš is bawling his eyes out and running into Kuai Liang's arms because Bi-Han was being "mean" to him, I immediately unfollow the artist. Tomáš is a grown man, it's disgusting how the fandom keeps babying him. Not to mention it's getting boring and on top of that, it's completely wrong characterization of both Bi-Han and Tomáš. In the scene where Bi-Han snaps at him, Tomáš barely even bats an eyelash. He looks confused and annoyed if anything, not heartbroken, and he certainly doesn't break down in tears either. Tomáš literally chose to talk back to Bi-Han, he's not afraid to say what he thinks, which is proven by the fact that he even confronts Liu Kang for letting his family die. Tomáš is courageous and he stands up for himself. This man watched his entire family get murdered in front of him and chose not to let it haunt him. ("Their ghosts no longer haunt me.") Of all three Lin Kuei brothers, he's the one with the highest emotional maturity, choosing not to let emotions cloud his judgement, unlike Kuai Liang (blind anger/hatred) and Bi-Han (frustration). Tomáš is so much stronger than people give him credit for. He's not some damsel in distress that needs saving and he definitely doesn't need Kuai Liang to defend him, especially not from Bi-Han who respected Tomáš and his skills enough to let him join them for important missions when he had everyone else in the Lin Kuei at his disposal. It's awful how some fans deliberately paint Tomáš as weak and Bi-Han as cruel, so they can make Kuai Liang look better.

A lot of the traits that define Tomáš are usually taken away from him in fanfics and fanart and given to Kuai Liang instead. Tomáš is the loyal, brave and kind brother who wants peace above all else, who wants his brothers to reconcil, who is truly selfless and respectful, even towards some of his foes. Believe it or not, Tomáš is not the "soft" brother. He chooses to be kind and fans mistake it for weakness. Despite being angry at Bi-Han, Tomáš doesn't want vengeance against him. He wants his brothers to stop fighting, for Earthrealm's sake and because they're family. Tomáš might be the youngest of the brothers but he's wiser than them. He has seen enough death and bloodshed to know no one will come out of this war as a winner.

Tomáš used to idolize Bi-Han, not Kuai Liang. Bi-Han, who is known to be cold and ruthless. As I said before in another post I made, Tomáš is no less ruthless than his brothers. He is not sweet and innocent. Just like Bi-Han and Kuai Liang, he was trained to be a lethal and stealthy warrior. Even before joining the Lin Kuei, Tomáš was a hunter. He grew up in a family of hunters. Listen to his taunts at the end of each round and the way he giggles while performing one of his fatalities. Tomáš enjoys hunting, he enjoys the thrill of it.

There is no part of the story or any intros that indicate that Kuai Liang and Tomáš were ever close before their falling out with Bi-Han, but it is said that Tomáš used to admire Bi-Han. I don't know why the fandom made up the wholesome bond between Kuai Liang and Tomáš because of that one scene in which Kuai Liang conveniently tells Smoke that they're brothers because he needed him on his side. Kuai Liang doesn't even bother interrupting when Bi-Han reprimands Tomáš. He even questions Smoke's resolve. What brought them both closer are a few shared ideals, such as the wish to honor their father's legacy and continue their duty of protecting Earthrealm. Kuai Liang is now the only family Smoke has left, which is why he's doing everything he can to prove worthy of his trust. He calls himself the Shirai Ryu's second in command, he's the one who recruits Hanzo, he's supportive of everything Kuai Liang does and never contradicts him despite having different opinions than his brother, possibly out of fear of losing his family yet again.

Tomáš is a very curious and open-minded person. Unlike Bi-Han and Kuai Liang who are both equally disgusted by the idea of fame and stardom, Smoke seems eager to play a part in one of Johnny's movies when Johnny suggests giving him a role in a film he made. He's also the one reaching out to others to try and bond with them, to make friends. He tells Raiden that he wants to visit Fengjian, he asks other characters questions about themselves etc.

Tomáš is without a doubt traumatized from what he's seen and been through. Similar to Bi-Han in the previous timeline, Smoke is concerned that he's tainted by evil due to his nightmares about the Enenra. Ashrah reassures him that her kriss can't sense any evil, but there's a chance he might still become corrupted.

I hope this makes sense and will help writers and artists out there to portray Tomáš more accurately in their works. Too many people in the fandom have a wrong idea of who this character is.

[feyascorner]

Okay now hear me out HEAR ME OUT… this might get a bit angsty

But if astarion had romanced an elf tav, since elves reincarnate in dnd lore and retain some memories of their past life surely astarion would wait, right? Wait for them to come back to him, right??

Well most of us know that already 😋 but one thing I found interesting was; if astarion did find tav again (maybe he confirms it’s them through small mannerisms, maybe they meet at a tavern and this new tav laughs in the same melodic way, or he overhears tav talking about an interest they had in their past life) after confirming it is indeed tav again, how would astarion even feel ☹️

Because yes yipee you found them!!! But now are faced with the task of having to not only explain everything to them again (maybe fill in some of the gaps that are missing in their elf trances) but also have to deal with the impending doom that they’re going to have to die all over again 😭 like a cruel never ending cycle of having each other but never forever. (“I love you forever”, “oh darling our forevers don’t match up”)

OR OR OR if we’re feeling extra cruel, astarion finds tav over and over but each time tav dies gruesomely and it’s never preventable. A classic #timeloop lmao.

Ok enough rambling do with that as you wish

I LOVE TIME LOOP TROPES SO BADLY IT'S NOT EVEN FUNNY...i dont really like how this came out but i love sad astarion so!!! not proofread so pls excuse that!!

Astarion, of all people, should love blood.

But when it's yours, all sticky and warm on his hands, he's repulsed by the crimson red staining his pale skin. Your lifeless body lies in his arms, head tucked into his chest, but your own no longer rising and falling in rhythm with your breaths. Your lashes are specked with flicks of red, and your eyes shut almost as if you're sleeping. It's only in moments like these, where you're truly like him, yet not like him at all. Dead, but not undead. Even in death, he thinks you're beautiful.

Just a few years, he reassures himself, despite the wet tears on his face. Just a few years, and you'll be back, as you always are.

And he does find you. After so many years of wandering aimlessly into bars you liked, places you enjoyed spending free time in, and spending most of his time in your previously shared home, he finally comes across you in the city square.

Only then does he realize you haven't gathered all of your past memories yet. On the one hand, he's ecstatic he found you when you have more time left in your elf lifespan, but on the other, it pains him to see you look at him in a gaze that's void of your usual adoration. But no matter. If something as trivial as this were to break his spirit, he would've rotted away years ago.

It takes time, but you manage to remember him again fully. When you do, neither of you wastes any time in restoring the remains of your previous lifetime together. You redecorate your old shared home together, toasting to a new lifetime together afterward. You give him that soft smile of yours, and he thinks he could not be happier than this. With you having so many years left, and him being infinite, he has no need to worry about being separated from you anytime soon.

For a moment, he's almost glad he was turned into a vampire spawn, because of what it means for the two of you.

"I love you forever," you say one day, pressed up against his chest with your legs entangled. "Even through all my lifetimes."

"Quite the grand gesture, my love," he grins, and you return the sentiment. "While I have only this lifetime to give you, you can have all of it. You can have what's my eternity."

You press a kiss against his lips. "...And half your closet?"

He snorts. "Everything except that."

It's okay, he tells himself. He has time. He won't have to watch your lifeless body lowered into another grave again until he's readied himself---though it seems he's never truly ready. As long as he's careful, you'd be okay.

He's always joked that your heroic tendencies would be the death of you.

There had been a storm. A large one, in fact, causing large waves to crash against the harbor and sending its occupants fleeing inward toward the city.

He should've begged you to stay.

"It's dangerous."

"It's far enough from the harbor, I'll be fine," you insist. "People need help fleeing and our neighbors are going to help out. I should too."

"Then I shall go with you-"

"It's still daytime. We can't risk it," you shake your head, squeezing both of his hands. He smells the whisk of your shampoo as you do. "I'll be okay, Astarion. I'll be back in an hour or two, I promise."

You never do.

By the third hour, the storm has already calmed, and he impatiently throws on a clock and bursts out the door like a madman. He flies past the dozens of people perched on the streets as they try to recover from the hellish storm, and despite how many there are, he doesn't see you. None of them even know where you are.

"They saved my son. Jumped into the water into those nasty waves and got him out, but they...they didn't make it."

Astarion can see the fisherman's mouth continuing to move, but he can't hear him anymore. He feels like he's suffocating, eyes wide as they slowly turn to the calm ocean that now acts as your grave. But there is no tombstone, and there is no place for him to lay down your favorite flower.

He was supposed to have time. You were supposed to have time.

And this time, he doesn't even have the opportunity to kiss your pretty face goodbye, left with nothing but the murky waters of the city that extend past what his eyes can see.

It's times like these that he hates his own eternity.

He's numb by the time he reaches the house again, just as you'd left it. When he enters the bedroom, he realizes that neither of you bothered to make the bed this morning, and sees your pillow crumpled messily against his own. And beside it, your messily tossed pajamas lying with no owner anymore.

He grabs the shirt, staring down at it with dull eyes.

He can't even cry anymore.

Astarion spends the next few decades as a ghost of the city, holding himself hostage in the confinements of his own home. He doesn't touch anything, he doesn't move anything, and he doesn't even dare to open your closet door out of fear that your clothes will lose your scent. He's sure they've already lost it, but it comforts him to know that he's left everything exactly as you had.

Time passes, and as usual, it only leaves him behind.

The criminals lurking in the shadows are the ones who face his wrath. He hunts them down viscously, barely drinking half their blood before they're already dead from the wounds he inflicts on them. He gives no more mercy, because the world has not shown him any in return. Today is no different, as he corners his victim for today in the darkest alley he can find that has a dead end.

The man begs for his life, but it doesn't even register in Astarion's head before he's dead.

The blood tastes like nothing as it slides down his throat. When he releases the man and his body collapses to the ground, Astarion wipes at his mouth, glowering blankly at what remains. A corpse. Even filth like this could leave something behind while you were lost in the sea, forever forgotten by everyone but him. It's not fair. It's not fair at all.

"Astarion?"

His head whips around, able to recognize your voice anywhere, regardless of how much time has passed. It relieves him because he'd begun to fear that his mind had grown foggy in regards to your voice, but the worries seem to have been misplaced because you sound exactly as he remembers. Your hair is a different length now, your face void of the previous scars you've had and replaced with new ones. But no amount of change can stop him from recognizing you. Not even death itself.

"Darling."

"I knew I'd find you here."

As you run into his embrace, he sees color again. He can breathe again. He can live again. And for the first time in decades, he lets himself cry again.

No matter how many times he does this and how many times you die, he'll wait. Even if it crushes him to watch your demise every time.

[wildflowercryptid]

florian's always struggled to make friends so he didn't really have any back in galar... uh, actually — it might be more accurate is that he USED to have one...

headcanon explanation + bonus under the cut!

like mentioned above, florian has always struggled a lot with making friends. while he's a kindhearted and friendly kid, he can come across as kinda intense to others, ( especially when discussing his interests, ) and that's led to him often being alienated amongst his peers. though he's grown used to being by himself and has learned to not care if others dislike him, he still hopes that he can find at least a few people to connect with outside of his family. it's a hope that's always been present, ever since he was growing up in wyndon.

of course, he wasn't the only loner amongst his childhood peers. around 7 years old, he found a friend in bede fee, who attended the same primary school as him. bede themself wasn't exactly the friendliest kid out there and often had spats with people who made fun of them for their family's low-income status, but florian managed to get them to warm up to him. the two got along pretty well and found comfort in having a friend that seemed to understand them, both being lonely kids who were often picked on by others. after a while, they became pretty much inseparable as they frequently played, read, and laughed together. to florian, it didn't matter that people picked on him just as long as he had bede there to be his friend. bede shared a similar sentiment... at least, at first he did.

admittedly, florian has a habit of resting on his laurels when it comes to things he doesn't have an interest in improving. ( it doesn't matter if he isn't as good of a battler as his sister, all he needs is to be strong enough to keep himself safe during field research. it doesn't matter if he's ostracized amongst his peers and looked down upon, he's alright as long as he has someone to call a friend. etc, etc. ) bede, however, couldn't keep themself from caring about their place in the pecking order. they were sick of others looking down on them, sick of others thinking they were better than them. they just couldn't understand how florian could stand people treating him poorly without getting angry. over time, frustration and resentment towards his attitude festered inside them. these feelings were only exacerbated by their struggles at home and being sent to the orphanage. while they would still call each other friends, their bond had definitely become strained.

everything came to a head when they were both 11 years old, when rose visited bede's orphanage and his acknowledgement caused a major shift in their personality. after all, someone that important seeing their potential surely meant that they better than their peers, right? they soon became much more pompous and rude in nature. florian still stayed close by despite bede's worsening attitude towards him, but it wasn't before long until all of their pent-up feelings came flooding out. their friendship ended with massive fight, with bede telling florian that they were sick of being weighed down by an " annoying pest " like him. while they expected for him to take their cruel remarks in stride like he always did with everyone else, bede couldn't help but feel a little guilty when florian ran off in tears. the two stopped talking after that fight and ever since then, there's always a worry in the back of florian's mind that his friends will eventually get sick of him like bede did. ( thankfully, the friends he's made since then have helped make him feel a lot more secure in their relationships. )

apologies for the long-winded explanation, here's the bonus i promised to make up for how sad this hc got :

the goofy ass side effect of coming up with this headcanon is realizing that they accidentally shaped each others' taste in guys rip

[berrybanana-arts]

Billford Reccs (as requested!)

@gratych requested some CONSENSUAL Billford as there is a LOT of noncon and dubcon out there... NOTE- Always check the tags!! These are Billford reccs so abusive/manipulative behaviour tends to be in literally all of these even if only as a 'oh god in hindsight this is sad' way.

RF- Researcher Ford (Pre-betrayal) PB- Post-betrayal W- Weirdmageddon AU- Alternative Universe (e.g. One Of Us)

Just as a note- I'm pretty sure ALL of these are Triangle!Bill.

*SFW*

Starstruck by FireFlerg899- RF Cute and fluffy with a hint of angst and manipulation because it's pre-betrayal. What a contradiction! Stargazing.

Something Said Before- FireFlerg899- RF, PB, W Mentions of torture, goes through all 3 eras echoing the same phrase.

To Destroy, To Remake- FireFlerg899- AU, PB Deliciously dark Ford, tempted by power!

Break and Bind yourself to Me- kingsteeth-RF, PB Poetic and different. I enjoyed this.

Future Talk- anysin, RF Bill talks to Ford about the future and coming to visit him. Light warning for pain/blood/emotional manipulation. Funny Bone - anysin, RF Ticking, fluff

Silent Lies- Perlumi, PB Ford reminisces on the past. Minor self-harm, angst, references to NSFT themes but no actual sex.

Knock on My Door- sugarboat, PB (portal) I LOVE this one. Bill finds and patches up a wounded Ford because only HE is allowed to mess with Sixer. Graphic description of injuries, hurt/comfort, weird fluff.

The Writing of Destiny- Nelja, RF Oof. Love this one- Ford believes everything has led him to Bill. Lovely fic.

Reality is an Illusion- chaseandcatch, RF, PB OOF. Sweet and short. Ford looks back on his first journal entry about Bill with... uh... new information.

I can be cruel to you, my love- orphan_account, RF? PB? Unsure. Prose poem, love this series (Hymns).

thoughts that are above you (i've gotten so good at lying to myself)- orphan_account More prose poetry! forever cursed in love are the observant- orphan_account More sad prose poetry. Bill puts Ford in a time loop until Ford gives him the answer he wants.

*NSFT:*

CLEAR consent-

Ford is super duper into it in all of these! Warning, a LOT of these are pre-betrayal and therefore Ford is technically being duped into thinking Bill is his friend so the consent IS dodgy in that way. Enjoy!

I search myself, I want you to find me- dieslaudata, RF Bill is having some fun with Ford's body while Ford watches. Consensual possession.

Contrast- dieslaudata, RF Choking, in a sexy way rather than a dying/torture way. Love having to clarify that /hj. Consensual possession. Holding Onto Everything- sugarboat, AU, PB AU where Ford accepted Bill's deal many years ago and they are in an established relationship, of sorts. On One Condition- anysin, RF Voice kink, conditioning, coming untouched, etc

Calling You- anysin, RF Ford summons Bill in a more... Unconventional manner.

Up to the Neck- anysin, RF Jealous Bill. Short, but Bill's blustering always amuses me.

Everything Stays- sugarboat, RF "Only one of them sees the inevitable end approaching"- LOVE this caption. PWP, tentacle sex, praise kink.

First- Pengychan, RF Fluffy, awkward, cute!- "Full access to one’s mind comes with a few downsides, like stumbling on private fantasies the All Seeing Eye could have lived without ever having to see. Not that they’re not kind of flattering. And really, there’s a first time for everything."

Count to 100- kikaikitai, RF Ford summons Bill in a more... unconventional manner. Again. This is a running theme in Billford NSFT fics and I love it. Praise kink.

Incubus- kikaikitai, RF Sequel to Count to 100. Ford loses himself in his sexual relationship with Bill. Weird demon sex, consensual possession, worship, etc. This is a fun one. Obviously manipulative fuckery from Bill. Ford is DOWN BAD, though.

Restless Sleep- GoofyGoldenGirl, RF Massage, fluffy NSFT.

Trignometry- wubub redux, RF Alien biology, Bill helps a 'distracted' Ford concentrate. Ford wants to reciprocate.

Territorial- Pengychan, RF Mentions of sex. Bill saves Ford from a creature torturing Ford with cruel words, pretending to be Bill... Yes, the irony is painful.

Vibe for this section- Consensual! But more dubious/dark than the last section.

Ranges from 'Ford is capital M mad at Bill still but also DTF...' to 'hoo boy this is a little dark!' Read at your own risk, you've been warned. Check the tags!

Are you ready to drink or are you waiting to drown?- sugarboat, AU Body horror, tentacle sex High Esteem- anysin, RF Jealous Ford. No sex, just Bill being very manipulative, gaslighting Ford and telling him what he wants to hear.

Blood Offering- nelja, RF No sex, just a ritual involving self-harm and dark thoughts from Ford as he summons Bill after a long absence.

A change of scenery- nelja, RF No sex but there is burglary, tattooing, and suggestive themes.

Golden Nerd Doll- nelja, W No sex but- objectification, possessive behaviour, etc from Bill who lacks any sort of self-reflection abilities...

Ghosts of Love Past- nelja OK, WARNING, this one is kissing, if not straddling, the dubcon line. I'm popping it on the list because 'non-consensual bondage' is literally in canon. TLDR- Bill chains Ford (Weirdmageddon) and pets his hair. Ford has a visceral reaction to this which he hates/loves/hates.

I hope you enjoy the fics! I've been careful not to spoil them too much but do be careful- Billford is always a tricky one, as much as I love it.

-Berry

[honey-milk-depresso]

Batboys watching anime with reader

You know my ass went FULL ON LOCK MODE with Tim. I went crazy- 💀

***S/o is above 18, which means characters below are also aged up!

Doing requests until 1 Feb! Please see my pinned post and read the request rules on the navi! Thank you!🩷

Batbros watching anime with you

Dick Grayson

He’s watched a few 90s anime before, more the basic ones like One Piece and Pokémon, and he probably still watches them to this day. Boy has old CDs he has and you should probably try finding a Blue Ray (or use his if he can have Tim help fix it because it’s good as dead 💀) because he’s popping in every CD of old anime’s he have lying about.

“Wow, I didn’t know I had cowboy bebop! Or Slam Dunk!” He got a few rare gems, which makes it all the more fun to sit down on the couch under a blanket as you huddle and watch the nostalgic 90s anime shows together while eating popcorn.

He doesn’t mind watching new, modern day animes, just be prepared for when you two watch sad anime shows because he will sob like it’s the end of the world.

“NO, WHY WOULD KAORI DIE LIKE THIS?? AND SHE LOVES ARIMA- OH MY GOD IM SO—”sobs even more. He gets emotional while watching them because it’s so sad that it’s sO GOOD-

Loves dancing to those danceable anime music with you. He goes ALL. OUT. He even sings all of it in Japanese like wow-

I would love to hear him sing Cruel Angel’s Thesis in his Discowing suit and with goth makeup on it because it “sets the mood”, PLEASE-

Overall, great time watching with Dick. <3

Jason Todd

You expect someone like him to like Chainsaw Man, Trigun or something like those grunge-y, guns and knives animes, right? I mean, he does, but only with you and ONLY with you will he let his inner Magical Girl enthusiast ass shine. Because he LOVES Magical Girl animes. That’s probably the reason and one point of time why he wore red ribbons around his arms, he wanted that Sailor Moon experience and Tim might’ve just teased him about that era without knowing his love for Magical Girl animes and Jason might’ve flipped and freaked the fuck out and started chasing him down the manor.

Jason watches Sailor Moon, Madoka when he feels edgier than usual, Cardcaptor Sakura, every Precure series, Tokyo Mew Mew, man has all these shows somehow. He swears they weren’t through illegal means and he just worked very hard to gather all of them. He also might be a shoujo anime fan because if he loves Jane Austen books, you bet his ass would be reading Fruits Basket, Maid Sama or something because of course he would.

Also a Studio Ghibli fan, although watching the Tale of Princess Kaguya might make him feel too much, especially getting pissed off with the dad who forces his daughter into a wealthy life without her input and- yeah, you gotta calm him down as he cries bitterly and sourly with a pout on his face.

The two of you can go on and on about debating about unclear endings of animes all day long. You know the “AND SHE WAS A PRINCESS” video? That’s Jason.

Great man to watch anime with, and he’ll gladly be your Tuxedo Mask to your Sailor Moon (and not the “But you did nothing meme- or the other way around- he don’t mind being the Usagi-). <3

Tim Drake

I’m very convinced this man got into his whole detective shit because he watched Detective Conan and honestly I can’t blame him. Tim has probably the largest vessel of anime knowledge out of all of them. He doesn’t really have a specific genre he likes but he’s pretty fond of old 90s and 80s animes. He can explain the whole lore of One Piece, Fairytale, Pokémon like Jesus Tim, calm down- 💀

I can see him watching Neon Genesis Evangelion, Serial Experiments Lain or Key the Metal Doll because he likes that little bit of horror nature and mystery and thriller in his animes although he really doesn’t mind watching Haikyuu all over again if you want to.

Might introduce you to underrated and/or old animes like Revolutionary Girl Utena, Nadia the Secrets of Blue Water, every Studio Ghibli movie, those kinds of animes that give off the really pretty and aesthetic old anime animations that is just so pretty to watch and with really good storylines that both of you can cuddle on a couch together and watch. I bet he even watches anime with you even before you two got together, so you guys pretty much have “watching anime together” as part of the foundation of your relationship. Owns so much manga that you can’t even count, too.

Just… don’t make him watch those really slow burn, comedy love animes, specifically Love War. Not that he don’t like romance animes, he watches Ouran High School Host Club and Your Name, trust me, but Love War? He is going absolutely insane because of it.

“OH MY GOD- PLEASE JUST KISS ALREADY. ME AND S/O ARE ALREADY TOGETHER FIVE MONTHS AGO ANF YOU TWO ARE STILL TOO PROUD TO ADMIT YOU LOVE EACH OTHER WHILE BLUSHING- JUST KISS ALREADY-” <3

Damian Wayne

Damian likes anime. Would 100% go to an anime convention with you as a date if you’re up for it. He doesn’t mind (surprisingly- just for you only-).

He doesn’t necessarily like showmen animes although he has enjoyed a few, but he really loves slice of life, I feel. It just feels like he wants to put himself in a normal life and with a tad bit of drama in it like what the characters go through. The touching ones like Hyouka or Natsume’s Book of Friends.

Also animal related anime maybe except Beastars because he didn’t understand shit-?? He calls that peak anime. Aggretsuko, Chi’s Sweet Home and My Roommate is a Cat?? Damian loves this shit, he watches it intently with his arm around you. Even if he doesn’t smile, you know he loves it by the way his eyes sparkle.

Just don’t tell his brothers. He will seriously feel betrayed if you do so because he only watches these kinds of shows with you: the cute animal ones that are actually wholesome and/or funny.

The whole family is into Studio Ghibli, and he is no exception. He feels like it’s the best kinds of anime to watch with you when you guys just want to turn in for the day and huddle up on the couch. It’s one of the rare times he relaxes and softens and he’s glad to have quality time with you. <3

Duke Thomas

He likes anime! Studio Ghibli is definitely a favourite of his and he would gladly watch it together with you! He also love a fair bit of Shounen animes, the more popular ones like Jujutsu Kaisen, One Piece, Haikyuu, or Spy x Family. He likes them a lot!

A big fan of romance animes too: Ouran High School Host Club and The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya (if you two are in the mood to huddle on the couch together and cry).

Duke doesn’t mind any kind of anime so long as it doesn’t have too much horror or gore like… Higurashi. He gets chills when that anime is mentioned. D-Don’t watch it for your own sake if you don’t know. And if you do, avoid it with him at all cost because he will.

Duke also like singing some good anime songs with you and you guys can go crazy and dance around, just not as dramatic as Dick.

He would be super excited to spend a date with you watching shounen anime movies like from Jujutsu Kaisen and he would be so hype to spend time with you being a fanboy while also sharing that romantic air for the shared love of anime between you two and the love that you two share, although that love is far stronger. <3

Reblogs help! ^^

[natasha-in-space]

Every so often, I can't help but think about all the dirty jobs Saeyoung had to do during his time as an agent. I'm not talking about the usual digital crime stuff he feels comfortable enough to mention openly. I'm talking of those missions he'd rather just shut up and never speak a word about. What about all the missions that went wrong for him, back when he was still young and inexperienced?

The fact that he has blood on his hands is apparent to us. But, do you ever think about whether or not he was forced to kill an innocent? Be it by some cruel accident or by direct order from the higher ups he had no choice but to obey? Have you ever thought of him having to make a quick elimination on yet another corrupt member of society, only to realize that his family, who has nothing to do with this, had seen him?

Have you ever thought about him doing everything he can to fix this: coming up with shaky lies on the spot, attempting to fabricate evidence, eventually resorting to pitiful begging that goes nowhere. But there should not be any witnesses. It's too late to turn back now. He got sloppy. His DNA is already on the scene of the crime. If he refuses, he not only puts his own safety at risk, but these people will get eliminated regardless. The least he can do is make it quick and painless. Have you ever thought of him still having to come back to his sad parody of a home and pretend like everything is fine? Like this was just another Tuesday, and not one of the most sickening things he had to do and witness?

Have you imagined him sitting down, staring at his bloodied hands with a blank and glassy look to his eyes, his weapon still in his grasp, and his ears ringing from every shot he has fired? Have you ever thought of him feeling so utterly disgusted and ashamed of himself that it almost seems like the silver cross on his neck that has always brought him a sense of security, is burning through his clothes and straight into his flesh? He won't take it off, no matter how heavy it feels. He wears it as a constant reminder of the sins these hands have committed. He knows that God has seen it all. He knows that, much like Lucifer, he will never be allowed to step foot over the Heaven's Gates. His soul is too sullied. Too dirty. Too sinful.

I feel like these are the days when he goes complete MIA. He tells everyone in the RFA later that he just slept through these few days.

He maintains contact with V, just in case. But, really, he spends these few days just... in a daze. Luciel has no remorse for selling his entire life away to guarantee his brother's happiness. He does not regret sullying his hands in the darkest sins this world had to offer, if only it means that Saeran's hands will get to do all the good things he has always dreamed about. He does not regret forsaking his own childhood, because he never thought of himself as a child in the first place.

But, in these moments... as the events of what he has done continue to unfold in his head over and over again, like he never even left, he feels it. Regret. Guilt. Disgust.

Luciel harbors a deep hatred towards his parents. He hates his joke of a mother, who has brought nothing but endless torment on her own children for ruining the life she foolishly destroyed all by herself, something he despises with all his heart. He hates his father for forcing them to live in constant fear and paranoia, just for the unforgivable crime of being born into this world. He hates every bystander who has done nothing to correct such an unfair act of pure cruelty unfolding right in front of their eyes.

But, as his vacant gaze keep drifting back to the equipment he has stashed away in one of his many drawers, a grim thought claws at his insides, tearing him apart piece by piece like a vicious parasite feeding on his flesh: is he... really that different from them?

Vanderwood ends up being the one find him, slouched in his seat, his hands still caked and crusty with blood. They just sigh, already knowing what happened. It's something they all had to go through. They just sit next to him, letting the younger agent know he's not alone. And, once Luciel's shoulders start to shake with choked, painful sobs, they don't say a word. They just let him break down into their arms.

It's one of the rarer moments of tenderness between the two.

[my-name-is-bunnyfoxy]

Do you have any Fluffybunny (Jax x Pomni) headcanons in mind?

Not much really. Although I can come up with a few!

Jax actually does hold a little admiration for Pomni's determination in wanting to escape. The only person he has ever seen like this was Kaufmo. He does also kind of find it stupid but given how almost everyone acted like that before, he expected it and doesn't blame her all that much.

On that topic, while most of Jax's sarcasm and teasing was rather him doing it out of fun and just cause he wanted to be an ass, he also wanted to lighten the mood for Pomni when she first arrived.

Jax has probably been at the circus for a long time and most likely acts the way he does because well- there are no real consequences. If he broke something it might just be respawned and or fixed by Caine in a snap of a finger. He has probably witnessed a bunch of crap so like mentioned before, he might try to lighten the mood up.

Jax clearly has been shown to like pranks and obviously bully the others and since jester's are rather meant to be funny, he believes Pomni would like it too. So he invites her to prank the others, although, she doesn't really like how sometimes his pranks can become genuinely cruel that calling his pranks mean is an understatement. She says she isn't gonna be apart of any of his pranks. Unfortunately that leads to him pranking her now.

I believe in later episodes, perhaps Jax, Ragatha and Pomni are gonna be often seen together and Pomni will probably cause of this reason, warm up to Jax and even predict his actions. Jax can't help but genuinely be surprised by her predicting his actions and words. He ends up feeling impressed and maybe even flattered which is why he ends up teasing her about it that he might have a secret admirer who constantly watches him. Pomni easily gets annoyed by this and would get upset if Jax one time says he has a stalker when that is not true. Jax kind of cuts it out seeing how annoyed she gets, but still teases every once in a while.

Regarding Gummigo's death, Jax does see Pomni genuinely upset and saddened by his death and what had happened to him. So, to get her to let go of those feelings, he tells her that he is fine and that Caine often just returns them back to where they originally were. Of course- in his own way of words. "Calm down Poms, that guy is probably fine. Caine just takes them back to their original maps and that's it. Now you can stop being sad and thinking he is gone forever when really he is probably doing just fine."

Pomni would try to keep asking Jax if that is the case and he just tells her that this has happened many times and Caine often just takes them back to where they originally belonged. Pomni would feel a lot of relief knowing that, at the very least Gummigo is safe and unharmed. Jax just glad she cut the bullcrap and ain't thinking about him anymore and can finally relax for once.

Perhaps, Jax warms up to Pomni eventually and maybe starts getting more comfortable. Like I mentioned in the 1st headcannon that Jax has an admiration for Pomni's determination, I believe Jax would admire that she is somehow surprisingly going well and slowly getting used to her new home. He expected that, considering what had happened when she first arrived, she would still be insistent on trying to escape and would have probably gone insane by now but no. She actually seems fine. To be honest- Jax- sort of respects that. He has seen others going insane almost immediately and abstracting easily, so Pomni becoming used to the circus after what had went down, makes him hold to some level respect(?). He genuinely assumed she would abstract but nope. He slowly claps her for that. Could deserve more but it's Jax we are talking about really.

Not really the best at coming up with headcannons and apologies if maybe this seems out of character with some of these. Okay that's about it.

[colourstreakgryffin]

Hi can request a not-yandere Yoriichi X Dying! Reader? Reader got a terrible illness that basically has no cure and they lay in bed losing all motivation to do anything while the illness slowly takes away their life. When Yorichi came to visit them again, they were gone and there was only an empty bed. (means they are already gone/dead.)

(A bit about Yoriichi and reader's past, reader is one of Yoriichi and Michikatsu/kokushibo's childhood friend and was friend with them until reader dies, reader was always there for Yoriichi whenever he is in a rough time/shape and always comforts him like when his mom died, Uta and his unborn child died, Michikatsu gone and more. Yoriichi fell in love with reader a few months after Uta died but never confessed. Reader got their ill a few months after Michikatsu became a demon.)

Aaah! That’s sooooo sad! Why Yoriichi, he doesn’t deserve more pain! But okay, okay. I’ll write this as I cry

Tsugikuni Yoriichi- Terminal Heartbreak

The only thing Yoriichi could lay his eyes on was a empty, hollow futon with the blankets flipped back. The house the futon belonged in was just as dull and lifeless. It broke his soul as he slowly approached the futon, kneeling down and sitting on his knees before it. He just stared down at the creased cooling fabric as his eyes swelled in tears, unable to keep himself composed any longer

First his beloved mother disappeared from his life, his incredible wife and unborn child was taken away, his brother abanonded his humanity to turn to the darkness and now, you can’t even be here for him to say goodbye to… why was this world so cruel to him? You were with him from the very beginning, even as childhood

You weren’t necessarily either of the Tsugikuni Twins’ assigned bride. No, your parents are extremely wealthy and have been business partners with the Tsugikuni family before you were even born. Throughout most of your childhood, you were pretty healthy and kicking but then. Tragically, you contracted a strange disease your hysterical parents couldn’t find the cure for and you were truly dissipating each day. It got so bad that it drifted your past closeness with the Tsugikuni Twins

Michikatsu was furious, you couldn’t play with him and Yoriichi like you use to. You were basically useless in this state and it drove him away whilst Yoriichi stayed. He never left, he never walked away. He sat besides you and did everything he possibly could for you, as he grew up, he was determined to try find… something to help you. Every disease has a cure, they’re must be a cure! Yoriichi always told himself before he tucked you into bed and left the house to continue his fruitless search

In exchange, you adored Yoriichi. He wasn’t that rotten selfish anomaly Michikatsu made him out to be, he was a pure loving man with a golden heart and your view never changed, despite how bad your condition grew. Even though you could barely walk, you always got up to be besides Yoriichi, you basically crawled your way to him when he founded the Demon Slayer Corps and you were there to defend him when he ran into Kibutsuji Muzan but failed to dispose of him

Yoriichi, despite being married to the lovely woman Uta, felt himself falling deep in love with you. It was wrong, he knew it. Especially since he lost Uta and his unborn child only a few months ago, but he can’t help himself. You were one of the first people who ever truly loved Yoriichi, and the fact that you’re gone now hurts his soul tremendously. He can’t do anything to save you, he always did everything right… on his first try!

Yoriichi always suffered and suffered and suffered, and for what did he suffer for? Everything he loved in his life is taken away from him and it’s growing unbearable, is he really suppose to be with anybody? Illness takes away all the people he devotes his life too. It seems that he is a plague among people and anybody who associates with him will end up dead or immoral

Yoriichi stared at the empty futon silently, his calloused fists curled up on his own thighs as his kind screamed at the outrage. Why couldn’t he save you? Your sickness ruined your life and it took away your will to continue forward with genuinely living, to do anything as you laid down and stared blankly. Yoriichi could tell how much you struggled and his heart broke for you over and over

If he could, he’d trade places with you. He’d happily die for you so you could walk and run outside freely with no problems. He’d be livid to give you the freedom of perfect health again… but he just can’t. Yoriichi gave up on medley hopping you’d return back to your home, anytime you came out, he was by your side and helping you. He left for a few hours and your gone, nobody has helped you. He doesn’t know where you could have gone

Yoriichi does want to look for you, you could still be alive somewhere but then again. You could have taken the easy way out when his back was turned, to get away from all the pain your illness tortures you will. He wouldn’t be able to stop it if he wasn’t around and that could be the case as he gently grabs the futon blanket, lifting it to his chest whilst tears poured down his defined cheeks

He couldn’t keep himself together any longer as he cried, his head dropped down to brush over the blanket as his heart shattered before him. Yoriichi fell into a deep slumber by the futon, he cried himself to exhaustion as his emotions were truly haywire now. It was too early. You left him too early… he never even got the chance to tell you…

That he loves you

[randomly--accessed--memories]

Each cast member's relationship with Vox in RAM

Alastor – Alastor decided to break Vox on a whim. Seven years ago, during one of their fights, he managed to subdue Vox, which he'd never fully managed to do before; usually, they would fight to a stalemate or one of them would decide to make their escape before things could get really serious. With Vox at his mercy, Alastor found himself recalling a certain experiment he performed several years ago on the former overlord of the fashion industry. Alastor wanted to claim victory over Vox, make him suffer for his decades of insolence, and, most importantly, wind back the clock. Vox used to be his starry-eyed little protégé, hanging on his every word and doing exactly as he said. He missed that version of Vox (or rather, what that version did for him and his ego) and hated the crass, obnoxious megalomaniac he'd become. If that experiment had transformed Niffty into such a loyal, amusing thrall... why not try the same with Vox? Alastor took Vox into the basement of Vee Tower and did things to him that no one will ever know, broadcasting his screams to all of Pentagram City. Once he was satisfied with his work, he dumped Vox's mangled body in the lobby and completely vanished from the Pride Ring for seven years. He hoped that, whenever he returned, he'd find a Vox that was far more to his taste. And he got his wish. Or at least, he thought he did.

Alastor finds Vox's state quite amusing, and he derives a great deal of satisfaction from having such total control over him, but... he still misses the old Vox, in a way. Alastor enjoyed the challenge Vox used to pose. He enjoyed being able to banter with him. He enjoyed how, for 60 years, he and Vox perpetually feuded, but never truly defeated each other. This new version of Vox offers none of that. He's almost cloyingly docile with Alastor and absent-minded to the point of incompetence. There's only so long the novelty of watching his greatest rival reduced to a pathetic, feeble-minded wretch can last. Still, Alastor is unwilling to let Vox go. He's his toy now, and there might still be some fun to be had by dangling him over the Vees' heads until this nonsense with the hotel is finished.

Angel Dust – Angel's feelings about Vox are deeply complicated. He was one of the few non-overlords who knew that Vox was still alive and had lost his mind, due to his constant proximity to Val. Vox's condition was a constant source of rage, grief, and frustration for Valentino, and more often than not, he chose to take those feelings out on Angel. He wishes so badly that he could just ignore Vox or laugh at his suffering, but he can't. Seeing it up close every day isn't cathartic, it's just sad, and he hates that it makes him pity the man who happily enabled his abuser for decades on end. He'll never forgive Vox or become his friend, but, after several months at the hotel, he decides that he can at least be a better man than Vox ever was and not be needlessly cruel to him. Read more here.

Charlie – Vox grows to really like Charlie (just like everyone else tbh). She's just so endlessly patient and kind; she always treats Vox with respect and understanding, which makes him very eager to please her. If she sets him a task, whether it's related to hotel maintenance or the redemption activities, he'll try his best to do it right– and if he fucks up, he'll attempt to make it up to her somehow, even if his methods are kind of... extreme (Accidentally fried the hotel TV? Time to go steal a new one!). They're not super close friends, but there's a lot of affection between them.

Cherri Bomb – Cherri is unsympathetic to Vox once she finally meets him. She's not willing to forgive him for what he helped put Angel through for all those years and tries to get Angel to laugh with her about how he got what he deserved. As much as he'd like to, Angel can't bring himself to laugh along. She'd probably be the hotel resident most willing to mock or prank him (other than Alastor) once she moves in, but we'll see what happens in season two.

Husk – Husk does his absolute best to never exchange words with Vox unless there is literally no other option. Vox scares the shit out of him. It'd be one thing if Niffty was just a one-off– maybe something went wrong with her during Alastor's usual overlord-murder routine and he just decided to roll with it– but seeing explicit confirmation that, no, this is something Alastor can and will do to people just for shits and giggles is terrifying. Husk has no love in his heart for Vox as a person, but watching Alastor puppet him around and utterly rob him of his dignity makes Husk fear and hate Al all the more. If Husk steps too far out of line, what's to stop Alastor from doing the same thing to him, someone he actually has under contract and who no longer has access to the power that Vox and Niffty had when they were broken?

Lucifer – Vox has an ongoing delusion that Lucifer is one of his old bosses from his human life. He's constantly sucking up to him, trying to earn his approval so he'll finally give him that promotion he's been after. Lucifer finds this situation fun and plays along. He's not malicious about it– he genuinely just enjoys putting on a show and doesn't think it's doing Vox any harm. He may or may not care about who Vox used to be; if he does care, it's only in the context that Alastor is capable of doing this to his fellow sinners, and that's all the more reason not to let him continue to manipulate Charlie.

Niffty – Vox and Niffty instantly click. They're from the same time period and are both in similar mental states, so they get each other on a level no one else in the hotel can. Alastor specifically fucked with Vox's mind to make him more amenable to retro culture, so Niffty's 1950s sensibilities immediately make him feel at home with her. She's also the only one in the hotel who isn't even remotely bothered by his cognitive issues. Vox forgets what he's talking about halfway through a conversation and tries to leave to do something else? Niffty will come along happily, regardless of what they were originally doing. Vox fries electronics or shocks her by accident? Yay, pain! And now there's a mess for her to clean up! They just adore each other. Neither of them is cognizant enough to realize that they're both ex-overlords in the exact same situation– they just "naturally" get along completely separate from that. They're one hell of a double act, causing problems without realizing it and occasionally calming down enough to have sweet, quiet moments together. Out of everyone in the hotel, Vox will miss Niffty the most once he finally goes back to Vee Tower.

Sir Pentious – Pentious is sent by the Vees to infiltrate the hotel and report back on how Vox is doing, as well as if the hotel has any vulnerabilities that they can exploit in order to rescue him. He isn't caught quite as quickly as he is in the main verse and instead choses to defect from the Vees after a few months due to how willing they are to kill everyone in the hotel as soon as they get Vox back. Pentious used to look up to Vox as one of the most powerful overlords in Hell and is caught off-guard by the state he's now in. Even as Pentious is playing double agent, he finds himself becoming very attached to the hotel and its residents, including Vox himself. Vox is supposed to be the hotel handyman, but he ends up breaking things more often than he fixes them due to his short attention span and volatile powers. Pentious finds himself helping Vox with his job more and more often; he has a lot of experience with wrangling mentally not-all-there people (or eggs, in his case) into successfully completing complex tasks, after all. Vox ends up liking Pentious a lot; they talk about mechanical stuff and Vox finds Pentious' big personality funny and interesting and attention-grabbing. They strike up a pretty sweet little friendship, which gives Pentious a bit of an ego boost that an ex-overlord likes him enough to consistently want to spend time with him. And at no point does Vox ever feel compelled to scream at Pentious to kill himself. Read more here.

Vaggie – Vaggie mostly kept her distance from Vox for the first six months at the hotel, like she did with most of the other residents. She doesn't trust easily, so it takes a while for her to open herself up to people. She sort of mentally filed Vox under the same category as Niffty: Erratic weirdos who Alastor brought to the hotel for God knows what reason, but who don't seem to be malicious. She struggled a lot with being patient with him and dealing with his destructive fits though. Her first instinct is to attack when threatened, so Charlie often had to get in between the two of them whenever Vox started losing control. Eventually, Vaggie starts picking up on the fact that something is off about Vox and Alastor's "friendship." Once she learns what happened to Vox, she finds herself empathizing with him quite a bit; she knows how it feels to be blindsided and left to rebuild your life from nothing, as well as what it's like to be an ex-monster hiding in plain sight.

Valentino – Valentino has not been doing well these past seven years. He was never known as an overlord with an abundance of self-control, but any he may have once had has gone completely out the window. He simply does not know how to deal with his emotions, so instead, he takes them out on everyone and everything around him, including himself. His reputation for needless violence towards his workers has grown exponentially every year since Vox's encounter with Alastor. He constantly starts totally unnecessary fights with other overlords and wannabe overlords just to give himself an outlet for his anger. He's abusing his body in a manner he hasn't done since he was alive and is doing so with increasing frequency. He's become a rabid dog that everyone in Hell knows needs to be put down, but no one can manage it because he and Velvette have become so powerful in Vox's absence.

But for some reason that even he can't understand, Val leaves most of that anger at the door when he goes into Vox's quarters to make sure he isn't driving his claws through his screen, or curled up in the corner of the room, screaming at memories from decades ago, or simply catatonic, unwilling or unable to move or speak. He becomes something that he never– not in a million, billion years– would've ever thought himself capable of being: a caregiver. A shitty one, probably, but a caregiver, nonetheless. He'll do his best to calm Vox down during his bad spells and, amazingly, manages not to retaliate when Vox lashes out at him. He'll try to provide what little comfort he can when it seems as though Vox is about to shatter into a million pieces. He somehow finds it within himself to be patient when Vox can't recognize him and asks the same questions over and over and over again. And never– not even once– has he been tempted to take advantage of Vox's vulnerable state. Why?! Preying on vulnerable people is his entire identity! Val cannot understand why– if he can't bring himself to take advantage of this weak, pitiful version of Vox– he doesn't just go back to his room, retrieve his angelic bullets, and put Vox out of his misery already. But he doesn't want to. Not really. Vox is his. And no matter what, he always will be.

Velvette – Velvette always considered herself "the backbone of the Vees." Well, now no one can deny that fact and she's infinitely less satisfied with her afterlife because of it. After it became clear that Vox was not going to recover, she took over his old position as CEO of VoxTek (now VTek). She'd always idly coveted Vox's power, but now that she has it, she's utterly overwhelmed. Between running both her and Vox's businesses, caring for a Vox who doesn't even recognize her most days, and having to deal with Valentino's self-destructive spiraling, she's simply spread too thin. Vox's situation on its own is so deeply emotionally draining, it's a miracle she still has energy to run the company. She knows she can't falter though, even for a minute. Everything, from her own power to Vox's personal wellbeing, is hanging on her ability to project strength and carry on like nothing's wrong. And on top of all that, none of the other overlords or the public in general give her the respect she deserves. They see her as a nepo baby who inherited the bulk of her empire from a man too arrogant to realize that sharing power is not generally considered a respectable strategy in Hell. It almost makes her as angry as Val, although she makes an effort to actually control that anger or at least put it towards something productive.

She never realized how much she loved Vox until she essentially lost him. She knew she had a good bit of affection for him, but she never would've anticipated that she'd be willing to go to such lengths for him. She's not a patient person, but she finds herself becoming one with Vox. She'll play along with his delusions if that's what he needs from her that day (even that horrible, gut-wrenching one where he thinks she's his seven-year-old, human daughter). She'll make whatever accommodations to the tower that are needed in order to keep him safe and as happy as he possibly can be, no matter how much they cost. She'll shout Val down when he reaches his breaking point and nearly lashes out at Vox, and then turn around and offer whatever comfort Val will accept when he breaks down over losing the only person he ever loved. The urge to be kind makes her skin crawl– she fully committed to becoming the most callous, impudent, self-serving version of herself years ago (with Vox's own guidance!)– and it makes her feel weak to love this deeply, but... she'll never stop. Not until all three of them are banished to the bottomless pits of Purgatory.

[tua-five]

Season 2 Episode 10

Today's episode starts off sad. A painful reminder that Ben is gone.

Reginald was cruel enough to blame it on the kids, but at least had the decency to let them have the day off.

I also love it shows that each and every one of them affected the timeline. Even Klaus. How he was named and knew the connection (probably through last name), I don't know. And of course, they think Five was being held hostage and then Five says he does feel like it sometimes.

Which brings another thing to attention. The news specified "hostage" not kidnapped. Kidnapped requires moving the victim, whereas hostage does not. However, that has nothing to do with my point. Hostage also requires the attention of a 3rd party. So they believed that they held Five hostage in order to do something or get something. What exactly did they think that was? I really want to know how far the conspiracy theorists went.

The siblings all had a lot of balls to tell [Viktor] that they won't help [him] and Harlan. For the first time, [he's] asking for help. Admitting that [he's] scared. And they tell [him] they have other priorities. They tell the one who literally keeps ending the world no. Good choice. Also, little do they know that it literally WILL be their priority in just a few measly hours. They make up for it by all joining in the car. That was really sweet.

And wow, I forgot that Ben told [Viktor] to tell Klaus that he was too scared to go into the light. That it wasn't his fault. I almost started crying again.

The only thing I can think of, is Diego should've shut his dang mouth. I mean, I know it would've happened anyway, but still. Diego saying there's 7 of the siblings and 2 of them. Oh yeah, you're right. See what I can do? Boom. A billion commissioners. Idiot.

I am proud of Diego, however, with the bullets. He's never done anything like that (assumably), and it's a lot at once, too. He did it to save his dumb brother that everyone believes got themselves into this mess.

There's a lot going on here, and I'm writing as I watch, so it's a little difficult to find the words to voice my thoughts on this. I'll try my best.

[Viktor] being able to calm Harlan, being able to go into the little bubble that was created, is impressive. It might not seem like it, but it actually really is. That I'd such a huge energy force. Anyone else would probably be dead.

Lila being able to mimic everyone's powers is way too overpowered. And somehow, without practice with any of the powers, she's already stronger and can master them. Despite Five being too tired to blink, Lila was still able to.

Klaus being about to hit the ground, but being caught by ghosts. Another show of his powers and how great they can be.

And of course, Five being the dumbest most idiotic person and pushing a 300-pound Luther out of the way of falling bricks. Luther literally survived a chandelier being dropped on him without a scratch. However, I do know that Five doesn't truly know that, so fine. But still. His love for his siblings makes him dumb.

Another thing about Five. He was too tired to blink with Diego, but then he goes and fights Lila, blinking around the room. There's 2 logical reasons he's able to do this. 1 being, he's had enough rest that he isn't tired anymore (though 2 minutes barely feels like enough time), or 2, he's running on adrenaline now. Out of fear. For himself and his family. He sees Allison dying, thought Luther was going to die (supposedly) by the bricks, etc. He's mad and confused, and he's afraid. He won't admit it, but he is. I'd like to believe it's the latter. That he's running on adrenaline. It just makes more sense.

Okay, hold on..

It seems I have remembered things wrong..?

The siblings are just now figuring out that Lila is "one of them". Klaus says, "Eh, but there were only 7 of us." Somenwhere somehow, my brain went to the hargreeves siblings knows that they are 7 of 43 gifted children born on the 1st of October 1989 from women who were not pregnant when the day began. I assumed that Reginald Hargreeves told them so. However, here, the siblings say that he never told the full truth. That they should consider the possibility of there being more of them out there. Meaning they didn't know about the other 36 children.

I went back to the first episode. To rewatch Sir Reginald's speech after the bank heist. And he says, "Our world is changing. Has changed. There are some among us lifted with abilities far beyond the ordinary. I have adopted six such children. I give you the inaugural class of The Umbrella Academy." So here, he hints that there are more "powered" people out there. However, the siblings now seem to not know that. So Reginald, either gaslit them, and/or they blocked that out. They're kids, so right now, all they're thinking about is the hundreds of people in front of them. The news cameras. The people they just saved and those they killed. The victory of their assumed first mission.

Can we talk about the amazing lines in just 30 seconds?

Luther saying "Love shouldn't hurt this much." Diego saying "I know what it's like to love dangerous people. Difference is... they love me back." Him saying that they can be her family if she let's them. Lila pausing to look at the others, and they all smile at her!! Like they truly will!!?

And then, dang, I did not remember The Handler just killing everyone so quick.

What's so sweet is Lila saying, "They're my real family." To the one she's called mom for so long. She's calling them family after she just tried killing all of them.

It's also sad how I'm sure Five is using his very last energy to go back in time. "Seconds. Not decades." He's dying, a gun pointed st his face, and his father's words echo in his head. And he uses that.

So much can change in a matter of seconds.

He saves his family with the last ounce of hope and will he has. Successfully.

Oh, and may I just say. With how accident prone and apocalypse prone, the siblings are, they should've known to take an extra briefcase. Just in case, ya know?

Cause yeah. "Shit" is right.

Gif collection!

[frostwing213]

I keep getting a lot of Elain stuff popping up on my dash. Mostly about shipping, and I'm like:

How'd this girl end up in a love triangle????

People are very opiniated too, fighting over and making essays about it. There's Elain/Az and Elain/Lucien (There's also Az and Gwen, but I understand how Az got in a love triangle.)

I'm just, struggling to care. Don't get me wrong, I don't hate Elain, I just find her kinda boring. She doesn't do much. She feels like that classic fairytale princess that looks pretty and sad in a tower.

Off the top of my head, these are things that define her (Without being linked to men, becase I'm not there yet. Plus, a female character should be able to stand on her own without the men in her life)

She gardens and is primiarily associaed with flowers

Pretty

Nice

Weak

She kinda killed the king of Hyburn

Didn't want to be a fae

kinda wishy washy

Achreon sister

Quiet

Her sisters want to protect her

Future seeing powers

And I'm out of ideas. From my point of view, she doesn't have any discernable personality. Her three major defining things when people think of her are: Pretty, flowers, soft.

She doesn't act for herself, she doesn't speak up. She goes with what happens and gets sad when she doesn't like it. (Becoming a fae was traumatic, and I understand her reaction, but I don't really like it. AND I HAVEN'T EVeN TOUCHED ON THE GREYSON[was that the human dude's name???]THING YET!)

So, when the books start, early ACOTAR. Archeron sisters are in the woods. Feyre is the only one doing something to support the family. Who is Elain in this book? Pretty gardener. Delicate. She isn't doing anything. Some can argue Nesta isn't either, and as a Nesta Supremist, I have to say she was willing to get married to someone cruel to make it easier on her family, and although that isn't much, it's still something. What does Elain do in this book? Be pretty. Please, someone give me an example of Elain doing something constructive and I will edit it in. Please.

Moving on. Next book. She... hosts the house along with Nesta. Oh! She's engaged to a fae hating guy (Who i think is named Greyson. I can't remember and I'm currently loaning out my 2nd and 3rd book, so I can't check rn). Uh.... I don't remember if she does anything else until the end, where she is captured and dumped in the caldron. We find out Lucien is her mate. EDIT!: As @devi1sange1 pointed out to me, Elain did stand up to Nesta about using their house as a meeting spot for the queens. She also takes responisblty for how they treated Feyre. 2 points for Elain. I give her those

She shows up more after that, so I'm not doing book by book, but she gets dumped fast by her fiancé and hangs out in the house of wind, being very sad. I almost wanna describe her as floaty, because she's acting like a ghost, just existing and mourning what is gone. This is a vaild response, and I understand why she responds this way, it just annoys me because she has not shown any autonomy so far. Anything. I think I remember her asking her ex-fiance to take in humans, but that was after being pushed by the inner circle. Uh... she gives a few prophecies, yay that. When the fighting starts, she stays on the sidelines, which I don't blame her for. She kinda kills the king of Hyburn. I think that's all she does in that.

After that. What does she do? Other than hang around??? I DON'T KNOW!

Elain shows no real drive! She exists and sometimes does stuff to push the plot!

Now onto the (possible) romantic interests she has.

Greyson: Uhhhhh, they like each other. She likes her because she's sweet and pretty. I didn't catch anything else between these two. Uh, he dumps her as soon as she's fae and she gets depressed over it

Lucien: Mating bond. She doesn't like him, I get it. He tries to back off. I think Lucien acts responsibly in this situation. Elain is at no fault in this situation either. Mating bonds don't always pair up the most romantic pair, and it doesn't always work out well. Honestly, I never saw much chemistry between these two, and if not for the bond, they likely would have forever ignored each other.

Azriel: (Random, but I searched him up on tumblr because I couldn't remember how to spell his name, and WOW, there's a lot of Azriel x reader. Yall really 'like' him) How, just how did this become such a popular ship? I never even caught this on my read through. Yeah, Az is nice to her, but he's nice to anyone considered friendly. He's just as nice to Feyre and I don't see anyone shipping those two. I just... don't get it. Is it because we want the sisters paired up with the bat boys? Is that it?? I don't understand. I see no chemistry. It's just two people being nice to one another guys.

I think those are the major ones. I don't understand any of them. Lucien and Az are such powerful charters, while Elain is... 'pretty flower girl'.

I don't hate her, but she kinda annoys me with how much crazines she's getting with people shipping her. Wanna know what i think would be great? She ends up with no one romantically. She has friends, just no romantic partner and that is perfectly fine. Lucien will live. If there's nothing between Az and Gwen, then Az will live.

To wrap up, I find Elain to be a pretty boring charter, I just feel indifferent towards her. I love the other two siblings, but I feel like Elaine could have been improved.

Feel free to talk to me about this! Throw out your own opinions! Give me edvince that supports or opposes any of my points! Correct me on stuff and ignore my spelling!

I love a good debate! Give me one! Please.

Interact with me.

Edit!: Thanks for interacting! I swear I'm reading everything! I just didn't expect this to blow up so fast!

Another edit: Thanks yall for interacting! I'm really enjoying reading the responses and what people hope to see coming from Elaine in the future!

[owlwithanapple]

Fate Chapter 03. — New

Roronoa Zoro X OC X Trafalgar Law

The story tells about the encounter between Yuki and the Straw Hat Pirates from different worlds and different eras.

In the evening, you get together with everyone for dinner and talk about a grand carnival that will be held on a certain island. When Luffy heard about the carnival, he took the opportunity to clamor to go there and have fun. Sanji and Chopper happened to have to fill up supplies, so the next destination was there.

Robin knew the destination, she took the opportunity to suggest buying you some daily necessities and clothes. Nami felt a little guilty that she felt sorry for giving you old clothes, but you really didn't mind.

After dinner you helped to sort out the dishes and take them to the kitchen for cleaning. You came to this world, they treated you well but you didn't give them anything in return. Thinking about it was better to start with basic chores first, which was better than idleness.

Washing so many dishes reminds you in the past there were just a few dishes in your own home, but now there are so many as if they were enough for a family. It’s the life you’ve been looking forward to spending with your lively family and friends.

Your family originally had you with your parents, but you were alone in the empty home. You are a little envious everyone always has their parents to accompany and play with them, but you are always alone.

Even if your parents leave Japan to work abroad, they will come home to celebrate your birthday. You are very happy from the bottom of your heart. Since then, you have been looking forward to their return home and reunion every day, but the reality is often cruel.

In the end, there was nothing to wait for. The door to the house was opened by no one but yourself.Recently learned how to cook curry rice and feel very proud of yourself and want to share with them.

Gradually, you discovered that they have not come back in recent years, the phone calls are no longer dialed immediately. The only way to confirm that both parents are still alive is to remit the amount to your account every month. The once-a-year birthday wish suddenly collapsed. .

As time goes by, you gradually no longer have any illusions and expectations. Go to school then come home on time to do your homework, work part-time during holidays, and watch anime or sleep in your free time.

Perhaps these reasons have caused you to become more withdrawn and unwilling to socialize. It may be that you are afraid that the loneliness of separation will be unbearable. Life must go through many setbacks, and you should probably learn to accept or reject them.

In order to numb your emotions, wake up every day and tell yourself must face everything with strength. In fact no one to rely on. Even wanted to seek comfort for a small matter, you see nothing but just an empty space when got home. You could only curl up on the sofa and cry silently.

It's hard to get used to being with the Straw Hat Pirates now. It's so lively and you feel out of place. You have been accustomed to loneliness and suddenly come to a strange but lively world. You are afraid of making the same mistakes again. The moment of happiness will gone again.

"Hey!"

You were jolted out of your thoughts by a shout "Hwah!"

"Why are you looking so sad~" Luffy tilted his head.

"Really?" Luffy saw through it immediately but you still kept smiling.

Luffy just stared at you with a pouted "Hmmmmm..."

"Luffy?" Luffy kept staring at you, and felt a pressure in your heart.

He put his hand on the straw hat smiled brightly, "You are no longer alone!"

You learned from Nami that Luffy is a relatively casual and simple person. He often yells and makes a fuss in a silly manner but is a very reliable person. Although his behavior is very strange, he can inexplicably sense the vulnerability deep in your heart.

"I know." You were so moved by what he said, you almost couldn't hold back your tears.

Luffy seems like a sunny boy who can warm people's hearts. You have to cheer up, you are no longer the lonely person you were before, now you have the Straw Hat Pirates with you.

Luffy left happily after chatting with you. After that you organize all the washed dishes put them in the cupboard one by one. Some large plates are stored in high cabinets. You pull up a chair and stand up, holding several plates placing them carefully.

"Need a help?" Zoro's voice came from behind you.

Thinking that there were still a few plates that you could put away, so you politely refused him, "There's just a little more. It's almost done."

Zoro hadn't left yet just stood at the table with his arms crossed. He actually just heard the conversation between you and Luffy outside the door. He had a vague feeling that Luffy noticed something was wrong with you, and he walked in out of curiosity.

He was purely wishful thinking, and his body followed you unconsciously. He has a premonition that you may appear and disappear at any time, as you said, you may suddenly return to your own world.

He wants to hold on to you and not let go. Once he lets go, you will really disappear from his world. This also means from now on, the two of you will really be friends who can never meet again in different worlds.

He knows very well that he cannot control your appearance, because it is an unknown ability that brings you. He knows that since that ability can bring you, it can take you away at any time.

"I'm done!" You get off the chair.

Your voice brought him back to the present "Oh, good."

"Zoro, are you okay?" You stood in front of him to make sure he was okay.

He took a step back and looked away, "I'm fine."

"Liar. You don't look okay at all." His expression clearly showed that he was uneasy.

He was very annoyed when you poked a sore spot "Tch."

"Zoro...do you have something to say to me?" You don't know if it's your imagination, but you want to know what Zoro is thinking now.

He couldn't help but think about it, but after thinking about it he felt strange. Should he ask or not? He still compromised. He clenched the scabbard in his hand to calm himself, "I want to ask... if have the opportunity to return to your World, will you go back?"

His question poked deep into your heart. You had indeed thought about this question. If you could really make your own choice, what would you choose, whether you would go back or stay.

"You don't need to answer, I'm just asking casually." Zoro noticed that your expression had changed, he think about it and quickly change the subject with you.

Zoro looked a little flustered. You knew in your heart that he wanted to end the topic, but the question he asked was indeed a question that you had to think about and choose. "You are right to ask, it is the question I should be thinking about."

"Oh..." Zoro was a little at a loss because you didn't change the topic.

Zoro gives you the impression he is someone who knows right from wrong. Coupled with his super combat power and keen insight, he is like the strongest support for the entire team.

You believe that he has seen through your inner doubts before asking you this question. You don't hate the fact that he is straightforward and cares about other people's feelings. Getting along with him makes you feel much more at ease.

"If I could choose whether to go back or not...Zoro, as long as you ask me to stay, I will definitely stay." You haven't figured out how to answer yet, so you tell him in a naughty tone.

Zoro's current expression is one of surprise with eyes wide open "Huh!?"

"Hahaha, I'm kidding. I just haven't figured out the answer yet. I'll tell you as soon as I think about it." Zoro's reaction is really cute. You smile and answer your current thoughts.

He didn't know why felt an impulse surge in his heart for a moment, and he told himself to calm down in annoyance. Zoro, who was now in a good mood, just smiled softly and touched your forehead with his finger, "Idiot."

"Hehehe." You continued without saying anything and just laughed in front of him.

"Yuki-chwan~ Do you need my help?~" Sanji wanted to sneak in to take a look at you, but Zoro was there. He immediately rushed over stand between you and Zoro. "Hey! Marimo! You want to do something to Yuki-chwan again? !"

"Huh? What are you talking about again..." Zoro was indeed a little impatient.

You gently moved your fingers on Sanji's shoulders, "I've done the dishes."

Sanji turned around and saw your face so close. His eyes turned into loving hearts and his hands were waving in the air, "Thank you~ Yuki-chwan~ You must have been working very hard today~"

You shook your head, "No. I just want to thank you for hosting me."

Sanji raised your hand and put it under his lips. "No, it's actually just my wishful thinking that I want to be nice to you."

You are not good at dealing with Sanji's personality. You know that he treats you out of kindness. Although you are very happy but is difficult to adapt and strange suddenly have such special treatment.

You want to stop but you don't know how to say it. It would be rude. While you were troubled, Zoro went to the cupboard to get a tall pot and covered Sanji's head to plunge him into darkness.

Zoro pushed Sanji away then grabbed your hand with a wicked smile "Let's go."

"Hahaha..." You were frightened by his actions but amused.

You both fled the kitchen together leaving poor Sanji with a tall pot on his head and yelling "Damn Marimooooooo!"

You escaped to the front of the boat and made sure Sanji didn't catch you. Then you breathed a sigh of relief and found a place to sit down. Thanks to Zoro for saving, otherwise you really don’t know how to refuse.

You two looked at each other, and couldn't help but burst into laughter holding stomachs. Although sorry for Sanji, the scene of the head being covered just now was really hilarious.

After you finished laughing, you sat there stared at the night sky in a daze. It's incredible to be able to look at the sky in the middle of the sea. It's like the sky and the sea are so close but so far away visually.

The vast sky and sea may seem calm and beautiful, they can never erase your feeling of loneliness and helplessness. Frankly speaking, you are actually very scared when you enter another strange world.

Fear is normal. Coming to a strange world, woke up in a sea, suddenly sank into the sea, with a talking reindeer, a singing skeleton and all kinds of weirdos.

The emotions you were holding back surged up in your heart in an instant. You hugged your legs rested your forehead on your knees. You wanted to cry but hold back the tears because Zoro was sitting next to you and didn't want to affect him by your emotion.

Zoro touches you "Are you sleepy?"

You just shake your head.

He is annoyed by the way you are silent now and doesn't understand what he should do. He is not good at comforting and expressing his thoughts. He is more like the type who silently protects people from behind, but now he can only give it a try.

"Erm...the night is particularly beautiful today?" Zoro muttered but so embarrassed by what he said.

You raised your head and looked at him with dumbfounded eyes. Although there were tears in your eyes, what he said caught your attention. You tilted your head and wondered why he suddenly said such embarrassing words.

Zoro was startled and there were tears in your eyes. He was wondering if he had said the wrong thing, but he just said it casually. He scratched his head and couldn't understand.

You wiped your tears "What are you doing?"

"It's nothing. Don't pay attention to me." He relieved his embarrassment and looked at the sky.

You can probably guess from Zoro's reaction that he is not very good at expressing himself. He looks cool and strong, but he is very gentle and considerate, he doesn't show it. You know that he cares about what's going on, and you are really happy.

You smiled slightly, "I'm just a little scared, being in a strange world. Being alone in a world I'm not familiar with..."

Zoro interrupted before you could finish your sentence. "You are no longer alone."

His words moved you to tears. You tried to wipe away your tears but were stopped by Zoro's hand. Instead, he was wiping away your tears. You said nothing and just watched him comfort you with this small gesture.

"Thank you." You simply said.

He took back his hand and faced you, "You might as well tell me..."

You hesitated for a moment. Since everyone is Nakama, it doesn't matter if you tell him. If he wants to listen, let him listen. If he doesn't want to, just go away.

You clasped your hands and pondered for a moment before you started to say, "I miss my parents. I don't know if they miss me."

"Huh?" he asked.

"My parents and I are separated in two places. I am alone in Japan, and they work abroad, so I cannot see them often. I can only contact them by making phone calls."

"But... gradually I can't contact them anymore. I only know that my parents will remit money to me every month. Now I am in this world, I feel very warm. Everybody here who have filled my loneliness."

You looked down at your legs with tears in your eyes and your vision began to blur.

"So whether your parents are still alive, you only know through that thing called remittance..." Zoro doesn't understand what remittance means, but he probably understands you.

You nodded slightly, "Yes. Obviously we are a family but I feel very lonely. So I am very curious whether they will miss me and whether they will be sad when their daughter disappears suddenly."

"I don't know your parents' thoughts or reasons for alienating you. Now we have filled your loneliness, you can enjoy this world start from today on." Zoro crossed his hands and looked at you smile slightly.

You rested your head on his shoulder and closed your eyes "Zoro...you are so gentle."

"Ha!" He was a little embarrassed but not disgusted with you leaned on his shoulder.

"Huh..." A slight snoring sound was heard.

Zoro glanced at you "No way! Did you really fall asleep?!"

He poked your cheek saw that you were not awake. He scratched his head and was worried. He really couldn't do anything to you, he would wait until you were completely asleep before taking you back to the room. He was just chatting with you, but you fell asleep comfortably, leaving him alone in embarrassment.

His clothes expose his chest muscles, he can vaguely feel the warmth of your breath transmitted to him. He pinched his own wrist to suppress the turmoil in his heart. You are just a girl but you can make him feel itchy.

The one-line collar top reveals your fragrant shoulders and collarbones, your hair has a light floral fragrance, and your body moves with the rhythm of your breathing. You looked so innocent sleeping on the shoulder of a beast like him.

"Unsuspecting idiot." He lifted your hair.

Suddenly you rub his shoulder and say, "Zo...ro..."

"Damn...!" He covered his face.

He picked you up while you were sleeping, your face resting on his chest, and he felt the warmth of your breath getting closer and closer. He pushed open your door with his shoulder, walked in, gently and carefully placed you on the bed.

"Cute sleeping face." He poked your cheek several times.

When he stood up to leave the room, he heard "Zo...ro..." It was you moaning.

He sighed loudly and walked to your bedside pull up a chair and sit down. Your unsuspecting and innocent appearance aroused a burning desire in his heart. He clenched his fists told himself to calm down.

But he finally couldn't bear the feeling of saying his name from your mouth. He slowly stood up held your hand. His slowly came closer to your lips. He realize that your face was close and really beautiful at first glance.

When he couldn't resist the urge in his heart and wanted to kiss you secretly, you suddenly turned over and slept on the other side. He was fortunate realize that he almost made a mistake to you and immediately fell into embarrassment.

"What the hell am I doing..." He stood up and stood by the door, holding the doorknob.

After he calms down, leaves your room and goes outside to relax. He went to the kitchen get a bottle of wine and find Franky who was guarding at night. He sat down and started drinking heavily. He almost kissed you by mistake just now, but luckily he controlled it.

"Can't you sleep?" Franky adjusted his robot hand.

He put down the wine"Well, drink some wine so that can sleep better."

"What's wrong with you? Your ears are a little red. Do you have a fever?" Franky pointed to his ears.

"A little drunk." He said Franky casually.

Franky became suspicious and found it hard to believe, "You drunk?"

Zoro realized that he seemed have said the wrong thing, he chose to avoid the question and continued drinking his wine. Franky vaguely noticed something was wrong with Zoro, but he ignored it and continued to do his own thing.

As time passed little by little, it was already morning time. You was tired from getting used to the new environment and cleaning yesterday so slept for a long time, longer than usual.

Someone was running in the corridor, and the sound was getting closer to your room. Luffy opened your door and shouted, "Get up! Breakfast!"

You don't feel very angry when you wake up just your face looks bad every time you wake up. You lifted the quilt and sat up from the bed, glaring at Luffy who was standing there with a silly smile. Your eyes were sharp, but Luffy felt a fierce aura coming towards from you.

"Bye!" Then he ran away without closing the door.

You looked around realized there was your soft bed in your room, but why was the wooden chair next to your bed? It was obviously placed next to the wardrobe. Maybe you pulled it over yesterday and forgot about it.

You get out of bed leave the room and look up to see a clear sky with the sun shining brightly. The sun is not that close to you at home, but now you feel that the sun here is really bright.

Because the sun was very dazzling, you covered your eyes with hands and went to look for other companions. You see Ussop, Chopper and Luffy hanging out together. Robin sat alone and read a book silently.

You walked up to Robin, she patted the empty space with her hand to signal you sit down. You sat down and opened your mouth to yawn. You admired Luffy for being so energetic and lively so early.

"Oh, didn't you get enough sleep?" Robin closed the book.

"I'm not used to waking up early~" You yawned and fell asleep on her shoulder.

Robin looked at your behavior this morning and snickered, "Hehehe, so cute."

She continues to read her book quietly without disturbing you. Nami greeted everyone before walking towards where you and Robin were. Nami sat next to you and leaned back in the chair, chatting quietly with Robin.

"Such a soft face!" Nami poked your cheek gently.

Robin laughed "Hehehe."

"The hair is so messy. This little girl must not have combed her hair when she woke up." Nami ran her fingers through your hair.

Robin waved "Nami..."

Nami understood Robin's idea and nodded.

The two of them secretly used a comb and hair tie to create a new hairstyle for you while you were still asleep. Brook and Sanji came around to join in the fun.

You vaguely felt many eyes staring at you, making you uncomfortable. You opened your eyes slightly saw Chopper sitting on your lap. You were surprised why Sanji had love eyes and Brook covered his mouth with hands.

You felt a cool breeze blowing on your neck. You didn't remember that you had your hair tied up when you went out. Robin and Nami were sitting next to you and kept smiling. Did they do something to your hair?

Chopper took out a mirror for you to look at, and you saw a double braid look. You were not good at braiding hairstyles, so you simply tied a ponytail every day. Now you liked the new look very much.

"Nami! Robin! Thank you!" You smiled.

Robin smiled slightly and said, "As long as you like it."

Nami likes "Let's us braid your hair from now on~"

"It suits you very well~Yuki-chwan~" Sanji praised you with loving eyes.

You looked in the mirror and stroked your braided hair. The two of them were really good at creating such complicated styles. You saw Zoro coming over with a yawn, and you handed the mirror back to Chopper.

Zoro yawned "Hwahh~ Why are you gathering here?"

"What do you think of Yuki's hairstyle?" Ussop pointed at you.

He glanced at you and held out his hand with a chuckle, "Yeah, it fits."

"Hehehe" you smiled and let him stroke your hair.

"Hey~ I saw the island!" Franky informed the two of you who were chatting.

Luffy immediately jumped up "Yahoooooo~Island~"

You looked the direction of an island pointed by Franky. Ussop handed you a telescope to let you see more clearly. Through the telescope, you saw many ships docked at the island's pier.

There are a lot of colorful decorations on the pier, which is a custom of the island's carnival. You put away telescope and prepare for the fun time to come with anticipation and excitement.

Zoro stood behind saw you and Chopper looking very expectant and excited. He was secretly happy. To be honest, he was really looking forward to arriving at the island as soon as possible. Maybe it was your reason that infected him.

To Be Continued—

*If you have any ideas leave them in the comment section, and I will try to add in the story.*